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lilysdaydreams · 3 years

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For Them

→ Pairing : Corpse Husband X Fem!Reader

→ Genre : fluff.

→ Warnings : Swearing, Reader panicking a bit.

→ Request : Heya! I was thinking maybe a corpse x reader where the reader is playing among us with him and the gang and they use the proximity mic and he walks past her to hear her singing and she’s kept her singing like a MAJOR secret because she’s shy about it- idk you don’t have to do it if ya don’t feel like it it’s just an idea 💛

→ A/N : Oh my god, did Lily finally finish writing something??? YES SHE DID. Pretty happy with this, so I hope you guys enjoy as well! Sorry for any spelling mistakes :) Requests are open!

~~~

You grabbed the water on the table, moving to the side and out of the camera to quickly take a few sips. You could hear the rest of the group still yelling about the previous game. You laughed quietly hearing Peter and Rae yell at each other.

Looking over at chat you hummed as you took in the questions.

"How much longer am I streaming?" you read out the question.

"Probably a few more games. Maybe like 30 more minutes. I wanna go get dinner soon." you mumbled as you kept on scanning the chat.

A random question caught your eye.

"Do I sing?" you read out with a laugh.

"Wow, that's such a random question oh my god. Um, I used to want to be a singer when I was a kid," you started leaning back in your chair. You looked at the ceiling reminiscing and chuckled when you remembered the concerts you used to throw for your parents.

"I used to get my parents to be the audience and I would sing all my different songs for them. When they weren't free, I would do it for all of my plushies on my bed. Oh my god, I probably have old videos in the basement or something."

You smiled wistfully, looking back onto the screen.

"Those were good times," you muttered.

Looking back onto chat, your eyes widened at the amount of "SING FOR US" messages.

"Woah guys, calm down, that was when I was a kid. I don't sing seriously you know that right?" you questioned, laughing at how fast the chat was going.

"Okay okay," you said smiling when they didn't stop. "Lemme ju- Oh wait" you cut yourself off seeing the words "IMPOSTER" light up your screen.

"LETS GOOOOO" you yelled, turning your mic on again for the game. Everyone's voice slowly faded as people went different ways. You stuck with Lily, both of you going straight to medbay.

"Lilyyyyy" you said dragging her name out.

"Y/N" she said doing the same to you.

You giggled, and asked her if she had med scan.

"Nope, I have the inspecting the sample one."

"Ohh okay," you said getting on the med scan and pretending to scan. You watched as Lily finished her task, saying a quiet "bye" and rushing off to the next task.

You sighed, moving off the scan and starting to walk towards weapons. "Lily's so nice, I'm so glad I got to meet her through this. Like, she's the absolute sweetest I swear, I'm hoping that I get to m-" you got cut off by a body being reported.

"Already?" you asked, others echoing. You gasped when you saw who was killed, immediately whining about how someone could kill Sykunno, while playfully glaring at Sean's name, who was the other imposter.

"Okay, so the body was at reactor," revealed Rae.

"I was in the cafeteria, going towards weapons. Me and Lily were in Medbay before but she left before me," you said leaning back.

Lily confirmed this, also stating that she was in weapons now.

Sean, Corpse and Felix all said they were in Electrical, and Poki said she'd been in storage.

You looked at the chat again, not saying anything while the rest said where they were.

The chat was still spamming "Sing please!" and you looked back to the game without giving an answer. If you were being honest, then what you had said before was a lie. You still sang. Hell, it had been your dream to release your songs ever since you started writing at 15. You had started singing by singing for your parents. Ever since their car crash though, you couldn't even think about performing for anyone else. If you couldn't even perform for them, then what was the point? For some reason, whenever you thought of singing in front of someone, you couldn't even get the words out.

You sighed and skipped voting as the timer ticked down. No one was ejected and you started humming slightly as you moved away from everyone.

"Hmm should I sing you a song everyone?" you asked your voice very low. You breathed deeply reminding yourself that technically no one was in the room with you, and it was only your fans watching, a small community of people who were the sweetest you had ever seen.

Going into reactor and moving down to the very end so that no one could see you, you breathed in deeply and started singing lightly, noticing that the lights were off, the blinking arrow in the corner of your screen.

"I think we could do it if we tried

If only to say you're mine

Sofia, know that you and I

Shouldn't feel like a crime

You know I'll do anything you ask me to

But oh my God, I think I'm in love with you

Standin' here alone now, think that we -"

"Y/N what the fuck your voice is -"

You screamed before the person could even finish what they were saying, hitting the "kill" button without even realising, and letting out a gasp when you saw the black body flop over.

"Oh god, oh my god, what did I do?" you whispered staring at Corpses body, half of your brain freaking out over the fact that he had heard you and the other freaking out what to do. You quickly vented, coming out in electrical and pretending to do the download.

"Oh my god, guys!" you whispered furiously, playfully glaring at the camera. "This is all your fault, do you see what I did, I killed someone with my singing... I just got so scared because he came out of absolutely NOWHERE, oh my god guys." Leaving electrical, you heard someone yelling and headed closer to them laughing nervously when you found Toast and Sean yelling at each other.

"Hey guys," you said voice being unnoticed because of all the yelling and you moved into comms pretending to do a task there.

Just as you did that, Pokis body was found, and you gasped as you realised that Sean had killed three people so now there were 5 left. Toast was dead, which means that he just died, which left Sean, you, Rae, Lily and Leslie.

There was a stunned silence for a second as everyone took in the 4 kills and then Rae immediately attacked.

"Ahh, the body was in cafeteria. Like bottom cafeteria."

"Um, So I just wanna add something, I was coming from the electrical right, and I was walking to comms, and Toast just passed in the middle of storage. I came into comms and Sean is here as well.

"Yup, shes right, toast just left and she came in." confirmed Sean.

"Well, I saw Leslie at the start of the round, we stuck together and then I was with Poki for a bit."

"Yeah okay, but where were you?"

"Well, I went to weapons then I went down into comms and storage and then I went electrical when lights were called and everyone was ther-" she said cutting herself off and gasping. “Guess who WASNT there? Y/N wasn’t there!”

“Well yeah, I just thought someone else would do it” you replied. “I was all the way in upper engine and I couldn’t be bothered. You all did lights and I was doing my tasks in reactor and then I went to electrical and then I was waking to comms, and then I saw toast and then I got into comma and saw Sean. Even if I was the imposter and killed Toast, I definitely couldn’t have been able to kill Poki.”

“Yeah no, I still think it’s you,” said Rae after a pause, Leslie and Lily both giggling at her.

Lily chimed in then as well, “Yeah I haven’t seen y/n this whole round at ALLLLL, so I think its her as well."

Ignoring your protests, they all voted you out, and you shrugged at the camera as your character was thrown off the ship.

"I think I'm okay with that guys, I was way too nervous to still play," you muttered, now looking at the chat.

"Guys," you whined suddenly remembering. "I was only meant to sing for you, I didn't want anyone else to hear it, Corpse literally came out of nowhere. I hope he wasn't deafened by my screeching," you grimaced.

The word "Victory" came onto your screen and you huffed out a laugh as the lobby exploded with noise.

"Lily! I told you it was Sean!" exclaimed Rae.

"Sean was on a killing spree," you added in, sipping your water. "I only killed like two people cuz I was distracted, I swear he literally carried the whole game.”

“He backstabbed me!” said Sykkuno and you could hear the smile in his voice. “I was doing upload while he was right next to me and we were talking about how great this group was and he just killed me right there!”

Suddenly all the attention was on Sykkuno as everyone started cooing.

“Awww, Sykkuno, did you just compliment us?” Rae yelled, lots of other chiming in to tease Sykunno and him ending up stuttering because he got flustered.

“Alright guys,” you said when everyone quieted down. "I think I'm gonna go now."

"NOOOOO" yelled Rae, everyone else echoing her.

You smiled and quickly said your goodbyes, logging off the game and quickly saying bye to the viewers and ending that as well.

Slumping into your chair, your breath quickened. "Oh my god," you whispered, the realization creeping up on you that you had just sung in front of nearly ten thousand people and that Corpse had heard you sing. You and Corpse had met through Among Us with Toast inviting you to the lobby. You had fun playing with him and you'd both followed each other, but most of your interaction was in games. Like sure you'd messaged each other a few times but those were only brief conversations! and sure, maybe you had a small tiny crush on the guy but like WHO WOULDNT? He was sweet, nice and you related to him a lot. The point was, you were absolutely not ready to sing in front of him. You stood up from the chair and went to the kitchen, pouring yourself a glass of water to calm down.

Your phone rang and you grabbed it from the counter, choking on the water as you saw that it was from Corpse.

He had never called you before. Like you said you simply weren't that close.

Coughing out a "What the fuck?" you answered the call, grabbing onto the counter for support.

"Hey," you said, confused when there was no sound.

"Uh yeah, Hi Y/N. Its Corpse."

"Ah yeah, I see." You facepalmed yourself, rubbing your forehead. What the fucks was wrong with you.

"Um yeah, so uh I just- You know in the game? Um I kind of - well - I kind of heard you singing, um um, that song."

You stilled, not a breath coming out of you.

"Your voice, its -" he paused, letting out a huge breath. "It's absolutely beautiful."

You opened your mouth not even sure what you were gonna say but he continued talking.

"I just, I cant get it out of my mind. Have you heard some of my music?"

"Um yeah, I-I listened to it when I first heard about you. Your songs are so good!" you exclaimed, finally being able to move your mouth

"Do you think maybe we could do a song together sometime? Your voice would be absolutely amazing on one of the tracks I'm currently working on, its a chill one that I have, kind of like Agoraphobic," he asked, rambling through the sentence.

"Um, Oh my god," you muttered, still confused on if this was actually happening. "Yeah, Yeah definitely that would be so cool."

"Oh. Oh that's great, I-I didn't think you'd agree, that's great, I can send you a sample and the lyrics but -"

"Um," you started cutting him off. "If I'm being honest," you muttered, shoulders coming up to your ears. "I'm actually really conscious about my singing. Like this was the absolute first time I ever even sang on stream, so like sorry- I'm ruining it, but this is just a bit overwhelming for me. It's a great opportunity, and if you want I can definitely try but please don't have big expectations of me okay?" you asked biting your lip slightly. "I'm not that great."

There was a second of silence and then he whispered lightly, "Even if you don't believe it, just from those 30 seconds, I could already tell how amazing your voice was."

Your breath caught but a second later he had already moved on.

"If you want to, we could do a few singing sessions together? Just mess around have some fun? That way you can get a bit more comfortable and have some fun," he suggested, voice changing to a shy one that you hadn't ever heard from him.

~~~

"Yeah sure," you agreed, smiling. "Lets try that."

3 months later, you guys finally released your song. Titled "For Them", you sang about your parents who you had loved dearly, and he sang about his parents and their distant relationship. It showed two different perspectives, two different stories, two different lives, and you both loved it so much.

The song was a success, with fans pouring into your channel and small community and well, your life. Most importantly though, along with all of it, came a mask-wearing man, who held you on the days that it was hard for you, and who you held on the nights that were hard for him.

fin.

#corpse #corpse husband #corpse x reader #corpse husband x reader #sykkuno #Corpse husband fics #corpse x y/n #please like and comment #I like validation

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theres-an-impulstor-among-us · 3 years

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Friday Night Stabby best quotes part 27 (23/07/21)

Pearl has replaced Joker for this session. Grian also played for a while despite it being 3am his time.

…

Tango: Mrs T, are you good? Are you good? Mrs Tango: I was talking to people, I’m sorry. What do I need? Impulse: You need to get ready to stab some people in the face.

...

*Grian has altered his outfit and accessories to match Etho’s, complete with blue colour* Grian: I’m also Etho. Brody: It looks like it. Tango: Oooh! Look at that! Etho: Ohh, you’re looking good, actually. Grian: I’m off-brand Etho. Brody: Hold on. *pause* Etho: Oh no, no. Don’t, Brody. Brody, deadpan: What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. *Brody has also put on Etho’s outfit, making 3 blue-coloured characters with the green alien and lab coat* Grian: Well that’s just copying.

...

(due to technical issues, the crew had to go back to vanilla Among Us. in the process, Grian managed to nab the cyan colour from Etho and now looks exactly like Etho usually does)

*votes are revealed, everyone skipped except Grian who voted for Etho* Grian: *laughs* Etho: Oh come on! What? We were together the entire time, Grian! Grian, still laughing: I know. Etho: Now that’s just spiteful.

...

*Grian runs up to the top reactor panel* Impulse: I got the bottom [reactor panel]. Etho, running down to join him: Etho powers! Oh. Impulse stole it. Okay. Grian: Did you just call me Etho?

...

Grian: Alls I wanna say is Tango was running at me really hard, like- Tango: I was going to weapons. Grian: He had his head down and he was sprinting, saying nothing. He had vengeance in his heart. Tango: Watch as I modify my speed, yes. Grian: Just saying. He didn’t say anything, not a friendly hello. And I know Tango; he is a fan of friendly hellos. I’m just saying, this is really suspicious. Tango: Not when I’m tryina kill you, I’m not gonna give you a hello.

...

(Grian has changed his skin back now to the lighter red with a balloon accessory, Etho is back to normal)

Brody: Did you say Grian intentionally talked to you? Endless: No, he was ignoring me. Brody: Oh well that checks out.

...

*after Impulse framed Endless for Grian’s murder but got voted out the next round* Endless, dead: I hate you for getting away with that, Impulse. Impulse: *laughs* Endless: I hate you for other reasons too but I hate you for that especially. Impulse: I can’t believe they believed me.

...

Grian: *reports Skizz’s body* Grian: So this is pretty clear-cut. Evil, do you wanna- I’ll let you defend yourself before I tell everyone what happened. Evil: I would like to hear what story you’ve got to come up with, Grian. Grian: Alright, well, it’s as simple as I went into electrical and you were walking right out past the body. Pearl: But this happened, like, literally 1-2 seconds ago cuz I just walked away from Skizz. Grian: Yeah, I caught him killing [Skizz]. Impulse: Was he cleaning his knife off, by chance? Grian: He had it in his beak, shaking it side to side. Impulse, laughing: That’ll do it! *pause* Tango: Evil? Defence? Evil: I was… *pause* Grian: …killing someone? *long pause* Evil: You told the story perfectly.

...

Brody: Impulse is laughing. I don’t trust it. Impulse: You shouldn’t :)

...

Grian, whispering: Guys. It was Etho. Brody: Grian thinks it’s you. Grian, whispering: Grian KNOWS it’s you. Brody: KNOWS it’s you. *pause* Etho: That’s fine, you can vote me. See what happens. Impulse: If we vote Etho off, it’s gonna be really fun trying to figure out who it is after, cuz I got sus on nobody other than Etho. Brody: Okay. You said fun and I like fun. *votes* There you go. Impulse: Mmhmm! Let’s go for fun! *pause as everyone starts to vote* Grian: It might be Impulse, guys. Impulse: Yay for fun! Let’s go, Mrs Tango! Yay for fun! Mrs Tango: I did fun. *Etho is unanimously voted out* Brody: Etho! Why did you vote for yourself? Mrs Tango: Peer pressure.

...

Evil: I thought I was safe! I kill and I go to run out and here comes Grian and I’m like “son of a gun…” Astro: He must have a camera in that balloon or something. He can see everything. Impulse: Detective Grian! Check out his second channel.

...

Etho: So what makes you think I came from the left, Grian? Grian: I- Stop gaslighting me! It’s 4am, I might actually be wrong!

...

Endless: Brody’s got too many hats on. Brody: No, this is just the right amount of hats. Endless: It’s too many hats, sir. Brody: Don’t tell me how to live my life. You’re not my real dad.

...

Endless: Miss you, Astro. Evil: Did you miss him with your knife? Endless: I was standing right next to you in electrical!

...

Etho: I’ve got my eye on Balloon Boy a bit. Grian: You’ve always got your eye on Balloon Boy.

...

*everyone skipped except Endless, who voted for Grian* Grian: Endless! Why? Brody, to Etho: You convinced Endless. Impulse: Don’t worry about Endless, sometimes he just… you know.

...

Endless: I’m voting for Grian. Grian: What?! Wait wait wait wait wait, why are you voting for me? *long pause* Endless: You don’t know. Alright, let’s go. Grian: There’s literally nothing! Impulse: Welcome to Endless, Grian. This is Endless; don’t worry about it.

...

(Grian leaves the group)

*body is reported* Tango: Etho, where’d you just come from? *pause* Etho: I dunno. Tango: Mkay.

...

Endless: Pearl mocked me for saying ‘gas’ instead of ‘petrol’ so I’m voting for her.

...

Evil: Etho, are you feeling okay, buddy? Etho: I’m fine. It’s the rest of you that are crazy.

...

Astro: Okay so let’s vote for Mrs Tango because she blatantly came right in, killed Endless, and then jumped in the vent. Etho: Mrs Tango, you got a defence? Mrs Tango: Can you blame me? Etho: Good defence.

...

Brody: Hey, guess what? Endless wasn’t an imposter. Tango: Oh. We should vote him out anyways.

...

Skizz: That was VERY well done, Impulse. Impulse: Not well done enough, apparently. Skizz: No, it wasn’t good enough. But only because you’re not good enough. Impulse: HEY!

...

Astro, chasing Endless round the lobby: I’m sorry, Endless. Sorry, Endless. Endless: No, there’s no sorry! Killed first? We couldn’t just- We couldn’t just go aside and talk about it for a few minutes and then just let me not report you? I would’ve let you have that but you killed me first, dude! Astro: *laughs*

...

Brody: Tango seems like the kind of person who would kill Endless first. Tango: *laughs loudly* Ah, man. I hate you.

...

*Endless is the only person to have not gotten imposter the whole night* Endless: I love each and every one of you but this game is the stupidest game I’ve ever played in my life.

#friday night stabby quotes #friday night stabby #impulsesv #tangotek #skizzleman #etho #pearlescentmoon #grian #theendless #evilnotion #brodyman #astrozoan #mrstango

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i-need-glitter · 3 years

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Vent below

My boss’ wife deserves to break both her arms.

My boss left for an appointment for the majority of the day and his wife showed up and just fucking complained ALL. FUCKING. DAY.

She came into the office and asked me “what is this crap on the floor?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked her. There was nothing on the floor that I saw.

“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me ask about the crap on the floor.

All while there’s a man who I am assuming is a fucking client standing behind her that she let in (this is the 5th time she’s spoken to me in a demeaning tone)

This fucking woman said the guy was here to pick up a check. I had no idea wtf she was talking about and said so.

“Of course you know about the check. Don’t act like you don’t know. You have to know.” She said.

I still didn’t know. Said as much. She got mad at me and I decided to check the place we keep checks for in person pick up. I found it, as I was asking for the guys signature she starting talking AT ME. She always talks AT ME. I fucking hate it because she nitpicks everything and fucks with how the office is organized.

Of course the lady that shows up once or twice a month especially since quarantine started is allowed to rearrange the entire office because “it makes more sense”

LA-DY

I’m fucking lucky I got all my shit done before she showed up cuz I was able to file things

And

She

Had

Shit

Say

About

That

Like. “This is messy and unprofessional. You need to clean it.”

Internally I said FUCK YOU. But I just said nothing.

She likes complaining and micromanaging because half the time she’s ALSO complaining that she can’t pay her mortgage

Like. That’s a personal problem. Get a job. You like talking about how your a Doctor but (and no shade) your just a fucking midwife

Get a job and shut up

Sell your 2 fucking boats and downgrade to a fucking apartment from your fucking house you bitch.

I managed to put a bunch of shit away but I really wanted to do billing shit today and I couldn’t do it while she was there because she said I fucking quote “that’s [the billing] isn’t important. You have actually important things to do.”

