#it's an old piece and an exercise so i was both too young and too insecure to watermark it when I did it

[lucky-numberme]

found out a popular literary magazine website has been using a piece of my fanart as the header for their Hallowoods page without crediting me 🙃🙃🙃🙃

[howtofightwrite]

If I had a character in a medieval fantasy setting who was a short-statured young woman with some limited basic training in short bow archery and other combat arts, but generally a bit weedy, how quickly could she adapt to a longbow? The bow is notably too big for her, having been inherited from a large adult man. The process of learning and gaining the strength is intended to be difficult. Thank you!

I feel like I'm repeating myself, and we may have covered this recently, but the process of using a bow will result in a lot of upper body strength. It's fairly strenuous exercise and that will result in some bulking up. I've mad the joke that archers will be absolutely ripped, but it's also true. If she's pulling eighty to ninety pounds of force with every shot, that will quickly build muscle. That's true of both short bows and longbows. This should be fairly self explanatory, but less weight in the draw, the less power the bow has. If you have a very light draw (say, around 30lbs), then your bow won't be useful for much beyond short range target practice. Short bows tended to start around 80lbs. This is contrast to modern bows (usually used in hunting), which rarely exceed 60lbs as their maximum draw weight. There's debate on the draw weight of a historical English longbow, but estimates range from around 80 to 185lbs. (There was also a belief at the time, that you had to be raised to use the English longbow, because of it's extremely high draw weight. So, under conventional wisdom at the time, it wasn't a weapon you could learn to use later in life, you needed to be raised from childhood to use these things.)

So, here's something kind of goofy about this, that's really worth thinking about. The English longbow was ~6ft long (about 1.8 meters.) This is the average height of an adult male (at least, in theory, the statistical average is a few inches shorter.) Now, if you've ever looked at a bow, you may have noticed that you don't hold it on one end. In fact, you grip the weapon at the mid-point. Meaning, that while the weapon itself is 6ft long, only about 3ft of that protrudes up or down from your arm. Similarly, the draw length of the English longbow is slightly under 3 feet. (I don't have the exact draw length, but the arrows used were 3ft, and for obvious reasons, you can't overdraw beyond the length of the arrow.)

So, just how small is your character?

Arm span will be slightly greater than an individual's height, but for someone to be too small to draw the bow, they'd need to be under 4ft tall. They also wouldn't have meaningful difficulties aiming the weapon unless their shoulder height was less than 3ft from the ground. That works out to someone who's about 3'10.” Going by modern growth rates, that would put her at around six to eight years old. (Ironically, this correlates to roughly the age where children would begin training on the English longbow.)

So, you're telling me, your character is smaller than a 10 year old?

Also, to be clear, we're talking about the English longbow, one the largest handheld bows ever fielded. If you're using, “longbow,” in the more modern colloquial meaning, and referring to something like a war bow, the bow would be significantly smaller. So, for weapon size to be a serious issue, they'd need to be even smaller than I'm estimating.

Before someone says, “maybe they meant the siege bow,” yeah, that's not a real thing. Siege bows are (as far as I've ever been able to find), a modern item. They're roughly the same size as an English longbow, and it's possible that someone once referred to the longbow as a, “siege bow,” but I've never seen that. The closest thing to what the name evokes, would be the ballista, which was an actual artillery piece, and is slightly closer to a crossbow than a bow. Somewhat obviously, your character is not going to be trying to carry around and deploy a ballista from her backpack.

I get the whole idea of the, “small girl, big weapon,” (and, yes, I know you described her as a woman, but then proceeded to try to infantilize her by giving her a weapon too large for her to effectively use.) Adult women, on average, are not that much smaller, on average, than their male counterparts. If a weapon is too large for a woman to use, it's too large for a man to use. If you're trying to say, “well, she's little and weak,” you are deliberately trying to infantilize her. Please, cut that shit out.

And, while we're on that subject, if she's an archer, she's going to be absolutely ripped. Now, no judgment whatsoever if that's not the mental image you had planned out, and yes, because of their layer of subcutaneous fat, women tend to display less of their musculature development than men with similar builds. (Actually, both men and women rarely display much of their muscular definition unless they're intentionally dehydrating. Regardless, she's not going to look like a body builder.) All this really means is that her muscles would be stealthier, and trying to hide from casual examination, but, you're also talking about a character who could probably bench press you, before she started training on the longbow. (And, yes, I'm saying this without knowing your gender or overall level of fitness.)

How quickly could she learn? That's not incredibly clear. On one hand, my perspective is that a bow is a bow, and while there would probably be some learning curve, it is still the same weapon. Beyond that the hard part would be adjusting to the higher maximum draw weight. However, contemporary sources claimed that learning the English longbow required that you start training with it in childhood, and that it was effectively impossible to learn later in life. I'm inclined to believe that this wasn't exactly as impossible as those authors believed, but they also documented that the method of drawing the English longbow differed from methods used with other bows, and that could create a serious issue for an archer trying to learn it later in life. (Specifically, the description states they would put their body weight into the draw, which sounds like a fantastic way to seriously injure yourself, so clearly I'm missing something here.)

-Starke

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[the-copycat-hero]

In my mind, Monoma knows how to pickpocket, do sleight of hand, roll a coin across his knuckles, all that good stuff :D I also hc him to have voluntary nystagmus. No particular reason, I just 100% think Monoma would use that skill to freak people out

Also I hc him to be friends with Hatsume Mei. Each time he visits he brings a whole packet of papers, diagrams, analytics of quirks and how they relate to their costumes, and Mei def eats it up EVERY TIME. She also has him try quirks she needs for the equipment whenever possible. They’re smart kids :>

What do you like seeing most in monoma fics/fan work and what do you want to see more of? Any relationships (romance or gen) you like? Also I’m very curious about the Monoma family 👀 Clearly they don’t seem to keep in touch. What does Monoma say when he’s asked about them? Is it something he keeps under wraps or are most of his friends aware

!!!!!!! Big Brain Takes! Massive!

sleight of hand (and other assorted part trick) Monoma is near and dear to my heart, and i could definitely see him being able to do Some Sorta Nonsense with his body like voluntarily vibrate his eyes. i could see him being double jointed, too. (he is a Bendy Boy.)

ALSO the fact that Monoma and Hatsume never interacted in any meaningful way will haunt me until i die. they are so smart, and they are such freaks (/pos). their aura would have been so powerful. maybe too powerful? i guess Hori had to nerf them somehow.

as far as fanworks go, i am a massive fan of any fic that has Monoma showcasing his quirk. (for example, Learning Curve has a fantastic scene with a training exercise/mock battle that i frequently go back to because it is So Peak to me.)

as far as things i'd like to see more of, i'd kill for more introspective pieces of Monoma learning how to adjust after the war. (let me see him talk to Bakugo, who he watched die! let me see him talk to Aizawa, who tried to protect him!!!) i'm hoping some more of that will come with time as the anime draws closer to the end, but i suppose we shall see.

romance-wise, i'm big on Monoshin and have been since season 2. the fact that it used to be a rarepair floors me. (really played the long game on that one). that being said, i could honestly read about Monoma with almost any other student, his personality is just that much fun to me. apart from Monoshin, i've been seeing quite a bit of Timebomb and Monoma/Pony on my timeline, and i find both so incredibly charming.

platonically: Kendo. Shinsou. Tokage. Mei. Honenuki. Bakugo (especially after the war). ERI. Vlad and/or Aizawa. slap Monoma in an interaction with any of them and i am Locked In.

FINALLY, the Monoma family. (man, the Monoma family.) @smallvictorianchildwhofoundwifi and i have constructed pages upon pages of lore for these human disasters, but i'll try to keep it brief:

Monoma's dad (still need a name) - only ever agreed to have a child in the first place because his side of the family was pressing for it. resents Neito for reasons that i'll probably dig into later - but as long as Neito isn't actively making a mockery of the family name, his dad really can't be bothered to think about him.

Monoma's mom (Hiromi) [PRE WAR] - had Neito when she was young (around 21 years old) because, again, her husband's side of the family was insistent. she adored him at first sight; however, she has had to make a lot of changes to appease her husband's side of the family over the years, and it has turned her into a harsher, colder person overall. every once and a while, she'll be struck with fondness for her son, but it never lasts for long before she goes back to being made of ice. maybe also unconsciously resents Neito some for marking the end of her old life.

Hiromi (cont) [Post-War] - determined to reconnect with her son after almost losing him in the final battle. has made so many mistakes that it seems impossible, but Neito got his tenacity from someone, and it certainly wasn't his father.

Monoma's class knows next to nothing about his family. even Kendo, who has known Monoma for a long while, has precious little information to go off of.

some of the girls in Monoma's class stumble across a picture of Monoma's mother from one of her last modeling shoots, but when they ask him about her, Monoma just tells them that he has his mother to thank for his dashing good looks and leaves it at that. Ittaka - Monoma's old caretaker (and pseudo-older sister) - comes to visit him once, and his classmates briefly think that his real mother must have died until Kendo corrects them (because she may not know much about the Monomas, but she knows that they are all still kicking). but that's about all they've got.

tldr; trying to wrangle a straight answer out of Monoma regarding his family is impossible.

[elizaleclerc]

HI MY LOVEEEE

first off all I'd like to say i love your work so much, can you do a max x reader where she's griend with carlos gf alex, max's just like freshly broke up and reader has like the biggest fattest crush on him and i trust you to end this fic in anyway you'd like

hello gorgeous (i see ur typo dw love), i'm combining this request with another one i got (the lovely anon that sent one about watching reader perform at a recital). tweaking these ideas a little and instead of it being reader im making it a fem oc AND turning it into a series!! absolutely stoked ab this idea and hope you both love it <3

the dying swan 🩰

(part one)

max verstappen x female original character

summary: as ballerina madeline moreau prepares her final dance as a bachelor's student, her good friend charles invites her to her first grand prix in monaco, where she sparks up a relationship with her crush max.

song: le cygne by saint-saëns

author's note: haven’t written a fic with a fem oc on here so im a little nervy. i adore this concept so i hope u like it too :,) this will have multiple parts (not sure how many yet), so stay tuned! xoxo 

word count: 2.3k

As Madeline Moreau prepared for her final performance towards earning her Bachelor's in performing arts, she carefully laced the ribbons of her ballet shoes around her ankles. The soft pink fabric contrasted against her pale skin, adding to the ethereal quality of the dance she was about to perform. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the studio and began the grueling practice session for "The Dying Swan". This solo dance was known to be one of the most challenging variations, but Madeline had purposefully chosen it as her final piece. Ballet had been her life since she was a young child, and completing a Bachelor's degree in this intense passion meant everything to her. As she gracefully moved across the studio floor, every stretch and turn was executed with precision and emotion, conveying the story of a swan's final moments beautifully through movement and music.

Her heart's deepest desires yearned for her to dance under the sparkling lights of the Paris Opera Ballet. Growing up in the enchanting country of France, she would often sit in front of her television, mesmerized by the grace and agility of the ballerinas on stage. She imagined herself twirling and leaping alongside them, a part of the grandeur and beauty that captivated her every time.

Already she had scouts eyeing her for various ballet companies through France, companies that would bring her massive attention and fame in the dancing world. She could already imagine the opportunities waiting for her in her home country, the chance to dance on grand stages and gain worldwide recognition. As she began her first practice that morning, thoughts of fame and success swirled through her mind like ribbons caught in a gentle breeze. Each stretch and exercise was calculated, each muscle carefully worked as she prepared for the challenging routine ahead. Her ankles, strong and supple, were crucial to executing the entire dance en pointe, with grace and precision that would captivate audiences. This was her passion, her art, and she was determined to master every aspect of it.

Madeline's body moved gracefully to the familiar notes of her favorite dance theme. As she moved across the studio floor, she couldn't help but feel a bittersweet ache in her heart. This was her final performance as a student ballerina, and just as the swan dies in the dance, she too would soon be bidding farewell to her youth as a performer. But with each precise movement of her arms and each delicate arch of her feet, she knew that something new and beautiful would be born from this ending - a career as a professional dancer. And as she gracefully folded her arms into her torso, it felt as though she was shedding an old skin and emerging anew, like a majestic swan taking flight once again.

With each graceful, extended step, Madeline could feel her ankles straining and trembling beneath her. The pain was excruciating, but she refused to let it show as she balanced delicately on her toes, emulating the movements of a dying swan. Her muscles burned with exhaustion, but she pushed through, determined to make every motion appear effortless and fluid.

Despite the countless blisters that formed on her feet, Madeline never uttered a complaint. She understood that to achieve true beauty and grace in her performance, she had to push her body to its physical limits. It was a constant battle between mind and body, but for Madeline, the end result was always worth the pain.

She glided through the four-minute variation with determination, her movements precise and fluid. Her instructor stood in the corner, arms crossed and a stern expression on their face. With each mistake, they scolded Madeline, pointing out every tiny detail that was not up to par. And with each correction, Madeline cursed herself for not being perfect.

As a ballerina, she had learned to be a perfectionist under the constant pressure of her instructors. But unlike others, Madeline placed all the weight of expectation on her own shoulders. She believed that this self-imposed scrutiny and criticism would propel her straight to the Paris Opera Ballet company. As she finished her routine, sweat glistening on her brow, she couldn't help but wonder if she would ever be good enough for her own standards.

After what felt like an eternity, she hung her head in defeat as the day came to a close. Learning the variation had not been the biggest challenge - it had come naturally to her - but the hours of repetition and inevitable mistakes had left her confidence bruised and battered. As she wearily made her way out of the studio and back to her small apartment, she couldn't help but wince at the painful blisters forming on her toes, a tell-tale sign of her dedication and determination to perfecting her craft.

She took her hair down out of her bun and drew herself a warm bath to ease the aching of her muscles. Just as she tilted her head back and closed her eyes in relaxation, she felt the vibration of her phone on the side of the tub.

She dried off her hands and answered the phone call, “Salut, Charles.” Her good friend Charles Leclerc spoke on the other side of the phone, asking her how she’s been and what progress she’d made on her dance. She updated him on her failures of the day, and as he had plenty of times before, he told her she was being entirely too hard on herself.

“I wanted to extend an invite to you.” His voice echoed through the phone’s speaker.

“Yes?” She urged him on.

“How would you feel about finally coming to see us race in Monaco?” He was met with silence.

“I dunno Char,” Madeline sighed, considering the opportunity. The Monaco Grand Prix was a few weeks away, and she knew how busy she would be working on her variation, and how much more progress she had to make in perfecting it.

“Cmon, it would be loads of fun.” He persisted, but yet she hesitated still. The Formula One crowd was widly different than the dance crowd she was used to. Her and Charles crossed paths several times through their youth, over time becoming closer and closer. Charles knew that Madeline was a fairly timid girl, and therefore might feel uncomfortable around the loud cars and adrenaline filled atmosphere. Madeline’s spirit was much more peaceful and slow, her entire aura radiating the serenity and calmness of ballet.

“I’ll think about it.” She finally answered, but that didn’t satisfy him.

“Every time you say that you always end up saying no.” He argued, further putting Madeline in a difficult position. “You know Max will be there.” He joked, which made her roll her eyes over the phone.

“Very funny.” Her sarcastic remark caused Charles to chuckle. He always liked to say that Madeline had a major crush on Max, but she had never even met him. Her own nerves prohibited her from reaching out. The fact that Max would be racing in Monaco and Madeline could potentially meet him almost made her more resistant to go. “Who would I be staying with?”

“During the race you could stay up in the balcony with my family and friends. Alex will be there as well. You’d be in good company, Madeline.” Charles was making a good argument. Madeline adored Charles’s girlfriend, Alexandra, as she was a lover of the arts and always made sure to adorn Madeline in compliments over her dancing skills.

“Fine, I’ll be there.” Madeline gave in, finally feeling excited with the possibility of it all. She could hear Charles’s cheers in the background.

As they ended the phone call, she took a deep breath. Charles' words lingered in her mind, causing her to question her actions. He was right, of course, to tease her about seeing Max. After all, he had been her long-time crush since his impressive debut on the Formula One track. Despite the passing years and numerous offers from Charles to introduce them, Madeline had always managed to avoid meeting Max. But as her fame as a ballerina grew in France, fans began to speculate about her connection with the much more renowned Charles Leclerc.

The media had never bothered to inquire about her, yet Madeline's rise in popularity could be attributed to the relentless efforts of Charles and Alex, who took every opportunity to mention her name. As she walked through public spaces, Madeline's cheeks would flush with a mixture of shyness and discomfort, still unaccustomed to the attention that came with being associated with a famous Formula One driver. But deep down she knew that fame and recognition within the ballet world were her ultimate goals. She yearned to see her name among the ranks of the greats, and she understood that this would require adjusting to constant public scrutiny and attention.

The water in Madeline's bath slowly grew colder, but she hardly noticed as she scrolled through Instagram. With steady hands, she searched for Max's name in her following list. His profile appeared on her screen, his handsome face and perfectly curated photos drawing her in. She spent time studying each picture, taking in the details of his life that she had been missing out on. Where there used to be images of him and his girlfriend, now there were only solo shots of him posing with trophies and accolades, a clear indication to his millions of followers that they had split up. A small smile tugged at Madeline's lips, the realization that he was single igniting a spark of hope within her. But deep down, she knew that even with this new opportunity, she may not have the courage to approach him. The thought left her feeling both exhilarated and defeated all at once.

~

A dull, persistent ache nagged at Madeline's muscles as she trudged into the dance studio the next day. But her mind was not occupied with thoughts of rest or recovery; instead, it was consumed by thoughts of Max. She hated herself for feeling this way. For so long, her focus had been solely on dance, unable to entertain any distractions or desires for a romantic relationship.

But now, as she danced to prophetic love ballads and hopeless romantic variations, she couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to experience the type of love she often portrayed in her performances. With every step and turn, she poured all her energy into keeping her mind focused on the theme of her current variation: the dying swan. Her arms moved gracefully, mimicking the delicate movements of the bird's wings, while her fingers flicked with precision and emotion. As much as she tried to push him out of her mind, Max's image lingered in the corners of her thoughts, tainting even her most effortless movements with a bittersweet longing.

Under the watchful eye of her instructor, Madeline pushed herself to her limits, determined to improve. She gritted her teeth and forced herself through each step of the variation, her feet aching and screaming in protest. But she refused to give up or show any sign of weakness. After completing another round, she could see the concern in her instructor's eyes. "Madeline, take a moment to catch your breath. You're only on your second day, I don't want you to overdo it and injure yourself." Madeline tried to regulate her breathing and calm her racing heart. Sweat dripped down her face, mingling with the tears of pain and determination. But she knew that she had to keep going, pushing herself harder than ever before in pursuit of perfection.

She huffed and finally sat down on the chilled floor. “I don’t care, I need to be perfect or nothing.”

“That attitude will not make you ‘perfect’, you fool,” the instructor scolded, “there is no such thing as perfect. Your body needs rest. An audience can see clear as day the difference between a healthy and strong dancer and one that is barely hanging on to each movement.”

Madeline's body trembled with exhaustion as she hung her head low, trying to hide her overwhelming disappointment. The instructor's angry voice still echoed in the room, adding to the throb of pain in her feet and the twitches in her muscles. She tried to soak in their words, but her mind was foggy from the grueling practices she endured every day. Yet, she convinced herself that these struggles were just part of the ballet world. After all, the ballerinas in the most prestigious companies had gone through much worse. Madeline believed that she simply wasn't strong enough yet.

In the solitude of the studio, she pushed her body through the variation one final time. As her muscles trembled and her legs threatened to give out with every move, she couldn't tear her eyes away from the large mirror in front of her. She watched as her shaking limbs seemed to amplify the dying and fatal motions of the swan, transforming the dance into a display of intense urgency and desperation.

Beads of sweat glistened on her forehead, proof of her physical exertion. But it was the reflection in the glass that truly captured her attention. Despite the beautiful lines of her facial features, there was a hint of anguish and exhaustion in her expression. Like the dying swan she portrayed, her spirit and morale were crumbling under the weight of this performance.

part two coming soon where madeline and max actually meet! this part was rlly just a lottt of exposition :) x

[aquadestinyswriting]

Writing Exercise 2

I was tagged by @druidx to do the 3rd writing exercise from this post as well; Describe a character by turning out their pockets.

While Meredith's vestments do have pockets, let's have the moment from Fangthane's Folly where she's being processed after being wrongfully arrested on the charges of Heresy and Treason since she wears and carries a bunch of stuff on her person that they really don't want her to have. Popping under a cut because there's some... creative swearing in here.

Tagging in @davycoquette as requested, along with @ashirisu, @lexiklecksi and @sparrow-orion-writes

The elderly Inquisitor behind the desk met the glower that was being levelled at him with a bored yawn. He eyed the young dwarven woman in front of him,

"Right, so we're gonna need ye to take off the armour and hand over your weapon and any items that could be considered property of the Church."

Meredith snorted,

"Well, unless ye've got something for me to change into, the vestments are gonna have to stay on." she sniped. Meredith grunted as Fergus shoved her into the desk,

"You better shut that mouth afore I shut it for you." he growled, tightening his grip on her wrists to an almost painful degree

"Oh, awa' and bile yer heid, ye scummy wankstain." Meredith spat, her patience having been left all the way back in the Contemplation Chamber. The desk officer heaved a sigh and glared at the two dwarves directly in front of him,

"Alright, that's enough!" he snapped, "Seeing as we're out of spare clothes, ye can keep the vestments on for now, but everything else is going to have to be handed in."

Meredith did not know how she managed to keep as still as she did as Agnar and Vera began divesting her of her possessions. Probably because neither of them were blazing red with Evil and were simply doing their job.

