#i mean specifically usually. aa defenders

[utterdrip]

a lot of astarion thinkpieces are sooo funny bc almost every one of them forgets that like

this man is constantly making funny little inside jokes with himself about being dead. i repeat: with HIMSELF.

he makes godawful puns with complete glee and without an ounce of irony

his plans are vague and not well thought out (for obvious reasons) but hes just like: fuck it we ball

[characteroulette]

👋 I left you a comment on AO3 earlier on the AA prosecutor meta, but seeing as you did cover the one-off prosecutors in Investigations (as well as the Paynes), I'm curious about your thoughts on Lana Skye especially. I really like RFTA as a window into the legal system's politics, and Lana as a character is especially intriguing in comparison to the other prosecutors we defend (e.g. Edgeworth/Blackquill/Nahyuta/Barok) because we never actually face her in court...but they still draw on RFTA's themes and character beats for some of those cases, especially in 6-5 and DGS2.

Oh hello!! Awh thanks for reading my meta essays I wrote mostly in the span of two days! XD

Lana Skye is a very interesting one, mainly because, as you noted, we never see her prosecuting style in court and that's really one of the biggest ways I draw characterisation notes from our rivals in these games. Seeing how they are presented to us as obstacles and how we are meant to slowly warm up to them was my main goal with those lil essays, but I definitely got off track a bit hahaha.

(Got a bit carried away here, too, so. Read more!)

Lana is an interesting case, though. She's our first defendant (if you play these games in order from the ds release on) we're really unsure if we can fully trust. She is trying to confess to the crime, and only by the grace of Ema's belief in her does Phoenix also agree to believe in her. She's short with us and pushes us away, giving the distinct impression that something is pretty wrong.

However, we also get told multiple times that this isn't her usual personality. That she "changed" once she became Chief Prosecutor. So it's a little harder to grasp her personality on top of take anything she says with a degree of belief. Her actions are more about sowing seeds for the mystery of why she would be so determinedly trying to get convicted instead of establishing a solid character for her. We do get the sense that she's a hard nut to crack, that she cares too deeply for Ema, but otherwise her cold and stoic personality is a complete front, we're told. A means of pushing those who used to care for her further than arm's length to keep them from discovering what's happened, to keep them from getting caught up in the splash zone.

There's also the odd note that she was close with Jake and Neil Marshall enough so that Ema was fond of them, too. Specifically the Marshall brothers, not Angel Starr or Bruce Goodman. I always found this interesting because Lana kept Ema away from Gant, but didn't mind letting her get close to the Marshall brothers. Gant was far more dangerous, especially as we learn about his all but framing Ema for Neil's murder, but it's still an interesting thing of note that comes up once at the beginning and kind of never again.

Even when you finally get a chance to talk with Lana about Gant before the final day of the trial, she's still composed and cool. Still completely under control. It's not until Ema is actively in danger of being found guilty of murder does she lose it. The final day of the trial is her at her most desperation mode, renouncing Phoenix's defence and running for that Guilty verdict. She has to keep Ema safe no matter what and it's interesting that the game lets us ruin that for her! This is probably why there is a slight bad end scenario where we don't play our cards right; it's all in service of these high stakes and connects to Lana's own desperation.

It is another interesting note how, at the end of the second trial day, she admits to the forged evidence. She has realised, on some level, Phoenix will claw his way to the truth no matter what. So she admits to this thing she knows would just get proven anyway. She's the one to cause the uproar and delay the trial one last time. It's all a part of her cool and calculated control, but it's also an admission that we've done well to get this far. It's a victory, but one delivered the same way she stabbed Bruce Goodman's body. The only person spared was Gant; everyone is going down with her.

It really is a fascinating mindset to see. I'm not a huge fan of the whole "stoic woman smiling at the end to show she's come out of her shell" anymore because AA uses it a bit too much (when will we get the male equivalent, huh??? Blackquill and Barok were right there!!! Make them smile, damn it!!!), but it is refreshing to see that Lana no longer has to keep her heart frozen over. She ans Ema hugging is the MUCH better payoff, even as Phoenix waxes poetic right behind them. XD

So yeah!! Despite this case saying on the surface that we shouldn't trust Lana, it really leads us along to trusting and liking her pretty much from the start. She's compared to Mia, after all. She is also the only defendant to date to turn their back to us and I still think that's funny as hell.

I... had more to say than I thought!! Hope this satisfies a bit of what you wanted!!

[readymades2002]

of course talking about it right now is difficult because in funny fantasy universe of aced attorney going “the way that everyone in court is performing a melodrama at all times is so fascinating to look at and examine and think about what it says about them” and i DO believe that but also thinking about real life lawyers playing to the audience as a huge part of their job in front of a jury is making me want to explode with rage. if i hear a lawyer make a sarcastic quip in real life i want to blow them up with my mind

[brainlessrot]

Can i request yuuken, jack and leona with a really short s/o? Like 150cm short? And s/o doesnt really mind being that short and doesnt have any insecurities about it

i did this as headcanons, hope you dont mind!!

Contents ;; short! GN! reader, written with romantic intent but can be interpreted as platonic!

Characters ;; Yuuken, Leona, Jack

Twst Boys + Yuuken - Short reader

Yuuken ;;

He doesnt really care about height, and wont even realize that you're much shorter than him, he just views you as a cool person!!

if someone is being mean about your height, he will glare at them from right behind you, and if you defend yourself and stay your ground, he'd be extremely proud!!

aa stated, he doesn't care about your height, but the fact that he can engulf you when he gives you a hug makes him feel warm (and his hugs are GREAT, so you would be in heaven)

will give you a piggy back ride if you ever ask, this man is jacked and will even try to throw you up like a baby if the oportunity ever arises

a gold retriever himbo, if you ever compliment him of how jacked he is, he'll grab you in his arms and spin around, your feet dangling around as he smiles, hes sweaty, but wants to express how happy you make him

if you ever need to grab something off of a high shelf, hes your man! but instead of grabbing it he'll ask if you need him to lift you up

adores resting his arms on your shoulders if youre just standing around, theyre the perfect height to hug you!

if you ever ask him to join him in his kendo training, he'll definetly give you a handmade kendo shinai made so that it'd be perfect for you and easier to handle than a regular one!

Leona ;;

... why?

this man will NOT shut up about your height

playfully calling you shortie, putting things on the shelves you dont reach, putting his chin on you head (or even his arm!) and lifting you "lion-king" style, arms under your armpits while you just... dangle there

appart from his usual "herbivore" nickname, he'll resort to call you "mouse", and if you're being extremely annoying that day "little rat"

will fight anyone that makes fun of you though, however, would very much enjoy you kicking anyones asses, so if youre up for it, he'll even buy popcorn to watch you, and be your biggest hype man

he sometimes may be mean, but hes bever mean-spirited, he very much likes you for who you are, and you are you, so he wouldn't want to change anything from you, even if you sometimes get on his nerves

be prepared to be his body pillow, no matter your size, you will be used for napping.

LOVES being the big spoon, whenever he can, he'll drag you down with him while he's napping so that he can put his arms around you

... he would buy you a baby chair to make fun of you, hes a little shit but hes nice (every blue moon)

mother fucker probably bends down to talk to you

Jack ;;

another one that doesnt really care much about your height

at first he thought you were short because you didn't work out much

but he lived to regret those words

however, he will make a specific work out regime to maximize your body!! no matter how small you are, you should be able to take down anyone that dares look at you wrong, even if he is always there to give a hand

HE LOVES YOUR HANDS, the size difference between yours and his makes his heart all jittery, and if you pet his head, he'll become mush, he doesn't care that he has to bend down!!

another one who loves being a big spoon, generally, being able ro peotect you, even if you're capable yourself, will make him feel fulfilled in life

if youre too tired after working out with him, he'll carry you to your dorm, hes so reliable!

his tail wags so hard whenever you ask him for help to get something from a tall place

picking you up is his favourite thing, and will try to do it anytime, anywhere, however he can, a hug and perhaps standing straight so that your feet are slightly off the ground, raising you so that you can grab that fruit you've been eyeing, putting you on his shoulders so that you'd be able to see above the crowd...

[janiedean]

if you ever wrote that rant about grrm making jon his chosen one deconstruction i'd be very happy to read it 👀

hello anon sorry for the lateness but here we go *deep breath*

sssooo, I had once ranted about it though not mentioning the thing I mentioned in those tags so lemme see if I can find the op and like... cp the main argument and amend it bc it was long, but okay so I found it, original anon asked me: why is Jon considered to be one of the most special characters grrm created? Why is he not the typical hero of fantasy books?, my original answer was here if anyone wants to go there but basically lemme just cp the first part making it shorter and then I'm adding:

first thing, the Typical Post-Tolkien Chosen One With A Shitty Life Before He Finds Out He Is Chosen™ character (I’m saying post-tolkien because every fantasy writer in existence who copies tolkien thinks that lotr went like that and instead it didn’t) usually goes through the following steps: his life sucks up until the beginning of the series, his family generally hates him/her or doesn’t appreciate them or abuses them or anyway doesn’t make their life easier and they’ve never known any different, but *something* never quite worked right and they always knew something was missing in their life, they just didn’t know why. suddenly someone who knows they were Chosen™ shows up and tells them that they’re actually Special because of this this and that and they have a quest to go on to save the world or something. our hero/heroine obviously is finally validated and while their quest is hard and full of hardships and maybe they lose a few friends along the way, finding out that they were Chosen gives their life meaning, they usually find love/friends/everything they didn’t have before until they fulfill the Prophecy™ and live more or less happily ever after, possibly after hooking up with the Person Of Their Dreams with whom they had UST up until the last twenty pages of the book. basically: being Chosen™ in regular fantasy novels is a good thing because suddenly you’re special and all the crap you suffered acquires a new meaning and in the end it made your life better.

jon snow is a complete overhaul of about everything in this sense because

instead of having a family who hates him he has a family who actually mostly loves him, and with ned it’s arguably so much that he risks royal treason by keeping him hidden from his *best friend* - sure, there’s cat and peripherally sansa, but his issues stem from the fact that he feels lesser because he’s a bastard (as far as he knows) and it’s a *class* issue, not a *my family hates me* issue not counting catelyn obv but that's what gives him freudian issues more on that in the emended part later

no one actually knows that he’s Chosen™ - like mel could get there and probably will and someone will put two and two together when his parentage comes out in the open, but he doesn’t have a gandalf or mentor who shows him The Way Towards His Quest

so instead of going from ‘my life sucks but I’m going on a quest which is gonna be a+’ he actively chooses to leave a fairly decent situation (a household he knows, siblings who love him - ned actually hoped he’d become robb’s counselor or right hand man or something from what we can gather) because he feels like he has to prove he’s better than his name and goes to the Crappiest Place In Westeros. like idk if people grasp it, but the wall is basically a prison and at the ripe age of fourteen he decides that it’s totally a good and honorable choice (his only choice actually) to go defend the realm in the freezing cold along with a bunch of criminals/derelicts/rejects of society

at which point he makes friends among said rejects and let’s remember that it’s the point where he actually has to do his first an only privilege when donal noye made him go like hey you were brought up with nobles these ppl are here because they stole bread, and that helps making him more into the person he is rn but like your tyopical fantasy hero who has had a shitty life doesn’t usually have to acknowledge that other people might have had it worse

then he goes on the Quest where he finds his first One True Love, and that’s where it turns even worse because usually the quest is where things start to go right for the Hero™, instead for jon they start to go wronger, because first he has to go undercover which pretty much tests most of his belief/code system, he falls in love with a girl he has to betray, half of his friends and his lord commander die along the way, while he’s off doing his thing winterfell gets taken/burned and robb dies when jon openly stated that he also was going to the wall to defend his family and keep them safe (yeaaah worked out real well), when he goes back to the wall he has to fight the people he lived with for months, the woman he loves dies in his arms and he can’t do anything about it and he’s aware it couldn’t have gone any other way, people put defending the wall on him and then put his loyalty in question, when stannis shows up with a legitimization (which is everything he ever wanted) he refuses because he doesn’t want to accidentally steal his siblings’s inheritance (which was what cat was so worried about hahaha) and actively chooses the crappy defending the realm life all over again. also in all this time his being Chosen™ hasn’t manifested or helped him in any way whatsoever - actually all his honor-moral code related baggage is what  moral dilemmas come from that. like, your usual chosen hero™ would always take the right decision and it all turns out good eventually, jon takes the morally right decision and it all turns SOUR eventually

at this point he finally gets elected LC, thanks to his friends also pitching in, which is about the one fantasy hero™ thing that’s happened for now. should be good, yes?

lol no, because he ends up with THAT hellish responsibility at sixteen, since he thinks that he has absolutely to be even better than that now and he has very specific notions about how you should lead and he knows he has to take unpopular decisions/decisions that he doesn’t necessarily like, he ends up either having to send his friends away forreal (sam) or detaching from them (pyp/grenn/the likes) and when as far as he knows he learns that his sister is married to ramsay he can’t do anything about it

never mind that it’s the same situation as when he had to pick the watch or robb in book one - he went there to defend his family and now being there actually prevents him from helping them in person. ops. meanwhile he’s trying to implement a new vision of things which is modern and smart and actually makes sense because why fighting the wildlings when you have ZOMBIES coming. your usual Chosen One™ would get people to approve just because he’s the Chosen One

instead jon gets stabbed to death - okay, that was also because he wanted to go get arya but it was the last straw, people were pissed over the wildlings plan first and foremost

so basically he’s gone through all the Chosen One™ steps but in reverse - he loses his family which did love him instead of finding another one that makes the first pale in comparison, he does find a new one who loves him but has to alienate most of its members for responsibility reasons as a consequence of what should have been the crowning achievement of his life choices (which eventually is NOT one), he falls in love and they don’t drag the UST forever but they never get a chance to be together without small print in between, he chooses the admittedly most masochistic life he could for his family as well and half of them die and he can’t do a thing for the other half, every other mentor-like figure he runs into after ned dies, instead of finding validation he ends up having to isolate himself and on top of everything HE STILL DOESN’T FUCKING KNOW HE’S THE CHOSEN ONE™

so instead of his life going better the more he learns stuff and matures as a person, he gets murdered. by the people he trusts and who were supposed to be his new family. haha?

never mind that when he finds out he’s the Chosen One™ it won’t bring him closure because all he ever wanted was being full stark like his father/siblings and then bam he’s going to find out his father’s actually targaryen and what does that even mean to him?

on top of that being AA will just be a pain because I don’t believe for a second he’s not going to get leftover ptsd and who the hell is gonna help him deal with it? or how is he ever getting over his *brothers* murdering him? and people are going to ask stuff of him all over again and he’s gonna have to go slay a mythical monster and if I know grrm it’s not gonna be fun, pretty or cathartic FOR HIM

on top of that, Chosen Hero™ fulfills the prophecy and gets a realm to rule and everyone lives happily ever after. money is that if jon does get that realm (and I think he is because he has the best claim if he's legitimate and most likely it'll turn out he was on the targ side but ROBB also legitimized him so he has double the legitimization), he’s going to hate every second of it and he’ll take it because a) duty, b) literally no one else is available, and like this guy didn’t want to rule a realm or be a king or anything he just wanted to be a stark, and instead he’s going to have to after all that shit thanks to Magical And Noble Heritage he hadn’t even known he had and probably didn’t even want up to that point because since when jon wanted to be a targ? yeah since never

obviously I hope he manages to be somewhat happy regardless because the alternative is too miserable, but basically being a Chosen Hero™ is what makes jon’s life worse rather than better and the fact that hew went through all the regular self-discovery journey for the fantasy hero list doesn’t mean he’s not flipping that over in his sl. the fact that he stayed a decent person more or less throughout it and that he hasn’t turned into a bitter asshole also doesn’t change the main point XD

tldr: jon snow is not a typical fantasy hero because he deconstructs that trope into tiny little bits same as robb deconstructed the arthurian flawless king hero trope

now ^^^^^ THAT was what I originally wrote for that meta but adding on to what I said in those tags

okay so... there is a certain tendency to also make the chosen one™ special in the sense that he's kind of goals - good looking, rich or set to inherit, gallant, takes the initiative, he's like.. social or anyway immediately makes friends etc and all that jazz which jon... doesn't really fit

like jon is an introvert who immediately makes friends just with outcasts and his siblings also bc he feels like one but he's hardly a social butterfly and charms everyone wherever he walks by

