#early arrival catches it on video and it goes viral

[quinnkasih]

Kitty Cat

chapter 4 - "encounter"

cat!scara × collegestudent!fem!reader

SYNOPSIS

You are just an ordinary college student, having friends, hard projects and surviving on a low budget. Every week, or saturday to be specific, you would come by your favorite cafe in town, Fatui Cat Cafe. It is such a calming and lively place for you after a busy week as a student. In the cafe, there's one cat that despises everyone, except you.

A/N

omg cat scara cannon?? 😭 (its only leaks tho)

MASTERLIST - previous | next

It was very late by the time Childe and Scara arrived at the 24 hour convenient store, they paid no mind to the time.

You were not surprised to see someone this late.

It was supposed to be your time at home, resting. But your co worker asked you a favor to cover his shift for a hour. You were ok with it and just agreed.

Unfortunately, it has been more than a hour and yet he hasnt came yet for his shift.

Well, being a good co worker you are, you decided to wait and cover his shift until he arrives.

You were actually about to celebrate right there behind the cashier counter when you hear the glass entrance door opening, hoping it to be your co worker. But it isnt him.

So here you are crying mentally and slumping into your arm as you wait for the pair of customer to find their grocery pick.

The sound of plastic bags being placed infront filled your ears as you lazily try to wake up with the help of your arms.

You wanted to finish quick. Your vision was already blurry from the lack of sleep.

The screen you are looking at blinded your eyes, it was to bright. As you finish inputting the grocery in the computer the pair bought, you squinted at the price.

It took awhile for your eyes to adjust the brightness and blurryness to see the nominals of the price. But eventually you were able to tell the price to the customers.

As the purple coloured hair customer try to find money in his pocket, the ginger haired person he was with was looking at your face with a confused face. He was also squinting.

The ginger haired started talking, "She looks.. Familiar.." He said as he make a questioning pose and squinted.

"Pfft its probably just you" The other person scoffed as he finally found the money and placing it on the counter.

Acting like you didnt hear their interaction, you just countinued the payment and paid no mind.

That was until you hand back the change to purple haired guy to see that his face was slightly surprised.

You just wanted to give him the payment paper and the change until the ginger haired spoke again.

"Hey! Are you that girl in the viral video of a girl who was able to calm Kuni the cat?!" He taunted as he pointed his pointer finger at me.

You were quite shocked. Despite you being viral, you didnt thought that you would be recognized. And especially this early.

You just nodded shyly.

Meanwhile the purple haired guy's eyes were large as saucers due to how surprised he was. And also if you squint well at his face, you'll be able to notice his slightly, very slightly, red cheeks. (At first you thoght you were just imagining things due to how sleepy you are)

He noticed that you were looking at him as his expression goes back to how it was before.

He just nervously take the payment paper and took out a pen in his hoodie pocket and scribbled something on the paper then leaving it on the counter. He grabbed the grocery and headed out quickly.

Meanwhile me and his friend just stared at the shutted glass door and to eachother's confused faces. But that confused expression on his face suddenly turned into a smug one and he winked at me. He then went to catch up on his friend outside.

You were confused as ever.

You took the paper left by the purple haired guy which was left on the counter.

There on the paper, numbers are written.

You supposed that it was his number. But its late and probably his in a hurry, so you decided to call him tommorow.

...

It was just another morning at your college. But this time you were more tired than usual due to last night.

Your co worker actually came which surprised you because you thought that he wouldnt be coming and it was also nearing the end of his shift. Well, he owe you something now tho.

The teacher on the front is now reminding everyone about the last project, the group project you were half finished.

You then eyed Ganyu who was seated across the room.

With eye movements, it felt like you two are conversing.

The conversation-like interaction then came to an end as she smiled at you and nodded. She then returned her attention back to the teacher infront.

...

It was lunch, you were just taking your books to bring and store it back on your locker on your way to cafeteria.

That was until you heard Ganyu taunting from behind. She seems to be waiting with the group mates, Yun Jin and Keqing.

"Ah y/n, you're here" Keqing greeted. Yun Jin smiled and Ganyu made a little a hand wave towards you.

"So, as you heard before in class, the deadline was shortened due to some campus events coming soon. We really should get our project finished, when are you available?" Keqing countinued seriously.

You nodded, "Im available everyday as long it isnt sunday. And also I cant stay later than evening".

After sometime, you and your group decided the date and time. And once more, the place where you guys will be meeting is at the Fatui Cat Cafe.

Ganyu eventually recommended it again because she find the place nice and calm, a fitting place to do the work. Everyone agreed.

...

"Y/n!" A feminine voice called you from behind when you are busy packing your bag at your locker to leave the campus.

You turned to see a pink-ish haired girl and long, brown-haired girl running towards you.

'Oh, its Yanfei and Hu Tao.. They are college's best-bestfriends'

"I watched this video with Yanfei and thought it look familiar! You are the first to came into our mind when we see this video, is it really you?!" Hu tao excitedly asked as she showed her phone which was playing the video of you stroking Scara.

You nodded nervously with a crooked smile.

"See! I told you it was her! It just seems very familiar. Now hand me the money fei-fei!" She turned to Yanfei with a proud face. And meanwhile Yanfei sighed at her as she pulled out 10 moras and handed to Hu Tao, she just countinued to giggle.

"But y/n, is it really you? Im really surprised! Its such a wholesome and cute video, how do you managed to calm him down and get him to warm up to you?" Yanfei asked.

You let out a awkward laugh and scratched the back of your neck, "Its really pure coincedence! Afterall, he is asleep. I really have no such intent to actually get him warm up to me, i wanted to feed him, thats all"

Yanfei and Hu Tao let out a long "ohh", they really do share a braincell together.

"Hey y/n! Can we take a selfie together? I really wanna flex to my online friends that the viral girl is actually my friend!" Hu Tao whispered to you mischievously.

"Me too!" Yanfei joined in the selfie.

Hu Tao then looked at the selfie for awhile, "Its great! Thank you once again y/n! Hehe.. Gonna get those people jealous~"

Yanfei just looked at you with a crooked smile, "Were sorry for bothering you y/n, and also Hu Tao's antics".

"Hey??! What did I do?" Hu Tao heard and questioned.

We then laughed together heartfully.

...

You just arrived home, in the bathroom having a warm, comfortable shower.

Through out the time you are washing, you remembered that purple haired guy's phone number which he left yesterday. You gave yourself a mental note to check it later after you finished showering.

...

With a towel hanged around your neck and new clothes, you rummaged trough your trouser's pocket you wore yesterday at work.

Founding the neatly folded paper, you sat at the edge of your bed and took out your phone.

You carefully typed in the numbers in your phone's number keypad, making sure no number was not typed or mistyped.

After finishing, you tapped the call button.

At first you were doubting that he would not answer the phone call, which is true.

You really also wanted to talk to this guy and get to know him. You really feel like ringing him once more but you are afraid that you'll disturb his time.

Being brave, you ringed his phone once more.

After sometime of waiting and almost losing hope of him answering, he finally answered.

"Hello?" A masculine voice called from the other end.

"A-ah hello! Im y/n, the cashier staff from last night that you gave your number to" You greeted back.

Some lovey-dovey "ooh"-s was heard from the background sounds. There was a brief silence, only him with muttering cursing words which maybe was towards the guy who made the lovey-dovey "ooh"-s.

...

We had a great time talking to eachother, from introducing ourselves and to talking about our interests which was far not different.

His name was Balladeer, which is the most beatiful name I've ever heard from being friends with many people for years.

Sadly, our conversation had to be cutted short because he had some bussiness he had to do. He said he is mostly available during night time, especially midnight.

We also already saved eachother's phone number to converse more later.

'I mean, I dont mind staying up late for this guy'

TAGLIST

@dee-zbignuts @cr4ftingtable @lxry-chxn @cherricoladrink @scrmgf @ember-is-clueless @butterandbeans @lilias-spouse @crinklypink @nemesis1ofdark @sukunasin @wisteriaflowersss @louise-rosita-leroux @thetwinkims @koi-chairowo @grimreapersscythe @eimuros @kaoyamamegami @meowlumi @crazypriestess @g0re-h0und @ssilentblackyt @blurr3db3rry @blvdmrcnry @toriiee @lycheemouse @valiryyz @nejibot @pheebbbs @lovely-scaramouchie

[oh-surprise-its-me]

Roy/Jamie prompt: Jamie's a no show to training and everyone is super annoyed, but that all goes out the window when he finally does arrive, but he's pale and shaky, and worse still his clothes and his hands are stained red. " It's not my blood." He says dazedly before he collapses into Roy's arms. He doesn't faint, just goes limp and catatonic. No one can figure out what the hell happened until a viral video appears all over, showing Jamie not only witnessing a horrific traffic accident but also springing into action and helping to pull the victims out of the mangled wreckage. The image of Jamie screaming and desperately trying to keep a little girl Phoebe's age from bleeding out in his arms is seared into everyone's brains, especially Roy's. Roy vows to do all he can to help Jamie heal from this trauma. Love ends up being one of the best remedies.

Anon ily I’m ready to attempt to make people cry again. *rubs hands together*

tw I’m killing the victims of the crash to really make it tragic. *SORRY* there’s also a bit of blood described.

Roy had texted and called Jamie about 20 times now. He doesn’t know what happened, three hours ago they woke up together, lost an hour in bed, Roy had to come in early so Jamie said he’d run here.

That was over two hours ago. Practice is basically over. People are talking showers. It’s insane. He has to pick up Phoebe in another hour, and she was really looking forward to seeing her ‘uncle Jamie’ Christ that kid.

He is officially freaking out. He knows Sam and Colin have called and texted also. Beard did his weird thing of “I know a guy” and left it at that.

Roy is just about to do another lap around the office when he hears Sam yell. He darts out of the room

Jamie.

Jamie covered in blood.

Oh god.

Jamie scans the room ignoring everyone’s questions and panic, he finds Roy. He takes the four steps over to him and collapses. Roy catches him like always, he slowly drops the both of them to the floor, Jamie proceeds to crawl into his lap.

Roy let’s out a noise he refuses to acknowledge. “Not my blood, I’m fine, gonna not talk now kay lads?”

Roy vaguely wonders if Jamie decided to kill his father today but that seems like an unlikely answer.

Beard comes running back in from where he disappeared to take a call.

“Roy we need to talk- oh good god okay good he’s here. There was a car accident. People filmed. Jamie was the first person around, a kid was thrown out the windshield. She uh she didn’t make it off of the scene. He held her. Screamed at people to call 999. Wouldn’t let her go until the ambulance got there. He held her the whole time.”

Roy blinked through tears he could feel starting out of his eyes. Christ fuck morning practice how could they think Jamie was just fucking off, he would never do that.

Sam comes over to where Jamie is staring at the wall behind Roy’s head. Sam sits next to Roy and takes a still bloody hand. Isaac and Colin move in sync, Colin digs out baby wipes, Isaac takes them and kneels down to wipe off the bits of Jamie’s arm that’s not wrapped around Roy’s neck.

Roy presses a kiss to Jamie’s head, a rare sight for the locker room but he feels that it’s allowed. Jamie let’s out a shaky breath. Roy repeats the action, when he pulls back this time though he’s got a plan.

“Alright, everyone our house 40 minutes, Isaac can you pick up Phoebe. We are gonna get Jamie showered off and fine again and then have a quiet movie day.”

Theres a murmur of agreement in the room,

Isaac swaps cars with Roy so he has a kid seat. Everyone leaves the locker room but not without touching Jamie in some sort of way.

Colin lingers for a second with an offer of “need help?” Roy needs to later tell him how grateful he is but he shakes his head no. Colin leave with a nod to go get Phoebe with Isaac.

“Baby can we stand to wash you off?”

Jamie sniffs. He nods his head unfolding himself from Roy’s lap.

Roy stands with a flinch, that’ll hurt more later but not the biggest issue. He slowly undresses Jamie, he tosses all the clothing into a trash can.

Jamie had worn all white today. It was a blinding contrast.

Roy undresses with less care then he did for Jamie, he pulls him into the shower. Roy reaches for Jamie’s body wash, Jamie looks up at him.

“She was about Phoebe’s age. I didn’t know they had that much blood in them that young. She wasn’t even really crying. I think I cried more then she did.”

Jamie gasps like it’s the first time he’s taking a breath.

Roy moves onto his hair now that the blood on Jamie’s skin is washed off. Clearly Jamie ran hands through his hair, the blonde streaks are tinted pink.

“She told me she was happy to be held. That she loved me.” Jamie cuts himself off with a sob. Roy gathers his up to his chest.

What can he even say besides he’s sorry at this point. No one should ever go through this.

“Her uh, her mom was driving, got slammed into by a truck that went through a light. Never saw it coming. She died in the car they said.”

Roy rocks them slowly under the water, “I know I’m sorry isn’t enough but you know I’m here for you. It sounds like you did everything you could’ve.”

Jamie nods again, “paramedics said the same thing, cops too. I was just thinking of Sarah and Phoebe the whole time.”

Roy sighs, he lets the tears he felt earlier come down his face, “I know. When you said mom and daughter I thought the same. But they are both fine, Sarah is at the hospital, Isaac and Colin are picking Phoebe up to bring to our house.”

Jamie sniffs. “Can she stay the night.”

Roy nods. “Course. I think everyone might be staying the night though, don’t think they’ll let you out of their sight any longer then the 40 minutes I asked for.”

Jamie let’s out a wet laugh. “God I really scared everyone didn’t I.” Roy leans down and kisses Jamie “more then any of us could ever tell you.”

Jamie taps Roy’s chest, “let’s go home.”

Roy holds Jamie’s hand. He knows it might take a while but Jamie will be okay eventually.

[saturnsummer]

baby, be with me so happily

based off that video that drove me nuts and that photo. anyways, a small excerpt i guess that i might want to include in a future bokseul fic? hm... still brewing...

enjoy as always, grammar and other mistakes by me!

summary: after bokgi witnesses something, his suspicions are confirmed when he sees it again in person. 

word count: 3181 words

excerpt title: protect.

trigger warning: abuse, slight mention of blood, minor cursing. 

"Yah, Bokgi! Are you listening?" Yebeom nudged his friend as Bokgi stirred his metal tray of rice.

“What?" Bokgi raises his head, to find his friends staring in concern. Bokgi, confused, leans back as he spoons another mouthful of rice into his mouth. He wasn't particularly hungry, but he chewed anyway. He knew if he didn’t eat, he would end up dozing off in class. And it didn’t help that he was already blacklisted for talking back to the teachers often.

"You okay? You seem pretty distracted." The older Sol asks. Bokgi shakes his head, avoiding eye contact with his noona. But he knows that amongst the six of them, he’s the worst liar. Setting his utensils down, he leans forward and darts his eyes and head around. The group gets his cue as they lean down to the table further, huddling together.

"You know Jeon Yeseul-ssi?" Bokgi asked. Yebeom cocked his eyebrow.

"What, the eye candy in my batch?" The younger Sol turns her head, staring in a cold piercing stare and swats his arm. Jiho clicks his tongue as Joon Hwi sighs.

"Yeah, she's the new transfer right? Just got in about a week ago?" Joon Hwi asks, ignoring the mutters of complaints from Yebeom.

"What's up? You like her?" The older Sol asks, a hopeful grin on her face. Bokgi swears his face flushed red, but this wasn't the time. He needed to be truthful on what he saw.

"I saw her this morning arguing with an older guy today. Some college dude. He looks kind of familiar, I just can’t remember.” Bokgi admits uncertainty in his voice as he chews on a piece of meat.

"It might just be her boyfriend, and they got into a fight." Jiho quips.

"It didn't look like it. The way he shouted and the way she shrunk back was...different. I can't put my finger on it, but it felt weird." Bokgi sighs. "Maybe I'm thinking too much about it."

The group is mostly silent as they finish their meals. Bokgi, still deep in his thoughts, can't shake the image from this morning. The way Yeseul's eyes were so full of fear and hurt when she looked up at the older guy, the way when her eyes met Bokgi's that screamed helplessness, but she only gave a small smile when Bokgi asked if she was okay. Most of the time, Bokgi would have blushed as usual whenever he caught her eyes, but that moment, he felt uncertainty and sadness.

"Bokgi, she has club activities with me today. I'll ask her about it carefully. Maybe ask if she has a boyfriend or whatever first. After all, she did create quite a buzz when she arrived." Sol says. Bokgi hides a blush and darts his eyes away to anywhere but his friends. God, Sol-noona is never gonna let me get away with my embarrassment.

"Thanks, noona."

"Oh, wait. Sejun from class 5 just sent me some gossip." Yebeom said, scrolling on his phone. "He says that some girls have asked Yeseul and confirmed she has a boyfriend. Her boyfriend is popular politician's son, Ko Yeongchang."

"Ah! The guy that went viral for all his videos online and good looks?" Joon Hwi asks as Bokgi researches his name and confirms it when a bunch of his photos pop up over his browser. Yes, this was the man that Bokgi saw with Yeseul this morning. But why does he feel like he knows Yeongchang from somewhere else too?

“We’re going to be late. Let’s go.” Jiho says, picking up his tray and the rest follow suit as they head out to clear it. They split to their respective classes, agreeing to meet after school at the entrance.

Bokgi shoves his hands in his blazer pockets as he walks back to his classroom, taking his seat at the back. He slumps his head on the table, replaying the way that Yeseul shrunk back when Yeongchang raised his voice. The way that Yeseul formed a shaky smile when Bokgi came over to ask if she was okay, and she only nodded. How he noticed the small bruise on her arm, hidden by her blazer, but said no word.

There was something more, and Bokgi was ready to find out.

-----

Yeseul sits on the toilet seat cover of the school’s bathroom as she takes off her blazer and rolls the sleeve of her blouse up. She sighs looking at the bruise that is slightly red, a hint of purple just underneath. She's glad for the blazer now, as much as she hates the rough material and the ugly colour. At least it hides away the bruises blossoming on her arms under the white shirt.

Taking an ointment from her pouch, she dabs carefully, rubbing in with care and bites her lips from hissing when it's too painful. Yeseul sighs when she rolls back her sleeves and runs a hand through her long locks. When she shuts her eyes, she can only replay the way Yeongchang's hand digging into her arm over her fresh bruise from the day before, and her foolish mistake for angering him more when she forced her arm away and shouted back. She knew better than to shout back, especially when they were in front of her school in the early morning.

"I should have never said anything about school..." Yeseul mumbles to herself as she puts her blazer back on. She opens the cubicle door, sighting a few female students reapplying their lip tints and she forces a friendly smile before heading to the last sink to wash her hands. The girls give an equally excited smile back before they rush out in hushed whispers. She catches a girl whispering about how Yeseul looks so elegant, like a sculpture brought to life.

If only they knew, Yeseul thought, as she dried her hands and stared at her lifeless eyes. She fixes a smile on her face before walking out of the washroom. Once she was out, she noticed the back of a familiar curly haired student from afar walking along the hallway alone, hands in his blazer. When he turns to walk into the classroom, Yeseul's eyes soften as she's reminded of what happened just a few hours ago.

Bokgi was someone Yeseul always noticed, even though she had been in school for just a week. She would find him hiding behind a wall and he would run away or just smile in a silly fashion before making a lame excuse to run off, no, sprint away. Yeseul also noted how Bokgi's voice could be heard from the other end of the hallway, arguing with his teacher on the reasons on why he strongly agrees with the point of having all citizens exercise their own right to express their views. Shortly after, when she ended class, he was sitting outside on the floor sulking, kicked out from class. Yeseul stifled a laugh, because for some reason, his sulking made him seem like a cute five year old that didn't manage to convince his parents that he wanted that piece of candy.

When he approached him this morning, his tie loose around his collar and asked in a soft voice if she was okay, Yeseul had wanted to say that it wasn't. Yeseul wanted to admit to him that the bruises on her arms hurt, that she was boiling with anger. But she held her tongue back. No, she wasn't angry, Yeongchang was just going through a phase and his emotions got the best of himself. No, her bruises didn't hurt. Yeongchang doesn't mean any of it, he never means to hurt her.

Yeseul takes a deep breath in as she walks back to her classroom and takes her seat. She flips through the photos she's taken with Yeongchang. A mirror selfie with his arms around her waist in his room. Them in matching outfits sharing a sweet kiss. Her in a body hugging satin ruched dress and him in a suit as they celebrated Valentines. She smiles at the sweet memories, remembering his loving touch and sweet words.

No, she doesn't regret being with Yeongchang. He doesn't mean it.

No, she loves Yeongchang, and he loves her.

Yeseul is okay.

Yeseul is not a victim.

-----

Bokgi unwraps the hand wraps around his knuckles as he pants heavily. Leaning against the locker door, he picks up his phone and replays the video. Screening through, he sighs as he notices the break in his form when he punches the punching bag and how unsteady his footwork is. He needs more practice, if he wants to improve from where he is now.