Her mace was and crossbow were, understandably, the first things to go. Both items were quickly taken to the storage room behind the desk. Well, she wasn't going to be seeing either of them again, of that Meredith was certain. She bristled as both her own Holy Book and the one that had belonged to Starhammer were unhooked from her belt and handed over to the desk officer. The longbeard inspected both books,

"Two?" he queried. Meredith grumbled out a sigh,

"The mythril-bound one belonged to Starhammer. I wasn't going to just leave it for the Brotherhood to find and flog off to the highest bidder." she said, a pang of grief and regret hitting her heart at the memory of how she had acquired it. The longbeard gave her a long look, while Fergus muttered something about 'lying whores' behind her. Meredith ignored the older Inquisitor, rising to the bait would only make this more difficult than it already was. Both books were, like her weapons, taken back into the storage room.

Next was the armour. It took everything Meredith had in her to allow Vera to unbuckle and take off every piece of it. She only hoped that, once this was all over with, that she could get it back. Explaining how and why she couldn't wear it to her uncle would be too damn awkward otherwise, especially given all the trouble he'd gone to to finish it on such short notice. Meredith noticed Vera and the desk officer marvelling at the runic inscriptions and the array of gemstones set into the metal. Well, she would be more than happy to recommend her uncle's runesmithing business if asked, he could use some extra work.

Vera frowned as she patted Meredith down, carefully pulling out the small, leather-bound book Meredith had found in the little chapel underneath the Contemplation Chamber. She felt Meredith's nervous twitch, nodded slightly and opened the book, pretending to leaf through the pages without actually reading them. When she was done, she looked at the desk officer,

"An old personal journal. Nothing in here that looks incriminating, it's mostly personal thoughts and some prayers." she said. The desk officer nodded and waved at the sandy-haired young woman,

"Aye, that's fine for her to keep." he said, ignoring the infuriated glare that Fergus sent him. Vera nodded, put the book back and continued her patdown, pulling out some sealed inkpots, a couple of small quills and some parchment from the other pockets, all of which Meredith was permitted to keep, though the coin purse was swiftly handed over once it was found.

Vera frowned as she half-pulled another book out of another pocket, but quickly put it back upon feeling Meredith tense. She finished fishing through the rest of the pockets - handing over some more loose change, a few loose bolt heads, about a dozen sticks of incense, a small bottle of oil and about a dozen vials filled with Blessed water- then stood up and dusted herself down,

"That's everything Eric, not much on her aside from the obvious."

Eric nodded and finished making a note of everything he was given,

"Right, good. Here's the papers for all the items ye gave me, and here's the paperwork ye need to fill out to finish booking her in." he said, smiling a little too widely as Fergus snatched the papers from his hands,

"Ye don't have to look so damned pleased about it." he grumbled, stalking off ahead of his prisoner and attending officers, "Goddamn bloody paperwork! I swear on Moradin's Beard, if I have to fill out one more set of bloody forms I'm gonna shove them down Grimbeard's throat so far..."

Fergus' voice trailed off down the hall as he vanished around a corner. Agnar shook his head and put a firm hand on Meredith's shoulder, starting to lead her down the corridor Fergus had disappeared down,

"Might as well follow the old grump." he said. Meredith didn't resist. As naked as she felt, despite still getting to wear her vestments, at least she'd managed to keep a hold of the two most important things she owned.

[integra1127grimmreaper]

His Warrior Princess - Part nine

Series Masterlist

Part 8

You were lounging in your parlour; reading when Rhaenyra entered like a gust of wind.

“You seem a bit more cheerful than yesterday…” you remark, studying her over the top of your book.

“More or less so…” Rhaenyra shrugs, throwing herself into a nearby chair.

Setting the book aside, you turn your full attention toward her.

“Out with it then…”

“Father has finally agreed to send aid to the battle at the Stepstones” Rhaenyra informs you.

“I doubt, Daemon would be too pleased with that…” you cringe at the thought of his response to the news.

“Which is precisely what I had told Father” Rhaenyra nods in agreement.

“I had offered my assistance to him before, but he declined it. Insisted on fighting the battle on his own, but he did promise me that if all else failed; he would send word for my aid.”

“Vhagar would have enjoyed rekindling the good-old days of warfare, even more so than you” Rhaenyra remarks.

“Those were my precise words…” you smirk in response.

“But alas, you know how our Uncle’s pride can get the better of him. Daemon would sooner have Caraxes swallow him whole than beg for help.”

“I agree…” Rhaenyra nods.

“The rift between he and Father has become quite great… I had hoped that they would have made amends by now.”

“You know how stubborn Daemon is; more so than anyone, as you inherited that trait from him yourself” you remind her.

“And Father… he listens too much to the poisonous words of that leech, Otto.”

“It is a never-ending battle with those two…” Rhaenyra replies.

“Father puts his foot down when it comes to a subject, and Daemon does everything in his power to rebel against the decision if he does not agree with it.”

“Precisely…” you nod with a huge grin.

“Which is the trait that I have inherited from our loving Uncle.”

“Let us place that subject aside for the moment” you brush off the conversation then.

“What is the second piece of news you have not spoken of yet?”

“Father has allowed for me to wed a husband of my own choosing” Rhaenyra states.

Your brows furrow at your sister’s lack of emotion behind the statement.

“That is good news, is it not? This means, you do not have to marry that weasel, Jason Lannister.”

“I suppose so” Rhaenyra shrugs.

“Rhaenyra…” you sternly stare at your sister.

“Why must you complicate things this much? We have both known from a young age what is expected of us, it is our duty to carry on the Targaryen bloodline.”

“You should be one to speak…” Rhaenyra scoffs at you.

“You are not the one that is being forced to marry and become a breeding mule.”

Straightening up in your seat, with pursed lips; you stare at your sister.

“There in, my dear Sister, you are wrong…” you drawl out.

“Meaning?” Rhaenyra frowns at your remark.

“I myself have been given six months to find a husband, if not; Father will find one for me.”

“And you are content with it?!” Rhaenyra stares at you in surprise.

“You are a warrior Visenya… you are telling me that you are content with being nothing but a possession to some Lord? To live the rest of your life trapped in a castle, spewing babe after babe?”

Feeling quite offended by your sister’s remark, you scoff at her.

“When have you ever known me to be submissive to a man? I shall do my duty as a Princess of this realm, but it shall be at my preference.”

“Very well…” Rhaenyra responds with a wave of her hand.

“Have you any candidates so far then?”

“There was one…” you confess a bit despondent at the thought.

“Who is it?” Rhaenyra stares at you intrigued then.

“It no longer matters; he is interested in another.”

“The fool he is then” Rhaenyra remarks, reaching out to squeeze your hand in comfort.

Giving her a faint smirk, you return the gesture.

“Enough of this gloomy subject!” Rhaenyra announces, shooting up from her seat.

“I believe the dragons could do with a bit of exercise, what says you?”

Smiling at her in agreement, you get up from your own seat to follow her to the Dragonpit.

After the talk with Rhaenyra and having cleared your mind upon the back of Vhagar, you were at ease now. The thoughts of your unreciprocated feelings for Ser Harwin were no longer a bother; let him woo Rhaenyra if he wants, you would search to other parts of the realm for a suitable husband.

It was a beautiful day outside and being bored of lounging around in your chambers all day; you decided to head to the training grounds.

You were in the midst of practising your sword swinging onto a training dummy, when you sensed someone approaching from behind you.

“Care if I were to join, Princess?”

Recognizing the voice, you turn around to find Ser Harwin smiling at you.

“The training grounds are for all, is it not?” you drawl out, turning back to continue your training.

Harwin silently stood watch as you unleashed your frustrations upon the poor training dummy. He had never seen a female as skilled as you were with a sword, it both frightened and aroused him at the same time.

“Perhaps, it would be better if you had a moving target?” Harwin interrupts you.

Turning around with an arched brow and sly smirk, you bow in acceptance of the challenge. What better way to relief your frustration than unleashing it onto the instigator behind it himself.

The sounds of steel against steel echoed throughout the yard as Harwin blocked each of your swings with ease, a look of pure enjoyment plastered across his face as he silently taunted you.

“Come now, Princess… I am sure you can do better than that…”

With a broad smirk upon your face, you step back from him, stabbing Dark Sister into the ground.

Harwin lowers his sword, frowning as he attempts to figure out what you were doing.

You reach for the side of your armoured breastplate, loosening the fastenings, then the ones on your shoulder.

“Are you sure that is a wise choice, Princess?” Harwin frowns in disapproval.

Remaining silent, you continue to smirk at him as you thrust your armour aside and reach for Dark Sister again.

“So be it then…” Harwin mutters out, raising his sword back up to await your next move.

With Dark Sister positioned to your left, you charge at him full force. Harwin brings his sword down to meet yours, but instead of pushing your weight into the blow; you drop down onto your knees in front of him as the swords collided.

“I believe this is the part where you yield…” Harwin utters out softly, staring deeply into your eyes.

“You think so…?” you slur, smirking at him seductively.

“Aye…” Harwin raspily responds.

“I think not…” you whisper out, catching him off-guard when you release one hand from your sword to grab hold of the Dragon’s Eye sheathed against your left side.

Harwin never saw it coming as you swung the hilt of the Dragon’s Eye into the back of his knee full force.

Letting out a grunt of pain, Harwin slightly staggers backward, and you use it to your advantage to push yourself back onto your feet.

As Harwin attempts to get his bearings back, you swiftly kick his legs out from underneath him then. The instant he landed on his back, you were upon him; both Dark Sister, and the Dragon’s Eye crossed over against his throat, while you sat comfortably on his chest.

“Yield…” you smirk down at him in victory.

Letting out a sigh of defeat, Harwin releases hold of his sword; arms sprawled out as he smirked up at you.

“I yield…”

Harwin and you both breathed out heavily as you stared deeply into each other’s eyes.

“Princess!” you were suddenly snapped out from the trance like state by the sound of Ser Harrold's voice.

Looking up, you watched as he approached, a deep disapproving scowl upon his face.

Sighing out with a eye roll, you climb off of Harwin. Extending a hand out to assist him back to his feet.

“Your father, the King requests your presence” Ser Harrold informs once he reaches you.

“Thank you, Ser Harrold” you nod at him in response.

“Would you be so kind as to have my armour and weapons taken to my chambers.”

“As you wish, Princess...” he bows at you in reply.

You turn toward Harwin then.

“Thank you for the assistance, Ser Harwin...”

“The pleasure was all mine, Princess...” he bows with a broad smirk.

“Perhaps, we could do so again?”

“Perhaps...” you smirk at him nodding, taking your leave to go see your father then.

Picking up your armour, Harwin hands it over to Ser Harrold.

“You are playing with fire, Lad...” Ser Harrold warns him.

“Beg your pardon?” Harwin frowns at him.

“You should not be so intimately close with the Princess.”

“We were merely sparring...” Harwin smirks in response.

“To others it may seem so, aye... but I see that look in your eyes.”

“And what look may that be, Ser?” Harwin stares at him with a cocky smirk.

“You know precisely what I speak of, I shall only warn you once... Hurt the Princess in any way, and I shall gut you were you stand...”

“Warning noted...” Harwin bows at him in response.

Ser Harrold takes his leave then, briskly walking away while grumbling under his breath.

Harwin stood silently chuckling as he watched.

What Ser Harrold did not realize was that the only one at danger of being hurt; was Harwin.

The Princess Visenya had him completely hooked and she had no clue whatsoever of the power she had over him.

Part 10

Tag:  @missusnora  @alexandra-001 @green-lxght  @stitchattacks @evyiione @squidscottjeans

[theminecraftbox]

This ask is really for you and angela both - what would’ve happened if nettle was conceived much earlier in the timeline, say during the basement era? How does having a biological kid together change the family dynamics, if at all? Does it make everything ten times worse or does it speedrun them into the contract era earlier? How does having a sibling alter briar’s experience of growing up? and most importantly are the kids able to unionize

oh what a lovely scenario. This would inflict such psychic damage on everyone involved.

There’s another question implicit here, which is, do they keep it. Sam, despite the various and sundry violations to Dream’s autonomy he commits on a daily basis, would not force Dream to terminate the pregnancy, nor to keep it if Dream insisted he didn’t want it. He’s pro-choice, he’s a liberal, #Trust. No matter what, though, they’re both torn. Sam loves the idea of this child of his already, even though he truly can’t handle the idea that it’s also Dream’s. Dream doesn’t, but he does like the idea of something to hold over Sam: nine months of good treatment, for a start, and possibly future concessions to be extracted. He’s also afraid of giving Sam even more leverage. And of course, this would mean the cat’s out of the bag to Briar. Absolutely no one wants that!

Mostly, though, neither Sam nor Dream is anywhere NEAR ready to face the Ramifications of their, erm, “relationship” being anything other than an extension of prison sex—it’s a dirty secret, something that only exists after dark and without acknowledgment. Sam thinks of it as a shameful indulgence. Dream thinks of it as a twisted way to exercise power. They both think of it as a grimy concession to the reality of two lonely people stuck with only each other.

But let’s say Dream keeps it, and Dream has Nettle, when Briar is ten or eleven or so. The basic components are similar. Sam loves Nettle, Dream loves her as his child and also kind of hates her as Sam’s. Sam loves Nettle and he loves Briar, and his love for them both is an acceptable form of loving Dream.

Sam would try to keep Nettle away from Dream as much as possible, minimizing his corrupting influence, and then realize that raising a newborn AND raising an extremely hostile eleven year old AND keeping a guy in your basement is very difficult as a single dad. He’d be sort of forced to give Dream more privileges… but he’d resent the hell out of Dream for it. Things are on a permanent knife’s edge. Briar’s resentment and sleep deprivation don’t help.

Briar would be very, VERY upset at both Dream and Sam. He’d feel supplanted and replaced and unable to understand why and how this has happened. Why is his mom sleeping with the enemy? When Dream sat him down to try to explain things, he said Sam didn’t force him into anything, but that’s so stupid when Dream isn’t even allowed to eat without Sam’s say-so! The lines of what Briar is supposed to hate Sam for and what he isn’t get so confusing so fast. He’s too young for this mess.

I think the kids don’t even have time to unionize because I think things fall apart rather quickly in this scenario. The helplessness of a newborn means that there’s more urgency from everybody. Sam wants to get her away from Dream; Dream wants to get her away from Sam; Briar wants to be anywhere but here. This is not a system at equilibrium. It’s radioactive, and it’s going to fly to pieces fast.

[mugiwara-no-toshokan]

Some Direction

CisFem Reader x Roronoa Zoro

CW: Language, stalking, violence, sexual themes and situations, ptsd -- surprisingly fluffy despite it all. 18+ only

Chapter 24: Speed Bump

Friday was a bundle of nerves and nervous energy for you and Zoro. He did his best to keep his composure outwardly, but he put salt in your coffee instead of sugar. Not your preferred method of waking up in the morning, but after that Mihawk wouldn't let him in the kitchen.

By the time it was time for you to go to the appointment, he had led a morning class, trained, cleaned the dojo floor, made you a proper and unsalted coffee, grabbed a shower, and was trying to not let his knee bounce as he sat on the couch. It was adorable and it took everything you had to pretend you weren't noticing it. You, surprisingly, weren't too nervous, but maybe because you had gotten your nerves out of your system in the bathroom after you had taken the OTC test.

Once Zoro and Mihawk's reactions had been positive, you had found yourself oddly at peace. Whether the news was good or bad, things would be okay.

The appointment was with an elderly lady doctor who seemed to be more piss and vinegar than blood and bones, but she didn't tease Zoro for too long. Dr. Kureha had been recommended by Marco, who was pretty sure she had been a doctor sometime around the dawn of humanity, and just kept at it. She was in remarkably good shape, and if you didn't know she was well past retirement age, you wouldn't have guessed her age over her mid-fifties.

You were up on the table, shirt hiked up, as the old doctor moves the transducer around with practiced movements. The sound was unmistakable, and her face lit up along with yours.

"Congratulations!" She offers with a smile as Zoro squeezes your hand. "I -... oh."

"Something wrong?" Zoro asks, and you have to give him credit for not sounding nearly as nervous as you know he is.

"Perhaps," Dr. Kureha looks between the two of you. "It sounds like twins."

"... Twins?" You question, your brain not quite keeping up with the implications.

"Mm, indeed. There're two different beats in there. We'll keep things closely monitored, of course. You said your wedding is scheduled for 1/10, right?"

You nod, "Eight weeks from tomorrow."

"Alright, we'll check again on the 6th, but I don't foresee any issues. Your vitals are good, and there's nothing concerning. I'll let you know if the tests come back differently, but for now just go about business as usual." She explains. "Your residence is the Yoru Dojo, right?"

"Yeah, for almost four months now." 

"Well, I wouldn't recommend you go too overboard with training, but exercise should be fine. I know how strict young Mihawk can be, but bruises and welts should be kept at a minimum." She instructs. "Your body has enough to take care of, so no unnecessary injuries. You're still welcome to enjoy each other's company, 'til I say otherwise, so don't be nervous about that."

You can feel your ears go pink, not that it slows down the doctor.

"Schedule an appointment between now and the 6th if anything feels off. Bleeding more than spotting, nausea, vertigo, that sort of thing. Mild flus or colds aren't cause for concern, but if your temperature's high for more than a day or two, go to the ER and see if they can pull it down for you." She leans back and looked at the both of you, dumbfounded looks on your faces since the reveal of twins, and smiles. "You two get any of that?"

"Ah, um..."

"Next appointment is the 6th before the wedding, exercising is fine, but no harsh training, we can have sex until you say otherwise, and schedule an appointment sooner for, uh, bleeding, nausea, or vertigo, and go to the ER for prolonged fevers." Zoro replies.

You felt oddly proud of Zoro and weren't sure what to do with it. Dr. Kureha barks a laugh and hands over a piece of paper that has the details on it.

"Good job, kid." She pats your thigh as she gets up. "Those useless lumps at the WG got you two right at the very least. Congratulations on your wedding as well. Take a few minutes if you need it, and then you can schedule your next visit at the desk on your way out."

She left and you turned to Zoro, and for some reason he looked... almost sheepish.

You grin. "You feelin' like an over-achiever, Ma-ri-mo?"

He flinches, his ears going red. "... A little."

You can't help but laugh a little as you kiss his cheek. "I will survive your virility, I promise. And – ha! You can't pamper me; doctor says I can do everything still."

He hugs you close and whispers in your ear, "If I didn't restrain myself, you'd need me to pamper you the next day."

You can feel the heat rising in your cheeks and he chuckles when you remind him that you have an appointment tomorrow.

. . . . . .

You open the door to see Sanji's smiling face, though the smile fades as Zoro pulls the cigarette from his mouth and tosses it in the gravel of the driveway. There was a tense moment between them for until Zoro breaks it.

"She's pregnant, shitty cook, no smoking."

"Oh— EH!?" Sanji drops the cigarette he was already pulling out to replace the one Zoro had tossed, when he tucks the pack away. "Well, felicitation, (Y/N), may they take after you." Sanji says cheerfully, shaking your hand. "I guess it's good to know at least some part of you has a sense of direction, Marimo." Sanji adds, grinning deviously at Zoro.

Zoro clicks his tongue and you refrain from putting your head in your hands. "Gentlemen, shall we?" You step to the side and let Sanji come in. "We've got a lot to talk about."

The three of you sat around the kitchen table and talked about food and options and costs for almost three hours. The numbers and options were starting to make your head spin, and you were grateful that Sanji and Zoro managed to get along during most of the conversation. Mihawk had come around a couple times as well, breaking up any impending arguments between the two – in a way that left you with the impression that he was very practiced at it – and offering soft bits of advice.

"Well, one-hundred and fifty people isn't impossible." Sanji admits as all three of you are running out of steam. "I have some dependable guys I can tap for assistance. Are you really expecting so many?"

"I expect we'll have about half. We've invited the dojo students, but most of the smaller kids aren't going to be interested, and quite a few of the college students are going home for winter break and won't be here." You explain, stretching and hearing your back pop in satisfying ways. "Some of my coworkers will be coming, and a few of Zoro's EMT buddies, but I'd rather have too much food than too little. Baratie's has a good process for donations, right? Any excess of food can be donated without much concern?"

Sanji beams. "That's true, you can leave that to me, free of charge. I'd be more than happy to make sure nothing goes to waste. Have you decided on a cake yet?"

"Not yet. We went to three places the other day, but we had other stuff on our mind."

"Well, if you get stuck let me know in the next week or two. I know a good baker. She's a little eccentric, but her skills are solid."

There's a knock at the door that Mihawk answers, but you don't get a chance to get back into your conversation before he's turned toward the kitchen.

"Mr. Sanji?" Mihawk prompts. "The man at the door is for you, it seems your Matchbook has arrived."

[quinloki]

Some Direction

Fem Reader x Roronoa Zoro

CW: Language, stalking, violence, sexual themes and situations, ptsd 18+ only

Chapter 1 - Table of Consent -

Chapter 24: Speed Bump

Friday was a bundle of nerves and nervous energy for you and Zoro. He did his best to keep his composure outwardly, but he put salt in your coffee instead of sugar. Not your preferred method of waking up in the morning, but after that Mihawk wouldn't let him in the kitchen.

By the time it was time for you to go to the appointment, he had led a morning class, trained, cleaned the dojo floor, made you a proper and unsalted coffee, grabbed a shower, and was trying to not let his knee bounce as he sat on the couch. It was adorable and it took everything you had to pretend you weren't noticing it. You, surprisingly, weren't too nervous, but maybe because you had gotten your nerves out of your system in the bathroom after you had taken the OTC test.

Once Zoro and Mihawk's reactions had been positive, you had found yourself oddly at peace. Whether the news was good or bad, things would be okay.

