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razberrybi · 3 years

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hello! this isn’t the most timely of postings, but I want to make a series with stuff I wish I knew before applying for/getting into college. the series will be most helpful to lower-income american students, because that’s my experience! eventually I’ll have more stuff regarding STEM courses & tips for when you do start college. everything will be tagged #college help by raz. I’ll get a link for it up and running on my blog.

first off, probably the ugliest part of the process for me: filing the FAFSA, aka the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. I wouldn’t be able to go to college without it but the process literally brought me to tears.

if I save just one student some unnecessary frustration, then my job here is done! kal @promethes was my inspiration to do this, she’s running something with a similar purpose in a couple months so if you’re interested keep an eye out for that.

finally, if you’re trying to get into college/are just getting in and have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an ask!

if you don’t want to open up the link above to a google doc, the text is available under the cut.

Things to know about the FAFSA:

It opens on October 1st every year. Be prepared to file it right when it opens, the aid is first come, first served.

If you’re going right into college after high school, that means you should apply on October 1st of your senior year.

If you missed the deadline, it’s open till June 30th the next year, but do not procrastinate this. Please trust me. Mark October 1st on your calendar, know it like your birthday. This is free money from the gov, don’t miss out.

You need to file for the FAFSA every year you’re in college, it’s not a one-and-done thing.

To file, you will need an FSA ID for you AND one of your parents (unless you’re not a dependent. If you’re living with a parent/legal guardian and they provide more than 50% of your financial support, you’re probably their dependent. That means they claim you on their taxes & get money back on their return). Make those FSA IDs here. Remember the passwords.

These are separate accounts that you’ll need to actually file the FAFSA. Also, if you have loans taken out they’ll show up here.

When you’re ready to do the FAFSA, use this official website. Other websites can charge you. They might not be secure and definitely won’t be any easier.

Sometimes, income is complicated or parents aren’t always on top of their taxes. Thankfully FAFSA wants documents from two years prior, i.e., for the 2020-21 school year they’re asking for 2018 taxes.

Try to check that those are filed away somewhere you can access before the Oct. 1 deadline. Make sure your parents know the government will pay for your schooling if you do this, and you usually won’t have to give that money back.

If your situation changed and you make a lot less than you did 2 years ago, contact your school’s financial aid office. Sometimes they can help with extra aid.

What documents will you need?

Your social security number

Your driver’s license, if you have one

W-2 forms from 2 years prior, and other records of money earned

Your (and/or your parents’) Federal income tax return from 2 years prior (form 1040, will be different if you’re in an American territory and not one of the states)

Any untaxed income records form 2 years prior, like payments to deferred pension & savings plans, tax exempt interest & child support

Records of taxable earnings from federal work-study from 2 years ago

Record of grants, scholarships, or fellowship aid that was included in you or your parent’s 2018 adjusted gross income

Any current bank statements

Any current business and investment mortgage info, business/farm records, stocks/bonds info

Documentation that you’re a permanent US resident or other eligible noncitizen

If you’re lucky, all these records will be filed in one spot or easily accessible. Try to access them early just in case.

If you have an idea what colleges you’re applying to, add them to the FAFSA when prompted. This will help you know exactly how much money they’re giving you sooner.

Because of the whole “parents not being on top of taxes” thing, I’ve always had to manually put things in instead of clicking the button that lets you manually import the info.

It’s frustrating and takes a while, but you will be able to do it. Thankfully the FAFSA has been getting better with the help available on the page (you can click an info button and it explains most things).

Still unsure what something means? Open a new tab on your browser and google it. You need to answer everything honestly, don’t take chances and take your time.

If you do get to auto-import, I suggest you go through the information manually to double check things if it lets you! I’ve used a similar tool with a tax-filing service and they can get some things wrong.

There are a couple “optional” sections. I fill them all out except for the section about assets, which I’ve consistently skipped. I always get max aid doing this, your mileage may vary.

When you finish, you’ll get a number for your EFC, or expected family contribution--how much they predict your family will have to pay for college. For example, if that number is 000, you’ll hopefully get maximum aid and your tuition will be paid for.

Sometimes, they can’t give it all in grants (money you don’t have to pay back), so some of the money will be made out to you as subsidized or unsubsidized loans. If you need them, take out the subsidized loans first, these will not gain interest until your grace period ends, typically 6 months after graduation.

I’ve literally never had success applying for random online scholarships and I applied to a lot of them. The FAFSA is so important if your family is low-income, those grants cover my entire tuition. The rest of my college, including room/board and a shitton of fees, is covered by merit scholarships directly from my school. I go to a large, in-state school, and suggest you stay in state if you can’t get into an out of state college that will 100% pay everything for you. Those colleges, not coincidentally, are also extremely hard to get into especially if you don’t have connections--think the Ivies, MIT, etc.

I recommend in-state because it’s almost always much cheaper than out of state tuition. Sometimes colleges have programs that will let you go to another state and pay in-state tuition at their partner school, if you’re desperate to move far look for those programs OR find a farther college in your state keeping in mind how good their program is for the major you’re looking at.

Also, fancy private schools might get you some connections or more famous speakers at events but the quality of your education won’t be much better, if at all.

Look for scholarships that come directly from the school you like.

Merit scholarships are money your school will give you for having good grades/test scores. How much money 100% depends on the school. Mine had a program where they had different levels of aid, and they calculated which level you fell into based on your high school GPA, ACT, and SAT scores. It’s worth trying to improve your scores on one of those tests if you know it’ll get you more money. These scholarships tend to renew every year/semester if you keep your GPA up in college.

For school-specific questions, contact the school’s financial aid office. For general questions, contact me! Send an ask to @razberrybi on tumblr.

Finally--if you manage to complete the FAFSA wholly or partially on your own, congratulations!! It’s not an easy feat. In my experience the FAFSA is literally harder and more frustrating than filing your taxes. Treat yourself for getting it done!

#college help by raz #studyblr #college tips #college advice #university #college #student #studyspo #fafsa #financial aid #promethes #sorry for the tag spam but I want to help this get around!

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whentherewerebicycles · 3 years

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i am not reblogging this post from OP (posted 2 days ago, with 4,400 notes and counting) because i know that often people are just making their own vent posts on their blogs and maybe don’t expect them to circulate widely outside of their small tumblr circle! and i don’t mean to like, jump on someone who is just commenting on something and then going on with their life. but i feel like i keep seeing versions of this sentiment on leftist twitter too and i really think it is a gross misrepresentation of the bill that passed earlier this month - which is due in part to social media’s intense focus on the “stimulus check” part of the bill. but the bill was not called “the stimulus check” act! it was called “The American Rescue Plan” and it was specifically geared towards providing desperately-needed relief to the American middle & working classes. the $1400 direct payments to individuals was just one small portion of the bill. here are the far more important parts:

in addition to receiving a $1400 direct payment themselves, individuals with children receive an additional $1400 check for each dependent

college students who are still listed as dependents on their parents’ tax forms (typically so they can retain health insurance benefits under the ACA) can more easily claim stimulus money - which is huge for college kids who may be helping to financially support immediate or extended family members

unemployment benefits have been extended from March 31, 2021 (their original expiration date) to September 6, 2021

unemployment benefits will be supplemented with a $300 weekly payment (ie $300 on top of what people are receiving from their state government)

unemployment benefits received in 2020-21 are tax-exempt (a retroactive change that means people who are unemployed won’t receive a surprise tax bill counting their unemployment money as “income”)

a substantial tax credit for employers who offer paid sick leave and paid family leave benefits (ie creating a direct incentive for employers to authorize emergency paid leave)

15% increase in food stamp benefits and extension of eligibility

child and family tax credit benefits!!!! this is the part that people are describing as one of the most significant anti-poverty initiatives in American history. families are eligible for a tax credit of $3600 for each child under the age of 6 and $3000 for each child between 6-18. people can also claim a child and dependent care credit with a maximum benefit of $4000 for one eligible dependent and up to $8000 for two or more. it also expands the earned income tax credit and lowers the age limit to 19. dems also pushed to get at least 50% of the tax credit money to people this year instead of making them wait for their 2021 tax return. this calculator allows you to calculate how much families will receive. if you make $50,000 a year and have four children, you will receive $13,200 through the child tax credit alone, paid out in monthly payments of $1,100 from July to December 2021 + an additional $6,600 lump-sum payment when you file your 2021 tax return early next year. there are also some additional dependent-related tax credits things that I don’t fully understand but that seem to indicate people are eligible for even more money.

forgiven student loan debt is made tax-free (a necessary prerequisite for future efforts to cancel/forgive student loan debt)

huge expansion of grant benefits to small businesses, including $28.6 billion specifically for bars and restaurants; $15 billion for low-interest, long-term replayment emergency disaster loans; and $7 billion more for the paycheck protection program (which can only be used on payroll expenses and makes it possible for small businesses to keep workers on payroll even if they are operating at lower capacity). you can describe this as “for the economy only” if you want, but I sure feel like it will alleviate a whole lot of human suffering by allowing people to keep their jobs & paychecks even if their workplaces remain partially shut down. my dad is a small business owner and has been able to keep his entire staff on payroll through the entire pandemic. the bill also includes billions for airlines and concert venues, which will again! means people won’t lose their jobs!! plus it allocates $175 million to fund a Community Navigator Program that reaches out to eligible businesses and helps guide them through the application process—ie making it possible for small businesses to actually take receive these benefits.

$350 billion to state, local, and tribal governments

$130 billion for K-12 schools to improve ventilation, reduce class sizes, purchase PPE for employees and students, and hire support staff; of this money, 20% must be dedicated to programs designed to counteract “learning loss” from students who missed school during the pandemic

$40 billion for colleges and universities, at least $20 billion of which must go to emergency grants to students (our university has been giving regular emergency grants throughout the pandemic to students to help cover rent, unexpected medical expenses, costs related to family emergencies or lost family income, tuition bills that they suddenly can’t pay, fees associated with wifi or purchasing tech equipment so they can learn virtually)

a HUGE amount of money four housing benefits!!!! i keep seeing people yelling about how $1400 won’t cover their rent but THAT’S WHAT THE RENTAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS ARE FOR. $21.6 billion in rent and utility assistance, paid directly to states and local governments so they can disburse it to eligible households!!! plus $5 billion to Section 8 housing (which “must go to those who are or were recently homeless, as well as individuals who are escaping from domestic violence, sexual assualt, or human trafficking”).

$5 billion to support state and local programs for homeless and at-risk individuals (can be used for rental assistance, homelessness prevention services, and counseling; can also be used to purchase properties that will be turned into permanent shelters or affordable housing for people who are homeless). plus an additional $120 for housing counseling.

