#its not entirely applicable 2 them but i like these lines

[bbgatile]

i know your mistakes and you know mine

[commodorez]

What kind of work can be done on a commodore 64 or those other old computers? The tech back then was extremely limited but I keep seeing portable IBMs and such for office guys.

I asked a handful of friends for good examples, and while this isn't an exhaustive list, it should give you a taste.

I'll lean into the Commodore 64 as a baseline for what era to hone in one, let's take a look at 1982 +/-5 years.

A C64 can do home finances, spreadsheets, word processing, some math programming, and all sorts of other other basic productivity work. Games were the big thing you bought a C64 for, but we're not talking about games here -- we're talking about work. I bought one that someone used to write and maintain a local user group newsletter on both a C64C and C128D for years, printing labels and letters with their own home equipment, mailing floppies full of software around, that sorta thing.

IBM PCs eventually became capable of handling computer aided design (CAD) work, along with a bunch of other standard productivity software. The famous AutoCAD was mostly used on this platform, but it began life on S-100 based systems from the 1970s.

Spreadsheets were a really big deal for some platforms. Visicalc was the killer app that the Apple II can credit its initial success with. Many other platforms had clones of Visicalc (and eventually ports) because it was groundbreaking to do that sort of list-based mathematical work so quickly, and so error-free. I can't forget to mention Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC compatibles, a staple of offices for a long time before Microsoft Office dominance.

CP/M machines like Kaypro luggables were an inexpensive way of making a "portable" productivity box, handling some of the lighter tasks mentioned above (as they had no graphics functionality).

The TRS-80 Model 100 was able to do alot of computing (mostly word processing) on nothing but a few AA batteries. They were a staple of field correspondence for newspaper journalists because they had an integrated modem. They're little slabs of computer, but they're awesomely portable, and great for writing on the go. Everyone you hear going nuts over cyberdecks gets that because of the Model 100.

Centurion minicomputers were mostly doing finances and general ledger work for oil companies out of Texas, but were used for all sorts of other comparable work. They were multi-user systems, running several terminals and atleast one printer on one central database. These were not high-performance machines, but entire offices were built around them.

Tandy, Panasonic, Sharp, and other brands of pocket computers were used for things like portable math, credit, loan, etc. calculation for car dealerships. Aircraft calculations, replacing slide rules were one other application available on cassette. These went beyond what a standard pocket calculator could do without a whole lot of extra work.

Even something like the IBM 5340 with an incredibly limited amount of RAM but it could handle tracking a general ledger, accounts receivable, inventory management, storing service orders for your company. Small bank branches uses them because they had peripherals that could handle automatic reading of the magnetic ink used on checks. Boring stuff, but important stuff.

I haven't even mentioned Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, or a dozen other manufacturers.

I'm curious which portable IBM you were referring to initially.

All of these examples are limited by today's standards, but these were considered standard or even top of the line machines at the time. If you write software to take advantage of the hardware you have, however limited, you can do a surprising amount of work on a computer of that era.

[splatsvilles-fashionista]

Salmon Run tips for beginners

My last post about Salmon Run, the one about Explosher, was kind of a hit, and I had some other advice that I wanted to share with people new to the series. Salmon Run gets pretty intense and stressful as you climb the Grizzco-rporate ladder, so hopefully some of these tips will ease that burden for you all just a bit.

That said, here’s some things I would suggest new players keep in mind! People who have played for a long time will probably not need me to tell them these things, but you never know, sometimes a reminder is nice.

Killing bosses is more important than collecting golden eggs. This might seem contradictory at first, after all, collecting golden eggs is how you win waves. While this is true, you also need to survive the wave, and the thing most likely to lose you the wave is not having too few eggs, but being overwhelmed by bosses. Boss Salmonid control vast amount of space with their size, damage, and paint output, and leaving them unattended for too long, even the more passive ones like Drizzlers and Fish Sticks, can very quickly spiral out of control as more of them spawn and completely take over the stage. This isn’t to say that you should ignore eggs entirely and run towards a boss at every given opportunity, but I’ve seen people basically pretend bosses don’t exist and instead try to ferry six eggs from the shoreline to the basket on their own, and this can cause far more harm than good. Move around stage with purpose and pitch in eggs where you can, but never sit idle. Time is precious and it’s on you to use it well.

Adapt to the weapon you’re assigned. All weapons have their own strengths and weaknesses, and you should act in accordance to them. If you get a Charger, park yourself up on a ledge and support your team from afar. If you get a shooter, move around the front line mowing down regular Salmonid, and so on. Far too often I see people approach all situations the same regardless of what they’re armed with, and it usually ends in disaster. Chargers and Exploshers rushing in to gather eggs who get themselves trapped and dogpiled, short-range shooters that try in vain to shoot down Steelheads or Slammin’ Lids, getting tunnel vision in the progress. I know not everyone can be good at or even like all weapons, but you should always try to use whatever you’re given to the best of your ability.

If possible, drag bosses to the basket. Okay, so when I said you should kill bosses as soon as possible, I was actually lying. There are a lot of boss Salmonid who don’t pose a threat until they’re right on top of you, like Maws, Scrappers and Steel Eels. So why go through all the trouble of dragging all of the eggs you’ll get for splatting one of them to the basket when you can make the boss itself do it for you? This was common knowledge in Splatoon 2, but it’s something I see a lot of people disregard in 3 now that we have egg throwing, but throwing eggs come with a hefty ink cost every time you do it, so it is usually more efficient to pull the boss to the basket first. Trust me when I say that doing this will save you a lot of time and effort, and having eggs around the basket when things go south is often what saves an entire run.

Use the Squid Roll! Squid Rolls are one of the fancy new things in Splatoon 3, and its something a lot of people forget about, but it has a lot of useful applications in Salmon Run. One of the simplest applications is to start doing them as you pick up eggs, immediately shifting your momentum in a different direction and letting you get back to the basket faster. Squid Rolling also gives you a bit of ink armor, letting you tank some extra damage. If you haven’t used Squid Rolls much up to now, experiment with it for a bit, I think you’ll be surprised by the ways in which it might help.

Don’t forget about bodyblocking. Did you know that your body can block bullets from your own team? This is most commonly an issue with Shooters and Splatlings, and can cause some serious headaches if you or your teammates aren’t cognizant of it. It can especially become a problem in Glowfly waves, where the whole team is usually huddling together and guarding a single pathway. Don’t be the one who loses your team the wave because you soaked an entire charge’s worth of shots from your Hydra teammate.

And that’s all I have for now, I think, don’t want this post dragging on for too long. Hopefully this will be useful to someone out there!

[damianbugs]

I remembered u like jjk so I'm gonna ask... What made you like jjk v much <3

this line

shounen animangas are notoriously known for having teenage characters be put through literal hell in order to triumph evil and save their friends, and the trope remains popular because it is so entertaining. perhaps it's the unwavering hope and naivety becoming hardened determination that is appealing in these stories. i used to enjoy this genre a lot as a kid, but after a while watching highschoolers fight to survive wasn't as exciting as it once seemed to be.

but jjk is so popular, so i am watching it, and this arc begins. we are introduced to nanami, who is a surprisingly silly guy despite his general demeanour, and i already love itadori, so i was excited to see this dynamic. immediately you could tell this arc was set for itadori to fail and learn a valuable lesson, to which nanami will probably enlighten him about.

i just didn't expect the lesson to be this.

sure, there are many other stories about people acknowledging the main group are children, realising they're not strong enough for this task, and that we should've looked after them better, it's not their fault, we expected too much and hurt them, but very rarely are these grievances 1) expressed in a way that doesn't make the child in question feel guilt for their lack of maturity and 2) be stated so bluntly TO the child themself.

nanami clearly teaches itadori that he is a child, and nanami is the adult, and so itadori shouldn't be expected to carry out the jobs nanami is responsible for, because he is just a child, and that is okay. no metaphorical or symbolic talk about strength and dreams and growing up. just the fact of the matter;

being a child is not a sin.

it's after this did i realise that this has been the point of the entire story the whole time.

to me, jjk is a story about children. children who are doomed by their fate and their circumstances. children who are forced into roles and responsibilities they don't want and can't handle. children who are no longer children, but much older, trying to stop other kids from following their steps — to no avail. this world they are born into is written against them from the start and they still get hurt. they are all still hurting.

although this moment is vital for itadori specifically, and no one could've delivered it to him as good as nanami did, i think the line is applicable to the dozens of other children in the story as well. nanami as a character is someone who now strives to protect all these children, because there was no one to protect him and his friends, and this moment (and the many others of his that follow) really make him one of the greatest characters for this specific story.

although this line and entire conversation is what really made me go from liking the anime to loving it, this entire arc in general was fantastic. even without knowing nanami's past, we understand there is a cycle of hurt and loss, really highlighting the question about responsibility and choice. it was superbly written (no wonder nanami is gege's favourite character!).

in fact after watching this arc i immediately started reading the manga, and then upon taking a long mental health break after shibuya, i am now reading it again for its finale. although jjk has kind of... lost the plot now, i continue to read for itadori, curious to see what destiny awaits a child who is forced to keep losing.

[bellofthemeadow]

The Road Ahead - ch 6 | Frankie Morales x female reader

Series Masterlist

Previous Chapter

For most of your married life, you dedicated yourself to waiting for Frankie. After each deployment, you patiently awaited his return, longing for the moment when he would be by your side again. During those nights when nightmares consumed his thoughts, you yearned for him to open up to you, hoping that he would find solace in sharing his pain. And as his addiction spiraled out of control, you held onto the hope that he would recognize his problem and seek help. However, despite your countless protests and pleas, you now find yourself waiting for him once more as he ventures off to Colombia, engaged in God knows what.

But this time is different. Determined, you make a solemn promise to yourself: You will never wait for Frankie again.

Rating: M for Mature (18 + no minors allowed)

Word Count: 9K (Sorry T.T)

Warning: Applicable for the entire fic / PTSD, drug use and addiction, postpartum depression, abusive familial relationships, self-hatred, unhealthy coping mechanism, explicit sexual content, violence, mentions of suicidal thoughts, super angsty

Chapter Summary: Summer without your husband. You don't know what to except for the months ahead with Frankie away in rehab, but you know you want to learn who you are again.

Notes: Hey everyone, thank you very much for the support for this fic, it means the world to me to see people liking, reblogging or commenting!!! This fic is approaching the end unfortunately, as much as I love these two together, it was always meant to be on the shorter side. Since its my first ever story, I wanted to see if I could stick to a story without my mind fizzling and apparently I can ! SO HURRAY! I am anticipating 1 more chapter and 1 long epilogue after this.