The appointment was with an elderly lady doctor who seemed to be more piss and vinegar than blood and bones, but she didn't tease Zoro for too long. Dr. Kureha had been recommended by Marco, who was pretty sure she had been a doctor sometime around the dawn of humanity, and just kept at it. She was in remarkably good shape, and if you didn't know she was well past retirement age, you wouldn't have guessed her age over her mid-fifties.

You were up on the table, shirt hiked up, as the old doctor moves the transducer around with practiced movements. The sound was unmistakable, and her face lit up along with yours.

"Congratulations!" She offers with a smile as Zoro squeezes your hand. "I -... oh."

"Something wrong?" Zoro asks, and you have to give him credit for not sounding nearly as nervous as you know he is.

"Perhaps," Dr. Kureha looks between the two of you. "It sounds like twins."

"... Twins?" You question, your brain not quite keeping up with the implications.

"Mm, indeed. There're two different beats in there. We'll keep things closely monitored, of course. You said your wedding is scheduled for 1/10, right?"

You nod, "Eight weeks from tomorrow."

"Alright, we'll check again on the 6th, but I don't foresee any issues. Your vitals are good, and there's nothing concerning. I'll let you know if the tests come back differently, but for now just go about business as usual." She explains. "Your residence is the Yoru Dojo, right?"

"Yeah, for almost four months now." 

"Well, I wouldn't recommend you go too overboard with training, but exercise should be fine. I know how strict young Mihawk can be, but bruises and welts should be kept at a minimum." She instructs. "Your body has enough to take care of, so no unnecessary injuries. You're still welcome to enjoy each other's company, 'til I say otherwise, so don't be nervous about that."

You can feel your ears go pink, not that it slows down the doctor.

"Schedule an appointment between now and the 6th if anything feels off. Bleeding more than spotting, nausea, vertigo, that sort of thing. Mild flus or colds aren't cause for concern, but if your temperature's high for more than a day or two, go to the ER and see if they can pull it down for you." She leans back and looked at the both of you, dumbfounded looks on your faces since the reveal of twins, and smiles. "You two get any of that?"

"Ah, um..."

"Next appointment is the 6th before the wedding, exercising is fine, but no harsh training, we can have sex until you say otherwise, and schedule an appointment sooner for, uh, bleeding, nausea, or vertigo, and go to the ER for prolonged fevers." Zoro replies.

You felt oddly proud of Zoro and weren't sure what to do with it. Dr. Kureha barks a laugh and hands over a piece of paper that has the details on it.

"Good job, kid." She pats your thigh as she gets up. "Those useless lumps at the WG got you two right at the very least. Congratulations on your wedding as well. Take a few minutes if you need it, and then you can schedule your next visit at the desk on your way out."

She left and you turned to Zoro, and for some reason he looked... almost sheepish.

You grin. "You feelin' like an over-achiever, Ma-ri-mo?"

He flinches, his ears going red. "... A little."

You can't help but laugh a little as you kiss his cheek. "I will survive your virility, I promise. And – ha! You can't pamper me; doctor says I can do everything still."

He hugs you close and whispers in your ear, "If I didn't restrain myself, you'd need me to pamper you the next day."

You can feel the heat rising in your cheeks and he chuckles when you remind him that you have an appointment tomorrow.

. . . . . .

You open the door to see Sanji's smiling face, though the smile fades as Zoro pulls the cigarette from his mouth and tosses it in the gravel of the driveway. There was a tense moment between them for until Zoro breaks it.

"She's pregnant, shitty cook, no smoking."

"Oh— EH!?" Sanji drops the cigarette he was already pulling out to replace the one Zoro had tossed, when he tucks the pack away. "Well, felicitation, (Y/N), may they take after you." Sanji says cheerfully, shaking your hand. "I guess it's good to know at least some part of you has a sense of direction, Marimo." Sanji adds, grinning deviously at Zoro.

Zoro clicks his tongue and you refrain from putting your head in your hands. "Gentlemen, shall we?" You step to the side and let Sanji come in. "We've got a lot to talk about."

The three of you sat around the kitchen table and talked about food and options and costs for almost three hours. The numbers and options were starting to make your head spin, and you were grateful that Sanji and Zoro managed to get along during most of the conversation. Mihawk had come around a couple times as well, breaking up any impending arguments between the two – in a way that left you with the impression that he was very practiced at it – and offering soft bits of advice.

"Well, one-hundred and fifty people isn't impossible." Sanji admits as all three of you are running out of steam. "I have some dependable guys I can tap for assistance. Are you really expecting so many?"

"I expect we'll have about half. We've invited the dojo students, but most of the smaller kids aren't going to be interested, and quite a few of the college students are going home for winter break and won't be here." You explain, stretching and hearing your back pop in satisfying ways. "Some of my coworkers will be coming, and a few of Zoro's EMT buddies, but I'd rather have too much food than too little. Baratie's has a good process for donations, right? Any excess of food can be donated without much concern?"

Sanji beams. "That's true, you can leave that to me, free of charge. I'd be more than happy to make sure nothing goes to waste. Have you decided on a cake yet?"

"Not yet. We went to three places the other day, but we had other stuff on our mind."

"Well, if you get stuck let me know in the next week or two. I know a good baker. She's a little eccentric, but her skills are solid."

There's a knock at the door that Mihawk answers, but you don't get a chance to get back into your conversation before he's turned toward the kitchen.

"Mr. Sanji?" Mihawk prompts. "The man at the door is for you, it seems your Matchbook has arrived."

[namethat-i-oughttohavetoldyou]

The Fine Art of Kitten Wrangling

And to the person who had to wait the longest - @falasta​, thank you for your patience! This one is, with over 4k words, the longest of the Catsiversary fics, out of the simple reason that you gave me the perfect opportunity to use a fic snippet that I didn’t really know what to do with. I hope you enjoy! ♥ All my love to all who read/like/reblog! :)

It was not often that a cat looking for trouble came to the junkyard, but when it did happen once upon a time, it was always the hottest topic in London for weeks on end.

On one of these occasions, little Pouncival laid on his back in the middle of a small private clearing, all four legs stretched towards the sky, and gave his best efforts to contemplate his third name. This was quite a hard exercise for such a young kitten as him, and Asparagus had often assured him that it was just fine to think about his second name until he could bring up enough concentration to start with his third, but Jemima was already thinking about her third name a lot, and she was younger than him, so he could do it just as well as her.

Or so he claimed.

In reality, his thoughts kept drifting to the latest game he and Tumblebrutus had come up with, and from there to Munkustrap’s last story, which had been very entertaining and made him giggle when he only thought about it in passing, and from there they drifted to the new toy he had found in the rubbish that a human had left at the outskirts of the junkyard a fortnight ago… And when he remembered what he had tried to do in the first place, he promptly fell asleep.

His surprise was great when he was rudely awakened by someone slapping at his outstretched legs. His outraged squeak only drew a threatening hiss from his attacker.

Pouncival raised a warning cry, just how Alonzo had taught him, although it sounded more like a mouse choking on a too-big piece of cheese. He felt very brave, either way.

The attacker stood tall in front of him. It was a rather bedraggled looking tomcat, and as far as Pouncival could see (which wasn’t very far, as he was covering his face with his paws), he was sporting brown fur with black patches, was missing half of his tail and his teeth were more crooked than Plato’s milk teeth had been.

“Where is your leader.” the tom said, and it didn’t really sound like a question.

Pouncival carefully lowered one paw, resisting the urge to suck on the other like a nursing kitten. “At the vicarage,” he managed to squeak out, only remembering that he probably should refer from answering any questions. Then again, it hadn’t really been a question, had it? Jenny would certainly believe him if he told her –

“I don’t mean that ole’ shoe brush,” the tom snarled, tail lashing aggressively. “Your leader. Where is he.”

Pouncival was very scandalized at this ugly, know-nothing cat calling Old Deuteronomy a shoe brush, but he had enough sense to not argue. That wouldn’t be very clever, after all. And he wanted to be clever, just like Mister Mistof–

“Bring me to him!” the tom shouted at the poor kitten, who cowered and brought his paw back up over his face.

“To whom?” he whispered.

“The silver one. With the deadly kick.”

Pouncival took both paws off his face this time and frowned. “But he’s not our leader. He’s our storyteller.” He turned to the hills of junk behind him, impatiently waiting for reinforcements. After a moment of consideration, he raised a second warning call, just to be sure. It was quite a bit louder this time.

The tom flinched at the call, his claws extending. “He is your leader.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He is your leader,” the tom repeated.

“Is not.”

“He is.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Bring me to him!” the tom barked, in a tone that would have made the bravest pom make a run for it.

Pouncival wasn’t a pom. He stood his ground, tail pulled between his legs.

Before he could inhale to utter a third warning cry, Alonzo was suddenly between them, going to town on the unsuspecting tom who very quickly lost his tough attitude after a few well-placed hits against his muzzle.

Pouncival sat back on his haunches and lifted one paw back to his face to suck on it, purring a little to calm himself down. Everything was alright now, he was allowed a little self-soothing, wasn’t he? Jenny surely wouldn’t reprimand him.

Apparently, Alonzo had grown tired of smacking the impoliteness out of the other cat, since he came to a stop, breathing heavily, tail waving quickly from side to side in warning. He turned around to Pouncival. “Alright, Pounci?”

Pouncival nodded dutifully, still sucking on his paw. Alonzo wasn’t big on physical affection, but that was alright. He hadn’t been hurt, anyway.

“Your leader,” said tom wheezed, licking at his shoulder. Everlasting Cat, he was surely insistent.

Alonzo hissed. “What about him?”

“The silver one. Bring me to him. I want to speak to him.”

“Say please,” Pouncival said, feeling a lot braver now that Alonzo was there.

Alonzo sent him a look, but he didn’t hide his amusement well.

The tomcat pulled a face as if he had a bad case of gas. “Please. I want to speak to him.”

With a grunt, Alonzo picked up Pouncival by the scruff of his neck and nodded at the tom, gesturing to him to follow.

The junkyard-Jellicles were no strangers to unexpected guests, and they were always open to newcomers, always offering shelter and food if they had enough of both. The streets were hard on any cat that didn’t have a human home, and thus every cat was welcome, as long as they abided by the rules. Sometimes, when a cat in need of help came to them, he or she was mistrustful or downright rude, but the Jellicles knew better than to take it personally. Those who made the junkyard their permanent home came out of their shell after a certain amount of time, becoming a part of the community without much troubles after staying for one or two Balls. Thus, Alonzo didn’t chase the tom away, even if he was inclined to do just that with how rudely he had treated the poor kitten he was carrying.

It was very hard to withstand the temptation.

“Get Munkustrap, if you would” he told Plato as soon as he entered the main clearing, setting Pouncival down in Jennyanydots’ lap, who immediately began to groom the kitten, purring loud enough for Alonzo’s whiskers to pick up the vibrations a few meters away.

Plato blinked slowly and shook his head. “He’s not here. He’s escorting Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer to their human family.”

Alonzo could feel the strange tom bristle behind him. “Thank you, Plato,” he said, breathing deeply before turning around to avoid grinning a bit too widely.

“You’ll have to wait–“ he began, but the tom beat him to the chase.

“I am Geralford and I will become the new leader of this tribe!” he announced unceremoniously.

A perplexed bout of silence fell over the junkyard.

“Erm,” said Alonzo.

“I will challenge Mousetrap to a duel of strength and endurance, and the winner shall acquire leadership over this tribe!” Geralford continued self-confidently, every singly hair on his body raised up to make him appear taller.

Someone snorted a laugh at the tom’s creative mispronunciation of Munkustrap’s name.

“Ah, my dear,” Jellylorum piped up from the sidelines, “that’s not quite how it works, I’m afraid.”

“Winning leadership by fighting? Cat above, where are we, the middle ages?” Asparagus muttered from his position on the pipe. Tumblebrutus next to him shook his head in exasperation, even thought he hadn’t listened and wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be exasperated about.

Geralford huffed. “I was told by trusted sources that the Jellicle Cats had claimed the Junkyard as their territory. Mousetrap defeated Macavity and gained the position of the leader of this tribe in the same night,” he spoke confidently, looking down at Alonzo, who had flopped down into a nice patch of sunlight and was snickering quietly.

To everyone’s surprise, Mister Mistoffelees raised his voice. “Macavity never was the leader of our tribe,” he scoffed, irritatedly scratching at his right ear. “He is a fiend and an intruder, and that is all he has ever been.”

“And Old Deuteronomy certainly didn’t become leader by fighting for it. What a distasteful idea!” Jellylorum’s whiskers twitched with carefully repressed irritation.

“I will speak to Mousetrap about it,” Geralford said stubbornly.

“Nonsense,” Jennyanydots said, sending an immaculately groomed Pouncival off to go play and get dirty again. “It’s not on him to decide. George, dear, if you’d be so kind to show Geralford here where he can find something to eat?”

Alonzo’s grin grew a little wider. Sending George was Jennyanydots’ version of an intimidation tactic, even if he wouldn’t dream to even hurt a fly. Geralford, however, didn’t know that, and was appropriately worried when the calf-sized mutt plodded towards him, panting with excitement and tail wagging with joy.

“We will consult on a possible… er, management change,” Jennyanydots continued nonchalantly, turning around and making her way to the empty den behind the tire, which was often used for conferences, or, in this case, for meetings of the elders’ council. Jellylorum, Asparagus, Skimbleshanks, Marsily and Bustopher Jones followed her, leaving Geralford with a very dutiful George, who grasped the big tomcat by his collar and dragged him off to one of his preferred hunting grounds.

As soon as they had turned the corner, Alonzo stood up and entered the ‘conference room’, where he was met with a heap of elderly cats falling over themselves with laughter.

“A management change,” Bustopher boomed in delight, having to hold onto his monocle while he dried his laughing tears.

Skimble had pulled up his vest halfway over his head to try and stifle his boisterous giggling in it, without any success.

Alonzo smirked and waited until they had calmed down, then he said: “Well, what does the council decide?”

“A very good question,” Skimbleshanks answered, still having to cover his mouth from time to time to not start giggling again because of Asparagus having the hiccups.

Jellylorum dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, stifling a snort of laughter in it every now and then, and Jennyanydots groomed Marsily’s back to calm herself, her purring interrupted by fits of wheezing.

“Well, he’s a stubborn one, and he won’t leave it alone and make a tantrum until we’ve come to some sort of conclusion,” Jellylorum offered, “so we’d rather think of something fast. I’m not looking forward to him making a fuss like that everyday until Munkustrap agrees to fight him to the death.”

Alonzo made a great mistake in asking: “Don’t you mean Mousetrap?”

The following fits of laughter were so severe that more than a few cats curiously poked their heads into the den, fighting grins of their own with the infectious guffawing that greeted them. Soon, the den was full of at least 30 mirthful cats, walls trembling with their laughter.

“I don’t – hic! – I don’t think Geralford will be – hic! – content if we tell him that the Everlasting Cat chooses the next Jell- hic! -le Leader, and no-one else,” Asparagus said finally, fighting against his hiccups.

“I will allow no fighting,” Jennyanydots said resolutely, “we have enough problems with Macavity’s henchcats. Cat knows what he’ll do after he finds out that defeating Munkustrap didn’t help him in his quest to become leader.”

“Then we’ll throw him out. He stands no chance against all of us, even without Munkustrap here,” Plato spoke up.

Bustopher hummed, tapping his chin in thought. “Mightn’t we have a little fun? He seems a little dull, if you get my meaning. And it would serve him right.”

“It would,” Cassandra agreed, ears perked up with curiosity. “Do you have anything in mind?”

The kittens giggled in excitement. A prank, how wonderful!

“A competition!” Etcetera suggested, bouncing up and down.

Electra grabbed Etcetera’s tail and cuddled it. “Mh-hm. A competition.”

“If this competition doesn’t contain any fighting, I’m in favour,” Jennyanydots said, proudly patting the two kittens’ heads.

Jellylorum suddenly looked unusually sly. “Out with all of you,” she commanded, manoeuvring everyone but the elders out the door.

The kittens protested, wanting to know what the competition was to be about, but Jellylorum stood her ground.

“You’ll know, don’t worry,” she promised when Jemima threatened to cry if Jellylorum didn’t tell her right now. “But it’ll be worth the wait.”

Munkustrap returned the next day, herding Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer and looking a little crinkled. He obviously hadn’t gotten much sleep, which was unfortunate, but very helpful for the competition the elder cats had planned.

It wasn’t very complicated, really, but it promised to be very entertaining.

Alonzo had brought Geralford onto the clearing, followed by an eager George who begged to keep his new friend. Said new friend didn’t seem that sure of himself anymore.

“The competition for the leadership of this tribe will begin now!” Jellylorum exclaimed, making both competitors blink in confusion.

“Competition?” Munkustrap asked, fur bristling. “For leadership? Jellylorum, what is going on?”

“Oh, darling, don’t you mind that. Go and find something to eat, now won’t you?” Jennyanydots interrupted, quickly guiding him away from the clearing.

Meanwhile, Bombalurina walked up to Geralford, a squirming Bill Bailey in her arms. “Hold this for me, will you?”

Geralford didn’t even reach out to take the kitten, instead pulling a disgusted face and stepping back. “What?”

A disappointed murmur reached their ears from the tire, where the rest of the elder cats had gathered. They whispered among themselves and seemed to confer.

Geralford’s ears flattened to his skull, lips pulling back in a confused sneer.

Bill Bailey in Bombalurina’s arms gave an impatient mew, itching to continue playing with the other kittens.

Cassandra approached them, holding Carbucketty.

“I will not hold him for you,” Geralford hissed before Cassandra could even open her mouth. He was met with unforgiving eyes, as hard as steel.

Carbucketty was thrust into his arms without precursor.

Neither Geralford nor the kitten seemed to be very convinced of this arrangement, and Bill Bailey squirmed more impatiently when Bombalurina held him in front of Geralford’s face.

Geralford took him reluctantly, holding both kittens in one hand each at an arms length.

Bill Bailey gave another annoyed mew, accidently kicking Carbucketty as he writhed in the uncomfortable hold. Carbucketty gave his best hiss and scratched at his littermate in retribution, leading to a very unusual brawl, suspended in the air as they were.

Geralford obviously hadn’t expected this to happen, and promptly let both kittens fall. Luckily, Bombalurina dove down quick enough to catch them before they fell on their heads.

The murmuring of the elders grew louder, and Skimbleshanks hurried across the clearing to see if the kittens were alright. He needn’t have worried – the shock of the sudden fall had removed all thoughts of murder and revenge from their little heads, and not five seconds later they were off, chasing after a moth.

“Me pleasure to tell you that you lost,” Skimbleshanks told Geralford unceremoniously, face stern and unforgiving.

Geraldford looked even more confused than before, but Bustopher interrupted.

“There, there, old chap, not too hasty now. The other competitor has not even had a chance to claim his victory!”

Speaking of the devil, Munkustrap re-entered the main clearing, tail dragging behind him with exhaustion. He lifted his tail in a friendly greeting when Alonzo walked up to him, Tumblebrutus throning on his shoulders. They quickly became engrossed in conversation, and the attention of the elders shifted from Geralford to them.

Alonzo went down the list of everything Munkustrap had missed during his outing with the twins, excluding their new guest. He purposefully left out a few details; he didn’t deem it fit to stress out his friend with a potential threat, not if they had it covered so far. Munkustrap nodded and listened attentively, so attentively in fact, that he barely reacted when Alonzo casually grabbed the kitten on his shoulders and set him in Munkustrap’s arms, except by readjusting his hold so that Tumblebrutus was comfortable. The kitten in question didn’t seem to have anything against being held, gleefully dangling his legs and kneading Munkustrap’s shoulder fluff with tiny paws.

An appreciative hum came from the cats on the tire. Munkustrap’s ears twitched into their direction, but since he didn’t sense anything amiss, he let them be.

Just as Alonzo came to the end of his report, Demeter and Jemima turned the corner. Jemima wasted no time to swiftly climb up Munkustrap’s left leg and settle across his shoulders like a small, purring scarf.

“Oh, hello,” Munkustrap said with a smile, giving Demeter a nod and gently bumping his head against Jemima’s. “Glad to be home?”

“Very much so,” Demeter sighed, exchanging a wave with Tumblebrutus and touching paws with Alonzo. “Our humans treat us well, but Cat above, they are ever so loud.”

Bill Bailey came plodding back to Bombalurina, having decided that he did want to be held a little. Bombalurina picked him up and presented him to Munkustrap. After a beat, Bill Bailey stuck out his arms towards Munkustrap demandingly, and the Storyteller obeyed, situating him on the arm that Tumblebrutus didn’t occupy already.

Pouncival came next, hissing at Geralford in passing for good measure and then attaching himself to Munkustrap’s shin.

“Hello, Pouncival. Are you tired?” Munkustrap asked, wiggling his leg a little. The attached kitten grumbled and clung.

“Hmpf.”

“I see.”

Geralford sat down on the saddle of a rusted bike, trying to make it look like he wasn’t pouting. At least he wasn’t screaming anymore, so this suited the Jellicles just fine.

Cassandra snatched up Carbucketty when he scampered past, and with a delighted squeal he was placed on Munkustrap’s arm next to Tumblebrutus. Munkustrap didn’t comment, still chatting with Demeter about humans and their unpredictable temper. No sooner had one presented one’s belly to them to show one’s trust, they started to attack and try to mess up one’s fur with their fingers! Humans were peculiar.

A discontented grumble came from the tire, but this time it wasn’t because of Geralford, but because of the Rum Tum Tugger, who swaggered onto the clearing, Etcetera and Electra following him like ducklings.