Oh? Like doing work that neither of us is allowed to do because you think you know how to be a lawyer? Like when you had a tantrum like a 3 year old because the TRAINING I HAD told me not to do LEGAL WORK IF A LAWYER DOES NOT GIVE IT TO YOU TO DO and you aren’t even an employee of the firm? Because you sure as shit ain’t a fucking lawyer.

*grown woman with several child and several grandchildren* goes to her husband like a 3 year old who got their toy taken by another kid at the playground because I said no with a legitimate reason and refused to back down.

Like this lady has never had people treat her like an equal.

I am just a bit younger than her kids and I don’t look at her like an ‘authority’. I’m like, yeah. That’s my boss’ wife. Technically she has no power over me and I’d like to tell her to fuck off but then she’ll get emotional and I just don’t want to deal with it

I’m so fucking excited for when I hand in my 2 weeks later this month. When that happens I’m just gonna tell her to fuck off.

Because if she says shit to a future employer I get to tell them. “Yeah that’s the lawyers wife who tried on multiple occasions to get me to do legal work that required my boss’s signature and I refused each time so she started insulting me and calling me a psycho because I wasn’t afraid of her.” Like, an actual ethical employer will like my story.

Fuck you Marsha.

#glitter life #vent #vent post #illegal #this shit I swear #it isn’t Karen #it’s Marsha

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miscellaneous--bones · 3 years

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scar map for ray! and also freckles, technically. shes gotten MOST of them from different fanfics i've put her in (she plays y/n sometimes, especially in shit like creepypasta or undertale, etc) im gonna put some close ups under the cut as well as explanations from where they came from kinda :) (tw for semi-detailed talks of various injuries and maybe body horror and/or gore? also self harm a lil bit)

lets start from the back! a couple of these i'll talk about in the front, but lets see what i can get to here :)

the big sun one is technically a tattoo, Lue has one too! it was just for fun :)

uhhh the one right down the middle is from a time someone dragged a knife down her back? i dont remember if this happened in a fic, but it happened regardless from one of her crazy adventures.

the ones on her shoulder blades(?) are from the multiple fics where the reader has wings and has them cut or ripped off- and if not that its from when she's shapeshifted wings for herself? i posted a lil comic about that once you should be able to check her tag or something. but yeah! somethin' like that.

the big one on her lower back is from an onward fic where she fell through the floor and got like. stabbed by a giant plank of wood, and i distinctly remember this one because it was one of the first times i'd used the idea that she can ''recharge'' or heal in sunlight :)

the little scratches- any little scratches honestly- are either from various fights shes been in, animals that have attacked her, or maybe even just herself, honestly lmao, shes usually careful but her claws are sharp haha

rspeaking of, the one on hr

uhhh the big one on her chest! she got that one from the multiple times shes been stabbed in the chest (thats. SUCH a common place of injury in fanfic actually??) the most recent i think is from [this sans/reader fic] that i've been reading for the past while its rlly good u should check it out :)

the one down the middle (from her chest to below her belly button? u cant see it too well cuz of the chest one but its from this one really gorey creepy ass MTT/reader on ao3 where the y/n was like. disected??? idk but she got her HEART ripped out and shit, it was weird, but it stuck w/ me so its been one of her scars for however long

the one under her left boob is another stab wound from... i think? tmnt? i forget if it was tmnt or creepypasta, but im pretty sure creepypasta usually does stuff lower.

speaking of, the one on her right side is from a couple different times she was stabbed in creepypasta (mostly by jeff, probably) it doubles as where she was hurt by the wood in the onward thing

the one on her right shoulder and the two scratches are from her own lil adventures, especially the one on her shoulder its another one of those common injury scar things.

you can only kind of see it but the little one on her left side is from where she had one of her kidneys stolen by eyeless jack in creepypasta, because of course thats happened before, cmon now. its regenerated by now, but the scar persists none the less.

the one her thigh and the one on her shoulder are both from creepypasta fics, both were jeff x readers i think? the one on her shoulder she got at the same time she was stabbed in the side i think, it was from this scene were fuckin, jeff was goin' nutts and attacked her or something? and the one on her thigh was just another common-injury scar from that fandom idk

uhh the two bite marks were from when she was attacked by either one of the creepypastas that have sharp teeth or it was some kind of monster from somwhere idk they aren't from fics i dont think tho

and then the self harm scars is because of how often the author writes y/n as depressed (usually as a vent or something) and therefore the y/n may cut and its usually hurt/comfort or something similar. i figure a few are from herself too, because of common injury OR because she was kind of experimenting with pain and getting hurt and sharp things when she was first getting used to haveing a Body and the likes

and then these three!

the mouth one is from a jeff x reader where jeff cuts a smile in the reader's face. i didn't wanna give her the full smile because of recognizability, but i figured she could have little ones at the corner of her mouth instead.

the one around her leg is from a bear trap, it wasn't in a fic i just figure yeah she probably got caught in one at some point, thats just a ray thing to do

aaand the last one is from [aNOTHER jeff x reader] by @/littlebitoffanfic (they're work is just really good anyway) where the reader gets hurt and the jeff feels guilty ands its this angsty hurt/comfort, but yknow

thats it!! that was really long. either way if you read all this and wanna know more about certain specific ones lmk! i dont remember what all the fics were that she got her scars from- especially because some of them happened multiple times, but i tried to link them if i could remember what they were. either way, yeah :)

#Ray D'Roe #oc #art #dipity doodles #tw scars #tw gore #ask to tag #tw self harm #tw injury #im probably not gonna draw these all the time cuz theres just so fucking many #but also cuz maybe like she hides 'em w/ glamour or something #just cuz of convenience and her job and all that #should i tag this as long post?#no its under a cut nvm

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heckyeahepithetswitched · 4 years

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candaru liveblogs reading her own writing: episode 4

ngl the whole backstory bit was just so fun to write. also rich girl mera

GET IT? GET IT? CUZ IT RHYMES WITH REFLECTION? GET IT—

and the Giovanni parallel of Molly’s first time standing up for herself!! aka local gremlin chooses NOT to pick a fight he can’t win for once

ngl I’m proud of this whole monologue by Indus because reading it is just like “oh yeah that makes sense!” and doesn’t give the impression that I took DAYS figuring out how to close all the plot holes (which I did)

I love Lambchop

I distinctly remember being REALLY happy about this part, for some reason. I guess because I destroyed the dinosaur bones and wasn’t sure how I was gonna get Gio up into the vent?

...ok this is worse than the McHammer joke, I’d like to have a word with my past self

HGBASDFKLGH I STILL LOVE THIS PART

can’t even tell you how annoyed I was that Indus needed to send the Amulet out on a little frisbee because physically he cannot get close enough to Percy to just grab her/tap her with the Amulet himself and that felt SO stupid and anticlimactic to me but hgsdhfklgh whatcha gonna do

another little reference to Parapet from the RP blog! you can’t prove that Epithets AREN’T sentient beings that whisper influences into the subconscious

as I mentioned earlier: one of my favorite things in this project was to take lines of dialogue from the original and then twist them by changing their characters/scenarios

(the original is Molly talking about Giovanni in her first moment of standing up for herself because he’s inspired her; in this version, it’s Indus rationalizing hurting other people because of how much he cares for Mera)

for anyone that didn’t catch it, this isn’t just Molly somehow brute-forcing her way through— she activated Hushabye (which “unsummons summoned stuff”) to force the barrier to go away! the smashing effect was honestly more for the aesthetic ashgiksdlfhg (if Jello can have Mera summon blue fire for no reason I can have Indus’s barrier shatter into pieces for drama u-u)

in EE all of Giovanni’s boys are in love with him, so naturally all of swap!Molly’s girls want her to adopt them

ngl when I typed “you’d better watch yourself when you grow up” I stared at the screen for a solid second before going oH NOW I KINDA WISH THIS WAS A REAL SHOW BECAUSE THAT’S SUCH AN EPIC PREMISE

like. the drama/angst possibilities of “I’ll protect you but only until you’re older, at which point we are sworn enemies and I won’t hold back?” can u IMAGINE the kind of familial heart-wrenching slowburn you could make with that premise

the best canon-to-AU line in the whole darn series

ok there was so much stuff I wanted to fit into the original but just couldn’t make work for the script at the same time as when the original joke was used, but then the opportunity came up LATER and I was like

me realizing I can fit in Molly’s patented “dumb” powers after all: >:O!

me realizing I can fit in THE HEADLIGHTS JOKE after all: >:OOO!!!

THE CONCLUSION OF HIS CHARACTER ARC!!! ....uh, sorta? he’s still aiming to be a criminal but now he’s not picking a fight with everyone who he sees at least? X’D epithet is a weird show idk

okay, ALSO, trying to figure out this whole last part was really hard for some reason. trying to get Sylvie and Percy out of the picture so Molly & Indus/Mera could have a moment alone, while also making sure Gio had a ride home— it was a lot of frustrating technical “if this, then that”s.

admittedly, I actually wanted Gio to be the one to get the Indus/Mera moment because that'd be a more perfect “swap” of the original, but I knew from the start that Molly was gonna use her dumb powers to let Indus and Mera hug. so, y’know, sacrifices had to be made.

...so, uh. I was sleep-deprived because I stayed up late to finish the last script on time, and in my haste these two lines were originally typos (I kept the names “Giovanni Potage” and “Zora” rather than switching them).

so if u ever feel bad about ur writing please remember that everyone not only makes mistakes but apparently canon-shattering mistakes

aaaaand that’s it!

...I feel like I should have some sort of commentary about the swap!Museum Arc as a whole but I really don’t other than “it was one of the best experiences of my life to write/publish”

OH fun fact I guess I can share; I first decided to write the Switched Scripts while I was re-listening to the audio of EE for the 4th time while painting a house :D SPECIFICALLY, during the part in episode 3 when Molly breaks away from Indus and runs into the other exhibit; I was jumping up and down stimming rapidly because the show just gave me SO MUCH ADRENALINE with how good it was, and I suddenly went “I GOTTA REWRITE THIS WHOLE SHOW BUT WITH SPLIINKLES’ AU. THAT’S WHAT I GOTTA DO” kind of out of nowhere?

and then i did! live your dreams kids

#candaru liveblogs reading her own writing #I'll probably do the redwood scripts too but idk when #epithet erased #epithet switched

19 notes · View notes

dvoyd · 4 years

Note

I cant get past the medical facility in Alien Isolation and I've been trying g for a year but every time I get there I'm too frozen in fear to move

yeah i was in a similar position on my first playthrough myself in that section LOL it doesn’t help that it’s such a long section (like technically 2-3 parts) and it can really get under your skin and make you freeze up or panic.

I’m actually at that part again cuz I loved the game so much I’m doing a second playthrough on Hard again to try and see if I can do better and apply what I learned under the same conditions (also get some missed achievements and collectibles although I know I won’t be able to 100% the game bc there’s no way I’d have the patience to get One Shot, even on Novice)

but I gradually learned during my first playthrough that you have to keep moving. because the longer you stay in one area the more certain the alien becomes that you are where you are and will look more thoroughly each time he pops down for a peek. also learned that while the Alien isn’t close (like .60+ distance away on the motion tracker) or in the vents, he doesn’t make a distinction between whether you’re walking or crouching so its better to walk at some points to increase distance between you two and get to your objective faster.

I was just so in love with the game that after I finished it I was craving more Alien content, so I got Aliens vs Predator on Steam as well at a v nice discount. while multiplayer on it is absolutely dead I got it for the 3 single player campaigns that let you play as Alien, Predator and Marine and the Alien’s is so much fun that I played thru it twice, first on normal then on hard. will probably go for Nightmare next in a bit.

but yeah I highly suggest you pick Alien Isolation up again and finish it because it’s so good despite how shit-in-your-pants inducing it is lol. I’m more than willing to give you a bunch of tips and tricks I learned over my playthroughs if it would help! I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.

#sorry for the late response! tumblr even in beta still likes to hide my message notifs >:(#but pls pls pls power through A:I it's SO worth it #skyler answers #skyler plays games #Anonymous

2 notes · View notes

s-j-ace · 4 years

Text

The Same Question

Chapter Five

Characters: Shuichi Saihara, Ouma Kokichi

Words: 10600

Summary:

After Detective Shuichi Saihara encounters mysterious thief Kokichi Ouma for the first time, a game of cat and mouse ensues as both men ask themselves the same question. Why exactly does the elusive phantom thief do what he does?

This is Chapter Five, Here are Chapters One, Two, Three, and Four

Read on AO3

[Log of Text Messages from Maki Harukawa’s Cellular Device]

From: idiot #1

Hey Makiroll <3

How was your flight?

From: Me

Good

Well

You know

I was on an eight hour flight

So that was never going to go well

But I just got to the apartment and I made some tea

So I’m good now

It’s nice to be home

From: idiot #1

Haha I bet

Man I wish I could be home to greet you!

I’d give you a big hug and kiss right now if I could!!!!!!

From: Me

Gross

From: idiot #1

From: Me

…

If you were here right now I’d tell you I love you with my words

Like an adult

From: idiot #1

What no kiss?

From: Me

Maybe a small one

From: idiot #1

From: Me

If you’ve shaved

From: idiot #1

From: Me

I gotta wean you off kisses kaito

That way you won’t have to go cold turkey right away when you go on your big trip

From: idiot #1

My big trip?

Lol, you make it sound like I’m just going overseas or something

From: Me

Well space is treated as international waters by most countries

From: idiot #1

I guess that’s true?

Hey!!

That’s a space fact!

Maki Roll!!!!

From: Me

Shhushhhh

From: idiot #1

From: Me

Oh hey

Speaking of big trips

Have you heard from Shuichi at all?

I’m concerned that he may be mad at me

From: idiot #1

Whaaaaat

Why would shuichi be mad at you

From: Me

Well

I didn’t back up his clowns stealing toilets from the louvre thing

And then clowns stole toilets from the louvre

I’m worried he may feel as though I’ve gaslit him

Or something

From: idiot #1

What

How did you know about the toilets

From: Me

It was in the news?

Wait, so you heard a different way?

From: idiot #1

From: Me

So you have heard from him

From: idiot #1

Oh yeah

I don’t think he’s mad at you

He’s pretty preoccupied with the clowns I think

And besides you know

My sidekick isn’t really the type of guy who like

Gets mad

He’s more likely to like

Think you’re mad at him

And then be mad at himself for making you mad

From: Me

Shuichi gets mad sometimes

I saw him punch a guy once

And he listens to those songs that are just people screaming endlessly about hating other people

From: idiot #1

Yeah but he cries while doing that

Also I meant like

He wouldn’t get mad at you like that

Because you’re friends

From: Me

Yeah

You’re probably right

I still want to go visit him tomorrow

Say I’m.. sorry? Or something

Is this the kind of stuff that apologies are for?

From: idiot #1

Well I mean like

If you feel bad like by all means feel free to let him know

But Shuichi probably doesn’t think it’s a big deal

From: Me

Yeah but I still want to

From: idiot #1

Also I don’t think visiting him would be super productive

As far as I can tell he isn’t back from his trip yet

From: Me

What

But it’s been a month since he left

Isn’t he bored of Paris yet

From: idiot #1

No I think he’s like

Going other places too

From: Me

wym

Like, he’s doing a tour of europe?

That sounds nice

From: idiot #1

No I think it's more like

He’s still on the case

Cuz last week he was in Taiwan

And the week before that he was in Egypt

And some robberies happened there

From: Me

So he didn’t take my vacation advice at all huh

From: idiot #1

Yea I guess not

But hey

Not giving up is a good thing!!

From: Me

But what if you need to give up something that’s hurting you

Like smoking or murdering or drinking or overworking yourself because you equate productivity to self-worth

From: idiot #1

Then don’t give up on trying to get better!!!! You gotta believe in the best version of yourself

From: Me

|:/

Is he at least going to take a break long enough to come home and see you off

From: idiot #1

From: Me

Maybe I could text him to remind him and casually slip in the fact that I may be a little bit sorry that I thought he was insane

I mean obviously he’ll want to come see you before you go

You did tell him right

Kaito

...

You forgot to tell him

From: idiot #1

Well I don’t know about forgot

It’s more like

There was never really a good time? To tell him?

From: Me

…

I’m changing your contact back to number one idiot in my phone

From: #1 idiot

Ouch

Will you change it back if I tell him today?

From: Me

Maybe

Do you even know where he is?

From: #1 idiot

…

From: Me

… well you better find him before I change your contact to “best friend loser”

From: #1 idiot

Implying that I’m your best friend and a loser or implying that I lost our best friend to the thrill of chasing a group of fiendish clowns

From: Me

Both

From: #1 idiot

Okay okay I’m already texting him --- Shuichi Saihara spent the start of his day awkwardly trying to fit in with the rest of the people sitting in the front row of the exceedingly fancy audience at the first show of fashion week in Milan, Italy. He knew he should technically feel exceedingly lucky that he even got into the show, let alone that he got one of the very expensive front row seats. The Milan fashion week people were certainly the most cooperative of any potential DICE targets he had tried to warn previously. Probably because Shuichi made sure not to just send the warning through Interpol this time, and the fashion people actually cared about their careers enough to take the threat of a break in seriously. Except, Shuichi wasn't sure all the security should be placed around the stages and dresses like they were. The most typically valuable item on sight was never really DICE's MO.

That's why he was here, wasn't it?

In the front row. With all these strangers. Who were giving him weird looks. Did that lady just whisper to her friend while looking directly at him? Wait no, don't look at them. Or maybe do look at them? What if they were DICE members who only just spotted him? Right, right, all these people were suspects. Job before social anxiety Shuichi.

Refocused, Shuichi made some observations around him. He scanned the crowd, but didn't see any of the DICE members he would recognize. He did see that security guards had been helpfully placed by the doorways. He wondered if any of them were interpol agents. If they were, it wasn’t anyone he knew. Probably for the best anyway. Agent Ishimaru was mostly likely still pretty steamed at him. He hadn’t been letting Shuichi look at the notes DICE sent to Interpol, even though their team didn’t seem to have as much luck translating them as Shuichi had in the past.

Wait, there was one entrance wasn’t there? Maybe he should watch it? After all, there was no guarantee that DICE wouldn't just walk right in. Like they did in Nevada. And Cairo. But weirdly not Taipei? It seemed like they had abandoned whatever they were going to use Doctor Iruma’s EMP bombs for after failing to get them... Or were the bombs the heist after all and DICE had just waited for him to leave Taiwan to carry out the heist and actually weren’t in Milan at all and Shuichi was a big old idiot? No, they had to be in Milan, he had seen the airport tapes and done the research. But were they at the show? If they weren’t that’d be good news for the next season of fashion, but probably not for Shuichi’s case...

Ok, he just had to make sure that even if they were here nothing got stolen. What was he saying? Oh, yeah. Just walking in was probably less likely here, with all the security and all.

But wasn't it just like DICE to pick the path less likely than one would expect?

As the intro music cued in to the beginning of the fashion show and the house lights dimmed, all Shuichi really knew was that he should be ready for anything.

Two spotlights did a bit of a dance on the catwalk before they too faded and the whole room was pitch black.

There was a moment of silence.

…

And another.

…

And… another…

…

People started murmuring in the crowd.

Shuichi heard some English lady say, "What, do they expect us to have night vision?"

"It's all part of the show, dearest," said the woman next to her.

Shuichi thought for a second.

…

And another.

…

And a-

…

They stole the lights didn't they. --- Kokichi Ouma had to be honest with himself, as he continued on his circuitous route throughout the vents which overlooked the first show of fashion week in Milan, stealing all the lights from this year’s venue wasn’t very inspired. He was essentially reusing the Taipei 101 idea that hadn’t come to fruition, but Queen had insisted he needed a powerful light for his next project and the rest of DICE seemed to have formed some sort of blood pact to support whatever his next heist idea was as long as he didn’t make them watch the cinematic masterpiece Cats (2019) at their last movie night.