$4.5 billion earmarked for a special assistance program that helps low-income households cover costs of heating and cooling and $500 million to cover water costs

$750 million in housing assistance for tribes and native Hawaiians (who are also eligible for other benefits through the rental assistance and direct tribal government grants described above)

and then BILLIONS of dollars to support FEMA, the Veterans Affairs’ healthcare system, the CDC, and state, local, and territorial public health departments for all things related to: COVID testing, contact tracing, vaccine production and distribution, vaccine outreach, PPE, and public health education. this includes (among many, MANY other things), $5.4 billion to the Indian Health Services (division of the Department of Health and Human Services that specifically provides health services to Native people and tribal territories), $200 million for nursing loan repayment programs, $80 million for mental health training, $3.5 billion in block grants specifically geared towards community mental health programs and substance abuse/prevention/treatment programs

$86 billion for a rescue package for pension funds (esp union-sponsored pension funds) that are on the verge of collapse - collectively covering 10.7 million workers.

billions of dollars for public transit programs (and sure, public transit is important to the economy, but access to regular, reliable, affordable, and safe public transit is HUGELY important to human health and well-being! it is how many people esp in urban areas access grocery stores, health care, their jobs, childcare facilities, etc.

$10.4 billion for agriculture, of which $5 billion is specifically earmarked for socially disadvantaged farmworkers. to quote wikipedia: “Experts identified the relief bill as the single most important piece of legislation for African-American framers since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

tons of money to fund 100% of premiums for COBRA (health insurance for people who have unexpectedly lost or had to leave their jobs) through October 2021. COBRA is hella expensive and experts estimate that 2.2 million people will need to enroll for COBRA benefits in 2021. there are also various provisions that expand Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (a program targeted at uninsured children in families who don’t qualify for Medicaid but may not be able to afford adequate healthcare coverage. it also fixes some things with the ACA that could’ve led to people getting surprise bills due to fluctuating income or unexpected changes in employment status.

i am SO OVER the so-called ‘progressive’ rhetoric that no good can ever come from the government, or that all politicians (dems or republicans) are basically the same level of evil and incompetent, or that ~mutual aid~ (ie small payments made between individuals in a community) is the only thing we can count on or should count on in times of crisis. no!!!! fuck no!!!! like mutual aid is great but America is an INSANELY WEALTHY country and it is such bullshit to act like we can’t or shouldn’t expect our government to take care of the people who live here. and i am also just GRAHARRGHGHH at people who are completely disengaged from politics offering their jaded and hyper-cynical hot takes on things they don’t! actually! know! anything! about!!!!!!! and in the process making other people increasingly jaded and cynical about the possibility of electing a government that actually prioritizes the needs & well-being of its citizenry!!!

ugh i’m just TIRED of leftist political cynicism y’all especially when it comes from people who have absolutely no understanding of how much WORK it takes to make huge things like the American Rescue Act happen (work that includes not just the immediate negotiation of the bill but also the years of organizing & voter recruitment work it took to get a narrow democratic majority in the senate so that we could pass things like this!!!!). I’M DONE WITH BEING CYNICAL!!!! i feel, in a totally earnest and unjaded way, that it’s absolutely incredible that dems were able to write, negotiate, and pass this bill, and i feel so so so relieved to be currently living under an administration that is flawed in many ways but is at least actually and earnestly TRYING to reckon with unprecedented “suffering in an actual human scale” (to quote OP) and is even using this crisis as an opportunity to advance major anti-poverty initiatives that will have a LASTING IMPACT on actual human lives. as opposed to our previous administration, which was made up of thousands of people who woke up every single day and asked themselves “what can I do today to further dehumanize & inflict needless suffering upon millions of people?”

PHEW!!!! SORRY!!!! JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS I GUESS!!!!!!!!

#i went into this thinking i was going to be very measured and calm #but actually i'm pretty pissed off #people fire off their hot takes and thousands of people read them and it's so! fucking! infuriating!!!#no government is ever gonna be perfect! certainly ours still has a shit-ton of problems!!!!!#but i hate the 'only option is to fully disengage & say fuck it' attitude #esp when then thousands of people read it and accept it as truth #long post

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not-close-to-straight · 4 years

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Lost and Found (Fifteen)

Tony planning for the inevitable and finally finding some answers. *cue the music and make it pearl clutchingly dramatic*. I have about a thousand reasons why I love this chapter, but I’ll put those in the notes at the bottom!

Super brief mention of past drug use in this one, as well as verse typical anxiety/mania

MASTERLIST

****************

64%

“JARVIS.” Tony tossed the monitor into the desk drawer and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Where’d we get with the facial recognition program for James with the addition of the Pierce angle?”

“Nowhere at all, sir.”

“Right. Right I knew that.” Tony did know that, he remembered having this discussion yesterday-- the day before?-- and being just as frustrated as he was right now. “Okay listen, scrap that search and start another.”

“Parameters?”

“Narrow it down to the Tri-State area, specifically Brooklyn.” Dum-E beeped over with one of his shakes in a horrifying seventy-two ounce amount, and Tony sighed and patted the robot in a fond-if-not-begrudging thank you. “Get out of the military branches and start searching for family members. I’m not looking for James anymore, I’m looking for someone related to James. Next of kin, anything like that.”

“Yes sir.”

“Expand it outside of male, let’s find a sister, maybe his mom.” Tony unscrewed the lid and gulped at the horrible stuff. “I’d settle for a cousin and a long lost Auntie. Dial back the points on the recognition software so it’s not quite so specific. Sometimes siblings look a lot alike, sometimes they don’t. If it’s a half sibling, they might only share a common nose or both got Dad’s unfortunate ears.”

“You consider James’s ears unfortunate, sir?”

“Nothing about that man is unfortunate.”

JARVIS did one of those purposefully long silences followed by an almost impatient sounding click, and Tony smiled. He’d done the right thing modeling the AI after the unflappably loyal butler/driver/body guard that had been his constant childhood companion. The real Jarvis would have responded exactly the same-- a purposefully long silence, and then a click of his tongue before changing the subject and suddenly Tony missed the old butler enough to make his chest hurt.

“Run program for James and while you’re at it, look up Edwin Jarvis relatives and let me know if they’re doing okay. If he’s got a direct grandkid going to college or something, let’s make it happen. Pretty sure Jarvis is the only reason I survived long enough to make it to college, least I could do is return the favor.”

“Yes sir.”

“Thank you.” Tony drummed his fingers on the desk absentmindedly. “Did we ever get bank accounts created for James?”

“Ms. Potts saw to their creation when you first arrived back in Malibu from D.C.”

“Run the Ghost Protocol file list and double check everything.” Tony held up his hand towards Dum-E and the robot rushed forward to bump into him affectionately, nearly pushing Tony right out of chair. “How are you simultaneously the worst robot and funniest dog in the world?” he asked the machine and Dum-E only beeped and waved at him. “Right. My fault cos I programmed you. What was I thinking?”

“Ghost Protocol file list ready, sir.”

“Set up recurring payments into James’s account from one of my trust funds.” Tony instructed. “I don’t care which fund it comes from, just make it irrevocable. We also need to make sure he’s on the company insurance plan so he has access to our doctors.”

“Of course.”

“Did we give Happy a raise?” Tony grit his teeth and took another drink. “What about his pension plan? Is it set up okay?”

“Both Mr. Hogan and Ms. Potts have a pension plan even the president would be jealous of.”

“That’s good.” Tony smiled again. “No, that’s-- that’s good. I want to make sure they’re taken care of. Rhodey too? What about Mama Rhodes, have we been keeping up on her money in case anything happens to him?”

“Within the files of Ghost Protocol, you have taken the necessary steps to ensure each of your loved ones are well taken care of in the event of anything catastrophic.”

“I won’t let this be catastrophic.” Tony muttered grimly, pushing at the reactor where it sat heavy in his chest. “I’m not going to let this thing be catastrophic.”

“And how do you plan to do ensure that, sir?”

“You let me worry about that.” He pulled up the specs of James’s new arm so he had something to look at while drinking the green sludge. “Close Ghost Protocol. Open new file. Have you been running continuous diagnostics on James’s arm?”

“Honestly, sometimes I think you doubt the abilities you hand coded into my system.”

“Right yeah that’s--” Tony scrubbed at his face wearily. “Of course you’re on it. Wish I could write you a retirement plan, J. You deserve something good after all this. Maybe I’ll download you into NASA, wouldn’t that be fun? Controlling space ships and all that sort of thing?”

“The only reason for me to go to space would be to guide you on your way, sir and it would be an honor to do so.”

“...Thanks, J.”

************

Tony didn’t mean to fall asleep on the desk. It was certainly the least comfortable spot he’d fallen asleep at recently, the cold metal was no match for James’s arms or even the solid line of the soldier’s chest. His neck would hurt when he woke up, his back would twinge from being slumped over in the chair and his face would no doubt have unattractive creases from his shirt sleeve but Tony fell asleep all the same.

He was exhausted. Always always exhausted. The whirlwind round of sight seeing he’d done with James over the last week or so had been physically as well as mentally taxing, the nagging feeling that he was ignoring more important things like world peace and suit upgrades was wearing on his mind. The numbers on the monitor certainly didn’t help anything and neither did the increasingly often, increasingly intense rounds of...of making love...

...there it was. No other word for it. Far past hooking up, far past just sex. The way they moved together was making love, the way James held him close and gasped his name was making love. The way Tony felt afterwards when James pressed soft kisses to his scars and he did the same to the mottled skin where prosthesis met flesh…

Christ, Tony hadn’t known it would ever be like this.

He hadn’t known it could be like this.

Twenty five years Tony had been waiting to find the courage to even try and now every step forward with James was a step closer to running out of time.

So he slept, hunched over and uncomfortable and exhausted on the desk in the lab because all the best things he’d been doing lately were more than likely killing him faster.

C’est la vie.

Que sera, sera.

It was quiet in the house.

James was out with Happy cos somehow the ex soldier and driver/bodyguard had struck up something of a friendship that revolved around food and Happy cheating at mini golf. James had tipped Tony’s chin up and smiled down at him before leaving, “I could ditch Happy and you and me could go get lost together, sugar.” and Tony had wrapped his hand around the immovable left wrist and forced back a plea to stay and joked instead, “Getting lost with you sounds fun, but you do not want Happy coming after you with a putt-putt nine iron for standing him up.”

James’s goodbye kiss had been soft and sweet and packed full of promises Tony desperately wished he would have time to cash in on, but even as he waved his soldier and Happy down the driveway, the kiss faded from his lips and just left him cold. He was getting worse and he knew it, if the numbers on the monitor didn’t prove it, the increasing fatigue and bone deep pain certainly did. God Tony would love to get lost with James and see all the things they could find together, but he had things to check off his list before it was too late and that’s why he was in the lab alone working on the Ghost Protocol.

He had to finish before it was too late.

Besides, the quiet was sort of nice.

