#i wish someone archived specific thread (at least one) but i take what i can get

[theyhitthepentagon]

my qpp found this 2008 webcomic called between the lines about the harder aspects of growing up transgender and i think its really good. definitely something you guys should check out if you get the chance

[monstersdownthepath]

Some cool First World locales

First World: Realm of the Fey came out in 2016, and yet every time I read over it I discover something new. A new bit of lore, a new strange thread to follow, a new bizarre bit of terrain, some new monster or deity to follow up on... But the one gift that keeps giving is the Gazetteer, going on for over 15 pages and listing strange locations YOU, yes YOU, the DM, can send your players to! Be it a fey portal, the whims of the Eldest, a questline taking them into the First World, or some other plot contrivance, there’s over 60 different vacation spots with varying levels of dangerous, curious, or downright weird for DMs to expand on and send players into!

Hopefully this post will motivate at least a few of you to pick it up, if for nothing else than the Gazetteer, which has lore you can’t find in the Archives of Nethys or the PF wiki! It’d be rude of me not to share at least a few favorites from among them under the cut below!

The Canyon of Faces: One of the most alarming locations in the book, the Canyon is a seemingly infinitely-deep cut into the earth filled with uncountable stone heads, each of them perfectly rendered and resistant to damage. Rumors abound about what happens when you find your own face, or someone else’s face; no one can seem to keep the story straight about if finding your own face gives you infinite power or slays you instantly, just as no one can say what sort of power (if any) you gain over someone else if you find their face in the cavern... or if these heads hold any power at all, and aren’t simply the trophies or creations of some grim collector or sculptor no one’s ever seen. And yet, finding one specific head among many is an exercise in tedium and futility, as no matter how far down one digs, there’s just more of these strange busts, which basically makes the quest of finding a specific face impossible. Perhaps that’s why there’s so many rumors about what happens if you find your face; because no one has.

The Chittering Tabernacle: Nestled in the amusingly named Plain of Leaping Stones (which, true to its name, is filled with rocks that just love launching themselves unexpectedly into the air), this tabernacle is staffed exclusively by a unique brand of arachnoid Fey called Chkchks (do NOT call them ‘nurse spiders’). The chkchks utilize healing spittle, silk casts, stitches made from their own coarse hairs, and the occasional spell to provide the utmost of care to all their patients, healing injuries, curing sicknesses, breaking curses, and even restoring life to any dead brought into their doors, regardless of the patient’s species, allegiance, or alignment. While in most cases this would be extremely suspicious, the chkchks operate are truly and purely altruistic and don’t even demand payment, though they gently offer the exchange of favors, talents, time, or the completion of specific questlines to anyone who wishes to pay anyway.

The only overtly sinister thing the spidery caretakers do is draw a small amount of blood from every patient that comes in, regardless of the patient’s treatment needs, taking this sample to the “Sagechoir” at the Tabernacle’s center for analysis. They do this because they believe in a prophesied messiah called the Deathender who will rid all worlds of all suffering when she is found, and they believe she will first come to them as a patient and that her blood sample will reveal her. Whether or not the Deathender--or her supposed promise to alleviate all cosmic suffering--is real and not a ruse by some other force isn’t said.

Earis Highlands: In opposition to the above, the blistered, naked, rat-like Earis Fey that populate these brush-filled lands are also called Fever-Drinkers. They extract high tolls from those who come to them to be alleviated of their illness, which the rat-fey do by physically sucking the illness from their bodies... and anyone else with the money to pay can buy the diseases themselves (typically by having the Earis containing it regurgitate it onto another target) for their own use, whatever that may be.

Dusking Hills: This one’s amusing to me for the simple fact that darkness itself is somehow farmed, bottled, and sold here for export to other areas of the First World. There’s also the significantly more worrying is the Gloaming Caves, giant crystalline mines where blackened crystals encase armored figures of dozens of different races for an unknown reason.

Endless Siege: This one’s fun, if only because of the potential to run it as an adventure again and again and again. There is a desolated stretch of the First World filled with mud, trenches, corpses, and abandoned siege weapons, at the center of which is a squat, ugly castle, which acts as the prize. The owners of the castle are the family of Boralas, a coalition of extremely powerful and sadistic soul-eating fey known as Vilderavn, and each one wants the castle for themselves and are willing to do whatever they need to in order to take it, even going so far as to conscript hapless souls from across the Great Beyond... like a party of player characters.

Why? For fun! The war itself is the point, and the castle itself is simply the objective they’ve collectively agreed upon. The Boralas family instead uses the constant battle as entertainment, to better their own tactical acumen and understanding of war, to find new creative ways to conquer or hold onto the castle... and to feed upon the souls of all the soldiers who fail them.

Harvester’s Deep: This one gigantic lake is enthralling for a specific reason. It has nothing to do with the titanic shrimp and nautili that dwell within the deep waters of the lake and everything to do with the mysterious Harvester from which it draws its name, a creature without any form of description, lore, or even a CR attached to it. It’s stated only to rise once every 20 years and go on a cataclysmic rampage which the citizens of the various surrounding towns either flee or hide to survive.

Palenhyr: When the gods abandoned the First World, many fey were hurt by the loss. Palenhyr is the result of this pain; a grand city of temples, altars, churches, tabernacles, and tombs all devoted to thousands upon thousands of gods (some real, most not) with followings everywhere from a single maniac to an entire organization. Faith of all flavor is welcome and available and niche religions abound, with all the mad drama such a thing could create. Notably, there is enough divine power flowing into Palenhyr that it’s a force people can feel, and the ruling council of the city is said to secretly be constructing a massive ritual to use this energy to pull a god from the Material back into the First World... perhaps even multiple.

The Moon Ladder: Constructed by First World Gnomes, this enormous machine for years projected a bridge of light into the heavens of the fey realm, allowing gnomish explorers to visit the many moons and planets circling overhead in the distance. Recently, however, the bridge has been shut off, the ladder and the research stations becoming closed off and restricted to any outsiders, and the researchers themselves recluses who rarely ever leave the lab. There’s whispers that something came back down the light bridge that’s caused the gnomes to turn from explorers into defenders, either studying the something or preventing it from getting out, but what that something could be is left unsaid.

Phasetree: A simple one: A massive tree is there every day, which the fey in the surrounding town in its roots climb up to harvest its fruits, leaves, lumber, and the various beasts that nest among branches as wide as roads. Every night, they have to climb back down as quickly as possible because the tree vanishes entirely. Where it goes, no one knows, but every time it reappears it’s changed somewhat; new branches, new fruits, new monsters twisted within its branches, new rune marks along its trunk, and sometimes it even brings a blast of weather from... wherever it travels, sending snow or rain or wind in every direction. No one who’s ever been caught on the tree when it disappears has ever been seen again, and no divination can reach them.

The Thrice-Tenth Kingdom: Baba Yaga came to the First World once. This is the kingdom she built by doing little more than telling the First World what she wanted, and it bent and folded itself in whatever direction she ordered to please her. She rarely visits and never stays, leaving her minions to hold it for her instead.

Vestige: The one I saved for last because it’s the one I like the most. Fey don’t die like most creatures, so the town of Vestige allows fey to experience what it’s like in varying ways; sometimes they hold mock funerals, sometimes they bury themselves alive, sometimes they record their names and deeds on headstones and place them in the city’s endless graveyard, and sometimes they go as far as to inflict terrible injuries on themselves to “get into character.” Fey study death alongside necromancers of every stripe, recording their research and discoveries in vast libraries for future perusal... and despite the oddness and pageantry of the town, it’s no less dangerous for mortals who catch the attention of the fey. They’re enamored with the idea of death and dying, and captured mortals are often subjected to hideous but coldly academic practices to help the fey understand the phenomenon.

ok there’s still a lot of really good ones but i’m restraining myself. please allow the names Plain of Doors, Stasi the City of Vaults, Tubehollow, the Riddle Sphere, Watchers on the Shore, Spindlewood, and the Sea Without a Shore sink into your brain. also pick up the book itself, it’s good stuff.

[daytura]

Thoughts on the Antinet's manual search

Nicolas Gatien: @ArchLeucoryx Any thoughts? Based on your twitter posts, I believe you are working with Logseq and Obsidian?

First--thank you for taking the time to write the thread. Scott discussed this in one of his videos but finding specific info is a bit harder ;) I think plenty of people are worried about "blinding" themselves to their notes without full-text search.

I use Logseq and Obsidian casually, among other applications like Dendron on VSCode, FSNotes, and even Twitter. Currently, I'm on a "null theory" of PKM, and I'm investigating the ways we represent our knowledge--literature, journaling, commonplacing, note-taking, oratory, communication, etc. I don't think there are any rules to knowledge! All representations are mutable and interchangeable; your notes are not your knowledge; the map is not the territory. But that doesn't mean we can't be open to better maps that give us new perspectives on the old.

(Note: I don't have an Antinet myself, but I think I have a good picture of it. I tried making an alt-Zettelkasten in TiddlyWiki that used sequences of sequences rather than trees of trees, and timestamping instead of alphanumeric IDs.)

The lack of direct search is definitely not a bug. The Antinet still uses a hand-curated index, so you're not lost every time you open your drawer. The manual search is really just something you do, right? It's practical usage. At the very least, the process of re-reading is an aid to memory; recall in of itself makes memories stronger.

I'm reminded of this other application, ThreadHelper...it was a sidebar extension to Twitter designed to be a serendipity engine. Every time you wrote in your compose box, the sidebar would bring up related tweets from your account and your bookmarks (you had to import your Twitter data locally, I think). And one of the developers, exGenesis, explains that "[your] body of work should be a living system but water is drying up nearly as soon as it's posted". I can't help but think that the process of re-reading your notes is like "watering" them again, digital or no. You're coming back to your past self and following up with their thinking. This way, your thinking literally compounds over time.

Meanwhile, the Zettelkasten falters a bit at explicit recall, at least later on. An Antinet small enough that you can keep it's contents in your head and reliably put in and take out the exact card is an archive. And explicit recall does make sense! Sometimes you need the full fidelity of either your own or someone else's writing. But it's kind of interesting that we haven't really investigated the shift from explicit recall to associative recall in the slipbox, as the slipbox grows.

Further, the key to associativity seems to be surprise and discovery. Eva Thomas writes in her article that Luhmann described the "surprises we encounter while interacting with the slip-box [...] as a process of finding something you were not looking for, but something that you can still use". (Unfortunately I don't know what quote that is in his actual paper, Communication with Slipboxes.) Is a mature Antinet a discovery engine just by reading through the notes and walking down the associative trails to find what you need? That seems too good to be true. But it also makes a lot of sense. What happens when the user of the Zettelkasten begins to forget what they have written? Well, the more the user forgets, the more surprised they are when re-reading their writing. Forgetting is integral to serendipity; a creative partner. At this stage, you put a note in there to "lose control of it, not to gain control over it".

To be surprised, we must be unaware.

To be surprised of known information, we must make it unknown. Defamiliarize; misplace; forget. It is only when we know we have lost something that we wish to get it back, to reclaim it more tightly.

[lightrises]

"Only in allowing her to pass..." — Hornet, The Radiance, and the means by which Hallownest turned its victims against each other

A quick note: I read Hollow Knight as an anti-colonialist text. As such I'll be touching on topics related to colonialism as it's depicted in the world of the game, and said analysis will reflect both a sympathetic take on The Radiance and a critique of The Pale King that won't pull its punches. If this sounds up your alley, hello and thank you for the read! Let us be sad about these bugs together.

———

So!! A while back I realized something about pre-canon that felt rather... "curious" is one way to put it, I think. To wit: for all the effort and scheming and determination The Pale King poured into trying to get rid of The Radiance, neither of his plans involved directly killing her.

Was that his long game? Well, sure, that seems clear enough. His tack changed from luring the moths away from their god and creator to a more literal form of incarceration once the infection became a factor, but at its core the end goal never really changed—The Pale King very sincerely wished to destroy Radiance via obsolescence. The Seer lends us foreshadowing to confirm as much:

[Image descriptions: Two screenshots from Hollow Knight, showing the Seer and Ghost in the Seer's alcove at the Resting Grounds. Across both screenshots, the Seer tells Ghost the following: "None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters." End description.]