I mean ffs says all that the only person he charmed in that sense is stannis who is the literal only person in charge in the books who is more introvert than him and has worse communication issues and appreciates ppl going straight to the point

on top of that in the book he looks like ned.... and arya looks like ned and ned isn't described as being particularly handsome that was brandon so he's not even like... I mean kit h. is v. pretty and I think he was a good choice for the role and I'll die on the hill that he was born to play that character and he did it well but book!jon doesn't have that kinda pretty face so the concept that he's the HOT alternative to anyone to me is kind of iffy bc he's not

he's shit at social interactions and at PR which is why robb and him would have been a key winning ticket like he has a better idea of the larger picture but robb would have actually made sure ppl didn't turn against them bc he actually was good at that but like he doesn't go around rallying armies in his name does he

the one time he's been with a girl it was ygritte and like he courted her without realizing it and then she had to pursue him and he barely knew wtf to do on top of the fact that they slept with ghost in the middle of them like a sword which..... is.... I mean sleeping with the sword in the middle was a thing to make sure the maiden stayed a maiden and he's the one who is like i CAN'T HAVE SEX WITH HER EVEN IF I WANT TO BECAUSE I'M TECHNICALLY SPYING ON THEM like... he's not... gallant-knight coded

never mind that the moment they do the do she basically does everything until he decides to try the oral which I mean... isn't exactly alphadominatingmale out of jon which is not a given with the trope he's supposed to represent like he's not smooth he's not suave he's like WHAT THE FUCK when ygritte tells him he has a pretty face bc most likely no one else told him that and he like... doesn't pursue people like that in general which is also not exactly 100% what that trope usually goes for

we can add that he has a lot of passive-aggressive little shit sarcasm in him that they didn't let him go for in the show but like... usually chosen heroes™ don't think what he thinks about selyse in general

we can also add that he's not automatically above being better than his position like... he doesn't take winterfell bc ygritte is dead but he did think he'd have taken the deal sansa or not if stannis had said he could marry her and not val and if she wasn't dead, he basically went off the rails at the dude he was fighting with thinking about robb telling him that he couldn't be lord of wf because he was a bastard and he's absolutely not in the frame of mind of 'well I was born a bastard who cares it doesn't define me'

he's obsessed to the point of unhealthy with actually being defined by it which is why he was better off with the wildlings aka the only idiots in the realm who don't gaf about that

and that's like... I mean usually if chosen ones™ have parental issues it's like 'you were an orphan and raised by asses who weren't your parents but your parents loved you and you'll find out at some point and you'll be happier for it and make your own family', jon is like... he has the mommy freudian issues of the century bc of how cat treated him, on the other side he's obsessed with living up to ned's/his father's name and he hates that it makes him not-belonging or that he feels like he doesn't even if he does with his siblings, and at the same time when the truth about it comes out he's going to get the cold shower of the century bc like - he's spent all that time thinking BUT DID MY MOTHER WANT ME WHO WAS MY MOTHER and he's going to find out of who it was and how he was born and honestly considering that lyanna most likely did regret running with rhaegar the moment he finds that out and that she died birthing him how is he going to feel? - also he spends his life wanting to live up to his 'father's' name aka ned aka someone known to be honorable to a fault and then it turns out his bio father is... the dude who started that entire rebellion not doing a very honorable thing? - also if jon*erys is a thing idt that he'd take 'I fell in love with my aunt' so nonchalantly as he did in the show tldr: he's never gonna get over his parental issues in a short time and when that particular brick hits him in the face it won't be pretty

like the entire point of jon is that he goes through all the chosenone™ cursus honorum as we'd call it in high school when studying latin but each step that means smth good for the usual chosenone™ to him is something bad, being one is not going to make his life better and throughout the entire thing he does not fit that stereotype when it comes to look, personality, basic traits and familial history and like hell he's going to have the happy ending tied up with the bow - like I think he gets a bittersweet one and eventually goes off with the wildlings bc he belongs there after being jon snow first of his name (bc like hell he's not reclaiming his bastard background at the end of this entire mess I'm eating my hat if he doesn't) after splitting the seven realms and fixing things but that's hardly the neat happy ending the chosenone™ usually gets so that's my two cents

... christ this was long *raises hands*

[sandwichrin]

A Little into You (Junkyu x Reader) (Ch. 15)

Chapter 15 - Almost there

Word count: 6.1k words

Genre: Fanfiction, PG13, Comedy, Romance.

A/N: Hello! Chapter 15 is here, and I’ve written this chapter longer than I did before this ^^ Thank you for waiting everyone <3 Also, I’ll be starting my chapter 16 a.s.a.p. too so I hope you guys are interested to know what goes on later after this chapter :D 

(Practice Room / Treasure)

“Hands up, straight!” Jihoon reminded his younger members.

All of the members that were younger than Jihoon and Hyunsuk were given a punishment in which they have to sit up straight whilst raising their arms straight, pointing to the ceiling above.

“I don’t get it, hyung. Why are we getting punished too? We weren’t involved in this stalking mission anyways,” Haruto whined, his raspy voice making it sound more of like a complaint.

The rest of the boys who were sitting in the back, Asahi, Junkyu, Mashiho, Yoshi and including Haruto himself started talking and whining all at once, making it almost impossible to identify what they were all trying to say.

Not to mention, it made the practice room noisier than it was before.

Jihoon raised his hand, signalling them to quiet down.

“Now, you boys in the back weren’t involved, sure. But you guys should’ve been more alert as well! I mean, did you guys not notice your friends acting fishy earlier today??”

“No…” Yoshi answered Jihoon’s question.

“Weren’t they all regularly fishy at all times?” Haruto asked back.

“Yeah, hyung. To be fair, we’re all weirdos here,” Mashiho added.

“Hey, hey,” Hyunsuk interrupted them. “Who said we’re weird?? We’re unique, okay”

“Didn’t y/n call us weird that one time though hyung?” Jihoon asked him back.

“Oh. Well then in that case, maybe we are weird huh,”

“Wait a minute, are you all trying to distract me?” Jihoon asked the rest of his dongsaengs who were sitting on the floor in front of him, with their hands resting by their sides by now.

“Woops,” Doyoung snickered.

“Hands up! Raise them high and straight!” Jihoon ordered them.

They all started groaning and complaining again, since their arms were tired from the punishment Jihoon gave them for the past 15 minutes.

                                                                *

 Fast forward to Friday, you were getting a hang of working in the YGE Building. You have already figured out your way to your preferred restroom, you have your own lunch spot which was the balcony, and you were fairly familiar where the other facilities are since you were frequently asked to run errands here and there regardless of which floor.

“Y/n, before you leave, can you help take out the trash?” Bomin asked you, his finger pointing at the bin by the door whilst his eyes were still busy reading the document Soomin was showing him.

You shut your notebook slowly and looked at Soomin, who was also looking at you questioningly.

You were about to say okay when Soomin suddenly spoke up, “Hm? Why are you asking Y/n to take it out? Can’t you ask one of your own staff??”

Bomin placed the document in his hand down onto the table and smiled at his friend. “Come on Soomin, it’s just taking the trash out. Besides, she doesn’t have much task to do in your team.”

You felt a pang of hurt when he mentioned that. But it was true, ever since you entered the team, you haven’t received any serious tasks to be done. Everyone else had their own specific roles in the team and to be honest, you felt a little out of place knowing that your tasks were mostly small errands like printing and sending the documents out throughout the week.

“Well, y/n helped us a lot too!” Soomin defended you.

Bomin grinned at her, “Aw come on, don’t be too worked up about this. I know she’s new to your team anyways. I just wanted to—”

“It’s fine,” you interrupted the both of them.

Both Bomin and Soomin turned to look at you.

“I’m heading out anyways,” you smiled at them. “I’ll take the trash out and just head back home,”

Soomin glanced over at her watch. “Oh? Omg yeah, I almost forgot we finish work at noon on Fridays! Thanks for the reminder, y/n,” she winked at you.

You grinned at her and got up from your chair, packing up your stuff into your tote bag.

“Oh wait, Y/n!”

“Yes, Soomin?”

“You don’t want to have lunch with us before you leave?”

“Ahh,” you looked at her and the rest of your team in the room who were busy chatting with one another.

“It’s fine, I’ll just head home,” you said to her, giving her an apologetic smile.

“Sure, it’s fine,” she smiled back at you. “Take care, okay? I’ll see you on Monday?”

You nodded at her, “Yup, see you on Monday!”

With that, you picked up your bag and head towards the door of the meeting room. You picked up the trash bag from the bin beside the door and left the room.

                                                                *

 You threw the trash bag into the larger bin at the end of the floor and entered the restroom to wash your hands for a while.

While you were drying your hands, you felt your phone buzzing from your bag.

Taking out your phone, you read the name on the screen. Chani. You answered the phonecall.

 Phonecall conversation (Y/n and Chani):

Chani: Y/n! Where are you?? Really?? I went to the restroom for a while and you just left me like that??

Y/n: Oh my god Chani, don’t make me sound that bad.  

Chani: Where are you?

Y/n: I took out the trash just now. I’m heading home now.

Chani: What? Why? Are you sick??

Y/n: Gosh, you need to chill. I’m fine, Chani haha. I finish work at noon on Fridays, just so you know.

Chani: So…does this mean I’ll be having lunch all alone today…

Y/n: (rolls eyes) Oh my god, you have other friends too. Remember what you told me? Everybody loves Chani.

Chani: (sighs) okay fine. I’ll see you next week then?

Y/n: Yup. Okay then, go and have lunch! Byee!

-End call-

 You looked at yourself one last time in the mirror before leaving the restroom.

                                                                 *

You were walking out of the restroom when you met Junghwan who was passing by.

Junghwan stopped walking when he saw you.

“Noona!” He greeted you cheerfully. He hurriedly approached you.

You smiled at him. “Junghwan.”

“Where are you going noona?”

“I’m about to head home. I get off work early on Fridays, remember?” you reminded him.

“Ahh, that’s right,” he scratched his head.

“Well, I’m going off now. It was nice seeing you. I need to make a quick stop at the convenience store out front too,” you said, referring to the convenience store you frequently visited which was opposite the YG Building itself.

You were about to walk away when Junghwan stopped you.

“Wait, noona!”

“Hm? What’s wrong, Junghwan?”

“Uhh, convenience store? W-we uh, have one here,” he started stuttering now that you were making direct eye contact with him.

You looked at him questioningly. “Ohh…Okay?”

“I mean—” Junghwan looked around. “Okay, come with me,” he grabbed your hand and pulled you along with him.

“Whoa, wait, slow down Junghwan!” you said, trying to keep up with his steps.

                                                                  *

 (GS25 Mart / YGE Building)

“Hyung, you’re getting that buttercream bread again today?” Haruto asked Jeongwoo who was at the bread aisle.

“Yup, it’s surprisingly good. You want one?” Jeongwoo asked him back.

Haruto turned to look at Jeongwoo before nodding at his hyung. “Sure,”

Haruto stood at the drinks aisle, still thinking of what drink to buy for lunch today. His hand reached out to his usual pick, cola, but then he moved his hand slightly to the grape juice on his left.

“Oh? That’s unusual.” A voice startled him. Haruto turned to look at the voice that surprised him.

Junkyu blinked curiously at him.

“W-what is it, hyung? Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Nothing, it’s just that, you’re getting grape juice??” Junkyu asked in disbelief.

“Whoa! What did you say?” Jeongwoo’s head popped up from behind the shelf near them.

Haruto blushed, “What?? I was just looking at it! I wasn’t really going to buy it!” he said, defending himself.

Junkyu lets out a laugh at his friend. “I was just kidding—”

“Here, here! Isn’t it cool?!” Junghwan’s excited voice boomed throughout the store in all of a sudden.

“Yah, So Junghwan, what are you being so loud for—” Jeongwoo stopped when he saw you and Junghwan outside the store. “Oh? Hey!” Jeongwoo hurriedly ran towards the both of you.

You nod and smiled at Jeongwoo as you saw him approaching you.

“What are you doing here, y/n? You here to buy some lunch?” Jeongwoo asked you.

“Ahh, I was actually heading towards the convenience store outside…” you said.

“Oh?” Jeongwoo said, surprised that you were here instead. Then he saw how Junghwan’s hand was still holding onto your arm.

Jeongwoo raised an eyebrow at the both of you. “So…Junghwan brought you here?”

You smiled apologetically and nodded at him.

Junghwan immediately lets go of your arm, “H-hey, I was just bringing her here since we have a convenience store here too!”

“Uh huh, sure,” he smirked at the maknae.

Your eyes looked around the outer part of the store and you felt amazed now that you were standing right in front of it.

“Wait, this store!” You ran to the front and pointed at the signage of the store.

“It’s the same store from that K-Drama, right?!” You fangirled excitedly.

Junghwan and Jeongwoo looked at you confusedly.

“Which drama, noona?”

“That oneeeee. The one with that Ji Chang Wook guy!”

Junghwan scratched the back of his head. “Maybe I should ask Yoshi-hyung if he knows that one, I haven’t watched many dramas,”

You took out your phone and posed for a selca with the smaller sign on the entrance of the store.

Jeongwoo shook his head at you. He turned to the maknae beside him, “You getting anything here?”

Junghwan blinked a couple times before patting his pockets. His face showed as if he just realised something and he turned back to his hyung, face in shock.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Hyung…I left my wallet in the practice room…”

“Aish, don’t worry about that! I can pay for you too,” Jeongwoo said as he ruffled the maknae’s hair.

Junghwan grinned at his hyung. “Okay! I have a few things I want!”

“Hey, hey, I said I could pay, I don’t mean I’m buying you the whole store Junghwan-aa” Jeongwoo laughed.

Suddenly, another familiar voice called out to the both of the maknaes as they were about to enter the store again.

“Hey guys!”

Both of them turned around to see…

Chani skipping cheerfully towards them. He waved at them once he noticed they were looking at him.

“Hyung! Hi! What brings you here?” Jeongwoo greeted him.

Chani smiled at them, stopping right in front of both the maknaes. “I’m on my way to lunch, but I wasn’t in the mood to eat anything from the cafeteria,” he told them.

“Ahh. Oh? Are you going to have lunch at the balcony again today, hyung?” Jeongwoo asked since he knew how Chani was always having lunch with you at the balcony.

Chani shook his head, “Nah, y/n went home already. She told me she only works half-day on Fridays so,”

Junghwan and Jeongwoo looked at each other.

“So, you both buying lunch here too?” Chani asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Jeongwoo answered.

“Ah, you guys eating in the cafeteria today?”

“Oh, no. We need to catch up with practice so Hyunsuk and Jihoon hyung told us to just grab something and eat in the practice room,”

“Ahh, I see. Well,” Chani shrugged. “I wish y/n was here though. I don’t think I’ve brought her to this store yet. Oh well. Let’s go inside and buy some food together!” Chani said happily to the both of them.

Suddenly, Junghwan felt panicked. Instead of following Chani whom was heading towards the store, Junghwan immediately yelled, “OH? NOONA!”

Hearing this, Chani and Jeongwoo immediately turned around to look at Junghwan.

“S-sorry, I thought I saw Y/n-noona up there just now,”

“Oh? That’s impossible, she told me she was heading home just now,” Chani said as he took out his phone from his pocket.

Jeongwoo looked at his dongsaeng, confused as to what Junghwan was doing.

“She’s not answering her phone,” Chani sighed after he failed to call you. “She must’ve put it on silent again,”

“M-maybe,”

“Well, I’ll get going. See you all next time!” Chani said as he was about to leave the both of them.

“Hyung! You’re not buying food here?” Jeongwoo pointed at the store.

“Nah, I want to go check if y/n is up there. I’m gonna give her an earful of nagging for leaving without saying goodbye to me,” he complained. With that he waved goodbye at the maknaes and ran off towards the escalators heading up.

Jeongwoo shook his head and clicked his tongue, “Tsk tsk Junghwan-aa. Look at you,” he smirked at the maknae.

“I panicked! I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it too. “When he said y/n-noona went home, the only thought that crossed my head was that if he saw noona in the store, he might have dragged noona out to have lunch with him,”

Jeongwoo nodded, understanding why Junghwan did what he did.

“I mean, he gets to work with y/n-noona every day, he has lunch with her every day, and well, since noona is here today, I figured it’s only fair if I wanted to make sure we were the ones that get to have lunch with her this time,” he continued.

“Aigoo, you don’t have to get emotional about this,” Jeongwoo ruffled the kid’s hair. “I understand,” he said softly.

“Let’s get inside and grab lunch so that we can head back to the practice room soon, okay?” Jeongwoo added as he wraps an arm around Junghwan’s shoulder.

                                                                *

 After taking selcas at the front entrance of the convenience store, you excitedly entered the store and started scanning through the shelves to see the types of snacks and food sold there.

Now, because you were quick enough to enter the store without the maknaes realising it, you had no idea about what went on outside the store when Chani and the maknaes met.

Oblivious and excited about being in the store, you didn’t realise there was another guy on the same aisle as you until he walked up towards you.

“Y/n!”

You turned to look and realised it was none other than Haruto, holding a bottle of grape juice in his hand.

“Hi Haruto!” You smiled at him.

“What are you doing here alone?”

“Junghwan brought me here,” you grinned. “I just got off work and we bumped into each other in the hallways. I was actually on my way to the convenience store outside, but your little brother out there brought me here instead,”

Haruto chuckled at your explanation. “Makes sense of him to bring you here. This store is good too. They sell good stuff here,”

You looked around you. “I can agree to that.”

“So, what are you getting?”

You eyed the grape juice in his hand. “I might get one of that,” you pointed at it, making Haruto blush when he noticed you wanting to get the same drink as him.

“And a ramen cup I guess?” You added. “It’s Friday anyways,”

Haruto nodded at you even though he had no idea how Fridays and ramen cups are related to one another.

