#he's a mix between what little description the light novel gave us and what the stage play did

[originalartblog]

have. my detective Murase design. for reasons. just know that he exists.

[minshookie]

LATE NIGHT HOOKUP

| JIN |

College AU, upperclassman!jin x underclassman!reader, fuckboy!jin, Smut!!, descriptive smut. 18+ minors pls DNI, “cheating”, unprotected sex, oral (fem receiving), squirting, dubcon, forced orgasm. [[unedited]]

[Jin • Yoongi • Hoseok • Joon • Jimin • Taehyung • Jungkook ]

Peaceful was an understatement, almost alone in the campus library late in the hours of the night. You head rests against the wooden table as you closely read the Intriguing tale.

“Is the bookworm ready to go home?” His large hand rested on your shoulder giving you a startle. “Oh Jin!” You closed your novel placing it in your tote before rising from your seat.

He captured you in a protective hug, warmly pecking your neck causing you to blush at his subtle PDA.

“Thank you so much for coming, I’m sorry to bother you but I really needed to study.” He released looking into your gaze, “you could never bother me, a novel for studying...what are you reading now?”

You reached into your bag, pulling the timeless tale, “Ah the Catcher In The Rye, you understand this Doll?” Jin was a bit older than you, he acted superior treated you inferior but you know he means well. “Yeah, Jinnie, I’ve read it before.”

Tucking the book away in your tote, Jin seizes the opportunity to grasp your free hand, “hungry?” He began to lead you out of the silent reading space, in all honesty you were tired. “Depends on what you’re offering.” You squeezed his hand flirtatiously.

He held open the door leading you to his usual parking spot. “I was cooking when you texted, it should still be warm if you’d like to come over.” He opened the car door granting you access. His car smelt familiar, strongly of his cologne.

Settling in your seat he buckled you in, “oh?...to your place?” The dorms weren’t too welcoming of guest, and since it was your first year, you had to live on campus. So whenever you and Jin found solitude it was either in his car, or at a hotel where he’d pull some strings.

And where there was solitude, there was intimacy and though you were tired...you could go for a little fun.

So it’s not that you didn’t want to go to Jin’s supposedly large apartment, it’s just that you’ve never been Is all. The new territory made you nervous.

“Yeah, if you’d like.” He pulled from the lonely parking lot, “you cold cutie?” His eyes never let the road as he closed your vent, you tossed the idea of the late night dinner date in your head.

“I’m gonna need to know your answer before I get out of here.” He looked over to you briefly. Sighing you answered “Yeah Jin, I’ll go I am pretty hungry.” He smiled reaching to grip your knee. “That’s my girl, you’ll love it.” He gave you a squeeze.

You reclined your seat, the smooth ride almost lulling to sleep. “So...boyfriend? Girlfriend?” He awkwardly asked tapping his fingers on the wheel waiting at the light. “Hm no...you?”

He laughed rubbing his bottom lip. Jin in total has at least four ‘relationships’ including you, he was the campus player but he was wise enough to charm all of his rendezvous into silence and compliance.

“Mm a few, but you’re the best.....I mean that y/n.” He leaned over the counter pecking your warm cheek, “I really do baby.”

The car ride was short, full of sensual touches at red lights, dirty talk and flirtatious comments that made your stomach flutter. His hand momentarily rested between your legs, teasing your under your skirt. Only a preview of what was to come.

Pulling into the parking area, he looked over at your figure, “I have a secret.” You pulled your tote over your shoulder, “yeah Jinnie?” You yawned. “I didn’t cook...but I do want you to see my apartment.” He smiled warmly pulling his key and leaving it in his pocket.

You had no clue where you were, Jin was your only ride so of course you had no choice but to comply. “Well...you didn’t have to lie.” You yawned stepping from the low car, “mm I got nervous, not too appealing if I say ‘I don’t wanna pay for Hilton, let’s fuck at my place.’ ”

He followed behind locking the doors, catching up he pushed his palm along the small of your back. “Ah so that’s why I’m here.” He snickers, nudging your hair with his nose as he walked beside you. “Don’t act oblivious...it’s not your thing.” Oh how romantic he could be.

He walked you proudly through the glittering building, giving a rushed tour that you didn’t care much for. He pulled you into the spacious elevator, the way he cradled you against frame you knew what was next. He gripped your chin pulling you to one of his signature rough lip locks.

Not even making it to his apartment you lips became bruised and slightly swollen, lost in the moment your eyes remained closed as he pulled back. “To my apartment first, alright?” He chuckled in your flustered face. Nodding you let him grip you hand as he pulled you through the hall.

Unlocking his door he pulled you inside, stripping you of your tote hanging it on the wall rack. “Alright here it is, like it? Love it?” He locked the door, awkwardly you stood horny with one thing on your mind. “Dumby, go sit on the couch.” His every order you followed plopping down on the firm couch.

“Those videos you sent me...you show those to other men?” He questioned unbuttoning his tailored shirt, cockily coming close to you. “Be honest.” He let the expensive material fall to the polished floor.

“No...did you?” You were now anxious, your mind was clouded when you sent those drunken videos to Jin. “Never would I share something so beautiful.” He avoided eye contact falling to his knees.

He found himself at your knees, in nothing but socks and dress pants. His large hands caress you chilly knees, granting himself access to what he’d been waiting for.

“Remind me what happened in those videos.” Your breath got lost in your throat, he hid himself under your skirt lapping at you through your fabric panties. “Go on don’t get stage fright.”

You closed your eyes in attempts to recollect the night. “I was out with my f-friends I got really drunk Jinnie!” He’d slipped the thin fabric to the side focusing the tip of his tongue on your hardening nerve. “I-I missed you, I called you and you didn’t pick up.”

He hummed against your moistening core. “Hm you needed me?”

“I needed you, and I wanted to show you- you how much I did.”

You sounded pathetic in those graphic videos, the sound of your pussy, the whimpers and moans you let free. You just didn’t know when to stop you kept pushing orgasm after orgasm, in your drunken state the euphoria felt so good. Too good.

“You showed me alright, you came almost 8 times pet.” He spoke against you licking like a starved dog, you whimpered rubbing his head there wasn’t much to grab as his head was shielded by your skirt.

“I came, a-a-and came-” he inserted his middle finger “until you squirted all over that little phone of yours.” Oh it felt amazing, you’d do almost anything to feel a release like that again.

“Fuck, that video made me so hard, I saw it right when I woke up...made me cum 3 times kitten.” He growled fingering you with skill. “Your voice calling out to me as you spazzed, shaking like a leaf...your eyes rolled, you were crying babe, felt too good?” The combination Jin was gifting to you proved too pleasurable, you were lost in his motions.

He’d stoped talking, opening his jaw giving long licks along your opening. Sucking you with every motion. His thumb applying pressure to your clit rubbing you from side to side.

“Yes it felt amazing.” You gasped revealing him from under the skirt, burring your hands in his locks. Collecting saliva he made a mess of your dribbling cunt. “Cum for me, scream for me again.”

His demands were final, he devoured you slopping over your core his tongue laid out wide.

Mixing his hot saliva with your natural slick, he groaned deeply slurping at your middle the sounds he made only made you closer.

Collecting the mess he’d made with his finger, he fucked you with his curling middle and index. “Fuck Jin-fu-ahh!”

Using his free hand he held the fabric of your panties to the side. His head still bobbed as he ravished your cunt like it was his last meal before death. You fingers pulled his dark hair painfully, a moaning mess your stop muscles tightened and released telling you of your creeping orgasm.

Jin always put passion into gaining your orgasm, he grunted with his lustful actions. Focusing his slick plump lips on your clit sucking and lapping at the sensitive area.

The tightening in your stomach caused you Yelp out in pleasure, gushing into his awaiting mouth. “Fuck, you’re gonna give me a headache all that mmm tugging.” He complained cleaning you with his tongue.

He held your shivering wrist, coaxing you to let go of him. “You’ve made a mess of my couch.” He sat back giving you a view of his glistening chin, red cheeks, arousal covered nose.

No shame, he pulled your ruined panties down your legs, removing your shoes undoing your skirt and completely stripping your bottom half. Focusing on your breathing you closed your eyes getting comfortable, your pussy quivering involuntarily.

“But I don’t mind...I’d rather you made more of a mess like your little videos perhaps?”

You sigh feeling his fingers glide over your core.

“Give me your hand Bunny.”

Obliging, your head clouded even more tired than before. He gripped your wrist making you rub yourself, “do it again, make a big mess for me.” He let you go, spreading your legs you toyed with you sore clit delving lower collecting the mess he’d left. To assist the process.

The lazy ovals gave faint pleasure you let your head fall back.

Jin was impatient and you knew it, so you played the lazy game...he caught on. Unbuckling his pants he let them droop

He pulled free his rock hard member, throwing your hand from your area. “You better fucking- fuck.” He plunged himself deeply, his girth familiar yet so foreign. You freed a whimper in response your lower stomach already clinching as he fucked into you.

He pulled you, letting your legs rest on his forearms, your back on the seat of the couch. “Moan for me, tell me how I’m treating your tight little cunt.” He grunts through his teeth, “good so good please!”

He chuckled darkly, “who are you gonna to cum for? Who made you so horny bitch?”

He watched your face contort, pushing his large palm over your lower tummy. “Oh-oh! You Jinnie please not too hard I’ll- mm!” “You’ll what?” He fucked you with no mercy.

“Keep your legs up and open...slut.” “Uh-huh ok.” The results of the last orgasm already found you vulnerable. You had to go, bad.

He railed you, rubbing your clit and applying pressure to your lower abdomen.

You whined and begged, feeling your release closer than you’d like. “Jin, fuck Jinnie wait-” “I said up and fucking open!” He held his head down in search for his high. You could see his muscles tense.

Your eyes rolled shut, no way could you stop the release, he thrusted deeply hitting every spot you needed, the flicking of his thumb along your clit drew it near you back arched from the cushions. “Do it! Let go!”

You screamed, gushing against his lower half, in quick streams of pleasure, whimpering as the flow finished and you clenched around him. Crying out as he continues to fuck into you, only to make you release more liquid arousal mixed with others.

He pulled from you, using what you’d produced to finish on your cardigan. Your eyes half lidded as you struggled to gain stable breathing. “ugh, my cardigan-” “I’ll buy you six cardigans.” He mumbled wiping his member clean on the plush fabric.

His cold demeanor ruined the mood. Why must he act this way after every loving session.

You stretched, giving a comically loud yawn, “my underwear please.” You reached out grabbing for them. “You soaked them.” He disappeared down the hall, “the skirt too!” He informed as you sat up your head pounding slightly.

“Lucky for you...” he came back with a pair of sweats and a pair of panties that definitely weren’t yours.

“I’ll pass, the sweats please.” He tossed them, you pulled them on your knees wobble weakly you swim in the fabric of the sweatpants, they were his. “Your loss, they’re clean I promise!”

You struggle to bend and collect your damp clothes, “c-can I spend the night?”

He sighed dressing himself in a change of clothes. “I’m afraid not...I have a Uhm meeting tomorrow morning.”

It didn’t upset you in a jealous way, it upset you in a betrayal way, it upset you that he’d use you and kick you out.

“With who?” “Do you want me to take you home or are you calling a ride...I’ll pay.”

The headache depended as you leaned against the wall.

“Whatever, just-let’s go.”

What kind of hold did Kim Seokjin have over you, to treat you so shitty and still have you wrapped around his finger and cock at that.

“Don’t pout.” He thumbed your lower lip.

Pulling your chin he pecked your lips, “I’ll treat you to lunch tomorrow hm?”

“And after we can come back here....that make you feel better my best girl?”

He chuckled pulling you out of his apartment by the hand.

“No matter what you think, you’re perfect, I just love the way you make me feel I could love you.”

He loves you, that’s the hold he has on you, and he’ll do anything to make you believe It.

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach Cosmology 4/4

Last post in this series on Bleach world terms: [1] [2] [3]  The super super unaddressed Quincy realm from the final arc, soon to be adapted into the final anime season...

Schatten Bereich(シャッテン・ベライヒ) Sha-tte-n' Be-ra-i-hi, German for “Shadow Realm” and pretty literally interpreted in Japanese as [影の領域] “Realm of Shadow(s).”  A straight forward description of what it’s supposed to be as a place hidden in(?) the shadow of Soul Society, and the Seireitei specifically.  It’s a real shame we didn’t get any actual explanation of what this realm was or how it worked or really much of anything other than the super vague description...

Did the Quincy make it themselves to hide in?  Did the Shinigami make it to banish them to?*  What was that thing about Yhwach having a time limit he could spend away from it that just never came back???  If the Quincy were wiped out 200 years prior, how are there so many of them in there?*  Had they been recruiting new Quincy from the human world?(As Nodt having been in a hospital bed suggests yes)  How were people getting in there?  Or were they supposed to be original Quincy from the conflict 200 years ago, in which case... we were told Quincy were specifically humans who’d just mastered and passed down a set of distinct skills, so how did they survive 200 years without just aging and dying?

*[edit]: My mistake. It’s mentioned at the start of the second attack that they hid themselves in the shadows of soul society specifically 1000 years prior, and following the alluded to first conflict between the Shinigami and Quincy.  Although that event wasn’t really elaborated on either, so that just raises other questions.

Anyway...  none of that has to do with the locale itself, and frankly there aren’t really any answers to uncover in the sparse world building material the final arc gave us...  As to the physical features of the realm itself, Kubo really pulled an awkward repeat of Hueco Mundo with the stark white stonework in a realm of eternal darkness...  But this time, it’s more explicitly cold and also literally icy.

I feel like there was supposed to be some kind of theme about the Quincy living in shadows and not seeing the light of the sun, and being denied its warmth, which just seems like a tiny tweak of the Arrancar Arc’s night sky and day light/sun and moon imagery.  Was the Soul King meant to have a sun motif that we just never got to see? (equating light of the sun with love of god and loss there of, harkening back to biblical revolt of heaven imagery?)  Sun gods and sun king and god kings are all pretty classic to Japanese mythos, and also to Japan’s fetishization of some of classical Europe (although that’s more French rococo, ala Louis XIV, than German)  If there’d been a more overt Sun theme with the Soul King it would’ve made a much more interesting parallel with Ichigo’s Black Sun(opposite Rukia’s white moon) motif.

Sorry, off topic again, and mostly just filling space here...

Wahrwelt(ヴァールヴェルト) Vaa-ru-ve-ru-to meaning “True World” and written as [真世界城] “True World/Society Castle.”  Note that while [真世界] being read as “True World” obviously is meant to mirror Wahrwelt, [世界] can also read as “Society” which is probably meant to directly mirror Soul Society[尸魂界] although they don’t use the exact same construction to denote “Welt” and “Society.”  It suggests that Soul Society is a false regency over the spirit world, and that the Quincy are the rightful rulers, rather than being outsiders come to take over.  Although it feels a little misplaced that the Wahrwelt was specifically the replacement for the Royal Realm and not what replaced the Seireitei.

Silbern(ジルバーン) Shi-ru-baa-n' just meaning “Silver.”  Written as [銀架城] meaning “Silver Mounted Castle.”  I've seen people translate this is “Silver Cross Castle,” but I think this is a misunderstanding of the verb kakaru[架かる] meaning "to cross."  But that's not "(a) cross" like the Quincy cross, it's "to cross" like to cross a street.  The Quincy had a whole thing about silver stretching pretty far back in the series so there’s consistency there, but it doesn’t seem like there was much more going on with it...

As you might expect from the kind of shoddily put together final arc, there’s not a whole lot else to go off of here.  Which is a shame, because although there’s not a wealth of potential the way the Arrancar arc had, there was certainly a lot of empty space to fill as far as world building or character motivations go.  It would’ve been nice to have actually taken the time to explore any of that...

In particular there was the super SUPER curious bit with what appeared to be Quincy ruins left in Hueco Mundo that we didn’t really get much of an explanation of.  Kubo even does a remarkably good job with visual story telling where the rough stonework we get only a glimpse of makes it very clear that the ruins aren’t the same same as the clean, sleek designs of Los Noches.

I think one of the light novels gave them the name “Negal Ruins” that the Bleach wikia references, but I don’t have Japanese copies of the LN to confirm that, and the wikia confusingly doesn’t cite where it got the name from or include any kind of kanji or kana...*  But as little as that is to go off of, I do LOVE the idea that the Quincy once occupied Hueco Mundo in the past, and it just feels like the first tiny tiny step toward what should’ve been a much bigger plot point.  Even the fact that Urahara is out there with scientific equipment doing some kind of research seemed to imply that he’d come back with some crucial information...  I guess that was supposed to be the hollow pills plot device?  But that wasn’t especially clear, let alone remotely satisfying either as follow up or even as its own plot development.

*no no, i was way off.  It’s right there in the same chapter they show up. [ネガル遺跡] “NE-GA-RU” + “Historic Ruins/Archeological Site.”  Dunno why my eyes just glossed right over that.  Not that it really clarifies anything.

Curiously, the Taiyou-no-mon[太陽の門] “Gate of (the) Sun” that plays kind of a deus ex machina role toward the climax of the arc isn’t named in German at all.  (it is mentioned on a few separate occasions, so it doesn’t come out of “nowhere” exactly, but it’s never really elaborated on either)  It’s not clear if that’s supposed to mean something, or if Kubo just gave up juggling dictionaries to come up with a new name on the fly.  It sticks out like a sore thumb by comparison though.  Very odd.

Anyway that’s basically it for big world terms across the major story locales...  There are a few misc. locations like the Valley of Screams or or Hell focused on in the movies and only briefly brought up in the manga, but they’re all pretty literal names: Kyougoku[叫谷] “Scream Valley” where the lost souls, Blanks wind up when they can’t make it to Soul Society, referencing their unheard voices.  Jigoku[地獄] just the actual Japanese word for an underworld, originally borrowed from the Chinese Diyu[地獄] and the mix of indigenous Chinese and Buddhist influences mythos, but at this point linguistically used as the translation for any kind of penitent underworld, regardless of cultural origin.  It’s written with the characters for “Ground” and “Prison.”

I may not have had a lot of take aways from all this, but I gotta admit going back over some of this material did kind of rekindle my excitement for the anime this year, so that’s something.

Bleach Cosmology posts: [Karakura] [SoulSociety] [Hueco Mundo] [Wahrwelt] [Hell/Naraka(allusions)] [Animal Realm(?)] [Preta Realm(?)]

[slash-em-up]

In-Flight Entertainment Pt. 1: ChromeSkull x Reader

This was supposed to be a one-shot; but then it started creeping up on 2k words and I figured I better chop it up. Part 2 will be up soon and 90% smut.

------------------------------------------------------

You were not ashamed to say that you hated airports. Absolutely hated them. The bustle, the smell, the overpriced coffee… There was nothing about them that inspired less then complete loathing in you. So when your boss gave you a heads-up that you’d be traveling to LA for a company meeting, you could only groan internally.

Nothing ever seemed to go right when you flew - a belief further cemented by the unexpected snowstorm that had caused your current situation: A ten-hour layover in Denver.

You were going to be so late for your meeting.

Your carry-on seemed to weigh a ton as you lugged it off the plane, cursing yourself for not fixing the loose wheel before you left as it swerved and pulled your case back and forth behind you.

Sighing heavily, you adjusted the barley-hull pillow wrapped loosely around your neck so it wasn’t pulling on your hair quite as uncomfortably, and searched for the sign to direct you towards your next gate.

On the other side of the airport. Great. At least you didn’t have to worry about being late for take-off.

Passing through the airport, you couldn’t help but glance around at the multitude of shops and small restaurants that peppered the space. It almost looked like a mall, if you discounted the weary look your fellow travelers all seemed to be sporting and the cases trailing behind them like colorful dogs.

You’d have to stop somewhere to eat. The small package of pretzels and soda you’d consumed on your first flight had done little to tide you over, and now you were feeling more than a little peckish. And thirsty. And stressed. You’d kill a man for a decent Old Fashioned.

Arriving at your gate, you plopped down onto one of the barely padded seats with a sigh. Nine hours and twenty-three minutes until takeoff. A family of six sat next to you, immediately starting in on a very loud and expressive argument. It was definitely time to go find that airport bar - but first, you needed a quick refresh in the ladies room.

Dropping your carry-on with the rest of the luggage you trotted across the large hallway, having extricated your makeup bag from your case before leaving it with the desk-steward. There were a pair of eye-masks in there calling your name.

It was insane how enjoyable leaning up against a hard wall with your eyes closed could be after five hours cramped in Coach. You stretched up and down on the balls of your feet as your muscles slowly relaxed, leaving you feeling a bit better than when you’d arrived. Now you just needed food.

That was the only thing on your mind as you shuffled back to the desk and snagged your case from the luggage corral.

Even your case felt lighter. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a horrible layover after all.

“Excuse me Ma’am. I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”

Aaaannnddd you’d spoken too soon.

You spun quickly, taking in the very large, very serious looking men in suits standing shoulder to shoulder behind you.

“…Me? Me, Ma’am?”

The suit-twins eyes narrowed.

“Yes, you Ma’am. Don’t try to run, we’ve already got security on alert.”

You gaped in shock.

“Why would I try to run? I haven’t done anything!”

One of the men sneered as the other looked at you like you were an idiot.

“So that’s your bag, is it Ma’am?”

You blinked.

“Uh, yeah it’s my…”

Your voice trailed off as you took a closer look at the bag you were holding.

Sharp corners, no scratched metallic paint, a gleaming ‘RIMOWA’ screeching up at you from the side…

Well that explained the wheel…

The silver hard-sided case was definitely not yours.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I must have grabbed this one by mistake. I’ll take it back, I’m so -”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple ma’am. You’ll still need to come with us.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------

You were getting the distinct feeling that you were fucked. Or, were about to be.