(Which, by the way and given the context, talk about an extremely unsubtle allusion to cultural genocide huh!!! Whew.)

In any case, we're left with a whole bunch of machinations which build up to... well, two very roundabout attempts at committing deicide. That's kind of weird, all things considered! Why not just do the deed in one fell swoop and get it over with?

This could be for any number of reasons. Maybe the king was devoid of the means to instantly kill another higher being. Maybe his personal sense of scruples stopped him short of signing off on MURDER murder (although, y'know, the aforementioned genocide + eternal imprisonment = still cool and copasectic apparently!). Maybe the long drawn-out cruelty was the point. Maybe the idea of playing fuckign 4D chess with the circumstances was too delicious for him to pass up—that man did love to tinker and stick his claws where they sure as hell didn't belong—or maybe it was a little bit of All The Things. Who knows!!

But interrogating The Pale King's methodology on this count isn't what I'm here for, at least not really. The main reason I raise this question at all is that in her own way, Hornet did too.

"I'd urge you to take that harder path... "

See, going by The Pale King's actions and what The White Lady explicitly says, they both foresaw two outcomes wrt the infection: it can be allowed to spread, or it can be contained. At Teacher's Archives, Quirrel acknowledges the fact that Ghost is expected to do... something about this, but he doesn't elaborate on what HE thinks that's supposed to be apart from the obvious "Gotta bust into Black Egg Temple first". Hornet is the one person who presents to us—to Ghost—what's framed as a third option: confront and destroy the infection at its source.

And she doesn't bring it up like it's just another tactic for Ghost to consider, prim and indifferent to what they would do. She nudges them towards it, actively, up to the point where she throws herself into the fray against Hollow at a juncture that's uniquely dangerous to her and her alone just to make that option feasible.

Even when she's couching it in disclaimers that this is still Ghost's decision to make (and let's be fair, she's extremely not wrong about that lol), no one can pretend Hornet is unbiased. It's obvious in that buttoned-down Hornet kind of way that she is way the hell done with the increasingly tenuous stalemate that's kept Hallownest's desiccated corpse from collapsing in on itself. Personally it's hard for me not to read some Toriel Undertale-esque "My father was too entrenched in his own foolishness to pursue any course of action that would have DEFINITIVELY ended this" shade into her stance here, regardless of whether that's strictly true in canon.

And that bit—Hornet's hopes for an end to Hallownest's stasis, moreover her grim calculation of what needs to be done to get there—that's the bit I find super interesting but likewise tragic and depressing as shit, on multiple levels. In no small part because a) canon itself gestures towards Hornet feeling conflicted about the very plan she's pushing, and moreover b) she has at least two (2) damn good reasons to feel that way.

So, what do I mean by that? Let's look here first:

[Image description: A screenshot from Hollow Knight, of Hornet and Ghost inside the Temple of the Black Egg, standing in front of the unsealed egg itself. Hornet has been struck by the Dream Nail and her dialogue is displayed as follows: "... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?" End description.]

As the curtain is about to drop on things one way or another, Hornet thinks,

... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?

Now, looking at that last bit it's easy to go "Oh no, Hornet's worried that Ghost won't survive killing The Radiance!" And I do think that's part of it: Hornet is, categorically, not her father. By endgame it's clear she's not content to view her Void-borne siblings as tools to be used then disposed of. She's also well aware that as a healthy autonomous Vessel amongst the countless dead, Ghost is the only person left alive who has a fighting chance against The Radiance. Knowing someone is the only qualified candidate for the job doesn't make encouraging them to embrace a probable death sentence any less of a bitter pill to swallow, though. And odds are on that this sentiment extends to Hollow too, who IS going to die no matter what happens here. To put it bluntly, it's more than reasonable to conclude that Hornet hates the absolute fuck out of this.

But I don't think that's all there is to it either. Remember what I said earlier about The Pale King's bids for genocide? Well, it's not like the man deigned to limit his efforts to just the moth tribe.

"We do not choose our mothers... "

On top of everything else—an infected Hallownest being all she's ever known, the fact that she only exists because of the infection, the list goes on—Hornet has spent her life wedged into a position that's been uncomfortable and terminally unglamorous at best: she is both a daughter of her father's kingdom and of Deepnest.

Deepnest, which like the moths and many others was here long before the wyrm and his lady wife swanned onto the scene and the God Become Bug laid claim to everything the Light touched plus a considerable amount of change. THAT Deepnest, which has fought claw and thread to retain its sovereignty against same-said settler king, and for which Herrah not only surrendered her life but also agreed to bed her worst enemy, all in hopes of securing a viable future for her people (put a pin in that last part by the way, I'll come back to it soon).

Two Worlds, One Family (Ft. An Indigenous Woman Trying Her Damndest To Work With What She's Got Versus An Imperialist Who Only Signed Up For This Because He Needed The Political Favor THAT Badly, So It's The Height Of Dysfunctional Actually). Fun times!!!!

The baggage this entails for Hornet is gnarly enough without implications made by The White Lady and the pre-canon timeline of events and even Team Cherry's dev notes that the king may well have looked at baby Hornet, gone "YOINK", then ensured she spent the lion's share of her childhood reared within the pearly auspices of his Pale Court*. That would be rather advantageous for Him Specifically after all, the potential to mold a born foe into a future ally and even have her trained in combat under the same tutelage as her doomed sibling. And far be it from him to stop a grown Hornet—his own flesh and blood too!—from making Deepnest her forever home if she so pleased. He totally wouldn't be reneging on his "fair bargain made" by doing this one simple thing until Hornet came of age, not t e c h nic c a l l y.

If that is indeed the case, there's a non-zero chance Hornet's formative years were a hot mess of cultural alienation and being a good deal more privy than most to just how much of a bastard her father could be. There's an equally non-zero chance that at some point she stood or sat within earshot as The Pale King finally, finally dropped all pretense and euphemism to name the Light for precisely what (for who) it was.

See, in conjunction with the question that started this whole dang train of thought I've been asking this one too: Does Hornet know? When she speaks of confronting "the heart of [the] infection" does she know she's talking about not just a literal person but someone very specific? The Radiance, who god though she may be shares skin in the game alongside Hornet as a native woman screwed over by the same settler king, likewise deprived of her kin and saddled with a life gone horrendously pear-shaped?

I'll assume for the sake of exploring the possibility and because I think it's a likely one anyway that yes, Hornet does know. She knows, and despite everything can't help empathizing. She might even look at Radiance and see bits and pieces both reflected and slightly inversed in her own mother: Radiance was forced to the sidelines while her people—her children, the brood she was meant to lead and care for—died out under The Pale King's rule, and it's no stretch to assume she's at least as upset about that as she has been about everything else; Herrah too took drastic measures for her people's sake, trying to head off annihilation by relegating herself to the sidelines in an act that was as much calculated risk as an attempt to find wiggle room and leverage in the face of a nasty proposition.

A calculated risk that, if things continue as they are, might well amount to nothing as the rest of Deepnest gets eaten alive by the infection. It survived The Pale King's advances for so so long, only to fall here. Herrah's sacrifice would be for naught; the other tribes—themselves the king's victims—would keep succumbing to the infection too.

And this is where things fall apart.

"... or the circumstance into which we are born."

Let's be clear: I think Hornet is wise enough to know what's what here, that all the carnage and suffering falls on her father's head for starting this slow-motion trainwreck in the first place. Hallownest wasn't always Hallownest. This domain was Radiance's home first, along with many others. It was the worm-turned-king who rolled up on the scene unsolicited and decided this was a ""'problem""" that had to be """solved""".

But the fact of the matter is that he's gone and The Radiance is here, raging, seemingly inconsolable. Above and beyond being Deepnest's rightful heir, Hornet isn't in a position to countenance more splash damage even if the grief and fury fueling it makes perfect sense. She can understand without ever bringing herself to love Radiance, and she can bend her knee to practicality even if she hates the everloving shit out of it because the fact that it "has" to end this way isn't fair.

This lends itself to one last awful conclusion: that Hornet has probably considered and (rightly or wrongly) discarded the possibility that Radiance can be saved, at least not without dragging more collateral along for the ride. If even her mother and every other enemy to the king seemed to dismiss talking Radiance down as an option way back when... well. Why should Hornet hope for any better after things have escalated so far?

Again, it's practical. A practical net good is what Hornet strives for. And again, it fucking sucks.

For extra tragedy points, this makes Hornet's extended crypticness around Ghost followed by her last minute casting about for a reason to tell them "Wait, don't; not just yet" that she never voices even more of a gut punch. She can't bring herself to burden Ghost with the context that haunts her so, least of all when it might weaken their resolve to go through with what (she thinks) needs doing.

It's the "same song, different verse" which led to the mantis tribe and Deepnest being pitted against each other: Hallownest rigged the game so that two women who could have been powerful allies—who have a mutual vested interest in driving out settler rule—wound up poised as enemies instead. And how awful is that? The king for all his being extremely fucking dead still gets the last laugh, because outside of a miracle the game never manifests Hornet can salvage what her mother started and look forward to a future where Deepnest pulls itself back from the brink if and only if The Radiance dies.

Resolution comes at the price of a completed genocide. Add two more dead siblings to the unconscionable pile thereof, while we're at it. That's what it boils down to whether or not Hornet can bear to articulate it as such, and there's no grace or even a properly bittersweet ending to wring from this clusterfuck. And that is rough.

———

* This has been better explained elsewhere, but a quick rundown: The White Lady tells Ghost that Hornet and Herrah "were permitted little time together." On its surface this can be taken to mean that Hornet was still very young when Herrah was shipped off to Eternal Dreamland—except this doesn't jive with the fact that we meet Hornet as an adult. If the stasis kicked in once the Dreamers went to their rest, which in turn halted the aging process for every living bug in Hallownest, AND before all this Hornet experienced little by the way of quality time with her birth mother... I think you can see where I'm going with this.

To top it off we've got Team Cherry weighing in ominously from their dev notes on Herrah: "As part of the agreement for her alliance and her role as a dreamer, King gave her a child (Hornet). Was she allowed to keep this child or was she taken away?" This isn't confirmation by itself of course, but given additional canon details (see above): Can I get a "yikes" in the chat fellas.

[yanderecandystore]

The bullies with an S/O that’s just completely off the board? Like no matter how much they look the bullies can’t find /anything/ on them, all their school papers are forged and their home just isn’t able to be found no matter how hard they look? Maybe due to the S/O changing their identity after doing something bad?

That's hella specific and I love it?? XD

Sure thing boo, let me see what I can do.

Also, I'll change the ocs profiles to be paper drawings with digital coloring because believe me boo, I'm tired of redrawing them (and I believe y'all are tired of always seeing these new drawings).

I noticed that my paper art is a lot better than my digital art, and although I'm kinda proud of them I still feel a little petty because I wish to do cool stuff on the computer ;-;.

Anyway, just a heads-up if you see something off with the oc's bios.

TW/Tags: I have no idea what to tag this lmao // identity theft // illegal/unauthorized inscription // not an accurate representation of university/how universities work lol // abusive household/abusive parents // I may or may not have changed your concept a little, I'm sorry for it 😔

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

Suspicion (fuck yeah, I don't know what to title this) [Yandere!Bully OC x Reader - Headcanon]:

→Adrien Coldwell:

For a person that prides themselves as the "know it all" when it comes to people's social media and reputation, he doesn't know anything about you.

This is a first for him, which is both annoying and honestly so intriguing. You didn't strike him as a person who would hide any secrets, and he had a hunch this was about to be good.

He searched for social media first, not finding anything about Avery Remington. Well, at least nothing with your face on it.

However, he did find something very, very interesting while looking at the school's documents, specifically the archives of all the students that have already studied here. He honestly didn't think he would find anything about you in these old papers, he was probably doing all this stupid work for nothing.

However, he was half right and half wrong. He didn't find anything about you, but this whole search wasn't completely lost, as he did find "you", Avery.