You hurried towards the shelf that were filled with different types of cup and bowl noodles. You eyed every single one of them and picked up a few, wanting to read them closely since there were a few that you’ve never seen before.

“What kind of ramen do you like, y/n?” Haruto’s voice appeared again beside you.

You put back some of the cup noodles onto the shelf, leaving one in your hand.

“I like the ones that are not too spicy? Something with a broth or soupy too,” you answered him, your eyes still scanning the shelf.

You knelt down to look at the lower shelf and Haruto knelt down along with you, wanting to see what you were looking at.

You grabbed another ramen bowl from the bottom shelf and held it in your hands along with the one you had earlier.

“Which one is better, Ruto?” You turned to look at him.

“Hm? What do you mean?”

“Among these two kimchi ramen bowls. Which is better?”

Haruto looked at the bowls in your hands. He pointed at the one in your left hand. “This one has a nice sour kick to it, if you like the plain kimchi flavour,”

You nodded at his choice. “Okay, thank you for your suggestion,” you smiled.

You put back the noodle bowl that Haruto chose and decided to choose the one you picked from the top shelf earlier.

As you stood up, Haruto said, “Hey! What’s the point of you asking if you’re not gonna choose my pick?”

“Ah,” You looked at him, your chin slightly raising since you had to raise your head slightly to meet his eyes.

“I wanted to try this one instead,” you said as you showed the bowl in your hand again.

“But! That grape juice you’re holding looks good! Is it nice?” You asked, noticing he was confused with what you did earlier.

Haruto looked at the drink in his hand and then he looked at you who was eagerly waiting for his answer. “It’s actually my first time trying it,” he said, a little shy with his confession.

“Cool! I trust your taste, so I’ll get one too,” you said cheerfully.

Haruto smiled at you as he hears your praise on his taste.

“Ruto-yaa where are you? Help me here!” Another voice said on the other side of the shelves you and Haruto were standing at.

“I’m still here, hyung! What happened there?” Haruto answered as he walked towards the direction of the voice.

You followed behind him and saw Junkyu standing in front of the chiller, his hands on the handle.

“How did you open this chiller door? I’ve been trying for the past 5 minutes and it won’t open,” he whined, not noticing Haruto and you were directly behind him by now.

“Agh! Aigoo, this door!” Junkyu complained as he lets go of the handle.

“Aigoo hyung, it was fine before, how did it get stuck now?” Haruto asked him. He hands over his drink to Junkyu, asking him to move aside so that he could try pulling the door open this time.

You watched as the two guys in front of you struggle to open the chiller door.

“Uh, do you guys need help?” You asked, making Junkyu jump slightly, startled that you were there watching them the whole time.

“Y/n? When did you get here??”

“I…I’ve been here for a while now, I guess,”

Haruto smirked at you, “Pfft y/n, there’s no way you can open this. Even Junkyu-hyung struggled,”

“Heyy, I’ll have you know, I’m good at opening jar lids so, it’s probably the same, no?”

With that, you shoved your ramen bowl into Haruto’s hands and stepped up in front of the chiller door, with Junkyu beside you.

“Hyung? Y/n? You guys still here?” You heard Junghwan asking as both him and Jeongwoo stepped into the store after their moment with Chani earlier.

“We’re in the back here!” Haruto called out to them.

You huffed as you tugged on the door handle, one, two, you counted in your head.

Junkyu tilt his head slightly, feeling like it’s ridiculous to see you struggling to open the chiller door now.

“H-hey, let me try again. You might get hurt,” Junkyu said, his hand reaching to hold onto the handles again.

“No, I got this,” you said confidently.

Junkyu rolled his eyes and handed Haruto his drink back. He placed his hands slightly above yours, making it only 2cm close enough to touch your hands and he started pulling the handle as well.

“What’s going on here?” Jeongwoo said as he showed up behind you all.

“These both are competing to see who is stronger at opening that chiller door,” Haruto answered with a shrug.

“Hey, we’re not competing!” Junkyu said.

“Yeah, we just want to get this thing to open so I can get myself a grape juice too!” You added.

The both of you tugged harder this one time and as if luck was on your side, the door opened up.

But because the both of you had tugged too hard on the handle, the moment the door opened, Junkyu lost balance and lost his grip on the handles, making you the only person holding onto it as the door swings open quickly.

‘THUD’

“Whoa, did you guys hear that? What’s that loud noise?” Junghwan said, showing up behind Jeongwoo. His hand was holding onto a pack of gimbap.

Junghwan looked around and noticed that all of his hyungs’ eyes were on you, all looking shocked.

“What? What’s going on??” Junghwan asked again, not understanding what was going on.

“Y-y/n…a-are you okay?” Jeongwoo asked.

Haruto and Junkyu stayed silent, too shocked to even say anything.

You blinked a couple times, noticing your hands were still holding onto the chiller’s door handle. You also noticed a sharp pain on one side of your forehead.

That’s when you noticed that the edge of the chiller door was rested against your forehead. The part where your forehead was hurting.

You let go of the handle, making the door slowly closing back.

“Y/n?? Can you hear me??” Jeongwoo asked again, since you still hadn’t responded to him.

You felt your forehead sting in pain again, now that it’s exposed to the cold air in the store. You backed yourself against the side of the chiller, supporting yourself so you wouldn’t fall.

“It’s not bleeding, right?” You ask, your voice a little softer than usual.

Haruto, Jeongwoo and Junkyu all shook their heads, except for Junghwan who still didn’t know what happened.

You blinked a couple times again, making sure that you could still stand up straight.

“Well then, I guess everything’s okay then!” You tried your best to sound cheerful.

“You sure you okay?” Haruto asked this time.

You nodded several times, convincing them all that you were fine.

“I’m good! Now, get me a bottle of that grape juice too,” you said with a smile.

                                                                   *

 (YGE Building / Treasure’s Practice Room)

Half of the Treasure members were in the practice room when you entered with the gang that were with you from the convenience store earlier.

Hyunsuk, who was sitting beside Mashiho, tilted his head when he saw you entering.

“Oh? You guys are back…. with…who’s that?” he asked, not being able to recognise you.

You were wearing Junghwan’s cap which covered most of your face (you purposely pulled it down) especially since after the incident in the convenience store the boys said they could see a bump forming on your head. Not to mention, you were dressed casually too (casual Fridays; what your company call it), wearing a dark blue hoodie paired with black jeans and your sneakers.

You pushed the cap on your head a little to the back to reveal your face. “Hi! Your boys forced me to have lunch with you guys here,” you smiled as you said this.

“Y/n!” Hyunsuk stood up excitedly and went up to you, hugging you as soon as he reached where you stood.

“I’m not sure if me being here is legal, but yeah, I originally wanted to head back home after having some ramen at the store outside,” you explained.

Hyunsuk grinned happily, feeling glad that after not meeting you for days, he could finally see you again.

“Oh wait, if you’re here,” Hyunsuk looked over behind you and his other members who were with you. “Is Chani here too?” he asked, knowing that ever since your team started working in their building, Chani has been your companion every time and everywhere.

“Aish, hyung! Don’t mention his name here, he might really show up!” Junghwan said in a loud whisper to his hyung.

“Ahh, sorry sorry,” Hyunsuk apologised, understanding why his maknae said that. “Come here, y/n! Let’s sit with the rest!” He said as he pulled your hand to go to the center of the room where the rest were sitting at.

“Wow, the moment he sees Y/n he literally forgot about us,” Haruto chuckled. “It’s almost like we were never here,” he added, jokingly.

Jeongwoo laughed at this. “As usual, Hyunsuk-hyung gets easily attached to people he likes I guess,” with that, Jeongwoo left to go and sit with you and the rest of the members.

Junkyu rolled his eyes after hearing both of what his dongsaengs said.

                                                                  *

 “Ahh there they are!” Hyunsuk said as soon he sees Jihoon and Yoshi entering the practice room with a paper bag in their hands.

It had been only 15 minutes since you arrived in the practice room and while waiting for both of them, you had been chatting with Hyunsuk about your work.

You turned your head to look at the both who just arrived and smiled at them, letting them know that you notice them coming in too.

“Oh? Hello there, Y/n…with a cap? That’s a first!” Jihoon exclaimed when he sees you.

Yoshi bowed slightly at you and smiled as he greeted you.

All of them including you sat down on the floor, all in a scattered manner since the practice room was wide, unlike your cramped living room at home.

The one sitting nearby you were Hyunsuk, Yoshi and Junghwan.

Junghwan handed over your ramen bowl that you bought with him and the ones who were at the convenience store downstairs. You thanked him and tore the lid off.

“Oh? I forgot to get myself some hot water,” you said.

“Aish, noona. We got you covered,” Junghwan said to you. He got up and pulled out a flask of hot water from his bag, passing it to you once he sat back down.

“Wow, you bring hot water to practice every day?” You asked, impressed.

“Ah, Doyoung-hyung and I bring a flask each every day in case we’re too lazy to go get some from the cafeteria,”

“Huh, nice of you both,” you praised as you poured the hot water into your ramen bowl, covering it back with the lid once you’re done. You hand over Junghwan his flask back and thanked him.

You looked around you and see all of them eating their own food they bought, all immersed in their own thoughts, some talking to one another and laughing while eating.

You were waiting for your noodle to soften so you decided to tie up your hair into a low bun while waiting. Pulling your headband from your wrist, you tied up your hair into a messy low bun, struggling a little since the cap on your head was sort of making it hard for you to do so.

The cap on your head slipped forward, covering your eyes while you were tying your hair, and Hyunsuk noticed this.

“Aigoo, this cap is kinda big on you, no?” he said with a grin.

You smiled at him and finished up bunning up your hair.

Hyunsuk helped push the cap back to make sure you were able to at least look at your food and without realising it, he accidentally touched the bump on your forehead.

“Ah,” you winced softly. You backed your head away from Hyunsuk’s hand and held onto the cap, directly on the spot of your bump.

“Why, what’s wrong y/n?” Hyunsuk asked when he sees you looking uncomfortable.

“Oh nothing, nothing,” you tried to look away from him and ignored the sting on your forehead. Fixing the cap properly (enough for you to hide the bump and see your food in front of you), you grabbed your chopsticks and took off the lid of your noodle bowl.

You stirred your noodles and began eating it.

“Mmm, so good,” you said happily.

Hyunsuk smiled watching you eat beside him. He reached out his hand and pats your head, which earned another wince from you, since you felt the sting on your head intensify.

This time, your wince was loud enough for Junghwan to hear you. He turned around, a worried look on his face.

He set down his food onto the floor and scooted towards you. “Noona?”

You held onto the spot where your bump is hidden and you lowered your head, holding in the pain that was literally throbbing by now.

“Y/n?” Hyunsuk called out to you, worried as well now that he noticed Junghwan’s expression.

You blinked a couple times and took deep breaths to hold in the pain on your forehead.

You shook your head and forced a smile at the both of them. “I’m good, just a little sting in the head,”

“Really? You looked like you were very much in pain earlier,” Hyunsuk said, his frown visible on his face, not being able to shake his worry towards you. He clearly heard you wince not once, but twice.

You nodded profusely, you even grabbed your ramen bowl and started eating it back just so you could convince them not to worry about you.

“Noona…it still hurts, huh?” Junghwan said to you.

“Hm? What, what happened?” Hyunsuk asked him.

You chewed on your noodles, ignoring the both of them.

Seeing that you wouldn’t be honest with him, Junghwan pulled his cap off your head.

The sudden cold breeze hitting your forehead made you lift your head, your eyes meeting his.

Junghwan’s eyes widened though the moment he pulled his cap away from you.

“N-noona, your head…”

You pushed the stray strands of your hair away from your face, wondering why he looked so surprised at you. “What? What is it?”

Hyunsuk immediately pulled you to face him, “Oh my god! Y/n!” he exclaimed rather loudly.

Yoshi, who was beside you immediately put down his ipad that he was watching while eating and scrambled over to Hyunsuk’s side. “Oh my god, Y/n!” He said in shock as well.

You frowned at your friends. “What? Oh my god, what’s going on??”

“What’s going on over there?” You heard Jihoon’s voice asking from the other side of the room.

You turned your head to look at him and immediately everyone else on his side gasped out loud.

“Y-yah! Y/n! What happened to your head?!” He screamed in shock.

“What is it?? Is my head bleeding??” you asked back, your eyes tearing up.

You tried to touch the bump on your head but the moment your fingers grazed against it you felt a sharp pain, “Ouch,” You clenched your fist to hold yourself from screaming.

“No, don’t touch it, noona!” Junghwan said as he grabbed your hand.

“It’s bad…” Haruto breathed out as he stared at you.

“What happened to Y/n??” Jihoon asked again, this time, his voice a little louder.

“N-noona hit her head against the edge of the chiller door downstairs…” Junghwan stammered.

“What?!” Hyunsuk said, louder this time too.

“Guys omg, it’s just a small bump, let’s not make a big deal about it” you said.

“No, no, Y/n. It’s not a small bump like the one we saw earlier…” Jeongwoo explained to you.

You furrowed your eyebrows. “What? Then it’s a big bump??”

SNAP! The sound of a camera clicked. Everyone turned to see Asahi holding up his phone.

He walked up towards you and showed a picture of you, a frown on your face—and there it was, on your forehead—the small bump you remembered from before had grown bluish-black, making it seem like your forehead was rotting.

“OH MY GOD!” You screamed. “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT??”

“That’s…your forehead, y/n,” Asahi stated matter-of-factly.

Your eyes were tearing up. “Why is the colour so dark??”

“You must have hit your head so hard…” Hyunsuk said.

“Yah! What are you all doing just standing there?? Get something cold to calm the bruise on her head!” Jihoon said.

Yoshi hurriedly grabbed his cold canned drink that he hasn’t opened yet. Without thinking much, he immediately pressed it against your bruise, making you wince in pain because of the sudden contact against your throbbing head.

“Hyung! Don’t do it like that! Do it slowly!” Yedam called out to him.

At this rate, the whole group was gathering around you, worried looks on their faces as they watched Yoshi calming your bruise, trying to make it no longer swell whereas Hyunsuk and Junghwan kept calming you down every time they see your face showing any discomfort.

“Shh shh, it’s okay, it’ll be less bruised later, okay?” Hyunsuk whispered to you as he stroked your head.

“Noona, it’s okay, it’ll be less painful later,” Junghwan said as well, his hands holding yours.

Junkyu watched as everyone was focusing on you now, even himself too. He felt slightly guilty for not being able to contribute anything to make you feel better, so he just sat and watched over you with the others.

                                                                  *

 (Evening / Dorm 1 – Hyunsuk, Yoshi, Junkyu, Haruto)

“I’m home!” Haruto called out as he entered their house even though there was nobody at home.

“Welcome home!” Yoshi replied, as he entered the main door beside his dongsaeng.

Haruto giggled at this and moved to the side to let everyone else enter as he bowed down to take off his shoes.

“Aaahhh home sweet home!” Haruto chanted as he raced towards the living room, jumping onto the sofa, letting his body rest after a good amount of dance practice with his group today.

“Aigoo Ruto-yaa, you better go wash up first before you fall asleep on the sofa,” Junkyu nagged at him when he passed by the living room.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, I’ll shower up in a bit”

Hyunsuk entered the living room, his face clearly distracted.

“Hyung, everything alright?” Yoshi asked when he saw Hyunsuk’s expression.

“I don’t know…I just feel so worried about Y/n.”

“Ahh hyung, don’t worry too much. Her bruise wasn’t as dark as before too, and she said she was fine too when she left us after lunch. She was even smiling too,”

Hyunsuk shook his head. “How did she even hurt herself like that? She’s only worked in our building for a week and she already got herself into an accident like that. Imagine working there for a month, what else would happen to her?”

Yoshi walked up towards his hyung and pats his back. “Don’t worry, hyung. Y/n wouldn’t like it if we worry about her like this too,”

Haruto, who was listening to the whole conversation, scooted himself to sit up properly on the sofa. “Hyung-ah, do you think she’s doing okay right now? I mean, I feel like y/n might be the kind of person who wouldn’t be entirely honest if she’s feeling pain…Even when she got hit by the chiller door, she laughed it off and said she was fine. She even hid the fact that she was hurt by the bruise to the point when we found out it was already black and swollen badly,”

Hyunsuk nodded, understanding what Haruto was trying to say.

Suddenly, an idea came up to his head. “Do you guys want to have dinner with y/n? We can order takeout and watch a movie at her place. At the same time we can watch over her bruise too,” Hyunsuk said to his dongsaengs.

Yoshi and Haruto exchanged looks with one another. They knew that Hyunsuk was worried about you, because he really cares about you, but they weren’t too sure if bothering you tonight would be a good idea.

“Or, hyung, we could just invite her over for lunch tomorrow? She might want to rest up tonight,” Yoshi suggested.

“Oh? But y/n has never been to our place. Will that be okay, though?” Haruto asked.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be okay, as long as everyone in this dorm consents to it, it should be okay, no?”

Hyunsuk nods his head at this idea. His eyes glanced over at Junkyu’s room.

“Junkyu-aa! Junkyu, come over here!” he called out.