What the hell was in that suitcase?

The suited men had ushered you quickly to a side-elevator, punching a code into a keypad before pushing a button labeled ‘P’.

They’d yanked the case from you the first moment you were out of public view and now seemed intently focused on making sure you stayed still and quiet.

Even minutely adjusting the pillow still draped across your shoulders had made them both twitch like they were expecting a fight.

The elevator ding sounded ominous as you were quickly led down a gleaming, white hall - each side covered from floor to ceiling in magnificently large windows, offering a spectacular view of the departing planes and the snow-covered Rockies far behind.

The only break in-between were what looked like small sitting rooms. It dawned on you that these must be the VIP lounges. Like, the VIP-est of the VIPs. Shit, who’s luggage had you stolen, Lady Gaga’s??

You were brought to an abrupt stop at one of the closed doors, pausing outside as one suited man knocked quietly, entering after some unknown signal, bag in-tow; as the second man stayed outside - never removing his eyes from you.

“I can apologize in person if that’s what you’re after. I’m a big girl, I can own up to having grabbed the wrong bag - I just think the whole secret service thing is a little over the top…”

The guard didn’t blink.

Ok, this was getting ridiculous.

“I’m SORRY MR. OBAMA, I DIDN’T MEAN TO STEAL YOUR CASE!”

Your arm was grasped firmly as the suit dragged you a little closer to the door.

“BEYONCE? I PROMISE I WON���T DO IT AGAIN!”

The grasp on your arm turned into a solid shake, nearly knocking you against the wall.

“Shut up!” the guard hissed.

You sneered up at him.

“COME ON SNOOP DOGG, I THOUGHT YOU’D BE COOLER THAN THIS!”

The door opened, allowing the other guard to exit with a look at you like you’d just signed your own death certificate.

“He wants to see her.”

“He, who?!”

The man grasping your arm pulled you quickly, spinning you into the room and closing the door firmly behind you.

You blinked, trying to get your eyes to adjust to the sudden dim lighting of the small room; taking in the plush modern couches lining the walls, the two-person dining table, the open pair of suitcases on the glass coffee-table, and then finally, to the man sitting casually behind the luggage, inspecting a pair of underwear from your case.

“Ah… Pitbull. You were going to be my next guess…”

A single brown eye flicked up to meet yours, followed by a loud snort and a half-smirk.

His head tilted as he examined you, and you did the same.

Gaze wandering from his black dress shoes, up his long black-clad legs, over his broad torso - dress shirt uncuffed and sleeves rolled up to expose fully tattooed forearms - then finally to his face. You weren’t an expert by any means; but even to you it was pretty clear he’d undergone some extensive reconstructive surgery at some point. His entire face, all the way up to his bald head looked… off… The black leather eyepatch was also a little bit of a give-away.

He allowed you a few more moments to take him in before reaching down and pulling a phone out of his pocket.

You jumped slightly as an electronic voice sounded through the room.

“I’ll have to address security with the airport. You’re either an exceptional thief, or they really suck at their jobs.”

Now it was your turn to snort.

“Believe me, of the two, they’re definitely more likely to just suck at their jobs.”

His gaze never left you as he reached down and plucked out the romance novel you’d stuffed into your bag for the flight, waving it teasingly.

“I almost believe you.” He typed.

You looked down, starting to feel embarrassed.

“Look, I’m really sorry for this mix-up. I swear I didn’t know it was your bag.”

Without commenting, the man rose from his seat.

Holy shit, he was tall.

He walked slowly, like he had all the time in the world and knew you weren’t going anywhere.

He stopped as he reached the small dining table, leaning down to open a mini-bar placed inconspicuously against the wall and grasp two small bottles of alcohol.

He shook them in your direction and raised his visible brow in question.

“God, yes.”

He snorted again and made short work of pouring the libation into a set of non-descript glasses; offering you one before motioning for you to take a seat.

You relaxed back into the pale leather, pausing for a moment to quickly (and hopefully discreetly) remove the pillow from around your shoulders.

The glint in the man’s eye told you he’d noticed and was once again amused by you.

You took a large gulp of the liquid in your glass and almost immediately started choking on it.

“FUCK!” you hacked out “What *cough* the fuck is this?!”

A broad grin and shaking shoulders met your watery eyes as the man reached over to type something into his phone.

“I understand ASL, unless *hng* you’re just some wacko who doesn’t like to talk.”

The man nodded before setting his phone back down.

‘It’s Lagavulin. Not exactly something you try to shoot.’

You took another - much smaller - sip and nodded.

“I’m sure under different circumstances it would be wonderful.”

‘Different circumstances?’

“Yeah, well it’s kind of hard to enjoy something so nice when you’re being accused of stealing and are more or less imprisoned.”

The man leaned back in his seat.

‘I know you didn’t take my case… at least, not for any reason I’m concerned about.’

You blinked.

“You do?”

He nodded succinctly before signing.

‘If you knew who I was and were trying to take my case, you wouldn’t have drunk something I gave you so readily.’

Again, you were feeling more than a little dumbfounded.

“So… I can go?”

A long arm motioned towards the white door.

‘Anytime you like; do you have somewhere pressing you need to be?’

You thought sadly about the uncomfortable chairs and family of six waiting for you back at your gate.

“… Not really.”

‘Layover to LA?’

“Yeah! You too?”

The man nodded, looking at you sympathetically.

‘Guessing you’re not business class.’

You laughed out loud at that.

“Ha! No way, who’s got the -… well I guess you do.”

He answered with a shrug.

‘I’d like to buy you dinner, by way of an apology for all the hassle today.’

A small smile crossed your lips as you thought about it.

On one hand, he’d kind of had you kidnapped and implied that if you’d known who he was you would have expected him to poison you or something… But on the other hand, this was definitely the most interesting trip you’d taken, and it was largely in part to do with this guy…

Eh what the hell.

“I’m Y/N.”

The man grinned widely, showing off his perfectly straight, white teeth.

‘Call me Jesse.’

[the-muses-are-herd]

Recent OC list.

A handy little reference... that I’ll update later, with the proper info. For now, just a list of recent OC’s I have been using for RP: 

*

- Todd Mannix. 

*

SETTING: A story of mine, loosely based on “The Fox and the Hound” (primarily the novel, but frankly, a few other sources as well). Fantasy, kinda… Steampunk setting. A world loosely based on early 20th-century America (as in the continent), with technology being a touch more advanced and magic existing but being rare and regarded as a very risky type or energy to tap into. 

GENDER: Male. 

SPECIES: Red Fox.

SEXUALITY: Pansexual.

AGE: 25 (loosely).

OCCUPATION: Jack-of-all-trades.

PERSONALITY: Extroverted, quietly calculating. 

DESCRIPTION: A globe-trotter adventurer whose charming looks hide a seasoned survivalist. Frequently seeking new sights and thrills, loyal primarily to his best friend, the more laidback Toby. 

*

- Toby Slade. 

*

SETTING: Same as Todd. 

GENDER: Male

SPECIES: Hound dog. 

SEXUALITY: Bisexual (not entirely set in stone just yet)

AGE: 27 (loosely).

OCUPATION: Former hitman, currently jack-of-all-trades.

PERSONALITY: Businesslike and formal —save with his close acquaintances, with whom he reveals a more sarcastic, yet well-meaning, demeanor. 

DESCRIPTION: Former member of a mercenary team, quit to become an adventurer with his best friend, the more adventurous Todd. Holds himself to a code of honor that is frequently challenged by the often outlandish situations their adventuring leads to. 

**

- Camazotz. 

*

SETTING: Housamo (aka Tokyo Afterschool Summoners); this OC is one of many that I basically came up with during a long talk with my boyfriend. 

GENDER: Male.

SPECIES: Honduran white bat (Ectophylla alba) (*)

AGE: 26. 

OCCUPATION: Medical aide / independent researcher. 

PERSONALITY: Entirely focused at work and in battle, but very easily distracted in his free time. Somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he’s often mistaken for a child, which is only exacerbated by his love of sweets. 

DESCRIPTION: A bat Transient hailing from Anáhuac (**); descended from a long line of executioners, Camazotz long decided that he wanted to be a healer instead. This new world gave him the perfect opportunity for that, and so he set out to join the ideal Guild for his plans. Though regarded as too adorable to take seriously by most people, Camazotz is a hard-working individual, determined to achieve his goals. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: A string that grants ‘Divine Mercy’. However, Camazotz does not like using this Artifact except as a last-resource option —ostensibly it is a healing device. But in truth it has two outcomes: If the patient has wounds that might have healed over time, the string heals them instantly. If the wounds were lethal, the string kills them —the divine mercy in question. Camazotz believes there must be a way to repurpose it to find a third option. 

GUILD: Tamers. 

(*): Look up photos of them, by the by. It’s the cutest stuff in the world! :3

(**): Anáhuac is a concept I use in lieu of the game’s “El Dorado”. This territory includes other territories derived from Prehispanic mythologies, such as Hanan Pacha (see Chuychu, below). 

**

- Chuychú.

**

SETTING: Housamo. 

GENDER: Male. 

SPECIES: Alpaca. 

AGE: 28. 

OCCUPATION: Librarian. 

PERSONALITY: A flirty, somewhat vain, yet sharp young man. 

DESCRIPTION: Hailing from Hanan Pacha (*), Chuychú has been liaison between gods, astronomer / researcher, and now part of a Guild that mixes magic and scientific research. His main objective is to study and catalogue divergent timelines, including previous time loops. Generally pacific by nature, leaving the fighting to the bodyguards in his group, he is nevertheless more than wiling to defend himself or others in a pinch. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: The star mirrors —two twin orbs. One shows time and one space. Chuychu primarily uses them to study cosmic and time anomalies. Can also use them to show others their own past or divergent timelines (an ability he usually reserves only for people who might need a push in the right direction). In battle, he can combine their effects to create a profound vertigo effect, powerful enough to knock down all but the most resilient opponents. 

GUILD: Tama Scholars (**)

(*) = A world based on Inca mythology. 

(**) = Another concept my boyfriend and I came up with together. A group more interested in research than in fighting, based on Tama as it is the site of Tokyo’s biggest library. 

***

- Juan Darién (aka JD)

**

SETTING: Housamo.

GENDER: Male. 

SPECIES: Tiger-man / Human (see below).

AGE: 17. 

OCCUPATION: Student. 

PERSONALITY: Self-assured, if somewhat stubborn. Because he believes humans to be naturally prone to evil, he figures that his human form is not beholden to the same restrictions he imposes upon himself as a tiger. Consequently, in his tiger form he acts in what he understands to be a virtuous way (some say, self-righteous) and in his human form as a creature of desire. Yet his true personality is that of a naive young man still learning about the world. 

DESCRIPTION: The son of a tiger-man and a human woman. Lived peacefully in a small village in Yvy Tenondé (*), until the townspeople, who did not approve of this mixed marriage, burned their home. Juan Darién lost his parents that day, and since then came to believe that humans are evil by nature. Later, coming to a different world via a pillar of light, he joined the Aoyama group, figuring that their beliefs are the closest to his notions of good and evil. He considers his tiger form his true, and pure nature, and sometimes dons his human form purely to excise out his “sinful temptations”… or used to, until a fateful day when his ideologies led him to clash with one of the Crafters. 

The experience with the resulting Exception, and the intimacy necessary to cancel it, have led JD to question several of his long-held beliefs. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: A medallion that represents “Split”. He uses it to switch between his two forms, identifying the tiger side as “Juan” and the human as “Darién”. Only recently has he begun using both names at all times. The medallion can also be used in combat to split App users from their Artifacts. However, this can be a double-edged sword. Some Artifacts will simply go inert without a wielder, but others will go wild without a user to anchor them. 

GUILD: Missionaries. 

(*) = Part of the same world that includes Anáhuac and Hanan Pacha. Loosely based on Guaraní mythology. 

NOTE: Based on a character by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. 

***

- Fortunato. 

**

SETTING: Housamo. 

GENDER: Male.

SPECIES: Lion. 

AGE: 40. 

OCCUPATION: Security guard. 

PERSONALITY: Serious-minded about his job and about what he is to protect, be it arts, relics, or knowledge. Generally friendly otherwise, and particularly kind to children. 

DESCRIPTION: A transient who journeyed from his word looking for his twin, Sopho. Together they formed a duo dedicated to guarding all manner of temples and sacred spaces, descending from a long line of guardians. In this world he fulfills that role in his guild’s library base, together with a wolf transient whom Fortunato regards as a brother-in-arms. Quite protective of his guild and his friends, perhaps in part derived from his job. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: A morning-star flail that can hide doorways or reveal them. In battle Fortunato uses it to lock his opponents into a combat room that he alone controls. 

GUILD: Scholars. 

***

- Phyx. 

** 

SETTING: Housamo. 

GENDER: Female.

SPECIES: Sphynx (winged lioness) 

AGE: 35. 

OCCUPATION: Linguist. 

PERSONALITY: Inquisitive, to the point that sometimes she’ll hyper-focus on questions. Especially when meeting somebody new. Nevertheless a capable leader and a fierce warrior when needed. 

DESCRIPTION: A transient from Aaru. Phyx was the guardian of a massive temple until curiosity led her to explore the contents of this temple herself, finding a vast wealth of knowledge and culture. When she journeyed to another world, she sought a similar place of culture, finding it in the largest library of the city. Leader of the Tama Scholars. Under her leadership, this Guild is less interested in imposing a specific Ideology than in preserving records of several matters —including the many time loops that have come to pass before. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: A golden scepter that controls light. At it’s most powerful it will summon a light beam that can annihilate in seconds. There is a second, subtler power it has —Phyx can use it to reveal hidden passages or messages.  

GUILD: Scholars.

**

- Yasy Yateré.

SETTING: Housamo.

GENDER: Male. 

SPECIES: Unkown —shapeshifter, presents as a golden hare-man.

AGE: Unknown —claims to be 18. 

OCCUPATION: Greenhouse keeper.  

PERSONALITY: Polite, friendly and approachable. Has a more playful side that he reserves for his “golden friends” (see below). 

DESCRIPTION: A mysterious, elusive Transient from Yvy Tenondé. He generally stays out of App Battles and what few people contact him have found Yasy to be an okay, if slightly reserved, fellow. However, he has a side that only a few have seen. Every so often, Yasy will find a boy who catches his fancy, and use his powers to get close to him. When the time is right, he will give them a kiss that tastes like honey and wild berries —which will entrance them, after which he’ll take them to his secret garden to play. Yasy eventually gets bored of these “golden friends” and will let them go. What is he truly searching for? Even Guilds like the Wisemen and the Entertainers have not been able to crack this mystery just yet. 

SACRED ARTIFACT: A baculum decorated with small precious stones. It controls neither plants nor mesmerism, as his opponents expect —instead, it lets him control emotions or even make people drowsy. Yasy prefers to escape rather than to defeat his opponents. However, an opponent who pushes too far will find themselves confronted with Yasy’s true nature: One of the seven children of Kerana and Tau, god of Evil. His genuine appearance and powers are not quite so whimsical. 

GUILD: Unknown. Has been rumored to be part of either the Rule Makers or the Genociders, but neither group has ever confirmed he is in their ranks. 

**

- Amber. 

An AU variation on Kounosuke, using concepts from “Steven Universe” and later “Houseki no Kuni”. 

Basic info can be found here --though it is now slightly out of date. 

**

- Hugh Cahil. 

*

SETTING: A particular AU that I use along with my boyfriend that is, uuhhh….. “Morenatsu but with Sci-fi stuff. Also a lot of characters from other Fandoms”. 

GENDER: Male. 

AGE: 21. 

SPECIES: Tasmanian Devil. 

SEXUALITY: Gay. 

OCCUPATION: Drama teacher. Moonlights as the drummer for “The Carrions”. 

PERSONALITY: Blunt and straight to the point, yet fiercely loyal to his friends and to their friends in turn. Highly gregarious. 

DESCRIPTION: The kind of cool teacher whose students flock to for his unconventional choices in teaching (one year he had this drama class do a stage production of “You’re good man, Charlie Brown” followed by “Dog sees God: Confessions of a teenage blockhead” (*) ). Singaporean, though of Australian origin, recently Hugh has been focusing more on his band, as they are finally starting to get their first breaks. 

(*) = Look up the plot to these plays. You are in for a quite a treat!

** 

- Karnevil.

SETTING: Mutanimals / TMNT. 

GENDER: Male.

SPECIES: Hyena. 

SEXUALITY: (Undecided)

AGE: Unknown (roughly estimated to be in his late 20’s).

OCCUPATION: Former hotel doorman; currently, mercenary. 

PERSONALITY: Obsessive, yet wiling to bargain. 

DESCRIPTION: A victim of two separate mutations, first from human to hyena-man, then briefly to brainwashed servant and back —but in the process discovered a dark desire deep inside of him: To eat the flesh of living human beings. Mutants, too. He has forgotten his original name in lieu of his chosen monicker. Will lend his augmented speed, strength, and mouthful of razor-sharp teeth and claws to any employer wiling to provide him with what he craves. Yet once the hunger is sated, he has found himself aimless and often adrift in life…

**

- Moy

SETTING: TMNT / Mutanimals. 

SPECIES: Mutant Leopard with purple fur. 

GENDER: Male. 

AGE: 26. 

OCCUPATION: Former truck driver, currently freelance courier.

PERSONALITY: Disciplined at his job, used to be timid. Currently becoming more and more outspoken. 

DESCRIPTION: An exchange student from Guatemala who extended his stay working all sort of off jobs. He was considering leaving when disaster struck and he found himself doused in Mutagen even as he clung to a dyed paw he had won in a fair years ago. The mutation gave him the additional, uncommon power to teleport. Finding himself with no real barriers for the first time in his life, Moy has decided to explore every nook and cranny of this strange world —and beyond! 

NOTE: Based on the character “Moykat” from the licensed Mexican TMNT comic back in the 90’s.

*

[hhjs]

kismet.

pairing ⇨ yoo taeyang x reader.

alternatively ⇨soulmates, royalty. more specifically, prince!taeyang + royal librarian!reader.

In both a hopeless desire to love and admiration for a blatant stranger, Taeyang finds love by a twist of fate.

wherein, soulmates are bounded together by shared scars.

warnings ⇨ elaborate descriptions of wounds.

word count ⇨1.9k

type ⇨mini fic.

The gash on his palm was a pink, golden stretch, giving the illusion of a simple graze. It used to look as though an animal had dug its claw in and tore it open - and he imagined it, imagined the scenarios his soulmate put themselves in to acquire such a dramatic wound.

He envisioned the sharp pain of a kitchen knife running along their palm in the split second while they're committed to a harmless task of chopping vegetables. He often found himself smiling at the thought, imagined himself rushing to help, cleaning it as he scolded them, these images helped Taeyang fill an endless hollow inside his chest that was evidence of his remoteness, even if the relief was temporary.

His innate brevity and intense inability to produce dramatic expressions of his emotions subsequently reduced him to a limping thing going through a abundance of unspeakably articulate individuals, someone who was to carry the weight of their despondence like it was the only thing that mattered and his world, a world of war and peace, the endless crowns passed down to his father and his father's father, a world that conditioned him to hide his true self under the unspoken bravado of being a prince, it had.

The library was a dramatically architectured room, giant shelves stretched for a few thousand feet, spines of a wide variety of novels sticking out, some new, some old, some shoved upside down. The tables were wide, even the relatively small ones designed for one person, little lamps perched up on each corner.

Behind them, laid different stories, of concentrated faces of scholars, astronomer, flustered faces of couples who've secretly kissed behind the foreign literature section, faces struggling to keep their focus and resorting to tapping their fingers and frowning - he's seen it all and he couldn't quite name what which category you belonged to.

"Like this." Placing a neem leaf between the pages, you beamed up at him in a way that made him feel as though he couldn't ever forget you. He said nothing, staring down curiously, in an umpteenth attempt that week, to act on his desire to act on his attraction for you, "That'll keep bookworms away."

Sensing his excessively lengthy stay, he finally nods, reaching out to accept the thick spined novel and just for a second your fingers brush up against his knuckles and linger, in a barely-there, airy gesture.

It's in this sudden ephiphanous moment, Taeyang decides that his concern for being absurdly lonely was less important than chancing upon you again.

…

"Watch where you're going." The tone of your voice was surprisingly chirpy for someone who just knocked over a heap of novels whilst they carried on a careless pursuit of practically leaping to their destination. It amused Taeyang.

In a confused fashion, he furrowed his eyebrows, pursing his lips as you attempted to collect the items quickly, piling them again into an unsteady heap. "You bumped into me." The calm reminder came from him, insinuating that you ought to take your own advice.

The sheepish design of your face greatly piqued his interest, if not the way your eyes widened when you immediately recognised him by his princely position and subsequently rendered an apologetic smile. It was different from the usual veil of confidence you wore when you worked tirelessly at the library. "Pardon me!" You quickly exclaimed, blinking profusely.

"You're pardoned."

Taeyang noted the immediate look of relief on your face whilst he knelt to your position, picking up the remaining set of the dropped elements with great care - but instead of returning them to your expectant hand, he held it snuggly against his chest. "if...if you let me help." He added, peering up at you from behind his lashes, only to find that you were nodding, in all but a poor attempt to bite down a gigantic smile.

...

Taeyang will admit that he doesn't rely on the truth to make "coincidental" visitations to the royal library - he just wanted to see you and in his defence, there was no way to be honest about how he felt without potentially embarrassing himself by blubbering nonsense he'd come up with whilst thinking over elongating conversations with you.

All he knew was he liked the way your eyes travelled over the ups and downs of words, sentences and how you pressed his thumb against the corner of a page before flipping it so there wouldn't be any creases.

