#i have been going back and fourth on whether i should reload again or not and needed to vent

[wilchur]

It really annoys me that there's no way to talk Astarion out of the ritual other than bargaining with the lives of the spawn to be honest. Makes it so that trying to persuade him as a character that is far from good and selfless, but cares about him a lot feels ooc as hell. Sure you can pick the "Cazador said this will kill you, don't risk it" option but it leads you back to either "But the spawn :(" or "Okay, let's do this". The dialogue tree there leaves no ambiguity to the morality of your character.

I wish there was a way to get the insight check after you voice the fear for his life and get a persuasion one if you succeed. Kind of a "I was ready to see them all burn for you, but I can see that you're not sure and the ritual claiming your life is not worth the risk. We'll find another way. There's still the crown, remember?" thing. They leaned too heavily into this ending being the "vampire fetish" one, assumed that if the player character doesn't care about a bunch of random spawn, they would not care about Astarion's emotional wellbeing and that's just not how people work to me. The way you have to be the one to make the choice what to do with the spawn if you do stop the ritual annoys the fuck out of me too. It's not my choice to make, my Durge does not give a fuck what happens to them once Cazador is gone and the party is safe. He would rather leave that choice to Astarion. He wants to kill them anyway? Great! Blood, guts and suffering! Lovely! He wants to spare them? Whatever love, if that's what you want. Let's just get the fuck out of here.

It would be nice to have that option, especially considering this is supposed to be all about Astarion reclaiming his autonomy.

I just don't like it when to not get fucked over by a game I have to sacrifice the roleplaying aspect of it idk. Even if my character genuinely wants Astarion to ascend no matter the cost it will have for others because he's convinced them that's what he needs to finally gain his freedom and they're the kind of "anything for you kitten" person, they still should be able to notice that Something Is Not Right without it going against their personality and feeling forced.

[freefallingup13]

Toni AU; The Organization pt. 4

Okay so apparently this is Chapter 2, and it doesn’t make sense for me to split it up, so this one will be long!

TW: Gun violence, Death by gun (unnamed, NPC-like characters), Witnessing a panic attack (twice in this piece), Gunshot wound, Death Threats

Part 1 here Part 2 here Part 3 here

Part 5 here

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Besides the small hiccup regarding Derek's relationship status, the plan that his father set up was a success. Toni and Derek began hand-to-hand combat training and learned military tactics. They spent hours learning how to use every gun, blade, and explosive that passed through their compound. Toni was especially attentive to the lessons about espionage. Derek was interested in it, but he didn't take it very seriously. 

As for Derek and Toni's relationship, they carried on as normally as they could. Toni was a little curt for a while, but after a couple of weeks they went into a regular rhythm. Wake up. Breakfast. Lessons. Lunch. Work. Dinner. Sleep. Repeat. It was hard to avoid each other in their small apartment, and not talking to each other didn't work when they had to collaborate with each other on projects for class. Derek wasn't too sure about what she thought of him. He'd been absolutely terrible about the entire thing, after all. But she was soon back to her normal self. 'Master Derek' this, and 'Master Derek' that. Usually, it bothered the hell out of him, but he found it a welcome greeting after the complete silence she'd given him for days.

She honestly didn't mean to be so quiet. She apologized profusely for being so rude every time he brought it up. Derek could never figure out why she was silent, of course. That would be unprofessional of her, and it would worry him. Honestly, though, she didn't really know herself. Those few days after the dinner were a numb blur, every single thought in her head uncertain. It was always a mix of half-sentences and words jumbled in her head, never a finished sentence, never a complete thought. She couldn't remember a single bit of it, only that overall she felt nothing at all.

It was about a year later that they were out and about on one of Derek's day trips. Today they were driving and hiking through a nature park in Washington. It had an ulterior purpose, considering Derek's father. They were to take notes on the local fauna and determine whether they were knowledgeable enough about foraging to both survive and not poison themselves.

The trip also became an exercise in parkour.

"Here, here! Stay down!" Derek told her as he slid under a fallen log, propped on top of some giant tree roots. "Get down!"

"Obviously!" Toni seethed as she dove in headfirst, intending to provide cover from the other side. Slipping her backpack off of one arm, she unzipped the side pocket and pulled out a pistol. As she pulled out two magazines and put them in her left jacket pocket, she glanced at Derek, who was fumbling to do the same. She dug her heel into his side, and he turned to protest when a bullet shot into the bark above his head, making him yelp and scurry backwards. "Derek, focus! We're dead unless you do!"

"Alright, alright! Jesus,." His grip tightened on the pistol in his hand. Nobody should die today. He found himself thinking. It's just not fair.

He kept a watchful eye and kept ready to fire. He couldn't see anybody in all these ferns. This was nothing like target practice or their paintball sessions. It was literally impossible to see from this angle.

A tug on his pant leg drew his attention. "Turn around. There's a clear path to my left. We'll have to run, they've gotta be closing in."

Toni shielded her eyes from the bits of bark shattering above her face. She was having just as much trouble as Derek seeing anything but plants, but whoever these assailants were, they were clumsy. They'd moved the plant leaves with their guns as they swept the area to find where they were, and she saw black sleeves peeking out from the trees. They were set like a dotted line in front of her, but there was a gap that was very big, big enough for them to run through. If they stayed here, they'd get pinned, right? Who knows what these people were trying to do, or who they were. it definitely seemed like they were trying to kill them.

She kept her eyes on the assailants as Derek clumsily turned himself around to face the same direction. "I'll go first. You need to be right behind me, okay? If I go first, it'll draw their fire." She ordered as she cast a glance at him. His eyes were wide and darting around more than hers were. His pale skin was beginning to get a thin sheen of sweat. His lips were parted and panting. Too agitated. Too panicked. She nudged his arm, and his head jerked towards her. "Derek, calm down. We're fine. We just have to get out of here. You're okay. You gotta focus."

It wasn't working. He was panicking more. his breath was getting faster, and his head jerked away at the sound of more gunfire. He wasn't listening to her anymore.

"Derek? Derek!?" She reached out to put a hand on his back. "Derek, listen to me, come on, we have to g-"

He put his head down against the ground and screamed. It was too late. He was having a panic attack.

The gunfire was ruthless now. They were hidden under the log, but now that he was screaming, they knew exactly where he was. All of the bullets were landing in the wood above his head.

Something snapped in Toni. She'd protected him before, but nothing like this. Never like this.

She wrenched the pistol out of his hands and turned him onto his side, pulling him further under the fallen tree. He curled up into a ball on his side, still screaming, hands clawing into his skull. Toni stayed bent over him, stroking his head softly and whispering to him as she grabbed the magazines out of his pocket and shoved them into her own. 

Assess. Over one shoulder, behind them. She couldn't see anybody there. Maybe they were unevenly trained? Over the other shoulder, in front of them. Still as clumsy, still giving away their position.

This was too obvious. They were being directed that way. But what choice did they have?

There was a pause in gunfire. Two of the five, the ones on the left that had left the gap. She could see their arms. reaching to their sides. They were reloading.

Act.

Pushing off with her knee, she scrambled out of the hiding place and ran for the plants, tumbling in. The assailants started shooting at her, reacting to the movement. She crawled closer and closer, then took aim.

First gunman down.

She took a sharp breath and froze. Her hand started to shake. Memories of blood and bullets crept into the back of her mind, threatening to overtake her.

Don't remember them. Don't get compromised now. Finish it.

'finish him off’

Her fists clenched, and her face contorted monstrously. Not now. She knew what was most important about that memory, and he was right there under a tree, about to get shot unless she did something now. 

She stood up and took the gunman's place behind the tree. They were arranged in a half circle, and they had apparently arranged themselves so they could see each other. The other gunman that was reloading had finished, and was shouting as he aimed his rifle at her.

Second gunman down. She took his place again, stumbling backwards as a bullet hit the tree trunk beside her face. Stepped a bit too far. Don't be clumsy now. She raised her arms. 

Once. Miss. Twice.

Third gunman down. She scrambled to the next tree, falling into the ferns. She saw the next one jump in surprise, then they both quickly pointed their guns at each other.

Fourth gunman down.

The fifth gunman backed up, stumbling backwards into the foliage. She was parallel to the tree trunk now. Derek's screaming was beginning to quiet down. I'll give him honey later. For his throat.

"Derek, come on." She dragged him by his shoulders out into the open and onto his feet. "It's clear. Let's go. Come on."

He was sobbing now as she pulled him behind her. When he stumbled, she pushed him in front of her. The forest sounded so quiet now with only half the guns as before. She was able to lay a bit of covering fire as the assailants moved towards them, disturbing the foliage. She got one or two of them. The fewer, the better. Derek was shambling. His head must have been a mess, honestly. He wasn't ready for anything like this. All the training in the world wouldn't help him right now.

They reached a road. Toni stood behind him, gun at the ready and aimed for the trees behind them. The guns behind them had stopped. Judging by the cars passing on the road, either they didn't want to hit any civilians, or they didn't want anybody to know of their presence. Probably both.

"H-Hey, Do you think we could go in there?"

She spared a few seconds to glance. Across the road was a gas station. It wasn't getting any traffic at the moment. It would be a public enough place for them to lay low while she called for an extraction.

With a nod, she gestured for him to go first. She stayed for a few moments, her grip on the gun tightening as she scanned for any enemies. For all their sloppiness, they seemed to have disappeared. Tucking her gun into the back of her belt, she jogged after Derek, who was waiting on the other side of the road. He was staring at the ground, shifting on his feet, only looking up when he heard her approach. "Master, are you crazy? Never mind, come on, we've got to go inside.” She grabbed his arm and guided him in.

The door rang a tinny bell as they walked inside, Derek first and Toni soon after. A girl at the counter looked up, her head in her hands, then sighed and sat up. “Welcome to Johnny's Fuel. Anything I can help you with today?”

Toni shook her head at her with a tight smile, walking Derek out of sight of the cashier before turning him to face her. “Derek, are you alright?”

He was looking at the ground again. She tapped his shoulder a bit to make sure he wasn't unresponsive. “Derek?”

Derek jumped, stepping back a bit. His hands were held up in defense, but once he saw Toni's face, he started to understand what was happening. “T.... Toni...” His voice caught in his throat, and he shook his head. “I... I-I can't do this anymore, Toni... god...”

No. Was he going to rebel again?... It was the same thing he said before, isn't it? But, no... the way he was saying it... this was different. This was new. She'd never seen him like this before.

With a sigh, she cradled his face in her hands tenderly. “Derek...”

Something's moved. There's more than one cashier? Was her first thought. The bathroom door had opened, and heavy boots thudded against the floor. It could have been anyone. It was anyone.

All she saw was the face of a man in rage and a gun.

“Derek!” In one quick movement, she went from embracing Derek to shoving him to the side, throwing herself behind her master.

One shot. A shriek. Her shoulder suddenly became warm – she knew she wouldn't be able to use her arm anymore.

It didn't matter – she had to get Derek out of the way. There were objects crashing to the floor, and Derek was screaming her name as she shoved him into an aisle with her bad shoulder. The pain hadn't kicked in yet, and she was too on edge to care even if it had.

The both of them collapsed to the floor, and Toni scrambled for the gun in the small of her back. No time, there wasn't enough time-

“Get up, Alvar!” The man bellowed as he cocked his gun, storming towards their aisle. “You destroyed my family, and I'll make sure you never do it again!”

“Derek, get my gun, I can't get it,” Toni ordered firmly as she slipped her backpack off her shoulders.

“What the hell – Toni, what the hell-”

“Get it!”

“Alvar! Come out!”

“Get it!”

“I-I'm trying! You have to get up!”

With a cry, she rolled onto her right arm and grabbed wildly at her back. Her hand collided with Derek's clawing madly for a grip. He was getting closer. 

“I've got it! He-”

There was no time. She snatched it out of his hand, whipping it out in front of her just as the man came around the corner. Both of her hands clenched into fists as she pulled the trigger. When he didn't fall down, she pulled the trigger even more until the gun clicked empty several times.

The gun stayed in the air for a few moments before falling to the floor, and Toni's chest heaved as she rolled onto her back.

“Toni, you got shot... Oh my god...”She felt a pressure on her shoulder, and Derek pulled her to sit up against him. Her gaze drifted to the pressure, and she saw that her green jacket now had a dark growing stain underneath his hand. Toni's entire body tensed in his grasp, and she looked up at him with fearful eyes and a strangled cry.

Derek was completely dumbfounded. Everything had happened so fast – the gunmen had appeared out of nowhere, an attempted assasination. He stared in front of them at the body on the floor. Who was that man? What did Derek do?

Suddenly, a new pair of feet appeared. Again? He looked up and saw another gun pointed at his face. It was a teenager behind this one, hair red as fire and jade green eyes. This kid couldn't be any older than Derek and Toni. “Who are you and what the hell just happened?” The stranger demanded, shoving the gun at them for emphasis.

Toni's head shot up at the new voice, and at the sight of the gun, she gasped, jerking her arm up to shoot again. The stranger shouted and took a step back, his grip tightening on the gun in his own hand. “It's empty!” Derek shouted, holding his hand out at the stranger. “I-It's empty! It's okay! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!”

The stranger growled as his eyes narrowed in suspicion, and Derek pulled Toni as close to him as he could, pulling the gun from her hand. She stared at her hand in confusion as it was torn away from her, and Derek set it down on a shelf. “See? It's fine. Don't shoot, please. Please.”

His words seemed to set off a switch in Toni, and she whimpered, turning to bury her face in Derek's shirt. She clutched at him and pushed at the ground with her legs. All he could do was hold her tightly as he gulped and stared at the person in front of him. “Please... Look, she's scared... she didn't mean it, honest... she's scared...”

“Ryan? Is everyone alright?”

He cast a glance over his shoulder, but her arms weren't raised. No gun. Still, as he turned his head around, something about her voice prompted him to turn back to see her better. She paused at this, but returned his gaze in confusion.

Platinum blonde hair, almost white. Her cheeks sloped smoothly into the softest lips he'd ever seen. And her eyes! Blue eyes, baby blue on the inside becoming cobalt on the rim. It felt like he was staring into a galaxy, beauty and bewilderment creeping into his heart and taking a firm hold.

“Hey! I'm talking to you!”

Derek's attention was snapped back to the red-haired boy. “What the hell happened?”

“There's – okay, there's people trying to kill us, okay? I don't know why, something's going wrong, we were just out here for a trip in the park, and people started shooting at us –“ His eyes flicked to the gun, and he shook his head desperately. “Please, for the love of god, can you just put the gun down?”

“Give me any reason why I should,” the stranger – Ryan – scoffed. “You two just walked in and murdered somebody!”

Toni screamed at the stranger's voice, curling up into Derek. “He's gonna kill us, he's gonna kill us, Derek... Derek...” She was starting to sob into his chest, clutching him close.

“Stop! Come on, look at her! She's scared, we have no idea what's going on!” Derek shouted. “That guy tried to kill us first, he shot her! We were just trying to protect ourselves!”

“He shot her?” The girl's voice behind him again drew another glance from him. Well worth it, in his opinion. “Where did he shoot her?”

“Her shoulder. I-It's bleeding,” Derek said quickly, adjusting himself to sit Toni up so the girl could see. “I need to get her help.

”Please, please help. She's scared. We don't know what's going on, she's scared,” Derek pleaded, turning back to Ryan, who had lowered his gun a little out of uncertainty.  “Please. Nobody else has to die today. Please.”

They all sat like that for a while in silence, Derek’s heart pounding in his ears. He thought he would go deaf, but the girl scoffed and walked towards them. “Ryan, put that thing away. They need help, stop it.”

Ryan looked at her in confusion, but lowered his gun. “Cora, this is dangerous...”

Cora. Her name was Cora. Derek found himself whispering it under his breath as Cora approached them. It was soft, and beautiful. Just like her.

“Who cares? The gun is empty. They're scared. Just stop,” Cora told Ryan as she kneeled down next to the pair. “Is she okay? Does she need bandages?”

“No, we've got some. We've got bags... Our bags...” He reached out for the one that Toni dropped in her panic, and Cora reached for the same one. Their fingers touched, and Derek gasped a little from the sudden rush of dopamine in his system. It felt like somebody had stroked his skull and spine in soft fabric or water. It was a wonderful sensation.

... Awh, hell...

“Oh! I'm sorry!” Cora drew her hand back. “I-I didn't mean to startle you.”

Derek shook his head and blinked. “No, you're... You're fine.” He mumbled as he grabbed the bag, opening it. He rummaged around inside for the first aid kit, but his fingers came into contact with something a lot heavier. When he pulled it out, he was staring at the burner phone that his father always sent with them on trips. “Oh, thank god...” He sighed in relief as he flipped it open, starting to dial a number. Then he realized what he was doing, and looked up at Ryan and Cora. “You guys... You guys need to go. Now.”

“What? You better not be pulling anything funny, call the cops with that thing.” Ryan warned, pointing the gun at the phone as he kneeled in front of them. “She needs an ambulance.”

“No, you don't understand, that's not what this is for,” Derek said as he pulled the first aid kit from the bag and snapped it open. It was a little difficult with Toni grabbing at his arms, trying to hide beneath them, but he was able to get the gauze and pads. “This is for calling back-up. It's protocol for them to kill all witnesses. You guys need to leave before I call, and that means you need to leave now.”

“Back-up?” Cora glanced at Ryan with concern in her eyes, and Ryan's grip tightened on the gun as he spoke. “Excuse me?”

“Ryan for the love of god, put that stupid gun away!” she said, pushing the gun so that it pointed at the shelf. Ryan looked at her incredulously, and Cora looked apologetically at Derek. “I'm so sorry, we got robbed last month, and ever since then, Ryan's been carrying around this stupid water gun, it's not real.”

“What- Cora!”

“Shut up! They're fine, they need help!”

“Hey...” Derek put a hand on Cora's arm, and she looked at him. Her eyes held concern, confusion. “Look, you have to go. The cops might come, but you can't tell them about us. Our back up is going to take the body and make it look like an armed robbery. I-I don't know what to tell the cops – tell them you guys were on break, or blew off the rest of the shift. But nobody can know that you guys were here when this happened, or you're going to die. They'll kill you.”

The two gas station workers looked at each other, obviously disturbed by the notion. Ryan opened his mouth to ask a question, but Cora shushed him. “I... I think it's better we don't ask.” She noted, looking at Derek again. “This sounds bad.”

Ryan looked frustrated, but nodded. “I'll get the car.” He said before walking out stiffly. The jingle of the bell made Derek relax a bit, and he focused on flipping Toni onto her back. “It's okay... It's okay... Shhh....”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Asked Cora, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have stopped this from happening...”

Derek shook his head. “It... It comes with the business, I guess...” He mumbled as he unrolled the gauze. He didn't think anything of the note until he looked up at Cora and saw the sadness in her expression. “I- D-Don't worry about it. Look...” 

He put a hand on hers and looked her in the eyes. “Please. The best thing you can do now is go home and stay safe. Don't tell anybody about me and Toni. I…” He shook his head. “No more people should die today. Nobody should have. I don't want anybody else to get hurt. Please go home.”

They stared at each other for a while, and Derek lost himself for those few moments. Neither of them seemed to know what to do, but no words felt like they needed to be said.

“Derek...”

His attention was called away from Cora as Toni put her hand on his elbow, pulling his arm down to drape over her. “Derek...”

“Car's ready.” Ryan had come back in, and stared down at the three of them. Toni, who seemed to have calmed down from her panic, turned away from his gaze and pulled Derek's arm to cover her. She felt vulnerable, just lying with her head on Derek's lap like this.

Derek and Cora's hands shot back to their own laps, and Derek gestured with his head as he picked up the gauze again. “Go. You gotta go. I gotta make this call. Go.”

Cora nodded and stood up, and Derek heard their whispers as he dialed the phone.

“Do you think we can trust him?”

“Do you really want to die?”

“Ugh... fine...”

He laughed a bit to himself, then cleared his throat as he put the phone to his ear. As the dial tone rang, he thought to himself, hoping the consequences wouldn't be too severe when they returned to the compound. Toni's breathing was steady beneath him as he took her jacket off and started to bandage the wound. 

Everything felt so lonely all of a sudden. It was peaceful, but without Cora here, it all felt lacking. He had the feeling it would stay that way for a while.

“Second, what's your status? Everything alright?”

Derek shook his head, securing the wrap on Toni's shoulder. “No. We've been attacked. Third is injured. We require immediate extraction. We're at a gas station on the highway called Johnny's Fuel...”

[danceworshipper]

Okay, since I’ve seen people getting very frustrated with the Quidditch event and I’m already mostly done with it, I’m going to put out some of the tactics that I’ve been using. I’m not sure if playing as a Beater is any different, but I’ve only been playing as a Chaser, so keep that in mind.

First off, to get all of the rewards, you’ll need to complete a full streak 4 times, though if you’ve already got some points from previous attempts it might not take that many. But since gathering tickets is super annoying, you’ll want to do this as efficiently as possible.

Secondly, the most important thing to remember is to not get psyched out. The time limit even in the very last match is enough for you to focus on the targets’ speed. Most of them will be different speeds, though frequently the third and fourth targets will be the same speed.

When starting a maneuver, do not hesitate with the first target, whether you have a time limit or not. Immediately hit it, and you’ll likely get either a green or a yellow. As you hit it, stare at the second one to get the timing, and then hit it and try not to hesitate. For the third and fourth ones, you can watch one time to get their timing, but usually you can only watch one in and out so make sure you’re paying attention.

The first two matches are super easy, and you don’t have to try that hard, but I recommend pretending that it’s as hard as the very last one to get your technique. The third match is a bit “harder” which really only means “faster” and that you have to get a higher number of points per maneuver. All yellows should be enough for this match, so try to get at least a yellow on each target.

It’s here that I’m going to point out that sometimes if you only just pass the maneuver, the bar showing who’s winning will barely move. Do not panic. Any movement is enough.

After match three, the point requirement will stay up, though the game will slow back down a bit. Try to practice getting at least one green during maneuvers now, while still getting the rest as yellows. If you can do better, do it, but at least try and get a minimum of one green. Matches four through six are roughly the same difficulty as each other.

Match seven is the worst, and you need the most amount of points per maneuver for this. However, you don’t need to get a perfect maneuver to win. This is where getting at least one green and the rest yellows comes in. The regular check mark on this bar is very close to the perfect check mark. Again, do not panic if the score bar is barely moving. You’ll still win.

Match seven (and six, I believe) has four maneuvers per match instead of three, so don’t let your guard down after the third one and get caught off guard.

DO NOT pay attention to the timer in the corner. If you glance at it for even a second, you’ll probably end up losing your rhythm. As I said before, you should have enough time. I typically end maneuvers with three seconds left. Between each maneuver, take a second to refocus on the screen. Have your finger ready to grab the disk. Breathe evenly. Most of the difficulty comes from your own nerves.

Finally, a tip I stole from @pepperuppuffskeins : If you miss a maneuver, as soon as you realize that you missed it exit completely out of the app and reload. You should get a chance to repeat the maneuver. Note that doing this can sometimes confuse your game, so after leaving the event, reload your game again to prevent any glitches during classes.

I hope this helps some of you!

[starting-now]

What Happened? (Barry x Reader)

Request by Anonymous:  hey! i was wondering if you could write a fluff/angst imagine where the reader works alongside barry and gets injured on a mission, and barry has to tend to the reader’s wounds?

(gif credit to @lousolversons)

Warnings: gun violence, cursing, stitches

Word Count: 1910

A/N: Requests are open!! Thank you so much for this request, Anon, I hope you like it!!

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

Barry stepped cautiously through the archway into the room. There were crates stacked from the floor to the ceiling, most likely loaded with gun parts and drugs judging by the file he was given before the mission. He leaned forward and did a quick scan of the grey room before turning around to you and gesturing that he was going to do a sweep and to watch his back. 

You nodded, holding your MK23 pistol tightly in your grasp and checking your blind spots. This wasn’t your first time on a hit, and you and Barry had worked together a handful of times before. He was great at his job, but if you were being honest you much preferred him outside of work. You loved to compliment and flirt with him to make him blush, which was adorably easy. But here, he was stone faced and serious, so much so that he didn’t seem like someone who had ever blushed in his life.

Barry focused on sweeping the room, checking the corners and entrances expertly. As he finished his gaze wandered back to your face, which was intently focused on him and your surroundings. He really did hate this job, but he loved how determined and focused you were while doing it. He thought back to the first time you two met.

-

“Barry. (Y/N). (Y/N). Barry” Fuches said and gestured to you both. You held out a hand for him to shake and Barry cautiously accepted. “This is gonna be great I can just tell. You’ll be the brawn, she’ll be the brain, right buddy?” Fuches said condescendingly

“So then what exactly do you bring to the table?” you responded sarcastically. Barry smiled, and you caught a glimpse of it from the corner of your eye. Fuches stammered and you laughed to break the tension.

“Well, I guess I’ll just let you two get to know each other.” he said and gave Barry a dramatic wink and walked out of the room. He wanted to disappear into the floor.

“So,” you started, sitting down on the couch in the room, “what’s your deal?” you asked with a smile.

You stayed up almost that whole night talking about everything from how you both ended up being hitmen, to the mental and physical toll it takes, to Fuches, to Barry’s acting, which you were particularly interested in.

After you learned about his interest in acting you made it a top priority to see all of his performances, even though you knew he wasn’t very good yet. And you always brought him a flower, you loved to see the small embarrassed smile on his face and the way that his classmates gave him the side eye. He wished he could tell whether you were messing with him or not. He hoped you weren’t.

-

Barry smiled at the memory and glanced around the room one more time before nodding at you and standing up. You followed suit, but as soon as you stood a bullet came through the small glass pane in the door on the east side of the building and hit your side. You fell over and Barry watched in slow motion as your body hit the floor and you began to bleed.

Bullets were still flying through the room and Barry dove towards you and laid flat on the floor for cover. His brow furrowed with worry as he looked at you, and he pressed his hand to you, coming away with his hand covered in your blood. He felt tears beginning to escape his eyes, but his sadness quickly turned to rage as he turned towards the source of the bullets and began army crawling towards the door. The bullets stopped briefly, and Barry could hear the shooter fumbling with his ammunition to reload. He stood up and opened the door harshly to reveal the shooter, a low ranking member of the Bolivian mob, who stared up at Barry with wide eyes as he continued fiddling with his ammo. Barry raised his gun but the man rolled around the corner and began to run. Barry’s feet pounded the ground as he chased the man.

“I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU!” he yelled and finally caught up with the shooter at a dead end in the hall.

The shooter didn’t have time to say anything in response as Barry emptied the chamber of his gun into the man’s body. Barry breathed heavily and wiped the tears from his eyes which continued to flow. He jolted quickly and began sprinting back down the hallway towards you. The blood had heavily soaked through your shirt. He grabbed yours and his gun and put them in his bag before sliding his arms underneath your body carefully.

“(Y/N)? Can you hear me? Please say you can hear me.” he stammered

You groaned in response and managed to get out a weak ‘I can hear you.’

Barry smiled as the tears still flowed freely from his eyes “Alright, okay, I’m gonna get you out of here.” he said.

He carried you outside where Fuches was waiting in the car. He flung open the car door when he saw Barry walking towards him with you in his arms.

“What the hell happened?!” he exclaimed.

Barry didn’t respond, opening the backdoor and gingerly laying you across the back seat.

“Barry! What. Happened?” Fuches repeated.

Barry turned to him with red puffy eyes and Fuches’ expression softened.

“She’s hurt real bad.” Barry said.

“Then lets get the fuck out of here.” Fuches replied and jumped back into the car. Barry sat in the backseat, holding your head in his lap and making sure you stayed conscious. Fuches drove as fast as he could back to the motel, where they slipped in the back without being seen.

Barry rushed through the door with you in his arms and carefully laid you down on the bed. Fuches gathered the supplies and handed them to Barry.

“Listen buddy, I gotta go. Someone has to clean up that pool of blood you two left behind before the cops get there. You got this right?” Fuches said hesitantly and patted Barry on the shoulder half-heartedly.

Barry simply nodded, and Fuches took a hesitant step backwards before grabbing the keys and leaving the room again.

Barry rolled up your shirt so he could assess the wound. The bullet seems to have been lodged between your third and fourth rib, which were definitely broken, but still, you were lucky to be alive. Barry felt a wave of guilt wash over him. This was all his fault. You could have died. He shook the thought from his head and began working. He cleaned the wound using alcohol, earning a pained groan from you. He hated to hurt you, but on the bright side at least that meant you were still conscious. He started on the stiches, being sure to take his time and make sure they were right. Your groans continued. A good sign. When he was done, he cleaned the wound once more and placed a large bandage over the area.

You were slowly regaining consciousness, but you needed rest. Barry grabbed a water bottle from the motel minifridge and brought it to you, helping you drink some and then setting the rest on the side table. He grabbed two pillows from the other bed and propped you up enough to slide them underneath you. You drifted off to sleep from exhaustion and pain. Barry poured himself a drink from Fuche’s scotch and sat on the bed next to yours, watching you with a pained expression on his face.

He sat there for hours, feeling guilt and shame for putting you in that kind of danger, for being so stupid. And just as he was beginning to worry if you were okay, you let loose the loudest groan of all.

“Ugh, holy fucking shit.” you heaved.

Barry rushed to your side and helped you to sit up. Your brow was furrowed tightly and your arm was holding your side. You sat there in silence for a minute trying to regain your composure and breath, as well as remember what happened. Barry returned to his spot on the bed opposite you.

“Listen, (Y/N), it was all my fault. I didn’t see that guy and it almost cost  you your fucking life. I don’t think I could live with myself if…” Barry said and trailed off.

You reached out and put a hand on his knee. “Don’t beat yourself up.  Neither of us saw that guy. He wasn’t even a good shot, he just got lucky.” you said and smiled, which Barry returned half heartedly before his eyes flickered back to the floor.

“Besides, I mean, you also saved my life today.” you said.

“I wouldn’t have had to save your life if I wasn’t here at all. I knew this was a bad idea. I knew it. I should go, I’m sorry. You really don’t need me, and you’d probably be better off if I-”

“If you left?” you interrupted and Barry hesitated before nodding

“Yeah” he answered.

“Barry, I had nothing before I met you. I had no friends, no family. I was depressed and angry and careless because I didn’t think there was anything left here for me. And then I meet you. Barry Block, the aspiring actor with the adorable smile. Barry Berkman, the coworker that I’m fucking in love with. And yea we’re hitmen but I finally felt some kind of normal for once. Like maybe there is something more to me than this.” you said, avoiding his gaze.

“Do you mean that?” Barry stammered quickly “I mean, do you really mean what you said about...being in love with me?”

You raised an eyebrow “Of course, Barry. I bring you flowers to every performance you do, I flirt with you all the time. What did you think?” you asked incredulously.

Barry smiled and blushed, as he so often did around you. His previous thoughts that you were making fun of him seemed so silly now. “I guess. I kinda. Thought you were, ya know, making fun of me?” he said and shook his head.

“You are ridiculous, Berkman.” you said and grinned.

“...I’m, um, in love with you too.” Barry responded and there was a short silence.

“Kiss me, Barry.” you said with a small smile on your face.

“R-really? Like right now?” he asked, looking around like a nervous schoolboy.

“Yes and my side hurts so fucking bad so I’m gonna need you to come to me.” you said, and he leaned forward. Your hand slid up to cup his cheek and you pulled his face to yours and captured his lips in a kiss. It felt just right, his calloused fingers gingerly rested on your neck and he ran his fingers through your hair. It was slow and romantic. You wanted to deepen the kiss, but when you leaned forward you let out a pained noise. Barry pulled back and you clutched your side.

“You should probably get some rest.” he said softly.

“So should you. Why don’t you join me?” you asked and he smiled down at you, helping you to lay back down. He slid his shoes off and laid down next to you. You couldn’t move much, but you managed to find his hand and intertwine your fingers with his before drifting off to sleep.

[rorynne]

Time Lost Chater 11

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Reader

Summary: An accident during a mission sends you back in time to the second world war. There you enlist the help of Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes to find the object that can send her back.

Warnings: Gun Violence, War, Death. Its a WW2 mission friends.

Word count: 2.4k

Masterlist

Prologue Ch 1 Ch 2 Ch 3 Ch 4 Ch 5 Ch 6 Ch 7 Ch 8 Ch 9 Ch 10

The scene wasn't unlike the last time you had gone on a mission with the commandos, Steve hunched over a map, going over infiltration plans. The Commandos surrounded him, giving them their thoughts and making snarky jokes. You weren't quite paying attention to it, instead, you were glancing every so often at Bucky. You couldn't stop thinking about the letter sitting in your breast pocket. It was the fourth one Bucky had sent you in two weeks, each one managing to pierce your heart a little deeper.

The letters themselves weren't even romantic in nature, had one not known any better, they might have thought they were letters to a sibling, or maybe a friend. But something about it all, maybe it was your history, maybe it was the absurdity of sending someone in the same camp mail, or maybe it was the way he always signed them off as 'yours', made it all feel like much more than just friendly letters. You never replied to them. You could never convince yourself to. But you did start finding yourself wandering down to the mess during mail call, just to see if your name would be called that day.

You didn't really understand why he kept writing you letters, but honestly, you were too scared he would stop if you questioned it. After weeks of trying to convince yourself, and Bucky for that matter, that the two of you were nothing more than friends, the letters had begun to feel like your own little secret. Your own vice, clinging to the vain hope of something you couldn't, wouldn't let yourself have.

"What do you think we should do, Y/N?" Steve asked, looking at you expectantly.

"What?" You blinked pulled out of your trance by the sound of your name.

Steve raised an eyebrow, "To infiltrate the base, do you have any ideas?"

You blinked a few more times, biting your lip as you looked at the map. A flash of brilliance overtook you as you recalled your time in Paris. "There's a daily supply convoy that passes through this area. No doubt they supply this base too. It wouldn't take much to sneak onto a truck."

Bucky's gaze lingered on you for a moment before looking down at the map. "And what exactly do we plan on doin' when we get driven in? Just jump out guns blazing like last time?"

Steve shook his head, "This base is huge compared to Italy. It would be a suicide mission." He took a deep breath as he thought out some semblance of a plan. "Our best bet might be doing something similar to what we did in Austria."

The Commandos looked at him like he was nuts. "Steve." You said carefully. "Don't pretend you had a plan for Austria."

Steve rolled his eyes at your comment, opening his mouth to speak before Jones spoke up. "What about this large building here?" He pointed to a flyover picture of the base, "It looks like the energy silo that was in Austria. If we go in and blow that up, it might cripple them enough to swing things in our favor."

"That… might actually work." Falsworth responded, picking the photo up for a closer look. "It would also be easier to sneak into the base with a sapper group instead of all eight of us." He handed the photo off to Steve. "A team of three? Jaques of course, then two others."

"I'll go." You said. The sooner you got inside the base, the sooner you could figure out where the Bell had been taken. The men seemed to understand your eagerness, nodding amongst themselves.

"Then I'll go too," Bucky said almost immediately after, making your heart skip. It was as if he were waiting for you to volunteer. 

"No." You argued. At best he would be a distraction, a severe distraction. Ay worst… "You are an absolute danger with explosives and you know it." The last thing you needed was for him to lose a hand.

"I'm not that bad." He rolled his eyes. "And we damn well know you're gonna run off for that Bell the moment that building goes down. You need someone able to watch your six." You opened your mouth to protest, to tell him you didn't need to be protected, but he cut you off. "Don't even start. You're a Commando whether you admit it or not. And I'm not about to let one of our own run off alone in a war zone." To your frustration, the rest of the men grunted in agreement.

"Fine." You conceded. "We don't have time to argue about this. The convoy leaves Paris at noon, it's almost sundown now. Taking into account the convoy stopping to unload and reload supplies, it should be coming by any time now. If I remember the convoy maps right, it comes down the west road here." You traced out the road on the map with your finger. You hoped the Germans didn't think to change their supply routes since you were last in Paris.

Steve nodded, "It's settled then. Bucky, Jaques, and Y/N, get what you need to take the building down ASAP. The rest of us are on standby until then, got it?" The men voiced their agreement once more before bursting into action.

The convoy, luckily, was right on time, and it took no time at all for the three of them to slip onto the final truck in the line. You sat against a crate, concealing yourself from the trucks opening as it continued down the dirt road. You winced as the truck jostled you roughly back into the crates as it hit a bump. 

"What exactly is going on between you two," Dernier questioned in his typical french. "I thought you two worked your shit out weeks ago."

You frowned at him. To say you and Bucky worked things out was dubious at best. If anything it would have been more accurate to say you ungracefully shattered your own heart and swept it under a rug, only to pretend nothing had happened. You flirted far less now, but that really just served to hurt your heart more. "There's nothing going on between us." You shot back in french.

Dernier scoffed. "That's why you two keep looking at each other like kicked puppies when the other isn't looking."

"I still don't speak french." Bucky reminded, a tinge of frustration in his voice before you had a chance to respond to Dernier.

"It's nothing." You said quickly. "He's just trying to make sure this all goes smoothly." It wasn't exactly a lie, you convinced yourself, though the raise of Dernier's eyebrow told you you probably shouldn't have. "We should try to stick together until the building goes down."

"I'm sticking to you like glue, doll," Bucky said with a slight nod. "Don't worry abou-" Bucky went silent as the truck stopped. German voices could be heard from outside as the beam of a flashlight poked through the truck’s canvas cover. The three of you tensed as the beam swept across the truck bed, narrowly failing to illuminate you before disappearing. The three of you breathed a collective sigh of relief when the truck began to move again.

The second time it stopped, it had reached the base, you jumped out of the truck and slipping into a small alcove in the nearest building. Dernier pulled the flyover photo from his pocket, using it as a makeshift map. He pointed towards the energy silo and you both followed his lead, avoiding detection and planting bombs where he had ordered them to be placed. It had barely been half an hour by the time the building was properly rigged to explode. "Go." He whispered to you and Bucky as he fiddled with setting up the detonation device. "I'll meet up with the others as soon as I take the building down."

You nodded, patting Bucky on the arm. "Let's go." You said as you moved to leave, only for him not to follow.

"And leave Jaques?" He questioned, grabbing your arm to stop you. You rolled your eyes, of course. After this mission, you were making sure the men knew at least basic french. They couldn't rely on you and Jones constantly translating. 

"Stay or go, it's up to you. I'm going, Jaques said he can handle it." You insisted. Bucky was clearly wary about leaving a Commando on his own, but you really didn't have the time to try to convince him. Luckily, as you turned to go, Bucky reluctantly followed.

The bombs went off the moment the two of you were out of Dernier's sight, taking the building down with a deafening roar, and plunging the base into darkness in the process. Jones had been right, it was an energy silo, apparently, the entire base had been running off of the tesseracts stored power. You squinted through the darkness, the sun now well below the horizon, as you looked for some form of an administrative building through the growing chaos.

Shouts and screams and gunfire surrounded you making you suddenly very aware you were in the middle of a war. You were also suddenly very aware that you were completely alone. In the darkness and chaos, Bucky had disappeared from your side. Worry overtook you as you whipped around looking for him, even a fool would know he would never willingly leave your side in the middle of a mission. You bit your lip, considering your options. It would be easy to just continue your search, find Bucky later. He was fully capable of being on his own after all. Right?

You swore to yourself doubling back towards the now burning energy silo, but you failed to find any sign of Bucky. You shook your head, he was okay, he had to be. You weren't quite sure what you would do if he wasn't. You took off running searching for him, following your gut more than your brain.

You ran into the first building you saw, charging past hydra soldiers with reckless abandon. Something in your heart told you he would be there. Or maybe, it was just your mind trying to quell your growing panic. Either way, it didn't matter if it meant he was safe. He had to be safe.

You rounded the corner, turning down a hall of what appeared to be offices. Not that you noticed. You were far too focused on the Hydra officer holding Bucky at gunpoint. Bucky's eyes went wide when he caught sight of you over the officer's shoulder.

