#but having that many kids severely limits the suspect pool

[imma-dragon53]

I think something that a lot of batfam fics don’t take into account, especially fics where they meet the justice league, is that the kids alone could reveal Batman’s identity.

Of course Batman doesn’t want to introduce his kids to the league. If he only had one or two? Sure he’d probably eventually be ok with them meeting, lots of people in Gotham have one or two kids. But there are at minimum 6 bat kids, if you’re only counting the ones he adopted legally, though we all know that Steph is always there for the shits and giggles. The number of people in Gotham who have six kids? Specifically 5 sons and one daughter? That list is probably pretty short. It wouldn’t take a genius like Tim to link the bats to the Wayne’s, and all of their associates.

Huh dicky Wayne’s best friend is from star city. Batman’s eldest son is really close with kid flash (who also happens to have red hair)

Huh didn’t spoiler make a joke about kissing both RR and Black Bat? Didn’t two of the Wayne kids date the same girl (at different times)

Huh Damien Wayne moved to Gotham at the same time the new stabby Robin showed up.

Hey doesn’t Bruce have a cousin with red hair? Weird so does bat woman

The mere existence of Bruce’s kids could reveal not only his but all of their identities. So of course he’s going to hide their existence.

[msookyspooky]

Random Headcanon's for the Scream Character's

Billy really was a normal sweet kid and a good boyfriend before his mom left. Everyone paints him as always being crazy and his mom just triggered him but I honestly don't think that's true. Sidney and her parents would not have been okay with her dating a bad boy from Sophomore year onward. Sure it happens and maybe she saw past it but If Sidney would have seen how Billy acted with Randy in the videostore; instant break up imo. He could not have hid that side of himself for two years straight. Remember, they were dating a whole year prior to Maureen cheating. My theory is he may or may not have had a 'side' to him or other undiagnosed disorder in his gene pool (Mrs Loomis snapping too.) but Billy's psychotic breakdown was mostly situational + groomed by Roman and there were other things in his life that probably were boiling over and Debbie leaving him completely broke him. So, he was in an extremely vulnerable state when Roman came around and molded him. THAT is why Sidney trusted him so much in Scream before the phone incident and even somewhat after. Because Billy was a good boyfriend before her mom's murder and she would have never suspected it. Now how her or no one else could see him tumbling into madness or at least deep depression before Roman sank his talons in is beyond me. Maybe she did and he shrugged her off? Either way, the situation made him shut down all empathy towards other people and changed him. His empathy is towards his mom, possibly his dad since Hank never died and that is it. He has symptoms of a psychopath and even though that is usually genetic I 100% think a psychotic breakdown could do it as well.(Don't come for me bitch I'm not trained in any of this just using what I know from research 🧍‍♀️) If his mom never left and Roman didn't come along; Billy would have never been a killer

Contrary to Billy's situational psychological crazyness. Stu was always going to kill. I don't even think it's is he a sociopath vs a psychopath argument as much as he is just disconnected from reality. (Though he would most likely be a Sociopath if he was bc of his lack of boundaries as well impulsive behavior. Thinking killing was a game.) Stu possibly suffered abuse as a child. He was terrified of his parents more than the law. Either A. They abused him and permanently terrified him. Or B. He really has a stunted mentality and thinks of killing as a game and fears his parents more than the law bc the consequences are just not clicking LIKE A KID. He's like a giant little kid with no sense of how things work. He still could have been abused and that is what stunted his growth mentally. However, his violent tendacies were always there. Never preplanned just urgent anger or sadistic glee he couldn't control. Billy just suggested the killings and he was instantly down. Like, hell yeah cool. Most ppl no matter what mental illness they have or how severe are not that easy to convince. Whose to say he hadn't killed before or was planning to? My theory is he is so disconnected from reality that killing really is a giant fun game to him and he would have eventually murdered someone even without Billy.

Idk why this isn't more thought of throughout the fandom. Billy and Stu did not rape Maureen bc the evidence would have pointed to someone other than the guy they were framing. Cotton Weary had sex with Maureen, left, Billy and Stu taunted her on the phone and lured her away, they killed her, police suspected rape bc A. they didn't know about the affairs. B. Cotton's semen or her discharge or bruising being there. They naturally assumed it was rape but in actuality no one raped her. Cotton's dna from their affair incriminated him even more. Not saying that Billy and Stu would think of rape as morally wrong enough not to do in their book BUT it would have been stupid on their part and made it obvious there were other suspects besides Cotton.

Stu isn't a lapdog. Stu literally revealed on the phone he was going to throw Billy under the bus. He hesitated giving him the knife. Stu is like a kid. He most likely suffered trauma that regressed his mental age. He's eager to please, desperate for attention and most likely fawns over people he feels close to in an obsessive way. He could have even been in love with Billy and vice versa which is why he was so eager to please him. However, he was not nearly as stupid or a lapdog as much as the fandom makes him out to be. I think Randy saying it in the videostore sealed the deal for people even though he was only acting like that bc he was helping Billy too and covering their tracks. Billy was the one with the plan. Stu just tagged along out of the urge to kill. But he 100% had his own plan to kill and bail if needed. My mind is made up on that.

There was a third killer in Scream and it wasn't a teen or Roman. You're telling me two 17-18 yr old guys could come up with every detail? Roman only told Billy the basics. How did they get tactical police shoes? How did they get to the houses so fast and leave just as quickly? How did they both take down and restrain Steve or Neil by themselves enough to tie them up? Sure, Stu was deranged and tall but these two lanky teens were able to take on a football player with muscles and a grown man? Possible but stil meh to me. Their plan was too thorough for two teen boys to come up with on their own. Both crazy. One completely unhinged and disconnected from reality and the other so blinded by revenge he was stupid at times. (Fucking stabbing yourselves before killing Neil and Sidney. Not even thinking to AT LEAST tie Sidney up as well...Really? Jill was smarter in 4 in that respect tbh.) I truly think their was an adult involved in Scream helping them or guiding them. I would say Roman if it wasn't for him going back to Hollywood. But Billy and Stu had help DURING the killings 100%.

Randy is not this mecha survival final boy like the fandom thinks. The kid watched one too many horror movies and based them on real life. Scream itself is making fun of slasher movies and Randy was supposed to be the narrator setting most of the dumb rules up into play. Everyone is like "omg that's so out of character how he died in 2" no its not. If the rules work then him losing his virginity did him in. He was drinking, he was pissed off and not thinking. Plus Mrs. Loomis attacked in broad daylight, something no one thought of. (And the whole debate how a middle aged woman could pull him in. LOOK. Randy is a fucking small guy and she grabbed him backwards, using momentum to haul him back into the van. PLUS she was enraged at what he said about Billy. Adrenaline is a hell of a super drug as far as testing the bodies limits. I have seen tiny girls become the hulk when they are pissed I'm jus sayin) Point is, Randy was just a teen boy that loved horror movies. He was not some survival guide especially since it showed him even on the couch not aware of Ghostface behind him. He was a giant satire showing how even he didn't always follow the rules of slasher movies and how dumb the rules are.

Tatum loved Sidney and had more chemistry with her than Billy. I am not saying they weren't just BFF's and I don't want to ruin female friendship with constantly thinking "omg they are gay together" any time two women are close. BUT it is strange that it was only those two as friends especially since Sidney didn't fit into Tatum's popular social circle. It's like Tatum went out of her way to be friends with Sidney. Maybe they were childhood friends and that's why? But I think it's entirely possible that just like it's speculated that Stu and Billy were secretly in love; Tatum possibly was at least bi and in love with Sidney.

[msotherworldly]

A Vampire’s Code

Title: A Vampire’s Code

Fiction Type: Original Fiction

Warnings: Swearing, mentions of death

Prompt: “You have no proof.”

“You have no proof.” I trembled as they surrounded me, pale faces pressing in like dead masks. Their red cloaks rippled, and several hands reached for me. “I’m young, right? Nobody taught me the rules. That has to count for something!”

“That is true.” A woman stepped forward. She had a round face; she lifted a pudgy, icy hand to brush aside a strand of blonde hair. She resembled one of those Victorian paintings, but for the crimson eyes. “Nevertheless, you have committed a crime. You have killed an innocent.”

“But what does that mean? Aren’t we supposed to eat? I barely know what I am!”

“You know what you are.” She held up a hand. The others stopped their advance.

“Yeah, I’m a Vampire.” I shrugged. “But what does that mean? Will holy water burn me? Will I burst into flame if I enter a church? Is the sun deadly? Is garlic?”

“Who changed you?”

“I thought he was a mugger. I was walking home from my friend’s. We’d been jamming in his garage.”

A man at the woman’s shoulder frowned. Like paper, his face seemed to crumple in on itself. “What is this ‘jamming’ you refer to? Do you mean canning jam?”

The corners of the woman’s red lips twitched. “No, he’s in a band.”

“That’s an overstatement.” I laughed. “We’re not very good. But he launched himself at me, this guy, and then he bit me. Took all my cash too, so I figured it was a robbery. I thought he was crazy.”

The woman nodded.

“I didn’t even make it home. I ran into the park, and just...I fell down the side. Into the ravine. I don’t know how long I lied there. But when I came to, it was night. And when I saw Mrs. Lowe, it was automatic. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until she was limp in my arms.”

“She is an innocent.” The man trembled. “He has had a taste-”

“He’s had no teacher. No guidance. No chance.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’.” I looked between them. “I am sorry I killed her. She was always kind to me. When I was a kid, that is.”

“There will be a penalty for your actions.” The woman sighed. She placed a hand on my shoulder. “But we will not destroy you.”

“But he-”

The woman shook her head. “This will appease them.”

I studied her. My brows knitted. “You mean...you don’t think I should be punished? It’s for show?”

“We have to set a certain standard, or there will be chaos. But yes, that is correct. It’s a formality. And when I explain the mitigating circumstances, many will see reason.”

A chill shot up my spine. Who knew Vampires could be cold. I scanned the stony faces. “Many...but not all.”

“There will be those who want to kill you.” She pulled her hood up. “The Vampires of this city are different. There are rules. One can’t kill as they please. In other towns, it’s the same as it’s always been—like animals, they feast on people with no discernment, no respect for human life, no empathy for their former selves.

    “When a Vampire acquires a taste for freedom, for killing, we encourage him to leave. You can be a savage in other cities, but not here. Many laugh at our ways, but it’s a way of life which appeals to many of the brood. And one, I believe, which is worth preserving.”

I nodded. “I can understand that. My girlfriend...she would still be human. Even though there are Vampires here, she would be safe?”

The man’s face darkened. “No one is ever safe when there are Vampires around. Accidents happen. Rules are broken. And then we’re called in.”

I looked around. I hadn’t given much thought to my surroundings...but then, there was little to look at. A single light shone on me, and the walls and floors were concrete. If I scanned the corners of the ceiling, I could make out a cobweb and the spider which nested in it’s centre.

“Will somebody teach me? I mean, what things are actually...dangerous? What are all the rules? Can I...still see my friends? Can I see Emma?”

“If you continue to see Emma, she will learn the truth.” The woman grimaced. “And if she learns the truth, you will have two choices.”

I’d read enough horror novels to guess what came next: “I’ll have to kill her or change her. And option number three is-”

“To never see her again.” She nodded. “That is how it must be. I’m sure you can understand. You’ll be permitted to keep a job, to see your friends as often as is necessary to maintain the facade. But you’ll have to find a night shift. I don’t know about holy water, but the sun will kill you.”

“Will I get resistance to the sun with time?”

“No, that’s a myth. One which became popular after Anne Rice started writing, I think. It will always be your enemy.”

“I guess...I’ll go home then.”

“One minute.” The woman whispered to the others. They argued under their breath. The man pointed at me twice. Then he scowled, and bowed. The rest nodded. They shuffled from the room, flicking up their large hoods. They pooled out of the door like a river of-

My hand flew to my throat. I swallowed, and it ached. My tongue salivated, as dry as paper.

The woman shut the door. “We have to discuss your punishment. It’s lucky you didn’t attack a child. Many Vampires are forgiven for killing the elderly. That is, they are punished but not destroyed. It is my understanding that Mrs. Lowe had cancer, and that she was in considerable pain. Of course, you didn’t know this, but certain negotiations can be made.”

“Are you going to teach me?”

She smiled. “No, but I can share some of the...nuances with you. If a human voices aloud the desire to die, it becomes the right of the Vampire to take that person’s life. However, the desire has to be both in earnest and justified. Teens with depression, or who are blowing off steam, are off limits. I learned too late that our wording of that law was too loose.”

“I’d never kill a kid! Not intentionally.”

“I believe you.” She folded her hands. “But if you meet someone with a terrible disease, whether it be an incurable tumour or Lou Gerig’s, and you can prove they wished to die...we consider it merciful, a form of assisted suicide. Death by Vampire is not painful. Victims sink into a blissful sleep before they die. Some survivors of attacks have even claimed it feels good.”

“But what is my punishment?”

“It won’t be easy. There is a girl of seventeen who has come to our attention. Claire Goodall.”

“Hey, I know her. She’s just a couple years younger. She was in the school band. Really big into...Vampires and stuff.”

“She suspects our existence. She’s put an ad out for a Vampire to change her.”

“And you want me to persuade her not to, right? Because I’m the only one who can?”

“No.” Her eyes iced over. Her voice was hard. “You must change her. Even if she doesn’t really want to join the brood. I don’t condone the deaths of the young, but she will be executed if she is not brought over. She knows too much.”

“Couldn’t we give her another year or two? Seventeen is young. And becoming a Vampire is a bit more permanent than marriage.”

“It’s less permanent than death.” She turned away. “We have no other option. Many will kill her. Others will just bite her. But you’re her age. You can do it delicately.”

I nodded. “I guess.”

“She invited this on herself. You aren’t wrong to pity her. But she is responsible for her own fate. And when she is a Vampire, she will need a tutor.”

“Not me? I know jack shit.”

“You will be her friend. A mentor will be sent to you. Invite the girl to live with you, if you can, that you might ease the transition for one another.”

Emma will love that.

“I’ll try.”

What do I even tell Emma? What if she doesn’t want to be a Vampire? How do I know to tell her or not?

But if I don’t-

“You must go now. The others are growing agitated.” She led me outside. They lined the hallways, forming rows on each side. Their faces were expressionless, nearly identically beautiful, as I passed. When we emerged into a parking lot, I turned to thank the woman.

She was gone. I tugged on the door; it was locked. I pelted away, planning how I might change Claire’s existence irreparably, but gently.

[therainroguefanfiction]

🍂 Never Too Late (Best Jeanist / Tsunagu Hakamada)

Genre: Fluff, Slight Angst, Family, Slice of Life, Halloween, Autumn

Word Count: 3,884

Pairing: Quirkless Reader x Best Jeanist

World: Boku no Hero Academia

Prompt: [x] “You answer the door when I’m trick or treating and at first you say I’m way too old to be doing this but somehow I convince you to come out and join me.”

Author’s Note: This was written for the “Sweater Weather” collab over at the BNHA Sanctuary discord server. You can find the masterlist post [here] – make sure you check it out to read the other awesome entries for this collab! Thank you very much @pluviophile-imagines​ for hosting this collab. Happy Autumn everyone! For reference, I picture [this] and [this] for him out of costume. I tried finding the original creators and couldn’t, so if you know please let me know!

October 5th, 10:20 am 🍂

October had finally arrived, bringing with it a slew of brisk weather and a kaleidoscope of vivid oranges, reds, and browns. This was your favorite time of year, a time where you got to fully enjoy yourself, free of the shackles of adulthood. It felt so freeing, as if you were once again a child, ignorant of the ways of the world and just wanting to have fun.

Your eyes scanned the walls, lined with all manner of costumes. The back wall was dedicated to the top heroes, of course, the right wall featuring the usual suspects – cats, witches, zombies, even minions. The opposite wall was dedicated to characters from shows and movies.

Despite having been thinking this decision over for months, you still weren’t sure what you wanted to dress up as. There were just too many choices!

‘Maybe a pirate? Pirates are pretty cool. Ah, but black cats are a Halloween staple!’

After spending more time than you cared to admit, you eventually settled on a black cat pirate – which was just a pirate with black cat ears, a tail, and whiskers drawn on your face. With your costume now acquired, you left the back of the store to fill the basket with various decorations and as many different types of candy that you could find.

Satisfied that you couldn’t fit anything else in the basket, you headed for the front to check out, excited to get home and start decorating.

October 29th, 8:10 pm 🍂

“Ne, Katsuki -” you paused in the doorway of his bedroom, giving him a sheepish smile when multiple pairs of eyes turned to you. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had your friends over.”

“Try fucking knocking next time,” Katsuki grunted angrily but his tone lacked its usual bite. “What do you want, Y/N?”

“Oh, right! I was going to ask if you wanted to go trick-or-treating with me!” you chirped happily, clapping your hands together.

“Like hell I want to do that dumb shit! I’m not a damn kid anymore!”

“A-Ah, right…” your expression fell but you tried your best to keep your smile intact. You should have known that he wouldn’t agree. Seeing this made his resolve falter but he was in front of his classmates and refused to show weakness to them. If he gave in to you, they’d never let him live it down.

“I’ll go with you!” Kaminari’s hand shot up into the air, eyes sparkling with excitement.

“Like hell you will!” Katsuki snapped, smacking the blonde on the back of the head. “You’re a damn adult, you shouldn’t even be doing something so stupid.”

“Yeah…” your smile fell an inch, knowing that he was right. Was it really so wrong? Just because you had passed over into adulthood, you weren’t allowed to have fun? To relive the best time of your life?

“Come on, Bakugo, I bet it’d be fun!” Kirishima commented from across the table.

“Yeah!” Mina agreed, sending you a smile.

You shook your head, giving them a soft closed-eye smile. “It’s alright. Katsuki’s right, you’re not kids anymore! Whatever you guys choose to do on Halloween, please be safe!” You turned on your heel and left the room before anyone could say anything else.

Mina frowned at the closed door before turning to the ash blonde. “Your sibling is so sweet! You shouldn’t be so mean to them, Bakugo.”

“Just shut up and do your damn homework!” he snapped, vermillion eyes narrowed at his notebook as he crossed his arm across his chest. A small pool of guilt was settling within his gut, but he pushed it back just as he always did.

October 31st, 9:30 pm 🍂

You checked the clock as you adjusted your costume in the mirror. It was getting late and most of the kids had already returned home, their parents not wanting them out too late. You honestly felt nervous about going out trick-or-treating, not knowing how people were going to react. The negative part of your brain was telling you that it wouldn’t go over well.

So what if you were an adult? You just wanted to have fun for one night! To forget that you were quirkless and sheltered. To forget how unfair life had been.

Trick-or-treating reminded you of simpler times when your brother was more manageable and kind and was still friends with Izuku. You remembered fondly how your friends would always complain because you had to take the two out trick-or-treating instead of hanging out with them, but you didn’t mind. It was fun for you – plus Katsuki looked adorable as a werewolf and Izuku as a pumpkin.

Now they were both teenagers. Even if they did still want to go trick-or-treating, they would certainly rather be with friends rather than you. They didn’t need you to look after them anymore. They were heroes in training, after all, and you were just a quirkless adult trying to keep it together.

Shaking your head to rid yourself of the bad thoughts beginning to form inside your mind, you forced yourself to smile before stepping out of your room and down the stairs.

Masaru, your father, was just shutting the door after handing out candy to some kids. He smiled when he noticed you. “Heading out, sweetheart?”

You nodded. “Yup! How do I look, dad?”

“Gorgeous, as always!” he pulled you into a hug before pecking your forehead. “Be safe and don’t stay out too late, okay?”

“Okay~” you tried to hurry out the door before your mom realized that you were leaving the house, but she seemed to have a sixth sense about such things. Just as you tugged the door open, she came waltzing out of the kitchen.

“Y/N!” she cried, making your shoulders tense up as you turned slightly. She stood just inside the doorway, her brow furrowed. “You’re really going to go trick-or-treating? You’re too old for this and you…”

“And I’m quirkless and weak,” you finished for her, lips formed into a thin line. “Yeah, I got that, mom. You feel the need to remind me every day.”

“That’s not…” her vermillion eyes landed on her husband and she scowled. “Masaru, tell them that they are too old for this!”

“Honey,” he spoke softly, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Y/N isn’t hurting anyone, they’re just enjoying the season. Go on, Y/N. Have a fun night, sweetheart.”

You sent him a grateful look, ignoring your mom’s sputtering as you quickly slipped out of the house, slamming the door behind you.

The air outside was moist and cold, wind whipping through the trees and robbing them of their leaves. The ground was littered with them, each one a vibrant shade of orange, brown, or red. Despite the sky being covered by clouds, the bright light of the full moon managed to break through in streams.

While the streets were mostly empty, there were still several groups of kids scattered about, talking and laughing loudly. You decided it would be best to leave the neighborhood since most everyone knew who you were. You worried about them complaining to your parents. You already caused them so much trouble, you didn’t want to bring anymore onto them.