He liked that you could always strike up a chat about the most random things, liked the way your mouth quivered when you'd try to stop yourself from smiling, liked how you two always forgot to take note of time, sitting hours tangled in a mix of silence and long stretches of talking deliberately with him, in the course of time, he developed the courage to grow closer to you just as he attempted; albeit, regardless of the fact that you seem to have become increasingly close, you never talk about your soulmate, or your scars or produce typical impassionate harangues about how fated you were to someone - not that it mattered.

In fact, whoever his soulmate was, he was sure he couldn't possibly grow half as fond of them as he is of you.

A bed of wet grass pressed up against his back, it was too cold and too dark and the moist earth was undoubtedly going to leave a nasty imprint on his milky tunic - but he didn't care, he didn't care about those trivial, unimportant, stupid things.

Because you were with him.

"Don't you ever wonder what it'd be like if they showed up? Your soulmate?"

Your question sounded more like a test than it did a question - dipping cautious toes in uncharted waters to see if the crocodile would leap and bite.

He tilted his head to you even though not a thing was visible in the intense black of the night.

It gave him immense pleasure to know that in spite of his hindered vision, he could still picture what your face might look like now, the slope of your nose, the anxious pinch of your eyebrows and a lopsided frown.

He shrugged, "Not really."

"Why not?" You asked, albeit the cheery ring to your voice seemed to determine that you were quite pleased with the answer, as if you've gained something in knowing he wasn't looking for someone else.

He scoffed in an offended fashion, like the answer's just that obvious, like you shouldn't have even asked, not allowing a single beat of silence to pass, he felt for your fingers in the dark and easily slipping his own ones, holding the interlaced pair up like it meant something to to him. "This." He said, "is more important to me than being lumped together by fate."

...

"Still practising, huh?"

Even in the acute quietude, vaguely disturbed by the distant sound of buzzing crickets and the slight crunch of twigs under his feet, the sudden sound of your all too familiar voice didn't startle him.

Taeyang pressed his finger down on the arrow's shaft and slowly retracted from a shooting position. Perspiration had effectively glued his fringe down to his forehead and he could feel his body slowly give away to overexertion. But it wasn't uncommon for him to push himself to a point of absolute lethargy when he put his mind to perfecting something, Taeyang was hardworking by nature.

Your face was yellow from the oil lantern you were holding up, your free hand was behind your back. Looking over his shoulder like this, he could make out that you were donning a look of utter worry, the colour barely found the lopsided curve of your mouth and disappeared all the way down to your throat, to the slope of your neck.

His chest heaved upwards and downwards from the heavy intakes and outtakes as he watched you in masked endearment.

Taeyang blinked, his curious expression replaced by a sudden look of apparent conclusion at the way your head's poised to stare at your toes. "Is something the matter?"

You produced a non committal hum and it startled him, the possibility of upsetting you when he hadn't intended to, Taeyang opened his mouth to say something but didn't know what exactly that something ought to be, so he closed it again.

You drew your hand from behind your back and held a digit up in the air, where the light caught on and he could clearly see a fresh scar atop.

It was earlier that day when it happened.

You ran your fingers along the smooth spine of a bent novel sticking out rather ungracefully.

All you could hear was nothing but the nervous ringing of your ears, the involuntary tremors of your excessively careful hand.

It wasn't like you to be so anxious at an unsuitable time like this. But there was an unsettling feeling inside your chest, like something was about to go wrong and yet you had no idea what that thing may be, the roaring and clapping and grumbling lightning before a cyclone hits.

You hissed, taking your injured skin into attention once you realised a deep wound had torn open on the tip of your index, it had an abysmal sting to it, the kind of sting that jolted up your spine and gave you a headache - but you stood frozen in your spot.

But you hadn't whipped your head about rapidly, searching for another person who could've been whelping in the aftermath of the same injury. Like you always did before.

You wonder when it came to this - when you stopped looking for your soulmate. This love, you told yourself, was enough, even if it wasn't perfect, even if you weren't fated. The way you care about him is deliberate, the way you're falling in love in spite of the unnerving fear of losing him is intentional and purposeful. And nothing in the world could replace this.

"I don't care for it." You said quickly and honestly, the sincerity in your voice so weighty that he could understand you meant this statement.

Taeyang's smile, of all things, wasn't something you quite anticipated, sensing that it was a gesture he just couldn't fight, he put the down instrument on the wet grass, padding closer to where you stood. It was a strange thing that bound you together, something indescribable, that led him to recognise that he needed to be in your proximity at all times.

And now he had a name for it.

It was earlier that day when he'd absentmindedly pricked himself while sharpening an arrow tip, the injury was apparent, a reflection. You blinked, once and twice. And then you smiled a big, wide smile.

"It's you." He said, mimicking your gesture. "It's always been you."

Shadows of his outstretched digits crawled along your face, reducing the splatter of light to mere speckles, he made a careful work of caressing your face, wiping away a thin layer of mist against the cool skin with the calloused pads of his thumbs. (And then he kisses you and it feels like something erupted inside the depth of his belly, a knot tightening and tightening and tightening, and this is something he's always wanted. To love someone, to love someone so much he thinks he could die for it, had fate put him to the test.)

...

[aliceslantern]

Beyond this Existence, Counterpoint, chapter 11

Summary:  After being recompleted, Ienzo vows to do everything in his power to atone for the atrocities he committed in the past. But this life hasn't been easy, and he's plagued with memories and nightmares. When Demyx suddenly reappears, the two discover that they have more in common than they thought, though the secrets in their past might tear them apart. Zemyx (Demyx/Ienzo), post kh3

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

---

It seemed to grow piercingly cold all at once. The next day they ended up having to go to the market for warmer clothing. Four days had passed, between sleep and trauma. Ienzo found himself dreading to return to the research, which was unusual. He wanted to help Sora, desperately, but at the same time, he’d been experiencing so much--good and bad--lately that he wasn’t sure he could have a clear head.

He would just have to try his best, and, if need be, ask for help. He’d finally started to make some progress, after all.

The day passed quickly and relatively peacefully. Ienzo did feel a lot better, no longer plagued by the headaches and dizziness that had no doubt been a result of sleep deprivation. His anxiety, too, was much more manageable, though he guessed this might be because he was spending so much time with Demyx.

Ienzo was in love.

As a teenage Nobody, he’d read some romance novels, mostly to try and gain some insight as to what this all meant in the world, especially for the Somebodies he’d been put in charge of observing or manipulating. He’d always found such descriptions of love melodramatic and overblown, lacking grounding in reality. Of course, the fact that most of these novels were written for heterosexual couples might change things too.

He felt the precise opposite of that dissociative, codependent infatuation. He’d hardly ever felt more awake, and more himself. Maybe that was why he was so afraid to leave the safety of this week. This stability and peace was so very tenuous.

Demyx helped him make dinner. He tried to take the instructions Ienzo gave him, he really did, but his knife cuts were not very clean or uniform. Ienzo couldn’t help but wonder how Demyx had been raised. With some things he was so practical and capable, but yet he couldn’t dice onions.

“Why’d you learn to cook?” Demyx asked him.

Ienzo checked the recipe. They were making a sort of bouillabaisse. He measured out a few different spices. “Perhaps you’ve noticed, but we apprentices tend to view our bodies more as vessels for the mind more than anything else. The meals I were raised on were nutritious, but bland. It frustrated me when I was younger, so I did research.” He shrugged. “It’s something I enjoy doing. Objective. Harmless.” It was the closest to artistry he could get.

Demyx pointed to the still-fading scar on his hand.

“ Largely harmless,” he corrected. “More so than my other research. Are those carrots ready?” That brought him, inevitably, to spiraling about Sora. He had to be careful. But wasn’t time of the essence? The more time Ienzo spent away from his work, the farther Sora was drifting from all of them. Ienzo reached over and corrected Demyx’s cuts before mixing them into the pot.

“Are you beating yourself up again?” Demyx asked. “We’ve talked about this.”

“You always ask questions about me. That doesn’t seem fair. Tell me more about you.”

He started slicing down the potatoes in front of him. “There’s not a whole lot to know,” he said. “You know about as much about me as I do.”

“...So you haven’t remembered anything else?” Demyx’s heart should be complete by now. This amnesia was concerning. Was it all trauma and repression? Or had Xehanort’s heart done more damage to him than they’d originally thought? But then Even’s memories should be scattered too, and by all accounts they weren’t. Worry tightened in his throat.

He sighed. “There is one thing,” he said. “Um, it’s kind of a doozy though.”

Ienzo looked up. Really it had only been a month or so since Demyx’s return. Did he just need time? “Pray tell.”

Demyx set down the knife.  “Well. Don’t freak out. But--”

Ansem’s voice broke the moment. “Oh, boys, that smells absolutely incredible.”

“Ienzo did all the work,” Demyx said without making eye contact. “I’m just moral support.”

“That’s not true. He’s trying,” Ienzo said. “It’ll be ready in about an hour. I hope you’ll be joining us?”

“I shall.” He paused slightly. “You look much improved. Perhaps I shall take a page out of Demyx’s book.”

“I am… feeling rather better.” This was the first time Ienzo had spoken to Ansem since he’d found out about the relationship. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t awkward. It had been all too easy to avoid him, lest he feel the need to give his two cents, or worse, try to feign parenting. When it came to something this personal, he did not need unsolicited advice.

“And you were both able to find good things for winter?”

“Yeah. Thanks again,” Demyx said.

Ansem smiled. “Like I said, I wish for you to be comfortable here. Winters in Radiant Garden can be… bracing, if one is not used to it. I can feel it even now. Perhaps, Demyx, if you wouldn’t mind, you can help Aeleus light the boilers sometime in the next coming days?”

Demyx blinked. “I don’t know why I’d be the right one for the job.”

“He needs assistance. I’m afraid with all of us tied up in our work, and Dilan still acting as guard, we’re one pair of hands short.”

“I’m happy to help,” Demyx mumbled. He turned back to his potatoes.

Awkwardness aside, Ienzo wanted to ask about the state of the research. No doubt Ansem had been investigating as well. It took a great deal of restraint not to ask. The model's face, so alive, so like the real thing, flashed behind his eyes. He felt recovered, but that didn’t mean he was. Still, his hands trembled.

“I shall see you in an hour,” Ansem said.

“I’ll hold you to it,” Ienzo said. He added some thyme to the soup. “Well. What is it you wanted to tell me?”

“...Nothing. It can wait.” He smiled.

“So you’re happy to help,” Ienzo said. Flirting was new to him, but he liked it. A new and unexplored use of wit. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to talk up Master Ansem, or if I’ve been a good influence on you.”

He seemed to hesitate, but really only for a fraction of a second. “Neither. It really is cold as fuck in here!”

“I’m afraid even with the heating it doesn’t get much better. This place is very old, poorly insulated. You’d better brace yourself. Though admittedly… it occurs to to me there is one way to keep warm.” Before he could lose his nerve, Ienzo kissed him. Part of him wondered, briefly, if he was only doing this to distract himself; warmth and want chased off the anxiety. Humanity was so manipulable. He'd always wondered why.

“Ienzo!” Demyx gasped in surprise.

He felt his face warm. “When this week ends, we won’t have that much time together,” Ienzo said.

He brushed a finger against Ienzo's lip.  “I’m not going to let you overwork yourself like that again. You can’t get rid of me.”

“Is that a promise?”

Demyx kissed him back equally as deeply, pulling his fingers through his hair and trailing down to his throat. The only thing that interrupted them was the loud sloshing as the pot boiled over. Ienzo swore and dropped the burner’s heat to “low.” “Later?” Demyx asked.

Another surge of anticipation, stronger this time. “Later.”

After all that, dinner was a bit of a fiasco. The food came out alright, despite the cream overheating. The apprentices’ old hierarchy was still very much in place; thinking nothing of it, Demyx had sat next to Ienzo, not realizing it was Even’s place. Nobody really outwardly commented, though Dilan did smirk. He’d always been a glutton for drama. Seeing them all here, gathered together, Ienzo felt something akin to embarrassment. The truth of their relationship had already been revealed, but to have it acknowledged added a strange layer of tension to the air. This sort of thing had never happened before.

“I see you’re feeling well, Ienzo,” Even said sweetly. “What is it you’ve both done to keep yourselves busy?”

The impudence of this made the blood rise in his face, but Ienzo replied pleasantly, paring the truth down to something palatable and non-incriminating.

“I am sure we’re all glad to see you back in good health,” Even said to him. “I just hope that this new development does not cloud your judgement going forward. To be young and… caught up in such matters, can no doubt impede your critical thinking. However natural it is.”

Demyx’s eyes flashed, but he said nothing.

Ienzo set down the cup of tea he was drinking. “Clearly you have thought on the subject, and I appreciate your concern. But I feel as though I am just as able to take on my research as I ever were. Not that I have asked for your advice. Should you have more to say on the matter, please let us discuss it in private.”

Even turned faintly pink.

“You needn’t worry about me anymore,” Ienzo said, a bit more gently. “I… I’m not the little boy I was.”

Even shook his head. “I will always worry about you,” he said. “After all, I’ve so much time to make up for.”

After a rather pregnant silence, Demyx cleared his throat. “Anyone want seconds?”

They both did the dishes. Ienzo was extra cautious to make sure that no knives were lying around. They returned to his room, though the mood from before had been spoiled. Demyx sat on the bed.  Ienzo turned towards the window, looking out at the town wreathed in fading light. “I must apologize for Even. It was incredibly rude for him to be so suggestive.”

Demyx joined him. “Why? Everyone knows.”

“They used to be… quite protective of me,” he said, with a shake of his head.

“I think it’s nice they care so much about you.”

“They don’t… dislike you,” he said. He flinched at the double negative.

“They think I'm not good enough for you. And they're right."

Ienzo took his hand and sat down next to him. “I don’t think you understand the impact you’ve had on me,” he said quietly. “If it were not for you, I’d still be there, miserable and working myself to death, unable to find any value in myself aside from needing to atone. I… I know the mistakes I made cannot be undone, but I… I’m better. Destroying myself isn’t going to fix what I did. You’ve… brought me back to reality. And if they don’t realize that, then they’re worse off. I wish they could see what I see in you. Your kindness, your patience, your emotional intelligence.”

Demyx shook his head.

“Healing is a slow, tedious, constant process. You can’t allow yourself to get caught up in moments like these. They don’t matter.” He touched Demyx’s face. “You do. We do.”

Demyx blushed. “I didn’t realize you were such a romantic,” he said.

“I… still have a few things to learn.” He kissed him gently.

Intimacy was still new and shocking to him, though at least he had somewhat of an idea of what to expect. Ienzo didn’t want to be so passive this time. He pulled his legs around Demyx’s waist and kissed him along the throat, along the soft spot that always made he himself feel weak. Demyx responded by pulling him down on top of him.

"I admit," Ienzo whispered. "All of this is... very new to me still. But I think I'm starting to understand."

Ienzo wondered if he should tell him, if he should say it out loud. But he had to know already. Everything he’d just said meant ten times more. He felt Demyx reach for the buttons of his pants and figured maybe now was not the time for talking. Clothing having been dealt with, Ienzo touched him, rivers of veins and muscle and bone, and scars. He kissed them and found that he’d been right about it also being pleasurable for Demyx, if the reaction he felt meant anything. He could feel it too, heavy and delicious and impermanent. To a degree, what Even said about this muddying thought was completely accurate. But was it such a sin to try and stop thinking for a few moments? The hand he'd been propping himself up with tightened against the sheets. "I want to..." Ienzo's voice sounded strange, a little like someone else's. "I want to do this for you. I--" His experience with such frustration was minimal, but he couldn't imagine it was easy.

He bit his lip a little and brushed Ienzo's hair out of his eyes. "If you're not ready--"

His face burned feverishly. He could only imagine how ridiculous he must look. "I am ready. And I want to. I just... I'm not, technically speaking, sure how?" He should probably try it on himself one of these days, if only to know the difference in sensation, but the thought was so jarring he pushed it away.

Demyx laughed a little. "Do you remember what I did to you?"

He nodded. The memory of it almost made him gasp out loud.

"Something like that."

He smiled shakily. "This isn't really something you read about in books."

"I guess it wouldn't be."

This shouldn't be difficult. He wanted to do it, to make him feel good as well. Yet finding the nerve took some time. Ienzo kissed him. He tried to will the trembling in his hands to stop. His hand brushed against Demyx's waist and hip and thigh. The scarred skin was warm. Demyx kissed him harder, his hand tangling in Ienzo's hair. This distraction was enough for him to touch his (what was it called in such moments? Wasn't "penis" too medical?) dick. The skin there was softer than he though, more natural. At least it was somewhat familiar in terms of structure. He stroked it gently and heard a small sound catch in Demyx's throat.

Ienzo pulled away from the kiss. "Was that alright?"

He nodded, unable to catch his breath. "Just a little bit more towards the--"

He tried to oblige. There was a sort of pleasure in doing this. He felt Demyx start to touch him too and tried to copy that. The awkward self-consciousness began to fade, replaced with the same lovely thoughtlessness as before. It was amazing that the body was capable of such pure joy. Little waves of it broke over him, heightening the tension within. He wove the trust and love into his touch and felt the same in return. The vulnerability did not feel so much like a weakness as a strength. It was okay. The rising, tightening feeling in him was recognizable now. He tried briefly to hold it back, but the need for release was just too tempting. He heard Demyx gasp as he came against him.

“I see,” Ienzo said softly, pressing a kiss into his sweaty brow. “It really is simpler than I thought.” The stress had been for naught.

Demyx lay back. “I swear this is not indicative of how long I usually last.”

Ienzo laughed. He shifted off of him, onto his side. “So do you feel better?”

“ So much better.”

He did too. The utter lack of anxiety was intoxicating. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He leaned against him. “You’ve been so patient with me.”

“It wasn’t all for you. Everything feels so different than it normally does. Plus I… I’m not used to the emotional part of it.”

“The sense of connection is… certainly unique. If I’ve learned anything, emotions are always capable of becoming more overwhelming. No matter their strength.”

Demyx hummed in response. For few minutes, or however long they remained knotted up together, he felt perfectly at peace. If there was anything to worry about, there was a later in which to do it.

“What the hell is that?” Demyx asked.

“My gummiphone. Though I have no idea who would be calling.” He got up and pulled on a robe, then reached into his lab coat pocket for the phone. “I’m sorry. I have to see who it is. Hello?”

“Ienzo? Are you busy?” Roxas’s voice, garbled.

“No, I’m not. What is it?”

It was hard to tell exactly what he was saying. Something about “worldlines.” Anxiety, or panic, made Roxas speak quickly.

“Slow down. The signal is not very good.”

“Are there universes other than this one? Like parallel universes? Xehanort mentioned something about worldlines but when I tried to ask Ansem about it he didn’t answer.”

That was so like Ansem. He probably hadn’t even heard the phone ring. “Well I do suppose it’s possible but I’ve had no insight this past week as to what he’s been up to, I fell ill and was resting--” He only knew about the Worldlines Theory vaporously--because it was just that, theory.

“Are you sick?”

“No, I’m alright now. And yourself? You sound distressed.”

“I mean I think I am? And then Riku went over to Yen Sid to ask more about it, and well, he said it’s possible, especially with the power of waking. They said Sora broke the rules of the power and walked between worlds. So they think that, if he’s done that, he’s in another worldline. Ienzo, do you know anything?”

Yes. Yes, it was all making sense. How had he not even taking the power of waking into account? He’d assumed it had all to do with hearts. He’d been wrong. “I understand,” he said woodenly. “I’m afraid if that’s the situation then… I’ll try my best, but you must realize the prognosis is not good.”

“Can you check in your research? See if anyone knows anything?”

“Yes, I’ll let you know. Try and take care.” He hung up. His mind was spinning but no good thoughts came from it. He sat down on the bed.

“What happened?” Demyx asked. “Who was that?”

“It was Roxas. They think Riku’s got a lock on Sora’s location.”

“But isn’t that… good? Then why are you both upset?”

Ienzo was wringing his hands. “Because he’s not in this reality. We’ve no way to get him back. Wherever he is… he’s there, alone. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

[lewispandawrites]

Something unexpected, Malec, 3153 words, T rated.

A birthday gift to a wonderful @enkelimagnus - inspired by her fic, Six of Swords

The bookstore was usually quiet and calm - it was one of those ‘hole in the world’ type of places - but people who would come there, came with purpose. Teenagers who only looked for school novels rarely visited the Reading Nook, but it still was a favourite place of many book lovers. They had many different sections, that were organised in an unusual way. Categories, such as ‘dragons’, ‘not-so-happy endings’, ‘lgbt history’, ‘animal characters’, ‘second life of a good book’ and ‘readers’ choice’ provided a different approach to finding a suitable book, and many people found it helpful. If anyone was lost, as to where look for a book they might enjoy, they could always ask a person sitting behind the counter.

Magnus loved working there. The smells of old and new books, mixed with a pot of coffee or tea always brewing in the back room, had become familiar and brought him comfort. During slower days, he could take out his painting supplies, and work on yet another deck of tarot cards to sell. Once in a while, when he wasn’t particularly inspired to paint, and no customer needed his attention, he would choose a book that had the most interesting description, and read - sometimes for hours to end. He also had a green light from the owner - who had rarely visited the place, due to his old age - to re-organise book categories, and the front display as he pleased. Magnus always made sure that something interesting and colorful was visible from the street, so more curious customers would come in. Just last week, he had finished yet another display on Harry Potter, as was his tradition for September.