Junkyu walked out of his room, his hair slightly dishevelled, obviously he was laying down in bed earlier. “Yes, hyung?”

“We’re having lunch with y/n tomorrow, you cool with that?”

Junkyu shrugged, not understanding why Hyunsuk has to ask him. He would’ve just followed the rest of them without any complaints.

“Okay, I guess.”

“Okay, good. I’ll bring her over here tomorrow,” Hyunsuk said happily. Yoshi and Haruto too, smiled at their plan for tomorrow.

Junkyu was about to leave for his room back when he processed what Hyunsuk said earlier.

His eyes widened and he turned around to look at his dormmates again, “Wait, what?? You’re bringing Y/n over to our dorm??”

 To be continued…

[outlaw-unicorn]

Slams a 📖 in your inbox cuz I'm sure you don't have only one untold au anyway >:3

XD *looks around starled when a book drops on my head*

okay, how about this one (I had been meaning to write it for the Protection prompt of klapollo week but alas, life happened and I was too busy)

Polly gets himself a new client who was falsely accused of an undefined crime [what it is changes depending on my mood but it's definitely up the organized crime alley]

Polly's client didn't do it of course and instead has been set up to take the fall by a criminal organization (the mob, the government, take your pick). now in usual AA fashion Polly plans to get to the truth and reveal the true culprit but unfortunately he (and the WAA) are known for their unusual talents. Cue Polly finding a clue at a crime scene and then suddenly meeting the wrong end of a club/crowbar/baseball bat. he's knocked out, tied up and then left in the cellar of an abandoned (but not so abandoned bc the Organization™ uses it for their crimes) house. specifically in the cold, damp cellar.

meanwhile they blackmail the WAA to let defendent Mr D.N. Doitt take the fall unless they want Polly to die. (and since they're not exactly known for being kind, chances are Polly might not survive this anyway)

cue the combined powers of the WAA and the Prosecutors Office looking for Polly. and do you know who else is looking? and can exploit a network of informants the others don't have access to? The Kitaki family :D bc they've officially adopted Polly into their family (no one bothered to tell Apollo) and they find Polly, get Klav and then hide them away in one of their safe houses while the WAA wins the case and exposes the truth

Polly's fine except a concussion, hypothermia and a lil bit of trauma bc it wouldn't be AA if you didn't also traumatize the protagonist :')

[letswritefanfiction]

New Pokémon oneshot series! Mistakes Were Made.

A series of disconnected oneshots that poke fun at the fandom hivemind, canon, and past!me. I’m taking things that I’ve either observed or done myself and reframing them in parody where hopefully we can just all have some low stakes fun and, at best, maybe learn something about our favorite characters and writing.

Chapter One- Addiction: Redux

Summary: Once upon a time, an enterprising, young fanfiction authoress wrote the first chapter for her years-long alphabet challenge, and it sucked. Six years later, she makes a whole story devoted to making fun of it.

"Ash, Ash, Ash!"

Ash felt a tingle go up—or down?—his spine at the sound of his name. But not the good kind. He currently had a packaged cookie in his mouth and was reaching for a second one, but knew that wasn't why his name was being called. No, Misty's voice was farther away, there was no way she was in sight of the kitchen, watching him pilfer her snack cookies from the cabinet.

Pikachu filled him a glass of water so that he could swallow the evidence as soon as possible and then he walked towards where the sound had come from.

Misty's office.

That's where the dread came in.

If he'd heard her exclaim his name like that from somewhere else in the Gym, he might have thought it was Pokémon-related and he probably would have been too excited to remember to cover his tracks with the cookies. But in the time he'd spent in the Misty's Gym since becoming a couple, he knew that only bad things lay behind those doors.

Usually those bad things were nothing more malignant than paperwork and maybe an overworked, slightly cross-eyed Misty. Nothing he wasn't used to. But excitement…that probably meant that she wasn't working. Exciting paperwork could in theory be something like a grant, but he probably would have heard about that. And would probably remember it. Maybe. But since he didn't, he had to assume it was something much more sinister.

She'd found something on the Internet.

"Do I have to, Pikachu?" he whispered as he approached the door.

"Pika chu," Pikachu nodded, pushing his Trainer forward and then making a run for it. Coward.

"Hey, Mist," Ash said with false cheer as he came into the dark room. The sun had set maybe an hour or two ago—Ash didn't pay attention to those things well when he wasn't on the road—and Misty had yet to turn any lamps on. But her face was heavily illuminated with the cold, blue glow of her computer monitor, which she was staring unblinkingly at.

"Hey, babe," she said, always more comfortable with the pet names than he was. He'd get there someday. Maybe. She was just 'Misty' in his head! He couldn't help it. "Check this out."

Her voice was slightly maniacal as she pointed to the screen full of words in front of her. Gee, Ash's favorite. He rolled his eyes. He had a sinking feeling what this was about.

"Look at this terrible fanfiction!"

"Is it about you and me?" he deadpanned.

"Yes, and it's terrible! I mean, I'm pretty cute in it, but you're so OOC I can't help but cackle."

And cackle she did. Then, she began to read it out loud:

"Misty was nothing if not true to her word," she began, her voice taking on the lilt of a storyteller's. "I am that. Have I ever lied to you?"

"Probably wouldn't date you if you had," Ash said, wanting this experience to be over as soon as possible. He didn't have an especially good relationship with reading in the first place, but reading about himself…ew, there was just something icky about it. Especially since Misty had shown him…certain stories.

Misty continued. "Today, Ash found himself sitting in an uncomfortable plastic seat, the kind that he hadn't had to deal with since grade school. This one was missing the foot off of one of the corners, so Ash spent his time rocking from side to side—okay, that part is like you," Misty said, interrupting the story. "You've definitely done that before. So let's skip to the bad stuff. Long story short, you're in an AA meeting—"

"What?" Ash exclaimed. "Why would—okay, you're right. That doesn't sound like me at all."

"No you're not addicted to alcohol," Misty explained. "Just…Just wait for it. Ah, let's skip to here. 'Hello, my name is Ash,' Ash mumbled into his shirt as he avoided eye contact with all others in the room.

Ash—the real Ash, not story-Ash—rolled his eyes. Not at the story, surprisingly, but at Misty. She had taken to reading lines that he—or, rather, the fictional version of him—had in something of a stage whisper. She was making fun of his raspy voice just because she could.

"Resounding back to him was a dull chorus of, 'Hi, Ash.' His mouth was dry. As much as he loved being the center of attention—hah, now that part's right!" Misty interjected. "Oh, and this next part is good: Ash had never been good at the public speaking. He usually ended up saying something dumb that Misty would then make fun of him for later. So he said the only thing that he could think to say: "And I'm addicted to Pokémon Battling."

"What‽" Ash exclaimed, slamming his hands down on the desk as he got closer behind Misty to see the screen for himself. "What does that even mean? How can someone be addicted to Pokémon Battles? This is the stupidest—"

"Shh, that's explained. That's what I'm getting to. Listen:" Misty said, skipping down a bit further. "'Aw, Mist, it's not like you really believe that an addiction to Battling is a real thing, do you?' Misty turned sharply to look at him. "Ash, you battled to the point where Pikachu could hardly breathe! We had to spend the whole day in the Pokémon Center, remember? Clearly you have a problem, and I couldn't think of any other solution besides peer pressure to get you to shape up.'"

"Nope," Ash said immediately. "Nope, nope, nope. I would never do that in a million years."

"I know!" Misty explained, laughing as she stared in disbelief at the words on the screen. "You'd more likely run on the field and land yourself in the hospital."

"I have."

"I know."

Ash frowned as he read the words over again. They made him angry to read. Mostly because the idea of any Trainer doing that to a Pokémon incensed him, but it was more than that. "I can't believe someone out there thinks I would do that."

"Oh, Ash," Misty said, finally swiveling around to look at him. "This person doesn't know you. They just think they do, for some strange reason. Or maybe they knew this wasn't what you're like and wrote it anyway. There are stories like that too."

That didn't make him feel better. Suddenly Ash wanted to run and find Pikachu again, just to hold him. He wanted to hold Pikachu's warm, healthy body, stroke his bright, shiny fur, and feel his full, but muscular belly just to be reminded of the partnership that he had. He was nothing like that…stranger being depicted on the screen.

"I'm sorry if this story upset you, Ash," Misty said, turning the monitor off. "I just find it funny when people get it so wrong. Other than that, the story isn't too terrible. I mean, the writing itself is fine—it just has a crappy core premise. It's even a little funny, though. In the end, I get your mother's cookie recipe just so I can train you with them."

Ash stiffened a little bit. Cookies? Maybe that writer knew more than they seemed to…

"Gosh, it's pitch black in here isn't it? One sec…"

Misty turned on her desk lamp before swiveling in her chair back to Ash. As soon as she saw him, her eyes widened and she pointed to his face. Specifically to his lips.

"Cookie thief!"

By reflex, Ash licked his lips, and found the slightest taste of chocolate at the corner of his mouth. Why hadn't Pikachu told him? And…had he ever put the package of cookies away?

Well. The one thing this author didn't know—in addition to not knowing anything about how Ash battled, apparently—was that he wasn't the true cookie fiend. The true cookie fiend in the Cerulean Gym that day was not him or Misty, but a little electric rodent, who had been left alone for quite a while now.

"Misty," Ash said, his tone just desperate enough to draw her eyes up to his. "We've gotta go!"

Moral: Everyone writes some bad stories. In case you missed it, all those excerpts up there do come from a real story existing on this site. Written by me. This is the first chapter from my Alphabet Challenge, "Addiction." No, not even I am cruel enough to pick some rando's story off this site and make fun of it so heartlessly. No, luckily I've written enough poop myself that I was able to use my past mistakes to illustrate something.

Exception: None. Everyone writes some bad stuff.

Second Moral: Ash would never abuse his Pokémon. I mean, yes, his Pokémon have ended up in dangerous condition before, but always super by accident. In this story, Misty lets us know that it's Ash's fault and it's a habit and that just isn't our sweet baby boy. Ash would never hurt his Pokémon.

Exception: Again, none? Unless there's some real defendable ignorance—it is Ash, after all—then, I repeat: Ash would never hurt his Pokémon.

[thecheekbonesquad]

MAG Dream Team - a challenge;

have you ever wondered what your MAG Dream Team would look like?

i’ve given it a lot of some thought because i don’t want to write my dissertation right now and thought i’d share it here. so, there are some rules:

1. you can choose five gymnasts for your Team, of any nationality, as long as they are a senior (16+ years old) and from a FIG-associated country; 2. you also have one spot for a Specialist on each of the six apparatus, and one spot on the individual AA, same specifics as above; 3. you can’t repeat gymnasts! that means if you choose someone to be on your Team, they can’t be used as a Specialist, and vice-versa; 4. retired and suspended gymnasts can’t be chosen! you can choose injured/recovering gymnasts though, we’ll just pretend they’re healthy lol; 5. standart FIG rules for Team finals apply: you can send three gymnasts to each apparatus, all scores count;

i had a rough time choosing because i’m emotionally attached to a lot of gymnasts, and feel like sometimes i’ve made choices based more on how I feel about them rather than their actual results lol but anyway, here’s my Team:

1. Kenzo SHIRAI (JPN): the twisting prince, a precious ray of sunshine, please take a moment to realize how beautiful his smile is; 2. ZOU Jingyuan (CHN): squeaky clean all the time, beautiful routines, commentators mispronounce his name 98% of the time; 3. Ryohei KATO (JPN): rock solid, cheekbones that can cut through diamonds, beautiful smile, blinks a lot, has a pretty cat; 4. Kazuma KAYA (JPN): also rock solid, great cheekbones, his roar can awake your ancestors’ spirits; 5. Artur DALALOYAN (RUS): super elegant, i like his hairstyle and his respectful bow at the end of his routines, doesn’t keep spitting on himself like his russian teammates;

FLOOR EXERCISE - TEAM; 1. Kenzo SHIRAI (JPN): i mean, no explanation needed, right?; 2. Ryohei KATO (JPN): great balance of difficulty and execution, good landings; 3. Artur DALALOYAN (RUS): very elegant and clean, his opening tumbling pass from 2019 (front layout + double pike with a half turn) is so beautiful; FLOOR EXERCISE - SPECIALIST; 1. Carlos Edriel YULO (PHI): his execution is just SO GOOD, he is so clean and precise, he looks underage (mostly because of his hair + he is 1.5m) but he is actually 20 years old;

POMMEL HORSE - TEAM; 1. Ryohei KATO (JPN): clean and precise, there is nothing this man can’t do; 2. ZOU Jingyuan (CHN): his form is beautiful, difficult and very well executed routines, i wish he'd do flares because it’d look awesome; 3. Kazuma KAYA (JPN): pommel horse guy, beautiful lines, i feel like he can step up his game a little bit and add some extra difficulty to his routine (like a triple russian between the handles or a spindle on flares); POMMEL HORSE - SPECIALIST; 1. LEE Chih Kai (TPE): known for flaring through 95% of his routine and it’s AWESOME, his legs look insanely long and his hand placement is just so accurate and precise. he looks very serious but has a pretty smile. he is the kind of gymnast i’d like to take to the park and walk and feed the ducks and talk about diplomatics and modern art, u know? i like him;

RINGS - TEAM; 1. ZOU Jingyuan (CHN): not insanely difficult but his routines are clean and beautiful, moves very smoothly between positions; 2. Ryohei KATO (JPN): again, nothing this man can’t do, he blinks a lot but his face is always so calm, even on the craziest positions; 3. Artur DALALOYAN (RUS): he is not like great on rings, but he is better than Kenzo and Kaya, so go Artur. but as usual he is very elegant and has beautiful execution; RINGS - SPECIALIST; 1. Eleftherios PETROUNIAS (GRE): the Lord of the Rings and a greek god, i still think he is the best in the world;

VAULT - TEAM; 1. Kenzo SHIRAI (JPN): not a surprise that Kenzo is here, i love all his eponymous vaults; 2. Artur DALALOYAN (RUS): he shall enlighten us with the second best double pike out there; 3. Ryohei KATO (JPN): usually does a 5.2 but his execution makes up for the difficulty, great landings. he also looks very good on round, Harry Potter-style glasses; VAULT - SPECIALIST; 1. Marian DRAGULESCU (ROU): this man is a living legend, very consistent, no one does a Dragulescu like Dragulescu himself;

PARALLEL BARS - TEAM; 1. ZOU Jingyuan (CHN): 2017 and 2018 world champion, would’ve been on 2019 too (i’m not over this yet). unparalleled combination of difficulty and execution, so beautiful and elegant. commentators always talk about how light he is on his moves (i was curious and he weights like 46kg). i’d totally go out for a brunch with him; 2. Ryohei KATO (JPN): probably not his favourite event and i’m sorry to inflict this on him, but he is very precise and clean and i like his performances; 3. Kazuma KAYA (JPN): nice work, very clean and elegant, he can step up his game here too; PARALLEL BARS - SPECIALIST; 1. Oleg VERNIAIEV (UKR): he is not as clean as Yuanyuan but he is pretty elegant, nice difficulty. has some issues with consistency but he is a very good pbars worker. he is also very humble and has a nice smile;

HIGH BAR - TEAM; 1. Kazuma KAYA (JPN): has some cool German giants, very flexible and clean, nails the landing most of the time; 2. Ryohei KATO (JPN): he fell on his Voronin (B skill, back uprise + piked vault with a half turn, basically the move where they just jump over the bar) on Rio 2016 AA final and my heart is still shattered, but i trust him, he is awesome; 3. Artur DALALOYAN (RUS): very elegant on his releases, i like his style and the way his hair flows during giants; HIGH BAR - SPECIALIST; 1. Kohei UCHIMURA (JPN): there is absolutely no way that i’d leave King Kohei out of this. i was crushed when he said he wouldn’t be defending his olympic AA title, but i totally understand him now. he is nailing the Bretschneider (full twisting Kovacs) now, and he can also do a Liukin (full twisting Tkatchev, not insanely difficult but i like how it looks) and some pretty neat connections. beautiful, great balance of difficulty and execution, elegant, precise, nails the landing, long live the King;

ALL-AROUNDER; 1. XIAO Ruoteng (CHN): i like him a lot. has some small issues with consistency but he is very reliable, can deliver great routines, nails his landings. he grinds his own coffee beans every morning and cuts his friends’ hair. has a very particular way of vaulting, doesn’t sprint like other usually do. he could snap a neck if he wanted to, he is always humble and friendly and he uses an electric toothbrush. i like him. i’d go jet-skiing with him;

wow this took so much longer than i thought, but i actually enjoyed myself a lot doing this. sooo, feel free to take the challenge too! i’d love to see what you guys come up with! <3

[illfoandillfie]

Hi again, I’m the one that requested about the romantic soulmate and when will it come and yes, please can you tell me more about them? I asked if I’d ever meet them because sometimes it feels like it won’t happen so I’m more like I could wait forever as long as they get here you know? But if you could tell me more, I’d be grateful. Also yes, I know that you can’t give me a specific time but I wonder more like if it’s in the near future or later on in life. Again, thank you💕

This was fun! Hopefully some of this will make sense, even if it’s not straight away lmao if you have any more questions or theres anything else you’re curious about let me know and i’ll see if any of my decks can give us some clues!