I've already started working on fic #2 and #3 and I will be posting the summaries/ series masterlists later tonight or tomorrow morning :) I was also thinking on opening a poll to ask which stories you guys want me to do first.

But in the meantime, hope you all enjoy this chapter !!!!

A Change of Season

MONTH 1 - JUNE

"Are you sure, Alma? I don't want to impose on you too much..." you ask hesitantly, internally hoping Alma will agree to your last-minute request.

"Nonsense, mija. It's my pleasure. You know how I always enjoy spending time with Estrelita, and it gives me a chance to spoil her rotten. Truly, it means the world to this old woman that you trust me to stay with your little Princesa." Alma responds warmly.

Relief washes over you as you let out a grateful sigh. "Thank you so, so much, Alma. I hate asking so last minute, but my boss just called me to cover this Saturday since I have to take Ella to get her shots today. And I know Ella would be thrilled to spend time with her favorite abuela.”

Alma Vargas Morales snorts angrily on the other end of the line. "I can't believe those pendejos would make you work over the weekend like that. As if baby shots could be re-scheduled like a nail appointment! I'm tempted to march over there and give them a piece of my mind!”

You can't help but let out a laugh, picturing Frankie's spirited 72-year-old mother storming into the Florida Community College library, grabbing your boss by the ear, and dressing him down loud enough for the dean of strudents to hear. You’d pay good money to see that. “But seriously, Alma, I can't express how much I appreciate this. You're a lifesaver.”

"And you are an amazing mother, mija..." You can hear Alma taking a deep breath on the other side of the line. "Not many women would have done what you have for your daughter and your husband."

"Alma..." you begin to interject, but she cuts you off.

"No, mija. Francisco was so out of line he couldn't even see the line anymore. I didn't raise my son to act like this, and you are way better than he deserves at the moment." Alma's words carry a mix of frustration and disappointment.

Alma takes another breath, her voice softening. "I love mi hijo, I nursed him, took care of him when he was sick, I saw him grow from a shy little boy into a handsome and self-assured man. But he was never really happy until he met you, mija. Now, es el momento de que Francisco se arrepienta de sus pecados." Her tone finishes somberly.

You're left speechless, both deeply moved and unsure by Alma's sudden outburst. The woman had always been strict but loving. When Frankie was young, they didn't have much. His father died young and without insurance, leaving Alma alone to raise Frankie and his two sisters. But Alma had done her best to provide for her three children and give them every opportunity she could.

Now, Frankie's younger sister followed in her mother's footsteps as a nurse, while the eldest had become an accountant before deciding to stay home with her own children. Alma was a strong woman whom you had always admired. When you first met her, she had looked at you for only a couple of seconds before grabbing you by the neck with her tiny yet stout stature, pulling you into a tight embrace. "Thank you for taking care of mi hijo, God knows that knucklehead needs it! Just like his dad, that one is! " she had whispered in your ear before releasing you and playfully swatting Frankie's head. "What the hell was that for?" Frankie had exclaimed.

"No decir groserías," Alma had answered, her gaze piercing Frankie. "That was for hiding this lovely girl all this time and for not minding your manners. You haven't even offered her anything to drink yet!" Frankie rubbed his head and muttered, "Esta es tu casa…"

"Qué dijiste Francisco?" Alma questioned sternly.

"Nada, Nada," Frankie quickly replied, trying to diffuse the situation.

Throughout the entire interaction between mother and son, you had held back your laughter. But as Frankie's cheeks turned pink, he made his way towards you, and you couldn't help but think that you would love to be a part of this family. Since that day, you had loved Alma, and she had become the mother figure you had never truly had in your life.

"Alma, whatever happens between Francisco and me will never have any repercussions on your relationship with Ella. I would never take her away from you or your family. Ella is a Morales, and you can see her whenever you want," you assure her.

On the other side of the line, you hear Alma's sniffles. "Maldito Francisco, eres un estúpido muchacho," Alma mutters, her voice filled with frustration. "Francisco has made a lot of mistakes, but the one thing he didn't mess up was marrying you, mija."

"Gracias, mama. I promise that whatever happens, Ella and I will always be there," you express sincerely.

"Gracias, mija," Alma replies warmly.

"Is it okay if I drop Ella on Saturday around 7:30 am? I have to be at the library by 8:15," you ask.

"Of course, es muy perfecto! I'll make my famous tostadas!" Alma responds enthusiastically, her excitement palpable.

You can't help but let out a laugh at Alma's enthusiasm. "Alma, you know that Ella is just 5 months old, right? She won't be able to taste your famous tostadas for a while yet."

Alma lets out a huff, acknowledging her oversight. "I got ahead of myself; I suppose."

"I'll pump some milk and have it ready for you in her bag," you suggest. After a brief pause, you add, "Will you call me to tell me how everything is going?"

You can hear Alma's affectionate tone as she responds, "Mija, I'll send you updates every hour on your phone, with those messages things you kids always send each other. You don't have to worry. I've raised three babies, and they all reached adulthood, although some have made questionable decisions."

"Thank you so much, Alma. I really appreciate it," you express gratefully, feeling a sense of relief knowing that Ella will be in capable and loving hands.

"ESTRELLA MORALES!" The loud voice of the tall brunette clad in blue scrubs resonates through the large waiting room.

"Sorry, mama, I have to go. It's Ella's turn," you whisper urgently into the phone.

"Te quiero, mija. I will see you tomorrow morning."

Quickly, you close your phone and grab the stroller where Ella is peacefully napping. Gathering your belongings, you ensure that everything is in order before hurrying after the nurse. As she leads you into a smaller room, she introduces herself. "My name is Coral, and I'll be administering the vaccines for little Ella today," she says, reaching for the files on her desk. "I see she is here for the DTaP-IPV-Hib vaccine. It shouldn't take too long."

Coral glances inside the stroller where Ella has woken up from her nap and is looking around anxiously. "Well, isn't she a cutie? Hello, baby," Coral greets Ella warmly, taking out a bright pink rattle and shaking it in front of her. Ella responds with a delighted laugh, momentarily distracted from the unfamiliar surroundings.

"All right, mama, I'm going to need you to hold your baby while I give her the shots. She won't like it, as few babies do, but I'll be as quick as possible," Coral informs you, her professional demeanour evident. She briefly scans the page of Ella's file before her eyes narrow slightly. "I also wanted to confirm something with you. I only see one signature on the parental form, but there is a Francisco Morales listed on Ella's file. Should we be made aware of a change in the files?"

Your heart drops at the insinuation, and a mix of emotions floods over you. "Frankie... I mean, Francisco is Ella's father," you explain, your voice tinged with a touch of defensiveness. "He is currently unable to sign off on the documents due to personal reasons, but I promise he is 100% supportive of every medical decision I make for Ella."

You realize that you're frantically trying to justify yourself to this stranger, feeling the weight of judgment and the need to ensure that Ella's well-being is understood. Coral looks back at you, then at the file, before letting out a sigh. "Look, I'm not trying to trick you," she begins, her voice filled with a mix of empathy and professional concern. "But as medical professionals, we have a responsibility to ensure that the environment at home is safe for Estrella. You understand what I'm saying.” The mere mention of home safety sends a chill down your spine, the silent threat of involving CPS clear in Coral’s tone.

With a knot forming in your stomach, you gather your thoughts and respond cautiously, your voice betraying a hint of fear. "Yes, I understand," you manage to say, trying to keep your composure. "I assure you that Estrella's home environment is safe and loving. We prioritize her well-being above everything else, and we take every precaution to provide her with a secure and nurturing space. My husband is just… unavailable right now.”

Coral glances back at you, her eyes narrowing slightly as she processes your response. "As you say," she acknowledges, her tone carrying a hint of reservation. However, her sunny disposition quickly resurfaces, and a warm smile returns to her face. "All right then," she says, her voice brightening. "Shall we proceed with this little shot?”

MONTH 2 - JULY

You sit outside, enjoying the warmth of the sun on one of the only free benches in front of the library building. With a tomato sandwich in one hand, you type a message to Mrs. Hu, asking about Ella's day so far. Almost immediately, Mrs. Hu responds by sending you an adorable picture of Ella on her belly, reaching for her favourite cat plushy, a big orange thing with oversized ears and fuzzy white paws. It melts your heart, and for the 100th time, you can’t help but be amazed at the wonderful being your love with Frankie created.

Frankie... Oh, Frankie. Today feels bittersweet, as on the one hand, you hadn’t thought of him too much, but on the other hand, you felt guilty because you hadn’t thought of him that much. Some days are almost unbearable, as your mind becomes entangled with memories of… memories of everything before it all went to hell. You replay moments: the goods, the less-than goods and everything in between. But still, all these moments were what made you and Frankie a team, a partnership. It was a life you built together. Still, you couldn’t help but question your actions and wonder if anything could have prevented the events that unfolded over the last two months.

Yet, dwelling on these thoughts only serves to torment you further. Now when these thoughts surface, you try your best to follow the guidance of your new therapist. You try to let the memories wash over you like rain on an umbrella, try to let them come, accept them without letting yourself be ruled by them. But they persist, stubbornly clinging to every corner of your mind. It's a difficult battle, and despite your earnest efforts, grief and longing persistently infiltrate both your waking hours and restless nights. The weight of it all hangs heavily in the air, casting a sad shadow over your life. You yearn for a bit of reprieve from the ceaseless ache that Frankie's absence has left behind. But today is a good day. So far.

The blaring alarm on your phone abruptly interrupts your lunch break, signalling that it's time to return to work. Hastily cramming the last remnants of your sandwich into your mouth, you briskly make your way toward the imposing building. Upon reaching the entrance, you make your way to the help desk, where you settle down and begin reviewing emails and addressing various queries from staff and students.

As you open the first email, which seems to be part of an infinite pile (how is this possible after just half an hour?), your attention is diverted by the approaching figure of the library director. A distinguished-looking older man, his hair hangs in wispy white strands, lending him an air of wisdom. His tweed suit, more reminiscent of academia at Oxford than the sunny locale of Florida, accentuates his scholarly aura.

"Sweetheart, do you mind coming into my office?" You can't help but cringe at the nickname. You've never been fond of the nickname. You were initially uncomfortable but later learned from Roberta, another librarian who looked like she was born between the bookshelves, that he addresses everyone this way. Annoying and reductive, perhaps, but ultimately benign. And honestly, apart from the cringeworthy calling, Director Robertson is an amicable presence with no noteworthy complaints.