Kokichi himself hadn’t actually seen Cats (2019) yet. He kept reminding himself to, after hearing of its reported cursedness, but he just hadn’t gotten around to it. DICE had watched it for the first time without him, and now every time Queen brought it up Kokichi felt obligated to shut him down for the sake of maintaining his own authority. “Now Queen, obviously I love Cats (2019) directed by Tom Hooper and starring Franceska Hayward, as a fellow enthusiast of the cinematic arts, but for the sake of everyone else…” Cue eight sighs of relief courtesy of your one and only super awesome boss.

While thinking absentmindedly about his and the cinematic masterpiece Cats (2019)’s passing like two ships in the night, Kokichi checked where all his pieces should be on his internal chessboard. The locations of four fake guards, two fake handymen, and three vent crawlers popped up on the schematics he had memorized of the event hall. All busy dismantling lighting equipment or keeping an eye on a certain detective.

The word detective sent a third train of thought spiraling. Saihara really had shown up, hadn’t he? Kokichi hadn’t even sent a note this time and the detective was already here in the front row of the audience. That was probably the main reason Kokichi felt it was fair to upcycle the same plan from Taipei. Usually he’d get bored of an idea after tossing it around for a bit, so he had to act fast before his own lack of motivation became his undoing, but with Saihara around he didn’t have to worry about entertaining himself with his plans. Whatever the detective would do in response was bound to be far more interesting.

Okay he was almost in position for the first hit, and Ace was about to cause the black out in 5… 4… 3…

Oup, the light already turned off. Now Kokichi was just shuffling through the dark old vent getting ready to drop down and steal the lights from whatever room was beneath him while counting to himself about nothing and having three incongruous trains of thought at the same time.

The reason behind Kokichi’s super special secret ability to be thinking about three things at once was that A) he was a genius and 1) he was still on a sugar high from the gelato that he and his hench people had gotten for breakfast, and everyone knows sugar make brain work good.

Also! Gelato is just like… Ice Cream ++. Just like, better ice cream. It was just smooth and creamy instead of cold and chunky all the time. Kokichi could eat a lot more of it without getting a brain freeze than the regular stuff, and he wanted to get as much of it in him as possible before they left Italy forever. He’d ‘reluctantly’ promised they’d get some more to celebrate after the heist was done, but it was mostly because when they were plotting their escape he didn’t want to deal with a sugar cr-

*CREEEEAAAAAAK*

No, a crash, silly vent making a stupid noise, a sugar cra-

*CRACKOOM*

That was the last sound Kokichi heard before the ceiling crumbled beneath him. --- Shuichi Saihara realized that, by all means, the black out was rather clever. It completely stifled any immediate action on the part of an investigator. Even if Shuichi was right and it was the stage lights that were stolen, waiting to confirm the fact would only give the thieves more time to escape. He’d probably be able to bumble around in the dark searching for the entrance, but then what?

Then his phone buzzed.

Oh. Duh. He thought.

Quickly he pulled out his phone, swiping aside whatever thing Kaito had just sent him to access his phone’s flashlight feature.

"Lights!" He shouted. "Use your cellphones as lights!"

He repeated these directions once more in the best Italian he could manage, hoping he sounded authoritative enough to garner a response.

There was a great shuffling all around him as the audience muttered and reached for their phones.

Then, as Shuichi turned on his own phone's flashlight and raised it up, he watched everyone in the audience do the same. Hundreds of little lights flickered on around him, the image of the runway becoming clearer every second.

As if that were their planned cue all along, the first models began to strut down the catwalk, every glitzy gown and sparkly suit seemingly illuminated by a thousand stars in the night sky. The audience oohed and aahed, and maybe Shuichi would've found the sight pretty cool too if he hadn't been looking up at an entirely different catwalk altogether. The lighting deck above had apparently been stripped bare during the black out. Shuichi knew that both sides of that catwalk let out to the heavily guarded backstage area. So where did DICE go?

Wait… were those horizontal air vents over the catwalk?

Shuichi started making his way over to the security guards near the exit.

God, when would architects of security systems ever learn? Why would you ever put a horizontal vent right above whatever it is you're trying to not get stolen? It's child's play! Any thief with at least one limb or a very ambitious set of teeth could steal something with a horizontal vent over it, and yet no one ever thought to check them until it was too late!

When he reached the guards he said hurriedly in a low tone, “We need to check the vents right now.”

Both guards gave him weird looks and Shuichi felt his confidence immediately wither.

“Parla solo italiano.” Said the guard to the right with the long dark brown hair tied in a tight bun. Speak only Italian. Shit.

Uh. Okay. Um.

“I ladri hanno... colpito,” Okay, ladri means thieves. Yeah. Uh. Was colpito the right word? Maybe? It sounded like culprit. What was the word for air vent again... “Controllare l'uscita… dell'aria!” Yeah! It was dell’aria. Okay. Good. Italian spoken.

Except now she was giving him an even weirder look.

“Cosa hai detto signore? Lardo hanno colpito? Qualcuno sta lanciando lardo tra il pubblico? Lardo nelle prese d'aria?”

Ah. Uh. That was a lot of words. Cosa… hai detto… what did you say sir. And then. Something about lard?

“Lardo….” Had she not heard him correctly through the loud music of the show happening behind them? His eyes wandered to the other guard, a man about the same height as the woman with the same dark brown hair color. Both guards were wearing sunglasses, but the man’s face suddenly scrunched with obvious anger.

“Hey! Are you calling me fat?” He accused with no hint of Italian accent.

… What? Why would he… Unless…

The woman cracked her knuckles. “Ti faccio vedere dov'è il lardo, ragazzo duro.”

Before Shuichi could even begin to decipher what that meant, the woman put him in a headlock.

DICE . Shuichi realized as the man took a cloth out of his pocket. Shuichi smelled the sweet, familiar scent of a volatile anesthetic. Probably chloroform or something of the sort….

Luckily this wasn’t the first time Shuichi had been in a headlock, and she wasn’t even holding a knife to his neck. He tucked his chin into the arm restraining him, holding it with his right hand as he brought his left up and over the front of her face. In one smooth motion he flipped her over on her back.

Officer Chabashira had taught him that. Tenko had been one of his better friends on the force. Though she spent most of her time beating up other cops for being misogynist pigs than catching criminals. Then again that strong sense of justice was something Shuichi actually liked about her. He hadn’t seen much of her after she quit the force, though. He heard she opened a studio for something called “neo-aikido” but had been too afraid of too many things, like that she wouldn’t recognize him and that things would be awkward and then she would yell at him for being a degenerate male, to check it out. It was probably for the best anyway. If she were here right now, she’d definitely yell at him for betraying the number one rule of her aikido teachings...

“Shuichi don’t use neo-aikido on girls. If a girl tries to kill you, you deserve it.”

Said “girl” trying to kill him landed in a roll, and probably would have tried to grapple him again if she hadn’t crashed into a nearby audience member.

Shuichi made a break for the exit. He expected to be intercepted by the other guard, but the man turned instead to help up his partner.

“You okay, sis?” He asked concernedly.

“I’d be better if you weren’t letting him get away, lo stupido!” She replied tartly and also, Shuichi noted, without much accent.

He managed to get through the doors and found that the guards that had been assigned to stand outside the entrance were no longer there. That meant that he would most likely have to find his way backstage by going around the building if he wanted back up, so he started running.

He’d probably have to shake his tails first, he reminded himself as the doors burst open again behind him.

Shuichi changed course, making a couple of quick turns. Around the corner near the exit he saw the sign for the men’s bathroom. Of course! The bathroom! There would definitely be a vent outlet in the bathroom.

He opened the door and quickly ducked in. He hoped that the DICE members wouldn’t follow him in before he got to the-

Shuichi froze.

The scene that lay before him was one familiar to him since childhood, but yet every time he saw it he hoped to never see it again.

A body was sprawled face down on the bathroom tile, blood splattered on the ground all around the head. Shuichi realized that he recognized the blood soaked hair’s strange purple color, although it seemed to be tied back for some reason… He looked up at what was apparently a hole in the ceiling and deduced that the thief had been crawling through the vents when he fell. The rubble on the ground around him seemed to confirm that. Shuichi…. Shuichi couldn’t tell if he was breathing from here.

What a way to end the thief’s crime spree...

He willed himself to put one foot in front of the other. Then he did so again. Then he got over his shock and walked up to the body. These things get easier, he reminded himself.

Shuichi kneeled down to take a look, careful not to contaminate any of the blood spatter with his shoes. There… really was a lot of blood. There were no obvious signs of breathing…

Okay. Shuichi needed to check the pulse to see if he should call an ambulance. Maybe there was still a chance…

He reached for the man’s wrist-

The man suddenly sprung up, thrusting his huge grinning, and now blood covered, clown mask into Shuichi’s personal space. “It’s a lie!” He exclaimed

Shuichi startled, falling on the floor. Shock ran through him as the thief began to cackle his signature laugh.

“Did I surprise you?” He teased, blood pouring down his mask, “Were you going to scream and cry in terror?”

Shuichi looked at him in shock for a solid ten seconds. The thief in return looked at him, leaning back and forth a little dazedly. Shuichi watched a drop of blood separate itself from the man’s chin, going to join the puddle on the floor.

“Oh, sorry…” The man disrupted the silence. “I should be saying something real witty just about now… I’m just a little light-headed from the blood loss. Yeah. This is. This is real blood.”

Then the shock was over and Shuichi found himself reacting by standing up, grabbing the thief, and putting him in a standard police academy arm lock on the ground. As much as the move required speed, Shuichi tried to be mindful of the head wound. He didn’t want to give the thief the chance to escape like his mistake in Taipei had, but he also didn’t want to further injure him.

The man still made a grunt of pain when he hit the ground. “Wow, detective, you’re a lot better at police brutality than you are at dressing for fashion shows.”

Shuichi remembered the people in the front row of the show who had been giving him odd looks. He frowned. “What’s wrong with the way I dress?” He muttered as he tried to figure out how he could hold this guy down and also grab a bandage from his coat pockets. Which were very functional, thank you very much.

“Well, some people might say that the all dark clothing kind of makes you look like an evil villain.” He said with the same dazed tone in his voice. How much blood was he losing? Shuichi couldn’t tell with the mask still on. He moved to take it off-

The door opened and Shuichi saw two security guards come in and Shuichi turned slighty to look at them. Thankfully they weren’t the two from before. Perhaps they had figured out the vents were the escape route already and had come to investigate?

“Like those guys.” The man beneath him muttered on. “They might think black clothing is kinda.. Villain looking. Not me though, I think you look like a sexy motorcycle.”

Shuichi frowned at him. Wow, he sounded very loopy. He was losing a lot of blood.

Shuichi turned to address the guards, who were seemingly frozen in shock. “Scusa... ma potra-no, uh, tresti, potresti chiamare,” what was the gender for ambulance again? “a-ambulanza-”

The woman from before burst in, the other DICE member pretending to be a security guard at her heels. She pointed at Shuichi, exclaiming, “L'uomo in cima a quel brutto bambino è colui che ci ha attaccato!”

“Vroom vroom” The man beneath him giggled out before Shuichi was picked up by the two guards and slammed against the wall.

“Sei sicuro che sia lui?” One of them said to the Italian-speaking DICE member. “Quest'uomo sembra molto debole.”

“Quello è lui. Deve essere uno dei ladri.” She was… calling him one of the thieves? “Sono addestrati in aikido, ricordi l'incontro informativo?”

“Certo, certo.” Said the guard in response, obviously lying. If he had been to the l'incontro informativo - the informational meeting - then he would know who Shuichi was.

“Tu non capisci!” Shuichi exclaimed.

“Stai zitto, straniero.” The other guard shoved him up harder against the wall.

“Boss! What happened to you?” The male DICE member exclaimed.

His “boss” propped himself up on his elbow and swung his legs like a tweenager at a sleepover party. “Well, it’s a funny story! But at this rate I’m going to pass out from blood loss before I tell it to you!” His lackey gave him a concerned look. “Neeheehee… just kidding.”

“Wait I-” Shuichi started to say. The guards shoved him harder against the wall and he winced before going on. “I have some bandages and gauze in my pockets somewhere.”

The DICE members all turned to look at him. The man who had dressed as a guard looked at him hopefully, but the bleeding thief only gave him a blank stare and the woman fixed him with a steely glare.

“Aiuteremo questo piccolo bambino straniero.” She said icily. “Voi due potete prendervi cura del criminale.”

“What can I say Saihara?” The thief muttered as his lackeys helped him up. “Ya.. Ya shouldn't've worn all black to fashion week. Yup. That’s the… That’s the moral here.”

As they shuffled away, Shuichi realized there was nothing he could do. Even if he fought both security guards and managed to escape somehow, it would only prove to them that he really was a threat, and that was aside from the fact that he wouldn’t be able to do anything to capture the thieves on his own. He’d have to wait until they brought him to someone who actually recognized him and by then it would be too late.

The impossible is possible, all you gotta do is make it so.

“... I’ll stop you.” The detective said, resolution clear in his voice.

“I’d like to see you try.” The thief muttered in response.

Then the door shut. --- “Man… You’re really bleeding a lot there, boss…” Clubs muttered as Kokichi buckled himself into the seatbelt of their getaway car. After putting him down in the back seat, Clubs got in next to him, taking his usual spot in the middle seat even though there wasn’t really a need yet. Maybe he was anticipating the arrival of the rest of the group. Or maybe he was just being Clubs. And Clubs always sat in the middle seat. Not because of a reason but because he did. People operated from their own internal self as if the person they constructed from their thoughts and actions was more important to maintain than any law in the land.

Italian cars were… really weird huh? Very smooth… Like, like… Gelato.

“I’m fine.” He said. Ugh how unconvincing. “I’m just... pretending to bleed.”

Clubs frowned at him. “How could you possibly pretend to bleed?”

Kokichi was! Going to come up with a very, very good explanation. As soon as he just… sucked that blood back in… yeah… gelato… they were supposed to get gelato…

“He can’t.” Spades ducked her head into the car. “We need to stop it. Do you have a cloth or anything on you?”

“Only the one…” Kokichi muttered. He was thinking about the kerchief he still had in his pocket from the detective. Not that either Spades or Clubs knew that. They probably just thought he was going crazy. Well fine he didn’t want them to know about it anyway. They’d just get blood on it.

“Here,” Clubs took off his own bandana and put it on Kokichi’s head. “He’s still bleeding.” He reported.

“That’s why we’re taking him to a hospital.” Spades replied, now taking her place in the driver’s seat of the gelato car.

Ugh, what? No.

“You can’t take me to a hospital. It’s the first place they’ll look.” He wasn’t going to let the detective catch him at a hospital of all places… What kind of Phantom Thief got caught in a hospital… Lame… Lamey-lamey-lamooo….

Spades put the key in the car and started it. “Fine. We’ll go to a mafia doctor if we have to.”

Kokichi shook his head and felt the fluids roll around inside and outside of his skull. Part of him wondered if he could just sit in this car forever and bleed out until he died. The other part of him was sure that he was doomed to be immortal. “Nope. You crazy or something? We cannot get mixed up in organized crime. They murder people and we don’t do capitalism. Crime should be disorganized or else-”

“Okay! Fine! We’ll go to a fucking Farmacia and pray that you don’t have a concussion!”

Kokichi snorted. “I can’t have a concussion. I’m too smart.”

Clubs gave him a look. “Boss, do you know what a concussion is?”

Kokichi squinted. He’d only ever seen the word being used by people making fun of jocks on the internet. “Isn’t it like a sports thing?”

“Well, actually,” Clubs said in an informative tone of voice. “It’s a serious brain injury.”

“You listening to your fortnite buddies again?”

“No, we learned that in junior high.”

Hah. School. Lameass. Kokichi never needed school. Who needs school when you have google, video games, and anime?

“I’m a serious brain injury already, I think I’ll be fine.”

“No, you won’t be, you could die.” Spades was on her phone, probably looking up italian pharmacies.

That would be fine too. Haha. What a good… A good joke… brain…

“I’m just woozy. I need… like a gelato. We’re getting gelato. We gotta wait for the rest of the gang so we can get gelato.”

“No, I texted them, they can all fit in the other car, you need medical attention.

Kokichi frowned. “There’s seven of them. That car’s a five seater.”

“We’re clowns boss.”

Right. Clowns.... Clowns…. Horses.

“Sis, don’t you think we should wait for King? He’s got his nurse certification, so he should be the one to help with injuries.”

Horses?

“No, this is a different kind of thing Clubs, with head injuries you have to act fast. King can catch up to us with the rest.”

Why weren’t there clown horses?

“Boss, don’t fall asleep. Clubs, make sure he stays awake. See if you can find concussion tests online” She handed her brother her phone.

Kokichi imagined a horse in clown makeup… they’d have to make it a real big red nose. Juicy like gelato…

“Boss, stay with us.”

“Only if we’re going to get… get gelato.” --- Shuichi Saihara was still in police custody, locked alone in one of the back rooms of the fashion week venue and wrestling with his own inadequacy, as he often did, when Agent Ishimaru arrived. He was holding a briefcase.

The interpol agent usually announced himself loudly to whatever room he was in, but today he entered quietly, closing the door in that stiff way of his before sitting down at the interrogation table across from Shuichi.

Shuichi expected him to start yelling again.

He didn’t.

Instead he said, “Mr. Saihara. I am disappointed to see you here.”

“... I am too.” Shuichi said after a moment’s pause. “I almost caught the thief today.”

Kiyotaka looked like he was about to say something along the lines of a reprimand, but he paused and took a breath instead. “Perhaps… perhaps you did.”

Shuichi was still trying to piece this together. Was Kiyotaka mad at him or not?

“But, Mr. Saihara, I would ask you to consider…” He paused. He put the briefcase on the table, but didn’t open it. “That it is not your job to catch this thief.”

Shuichi felt indignant at that. But clearly Kiyotaka was going somewhere with this. “... as a detective, I often find it is my job to solve crimes.”

“You-” Kiyotaka grimaced. “I must apologize, Mr. Saihara, for speaking so obtusely. Yet there are some matters of rule violation recently brought to my attention that require me to handle this situation with a delicacy I am not known for.”

Oh… was this about…

“Just tell me the truth.” Shuichi said.

Kiyotaka took another breath.

“Shuichi Saihara, it has recently aggrieved me to know that you have recently been impersonating an interpol officer at crime scenes involving the DICE cases to further your vigilante investigations. Is this true?”

Vigilante was a little harsh…

“Yes.” Shuichi replied honestly. “I have been asking local law enforcement for access to flight records and airport security information in order to track down DICE--” Kiyotaka visibly tensed at this admission, but Shuichi kept going, “--but I sent every piece of info I’ve uncovered to your team. I know that it’s against your protocol to respond to them, but I’ve been right every time and-”

“And to some that could be very suspicious.” Ishimaru finished for him.

Shuichi grew wary. “What do you mean?” He asked.

Ishimaru sighed. “Do you know the name Kyosuke Munakata?”

“Yes.” Shuichi replied. “Isn’t he the new Secretary General?”

“Yes. The officer in charge of our day-to-day practice. He is my direct superior.” Ishimaru began opening the suitcase, which had two simple latches sealing it shut. He took out a small white envelope and handed it to Shuichi. “This is from him.”

Shuichi took the envelope and looked it over. There was no address on the outside, or stamp, or anything really. Just a foil laminate seal, with two characters interlaced stylistically in it. “未” and “来.” Future.

“You do not need to open it here.” Ishimaru went on. “But I can tell you what it says, if you want.”