So to start I drew 4 attribute cards to try and get a sense of this person’s personality. Each archetype has light and shadow attributes, though it doesn’t necessarily mean all of them will be exhibited. More that they are negative aspects that this person has the potential to fall into (eg: just because the shadow attribute of trickster talks about manipulating others, it doesn’t mean this person is going to be overtly manipulative of you. but they might be good at playing the system to benefit themselves or something like that)

We got:

Trickster - Light attribute: Transcending convention, stuffiness and predictable behaviour / Shadow atrribute: Manipulating others through duplicity

Mentor - Light attribute: Passing on wisdom and refining a student’s character / Shadow attribute - Inability to allow the student to move on to the role of Master. Imparting false instruction

Exorcist - Light attribute: Freeing yourself and others of destructive impulses / Shadow attribute - Fear of facing your own demons 

Visionary - Light attributes - Capacity to envision what is not yet conceivable to others. Willingness to proclaim a vision without regard for personal gain. / Shadow attributes - Selling insights to the highest bidder. Compromising your vision to make it more acceptable.

So from these it seems this person will be a little outside the box, maybe they have a particular style of dress which is unusual or a special interest/hobby that is a bit odd. With both mentor and exorcist they may have a background in teaching or social work - even if they are no longer on that path. It might not even be an official degree they have, they might just be particularly aware of the system, maybe they know someone who benefits from AA meetings something like that. It could be as simple as them tutoring school/uni/college students. With the visionary archetype it seems they’d be a bit of a dreamer, probably a creative thinker.

Next thing i did was draw some letters and charms to try and get some more info on what they’re like.

For the letters we got D, E, I, F, R, L, I, O, P - there may be initials in here. with the two Is it might mean this person has double letters in their name. There might also be other words in here to describe them. 

I know I’m seeing DILF lmao but also Pride (so maybe they��re lgbt or just proud of who they are/what they have accomplished), Pie (maybe the like to bake?), Leo and fire (so maybe they’re a leo or a fire sign or have a fire dominated natal chart)

have a look what words jump out at you as well and see how you might be able to connect them (i can’t see any names in there but im notoriously bad at anagram things so maybe you can)

As for the charms:

The world on the dice and the eiffel tower both suggest overseas travel, so this person might be well traveled or they might have a specific connection to France. 

The shell could represent a connection to the sea or the beach. In dream interpretations shells have a few meanings. They can represent having a hard exterior but being soft on the outside so this person might come across as cold or closed off until you get to know them better. Shells can also be a symbol of wanting protection so it might be that this person has a defensive streak or they are very protective of those they love. Shells are also connected with the goddess Venus and so are seen as signs of sexual pleasure. 

words you got here are freedom, sassy and reach(ing) - freedom i think definitely makes sense with the trickster archetype above and maybe the visionary one as well. 

You also got the Make Poverty History badge so this person may donate money or time to a charity (or multiple charities). The badge also says Stand Up And Be Counted so it might represent this person being outspoken, especially about things that are important to them. 

The hand charm reminds me of the Hamsa symbol, even though theres no eye on the palm. the Hamsa is a symbol of protection or warding off evil. Aside from that, open palmed hands can be a symbol of open communication, so that is definitely a good sign. In dreams palms can also indicate a chance meeting with a stranger who may become a romantic partner so that just ties into what i said in the previous reading about you not having met them yet. 

And finally we have 2 different scissor charms. To me this represents sharp - sharp wit, sharp mind, sharply dressed. But scissors can also be a sign of decisiveness, or of a fear of being cut off for something. This person is likely the sort who knows what they want and will go after it. Once they make a decision they stick with it. And once they meet you, they’re not going to want to leave you. 

To try and get some more info on how you’ll meet I drew some tarot cards. 

7 of pentacles, 10 of pentacles, king of pentacles, 7 of wands, the tower, ace of pentacles.

Look at all those motherfucking pentacles. Just like I said in the previous reading, this definitely has something to do with work. With the king of pents there in the middle I’m inclined to say this person may work at the same place as you, maybe in a managerial role or at least someone higher up the chain than you. Or maybe they just have more experience in the role than you do. 

The last few cards are the most interesting. The 7 of wands is a card of conflict or struggles though it doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. It can represent standing your ground or defending yourself or others. The tower is a sign of dramatic and unexpected change, often negative. I pulled a clarifying card for it as well, to see if we could get some info on what this tower moment is and i got the ace of pentacles. The ace of pents is about new opportunities, especially related to money or work.

To me this says something is going to happen that will cause a dramatic change to your work. Now, I can see this going either two way. At it’s most negative this is a conflict, maybe with someone you work with, maybe just the work environment itself. Maybe it’s one of those things where every day becomes a struggle and you start to hate your job and you dont want to be there anymore. This leads to the tower moment of you quitting and finding a new job.

OR, at it’s most positive - the conflict moment still happens, but because of how well you handle the situation you’re offered a promotion or a transfer or something like that. It’s still a new opportunity, it still has the stress and sudden change that the tower indicates, but it’s not quite as negative.

Whichever way it goes, it leads to you meeting or coming into closer contact with this person, the king of pentacles, your soulmate. 

(As a side note, in the previous reading we drew the queen of pentacles and now we’ve drawn the king so if you wanted proof that they’re The One, that’s it. Also like, the story these cards tell matches so well with the last reading, the work, the new opportunity im like a little stunned by it)

In an effort to lean more about them and more about when you’ll meet I pulled some romance angels. You got:

Forgiving and Learning - as you release and heal the past, you experience more love in your present moments

Very Soon - clearly decide what you want so that it comes to you now

Keep an Open Mind - your soul mate may differ from your usual type and expectations

Trust - This situation is calling for you to have faith

So, in the context of when will you meet, trust is obviously asking you to have faith that the universe will bring this person towards you even if it seems to be taking forever. And also trust that this person is right for you, especially if they’re different from what you might expect as the keep an open mind card suggests. Obviously the most interesting is Very Soon which suggests that you’ll meet them sooner rather than later. I pulled a number tile as i was focusing on that card to try and get an indication of timing and you got a 3. Now, that could be 3 day, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years. It might also be a number relevant to the time when you meet them (maybe 3 weeks AFTER something else or maybe 3pm or even you’ll just see the number 3 around a lot as a warning that they’re coming)

And finally. I have a deck of channeled messages. These are things that your person might be thinking or might be wanting to say to you. Take them with as many grains of salt as you like but I figured it could be fun. The white cards are messages from the person, light blue are messages from the deck/universe.

The one blue card we got is They are waiting for you and really I think that sets the tone of all of these cards.

I just dream and wish for everything, I just want you all the time, I lie awake thinking about our future. This person is ready to meet you, they are sick of dating around, sick of the wrong people, they want something real and long lasting. 

Please give me time I’ve never felt this way before. You’ll need to wait a little longer before you meet them but not much longer. It’s next to I think we should slow down in reverse, they want this to happen as soon as possible, they are as sick of waiting as you are. 

Definitely is designed to look like The Tower card which is very interesting but with this one there is no question of it having a positive outcome, even if it feels hard in the moment it will be worth it.

And finally, I’m too afraid to talk in reverse. It’s likely this person will approach you, there’s no fear there, no worry about what you’ll say. And once they start talking to you they’re going to keep talking to you. 

[madsnjay]

1. Therapy

Tom's POV

"Would anyone else like to come up and share? We have a few minutes left of our session." Amanda shares.

"I'd like to step up." Said a voice in the front row. He jumped up on the podium.

"Hi, how's everyone doing? I'm Alex."

"Hi, Alex."

"Well to start off, it's obviously my first time in one of these things. I'm not gonna lie it was kind of rough for me to finally make my way here. I am many things. I'm a liar, I'm a cynic. I'm a sinner, and a saint. A loser, a critic. Honestly, I'm the ghost of my mistakes."

And I thought the musician was dramatic. "I want this one first." I said turning to Jay. "Already on it."

"Well I'm not one to really beat around the bush. I kinda just say it as it is. I know this isn't AA but I have struggled a lot with alcohol. I recently got into an accident because of it, in which ended with my best friend in the hospital. Thankfully he's okay. It fucking sucks that it had to get to that point for me to finally realize I had to fix this problem. I've been sober for almost two weeks now and I'd be lying if I said I haven't been tempted. Every time I let my mind wander I think back to that night. He told me repeatedly he'd drive. He was a lot more sober than I was. He offered to pay for an uber for us. He did all the right things except for one. He decided to get in the car with me. He decided to trust me. That will forever be my greatest regret. I keep thinking 'yeah, I should be laying in that hospital bed. It should be me fighting for my life even though I don't deserve to live'. I take my life for granted. I'd give anything for a bottle to help me forget. He helps me through it all. He's forgiven me. Now it's time for me to learn to forgive myself."

What a load of bullshit. Two weeks sober huh? I bet I can break him.

"Time heals all wounds. We're all hard on ourselves because we know we should've known better. We are all our own worst critic. Thank you so much Alex, we are all here for you and you have our support. And thank you to everyone else who shared today. I'll see you all next week." Amanda says with a bright smile.

We sit and watch everyone make their way to the door. Once everyones gone, I turn to face Jay for a report.

"Alex's story checks out. The only thing I'm curious about is how could his friend have forgiven him if he's in a coma?" She says with a sarcastic grin.

Welcome to the game, Alex.

Jay's POV

Finding Alex was easy, but finding more info on Em was a bit more of a challenge. Usually the damaged like to share more of themselves to try to get others to feel pity. Em was different, and I liked a challenge.

"You ready?" Noel said as he and Cody stood out by the door of the session. When you help one of the town's most feared, you're obviously gonna need some type of protection. As I filled them in on our two newest players, Cody went off to follow up on Alex's unfortunate victim.

"Noel, I'm gonna need you to follow the musician around-"

"Boss says I can't leave you on your own-"

"Yeah? Well I'm your boss, too. And I need you to do this for me. I'll take care of Tom." I said aggravated. He was hesitant at first before he decided to walk off and catch up before she got too far.

Before I decided to walk back into the room with Tom, I felt eyes on me. I turned and seen Alex making direct eye contact from down the hall. Show time.

"Like what you see?" I said with a smirk.

"For the most part."

"Very revealing story there, Alex." I said as I made my way to him.

"Just being honest and open that's all." he said leaning against the wall.  "And since we're being honest and open, how about you let me take you out for some coffee. Unless you got other plans." He said as he looked behind me to see Tom standing down the hall by the door.

"Nope, totally free." I said as I glared at Tom. I love him, but I'm tired of him thinking he can control me. I hate the fact that he knows he has me wrapped around his finger. This is a step I'm taking all on my own, and I'm gonna prove to him that I don't need his white knuckled grasp on me to produce results.

Tom's POV

What in the actual fuck does she think she's doing? Going off with Alex? Alone? She could absolutely blow the entire thing with this idiotic burst of rebellion. And why the fuck did Noel just leave like that? I specifically told him not to leave her alone, and that's exactly what he did. I know she can be persuasive, and honestly downright intimidating sometimes, but orders are orders. She can't be undermining me to my own employees.

As they all walked off in their separate directions, I found myself standing there, unsure of what to do. Before I could give it any more thought, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around to see Amanda, giving a big smile to the last couple of people heading out of the building.

"Tom, let's talk inside." She said as she jerked her head back towards the building. I sighed and turned to follow after her. I need to find out what Jay is up to, but I guess I can't really be seen following them around. Then I'll blow the whole thing. Plus, if she told me to talk inside and I left, she'd have my head displayed on her mantle, and that's not really how I planned to go out if I'm being perfectly honest.

"What's up, A?" I asked as I sat next to her on the back row, throwing my arm over the back of the chair between us and turning to face her.

"We need to talk better strategies. You and Jay have gotten kind of... sloppy lately. You're my number one asset, and I don't want her reckless rebellion interfering with your success." Shit.

"I mean, I'm your only asset but I'll take it," I said with a chuckle, trying to ease the tension. She didn't so much as hint at any sort of smile at my lame excuse for a joke. I nervously cleared my throat and continued. "Amanda, I can assure you I have everything under control. We're just going with a... different course of action this time, but I can assure you, everything will go as planned." She seemed pleased with my response, and she confirmed by not pressing the issue anymore.

"So. Who are the new targets?" She always got eager to know who we were going after next. She's a firm believer in ridding the world of the damaged people that damage others. It was almost unsettling how much pleasure she took in our work.

"Definitely Alex. Dude was way too dramatic from the start. Had me at his poetry bullshit before he ever even told his story." She nodded in agreement and looked away in thought.

"So just him? Cody, Jay, and Noel all went off in different directions. Kinda strange for one target, isn't it?" For some reason, I didn't want her to know about the musician yet. I wanna know her full story before I get Amanda involved.

"As of right now, yes. Cody is checking in on Alex's friend to see what's up, and Alex asked Jay to go get coffee with him, so she's gonna try to get more of an inside story from him. Noel is keeping an eye on them from afar." She nodded, hopefully not suspicious of my answer.

"Very well then. Keep up the good work." She said shaking my hand as we both stood up to leave. As I was about to walk out the door, she spoke again stopping me in my tracks. "Oh, and one more thing."

"Yes ma'am?" I asked turning back, worried she was about to call me out for lying straight to her face. "I'm glad you're on our team." She threw in a small smile at the end, easing my nerves.

"I am too. I really am." I said before I turned and exited the building. Now how the fuck am I gonna handle this whole situation?

Jay's POV

"Pick your poison." He says as we made our way to the register. Poison, not a bad idea. Simple and a hell of a lot less messy.

"Can I get a venti salted caramel cold brew with toffee nut in the foam please?" As I reached for my wallet I felt his hand pull mine away.

"And a black hot coffee for me, both under Alex. Thank you." he said as he handed his card over. A gentleman, kind of a shame. "I asked you out for coffee, my treat. I'm guessing your boy has you fend for yourself a lot huh?"

I really had no idea how to respond to that. Part of me wanted to defend Tom, but the other part of me knows he's kind of right.

"I'll take your silence as an answer," he chuckled. I walked over to a table as he brought over our drinks. "Speaking of, what's the deal with you two? Trouble in paradise?"

"He's no one you really have to worry about. We're just really good friends." I said as I take a drink.

"That's good to know, now this all doesn't have to be too awkward."

"Were you worried?" I said with a big grin.

"A little, it's just the way he watches you. Like he's waiting for you to slip away."

"He has no hold on me." I said with a reassuring smile.

"So, you know a little bit of my story. What's yours?"

"Well, I have a habit of collecting damaged people. I seem to gravitate to it apparently." I say as I take another sip.

"So what are you after? Some kind of disaster?"

"Damage attracts damaged."

He smiles as he takes a drink. "Well, then I think this could be good for us. Help fix each other."

Sure, help me.