The place was too small to host any meetings or book clubs, but it had a loveseat squeezed in between the window and an old, wooden bookcase. From time to time, a person or a couple would occupy it, reading or chatting quietly. Magnus had been a witness to people smiling like idiots, or shedding a few tears over a particularly good book. Sometimes, a customer might strike up a conversation with him - it usually happened when a person was looking for a book on a specific topic, but had no idea what to choose. Just last week, a teenager had come in, looking for a book on queer figures throughout history. Although, they had a section for that, they had had hard time finding a book that would be the best, and not cost crazy amount of money. Shyly, they had asked Magnus for advice, and the two had talked for over an hour - Magnus had shared his experience, as a bi man of color, and Remi had taught him about the local trans community in return. Magnus had pointed out a few books that might be helpful for Remi’s school paper, and suggested they would come and read them here, for free. He had brought in a chair from the back room, placed it next to the counter, and offered to share the space, so Remi could take notes on their laptop. After finishing their essay, Remi had sent it to Magnus, and had promised to share what grade they got on it. The encounter still warmed Magnus’ heart, every time he thought about it.

A man had entered the bookstore an hour ago. Magnus had greeted him but had kept to himself, seeing the determined look on his face. He had clearly known why he had come here. But, as the minutes had passed, and the man had kept browsing, he had started to look more and more lost.

Carefully, Magnus had placed his brush in the cup, then approached the man.

“Can I help you with anything?” Magnus asked.

“No, I’m afraid you can’t.” The stranger looked sad. Maybe he had been looking for a specific book, but it hadn’t been there? It had happened before.

“If you are after a specific title, I can see if I could order it for you?” Magnus suggested. It might take a few days, for the book to arrive, but at least the man would get it. The warehouse they got all their titles from was very well-stocked, and Magnus knew an additional bookstore owner or two, in case the book would turn out to be exceptionally rare.

Magnus got a smile in return, but one that didn’t reach stranger’s eyes. “Thank you, but I’m not looking for a specific book. I’m no longer sure, if I’m looking for a book at all.” There was a deep frown on man’s face, and he was hunched forward, looking tired. From up close, Magnus could see the dark circles under his eyes. For some reason, he didn’t want to let the man walk out right away.

“How about I make you something warm to drink, and you tell me more about what brought you here? I’m sure we can figure something out.” Magnus suggested. The other man hesitated, but eventually nodded, and took the chair that had been occupied by Remi last week. “Tea or coffee?” Magnus asked.

“Tea, please.” The man replied. Magnus had left him by the counter, and went to the back room, to boil some water. He took two mismatched mugs, and added a spoonful of his favourite green tea to each, then waiter for the water to be ready.

Not long after, he had emerged with two steaming mugs. “Be careful!” He warned his companion, as he placed a mug in front of him.”It’s still too hot to drink. And you may want to wait until the leaves will sink to the bottom.” The man nodded again, thanking him silently for the beverage.

“Magnus.” Magnus offered his name, as he sat down. He thought it was a polite thing to do, and a good conversation starter.

“Alec. Alexander.” his companion replied, watching the steam curl over the rim of his mug.

“Alexander. What brought you here?” Magnus asked, and leaned back in his chair. He wanted to give the other more space to breath and think, since he looked to be troubled by his thoughts. Something important must have had convinced him to come.

“I’m an art student.” Alec said after a moment. The frown was still on his face, as if it was a permanent fixture to his features. “We have an assignment. To create something using materials, that had already been used. Many people go for plastic bottles, or wine corks. T-shirts, pants... My friend is actually using her old pencils and crayons.” His sister, Clary, had suggested to break a few ceramics, but he wasn’t feeling that.

He called Clary his younger sister, but, in reality, they weren’t blood related. They had become inseparable, though, from the moment Luke and Maryse had first introduced them to one another, and grew up together under one roof, sharing a wall.

She had followed into his footsteps, claiming it had been him and not her biological mother who had inspired her to pursue art, and applied to the same art school one year after him. They both lived separately - Clary had a studio apartment, while Alec lived in a three-bedroom flat, with Clary’s girlfriend. It was the most bizarre combination, but the two had only been together for a few months. Maia spent most of her time at Clary’s, which gave Alec plenty of alone time, to work on his projects in the spare room. But he had been planning to ask Clary and Maia, whether or not they would want to switch apartments - they had been going pretty steady, even in such short amount of time, and Alec didn’t mind living alone, as long as he would have space to work. And he knew that Clary’s studio apartment was good for that.

It warmed his heart to see his little sister and his roommate so happy and in love, and he would do anything to support their relationship. In his eyes, those two were true relationship goals, alongside mom and his step-dad.

“I thought about using books.” Alec continued. “Wanted to cut out the letters, then layer the pages to show how our words turn into incomprehensible gibberish. How being unable to talk is the disease that kills our relationships with other people slowly, and then kills us from inside, when we are unable to express our needs and wants. We become numb, bland and detached from the world, going for the cheap thrills that promise us to fill the void inside, one we are unable to describe.” During his little speech, Alec had begun to gesture widely, and Magnus had found it adorable. What the other man was saying wasn’t anything new to him - he had understood his thoughts and concerns fully. Many writers had written about similar things. Yet, Magnus liked the idea to use this as a message behind a new piece of art - it was an old lesson, but one worth teaching again. “Or just stick to the first part, I guess. Just the gibberish.”

“And you didn’t find any of the books suitable?” Magnus asked, after carefully taking a sip of his tea. It could use a moment of two longer to brew, so he put the mug down.

“I guess I wasn’t going for any specific book. Just books in general.” Alec shrugged. “But…” he started, then grew quiet. They both just sat there, in silence that wasn’t uncomfortable, drinking the tea slowly.

Magnus was about to ask whether Alec would enjoy a homemade cookie, when the other spoke again. “I just can’t bring myself to destroy any of those books. Neither new, nor old. There’s just...so much love. It’s clear someone is taking care of them.” Their eyes finally met over the counter, and Magnus was struck by the sincerity and rawness in Alec’s eyes. Here sat a man, who was unable to destroy a thing, that had been an object of someone’s love. It was so pure and honest, that Magnus didn’t know what to say.

“I know it sounds stupid.” Alec said, and broke the eye contact. “But I just...can’t. Maybe if I psych myself up. But not today.”

Magnus reached over the counter, and placed his hand on Alec’s forearm in - what he hoped was - a comforting gesture.

“There is nothing bad about it. You shouldn’t be ashamed of not wanting to destroy something.” Magnus told Alec, and the other man met his gaze again. “Some of those books had lived wonderful lives, and have an additional story to tell. And some had been printed less than 6 months ago. But, they have all been carefully selected, so they would have something to offer to their future reader. I actually think it’s beautiful that you can see that.”

“It’s not only that. It is clear to me how someone had been taking care of them. How much love has been put into keeping them in a good shape, so they can be read by someone one day. I assume you were one of those people.” Alec added. The frown he had been sporting, had somehow smoothed during their conversation. “They are all carefully arranged, and there is no speck of dust on them.”

Magnus could feel himself smile widely, at the praise. No one had ever given him a similar compliment, but it had touched him deeply. “Thank you. I do love to work here.”

Alec’s eyes traveled from Magnus’ face, to the surface of the counter, and his eyes had finally fallen upon the art supplies. “Are you an artist as well? May I see it?” He pointed towards the tarot card. Alec understood that the projects, and the process of creation, could be very intimate and personal, so he had wanted to ask before looking at Magnus’ art.

“Of course.” They both stood up from their chairs, to walk up to the opposite end of the counter. Alec leaned down, to have a closer look at the detailed painting. “What is it?” The small painting reminded him vaguely of something, but he had no idea what it was. Besides, this was Magnus’ project - he probably knew the best. Probably, since the results could be tricky, and sometimes things created in the process made no sense to the artists themselves.

“It’s a tarot card. The Moon.” The bright gold of the Moon was a stark contrast against the dark hues of blue and purple. Alec could vaguely make out more shapes in the dark background - two high towers, two dogs, and a lobster. “This is my take on it, but I wanted to stay within the original design. Can you see a path in the middle?” Alec’s eyes were drawn to a thin line, and he nodded, hoping that he had found the right element. “This is the path that we walk. The dog and the wolf.” Magnus pointed out to two figures, that Alec had previously mistaken for two dogs. “symbolise our animalistic nature. One is tame and civilised, like a dog, and one is wild and feral, like a wolf. The two towers in the background” They were dark, barely floodlit by the Moon. “represent the forces of good and evil. They look exactly the same, to show how difficult it can be to distinguish between those two, in our everyday life. We walk a difficult path.” Magnus traced the middle line with his finger. “between wild and tame, between good and evil, between conscious and unconscious. The pond represents a subconscious mind, and the crawfish” Magnus pointed out the lobster-like animal. “is the early stages of consciousness. The Moon, on the other hand, is the symbol of unconsciousness. This card is the essence of dual nature, and rules the astrological Pisces. Sorry, I’m probably rambling.” Magnus said, blushing slightly.

“No! No, you’re not.” Alec replied. “This is really interesting. I had never seen a tarot card in my life.” Alec admitted. “I know nothing about them. But it’s beautiful. All the detailed work, and the meaning behind it...it’s beautiful.”

Magnus blinked, surprised. “Most people would find it weird or tacky. Tarot readings, magic things and such.” He rolled his eyes at his own words, but deep down he remembered well how much the reality could hurt. “You are a one big surprise, Alexander.”

“A good one, I hope.” Came a quiet reply.

Magnus just rounded the counter, and reached for Alec’s hand, to pull him somewhere. “I may have a few things that could interest you.” He led them to a narrow hallway, that had bookshelves on both sides. There was barely any space for the two of them to fit, without touching each other. Magnus kept whispering under his nose, quiet enough for Alec to be unable to hear, as he scanned the tall bookshelf.

Eventually, Magnus stood up on his toes to be able to reach a thick volume. “Here.” He dusted off the cover, just in case, then handed the book to Alec. It felt heavy, and the only decoration on the red cover were thick, black letters.

“To my Alice. On how to find yourself.” Alec read the title aloud, then looked up from the book.

“I know, it’s very unusual.” Magnus glanced at the cover again. “It had been brought here, a few years ago, by a person who had found it in their attic. He had no idea who Alice was, and the author isn’t mentioned anywhere, but it looks to be a collection of letters, written on a typewriter. I know the volume isn’t exactly college-student friendly. Especially when you are busy. But I have read a few letters, and I seriously recommend them. Maybe it’s not a conventional way to deal with artist block, but I really hope it can help you.”

Alec just looked at him, silent.

“I could just find some books on sculpture or photography for you? Or about the zero waste movement?” Maybe he had taken it too far. He had called whatever state Alec had been in an ‘artist block’, and suggested he read what looked to be an old coaching book. Great. But he had thought they had something...deeper going between them. Apparently, he had been the only one who had felt it. “Look, I’m sorry if I overstepped some boundaries…”

“No.” Alec cut in, his voice barely above the whisper. “This is a great suggestion. I hope it can truly get me unstuck.”

And they just stood there, for what felt like eternity, eyes locked together. One artist bearing their soul to the other. It was always a magical moment, full of vulnerability and trust, but this time, it felt like something more. A ‘Thank you for understanding.’, on both sides. ‘Thank you for no laughing at me.’

Neither of them had realised, when they had gotten closer, but suddenly their faces were only inches apart.

Alec was the one to break the silence.

“Can I kiss you?”

Magnus searched his face for something, anything - he wanted to say yes, but didn’t know id they wanted the same thing. For him, one kiss wouldn’t be enough. He wanted to get to know Alec better, to go out with him, find out his favorite sitcom, and his stance on dog versus cat. He wanted to learn, and learn, until there will be no new informations.

He wanted more.

“Or I could take you out first? If this is what you want, that is. You may say no to both things. Sorry.” Alec was already backing away from him, and Magnus couldn’t afford to lose that opportunity.

“Yes, kiss me. And I know a perfect place for the first date.”

Alec’s blinding smile was the last thing Magnus had seen before closing his eyes. The other man kissed the same way he had interacted with Magnus - at first, shy. Just a brush of lips. Then another, and another, until their lips stayed pressed together. Neither of them knew who had started moving their lips again, but they kept kissing, not being able to pull apart. Magnus could feel Alec’s teeth grazing his bottom lip, before the man grabbed onto his vest, and made a move to push him back against the bookshelf.

Before Magnus’ back could collide with anything, Alec broke the kiss. Magnus was very aware of the wall of books behind him, and wished Alec could finish what he had started - an image of being pressed against a bookshelf, with Alec pinning his body there while they kissed, wasn’t exactly an unpleasant one. But he understood it was neither time nor place for such things.

Magnus leaned in, to steal one more kiss, before he covered Alec’s hands with his own. “Your tea should still be warm. Want to finish our drinks, before we exchange numbers?”

Magnus didn’t believe Alec’ smile could get any wider, but here he was, proving him wrong. “I’d love to.”

[abookhaven]

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi: book review

Okay guys I have so much to say about this amazing novel.

NOn Spoiler:

Children of Blood and Bone is an amazing novel that follows 3 perspectives. One of a princess, a prince, and the daughter of a powerful, magical Reaper. The book follows Zélie Adebola, a daughter of a once powerful Reaper- a person who contains death magic. In this amazing fantasy world magic is gone but Zélie remembers the days when magic and the maji (the magic wielders blessed by the gods) flourished. Under the rule of a ruthless king, the maji were hunted and killed off, leaving the land of Orisha without magic. But when a chance to bring magic back is presented to Zélie, she knows she must succeed no matter what the cost to free her people from the tyranny of the monarchy and a world that has come to hate and fear her kind. Zélie teams up with a runaway princess and other awesome characters to outwit the evil king and the heir prince to fulfill her quest of bringing magic back to the world and free her people. But along the way Zélie faces unimaginable obstacles and tragedies as she tries to control her own powers and understand the world she lives in, and if her duty is stronger than her feelings for an enemy. IF you enjoy Black Panther or Avatar the Last Air Bender, this book is like a lovely mash of the two with so many other fantastical elements thrown in, making it unique and such an adventure of a read.  

SPOILERS AHEAD:

Alright, let’s get into this. !!!

This book was so freaking good, I just want to go on and on about it! It has everything I love about fantasy: giant animals people ride, super awesome magical powers, a badass female protagonist and other super awesome cast of characters we love to hate and hate to love, and an amazing quest that must be fulfilled. The whole imagery of the world is GORGEOUS! Like, the diviners having white hair and some have light colored eyes that contrast with their dark skin is so pretty. And the food clothing descriptions just make me drool. Like this world is a combination of Black Panther and Avatar the Last Air Bender. Two of my favorite things combined!! Yessss Pleassse!!!!      

For the girls:

Adeyemi does such an amazing job of bringing Zélie to life from the very first page. We learn that Zélie is a stubborn, loyal girl who loves her family and friends above anything else. What I love about Zélie’s character is that she is strong and independent before her magic is even awakened. Her skill with her staff and knowledge of the gods and magic gives her an edge that only allows her to become even more powerful with her magic. Zélie’s character also does have obvious faults that constantly work against her, such as her stubbornness and her smart mouth. But these faults all stem from a deep love for her people and a sense of duty and justice, which makes her faults more like strengths. She refuses to stay silent and passive when her people are beaten and broken, like when she ran after her mother after she was pulled from their home and hung in the tree, or when she buys water at the well and offers it to some of the diviners and laborers in the stocks because they can’t even afford a sip of water.

I also enjoyed the relationship development between Zélie and Amari. At first Zélie detests Amari for being the princess and daughter of the tyrant king, but eventually Zélie begins to realize that even the royal princess has suffered the tyranny of her father and that she shouldn’t judge Amari for her family. Eventually, both girls begin to trust and rely on one another and become close friends. Amari is the first person Zélie tells after her magic disappears. And Amari doesn’t get angry or upset like her brother, Tzain, usually does when  Zélie withholds information. Amari does become slightly worried, but she puts her faith in Zélie and tells her that even so, they must try anyways, because Amari’s faith in Zélie never wavers once. THey are such a badass pair of women together!!!!! I really appreciated Adeyemi making Amari’s character not a feeble princess who only has her wit to help her, but rather she made Amari a skilled fighter with a gentle side. Unlike Zélie, who’s instinct is to jump in head first, Amari is more levelheaded and quiet and adds a nice balance to their trio.

Now for the boys:

I liked Tzain’s character because he definitely feels like the male version of  Zélie. Throughout most of the novel Tzain’s character faults  Zélie ‘s character for not thinking about her actions and for always putting those she loves in danger. But Tzain isn’t much more level headed than   Zélie. He is quick to jump in and fight or defend those he loves, just like  Zélie, only he doesn’t have the pressure of being a diviner like his sister does. This world really delves into how prejudices shape the view of certain people, and  Zélie is looked down on for being a female and a diviner. I think having Tzain’s character with  Zélie throughout the novel was important for  Zélie because she has already lost the rest of her family and friends, so her brother gives her strength and something to fight for. BUut I didn’t like how he was so quick to judge  Zélie for her feelings for Inan, when he himself had feelings for Amari, or when he leaves the camp because he is so angry at  Zélie for kissing Inan and then the soldiers attack and  Zélie is left alone because Amari runs after Tzain. It’s understandable for Tzain to not like Inan, but I didn’t like how quickly he gave up on her sister. But after  Zélie is captured and tortured, I think Tzain knows he was wrong and his character grows to see that loving people means supporting them even when we’re angry. Plus I was all for Amari and Tzain together, because like I said before, she adds a nice balance to his hot headedness.

Now Idk how to even start with Inan. I think aftter wading through so many mixed feelings for the royal prince, I mostly pity him. Inan was raised to become the king one day, and his whole life has been filled with a hatred for magic and the maji. He has been taught to choose his duty over all else and this is what makes him a weak and dangerous character, especially to Zélie. At the beginning of the novel we have hope that Inan will realize he is on the wrong side and he will use his power to do good and join Zélie on her quest. Because as a new maji himself, Inan is forced to experience the life of a magic wielder and to feel the fear so many of his subjects felt when they were hunted down and killed. Inan begins to see the other side of the story as Zélie shares her memories with him and he feels all her pain and rage. Inan begins to understand the injustice and tyranny his father has subjected the maji and diviners to. And our hope for him to change only grows with his understanding. But it’s when he is given a choice, to choose Zélie and help her free her people or help his father destroy magic for good, that we see the truth and watch as he draws a line in the sand. Even after seeing and feeling everything, after being a maji himself, Inan still chooses to help his father destroy magic because he is afraid and doesn’t understand. It was at the point when he betrays Zélie at the temple when I decided Zélie deserved a better love interest. We almost can’t fault Inan for making his choices because he’s predictable. Even as a child he was willing to hurt those he loves, like when he cut Amari’s back open with a sword. Amari defied her father as a child and an adult, but Inan has always followed his father’s orders and this makes him weak. I pity his character because in his heart he thinks he’s doing what’s right, but he only hurts everyone in the process and his own father turns on him in the end.  Inan also makes me sad. He has been raised in such a hateful and prejudice environment that he was almost doomed from the start. Amari had the benefit of being defiant since a child, and she also had her maid Binta, a diviner, to help her gain perspective. But Inan never had anything like that. He is the heir prince, so he felt the full force from their father. But I haven’t given up on Inan. Although I loathe the choices he made at the end of the novel, I understand why he made them. Fear is a powerful force, and of all the characters in the novel, Inan is the most afraid, even when he has never experienced life like the other diviners. I’m not sure what Inan will do in the second novel, or if he even survives, but I hope he overcomes his fear and finally becomes the great ruler he can be, and succeeds in uniting the maji and Orishians when his father and grandfather both failed.

Okayy I know this was super long, and I have so many more thoughts, like how I love Zélie’s giant lionaire, Nailah, or mama Agba’s amazing staff fighting and her Seer powers! But all I can really say is that this novel was amazing! Tomi Adeyemi has created a one of a kind fantasy world that combines African mythology, culture and lore, making it super unique in the YA universe. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting a super epic read. I will be avidly awaiting the next installment! Also I’m SUPER EXCITED THAT ITS BECOMING A MOVIE! FOX will be adapting the novel into a film and you can bet my little butt will be in one of those theater seats when it comes out. !!!!!!!!!!!

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Roger Zelazny, Tros of Samothrace, Fred Saberhagen, Eyrie of the Dread Eye, Charles Beaumont

Authors (Rich Horton): Roger Zelazny would have been 82 today, but, dammit, he died way too young in 1995. I loved his short fiction but I haven’t written a lot about it, so instead I’ve taken four rather short bits, capsules, really, that I did of four of his novels, for my SFF Net newsgroup a while ago, and in once case for Black Gate retro-review of an issue of Galaxy.

  Tolkien (Eldritch Paths): I have a confession to make. Up until last year, I hadn’t actually read The Lord of the Rings. I know, I know. I say I read fantasy and I haven’t read what’s considered one of the greatest pieces of fantasy ever written. To be quite honest, I was a bit reluctant to read the trilogy. The complaints I’ve heard about Tolkien being “boring”, middle-earth as a setting being cliche, and that the novels having way too much description put me off. Eventually, I hunkered down and bit the bullet. To my surprise, I was blown away.

  Science Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale. The problem was and is this: How do we write convincingly about the supernatural, the rural, and the irrational in a thoroughly materialist, urbanized, and (supposedly) rational age?

Fiction (DMR Books): Talbot Mundy described the adventures of Tros in three books: Tros of Samothrace, Queen Cleopatra and Purple Pirate.  We will look at each of these books in turn and you can find them in paperback, hardcover, ebooks or here, at the invaluable library of Roy Glashan.  Although Tros of Samothrace was originally serialized in the pages of Adventure magazine in 1925 and 1926, it was not published in book form until 1934.

  Pulp Writers (My Drops of Ink): The beginning of adventure novels for men—1901-1920 period.  A few months ago, I wrote an article for Paperback Parade about Steward Edward White, an early 20th century writer of popular adventure, Westerns, and nonfiction about birds and nature.  He was a conservationist, naturalist, and big game hunter, and his love for nature, conservation, and adventure were to become very much a part of his literary works over his long career.  He enjoyed writing about pioneers, the West, logging, gold mining, and nature.