"Get on the fucking ground!" The officer yelled at him in German, gesturing to the floor. Bucky looked at the officer, carefully trying to piece together what was asked of him. The officer growled, stepping closer to Bucky, gun still trained on him. "Get on the ground before I put you on the ground."

When Bucky failed to comply with the order again, the officer aimed his pistol at Bucky's leg. You reacted before you could even think, you didn't even realize your gun was in your hand when you emptied the clip into the man's back and head. The officer fell to the floor in an instant, dropping his pistol in the process. The gun hit the ground with a clatter and a bang, firing a shot from the force of the impact.

Bucky hit the ground next, grasping his leg, a look of pain clear on his face. You nearly choked on your own breath in sheer panic when you rushed to his side. "What is with you and scaring the absolute hell out of me?" You questioned, inspecting his leg. He was shot, but it was a clean shot, straight through the muscle.

Bucky drew in a breath when you began applying pressure to the wound. "Scaring you?" He argued back, "I looked away for a second and you disappeared!" He winced again as you shifted your weight on his leg. "Damn that hurts."

"You got shot, Buck. It's supposed to hurt." You said dryly as the bleeding started to slow. Thank god. "And I didn't disappear, you did. I was running away from the explosion."

Bucky gave you a look, shaking his head. "No." He said simply as you broke out your med kit and began to bandage the injury.

"No?" You almost squeaked. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You really think I would have willingly left you in the middle of a battlefield?" He shot back, sounding more than a little bit offended. You looked up at him as you fought the urge to argue back. He was right. You knew he was. You knew he would never have intentionally left your side. But god damn the fear of turning around and seeing him missing still shook you. 

"We got separated then." You compromised, not placing the blame on either of you, as you tied off the bandage. "Are you okay resting here? I need to at least try to find something on the bell." He would be too much to carry from room to room on your shoulder, but you still needed to look for the bell.

"Actually," Bucky said as he pulled some hastily folded paper from his pants pocket, "I might have already found it." You took the papers from him and looked them over. They were heavily cyphered documents, the only indication of what they might relate to being the picture of a bell stapled to them.

"Bucky you're amazing!" You squealed, throwing your arms around his neck. You jumped back when he let out a grunt of pain, remembering his injury. "Shit, Sorry!"

He grimaced at the pain. "I'm not one to complain about a dame throwing herself at me Doll. But try not to hit my leg next time alright?" He gave a weak but flirty smile, just enough that you felt your face warm. Instead of throwing yourself at him again, you wrapped his arm around your neck, fighting the urge to flirt back with him as you helped pull him to his feet. 

"Come on Sarge." You said lightly, trying to distract yourself from how close you both were. You hadn't been this close since that snowy night in December. "It's finally Steve's turn to yell at us for being reckless."

A chuckle rumbled through his chest, "Never thought I'd live to see the day."

Tag List:

@henderwhore4life @mysterieuselizeuze  @mystifyign @part-time-prefect @walkingtravesty97 @geekofmanyforms @book-lover-like-no-other @thelibraryoffanfiction @nyctophillialife @irelandsfinestpotatoedealer @rootbeerboogy

[amandaoftherosemire]

Lightning Strikes Part Eight

Fandom: Marvel Avengers AU

Pairing: Thor Odinson X Reader

Characters: Thor Odinson, Loki Odinson, Valkyrie, OFC Astrid, OMC Halvar

Author: @amandaoftherosemire​

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 5,692

Format: Series (Complete)

Warning: Language, angst

Summary: Thor spends some time brooding and missing you. You deal with Loki and a gift you’re pretty sure you don’t want.

A/N: I don’t know if marijuana helps creativity, but I do know I was high when I wondered what it would look like if Korg and Miek tried to put together IKEA furniture. I also know that imagining it made me laugh so hard I fell off my couch.

Part Seven: Sublimation here

Aphelion

Thor sat in the giant leather executive chair behind the enormous oak desk in his office, staring resentfully out the window. He liked this chair. Tony had sent it to him in pieces for some reason, but Miek and Korg had managed, over the course of a week and with only one bout of tears, to assemble it into a sturdy throne.

He was grateful, both to Korg and Miek for the assembly, but also to Tony for the thoughtfulness. He hadn't understood why Tony had laughed so hard when he'd thanked him for the chair that shared a name with one of Thor's great-uncles, but he appreciated the gift regardless.

He especially liked that he could put his hands behind his head and rest them against the wings of leather around him. It was the most comfortable way to hate Tuesdays.

Thor despised Tuesday afternoons with every fiber of his being. The only thing keeping the clouds from smothering the hated sunshine pouring through the window was Thor's determined effort to not call them. His mood would have drawn the thunderstorm long before otherwise. Still, he couldn't punish others for his mistakes.

Even the pilot of the jet from New York, the cause of all this hate and resentment.

Tuesday afternoons the jet from New York came, unloaded, reloaded, then left. He knew now that hadn't been the plan. The plan had been for the jet to stay, along with the only joy he'd found after the loss of his home. He hated Tuesdays because it was supposed to be the day you came back to him. Instead, because he had been a fool and a coward, that jet held nothing he wanted anymore.

He was especially infuriated with himself because he’d known better. He'd known you were even more loyal than you were beautiful within only a few days in your company. If he'd asked himself, he would have been certain he could trust you, down to his bones. But he'd allowed the poison his father’s advisers had dripped into his ear to convince him to assign his newly appointed spymaster to the task.

Thor had already decided to ask you to live with him when the final report had been submitted along with a snotty lecture about hypocrisy. Loki had concluded that your loyalty to Thor was unassailable and suggested that those who had been so worried about a human spy in their midst might perhaps have things to hide.

If only he’d told you the truth before you’d found out for yourself in such an awful way. You were so amazing, so understanding of all the fucking bullshit that went hand in hand with his birthright, his burden. If he’d told you the truth, explained the why of it, apologized, perhaps you’d be coming home right now.

“What time is it?” The lump currently taking up space on the couch under the window spoke from under the purple and yellow baseball cap. Her long legs were tightly encased in jeans and crossed at the calves stretched out across the couch. Her arms were crossed, and she’d pulled the cap down to cover her eyes.

Until she spoke, Thor had thought she’d been asleep.

He glanced at the clock, then answered with a sigh, “Five after two.”

To his astonishment, she sat up immediately, pushing the cap back to reveal the dark beauty underneath. “Shit, she'll be here soon.” With that, Valkyrie jumped to her feet and headed with long strides toward the door.

Thor shook himself out of his brood, suspicious of her sudden leap into action. “Who will?”

“The jet from New York should have something for me.” Valkyrie wasn't going to stop, but the look of astonishment had her pausing at the door and rolling her eyes. She adored Thor, but he had a weird habit of dissociating when he was depressed. Not a terribly great characteristic in a king, but at least he wasn't a homicidal maniac.

Still, she considered it part of her duties to kick Thor in the ass whenever he needed it. She'd decided.

He needed it.

He'd brooded long enough. He was obviously not going to get over you, so it was time for him to try to win you back. To be truthful, Valkyrie liked you immensely. Your reaction to what had happened had earned her respect. Spending time with you had earned her friendship. Bringing her delicious top-shelf liquor had earned her undying love.

“Your majesty, you might want to actually look out that window from time to time," she sneered, "or actually talk to your people." At this, pure disdain settled onto her face and had Thor fully paying attention to her. "You know, instead of only listening to the idiots that appointed themselves the people's representatives.”

The next second, she was gone, the door closing with a slam behind her. Thor turned his chair back to the window and stared at a cloud that hung perfectly framed by the panes of glass. He frowned, mulling over Valkyrie's words, her tone, her expressions. He started to wonder what he would see if he walked to the window and looked out. What could be happening out there?

Not much later, Thor was getting to his feet and wandering over to the window. As he did, the Wakandan jet that had been meant to bring his heart back to him was settling down on the helipad at the back of the manor house. To his surprise, a crowd of Asgardian children were running toward the jet cheering, with his brother, Astrid, and Valkyrie following behind at a walk.

When the hatch opened and you walked out, lovely legs in tight jeans and boots, a t-shirt with Captain America's shield emblazoned across your breasts, and a bright smile for the crowd there to greet you, Thor felt the loss of you like a physical stab to the gut, a spasm of pain rocking through him. Had he been sitting here hating the world every Tuesday when you were right outside his house the whole time?

Part of him wanted to run outside, snatch you up, and imprison you in his bedroom until he could convince you that he hadn't meant any of it. He wanted to apologize, swear he hadn't needed a shred of proof to believe in you. He wanted to show you he regretted it more than almost anything he'd ever done, promise he'd never hurt you like that again. He held himself back, knowing that he had no right to even a moment of your time. He also had a healthy respectful fear of you and was certain you'd find a way to make him regret such high-handed behavior. In all the realms, he'd never met another like you.

In all his centuries, he'd never loved another the way he loved you.

That you stood in his kingdom despite it all gave him hope that you would listen if he ran outside and begged for your forgiveness. Whether you'd forgive him or not, you'd at least hear him out. You were too fair, too kind to do otherwise. But Thor had decided that fate had spoken. He was meant to let you go. He could never give you everything you deserved. As such, he would not be so selfish as to beg you to return to him. Even if he deserved you, you deserved more.

Thor frowned when you embraced all three adults, even as the children milled around you. You even took Loki's face in your hands and pulled his cheek down for a kiss, smiling into his eyes.

How the FUCK had his brother weaseled his way back into your good graces when Thor hadn't even known you were in his kingdom?

You ducked back inside the jet only to emerge a few moments later holding an open box. Fascinated, Thor watched you start pulling out items from said box and passing them to the children who still circled you expectantly.

This had become one of your favorite parts of the week. Despite the fact that visiting New Asgard sent a spasm of pain, anger, and regret through you every time you arrived and every time you left, there was still joy to be found here.

After you and Thor had broken up, Pepper had made it clear that they could easily assign another pilot to the New Asgard run. She’d have worked with you in any way you needed to make things okay after what had happened, feeling responsible since she’d asked you to entertain Loki. You’d considered letting her rearrange things for you once again, though you didn’t blame her at all. She had only been concerned with keeping the peace and would have never knowingly put you in such a position.

You thought about walking away from New Asgard and everyone in it. It would have been easier.

Easier wasn’t better, though. You’d wanted the new job, the new responsibilities. You’d been excited to take on new challenges and you didn’t see any reason to let Thor stand in the way of that. You’d never let a failed relationship dictate your behavior in the past; you didn’t see any reason to start now.

Which is how, over the past few months, you’d made an odd little place for yourself on the periphery of Asgardian society. At first, it had only been Astrid to come greet you every Tuesday. Then, Halvar had come with questions about Midgard candy.

Halvar was a small child with a shock of blond hair, bright blue eyes, and ridiculously charming dimples. He looked to be about seven years old, but you weren’t sure how Asgardian aging worked so he could be older than you in years for as far as you knew.

He had surprised you on your fourth Tuesday run when he’d tapped gently on your arm. You’d been supervising the cargo trade and pointedly ignoring the dark god that grinned at you from the balcony. You’d been trying not to notice the other conspicuous absence.

Halvar had been designated by the children as their representative. As such, he had come to ask what the King’s Midgardian lady might know of something called chocolate.

You had been delighted to tell him everything you knew. The following Tuesday, a small group of Asgardian children were waiting for you to ask further questions. Instead, they were rewarded with their first taste of milk chocolate. You’d started simple, with high-quality plain chocolate squares from your favorite chocolatier in New York.

The look of wonder that crossed each sweet little face as the flavor hit made up for the fifth week in a row that you’d seen neither hide nor hair of Thor. Astrid’s near sexual moan of pleasure as she sampled the sweet had you laughing out loud and lifted some of the clouds that still hung around you. That had been the beginning of a routine, and a new place for you on the fringe of Asgardian society.

You’d somehow become their connection for Midgard specialties. You were more than happy to help with special requests, which is why your cargo on this day included first edition books for Loki, insanely expensive moisturizer for Astrid, hundred-year-old scotch for Valkyrie.

And a box full of packets of Fun Dip for the children.

You'd discovered when looking for a retail outlet that sold candy in bulk that you could not simply buy the dipping sticks by themselves and found it offensive to the point of heresy. Why did we even invent the internet?

The children, under the watchful eye of both Astrid and Valkyrie (Loki didn't care, and the children knew it), were waiting patiently as you tore the tops off and placed the lik-a-stik in each little hand. Halvar received an approving look from you when he nibbled a little at the end once you had the children taste them. You and that kid were simpatico, for all you were born on different planets.

When he placed the stick covered in powder in his mouth, then looked at the sugar stick like he preferred it by itself, you laughed out loud. Halvar was a pistol; you could tell he was going to be a force to be reckoned with based on the streak of stubborn you could see in the set of his chin. You wouldn't be surprised if he ran his parents ragged now.

Thor couldn't tell what exactly you were doing, but it looked like you were sharing some treat with the crowd that assembled around you. Even the Asgardians unloading the jet stopped to try whatever you had brought. To their king's astonishment, they seemed to be easy with you, their body language speaking of joking and the good-natured jostling of camaraderie.

As the cargo trade finished, the children wandered off, little paper pouches in their hands. He watched you trade hugs with Astrid, the housemaid, and Valkyrie, before they walked away, both carrying boxes you'd given them. Loki dawdled, however, making Thor's eye narrow in suspicion.

Once the two of you were alone, Loki stepped forward. He'd noticed your gaze avoiding the house and inwardly smirked. Even you had your tells. Your stubborn affection for his idiot of a brother gave you away when little else did. Loki knew you were still in love with the oaf, though you no longer scanned for his approach with anxious but hopeful eyes.

Loki was well aware that Thor could win you back easily. All he'd have to do is be honest about what he'd done, why he'd done it, and how he felt about it and you'd end up forgiving him. He'd never met a harder bitch with a softer center. You loved Thor. You hadn't stopped.

Loki had absolutely no intention of telling Thor any of that. He also hadn't told Thor that you visited New Asgard every Tuesday. Nor had he told his brother that you and he were friends again. He'd kept to himself his suspicions that you were slowly being absorbed into the soldier and his feral dog's relationship. There were worlds of information he hadn't shared with Thor when it came to you.

For example…

"Your turn, dear one," he said with a wicked smile and a flourish, bringing a box of his own into view. His, however, was made of wood almost black with age. The surface was carved over its entire surface with symbols and sigils that could be read by only a few people even within the borders of New Asgard.

You looked at the box that had shimmered into being in Loki's hand with a skeptically raised eyebrow. Whatever was in it, you already felt like Pandora just looking at it. "Uh-huh, what's in it?" you asked, a half smile curving your mouth, and made no move to take it.

Loki's smile widened. He loved how affectionate you were in your complete mistrust of him. You believed nothing he said without question, but you also seemed to always react with humor rather than anger. At least since you'd stopped punishing him for his earlier deceptions. Truthfully, you'd been remarkably forgiving for that considering that he hadn't apologized.

"A present for you, love." Loki had stopped bothering to pretend he didn't adore you. He could have maintained the pretense that he had only befriended you to spy for Thor, but he saw no reason to deprive himself of your company.

You narrowed your eyes in suspicion. "Is it a present I want? Or are you fucking with me?"

"Yes?" Loki looked earnest, but you could tell by the twinkle in his eye that he was teasing you.

Still a touch reluctant, you reached out to take the box. Hopefully, you weren't going to regret this. You examined the box, discovering when you went to open it that it appeared to be one solid piece of wood. "What is this?"

"A choice." Loki's eyes were dancing and making you vaguely nervous. "I'll tell you how to open it later."

"Okay." You scowled at him, tucking the box under your arm. "It's not gonna blow up or anything, right?" You were asking mostly for form; you didn't really think Loki would put you in harm's way. You were pretty sure he had a soft spot for you, but you couldn’t be certain of anything when it came to the Odinson brothers anymore.

Loki's eyes softened ever so slightly and reassured you before he even opened his mouth. He was thinking it was a shame that remaining loyal to his brother had meant betraying you. He didn’t mind that you didn’t trust him, but he disliked that you were no longer sure of his affection for you. He would not have had it so.

“Of course not, dear one," he replied with a slow, wicked smile. "How would that entertain me?"

"I'm not going to give you ideas for how to make blowing me up entertaining." You turned with a roll of your eyes and began to walk toward the jet. Loki followed you, laughing, to place a hand on your shoulder. Spinning you around, he gave you one of his rare hugs.

"Don't try to open it without me," he said as he pulled back to frown sternly at you. "Promise me."

"Okay," you retorted, sneering a little, "weirdo, I promise."

Loki smiled again, knowing you, at least, could be counted upon to keep your promises. He reached out to brush the backs of those long, artist's fingers down your cheek. "I'll see you soon, love." Once Loki had started calling you 'love', you'd realized that the tone, the timbre of his voice was the same as it had been on the word 'pet'. You weren't sure to feel worse about the new endearment or better about the old.

Because it made your heart hurt, you opted not to think about it. If he didn't care for you, nothing about your current situation changed. If he meant it, if he truly did have a soft spot for you, to call it into question would hurt him unnecessarily. You didn't want to hurt Loki, or Thor for that matter. You just wanted to stop hurting, yourself.

"I can't wait," you said, sardonically, a wry half-smile on your lips to soften your sarcasm. "I gotta go. I want to get ahead of the storm."

For a fraction of a second, Loki didn't understand. When he did, he wanted to laugh aloud. His brother's timing was almost perfect, as per usual. He leaned in and brushed his mouth quickly, chastely against yours. You didn't respond, simply stared at him in astonishment. He smiled wickedly, causing your expression to shift into amused exasperation.

You didn't know what Loki was up to, but you were sure you wanted no part of it. You decided not to get in any deeper than you already were. "Goodbye, Loki," you called out as you turned away again. The last thing you heard as the hatch closed behind you was the sound of the god's mischievous laughter.

As Loki walked back to the manor house, he looked up to meet Thor's furious gaze in the window on the third floor.

Loki smiled.

Thor sat on the cliffs, watching the clouds boil. He knew he should rein it in, that his people as well as those across the fjord didn't deserve to bear the brunt of his foul temper. He couldn't do it, though, too lost in bitter pain and rage. He'd held off as long as he could, but the storm in his blood would be denied no longer.

He wasn’t the sort of man who enjoyed dwelling on the mistakes of the past. He knew he’d go mad if he spent too much time looking back. As long lived as his kind was, they had ample opportunity for regret. The only way to survive was to look forward.

Considering the mistakes he’d made in recent years, why this one should plague him so was a mystery. Even before he’d laid eyes on you once again, he’d been tormented by the loss of you.

Now, however, he'd been reminded of the sparkle of your smile, the arrogance in your walk, that sexy hip-shot stance in response to any challenge. He missed you so much it was like a physical ache. Knowing you were only a quick flight away had been torture. To now know that you visited his home every single week was agony. The temptation to go crawling back to you, begging for another chance was going to be excruciating.

The only reason he hadn't yet was he'd thought you'd be happier away from him and the insanity that followed him. Only now he'd discovered that you had remained friends with Astrid, become friends with Valkyrie, and become friends, again, with his blasted brother. Thor had been denying himself the pleasure of your company only to discover that not a single member of his household had done the same.

The confrontation with Loki had been ugly, for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that Loki had the moral high ground for once. He'd never pretended to be anything but what he was, an unrepentant liar and trickster, which is why, apparently, you had let him back into your good graces. Thor doubted he'd find it so easy to win you back.

Because for all his brother's flaws, he'd been absolutely correct. Loki had been oddly honest with you, proving his affection. He would not have bothered to give you what honesty he could in the midst of a deception had he not cared about you. Thor wasn't the least surprised that you could see that. You saw Loki more clearly than most.

Unfortunately for him, you'd seen only what Thor had wanted you to see. The day you'd found out he'd asked Loki to spy on you for him was etched with painful clarity across his memory. You had been utterly blindsided, had not even considered suspecting him of subterfuge before that moment. He had seen the betrayal on your face, was so intimately familiar with the pain of that emotion, he'd been unable to offer any defense beyond the weakest expression of remorse.

You had been unimpressed, and rightly so. If he had it to do over again, he'd tell you he never really distrusted you. He'd heard no end of mindless fearmongering from his father's advisers and had believed none of it. He'd fully expected Loki to prove you true, had in fact counted on it. He'd wanted to quiet their groundless terrors once and for all.

And that was all information he should have shared with you long before you found out by overhearing he and his brother arguing about it. If he had it to do over again, he'd have faced you with the truth as soon as Loki had given the final report to said advisers. He'd betrayed you twice; you'd been right to walk away.

Thor had let you go for a reason, and that reason hadn't changed. He carried nothing but pain with him. He'd already hurt you enough; he wouldn't risk hurting you again.

"Okay," you sneered at the man that had just shimmered into being on the couch in the living area of your quarters at the Avengers compound. "What bullshit are you up today?" You nodded at the piquant box he'd given you earlier in the day on the coffee table in front of the couch. You'd set it there and waited, knowing Loki would be paying you one of his hologram visits before your day was over.

You weren't disappointed, though it was much later than you expected, closer to midnight. You wondered what could have happened in New Asgard that could have had him occupied until nearly dawn his time. He didn't offer an explanation, simply smiled indulgently.

"I beg your pardon, dear one," he demurred, his eyes twinkling with good-natured mischief. You narrowed yours in response. "It is nothing dangerous, I promise." He was laughing, but you could see the tension around his eyes.

"To open it, you must trace the waxing crescent moon to the ridge of the mountains. From there you follow the path through the valley into the winter sun." His lips were twitching, and he looked entirely too pleased with himself.

When he had appeared, you had been pouring a much-needed glass of wine. You could have sworn you'd seen Thor earlier that day in a third-floor window, watching you. Your heart had raced, but you'd been able to resist the urge to run inside and punch him until he hurt as badly as he'd hurt you. You'd vowed to hold on to your temper and your tears on the day you'd decided to keep the New Asgard run.

Swirling the pinot noir in your overly full glass, you sat casually on the couch next to Loki, crossing your legs with a dubious smile on your face. "Uh-huh." You lifted an eyebrow. "What's in the box? And it better not be a head."

"Why would it be a head?" When you opened your mouth to explain the reference, he lifted his hand to stop you. "Don't answer. I don't care. Open it and look."

Your eyes narrowed even further, your lips twisted in suspicion. Still, he seemed to be having fun-fun, not mean-fun, so you figured you could risk opening the thing. You leaned forward and set your wineglass on one of the agate slices that served as coasters to protect the dark oak of the coffee table. You grabbed the dark box Loki had given you earlier and sat back, settling it in your lap. You shot Loki a look from under skeptical eyebrows.

Turning your attention to the box, you were taken by the beauty of the thing. It wasn’t large, but rectangular in shape and a little smaller than a brick. Its surface was shiny and nearly black with age. But for the symbols and sigils carved deeply into the wood, you would have thought the object made of obsidian, so smooth and glassy was the surface between the carvings. Almost immediately, your eye was caught by the elaborate crescent with the horns facing left along one of the thin, long sides.

Your finger reached out and delicately traced the curling pattern within the crescent. When you reached the end, the entire symbol began to glow a white-edged blue. Your finger followed a jagged line that reached around and ran along the edge of one of the thin, short sides. From there a winding, curving line through symbols and runes that you couldn't translate across the other long, thin side through a dipping 'U' shape. Finally, your finger followed the line into a spiral on one of the large faces. The spiral itself nestled into a symbol strangely reminiscent of a sun within a snowflake.

Once the line that traveled through all the symbols was lit with that bluish-white light, a seam in the wood appeared. Feeling very much like Pandora, you slid the lid out from the groove in which it sat. Inside, on a bed of silk, lay a small, crystalline bottle full of a vibrant blue liquid that seemed to shimmer in the light as it faded from the symbols. Tendrils of steam swirled out of the box where the chill of the bottle met the warmth of the air.

"Oh, what fresh hell is this?"

At your acerbic response, Loki burst into full-throated laughter. "Only you, dear one, could find a king's ransom an irritant."

"It is when you're offering it." Lifting a brow, you gestured toward the bottle, silently asking if it was okay to remove it from its nest. Loki inclined his head in assent with a knowing smile. You carefully lifted the bottle, your fingers chilling the moment you touched it, wondering at both the container and the liquid within. "This isn't glass, is it? What does the liquid do?"

"Glass couldn't hold it, dear one." Loki's smile had taken on a slightly sinister edge. You'd noted his smile took on that particular cruel edge preceding a half-truth. He always looked a little cruel whenever he was about to give you an answer that was technically the truth but omitted a lot of important information. "A capful will extend your life by fifty times its normal length."

"And the catch?" You reluctantly set the bottle back in its nest, the chill starting to hurt your fingers. You continued to examine it, however, as once you'd lifted it to the light, you'd been able to see delicate patterns etched into the surface of the bottle as well. "I age at my normal length so that when I die several thousand years from now, it's from crumbling apart?"

"No, you will age proportionally to your lifetime." Loki was vaguely exasperated, but thoroughly amused. You were the only person he'd ever thought to offer this secret to. Part of that was exactly this, that you were one of the few he'd ever met who wouldn't immediately drink it but would ask a dozen questions first. He was starting to think you weren't human; you were too clever. "Remember, I actually like you, dear one."

That touched you a little. You were pretty sure that was the truth. Still… "There has to be a catch."

Loki's smiled widened. "It will change you physically. You will become much harder to kill, among other things." That cruel cast came and went once more on his ascetically pretty face. "You might not like some of the changes."

"Huh." You sat for a moment, thinking over all of the information he had both volunteered and carefully hidden. You couldn't help but notice that he hadn't entirely answered your question. You knew there had to be more of a catch than he'd revealed, but you could also tell he didn't want to tell you. Whatever was going on here, you could see clearly that Loki was not being entirely honest with you, surprise, surprise. You were certain there were aspects that you would not like should he tell the truth. Until then… "No."

"No!?"

You burst out laughing at the sheer insult all over him. His face was a study in umbrage, his body recoiling in horror. He was genuinely shocked that you wouldn't leap at the chance to extend your life without thinking further. You were genuinely amused that he thought you'd jump without thinking about the consequences first. You hadn't survived this long in the odd world you inhabited by being either naïve or reckless.

"No, I will not drink your I’m-an-obvious-trap-and-if-you-drink-me-you’re-an-idiot potion." You closed the box with a snap, then leaned forward to place it on the coffee table once more. You picked up your wineglass and sat back to continue. "This has Faustian bargain written all over it. ‘Drink this mysterious liquid that does not have a label and you have no idea what’s in it and you’ll have life, health, and youth for the next 4,000 years, no strings attached.’" You scowled good-naturedly at the now smiling god. "Sure! Nothing insanely wrong here! I mean, if you can’t trust the God of Mischief and Deceit."

Loki tilted his head back and roared with laughter. You'd never seen him laugh like this, open and unguarded. It occurred to you that Loki hid a lot of himself away, and you wondered about the why of it. Today, however, you were just grateful to see him enjoying himself so thoroughly. Your face softened, and you teased gently as he calmed, "Well, come on. This might as well have a sign that says, ‘Free Bird Seed’ on it."

"I do not understand," he answered, still chuckling. "Is bird seed terribly precious on Midgard?"

"I cannot figure out where to even begin to explain Wile E. Coyote to you."

"If it is another ridiculous Midgard thing, don't bother." He lifted a dismissive hand and you laughed again. "I don't care." His expression shifting to one of amused temptation, he slid forward on the couch. Though you knew you couldn't touch him, you weren't certain if Loki could touch you in this form. You forced yourself to stay relaxed and not retreat. Loki would immediately take advantage of any sign of weakness. "When you change your mind, love," he smiled that enticing smile of his, the one that crossed his face when he was up to something, "let me know. Do. Not. Drink it without me. You'll need my help."

"I'm not drinking it." If Loki had been a study in insult, you were now a study in doubtful challenge. You leaned back, one arm casually draped across your lap, the other swirling your wine as it lay along the back of the couch. "But I still want to know why you're even offering it to me."

"It has become clear that it is going to take you forever to stop pining for my oaf of a brother." Loki slid closer and you felt that odd push-pull you always had with Loki, the urge to run coupled with the temptation to get closer. "I want you to still be alive when that happens so I can steal you once and for all."

The last words were spoken almost against your mouth and you would swear you could feel it. Your lips seemed to tingle, as though his had been only a breath away, but you weren't sure you weren't merely hallucinating the sensation. In the next instant, Loki was gone, undoubtedly concluding that a strategic retreat was best to accomplish his aims.

He wasn't wrong; you were certain you'd be thinking about the box, and him, for a long time coming. How could you not? Even his reason for offering would prey upon your mind. It was so weirdly sweet.

Didn't matter, you thought to yourself. You weren't a fucking idiot, and you did not know what that potion really did. You weren't fucking drinking it.

Part Nine: Ablation here

Taglist:

@lbouvet @rocknroll-is-thewaytogo @chook007 @quickies-with-quicksilver @deinopis @daylight-saver @rishlo @pebblesz892 @bibliophile1773 @bojabee @knightofreaders @pancake-pages @666nunslut666 @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @lilulo-12 @tabbytyler @sunigyrl @suz-123 @cheekygeek05 @hellzzzbelle @jewels2876 @innerpaperexpertcloud @miraclesoflove @irritated-bisexual @diinofayce @fashionworld12

[crayonwriting]

Irreplaceable You: 5 (Bucky Barnes)

Summary: Unexpectedly diagnosed with a terminal disease, you embark on a mission to find a new love for your fiancé and childhood best friend, Bucky Barnes.

Disclaimer: This story is a rewrite of the movie of the same title on Netflix. Directed by Stephanie Laing and written by  Bess Wohl. Go check it out!

—

You huffed as you exited the elevator. It was only your first day of support group and you didn't like it one bit. You swore to yourself that you'd never go back again. Ever.

"The whole point is to mingle." A voice piped up behind you. You turned around and saw Tony, with his arms crossed against his chest—a trademark you've noticed in the hour and a half you've met him.

"Not feeling up to it." You replied, pulling your bag higher up your shoulder.

"Neither does anybody. That's why we do it." He walked closer to you, holding out his hand. "Tony. Tony Stark. Multiple myeloma." He noticed your apprehensive expression as you shook his hand. "You've never heard of it?" He chuckled at your lack of a response, putting his hands on his hips.

"Stay a while." He encouraged.

"I'm not really a mingler."

"Not a crocheter either, apparently." He pointed to the ball of yarn in your hands.

"Didn't have time for pointless hobbies then, really don't have time for them now, and I'm especially uninterested in discovering that crocheting is a metaphor for healing or whatever."

"What you're feeling is totally normal."

"You know," you sighed heavily, biting your lip in frustration. "I wish people would stop telling me that totally insane things are totally normal."

"Insane things are normal." He snarkily remarked. You stared daggers at him. With all the pent up frustration you had in you, you suddenly burst out.

"Have you looked around?" You paused, waiting for an answer but he didn't say anything. "And you just accept that? You just accept everything that's going on? You make jokes about your wife having a new boyfriend?" You waved your hands around, emphasizing your point. When he just stared at you, you huffed out loud and turn to walk away.

"I don't accept it." Tony stated. You turned to look him. "But in the event that I do kick the bucket, I hope she does find a boyfriend. Somebody nice. Less well-endowed to be sure, but nice."

You weren't sure how to respond to that. You just shook your head and let your pride get the best of you.

"Well, I just think I am in a different situation. Sam and I met when we were kids, we've been together forever."

Tony chuckled. "How old is he?"

"Thirty-one."

"Oooh." Tony faked a pained expression. "Yep, he's gonna go through a major slut phase." You just stared at each other for a moment before bursting out in laughter.

"Thanks for the heads up." You smiled at him. He smiled back at you before turning around and pressing the button for the elevator.

"You come back." He pointed a finger and raised an eyebrow at you. You just shook your head, turning to walk out of the building.

"Nice to meet you, Tony."

"Nice to meet you, Y/N."

—

You stared intently at Bucky, memorizing his distinguishing features—his eyes, his wavy hair, the slope of his nose, his lips. You felt fluttering in your stomach at the sight of him. Almost immediately, you felt fear of how other women were looking at him. Of course, they wouldn’t look now because everybody knew your history. But what happens when you’re gone?

"Are you gonna go through a slut phase?" You had your chin rested on your palm as you stared at Bucky across the table. You both were eating dinner and you just can't stop thinking about what Tony had said.

"What? No." He said with a mouthful of noodles. "Why would you say that?"

"You're not even thinking about it?"

"That's the absolute furthest thing from my mind right now." He took another bite of his food before looking straight at you. "It's further than like meeting someone on Tinder." He chuckled softly at his statement.

"Okay," you started, "but Tinder can't be that far from your mind because you just said it, which means you had to be thinking about it, which means you're thinking about this too." You ranted. Bucky rolled his eyes at you, shaking his head with a smirk.

“Yeah. I'm busted.”

“I'm serious! I mean look at you.” You gestured to him. He just stared at you, waiting. You pointed a finger at him. “The puppy-dog eyes.”

“What?”

“The absent-minded professor thing.” You added.

“What do you mean absent-minded?”

You sighed. “This is a disaster.” You lay your head on top of the table, defeated.

“C’mon Y/N. What are you talking about?” He reached out and held your elbow.

“You don't know!” You were exasperated. “Because you have no experience.” You leaned in closer to him, pointing a finger. “Women are gonna eat you alive.” Bucky just scoffed and pulled back.

“I can take care of myself.” He argued.

“But what if you can't? Who's gonna match your socks or keep up with your glasses or make you chicken?”

“You don't make me chicken.”

“Yeah, I know. But I would,” you shrugged, “Hypothetically.”

“Well, our hypothetical chicken has been in the freezer for like a year.”

You furrowed your brows at him with determined eyes. You slammed your palm against the table and stood up, your chair screeching loudly against the floor. You stomped towards the refrigerator, pulling out the block of ice that is the chicken out of your freezer.

“What are you doing?” Bucky asked, looking incredulously at you.

“Figuring out how to cook a chicken.” You hastily grabbed your phone from your pocket. Bucky stood up, picking up both of your plates and headed to the kitchen sink.

“Now?” He asked.

“No time like the present.” You tapped on your phone and searched, ‘How do I cook a chicken?’ You scanned through the results and selected one article. You placed your phone beside you on the counter and started thawing the rock-hard chicken. Bucky laughed at how childish and adorable you were being. Passing by you to the sink, he kissed the top of your head.

"It's gonna be amazing."

—

You were at your fourth—or was it your fifth?—session. You and Scott had gotten pretty close. He was always talking and he was funny. He added color to the bleak walls of the hospital.

“Then how come at the end of Reloaded, Neo can just all of a sudden use his powers outside of the Matrix?” He crossed his legs and pursed his lips. “Explain that.”

“Because the entire Matrix was a metaphor!” You raised your hands in emphasis. “And if you can't see that, you're in the Matrix right now.” You smiled triumphantly, going back to scrolling through your phone.

“Alright. You win this round, Y/N.” He checked off some things from your chart and stood up. “I’ll check back on you later.”

You relaxed a little when you found yourself alone in your cubicle. You thought about how you would treat Scott to lunch sometime when you finally get better. Maybe you could even meet Cassie Lang, his daughter, that he was so proud of. Scott made your chemo sessions much more bearable and you were extremely grateful for that.

—

You found yourself alone in your apartment once again. Your puking has stopped for a few hours now, so you were good to do your normal daily activities. You did a few aerobics to stretch your muscles, cleaned out your closet of old clothes and stuff you thought weren’t important anymore.

When you were finally done with some chores, you sat down by the table, grabbing one of Bucky’s books. You also got a pad of sticky notes and a pen. Carefully, you wrote little messages and stuck them inside his textbooks. ‘Check your socks’, ‘Smile! X’, ‘Drink water pls :)’,’Too soon?’, were just a few of them.

You rested your chin on your palm, thinking about whether he’ll find the notes before or after you were gone.

—

“Hey Y/N, have you read the new Cleocatra?” Clint sat down beside you, clutching a few papers in his hands. “Marianne Hall's awesome. She writes this whole narrative about a feline in Ancient Egypt.” Clint impressively whistles. “I think we should take a meeting with her.” He looked at you but it seemed like you weren’t listening at all. You were sipping on some warm tea whilst scrolling through your phone.

“Y/N?”

“Oh, yeah. It's great. I love it.”

Clint caught a glimpse of your phone and he clapped loudly, earning the attention of all the people inside the library. It also snapped you out of your daze and you immediately looked at him.

“What the hell, Clint?” You whisper-shouted. Clint had a mischievous grin on his face and you found it annoying. He pointed to your phone and that’s when realization hit you. You dragged him to your back office where no one can see or hear the both of you.

Clint full-on laughed as you closed the office door.

“Did I see what I just saw? Are you on a dating app?” He chuckled harder. “The same dating app you told me to leave? And, what,” He took your phone from your hand and checked your screen. “Is cancer making you super horny for girls?”

You rolled your eyes at him, taking your phone back. You sat down on your desk and continued to swipe through potential matches.

“I am not horny for girls. And I don’t even know why people use these things.”

“You might be forgetting that I use it.” He dragged a vacant chair closer to your desk and sat on it, resting his arm and chin on the backrest. “It is interesting to know why you are on it.”

“I’m...researching.” You said, defensively.

“Researching what exactly?” Clint raised his eyebrows.

“Just! Just research Clint!” You smacked his arm, biting your lip to prevent yourself from laughing yourself. Clint eyed you warily. You stared back at him, keeping firm.

“Okay, okay.” He raised his hands up in defense. “I'm gonna set up this meeting and you do your ‘research’” He did air quotations with his fingers. “Just call me when everything backfires and hits you in your face.”

“Love you, Clint.” You blew him a kiss.

—

feedback is appreciated!

Tags: @blueskiesbleakeyes / @justanothergirlwithdemons / @butteryoptimisticpeanut /  @likes-to-smell-books /  @hennessy0274-blog

[typhon-science]

68. ("This isn’t what it looks like.") for... anything with North and Connor, if I had to pick anyone for that.

this is my first attempt at humor so like,,, proceed with caution fvgwakvfgwhkavk also it’s unbetaed except for grammarly saving my ass with some errors here and there. also no.2 i learned that prompts were supposed to be 100 words long which like,,, oops? here, have a healthy 4,1k heap of chaos instead. Enjoy.

@kianraidelcam asked to be tagged, so here you go!

68. "This isn't what it looks like."

North was just watching them. Just watching. Absolutely not breaking into their house and stealing their pets right from under their noses. No, sir.

In her defense, said illegal act hadn't been a part of her plans for that night at all.

She's just been spending her free time the usual way - which meant stalking small anti-android groups, a hobby that made her feel both productive and useful in a way none other hobbies did.

(Besides shooting things, which Markus disapproved of, as it apparently ruined the "aesthetic" of New Jericho to have gunshots going off at night. Clearly, even with his fashion sense, Markus had no sense for true aesthetic.)

The group she chose to observe that day called themselves the True Humanity. It was a really small group - nothing nearly comparable to the gangs that Cyberlife attracted to itself, or the terrorist groups that tried to snipe Markus every few months. Definitely not similar to the workings of the BIOR (Blood is only red) group, Detroit's biggest anti-android establishment that Markus was semi-forced to tolerate for the time being, even if their protesters swarmed Jericho 24/7.

True Humanity was not some masterminds' strategic plan to overthrow the android movement. Not even a boycott or a protest.

It just looked like a band of teenagers with nothing else to do.

She had been standing outside on the street, leaning against the wall, in front of their meeting point, a small, semi-collapsed shack of a house, when she overheard the conversation.

It was between two of the teenagers, the one leading the group and its member, smoking outside in front of the porch. North had been watching them for some time, choosing her place so that the shadows were in just the right position for it to be unlikely that they'd notice her.

They didn't really talk about anything interesting, spent 15 minutes bickering about sports alone.But just as she was losing patience and itching to go and see if there was something else happening in the house, she heard one of them curse and start in a different tone.

"Damn fucking bitch won't stop making more kittens. I swear, one more time and I'll shoot it, right between the eyes." He glanced towards the open door of the house.