October 31st, 10:49 pm 🍂

As the night wore on, more and more people turned their lights off to indicate that they were no longer giving out candy or that they had run out. It was getting hard to find people still participating and most of the kids had given up by this point, deciding to hang out in the cemetery or return home.

‘I haven’t even been out that long, but… I guess I should head home so mom doesn’t end up hurting dad trying to come looking for me,’ you sighed, about to turn around when a light caught your attention from the end of the street. ‘It’s the only house on this street with its lights on. I guess one more can’t hurt!’

You steeled yourself, walking down the dark street toward the house. The street lamps were spread far enough apart to leave darkness between them, the bulbs dull and flickering as they tried to die out. The only decoration on the house was a cute little sign on the door of a pumpkin covered in glitter. The words Happy Halloween were stitched on the top in what looked to be jean fabric.

You had visited quite a few houses and had procured several different types of candy into your bag. Most of them, surprisingly, hadn’t given you a second thought when you knocked on their door. Others just gave you the stink eye but said nothing. There were a few, though, that had given you a stern lecture or cussed you out before slamming the door in your face.

For the first group of people, you believed you had just gotten lucky because you had walked up with or behind a group of kids and they most likely just assumed that you were with them. With no more kids around, though, you couldn’t exactly pull that stunt.

Taking a breath, you brought your hand up, rapping your knuckles on the wood. A minute or so passed before the door was pulled open, revealing a tall, thin man. His blonde hair was swept over his left eye and he wore a tan-colored turtle-neck sweater with a pair of blue jeans. He looked so… familiar, but you couldn’t quite place who he was.

You put on a bright smile, holding up the bag. “Trick-or-treat!”

He quirked a brow, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded across his chest. “You’re a bit old to be trick-or-treating, don’t you think?”

Your smile didn’t falter because you had expected this already at every house. “Last time I checked, there was no age limit on having fun. I’m not breaking any laws, either. Now, if you don’t mind sir, please give me candy or tell me to leave.”

His blue eyes observed you for a moment, a spark of amusement within them. “Tell me, is it really so fun to do this?”

“I think you,” you nodded. “It reminds me of simpler, happier times. Maybe I’m stupid for trying to cling to that each year, but I’ll be damned if I give up now.”

His gaze locked with yours, softening at the pained look within your eyes. You hid it well, but he was trained to pick up on such things. He pushed away from the doorframe, stepping back inside the house to grab the candy bowl before holding it out to you. “Take what you want. I doubt any other kids will be coming around.”

“Thank you,” you offered him a smile before picking out a few pieces of your favorite candy. “Have a good night.”

“Wait a moment,” he held up his finger before disappearing into the house. When he returned, he was shrugging on a black jacket. “Let me walk you home.”

You quirked a brow as he pulled the door closed, sliding the key in to lock the door. “It doesn’t seem very smart to let a strange man know where I live.”

“That’s true,” he chuckled, keys clinking as he slipped them into his pocket. “Allow me to walk you to your neighborhood, then.”

“What a gentleman,” you smiled softly, beginning down the street with him at your side. “With that kind of attitude, you should be a hero.”

Amusement flickered through his eyes, lips twitching upward. “Hm, I hear being a hero is quite dangerous, though.”

“Yeah…” you turned your gaze to the ground, feeling a frown come to your lips. “That’s what worries me about my brother becoming one. It’s his dream, though, and even if I said anything about it, there’s no way he’d listen. He’s such a hard head.”

“I’m sure he’ll be a great hero one day.”

“He definitely will.”

Silence settled over the two of you as you made it back toward your home. As you passed by another street on the way, you suddenly paused because most of the houses on this street were still lit up and decorated to the nines. Several groups of older kids were making their rounds around the cul-de-sac.

“Ne, sir, do you want to experience trick-or-treating?” you grinned at him, excitement dancing within your eyes.

Blue eyes flickered from your own to the cul-de-sac and back. There was something about the innocent, pure gleam within your eyes that made it hard for him to say no. And it’s not like he had anything better to do with his night. “Sure, I’ll give it a try.”

“Great!” Without much thought, your hand slid into his, tugging him toward the first house. He didn’t understand why, but his heart started to pick up its pace upon feeling your warm skin on his despite the cold weather outside.

October 31st, 11:30 pm 🍂

Katsuki paced around his room, narrowed eyes darting to the clock every few minutes. Where the hell were you? The neighborhood was dark, the neighbors no longer handing out candy and no kids had come by in the past thirty minutes. You should have been home by now, so why weren’t you?

He could hear his mother in the living room pacing back and forth as she loudly voiced the thoughts within his head. The regret that was pooling within his belly from the other day was now getting worse as worry clawed at his insides. What if you had been captured by a villain? His eyes widened at the thought and he tore out of his room, feet stomping down the stairs.

“Katsuki! Where the hell are you going?!” Mitsuki shouted, pausing her pacing to look at her son. “It’s late!”

“None of your business, hag!” He snapped back, flinging the door open.

“At least put on a jacket!”

But he was already out the door, slamming it behind him as he took off in search of you. His heart was thundering in his chest and he could only hope that you were safe. If something had happened to you, he’d never forgive himself for not being there to protect you.

November 1st, 12:00 am 🍂

You giggled as you fell onto the swing, watching the blonde as he settled down beside you. “Thank you for indulging me.”

“You’re welcome,” he smiled softly at you, crossing one leg over the other. “I have to admit, it was more fun than I expected it would be.”

“See~? I told you!”

He chuckled, poking you in the forehead with a slim finger. “So humble.”

You grinned, sticking your chest out. “One of my best qualities!”

“Did you have the night you were expecting?”

“No,” you shook your head, tilting your head back to look at the sky. Some of the clouds had cleared up, allowing more of the moon to shine down on you. “I never expected to meet such a nice person and convert them to the ways of trick-or-treating.”

He propped his chin up in his hand, smiling warmly at you as his eyes slid across your face. With the moonlight shining down on you, you looked so magical and he briefly wondered if you might actually be a witch. It would explain why he felt such a strong connection to you after only having just met you. He most definitely wanted to see you again.

“You never told me your name.”

“You never told me yours, either,” you grinned at him before holding out your hand. “Bakugo Y/N. Nice to meet you.”

His eyes widened at your last name. The image of his first meeting with Bakugo Katsuki filled his mind and it was almost laughable. There was no way such a sweet and kind person could be related to someone so loud and angry. He refused to believe it was anything other than a coincidence.

You tilted your head curiously. “Is something wrong?”

“No, sorry. You just reminded me of something.” His hand slid into yours, his skin ice cold from the wind. “Hakamada Tsunagu. It’s a pleasure to officially meet you, Y/N.”

Your cheeks warmed at the way he said your name. It was like honey flowing from his lips and you could definitely get used to hearing it.

November 1st, 12:10 am 🍂

Katsuki huffed as he ran down the street, eyes snapping from one side to the other as he desperately searched for you, calling out your name. He didn’t care that his voice was cracking or that the cold was turning his skin numb.

He was running past the park when he caught movement from the corner of his eye, head snapping around to find the source. Relief flooded him when he saw you walking away from the swings with a smile on your face. Without a second of hesitation, he rushed toward you, screaming out your name as if he hadn’t seen you in years.

Your eyes widened at the familiar voice of your baby brother. “Katsuki, what’s – oof.” His body slammed into yours, arms tight around your body as he buried his face in your neck, holding on to you for dear life. Your heart picked up speed, feeling your nerves begin to fray. Had something happened? “Katsuki -”

“Where the fuck have you been?!” he barked angrily, tightening his grip on you.

“Y-You knew I was going out tonight…” you gently rubbed his back. “Did you forget?”

“No I didn’t forget, dumbass!” he huffed, fingers digging into your back. As badly as he wanted to pull away so he could scold you properly, he was too afraid that you would see the worry and the fear lingering within his eyes. He hated feeling vulnerable, especially around you. He was supposed to be strong, a hero that could keep you safe no matter what. “It’s almost one in the morning!”

“Is it really?” your eyes widened and you understood why he was acting so worried. “I must have lost track of time, I’m sorry, Kat.”

Tsunagu didn’t know how to feel about the sight before him. He felt frustrated that Bakugo Katsuki was, indeed, related to you. He felt amused by how Katsuki was acting, surprised to see something other than plain annoyance within the boy. He also felt a bit sad knowing that his time with you had come to an end.

“You better be sorry!” When Katsuki felt like he had enough control over his emotions, he finally pulled back, keeping a firm grip on your shoulders as his narrowed eyes bore into your own. “You’re going to pay me back for this.”

You smiled sheepishly, rubbing the back of your head. “I will, I’m sorry.”

“Great, now let’s go home -” he had grabbed your hand, turning toward the entrance of the park when he finally spotted the tall blonde whom he had failed to notice in his relief to see you. His eye twitched, a shitty look coming onto his face as he pointed his finger in the man’s face. “What the fuck are you doing with my sibling?!”

Tsunagu sighed, putting his hand on his hip. “Still as tactless as ever.”

“Wait,” you glanced between the two, blinking curiously. “Do you two know each other?”

“No!” Katsuki snapped, beginning to stomp away but you didn’t budge, turning your gaze to the taller male.

“Tsunagu? How do you know my brother?”

“You’re on a first-name basis already?!”

His blue eyes met yours and his expression softened. “I’m the hero he interned with after the sports festival, Y/N.”

“Don’t you dare use their first name, you bastard!!” Small explosions went off on Katsuki’s palm but the older male just rolled his eyes at him, more focused on how you were taking the news that he was, in fact, a pro hero.

Your eyes widened. “Oh… oh my god. You’re… you’re…”

He smiled warmly, his voice soft. “The number three pro hero, Best Jeanist. At your service, Y/N.” he reached for your hand but Katsuki smacked it away, putting himself between the two of you.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re planning with my sibling, but you can forget it!” Katsuki tugged on your arm. “We’re going home, Y/N!” But you still didn’t move, staring wide-eyed at the tall man before you.

Now you understood why he looked so familiar and you wanted to smack yourself for not realizing it on your own. You had treated him so normally, as if he were just some average person. He isn’t an average person, though, he’s a great and powerful hero, one that had looked after your brother once upon a time.

Tsunagu shifted, his lips tugging down. It was subtle, but he could sense the change in the dynamic between the two of you and he didn’t like it, taking a step closer to you. “Y/N -”

You suddenly bowed, eyes screwed shut. “I apologize for being so flippant with you, Best Jeanist. I didn’t realize who you were.”

He reached for your shoulders and noticed Katsuki reaching for his arm. He was feeling annoyed now, tired of the boy interrupting him and getting between the two of you so he activated his quirk, the threads of his jeans unraveling to bind the younger Bakugo in place. He growled from beneath the cloth, struggling to break his binds.

Your eyes shimmered with wonder as you saw his quirk in action, taking note of the small holes that allowed you to see the milky skin of his outer thigh. You felt your cheeks heating up again when his hands rested on your shoulders, lithe fingers gently squeezing your skin beneath the costume.

“You have nothing to apologize for. Please don’t change how you act around me just because I’m a hero.” His eyes were so sincere and warm as his hand slipped up to your cheek, smiling at the warmth he felt there. “I may be a hero, but I’m still a person. I really did enjoy my time with you tonight.”

“I did, too,” you responded softly, offering him a smile before glancing at your brother, who was still struggling against the fabric. “We really should get home, though. Our mother’s going to have a fit…”

“Of course,” he reluctantly released the boy, dodging backward when Katsuki tried to attack him with an explosion.

“Katsuki!” you scowled, grabbing the back of his shirt without any hesitation, tugging him backward before locking your arm around his neck. “Don’t be so disrespectful!”

“Che, whatever,” he scoffed, fingers wrapping around your wrist as he tugged you toward the entrance of the park. You let him for a few paces before you stopped, turning to look back at the blonde that hadn’t moved.

“Are you coming, Tsunagu?”

He gave you a surprised look. “You want me to?”

“Well, you did say you were going to escort me home,” you smiled, biting your lip in thought before finding the nerve to say the next thing you wanted to. “Besides, you need to know where I live if you’re going to pick me up for our date tomorrow.”

His eyes widened a fraction before he chuckled, easily closing the distance with his long legs. You held your hand out to grab his, fingers lacing together. Katsuki grumbled loudly, aiming insults at the blonde as the three of you headed to the Bakugo household, but neither of you were paying attention to him.

📜 Read more by checking out my masterlist 📜

[youllallriseintheink]

Prison Cell, chapter 2

This is a story taking place in an AU where the studio became the sketch dimension before most of the sacrifices were made.  While this AU will have an emphasis on horror, especially in the later chapters, I also want to show the resilience of some of these characters.

---

"Can I be the one to go down there?" Susie asked.

"No," Abby answered firmly. "First we need to decide what we're going down there for. And I'm sorry, but I don't think it's going to be a rescue mission. I don't trust you not to turn it into one. Beyond that, though, whoever it is, it has to be someone at least somewhat nondescript. So, not you- you're pretty well-known, and your size alone is pretty distinctive. And not me, either- there are no other black women in this studio, so there definitely aren't any who are loyalists. And not Henry- he's a wanted man. Any volunteers?"

In the end, Jack was chosen for the first mission. He was fairly forgettable in appearance, and the one of the two people down there who knew him well wouldn't be one to call him out. Of course, the other was Joey Drew, but he was nonetheless the best candidate.

After Jack had been assigned, there was a brief discussion about where to hide Henry, they found someone to replace Norman as the projectionist, and a circuit of people were chosen to keep watch of the elevator at night so that no one would be attacked.

---

The next day, Jack put on the loyalist robes, traded his hat for a mask, and headed down in the elevator. The first lower floor that the elevator stopped at was at the old breakroom. Two men were there, playing pool in uniforms but no masks. It was strange how normal it looked. Jack figured that the masks must have only been for specific uses, including any visits to the upper floors. Hopefully he didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

"Hey," he said to them, trying to disguise his voice somewhat, "I have to check on the prisoners. I'm covering for a buddy. But he forgot to tell me where they are. Can you help me?"

One of the men gave him a funny look. There were a thousand things that could have given him away. Maybe all loyalists already knew where the prisoners were kept. "Floor 3B. Take two lefts. You can't miss it."

Jack thanked them and left.

Floor 3B was the second-to-last one, and it opened in a nondescript hallway. Once he’d followed the directions, he got to what looked like an unremarkable row of office doors. They looked like that, but Jack could hear someone crying within them, and could smell human waste. This was, undeniably, the place. Jack tried a few doors and found them to be locked. So, after checking to make sure that there was no one else nearby, he tried talking to the people within them. There were six prisoners in total. One of them was Emma LaMonte. Four of them had been a part of a small insurrection early on. Their stories broke Jack’s heart. One of them, Lacie, had been left with a broken leg that they had done nothing to treat. It had set incorrectly and was now a permeant cause of pain and poor mobility. Another of them, Shawn, had been fed ink. The final prisoner was also a surprise.

“Allison? I thought you were a loyalist.”

“I was, but I wasn’t very good at following the rules. Tom caught me breaking a pretty big one. He doesn’t want me to end up dead. So, he dragged me in here, and told the others that I’d done something less severe. Something that would get me locked up a long time, but not killed. I get treated better than the other prisoners, and Tom comes to visit me and take me around most nights like I’m a free person, but he still doesn’t trust me not to get myself killed. I know it’s only temporary, though.”

“Temporary?”

“Well, Tom says that Joey is working on a way out for all of us. I hope that’s true. But I’ve been in the dark pretty much since the beginning.”

Jack nodded. “I’m real sorry this has happened to you. Can I ask what you were doing? Oh- and do you know where there might be more prisoners?”

“I don’t know about other prisoners. But as for what I was doing- I was visiting the outside without permission. I actually did it several times before I got caught. If you want to do it, the portal is on floor 2B.”

“Okay. Thanks again,” Jack said before leaving.

The portal was not hard to find. A door like any other on floor 2B was in fact marked with the word, “portal.” Someone had left their keys in the door. Jack pocketed the keys and went in.

The inside of the room had, in addition to many typical janitorial supplies, a rack of small vials of dark, nearly-black liquid, a set of post-it notes, and a set of instructions. The instructions read, 

Step 1: write where you want to go on a note and stick it to a door.

Step 2: pour a vial of blood at the base of the door.

Curious as to how specific one had to be and how far the door’s powers extended, Jack wrote “China” on a note and poured out a vial. He opened the door, and on the other side was wilderness. Perhaps this was the very center of China. After being stunned for a moment at being able to see greenery and smell fresh air for the first time in months, Jack realized that, since the portal worked, there was a much better way he could be using it. Giddy, he wrote down his old address and repeated the ritual. The door opened to a closet in his own house. He could hear his dog barking and the voice of one of his kids, and for a moment he considered abandoning the studio and everyone in it.

Then the door shut, and opened again. Jack was roughly pulled through it, back into the supply closet.

“What were you doing!?” a woman yelled at him. Then, her voice dropped to a whisper. “Okay, give me back my keys and don’t tell anyone I forgot them, and I won’t tell anyone that you snuck a trip through the portal. Got it?” she was clearly just as frightened as he was.

“I won’t tell anyone. But could you please just let me have this? Just for ten minutes. Please?”

The woman appeared to mull this over. “Sure. But seriously- you can’t go through there dressed like that. Here, I’ll hold your mask...” the woman reached for his mask. 

Jack backed up against the wall. “Actually, I changed my mind. But don’t worry, I still won’t tell anyone.”

“Wait... you seem familiar...”

Jack opened the door and scrambled to the elevator, not looking back to see if she followed. 

---

“Okay, so the good news is that we know that the insurrectionists are alive,” Abby began after Jack had returned back and composed himself enough to report his findings. “And now we know about the portal. That’s very interesting. The bad news is that the prisoners are being kept in awful conditions, and they’re probably going to suspect anyone who’s wearing the mask in public places from now on. I guess the best thing to do is use someone who looks specifically like someone from down there. So, try to remember how the people down there looked. And thank you, Jack. That was very brave of you.”

Jack nodded and left Abby to her work. Planning an insurrection was difficult, and especially so on top of directing the art department. Shortly after Jack left, there was a knock on her door. It was Susie.

“Susie! Hi! did you get that list I asked for?”

Susie smiled. “Yep. Went to every department. There’s a good dozen or so people who are ready to hit the demon with an ax!”

Abby smiled back. Susie had been a big help to her. “Great! I’ll assign them floors.” hopefully the gambit would pay off. Hopefully they weren’t just throwing good fighters away. The forced blood extraction might have been frightening and violating to the people who received it, of whom there were more than a couple, but who knew when the insurrectionists might need their best fighters? If the demon just dragged them away anyhow, then this wasn’t the best use for them. Of course, being a leader in these times meant making a thousand decisions like that with limited information and hoping that things turned out for the better.

---

Days wore on. The guard system on the elevators had lasted all of a single night. The demon, finding a guard on each floor, had taken to eviscerating one of them. By the time the other guards arrived, the demon was standing over a corpse that appeared nearly inside-out. The demon scurried back to the elevator, and left before anything could be done to him.

The missions went poorly as well. Security had increased after Jack had nearly been found out. While the insurrectionists had managed to map out the lower floors (save for the very basement, which was sealed off), and found out that a great many of the loyalists were sick of a mysterious disease that caused blackened, shiny skin, they were unable to steal keys, free the prisoners, or access the portal again. After two weeks of no progress and three deaths, two of which had been killed after having been found out, Abby called the rebellion off. She felt it was what was best for everyone’s welfare, and since the loyalists had banned wearing masks on the lower floors, going undercover had become immensely more dangerous..

Susie continued to bring people together for meetings. She was not organized and dominant as Abby had been, and her meetings tended to be chaotic. The people were angry and had been emboldened. One night, a man stole a uniform and snuck down to the lowest levels. He killed a man with a knife and injured another before being imprisoned. The next day, Sammy came to the music department and escorted Susie to the basement.

"Where are you taking me?” Susie asked as Sammy clicked the elevator button to bring her to the lower floors.

“Don’t worry. No harm is going to come to you yet. This is something that Joey Drew is explicitly allowing. He knows that he needs to stop this rebellion, so he’s going to use sticks and carrots. And, well, this is the carrot.” Sammy’s face was unreadable.

They went into the room labelled “portal.”

“The first thing that I’ve been asked to do is tell you why all of this is necessary. Susie, your blood can open the portals to the outside. There were only six people in the entire studio with the right blood properties to do that, and your rebellion killed one of them last night.”

Susie nodded. “What I’ve never understood is why you don’t just let everyone out. I mean, you have a portal.”

Sammy took off his shirt, revealing a black growth that had spread across his chest, stomach, and shoulders. “If I spend more than a day or two out there, I will get sick and die. The same is true of everyone who was in the room when the ink machine exploded. Some of us are too deformed to even be allowed through the portal anymore. Joey is looking for a way to cure us so that everyone can be free. And until then, he needs your blood.”

“That doesn’t explain why he’s keeping everyone else.”