"Of course, Mr. Robertson. Would you like me to come in now?" "Yes, please," he says, his fingers delicately twirling his long mustache, "I know you've just returned from your lunch break, so I presume you haven't embarked on any new tasks yet." Captivated momentarily by the whimsical sight of his mustache dance, you acquiesce and rise from your desk before placing a sign that reads "Keep reading - Be back in 15 min." Trotting diligently behind your boss, you traverse the expanse of the library, guided by the soft glow of sunlight streaming through the windows. Finally, you arrive at his office nestled at the rear of the building, granting an enchanting vista overlooking a courtyard where students are rushing to their next classes.

Director Robertson gestures toward the plush, cushioned chair positioned in front of his grand wooden desk, silently inviting you to take a seat. With a touch of unease, you settle into the chair, your hands nervously intertwining in your lap. There's something about Director Robertson's stern grandfatherly demeanour that always makes you feel like a scolded child in his presence. Seeking solace, you follow the advice of your therapist, taking a deep breath and counting silently (1-2-3), before releasing it slowly, allowing the tension to dissipate. Untangling your hands, you place them gingerly on the armrests of the chair. After all, sometimes you have to "fake it till you make it," right?

"What can I do for you, Director?" you inquire, maintaining a composed facade despite the underlying nervousness.

"AH! That's what I appreciate about you, dear!" Director Robertson exclaims with a hint of enthusiasm. "You don't beat around the bush, and you don't try to kiss my ass like everyone else around here!" His words, while somewhat brash, sound genuine.

"I am glad to hear it, sir..." You respond, feeling a sense of perplexity. The sudden shift in conversation catches you off guard, leaving you momentarily lost.

"How is that little girl of yours? Your little baby, right? How old is she now?" Director Robertson inquires, a touch of warmth underlying his words.

"Ella, sir. She's just about 5 months old," you answer, a fondness evident in your voice as you think of your daughter.

"Still so young! Ah, well, you still have a couple of years before she becomes unbearable. I've had 5 of those, my dear, and let me tell you, it doesn't get easier," Director Robertson responds with jovial teasing, his words laced with a sense of seasoned experience.

"Right, well hopefully I'll survive the tween years unscathed," you respond, trying to match Director Robertson's teasing tone.

Director Robertson bursts into a hearty, full-bellied laugh, his amusement filling the room. He reaches inside his desk, retrieving an official-looking letter. "Do you know what this is, dear?" he asks, a gleam of anticipation in his eyes.

"I'm afraid not," you reply, your throat suddenly dry with anticipation.

"This is a job offer that the University of Florida sent me last week for the directorial position in their library," he reveals. Your heart skips a beat. The University of Florida—the dream institution. Positions like that were nearly non-existent, as it seemed their librarians were born and died at their posts, passing the torch down the line.

"That's amazing, sir! You must be really happy," you exclaim, genuine excitement resonating in your voice.

"Well, I declined the offer," Director Robertson confesses nonchalantly, his words causing a mixture of surprise and confusion to wash over you.

"Oh, but why? The University of Florida has some of the best facilities in the state, and the salary must be significantly better than what we have here. And the access to all those books—it must be incredible!" You can't help but let your tone drift into wistfulness, envisioning the possibilities.

"I'm sure it is, but I'm reaching a certain age, and I promised my wife that we'd retire in her family's home in Capua," Director Robertson explains, a hint of nostalgia colouring his words. "Let me tell you, deary, I'll take Capua, Italy over the University of Florida any day. And you know what they say: 'Happy wife, happy life,'" he playfully scrunches his nose. "Make sure your husband remembers that dear," he adds, teasingly.

A heavy rock settles in your belly at his words, but you manage to smile through it. "I'll make sure to remind him," you reply, masking any personal turmoil beneath a veneer of cheerfulness.

"You better. Men sometimes need a good whack on their head to remind them that they would be nothing without their wives," Director Robertson remarks, his fingers fidgeting with his mustache once again, as if deep in thought.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not sure I understand why I'm here," you ask, your uncertainty evident. The words hang in the air, seemingly snapping the older man back into focus. His pale blue eyes settle on you before a secretive smile graces his face.

"Because when I said no, I recommended you for the job, my dear," he reveals, his voice carrying a sense of pride and hidden intentions. Your heart stops, the revelation jolting you with disbelief.

"You... You... You did what?!" you stammer, your voice escalating into a screech. Heat surges through your body, from head to toe, as a mix of shock and astonishment overwhelms you.

"Deary, you've been here for how long? Seven years? And in those seven years, you've completely revamped this library," Director Robertson calmly begins. "All the programs you added for the students have made this place thrive. The faculty-based librarian assistance program was a stroke of genius if I may say so. And the digitalization of our database was an incredible achievement that completely propelled us into the 21st century."

He pauses, allowing his words to sink in. "There was no one I would have felt comfortable recommending, as it is my name on the line. But you, my dear, I know that you have the capacity to make anything your own and make it shine."

The weight of his words hangs in the air, the realization of the immense opportunity dawning upon you. Director Robertson's faith in your abilities washes over you, mingling with the heat that had consumed you moments ago.

"Now, you don't have to accept, of course," Director Robertson remarks, his tone understanding. "The university is about an hour's drive from here, so it would be quite the commute. But it would come with a hefty pay raise." With a swift motion, he slides the papers across the desk, urging you to take a look.

You turn the papers over, and your eyes widen as you see the figures before you. An 8 followed by another 8, followed by a series of zeros that threaten to make you faint. It's more than double your current salary, a staggering amount that fills your mind with all the possibilities that would come with such a raise. "That's... That's a substantial amount of money," you whisper, the words barely escaping your lips. The weight of the figure displayed on the paper sends a shiver down your spine, leaving you momentarily speechless.

"Indeed, deary, indeed," Director Robertson affirms, his voice filled with a sense of reassurance and pride.

"I can't believe it; I don't know how to express my gratitude. Sir, I am so incredibly thankful for this opportunity!" you exclaim, a mixture of excitement and nerves coursing through you. "Should I send an email to someone? Who should I reach out to? Should I prepare for an interview? Oh my god, what about my work here?”

Director Robertson's smile remains warm and comforting. "Please, don't worry about your current work here. I have every confidence that Jocelyn will step up and shoulder her fair share of responsibilities. As for the university, they already have all your information and will soon send you a comprehensive email with all the necessary details. At this stage, any interview would primarily be a formality, as I know without a doubt that you will excel.”

You rise to your feet and extend your hand towards Director Robertson, gripping his hand firmly. "I promise, sir, I won't let you down. I will do my best to be deserving of the trust you have placed in me," you affirm with determination, your voice filled with gratitude.

Director Robertson's eyes soften even further, reflecting a genuine warmth. He clasps your small hand in his wrinkled, larger ones. "There's no need to worry about any of that, my dear. Just go out there, impress them, and let your radiant spirit shine like the sun," he kindly encourages,

Tears well up in your eyes, and with a small, trembling voice, you squeak, "Would it be too presumptuous to ask for a hug, sir?"

Director Robertson's kind smile widens, and he extends his arms, inviting you into an embrace. As he wraps his arms around you, you inhale the comforting scent of old cotton and pines, a fragrance that exudes reassurance and kindness. "Thank you for everything, sir," you murmur, your voice filled with gratitude.

"You deserve every bit of it, my dear. I don't think you fully understand the immense potential that resides within you. If you could truly see it for yourself, you would be unstoppable," Director Robertson assures you, his words resonating deep within your being.

Unstoppable. The word dances in your mind. You like the sound of that.

MONTH 3 – AUGUST

“Estrelita, my little love, I wish I could give you the biggest hug in the whole wide world. Even though Papa is away, please know that you're always on his mind. Let me tell you my all-time favorite story, the one your abuela used to tell your tias and me when we couldn't sleep. It's called "El Conejo y el Coyote," and it starts like this; Una vez el coyote se encontró a un conejito y le dijo….”

Frankie's voice fades as he skillfully imitates the rabbit and the coyote on the recording. Ella seems entranced by the story, yet unsure to hear her papa's voice without seeing him there. You've developed the habit of playing the recording at least once a day for Ella, so she can always be close to her papa, even when he's away. And if you're completely honest with yourself, you also play it for you. Even after all this time, hearing Frankie's voice still makes the butterflies in your stomach flutter.

Frankie's letter remains unopened on your bedside table. You haven't been able to open it yet. You don't know if you will. As much as you miss Frankie and hope he's doing well in rehab, you still don't know what you'll do when he leaves at the end of next month. You know he'll be allowed visitors as of next week, marking three whole months he's been there. But you don't know if you should go if you're completely honest with yourself. You know Ella has to go, that's not even a debate. But should you?

Alma is also unsure if you should go, stating that with your new job and the new hours, you should focus on yourself and Ella. She kindly offered to bring Ella with her when she goes for his weekly allotted visitation time. You might take her up on that offer.

Frankie's voice comes to a stop, signalling that the story is over, and Ella appears heartbroken. You notice her bottom lip flutter angrily, and her face turns red. Unable to resist, you chuckle and say, "Don't get mad peanut. Do you want to listen to your papa's story again?" With a smile, you walk over to the recorder and press rewind, filling the air with Frankie's voice once more. Ella's clapping and happy expression from her playpen make your smile widen.

Currently, she is nestled on a mountain of soft pillows, engrossed in playing with the play gym you got her when the rattle lost its appeal 3 weeks ago. It's hard to believe she's already in her sixth month—time has flown by, and she has grown so quickly. The thought nearly brings tears to your eyes. Ella is determinedly reaching for one of the planets hanging from the chord, but her little arms fall just short of grasping it. You laugh at her expression of determination, reminding you of Frankie and his own determined expression when he was working on revamping an old beat-up mustang, he got at a garage sale.

However, your thoughts are abruptly interrupted by a rapid succession of knocks at your door.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

"Coming!" you bellow loudly, making your way toward the door.

You open the door and are greeted with Benny's grinning face, in one hand holding a 6-pack of beers and in the other holding a toolbox. You roll your eyes and say, "You didn't have to bring anything, Benny. You're helping me, so I should provide the beer."

Benny smiles and replies, "Don't worry about it, sunshine. I had to make sure the good stuff would be here."

Teasingly, you inquire, "Are you doubting my beer selection, Benny?"

He lets out a laugh and says, "Nah, not you. Just Fish. You know he drinks that watered-down piss that passes for beer. I had to make sure there'd be something with more substance available."

"You're such an idiot, and you know I have tools, right? Frankie's got the locker full of them."

You scratch your head in embarrassment and continue, "I just don't know how to use them, that's all."

Benny laughs and says, "I can't in good conscience use another man's tools. Those things are like sacred, you know? Can't go around and mess up Fish's system or whatever."