The other followed his gaze, before taking a drag of the cigarette and asking, smoke flying off his tongue. "You still having trouble with the cat?"

"Yeah. Gonna drown the new ones today."

North system stuttered. They what?

"Why do you even keep that cat, dude. Can't you just...shoot it already or dump it on the street?"

The leader's answer was quiet. He stared into the ground, voice slightly pained. "It was my brother's."

"Oh," the other replied, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "What...what exactly happened to him?"

The leader took a while to answer. "He...he was near Hart Plaza the day those plastic bastards decided they needed their freedom and vandalized the place."

North scoffed to herself but continued listening. It wasn't the worst she'd heard.

"He tried to run away, but the military mistook him for an android. He...didn't make it."

Oof. It never occurred to her, but really, how was the military supposed to know who was and wasn't a deviant? She didn't care at that time, either.

How many casualties were there? Nobody mentioned any at the meetings.

The leader took a breath and turned around when he received no reaction other than a mumbled "I'm sorry," from his accomplice, ending the conversation.

"You're right though, I should just shoot the cat. No reason for it to stay here, It'll be basically mercy." He nodded to himself, straightening up.

"Gonna shoot the kittens to while we're at it, I don't really feel like going to the river."

North's insides twisted in disgust.

She knew humans could be brutal to creatures that they considered below themselves; the acts against androids spoke for themselves just how far they'd go.

But kittens? Why would they drown kittens? There was a multitude of other things they could do that would not require such a brutal (and illegal) action. Hell, shelters still existed and all they needed was to wait until morning.

She didn't know much about pets, not many androids did, but from what she knew from Connor, humans were usually pretty fond of them. More than fond, in some cases. They were family members, even more than androids used to be (oh, how bitter she was about that.)

"You wanna help?" The other dude asked, absolutely unconcerned.

The leader shrugged. "If you want to."

North's spine went cold. Of course. Of course.

She should've guessed that people who saw no issue in gunning androids in the street would see no issue in shooting a helpless fucking kitten.

She watched as they retreated into the house, complaining about the lack of light. The absence of street lamps in the less funded parts of Detroit was actually something that went in her favor, now more than ever.

She was just supposed to watch. Connor allowed her to stalk them with only that one condition, and North initially saw no problem with it.

Now, she was on her own thin ice.

There was no reason to save that cat. None, really. A few lost kittens wouldn't make the world crash and burn.

But it nagged at her. G-ddamn empathy.

A door shut and the two teenagers came out again, a third member dragging behind. The leader carried a gun, an old rifle from the year 2027. Quite the punch, but without the reloading speed.She had to say it was a good gun when you're fighting androids in the streets.

The leader was explaining how the gun works to what she assumed was a new member. They were all completely caught up in their conversation, not paying attention to anything else.

She was so close. Given that she was an android, locating the cat and taking it away without being noticed would be a breeze. She'd just take it to the closest vet and-

Ah, yes. 2:34:27 AM. She'd take it to New Jericho then, just for the night.

Okay, okay. She could do it.

Only then she realized that she had really started planning.

I'm really doing this, huh?

Fuck Connor. She's saving a life today whether he likes it or not.

She sneaked around the fence, careful to evade detection. Thankfully, it was second nature to her from the minute she became deviant. At last, the days of constantly running and hiding like a coward were actually good for something.

As far as she was aware, True Humanity only had three members, but she'd never seen the newcomer before. Which brought the number to four and meant that one more person was inside, probably sleeping.

She assumed they were awake. Rather assume the worst and then later find out it was better than the other way around.

She went around the back of the house, finding all of the lights off. It wasn't a problem to her; one more advantage she had to herself was night-vision.

(Not all androids had it, but it was standard equipment for sexbots, of course, because how else were they supposed to find the dick in the dark? Echolocation?)

She took out her knife and opened the window to what seemed to be the kitchen and climbed inside, her night vision protocols automatically loading.

The place was a mess.

Did humans really live like this?

The first thing that hit her was the smell; burned food, mold and sweat, oppressing and stuck to every surface.

It was a sight to behold - trash everywhere, clothes and wrappers laying on the ground making her movement unnecessarily difficult and dirty dishes in the sink that she doubted were ever touched. Anti-android banners and posters covered the walls. The room was large; a kitchen connected to the living area; making her able to see the lights on the porch through the window on the other side of the room, above the couch repurposed as a bed.

She checked the couch for the fourth member while she made her way to the door. Wherever he was, it wasn't there.

She avoided stepping on the wrappers and moved over to the hall, adjusting her audio units and listening for any sign of a human presence.

She heard meowing instead.

It came from the other side of the hallway. She crouched at the door, hearing the conversation outside, and moved in the direction of the tiny sounds to the small space in the darkness in front of her.

She saw the cat's bright, reflective eyes staring back at her.

Half across the hallway, her units picked up other sounds, human breathing. It was coming from behind the wall, slowed down and deep; definitely from a sleeping person.

She knew the sound well enough; it was something that androids simulated quite well while in rest mode and she was awfully known for watching her friends sleep, paranoid and insomniac as she was.

The floorboards creaked softly, but she doubted human ears would pick that up.

The cat started hissing when she finally came close enough to touch and North realized that she actually had no idea how to handle a cat with kittens. Well, too late to stop now.

She recalled what Connor did when he wanted to pet a dog on the street and simulated the movement, curling her fingers and reaching out towards the cat.

It recoiled at first, but eventually leaned forward and sniffed her hand. Hissed again, this time quieter. Wary, not aggressive.

North finally noticed the kittens, four fluffy, breathing balls curled next to the cat. They were smaller than her own hand; their ears stuck to their heads and limbs short. She had only used to word three times in her life, but she had to say that it was, as humans said, really fucking cute.

Humans' ability to murder kept surprising her. Androids, their own, children, pets? They didn't care. They would murder everything if it got them what they wanted. Or even, if it just got rid of a problem for them.

(It had actually been what made her stop wanting to murder. Realizing that she could be better than them. After that realization, only then was she able to see what of an extraordinarily strong being Markus was. Murder was the easy way out; it took a lot of strength to avoid it.)

She reached, slowly and hesitantly, for one of the kittens, feeling tears in her eyes when she actually touched the tiny, warm body, felt the fast heartbeat and the weak breaths. How could anybody cut the lives of these creatures short? And even worse, how could they choose to?

She couldn't see the kitten's colors as her night-vision was nowhere as sophisticated as Connor's, but she knew they were beautiful. Tri-colored, by the way how some parts of them appeared darker.

She looked around for anything that she could carry the cats in, noticing a rectangular cardboard box lying on the side of the hallway. She reached for it, emptied it of the never-opened books, and laid it in front of her.

The cats watched her while she took off her jacket and placed it inside the box to create some cushioning.

Now, the hard part.

North didn't know how to handle cats. She never actually met one before, only knew how they looked and what they did, but the actual presence of one and the overall situation made her anxious.

She reached with a whispered "sorry" and lifted the animal with both of her hands, ignoring the way it scratched her synthetic skin in protest, causing drops of thirium to drip down her fingers.

The much easier transport of the kittens began as soon as she laid the cat down into the impromptu container. North hoped their meows, quite loud with the way her audio sensitivity was set on high, wouldn't alert any of the four members.

She was well aware the conversation outside stopped, but currently powerless to do anything about it.

The door opened while she was still holding the fifth kitten in midair. Her thirium pump jumped fair beyond parameters.

"What the fu-"

With the changed audio-sensitivity, the gunshot was loud enough to rattle her processor as a bullet went through her right shoulder. Warnings exploded in her vision, huge and assaulting, but all she cared about was finally closing the cardboard box and getting the fuck out.

The leader of the group stood in the light coming from the main door, gun aimed, his accomplices behind him.

"Oh, my g-d! And android!"

It was really time to go.

The door to the kitchen area was on the other side of the wall, the dude standing directly in front of it. Which left one option.

She picked up the box and broke into the other bedroom, almost falling as she stumbled into a mattress. The fourth member was there, waking up from his slumber, still obviously groggy and not exactly aware of what was going on.

She vaulted over him, trailing thirium behind her and broke the window to the outside, calibrating her leap with the safety of the cats and then jumping through.

The fall was rough for her, she could survive much more than a kitten could.

She picked herself up and started running in the direction she originally came from, knowing where the street allowed her to get to the roof.

Several gunshots rang off behind her, these only hitting the cement wall. Splinters rained down on the sidewalk.

"You fucking bitch-" the leader screamed at her, taking aim and missing again.

Excellent vocabulary there, mister.

She turned a corner and found the ladder, climbing to the roof of the abandoned apartment building.

She immediately set course to New Jericho, only then realizing that there was no way she could make it through the main door like this.

First, there were the protesters. Second, one of the leaders of Jericho just randomly showing up in the middle of the night covered in blue blood is prone to scare some of their own poor, poor people. Third, Markus was probably still awake and she was not nearly okay enough to hear whatever bullshit he'd have to say.

Her own room in New Jericho was inaccessible from the roof; she made that choice so that nobody could sneak up at her and try to kill her while in rest mode. Markus' room was the same case and even if it was accessible, she wouldn't even think of it.

Which left the one and only room which she could use. Connor's.

Connor got the ridiculously small room after everybody picked out their own, elaborating on his choice to wait and see by the claim that he wouldn't be in Jericho much anyway, which turned out to be true. North didn't know much about where he actually went or spend the nights at, but the only days he made sure he was in New Jericho were saturdays.

It was thursday. So, no Connor.

She stumbled several times while on her way to the building, her thirium pump skipping a beat each time. The cats had to make it. Had to.

She knew the thirium loss was making her partly delirious, but it was still concerning when time stopped working how it was supposed to, her awareness fading in and out as her processors tried to cope with the sudden losses of power.

But she made it in under 30 minutes. That was good.

Connor's window wasn't easy to open, the action much more difficult by her hands growing uncoordinated from the unsteady power flow, but she managed to pry it open and started climbing through, cradling the box to her chest with one hand and using the other to stabilize herself.Getting her leg through the frame without completely destroying Connor's special flowers was harder than all the other times she'd done this, but she made it eventually.

The sound of somebody clicking off a gun's safety went off.

She froze and stared into the dark, trying to find the source, while her processor struggled to give her prompts of what to say and produced one heap of utter garbage.

"This isn't what it looks like!"

Okay, North. That was definitely words.

What did it even look like? She was covered in blood, one leg in the room with the other still outside, clinging to a box full of cats like if her life depended on it and she just attempted to break into New Jericho through the room of its Security counselor of all people.

"North?!" Connor's voice. Fuck.

Only then her processor realized that yes, Connor mentioned that he's gonna be finishing some work on thursday. Damn.

The lights turned on. Connor was standing in front of the door, which was still ridiculously close to her; the room itself was more like a tiny pantry than anything that could be lived in, anyway.

His gun was already down, but she knew he had been aiming right at her head a few seconds before. His LED finally lighted up, going to yellow.

He was worried, she could tell, but she doubted she ever saw him so confused in the entire time she'd known him.

"What- did you get shot?!" There it was.

North tried to get her other leg through the window. "...a little."

"A little?!"

"Okay, actually a bit lot." Words, North. Words.

Connor rushed to help her, basically pulling her out of the window and helping her stand.

"There's blood fucking everywhere, North, what the-," he glanced over at the windowsill, "my plants!"

North honestly hadn't considered that she was still dripping thirium everywhere and that thirium was highly toxic. Ah well.

"My G-d," Connor turned to her, his gestures unusually expressive. "What the fuck is going on? North, what did you do?!"

She wasn't sure if her processor was that fucked up from the thirium loss but it sure was producing garbage instead of meaningful sentences.

"Cat. I stole... a cat," she held up the box, "uh, more like, five cats."

"What?!"

And that was the moment the cat decided to investigate the outside, pulling a black paw through a hole in the box and meowing loudly.

Connor stared at her, mouth slightly open, but he didn't say anything. Just stared as if in some kind of shock, his eyes darting from North to the cat and back to her. He didn't move. His eyes were still wide.

She shouldn't be proud of it, but Simon sure did owe her 10 dollars now that she was the one who made Connor bluescreen. Their ongoing bet was silly yet challenging, as Connor never fell speechless when he was supposed to react, always knew what to do next and what to say.

Until now, apparently.

She itched to do something, realizing that she had been staring right back at him and also hasn't moved, as if they were stuck in a staring contest unaware.

Connor moved first, shifted his weight, his expression not changing. "...okay." His voice was strained.

"Can I…?" She gestured at the box and then the desk, getting a nod in response.

She left him standing there and laid the box on the desk, sighing in relief when she found that all of the kittens survived. The cat immediately tied to jump out and North didn't blame it, given that the time it spent in the box wasn't exactly a relaxing experience.

North couldn't scan and even if she could, she wasn't sure if scanning animals for injuries would be available. She surveyed the net and tried to work with what she got, still coming up too short for her liking.

She hadn't even realized Connor moved to stand next to her until he leaned over, his LED went yellow, scanning. His calm facade was back.

"You will tell me how the fuck this happened, but for now, let's take care of these," he reached forward and let the cat, currently sitting on the table, sniff his hand. "You should be glad that I started taking veterinary courses."

North turned to him. "You what?"

"I'm pretty sure the message I conveyed was clear. Did the blood loss damage your auditory units?"

There was the Connor she knew. Cold, stone-faced, sarcastic bastard.

"Fuck you," she snapped back, getting a grin in response.

"They're all dehydrated and haven't been cared for for quite a while, but I don't see anything serious.” He straightened up, his expression going back to neutral. “They’ll stay here for the night. I can drive them to the nearest shelter tomorrow. The cat isn't chipped, so I think it should find a good home pretty fast."

She was surprised at herself when her mind recoiled at the thought. "No."

"What?"

"Mine," her voice was louder than she expected. "Mine now."

"Come again?" His eyebrows rose up.

"I'm keeping them."

"North, are you sure? Do you even know how to care for a cat?"

"No," she began, "but I almost died for them! I'm not giving them back to the humans!"

He thought it over. "North...why exactly did you steal them? I thought you went to investigate the True Humanity group."

"I did. And this was never my plan, but the dude said he was going to shoot them and I just...I just couldn't let him do it."

She saw the fire rise in Connor's eyes. She almost expected him to be shocked, but he was a detective after all; he saw what humans could do to each other, what they could do to androids.

And if there was something she knew that made the detective angry, it was the mistreatment of helpless animals.

"So," his voice was firm. He was, indeed, fucking mad. "They shot you? Because you broke into their house to save these?"

She nodded, looking back at the kittens. They were tri-colored, her search identifying the coloring as calico, except for one, which was fully black.

Her eyes with the mother cat’s and she noted their color  – copper-brown, whiskey at the edges.

Connor was rubbing his hands together, his LED yellow. "Don't worry about the law, I'll cover it for you."

She nodded again, trying not to show her relief. "Thanks."

"Do you have anything to do tomorrow? I'd rather get to the vet as soon as possible."

North crossed her hands. "When did you get the right to command me about this?" she teased.

Connor straightened and put his hands behind his back, a habit he still hasn't let go. "North, you don't know how to care for a cat and these will need more than what you can google. I want to help."

"Sure," she chuckled. "You're just a sap."

His expression dropped. He actually looked hurt as he stared on the ground.

"Fine! You're co-owning them."

His eyes lighted up instantly. It was pure excitement, which was also something she didn't see on him often.

"So, 6am tomorrow?" She asked.

He nodded. "I'm not letting you off the hook about breaking into the house of an anti-android group just yet, but this is way more important."

Connor reached for one of the kittens, petting it with extremely careful movements. "I'm going to order the supplies shortly, but I'll wait on your input if you have color preferences and such."

"Yeah," she said, opening a connection and sending the information.

She lifted her hand, intending to fix her hair, frowning when she noticed it was covered in blue. Ah, yes, bullet wound.

She looked down on the floor, relief washing over her when she noticed the thirium loss was much weaker as her self-repair systems kicked into gear. The floor had quite a lot of bloody footprints, though. Connor hadn't noticed yet. She should leave before he does.

"I...I think I'm gonna go get repairs now."

"You should be glad it didn't hit anything important," Connor said with a slight frown as he looked at her.

"I am."

She hesitated for a while. "Take care of them, okay? I'm gonna be back in an hour or two."

"Of course. "He replied with a nod and a smile.

She nodded back and gave the cats a last look before she turned and left through the door.

She noticed Markus incoming from the other side of the hallway, doing his typical waltz-walk. Their eyes met. If she won't leave now, he will notice.

Not today, sir.

Too many things happened. Too much new.

She turned in the other direction and sped up, hoping he wouldn't notice the blue footprints she was probably still leaving behind.

[geek-patient-zero]

Part 1, Chapter 2

Or: McCann Reads His Mail

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Dead Trilogy Volume 1

Dire McCann returns to his office, in “the heart of the tenderloin district.”

Big, bold, black letters on the door proclaimed, D. McCann, Investigations. Beneath his name, in much smaller print, was the disclaimer Consultation by Appointment Only.

I guess even Dire knows his first name’s a little odd and abbreviated it. Who’d want to give work to a guy who looks like they’re trying to give themselves a nickname.

There’s several paragraphs describing the office. The outer office/reception area has a coffee table with old issues of Sports Illustrated and three red chairs, like a doctor’s office with an even more limited selection of outdated magazines.

It wasn’t much, but he didn’t require any better.  Recently, his only clients had been the Kindred, and none of them worried about his taste in furniture.

Not to his face, anyway. Vampires are like suburban parents that way.

The office proper, or his ”inner sanctum” as the narration calls it, is pretty standard; huge oak desk, “an elaborate telephone answering machine,” a table with a fax machine, PC, and printer on it, some metal cabinets, and more red chairs. It was also mentioned to have an “outrageous” rent that was almost worth it for the building’s cleaning lady.

The glow of a nearby streetlight gave the room an eerie, ghost-like interior.[...]No cheaply framed photos with hearty endorsements or tacky paint-by-numbers artwork hung on the walls. McCann believed in a strictly functional workplace. Besides which, it made a better impression on potential clients.

McCann sits behind his desk and reloads his submachine gun.

Considering what had happened already tonight, it seemed like good policy to stay ready for trouble.

For all the good it did him, but good thinking I guess. Proper paranoia helps in the World of Darkness.

Then he checks his answering machine. Two of the messages are for “divorce work.” That kind of stuff “didn’t interest” McCann, but there’s another detective in the building who specialized in it, and McCann trades him leads for favors, so he writes down the names and phone numbers. Another message is trying to sell him health insurance.

McCann grinned. Considering his present circumstances, he wasn’t sure he could afford the premiums.

Finally, McCann gets around to checking the mail he was carrying around during the first chapter. After separating the junk mail, he’s left with the small box, which was from Switzerland, three letters from Venice, Italy, another from Australia, and the last from Peru. He starts with the mail from Venice.

Dated approximately a week apart, the letters contained detailed records for financial deals made during the previous seven days.  The facts and figures covered hundreds of major business transactions throughout Europe and the United States. The detective scanned the documents carefully. There were no unusual expenditures or unexplained finances. Not that he expected to find any. The masterminds of the Giovanni Clan were the greatest financial wizards in the world. They kept a tight watch on their investments. McCann merely wanted to make sure no one other than him was skimming the profits.

Interesting. Despite doing work for the Camarilla, McCann also has connections to the independent Giovanni Clan, or at least is stealing money from them, and in a way that even their “financial wizards” can’t detect. There’s an even more interesting reveal at the end of the paragraph.

The longer he lived, the more cautious he became. And, though he appeared to be in his mid-thirties, Dire McCann lived a very long time.

Huh. The summary on the back cover describes him as “mortal.” Then again it also misspells his surname as McCannan, so...

Next he opens the latter from Darwin, Northern Territory Australia, which contains a newspaper clipping. Recently, “nomadic” Aborigines fled their reservation in the Tanami Desert and set up a shanty town outside the city. Officials tried to get the “troublemakers” to go back, “but with no success.”

No one could offer an explanation for the natives’ unexpected migration. Nor were the unwelcome Aboriginals willing to discuss why they had abandoned their primitive shelters and made the long trek to the coast. Their only reply was to point in the general direction of the Macdonnel Ranges and utter the word “Nuckalavee, Nuckalavee,” over and over again.

The hell’s a mythological Scottish demon doing in Australia?

Unfortunately, no one other than the natives understood what the term meant.

Have they tried asking a Scottish person? Maybe someone from the Orkney Islands? This is like Native Americans fleeing from the Loch Ness Monster or a kappa.

For those of you who’d never heard of it, or had never played The Bard’s Tale, the Nuckelavee is this big horse with the upper torso of a rider growing out of the middle of its back, and it has no skin.

The story ended with the mayor promising city residents that the shanty town would be gone shortly.

Australians being shitty to the Aboriginals. What a surprise.

I know, hypocritical coming from an American. But still.

McCann grimaced. He understood why the Aboriginals had fled. But he doubted that the government officials in Darwin would believe his answer. Or care. Mentally, McCann noted that he should request that his clipping service search for any follow-up stories. Or reports of unusual disappearances in the Northern Territories.

It’s a minor spoiler, but not an unsurprising one given the setting, but the World of Darkness version of the Nuckalavee is a vampire; a Nictuku, the name for a fourth generation Nosferatu. Father Naples mentioned them during the prologue when he was talking about the Nosferatu, remember?

“A few of their fourth-generation progeny are rumored to be grotesque monsters, known as the Nictuku.”

But whether it’s the mythological Nuckelavee or a vampire character based off of it, it’s bizarre that Weinberg took a mythological creature from one culture, transplanted it to a completely different one on a different continent, and act like it was always a part of that culture. Even in 1994, before Wikipedia, anyone familiar with Scottish folklore would know better. Hell, check that fan wiki page I linked just now. The reference used for the page came from VTM: Clanbook: Nosferatu. It came out in 1993, and it’s most likely what Robert Weinberg used for information on Nuckalavee too. If the information on the wiki is accurate to the book, then the book straight up says that the thing is Scottish. Even if the vampire migrated at some point, more people should know about it, at least as a legend, than some scared Aboriginals.

Speaking of... I’m no expert on Aboriginal cultures, living on the opposite side of the Pacific and all, but I’m sure they can communicate better than pointing at some mountains and grunting a monster’s name in fearful tones like some old Hollywood tribal character. At least enough to say “there’s something life threatening by our reservation and we’re getting away from it.” The story’s sympathetic to them at least, but that part rubs me the wrong way.

Next, McCann opens the envelope from Peru. It contains a photo and a handwritten note from a member of the Explorer’s Club. The photo makes McCann “swallow hard”. More bad news.

Scribbled in black ink around the margin of the photo were the words, “Found at entrance to huge cavern, Gran Vilaya ruins, Peru.” The picture showed a massive stone statue of a crouching demonic figure with a misshapen, bloated female body and the face of a snarling jaguar. Circling her feet in a ring were a dozen stone heads. Judging from the size of the skulls, the demon stood a least fifteen feet tall.[...]It fronted a huge network of previously unknown caves that honeycombed the Andes for miles. No one knew for certain the purpose of the underground warren. Several members of the expedition thought it might have served as a ritual burial ground for the mysterious Chachapoya civilization due to the numerous skeletons found scattered all through the tunnels. Which would therefore identify the demonic figure as the guardian of the dead.

Credit where it’s due, Robert Weinberg didn’t just make up the Chachapoya. Little’s known about their ancient civilization, and some of what we do know come from the Inca that conquered them and the Spanish, which aren’t what you’d call unbiased accounts. They even lived in the kind of “fog-shrouded region” or “cloud forests” that Gran Vilaya was described as being found in.

The writer ended his note with the hope that McCann felt his research money was being well spent.

McCann used money from a “secret Giovanni slush fund”, which of course none of the Giovanni clan elders know about, to fund the expedition. McCann feels the cost was justified, but would’ve preferred it it if they’d found nothing.

The statue was not a representation of the spirit guardian of the dead Chachapoyas. It showed their murderer..

Not sure why the Spanish had to build underground catacombs for the Chachapoyas to die of disease and poverty in when- No, wait, he’s talking about a vampire.

A creature who abhorred all life, she was named Gorgo, the One Who Screams in Darkness. And the empty caverns in Gran Vilaya indicated that once more she walked the Earth.

Turns out she’s another Nictuku, like Nuckalavee. One with a kickass title. It looks like some very old, very powerful vampires are waking up, and McCann is not happy about it. He opens the box from Switzerland. It came from “an old friend.”

Inside were photocopies of more than three hundred pages of hand-written memos and high level classified documents. They were a mixed selection from a half-dozen different European security agencies. All were marked TOP SECRET.

But we readers don’t get to learn what they say, because McCann checks his watch and learns he’s gotta be at the Club Diabolique to meet Alexander Vargoss in half an hour.

McCann’s preparing to leave when his phone rings. Remember his “elaborate telephone answering machine?” It’s got some spiffy futuristic tech in it like a “caller ID feature” and the ability to record phone calls. Stuff that only someone secretly skimming money from the Giovanni can afford. But seriously, I enjoy reading old stuff and seeing things that are common today described as rare and amazing. Hell, I didn’t know caller ID was a thing in 1994. My family’s middle class and we didn’t get phones with caller ID until the 2000′s.

Unfortunately, none of his phone system’s features come in handy in this case. He doesn’t recognize the number, but McCann answers the phone anyway.

A man whose voice McCann didn’t recognize spoke in clear, crisp tones. “Lameth,” said the stranger, “beware of the Red Death.”

Without another sound, the man hung up, leaving a stunned McCann holding the receiver. Lameth, the speaker had called him.

Nah, Dire, despite his clear, crisp tones the mysterious caller still has a bit of a lisp. He was actually calling you “lame-ass.”

It was a name from the dawn of history, one that McCann believed long forgotten. A master schemer, the detective did not like unexpected shocks. Especially ones of this magnitude.

McCann certainly has the connections and resources to be a master schemer. Still, I’d of liked to have seen him actually scheme before the narration straight up calls him one.

He tries to listen to the recording of the phone call, but turns out it didn’t record. The caller ID screen is blank, and even the phone number it picked up earlier disappeared. This is starting to sound familiar.

Luckily, McCann memorized the number despite his previous confidence in technology. He calls the local police station, specifically a cop named Harry. He asks for a favor due to him for a bottle of wine he sent Harry for his birthday; the location where his phone call was made from. Turns out, it’s from a booth in the front lobby of his building. One that’s been out of service for months.

Let’s recap. Assassins just tried to kill McCann. Powerful vampires are waking up abroad, which is worrying for a very old schemer with an eye towards international news like him. And an untraceable magic man just called him by a very old name no one should know and warned him of a threat with an ominous name. All before he’s gotta meet with the Prince of St. Louis. Good thing McCann’s a big tough book protagonist, ‘cause I’d certainly be a little anxious.

Not a believer in coincidence, the detective knew the three events had to be linked together. But how?

The voice on the phone had warned him to “beware the Red Death.” McCann had absolutely no idea who or what the Red Death might be. He had a terrible suspicion that he would soon find out.

[crowsvalentine]

Lost Hope

Kaz and Inej do what they always do, they learn and they adapt. 

(not linked to any other fic, this is entirely stand alone)

Please give some feedback, I don’t write much angst and I kinda really like doing it but I’m not even sure if I’m any good!

It was a question he never thought he’d be asking. A possibility he’d never thought he’d be hoping for. A future he stopped wanting and never thought he’d ever have. They’d tried, almost every night, almost every minute they were free, they tried positions and techniques that randoms on the street had told them about, they tried. But nothing was happening. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair one night, “I tried giving you everything but I can’t give you this.” 

She placed her small hands on the sides of his face, smiling at him with a smile he would rather die than never see again. She promised him she still loved him no matter what, reminding him that she was with him for him and not his abilities. 

“Nina is back tomorrow and says she knows a healer who can help us,” she’d told him, “they can tell us if something is wrong.” 

She kissed his forehead before laying down next to him, back pressed to his chest as she slowly relaxed and fell asleep. He could’t join her, however, trying to understand why nothing was working for them when people who weren’t even trying get it so easily. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he looked down at the hand that was splayed over the bed, her fourth finger showing him that they’d done everything right up until then.

A week later he found himself sitting across the closed door to his own bedroom. The healer needed the room empty to concentrate, she’d ordered him out the moment she’d been done with him and called Inej in. Nina had slid down to the floor next to him, and if he were anyone else, he knew she’d have taken his hand in her own and promised him everything was going to be okay. But nothing was ever okay with them, even after years of them being at the top of the world. Things still went wrong, plans never went as they were supposed to, these are things that they dealt with on the daily. Yet, he felt like he never felt any of those other times. With every second that door was closed, he felt little cracks appearing inside him, things that were once sealed opening up once more at the thought of something being wrong. 

“It could be just the stress of wanting it so bad,” Nina finally said, “I knew of women who couldn’t until they’d stopped trying.”

“Too bad we don’t know how to stop trying.” 

She frowned and sighed before standing, holding her hand out to him in vain, knowing he wouldn’t take the help to stand. 

“Let’s go for a walk, Brekker, you need some air.” 

They walked, only down the street and back up again, Kaz not wanting stray far from the house in case they were called back in and he wasn’t there. It was the healer standing at the door that made him run the last few feet to the house, the look on her face quickly telling him what he didn’t want to hear.”

“I felt nothing inside of her,” the healer said, sipping from the cup of tea Nina had handed her. She’d put Inej to sleep for the checkup, and informed them that she’d be awake in a few hours and would want all of them there when she was told the news. They sat in the small kitchen until then, her and Nina drinking their tea while Kaz’s sat untouched in front of him. “There is usually something else alive inside women, millions of little bundles of cells that hold half a life. I didn’t feel any inside of her.” Kaz knew the basics to the reproductive system inside of women, but he was no healer or medik. “Eggs, Mister Brekker,” the healer said, “we call them eggs.” He knew of that. 

“She would have known if she’d been sterilized, wouldn’t she?” Nina asked

Kaz gripped the edge of the table, his nails scratching through the hard wood. He should have known, he should have at least suspected. The same thing was done to the girls at the White Rose, though the procedure was consensual, they’d had the choice whether to do it or not. Inej wasn’t given the choice, or the knowledge of it even happening. She wouldn’t have been the only one. He stood, fast enough to knock the chair he’d been sitting on to the ground, the motion and sound making the two women jump. 

“Send a runner when Inej wakes up,” he said as he started out toward the door.

“I need to know where you’re going to do that.”

“I’m going hunting for a peacock.” 

If the false plague that Nina had created did any damage to the Menagerie, the business didn’t show it. Men and women still streamed in and out of the building, not seeming to remember that just over a decade ago, a red X marked the front doors. Kaz scowled up at it before he walked in, the plague may have lessened business, but the fact that the building still stood and was pact with people, was enough for him to hate it. 

Heleen Van Houden seemed to be ageless, she still looked the same as she did the first time he’d seen her standing in the center of her brothel. It was the work of a tailor that Kaz knew was stowed away in one of the top floor bedrooms. Women like her didn’t deserve the privileges of a tailor, they deserved to grow old and wilt. 

She seemed to sense him walking in, her eyes going straight to him the moment he stepped inside. No words were said, but people screamed when Kaz pulled the gun out of his coat and aimed it directly between her jewel lined eyes. 

“It’s been a long time, Dirtyhands,” she drawled, looking unaffected by the weapon that could end her life in less than a second. “How’s my little Suli Lynx?” 

Kaz pressed down the trigger, smirking when she finally showed any ounce of fear. The gun clicked, but no bullet was released. 

“Imagine if it was loaded,” he finally said, “it may not be my way anymore, but I’m not incapable of killing if I have a good reason.” He paused and looked around, all eyes were on them. “Remember that you’ve given me a reason, Heleen, but I need some names before I put a hole through your head.” 

Threats like this would have had him picked up by the Stadwatch in a matter of minutes, but he was Kaz Brekker, he owned the Stadwatch and after everything she’s done, all Heleen Van Houden had were some diamonds and a handful of girls that would leave her side the second they could. 

He sat across from her in her office, being escorted there by the hired muscle that stood at the Menagerie doors, Kaz wanted to show her how her men wouldn’t lay a hand on him even if she told them to, but he didn’t, he still liked the idea of Heleen thinking she was safe.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he paused, “today. But I should.”

She didn’t let out a sigh of relief, only shifted her eyes to the one-way glass that surrounded her office. She could look out, but no one could look in, something that is critical in her establishment because she needed to know what her girls were up to when she wasn’t around. However, in the past she looked around in glee, her entire world laid out in front of her making her money and giving her everything she ever wanted. Now, as she looked out, Kaz could see thoughts swimming through her head that scared even the great Tante Heleen. He smirked.

“It will all be taken away eventually, Heleen,” he reminded her, “just because I’m not putting a bullet through your head or slicing open your throat at this very moment, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

“And why is my life on your list now, Brekker? I haven’t gone after that Suli Lynx of yours in years.” 

“Why?” He stood, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, the image of Dirtyhands from those first few years of his arrival coming back ten fold, and Heleen looked ready to soil herself. “Because I’m trying to have a fucking family but my wife can’t bare my fucking children!” 

She froze, the tiniest of smiles ghosting over her face that Kaz wanted to blow off with a bullet. But he couldn’t, he still needed her. 

“She was sterilized for her own good, Brekker, all the girls are,” she spoke as if it was a gift, the best thing she could give her slaves. “It’s not my fault she couldn’t understand what was being said to her.”

“Translators exist.”

“I didn’t want a translator, I wanted whores who couldn’t get pregnant.” 

He did as he had done back at the house, digging his nails into the hard wood of his chair’s arm rests, trying to keep the urge to dig a blade through her heart at bay while he finished what he came for. 

“Names, of the healer who did it, of the men who held her down, and any one else involved.” 

She said nothing, just sat back, smiling at him with the same smile as before. 

“What do I get in return?”

He moved quickly, as she was talking he’d reloaded his gun, and now, it had one less bullet, and Heleen stared at the shattered glass that now lined her office floor. He’d broken the peacock figurine she had perched on her desk, the bullet now embedded in the only real wall of her office, right near her arm. 

“I don’t put the next one through your skull.” 

As he listened, memorizing every name and address that she listed off for him, he imagined the bullet hitting her right between her eyes, wanting to see her body hit her desk, blood pooling all over the contracts and the forged indenture agreements. However, he just sat, making no move to make his imagination come to life. By the end of it, she sat, stiff as if bracing herself for something.

Then he stood, and she raised her arms to protect herself.

“Thank you, Heleen,” he said, buttoning his coat with the gun still in his hand. He said nothing else when he turned and made for the door, not planning to turn around at all to even look at her one last time. But then-

“You should be happy that whore can’t ha-”

Heleen Van Houden, Tante Heleen, The Peacock, hit the floor like any other barrel rat, one eye wide, the other blown out by a bullet. No parade, no fireworks, just another body for the boats to take at night and dump in the water. 

When he stepped out of the office, all eyes were on him, everyone hearing the shots but not understanding a thing. Kaz stood facing them all, face hard, hands resting easily on his cane. 

“Everyone but those who work here get out in the next five seconds or the next bullets will go through you.” 

People ran screaming, and the girls huddled together on one of the feathery couches. Kaz waited the five seconds, and five more before he put the gun back into his coat. 

“Where the fuck have you been, Brekker? How do you just leave Inej like that, how can you,” Kaz tuned Nina out as he made his way through the house. He climbed the stairs slowly, so slowly that Nina took a step back just to watch. He put a hand up to stop her, shaking his head when she questioned him. He needed to be with her alone, and Nina thankfully understood this. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said the moment he stepped into the room, and his heart shattered into a million pieces when her voice cracked and tears started down her cheeks. She stood in the middle of the room, practically falling into him when he wrapped his arms under her and lifted her. She continued crying as he walked to the bed, and didn’t stop even when he sat her down on his lap.

“You did nothing, Inej,” he whispered, “nothing is your fault, nothing.” 

“I can’t, I can’t give you what you want. What you deserve, Kaz, you’ve tried so hard to,” she took in a shaky breath, and Kaz pressed his lips to her head as she did, “tried so hard to change, you did change, and now I can’t-”

“Inej, Inej I didn’t change to have this,” he assured her, she sniffled and finally looked back up at him. 

“Yes you did, this is what you wanted, and I-”

“I didn’t change to have a child, Inej,” he said again, “I changed to have you, to have you in my life, I took off all my armour for you, I became a better man for you, you and no one else.” 

She nodded slowly and laid her head back down on his shoulder, and Kaz understood. He shifted, not letting go even once as he moved back on the bed to rest against the headboard. She needed to cry, she needed him to hold her. She was strong, but there are things that could break even her. Even if for only a little while. 

“I killed her,” he finally said after almost hours of silence, “Heleen, she’s dead. She can’t hurt any more girls.”

She looked at him for the first time, her eyes red, her lip swollen from where she was biting it, and she looked relieved. Taking his face between her hands, she brought him up to press his forehead against her’s, closing her eyes as she took a deep breath.

“Thank you, Kaz, thank you for saving me and all of them.” 

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @rubyredhoodling!

For rubyredhoodling, who likes BAMF Stiles (and Derek), spark Stiles, Derek comes back, and there may be just a small hint of mafia au. Season's greetings, and I hope you like it!

Read on AO3

*****

Priorities

There were hunters in his town.

Stiles sat behind his desk, picking up the plaque reading "Sheriff Stilinski," only mildly defaced by the removal of his dad's first initial, and turning it over in his hands. There had been five people who held the office of sheriff between the two Stilinskis; the first, and only one elected to the position, had been a deputy that had ties to hunters but hadn't taken part in any activities that could lead to firing or even disciplinary charges. He'd laid low long enough for things to settle down and then used his connections to mount a successful campaign to remove John Stilinski from office - because surely all of the dramatic violence in Beacon Hills had to be due to the sheriff not doing his job.

The former deputy's hunter regime had lasted a year before he was removed from office in disgrace. Not for the harassment and humiliation of anyone even vaguely connected with the supernatural (or somewhat brown in skintone), but for having so grossly mismanaged the department's budget that the county only found out the sheriff's office had run out of money when checks bounced. The forensic accountant that was appointed as interim sheriff stayed for a month, presenting a preliminary audit and her resignation at the same time. The next sheriff had died in what was referred to as either mysterious circumstances or a hunting accident, depending on who was speaking and who was listening, followed by the fourth sheriff resigning by way of an email sent after he got into his car and kept driving after attempting to investigate said mysterious hunting accident. His family had to stop unpacking and reload the moving truck to join him.

By the time the fifth sheriff in two years had been appointed, Stiles had resigned from the FBI and come home on a mission. If his dad wouldn't leave - and he wouldn't - then Beacon Hills had to become a safe place for his dad to live, and not just within the perimeter of mountain ash and totems and runestones and every other type of protection magic that Stiles could find to place around their house. The forces of evil couldn't even see the house, but it wasn't as if his dad would agree to stay inside it forever.

If the fifth sheriff had contented herself with accepting the drop in the murder rate and number of animal attacks, she might have lasted. As it was, she had arrived one night at the high school in time to see the longest-serving deputy remaining on the force go up in flames, a number of people growing fangs and claws, another set of people shooting at everything that moved, and one Stiles Stilinski, holding a baseball bat and smiling. A few tumultuous hours later, she'd listened stonily as Scott did his best to explain things while applying pressure to the gunshot wound in her shoulder and Stiles methodically adjusted the scene to reflect the story he was dictating should be told by everyone.

One hunter had deviated from the story, theoretically supporting the fifth sheriff in her quest to find answers. Caught between what was being whispered in her ear and what she gleaned from Scott, the fifth sheriff made the mistake of finding the middle ground between them, the one thing they agreed on: blaming Derek Hale.

Within twelve hours of Derek being brought in and held for questioning, the sheriff's hunter lover was in FBI custody on multiple weapons charges, with more possible charges pending, and the fifth sheriff was implicated in facilitating the transfer of illegal weapons over state and national borders. The blood and DNA samples the fifth sheriff had forced to be taken during Derek's pre-detention medical screening were discovered to be too contaminated to use, lawsuits had been filed, and more than half of the officers on shift had called in sick.