Shuichi set the letter down on the table, “What does it say?” he asked.

“If what my superior has told me is to be believed, it is an offer of employment.”

What.

His disbelief must have shown on his face, because when Ishimaru kept going he acknowledged, “I was just about as surprised as you. To see my superior want to reward a rule breaker such as yourself… but then he explained it to me like this. He said, ‘If that young man was able to use our resources to such consistent efficiency, then he should see no problem with transparently putting his methods towards our cause. But if he is not so transparent and refuses our offer, well then we have reason to suspect his intent in this case.’”

Shuichi blinked. Really?

“You’re saying that… the Secretary General suspects that I’m in league with DICE.”

“That is correct.”

"But I-"

"Frankly I do not agree with Secretary General Munakata's deduction."

That was… some relief at least.

"I think that you will refuse this opportunity because, despite your tendency to believe the law does not apply to you simply because you don't believe in it, you are a good detective."

That was… not not where Shuichi thought that sentence would go.

Ishimaru pulled a chunky manilla folder out of the briefcase next. And then another one. And another. And… yeah he ended up pulling out five overflowing manilla folders.

"Do you know what this is?"

"... No."

"This is a print out of the files we have on you."

"What?" They had files? About him? What was he, an international security threat?

Oh… Maybe that was what Ishimaru had just finished telling him wasn’t it...

"Each of these files is a year since you joined the Towa city police force." Ishimaru gestured towards two slightly thicker files. "And these are the two years after you quit." He riffled the papers coming out of the side of one of the folders with his thumb. "Each packet of paper in these outlines a specific contribution you have made to getting a case solved. Everything from missing kids to the Novoselic Diamond case."

Oy vey...

"There's about forty or so cases in each of these files. That means you solve, on average, forty cases in a year. That's about three cases every month."

That wasn't so much. It wasn’t uncommon for Shuichi to be looking into more than one case at once. Except this month…

"This month you've solved zero cases.” Ishimaru seemed to read Shuichi’s mind, but the statistics hit him like a knife to the chest when read aloud. “You've been too busy doing what? Chasing a troupe of clowns who nab the occasional toilet or light fixture?"

… ouch.

"I don't mean to be harsh, Mr. Saihara, I really don't. You'll have to forgive my tone. But these DICE guys simply aren't worth your time. A month spent chasing them is a month you could use to much better effect on a different case. One involving the safety of children or national treasures, rather than the carpets of closing museums."

Ishimaru paused, letting Shuichi absorb what he just said. Then he started placing the folders back in the briefcase.

"So, Mr. Saihara, I think that I may be able to get my superior off your back, but only under two conditions."

He closed the lid of the case.

"The first being that you reveal to us in detail whatever method you have used to divine DICE's machinations from airport documents."

He closed the latch on the right of the briefcase.

"And the second being that you return home effective immediately and cut all ties with this case."

He closed the latch on the left.

"Do you find issue with these terms?"

His usually active hands found a resting place atop the case.

“...”

“Well?”

Shuichi couldn't quite understand how he had gotten here. In his head, until this moment, it really had seemed like he had been doing the right thing. He remembered that when he first latched onto the DICE case he had managed to keep it on the back burner while he dealt with the cases of clients. It had struck him as odd that a string of high scale robberies such as theirs would go unchecked for so long, going back five years or more. It hinted, to him at least, at a missing factor. Perhaps each hit was a calculated strike paid for by a foreign government, or a scheme funded by an underground criminal organization, or perhaps just another play at developing a network of untraceable capital to benefit a small group of people. Yet when was the last time Shuichi had spent any serious time looking into those connections?

It occured to Shuichi, then, that perhaps his ego was behind the wheel of the past month or so, when he'd spent the majority of his time exclusively tracking down DICE. Instead of actually assessing the threat that DICE posed, if any at all, he wasted time tracking down where they would strike next. To do what, catch them in the act? He didn't have the power to arrest them if he did. Even now, when he was closer than ever, all he had done was worsen his already tenuous relationship with the international police. The only plausible motive behind his own actions was that he investigated DICE simply because he knew that he could and he thought that he could do it better than anyone else.

But that wasn't true, was it?

He might think he was especially clever, but as soon as he revealed his methods that special cleverness would run out.

And he was tired, wasn't he? His head was perpetually sore, his eye sockets ached, and his limbs were weighed down by a the familiar slowness of a confused circadian rhythm anytime he didn't have a cup of coffee in his hand.

What Ishimaru had just done with the case files felt like an intervention. Like when TV nutritionists would show someone how many Coca-Colas they drank a month by building a tower of cans or filling a swimming pool with them in order to stop that person from drinking so many Coca-Colas… except Shuichi's Coca-Colas were investigative contributions to criminal offenses.

Maki had been right. He needed a break from this case. What kind of detective was he anyway…

Shuichi swallowed the lump forming in his throat and started talking.

"Well the only thing from the airport you need are logs of ticket purchases and the security footage from the gates if those aren't enough. DICE is an organization of ten people, so you're always looking for a bulk purchase of 9 to 10 tickets at the same time, although they can be from different airports... It doesn't matter who the tickets are purchased by or what identities are attributed to them, only that they're purchased at the same time. I say 9 or 10 tickets because sometimes DICE members will infiltrate the flight crew."

"Like in Paris."

"Like in Paris." Shuichi confirmed. "From there you can essentially pin down what flight they're on. Then you can figure out the general vicinity of the next crime… and I think from there is mostly luck."

"I don't believe in luck.” Ishimaru pressed on. “I believe in hard work. I think the same can be said for you."

Haha. Maybe.

Shuichi was hard pressed to think of anything that wasn’t already pretty obvious, though.

"... I suppose if you really cared to, I would think up all the possible targets after some preliminary research and try to warn them. You probably know this already… but DICE's targets have a trend of being rather famous or rather high security locations in big cities. Honestly, though, a lot of my encounters with them were due to chance."

He really wasn’t lying about that. The Paris, Taipei, and Cairo encounters were essentially pure coincidence.

Ishimaru paused, seemingly weighing this information for any fraudulence in his head. Then, he simply nodded. "Very well, Mr. Saihara. Thank you for cooperating with our investigation."

The agent stood, picking up his briefcase. "I hear that you've already given your testimony to the Italian authorities. In truth, however, we expect this case to be wrapped up shortly regardless of the details of this particular robbery, considering the substantial forensic evidence left by the perpetrator of these crimes." That was one way to refer to a pool of blood on the bathroom floor... "Is this of any consolation to you?"

"Yes, some." Shuichi felt the untruth of the statement even as he said it. It wasn’t how he would run the case, if he were in charge. Blood tests were highly unreliable for tracking down a criminal that could be from anywhere in the world, especially in a contaminated place like a bathroom. And if that criminal has never been taken into police custody or gotten blood work done before then the test would be completely useless. As a detective, he’d want to do his due diligence at the crime scene anyway…

… But this wasn’t his case anymore, was it?

Ishimaru took him at his word.

"Very well," He said.

The man pulled out of his pocket a phone, which Shuichi realized to be his own, and handed it to him.

"Your coat and other confiscated items are outside. Feel free to leave at any time."

Ishimaru did a quick bow in lieu of a verbal farewell, leaving the room in an orderly fashion.

After the door shut, Shuichi was in silence again.

He turned on his phone. As the screen lit up, he was greeted by a few messages from Kaito. He remembered, guiltily, swiping them aside when he had taken out his phone before his confrontation with DICE.

Now, he opened them. --- [Log of Text Messages from Shuichi Saihara’s Cellular Device]

From: Kaito

Hey Shuichi

How’s it going man

From: Kaito

Are you like chasing clowns right now

Text me when you’re not chasing clowns down

From: Me

I am no longer in the career of chasing clowns down

From: Kaito

Oh shit for real??

Did you catch them?

From: Me

I was just asked not to try to catch them

Very politely

By interpol

From: Kaito

Haha

That’s my sidekick

Making the international police scared for their jobs every day of the week

From: Me

That’s a funny way to look at it...

From: Kaito

Hey don’t be blue about it Shuichi

You got off the clown catching clock at a good time

If you catch a flight home sometime this week you could come with us to the open house at JAXA on friday!

From: Me

Oh is that this friday?

Man I totally

Spaced

On that

From: Kaito

Aklsjdfasflkdj

Since when do you do puns

From: Me

I would be fine if you deleted those messages actually

From: Kaito

Too late I already sent that to Maki

From: Me

:( rude

From: Kaito

She says she’s disappointed in both of us now lol

From: Me

Haha that sounds like Maki

why would she be disappointed in you tho lol

From: Kaito

There might be something I forgot to tell you

From: Me

What?

From: Kaito

Do you remember when we were in DC

I had to go to NASA (america’s JAXA basically) and meet with some people

And then I told you I had to tell you something over steak dinner

But then you had to tell me you said you wanted to do a “stake out” not “go out for steak”

And we kind of forgot about it

From: Me

Oh uh

Vaguely?

From: Kaito

Well

The thing i was going to tell you and then forgot to tell you

Is that I’m going on my first mission next week

From: Me

A space mission

From: Kaito

Yeah

Just to the ISS though

I’m gonna be running experiments in the kibo module

For a few months

Maybe a year

From: Me

You’re leaving next week?

How long have you known?

From: Kaito

Like, a few months

From: Me

From: Kaito

Haha yeah

Kinda forgot to tell you

Thats on me

From: Me

Its fine

From: Kaito

Phew glad i got that off my chest

Can you believe Maki Roll thought you’d be mad at me?

From: Me

Haha what

No its fine

Everything’s cool --- [Log of Text Messages from Shuichi Saihara’s Cellular Device]

From: Me

What the hell???

From: Maki

I know right???? --- Shuichi put down his phone, feeling like a plate on a table that just got the table cloth pulled from beneath it and yet some how found itself shockingly sedentary. He internally recalculated his schedule. He'd need to get on the next plane to Japan as fast as he could.

He opened the door. The lights outside the holding room seemed to have been taken as well. There was an officer with a flashlight who helped him grab his stuff.

Weirdly, on the way out, Shuichi looked back through the little window in the door to the holding room. The lights had gone out in it as well. Wait… wasn't there a vent in that room too?

As soon as the thought occurred to Shuichi he forcefully extinguished it.

Not my case. He reminded himself.

Then he turned, nodded to the officer, and walked out the door. --- Kokichi Ouma sat in the back seat of one of DICE's get away cars with a fresh bandage wrap on his head, slurping street vendor Gelato and trying to convince himself this was another win. Sure, the heist went well. Rook, King, and Queen had been on vent duty with him and had managed to sweep up his unfinished light fixture nabbing route. They were actually about to pick Rook up from the final rendezvous point right that second.

Which brought Kokichi to the discrepancies indicating he may be suffering a loss here.

For starters, no one was smiling. They had just pulled off a major haul and nobody was happy about it. Kokichi thought that if he got into the car where no one had seen him go splat from ceiling to floor he wouldn't have to deal with this, but Queen, King, and Bishop were really out here acting like he had died or something. He didn't even have a concussion! They did all the tests! King checked him out like forty times, he just cut himself on the edge of the broken vent!

But Bishop was stone faced behind the wheel and Queen kept pausing the tikkertap of his fingers on the keyboard to look back at Kokichi. Even King was just sitting there trying not to stare at him. Kokichi could tell he was worrying about him because if King wasn't worrying about him then he would be texting Rook. Those two were insufferable. Did he say insufferable? He meant inseparable. Like they always say next to each other when they could and texted each other the entire time they couldn't. If King was texting them it meant he was looking for emotional support because he was worrying about Kokichi but thought that he should try and make sure Kokichi didn’t know he was worrying about him, which was annoying as hell.

They weren't looking at him like their boss right now, they were looking at him like their kid brother.

He tried not to let that turn his stomach. He had gelato left to put in there, after all.

Ok, them thinking he was weak for bleeding out wasn’t the only option here. Maybe they were just antsy to be done with this heist.

Kokichi couldn’t really argue with that sentiment, though. Not because this one was a trash fire, even though it kind of was, but because he wanted to get onto the next one. Once they picked up Rook, they could figure out where they were going next and Kokichi would have another chance to match wits with the detective. With Kokichi's big screw up today it had only been due to Spades and Clubs's intervention that he hadn't gotten caught. Saihara was right on his tail and Kokichi still had no idea how he was doing it. It was like a puzzle, like an actually hard one. Kokichi spent a few moments thinking up possible methods, crossing out a few, and sorting the rest of them into piles based on likelihood in his head.

He only realized he had been silently spacing out for six minutes when the car stopped. He heard the trunk open and close

King scooted over into the middle seat and Rook came in to sit on the right hand side behind Queen. Kokichi thought about that for a second, because King had automatically assumed that he should be the one to move to the middle seat. Did it speak to Kokichi’s authority that it wasn’t even a consideration that he should move over to let Rook into the car, or did it speak to their interpretation of his fragility? Well, Kokichi was never asked to move over in the back seat. Then again, he usually sat in the front. Wait, wasn’t he in the seat behind the driver? There was a gif set online somewhere where two white guys are in a car and one explains to the other how the seat behind the driver’s is the safest seat in the car. Had everyone subconsciously thought of that gif set when they sat down in the car? Or were they merely following a pattern of behavior because Kokichi was never asked to move over when someone got in the car. In fact he was never asked to move over at all, not even when he was taking up a lot of space on the couch. Again, that could be a sign of his inherent authority. Except maybe it didn’t mean anything because DICE members asked each other to move over as a sign of antagonism and they just didn’t antagonize him like that. Were they afraid of him? Or maybe King just scooted over because Rook was coming in on his side-

Wait, rewind. Were they afraid of him?

Kokichi rethought the silence that had encompassed their ride thus far. Now that he reconsidered, the silence had almost seemed anticipatory, as if something were weighing on their minds more pressing than fresh banter or celebration. He had thought they were just anxious to finish off the operation, but now that Rook had stowed the goods and was safely in the car, the tense anticipation of something to come still hung heavy in the air.

As the car started back up, Kokichi noticed Rook and King exchange a glance. Bishop checked the rear view window at a suspicious angle. Rook’s hand went over the shoulder of the passenger seat, obviously palming something they were handing to Queen.

Kokichi spun a wheel in his head. Get out of the car? Confront them? Change the topic? Make them feel so bad for him they have to drop everything? Strike fear into their hearts of what his reaction would be towards untoward news? Maybe he should do a food crime to make them realize he was fine? Except he had finished his gelato, so what was he supposed to do? Eat the paper cup his gelato was-

Oh, oops.

While Kokichi had been considering what to do, it turned out he had also been methodically folding the finished gelato cup in his hands. Now, it was in his mouth.

Wow, he hadn’t thought this out, huh? He was trying to look less like a person with brain damage, not more . Well, too late to take the paper out of his mouth, he had already committed to the bit.

Kokichi pretended not to notice that everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch him with dawning horror as he chewed the former bowl to pulp in his mouth. It still tasted a little chocolatey. Mostly in an unsatisfying way, though. You know how when you eat the last bit off your spoon and you end up tasting mostly the spoon which just leaves you wishing you had more ice cream and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Except instead of a spoon it was this paper bowl. He felt the fibers dampen and rip apart under his teeth. The gnashing filled the car with sound.

Then he swallowed.

The car was once more filled with a petrified silence, this time on Kokichi’s terms.

“You four have been scheming behind my back.” He announced, emptying the car of silence with the sound of his voice.

At Kokichi’s words, everyone in the car flinched into an avoidant position. Bishop took the car out of park and started driving, Queen went back to typing on his computer, and King leaned as far away as he could from Kokichi without unbuckling.

Rook was the last player standing and braved looking Kokichi in the eyes.

“Uh. So.” They started roughly. “We just thought that….”

“I knew what you thought as soon as you volunteered for the last rendezvous point this morning.” Kokichi interrupted, bluffing wildly, “Just show me what you got out of it.”

“Just one sec, boss I’m uploading it to the computer.” Queen muttered, probably dragging around files from the SD card Rook had handed him. When he finally did turn the laptop around to show Kokichi, an audio player was open. He also noted on the task bar that file explorer,

Mozilla Firefox, and Fieldwire were open but minimized.

Kokichi grabbed the computer and put it in his lap before pressing play.

“Well the only thing from the airport you need are logs of ticket purchases and the security footage from the gates if those aren’t enough.” It took Kokichi a couple seconds to recognize the voice. “DICE is an organization of ten people, so you're always looking for a bulk purchase of 9 to 10 tickets at the same time, although they can be from different airports... ”

Kokichi opened Fieldwire. It was the program that DICE used to share blueprints with one another. Queen had started a new project that had been shared only with Bishop. He opened it.

“It doesn't matter who the tickets are purchased by or what identities are attributed to them, only that they're purchased at the same time.”

It took Kokichi a few moments to figure out what exactly he was looking at.

“I say 9 or 10 tickets because sometimes DICE members will infiltrate the flight crew.”

They were blueprints for a plane.

“Like in Paris” A new voice cut into the recording.

“Like in Paris” Shuichi replied.

There was a minute left on the recording. That was how long Kokichi had to figure out what the hell was going on here and what his response should be.

Detective Saihara using information from airports had been a possibility that crossed his mind before, but Kokichi hadn’t highlighted it any more than his other theories, which ranged from secret spy gear, to omniscience, or to just plain old random chance.

Obviously the same could not be said for those of his cohort. They had suspected public air transport was the root cause of their encounters with the Detective long enough for Queen to draw up these blueprints and recruit Rook to bring evidence for some sort of pitch they were planning.

They had figured the detective out before him.

Kokichi had thought of the detective’s successes as challenges, exciting roadside attractions to disrupt an otherwise monotonous road trip through life. How had he not stopped himself even once during the past month to ask himself how they looked to the rest of DICE? To his subordinates, Saihara’s successes seemed less like fun interruptions and more like real obstacles towards goals they all commonly held. In other words, setbacks revealing failures in Kokichi’s plans.

The worst thing was that Kokichi wanted to be angry at these four for this intervention bullshit. Angry that they took away some bit of mystery solving fun from him. Angry that they wanted to take away something that he had felt good about. Angry that they were undermining his authority by going behind his back.

But he wasn’t going to be angry. It was a stupid, pointless thing, his anger.

Being a supreme leader of ultimate evil isn’t all tulips and tirades. Everything Kokichi did needed to have a purpose, because he knew that DICE were always watching him, looking to him, making judgements and changing their perceptions of him in their minds.

What would being angry here accomplish? It would only strengthen their impression of his sudden unreasonableness. Even if he explained his motives, they didn’t hold up very well upon inspection. What was that Boss? You’re so bored by us that you feel the need to endanger us by playing mind games with a boot licking private eye while we do all the work? Oh yeah, we totally understand. Wait right there while we never fully trust you with anything ever again.

If anything DICE had a right to be angry at him. What had he been doing these past few weeks? How had they figured out this plane thing before him?

Was there some part of him that was actively sabotaging himself? A part that wanted him to fail just for the thrill of it? Maybe he had known how Saihara was really tracking them, but had just ignored the obvious answer because he didn’t want the mystery to be over yet.

How could his friends trust him if he didn’t even trust himself?

Kokichi had ten seconds to wrap up this train of thought before the recording was finished. No more questions, only answers, lets go.

The plans for the airplane were by all means exactly what DICE would be looking for in a plane. It was small enough as to not require a massive amount of runway space but large enough to house everyone comfortably. There were some rather intricate illustrations of those convertible mechanisms that Queen had gotten really into earlier that year. How long had he been planning thi- no questions. Fold out tables, couches, a TV, things that could turn a vehicle into an on the go hideout in the blink of an eye. Kokichi estimated the total cost of everything to come out to around ¥1,190,401,200. Which is. A lot of money. But most of that money would probably be for the engine, which if you buy legally would be around a billion yen. If he factored out buying legally, the rest of the blueprint would probably cost around ¥1,081,200, a much lower figure. Renting a hangar would cost a little less, but that price was more flexible depending on what Bishop said their monthly earnings were.