You look at the large toolbox and see the name "W. Miller" written in large white letters on the front. You snort, "So that's why you took Will's tools?"

Benny's ear turns slightly pink as he responds, "He's my brother, everything that’s his, is mine or whatever."

You roll your eyes playfully, "All right, well, can I offer you one of the beers you brought then?"

Benny replies, "Nah, not right now, sunshine. I've got to be on my A-game to fix your shit. Where is it, anyway?"

You lead Benny toward the bathroom, where the fan is closed. Flicking one of the two switches, a loud groaning noise emanates from the top of the shower.

"The fan is busted. Now when I take a shower, I turn the whole place into a sauna. And I'm getting a bit afraid that mold or mushrooms are going to appear, you know? The landlord said he was going to fix it, but it's been 3 weeks with no answers. If Frankie were here, he would..."

You stop yourself, not wanting to finish the sentence.

"Anyway, I told the landlord that if he provided the materials, I'd fix it, and here we are."

Benny smiles and says, "Shouldn't be too hard. Are you ready to play assistant contractor, Sunshine?"

You snort and reply, "Sure, boss. Lead the way."

Benny puts the toolbox next to the sink and goes to inspect the damage. You hover around the door, keeping an eye on Ella who is still in the same position as earlier, now listening to Frankie tell a story about two volcanoes who fall in love. The scene brings a smile to your face.

"Hey, assistant, before I get started, do you mind shutting down the electricity for the bathroom, so I don't become Toasted Benny?" Benny asks. You nod and reply, "Sure, give me a sec." Making your way to the electrical box, you turn off the power in the bathroom. On your return, you quickly check on Ella, who is still determined to grab the hanging planet. You smile and give her nose a tiny kiss before making your way back inside the bathroom.

"All closed, Ben," you inform him. Benny responds, "Awesome. Can you grab me one of the adjustable wrenches? It should be on the top of the box. I'll just take out the old fan, disconnect the wiring, and fit the new fan inside. Should be all done in an hour."

You nod and pick up what looks like a wrench, though you're about 73% sure it's the right one. You ask, "Is this okay?" Benny extends his hand and says, "Yep, all good. Give it here." You place the wrench in Benny's hand, and he smiles at you, saying, "See, you aren't so hopeless. By the end of today, you're going to be the best assistant contractor in Florida."

You smile at Benny's puppy-like excitement and reply, "Sure, Ben, sure."

You watch Benny diligently work on the fan, removing the old moldy contraption. He lets out a whistle at the sight and exclaims, "Fuck, when was that thing installed? The fucking Stone Age?"

"Pretty sure caves weren't equipped with centralized electricity," you quip back. Benny looks down from his elevated position on top of the bathtub and retorts, "Ha. Ha. Ha, aren't you clever." You give him a broad smile and reply, "I know, right?!"

"Why don't you be clever over there and throw that old fan away," Benny suggests. You nod and reach for the old fan, making your way toward the bin. As you do, you hear Benny shout after you, "Make sure to bring back the new one!" You roll your eyes playfully and respond, "I'm not that clueless, Benny!" A loud chuckle echoes from the bathroom as you head to the counter where the shiny new fan awaits. Your eyes briefly glance at Ella, and...

"BENNY, BENNY, COME HERE QUICKLY!"

You hear a commotion coming from the bathroom as Benny stumbles out, panicked. "What?! What's wrong?!?!" he exclaims. You simply point to the living room carpet, your eyes filled with happy tears. "Look!!!" you say, barely able to contain your excitement.

Benny follows your gaze and looks down to see Ella on her belly, attempting to crawl toward the coffee table where the recording of Frankie has stopped playing. You urgently shake Benny's arm. "Quick, quick, grab your phone!!! Oh my god, she's never crawled before, Ben!!! I have to film this. Quickly, my phone is in the bedroom, grab yours!!!"

Benny's eyes widen with a mixture of astonishment and joy. Without wasting a second, he retrieves his phone from his pocket and opens the camera “Go to her! I’ll be your own cameraman!!!”

You smile warmly and swiftly make your way to Ella, crouching down next to the coffee table as she momentarily pauses in her crawling. She looks up at you with tired yet determined eyes. "Come on, my little peanut, you're almost there!" you cheer, feeling a surge of pride and excitement. In the background, Benny chimes in with a playful exclamation, "Let's go, Ella! Show them who's the best fucking baby in the world!"

You shoot Benny a disapproving look, and he responds with a sheepish smile. "Sorry, Sunshine, I'm just...so excited!" he says, his words stumbling out of his mouth. Rolling your eyes, you turn your attention back to Ella. "Come on, peanut, you've got this!" you encourage her, your voice filled with loving adoration.

Ella's determined expression, so much like Frankie's, reappears on her face as she resumes her crawling. Benny and you continue to shout words of encouragement, your voices filled with excitement and pride, as she inches closer and closer to her destination.

Finally, Ella reaches the coffee table, and without hesitation, you bend down to grab her, gently scooping her into your arms. Overwhelmed with joy, you give her a crushing hug, unable to contain the immense love and pride you feel in that moment.

"You did so good, baby. Mama is so, so proud of you!" you whisper, your voice filled with pride. With a tender smile, you softly nuzzle your nose against Ella's. Ella coos happily in response, her little sounds of joy filling the air and further melting your heart.

You bring your face up and turn towards Benny, who is still holding the camera, a hopeful look in your eyes. "Did you catch all that, Ben? Wasn't she absolutely amazing?" you ask, eager to hear his response. Benny's face lights up with his signature megawatt smile, and he exclaims, "SHE WAS GREAT!!! Ella, you are just like a shooting shining star!!!”

Benny continues, his excitement contagious. "Now, proud mama, you got anything to say to the camera?" he prompts. With a radiant smile, you twirl around, holding Ella close to your heart. "Only that I've got the bestest little peanut in the whole world!" you declare with overflowing love and pride. Ella lets out a happy squeal in response, and the sound of Benny's laughter echoes in the background.

MONTH FOUR – SEPTEMBER

Frankie found himself seated at one of the picnic tables outside, overlooking the tranquil man-made pond in the rehab facility's backyard. Nervously fidgeting with his fingers, he’s been reflecting all morning on the past three and a half months he’s spent here. His mother had eagerly awaited the fourth month when visitations were permitted. However, Frankie had approached the session coordinator and asked for a delay in visits. Despite his deep desire to see his mother, sisters, daughter, brothers, and… You, he didn't feel emotionally prepared for it. Not yet.

The day before September 1st, Frankie had experienced a crippling panic attack that left him completely incapacitated. The following morning, he gathered the courage to stride into the office of the head therapist. Once there, Frankie had explained to him that he needed more time before he would be able to face anyone. Dr. Stevens had smiled and told Frankie how proud he was that he was finally setting boundaries and acknowledging his limits. If there was on thing Frankie’s time in the rehab had taught him, it was the value of recognizing his own needs, a lesson he had never truly internalized during his years in the army. He had become so accustomed to unquestioningly following orders, regardless of the harm they inflicted on him, that he had forgotten that he needed to care for himself and listened to his needs sometimes.

During therapy sessions, Dr. Stevens had emphasized the significance of listening to Frankie's own desires and engaging in introspection. The therapist pointed out that, by consistently ignoring his own wants, Frankie's inner turmoil found an outlet through self-destructive behaviours. Dr. Stevens believed that if Frankie started paying attention to his own needs and delved deeper into self-reflection, the compulsion to numb his pain with cocaine might gradually diminish, even if only minimally.

Frankie sighed heavily, his hand sweeping across his face as he noticed a mother duck leading her adorable ducklings across the serene lake. These past few months had undoubtedly been the most challenging period he had ever faced, and Frankie had been shot multiple times before. So that’s saying something. Confronting the stark contrast between the person he believed himself to be and the person he had become, all while battling intense withdrawal symptoms, had left him feeling lethargic during the initial weeks.

Throughout his life, Frankie had always viewed himself as a provider, a dependable man on whom others could rely. Memories flooded his mind, particularly the day his father passed away when Frankie was just a young boy. He vividly recalled how, the day before his father's death, the man he had admired for his strength and dedication to his family had called upon ten-year-old Frankie. "Francisco," his father had spoken with pain, surrounded by the incessant beeping of medical equipment, "I need you to take care of your mother and sisters when I'm gone. You will be the man of the house, and it's your responsibility to look after those you love."

Frankie had internalized those words and earnestly tried to fulfill his father's wishes, caring for his mother, sisters, and eventually you and Ella. However, in the end, he felt that he had failed spectacularly. When he confessed these deep fears to Dr. Stevens, a wave of vulnerability washed over him, tears streaming down his face. The older therapist regarded Frankie with a sympathetic expression, moving closer and offering a tissue.

"You haven't failed anyone, Francisco," Dr. Stevens reassured him, gently patting his back. "Yes, you've made mistakes, but now you are making the right choices and striving to make amends. You don't have to live up to any expectations or face external pressures alone. Your focus should be on taking each day as it comes. As long as you care for your wife and your little girl, it will be enough. I am certain that if they were here, they would tell you the same."

Then, Dr. Stevens had Frankie make lists. A list of the things he was most afraid of:

Loosing you and Ella for good

Seeing his brothers die

His mother never forgiving him

Dying before he could see Ella grow up

Not being the man, his father wanted him to be.

Then a list of all those he had hurt,

You and Ella, the two persons cherished the most.

Ben, Will and Pope, the brothers who counted on him and whom he let down.

His mother who didn’t raise him to be what he his today

Tom, whose life was lost due to the choices he made.

Himself himself

Then a list of all he regretted

Lying to you, betraying your trust.

Bringing drugs home, staining the sanctity of the home you built together

Taking your love for granted, failing to appreciate you.

Keeping himself closed off, unable to fully express his emotions.

Shooting first Causing Tom’s death

After finishing the lists, Frankie was instructed to go back to his room and engage and reflect on what he had written. Left alone with his thoughts, Frankie delved into the profound weight of his past actions and the far-reaching consequences they had on the people in his life.

Even though it was incredibly tough, Frankie drew strength from imagining you and Ella right there with him, offering unwavering support. Your smiles and hopeful expressions fueled his determination when he felt overwhelmed and tempted to give up.

Frankie knew how crucial it was to take his recovery seriously. He understood that unless he fully committed to it, the chances of winning you back would dwindle. But it wasn't just the fear of losing you that pushed him forward. Deep down, he genuinely wanted to change. He wanted to be a better man, not just for you but also for himself. He didn't want to be that scared and dishonest boy anymore.