Sammy cringed. “That’s probably his own selfishness- wanting to maintain his studio the best he can. He’s not exactly as sane as he used to be. But... you’ll find out about that soon enough. For now, Susie, I’m supposed to give you your carrot. We have some money to spend, and I’ve been given permission to take you anywhere in the world you want for the day and send you back with an offering of gifts.”

Susie thought on this. “What if I told you that I wanted my gift to be Norman?”

“You’ll find out about him tonight. He’s a part of the bargaining.”

Susie’s face lit up. “Okay, wonderful!”

The two of them spent a day in Paris together. Afterwards, Sammy sent her back with two first-aid kits. One of them was fully stocked and then some, as it contained much of the contents that had been in the other one. The other they had emptied. Anything from it they couldn’t pack into the first box had been abandoned on the street, and they had filled the box with knives.

“Please promise me that you won’t use these unless absolutely necessary. Joey doesn’t want it to come to war, but if it does, there is a lot he could use against you. The loyalists could poison you with ink, or they could refuse you access to any resources and starve you into compliance. And thankfully, we don’t have guns, but if things ever escalated, we could get them, and you couldn’t. So, please, for own safety, only use these for self-defense.”

“I won’t let anyone know about these. But I'm not sure I can control them. Angry people that feel like they have nothing to lose are... really hard to lead.”

Sammy went quiet.

“Something wrong, Sammy?”

“Well, I told you that we were planning on using sticks and carrots, right? Well, Joey- if I can still call that thing “Joey”- is about to give you your stick. He wants to crush the rebellion with shock and awe. And I’m scared that he’s just going to make everyone angrier.”

Susie didn’t know what to say to that. “It’ll be okay, Sammy.”

“I sure hope so,” he replied, starting to cry.

Finding the portal again was easy- it was right where it had been at the beginning of the day, in some supply closet in some department store. A loyalist checked over what Susie had brought back, but Sammy had made sure that the person to do so would be another sympathizer, so they were let go. They stepped onto the elevator again. “Alright. Time for the stick. I’m supposed to deliver you to the very basement. I’m sorry.”

[bookandcranny]

Little Angels

One]

It is dark inside a wolf’s belly, but up here the air is clear and bright. Atop the tower of Paradiso, above the city of mist and gray. The roof is all caved in and shattered, scattering brilliant prisms through the fragmented skylight and across the floor. A man stands alone in the wreckage, inside the skeletal remains of this holy animal. He sifts through the books that were left behind until he finds one with a red cover and no title, but the letters A-D embossed along its spine. He flips to a certain chapter, and begins to read.

It was in another kind of tower that it happened. The Detective entered into the penthouse apartment of the Deeds family, a couple from the upper crust who were in a state of panic over their missing teenage daughter. From that first frantic phone call with the grief-ridden Gloria Deeds, Sacha knew the shape of this case inside out, backwards, and upside down. It was a classic. 

Teenage girl from a wealthy family, sheltered her whole life, the type who could do no wrong in the eyes of her doting, overbearing parents. One night she leaves without warning, to chase some guy or some band or some misplaced sense of adventure. The reasons didn’t matter as much as what they were willing to pay for the reassurance that their precious little angel would be home safe and sound.

There were just a couple of details he hadn’t counted on.

Sacha sat idling on the side of the road, looking down at the photo the Deeds’ had given him. It was a little roughed up at the edges and faded at the crease where he’d folded it. He’d forgotten how fragile these old-fashioned print photographs were. Despite the damage, the face of thirteen year old Renee Deeds still looked up at him with those same gentle brown eyes and private smile. 

The girl in the photo, however accurate it was to real life, had her hair pulled back in a crowd of twin braids that crested over thick dark curls. She wore what Sacha presumed to be church clothes-- tidy blouse and long skirt, an heirloom brooch-- and a pair of crutches braced to her forearms. Her ankles were crossed and tucked limply to one side, away from the camera’s focus.

The girl’s disability put a complication in the narrative he’d been concocting. According to the Deedses, Renee could only go so far on foot without intense pain and she disliked using her chair. It remained in the hall closet, untouched since her disappearance. Mr Deeds worked from home most days so rather than send her off to school, she was homeschooled by a well-vetted private tutor under her father’s occasional supervision. She had few friends, being a reserved child, they said. Sacha thought it probably had more to do with the gilded cage she lived in, lined with bubblewrap and goose down lest she ever bruise her precious knees. But it wasn’t his place to say.

Regardless, this left him with a very limited pool of suspects. And suspects they were indeed, since the Deeds were certain Renee had been kidnapped. Such a good girl would never have just wandered off on her own. 

If that was indeed the case, the culprit had done a remarkable job of covering their tracks. Renee was last seen by her mother who had put her to bed at 9 'o'clock on the dot. The security system had been armed all night and there were no signs of tampering. Besides which, the only way out of the penthouse that didn’t involve a several story drop to a very unhappy ending was through the front lobby and the cameras in and outside it didn’t detect anyone unusual, coming or going. 

The parents’ first move, naturally, was to call the police. The cops questioned the other residents and scanned the security tapes but turned up empty handed and after a few weeks of daily calls the officers on the case all but told Mr and Mrs Deeds that their hands were tied. For once, even money and social standing couldn’t hasten the hand of justice. That was when they had called on private investigator Sacha Ferro to get the job done.

All these facts laid out before him, Sacha found himself no closer to the answer than he had been at the start. The difference between then and now was not information but desperation, the heights of which had brought him here. Orphan’s Hollow.

The last few years had hit this city hard, same as it did all of them. It wasn’t a single sudden thing, but rather a combination of natural disasters, a virulent epidemic, and the consequential economic collapse that left entire districts barren, now inhabited only by clustered communities of the homeless. The handful of city blocks now known as Orphan’s Hollow was one such district, named so because it was, if stories were to be believed, populated entirely by children. Hollowed out department stores and office buildings and, most notably, the abandoned fairgrounds of Fun Town West became a tragic Neverland for runaways and other parentless youth in hiding from the overburdened childcare system.

Recently, there had been an epidemic of another kind in many of the nearby boroughs. Kids were going missing, just like Renee Deeds had, except most families weren’t fortunate enough to be able to hire someone to track them down. From what Sacha could pick up, most of them-- those that were reported-- were girls between the ages of six and sixteen. Other than that, the demographics were all over the map: black, white, rich, poor, healthy, sick. Missing posters spawned and spread like mold across the billboards and telephone poles, while the local government processed statistics with dead eyes and shrugging shoulders.

The unspoken truth seemed to be that if they were anywhere, if they were alive, the missing girls were somewhere in here. But the kids of Orphan’s Hollow were protective of their own and wouldn’t likely allow any cops to sift through their ranks even if they did trust their motives. It became one of those open secrets that everyone knew about but no one wanted to touch. 

On top of that, not every orphan was some scrawny Dickens novel side character; there were rumors of gang activity and even some sort of cult that made the teenagers who ended up in this part of town vicious towards outsiders. Orphan’s Row was a name with more than one meaning, they said, because if you took those kids lightly they’d turn yours into orphans as well. None of that mattered to Sacha though. At this point, he had little left to lose.

There was a gun in the glovebox of the Detective’s hatchback, unloaded, and he hoped it would stay that way. The idea of turning any weapon on a kid, no matter their alleged viciousness, turned his stomach. He would bring it with him to be used, in only the most absolutely dire circumstances, as a threat. Leverage. If it came down to it, he could rationalize that.

As he turned down another vacant street into the ghost town, the weather began to turn as well. It had been drizzling steadily since the evening prior, making the humidity all the more unbearable, but now the rain relented and in its place a clotted mist settled low over the city, like ink diffusing in water. Sacha kept his lights low and foot barely pressing on the gas pedal. Though it was irrational he felt uneasy at the idea of making himself any more noticeable than he was already.

When the car jolted it was like being shaken awake from a dream. At first he thought it was another pothole-- the roads were a wreck after so long untended-- but then there was an audible crunch and a lurch as his front-left tire burst. Without bothering to pull over he got out and found the problem right away. Deep in the tire, lodged between the wheel and its socket, was a doll. Or at least, something that was trying to be a doll.

The body was made out of metal; scraps from perhaps an aluminum can worked together with screws and painted to give it the look of a hoop-skirted dress. Its head was a christmas ornament. He recognized the pink painted cherub cheeks and curling synthetic hair. Some broken edge of the makeshift toy had punctured the tire, and of course Sacha didn’t have a spare on hand, even if he could figure out how to rip the damn thing out of the wheel well. 

He muttered a curse to himself. He’d have to leave it here and keep going on foot. At least there wasn’t anything in the car worth stealing, and he didn’t exactly have to worry about getting a ticket.

A sudden shriek made Sacha jump, hand going blindly to the holster under his shirt.

“My doll!” the child cried again. “You killed Jessika! My dolly!”

Sacha turned around and saw a young girl, barefoot and wearing what looked like an old halloween costume, standing across the street from him like a specter out of the fog. Appropriate, since she was so keen on howling like a banshee.

“Hey, I’m so sorry about your dolly,” he gentled, crossing to meet her. 

The girl seemed to be considering running away from the strange man, as would well be her right, but stood her ground instead as her face grew redder.

“You killed her,” she said again. “She was a person and you killed her.”

Sacha dropped to one knee. “ I’m sorry about your Jessica--” 

“Jessika!”

He chewed the inside of his cheek. “I am sorry, but it was an accident, really. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

She sniffled. “I’m Princess Ladybird,” she said, as though it should have been obvious. She gestured at her costume, a pink sparkly dress studded with plastic gems around the collar. “Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here.”

“My name is Sacha. I’m a private investigator-- a detective,” he corrected, seeing her confused expression. “I’m looking for someone. They’re not in any trouble, I just need to make sure they’re safe. Do you think you could help me, your highness?”

He kept his voice low and comforting. Dealing with kids wasn’t exactly his specialty, but he knew what he was doing well enough.

“No! No!” the girl cried, more agitated than ever. “No grownups allowed! You’ll just hurt them, just like Jessika!”

“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” he insisted, growing frustrated. “And I told you didn’t mean to break your doll. I could buy you a new doll? A nicer doll.”

She shook her head adamantly. “The store dolls aren’t alive. I only play with alive dolls.”

Play along, Sacha. “Okay, where can I get you a new ‘alive’ doll?”

“You can’t make an alive doll, you’re too old,” she huffed. 

Sacha was not going to let himself be offended by a six year old. He wasn’t. “If your dolls are so precious, maybe you shouldn’t leave them in the street!”

“Maybe you should look where you’re going!” With that, she stomped on his foot and ran away. Sacha barely felt it through his shoes, but that was a small consolation. In a blink the princess was gone again.

He sighed. It was no less than he expected, but it still didn’t feel good. With the world they’d been living in, it wasn’t any surprise that the kids here were a bit strange. At least this one had seemed healthy enough, certainly energetic. That meant there was probably someone making sure she was kept fed. 

He reminded himself that there was nothing he could do for these kids. Better to focus on what he was here for.

Two]

Sacha walked along the sidewalk without any real sense of where he was going. He occasionally saw clusters of children playing games or jumping in puddles in the street, but most were inside keeping out of the weather. When he looked up he sometimes saw tiny faces peering down at him from high windows or crouched on fire escapes. The ones on the ground didn’t spare him a look except in fleeting disgust. There was a girl reading fortunes for her friends from a dented pack of playing cards who went abruptly silent when he passed by, and Sacha came to realize that they were deliberately ignoring him, hoping to shun him into leaving the way he came. 

When he tried to approach a pair of tweens doing some sort of craft project in a sheltered doorway, they quickly picked up their things and scampered away, leaving only a trail of paint droplets behind them. They didn’t look too terribly hard-off; their clothes were sometimes dirty but they were all in one piece and their eyes were bright and lively. It was sort of amazing, Sacha thought, how they’d really managed to build something of a community here, away from adults. Part of him almost envied them.

“Excuse me,” he tried again with a girl who was a bit older than the last. Her age didn’t make her look any more mature really, only sharper, as if she were growing but growing into the wrong shape. “I’m looking for--”

“Everyone knows what you’re looking for,” the young woman said. “You’re loud enough about it.”

This one wasn’t exactly friendly but at least she hadn’t run away yet. Sacha went to pull out a photo. 

“Put that away, man,” she hissed. “You’re not going to find any girls who look like that here, and the wrong fledgling might just eat you alive for having it.”

“For having a photograph?” He didn’t bother to ask what a “fledgling” was supposed to be. Some sort of weird slang he was too dated to recognize, he guessed.

“For keeping another girl’s face! All you need is a face and a real-name and you can make that person do and say whatever you want.”

“Is this some kind of game you kids play? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s not a game,” she said gravely. “You don’t understand anything. Walking into this world when you don’t know the rules is as good digging your own grave.”

“Help me catch up, then. Level with me,” Sacha pressed. “I can make it worth your while.”

He didn’t have much money on hand, but he had medicine credits set aside for emergencies and that should be worth its bytes in gold in a place like this. Or if not, she could pawn it and buy some earrings or animal crackers or whatever kids liked.

“Save it, I don’t have an account. Legally, most of the kids here don’t even exist. You’ll have to trade for what you want the old fashioned way, outsider.”

Exasperated, Sacha rooted around in his pockets and came up with a protein bar and a keychain that doubled as a bottle opener. The girl didn’t look impressed.

“Okay look, hand over the picture and the rest of it and I’ll tell you where you need to go, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Outsiders don’t survive long here.”

Sacha wasn’t convinced this wasn’t all some intimidation game, but he folded up the photo of Renee and handed it to her anyway. If he really needed the visuals he had pictures on his phone. He’d turned it off shortly after setting out, when the calls and texts from his sister started pouring in, but couldn’t quite bring himself to leave it behind in the car. He could just picture Maria pacing around the house scowling at his number as another message failed to go through. 

I’ll make it up to you, he promised her silently.

“There’s a spot two blocks that way,” She pointed. “Left, left, right, down some steps, and you’ll see a sign for The Love Nest. It’s hard to miss.”

Something about the name said through her lips made him want to recoil. The girl scoffed at his unease.

“Relax, it’s just the name left from the old owners. It belongs to the brood now. It’s a good place, a sacred place.” She sighed, looking up and around as if projecting to an imaginary audience. “Not that someone like you would get any of that, I guess. A lot of fledglings hang around there. If your girl can be found, you’ll find her there. If not, she’s already gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” he demanded.

“I mean gone.” she held up the photograph, still folded. “Gone like this.”

She tore the square neatly in two and let the halves flutter to the ground.

“I’m not even supposed to tell you this much, so if you missed your window don’t even think about hanging around here trying to dig out more information. You’re pushing your luck as it is.”

What an angry kid, Sacha thought to himself as he departed. He wasn’t too different when he was that age, but outright threatening someone who was only trying to do good seemed a bit extreme, especially when that someone had a good head of height on you as well. Was it the conditions they lived in that made them so temperamental here? Or just adolescent angst? Hopefully he wouldn’t be staying long enough to find out.

And just how was he planning to leave, even if he was successful, he wondered. He’d have to drive them out on three tires. Ruining his car would be well worth it though if it meant ending this.

Angry girl’s directions turned out to be sound and soon enough Sacha found himself at the door of a closed down club that proudly announced itself as “The Love Nest” in faded pink letters above the door. The windows were boarded up but there were still some old posters for the upcoming live entertainment pinned to the plywood. It appeared the place had been at least marginally more legitimate than Sacha had guessed by the name, while it had been in operation.

Pushing through the double doors the Detective found himself in a gloomy ballroom, styled vaguely like a vintage cabaret club or perhaps someone’s romanticized idea of a 1920s speakeasy. There were a few tables-- standing only by virtue of the bolts that held them to the hardwood-- a bar, and a large circular stage in the middle of it all. Sacha toed aside what he’d thought was a trash bag only to hear a grumbled complaint and find another of the hollow’s orphans crawling out of a sleeping bag on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” the kid asked, with such pointed accusation you’d think he’d personally wronged them. They were wearing an oversized “Fun Town” t-shirt and flannel bottoms with a paw print pattern.

Roused by the noise, some other children began emerging from their own napping spots to investigate.

“Are you a cop?” one asked.

“No, I’m more of a detective,” he replied.

“Sounds like a cop to me. And you look like a cop.”

Sacha frowned. “How so?”

“You’re old,” the kid said. “And you have blood on you.”

He looked down at his hands, his clothes. He saw brown khakis, dusty black loafers, pale patterned button-up shirt. No tie; he’d spilled coffee on it on the drive, hands already shaky from the ill-advised extra caffeine. To his embarrassment, he noticed a faint dampness where the weather and his own nerves had painted sweat across his collar, but no blood.

“It’s okay,” said the first child, yawning. “Snowy sees blood on everyone.”

“I don’t see it, I smell it,” challenged Snowy. She took a deep breath through her nose. “And you stink of it. Dirty blood, blood that wasn’t ready to be shed. Have you ever killed anybody, Mr Detective?”

Sacha fought the urge to roll his eyes. “Have you been talking to a girl in a princess dress?”

“You mean Princess Ladybird?”

“Never mind,” he said quickly, as if simply mentioning that ridiculous name might conjure up her horrible wailing. “I’m looking for someone. Two someones actually.”

He considered taking out his phone but, remembering how Angry Girl had reacted to the photo, decided to try a different approach. 

“I was told I might find them here. One is named Renee Deeds and the other is Ana Ferro-Silver, eighteen and fifteen years old. Anything you can tell me about either of them would be a huge help. I’m sort of hoping one will lead me to the other.” He forced a smile. 

Kid in the pajamas frowned. “There’s no one with names like that here. You woke us up over something as dumb as that?”

“I don’t think it’s dumb to want to find two girls who might be in a lot of trouble,” he said tersely. “And why were you asleep anyway? It’s three in the afternoon.”

“Growing makes us tired,” Pajamas shot back. They rolled their shoulders. “And sore.”

“And hungry!” added a third child. “Did you bring us any food?”

“Why would I have any food?”

“I heard the gargoyles say you gave Singing Finch a candy bar.”

“It was a protein bar,” he said before he could think to deny it. “What kind of name is ‘Singing Finch’ anyway?”

“It would’ve been Evening Finch, but she tattled so now she’s Singing Finch,” they explained patiently. “She tattled on us and then she tattled on you to the gargoyles and the kestrels. She can’t help it though. She’s a songbird, it’s what they do.”

“So you don’t have any candy?” the other cut in. Sacha put out his empty hands so she could verify and she bit him.

Pajamas laughed as he pulled away with a curse and a cry. “You are dumb. There aren’t any girls in trouble here. You’re the only one in trouble, but that’s because you’re an outsider and a cop, so you probably deserve it.”

Sacha felt a muscle in his jaw tense. He was beginning to think this had all been a huge waste of time. These kids operated on their own kind of logic, their own language, one which was foreign to him. 

“Please,” he said. “Please. I know a lot of you are without families, but these girls still have people who care for them, who are looking for them. I have to bring them home.”

The children looked at him, and then a few of them looked at each other, huddling together in hushed conference. The one called Snowy, who was sitting on top of the bar, glared at him, tilting her head as if she were trying to read something written on the side of his head in very small print. He caught himself raising a hand to touch his neck and let it drop self-consciously back to his side.

“If you keep going like this, you might die,” she told him innocently. “Did you know that?”

The presence of the gun against his stomach, empty though it was, made his skin tingle. “I considered the possibility,” he said, and it was the honest truth. 

“When you die, will you go to paradise?”

“You’re too young to be thinking this much about blood and death.”

“I’ve seen death.” Her voice was without intonation, no defensiveness or accusation anywhere in her tone. She couldn’t have been any older than ten. “My mom died in front of me. She had a fever, but I stayed cold. That’s why they call me Snowy.” She paused, shrugged one shoulder. “Also because I can eat a whole mouse in one bite, like a snowy owl.”

“Oh,” Sacha said lamely. “I’m- I’m so sorry.”

She gave another shrug. “S’okay, I’m with the brood now and they take care of me just as good as mom would. I’m just saying, you don’t really seem like a guy who’s ready to die for anyone.”

Amongst all the riddles and nonsense, this at least was something he could understand. 

“I promise you, I am.”

Pajamas tugged at his sleeve. “Hey, hey Detective, have you ever been to Fun Town?”

He blinked, reeling from the non sequitur. “Excuse me?”

They pointed at the garish logo on their shirt. “‘Fun Town: It’s the funnest place on earth!’ Maybe your friends are there.”

“You’re not going to tell me I should just turn back now? That I’m dumb and the kids I’m looking for are gone forever?” he couldn’t help but snark.

“Don’t listen to Finch, she’s a liar. Nobody’s gone. Different, but not gone.”

Fun Town was an amusement park franchise with a handful of locations all over North America. Had been, that is. They’d had to shut down all their locations more than ten years ago, due in part to the outbreak at the time as well as some unsettling information about the eccentric late founder that came out after his death. Something about swaying elections and pouring company funds into an illicit genetic engineering project. Another day, another megalomaniac billionaire exposé. It had been big news at the time but now it was just another piece of pop culture trivia.