Kokichi googled ‘Japan Aerospace.’ He was in luck, the first thing that popped up was an article about a new JAXA mission.

The recording stopped.

Showtime.

Kokichi let them breathe in the silence a bit.

Then, when they were good and nervous, he enacted his plan.

“Bishop, tell Queen how much we earned this month.” He requested calmly.

Bishop replied readily, “About ¥2,000,000, Boss!”

Whoa. What? Were they really making that much a month? Kokichi supposed they had been robbing high security locales on a weekly basis, but somehow he had still viewed their team as barely scraping by. What was even the point of the heists anymore if they-

No time for questions, Kokichi had to use that figure right now.

“Do you know what that figure means, Queen?” Kokichi asked, knowing that Queen never thought about the monetary cost of his projects for more than three seconds.

“Uh… Money?” Yeah, okay, Kokichi needed to remember not to target Queen too much, even though he seemed to be the ringleader of this insurrection. That would only serve to force the other members of DICE to pick a side, which was not the ideal dynamic of a ten person group.

“It’s exactly how much money we would need to rent a hangar and build an airplane covertly in Kagoshima next month.” Kokichi clarified.

“... Uh boss,” Bishop interrupted hesitantly, “I hate to contradict you there, but most airplanes would cost a hundred times that-” “I’m not talking about how much it would take to build most airplanes.” Kokichi interrupted the interruption he had expected to occur. “I’m talking about how much it would take us to build an airplane.”

Kokichi then turned the laptop back around to show Queen the article about the manned launch to the ISS happening next week. He scrolled down to a picture of the engine taken at the launch site in Tanegashima. When Queen’s eyes lit up and King let out a sigh of relief, Kokichi knew that he had gotten away with it.

He managed to play off this whole month-long debacle as a waiting game, pretending that he had the very same understanding and intentions as the rest of them since the start of the month.

They’d get on different planes, booked at different times to the international airports in Tokyo, and then ship out to the JAXA launch site on Tanegashima, fuck things up a little and steal some rocket level engines. And Kokichi would stuff down the emptiness that curled in his gut at the lost prospect of a very interesting adversary.

… empty, huh?

Why would cutting his losses make him feel empty? Why-

No questions.

…

He should get some more gelato. Things were good when he was eating gelato.

#shuichi x kokichi #shuichi saihara #shuichi danganronpa #kokichi ouma #kokichi danganronpa #oumasai #saiouma #fanfiction #Phantom Thief AU #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 killing harmony #writing #im gay lol

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incognitowetrust · 5 years

Text

I am a selfish person. Long incoherent rambling time.

There’s no way to get this out in a well written thing without taking fucking forever.

But it’s something that bothers me about myself. Actually, I just wrote a thing in a Discord chat, and I’m basically gonna copy-paste the damn thing because I don’t want to rewrite the whole thing. I’ll add a bit more on than the initial thing though.

I usually don't vent, but I'm just gonna do a small one because I feel like mentioning it to someone. A friend person I made recently is on the spectrum like me and around the same age, and she's nice and all, but I have the same problem with her that I've noticed I have with some other people, and it makes me feel awful and also annoys the fuck outta me. Her drawing style is pretty basic, and I'm happy to see people get excited about their characters but her characters aren't technically interesting, and she messages a lot and recently I did say "hey listen I'm not gonna reply to every message" because I like to be upfront about that shit just so people know... but anyway, it's hard to describe, but she falls into like a specific type of person that I can relate to and still have love for but I find myself wanting to avoid and I can't actually grow off of them.

Like... it's awful because it reminds me of when I was like ages 13-15 and actually learning social things that other people already knew just because of me lacking friendship experience and only just having made artist friends, and I cringe at my past self but understand it at the same time, and I have to be understanding towards people because I understand what it's like to be there, and I always want to be the person I needed when I was younger. But... I mean... is it selfish to pick and choose who I "like" based on standards like... "experience" and "skills"? I mean, I often haven't been brave enough to interact with "cool" people anyway, but... fuck, I wiiish that I couuuld be liike the coool, kidsss, like the coool kiiiids.

I wonder if some of my feelings relate all the way back to elementary school, I was often paired with this one autistic girl, who I didn't have anything against (though tbh she did have some gross habits and she was hard to talk to at a young age), she and I were always the slowest in PE, always the quiet lonely kids, always the kinda pudgy and awkward girls, and I guess I felt myself pushing away from her not because I didn't like her but because of my strong sense of wanting my own identity and didn't want to always be stuck with her "just 'cuz" she was the only partner who was left over when other kids made partners.

Something that I also wonder is, well, I have an older sibling on the spectrum, but diagnosed early. I was diagnosed at 18. My parents have always tried to be fair as far as making sure we both get the attention we needed, but still, I was pretty much the older sibling because for much of our childhoods my sister and I did everything together, and I was very protective of her. The only reason I have ever punched anyone was because someone stole her glasses and I punched the girl to get them back after trying to politely reason didn’t work. We were so close, but somewhere around puberty I started breaking off from her, I became more and more hungry for my own identity, and our interests and activities grew apart as well. At this point in my life, I don’t really chat with my sister much, or do a ton of sisterly activities with her, and I think I basically avoid her because I don’t want to get mad at her for stupid little pet peevey reasons. I admit, there’s some of me that resents that I’ve had to make sacrifices because of her, I could never hum or sing because of her sound sensitivity, and nowadays sometimes I have to be the one to receive a text to relay a message to my sister because she often either doesn’t notice texts, or doesn’t have her phone on at all. I remember in 2016 in the past, it was around the peak of a shitty time in my life, a school staff member came up and asked how my sister was doing and what she was doing. I was salty and grumpy, and basically said “I don’t know” and “I don’t really care” because I’m not her damn babysitter, and if it’s SO important to ya, lady, you can probably just email her. Though, oh yeah, my sis hadn’t always checked her emails either.

Look, I’m not gonna act like I don’t have my problematic quirks. I do take out garbage and vacuum, but I avoid problems even if I remember there’s something I’m supposed to do, and I procrastinate. It’s also very easy for me to forget or ignore something unless it’s right under my nose, but I admit, often it’s just me acting out of avoidance.

Something that I think I’ve developed is... I have a huge want to love and be loved in return, I want to take care of people and feel like I matter to someone, but on the other hand besides my mom and a few adults rocking pulling me through life I’ve kinda picked up on behaviors of “Other people have problems. They gotta be taken care of. I should help. I am lazy and not all that troubled anyway, so I don’t need to share my problems with others.” ... I want to take care of others and be a good listener, but I resent it at the same time. I resent that while I’m out trying to take care of people, I don’t feel like I can be vulnerable and let someone take care of me. Because I also don’t want to let myself be vulnerable and rely on someone enough so that if I made a “friend” and lost them that I’d be legit hurt.

I’m left with even more weird feelings about myself, remembering and considering things I know about my own family members now that I didn’t know the same about when I was young, like my mom, who I credit as being the most important person in my life, she’s the oldest of 5. She was really another parent. Look, I don’t care how close your family is, or how loving they are, when ya got a big family, the oldest child becomes another parent. And they lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, where at one point the family got in a bad car accident and my gramma was wheelchair bound and immobile, and though my mom lost use of one of her arms for a while she took up the brunt of a lot the taking-care-of-people work. She’s badass, but so many responsible people, as much as suffering builds character, there’s a lot that so many people like this shouldn’t of had to do. My aunt Santos (partner of one of my aunts) was the “tough” child... sure, her parents can praise her for never having to give her help, but it doesn’t matter how “normal” or how “capable” you are, everyone should be able to feel like they can be vulnerable and be taken care of sometimes. Something I’ve come to try and remember a lot is you never know what pain people are actually going through, so while I do want to take care of myself, I always ask my mom when she comes home how her day was. She’s mentioned to me in the past that as a parent there’s the dilemma of “do I show I’m troubled so my child knows I’m human and it’s okay to be upset, or do I hide my troubles for the sake of their comfort?” ... but now that I’m older, I assume this gave a lot more leeway for me to be a listener. She still takes care of me way more than I take care of her, but I do things with her and listen to her in ways that my sister doesn’t necessarily do automatically.

I guess back to more of the original subject, I’ve actually had a friend for many years now, or at least I’ve certainly known them for many years and we became friendly a little later, she isn’t diagnosed with autism, but she still fits in the category of “nice people who I sometimes want to avoid for some reason”. It’s awful, this person has great respect for me, and we even made a couple OCs together, but I’ve had times sitting here in my chair wondering “how do I respond to this?” or “Should I feel bad I’m not as excited about this one thingy as she is?” and “Aw man I wanna talk to someone. No, not you right now. I’m being a choosing beggar.” like who the fuck do I think I am to not be loving on this person who only holds me in the highest of regards??

But here’s the thing I guess. No matter what, there are a few important things in friendships, or really any relationship. Communication, and mutual enjoyment. It doesn’t have to be the choice fault of one or both people that something doesn’t like up, often people just don’t line up. I mean, lots of romantic relationships end not because people hate each other but because two perfectly decent people feel hungry for something else. As long as I treat people with basic human respect, I can’t be too hard on myself can I? There’s so so many people I could choose to have as the few I have regular conversations with at a time, but I tend to fall into routines, and there’s only so much time in the day, so this impacts my social capabilities a lot. I can only talk to people how I want to talk to people on my own time. I wish I could hear everyone’s stories and carry a small piece of them around with me all the time, but it’s tiring as fuck, man.

I want to be around people who inspire me so badly I am thrown into euphoria, the rare euphoria I only get when I have a friendly interaction with someone I didn’t think would have the time or interest to notice me. I technically have really good reading, writing, and drawing skills, but I need to push myself, I need people to bounce off of so I feel motivated to impress and not be lazy. I’m constantly starved for that stimulation and positive reinforcement.

I’ll end this here I suppose.

#personal #vent #long rant

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spelviin · 5 years

Text

disclaimer: please don’t reblog this post. it is not meant to make any sweeping statements or generalizations, it’s not meant for public discussion or debate, it’s literally just me venting bc some shit’s been weighing on me and i needed to get it out.

being an ace lesbian is fucking wild cuz it’s like

the world is scary and homophobic but at least there’s a strong lgbtq+ community online that doesn’t hate me for being gay, which is a comfort

but a significant percentage of that very same community does hate and ridicule me for being ace, which takes away that trust and comfort.

like, i am gay. i am a lesbian, and i know this. i like women. i want to fall in love with and marry and spend my life with a woman. i know, logically, that i do belong in this community. but i still don’t feel entirely safe or welcomed on the basis of my asexuality, and i don’t know how to combat that

bc it’s not like people outside of the lgbtq+ community are accepting and friendly towards aspec folks either. i’ve only told one person irl that i’m ace, a relative i trusted more than anyone in the world, and it was the best-case scenario in that she only told me i was confused. if it were anyone else, they’d say i was a freak, broken, pathetic, that i just needed to find the right person, or worst-case scenario, threatened with or deemed deserving of corrective rape. the only thing protecting me in the general population is ignorance.

and i know most people will say, “oh, well, you’re at least a lesbian so i guess you do count as part of the community, technically” and yeah, that’s great, but i still have fucking eyes. i can still read. i can still see the vile shit folks spew about aspec people, and guess what? i’m an aspec person every bit as much as i am a lesbian, so that shit hurts me too. like, putting aside the completely obvious fact that no one should be subject to that stuff, they’re hurting “qualified, card-carrying members of their community” (in their words). but that doesn’t matter, does it? not as long as they get the adrenaline rush of self-satisfaction that comes with “owning the snowflake faux-oppressed resource-stealing evil cishets”, (even the ones who aren’t cishet), and the feeling of power that always comes with being a bully.

there’s a lot more to unpack about that whole fucking situation, but honestly i don’t have the time or mental/emotional energy to go into any of that, and please don’t take this single vent post as an invitation to get into that with me, because again, it’s not happening.

point is, i know that i will never be able to be proud of every part of my identity. even in the lgbtq+ community, my community, that i belong in (though only just, in the minds of many), i feel ashamed and looked down on. and this isn’t a poor-sga-aspecs thing, i’m not saying that i or any sga aspec people have it the worst out of anyone in the community, because that would obviously be a stupid fucking thing to say. of course we don’t. there are billions upon billions of people who have it worse, both within and outside of the lgbtq+ community.

but it still just kinda fucking sucks a little bit, is all i’m saying.

anyway, once again, before anyone gets in the comments/replies/my askbox/whatever, please just... don’t. this post is not meant as a sweeping statement about oppression or the community - ace specifically or lgbtq+ at large or, as it should ideally be, both) or exclusionism or inclusionism or anything like that. i’m not trying to make a statement of any kind here. this shit has just been weighing on me for a really long time and i needed to vent and get it off my chest.

again, this is one venty post about one person’s feelings about her own experience as an ace wlw, nothing more, nothing less.

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painted-kinzy-reblog · 6 years

Photo

OKAY EXPLANATION:

I started this as a practice, ‘cause I figured out a new way to draw on this program I have, and I thought that making something in color would help me figure out how to do that BNHA comic I’m gonna start here soon.

(It did btw)

Now, though, it turned into a vent kinda? And a shameless show of an OC I had to invent for an LA class project. Which I never posted. But I should ‘cause I really liked it. So that’s Blaze, AKA Tanner cuz he’s just big ball of extra.

But yeah this is technically a vent, and if you wanna read my vent story and sort of life tip, please do read on.

Wow you’re actually here. Welcome to the vent I tried to keep short but failed.

My little crisis started a while ago with my dad, when we were discussing tattoos. We’re planning on getting some together some time soon, and Dad wanted to make sure I knew what I got was completely up to me; that he’d tell me his opinion, but ultimately, it’s my body, and he wants me to get what I was happy with.

Literally the next day, one of my friends was worried that her mom would make her get her ears pierced, something she didn't want to do. I may or may not have gotten passionate about that, and got a bit mad. Maybe. I was just remembering the thing with Dad and I didn’t want her to do something she would be uncomfortable with.

(I don’t think she will, jsyk.)

So now I’m a bit annoyed and such, and my mind keeps going back to that topic. Not so much because I was mad, more because I’m still trying to think of a good tattoo idea lol.

So now I’m going on vacation with my grandparents, who are a bit old school. We were in a city, and went to two baseball games, so we were always in crowds. Which I hate, but that’s not the point here. There were a lot of people around us, all different in their own ways. After the second game, we were going to Grandma’s sister’s house (where I’ll refer to her and her husband as Jay and Dee).

I’d been having fun, and was totally focused on the plethora of deer that were around Jay and Dee’s home. It was super pretty, and we sat outside a lot.

The last night, we sat out on their back deck in the dark, watching for deer and raccoons and such, while they talked and I drew. I wasn’t really paying attention to anything. I was totally relaxed and content to just doodle away and listen to their voices. Another great thing about this vacation was that I wasn’t expected to speak in every conversation like I sometimes feel at dinners at home. I’m an introvert that prefers to talk over the Internet. Like now. Oops.

Then I heard grandma say something about a girl at the game that had a tattoo on her shoulder, and I knew exactly who she was talking about. I got excited, ‘cause it was a really cool image of a mermaid and I actually was considering the placement she had! So I spoke up, asking if it was the neat mermaid on the girl a couple rows ahead of us.

She kinda scoffed at me? Like, mockingly saying, “neat mermaid,” like it was disgraceful or something. They all had a bit of a chuckle, and started talking about how terrible tattoos were.

I was a bit... dismayed? None of them knew I was thinking about getting one, so I don’t think they noticed that I was getting upset. I mean, I’ve told my grandparents that I would at some point, but definitely not how soon. And they’d never been so... passionate about their hate before so it took me by surprise. Anyway, I’d hoped that maybe if I said something they’d at least stop talking about it? Like, I wasn’t going to try to change their minds, but I’d appreciate a little more respect for other people’s wishes, y’know? So, after Jay said something about, “I can’t imagine getting one without at least having some sort of meaning,” I said that I wanted to get one of a dragon.

No hesitation, she replied, “Yeah, but you love dragons! That has a meaning. I see no reason to get a big serpent wrapped around a girl’s back and peaking over her shoulder.”

While they argued the chances of said girl every getting a day job, I thought to myself;

You just contradicted yourself, wtf. If I like dragons, what if she likes snakes?? What’s so bad about that???

Dee then started laughing and said, “I don’t even understand the appeal! Why get anything on your body that everyone will have to look at forever? Or not even see at all!”

Now I was just offended.

For one thing, my dad has a tattoo across his shoulders that you can’t normally see under his shirt, but he says just the fact that he has it makes him feel good.

But also, I’m a fucking artist.

So I kind of snapped, but in a nonviolent, shy sort of way that I usually snap. (Basically, I got more talkative) I had calmly set my sketchbook on the table, dropping my pencil and eraser on it in a sort of fruitless way to draw their attention to the fact that I was d r a w i n g while I spoke, and said, “It’s art. Art that the person loves, and the person that made it loves, and you get to look at it for the rest of your life. It’s like having your own little painting with you 24/7!”

No one listened to me.

Now the topic switched to piercings; how terrible gages looked, how stupid people looked with a nose ring, “what’s even the point of a belly button piercing?” “who in their right mind would get a nipple piercing?”

Idk about you, but I have friends with all the above. So now I’m steaming in my seat. They started talking about how disgusting it must be to “have a cow ring with a runny nose.” Common sense says take out the piercing, or wash it. But at this point, I don’t think they had common sense.

I left that conversation.

My point of this, besides just ranting, is that your body is your own. You shouldn’t have to worry about what people think about you. If you want a tattoo, by Truth, get one. If you want 30 different piercings on your body, fucking do it, I’ve seen worse. Just remember that this is (usually) permanent, so get something that makes you happy. Not your mom, or your special someone, or your cousin twice removed. You.

Your body. Not their’s.

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transcripted-podcasts · 4 years

Text

Zombie Fishbowl - Episode 1

Haunted Battlefields

In our first episode, we talk about the phenomenon of ‘haunted battlefields’ after we introduce ourselves and explain WTF ‘Zombie Fishbowl’ actually means!

Listen to the episode here!

---

[Intro music]

Melanie: Hello!

Danielle: Hello!

Melanie: Welcome to Zombie Fishbowl, a podcast about random shit!

Danielle: Zombie Fishbowl? What does that even mean?

Melanie: Not a damn thing.

Danielle: And everything at the same time! Wow!

Melanie: All right, so let's start by introducing ourselves.

Danielle: Hello! I'm Danielle, I live in Northwest England, in a very damp, seaside town. But I did live in California for about 13 years, hence the weird accent. I'm studying for a master's degree in archaeology after deciding that I wanted to change my career after being a support worker for 10 years. So, I fucking love history and logic, and am, as you will get to know, very skeptical of the paranormal world (which we will probably do a lot of talking about because it's the most fun). And, even though I roll my eyes at ghost hunters and psychics and spooky YouTube videos, I still fucking love it! I love a ghost story. I love a weird happening. My mum and I share this enthusiasm. She kinda passed it on to me.

But although I am absolutely intrigued by the unknown, I also like to have a look and see what reason there might be behind something. So, I'll be bringing the scientific papers and whatever reliable publications I can find to try to explore humanity's obsession and consistent claim that there is something, some other world that we cannot see or test or measure.

Melanie: And I'm Melanie and I live in California, USA. Daughter of a horror novelist and a porn star, I'm an enthusiast for the bizarre, taboo, and fun. I am pagan, a recovering medium, a horror and fantasy fanatic, and mythology nerd so, needless to say, whatever she doesn't believe in? I just might. Or, at least, will enjoy the telling.