With a smirk and a wink, Tugger lifted Etcetera in Munkustrap’s arms, which resulted in a small ripple of movement; Jemima moving from across Munkustrap’s shoulder onto his arm next to Bill Bailey, Etcetera crawling up to dangle backwards over Munkustrap’s right shoulder. Munkustrap didn’t have enough hands free to help readjusting their positions, but they sorted it out themselves fairly well.

Munkustrap frowned as Tugger draped Electra over his other shoulder like a towel.

“Is something wrong?”

“On the contrary,” Tugger chirped, scratching Jemima’s chin. “You’re all looking very comfortable, I must say.”

Munkustrap looked down at himself, seemingly only now realizing that he was covered in kittens. His right arm, where Tumblebrutus and Carbucketty were situated, was starting to go a little numb.

A soft pitter-patter of small paws made itself heard only a few moments later, and then Mungojerrie shot out of a heap of junk and launched himself at Munkustrap, wrapping himself around his waist like a little tiger-striped monkey. Munkustrap didn’t budge a centimetre, that stance of his absorbing Mungojerrie’s impact effortlessly.

“Aren’t you sick of me for today?” he asked the cheeky kitten, and Mungojerrie beamed up at him.

“Never!”

“Where’s your sister?”

“Ahh… she must’ve been just behind me.” Mungojerrie pressed his cheek into Munkustrap’s soft belly fur and turned his head as far as it would go. Munkustrap was a little worried for his neck.

“Me legs are longer’n hers,” he said after a while when Rumpleteazer did not appear. “Might be with George, to play fetch.”

Alonzo nudged a part of Munkustrap’s shoulder that wasn’t full of kittens with his forehead. “I’ll go and look for her.”

“Thank you,” Munkustrap said, sounding a little distracted.

Walking would be an effort, as it was, since he didn’t want to lose any kittens or kick Pouncival off.

“Kitten wrangler,” Bustopher mumbled into his moustache, and none of the cats on the tire had ever thought of any designation to ring more true than this one.

“Etcetera,” Munkustrap said, careful to not move his shoulder too much, “Etcetera, would you mind sitting up a little? I wouldn’t want you to slip off.”

Etcetera chirped and held onto Munkustrap’s ear to pull herself upright, curling up and wrapping her arms around his neck. “All safe.”

“That’s good,” Munkustrap replied, discreetly wiggling his numb arm a little. The kittens that were attached to it squealed with glee.

Shuffling a few steps proved to be impossible, he was quite stuck. Not that he minded, of course, any minute with his kitten hoard was time well spent, but only now he could make out a foreign scent and an unfamiliar coat pattern, which could only mean that they had a guest. One who he wouldn’t able to greet for a while, as it seemed. Munkustrap was mature enough to admit to himself that this knowledge made him a little antsy; he was eager to meet any newcomers and try to help them feel at home, but the others had apparently managed well, so he tried his best to tamp down his restlessness.

Mungojerrie’s tail hit Pouncival in the face when he wrapped his arms a little tighter around Munkustrap’s waist. “’Scuse me. I’m a duffer at aiming.”

Pouncival bared his teeth at the tiger-striped tail, but didn’t try to bite or catch it. Munkustrap was grateful; he was a little too preoccupied (and also occupied) to prevent a brawl.

Jemima had grabbed onto the ring on Munkustrap’s collar and swung her legs, her heels colliding with Munkustrap’s ribs like little hammers. “Munkustrap, the elders are scheming,” she whispered conspiratorially.

Munkustrap flicked the ear that wasn’t being held onto. “Oh?”

“They’re reliving their young years,” Carbucketty ruminated, giggling shrilly when Tumblebrutus reached over to bap him on the head.

When he turned his head to the tire, Munkustrap was marginally unsurprised to discover that all eyes were on him. His slow blink was reciprocated by seven pairs of eyes, but nobody approached to explain anything to him, and he couldn’t exactly walk over, either.

Before he had decided if he should call out to them or not, Alonzo returned, holding Rumpleteazer upside down by the ankles. She didn’t seem to be bothered by it, instead chattering without pause about her opinion on spices she had found in her human family’s kitchen.

Alonzo swung Rumpleteazer upright with a single flex of his arms, producing a shriek of elation and catching her in the air. Then, she was held out towards Munkustrap.

The silver tabby in turn came to a devastating revelation:

He had neither an arm nor any space at all left to take her.

The long, mostly sleepless night finally took its toll as he spiralled into desperation. Poor Rumpleteazer, hopefully she wouldn’t take it personally! And worse; what if she or another kitten needed a hug, or a private talk, or wanted to play? He was severely indisposed…

(The fact that every single kitten of the junkyard bar Rumpleteazer was currently attached to him in some way didn’t occur to him in his panic.)

The elders decided to relieve him of his misery and declared the competition as concluded; Geralford retreated to a far-off corner to sulk as Skimbleshanks hurried to take the squirmy Rumpleteazer and notify Munkustrap that he had indeed won, having to stifle a hysterical snort at the absolute confusion displayed on the overtired tomcat’s face.

One after another, the kittens left the sinking ship, scurrying over each other and around and through Munkustrap’s legs like a downy anthill. Munkustrap touched offered small paws and patted little heads here and there without even trying to ask what all this had been about, which certainly said a lot about his current state.

“I have a den that’s calling your name,” Marsily told him kindly as soon as the kittens had dispersed, having clearly picked up on their Storyteller’s exhaustion. “And a story, albeit a short one. Walk with me?”

Munkustrap walked with her, eyes growing larger and larger the more Marsily talked. When they turned the corner, the cats on the tire smiled and trilled with satisfaction at his exclamation of “Kitten stacking?!” and following incredulous laughter.

Pouncival toddled to and fro, indecisive how he should spend the rest of his afternoon. He wasn’t really in the mood to try and contemplate his third name again, maybe he truly was a little too young yet. Playing was the next-best option, but he felt a little too riled up. Maybe he could go to Plato and ask him to throw him…

Without his notice, Pouncival’s legs had carried him directly in front of the spot Geralford had claimed for himself to nurse his lost pride.

With his heart in his throat, Pouncival stared at the other’s scrawny legs, trying to think of a way out without provoking an unpleasant reaction.

But then again… Geralford had lost the fight, hadn’t he? Even if it hadn’t really been a fight.

Resolutely, Pouncival lifted his head and stared directly into Geralford’s eyes.

This kind of direct staring came as close to a middle finger among cat kind as one could get, but Pouncival was sure that he could be forgiven for it this one time. He hardened his glare when Geralford stared back, huffing and puffing with anger.

Geralford unsheathed his claws and raised his hackles, teeth bared.

They stood at a stalemate for a few long seconds, tails whipping and backs arched.

And then, Geralford looked away.

Pouncival was so surprised that he choked on the hiss he’d prepared in the back of his throat and plopped on his behind. A second later he pranced off, ears and tail as perpendicular as they would go, carrying his own little victory with him and out of sight.

Geralford grumbled under his breath and hid his head under his paws. Maybe he would have to wait a few more days before he could confidently show his face again.

Being a duffer at something: to be bad at something “Marsily” is my chosen name for Exotica. :) Also, meet my OC Geralford! He fucking sucks <3 I am so, so very happy that I was finally able to use this thing ajskdjakd it was just gathering dust in my WIP folder and I thought it was a shame! Poor Munkustrap, he has only two hands and three (dozen) kittens. Thank you for reading! ♥♥♥

[purekid]

On Nietzsche

“Violence that can’t be inflicted on the world will ultimately express itself towards itself. Nearly every young man has an innate drive to punish his body one way or another—training, boozing, drugs, combat, staying up all night—“

“Texting you,” I interrupt.

“I wasn’t finished.”

Your glare peeks through your glasses and snakes around the pink macbook resting on your knees. A square block of text-ridden white light infects your eyes. You light mode abuser.

“You secretly like hurting me. You like making me feel that way because it's you that's making me feel this way. It makes you feel like you have power over me. End quote,” I finish.

I’m reciting the text you sent me last year on April 4th because it’s surprisingly more Nietzschean than any random quote you can spew off your liked posts on X.

In "The Theory of the Sense of Power”, Nietzsche argues that we exercise power over other people both by benefiting them and by hurting them. He also suggests that cruelty is a sign that one lacks power.

And suddenly, the air tastes bitter like electricity. I sit up and try to reassemble my pieces into a God. On your pink silk bedsheets that are littered with Hello Kitty stuffies. It could all be so simple, couldn’t it? I’m sure you’d think so.

Darkness leeches in tendrils from my fingertips. You say you love me no matter what. Even when you watch your pink silk turn grey at my feet. Even when the sun sets when you wake me up. Even when spring turns to winter when you touch me. I’m thinking too much again and I know you told me not to. But since when do I listen to girls who care about me?

It seems like every girl who falls in love with me gets infected by my darkness through osmosis or something. I always knew I wasn’t good. But even an evil boy deserves something nice every once in a while, no?

And you said something funny as I lifted up my yellow polo sweater, showing you the contraption located in my chest. The thing in my chest that never beats. You told me it’s okay.

And you want to know something? The night my parents kicked me out of their house. My stepfather, 53 years old, sitting across from me, meets my gaze burning a hole in the middle of his forehead. And the thing in my chest. Not beating, thinking, or even breathing.

“Those eyes of yours,” he says blankly. His eyes hold their hands up. In surrender. I’m drunk in power.

And I, 19 years old, can’t tell what he’s feeling. I’m a loaded gun aimed for a kill shot. I want his brains on the walls, on the furniture. Something in the corner ticks. The room blinks. And I swallow everything whole.

[blackhakumen]

Mini Fanfic #1068: Past My Prime? (Super Smash Bros Ultimate)

11:34 a.m. Outside of Shy Guy's LaCafé.......

Luigi: (Carefully Walks an Exhausted, Back Pain Ridding Chun-Li to her Side of the Table) That's it. Take it nice and slow.....We're almost there....(Quickly Rushes Towards the Chair and Pull it Away From The Table for Chun-Li to Sit On) Here you go!

Chun-Li: You're too kind.....

Despite the small, yet noticeable groaning escaping out of her mouth, Chun-Li let's Luigi help her slowly sit down at her on chair before she was gently pushed towards the table the duo has chosen to go to, letting out a heavily sigh of relief and relaxation.

Chun-Li: Finally!....We made it here in one piece. (Winces a Bit in Pain Before Using One Hand to Rub her Back) For the most part that.....(Smiles Softly at Luigi) Thanks for helping me get there, Luigi. You really didn't have go out of your way to do that for me.

Luigi: (Smiles Back at Chun-Li as He Sits Down on the Other Side of the Table) Think nothing of it. The last thing I want is for you is to walk around with an aching back. (Frowns a Bit in Worry) Our training exercise must've done a real number on you at the last second of your stretch , didn't it?

Chun-Li: (Rolls her Eyes) Tell me about it.....I've stretched after a workout multiple times before and none of them ended with an aching back pain before. (Crosses her Arms While Sighing) I wonder what's up with that?

????: Maybe it's your poor back telling you how much you've past your prime.

The duo turn their heads towards a young, rebellious looking woman taking a purple lollipop out from her mouth before giving Chun-Li an evil like smirk on her face, which in turn causes Luigi to get startled a little.

????: Grandma~

Chun-Li: (Sighs While Pinching her Nose at a Familiar Face in Front of Her) What do you want, Juri? Besides being a nuisance as usual...

Juri: (Rest her Arm on the Top of Luigi's Head) Ohh nothing of the sorts~ I've been hitting around town as of late and just sp happen to notice this string bean here is taking you to your table. (Smirks Starts Growing Wider) You don't need me to buy you an elderly cane to help you walk now, do ya, old lady?

Chun-Li: (Starts Gritting her Teeth at Juri) I'll do fine without it thanks..... And the string bean you're referring to is Luigi. Show him some respect!

Luigi: (Nervous Waves at Juri) H-Hello.....

Juri: (Scoffs While Rolling her Eyes) Please. (Playfully Twists One Side of Luigi's Mustache Around Much to His Displeasure) As if I would ever show any kindness towards a Player 2 loser like him.

Luigi: My name is Luigi actually-

Juri: Yeah, who cares? You're nothing but a wimpy crybaby of a sidekick. Always have, always will.

Chun-Li: Would you just leave us alone already!!!?

Juri: (Finally Gets her Arm Off of Luigi's Head as She Holds Both her Hands Up Nonchalantly) Alright, alright, don't get your buns twisted. I'll take my presence elsewhere. (Finally Takes her Leave Before Stopping Mid Second) But lemme know if you need some medicine picked up from the pharmacy. (Turns Back to Chun-Li With the Same Evil Smirk) We don't want your poor old bones to give up on ya, now don't we?~

Juri let's out an evil laugh before walking off for real this time, leaving Chun-Li fuming with unadulterated rage before quickly deciding to do the sensible thing and takes a deep breath to calm herself down.

Chun-Li: Today is your day, Chun-Li. Don't let the brat ruin it for you. (Turbs Back to Luigi) Are you okay, Luigi?

Luigi: (Gives Chun-Li a Reassuring Smile as He Fixes Up his Mustache) Yeah, I'll be fine. I've been called a lot worse in the past few years, so it's not all bad.

Bowser: (Walks by the Table Wearing a Green Shirt that Says 'Green Mario' and a Poorly Drawn Face of Luigi Sitting Below) Nice bod you got there, Green Mario. Bwhahahahaha!

Luigi: (Immediately Puts on a Deadpinned Look on his Face) Nevermind. My day is starting to get ruined now.

Chun-Li: What is up with people calling you Green Mario all the time?

Luigi: (Sighs While Facepalming Himself) I don't knoooow......This has been going on for years now! (Sadly Twiddling his Fingers in Front if him on the Table) I guess they find it hard to believe that someone as wimpy and cowardly as myself could ever live up to Mario's success and glory no matter how hard I try.....(Notices Chun-Li is Still Staring at Him With Worry in her Eyes) B-But it's fine! I've been called that a million times now that I should be used to it by now. (Chuckles a Bit Awkwardly Before Looking Sighing and Looking Down a the Table)

Chun-Li: You know, Sammy told me all the times you saved your brother from getting kidnapped from the ghosts, despite being terrified of them. (Smiles a Little) I think that's pretty brave of you.

Luigi: (Looks Up at Chun-Li For a Brief Second Before Slowly Smiling Back at Her) Thanks. It's a miracle I was able to save him unscathed....But I'd do anything for my bro. And for everyone I care about.

Chun-Li: (Smiles Brightly) That's great to hear. (Chuckles a Bit) I wouldn't last a second being in the same room with a ghost floating in front of me.

Luigi: (Eyes Widened in Genuine Surprise) You're scared of them too?

Chun-Li: Oh big time! One time, my father, bless his soul, told me this really spooky story about an evil ghost spirit of a young woman who was killed inside an abandoned mansion for thousands of years, consume and torments the souls of every tourist and travelers who dares to walk in unannounced. Not even the children are safe from it's wrath.

Luigi: (Shivers a Bit in Fear) S-S-So is she's a vengeful spirit of sorts?

Chun-Li: Kind of? Father never really gone into detail on who or what killed her that day. And honestly.......(Grimamce at the Thought) I-I-I don't think I ever want to find that out.......

Luigi: Me too. (Starts Clearing his Throat) S-So anyways, who was that woman who came by here just now?

Chun-Li: Juri Han. The former member of an evil organization known as S.I.N. and one of the biggest pains in the neck since Bison.....

Luigi: She caused you that much trouble, huh?

Chun-Li: Yeeeup. I mean, she causes trouble for the Interpol as well, but she always has to find SOME WAY to mess me, even stupid crap like this! (Crosses her Arms in Annoyance) It's really starting to get old right now........

Luigi: ......You know, if it makes you feel any better....(Notices Chun-Li Slowly Turning Back to Him Before Putting on a Soft Smile on his Face) I think you really good for your age. And your legwork looks so amazing and graceful see in action too. I can definitely why Samus has fallen for in the first place.

Chun-Li: (Smiles Back at Luigi as With Small Blushes on her Cheeks) Xièxiè. Father always says to make sure to look your best before leaving the house. And I pretty sure I wouldn't be who I am today if it weren't for him and Gen taking the time and effort to discipline and teaching me everything I need to know how to fight in general.

Luigi: Do you still miss your father sometimes, Chun-Li?

Chun-Li: Almost everyday. But I can't keep dwelling on his absence forever. (Smiles Brightly) I have you guys to worry about after all.

Shy Guy Waiter: (Walks By Carrying a Plate of Macaroons and Coffee Mugs on his Tray Before Placing Them all Down One by One on.the Table) Your orders, ma'am and sir.

Chun-Li: (Raises an Eyebrow in Confusion) We didn't order anything ye- (Suddenly Gasps Loudly at What is in Front of Her) Is that really me on my latte!?~

Shy Guy Waiter: (Happily Nodded) Yep. We custom made it ourselves. (Points at Luigi Behind Him) You can thank him for having that ordered for you. (Makes his Way Back to the Café With His Tray Under his Armpit)

Chun-Li: (Turns Back to Luigi With Sparkle in her Eyes) Weegie......You really did this for me?~

Luigi: (Happily Nodded) That's right! (Smiles Sheepishly While Rubbing the Back of his Head Back and Forth) Samus wanted me to treat you somewhere nice for your birthday today, so I decided to call the café to have our latte ready for us before we left gym together. Also......

Luigi takes out a small envelope from his workout pants' pocket before giving it to the birthday girl in front of him and letting out a small chuckle.

Luigi: Surprise!

Chun-Li: (Tears the top of the Envelope Open, Revealing a Coupon Inside Before Picking it Up and Reading it) You got me a birthday special coupon for Koopa Troops' Springhouse?

Luigi: (Smiles Brightly) Yep. It's one of the many birthday presents we got for you this year. Plus, given how tired out you are roght now, you deserve a day at the spa for once. (Felt a Buzz on the Side of his Hip Before Taking his Phone Out From his Other Pocket and Reads the Text Give ln to Him) Ooh! Speaking of Samus, she texted me just now and says that her and Daisy will be on their way to meet us there after we leave here. (Starts Reading the Text Again) And to also prepare yourself. We have a pretty long day ahead of ourselves afterwards.

Chun-Li: We're having our first Double Date today?~

Luigi: Pretty much. I hope it's alright with you.

Chun-Li: (Smiles Very Brightly) Are you kidding? I couldn't think of more perfect than this!~ Thank you so much!~ I'd hug you if my back wasn't killing me right now.

Luigi: I got it!

Luigi gets up from his seat and makes his way towards Chun-Li's side of the table to hug her.

Luigi: There you go. One hug for the birthday girl~

Chun-Li: (Heart Begins to Melt in Pure Happiness as She Hugs Luigi Back) You really are the sweetest~

Luigi: Just doing what I can to help is all. Happy Birthday, Chun-Li.

Happy Birthday to the Strongest Woman in the World!!

@keyenuta

@caleb13frede

@cyber-wildcat

@tamrinthian

@theweebmaster31

[ratralsis]

Strings: Mini-Prequel and Mini-Sequel

In the time between my first attempt at writing the story I'm currently calling "Strings" and the version that I just posted, I took a couple of short-story-writing classes from the same school that I then took two longer novel-writing classes from.

Because I lack creativity, or possibly because I thought it would be fun, I decided to use characters from Kevin and Marigold's little story in a couple of the prompts.

One prompt was to write a 250-word story based on the phrase "Love Hurts." This is what I wrote.

Henry tilted his head from side to side, his neck cracking loudly. He yawned, alone in his car with his briefcase and a fast food bag, still slightly warm from holding the dinner he'd eaten while driving. He grabbed the briefcase and walked to the door of his house.

He knocked. After a moment, the door was opened by an older woman who looked almost as tired as he felt. "You can't keep doing this," she said.

"It won't be forever, ma," he sighed, raising his arms for a quick hug. The briefcase made the motion clumsy.

"Until when, then?" She asked. "Until the girls are old enough that you just leave 'em by themselves all day?"

His shoulders dropped. He looked past his mother at the curtains. Pale blue. Emily's idea, bought just over a year ago. Before the twins, when it was the two of them living here. Now it was the three of them. It had never been the four of them.

He swallowed that thought along with a piece of hamburger bun that had been stuck in his teeth. "What do you want me to do? I gotta work. I'm all they've got."

"No, for half the day, I'm all they've got," she said.

"And I appreciate it," he said. "But we're both too tired for this right now. Can we talk about it this weekend? Please?"

"Fine," she said. "They're asleep, God only knows how much longer."

"Alright, ma," Henry sighed. "Good night. Love you."

This is much of a prequel as I ever plan on writing for Marigold. 250 words, all of them very carefully chosen as I pared down a much longer piece until it fit that requirement, about Henry as a young man, and Marigold and Lily as tiny babies who don't even really appear.

Henry's struggling to get by. He's working overtime at the law firm, trying to establish himself as a lawyer or possibly still trying to pass the bar, I'm not really sure myself, at age 26 or so, while the girls are still too young to be left alone. In another year, he'll have remarried, and in a few more, he'll have divorced, and then a decade or so of peaceful days before one of his daughters dies in a car accident.

It's not worth writing more about him. I love Henry as a character, but his story, to be blunt, doesn't interest me much. As a character, he's fascinating, though. He's worked hard and found himself thrown about by fate and chance in a million different directions, and through it all, he's perservered, and worked hard, and done his best to keep his chin up. When we meet him in the main story, he's 47 or 48 years old, still working, making somewhere around $100,000-200,000/year in his day job (but not, like, millions), living in a big house with a big yard, but he's living by himself, and finds himself facing life as an empty nester while also knowing he's going to have to keep working for probably another decade or two before retiring. He's not sure he made the right decisions, but he did what he thought was right, and now things are the way they are and nothing can change the past.