He wipes the sweat off his forehead, thankful for the hair tie that the older Sol lent him to tie his hair back for training. He grabs a fresh change of clothes before heading to the shower room, stripping off his sweaty clothes and taking a quick shower, erasing all traces of sweat. His boxing training ends the earliest, but he takes the longest to shower with the mount of curled locks he has.

When he's changed into comfortable, clean clothes, he dries his curled locks as best as he can, but he still doesn't know how to not make it look so wet. He wishes the younger Sol was here to help him with his hair, but she's probably still in debate, arguing with Jiho. (Silently, Bokgi prays that they are on the same team so that he wouldn't have to witness another cold war between the two.)

Muttering his curses, he throws the towel in his duffel and picks up his school bag and heads out the gym after waving goodbye to his coaches and club mates. He goes to the vending machine, purchasing a carton of banana milk and sits by the steps of the school's entrance, sipping on his drink.

From the corner, he notices Yeseul walking from the side and Bokgi does his best to not choke on his milk. He scrambles from the steps and runs away to the corner, behind a wall, peeking over to see Yeseul with a small smile as she walks with a few students. But her smile drops when they bump into a familiar man, hands in the pocket of his jeans, a smug smirk on his face.

Ko Yeongchang was back.

The students next to her gaped, for the first time seeing this ulzzang in person. Bokgi can't make out their words, but Yeongchang throws his head back, mouth wide open and eyes crinkled. From the way the students are looking, Bokgi suspects that he must have told them Yeseul is his girlfriend. Yeseul's face plasters a shy smile, but her eyes speak otherwise. Her eyes bore uncertainty, the same way that Bokgi remembers from this morning.

Yeongchang's arm slipped around Yeseul's back, his hand grabbing onto her arm. For a split second, Yeseul's eyes flashed pain, but it was quickly covered with her usual sparkle and light as she gave a light laugh. Bokgi's stomach churned. Something was obviously wrong, and it was enough to make him feel almost slightly nauseous.

The other students giggled as they walked away, waving to Yeseul as they scurried back to school. As soon as they were out of sight, Yeseul rips her way out of Yeongchang's arms and takes a step back, her hand instinctively going up to grab her other arm. It was enough for Bokgi to infer what was probably going on. Bokgi's anger bubbled inside as he felt the puzzle pieces falling together.

"This bastard..." Bokgi cursed through his gritted teeth. It didn't take a genius to know that Yeseul was being abused by Yeongchang. The way that she shrunk back when his hand reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear this morning. The way her eyes darted when Yeongchang held her arm in a tight fashion.

Yeseul shouts something inaudible to Yeongchang, and they exchange a few shouts. Yeseul is turning around to leave when Yeongchang grabs her bag and spins her around, hand gripping her wrist. She forcefully pulls away, but Yeongchang grabs her arm. The moment he raises his hand up is when Bokgi crushes his carton of milk and shouts. No, he can't see this. Not again.

"Yah! What do you think you are doing?" He shouts in a voice so loud and full of anger, he can't recognise it as his own. He storms over, sticky sugary milk dripping between his left hand as he clutches his carton. He reaches and Yeseul is almost surprised to see him. If Yeseul wasn't there, Bokgi would have said nothing and pummel him back.

"Bokgi-ssi..." Yeseul whispered, almost in surprise.

"Noona, are you okay?" Bokgi turns to ask Yeseul.

"Noona? What, does he know you? When did you know other guys?" Yeongchang asked, voice raised and slightly aggressive.

"That's none of your business. And what were you about to do? Hit her?" Bokgi spat back in anger. His eyes burned with fury as he challenged the taller man.

"Why are you meddling in our business? She's my girlfriend, I get to do what I want." Yeongchang scoffs back, hand grabbing back to Yeseul's arm as he pulls. This time, Yeseul is caught off guard as she hisses in pain.

"Stop!" Bokgi shouts in fury before pulling Yeongchang's hand away. Swiftly, he pushes Yeseul's hand away from the both of them.

"Why are you so concerned? What, you like her?" Yeongchang's eyes are dark and challenging as he stares down at Bokgi.

"Noona doesn't deserve to be treated by a bastard like you." Bokgi seethes with gritted teeth as his fists are balled tightly.

"What? What did you say?" Yeongchang's face contorts to one of so much fury, as he grabs onto the collar of Bokgi's shirt.

"You heard me, bastard."

And that was all it took for Yeongchang's fist to come flying across his face, knocking him to the concrete ground. Bokgi shook his head to centre himself, a hand reaching up to his face knowing a bruise will form.

"Bokgi-ssi!" Yeseul shouts in concern as she bends down, trying to help Bokgi up. But Bokgi only shrugs her concerns off.

"You know, for someone that beats people, you're kinda weak." Bokgi says, a taunting smile on his face. Yeongchang's face grows in even more fury as Bokgi stands up, dusting the dirt of his clothes.

"You—" Another punch comes, but Bokgi has enough playing victim, and he dodges the blow effortlessly. Yeongchang tries throwing an uppercut, but Bokgi is quick to block his arm and land one across his jaw. He doesn't hit hard enough for a bruise, but hard enough to hurt. Yeongchang stumbles back, almost surprised at the power of this high school rebel, but Bokgi stands tall.

Another punch comes, but Bokgi is faster to land one before Yeongchang could land his. Bokgi manages to catch Yeongchang off guard as he turns his arm backwards and pins it against his back. With every tug, Yeongchang is cursing in pain.

"One more word from you and I'll sprain your wrist. Or should I maybe crack your ribs?" Bokgi threatens. "You sick freak, beating up your girlfriend? And you have so many people looking up to you as an influencer?"

"Let go of me!" Yeongchang shouts in anger.

"You know, we have security cameras here, right? And they clearly saw you this morning and just now, raising your hand. They also caught you punching me first." Bokgi brings his lips closer to his ears. "How will that look, hm? A politician's son, on the news of beating his girlfriend?"

Yeongchang is lost, but still squirming. Bokgi slides his foot between his legs, letting him fall to the ground on his knees as Bokgi holds him in a kneeling position. From the corner of his eye, he spots Yeseul with the older Sol rubbing her back and Joon Hwi next to her with the rest of his friends.

"What-What do you want?"

"Promise you won't ever, ever touch noona like that again. If I find out on my own that she's hurt by you..." Bokgi tightens his grip on his wrist as Yeongchang grunts in pain. "Your wrist isn't the only thing that is going to be broken."

Bokgi finally lets go and steps away from Yeongchang, Joon Hwi joining Bokgi by his side.

"Get out. Now." Joon Hwi sternly barks as Yeongchang, still seething with anger, dust the dirt from his pants. He sets his eyes on Bokgi as he stares straight into the brown orbs.

"You...watch out. You'll pay." He says before turning on his heels and walking away, hands running in his hair with frustration. The group joins from behind, as Sol and Yeseul walk over to join. All of sudden, it occurred to Bokgi that Yeseul had to watch this, and he wished a deep pit swallowed him alive in that instant.

"Ah, Yeseul-noona... I'm sorry you had to watch that... I...I'm sorry." Bokgi mutters his apologies. Yeseul shakes her head slowly.

"Thank you for standing up for me. I'm sorry you had to get hurt." Yeseul says softly as Bokgi brings a hand up to his face. It's sore, and he finally tastes the slightest bit of metallic blood from the burst corner of his lips.

"Ah? This is nothing. I have it a lot worse in training." Bokgi shrugs it off. The older Sol hits him on the head lightly as Bokgi yelps.

"A lot worse in training? Do you want us to kill you before you get beaten to pulp? Take care of yourself, Min Bokgi!" Sol scolds. Yebeom passes him a wet wipe to wipe his sticky hand from the banana milk.

"You should get ice on the bruise." Yeseul says as she digs into her pockets for a small container and takes Bokgi's calloused hands before pressing it in.

"It's some ointment for bruises that I, you know..." She trails off. The older Sol just carefully places an arm around her.

"Are you going to break up with him?" Jiho asks, his head nodding in the direction of where Yeongchang left. Yeseul stayed silent as her lost eyes darted, her hand sweeping her hair away. Bokgi doesn't know where he gained the courage from, but he gently places a hand on her shoulder, careful to just let it rest.

"I'll protect you, okay?"

Yeseul looks into Bokgi's soft eyes as Bokgi gives a small smile. Even with a red bruised jaw, a burst lip, this man could still smile at her like an innocent child. Yeseul just nods, drawing a small smile out of her, as she suddenly feels a faith arise in her.

Bokgi might not have been able to protect her from the bruises then. But he will protect her heart and from the bruises now. Even if it means being beaten down countless times, he would protect her, each time.

She was worth protecting, even if she didn't feel the same.

[bewitching-elizabeth-olsen]

Press: Elizabeth Olsen’s 20/21 Vision

The Marvel star takes us inside her transformation to a new kind of hero

GALLERY LINKS

Studio Photoshoots > 2021 > Session 002

Magazine Scans > 2021 > Grazia

  GRAZIA: Elizabeth Olsen is a trooper. We are in a field in Surrey on the outskirts of the Marvel studios; it’s a biting minus one and she is standing in a Chanel broderie anglaise sundress and increasingly soggy UGG boots. Her feline cheekbones face skywards, but Olsen is slowly sinking into the mud, trilling out high notes to keep herself warm (possibly distracted) and of course with spirits high. “It was the wind I think, that was worse than the sideways rain,” she jokes as we trundle back to the soundstage hangar that we are using as a studio. It’s the kind of moment that could go viral on Instagram, that is, if Olsen were on social media. Yet one of the biggest stars of our current cultural moment is completely offline – and that surprising fact might just be the least interesting thing about her. If anything, it is a sign of how Olsen has come into her own as a confident, decisive star with the power to create her own universe.

On the cusp of her 32nd birthday, Olsen is fastidious and professional, yes, but also bright, engaging, creative, and collaborative. Born and raised in the California sunshine, she is surprisingly at ease in the blustery conditions that deluge the English countryside in late January – or, it’s that she’s very good at acting. “It was one of the ugliest days of this winter – just hilarious – but I knew we wanted the shot,” the 31-year-old actress says.

Since October, Olsen’s been living in the leafy British countryside with her “man-guy-partner,” musician Robbie Arnett, just a short drive to the Surrey compound where Doctor Strange is being filmed. It’s a closed set, masked in secrecy as much as the socially distanced masked crew dotted all over the 200-acre studio. “It feels right being in a small city right now,” she says.

Indeed, Olsen is a modern-day Renaissance woman. Learned and dedicated to her craft, she studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, with a semester at the Moscow Art Theatre School studying Stanislavski. (Surely, no matter how much of a genius the Russian theatre master was, he never could have conceived of the Marvel universe.)

Approached with the concept of WandaVision, “I thought it was perfect for television, and a very original idea that made me excited,” Olsen says. Also, she was happy she would get to work with Bettany again: “He’s very precise, like me.”

In many ways, WandaVision is a love letter to the first American television heyday. Olsen, who stayed up late watching Nick at Nite reruns as a child, says it’s a bit of a homecoming in that way. “I was a very hammy, performative child,” she explains. “So, I do think I got to live out some sort of childhood dream doing the show.”

“The highlight was really getting to tell a story about these superhero individuals told in different decades of American sitcoms, trying to match the tone of those sitcoms in order to help orate the story,” she says. “But keep it playful and fun.” Little did she know just how much we’d need that.

Half-filmed pre-pandemic in Atlanta and half post-pandemic in LA – with a six-month hiatus in-between “until all the unions figured out to work safely” – WandaVision was released almost a year into the pandemic. In many ways, it is an artifact of its time: centered upon a yearning for the simplicity of earlier days, yet shot through with the creeping realization that such days may never return, and perhaps never existed to begin with.

Indeed, the weekly story of suburban superheroes Wanda and Vision has played out like a parable of our times: Wanda living in her chosen bubble, her trauma resonating in the world we find ourselves in today. Olsen appreciates a good metaphor, but feels people may be projecting a bit much. “I see Wanda as a victim of extreme trauma, who does not understand how to process it,” she explains. “She has been a human experiment.” (Not to belabor the point, but haven’t we all?)

Being summoned by Marvel is like being called to a parallel universe for an actor: thrilling, yes, but not without a tinge of terror and a dash of the unknown. Six years in, though, it’s become like family in some ways. As a member of two dynasties – Olsen and Marvel – family is key to Olsen. She checks in on her mom (who still lives in California) and, like many American daughters, is researching which vaccine mom should get.

The performative gene runs strong through her family, of course – and no, we don’t mean her sisters. Olsen’s mom was a ballerina. Still, when she first started auditioning, Olsen took special care to carve her own path – one far from Full House. “Nepotism is a thing and I’m very aware of it,” she says. “And of course, I’ve always wanted to do it alone.” She did just that, her acting credentials consistently rising as her sister’s cemented their fashion kudos. Olsen bears a noticeable resemblance to her fashion-designer older sisters and her sartorial DNA is similarly low-key. She loves The Row (of course) and NYC label Khaite’s denim and cashmere.

For Olsen, her day job is like playing dress-up. This time around, she walked away from WandaVision with the girdle worn underneath her 50s wedding dress, laughing, “I mean, to have a custom undergarment like that, I felt like it was necessary!” Her WandaVision co-star, Kathryn Hahn, also became her shopping cohort when filming.

“She’s dangerous!” Olsen says. “She has the most exquisite, minimal but expensive taste.” It was Hahn who led Olsen to the independent boutique where she found the belted Julia Jentzsch trench that she wore to our shoot.

At the rail of samples compiled by the stylist, Olsen gravitates towards a spacious linen boilersuit and longline cashmere cardigan. Has she always been a tomboy, I ask? “I think I felt uncomfortable being a child being told they were pretty,” she says of her early auditions at age 10, adding that her love of ballet and musical theater could leave her “feeling exposed” at a young age.

Speaking of over-exposure, Olsen is distinctly offline in a time when so many are defined by their social media presence. Among celebrities and regular digital citizens, the perfect balance of online and off is up for debate, but Olsen is clear: social media saturation is a choice for all of us, and everyone needs to draw their own boundaries.

“It has to be a personal decision, right?” she begins. “So, my opinion has nothing to do with what anyone else does or doesn’t do with it.” Her own journey began when she momentarily dabbled with Instagram (since deleted), while filming Ingrid Goes West, director Matt Spicer’s frightening and funny debut feature about a social stalker, co-starring Aubrey Plaza.

Up until that time, she says, “I had never touched it before. I thought, ‘This is an interesting social experiment for myself, to see if it is a good source to talk about charities or a good source to talk about small projects, or to share something goofier about myself.’ But I think at the end of the day, what I discovered was one, I’m really bad at creating a perceived identity!”

“I didn’t find it very organic to who I am as a person,” she continues. “I found some joy in putting up silly videos, but I think the main reason I stopped – not I think, I know the main reason why I stopped – was because of the organization in my brain.”

“Lots of horrible things happen all the time. Or, lots of great things happen all the time. Whether it’s something terrifying, like a natural disaster or a school shooting or a death, there are so many things that happen, and I love processing information. I love reading articles. I love listening to podcasts. I love communicating about things that are happening in the world to people around me. And what I don’t love is that my brain organization was saying, ‘Should I post about this?’ That seemed very unhealthy ….”

“And to then contribute to these platitudes that I don’t really love, you have to subscribe to two different ways of thinking,” she says. “So, I didn’t like that, and there was a lot of it that was just bothering me for my own sake of what value systems I have.”

That’s not to say that there’s any inherent value system – pro or con – in using Instagram. Olsen is clear that like any other method of expression, it’s up to the individual to use it as they see fit. “I do see a use of it and how you can use it well for work,” she says. “But I don’t think that I would like to use that tool to promote myself.”

She’s private for a millennial yes, but not prim. On the photoshoot, lockdown experiences were shared, and Olsen recounted her (hilarious) first at-home bikini wax: banishing her husband upstairs “for an extended chat with his therapist,” her trusted waxer on speed dial, and microwave set to ping! (Yes, Olsen is a trooper, as I mentioned.)

We catch up over Zoom a week later, her hair once again pulled up in a casual topknot, her cashmere turtleneck simmering in a dark claret, and her entire being suffused with covetable understatement. She chats buoyantly against an unexpected backdrop of pirate ship wallpaper in the playroom of a house she shares with Arnett, who proposed with an emerald and diamond ring in 2019.

“We first started to try to make it the gym, but it was so cramped,” she says of the jolly space. The home gym was instead awarded a larger room, where Olsen loves to maintain a varied fitness regime – running, yoga, dancing, more – though after all the intense Marvel filming, she jokes, “maybe it’s time to give up on my body?!” Being comic book fit does sound grueling or “time-consuming fun” as she anoints the “strenuous physical demands.”

Like most of us, she is longing for the spring, but she still takes a regular constitutional walk in a nearby Richmond park, whatever the weather. “The deer are incredible; every time I see them I feel alive,” she says. “We have been lucky to have nature around us in lockdown.” It’s a marked difference from her paparazzi-populated home in the Hills. “They know our walks, where we get coffee, work-out…,” she trails off.

Her haven in Los Angeles is her backyard, complete with a mid-century swimming pool and an edible garden. “It’s crazy the blackberries grow like weeds! I love watching a kid’s first reaction to an edible garden,” she gushes That has been the part of the pandemic travel restrictions she’s found hardest: missing her friend’s children growing up, and others who have been born this past year that she’s yet to meet. They will no doubt all be treated to her homemade blackberry sorbet on her return stateside.

Yet, her time on British soil will likely be prolonged, with a prospective indie commencing filming here when Doctor Strange wraps. Prompted for more detail, her firm charm kicks in. “I can’t jinx it!” she insists. Still, she will share that she’s heavily involved in the creative, and that funding smaller productions in the current climate has been a challenge.

Through it all, Olsen has remained determined and calm. “I feel patience is my superpower. But my weakness also,” she says. “I feel like it gets tested more than others who don’t have a lot of patience. If someone learns you’re easygoing or that you’re relaxed, sometimes it gets taken advantage of.” While she waits for the green light on that film, she is busy producing a new children’s cartoon with Arnett, “about loving and caring for our world,” and has also written a children’s book about to be published by Random House, all while the demands of Marvel life continue to surround her.

Indeed, Olsen is a superhero for the modern age: Multi-hyphenate, but fiercely devoted to the craft that she loves; instantly recognizable, yet thoughtfully protective of her private life; a woman with style, substance, success, and deep rewarding relationships with those around her; focused on a vision of a better world for us all.

Press: Elizabeth Olsen’s 20/21 Vision was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

[artificialqueens]

I'm Not Into Sometimes, Chapter 2 (Rosnali) - SnowBun

A/N: Very proud of this chapter <3 finally feel myself getting back to the writing style I enjoy the most. I hope you like reading this is as much as I like writing it. much love everyone xx

Summary: When Denali goes viral for posting a dance video, she doesn’t expect it to lead her to becoming a choreographer for Rosé, an up and coming singer destined for fame. Denali thinks that this might be her first (and only) shot at achieving her dream. If only her dream wasn’t wrapped up in a flurry of pink hair, charm and a supposedly professional relationship.

—

Release comes in the sound of blades scraping against ice. It is the feeling of her core tightening as she pushes off the ground and becomes the world turning on its axis. She is this moment of weightlessness and control.

Then her head begins to fog with visions of spinning rose-colored tops across a dark wooden floor, so endlessly mesmerizing. Her mind fills with questions of intrigue and challenge, the first time she’s ever seen duality so up close. Oh, to be so breathlessly enamored by beauty and talent.

It’s the loss of focus that weighs her down, causing her to land shakily on her right foot. She extends her left leg for balance and slides not-so-gracefully on the ice. She hears Olivia cheer in the sidelines, all bright white smile and wonder. It brings her back to the rink and away from the studio.

She skates over, pressing her forehead to the fence. “It’s not so bad.” She thinks. The rest of the world is slowly but surely getting hooked on Rosé, and she lives up to every expectation and more. She thinks it’s perfectly normal to feel a little charmed by her.

Even if she was a bitch at first.

“What’s wrong?”

Then again, she can’t quite answer Olivia’s question. She isn’t a fan from half way across the world. She’s the damn choreographer. She’s in New York, seeing her old friends and grasping onto her dream.

Said dream just had to come in the form of pink hair and clear brown eyes.

She shakes her head and smiles. “Nothing’s wrong, Liv.”

—

At first, she thinks she’s just so tired that she’s seeing things. When she blinks, she realizes that her eyes aren’t lying and that Rosé really is right there, sitting on the dance studio floor at 6:30 in the morning. She’s staring at intently at her phone, with an expression that can only be described as upset fury. She becomes too absorbed in typing to even notice Denali come in.