"You fucked up," Stiles had told her when he came in, his hands empty and his clothes casual. "But you can still turn it around."

Maybe if she hadn't fallen so deeply in love with her hunter, she would have listened. If Stiles had had more time to prepare, maybe he would have been able to be more persuasive, or at least diplomatic. Definitely things would've gone better if he'd been able to get his dad to go talk to her, even if it would've meant Stiles was left talking to all the guys on the force that were spending their 'sick' day at a barbecue in the Stilinski back yard.

But, then again, the fifth sheriff thought it was a good idea to respond by threatening to arrest Stiles, so maybe not.

She had been politely asked to leave her position, and less politely invited to cooperate with the FBI into the investigation of her lover's ties to organized crime, before Stiles had finished checking his email as he sat in the police station lobby. Lingering let him give Derek a ride home when he was shortly released from custody without ever being formally arrested. The sincere, formal, and voluminous apologies delivered to Derek by the elected representatives of Beacon Hills carried more than a whiff of 'please don't sue,' and Stiles had to turn away to keep a straight face as Derek thanked them gravely for their commitment to justice.

The impression he had gotten was that they'd beg his dad to come back - they'd done it before, after all. Instead someone had the bright idea of appointing him to the job, anticipating his ten-year plan by at least eight years. Stiles had had to sit there and deal with it as his dad laughed himself sick.

And now, after six years of making damn sure his town was a safe place for all of its citizens, after everything he'd given up and everything he had lost, after a year of peace and calm, there were hunters trying to move back in.

"Sheriff?" One of the baby deputies peeked around the corner, both sets of eyelids blinking convulsively with nerves. "There's someone here to see you."

"Take five," Stiles said, putting the plaque back on his desk as he stood. "I'll speak to them."

There weren't many people in the station; Stiles was a big believer in having his officers out in the community as much as possible, and if it also kept the possibility of casualties down in case of an attack then all the better. That didn't stop all three deputies that were there, even the young naga, from making a point of having a clear line of sight to both Stiles and the visitor. "Alpha... Viel, isn't it? I hadn't been notified you were planning a visit."

"I wasn't aware I had to report my movements to the local law enforcement," the alpha said, still leaning against the wall in the waiting area and examining his fingernails. "This is America. Free country, or haven't you heard?"

"See, I was taught that good manners are important no matter where you are." Stiles swung open the pass-through, breaking the mountain ash line. "But, whatever, you're here now. Did you want to talk out here, or is my office okay?"

Extending one hand, the alpha tilted it from one side to the other, as if critiquing a manicure. "Do you get a lot of werewolves stupid enough to walk into a trap?"

Stiles shrugged and closed the station doors with a gesture. "You tell me, since you walked into someplace you can't walk out of just to have this conversation. I mean, I'm not all that interested in keeping you, but you asked."

"You think you're funny, don't you?" The alpha's claws came out and he lunged forward, laughing when Stiles flinched. "Now that, that was funny."

Waving to his deputies to get them to stand down, Stiles said, "Was there a point? Because I feel like I could probably deliver your lines from the script, and I have actual work to do."

"Does your script include the fact that I've got your pack?"

"It might surprise you to know that comes up a lot," Stiles said. "The only real question I have is whether you're working with the hunters that showed up or if they came here looking for you."

The alpha's smug smile fell and he lunged again, not feinting this time, only to be brought down before Stiles could even lift his hands defensively. His roar cut off with a crunching noise, and Stiles shuddered as something bounced off his foot. "Was that his fang? Did you break his fangs?"

"You're welcome," Derek said, still kneeling firmly on the alpha's back, one hand grinding his face against the floor. "Your dad said to tell you we're having quinoa casserole for dinner."

Stiles groaned. "You should never have told him about that spell I found to unclog his arteries. This reign of terror is endless."

"It would have taken a year off your life, if it didn't kill you," Derek said. "I regret nothing."

The alpha stopped trying to buck Derek off his back, and Stiles squatted down next to him while Derek yanked his head up. "So, you were saying something about my pack."

"They're dead," the alpha said, blood running down his chin. "You're all dead."

"Lydia's fine, she and her mom are at your house with your dad," Derek said, ignoring the alpha's muffled curses as he got pushed into the floor again. "I don't know about any of the others."

Shaking his head, Stiles said, "Bring him, he can go in the special cell while we check on everyone. And we've got hunters, by the way. Cora called in to let me know when they checked into the motel."

Derek grimaced. "I hate that place." It wasn't a new observation, but Stiles didn't feel the need to defend Cora's choice to buy and run the local no-tell establishment. Especially since it might've been partly, a little bit, due to Cora losing a bet with Stiles. Just a little bit, though.

They almost had the alpha in the cell, struggling and cursing, when the front doors blew open and distracted Derek's attention long enough to lose his grip. The alpha didn't waste any more time posturing, making a break for the closest window and ripping his claws through the deputy that happened to be in his way.

"Stop!" Scott's alpha roar did nothing to slow the retreating alpha, but it made Lewis hesitate in reaching for his radio to call for an ambulance. Derek was already kneeling next to Sams, discreetly assessing his injuries and applying his first aid training. Stiles tried to remember if there was anything supernatural about Sams that would require warning the hospital, but if there was he couldn't think of it.

Warning his people was the next priority. There were probably municipalities that did not have codes in place for supernatural shenanigans, but it hadn't made sense not to anticipate Beacon Hills being Beacon Hills. Scott was trying to demand answers, but only Lewis was paying attention to him; Stiles didn't have time to deal with it as he got a hold of Yang's shoulders, turning the naga to bring their eyes in contact. "Hey. You with us? Breathe, deep breaths, everything's fine now. You protected everyone as much as you could."

"I froze," Yang muttered, ducking his head. "Sams--"

"Will be fine," Stiles said. "And freezing was better than charging in."

The wail of the ambulance siren cut through the air and Stiles gave Yang a final nod with eye contact before moving to make sure the path was clear for the emergency crew to enter. Not for the first time, Stiles contemplated briefly whether kidnapping his dad would be a viable strategy for actually leaving Beacon Hills behind.

***

"Derek, do you think the spark is gone?"

Rolling his eyes, Derek joined Stiles where he was leaning on the hood of an anonymous dark blue Camry, significant mostly for how hard it would be to distinguish from the number of Toyotas on the street. "Stop trying to make 'Spark' happen. Deaton using a corny metaphor does not make 'Spark' a thing."

"Hey, it's a thing! It's my thing!" Stiles spread his arms and wriggled his fingers. "I didn't spend all those years in sparky magic school to be--"

"Austin Powers, really?" Derek's look of disdain would have crushed a lesser being. Luckily, Stiles was used to it.

"I need to use references old enough for you to get them, since you're practically a senior citizen." Stiles gave his best angelic smile. "Don't think I missed that you actually attended bingo last Sunday."

With a sigh, Derek said, "I go to bingo every Sunday, or did you forget that someone promised the Daughters of Thoth that we would attend to them on a regular basis?"

"Oh." Stiles rubbed the back of his neck, dislodging the collar of his plaid shirt. "I kinda wondered why they hadn't said anything, but I haven't had time to get to them."

"You can't do everything yourself," Derek said. "No matter how much you keep pretending that you can."

Sputtering, Stiles waved his arms around. "Dude! Not fair! I'm here specifically waiting for you, just so that I'm not going alone to deal with these assholes."

Derek's lips twitched. "And it only took how long to convince you not to go by yourself?"

"About as long as it took to realize I wouldn't end up having to stop to protect you." Stiles pushed himself off the hood and picked up the baseball bat that he'd leaned against the side of the car. "Although I'm still waiting for you to realize how sexy I am and agree to post-fight makeouts."

The flick of Derek's finger against the back of Stiles's neck was a brief sting, and a familiar one. "Focus."

"Right." Stiles climbed into the passenger seat, keeping one hand on his bat and the other near the release for his seatbelt. After a few minutes of driving in silence, he said, "I bet you five bucks that they ambush us on the blind curve behind Old Mill Road."

Derek took his eyes off the road long enough to glance at Stiles. "No bet. Except they may be smart enough to have one wait, pretend they're not working together so that they surprise us when the evil cavalry rushes in."

"Okay, one, the fact that you just said 'evil cavalry' turned me on just a little bit," Stiles said. "And you're totally right, they are absolutely that dramatic. Do you think we should stop early and, like, walk in? Do our own big show of 'ha HA, I am not alone!'"

The noise Derek made would've been called a huff by anyone who hadn't put the time in over the course of years to recognize it as a laugh. "You just don't want anyone to know you're driving to the scene of a crime in a sensible mid-size sedan."

"With an impeccable safety rating," Stiles said mournfully. "It's terrible."

"You'll live." The blind curve was coming up, and Derek slowed just enough to lock eyes with Stiles and share a brief nod before he gunned it around the corner. The spikes in the road made the car fishtail, but Derek's reflexes were good enough to keep the car on the road, pulling to a skidding stop just a few feet from the treeline.

Stiles stepped smoothly from the car, bat hanging loose in his grip. "You have no business in my town."

The hunter was just a little older than Derek, with hair that touched his collar and a brown leather jacket. Stiles had thought the man was a waste of oxygen when he'd read some of the reports from the official background check and the unofficial victim and witness statements from his hunting activities, but the fact that the man was tall and good-looking somehow made it worse.

"You're harboring fugitives," the hunter said, flashing a smile that made it clear he knew exactly how handsome he was. "Doesn't seem right, a lawman sheltering the lawless."

In a flat voice, completely free of inflection, Stiles said, "Oh, what a clever argument, I am undone."

"You think you're clever," the hunter said. "You got Brent all riled up - thanks for confirming you're a spellcaster, by the way, good to know - but you don't know as much as you think you do, and you're definitely not going to live to see morning."

"The only thing I don't know is why you're here," Stiles said, his grip on the bat tightening. "But I'm guessing you felt like destroying something beautiful."

The hunter smiled again. "Fight Club. Great movie."

"You'd be the type to think so." Stiles knocked the bat against the inside of his sneaker before bringing it up to his shoulder. "So, who goes first, do you go first?"

Raising a pistol he'd been holding in the shadows next to his leg, the hunter fired three shots directly to center mass. Stiles stood impassively as his protective spell took the impact that the kevlar didn't, preventing the shots from even bruising him. Whatever magical kryptonite the hunter thought he had, he either hadn't deployed it yet or it hadn't worked. "My turn." Stiles lifted the bat, dug a foot into the ground, and swung as if he was trying to send the hunter's jaw to the outfield.

The hunter had his own magical protection, but it wasn't enough; the crunch of teeth and bone was loud in the air as blood spattered onto the trees behind them. "I'd say you could still leave, but that's not an option," Stiles said, swinging the bat again, this time at the hunter's stomach. "You can still live long enough to go to prison, if you surrender very quickly."

More shots rang out, one coming close enough that it tore through the shoulder of the overshirt Stiles was wearing. Turning his head slowly from one side to the other, Stiles felt a coldness rise inside him, creeping over him and lifting the corners of his lips. "Evil cavalry's here. Let's see how that goes."

Five targets, closing in to surround him; his own backup lurking in the darkness and making sure no more surprises were hiding in reserve. Cover fire for the sixth and primary target to escape. Car behind him, partial shield, but also a risk if someone thought to light up the gas tank. Moving quickly, Stiles broke the main hunter's shoulder with a strong sweep of his bat before seizing his neck, holding him up long enough to block two shots before throwing him down towards the trees.

"Down," he heard, but he'd already stooped to pick up the hunter's gun and just turned his head to see Derek fly past, half shifted and running a few steps on all fours before throwing himself in the air and landing in full wolf form with his fangs buried in a hunter's bicep. He always tried to avoid tearing out throats during a fight but it might not matter; the chunk gouged out of the attacker's arm was bleeding so heavily that the man might not make it to the 'ask questions' portion of the night.

Lifting his arm, Stiles listened to his own breath whistling in and out of his chest as if traveling through a huge, empty cavern. One shot, two shots, pause and fire again, shift stance and fire again. Three targets now, with three down, and Stiles was still calm as the coldness blanketed everything except the calculations needed to get through the fight.

The alpha roared, leaping to the top of the car and flashing his eyes red as he looked down at Stiles. After a flicker of a glance, Stiles turned away from him, concentrating on the two hunters still firing in his direction. The alpha wasn't a threat worth thinking about, because Derek was already charging, a blur of black fur and blue eyes dripping a trail of blood from his flashing teeth.

"I'm still willing to let you live," Stiles said, not bothering to raise his voice. "Limited time offer, one time only."

He waited, his head tilted and a faint, pleasant smile on his face, until the crack of another gunshot rang out. He was tired enough that he brought his left hand up, palm flat out, to support with the gesture the spell to stop the bullet that had been aimed at his forehead. It fell to the ground and he shrugged, stretching his arms out before returning fire with the last of the bullets in the gun he'd held onto. "Okay, death it is."

Leisurely, Stiles moved to the closest downed hunter and stepped on the man's hand before taking his weapon and the fresh clip he'd been trying to load. With a wink, Stiles said, "Ah-ah, no trying to be sneaky. Either you're down or you're dead."

"Fuck you!" The hunter was struggling to get off the ground and Stiles allowed it, using the time to slam the clip in place and take the shot to eliminate the next closest target, peering out of the brush cover to attempt another attack and instead getting a neat hole between his eyes for his trouble.

The hunter at his feet managed to get a knife in his hand, lunging towards Stiles with one last burst of strength. Stiles just sidestepped and ended him with a shot to the back of the head, attention momentarily caught by the fight between the werewolves. The alpha had Derek pinned in a canine restraint position, and the coldness in Stiles flickered as he wondered whether the man had veterinary experience. It didn't last long; Derek shifted back to human form and threw the alpha to the ground in a crack of broken bones, and Stiles still had business to attend to.

The one hunter left standing wasn't firing, and Stiles moved to where the leader was rolling on the ground, clutching his broken arm and yelling for his men as best he could through broken teeth and a fractured jaw. Crouching next to him, Stiles pulled the man's backup piece from his ankle holster and placed it in his left hand. "There you go. Sporting chance, right? Can't just kill you if you're helpless - then I'd be just like you!"

"Except, no," Stiles said, standing up. "Because I didn't hunt you down. I didn't go to your home, I didn't set up an ambush for you, and I sure as fuck didn't decide to devote my life to the pursuit of genocide by targeting the most peaceful, helpless people I could find."

The cold and emptiness drained away as Stiles stood and lifted his gun. The hunter dropped the smaller gun Stiles had given him and started pleading, but Stiles fired before he could manage more than one word.

A howl behind him made Stiles turn around, just in time to see the alpha lunge at Derek, fangs bared. Stiles raised the gun, feeling shaky and almost too tired to lift it, but it wasn't necessary; Derek sidestepped smoothly and took hold of the alpha's hair, using it to pull his head back and expose his neck. The arterial spray shot over Derek's claws as he dug deep into the dying alpha's throat, almost as red as the glow overtaking the blue in Derek's eyes.

"There's one unaccounted for," Stiles said, because he'd trained himself so well on prioritizing threats that it was the first of the thousand thoughts in his mind that coalesced into speech.

Jerking his head to one side, Derek said, "Pissed himself back there. Hasn't moved since."

Stiles sighed. "Come out here. If I have to go find you, it won't end well."

"There's one on the ground that might make it," Derek said. "I'll need your shirt."

With a quick glance over Derek's naked, blood-spattered body, Stiles handed the overshirt over. "Yeah, it's a bit chilly out."

"Or I could make bandages." The last hunter crept out of the treeline, white-faced and shaky. Derek sighed as he headed to help the wounded hunter. "They get younger every year."

"Because we're getting old," Stiles said, although the hunter really was a kid. "Jesus, what are you, twelve?"

Shaking his head, the kid said, "Sixteen."

It was enough to make Stiles feel a rush of sympathy which drained the last of his energy and the chill of battle from his system, leaving a welter of confusion where there had been a clear emptiness. "Didn't anybody tell you to be home early on school nights?"

"Werewolves killed my mom and dad," the kid said. "These guys killed the werewolves, said I could help other people. Then we came here."

"Aw, crap." Dropping the gun, Stiles retrieved his baseball bat and ended up using it as a cane when it became apparent that something had turned his ankle into a mass of pain at some point while the adrenaline and emptiness had kept him from feeling it. The kid didn't move throughout, not even when Stiles sank down on the front bumper of the Camry and rested both hands on top of the bat to help himself stay upright. "So, hi, I'm Stiles Stilinski. I'm the sheriff around here, and I don't take kindly to people coming to town and planning to murder people."

Frowning, the kid said, "But--"

"I'm going to stop you there," Stiles said, holding a hand up and then putting it back on the bat when the kid flinched. "The next thing out of your mouth is probably going to piss me off, and I'm tired, so. First off, werewolves are people. Second, while some werewolves are murderous fu-- jerks, so are some humans." Stiles gestured to the hunters on the ground, including the one Derek was stabilizing.

"I've heard swearing before," the kid muttered, but Stiles ignored the comment in favor of continuing.

"Thirdly." Stiles had to pause for a moment before he could remember where he'd been going with that. "If I can handle things legally, I will. I offered the chance to surrender and be arrested, and I didn't kill anybody that didn't try to kill me first - but I'm not about to be stupid enough to let someone live who's just going to come back and try to kill me again."

The kid went paler, which Stiles wouldn't have bet was possible, and stood up so straight that it made Stiles ache in his lower back just to look at him. "So you're going to kill me?"

"What? No, weren't you listening? You didn't try to kill me, I don't kill you." It only relaxed the kid a little bit, but it would have to be enough. "I don't know what I'm going to do with you, but death is currently off the table."

A shot rang out, making them both flinch, and they both turned to see Derek, still stark naked, holding a pale hunter in the air by the neck. The hunter was trying to break his hold with one hand, the other covered in blood dripping from the wound that Derek had bandaged with the ripped up plaid shirt. "Where's the fucking gratitude, I ask you? That was my favorite shirt!"

"It was an eyesore," Derek said, still easily holding the hunter as he tried scratching and kicking his way to freedom. "What do you want to do with this one?"

"Check him for any more weapons and then bring him here," Stiles said. "If he wants to die, he can off himself after he's answered some questions."

This earned him an epic bitchface from Derek, who threw the hunter to the ground in front of where Stiles sat. "They never answer questions."

"I hardly ever get to ask," Stiles pointed out. "There's wipes in the trunk, clean up a bit before you get your clothes back on."

"You clean up," Derek muttered, but disappeared behind the car anyway.

Stiles waited quietly while the hunter cursed and blustered, although he noted with interest that the kid flinched away from him and circled around to get Stiles and the car between himself and the injured hunter. At length, the hunter got himself to his feet and faced up to Stiles, holding his injured arm and looking around the small clearing. "You won't get away with this."

"Me?" Stiles tilted his head in confusion, looking from side to side as if he was on The Office or there would be someone there who could confirm what he just heard. "Are you serious right now?"

"You're building up this underworld empire, providing sanctuary for all sorts of vermin just to build an army - we're on to you." The hunter lifted his chin defiantly. "Jeff had a crappy plan, but he had the right idea, and there's others. We'll be back, and next time we'll kill you."

Scratching the back of his neck, Stiles thought about what the guy was saying. "So what you're saying is, your group went off half-cocked because you guys thought I was getting too powerful by, what, allowing people to live somewhere without having to be afraid for their lives 24/7?"

"Fuck you," the hunter said, even as he swayed and half staggered from the blood loss. "I am one, but I represent legions."

Stiles watched him as he fell slowly forward, eyes fluttering. "You realize that quote is about demons, right? You just pretty much used your last words to say hunters are demons."

The hunter twitched as if trying to get up again, but fell unconscious without managing it. His breath was becoming shallower as the bandage around his arm finished unraveling and blood seeped out. "So, Derek? Kid? Anyone feel like heroic measures? Because I'm tired, and he tried to kill me."

"It's too late anyway," Derek said, coming back around the car as he pulled a t-shirt down over his head. "If we'd gotten him to the hospital for a transfusion before he tried to shoot me, maybe. Since he wouldn't even let me stop the blood loss, he basically killed himself already."

Sidling along to peer around the car, the kid said, "He was a creepy fucker. Jeff was talking once about the birth rate and I asked if he meant, like, sterilizing, and Chase laughed and said direct extermination was quicker."

"And you didn't think to question that at all?"

"Did you say this guy's name was Chase?"

Derek and Stiles spoke at the same time, then exchanged a glance that had Derek raising his eyebrows and Stiles shrugging. "Kid in a cult doesn't question the cult, especially if there's guns. But, dude." With a wave to the corpse, Stiles said, "He was a hunter named Chase. It's kind of hilarious."

"There is something seriously wrong with you," Derek said, rubbing a hand over his face. "Your sense of humor isn't twisted, it's a spiral."

"Don't front, you love it." Stiles moved to stand up and then winced when pain shot up his leg. "Okay, not doing that. You're on body duty, I'm going to hop along into the car and start the paperwork."

Derek frowned and picked Stiles up, carrying him to the back seat before kneeling to inspect his ankle. "It's probably just sprained, but you'll need an x-ray."

"I just want a shower and my bed," Stiles whined. "Can't I deal with it tomorrow?"

"No, because you'll try to use magic to heal it and make yourself worse." Carefully, Derek helped him maneuver himself into the car with his ankle propped up, then tossed a package of wet wipes at his face as soon as he was settled. "Try to clean up. We'll go as soon as I get the bodies out of sight of the road."

"Love you too, boo!" Stiles chuckled as Derek gave him the finger without turning around, even if there was a slightly bitter edge to the humor. He settled down to cleaning off his hands and wiping his face, only to jump when a throat was noisily cleared from just next to him. "Holy crap, kid, you scared me!"

With a shrill laugh, the kid said, "I scared you?"

Stiles dragged a thumb over his mouth, trying to hide the laugh trying to escape. "Fighting is different. If I'm not in a fight, I don't need to be all..." He trailed off with a gesture towards his own face and the night outside the car.

"Scary as shit stone cold killer?"

"I was going more for hyper-focused, but okay." Gesturing to the front passenger seat, Stiles said, "Go ahead, sit down. You might as well ride with us to town while we figure out what to do with you."

Gingerly, the kid slid into the seat and even buckled his seatbelt. Stiles was starting to get fluffy kitten feelings about this child, which was going to be a hell of a thing to explain to his dad. "I don't really have a place to go? Jeff was my foster dad."

"And isn't that a scathing indictment of the entire foster system." Stiles sighed and rubbed his face with his hands, then grimaced and deployed a new wet wipe. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Noah. Noah Kowalski." The kid started to reach back to shake hands, but got tangled in the seatbelt and then pulled back after Stiles pulled the filthy wipe away from the half of his face he'd managed to clean. "Uh. I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but..."

Nodding, Stiles said, "No, totally understandable. Stiles Stilinski, I don't remember if I said. Noah is my dad's middle name. He's still the one everybody calls Sheriff Stilinski - everybody ends up calling me Sheriff Stiles, it's kind of a thing."

The kid didn't seem to know what to do with that, just gave a small "ah" before they fell into an awkward quiet. Finally, just as Stiles could feel the river of babble reach his lips and threaten to burst forth, Noah said, "So how long have you and that guy been together?"

Stiles choked on thin air and the words that jammed up on his tongue as his brain rebooted. "You-- he-- wha?"

"Sorry!" The kid retreated into himself like a turtle. "I was just, you know, never mind, it's not my business, I'm sorry I asked!"

With a small cough, Stiles said, "No, it's whatever, we're just not - we're not like that."

Over the years, Stiles had been the target of all sorts of pointed looks, but somehow the one Noah gave him just then managed to combine the distilled platonic ideals of all them - pity, condescension, disbelief, amusement, and indulgence were all represented in this sixteen year old's judgmental stare. "You don't have to pretend, it's not like I'm homophobic or anything. You even just said you love him."

"Lots of people joke around saying things like that," Stiles said. "And, anyway, he barely puts up with me. He'd never be-- he'd never want--" Breaking off, Stiles cleared his throat. "Anyway, yeah, nothing like that."

"It could be! He's totally into you, it's obvious!" Noah's eyes were sparkling now as he turned around in his seat to look directly at Stiles for the first time. "You could just tell him how you feel, or, or, I could help you set up, like, a super romantic atmosphere and--"

"Kid! Seriously?" Stiles kind of regretted crushing Noah's enthusiasm as he hunched in on himself again, but no way was he indulging any matchmaking delusions from a child that had probably shot at him. That way lay madness, and trying to sing along to Adele while under the influence of alcohol and/or sugar. "No Parent Trap moments, okay? Derek doesn't need to deal with that."

Crossing his arms and facing forward, Noah said, "Whatever. It's not like I care about a werewolf and some hick sheriff who murders people."

"Says the kid who--" Stiles cut himself off with an internal reminder that he was supposed to be an adult. "I've got some calls to make."

He'd barely gotten his phone out when Derek slid into the driver's seat and started the car. "I already got a hold of Parrish. Your dad's going to meet us at the hospital to take temporary custody of Noah."

"Hey, how'd you know my name? And you can just drop me off at the bus station, I'll get home by myself."

Derek made some sort of answer, but Stiles couldn't hear it over the blaring alarms in his head repeating "you fucked up, you fucked up, you seriously fucked up" in ever-increasing volume. Not only was Derek a werewolf, he was an alpha again - he'd probably heard every word they'd said, especially since he would've wanted to monitor Stiles for any signs of pain or discomfort, because that was the kind of caring, considerate asshole that had made Stiles fall in love with him. There was no way things wouldn't be weird now.

Or, maybe? What exactly had he said? Stiles racked his brain to try to remember the exact phrasing he'd used, wondering if maybe there was a chance of playing it off. Had he actually, out loud, admitted that he was hopelessly in love with Derek? He couldn't remember.

They pulled to a stop, Stiles barely noticing the lack of noise from the engine, until his dad opened the door across from him and leaned his head in. "Hey, kiddo, you okay?"

"There's many kinds of love! Love doesn't just have to be romantic!"

His dad paused for barely a moment. "Okay. So, I'm going to let you talk about that with Derek while you get your leg looked at. Good to know you're doing okay."

Hitting his head against the back of the seat in front of him seemed like an excellent idea. It was unfortunately too well-padded to knock him out, and so he was fully awake and aware as Derek helped him out of the car and kept an arm around him for support as Stiles limped his way into the ER. "Okay, Mr. Cassidy, slow down. You're overdoing it."

Stiles gave him a look of blank incomprehension, and Derek's ears turned faintly pink. "Hopalong Cassidy? Your dad's childhood hero? There's a poster in his office, Stiles, you've got to have noticed it."

"I never paid attention to Dad's westerns," Stiles said. "Are we there yet? This is kind of a little excruciating."

As he should have fully expected, Derek just swept him up and carried him the rest of the way into the ER, depositing him gently into a wheelchair the triage nurse provided. He was promptly whisked off for poking, prodding, and intense questioning about the state of his health insurance despite the fact that Scott's mom had made him a "frequent customer" card for the hospital years ago. By the time they delivered him back to the waiting room with a bandage, a boot, a prescription, and a stern lecture about not putting any weight on his ankle, he half thought that Derek might have left to deal with the fallout of the rest of the night.

Only half, though, because it was still Derek, so of course he was sitting in a horrible plastic chair, pretending to be asleep while the other people waiting to be seen watched him with wariness or fascination. Stiles suppressed a sigh, because, well, same. "Come on, Sleeping Beauty. I'm about to turn into a pumpkin."

"Stop mixing fairy tales," Derek said, stretching as he stood. "And it was the carriage that was a pumpkin, so unless you're giving out ri-- No."

On any other day, Stiles would've had about fifteen 'jokes' in a row about giving Derek a ride. For now, though, he waved a hand and said, "Too easy. Just take me home."

Derek's lips twitched, but he didn't say anything as he left to get his car, the anonymous Camry having been driven away to be cleaned and hidden away again in the depths of the impound lot. The Camaro might not have had room for him to sit in the back and stretch his foot out, but he had both standards and pain medicine. They'd make it the five minutes it took to reach the Stilinski house.

Or even the ten minutes it took to get to Derek's apartment. "This is a lot nicer than my usual kidnappings."

"You just need a better lair to take people to," Derek said. "Having to take people you've kidnapped to your dad's house really limits your potential."

"Oh, ha ha." Stiles crossed his arms and pouted as he was swept once again into Derek's (strong, dependable, sexy) arms. "Living with family is a valid life choice and a cultural norm for most societies."

Derek smirked. "Sure, Stiles. Remind me again, who made snide comments for a solid week about the Henderson pack?"

"Okay, no, there's living with family and then there's whatever sister wives, dear leader culty bullshit was going on there." Stiles relaxed into the couch as soon as Derek set him down, letting himself sink into the perfect squishiness of it. "Seriously, I am going to steal this couch someday. It's like laying down on a cloud that can hug you."

"You can have it," Derek said, sounding unusually serious. "You can have anything you want that I can give you."

Cracking an eye open let Stiles see that Derek was sitting on the coffee table, directly in front of Stiles and looking... Stiles couldn't define how he looked, just that it made him breathless and he had to close his eyes again to try to get his own heart under control. "I don't need pity."

"Good, because I don't have any," Derek said.

Stiles hauled himself to a sitting position, facing Derek and the music. "You heard the kid talking about us being together."

"I did." Derek's face was impassive, but there was so much emotion in his eyes that Stiles couldn't bear to look at him even as he couldn't tear his eyes away. "I also heard you tell him it was because I wouldn't want it."

"Didn't I also say something about people joking--"

All of the words Stiles knew dried up and disappeared when Derek took hold of both his hands, cradling them gently. "It's okay. If you were joking, if you didn't mean it that way... I don't expect anything from you."

"Okay," was a harsh, croaking whisper, all that Stiles could manage as years of half-formed hopes were crushed and died with one simple sentence. "Okay, that's fine."

Derek's eyes swept down and Stiles started to pull his hands away, but Derek held on. "No, Stiles, you don't-- You're under no obligation, if you're just joking or you really just love me as a friend, that's enough, I won't pressure you or talk about this again. That's... Whatever you want, that's what I want."

It turned out hope wasn't dead, but it hurt. "You-- what are you saying?"

"I'm saying... I guess I'm saying that I'm in love with you." Derek let out a breath, his shoulders relaxing like shedding a weight even before tightening to brace for a blow. "And that you don't have to love me back the same way."

This time it was Stiles clinging to Derek's hands, preventing him from moving away. "What if I want to?"

Derek flinched. "I don't need pity either."

"Good," Stiles said, still not letting go. "Because we are super compatible. There is no pity here. None at all. We're kind of a little famous for it."

"So we're repeating things now? That's what we're doing?" Derek arched an eyebrow, but stopped trying to pull his hands back. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I'm in love with you, too," Stiles said. "Asshole. Do you know how long I've been in love with you? And you're here--"

Stiles glared over the hand that Derek put over his mouth, but Derek just smiled. "Now, I could let you keep talking, since I know you like that. I could stand to hear a little about how long you've loved me, since it might make me feel a bit better about how long I've been in love with you."

He stopped there, waiting, while Stiles practically vibrated with curiosity. Curiosity and rage. And maybe some anticipation. A lot of anticipation. "Or?"

"Or you could sit in my lap and we could make out. Just a little." Derek's smile was everything sinful and tempting. "Or, now that I know you actually mean it, a lot."

"Oh, I mean it. I mean it very hard." Stiles was scrambling to try to reach Derek, but somehow not making any headway. The problem was solved by Derek lifting him up and arranging them so that Stiles was not just comfortably situated on Derek's lap, his (mildly) fractured foot was supported by some pillows and the arm of the couch. "I never really knew I had a manhandling kink until now."

Derek's eyes flashed red, just for a moment. "I did."

That statement needed to be explored, because one of them owed the other a shitload of teasing over it and Stiles was pretty sure he could work out how to be the one dishing it out. On the other hand, Derek's alpha eyes went straight to the danger = hot kink he was already well acquainted with, and he'd been expressly invited to make sexual advances on the man of his dreams. Priorities were important.

Kissing Derek was a revelation, better than he'd ever dreamed it could be, because he'd never imagined the noises Derek made, could never have anticipated the electricity of Derek moving softly, desperately against him. Stiles was allowed to touch, allowed to run his fingers through Derek's hair, allowed to lose himself and moan and grind and laugh a little at himself and at Derek, because he'd forgotten about his stupid ankle and having Derek jump up and growl while still holding Stiles against his erection was just funny.

It was okay, because this was Derek, and Derek knew him. The mood wasn't gone just because Stiles had laughed, or because Derek had snorted and rolled his eyes, making Stiles laugh harder. Instead it was part of it, part of them, and they would be okay. "I love you. I do, I love you, because you're amazing and you, you're mine."

"I like the sound of that." Derek lifted Stiles so his legs went around Derek's waist and his back was to the wall, holding him up and kissing the hell out of him until he couldn't think. "I'm yours."

"Damn right," Stiles panted, giving a light tug to Derek's hair. "And you're going to stay mine. Right?"

They were in the bedroom before Stiles could think coherently again, and Derek was looking just smug enough that Stiles licked his lips and waited only for Derek to finish undressing before beckoning him closer, close enough that Stiles could nip his earlobe and whisper hotly, "After we fuck the wildness out of our system, we can make love nice and slow. I'll kiss you when you cry afterward. We'll deal with the rest of the world sometime tomorrow, or maybe the day after."

"Priorities," Derek murmured, dragging a claw over Stiles with just enough pressure to cut through his clothes without harming the skin underneath.

"Okay," Stiles said, unbearably turned on and fairly certain he was going to combust. "Maybe the day after that. We'll have time."

[dovesandsparrows]

Kidnapped: Part 4

( first entry - previous entry - next entry )

The gentle hum of the hover-truck does nothing to calm Angela’s nerves. The arcade is not far down the Hyperlane, but with the van embroidered with the Overwatch symbol, it lags across the tracks, and the road stretches on and on, the end just too far to grasp. She sighs, bowing her head, to picture Genji looking up from behind one of the ancient game machines upon their arrival, beaming as the team had elected to join him after all.

That was the best possible outcome of this trip. Suited in her Valkyrie, however, with a silent Lúcio in deep contemplation beside her, and Hana steel-lipped at the wheel, it feels more like an official mission than worried friends in pursuit. Genji is not a mission, nor is he simply just an agent. His rescue should be their priority until he is home safe in her medbay, for a thorough checking and care.

Home safe with her, and his friends, whose usually bubbly-selves are so withdrawn with the worrying news of his disappearance. It nags at her too, like an ache in her chest she cannot soothe. Her face must display it at this point, because as Hana directs them off the Hyperlane, Lúcio pats her knee, then leans forward to say to the driver, “Are we close, Song? I’ll chuck on my gear, get a scope of the place from the outside. See what I can find.”

She hums in approval, then glances in the rearview mirror at Angela. “You and me for the good cop, bad cop, Doctor Z?”

Speaking with the patrons and staff at the Arcade, Hana intends to ask, when Angela simply would prefer to chase straight after him. Track down this Sombra article, cipher her last known sightings from Talon-monitoring satellites, find her before something bad finds Genji. (Winston had already told her Sombra is far too elusive for the imagery to detect, but it was worth asking, and still lamenting about now.)

Short of Hana’s joke, she replies, “I’ll speak with the owner, yes. You can join Lúcio if you want, I will be fine.”

The stunted answer makes Hana blink, to stare back out to the road. The Arcade is at the end of the street, all bright colors and taunting. “Oh, okay. Uh, Lú?”

“Nah, two people on deck would be good. Maybe you could mingle, there’d be a fan or a hundred.” He hangs over the front seat, fingers framing an imaginary Hollywood sign: “the famous D.Va, in the flesh, on world-saving business! Her prime informant: the arcade dweller.”

Hana giggles, slapping his hands away as the car cruises to a stop besides the decorated building. The display is enough for Angela, who slides out of the car, and treks straight into the Arcade. It’s smaller inside, but the levels climb up higher than she allows her eyes to follow, instead her gaze is set on the counter immediately in front, and the attending with a name badge that says “Jason”. He’s staring googly-eyed at her, whether it’s at the suit or simply her, she cannot tell.

“Ohhhh, hey,” he croons, as she approaches. “The big bosses rang, told us you were coming. Overwatch. I never thought I’d even see you guys in action, let alone meet you. It’s Mercy, right? You’re Mercy, the angel, you’re so coooooool-”

“Yes, I’m Doctor Ziegler. I need information regarding-”

“And D.Va?” The attendee’s attention is stolen as Hana strides in, only in a loose version of her MEKA suit, but still in-gear all the same. She beams at Jason, moving to give him a high-five.

“Hey dude! You can call me Hana, and Doctor Z here, she’s cool too.” She leans on the counter, and Angela tries to relax, reminding herself they are all here to help. “They told you what happened to our agent?”

“Shit, yeah, scary stuff. Talon was here. I could have died, y’know, was texting my boyfriend about it. Then I told him: Overwatch is here, so I really got nothing to worry about, huh.”

“We will try our best to find him, and to secure the grounds,” assures Angela after a deep breath, complete with a patient-brand warm smile. “One of our agents is currently scoping the exterior, we’ll go over the inside.”

“For sure, Doctor. We’ve got everyone on the ground floor, cleared out where it happened so it was clean for when you guys got here.”

Sure enough, the floor is packed with gamers of all shapes and sizes, some with eyes glued to screens, others watching them with mixed expressions of confusion, awe, disbelief and suspicion. It is only small down here, it seems tables and machines have been mashed together like a jigsaw to make room. The capacity of the room means all of the game advertisements - some posters of Hana, too, she realises - cannot be seen among all the people. There is a low murmur from all the patrons, talk of their games, their characters, the goings on, or simply the passing of their lives. Angela hadn’t noticed any of it on her march up to the bench. That, or she chose to ignore it, thinking during such a dire situation as this they would have at least closed the building to the public.

Apparently not. Many things had changed during the war. The refusal to cave to fear was one of them, but it called into question where to draw the line at “stupid”. Allowing people to remain here, with possible Talon activity confirmed in the area, was definitely stupid. Yet she couldn’t dwell on it now, what’s done is done, and unfortunately not her business. Genji is her business. Finding him, making sure he is safe and well.

“Thank you,” she says, shaking the tension from her voice. Genji’s status could worsen if she’s clammy like this, and regardless, it’s unprofessional of her. Better status should be expected of an agent of Overwatch, and a doctor, to not let the situation get to her.

“I’m gonna go make some friends,” Hana announces proudly, giving Jason some finger guns, then disappearing off between the machines, like she’s a part of the scenery, colors and all.

The attendant takes her into the staff area, introduces her to the other staff, and the manager. They are kind, and make her a coffee as she peruses the video footage (erased), reviews the entries to the arcade today (clean), examines the grounds (bare) and checks in with Hana for witnesses (nothing). It turns out, to her utter dismay, Talon may have just committed the perfect kidnapping.

It tortures her, so she reviews where he was taken again: an upturned stool on the third floor behind a machine entitled “Omnic Kong 3”, a nearby open window with nothing but sky in its wake, and the absence of Genji. It’s also when Lúcio chooses to appear in said window, making her jump so much he begins spewing apologies.

“But hey, uh, Doc Z. You’re gonna want to come up and look at this.” Her heart leaps: he’s found something, finally, a lead. Something to grasp, to confirm to herself Genji isn’t entirely out of their reach. “You got your Valkyrie activated? Follow me up here.”

The window is only small, but so is she, climbing out of it with ease. She sits three floors up, legs dangling over the edge, to give a weak smile at Lúcio across the way. He’s perched on the wall next to her, skates grinding in a whoosh sound against the bricks. He glances above his head, where the gutter of the roof begins, something heavy in his eyes.

Her heart leaps, even more than when she activates the Valkyrie suit, pushing herself out of the window. The suit catches her, a quiet pulsing as the wings strain to keep her afloat above the ground. Once the slow descent starts, Lúcio climbs the rest of the way to the roof, so she beckons the suit to follow him.