"- Student name Avery Remington, average grades and apparently no history of wrong doings or any bad behavior in general. Their registration to the Academy dates to 1980."

Oh. Ooooh, this was rich.

"- Huh." He said closing the documents and letting it where he found it. He was at least kind enough to let the palace a little organize after going through each paper trying to find your name.

Well, "your name". The only things that he kept for himself was photos of both the old documents about Avery Remington, and the earlier documents about Avery Remington. It was clear that you did something probably really, really bad, and you know he'll take advantage of it.

He had built his own theory about this, as in: you somehow found the paperwork of Avery's registration and their previous school's records so you could somehow impersonate them and get a free entrance to this institution.

He knew that you had something to hide, no one can be so perfect. But knowing the action itself wasn't enough for him, he needed to know the motive behind it.

For someone that is lazy and doesn't bother to care about important things, he sure spent a lot of time trying to scoop some dirt on you. When he finds the perfect opportunity, without any witness around, he'll take the chance to use this information against you.

"- Well, hello "Avery"." His tone was already suspicious, his voice not hiding anything from you. He came here to belittle you for his own entertainment.

"- H-Hi Adrien." You said shyly, hoping that your anxious mind was wrong and that this was all just a misunderstanding. You were hoping that the growing feeling of him possibly knowing about your fraud, was wrong.

"- Ya know, I'm kinda jealous of whatever plastic surgery you went through to look so young, maybe you should ask the faculty to correct your age tho." He said while showing the pictures he took of the documents.

"- Wait! I-I can-"

"- Honestly, I didn't think you were over 60 years old! Could have fooled me." His smug face was the selling point. You knew that you wouldn't find any form to convince him that what was on his phone was false.

He had a victorious smile on his face. Ever since you entered this school you always acted a little too paranoid and almost too friendly for his liking, and to confess to himself that he has fallen for you would be the bottom of the pit to him.

Still, he wanted to know why you did it. Why didn't you pay to get in if you wanted the scholarship so badly? What, you were too poor for it?

And what about a talent, or the test? Obviously, the university hasn't gone out of their way to pick a loser like you and insert you inside their classes on a whim, as they thought you were Avery Remington, a student that is already registered in school's documents (yet, of course, their system haven't verified the date of the registration, either by incompetence or by a "small mistake"). So you didn't do the test too, simply pathetic honestly.

Your sad dramatic story explaining how you managed to get into the academy. You did your best to get into the academy by legal means, but they always rejected you. Apparently you thought it would be a good idea to use your grandparent's documents to squeeze yourself into the institution.

"- But why in hell would you do such a thing? Are you that pathetic dearest?"

"- I… I wanted somewhere to go. Somewhere I could grow into a better person, a-away from-" You cut yourself short when the memories of your old home started to come into view.

For some reason, your parents couldn't stand the idea of you getting into a decent university, if anything, they thought you weren't capable of even washing some dishes at the local pizzeria. In their eyes, you were worthless.

When you found out your grandparent used to frequent this institution, and that they managed to disattached themselves from their familial routes and thrive as a musician you got instantly inspired! Determined to follow their steps and prove your family that you're just as worth ass-

"- Urghhhh- Boring! I don't care about all of that. Are you serious? You committed a crime just so you could stick it up to your shitty parents?"

"- …. Yes?"

"- Huh. Geez you're cooler than I thought. Listen, how about we make a deal?"

The deal was simple, he would not tell anyone about your little secret, and he would even help you keep your scholarship and help you reach your ambitions as long as you started spending more time with him. Which, at first you thought it sounded absurd, this man is holding your whole life by a thin thread as long as you give him attention?? What?!

And although that sounded extremely suspicious, you accepted it, not knowing that for the next few years you would have to endure a harsh training to discover your talents and to improve them before you two graduated. However, you started to think Adrien was starting to see your deal in a different light-

"- Come on now, after this we can go eat something okay? Where would you like to go this time? Our last date I chose the best restaurant I know, so you better choose something of equal value."

…. Date?

→Alexandra Coldwell:

You were suspicious from the very start. Overly friendly and too- Ugh! Too cute?!

You were always skittish whenever someone called you. What, you had a problem with your name or something?

And the worst part was how no one seemed to know where you lived. Every group project with you was considered annoying by most of your classmates, as you never called people in your house or never let anyone have your address, not even your phone number??

You didn't have any social media, what are you, a weirdo? What the hell??!

She is not even pissed about you being a loser, she is pissed that she has fallen for someone like you! A complete weirdo that was always panicking over nothing.

She started stalking you with the intention of finding at least one thing that she could hate on you so she wouldn't feel so- Lovey dovey towards you!

But what she really found was something worth an entire gold mine.

A private phone call between you and someone who was losing their shit. She couldn't understand too much of the conversation as she didn't have any context, yet she could hear a lot of things that you and the person were discussing.

The person yelled [Y/N] multiple times while in the phone call, saying how you were absolutely the worst mistake of their lives (which by the way, rude much? Who is this asshole?), that you were a selfish brat that needed to learn to appreciate their hard work.

Oh… Oh. She now knows who you're talking with. She decided to record the entire thing the moment she saw you taking your cellphone to have a private call.

She was planning on recording your voice for her own hearing pleasure, but this? This was so… Interesting.

"- [Y/N]?" She called your attention after the conversation ended, and because you haven't been accustomed to people calling you "Avery", you turned around saying "what" instinctively.

And when you noticed Alexandra smirk for a split second, you regretted answering your parents call. Not that you needed anymore reason to regret it, but this was certainly the last nail in the coffin.

You begged for her to understand that you couldn't go back, you simply can't go back to them, ever again! You told her the whole sob story about how your grandparent had decided to run away from home and fulfil their own dreams as a musician, even if people didn't really hear their music all that much, and now that you think about it, that's probably the reason why no one have recognized their name at all.

Your grandparent had a really small fanbase, and you knew that because you were part of them. They weren't popular at all compared to Amaryllis Academy standards, yet they were happy singing their songs to the world.

You kinda wish your family hasn't broken the old recorder that belonged to your grandparent. Their first album was in there, it was cheesy and filled with errors, yet they sounded so happy when doing what they loved, and you wanted something like that for yourself!

You needed to live that hell hole and so you did. You rented a small apartment that was falling apart, the reason why you never gave people your address was because you knew they would bully the hell out of you because of how poor you are.

After finishing your story you noticed Alexandra snoring beside you. You thought she was only exaggerating, but then you saw her drooling and acting really dizzy after you woke her up.

"- Oh my God, so… That was it? You ran away to follow your dreams and stuff?" She asked, still kinda sleepy.

"- What? Of course it was-" You were fuming with anger, how dare she-

"- And I thought you only looked cool because I liked you! You're pretty strong for sticking up for yourself." She interrupted you, looking at you with admiration in her eyes.

She proposed to you a deal. How about you two keep this secret together, and, if anything does happen she'll still help you stay inside the institution. However, you'll need to work your ass out to become the best you can be, and you'll let her guide you through, because you're too much of a dummy to do it all by yourself. You'll have to spend time with her and let her help you out.

At first, you thought it sounded absurd, this woman is holding your whole life by a thin thread as long as you give her attention?? What?!

And although that sounded extremely suspicious, you accepted it, not knowing that for the next few years you would have to endure a harsh training to discover your talents and to improve them before you two graduated. However, you started to think Alexandra was starting to see your deal in a different light-

"- Why you never hold my hand? Come on, "Avery", won't you hold the hand of your dearest girlfriend?" She asked playfully while taking your hand anyway.

…. Girlfriend?

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

[bluejayblueskies]

ten to one

Words: 2.8k

Fandom: The Magnus Archives

Relationship: Tim Stoker/Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims/Sasha James

Characters: Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood, Jonathan Sims, Sasha James

Additional Tags: Fluff, Kissing, Alcohol, New Year’s Eve, tim is a sore loser, sasha has cats, martin hates chestnuts, jon just wishes they could drink something other than champagne

Summary:

“You’re going to be sick,” Jon comments, taking a small sip of champagne from his glass and ignoring the way Tim’s lips curl into a pout. He’d said, when Sasha had poured him a glass of champagne, that he’d thought it was meant to be drunk at midnight; she’d assured him that this bottle was one of their pre-countdown bottles.

Given the number of bottles lining her kitchen countertop, he was inclined to believe her.

----

The archival staff counts down to the new year with cupcakes, champagne, and cats.

Read on Ao3

Or read below:

10

.

That’s how many little cupcakes Tim’s eaten, by Jon’s count. When Tim grins at him, his sharp-toothed smile is stained black from the frosting.

 “You’re going to be sick,” Jon comments, taking a small sip of champagne from his glass and ignoring the way Tim’s lips curl into a pout. He’d said, when Sasha had poured him a glass of champagne, that he’d thought it was meant to be drunk at midnight; she’d assured him that this bottle was one of their pre-countdown bottles.

 Given the number of bottles lining her kitchen countertop, he was inclined to believe her.

 “I’ll have you know,” Tim says, sliding closer to Jon on the couch and snagging his glass out of his hand, “that I have a stomach of steel. It’s sick-free!”

 He takes a long sip of champagne as if to prove his point. His lips stain the rim of the glass black.

 “Tim,” Jon says flatly. “That’s disgusting.”

 Tim looks at the glass, noticing the discolouration. “Huh.” Then, a wide grin splits his mouth nearly in two, and before Jon can pull back, Tim presses a quick kiss to his lips, lingering just long enough that Jon can taste the sugar on Tim’s mouth.

 It’s nice, and for a moment, Jon’s irritation melts a bit, softened by the champagne in his stomach and the feeling of Tim’s lips on his.

 Then, Tim pulls back too-quick and squints at Jon’s mouth. “Huh,” he repeats. “Looks like black food dye really does stain everything.”

 Jon looks at the glass, still in Tim’s hand, and then at Tim’s lips, tinged ever so slightly with black. His own still taste of sugar.

 “Tim!”

.

9

.

That’s how old Martin was the last time he spent New Year’s Eve with someone. It had been the first time his parents had let him stay up until midnight, and they’d given him a champagne flute of sparkling apple juice so that when the clock hit midnight he could toast the new year just like they did. He’d barely made it, his eyes fighting a losing battle against exhaustion as the new year inched closer and closer, but he’d done it.

 That had been a long time ago, though. After a while, Martin had taken to treating New Year’s Eve like any other day. No point in forcing himself to stay up late for something that was bound to be disappointing in the end.

 Now, though, Martin’s sat on the couch at Sasha’s house with Tim’s legs across his lap and Sasha tucked into his side, a large container of cheesy popcorn balanced between the three of them. Jon’s somewhere in the kitchen, having squirmed out from underneath Tim long enough to take the chestnuts out of the oven. From the little frustrated noises Martin can hear coming from the kitchen, Jon’s struggling to extract them from their shells.

 Martin’s really not a fan of chestnuts. But he’d rather die than tell Jon that right now.

 So when Jon finally returns to the living room, a steaming bowl of shucked chestnuts in his hand, Martin accepts one with a smile. And maybe it’s something about that night or the way that Jon’s smiling at him, but when he bites into the chestnut, he doesn’t hate it.

 He doesn’t hate it at all.

.

8

.

That’s what time Jon appears at Sasha’s front door, on time to the minute. He’s a good fifteen minutes ahead of Martin, who had sent Sasha a running late! text with a string of apologetic emojis attached to it, and at least an hour ahead of Tim, who has being fashionably late down to a science. Jon seems nervous, shifting back and forth on Sasha’s threshold with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a large bag of raw chestnuts in the other.

 Sasha lets him in with a warm greeting and a smile (and, once she’s taken the bottle out of his hands so he won’t drop it, a quick kiss on his cheek). He sets the chestnuts on the counter, his eyes going to her living room couch, then the kitchen, before finding her again.

 “Am I too early?” he says, eyes wide and unsure, and Sasha wonders briefly how he’d ever managed to convince them that he was stuffy and closed-off. Particularly when he’s standing in her living room, clutching a bag of chestnuts in his arms like a lifeline.