“Hey.”

She looks up and her face softens into a small smile. There it goes again, that weird feeling of nakedness that comes with being looked at by those eyes. The combination of this and the lack of sleep is disconcerting, but she manages to smile back anyway.

“Hey.” Rosé procures a coffee cup from behind her and reaches up to pass it. “I got you coffee.”

It takes her a minute to process, way too taken aback by the gesture. She’s always prided herself on being difficult to phase, but when a woman who is basically her employer that she barely knows hands her coffee, it’s hard not to act surprised.

Nonetheless, she accepts it gratefully, muttering a ‘thanks’ as she sits down on the floor beside her.

For a while, she stills as Rosé continues to type with such force that Denali’s scared that she might end up cracking the screen somehow. She wonders in silence, but she’d be lying if she says she’s not tempted to cross the arbitrary line and ask if something is wrong.

“Sorry.” Rosé’s voice suddenly rings clear, but the world around them still feels quiet, tranquil almost. “Just a lot of stuff that needs to get done before the video shoot.”

“Mmm,” Denali says, as she sips her coffee. “It’s fine, I don’t mind.”

Even if the phone has been tucked into the pocket of her bag, Rosé opts for stretching out her legs in front of her and yawning instead of getting up. She turns her head to look at the choreographer whose gaze is directed at the cup in her hand.

“So,” She draws out the word lazily, cocking her head to the side. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What do you think of Phenomenon?”

It’s a difficult question to answer. If she says something bad, she’s kicked off this project. If she says something good, she’s just kissing ass. She knows that the only right answer to this question is her own opinion, but when her mother told her that honesty is the best policy, she’s not sure this is the situation that she had in mind.

“Honestly?” Rosé nods. “I think it’s great. The lyrics are good, the production is amazing, your vocals are fantastic. Plus it’s your own brand of witty and self-assured. Not sure what’s not to like there.”

She isn’t sure if this was the answer Rosé expected from her. All she hears is a sigh and they sink once again into that comfortable silence while Denali finishes her coffee. She doesn’t really know much, or anything really, about the woman beside her, but in the stillness of the morning, she feels comfortable.

“Right,” Rosé’s voice is soft and she hates herself for the ache that starts to bloom in her chest. “What’s not to like?”

She tries to ignore it, that stupid idea that this true vulnerability and not just small talk between colleagues; but she sees those eyes staring into the empty space, watches the beams of sunlight give her a blush halo. The ache spreads through her body and she bites her tongue to stop from begging to know what she could possibly not like.

Denali stands up and throws away her cup in a bin in the corner of the room. “Anyway,” She reaches out a hand to help her up. “We should get to work.”

Rosé smirks up at her and she thinks that the ache is threatening to cause an implosion. “Oh, so she’s all work and no play, huh?” She says, grabbing at her hand.

Then they’re face to face and Denali can feel the tug, that back and forth that comes with the competition that is flirting. She laughs a little, tries her best to play it cool. “I have to work hard if I want to play hard, don’t I?”

She walks away with a pair of eyes on her back and an ache that won’t go away.

—

“Are you going to spill all the tea now or what?”

Her eyebrows raise behind the glass of vodka cranberry that she’s holding. Of course, Mik wants to get straight to the gossip. She’d be surprised with any other conversation starter to their Friday night, almost a week since she’d arrived in New York. The bar Mik chose is a little too crowded for her taste, filled with other women who have been eyeing her. She notices but she ignores it in favor of the woman in front of her.

“What happened to ‘how have you been, Denali?’ or ‘how’s New York, Denali?’”

“Okay whatever,” Mik rolls her eyes. “How are you?”

“Tired.” She answers in a heartbeat.

“And would that have anything to do with a certain singer whose name rhymes with… shit, I can’t think of anything.”

She purses her lips together. If she’s honest, working with Rosé is probably the least tiring thing on her agenda. The ice skating in the early evenings as a bid to tire herself to sleep hasn’t been working. All its led to is sleepless nights staring at the ceiling until she sees the first vestiges of day creep through the windows, signaling another turn on the earth’s axis.

In the studio with Rosé, she can at the very least find some peace. The understanding that they are both good at what they do and the comfort of knowing that each day with her is a chance to know her more drives her to get out of bed and into the studio.

“A part of it, yeah.” It’s the tiniest bit of truth and Mik doesn’t look one bit sated by it. “What else am I supposed to tell you?”

“Oh, come on,” It’s that signature Mik whine that finally gets a laugh out of her. “You have to tell me something, anything!”

“You’re an MUA that works with runway models. You know enough famous people as it is.”

“That doesn’t make me any less curious about them.”

She bites her tongue when she hears those words. It’s not like she’s any different. Every morning with Rosé is an established routine with coffee and curiosity on both ends. The existing respect for each other’s craft makes them both wonder about the person underneath.

So, they start to ask questions. How’s New York? Where’d you get the coffee? How’s your morning? What’s the name of that guy on TV who used to host Fear Factor and is a shithead now?

Like clockwork, the questions morph into flirting. It’s standard, innocent, verging on comfortable even. Rosé is always the first to break into a blush, true to her name. At times, Denali thinks that she may have gone too far, but then she sees those eyes again, all amusement and interest. Each interaction is a chance for the ache to spread somewhere new along with the growing assurance that there’s nothing to dislike.

“I don’t know, okay?” She finally lets out. “We work great together and we get along, but it’s not like, ‘ooo, you’re my new bestie’ or anything like that.”

“Hmm,” Mik lets out a him, popping the straw out of her mouth. “That’s interesting.”

“Why is that interesting?”

“Let’s just say my sources tell me she doesn’t get along with everyone.”

Her eyebrows scrunch together at that. Sure, she understands that Rosé isn’t exactly everyone’s glass of wine, especially with the cold seriousness that she handles her music, but she respects that about her.

What’s not to like?

“Well, I don’t think she’s a bitch, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Or maybe you want to be her bitch…”

“Oh, fuck you!” She throws a tissue at Mik’s face as the model cackles in delight. Her phone suddenly chimes, a message from an unknown number popping up on the screen.

?: hey, I got your number from Tamisha

“Who is it?”

Damn her and her expressive features. She keeps quiet, brain going at breakneck speed to think of all the reasons why she’s texting on a Friday night when she probably has at least a hundred different parties to go to and a thousand different women trying to catch her eye.

Denali: really hope this is rose and not the guy standing outside Tamisha’s office who keeps asking me out

“It’s just Rosé.” She watches Mik’s mouth turn into an O-shape and she throws another tissue. “No, no, not what you’re thinking, sweetie.”

At least she doesn’t think so. Harmless flirting is one thing, but getting her number from her manager? They keep stepping closer and closer to the line and she thinks she sees the chalk start to smudge.

?: sorry to disappoint, it’s just rosé

Denali: too bad. what’s up?

“She’s texting you on a fucking Friday night.” Mik sounds absolutely dumbfounded. “Sounds a lot more than professional to me.”

She knows that Mik is right. They don’t even have practice tomorrow, so she can’t justify it as a possible cancellation. She’s about to come out with some boldfaced lie when her phone vibrates on the table.

Rose: just thought you should have my number. ps: my name is not rose

Olivia arrives and she slams her phone right down on the table.

“I’m buying us a round of shots.

—

She hates this. She loves this. Saturday morning is now the distant tip-tap of heels against the floor, click in the brain, a switch to her soul. Wake up, wake up, wake up. This is not home, it’s not her hotel room. It’s just a cold floor where she has some peace.

Then she hears that voice, every note of the song a gentle wave rushing in to carry her away from her body. Her eyes are glued shut, but it doesn’t matter when she’s already left her body behind on the shore. The voice grows louder, closer, and the waves start to grow. Her body is too far away now and she’s not sure if her eyes will ever open again.

Wake the fuck up.

“Denali?”

A poke to the ribs sends her rushing back into her own body. An involuntary groan escapes her lips and she hears a laugh from above her. She scrunches her eyes shut, terrified that any form of light might cost her the ability to see.

“What the hell?”

Her voice sounds like a croak to her ears and she manages to roll over onto her back. With a moment of preparation, she cracks open an eye. She’s greeted by the sight of Rosé kneeling over her barely functioning body, clearly trying her best not to laugh. Again, she groans and Rosé can no longer help herself.

“Why are you here?”

Honestly, she’s not sure about the answer to that one. There are bits and pieces of memories from last night printed on the back of her eyelids, but it’s all too fuzzy for her to try to piece together immediately. She remembers the sound of Olivia’s laughter mingling with Mik’s voice as they watched her throw back a seventh shot. The memory causes pain to start creeping into her head and she makes a promise to herself to never drink again.

There’s the sound of shuffling and when she looks up, Rosé isn’t kneeling above her anymore. She assumes that she’s sick and tired of her hungover ass, a perfectly valid response in her opinion. Then she hears humming beside her and sighs, glad that validity has no place in this situation. She closes her eyes again, losing herself to the light behind her eyes to ease the throbbing at her temples.

“Isn’t it a Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you here?”

“I asked you first.”

Her hands fly up to her face. Rosé is laughing again and the pain starts to spread throughout every part of her head. If only it would subside, maybe she’d finally have the energy to actually be embarrassed about waking up on the floor of her workplace.

“Went drinking.”

“Ah, and how’s that going for you?” There’s a smile in her voice. Fuck it, she thinks as she jumps straight over the line of professionalism with a flip of her middle finger. Oh well, it’s not as if this whole situation has pretty much created a void where the line should be.

“Your turn.”

Rosé goes quiet. She focuses on the sound of their breathing. Inhale, exhale. The expansion of her sides with every controlled gulp of air. She hears a plane overhead, letting the escape of air follow it far away from city streets.

“Just wanted to get away for a while.”

She turns her head, sees pale pink rose petals sprawled out on the dark floor. In the gentle light of a Saturday morning, her eyes break her promise to herself, drinking in the sight of weary beauty. She thinks she’s just hungover, but she believes she’s never seen anyone quite so pretty before.

“Well,” She looks back up at the ceiling, stark white staring back at her. “Same here.”

—

By 10:00 PM, she’s burying herself in sheets. She’s never been much of a fan of stillness, but she thinks the last week might be changing her mind.

A few hours earlier, she’d replied to Mik and Olivia’s texts, asking her if she was okay. She cursed and reassured them in the same breath. When they’d asked her where she’d ended up, she had said, “passed out on the floor.”

Half a truth is good enough, right?

If she had told them everything, she’d have to tell them that she laid in the studio for half an hour with Rosé’s humming the only thing cutting through the pounding in her head. She would have to tell them that she’d stumbled as she got up, letting warm hands guide her as she learned to stand. She’d have to tell them of the exchange of tender smiles, so different from the tug of war of flirtation that she’s accustomed to.

Her phone lights up. She expects Mik or Olivia, even Kahmora. No, she only sees that name and she giggles to herself like a damn teenager, a quiet admission that she’s allowed something to change.

Rose: pls tell me you didn’t go drinking again

Denali: I actually like having more than one brain cell, thanks

Rose: great, don’t want to have to pick you up off the floor again

Denali: won’t you ever let me live it down rose?

Rose: only if you start spelling my name right

Denali: the accent’s too much of an effort

Rose: then use my real name

Denali: ???

Rose: call me rosie

A smile graces her lips and she shoots off one last message. She places her phone on the nightstand and buries herself in the blankets, drifting into her first good sleep in a long time.

Denali: alright, night rosie

—

Monday morning suddenly frees up when Rosé says she has to move their session to the evening to make room for interviews. She fills up the rest of her morning by replying to emails about skating gigs for when she eventually returns home. She has lunch with Mik and Olivia and when they inevitably begin to pry, she stays mum on what she can only now describe as her complicated friendship with Rosé. She returns to the hotel and lets herself sleep, turning the feeling of being well-rested into a brand-new addiction.

When she arrives at the studio at 7, there’s no one there. While it isn’t like Rosé to be late, she doesn’t text. She assumes that she’s coming from yet another one of many interviews that she kindly referred to as, “shitheads trying to get way too personal.”

She settles for freestyling to loosen up while she waits. When the music starts, she feels herself break. Every moment is grounded in her own brand of ferocity and well, sex. There’s comfort in her own body, in the knowing that it is a temple of worship to herself. A signal from her brain to move, a single fluid motion, all indulgent offerings to the pleasure only she will ever feel. She throws herself into the fire and the sensation of pleasure starts to build.

The door opens, but she doesn’t, can’t stop. She feels like she’s hovering over the floor, on the brink of climax. The song peaks and she almost gasps, dropping to her knees and letting her back hit the floor. She takes a deep breath, relishes the feeling of being alive.

“Sorry.” She’s apologizing, but she’s not sure for what.

“I…” For once, Rosé is at a loss for words. Her quick wit has been thrown out the window and is probably being dragged around under the wheels of a taxi. She laughs breathily as she gets to her feet.

When their eyes meet, the air turns heavy with unspoken words and desire. She tries to look away, but she can’t. Brown gazes meet and for the first time, she permits herself the thought of what it would be like to kiss her. Maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“Uhm, okay! Let’s get started?” Rosé bursts out and she thinks that she might have won this round.

If the singer seems more distracted than usual, she doesn’t say anything about it.

—

The water in the shower is still cold when she receives a text that evening.

Rosie: no need to meet me for the rest of the week. We need four dancers for the video, auditions on wed

The water suddenly seems warm and for the first time in her life, she thinks she’s finally learning what it’s like to lose.

—

[insanely-creative-things]

Big Hero 7: The Series

www.fanfiction.net

Big Hero 7 S2

Prey Date

*The two boys, Fred and Hiro, have decided to take a dude's day off where for today, they can play video games together. This video game in particular is a Monster brawl game arena which the two are going toe to toe... until Fred gets hungry.*

Fred: Wait wait wait! Snack break!

*Fred goes over to his popcorn bowl, but finds it empty. Then to his delight he found some popcorn on the floor.*

Fred: Five Second rule!

*But when Fred eats the popcorn pieces, Baymax speaks.*

Baymax: The five second rule is a common myth. Harmful bacteria cling to food immediately upon contact.

Fred: What?!

Hiro: Come on Fred I'm in the middle of a twelve hit super combo!

*Hiro's purple monster is delivering the combo onto Fred's Monster avatar.*

Fred: But this is a snack emergency! And I'm out of clean popcorn!

Hiro: Yeah, and you are also out of HP.

*And just like that, Hiro's monster avatar defeats Fred's monster with colossal damage...and then it dabs like a boss.*

Fred: No fair, I wasn't paying attention! Time out.

Hiro: Fred, there's no time outs.

Mama Frederickson: AHH!

Fred and Hiro: Time out!

*Hearing Fred's mother scream gave them reason to investigate and save her, with Baymax waddling behind. But when they arrive to the scource of the scream, all they see is Mama Frederickson showing a video of a puppy to a Liv Amara.*

Mama Frederickson: Its so darling!

Hiro: OK...not what I expected.

Fred: Yeah, my mom's a joy screamer. Honestly its embarresin-*Sees Chris carrying cupcakes* AH! Cupcakes!*

*While Liv Amara talks to Mama Frederickson, Hiro's mind races back to the dinner attack from Momakase, where Cora shared what she had learned about Liv Amara. While he was ticked off that Liv Amara snubbed him because of Baymax's true creator, he wouldn't pinpoint Liv Amara to any thing that Krei would do... but when she brought up what she learned, the scales and schedule, and Krei's behavior to check that his resentment is more than jealousy, and how Orso only went after her alone. It had been a shock to all of them, especially Grandville, but they knew that Cora would never make something like this up. So while Fred is more or less neutral(Though slightly wary) of the 23 year old business woman, Hiro's suspicion flipped on and so he began to check her every move and action... just in case.*

Mama Frederickson: Boys! Look at this hilarious puppy!

Liv: I hate to admit it but I'm addicted to these viral videos.

Baymax: My scan indicates zero viruses on that video. It is safe.

Liv: Literal robot, also cute!

Chris: I bet the internet would love him! Cupcake anyone?

*Fred grabs four cupcakes, two for himself and one for Hiro and Cora.*

Mama Frederickson: Before we talk about investment opportunities Miss Amara, I've been meaning to ask about your progress on curing my dear friend Orso Knox.

Liv: Oh... Orso Knox of course... I'm confident we're two to three weeks from a breakthrough.

Mama Frederickson: Well that's a relief to hear. Oh liv! Have you seen the sleepy hedgehog?

Liv: How couldn't I? I made it into a meme on Sycorax's lifestyle blog.

*Hearing about Orso Knox immediately brought to mind about Cora's words... and a certain interview Liv had. And so, after Fred and Hiro leave the women be, they pulled up a chat room and contacted the gang.*

Hiro; OK guys, remember how Cora brought up about Orso Knox and Liv Amara? She said something very familiar today.

Baymax: Yes, I am often told I am cute. I am not programmed to know what that means.

Gogo: I don't think Hiro meant that.

Hiro: Exactly, here's what I mean.

*Soon on each of the member's laptop showed Liv Amara's interview with Bluff Dunder on the subject of curing Orso Knox. Cora gently places her Eve robot to the table as she listens carefully.*

Bluff: Random aside Liv, how is that mutated fellow, so horribly mutated...what was it- Orso Knox?

Liv: I'm confident we're two to three weeks from a breakthrough.

Hiro: Its the exact same answer she said to Fred's mom, and this was two months ago!

Cora: You would have thought someone like Liv Amara would have harder at curing Orso Knox since he was her investor.

Honey Lemon: What do you suppose we do? We can't just go in and ask.

Wasabi: The tour was a one time thing to us.

Gogo: You need an employee or intern to get in.

*That's when all eyes are directed to Cora.*

Cora: Oh...

Hiro: Cora, you still have your intern invite right?

Cora: I still do.

Hiro: Then maybe... you can accept and check to see whats really happening to Orso Knox?

*Cora looks at her feet, then to Hiro. Soon her face grows with determination and a confident smile. Karmi is in the darkness of her lab, studying over her viruses when she sees a figure of Liv Amara and someone beside her. The lights turn on as Karmi removes her googles.*

Liv: Hello Karmi, say hello to our new Marine-Biology intern Cora.

*Karmi's eyes widened in shock as Cora gives a sheepish wave hello. Unknown to the women around the girl there was an ear piece on her with Hiro listening in.*

Hiro: Oh... right... Karmi...

Fred: Whats wrong with her?

Hiro: You do remember that Karmi hates our guts right? Cause we're younger than her and go to SFIT? Cause we're a couple?

Gogo: And how Cora responds to Karmi's snipes.

Hiro: *To Cora* Its OK Cora, you got this.

*Cora nods in response and puts on her best smile.*

Liv: Cora and I had a small discussion and she agreed that she would be an intern for a test run, to see what its like here! Be nice to our new Marine Bio intern Karmi, and direct her to her new lab!

*And so Liv leaves the two teen girls alone. Cora looks at Karmi who is ready to explode only for her to put on her most sickly sweet smile and walk her towards the Marine lab. While on the way some of the employees greet Cora warmly as the blue haired teen merely nods. While the girls are nearing the marine Bio lab Cora speaks up.*

Cora: So... Have you heard anything related about Orso Knox?

Karmi: What about it?

Cora: Well, it has been quiet some time and we hadn't gotten any word about any cure for him. And its been over two months.

Karmi: Someone's impatient.

*Cora sighs, but then she realizes something that could play to her ego. Well.. time to please the devil herself.*

Cora: OK, how about you show me around the lab? Afterall, Hiro only got see the main lab, but not all its juicy secrets.

*This catches Karmi's attention and soon she smirks at Cora.*

Karmi: OK then, I'll show you... after you set up any progress on your lab!

*Cora's lab opens and Karmi shoves her inside.*

Karmi: Meet me at the main elevator at break... fish girl.

*The door slams as Cora flinches. She sighs deeply before she turns to the lab. To a bit of her comfort there were tanks now filled with clown fishes and the most adorable school of baby cuttlefish swimming freely.*

Cora: *To Hiro via earpiece* OK Hiro, I'm in. And Karmi agreed to take me around the lab.

Hiro: Good, that way you can figure out which one has Orso Knox and check on him...Also.. good job stroking her ego.

Cora: Its what I do best... aside from roasting her.

*Cora turns to the cuttle fish as she smiles gently, stroking her finger on the glass as the baby cuttlefish curiously look at her.*

Cora: I think you are my highlight of the day little cuties. considering how I'll have to deal with she who shall not be named and finding Orso Knox, you're gonna be the sugar that makes the medicine go down.