Pepper was out doing whatever she did that made sure Stark Industries didn’t collapse, being powerful and beautiful and so much more competent than Tony had ever been simply because she cared. Tony knew what they were saying about Pepper, about how she wasn’t qualified to run Stark Industries and how there could only be one reason why she got the job... and yes, there was only one reason why Pepper got the job. She was the only person in the entire world Tony knew could do it perfectly.

Plus, she deserved it. Pepper deserved the company and all the money and prestige that came along with it because she had helped carry him through some of the darkest moments possible and that was something Tony could never repay her for.

Just like he could never repay Rhodey, who was off being the world’s greatest hero, or Happy who had been Tony’s confidant on many many drunken nights when all his walls came down and he sobbed his heartbreak out all over the backseat of the limo.

Tony couldn’t repay the people he loved so much, but he could make sure they were okay after he was gone and that’s what Ghost Protocol was all about.

So Tony drifted while the world went on around him, dozed in the quiet while JARVIS uploaded the most recent design changes to what would be Rhodey’s suit while simultaneously running programs to see if there was any hope of finding even a distant relative of James so he wouldn’t be left alone.

Tony didn’t want James to ever be alone, not again, not after they’d found--

*beep beep*

“JARVIS.” Tony's head jerked up, mind skittering and scrambling trying to land on exactly what the noise meant. There were so many noises and alarms set in his lab. Was a project done? Was it time to check his blood? To take another drink? What was he supposed to be doing?

It felt like the times he’d done coke in his college days, where everyone else swore the drug focused them but all it did to Tony’s already high functioning mind was crash and burn and scatter his most basic thought processes. It was like a train wreck and Tony was wavering between tired enough to pass out and edging towards manic with the need to keep going keep going keep going and it just wasn’t working.

“What is that--that is-- we are--the noise--- fuck!” Tony crashed his hand down on the desk and swore out loud. “Damn it, JARVIS. Please tell me what’s going on. I can’t--” he forced out a breath. “I can’t do it. Help me.”

“Allow me, sir.” JARVIS interrupted smoothly, and Tony rubbed at his eyes in frustration because he just couldn’t concentrate. “It would seem we have found a match within our search for James’s identity.”

“Wait.” That certainly brought his mind into laser sharp focus. “What? Already?”

“Apparently the new parameters proved far more fruitful than our original endeavors.”

A picture popped up on the fold down screen of a young man with glasses, a neatly trimmed beard and a pair of unmistakably piercing, pale eyes that were all the more startling against his olive skin.

“Oh my god.” Tony zoomed in on the picture, stared deep into the same gaze he saw every morning. “Find a lineage. Mom, Dad, I don’t care. Trace it until we find James.”

“Searching, sir.”

*ping* “Last name Adams, first name Scott. Maternal name leads to a divorce, maiden name Proctor.”

“Proctor.” Tony repeated. “Switch to a new screen and search under Scott Proctor. He looks the right age to be James’s brother or cousin.”

*ping* “Proctor, Scott, age twenty seven. Maternal line leads to Ramon, paternal line continues Proctor.”

“Continue searching Proctor, we should be getting close.” Tony’s skin was nearly crawling with anticipation, his mind stuttering as it leapt from fact to conclusion, fact to conclusion. Finding someone who was so clearly related to James-- no way those eyes belonged to anyone else-- and was the right age to only be a sibling or a cousin. They were getting close.

This was good, this was good because now there would be family, someone to help James after Tony was gone, someone to soften the blow of loss.

--if it was loss, that is. If James considered not having Tony anymore to be a loss and Tony wasn’t-- he wasn’t entirely sure. Yes, he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t kid himself about his own feelings anymore. And yes, he and James had been working on being vulnerable and being open but Tony knew he’d never be vulnerable and open enough to ask for love.

Not-- not love. Not for him. Not after only a few months, not when asking for love when James barely knew himself would almost be cruel, not when Tony would always wonder if James would say yes because it was true or because he knew something was wrong with Tony and figured he wouldn’t have to make good on that particular promise.

No, not love. Tony couldn’t ask for that.

He wasn’t brave enough for that.

And he knew James knew something was wrong and that Tony was lying every time he said “It’s okay.” James knew he was lying just like Pepper and Rhodey and Happy knew he was lying but that was okay. It was. Tony wasn’t going to let goodbye be awful for them, wasn’t going to let it be catastrophic, so he would keep right on lying and right on not asking for love up until everyone figured out the real truth.

I won’t let this be catastrophic.

*ping* “Proctor, James--”

“Holy shit, here we go.”

“-- deceased. Passed away of natural causes in 1991, survived by his ex wife and his son, Scott Proctor.”

“What?” Tony frowned and shook his head. “No, that’s not right. Okay, James isn’t immediate family with the Proctors. Keep expanding the search but keep them up on this screen, there has to be something here. No way that kid looks so much like James for no good reason.”

*ping* Proctor James, child of Rebecca P. Proctor nee Barnes, deceased--”

“--that’s going back too far, J. I need something from this century please.”

“--1964, survived by her son James and an unnamed daughter, grandson Scott Proctor. Also of note--”

“J, this is a waste of time!” Tony threw up his hands in exasperation. “I don’t want to hear about people who died before I was born! I said expand the search not deepen the search! Maybe it’s an adoption or a couple divorces down the line but please keep it with in the last forty years, I need something concrete! I need something real! James can’t be left alone after I--”

“--Rebecca Proctor Barnes was ALSO assumed survived by her brother, former Sergeant in the United States Army James Buchanan Barnes, who went missing in action--”

“-- in March of 1945 after he fell off a Hydra owned train while on a mission with Captain Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America. Sergeant Barnes is the only one of the Howling Commandos to not return home at the end of the war and is listed as missing, presumed killed in action.”

Tony recited the fact before he caught himself, the information rattling off his tongue like it had done so many times before when he’d visited the Smithsonian as a kid and learned all about the Howling Commandos and Captain America and the intrepid...Sergeant… Barnes…

...too late, Tony’s mind finally caught up, crashed into a wall of facts and splintered into an unbelievable realization.

No no no.

“J?” No. “A picture of Sergeant Barnes please?”

An enlistment photo of mid twenties James Buchanan Barnes, blue eyes and dark hair and the hint of a devilish smirk that promised the soon to be Sergeant was going to change the world.

“Christ.” Tony’s mouth went dry, his fingers white on the table. “And-- and up against a picture of James?”

Another photo, one from the redwoods where Tony had caught James looking up at the trees in awe. The soldier had turned at the last minute to stare into the camera, striking blue eyes and shoulder length dark hair and the hint of a devilish smirk that promised he was going to change Tony’s world.

No.

It wasn’t possible.

“The footage from my racing helmet in Monaco. Give me anything from the dash cam as well and from the suit. CC TV, anything possible. Compile it all, now.”

It came in pieces as JARVIS tapped the Grand Prix security footage, as he searched the vault of Iron Man helmet recordings and the downloaded information from the car’s camera and each image went up besides the photo of Sergeant Barnes for comparison.

-- James vaulting the twelve foot fence like it was nothing and denting the concrete when he landed.

--James racing down the road almost too fast to be tracked as he ran to save Tony.

--James taking the brunt of Vanko’s rage and pushing Tony behind him.

--James taking an electrified whip to his left arm and shaking with the pain.

--James grabbing the whip with his right hand and yanking Vanko towards him for a nose shattering punch.

--James later in the crowd with no marks or scars or burns to be seen.

James.

Sergeant Barnes.

Bucky.

“Search my Dad’s files, anything I’ve uploaded, all the server dumps I did when we moved the last of it from the New York apartment.”

For the first time in months, Tony’s mind was operating at lightning speed, data snapping together click click click even if he couldn’t quite comprehend it all yet. Almost manic, almost overwhelming but he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, had to know everything right now.

“I want everything about Project Rebirth, everything about the illegal mission Dad flew to Azzano to drop Big Blonde and Stupid off behind enemy lines. Everything.”

“Downloading, sir.”

Page after page flitted across the screens, the official reports of Project Rebirth, the confidential mostly redacted pages and the un official reports of anyone gathered that fateful day Steven Grant Rogers went from a scrawny Brooklyn punk to the red white and gorgeous hunk of patriotism they turned him into.

Official reports of the Azzano rescue detailing soldiers lost and wounded, the number returned home, how many days it had taken to bring them back. A furious letter from Colonel Phillips about the sheer disrespect of the man in tights had shown him and the Army in general.

A note from Auntie Peggy about how it had been entirely her fault to steal the plane and not Stark’s no matter how he bragged, and honestly how could she expected to say no to someone with a smile like Captain Rogers?

Howard’s admission of guilt for helping take the plane and dropping the Captain off behind enemy lines and yes, he’d tried to also take the plane somewhere to get fondue.

The unofficial report of Azzano written in Captain Rogers’ own hand about how he’d found Sergeant Barnes strapped down to a table in a rudimentary lab. About the empty vials and the puncture marks in Bucky’s skin. How he was positive Sergeant Barnes had snapped a rifle in half in his hands but in the heat of the moment he couldn't be sure, he highly recommended they run additional tests to see if the Sergeant had been injected with anything. Johann Schmidt had access to the super soldier serum, was there any possible they were using a version to experiment on prisoners of war...?

“Jesus.”

It was too much information.

Mission dossiers, the incredible feats the Commandos had accomplished with Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes leading them into battle. Victories attributed to the super soldier serum that made Steve Rogers Captain America, but at second glance maybe it wasn’t just Captain America.

The Sergeant racked up an incredible amount of kills-- sniper shots made with nothing more than a simple rifle that professional snipers today had trouble matching. Hand to hand combat where he was bested only by the Captain. The ability to seemingly go for days without rest and that’s why the Commandos were an unstoppable force. Who needed sleep? Not Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers apparently.

Too much information.

The fateful fall from the Schnellzug EB912 train and how Captain Rogers had searched for days for a sign of Bucky only to find nothing but blood and drag marks. Then the Valkyrie had gone under and the world had moved on…

….and somehow Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had ended up in a diner in Washington D.C. eating breakfast on the same day Tony had been mid-nervous breakdown.

Click click click.

Too much information.

Monaco. The bruises James left even when he was careful. The way the metal arm had been calibrated to some insane number to match strength with the other one. The old timey music and dancing. The Brooklyn accent. The quick shift to violent and the lightning fast reflexes. The way James had to catalogue everything in a room before he could breathe. The PTSD and memory issues.

“James said Iron Man wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever seen.” Tony whispered woodenly. “No shit, his best friend was Captain America”

Click click click.

Too much information.

Tony had seen so many little pieces that he’d missed the whole picture, he’d been so overwhelmed by the unimportant details like being called sweet thing that he never remembered to care about James not knowing even basic history or understanding every day things that wouldn’t have been affected by trauma induced amnesia.