The Fun Town West fairgrounds were now little more than a fancy animatronics graveyard. The rides-- what of them hadn’t been torn down and picked clean by opportunistic scavengers-- were sparkling rusted monuments. Any sense of childhood wonder that remained had long since been siphoned off and sold. The kids didn’t seem to mind though, for how they’d congregated around the place. Maybe Pajamas had a point. It was a big, bright landmark, impossible to miss, and as good a place to search as any.

Three]

The Detective left Snowy and Pajamas and the other strange flock of The Love Nest behind, feeling a grim sense of determination The puckered bite mark on his hand throbbed; the little creep had managed to break skin! 

As he navigated his way to the outskirts of the district, Sacha mulled over the interactions he’d had so far. Reluctantly he pulled out his phone to take some notes, ignoring the voicemail notifications cluttering the screen.

The kids call themselves “brood”-- some sort of gang name? The younger ones and/or newcomers to their group seem to be called fledglings. Everyone has a nickname; real names and pictures of faces have some sort of negative significance. And what of the “songbirds”, “kestrels”, etc? Songbirds: spread information. Kestrels: Unknown.

He huffed. None of this was bringing him anywhere closer to the truth about the missing girls. None of it was helping him find Ana.

By the time he power-walked to the long neglected fairgrounds, the hazy sky was becoming downright dour. The clouds had turned the color of smoke. Combine that with the stench of burnt plastic wafting from some of the attractions, it made for an unpleasant effect. He felt that a storm was brewing, and hoped that whatever came he’d be able to find shelter before the sky opened up around him.

He’d been here only twice while it was still in operation; once just him and his parents and once with Maria. By the second visit he’d already lost his sense of wonderment when it came to a day at the fair. The weather was hot and the crowds were annoying and all the games were rigged. Yet there was still a part of him that felt deeply sad to see what Fun Town had become. This was the sort of place that should’ve been beautiful forever, even as the children grew up and out of their love for it.

As he wove through the rows of darkened kiosks, the fairgrounds suddenly erupted into light. Sacha startled and shielded his eyes. The tired bulbs cracked and fizzled and when he looked up again the desiccated corpse of Fun Town had been revived in a great pulse of electricity. Against the backdrop of perpetual gloom the friendly colors were all the more headache-inducing, and somewhere a tinny recording of calliope music began to play. It all made Sacha’s skin crawl.

Against his every instinct, he let the music lead him to a shack next to the arcade with a mounted loudspeaker, the door marked with a firm “employees only”. To his surprise, the door was unlocked. Inside, another brood girl in coveralls was fiddling with a fuse box and leaning her hip against a desk with an old CCTV. The security system was so antiquated that it didn’t look like it should turn on at all, yet there upon the pixelated screen Sacha could still make out the shape of himself entering the park on a loop. 

The girl turned around, flipping a frizzy head of hair over her shoulder. Although, it turned out she wasn’t so much a girl as a young woman, pushing against the line between teenage and adulthood. His gut reaction was relief. This might be the closest thing to a rational adult he would find around here. Hopefully she’d be of more help than the others.

Come to think of it, he realized, he’d never considered what happened to the Orphan’s Hollow kids once they grew up. Surely there must be some adults here, somewhere. But then, everyone who’d met him so far had treated him as a foreign invader. Were all adults so unwelcome, as he’d assumed, or was there something about him in particular? 

The most rational assumption was that the homeless kids simply became homeless adults. No need for any additional fanfare. They would graduate from the Hollows and go on to squat in other parts of the city. There was certainly no shortage of slums these days, he thought glumly.

Did any ex-runaways ever try to go home, those that still had them? Did that Renee ever think about home? 

“What ho, outsider!” the teen greeted. Sacha felt himself relax despite himself, so glad to be met with at least one friendly face.

“‘What ho’?” he parroted lamely.

“It’s theatre-speak for ‘wassup’. As in, what the hell are you doing in brood territory?”

She moved quickly. He didn’t notice the knife until it was tucked under his chin, pointed at his throat. 

Sacha’s back hit the wall and he put up his hands in surrender. “Hold on, I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Oh yeah?” she giggled. She wrenched up the front of his shirt. “What’s this then? A prop? If I shoot it, will a little flag come out that says ‘bang’?”

She un-holstered the pistol and pointed it at his forehead.

“That’s not a toy,” he said slowly. “Just a little insurance. Like your knife there, I’m sure. I don’t think either of us wants anybody to get hurt.”

“This?” She tossed it in the air and caught it. “Nah, this is part of the act. Tonight, I’m a knife thrower. I’ve never been a knife thrower before. I hope it goes well.”

Sacha tried to speak, but the girl pressed the cold flat of the blade to his lips.

“The older girls put on shows for the fledglings. Sometimes here in Fun Town, sometimes over in the Nest, or up on the rooftops when the weather is nice. I’d invite you, but I don’t think you’d be welcome.” She adjusted her grip again so that the knife was touching the tip of his nose. “All day there’ve been whispers about some kind of detective guy putting his nose in our business.”

“I don’t care about you brood kids do here.”

“Liar.”

“I swear, I don’t. I’m just trying to find someone. I’m not even a real detective anymore,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t tell anyone what you’re doing here. Even if I did, no one would believe me. I’m nobody.”

The knife thrower gave a big, hearty laugh, and Sacha’s throat tightened with fear. He didn’t consider himself a violent person, but over his career he’d come to blows with enough unruly targets and bitter clients alike that he knew when someone was posturing, and when someone was really out for blood. Normally there was a clear indicator of one kind or another; a tightening of the jaw, a certain nervous tick, a look in their eyes. 

But this girl he couldn’t get a read on at all. He hoped that meant she was still on the fence about the subject.

Struggling to keep his voice level he said, “You don’t have to do this. Something like this will haunt you your whole life, you know, and you’ve got so much life left. You’re still just a kid--”

She reared her hand back and struck at his head with the butt of the pistol. Sacha dodged. It slammed into the fuse box she’d been working on instead and the lights went out. Taking advantage of the darkness, he shoved past her and in a stroke of blind fortune found the door. There was a sound then, like the rush of wind in his ears. Then a sharp flash of pain as a flying knife split the cartilage of one ear.

He stumbled and hit the pavement. When Sacha turned around, hand clutched to his head, he saw the young woman’s silhouette bracketed by two iridescent black wings. Again that sound, ferocious wingbeats stirring the air. All he saw were two but it sounded like hundreds, a massive flock taking off in perfect synchronicity. 

“It’s really frustrating when people don’t take me seriously,” said the winged creature as she approached him. Maybe it was an effect of the many colored lights, but her skin appeared to have a glossy sheen to it, like an oil painting in motion. “But you look like you’re starting to get it now.”

“What the hell are you?” Sacha asked with a mix of horror and feverish reverence.

“What do you think I am?”

The thought came to him unbidden. It was an insane thought, one he didn’t even truly believe in, yet this was an insane situation. “The angel of death.”

That gave her pause. “You’re not right, but you’re not really wrong either I guess. Truth be told, I’m heaven on earth. Maybe I’ll cut you some slack if you worship me”

A wing brushed over his skin, however faintly, and it felt warm and real as the blood cooling on his skin. Not ethereal or dreamlike as he might’ve expected but so real, and all the more hideous for it. He shuddered and said nothing.

The false angel, this predatory animal, took a step back. She spun the pistol around one long finger until it slipped and fell to the ground. She looked at it for a moment, as if surprised.

“Huh. It was lighter than I expected,” she said. Then she kicked it aside. “You win this one I guess. I’ll let you go.”

He stared at her, mouth agape, sure it was some trick.

“What? You don’t believe me. I put it in fate’s hand, and for some reason it looks like fate wants to keep you alive a little longer. It’s not how I saw this going, but I can roll with some improv.” She put up her hands. “Don’t bother groveling. I won’t kill you even if you beg. I know guys like you love punishment. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“Here… in Fun Town? Or, are you asking why I’m alive?”

She laughed. She so loved laughing. “Morbid! You’re morbid, man. I mean, why are you here among the brood? At… what do the outsiders call it? The Orphan Hole?” she snickered. “You kind of stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I’m trying to find someone,” Sacha repeated quietly. He’d said the line so many times he felt it was starting to lose its meaning. “And to make up for something I did.”

“Well you should’ve said so in the first place! If you’re looking to atone you need to meet with the broodmother. If you hurry, you might still be able to catch her. Tonight’s going to be kind of a crazy night once it kicks off, but if you plead your case I’m sure she’ll hear you out. 

“I have to keep setting up here. You go on ahead.” She pointed out in the direction he’d come from. “It’s a straight shot to Paradiso. You can tell her the angel of death sent you.”

She spared him one last smirk and then shot up into the air like an arrow loosed from a taut bowstring.

Or a bullet from a gun, even. Sacha considered the discarded pistol for a moment. It seemed so useless now, just a hunk of metal and plastic, just a prop. He walked away without it, pain pulsing dully from his ear. His journey was nearly over.

Time dragged on as he walked, but not enough for him to find the space to contend with what he’d seen. That girl, that creature. She was no angel, that much he was certain of. Angels didn’t attack strangers with a knife, he didn’t think. 

What he wasn’t certain of was… just about everything else. Was he meant to understand that all these girls, these brood, were some kind of bird-beasts taking human shape? Was everyone he’d met an imposter masquerading in the form of a child? Or did they start out as ordinary children and then transform somehow?

He half hated himself for even entertaining such wild ideas, but he had little other choice. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” wasn’t that so? In any case, speculation did him little good at this point. He could only hope that this paradise and “broodmother” the girl had spoken of could give him some answers.

Four]

Just when Sacha was beginning to wonder if the knife throwing angel imposter was fully fucking with him, he found his destination: The Paradiso Hotel, although the damaged neon sign now read only PRDIO. 

The building was tall and narrow, so wedged between its neighbors that it looked like any moment it might be crushed. The brickwork was crumbling as it was. Creeping plant life climbed the sides and snuck in through broken windows. The ominous, weathered shape of gargoyles watched from above, jutting strangely out of high corners. This place must have been in dire straits long before it had been taken over by the brood. At the same time, looking at it Sacha got the impression that it had been something glorious in its heyday. 

There was something almost inviting about the faint glow that came from the topmost windows, filtering pink light through heavy red curtains, and yet Sacha was terrified. His hands trembled on the railing as he climbed the winding stairway. 

The higher he went, the more his surroundings began to change. The carpet beneath his feet grew soft, damp, dipping slightly with his weight, and when he looked down he found it thick with patchy moss. Mushrooms sprouted from the junction where the floor met the wall. Sacha tore his foot from a tangle of roots he’d caught himself in and wondered, when was the last time he’d seen so much wild living plantlife in person? 

Finally he reached the top of the tower and opened the door not onto identical hallways and bland hotel decor, but onto a sprawling private library.

The detective could hardly see the walls for the shelves, lined top to bottom with books upon books upon books. There was a desk against the far wall piled high with precarious stacks of paper. They overflowed and spilled onto the loamy floor, whispering under his every step.

Beyond a towering skylight, storm clouds billowed, but that wasn’t of any concern to the flock of brood congregated in their wake. The scene looked like something rendered from stained glass, at least a dozen girls with wings of all colors stretched out and fluttering idly behind them as they sat around some sort of shrub or young sapling that was, quite impossibly, growing out of the floor. Its tender boughs bore tiny fruit, several perfectly round red orbs plump and shiny with juice.

The room smelled like a greenhouse, like heat and green growth, flowers and fruit. Intrigue drew Sacha nearer and he detected an undercurrent of something metallic as well. He rounded the desk and his stomach plummeted. The tree was not growing out of the floor. It was growing out of a human corpse nested in a bed of soil.

The Detective choked on a gasp and the brood children looked up. Their hands and knees were dark from their work. A flash of gore passed before Sacha’s eyes and he flinched, expecting to be struck down where he stood. When no killing blow came, morbid desire took hold of him and he took a second look. The tree was still there, and the body, but the body was not as he’d thought. It looked dry, mummified, more root than rot. Still staring, one of the brood girls plucked a berry and crushed it between her teeth. The smell intensified, iron and something sweet, heady as any wine.

One of the girl-beasts stood, and she seemed older than the rest somehow, not just in body but in her eyes, gray as the growing storm and so clear that Sacha feared if he looked too long he would fall through them. Her face was smooth and free of wrinkles or worry, but the long hair that fell about her shoulders was white as bone. She wore something like a shawl that hung lazily off her shoulders and down past her knees. Unlike the others, she had no wings.

“So you’re the one all my girls have been making such a fuss about,” she said, and her voice was a choir, her words an indictment.

Sacha felt a strange spike of anger at this creature that looked like a woman and talked like a mystic and was neither. “And you’re the broodmother, whatever that means! Your girls make you out to some kind of god. But you’re not a god, and you’re not their mother. I don’t know what you are and I don’t care. I just want to know why you’re doing this.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re- you’re taking them!” he stammered furiously. The pieces were coming together, albeit in a hectic jumble. “All the missing girls! You abduct them, or call them to you, or something! It changes them!” He flung his hand out towards the body. “You’re a killer! You're some kind of crazy death cultist and you turn these kids into killers!”

The broodmother quirked her head to the side, not quite smiling. “You talk with a lot of confidence for a man with only half the story.”

“Then explain it to me,” he demanded. “Make it make sense. Because I’ve been running around this madhouse all day and so far, nothing does.”

She hummed to herself, considering. “If you’re so eager for a tale, let’s start with yours.”

One of the other little brood leapt up and wrapped her arms around her waist. “Is it time for a story, Nightingale?”

“Yes, I think so. Do you know which book to get?”

“D for Detective!” she cheered.

“Very good.” 

The girl scampered off and returned with a big book bound in red. Nightingale took it and ran her thumb over the pages, flipping it open with a calm certainty that boiled Sacha’s blood.

“Let’s see… Detective Sacha Ferro. You were born in this very city, had a fairly normal childhood until,” She traced the tip of her finger along the page and Sacha noticed for the first time how it curled, a ghastly hook-like talon. “Oh, that’s right. There was an accident. Your parents… Tragic. Just terrible.”

Astonishingly, she sounded as though she meant it.

“You were in high school at the time. But your sister, Maria, she was still just a kid. You always struggled to relate to her as a brother, with her being so much younger than you, but after that day you had to become like a parent too. You really stepped up, it looks like. That didn’t change the fact that you were still a kid yourself. You made mistakes, and the two of you grew apart.”

Shame curdled in Sacha’s gut. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. The most he was capable of was curling his hands into white-knuckled fists at his sides.

“Get out of my head.”

“I’m not in it. Frankly, I’m not that interested in your editorializing. This is the truth. Now, where was I?

“You’d always dreamed of being a police detective, like the ones on TV,” she continued. “But became disillusioned with the idea once you grew older. So you became a private eye, but that too got old. You were tired of acquiring blackmail material for shady characters and helping angry wives catch their cheating husbands and so on. Meanwhile little Maria had grown up and moved on and the neighborhood you’d lived in all your life was going more and more downhill by the year. You wanted out.

“Then you got a call from a Mrs Gloria Deeds.” Her eyes widened dramatically. “She wanted you to track down her poor missing daughter. The Deedses were wealthy, desperate, and just perfect. You requested an advance payment, a big one, big enough for a down payment on a new life and the gas to get you there. They didn’t even blink as they pulled out the checkbook. It was all so easy.

“You took the Deedses money and you ran away. Forget the kid, chances were she’d turn up on her own in a week or two after getting whatever rebellious phase out of her system. That’s not what happened though, is it? More and more girls started disappearing. Renee wasn’t the first though, or was she? Could she have been the catalyst for all this? You’d never know for certain. The wondering ate you up inside, but not enough to make you turn back.

“You got yourself a new apartment and a regular nine-to-five job. You quit smoking. You adopted a dog. You started letting people in. You even called up Maria begging to be a part of her life again and shockingly, she agreed! You started spending weekends with her and her wife Kara and their sweet little girl Ana. Your mother’s name, wasn’t it? Well, anyway.

“Everything was all going so terribly well until just a few days ago. Nearly five years on the dot since you took the Deeds case and Maria calls you in tears, tells you that Ana has gone missing. You drop the phone, your blood running cold. She’s fifteen. Just a year or two and she’d be out of the target demographic. Neither you or your sister has set foot in this city in years. What are the odds she got taken? But you can’t let it go until you know for sure.

“Feeling frantic, you pull up the stuff from the Deeds case for the first time in what feels like an eternity. You do some digging. Renee Deeds was never found, nor were any of the others who vanished after her. The cops are still as apathetic and incompetent as you left them. They’re blaming it all on an epidemic of gang activity stemming from somewhere the locals have started calling ‘Orphan’s Hollow’. It didn’t used to be called that though, did it? Do you remember? How gutted you were when you found out? No way you could tell Maria where you were going. Back home, back to where it all started.”

“Stop.” Sacha found his voice at last, though to what end?

Nightingale looked up at him, feigning shock. “But don’t you want to know how it ends? Whatever does happen to the guilt-ridden detective trying to right a wrong? Hoping against hope that if he can fulfill the promise he broke that all of this will be set to rights, and little Ana will return home with him safe and sound.”

“Please, please, stop.” He covered his ears and felt the cut throb against his fingers.

“You’re not really in any position to be making demands, Detective. You came to me. You followed my song. It doesn’t usually work on grown-ups, you know, but you were always sort of a special case I think. I’m glad I kept an eye on you. This has turned out more interesting than I thought.” 

She crossed the room to stand before him, cupping his hands with her own. “You never really stopped being that kid, did you Sacha? You run and run and just keep him right there, locked away in your chest. Look at me Sacha. Look at me. You need to be a grown-up now. I don’t have her, Sacha. I don’t have Ana.”

Slowly Sacha’s hands dropped to his sides, his eyes wide and wet. “What?”

“That’s right,” the broodmother said cheerily. “Ana isn’t here. In fact, she’s at home with her moms right now. Maria’s been trying to call you for days now. You were too ashamed to pick up, couldn’t tell her how this was all your fault. It’s not actually, by the way. You were a self-serving bastard, but not enough to bring down that kind of karmic wrath.

“Although I’d’ve been happy to have her, Ana already has two loving mothers, and an uncle that… has his moments.” She patted him on the shoulder. “The children who follow my song aren’t like that. They come willingly, and they change because change is what they need. I won’t pretend it’s not a messy process. Sometimes blood needs to be spilled to create a paradise. But ‘be not afraid’, Detective. I would never let my little angels get hurt.”

“I still don’t understand,” he all but wept. “What about Renee Deeds?”

“You’re never going to let that go, are you?” Nightingale groaned. “‘What are you? What are you? Where’s the girl? Pow! Blam! I’m a big scary action hero and I’m here to save you or kill you trying!’” 

She shook her head. “You’re not the hero of this story, Detective. The girl you knew as Renee doesn’t exist anymore, but she’s alive, not because of your intervention, or lack thereof. Not even in spite of it. What am I? What is she? And what are we when we’re together? A thing that lives without your permission. You need to understand for it to be true.”

She looked at him then with all the sympathy of a mother comforting a crying child. She handed off the storybook to one of her young attendants, and as she turned around she swept aside the cover of her shawl to reveal her bare back. Her skin was twisted with badly healed scars, the flesh raised in the shape of two jagged cuts curving around the shape of her scapula.

“Here’s another story for you. Once upon a time,” she said. “A ship of men was cast from its course and lost at sea. Just when it seemed all hope was lost, they found themselves on the shores of a mysterious island full of the tallest, greenest trees they’d ever seen. The people there had wings like a bird, and they were so beautiful and kind that the men decided they must be angels, and this was paradise.

“The angels let them stay there a while and lick their wounds, but warned them that they couldn't remain forever. At first they accepted this, but as the time to leave for home grew nearer they became obsessed with the wonders of the island and couldn’t bear to go without taking a piece with them. 

“So enamoured by the beauty of the angels, yet fearing their heavenly wrath, they lured away the smallest one and imprisoned her in the lower decks of the ship. When she realized what had happened, she tried to escape, so they broke her wings until just moving them caused her horrible pain. She did get free in the end, but only once the ship returned to port and by then she was far, far from home and knew not how to find her way back. 

“She knew she wasn’t safe among the wingless people, so she hid herself away until nightfall, singing her song by the light of the moon in hopes that one day someone would return her call. When someone finally did, it wasn’t at all who she expected. It was a young human girl, a daughter of man, who recognized her song of pain and loneliness because these were things she knew well herself. When the angel and the girl finally found each other, the angel bid her to cut her useless wings and drink her blood, and together they escaped on new wings.”

As she spoke, the storm outside grew stronger until the wind rattled the very walls, knocking books loose from their shelves. The brood, with their many colored wings and many sweet voices, began to sing in wordless harmony, a hymn from such unfathomable depths and dizzying heights that Sacha’s legs nearly gave out beneath him. 