So, backstory. Danielle and I were best friends growing up in southern California. We were nerds with a punk/goth twist that were never quite cool enough for the punks or the goths or even the nerds. But we partied together, grew together, and basically been through hell and high water. We grew up and I stayed in California...

Danielle: And I moved back to England to be with my loverboy.

Melanie: So here we are, in our 30s, continents apart. But whenever we get a chance to chat, it's always insane, fun, and full of information. So we thought we'd share our love of the random, macabre, fun facts and turn it into a podcast.

Danielle: Also, in regards to the name of our podcast, I suppose you do need some kind of explanation. Well, we tried being clever, intellectual, and punny, but nothing was quite working until Melanie, randomly, in an exasperated moment threw out Zombie Fishbowl which was the name of the band we almost-tried-to-but-didn't-quite-ever-have in high school, although I did attempt to learn how to play the bass, and I can still play the intro to Crazy Train like a total badass.

Melanie: And I can sing, so that was something. [laughs] It doesn't mean anything but it could mean so much.

Danielle: So throw it all in a zombie fishbowl and eat it up!

Melanie: So here's the plan. We have a list of wide-ranging topics from magic to UFOs, and every week we throw them into a randomizer and then research the shit out of it. Hopefully, as this podcast grows, we'd love to hear from you. All of our social media information will be holla-ed at you at the end of the podcast.

Danielle: But we're going to steer clear of current affairs, politicky stuff, because it is so so so so divisive and polarizing and just plain frustrating. We will no doubt get political, it is in our very nature, but not as a topic, and we'll try not to be overtly preachy.

Melanie: Also, sports because we do not sport.

Danielle: Nope, I can't sport and neither can Melanie, so no sport. Anyway, one more thing before we get into the topic this week: we have The Purge.

Melanie: Dun dun dun! So this is where we, mostly Danielle, will have a moan for a couple minutes to clear the air before starting. So what do you want to vent about this week, Danielle?

Danielle: Wet rain.

Melanie: [laugh]

Danielle: Not normal rain that just comes down and you can, you know, put your umbrella up and you're quite happy walking across the street looking all emo and [unintelligible], but the kind of rain that just makes everything on your body damp and no matter what you do, everything is just wet and miserable and it just...it makes everything difficult. Uh! I just fucking hate wet rain. It's that stuff that comes from the ground as well as the skies, comes from the left and it comes from the right, and there's nothing you can do about it, and you're just damp all the time and--

Melanie: It's like a soggy miserable rain.

Danielle: Yeah, which is pretty much 90% of the weather in this bloody town. It's really, really grim out there right now. It's been grim for a couple days, but then there's like an hour of beautiful sunshine and everyone runs out in their shorts just--just 'please give me the vitamin D! Please give me the vitamin D!' and then everybody runs back inside as soon as it starts to rain again. It's June! It's supposed to be lovely outside but it's like looking at a November...ugh, so miserable. That's--that's what I wanted to get off my chest. I got wet earlier today and I haven't got over it yet.

Melanie: [laughs] I'm sorry for your soggy life over there.

Danielle: Well, you know, it's what I signed up for, I guess. You gotta have the bad damp horrible weather in order to appreciate and really take advantage of lovely sunshine which I can see you're having right now, ya bitch.

Melanie: Oh yes, the sunniest of sunshines. And it's not quite yet at like 90 degrees. I think we're at a nice medium 65 heading toward 70.

Danielle: That sounds perfect!

Melanie: Yeah, yeah that's that's the sweet spot, but give us about two hours and it's gonna probably be like 85.

Danielle: Yeah, it kind of goes OTT after a while. I don't know why I said OTT! I don't say that in my daily life. I'm gonna say it fully: over the top.

Melanie: [laughs] Okay, good because I'm old, and when you said OTT, I have no idea what that meant.

Danielle: I read a lot of Reddit. [laughs] I learned the lingo of the youths.

Melanie: Yeah I'm not, I'm not hip with the kids today with their their letters instead of words.

Danielle: I have to admit, every so often I have to Google an acronym, but...

Melanie: I have to Google an acronym almost every day. It's awful.

Danielle: [laughs] fantastic. Right, okay. Do you have anything you want to purge?

Melanie: Oh I suppose we'll go with cats. No, I love cats. I have two cats. I--I love my cats, but they can be such fucking cats. Like Phineas, my big fat old one. He's fine. He's too lazy and slow to really do anything much as far as the bothersome cat behavior. He just has that Siamese cat meow which makes you want to kill something, but other than that? But my kitten is such a kitten and I can't stand it! She, I have a cup of water above my bed every night, and every night I get clunked in the head with a glass full of water. And you'd think I'd learn.

Danielle: Yeah. [laughs]

Melanie: But I don't because I keep forgetting that she's such a cat. Like not just...the little things, you know, knocking things off the things, the technical term. Why?! Why! It's so cute until it actually is in your life and then you're like 'why the fuck are you catting so hard!'

Danielle: [laughs]

Melanie: So that's--that's my purge because I keep getting knocked in the head with water at like 2:00 in the morning.

Danielle: Patrick started...it's his summers sick ritual which is, you know, when the summer comes around, cuz he's a long-haired cat, and every other day he'll be hacking up a hairball. But he just doesn't do it over the--the wood floor, it's all over the carpet and it's all over multiple carpets because he moves three feet between each regurge.

[Laughter]

Danielle: So, you know, swings 'em roundabouts, really. They're awesome, they're awesome. I love my cats, they're my little dudes, but yeah. They don't knock water into my face but they certainly make for a Russian Roulette when you're walking around the house barefoot. Yeah, all right, I feel better, do you?

Melanie: I think I do. A little bit.

Danielle: All right. Let's take a deep breath and we'll start this week's factotastic Zombie Fishbowl podcast.

Melanie: Ready?

Danielle: Ready.

[Sounds of exaggerated deep breaths and laughter]

Danielle: That's never gonna get old.

[Laughter]

Melanie: All right. So, this week's topic randomly picked from our random topic picker is:

[In unison]: Haunted battlefields!

Danielle: Wow, that was shit, fantastic. You go.

Melanie: I felt good about it, I don't know about you.

Danielle: [laughs]

Melanie: I really did.

Danielle: Fantastic.

Melanie: Okay, so I suppose I'll start. Being in America, we have had a bloody civil war, which we all know, but really getting a grasp on the numbers of it was was phenomenal. So, out of all of the soldiers that have ever fallen in a war, every single American soldier, if you add them all up from the beginning of American soldiers being a thing to present day, if you add all those casualties up, half of them took place in the Civil War. But brother against brother so, no matter who fell, it was an American falling and it was just so, so much and that's not even including all of the battles against the Native Americans and--and the Mexicans and--and just--just the slaughter that took place here all over the place. There are many ways I could have gone, and I kind of got stuck in the Civil War, mainly because I have never in my life had any interest in it. So I thought, this thing that I--I know enough about to pass like, what, third grade, but it never really hit me as anything super interesting, so I researched into it.

Danielle: I feel you on that. I'm not a big warfare history buff. I like my history and stuff like that but, you know, battlefields and war and battles, it's never really been...because it's--it's a little bit repulsive.

Melanie: Yeah! Yeah! And it's funny because, instinctively, I think we're just kind of like 'oh yeah, no, this happened' but if you actually just take a second to really try and grasp what happened, it's heartbreaking and hideous and then just horrifying.

Danielle: Yep.

Melanie: So, um, I started by researching the top ten bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

Danielle: Oh, god.

Melanie: Which is so fucking significant like, oh my god. And poor Virginia, man. Well not so much poor Virginia but, Jesus, the amount of people who died there for this--this war is staggering. It's like at least 15,000 just in a couple of these battles? It's just absurd. Anyway, so we'll start with the--the biggest, which is the Battle of Gettysburg.

Danielle: The most famous, I think, in American history.

Melanie: It is the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. It lasted for three days in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Grand total casualties including wounded was almost 50,000 people in three days. 5,425 people just went missing. Which I think is interesting, and looking at all of these battles, you don't see a number so much for people just missing. But with the Battle of Gettysburg, almost 5,500 people just, poof!, disappeared. So, Battle of Gettysburg. With so many dead, dying, injured, and just missing, it's--it's one of the most haunted sites in America.

Danielle: Mm-hmm.

Melanie: All right, the battle took place across this one field, but it also took place over mountains; it even went into the city itself. It was so bad that in some of the houses that were healing the--the injured, people were like ankle deep in blood.

Danielle: That sounds like an exaggeration.

Melanie: It's an exaggeration, but--but the--the walls? Covered. The floor? Covered. Like completely covered. Ankle deep, yeah, is a bit of an exaggeration, but to say that they were at least heel deep in blood I don't think is an exaggeration.

Danielle: They were slipping in the stuff.

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: Yeah.

Melanie: But one of the things, with all the battlefields that I researched, I found that most recurring...thing was when...hold on, I got the word...residual hauntings.

Danielle: Mm-hmm

Melanie: The residual hauntings are really just a replay of the events.

[Overlapping talk]

Danielle: I have heard that. Yeah, sorry, you, go ahead, you say it.

Melanie: [laughs, then with a lisp] So from a psychic pagan perspective…

Danielle: [laughs] Yes.

Melanie: All right, with residual hauntings, I believe that...when you have that much death and that much rage and fear and--and just--just really amped up energy, it sort of leaves an imprint. I mean, you go into a room where somebody's been, you know, beaten their whole lives, even if you don't have any context of what happened there before, that room feels dark and oppressing and not great. So when you go to a battlefield or go to a place where, you know, the soldiers were taken to be treated and eventually probably die or have their legs amputated with no anesthesia, there's a lot of emotion there and so with residual hauntings, a lot of it is just, you see these people replaying these moments, whether it's somebody's specifically getting up and walking across the room or [clears throat] a lot of the times they'll see people standing on (or sitting on) horses just sort of standing there in the field, just--just chillin'.

Danielle: So my--my knowledge of this means that they're not intelligent, they can't interact with them, and they don't interact with you. In fact, they probably don't even see you. It is an imprint of emotion left, so this kind of definition within the metaphysical world implies that it's not actually the human soul; it's not actually a person who is dead, it is actually more like a film being replayed.

Melanie: Yes exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, when it comes to those kinds of hauntings I don't find them particularly---

[Children's screams]

Danielle: Ahh!

Melanie: Holy Jesus! I'm gonna close that window!

[both laugh]

Melanie: Lord have mercy!

Danielle: Hopefully people with earphones didn't suddenly think some child was screaming in their ears.

Melanie: It's my own ghost child...so when it comes to residual hauntings, I don't find them particularly spooky because, again they're, yeah, they're unintelligent, they don't have a motive or instinct or reason; they just are replaying.

Danielle: Mm-hmm. I think and also, by its own definition, it's not proof of an afterlife.

Melanie: Absolutely! Absolutely! Yeah, they're--they're not so much ghosts to me as like, yeah, holograms, imprints.

Danielle: Yeah.

Melanie: But one thing I thought was really interesting at Gettysburg is people getting wafts of phantom scents of mint or vanilla. And they'll come out of nowhere.

Danielle: Vanilla?

Melanie: Vanilla because, back then, back in the day, after the war, you know, the streets are piled up with bodies, just--just piled up in the middle of Pennsylvania's summer which, I gotta tell ya, it's hot. Not only is it hot, it's humid. So bodies were swelling to twice their size and they were just sitting in the streets. But it still had to function as a city, so people would have to walk through these streets, and they would douse their handkerchiefs with peppermint oil or vanilla oil to try and mask the smell.

Danielle: Oh, I'd definitely be a peppermint, because, if I was smelling the rotting corpses of the dead and vanilla, it'd be like that sickly sweet...oh no, mint for me, definitely mint.

Melanie: It would put you off [unintelligible] forever

Danielle: Yeah, seriously.

Melanie: But yeah, I think--I think that's interesting, especially because, you know, it's not that mint isn't native to it, but when you get just a waft from out of nowhere, and it's gone within a second, I mean, that's--that's a little bit more telling than sort of been like 'well, no, there's probably people just growing mint all over the place' no, it's a strong, concentrated smell.

Danielle: And people in Gettysburg still get whiffs of that?

Melanie: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it--it's just, to them, it's just sort of what it's like there now. But people who go to visit, they'll be walking and they'll smell, like, you know, just regular street, they'll smell flowers, they'll smell the baker, and all of a sudden just a bomb of menthol in your nostrils.

Danielle: It's interesting that it's that and not the smell of rotting corpses.

Melanie: That's what I thought, too! Why not the smell of corpses? I mean, you'd think that would be more predominant, but I think because the intention, there's that very strong intention of, you know, masking this smell or--or even, because mint was also believed to help prevent disease and decay, it was sort of like also as a medicinal buffer from the dead? I think the fear from--from...while inhaling such a scent is what left its imprint rather than the whiff of the dead bodies.

Danielle: Okay, okay. Plus, if you smelled what you thought was dead bodies, you possibly just misinterpret it as the drains? [laughs] Who knows?

Melanie: There's that, too.

Danielle: I don't know. Anyway, carry on.

[Both laugh]

Danielle: I find smells very hard to believe because, like you said leading up to it, it can just easily be coming from someone who's growing some mint in their back garden or, you know, the smell of some concentrated vanilla isn't that unusual in the 21st Century with cupcake shops and doughnuts and stuff. So, you know, if it was something like, you know, really unique, like the smell of a very particular cigar or something like that, maybe I'd be a little bit more intrigued, but mint and vanilla, to me, I could write straight off. Poof! Those are common smells.

Melanie: And--and, I was willing to write it off too until I was reading the accounts of people. It's like, no, it's not just a subtle mint smell, it's like, it's like being chloroformed with mint, just...

Danielle: All right.

Melanie: You know, really strong, strong whiff. [with a lisp] So that's what I got for Gettysburg. [back to normal speech] There's--there's so many. God, the amount of people that died is just insane. Next one I wrote out was Little Bighorn. Do you know much about that?

Danielle: Native American battle...was that...I'm going to sound really ignorant...west coast?

Melanie: So Little Bighorn...shit, I don't think I even wrote down where it fucking was.

[Both laugh]

Danielle: The Matterhorn is in California? And that, maybe that's what I'm mixing it up with.

Melanie: So the battle of Little Bighorn took place somewhere very important...

[both laugh]

Danielle: Over there.

Melanie: Over there. And there was a whole bunch of tribes involved, and that was basically one of Custer's last battles. It was his last battle. There we have the Sioux nations, Hunkpapa Lakota, Sans Arc, Blackfoot tribes, whole bunch fought against Custer's 7th Cavalry. On January 25th, 1876, most of the native warriors survived, but almost every single one of the troops that went into battle died. There was a rumor or a legend or a myth that the only soldier to come out of there alive was the horse named Comanche.

Danielle: On the American side?

Melanie: On the American side. Well, I guess they're all Americans. So Custer went over there with 600 troops. Only 300 entered the battle. Sitting Bull gathered his warriors and ensured the safety of women and children, while Crazy Horse left with a large force to attack. Custer was quickly defeated. Including Custer, over 260 troops of the 300 died. The hauntings again seem to be residual, but they do seem to be a little bit more intense. And I think a lot of that comes from either the Native Americans' connection to the land itself, I think it just has a deeper significance to them. But most of them, again, it's residual. Warriors on horses just surveying the field. Occasionally believed to see some of the federal soldiers looking for their limbs.

Danielle: Nice.

Melanie: Which I found this interesting.

Danielle: How do we know they're looking for their limbs?

Melanie: Probably just that lost look and that one arm reaching...'it's gotta be here somewhere.'

Danielle: Someone hopping along and saying 'has anyone seen my foot?'

[Both laugh]

Danielle: 'My country for a foot!'

Melanie: [laughs] And then from there I have cryptids. So I want to hear what you've got before I go into cryptids.

Danielle: Cryptids on battlefields.

Melanie: Mhmm.

Danielle: Melanie told me that she was going to cover the continent of the USA, Northern America. Or, did you go into South America? Because you did just say continent.

Melanie: I did not. I'm a big fibber. I was pretty strictly on my end...

Danielle: Right, that's fine, that's fine because, I did--I did a couple. You can tell me whether you want to hear both of them at the same time or one at a time. But the first one I did was one called the Battle at Culloden Moor. Or [repeats name slightly differently] I don't want to sound like I'm doing the Scottish accent, but it's in Scotland. And it's up in the Highlands. It was during the Jacobite rebellions. So, for those over the pond that don't know, the Scottish really don't like the English, and at every opportunity have fought tooth and nail to not be part of English sovereignty, if you will. You'll still hear about that today. They really don't like it. The Jacobites were basically these, sort of, people of the Highlands of Scotland who did not want to be a part of the English Kingdom, but the king was pretty adamant that they should better bend the knee kind of thing. So it's up in the Highlands, near Inverness, so if you wanted to take a look for it, it's in a lovely little place which is on the crook[?] of the Moray Firth which is a part of the North Sea that goes into Scotland. Lovely part of the country. Never been. On me list. It took place in 1746. It's the last battle of the Jacobite rebellion. They've been fighting for 31 years, so this was a long time coming.

Melanie: Good grief.

Danielle: It was horrific, it was bloody; you can imagine, we're still using swords and, you know, stabby things at this point.

Melanie: Pointy sticks.

Danielle: Pointy sticks, throwing shit, stones, all that horrible stuff. And, unfortunately, it's the infamous death of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and loads of his followers. I'm not going to get into why he was called Bonnie Prince Charlie, I will let you imagine why the Scots call him Bonnie Prince. I'm sure it won't take you very long to work it out. It also lasted less than an hour. I mean, they were annihilated, and it was the end of the Jacobite rebellion, and the king was victorious in the end. So not only were they horrendously defeated, apparently their suffering didn't end at the end of the battle because they still haunt the battlefield to this day, so people say, anyway. Every year on April 16, which is the anniversary of the battle, people see, I guess, a residual haunting of a reenactment of this battle. So...I'll get more into that bit in a bit but, um, people have apparently seen this reenactment, but it gets funny. But I'll tell you about this afterwards because I want to tell you this--this story about these two old ladies because this is the cutest ghost story I've ever heard.

Melanie: Nice.

Danielle: So, right, I like it because it works backwards, and to me, that is more logical than when somebody's told something's haunted and then sees a ghost.

Melanie: Mm-hmm.

Danielle: Other way around. So, I will show you this. These two old dears show up at a National Trust for Scotland site. National Trust for Scotland, basically, we put up an office in a nice little Museum next to historical buildings and places of historical interest and charge people to get into it to keep and maintain it because we love that shit. On a bank holiday weekend, we'll go to a castle, go through the cafe, go sit down in the castle, have a look around, come out, go through the gift shop and have another brew. That is a bank holiday weekend to the tee.

Melanie: Nice

Danielle: Literally tea. Anyway, so these two old dears go to this National Trust of Scotland site, and they asked if they could see a map which would show the route for this infamous Jacobite retreat. Now, the bit that I didn't talk about before was that, prior to the actual battle, there had been a failed surprise attack by the Jacobites. So, they had split into two and decided to ambush the Duke of Cumberland, which was the son of the king at the time (and nicknamed The Butcher) who they were going to be battling at some point or another, but they split into two to decide to go and surprise attack them. One of the armies, one side of the army, decided that it was just not workable, we're going home...well back to the camp, and went back. And that was about 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Well, the other half didn't get the message until nearly daybreak, when they were literally on top of Cumberland's camp, was, like, literally about to attack as far as I understand it, and then someone was like 'no! call it off!' so they all had to run. So this lady knew about this retreat, but she wanted to see the route of it, so she and her friend were looking at this map, and the--the helpful people in the gift shop at the National Trust were showing them the route that the--the retreats took (because we did take very good notes, I guess; someone took the time to write it down). So they're looking at this, and then the woman goes 'ah! there's my house!' So she sees on the route of the retreat that it runs right through her back garden. And she turns to her--her best friend, or old lady friend over there, and goes 'see! see! I told you! I told you!' Apparently, about five times over the last ten years, she'd been woken up in the early hours of the morning to the sounds of, very distinctly, soldiers running through her garden. Now, I don't know what soldiers running through a garden sounds like, but I imagine it probably gives off a little bit at a different aura, difference aural sound...