 “Nope,” Sasha says, extracting the chestnuts from his arms with a smile. “You’re right on time.”

.

7

.

That’s how many times Sasha’s caught Tim trying to open the bottle of special midnight champagne, tucked away on the far corner of the counter and labelled with a bright blue sticky note to avoid being accidentally opened. She supposes if she’d wanted to Tim-proof it, she probably should have put it in a locked safe. Though he knows her so well, he’d probably be able to guess the passcode.

 It should be irritating. Somehow, it’s hopelessly endearing instead.

 “Tim,” Sasha says, snatching the champagne out of his hands as his thumbnail begins to pick at the gold foil covering the cork. There’s a rip in it when she extracts it from him, revealing a small strip of cork underneath. “That’s for later!” Her eyes slide to the left, where there’s a half-full, open bottle of champagne sitting on the counter next to them. “What’s wrong with that champagne?”

 Tim gives her the saddest set of puppy dog eyes he has in his arsenal. “Sasha, I have been waiting months to drink that champagne. Months! I don’t want to wait until later!”

 A weaker woman would have folded under the impressive weight of Timothy Stoker’s big brown eyes and pouting lips. Sasha just grabs the open bottle of champagne and presses it into Tim’s hands with a smile and a quick kiss on those same lips. “Later,” she repeats, before taking the bottle to hide it somewhere Tim won’t be able to find it.

 She hopes.

.

6

.

That’s how many letters are in Martin’s name, Tim thinks idly as he runs his hands through Martin’s hair, scratching his nails lightly against Martin’s scalp. Somehow, in the rearranging of the four of them on Sasha’s obscenely long couch, Tim had ended up with Martin’s head on his lap, and he certainly isn’t going to complain.

 Sasha and Jon are bickering about some small detail in the movie they’ve put on, Tim thinks, like they always do—is it pronounced this way or that way, would a wide shot or a close-up be better here, would that specific piece of clothing have been period-typical at the time (yes, if it were dyed with indigo flowers, Jon had said primly, which had then been followed by a hey as Sasha’s elbow connected with his side)—and so he’s got Martin all to himself. Which is such a lovely place to be, he thinks as he continues to massage Martin’s scalp with his fingers.

 “Tim,” Martin says, his voice pinched slightly in that way it always gets when he’s receiving affection—like he’s always surprised by it, half-expecting it to be taken away without warning. “I have to tell you something.”

 Tim hums, a soothing noise, and says, “Okay, but I should warn you—I’m currently seeing someone. Several someones, actually. In fact, I believe it would technically be three—”

 “Okay, okay,” Martin says, one hand coming up to swat at Tim’s. His mouth is curled into a small, amused smile. “No need to be so…” He waves a hand in the air vaguely.

 “Handsome?” Tim suggests with a sharp grin.

 “Cheeky.”

 Tim puts on a comically large expression of shock. “No. Me? Couldn’t be.”

 Martin laughs, a small and breathy thing, and Tim loves him for it. His expression slips into something warmer and real, and he resumes running his hands through Martin’s hair. “Fine, fine, I’m listening. Go ahead, Martin.”

 “Thank you.” Martin closes his eyes, hums gently, and says, without opening his eyes, “You have frosting on your nose.”

.

5

.

That’s how many fingers are on Jon’s left hand as it finds Martin’s on the couch, those same fingers threading through Martin’s with an ease that could be practised had it not been just a few months since working together had turned into getting lunch together had turned into pining had turned into… everything else. Martin had spent a lot of time looking at Jon’s hands, before; the way that his knuckles are wider than the rest of the finger, or the way that he drums his fingers on his desk when he’s bored, or the way that his hands look wrapped around a mug of tea, black and over-steeped just like Jon likes it.

 They’d looked soft, Martin had thought.

 He’d been right.

 The kiss Martin places over the top of Jon’s knuckles is quick and impulsive, his lips still wearing the smile from something Tim had said and his other hand clasped with Sasha’s (her grip is impressively tight, like she’s afraid she’s going to drop him). The soft, surprised smile that Jon gives him is worth the entire world.

.

4

.

That’s how many cards Tim has to draw when Martin plays the Draw 4 Uno card, giving him an apologetic smile that does nothing to alleviate the fact that Tim had one card left and was about to win, goddammit!

 “Martin,” Tim says as he draws painstaking card after painstaking card. “Dearest Martin.” He draws another card. “Lovely, kind Martin.” He draws the final card and gives Martin his best solemn expression. “This is how you ruin relationships, Martin. This, right here.”

 Martin’s face is flushed pink, but his voice is casual when he says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Tim. I’m just playing the game.”

 Tim points at Martin, looking back and forth between Jon and Sasha for support. “Do you hear that? Nothing but disrespect. Treachery. A fatal blow!”

 Sasha looks like she’s trying not to laugh. Jon just looks bemused. “I mean, he is just playing the game,” Jon says with a small shrug. “And I believe he’s winning.”

 Tim looks over at the single card Martin’s holding, and before his brain can process the situation fast enough to call Martin out for not declaring it, Martin says quickly, “Uno!”

 “Jon!” Tim says, kind of wishing it hadn’t come out so whiny but feeling altogether too slighted to do anything about it.

 “My turn,” Jon says, and plays a reverse card.

 “Oh, I hate you all.”

.

3

.

That’s how many glasses of champagne Martin has had, which is a lot for him since he doesn’t really make a habit of drinking, especially wine, which tends to give him a headache even if he drinks white. But Jon had assured him that champagne is essentially tannin-free, having minimal skin and oak contact, so the only thing Martin had to worry about was his own terrible alcohol tolerance.

 Well, Jon hadn’t said that last part. That was just Martin.

 Three glasses, it seems, is enough to activate Martin’s least-favourite part about drinking—the complete inability of his brain to keep every single thing that comes across his mind from spilling out into the open. He’s already told Sasha that he accidentally stole the cardigan she keeps in her desk at work and, by the time he realized a week later, was too embarrassed to give it back. (“So that’s where that went!” Sasha had said with an accusatory tone.) He interrupted Tim mid-sentence to tell him, quite abruptly, that whenever Tim wore that black-and-white patterned shirt to work—which was just a bit smaller on him than the others and which he usually wore with the top two buttons unbuttoned—he could never stop staring at it. (“Really?” Tim had said with a smirk. “I suppose I’ll have to wear it more often then.”)

 And now, when Jon shoots Tim a very impressive glare and says, in his best professional voice, “I don’t think that’s quite work-appropriate, Tim,” Martin isn’t able to keep himself from blurting out that he finds Jon’s “archivist” voice really, really hot.

 The silence that blankets the room at that is deafening. Tim looks delighted; Sasha looks amused. And the flush that spreads over Jon’s face is really quite impressive, visible even in the low light of Sasha’s living room.

 Martin really shouldn’t have had that third glass of champagne.

.

2

.

That’s how many cats Sasha has, until now shut away in her bedroom to avoid being overwhelmed by the loud noise or being stepped on. At Tim’s insistence (and Jon’s not-so-subtle glances toward her closed door), Sasha finally relents, but not before pointing a stern finger at Tim and telling him to behave.

 (“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Tim says innocently, like he doesn’t always end up getting himself bitten or scratched.)

 Now, one cat—an orange-and-white shorthair named Darwin—is curled up in front of the television, currently being assaulted by Tim and Martin as they spoil him with pets and treats and the little feather on a string that he likes. The other—a midnight-black longhair named Emily with wide yellow eyes—is sprawled across Jon’s lap, her purring loud enough that Sasha can hear it from the kitchen where she’s subtly retrieving the bottle of midnight champagne from its hiding place. Sasha’s pretty sure she’s never seen Jon look at anything like that—with eyes full of love and wonder and the corners of his mouth pulled up into what looks like an involuntary smile.

 Sasha’s suddenly so very in love with him—with all of them—that she can barely breathe. It’s not an emotion she’s very comfortable with—she’s never gotten crushes easily, and the ones she’s had tended to ruin year-long friendships when they sprung up almost overnight, when her brain finally decided that it wanted more. Jon, she’s known for ages, their desks in research being directly across from one another and her persistence knowing no bounds. Martin longer still, having met him when he worked in the library and she worked in artifact storage. Tim is the most recent, technically, but god, it feels like she’s known him her whole life.

 There’s a small shriek from the living room, and when Sasha looks back, she sees Tim with his hand buried in the fur of Darwin’s stomach, Darwin’s teeth nipping at the flesh of Tim’s thumb. “Ow ow ow, sharp,” Tim says, but he’s laughing, and he continues to rub at Darwin’s belly with a smile on his face.

 Really, Sasha thinks as she turns back to the kitchen with a smile of her own, there’s nowhere she’d rather be.

.

1

.

That’s how many minutes there are until midnight. The glass of champagne in Jon’s hand looks exactly the same as all the others, but Sasha had insisted that it was better, Jon, it’ll taste heavenly, I promise, so he holds it and watches the numbers on the television screen begin to count down.

 It strikes Jon, as the seconds pass and midnight draws closer, that he’s never really felt any need to celebrate the new year. The two days—New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day—were technically indistinguishable from one other, delineated only by the human decision to make them so, and therefore what was the point really of staying up so late just to drink bad wine and stare at a clock? He’d gone to a New Year’s Eve party once with Georgie in uni, and it had been fine, but once they broke up he really didn’t see any reason to attend another. He disliked everything about New Year’s celebrations—the bad champagne, the resolutions nobody kept, the way he always wrote the date wrong for a few weeks afterwards.

 He doesn’t dislike this, though, he realizes, sitting with Tim pressed up against one side and Martin against the other and Sasha on the end of the couch next to Tim, all of them watching the countdown with rapt attention. Maybe the champagne is terrible and the resolutions are silly and having to constantly erase the last number of the year will be frustrating, but this—being together, celebrating together—really isn’t so bad at all.

 The countdown reaches ten, and Tim begins to vocalize the numbers along with it as they flash across the screen, altogether too loudly for this time of night. Sasha and Martin join in at eight, and Jon finally makes up his mind as the counter hits one, his lips shaping the word along with the rest of them.

 Glasses clink and champagne is drunk (not heavenly, Jon thinks, but more palatable than the rest) and kisses are shared as Happy New Year! flashes across the television screen. And, Jon thinks, it’s really quite lovely after all. To bring in the new year with the people you love.

.

0.

That’s how many of them wake up the next morning without mouths full of cotton and pounding headaches, the several empty bottles of champagne making themselves known.

 “Ughhhhh,” Tim groans eloquently, and falls back asleep.

[yuuchre-moved]

Summary: Hilda would never call herself a nervous person, but she starts to understand what it's like when she falls head over heels for her friend Marianne. Things start to get complicated when she invites Marianne over to her place and realizes she's going to have to hide the fact that she's a witch - while simultaneously keeping her head around her ridiculously cute friend. 

Being a witch isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At least, that’s the only thing Hilda can think as she carefully draws the beginnings of a protection spell onto yet another pendant for what might as well be the hundredth time that day. It’s delicate work, and she isn’t one to shy away from admitting she’s good at it, but today she just can’t seem to focus. Anticipation hums throughout her body, stirring butterflies in her stomach and clouding her senses with worry.  

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, breaking her concentration, and she drops her pen onto the table in defeat.

Her stomach drops when she looks at the name of the caller. Claude’s infuriating, knowing voice teasing her from across the city is something she really doesn’t need at the moment, but she knows she’ll feel guilty later if she ignores him.

“Hey, Claude.”

“Somebody has a date tonight,” Claude sings, and she doesn’t need to see his face to know he’s flaunting his trademark smug grin.

“I already told you, it’s not a date. Marianne and I are just hanging out at my place.” Frowning, she stands and walks over to the fridge.

“Yeah, but you wish it was, right?” He continues smoothly before she has the chance to scold him. “So have you told her you’re a witch yet?”

“No, I haven’t told her. Honestly, Claude, if I told every cute girl I met I was a witch, I’d have a mob waving torches at my door by now.” She balances her phone between her ear and shoulder and opens the fridge, rummaging around for something to drink.