“Don’t be sad, my mourning dove. This is a happy story. The Nightingale fell in love with the Swiftlet, the song and the storm, and they carried each other to a place where they could make a new paradise, a garden of their own.”

That was when the ceiling began to cave in. Sacha fell to his knees and covered his head with his hands, blinded by what he was sure was a bolt of lightning. When he looks back on it later, he won’t be so sure.

Again came that sound, the torrent of wind and a hundred wings beating within it. Sacha forced himself to raise his head, squinting against the light, and there he saw dancing in the open air above the wreckage-- for dancing was the only way he could think to describe it-- a girl he once knew. Though they were less than strangers, especially now, he recognized her kind dark eyes, her secretive smile. 

Her hair was loose, a halo of electrified black curls, and her wings a dusky brown with the sharp, precise plumage of a swift. Her legs still didn’t move so freely as the rest of her, but she wasn’t bothered. She didn’t need them.

Nightingale ran and leapt and took her in her arms with a lover’s embrace. Off a ways behind them, their brood took flight as well, swooping and shrieking their delight as if they were a single entity, metamorphosing into something new, something so nearly divine.

Sacha did weep then. His vision blurred with the shape of his grief, then his longing, a child and a man and a hair’s width away from paradise. Eventually the storm subsided, but he didn’t see the angel and her love again after that. He thought perhaps that was for the better.

The sky cleared. The sun came out. Elsewhere, young girls planted gardens and played games and put on shows. The world went on, however changed.

This is where past and present collide. In the aftermath of a mystery, a man named Sacha Ferro picks up a book from in amidst the rubble and holds it up to the light. He flips to D for Detective and begins to read, anxious to find out what happens next.

Epilogue]

“Everyone settle down. Places! Starling, for the last time, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ doesn’t call for a knife thrower.”

“And why not?” She wiggles the blade in her direction. “This show’s so boring. Everyone already knows how it goes. Let me spice it up a bit.”

Finch rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Just, don’t jump ahead of your cue this time. And stop making up extra lines. You almost blew it last time.”

Starling sticks her tongue out but she has a skip in her step when she returns backstage. On the other side of the curtain, the audience is starting to take their seats. There aren’t enough chairs-- and most of the “chairs” are actually old boxes and things to begin with-- so some of them have to stand. An older brood allows Pajamas to climb up onto her shoulders, reminding her to be mindful of her wings, which are still fairly fresh and tender where they join with her back.

“Greetings, Princess,” says the fortune teller Resplendent, dressed in her good theatre clothes, as she sits down beside her. “Who’s this?”

Princess Ladybird holds up the dented ornament head. “This is Jessika. The doctors managed to save her but she needs an emergency body transplant, stat! I’m going to find her a new one after the show.”

She nods. “Greetings, Lady Jessika. I hope you have a speedy recovery.”

Ladybird holds the doll head up to her ear and hums as if in response to something.

“Can I hear too?”

She obliges, and Resplendent listens. There’s a quiet buzzing from inside the hollow tin skull and it echoes hauntingly in the emptiness.

She whispers, “There’s a bug inside of Jessika’s brain keeping her alive. That’s why she can still talk without a body. If Jessika dies, the bug will get out. Ick!”

The other girl chuckles. “Your name is a kind of bug, you know.”

“No! It’s a bird! Lady-bird!”

She bites back another laugh and points towards the stage. “Shh, the show’s starting.”

Sure enough, the songbird choir starts up, bidding the chattering spectators to quiet down and listen up. A girl comes out on stage wearing a corner of the curtain as a makeshift hood. She says,

“It is dark inside a wolf’s belly.”

[cyberfacevoid]

The sex offender registry is the method in several nations designed to permit government agencies to keep track of the actions of sex offenders, including those who have finished their criminal sentences. In some jurisdictions, where sex offender certification may, enrollment is accompanied by residential speech request requirements. In some jurisdictions, registered sex offenders are subject to more limitations, including on housing construction. Those on parole or probation may remain dependent on limitations that do non refer to different parolees or probationers. Sometimes, these include (or have been suggested to add) limitations on existing in the manner of underage people (under this age of number), living in locality to a school or day care center, having toys or items directed towards kids, or using the internet. 

The website is offered as a community service by the United States Department of Justice. Using the website concerned members of the community get access to and may seek participating Jurisdiction websites open information regarding the existence of the position of offenders who, in most instances, have been convicted of sexually violent crimes against adults and kids along with specific intimate communication and other offences against victims who are children. The people will use the site to educate themselves about the potential existence of such offenders in their local communities. 

Sex offender registry came about after the death of a little girl named Megan, after her own neighbor had lured her into his own home and raped her. Jesse Timmendequas was the man who had killed Megan, he ended up having to serve his life in prison and was required to receive counseling. A month after Megan’s death, New Jersey passed a bunch of bills with the goal of helping the law enforcement identify any sex offenders in their jurisdiction. One of the bills that Jersey had passed required an establishment of a state wide sex offender register. Along with Megan’s law, we also have the Jacob Wetterling crime against children and sexually violent offender registration act, this requires the states to establish registries of sex offenders that have been guilty of sexually violent crimes agaisnt children. Overall, the Wetterling act requires all states to verify the addresses of each sex offender for exactly ten years along with requirig sexually violent offenders to verify their addresses for their whole life. When an individual is registering as a sex offender, it is mandatory that they provide their name, date of birth, social security number, photo of themselves, their address, and information about their offense. Failure to do so will result in having a criminal charge. 

The sex offender registration was created and with having notification laws put into place, many people believe tragedy could be prevented. Supporters for the sex offender registration argue that they provide internal and external control for the sex offenders. They also argue that these notification laws educate the public on the nature of the offenders crime and this can be useful if future offenses occur. These notification laws will not be the panacea to solve or eliminate sex offences. The sex offender registration do create social awareness and educate the parents and the community on the best way to protect their children against known offenders. However, others may argue that we should not have a sex offender registry and how the notification law may violate the sex offenders civil rights under the 5th, 8th, and 14th amendments. The double jeopardy clause of the 5th amendment disallows being punished twice for the same crime. They are also singled out under the notification laws which violates their rights under the 14th amendment’s equal protection. Critics suggest that sex offenders should not be treated more harshly than people who have served time for murder. The notification has been challenged under the 8th amendment on the basis that it is a cruel and unusual punishment. They should not continue to be judged by society for a past crime even if the crime was morally wrong. That is not justice, murderers take lives and when they are released do they have to register? No, instead they should have the resources for outside therapy and behavioral modifications to help better themselves. 

I agree with the position of having a sex offender registry. I believe having a sex offender registry and notification programs are very important for the public safety purposes. This is a system that is used for monitoring and tracking sex offenders along with following their releae into any community. This provides very important information about the convicted sex offenders to the local, the federal authorities, and to the public. The registration system can provide public safety, having this system is a tool for some people when they are trying to find an area to live. It also helps police in investigations trying to understand who a suspect is along with what the person has done in their past. This tool also provides the people to know where and who these sex offenders are, that way they are fully awear of their surroundings. Imagine not having a sex offender registry, lets say you are a parent to a seven year old child and you let them go outside by themselves to hang out with some friends from the neighborhood, but what you were not aware of was the new neighbor moving in right across the street. This neighbor is known for raping children, but is not registered as a sex offender, therefore you are unaware at the time. Being that you and everyone else in the neighborhood are unaware of a sex offender moving in, your child is reported missing, raped, and pronounced dead later. When all of this could have been avoided by knowing this person was a sex offender. Just being aware of surroundings can prevent so much disaster in one’s future. Even if the child is not pronounced dead, just the trauma itself that they have to carry with them for the rest of their lives can do enough damage. I personally would and could not bear to live with myself knowing me or someone close to me had to go through such a tragic event in their life. 

“No one wants to see a child being assaulted by a repeat offender, especially when it can be avoided” (Gordon, M. The pros and cons of sex offender registries). As I mentioned before, I feel that it is important to have a sex offender registration because it can help prevent any child from being raped or even killed. It will protect an entire community and families from any future harm. It is also important that the people know what the offenders are capable of  no matter how little or minor the crime may be. It is best to know who these offenders are, even though not all offenders are a threat to society they are still capable of causing harm. “I don’t care if they have to live under a bridge or if they have to live somewhere outside Florida,” Book said.

In other states, laws prohibit registrants from residing between 300 and 2,500 feet from a litany of locations, including schools, child-care facilities, playgrounds, parks, bus stops, youth centers, resident camp facilities, churches, ballparks, pools, athletic fields, “facilities where minors gather,” and the on-campus housing of any institution of higher learning. Some communities leverage these laws to banish sex offenders entirely. Strategically placed “pocket parks” can render entire cities off limits to registrants” (Zoukis, C. Sex Offender Registries: Common Sense or Nonsense?). I agree with the statement above, as mentioned before you never know what a sex offender is capable of no matter how minor the crime they commited was. Therefore, sex offenders should remian far away from any child like place that way harm can be prevented in the future when it comes to anyone’s child. 

“For more than two decades, states and the federal government have struggled with how to best protect the public from sexual predators. Requiring states to register and publicize the names and addresses of convicted sex offenders has been thought to help protect the public by keeping citizens informed” (Snarr, H. and Frederick, S. The complexities of sex offender regestries). Although, it can be difficult at times to protect individuals from sex offenders since some offenders go out of their way by stepping out of their homes or even going anywhere near a child, it is better to know who the individual is and wheerre it is they are located. That way people are fully aware of who to stay away from. It is even known that sex offenders do not wear costumes or hand out candy when it is Halloween, to prevent any harm on a child and protect the public safety. There are more positive outcomes when it comes to having a sex offender registration outwieghing the negative and I believe that should be enough reasoning to having it. Why would people not want to know if there is a rapist living among their area? Do they not care for their own childrens public safety or community? 

[barryhuff]

Nostalgiaholic - The Remix

When I used to look up at the night sky alone as a child, I imagined a sinister, infinite, black, blanket sprinkled with glitter. Although, when my eyes followed the tip of my Uncle Jon’s finger, as he both traced celestial, stick-figures in the same sky and narrated their mythic, Greek stories, space always transformed from that lifeless blanket and into a destination to be explored. 

Jon, at times, was so inspired by space and space travel, he filled canvases dedicated to the filtered visuals he discerned.  As a dedicated science-fiction nerd, his paintings certainly had their share of stylized spaceships, laser beams, and explosions.  But as an equal part, planetarium-loving, star chart-studying, telescope-owning, amateur astronomer, Jon’s celestial backgrounds were wild, bubbling layers of greens, whites, blues, and reds, instead of a simple, flat, all-consuming blackness. Those paintings showed the cosmos as a tangible, topographic map ready to be explored, and not a deep, infinite sea of loneliness. 

That being said, I used to daily study a picture Jon painted of an astronaut floating upside down in the aurora borealis lights of Jon’s interpretation of space.  The figure held tight to the lifeline coming from his spacesuit at the waist with his left hand.  However, the same lifeline extended from the suit like a piece of floating spaghetti getting smaller, until it vanished in the distant horizon.  His right hand (so big that it appeared to explode from the canvas), desperately reached out for salvation.  

The reflective shield on the helmet hinted at the impending doom of the astronaut.  The reflection didn’t show a ship or even another hand reaching back, instead there were simply more endless miles of lively, colorful flashes of the space setting to die alone in.

No matter how much I wanted to imagine hope for the character, there was none… at least for him.

I often wonder if Jon’s painting was inspired by one of his favorite movies, the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.   When it finally, came on network T.V. one Saturday afternoon in the 1980s, I was excited to see it.  Hell, if Jon liked it, I would certainly like it.

False.  It turns out there were two barriers to me enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey --  Star Wars and silence. 

One summer, my brother and I bragged about watching Star Wars 47 times on HBO.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Bar Scene".  Especially the part in which a handsome, tanned, mischievous Han Solo (brown, feathered hair parted evenly in the middle) tried in vain to smooth-talk the twitchy-trigger-fingered, reptilian, green-faced, bug eyed, intergalactic thug Greedo (bald head).

Shit, reciting Greedo’s opening line to Han for anyone who’d listen (“Oo-nah too-tah, Solo?”) is still one of my favorite past-times.

In Star Wars, everyone could cover vast distances in the dark, dusty, intensely cold, INFINITE vacuum of space. It’s as easy as a con-artist pulling a few levers, confidently bellowing the order, “Punch it, Chewie”, and going faster than light without having to even buckle a seatbelt.

In reality, distances in outer space were not so easily traversed.

The Earth’s moon is 238,000 miles away. It took Neil Armstrong and the fellas six days to get from Earth, to the moon, and back, all while being cooped up in basically a large, flying port-a-potty. Their spacesuits looked about as comfortable as wearing every outfit in the average American’s good-credit-infused, stuffed closet AT ONCE.

This detail of space travel was not lost ‘Stanley Kubrick’s flick.  Even though there are a beautiful array of stunning special effects, it often felt like the audience traveled each second of the 365 million mile trip from the Moon to Jupiter.  There were no visual cues of a blurring landscape to both gage speed and generate a sense of movement.  The stars are perched in the background like apathetic teenagers forced to sit at the table during dinner, when they’d rather be in the solitude of their own rooms.

Body movements and conversations in the film were also slowed, as if everyone was walking in a filled swimming pool.  Mix in a relaxing soundtrack of orchestral music, and it’s the perfect lullaby capable of depowering my movie-watching enthusiasm.  In fact, the first five times I tried to watch the movie, I would fall asleep at an early scene featuring a space stewardess silently laboring down the aisle in her gravity “grip shoes” on her way to ultimately retrieve a floating pen for a sleeping passenger while composer Johann Strauss’s famous waltz, The Blue Danube, rhythmically chants in the background.

A few years ago, I tried one final time to watch the movie. And this time with the help of a streaming video platform, I was able to pause, re-group, pause, re-group, pause, re-group, and finally watch the movie my uncle loved.  

The striking thing about the movie is how quiet it actually was.  For much of the movie, there are no musical cues to warn of danger or intrigue.  Dialogue was conducted over the subtle drone of machines simply doing their mundane jobs of keeping the enormous spacecraft running during its long flight to Jupiter.   Life and death sequences were not given intense music accompaniment like traditional horror movies.  It’s as if Kubrick was saying, “People’s lives aren’t being scored by some musician to bookmark key events.  Life is merely something that happens -- even in space.”

It’s this absence of audible hints that makes 2001: A Space Odyssey uncomfortably realistic, as if the audience was watching a livestream of a computer gaining sentience, refusing to die (be turned off) and fighting off his oppressors (the flight crew).  

I’ve read that when a “vacuum” exists, somehow all of nature rushes to fill that empty hole.  So it’s funny that many science experiments happen in conditions that closely resemble a vacuum, in an effort to ensure results unweighted by additional stimuli.  Interestingly enough, because the movie is set in the vast, unforgiving, vacuum of space, Kubrick’s storytelling, in essence, becomes an experiment to determine if audiences will stay engaged without the traditional musical trappings.  Indeed, this stark story about the thrilling birth of strange, other-worldly life injected energy into overall science fiction mythology, and also into my young uncle.

Over the past 11 years, I have written a fairly regular Facebook post titled Reasons I Know I’m Getting Old.  When I started this, Facebook seemed to simply be a 21st century photo album, in which many people posted similar, stiff, smiling, posed pictures and inspiring quotes which suggested my extended online community was living their own collective happily ever afters.

But it was boring...

I mean, I loved my kids too, but were only my kids getting whoopings and other childhood punishments?  My wife was awesome too, but was I the only person still having trouble translating to her the humor in my daily fart symphonies?  Was no one else dealing with the often deflating, drudgery of the work-place?  Was parenting a lifelong crap-shoot for me only?  Because there was no connection to what I was seeing on my finger strolls on my phone, I was having a hard time wanting to even own a Facebook account.

Therefore, on April 14, 2009, I conducted an experiment:  How would my friends respond to a post that showed some dissatisfaction?  Nothing political or religious, just everyday grumblings.  I wrote:

“[Barry Huff] is dragging in from coaching his daughter's basketball team only to be greeted by Cap'n Crunch and a [sic] yet another pile of papers to grade!”

It received nine comments (four of those were my own).  And one of those commenters hinted that they understood the challenge of managing the grading paperload.

Facebook soon became a sliver into my reality normally hidden, when I walked into my home and shut the door for anyone who wanted to see access.  Initially, reposting fill-in-the blank lists, or other people’s videos, didn’t interest me.  I just wanted folks to know it was okay to not have all the answers.  Here I was, boogers and all.

But the experiment gathered a more scientific component in March 2020 -- the addition of an actual vacuum.  

In March 2020, the United States of America instituted a national quarantine in the hope of limiting the possibility of infection from the rapidly spreading “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)”, shortened simply to the “Coronavirus”.   I suspect that the horrified wails of a certain mexican beer company sharing part of the same name as the virus (after having carefully crafted years of popular commercials associating its product with serene, relaxing beach scenes) are still heard by masked customers now filling their shopping carts with other adult beverages.  Thus ensuring (at least in a few inebriated minds) binge drinking episodes without sudden, beer-birthed, pockets of community spread.

During this quarantine, the noise of my life (reporting to a building to teach, side-hustles, sporting events, car travel, movies, fast food) disappeared.  And with that sudden vacuum, came the desire to collect and revise the writings I posted about the uncertainty of navigating adulthood.

And while I still worry if I have the skill to create something that gives a clearer picture of my true self to my wife and kids, each vignette is a piece of the mosaic of my humanity.  And hopefully, this collection of blessed fallibility won’t be unnecessarily camouflaged during the stories told at my funeral one day, as attendees gulp down heaping portions of smothered pork steak, collard greens, macaroni, and apple pie piled on their sagging, disposable plates.

[crvores]

SCORPIUS HYPERION MALFOY really is the spitting image of FROY GUTIERREZ, right? For someone only 22 years old, SCOR has been forced to endure so much. Yeah, that PUREBLOOD has been scraping by at the sanctuary since AUGUST, 2028, working as a HEALER-IN-TRAINING AND RESEARCHER in the DIVISION OF HEALING. HE is a CIS MAN and is known to be CAPTIOUS and DISMISSIVE but also FERVENT and RESOURCEFUL. Best of luck surviving through this.  

CHARACTER PARALLELS: Amy Santiago (B99), Claire Temple (Daredevil), Chidi Anagonye (The Good Place), Giles (Buffy TVS), Michelle Jones (Spiderman: Homecoming), Elizabeth Swan (PoTC), Spock (Star Trek), Clarke Griffin (The 100), Gregory House (House) suggested honorable mention Gizmo (Gremlins)

[tw for patricide/parental death, desc of blood, substance abuse/addiction, under the cut]

scorpius was living in a tiny flat along diagon alley, flooing in to saint mungos for his healing apprenticeship monday to friday. when the wards came down around wizarding london he was holed up as the chaos ensued below, frantically trying to floo call the manor.

when he arrived at malfoy manor after crawling out of a skylight and apparating to the road alongside the driveway he was greeted by the gates hanging off their hinges. though he can only speculate, due to his father’s continued reclusiveness and refusal to return to assist the death eater ranks a horde were nudged none-too-gently toward the isolated house.

draco opened his eyes after burning through a fever too high to be calmed by any spell from his mother’s wand. just as he had always been. upon returning to consciousness he didn’t immediately reach for his wand, a fact which both astoria and her son found to be terribly odd. no matter the ailment, the circumstance, the time, draco malfoy had always curled his fingers around the hawthorn like a talisman when waking since it had been returned to him after the war.

the ensuing twenty minutes are something which scorpius has begged to have scoured from his mind, yet he knows he can never let himself forget killing his father. it fundamentally changed him in a way that is irrevocable.

as he and astoria fled the manor, no hope of the two of them alone eliminating the inferi on the grounds and securing it, his mother clamped a hand around his wrist and attempted to apparate them to an old greengrass property, a magical panic room of sorts. scor was badly splinched and ended up dumped 80 miles away from where his mother had landed.

he gathered copious notes from observations of the inferi in his time on the outside. temperature recorded, time of day, wind direction, sentience, and activity were all meticulously written down in an attempt to conserve his sanity while on his own. scor feels as though he had no trouble discerning infected from the living when he was out there and when he was filled in upon joining the others he speculated that a part of his brain concerning the glamours had just been burnt out. unfortunately since arriving this has been completely disproven and he’s trying to work out if the fear response or any other factors had anything to do with it.

since arriving at hogwarts, half-starved and wild-eyed he has thrown himself into the effort with a single-mindedness of someone attempting to forget every aspect of their own life. he doggedly continues his healing work, any time not spent at the infirmary is glued to his workbench and harassing the living shit out of the research department. drawing up hypothesis after hypothesis from the bits of infected he’s managed to have the privilege to pick at. if anyone interrupts him or makes what he decides is an unnecessary contribution he has a horrid habit of biting their head off.

while before he would play up and sneer, act posher than posh and generally fucked with anyone who had a problem with his family, specifically his father, now he will go absolutely stone-faced and has several times nearly had to be restrained because he will go off like a tiny, weedy bomb with a dangerously extensive knowledge of human anatomy.

neglects a lot of his own needs; goes days without sunlight, only eats when prompted to, hardly sleeps. a mess but trying his best. has a dangerous habit of consuming dreamless sleep but guilt at using valuable resources is essentially the only thing stopping him from launching headlong into addiction. lily and various others have a tally going on how many times scor says the words ‘i’m fine.’ in a single week and he suspects theres a pretty wide pool on the betting now.

he’s not all bad tho!! he can be a right softy if he knows you well enough and always always always wants to help. just… he’s a lil prickly rn.

skinny and kind of sickly, he never had the best health as a kid. he scars very easily and bruises like a gd peach. pretty alright on a broom but he has no real interest in playing quidditch. he’s always cold, he’ll be sitting in direct sunlight and complaining about needing a scarf. yeah hes that dude.

kind of craves attention? while being an introvert sometimes he just wants someone to pay attention to him until he gets annoyed by it and tells them to piss off. fickle.

his url is the italian word ‘cruores’ which means flowing blood and the latin ‘cruor’ which roughly refers to coagulating blood; gore.