  Dime Novel Westerns (Crime Reads): Two detectives came out to Wyoming in early February 1885, seeking a boy from New York City and the ten thousand dollar reward posted by his father. The boy, an eleven-year-old banker’s son named Fred Shephard, had disappeared the month before, but had not been abducted. An obsessive reader of Western dime novels, the young man broke open his tin bank one January night and climbed down the rain spout from his room to the street. His latest book was left at school, his heroic intentions scrawled across the bottom of its open page, “Ime goin West to be a cowboy detective.”

  Fiction (Goodman Games): Science fiction and fantasy author Fred Saberhagen was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 18, 1930. Beginning his professional writing career at age 30 with a short story published in a 1961 issue of Galaxy Magazine, Saberhagen went on to become best known for his works featuring the characters Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Fantasy role playing enthusiasts of a certain age are probably much more familiar with Saberhagen’s second-most popular work, The Swords Trilogy, which began being published in 1983, just as the Dungeons & Dragons craze was hitting its peak. Saberhagen followed that up with a subsequent sequel series, The Book of Lost Swords, which totaled eight additional books in all.

  Fiction (Paul Bishop): Somewhere, jockeying for position in my top five favorite tough guy private eyes, you will find the six book Rafferty series by Shamus Award winning author W. Glenn Duncan. Like author John Whitlatch, who I previously posted about, W. Glenn Duncan has been an enigma to his fans for many years. A former journalist and pilot, Duncan lived in Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Texas, and California, before disappearing into the proverbial wilds of Australia with his wife and three children.

  H. P. Lovecraft (Jeffro Johnson): Did this show with Zaklog the Great last Friday. Enjoyed talking Lovecraft and Lord of the Rings and… these obnoxious people that poison your mind until you’d begin to think that your “beloved past had never been.”

Lovecraft writes three times that “there was no hand to hold me back that night I found the ancient track.” After mulling this whole scene over in light of the Boomerclypse we’re in the process of rolling back, I’ve concluded that there was in fact a hand there. The hand of wisdom!

  Westerns (Frontier Partisans): During the summer between junior high school and high school, a movie came to our little local theater that I simply had to see. It was titled The Long Riders and it had this cool gimmick — four sets of brothers played four sets of brothers — the James Boys, the Youngers, the Millers, and the Fords, played by James and Stacy Keach; the Carradine brothers; the Quaids; and the Guests. My parents thought it was too violent and they didn’t like the idea of “glorifying outlaws.”

  RPG (The Mixed GM): Today, let’s take a look at AX5: Eyrie of the Dread Eye. I purchased the pdf and physical copy, but this review will focus on the pdf, due to the fact that the physical copy is still on its way. There is a 5E version of this, but I am only interested in the Adventure, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) version of it!

Sidebar: Really appreciate Autarch making the pdf + physical copy combo the same price as just purchasing the physical book.

  Cartoons (Kestifer): Mobile Suit Gundam aired on Japanese television in 1979 and birthed a brand new sub-genre of giant robot fiction: the “Real Robot.” Where the 60s and 70s had a thriving “Super Robot” field populated with classics like Tetsujin-28 Go,Mazinger Z, and Getter Robo (worthy in their own ways), Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Gundam treated giant robots less as giant superheroes calling out their attacks, and instead as advanced weapons of war against a backdrop of space opera and large scale warfare.

  Fiction (Easily Distracted): I first gave up on the paperback edition of Fires of Eden in August 1995. But powerful images and scenes from Fires of Eden stuck with me, particularly a legion of night-marching spirits filing through the wilds of Hawaii. Similar to the staying power of scenes of devouring lampreys in Simmons’ Summer of Night or the vampiric stomach siphons of Romanian orphans in Children of the Night.

  Cryptozoology (Kairos): Cryptozoology has been a sporadic hobby of mine since childhood. I’ve studied the research of investigators like Loren Coleman, Jeff Meldrum, and John Keel for years. I can’t tell you what our guest blogger encountered. I can tell you that his account perfectly aligns with multiple data points consistently found in the most credible Bigfoot reports.

  Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): WOWhead has more information as there are some significant difference between how it was and how Classic will go, mostly of a technical nature due to technology changes between 2004 and now, but if you weren’t there then you might want to read up on what you’re getting into.

Get ready for How Things Used To Be, folks, including everybody and their uncle rolling a Forsaken Rogue.

  Fiction (Pulpfest): A prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Charles Beaumont was born on January 2, 1929. According to award-winning writer and editor Roger Anker, “In a career which spanned a brief thirteen years,” Beaumont wrote and sold “ten books, seventy-four short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of which were produced), two dozen articles and profiles, forty comic stories, fourteen columns, and over seventy teleplays.”

    Sensor Sweep: Roger Zelazny, Tros of Samothrace, Fred Saberhagen, Eyrie of the Dread Eye, Charles Beaumont published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[beneaththetangles]

BtT Light Novel Club Chapter 10: Outbreak Company Vol. 1

The Light Novel Club returns with a tale of a missionary, sharing what he believes and loves with a new culture. Sure, the "missionary" is an otaku sharing anime, manga, and the like, and the "new culture" is a fantasy alternate world country, but don't mind the details too much. TWWK and I take a look at the first volume of Outbreak Company, a light novel series licensed by J-Novel Club that inspired a 2013 anime and provides its own take on the isekai story.

Note: This time around, I have brought back the old format of numbered questions. If you have a preference for what format we use here, let us know in the comments!

1. What do you think of the book overall? What do you think of it compared to other isekai series?

TWWK: I would say the two words that come to mind after reading volume one are “impressive” and “frustrating.” I’ll talk about the latter later, but the “impressive” part is that the novel just FLEW by. I enjoyed I tremendously, and I also found that it had really important ideas expressed within, items that I did not expect to read about in a moe moe take. The focus seems to actually revolve around these ideas, which to me separates it from other isekai, which focus on the protagonist’s journey in another world.

stardf29: That is definitely what stuck out to me about this series: it actually looks at particular issues that come up when someone goes to another world and brings their culture there. It gives a nice angle and that gives it something to keep my interest even through some of its weaknesses.

2. What do you think of the characters? Do you think Shinichi is a good protagonist? How about the other characters?

TWWK: I have mixed feelings about Shinichi. He’s extremely likable of course, and that’s kind of the issue—he’s too funny, too nice, too motivated, too much of a “perfect otaku.” That’s purposeful, and perhaps that also the point. Maybe he’s designed this way to encourage otaku or because we need to be able to somehow put ourselves in his shoes—if so, I don’t like the strategy. If he’s this way because the focus, again, is on these greater themes, then I’m more open to his goodness.

Myusel and Petralka are wonderful characters, archetypes that remain interesting because of clear descriptions and crisp dialogue. Very easy to like, very easy to root for. It was also fun Petralka’s character growth happened through and because of Myusel!

stardf29:  I think that in general, isekai protagonists tend to be "too good" (that or an angsty edgelord), though I want to say Outbreak Company started before the current isekai boom. You do bring up a good point that, because this story wants to address certain themes, it might have more of a need of such a protagonist. And yes, the other characters are great. I definitely appreciated Petralka's growth, in particular.

TWWK: That's interesting...you know a lot more about isekai than I do, so I'll ask this: has the trend REVERSED as of late? I think of examples of some isekai protagonists that have negative attributes, some crippling, like Subaru in Re:Zero. I totally understand the need to make your protag a loveable character in a series that is meant to whisk you away (and especially if your an otaku), but there seems to be merit, too, in challenging readers who put themselves into the position of the MC to see one who is profoundly flawed.

stardf29: Honestly, other than the aforementioned "angsty edgelord" protagonists, I haven't really seen any change in this trend. I think it's because most isekai light novels originated as web novels, where people generally just "write what they like", post it to a site like Shousetsu ni Narou, and hope other people hop along for the ride. (Some of those authors might "like" their protagonists to be more edgy for one reason or another.) I think what it boils down to is that, as you mentioned, most of these isekai are more focused on the characters' adventures themselves, rather than seeking to convey some kind of "message".

It's worth noting that Outbreak Company did not originate as a web novel, which may have played a bit into why it's more focused on its themes.

3. What do you think about all the otaku elements and references?

TWWK: The references were fun for me! They didn't go too deep, which was okay by me—Fujiko Mine is kind of at my level—though its possible I missed some. I did read that there were a lot of shout outs to various anime in the series (which I'm now eager to see). I do think the volume would be stronger, though if the cuts were deeper—it would of course establish Shinichi as more of an otaku (I don't really feel his weak nerd rejection story and constant reference to himself as a home security guard really establish his otaku identity); in this aspect, I was hoping for a little more Ready Player One, which contained a ton of references I knew as an 80s kid, but also gave enough explanation that even if I didn't know the reference, I could embrace it.

stardf29: I haven't seen or read Ready Player One so I can't comment there. I will point out, though, that as far as catching references go, I have a bit of help... For J-Novel Club's novels, if you have a membership, you can buy special Premium ebooks straight from the site; these Premium ebooks have some form of bonus content with them, such as extra short stories (sold as store exclusive bonuses in Japan), textless versions of the opening color illustrations, or in some cases, content written by the translator/editor. For Outbreak Company, in addition to textless color illustrations, there's a glossary of all the otaku references (and other cultural notes).

TWWK: That’s a really cool option! What a great idea for a premium content offer! I tell you what—for Outbreak Company in particular, I could go for more illustrations. The character sketches are some of the best I’ve seen in any light novel I’ve read. I was super impressed by how pretty the illustrations are.

4. Is there anything about the worldbuilding so far that you particularly like?

TWWK: So I love the IDEA of the worldbuilding in this series. The author comments on it at the end of the volume—it's a neat concept to bring Japan together with a fantasy world. I even like the idea of this kind of black hole connecting the worlds and the transfer of goods between, as well as the JSDF having a post in the city. But I don't think the movement of concept to reality was particularly strong. This kind of led to a general frustration about the volume—the lack of subtleties and details. I could probably put this more delicately, but it felt like plot vomit—there was this rush to get to the climactic scene, and so instead of taking the time to bask in the uniqueness of the world by just walking through it, the author had us frequently in one of two places: a class setting to develop dynamics between Shinichi and the girls or in a scene that was full of action, like that at the end. Why not demonstrate the class divisions instead of having Shinichi rage about them? Why not elaborate on a specific village setting, noting what each type of race was doing, instead of info-dumping? The author is capable—there are really nice moments of relationship development for instance—but the hurry to get from point A to point B, I think, broke down a chance to make this volume into something even better.

stardf29: Huh, that might be an unfortunate result of the light novel format, if the author had a certain page limit to finish the volume in. (It's possibly an advantage for starting as a web novel, where one can write things at their own pace to start with, and worry about volume divisions later if it gets picked up for publication.)

And now for the big question of the volume...

At many points, the story describes Shinichi's work in terms very familiar to Christians, like calling him an "evangelist" of moe culture and spreading an "otaku" gospel. And at the end, he even references the spread of Christianity during the Middle Ages and how it was an example of a "cultural invasion", whether intentional or not. So, how is Shinichi's work similar to Christian missionary work, and to what extent can that be "cultural invasion"?

TWWK: That was a really interesting parallel made in the volume. I think it makes sense, too, in terms of this desire to do the right thing versus a more administrative, worldly concern. Shinichi reminds me of a passionate missionary, aiming to share his love of otaku culture with those who have never experienced it, while the Japanese government may have ulterior motives, not unlike church bodies of years past (and perhaps now) who have concerns other than altruistic ones in spreading the gospel.

The idea of cultural invasion is also interesting. As I often do, I’m reminded of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, where the idea is considered whether or not the missionaries belong in Japan. The message is good—if you believe in Christianity, you believe is to be necessary and true for everyone—but will is also cause immediate harm to cultures receiving it? Shinichi seems to be considering this, especially in light of the terrorist act that concludes volume one.

stardf29: The question of "immediate harm" is notable because Shinichi notes that the otaku products he's introducing contains concepts like freedom and equality--concepts that, should they be accepted into the culture, would arguably make life better for people. Likewise, with Christian evangelism, we believe we are ultimately helping the people we are reaching out to. However, that doesn't change how introducing radical concepts can produce unexpected results that might not be pleasant. So the question then is, when do we avoid "stirring the pot" and when do we go ahead and do what we believe is to be done?

TWWK: And also is there a better way of introducing “good” concepts? Paul mentions how he adjusts his mode of communication for different people groups—I think the willingness to invest in this and to do it show your heart for the people. Shinichi is already considering how to approach his own evangelism and makes adjustments, while the Japanese government don’t apparently care much for doing so—only as far as it can export its culture and empower and enrich itself.

stardf29: That's a great point: having a heart for the people rather than just being concerned about your own goals. The answer Matoba (the Japanese government official) gives for "are we invaders" shows pretty clearly how self-interested they are: "If you believe you're an invader, then you are, and if you don't, then you're not." You can't get any more self-centered than that. By the same token, though, the terrorists are also acting out of the interests of only their group's interests, wanting to maintain the dominance of humans over other races. The contrast to them is Petralka, who starts off with various prejudicial beliefs because that's how she was raised, but after being exposed to different ideas, starts to come around to the point of saving Myusel. (Also worth noting is Garius, who has noticed that the culture of the country has become stagnant and welcomes the opportunity to introduce new ideas and help it grow.)

From the perspective of the missionary, one can hope that the people we are reaching out to are as receptive as Petralka and Garius are of otaku culture... but if they're not, we may simply have to be patient and start by putting our own goals aside and simply serve them with no strings attached.

TWWK: Well said. It will be interesting to see how Shinichi approaches his evangelism as he becomes more aware both of what he’s doing and what his employers goals are.

And that concludes our discussion! For further reading, check out @negativeprimes's article on the anime adaptation and how it compares to other stories with similar concepts, over at Curiously Dead Cat (warning: the article goes into anime content that comes from volume 2 of the light novel).

For those of you who read along with us, or are familiar with the anime adaptation, what do you think of Outbreak Company and how it relates to Christian missionary evangelism? Let us know in the comments!

And if you're interested in buying the light novel ebook for Outbreak Company, you can go here for links.

[theinvinciblenoob]

It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the state of AAA gaming today than Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game where the whole of the wine-dark Classical Aegean is available for you to ply with your oars — but which operates according to a risible, cartoonish video game logic that seems, if possible even more anachronistic. Should you play it? Absolutely.

(Very minor spoilers ahead.)

In case you haven’t been following the Assassin’s Creed… well, odyssey, the last few years, the game took some time off following the lavishly produced but ambivalently received Unity and Syndicate games, set in revolutionary Paris and Victorian London respectively. The series, critics said, was wearing itself a bit thin despite the fabulous set dressing.

You can imagine everyone’s surprise when AC returned in Origins, set in an enormous swathe of ancient Egypt. New systems nudged the game from the stealth action of its roots towards the expansive, open-world RPG currently in vogue. It was a little rough around the edges but the scale was welcome, as was the shift away from the increasingly turgid Assassins vs Templars secret society scramble.

The news that the next game would take place in Ancient Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War thrilled me to no end. I’ve always been a fan of the Classical era, Homer and Herodotus and Periclean Athens and all that. I’ll also admit to an unironic love of 300 and the story of Leonidas’s last stand — the graphic novel, not the movie, which was awful.

Are you kidding me? Look at this.

Here, then was that world brought to life with all the fidelity that Ubisofts hundreds of artists and modelers could bring, with a narrative combining secret societies with classical warfare, historical figures, and high-seas adventure (I loved the pirate-themed AC Black Flag). On paper this is the greatest game ever to grace the screen.

And in a way, it is. Ubisoft’s rendering of the Classical world is so beautiful, so massive, so obviously a labor of love and skill and intensive research that I have spent much of my time in the game simply gawking.

The costumes! The statues! The landscapes! The light! It’s a feast of details at every location, from the idyllic backwater of Kephallonia, where your hero begins their story to the sprawling, bustling Athens just approaching the zenith of its glory. I (that is to say, my character) walked past the Theatre of Dionysus in its construction, which I have visited in person (now ruined and restored, of course), and on up to the Acropolis, where I scaled the Parthenon and looked out over the tiled roofs under one of which, for all I know, I may find Plato sitting and writing the Symposium.

Seriously.

Then I meander to the harbor, board my black ship, and split the seas to explore any of the islands in the entire Aegean — any of them. The whole Aegean! Well, most of it, anyway. Enough that you won’t ask for more. Here be mythical creatures, political machinations, stormy seas and sunny shanties.

The world that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in habits, I feel confident in saying, is the largest and most impressive that I have encountered, with special credit given for having to reflect reality to a certain extent, which is not a limitation shared by its eminent competition in the open-world genre, like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild.

In my opinion, both as a gamer and a lover of antiquity, it is worth the price of admission to experience this world, to see and hear Ancient Greece in a way that was heretofore impossible, and simply to revel in the almost inconceivable level craft that was so obviously put into this mind-boggling world.

And now, having made that judgment, I will proceed to trash the game I just recommended for about two thousand words.

The game itself

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the game itself, is embarrassing to play. The characters you interact with and the minute-by-minute gameplay are so uneven that I truly believe that Ubisoft simply didn’t have time to adequately play-test it. It feels like the game was just too big to run through once they’d made it so they just shipped. If someone from Ubisoft were sitting next to me as I played, I would expect them to be cringing constantly.

It’s an incredibly lopsided collection of old and new ideas, balanced and unbalanced systems, good and bad UI, intuitive and baffling combat, beautiful and repulsive graphics, and excellent and laughable voice acting. I haven’t finished the game, let alone all the side quests, but although I expect to encounter more good things as I go, the bad things were apparently pretty much from the first few minutes and haven’t abated.

The AI of the people in this game seems to have regressed ten years to a simpler age. They are truly idiots all, from people on the street to elite soldiers.

Good old Adrastos the Logician, engaging in hand to hand combat.

One of the first things that happened when I got my horse and learned to have it follow a road was that it mowed down a few laborers. This, I found, would happen everywhere I went: every character in the game walks right in the center of the road and dives madly out of your way as you canter down it, screaming and cursing. Wild animals cluttered the road, and reacting confusedly as I approached and throwing themselves under the hooves of my steed, Phobos.

This was my first taste of what would become a theme. Why, I asked myself, wouldn’t these people just walk on the side of the road? The developers clearly accounted for horses riding down it, and have behaviors and barks for when that happens. But it’s so weird, so unrealistic, so video gamey. Surely in this lovingly rendered world it is not unusual for a horse to run down a mountain road? Why then do they behave in this way? Because the people were not created intelligently — it’s as simple as that. None of them.

I once emptied a military camp of guards and then set about looting the place. A woman was being held captive in a cage — not an uncommon thing to find — so I let her out. As she escaped, thanking me, I turned to take the items out of a nearby chest. The woman, mid-escape, screamed with rage at me for this theft, snatching a nearby spear and rushing me in righteous anger. What?

Perhaps I can’t expect every peasant to be a genius, but guards too (of all ranks) are unbelievably dense. They will step over the corpses of their fellow men to get to their post and not say a word. They will fail to hear the clashing of swords, or not notice a guy being violently flipped over and disemboweled, a matter of feet away. They will follow you one by one around corners where you can dispatch them individually and fail to see or care about the ever-widening pool of blood. They are as dumb as the dumbest guards from games that came out 10 years ago.

“Mother of Spiders”

Not much better are the much-ballyhooed mercenaries, who come after you if you do too many bad things. It’s not really clear what the bad things are, but eventually you’ll see a red helmet icon on your map and know you’ve been naughty. They’re basically guards with special weapons and a few characteristics like “weak to fire” or “takes 20 percent less ranged damage.” Technically they have backstories but you have to drill down to their description to find them, and by the time you’re doing that you’ve probably already killed them. You can recruit them for your ship, like you can recruit anyone, but they generally amount to stat bonuses with funny names like Demos the Drunk. He didn’t act drunk — just had a spear I wanted, so I took him out. I mean, the variation is welcome, but it’s nothing like, for example, the nemesis system in the Mordor series.

Combat is a real mix. You are no longer a fragile assassin who can be killed from a few good hits, but a powerful warrior with supernatural skills like instant mid-battle heals and teleportation. This is combat between equals, but your equals are generally stiff types with two or three attacks they repeat over and over, glowing a bright red or gold before doing so.

A slippery-feeling dodge system zips you through these attacks, or you can parry some of them, then slash away at your attacker. Some guards or targets, especially if they’re a level or two above you, will take minutes of patient slashing before they drop. I was sent on a hunt to kill a legendary boar that I gave up on after a couple minutes because I had only taken its health down by a quarter while not being hit myself.

Compared with other action RPGs it’s pretty listless stuff. More appealing is the stealth, which the fools of guards are obviously there to encourage, since you can empty a camp or fort of its occupants systematically and it can be quite satisfying. But with the perfect knowledge effected by scouting such a place with your eagle’s x-ray vision, it feels more like bullying than anything.

The Peloponnesian War is going on around you, though you’d be hard-pressed to notice most of the time. You don’t exactly take sides, since whatever area you’re in, your enemies are the ones in control. You can weaken the faction in power by various means and force a battle (a melee in which the combat, now against dozens, feels frustratingly sloppy), but ultimately the guards and camps feel much the same as one another — Spartans have different helmets from Athenians.

I thought at first this would be deeper than it is. I had looted a variety of armor pieces, several of which suggested I could use them to blend in among the Athenians whom I was at that moment working to undermine. So I donned them and headed to the nearest camp, hoping to walk about unsuspected, Hitman-style, sowing chaos by releasing caged animals and setting fire to supplies. Nope: I was immediately attacked on approaching the gate, before I’d even come in or done anything suspicious. The guard that had never seen me before apparently recognized me as the bloodthirsty mercenary who’d wiped out a camp a mile or so away, minutes earlier. No espionage for me.