“JARVIS.” Tony had memorized his Dad’s notes long ago. As a child he’d been angry Howard focused so much on the near mythical Captain Rogers and tragic Sergeant Barnes. As a teenager, Tony had studied and focused on the stories as well just so he had something to talk to Howard about. After graduating college, he’d packed everything away in storage and hadn’t thought about it again because if summe cum laude didn’t make Howard proud, nothing would.

And then December 1991 had happened and Tony stopped thinking about anything other than his next drink for a long long time.

But now it was all coming back.

Click click click.

Too much information.

“JARVIS. In the files of Howard’s journals there are some notes from the early seventies. He was chasing down a theory that made sure he wasn’t at the hospital the day I was born. Someone died, some Prince from Saudi, not the royal family but someone lower. It was a quiet kill, didn’t make the newspapers but Dad had piles of notes about it for some reason. Find those.”

“Searching, sir.”

Tony drained the last of the smoothie, then leaned his head back down on the cool table and tried to corral his thoughts. There was something something something right there at the back of his mind, something he wasn’t putting together. There was too much information and he was too exhausted to process it, a year ago he’d have this done already but today he was moving slow and taking more time, and good God was this what normal people felt their whole lives? Slow and tired and unable to focus on a single thing at a time?

“J?” Something else peeking through the fog of weariness and the sting of growing shock Tony was trying and failing to keep away. Now was not the time to break down, not when he was so close to answers, not when he was about to find out something big, he knew it was going to be something big--

--and it would ruin James’s life but then again maybe it wouldn’t, maybe this would be the perfect thing to do, if Tony was out the picture but there was someone else there to walk James--Bucky-- Sergeant Barnes--through it all.

“J, my Auntie Peggy’s notes from around the same time when she was stationed at Lehigh. There was a thing--” he snapped his fingers impatiently. “--A thing about how it had been twenty five years since Captain Rogers went into the ice and then a thing about how they’d re-doubled their efforts searching for him and while they were at it, they looked back into the information about Sergeant Barnes for some reason. Find those.”

“Found, sir. Shall I read them to you?” JARVIS didn’t wait for answer, the AI’s systems registering Tony’s alarmingly raised vitals and clear frustration. “As per Ms. Carter’s personal writings, dated April 7, 1970.”

“When we lost Sgt Barnes off the train, we told the world he was missing presumed killed in action, but among ourselves and those who had been at Azzano, it was widely accepted that if he hadn’t died, Stg Barnes had been taken by Hydra’s men to continue whatever they had done to him at Azzano. Captain Rogers always worried there was a spy among us, not in the Commandos itself but among the ranks of the very beginning of SHIELD and the seemingly instant disappearance of the Sgt lends itself to the fact that someone knew the Commandos were coming, knew where they would be, and were poised and in place to take prisoners.”

“Yeah, I know all that.” Tony pinched the bridge of his nose and pursed his lips. “Keep going. Past that.”

“There have been rumours of a master assassin in Eastern Europe, though we have yet to find evidence of him here in the West. Reports come in of superhuman speed and reflexes, the bearing of a soldier but movement like a ghost and shining silver in the light as if he is half man, half robot. They call him the Winter Soldier and Howard is afraid--”

“It’s Captain Rogers.” Tony finished, because he did know all this. He remembered finding these notes when he was fourteen and taking them to Howard and Maria to ask if Captain America had really escaped the ice and gone on to be a master assassin. Howard had got up and left the room, Maria had only smiled sadly and taken the journal away and nothing else had ever been said. “Dad was afraid it was Captain Rogers exacting some sort of over patriotic brand of super soldier revenge. Keep reading.”

“However, I am afraid the answer may be worse than we feared. I am sure Captain Rogers went into the ice and never made it home, a fella wouldn’t stand me up for a dance for no good reason.”

“Jesus, Auntie.” Tony closed his eyes tight, heart breaking for his sweet Auntie who had loved exactly one man her entire life.

“I am afraid we are looking at the newest generation of super soldiers, a project taken from Schmidt’s attempts at the serum and handed over to the wrong people, perhaps the same work done on Sgt Barnes at Azzano and maybe even perfected if Hydra managed to take him again after the train. I cannot fathom the horror of a soldier changed into a monster and used for unspeakable deeds, but I suppose our work with Captain Rogers looks the same to the other side-- an innocent boy turned into a killing machine. The prospect is much scarier when it is we who are unprepared and facing a super-human we have no hope of stopping.”

“Howard has been given the task of recreating the super soldier serum we used on Captain Rogers, but it has been twenty five years since we lost the original formula so he will have to start from scratch. It may well take another twenty years to finalize it and I’m not sure if we should even try. The sins of the war should stay buried where they lay in the ground, and beneath the ice.”

“Half man, half robot.” Tony’s gaze cut over to the schematics for the new arm he’d built James. “This cannot be happening. How did I not put this together?”

“To be fair, sir. No one could have possibly drawn a connection between a soldier of legend in American history from seventy years ago, to a few shadowy accounts of an assassin detailed in Ms. Carter’s notes over forty years ago, to a modern day former soldier. Even if your most alert form, there is no possible way to have achieved this conclusion.”

“This cannot be happening.” Tony ignored JARVIS’s well meaning and entirely correct comfort and asked, “Alright, if Sergeant Barnes really was taken by Hydra again and used as an assassin for decades, how would they have accomplished that? The super serum slowed down aging by the process of speeding up healing, but seventy years would age anyone. James doesn’t look more than a couple of years older than his enlistment photo.”

“Cryogenic freeze, perhaps?” Several articles pulled up and across Tony’s screens. “Scientists have been aware of the process since the eighteen hundreds, and it is not a stretch to assume the same scientists that could create a super human could also master ways with which to preserve the specimen.”

“The specimen.” Tony muttered. “Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Alright, cryo-freeze. Fine. If I can believe in a tiny kid from Brooklyn lifting motorcycles over his head while wearing tights and punching out Adolf, I can get on board with cryo freeze. But after the war, Hydra was dismantled. We took the best scientists and killed everyone else. Who would have the money and power necessary to not only keep a super soldier on ice undetected, but also to thaw him out and unleash him on the world every so often?”

Later, later Tony would be sick to his stomach thinking about what James might have gone through at the hands of some insane Nazi scientist. Later he would deal with the head splitting migraine because out of all the things he knew, he never thought he’d ever know a century old super soldier who didn’t remember anything other than his name. Later Tony would break down and let himself cry because the closest thing he’d ever found to love wasn’t meant for him at all, a resurrected and re-found American Hero and long term Prisoner of War Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes wasn’t meant for him.

Tony would do that later.

Right now he needed know only one thing-- “Who, J?”

“Ms. Carter feared a spy in the organization that became SHIELD. Perhaps you should start there.”

-- and then he needed to make a call.

******************

Ring-ring.

Tony’s heart sank even as he listened to the waiting tone. He’d been hoping to find someone for James, but he hadn’t thought it would be this soon. He hadn’t thought it would be someone so perfect for James that Tony’s inevitable leaving wouldn’t even register with the soldier.

He hadn’t wanted good-bye to be catastrophic, but he knew when the phone picked up and the call connected that this was only the first step in James moving on from him completely. A couple months was nothing in the face of years of history, shared trauma nothing in the path of entwined lives.

He hadn’t wanted good-bye to be catastrophic, but hell Tony had thought he’d have more time before he broke his own heart trying to do the right thing.

Ring-ring.

And this was the right thing. It was the right thing. For James and for everyone else involved. Tony couldn’t in good conscience hide what he knew, he couldn’t even store it away for later after he’d had just a little more time with James because what if later was too late?

What if his numbers climbed too high, too fast and he never made it to later and good-bye came without James knowing?

This was the right thing to do, the first step in Ghost Protocol and really the most important step because Tony knew Happy and Rhodey and Pepper would be okay with out him and now he knew James would be okay.

It was the right thing to do, the first step in the Protocol Tony had began working on the day he came home from Afghanistan so why did it feel like it was the first step off a cliff?

Ring-ring.

I’m not ready to say goodbye.

I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do--

Ring-ring-click.

“Hello.”

“Director Fury.” Tony closed his eyes tight and forced himself to breathe. “This is Tony Stark.”

“Well well well, it’s not every day I get a billionaire calling my personal cell phone number that is in no way available without some high tech and definitely illegal hacking of sealed files. What can I do for you Mr. Stark?”

“...You know that thing that you think you’re keeping secret, but I definitely have been aware of since you pulled it from the ice three years ago?”

“Nope. No idea what you’re talking about.”

“Right, because you’ve got entire libraries full of secrets, I guess I’ll have to be a little more specific.” Tony pried his eyes open so he could look up at the picture of Sergeant Barnes and Captain Steve Rogers on his screens, the famous one the Smithsonian always kept up at their Howling Commandos display. “Let’s talk about Project Resurrection. I’d like to meet the star of the show.”

“Absolutely not. Not an option.”

“Director Fury, I want to meet him.” Tony set his jaw and straightened his shoulders and let a layer of that Stark iron harden his voice. “And based on the lack of surprise in your voice, I’m assuming you know what this is about and we can talk later about how tired I am of people keeping secrets from me.”

Something bitter like betrayal in the back of Tony’s throat-- would he ever get used to people keeping things from him? How long had Fury known about James?

“So Director Fury, this will be the only time I ask nicely. I want to meet him.”

Silence.

“...How soon can you get to D.C.?”

**************************

Chapter Notes:

I really really love Tony’s mind set here. He is all over the place and unable to concentrate but still, his priorities are fully in line-- taking care of the people he loves and still trying to find answers for James and when he finds those answers, he forces himself to do the right thing.

The picture J brings up of Scott Proctor is actually a reference to that one tumblr post about how Michael Pena (Luis, Ant Man) sort of looks like Seb Stan in some pictures? Like if Luis was Rebecca Barnes’s grandson? I can’t find the exact post but look HERE and HERE and I love the similarities so much!

If you’ve read my ‘Time Falls Away’ time travel series, you might recognize some of the conspiracy theories in this chapter! And ever since writing that fic I always want Auntie Peggy Carter to save the day for Tony. Love her.

April 7, 1970 is the day Stony goes to Lehigh in Endgame.

SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE CHAPTER!