“Then I hope you cleaned up a little. Last time I was over there, there wasn’t a single flat surface clear of potions or enchanted hair clips.”

She grabs a bottle of tea and slams the fridge shut, collapsing back onto her chair with a sigh. Eyeing the cluttered tabletop with disdain, she shoves aside the pendant and a pile of pens to set down her drink. “Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it. Don’t complain unless you’re going to come over here and clean it yourself. And of course I’ll be careful, she won’t suspect a thing.”

“So is she finding out before or after the wedding?”

“Claude!” Hilda flushes, listening to him burst into laughter. “Stop that. I haven’t even told her how I feel yet, so don’t go getting my hopes up for nothing.”

“Aww, have some faith in yourself. Do you think you’re going to confess tonight?”

Hilda groans. “ No . Maybe. I don’t know. Stop pressuring me!”

“Well, I’m looking forward to the full report on what happens later. I have to go now, but I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Only if you stop with the stupid jokes. I’ll see you later, Claude.”

She hangs up and nearly chokes on her tea when she sees the time. Marianne is coming at two, and it’s already a quarter past one. The state of her apartment hasn’t changed much since Claude had seen it. If she’s being honest, it may have gotten a little worse, and there was no time to call someone to help. She’d have to fix the place up on her own. The thought that made her stomach flip, but she’d do it for Marianne.

She stands, surveying her kitchen. Piles of craft supplies and potion ingredients alike are crammed into every corner and stacked precariously on the countertops. First and foremost, she has to take care of anything vaguely magical she’d left lying around the house. If Marianne finds out she’s a witch, it would do nothing but hurt the chances of her ever saying yes to a date, if it didn’t kill them completely.

Jasmine, the tiny black cat she’d adopted about a month ago from Marianne’s animal shelter, ambles into the kitchen and meows at Hilda.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do. I don’t suppose you’ll be willing to help?”

Jasmine stares blankly at her.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t say yes either. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… let’s get to work.”

*

When a soft knock sounds from the front of her apartment, Hilda nearly jumps out of her skin and drops her broom. She smooths her skirt, then her ponytail, resenting the fact that she never got to change. Putting the broom back into the kitchen, she flits over to the door and takes a deep breath before opening it.

“Marianne! Wow, you look gorgeous!”

She can’t help it — it’s the first thing she thinks, and it completely swamps her mind. Marianne’s blue hair is arranged into a delicate updo, all plaits and elegant tucks, and her gentle smile awakens the butterflies in Hilda’s stomach.

“Thank you,” she says, her cheeks pink. Hilda ushers her inside, glancing around to double-check that she hadn’t left anything strange lying around while cleaning. “You look lovely as well.”

Hilda laughs, but it’s high and strangled and she fears she actually might faint on the spot. “Oh, you’re too sweet. You can have a seat at the table over there. I’m going to grab a drink, do you want anything? I have tea, water, — um, that’s kind of it.”

Marianne sits, folding her hands on her lap and crossing her ankles, and it’s so cute and dainty that Hilda has to stick her head in the fridge to hide her huge smile.

“Um, tea sounds nice, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all.” Hilda grabs two bottles and slides into the seat across from Marianne, holding one of the drinks out to her. “Hope you like peach tea, it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

Marianne nods, her fingers brushing Hilda’s as she closes them around the bottle. Hilda cracks open her own bottle and takes a swig, if only to have something to do besides stare at Marianne. That damn phone call with Claude had frayed her nerves to threads, and she made a mental note to chew him out the next time they spoke. As if she needed that kind of teasing when she was already tripping over herself around Marianne.

Something about Marianne scatters the universal truths Hilda thought she knew like wind to a card tower. Usually, she’d balk at the thought of cleaning up on her own for someone. A lot of the time, she invites people over to do the cleaning. But Marianne makes Hilda want to jump up and retrieve all the peach tea she could ever want if it meant she was the cause of that beautiful smile.

“Hello, Jasmine.”

She looks up, following Marianne’s gaze down to her cat. Jasmine wanders over to Marianne and rubs against her leg, and Hilda tries not to sulk. Leave it to her cat to be better at attracting girls than she was.

“What do you have in your mouth?”

Marianne leans down to take something from Jasmine. Hilda leans over the table, wondering what the cat had gotten into now, and her heart drops when she sees what’s in Marianne’s hands.

“Oh, that’s nothing!” Hilda cups her hands and stretches over the table, motioning eagerly for Marianne to give her the necklace. “Can I see it?”

“Of course.” Marianne drops it in her hands, her eyes wide with concern. “I’m sorry I touched it, I was just worried that Jasmine got into something she shouldn’t have.”

“It’s okay.” The necklace’s stone pendant pulses with warm, blue light from the many enchantments she’d placed on it. Trust her sassy cat to grab something weird and witchy instead of one of the many, many toys Hilda has bought for her. “Remember how I mentioned I make and sell accessories? This is one of them. I’m branching out into jewelry and stuff.”

Marianne’s eyes light up. “That’s amazing. I can’t imagine how you managed to get a light inside.”

“Trade secret!” Hilda jams it into her pocket and wipes her sweaty palms on her skirt.

“You really make things like that, all on your own? You’re very talented.”

Hilda feels herself smile and jumps to her feet. “Want to see more? I think I have the perfect hair clip for you to try on.”

She takes Marianne’s arm and steers her towards her bedroom. With a silent prayer that she successfully hid all her magic ingredients, Hilda opens the door.

“I’ve got a bunch of stuff in here. You can sit on my bed, even though it’s a little messy right now.”

She turns to her vanity and starts to look through her hair accessory drawer. Though she didn’t actually have a specific accessory for Marianne to try on in mind when she suggested it, she isn’t about to pass up the chance to see how her crafts look on Marianne, who is already unfairly adorable.

“What’s this?”

Hilda turns and smothers a surprised squeal. Light glints off the clear tube Marianne holds up, the shimmering liquid inside sparkling like a pile of diamonds and glowing bright purple. Hilda can’t read what she’d scrawled on the crude tape label from here, but she vividly remembers scribbling down the words a couple of nights ago: Protection + Confidence Spell .

Hilda flies across the room, snatches the bottle, and shoves it into her makeup drawer in the span of a few seconds, struggling to keep her breathing even.

“P-Perfume. I’m dabbling in perfume.”

Marianne’s eyes are wide, and her forehead wrinkles endearingly. “Are you feeling okay?”

Hilda waves off her concern and turns to dig in her makeup drawer. “I’m totally fine. I just remembered, I have something I think will suit you. I started making lip gloss a while ago, and there’s this one that you need to try.”

It’s a stupidly desperate attempt to distract Marianne, but it was the first thing Hilda thought to say. She grabs a handful of tubes, intending to grab a random pink one when a specific gloss catches her eye.

It’s one she’s never tried herself, a rather recent creation, but among her more subdued experiments when compared to some of her other magic-inspired glosses. It’s a sweet, classic shade of pink, labeled “Strawberry Sunshine.” Hilda snorts. Not her most creative product name, but she can’t deny how much it reminds her of Marianne and the light she brings to a room.

“This one would look really good on you.” She tosses it to Marianne, who jerks back in surprise and fumbles the bottle. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry! I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s okay. I was just a little surprised, that’s all. I’m happy it didn’t break.” Marianne picks up the tube and gazes at it, her smile fading.

Hilda lingers by the vanity, picking at her shirt sleeve and trying to keep her expression even. She watches Marianne unscrew the cap and stare at the brush, holding her breath, and waits.

Marianne lowers the lip gloss with a sigh. “Hilda, I don’t think I can do this. I’m… not too great at this kind of thing.”

Hilda nearly trips over herself dragging the vanity’s chair over to Marianne so she can sit in front of her. “Here, I’ll do it. And don’t worry about your skills too much, you don’t even need it to look pretty in the first place.”

She sweeps Marianne’s bangs out of her face and tilts her chin up with the tips of her fingers, breath catching as Marianne blinks up at her. Hilda has never been close enough to tell that her eyes are a wonderfully warm shade of grey-brown, and they’re blissfully soft as she gazes at Hilda.

“Um, here we go,” Hilda murmurs as she pulls her hands away to pick up the lip gloss.

She unscrews the cap and leans forward, taking what she hopes is a subtle steadying breath before bringing the brush to Marianne’s slightly parted lips. It glides over her bottom lip, leaving a sparkling trail in its wake that Hilda can’t look away from.

“Wow, strawberry really does suit you.” Hilda giggles, beaming when Marianne’s lips quirk up into a small smile. “Hold on now, I’ve still got to do your other lip.”

As carefully as she can manage, Hilda spreads a thin layer over her top lip. Though the gloss’s shine can’t match the lovely sparkle in her eyes, it does nothing to quell Hilda’s growing urge to cup Marianne’s face in her hands and find out exactly what her lip gloss tastes like.

She clears her throat, her cheeks burning, and caps the gloss. “I was right, this color is perfect for you. Not that you weren’t perfect before— I mean, you’re lovely. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Marianne breaks into soft laughter, and Hilda can’t remember how to breathe. It’s the first time she’s seen Marianne smile this hard, this openly, and it’s absolutely mesmerizing.

“Oh, Hilda. You make me so happy,” she says between gasps.

Hilda thinks her heart might burst from adoration. Doubts be damned. She would be an idiot if she let a girl like Marianne slip away from her, especially when she was right here , warm and real.

“Marianne,” Hilda says, pride swelling in her chest when her voice is as even as she means it to be. She takes Marianne’s hands in hers and looks steadily into her eyes. “Can I kiss you?”

Marianne’s lips part in a small ‘o.’ She breaks into a smile again and squeezes Hilda’s hands, her voice breathless when she responds. “Yes.”

Hilda leans in and, as gently as she is able, presses her lips to Marianne’s. Her fingers curl against Marianne’s neck and she has to restrain her urge to beam, warmth blossoming in her chest. It’s sweet and wonderful and so much better than she ever imagined, because she’s really kissing Marianne.

She’s really kissing Marianne.  

Marianne pulls away after a few moments, her face flushed beautifully, brilliantly pink. “Um, does this mean…” She fiddles with her bangs, looking shyly at Hilda. “Maybe you’d like to go on a date sometime?”

“Yes! A billion times yes!” Hilda jumps up and nearly stumbles over something on the carpet. She looks down to see a round potion bottle lying there, labeled “Charisma Booster.” Well, she won’t be needing that any time soon. She sweeps it under the bed with her foot and clears her throat, looking back up at Marianne. Hilda owes it to her to come clean, and she might as well do it when she’s at such a high point.

“But, ah, there’s something I should probably tell you first.”

[cotillion-the-rope]

Not Hollow Chapter Five: Resting Grounds

I'm still not completely happy with this chapter, specifically the latter half with the Seer, but sometimes you just gotta accept that something ain't gonna be as good as you'd like it to be and just let it be good enough and upload it so you can move on to work on other things instead of continuing to stress about it.

On the way back to the Teacher’s Archive, Hornet filled Quirrel in on the specifics of the situation and what she needed his help with. She didn’t want to share that much information about her siblings and their suffering but Quirrel knowing the specifics might be important to his search. It was best not to takes chances with that kind of thing especially since she didn’t know how much he already knew or had regained memories of. He asked a few clarifying questions but tactfully didn’t press on anything sensitive such as Hornet’s connection to it all which he didn’t need to know.

When they arrived, he wasted no time. “I’d offer to teach you Monomon’s code so you could help but it’d probably take a while so… it might just be faster for me to look by myself,” he said before heading off to get to work, not even giving her time to reply if she’d wanted to.

That left her with nothing to do but wonder the halls with Grimmchild. … Maybe she should free him from the leash and muzzle. … Had he learned his lesson though? She couldn’t say for sure and she didn’t want to risk getting caught in an explosion to test it so no, she’d keep him leashed for now. She’d made sure nothing was tight enough to hurt him or cause any real physical discomfort so he’d be fine as he was for a while longer. If nothing else it should hammer home the point that he shouldn’t attack things that explode when hit and that he should listen the first time when told to do or not do something.