It’s never really clear who you’re fighting or why, because the locations and people are just names. It doesn’t matter if they’re Athenian or Spartan, just that they’re the ones between you and the treasure chest. I guess that’s the life of a mercenary, but it doesn’t make you care a lot.

That was a quest?

The RPG elements, from gear to abilities, have almost no integration with the game itself. From the very beginning you can see your whole skill tree, including things involving the magic spear that you don’t yet know is magic. You gain new abilities and upgrade your ship not through interesting quests or meeting interesting people, but simply by spending points and resources.

When your ship’s captain says the hull ought to be upgraded, it’s not the start of a quest to find some cool big trees or visit his hometown where he left his ship-building tools and pals. It’s literally just a reminder to stock up on wood and iron and press the button to upgrade in the pause screen.

When you meet a talented carpenter whose brother is being held by bandits, it isn’t a quest to reunite these guys for a power team that enables a ship repair superpower. He just turns out to be a regular guy who increases your hull strength by a couple percentage points.

Quests, talked up ahead of release as being fully voiced and emergent, as though you’re receiving a request from help from a needy merchant or the like, are nothing of the sort. Every one I’ve encountered so far has been a variant of: Kill these five wolves specifically. Kill these three Spartan elite guards specifically. Kill these bandits. Sink these ships.

Each has a flimsy justification (they’re blocking the road; they stole money from me) and are often atrociously acted. In one I found the quest giver asleep; he obligingly woke me up to say he wanted to take the fight to some bandits who had been demanding money from him. As soon as I agreed, those very bandits appeared not ten feet away and instantly ran him through. Quest failed.

There are deeper side quests, to be sure. But the hundreds of quests you’ll see on quest boards or appearing randomly in the wild are like this, and rarely give more than a spritz of XP and gold. Sometimes you can recruit the quest-giver, though they might or might not be helpful on your crew.

I wish that they had taken the time and effort that went into creating 20 or 30 of these quests and made one single side quest with multiple steps, characters that mattered a bit, and provided substantial rewards like a new ability for your ship.

Even main story quests, such as the targets you’ll be taking on, can be disappointingly shallow. You’re supposed to be following threads and clues, but several are just handed to you: Here’s some lady. Here’s her exact location. Go kill her. No dialogue, no footwork, no alternatives. Stab this person and take their shiny thing. Shouldn’t I at least try to get some information out of her? Why isn’t there even a death cutscene like in so many of the other games?

The writing is hit and miss. The main story and its immediate side quests are fine — I’m perhaps 25 hours in and I’m interested to see where it’s going, even if it’s not particularly surprising. And it helps that the writing and voices for the main characters are leaps and bounds above the rest.

I chose to play as Kassandra, as opposed to Alexios, for a lot of reasons. And I love her. She’s well-acted, her writing is funny and occasionally realistic, and I like that she is indistinguishable from her male alternative in every way. Your companions, especially Herodotos and your exuberant captain Barnabas, are great.

Yet other characters are ridiculous: badly written, worse acted. Even major ones. I remember one exchange with a soon-to-be-target who was pressuring me to torture some poor sap. His voice acting was so bad, especially compared to his interlocutor Kassandra’s, that I was laughing out loud. He was far from the only example of this.

Games like The Witcher 3 have spoiled us on the quality of the writing and quests, but that should be a new bar to meet, not a high-water point. It’s sad that Ubisoft hasn’t upped its game here, so to speak; it feels like 90 percent of the game I’ve played so far is purely mechanical, and even at its best it sits like a layer of butter spread thinly across an enormous Greek piece of toast. But what toast!

It’s tantalizing to see how good a game like this could be, only to be let down again and again with elements that would feel out of date ten years ago. I’m having a great time when I’m not shaking my head at it, and enjoying the scenery when I’m not being attacked by one of the evidently 50,000 bears out for my blood in the Classical world.

As I wrote earlier, to me it is worth buying just for the good parts. But as someone who cares about games and loves the idea of this one, I can’t help but observe how dated and baffling it is at the same time. It doesn’t live up to the world it was created to inhabit, but that world is practically a complete game in itself, and one that I immediately loved.

via TechCrunch

[glittership]

Episode #57 - "You Inside Me" by Tori Curtis

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 57 is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and is part of the Autumn 2017/Winter 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

    You Inside Me

by Tori Curtis

  It’ll be fun, he’d said. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to be looking for romance, it’s just a good way to meet people.

“I don’t think it’s about romance at all,” Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. “I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he’d have to resign.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve never had a vampire congressman,” Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. “Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light.”

  Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 57 for May 21st, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you.

GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service.

If you’re looking for more queer science fiction to listen to, there’s a full audio book available of the Lightspeed Magazine “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” special issue, featuring stories by a large number of queer authors, including  John Chu, Chaz Brenchley, R.B. Lemberg, and many others.

To download a free audiobook today, go to http://www.audibletrial.com/GlitterShip and choose an excellent book to listen to, whether that’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” or something else entirely.

Today I have a story and a poem for you. The poem is “Dionysus in London” by Tristan Beiter.

Tristan Beiter is a student at Swarthmore College studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He loves reading poetry and speculative fiction, some of his favorite books being The Waste Land, HD’s Trilogy, Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found crafting absurdities with his boyfriend or yelling about literary theory.

  Dionysus in London

by Tristan Beiter

  The day exploded, you know.

Last night a woman with big bouffant hair told me, “Show me a story where the daughter runs into a stop sign and it literally turns into a white flower.”

I fail to describe a total eclipse and the throne of petrified wood sank into the lakebed.

James made love to Buckingham while I pulled the honeysuckle to me, made a flower crown for the leopards flanking me while I watched red and white invert themselves, white petals pushing from the center of the sign as the post wilted until all that remained was a giant lotus on the storm grate waiting to rot or wash away.

I let it stay there while the Scottish king hid behind the Scottish play and walked behind me, one eye out for the mark left when locked in. You go witchy in there—or at least you—or he, or I—learn to be afraid of the big coats and brass buttons, like the ones in every hall closet; you never know if they will turn, like yours, into bats and bugs and giant tarantulas made from wire hangers.

The woman showed me our reflections in the shop window while one or the other man in the palace polished the silver for his lover’s table and asked me who I loved; I decided on the cream linen, since the wool was too close to the pea coat that hung

by your door. I suppose that the cat is under the car; that’s probably where it fled to as we walked, knowing we already found that the ivy in your hair was artificial as the bacchanal, or your evasion, Sire, of the question (and of the serpents who are well worth the well offered to them with the wet wax on my crown). I

suppose the car is under the cat, in which case it must be a very large cat, or else a very small car. I eat your teeth. I see brilliantine teeth floating in her thick red lipstick. James tears apart the rhododendron chattering (about) his incisors and remembering the flesh and—nothing so exotic as a Sphinx, maybe a dust mote or lip-marks left on the large leather chaise. Teeth gleam from the shadows where I wait, thyrsus raised with the cone almost touching the roof of the forest, to drown

in a peacock as it swallows (chimney swifts?) the sun—or was it son—or maybe it was just a grape I fed it so it would eat the spiders crawling from the closet. It struts across the palace green like it owns the place, like it will replace the hunting- grounds with fields of straggling mint that the king would never ask for.

The woman teases up her hair before the mirror, filling the restroom with hairspray and big laughs before walking back into the restaurant, where we wait to make ourselves over—the way the throne did when the wood crumbled under the pressure of an untold story, leaving nothing but crystals and dust.

We argued for an hour over whether to mix leaves and flowers, plants and gems, before settling on four crowns, one for each of us.

Her hair mostly covers hers. The cats will love it though, playing with teeth that were knocked into your wine in the barfight (why did you order wine in a place like that, Buck?) and you got replaced with gold, like I wear woven in my braids as the sun sets on the daughter that, unsurprisingly, none of us have. But

if we did, she would turn yield signs into dahlias and that would be the sign to move on with the leopards and their flashing teeth and brass eyes and listen. To the walls and rivers, to the sculpture that is far whiter than me falling. And to the peacock which has just eaten another bug so you don’t have to kill it. Get yourself a dresser and cover it with white enamel it’ll hold up, and no insects live in dressers. Keep

the ivy and the pinecone in a mother-of-pearl trinket box with your plastic volumizing hair inserts and jeweled combs. And put a cat and dolphin on it, to remember.

    Next, our short story this episode is “You Inside Me” by Tori Curtis

Tori Curtis writes speculative fiction with a focus on LGBT and disability issues. She is the author of one novel, Eelgrass, and a handful of short stories. You can find her at toricurtiswrites.com and on Twitter at @tcurtfish, where she primarily tweets about how perfect her wife is.

CW: For descriptions of traumatic surgery.

  You Inside Me

by Tori Curtis

  It’ll be fun, he’d said. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to be looking for romance, it’s just a good way to meet people.

“I don’t think it’s about romance at all,” Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. “I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he’d have to resign.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve never had a vampire congressman,” Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. “Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light.”

He took fifteen minutes to edit her photos (“they’ll expect you to use a filter, so you might as well,”) and pop the best ones on her profile.

Suckr: the premier dating app for vampires and their fanciers.

“It’s like we’re cats,” she said.

“I heard you like cats,” he agreed, and she sighed.

    Hi, I’m Sabella. I’ve been a vampire since I was six years old, and I do not want to see or be seen by humans. I’m excited to meet men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five.

“That’s way too big of an age range,” Dedrick said. “You want to be compatible with these people.”

“Yeah, compatible. Like my tissue type.”

“You don’t want to end up flirting with a grandpa.”

I’m excited to meet men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.

I’m most proud of my master’s degree.

You should message me if you’re brave and crazy.

    It took days, not to mention Dedrick’s exasperated return, before she went back on Suckr. She paced up the beautiful wood floors of her apartment, turning on heel at the sole window on the long end and the painted-over cast-iron radiator on the short. When she felt too sick to take care of herself, her mom came over and put Rumors on, wrapped her in scarves that were more pretty than functional, warmed some blood and gave it to her in a sippy cup. Sabella remembered nothing so much as the big Slurpees her mom had bought her, just this bright red, when she’d had strep the last year she was human.

She wore the necklace Dedrick had given her every day. It was a gold slice of pepperoni pizza with “best” emblazoned on the back (his matched, but read “friends,”), and she fondled it like a hangnail. She rubbed the bruises on her arms, where the skin had once been clear and she’d once thought herself pretty in a plain way, like Elinor Dashwood, as though she might be able to brush off the dirt.

She called her daysleeper friends, texted acquaintances, and slowly stopped responding to their messages as she realized how bored she was of presenting hope day after day.

    2:19:08 bkissedrose: I’m so sorry.

2:19:21 bkissedrose: I feel like such a douche

2:19:24 sabellasay: ???

2:20:04 sabellasay: what r u talkin about

2:25:56 bkissedrose: u talked me down all those times I would’ve just died

2:26:08 sabellasay: it was rly nbd

2:26:27 bkissedrose: I’ve never been half as good as you are

2:26:48 bkissedrose: and now you’re so sick

2:29:12 sabellasay: dude stop acting like i’m dying

2:29:45 sabellasay: I can’t stand it

2:30:13 bkissedrose: god you’re so brave

  (sabellasay has become inactive)

    “Everyone keeps calling me saying you stopped talking to them,” Dedrick said when he made it back to her place, shoes up on the couch now that he’d finally wiped them of mud. “Should I feel lucky you let me in?”

“I’m tired,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a symptom. I like this one, I think she has potential.”

He took her phone and considered it with the weight of a father researching a car seat. “A perfect date: I take you for a ride around the lake on my bike, then we stop home for an evening snack.”

“She means her motorcycle,” Sabella clarified.

He rolled his eyes and continued reading. “My worst fear: commitment.”

“At least she’s honest.”

“That’s not really a good thing. You’re not looking for someone to skip out halfway through the movie.”

“No, I’m looking for someone who’s not going to be heartbroken when I die anyway.”

Dedrick sighed, all the air going out of his chest as it might escape from dough kneaded too firmly, and held her close to him. “You’re stupid,” he told her, “but so sweet.”

“I think I’m going to send her a nip.”

    The girl was named Ash but she spelled it A-I-S-L-I-N-G, and she seemed pleased that Sabella knew enough not to ask lots of stupid questions. They met in a park by the lakeside, far enough from the playground that none of the parents would notice the fanged flirtation going on below.

If Aisling had been a boy, she would have been a teen heartthrob. She wore her hair long where it was slicked back and short (touchable, but hard to grab in a fight) everywhere else. She wore a leather jacket that spoke of a once-in-a-lifetime thrift store find, and over the warmth of her blood and her breath she smelled like bag balm. Sabella wanted to hide in her arms from a fire. She wanted to watch her drown trying to save her.

Aisling parked her motorcycle and stowed her helmet before coming over to say hi—gentlemanly, Sabella thought, to give her a chance to prepare herself.

“What kind of scoundrel left you to wait all alone?” Aisling asked, with the sort of effortlessly cool smile that might have broken a lesser woman’s heart.

“I don’t know,” Sabella said, “but I’m glad you’re here now.”

Aisling stepped just inside her personal space and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but are you—”

“I’m trans, yes,” Sabella interrupted, and smiled so wide she could feel the tension at her temples. Like doing sit-ups the wrong way for years, having this conversation so many times hadn’t made it comfortable, only routine. “We don’t need to be awkward about it.”

“Okay,” Aisling agreed, and sat on the bench, helping Sabella down with a hand on her elbow. “I meant that you seem sick.”

She looked uneasy, and Sabella sensed that she had never been human. Vampires didn’t get sick—she had probably never had more than a headache, and that only from hunger.

“Yes,” Sabella said. “I am sick. I’m not actually—I mentioned this on my profile—I’m not actually looking for love.”

“I hope you won’t be too disappointed when it finds you,” Aisling said, and Sabella blushed, reoriented herself with a force like setting a bone, like if she tried hard enough to move in one direction she’d stop feeling like a spinning top.

“I’m looking for a donor,” she said.

“Yeah, all right,” Aisling said. She threw her arm over the back of the bench so that Sabella felt folded into her embrace. “I’m always willing to help a pretty girl out.”

“I don’t just mean your blood,” she said, and felt herself dizzy.

    It was easier for Sabella to convince someone to do something than it was for her to ask for it. Her therapist had told her that, and even said it was common, but he hadn’t said how to fix it. “Please, may I have your liver” was too much to ask, and “Please, I don’t want to die” was a poor argument.

“So, you would take my liver—”

“It would actually only be part of your liver,” Sabella said, stopping to catch her breath. She hadn’t been able to go hiking since she’d gotten so sick—she needed company, and easy trails, and her friends either didn’t want to go or, like her mom, thought it was depressing to watch her climb a hill and have to stop to spit up bile.

“So we would each have half my liver, in the end.”

Sabella shrugged and looked into the dark underbrush. If she couldn’t be ethical about this, she wouldn’t deserve a liver. She wouldn’t try to convince Aisling until she understood the facts. “In humans, livers will regenerate once you cut them in half and transplant them. Like how kids think if you cut an earthworm in half, you get two. Or like bulbs. Ideally, it would go like that.”

“And if it didn’t go ideally?”

(“Turn me,” Dedrick said one day, impulsively, when she’d been up all night with a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, holding her in his lap with his shirt growing polka-dotted. “I’ll be a vampire in a few days, we can have the surgery—you’ll be cured in a week.”)

“If it doesn’t go ideally,” Sabella said, “one or both of us dies. If it goes poorly, I don’t even know what happens.”

She stepped off the tree and set her next target, a curve in the trail where a tree had fallen and the light shone down on the path. Normally these days she didn’t wear shoes but flip-flops, but this was a date, and she’d pulled her old rainbow chucks out of the closet. Aisling walked with her silently, keeping pace, and put an arm around her waist.

Sabella looked up and down the trail. Green Lake was normally populated enough that people kept to their own business, and these days she felt pretty safe going about, even with a girl. But she checked anyway before she leaned into Ais’s strength, letting her guide them so that she could use all her energy to keep moving.

“But if it doesn’t happen at all, you die no matter what?”

Sabella took a breath. “If you don’t want to, I look for someone else.”

    Her mom was waiting for her when Sabella got home the next morning.

Sabella’s mother was naturally blonde, tough when she needed to be, the sort of woman who could get into hours-long conversations with state fair tchotchke vendors. She’d gotten Sabella through high school and into college through a careful application of stamping and yelling. When Sabella had started calling herself Ravynn, she’d brought a stack of baby name books home and said, “All right, let’s find you something you can put on a resume.���

“Mom,” she said, but smiling, “I gave you a key in case I couldn’t get out of bed, not so you could check if I spent the night with a date.”

“How’d it go? Was this the girl Dedrick helped you find?”

“Aisling, yeah,” Sabella said. She sat on the recliner, a mountain of accent pillows cushioning her tender body. “It was good. I like her a lot.”

“Did she decide to get the surgery?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her to choose.”

“Then what did you two do all night?”

Sabella frowned. “I like her a lot. We had a good time.”

Her mom stood and put the kettle on, and Sabella couldn’t help thinking what an inconvenience she was, that her mother couldn’t fret over her by making toast and a cup of tea. “Christ, what decent person would want to do that with you?”

“We have chemistry! She’s very charming!”

She examined Sabella with the dissatisfied air of an artist. “You’re a mess, honey. You’re so orange you could be a jack-o-lantern, and swollen all over. You look like you barely survived a dogfight. I don’t even see my daughter when I look at you anymore.”

Sabella tried to pull herself together, to look more dignified, but instead she slouched further into the recliner and crossed her arms over her chest. “Maybe she thinks I’m funny, or smart.”

“Maybe she’s taking advantage. Anyone who really cared about you wouldn’t be turned on, they’d be worried about your health.”

Sabella remembered the look on Aisling’s face when she’d first come close enough to smell her, and shuddered. “I’m not going to ask her to cut out part of her body for me without thinking about it first,” she said.

“Without giving her something in return?” her mom asked. “It’s less than two pounds.”

“But it’s still her choice,” Sabella said.

“I’m starting to wonder if you even want to live,” her mom said, and left.

Sabella found the energy to go turn off the stovetop before she fell asleep. (Her mother had raised her responsible.)

    12:48:51 bkissedrose: what happens to a dream bestowed

12:49:03 bkissedrose: upon a girl too weak to fight for it?

12:53:15 sabellasay: haha you can’t sleep either?

12:53:38 sabellasay: babe idk

12:55:43 sabellasay: is it better to have loved and lost

12:56:29 sabellasay: than to die a virgin?

1:00:18 bkissedrose: I guess I don’t know

1:01:24 bkissedrose: maybe it depends if they’re good

    “It’s nice here,” Aisling confessed the third time they visited the lake. Sabella and her mom weren’t talking, but she couldn’t imagine it would last more than a few days longer, so she wasn’t worried. “I’d never even heard of it.”

“I grew up around here,” Sabella said, “and I used to take my students a few times a year.”

“You teach?”

“I used to teach,” she said, and stepped off the trail—the shores were made up of a gritty white sand like broken shells—to watch the sinking sun glint off the water. “Seventh grade science.”

Aisling laughed. “That sounds like a nightmare.”

“I like that they’re old enough you can do real projects with them, but before it breaks off into—you know, are we doing geology or biology or physics. When you’re in seventh grade, everything is science.” She smiled and closed her eyes so that she could feel the wind and the sand under her shoes. She could hear birds settling and starting to wake, but she couldn’t place them. “They’ve got a long-term sub now. Theoretically, if I manage to not die, I get my job back.”

Aisling came up behind her and put her arms around her. Sabella knew she hadn’t really been weaving—she knew her limits well enough now, she hoped—but she felt steadier that way. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I don’t think they expect to have to follow through,” Sabella admitted. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who ever thinks I’m going to survive this. My mom’s so scared all the time, I know she doesn’t.”

Aisling held her not tight but close, like being tucked into a bright clean comforter on a cool summer afternoon. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, her face up against Sabella’s neck so that every part of Sabella wanted her to bite.

“Maybe,” she said, then thought better of it. “Yes.”

“How’d you get sick? I didn’t think we could catch things like that. Or was it while you were human?”

“Um, no, but I’m not contagious, just nasty.” Aisling laughed, and she continued, encouraged. “Mom would, you know, once I came out I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, but she wouldn’t let me get any kind of reconstructive surgery until I was eighteen. She thought it was creepy, some doc getting his hands all over her teenage kid.”

“Probably fair.”

“So I’m eighteen, and she says okay, you’re right, you got good grades in school and you’re going to college like I asked, I’ll pay for whatever surgery you want. And you have to imagine, I just scheduled my freshman orientation, I have priorities.”

“Which are?”

“Getting laid, mostly.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“So I’m eighteen and hardly ever been kissed, I’m not worried about the details. I don’t let my mom come with me, it doesn’t even occur to me to see a doctor who’s worked with vampires before, I just want to look like Audrey Hepburn’s voluptuous sister.”

“Oh no,” Ash said. It hung there for a moment, the dread and Sabella’s not being able to regret that she’d been so stupid. “It must have come up.”

“Sure. He said he was pretty sure it would be possible to do the surgery on a vampire, he knew other surgeries had been done. I was just so excited he didn’t say no.”

Ash held her tight then, like she might be dragged away otherwise, and Sabella knew that it had nothing to do with her in particular, that it was only the protective instinct of one person watching another live out her most plausible nightmare. “What did he do to you?”

“It wasn’t his fault,” she said, and then—grimacing, she knew her mother would have been so angry with her—“at least, he didn’t mean anything by it. He never read anything about how to adapt the procedure to meet my needs.” She sounded so clinical, like she’d imbibed so many doctors’ explanations of what had happened that she was drunk on it. “But neither did I. We both found out you can’t give vampires a blood transfusion.”