Frankie was well aware of the pain he had caused you, and he acknowledged that the drugs were only a fragment of the larger issue. He understood that his actions stemmed from a deeper problem — his reluctance to open up and reveal the parts of himself he found most fearful and repulsive. The mere thought of you looking at him with disgust in your eyes was unbearable to him.

Deep down, Frankie knew that such concerns were unfounded. He knew that you would never judge him for his past or hold his mistakes against him. However, fear and self-hatred have a way of distorting one's thoughts and leading to irrational behaviour. Frankie recognized the irrationality of his actions and the influence fear and self-doubt had over his decisions.

But Frankie was learning. He was slowly coming to terms with the fact that his fears and self-judgment were hindering his progress. He began to realize that the path to healing required vulnerability and trust, especially in his relationship with you. Overcoming his own insecurities and learning to open up was a crucial step towards rebuilding the trust he had broken.

For Frankie and you to have a chance at reuniting, he understood the importance of treating you as an equal partner, rather than just his wife in need of protection. Opening up and being honest with you were crucial steps he needed to take. In the group therapy sessions, the topic of his treatment towards you had come up, and one woman in particular, Ronnie, didn't hold back in expressing her opinion. She bluntly stated that if she were in your position, she would have swiftly shown Frankie the door, recounting her own experience with an ex-husband who had been a taciturn statue throughout their short-lived marriage.

Ronnie's words struck a nerve with Frankie, leaving him feeling exposed and vulnerable. He felt raw and tender. But he could only acknowledge that she had a valid point. He had failed to communicate and share his thoughts and emotions with you, and that had taken a toll on your relationship.

Dr. Stevens had attempted to calm the group, but the impact of Ronnie's words lingered within Frankie for a couple of days afterward. Frankie had no choice but to confront the truth of how his behaviour had affected you and how he had fallen short of being the partner you deserved.

Frankie's thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a firm clap on his back, drawing his attention away from the peaceful pond. Frankie's face lit up with genuine joy when he catches the blue eyes of Will looking back at him.

"Will! Man, it's so good to see you!" Frankie exclaims, rising from his seat to embrace his friend in a tight hug. "How have you been, brother?"

"Good, good. Same old routine—VA visits, giving speeches, and keeping Benny out of trouble," Will replies, "Oh, and I might have met someone special," he adds, a playful grin on his face.

Frankie's face lit up even more. "That's fantastic, Will! I'm really happy for you," he exclaims, gesturing for his friend to take a seat on the opposite side of the picnic table. "This spot gives you the best view of this place," Frankie remarks, pointing towards the serene pond and the ducks swimming on its surface.

Will settles into the seat with a contented smile. "I can see why," he replies, appreciating the calm scene. His eyes then shifted to Frankie, noticing a change in his friend's demeanour. "You look good, Fish. Actually, better than I've seen you in a while," Will remarks, his voice filled with genuine warmth.

Frankie's expression softens, gratitude filling his gaze. "Thanks, Will. I feel good too," he confesses, a mix of relief and newfound understanding in his voice. "Being here has given me the time and space to confront things I wasn't ready to face about myself. I wish I had done it sooner, instead of being so stubborn. It was the best thing I could have done for myself and for them," he explains.

Will's smile widens, expressing his genuine happiness for his friend. "I'm glad to hear it, Fish," he replies warmly.

As the two friends catch up, their conversation started to delve into the time they had spent apart. Frankie eagerly sharing his experiences in group therapy and the progress he had made with his personal therapist. He spoke openly about the challenges he faced during the initial month of withdrawal, recounting the intense loneliness that had enveloped him during that period.

Frankie's voice grew heavier as he broached the topic of guilt surrounding Tom's death. Will's gaze turned serious, his eyes locked onto Frankie's, conveying a sense of understanding and empathy. With a firm conviction in his voice, Will interrupted Frankie's self-blame.

"None, and I mean it, Fish," Will asserts, his words laced with sincerity. "None of what happened in Colombia was your fault. We all had a part to play in those circumstances, and you don't have to shoulder that burden alone, alright?"

Tears welled up in Frankie's eyes as he nodded, his voice trembling with gratitude. "Thank you, Will," he chokes out, his voice thick with emotion. "I needed to hear that, to be reminded that I'm not alone in this. It means the world to me."

Will reaches out and places a comforting hand on Frankie's shoulder, offering both physical and emotional support. "You never have to face this journey alone, Fish," Will assures him, his voice filled with unwavering loyalty. "We're in this together, and I'll always be here for you."

A brief pause hung in the air as Frankie's gaze shifted to the side, a touch of melancholy crossing his face. He mustered the courage to ask the question that had been weighing on his mind, his voice tinged with longing. "Did you see my wife and Ella while I was away... How... How are they doing?"

Will's smile softens, his own eyes wandering toward the ducks in the distance. "They seemed well," he replies. "Ella grew like a weed, you know. And your lady, she's doing great. Got herself a new job with better pay. I could tell she was really proud of it."

Frankie closes his eyes, allowing the words to wash over him. For a fleeting moment, guilt threatens to seep in—the guilt of not being there by your side. But just as quickly, it dissipates, replaced by an overwhelming sense of love and admiration for you and the strides you were making while he focuses on his own journey of healing. "A promotion, huh? She's so smart. I can't wait to tell her how happy I am for her," he whispers. A spark of excitement flickers within him. "Did you guys celebrate? Because I can organize something once I'm out."

Will's smile broadens. "We thought we'd wait for you, but we did take her and Ella to Outback Steakhouse," he reveals. "Is she planning to visit before you leave?"

"I'll be out in two weeks, and Mama is coming with Ella next week, but I think it's best if we wait until I'm out," Frankie explains, his voice tinged with a mix of longing and practicality.

"That's fair," Will nods understandingly. "She seems well, Fish, but I can tell she's lonely. She looks like she misses you."

Frankie's eyes brim with tender determination, "She could never miss me as much as I miss her and Ella. This time here has made me realize how fortunate I am and how close I came to squandering it all. I'll never make that mistake again, Will, believe me."

A twinkle appears in Will's eyes as he reaches for his back pocket. "Wait, I have something for you," he said, pulling out his phone and opening the camera app. He scrolls through a collection of pictures; some he had taken himself and others that you had sent to him. "These are for you. Your lady wanted to make sure you knew they were doing all right."

As Frankie continues scrolling through the photo albums, he was greeted by a plethora of precious moments captured between you and Ella. Each image held its own story, showcasing the love and joy that radiated from your little family. In some pictures, you cradled Ella in your arms, your eyes filled with tenderness. Other photos focused solely on Ella, capturing her adorable expressions and mischievous nature. And then there were the silly selfies—the ones that always brought a smile to Frankie's face. They were the ones you both loved to take, capturing the candid, carefree moments of your lives.

There were morning snapshots, featuring tousled bedheads and tired smiles, Ella playfully blowing raspberries at the camera. Other pictures overflowed with warmth and sunshine, showcasing the adventures you embarked on during the summer. Ella in her tiny bathing suit, her chubby fingers clutching a plush cat toy. You and Ella wearing matching sundresses adorned with elephants, holding a basket full of produce from the farmer’s market. Frankie's heart swells as he sees an image of you delicately feeding Ella a small bite of ice cream.

Tears well up in Frankie's eyes—a mixture of longing and joy. Joy because he is so grateful to see you both thriving and creating beautiful memories. Sadness because he has missed out on these precious moments. As he continues scrolling, he stumbles on a video. With a quick double-tap, he initiates the playback, and your voice resonates from the phone's speakers.

"Come on, quickly, take out your camera..." your voice echoes, filled with excitement.

"Fish, wait a second, you should turn that off," Will's voice interjects, attempting to grab the phone.

But Frankie evades him, his body turning towards the lake, his back to Will. His heart yearns to hear your voice, to immerse himself in the presence of the family he deeply misses. The camera comes into focus, and there you are crouched next to the coffee table with Ella... Is she crawling?! Frankie's heart tightens as he watches his little Estrelita grow up right before his eyes, slowly making her way toward you.

And then he hears it, a voice echoing through the phone, "Go to her! I'll be your personal cameraman!!!" It's Benny's voice and Frankie's body tenses in response. The video continues, capturing your shouts of encouragement to Ella, and even Benny's voice cheering, "Let's go, Ella! Show them who's the best fucking baby in the world!"

Frankie catches your disapproving look at the camera, and Benny offering a sheepish apology. Sunshine. Benny called you sunshine. But it's just Benny being Benny, right? It has to be. Benny would never... he couldn't possibly… Do that. But deep down, Frankie can't help his mind from wandering into unsettling territory.

The video plays on, but Frankie's focus wavers. He can't seem to see anything else on the screen. And then, finally, Ella reaches you, and Frankie is jolted from his daze by your scream of excitement. Suddenly, a cold shock washes over him as he hears Benny's voice again, "Now, proud mama, you got anything to say to the camera?"

Your radiant smile is directed at Benny; Ella's happy satisfied face is all for Benny—it's all too much. He isn't there. But Benny is. Benny is there. Frankie can feel himself spiralling.

The phone is snatched from his hands, and Will sits down next to Frankie, gripping his shoulder firmly. "Benny was just there that day to fix the fan in the bathroom, it was all just circumstances, I promise you," Will reassures him. Frankie's voice trembles as he responds, "The fan was broken? And I wasn't there to fix it. But Benny was."

"No!" Will's voice booms with determination. "Don't go down that road, Fish. Understand? There's nothing going on between your lady and Benny. You've made incredible progress these past few months, and I'll be damned if you let yourself fall into another dark place. I wasn't there last time, but this time, I'm right here with you!"

Frankie's mind whispers, "Maybe it would be easier if I didn't come back. She has a new job, and Ella seems well. They'd probably be better off without me." He looks down at the ground, feeling his hands twist anxiously.

"Are you kidding me?!" Will exclaims. "Frankie, these girls love you more than anything in this world. If you leave, they'd be shattered. You're not thinking straight right now. Remember why you made that recording? So that Ella wouldn’t forget your voice. Fish, you knew you'd miss a lot of things by being here. But look, today you've been telling me how much progress you've made, how you're ready to open up and communicate better with your lady. With us. Well, let me introduce you to a new concept: trust. You need to trust that she would never do anything to hurt you. And you need to trust that Benny would never betray his own brother like that, okay?" Frankie takes a deep breath, absorbing Will's words.

“You are right. Of course, you are right. Sorry for freaking out like that.”

"It's all right. Are you really okay though?" Will's voice is filled with genuine concern.

Frankie's mind balks. Is he really… Okay? He doesn't have a definite answer. The old Frankie would have brushed it off, assuring Will that he was fine and that he didn’t care that Benny was seemingly playing house with you and Ella. Then he’d go snort a line in the bathroom to take the edge off.