But what's the conflict in his story? If I actually wrote it out, it would just be "Decent, hard-working guy keeps having bad things happen to him and his family," and that's not an interesting story.

So no prequel for Henry, but I absolutely love the 250 words I did write. "It had never been the four of them" is one of the best sentences I've ever written.

A while later, as a POV exercise, I wrote this three-part story. It's a sequel to the main story, and I really enjoy it, too.

Part 1. Marigold arrived home later than she had planned. There was no way to sneak into her apartment after the guests had already arrived. She tried to look on the bright side: this way, she could avoid the suspense of having to wait for them to show up.

She had helped Kevin set up the Christmas decorations earlier in the week, so those were no surprise. The bright paper streamers along the walls were his idea, as was the tree in the corner that took up a bit more of the room than she would have preferred. It did look nice, though, she had to admit. Extra chairs had been placed at the table, but nobody was sitting at it.

She hadn't known what food he was going to be preparing, and the spicy smell of it hit her like a wall as she walked in, guitar on her back. Her heart in her throat, she scanned the front room, hoping to see Kevin first. She saw him, but he was standing near the kitchen, chatting happily with the guests of honor: his parents.

Part 2. "Oh, there you are," Kevin said, turning to face her when he heard the sound of the door. "I was just finishing up the grand tour, such as it is."

"Oh, great," she said, giving them her best stage smile. "Let me put my guitar away, and I'll be right back for introductions, okay?"

Kevin smiled back and nodded. His parents said nothing, staring almost blankly at her. She darted into her music room and placed the guitar case against the wall. She could fuss with it later. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and came back out. Kevin and his mother had disappeared back into the kitchen, leaving his father standing by himself. She walked over, stuck out her hand, and looked up at him. He was as tall as his son--nearly a foot taller than she was.

"So, I'm Marigold, and you must be Mister Stiles."

He took the offered hand and shook it. "Please, just Kevin," he said. "I think we can be on a first-name basis."

"Sure, but, that's also what I call, you know, Kevin Junior?" She kept smiling, though it felt a bit strained at this point.

Part 3. "I'm sure I can figure out which of us you mean from context clues," he said. "So, my son told me you're a musician. Tonight's performance ran late?"

"Um, well, sometimes that happens when I'm playing a reception," she said. "I'm paid by the hour, so when the family is willing to keep paying me to stick around, I… let them. Plus, they're more likely to leave me a good review if I'm a good sport, you know?"

He furrowed his brow slightly and looked closely at the petite woman in the pink dress in front of him. "Certainly. And that's what you wore to a wedding reception?" He asked.

She bobbed her head to one side and continued smiling. He wondered if this was her best dress. "Yep," she said, after a moment. "Sure did. I'll be right back, I'm just going to get a drink."

She was back in only a moment, full glass in hand.

"I like the decorations," he told her, gesturing.

"Thank you," she said. "They were Kevin's idea, actually."

"I know," he said. "I still thought you should know that I liked them."

"Okay," she said, and downed most of her glass.

I can't remember what all of the rules were, but I believe Part 1 was required to have no dialogue, part 2 to be from one character's point of view, and part 3 to be from another's. Part 3 is meant to be from the point of view of Kevin Stiles Sr., though it's not as obvious as I wish it were given how short the story is.

I loved writing this, because I loved showing Kevin's dad as this very uptight and stiff conservative sort of guy who looks down on Marigold's line of work and lack of education (she's a high-school dropout with a GED, remember), sees her as irresponsible (for showing up late to an event like this Christmas party), and wonders if the outfit she has on is really the best she has (maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's what she wore to a wedding reception where she played acoustic guitar for just as many hours as her client was willing to pay her to). He's not a bad guy, but he's not willing to meet Marigold at her level or engage with her as an equal. He doesn't accept that she's going to have trouble calling both him and his son "Kevin," because, even if this guy says he'll know who she means, when they're at the dinner table and she says "Say, Kevin," both Kevins are going to look at her and she's going to have to point at one of them.

Marigold also has a rough relationship with alcohol in the original story. After her car accident, she quit drinking. It's the real reason why she refused a drink from Kevin on the night they first met. Her "I don't drink while I'm working" excuse was a lie. She doesn't drink alcohol because the last time she did, she thought it was a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car and her twin sister died. It's based on a guy I knew whose drunk driving accident scared him sober, but I don't know how common it really is.

Yet, in this sequel story, she downs most of a glass of something that presumably has alcohol in it simply because Kevin Sr. is being kind of weird to her and she's having a hard time coping with it. So either

A) She's gotten over her fears of alcohol and now drinks on occasion, B) There's actually no alcohol in her drink and she just finds the act of drinking ANYTHING to be calming, or C) I thought it was funny and knew nobody else in my writing class could possibly have read her story and known she didn't drink.

Take your pick.

While I truly love the character of Kevin Sr. as seen here, as the guy from whom Kevin Jr. gets his serious and boring sides from, a stereotypical no-nonsense German dude (Kevin is 1/2 German, 1/4 English, and 1/4 Mexican, though only the 1/4 Mexican part is specifically mentioned in the story; Marigold's ethnicity was spelled out in an earlier draft as being equal parts South Korean, Syrian, Northern Indian, and Puerto Rican, but I decided for this draft that it was more fun to just leave her as "light brown" and never let the reader actually know), but going on from there, it's not the most interesting story. It would just be Marigold having a very awkward night, and while I did truly love writing from her POV after so long writing from Kevin's, and showing her fears and insecurities for once instead of Kevin's, as well as showing how Kevin appears to her from the outside for once, where does it go from here? Eventually, Kevin Sr. and Mary will leave, and Marigold will sigh heavily and say "Wow, that was rough" and Kevin will say "Haha what" and then they'll… live happily ever after, probably?

Again, there's not much conflict there. I don't want to bring back anything from Marigold's past to threaten the happiness that she and Kevin have together. No childhood friend is going to appear and threaten to get her canceled online. Her probation officer isn't going to show up and threaten to lock her up because she crossed state lines. Her career isn't going to fizzle out and force her to get a real job. Kevin's not going to lose interest in her and find solace in the arms of another woman. They're just going to be a boring couple like every other boring couple from here on out. They'll have ups and downs. Maybe Marigold will eventually be able to have kids, and maybe she won't. Maybe they'll adopt, and maybe they won't. Maybe they'll drift apart in ten years and get divorced, and maybe they won't.

I'm really and truly happier not knowing. I'm happier leaving them just as they are, a young couple starting their adult lives together, unsure of themselves but sure of each other, doing their best to face things one day at a time, just like everyone else.*

*I love this kind of ambiguity in storytelling sometimes. It's why the second chapter ends with Kevin saying that he isn't sure if five minutes will be enough time to make up for two months of not having kissed Marigold. What happens next? Does he give her a little peck on the lips? Does he shove his tongue into her mouth? Do they fuck right there on the loveseat?** It's whatever you want it to be. I'll never tell.

**They probably didn't fuck on the loveseat. They really did only have five minutes, after all. But given that Kevin reflects on how he's seen Marigold's spiderweb tattoo before when she shows it him a few months later, it's reasonable*** to assume that, at the very least, he's seen her in her underwear.

***My headcanon is that Kevin's social awkwardness and Marigold's fear of letting someone get too close to her mean that neither of them has as much experience with sex as they want the other to think they do (it's entirely possible that they began the story as a couple of virgins), but it's not on the page, so it really is just headcanon, and mine is no more valid than anyone else's if it's about things that didn't make it into the story.

So there won't be a prequel or a sequel, because I've already written them, and they were a lot of fun, and there's nothing else to say about Kevin Stiles and Marigold Spade that I want to say.

For now, at least. If I live long enough, I may change my mind.

This is already more of an afterword than I had planned. There won't be more.

[nightmarist]

For the artist questions, 6, 21 and 30 if you dont mind

6. What’s your least favorite thing to draw?

Ironically what people tell me to draw.

It's my love-hate with commissions, where I can need the money but dread what people are going to pay me to draw. However, I do like requests, there's a semantic difference in my brain for a request bc usually requests are framed in ways that people want me to draw something they think would match my art or think I the artist would enjoy drawing vs commissions where people want something I just couldnt care less about but Have to do it.

Since I've gotten more established professionally IRL I get to be more choosy about what I take on as commission, so I might just endup doing a whole "I'll only do commissions if I actually like your idea" since I do want to be paid for my work and I do think people have really cool ideas I would love to pry out of their tangled brains and put to paper or canvas or whatever. But even then, If I do really love someone's idea, I mean. Fuck it. I'd love to do it. I love making things for people and giving them away. The fleeting aspects of art can be art too.

21. Do you like to challenge yourself?

Yes !!! I constantly do shitty little sketches and go to drawing tutorials, ask my art instructor and professor friends for tips, tricks, ideas etc. I do a lot of exercises and recently I've become much less afraid of creating backgrounds now that I have a better grasp how to make them. Similarly I'm trying to figure out painting more, which is both fun and challenging.

I don't want to do Just realism, I would love to experiment with other styles. Now that I have actual income, I can "waste" resources (paint, canvases, etc) practicing. Usually the issue is, if I make something, I can't buy back the things I used to make it, and therefore can't continue making. One of the big reasons I've been doing so much more art lately than the past decade.

30. What inspires you to not just make art, but to be a better artist?

How do you define it? Is it what's the most realistic? I can do realism. I have. Ive been doing it since I was a young teenager, I had galleries and awards and was paid hundreds to nearly a thousand dollars for pieces. My parents kept all the money. Now that I'm an adult, no one gives a shit that some thirty year old man can paint a realistic portrait of a celebrity. It only mattered when I was 13 and 14 using a program no one ever heard of (paint tool sai) or didnt think photoshop could be anything but a photo editor. Realism isnt fun, anyway, at least not anymore for me.

I do think that things like "the basics" - anatomy and realism, still life, color theory, perspective, all should be learned to learn how to make compelling art. But they dont have to be used in polished, aesthetically pleasing ways. Once you learn how and why "oh these colors clash and make people turn away from how jarring they are" you can use that. "These perspective lines are weird" can be just as compelling when you have the knowledge to fuck around with it.

I think the thing for me is, after having collaborated with so many other artists IRL and seeing their work, art is so much more than being "good" or "better" or "best" — it's expression. What you express, how you express it, those are each personal things.

Art isn't just painting. Or embroidery. Or convention. Its this lady in town who makes full body puppet costumes out of scrap blankets and broken ceramics. Is this old woman in the country side who makes masks out of paper and crayons. Its a local punk who learned to silk screen their own T shirts with weird shit.

I guess more or less being a "better" artist for me is coming to understand that there's no actual such thing. You can have your own personal goals, set them, and make them.

In addition, "every artwork is practice for the next"

It's a perpetual cultivated skill that, when you look back, there will always be something you could have done "better"

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Fairy and the Prince #1 + #2 + #3 + #4

Part 1 - Part 2 - Parts 3 & 4 - Part 5 - Part 6, 7 & 8 - Part 9 & 10 - Part 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16 - Part 17, 18, & 19 - Part 20, 21 & 22 - Part 23, 24, 25 & 26 - Part 27, 28, 29 & 30 - Part 31, 32, 33 & 34 - Part 35, 36 & 37 - Part 38, 39, 40 & 41 - Part 42 & 43 - Part 44 & 45 - Part 46 & 47 - Part 48, 49, 50 & 51 - Part, 52, 53 & 54 - Part 55 & 56 - Part 57, 58, 59 & 60 - Part 61, 62, 63, 64 & 65 - Part 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 & 72

Originally posted 9/1/2022, 9/14/2022 and 9/28/2022. Celebrating the FINIS of this story, I’ll be reposting it in its entirety once a day through February, starting today. It’s queued so that both the original posting and the reposting will come together for the final piece.

Again, thank you to all that read it, that liked it, that let me know so. I never expected to get as long as it did, but well, here we are.

If you’re new to the party, please bear in mind this was originally a speed-writing exercise. Editing has been minimal. Concurrency was a seat-of-the-pants thing, and if the spelling for names and titles matches from one chapter to the next I’m gonna be the first one surprised. All of that is getting cleaned up in post, and this is a story I’m definitely considering self-publishing, if only to see how that goes.

Prince Adam met Linden while escaping his geography lessons.

Geography is one of those things everyone should know and no one wants to learn. The Queen Dowager had commanded that it be taught to the mob of prospective heirs to the throne that she’d gathered in the Royal palace, among with many other sciences and arts. Then again, the same august and childless lady had also commanded that they be taught the finer points of fencing, wrestling and knife-fighting, so everyone had a good, if resignedly terrified idea as to how she meant to solve the matter of succession without actually making a choice and angering a niece or nephew. However, these were also the same people who’d agreed to drop off their kids at the palace and under her supervision.

In any case, Adam had no more fondness for his geography studies than any other of the Princes at hand. He was fortunate, or unfortunate, enough that, the youngest of the candidates at nine years, by the time his geography lessons rolled around the teacher, a dour old priest of the Tree-Father, was either already asleep, or nearly there. All he had to do was read quietly, peeking up, until the man started snoring.

Which he’d done.

He’d only meant to slip out onto the balcony and sit on the ornate stone railing. But the day was lovely and still young, and he’d realized that one of the gutters ended not too far from the balcony, the spout carved like a horse’s head. He’d leapt lightly onto it and charged into many a battle on his moss-painted steed before a nearby cornice had caught his eye. From there he’d climbed several fashionable false arches, like a great explorer over vast mountain ranges. Then he’d leapt and caught an old arrow-slit by his fingertips, and climbed further up, until he could tip-toe along a gutter made slick by decades of rain-feed moss.

By then he was nearly six stories off the ground.

He stalled after having raced along a lip of brick, mortar and stone barely wider than his fine leather slippers, which he’d already thrown off at some point between mountain-exploring and harpy-fighting (there had been three particularly angry swallows with nests under another balcony). The gutter there ended in a fish-head spout, and there the palace itself turned in a sharp corner, rather than a round tower curve.

Adam glowered at the lack of further road in impotent anger. After a few minutes, however, anger grew boring with no one there to look upon it, and he put his mind to more practical concerns. He was a clever young man, forced by circumstance to become even cleverer, struggling to leave childhood behind just to survive the deadly competition he found himself in. He was a lovely child, a little on the slim side, with his father’s curly black hair and his mother’s (and grand-aunt’s) narrow, firm features, black brows and deep blue eyes, pale skin quickly growing pink because no one could keep him out of the summer sun for long.

A decorative ledge above him caught his eye. It was a mirror of the one he was standing on. On his tiptoes, he couldn’t reach it, his fingers just shy of the goal. If he leapt, though…

He glanced over his shoulder. Far below he could just see the tops of the trees, swaying in the afternoon breeze like fretful nannies. Beyond them were the muddy grounds of the expanding Royal Gardens, and beyond that was the dark green smudge of the Hunting Woods. But there was no one to tell him no, and so he leapt.

He caught the ledge, and almost immediately his right hand slipped. The ledge was, he realized belatedly, much larger than he’d expected, and at a slant, meant to shed water off from whatever might lie beyond it. Years of rain had left it as slippery as the gutters.

He tried to find the ledge below his feet, but he was just high enough that his questing toes couldn’t reach it. He tried to grip the ledge once again, but couldn’t find a place that wouldn’t spit out his fingers. His left hand was slipping, and for the first time it occurred to prince Adam that he might have been a mite unwise in his choice of entertainment for the afternoon. Grunting with effort he tried to lift himself up one-handed onto the ledge.

His left hand slipped.

Adam was weightless for a single, fragile moment, the tiny space between his heart beating and his breath catching.

Then he realized there was a small, strong hand gripping his left wrist, and looked up into the face of the most extraordinary creature he would ever meet in his life.

The stranger laughed, a merry and carefree sound, the ringing of cheerful bells. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

They were wearing mismatched clothing, pants too big and tied with twine around the waist, folded many times over at the leg, shirt worn so thin the sun shining at the edge of the roof behind them showed skinny arms and a slender, graceful neck. Their hair was white and fine, tipped in dark gold, a halo around a fine-boned, acorn-brown face. But their eyes…

Their eyes were shattered glass.

Adam blinked, enthralled. They were brown and green, blue and hazel; it was as if someone had taken chapel windows and made them into eyes, glorious and random and full of lights. He fought to grip the ledge with his right hand, and finally found a spot willing to meet him halfway. “It’s my first time climbing this high up!” he protested.

The stranger, brown and lithe and mismatched in every way, laughed again, glad and guileless, and helped Adam scrabble onto the ledge.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” the Prince asked.

The stranger jerked back in surprise, blinked pointedly, and then squinted at Adam. “Nothing. What’s wrong with yours?” they challenged.

“Nothing,” Adam replied, flopping onto the ledge, which was far larger than he’d expected, the slate and stone of it sun-warm. “Other than they’re boring, I suppose.” He rolled over, trying to catch his breath. The blue sky above him vanished behind that white-haired face, far too close to his. “Gah!”

“What’s boring about them?” the stranger demanded. “I think they’re lovely. Like a bluebird’s feathers.” They reached out to try and pry at Adam’s eyes, and the prince swatted that hand aside.

“What are you doing? It’s rude to touch people without their permission!”

Fine white brows went up. “Should I have asked permission to catch you when you slipped?”

“That’s different,” Adam sat up, and his new acquaintance, kneeling by him, leaned back on the heels of their bare, muddy feet. “Of course you don’t ask someone if you can save their life, you just do it. But when it’s not important, you should always ask. It’s good manners.” The young prince flopped back down again. “Thank you for catching me.”

“You’re welcome,” the stranger seemed to be mulling on Adam’s words, and once again that fine-boned, brown face filled his field of view. “I don’t think you’re boring. I liked how you fought the swallow-harpies.”

“Have you been watching me all this time?!” Adam burst up to a sitting position again.

“Yes,” his savior admitted blithely. “It was much more exciting than me just climbing to catch the sun.”

“Catch the sun?”

“Yes, see?” The stranger reached into a pocket of their oversized pants and pulled out something that gleamed too brightly for Adam to really see, something warm and golden like fat drops of honey held in the cup of that muddy, small hand. “It’s not a lot.”

“It’s more than I could ever get,” Adam replied, intrigued. “I didn’t even know you could catch the sun like that.”

“Well, it is tricky,” they admitted, a delicate fluster on the brown and high cheeks revealing faint green freckles as they pocketed the sun drops again.

“What do you even do with it?” Adam asked curiously, examining his feet and finding them incredibly filthy; for some reason this pleased him immensely.

“I bring them into the woods, where the normal sun doesn’t reach.”

“Oh, that would be so helpful to everything there!” Adam exclaimed, and his companion flushed even deeper, all unnoticed. By the time the young prince turned to face them, they were sitting cross-legged next to the boy. “By the way, I’m prince Adam Lestrelle. But it’s fine to just call me Adam.” He offered his hand, trying to make the gesture very grand and grown-up.

“Oh, Adam’s a good name. Better than Prince, anyways, there’s too many Princes here, it’d get confusing really quickly. I think you might be the only Adam.”

“I am,” he admitted. “I’m also the youngest. And you?”

“Ugh.” The stranger took Adam’s hand; their grip was strong, dry, warm, like wood softly polished by age and use, and warmed by summer daylight. “Me too. I hate it. There’s nothing good about being the youngest.” They licked their lips in thought, and then nodded, seeming to have come to a decision. “You can call me Linden.”

“Like the tree?”

“Yes.”

Adam considered. “It suits you.” He leaned closer a bit and sniffed, making Linden look at him curiously. “You smell like them, too.”

Linden shoved him. “Of course I do!” They sprung up to their feet, and offered a hand. “Come on, then. Palace won’t climb itself!”

There was a challenging, welcoming grin on Linden’s face, as bright as the white of their hair. Adam grinned back, took their hand, and let them help him to his feet.

***

By the time someone noticed the youngest prince in the palace was missing, it was suppertime. By the time he was found, seven people had been fired, three had been threatened with beheading, and the Dowager had written increasingly scathing letters to the monastery that provided her with teachers. Adam was dragged into a bath, sunburnt and windburnt and eyes full of wild glee, soot-black from where he’d made his way into an unused chimney and climbed down and out through the hearth. Linden had shown him the chimney, and watched him begin his descent. “Be careful, Adam,” they’d warned the prince, those shattered eyes gleaming in the setting sunlight. “I can’t catch you if you fall here.”

“There’s steps, it’s fine. A baby could climb this. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Maybe.” Linden had laughed. “You know where to find me.”

He was grounded, and quickly forgotten once again. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s hard to keep a young boy in a giant palace grounded if you start ignoring him. He slipped out through the cellar once, when he’d been given punishment duty there. The master-at-arms lost track of him in the training yard, busy with the older boys whom he actually had faith in. He climbed up the beams in the stables when he was supposed to be doing punishment detail shoveling hay, and slipped out through the open shutters where hay bales where shuttled back and forth. Twice he climbed out of windows, his own and the one in the secondary library. He nearly fell once.

Linden was always there to catch him, with a merry laugh and those shattered, many-colored eyes. The palace rooftop and the cool dark woods were their playground, and they went everywhere together. In shallow cisterns and tiny pools carved out of the stumps of fallen forest giants Linden showed him impossible fish that spoke in tiny strings of bubbles, like pearls from a spilling necklace. They fought with imaginary swords, back to back, defending against savage barbarians and wicked pirates and murderous raiders, legions upon legions of them. It was always his ideas that they chased after, but Linden never seemed to mind falling in with the young prince’s wild imaginings.

In the end, with summer growing heady and sweet and hot, he got grounded for good, his windows barred shut while the sour-faced, pinched-mouthed man that handled the princes made “other accommodations”. His door was barred and there was a guard set upon it, and he couldn’t force the windows open even a little bit. He’d tried to climb out of his hearth, but it shared a chimney with something that had a fire going at all hours of the day.