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: Transmission or whatever than your average running man? But she says that it sounds like soldiers. So she--she'd run up to the window to see, what the heck, who's running through her garden. And then she wouldn't see anything, but she'd still be able to hear them. And she was like 'I've always heard soldiers running through my garden.' and--and so this kind of gave her a little bit of validity in that the route of the retreat most likely went through her garden. So she is pretty convinced that she's heard the residual sounds of the Jacobites in retreat, which is quite interesting. Because it works backwards, I'm more likely to believe an old lady trying to prove herself right (because I know how that is) than somebody that goes somewhere that is known to be haunted and saying 'oh I saw a specter.' Well, you were expecting to see it so you're gonna see something. That's the other way around, it's a little bit more believable.

Melanie: Exactly.

Danielle: And the actual battlefield itself...I forgot what it's called already...Culloden, Culloden Moor, the actual battlefield itself has your typical array of ghosty apparitions. Mostly sounds: war cries, clashing swords, screaming in agony, those sorts of things. Especially around the anniversary of the event itself. So this is what I'm gonna get a little bit cynical because, interestingly enough, the author of the Outlander novels, name's Diana Gabaldon, have you heard of Outlander?

Melanie: Yes.

Danielle: Yeah. So the writer of these novels, right when she was releasing a book which happens to be talking about star-crossed lovers who were separated by this very specific battle, came out to say that she's been to the battlefield, and she was brought to tears by the feeling of dread and sadness of the--of the souls that were on the battlefield. So it was pretty highly, not highly but, you know, it was put in all the press and all the tabloids and everything about how she feels it was so much...she's just...knows it's haunted. She just knew, Melanie, when she went; she knew it may be haunted by all these souls. ‘Buy my book! It's so haunted, it's so, you know, it's such a horrible thing. Buy my book.’ So that happened.

Melanie: [laughs]

Danielle: Some other stuff that's happened: locals and tourists say that they are visions of unearthly specters over the graves of the Jacobites. Basically, the Jacobites were buried in mass graves right in the battlefield.

Melanie: Mass graves are the worst.

Danielle: Yeah there's loads of the burial mounds, there's loads of things like that around the battleground, they're just chucked in. One person claimed to have seen a tartan-clad man lay maimed and bloodied on the ground on the moor. So I wanted to look at see if the Jacobites would have actually worn tartan, but then I forgot and didn't. There's this whole thing about how tartan is associated with the Scots...Scottish. Ooh, they don't like, sorry with the Scots, Scottish...Scots.

Melanie: Stop offending people.

Danielle: I know, I just, you don't say Scotch, you say Scots. There's a whole thing about how the certain tartans weren't actually around until hundreds of years later and things like that, so I meant to go and have a look if it was even likely that someone in this battle would have been wearing tartan, but I didn't. I'm sorry...

Melanie: We'll never know!

Danielle: But that's the one thing I'm like, right, okay so if you're going to say that something so specific that they're wearing tartan, I'm gonna go find out if it was even likely that a Jacobite was wearing tartan, but I'll get into that another time. But the thing that the actual site themselves claim is that birds do not go near it. That is something that can be verified. So apparently birds don't go near the battlefield, and they certainly don't sing. So if they are passing by, or hopping along, they won't sing while they're at the battlefield. Now that is something the site itself, like, the sort of touristy bit of the site claims - there's no birdsong so that's definitely something that I'd like to explore further. that is, literally, you just have to go there and stand there, and if you don't hear any birds, you go 'huh, no birds. That is weird.' But if I hear a bird, then I'm gonna be like 'well that's obviously BS.' So...

Melanie: Bullshit!

Danielle: Yeah. So with this sort of battlefield ghosts, I mean, it was--it was horrendous and it was devastating for Highlanders. It's really gotta sting; this was their defeat. So I feel like these legends just ensure that the story of the battle continues. And that people don't forget how shit and nasty the English can be. So I don't blame them; ghost stories are a perfect way to do this. But I can't take away from peoples’...I can't take away peoples’, like, personal experiences. So I'm not pooh-poohing anyone that feels like they have actually seen something or heard something on any scale because I wouldn't be so bold as to say that I'm right and they're wrong. But it just seems too perfect for me that a place where the Scottish would want people to remember a battle that they want people to be pissed off about, you know, the best way to do that is to build a legend around it. So the legend around it is that it's incredibly haunted

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: So it's a really good way to transmit a cautionary tale, you know, about how shit the English are. You'd think we'd learn but, you know...and that was Culloden Moor, anyway. Do you want me to do my other one?

Melanie: Yeah, do it!

Danielle: The second one that I thought I'd do...I knew you'd have to do Civil War, if you were doing the US; that's the only war you fought on your own soil. Unless you did Pearl Harbor, which I don't really know if counts as a battlefield, really.

Melanie: Right?

Danielle: It's a location of war, but it's, you know, like warfare but not necessarily battlefield. It was a bit one-sided.

Melanie: Yeah, a battlefield is where two forces are clashing.

Danielle: So I thought that I would sort of educate, in a way, your side of the pond in that we also had a civil war. So we have, you know, we have had a civil war was between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, because there was a time in our history where the kings and queens of the Royals were not looked upon favorably by a certain sector of the population. They were taking the piss and so Parliamentarians, people that wanted to have a more democratic - I'm gonna say that with a pinch of salt because it was…it was a religious revolution more than it was a political one. And one of the greatest battles of the Civil War took place in 1642 in Warwickshire. It was called the Battle of Edgehill. It was, as you can imagine, pretty horrendous; thousands died and it ended up being strategically moot because both sides lost about the same amount of people. It added no strategic advantage to one side or the other, and the war continued, and it didn't seem to really have much of an effect other than the fact that they all had less people. But they ALL had less people so, you know, it didn't leave anyone with any advantage, so it was kind of a bit, you know, shittily planned battle.

Melanie: Yeah, pointless.

Danielle: Yeah. The funny thing about this particular haunting is that it happens almost immediately. So, you know, you've usually got a little bit of time between when a tragedy occurs and you start seeing ghosts.

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: Well, this literally happens less than two months later. So it happens in about November, that was (I’m trying to remember now) October, at the end of October, in 1642, and just before Christmas, a shepherd reported seeing a reenactment of the battle. But not just, you know, on the ground, like your typical reenactment. Up in the sky! Above the battlefield. Right, so you could hear the clashes of armor, cries of the dying, screams, voices, even horses up in the sky. So he runs and he tells his priest like ‘I just saw this great battle in the sky over the battlefield at Edgehill.’ And what does the priest say, do you think?

Melanie: That he's drunk.

Danielle: No. ‘I saw it, too!’

Melanie: Oh, shit.

Danielle: The priest tells him ‘I saw it too! I thought I was going mad!’ Now, I don't think if he said that bit but he said ‘I saw it, too’. And over the next few days, apparently, more and more locals reported to seeing the phantom battle in the sky. So much so that they produced a pamphlet in 1643 (so this is the next year) called A Great Wonder in Heaven. And it detailed all the different peoples’ accounts of this battle.

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: Right. So this little, you know, town who's made this pamphlet about this haunted battlefield, and the king finds out, and he's very intrigued. So he sends his, he sends his bros down to see what the fuck is going on, right? So it's in Warwickshire, so it's not that far. He sends him up from London. And, lo and behold, his cronies see the phantoms at the battlefield, too! Not only did they see this phantom battle going on in the sky, but they could recognize people who were in it. This only happened two months previous. Their comrades up there, and I can actually see, apparently, their friends and their, you know, their confidants up in the sky.

Melanie: Oh no, it’s Jeff, he's getting stabbed! Run, Jeff!

Danielle: Exactly. There's one particularly interesting one which was the king’s standard bearer. And for those of you don't know what a standard bearer is, it's the person that is tasked with holding the flag that has the standard of the king on it. So they don't actually fight, they're not soldiers, but they're usually highly…they were soldiers, and usually are very highly decorated, but their role on the battlefield is not to take part in the battle but to hold the standard. And if the standard falls into the hands of the other side, it's kind of like they win the battle. It's kind of like capture the flag.

Melanie: Wow…

Danielle: [laughs] So I don't think that people would just, like, surrender if the other side had the flag, I think people would keep fighting, but it's kind of like symbolic? If the other side has your standard, then it's like ‘oh shit, we're losing!’ So, you know, it could either serve as motivation to fight a little harder or it could make you feel despair that you're losing. It depends on your predisposition

Melanie: I would imagine they kept those guys at the back, right? They had to work their way through?

Danielle: I mean, it would usually be quite close to the king, so the king will be pretty heavily protected. Or, you know, like the commander of the particular rank…you know, the most highly ranked person there because you'd have to have a standard bearer there to sort of decree so everybody knew whose side was who, I guess. I'm not an expert on these things, but there's always somebody holding a standard. I think that it shows up in Game of Thrones at some point, so if you guys wanted…that really did happen, people did really hold flags. But this guy, Sir Edmund Verney, was the standard bearer for this battle and had gallantly refused to let go of the standard when it was being, like, yanked from him by the other side. So they chopped off his hand and his arm to get at the standard and then got it. So, apparently, these guys who had come down or up from London to have a look, saw their friend Sir Edmund Verney getting his hand lobbed off and the standard taken. PSI…is it PSI? Side note: the Royalists do get the standard back, and, apparently, they get it back and his hand was still clasping onto the pole. What a guy! Still, you know, and the Parliamentarians hadn't, you know, tried to rip it off. It was time-consuming, I guess. So apparently when they got the standard back, his hand was still attached. So this guy was pretty well thought of. There's this sort of…he's almost martyred, if you will. The standard bearer of the King, ‘til his dying breath, held the standard and had to have his arm cut off before he would be able to have it pried from his hands, right? So, can you say propaganda with me?

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: So these people that have come up from the king just happen to see the hero of the battle, if you will, Sir Edmund Verney, getting his hand lobbed off and the--the standard being yoinked. So I'm not saying the story’s bullshit or anything, but [laughs].

Melanie: I don't know, watching the whole battle in the sky sounds pretty realistic to me.

Danielle: I just mean that their--their particular account of their friend Sir Eddie there. So yeah, but it certainly makes for interesting telling to the king when they get back, which they do, more on that later. So the villagers and, I imagine the priest, who in no way makes any money from this, wink wink, decide to give all the corpses a proper Christian burial. So they get the proper rite, it's the Christian rites, as they're being…because obviously they've just been kind of dumped in this field. It was only two months ago; some of them were probably still sticking out of the ground. And apparently, for the time being, the great ghost battle in the sky stopped. So apparently burying them in Christian graves by the priest and getting all of their last rites, apparently settled their souls for a time.

Melanie: That's usually the way to do it.

Danielle: Yeah, well, it seems to be pretty consistent in these kind of stories that they need some kind of resolution, unfinished business, if you will.

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: Contradictory to this, people still report to hear shit to this day. So, at the time, they were quite happy with settling, you know, settling it and saying, ‘Listen we gave them all Christian burials and everything went away.’ Well that's very good Christian propaganda, end of story, right? Well, as time has gone on, people have latched on to the ghost story a little bit more. And the whole thing about God Almighty letting them all settle at the end, you know, as long as they've got their rites? That's finished, we don't believe that anymore, do we? So people still report to hear shit like screams, cannon fire, hooves galloping, and battle cries on the site, especially around the anniversary. Like a week or so before a fair or a carnival or something that doesn’t need press or publicity or anything. Suddenly people will start hearing shit and it gets into the local paper and at the bottom of it might seem like ‘oh we're having a carnival!’ I'm not cynical or anything…

[Both laugh]

Danielle: But it's infamously haunted, this place, Edgehill. Interestingly, and this is my last little fact on this, because this is--this is the most fun fact for me because of all the…both these stories I can easily dismiss as…the first one was Scottish making up legends to try to, you know, demonstrate how shit the English are, and then this one clearly a religious one because the Civil War was a religious war. But this, this is funny because this is the historical impact that this ghost story's had on our country. Because the king sent this official committee, if you will, to go and investigate this? Their account is held in the public records office.

Melanie: Nice.

Danielle: So it is the only officially recognized phantom battlefield in Britain. In fact, any ghosts whatsoever. It is an officially recognized haunted location according to the public records office because the king sent an official group of people to go and get an account. They wrote it all down, it went into the public records, eventually into the archives. So, legally, it’s haunted.

Melanie: Yeah, totally real. That’s awesome.

[both laugh]

Danielle: I don’t know if there’s any other legally, you know, officially recognized haunted places. I think things that are of historical interest, the haunting will be included in that. But in this particular case, the haunting is the record.

Melanie: Wow, that’s awesome.

Danielle: I thought that was pretty cool. I actually tried to find the official document within the public records, but it's not that easy to track down because it's not really called like the public records office anymore, it's like the National Archives. And they haven't digitized everything yet. So it's there, but I’d have to actually go to London and go through the National Archives and find it.

Melanie: If you ever do that, you could put that in the notes on our sites.

Danielle: I wanted to quote it. I wanted to quote it, I wanted to read it and be able to tell you what these dudes actually said. Like, ‘Lo, before me ‘twas the face of Sir Edmund, my friend.’ [laughs] I wanted to hear what he actually had to say. Anyway, so those are my battlefields.

Melanie: All right. Well then, in our last few minutes, let me just get in a cryptid and a yokai.

Danielle: All right.

Melanie: So the one cryptid that I did want to bring up is [says ominously] Old Green Eyes.

Danielle: Okay.

Melanie: So Old Green Eyes, he appeared...it's believed that he appeared before the battle but he really became popular around the time of the Battle of Chickamauga. And I have some details on that. It's the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War, second only to the Battle of Gettysburg. A shit ton of people died…where is me notes? Ope, there it is. Sorry.

Danielle: Organized as ever!

Melanie: Yeah, right? So the Battle of Chickamauga took care took place in Catoosa City in Georgia. It was a two day long battle. 3,969 people died. And right after that, even during the battle, it was said that the--the smell of blood, the screaming, the devastation…so much blood was spilled that a creature of great malice was drawn to the devastation. Most people believe it's a ghoul. It's not so much a ghost as a creature that stands about six to seven feet tall, humanlike. Some people say it's got long black hair and bright green, glowing eyes. They kind of, they have that--that green that almost turns orange; that shift of, like, night vision, like in a wolf.

Danielle: Like 1990s, you know, Fresh Prince hats.

Melanie: [laughs] Yes. But he has a huge deformed jaw and terrifying fangs (some people say fangs and some people say tusks) protruding. And he came to eat the dead. I wanted to, I didn't have enough time, but I wanted to see if there was any sort of, you know, native lore on a creature like that that might have been around that area. I'm still going to research that and, if I can come up with some facts, then I'm gonna throw that on one of our pages because I thought it was really interesting.

Danielle: Was it in Virginia again?

Melanie: Georgia, I believe. [Sound of notes shuffling] Yes, Georgia. And he's been seen over and over and over again. There was this one telling that there was this guy who was like a park ranger, and he'd seen it a good couple times. I meant to write down his name. I think it was Tidds or Timmons or Tiddly. [Laughs]

Danielle: TT, my friend!

Melanie: The park where this battle took place, it's kind of like Lovers Lane. It's a good makeout spot for a lot of people, and there have been numerous people that felt, like, while they were making out, all of a sudden this hot breath on the back of their neck.

Danielle: That’s very romantic.

Melanie: Then they turn around and they'll just see these big, bright green eyes. Then, of course, [clap sound] they fucking book. Sorry about my loud clapping. And then they fucking book. And this one park ranger had seen him a good few times. And it's interesting that, as the years progressed, the ghoul progressed. So whereas before he was a mostly naked kind of ghoul, but some people will see him now and they see him with a top hat or like a long black coat. And back in the 60s or…60s? I want to say 60s or 70s. No. Yes. One of them have this really racist viewing of it. They saw this tall…with gold green eyes and had the six feet tall and a big white head as if it was hair was wrapped up in something. And the person who walked upon it seeing it, seeing this giant, like, not hairy but human-like thing but so dark in the shadows but this big white thing on their head, they hear a baby crying, and they go to go approach them and, you know, say ‘what--what was going on? Can--can we help?’ and they described it as looking like an African American with their head wrapped up in a towel and then said in a big burly deep voice [speaks in growly voice] ‘just leave me alone’.

Danielle: Sounds like a Voodoo demon. I'm trying to remember. There's lots of fun folklore about particular, um, I think he's the sort of Voodoo version of death or, you know, like the Grim Reaper type of thing. Sounds a bit like him. I'm trying to remember what he's called.

Melanie: Oh, I know it.

Danielle: He’s sort of like half zombie half, you know, beast humanoid with the green theme is running through that one as well, but he's got white face paint on. He's definitely a black man with the top hat.

Melanie: I know his name. I have it in my flipping head.

Danielle: I know, it’s so bugging me.

Melanie: It’s like Big Daddy Saminy...Samily? Sam…something. Shit.

Danielle: We’ll remember like ten seconds after we finish this.

Melanie: Yeah.

Danielle: But Big Green sounds a lot like that legend.

Melanie: Old Green Eyes evolved and I think probably, I think initially it was just something that somebody was seeing when they were really, really terrified though. All of this monstrosity is going on, a monster in the mix really doesn't seem that out of place right now. But…

Danielle: So people on the battlefield themselves reported to seeing this thing before they went into battle?

Melanie: Yeah or during, in the middle of battle.

Danielle: Ooooh.

Melanie: Yeah. That was interesting. So some people had seen it or had been talking about it before the battle. But none of the soldiers who were there knew anything about it at all. They all of a sudden just see this--this tall huge creature with this massively deformed jaw just, like, slinking out from the woods to grab a corpse and pull it back in to eat it.

Danielle: Could it not possibly be an animal, but it's all fucked up and mangy looking because there's a war going on?

Melanie: Absolutely, especially because of the--the green eyes. And some people say that the green eyes turned from green to orange so it had that nighttime reflective much like a wolf, I think like that. But I did think that was neat with the whole, like, the tusks and the deformed jaw, I think it's really terrifying. Some of the images I found were downright spooky. And I love a good monster so I--I'm all about Old Green Eyes. But, over time, I think that it was interesting that he sort of evolved to just sort of be this like racist creature.

Danielle: Yeah, it’s a bit odd, that’s very telling.

Melanie: Yes, and that's how humans are, you know? We latch onto a story, and we sort of evolve it with--with us. And then my last thing I want to mention is my yokai because, with any topic, there's a yokai for that. My yokai is…I went with the Kosenjōbi which is a demon fire. It's made from the blood of warriors and animals that died in battle. The blood soaks into the earth and then the Kosenjōbi rises from the--the blood-soaked earth into the air at night, creating fiery shapes or orbs. They occasionally take the form of fallen warriors or animals, but mostly it just sees just balls of flame. And that's really predominant a lot of Japanese, like, mythology. Same thing with Chinese mythology, too. They do the big flaming balls of hate, fear, children, all kinds of things. But these ones are specific to battlefields. It’s said they, once again, they wander around the fields looking for their missing body parts. They're harmless but spooky.