***

Quirrel wanted nothing more than to leave his old life behind, start new and fresh somewhere else. He’d been in the process of trying to get Lemm to join him, mostly for the sake of a companion because he was tired of traveling alone. But it seems, he wasn’t quite done with Hallownest yet.

The vessel, Ghost as Hornet called them, was someone he’d grown to consider a friend. He’d thought they had everything handled, they certainly seemed more than capable enough, but it seems they hadn’t. They’d cracked too. Which was bad enough by itself but Monomon had died to allow them that opportunity to fix the Infection. Quirrel couldn’t let her death be in vain and he couldn’t leave his friend to suffer if he could help it.

And so, he scoured through the Archives, looking for any mention on how to enter the Dream Realm in a way that would allow one to kill a god there. Luckily, despite his spotty memories, his ability to read Monomon’s shorthand was still intact. His vague memories of his time working in these halls came in handy; he knew for sure which places not to look and had some ideas on where to begin.

He started with everything that had been archived about the Dream Realm itself. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there wasn’t much, certainly nothing even speculating on how to access it. Next he looked into the Radiance herself because the Dream Realm was her domain. There was a lot more about her, more than even Hornet had told him on the way up here. Though he quickly found out that most of it had to do with research done on the Infection and how to contain her in a vessel. He’d have to shift through that to find anything else. It’d take a while but he didn’t have any other leads. At least it was an interesting topic.

***

“I found something!” Quirrel called as he rounded the corner into the hallway Hornet was headed down. That had taken longer than she would’ve liked but not as long as it could’ve.

She picked up her pace to quickly met up with him. “What is it?” She didn’t dare get her hopes up too high yet but hopefully he’d found something substantial.

“Well uh… it’s not a huge lead and might actually be a dead end now that I think about it,” well, wasn’t that just great? “but… there was apparently a tribe of moths that used to worship the Radiance before the Pale King arrived in Hallownest. There were rumors that they had a way of reading people’s minds and entering the Dream Realm. Alas, there’s not any information on how they did that or even if it’s true or really much about them at all. So uh… I might’ve gotten a bit excited over nothing substantial. It is rather fascinating though, so if nothing else at least we learned more of Hallownest’s past.”

Hornet had heard of the moth tribe before of course but never known that they had a way of supposedly entering the Dream Realm. If she had, her earlier connection about Ghost gaining that ability after she’d lost track of them of them in Crystal Peak would’ve lead her to a different part of Hallownest. “Actually, that might be huge,” she said. It might not be but she was tired of wondering the Archive’s halls regardless.

“Uh… really?”

Not bothering to reply, she took off towards the exit, trusting him to follow or not as he pleased. She just wanted out of here and to finally doing something again.

 -

As much as she was in a rush, she did pause outside Fog Canyon to finally free Grimmchild of the thread. He’d been tethered and muzzled more than long enough and they would hopefully not have to venture back into Fog Canyon any time soon.

As soon as he was free, he hissed at her before flying in a large circle, spitting a few fireballs at nothing. He then flew back to start hovering behind Quirrel’s shoulder as he caught up with her. She was his aunt and he had the audacity to follow someone else just because she’d rightfully disciplined him? … Let him then, she didn’t care.

“Ah, hello little Grimm,” Quirrel said with small hand wave. “Nice of you to join me. Now uh… Hornet, I’d appreciate an explanation. The moth tribe is long gone so even if they could…”

“They have graveyard,” Hornet interrupted. “And I’m almost one hundred percent positive Ghost went there during the time period they gained the ability to travel to the Dream Realm.”

“Oh uh… yeah, I guess that’s a good lead then.”

Without further word, Hornet took off again.

 -

Hornet had been to the Resting Grounds before of course – she’d had a long time to explore all of Hallownest – but she’d never really thought much of it. It was a graveyard of bugs she’d never known, what could there possibly be here that would be of interest to her? Nothing unless there was something here that could get her into the Dream Realm. She didn’t fancy the idea of graverobbing to get it but she’d do what she had to.

First, she had to wait for Quirrel and Grimmchild to catch up. Which thankfully they did fairly quickly.

“Are we going to be digging up graves?” Quirrel asked. “If so, we might want to go get some shovels first.” Well, he apparently didn’t mind the thought of doing such a thing so at least they wouldn’t be having an argument about it if it was necessary.

“I don’t know yet, let’s just explore the place some first.” Hornet resumed walking, going much slower now. She wanted to continue rushing but she didn’t know what they were looking for so slow going and careful examination along the way it was. “Tell me if you spot anything interesting, you too Grimmchild.”

Looking much more closely than she ever had before during her brief prior visits, Hornet couldn’t help but notice that the graves, though old enough for the lettering to be starting to wear away on more than a few of them, seemed to be well tended. Odd, why would anyone bother to take care the graves of a people long gone? Especially in a kingdom so devoid of life. … It also had to mean someone lived nearby that Hornet didn’t know about, right? A discomforting notion considering how long she’d watched over the land while thinking she knew of everyone who inhabited it.

Eventually after reaching and climbing most of the way up a vertical cavern, it was starting to look like they weren’t going to find anything without doing some digging. She was not looking forward to digging up a bunch of graves. She was determined though so…

“Ah, about time you should up!”

Hornet jumped, whipping out her needle to point at… a little old moth using a cane to walk as she approached out of the shadows of a smaller cave. She looked harmless but one could never know for sure so Hornet didn’t dare lower her needle yet.

“I’ve been expecting you,” the old moth continued, seemingly unphased by the needle pointed in her direction.

“Who are you?” Hornet didn’t like this. “And what do you mean you’ve been ‘expecting’ us?”

“You can just call me Seer. And what else could I mean by ‘I’ve been expecting you’ than exactly that? I knew Hallownest’s princess would find her way here eventually. You’re looking for a way to access the Dream Realm, correct?”

Hornet flinched a little, she didn’t like someone knowing who she was and what her goals were when she knew next to nothing about them. Before she could reply though, Quirrel stepped forward to stand beside her.

“Yep, that’s what we’re here for,” he said, seemingly unbothered by this whole situation. “I’m Quirrel, this is Hornet, and this,” he pointed up to Grimmchild still hovering just behind him, “is Grimmchild. We’re looking for a way to enter the Dream Realm so we can kill the Radiance. She’s been causing problems for far too long and there’s a friend of ours that we wish to save from her. I assume since you know what we’re looking for, you can help, right?”

“Yes, I can. Follow me.” Seer turn and started back into her cave.

Quirrel started following her with no hesitation. With a sigh, Hornet forced herself to relax and sheathe her needle at last and follow suit. She was still not a fan of this situation but it probably wasn’t dangerous and if this did lead to a way to kill the Radiance, putting up with it would be more than worth it.

Inside the cave was obviously Seer’s home. Most of the space was taken up by a nest of pillows that the Seer had already settled on. Quirrel sat down in front of her, resting his nail down on the ground beside him, he kept a hand near its hilt though so he wasn’t quite as nonchalant about all this as he seemed on the surface. Grimmchild settled on the pillows, the furthest from the Seer though so he wasn’t completely chill either. Hornet however was far too anxious to sit down so she stayed standing for now.

“How do get into the Dream Realm?” she asked as Seer started pulling out a tea set as if she were planning on serving them tea of all things.

Unphased, Seer continued her tea preparations. “The most efficient way to get into the Dream Realm for the purposes you wish to enter is by using a Dream Nail on an unconscious or near-unconscious bug.”

“Great, where do we get one?”

“Or two,” Quirrel added. “I’ve already come this far in this quest, I’d like to continue if possible.”

“I can give you each one but only in the Dream Realm.”

“That doesn’t help much then.” Hornet didn’t bother trying to hide her displeasure.

“No need to get feisty dear, that’s what the tea is for. I said the Dream Nail is the most efficient way into the Dream Realm, not the only way.”

“So, you’re going to drug us?” Hornet interrupted before she could say more. That wasn’t a pleasant idea but… there probably wasn’t any other choice.

“Yes. It’s mostly harmless though, you should come out the other side feeling nothing but a little groggy. My people used it frequently with little consequence.”

“Your people being the old moth tribe that worshipped the Radiance?” Quirrel asked, seemingly more fascinated by that than the fact that Seer was planning on drugging them.

“Yes. I’m the last.” Suddenly Seer sounded a lot more somber.

Like with Hornet, Quirrel had the tact not to press any further, staying silent instead. Holding back a sigh, Hornet lowered herself to sit beside him.

“Watch her while I do this,” she said. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything she’s not supposed to while I sleep.”

“Hmm… I’d love to but, like I said, I’d like this Dream Nail thing too. How can I assist in killing the Radiance without one after all?”

Hornet was tempted to object; perhaps she didn’t need his help with that part after all but… even if she didn’t want to admit it, she might. Killing a god wasn’t something to be taken lightly after all. And besides, he had very good reason to want the Radiance dead too; he’d been close to Monomon – in what way Hornet wasn’t sure but definitely very close – he wouldn’t want her death to be in vain just like how Hornet didn’t want Herrah’s to be. And the questions he’d asked about Ghost while she’d explained things to him suggested he was fond of them and possibly even consider them a friend. So she couldn’t deny his help, when he was actively offering it.

“Little Grimm can watch over us though, can’t you buddy?” he continued looking over at Grimmchild on the pillows, watching the three of them. He chirped what sounded like an affirmative in reply.

“Good,” the Seer cut in. “With that settled, it’s nearly tea time.”

 -

Hornet rarely remembered her dreams and even when she did, they were never vivid. But here, if she didn’t know better she’d think she was still awake. She was standing on a platform, floating in a bright sky and surrounded by clouds.

“This place is actually quite lovely.”

She snapped around to see that Quirrel was standing beside her. Which actually made sense, they’d come here together so why wouldn’t they remain so. Grimmchild was flying just behind him though.

“Grimmchild, you’re supposed to be keeping watch,” Hornet said, giving him a stern look.

Grimmchild paused for a second before turning to look at her. He then made an apologetic sounding chirp before vanishing, leaving behind a few red symbols in the air that quickly faded too. As suspected though, he could come in and out of the Dream Realm as he pleased.

“Now let’s figure out what we’re supposed to do.” Hornet grabbed Quirrel’s wrist again and started dragging him towards the edge of the platform. Before the reached it another one appeared a short distance away. They both easily made the jump and the next one after that and so on until they reached a platform with a glowing moth on it, presumably Seer even if it didn’t look much like her.

“Here,” she said. “It’s long past time this stasis came to an end.” She lifted her arms and two bundles of light shaped like nails appeared before them.

Without hesitation, Quirrel grabbed the hilt of his. He vanished with a flash of light, presumably returning to the waking world. Not letting herself hesitate, Hornet followed suit; there weren’t any other options available.

 -

She woke feeling rather groggy and sluggish, looking up at Quirrel standing over her. Wordlessly he held out a hand, offering to help her stand up. She wouldn’t normally accept such an offer but whatever, they were allies in this so she might as well.

Back on her feet, she glanced around the cave. They were in the exact same spot they’d been in when they’d gone to sleep. Seer was there too, looking up at them.

Hornet reached for the Dream Nail, instinctively knowing there was no physical component to it, making it more a spell than anything else. She still wasn’t sure how to use it but asking Seer to explain the ins and outs of it shouldn’t take too long. Then they’d be off to kill the Radiance at long last.

[beedaleebjd]

Psssst do you happen to have any tips or beginners links for newbies who are interested in getting in to the BJD hobby? 👀

*SOFT SCREECH* ALICE COME DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE WITH ME... /CLAMBERS FOR

This is a very slap-dash tips post, because a full fledged crash-course would take me much longer than a day to assemble. I think this could get someone started, but I can always answer specific questions if you have them in the future. ❤️

BJD 101: For a rundown of definitions, terminology, and origins of the hobby, I highly recommend checking out the Wikipedia article. (Warning for old vaguely spooky doll photos) I honestly wish I just read this when I got started, haha. It’s not everything, but it’s definitely a start.