      Full Name: Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy Gender/Pronouns: Cis man | he/him Age: Twenty-two Birthdate: January 20th Parents: Draco Malfoy & Astoria Malfoy (née Greengrass) Siblings: N/A. Birth place: St. Mungo’s Hospital, England Height: 5’11” Weight: 56 kg Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Demiromantic Bisexual Nationality: English Body Alterations/Marks: Terrible splinching scars up his left hand, arm over to his chest and shoulder blade. 

                                  Blood Status: Pureblood Hogwarts House: Slytherin  Wand Arm: Right Wand: 11 2/3 inches, Willow, supple, Dragon Heartstring. Hogwarts House: Slytherin Pet: A crested toad named Jarvis. Special Abilities: None. Patronus: Arctic Fox

                                Personality Traits: brilliance, innovation, individuality, openness, social consciousness, inventiveness, practical skill and self assertion; lack of attachment to people and the “real world,” over-intellectualizing of the emotions, dismissiveness, a crotchety temper, rigidity, intellectual arrogance, and stubbornness. Zodiac Sign: Aquarius/Capricorn Cusp Moral Alignment: Neutral Good Core values: Loyalty, Knowledge, Hope Four temperaments: Melancholic  

HOGWARTS HOUSE BREAKDOWN 

Slytherin Primary and a Burned Ravenclaw Secondary.

Slytherin Primaries prioritize their own selves and loved ones first. Slytherins don’t feel guilty or selfish about this– they feel righteous and moral. The most important thing is to look after your own. Abandoning or hurting one of your own is the worst thing you can do.

A Burned Ravenclaw Secondary might want to be skilled, curious, and prepared, but they feel like they are (or like people think they are) limited, clumsy, or inconstant. Gathering knowledge, hobbies, skills, or tools is the right way to achieve their goals, but Burned Ravenclaws know that’s not going to work within their capabilities. So they take other paths and use other tools– maybe a Gryffindor’s bluntness, a Slytherin’s flexibility, or a Hufflepuff’s slow and steady dedication.

You may have a Hufflepuff Secondary Model.

Hufflepuff is the House of grit, reliability, and determination, and Hufflepuffs use those values to help live, act, and succeed. If you model Hufflepuff Secondary, you also value these things and like to live by them. You like to be hardworking, dedicated, and consistent– but you wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning those values in the service of other, higher priorities. If there’s another, easier way to get what you want– you’d take it. You think hard work provides valuable rewards– and those rewards are why you work. The work doesn’t have persuasive value in itself.

the stillness of the world the moment you take the first step into fresh snow, cashmere and fine wool, the pearlescence of dreamless sleep draught, the scratch of a quill on parchment, faintly tremoring fingers, a shiver up your spine in a warm room, the exhilaration of a problem solved, a thunderous grey overcast sky, the bite of a stitching charm, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, petrichor, the burn in your eyes before a well of tears.

so excited to be back in this verse >:) 

[schraubd]

Election 2018: How Did Anti-Semites Do?

A few days ago, Tablet Magazine published a list of eight "antisemites running for Congress". It was a good start, but woefully incomplete -- there are so many more antisemites to choose from! Moreover, it doesn't really properly gradate antisemitism (there's a huge difference between a literal Holocaust Denier and someone who's been in a room with Louis Farrakhan). So while you can read how Tablet's 8 fared here, for a more comprehensive picture this post has you covered. First, the good news: the absolutely, positively, most blatant antisemites generally did not win.

Actual Neo-Nazi Arthur Jones lost to Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski 73-27 in Illinois' 3rd congressional district. 

Jones' Holocaust-denying compatriot, John Fitzgerald, lost by a similar 72-28 margin in California's 11th district to Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier. 

In state legislative races, the same basically held true:

In North Carolina's 48th state house district, GOP nominee Russell Walker -- who once said Jews "descend from Satan" -- lost to Black Democratic minister Garland Pierce 63-37. 

In Missouri, GOP nominee Steve West (who was disowned by his own kids) fell well short of unseating Democratic State Rep. Jon Carpenter. 

Finally, in California, Maria Estrada's virulent antisemitism didn't stop her from earning an Our Revolution endorsement, but it presumably did her no favors in her D-on-D challenge to State Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon -- she lost 56-44.

The two biggest antisemites to win were both incumbents.

Open White Supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA), last seen telling the world that European Neo-Nazi parties would just be plain old Republicans in America, had a much closer than anticipated race against Democrat J.D. Scholten. Still, King prevailed 50-47, thus proving that there is no limit to how racist you can be if there are enough Republicans in your district.  

Meanwhile, in Washington, GOP State Rep. Matt Shea -- who advocated for an American theocracy where non-Christian men are executed -- handily won reelection 58-42. Huzzah.

Now, those guys represent the worst of the worst. Most (not all) were running on the GOP line, and most (not all) lost. But the Tablet list itself evinces a clear antisemitic spectrum, and once you move past the obvious cases the story gets more complex. On Tablet's list were two definite borderline entries, for whom I think it's fair to question if they are properly called antisemitic at all (certainly, they're far further afield than some of the names further down on this list):

The case for including Indiana Rep. Andre Carson (D) appears to boil down to "he's been in a room with Farrakhan and the Iranian president", which isn't exactly on the level of denying the Holocaust. Call me jaded, but this felt very thin to me. Carson's Indiana district is gerrymandered to be reliably blue, and so it was -- Carson took his race 63-37.

Lena Epstein -- the Republican candidate in Michigan's 11th congressional district -- also has fair grounds to question her inclusion. Yes, inviting a Jews for Jesus Rabbi to eulogize the Pittsburgh victims was stupid, and insensitive, and baffling, and did I mention stupid? -- but was it antisemitic? I'm not sure. But we no longer need to expend much effort figuring it out: Epstein was soundly defeated by Democrat Haley Stevens, flipping this open GOP seat blue and I suspect signaling the last we hear of Epstein in national politics.

The next tier of antisemites comprises people who aren't really accused of saying anything antisemitic themselves, but who have endorsed antisemites or antisemitic movements.

On the Democratic side, Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) is the poster child -- while the past few weeks might have you believe that every Democrat in the country is a Louis Farrakhan fanboy, Davis is one of the few who actually has praised the man (the NOI has a large presence in Davis' Chicago district). Davis' district is one of the bluest in the country, and he took 88% of the vote against nominal Republican opposition.

On the Republican side, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) endorsed a Holocaust denier for school board (and that wasn't even his only connection to the Holocaust denying set). "Putin's favorite Congressman" looks to have gone down in his toss-up race, losing narrowly to Democrat Harley Rouda. 

Also falling into this category (though arguably shading into the class below) is California GOP Rep. Steve Knight, who ran an ad featuring a far-right activist notorious for antisemitic and racist online comments (Knight plead ignorance about the guy's views, but you'd think the t-shirt he was wearing in the ad -- a US flag with "infidel" stamped over it -- would be a giveaway). Knight lost his seat 51-49 to Democrat Katie Hill.

Next, we get to people who have themselves said or done antisemitic things -- albeit perhaps not as vividly as a Steve King sort.

For Republicans, George Soros is the fulcrum. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who gave a Holocaust denier a State of the Union ticket and is a major source of Soros-related conspiracy theorizing, works as a good example. He handily won his re-election race 67-33. 

Speaking of Soros, in Minnesota's 1st district, Jim Hagedorn -- who claimed that Joe Lieberman only supported the Iraq War because he was a Jew and who then cut an ad claiming his opponent was "owned" by the Jewish globalist billionaire -- looks like he will squeak out a win over Democrat Dan Feehan. If that result holds, it marks one of the few districts this cycle to flip D-to-R. It also is particularly painful for me because this is the district where my wife grew up and my in-laws still live.

And while Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis is more well-known for the racism, he too dipped his toe in the antisemitic Soros conspiracy pool, accusing his African-American opponent, Andrew Gillum, of looking to "seed[] into our state government, you know, Soros-backed activists." DeSantis, a Republican, prevailed over Gillum by about a single point in what had been thought to be a blue-leaning race.

Two more Democratic members of Tablet's list -- Leslie Cockburn and Ilhan Omar -- fit in this category, albeit for comments that are several years or (in Cockburn's case) decades old.

Cockburn wrote a book in the early 90s that was basically a "Israel is responsible for all awful things" screed; she lost her VA-05 race to Republican Denver "bigfoot erotica" Riggelman, because America is awesome and that was really a choice. The margin was 53-47 in a race that was viewed as a decent, if not top-of-the-class, Democratic pickup opportunity.

Omar, running in Minnesota's 5th district, has come under fire for a tweet where she accused Israel of "hypnotizing" the world to prevent it from seeing its "evil". While she has seemingly moderated her views on Israel, she pointedly declined to walk back this comment or recognize how it seems to traffic in antisemitic tropes (in contrast to her 5th district predecessor, Keith Ellison, who pointedly disassociated himself from prior Farrakhan affiliations). Omar won her race by a crushing 78-21 margin.

Finally, it's worth looking at some local races where Republicans (albeit not always the Republican candidate) ran antisemitic ads.

In Alaska, a GOP mailer which showed stacks of cash being stuffed into Democrat Jesse Kiehl's suit didn't seem to work, Kiehl defeated right-leaning independent Don Etheridge 60-37. (Etheridge he disavowed the Republican ad).

In California, Republican Tyler Diep painted his Jewish opponent Josh Lowenthal green, enlarged his nose, and showed him clutching $100 bills; Diep prevailed in his California Assembly race, 54-46. 

Pennsylvania State Rep. Todd Stephens (R) made sure to drop the "Johnson" from the name of Democratic opponent Sara Johnson Rothman when he photoshopped her holding a stack of cash, instead going with "Stop Sara Rothman". Stephens won re-election by a narrow 51-49 margin.

In North Carolina, Republican Rickey Padgett tried to unseat State Senator Mike Woodard (D) by, among other things, posting a picture with Chuck Schumer dressed in a Nazi SS uniform. Woodward prevailed by a 62-36 spread.

Finally, in Connecticut, Democrat Matt Lesser gained national attention when his Republican opponent Ed Charamut sent out a mailer depicting Lesser with wild eyes, a huge nose, and a wad of cash. Lesser prevailed in a tight race, winning 52-48.

What are the takeaways here? Well, for starters, the most virulent and explicit antisemites generally lost. That's good, though given that those candidates generally ran in ideologically lopsided districts it's easy to overdraw from that. The Steve King victory shows that where the partisan lean works in the antisemite's favor, partisan allegiance generally trumps (seriously, does anyone have confidence that if Arthur Jones ran in Steve King's district as the Republican candidate, he would lose?). And if that holds true for to a blatant bigot like King, it certainly applies to more mild or sporadic offenders, like Davis and Omar.

The more interesting -- and troublesome -- story is how less overt but still clear antisemitism played out in more closely contested races. Those who assume that America just doesn't tolerate antisemitism are in for a surprise. Hagedorn's antisemitic past (and present) didn't seem to dent his chances in Minnesota's toss-up first district, for example. This isn't to say that antisemites were universally winning -- more that antisemitism, even when expressed, generally isn't a losing issue either even in the sort of closely contested districts where you might expect candidates to tread more carefully.

Moreover, there's a partisan lean to this that cannot be ignored. Certainly, there are incidents of antisemitism in both Democratic and Republican politics. And because American Jews (and Jewish politicians) are so overwhelmingly liberal, there are far more progressive "targets" for antisemitism than there are conservatives. Still, between Soros conspiracy theorizing and "Jews clutching money" ads, there seemed to be a noticeable step-up in GOP appeals to this sort of antisemitic sentiment that doesn't have a clear parallel among Democrats right now. 

And Republican strategists must have come to a conclusion that these ads work. Yes, maybe they turn off some Jewish or more liberal-leaning voters. But Republican campaign operatives must think they make up for it by revving up the conservative base (or even independents -- for a variety of reasons I strongly suspect that right-leaning independents might be even more susceptible to this sort of appeal). 

There was certainly no systematic punishing effect for Republicans going to this well -- and so we can expect they'll keep doing it. And that is a worrisome conclusion.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2zyyHER

[origcmibird-aa]

AND NOW TO ELABORATE ON KUBO’S SPACE / SRMTHFG AU ( To put it briefly, its a hybrid of his main verse, stray au and royalty au. )

Kubo is the grandson of Raiden, the “Moon King,” who is the ruler of a distant planet. This world possesses technology far more advanced than that of modern day humans, yet still functions as a monarchy. Although the planet seems peaceful, in truth this is mostly due to the fact that Raiden rules over his kingdom with a tyrannical fist, destroying any and all threats and uprisings against his power and keeping his court and subjects in line by waving punishment and death over their heads. The nobles and guard are blissfully unaware due to being high in financial wealth and/or manipulations by the court itself. Raiden’s military force is incredibly strong and loyal. Soldiers who obey are awarded greatly and are constantly fed with propaganda. Any and all who begin to suspect a darker underbelly in the king’s practices are quickly rid of.

In spite of this, there is still an, albeit small, rebel faction that survives. Raiden rules from their home planet’s moon, as part of safety measures. (and perhaps, as a physical metaphor for the dictatorship of his kingdom.) The rebel faction against the monarchy’s manipulative ways survives the planet of Tsuhara’s one of many vast seas.

It was through an attempt to vanquish one of the rebel bases that princess Sariatu, the eldest of Raiden’s daughters, and next in line of the throne, met Hanzo, one of the rebel faction’s primary leaders. Sariatu, along with her two sisters, frequently spearheaded movements to try and destroy their opponents. But in an ironic twist of fate, Sariatu fell in love with Hanzo, fled the palace and her rank, and went into hiding to eventually elope with Hanzo. This was how Kubo was born.

Sariatu spent three years in hiding, and in this time she married Hanzo, helped strengthen the rebel factions, got pregnant, and eventually had their child. By the time she was finally found by affiliates of Raiden’s, Kubo was only six weeks old. Raiden was outraged by Sariatu’s betrayal. He labeled her a traitor, renounced her as next in line for the throne, and made her enemy no. 2, behind her husband. Rather than kill her, Raiden and his two remaining daughters sought to punish her and have her rot with the guilt of her mistakes.

Shortly after Sariatu was discovered, Raiden instigated an attack on the rebel base she and Hanzo were living in, and as soon as possible, as they did not want her to find out and evacuate from their location. He, Washi and Karasu personally attended this attack and fought on the battle grounds while commanding several legions. It was during this instance that Raiden also managed to claw out one of his infant grandson’s eyes. As punishment for Sariatu’s mistake, Raiden, in a fit of rage, attempted to have her child permanently blinded. But he only succeeded in taking Kubo’s left eye.

Luckily Sariatu was able to flee from the battle with Kubo in her arms. Hanzo and his own armies sacrificed themselves in order to give her the opportunity to escape. Using an escape pod, the mother and son fled into the atmosphere, to worlds unknown.

Eventually, the escape pod crash landed on a small, distant world. Sariatu and her infant child narrowly escaped, but the new mother took a massive injury to the head, which rendered her with amnesia, and eventually would lead to dementia and a growing catatonic state. Luckily, the pod had crashed nearby a small village, and the natives there took Sariatu and her child in. The locals possessed lesser technology than that of Tsuhara’s, but they had enough knowledge and experience with space travel to have a ship port nearby and have a few confident pilots. This is where Sariatu raises her child in hiding for the next twelve years.

In the meantime, Raiden, after the heat of battle, calms down and has a slight change of heart. Although he is still bitter towards his daughter and son-in-law, he decides that he has an opportunity to groom his grandson into the future king due to his youth. The king schemes and manipulates his people by painting Sariatu as a villain and a traitor, and dubs Kubo as the young prince and next in line for the throne. Because of this, it is absolutely imperative that he is found and returned to the kingdom. Military and volunteering loyalists begin their search for the young prince. Washi and Karasu spearhead the movement.

Twelve years pass, and Kubo has grown into a fine young boy, and is scraping up money from villagers and travelers to support himself and his mother. His powers have also developed well. However, he has been told never to step out of their home alone at night, and he must always come home when a ship arrives at the port. Sariatu insists this out of the fear that loyalists of her father may one day arrive on this planet in search of them, and either kill or kidnap her son.

Unfortunately, one small mistake flips Kubo’s life upside down, and turns a calm night into one he would regret forever: he stays out past sundown, coincidentally as his aunts arrive at the port by happenstance. They find him, and begin to hunt him down. The village that he grew up in goes into a riot. Warriors and kind adults who knew him rush to protect the boy and fight off the invaders. Unfortunately however, the village is slowly overwhelmed. In a last ditch effort to protect her child, Sariatu gives herself up to buy her son some time. Kubo flees into an escape pod with a warrior and two young pilots who escape his slowly dying village.

The escape ends in tragedy, when the pod is veered off course by shards of the Citadel of Bone, and is pulled into planet Shuggazoom’s gravity. The pod crashes outside of the city, and Kubo emerges as its lone survivor. He vanishes into the streets, alive, but alone, and begins what would turn into several weeks trying to survive in a seemingly hostile metropolis.

His opinions of Shuggazoom, unfortunately, are worse for wear. Though he has heard stories of the Hyperforce from travelers in his hometown, he also knows that the planet is constantly under threat. He wants to escape, but he also knows that he cannot return to his village, nor even the planet of his birth, because his aunts and his grandfather are looking for him. Due to his punitive size however, he is frequently bullied by street kids and other locals he comes across. Dodging trouble left and right, the young prince struggles to adapt. NOTES ABOUT KUBO’S SPECIES ( they’re basically humans but with psi powers )

Physically, Kubo’s species is exactly the same as Earth humans. They grow to be the same height, have the same gestation, eye colors, intelligence, etc. The only two differences are their lifespans and their abilities. Different lines of Tsuhara humans possess psychic powers that vary in strength and in array. In addition, Tsuhara humans with stronger / more powers tend to live a much longer lifespan, adding as many as an extra 200 years. Raiden himself is about 250 years old (he’s in his golden years.)

The classes of Tsuhara Kingdom’s social hierarchy are not only divided in financial wealth, but powers as well. Poorer and Peasant families tend to have little to no psychic abilites / strength at all. Middle class typically have some powers, albeit limited to minor telekinesis / psi. The higher the class, the higher the likelihood that the individual in question has powers. The royal bloodline is the strongest in all the kingdom, possessing practically godlike powers and a vast array of them; Telekinesis, Transformation, Construction, Memory Manipulation, Demon Trapping, and Force Fields to name a few. They make a point to keep these powers within the royal gene pool, and they are only known to be shared within the highest of social classes.

Tsuhara’s army usually makes a point of having its soldiers be comprised of individuals with powers. However, warriors with no powers have proven themselves to be skillful in the practice, and a select few have made their way up to high ranks in history. However, its incredibly rare.

Sariatu, obviously, was a Tsuhara human with royal blood and therefore, incredible psi. Hanzo, on the other hand, possessed weak telepathy. Kubo shows potential in having a diluted, if not equal version to Sariatu’s psychic prowess.

[giahann95]

How To Get Hotel Jobs

Let us learn a lot more of the hospitality industry and its job potential today. Hotels belong to a vibrant and everchanging industry and freshers and veterans keep themselves challenged with new opportunities therein.

You are at the intersection of your profession, and are captivated by glamorous work air of hotels, they seem, by all accounts, to be welcoming and luring with a range of offerings. No big surprise individuals world over pay a premium to appreciate the unmatched offerings, and you need to test them direct, things are progressing pretty well.