“Why would you need to?”

She shrugged. “You don’t, usually, in plastic surgery.”

“No,” Aisling interrupted, “I mean, why wouldn’t you drink it?”

Sabella tried to remember, or tried not to be able to, and tucked her cold hands into her pockets. “You’re human, I guess. Anyway, I puked all over him and the incision sites, had to be hospitalized. My doctor says I’m lucky I’m such a good healer, or I’d need new boobs and a new liver.”

They were both quiet, and Sabella thought, this is it. You either decide it’s too much or you kiss me again.

She thought, I miss getting stoned with friends and telling shitty surgery stories and listening to them laugh. I hate that when I meet girls their getting-to-know-you involves their Youtube make-up tutorials and mine involves “and then, after they took the catheter out…”

“Did you sue for malpractice, at least?” Ash asked, and Sabella couldn’t tell without looking if her tone was teasing or wistful.

“My mom did, yeah. When they still wanted her to pay for the damn surgery.”

    Aisling pulled up to the front of Sabella’s building and stopped just in front of her driveway. She kicked her bike into park and stepped onto the sidewalk, helping Sabella off and over the curbside puddle. Sabella couldn’t find words for what she was thinking, she was so afraid that her feelings would shatter as they crystallized. She wanted Ais to brush her hair back from her face and comb out the knots with her fingers. She wanted Ais to stop by to shovel the drive when there was lake effect snow. She wanted to find ‘how to minimize jaundice’ in the search history of Aisling’s phone.

“You’re beautiful in the sunlight,” Ais said, breaking her thoughts, maybe on purpose. “Like you were made to be outside.”

Sabella ducked her head and leaned up against her. The date was supposed to be over, go inside and let this poor woman get on with her life, but she didn’t want to leave. “It’s nice to have someone to go with me,” she said. “Especially with a frost in the air. Sometimes people act like I’m so fragile.”

“Ridiculous. You’re a vampire.”

Her ears were cold, and she pressed them against Aisling’s jawbone. She wondered what the people driving past thought when they saw them. She thought that maybe the only thing better than surviving would be to die a tragic death, loved and loyally attended. “I was born human.”

“Even God makes mistakes.”

Sabella smiled. “Is that what I am? A mistake?”

“Nah,” she said. “Just a happy accident.”

Sabella laughed, thought you’re such a stoner and I feel so safe when you look at me like that.

“I’ll do it,” Ais said.  “What do I have to do to set up the surgery?”

Sabella hugged her tight, hid against her and counted the seconds—one, two, three, four, five—while Ais didn’t change her mind and Sabella wondered if she would.

    “I have to stress how potentially dangerous this is,” Dr. Young said. “I can’t guarantee that it will work, that either of you will survive the procedure or the recovery, or that you won’t ultimately regret it.”

Aisling was holding it together remarkably well, Sabella thought, but she still felt like she could catch her avoiding eye contact. Sabella had taken the seat in the doctor’s office between her mother and girlfriend, and felt uncomfortable and strange no matter which of their hands she held.

“Um,” Ais said, and Sabella could feel her mother’s judgment at her incoherence, “you said you wouldn’t be able to do anything for the pain?”

To her credit, the doctor didn’t fidget or look away. Sabella, having been on the verge of death long enough to become something of a content expert, believed that it was important to have a doctor who was upfront about how terrible her life was. “I wouldn’t describe it as ‘nothing,’ exactly,” she said. “There aren’t any anesthetics known to work on vampires, but we’ll make you as comfortable as possible. You can feed immediately before and as soon as you’re done, and that will probably help snow you over.”

“Being a little blood high,” Ais clarified. “While you cut out my liver.”

“Yes.”

Sabella wanted to apologize. She couldn’t find the words.

Aisling said, “Well, while we’re trying to make me comfortable, can I smoke up, too?”

Dr. Young laughed. It wasn’t cruel, but it wasn’t promising, either. “That’s not a terrible idea,” she said, “but marijuana increases bleeding, and there are so many unknown variables here that I’d like to stick to best practices if we can.”

“I can just—” Sabella said, and choked. She wasn’t sure when she’d started crying. “Find someone else. Dedrick will do it, I know.”

Aisling considered this. The room was quiet, soft echoes on the peeling tile floor. Sabella’s mother put an arm around her, and she felt tiny, but in the way that made her feel ashamed and not protected. Aisling said, “Why are you asking me? Is there something you know that I don’t?”

Dr. Young shook her head. “I promise we’re not misrepresenting the procedure,” she said. “And theoretically, it might be possible with any vampire. But there aren’t a lot of organ transplants in the literature—harvesting, sure, but not living transplants—and I want to get it right the first time. If we have a choice, I told Sabella I’d rather use a liver from a donor who was born a vampire. I think it’ll increase our chance of success.”

“A baby’d be too weak,” Aisling agreed. Her voice was going hard and theoretical. “Well, tell me something encouraging.”

“One of the first things we’ll do is to cut through almost all of your abdominal nerves, so that will help. And there’s a possibility that the experience will be so intense that you don’t remember it clearly, or at all.”

Sabella’s mother took a shaky breath, and Sabella wished, hating herself for it, that she hadn’t come.

Ais said, “Painful. You mean, the experience will be so painful.”

“If you choose to go forward with it,” Dr. Young said, “we’ll do everything we can to mitigate that.”

    Sabella had expected that Aisling would want space and patience while she decided not to die a horrible, painful death to save her. It was hard to tell how instead they ended up in her bed with the lights out, their legs wound together and their faces swollen with sleep. Sabella was shaking, and couldn’t have said why. Ais grabbed her by her seat and pulled her up close.

“You said you couldn’t get me sick?” she asked.

“No,” Sabella agreed. “Although my blood is probably pretty toxic.”

Ais kissed her, the smell of car exhaust still stuck in her hair. “What a metaphor,” she murmured, and lifted her chin. “You look exhausted.”

Sabella thought, Are you saying what I think you’re saying? and, That’s a terrible idea, and said, “God, I want to taste you.”

“Well, baby,” Ais said, and her hands were on Sabella so she curled her lips and blew her hair out of her eyes, “that’s what I’m here for.”

Sabella had been human once, and she remembered what food was like. The standard lie, that drinking blood was like eating a well-cooked steak, was wrong but close enough to staunch the flow of an interrogation. (She’d had friends and exes, turned as adults, who said it was like a good stout on tap, hefty and refreshing, but she thought they might just be trying to scandalize her.)

Ais could have been a stalk of rhubarb or August raspberries. She moved under Sabella and held her so that their knees pressed together. She could have been the thrill of catching a fat thorny toad in among the lettuce at dusk, or a paper wasp in a butterfly net. She felt like getting tossed in the lake in January; she tasted like being wrapped in fleece and gently dried before the fire; her scent was what Sabella remembered of collapsing, limbs aquiver, on the exposed bedrock of a mountaintop, nothing but crushed pine and the warmth of a moss-bed.

She woke on top of Ais, licking her wounds lazily—she wanted more, but she was too tired to do anything about it.

“That’s better,” Ais whispered, and if she was disappointed that this wasn’t turning into a frenzy, she didn’t show it. They were quiet for long enough that the haze started to fade, and then Aisling said, “I couldn’t ask in front of your mother, but was it like that with your surgery? They couldn’t do anything for the pain?”

Sabella shifted uncomfortably, rolled over next to Ais. “I was conscious, yes.”

“Do you remember it?”

It was a hard question. She wanted to say it wasn’t her place to ask. She tried to remember, and got caught up in the layers of exhaustion, the spaces between the body she’d had, the body she’d wanted, and what they had been doing to her. “Sounds and sensations and thoughts, mostly,” she said.

Ais choked, and said, “So, everything,” and Sabella realized—she didn’t know how she hadn’t—how scared she must be.

“No, it’s blurry,” she said instead. “I remember, um, the tugging at my chest. I kept thinking there was no way my skin wasn’t just going to split open. And the scraping sounds. They’ve got all these tools, and they’re touching you on the inside and the outside at the same time, and that’s very unsettling. And this man, I think he was the PA, standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got to calm down, honey.’”

“Were you completely freaking out?” Ais asked.

Sabella shook her head. Her throat hurt. “No. I mean—I cried a little. Not as much as you’d think. They said if I wasn’t careful, you know, with swallowing at the right times and breathing steady, they might mess up reshaping my larynx and I could lose my voice.”

Ais swore, and Sabella wondered if she would feel angry. (Sometimes she would scream and cry, say, can you imagine doing that to an eighteen-year-old?) Right now she was just tired. “How did you manage?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think just, it was worth more to me to have it done than anything else. So I didn’t ever tell them to stop.”

    “Please don’t go around telling people I think this is an acceptable surgical set-up,” Dr. Young said, looking around the exam room.

It reminded Sabella of a public hearing, the way the stakeholders sat at opposing angles and frowned at each other. Dr. Young sat next to Dr. Park, who would be the second doctor performing the procedure. Sabella had never met Dr. Park before, and her appearance—young, mostly—didn’t inspire confidence. Sabella sat next to her mother, who held her hand and a clipboard full of potential complications. Ais crossed her fingers in her lap, sat with a nervous child’s version of polite interest. Time seemed not to blur, but to stutter, everything happening whenever.

“Dr. Park,” Sabella’s mother said, “do you have any experience operating on vampires?”

Dr. Park grinned and her whole mouth seemed to open up in her face, her gums pale pink as a Jolly Rancher and her left fang chipped. “Usually trauma or obstetrics,” she admitted. “Although this is nearly the same thing.”

“I’m serious,” Sabella’s mom said, and Sabella interrupted.

“I like her,” she said. And then—it wasn’t really a question except in the sense that there was no way anyone could be sure—“You’re not going to realize halfway through the surgery that it’s too much for you?”

Dr. Park laughed. “I turned my husband when we were both eighteen,” she said as testament to her cruelty.

Sabella’s mom jumped. “Jesus Christ, why?”

She shrugged, languid. Ais and Dr. Young were completely calm; Ais might have had no frame of reference for what it was like to watch someone turn, and Dr. Young had probably heard this story before. “His parents didn’t like that he was dating a vampire. You’ll do crazy things for love.”

Sabella could see her mother blanch even as she steadied. It wasn’t unheard of for a vampire to turn their spouse—less common now that it was easier to live as a vampire, and humans were able to date freely but not really commit. But she could remember being turned, young as she had been: the gnawing ache, the hallucinations, the thirst that had only sometimes eclipsed the pain. It was still the worst thing that she’d ever experienced, and she was sure her mother couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to do it to someone they loved.

“Good,” she said. “You won’t turn back if we scream.”

Dr. Young frowned. “I want you to know you have a choice,” she said. She was speaking to Ais; Sabella had a choice, too, but it was only between one death and another. “There will be a point when you can’t change your mind, but by then it’ll be almost over.”

Ais swore. It made Dr. Park smile and Sabella’s mom frown. Sabella wondered if she was in love with her, or if it was impossible to be in love with someone who was growing a body for them to share. “Don’t say that,” Ais said. “I don’t want to have that choice.”

    The morning of the surgery, Aisling gave Sabella a rosary to wear with her pizza necklace, and when they kicked Sabella’s mom out to the waiting room, she kissed them both as she went. “I like your mom,” Ais said shyly. They lay in cots beside each other, just close enough that they could reach out and hold hands across the gap. “I bet she’d get along with mine.”

Sabella laughed, her eyes stinging, threw herself across the space between them and kissed each of Ais’s knuckles while Ais said, “Aw, c’mon, save it ‘til we get home.”

“Isn’t that a lot of commitment for you?” Sabella asked.

“Yeah, well,” Ais said, caught, and gave her a cheesy smile. “You’re already taking my liver, at least my heart won’t hurt so much.”

They drank themselves to gorging while nurses wrapped and padded them in warm blankets. Ais was first, for whatever measure of mercy that was, and while they were wheeled down the dizzying white hallway, she grinned at Sabella, wild, some stranger’s blood staining her throat to her nose. “You’re a real looker,” she said, and Sabella laughed over her tears.

“Thank you,” Sabella said. “I mean, really, for everything.”

Ais winked at her; Sabella wanted to run away from all of this and drink her in until they died. “It’s all in a day’s work, ma’am,” she said.

It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, and Sabella loved her for pretending. Ais hissed, she cried, she asked intervention of every saint learned in K-12 at a Catholic school. A horrible gelatinous noise came as Dr. Young’s gloves touched her innards, and Ais moaned and Sabella said, “You have to stop, this is awful,” and the woman assigned to supervise her held her down and said hush, honey, you need to be quiet. And the doctors’ voices, neither gentle nor unkind: We’re almost done now, Aisling, you’re being so brave. And: It’s a pity she’s too strong to pass out.

Sabella went easier, hands she couldn’t see wiping her down and slicing her open while Dr. Park pulled Ais’s insides back together. She’d been scared for so long that the pain didn’t frighten her; she kept asking “Is she okay? What’s happening?” until the woman at her head brushed back her hair and said shh, she’s in the recovery room, you can worry about yourself now.

It felt right, fixing her missteps with pieces of Ais, and when Dr. Young said, “There we go, just another minute and you can go take care of her yourself,” Sabella thought about meromictic lakes, about stepping into a body so deep its past never touched its present.

END

    “Dionysus in London” is copyright Tristan Beiter 2018.

“You Inside Me” is copyright Tori Curtis 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The City of Kites and Crows” by Megan Arkenberg.

  Episode #57 – “You Inside Me” by Tori Curtis was originally published on GlitterShip

[funnythingshere0-blog]

'Savagely funny and bitingly honest' – 14 writers on their favourite Philip Roth novels

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/savagely-funny-and-bitingly-honest-14-writers-on-their-favourite-philip-roth-novels/

'Savagely funny and bitingly honest' – 14 writers on their favourite Philip Roth novels

Emma Brockes on Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

I fell in love with Neil Klugman, forerunner to Portnoy and hero of Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth’s first novel, in my early 20s – 40 years after the novel was written. Descriptions of Roth’s writing often err towards violence; he is savagely funny, bitingly honest, filled with rage and thwarted desire. But although his first novel rehearses all the themes he would spend 60 years mining – sexual vanity, lower-middle-class consciousness (“for an instant Brenda reminded me of the pug-nosed little bastards from Montclair”), the crushing weight of family and, of course, American Jewish identity – what I loved about his first novel was its tenderness.

Goodbye, Columbus is steeped in the nostalgia only available to a 26-year-old man writing of himself in his earlier 20s, a greater psychological leap perhaps than between decades as they pass in later life. Neil is smart, inadequate, needy, competitive. He longs for Brenda and fears her rejection, tempering his desire with pre-emptive attack. All the things one recognises and does.

My mother told me that the first time she read Portnoy’s Complaint she wept and, at the time, I couldn’t understand why. It’s not a sad novel. But, of course, as I got older I understood. One cries not because it is sad but because it is true, and no matter how funny he is, reading Roth always leaves one a little devastated.

I picked up Goodbye, Columbus this morning and went back to Aunt Gladys, one of the most put-upon women in fiction, who didn’t serve pepper in her household because she had heard it was not absorbed by the body, and – the perfect Rothian line, wry, affectionate, with a nod to the infinite – “it was disturbing to Aunt Gladys to think that anything she served might pass through a gullet, stomach and bowel just for the pleasure of the trip”. How we’ll miss him.

Emma Brockes is a novelist and Guardian columnist

James Schamus on Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Philip Roth was more than capable of the kind of formal patterning and closure that preoccupied the work of Henry James, with whom he now stands shoulder-to-shoulder in the American literary firmament. So yes, one can always choose a singular favourite – mine is the early story Goodbye, Columbus, though I know the capacious greatness of American Pastoral probably warrants favourite status. But celebrating a single Roth piece poses its own challenges, in that his life’s work was a kind of never-ending battle against the idea that the great work of fiction was anything but, well, work – work as action, creation; work not as noun but as verb; work as glorious as the glove-making so lovingly described in Pastoral, and as ludicrous as the fevered toil of imagination that subtends the masturbatory repetitions of Portnoy’s Complaint. Factual human beings are fiction workers – it’s the only way they can make actual sense of themselves and the people around them, by, as Roth put it in Pastoral, always “getting them wrong” – and Roth was to be among the most dedicated of all wrong-getters, his life’s work thus paradoxically a fight against the formal closure that gave shape to the many masterpieces he wrote. Hence the spillage of self, of characters real and imagined, of characters really imagining and of selves fictionally enacting, from work to work to work. So, here, Philip Roth, is to a job well done.

James Schamus is a film-maker who directed an adaptation of Indignation in 2016

I read it when I was about 18 – an off-piste literary choice in my sobersided studenty world. I had been earnestly dealing with the Cambridge English Faculty reading list and picked up Portnoy having frowned my way through George Eliot’s Romola. The bravura monologue of Alex Portnoy wasn’t just the most outrageously, continuously funny thing I had ever read; it was the nearest thing a novel has come to making me feel very drunk.

And this world-famously Jewish book spoke intensely to my timid home counties Wasp inexperience because, with magnificent candour, it crashed into the one and only subject – which Casanova, talking about sex, called the “subject of subjects” – jerking off. The description of everyone in the audience, young and old, wanking at a burlesque show, including an old man masturbating into his hat (“Ven der putz shteht! Ven der putz shteht! Into the hat that he wears on his head!”) was just mind-boggling. A vision of hell that was also insanely funny. Then there is his agonised epiphany at understanding the word longing in his thwarted desire for a blonde “shikse”. (Was I, a Wasp reader, entitled to admit I shared that stricken swoon of yearning? Only it was a Jewish girl I was in love with.) Portnoy’s Complaint had me in a cross between a chokehold and a tender embrace: this is what a great book does.

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic

William Boyd on Zuckerman Unbound (1981)

Looking back at Philip Roth’s long bibliography, I realise I’m a true fan of early- and middle-Roth. I read everything that appeared from Goodbye, Columbus (I was led to Roth by the excellent film) but then kind of fell by the wayside in the mid 1980s with The Counterlife. As with Anthony Burgess and John Updike, Roth’s astonishing prolixity exhausted even his most loyal readers.

But I always loved the Zuckerman novels, in which “Nathan Zuckerman” leads a parallel existence to that of his creator. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) is the second in the sequence, following The Ghost Writer, and provides a terrifying analysis of what it must have been like for Roth to deal with the overwhelming fame and hysterical contumely that Portnoy’s Complaint provoked, as well as looking at the famous Quiz Show scandals of the 1950s. Zuckerman’s “obscene” novel is called Carnovsky, but the disguise is flimsy. Zuckerman is Roth by any other name, despite the author’s regular denials and prevarications.

Maybe, in the end, the Zuckerman novels are novels for writers, or for readers who dream of being writers. They are very funny and very true and they join a rich genre of writers’ alter ego novels. Anthony Burgess’s Enderby, Updike’s Bech, Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares, Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams, Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose and so on – the list is surprisingly long. One of the secret joys of writing fictionally is writing about yourself through the lens of fiction. Not every writer does it, but I bet you every writer yearns to. And Roth did it, possibly more thoroughly than anyone else – hence the enduring allure of the Zuckerman novels. Is this what Roth really felt and did – or is it a fiction? Zuckerman remains endlessly tantalising.

William Boyd is a novelist and screenwriter

Roth outside the Hebrew school he probably attended as a boy. Photograph: Bob Peterson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

David Baddiel on Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

Philip Roth is not my favourite writer; that would be John Updike. However, sometimes, on the back of Updike’s – and many other literary giants – books, one reads the word “funny”. In fact, often the words “hilarious”, “rip-roaring”, “hysterical”. This is never true. The only writer in the entire canon of very, very high literature – I’m talking should’ve-got-the-Nobel-prize high – who is properly funny, laugh-out-loud funny, Peep Show funny, is Philip Roth.

As such my choice should perhaps be Portnoy’s Complaint, his most stand-uppy comic rant, which is gut-bustingly funny, even if you might never eat liver again. However – and not just because someone else will already have chosen that – I’m going for Sabbath’s Theater, his crazed outpouring on behalf of addled puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, an old man in mainly sexual mourning for his mistress Drenka, which could anyway be titled Portnoy’s Still Complaining But Now With Added Mortality. It has the same turbocharged furious-with-life comic energy as Portnoy, but a three-decades-older Roth has no choice now but to mix in, with his usual obsessions of sex and Jewishness, death: and as such it becomes – even as we watch, appalled, as Mickey masturbates on Drenka’s grave – his raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light masterpiece.

David Baddiel is a writer and comedian

Hadley Freeman on American Pastoral (1997)

American Pastoral bagged the Pulitzer – at last – for Philip Roth, but it is not, I suspect, his best-loved book with readers. Aside from his usual alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, the characters themselves aren’t as memorable as in, say, Portnoy’s Complaint, or even Sabbath’s Theater, which Roth wrote two years earlier. And yet, of all his books, American Pastoral probably lays the strongest claim that Roth was the great novelist of modern America.

Zuckerman, who is now living somewhere in the countryside, his body decaying in front of him, remembers a friend from high school, Seymour Levov, known as “the Swede”, who seemed to have everything: perfect body, perfect soul, perfect family. But then the Swede’s life is shattered when his daughter, Merry, literally blows up all of her father’s dreams, by setting off a bomb during the Vietnam protests and killing someone. The postwar generation has rejected all that their parents built for them, and while Roth uses the Levov families as symbols for America’s turmoil, they are far more subtly realised than that. And in a terrible way, now that school shootings – almost invariably done by young people – are an all-too-common occurrence in America, the bafflement the Swede feels about Merry seems all too relevant. “You wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance, she’s your daughter!” the Swede’s brother famously shouts at him. In today’s America, more divided and gun-strewn than ever, it’s a line that still chills.