Danielle: See, to me, oh you know the whole thing, everything that we've both researched, that all of it is not happy, right? And it’s never going to be happy when you're researching the ghosts of fallen soldiers. But these particular stories have a very clear message. All of them have a clear message: that war and battles and death like this is just bullshit. It's just...shit, it's shit; it creates horrible monsters, it creates balls of flame that could possibly represent like anger and hatred. You know the great sort of battles that are being reenacted with our friends dying over and over and over again, all of it has a very...although you can sort of twist it and mold it to your own narrative as much as you want. Overwhelmingly the, you know, without any doubt, going into it and coming out of it, this topic was going to come out. The moral of the story is: war is bad, m’kay?

Melanie: War sucks.

Danielle: War sucks. So yeah, any story that comes out of a battlefield, anything like that, I'm going to be a little, I suppose, I'm very skeptical and cynical of it, obviously. But I am NOT cynical of the message that is being…so if in Japanese culture they believe in this fiery, you know, beast if…sorry in this fiery yokai. If in Georgia they believe in this, you know, cannibalistic man-pig thing that comes and devours these bodies of the dead and--and--and mine as well, it just, you know, it's sad. It's sad that we don't listen to these things and…or at least that we manipulated the actual stories of the event to fit this kind of weird spooky side story and not actually tell the true stories or what actually…I'm sorry, I'm getting a little preachy, but I don't really like war.

[Both laugh]

Melanie: War, not so much fun.

Danielle: No, it's a little bit depressing. Because, after all of this, like, we've had a laugh and we've added this or we’ve added that, but these people really did actually exist at one point and they were killed horrendously. So just thought I'd end our little topic there, just like, sorry guys, you know...shit, no, sorry guys, sorry.

Melanie: I wanted to go into the stories of what generals took what where and--and all those details but there's so much and war, it's such a huge, huge topic that I unfortunately went the lame route of just, like, there was a battle and people died there. It was, you know, they had names they--they had families and the amount of places that General E Lee apparently haunts is hysterical.

Danielle: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I imagine. I think I've seen a few documentaries because allegedly the spirit of, you know, you’re going ‘yeah well isn't he meant to be haunting that other place?’ Like, he gets around.

Melanie: You know he seriously haunts, like, 60 different places.

Danielle: If you could, would you multi-haunt? Like, if you were a ghost and you could go on holiday and haunt loads of different places, wouldn't you?

Melanie: Probably.

Danielle: Yeah! You wouldn’t want to be in the same spot all the time.

Melanie: You’re, like, stuck here, you might as well…I'm gonna haunt Disneyland. Was never there, but I’m gonna do it.

Danielle: I'm gonna latch on to this guy because this accent does not sound familiar, and I want to know where it goes.

Melanie: Hey, where does he come from?

Danielle: [in slight southern accent] Oh Spain! I’ve never been here before!

Melanie: [in southern accent] This is neat!

Danielle: That was my really bad southern accent, but I tried not to do it over the top. [laughs] Okay, so, well, that was a lot of shit there for the Zombie Fishbowl.

Melanie: Indeed it was. I think we did some stuff.

Danielle: Stuff definitely happened.

Melanie: Definitely.

[Both laugh]

Danielle: And if, after all that stuff, you enjoyed it and want to listen to us again for some reason, please, please, please subscribe. And, if you could, rate and review us, that would be awesome.

Melanie: And tell your friends.

Danielle: Yes please! You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram and join our Facebook page all under Zombie Fishbowl Podcast. It's dead easy.

Melanie: And if you want to contact us to tell us where we're wrong about something, which I'm sure there's plenty of that, and want to request a topic to be added to the random topic picker, you can email us at Zombie…hold on, my brain, [email protected].

Danielle: No hate mail, though.

Melanie: Speak for yourself. [evil laugh]

Danielle: All right. Thank you so much for listening to our little podcast. If we, sorry, we really want to do well, so any feedback would be received with much, much love and humility. Also, if you want my list of sources or Melanie’s list of sources at any point, give us a shout and we'll give you the details. I'll keep track of any scientific journals and stuff whenever I mention them, which I didn't this episode. It was a bit tricky to shoehorn in, but I'll try harder next time

Melanie: Well that just leaves us to say goodbye and thank you.

Danielle: And I will leave you with a quote by one of the greatest minds of the 20th century: ‘In critical moments, men see exactly what they wish to see.’

Melanie: Danielle, is that a Spock quote?

Danielle: Yes.

Melanie: For fuck's sake.

[Laughter]

Danielle: Bye!

Melanie: Wait! We need to pick a topic!

Danielle: Oh shit! I forgot!

[Laughter]

Danielle: Right, okay. I'll pick a topic right now. I'm going to the random topic picker. [Singing] Random topic picker, random topic picker, pick a random topic, I’m a topic random picker.

[Laughter]

Melanie: That was solid!

Danielle: You want to know our next topic?

Melanie: Yes.

Danielle: Mummies!

Melanie: Oh, that's exciting!

Danielle: Yes.

Melanie: And on that note, bye!

Danielle: Bye!

[Laughter]

[Outro music]

#podcast #podcast transcript #transcripted podcasts #paranormal #paranormal podcast #transcript

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manabingu · 7 years

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When I was recording New Divide earlier on the smule karaoke app, my mom came in with a bowl of pineapple and she made me some tea. She said she came in and wanted to give me something for my throat cuz she felt bad that I didn’t have a water bottle with me. But when I saw her eyes, it was the look of parental concern & her eyes looked kind of misty too.So I dunno if she was lying and came to check up on me because I probably sounded like I was in pain, which I am. I’m using singing as an emotional outlet so I don’t do something dumb. I just took some anxiety medicine too so I can feel reassured.

I dunno how loud I was singing, I honestly can’t feel anything right now tbh, I’m in a somewhat frozen state I get when my brain shuts down a little.

But something I discovered thanks to joining YouTube Idol it’s that one strength I have as a singer is emotional delivery, I may not have been the most technical vocalist, but the reason I won over the others was because I made the judges feel something. Ceonn told me its the one thing he wishes he could master, and I look up to Ceonn, he’s one of the most talented friends I have, I grew to accept that strength of mine but I’m also digging deep to understand why I CAN deliver strong emotional deliveries. And this whole Chester news happened, I feel like Chester’s entire career was talking about the feelings that maybe a lot of us want to express but are too afraid to, or just don’t wanna show in public to “save face” or something like that. But the thing is, honestly we don’t take this stuff seriously enough. That man clearly was pouring out his own soul into the music. And THAT’S why his music resonated with people, because there are so many people including myself who can relate to the lyrics and the vocals that are soul shaking. Chester went through all these dark feelings, and anytime he saw a fan or friend struggling with it, he would talk to them till they felt better. And that’s something I try to do as well whenever I see anyone feeling remotely sad, I don’t want ANYONE to feel this horrible thing, I try to cheer up people when I can. I’ve been looking up vids all day to remember Chester and I feel SO bad such a kind, humble artist like that was feeling the way he did. I wish I had tweeted to him thanking him for being a big influence on me. I feel guilty for not speaking up and letting him know. But I can’t do anything now.

I’ve been growing more and more depressed/suicidal as the years go by. It kinda gets worse as each day passes & anytime something like this happens to a person I look up to, it makes me revert back to square one after so many months of progress. I don’t speak up but there are days when I still remember deaths of people I cared about like...just randomly outta nowhere. And it makes me feel numb inside or like an impending doom kinda feeling. I recently went to go see a family friend with my mom & sis so I can have medication (organic though cuz I hate chemical stuff) to help my metabolic imbalances cuz I apparently have some. I swore I would never do that because ( in all honesty I didn’t wanna become dependent on medicine to feel better. And half of me honestly doesn’t care anymore what happens to me, I am convinced it wouldn’t make a huge difference if I just evaporate or something. I dunno, I’m jut goin through the motions at this point). It takes a LOT of energy for me to feel genuine emotions anymore. But honestly things that make me happy is music, well-written shows/acting, abridging & drawing. My creative outlets are what keep me alive & help me HAVE a will to live nowadays.

But like...Linkin Park was probably one of the first rock bands I ever listened to, and it was that band that me and my friends would bond over a lot. I texted Crystal today and she was just as devastated as I was, I am gonna go see her next week. Because I can tell we just need to be in each other’s company, to watch each other’s back... she admitted she’s been feeling down too. I proly told a few people but you know how some people feel better after listening to soft, relaxing music? Well...for me screamo, metal, and hard rock (as aggressive and loud as it may sound) is what I find makes ME feel better, it’s like a catharsis of emotion. I remember in middle school I kinda started to see the harsh reality of the world. And then, I found myself starting to develop a love for rock music. I didn’t know why I wanted to wear black & enjoyed that whole rock scene (most hispanic people back then that I knew always made me feel bad for not liking hispanic music/customs enough, I dunno? So I felt like an outcast growing up?) But I remember my older sibling said “if you turn emo or dress in those fashions that they’d become a problem student”. And I of course didn’t want that, so I hid my inner musical tastes from them, but I hate the feeling of being restricted. I enjoy freedom of expression through music & art and fashion. But I wasn’t allowed to do that, I had to be prim and proper and act like a lady (I hadn’t yet realized I was genderfluid/ demisexual so that’s another reason why I probably felt socially awkward) . I CAN do that now, but I know I am still silently judged about it. When I sing or record sometimes, I go to apologize afterwards (if I wasn’t home alone. I usually TRY to record when I’m home alone so I don’t have to hold back & be more loose) because that’s just how I grew up. Being self conscious all the time and apologetic of who I feel I really am on the inside. And sure, whatever people keep constantly making fun of this stereotype about “emo kids” and the way the dress or sing or things they like. But honestly we shouldn’t do that.

I think that we need to tell people that it’s ok to express themselves however they want. And IF they like something that seems “unconventional” for their race/gender/other dumb labels, that they don’t gotta be shunned for it. Let people just be themselves man. And if we just give people more love and understanding, they will grow up with healthier self esteems.But yeah. I just, I’m probably just really groggy from crying, singing till my throat stings & just having these heavy emotions all day. I am sending everyone who needs a hug a HUGE hug. And I honestly want you to have a good/day/week/year. You are important and lovely and I care if you’re happy. I’m sorry for rambling tonight But I needed to just vent a bit.

#Mana Blabz #I am gonna try to get back to being productive tomorrow. I didnt get much done today #Time was just frozen still for me. I need hugs but I sometimes become a hermit sometimes Im sorry #Anyhow I hope you all are ok and Im wishing good vibes your way. Sorry again for rambling

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canaryatlaw · 7 years

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Okay, well today wasn't bad. Still kind of overall stressed, but dealing with it. I have time at least, to get all this shit done, get it spaced out over and all that, so that helps. Alarm went off at 7 and I got out of bed and made it to work and made it through the rest of the file for the permanency hearing, which was more of the parents being like "we're not alcoholics we don't need treatment fuck you" all the way to getting their damn kid removed, so I write up some normal permanency hearing questions and took that and the file over to the lawyer who gave it to me to talk to him about it. I ask if they ever made a paternity finding, because there was a whole big thing about it because apparently her "dad" her whole life isn't technically her legally-presumed dad because her mother was married to someone else when she was born, but I never found a finding, and then the lawyers like "oh yeah, well dad passed away in November, something related to his alcoholism." Oh. Well. And he goes on to add the mom is basically on her death bed in the same situation. Don't need treatment my ass. This poor child. She seems like a good kid though, so hopefully we can get her get into some post-high school training if not actual college. I'll get to meet her and interview her Monday. At that point I went back to my office and created a template for permanency hearing questions that I could just tweak for individual cases since the status based questions are largely the same. Somewhere in all of this my eyes were drooping way too much again so I took another 15 minute head on desk session, I might've actually passed out for a few minutes, but when the alarm went off I freaked out for a minute because I was expecting the wrong time for some reason and thought I accidentally passed out for like two hours lol. So I was fairly glad that didn't happen. Somewhere in here I also tried to call my psychiatrist about the whole Xanax thing I was discussing last night, only to be told he's on vacation till the end of the month.....I mean, the guy definitely deserves it, he's partially retired already and probably in his 70's, and I don't want to disturb him or anything, but like, I know him and I know he would want to hear two sentences from me on this issue but I didn't want to say it was an emergency because it wasn't, and if I did they probably would've put me on with one of the other psychiatrists that are filling in for him, and I'm sorry but there's no way I'm trusting anyone else with this shit. I think I'm gonna increase it to 3 mg a day for now at least, which is still within the normal range he said I could try so it's not a big deal. Hopefully that will make finals a bit more manageable. So that was less than ideal, but oh well. All of my events are really out of order for today so idk if any of this happened in this order, but around lunchtime I went to go see my across the hall friend who's now my across the building friend, to see if she was feeling better and if she wanted to get lunch because I, like a kindergartener, left my lunch box in the fridge yesterday (I had actually packed dinner in a brown paper bag for later but I didn't want to pack two of those). So we went to the "bakery" that has super awesome pizza an I got some of their pizza with the seriously biggest slices and ate like, half a slice lol. So good though. It was nice to talk to her though, we traded crazy stories from our courthouse and the DV one, and I was just like man, I'm so glad I have people I can share these things with without them being immediately horrified and me being like "yes I know those are terribly tragic circumstances but if you hang in there for a moment the court moment was really funny!!" Lol, it's gallows humor for sure but I mean gotten let it out somehow. I vent to my brother about crazy cases too, that's helpful since talking about the law is one of the few things we can talk about and actually have a lengthy productive discussion on without it somehow devolving into him being an asshole (mostly, anyway). So there's that at least. He appreciates my stories. So back from lunch and I spent a while organizing orders into alphabetized folders for two different lawyers haha who both apologized for the shitty work but I'm like hey whatever it's all good I know I'm the intern and I'll deal with your shitty jobs if it gets me a good in here. And then I had to show my supervisor how to send in the mid-semester evaluation my field placement supervisor wanted from him (oh, and he apparently knew my FP supervisor like 15 years ago and he was her boss in this office??? I swear he was everyone's boss at some point) because he was getting so lost in computer forms and retrieving files and saving them and electronically signing forms, so I'm just sitting there showing him how to do it and he's like "ohmygosh Rachel, you're so smart!!!" and I'm like trying not to laugh because he's just so adorably funny. And then of course I got to read more of the nice things he said about me which made my heart melt once again because he's literally so nice I can't handle it and his words are always really genuine too so it's nice. And yeah. So I didn't have anywhere to rush to right after leaving the juvenile courthouse today for the first time I can remember since, the summer, since I decided no kickboxing this week because I simply don't have the emotional or physical energy for it, so I was just gonna find a Starbucks to chill in and work on my appellate brief until small group time. So I got to like, take my time leaving and my supervisor is like "Rachel what are you still doing here, you're gonna be late to class!!" and it's like 5:01 haha so funny. So then waiting for the bus I saw the PD that was on the panel we did yesterday so we of course talked about delinquency stuff, like the spring break project from last year and of course eventually got into the whole transferring to adult court thing and I mentioned the slenderman case because that's just the most horrific case of misjudgment by the system and she'd heard of it of course but didn't know the details and she was beyond horrified to hear that they're trying two severely mentally ill 12 year old children as adults and having them face 35 years in prison. Like, we literally have an entire juvenile justice system FOR PRECISELY THESE REASONS. Bypassing it ignores all the science and research and not to mention the recidivism rate which skyrockets when you try children as adults. I'll cap it there though, not gonna go into a full rant at the moment (I know I've already done it on here). I got off the one bus to catch another and had to watch it stop and drive off while I was stuck on the other side of the crosswalk which SUCKS and it was just chilly enough to be annoying out today, but then thankfully another bus came like 2 minutes later which isn't typical but I was very grateful for. So I took that to the Starbucks area, then popped into Walgreens to buy more of their caramel chocolates that Lyft driver got me hooked on (lol) except they didn't have those exact ones, so I got what's basically the same but with toffee pieces and I tried a little and they're pretty amazing. So then I went to Starbucks and got an iced white tea lemonade and tried to surreptitiously eat my sandwiches (I mean I was facing the window so I didn't have to be all that secretive about it) and start the behemoth that is gonna be finishing my appellate brief, and I pretty much immediately felt lost, but always over like the stupid stuff I could find like whether saying "don't use the party names" meant the given names or the terms plaintiff/defendant....(it's the prior, I think anyway) but I figured as some sort of game plan I would work on fixing the argument section based on the feedback I got from our prof, since that still is the substance of the brief, and then work on adding all the extra parts. Half of the edits she gave me though we're like about ordering the arguments and shit and it just pissed me off because I like the way I order my arguments, dammit, because IT MAKES SENSE, and I'm sorry if it doesn't fit your blue book standard but my boss at my actual job where I submit actual motions to actual court seems to be quite impressed with it so you can take your argument order and shove it.....(note please that that wasn't actually directed at my prof, cuz I kind of like her, and I know it's the curriculum and not her setting the standards). But that just annoyed me cuz like, real life isn't legal writing fact patterns. You're not always gonna have an analogous case and a distinguishable case, and you're gonna have to make it work. I just....I get too worked up about all of it. But I at least made some progress on preliminary efforts, so maybe, 5% done? It's a start, at least. I walked from the Starbucks to church which is like a ten minute walk and even though it was still a little chilly I haven't done any walking for the past two days and I haven't had any chance to work out this week (I likely won't go to the gym tomorrow because I have no reason to be downtown) so it's something at least, to go with my push ups (which I think may be hurting a muscle in my side, because trying any new physical activity is basically let's see how I can piss my body off this time for me). But yeah, small group was good. This was something I meant to mention quickly on my last week's recap of it, but I think I might have a teeny tiny crush on one of the guys? Like it was in my head last week but it was barely anything, then I get in there today and we start talking about the marvel tv shows and you know I can talk above superheroes all damn day haha so that was enjoyable, and then he was being like "yeah it was cool being at my cousins wedding this weekend but it's also so weird being single at a wedding" and I'm like alright, that might have been a subtle hint, lol, and of course as soon as the idea even entered my head I spent the rest of the night pretty much planning our wedding when I haven't really decided if I even like the guy yet, lol. Physically he's not like drop dead gorgeous, but he's definitely not ugly and has a certain charming quality to his appearance, so I can work with that. The rest of small group (I almost just wrote Smallville) was good too, we talked about a passage in 1 Corinthians I was familiar with about love and of course I got to opine about my deep theories on the issue about how basically the passage is indicative of the entire problem of "religion" and what the church is facing today- that is, they have all the rules, all the right answers, but without love following through all of it it's basically useless, and I feel like that's so on point for what the church is dealing with right now. Like, no. Love meets you were you are. Love is right in there with your mess. Love doesn't require you to clean up your act before you're welcomed into our church. Jesus certainly didn't require it to be let into his presence, so how dare we even try to do it? And yeah, other random deep shit like that, lol, you get the picture. Took the train to the bus as my normal and AGAIN had to run to make the bus (this was a different stop, but same bus route) and again had to bang on the door to get let in while the driver was looking so put out by it and I'm just like....calm your tits lady we're giving your company money but being here, lol. But I got home, didn't almost get run over by a car but had the weird experience of a car stopping fully at a red light, and I started crossing, and then they suddenly started driving again and blew the light by like, a mile. They didn't even come close to wear I was crossing so I was never in danger or anything, but I was like seriously, wtf man? Who does that?!? Idiots. For home and watched Powerless, which was cute of course, then Riverdale which just left me with the comment that this is the one teen drama where all the high schoolers have it together for the most part and all their parents are going batshit crazy, lol. But I enjoyed both, and that pretty much wrapped up my night. And it's late, and I get to sleep in which I'm very glad about, but still I'm tired and want to go to sleep now, so that's what I will do. Goodnight mis amigos. Happy Friday.

#daily journal #April 2017

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