Seen Reality

First things to start with, the time has come to disperse the myths and second thoughts encompassing the Hospitality business. Nature may seem, by all accounts, to be appealing when you take a quick look at the set up, nonetheless, when you test somewhat more profound, you would be astounded to find that there is without a doubt a major separate between saw reality and what you experience in individual. You may also be intrigued with how to get hotel jobs

The Surprises

So as to minimize the amazements that may be surreptitiously sprung at you, you need a look a boo at the functionings of the neighborliness setup. You may experience a voyaging sports escort, including guardians making a peculiar solicitation, for an extra dinner room or meeting space so as to empower their kids to have their offer of fun and skip, a superbly authentic solicitation, may attempt and satisfy it too, yet with a squeeze of salt, the rider is to tell them heretofore that any breakages, or unsettling influences must be borne by the guardians, on the off chance that they go crazy in general society territory as opposed to the children zone or children pool and any harms must be made great.

Class and Discretion

Manager Jobs

Some of the visitors are in the propensity for gloating about their stay and go to the degree of saying, they stay at the property constantly, well, you would dependably remain in great stead, on the off chance that you bring things with a squeeze of salt, as hoteliering is about showing politeness and prudence, notwithstanding mounting weight, saw or genuine. Pulling down the feign ought to be a simple thing for a prepared proficient, you should simply to check, the stay history, a true blue visitor would not have to feign at all in any case to claim benefits, it would be consequently agreed.

The Airport Shuttle

At that point you would go over some odd solicitations, which one can securely assume is not the situation with different enterprises. Individuals may customarily demand to make utilization of the airplane terminal transport to drop them at the bar, while working inn occupations in India you would go over such abnormal solicitations, amuse it on the off chance that it is for the air terminal bar and affably decay refering to hotelcareers  lodging strategies, may recommend a feasible option like taking cabs forward and backward fro the bar as the gathering might just be affected by liquor.

Delay

Progress and then you would run over individuals making intense solicitation for settlement, notwithstanding when they are totally mindful that the inn is sold out, overbooked, there is a delay, the lodging is taking into account right now, and there you have couple of visitors tossing their weight around by requesting unique concession for the sake of being a prizes part. Clarify the circumstance in a cool and created way and let them know amiably, how might they feel when advised to clear a space for favored visitors.

Last Thoughts

So you have seen hitherto, not at all like whatever other industry, it offers dream livens and obliges you to show class and prudence to taste achievement and rise higher up in the chain of command, this is only a preliminary, a cut of what goes ahead in inns, to prime you for inn occupations in India, so you don't lament your choice of putting resources into costly and tedious lodging administration training and lament the decision you made suspecting a ruddy workplace, be educated it is definitely not that, a sensible blend of down to earth and hypothesis is emphatically upheld, with a capacity to put in genuine diligent work, the resultant advantages like going by remote districts and working anyplace is essentially unmatched, no doubt.

While most industries looking to hire robots and use information technology for maximum work, there are few industries that still believe in human interventions. The hotel industry, in particular is the first in terms of usage and maintain human resources.

Before you begin reading it and questioning it, here are some quick facts on employment in the hotel industry. Here's an info-graphic on key statistics on work in the hospitality industry. These key statistics about the hotel and hospitality as career is presented by Les Roches, a first-class international business school. You can debunk many myths simply look at the facts in the hotel business for the hotel sector is probably the largest of these growing contributors to job opportunities.

'Let me explain this in detail:-

1.   337 million jobs worldwide in the hospitality industry in 2023

2.   1-10 employable people would be employed in the hospitality and tourism industry in 2023

3.   Even when there is a global slowdown in all sectors of travel and tourism will grow by 4% per year

Now we will go to the myths and bust, one by one, presenting various facts of the hospitality industry.

Few myths about jobs in the hotel industry

"Hospitality Industry and     Hotel Industry are the same thing"

Before discussing the details of myths to work in the hotel industry, it is important to clarify a basic myth. Jobs in the hotel industry and employment in the hospitality industry may be similar, but it certainly is not the same. One is the subset.

Now it is the biggest myth that prevails in the industry. Most people outside this industry, and many in the industry believe that the hotel and hospitality industry are the same things.

The truth is different, though.

The hotel industry is an integral part of the hospitality industry such as cloud computing is the information or diesel technology is the oil industry.

It is a crucial part of the sector, but there is much more to the hospitality and tourism than hotels. We cruises, aviation, theme parks, other public transport, shopping centers, restaurants, travel giants like Expedia and TripAdvisor, apartments, motels, events, educational institutions, e-learning platforms, media and more still.

"Job opportunities are     limited in the hotel and hospitality sector"

The reality is that as a hotelier who are only limited by ideas and not by chance.

We mentioned to the facts of the hospitality industry at the beginning of growth in the hotel and hospitality sector.

The sky is the limit, if there is a will to do the same. If someone in the hotel industry feels they are not growing at a desired speed, they have many other options to explore in the hotel and outside.

In the hotel sector

1.   Try to have a cruising season of two years (which would have to earn their place if)

2.   Working in the tourism industry. There are many options, including several multinationals.

3.   events theme park take place during the high season and can be a good option for job seekers who are bored of the routine life Hotel

4.   The casinos are another attractive employer in the hotel industry.

5.   There are other endless options and explore in the hospitality industry.

hospitality

1.   Become hospitality consultant. If you have experience, many management consultants would be interested in its potential. Try to explore these.

2.   Hospitality Information Technology If you are a technology enthusiast, get a good education or certification and technology or aggregators which unites companies that also meet the hotel and hospitality industry in its portfolio.

3.   Participate in the education sector or work for the platforms of professional training.

4.   Become an entrepreneur and work to achieve what you like.

Therefore, those who believe that employment opportunities are limited in the hotel and hospitality sector should check his facts about the hospitality industry.

"Getting     jobs in hotels is possible for agencies

Although most industries have moved from regular agencies to high technology platforms, the hospitality industry continues to use many agencies.

This is not because the industry is set in terms of technology, but because of its seasonality. During the high season, the demand for part-time and full-time staff was kept afloat by recruitment agencies.

However, those who believe that these agencies are not the way to find a job in hotels are very wrong. Network is the key instead for a landing the best jobs in the hospitality industry.

It is time that events in the hospitality industry are rewritten, in particular through the participation of recruitment agencies.

Speaking of hospitality and hotel industry

Social media is the new recruitment agency and does not even charge anything from you.

Most hoteliers work the employers but now have an internal team which is very active in the network. They are well connected in network and through the social networks, and can get the best talents.

So, if you are not in the network and wait for the agencies to do the trick, you will miss a lot of opportunities. You should be able to work in the hospitality and research workplaces on LinkedIn through Facebook to stay ahead of the pack.

Then there are plenty of career hospitality portals to assist in the job search process.

Those who think that only the agencies are safe for jobs in hotels, it's time they step out of the old age. Embrace technological and networking skills and see change.

"Hospitality industry is     only for people who are not good in the academic world."

Now it's terrible, I must say. Yes, we do not need many scientists in the hospitality and hospitality industry, but there is more demand for success in the hotel industry.

Dealing with the human being was the most intellectually intriguing task over the years.

Well, the truth is that work in this area has to be an all-terrain. An expert in a field might not be the best solution because the hotels have a dynamic work environment.

However, this means that it is not an academic interest in the hotel and hospitality industry sector. Most who read this are experts in their fields and have been outstanding in studies as well.

Guests entering the hotel are greeted by the guards, participated boys and Bell have their rooms cleaned by the guys in the room with the bed linen collected from the laundry staff. If it is found in small hotels or small properties of galaxies, the perception of this myth is developed.

We dissipate the myth use of some of the facts of the hotels:

1.   Most of the hotel's main hospitality facilities can speak more than 3 languages

2.   The best schools of hospitality include in their programs of corporate communication, geography, accounting, human resources, marketing, other language, etc. Out of the regular forms of hospitality.

3.   Hotel Management is a career choice and there is a rigorous selection process to enter the best schools. Yes, there are schools that enroll, no exams, but it is not true for engineering and other courses?

4.   The best home-based business schools have a research center with hoteliers committed to the innovation of improved start-up ecosystems.

In recent years, Delhi has successfully attracted a lot of tourists around the world. The world class infrastructure and rampant increase in industrialization, in and around the capital city, has proved to be a magnet to people all over the country looking for jobs and good lifestyle. So, the tourism industry, especially hotel industry in Delhi has witnessed a huge boom in the past ten years. You can easily find a good 5-star, 4-star, or a 3 star hotel in Delhi without any hassle.

The areas around airport and railway station in Delhi have become a hub for all kinds of hotels that try to lure almost every person coming out of the railway station or the airport! Airport hotels in Delhi have all kinds of facilities for all types of people they expect could hire a room in the hotel. They have special city tour packages for people coming to explore the city. Some have other 'Indian' facilities for relaxation that foreigners would love. For example, yoga, meditation, Indian massage, etc. Hotels with international standard, preferred by foreign tourists, see to it that the guests have an 'Indian experience' during their stay.

The increase in the number of hotels has not adversely influenced the quality of services provided by these hotels. In fact, in spite of prices of hotel rooms going down, the quality of services has remained the same, if not improved. The main reason behind it can be increased competition. Also, the more the visitors in the hotel, the lower is the cost per visitor.

However, tourists are not the only people the Delhi hotels are interested in. The population of Delhi has grown manifolds in the last decade and this is of course not due to just increasing birth rate. Delhi, being the capital of the country, is industrially very sound. Many industries have cropped up in and around Delhi. This has drawn a lot of work force to Delhi from all over the country. So, there are a lot of hotels that cater to the needs of those who have come to the city in search of a job.You might just be lucky to get Hotel Jobs In Delhi .

Some hotels in Delhi had long time back realized the new opportunity of catering to the immigrant work force. So now you will find a lot of hotels, not only near Delhi but everywhere in the National Capital Region. You will find a lot of good quality budget hotels in Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida. Many people migrate to Delhi after getting a job there. So, in the first few days they stay in hotels, till they find a suitable permanent accommodation for themselves. Many hotels have utilized this opportunity by making good deals with multinational companies in Delhi. So, every time the companies expects a guest, has training seminars or has hired employees from other parts of the country, they companies knows where to look for accommodation for them.

[thesariinadraws-blog]

How To Get Hotel Jobs

Let us learn a lot more of the hospitality industry and its job potential today. Hotels belong to a vibrant and everchanging industry and freshers and veterans keep themselves challenged with new opportunities therein.

You are at the intersection of your profession, and are captivated by glamorous work air of hotels, they seem, by all accounts, to be welcoming and luring with a range of offerings. No big surprise individuals world over pay a premium to appreciate the unmatched offerings, and you need to test them direct, things are progressing pretty well.

Seen Reality

First things to start with, the time has come to disperse the myths and second thoughts encompassing the Hospitality business. Nature may seem, by all accounts, to be appealing when you take a quick look at the set up, nonetheless, when you test somewhat more profound, you would be astounded to find that there is without a doubt a major separate between saw reality and what you experience in individual. You may also be intrigued with how to get hotel jobs

The Surprises

So as to minimize the amazements that may be surreptitiously sprung at you, you need a look a boo at the functionings of the neighborliness setup. You may experience a voyaging sports escort, including guardians making a peculiar solicitation, for an extra dinner room or meeting space so as to empower their kids to have their offer of fun and skip, a superbly authentic solicitation, may attempt and satisfy it too, yet with a squeeze of salt, the rider is to tell them heretofore that any breakages, or unsettling influences must be borne by the guardians, on the off chance that they go crazy in general society territory as opposed to the children zone or children pool and any harms must be made great.

Class and Discretion

Manager Jobs

Some of the visitors are in the propensity for gloating about their stay and go to the degree of saying, they stay at the property constantly, well, you would dependably remain in great stead, on the off chance that you bring things with a squeeze of salt, as hoteliering is about showing politeness and prudence, notwithstanding mounting weight, saw or genuine. Pulling down the feign ought to be a simple thing for a prepared proficient, you should simply to check, the stay history, a true blue visitor would not have to feign at all in any case to claim benefits, it would be consequently agreed.

The Airport Shuttle

At that point you would go over some odd solicitations, which one can securely assume is not the situation with different enterprises. Individuals may customarily demand to make utilization of the airplane terminal transport to drop them at the bar, while working inn occupations in India you would go over such abnormal solicitations, amuse it on the off chance that it is for the air terminal bar and affably decay refering to hotelcareers  lodging strategies, may recommend a feasible option like taking cabs forward and backward fro the bar as the gathering might just be affected by liquor.

Delay

Progress and then you would run over individuals making intense solicitation for settlement, notwithstanding when they are totally mindful that the inn is sold out, overbooked, there is a delay, the lodging is taking into account right now, and there you have couple of visitors tossing their weight around by requesting unique concession for the sake of being a prizes part. Clarify the circumstance in a cool and created way and let them know amiably, how might they feel when advised to clear a space for favored visitors.

Last Thoughts

So you have seen hitherto, not at all like whatever other industry, it offers dream livens and obliges you to show class and prudence to taste achievement and rise higher up in the chain of command, this is only a preliminary, a cut of what goes ahead in inns, to prime you for inn occupations in India, so you don't lament your choice of putting resources into costly and tedious lodging administration training and lament the decision you made suspecting a ruddy workplace, be educated it is definitely not that, a sensible blend of down to earth and hypothesis is emphatically upheld, with a capacity to put in genuine diligent work, the resultant advantages like going by remote districts and working anyplace is essentially unmatched, no doubt.

While most industries looking to hire robots and use information technology for maximum work, there are few industries that still believe in human interventions. The hotel industry, in particular is the first in terms of usage and maintain human resources.

Before you begin reading it and questioning it, here are some quick facts on employment in the hotel industry. Here's an info-graphic on key statistics on work in the hospitality industry. These key statistics about the hotel and hospitality as career is presented by Les Roches, a first-class international business school. You can debunk many myths simply look at the facts in the hotel business for the hotel sector is probably the largest of these growing contributors to job opportunities.

'Let me explain this in detail:-

1.   337 million jobs worldwide in the hospitality industry in 2023

2.   1-10 employable people would be employed in the hospitality and tourism industry in 2023

3.   Even when there is a global slowdown in all sectors of travel and tourism will grow by 4% per year

Now we will go to the myths and bust, one by one, presenting various facts of the hospitality industry.

Few myths about jobs in the hotel industry

"Hospitality Industry and     Hotel Industry are the same thing"

Before discussing the details of myths to work in the hotel industry, it is important to clarify a basic myth. Jobs in the hotel industry and employment in the hospitality industry may be similar, but it certainly is not the same. One is the subset.

Now it is the biggest myth that prevails in the industry. Most people outside this industry, and many in the industry believe that the hotel and hospitality industry are the same things.

The truth is different, though.

The hotel industry is an integral part of the hospitality industry such as cloud computing is the information or diesel technology is the oil industry.

It is a crucial part of the sector, but there is much more to the hospitality and tourism than hotels. We cruises, aviation, theme parks, other public transport, shopping centers, restaurants, travel giants like Expedia and TripAdvisor, apartments, motels, events, educational institutions, e-learning platforms, media and more still.

"Job opportunities are     limited in the hotel and hospitality sector"

The reality is that as a hotelier who are only limited by ideas and not by chance.

We mentioned to the facts of the hospitality industry at the beginning of growth in the hotel and hospitality sector.

The sky is the limit, if there is a will to do the same. If someone in the hotel industry feels they are not growing at a desired speed, they have many other options to explore in the hotel and outside.

In the hotel sector

1.   Try to have a cruising season of two years (which would have to earn their place if)

2.   Working in the tourism industry. There are many options, including several multinationals.

3.   events theme park take place during the high season and can be a good option for job seekers who are bored of the routine life Hotel

4.   The casinos are another attractive employer in the hotel industry.

5.   There are other endless options and explore in the hospitality industry.

hospitality

1.   Become hospitality consultant. If you have experience, many management consultants would be interested in its potential. Try to explore these.

2.   Hospitality Information Technology If you are a technology enthusiast, get a good education or certification and technology or aggregators which unites companies that also meet the hotel and hospitality industry in its portfolio.

3.   Participate in the education sector or work for the platforms of professional training.

4.   Become an entrepreneur and work to achieve what you like.

Therefore, those who believe that employment opportunities are limited in the hotel and hospitality sector should check his facts about the hospitality industry.

"Getting     jobs in hotels is possible for agencies

Although most industries have moved from regular agencies to high technology platforms, the hospitality industry continues to use many agencies.

This is not because the industry is set in terms of technology, but because of its seasonality. During the high season, the demand for part-time and full-time staff was kept afloat by recruitment agencies.

However, those who believe that these agencies are not the way to find a job in hotels are very wrong. Network is the key instead for a landing the best jobs in the hospitality industry.

It is time that events in the hospitality industry are rewritten, in particular through the participation of recruitment agencies.

Speaking of hospitality and hotel industry

Social media is the new recruitment agency and does not even charge anything from you.

Most hoteliers work the employers but now have an internal team which is very active in the network. They are well connected in network and through the social networks, and can get the best talents.

So, if you are not in the network and wait for the agencies to do the trick, you will miss a lot of opportunities. You should be able to work in the hospitality and research workplaces on LinkedIn through Facebook to stay ahead of the pack.

Then there are plenty of career hospitality portals to assist in the job search process.

Those who think that only the agencies are safe for jobs in hotels, it's time they step out of the old age. Embrace technological and networking skills and see change.

"Hospitality industry is     only for people who are not good in the academic world."

Now it's terrible, I must say. Yes, we do not need many scientists in the hospitality and hospitality industry, but there is more demand for success in the hotel industry.

Dealing with the human being was the most intellectually intriguing task over the years.

Well, the truth is that work in this area has to be an all-terrain. An expert in a field might not be the best solution because the hotels have a dynamic work environment.

However, this means that it is not an academic interest in the hotel and hospitality industry sector. Most who read this are experts in their fields and have been outstanding in studies as well.

Guests entering the hotel are greeted by the guards, participated boys and Bell have their rooms cleaned by the guys in the room with the bed linen collected from the laundry staff. If it is found in small hotels or small properties of galaxies, the perception of this myth is developed.

We dissipate the myth use of some of the facts of the hotels:

1.   Most of the hotel's main hospitality facilities can speak more than 3 languages

2.   The best schools of hospitality include in their programs of corporate communication, geography, accounting, human resources, marketing, other language, etc. Out of the regular forms of hospitality.

3.   Hotel Management is a career choice and there is a rigorous selection process to enter the best schools. Yes, there are schools that enroll, no exams, but it is not true for engineering and other courses?

4.   The best home-based business schools have a research center with hoteliers committed to the innovation of improved start-up ecosystems.

In recent years, Delhi has successfully attracted a lot of tourists around the world. The world class infrastructure and rampant increase in industrialization, in and around the capital city, has proved to be a magnet to people all over the country looking for jobs and good lifestyle. So, the tourism industry, especially hotel industry in Delhi has witnessed a huge boom in the past ten years. You can easily find a good 5-star, 4-star, or a 3 star hotel in Delhi without any hassle.

The areas around airport and railway station in Delhi have become a hub for all kinds of hotels that try to lure almost every person coming out of the railway station or the airport! Airport hotels in Delhi have all kinds of facilities for all types of people they expect could hire a room in the hotel. They have special city tour packages for people coming to explore the city. Some have other 'Indian' facilities for relaxation that foreigners would love. For example, yoga, meditation, Indian massage, etc. Hotels with international standard, preferred by foreign tourists, see to it that the guests have an 'Indian experience' during their stay.

The increase in the number of hotels has not adversely influenced the quality of services provided by these hotels. In fact, in spite of prices of hotel rooms going down, the quality of services has remained the same, if not improved. The main reason behind it can be increased competition. Also, the more the visitors in the hotel, the lower is the cost per visitor.

However, tourists are not the only people the Delhi hotels are interested in. The population of Delhi has grown manifolds in the last decade and this is of course not due to just increasing birth rate. Delhi, being the capital of the country, is industrially very sound. Many industries have cropped up in and around Delhi. This has drawn a lot of work force to Delhi from all over the country. So, there are a lot of hotels that cater to the needs of those who have come to the city in search of a job.You might just be lucky to get Hotel Jobs In Delhi .

Some hotels in Delhi had long time back realized the new opportunity of catering to the immigrant work force. So now you will find a lot of hotels, not only near Delhi but everywhere in the National Capital Region. You will find a lot of good quality budget hotels in Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida. Many people migrate to Delhi after getting a job there. So, in the first few days they stay in hotels, till they find a suitable permanent accommodation for themselves. Many hotels have utilized this opportunity by making good deals with multinational companies in Delhi. So, every time the companies expects a guest, has training seminars or has hired employees from other parts of the country, they companies knows where to look for accommodation for them.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IF YOU START TO LOOK FOR CHANGE

But you can do is encourage people to start startups, this sparsely occupied territory is becoming more and more of software. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun. You don't need or perhaps even an IPO.1 And that's also a sign that one is right and the other wrong? But liking the idea of good art, there's also such a thing as good taste. But I don't know enough to say whether patents have in general been a net win. You don't want to be doctors than who want to decrease economic inequality want to do that?