***************************

@quietgayguy @bluedreamdino @akimi-youngblood @blackstar1602 @dixiehellcat @travellover1245 @capnstarkey @the-awkward-teenaged-one @thanossucks @peteryoulittleshit @tony-and-steeeb @striving-artist @roe-sesandthorns @coolsidedpillow @i-am-worth-it-25 @firelightmystic @maligatorthealigator @simsccsol @a-tardis-in-221b @happyendingrequired @everygoodoneistaken11 @pootie-and-the-snoots @megahuffledor @xkissmeimirishx @crystalskrull @hazelbeatsturtle @wecollectnightmares @endrega23 @saganarojanaolt @the-crazy-house @ravynfyre @yomama-umbridge @lovely--tony @gayspacesprinkles @elliotkaingrey @warmachinesocks @glitternotgold73

@ships-galore @ceealaina @izziebladez @cwar1864 @hausoffro @tonystarkisanangel @multishippinglife @girlnic @iam93percentstardust @paranormalmoonlight5 @igotloki @moosette05 @wayward-student-philosopher @kaz-brekkers-gloves @atomicfandombomb @1fuckingshitup69 @agentlokii @livewire28 @tulipsnbigcats @kimstark @alex-stark-rogers @bibbarnes @heeeyitskay @goindownshipping @justaniche @actual-demon-belial

#ncts fics #winteriron #tony stark #bucky barnes #nick fury

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soloshikigami · 3 years

Text

Is another rant... it contains possibly controversial stuff about illegal immigration, but mostly I’m complaining about a rich white man. And mostly I’m keeping it here because I have others I would feel comfortable having a conversation about this with and I don’t want to forget the way I’m feeling right now.

I don’t disparage most people for having money, especially if they earned it, and hey, you happened to play the stock market right? Good for you. I hope it keeps you and your family somewhat comfortable, because being worried about money is a bitch.

However, I resent when they don’t pay their dues, ie taxes. I’ve been scanning old documents at work and I came across a letter to the Senator, saying that they want to retroactively be made an illegal immigrant, because hey, two years of taxes forgiven and a $2000 fine? Great deal! And hey, their children, as illegal immigrants, would get preferential treatment at college! This letter was written more than a decade ago I think, I don’t know what was going on with immigration then, but regardless whatever deal our government tries to cut with them, this man was way fucking out of line, and I will tell you how.

First of all, I am mostly ignorant on immigration. Just offhand with my limited knowledge, I generally don’t appreciate the idea of people coming here illegally, working, sending all their money home, and they retire without paying taxes etc. Now, that all may be a lie that was fed to me or just an assumption I’m making. I am most definitely willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, hear their story, because I know shit is bad in other places, and part of me also feels there is enough space and resources to take in people and last I checked I thought that’s what this country was based on (in an idealistic sense).

So... this white douchebag... the thing is, the papers I was filing has his financial information. The man had over $700K in assets. He had a boat, a Buick, some other fancy car, a house in two states, THREE timeshares and something called a PGA Vista (that alone was something like 11 grand), and he has the fucking audacity to complain about how much he is paying in taxes? Who needs three timeshares?!?!? Seriously??? And whatever a PGA Vista is (something to do with golf, I’m sure), the point is, is that it’s super frivolous. And you know what, if you have the money? You have the right to be! But again, if you have the money. If paying what you owe in taxes is too much, guess what? You’re gonna have to sell one of your little luxuries. Maybe try donating more of your wealth instead of holding onto it like a goddamned miser, you get tax breaks on donations you prick.

Oh, and no, don’t start this racist thing about immigrant children getting preferential treatment. You know, if a kid was born on American soil, I don’t see what they can’t be a citizen. I don’t believe children should pay the penalty of their parents. they still have to go through the same application process as any other person in this country, and yeah maybe they will get a leg up for being a minority or being the first in their family to go to college but they would get that even if they were legal citizens. That was just such a fucking ignorant thing to state.

And to top off this fucking douchebaggery, the heading of the letter had some sort of 90′s “Stay cool!” graphic, and like.... was this man demented? If he wanted to be taken seriously, just..... it’s like sending in a Princeton College application done in glittery gel pen, you know? Might as well have written the letter in crayon.

So, yeah... I don’t mind if people have money, I do mind when they don’t like the financial responsibilities of being rich.

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dickshardblog · 3 years

Text

Moving Day DID NOT Go As Planned

Last time we moved, we vowed we weren't doing it that way again. We rented a U-Haul, asked some friends for help, loaded all of our belongings into a truck, drove them to our next place, and unloaded all of our stuff. "Next time," we said, "next time we're hiring movers."

And this time, we did. We found a service called Bellhop, they had good rates. We booked our move for Friday the 23rd of July. We closed on our new house two weeks before, and we needed to be out of our rental by the 31st. That would give us a week to make sure we left the property in the same condition we found it in.

By the time the movers got there at 2:00pm on Friday, I had already emptied the basement into two separate storage units by transporting boxes in my car. I packed up the library, thousands of books, and moved all of those over to the new place myself. We packed up all our DVDs and Blu-rays, and moved all of them into storage along with the shelving we used to display them. We'd packed up most of the kitchen (the counter-tops were still full of stuff from the cabinets we emptied, we figured we had a week to pack and move the stragglers) and moved the boxes to the front room. We packed up the bedroom and the nursery, and moved most of those boxes to the front room. We left some boxes stacked in the nursery.

We bought a new couch for the new house and were getting rid of the old one. So we told them we didn't need the couch moved. We had some loose items that hadn't made it into boxes on the couch, which also, was not their concern. We showed them the front room, said we needed those boxes, the curio cabinet, computer desk, leave the couch, the desk we used as a TV stand, the TV (surround sound, 4k player, cable box had already been packed and moved), from the kitchen, just the small table, microwave, washer and dryer. No need to move the refrigerator, or the stove, they belonged in the house. Upstairs, we needed two beds, the crib, chest of drawers, computer desk, TV, a nightstand, an etagere, and two small filing cabinets moved.

By this time, a full three quarters of our belongings had already been moved into storage or into the new house. The movers were supposed to come with the expectation that they were moving a two story, two bedroom house into a three bedroom two story house. After they stepped outside and conferred amongst themselves, they came back in and said they were going to need to re-schedule the move … — Scuse, please? You don't re-schedule a fucking move. Moving day is moving day, come hell or high water. Period. Full stop. End of story.

Upon questioning, they said it was to give us more time to prepare for the move … — Scuse, please? For two months we've been spending our evenings and weekends packing and moving the majority of our belongings out of this fucking house while working full time jobs and raising a child. My entire library is already moved, all of the end tables, my massive mixed media collection … two storage units, a 10x10 and a 5x10, and a good portion of my new house was already full of my stuff that I already moved there prior to moving day. What the fuck do you want me to do, take apart all the furniture? That's kind of the point of hiring movers. I don't want to mess with that. I don't want to do it so much, that I'm willing to pay someone else to do it. That's the whole point of hiring the work out.

Anyway, they left and after we picked our jaws up off the floor at the sheer fucking audacity of what had just happened, we re-grouped and scrambled to find a U-Haul truck available at 2:00 pm on a Friday afternoon in late July. Luckily, we found a twenty-six foot truck available. I reserved it, we went and picked it up. It was jacked up. The brake light kept coming on and beeping at me. The brakes seemed fine, and if I turned the truck off and back on again, it stopped until it decided to start up with the beeping again.

I got the truck home at 4:30 pm, and we immediately started loading it as fast as we could. The goal was to get as much as we possibly could into the truck, loading our bed and Rowan's crib last, so we could get the truck to our new house, and unload the crib and bed, get them set up by a fairly reasonable time, go to sleep, and save the rest of the unloading for morning. We stopped loading and headed to our new home around 9:00 pm. We were tired, sweaty, dirty, we hurt all over. And to think — the plan had been to sit back and point at things while we watched fit, muscular men move all our stuff for us. We'd paid good money for it, after all.

I think we got to sleep around 3:00 am the next morning. Nothing went quite as planned. When we got back home with the U-Haul, we realized we didn't have any of Rowan's food, nor her milk, nor any food for us, and we didn't have Sammy's dog food. So, I left Jay to fight with getting Rowan's crib re-assembled on his own while I ran to Kroger and obtained sustenance for my family.

In the morning, I tried to secure the truck for another day. It was already booked. Every 26 foot truck in a 30 mile radius was booked. I tried to get a smaller truck, any truck, for the rest of our stuff. I kept calling all of the U-Haul locations near me. Nobody had a truck. Finally, I called the national number, and they did find a 20 foot truck. So, while Jay dropped Rowan off at his friend Linda's house, I unloaded what I could of the U-Haul. When Jay got back, we unloaded the two-man objects. We went to the U-Haul, swapped out the trucks, and drove back to our old house for round two.

Jay headed back in the car to go pick up Rowan at around 7:00 pm. I kept loading until around 8:30, then drove the second truckload of furniture and boxes back to our new home. We had no plans to unload that night. We would unload in the morning, return the truck, and bring two more carloads home that evening, my Versa and his Optima. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the next week, I drove the Versa over to the old place after work and brought home a carload. Thursday, we took both cars, we made two trips with the Versa and one with the Optima. Friday, we brought both cars again, loaded them up, and finally got everything out of the old place that we meant to take.

Saturday, July 31st, eight days after some jackasses with no work ethic told us we needed to reschedule our move, I drove to the rental office and dropped off our keys.

I think that in many ways, in some states, when executed properly, the gig economy can be a good thing. In states that have adopted the Affordable Care Act, where self-employed individuals can find affordable health care options, and sensible tax codes. I think it has the potential to be good for workers, employers, and consumers alike. I rely quite heavily on services like Instacart, Shipt, Doordash, and Amazon, all of whom employ gig workers to make deliveries, do the shopping, etc. Most of the time they do a phenomenal job. And when they don't, it's usually because the person you lucked into getting is fairly new, in over their heads, not cut out for the job, and likely won't last long before they seek out something more suitable for them.

But a moving company is not suited for gig workers at all. Moving a person's belongings with the care and respect they deserve is a learned skill that most people don't possess. Let's face it, Americans love their things. Their shiny baubles. Their found treasures. I was already nervous that the movers might just be careless and break things without a thought. I was nervous that they wouldn't show at all. I didn't imagine they'd show up and then go, "Meh, too hard."

We wanted professional movers, and they sent us college kids with no work ethic, no sense of obligation to honor an agreement, and absolutely no clue what goes into moving all of ones belongings from one house to another. Every time I think back, I think up fresh, new ways I should have berated them as they beat a hasty retreat from my rented property.

Next time we move, I swear, we're hiring professional movers.

#moving #bellhop #gig workers #gig economy #work ethic #hell week

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arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

#matt taibbi #substack #long #read the whole thing #student loans #student loan debt

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dayseternal-blog · 4 years

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Just fyi, & happy “Independence” day

If you guys see a post about a Change.org petition against Mark Zuckerberg to stop him from suing Native Hawaiians for land on Kaua‘i island, like, IT’S A WEIRD SORT OF MISINFORMATION.

I saw it 2x on my dashboard, and thought, huh? This sounds really familiar, didn’t this happen awhile ago? (Spoiler: 4 years ago, but the petition was made a week ago?!). Please don’t reblog that useless petition, or delete it if you already did.

Here’s why this whole business makes me feel like 🤮:

1. Sometime in 2016, the Facebook guy was looking at his Kauai property and thought, hm, I need to own the beach over there, too (you know, how greedy rich people are).