"I don't know, Will. I don't know if I'll ever be all right." Frankie puts his head in his hands, feeling the weight of his emotions bearing down on him. Will places a reassuring hand on Frankie's upper back. "Then we'll take it one day at a time.”

One day at a time. Just 14 more days until he sees you and Ella again. Only 14 days until you decide if you want him back. Just 14 days until he must confront the consequences of his actions and the pain, he caused you over the past few years. Those 14 days stretch before him, both seemingly endless and surprisingly close. Is he truly ready? The honest answer is, he doesn't know.

Next chapter

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: River Page

Published: Feb 2, 2024

"Companies also cannot take race-motivated actions to maintain a demographically 'balanced' workforce." — Commissioner at Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Andrea R. Lucas in Reuters, June 29, 2023

"An unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice." — 42 USC § 2000e–2(m) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

---

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, tech companies promised to hire more minorities. One company that claims to help them do it is Gem, and although you might not have heard of it, you’ve probably heard of some of its 1,200-plus clients: Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, Discord, Zillow, Stripe, Affirm, and Grammarly, just to name a few. Although Gem’s software is primarily used for things like non-race- and gender-based recruiting, payroll, and benefits management, John, (not his real name) — who worked for Gem as a sales development representative through a B2B outsourcing firm from March to July of 2021, told us that the prospective corporate clients he talked to were most interested in Gem’s “diversity enhancing” capabilities. Essentially, they had race- and gender-based hiring quotas and wanted to use Gem’s software to meet them. He said one prospective client, an executive at the Bay Area-based AI and robotics research arm of one of the world’s leading car manufacturers, told him explicitly: “I need more black candidates this month.”

According to its website, Gem’s software allows recruiters to track “gender and race/ethnicity throughout the entire hiring funnel.” Essentially, it appears to include a comprehensive race and gender tracking system designed to help companies fill race- and gender-based quotas with precision. For example, in a 2021 diversity webinar posted on YouTube, a Gem employee seemed to explain how the software could show how many candidates a company would need to reach out to if it had three engineering positions open, but didn’t want to hire men for them (in her words: “wanted to give women a chance”). In the same video, she demonstrated how to break down each stage in the hiring funnel by race, and explained (but did not show, probably for privacy reasons) how companies could further track how their recruiters’ own efforts break down along the lines of the company’s race- and gender-based hiring quotas, so that the company may “hold them accountable.”

[ Screen capture from Gem’s diversity webinar ]

All this requires a lot of data. According to a recent LinkedIn post by Gem founder Steve Bartel, this data can come from three sources:

Self-ID: the demographic data collection on job applications

Manual override: the recruiter reports your race and gender based on visual cues such as your LinkedIn profile picture

Predicted: Gem’s proprietary AI determines a candidate's race and gender based on machine learning (Bartel notes this is only for aggregate/anonymized use, meaning that the UI doesn’t allow recruiters to see which race was assigned to individual candidates)

John told me that, of Gem’s features, its race- and gender-identifying AI was the biggest selling point. “A key part of the pitch was to tell clients that Gem uses AI and machine learning to determine race and gender.” (This is especially ironic, given the panic about “racist AI” that has consumed every discussion about artificial intelligence for years.)

“One thing that cracked me up was that recruiting/DEI buyers at companies would ask, ‘Is this legal?’” John told me. “Not because they were offended by how obviously racist the software was — they loved what they saw. The concern was pushback from their legal team.” He said this question was asked so frequently that Gem’s Chief Legal Counsel had a prewritten response to the question that would be passed along to clients who asked.

[ Source: Gem’s website, February 1, 2024 ]

The "Diversity Recruiting" section of Gem’s website offers a slate of what it calls “Case Studies” — essentially customer testimonials — where companies explain how they used Gem to hire based on race and gender.

In a case study for payroll firm Gusto, Gem seems to indicate the company used its “Candidate Rediscovery” tool to hire based on candidates’ race and gender. In Gem’s language, Gusto used the tool to “unearth talent who is vetted — and diverse — ultimately reducing time-to-hire.” In other words, companies could use Gem’s software to find people with specific racial and gender-based characteristics that meet the position’s requirements and hire them quickly, while weeding out similarly qualified candidates who are, presumably, white or male or both.

In a case study about the telecommunications company Twilio, Gem seems to describe how one of its senior recruiters was able to avoid hiring men with their tool:

Gem’s metrics have also helped [the recruiter] zero in on stages in the interview process where the team is falling short on equitable gender hiring. “For one division, we intuited that we were hiring more women than the average team—and we were! We were prepared to roll off our passive sourcing efforts for that division, but I don’t like to make a move without looking at all the data first. That’s where Gem came through.” [The recruiter] dug through the data in more detail and discovered that the proportion of male candidates was actually increasing quarter over quarter—so much so that, by Q3, they would have made significantly more male than female hires. “If we hadn’t had access to that data, we wouldn’t have been able to identify that trend and strategize on how to allocate our resources properly.”

This is easily interpretable as: We thought everything was fine until Gem showed us that by Q3 we might hire a disproportionate number of men in a division that a disproportionate number of men applied to work in. It's worth noting that when announcing massive job cuts in 2022, Twilio’s CEO bragged that the layoffs had been carried out through an “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

In another testimonial from Chili Piper, an inbound conversion platform for B2B revenue teams, the company’s Talent Ops Manager says she used Gem to discover that URG (under-represented group) candidates were dropping off after the company stopped including a video submission in the application (itself seeming to indicate that a significant proportion “URGs” were being advanced through the hiring pipeline because of their race or gender). She successfully lobbied to bring the video submission back and modified the assignment. “Now it’s like, sell us a new smartphone: something that really levels the playing field and lets us see candidates’ creativity, communication, and approach in action. It’s not necessarily entrenched in experience in tech and SaaS sales.” Since then, the company has “seen a decisive shift in the demographics of candidates who make it to the interview stage of our process. We have seen a 54% increase in URG candidates and a 31% increase in female-identified candidates making it to the first round of interviews. Offers extended to, and offers accepted by URGs have increased.”

In other words, Chili Piper's testimonial seems to indicate that Gem showed the company that when it stopped asking applicants to submit a video that allowed them to see their race and gender, they stopped hiring more minorities. So they brought video back, and seemed to effectively lower their standards by changing the assignment to one in which industry experience was deprioritized.

Gem’s own hiring practices also raise red flags. An internal jobs board from June 2021 provided to Pirate Wires shows that under a field titled “Diversity Search,” positions are either listed as “Open,” “Women,” “URM,” or “Women & URM,” suggesting that certain positions were closed off to straight white males, or perhaps that women and minorities were being sought after in those positions. We sent the screenshot of the internal job board — with company name and other identifying information redacted — to a tech industry employment lawyer, who said:

Without knowing more about the company or getting clarification on what some of the designations mean on the chart, it looks a bit problematic. The law allows companies to set “targets” and “goals” as they relate to the hiring, retention, and promotion of women, veterans, and underrepresented minorities (those targets/goals must be temporary). But the law does not currently allow private companies to set aside or otherwise designate specific positions for such group members. There are some grey areas for certain types of federal contractors, but it’s the exception to the rule.

As a non-lawyer, I’ll not comment on the legality of Gem’s hiring practices. However, I will say the company seems to use unorthodox recruiting methods. In Gem’s diversity webinar I referred to earlier, one of the hosts said, “Here at Gem, each time we open a new req [position], we actually focus solely on sourcing URGs, and in conjunction [with that] we don’t post the job on the career site until other levers need to be pulled…”

The host then explained how she found candidates of specific races and genders at Gem, telling the audience: “Sourcing for URGs may require you to shift some fundamental ideas you have about what a quote-unquote good candidate looks like.” Next, she described how she would go through LinkedIn, searching for candidates with stereotypically minority names, who use neo-pronouns, or who went to minority-majority schools, among other tactics.

[ Slide from Gem’s diversity webinar]

When asked for comment, a representative from GEM told us “Our product provides interested customers with insights that help them build a diverse talent pipeline. We work closely with legal counsel to ensure our platform complies with all applicable laws and welcome potential customers looking to learn more to reach out to us."

Gem: a company that apparently doesn’t post some job announcements publicly without searching for specific races and genders on LinkedIn first. A company whose value proposition is to help companies hold their recruiters “accountable” for hiring too many of the wrong race and gender. A company that created an AI that predicts your race and gender. A company whose AI tracks race throughout the hiring pipeline so efficiently that, allegedly, even woke companies question its legality during sales calls. Gem is the company that vast swaths of the tech industry are using to hire.

So if you’re in the business, and you’re a Derrick O’Donnell or a John Chau, good luck out there. I think you’re gonna need it.

[ Via: https://archive.md/gxFMK ]

==

DEI is discrimination.

[liebgotts-lovergirl]

Wonderstruck Pt. 2

(Pt. 1)

Gallery II Taglist Application II Symbol Guide

Summary: In following her out into the night after her hasty exit, Joseph Liebgott has flipped Alix's entire world on its head. But maybe, just maybe, she doesn't mind. A/N: THERE'S A PLOT, I PROMISE, THERE'S A PLOT!!!! Dedication: To my dear friend @brassknucklespeirs who encourages my bad behavior. Consider this your payback for hurting my heart & calling me out with "No Shame"🤭💖 WARNINGS: SMUT (18+), Hurt/Comfort, Unsafe sex (WRAP IT BEFORE YOU TAP IT, Y'ALL, OR I'M COMING FOR YOUR KNEECAPS 🤬🤬🤬), Trust issues, Implied abuse (nothing graphic), everybody cusses like a sailor but y'all knew that Taglist: @latibvles @softguarnere @brassknucklespeirs @mccall-muffin @holdingforgeneralhugs

8 Months Earlier: January 8th, 1944. Aldbourne, England.

It wasn’t until Alix made it outside of the lobby and into the icy chill of the English winter that she realized she’d forgotten her coat.

The wind was harsh, stinging her bare skin, and she rubbed her arms in a vain attempt to ward off its bite as she began the long walk home.

“Kinda hard to 'go for a smoke' without your cigs, ain’t it?” a familiar voice called into the night as the door squeaked shut behind him, forcing Alix to stop in her tracks.

Goddamn it. 

The agent huffed, gathering her courage before turning to face Joe, the small cloud of her breath still hanging in the frosty air behind her. 

She'd intended to speak but no sound came out. 

After all, what was there to say? 

“I lied and ran off because I’m scared to get involved with you, in case you’re already involved with someone else?"

Yeah, that would go over like a ton of bricks. 