*And so Cora sets to work on her progress for her Marine Bio major, setting out potential patterns of weather and studying over the movement of all the marine life holograms. She also made sure to feed the fishes and cuttlepods, though she ignored how they seem to be wriggling in excitement whenever she hummed a song she knew. But soon enough Cora got tired and closed her eyes as she lays her head down to rest on the table to sleep.*

(?):*Faint*W-

(?):*Soft* Wake up...

(?):*Soft* Hurry! Wake up!

*Cora's eyes fluttered as she heard rather young and cuteish voices of children ring through her ears . At first she thought it was remnants of a soon to be forgotten dream, but when she stretched her arms and checked over her surroundings, the voices did not go away... it became stronger and frantic.*

(?): You have to get out of here!

(?) That red lady is not what she seems!

(?): Go away from this place!

*Cora's eyes tried to look for any person that could be in the room or even a speaker. If this was some sick prank then she would take note to punch the prankster in the throat. But there was neither a person or stereo. That is when Cora turns her head to see the adorable clown fish and cuttle fishes pressing their heads to the glass.*

ClownFishes and Cuttlefishes: RUN CORA!

Cora: AHHHH!

*Cora lifts her head up to shake her head out of the nightmare she had. She places her hand over her heart where she looks around sees nothing out of place. Though while the fishes and cuttlepods are safe, they are staring at her funny... That's when she realizes she was on the floor. She quickly picks herself up and brushes herself off.*

Hiro: Cora? Are you OK?

Cora: Y-Yeah... I'm fine...

*Cora looks at the clock up ahead and sees its almost time, and so she sets out her way through the main lab a few minutes early to meet up with... her... As she arrived she looked around the team who are busy doing their research she did note one thing... a file that lead to-*

Karmi: Hurry up Cora.

*Cora's attention is snapped back to Karmi, who she sighs sadly before joining her to the elevator.*

Karmi: So, where do you wanna go?

Cora:*Looks at the pad and points to the lowest level carelessly.*

Karmi: Ya know that's only reserved for the most important scientists...

*Cora sighs as she prepares to hear Karmi go on a tangent.*

Karmi: And I can't take you there. That's the most exclusive labs there where the really important stuff is.

Cora: *Blinks in surprise* What?

Karmi: Last time I tried to go I had to be dragged up to Liv Amara's office! Thankfully, being her FAVORITE intern, I got off easy.

*Cora blows a piece of her hair from her face. So much for that. And so they arrive at the second lowest floor, with Karmi stepping off walking ahead.*

Karmi: And so to your right you'll see where we store the cellular molecuels of the rare greenery and pesticides, and if you look to your left..

*But it seemed that in Karmi's state of showing off she forgot to check that Cora actually followed her. The blue haired teen looked at Karmi and then to the pad and then decided to press it. The lowest floor, level 6. When the doors to the elevator open again Cora steps off carefully, seeing a lone door in front of her. She noticed a key pad in front of her, telling her its passcoded.*

Hiro: Cora? Where are you?

Cora: Hiro? Can you hear me?

Hiro: A little, where are you now?

Cora: I'm at the lowest level of the building, there's one door in front of me. I'm gonna check it out.

Hiro: Be careful Babe.

Cora: I will Hiro. I love you.

Hiro: Love you too.

*Cora finds the most worn keys and pressed enter. The lights turn on as she looks inside, where soon all sorts of biological related science enters. Rows of eyes look at her as numerous jars of brains from largest to smallest neatly stacked. As of while Hiro is back at his room trying to get connection to Cora.*

Hiro: Cora! Cora can you hear me?

Baymax: It seems you have lost connection.

Hiro: The lower level must be scrambling the waves!

*Cora sees over the strange creatures and items, her heart beat being the only tangible sound... until she heard a soft growl. Cora turns her head to see behind the room a large set of cells... with one occupied creature she knows all too well. Liv Amara is heading over to Cora's lab, carrying in her hands a cup of tea; she is planning to talk to her about her grandmother's book. Now that she is a sycorax intern she can learn whatever secrets the old book may hold. But when she reaches there she finds it empty.*

Liv: Chris?...Where is Cora?

Chris: Oh! I saw her earlier with Karmi.

*Cora slowly walks towards the cell, her footsteps echoing through the hall. As she draws closer the figure takes more clearer shape as the creature opens it familiar blue eyes. Cora felt it pierce her soul as she sees Orso Knox, trapped behind the cell like an animal.*

Cora: Mr. Knox?

Knox:...What do you want?

*Karmi is currently at the dangerous viruses lab wearing her biohazard suit.*

Karmi: And if you see here-

Liv:*Camera* Karmi.

Karmi: *Jumping slightly* Miss Amara! How are you?

Liv: Where are you and Cora?

Karmi: At the Viruses laboratory, she's right-

*But when she turns around she finally realizes that she had been alone all this time.*

Liv: Karmi… where is Cora?

*Cora slightly jumps at Orso Knox's voice. It had been the same deep and powerful growl that had haunted the team and san Fransokyo since his attack.*

Cora: Are you alright Mr. Knox?

Knox: Does it look like I'm fine?

*Cora flinches at the tone, but holds her ground.*

Cora: I suppose not... considering you're still here.

*That is when Knox's eyes widened in surprise. He slowly approaches near the cell door where the young girl looks up.*

Knox: You can understand me?

Cora: Yes? Considering you spoke? Whats going on Mr. Knox? Liv Amara said that they should've cured you by now! But instead you're still here.

Knox: That's all Liv Amara is good for. Lies! Everything she says is a lie!

Cora: What happened to you Mr. Knox?

Knox: Liv Amara did this to me! I-If I see her I will rip her to pieces and throw it to the poisons she makes!

Cora: Mr. Knox! Please calm down!

*Knox pants heavily as he looks at the young girl, her eyes still holding the fear he placed, but alongside it the care and concern for him.*

Knox: You need to run, tell Big Hero 7 about Liv Amara! She's only just begun!

*That is when door shuts behind her and the lights turn bright red, blaring an alarm in this dark lab. Meanwhile at the very top, it was a more calming ding letting the workers know to search for a missing intern; and Liv Amara goes forward to look for Cora... she has some questions that Cora should answer. The blue haired teen covers ears tightly as Knox howls in pain, his increased sense of hearing feeling like tanks setting off his ears. That is when Cora sees her own name tag glow a dark red. And suddenly her feet became stuck to the floor. That's when it starts dragging her through the floor!*

Cora: AAHHHH! HELP!

*Cora tries to run to back to the cell, holding tightly the pad near him, but the force pulls her away... but not without her accidentally pressing the release button on Orso Knox's cell. Knox sees with his own eyes Cora being dragged away by the tag around her neck... if she is found by Liv Amara or by her goons then she would be doomed.*

Chris: Everyone! Check every room in the facility, the first one to find her brings her to Liv Amara immediately!

*Cora continues screaming as she tries to remove the tag from her neck. Whatever technology Liv Amara made, it made sure to make her tag be bio magnet to carry her around. She finally stops being dragged when she is in view shot of a couple scientists and Karmi.*

Scientist: There you are!

*Cora held her breath as she sees the scientitsts' and Karmi's faces; with the adults its presumed worry over her safety, with Karmi its ' ya brat'.*

Scientist: Where were you? We've been worried sick!

Cora: I-I was-

Karmi: Save it Cora! You're gonna get it now-

Knox: *GROOOOWWWWLLLLL!*

*The scientists and Karmi gasp in horror as they see Knox charge through the hall and land in front of Cora. The scientists and bio intern backing up.*

Knox: DON'T GO NEAR HER YOU BOOT LICKING RATS!

*Knox then picks Cora up in his hand and soon runs through the halls in inhumane speed.*

Cora: What are you doing Mr. Knox?!

Knox: Getting both of us out of this hell!

*The scientists either had dodged out of the way or tried to grab whatever weapon they could use to subdue him, but his superior speed and intellect made him nearly unstoppable. When Liv Amara is about to enter the elevator she sees Orso Knox launch through the emergency staircase to the entrance. That is when Liv sees the person in his hands.*

Liv: Cora!

*Orso's eyes turned to Liv Amara as he growled with death in his eyes.*

Orso: I will not let you silence this one as you had those before! You will pay for this Liv Amara...O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

*He crashes through the building, running outside into the outskirts of San Fransokyo. As of while, Karmi gets up from being slammed against the door when she sees an ear piece on the floor, curiously she picks it up to figure out who it belonged to. But when she headed up she began to hear a voice coming from the ear piece.*

Hiro: Cora? Are you alright? Can you hear me?

Baymax: The connection is stronger. She should be able to hear you clearly now.

Karmi: Hiro! what the hell are you doing!

*Hiro, from his side, jumped from the sudden screeching of Karmi's voice. He gets up and tries to calm himself down.*

Hiro: Oh! Hey..Karmi… so uh.. c-could I talk to my girlfriend right now-

Karmi: You're precious girlfriend is now Monster chow you creep!

*That's when he hears the crunch of the ear piece from Hiro's side, indicating that Karmi destroyed it.*

Baymax: Karmi destroyed the-

Hiro: Wait... Monster?...No! No!

*But soon enough, he could hear the TV and news playing, showing the monster Orso Knox, with Cora in his hands.*

Hiro: CORA!

*Immediately Hiro calls forth the gang to meet up at the garage, already planning out whatever strategy to stop Knox and save Cora. From his sight as he passed the Café Cass covers her mouth as she sees Knox run through the city with the girl in his claws!*

Cass: Oh no!

*Mizuchi is already leaving the city to search for Knox and Cora, his heart racing a mile a minute as Kaguya goes to Cass... alongside her Kage. Now, Kage had met Cass before, and after his surgery. But he could only mutter a few words before he turns quiet. But Cass and Kaguya did not fail to see the genuine concern for Cora's safety in his eyes. Hiro saw it too... and that's when Kage sees him. Hiro and Kage stare at each other for a few seconds before Hiro shakes his head to concentrate.*

Hiro: Later Kage… Cora needs me.

*Kage says nothing as he sees Hiro run off to join his friends... he gives a soft smile to him, knowing that they will succeed.*

Honey Lemon: Poor Cora!

Wasabi: Why didn't we think of giving her any weapons for self defense?!

Gogo: Guys! Now is not the time to beat ourselves up.

Hiro: Exactly, Cora needs us! First we suite up.

Fred: Not to nitpick but while your silver suits did work for us, it didn't work so much for Orso Knox.

Hiro: I know. I'm gonna upgrade it, and give myself some new weapons. This time with more aquatic features.

*And so Hiro sets off to work, making sure to combine his tech expertise with marine Bio as the gang either practiced fighting or kept any updates on the Monster search.*

Bluff: This is Mr. Dunder on Channel seven news. Just today, the calm and sunny afternoon turned into a storm of horror as the mutated monster, formerly known as Orso Knox, had escaped from Sycorax and is in a rampage with one intern trapped in his claws. As the police and search party and Big Hero 7 soon to arrive to rescue the intern and stop this monster, we may have to ask ourselves this: Just how reliable is Sycorax after this monstrous catastrophe?

*That is when a cup of tea is thrown to the TV, which causes both the TV and cup to shatter. Liv is looking at all her investors, both current and future ones, currently asking her competence about this situation, even questioning her ability to help Knox. That is when the hologram of Nozako appears, her face still in the shadows.*

Nozako: It Seems like your little pet monster has escaped Liv Amara.

Liv: Whatever that blue haired brat has done, I'm gonna rip into her and-!

*The load echoes of a cane hitting the floor via hologram echoed through the room, silencing Liv Amara.*

Nozako: You have until Midnight to recapture the beast and this child. And when you do bring him back... you will kill him.

Liv: Madame Nozako! He's Orso Knox!

Nozako: Silence! Look at your investors... the monster's escape has planted the seed of doubt to your competence. You had already 'tried' or so to speak... killing him would be an act of mercy. After all, you said so yourself that he had long since forgotten human speech. Slay this beast, and you will be rewarded immensely.

Liv: I understand...and of the girl?

Nozako: Do whatever you please...

*With Orso Knox and Cora, the monster had swiftly carried ran underground to the abandoned subway. Deeming it safe the monster gently drops the girl as he lays down to rest.*

Cora: W-Why did you that?

Knox: It had to be done.

Cora: Running through the lab while destroying their hard work only paints you more like a monster.

Knox: Most of those fools already know, and those who don't are either naïve or waiting to be transformed to be in Liv Amara's image. I cannot let them do to you as what they have to me.

Cora:...What did happen to you Mr. Knox?

*The man growled softly in sadness as he looks at his reflection.*

Knox: I had fallen for Liv Amara's charms. She seemed so full of life and hope for this world, I wanted to support her...I was so blind. I blinded myself from other companies that needed me... and blinded myself from seeing the true reflection of her. If a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but with her... she was a rose with poison tipped thorns. I had come to her office one night for a discussing. I had planned to split the money and talk to Liv Amara about a conjoined partnership with Krei Tech. But while I waited, I let my curiosity get the better of me when I saw her hologram recordings... This woman... she had done the most deplorable and disgusting things I wished to never see again... I cannot tell you what most of them are to preserve your innocence… but what I can tell you is that Liv amara's start of Sycorax had been nothing but a sham. A garden hiding the poisonous yellow diamond back snake. That is when Liv Amara found me. She begged me to stay silent, but I was so disgusted and repulsed, that I lost my wits and made the foolish choice to shout that I will expose her heinous crimes and ruin her... That is when in an attempt to slay me, she had stabbed something inside me... this thing that had made me what I am today... The monster of Sycorax...

*He looks at the girl, who's eyes widened in shock and horror as she heard his story. He turns his head away as he looks at the floor.*

Knox: I am sorry you have gotten involved little one.

Cora: Its OK Mr. Knox. I just can't believe... I'm so sorry...

Knox: *Sad chuckle* Is your name Cora?

Cora: Yes?...Why?

Knox: Once or twice Liv Amara spoke of you whenever she 'visited me'... you should've stayed away. That woman wanted your grandmother's herbal book. Agreeing to be her intern means that all you have will be hers... and whatever is in your book must be of great value.

Cora: That's why she was so pushy! Augh! Hiro owes me big time for this...

Knox: *deep chuckle* I suppose this Hiro is your significant other?

Cora: Yeah... he is. *Smiles with a small blush on her face.*

*Orso Knox smiles at the girl, and for once since his transformation, he could relax and be at peace. He will admit this to himself... according to Liv Amara, he had lost his ability to speak in human tongue, making any please for help impossible... but somehow… this girl could understand him and listen. He can think about how it works later... he wants to enjoy the peace of now. As of while Mizuchi is at the streets, joining the street search as the police arm themselves with tranqulizers.*

Chief Police: The Monster has a civilian in his hands! Find a way to separate the girl and the monster!

*Mizuchi's mind flashes to the angry mob chasing him down with all their pick axes and metal rakes. He shudders away those painful memories, trying to focus on finding his daughter. That is when everyone looks up at the sky.*

Civilian #1: Its Big Hero 7!

Little girl: And they look super cool!

*The team is wearing what appears to be a black version of their super suits with all the new fixings. Fred's suit spikes can now shoot projectiles as well as act as armor, with the tips being able to stun the monster. Gogo's suit has it now act as a swim suit warmer and her wheels to act as rotors to swim through it easily, Wasabi has his laser blades also turned to projectiles while having a shield and a sword, and if acted just right, the shield would emit an ooze to make the monster's claws slip rather than break...Wasabi needed a few minutes in the bathroom after being shown that. Honey Lemon now has a chem bazooka that allows her to fire at a long range and with the added bonus of being able to act as an echo-locator when hits its target. Baymax now has the added ability to throw stronger punches and swim swifter than he could before. As for Hiro, he now has electro-magnetic discs to pin metal down, and with an homage to his girlfriend, his boots also act as squid strength suction cup shoes to stick to any surface. *

Hiro: Honey Lemon! Launch your chem ball to any entrances below! Chances are they might be under ground! Gogo, carry Honey Lemon as fast as you can!

Gogo: Got it!

*Gogo skates over to Honey Lemon and picks her up to take her to all the possible as Honey Lemon aims her bazooka and fires. Hiro checks over his tracker that shows Echolocation as more of Honey Lemon's chem balls hit any possible places. When Honey Lemon hit the next chem ball to an abandoned subway station, Hiro sees two figures on the screen.*

Hiro: I got a visual! They're in the underground subway station at Night Market square! Group up!

*And so they all run towards the subway station, heading to the dark abyss to rescue Cora. However... they had failed to realize that since Orso Knox's senses have increased, he felt the vibrations coming afar. He looks at Cora, who is asleep, and gently nudges her awake.*

Knox: Cora, wake up.

Cora: *groggily*W-wha?

Knox: I think they may have found us...

Cora: Who?

Knox: Liv Amara's goons.

*When the sound grows stronger he immediately picks her up and starts running off. Cora holds tightly to his hand as to not shake so much. Just then his path was blocked by Baymax with Hiro behind him.*

Hiro: Orso Knox, let Cora go!

*Orso Knox growls before he jumps over them and tries to run off again.

Cora: Wait! Orso Know! That was-!

Honey Lemon: They're they are!

Gogo: Let her go you freak!

Cora: Guys wait!

*But Orso knox keeps trying to escape with the gang all successfully blocking his path. Finally Baymax prepares his rocket fist as Honey Lemon uses her chem balls enhanced to pin him down.*

Cora: Baymax no!

*Cora uses the opportunity to free herself from Orso Knox's grip and stand in front of Orso Knox.*

Cora: Guys I'm fine now!

Wasabi: We know you are and were thankful you're safe.

Fred: But now we gotta stop this guy and take him back to Sycorax lab-

Cora: You can't! Sycorax is where he got turned to the monster!

*That caused everyone in the room to stop, to which Hiro remembers how it all began in the first place.*

Hiro: Oh... Oh!...

*Hiro climbs down as he walks over to Cora.*

Knox: Stay away from her Amara slave!

*But to Hiro and the others they heard growls.*

Cora: Its OK! He's Hiro, Hiro Hamada...a friend. *To Hiro* I was right, Liv Amara was responsible for Knox's transformation. Apparently Knox found some incriminating evidence about Liv Amara's questionable activities and she turned him into that to shut him up.

Hiro: She never really meant to cure him.

Gogo: Everything she said about helping him was nothing but a lie.

Honey Lemon: Is there anyway to cure him?

*That is when Hiro spots something in Knox's arm... a small indented chip with red icky veins.*

Hiro: Whats that?

*Hiro tries to get a closer look only for Knox to roar. Hiro scrambles up and stands in front of Cora as she hears him shout.*

Knox: DON'T TOUCH IT! IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO IT I'LL DIE!

Cora: What?!

Wasabi: Cora what's up?

*Cora looks at the monster, waiting for an answer.. to which Knox speaks.*

Knox: This is what she had injected me. It is a chip of her design.. the cursed object that had made me into this. It is designed by her and can only be operated by her... if anyone else besides her were to remove it, it will release a venom that will stun the heart and then the brain...

Cora: Oh no... *Turns to Baymax* Baymax, scan his arm.

Baymax: His harm has a small chip inside him. It is currently keeping his altered DNA in this state.

Honey Lemon: So that's how he's still a monster.

Gogo: I say we go to the hospital and remove the thing.

Cora: No Gogo! Chances are Liv Amara rigged the chip to kill him if anyone else besides her were to operate on him.

Fred: That definitely sounds like a Phase two villain!

Cora: He's not safe here! We gotta get him out to the ocean.

Hiro: Why the Ocean.

Cora: Assuming his whale side is effective, he'll live.

*after sneaking around, Baymax opens a path that leads to the San Fransokyo bay, where the moon shine bright.*

Cora: *To Knox* I promise you, we will do everything we can to do help you and bring Liv Amara down.

Knox: Of course. I will never forget your kindness nor of your friends'. *Before jumping off to the bay* Oh! When you do stop Liv amara and find a cure for me...let me get the first punch.

Cora: Whatever you say.

*And so after they see him off, they all emerge back to the city. Baymax holding a piece of molten skin to be proof they fought him, and Hiro carrying Cora in his arms just for the fun of it. everyone had cheered at BH7's success, happy that the monster is gone and that the girl captured was now safe. Cora giggles before she kisses Hiro's cheek, to which causes the boy to blush. The next day, Cora is walking towards Sycorax, her family and friends by her side to see her off to the building. Karmi and Liv Amara were cleaning up the mess along with everyone else as Cora gently places her Sycorax lab coat and name tag onto the recyclables.*

Liv: Cora? what are you doing?

Cora: I'm resigning Miss Amara. I get that what happened yesterday isn't exactly the most ideal way to have a test trial... but even without the incident I could not focus here very well especially since there are some challenges at home and school that I need to resolve. I enjoyed what time I had, but this isn't for me. *To Karmi* And Karmi?

Karmi:...What?*

Cora: I hope you enjoy this job immensely, just be careful K?