So he’d hid in the laundry pannier.

The staff panicked. How had their charge slipped out? How had he made it past the guard, the barred windows, the locked door? People dashed in and out, but no one thought twice of the laundry basket, least of all the burly-armed maid that carried it down to the boiling pools of lye water. Someone shouted when Adam squirmed his way free, but in the vast forests of laundry hung to dry hardly anyone could see him, let alone catch him. He scrabbled over a stone wall and raced along the top, leapt onto the low eaves of the kitchen, sprinted away and clambered up a gutter, thanking each water spout he passed by name, as Linden had taught him. He was almost to the top when his feet went out from under him and he slammed against the edge of a steep roof with punishing force, blowing all the breath out of him. His grip slipped.

A strong, tiny, brown hand caught him by the wrist. “Are you ever gonna get any better at this?” Linden accused him cheerfully.

“I hope so,” he admitted, groaning.

“That took forever!” Linden helped him onto the roof, and Adam flopped down on his stomach to catch his breath. “What happened, where have you been?”

“They locked me up.” Adam sighed.

“Uuuuugh!” Linden dropped to sit next to him, playing with the black curls of his hair. “Are they even allowed to do that? You’re their prince!”

“I’m one of, like, fifty princes, Linden.” Adam felt himself relax at last under that familiar, friendly touch, like a bird making a nest of his hair. “And I’m the youngest. I’m never gonna be king, so they don’t care.”

“If they don’t care, why’d they lock you up?” Linden sprawled on their back next to him.

Adam turned his head to look at them, frowning a little as he put his words together; that, he’d learned from no teacher in the palace, but from his mother, who hadn’t wanted to leave him behind. “Because I made them look bad,” he explained at last. “When you’re a prince, they have to know where you are and what you’re doing, always and always. And if I told them about you, they’d say it’s too dangerous and wouldn’t let me do any of it.”

“That’s so dumb.”

“Right?” Adam was silent for a long moment. “What about you? What does your family think of me?”

“They think I’m very silly for spending time with you,” Linden tucked their arms under the gold-tipped burst of their white hair. “But they’ve always thought I’m silly.”

“You’re not silly!”

“Well, of course not.” Linden looked pleased at Adam’s staunch and immediate defense. “But they think everyone that’s young is silly, and I’m the youngest, and you’re the youngest. So we’re twice the silly.”

“Ugh.” Adam was very familiar with that sort of thinking, and kept as much distance between himself and it as possible.

“And who cares what they think anyway.” Linden whipped upright. “Now come on, I found a stork’s nest!”

Adam sprung up to a sitting position. “With storks?!”

“How else would I know it’s a stork’s nest? Come on!”

***

He came back, of course, he had to. Hunger brought him back.

“Are they going to lock you up again?”

“Probably,” Adam admitted as they meandered over the narrow edge of a high partition, soaring high above a private courtyard on one side and a small kitchen’s garden on the other. “It won’t be forever,” he told Linden when his friend’s face fell. “I’ll find some way to get out, I promise.”

“What do they even want from you?” Linden demanded. “If you’re not going to be king, why can’t they let you be?”

Adam found that an excellent question and, when he was dragged once again before Master Leminy, after the sour-faced, prune-mouthed man was done with his shouting and berating, he asked it. The Master of Scions swelled up like an angry toad. Adam would know, he’d recently made the acquaintance of several of the creatures.

The truth of the matter was, Everidge Leminy had tried to get Adam sent home. Repeatedly. But he couldn’t very well explain to the Dowager why he wanted the boy gone without admitting that he was balking the entirety of the palace staff and, mostly importantly, master Leminy himself. Admitting to such a failure might well cost the Master of Scions his job, and the rank and power that came with it. The first time he had excused it as the teacher’s failing. There wouldn’t always be someone else to blame, and the Dowager would not eschew even one boy. There was talk of a prophecy, of a fairy curse that she was trying to escape, ergo there being no children of her own. But master Leminy was too busy a man to believe in fairies.

He did believe, however, that the shameless, reckless brat before him would keep on vanishing. No one could watch a child every moment of the day; no one should have to, which made it all the more infuriating, because Adam was forcing him to do exactly that, and falling behind in his studies to boot. The latter wasn’t terrible, it could be readily excused by his youth, by having to compete with peers who in some cases more than doubled him in age. But eventually someone would make a comment to the Dowager, and she would start asking questions of Master Leminy.

Faced with uncomfortable risks and unwanted variables, Leminy shifted tacks. He clapped his hands and pressed his laced fingers to his mouth. “Prince Adam. It occurs to me that your life in the palace must be unbearably boring.”

Adam, who knew grown-ups never speak to a child with that sort of make-believe respect unless they want to set a trap, was instantly on his guard. “It’s alright,” he admitted neutrally, wary.

“You’ve no peers,” Leminy replied. “No one to do childish things with. I believe Prince Rickard is… thirteen?”

“He’s twelve,” Adam replied. And a bully, he didn’t add, but gosh he was thinking it very loudly.

“Just so.” The Master of Scions kept from gritting his teeth at being corrected, but it was a close thing. “I will make you a deal. I will find friends for you. I will set aside time from your schedule so you can do,” he flapped a hand, “whatever it is children do. But in exchange you must attend your lessons without fail.”

Adam nearly cried out agreement in delight. But as his many escapes made clear, he was a clever young boy. “How much time?”

“Three hours every day before supper.” Which were hours Adam would have had free anyway, until new teachers could be found from the monastery; the Dowager’s letters had not impressed them. “But you will have to make them up; no more free mornings during the end of the week.”

Adam chewed on his lip restlessly, his hands in his pockets. In one of them Linden had thrust an empty snail shell, and he ran his fingers restlessly over the rim. Was it a good bargain? It sounded like one to him, but the source made him nervous. And would the Master of Scions stick to it? He had no reason to. He could throw Adam up in a high tower cell and leave him there forever, until his hair grew as long as his nails and he forgot what the green world looked and felt like. “I don’t need paid-for friends,” he murmured.

“Of course you do! Every young boy needs friends!”

Adam saw the trap then. They wouldn’t be friends; they would be Lemony-Leminy’s spies. That made much, much more sense. And so, as graciously as he knew a prince should, he agreed. They both left the meeting quite satisfied, even if Adam was being marched off to another punishment detail in the kitchens, and Leminy was off to wrangle an impossible little urchin’s schedule into something suitable for a would-be king.

***

Summer quickened into fall, and then into winter. Linden warned Adam that they wouldn’t be able to come once the snow fell, and the young prince spent the time after their last parting forlorn behind the glass-paned windows of the palace. For lack of anything better to do he applied himself to his lessons, half forgotten during the golden warmth of better days. He found in himself a surprising aptitude for things he’d learned with half an ear and a tenth of the interest they should have been originally given. His teachers didn’t question their good fortune; they merely rushed to catch him up while they had his attention.

The ‘friends’ Lemony-Leminy had promised him had come the day directly after his talk with the Master of Scions, and they were no better or worse than Adam had expected. Older, of course, he’d expected no different. Unfortunately for master Leminy, when you might grow up to be a king, the politics of getting people to do what you want them to do take up a good part of your education. Adam made it clear to the three boys that if they left him alone and asked no questions he would return the courtesy, effectively getting them paid for doing whatever they wanted with their afternoons. All they had to do was meet with Adam briefly after his lessons so they could agree on a likely tale to tell anyone who asked, and not get caught the rest of the time.

Two of the boys had been thrilled with this agreement. The third tried to stick to his purpose, until he discovered that it entailed trying to follow the young prince as he climbed up walls and raced along roofs like a squirrel. After falling one time too many, he wisely gave up before he hurt himself irredeemably, and contented himself with scowling at the young prince every time Adam took off through paths best suited to cats and thieves.

Winter left him stuck with the boys, and while they weren’t bad sorts, Adam couldn’t forget that they weren’t his friends. They were paid to stick around, paid to tell master Leminy what he did with his time, paid to try and keep him busy. He’d offered for them to accompany him in his lessons, but while all three had agreed, it quickly became obvious the only one with a real interest was Beliwick. To the other two boys it was just time spent away from unwanted chores with a valid excuse.

“Is she pretty?” one of the boys asked one afternoon, his voice just this side of a taunt.

Adam jerked back to reality. He’d been staring out the window at the snow-choked grounds of the palace, willing spring to arrive faster, hoping for just one sprig of green, one touch of color, to let him know his best friend would come back soon. “Who?” he asked in confusion.

The two boys, Dane and Oliver, where sprawled by the hearth playing dice. Beli, who’d been painstakingly reading one of Adam’s math primers, a gift of the prince to him, glanced cautiously at them and then ducked his head low.

It was warning enough for Adam, who dragged himself with an effort to the present.

Oliver, the oldest of the boys, snorted. “Whatever girl you’re pining after.”

“Ugh,” Adam made a face to go with the groan. “You’re getting too old to be my friend if you think I’m interested in a girl, Oliver.”

The smirk went right out of their faces, and Adam saw Beli hide a grin.

“I’m waiting for spring. I’m tired of being inside forever and forever,” he explained.

Dane flopped on the warm slate before the hearth. “The whole world is,” he agreed easily enough. Dane was not a bad sort; he was simply lazy. He would always agree with whatever was easiest. “Winter’s dragged on this year.”

“Well, it needs to drag away faster,” Adam groused.

Winter, of course, would be rushed away by no one, but it eventually did give way to spring. By then, much to his teachers’ astonishment, Adam had caught up with and surpassed a few of his peers in his academic studies. It didn’t occur to most of them that it was because he had nothing to do but read.

Rain fell on the day of his birthday, rather than snow, and he took comfort from it. He was invited to tea with the Queen Dowager, who asked the questions expected of her station and his studies, and seemed distractedly pleased over a boy from whom she expected very little, if anything at all. Just before supper he was dragged before the Master of Scions, along with prince Rickard and four more miscreants, one of them Dane. Everyone ended with punishment duties to go along with their black eyes and bloody lips, but since it was the first time Adam had landed a punch on the older boy, he counted it an improvement and the best birthday gift so far.

[mariacallous]

Today, President Biden and Xi Jinping met for nearly three hours in Bali, where, facing each other for the first time as top leaders, in a moment of progress, they agreed to restart climate talks. But on the issue of Taiwan, the future remains uncertain. Xi said that Taiwanese independence was as incompatible to peace and stability as “fire and water.” And while Biden noted that an invasion of Taiwan did not appear to be “imminent,” China has long sought reunification with the island—a prospect that Dexter Filkins explores in a deeply reported piece in this week’s issue.

In recent months, Chinese leaders have ramped up air and naval encroachments on the island, but when Filkins visited Taiwan earlier this year—after undergoing a mandatory quarantine—he found it “too caught up in the stresses and entertainments of prosperous modern life to think much about the enemy next door.” The idea of unification usually garners single-digit support in polls; and for the younger generation in Taiwan, “the fear of invasion has simply lasted too long to feel urgent,” Filkins writes. If China invades, will Taiwan be prepared to fight—and for how long would its military, which some experts believe is rooted in outdated strategy from the nineteen-eighties, be able to hold off China? Crucially, will the U.S. intervene? As Filkins writes, “both sides are caught—seemingly unable to back down without appearing to concede.”

—Jessie Li, newsletter editor

On Kinmen, an outlying island of Taiwan, the Chinese mainland looms so close that you can hear the construction cranes booming across the water. The island, about twelve miles from end to end, sits across the bay from the bustling mainland city of Xiamen. Whereas Xiamen is a place of gleaming high-rises, Kinmen is dotted with low-slung villages and patches of forest; it is famous for kaoliang, a sweet but fearsomely potent liquor distilled from sorghum.

In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Kinmen was the scene of ferocious assaults by Communist China as it tried to seize control. The invading forces, expecting an easy victory, were met with surprising resistance, from fighters dug in behind rows of steel spikes and in cement bunkers along the beach. Frustrated, the Chinese began bombarding Kinmen, flinging thousands of artillery shells across the water in the hope of forcing its people to surrender. When I visited not long ago, an eighty-year-old resident named Lin Ma-teng recalled hearing the shells as a young boy: “I used to hide under my bed.”

The shelling continued for decades. One day in 1975, when Lin was serving in a Taiwanese artillery unit, a shell exploded nearby, tearing off a chunk of his right thigh. He spent a year in the hospital and still walks with a limp. During my visit, he showed me rusting artillery shells that he has piled in his hallway—mementos of the long conflict between the fragile island democracy of Taiwan and the behemoth next door, which has never stopped trying to assert dominion. On the beach near Lin’s house, visitors can still see the bunkers and barriers, where people he knew in his youth fought the Chinese. They’re crumbling now. “Maybe the war is coming back,” he told me. “What would the people of Taiwan do? Jump into the ocean and swim?”

This past summer, the fight for Taiwan flared again. On June 13th, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, declared that the People’s Republic had “sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait. Under international law, the strait has long been considered an open waterway; Wang was sweeping that away. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China,” he said. Two weeks later, the People’s Liberation Army announced that it would hold a live-fire exercise seventy miles off the island’s coast. Then, on August 2nd, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arrived in Taiwan, making her the highest-ranking American official to visit in twenty-five years. As she greeted officials, an American aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, loomed offshore.

Soon after Pelosi departed, the P.L.A. test-fired eleven Dongfeng ballistic missiles, which landed in waters around Taiwan; at least four flew over the island itself. Then the P.L.A. initiated a large-scale naval exercise, arraying warships outside Taiwan’s major ports. “The U.S. has made wanton provocations,” Wang said. That same week, Chinese fighter jets undertook flights down the Taiwan Strait, crossing the “median line,” the customary boundary between the two countries; each time, Taiwanese jets scrambled to confront them.

The crisis passed, but it gave some American officials a sense that a confrontation between the two nuclear-armed superpowers was dangerously possible. “It was scary,” a senior Biden Administration official told me. “Not because we thought the Chinese would invade, but we worried there might be an accident, with unpredictable actors all around.”

China’s leaders seized the moment to say that they were “normalizing” these kinds of encroachments. In the next two months, Chinese fighter jets crossed the median line more than six hundred times. The flights were “very close and very threatening,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. Although China claimed that the maneuvers were a response to Pelosi’s visit, Taiwanese officials said that they had almost certainly been in the works for months.

These moves seemed designed to convince the Taiwanese people that their national existence—which grew out of the chaos of the Chinese Civil War, more than seventy years ago—was coming to an end. Physically, too, the provocations took a toll, wearing down the Taiwanese armed forces. “Whenever the Chinese send their planes up there, we have to go out to meet them,” Wu said. “They fly very close, and we have to be careful that we don’t fire the first shot in a war.”

Yet Taiwan’s leaders remained curiously low-key. Tsai Ing-wen, the President, welcomed Pelosi and denounced the Chinese military exercises but otherwise carried on as if little were amiss. When the Chinese test-fired the ballistic missiles, she didn’t tell the public that they flew over the island; that became known only after it was announced by Japanese leaders. When a Chinese drone flew into Taiwan’s airspace, Tsai’s government reacted with similar reserve, announcing the intrusion only after videos appeared online showing soldiers throwing rocks at the drone.

Wu, the foreign minister, told me that Tsai was trying to strike a balance between deterring the People’s Republic and exhausting the Taiwanese people by warning them too often. To some Taiwanese, though, her handling of the missile tests amounted to wishful thinking. “When something like this happens and there’s no response, the government looks like it doesn’t know what it’s doing,” Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, a former Taiwanese foreign-service officer in the U.S., told me. “The attitude is ‘Don’t look up.’ ”

American observers worried that the Taiwanese weren’t addressing their security with sufficient intensity. “Their military is so conventional and conservative,” the senior Administration official told me. If the U.S. intervened in a confrontation, the realities of economics and distance would weigh in China’s favor: China is closer to Taiwan, its industrial capacity far exceeds the United States’, and its willingness to suffer losses would undoubtedly be greater.

Taiwan’s defeat would dramatically weaken America’s position in the Pacific, where U.S. naval ships guard some of the world’s busiest sea lanes. Taiwan is an anchor in a three-thousand-mile string of archipelagos, known in military parlance as the “first island chain,” that wraps around the Chinese coast and helps constrain naval vessels heading to open sea. Another senior Biden official told me the Administration is worried that China feels increasingly able to seize the territory it has been coveting for much of the past century. “The Chinese hope that within the next five years or so they will be in a position where we cannot stop them from taking Taiwan,” the official said. “The way they see it, they are building up a sufficient capability to be able to execute an operation, and the tyranny of distance is so great that we wouldn’t be able to stop them.”

When I arrived in Taiwan, I found a place consumed not by the threat of societal extinction but by concerns about Covid. Boarding China Airlines, Taiwan’s national carrier, in Los Angeles, I was met by flight attendants in full-body medical suits and plastic visors, who politely chided me every time my mask fell beneath my nose. In Taipei, the capital, I was driven in a “quarantine taxi” to a “quarantine hotel,” where I was escorted to a room and instructed to stay inside. Meals packaged in plastic and Styrofoam were left at my door, and my windows were sealed tight. I emerged four days later into a flourishing city, with high-speed trains, exquisite restaurants, and masked people rushing between appointments, glancing at their phones. Taiwan sits in a climatological region called Typhoon Alley, and soon after my quarantine ended Typhoon Hinnamnor swept the island with wind and rain. No one was fazed.

I’d expected an embattled nation girding for a fight, but Taiwan seemed too caught up in the stresses and entertainments of prosperous modern life to think much about the enemy next door. In everyday conversation, the China question rarely came up. There were few signs of national preparation: military conscription is mandatory for adult men but lasts only four months. The government is considering adopting a policy that would allow it to mobilize its civilian population, but so far has done nothing. According to American and former Taiwanese officials, Taiwan’s defense posture is guided by a strategy that was devised in the nineteen-eighties, when the Chinese military was weak.

One day, I sat with Liao Chung Lun, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of National Chung Hsing University, where he studied environmental engineering. Liao had just completed his mandatory military training, which he described as something similar to summer camp. During the first month, he said, he and other recruits did pushups, a bit of running, and rudimentary combat drills, like thrusting a bayonet. A handful of times, he fired a gun. Liao told me that the course wasn’t especially rigorous. “Nobody fails out,” he said. His main jobs included collecting the day’s dirty laundry and pulling weeds. “They have really high standards for cleanliness.”

Like most of the young people I talked to, Liao said that he felt thoroughly Taiwanese and had almost no connection to China. But, when I asked him if he was worried about Taiwan’s future, he shrugged. “We’ve been hearing this for years—that the Chinese are going to invade,” he said. For much of Liao’s generation, the fear of invasion has simply lasted too long to feel urgent; like the typhoons, it has faded to background noise.

The struggle for Taiwan dates to 1895, when troops from the Japanese Empire wrested control of the island from China. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, sovereignty over Taiwan returned to China, but it would soon be contested again. The Republic of China was then embroiled in a civil war, which pitted government troops loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek against Communist insurgents led by Mao Zedong. In 1949, Mao won, and the People’s Republic of China was created. Chiang and his allies fled to Taiwan and a handful of other islands, declaring themselves the true representatives of the Chinese republic and vowing to keep up the fight.

In January, 1950, Dean Acheson, President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, drew a “defensive perimeter,” committing the U.S. to protect a huge part of East Asia against Communist aggression. He left South Korea and Taiwan outside of it; Truman, like others, expected Taiwan to fall before long. But, six months later, North Korean troops invaded South Korea, with help from the Soviets, sparking fears of a wider war. Truman ordered an aircraft-carrier battle group into the strait, and in 1954 the U.S. signed a defense treaty with Taiwan, placing troops and even, for a time, nuclear weapons there.

Chiang had brought with him more than a million mainland Chinese to an island with a population of six million; his political movement, the Kuomintang, dominated Taiwan for more than forty years. An austere and unforgiving autocrat, Chiang declared martial law and repressed dissent. During one savage period, known as the White Terror, some twenty-five thousand civilians were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. There were no free elections, no free press, and no political parties other than the K.M.T.

For years, Chiang fostered the idea that his was the legitimate government of China, even though it exercised no control over the mainland. The state of war with the mainland was constant; sometimes the two sides shelled each other across the strait. With the world divided by the Cold War, Western governments propped up the notion that Taiwan was the true China. For thirty years, the U.S. maintained diplomatic relations with the Republic of China and not the People’s Republic, and until 1971 Taiwan occupied China’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. In office, Chiang nurtured the dream that his forces would return to the mainland and overthrow the Communists. Taiwanese children born on the island were taught to believe that they were Chinese, regardless of their origins, and that their true homeland lay across the water.

Among the first generation of children who navigated the puzzle of Taiwanese identity was Lung Ying-tai, who grew up to be, through her books and journalism, a crucial advocate for democracy on the island. I met her in Dulan, a vast stretch of forested mountains along the southeastern coast. The area is home to the Amis, one of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups; according to local tradition, the mountains are inhabited by a benevolent god named Malatao. Lung’s house sits on a hillside overlooking Green Island, where political prisoners were held during the years of Chiang Kai-shek.

Lung was born in southern Taiwan in 1952, to parents who had fled Hunan Province during the civil war. Her father, a member of the K.M.T., became a provincial police officer. In school, she was taught the history and culture of mainland China but little about the island itself; the instruction was in Mandarin, rather than in the Taiwanese dialect.

Lung’s connections to the mainland were not abstract: her parents had left a one-year-old son behind with relatives, fearing that he wouldn’t survive the chaos of the exodus. “My mom thought they would be able to go back to get him,” she told me. Taiwan’s laws prohibited any travel across the strait; even exchanging letters could bring a death sentence. As a result, Lung heard only whispers of a brother she’d never met. “I didn’t even know if he was still alive,” she said.