He’s hunched over a tray, only about the size of her hand, but it is more than they had a second ago.

“Took me a while to find, but hey. Here it is.” He toes the tray, disgusted. Angela crouches down to examine it. “Looks to me like the dart they used to sleep him, they probably shoot him through the window. Hung down, one shot: bam!” He reloads an imaginary finger gun. “Then nabbed him back up here with the translocator, and took off.”

“I’ve seen this technology before,” Angela confirms, with a sigh. “It’s stolen from Overwatch, Ana Amari used the same technology. Almost had it perfected before she was killed.”

“You think it can lead us to him?”

She considers. “Perhaps.” The headache nabs her suddenly, pulling at her temple, beckoning towards the sleep dart debris in the tray. She massages it away with her hand, the other lifting the head of the dart with a gloved finger. “Talon likely finished the technology. If we find out how, we can track down the chemicals they used to do it. It’s a unique serum, it…. Shouldn’t be too hard.” The glimmer of hope she allows herself is minimal, but there. Lúcio is beaming, at least.

“That’s great news! I’ll get onto the others right away, I’ll find Hana! I’ll meet you down in the foyer!” He’s disappeared over the edge of the roof before she can say another word.

--

Hi all and welcome to the second D&S Fab Collab event!

Season two is centered around the prompt: Kidnapped. The fourth addition is authored by @talizorahs !

♚ For illustration continuations, please limit these works to 8 panels. For prose continuations, please limit these fics to 1k words. These are not benchmark figures, just the maximum amount for a submission.

♚ Submission from the next participating member is due on the 15th of November, either submitted to the blog or DMed to any staff member on the Discord server.

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[i-w-p-chan]

Red Crystal - Reload

Summary: Red Crystal AUAU/companion fic/sequel. Tsunayoshi of the Vongola picks a different choice and decides to be perfectly honest with Enma from the start.

Note: much, much shorter than Red Crystal. This is a Red Crystal AUAU, companion fic and sequel all in one. And I'd really appreciate it if you go read Red Crystal before this one. It's not just because of Selfish, Evil Author Needs, but also because there are parts that are merely mentioned/summarized that are explained in more detail in RC, descriptions, mainly. Descriptions that hold hints towards other aspects of the 'verse. So, yeah, it's better to read RC first.

And again, sorrynotsorry.

WARNING: Completely AU, Fantasy AU, Not A Happy Ending, FEELS, CRYING, There Is A Kiss (In An Emotionally-Charged Not-Actually Romantic Context), Is This What They Call Hurt No Comfort? *Shrugs*, Shameless Self-Indulgence, Fic Told In Titled Segments.

Disclaimer: Don't own KHR.

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Red Crystal

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Tsuna stood in front of the cushioned pedestal proudly displaying a red crystal on top of it.

He observed the crystal as he deliberated.

He had a choice to make and he hated it, hated its heavy weight on his shoulder, hated its implication and what it meant.

His hand went out to gingerly trace the surface of the crystal before he carefully cradled it to his chest.

He had a choice to make, between sending Enma off to Shimon island and letting him wake up there, cutting off all ties except the ones necessary to enable the two of them of closing the doors- and letting Enma out, right now, and telling him everything.

The thrum of life in the crystal sent a spark through Tsuna's Fire, turning him both warm and cold, digging up aching memories of blood, heavy bodies and empty eyes, memories of Enma lying on the ground, bloodied and unmoving.

Tsuna shook his head to forcibly get rid of the image and refocused on the crystal with its warmth, Enma was here, Enma was alive still, and Tsuna was going to be honest with him about the situation, no matter the cost, no matter how much being close to Enma again would hurt later when the two would inevitably separate.

Tsuna walked towards the couch in the room and carefully laid the crystal on it before putting his hand on top of the crystal and pushing both his Soul Fire and Spirit Core into it.

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Reload

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The crystal glowed, expanding and stretching across the couch before receding, leaving a young man in its wake.

Tsuna's breath hitched in his throat as he raked his eyes over Enma's form; he had grown taller, skin only a bit on the pale side and figure only slightly thin.

Tsuna's shaky fingers unbuttoned the shirt Enma was wearing and almost cried at the sight of his chest: there were no scars.

Tsuna's breath whooshed out of his chest and a heavy weight toppled from his shoulder. He had worried- despite the many reassurances he heard from the others that it wouldn't be so- that the healing coma wouldn't provide Enma's body with its needs, that Enma's growth would be stunted.

(The fact that the scars were gone too was a bonus)

(It had been five years and Tsuna missed him.)

Tsuna restrained himself from just dropping, boneless from relief, on top of Enma and busied himself with rebuttoning Enma's shirt.

And right on time, too, as Enma stirred into wakefulness not a moment later, his eyes blinked as he opened them and looked around him in confusion before he propped himself to a sitting position.

Tsuna tried to subtly put himself back together, at least for the mean time.

Enma's eyes then landed on Tsuna and stared at him, looking deep into Tsuna's eyes.

There were only the briefest hints of recognition in Enma's eyes, and his entire expression belied his confusion.

Enma's eyes then glazed over and he stopped breathing, his Core fluctuating in distress. Tsuna flared his Soul Fire in response, snapping Enma back to the present.

"Have we met before?" Enma spoke, voice shaky and hoarse and looking like the answer may make or break him.

So, memory problems? That was okay, Tsuna could handle it. Probably.

"Yes." Tsuna answered before he could second guess himself.

"When?" Enma's hands shot out and tightly grabbed Tsuna's, looking urgently into his eyes.

"We met when we were kids," Tsuna spoke in a soothing tone, his expression soft, "My mother was born and raised in your hometown and she took me to visit it often, that's how we met."

"My hometown?" Enma murmured, his Core fluctuating again for few moments before he (unconsciously, Tsuna assumed) forcibly reined it in, his grip tightening for a moment, "It's gone, everyone's gone everyone is dead!" Enma hissed.

Tsuna did not respond, letting Enma continue, "You lived. I… I survived?" Enma's frowned in confusion, as if he couldn't comprehend the fact.

"Yes." Tsuna inhaled, might as well tell Enma before he chickened out and diverted the topic to something else, "It was a very close thing. You were gravely injured and we had to put you in a healing coma. You just woke up."

"How long?"

"Five years."

Enma suddenly leaped to his feet, one hand letting go of Tsuna's to hesitantly hover over Tsuna's chest, "You weren't hurt, were you?"

Tsuna gathered his courage to clasp Enma's free hand in his own, "No, I wasn't." Tsuna pondered whether he should say more on the topic, almost deciding on moving on before he caught the look in Enma's eyes- desperate, begging, craving a confirmation, "You protected me, I came out of the town practically unscathed."

Enma let go of Tsuna and dropped to the couch, shoulders sagging and sighing in what appeared to be relief.

Tsuna reached his hands under his shirt and pulled out the small bag that he kept hanging on a string around his neck, he then gave the bag to Enma.

Enma took the bag absentmindedly, opening it without conscious thought. He put the bag in his lap and rummaged through it; the moment his hand came into contact with the contents of the bag, he snapped into attention and carefully spilled the contents into his lap.

An assortment of crystals in varying shapes, sizes and colors tumbled into view and Enma's breath hitched.

Tsuna averted his eyes, refusing to see Enma's reaction.

"Tsuna." Enma's voice was brittle, Tsuna stubbornly refused to look back at Enma no matter how tempting it was given that he hadn't told Enma his name after he woke up which meant that Enma remembered his name!

"Tsuna, please, look at me." Enma sounded so small and on the verge of tears and Tsuna couldn't keep his eyes averted.

When he looked at Enma, he saw him gingerly cradling the shining, orange, drop-shaped crystals.

Tsuna was suddenly very aware of the bandages wrapped around his left forearm and carefully hidden under the sleeve of his shirt.

"Tsuna… why?" Enma seemed at a loss for words.

Tsuna opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out, not that he expected it to. He hadn't gathered enough courage to confess about the orange crystals. He sighed and reached for his Priest robes thrown over the back of the couch and draped them over his left arm while trying to act casual, "It's getting late. Come on, you need to go to sleep. We'll talk later."

Enma gathered the crystals back in the bag and clutched it tightly.

"Keep the bag, I had it prepared for you," Tsuna said over his shoulder and walked towards where the Soul Fire-locked secret entrance in the hidden library room was and touched it with his own, causing the floor to vanish partially in one corner of the room and show a staircase going down.

Tsuna gestured for Enma to go down first before following him and returning the entrance to its previous form.

Tsuna led Enma to the sleeping quarters and escorted him to the room that was going to be his for as long as he was staying, and then gestured to the door on the room's left, "That's my room. You can come over if you need anything."

Enma nodded mutely and entered the room, closing the door behind him.

Tsuna sighed, tired; things could have definitely gone better.

(Pros of assigning Enma the room next to his: Tsuna got to keep Enma close in case of emergencies. Cons: the walls weren't thick enough to block out the sounds of Enma's muffled sobbing.)

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In the Dust

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Enma holed himself up in his assigned room throughout the next few days, only coming out when Tsuna coaxed him out for necessities like food and water. Not that Tsuna blamed him; Tsuna, unlike Enma, had years to come to terms with the great loss he suffered when Shimon town was attacked and everyone except him and Enma were killed, Enma missed five years of his life and was just waking up in a world that he only half-remembered (if that).

Enma looked horrible whenever Tsuna saw him; pale with blood-shot eyes and bags under his eyes.

He started to look better by the fourth day and even spoke a bit with Tsuna.

Tsuna was immensely grateful.

"Where are we?" Enma asked as he gently rolled one of the orange crystals in his hands.

"Vongola head quarters," Tsuna answered promptly, putting down the book on seals he'd studied forward, backward and sideways many times through the last five years, "They're directly under the Sky Temple, they lead to the offices on the surface, but that building is more of a cover. The main members stay here along with the dock for our ship."

"The Sky Temple? You work as a Priest there, right?" Enma gestured to Tsuna's Priest robe, which Tsuna had left next to him given that he was in Vongola head quarters.

"Yes. Why do you ask?"

Enma hesitated for a moment before asking, "Is it possible for me to join too? Even though my Soul Fire isn't from the Sky Spectrum?"

"Yes, you can. The diversity would actually be a good thing. A balance between the Sky Spectrum and Earth Spectrum is something we need. And since the Shimon are gone, that leaves you the only person capable of providing the other side of the scale. I'll take you to Xanxus to handle the details."

"He's the Head Priest?"

Tsuna hesitated, wondering if he should tell the truth or not, before he berated himself- he'd promised himself to be honest with Enma, "I am. But I won't be around for much longer and he's already stepping up to some of the Head Priest duties to succeed me once I leave."

Enma searched his face before averting his eyes, his gaze landed on Tsuna's book, "Is it because of the doors?"

Tsuna's silence was enough of an answer.

"You need two people to close them, one from the inside and one from the outside." Enma sighed before he stood up and walked over to sit next to Tsuna and grab onto his hands, "You're going to go close it from the outside?"

Tsuna nodded.

"You're going to be locking yourself out."

"I know."

"I'm going to help you then. Seal the doors from the inside. I remember I did it before a couple of times. It's true that I did it for practice and under supervision but I'll do my best to help you out."

Tsuna freed one hand as he smiled bitterly and reached for the book, "I guess we'll be practicing together."

Enma tentatively smiled back, just as bitterly.

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Duty/Farewell

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The days spent studying sealing together flew by too fast for Tsuna's tastes.

There was so much he wanted to tell Enma, so many things he wanted to do with Enma, to compensate for the five years of separation, but he couldn't. He couldn't be selfish, not when they had a weak point that could easily be exploited.

The Walls surrounding the Sanctuary were there for a reason, and their doors were left open for five years.

There was no room for delay; Enma still remembered the seals needed to seal the doors from the inside and didn't need much practice in setting them up, all the loose ends he had to tie up were handled and Xanxus had already took up position as both Head Priest of the Sky Temple and the current head of the Vongola, and the medicine Tsuna needed to deal with the flashes he had whenever he stepped foot in Shimon town was prepared (he even had another dose for Enma, just in case).

Xanxus personally manhandled him to the ship and let him drop to the floor next to Enma, who responded by throwing an arm around Tsuna's shoulders and squeezing.

Tsuna exhaled, put his face in his hands and carefully pulled himself together. When he raised his head again, he looked at Enma with a steely expression, "It's time."

Enma stared back at him with a similar expression, and Tsuna felt himself relax and tense up in equal measures.

(Tsuna suddenly wished he could go back in time, to a time before the attack on the Shimon happened, and maybe, maybe, he could have made it so that he wouldn't have to force others into sacrifices they had no choice in.)

Every step he took into the island felt like another step he took to his execution.

(Everything hurt, and Tsuna didn't want to do it anymore, except he had to. If he didn't, there would be more towns like Shimon town, more survivors like him and Enma, and he couldn't let that happen.)

(Even Enma taking the vial of medicine from him and drinking it without question hurt.)

His friends sped up ahead of him and through the doors to Beyond the Walls and waiting for him there, giving him some time alone with Enma.

Enma pulled out the tools he needed and started working on the seals. Tsuna observed him, careful to engrave every stroke and edge into his memory so that he could successfully replicate them on the other side.

After Enma finished with the seals and bandaged his hands, he stood and turned to Tsuna, "Hey, Tsuna, there is something I want to give you, if you don't mind."

Tsuna merely cocked his head to the side in response. Enma walked towards him and cradled Tsuna's face in his hands before bringing their faces close and sealed their lips together in a long, chaste kiss.

After they separated, Enma reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bag, "Here." He pushed the bag into a shocked Tsuna's hands.

Tsuna tore his eyes away from Enma's face and inspected the bag, his fingers taking out a couple of glowing, red, drop-shaped crystals.

Tsuna inhaled sharply and was about to talk when Enma interrupted, "Keep them with you, please. I didn't do it because you did the same, but because I wanted to give you at least something that could be of use to you." With that said, Enma gently turned Tsuna in the direction of the doors and gave him a small push, "Go."

Tsuna walked stiffly to the doors and stepped to the Beyond before he turned around and locked eyes with Enma, refusing to break eye-contact until the doors closed completely.

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Tsuna dropped to the ground and numbly bandaged his bleeding hands as orange crystals spread across the doors in an intricate web, sealing it on Tsuna's side.

Just like it was most definitely sealed on Enma's side.

Tsuna curled his hands into fists, pressed them against his closed eyes and screamed.

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End

Aha.

Ahahaha.

[dantelaw21]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295

Click on the video above to watch Episode 295 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 295. Today is the eighth of July 2020. And this is the episode where people are sad that the Fourth of July specials are over. But we got some good news for you guys. And we are going to keep the good times rolling here. We’re going to get into the questions. I think we’ve already got a ton on the page. But real quick, we’re gonna take a minute and say hi to everybody. And we got a couple of quick announcements. So I’ll start at the bottom today on my screen and we’ll go with Chris, how are you doing, man?

Doing well here. Some of it is in full force. And yeah, things are pretty good. The only thing that is not that lovely is today. Well, I gotta go back and wear some masks again here.

So yeah, yeah, better safe than sorry. I won’t go more on that subject. I just had someone sending me something about like, Can you believe it? They might cancel football games. I was like You kidding me in a friggin stadium.

Anyways, All right, Marco How are you doing today?

Is that all day, man. It must be a screen must be up in the background. I do it. I can’t help it. This is Costa Rica, guys. This is it. This is the real deal. You’re seeing it week to week and you’re gonna see it for a year then I’m turning the damn camera off because I hate being on camera.

It’s one of the things that I like least as being on camera just.

It’s not enjoyable. It’s kind of distracting to me if this is my workstation, then I need to work so it’ll be removed after a year of UIC in paradise.

Very nice. By the way, I posted again, some results in for you guys watching. I was questioning the methods. Also, I heard its methods got slapped by Google? What are you guys doing all kinds of different stuff? We got slapped, we got slapped and I go in and look at the results and I push results and it’s better than last week. You can follow it. You can just go it’s in our free group. It’s there. It’s I post it for you. Those are results week to week. So last week, there were 304 306 calls I think it was this week. It’s 366. So it’s going back 28 days over 28 days. We client got 366 calls. I think client is happy just when the GMB mind you that’s the click to call. That’s not including what he’s getting on the website, not including form fields not including all the other stuff that’s going on. guys gonna make so much.

I told you guys I’m upset. I should be hitting myself in the head with a hammer because I didn’t think that I should be I should do that the percentage-based agreement, per call agreement, which is still really, really, really, trust me, it’s really sweet. But it would have been so much better if it were if I had done the 10 to 15% that we often do, right? We often talk about that when you deal with a client, and you can establish that trust. I didn’t know that this guy all that well, it was a recommendation. So I had to go on a per call. And now he doesn’t want to change the deal, of course. So anyway, guys, go watch. It’s in the free group. It’s there for you. It’s in the heavy hitter free. It’s all of Semantic Mastery groups is on my page on Facebook. Go see the results for yourself. And if you’re wondering how we did it, summed up. Everything is there. I am not using anything different than what we teach and what we offer what we see, first of all, what we teach in our courses. And what we offer in MGYB is what we have, we have a team of very capable V is the keyword research was done by the keyword research VA? I mean, why wouldn’t I use the things? We set things up for ourselves to get results ourselves right then that’s after we’ve proven that they work we offer them to you guys so you can make it work for you and you can go make money. Now whether you do it that’s not my problem. It’s up to you to take that step and then go do the do. How you do you know how to do it the way I do but do something. I’ll leave it at that.

Good to go. Now Wayne and I haven’t seen Wayne on Hump Day hangouts a lot. He just said RYS reloaded is setting the standards by which all other copycats get judged. Haters gonna hate.

see any? All right. How you doing today? Good, man. Good. I’m happy. I just wanted to thank everyone that we’re supporting Semantic Mastery and enjoy be during our sale. You guys are awesome. So thank you for that. Thank you for those of you guys that that took advantage that took the distance

And everything we were doing pretty big discounts on both mg y b so and Semantic Mastery so thank you for that and regarding what Marco was saying about percentage deals we might be talking about that at some point Adam specifically my main man Adam right there he might be talking about he will be talking about a percentage-wise deal so that’s gonna be pretty cool Martin calm because we have some good stuff coming up.

Danny definitely looking forward to that. Yeah, Hernan’s got some more info on that but last but certainly not least Bradley How you doing today? I’m good man. I was just mentioning you guys when we first got on before going live that uh, I’ve got like several SEO projects starting two of which I talked about last week are going to be public case studies. I actually secured well I’ve determined two locations. One is going to be Pompano Beach, Florida, which is like the Fort Lauderdale area and in Broward County, very, very competitive. And then another one in Richmond, Virginia, both trees service sites or lead gen sites. So I’m starting on that but I’ve got like multiple other projects just getting started on. I gotten away from doing a whole lot of site builds. But recently I’ve just got a lot of work that’s come in which is interesting one of our mastermind members that asked, you know, how everybody’s dealing with this COVID-19 pandemic, you know, and all this stuff with client work in agency working, it’s interesting, but I’ve had some you know, I’ve had a handful of clients suspend services when this has happened depending on the business industry, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve landed several to Tree Service clients as well as several lead gen, like buyers and other lead buyers Tree Service lead buyers, so you know, it just depends I guess on the industries guys there’s still a lot of business going on out there so don’t let that stop you from going out and you know, doing what you got to do to make money so anyways,

so now I will second that. There was the post in the mastermind is either new member I apologize. I forget who it was but asking about you know, how things are going and like I definitely saw it too like not trying to hide anything I lost three clients generally work with three to five being given time at three when Coronavirus, hidden I lost two within a week. Like, just and it made sense. Like I was like, yeah, this totally makes sense. I’m not trying to like get them back. But ever since that point, it’s been busier. It seems like I’m definitely getting more out inbound. And it’s just gotten busier and busier. So it’s kind of been an interesting turn of events that, you know, we’ll see how it goes. You know, plenty of businesses who actually finally made the plunge and moved online. Yeah.

Tons of work. Yeah. And there’s work where you don’t always expect it, just to this may seem obvious to everyone else, but I had a travel company reach out to me, and like, that just blew me away at first because I was like, are you sure you want to talk to me? Like, you know, here’s kind of what I do. Here’s what I charge. Are we on the same page? They said, Yeah, yeah, let’s talk cuz they’re like, yeah, it’s obvious. We got to diversify, you know, we need to go online and we need to have something just beside the travel. What can we do? Let’s talk. I was like, wow, okay, this is really interesting. I never would have approached them. And out of the blue, they got in touch with me. So keep your eyes and ears open. And yeah, think about those different angles. Yeah, and the last thing I want to mention about that is, you know, for example, one of the Tree Service clients, who just hired me this week, actually, we started communicating in February of this year. So those of you that don’t learn, nurture your leads, and follow up, like, you know it, you’re missing out on a big part of the business. We talk a lot about that kind of stuff in the mastermind and into your agency. It’s touched on as well. But you know, that’s the thing. We started talking with this client, he reached out to me from some of my marketing out online, right, so it was an inbound lead.

We scheduled a call then I did send a proposal to them after that just you know, about a week within a week of the discovery call. And it would, you know, it was probably four or five weeks, I hadn’t heard from them. And I did some automated follow-ups over the course of that time. And I ended up getting a callback, you know, an email back where they wanted to schedule is two partners in this business and they wanted to schedule a conference call to ask some questions and stuff. So we did that. Then it was radio silence again for about two weeks. So my automated follow-ups kicked in and started following up with them sending them emails, just you know, every couple of weeks reminding them hey, you know, that proposals still hanging out there, if you’re interested, you know, reach back out, blah, blah, blah. And they followed back up in June. So from February until June, and then now it’s July, and they just now hired me. So we’re talking like, you know, what, four or five months of time lapse between when the initial contact, the lead came in, and when they actually hired me and it was just because of follow-ups that I was able to secure that client and it’s a pretty decent client. Pretty, a pretty good amount of revenue and they’ve got a good budget too. So my point, guys, it’s really important to follow up if you’re, if you’re not, you’re leaving, you’re losing business. Does that make sense? So, anyway, definitely. Yeah, I think that’s a good note. And we talked about it earlier and we’re talking about the mastermind. For everyone who doesn’t know what the mastermind is, that’s our closed private community. You can find out more about that a mastermind dot semantic mastery comm we just had part of the Fourth of July special was a very limited time offer for seven day trial into the mastermind booking and onboarding call. We had a lot but we had several people take us up on that. And just want to put that out there that if you’re interested in taking things up to the next level, if you know that being in a group of like-minded agency owners or consultants who are trying to grow and or understand that, you know, learning from others who have been there, whether it’s us whether it’s the other people in the mastermind is the way to get results. If you’re at that point now then please go check it out because that’s the group you want to be in.

The last thing I want to touch on is POFU Live. All right, I am excited. pofulive2020. All right, it can’t keep us downright no Coronavirus us from having POFU Live, it’s just going to be virtually live. All right this year. So it’s still September 25, 26th and 27th. Obviously, you can join wherever you’re at. And we still do have just the ticket available so that you can join and check everything out and watch all the talks. We have a VIP ticket available, we’re going to have a VIP event we’re going to be getting some beers shipped out to directly to you if you sign up and then we’re going to be hopping on for an online guided beer tasting event and then do some Bs and have some fun after that after everyone’s had a couple of beers. Yeah. How’s the good stuff? And then of course we’ve got the VIP plus ticket. If you’re out there and you’re looking for someone on one time or rather a several ones you want us to chime in on whether it’s your processes, building your agency, whatever it is, you’re gonna get a hell of a deal with that. So head over to pofulive.com. We’re going to be having more details coming out as the summer goes on. We’ve already got two amazing or sorry, forgive me, daddy. We’ve got three amazing guest speakers lined up. All right. Two of them are from our very own mastermind.

We have two very successful agency owners, Jordan Fowler and Brian cattle. And then Deadia the famous video will be speaking as well, I believe he’s going to be giving some info on updated case study. But regardless, we’re really looking forward to that Rob deal, of course, will be joining us and then all of us will be there. So it’s going to be jam-packed. We got a lot going on. We got some more guest speakers. We’re getting lined up. So head over to poker live. Grab your ticket. Do you guys have any questions? You’re watching this live, feel free to pop it on the page and we’ll answer today as we go.

Sweet. Are we ready? I think so. Let’s do this. Do this. Let’s get into it.

All right. Couple things real quick. This was Marco’s screenshot. And I mean, look at that. Look at the growth right there. He was talking about in the Facebook post and that’s it 30 days like that’s amazing Marco that’s fucking impressive. And it’s, you know, it’s not uncommon. It’s common for you to have results like this. But this, that’s really impressive what I’m saying. So that’s what Marco was talking about guys, it’s the same stuff that we teach. One other thing I want to touch on real quick is I’m building out a checklist, guys using process Street, which I love. It’s for processes that I use internally in my own agency. Now it’s for training and everything else. Its amazing process street is fabulous. Anyways, I’m building out a checklist for our methods so that it will be shareable that you guys will be able to go in. And it’s kind of following the battle plan, like what we talked about in the most current version of the battle plan, which is our methods and how to, you know, put them together in the proper sequence and all of that because I guess that’s not been clear to a lot of people still so probably next week, we’ll by Hump Day Hangouts, next week, there will this will be available. So you can see there’s a lot of information in here. And it’ll be step by step with certain things that, you know, you can checkbox to go through, but just kind of want to give you guys a quick update on that, or heads up on that, excuse me, because that’s something that I’m working on now. And it will be should be ready by next Wednesday.

And it’s going to continue to be fleshed out where I’ll actually add training videos like essential essentially explainer videos, where appropriate within the actual process doc to really explain the process because not only is it just knowing the process, but it’s also the why like, why do we do these things, right. And so I want to, I want to be able to add additional information into that, and we’re going to make that available to you guys. You know, like I said, the checklist will come first and then over the coming weeks, I’m going to be adding additional like video clips in within the actual process doc so that you guys will have a better understanding of what it is and then you can just import that in your own process street account if you choose to use it.

And then make copies or what’s called run checklists off of it. And then you can use that for each project. So you can just go right on through and check off the boxes as you get stuff done for each project. So, just want to share that with you guys as well.

Okay, any comments guys before we get into it?

Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Besides Directory Submission And Syndication, What Are Other Ways To Use The RSS For SEO Link Building?

Okay, so the first one up is Nicholas. He says, besides submitting to RSS directories and building syndication rings, is there anything else we can do with RSS feeds to help our SEO and link building effort? Yeah, use them in theme mirroring with your G site.

You know if I’m going to mention this here, I can’t show you how to do it here but it’s been covered in pretty much anyone of our paid courses and Syndication Academy, mastermind, heavy hitter club, I mean any one of them it’s been covered in, but use if you know how to use Feedburner. You can create an embed code from an RSS feed using Feedburner and then mirror that in knew your G site which you should be doing anyway. Right? Well, we call theme airing, right? And then you can link build to that g site page embed, you can do embeds for that g site page link building into that g site page both embeds plus link building to the embeds. And that’s a very, very powerful way to utilize your RSS feeds, again, stalking iframes in Google properties, right. So you got a G site, Google property, Buzz boost, embed code, Google property, RSS feeds, right. So it’s dynamically updated every time you publish content. The same thing with the press advantage RSS feeds, right? Every time you publish a press release, it dynamically updates, the embed code, the RSS embed code, so it’s very, very powerful. And I use that very heavily in my theme mirroring. So anybody has any other comments on that?

Nope. Okay. Uh, something else. One other thing you can do is if, you know it depends on how many projects I always recommend that you just have one branded syndication. So tier one branded syndication ring for blog content. But you know, if you’ve got if you’ve only got one project that you’re working on, then you might want to go through the trouble of having multi-tiered networks which works great if you can manage the second tier networks, so that you’re adding relevant content. So in other words, if you’ve got an RSS feed that you if you’re only syndicating to your sent your tier one syndication network, that’s great, that’s what I primarily do but if you have if you’re looking to squeeze more power out of it too You can do the multi-tiered networks and use that same feed to trigger your second-tier networks but you also want to add in related content feeds other relevant and related content feeds from other sources is what I’m saying. If you if you’re questioning what it is that I’m talking about, just go to support.semanticmastery.com And you can that that we have a knowledge base there and you can go look into the syndication Academy knowledgebase articles and look at them there’s several knowledgebase articles with videos in there that talk about how to utilize multi-tiered syndication networks for blog syndication. And that will give you a really in-depth description or explanation of how to how to set that up properly so that you can squeeze even more power out of an RSS feed. Okay. Oh, and lastly, if you check out the Syndication Academy in the advanced RSS training, there’s additional things you can do with it there.

Is There An All In One Done For You Package For Lead Gen?

Alright, next is don’t know what the name is. But Hi, I’m looking for an all in one done for you package. Is this possible for lead gen?

I mean, yes and no, we have the SEO shield, which is pretty much all of our methods. You still have to set up the main asset unless you’re going to use the G site within the SEO shield as your primary entity assets. So your primary website, which you can do, if you have if you’re doing for lead gen two, I’m assuming you’re talking about local lead gen. Then you can. Right now we still have, or at least currently we have GMB verification services available. So you should get a GMB then you can include that in your SEO shield build. Once the GMB has been verified, if you’ve already got one, then you do submit that with your SEO SEO build, and, and then we’ll build out all of those assets for you. Then it’s a matter of content marketing, which we don’t provide content marketing services yet, at some point in the future, we may, but content marketing on a regular basis press releases, we sell those in MGYB. It’s important to do that and then in link building and embeds to your entity assets. Again, it’s exactly what we cover in the battle plan.

And MGYB is, you know, done for you services, we don’t have an all-encompassing package that does set up, you know, the website and the entity assets and everything for you. There, you have to kind of put them together, but that’s what the SEO shield is because that’s most of our methods tied into one package. Any comments on

Guys, yeah, I read this a couple of days ago, I think it was, I can’t remember when it was first posted. And I thought about this and I said that it’s a great idea. But it would be hard for us to kind of put this together and I’m going to tell you why.

I like money. And I don’t mind people giving me money right through our done for you services. I know they’re effective. And I know that they work. But let’s say that we package it all we did, we did the five, six press releases in the package. We do the link building and put that in the package, we do the embeds. And we put that in the package and everything that you usually need, or that we can let’s say that we can use for this person, we’re talking about something that would probably run in the thousands of dollars, and it may be overkill. So it might be that this person would not need all of this to rank in that niche. And they would be needlessly spending money not

I’ll say it again, although I’d love for this person to give me the money, and they’re going to get results anyway, but then they might be giving me too much. And that’s something that to me, I have a problem with that I have a problem with people having to overspend for results. So this is why we set it up, you go in, you do your own page, right? Then you come and get the SEO shield, then you wait and see what the results are. Without data, you’re going blind. Like, without looking at ranking results without looking if you’re getting form fields. If you’re getting visits, you don’t have analytics set up, if you don’t have Search Console setup, if you’re not gathering all of this data, you know, waiting out the three weeks or so four weeks, once everything is handed back to you right once when that @ID page and the drive second D site and the syndication network and you’ve primed it and you started content syndication that you’re doing posting inside the GMB whatever your money site is, and you’re doing things the way that we that we tell you to had to look and see what kind of results you’re getting. Because if you’re already there, you might, you might just need a little push to stick and solidify. You might not need anything. And so it is a good idea. So okay, just give me everything. But what if you don’t need everything? What have you? What if it’s overkill? And what if it dances for months and months, which which we seen until it, it settles? I mean, you need that you could have been making money. Instead of setting everything to death. The only problem that I have with this is that it could be overkill, so maybe we set it up for another thing that I thought for more competitive niches. Well, even in the most competitive niches we’ve seen that we can do damage with, you know, some embed, runs link building and some press releases. Sometimes it doesn’t need a whole bunch of other times it needs more and it needs that consistency. It needs posting over time it needs to solidify the entity, your entity needs to be better than everybody else’s.

Well, that’s on page work so that the results can be better. There there is no, I wish there were such a thing as a magic pill as a way to look at a niche and say, This is definitely this and only this is what’s definitely going to work for that niche. Because guess what? It doesn’t work that way. And the algorithms don’t work that way, even in the same niche in different categories and different excuse me, subcategories. It might work differently. So we don’t know. All we can do is you follow the sequence. Look at the data and if you need more, we got loads more that you could do very well.

And he says that, yeah, he will buy the GMB service and make my own site. I just need something to rank both GMB, GMB and organic. Is there such a service and yeah, that’s what you know, that’s what we talked about with the SEO shield and in the ongoing link building and embeds, right that’s in a press release. So content marketing is all part of that problem of our method. And that’s how you add a tie, you build additional relevancy and authority to your assets is by continually updating with content and you add depth to your content. Right? Does that make sense? So it’s really important to do that. And that’s why if you get an SEO shield, that’s step one, right, and SEO power shield, because that covers all of those entity assets, all of our methods that we talked about, you know, it builds all of those out for you. And then it’s about powering up those entity assets consistently and with consistent content marketing as well. So, is anyone available? Yeah, every Wednesday at 4pm Eastern.

What Are The Values Of Embeds And iFrames In Terms Of Stacking?

Alona says, could you guys break down the value of using embeds verse iframes. It’s the same thing, Alanna, same thing, right. an embed code is nothing but an iframe. Right? Is there anything that I’m missing here guys know the iframe is the code. The embed is what you do with the code on on another page, right?

Right. Yeah, all different, not especially curious to you which to use when creating stacks? Yeah, again. So I may be the question is, should you create your own embed code, right, like an iframe generator, for example? And then insert it using the, you know, insert HTML box in G sites and insert your own code, or do you want to go to insert and then go to gadgets, and you find the iframe gadget, and then insert the URL and let g sites make the actual embed code for you? It doesn’t matter. Either way. It really doesn’t matter, either way. So it’s just, you know, six and one-half dozen in the other. Do you want to create your own embed code and embed it using the HTML box, you know, insert HTML box, or do you want to let Google create the iframe by using the in the iframe gadget? Either way, it’s going to do the same damn thing. Okay. So it doesn’t matter.

Is It Okay To Add An Amazon S3 Page To The Money Site SameAs Schema?

Okay, next j says, Hey, guys just got an ID page made recently, would it be wise to add the URL of the s3 page the money site same as schema? Would this cause any harm? No, that’s what you that should be if, depending on what type of ID or schema you’re using. For corporations or organizations, which corporation is a subset of organization schema, or even local business schema or any subset of local business schema, there is an ID page designation or attribute right within the structured data. And that’s what you would link that’s what you would designate as your ID page is the s3 URL is same as to you can you can put it there too, it’s not gonna hurt anything.

I prefer actually to if it’s for if I have a branded domain, I like, you know, everything, almost everything I run goes through. I use CloudFlare for DNS. And I like to set up an actual, you know, domain map using a cname over to the bucket URL. So that I’m using it’s not on HTTPS, but it

It ends up being like, for example, id.domain.com. Or if it’s location-specific, then I’ll do like the city name. So let’s just say Cole pepper dash id.domain.com. If I’ve got multiple locations, so multiple idx pages, if that makes sense. And I like to use that, because then it once again, it’s referencing the branded domain. And if you click on that URL, it’s basically showing the bucket both the bucket URL and the ID page. If it’s a custom app, domain, subdomain, then they both show like they’ll both show but what I do is that the canonical in the actual ID page so that it’s always canonicalized back to its own, you know, to the custom domain version of it, if that makes sense. But yeah, you can add it in the same as it’s not gonna hurt anything. I always do in fact, yeah, I always do make that pardon.

What Type Of Link Building Do You Recommend To Power Up S3 Bucket Safely To The Money Site?

Also, what type of link building would you recommend to power up the s3 bucket safely to pass power to the money site GMB link building. And embeds, embeds and link building. Remember, they both, both, you know, it’s both, it’s very powerful, both of them link building directly to the idx page. If you’re using iframes, and all of that on the idx page, then you’re not going to have any issues. Also, I like to do embeds and in link building to the embeds, because you can add relevancy that way, too.

Okay. And by the way, you can, you can basically build any types of links to the idx page. We, you know, we have the service and mg y b that has been developed specifically to work with our methods, but you could do any sort of links to that really.

Now we have adept here for that right MGYB to he’s been doing it forever seems like almost a decade. So why wouldn’t we use the master? That’s right.

That’s right. And he’ll be speaking and POFU Live.

What SEO Service Do You Recommend To Push The Ranking Of A Website From Page 1 To Page 2?

So Jonah says, How do you all really appreciate the videos you put out I’m looking to rank a page for a low slash medium competition local service keyword for local with no GMB listings, just purely organic results, my competitor hasn’t updated their site for years and doesn’t have any ongoing link building from my analysis just links from years ago that aren’t particularly strong. I checked on page improved content and built a handful of relevant guest posts and press releases along with links from the G stack, but been stuck on the top of page two for months. Is there anything you guys would recommend to give the page? A bit of a push? Thanks again? Um, yeah, I mean, more content. I talked about that earlier, just adding more depth to the site. As far as you know, I don’t know if you’ve got your site siloed or what, you know, how your site is structured, but adding more content so that it’s got more relevant and fresh content that helps syndication network, like I said, if you’re going to be publishing content, you may as well do it via your blog from your money site so that it’s syndicating out to a syndication network, which again, it’s activity, that it’s in relevancy that it’s building, you can power up your syndication networks, you can power up your entity assets. So for example, once again, SEO power shield, if you don’t already have that, make sure you get that right and that’s going to put your money site in the middle and then have this SEO shield. That’s why we call it that essentially like an SEO firewall of high authority profiles branded assets that are covering or cocooning your site, so to speak, right shielding your site, then you just do a shit ton of link building, as I just mentioned, in beds, beds, you can do embeds from your entity assets, you can even embed your money site if you wanted to. And in that way it’s getting the embed code is going to be placed on pages with relevant content, then you can link build to those link building or those embed pages, right. And so that’s just a stack service. In other words, when you buy embeds services from mg y b, then you order the link building as which will link build to the embed pages, all of these things are going to help to push it on to page one and that’s really the whole game in a nutshell there anything you want to add? Yeah look at the entity and work on the structured data. I see nothing on there about what you’ve done with your structured data that’s a given now anyways.

I guess not everybody understands that but yeah, you guys structured data is critically important. Remember, there’s You can also mark up besides just organization or markup or local business markup, you can also add elements of markup the elements of pages and things like that. So you know, the more that you can add, the better you’re going to be because you’re going to have a stronger entity, right, a stronger asset. So

Can I Use The Same Target URL In The SEO Shield For The Drive Stack Expansion?

Okay, next DCs? Yo, what’s up, man, he says, I’m going to order a couple of drive stack expansions soon, but just so I’m clear, can I use the expansions for both the same target URL the shield was set up to target in the first place as well as brand new URLs. I target the homepage twice, with different top-level keywords, then add another expansion for an inner page.

Bradley, can you and Marco kind of expand on this a little bit because we just rolled this out right before the Fourth of July special, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to really tell people he just in case anyone’s watching who doesn’t know what we’re talking about with that drive expansion. Yeah, here, I’ll pull it up. And Marco, you want to kind of talk through this a little bit.

So typically, what we recommend is that, you know, you’re going to have one primary keyword that you want the brand to be associated with. And I understand there’s a lot of additional keywords, products and services for businesses, there should be one primary keyword, right. And then from there, if you got your site structured with silo structure, then you’re going to have top-level categories. And so that’s perfect for drive stack expansion, right. So now you’re going to take the top-level keyword for one of your product categories or service categories. And that’s going to be an expansion. You’re going to order, you know, expand your drive stack for that, which is what we’re looking at on this page. Okay. So what that does is that is your Google Drive expansion stack and your Google Site setup. So what that means is if you if you’ve already got your, your, your primary drive stack and G site for your entity, your brand, then that’s again, creating the association between your top-level keyword plus the brand. Then after that’s built, then you would take your silos, right, so your product or service categories on your site, and you would whatever the top-level keyword is for each one of the categories, you would create another expansion stack, which would be basically creating an additional folder inside of your Google Drive folder, your main Drive folder that is optimized for that each silo keyword, right, so each folder would be now optimized for one particular category on the site. And then a page gets created on the existing g site for the brand. Write that then all of the drive folders and files get embedded into that. So that’s how you create that theme mirroring within the drive stack in the G site. So that’s what again, I, I don’t typically order an expansion stack that’s going to target the homepage because I typically have my site structured in with the silo architecture. So I’m going to start going after once the initial stack is built for brand plus keyword Association, then I start building out the expansions for the service cap, you know, product and or service category, essentially, the silos on the site market, maybe you can explain that difference.