A Martinelli doesn’t show weakness, Alix remembered her father scolding her when she’d dissolved into tears after Clay’s numerous, public infidelities. Not now, not ever. 

So she said nothing, arms crossed, her ruby-red lips pressed into a tense line as she studied the paratrooper who'd come out after her.

Joe was standing just outside the building's overhang, hands shoved deeply into his pockets as he leaned against the building's outer wall, Alix's navy-blue coat draped over one shoulder. 

His deep brown puppy eyes traced over her features so softly, as though there was something worth seeing in them…in her…

Alix crossed her arms even tighter around herself, dropping her gaze to the cobblestones. Anything to avoid those sweet, puppy-dog eyes. 

She hated the way he looked at her, like she was the sun: something brilliant, worthy of kindness and reverence, and a million other sweet sentiments she didn't feel she deserved. 

How could anyone look at her like that after the things she'd done?

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

4 Years Earlier: August 18th, 1940. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

With a shout of obscenities in Italian, her father Emilio, had burst into their parlor, slamming a stack of men’s magazines and pinup calendars down onto the mahogany coffee table in front of her with such force that the whole table shook.

“What in God’s name is this?” he demanded, stabbing an accusatory finger at a Beauty Parade drawing of her in a slinky evening gown cut practically down to her navel, her cleavage nearly spilling out as she leaned on a piano.

“And this!” A page torn from the Esquire calendar depicting a provocatively-posed Alix as Miss July, lounging on a beach towel in an impossibly tiny two-piece. 

“And this!” A Titter centerfold featuring a blushing Alix with the skirt of her sundress snagged in a door, revealing her garters and a tantalizing flash of white lace panties.

“Is this what you've been doing while you're away?” her father bellowed, his voice echoing off the walls. “We send you to Richmond for finishing school and you become a prostitute?!" 

"No, Pa, I-"

"Basta! Non dire cazzate, you got that? Don't fucking bullshit me!"  

"They're just pin-up drawings! It's not like I'm naked-" 

"You think that makes it better?!"

Her father grabbed one of the calendars off the table and waved it in front of her face.

"Do you see this shit? This is the shit roughnecks carry with them out to the oil fields every day! Is that who you want to be, Alix, some workmen’s tart for them to gawk at, like a piece of meat?! You want your name– OUR name– associated with the likes of them?!"

"I didn't even use my real name for those!” Alix shot back, her temper flaring. 

Her parents were strict but even still: she’d had a taste of freedom and she’d be damned if she’d be caged ever again. 

“Pa, I’m careful, I swear! I give false names every time! Hell, I’ve even worn wigs!"

"And what, you think that's going to keep people from recognizing you?! Ci fai o ci sei?!"

"No, I'm not stupid, Pa! Look, I-"

"Zitta! We did not name you after royalty so that you could parade around like a whore and humiliate this family! We’ve got a reputation to uphold and I am not about to have it ruined because of you! Capisce?"

Without waiting for an answer, he threw the calendar down onto the ground and began to pace across the floor, muttering and massaging his temple with his hand. 

“Santa Maria,” he all but spat, shaking his head at his prodigal daughter with disgust.

“We can only pray the Hearsts don’t hear of this. Because who in God’s name would want to marry you now, knowing the…the filth you’ve involved yourself in?!”

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

8 Months Earlier: January 8th, 1944. Aldbourne, England.

 Joe broke the tension first, clearing his throat uncomfortably, and Alix jumped at the sound. 

Tentatively, he draped her coat around her shoulders, as though she were a bomb set to detonate any second. 

Just like everybody else in the company.

Alix drew the dark material tightly around her for protection from the elements. 

“How’d you know?” she asked softly, glancing up to him nervously before her eyes darted away again. 

How did you know that was my coat? 

How did you know where I’d be? 

How do you know me so well without ever having known me?

Joe rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably.

“I ain’t a spy or anythin’ but I ain't fuckin’ blind either,” he remarked, attempting a smile but it came off more as a grimace of self-loathing.

“I noticed you when I came in. I remembered the coat you wore. It…” 

He huffed for a second, his breath clouding the frosty air, before finishing simply, “It looked good on you.”

“Thanks,” Alix murmured before retrieving her cigarettes and glancing back up to Joe, extending an olive branch.

"You want one?"

He cocked an eyebrow and hesitated for a moment, before asking, "What kind?" 

"Chesterfields," Alix replied with a half-smile, passing the white and gold carton over to him. "I'm under contract."

Was it just the dim lighting of the street lamps or did she see the ghost of a smile cross his face? 

"Ya got good taste," he remarked simply before plucking a cigarette from the carton and retrieving a lighter from his pocket. 

He leaned over to give hers a light first, the both of them painfully aware of how close their faces were once again. 

The unacknowledged memory of the almost-kiss from earlier lingered between them like the rolling fog over the crop fields and Alix wondered if he could hear the thump-thump-thumping of her heart at the thought, even now.

“You coulda just told me, y’know," he mumbled after the first drag, sounding so unusually quiet and hesitant, so unlike the brash, cocky front he tried to keep up, that for a second, his words didn't even register.

"Told you what, Joey?" 

The agent flinched at the way her voice sounded. Brittle, like broken glass.

But she couldn't help it. Her resolve was waning.

As she took a drag to steady herself, Joe's head jerked up in surprise at her words, brown eyes wide. 

"Joey, huh?" he repeated, ignoring her question as the corner of his mouth starting to quirk up in his trademark goofy grin. "Nobody's ever called me that before." 

Alix started to apologize automatically but Joe shook his head. 

"Don't," he chided gently. "I like it. But-" 

He chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. "Think I'd like anything that comes outta that pretty mouth of yours."

"Awful quick with the lines tonight, aren't we?" Alix tried to sound nonchalant but there was a notable edge to her voice that caused Joe's brows to knit with concern.

"That a problem?" 

"Of course not," Alix replied coolly, the smoke from her last drag curling into the air between them like a momentary barrier.

"I just know your type is all." 

Joe gritted his teeth at her insinuation.

"Yeah?” he asked tersely. “And what type's that?" 

“The type that gives their girl back home the runaround while they're off chasing tail and chasing glory."

A vein popped in his jaw at the insinuation.

"You think you got me all figured out, huh?” he snapped tersely. "Well you don't. I've never gone steady with anybody, okay? I don't have the fuckin' time!" 

He shook his head in frustration.

"I been workin' two jobs, helpin' out my folks and lookin' out for my siblings since I was a fuckin' teenager. Yeah I slept around a little bit here and there, I'm not gonna bullshit you, but I never gave anybody the fuckin' runaround, okay? I'm not Skinny and I sure as fuck ain't Tab." 

Alix blinked in shock at his outburst as she absorbed his words, but Joe wasn't done. 

"And y'wanna know why I joined the Airborne?" he demanded.

He took a quick drag, the exhale coming just as fast.

"Wasn't for shits and giggles, lemme tell ya. It was so I could save enough money to put a fuckin' down payment on a house for my folks. That's why. Not glory, not girls, okay? My fuckin' family. 

He took another puff of his cigarette, golden-brown eyes now studying the darkened landscape behind her before discarding it under his heel. 

Alix tensed. Taking a slow drag off her own cig, she hoped quietly that the slightly bitter, hazy taste would clear her racing thoughts. But it didn't. 

Boy, did she feel stupid. 

"Look, Joe, I-I'm sorry," she mumbled, staring at the ground and tossing her cigarette away, her muscles taut as she braced for some sort of fight. 

Conflict was a regular feature of her life growing up. Her father was a wild and wealthy womanizer and her melancholic mother socially prominent and heavily religious. When they clashed, which was often, the walls of their estate shook with the bellowing, doors slamming, and glass breaking.

A marriage of convenience, yes, but a match made in hell. 

Her first real boyfriend…her former fiancé…had been much the same. Alix had learned very quickly that Clayton Hearst did not tolerate mouthiness.

That was probably why her father had chosen him for a match— to keep his wayward daughter in line. It hadn't stopped Alix from fighting back but it made for some very rough arguments. 

Fortunately, Clay had left for the Marines while she was still in school, allowing Alix a small reprieve from their near-constant fighting. 

The Dear Jane letter she'd gotten in the mail a month later had only proven to her what she'd already known deep-down: 

Clay had never loved her. Hell, he'd never even liked her. The still-healing bruises from their parting arguments were proof enough of that. And just like her father, he'd rather spend his leave time cavorting with other women instead of remaining faithful to the one he was supposed to love. 

The soft percussion of boots on pavement shook Alix out of her reverie and she jumped. But to her surprise, Joe's approach wasn't angry. Not at all. 

Instead, she felt calloused fingers gently tilting her chin up to look him in the eyes and she flinched. But instead of the fury she'd come to expect, she saw only concern reflected back at her. 

“I don’t know what asshole taught you that that’s how men are,” he said softly. “But I can fuckin’ promise you, that ain't how I am. You'll see." 

Alix knew she shouldn't but the sincerity in Joe’s tone tugged at her heartstrings in a way she hadn’t expected and even with all her reservations, she couldn't help but believe him. 

She was suddenly, painfully aware of his proximity, his face so tantalizingly near that she could smell the dizzying sweetness of the alcohol on his breath mingling with the faint smoke of his last cigarette. 

Alix's eyes raked across his features: the intensity of his warm caramel gaze, his finely-drawn cheekbones, his strong aquiline nose, and she couldn't help but linger on the smile tugging at his lips, each thud of her heartbeat chanting the same thing like a mantra:

Kiss him. Kiss him. Kiss him. 

"You gonna kiss me or what?" Joe teased softly, as if he could read her mind. 

The slight gravel of his voice sent a tingle of pleasure down her spine and Alix knew then, as surely as she knew her own name, that kissing Joe Liebgott would be sealing her own fate, allowing herself to need him in a way she hadn’t wanted to need anyone ever again. 

But in that moment, a decision was made: 

It would be worth it. 

So in response, Alix gave in to her impulses and pressed her lips earnestly to his with all of the sweet desperation that had been building up inside her since their eyes had first met days earlier.

Before she’d even known his name, a part of her had wanted to do this and the fact that it was actually happening had her head spinning in the best way.

Joe’s lips were soft, far softer than she’d expected them to be and they moved instinctively against hers in perfect synchronicity, anticipating her needs as naturally as he had on the dancefloor. 

Alix reached up and ran her fingers through his thick copper hair, the intoxicating musk of his cologne and the feel of his arms sliding around her waist sending warmth blossoming through her like a blazing hearth in the winter chill.

Deepening the kiss, her tongue tentatively prodded his half-parted lips and he tangled a hand in her hair, intensifying their embrace. 