Chiang died in 1975. That year, Lung travelled to the U.S. to study at Bowling Green State University, and she went on to Kansas State University for a Ph.D. in literature. Freed from restrictions on communicating with the mainland, she wrote a letter to her brother; because she did not know where he lived, she scrawled on the envelope his name, Ying-yang, the county where her family had resided, and “the Lungs’ village.” She figured that it would never reach him, but three months later a reply arrived. “It was like a miracle,” she said. “My brother didn’t even know he had brothers and sisters.”

From abroad, Lung became celebrated for her writing about the politics and history of Taiwan and China; she focussed on the predations of the K.M.T. and on the upheavals that broke so many families apart. Her books sold best on the mainland, and a column she wrote appeared in newspapers throughout China. In 1985, she published a withering criticism of the K.M.T.’s rule, “The Wild Fire,” which was influential in the democratization of the island.

After Chiang’s death, Taiwan entered an era of political ambiguity. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and severed them with Taiwan; the last U.S. troops withdrew from the island. Still, a succession of Presidents continued to pledge support, giving an impression, if not a promise, that America would help defend against a Chinese attack. The U.S. sold weapons to Taiwan and allowed its diplomats to keep an office in Washington, D.C., as long as it wasn’t called an embassy. Taiwanese leaders performed a delicate balancing act, using their relationship with the U.S. to retain independence while also cultivating economic ties with the mainland.

In 1987, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law and began easing travel restrictions. Lung arranged to bring her parents to Hong Kong, where she met her brother Ying-yang for the first time. “He’d become a thin, dark-skinned, slightly bent peasant, denied education because his father had served in the Republic Army,” she said. He spoke a dialect that his family could barely understand.

The next year, the K.M.T. installed Lee Teng-hui, a Cornell-educated lawyer, as President. Lee moved Taiwan decisively toward democracy but at the same time presided over an improvement in relations with the People’s Republic; Taiwan provided markets for China’s products and investment in its economy, which was largely cut off from the West following the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Four years into Lee’s tenure, unofficial representatives of the two countries met in Hong Kong and reached an understanding—the 1992 Consensus, as it became known—that Taiwan and China were inextricably linked. The K.M.T.’s leaders had given up fantasies of reconquering the mainland; they hoped instead that the two countries, with their shared history and culture, could find a way to coexist until, at some undefined moment in the future, they became one China again.

In 2008, another K.M.T. candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, was elected President on a promise of greater integration. Ma, who trained as a lawyer at Harvard and New York University, told me in his office, “This was my vision—that bringing the two sides closer together would make war impossible.”

It would also help Taiwan prosper. At the time, Western economies were grappling with a steep recession, while China, Taiwan’s largest trading partner, was growing. In the next six years, Ma negotiated dozens of agreements with the mainland. Airlines began running daily flights across the strait, and thousands of Chinese visited Taiwan for the first time. In 2015, Ma met Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, in Singapore; it was the first such meeting since the end of the civil war. To avoid any awkwardness in the use of official titles, Ma was referred to as “the leader of Taiwan” and Xi as “the leader of mainland China.”

Ma told me that during his time in office Taiwan’s birthrate began to rise, after years of decline. “That’s how hopeful people were,” he said. But the island was restive. Lung said, “As China became more repressive, the Taiwanese people began to feel more and more separate from the mainland.” Lung became Ma’s minister of culture, and initiated programs for Chinese artists, writers, and filmmakers to come to Taiwan. “I especially supported documentary filmmakers in China because they were so critical of the establishment,” she said.

There was also a growing political opposition in Taiwan. In 1986, a group of activists, some of them former political prisoners, had founded the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which called for a stronger Taiwanese identity. With democracy flourishing, and a greater share of the population born on the island, a sense of nationhood had taken hold.

In 2013, Ma announced his most ambitious plan, the Cross-Strait Services Agreement, a measure that would have lowered barriers for Chinese to invest in such things as banks, shopping centers, and construction firms. Lin Fei-fan, a graduate student at National Taiwan University, helped lead a revolt. Lin told me he and his allies feared that the law would open Taiwan to a flood of Chinese money and people. “The feeling was that we were going to be swallowed by the mainland,” he said. “And the deals were being made over our heads—we didn’t ask for them.” The following March, Lin and about two hundred other students occupied the parliament building, vowing to stay until the Agreement was shelved and a mechanism was established to allow for public input. Tens of thousands more joined demonstrations in the streets, and after twenty-four days legislators agreed to put the plan on hold.

The Agreement proved to be the apex of coöperation between the two countries. In 2016, Ma’s party was swept from office by the D.P.P., a movement formed expressly to make Taiwan independent. Tsai Ing-wen, the new President, made Lin the Party’s deputy secretary-general. For Lin, the results confirmed that many other Taiwanese felt the same way that he and his fellow-protesters did: “We don’t want to be part of China.”

Reserved and cerebral, Tsai Ing-wen seemed an unlikely national leader. Born in 1956, she was one of eleven children. Her father was a member of the Hakka, a historically marginalized Indigenous Taiwanese group. Her mother doted on her, making her lunches into her college years. Tsai studied law, earning degrees from Cornell and the London School of Economics, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on international trade. As a young official, she attracted attention for her role in negotiating Taiwan’s tortuous entry into the World Trade Organization, where it was admitted not as a country but as a “separate customs territory.”

Tsai claimed to dislike the spotlight; in her memoir, she described herself as “a person who liked to stick close to the wall when walking down the street.” Elsewhere in the book, she wrote of the joys of toiling in obscurity: “This is Tsai Ing-wen, always proving herself in the quietest way.” People who know her did not disagree. “She’s most at home with her cats and dogs,” a friend told me.

As a Presidential candidate, in 2015, Tsai said that she supported the status quo in Taiwan’s relationship with China. She passed notes, through Taiwanese academics, to senior leaders in China, telling them that she wanted good relations. In public statements, Chinese officials suggested that those relations rested on her affirming that Taiwan and China were part of the same country.

The prevailing idea in China was that Taiwan would eventually join the mainland, much as Hong Kong had when it ceased to be a British colony, in 1997—an arrangement known as “one country, two systems,” in which a democracy could, at least rhetorically, coexist with a dictatorship. Tsai was faced with a conundrum. Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund, who has known Tsai for years, told me that Tsai was under pressure to placate the Chinese but couldn’t call Taiwan and China “one country” without splitting her own party. And she knew that Beijing was wary of the D.P.P. “The Chinese had already made up their minds that this woman was pro-independence to the core,” Glaser said.

In Tsai’s inaugural speech, she declared, “The two governing parties across the strait must set aside the baggage of history.” China’s leaders swiftly broke off contact. “The mainland and Taiwan belong to the same China,” Ma Xiaoguang, China’s Taiwan-affairs spokesman, said. “There is no room for ambiguity.” Tsai was vilified in official news outlets. A piece published by the Xinhua News Agency blamed her policies on the fact that she is unmarried and lives alone. “As a single female politician, she lacks the emotional encumbrance of love, the constraints of family, or the worries of children,” an analyst with the People’s Liberation Army wrote. “Her style and strategy in pursuing politics constantly skew toward the emotional, personal, and extreme.”

In fact, as a public speaker, Tsai was often dull. But she posted regularly on social media, pressing into crowds and posing for selfies with supporters. As she resisted Chinese pressure, her popularity surged. In 2019, when Xi said that he might use force to compel reunification, Tsai issued a sharp retort, insisting that China “must accept the existence” of Taiwan and acknowledge it as a democratic state. “Taiwan absolutely will not accept ‘one country, two systems,’ ” she said. Admirers began calling her Spicy Taiwanese Girl, borrowing a lyric from a popular song.

A pivotal moment came later that year, when Chinese security forces crushed peaceful protests in Hong Kong. Tsai became even more emphatically opposed to integration. Official contact between her government and China’s dropped to nothing, cross-strait travel and cultural exchanges plummeted, and eventually Tsai allowed American Special Forces to come train Taiwanese soldiers. The details of that program, and of many others the Americans are overseeing to help the Taiwanese strengthen their defenses, are kept quiet. “We probably do more diplomatically and more behind-the-scenes stuff with Taiwan than almost any other place—and we talk very little about it,” a senior American official told me.

Although Tsai maintained that she was willing to talk to the Chinese, there seemed to be a growing sense that the time had passed. “The moment we sit down with the Chinese, it’s over,” Lin told me. “There’s only one thing they want to talk about.”

During Tsai’s tenure, Chinese diplomats have worked to deepen Taiwan’s isolation. One by one, Chinese diplomats have persuaded Taiwan’s diplomatic partners to abandon her; the latest, in 2021, was the government of Nicaragua, which had maintained relations with the Republic of China for most of the past century. The senior American official said that the Nicaraguan government could expect to be rewarded with generous Chinese aid. “It’s very transactional,” Glaser told me. Only fourteen countries now have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, many of them island nations like Tuvalu. Under Chinese pressure, Taiwan has been excluded from the United Nations General Assembly and from formal membership in most international institutions, including the World Health Organization.

The result has been an uncomfortable paradox: even as Taiwan has developed a sense of nationhood, much of the rest of the world has pulled away. Earlier this year, President Biden dispatched a group of prominent former officials to reassure Tsai and to assess the situation. One of the officials on that trip told me that he was unnerved by what he saw: “What you notice when you’re in Taiwan is the profound sense of isolation. They’re alone.”

In 2015, two Taiwanese university students, Truman Chen and Sandra Ho, attended a journalism conference in Fujian, China. It was the height of Taiwanese and Chinese coöperation, and the students were obliged to sit through a performance of propaganda tunes like “The Embrace of the Motherland Always Welcomes You.” “It was so silly, we couldn’t stop laughing,” Ho told me. Back in their dorms, she and Chen poked fun at the exercise on WeChat, the social-media platform, and their riffs were a hit.

When they returned home, they kept up their act, imitating the newscasts on CCTV, the state-run Chinese channel. Chen played a straight-faced anchorman, narrating the preposterous reports that appeared onscreen. “Our feeling was that so much of the news was really funny and absurd, and we could tell people what was happening and have fun at the same time,” Ho told me.

Their posts grew into a comic newscast, “Eye Central TV,” which airs several times a week on YouTube; the most popular episodes get a million views apiece. Chen and Ho often taunt Taiwanese politicians, especially for their historic obsession with returning to liberate the mainland; China is referred to as the “occupied area,” with maps of Taiwan’s territory altered to include everything from Fujian to Mongolia. But the absurdities of the People’s Republic supply most of the material. Xi Jinping is referred to as Winnie-the-Pooh and the government as the Red Bandit. A recent segment took aim at Xi’s draconian “zero Covid” policy: video clips showed Chinese health workers, wearing rubber gloves and dressed in suits and masks, performing PCR tests on roosters, crayfish, lake trout, even cabbage. Then a clip rolled of a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining the policy. Chen referred to him as a “male publicist”—Mandarin slang for a male prostitute.

The creators of “Eye-C TV,” like much of its audience, are under the age of thirty-five, and the show is emblematic of Taiwan’s generational divide over ties with China. To Chen and Ho, the People’s Republic is a slightly crazy neighbor, whose main purpose is to provide fodder for jokes. “We don’t feel connected to China, but there is no way for us to say that we are not related to China, because many people’s ancestors are immigrants from there,” Ho said. Chen added, “None of my friends want to be a part of China. We’re different countries.”

In polls, the prospect of unification generally garners single-digit support. But many Taiwanese, particularly older ones, believe that President Tsai’s refusal to appease China is putting them at risk. “The D.P.P. is painting the Chinese into a corner,” Lung, the writer, told me. “The danger is that they’ll conclude they have no options except war.”

On paper, the Taiwanese military is overmatched. It has about two hundred thousand active-duty soldiers, sailors, and airmen; the P.L.A. is thought to have more than two million troops. Ian Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, a China-focussed think tank, told me that Taiwan could mobilize as many as four hundred thousand reservists within seventy-two hours. The trouble is that there is little infrastructure to accommodate a large-scale mobilization, and no weapons. “They are very big, but not very good,” he said.

Taiwanese leaders have so far refrained from establishing any kind of militia to provide guns and training to civilians who could be deployed in a crisis. And while there has been some discussion of extending the period of mandatory conscription to at least a year, that, too, has failed to materialize. Enacting either of those measures would require a substantial political commitment. “No leader wants to be the bad guy and ask people to sacrifice,” Chang Yen-ting, a former deputy commander of the Taiwanese Air Force, said.

As tensions with China have risen, some private citizens have begun acting on their own. One Saturday morning, in the basement of the Chi-Nan Presbyterian Church, in Taipei, I visited a course in first aid and rudimentary civil defense. An instructor showed some sixty concerned civilians how to move a person who has been wounded and how to stanch bleeding; other courses were dedicated to operating two-way radios and preparing to live in community shelters. Several similar groups have formed. One of those who signed up was a woman who asked not to be named, for fear of retribution. She grew up in Taipei, attended college in Hong Kong, and went on to work for a bank there. “When the Chinese came to Hong Kong, they brought in their surveillance cameras and their facial-recognition software,” she told me. “That’s what they want to do here.”

Robert Tsao, a billionaire founder of one of Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, U.M.C., pledged more than thirty million dollars to lay the groundwork for a territorial-defense program. Tsao was born in Beijing and did business with China as he built his fortune, but, since the crackdown in Hong Kong, he has begun referring to Chinese leaders as a “gangster mafia.” He told me that he envisioned a force of three million women and men; his funding would supply a down payment on housing and firearms training. “I don’t care if the government isn’t ready,” he said. “We have to act.”

President Tsai is constrained in part by pockets of pro-unification sympathy—particularly among her rivals in the K.M.T. In August, Andrew Hsia, a K.M.T. leader, travelled to China and met with government officials—one of the first such meetings in years. Hsia was vilified by Tsai’s supporters for the meeting, but he told me that his Chinese interlocutors were frustrated that they had no one to talk to in the Taiwanese government. “It’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “There’s no dialogue. That’s when accidents happen.”

The most powerful constituency for closer ties with China is the business community. Since the nineteen-eighties, Taiwan has invested tens of billions of dollars in China, and thousands of companies have opened operations there. Among them are some of the largest and most successful businesses in the world, including Foxconn, whose factories on the mainland assemble millions of cell phones a year. More than two hundred thousand Taiwanese live in China, many of them working in tech jobs. Taiwan is a net beneficiary of this economic relationship, with a trade surplus of a hundred and four billion dollars last year.

Many businessmen with operations in China are close to the K.M.T. and hold more positive views of China. Sheen Ching-jing was born in China in 1947 and fled to Taiwan with his parents two years later. He returned in the early nineteen-nineties and built the Yangzhou Core Pacific City Development Co. With more than six thousand employees, Sheen’s company has constructed apartment complexes, shopping centers, and homes. Sheen told me that good relations with China were essential to Taiwan’s prosperity. “This is an era of economics,” he said. “We share the same culture. We are of the same tribe. There’s no reason for us to be separate countries.” The widespread opposition to unification would inevitably fade away, and military force would be unnecessary, Sheen said: “The question will be naturally resolved.”

Some Taiwanese businessmen told me privately that Chinese officials had pressured them to avoid political positions that ran counter to China’s foreign policy. One businessman, who called himself Winston, said that China favored K.M.T. candidates—and made it clear that supporting the D.P.P. would invite punishment. Winston, who oversees an operation with thousands of employees on the mainland, said a government official approached him after discovering that one of his employees had contributed to a pro-independence Presidential candidate in Taiwan. The official threatened heavy punishment if the donations continued. “It was very sensitive,” Winston said.

During the 2020 election campaign, Winston recalled, his company’s leaders declined a request from President Tsai to appear with them in Taiwan, for fear of angering the Chinese: “It put us in a very tricky position.” He told me that his operations in China were under constant threat of inspections and fines, and that it was sometimes necessary to bribe officials to keep them from causing trouble. “We are dealing with people who are trying to make as much money as possible in the jobs they have, before they are moved out,” he said. “It’s a very difficult environment.”

The K.M.T. says that it is committed to preserving Taiwanese sovereignty. But some of its leaders have grown remarkably close to China. In May, Hung Hsiu-chu, a former K.M.T. chairwoman, toured Xinjiang, where Western governments have accused the Chinese government of committing genocide against the Uyghur minority and maintaining an archipelago of forced-labor camps. Speaking to Chinese media afterward, Hung dismissed claims of genocide, saying that she saw only “bright smiles on everyone’s faces, full of hope for the future.” She didn’t notice any Uyghurs working against their will, either: “If they are, why do they all show satisfied looks on their faces?”

Suspicions abound that pro-Chinese leaders have quietly accepted money from the mainland. One of them is Zhang Xiuye, a native of Shanghai who married a Taiwanese man and, in 2018, ran for a seat on the Taipei City Council. That October, she and a colleague in the Patriotic Alliance Association, which advocates unification, were charged with accepting sixty-two thousand dollars from a source in China, apparently to help their candidacies. Both denied wrongdoing; Zhang posted bail and disappeared, presumably to the mainland. “We suspect the Chinese are doing a lot of this,” Syu Guan-ze, an independent researcher, told me. “But it’s nearly impossible to track all the money flowing into Taiwan.”

At a conference in Beijing in 2019, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party exhorted Taiwanese media executives to advance China’s plan for the island. “We want to realize peaceful unification—one country, two systems—and we need to rely on the joint efforts of our friends in the media,” the Chinese leader said, according to a video of the meeting. “I believe you understand the situation. History will remember you.”

Much of the suspicion about Chinese efforts to co-opt the media has fallen on Tsai Eng-meng, a Taiwanese billionaire who built a sprawling conglomerate, called Want Want, of snack-food factories, hotels, and real estate on the mainland. Beginning in the two-thousands, Tsai bought several large Taiwanese media properties, including the China Times newspaper and CTi TV, which became known for a sharply pro-China slant. In 2019, it was reported that Want Want had received more than half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Chinese government since 2004; during the most recent Presidential campaign, CTi TV devoted nearly three-quarters of its coverage to the K.M.T. candidate. “It’s an outlet for Chinese propaganda,” K. C. Huang, the head of TAWPA, an organization dedicated to fighting corruption, said. In 2020, the Taiwanese government declined to renew the broadcasting license for the company’s news network, after receiving hundreds of complaints from citizens.

Misinformation is ubiquitous on Taiwanese social media. This summer, an audio recording widely suspected of coming from China gave instructions on how to prepare for an impending invasion. “Everyone must stay away from military facilities, sit quietly in their homes, and wait for liberation,” a Chinese-accented voice said. “If you have children in the Army, be sure to tell them if the People’s Liberation Army attacks Taiwan to hand over their guns and they won’t be killed.”

In 2013, Chinese construction crews arrived at a shoal in the South China Sea known as Mischief Reef. It was a speck in the ocean—so shallow that at high tide it disappeared below the water—but that didn’t last. The Chinese crews began piling sand atop the reef, and eventually poured acres of concrete to build it into an island—attempting to create a new political entity in one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors, on the southern approach to Taiwan. Mischief Reef was also claimed by the Philippines, which sued China in the International Court of Arbitration. But the Chinese crews carried on, even firing water cannons at Filipino boats sailing to a nearby reef. Within a few years, they had built a runway and brought in radar and anti-aircraft missiles, along with troops to man them; over time, two more artificial islands were fully militarized.

The construction was part of a long-running effort to claim jurisdiction in the South China Sea, which is rich in fishing beds and oil deposits. For decades, China’s government has been declaring that tiny spits of land in the sea are in fact islands, entitled to territorial waters that extend out for miles. The Chinese have made more than two hundred such claims, giving them jurisdiction over international waters and making it increasingly difficult for other nations to operate. In 2016, the International Court of Arbitration ruled that the claims had no validity. The Chinese government ignored the ruling, which the vice foreign minister dismissed as “a scrap of paper.”

On September 1, 2021, China declared that any foreign vessel sailing in the territorial waters of the reclaimed reefs and shoals would be required to identify itself. The U.S. refused. As a former senior naval officer told me, “We made it absolutely clear that we weren’t going to abide by that.” A week later, an American destroyer called the U.S.S. Benfold sailed past Mischief Reef without providing identification. Chinese forces went on high alert, and the People’s Liberation Army declared the ship’s presence “the latest iron-clad proof of attempted U.S. hegemony and militarization of the South China Sea.” The U.S. Navy said that the mission was intended to “demonstrate that the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows.”

As China stepped up its claims in the Pacific, Western leaders responded. In September of 2021 alone, the U.S. Navy sent aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other warships into the waters around Taiwan or the South China Sea at least six times; the British, at least twice. The next month, ships from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Japan gathered in the Philippine Sea for a sprawling multinational naval exercise, one of the largest since the end of the Cold War.

This year, the U.S. has sent warships into the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea seventeen times and has routinely sent aircraft to patrol there. The naval activity has sometimes been so intense that each side appeared to be reacting to the other. A former senior American naval officer insisted that this wasn’t the case, as the Navy planned each mission weeks in advance. “I think they are reacting to us,” he said. Whenever Americans have appeared, a Chinese vessel or aircraft has invariably come to shadow them.

Occasionally, the encounters have been humorous. In 2015, a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane was patrolling the South China Sea when it received a radio message. “This is the Chinese Navy,” a voice said in heavily accented English. “Please go away quickly in order to wrong judgment.”

An American officer gave a carefully parsed response: “I am a United States military aircraft, conducting lawful military activities outside national airspace.”

The voice over the radio replied, “Meow.” It was followed by a series of mysterious beeps: the sound of Space Invaders, the nineteen-seventies video game.