Not differently, but when I think of this, I think of the silo architecture, of course, and I think about how Bruce clay set this up, right? So he sets up the marble jar and they’re all of the colors are mixed. But of course, it’s marble so we can call them widgets, call them whatever you want. All right, so we’re selling marbles. And what we’re going to do with that main drive second g site is associate that with the keyword marbles. So it’s going to be g sites, site marble, whatever marbles, marbles, all colors. And we’re going to say shapes, sizes, whatever. And that’s perfect there. Alright, so each one of those jars on there is going to represent an inner page on not only the money site but the companion D site each time that you add a page. So now you have marbles, say marbles, calm. And the first one you’re going to do is green. So marbles, calm green, and red and yellow, you’re gonna write everything that you’re going to do about green marbles under that category, under that green now that hates that main page, you’re going to copy that exact same page into an error page. On the GE side, instead of you doing all that. What we do is we take that and we do it for you which take that page, we copy it, we set up the drive stack, we embed everything we add content.

And we just create that relevance. And we add that I’m not gonna say what we add, but it’s a way to pass the power through a fire hose with a nozzle. So that the power of that water think about it because you can cut metal with water. So we’re concentrating that power so that we pass the power to that inner page. Why? Because we’ve noticed and we’ve seen and our all our tests show that it’s much more difficult to rank one page for all of the keywords under that niche Marvel’s it’s much harder to do that than it is to break that up into categories. And the way that the Bruce clay shows on his website and under those, we target the keywords in that set. And what we’re after is green marbles. That would be the top-level category there. But every keyword under that would be a target. So green marble prize green marble costs, just what the best green marbles, all of that would be under that and it would be boosting that category. And what happens is, all of those keywords start pushing up that top-level category, they start coming up, and that’s how you start generating traffic to the website.

So when we thought that out, right, what we did is very simple, we take the keywords, we take the keywords that we isolated.

Now, this is inside the main drive site that you’ve already purchased. With the SEO power shield, we take that we isolate the keyword set under that subcategory which is green marbles and red marbles and yellow marbles. They should each have their own page, right so that we’re siloing properly and if they do then they should have a companion, dry stack, and G site page with them in the SEO power shield. So this is how when we thought this up, when I, when I, when I started to conceptualize it and start thinking about it, how to isolate it, and how to deliver the power, this is how I do it. I’m not gonna say here how we do it, because that’s giving away too much. But when you get it, you’ll see what it is that we do, if you break it down, like, like, we have a lot of people doing trying to reverse engineer, and that’s fine too. I’m not gonna give it away here.

So just a representation, you know, again, using Tree Service stuff, because that’s pretty much all I’m doing right now besides existing client work is tree services, the most broad keyword, right? So if I’m making brand association with the drive stack, the initial drive stack and G site, it’s going to be Tree Service plus company name, okay? And if it’s, if it’s very one specific location, we might include the location modifier, but for most of my Tree Service clients, they cover a, you know, a several County area, so we typically will just, it’ll be Tree Service and then whatever the company name is, that’s going to be the drive stacks gonna get built out for the G site as well. Okay. And then from there, that’s where you know we can silo out like Tree Removal tree trimming arborist services, each one of those would be separate sir silos, lawn care, land clearing, not all Tree Service contractors do lawn care, lawn care, but some do. landscaping could be another one. So each one of those would be your individual silos, right? Because those would be different service categories on the website. And so each one of these could get its own RYS expansion service created for it. And what that’s going to do is going to create subfolders within the primary RYS drive stack folder, right up that are optimized each one for each specific silo. And then a separate page is going to be created on the primary g site branded g site, there’s going to be mirrored for the website structure. And it’s going to include all of the drive stack files and folders that have been created as part of the expansion service in their respective pages on the G sites that make sense.

So that’s what it is. And each so for example, the tree removal expansion would be all the keywords that are associated with that are, you know, strictly Tree Removal based keywords that are going to be built in the, into the files, the GC, drive stack files, and then all of those files and folders are going to be embedded on that page, and are all going to be linking back to on the G site page. I mean, and they’re all going to be linking back to pages and or posts within the tree removal silo on the money site. Does that make sense? And then likewise, over here on lawncare, if this particular client or project had lawn care services to then there would be a lawn care expansion created, and all of the files and folders would be optimized for lawn care terms. They would all be linking to the lawn care pages and posts on the site. And then they would be mirrored onto the G site as well. Does that make sense? And now you’ve got separate targets that you can build links to within your drive stack within your G site folder, files, and folders that are that now you can buy specific link building gigs with keyword terms that are specific to that particular silo to that theme, does that make sense? So that’s how you can really start to push power into that very specific keyword sets within your actual site. Okay, anyway, that was a great question though. And thanks, Adam, for telling us to expand on that a little bit more.

How Would You Show The Progress Of Your SEO Efforts To The Client?

Alright, so next where were we that was DC SEO so Mohammed’s up next he says, Hey, guys, how would I show the progress I made for a client. My current car dealer client referred another dealer to me and I want to make a case study. What would be a good way to show the changes I effected I have the Webmaster Tools graph and GMB insights so far. Would anything else work? Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what I like to use more than anything is a search console, GMB insights and analytics. And if I’m doing AdWords or Google Ads then I typically will show ad data to, but that those are, you know, I always I don’t like to use rank reports anymore because they’re not that accurate. They’re just show an indication of the health. But they’re never all that they’re not very accurate. Because of you know what we’ve talked about many times on Hump Day hangouts with user location, you can’t really mimic location that Well, you can’t mimic browser history, browsing history, personal history, profile history, like, you know, what type of content people engage with and all that. So, you know, I don’t like to use rank trackers or rank reports really that much. I still provide them to clients, but those are always like secondary reports because I like to focus on GMB insights, analytics Search Console, and as I said, Google Ads data, if I’m running ads campaigns as well. Any other comments on that? Yeah. I mean, he has the client that recommended this other car dealer.

What is already in the door they’ve already taught? I don’t know how much more it is that you need to show or what it is that they’re asking for. But the GMB insights if you look at the one that I posted, again, in, in heavy hitter, anything like that, you can’t close the deal with something like that. Will you show and this, of course, you can go month, you can go weekly, you can go quarter by those are images that can I can’t show the actual GMB. But if you go in there, you can show the quarter, you can show the month, you can show it week to week, you can pick a timeframe, you can go into the historical data in the GMB and pull that up. I mean, you go into that historical data, you go a year back and you show what you did for that client, and it’s a done deal.

Look at the results. This is so again, focus your compensation or result you’re going to show results. You’ve been numbing with this current car dealer. You’re getting results that you can show, ask your other clients and they will

Mine, of course, under strict confidentiality, if this person could call and ask them about the results they got with you. I mean, that’s perfectly except I I don’t mind. Anyone that I’m talking to ever, of course with the clients, okay, calling the client and saying, Hey, don’t tell me more about Marco. They usually come recommended from a client anyway, I don’t take anyone just calling me cold and yeah, let’s talk. I don’t do that anymore. But this is the guy’s hot he’s coming from a dealer that’s referring you. They should know. And if they don’t give him the graph, I mean, that’s perfectly fine with Brad, he said, analytics is really good also for this for that visual. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I like to do. I like to show traffic reports more than anything.

It You know, that’s that that that seems to be the best metric to run by anyways, in my opinion. Well, bottom line is the best metric, right what kind of revenue has been generated, but that’s not something you can typically share.

How Do You Get Google To Update The Requests You Made In A YouTube Channel?

So, Tom’s up, he says, I have a generically branded YouTube channel with some lead gen videos that I had been using for a client. But unfortunately, an unforeseen circumstance or life, excuse me, life forced him to have to cancel his service. I purposely put his contact info at the top of the description in YouTube. So it would show in the search results, which of course changed once he was no longer a client, but Google was refusing to update the search results. As a result, my former client is getting free advertising and I cannot pass the videos along to a new client because of this. Got any ninja tricks to get Google to update this quicker? No, that’s the Google index cache. And you know, they refresh it when they want and I know what you’re talking about. I have

I had a video for a client project that I did about, I don’t know three or four months ago, and it’s got some really funky issue going on with that too. It was weird. I did a live stream and for some reason, It took the still like thumbnail image from that particular channel that I was live streaming. And that’s what you show it anyways, long story short, I’ve got a similar issue going on. And I don’t know how to get it to, you know, I’ve tried things like pinging, I’ve tried sending them through indexers I’ve tried, you know, sending it back through a syndication network, again, the embed, you know, the YouTube embedded in to go out, basically, get re syndicated out to a network again to see if forget it crawled again if that would update or refresh the Google index the cache essentially for the search results. And I experienced something similar, the only thing that I know that you could do would be to set it to unlisted until it falls out of the index, and then turn it back to the public, if that makes sense. Because then when Google goes to reindex it again, it should index it with the new you know, with the, whatever the new description is, that shows up at the top, whatever the new description is, that will show whatever’s at the top is going to show is the meta description in the search result. That’s the only thing I know maybe somebody else has another way to think force it. Any ideas? Guys?

No, nothing from me. Yeah. So that’s what I would do is try setting it to unlisted. don’t delete it, right? Because then you lose all of the work that you did to that particular video, just unlisted, wait for it to fall out of the index, which it will. And you know, I don’t know how soon that will be, you might be able to force that I don’t, I don’t know if you can force it to fall out of the index by pinging it or whatever. But once it, you know, isn’t in the index any longer, then you could set it back to public. And then I would ping it again, or run it through an indexing service re syndicated through your network, something like that. And when Google comes and crawls it again, it should refresh that cache to whatever’s at the top of the description now, that’s the only thing I can think of to do.

What Is A Theme Mirrored Page?

Alana says sorry, I got few questions from last week regarding I framing a money site you mentioned in your answer, creating a theme nerd page on a G site and reframing the money site on it. You elaborate on what you mean by theme, mirrored page, okay? Yes, we can.

From what I understand theme mirroring is creating a property stacks that align with the categories on your site. When you say money site, you are actually I framing the site, you actually want to rank on the G site. Yes, that is exactly what I’m talking about. So when we say money site, that’s whatever your primary asset is for your project. Typically, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. Most likely, you know, most of the time on WordPress, it doesn’t have to be, but most of the time, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. It doesn’t have to be, by the way, you could use your Google site as your money site, whatever my point is, whatever your primary asset is, for the project that you’re working on, most likely it’s going to be a self-hosted site. That’s what we call a money site. It’s just a term to describe whatever the primary asset is, okay. So from there, yes, on your G site, right, so, again, theming is all about creating a one to one ratio of your site structure your main property, your main website, site structure, across all of your entity assets. So that’s why we talk about theme mirroring onto your G site. So creating, if you’ve got, you know, for top-level categories or for services or for products, right, that you’re going to be selling on your site, then then we would mirror the four. So you’d have your main g site, which is going to be your brand, right basically, the homepage of the G site is your brand, and the whatever primary keyword is, but then you’re going to have pages on the G site that are mirrored after your money site pages, your primary website pages, right. And the same thing with your drive stack is going to have the primary folder, which is going to be branded plus your primary keyword, then you again, the expansion service, which would be the theme mirroring would be to create subfolders within your primary g stat folder, that each one of them optimized for a particular product or service or category on your site. So that makes sense. So whatever the structure first start with the on-page structure of your primary asset again, go take a look

Bruce clays, silo architecture article, you can go to our YouTube channel youtube.com/semanticmastery, use the channel search feature type in silo architecture, or silo structure, whatever you’ll see there are videos, there’s even a playlist where I very specifically talk about how to structure out of setup solid structure on a website. Then once you’ve done that correctly, then you go out and you start to build out those entity assets or purchase them and have us do it. But you start to mirror that same structure across everything you do across your content marketing across your entity assets, everything that you do, right, so again, if you’ve got a GMB, for example of Google My Business profile, and you have content silos on your main site, then publish content to your GMB profile using GMB posts. And you want to stack them the same way that you would stack content within your silos, right? So you’re adding depth to silos, right? So there’s width, how many categories there are, so you could have a mono silos which means one silo, but you just add a bunch of depth to it, which means supporting articles that are within the same keyword theme. And you just add additional articles are constantly adding depth to the site which builds relevancy. Does that make sense? You do the same thing within GMB posts, you do the same thing with press releases, you do the same thing on your G site, you do the same thing in the drive stack. Everything ends up getting mirrored to where it’s got the same structure and what happens is you build a shit ton of massive thematic relevance, right? So relevancy, topical relevancy, as well as you build a, you know, authority. And it creates a network Empire used to use a term called buoyancy, right? So by doing so, and you have all of these assets that are all linked properly, and they’re all building relevancy in proper categories or content silos, then it starts to create buoyancy across all of the content in every silo. In other words, it helps you know what, as I say, rising tides cause all boats to rise.

That’s what we mean by buoyancy, it helps all of the keywords to start to surface in the search results. I don’t know if that was a very clear explanation, but that was the best I could do anything else want to comment on it? a clone an exact copy, a duplicate of whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s all it. It’s just a bunch of fancy words for saying if we’re saying, do the same thing over there, the same thing that you’re doing here, wherever your money site is, do over there, wherever it is that you’re seeing mirror and think of a mirror, what do you see in the mirror, you see the same thing that that’s looking back at you, right? The same thing that that’s all we’re saying, I just hate mentioning the word duplicate because then people start saying, well, duplicate content and all this bullshit that we know is bullshit. And I don’t want people focusing on that. Just copy whatever it is that you’re doing, or do the same thing, everywhere. And then and if you do that, then your theme mirror.

What Are Embed Gigs?

Very good. All right, the last part of that was. Finally, you mentioned you run embed gigs, the G site, what do you mean by gigs? Well, that’s right here. Okay, so are on MGYB store, if you look at the embed packages, then you’ve got maps, videos, ID page General, you know, I typically would just order general, it doesn’t matter, guys just, you know, order whatever you’re looking to power up. But what this means is you, you take you, for example, your G site pages that you’ve mirrored right, so again, you got your homepage, which is going to be brand plus a primary keyword, okay, then once you start to mirror your pages from your money site, right, so your primary asset onto your D site, now you’ve got g site pages that are a one to one ratio. So if you’ve got 18 products, separate products that are all separate categories on your services, whether they’re products or services doesn’t matter. Then you’re going to have 18 pages on the G site homepage plus 18 pages, right? Each one of them is going to be one to one. So let’s say you’ve got blue marbles, green marbles, red marbles on your money site, you’re going to

You’re going to have blue marbles, green marbles, and red marbles or whatever on your G site to. Does that make sense? Each one is going to have a one to one-page ratio. And then from there, you can take your pages, or the G site homepage, whatever you want. But you can get very specific on where you’re pushing relevancy. And how, if you take your pages from like, for example, your green marble page, and you come over here and get your head, the embed gig over here, and let’s say you want to do one, just to say it’s a gas setup medium competition. So this is going to do 2500 embeds to your green marble g site page. Does that make sense? Or and you can add other stuff in there. Right? So let’s say that you what are the RYS drive stack its expansion. So now you’re going to have the G site page created by us on your G site, your existing entity or branded g site, excuse me, we’re going to create the green marbles page. We’re going to create the green marbles folder within your drive stack and in all of the files that are going to be created inside the drive, stack is going to be optimized specifically for green marbles. That makes sense. And they’re all going to be the links are all going to be pointing to the green marble page on your money site, then those files and folders are going to be embedded in the green marble g site page. And now you’ve got the G site page that you can order an embed gig to embed, you know, run to, and you could also embed the five the G site, excuse me the drive stat files, you could also embed your money site pages if you wanted to, for green marbles. Does that make sense? If you’re doing press releases, you could iframe the press the specific press releases that are pointing back to the green marbles money site page. Does that make sense?

All of those you can embed those. And what we mean by embeds is once again it’s creating an iframe. So it’s essentially creating a window and another website that displays your content, which is the same thing as what a YouTube video is, guys, when you share a YouTube video on somebody else’s website. And it shows up as a video. That’s an embed code, right? It’s an iframe. So you’re actually seeing YouTube code on somebody else’s website, well, that’s all you’re doing is you’re taking your website, or your G site page or your content, whatever it is that you’re creating an iframe, and we’re, we’re going out, Dadea, our link builder is going out and creating pages on other sites with relevant content that’s gonna have that window that iframe that embed code of your content in the middle of it, so that you’re starting to push relevancy in through the iframe that way. And then with the, again, with the different kits here that we have, or, you know, package levels that we have here, though, then link building to the pages that the embeds are on. So that’s what we mean by an embed run is just go and do that. And I use a combination of both, I usually start with link building, and then you know that so maybe month one, I’ll hit everything with link building. Then on month two, I’ll do embeds plus link building, then maybe month three, I’ll switch it up and I’ll hit maybe deeper targets from within the project would be called, you know, deep linking.

So there’s just another number of ways that we do it. And guys, a lot of this will hopefully make a lot more sense. Starting next week when I have the checklist on that I started to show you guys earlier from process Street, because then you can go through it and like I said, it will at first just be a checklist saying, Okay, do this, this and this and in this sequence, and in this, you know, it’ll be literally stepped by step, but I’m going to be adding over the coming week’s explainer videos to explain why we’re doing this so that you guys get a better understanding of the big picture. Because I still think that we, that gets lost a lot when they call it getting lost in translation. I think that gets lost a lot when we try to explain it because we understand it sometimes some of our audience does not and so we’re trying to get better about that, which is why I’m working on that checklist for you guys. Okay.

We’re just about out of time. Let’s see if we can scroll through another one or two real quick guys. Oh, allow says the theme area includes internal links. So do stacks link to each other? Well, it’s an expansion of an existing stack. So yeah, I mean, they’re all spider silo together anyways, if you understand what we mean by that, but yeah, if it’s a subfolder within a drive an existing drive stack, they’re all linked together anyways, that makes sense. It’s like a parent and child relationship. So, yes, if I wouldn’t build separate stacks, that doesn’t make sense. It’s why we have the expansion service, guys because you get more power out of building additional relevancy within one stack than you do by building multiple stacks. Does that make sense?

Okay, moving on there is no physical link between stacks. We don’t do a to b. No, we No, we don’t do that they live within one another. And if you’re isolating a stack, but you link out from that stack to something else, then you’re defeating the purpose of isolating the stack, as we recommend. So no, they don’t they interlink inside the drive stack itself. But if you have three stacks within the one main stack, none of those three will link either to each other or to the main stack.

There you go.

IFTTT Problem In Syndicating Full-Text Posts

Alright, the last one is we’re going to answer these questions real quick. Because he’s here every week asking multiple questions they’ve gotten. You’ve got fewer questions though. You’re starting to trend down maybe which is what we asked for. So anyway, I’m proud of you, buddy. He says, Hey, guys, IFTTT has a problem of syndicating Full-Text posts. have you encountered this problem? Or is it for new connections only? No, I have not.

I would. Now I don’t know I’m not saying that you’re wrong. But what I would suggest you take a look at your settings from your feed. So if you’re syndicating from a WordPress site or self-hosted WordPress site if you go into settings reading, right so so under the settings, option in WordPress and then go to a reading, you’ll see that

  There’s an option for the RSS feed to show either summary or full text. Now, even if you set it to full text, so the RSS feed shows the full text, some themes, WordPress themes will only show snippets instead. So summaries or snippets instead of the full text, even if you set that as a setting. So it really depends. I don’t think it’s an IFTTT thing. It’s most likely a WordPress thing. Either your settings are off or the WordPress theme that you’re using is forcing summaries. So I’ve not heard of that from anybody else yet. So if that is the case, then you know, we will know within the next few days for sure. And this is the last one guys and then I’m going to shut it down because we’re after five o'clock is do you do your backlink and embed packages on your press releases also or only syndication properties? Google properties? No, absolutely. That’s what I’m saying guys is you can push power in through any number of places and if your theme here.

And content marketing and they’re all in your content marketing is mirrored right across all of your content marketing sources, including press releases, you can utilize those very strategically. I’ve talked about this a lot in the mastermind. But for example, once again, guys like within a particular silo, right? you publish content from your money site, it syndicates out to your syndication network properties, where you can go extract those URLs from the syndication network properties that are specific to those posts. So let’s say you add five supporting articles in a silo. So five blog posts that get pushed out to syndication network, you go to syndication network, and let’s just keep it simple. Let’s just say that you just grabbed the three blog URLs for each one of the posts that gets syndicated out to the blogs, right. So blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, so you go extract now and you’ve got five supporting posts in this example, right. So now you’re going to have five URLs from blogger five URLs from Tumblr, five URLs from wordpress.com. Right and now the same thing if your theme mirroring on with using press releases. So you got five press

At least as each press releases promoting a blog post one of those blog posts. Now you can take those five, press release URLs. And you can add those into a link building gig or you can embed gig or whatever you wanted to do. So yeah, that’s what I’m saying guys is you can take them by the way, you can also create a, you know, the mirror pages on G site, I typically don’t do it on a post level, just on a page level. But if I wanted to, if you really needed the additional push, you could always take wherever your top-level pages are on your G site, right, so you’ve got, again, mirrored, your top-level categories are going to have pages on your G site, and you can create child pages. They’re not posts, but you can create child pages on your G site, and have each one of your posts now added as a child page on your G site. You can extract those URLs and add those to link building gigs. Then you order the link building games with keyword sets that are specific to that particular category or silo, that keyword theme that set Does that make sense? And so again, guys, yeah, you can and the same thing with press releases, you can work them right in there. Here’s the thing on your G site. If you’re going down to a post level and adding child pages on the G site as posts, right to whatever the category pages on the G site, then you can even take your content from your syndication network and iframe that into the G site page. Same thing with your press releases, right? So Can you imagine you don’t even need any additional content is my point guys, you can take the G site page, just create the page, optimize it for the same keyword as the post on your site, right that you’re trying to promote? And then you take all of the content that it’s been syndicated to and mirrored on, including press releases, and you just embed all of that into that page on, which is essentially a post on your G site. And now you don’t have you know, this massive amount of content. It’s all that relevancy all through iframes. And now you’ve got a G site, page target, that you can just hammer with link building with very specific keyword sets for anchors that make sense and you can push a ton of relevancy into it that way. So

Anyways, hopefully, that answers the question. Anyone wants to comment on that before I wrap it up, Marco. Was that good enough? Not good enough. Okay. Very good. Those are great questions today, guys. So thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. Thanks, guys. Bye, everyone. Yep,

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295

Click on the video above to watch Episode 295 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 295. Today is the eighth of July 2020. And this is the episode where people are sad that the Fourth of July specials are over. But we got some good news for you guys. And we are going to keep the good times rolling here. We’re going to get into the questions. I think we’ve already got a ton on the page. But real quick, we’re gonna take a minute and say hi to everybody. And we got a couple of quick announcements. So I’ll start at the bottom today on my screen and we’ll go with Chris, how are you doing, man?

Doing well here. Some of it is in full force. And yeah, things are pretty good. The only thing that is not that lovely is today. Well, I gotta go back and wear some masks again here.

So yeah, yeah, better safe than sorry. I won’t go more on that subject. I just had someone sending me something about like, Can you believe it? They might cancel football games. I was like You kidding me in a friggin stadium.

Anyways, All right, Marco How are you doing today?

Is that all day, man. It must be a screen must be up in the background. I do it. I can’t help it. This is Costa Rica, guys. This is it. This is the real deal. You’re seeing it week to week and you’re gonna see it for a year then I’m turning the damn camera off because I hate being on camera.

It’s one of the things that I like least as being on camera just.

It’s not enjoyable. It’s kind of distracting to me if this is my workstation, then I need to work so it’ll be removed after a year of UIC in paradise.

Very nice. By the way, I posted again, some results in for you guys watching. I was questioning the methods. Also, I heard its methods got slapped by Google? What are you guys doing all kinds of different stuff? We got slapped, we got slapped and I go in and look at the results and I push results and it’s better than last week. You can follow it. You can just go it’s in our free group. It’s there. It’s I post it for you. Those are results week to week. So last week, there were 304 306 calls I think it was this week. It’s 366. So it’s going back 28 days over 28 days. We client got 366 calls. I think client is happy just when the GMB mind you that’s the click to call. That’s not including what he’s getting on the website, not including form fields not including all the other stuff that’s going on. guys gonna make so much.

I told you guys I’m upset. I should be hitting myself in the head with a hammer because I didn’t think that I should be I should do that the percentage-based agreement, per call agreement, which is still really, really, really, trust me, it’s really sweet. But it would have been so much better if it were if I had done the 10 to 15% that we often do, right? We often talk about that when you deal with a client, and you can establish that trust. I didn’t know that this guy all that well, it was a recommendation. So I had to go on a per call. And now he doesn’t want to change the deal, of course. So anyway, guys, go watch. It’s in the free group. It’s there for you. It’s in the heavy hitter free. It’s all of Semantic Mastery groups is on my page on Facebook. Go see the results for yourself. And if you’re wondering how we did it, summed up. Everything is there. I am not using anything different than what we teach and what we offer what we see, first of all, what we teach in our courses. And what we offer in MGYB is what we have, we have a team of very capable V is the keyword research was done by the keyword research VA? I mean, why wouldn’t I use the things? We set things up for ourselves to get results ourselves right then that’s after we’ve proven that they work we offer them to you guys so you can make it work for you and you can go make money. Now whether you do it that’s not my problem. It’s up to you to take that step and then go do the do. How you do you know how to do it the way I do but do something. I’ll leave it at that.

Good to go. Now Wayne and I haven’t seen Wayne on Hump Day hangouts a lot. He just said RYS reloaded is setting the standards by which all other copycats get judged. Haters gonna hate.

see any? All right. How you doing today? Good, man. Good. I’m happy. I just wanted to thank everyone that we’re supporting Semantic Mastery and enjoy be during our sale. You guys are awesome. So thank you for that. Thank you for those of you guys that that took advantage that took the distance

And everything we were doing pretty big discounts on both mg y b so and Semantic Mastery so thank you for that and regarding what Marco was saying about percentage deals we might be talking about that at some point Adam specifically my main man Adam right there he might be talking about he will be talking about a percentage-wise deal so that’s gonna be pretty cool Martin calm because we have some good stuff coming up.

Danny definitely looking forward to that. Yeah, Hernan’s got some more info on that but last but certainly not least Bradley How you doing today? I’m good man. I was just mentioning you guys when we first got on before going live that uh, I’ve got like several SEO projects starting two of which I talked about last week are going to be public case studies. I actually secured well I’ve determined two locations. One is going to be Pompano Beach, Florida, which is like the Fort Lauderdale area and in Broward County, very, very competitive. And then another one in Richmond, Virginia, both trees service sites or lead gen sites. So I’m starting on that but I’ve got like multiple other projects just getting started on. I gotten away from doing a whole lot of site builds. But recently I’ve just got a lot of work that’s come in which is interesting one of our mastermind members that asked, you know, how everybody’s dealing with this COVID-19 pandemic, you know, and all this stuff with client work in agency working, it’s interesting, but I’ve had some you know, I’ve had a handful of clients suspend services when this has happened depending on the business industry, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve landed several to Tree Service clients as well as several lead gen, like buyers and other lead buyers Tree Service lead buyers, so you know, it just depends I guess on the industries guys there’s still a lot of business going on out there so don’t let that stop you from going out and you know, doing what you got to do to make money so anyways,

so now I will second that. There was the post in the mastermind is either new member I apologize. I forget who it was but asking about you know, how things are going and like I definitely saw it too like not trying to hide anything I lost three clients generally work with three to five being given time at three when Coronavirus, hidden I lost two within a week. Like, just and it made sense. Like I was like, yeah, this totally makes sense. I’m not trying to like get them back. But ever since that point, it’s been busier. It seems like I’m definitely getting more out inbound. And it’s just gotten busier and busier. So it’s kind of been an interesting turn of events that, you know, we’ll see how it goes. You know, plenty of businesses who actually finally made the plunge and moved online. Yeah.

Tons of work. Yeah. And there’s work where you don’t always expect it, just to this may seem obvious to everyone else, but I had a travel company reach out to me, and like, that just blew me away at first because I was like, are you sure you want to talk to me? Like, you know, here’s kind of what I do. Here’s what I charge. Are we on the same page? They said, Yeah, yeah, let’s talk cuz they’re like, yeah, it’s obvious. We got to diversify, you know, we need to go online and we need to have something just beside the travel. What can we do? Let’s talk. I was like, wow, okay, this is really interesting. I never would have approached them. And out of the blue, they got in touch with me. So keep your eyes and ears open. And yeah, think about those different angles. Yeah, and the last thing I want to mention about that is, you know, for example, one of the Tree Service clients, who just hired me this week, actually, we started communicating in February of this year. So those of you that don’t learn, nurture your leads, and follow up, like, you know it, you’re missing out on a big part of the business. We talk a lot about that kind of stuff in the mastermind and into your agency. It’s touched on as well. But you know, that’s the thing. We started talking with this client, he reached out to me from some of my marketing out online, right, so it was an inbound lead.

We scheduled a call then I did send a proposal to them after that just you know, about a week within a week of the discovery call. And it would, you know, it was probably four or five weeks, I hadn’t heard from them. And I did some automated follow-ups over the course of that time. And I ended up getting a callback, you know, an email back where they wanted to schedule is two partners in this business and they wanted to schedule a conference call to ask some questions and stuff. So we did that. Then it was radio silence again for about two weeks. So my automated follow-ups kicked in and started following up with them sending them emails, just you know, every couple of weeks reminding them hey, you know, that proposals still hanging out there, if you’re interested, you know, reach back out, blah, blah, blah. And they followed back up in June. So from February until June, and then now it’s July, and they just now hired me. So we’re talking like, you know, what, four or five months of time lapse between when the initial contact, the lead came in, and when they actually hired me and it was just because of follow-ups that I was able to secure that client and it’s a pretty decent client. Pretty, a pretty good amount of revenue and they’ve got a good budget too. So my point, guys, it’s really important to follow up if you’re, if you’re not, you’re leaving, you’re losing business. Does that make sense? So, anyway, definitely. Yeah, I think that’s a good note. And we talked about it earlier and we’re talking about the mastermind. For everyone who doesn’t know what the mastermind is, that’s our closed private community. You can find out more about that a mastermind dot semantic mastery comm we just had part of the Fourth of July special was a very limited time offer for seven day trial into the mastermind booking and onboarding call. We had a lot but we had several people take us up on that. And just want to put that out there that if you’re interested in taking things up to the next level, if you know that being in a group of like-minded agency owners or consultants who are trying to grow and or understand that, you know, learning from others who have been there, whether it’s us whether it’s the other people in the mastermind is the way to get results. If you’re at that point now then please go check it out because that’s the group you want to be in.

The last thing I want to touch on is POFU Live. All right, I am excited. pofulive2020. All right, it can’t keep us downright no Coronavirus us from having POFU Live, it’s just going to be virtually live. All right this year. So it’s still September 25, 26th and 27th. Obviously, you can join wherever you’re at. And we still do have just the ticket available so that you can join and check everything out and watch all the talks. We have a VIP ticket available, we’re going to have a VIP event we’re going to be getting some beers shipped out to directly to you if you sign up and then we’re going to be hopping on for an online guided beer tasting event and then do some Bs and have some fun after that after everyone’s had a couple of beers. Yeah. How’s the good stuff? And then of course we’ve got the VIP plus ticket. If you’re out there and you’re looking for someone on one time or rather a several ones you want us to chime in on whether it’s your processes, building your agency, whatever it is, you’re gonna get a hell of a deal with that. So head over to pofulive.com. We’re going to be having more details coming out as the summer goes on. We’ve already got two amazing or sorry, forgive me, daddy. We’ve got three amazing guest speakers lined up. All right. Two of them are from our very own mastermind.

We have two very successful agency owners, Jordan Fowler and Brian cattle. And then Deadia the famous video will be speaking as well, I believe he’s going to be giving some info on updated case study. But regardless, we’re really looking forward to that Rob deal, of course, will be joining us and then all of us will be there. So it’s going to be jam-packed. We got a lot going on. We got some more guest speakers. We’re getting lined up. So head over to poker live. Grab your ticket. Do you guys have any questions? You’re watching this live, feel free to pop it on the page and we’ll answer today as we go.

Sweet. Are we ready? I think so. Let’s do this. Do this. Let’s get into it.

All right. Couple things real quick. This was Marco’s screenshot. And I mean, look at that. Look at the growth right there. He was talking about in the Facebook post and that’s it 30 days like that’s amazing Marco that’s fucking impressive. And it’s, you know, it’s not uncommon. It’s common for you to have results like this. But this, that’s really impressive what I’m saying. So that’s what Marco was talking about guys, it’s the same stuff that we teach. One other thing I want to touch on real quick is I’m building out a checklist, guys using process Street, which I love. It’s for processes that I use internally in my own agency. Now it’s for training and everything else. Its amazing process street is fabulous. Anyways, I’m building out a checklist for our methods so that it will be shareable that you guys will be able to go in. And it’s kind of following the battle plan, like what we talked about in the most current version of the battle plan, which is our methods and how to, you know, put them together in the proper sequence and all of that because I guess that’s not been clear to a lot of people still so probably next week, we’ll by Hump Day Hangouts, next week, there will this will be available. So you can see there’s a lot of information in here. And it’ll be step by step with certain things that, you know, you can checkbox to go through, but just kind of want to give you guys a quick update on that, or heads up on that, excuse me, because that’s something that I’m working on now. And it will be should be ready by next Wednesday.

And it’s going to continue to be fleshed out where I’ll actually add training videos like essential essentially explainer videos, where appropriate within the actual process doc to really explain the process because not only is it just knowing the process, but it’s also the why like, why do we do these things, right. And so I want to, I want to be able to add additional information into that, and we’re going to make that available to you guys. You know, like I said, the checklist will come first and then over the coming weeks, I’m going to be adding additional like video clips in within the actual process doc so that you guys will have a better understanding of what it is and then you can just import that in your own process street account if you choose to use it.

And then make copies or what’s called run checklists off of it. And then you can use that for each project. So you can just go right on through and check off the boxes as you get stuff done for each project. So, just want to share that with you guys as well.

Okay, any comments guys before we get into it?

Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Besides Directory Submission And Syndication, What Are Other Ways To Use The RSS For SEO Link Building?

Okay, so the first one up is Nicholas. He says, besides submitting to RSS directories and building syndication rings, is there anything else we can do with RSS feeds to help our SEO and link building effort? Yeah, use them in theme mirroring with your G site.

You know if I’m going to mention this here, I can’t show you how to do it here but it’s been covered in pretty much anyone of our paid courses and Syndication Academy, mastermind, heavy hitter club, I mean any one of them it’s been covered in, but use if you know how to use Feedburner. You can create an embed code from an RSS feed using Feedburner and then mirror that in knew your G site which you should be doing anyway. Right? Well, we call theme airing, right? And then you can link build to that g site page embed, you can do embeds for that g site page link building into that g site page both embeds plus link building to the embeds. And that’s a very, very powerful way to utilize your RSS feeds, again, stalking iframes in Google properties, right. So you got a G site, Google property, Buzz boost, embed code, Google property, RSS feeds, right. So it’s dynamically updated every time you publish content. The same thing with the press advantage RSS feeds, right? Every time you publish a press release, it dynamically updates, the embed code, the RSS embed code, so it’s very, very powerful. And I use that very heavily in my theme mirroring. So anybody has any other comments on that?

Nope. Okay. Uh, something else. One other thing you can do is if, you know it depends on how many projects I always recommend that you just have one branded syndication. So tier one branded syndication ring for blog content. But you know, if you’ve got if you’ve only got one project that you’re working on, then you might want to go through the trouble of having multi-tiered networks which works great if you can manage the second tier networks, so that you’re adding relevant content. So in other words, if you’ve got an RSS feed that you if you’re only syndicating to your sent your tier one syndication network, that’s great, that’s what I primarily do but if you have if you’re looking to squeeze more power out of it too You can do the multi-tiered networks and use that same feed to trigger your second-tier networks but you also want to add in related content feeds other relevant and related content feeds from other sources is what I’m saying. If you if you’re questioning what it is that I’m talking about, just go to support.semanticmastery.com And you can that that we have a knowledge base there and you can go look into the syndication Academy knowledgebase articles and look at them there’s several knowledgebase articles with videos in there that talk about how to utilize multi-tiered syndication networks for blog syndication. And that will give you a really in-depth description or explanation of how to how to set that up properly so that you can squeeze even more power out of an RSS feed. Okay. Oh, and lastly, if you check out the Syndication Academy in the advanced RSS training, there’s additional things you can do with it there.

Is There An All In One Done For You Package For Lead Gen?

Alright, next is don’t know what the name is. But Hi, I’m looking for an all in one done for you package. Is this possible for lead gen?

I mean, yes and no, we have the SEO shield, which is pretty much all of our methods. You still have to set up the main asset unless you’re going to use the G site within the SEO shield as your primary entity assets. So your primary website, which you can do, if you have if you’re doing for lead gen two, I’m assuming you’re talking about local lead gen. Then you can. Right now we still have, or at least currently we have GMB verification services available. So you should get a GMB then you can include that in your SEO shield build. Once the GMB has been verified, if you’ve already got one, then you do submit that with your SEO SEO build, and, and then we’ll build out all of those assets for you. Then it’s a matter of content marketing, which we don’t provide content marketing services yet, at some point in the future, we may, but content marketing on a regular basis press releases, we sell those in MGYB. It’s important to do that and then in link building and embeds to your entity assets. Again, it’s exactly what we cover in the battle plan.

And MGYB is, you know, done for you services, we don’t have an all-encompassing package that does set up, you know, the website and the entity assets and everything for you. There, you have to kind of put them together, but that’s what the SEO shield is because that’s most of our methods tied into one package. Any comments on

Guys, yeah, I read this a couple of days ago, I think it was, I can’t remember when it was first posted. And I thought about this and I said that it’s a great idea. But it would be hard for us to kind of put this together and I’m going to tell you why.

I like money. And I don’t mind people giving me money right through our done for you services. I know they’re effective. And I know that they work. But let’s say that we package it all we did, we did the five, six press releases in the package. We do the link building and put that in the package, we do the embeds. And we put that in the package and everything that you usually need, or that we can let’s say that we can use for this person, we’re talking about something that would probably run in the thousands of dollars, and it may be overkill. So it might be that this person would not need all of this to rank in that niche. And they would be needlessly spending money not

I’ll say it again, although I’d love for this person to give me the money, and they’re going to get results anyway, but then they might be giving me too much. And that’s something that to me, I have a problem with that I have a problem with people having to overspend for results. So this is why we set it up, you go in, you do your own page, right? Then you come and get the SEO shield, then you wait and see what the results are. Without data, you’re going blind. Like, without looking at ranking results without looking if you’re getting form fields. If you’re getting visits, you don’t have analytics set up, if you don’t have Search Console setup, if you’re not gathering all of this data, you know, waiting out the three weeks or so four weeks, once everything is handed back to you right once when that @ID page and the drive second D site and the syndication network and you’ve primed it and you started content syndication that you’re doing posting inside the GMB whatever your money site is, and you’re doing things the way that we that we tell you to had to look and see what kind of results you’re getting. Because if you’re already there, you might, you might just need a little push to stick and solidify. You might not need anything. And so it is a good idea. So okay, just give me everything. But what if you don’t need everything? What have you? What if it’s overkill? And what if it dances for months and months, which which we seen until it, it settles? I mean, you need that you could have been making money. Instead of setting everything to death. The only problem that I have with this is that it could be overkill, so maybe we set it up for another thing that I thought for more competitive niches. Well, even in the most competitive niches we’ve seen that we can do damage with, you know, some embed, runs link building and some press releases. Sometimes it doesn’t need a whole bunch of other times it needs more and it needs that consistency. It needs posting over time it needs to solidify the entity, your entity needs to be better than everybody else’s.