2. He filed a bunch of quiet lawsuits to figure out who owns the land surrounding him and bid them out. Turns out the property is owned by hundreds of different people, some Native Hawaiians since The Great Mahele (Kuleana Act & disastrous Alien Land Ownership Act) in 1850, but most of the owners were descended from one Portuguese plantation “worker” (must’ve been high up in the chain of command to be able to buy so much land back then).

3. Turns out only one descendent was paying taxes on and taking care of the land, some descendents knew about this private beach and used it, still other “family” members didn’t even know about their 0.5% parcel of land until they got notice of the lawsuit.

4. Facebook guy and tax-paying guy sorta kinda team up, the other cousins are outraged. Facebook guy eventually drops out of this lawsuit/family dispute due to local public outcry HELLO OKAY YOU SEE HOW THIS IS OLD NEWS NOW?, but then tax-paying guy is still like, Yeah, I need to consolidate the parcels under only my ownership, let’s continue this lawsuit. It’s in everyone’s best interests that I own the land. (...So family drama wasn’t over. I don’t know how the story ended, but whatever.)

Moral of the story: Zuckerberg still a poop-blazing example of a truly complete, total haole who doesn’t understand the significance of kuleana lands.

And also importantly, a lot of that disputed land was privately owned by a Portuguese man, who bought it using money earned from working the plantations, yes, oh the strange irony in that due to the fact that it was the plantation businessmen who overthrew Queen Lili‘uokalani, and brought the unconstitutional end of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. This is just an example of how super rich people like the Facebook guy exacerbate and contribute to the continued systemic oppression of Native Hawaiians, how stupid laws and the Facebook guy got local, even native, families fighting against each other over land piece by piece, and how the State of Hawaii is in fact COLONIZED stolen land in the first place (happy independence day for who now?).

Initially what annoyed me so much is the false premise of the petition, whoever posted it barely looked into the background behind it (I mean, it’s 3-4 years old news, why make a petition now).

But then I got myself worked up thinking about how this whole story in itself reads as some kind of...mockery?...of Native Hawaiian issues, how the person who posted it obviously doesn’t actually care about understanding the history and importance of native lands and just wanted to point a finger at this Facebook dude since he’s trending. And how there’s hundreds of thousands of people just joining in on this ignorance, signing that totally useless petition without knowing any better (like petitions are great, but this one is just....so misguided).

Anyway, instead of signing that petition for a lawsuit that’s no longer even happening, there are other better ways to show allyship with indigenous people.

Donate to:

Aloha ‘Aina Support Fund (Protect Mauna Kea, yeah, the TMT protest is still happening)

Polynesian Voyaging Society (practically single-handedly started the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance, also, they inspired the movie Moana👍🏼)

Hale ‘Opio Kaua‘i - Youth Development & Treatment, specifically Kaua‘i island.

Malama Pono Health Services - specifically Kaua‘i island.

University of Hawaii - Native Hawaiian Student Services Aid Fund

Women in Need Hawaii - specifically Kaua‘i and Oahu islands.

Kumu’s Cupboard - School Supplies for Kaua‘i Educators

Even better is allyship for an indigenous nation near you:

Fundraiser for Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief

Dr. Michelle Tom’s Cause for Navajo Nation to fight COVID-19

American Indian College Fund

National Indian Council on Aging

Native American Heritage Association - Food Security & Necessities on Reservations in South Dakota and Wyoming

Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska

Or if you have no money to give, just please keep in mind and maybe tell someone else that July 4th celebrates the independence of white Americans from Britain, all while these white Americans were simultaneously colonizing stolen land and causing

genocide of indigenous people, culturally and literally, to today.

Celebrate the freedom to criticize the USA’s hypocrisy at its very roots 🇺🇸

Oh. And this shouldn’t have to be said, but before reblogging petitions, donation accounts, etc., please make sure they’re legit? Native issues get run over and forgotten about all the time by Mainland America, no need to rub it in with something wrong and useless like that petition.

#didn't know if I actually wanted to post this #but I really don't want to see that petition on my dashboard #happy independence day #native american #native indian #native hawaiian #native issues #donation links #aanhpi

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prorevenge · 5 years

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Someone stole 25k from me, it ended costing him half a million dollars.

A preamble:

I was married to a very OCD and pragmatic man. For example, for him, a big romantic gesture, had been to leave me alone for 24 hours at the hospital right after I had our son, so he could go pay bills and mow the lawn (20 years later I do understand he really did express love this way. But that’s another story)

I was in dire need of physical contacts because he’d never touched me, unless he wanted (very bland) sex, and also never ever kissed me.

The story is not about him, it’s only a preamble

So, I divorce him, not just for what’s above mind you, I wrote about it to explain the state of mind I was in when I met this other person that we’ll call PS.

PS was the total opposite, he was very in tunes with his emotions, he was very, very intense (this will be important later). He really expressed love like I thought I needed. On our first date, the waitress asked how long we had been together since he was so into me and touching me.

He made me feel amazing. He had a huge house and a rather flashy lifestyle, so I assumed he was really well off. He told me he owned a car wash and a phone marketing company.

Fast forward a bit, at this point we had been dating for about a year, and he had just asked me (and my son) to move in with him. I wasn’t 100% sure but he prepared the room for my son nonetheless. As I started spending more time in his house (still keeping mine) I also started to see strange behaviour. He’d be up all night, but sleep all day, I also overheard a few phone calls where I was telling people they owed money and needed to pay but the conversations didn’t fit with a carwash or phone marketing.

At some point, he told me he was having money problem he said huge clients were late in paying and that is was jeopardizing his house payments. So, I stupid me offered to help, I’m missing a part of this story because it started as me offering help with the house since we were there a lot (still had my house tho). but it ended up with me lending him 25K. I cannot remember that progression.

It was for 3 weeks he said. I’d have it all back in 3 weeks. 3 weeks…

That 25k$ came from my retirement savings/son’s college money, so I had to pay a fine to access it.

It’s also money it took me 10 years to put aside. That money was very important to me.

During those 3 weeks, I went out to have drinks with my friends… and found him on a date with another woman. I saw him French kissing another woman… I said nothing, went to his house, packed my shit and left.

So anyway, I thought he’d be an adult and would still give me the 25k the end of this 3 weeks. Big mistake.

Someone I knew told me he was glad I left and proceeded to tell me about him, he said PS was a junky, hooked on GHB, hence why he was so intense and so into his emotions. That also explained the erratic sleep/night patterns but the final blow what when he told me PS was also a con man. A “Specialist” in defrauding older people by phone., his so-called “phone marketing company”

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure I believed it, but then bits of what I had overheard in the last year started to make sense, And I realized it was all true. Back to this later.

I tried having my money back many different ways, none worked, I was at the end of my rope, and since it was in my year post-divorce (and during the 2008-2009 economic crash as well) I was poor as hell.

So this is what I did.

1st he had given me access to pay bills online (not to his bank accounts, but to his emails So I was able to investigate ALL his accounts with the same password, I printed/screenshotted every little bit of information relating to money. I found proof that he was indeed scamming people and found the people he “worked” with and even the name of the person at western union who facilitated the money transfer. I found out he was an organized criminal. I also found out he did this between the US and Canada. I started preparing strike 1.

Strike 1

So, for strike 1, I printed his face and the face of everyone working for/with him in defrauding people and left hundreds of flyers in his neighborhood. I also called the hotline for financial crime prevention in both Canada and the US and gave very specific details and names. (know that even if he had given me the money, this goes against my core values and I would have done the same thing either way) at this point, I was preparing strike 2 too

Strike 2

I was dumb in lending him money but I least I did it the right way, I wrote a check, I didn't do cash I wanted proof just in case. It would turn out to be a great idea. On the check, I had written that it was a loan. (Thank you, Judge Judy, for this tip)

Since he didn't pay me back, I prepared an invoice and sent it to me from his hacked email.

When the time came to do my taxes, I filed the 25K as an expense using this invoice. (I have many freelancers, I slid him as one of them) And it passed. Don’t ask me how I got his Social Security Number, I can’t remember, but I ended up having access to it so ratted him out to the IRS for hiding income. I found out later on through friends that the IRS started investigating him for unpaid taxed, I heard he had to pay 38% taxes on that 25k + pay a 20% fine for not declaring income.

At this point I was satisfied, I figured 9500$ in taxes plus +5k$ in fines was 50% of what he owed me, at least he didn’t get away with it all.

But remember I told you on the check I had written that it was a loan. So I took him to court and won (he didn't even show up), so he has to reimburse the full 25k plus court fees (plus what he owes to the IRS so it’s 39’500$ that he was to pay for not reimbursing 25k.)

To this day I still haven’t seen a cent, but the rest of the story makes it worthwhile.

At first, I thought the financial crime call I made had no effect, well it’s now the cherry on top. What I didn't know at the time is that the IRS would team up with Wire Fraud division and look at EVERYTHING he did, they were not able to catch him on the wire fraud, but and since the house he had did not fit with the money he was declaring, they got him on tax evasion and gave him a certain delay to pay back taxes, I heard it was only 3 months, but I don’t know if it’s accurate. They got him so good, they ended up freezing his accounts, and he LOST HIS HOUSE. The bank foreclosed it. And his debt to the IRS is still open, we are not in the US, so he won't go to jail for this, however.

But my 25k that he did not want to repay ended up costing him over half a million dollars. And since you cannot go bankrupt for a debt you owe to the government, I’m happy to tell you that at 40 yo, he had to move back with his parents and ask for welfare and will probably be paying this for the rest of his life!

This story is not finished however, I just learned that he now has a job as a concierge in the apartment building of his parents, so I’ll be contacting the court to have the money he owes me taken directly from his pay.

The thing is, he has NO idea I’m the culprit of all his bad fortune and he recently sent me a message telling me he misses me, that I was an angel for him and that he regrets what he did...

Well, not me looser, not me!

(source) story by (/u/eliksir_mtl)

#prorevenge #by /u/eliksir_mtl #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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luckylq46-blog · 4 years

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The back end of the order

Prepare a tentative marketing plan. It is important that you know that marketing does not necessarily have to cost you a lot of money. Some business can survive and prosper by word of mouth. Over 50 years ago, the United States jumped into Korea without provocation of any kind. Few spoke up before 33,000 Americans died and untold numbers of Koreans and Chinese. During Vietnam, peace demonstrators chanted, "Give peace a chance." Over 53,000 young American boys and 2.1 million Vietnamese died with hundreds of thousands wounded.

