"After these competitions, it was as if I had a third wind in gymnastics.
There was a moment in my career when I wanted to finish, then I was 17, I was the silver medalist of the Olympic Games, I was tired of everything, but then I came to life by the age of 19 and my gymnastics flew to the top. It was cool.
During this period, taking into account all the news and the lack of starts, I again began to entertain the idea that I should develop in another area and slowly leave.
but after these competitions, because of the incredible freedom in my gymnastics, because of the audience’s love for me, because of the pleasure of performing, I became to understand that I’m here for a long time.
So, the third stage in my career begins,
Welcome 🚀"
Umm…here’s just a quick unedited thing I wrote today. It’s a little character study of some of the main characters of my new original WIP.
In the Imperial Academy of Magical Studies, there are many hundreds of impressive, interesting people of whom impressive, interesting stories could be told. But, dear reader, you will forgive me for directing your attention away from these prestigious magihistorians and herbal wizards to the slight, sharp-faced girl in the coffeehouse.
This is Lizaveta—Vyetta to her friends, though there are few enough of those. She sits in the coffeehouse in a way that might seem sullen to others but to those who know her is simply focused, hunched over a pile of textbooks and scribbling away in a cramped, spidery font.
Vyetta—we shall take the presumption of calling her this, for are not all characters friends of their narrators and creators?—practically glows with loneliness, though she would rather have died than admit it.
And, as her creator, I know something she has not yet realized—it is this loneliness which has driven her to Rodrikov Lamovich, the subject of her intense academic interest and the biography of whom she has made her postgraduate thesis. 200 years earlier, he was also a very lonely boy, so lonely and so looked over that when he disappeared after the death of his imminent father, no one really took any notice one way or another.
Except Vyetta, 200 years later.
For now we shall leave Vyetta—but not forever, certainly—and visit our other person of interest halfway across campus, in the hall of music. The girl fidgeting with a pen in the back row of a lecture hall is Angelina Rudrakova—Gelya to her friends, though those have all been left back in Tonland. Gelya is pretty in the way popular in Russki, the round-faced, delicate, snub-nosed way, and for this she is popular among the students at the Imperial Academy. She is also lonely, and she is very angry.
She can do nothing about either of these things, and she’s given up trying. The Imperial Academy, far from her family and her music studies in Tonland, was her last resort, and she very mildly regrets it. It has done nothing to help her anger except putting a buffer of distance between her and the cause, and it has only increased her loneliness.
And, though they know nothing of each other, these two women will become the most important people in the world to one another in about three hours.
We must leave them to their innocence for now to visit the third player in our tale, just finishing his third round of practice that week and laughing with a teammate as they head out of the soccer field and back to their dorms. This is Aleksei—Vyetta’s brother’s best friend, currently looking forward to that night, when he would slip away to a coffeehouse on campus (that same coffeehouse in which Vyetta is furiously, desperately studying) and lead the bimonthly meeting of the Union of Free Men. Because as much as he wants to get through school with his medical degree, he wants to kill the tsar more. And he will do whatever it takes—even giving up sleep, even risking his life (or, as he will discover, others’)—to achieve this goal.
🚨 from january 1st 2024, russian and belarussian gymnasts will be able to complete if they are authorized according to these criteria
very intrigued how they will evaluate the criteria
surely this must have been in motion before but announcing this now is very much like oh we don't wanna ban israelis WHICH ARE ACTIVELY MILITARY PERSONEL so maybe some russians can compete lmao
full pdf stating that they must wear light blue, music must not contain references to their country, etc. is here