*Cora walks away to the exit, only to be called out by Karmi herself.*

Karmi: Wait! There's something you should know.

Cora: What is it?

Karmi:... I should have paid attention to you... because of me you were dragged around the city with that monster. I just... you know.

Cora: Be entitled to your workspace to feel like a special snowflake by injecting your venom into me?

Karmi:... You could say that...

Cora: I accept your apology.

Karmi: Second...*Scoots closer to Cora's face* What was it like being held in Electro-Alpha's arms?

Cora: Oh wow I think I hear my Papa calling me! Bye, see ya never!

*And so Cora immediately runs off, leading to Karmi dropping to the floor flat on her face. As of while, Liv Amara receives a text from Nozako, and the words written made her shudder with fear.*

You and I will have a little talk.

A.N: And that was Prey Date! Not something you were expecting huh? Any way to answer your questions, 1. I made the revelation of Liv amara being evil and responsible for Orso Knox's transformation earlier because the writing the path would be boring. it would definetly spice up this journey since now they all know she's responsible, now the quest is how to expose and defeat her.

2. Nozako is Cora's Grandmother from Mizuchi's side, read Chap 29 for full details! Till then, Love you all and thank you for reading BH7!

[fyeahtherain]

Episode Guide

Note: The following summaries and information were taken from the “The Rain” Wikipedia page. I did not write this. 

Season 1, Episode 1: “Stay Inside”

“A deadly virus spread by rainfall forces siblings Simone and Rasmus and their parents to seek refuge in a well-equipped underground bunker. The siblings’ father, Dr. Frederik Andersen, is a scientist who works for Apollon, the company that crafted the bunkers. He leaves the siblings with their mother in the bunker, saying he'll be back. Before he leaves, he instructs Simone to protect Rasmus, as he is the key to curing the virus. On hearing someone attempting to get inside the bunker, Simone opens the bunker door, assuming it is her father. Her mother, knowing that it is not Frederick and that their family will be infected if anyone else comes in, runs outside the bunker and tackles the stranger before he can enter. She is exposed to the virus and quickly dies, leaving Simone and Rasmus alone. At first the children are able to contact someone by radio, but the communication eventually stops. Simone has flashbacks to her parents' arguing about treating a sick Rasmus with some sort of virus. Six years pass. With their food supply dwindling, Rasmus wants to leave. Simone agrees, but first goes out alone in a contagion suit while Rasmus sleeps and finds only collapsed, desolate ruins. Later, back at the bunker, the air control alarms go off, signaling that oxygen is depleted. When Rasmus and Simone open the hatch to escape, they are confronted at gunpoint by other survivors who had covered the vents to force the siblings out.

Flashback: Simone & Rasmus”

Season 1, Episode 2: “Stay Together”

“Simone shows the group's leader, Martin, a map of other bunkers and promises them food. She then destroys the map, telling them they need to keep her alive to find it. In a flashback, Martin is revealed to have been a soldier tasked with holding the quarantine line at the onset of the virus. Unable to shoot a woman who is walking the highway holding an infant, Martin allows her to pass the checkpoint. He later finds his patrol dead, infected by the woman. In the present, the group encounter two men, referred to as ‘Strangers’, who are hunting survivors. Martin and Patrick (another member of Martin's group) kill the men. As the group travels, they struggle between doing what is needed to survive and holding on to their humanity. Finally, they arrive at the second bunker. Simone finds her father's phone in the bunker and learns, via information she finds on the device, that her father has likely traveled to Apollon headquarters in Sweden. Simone tells Martin that she and Rasmus are going to find their father.

Flashback: Martin”

Season 1, Episode 3: “Avoid the City”

“Simone and Rasmus venture into the city of Copenhagen as they travel toward Sweden. They are soon joined by Beatrice, Lea, and Jean. Lea believes that Simone's search represents hope and calls Simone "their guiding star." Emotionally connected to Beatrice, Martin later follows along with a frustrated Patrick. Separated, each finds shelter during a rain storm. Simone helps a small child, only to later see him attacked and killed by a desperate group of starving scavengers. Beatrice and Rasmus take shelter in an expensive house, with Beatrice claiming that it is the house she was born in. Martin and Patrick take shelter inside a bus. Playing with a piece of tech he took off the dead ‘strangers’, the device activates--revealing itself to be a map. Martin's group meets up after the storm, but a scavenger follows them and takes Rasmus hostage. The scavenger threatens to slit Rasumus' throat if the group doesn't give up their food supply to him. Martin and Patrick arrive and the scavenger stabs Rasmus before escaping with a bag of food supplies. The group arrive at a third bunker only to find it stripped bare. In a flashback, Beatrice tells Martin a story about her family house, similar to the one she told Rasmus, revealing that she is not being truthful. In the present, Martin shows Simone the map and they determine it is of the quarantine zone. Because the map shows a wall to the north, Martin concludes the spread of the virus was stopped. The wall, he declares, is where they need to go.

Flashback: Beatrice”

Season 1, Episode 4: “Trust No One”

“Rasmus, suffering from the stab wound he sustained earlier, is unable to walk, so Simone plans with the group to steal a vehicle from one of the quarantine patrols run by the ‘strangers’. The group manage to successfully intercept a quarantine patrol and incapacitate a group of ‘strangers’. As Martin interrogates the captured ‘strangers’ for information, Jean spots a snake tattoo on one of the men and recalls a memory that haunts him. He urges Martin to kill the men, and Patrick agrees. Martin seemingly does so, upsetting Simone. In a flashback, Jean stays with a kind family in the early days of the virus. One day, a quarantine patrol arrives and a group of strangers confront the father of the family instructing him to come with them. When the father refuses, he is killed by a man with a snake tattoo and the mother is taken away. Trying to quiet the shocked daughter to protect them from discovery by the ‘strangers’, Jean accidentally smothers her to death. After the ‘strangers’ leave, Jean buries the family and is introduced to Beatrice and Lea, who had come upon him as he stood before the graves he had just dug. In the present, the group has moved north and meets a doctor who operates on Rasmus’ stab wound. After Simone reveals who their father is, the doctor tells them she, too, used to work for Apollon. The doctor lures Simone and Rasmus away from the rest of the group and to her own bunker, confessing that she blames Dr. Andersen, the siblings’ father, for the death of her children. The doctor attempts to inject Rasmus with a fatal poison. The ‘strangers’ arrive and, seeing the man with the snake tattoo, Jean shoots him in the head and is then captured by the rest of the ‘strangers’. The others flee to the bunker. Patrick goes in alone and shoots the doctor, declaring that this is how things will be done from now on. Later, Patrick asks Martin why he listens to Simone and not him. Martin tells Patrick that the latter made the choice not to help Jean, and so is partially responsible for his fate. Patrick breaks down in tears. The group takes shelter as the rain falls during the night.

Flashback: Jean”

Season 1, Episode 5: “Have Faith”

“Lost in the woods, the survivors stumble upon a mansion where residents invite them to stay the night. Martin is distrustful of the residents, who appear very cult-like. The others enjoy the accommodations, including showers, fresh food and clean clothes. They are asked to forget their past and live in the now. In a flashback, Lea, a devout Christian, goes to a teen party against her mother's wishes. As a prank, her school peers spike her drink, and Lea's drunken behavior is caught on video and shared. Her mother sees the video, which has gone viral, and disowns Lea. Inside the house of the party, Lea prays for God to save her, and moments later the rain begins. Her partying peers die from the virus (having all gathered outside except for Lea herself). Lea’s mother dies from the virus also, having stepped outside during the rain in an attempt to pick Lea up. In the present, Lea bonds with an older woman, Karen, who teaches her to let go of the guilt she carries. Simone discovers that an Apollon employee is a resident of the mansion and seeks information from him. That night, all residents of the mansion are invited to a monthly "ceremony". It is revealed that every month a member is randomly chosen to be killed and eaten for the next month's ceremony, allowing them to be one with the group. Lea is "chosen", but Karen takes her place and the survivors are allowed to leave. Because he will not let go of the past, the Apollon employee is forced out of the mansion against his will. When he catches up with the survivors he tells them Apollon is responsible for ending the world before injecting himself with the virus and dying. Simone collects the syringe and the group walks into the night.

Flashback: Lea”

Season 1, Episode 6: “Keep Your Friends Close”

“As the group squats in a cabin, Patrick is hurt when Martin states the two are not friends during a casual conversation. Needing supplies, the group prepares to go to the next bunker, but Rasmus says he is too sick to move. Simone, Martin, Patrick; and Lea go, planning to return with supplies. In fact, Rasmus faked his illness to spend more time with Beatrice. It rains and the four are stuck in the bunker. They find videos of Apollon testing vaccines on random individuals. Depressed and alone, Patrick gets drunk. In a flashback to before the rain, Patrick is a loser who cannot hold a job or a girlfriend and his father disowns him. He is getting high in his car when the rain comes, sparing his life. In the present, a drunk Patrick tries to kiss Simone. When she rejects him they tussle and Patrick pushes her into the rain. Patrick tells Martin to shoot her, assuming she is infected. Martin hesitates, and Lea stands between the gun and Simone. Lea then backs up into the rain with Simone. When neither has a reaction, the group realizes the rain no longer causes infection. Back at the cabin, Beatrice and Rasmus enjoy their intimate day together, but a leaky roof causes Beatrice to be hit with a drop of water. Rasmus kisses her, assuming she's now infected, and they resign themselves to dying together. In the bunker, Martin tells Patrick he needs to leave and not come back, because he had pushed Simone into the rain. In a flashback, Patrick meets Martin for the first time, Martin telling him he's lucky they met when Patrick gives him a lighter. Patrick says it is the first time anyone has said that. In the present, Patrick returns to Rasmus and Beatrice, only to find Rasmus in a state of panic carrying Beatrice’s corpse--she had come into contact with a stray, infected dog seen earlier near the cabin. Patrick panics and runs away, only to trip and be captured by the ‘strangers’.

Flashback: Patrick”

Season 1, Episode 7: “Don’t Talk to Strangers”

“A band of armed ‘strangers’ torture Patrick in order to extract information from him. Patrick discloses to the ‘strangers’ about the bunker, where Simone and Lea and Martin are at, and about Rasmus not having been infected by Beatrice. Meanwhile, Rasmus arrives at the bunker carrying Beatrice's corpse. In the bunker's quarantine room, Rasmus begins to unravel, refusing to leave her side. Eventually he does, but he contacts the ‘strangers’ and allows himself to be captured. In a flashback, Sten, the head of Apollon, briefs the mission to the ‘strangers’, and then reveals to them that they have ingested the virus, which will be triggered if they leave the zone before finding an immune survivor. Like the survivors, the Strangers are trapped. In the present, the leader of the ‘strangers’, Thomas, feels Rasmus is the one they are looking for. After burying Beatrice, Simone, Martin and Lea capture a ‘stranger’. They try to trade him for Rasmus, but a depressed Rasmus takes the syringe with the virus and injects himself. However, he does not die. Martin makes up with Patrick, setting him free. Everyone leaves for Apollon headquarters, hoping Rasmus is the cure. As they leave, a ‘stranger’ kisses Rasmus on the forehead for good luck. He dies of the virus soon after the rest of the group is gone.

Flashback: Thomas”

Season 1, Episode 8: “Trust Your Instincts”

“Arriving at Apollon headquarters, the group is separated. Rasmus and Simone meet their father while Martin, Patrick and Lea wait in a bunker. In the bunker they are reunited with Jean, much to Lea’s joy. Simone's father, Dr. Andersen, tells her that they need to get away. To get the antidote, he tells her, they will need to access Rasmus' brain and bone marrow, killing him. In a flashback, Dr. Andersen lies to Apollon, claiming his children are dead in order to save them. Dr. Andersen has been exposing people to the virus in an attempt to find someone to replace Rasmus, and brutally killed a colleague who found out the lie. In the present, a doctor taking a swab from Rasmus is infected and dies. Dr. Andersen realizes the virus has mutated and that Rasmus is now a carrier, needing to be stopped to save the world. As the lab goes on lockdown, Lea, Jean, Martin and Patrick are reunited with Simone and Rasmus and plan to flee. However, Dr. Andersen shoots Martin in an attempt to stop the group from leaving with Rasmus. Patrick arrives with a stolen vehicle and the group reaches the wall. The ‘strangers’ block their path, and Thomas tells them that the nutritional supplements Jean, Lea, Martin and Patrick were given were really the unactivated virus. The four cannot leave, except Simone with Rasmus. The group encourages her to go. However, Simone cannot bear leaving her friends behind so the group back away from the wall and drive away. Thomas tells Simone that he’ll be after her. In a final scene, Sten is making a sales pitch to a select group of investors, telling them the virus can be controlled and weaponized.

Flashback: Frederik”

Season 2, Episode 1: “Avoid Contact”

“On the run from Apollon soldiers, the group is eventually captured and reunited with Simone's and Rasmus' father who is quickly shot and killed while giving them directions to a place that can help save Rasmus and find a cure. They escape after Rasmus in his distress over the death of his father somehow infects the soldiers near him causing a distraction. The group follows a set of coordinates to a base where rebel scientists who defected from Apollon are working on a vaccine for the virus. Fie and Jakob help them get into the community. Jakob runs tests on Rasmus including a risky spinal tap that reveals there is no fluid or blood but only virus in his body. Rasmus distressed by the pain and the doctor's discovery accidentally releases the virus killing Jakob and everyone else in the lab.“

Season 2, Episode 2: “The Truth Hurts”

“Following the lab disaster, Simone arrives and convinces Rasmus to lie and say someone dropped a sample infecting them all. Unbeknownst to them Jakob's sickly younger sister Sarah witnessed her brother's death and their coverup from outside the lab. Martin accompanies Simone on a journey to retrieve her father's computer. At the base, Patrick stumbles upon a hidden room filled with strange devices.

Flashback: Sarah”

Season 2, Episode 3: “Stay in Control”

“As Apollon surrounds the base, Simone scrambles to find a cure. Rasmus's secret draws Sarah to him—but threatens to tear the group apart. 

Flashback: Fie“

Season 2, Episode 4: “Save Yourself” 

“Simone, Martin and Fie pursue Rasmus and Sarah, whose bond deepens while they're on the run. Sarah and Rasmus want to have one good day. They go to an old amusement park. Sarah threatens to kill herself by jumping off the rollercoaster but is talked down by Rasmus. Patrick makes a discovery. There is an Apollon facility that can remove the capsules that keep them trapped inside the zone with the virus. Jean tries to console Lea.“

Season 2, Episode 5: “Keep It Together”

“Plagued by frightening visions, Rasmus takes his fate into his own hands. He knows the virus is taking over but The Cure isn't ready yet. He still injects himself with some of the solution. Sarah's health worsens. Jean and Lea share a tender moment. Simone and Fie may have discovered the cure! Lea sacrifices herself so that Simone can inject the cure.“

Season 2, Episode 6: “Survival of the Fittest”

“In the wake of their grim encounter, Martin and Patrick race back to the base. Meanwhile, a grief-stricken Jean plots revenge.“

[briankoning]

Don’t Waste YOUR Time with Social Media

7 Reasons Businesses Should Hire a Social Media Guru

– Unless you’ve been living on a deserted island for the past decade, you are acutely aware that almost everyone in developed countries is posting, texting, tweeting, pinning and doing whatever else it is they do on social media.

It’s estimated that approximately 90% of all purchases now start with some type of online search. It might be a search for a product or service. But many times, purchases happen because of the carefully crafted ads and posts on social media. A well-crafted ad with a strong headline, compelling copy and an eye-catching graphic hooks us like largemouth bass slamming a top-water lure in a quiet cove on Kentucky Lake early in the morning. 

Okay, so my mind drifted to bass fishing for a second. But you get the point.

The point is, social media is everywhere and, whether you like it or not, it influences our purchasing decisions and often results in impulse purchases. I’ve purchased shoes, music equipment, gifts, and more just because of an ad that popped up on Facebook. Just last week, I instantly clicked on a Facebook ad and purchased a flexible iPhone charger thingy that will allow me to stop having to prop my phone against something when I’m recording video. Now, I have to wait for about three months for it to arrive on a slow boat from China!

As a business owner and entrepreneur who has an excellent grasp of social media and digital marketing, I can tell you that social media is exhausting. It’s also very time-consuming. I’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in workshops, conferences and mastermind groups over the last six years to learn everything I can about social media and digital marketing. And, as soon as I feel I’ve mastered something, it changes. Digital marketing and social media are fluid and literally change hourly. It’s complicated.

For the average business owner, unless you’ve been riding the social media wave and thoroughly understand Facebook/Instagram advertising, Google AdWords, Twitter, LeadPages, landing pages, Click Funnels, and all the analytic tools to measure the results of your digital marketing, it will take you years and a lot of training and money to catch up. Sure, you can do it, but at the risk of your business failing because your time will be spent learning rather than selling. Six or seven years ago, it took me the better part of a day to launch a Facebook ad. Today, it only takes me about 30 minutes. For someone who knows nothing about creating a targeted Facebook ad and is not tech savvy, it would take a couple of days to launch even a basic ad that “might” generate a few leads.

So, what is the solution?

Hire a social media (or digital marketing) guru.  Here’s why…

You Can’t Maintain It

Social media for businesses is practically a 24/7 job. Sure, you start out with great intentions but you’ll get sidetracked by the things you should be doing… like managing the leads and closing sales. Before you know it, days and weeks have passed since you’ve posted anything or even checked for the leads that came in.

You’re Not Technical Enough

You can’t just send out a Tweet, post a photo on Instagram or boost a Facebook post that says, “Here’s my widget, buy it!” and yet that’s what a lot of business do. I see businesses all the time that have great products and services but their social media sucks. It’s killing them. Then, there are businesses that suck but are tech savvy and they are getting all the business. Those businesses know how to connect the dots using technology. They know how to find the most popular search terms. They know how to use Google Analytics or Facebook analytic tools. They know what hashtags to use. They know how to get thousands of likes, followers, and fans. They direct prospects to “landing pages” and they use “trip wires” to get people to opt-in, get put into a “drip email campaign” or “auto responder’ and become invested in the sales process. Social media is very technical and is an intricate, tangled web that requires a individual who understands how everything works together.

You’re Too Invested In Traditional Marketing

Hiring a social media expert takes a leap of faith. It’s an investment. Do you need to hire a full-time social media person? Not necessarily. You can contract a social media expert. We’re out here! I suggest re-allocating some of your budget from traditional marketing/advertising channels that are now obsolete and ineffective and actually use it to bring your digital marketing up to speed. Do you know how inexpensive Facebook advertising is? For the price of a print ad in a glossy neighborhood magazine that maybe reaches a couple hundred people one time, you can run a Facebook ad and reach tens of thousands of target people multiple times over the course of weeks or months?

You Don’t Really Know the Market

You may think you know who your ideal customer is. But, there’s nothing like a reality check when you run the social media analytics tools available and see who is responding to your posts and ads. For example, a client who runs an athletic training program for youth sports was convinced that they needed to target “dads”. However, the analytics report showed that it was actually “moms” and most were “single moms” who were looking for a program for their kid(s). I talked to an owner of a lawn care company who was running Facebook ads to every single homeowner within a 25-mile radius of the business. The analytics showed him that the ideal client was “male”, “40-65”, “homeowner”, “employed”, “household income>$80,000”, “married”, “college degree”, “Home value $200K+” and lived within a “7-mile” radius of his business. These are all some of the demographics and attributes you can select when running an ad, thus filling your pipeline with more qualified prospects. Don’t assume!

You Don’t Have a Plan

Social media experts thrive on the hunt and flushing out qualified leads. But they have a plan. They create “roadmaps” that carefully time the ads, posts, tweets, etc… They know from analytics what time of day most people will be on social media. They use tools to schedule posts, time emails, and create drip campaigns. Just randomly posting a photo on Instagram or sending out a tweet of you having coffee at your desk does absolutely nothing. Remember that ol’ saying, “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail!”

You’re Too Close to Your Business

As a business owner, you’re not always objective. It’s like a mom who believes she has given birth to the most beautiful baby in the world. In her eyes, it is. But to the outside world, it may not be. A good social media expert will help keep you “on brand” and help you see your business from the consumer’s perspective. And then there’s the whole reputation thing. Social media opens you up to criticism and negative reviews by dissatisfied customers and disgruntled employees, potentially damaging your reputation. As a business owner, it’s easy to take that personally and even respond in a negative way. A social media expert can (and should) help control that and respond appropriately. I always tell business owners about the 3/30 rule… if you do something good, a customer might tell three people; if the customer has a “perceived” bad experience, they tell 30 people. Unfortunately, that “30 people” can grow exponentially if a negative review goes viral on social media.