In 2020, the Chinese military issued a harsher provocation: a propaganda video, in which nuclear-capable H-6K jets carried out simulated missile attacks. In the video, which the P.L.A. titled “The God of War H-6K Goes on the Attack!,” the warplanes strike what appears to be Guam, the home of Andersen Air Force Base, one of a handful of major U.S. bases in the Pacific. The ground erupts; a block of waterfront warehouses bursts into a fireball, and then a column of smoke rises toward the planes. American observers responded bluffly to the simulation. “We could have killed them six times,” a U.S. military officer told me. Still, China’s belligerence reflected how the balance of military power had shifted since the late nineties, when the two countries got into a dispute over Taiwan, and China was forced to give way.

It began in 1995, when President Lee Teng-hui sought a visa to the U.S. to deliver a speech at Cornell. The Clinton Administration at first refused, but after an uproar in Congress it agreed to grant him one. The Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, enraged by what he regarded as Lee’s show of independence, ordered missile tests near the island and instructed the P.L.A. to stage military exercises, one of which mimicked an amphibious assault. President Clinton responded by sending a Marine landing ship and two other warships into the Taiwan Strait, followed a week later by an aircraft carrier.

Jiang backed down, but the crisis wasn’t over. The next March, after Lee declared his intention to enter Taiwan’s first free Presidential election, Jiang ordered new missile tests, along with further exercises. This time, Clinton responded with even greater force, sending two aircraft-carrier battle groups into the waters near Taiwan. Amid the crisis, thousands of Taiwanese requested visas to flee the island, and the stock market plummeted. But Jiang backed down again. “The Chinese were humiliated,” a former senior official in the Clinton Administration told me. “They vowed, ‘Never again.’ ”

Since then, China has undertaken an ambitious military buildup that has brought its conventional forces to near-parity with the United States’. The Chinese Navy is now the largest in the world, and, as the U.S. Navy prepares to decommission more of its own ships, the gap is expected to grow. China’s ships and submarines are widely regarded as less effective than their American equivalents, but the Chinese are rapidly modernizing.

China’s growing capabilities have coincided with an increasingly aggressive approach to foreign policy. For years, its leaders seldom boasted of their country’s military prowess, following the dictum of the former leader Deng Xiaoping to “hide your strength, bide your time” as the economy grew.

Since becoming the head of the C.C.P., in 2013, Xi Jinping has abandoned that precept. He set no deadline for bringing Taiwan into China but suggested that he intended to be in office when it happened. The Taiwan question, he said, “cannot be passed from generation to generation.” Last year, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party, he warned, “The Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, coerce, and enslave us. Whoever attempts to do that will surely break their heads on the steel Great Wall built with the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Xi’s reëlection as Party chairman in October appeared to herald a new era of assertiveness. He emerged from the Party Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, stronger than ever; he purged his main rivals in the Politburo and its Standing Committee, many of them market-oriented technocrats, and elevated loyalists, most of them drawn from the military and security establishment. In one highly visible moment, Xi looked on as his aging predecessor, Hu Jintao, was roughly escorted from the stage. Several of Hu’s allies, most of them relative moderates, were soon expelled from the Party.

In his speech to the Party Congress, Xi warned of “dangerous storms” ahead and ordered leaders to prepare for an era of “struggle,” a word that was edited into the Party’s charter in seven places. Phrases that suggested stability, like “peace and development will remain the themes of the era,” were removed from a report accompanying the speech. “Our country has entered a period when strategic opportunity coexists with risks and challenges,” Xi told the Party’s leaders. “The world has entered a period of turbulence and transformation.”

Western experts say that Xi’s ultimate ambition is for China to supplant the United States as the world’s preëminent power. His goal is what he calls China’s “great rejuvenation,” the recovery of national power, pride, and territory that fell away in the nineteenth century, with much of it surrendered to the West. Making Taiwan part of China, Xi has said, is one of his project’s crucial chapters.

For many China specialists in the West, the speech was a watershed. “There are no longer any checks on Xi’s power within the system,” Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national-security adviser under President Donald Trump and is now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me. “Any checks that now exist are external to China. Inside the system, Xi can do what he wants, including start a war.”

Several times a year, David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official who is now at the Rand Corporation, in Washington, assembles Navy and Air Force officers and officials to conduct war games between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. The participants gather around a large map showing forces arrayed across the region. Those playing the Chinese leaders are steeped in knowledge of China’s decision-making; all have access to the U.S. government’s best information. “The war games are so real that the participants are exhausted and stressed out—they take them very seriously,” Ochmanek told me.

The simulations take many forms, but usually start with a crisis, like the election of a pro-independence President of Taiwan, or with an outright invasion. Many of them end badly for the United States, Ochmanek said: “We usually lose.” Sometimes the Chinese military is able to keep the U.S. Navy at bay and capture Taiwan. Sometimes the Chinese sink U.S. aircraft carriers. This puts the burden on the participants who are mimicking American officials. Do they give up, or escalate? Do they strike China itself? “Sometimes, when the U.S. attacks the Chinese mainland, the Chinese attack Alaska and Hawaii,” he said. “The losses are very heavy.”

It’s not always so dire, Ochmanek said. In some cases, the United States prevails. And even the games that the U.S. loses are not necessarily reflective of how a war would unfold in real life; the main purpose is to evaluate American vulnerabilities. “We learn a lot from these,” Ochmanek said.

Like the war games, almost everything about a potential war with China over Taiwan is theoretical. For the Americans and the Taiwanese, gauging whether and how a war might start involves assessments of each country’s capabilities and objectives, as well as some calculation of the costs that each side would be willing to bear. For American policymakers, that means trying to determine what is required to dissuade China from attempting to change the status quo by force, or, if it does, how to make any war so painful that China would stop without achieving its goals.

American and Taiwanese experts agree that an invasion of Taiwan would be a colossal gamble for the Chinese leadership. A full-scale invasion would likely begin with cyber and missile attacks on Taiwanese military infrastructure, and possibly with an assault by airborne troops. But eventually an invading force of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have to cross a hundred miles of water, capture the island’s difficult terrain, and sustain an occupation, presumably while under constant attack.

In testimony before Congress last year, Admiral Phil Davidson, then the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, expressed concern that China could try to take Taiwan before 2027—the year its military modernization is scheduled to be complete. “I think our conventional deterrent is actually eroding,” he said. “I worry that they are accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order, which they have long said that they want to do by 2050. I am worried about them moving that target closer. Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then.”

Some American officials and experts believe that China’s advantages will begin to wane later in the decade. A new generation of U.S. defense improvements is scheduled to come online, and America’s defense industrial base, now attenuated, will be revived—or so goes the hope. Many of the same experts believe that China might be entering a long-term economic slowdown, brought on by a rapidly aging population and a maturing economy. “My sense is that the window is opening now, and that it won’t be open forever,” Elbridge Colby, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Trump, told me.

Taiwanese officials say that they are determined to repel an invasion on their own. “We think we would win,” Wu, the foreign minister, told me. But almost no one outside Taiwan believes this. “There is no scenario in which Taiwan can defend itself,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University and a strategic planner for Pacific Command in the Air Force reserves, told me. A more realistic goal would be to slow down a Chinese invasion, in order to give the U.S., if it chooses to intervene, time to marshal its forces and cover the vast distances to get there. A senior American military officer told me that Taiwan would have to hold off the Chinese for about six weeks. “We think it’s in our favor if it takes forty-five days,” the officer said.

China’s goal would likely be to seize Taiwan as quickly as possible, to present the U.S. with a fait accompli. According to American officials, Beijing worries that it would be unlikely to win a protracted conflict, as the U.S. gathered its allies and revitalized its industrial base. “The longer it goes, the more difficult it gets for the Chinese,” Mastro told me.

For years, Taiwan’s plan for its defense was to attack the mainland bases that would support an invasion. “The strategy is to go to the origin,” Chang, the former deputy commander of the Taiwanese Air Force, told me. The Taiwanese military maintains a formidable conventional force, consisting of fighter bombers, cruise missiles, and anti-ship missiles. But Taiwan’s strategy was designed in the years when its military was closer to parity with China’s. Lee Hsi-Min, who served as chief of the general staff of the Taiwanese military until he retired in 2019, told me that he had pushed for reform without success. “The government didn’t listen to me,” he said.

As China’s capabilities have raced ahead, American officials have begun prodding Taiwan to rely instead on a defensive “porcupine strategy,” which would aim to slow down an invading force using sea mines, anti-ship missiles, and other inexpensive weapons. Taiwanese defense officials have resisted, according to officials in both countries. Earlier this year, Taiwan asked to buy a number of American MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, used for hunting submarines. The State Department rejected the request, which officials considered emblematic of the old strategy. “They’re stuck in the nineteen-eighties,” the senior American official told me.

This year, as pressure from China has increased, the Taiwanese government has acted more urgently. The legislature has approved eight billion dollars in emergency defense spending, for such things as drones, anti-ballistic-missile radar, and patrol boats, all made domestically. But these programs will take time. Until then, the biggest obstacle to preparing Taiwan for a conflict appears to be supplies from the United States. Taiwanese officials told me that they were waiting on the delivery of fourteen billion dollars’ worth of military hardware, including scores of sea mines and anti-ship missiles—the very weapons the Americans have been urging them to buy. One reason, officials say, is that U.S. warehouses have been stripped bare by the conflict in Ukraine. “The Ukraine war has showed us that we don’t have the ammunition stocks to sustain a medium-sized war,” the senior Administration official said. “We don’t have the industrial base.” But Pottinger noted that the demands of supplying Ukraine didn’t explain all the delays: “Stingers and Javelin anti-tank missiles are going to Ukraine, but Harpoon anti-ship missiles are not. The Pentagon procurement system is so screwed up and totally bizarre. Our procurement is asleep. Saudi Arabia is in line to receive the Harpoons before Taiwan. We are not arming ourselves or our friends for the most dangerous fight.”

The biggest question of all is whether America would intervene. Since the early nineteen-eighties, the U.S. has had no legal obligation to defend Taiwan, but, because the American Navy was overwhelmingly dominant, the question wasn’t urgent. As China has grown more powerful, and Xi’s rhetoric more threatening, the matter has become more acute. In recent months, Biden has publicly promised on four occasions to defend Taiwan. Biden’s statements buoyed Taiwanese officials—“fourth time!” one texted me after the latest pledge—but White House officials say publicly that American policy remains unchanged.

The Biden White House seems sharply aware of the consequences of failing to insure Taiwan’s independence. Allowing the island to fall would give the Chinese Navy unrestricted access to the open oceans, as well as effective dominance in the sea lanes of the western Pacific, through which more than three trillion dollars’ worth of goods passes each year. It would also signal to America’s democratic allies in the region—including South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines—that the U.S. could not protect them. Many of the pro-Western countries nearby are under pressure from China as it is. “China is influential in the region, but it is not trusted,” Bilahari Kausikan, a former senior Singaporean diplomat, told me. “Once you display animosity in a naked way, people don’t forget it.” He added, “The leaders in Southeast Asia want American leadership.”

But that doesn’t mean these countries would provide assistance if the U.S. went to war with China. Neither Japan nor South Korea—which have formidable militaries, and which host large American bases—have committed to helping. “With the Japanese, even an attack on the U.S. base in Okinawa would not necessarily trigger self-defense,” Mastro told me. The concern is partly that the U.S. would not win a fight against China. The irony, Mastro said, is that a Japanese decision to join in would likely be decisive. “We would win every time,” she said.

A war to defend Taiwan would put the United States in direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China for the first time since the Korean War, when tens of thousands were killed in face-to-face battles. U.S. officials won’t discuss their battle plans in detail, but experts say that an American response would almost certainly involve missile strikes on the Chinese mainland. “Hundreds of thousands of people would die,” Mastro said.

Likewise, experts say that if the Chinese invaded they would probably attack American bases in Guam and Japan, as they try to keep the Navy at bay. The U.S. military would likely strike back hard and fast, the senior American official said: “We would destroy a lot of their assets immediately.”

But some experts believe that America’s strategy, organized around aircraft carriers, has grown dangerously obsolete—that carriers, while capable of delivering enormous firepower, are increasingly vulnerable to attack. In some of the scenarios that strategists have explored, American carriers could be attacked by Chinese hypersonic missiles that can damage ships even if they’re intercepted. These strategists imagine something akin to the episode in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, when the Imperial Japanese Navy sank almost the entire Russian Pacific fleet in a single battle. “If we don’t change, we will lose,” Lieutenant General S. Clinton Hinote, a deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, told me.

There’s another concern for some American officials: that the United States does not have the industrial capacity to sustain a longer war with China, which maintains the world’s largest steel and shipbuilding industries. “Who can rebuild their losses faster?” a senior military officer said. “Who can lay steel for new ships? Who can make carbon fibre faster for new aircraft? Aircraft carriers? Against China, we’re not in a position to take one for one.” The problem, experts say, stretches across the spectrum of manufacturing capability; a recent report by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an American research firm, said that, in a war with China, the U.S. Air Force would run out of advanced long-range munitions in less than two weeks.

China has its own reasons for caution. Richard Chen, a former deputy defense minister of Taiwan, told me that the most basic obstacle to an invasion was geography. Only about a dozen of Taiwan’s beaches are suitable for landing soldiers and material in large quantities; the water is too shallow for ships to come in close, and the beaches are too narrow to hold more than a battalion—about eight hundred troops—at a time. The beaches that might accommodate larger numbers lie in underdeveloped areas hemmed in by mountains and jungle. “Invading Taiwan would be a disaster for them, and I think they know it,” Chen said.

Some experts believe that, for Chinese leaders, the risks and uncertainties of starting a war are still too great. “My sense is that the Chinese don’t know what they don’t know—and that is the primary deterrent right now. They cannot, with confidence, predict the outcome,” an American naval officer told me. “If the generals tell Xi Jinping, ‘If you invade Taiwan, you’re going to lose one and a half million members of your armed forces,’ then Xi can decide whether that is a price he is willing to pay.”

But Chen believes that China could try to strangle Taiwan without invading. The island, he said, is vulnerable to a blockade, because so much of what it needs must be imported. The most glaring concern is energy: Taiwan’s power plants run almost entirely on liquefied natural gas and coal. Taiwan has no more than eleven days’ worth of gas in reserve, and about six weeks’ worth of coal. In addition, Taiwan imports two-thirds of its food. “In two weeks, Taiwan would start to go dark,” Chen told me. “No electricity, no phones, no Internet. And people would start to go hungry.” Chen said that the U.S. could protect cargo ships travelling to Taiwan, but he expressed skepticism that such an arrangement would last very long. “The U.S. Navy is going to escort ships into Taiwanese ports?” he said. “For how long? Months? Years?”

If China imposed a full naval blockade, it would constitute an act of war under international law. But a more targeted measure—stopping gas and oil tankers, or blocking arms deliveries—would be enough to cripple Taiwan. Dan Patt, a former deputy director at DARPA and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, in Washington, believes that this would pose the most difficult challenge for American leaders hoping to rally a response. “If it’s not happening on YouTube or social media, there won’t be anything for people to see,” Patt said. “Do you think American voters are going to want to go to war over a commercial cargo vessel being stopped on its way to Taiwan?”

China is also vulnerable to a blockade: it imports more than seventy per cent of its oil from the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Malacca, a narrow waterway that could be blocked with relative ease. Other routes, through Indonesia, would be slower and more expensive. But China has a hundred-day supply of oil, and much of the shortfall could be made up by Russia. “China could last a long time,” Mastro told me.

A larger concern is feeding the populace. China is the world’s largest importer of food, especially from the United States. Peter Zeihan, a demographer who has written extensively about China, told me that a cessation of imports would likely result in famine. “A war with the U.S. would be the end of China as a modern state,” he said.

One of the most important deterrents to war is Taiwan’s role in producing semiconductors. Seventy per cent of the world’s most advanced chips are manufactured there, many of them at the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. “Banks, iPhones, laptops, cars—almost every piece of modern equipment has a chip from Taiwan,” an executive in the industry told me. “A world without Taiwan is a world back to the Stone Age.” America has purchased some three hundred billion dollars’ worth of chips from Taiwanese factories in the past twenty years. “Apple, Dell, Google—they wouldn’t know how to function without them,” the executive said.

China is similarly reliant on the highest-end chips produced in Taiwan; it doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to manufacture them. If China seized control of Taiwan’s semiconductor factories, it could conceivably force local workers to run them. But the factories depend on a constant flow of Western material, software, expertise, and engineers, without which production would cease in a matter of weeks. Pottinger told me, “If the Chinese took the factories, there’s no way the West would help run them.” The industry executive wasn’t so sure, given the harm that their loss would do to the global economy. “It’s mutually assured destruction,” he said. Colby, the former official in the Trump Defense Department, went so far as to suggest that perhaps it was best for the U.S. to destroy the plants itself: “If we’re going to lose them, we should blow them up.”

Some Western experts fear that a Cold War dynamic has developed, in which the United States, trying to deter what it sees as aggressive behavior, is taking steps that seem aggressive to Chinese leaders, who then take their own steps to deter the U.S. This year, as China squeezed Taiwan, the Biden Administration took two steps that Chinese leaders are likely to regard as extremely hostile.

The first was a decision, in October, to ban sales to China of sophisticated semiconductors related to A.I., supercomputing, and chip manufacturing, if any part of them is produced in the U.S. Biden officials have said that the measure, which will likely prevent Beijing from buying billions of dollars’ worth of microchips, was intended to curb China’s military modernization. “These are unlike any export regulations we’ve ever had,” Patt, the former DARPA official, said. How will China react? “If you’re China, one reason not to invade Taiwan is that you have a good relationship with the Taiwanese, and they supply a lot of high-end technology,” Patt said. “The Chinese might not want to go to war, but they might be tempted to escalate.”

The second measure, now working its way through the American bureaucracy, would provide Taiwan with some ten billion dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry and training. In the past, Taiwan paid for most of the weapons that the U.S. supplied; under the proposal, the U.S. would give Taiwan money to cover the purchase. “The Communist Party could decide that this is a red line,” Patt said. “They could decide to quarantine all ships carrying American weapons to prevent them from entering Taiwan. What would we do then?”

An open confrontation would have enormous implications. “A war would fundamentally change the character and complexion of global power,” Pottinger said. “If China loses, it could lead to the collapse of the Party and the end of Xi. If Taiwan falls, we are in a different world, where the tide of authoritarianism becomes a flood.” Once engaged, a fight would be difficult to control. If leaders on either side began to believe that they were losing, they could feel pressure to escalate; China might attack Americans overseas, and the U.S. might intensify attacks on the Chinese mainland. Countries throughout the region, and perhaps the world, would be forced to decide whether and how to join the fight.

Even a minor crisis over Taiwan would likely spur large increases in the cost of insurance for ships in the area, potentially driving up the price of many goods in ways that would ripple through the world economy. Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former diplomat in China, told me, “China’s economy is sagging—there’s low consumption right now, and the principal driver of growth is exports. Would they want to destroy maritime insurance by making it impossible for ships to flow in and out of China? They’d be shutting down their own economy.”

In the Ukraine conflict, the West has had some success imposing sanctions on Russia. Christopher K. Johnson, the head of China Strategies Group and a former China analyst for the C.I.A., said that the Chinese are concerned about sanctions but believe that the U.S. can go only so far without harming its own businesses: “My sense is that Xi and the Politburo have decided that there is no way the West would dare to enact the types of comprehensive financial sanctions they have on Russia.”

Pottinger believes that if there is a war it will be because Xi misreads the conditions. “Xi has huge ambitions,” he told me. “But he has not shown himself to be a reckless gambler. He calculates.” Good bets require precise assessments of risk, though, and it is not clear that Xi is able to make them. “Information is like oxygen,” Pottinger said. “The higher up you go, the thinner it gets. Xi lives on the summit of Mt. Everest.” His officials are unlikely to give him bad news, and his American counterparts are unable to reliably communicate with him: “We came to the determination during the Trump Administration that messages we were sending through diplomatic channels were not reaching Xi. The Biden Administration has come to a similar conclusion.” The senior Administration official told me that the hotline between the two countries is unreliable, because sometimes the Chinese don’t pick up.

In October, Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, said that China had made “a fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” In recent months, China has begun integrating its fleet of civilian ferries, thought to number in the thousands, into military command. Its army has been staging exercises that feature amphibious invasions, practicing air drops for large numbers of ground troops, and moving military formations on railroads to Fujian Province, which sits just across the Taiwan Strait. The practical effect of these moves is to make it harder to tell the difference between an exercise and the real thing. “That’s the problem with these military exercises—you just extend them and extend them, you normalize them,” Mastro said. “To figure out what they are doing, we are forced to look at much smaller stuff. Are they stockpiling plasma? Are they moving forward medical supplies?” In the Biden Administration, the concern is that the Chinese will abruptly turn an exercise into an invasion. The other Administration official explained the fear: “At some point, they’ll decide, ‘We have to do this,’ and they’ll just look for a casus belli.”

But Johnson suggested it was dangerous to read these incursions as evidence that the Chinese were planning an imminent invasion. “As Marxists, they believe in the value of agitation and propaganda,” he said. “The goal is to wear down Taiwanese resolve and our willingness to intervene. They don’t mind if takes years or a decade.”

Both sides are caught—seemingly unable to back down without appearing to concede. Ryan Hass, the former diplomat, said, “China has a strategic dilemma. They’re frustrated by the status quo, and they’re probing for ways to change it. But taking big, bold actions would come at an extraordinary cost to them. You can’t eliminate the possibility that they would be willing to pay that cost, and so we have to be prepared for it. But if you accept the proposition that war is inevitable, and we must do everything we possibly can to prepare for it now, then you risk precipitating the very outcome that your strategy is designed to prevent.” ♦