[gffa]

HEY, LET ME YELL ABOUT SOME STAR WARS SHIPS.  THE FLYING KIND THIS TIME.  One of the banes of my existences is loving the worldbuilding of a particular canon, but not having it laid out for me in a way that’s organized for me to easily find what I’m looking for at any given moment.  And flipping through (the sadly no longer canon, but still incredibly useful!) Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Incredible Vehicles (see here for info!) really helped me get my head around a lot of it and finally able to organize these pages into a more “easy to find what kind of vehicle you need for a specific type of scene” list! But what I really wanted was to see a canon reference guide organized into size/use sections, to better reference when I needed either a massive star ship or when I needed to know the name of a speeder a given character might use.  (This focuses on the Clone Wars era, but if you want Empire/Rebellion era or First Order era info, feel free to give me a yell.) Encyclopedia of Starfighters and Other Vehicles: MASSIVE SHIPS:   ➞ Republic Attack Cruiser -  “The war between the Republic and the Separatists leads to a demandfor larger and more powerful battleships.  The Republic Navy expands to include the Reupblic attack cruisers, massive warships often referred to as "Star Destroyers". (Venator-class Star Destroyers can carry more than 420 starfighters (including V-wings, X-95 Headhunters, and Jedi starfighters); 40 LAAT/i gunships; and 24 AT-ETs.)"   ➞ Acclamator-class Assault Ship (Transgalactic Military Transport Ship) - "These assault ships are a predecessor of the later Star Destroyers.  They are built for the Clone Wars, under false orders supposedly issued by the Jedi Council.  This is all part of Darth Sidious's evil plan to take over the galaxy.  (During the Clone Wars, Acclamator-class ships are stationed at Coruscant, ready to carry clone troopers across the galaxy.)(Unlike many craft of this size, Acclamator-class assault ships can land on planets, where they deploy Republic forces in an effort to retake the worlds from Separatist control.)(Each Acclamator-class assault ship requires a crew of 700 and can carry up to 16,000 clone troopers.)"   ➞ Malevolence (Subjugator-class Heavy Cruiser) - During the Clone Wars, General Greivious's huge flagship leaves death and devastation in its wake.  Its massive ion cannons disrupt the control systems of surrounding ships, disabling their energy weapons and deflector shields.  (Four times longer than a Venator-class Star Destroyer, the Malevolence has an internal shuttle train system to deploy supplies and troops and is crewed by 900 battle droids.)"   ➞ AA-9 Coruscant Freighter - "The AA-9 Coruscant Freighters are originally built to haul cargo.  During the war with the Separatists, the Refugee Relief Movement has them transformed into vessels that can help people in need.  The freighters transport [up to 30,000] refugees from planets that have fallen under enemy control."   ➞ Pelta-class Frigate (Republic Medical Frigate) - "During the Clone Wars, the Pelta-class frigate is a common sight at the edges of space battles.  It is used by the Republic Navy to treat injured clone soldiers.  The more honorable generals in the Separatist fleet usually don't attack it.)  Each Pelta-class frigate can carry up to 900 crew, and is equipped with 16 escape pods.  Phoenix Home is modified to include turbo laser batteries.)”    ➞ Invisible Hand (Providence-class Dreadnought) - “Commanded by General Grievous, the Invisible Hand plays a key role in the last great battle of the Clone Wars.  With the sinister Sith Lord Count Dooku holding Chancellor Palpatine prisoner aboard the failing ship, the Jedi Order must rush to the rescue.  (The Invisible Hand is a difficult ship to attack.  There are 20 squadrons of droid starfighters ready to defend it.  Count Dooku turns the ship upper sensor tower into his lair, calling it the "Wizard's Tower".)(The Invisible Hand is controlled with a droid brain.  This means that Anakin Skywalker can override controls and fly the ship.  It's still a bumpy landing!)"    ➞ Coronet (Personal Spaceliner) - “The Coronet is Duchess Satine Kryze of Mandalore's personal luxury spaceliner.  This one-of-a-kind ship is practically a spacefaring palace.  It serves as a testament to the engineering and wealth of the Mandalorians.  (The lower decks of the Coronet are used for cargo transport.  The ship requires a crew of 75, and has eight engines all working in unison.)" STARFIGHTERS:   ➞ V-Wing - "Small, fast, and agile, the V-wing starfighter is used late in the Clone Wars by the Republic.  With ltitle in the way of firepower or armor, V-wing pilots use swarm strategies to overwhelm their opponents, assisted by an astromech droid."   ➞ V-19 Torrent Starfighter -  "The V-19 is used during the early days of the Clone Wars.  It becomes a popular fighter for the rapidly expanding Republic Navy.  Originally designed to be a short-range fighter, the V-19 later underdoes a series of upgrades that make it suitable for much longer flights."   ➞ ARC-170 Starfighter - "This three-person starfighter is durable and reliable.  It carries a formidable arsenal, as well as sufficient supplies for five days.  It should come as no surprise that the ARC-170s rapidly replace the V-19s as the Republic's primary dogfighter during the Clone Wars.  (The ARC-170s are so dependable that both the Empire and rebel forces continue to use the starfighters after the Clone Wars.  They become the template for the first generation of X-wings.)"   ➞ Y-Wing - "Designed for bombing raids, the Y-wing is a sleek ship originally used by the Galactic Republic.  Y-wings find new life as starfighters for the Rebel Alliance during the Galactic Civil War.  Stripped of every non-essential system and endlessly repaired by rebel mechanics, they remain popular with Alliance pilots.  (The first Y-wings used in the Clone Wars have a gunner's station above the cockpit.  In later models, one operator serves as pilote and gunner.)"   ➞ ETA-2 Light Interceptor (Jedi Starfighter) - The ETA-2 Interceptor's popularity with the Jedi Order earns it the nickname the Jedi Starfighter.  It is one of the fastest and most responsive starships produced during the Clone Wars.  Almost every Jedi flies one, customizing the craft to meet their unique skills and requirements.  (The Jedi starfighter uses heavy weaponry, but the power drain prevents constant firing.  Most Jedi remove the sensors and targeting equiment to save weight and space.)"   ➞ Delta-7 Light Interceptor (Specialized Jedi Starfighter) - The Delta-7 is designed specifically for the Jedi and is in frequen use long before the Clone Wars beigin.  As more Jedi leave the temples to join the war effort, their combat ships are swiftly upgraded to keep pace with the enemy's crafts.  This prompts the creation of the Delta-7B.  (There are small improvements from the Delta-7 to the 7B.  The Delta-7 has a wing part for an astromech, while the 7B places the port in front of the cockpit.  The Delta-7B also boasts a tougher central hull that its predecessor.)"   ➞ Naboo Starfighter (N-1 Starfighter) - Bold and beautiful in its design, the N-1 starfighter is the signature ship of the Royal Naboo Security Forces.  Its forward section is clad in chromium for ceremonial display, and its sleek shape is as much an expression of art as aerodynamics.  (The Naboo starfighter's long tail acts as a power charge collector.  The similarly shaped engine tails serve as heat sinks.)"   ➞ Republic Frigate (Consular-class Cruiser) - "Used by the Jedi and the Galactic Senate on diplomatic missions before the Clone Wars, these cruisers are retrofitted as combat frigates when war breaks out.  Their upgrades include armored hull plating and laser cannon batteries.  (Republic cruisers that have undergone the Charger c70 retrofit for use in the Clone Wars are longer than those that have not.)" AIRCRAFT (SPACE):   ➞ Stealth Ship (Corvette with a Cloak) - "The Republic's stealth ship is able to turn invisible.  It is designed with an experimental cloaking device, which allows it to sneak past Separatist blockades.  As well as being impossible to see when cloaked, it is undetectable by scanners and sensors.  (The stealth ship cannot fire its laser cannons or proton torpedos while cloaked, but it can launch flares to confuse enemy tracking torpedoes.)"   ➞ Republic Tugboat - Republic Tubgoats are used during the Clone Wars to maneuver massive warships into docking ports at space stations.  These tugboats are low on shields and have no weapons but are equipped with powerful engines and tractor beams."   ➞ Turtle Tanker - "Originally designed to haul minerals from asteroid mines, the bulk tankers (commonly known as "Turtle Tankers") are cheap and easy to build.  This makes them a familiar sight in established space lanes.  However, their lack of weaponry makes them a rare choice outside of heavily trafficked areas."   ➞ T-6 Shuttle (Jedi Ambassador Shuttle) - "This innovative shuttle design has a lasting impact on starship technology.  It is built by the insectoid Verpine, and features rotating wings that allows the rest of the ship an exception degree of motion.  Members of the Jedi Order use the shuttles frequently."   ➞ Eta-Class Shuttle (Ambassadorial Transport) - These comfy shuttles are first used by the Galactic Senate for diplomatic missions.  Later on, they are regularly employed by the Jedi in the Clone Wars.  Robust and suited to long-range travel, an Eta-class shuttle is chosen for a mission in Wild Space beyond the Outer Rim. (An Eta-class shuttle comfortably seats ten passengers and two pilots.  There is also room for emergency transport, such as two Undicar-class jumpseeders.)"   ➞ Twilight (Corellian G9 Rigger Freighter) - The Twilight is originally the property of crime lord Ziro Desilijic Tiure.  It is later claimed by Anakin Skywalker, who puts it to use during the Clone Wars.  This old ship is conidered massively out of date, so Anakin spends a large amount of his free time upgrading the vehicle.  (The side of the Twilight is decorated with a cartoonish painting of young Anakin's podracing.  The ship's upgraded weapons system causes random color shifts in the lasers.)"   ➞ Crucible (Paladin-class Corvette) - "Custom-built for the Jedi in the time of the Old Republic, the Crucible has been in service for quite some time.  It is used in the training of Jedi younglings, who learn how to contstruct their own lightsabers from crystals while aboard."   ➞ H-Type Nubian Yacht (Shimmering Senator's Ship) - "This yacht is the personal transport of Senator Padme Amidala.  It is a luxury ship, designed for comfort rarthe than combat, but does have very powerful shielding in case of an attack.  The vehicle is coated in royal chromium, reflecting its owner's high status."   ➞ Naboo Royal Cruiser (Custom-build J-type Diplomatic Barge) - The invasion of Naboo convinces the peaceful planet to upgrate its diplomatic vessels.  Though it still travels without weapons, this barge is far faster and better shielded than the J-type Nubian starship that came before it.  It also boats a range of backup systems in case of malfunctions or sabotage.  (The J-type diplomatic barge has spacious interiors designed for comfort.  It has room for four prestigious passengers as well as up to five crew and six guards.)"   ➞ Naboo Royal Starship (Modified J-Type 327) - This sleek ship is crafted to be a visual representation of the glory of Naboo.  It has no weapons, but it is shielded in case of attack.  It also has multiple astromech units, each one capable of making emergency repairs. (This ship is exclusive to the royal family of Naboo.  It includes quarters for the Queen and her handmaidens, equipped with climate-controlled wardrobes.)"   ➞ Naboo Star Skiff (J-type Star Skiff) - “Weapons on a Naboo royal ship are unheard of until this vessel is manufactured.  It also has a duller, more practical finish compared to traditional gleaming Naboo ships.  Unfortunately, the Naboo have had to adapt their ship designs for the harsh realities of battle during the Clone Wars. (The J-type star skiff is designed and built for Queen Apailana, the monarch of Naboo, in the latter days of the Clone Wars.  However, the ship is also made available for Senator Padme Amidala, the former queen.)" AIRCRAFT (PLANETSIDE):  ➞ LAAT (Low Altitude Assault Transport) - "The dependable LAAT is one of the Republic's main deployment craft.  Heavily armrored and highly maneuverable, this war transport is often sent into combat under fire.  It can glide through a storm of lasers to safely land its cargo and troops."  ➞ Republic Attack Shuttle - With heavier armor and shielding than most atmosphere vessels, the Republic attack shuttle is a long-range alternative to the LAAT gunship.  It is replaced by other shuttle designs after the Clone Wars, but one remains in service of the rebel Cham Syndulla during the time of Empire. (The Republic attack shuttle has a tractor beam, which is usual for a transport.  It also has magnetic clamps on its underside to clasp cargo and other smaller vessels.  A variant Nu-class transport has an enclosed cargo bay built in between the wings.)"

GROUNDCRAFT:   ➞ Clone Turbo Tank - "This 10 wheeled tank can deliver as many as 300 clone troopers into the heart of the battle in one trip.  It is designed to roll over any terraing with ease and to absorb enemy fire with no loss of function.  After proving effect in the Clone Wars, the tank stays in use during the age of Empire."   ➞ AT-RT - "Fast, nimble, and powerful, AT-RTs are used furing the brutal land battles of the Clone Wars.  A single clone trooper will usually pilot these as a scout, ranging ahead of the battlefront and gathering intel for the main force."   ➞ Stun Tank - "This Republic tank is primarily an anti-aircraft weapon.  It's ion cannon drains energy from the ship it targets, leaving them helpless.  Despite being designed for use against droid vehicles, the tank sees little use during the Clone Wars."   ➞ AT-OT (All Terrain Open Transport) - "The imposing AT-OT has an open-top design, leaving it vulnerable to attack from above.  Their role during the Clone Wars is to quickly move troops, rather than engage in battle."   ➞ AT-TE (All Terrain Tactical Enforcer) - "The AT-TE looks more ilke a huge robotic insect than a military transport.  It is used during the Clone Wars to move large numbers of troops through battle, and to operate as a mobile command center."   ➞ SPHA-T (Self-propelled Heavy Artillery Turbolaser) - "Bearing one of the bigger ground guns used by the Republic Army, this 12-legged walker is a low but steady feature throughout the Clone Wars.  Its turbolaser can destroy a starship, but can only operate for a limited time.  This is because each blast uses up a vast amount of energy."   WATERCRAFT:   ➞ Naboo Water Speeder - "The serene lakes of Naboo are the planet's most famous sight, renowned across the galaxy for their peaceful vistas.  In their free time, the Naboo take luxurious pleasure speeders out onto the water, exploring the hidden coves and majestic waterfalls. (The D-11 is manufactured by the same company as the N-1 starfighter and the two craft share many design features, despite being built to operate in very different environments.) (The D-11 water speeders were build specially for the use of the queen and the royal household.  A selection of the royal boathouse is set aside for their recharging and maintenance, however Padme Amidala is less indulgent than some previous queens, and the D-11s are seldom used.)"   ➞ Tribubble Bongo (Gungan Bongo Submarine) - These semi-organic subarmines have hulls that are grown rather than built, so no two are exactly alike.  The Gungans equip them with hydrostatic bubble shields to keep the air in and the water out, and use them to explore the oceans of their home planet, Naboo." SPEEDERS:  ➞ Barc Speeder - "This powerful speeder bike is designed for use by ARC (Advanced Recon Commando) troopers, but goes on to be piloted by other Republic fighters during the Clone Wars.  Ideal for scouting missions, it is also used by police patrols on Coruscant."  ➞ Jedi Turbo Speeder (Praxis Mk. 1 Turbo Speeder) - "An elegantly designed turbo speeder, the Praxis Mk. 1 is piloted by members of the Jedi Order when traveling around the city planet of Coruscant.  Its thing, wedge-like design cuts down on wind resistance, and the navigation systems are programmed to bypass heavy traffic.  (The Praxix Mk. 1 turbo speeder is equipped with collision-detection systems to help its pilot avoid accidents.  Twin repulsor generators allow the ship to run upside-down in midair.)" PUBLIC & PERSONAL TRANSPORT:   ➞ CSS-1 Corellian Star Shuttle - “"Built for diplomacy rather than battle, the CSS-1 shuttle has an impressive meeting room and comfortable quarters for VIP guests.  It can carry up to 200 passengers, as well as enough supplies to last for three years.  It is also equipped with an unusually strong deflector shield.  (Shortly after his appointment to Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, Sheev Palpatine ant he Jedi Council travel together to Naboo aboard the CSS-1 name the Perpetuus.)”   ➞ Taylander Shuttle - The Taylandor Shuttles are civilian transport vehicles during the final years of the Republic.  They are a common sight amongst the peaceful Core Worlds, but are even found in the far reaches of the Outer Rim."   ➞ H-2 Executive Shuttle - "The senators and even Chancellor Palpatine are among the high-profile users of this luxurious ship.  Palpatine's model is docked to allow direct access from his chambers in the Senate Office Building on Coruscant.  It makes for a comfy escape craft if the building is attacked."   ➞ Theta-Class T-2C Shuttle - “These ships are built by Cygnus Spaceworks, under special order by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.  They have never been available for purchase.  The model is eventually incorporated into the Imperial fleet, but only for the highest-ranking officers."   ➞ Luxury Yacht (Personal Luxury Yacht 3000) - "In the time of the Republic, diplomats use luxury yachts for meetings and travel.  They become less popular during the chaos of the Clone Wars, when they are seen as easy targets for pirates and Separatists.  (Luxury yachts are common vehicles in wealthier systems.  Built for comfort, they include a grand observation deck and a swimming pool, as well as five personal cabins for crew and guests.)" 

[worddevdealswithml]

Failed Step One (And Two (And Three))

Chapter 4: It’s a date (depending who you ask)

“It’s kind of weird,” said Adrien, scoring his third consecutive strike on Kagami, “usually I’m the one who’s distracted.”

He couldn’t see her face, but the slight hesitation before she launched her next attack as good as told him that she’d heard him.

Two counters, almost in unison, and she managed to get him back.

They reset.

“Is this about Chloe?”

The strike came through too early, and too hard.  It was the motion of someone who’d been surprised and acting without thinking.

He barely defended from it, but she’d fallen out of position, meaning-

“It is, then,” he said, pulling back from his successful counter.

There was a moment of silence.

“Yes,” she said, finally.

“Anything in particular?” he asked, as the next round began.

She didn’t answer.

One round.

Two rounds.

Three…

He’d almost given up waiting for a response, when-

“I was… idly considering whether she even knew how to fence.”

--

“Oh,” said Adrien.  “Well… I don’t think so, but I could ask her, if you want.”

“No,” she said, and now Adrien was as distracted as she was, which meant two easy successes.

“Why not?”

“What would it matter either way?”

“I…  Well…  I mean, if you’re curious, wouldn’t it be nice to know?”

Kagami didn’t respond.

“And… Maybe…  If she did know… You could go a few rounds against her.  Even if she didn’t, honestly.”

Kagami blinked, at that.

Adrien, apparently having found out the details of the situation, was…  suggesting she fight Chloe?

That didn’t sound right, somehow.

And yet…

“I’m…  Surprised to hear you suggesting that,” she said, diplomatically.  It came out easier than ‘I thought you were friends with Chloe, and I was almost certain you weren’t the vengeful type.’

“I…  I don’t know,” said Adrien, “I just thought you might get something out of it.”

He was.  Adrien Agreste was actively suggesting she get back at Chloe by rigorously defeating her.

But…  But…  She…

“Nothing I want to get,” she said, managing to recover herself enough to overcome Adrien’s frankly pitiful defense.

“Why not?”

She didn’t know how to explain this to Adrien, considering that she hadn’t expected him to be advocating it in the first place.

After a second, she settled on the simplest explanation to hand.

It was… an oversimplification, if she was honest; most people didn’t even get close enough to her to consider giving her trouble.  But…  On the rare occasions that they had…  She’d always walked away from it the victor, by sheer dint of not giving the aggressor what they wanted.  Chloe was just… A worse version of that.