You Don’t Have the Right Person On Your Team

The biggest mistake any business owner can make is to hand over the social media or digital marketing function to an admin, family member, or do it on their own. It’s time consuming. It is very technical. It requires someone who knows how the machine needs to be assembled to work efficiently. And just because you have a teenager or young adult that “thinks” they know what they are doing, they more than likely don’t. You need an expert that knows MARKETING and ADVERTISING and PUBLIC RELATIONS and SALES and so much more.

A social media guru (full-time or contracted) can bring the benefit of professional expertise to your social media campaign, but is it the best option for you? By exploring your own time constraints and being honest with your level of expertise, you can determine whether a social media manager is the best option for your business or whether you risk doing it on your own.

I’d be happy to talk with you about how I can help you create an effective social media and digital marketing plan to help you grow our business giving you more time to do the things you need to manage your business and enjoy more personal time.

Let’s talk!

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON IMPERIAL’S LEAD DANCE, LEAD VOCAL NOAH HAN ...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: n/a CURRENT AGE: 26 DEBUT AGE: 21 TRAINEE SINCE: 17 COMPANY: 99 SECONDARY SKILL: Cinematography

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): noee, noah-roo, noah’s ark. INSPIRATION: having grown up outside of korea, most of noah’s inspiration stems from international artists. michael jackson and bruno mars, with their charismatic performances, serves as some of his biggest influences. SPECIAL TALENTS:

capable of doing bland impressions of famous gagmen, actors, and notable characters from television dramas and/or movies, but the outcome is so stale, it does generate laughter. 

he does, however, provide a shockingly good michael jackson vocal impersonation.  

NOTABLE FACTS:

an only child.

cannot tolerate spicy food well, frequently turning red in the face and sweating profusely.

graduated from korea national university of arts with a major in cinematography.

has a extensive list of celebrity friends from most companies and is often uploading images of his network on instagram.

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

noah doesn’t aim high, but he does eventually want to direct a music video for imperial. with small opportunities already granted, he’s positive (yet anxious) the comeback will arrive, and his skill is beckoned. yet, that doesn’t quell the constant fear of rejection and inadequacy since he’s been vying for this select chance since before debut. and it has yet to come to fruition.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

he doesn’t want to stop himself at imperial; noah also wants to help create music videos for other idol groups. and it doesn’t end there, irrespective if he’s blindly shooting for the stars. limitations are solidified to be pushed, so he hopes to one day branch out and film other forms of media: commercials, primetime dramas, movies. in all honesty, it’s a little gutsy and unbelievable and far-fetched, but he desires a little segregation from imperial’s noah and film graduate, noah han since an idol life is not forever. he doesn’t think (potentially want) to last as a singer.

IDOL IMAGE

at first glance, noah has a little too much POIZN in him than 99 appreciates. perhaps, it’s the careless tattoo (more to come) on his inner forearm he got when he was sixteen and reckless that has directors and managers scratching their heads on what to possibly do with him. he, himself, is very little help to the cause. for most his life, noah has lived under the direct, communist law of someone else. he was never his own person, always skirting on the edge of uncertainty. so, they have a lot to work with, but they can also mould him to whatever stereotype they want.

the bad boy. 

the romantic. 

the ice prince.

they go with that—ice prince. play up his own personality to draw in fans. he has the face, the aura, the rare smile that catches cameras and goes viral. noah is an enigma, really. but that’s probably the polite way of saying he doesn’t have much of anything to begin with. he’s raw but viciously trained by a family that cared too much of image and structure than well-being and nurture. his natural rigidness is construed as mysterious, cold to the touch but alluring. he doesn’t reek of danger, but he draws people in. apparently. 

they want to know more.

except he doesn’t have much to offer. he’s quiet, cool and keeps to himself most of the time. so, the image placed on him works. he’s no prince charming, but a deity close to it. 

the charade is easy to maintain. just don’t talk and look and smile after keeping fans on the edge of their seat. not speaking much was added because his korean was crummy. standing around was amplified because he looked good in dazzling hair colours. and smiling, well, fan-service has to be thrown in to pacify and quell thirst. and honestly, noah does a pretty stellar job at preserving the mask. 

no one sees the broken boy nursing invisible wounds with alcoholic vices. he slips under the radar. 

maybe it has something to do with no one truly noticing him, anyway. so he assumes. 

maybe that has everything to do with it.

IDOL HISTORY

(triggers: death, physical abuse, alcoholism)

life starts with the death of his mother. 

the doctors say it was complications with giving birth. that she received an infection they couldn’t catch in time. and it wasn’t his fault at all. 

except that’s not what his father says. 

his father is a cold, ruthless man. one heartbroken and angry his wife was traded in for a son he didn’t quite want. noah learns early on in childhood, parents and family don’t have to love you. it’s not a perquisite. 

gold coast, australia is a battle to see which family in the korean community bests the rest. although, his father may not like him or see much worth in a toddling four year old sucking his thumb, noah is displaced in various academies to be a trophy his father can show off. that’s all he ever is, really, a possession only of value if he was gold. 

he never is gold, though. 

try as he might, noah doesn’t win piano competitions, is dropped early from spelling bees, fails to make it onto academic teams. he’s always an almost. he’s always not good enough. and his father preys on his frequent inadequacy, thinking a leather belt to the skin of an eight year old can teach something. 

it doesn’t. 

the last shot he has at making an impression, at receiving some kind of paternal love, is through choir. his father is a religious man, one that attends mass every sunday in his best attire. when a position opens up, noah is tossed in yet another gamble with his life on the line. family friends of equal snooty façades glower at the boy incapable of anything. but what comes out of his mouth aren’t keys off note or flat but angelic hymns of someone who has finally found their niche. 

thirteen, and noah is all about singing and music and even dancing. he sings at choir both at church and at school and even convinced his father to sign him up for modern dance (anything to get them away from one another). because as noah gets older, the more he and his father father butt heads. he’s becoming a threatening omega to his father’s alpha. but collision is momentarily stalled when they get a phone call. his grandfather is ill, and they need to go back home.

but seoul, south korea isn’t home to noah. it’s a foreign, concrete jungle of people he can’t understand and barely communicate with. at school, he’s an outcast, unable to fit in anywhere. but what’s new, really?

the one thing that remains the same is the music. and he finally meets people through this mutual appreciation. comrades who teach him of the idol industry and being completely saturated in song. well, they were fifteen and foolish then, thinking entertainment worked in such a manner. thinking it was that easy. 

it wasn’t. 

auditions were brutal. and the only way his father agreed to him parading on stage if he didn’t let his education become affected. so, noah balances tryouts and eventual training at 99 with school, hoping he’d graduate on the honour roll because his father can and will pull him out if he failed to do so. sleep slowly turns to privilege with so little time in the day to practice and study. he can’t do both; it’s impossible. 

but he does so, anyway.

perhaps why 99 chose him and kept him. he is more work than play. they like his work ethic, like that he tortures himself for a good result because in his life, that’s all that really mattered to anyone. being a trophy. being gold. being somebody to showoff. 

he’s a thing, an object others can they do as they please. long story short, he’s perfect for the industry he has morphed into a slave for.

early on, however, noah realizes being boasted as some medal comes with very little incentives. when one member leaves imperial, it confirms the lingering doubt into something factual. 

like all idols, he is only human, who easily falls into the lures and temptations of the vices that come with fame. or that’s his excuse for relying on alcohol and a warm-body to be late night companions. because as friendly as noah can be under the influence, he is very distrusting, aloof and can probably count a total of three close friends on one hand (not including his members). and that’s okay, right? he’s used to being in the slum of loneliness.

besides, less people to hurt him.

he confuses friendship with lust and submerges himself in a false sense of love because he’s never felt it. not once. and it scares him. so, he builds walls and hides behind a constructed façade all idols must have. he runs from problems and frankly, pretends they don’t exist because it’s easier to say he’s okay whilst pouring another glass of whiskey then explaining to others he wasn’t. because he’s an apparently talented, well-rounded idol, and no one will ever believe he’s unhappy.

he has no reason to be, right?

yet he’s overworked and on the brink of exhaustion. juggling the ideals of his father, the ideals of the contract he signed his soul to (fifteen year old noah couldn’t have seen this coming) and the ideals of his fans takes a toll on him. noah is an empty shell of himself, but he always was living his life for someone else. even now, working as idol is less about himself but more about the company, the group, the supporters. never about the actual person within the idol. 

in a desirable life, in a different reality, noah has this vision of fruity sunsets and royal midnights. if music was once his escape but now what binds him, he tumbles into the beauty of film, where anyone can be anything they so please. another distraction, another distorted reality he’s transfixed on. it can only end wrongly, but noah is desperate to find himself, to grow and be just noah han. 

a part of him is thankful his father forced his nose into books because he wouldn’t have made it into korea national university of the arts without it. wouldn’t have graduated, albeit slower than most (because he is imperial’s noah first), in cinematography without it. but now what? his father still belittles him and his choices. 

supposedly, noah is doing all he loves and has a passion for yet he doesn’t feel adequate. yet he’s still struggling, lost, finding himself in the whirlwind of life. 

born to a dying mother, a heartless father, noah’s actual endgame goal is to live a life that will give justice to his mother and make his father proud. 

so far, he’s failing and falling.

and here is to another shot of whiskey to soothe the pain away. 

he can’t please anyone. not even himself.

[wildlyhardphilosopher-blog]

service puppy training | house training a dog

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service puppy training | house training a dog

Photo of the Day Total Wellness Plan Senior Dog Local Voices Take note of where your dog has done his business, and take him to the same spot each time you bring him outside to eliminate. Having said that, what should you do about house training when you aren’t at home: FACTS & FUN Furniture & Car Protection And there will always be a time or two so it’s best to prepare in advance. If you see your puppy have an accident, yelling, chasing, or physically punishing won’t be effective. In fact, this sort of behavior is likely to teach them to be afraid of you when they have to potty. Thailand – ไทย Belgian Malinois Quiz: What Do You Know About Dog Adoption? BUILT TO LAST. Media/Press Rules, Regulations & Policies Sign Up for Emails Receive our latest news and offers! Latvia – Latvija Your Shopping Cart is Empty Snohomish County Animal Services said they will continue their investigation starting next week. Best Cat Products • How to Train a Puppy 2.3 Snakes United States Q: Can I select a date in the future to send my eGift? And though a puppy biting, chewing, or mouthing on your or other people’s hands, limbs, and clothing sure is cute for now, imagine if you do nothing and your puppy continues the behavior as he gets bigger. It probably won’t be too cute or fun for very long. Therefore, it’s best to start teaching your puppy that biting is an undesirable behavior early on. More Birds Put your pup on a potty schedule Because food travels through your puppy’s system at a reasonably consistent pace, if you feed them at the same times every day, they will settle into a pattern of eliminating at the same times every day. These are the tell-tale signs that a puppy may have to potty: Jumble School Programs Rules Archive **Our partner PetPlus works hard to make it easier for you to take care of your pet, and they don’t want you to worry about costs. If you find a better price for an item from a U.S. licensed, .Pharmacy verified online pharmacy, PetPlus will do everything possible to meet or beat that price. Please call us at 1-866-893-0306 to speak with a customer care representative. Pet Friendly Listings Long-Living Dog Breeds In the video, a trainer aggressively hits a dog with the bat while reprimanding it, causing the animal to seemingly cower in fear behind a chair. The video was recently released online and has since gone viral. It led to an investigation of the dog school in June. Saturday 8:00am – 12:00pm Once you have brought your new puppy home you’ll want to get him potty trained as fast as possible! How to potty train a puppy is a complete guide to that process House training a puppy or adult dog may seem daunting, but almost any dog can be trained to wait at the door and relieve himself outside, instead of going in the house. Create a schedule for feeding your dog and taking him outside. Then, reward your dog with treats and praise when he relieves himself in the designated outdoor spot. When he makes a mess in the house, just clean it up and stick to the routine, since punishing a dog will simply make him afraid of you. Patience and a good sense of humor are all you really need to help your dog adapt to life as a pet. Cool Dog Tricks Take your dog out first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and every 2-3 hours during the day. Take him out after he plays, wakes up from a nap and eats. House Training Dogs Topics Protect your stuff: Crate training helps protect your furniture, floors, and the rest of your home while you’re out. Set an alarm clock. During the early stages of training, set a timer on your phone or an alarm to remind you to take your puppy or adult dog out every 1-2 hours. If accidents are happening, step up the frequency. This is the key to training your dog in 3 days.  Repetition is key.

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fbq('track', 'ViewContent', content_ids: 'dogtraining.dknol', ); BONIES (4) 4. Shower him with praise when he does a good job. Make sure the treats and praise come right after he finishes eliminating, and make the praise enthusiastic and the food treat top-notch. You want to make it crystal clear that eliminating outside is a great thing. Don’t wait to get back to the house to give him the treat; he won’t connect the reward with what prompted it. Black Mouth Cur I hope that helps! Small Pet Costumes on orders over $25—or get FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime by Adrienne Janet Farricelli2 Breakfast Your veterinarian can help you determine the appropriate amount of food your dog needs and the number of feedings per day. For instance, some dogs tend to urinate when they get overly excited or during playtime. Add a photo Fear & Aggression 101 Allow the dog to continue using the puppy pads while you establish a cue word that means it’s time for her to relieve herself, such as “Toilet” or “Get busy.” Once she is using the pad in response to a command, you can slowly move the pad, inch by inch, as the days go by, to a different location, while instructing her that this is where you want her to toilet with your command. Now, keep a pad on you and place it on the desired toilet spot outside. Give her cue words, and when she goes, make a huge fuss of her. Then scatter a small amount of soil or grass or whatever substrate is your choice onto the pad. Gradually remove the pad. Cat Boarding (47) How to Potty Train To ensure your puppy understands he’s not to go in the house, you’re going to have to catch him in the act of having an accident. But if you can’t punish your puppy when you catch him, how do you communicate that going in the house is not allowed? Getting to know the Cane Corso Judges’ Directory Available classes National News Click a star to add your vote © Depositphotos.com / AOosthuizen Petrainer 998DBB Remote Controlled Dog Training Collar System, 1 count Canna-Pet Community Corner Wish list 0 Puppies vary in how long they can last at night without a wee.  Many pups are nine or ten weeks old before they can last all night (say around midnight  until 6 or  7 am) without a wee. To train a puppy not to bite, spray a taste deterrent on your exposed skin or clothing before play time. Give your pup teething toys during training sessions and never play rough, since this encourages biting. When the puppy bites, react with a firm “NO!” and walk away for a few minutes. For severe cases, fill a spray bottle with water and accompany your “NO!” with a squirt of water in the puppy’s face. Always give your puppy verbal praise and cuddles to reinforce good behavior! Dog Training Books Lost and Found As Seen on TV Walks and potty breaks are two different things, at least in the initial stages of house breaking. Potty breaks are trips to the yard specifically for the purpose of elimination. Walks are walks. A walk can be used as a reward for appropriate elimination, but never end a walk following appropriate elimination behavior. Provide rules, boundaries, limitations You may be reeling from all the information you’ve received on potty training, so here it is in a nutshell: Remove Warts on Dogs Symptom Checker This item:Puppy Training: How To Train a Puppy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Positive Puppy Training (puppy… by Carrie Nichole Paperback $12.47 It’s important with all dog training but especially with young puppies to use lots of encouragement, praise and rewards (positive reinforcement) in your training. Start your puppy training sessions as soon as your little puppy arrives at your home – it’s never too early. Set your puppy up to succeed, concentrate on developing desirable habits in your puppy and preventing undesirable behavior. It’s much a better alternative to put your puppy on the right path from the start, rather than trying to correct established problem behaviors later on. have a priority code? Up to 35% off Flea & Tick Toggle Search Calendar Hold him in your arms – or put him in a small crate for a few minutes before going back out to try again. Blue Dog Bakery Deli Bite Dog Treats | All-Natural | Grain-Free | Beef | 7.8oz (Pac… Our training approach is considered to be of the most advanced in the country. Our school has made motivational training the industry standard for dog training. Our staff attend conferences and constantly work on their ongoing education as they strive to improve techniques and training methods. If your puppy does something right, reward and praise him enthusiastically. If he does something wrong, make it clear you’re not happy or ignore him.  CONSERVATORY / NATURE puppy dog on grass image by percent from Fotolia.com Colombia Contact Vet Solutions (3) One of the easiest and fastest ways to create a positive association with the crate is to hand feed your pup all her meals in the crate. It’s so easy, it’s almost cheating. Young puppies typically eat three meals a day, so this schedule buys you three periods per day of long-lasting happiness in the crate. Dole out the puppy’s meal in tiny handfuls (or even kibble by kibble if you’re patient enough!) until the whole meal is gone, and then let the pup out. For the first few meals, keep the crate door open, and gradually progress to closing the door partially, then all the way, delivering the kibble in a steady stream through the closed crate door. In this way, you are classically conditioning the association between crate and food. It is the easiest path to having your puppy make the leap that crate = happiest place on earth. 4.1 Koehler method Check your journal to see if it is time for a break. Conure, Parakeets & More BI INTELLIGENCE Not Helpful 3 Helpful 29 Our Service Commitment Terms of Use and Licensing Discover which action patterns-instinctual behaviors built around fight, flight, feeding, and reproducing-your dog has inherited for its own survival and what makes unlearning” them so challenging.” training pitbull puppies | best way to potty train training pitbull puppies | how long does it take to potty train a dog training pitbull puppies | house training dogs Legal | Sitemap

[nancygduarteus]

AirPods Are the New Cubicles

Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them. They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but made of drywall and usually painted a neutral color, like many of the walls you know and love. Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles. Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone. There are only desks.

If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers.

Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were. But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a workaround to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.

The arrival of these now-ubiquitous devices has ushered in a new era of office etiquette—and created a whole new set of problems.

Beyond their tethered forebears, Bluetooth wireless headphones are convenient because they allow workers to forget they’re wearing a device and leave their desks without yanking their laptops onto the floor. In open offices, people commonly wander around with their headphones on all day, into bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes listen to nothing at all in order to avoid the constant distraction of compulsory social interaction.

We have Apple to thank for wireless headphones’ proliferation. The tech giant launched its tiny, white AirPods in late 2016 to accompany new iPhones that lacked a traditional headphone jack. Despite initial concern that having two plastic sticks poking out of your ears might look insurmountably lame, AirPods have avoided the demise of other wearable tech like Google Glass by being immediately useful. Industry analysts estimate that tens of millions of pairs of AirPods have been sold already, accounting for as much as 85 percent of the wireless-headphone market. The earbuds even star in ultra-viral videos and TikTok memes as a joke-y symbol of wealth among teens.

For Americans who have already joined the office workforce, AirPods serve a different purpose: tuning out your coworkers without looking excessively hostile. In that capacity, they’ve become indispensable to lots of people, because the hard surfaces, high ceilings, and empty spaces common in open offices help sounds carry. There’s rarely any soft surfaces to dampen them. Jerrick Haddad, a 35-year-old social media strategist in Brooklyn, won’t go to his open office without them. “We moved from offices to an open plan two years ago, and wireless headphones are why I haven’t quit,” he says. “One day I forgot them, and I got up and walked straight to the Apple store to buy a pair of AirPods.”

The same is true for Antigua Samuelson, a 29-year-old Los Angeles resident who works for a medical-marijuana wholesaler. She watches Netflix or Hulu at her desk during slow periods, and without her AirPods, she’d have to find another way to fill significant amounts of idle time. “If I forget to bring them with me, I will go back home and get them,” she says.

According to Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies organizational behavior, it makes sense that this subtle tactic for avoiding constant interaction has seeped into office environments. “People are very good at creating spaces for themselves, and these days you look at everybody, and almost without exception, they’re on their phones with headphones in their ears,” he says. In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interactions among coworkers by as much as 70 percent, in stark contrast to designers’ stated goals of collaborative teamwork.

The proliferation of small, wireless headphones may exacerbate that effect. Since you don’t have to remove AirPods to wander around the office, it can be hard for your coworkers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out. For Samuelson, sometimes that’s the point. “Once in a while, I’ll pretend to have them on just so I can eavesdrop on what people are saying,” she admits. And for people who find music as distracting as they find their coworkers, putting on their quiet headphones can be as much of a visual signal as it is an attempt to dampen ambient noise.

It’s not a perfect system. David Grilli, a 33-year-old IT professional, uses his headphones to signal that he wants to be left alone, but the message doesn’t always translate. His coworkers “stand in your field of vision until you take notice and ask what they need, or they start talking immediately as if you're not wearing headphones,” he says. Grilli’s coworkers might just need his attention at inopportune moments, but could also be true that office workers are becoming so used to seeing each other in headphones that they barely register them.