Study! Read as much as you possibly can!! Especially terminology and maintenance. I highly recommend watching a bunch of unboxing and review videos- it might seem silly, but they're really helpful to get an idea of scale, how they function/pose, and how they look and feel when handled by a human. I also recommend trying to find owner photos of dolls you’re interested in, because sometimes the store photos are limited!

Join a community! Consider joining a forum like den of angels or a facebook bjd group like BJD Addicts! Exposure to the hobby is really helpful and you learn way faster. It’s fine if you’re shy, you don’t have to interact if you don’t want to- I like lurking DoA for the valuable tutorials and threads on doll brands I'm interested in. Tip: You can view some of DoA’s threads without an account by searching "[subject/doll of choice] den of angels" in google, but i got tired of that pretty fast. Signing up takes a few weeks to get approved but it's worth it for all the knowledge, even old archived stuff.

Window-shop until you drop!! I think the number one regret in the hobby is 'too many dolls, not enough time to love any of them'. So I HIGHLY recommend making wish-lists. These help a lot with avoiding impulse purchases and buyer’s remorse. There are a loooot of dolls out there, so if you've seen a huge majority of them, you'll be more picky.

For me, wishlists include both dream/grail dolls, tentative desires i’m not sure about but want to remember the name of, dolls I could never afford but feel validated writing down somewhere, and also cataloging info- measurements, wig/eye/shoe sizes, resin colors, price, current availability, dealer websites, etc. it becomes such a godsend when you shop for them. you’ll thank me later!!

I spent a lot of time browsing dealer websites like Alice's Collections, Legenddoll, Denver Doll, DOLK Station, etc- I linked some of those here. This is to see what my tastes are. Not EVERY doll company will go through all or any dealers, but it’s a good start!

If you’re the social type, going to conventions or local bjd meetups can help with getting an idea of your preferences! I accidentally walked by one at sakuracon last year and got to hold an MSD and an 11cm tiny, and that was REALLY helpful for me to realize I DID like those sizes. If other doll owners will let you hold theirs, I totally recommend it! (Always ask first, of course! Not everyone is comfortable with it!)

Go!! Slow!!! if you think you're taking it easy, go even slower. i'm so serious. it's so easy to get dazzled, over-eager, or totally overwhelmed by this hobby. especially if you have a habit of hyper focus/special interest tenancies like i do. 

Patience is a virtue anyway: If you’re not buying second-hand or in-stock dolls, you will be waiting a while for your doll. Anywhere from a few months to a year, depending on the company and how backlogged they may be at any given point. Dolls are usually pre-order and take time to be made.

Some people like to just buy sculpts and let a character ‘come to them’, which is absolutely valid so if you wanna just go on a feeling that’s great!! i totally can’t afford that route most of the time, so I spend a lot of time mood-boarding for my potential dolls using pinterest and my own art to see just how in love with an idea i am and highly recommend it. I’ll ramble about this in another post soon.

Budget! They are not very cheap like 10-20$ fashion dolls at wal-mart, so those new to the hobby may be shocked.This hobby is an investment and an indulgence/luxury, as with most Nice Things. But don’t be discouraged! There are affordable dolls out there, a lot of Dealer websites offer layaway plans, and the second-hand market is always circulating things!

Here is a DoA list of dolls that are under 300$. 

Note: Size of dolls often scale with price, so the bigger it is, the more expensive (and HEAVY) it will be. Some videos on BJD sizing here and here, but Flickr is crawling with height comparisons as well.

Craft or Not To Craft: Are you team 'i'm gonna sew/craft stuff/do wigs/eyes/faceups for my doll' or team 'i'm gonna buy clothes/props/faceups/wigs/etc from other artists!'? I know most people end up being a little bit of both, but these things both cost time or money (or both) so you wanna think about that in the overall price when you're considering a doll. It seems intimidating, but really, it’s the responsible thing to do. I’d rather plan for it than have a naked sad doll to feel bad about. Some personal recommendations below helped me get started:

Wigs: Monique Gold Collection wigs are affordable in the 20 dollar range, and have incredibly soft fiber! (You can find a lot of these available through ebay sellers as well)

Eyes: Lemonjellyshoppe and CandyKittenEmporium have some incredible eyes and also do custom orders!

Sewing Patterns: DGRequim on etsy and SproutyDoll have both been very nice to use and easy understand and modify to fit your doll!

When you’re savvy on the sizing of your dolls and if you’re comfy with secondhand sales, Facebook groups like BJD Addicts Sales & Commissions, BJD Lovers Sales, and BJD Adoption has a lot of people selling BJDs and accessories, oftentimes discounted for de-stashing or collection overhauls!

In addition to the other dealer sites I linked before, Dollmore (which also has an ebay shop) has a lot of options on everything! 

Rec@sts and the community- This is a veeery hot button topic, but you’ll probably see a lot of it the more you get into the hobby. I don’t want to talk about it a lot because of the negativity it attracts, but to sum it up: BJDs are essentially commissioned art pieces. They are hand sculpted by an artist or small group of artists, and then cast in resin and refined and strung by hand. There are people that will cast copies of them and sell them for a very cheap profit. To put it simply, it’s theft, and it effects the livelihood of people that make a living of their art. A lot of companies stop making dolls because they can’t compete anymore. Most official doll/art related conventions (LDoll, Resin Rose, etc) ban rec@sted dolls, as well as DoA and several of the facebook groups. Be sure to read all the rules of groups/forums you join them.

A lot of people come into this hobby unaware of this and buy a bootleg doll on sites like Ebay or Aliexpress, and then get turned away from the community without understanding why. There are understandable circumstances that cause someone to end up with a bootleg doll, but it’s also important to respect the artists and creators that share their art with the public.

On that note: Sometimes people will resell 2nd hand dolls as legit when they are not. Be careful about who you buy second-hand dolls from. Also, keeping certificates of authenticity (CoAs), receipts, and original packaging is must if you ever plan to resell your doll!

I... think that’s everything major I can think of... at least enough to get someone started? I know a lot of it is a bit vague, but if you wanted my opinion on a certain brand or size of doll or budgeting tips if money is tight, I’d be happy to give my personal preferences on that separately!! But otherwise, good luck and happy treasure hunting! ヾ(＾-＾)ノ

[beatrice-otter]

An Open Letter to AO3 Regarding Fandom Tagging Changes

ETA: Checking the archive this morning, I found that the Wonder Woman (2017) tag no longer redirects to DCEU, but takes you directly to Wonder Woman (2017).  Also, someone said that even last night, you could (from the DCEU page) click on the "Fandoms" list on the sidebar and filter to just Wonder Woman (2017), but I don't know if that worked last night when the tags were merged, because in my poking around in disbelief, I forgot the 'filter by fandom' option on the sidebar.  I am writing another message to support thanking them for fixing the issue.

ETA 2: @melannen checked with the DCEU taggers and confirmed that redirecting the Wonder Woman (2017) tag was a mistake and not part of an overarching plan for DCEU or any other megafandom.  Somebody clicked the wrong button, I guess, and they fixed it as soon as they figured out it had happened.  Thank you to all the people working hard at tag wrangling and support to keep the archive going, and fix problems like this.

My original letter is below the read-more.

This is what I just sent off to AO3's Support. Hi!  First, before I get started, I want you to know that I have loved AO3 since its beginning.  I know how huge an endeavor it is, and how much work goes on behind the scenes (all of it on a volunteer basis), and I am grateful for it.  I also understand that there are situations where there is no good answer to a problem because of either technical issues behind the scenes or conflicting needs/wants of users, and I actively try to be charitable in how I interpret the decisions the archive makes, for the reasons stated above.  I know that large fandom trees were straining your servers, and you needed to find a solution. The flexibility of the tagging structure on AO3 is about 90% of the reason I love the archive.  And by that I mean, the ability to use tags to find EXACTLY what I want to read, instead of slogging through hundreds (or thousands, in some fandoms) of fics I am not interested, is THE MAJOR THING AO3 has always (until now) done better than any other fic archive or website.  My main frustrations with the archive have been when tags aren't granular enough--when I want them to be more specific than they are.  For example, when I wish that character tags were filtered by whether someone was a major or minor character in the story, or when I'm trying to find fic specifically about X-Men: Days of Future Past and get redirected to all XMFC fic.  And I don't think I'm alone in this.   So any change to make them less granular, even when it might make the back end run smoother, is a big problem for me. In particular, your that solution to current tagging woes (merging sub-fandom tags into one over-arching fandom tag) has broken the archive for me in some of my fandoms, and (if it is rolled out across other fandoms in the same way) will break all of those fandoms for me, rendering the archive virtually useless for doing anything other than reading fic I have already bookmarked. As a first step, merging the individual movies of the Star Wars Original Trilogy together into one tag is a pretty good decision, and I was actually surprised that it hadn't been done already.  It works because the three movies of that trilogy tell one unified story with pretty much the same characters.  There may be people who love one movie in it and hate the others, but I've never met any; and the fandom has not historically split along intra-trilogy lines.  There are very few people who, when they click on "Return of the Jedi" and get all OT fics, are going to be seriously upset or discommoded by it (and many who would actually PREFER to get all fics in that trilogy).  So when I saw the tumblr post saying you were going to do that, I went, "oh, yeah, good idea, that makes sense," and went about my day.  I assumed that other instances of merging things would be similarly merging things that were already a unified fannish category with little individual distinction and went on about my business. Then I found out that all of the DCEU movies have been merged together into one fandom.  That, my friends, is  WHOLE DIFFERENT BALL OF WAX.  Unlike the three movies of the OT, there are NO characters that are shared between all DCEU movies.  There are no overarching plot threads between them all.  There are MAJOR differences in plot, characters, theme, and many other points, between these movies.  It is quite possible to love one movie, and hate, loathe, and despise another.  There are LARGE swathes of the fandom that don't overlap.  There are many people, like me, who love one movie, like another, and actively try to avoid other movies in that megafandom.  This is quite common for megafandoms.  Every megafandom I'm familiar with--Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, MCU, Stargate, DCEU, Star Trek--is too varied for people to like all of it equally; you end up with a handful of people who genuinely like the whole thing and most people who focus on parts of it.  Except now, there's no way to separate out the stuff you ACTUALLY want to see from all the OTHER mass of stuff in the megafandom.  And while that's not that big a deal in a small fandom where there isn't much fic to sort through anyway, it's a pretty BIG problem in a megafandom with is, you know, MEGA, with lots of fic. For example, I LOVE Wonder Woman (2017), am only occasionally interested in in the DCEU Superman and Justice League movies, and am only willing to read Suicide Squad fic if it's a Harley Quinn story that's mostly comics canon with a few Suicide Squad details.  With the old way the archive was organized, this was not a problem.  I could regularly look through the Wonder Woman (2017) tag for new fic, dip into Superman and Justice League on the rare occasions that I was in the mood for Batfleck and Cavilman, and pretty much never have to deal with anything Suicide Squad.  Now, I click on Wonder Woman (2017), and instead of getting pages of exactly what I want, I get the entire DCEU.  On that first page of 20 fics, there are currently only four that I would even be interested in considering reading.  Your tag change has dropped my rate of finding interesting things from 100% to 20%.  That is an 80% reduction in my ease of finding fic.  An 80% reduction in how useful your tagging system is. Let me repeat that: your new tagging system has decreased the usefulness of this archive by 80%. We're not talking, "oh, a small reduction in user satisfaction for a HUGE gain in back-end functionality."  I don't know how much easier this makes things on the back-end for you, but it is a FRICKING HUGE reduction in foundational ease-of-use for the entire site.  This is not a minor change.  This makes the most basic function of the site--finding fic to read--80% harder.  The only scenario in which I would view this as a workable solution--not a good solution, mind you, but one that I could accept--is if it was literally a choice between this and closing the archive. Let's talk about what my use of the archive would have to look like going forward if this change is maintained and expanded, so you can see what I mean.  Up until this change, if I wanted Wonder Woman fic, I clicked on the tag and got it!  Now I can't do that.  So my options are: 1) slogging through the entire DCEU, 80% of which I don't want.  This is the only way to be sure I see every Wonder Woman fic I actually want.   Problem: it will take me at least 80% longer to find stuff I ACTUALLY want.  So, I would be less likely to look for new fic, and more likely to just go re-read old favorites, because it's so much quicker to do.   As a reader and a writer, this is a problem for me, because I do want to read new fic, and I want other people to be able to find MY new fic. 2) putting together a long string of boolean search terms, probably based on characters.  So, for example, I couldn't just search for "Diana (Wonder Woman)" because she appears in too much Justice League and Batman Vs. Superman fic (which I very seldom want to read).  Searching for her would be better than just DCEU, because I wouldn't get Suicide Squad, but it would still be a ton of slogging through fics I don't want.  I could search for "Diana (Wonder Woman)" and use the "Search within results" box to exclude Justice League and Batman and Superman.   But that would miss any fics about Etta Candy or Steve Trevor or Hippolyta or any other Amazon in which Diana didn't appear.  So, then, maybe use boolean search terms for Diana OR Steve OR Etta OR Hippolyta, and eliminating Justice League and Batman and Superman.  Except that would still miss any fic that is, say, general worldbuilding for Themyscira, that doesn't have Diana or Hippolyta in it.  And I love worldbuilding, but not everybody tags for it.  Do I have to build up a boolean search string for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE in the hopes of catching everything?  How many boolean terms can I use at once?  Or do I need to run several separate searches, which would mean sorting through a lot of these fics multiple times, as they would pop up under multiple search strings?  I would STILL probably end up missing things that I would be interested in, and it would take A SHIT-TON of extra effort on my part.  Far more effort, for less reward.  And, again, as both a reader who wants to find new fic and as a writer who wants other people to be able to find MY fic when I write it, everything about this is terrible. 3. Use AO3 Savior to do some of the filtering for me.  I don't know, blacklisting some tags would probably cut down on the number of boolean terms to rack up, but then I would have to go in and un-blacklist things on the rare occasions I actually wanted to read Batfleck fic.  But this would become of less and less utility as people stopped tagging for individual movies and just tagged everything with the current canonical metatag for DCEU.  Also: there is only one site I know if in which browser extensions are required to make the site useable, and that is tumblr which is a shambling hellscape of a site.  Is that AO3's new goal?  To become as user-hating as tumblr?  Because while I appreciate how hard you guys work, that's what this change feels like. Now, I know you may be reading all this and going, "well, yeah, Wonder Woman fic is a problem, but you won't even notice the changes in most fandoms!" Let me present to you a list of the fandoms I have read the most of over the last year: Star Wars (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Star Trek (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) MCU (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Wonder Woman (but not the rest of the DCEU) DC Comics (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Rivers of London And much as I love Rivers of London, I've spent a LOT more time reading fic in those other fandoms, because there's simply so much more of it, even when you only count the small pieces of each megafandom I'm interested in. What this means is that if you keep this tagging change and roll it out to other megafandoms, you will SERIOUSLY AND FUNDAMENTALLY BREAK how I use the archive.  And given a) how many other people on this archive are in megafandoms and b) how large a percentage of the people in megafandoms only read fic in one corner of that megafandom ... you are seriously and fundamentally breaking the websites functionality for a very large percentage of your userbase. At one fell swoop, you turn AO3 from an archive I love and support (including financially) to an archive I hope is replaced (soon) with something better, because it's a pain in the ass pretty much every time I try to use it.  Please, please, please, find some other way to fix the problem.  If you need money for more servers, or to hire a professional coder to do some serious backend changes to make things workable with the old tagging structure, I'd be fine with that and I would contribute to any fundraiser you did.  Your current choice is not a solution, it's a nightmare.