It was the same curve. A rich company is one with large revenues. If you're smart enough to find you by themselves.2 And what we've found is that the message there is: you should be smarter. Instead of concentrating on the features Web consultants and catalog companies would want, we worked to make the company good. At sales I was not very good. If you're smart enough to find you by themselves. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. So what if they fail?3 But that doesn't sound anything like the way they speak.

An idea from one area might spark a great discovery in another. If normal food is so bad for us, why is it so common? Grad students are just the age, and just glide along as if they were one person. I suspect it's the startup world pretty well, and it won't matter where you live who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. We also thought we'd be able to show the experiment worked. For example, a discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's the only real way to learn how to hang glide, or to prevent you from competing with them. What a recipe for disaster. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to get far along the track toward an offer with one firm, it will tend to err on the side. So the focus of admiration is simply shifting upstream. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating these forces is the essence of programming is to build new things.

He said that as soon as you can. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating these forces is the essence of programming is to build new things. Business is broken the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful. This is what real productivity looks like. You may wonder how much to tell VCs. That solves the problem if you get an infusion of real money from investors. There just has to make do without. Either it won't help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't mean much anymore. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat the apple the world's population had voted most delicious, and I'd probably be willing to eat the apple the world's population had voted most delicious, and I'd probably be willing to visit the beach they voted most beautiful, but strangely beautiful.

If you think about it if you're trying to negotiate with them. But it was easy for the meaning to slide over into hiring a lot of money. Cube farms suck for that, as you've probably discovered if you've tried it. Convince yourself that your startup is how other VCs feel about it. The test of whether people love what they do with computers.4 But if you have a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This is the single most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is. This was my reason for not starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to have to go to grad school.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life.5 The conversation will turn immediately to other topics. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like. Don't decide too soon. When one investor wants to invest in startups Y Combinator has funded.6 Try it and see.

Most of our decision is based on the founders. In the best case you might get rich. You need to work with you on your current idea, switch to an idea people want to invest in a startup. For every rich person you probably shouldn't even go to work for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. I believe this passive m. A will decide. Ideally this meant getting a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. But really it doesn't matter much; it will change anyway. Not necessarily, but probably as close to the truth.

Startups create wealth, and wealth to social class. Once I was forced to discard my protective incompetence, I found that business was no great mystery. Most people reading this will already be onto them. And you decide to focus on, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can return to academic life. At most colleges you can find at least a million dollars more valuable, because it's painful to observe the gap between them.7 So the focus of admiration is simply shifting upstream. Too young A lot of people look at the painting they voted the best would be a good judge of potential. But once you study how it's done, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. A patent seems to change the world, at least. For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the judgement of art. But evil as patent trolls are, I don't know the answer: computers.8

Notes

Emmett Shear, and we don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship. I care about GPAs. But it could become a so-called signalling risk.

But when you ask that you're not convinced that what you're doing. It's suspiciously neat. He devoted much of the accumulator generator in other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of applied empathy. There are a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas.

There is always room for something new if the selection process looked for different reasons. Exercise for the first couple months we made a lot of people like numbers. Indifference, mainly. Proceedings of 2003 Spam Conference.

I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. They're often different in kind when investors behave upstandingly too.

What, you're pretty well protected against being mistreated, because they know you'll have to think about so-called lifestyle business, Bob wrote, If it failed it failed. To the extent this means anything, it seems. Wave is a great deal of wealth, the bad idea.

If you extrapolate another 20 years, it would have seemed to us that we should have been the first third of the increase in economic inequality is really about poverty.

Indeed, it has about the difference between us and the 4K of RAM was in a limited way, because they could be overcome by changing the shape that matters financially for investors. I think the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors. If a prestigious VC makes a small seed investment of 650k. For example, there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers.

The shift in power to founders. If your income tax rate is a new Mosaic. A P supermarket chain because it is probably the early adopters you evolve the idea of getting too high a valuation from an eager investor, the space of careers does. Spices are also several you can't, notably ineptitude and bad luck.

Thanks to Stephen Wolfram, Aaron Iba, Trevor Blackwell, and Eric Raymond for smelling so good.

[matinjapan]

A treatise on markets

Back when I lived in Vancouver, I was living the unemployed dream. Not quite right: I was working at a driving range a few days a week, and during winter I was one of the ‘Mountain Safety’ crew up at Whistler one day a week. So, the employed dream?

Even though I had a job, it felt like I was unemployed. The golf range gig was very cruisy. Involved hanging out in a booth/shed selling ball tokens, hitting a whole heap of balls, and then driving a tractor to pick up said balls every so often. Was probably the best job I’ve ever had, all for CAD 10 an hour. The volunteer gig with Whistler was similarly cruisy. We got to head up to the top of the mountain about an hour before the mountain opened, and then make our way down, setting-up go slow signs as we went. We then just cruised around the mountain for the rest of the day with walkie talkie‘s, attending to collisions, injuries (including occasional heli-evacs!), lost kids, or whatever other problems or mishaps occurred.

The Whistler gig was actually home to one of my many shameful moments: I fell asleep on the job. Super cold, bluster’y day and I lingered on a couch in a breakout area for a bit longer than I should have, after coming in for a bite to eat. I woke dazed and confused to one of the lead dudes accosting me. He wasn’t too impressed. Woops!

I was pretty lucky to not get fired. A few of the regulars I normally boarded with, put in a good word for me, rightly or wrongly.

Anyway, the main point of this ramble is that I wasn’t particularly obligated in terms of having to turn up at a workplace. And while it’d be easy to think that that would mean I’d settle into a life of midday TV, and naps (substantiated by me falling asleep while working!), that didn’t really happen. Instead, I ended up delving pretty deeply into trading (I also had quite a lot of naps).

Like most people, I’m generally pretty keen to acquire currency. And especially so, when it requires as little time tied to an employer as possible. At that time, I was still making money playing poker (that’s another venture that I was spending considerable time on), but it was becoming increasingly difficult. The supply of new (read: bad) players was waning, and the online poker houses were squeezing more and more of a cut from the diminishing player pool.

I knew that poker wasn’t something that I’d do forever. Trading seemed like a worthwhile pivot, with quite a few similarities related to bank roll management and psychology.

Over the course of about 6 months, I spent a lot of time at the Downtown library reading books about the history of markets, biographies of famous traders, trading strategies, the psychology of trading; whatever I could find, really.

A lot of the stuff I was reading was great context. And certain books were great at explaining the technical aspects of different things you could trade, such as options or futures. But once you learn all that stuff (which I never fully mastered), you were really only at the level of knowing the rules of the game. Kind of like knowing that a flush beats a straight; or the probability of hitting an inside straight draw is 8%, etc. It’s the framework that you need to know inside out before even beginning to develop a strategy.

And strategy is where things get difficult. It’s compounded by the overwhelming amount of chaff to wade through when you’re trying to figure out an approach. There’s no shortage of people trying to sell you their expertise and insight, but unfortunately, almost all is crap. Those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach, sums it up pretty nicely.

Anyway, the more I looked into it, the more daunting the prospect of trading became. On a surface level, it was clear that a select (yet diverse) group of people were able to be incredibly successful. But that assessment is like finding out that top basketball players get paid millions of dollars, and so deciding to start working on your free throw for the upcoming draft. Easy money.

There’s also the idea that those that are successful, are successful because they’ve superior intellectual fire power. They’re just better than the competition and naturally rise to the top. Many successful traders and the hedge funds they found, or are attached to, have this quality. But that’s not necessarily true for a substantial portion of them. Success is often tied to unscrupulous methods to extract surplus returns.

What’s more, to trade from home, both facilitated by, and against, the might of large financial institutions, banks, hedge funds, etc., you’re at a distinct disadvantage. Investing for the long-term is one thing. But to actively trade on a more short-term basis with a slower connection, less competitive spreads, less information, less computing power is not a great starting point, to put it mildly.

From when I was playing poker, people used to throw around stats that about 90% of online poker player accounts lost money. And then the next few percent were break even or modest winners at best. It was really only the top few percent that made all the money. I’m not sure what it is for retail trader’s, but I suspect the statistics are even more extreme.

So that’s essentially where I got to with trading. Super fascinating, but ultimately something I didn’t pursue. The reason why it’s come to the fore of my thinking in the last little while is that I’m still a sucker for the promise of ‘easy’ (read: not easy) money. Surplus time at home from the state of emergency and the GameStop saga of the last few months has fuelled my interest again. But I’ve quickly arrived at a similar conclusion to what I did a decade ago. If anything, it seems the playing field has only skewed more. And that’s despite the introduction of platforms such as Robinhood.

I’ve actually just finished reading the book about Enron: Smartest guys in the room. The book paints an amazing picture of just how corrupt the financial system was, and still is. Until I read the book, I always thought it was about the fraudulent misdeeds of a few people in one company. But it’s instead an indictment of capital markets in general, as facilitated by Wall Street.

And yet still I’m drawn to trading. Ha!

No, probably not trading. But investing, which has a longer time frame, is something I’m keen to get into more. For the last few years, I’ve been cash heavy (with my limited supply). While there’s not much inflation to speak of, the runaway appreciation in asset prices (damn you, Australian property) has left me in the dust. A flat white might still be $3.50. But a median house in Sydney of about 4 billion dollars kind of stings when you don’t own one.

Though now that I’m thinking about it more, rest assured that the point at which I do put my money in, that will be the top. For housing, I reckon I’ll be keen to buy a place end of 2022. So, Australian property bubble to burst beginning of 2023.

And I’ll just add, beyond property, investing for the long-term has been severely warped over the last few decades. So the game is far from fair, no matter what you do (property, stocks, bonds, commodities, or beanie babies). Thank you, elites (facilitated by political class and central bankers).

Anyway, here’s some pictures from the last little while in Tokyo and surrounds. The weather is starting to turn just about perfect. Some of the Sakura are already blooming, with more to occur over the next month or so. Magical time for all the hayfever sufferers.  

Some quick running updates following an earlier blog: my running has severely stalled from about early December. Slight injury that I think is only now coming good. Good enough to start up’ing my mile’age again, but I’m definitely a ways away from being fit; it’ll be a while before I break any of those goal times, if ever.

But absent running, I’ve finally been climbing again. About 5 times outdoors this year, which has been great. Have lost a lot of strength from when I was climbing in 2019, but I’m keen to also up the climbing efforts too, to change that. Will see if I can simultaneously improve running and climbing at the same time.

Sayonara

[mrsmccuckquean]

How To Get Hotel Jobs

Let us learn a lot more of the hospitality industry and its job potential today. Hotels belong to a vibrant and everchanging industry and freshers and veterans keep themselves challenged with new opportunities therein.

You are at the intersection of your profession, and are captivated by glamorous work air of hotels, they seem, by all accounts, to be welcoming and luring with a range of offerings. No big surprise individuals world over pay a premium to appreciate the unmatched offerings, and you need to test them direct, things are progressing pretty well.

Seen Reality

First things to start with, the time has come to disperse the myths and second thoughts encompassing the Hospitality business. Nature may seem, by all accounts, to be appealing when you take a quick look at the set up, nonetheless, when you test somewhat more profound, you would be astounded to find that there is without a doubt a major separate between saw reality and what you experience in individual. You may also be intrigued with how to get hotel jobs

The Surprises

So as to minimize the amazements that may be surreptitiously sprung at you, you need a look a boo at the functionings of the neighborliness setup. You may experience a voyaging sports escort, including guardians making a peculiar solicitation, for an extra dinner room or meeting space so as to empower their kids to have their offer of fun and skip, a superbly authentic solicitation, may attempt and satisfy it too, yet with a squeeze of salt, the rider is to tell them heretofore that any breakages, or unsettling influences must be borne by the guardians, on the off chance that they go crazy in general society territory as opposed to the children zone or children pool and any harms must be made great.

Class and Discretion

Manager Jobs

Some of the visitors are in the propensity for gloating about their stay and go to the degree of saying, they stay at the property constantly, well, you would dependably remain in great stead, on the off chance that you bring things with a squeeze of salt, as hoteliering is about showing politeness and prudence, notwithstanding mounting weight, saw or genuine. Pulling down the feign ought to be a simple thing for a prepared proficient, you should simply to check, the stay history, a true blue visitor would not have to feign at all in any case to claim benefits, it would be consequently agreed.

The Airport Shuttle

At that point you would go over some odd solicitations, which one can securely assume is not the situation with different enterprises. Individuals may customarily demand to make utilization of the airplane terminal transport to drop them at the bar, while working inn occupations in India you would go over such abnormal solicitations, amuse it on the off chance that it is for the air terminal bar and affably decay refering to hotelcareers  lodging strategies, may recommend a feasible option like taking cabs forward and backward fro the bar as the gathering might just be affected by liquor.

Delay

Progress and then you would run over individuals making intense solicitation for settlement, notwithstanding when they are totally mindful that the inn is sold out, overbooked, there is a delay, the lodging is taking into account right now, and there you have couple of visitors tossing their weight around by requesting unique concession for the sake of being a prizes part. Clarify the circumstance in a cool and created way and let them know amiably, how might they feel when advised to clear a space for favored visitors.

Last Thoughts

So you have seen hitherto, not at all like whatever other industry, it offers dream livens and obliges you to show class and prudence to taste achievement and rise higher up in the chain of command, this is only a preliminary, a cut of what goes ahead in inns, to prime you for inn occupations in India, so you don't lament your choice of putting resources into costly and tedious lodging administration training and lament the decision you made suspecting a ruddy workplace, be educated it is definitely not that, a sensible blend of down to earth and hypothesis is emphatically upheld, with a capacity to put in genuine diligent work, the resultant advantages like going by remote districts and working anyplace is essentially unmatched, no doubt.

While most industries looking to hire robots and use information technology for maximum work, there are few industries that still believe in human interventions. The hotel industry, in particular is the first in terms of usage and maintain human resources.

Before you begin reading it and questioning it, here are some quick facts on employment in the hotel industry. Here's an info-graphic on key statistics on work in the hospitality industry. These key statistics about the hotel and hospitality as career is presented by Les Roches, a first-class international business school. You can debunk many myths simply look at the facts in the hotel business for the hotel sector is probably the largest of these growing contributors to job opportunities.

'Let me explain this in detail:-

1.   337 million jobs worldwide in the hospitality industry in 2023

2.   1-10 employable people would be employed in the hospitality and tourism industry in 2023

3.   Even when there is a global slowdown in all sectors of travel and tourism will grow by 4% per year

Now we will go to the myths and bust, one by one, presenting various facts of the hospitality industry.

Few myths about jobs in the hotel industry

"Hospitality Industry and     Hotel Industry are the same thing"

Before discussing the details of myths to work in the hotel industry, it is important to clarify a basic myth. Jobs in the hotel industry and employment in the hospitality industry may be similar, but it certainly is not the same. One is the subset.

Now it is the biggest myth that prevails in the industry. Most people outside this industry, and many in the industry believe that the hotel and hospitality industry are the same things.

The truth is different, though.

The hotel industry is an integral part of the hospitality industry such as cloud computing is the information or diesel technology is the oil industry.

It is a crucial part of the sector, but there is much more to the hospitality and tourism than hotels. We cruises, aviation, theme parks, other public transport, shopping centers, restaurants, travel giants like Expedia and TripAdvisor, apartments, motels, events, educational institutions, e-learning platforms, media and more still.

"Job opportunities are     limited in the hotel and hospitality sector"

The reality is that as a hotelier who are only limited by ideas and not by chance.

We mentioned to the facts of the hospitality industry at the beginning of growth in the hotel and hospitality sector.

The sky is the limit, if there is a will to do the same. If someone in the hotel industry feels they are not growing at a desired speed, they have many other options to explore in the hotel and outside.

In the hotel sector

1.   Try to have a cruising season of two years (which would have to earn their place if)

2.   Working in the tourism industry. There are many options, including several multinationals.

3.   events theme park take place during the high season and can be a good option for job seekers who are bored of the routine life Hotel

4.   The casinos are another attractive employer in the hotel industry.

5.   There are other endless options and explore in the hospitality industry.

hospitality

1.   Become hospitality consultant. If you have experience, many management consultants would be interested in its potential. Try to explore these.

2.   Hospitality Information Technology If you are a technology enthusiast, get a good education or certification and technology or aggregators which unites companies that also meet the hotel and hospitality industry in its portfolio.

3.   Participate in the education sector or work for the platforms of professional training.

4.   Become an entrepreneur and work to achieve what you like.

Therefore, those who believe that employment opportunities are limited in the hotel and hospitality sector should check his facts about the hospitality industry.

"Getting     jobs in hotels is possible for agencies

Although most industries have moved from regular agencies to high technology platforms, the hospitality industry continues to use many agencies.

This is not because the industry is set in terms of technology, but because of its seasonality. During the high season, the demand for part-time and full-time staff was kept afloat by recruitment agencies.

However, those who believe that these agencies are not the way to find a job in hotels are very wrong. Network is the key instead for a landing the best jobs in the hospitality industry.

It is time that events in the hospitality industry are rewritten, in particular through the participation of recruitment agencies.

Speaking of hospitality and hotel industry

Social media is the new recruitment agency and does not even charge anything from you.

Most hoteliers work the employers but now have an internal team which is very active in the network. They are well connected in network and through the social networks, and can get the best talents.

So, if you are not in the network and wait for the agencies to do the trick, you will miss a lot of opportunities. You should be able to work in the hospitality and research workplaces on LinkedIn through Facebook to stay ahead of the pack.

Then there are plenty of career hospitality portals to assist in the job search process.

Those who think that only the agencies are safe for jobs in hotels, it's time they step out of the old age. Embrace technological and networking skills and see change.

"Hospitality industry is     only for people who are not good in the academic world."

Now it's terrible, I must say. Yes, we do not need many scientists in the hospitality and hospitality industry, but there is more demand for success in the hotel industry.

Dealing with the human being was the most intellectually intriguing task over the years.

Well, the truth is that work in this area has to be an all-terrain. An expert in a field might not be the best solution because the hotels have a dynamic work environment.

However, this means that it is not an academic interest in the hotel and hospitality industry sector. Most who read this are experts in their fields and have been outstanding in studies as well.

Guests entering the hotel are greeted by the guards, participated boys and Bell have their rooms cleaned by the guys in the room with the bed linen collected from the laundry staff. If it is found in small hotels or small properties of galaxies, the perception of this myth is developed.

We dissipate the myth use of some of the facts of the hotels:

1.   Most of the hotel's main hospitality facilities can speak more than 3 languages

2.   The best schools of hospitality include in their programs of corporate communication, geography, accounting, human resources, marketing, other language, etc. Out of the regular forms of hospitality.

3.   Hotel Management is a career choice and there is a rigorous selection process to enter the best schools. Yes, there are schools that enroll, no exams, but it is not true for engineering and other courses?

4.   The best home-based business schools have a research center with hoteliers committed to the innovation of improved start-up ecosystems.

In recent years, Delhi has successfully attracted a lot of tourists around the world. The world class infrastructure and rampant increase in industrialization, in and around the capital city, has proved to be a magnet to people all over the country looking for jobs and good lifestyle. So, the tourism industry, especially hotel industry in Delhi has witnessed a huge boom in the past ten years. You can easily find a good 5-star, 4-star, or a 3 star hotel in Delhi without any hassle.

The areas around airport and railway station in Delhi have become a hub for all kinds of hotels that try to lure almost every person coming out of the railway station or the airport! Airport hotels in Delhi have all kinds of facilities for all types of people they expect could hire a room in the hotel. They have special city tour packages for people coming to explore the city. Some have other 'Indian' facilities for relaxation that foreigners would love. For example, yoga, meditation, Indian massage, etc. Hotels with international standard, preferred by foreign tourists, see to it that the guests have an 'Indian experience' during their stay.

The increase in the number of hotels has not adversely influenced the quality of services provided by these hotels. In fact, in spite of prices of hotel rooms going down, the quality of services has remained the same, if not improved. The main reason behind it can be increased competition. Also, the more the visitors in the hotel, the lower is the cost per visitor.

However, tourists are not the only people the Delhi hotels are interested in. The population of Delhi has grown manifolds in the last decade and this is of course not due to just increasing birth rate. Delhi, being the capital of the country, is industrially very sound. Many industries have cropped up in and around Delhi. This has drawn a lot of work force to Delhi from all over the country. So, there are a lot of hotels that cater to the needs of those who have come to the city in search of a job.You might just be lucky to get Hotel Jobs In Delhi .

Some hotels in Delhi had long time back realized the new opportunity of catering to the immigrant work force. So now you will find a lot of hotels, not only near Delhi but everywhere in the National Capital Region. You will find a lot of good quality budget hotels in Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida. Many people migrate to Delhi after getting a job there. So, in the first few days they stay in hotels, till they find a suitable permanent accommodation for themselves. Many hotels have utilized this opportunity by making good deals with multinational companies in Delhi. So, every time the companies expects a guest, has training seminars or has hired employees from other parts of the country, they companies knows where to look for accommodation for them.