For women, there’s often an extra wrinkle: Wireless earbuds are often so small that they’re entirely invisible under long hair. Bernstein suggests that to send a clearer do-not-disturb signal to colleagues, people might consider larger, over-ear models.

Employers can do some things to help with the confusion, like retrofitting a space with small, private phone booths to give employees somewhere to escape. That solves another headphone problem, too: Even when people can see your AirPods, they still don’t know what you’re doing with them. A person quietly sitting in on a conference call looks pretty similar to a person who’s focused on work while listening to soothing nature sounds or who’s checking Facebook while listening to nothing at all. This ambiguity has prompted a whole new visual language meant to mime the difference to unsuspecting desk-mates. To perform its most common gesture, which indicates that you are on a call, you dramatically motion to your ears while making a face that communicates a sense of semi-smug capitulation: You, too, are currently being inconvenienced by your own importance.

“I do a lot of strategic hair-tucking, gesturing at my ears, and phone-pointing,” says Lisa Derus, a 31-year-old publicist who frequently uses her AirPods for calls both on her long commute between Connecticut and New York City and in her open-plan office. “I learned the hard way that the same ear-tapping motion I'd historically used to signal ‘I'm on the phone’ is the exact same gesture that ends phone calls on my AirPods.”

According to the design psychologist Sally Augustin, all of this irritation has come about because open offices ignore some essential elements of human psychological development. “We get revved up just being around other people, so in a workplace you’ve always got that force energizing you,” she says. “When you’re doing intellectual work, you’ll do it better in an environment that’s generally less energizing.” Although headphones can help filter auditory interruptions, they can’t block visual ones, which Augustin says can be just as disruptive to performance and focus.

AirPods also can’t change the fact that you’re just sitting in the middle of an open room, which Augustin notes is stressful no matter what you’re doing. “When you can be approached from the rear, a little part of your brain is always vigilant,” she says. “It’s not about what you’re looking at on your screen or anything. It’s much more fundamental than that.”

The good news is that trends are already turning away from open offices in favor of designs that have a range of space types, including those that allow workers privacy and relief from constant stimulation. “This is how humans work,” Augustin explains. Evolutionarily, our open-plan stress response goes back to a time long before office politics. “We like to think we’ve come so far from our days on the savanna, but maybe not.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/airpods-open-plan-offices/588112/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

AirPods Are the New Cubicles

Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them. They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but made of drywall and usually painted a neutral color, like many of the walls you know and love. Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles. Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone. There are only desks.

If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers.

Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were. But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a workaround to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.

The arrival of these now-ubiquitous devices has ushered in a new era of office etiquette—and created a whole new set of problems.

Beyond their tethered forebears, Bluetooth wireless headphones are convenient because they allow workers to forget they’re wearing a device and leave their desks without yanking their laptops onto the floor. In open offices, people commonly wander around with their headphones on all day, into bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes listen to nothing at all in order to avoid the constant distraction of compulsory social interaction.

We have Apple to thank for wireless headphones’ proliferation. The tech giant launched its tiny, white AirPods in late 2016 to accompany new iPhones that lacked a traditional headphone jack. Despite initial concern that having two plastic sticks poking out of your ears might look insurmountably lame, AirPods have avoided the demise of other wearable tech like Google Glass by being immediately useful. Industry analysts estimate that tens of millions of pairs of AirPods have been sold already, accounting for as much as 85 percent of the wireless-headphone market. The earbuds even star in ultra-viral videos and TikTok memes as a joke-y symbol of wealth among teens.

For Americans who have already joined the office workforce, AirPods serve a different purpose: tuning out your coworkers without looking excessively hostile. In that capacity, they’ve become indispensable to lots of people, because the hard surfaces, high ceilings, and empty spaces common in open offices help sounds carry. There’s rarely any soft surfaces to dampen them. Jerrick Haddad, a 35-year-old social media strategist in Brooklyn, won’t go to his open office without them. “We moved from offices to an open plan two years ago, and wireless headphones are why I haven’t quit,” he says. “One day I forgot them, and I got up and walked straight to the Apple store to buy a pair of AirPods.”

The same is true for Antigua Samuelson, a 29-year-old Los Angeles resident who works for a medical-marijuana wholesaler. She watches Netflix or Hulu at her desk during slow periods, and without her AirPods, she’d have to find another way to fill significant amounts of idle time. “If I forget to bring them with me, I will go back home and get them,” she says.

According to Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies organizational behavior, it makes sense that this subtle tactic for avoiding constant interaction has seeped into office environments. “People are very good at creating spaces for themselves, and these days you look at everybody, and almost without exception, they’re on their phones with headphones in their ears,” he says. In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interactions among coworkers by as much as 70 percent, in stark contrast to designers’ stated goals of collaborative teamwork.

The proliferation of small, wireless headphones may exacerbate that effect. Since you don’t have to remove AirPods to wander around the office, it can be hard for your coworkers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out. For Samuelson, sometimes that’s the point. “Once in a while, I’ll pretend to have them on just so I can eavesdrop on what people are saying,” she admits. And for people who find music as distracting as they find their coworkers, putting on their quiet headphones can be as much of a visual signal as it is an attempt to dampen ambient noise.

It’s not a perfect system. David Grilli, a 33-year-old IT professional, uses his headphones to signal that he wants to be left alone, but the message doesn’t always translate. His coworkers “stand in your field of vision until you take notice and ask what they need, or they start talking immediately as if you're not wearing headphones,” he says. Grilli’s coworkers might just need his attention at inopportune moments, but could also be true that office workers are becoming so used to seeing each other in headphones that they barely register them.

For women, there’s often an extra wrinkle: Wireless earbuds are often so small that they’re entirely invisible under long hair. Bernstein suggests that to send a clearer do-not-disturb signal to colleagues, people might consider larger, over-ear models.

Employers can do some things to help with the confusion, like retrofitting a space with small, private phone booths to give employees somewhere to escape. That solves another headphone problem, too: Even when people can see your AirPods, they still don’t know what you’re doing with them. A person quietly sitting in on a conference call looks pretty similar to a person who’s focused on work while listening to soothing nature sounds or who’s checking Facebook while listening to nothing at all. This ambiguity has prompted a whole new visual language meant to mime the difference to unsuspecting desk-mates. To perform its most common gesture, which indicates that you are on a call, you dramatically motion to your ears while making a face that communicates a sense of semi-smug capitulation: You, too, are currently being inconvenienced by your own importance.

“I do a lot of strategic hair-tucking, gesturing at my ears, and phone-pointing,” says Lisa Derus, a 31-year-old publicist who frequently uses her AirPods for calls both on her long commute between Connecticut and New York City and in her open-plan office. “I learned the hard way that the same ear-tapping motion I'd historically used to signal ‘I'm on the phone’ is the exact same gesture that ends phone calls on my AirPods.”

According to the design psychologist Sally Augustin, all of this irritation has come about because open offices ignore some essential elements of human psychological development. “We get revved up just being around other people, so in a workplace you’ve always got that force energizing you,” she says. “When you’re doing intellectual work, you’ll do it better in an environment that’s generally less energizing.” Although headphones can help filter auditory interruptions, they can’t block visual ones, which Augustin says can be just as disruptive to performance and focus.

AirPods also can’t change the fact that you’re just sitting in the middle of an open room, which Augustin notes is stressful no matter what you’re doing. “When you can be approached from the rear, a little part of your brain is always vigilant,” she says. “It’s not about what you’re looking at on your screen or anything. It’s much more fundamental than that.”

The good news is that trends are already turning away from open offices in favor of designs that have a range of space types, including those that allow workers privacy and relief from constant stimulation. “This is how humans work,” Augustin explains. Evolutionarily, our open-plan stress response goes back to a time long before office politics. “We like to think we’ve come so far from our days on the savanna, but maybe not.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[artificialqueens]

game of survival, chapter 1/? (branjie) - holtzmanns

AN: Not quite sure how this one has happened, but here we are! Hopefully it’ll be a fun ride. 

“Two hundred fifty thousand, starting. Negotiable based on how fast and cleanly the job is done. It should not, under any cost, be traceable back to me.”

“That’s the primary goal of a hit job, is it not?”

The man’s eyes narrow at the drawl from the woman in front of him, seemingly unbothered by the looming bodyguards flanking his sides. She stares back, blue eyes unflinching and facial expression one of almost boredom.

“I need her gone, sooner rather than later. She’s not going down any other way.” The man takes a step forward. “Do we have a deal?”

The woman doesn’t move. “Five hundred thousand, with a hundred and fifty thousand of that deposited upfront in my account by 8 pm tonight.”

Her lip turns up at the man’s resulting growl. “You’re asking me to kill a congressional candidate, one adored by the public and for whom support is only growing across the country with every passing day. You didn’t think it was going to cost you?”

There’s a pause, as the man mulls over her offer. She waits for the answer that she inevitably knows will come.

“You have a deal.”

It’s not her typical job.

Brooke stopped taking the contracts that messed with her conscience years ago. It’s debatable, though, if she still even has one.

But she has her own system, to keep herself intact. She only takes jobs where she knows that the person has done harm. Where the world will be better off without them in it. Corrupt political figures, drug kingpins, even abusers if the person that hires her can meet her monetary demands.

Brooke has a reputation. She’s whispered about, her name brought up whenever a clean job is necessary.

She only takes the worst ones. The jobs that don’t stay on her conscience, the ones where she can calmly pack up her rifle after a clean shot and walk away without a look back.

This job is different - Brooke doesn’t take it because she wants to. She takes it because she has a chance to make more on this one hit than she has on her last ten, and because she owes very, very bad people money who have very, very bad consequences for those who don’t pay up.

She’d be crazy to do it even if she didn’t have a conscience. The target is Vanessa Mateo, a fucking political powerhouse and overwhelming public favourite whose brash style and fiery comebacks have spawned many a viral video already.

Brooke doesn’t need to be overly involved in politics to know that the woman is unstoppable and has made herself many enemies in the process. After all, one of them has hired Brooke.

She feels a phantom tug on her questionable morals. Vanessa Mateo is a politician, part of a population who by definition are not considered exemplary, but she probably has not done anything worthy of ending her life by Brooke’s standards. Brooke ignores it for now.

Brooke is not a bad person – that’s what she tells herself, at least. She’s Robin Hood, were he to go after lives instead of riches. Putting down the powerful in the name of the less fortunate. It’s a description she’ll go back to after this job on Vanessa Mateo, after she gets the money and saves her own ass.

The key to a successful hit job is the combination of a multitude of factors.

First is the background research on the target. Getting into the target’s head, into their lives, into their past.

Brooke spreads out the information that she collects onto a well-used bulletin board in her apartment, mapping out Vanessa Mateo. She pins up her social circle - her immediate confidantes, her friends, her coworkers, her rivals in the race, each photo connected by string and forming a complex web that weaves and stretches across the board. She dives into Vanessa’s past, her schooling, her connections, trying to figure how exactly she rose up in the political ranks faster than anyone’s ever seen. Who the blame of her future death can be pinned on.

Next is learning about the target’s habits, their day-to-day routine, where they spend each and every hour of their day.

It requires watching from afar. Patience. Scoping out where they grab coffee, what time they leave work, when they get home. Where ‘home’ actually is.

The first day that Brooke spies on Vanessa, she hears her voice before she actually sees her. It’s loud and gruff, carrying as she talks to an aide that is hurrying to keep up at her side outside the Capitol Building. Her team follows close behind, a flurry of loose papers and cellphones pressed up to ears, oblivious to the pedestrians that they’re barging past.

It’s not difficult to see that Vanessa is in charge. Brooke watches from her bench as her team trails behind her like puppies, scrambling to follow the orders that she barks at each one of them. She’s the shortest of the group, her heels clacking as she climbs the steps to the Capitol Building with ease.

Brooke maps out the rest of Vanessa’s schedule as the week goes on, eyes on her every action from afar. Despite the nearly six foot build and blonde hair, Brooke is inconspicuous. She moves quietly and blends into crowds, her eyes on Vanessa while giving no one else any reason to look twice at her.

Which leads to the next component of a successful murder for hire: location, location, location.

The gears in Brooke’s mind begin to turn based on where she has seen Vanessa go throughout the week. Is the best place for the deed Vanessa’s campaign office? Vanessa’s apartment building, with no security or concierge to keep out non-residents? The gravel path along the park two blocks away from her home where Vanessa faithfully jogs every morning?

Brooke scouts out each of them, planting bugs to overhear the conversations that occur inside. She worms her way into nearby buildings and looks for vantage points in their windows from where her rifle would be able to provide an accurate shot. She maps out possible getaway routes, ways of abandoning the scene of the future crime without a trace.

After all, to catch a prey, a predator must be prepared.

She ultimately decides on Vanessa’s campaign office as the scene of the crime. Vanessa appears to arrive at the building each morning precisely 45 minutes earlier than the rest of her team, coffee already in hand. A perfect amount of time to get the job done and leave a bloodied mess for her employees to find. Brooke finds the perfect lookout point from which to shoot in the form of a multi-story car park across the street that is still under construction.

A killing shot is only successful if it happens at the right place, at the right time. So Brooke waits, scopes out the layout of Vanessa’s office, bides her time with her eye glued to the viewfinder of her rifle every morning as she waits for the perfect moment, for a perfect shot to the head to line up.

Brooke is almost going to miss Vanessa, which comes as a surprise. She’s been infinitely more interesting to listen in on and watch than any other of Brooke’s past targets. Her interactions with staff, while maintaining her clear leadership position, are interlaced with comical swear words. Her clashes are a lightshow, Vanessa raining down on rivals who dare to cross her with absolute decimation.

Brooke’s sure that people will mourn. Not only the general public, who have started seeing Vanessa as a ray of hope in a current wasteland of politics, but also the individuals around her. The intern that brings her lunch, that she makes sure to thank every time. The secretary with whom Vanessa spends five minutes of her day with talking about The Bachelorette after a new episode airs. She treats them all with a surprising amount of respect while still maintaining her iron grip. Brooke has to give her that.

But it’s almost time for Vanessa’s end. Brooke needs the money, and someone has to pay. Brooke doesn’t want it to be herself.

She’s in the carpark on yet another morning, yawning into her viewfinder as she watches Vanessa a few blocks away. She’s striding up the street and towards her office with coffee in one hand and her phone in the other while furiously typing out a message. Brooke hopes that she can get a fucking clear shot today, she’s tired of the early mornings. She’s used to working at night, making bodies drop under the glow of streetlights. Not with birds chirping above her head.

As Vanessa gets closer to the office building, Brooke takes the chance to check over her equipment again. Viewfinder in place, silencer positioned for minimal noise of the shot, rifle loaded. She’s methodical in her examination; following a routine she’s had her entire career. She’s about to get back into position when-

Wait.

There’s talking.

Not Vanessa, but from inside her office. Vanessa is still outside.

The voices travel to the earpiece in Brooke’s ear, the bug that Brooke planted in Vanessa’s office continuing to work.

“Quick, over there-no not there, you dipshit, leave it under the desk.”

“You don’t think someone will fucking notice it if it’s under the desk?”

“They’re gonna go kaboom before they even realize what they’re looking at. Set the timer.”

Brooke comes to two realizations at once.

First, she’s never had others try to kill her target at the same time as her. It’s new. An interesting twist.

Second, fuck, fuck , she can’t let them kill her first, she needs that money goddamnit-

She’s running before she even realizes what she’s doing, bursting out of the car park and down the street and running head fucking first into none other than Vanessa Mateo herself.

“Shit! So sorry about that ma’am, let me help you get that-”

Vanessa tries to dab at the new coffee stain on Brooke’s shirt with a tissue, oblivious to the way Brooke is staring at her because she’s right there, closer than she’s ever been, all strong perfume and brown curls falling around her shoulders and her nearby office building is about to explode.

“This morning really started off on a rough note, huh? Hope it gets better for the both of us.” Brooke recognizes Vanessa’s political voice, the one she puts on for potential voters and funding backers.

Vanessa doesn’t notice as Brooke starts to tug them in the opposite direction from Vanessa’s office, continuing to inspect the stain damage on Brooke’s shirt near her collarbone instead as she walks.

“-Anyway, take my card, send me the dry cleaning bill for your shirt. I can cover it.” Vanessa grins at Brooke before turning back in the direction of her office. “Great meeting you, truly.”

No, no, no-

“Wait!” Brooke’s voice comes out more louder, more forceful, than expected, and Vanessa turns back in surprise.

Brooke doesn’t know what to say after that, not thinking she’d get this far. It is a blessing in disguise when she only has to dither over her words for a few seconds before the inevitable-

Boom.

Her arms around Vanessa are immediate, pulling her close and shielding her body away from the direction of the office. The flames are already licking up the sides of the building when Brooke lets Vanessa go, coffee stains and bumps into strangers long forgotten.

Brooke slips away while Vanessa is staring at the falling debris from the building in disbelief. She packs up her things at the car park, watches how Vanessa cranes her neck back and forth, to presumably look for her.

Brooke is good at disappearing. She has a talent of being able to slip away, leaving a mess behind for others to come in and clean up.

She’s angry as she watches the building burn, the bugs that she planted inside no longer working after being fried to a crisp. But she’s more so confused. She knows Vanessa has a lot of political enemies. But who else wanted to straight up kill her?

It’s messy. The explosion has made things messy. Vanessa has seen her (something that has never happened with a target, should never happen with a target), she now knows what Brooke looks like. Was searching for her in the aftermath.

It’s going to make Brooke’s job of killing her a lot harder, not being an anonymous face to her target. Especially if she needs to apparently compete against others to do it.

tumblr: plastiquetiaras

[junker-town]

How The Process failed Jahlil Okafor

Jahlil Okafor pulls a blanket over his lap, leans back in the leather recliner, and gazes up at the projector screen. The lights dim and Reese Witherspoon begins to narrate the opening sequence of Home Again, a romantic comedy that proves to be light on both romance and comedy. But Okafor doesn’t much care about the plot. He’s here for the setting.

Okafor’s girlfriend rests her head on his shoulder. A plate of sweet potato fries sits on a small, circular table that stems from the console between their two chairs. This is just the first of two movies he’ll watch on this September afternoon, both in the comfort of the iPic luxury theater at New York’s Fulton Market. Okafor is in town for a week of physical therapy and workouts, but he’s been known to take a train from Philadelphia to Manhattan just to catch a flick or two at the iPic. By the end of this trip he’ll have seen every film the theater offers.

“People want to know why I like going to the movies so much,” Okafor says. “If I was a psychologist and I had to evaluate myself, maybe I like how dark the room is and I'm able to sit there like a normal person and not be bothered and just enjoy watching a fantasy.”

Okafor has become accustomed to the darkness. He was once the top recruit in a high school class that included Karl-Anthony Towns, Myles Turner, and D’Angelo Russell, then earned an NCAA championship and first-team All-America honors in his lone season at Duke. But the past two years have not gone nearly as smoothly. The basketball world has judged Okafor harshly, labeling him as a delinquent after a series of off-court incidents as a rookie and a bust following two seasons of neglectful defense and injuries. Yet he kept to himself, content to let others shape the narrative of his pro career.

I'm unsure if I'm still on the team. Am I really a part of this process? Am I really a part of this culture?

This past summer, he sank deeper into anonymity. When Joel Embiid christened the 76ers’ young core as the “FEDS,” (Markelle Fultz, Embiid, Dario Saric, Ben Simmons), Okafor’s name was conspicuously absent, despite the fact that he was the third pick in the NBA draft just two years ago. While his teammates posted group photos on Instagram, Okafor swore off social media. As trade rumors swirled — and continue to do so — he stayed mum.

But silence should never be mistaken for apathy or acquiescence. The past two seasons affected Okafor deeply. He addressed his physical issues this summer, adopting a vegan diet that left him 20 pounds lighter and free of the chronic knee swelling that hampered him last season. But the offseason was about emotional growth as well, as Okafor finally arrived at a place where he is ready to open up about all that has transpired and where he goes from here.

“I'm unsure if I'm still on the team,” Okafor says now. “Am I really a part of this process? Am I really a part of this culture? That's why the guys have been out there on social media, but I've just kind of been in the dark. I'll go to a Sixers event, smile, take pictures with the kids and stuff like that, but I’m still thinking, ‘am I a part of this team?’”

Between the two showings at the iPic, Okafor heads to midtown Manhattan, where the National Basketball Players Association has installed a fully outfitted court in its Sixth Avenue office. Rick Lewis, who has trained Okafor since he was 13 years old, puts the 6’11 center through a series of perimeter-focused drills: length-of the-floor dribbling; hundreds of three-pointers; pull-up jump shots. Beads of sweat drip down the back of Okafor’s neck and he tosses his shirt to the side, revealing his newly trim waste and a nascent six-pack.