“I have no intentions of giving in to an impulse I’ve been fighting for years.”

Adrien practically stopped, midway through a parry.

Kagami landed her strike, and stepped back.

She couldn’t see his face, but Adrien looked away, and then… after a long second, he looked back at her.

“Kagami,” he said, and his voice was strangely soft, “there’s nothing wrong with what you’re feeling.”

She didn’t move, for a long, long moment.

“I can’t force you to do something you don’t want to,” he said, “but…  Maybe it’s worth asking yourself what you want sometimes.”

What she wanted?  What… What she wanted was to let Chloe starve for attention until she was forced to give up…

Or…

No.

That’s what she wanted to want.

But-

“Isn’t she your friend?” she said.

Adrien sighed.  “Kagami…  Honestly? I’m not sure I’d even be suggesting this if she wasn’t.  I think this… might be good for both you and Chloe, and, whatever happens, we’ll still be friends at the end of it.”

The piece clicked into place.

Adrien, of course, knew how abrasive Chloe could be; he’d had every chance to see it.  What was it to be friends with someone if not to want them to be the best that they could be?

Did Adrien really think she could teach Chloe humility?

For that matter, did he really think that she would get some kind of lasting satisfaction from doing it?

Well…  She’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to.

A long, long second passed, as she mentally staggered, uncertain which side of this she was supposed to be on.

She was supposed to rise above this kind of thing, but…  Then again… Maybe she could beat Chloe into submission, and at the end of it…

“One day,” she said.

His head tilted.

“I’ll only guarantee one day,” she repeated.  “Ask her if she knows how to fence.”

She didn’t need to see his face to see him perk up.

He nodded.

“Now,” she said.  “We’ve gotten distracted.”

She’d see if she couldn’t teach Chloe a lesson she wouldn’t forget.

--

Chloe already had her phone in her hand by the time she realized it had buzzed.

She looked down at message, and, specifically, the sender.

Adrien.

Probably here to ask her to stop asserting herself against Kagami.

Honestly, Adrien would just be friends with anyone.  It was downright sad.

She grumbled, and pulled up the message.

**

AA: Do you know how to fence?

She blinked.  That…  That hadn’t been what she’d been expecting.

CB: Of course not.

CB: Why would I?

AA: Well

There was a long second of typing, as Adrien seemed to choose his words carefully.

AA: Kagami seems interested in fencing with you.

She stared at the message.

CB:  What

AA:  I figured you didn’t know

AA: But also it doesn’t hurt to ask.

CB: And she didn’t ask this directly because

AA: well

AA: a bit because it was kind of my idea

CB: it was what

AA: I know that’s not ideal

AA: but on the upside this is still another chance!

**

She stared at the screen, feeling her brain trying to turn inside out at the sentence that absolutely couldn’t be there…

She didn’t know how to fence.  Adrien knew that she didn’t know how to fence.

How was she supposed to beat Kagami at something that Kagami actually knew how to do?

Not…  Not to say that Chloe wouldn’t be great at fencing; she would be.  But…  However great she was…

She was extremely glad nobody was listening to her thoughts

Kagami was supposed to be… really good at fencing.

Was Adrien really that confident in her?

And, the worst part, of course, was that now of all times, she couldn’t back down against Kagami.

She was trapped.

And Adrien…

Adrien…

She opened her eyes.

Actually.

He might be onto something here.

What did everyone know Kagami for?

Fencing.

And, that in mind, the greatest way to completely show her up… Would be to get better than her at it.

Anyone could win by attacking their opponent’s weakness.

Adrien, though…

She wouldn’t have expected him to come up with it, but it looked like he’d realized that to truly show superiority, you won by attacking your opponent’s strength.

She looked back down at her phone.

**

CB:  I’ll take it.

[aceprosecuties]

How does one write Simon Blackquill? (This is a cry for help because I have no idea how and I'm trying to write a story that has been sitting in my folder for the past 7 months and I want to finish it but how does one write him my God... ;_;)

SO I know I’m still on like…unannounced hiatus as I try andfigure out what I want to do in the face of tumblr’s nsfw ban (which I hate, soI’m wrestling with my desire to not really use tumblr anymore out of protestvs. wanting to stay because I enjoy running this blog for the most part).  BUT I saw this and knew I had to answer! :D

OKAY, so it’s hard for me to exactly say what might be bestsimply because him pre 5-5 and post 5-5 can be slightly different, so I willjust go over how I write him and stuff!  Anddon’t worry; it took me a while to get his voice down myself, and even now Istill sometimes wonder if I’m writing him alright (but I look back at somethings in the beginning of my AA writing career and I think I’ve been able to getcloser to him than I was)!

Simon is odd because he honorable, snarky, a troll(ish), protective,emotional, scary, and soft all at once.  He hasa very specific vision of honor and adheres to that very strictly – this samurai code he follows was his reasoning forwhy he was ready to sacrifice himself for Athena.  In court, too, he has a specific set ofstandards and methods that he finds to be legitimate (which he allows) and just ‘tricks’(which he hates).  He is very intolerantof things he finds dishonorable – hence why he did everything in his power (andwas successful) to make sure that Apollo was not able to use his perceptionability in court (until he found it a necessary evil to taking down thephantom).  To him, this is just a trickand has no legal or scientific basis.  Healso does not like the dirty tricks that Nahyuta sometimes plays – he getsinvolved in 6-4 partially because he found Nahyuta using Athena’s hearingability against her to be underhanded.

(cut because holy shit this got long I am sorry I can’t help myself)

His respect for people varies depending on if he finds themhonorable and to be a worthy ally or opponent. In court, he refers to the opposition with the honorific -dono as a wayto show his respect of them as an enemy. He is very poetic (in his own way) when describing…most things, butespecially courtroom battles – they are, to him, akin to actual war, and thewords and arguments people use are weapons and blades.  His respect (or lack thereof) can usually beseen in how he addresses people.  Thosehe respects get their actual name and an honorific.  Those he does not get a nickname atbest.  (Example – in 6-4 he starts outcalling Nahyuta ‘Sahdmadhi-dono,’ but once Nahyuta loses his respect, hechanges it to ‘Prosecutor Sad Monk’ on top of just flat out insults.)

THAT BEING SAID his having respect for people does not meanthat he always…treats them that way. Simon is The Gadfly/Troll trope – he likes to provoke people and makefun of them and make them uncomfortable…either because he finds it amusing(most of the time), or because he is trying to get them to figure something out(usually in the form of ‘tough love’ especially with respect to Athena in6-4).  In prison he was a prankster andjust reveled in doing things to messwith his fellow inmates. He has an extremely dark sense of humor (gallows-type)due probably needing to have it in his own way in dealing with his prison sentence, and laughs at his own jokeswhile everyone else/most people around him stare awkwardly and feel uncomfortable.  He used this in court a lot too; when peoplestill thought him a murderer, he would act like he was committed to violence andwas about to cut them all down and then when everyone was cowering andterrified he’d be like “lol just kidding you’re all pathetic but you shouldhave seen your faces.”  He also used hisfrightening reputation and appearance to his advantage in court – he wouldglare and bang on the table and break his shackles as a way to unnerve peopleand gain that sort of psychological advantage.  Andwhen he was seriously angry?  Well…that was terrifying.

In the English version of the game, Simon is said to be asamurai, but he actually is more akin to a ronin – a masterless samurai.  Metis was his master/mentor, and he lost herand so does not hold that same sort of reverence for (almost) anyone, which iswhy he is so powerfully devoted to her and preserving her legacy and honor and savingher daughter.  (I say almost because Iwould say that Edgeworth is the closest thing he has to a new ‘master’ in thesense that Edgeworth helped save him and is his boss and is highly respected,etc.  So where I think he makes fun ofeveryone else he respects, he does not do the same to Edgeworth, who is more onthe ‘revered’ level akin to Metis (though still less than her).  Yourmileage may vary on that though.)

Things that do not interest him get zero/minimal attention.  In fact, he will go out of his way to make others do things for him.  In this sense, he actually might be thelaziest of the prosecutors – sure he takes his job seriously and will fight inthe courtroom to the best of his ability, but he will also try and get thejudge and the police and the defense to do parts of his job for him.  Simply because he doesn’t feel like it, and/orsimply because he can.  The easiest example is how he convinces the judgeto do the opening statements in most cases just…because he doesn’t want to. The one he actually does dothe opening statement for is the case that is personal to him and so he takes astrong interest in it.

So, on the outside, Simon is rough.  His sense of honor does not mean he is respectfulin the traditional ‘respectful person’ sort of sense and most people who cross his path would probablyconsider him brash and rude.

On the inside, though, and at his core, Simon is extremelyprotective and loyal and emotional.  Hisprotectiveness comes out mostly with respect to Athena – he might make fun ofher and tease her relentlessly but the moment someone does something toactually hurt her in any way, he ison the warpath and puts himself in the path between whoever is doing that andher.  This is the other reason he gets involved in 6-4; he saw that Athena washurting and panicking and came to help her (while at the same time shaming Nahyuta and the entire courthouse audience).  Sure, he did this with his own ‘tough love’type of approach, but he came to her defense without hesitation. So even after he is out of prison, Athena is still a very importantperson to him – probably the most important aside from her mother – and he willdefend her.

Pre 5-5 he has a lot of emotions deep within him – he is sad(canonically, the marks on his face were created from the tears he cried whenhe was in prison that he never wiped away) and angry and fearful.  Although he ‘accepts’ his death in theloosest sense of the word, he did not wantto die.  It was a sacrifice he wasready to make that went along with his code of honor, but he did not wantdeath.  Sometimes I think people forgethow young he actually is – at 28 hewas in prison for seven years and was a day’s away from execution.  He looks older because of the stress being inprison put him under and from the secrets he carried, but he is still a youngperson and was ready to sacrifice so many years for his mentor’s daughter.These sorts of sad emotions, though, he was usually very good at keeping hiddenbehind his humor and his ‘twisted samurai’ persona.  So I usually use this when I am writing inhis perspective (which is…my usual route when he is around), but I don’t knowif it would be as apparently obvious to others, minus Athena, who knows him bestand can hear his heart’s turmoilwhenever he speaks.  I also write that hestill carries a lot of it after 5-5but that is my personal perspective!  Hedoes have a lot of relief and is happier after 5-5 and that fear of impendingdeath does not follow him.  But to me,that sort of trauma will stay with him. He just, still, does not show it. He is not the type to lean on others. Get them to do his work? Absolutely.  But actually lean onthem for emotional help?  Not somuch.  Even with his sister, he was verystunted in how he expressed his love for her (and vice-versa; neither Blackquillsibling is very good at expressing their emotions).  

UH I’m sure I’m missing things but I just realized that thisis already like…1500 words because I just rambled about Simon’s character and Ilove him so much.  I DON’T KNOW IF THISWAS HELPFUL because it might just be me rambling, so feel free to send meanother ask or DM or something if you would like more or something morespecific, even!  

[janiedean]

idk if you've ever talked about this, or if someone has asked before, but do you think it's possible that brienne could be the "younger, more beautiful woman" from cersei's prophecy? I just read a post by someone who had a theory about that and while I'm not fully convinced, it also makes a surprising amount of sense. the "younger" bit is obvious and as far as the "more beautiful" part is concerned, it could mean different things (like "beautiful on the inside" or since beauty is subjective, (c)

(c) it could mean "subjectively more beautiful", maybe to jaime or something). because the prophecy does say the "younger, more beautiful woman" would take from cersei everything she holds dear/loves, and I know she loves power and herself most of all, but it /could/ include jaime. and tbh, brienne has already "taken" jaime from her, since he went with her instead of responding to cersei's letter. also, if he's the valonqar, it stands to reason he's going to be the one to kill her, and I (c) always thought if that happens, it'll involve brienne somehow (like jaime will kill cersei in order to save/protect brienne somehow). so do you think there is a possibility that brienne /could/ be the "younger, more beautiful woman" from the prophecy? I know everyone thinks it's dany, but I think it'd be much more interesting if it turned out to be brienne. especially because cersei would never in a million years see it coming. and I'd love her utter shock lol.

first thing: my pal @robb-greyjoy​ once wrote excellent meta about the specific possibility of brienne being the younger and more beautiful queen and jaime actually getting kingship and honestly it’s a lot better put together/thought than any theory I have on that specific prophecy so I’ll just go and say that his opinion on the subject is imo fairly well-thought/sourced and honestly if it happens it’s probably gonna go like that for those reasons.

second thing: the maggy prophecy is the one on which I don’t have VERY SURE ANSWERS (differently than the aa/tpwp one) because it’s worded VERY vaguely and cryptically for very good reasons EXCEPT that I have a pet crackpot theory I’ll discuss at the end of this. buckle up because this is gonna be long as fuck but when it comes to prophecies I like to basically tear that shit apart by comma XD

 now, what I mean is, we have:

“Queen you shall be… until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.”“Will the king and I have children?”

"Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you. Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds, she said. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

now, this shit is worded VERY carefully for a reason (as tyrion said: PROPHECY IS A MULE THAT KICKS YOU IN THE TEETH) and when it comes to asoiaf prophecies I think the most important part when analyzing them is that the solution is never the one the characters think or that seems the most obvious to them. like, tldr but when it comes to azor ahai/tptwp I’m 100% in the jon snow camp because of the death that COMPLETELY FULFILLS THE REQUIREMENTS GOING BY BACKROADS/HINTS AND NOT BEING OBVIOUS and like... for US it’s obvious but for people in westeros? JON SNOW being azor ahai is basically wtf forreal, it’s not narratively obvious for THEM. anyway never mind my opinion about jon being AA, that was to explain how I go at this kinda shit. now, sadly for us, the OBVIOUS canon elements to decipher the maggy prophecy are not all there because again, let’s go in order:

“Queen you shall be… until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.”

now this bit already is problematic af because if we go at it STRICTLY LINGUISTICALLY:

‘until there comes another’: this already is a minefield because in english it could both be ‘another queen’, or ‘another woman’ or ‘another person’ and it’s not specified at all whether that person is male or female, just younger and more beautiful - now, I once used that loophole to write crack fic where JON was actually that person but I mean... it could absolutely be a man as far as grammar says, so like this younger and more beautiful person could be a) a new queen, b) another person either male or female we just don’t know;

‘take all that you hold dear’: problem is, now here we’re on another level of interpretation because that implies deciding what cersei holds dear. now, I absolutely do not subscribe to the school that she holds dear her children bar joffrey and I think she thinks she holds jaime dear but the only things she holds dear are a) herself, b) the iron throne, c) power, d) her position. so, do we go with what cersei thinks she holds dear, or what she really holds dear?

and that’s problem one.

problem two, the other bit:

“Will the king and I have children?”

"Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you. Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds, she said. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

this also has a SHITLOAD of language to unpack, specifically:

‘will the king and I have children’ + ‘sixteen for him and three for you’. obviously robert had sixteen bastards and she had three with jaime but she asked WILL THE KING AND I HAVE CHILDREN so if maggy’s replying separately like will he have them and I will I have them it adds, if it’s implied that cersei’s three are with the king then it gives more credit to @robb-greyjoy​‘s theory about jaime getting kingship at some point (even if I think that’s going to go to jon eventually but there could be others in between);

‘gold shall be their crowns’ also implies that myrcella gets to reign before she inevitably dies but nvm we can at least suppose that all of those three kids die period BUT if we include them in the ‘all that you hold dear’ part then younger and more beautiful whoever they are has to be somehow involved in it but I would exclude that option tbqh;

‘when your tears have drowned you’ has to be after losing all she holds dear because cersei crying for any other reason is out of the question;

also, if her aerys wildfire plot is also book canon (and I think it is) then it has to be after that, too, so we can put it safely either at the end of six or early seven;

‘the valonqar shall wrap his hands’: now this one is THE minefield. first thing: we can absolutely and utterly exclude that it’s tyrion because cersei thinks he is (same as we can exclude margaery from the younger and more beautiful pick of people because cersei thinks it’s her), and not just because cersei is REALLY unreliable in the sense that until now ANY TIME she’s assumed something it turned out to be the contrary, but because as stated above: the person is not who the narrative would make characters assume. AA is jon snow and no one in westeros would even consider it (melisandre HAS R’HOLLOR SPELL IT FOR HER AND SHE DOESN’T GET IT) and the valonqar is no one obvious. now, I used to think it had to be jaime because the text specified he’s younger than her technically and because she doesn’t expect him to be at all BUT there’s also a few reasons why I don’t know if jaime’s the most likely candidate now - I prob. had too much time to think about it BUT...

a) jaime doesn’t have hands, he has just one, and choking someone with a fake hand is usually not a good idea if you don’t want a fight;b) cersei is convinced that they’re going to die in a murder-suicide dumbass way and him killing her is still half of it and eeeeh idk;c) jaime does not need any further trauma tied to her tbh I mean I don’t think he’d gain anything by killing her and certainly not catharsis;d) I’m 99,9% convinced that jaime and brienne post-stoneheart go looking for sansa together (remember that he hasn’t been seen for weeks when cersei asks where the hell he disappeared at the end of adwd) and swearing fealty to her together and going north which would put jaime way out of the way geographically (sure he could come back later if there’s a book equivalent of the cersei/jon/dany meeting in the pit but TO KILL CERSEI SPECIFICALLY esp. if at that point he’s left her for brienne for good? dunno.) also I’m also 100% convinced that the prophecy bran had in agot where he saw sansa in a snow castle with three people defending her from a giant is jaime/brienne/sandor vs gregor unless I remember it wholly wrong but nvm;e) jaime’s thematic journey is also to get the fuck away from cersei and have his own life and idk if being the valonqar works with that;f) choking is... a fairly personal and cruel method of killing someone so unless this is metaphorical (possibly) idk if I see jaime who has been seen favoring clean, quick deaths and wanting one for himself would kill someone by choking when it’s slow, painful and he’d have to literally watch her life disappear from under his hands, and that someone being CERSEI I mean even not loving her anymore I can’t see him wanting to make her suffer when killing her if he did that at all;

also: it says ‘the’ valonqar, not your valonqar. cersei thinks it’s HER valonqar. but maggy never said that;

moral of the story: it could literally be ANYONE’S FUCKING YOUNGER BROTHER not necessarily hers;

and on top of that............ large mega extra spoiler: no one especially not maggy hasn’t said that the valonquar and younger and more beautiful aren’t the same person. like, I might be reaching here, but like.... you can’t rule that out.

so like, at the end of this entire delirium I think we can reasonably say the following:

cersei’s going to lose her crown before she inevitably dies;

her downfall will have to be tied to someone younger and more beautiful than she is but we don’t know if it’s a queen or if it’s not;

she’s dying choked or anyway suffocated and whoever’s doing it is someone’s younger sibling not necessarily hers;

tommen and myrcella are dying before she does;

it’s not tyrion;

it’s sure as hell not margaery.

now, again, we can reasonably suppose that her trial in the book ends like the one in the show ie she blows up the sept with AT LEAST the high sparrow and margaery inside it. and that’s like all about it.

now, again: I do like the idea of brienne being the younger and more beautiful person that takes jaime away from her, but I highly doubt it’s likely if it means her being QUEEN or taking cersei’s actual place, but if everything cersei holds dear also means power and her throne..... I don’t know how brienne is gonna do it. I mean, out of any woman in the run she’s the one with most likely chances and for those reason I refer you to damien’s meta above because like I 100% agree with that reasoning given that it happens, but as stated before if she’s off with jaime doing knight shit and saving sansa and hopefully getting him laid it might cause issues. I also would exclude sansa categorically bc she’s going north and that’s where her story’s headed so she’s not coming back to KL to take cersei’s place and dany seems way too obvious too me and also I don’t think cersei’s lasting until dany even gets to westeros in the book timeline imo. sure dany’s a valonqar, but also.... why the fuck would dany choke cersei when she can feed her to drogon? I mean, still more likely than sansa or marg (who’s toast) but less than brienne and still not exactly working out.

that said: as far as I personally am concerned, I’m more leaning towards thinking that the valonqar is a man but not cersei’s (also because to choke people you have to be strong and brienne choking cersei is out of the question she wouldn’t do that she’d give her a clean death if she had to kill her) and I’m not excluding that the valonqar is also younger and more beautiful.

NOW, thing is: at this point anyone is a good candidate. I mean, again, with these elements I could give you a mostly convincing case of fucking jon snow being the valonqar AND younger and more beautiful that would crumble on itself the moment we’d go back to the choking because jon wouldn’t choke her to death he’d have no reason, but other than that: jon’s younger, book version jon’s most likely more beautiful than she is ON THE INSIDE AT LEAST (show version is way prettier lmao), jon has the best claim on the iron throne among the current people if you’re a targ sympathizer or if stannis dies along with shireen (probable tho not like in the show) so if he takes the throne he would take away everything she holds dear. AND jon is actually a valonqar if you consider him rhaegar’s last son.

except that as stated it makes no sense with the choking and time-wise it makes no sense, right?

right. so now I know we’re wildly beyond the original purpose of this question but follow me a moment because I have a crackpot theory about this that MIGHT ACTUALLY NOT BE SO CRACKPOT. 

step one: we have stated that the valonqar has to be a male younger sibling of someone’s who would have very good reasons to choke cersei. and we established that younger and more beautiful takes away everything she holds dear which to me is not jaime but her throne. we also can reasonably assume margaery dies when cersei inevitably explodes the sept and that tommen/myrcella die after SOMEHOW.

step two: who is someone’s younger sibling who is alive in the book and who would want to choke cersei for revenge and who is reasonably near king’s landing at this point in the narrative? idk but this dude is not dead in the book:

I mean, would work, right? knight, certainly not weak, cersei’s sent him on a death mission and has written him for dead, would certainly want to avenge his sister disfigured or not. could work as younger and more beautiful too except that he’s most likely disfigured now, but I mean, how the fuck would loras even do it?

step three: who are the two assholes who are technically about to invade storm’s end? aegon vi targaryen and jon connington. what happens after they most likely take it? they realize that stannis’s residence was actually dragonstone or most likely move on to dragonstone. who is on dragonstone?

yeah, exactly.

step four: so let’s say that meanwhile news arrive that cersei blew up margaery and tommen’s dead. loras most likely doesn’t appreciate. also let’s remember that aegon’s requirements to get into his kg are ‘you should be willing to die for me’ and that’s it and loras was ready to die for tommen but I MEAN NVM THAT.

step five: let’s say loras decides he’s Done and wants revenge so he teams up with them to turn his cloak on cersei and helps them get to king’s landing - possible, especially since no one would stop them with stannis being north.

step five: is aegon vi targaryen younger and more beautiful than cersei? most importantly, does he have a claim to the throne (nvm if he’s real or fake it’s not important now)? even more important, varys is in king’s landing keeping cersei’s ruling on a fucking respirator because he’s waiting for aegon and jonc to get there and he needs her there because she’s a weak ruler and she’s insane so people would of course want her deposed and varys has been planning that for fucking years. long story short: aegon vi targaryen fits all the younger and more beautiful that will cast you away parts of that prophecy and cersei doesn’t even suspect that he exists, while loras fits perfectly the valonqar part of it and would have very good reasons to want to choke her to death if she killed his sister. and even if loras was not the valonqar... aegon is someone’s valonqar (rhaenys’s) and like he probably wouldn’t have reasons SPECIFICALLY to choke her to death but I mean if cersei went off about his mother or something like that.... still more probable than jaime given all of the above.

conclusion, at the end of this goddamned mess of a novel: the younger and more beautiful person who’ll cast her away and take what she holds dear (her throne) could very well be aegon and the valonqar could be loras.

idk if I’m betting real money on it but I think I have a pretty solid case here. IDK GUYS.

tldr: I like the brienne theory but I’m skeptical on how it works and while I absolutely would not bet real money on the above, I think it’s...... more textually plausible.

thanks for coming to my ted talk and sorry for having gone completely off the rails with this question but if it actually happens I want it written down somewhere that I actually had thought this through XD

[alittlelessdemocracy]

Runaway Bunny

I started reading Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting over the summer, and plan to use it as the primary text in my class painting after painting this spring. I used a couple of her previous texts when I taught a version of the course last year, and found them to be productive of interesting discussion among the students. I'm excited by the fact that she's attempting something like a totalizing account of painting that is more than either a rehash or takedown of the usual dominant postwar narratives. I think she's on the right track, and I'm pretty interested in most of her interlocutors. (The conversation with Merlin Carpenter is entertaining to say the least.) Since I spent a lot of my summer trying to get caught up on Marx (a life’s work if ever there was one) I'm looking forward to the final chapter on value theory, if for no other reason than as a reward for my efforts to familiarize myself with the terms of the discussion, though I'm sure it's going to be as frustrating as it is illuminating. Other than that, I've been working my way through a lot of stuff that I've been gathering over the past year or so and finally getting around to reading: a book on modernism i started last winter, and another one called Weimar Culture - The Outsider as Insider, both by the late historian Peter Gay; Berlin Alexanderplatz - a Weimar novel sometimes referred to as the German Ulysses, and the basis of a Fassbinder film I've watched a bunch of times in the last several years; a book about the socioeconomic conditions shaping the lives of Millennials called Kids These Days - The Making of Millenials; and a couple of intense and short books - The Transparency Society, and The Burnout Society - by a Heideggerian named Byung-Chul Han. His titles are not terribly inventive, but I think his analysis of contemporary society is pretty spot on. If emergent AI is Maxwell’s Demon, Han is willing to call it by its true name. But mostly I'm excited to begin reading this book I just got by a Hegelian named Robert B. Pippin, who I first learned about from a quote of his about intention in the Todd Cronan book we read in my grad seminar a few years ago.

I like this quote from Schelling that Pippin uses to introduce his book. It's as good an account as any I can think of for the value of all the endless reading and looking - which we may as well call research, though I think I prefer the term scholarship - that feels so necessary in order to do justice to our previous and future reading and looking, even when it is bewilderingly fragmented, incomplete, out of order, and disorienting: "All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art." I think if I have a problem with Graw, it's with her resistance to being swept away, and her desire to provide a historical account of the passive side of reception in socioeconomic terms, and in so doing explain it away - or so it seems to me. On the one hand, I think her demystifying negativity is crucial as a means of fortifying whatever can survive it.

According to Pippin, for Hegel thought must "tarry with" the negative to be thought at all - I think this is why he starts with the Schelling quote, and this is why I value pessimistic thinkers like Graw, Adorno, and Han, even when I don't want to agree with them entirely - probably because I start to feel like a hypocrite when I do. 

On the other hand, there's an unspoken absurdity to Graw’s whole enterprise (not to mention mine) if she is correct: if painting is just a convenient mystification of economic and social conditions, then who needs it? Capitalists, apparently, but that's hardly a defense.

I think she provides a great justification for art criticism, but it's at the expense of art that isn't itself mostly a form of critique (like mine.) To be honest, I still mostly prefer Cronan, Clark, and Silverman, who all write with more passion, but also more critical distance (perhaps it helps to get some distance on what one’s doing in order to be able to trust the feelings one has about it.) They all provide richly descriptive and analytic accounts for the contextual basis of painterly poetics without reducing them to an illusion, which is kinda what I think she does - at least in her work on painting...High Price is another thing entirely.

There's a vulgar Hegelianism underneath it all which I think she evades by pretending to be a journalist rather than a theorist when it suits her. It looks like humility, and maybe it is, but it rings false to me. She also provides a justification for this gesture, tracing it back at least as far as Vasari in the sixteenth Century. This saves her from the difficult task of defending the kind of reductive and often unappealing prescriptions (Andrea Fraser good, Daniel Richter bad, say) that would follow from making her underlying value judgements more explicit - she leaves that emotional labor to artists like Carpenter - who provide her text with the the kind of liveliness she says we project onto paintings...which points to another problem with the text. Her thesis doesn't only - or even most effectively apply to painting - which she defines so broadly it almost loses all meaning as a category: it's one of several enduringly convincing ways of engaging with any cultural artifact - particularly writing (see Of Gramatology) - particularly, if not only, in the Western context...which is odd, given the fact that of all the art forms, writing is perhaps the most collectively determined, the most inhabited (or haunted by) all the possible permutations of the ready made. But if I have to choose between the absurdity of her critical ouroboros which takes a love of painting for granted while attempting to undermine the basis of that love by accounting for it in external terms - emptying it of joissance, and the absurdity of naive naturalism which always wants to hide its love from the negativity of thinking - and so make it nothing but an attempt at escape, of which of course there is none, I'll always be more engaged by the passion for endless critique - so long as it's lively and ambitious - even if it's constitutionally unable to reflect transparently on its own passionate project of dismantling - a silence about its own creative destructiveness which opens it up to a deeper negativity which is something like its unconscious.

Ultimately, it's that frustrating lack in the center of the project that makes it engaging. It's like the opposite of what they say in AA: keep coming back, it doesn't work! Or maybe it does work, if we take “work” to mean something like ongoing, socially necessary labor, rather than the accomplishment of a solution to a problem: the working of a problem rather than the closing of it..though if the problem of painting is the kind of pseudoproblem suggested by Graw, then the work is not really work at all, or at least, not the kind of productive work it takes itself to be. I think if Graw were really convincing (or convinced) by her own skepticism there'd be no point in engaging with her doubts - even for her. There must be some reason she hung out with Kippenberger besides mere journalistic curiosity. The fact that she was there and is still there working out the details of what she witnessed and continues to participate in implies that she was and is more than an observer, as are we all. A definite strength of her approach is that she admits as much, even if she can’t quite account for her investment without admitting that she too is entranced by art’s mystifications.

I think the tone of Graw’s writing is symptomatic of the fact that we can no longer in good faith tarry with Fried's or Silverman's outright defense of grace, and we think we're too smart about power to let someone like Greenberg or Kraus (or Foster, or Joselit) tell us what the limits of the situation are without protesting: what about all the art outside the western context for instance (whatever that can really mean in an increasingly globalized world) or all the former outsiders who are now insiders, to borrow a phrase of Peter Gay’s...so she doesn't do either of those things, but she chooses insider objects and interlocutors who do some of that work for her - externalizing the cost of her commitments, and capitalizing on the surplus value her avatars produce.

Ultimately, I'm with her enacted commitment to unpacking through writing and witnessing. And I definitely don’t object to her spreading the work around - as she points out, this is how work gets done in a networked context. Here I’d want to call on Freud and the transference to broaden and deepen the meaning of this working through together - this mutual interdependence for the sake of the great work - whether we call it Thought, Art, Spirit, Being, or Cure - to remind us of the fact that we/it may seem new, but it’s only new to our perception that we’ve always been working in a networked context. And I like that she doesn’t rely on invisible labor that obscures the social hierarchy: all of her interlocutors are peers of equal or greater status.

In other words, I appreciate how much she appears to show her work - including the social work that is usually left hidden. (For instance, this post began as an email to a friend, as have a lot of my recent posts. I don’t borrow their words, but I borrow their subjectivity, insofar as I rely on my anticipation of their specific receptivity when I “speak” (that is, play with words on my desktop, in solitude, but never entirely alone.))

This is mostly why I read: If Marx is right, that the value of a commodity is determined not by the labor that went into it, but only by the socially necessary labor time that went into it, then it only makes sense for anyone engaged in intellectual/spiritual labor - which is also a form of play - to outsource as much of it as possible - to be an effective team player - and to benefit from the perceptions, judgements, and thoughts of others in order to contribute most effectively - honestly, rather than self-deceivingly, indulgently, solipsistically - to the larger project, which is both personal, practical, political, spiritual, ethical and aesthetic - both social and solitary - solitude having something to do with an irreducible labor that can not be exchanged or externalized, the work that must be done alone, even if some of its costs can and must be shared by others in order for the work to be effective and not mere wasted effort. In other words - it is our duty and our privilege to respect our own subjectivity and acknowledge its entanglement and interdependence with the subjectivity of others. It is incumbent upon us to make the most of our time here - not to waste this opportunity - which is time: not to waste our own time, and not to waste anyone elses.

For instance, just because it sometimes takes me a year to finish a painting - or days or months to write something worth sharing with strangers -  it doesn’t mean it’s worth more than a painting or a text that took five minutes to produce. Unless there is something genuinely necessary in that time I spent, and this not just for me alone, but for my work in relation to others doing work on the same problem, then that time is wasted, without return.

And aren’t the historical ethics of painting as described by Graw - freshness, liveliness, even grace - all wrapped up in this same sort of question of economy which tends to reverse the puritanical love of work for its own sake, which it so often makes a mockery of (in it’s most extreme case in the work of Duchamp) demonstrating the love of work without purpose as a kind of perversion - a fetishization of suffering? Suffering is instructive, and endurance can be a virtue - patience certainly - but never as a thing in itself - only in relationship to a desired end - even if that end is loose and deferred. In this way painting has always been spiritually capitalist insofar as it treats any unnecessary labor as the original sin - that is - the opposite of investment, which raises again the question of waste and expenditure, consumption and production - of time, and of value.

All things being equal, in painting, as under capitalist forms of production, the burden of proof is on the one who would choose to spend time unproductively. This is why we ritually abuse the proverbial garret - not because solitude is to be mocked, but because our mutual dependence and actual community of spirit must be respected.

The revolution rests on the question of how we frame the question of value and production. Painting is both regressive (insofar as it implicitly models the notion of Return on Investment) and revolutionary (in that it tends to relativize the question of productivity - its investment is not one in survival, but in meaning.)

I think the most important work we do as artists and scholars is the work we do to discover what other work (besides survival) needs to be done. Sometimes this involves reading and writing. Sometimes it involves abstaining from both in order to work with our hands, or submit to a process that requires that we spend a great deal of time doing very little, or very little time doing a great deal. But insofar as time is not ours to spend as we see fit  - that is, insofar as we give in to the very real and costly social pressure to always be visible, present - that is distractable, demonstrative, lively, reinvesting our being in immediate production determined by others, mediated by corporations - then our production is not our own. We become the productivity of some other.

Time is everything, and how we choose to spend it and to what ends is what we are.

Work is expensive, and “truth is work.”