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ifdragonscouldtalk · 4 years

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Fun Facts About Varsity Tutors

1. It’s not worth it

Unless you’re doing the online service and only have one question that will take you less than ten minutes to get an answer for, it’s not worth it. Not for you or the tutor. You, as the client, are paying I think $25 for every fifteen minutes of online tutoring. I, the tutor, see $15. This gets worse with real life, where it’s $65 and $18 respectively, regardless of distance driven or resources used (and either I or you are supposed to buy those resources). I, the tutor, am not allowed to discuss these rates with you -- its a breach of my contract to discuss money, and you’re not allowed to pay me in cash or to tip me. Nu-uh. I’m also not allowed to tutor outside of Varsity Tutors. Yay! Non-disclosure and non-competitive clauses in a contract I apparently signed? I read the entire contract before I signed it and didn’t see either of these clauses, but I guess I did sign it. Who knows!

2. Are you freelance?

I haven’t heard anything about a W-2 or a 1099-MISC or anything. I have no idea how I’m supposed to report this income on my taxes. Luckily, I was only working there two months and made probably only $300, so unless I get audited (as a college student, unlikely?) it won’t really matter, and even if I am audited it’s not like I’m going to owe any taxes on the money, I’ve made way less than the federal and state minimums. But hey, if you DO have another job and qualify for it, I have no idea how you’re supposed to file man! Sorry! Go through all your previous invoices and add them up, cuz VT doesn’t care about you. I don’t even know if they have a federal tax code, and I sure as fuck don’t know where to find that if they do. (Doesn’t matter anyway, because TurboTax won’t allow me to put freelance work on my tax form unless I pay them $30. Next year I’m doing my damn taxes by hand.)

3. “We provide free resources!”

No they don’t. Their resources suck and their search system is impossible. Each of their resources are rife with errors and don’t have instructions on how to use them. I had a better chance going on pinterest and finding something very specific than I did going to their ‘resources’ and just typing “English”. They bombard you with ‘resources’ in the hopes that you never actually bother to look at them and see that they’re all bullshit.

4. I quit but it still says I’m employed with them

I literally terminated my contract. I resigned. I said “I don’t want to do this anymore and I don’t like your contract so I’m quitting.” They apparently just put my account on hold and put my availability on zero. For all I know, I’ll be employed with VT the rest of my god damned life, because I can’t figure out how to ACTUALLY quit. Does the contract I said I wanted no part in anymore still hold me? Is that contract I don’t remember signing even legally binding anymore? I was checking their website today and apparently it was only copywritten through 2018 anyway, what the hell is up with that. I don’t want to be employed with you anymore, please just tell me how to file my damn taxes. You’re useless and I only wanted to make some money to take my sick guinea pig to the vet at the time. Are they allowed to do this? Are they allowed to list me as an employee when I formally sent an email to them declaring my intent to terminate our employment relationship? Probably not. It’s highly unethical, if not illegal. But like hell I’ve got the money to fight them -- NO ONE working for them has the money to fight them. All of the news reports I can find about them are from Saint Louis, where I guess they’re centered? Or from PR websites, so literally scams. I think that says a lot about them already.

tl;dr Don’t use Varsity Tutors. Go on craigslist, or care.com. You can find literally most VT tutors on care.com, with better rates, and all the money goes to them instead of into the pockets of a company that can’t be bothered to give me a W-2 because since they commit tax fraud, I can too!

#varsity tutors

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sgtbluebacon · 4 years

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What is a Strawman?

Has the United States created a second identity for you, yes you! In which billions of dollars are hidden for nefarious purposes? keep reading and find out.

I’m a little upset that I had to write this essay, because the obvious answer is no, you don’t have a second secret identity, otherwise known as a strawman. The theory I’m debunking is pure nonsense, and yet, there are people in the world that believe it to be true.

When I try to explain what Sovereign Citizens are to people, I often say, among other things, that they are a group of individuals who create legal conspiracy theories to avoid paying taxes or government fees, and few sovereign citizen arguments fit the bill of legal conspiracy theory better than the idea of Strawmen. Buckle in folks, because this goes pretty deep down the rabbit hole.

The strawman theory varies from one sovereign citizen to the next, but I've compiled some of the most common beliefs. I could honestly make an entire college level class on this one theory alone, because it pulls so much nonsense from so many places. We begin with what could be considered the theory’s starting point: A claim that the United States went bankrupt in 1933, before filing House Joint Resolution 192 which pledged all Americans as collateral, or debt slaves, against the national debt to the International Bankers. As collateral, citizens become shell corporations, used to store or hide money. Obviously, this must be true, because the names on legal documents are often fully capitalized, and we know from my other essay about America being a corporation that this must mean the people are corporations. Your birth certificate becomes a bond, and is internationally traded like corporate stocks. Supposedly, if you surrender your government identification, you will be granted the value of that stock, which ranges in value anywhere from 100 million to 100 billion dollars.

Here’s the issue: the United States never “declared bankruptcy,” despite many blog posts claiming otherwise. There is, however, quite a bit of debate among economists on whether or not the United States technically defaulted on foreign debt in 1933. Here's what actually happened:

At the height of the great depression, with unemployment at 25 percent and no improvements in sight, Americans were hoarding gold. 5,000 banks closed as they became unable to trade gold for dollars, preventing an economic recovery. The president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed executive order 6102 to prohibit the hoarding of gold, requiring citizens to sell their gold coins, bullion, and certificates at the market price to the Federal Reserve, in an attempt to save the country from an unrecoverable economic collapse. In 1934, this Executive order was made into a Congressional Act called the Gold Reserve Act. After the creation of Executive Order 6102, and before it became the Gold Reserve Act, House Joint Resolution 192 was approved. Contrary to the claims of Sovereign Citizens, this resolution wasn’t a declaration of bankruptcy, or the establishment of citizens as collateral. Contracts requiring payment only in gold were making things very difficult within the United States, as gold became difficult to acquire. Through this resolution, Congress prohibited obligations to pay debts through only one specific type of legal tender, such as gold, making them payable with any tender recognized within the United States as legal currency.

See, the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate the value of money, and it was decided that contracts requiring payment only in gold prevented Congress from doing that at the time, since, you know, the economy was f----d. Debunked.

Next is the idea that birth certificates and legal documents establish a second strawman identity. Supposedly, in legal documents, capitalization is very important, and changes the meaning of a word. This is true for some words, which are known as capitonyms. For example, hamlet means a small town, unless it is capitalized, which changes its meaning to the titular character of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Or what about march! When lowercase, it means to walk briskly or rhythmically. When capitalized, it is a month of the year. Sovereign Citizens take this idea, and say that in many legal documents, if all letters of a person’s name are capitalized, it must have a separate meaning, which establishes a second identity. They believe the fully capitalized name is proof of an Ens Legis, which is defined as “A creature of the law; an artificial being, as contrasted with a natural person. Applied to corporations, considered as deriving their existence entirely from the law.” (Black’s Law 2nd ed, 109 years out of date, by the way. I reference it because that’s what they reference) This is why in many videos of sovereign citizens in court rooms, they use a slightly different name, to distinguish between their personal identity, and their artificial corporate identity. As someone who has written legal reports, with fully capitalized names, I can tell you it isn’t some secret second identity. It just makes it easier to find a name when it is surrounded by text. That’s literally it. But don’t just take my word for it, go through these cases as well: Russel v Us (Western District of Michigan), Wyatt v Kelly (Western District of Texas), Gdowik v US (Southern District of Florida), US v Frech (10th Circuit), US v Washington (Southern District of New York), Jaeger v Dubuque County (Northern District of Iowa), Davis v Deddens (Southern District of Ohio), Rippy v IRS (Northern District of California), US v M.L. Lindsay (10th Circuit), Stoecklin v Us (Middle District of Florida), Boyce v CIR (9th Circuit), US v Lindbloom (Western District of Washington) Rosenheck & Co Inc v US (Northern District of Oklahoma), State v R.E.Wilson.

Look at all of these! But the piece de resistance is Grannis v Ordean, a Supreme Court case which establishes that minor differences in spelling, punctuation, or capitalization of a name, if it sounds like the correct name, does not change the fact that the name is still legally applicable to a person. ("even in names, due process of law does not require ideal accuracy. In the spelling and pronunciation of proper names there are no generally accepted standards, and the well-established doctrine of idem sonans...is recognition of this.")

Cross that one off the list.

Let’s look at our final theory regarding Capitus Demunitio, which is sometimes referenced by Sovereign Citizens in an attempt to legitimize their theory regarding fully capitalized names. The popular belief among them is that this translates to the reduction of status through capitalization. First, Capitus Demunitio was used in Ancient Romans law. For those of you who are not aware, the Ancient Roman Empire hasn’t existed since 476 AD, over 1500 years ago. Although the structure of our legal system is influenced by the Ancient Romans, United States Law and Ancient Roman Law are two very different things, and I can’t find a single legitimate modern application of Capitis Demunitio within the legislative branch of the US Government, to include statutes or case law. Second, Capitis Deminutio translates to “diminished capacity”, and was the removal of a person’s legal status, and capacity. It has absolutely nothing to do with how many capital letters are in your name. Do you think whoever came up with this actually fact checked it? Of course not. Sovereign Citizens are just trying to fill the pages of the ridiculous books and binders that they’re selling to each other, and this happens to be one of the bits of nonsense that looked fancy enough to reiterate. Consider this one debunked as well.

And that’s it. Those are three of the more popular elements of the strawman theory torn apart. Thanks for reading!

#sovereign citizen #strawman

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jaywrites101 · 5 years

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The City In FreeFall: Chapter Two

This is part of an ongoing open beta for The City In FreeFall, set to be published early 2020. All feedback is appreciated. Like, comment, and share if you enjoy the story. StreeTeam: @ciestess and @leave-her-a-tome, A special thank you to my StreetTeam members for their patience and enthusiasm. Tag List: @bexminx, @ahotpeaceofshit @ednaraged @nemothesurvivor @siarven and @jaclynwashere (with a special guest tag: @jennamoreci If you’re a writer and you’re not already following this cyborg religiously, you should be. Jenna, your Youtube videos on writing are directly responsible for getting me this far. Thank You.) Chapter One The next day I skipped school. What did it matter to me? I was failing Biology101 anyway. It takes money to get an education. Money my mama should've been spending on the baby.

Instead of taking the bus uptown, I turned south and walked deeper into the Heap. That's the name we locals gave to the badlands. Cops won't protect you in the Heap. Every few years some hotshot fresh from the academy will take up a beat in the Heap to put the gangs on their toes. They never last long.

Down here your only choice is to aid the gangs or move away. Good luck trying to move away.

If you've never been to the Heap, it's not pleasant. Old brick buildings leaned precariously against newer "affordable" housing projects. Cardboard replaced every other window. The whole place was held together with rusty nails and duct tape.

But what gets me is the smell. Imagine the contents of a million porta-potties after the annual chili festival all poured into a vat of booze and spilled across every sidewalk, every door, every lamppost, and every store. It's an all-out assault on your orifices. We call it the Heap's welcome. Newbies to the Heap never fail to toss their cookies, adding to its lustrous aroma.