For most of Okafor’s life, scenes like this were his refuge. His mother died when he was just 9 years old, and he buried his grief in hours of jump shots. “Each time I would go into the house where my mother used to be, I would start crying,” Okafor recalls. “I would just always go right back outside and start shooting and forget everything.”

Photo by Elsa/Getty Images

As a rookie, though, basketball turned from an outlet to a burden. In November of 2015, Okafor was involved in an altercation outside a Boston nightclub; video emerged of his swinging at a man who had taunted him. In the aftermath, two other stories surfaced in the Philadelphia Inquirer. One revealed that police had stopped him for driving 108 mph on the Ben Franklin Bridge earlier that month. Another report claimed that a man had pulled a gun on Okafor during a verbal dispute outside an Old City nightclub in October.

Reactions were swift and predictable: Another young athlete was immature at best, a bad person at worst. The Sixers suspended him for two games, and Okafor apologized in a series of perfunctory tweets. Inside, though, Okafor was struggling. For two weeks following the Boston incident he hardly left the house, sending friends and family members to pick up food.

“I was embarrassed, to say the least,” he says now. “They started criticizing the way my dad raised me. And that was the biggest thing that hit me, because I know when my mom passed, he did everything he could to put me in the best situation.”

Those around him say Okafor was deeply ashamed. During games, he wanted to hide. “I had to go on the court in front of all these thousands of people, and I know they had all just witnessed what I did in that video and were judging me for it,” he says. “So I remember not wanting to be on the court, being embarrassed to be out there. That was the first time basketball wasn’t my escape.”

It wasn’t until a long talk with Lewis in a Memphis hotel room that Okafor began to find his way out of his funk. His longtime coach talked about recovering from mistakes, referencing Bill Clinton as an example of moving past infamous moments. The key, Lewis preached, was owning up to those transgressions. But Okafor was 19 at the time, and anything more than a surface-level apology was uncomfortable. Two years later, self-reflection comes easier.

“We were almost about to win that game against the Celtics and it ended up getting away from us in the fourth quarter,” Okafor says of that night in Boston. “I remember just being upset because I thought we were about to get our first win. And I just decided I'm going to go out that night. I don't remember a lot of it, because I was really intoxicated. And me being drunk, I wasn't in my right state of mind. I remember being taunted — just random stuff I would hear all the time on the court. I just reacted differently.”

I remember my teacher said that you could go on the school bus every day and not throw up for 300 days, but if you throw up that one day, everybody's going to know you as the kid who threw up on the bus.

Those early experiences hardened Okafor. He was shocked when the speeding ticket became major news, then again when a rumor spread that he’d used a fake ID at a bar near his house, an allegation he vehemently denies. As the public made snap judgments about his character, he felt his trust in others erode.

“When you watch the [Boston] video, you’re gonna say ‘what a bad guy,’” says Lloyd Pierce, a 76ers assistant coach. “It was a one-off and who knows how and why it happened. But if you’ve never seen that one day, and you’ve judged Jahlil by everything else, you know he’s the sweetest, nicest, best teammate, upbeat. He’s a great guy. You’re never going to have a bad encounter with Jahlil Okafor.”

But that’s not how the public saw him. And Okafor couldn’t help but think back to a lesson from grade school. “Growing up, I remember hearing that one mistake changes everybody's idea of you,” he says. “I remember my teacher said that you could go on the school bus every day and not throw up for 300 days, but if you throw up that one day, everybody's going to know you as the kid who threw up on the bus.”

Following his rookie year, Okafor has kept a low public profile. Rehabbing his image as a basketball player, though, has proved to be more difficult. As much as the video of the Boston fight has haunted Okafor, another clip has caused more lasting damage. Last season, footage went viral showing Okafor standing flat-footed in the lane while the Heat missed a short jump shot, grabbed an offensive rebound, and eventually scored. It became the Zapruder film of Okafor’s defense, Exhibit A of his ineptitude at that end of the court.

Last season, Okafor ranked 61st out of 62 qualifying centers (ahead of only Towns) in defensive Real Plus-Minus, a stat that measures a player’s estimated on-court impact on his team’s defensive performance. According to basketball-reference.com, the Sixers were 4.9 points per 100 possessions worse on defense with Okafor on the court last season and 2.5 points worse when he was a rookie. Says one league executive, “He can’t guard anybody and he doesn’t try to guard anybody.”

Pierce doesn’t agree, particularly when it comes to questions of Okafor’s desire. He says Okafor sought him out after the video hit Twitter, asking what he’d done wrong. Pierce told him that he’d handled his assignment correctly — Okafor was supposed to retreat and keep the ball in front of him. It was Okafor’s listless body language that made the play look so bad. “Could he have done more on the play?” Pierce asks now. “Always. But he was where we want him on the floor. It always comes down to perception, optics. In 48 minutes, you’re going to find a clip on every single player on every team.”

Okafor, of course, didn’t go third in the draft because of his defensive merits. He was a dominant low-post scorer in college who mixed size and power with deft footwork and a soft touch around the hoop. He found open shooters when double-teamed and handled the ball well for his size. Though he wasn’t much of an outside shooter, Okafor loved to face-up his defender at the elbow and attack off the dribble. A good portion of those skills translated immediately to the NBA; he averaged 17.5 points per game as a rookie before a meniscus tear in his right knee ended his season in early March.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

Things changed last season. After missing two years due to injury, Embiid finally took the court. Along with Okafor and Nerlens Noel, that gave the Sixers three centers who were recent lottery picks. When all three were active, there weren’t enough minutes to go around. But the trio was also frequently injured, giving coach Brett Brown little opportunity to see how they fit together. Okafor and Embiid played just 80 minutes as a tandem; the Sixers were outscored by 34 points during that time.

Okafor’s playing time fluctuated and some nights he didn’t dress at all. His frustration reached a peak in January, when Brown called him into the coach’s office, took out a calendar, and informed Okafor that he would sit out the next four games. “That whole week I was just pissed off,” Okafor says.

He returned to the lineup at Washington. Two minutes into the game, he caught the ball on the right wing against Wizards center Marcin Gortat. Okafor turned, backed into Gortat with a pair of hard dribbles, and then accelerated toward the middle of the lane. He scooped the ball into the hoop with his left hand, drew a foul and set a tone. For the rest of the game he attacked relentlessly, even staring down his own coaches after several baskets. Okafor finished with 26 points and nine rebounds. “It was just me being pissed, kind of saying to our organization that I think this is unfair,” Okafor says. “Just letting the basketball world know that I'm still the guy that everybody thought I was.”

The Sixers hoped other teams would notice, because they realized they would have to trade one of their centers. In February, negotiations over an Okafor deal intensified to the point where the 76ers told him to stay home while the team traveled to Charlotte. But the deal fell apart and the next day. Okafor boarded an American Airlines flight to rejoin the team in Boston. An uncomfortable situation grew worse.

“It was awkward,” Okafor said. “I'm at home, watching my team play on TV, not a part of that team, but not a part of any other team. I was anxious. Eager to figure out where I was going to be. Kind of excited to have an opportunity to be with a new team and have a fresh start. Sad that I was leaving my teammates that I'd gotten really close with. And then I ended up playing the next night. I can't really put into words how difficult it was.”

So Okafor remains a Sixer — for now, at least. The 76ers continue to discuss trade options, but they have yet to find a suitable offer, in part because his value has plateaued. Says a rival general manager, “Everybody knows he’s been on the block. The fact that he’s been injury-prone obviously doesn’t help — he’s only played 103 games total in two seasons.”

He also represents an increasingly irrelevant NBA archetype: the back-to-the-basket center. As the NBA hurtles into the pace-and-space era, teams are searching for big men who shoot well enough to spread the floor and move well enough to contain ball screens and protect the rim. That’s not Okafor’s game. Not yet, anyway.

This past spring, as Okafor’s knee pain persisted, he read that dairy products can cause swelling. On a whim, he cut it out of his diet entirely. A week later, he visited the team’s trainers and they were amazed: The fluid in his knee was gone. So next he cut out chicken, then steak, then all animal-based products. And so it was that Okafor found himself shooting a spot for PETA at a vegan restaurant in Philadelphia last month.

Now 20 pounds lighter and pain free, Okafor is noticeably quicker. And in Okafor’s mind, if his body wasn’t a finished product before this summer, neither was his game. “I would hear somebody else get criticized, like ‘oh, this person is not good at that, but oh, he's going into his second year,’” Okafor says. “But when it's me, it’s ‘well, he's not good at that, he'll never be good at it.’ I never got the ‘oh, he's going into his second year.’”

I was kind of already thinking that I'm not really a part of this future. So it wasn't like 'oh my goodness, they left me out.’ I kind of left myself out.

Okafor has a point: He is still just 21. The early statistical evidence against him might be damning, but it’s not absolute. When Marc Gasol was a rookie, for instance, the Grizzlies were 5.8 points per 100 possessions worse on defense when he was on the court. He merely went on to win the Defensive Player of the Year award in 2012-13. But Gasol’s anticipation and awareness are otherworldly. By contrast, Okafor has struggled to pick up on the nuances of positioning at both end of the court. Those who have watched him closely point out a host of subtle flaws. Instead of rolling hard to the basket when he sets a screen, he tends to float on the perimeter. He lets defenders push him off the block, instead of working to establish deep position. On defense, his lack of quickness is magnified by the fact that he hasn’t grasped spacing and positioning, a problem that also leaves him out of place to rebound effectively.

Still, even the executive who trashed Okafor’s defense isn’t ready to give up on him: “I think he can get a lot better, but he has to know that he’s not good enough,” the exec says. “It’s going to take a total egoless approach.”

That might not be possible in Philadelphia. Two years of criticism, of loss after loss, of fans turning against him, have taken their toll. If Embiid has come to represent the fruits of The Process — to the point where he has adopted that moniker as his own — Okafor has become a discarded byproduct overshadowed by his young teammates.

“I definitely feel like I'm the scapegoat for a lot of The Process issues,” Okafor says. “Something I learned is that when you lose, people find a reason why you're losing and I think that's where the defense thing really blew up — ‘oh, he can't play defense, that's why they only won 10 games.’ But there were a lot of other reasons why we only won 10 games that season.

“And then the second year rolls around. It's JoJo's first year playing NBA basketball, so he doesn't get the blame. And it's Dario's first year, so he doesn't get the blame. Nerlens just had surgery and Ben wasn't on the court either, so I felt like it was me again as the scapegoat.”

Against that backdrop, he begins his third season in Philly. Pierce raves about Okafor’s attitude and professionalism; if he’s unhappy, he hasn’t shown it. But internally, frustration continues to mount. “I was kind of already thinking that I'm not really a part of this future,” he says of his teammates’ photos and tweets. “So it wasn't like 'oh my goodness, they left me out.’ I kind of left myself out.”

So is it time to move on? Okafor pauses. He wants to make it clear that he respects the organization. That he loves his teammates. That he has no complaints about how he has been treated. But, he confesses, “Sometimes I do think it would be great to get a fresh start, be on a new team, new surroundings, new teammates. I think about that often and I think that's something that could benefit me.”

He lingers in the fantasy, at the chance to find a way out of the darkness, a chance to feel home again.

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON MSG’S SOLOIST KIM RIAN…

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: N/A CURRENT AGE: 24 DEBUT AGE: 17 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 14 COMPANY: MSG

IDOL IMAGE

in rian there has always been an air of the melancholic. perhaps in the low pitch of her voice (a contrast to the soaring heights of her soprano) or the sad tilt of her eyes, a certain macabre expression in her gaze. her words are thoughtful and carefully meditated and she seems to be an old soul. it contributes to an odd dichotomy of image in the early days. a girl so young singing so sadly, a girl so sweet and soft with such a series of emotional ballad tracks. it’s not what had been expected of msg, of a seventeen year old, of a female solo artist- and at the time there had been few of those, that hadn’t come from other groups in the past at least. so it had been uncomfortably unsuccessful. a flop, if you will. she was too fat, she wasn’t very cute, she was too sad, she was too boring. there was nothing about her that quite appealed. the soulful vocal powerhouse image was thus, summarily, discarded.

despite their best efforts there was no fighting two qualities to rian: her melancholic malaise and her youthful visage. the surprising resolution was to combine the qualities. rian became something ethereal. a whimsical creature, alice lost in wonderland. a little vintage, a bit nostalgic, somewhat heartbroken, and with an air of something innocent, she becomes this vehicle for the telling of stories. rian is at the basis of it, always the same. each song, each video tells the story of her lovelorn and losing, heart wrenching and hopeful. there is a perfect fantastical air to her that imbues the theatrical surroundings with a dual sweetness and softness and sadness. it separates from the purely sugary into something with a nuance that pulls at one’s heartstrings.

this is the beginning, too, of rian as an actress. she isn’t meant for it initially, but with her videos becoming more conceptual and cinematic, she needs at least a hint of the talent, and without any group members to pick up the slack, she gets a little better each time, and when the first love calls come in, msg hardly minds sending her out to fill the gaps in her schedule with filming. there are no rave reviews at first, but they aren’t wholly negative either. she just joins the rank and file of idols trying to act and skirts below the radar, occupies that space for awhile. until, like her music, they find her a niche.

rian can’t be widely marketed as is. she’s too odd for that, too offbeat. there needs to be an angle explored. now that they’ve defined rian as a creature of dichotomy, as half innocent and half sexual, half fox and half bear, half loving and half lost, half magical and half melancholic, the world seems to be her oyster. at least, in the moment. btu the higher she is able to climb the easier she’ll fall, and as a girl on her own, there is no one to pick up the slack, no one to catch her if she plummets. they’ve created an image around her, as the nation’s first love, as a nostalgic representation of all the innocence and longing they remember of their own youth, and as something fairy like and ethereal to channel the most perfected representations of their stories. sexy, but not enough to make you feel impure for looking at her. it’s a cage of their creation, building up around her, into something she can’t possible stay forever. they expect too much of her and eye her critically for the slightest misstep, as if they delight as much in her failure as her success.

IDOL HISTORY

mangwon is a nice district. up and coming, they’ll tell you. trendy, a bit artsy. the next hongdae, but aimed at a bit older set. it is in a little rooftop apartment here that kim rian is born on a warm summer day - no hospital necessary. this is perhaps a foolish decision, but the kim family is home to two decidedly atypical parents. her mother an artist and her father a gallery owner.  kim kyujin works tirelessly and without complaint to support the whims and whimsy of his wife, bae minji. at the time of her birth their home is modest at best and it would remain so, their district not yet the up and coming location it is today.

kim rian is born into a home of pastels, paints, flowers, and hardwork. tireless effort and patience were the tools of her parent’s trade and they applied this to rian as well. they are gentle but firm and poured their expectations into the young girl relentlessly. they did not mean to fill her to the point of bursting, but this is what happened, regardless.

kim rian is given every opportunity to succeed, and her father works to the bone to make it happen. after school classes in english, in math, in art and in singing. she has a class for musicals, one for painting, one for korean literature, one for western literature. by the time she os in middle school she’s out until ten each night and when she arrives home there’s homework to do, piano pieces to practice, vocal scales to run.

when they discovers she has the voice of an angel, they trade some of the math lessons for vocal training, the arts for musicals, and so on. of course she enjoys this - she enjoys being talented, being told she’s talented. she likes that she’s making her parents proud, making them happy. when they had been endlessly sacrificing for her for so long, it felt as though it was her sworn duty to provide them that bliss.

the thing is, of course, that kim rian is never consulted about any of this. she never requested these sacrifices. more than anything. even as a child, the pressure is insurmountable. her voice continues to improve, her range growing, her appearance matching the soft and soulful nature of her music. “she sings like she’s lived a thousand years,” her trainer told her parents one day. “like she’s lived a thousand heartbreaks.”

maybe she had, in a sense. she’d always felt too much, too intensely, in a way that seemed just a bit More than other people did, perhaps a bit too much entirely. and in this way her parents did not mean to break her, but they did. hours of lessons. the pressure of performance. auditions for endless programs and schools, camps and opportunities.

when kim rian steps onto the stage to audition, the msg executives do not see anything special. her cheeks are chubby. she’s short. her features are obscured by a countrified haircut and tacky, ill fitting clothes. her eyeliner isn’t drawn on quite right. she’s underwhelming. she’s been auditioning all day, and all of yesterday, and nearly every day before that. she needs this. needs a shot. needs someone to see her- to hear her.

and they do.

she’s a slight thing, in stature and in age. but her voice soars powerful and pure, a heart wrenching quality to it that covers for breathiness, for unsupported notes, for the roughened lack of polish that comes with years of singing in her bedroom without any proper training.

they take a chance on her.

when she steps forward, for the first trainee evaluation of her young life, the criticism rains down on her immediately. she doesn’t temper her voice to suit the group, doesn’t make sure it melts with the other girls. she dances with two left feet. she’s stiff and awkward and expressionless. even if her voice has all the beautiful soul in the world, no one is going to really believe it when she looks so glum and dour. she’s too young to be this kind of melancholy, to seem so wounded. they need her to kick the pep up a notch, to bring the energy, to bounce and sparkle. they need her at a hot pink, not a dusty purple.

she tries.

she really does. but it becomes clear that she’s not going to be the vocalist they need for their upcoming girl group. it’s obvious that she’s - well, maybe not lacking. but she’s not quite right. she’s a puzzle piece in the wrong box.

they take a chance on her again.

they debut her solo with a ballad that plays to her melancholic nature, but the only comments she gets is consistent ridicule for baby fat and a boring song. the end of her debut stage is marred by the voices of girls hurrying her off stage to call for their idols, their biases. she’s too young to handle that kind of stress and she breaks down backstage. she’s crying and lonely, with only her manager at her side. her debut single sells barely into four digits, and that’s from a major company. it’s a flop. they keep at it. the next, the next, they’re bits and pieces better but they aren’t right. not yet.

and rian? she diets herself down slim. she does yoga, cardio, she builds lean muscle, she scrutinizes herself in the mirror. her skincare routine becomes obsessively detailed and the threat of acne, of imperfection sends her into panic. they tease her about vanity but watch worriedly as she examines labels. she lets them dress her up as they please, jumps at any suggestion of styling, anything to ward off the same cruel remarks that had been leveled at her so horrendously, so openly, so eagerly.  she gets her eyes done. what it takes. what she has to do. what they’ve recommended so casually since she became old enough to make that decision.

by the time she releases good day, rian is a different girl. pin straight hair and a brightly colored orange dress, she’s alice in wonderland. she’s a creature from a fairytale. she’s the girl wandering the enchanted forest.  she toes the line between a melancholy longing and a bright flirtation and it suits her. the soaring three octave note at the end goes viral and they trot her out to perform it live on various shows, like a wind-up doll. suddenly, now that she’s prettier, now that she’s happier, they love her.

this is when she learns that talent doesn’t matter. this is when she learns that her appearance is and always will be everything. that there will always be another girl prettier, another girl more charming, and she will all too easily fall behind. it begins an obsessive focus on her appearance.

they love her like this.

release after release, she plays the same role. a sweet girl, a sad girl. equal parts ethereal and melancholic, a twist on the little sister, first love image they adore from her. you want to protect her. you want to ruin her, you want to love her, you want to consume her. that’s the desire. that’s the game. they play her into fairytale roles, vintage sets, her videos tell little stories that spin her through impossible heartbreaks. it’s always the same, that soulful depth to her voice, that melancholic slant to her brow, they seem to mark her as a creature of fragility and the world wants both to protect and punish her for that.

punish, because, when she dares step a toe out of line, dares break the illusion they’ve constructed around her like a prison, they beat her down. break her apart. did you see her look at him like that? did you hear she went out to eat with him but chose an expensive play, let him pay? did you see the lyrics for her new song? scandals roll over her in an endless loop, created from nothing. she influences a song about it, about feeling torn between two things, two images, two girls. a fox and a bear, the desire to love or to make money, between child and woman. and that? they don’t like that. they don’t like seeing her fight back against the image that they’ve created for her.

so, msg pulls her back. sends her to japan for her music, pushes her through drama after drama. slowly, she builds herself up. slowly, she reaches higher, steps closer to the sun. she’s careful, now. or perhaps fearful. but over time, she keeps herself guarded. she uses their love as a platform, as a way to keep herself centered, focused, walls the parts of herself away from one another. there is the girl that they’ve constructed and the one that she is, and she thinks she can manage this. she thinks she can be okay with it.

she branches out in her acting, stepping towards a hopeful future. eager to establish herself as actress. as artist. wants recognition. she wants to be an artist, to be someone respected. she’s tired of being an overgrown little girl, half sexualized and half infantilized, often in the same breath, and condemned when she points it out. she’s frazzled and overflowing, all those same emotions bubbling up and over in bits and pieces. like an overripe fruit, she’s on the edge of bursting, an icarus with melting wings, soon to plummet to the sea below.

and there will be no one to catch her.