Well, that’s on page work so that the results can be better. There there is no, I wish there were such a thing as a magic pill as a way to look at a niche and say, This is definitely this and only this is what’s definitely going to work for that niche. Because guess what? It doesn’t work that way. And the algorithms don’t work that way, even in the same niche in different categories and different excuse me, subcategories. It might work differently. So we don’t know. All we can do is you follow the sequence. Look at the data and if you need more, we got loads more that you could do very well.

And he says that, yeah, he will buy the GMB service and make my own site. I just need something to rank both GMB, GMB and organic. Is there such a service and yeah, that’s what you know, that’s what we talked about with the SEO shield and in the ongoing link building and embeds, right that’s in a press release. So content marketing is all part of that problem of our method. And that’s how you add a tie, you build additional relevancy and authority to your assets is by continually updating with content and you add depth to your content. Right? Does that make sense? So it’s really important to do that. And that’s why if you get an SEO shield, that’s step one, right, and SEO power shield, because that covers all of those entity assets, all of our methods that we talked about, you know, it builds all of those out for you. And then it’s about powering up those entity assets consistently and with consistent content marketing as well. So, is anyone available? Yeah, every Wednesday at 4pm Eastern.

What Are The Values Of Embeds And iFrames In Terms Of Stacking?

Alona says, could you guys break down the value of using embeds verse iframes. It’s the same thing, Alanna, same thing, right. an embed code is nothing but an iframe. Right? Is there anything that I’m missing here guys know the iframe is the code. The embed is what you do with the code on on another page, right?

Right. Yeah, all different, not especially curious to you which to use when creating stacks? Yeah, again. So I may be the question is, should you create your own embed code, right, like an iframe generator, for example? And then insert it using the, you know, insert HTML box in G sites and insert your own code, or do you want to go to insert and then go to gadgets, and you find the iframe gadget, and then insert the URL and let g sites make the actual embed code for you? It doesn’t matter. Either way. It really doesn’t matter, either way. So it’s just, you know, six and one-half dozen in the other. Do you want to create your own embed code and embed it using the HTML box, you know, insert HTML box, or do you want to let Google create the iframe by using the in the iframe gadget? Either way, it’s going to do the same damn thing. Okay. So it doesn’t matter.

Is It Okay To Add An Amazon S3 Page To The Money Site SameAs Schema?

Okay, next j says, Hey, guys just got an ID page made recently, would it be wise to add the URL of the s3 page the money site same as schema? Would this cause any harm? No, that’s what you that should be if, depending on what type of ID or schema you’re using. For corporations or organizations, which corporation is a subset of organization schema, or even local business schema or any subset of local business schema, there is an ID page designation or attribute right within the structured data. And that’s what you would link that’s what you would designate as your ID page is the s3 URL is same as to you can you can put it there too, it’s not gonna hurt anything.

I prefer actually to if it’s for if I have a branded domain, I like, you know, everything, almost everything I run goes through. I use CloudFlare for DNS. And I like to set up an actual, you know, domain map using a cname over to the bucket URL. So that I’m using it’s not on HTTPS, but it

It ends up being like, for example, id.domain.com. Or if it’s location-specific, then I’ll do like the city name. So let’s just say Cole pepper dash id.domain.com. If I’ve got multiple locations, so multiple idx pages, if that makes sense. And I like to use that, because then it once again, it’s referencing the branded domain. And if you click on that URL, it’s basically showing the bucket both the bucket URL and the ID page. If it’s a custom app, domain, subdomain, then they both show like they’ll both show but what I do is that the canonical in the actual ID page so that it’s always canonicalized back to its own, you know, to the custom domain version of it, if that makes sense. But yeah, you can add it in the same as it’s not gonna hurt anything. I always do in fact, yeah, I always do make that pardon.

What Type Of Link Building Do You Recommend To Power Up S3 Bucket Safely To The Money Site?

Also, what type of link building would you recommend to power up the s3 bucket safely to pass power to the money site GMB link building. And embeds, embeds and link building. Remember, they both, both, you know, it’s both, it’s very powerful, both of them link building directly to the idx page. If you’re using iframes, and all of that on the idx page, then you’re not going to have any issues. Also, I like to do embeds and in link building to the embeds, because you can add relevancy that way, too.

Okay. And by the way, you can, you can basically build any types of links to the idx page. We, you know, we have the service and mg y b that has been developed specifically to work with our methods, but you could do any sort of links to that really.

Now we have adept here for that right MGYB to he’s been doing it forever seems like almost a decade. So why wouldn’t we use the master? That’s right.

That’s right. And he’ll be speaking and POFU Live.

What SEO Service Do You Recommend To Push The Ranking Of A Website From Page 1 To Page 2?

So Jonah says, How do you all really appreciate the videos you put out I’m looking to rank a page for a low slash medium competition local service keyword for local with no GMB listings, just purely organic results, my competitor hasn’t updated their site for years and doesn’t have any ongoing link building from my analysis just links from years ago that aren’t particularly strong. I checked on page improved content and built a handful of relevant guest posts and press releases along with links from the G stack, but been stuck on the top of page two for months. Is there anything you guys would recommend to give the page? A bit of a push? Thanks again? Um, yeah, I mean, more content. I talked about that earlier, just adding more depth to the site. As far as you know, I don’t know if you’ve got your site siloed or what, you know, how your site is structured, but adding more content so that it’s got more relevant and fresh content that helps syndication network, like I said, if you’re going to be publishing content, you may as well do it via your blog from your money site so that it’s syndicating out to a syndication network, which again, it’s activity, that it’s in relevancy that it’s building, you can power up your syndication networks, you can power up your entity assets. So for example, once again, SEO power shield, if you don’t already have that, make sure you get that right and that’s going to put your money site in the middle and then have this SEO shield. That’s why we call it that essentially like an SEO firewall of high authority profiles branded assets that are covering or cocooning your site, so to speak, right shielding your site, then you just do a shit ton of link building, as I just mentioned, in beds, beds, you can do embeds from your entity assets, you can even embed your money site if you wanted to. And in that way it’s getting the embed code is going to be placed on pages with relevant content, then you can link build to those link building or those embed pages, right. And so that’s just a stack service. In other words, when you buy embeds services from mg y b, then you order the link building as which will link build to the embed pages, all of these things are going to help to push it on to page one and that’s really the whole game in a nutshell there anything you want to add? Yeah look at the entity and work on the structured data. I see nothing on there about what you’ve done with your structured data that’s a given now anyways.

I guess not everybody understands that but yeah, you guys structured data is critically important. Remember, there’s You can also mark up besides just organization or markup or local business markup, you can also add elements of markup the elements of pages and things like that. So you know, the more that you can add, the better you’re going to be because you’re going to have a stronger entity, right, a stronger asset. So

Can I Use The Same Target URL In The SEO Shield For The Drive Stack Expansion?

Okay, next DCs? Yo, what’s up, man, he says, I’m going to order a couple of drive stack expansions soon, but just so I’m clear, can I use the expansions for both the same target URL the shield was set up to target in the first place as well as brand new URLs. I target the homepage twice, with different top-level keywords, then add another expansion for an inner page.

Bradley, can you and Marco kind of expand on this a little bit because we just rolled this out right before the Fourth of July special, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to really tell people he just in case anyone’s watching who doesn’t know what we’re talking about with that drive expansion. Yeah, here, I’ll pull it up. And Marco, you want to kind of talk through this a little bit.

So typically, what we recommend is that, you know, you’re going to have one primary keyword that you want the brand to be associated with. And I understand there’s a lot of additional keywords, products and services for businesses, there should be one primary keyword, right. And then from there, if you got your site structured with silo structure, then you’re going to have top-level categories. And so that’s perfect for drive stack expansion, right. So now you’re going to take the top-level keyword for one of your product categories or service categories. And that’s going to be an expansion. You’re going to order, you know, expand your drive stack for that, which is what we’re looking at on this page. Okay. So what that does is that is your Google Drive expansion stack and your Google Site setup. So what that means is if you if you’ve already got your, your, your primary drive stack and G site for your entity, your brand, then that’s again, creating the association between your top-level keyword plus the brand. Then after that’s built, then you would take your silos, right, so your product or service categories on your site, and you would whatever the top-level keyword is for each one of the categories, you would create another expansion stack, which would be basically creating an additional folder inside of your Google Drive folder, your main Drive folder that is optimized for that each silo keyword, right, so each folder would be now optimized for one particular category on the site. And then a page gets created on the existing g site for the brand. Write that then all of the drive folders and files get embedded into that. So that’s how you create that theme mirroring within the drive stack in the G site. So that’s what again, I, I don’t typically order an expansion stack that’s going to target the homepage because I typically have my site structured in with the silo architecture. So I’m going to start going after once the initial stack is built for brand plus keyword Association, then I start building out the expansions for the service cap, you know, product and or service category, essentially, the silos on the site market, maybe you can explain that difference.

Not differently, but when I think of this, I think of the silo architecture, of course, and I think about how Bruce clay set this up, right? So he sets up the marble jar and they’re all of the colors are mixed. But of course, it’s marble so we can call them widgets, call them whatever you want. All right, so we’re selling marbles. And what we’re going to do with that main drive second g site is associate that with the keyword marbles. So it’s going to be g sites, site marble, whatever marbles, marbles, all colors. And we’re going to say shapes, sizes, whatever. And that’s perfect there. Alright, so each one of those jars on there is going to represent an inner page on not only the money site but the companion D site each time that you add a page. So now you have marbles, say marbles, calm. And the first one you’re going to do is green. So marbles, calm green, and red and yellow, you’re gonna write everything that you’re going to do about green marbles under that category, under that green now that hates that main page, you’re going to copy that exact same page into an error page. On the GE side, instead of you doing all that. What we do is we take that and we do it for you which take that page, we copy it, we set up the drive stack, we embed everything we add content.

And we just create that relevance. And we add that I’m not gonna say what we add, but it’s a way to pass the power through a fire hose with a nozzle. So that the power of that water think about it because you can cut metal with water. So we’re concentrating that power so that we pass the power to that inner page. Why? Because we’ve noticed and we’ve seen and our all our tests show that it’s much more difficult to rank one page for all of the keywords under that niche Marvel’s it’s much harder to do that than it is to break that up into categories. And the way that the Bruce clay shows on his website and under those, we target the keywords in that set. And what we’re after is green marbles. That would be the top-level category there. But every keyword under that would be a target. So green marble prize green marble costs, just what the best green marbles, all of that would be under that and it would be boosting that category. And what happens is, all of those keywords start pushing up that top-level category, they start coming up, and that’s how you start generating traffic to the website.

So when we thought that out, right, what we did is very simple, we take the keywords, we take the keywords that we isolated.

Now, this is inside the main drive site that you’ve already purchased. With the SEO power shield, we take that we isolate the keyword set under that subcategory which is green marbles and red marbles and yellow marbles. They should each have their own page, right so that we’re siloing properly and if they do then they should have a companion, dry stack, and G site page with them in the SEO power shield. So this is how when we thought this up, when I, when I, when I started to conceptualize it and start thinking about it, how to isolate it, and how to deliver the power, this is how I do it. I’m not gonna say here how we do it, because that’s giving away too much. But when you get it, you’ll see what it is that we do, if you break it down, like, like, we have a lot of people doing trying to reverse engineer, and that’s fine too. I’m not gonna give it away here.

So just a representation, you know, again, using Tree Service stuff, because that’s pretty much all I’m doing right now besides existing client work is tree services, the most broad keyword, right? So if I’m making brand association with the drive stack, the initial drive stack and G site, it’s going to be Tree Service plus company name, okay? And if it’s, if it’s very one specific location, we might include the location modifier, but for most of my Tree Service clients, they cover a, you know, a several County area, so we typically will just, it’ll be Tree Service and then whatever the company name is, that’s going to be the drive stacks gonna get built out for the G site as well. Okay. And then from there, that’s where you know we can silo out like Tree Removal tree trimming arborist services, each one of those would be separate sir silos, lawn care, land clearing, not all Tree Service contractors do lawn care, lawn care, but some do. landscaping could be another one. So each one of those would be your individual silos, right? Because those would be different service categories on the website. And so each one of these could get its own RYS expansion service created for it. And what that’s going to do is going to create subfolders within the primary RYS drive stack folder, right up that are optimized each one for each specific silo. And then a separate page is going to be created on the primary g site branded g site, there’s going to be mirrored for the website structure. And it’s going to include all of the drive stack files and folders that have been created as part of the expansion service in their respective pages on the G sites that make sense.

So that’s what it is. And each so for example, the tree removal expansion would be all the keywords that are associated with that are, you know, strictly Tree Removal based keywords that are going to be built in the, into the files, the GC, drive stack files, and then all of those files and folders are going to be embedded on that page, and are all going to be linking back to on the G site page. I mean, and they’re all going to be linking back to pages and or posts within the tree removal silo on the money site. Does that make sense? And then likewise, over here on lawncare, if this particular client or project had lawn care services to then there would be a lawn care expansion created, and all of the files and folders would be optimized for lawn care terms. They would all be linking to the lawn care pages and posts on the site. And then they would be mirrored onto the G site as well. Does that make sense? And now you’ve got separate targets that you can build links to within your drive stack within your G site folder, files, and folders that are that now you can buy specific link building gigs with keyword terms that are specific to that particular silo to that theme, does that make sense? So that’s how you can really start to push power into that very specific keyword sets within your actual site. Okay, anyway, that was a great question though. And thanks, Adam, for telling us to expand on that a little bit more.

How Would You Show The Progress Of Your SEO Efforts To The Client?

Alright, so next where were we that was DC SEO so Mohammed’s up next he says, Hey, guys, how would I show the progress I made for a client. My current car dealer client referred another dealer to me and I want to make a case study. What would be a good way to show the changes I effected I have the Webmaster Tools graph and GMB insights so far. Would anything else work? Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what I like to use more than anything is a search console, GMB insights and analytics. And if I’m doing AdWords or Google Ads then I typically will show ad data to, but that those are, you know, I always I don’t like to use rank reports anymore because they’re not that accurate. They’re just show an indication of the health. But they’re never all that they’re not very accurate. Because of you know what we’ve talked about many times on Hump Day hangouts with user location, you can’t really mimic location that Well, you can’t mimic browser history, browsing history, personal history, profile history, like, you know, what type of content people engage with and all that. So, you know, I don’t like to use rank trackers or rank reports really that much. I still provide them to clients, but those are always like secondary reports because I like to focus on GMB insights, analytics Search Console, and as I said, Google Ads data, if I’m running ads campaigns as well. Any other comments on that? Yeah. I mean, he has the client that recommended this other car dealer.

What is already in the door they’ve already taught? I don’t know how much more it is that you need to show or what it is that they’re asking for. But the GMB insights if you look at the one that I posted, again, in, in heavy hitter, anything like that, you can’t close the deal with something like that. Will you show and this, of course, you can go month, you can go weekly, you can go quarter by those are images that can I can’t show the actual GMB. But if you go in there, you can show the quarter, you can show the month, you can show it week to week, you can pick a timeframe, you can go into the historical data in the GMB and pull that up. I mean, you go into that historical data, you go a year back and you show what you did for that client, and it’s a done deal.

Look at the results. This is so again, focus your compensation or result you’re going to show results. You’ve been numbing with this current car dealer. You’re getting results that you can show, ask your other clients and they will

Mine, of course, under strict confidentiality, if this person could call and ask them about the results they got with you. I mean, that’s perfectly except I I don’t mind. Anyone that I’m talking to ever, of course with the clients, okay, calling the client and saying, Hey, don’t tell me more about Marco. They usually come recommended from a client anyway, I don’t take anyone just calling me cold and yeah, let’s talk. I don’t do that anymore. But this is the guy’s hot he’s coming from a dealer that’s referring you. They should know. And if they don’t give him the graph, I mean, that’s perfectly fine with Brad, he said, analytics is really good also for this for that visual. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I like to do. I like to show traffic reports more than anything.

It You know, that’s that that that seems to be the best metric to run by anyways, in my opinion. Well, bottom line is the best metric, right what kind of revenue has been generated, but that’s not something you can typically share.

How Do You Get Google To Update The Requests You Made In A YouTube Channel?

So, Tom’s up, he says, I have a generically branded YouTube channel with some lead gen videos that I had been using for a client. But unfortunately, an unforeseen circumstance or life, excuse me, life forced him to have to cancel his service. I purposely put his contact info at the top of the description in YouTube. So it would show in the search results, which of course changed once he was no longer a client, but Google was refusing to update the search results. As a result, my former client is getting free advertising and I cannot pass the videos along to a new client because of this. Got any ninja tricks to get Google to update this quicker? No, that’s the Google index cache. And you know, they refresh it when they want and I know what you’re talking about. I have

I had a video for a client project that I did about, I don’t know three or four months ago, and it’s got some really funky issue going on with that too. It was weird. I did a live stream and for some reason, It took the still like thumbnail image from that particular channel that I was live streaming. And that’s what you show it anyways, long story short, I’ve got a similar issue going on. And I don’t know how to get it to, you know, I’ve tried things like pinging, I’ve tried sending them through indexers I’ve tried, you know, sending it back through a syndication network, again, the embed, you know, the YouTube embedded in to go out, basically, get re syndicated out to a network again to see if forget it crawled again if that would update or refresh the Google index the cache essentially for the search results. And I experienced something similar, the only thing that I know that you could do would be to set it to unlisted until it falls out of the index, and then turn it back to the public, if that makes sense. Because then when Google goes to reindex it again, it should index it with the new you know, with the, whatever the new description is, that shows up at the top, whatever the new description is, that will show whatever’s at the top is going to show is the meta description in the search result. That’s the only thing I know maybe somebody else has another way to think force it. Any ideas? Guys?

No, nothing from me. Yeah. So that’s what I would do is try setting it to unlisted. don’t delete it, right? Because then you lose all of the work that you did to that particular video, just unlisted, wait for it to fall out of the index, which it will. And you know, I don’t know how soon that will be, you might be able to force that I don’t, I don’t know if you can force it to fall out of the index by pinging it or whatever. But once it, you know, isn’t in the index any longer, then you could set it back to public. And then I would ping it again, or run it through an indexing service re syndicated through your network, something like that. And when Google comes and crawls it again, it should refresh that cache to whatever’s at the top of the description now, that’s the only thing I can think of to do.

What Is A Theme Mirrored Page?

Alana says sorry, I got few questions from last week regarding I framing a money site you mentioned in your answer, creating a theme nerd page on a G site and reframing the money site on it. You elaborate on what you mean by theme, mirrored page, okay? Yes, we can.

From what I understand theme mirroring is creating a property stacks that align with the categories on your site. When you say money site, you are actually I framing the site, you actually want to rank on the G site. Yes, that is exactly what I’m talking about. So when we say money site, that’s whatever your primary asset is for your project. Typically, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. Most likely, you know, most of the time on WordPress, it doesn’t have to be, but most of the time, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. It doesn’t have to be, by the way, you could use your Google site as your money site, whatever my point is, whatever your primary asset is, for the project that you’re working on, most likely it’s going to be a self-hosted site. That’s what we call a money site. It’s just a term to describe whatever the primary asset is, okay. So from there, yes, on your G site, right, so, again, theming is all about creating a one to one ratio of your site structure your main property, your main website, site structure, across all of your entity assets. So that’s why we talk about theme mirroring onto your G site. So creating, if you’ve got, you know, for top-level categories or for services or for products, right, that you’re going to be selling on your site, then then we would mirror the four. So you’d have your main g site, which is going to be your brand, right basically, the homepage of the G site is your brand, and the whatever primary keyword is, but then you’re going to have pages on the G site that are mirrored after your money site pages, your primary website pages, right. And the same thing with your drive stack is going to have the primary folder, which is going to be branded plus your primary keyword, then you again, the expansion service, which would be the theme mirroring would be to create subfolders within your primary g stat folder, that each one of them optimized for a particular product or service or category on your site. So that makes sense. So whatever the structure first start with the on-page structure of your primary asset again, go take a look

Bruce clays, silo architecture article, you can go to our YouTube channel youtube.com/semanticmastery, use the channel search feature type in silo architecture, or silo structure, whatever you’ll see there are videos, there’s even a playlist where I very specifically talk about how to structure out of setup solid structure on a website. Then once you’ve done that correctly, then you go out and you start to build out those entity assets or purchase them and have us do it. But you start to mirror that same structure across everything you do across your content marketing across your entity assets, everything that you do, right, so again, if you’ve got a GMB, for example of Google My Business profile, and you have content silos on your main site, then publish content to your GMB profile using GMB posts. And you want to stack them the same way that you would stack content within your silos, right? So you’re adding depth to silos, right? So there’s width, how many categories there are, so you could have a mono silos which means one silo, but you just add a bunch of depth to it, which means supporting articles that are within the same keyword theme. And you just add additional articles are constantly adding depth to the site which builds relevancy. Does that make sense? You do the same thing within GMB posts, you do the same thing with press releases, you do the same thing on your G site, you do the same thing in the drive stack. Everything ends up getting mirrored to where it’s got the same structure and what happens is you build a shit ton of massive thematic relevance, right? So relevancy, topical relevancy, as well as you build a, you know, authority. And it creates a network Empire used to use a term called buoyancy, right? So by doing so, and you have all of these assets that are all linked properly, and they’re all building relevancy in proper categories or content silos, then it starts to create buoyancy across all of the content in every silo. In other words, it helps you know what, as I say, rising tides cause all boats to rise.

That’s what we mean by buoyancy, it helps all of the keywords to start to surface in the search results. I don’t know if that was a very clear explanation, but that was the best I could do anything else want to comment on it? a clone an exact copy, a duplicate of whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s all it. It’s just a bunch of fancy words for saying if we’re saying, do the same thing over there, the same thing that you’re doing here, wherever your money site is, do over there, wherever it is that you’re seeing mirror and think of a mirror, what do you see in the mirror, you see the same thing that that’s looking back at you, right? The same thing that that’s all we’re saying, I just hate mentioning the word duplicate because then people start saying, well, duplicate content and all this bullshit that we know is bullshit. And I don’t want people focusing on that. Just copy whatever it is that you’re doing, or do the same thing, everywhere. And then and if you do that, then your theme mirror.

What Are Embed Gigs?

Very good. All right, the last part of that was. Finally, you mentioned you run embed gigs, the G site, what do you mean by gigs? Well, that’s right here. Okay, so are on MGYB store, if you look at the embed packages, then you’ve got maps, videos, ID page General, you know, I typically would just order general, it doesn’t matter, guys just, you know, order whatever you’re looking to power up. But what this means is you, you take you, for example, your G site pages that you’ve mirrored right, so again, you got your homepage, which is going to be brand plus a primary keyword, okay, then once you start to mirror your pages from your money site, right, so your primary asset onto your D site, now you’ve got g site pages that are a one to one ratio. So if you’ve got 18 products, separate products that are all separate categories on your services, whether they’re products or services doesn’t matter. Then you’re going to have 18 pages on the G site homepage plus 18 pages, right? Each one of them is going to be one to one. So let’s say you’ve got blue marbles, green marbles, red marbles on your money site, you’re going to

You’re going to have blue marbles, green marbles, and red marbles or whatever on your G site to. Does that make sense? Each one is going to have a one to one-page ratio. And then from there, you can take your pages, or the G site homepage, whatever you want. But you can get very specific on where you’re pushing relevancy. And how, if you take your pages from like, for example, your green marble page, and you come over here and get your head, the embed gig over here, and let’s say you want to do one, just to say it’s a gas setup medium competition. So this is going to do 2500 embeds to your green marble g site page. Does that make sense? Or and you can add other stuff in there. Right? So let’s say that you what are the RYS drive stack its expansion. So now you’re going to have the G site page created by us on your G site, your existing entity or branded g site, excuse me, we’re going to create the green marbles page. We’re going to create the green marbles folder within your drive stack and in all of the files that are going to be created inside the drive, stack is going to be optimized specifically for green marbles. That makes sense. And they’re all going to be the links are all going to be pointing to the green marble page on your money site, then those files and folders are going to be embedded in the green marble g site page. And now you’ve got the G site page that you can order an embed gig to embed, you know, run to, and you could also embed the five the G site, excuse me the drive stat files, you could also embed your money site pages if you wanted to, for green marbles. Does that make sense? If you’re doing press releases, you could iframe the press the specific press releases that are pointing back to the green marbles money site page. Does that make sense?

All of those you can embed those. And what we mean by embeds is once again it’s creating an iframe. So it’s essentially creating a window and another website that displays your content, which is the same thing as what a YouTube video is, guys, when you share a YouTube video on somebody else’s website. And it shows up as a video. That’s an embed code, right? It’s an iframe. So you’re actually seeing YouTube code on somebody else’s website, well, that’s all you’re doing is you’re taking your website, or your G site page or your content, whatever it is that you’re creating an iframe, and we’re, we’re going out, Dadea, our link builder is going out and creating pages on other sites with relevant content that’s gonna have that window that iframe that embed code of your content in the middle of it, so that you’re starting to push relevancy in through the iframe that way. And then with the, again, with the different kits here that we have, or, you know, package levels that we have here, though, then link building to the pages that the embeds are on. So that’s what we mean by an embed run is just go and do that. And I use a combination of both, I usually start with link building, and then you know that so maybe month one, I’ll hit everything with link building. Then on month two, I’ll do embeds plus link building, then maybe month three, I’ll switch it up and I’ll hit maybe deeper targets from within the project would be called, you know, deep linking.

So there’s just another number of ways that we do it. And guys, a lot of this will hopefully make a lot more sense. Starting next week when I have the checklist on that I started to show you guys earlier from process Street, because then you can go through it and like I said, it will at first just be a checklist saying, Okay, do this, this and this and in this sequence, and in this, you know, it’ll be literally stepped by step, but I’m going to be adding over the coming week’s explainer videos to explain why we’re doing this so that you guys get a better understanding of the big picture. Because I still think that we, that gets lost a lot when they call it getting lost in translation. I think that gets lost a lot when we try to explain it because we understand it sometimes some of our audience does not and so we’re trying to get better about that, which is why I’m working on that checklist for you guys. Okay.

We’re just about out of time. Let’s see if we can scroll through another one or two real quick guys. Oh, allow says the theme area includes internal links. So do stacks link to each other? Well, it’s an expansion of an existing stack. So yeah, I mean, they’re all spider silo together anyways, if you understand what we mean by that, but yeah, if it’s a subfolder within a drive an existing drive stack, they’re all linked together anyways, that makes sense. It’s like a parent and child relationship. So, yes, if I wouldn’t build separate stacks, that doesn’t make sense. It’s why we have the expansion service, guys because you get more power out of building additional relevancy within one stack than you do by building multiple stacks. Does that make sense?

Okay, moving on there is no physical link between stacks. We don’t do a to b. No, we No, we don’t do that they live within one another. And if you’re isolating a stack, but you link out from that stack to something else, then you’re defeating the purpose of isolating the stack, as we recommend. So no, they don’t they interlink inside the drive stack itself. But if you have three stacks within the one main stack, none of those three will link either to each other or to the main stack.

There you go.

IFTTT Problem In Syndicating Full-Text Posts

Alright, the last one is we’re going to answer these questions real quick. Because he’s here every week asking multiple questions they’ve gotten. You’ve got fewer questions though. You’re starting to trend down maybe which is what we asked for. So anyway, I’m proud of you, buddy. He says, Hey, guys, IFTTT has a problem of syndicating Full-Text posts. have you encountered this problem? Or is it for new connections only? No, I have not.

I would. Now I don’t know I’m not saying that you’re wrong. But what I would suggest you take a look at your settings from your feed. So if you’re syndicating from a WordPress site or self-hosted WordPress site if you go into settings reading, right so so under the settings, option in WordPress and then go to a reading, you’ll see that

  There’s an option for the RSS feed to show either summary or full text. Now, even if you set it to full text, so the RSS feed shows the full text, some themes, WordPress themes will only show snippets instead. So summaries or snippets instead of the full text, even if you set that as a setting. So it really depends. I don’t think it’s an IFTTT thing. It’s most likely a WordPress thing. Either your settings are off or the WordPress theme that you’re using is forcing summaries. So I’ve not heard of that from anybody else yet. So if that is the case, then you know, we will know within the next few days for sure. And this is the last one guys and then I’m going to shut it down because we’re after five o'clock is do you do your backlink and embed packages on your press releases also or only syndication properties? Google properties? No, absolutely. That’s what I’m saying guys is you can push power in through any number of places and if your theme here.

And content marketing and they’re all in your content marketing is mirrored right across all of your content marketing sources, including press releases, you can utilize those very strategically. I’ve talked about this a lot in the mastermind. But for example, once again, guys like within a particular silo, right? you publish content from your money site, it syndicates out to your syndication network properties, where you can go extract those URLs from the syndication network properties that are specific to those posts. So let’s say you add five supporting articles in a silo. So five blog posts that get pushed out to syndication network, you go to syndication network, and let’s just keep it simple. Let’s just say that you just grabbed the three blog URLs for each one of the posts that gets syndicated out to the blogs, right. So blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, so you go extract now and you’ve got five supporting posts in this example, right. So now you’re going to have five URLs from blogger five URLs from Tumblr, five URLs from wordpress.com. Right and now the same thing if your theme mirroring on with using press releases. So you got five press

At least as each press releases promoting a blog post one of those blog posts. Now you can take those five, press release URLs. And you can add those into a link building gig or you can embed gig or whatever you wanted to do. So yeah, that’s what I’m saying guys is you can take them by the way, you can also create a, you know, the mirror pages on G site, I typically don’t do it on a post level, just on a page level. But if I wanted to, if you really needed the additional push, you could always take wherever your top-level pages are on your G site, right, so you’ve got, again, mirrored, your top-level categories are going to have pages on your G site, and you can create child pages. They’re not posts, but you can create child pages on your G site, and have each one of your posts now added as a child page on your G site. You can extract those URLs and add those to link building gigs. Then you order the link building games with keyword sets that are specific to that particular category or silo, that keyword theme that set Does that make sense? And so again, guys, yeah, you can and the same thing with press releases, you can work them right in there. Here’s the thing on your G site. If you’re going down to a post level and adding child pages on the G site as posts, right to whatever the category pages on the G site, then you can even take your content from your syndication network and iframe that into the G site page. Same thing with your press releases, right? So Can you imagine you don’t even need any additional content is my point guys, you can take the G site page, just create the page, optimize it for the same keyword as the post on your site, right that you’re trying to promote? And then you take all of the content that it’s been syndicated to and mirrored on, including press releases, and you just embed all of that into that page on, which is essentially a post on your G site. And now you don’t have you know, this massive amount of content. It’s all that relevancy all through iframes. And now you’ve got a G site, page target, that you can just hammer with link building with very specific keyword sets for anchors that make sense and you can push a ton of relevancy into it that way. So

Anyways, hopefully, that answers the question. Anyone wants to comment on that before I wrap it up, Marco. Was that good enough? Not good enough. Okay. Very good. Those are great questions today, guys. So thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. Thanks, guys. Bye, everyone. Yep,

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

[daynamartinez22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295

Click on the video above to watch Episode 295 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 295. Today is the eighth of July 2020. And this is the episode where people are sad that the Fourth of July specials are over. But we got some good news for you guys. And we are going to keep the good times rolling here. We’re going to get into the questions. I think we’ve already got a ton on the page. But real quick, we’re gonna take a minute and say hi to everybody. And we got a couple of quick announcements. So I’ll start at the bottom today on my screen and we’ll go with Chris, how are you doing, man?

Doing well here. Some of it is in full force. And yeah, things are pretty good. The only thing that is not that lovely is today. Well, I gotta go back and wear some masks again here.

So yeah, yeah, better safe than sorry. I won’t go more on that subject. I just had someone sending me something about like, Can you believe it? They might cancel football games. I was like You kidding me in a friggin stadium.

Anyways, All right, Marco How are you doing today?

Is that all day, man. It must be a screen must be up in the background. I do it. I can’t help it. This is Costa Rica, guys. This is it. This is the real deal. You’re seeing it week to week and you’re gonna see it for a year then I’m turning the damn camera off because I hate being on camera.

It’s one of the things that I like least as being on camera just.

It’s not enjoyable. It’s kind of distracting to me if this is my workstation, then I need to work so it’ll be removed after a year of UIC in paradise.

Very nice. By the way, I posted again, some results in for you guys watching. I was questioning the methods. Also, I heard its methods got slapped by Google? What are you guys doing all kinds of different stuff? We got slapped, we got slapped and I go in and look at the results and I push results and it’s better than last week. You can follow it. You can just go it’s in our free group. It’s there. It’s I post it for you. Those are results week to week. So last week, there were 304 306 calls I think it was this week. It’s 366. So it’s going back 28 days over 28 days. We client got 366 calls. I think client is happy just when the GMB mind you that’s the click to call. That’s not including what he’s getting on the website, not including form fields not including all the other stuff that’s going on. guys gonna make so much.

I told you guys I’m upset. I should be hitting myself in the head with a hammer because I didn’t think that I should be I should do that the percentage-based agreement, per call agreement, which is still really, really, really, trust me, it’s really sweet. But it would have been so much better if it were if I had done the 10 to 15% that we often do, right? We often talk about that when you deal with a client, and you can establish that trust. I didn’t know that this guy all that well, it was a recommendation. So I had to go on a per call. And now he doesn’t want to change the deal, of course. So anyway, guys, go watch. It’s in the free group. It’s there for you. It’s in the heavy hitter free. It’s all of Semantic Mastery groups is on my page on Facebook. Go see the results for yourself. And if you’re wondering how we did it, summed up. Everything is there. I am not using anything different than what we teach and what we offer what we see, first of all, what we teach in our courses. And what we offer in MGYB is what we have, we have a team of very capable V is the keyword research was done by the keyword research VA? I mean, why wouldn’t I use the things? We set things up for ourselves to get results ourselves right then that’s after we’ve proven that they work we offer them to you guys so you can make it work for you and you can go make money. Now whether you do it that’s not my problem. It’s up to you to take that step and then go do the do. How you do you know how to do it the way I do but do something. I’ll leave it at that.

Good to go. Now Wayne and I haven’t seen Wayne on Hump Day hangouts a lot. He just said RYS reloaded is setting the standards by which all other copycats get judged. Haters gonna hate.

see any? All right. How you doing today? Good, man. Good. I’m happy. I just wanted to thank everyone that we’re supporting Semantic Mastery and enjoy be during our sale. You guys are awesome. So thank you for that. Thank you for those of you guys that that took advantage that took the distance

And everything we were doing pretty big discounts on both mg y b so and Semantic Mastery so thank you for that and regarding what Marco was saying about percentage deals we might be talking about that at some point Adam specifically my main man Adam right there he might be talking about he will be talking about a percentage-wise deal so that’s gonna be pretty cool Martin calm because we have some good stuff coming up.

Danny definitely looking forward to that. Yeah, Hernan’s got some more info on that but last but certainly not least Bradley How you doing today? I’m good man. I was just mentioning you guys when we first got on before going live that uh, I’ve got like several SEO projects starting two of which I talked about last week are going to be public case studies. I actually secured well I’ve determined two locations. One is going to be Pompano Beach, Florida, which is like the Fort Lauderdale area and in Broward County, very, very competitive. And then another one in Richmond, Virginia, both trees service sites or lead gen sites. So I’m starting on that but I’ve got like multiple other projects just getting started on. I gotten away from doing a whole lot of site builds. But recently I’ve just got a lot of work that’s come in which is interesting one of our mastermind members that asked, you know, how everybody’s dealing with this COVID-19 pandemic, you know, and all this stuff with client work in agency working, it’s interesting, but I’ve had some you know, I’ve had a handful of clients suspend services when this has happened depending on the business industry, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve landed several to Tree Service clients as well as several lead gen, like buyers and other lead buyers Tree Service lead buyers, so you know, it just depends I guess on the industries guys there’s still a lot of business going on out there so don’t let that stop you from going out and you know, doing what you got to do to make money so anyways,

so now I will second that. There was the post in the mastermind is either new member I apologize. I forget who it was but asking about you know, how things are going and like I definitely saw it too like not trying to hide anything I lost three clients generally work with three to five being given time at three when Coronavirus, hidden I lost two within a week. Like, just and it made sense. Like I was like, yeah, this totally makes sense. I’m not trying to like get them back. But ever since that point, it’s been busier. It seems like I’m definitely getting more out inbound. And it’s just gotten busier and busier. So it’s kind of been an interesting turn of events that, you know, we’ll see how it goes. You know, plenty of businesses who actually finally made the plunge and moved online. Yeah.

Tons of work. Yeah. And there’s work where you don’t always expect it, just to this may seem obvious to everyone else, but I had a travel company reach out to me, and like, that just blew me away at first because I was like, are you sure you want to talk to me? Like, you know, here’s kind of what I do. Here’s what I charge. Are we on the same page? They said, Yeah, yeah, let’s talk cuz they’re like, yeah, it’s obvious. We got to diversify, you know, we need to go online and we need to have something just beside the travel. What can we do? Let’s talk. I was like, wow, okay, this is really interesting. I never would have approached them. And out of the blue, they got in touch with me. So keep your eyes and ears open. And yeah, think about those different angles. Yeah, and the last thing I want to mention about that is, you know, for example, one of the Tree Service clients, who just hired me this week, actually, we started communicating in February of this year. So those of you that don’t learn, nurture your leads, and follow up, like, you know it, you’re missing out on a big part of the business. We talk a lot about that kind of stuff in the mastermind and into your agency. It’s touched on as well. But you know, that’s the thing. We started talking with this client, he reached out to me from some of my marketing out online, right, so it was an inbound lead.

We scheduled a call then I did send a proposal to them after that just you know, about a week within a week of the discovery call. And it would, you know, it was probably four or five weeks, I hadn’t heard from them. And I did some automated follow-ups over the course of that time. And I ended up getting a callback, you know, an email back where they wanted to schedule is two partners in this business and they wanted to schedule a conference call to ask some questions and stuff. So we did that. Then it was radio silence again for about two weeks. So my automated follow-ups kicked in and started following up with them sending them emails, just you know, every couple of weeks reminding them hey, you know, that proposals still hanging out there, if you’re interested, you know, reach back out, blah, blah, blah. And they followed back up in June. So from February until June, and then now it’s July, and they just now hired me. So we’re talking like, you know, what, four or five months of time lapse between when the initial contact, the lead came in, and when they actually hired me and it was just because of follow-ups that I was able to secure that client and it’s a pretty decent client. Pretty, a pretty good amount of revenue and they’ve got a good budget too. So my point, guys, it’s really important to follow up if you’re, if you’re not, you’re leaving, you’re losing business. Does that make sense? So, anyway, definitely. Yeah, I think that’s a good note. And we talked about it earlier and we’re talking about the mastermind. For everyone who doesn’t know what the mastermind is, that’s our closed private community. You can find out more about that a mastermind dot semantic mastery comm we just had part of the Fourth of July special was a very limited time offer for seven day trial into the mastermind booking and onboarding call. We had a lot but we had several people take us up on that. And just want to put that out there that if you’re interested in taking things up to the next level, if you know that being in a group of like-minded agency owners or consultants who are trying to grow and or understand that, you know, learning from others who have been there, whether it’s us whether it’s the other people in the mastermind is the way to get results. If you’re at that point now then please go check it out because that’s the group you want to be in.