Hadley Freeman is an author and Guardian columnist

Hannah Beckerman on American Pastoral (1997)

By the time I read American Pastoral I was a 22-year-old diehard Roth fan. But no book of his that I had read previously – not the black humour of Portnoy’s Complaint, nor the blistering rage of Sabbath’s Theater – had prepared me for this raw and visceral dismantling of the American dream. With Seymour “Swede” Levov – legendary high school baseball player and inheritor of his father’s profitable glove factory – Roth presents us with the classic all-American hero, before unpicking his life, stitch by painful stitch. Swede’s relationship with his teenage daughter, Merry – once the apple of his eye, now an anti-Vietnam revolutionary who detonates Swede’s comfortable life – is undoubtedly one of the most powerful portrayals of father-daughter relationships anywhere in literature. But this is Roth, and his lens is never satisfied looking in a single direction. Through the downfall of Swede Levov, Roth portrays the effects of the grand narratives of history on the individual, and questions our notions of identity, family, ambition, nostalgia and love. Muscular and impassioned, American Pastoral oscillates seamlessly between rage and regret, all in Roth’s incisive, fearless prose. It is not just Roth’s best book: it is one of the finest American novels of the 20th century.

Hannah Beckerman is a novelist, journalist and producer of the BBC documentary Philip Roth’s America.

Roth in 1977. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Xan Brooks on I Married a Communist (1998)

Great novels hit you differently each time you revisit them, but a second reading of I Married a Communist felt like being flattened by a steamroller. For decades I had cast this as the brawling bantamweight of Roth’s American trilogy; bookended by the more polished American Pastoral and The Human Stain, and bent out of shape by the author’s personal animus towards ex-wife Claire Bloom (thinly veiled as Eve Frame, a self-loathing Jewish actor). These days, I think it may well be his best.

I Married a Communist charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a leftist radio star who finds himself broken on the wheel of the 1950s red scare. Fuelled by righteous fury, it’s one of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails. And while the tale is primarily set during the McCarthy era, it tellingly bows out with a nightmarish account of Nixon’s 1994 funeral in which all the old monsters have been remade as respected elder statesmen. “And had Ira been alive to hear them, he would have gone nuts all over again at the world getting everything wrong.”

Xan Brooks is a novelist and journalist

Arifa Akbar on The Human Stain (2000)

I read The Human Stain when it was published in 2000. I was in a book club comprised of gender studies academics, gay women, women of colour. No men allowed. We had been reading bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid and along came Philip Roth. I expected it to be savaged. I expected to do the savaging, having never read Roth before, precisely because of his much-disputed misogyny.

Then I read it, this tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race, blackness and the alleged racism of Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old classics professor who embarks on an affair with a cleaner half his age, as if by way of consolation.

Here we go, I thought, and raised an eyebrow when she danced for this priapic old fool. But The Human Stain is much more than that single scene. Here was a Jewish American writer, taking on black American masculinity, filling it with its legacy of oppression, the perniciousness of the internalised white gaze, the “shame” that Silk feels that leads him to his lifetime’s masquerade. In less masterful hands, it could have read as dreadful appropriation.

I have re-read it since and it feels just as contemporary, like all great works of literature. It sums up so much about desire and ageing, but also institutionalised racism, the dangers of political correctness and colourism that we are increasingly talking about again.

Yes, we spoke of that dancing scene at our book club, but forgave it. There is something profoundly honest in the sexual dynamic between The Human Stain’s lovers. Roth caught male desire so viscerally and entwined it within the nexus of vulnerability, fear and the fragile male ego. I read the other Nathan Zuckerman novels afterwards and realised that you don’t go to Roth to explore female desire, but you read him for so much else.

Arifa Akbar is a critic and journalist

Jonathan Freedland on The Plot Against America (2004)

Rarely can a four-word note scribbled in the margin have born such precious fruit. In the early 2000s, Roth read an account of the Republican convention of 1940, where there had been talk of drafting in a celebrity non-politician – the superstar aviator and avowed isolationist Charles Lindbergh – to be the party’s presidential nominee. “What if they had?” Roth asked himself. The result was The Plot Against America, a novel that imagined Lindbergh in the White House, ousting Franklin Roosevelt by promising to keep the US out of the European war with Hitler and to put “America First”.

The result is a polite and gradual slide into an authentic American fascism, as observed by the narrator “Philip Roth”, then a nine-year-old boy who watches as his suburban Jewish New Jersey family is shattered by an upending of everything they believed they could take for granted about their country.

The book is riveting – perhaps the closest Roth wrote to a page-turning political thriller – but also haunting. Long after I read it, I can still feel the anguish of the Roth family as they travel as tourists to Washington, DC and feel the chill of their fellow citizens; eventually they are turned away from the hotel where they had booked a room, clearly – if not explicitly – because they are Jews. Like Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, the America of this novel stays in the mind because of the plausible, bureaucratic detail. Philip’s older brother is packed off to Kentucky under a programme known as Homestead 42, run by “the Office of American Absorption”, whose mission is to smooth off the Jews’ supposed rough edges, so that they might dissolve into the American mainstream, or perhaps disappear altogether.

It is not a perfect novel. The final stretch becomes tangled in a rush of frenetic speculations and imaginings. But it has an enduring power, which helps explain why the election of Donald Trump – who has often repeated, without irony or even apparent awareness, the slogan “America First” – had readers turning back to The Plot Against America, to reflect on how a celebrity president blessed with a mastery of the modern media might turn on a marginalised minority to cement his bond with the American heartland. Nearly 70 years after Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Roth insisted that it could – and he detailed precisely how it would feel if it did.

Jonathan Freedland is an author and a Guardian columnist

Roth in New York City. Photograph: Orjan F. Ellingvag#51SY ED/Getty Images

Linda Grant on Nemesis (2010)

After Philip Roth published The Plot Against America in 2004 and came to the end of the great sequence of long, state-of-the-USA novels beginning with Sabbath’s Theater, which were his brilliant, late, but not last period, he published a number of short novels that felt like a coda to the main body of work. They centred round the ageing, dying male, the declining libido, old age all alone. Then, with a final surprising flick of his fingers, he wrote Nemesis, returning to his youth in postwar Jewish Newark where it all starts. He uncovered one last story, the forgotten epidemic of polio that affected mainly children and young adults and whose malevolent transmission was the subject of conspiracy theories, a population blaming, as ever, the Jews.

It is the story of aspiring heroes and their moral failure, the lifelong consequences of striving to do the right thing and disastrously doing something so wrong you become trapped in a carapace of guilt. With his protagonist Bucky Cantor, Roth encapsulates his fascination with the heroic generation of Jewish kids destined for great things, and the ones who failed. Though I’ve read all of Roth, it’s the novel I’m most likely to recommend to absolute beginners to his work. It’s him in miniature, yet perfectly whole.

Linda Grant is a novelist

Alex Ross Perry on The Professor of Desire (1977)

I discovered the novels of Philip Roth as I have most literature during my 15 years in New York: on the subway. The experience of pouring over the sexual nuance of The Professor of Desire while surrounded by children and the elderly created a perplexing dichotomy between brown paper bag smut and totemic American fiction. This was both transformative and inspiring, illuminating for me the possibility of couching perversion, sexuality, anger and humour into a piece of work rightly perceived as serious and intellectual. Each transgressive element became less shocking as I made my way through Roth’s novels on F trains and Q trains, the feelings of shock replaced with the intended understanding of what these “amoral” acts said about the characters and the novels they inhabited.

I’m not sure if I would call The Professor of Desire my favorite of Roth’s novels (an honor I generally bestow upon Sabbath’s Theater, which I have learned seems to be the low key favourite of those in the know) but it was certainly the first to announce itself to me as massively influential. The Kepesh books introduced me to a view of improper, quasi-abusive relationships within academia that gave me the professor character in my film The Color Wheel.

When I began writing The Color Wheel in 2010, Roth was my north star. I intended to reverse engineer a narrative with the same youthful arrogance flaunting sexual taboos that excited, then inspired, me in his work. Depicting the story of an incestuous sibling relationship, but presenting it in the guise of a black and white independent art film, felt like a genuine way to honor the work of this titan; those books bound in the finest jacket design the twentieth century had to offer, elegantly concealing without so much as a hint the delightful perversions contained within.

Alex Ross Perry is an actor and filmmaker

Amy Rigby on The Ghost Writer

I refuse to accept the assertion that misogyny in Philip Roth’s novels makes it impossible for a woman to find herself in his characters. I want to – have a right to – identify with the great man or the schmuck.

I started reading The Ghost Writer looking for a road map to a stunning middle-career but found myself in a house of mirrors. The 46-year-old author looks back at himself as an accomplished beginner who visits an older giant of letters. Parents, wives, lovers – even Anne Frank – weigh in. It’s funny and moving and compact.

I picked it up again today, touched that anyone would ask for my thoughts on this genius whose work ethic and output made his greatness undeniable, whether you believe in him or not, and found this passage contained in Judge Wapter’s letter to young Nathan Zuckerman, who recounts it to us with such scorn and hope I couldn’t help but feel like a schmuck myself, or at least a poser: “I would like to think that if and when the day should dawn that you receive your invitation to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize, we will have had some small share in awakening your conscience to the responsibilities of your calling.’” You really were robbed, Phil.

Amy Rigby is a singer and songwriter. Her songs include From Philip Roth to R Zimmerman

Joyce Carol Oates on Roth’s legacy

Philip Roth was a slightly older contemporary of mine. We had come of age in more or less the same repressive 50s era in America – formalist, ironic, “Jamesian”, a time of literary indirection and understatement, above all impersonality – as the high priest TS Eliot had preached: “Poetry is an escape from personality.”

Boldly, brilliantly, at times furiously, and with an unsparing sense of the ridiculous, Philip repudiated all that. He did revere Kafka – but Lenny Bruce as well. (In fact, the essential Roth is just that anomaly: Kafka riotously interpreted by Bruce.) But there was much more to Philip than furious rebellion. For at heart he was a true moralist, fired to root out hypocrisy and mendacity in public life as well as private. Few saw The Plot Against America as actual prophecy, but here we are. He will abide.

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist

[iamnotthedog]

OLYMPIA: AUGUST 10-11, 2001

Having fourteen hours in my Oldsmobile to toss the idea of Olympia around in my mind—to build it up as a mythical and magical place, a dark place, the home of my childhood idol Kurt Cobain’s muse—a place that would take me in and envelope me in its mist, its pines, its rain-glazed streets—a place that would convince me to stop running forever, to settle down and lose myself in its cold, wet splendor—I was rather disheartened to find it as just another lost and dreary American city. I mean, Olympia is a beautiful place, certainly. But after the places I had been—the things I had seen—pulling off of Interstate 5 and driving down Martin Way made me feel like I was right back in one of those suffocating American cities I had decided that I would try my best to never go back to. And if it hadn’t been for Joe being somewhere in that city at that very moment that I was pulling in, I would have just driven straight on through and kept going without thinking twice about it.

I drove past a gas station, a hotel, a pizza parlor, a paint store, a real estate office, a tire factory. A Starbucks with a few strollers parked outside. A series of small, non-descript, one-story businesses, many of them selling some kind of insurance, a few being locked up by sad men in loose-fitting two-piece suits. Some houses, some pine trees, a bridge, a strip mall. Eventually, everything got older—the buildings looking more drab, the sidewalks and parking lots cracked and lined with crooked strips of black tar, houses with small unfinished wooden porches set back off the road next to driveways, between businesses with front doors that sat right up on the sidewalks. Teenagers in black hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Then more space—the space beyond the road widened to make room for car dealerships, gas stations, older businesses with “Capital City” in the name, places that sold things like stoves and stovepipes. A couple of right turns, and I was in a residential neighborhood. More trees, more bushes, some tall fences. A man in a grey sweat suit, walking his dog. Almost every house with one story, and maybe an attic or bedroom window up under the peak of the roof. Garbage cans next to one-car garages. Mailboxes on the curb. And then, without even having to look for him, Joe.

Joe was walking up a short driveway behind some pine trees towards a one-story grey house, car keys jingling in one hand, a twelve-pack of Olympia Beer in the other. He was whistling and looking exactly the same as the last time I had seen him—so much for those changes I was imagining—and as I honked my horn and pulled up to that curb in that little neighborhood behind that rusted out Geo Metro with the Illinois plates, I wondered if I had ever even left Morrison—if I had ever done anything in the past few years, or if it was all just a dream.

Despite my rather rude interruption of his early-evening, post-work ritual, Joe didn’t skip a beat. He gave me a big hug and ushered me inside, and in less than an hour we were eating steak and potatoes and drinking beer and I was exhausted, but well on my way to another roaring drunk. Then a bottle of Jim Beam appeared, and not two hours after dinner, I was sleeping face-down on a couch not ten feet from where Joe reclined in a Lay-Z-Boy, reeking of bourbon, breathing loudly through his nose, and scratching his nuts in his sleep.

I woke up in the morning to the sound of a door slamming and a car starting—Joe’s older brother Ben’s girlfriend Julie leaving for work. I rolled over and pulled a couch cushion over my face to block the light that stabbed at my eyes. Then I rolled over again and squinted out into the hazy daylight at Joe, still sprawled out on the fully reclined Lay-Z-Boy, his left arm draped over his eyes.

Joe had been thoroughly impressed with the fact that I had driven from Yosemite to Yellowstone and all the way up to Olympia just to find him. He had been impressed that I had done it all in the Olds—the same car that we used to drive out through the countryside back in high school, ditching class to smoke weed and listen to mix tapes. And Joe had been even more impressed with the fact that I had no idea where I was headed next, and that I did not intend to actually stay in Olympia—a decision I had made immediately upon seeing the place. After that one short night of drunken conversation, though, I could tell that he didn’t want to leave Olympia with me, either, and I didn’t even have to ask him.

So this—whatever this was going to be—was going to be it.

After a quick breakfast of bacon and eggs and some small talk with Ben, who I hadn’t seen since I was a young teenager and he used to get stoned and threaten me with his Swiss Army knife just for kicks—Joe went into the bathroom to shower and get dressed to go to work at some restaurant or something—a job he worked whenever he had a day off from working construction. I stood in the narrow carpeted hallway outside the bathroom, staring at an old Grateful Dead poster on the wall and sipping coffee while I talked to him through the door.

“I’m going to drive over to Olympic National Park. I’ve always wanted to see it.”

“As long as you come back.”

“I will. I just want to check it out. Maybe find a place for us to camp for a couple days. You got a day off coming up?”

“I’ve got two this weekend.”

“What day is it today?”

“Wednesday. I’m off Friday and Saturday.”

I leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the carpet. A street cleaner drove by outside, his brushes swishing on the wet pavement. Joe turned on the shower.

“Did you ever read that book I gave you?”

“Dharma Bums? I tried. Didn’t understand it. Too many weird words. I don’t know anything about Buddhism.”

“You don’t need to know the words. They make sense after a while. Bodhisattvas and bhikkus are just students of life, like you and me. They’ve just committed themselves to letting go. It’s all about freeing yourself from your attachments.”

“I like my attachments.”

“That’s why you’re so loyal. You know that there is no duality. There are no attachments and there are no ‘no attachments.’ Everything just is.”

“Whatever. See? I don’t get that.”

“I’ll give you another book I read a while back. Awakening the Buddha Within. It’s an introduction to everything.”

“I’d like to say I’ll read it, but I pro’ly won’t.” Joe fumbled with some plastic bottles. Trying to distinguish the shampoo from the conditioner or something. “I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though,” he continued. “You gave me that a long time ago. Remember that?”

“That’s a great book,” I said. I sipped from my coffee. “I think what drives Phaedrus nuts in that book is the same thing that’s going to drive us all nuts in the end.”

Joe laughed. “We’re all trying to define quality?”

“I think we all are. Yes.”

“Mrs. Frame always called you Phaedrus back in high school.”

“Phineas.”

“What?”

“She called me Phineas.”

“Who the fuck is Phineas?”1

 Mrs. Frame was our high school English teacher. She called me Phineas, referring to a character in John Knowles’ novel A Separate Peace who was a nonconformist, constantly refusing to follow rules and regulations, doing stupid shit like wearing his tie on his head, and organizing a group called the Summer Suicide Society. ↩︎

[judeberk89583-blog]

red haired milf pics - Knowing These Five Secrets Will Make Your Big Cocks Mature Look Amazing

The Return Visit Find Part One Here! If … Like so many of us are, you’re here just to get your rocks off, Then skip ahead to the line to enjoy the filth. Otherwise, sit back, relax and enjoy. A few weeks go by with very little communication between the four of us, just the odd ‘How are you doing?’ ‘What are you guys up too today?’ every now and again. Until about a month after the hotel night, we decide to organise a dinner date. To save on costs we all elected for a home dinner date and it was to be held at Jane and Stu’s place. So we drive the hour or so that it takes to get there, stopping at the closest supermarket to grab a bottle of vino and some kind of pecan based chocolate dessert thing. We pulled up outside their place, with the same feeling of anticipation and nerves that we felt on our first visit. Giggling and shaking like school kids on a first date. Knocking on the door we quickly gave each other a kiss and entered the house. Dinner was Vegan Duck pancakes, or Seitan which we all still find amusing. The three of us; Zee, Jane and I sat in the living room, which was decked out with various nerd memorabilia and Warhammer. Spotify playing in the back the drinks once again were flowing, as we popped the wine in anticipation of our food. I should mention at this point, for those who need descriptions, since our last meeting Janes pixie cut had gone from platinum blond to a red so dark it was almost black. The plan for the evening was a game of Jenga, but not just any jenga. Each block had a dare or strip written on it. So after we had got nice and merry and consumed the delicious chinese feast that was prepared we relocated to the Zen room. This room was lit only by black light, and was surrounded by mattresses on three of the four walls, the fourth held a book case with various board games and novels. In the middle sat the Jenga. Now the rules to this are simple but effective and I highly recommend you play it with all your enlightened friends. On each block you write a forfeit, a Dare, or a Strip and players take it in turns to pull out a block and enact the assigned task. So away we went, starting with Zee and moving clockwise, things started fairly tame. Remove item, a sock goes flying, Name the most risky place you’ve had sexual contact. Kiss the person to your right, Jane shuffles her way seductively to me and we make out for 0 seconds or so, exploring the new horizons of each other's face. The others watch on with smirks on their face. I pull out the next block Recieve oral from the player on your right. Fucking result, i’m getting all the good cards. I lean back and undo the top button of my maroon jeans that was my attire for the evening, I feel the waistband of my boxers being pulled down and lift my butt up to allow it. My semi erect cock immediately enveloped in a warm embrace. Now Zee knows my cock well by this point, she knows how to take my dick all the way down her throat and does so with ease, pulling me out to circle the head with her pierced tongue, the slightly cold feel of the metal on my tip bringing me to full mast.It’s over all too soon and I sit back up quickly getting slightly dizzy from the sudden movement. Zee removes the next block and weirdly its to recieve oral from a player of her choosing, naturally she pumped for Jane. In much the same way Zee led back to allow access, and Jane got to work, the hot milf being fucked one minute time limit quickly comes but they don’t seperate right away, as Jane expertly parting Zee’s legs with her hands and circling her tongue around the engorged clit. More clothes are removed as the rounds go on, and we’re left with a naked mature women over 60 Stu, bottomless but Bra Jane. Topless but knickers Zee and me in just my Calvin Klein boxers. If you have any type of questions pertaining to where and how you can utilize mature moms fucking movies, you can contact us at the site. ‘All players can write on you" This is the block that Jane pulled out that really got the game heated. We grab a makeup pencil and eagerly take turns writing all over her body ‘Slut’ ‘Boobs’ ‘lick here’ the usual, which I decide to do. Stepping drunkenly over the tower in the centre I push Jane down and start to tease her with the tips of my fingers, Taking in the scent of her wet pussy. I slowly work in two fingers to push against her G Spot and feel her buck against me immediately. Zee and Stu waste no time either as he demonstrates his equally excellent technique. The room heats up as Stu is placed down and fucked by Jane whilst Zee sits on his bearded face. I get involved the best I can by presenting my freshly shaven (for the occasion) cock to Zee’s mouth which she takes hungrily, whilst moaning. This continues for a while, until Jane decides she wants to fuck Zee, and produces a strap on from a drawer on the bookshelf. Purple in colour, about 6 inches long and fairly girthy it was attached to a black leather contraption that took some time to position and tighten. We all get into position, Zee in Doggy position with Jane entering her lubed up purply member into her now glistening pussy. Stu sits in front of Zee to get a deepthroating of the century, and I take the only available hole, which is Janes mouth. Feeling the sensation of a tongue that isn’t pierced when you are used to one that is, is an entirely new sensation and one that I did enjoy thoroughly. Although both girls were kind of preoccupied. We all take a break to grab some water and chat, before mixing things up once again as this time it’s my turn to be mounted whilst tasting on the pure delights of a freshly fucked pussy. We attempted to time it so that we all came together, but being only our second time all together it was possibly optimistic. Stu unleashed thick ropes onto Zee’s chest as i was fucking her from behind, which then led me to push my juice covered cock into Janes awaiting mouth and unleash a cum shot deep in her throat. Out came the Strapon once more as Jane, being the dominant type was determined to get Zee off. The guys sat back and enjoyed the show as Zee got closer and closer to a screaming orgasm that the neighbours in this small terrace house MUST have heard. We all collapse in a heap as I absent mindedly bring Jane to a quiet orgasm with my hands. At some point Zee and I must have fallen asleep as we awoke alone in the room. We go downstairs to find there is a full plan for breakfast before we make our journey back home in time for work the next day. I hope you enjoyed this story as much as my last one, please do leave a comment as I love hearing feedback, or how you got off to it. xX Matt Xx Mattieboobs