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The Millionaire Guide On SEO 2019 To Help You Get Rich

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SEO differs from local lookup engine optimization in that the particular latter is targeted on customizing a business' online presence therefore that its web pages is definitely going to be displayed simply by search engines when a consumer enters a local search intended for its products or services. The challenge for webmasters plus SEO is that Google will not want business people to rank regarding lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that creates A LOT of pages upon a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variants page-to-page. In time, the range between social media marketing management, channel growth, and SEO will be considerably blurrier than it really is usually today. In 2016, SEO experts have got determined which factors are almost all likely to affect your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Customers and marketers will need in order to begin implementing multiple forms associated with digital marketing tactics including compensated search, social media marketing, nearby SEO, in addition to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if they hope to rule a given Google SERP. Before beginning with this, the SEO experts should visit your organization and realize each and every aspect associated with your company so that they will can help your achieve your own marketing goals. What really matters in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is what a person prioritise today to ensure that will in 3-6 months you may see improvements in the high quality of your organic traffic. Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad invest by 2019.

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If you are carrying out a professional SEO audit to get a actual business, you are going in order to have to think like the Google Search Quality Rater And also a Google search engineer to supply real long-term value to the client. 44. Give your own social media profiles an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. 10% of our experts believe that will there's likely to be the lot of focus on cellular in 2019, as older SEOs realize optimizing for desktop is definitely pointless. White hat SEO is not really just about following guidelines, yet is about ensuring that the particular content google search indexes and consequently ranks could be the same content the user will see. A greater number associated with people will stick to tone of voice search, so SEO specialists may need to adjust to this particular relatively new kind of research. Seo or SEO is definitely a powerful method to generate targeted traffic to your site and hopefully increase your bottom part line. 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In case you are improving user knowledge by focusing primarily on the particular quality of the MC associated with your pages and avoiding -- even removing - old-school SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques - those certainly are usually positive steps to getting even more traffic from Google in 2018 - and the type associated with content performance Google rewards is usually in the end largely with least about a satisfying consumer experience. For instance, when I'm logged in to Google+ and I actually search for SEO, I have the following in my top 5 search results. Black head wear SEO practice involves breaking almost all of the rules and rules of the search engine. Every time you observe or hear the phrase research engine optimization, ” substitute exactly what create quality and indicating relevance” and you'll have the correct mindset permanently SEO work. 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[hmmasterlist]

ANNOUNCEMENT: Activity Check Results, Rule Changes

Hello everyone!

This is a seriously important announcement that affects everyone in the community, so we ask that you all give this a read. This post contains the July 15th activity check results, but also a massive rule change: we have completely edited how we handle activity on the HMMasterlist.

Our next activity check will be Saturday, August 5th.

Activity Check Results 

New Arrivals:

Yuzuki

Passed:

Aden

Angela

Barrett

Chase

Ford

Gill

Iris

Klaus 

Maya

Minori

Mist

Mistel

Odette

Tori

Wayne

Warned:

Ann 

Chelsea 

Frey 

Gwen 

Holly 

Jamie 

Lest 

Molly 

Rachel 

Renee 

Dropped and Available for Reservation

Harvest Goddess 

Witch Princess 

Yue 

Characters listed under the “new arrivals” and “passed” sections are in good standing! Warned characters must pass the August 5th activity check or else they will be dropped.

Activity Rule Changes

Our current activity system was simply not working out for us: we thought that a month was too long for an activity check period, eight posts were too much if we lessened the time period, and that the warning check system had to go.

We have made the decision to switch to a three week activity period. All current members — plus members who join up to a week before the next scheduled activity check — are responsible for four posts (of at least four sentences in length) in this three week period. New arrivals who join a week before the check are only responsible for two posts, and anyone who joins the day before/the day of an activity check will receive a faux pass.

We are completely scrapping the warning check system. Before, you would have to fail an activity check for a month-long activity period, and then fail a warning check two weeks later to be removed from the HMMasterlist. To be dropped after these rule changes, you must fail two consecutive three week long activity periods to be dropped from the masterlist. Same amount of time, but just a little different!

If a character does not make the four posts required to pass the activity check, they receive an activity warning (this is not the same thing as the warning one would receive for OoC issues, like being rude to another member.) If a character with an activity warning does not pass the activity check following the check where they received their activity warning, they will be removed from the HMMasterlist immediately.

Example: Molly passes activity check #1 by making 4 posts. Molly does not meet the 4 post minimum for activity check #2 and therefore fails. Molly is given an activity warning and must pass the next activity check by making 4 posts. Molly makes 4 posts before check #3 and therefore is in good standing. However, if Molly does not make 4 posts prior to activity check #3, Molly is immediately dropped from the community and available for reservation.

If your character is dropped from the HMMasterlist following an activity check, you may reserve them again immediately afterwards. However, if you are dropped, re-reserve your character, and then fail the next activity check: you must wait 24 hours to re-reserve. In both scenarios, it is possible for someone else to get a reservation in for the dropped character before you get to reserve them again. We want to be fair to everyone, but we hope that the risk of losing your character is enough incentive to remain active.

To accommodate the new activity period length, we’ve also changed the length of our semi-hiatus status. A semi-hiatus will now last for three weeks; a hiatus will still last for six.

We have not changed the wording of the rule that states you cannot request a hiatus until passing your first activity check; it just now means you can request a hiatus a week sooner that you would have been able to otherwise.

Other Rule Changes

We’ve lightly tweaked the wording of some of the rules. Most of these are related to the above rule changes (like if a rule said “eight posts” it now says “four posts”, most likely.) There was only one rule that was changed that was not related to the activity rule changes above. As we use a password system for reservations, we decided to edit the rule that states “if you wish to remain private, indicate this in your reservation message”, as we do not answer any reservation asks publicly unless they are from roleplaying blogs already a part of HMMasterlist. We have included a disclaimer stating that due to our password system, all reservations are kept private.

We have, however, added some rules.

We have implemented a rule requesting that characters make a simple text post tagged with “hmml:activity check” after an activity check has taken place. This is just to make life easier for us mods when we check everyone’s archives for the next activity check. This post does not count as an OOC post.

We’ve decided to allow character development/roleplay starter/prompt memes every Monday. Here are some examples of what we are talking about. You can reblog them from elsewhere (other rp blogs, blogs dedicated specifically to these types of things) or make one from scratch for the community.

We ask that you only send meme asks to those characters who have reblogged/posted something asking for one. If you do not wish to partake in Meme Mondays, simply do not reblog/post any memes! You are in no way obligated to answer any unwanted asks you receive.

Meme posts will only count towards activity if they are at least four sentences long and lead to a closed roleplay (ie - a roleplay between two people). For example, if Jamie sends Molly a prompt, Molly’s response only counts for her activity if her response is over a paragraph in length. However, if Jamie cannot continue a roleplay from what Molly posted, it does not count for Molly’s activity: there is no actual roleplay between two people. If Jamie can respond, the thread that ensues would count for both Jamie and Molly’s activity, as long as each reply was a paragraph in length.

We intend for this to be a light-hearted ordeal to spur activity and character development, and we request that everyone is respectful of what they post onto the dashboard. There is certain content we require to be tagged and placed under a read more regardless — it’s fine to roleplay this content as long as you follow our rules — but use your better judgment to gauge what is and isn’t appropriate, or what could potentially really bother someone to see on their dash.

Meme Mondays will start this upcoming Monday, the 17th.

If you have any questions about the changes to our rules, do not hesitate to contact us! We will be happy to help in whatever way we can.

Survey

There will soon be a short survey — regarding ideas for events and any other suggestions members may have — posted on the OOC blog for everyone to fill out. This survey is completely anonymous! While it is not mandatory to fill one out, we would greatly appreciate if you all would take the time to submit one. Any feedback or idea, no matter how small or vague, is a great help to us. Thank you! ♥

Affiliates

Previously, our affiliate page stated that we only affiliated with Harvest Moon/Rune Factory/Story of Seasons blogs. This is no longer the case: we are accepting affiliate requests from any roleplaying community (regardless of genre, type, or fandom) as well as any Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Rune Factory blogs (fanblogs, fanart blogs, etc).

Blog Changelog (aka minor changes that don’t really matter)

We now have a link to our new arrivals tag in our “important” section on the right side of the blog’s homepage. This section also now contains the date of the next activity check.

I announced this previously, but we now also have a promo blog. Any advertising for our community will be posted from that blog, and it is not mandatory to follow.

Our credit page has also be updated to include anything used on hmmasterlistpromo; I’ve also included some links to things we did not have listed on there before.

Our tag page has been updated to include the hmml:activity check tag and the hmml:promo tag.