The last thing I want to touch on is POFU Live. All right, I am excited. pofulive2020. All right, it can’t keep us downright no Coronavirus us from having POFU Live, it’s just going to be virtually live. All right this year. So it’s still September 25, 26th and 27th. Obviously, you can join wherever you’re at. And we still do have just the ticket available so that you can join and check everything out and watch all the talks. We have a VIP ticket available, we’re going to have a VIP event we’re going to be getting some beers shipped out to directly to you if you sign up and then we’re going to be hopping on for an online guided beer tasting event and then do some Bs and have some fun after that after everyone’s had a couple of beers. Yeah. How’s the good stuff? And then of course we’ve got the VIP plus ticket. If you’re out there and you’re looking for someone on one time or rather a several ones you want us to chime in on whether it’s your processes, building your agency, whatever it is, you’re gonna get a hell of a deal with that. So head over to pofulive.com. We’re going to be having more details coming out as the summer goes on. We’ve already got two amazing or sorry, forgive me, daddy. We’ve got three amazing guest speakers lined up. All right. Two of them are from our very own mastermind.

We have two very successful agency owners, Jordan Fowler and Brian cattle. And then Deadia the famous video will be speaking as well, I believe he’s going to be giving some info on updated case study. But regardless, we’re really looking forward to that Rob deal, of course, will be joining us and then all of us will be there. So it’s going to be jam-packed. We got a lot going on. We got some more guest speakers. We’re getting lined up. So head over to poker live. Grab your ticket. Do you guys have any questions? You’re watching this live, feel free to pop it on the page and we’ll answer today as we go.

Sweet. Are we ready? I think so. Let’s do this. Do this. Let’s get into it.

All right. Couple things real quick. This was Marco’s screenshot. And I mean, look at that. Look at the growth right there. He was talking about in the Facebook post and that’s it 30 days like that’s amazing Marco that’s fucking impressive. And it’s, you know, it’s not uncommon. It’s common for you to have results like this. But this, that’s really impressive what I’m saying. So that’s what Marco was talking about guys, it’s the same stuff that we teach. One other thing I want to touch on real quick is I’m building out a checklist, guys using process Street, which I love. It’s for processes that I use internally in my own agency. Now it’s for training and everything else. Its amazing process street is fabulous. Anyways, I’m building out a checklist for our methods so that it will be shareable that you guys will be able to go in. And it’s kind of following the battle plan, like what we talked about in the most current version of the battle plan, which is our methods and how to, you know, put them together in the proper sequence and all of that because I guess that’s not been clear to a lot of people still so probably next week, we’ll by Hump Day Hangouts, next week, there will this will be available. So you can see there’s a lot of information in here. And it’ll be step by step with certain things that, you know, you can checkbox to go through, but just kind of want to give you guys a quick update on that, or heads up on that, excuse me, because that’s something that I’m working on now. And it will be should be ready by next Wednesday.

And it’s going to continue to be fleshed out where I’ll actually add training videos like essential essentially explainer videos, where appropriate within the actual process doc to really explain the process because not only is it just knowing the process, but it’s also the why like, why do we do these things, right. And so I want to, I want to be able to add additional information into that, and we’re going to make that available to you guys. You know, like I said, the checklist will come first and then over the coming weeks, I’m going to be adding additional like video clips in within the actual process doc so that you guys will have a better understanding of what it is and then you can just import that in your own process street account if you choose to use it.

And then make copies or what’s called run checklists off of it. And then you can use that for each project. So you can just go right on through and check off the boxes as you get stuff done for each project. So, just want to share that with you guys as well.

Okay, any comments guys before we get into it?

Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Besides Directory Submission And Syndication, What Are Other Ways To Use The RSS For SEO Link Building?

Okay, so the first one up is Nicholas. He says, besides submitting to RSS directories and building syndication rings, is there anything else we can do with RSS feeds to help our SEO and link building effort? Yeah, use them in theme mirroring with your G site.

You know if I’m going to mention this here, I can’t show you how to do it here but it’s been covered in pretty much anyone of our paid courses and Syndication Academy, mastermind, heavy hitter club, I mean any one of them it’s been covered in, but use if you know how to use Feedburner. You can create an embed code from an RSS feed using Feedburner and then mirror that in knew your G site which you should be doing anyway. Right? Well, we call theme airing, right? And then you can link build to that g site page embed, you can do embeds for that g site page link building into that g site page both embeds plus link building to the embeds. And that’s a very, very powerful way to utilize your RSS feeds, again, stalking iframes in Google properties, right. So you got a G site, Google property, Buzz boost, embed code, Google property, RSS feeds, right. So it’s dynamically updated every time you publish content. The same thing with the press advantage RSS feeds, right? Every time you publish a press release, it dynamically updates, the embed code, the RSS embed code, so it’s very, very powerful. And I use that very heavily in my theme mirroring. So anybody has any other comments on that?

Nope. Okay. Uh, something else. One other thing you can do is if, you know it depends on how many projects I always recommend that you just have one branded syndication. So tier one branded syndication ring for blog content. But you know, if you’ve got if you’ve only got one project that you’re working on, then you might want to go through the trouble of having multi-tiered networks which works great if you can manage the second tier networks, so that you’re adding relevant content. So in other words, if you’ve got an RSS feed that you if you’re only syndicating to your sent your tier one syndication network, that’s great, that’s what I primarily do but if you have if you’re looking to squeeze more power out of it too You can do the multi-tiered networks and use that same feed to trigger your second-tier networks but you also want to add in related content feeds other relevant and related content feeds from other sources is what I’m saying. If you if you’re questioning what it is that I’m talking about, just go to support.semanticmastery.com And you can that that we have a knowledge base there and you can go look into the syndication Academy knowledgebase articles and look at them there’s several knowledgebase articles with videos in there that talk about how to utilize multi-tiered syndication networks for blog syndication. And that will give you a really in-depth description or explanation of how to how to set that up properly so that you can squeeze even more power out of an RSS feed. Okay. Oh, and lastly, if you check out the Syndication Academy in the advanced RSS training, there’s additional things you can do with it there.

Is There An All In One Done For You Package For Lead Gen?

Alright, next is don’t know what the name is. But Hi, I’m looking for an all in one done for you package. Is this possible for lead gen?

I mean, yes and no, we have the SEO shield, which is pretty much all of our methods. You still have to set up the main asset unless you’re going to use the G site within the SEO shield as your primary entity assets. So your primary website, which you can do, if you have if you’re doing for lead gen two, I’m assuming you’re talking about local lead gen. Then you can. Right now we still have, or at least currently we have GMB verification services available. So you should get a GMB then you can include that in your SEO shield build. Once the GMB has been verified, if you’ve already got one, then you do submit that with your SEO SEO build, and, and then we’ll build out all of those assets for you. Then it’s a matter of content marketing, which we don’t provide content marketing services yet, at some point in the future, we may, but content marketing on a regular basis press releases, we sell those in MGYB. It’s important to do that and then in link building and embeds to your entity assets. Again, it’s exactly what we cover in the battle plan.

And MGYB is, you know, done for you services, we don’t have an all-encompassing package that does set up, you know, the website and the entity assets and everything for you. There, you have to kind of put them together, but that’s what the SEO shield is because that’s most of our methods tied into one package. Any comments on

Guys, yeah, I read this a couple of days ago, I think it was, I can’t remember when it was first posted. And I thought about this and I said that it’s a great idea. But it would be hard for us to kind of put this together and I’m going to tell you why.

I like money. And I don’t mind people giving me money right through our done for you services. I know they’re effective. And I know that they work. But let’s say that we package it all we did, we did the five, six press releases in the package. We do the link building and put that in the package, we do the embeds. And we put that in the package and everything that you usually need, or that we can let’s say that we can use for this person, we’re talking about something that would probably run in the thousands of dollars, and it may be overkill. So it might be that this person would not need all of this to rank in that niche. And they would be needlessly spending money not

I’ll say it again, although I’d love for this person to give me the money, and they’re going to get results anyway, but then they might be giving me too much. And that’s something that to me, I have a problem with that I have a problem with people having to overspend for results. So this is why we set it up, you go in, you do your own page, right? Then you come and get the SEO shield, then you wait and see what the results are. Without data, you’re going blind. Like, without looking at ranking results without looking if you’re getting form fields. If you’re getting visits, you don’t have analytics set up, if you don’t have Search Console setup, if you’re not gathering all of this data, you know, waiting out the three weeks or so four weeks, once everything is handed back to you right once when that @ID page and the drive second D site and the syndication network and you’ve primed it and you started content syndication that you’re doing posting inside the GMB whatever your money site is, and you’re doing things the way that we that we tell you to had to look and see what kind of results you’re getting. Because if you’re already there, you might, you might just need a little push to stick and solidify. You might not need anything. And so it is a good idea. So okay, just give me everything. But what if you don’t need everything? What have you? What if it’s overkill? And what if it dances for months and months, which which we seen until it, it settles? I mean, you need that you could have been making money. Instead of setting everything to death. The only problem that I have with this is that it could be overkill, so maybe we set it up for another thing that I thought for more competitive niches. Well, even in the most competitive niches we’ve seen that we can do damage with, you know, some embed, runs link building and some press releases. Sometimes it doesn’t need a whole bunch of other times it needs more and it needs that consistency. It needs posting over time it needs to solidify the entity, your entity needs to be better than everybody else’s.

Well, that’s on page work so that the results can be better. There there is no, I wish there were such a thing as a magic pill as a way to look at a niche and say, This is definitely this and only this is what’s definitely going to work for that niche. Because guess what? It doesn’t work that way. And the algorithms don’t work that way, even in the same niche in different categories and different excuse me, subcategories. It might work differently. So we don’t know. All we can do is you follow the sequence. Look at the data and if you need more, we got loads more that you could do very well.

And he says that, yeah, he will buy the GMB service and make my own site. I just need something to rank both GMB, GMB and organic. Is there such a service and yeah, that’s what you know, that’s what we talked about with the SEO shield and in the ongoing link building and embeds, right that’s in a press release. So content marketing is all part of that problem of our method. And that’s how you add a tie, you build additional relevancy and authority to your assets is by continually updating with content and you add depth to your content. Right? Does that make sense? So it’s really important to do that. And that’s why if you get an SEO shield, that’s step one, right, and SEO power shield, because that covers all of those entity assets, all of our methods that we talked about, you know, it builds all of those out for you. And then it’s about powering up those entity assets consistently and with consistent content marketing as well. So, is anyone available? Yeah, every Wednesday at 4pm Eastern.

What Are The Values Of Embeds And iFrames In Terms Of Stacking?

Alona says, could you guys break down the value of using embeds verse iframes. It’s the same thing, Alanna, same thing, right. an embed code is nothing but an iframe. Right? Is there anything that I’m missing here guys know the iframe is the code. The embed is what you do with the code on on another page, right?

Right. Yeah, all different, not especially curious to you which to use when creating stacks? Yeah, again. So I may be the question is, should you create your own embed code, right, like an iframe generator, for example? And then insert it using the, you know, insert HTML box in G sites and insert your own code, or do you want to go to insert and then go to gadgets, and you find the iframe gadget, and then insert the URL and let g sites make the actual embed code for you? It doesn’t matter. Either way. It really doesn’t matter, either way. So it’s just, you know, six and one-half dozen in the other. Do you want to create your own embed code and embed it using the HTML box, you know, insert HTML box, or do you want to let Google create the iframe by using the in the iframe gadget? Either way, it’s going to do the same damn thing. Okay. So it doesn’t matter.

Is It Okay To Add An Amazon S3 Page To The Money Site SameAs Schema?

Okay, next j says, Hey, guys just got an ID page made recently, would it be wise to add the URL of the s3 page the money site same as schema? Would this cause any harm? No, that’s what you that should be if, depending on what type of ID or schema you’re using. For corporations or organizations, which corporation is a subset of organization schema, or even local business schema or any subset of local business schema, there is an ID page designation or attribute right within the structured data. And that’s what you would link that’s what you would designate as your ID page is the s3 URL is same as to you can you can put it there too, it’s not gonna hurt anything.

I prefer actually to if it’s for if I have a branded domain, I like, you know, everything, almost everything I run goes through. I use CloudFlare for DNS. And I like to set up an actual, you know, domain map using a cname over to the bucket URL. So that I’m using it’s not on HTTPS, but it

It ends up being like, for example, id.domain.com. Or if it’s location-specific, then I’ll do like the city name. So let’s just say Cole pepper dash id.domain.com. If I’ve got multiple locations, so multiple idx pages, if that makes sense. And I like to use that, because then it once again, it’s referencing the branded domain. And if you click on that URL, it’s basically showing the bucket both the bucket URL and the ID page. If it’s a custom app, domain, subdomain, then they both show like they’ll both show but what I do is that the canonical in the actual ID page so that it’s always canonicalized back to its own, you know, to the custom domain version of it, if that makes sense. But yeah, you can add it in the same as it’s not gonna hurt anything. I always do in fact, yeah, I always do make that pardon.

What Type Of Link Building Do You Recommend To Power Up S3 Bucket Safely To The Money Site?

Also, what type of link building would you recommend to power up the s3 bucket safely to pass power to the money site GMB link building. And embeds, embeds and link building. Remember, they both, both, you know, it’s both, it’s very powerful, both of them link building directly to the idx page. If you’re using iframes, and all of that on the idx page, then you’re not going to have any issues. Also, I like to do embeds and in link building to the embeds, because you can add relevancy that way, too.

Okay. And by the way, you can, you can basically build any types of links to the idx page. We, you know, we have the service and mg y b that has been developed specifically to work with our methods, but you could do any sort of links to that really.

Now we have adept here for that right MGYB to he’s been doing it forever seems like almost a decade. So why wouldn’t we use the master? That’s right.

That’s right. And he’ll be speaking and POFU Live.

What SEO Service Do You Recommend To Push The Ranking Of A Website From Page 1 To Page 2?

So Jonah says, How do you all really appreciate the videos you put out I’m looking to rank a page for a low slash medium competition local service keyword for local with no GMB listings, just purely organic results, my competitor hasn’t updated their site for years and doesn’t have any ongoing link building from my analysis just links from years ago that aren’t particularly strong. I checked on page improved content and built a handful of relevant guest posts and press releases along with links from the G stack, but been stuck on the top of page two for months. Is there anything you guys would recommend to give the page? A bit of a push? Thanks again? Um, yeah, I mean, more content. I talked about that earlier, just adding more depth to the site. As far as you know, I don’t know if you’ve got your site siloed or what, you know, how your site is structured, but adding more content so that it’s got more relevant and fresh content that helps syndication network, like I said, if you’re going to be publishing content, you may as well do it via your blog from your money site so that it’s syndicating out to a syndication network, which again, it’s activity, that it’s in relevancy that it’s building, you can power up your syndication networks, you can power up your entity assets. So for example, once again, SEO power shield, if you don’t already have that, make sure you get that right and that’s going to put your money site in the middle and then have this SEO shield. That’s why we call it that essentially like an SEO firewall of high authority profiles branded assets that are covering or cocooning your site, so to speak, right shielding your site, then you just do a shit ton of link building, as I just mentioned, in beds, beds, you can do embeds from your entity assets, you can even embed your money site if you wanted to. And in that way it’s getting the embed code is going to be placed on pages with relevant content, then you can link build to those link building or those embed pages, right. And so that’s just a stack service. In other words, when you buy embeds services from mg y b, then you order the link building as which will link build to the embed pages, all of these things are going to help to push it on to page one and that’s really the whole game in a nutshell there anything you want to add? Yeah look at the entity and work on the structured data. I see nothing on there about what you’ve done with your structured data that’s a given now anyways.

I guess not everybody understands that but yeah, you guys structured data is critically important. Remember, there’s You can also mark up besides just organization or markup or local business markup, you can also add elements of markup the elements of pages and things like that. So you know, the more that you can add, the better you’re going to be because you’re going to have a stronger entity, right, a stronger asset. So

Can I Use The Same Target URL In The SEO Shield For The Drive Stack Expansion?

Okay, next DCs? Yo, what’s up, man, he says, I’m going to order a couple of drive stack expansions soon, but just so I’m clear, can I use the expansions for both the same target URL the shield was set up to target in the first place as well as brand new URLs. I target the homepage twice, with different top-level keywords, then add another expansion for an inner page.

Bradley, can you and Marco kind of expand on this a little bit because we just rolled this out right before the Fourth of July special, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to really tell people he just in case anyone’s watching who doesn’t know what we’re talking about with that drive expansion. Yeah, here, I’ll pull it up. And Marco, you want to kind of talk through this a little bit.

So typically, what we recommend is that, you know, you’re going to have one primary keyword that you want the brand to be associated with. And I understand there’s a lot of additional keywords, products and services for businesses, there should be one primary keyword, right. And then from there, if you got your site structured with silo structure, then you’re going to have top-level categories. And so that’s perfect for drive stack expansion, right. So now you’re going to take the top-level keyword for one of your product categories or service categories. And that’s going to be an expansion. You’re going to order, you know, expand your drive stack for that, which is what we’re looking at on this page. Okay. So what that does is that is your Google Drive expansion stack and your Google Site setup. So what that means is if you if you’ve already got your, your, your primary drive stack and G site for your entity, your brand, then that’s again, creating the association between your top-level keyword plus the brand. Then after that’s built, then you would take your silos, right, so your product or service categories on your site, and you would whatever the top-level keyword is for each one of the categories, you would create another expansion stack, which would be basically creating an additional folder inside of your Google Drive folder, your main Drive folder that is optimized for that each silo keyword, right, so each folder would be now optimized for one particular category on the site. And then a page gets created on the existing g site for the brand. Write that then all of the drive folders and files get embedded into that. So that’s how you create that theme mirroring within the drive stack in the G site. So that’s what again, I, I don’t typically order an expansion stack that’s going to target the homepage because I typically have my site structured in with the silo architecture. So I’m going to start going after once the initial stack is built for brand plus keyword Association, then I start building out the expansions for the service cap, you know, product and or service category, essentially, the silos on the site market, maybe you can explain that difference.

Not differently, but when I think of this, I think of the silo architecture, of course, and I think about how Bruce clay set this up, right? So he sets up the marble jar and they’re all of the colors are mixed. But of course, it’s marble so we can call them widgets, call them whatever you want. All right, so we’re selling marbles. And what we’re going to do with that main drive second g site is associate that with the keyword marbles. So it’s going to be g sites, site marble, whatever marbles, marbles, all colors. And we’re going to say shapes, sizes, whatever. And that’s perfect there. Alright, so each one of those jars on there is going to represent an inner page on not only the money site but the companion D site each time that you add a page. So now you have marbles, say marbles, calm. And the first one you’re going to do is green. So marbles, calm green, and red and yellow, you’re gonna write everything that you’re going to do about green marbles under that category, under that green now that hates that main page, you’re going to copy that exact same page into an error page. On the GE side, instead of you doing all that. What we do is we take that and we do it for you which take that page, we copy it, we set up the drive stack, we embed everything we add content.

And we just create that relevance. And we add that I’m not gonna say what we add, but it’s a way to pass the power through a fire hose with a nozzle. So that the power of that water think about it because you can cut metal with water. So we’re concentrating that power so that we pass the power to that inner page. Why? Because we’ve noticed and we’ve seen and our all our tests show that it’s much more difficult to rank one page for all of the keywords under that niche Marvel’s it’s much harder to do that than it is to break that up into categories. And the way that the Bruce clay shows on his website and under those, we target the keywords in that set. And what we’re after is green marbles. That would be the top-level category there. But every keyword under that would be a target. So green marble prize green marble costs, just what the best green marbles, all of that would be under that and it would be boosting that category. And what happens is, all of those keywords start pushing up that top-level category, they start coming up, and that’s how you start generating traffic to the website.

So when we thought that out, right, what we did is very simple, we take the keywords, we take the keywords that we isolated.

Now, this is inside the main drive site that you’ve already purchased. With the SEO power shield, we take that we isolate the keyword set under that subcategory which is green marbles and red marbles and yellow marbles. They should each have their own page, right so that we’re siloing properly and if they do then they should have a companion, dry stack, and G site page with them in the SEO power shield. So this is how when we thought this up, when I, when I, when I started to conceptualize it and start thinking about it, how to isolate it, and how to deliver the power, this is how I do it. I’m not gonna say here how we do it, because that’s giving away too much. But when you get it, you’ll see what it is that we do, if you break it down, like, like, we have a lot of people doing trying to reverse engineer, and that’s fine too. I’m not gonna give it away here.

So just a representation, you know, again, using Tree Service stuff, because that’s pretty much all I’m doing right now besides existing client work is tree services, the most broad keyword, right? So if I’m making brand association with the drive stack, the initial drive stack and G site, it’s going to be Tree Service plus company name, okay? And if it’s, if it’s very one specific location, we might include the location modifier, but for most of my Tree Service clients, they cover a, you know, a several County area, so we typically will just, it’ll be Tree Service and then whatever the company name is, that’s going to be the drive stacks gonna get built out for the G site as well. Okay. And then from there, that’s where you know we can silo out like Tree Removal tree trimming arborist services, each one of those would be separate sir silos, lawn care, land clearing, not all Tree Service contractors do lawn care, lawn care, but some do. landscaping could be another one. So each one of those would be your individual silos, right? Because those would be different service categories on the website. And so each one of these could get its own RYS expansion service created for it. And what that’s going to do is going to create subfolders within the primary RYS drive stack folder, right up that are optimized each one for each specific silo. And then a separate page is going to be created on the primary g site branded g site, there’s going to be mirrored for the website structure. And it’s going to include all of the drive stack files and folders that have been created as part of the expansion service in their respective pages on the G sites that make sense.

So that’s what it is. And each so for example, the tree removal expansion would be all the keywords that are associated with that are, you know, strictly Tree Removal based keywords that are going to be built in the, into the files, the GC, drive stack files, and then all of those files and folders are going to be embedded on that page, and are all going to be linking back to on the G site page. I mean, and they’re all going to be linking back to pages and or posts within the tree removal silo on the money site. Does that make sense? And then likewise, over here on lawncare, if this particular client or project had lawn care services to then there would be a lawn care expansion created, and all of the files and folders would be optimized for lawn care terms. They would all be linking to the lawn care pages and posts on the site. And then they would be mirrored onto the G site as well. Does that make sense? And now you’ve got separate targets that you can build links to within your drive stack within your G site folder, files, and folders that are that now you can buy specific link building gigs with keyword terms that are specific to that particular silo to that theme, does that make sense? So that’s how you can really start to push power into that very specific keyword sets within your actual site. Okay, anyway, that was a great question though. And thanks, Adam, for telling us to expand on that a little bit more.

How Would You Show The Progress Of Your SEO Efforts To The Client?

Alright, so next where were we that was DC SEO so Mohammed’s up next he says, Hey, guys, how would I show the progress I made for a client. My current car dealer client referred another dealer to me and I want to make a case study. What would be a good way to show the changes I effected I have the Webmaster Tools graph and GMB insights so far. Would anything else work? Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what I like to use more than anything is a search console, GMB insights and analytics. And if I’m doing AdWords or Google Ads then I typically will show ad data to, but that those are, you know, I always I don’t like to use rank reports anymore because they’re not that accurate. They’re just show an indication of the health. But they’re never all that they’re not very accurate. Because of you know what we’ve talked about many times on Hump Day hangouts with user location, you can’t really mimic location that Well, you can’t mimic browser history, browsing history, personal history, profile history, like, you know, what type of content people engage with and all that. So, you know, I don’t like to use rank trackers or rank reports really that much. I still provide them to clients, but those are always like secondary reports because I like to focus on GMB insights, analytics Search Console, and as I said, Google Ads data, if I’m running ads campaigns as well. Any other comments on that? Yeah. I mean, he has the client that recommended this other car dealer.

What is already in the door they’ve already taught? I don’t know how much more it is that you need to show or what it is that they’re asking for. But the GMB insights if you look at the one that I posted, again, in, in heavy hitter, anything like that, you can’t close the deal with something like that. Will you show and this, of course, you can go month, you can go weekly, you can go quarter by those are images that can I can’t show the actual GMB. But if you go in there, you can show the quarter, you can show the month, you can show it week to week, you can pick a timeframe, you can go into the historical data in the GMB and pull that up. I mean, you go into that historical data, you go a year back and you show what you did for that client, and it’s a done deal.

Look at the results. This is so again, focus your compensation or result you’re going to show results. You’ve been numbing with this current car dealer. You’re getting results that you can show, ask your other clients and they will

Mine, of course, under strict confidentiality, if this person could call and ask them about the results they got with you. I mean, that’s perfectly except I I don’t mind. Anyone that I’m talking to ever, of course with the clients, okay, calling the client and saying, Hey, don’t tell me more about Marco. They usually come recommended from a client anyway, I don’t take anyone just calling me cold and yeah, let’s talk. I don’t do that anymore. But this is the guy’s hot he’s coming from a dealer that’s referring you. They should know. And if they don’t give him the graph, I mean, that’s perfectly fine with Brad, he said, analytics is really good also for this for that visual. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I like to do. I like to show traffic reports more than anything.

It You know, that’s that that that seems to be the best metric to run by anyways, in my opinion. Well, bottom line is the best metric, right what kind of revenue has been generated, but that’s not something you can typically share.

How Do You Get Google To Update The Requests You Made In A YouTube Channel?

So, Tom’s up, he says, I have a generically branded YouTube channel with some lead gen videos that I had been using for a client. But unfortunately, an unforeseen circumstance or life, excuse me, life forced him to have to cancel his service. I purposely put his contact info at the top of the description in YouTube. So it would show in the search results, which of course changed once he was no longer a client, but Google was refusing to update the search results. As a result, my former client is getting free advertising and I cannot pass the videos along to a new client because of this. Got any ninja tricks to get Google to update this quicker? No, that’s the Google index cache. And you know, they refresh it when they want and I know what you’re talking about. I have

I had a video for a client project that I did about, I don’t know three or four months ago, and it’s got some really funky issue going on with that too. It was weird. I did a live stream and for some reason, It took the still like thumbnail image from that particular channel that I was live streaming. And that’s what you show it anyways, long story short, I’ve got a similar issue going on. And I don’t know how to get it to, you know, I’ve tried things like pinging, I’ve tried sending them through indexers I’ve tried, you know, sending it back through a syndication network, again, the embed, you know, the YouTube embedded in to go out, basically, get re syndicated out to a network again to see if forget it crawled again if that would update or refresh the Google index the cache essentially for the search results. And I experienced something similar, the only thing that I know that you could do would be to set it to unlisted until it falls out of the index, and then turn it back to the public, if that makes sense. Because then when Google goes to reindex it again, it should index it with the new you know, with the, whatever the new description is, that shows up at the top, whatever the new description is, that will show whatever’s at the top is going to show is the meta description in the search result. That’s the only thing I know maybe somebody else has another way to think force it. Any ideas? Guys?

No, nothing from me. Yeah. So that’s what I would do is try setting it to unlisted. don’t delete it, right? Because then you lose all of the work that you did to that particular video, just unlisted, wait for it to fall out of the index, which it will. And you know, I don’t know how soon that will be, you might be able to force that I don’t, I don’t know if you can force it to fall out of the index by pinging it or whatever. But once it, you know, isn’t in the index any longer, then you could set it back to public. And then I would ping it again, or run it through an indexing service re syndicated through your network, something like that. And when Google comes and crawls it again, it should refresh that cache to whatever’s at the top of the description now, that’s the only thing I can think of to do.

What Is A Theme Mirrored Page?

Alana says sorry, I got few questions from last week regarding I framing a money site you mentioned in your answer, creating a theme nerd page on a G site and reframing the money site on it. You elaborate on what you mean by theme, mirrored page, okay? Yes, we can.

From what I understand theme mirroring is creating a property stacks that align with the categories on your site. When you say money site, you are actually I framing the site, you actually want to rank on the G site. Yes, that is exactly what I’m talking about. So when we say money site, that’s whatever your primary asset is for your project. Typically, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. Most likely, you know, most of the time on WordPress, it doesn’t have to be, but most of the time, it’s going to be a self-hosted site. It doesn’t have to be, by the way, you could use your Google site as your money site, whatever my point is, whatever your primary asset is, for the project that you’re working on, most likely it’s going to be a self-hosted site. That’s what we call a money site. It’s just a term to describe whatever the primary asset is, okay. So from there, yes, on your G site, right, so, again, theming is all about creating a one to one ratio of your site structure your main property, your main website, site structure, across all of your entity assets. So that’s why we talk about theme mirroring onto your G site. So creating, if you’ve got, you know, for top-level categories or for services or for products, right, that you’re going to be selling on your site, then then we would mirror the four. So you’d have your main g site, which is going to be your brand, right basically, the homepage of the G site is your brand, and the whatever primary keyword is, but then you’re going to have pages on the G site that are mirrored after your money site pages, your primary website pages, right. And the same thing with your drive stack is going to have the primary folder, which is going to be branded plus your primary keyword, then you again, the expansion service, which would be the theme mirroring would be to create subfolders within your primary g stat folder, that each one of them optimized for a particular product or service or category on your site. So that makes sense. So whatever the structure first start with the on-page structure of your primary asset again, go take a look

Bruce clays, silo architecture article, you can go to our YouTube channel youtube.com/semanticmastery, use the channel search feature type in silo architecture, or silo structure, whatever you’ll see there are videos, there’s even a playlist where I very specifically talk about how to structure out of setup solid structure on a website. Then once you’ve done that correctly, then you go out and you start to build out those entity assets or purchase them and have us do it. But you start to mirror that same structure across everything you do across your content marketing across your entity assets, everything that you do, right, so again, if you’ve got a GMB, for example of Google My Business profile, and you have content silos on your main site, then publish content to your GMB profile using GMB posts. And you want to stack them the same way that you would stack content within your silos, right? So you’re adding depth to silos, right? So there’s width, how many categories there are, so you could have a mono silos which means one silo, but you just add a bunch of depth to it, which means supporting articles that are within the same keyword theme. And you just add additional articles are constantly adding depth to the site which builds relevancy. Does that make sense? You do the same thing within GMB posts, you do the same thing with press releases, you do the same thing on your G site, you do the same thing in the drive stack. Everything ends up getting mirrored to where it’s got the same structure and what happens is you build a shit ton of massive thematic relevance, right? So relevancy, topical relevancy, as well as you build a, you know, authority. And it creates a network Empire used to use a term called buoyancy, right? So by doing so, and you have all of these assets that are all linked properly, and they’re all building relevancy in proper categories or content silos, then it starts to create buoyancy across all of the content in every silo. In other words, it helps you know what, as I say, rising tides cause all boats to rise.

That’s what we mean by buoyancy, it helps all of the keywords to start to surface in the search results. I don’t know if that was a very clear explanation, but that was the best I could do anything else want to comment on it? a clone an exact copy, a duplicate of whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s all it. It’s just a bunch of fancy words for saying if we’re saying, do the same thing over there, the same thing that you’re doing here, wherever your money site is, do over there, wherever it is that you’re seeing mirror and think of a mirror, what do you see in the mirror, you see the same thing that that’s looking back at you, right? The same thing that that’s all we’re saying, I just hate mentioning the word duplicate because then people start saying, well, duplicate content and all this bullshit that we know is bullshit. And I don’t want people focusing on that. Just copy whatever it is that you’re doing, or do the same thing, everywhere. And then and if you do that, then your theme mirror.

What Are Embed Gigs?

Very good. All right, the last part of that was. Finally, you mentioned you run embed gigs, the G site, what do you mean by gigs? Well, that’s right here. Okay, so are on MGYB store, if you look at the embed packages, then you’ve got maps, videos, ID page General, you know, I typically would just order general, it doesn’t matter, guys just, you know, order whatever you’re looking to power up. But what this means is you, you take you, for example, your G site pages that you’ve mirrored right, so again, you got your homepage, which is going to be brand plus a primary keyword, okay, then once you start to mirror your pages from your money site, right, so your primary asset onto your D site, now you’ve got g site pages that are a one to one ratio. So if you’ve got 18 products, separate products that are all separate categories on your services, whether they’re products or services doesn’t matter. Then you’re going to have 18 pages on the G site homepage plus 18 pages, right? Each one of them is going to be one to one. So let’s say you’ve got blue marbles, green marbles, red marbles on your money site, you’re going to

You’re going to have blue marbles, green marbles, and red marbles or whatever on your G site to. Does that make sense? Each one is going to have a one to one-page ratio. And then from there, you can take your pages, or the G site homepage, whatever you want. But you can get very specific on where you’re pushing relevancy. And how, if you take your pages from like, for example, your green marble page, and you come over here and get your head, the embed gig over here, and let’s say you want to do one, just to say it’s a gas setup medium competition. So this is going to do 2500 embeds to your green marble g site page. Does that make sense? Or and you can add other stuff in there. Right? So let’s say that you what are the RYS drive stack its expansion. So now you’re going to have the G site page created by us on your G site, your existing entity or branded g site, excuse me, we’re going to create the green marbles page. We’re going to create the green marbles folder within your drive stack and in all of the files that are going to be created inside the drive, stack is going to be optimized specifically for green marbles. That makes sense. And they’re all going to be the links are all going to be pointing to the green marble page on your money site, then those files and folders are going to be embedded in the green marble g site page. And now you’ve got the G site page that you can order an embed gig to embed, you know, run to, and you could also embed the five the G site, excuse me the drive stat files, you could also embed your money site pages if you wanted to, for green marbles. Does that make sense? If you’re doing press releases, you could iframe the press the specific press releases that are pointing back to the green marbles money site page. Does that make sense?

All of those you can embed those. And what we mean by embeds is once again it’s creating an iframe. So it’s essentially creating a window and another website that displays your content, which is the same thing as what a YouTube video is, guys, when you share a YouTube video on somebody else’s website. And it shows up as a video. That’s an embed code, right? It’s an iframe. So you’re actually seeing YouTube code on somebody else’s website, well, that’s all you’re doing is you’re taking your website, or your G site page or your content, whatever it is that you’re creating an iframe, and we’re, we’re going out, Dadea, our link builder is going out and creating pages on other sites with relevant content that’s gonna have that window that iframe that embed code of your content in the middle of it, so that you’re starting to push relevancy in through the iframe that way. And then with the, again, with the different kits here that we have, or, you know, package levels that we have here, though, then link building to the pages that the embeds are on. So that’s what we mean by an embed run is just go and do that. And I use a combination of both, I usually start with link building, and then you know that so maybe month one, I’ll hit everything with link building. Then on month two, I’ll do embeds plus link building, then maybe month three, I’ll switch it up and I’ll hit maybe deeper targets from within the project would be called, you know, deep linking.

So there’s just another number of ways that we do it. And guys, a lot of this will hopefully make a lot more sense. Starting next week when I have the checklist on that I started to show you guys earlier from process Street, because then you can go through it and like I said, it will at first just be a checklist saying, Okay, do this, this and this and in this sequence, and in this, you know, it’ll be literally stepped by step, but I’m going to be adding over the coming week’s explainer videos to explain why we’re doing this so that you guys get a better understanding of the big picture. Because I still think that we, that gets lost a lot when they call it getting lost in translation. I think that gets lost a lot when we try to explain it because we understand it sometimes some of our audience does not and so we’re trying to get better about that, which is why I’m working on that checklist for you guys. Okay.

We’re just about out of time. Let’s see if we can scroll through another one or two real quick guys. Oh, allow says the theme area includes internal links. So do stacks link to each other? Well, it’s an expansion of an existing stack. So yeah, I mean, they’re all spider silo together anyways, if you understand what we mean by that, but yeah, if it’s a subfolder within a drive an existing drive stack, they’re all linked together anyways, that makes sense. It’s like a parent and child relationship. So, yes, if I wouldn’t build separate stacks, that doesn’t make sense. It’s why we have the expansion service, guys because you get more power out of building additional relevancy within one stack than you do by building multiple stacks. Does that make sense?

Okay, moving on there is no physical link between stacks. We don’t do a to b. No, we No, we don’t do that they live within one another. And if you’re isolating a stack, but you link out from that stack to something else, then you’re defeating the purpose of isolating the stack, as we recommend. So no, they don’t they interlink inside the drive stack itself. But if you have three stacks within the one main stack, none of those three will link either to each other or to the main stack.

There you go.

IFTTT Problem In Syndicating Full-Text Posts

Alright, the last one is we’re going to answer these questions real quick. Because he’s here every week asking multiple questions they’ve gotten. You’ve got fewer questions though. You’re starting to trend down maybe which is what we asked for. So anyway, I’m proud of you, buddy. He says, Hey, guys, IFTTT has a problem of syndicating Full-Text posts. have you encountered this problem? Or is it for new connections only? No, I have not.

I would. Now I don’t know I’m not saying that you’re wrong. But what I would suggest you take a look at your settings from your feed. So if you’re syndicating from a WordPress site or self-hosted WordPress site if you go into settings reading, right so so under the settings, option in WordPress and then go to a reading, you’ll see that

  There’s an option for the RSS feed to show either summary or full text. Now, even if you set it to full text, so the RSS feed shows the full text, some themes, WordPress themes will only show snippets instead. So summaries or snippets instead of the full text, even if you set that as a setting. So it really depends. I don’t think it’s an IFTTT thing. It’s most likely a WordPress thing. Either your settings are off or the WordPress theme that you’re using is forcing summaries. So I’ve not heard of that from anybody else yet. So if that is the case, then you know, we will know within the next few days for sure. And this is the last one guys and then I’m going to shut it down because we’re after five o'clock is do you do your backlink and embed packages on your press releases also or only syndication properties? Google properties? No, absolutely. That’s what I’m saying guys is you can push power in through any number of places and if your theme here.

And content marketing and they’re all in your content marketing is mirrored right across all of your content marketing sources, including press releases, you can utilize those very strategically. I’ve talked about this a lot in the mastermind. But for example, once again, guys like within a particular silo, right? you publish content from your money site, it syndicates out to your syndication network properties, where you can go extract those URLs from the syndication network properties that are specific to those posts. So let’s say you add five supporting articles in a silo. So five blog posts that get pushed out to syndication network, you go to syndication network, and let’s just keep it simple. Let’s just say that you just grabbed the three blog URLs for each one of the posts that gets syndicated out to the blogs, right. So blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, so you go extract now and you’ve got five supporting posts in this example, right. So now you’re going to have five URLs from blogger five URLs from Tumblr, five URLs from wordpress.com. Right and now the same thing if your theme mirroring on with using press releases. So you got five press

At least as each press releases promoting a blog post one of those blog posts. Now you can take those five, press release URLs. And you can add those into a link building gig or you can embed gig or whatever you wanted to do. So yeah, that’s what I’m saying guys is you can take them by the way, you can also create a, you know, the mirror pages on G site, I typically don’t do it on a post level, just on a page level. But if I wanted to, if you really needed the additional push, you could always take wherever your top-level pages are on your G site, right, so you’ve got, again, mirrored, your top-level categories are going to have pages on your G site, and you can create child pages. They’re not posts, but you can create child pages on your G site, and have each one of your posts now added as a child page on your G site. You can extract those URLs and add those to link building gigs. Then you order the link building games with keyword sets that are specific to that particular category or silo, that keyword theme that set Does that make sense? And so again, guys, yeah, you can and the same thing with press releases, you can work them right in there. Here’s the thing on your G site. If you’re going down to a post level and adding child pages on the G site as posts, right to whatever the category pages on the G site, then you can even take your content from your syndication network and iframe that into the G site page. Same thing with your press releases, right? So Can you imagine you don’t even need any additional content is my point guys, you can take the G site page, just create the page, optimize it for the same keyword as the post on your site, right that you’re trying to promote? And then you take all of the content that it’s been syndicated to and mirrored on, including press releases, and you just embed all of that into that page on, which is essentially a post on your G site. And now you don’t have you know, this massive amount of content. It’s all that relevancy all through iframes. And now you’ve got a G site, page target, that you can just hammer with link building with very specific keyword sets for anchors that make sense and you can push a ton of relevancy into it that way. So

Anyways, hopefully, that answers the question. Anyone wants to comment on that before I wrap it up, Marco. Was that good enough? Not good enough. Okay. Very good. Those are great questions today, guys. So thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. Thanks, guys. Bye, everyone. Yep,

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 295 published first on your-t1-blog-url