Don't ask me how I could stand it. I grew up with that smell. To me, it smelled like home.

I walked quickly through BloodBlade turf. I tried to tell myself to calm down, but my heart wouldn't listen. It's alright, I told myself, knowing full well that talking to yourself is a sign of delusions. No one knows you jumped in with the SmashStones yet. Everyone on the block knew me. I saw old man Yin setting up his stir-fry shop. He waved like everything was normal. Did he know I was skipping school? Or did he just forget what day of the week it was?

Or, a darker part of me asked, does he know you've joined the SmashStones and he's just trying to keep you calm so you'll walk deeper into BloodBlade territory?

Paranoia's a bitch.

I'd walked this street a bajillion times, never caring who's turf I was in. This was the first time I'd walked down it after Jerry died. I'd never appreciated how long the road was. Or how shady the buildings were. Or how many punks hid in the old places like cockroaches.

You wouldn't notice where BloodBlade turf became SmashStone territory. It's not like there's a line drawn on the ground. But I knew when I'd crossed it. I wasn't worried so much about getting shot as I was about the mission ahead of me.

Once more I thought about my mama. She's a kind person. She'd never hurt a fly if she could help it. Even now, twenty years after I’d seen her, I have trouble remembering what she looks like. But I never forgot that smile. It was the kind of smile that cared about everyone. She would never have approved of this plan.

You're probably wondering why I didn't just pack it up and go home. So what if I stole a cop car? No one knew it was me. The gangs would assume I had cold feet--they get people like that every weekend. I could've left. I could've turned around, bought a meal off of Yin and walked into Bio101 in just enough time to be cool. I wish I could tell you that's exactly what I did.

But I didn't.

Instead, I turned off the main road and started walking in the narrow lanes between the buildings.

The idea of leaving haunted me every step I took… but I didn't… I never…

…

A part of me knew--even then--that it was already too late for me. I felt drawn down the path. An instinct that pulled me straight into the deepest danger.

I told you before, I was afraid of heights. But that never stopped me from climbing trees. In Briar City, we keep our State-mandated parks at the top of our skyscrapers. There's not a view like it anywhere else in the world. When I was a child, we'd dare each other to climb up on the rails and hang with our toes off the edge. Parents would freak out if they caught us--that's what made it fun!

When the others dared me, I would climb past the guardrail, up onto the concrete itself. I would stand up. And look down. Every time. I'd stare down the side of the building, wind brushing around me, and I'd think about falling. My heart pumped wildly, my feet would fill with lead. My mouth dries up.

It was like my worst fear was calling for me.

It was that same instinct that called to me now. I couldn't have stopped even if I'd wanted to.

In front of me, the path opened up into a dead-end ally. At the end, a tacky pink bar sign hung over a ramshackle brick building. The lights had long ago been shattered. The Rock. It was one of those places that would've looked old even when it was new. SmashStone moving into the old karaoke bar didn't do it any favors. Vagrants slept on garbage bags stacked on the sidewalk. It baffled me to think that a trash truck could weave its way through the narrow paths that fed into this place. But then again, the trash was piled high enough, maybe they never did.

The smell of vomit was stronger here. But it wasn't the only scent in the area. The air was thick with a haze of marijuana and a twang of cocaine. The SmashStones were known for their drug addictions.

Presentation is everything. I walked through the door with little regard for who saw me enter. I stood up straight as if I had all the right in the world to be in this dump. Not that it made much of a difference. For one thing, most of the "patrons" were lying everywhere unconscious from their long night of partying.

For another thing, I'm not actually all that tall. It's hard to look imposing when you're five-foot-two.

Rough thumps and pained grunts disturbed the sound of snoring thugs. It sounded like someone was getting beat up. It didn't take a genius to figure out that it came from the back room.

I was less confident walking past the sleeping crew. Before, I'd met Terry Mac, the recruiter, outside The Rock. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was going deeper into the devil's den.

Hand on the door, I pushed it open with as much bluster as I could manage. This time there was at least an audience.

"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy," the figure at the other end chided.

It was pitch-black in the room. The dusty light behind me revealed only the back of a muscle-bound man in a green wife-beater. Terry Mac, his back turned to me. I heard a few more thuds and the clank of chains. It was a punching bag, not a body. I released a breath I didn't know I was holding.

"He-he. I heard about your little adventure last night," he said, stepping away from the bag and taking off his gloves. His hands were still wrapped in white gauze, but that didn't stop him from lighting a cigar. He puffed a rancid blast right at my face, causing me to cough. "The Rat squeaked quickly enough. You owe me a thank you. If I hadn't warned him about your initiation you'd be behind bars." He looked over my shoulder and seemed to rethink his statement. "Well, behind iron bars," he chuckled at his own pun.

"Thank you," I said through gritted teeth.

"He-he-he," Terry cackled. He took another long puff from his cigar--and then knocked me to the floor!

I didn't have time to react; the man lashed out faster than I could even see. And I was looking right at him. The door flipped shut, it's tiny plastic windows not enough to pierce the darkness. I fell to the floor. Mac kicked at me. I tried to cover my gut with my arms and legs, but he knew all those tricks. His silhouette, a black form against the single ray of light from the door, leaned forward. A flurry of punches hit my sides. Something cracked. The dull red end of his cigar was the only thing that stood out.

I instinctively curled up into a ball and planted both feet as high as I could reach. I heard an "oof," but the red light didn't fall. A grip of iron clamped down on my calves and the next thing I knew I was being hurtled into the punching bag.

"Not bad, pebble," he said.

Getting back on my feet was no picnic. I felt like lead had been poured into my body. Except for my chest. The ripping, stabbing pain felt like someone had left a hot knife just under the skin. Standing up tall caused the room to sway like a boat on the water.

"Why did you come here?" he asked. All I could see of him was that damned cigar tip. It moved briefly as he flicked the ashes off the tip.

"I-I want to join you guys," I croaked out.

"I don't think so," Mac retorted, giving me a swift box on the ears. The ringing was unbearable but as loud as it was, Mac was louder still. "Your old man had a death sentence on him, your ma refused to pay the taxes. You've always been a good little boy, toeing the line and condemning our clients. Says here you joined college." He threw a file on the floor into the square patch of light. It lay opened with my picture pinned to several pages of thick text.

A full police file with all my personal information. The Rat had a busy night.

"I want revenge!" I shouted. Spittle and blood flew out of my mouth and landed splat in the middle of the file. I surprised myself. The truth just leaped out of me without any kind of planning, but already I could see how to spin it.

"My friend, Jerry was killed last week in a BloodBlade raid. I want them to suffer!"

"So you thought you could just join up with the SmashStones and kick them all into the dust," Mac finished.

I nodded reluctantly.

"Grow up," the bruiser condemned. "You don't just decide to join up with us on a whim. That's not how it works. We only take people we can trust. For that, you've got to do us… a favor."

I hesitated. Mac could see it. He flicked his ashes away irritably. "What kind of favor?"

Terry Mac’s shadow loomed over me. I'd never felt so small before. My head throbbed; the pain was nearly unbearable. I thought longingly about my seat in the college. I'd never been so enthused to have the chance to fail a class again.

"It says here you live in BloodBlade turf," he said, gesturing to the blood-splattered file. "Last week they stole our biggest shipment of drugs. That's the attack that your friend got caught up in. If you want to join us, first you have to prove your loyalty by finding that shipment--and returning alive, of course. If you do that, you'll be one of us."

I couldn't believe my luck.

I laughed. Hard. Hard enough that I spit up more blood. I howled to the empty rafters above dribbling my own blood down my chin like a madman.

Terry Mac took a step away from me.

"W-what's so funny!" He snarled, flicking his ashes away.

"You think I came here empty-handed? I already know where the drugs are being held." I felt strangely light-headed despite the pain. Looking back, that was probably a warning sign of something unhealthy.

Terry Mac looked lost for words. "Where--How?!?"

"My cousin, Beck. He runs with the BloodBlades. He let it slip that he's on guard duty for their drug stash. Warehouse 15 near the docks. Even better. He let slip that one of their boys got busted yesterday, meaning they don't have enough manpower to guard the shipment around the clock."

Mac was silent for a long time. When he spoke again it was with bated breath. "When?"

I allowed myself to grin. "Tonight at nine O'clock. But you boys had better strike now. Because they move the whole shipment to a new location at ten."

I pushed a little too hard. Mac shook his head in disbelief. "That's too perfect!" He growled. He stepped in like he was going to hit me again. Instead of flinching, I stood taller; inviting him to hit me.

He hesitated.

"You just said I couldn't do this without conviction," I reminded him. "Look at me now. Do I look like I'm still doing this on a whim?" I couldn't see Mac. I couldn't look into his eyes. But I could feel the doubt radiating off him.

Terry Mac stepped into the square of light. He stared at the rafters in contemplation. It looked like he was having a silent conversation with himself. "Why should we trust you?" He said, at last, making eye contact.

I held his gaze, I wanted him to see my conviction. It would make it all the sweeter when I burned this bar to the ground. "There's only one thing on my mind," I told him truthfully.

"And that is?"

"I want Cutter to die."

A laugh cut through the darkness. Mac withdrew against the wall. It was a deep, booming laugh that filled me with dread. There was only one person in the Heap who had a laugh like that.

A large mass dropped from the rafters. The whole building shook at his landing. Mac flipped an old iron switch and the lights flooded the room.

"I like you, kid," the mass boomed. He was a veritable wall of muscle. The veins popped out against his skin, blue on red. His square face had slash marks crisscrossing all areas in a patchwork of scars. His wide grin revealed a mouth full of chipped teeth. The only white man in the entire gang. The infamous SmashStone.

A giant of a man, SmashStone easily stood seven feet tall. I couldn't tell you if my knees were shaking from the beating I just suffered or from this man's sheer presence.

He put his hand on my shoulder and it was like someone dropped a sack of cement on my back. I started to fall to the floor but the behemoth's grip refused to let me collapse even as my knees gave out altogether. "It's not often I'll let in some unknown mineral off the street, but you've got stones in those britches, boy."

Honestly, I'm not sure what I said in response to this. Probably something like "hub-ub blek," since I was about two-thirds passed out already.

What I do remember is SmashStone grabbing the cigar right out of Terry Mac's mouth and planting the burning end right in the center of my chest. To say it burned would be a bit of an understatement. A drill burrowed its way into my chest! Charred skin and fried hair mixed with those noxious cigar fumes and ate their way up my nose. I howled to the sky, spitting up blood that would drip down my chest and mix into the inhuman concoction.

"Welcome to the SmashStones," he said. I fell to the floor and passed out.

#superhero #fantasy #book #new #wip #The City In FreeFall #StreetTeam #my writing #chapter 2 #sam farsight #the wingman #vigilante

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