Kissing Joe was like a drug, the syrupy-sweetness of the alcohol on his tongue and the searing heat of his mouth on hers stirred something in her she'd never before experienced. 

The warmth between them was slowly building, spreading like a wildfire, and even the sudden, frigid downpouring of sleet couldn't sour the elation they felt in each other's arms. 

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Joe chuckled in between kisses, deftly flipping the collar up on his jacket with his free hand.

“What’s wrong, flyboy?” Alix quipped, her hair now coated in the frozen slush. “Afraid of a little winter weather?” 

“Nah," he scoffed with a teasing nip at her bottom lip. "But if I catch a fuckin' cold ‘cause of it, I’m makin’ you take care of me.”

"Yeah?" the agent joked, returning the nip playfully. "Why me?" 

"'Cause I ain't foolin' around with Roe." 

Alix couldn't even respond, reluctantly having to tear herself away due to her uncontrollable shivering.

"I should p-probably get g-going," Alix managed from between chattering teeth.

Both her coat and dress had already been soaked through with the freezing water and the harsh wind was biting at her through the trees.

"B-Before it g-gets worse." 

"Not like this we're fuckin' not," Joe declared, gently guiding Alix under the overhang. "We'll catch our deaths."

"You-You don't have to come," Alix replied, wrapping her arms around herself in a vague attempt to conserve whatever body heat hadn't already fled. 

"Like hell I don't," Joe responded stubbornly, crossing his arms to keep himself warm as well.

"If you think I'm gonna let you walk home alone in the middle of the night, and in this weather on top of it, you're outta your fuckin' mind." 

He was shivering too but he still took off his half-soaked coat and wrapped it around Alix's already-soaked coat anyway. 

"What...What do you recommend then?" 

Instead of answering, Joe opened the door to the White Rose again. 

"Lemme take care of it, dollface." he called over his shoulder as he slipped inside. "Don't miss me too much." 

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

About five minutes later, Joe reappeared, dangling a room key with a triumphant grin on his face. 

"C'mon Ziskeit," he urged, wrapping an arm around her and guiding her inside where it was warmer. "I told ya I'd take care of it!" 

"How did you manage that?" Alix asked incredulously, once she'd stopped shivering so violently. "They don't rent to unmarried couples, do they? It'd be improper!" 

As if to answer her question, when they passed the concierge desk, the clerk gave them an enthusiastic parting wave. 

"Enjoy your Honeymoon, Corporal and Mrs. Liebgott!" 

Alix turned to Joe, wide-eyed. 

"Joey, you didn't-!" 

But Joe shot her a wink. 

"What can I say? I got creative." 

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

Their room at the White Rose was a bit on the smaller side, right next to the first floor stairwell, and most importantly, it was warm but Alix wouldn't have noticed the difference if it had been a suite at the Waldorf.

Joe's lips pressed urgently against hers and together, they stumbled as one through the doorway in a frenzy of desire, each kissing the other as though their lives depended on it.  

"You been drivin' me crazy all night, y'know that?" Joe mumbled haltingly against her lips as he fumbled blindly for the door knob.  

"Have I?" Alix asked innocently, lightly nipping at his bottom lip before peeling off her coat and tossing it to the ground.

“Don’t fuckin’ play with me, Zees," he cautioned, pressing her back up against the closed door, which rattled its complaint.

"But why, Joey?" Alix purred seductively, reeling him in by his tie just to brush her lips tantalizingly against his and slip away before he could kiss her. 

"It's so much fun to tease you."

"Yeah?" She could hear the smirk in his rough voice but what she hadn’t expected was to feel him behind her. 

Catching her hand as he spoke, Joe deftly tugged her back to him and she yielded, allowing him to pin her against the opposite wall instead with a dull thump, caging her between his arms.

"’Cause I bet it's gonna be a whole lot more fun to tease you.”

He started with her jawline, his kisses torturously gradual as he made his way down her arching neck, the heat of his breath sending goosebumps prickling down her limbs. 

Locating her sweet spots with relative ease, he latched on, sucking a small trail of love bites into the delicate skin, pulling a breathy moan from Alix’s throat before she could stop it.

He was smirking against the blossoming bruises, she could feel it, and she eagerly nipped a row of matching marks into his neck in return, around the chain of his dog tags, the resulting guttural groan from him making her a little weak in the knees. 

His kisses traveled further down at a maddening crawl, making Alix squirm with impatience.

He was keeping her caged against the wall on purpose, forcing her to allow him to take the lead and for an agent so used to being the pursuer, the honeytrap, in-command at all times, she could’ve screamed in frustration. 

Sensing her impatience, he captured her mouth in another desperate, heated kiss and she pressed her whole body flush against him with an almost-feline grace.

Slow as pouring honey, she dragged herself agonizingly against him, making sure he felt every inch of her from her breasts to her hips and ass up against him.

She could feel the curve of his hard cock straining through his trousers as it lightly prodded her thigh–– and the sensation inflamed her like a cat in heat.

Tugging him nearer by his tie a second time, Alix leaned just close enough for her warm breath to ghost along the shell of his ear. 

“Fuck, I need you, Joey,” she moaned breathily, running a teasing hand over the bulge in his pants and making him shudder from the contact. “I need you so bad.”

“Okay now that,” Joe groaned at her touch. “That’s just fuckin’ cruel.”

“Then do something about it,” Alix purred and that was all the paratrooper needed to hear. 

Joe could be a very petty and proud man, but even so: he wasn’t superhuman.

Scooping her up in his deceptively-strong arms, Alix let out a small yelp of surprise as Joe moved her away from the wall and began backing her towards the bed, their lips crashing against each other’s again and again as they stumbled to it, throwing off their clothes as they went. 

Joe’s tie, her dress, his shirt, her heels, they all were strewn somewhere on the way but neither of them noticed where.

The backs of Alix’s knees hit the bed and Joe gave her a gentle push, easing her onto it, the mattress springs creaking softly.

 But for all his earlier cockiness, the paratrooper was rendered completely awestruck by her nearly-naked form, and he took a step back for a moment, simply standing there in his skivvies, gazing at her in pure disbelief. 

“Fuckin’ Christ,” he whispered finally, his eyes roving down her lounging body on the mattress, absorbing the image as though he couldn’t quite believe she was real.

Alix propped herself up on her elbows to give him a better view. Her bra was long gone– tossed to the floor nearby– and all that remained on her were her black garter belt, and matching stockings.

Suddenly, Alix found herself feeling more nervous than she ever had before. Modeling was impersonal. This wasn’t like that at all.

None of the artists had ever looked at her the way Joe was looking at her now, so…so reverently and yet so ravenously at the same time.

Come to think of it, no man she’d ever met had looked at her like that before, with such a mixture of carnal desire and awestruck admiration, and it was driving her wild in the best way. 

She needed him. In whatever way he wanted, Alix knew she needed him.

As if he could read her thoughts, he walked to the edge of the bed and gently nudged her legs apart with his hand. 

Alix must’ve looked surprised because he gave her a playful wink and settled between her thighs as though he'd always been, the look of pure desire in his eyes sending a tingling sensation to her most sensitive parts. 

Shifting the pillows so she could have a better vantage point, Alix could see even from there that Joe’s pupils were blown with lust and she could feel herself reddening under his gaze.

“You just sit back and relax up there, Ziskeit,” he entreated her, the old cocky, flirtatious Liebgott grin she’d seen earlier in the evening returning once again.

“This is gonna be fun.” 

“Joey, you don’t have to…” Alix began softly but the feeling of his lips nipping and kissing the inside of her thighs killed the rest of the words in her throat. 

God, he was good. 

He left a burning path of love bites from her hip bones down her inner thighs, causing her to whine impatiently at the dull ache blooming between her legs. 

He was driving her crazy and he knew it too, damn him.

Alix’s breath hitched as Joe eased her panties to the side with a finger. 

"God, you're fuckin' soaked," he breathed and Alix felt her heartbeat quickening at the lewdness dripping from his words. 

But even underneath the obscenity and voraciousness of his tone, there was an underlying sweetness too.

“You sure you wanna do this, Ziskeit?” he asked tentatively, meeting her eyes and suddenly seeming almost nervous.

“We don’t have to, y’know…I’ll understand, if you don’t…”

Alix frowned. 

Had she misread his signals the whole night? Was he just here because he was mollifying her?

“Do you not want to?” 

His eyebrows shot up immediately and he sat back on his knees. 

“You kiddin’ me? Of course I want to! I just didn’t want you to think-”

“I don’t,” Alix interrupted, knowing instinctively what he was going to say. “I don’t think that, not at all.”

He nodded his acknowledgement and returned to his prone position between her legs.

"Oh, by the way," he remarked nonchalantly, looking up with a positively sinful grin.

"You're gonna be cumming at least twice before we do anythin’ else." 

Alix’s eyes must’ve looked like saucers.

“U-Uh,” she stammered, knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt now that her face was a deep crimson.

“One thing, before you start. Um…I’ve never…y’know…Not from this…or anything, really. I don’t even know if I can…”

Joe’s eyes were as round as hers as understanding set in. 

“Wait, never?” he asked incredulously and Alix shook her head with a nervous titter, suddenly feeling extremely shy.

“Nope.” 

Clayton had never been the type to care about her pleasure and the others had been similarly apathetic.

Truthfully, she hadn’t even known sex was supposed to be enjoyable until Lavinia from St. Mary’s had shared stories of her romps in the woods with one of the boys from St. Ignatius. 

“I, uh, I hope that’s not a problem, Joey.” 

Recovering from his momentary trance, Alix saw something flicker in the golden flecks of his eyes, like 24Karat gold dust…was it affection? 

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, dollface,” he reassured her with an easy smile as he nudged her panties to the side once more.

“Just lay back and lemme make you feel good.”

Alix obeyed eagerly and he hooked his arms under her thighs, draping her legs over his shoulders before descending on her heat like some kind of starving animal. 

“Oh fuck,” she whimpered, feeling a bit pathetic at the way a few well-placed laps of Joe’s tongue already had her head feeling light. 

Tangling her fingers reflexively in his thick, lush brown hair, Alix swore she could feel him smiling as he devoured her, reveling in the way he was making her come undone in a way no one else had. 

Minutes later, she was trembling. The assassin everyone was so in awe of was quivering like a leaf in the breeze at every broad stripe of Joe’s well-practiced tongue. 

He knew what he was doing, that was for sure. 

Her free hand gripping the sheets, she could feel the muscles in her stomach clenching, bracing for each wave of pleasure that Joe’s tongue sent rushing through her. 

“Shit, you taste good,” Joe mumbled, greedily lapping at her core like a man starved, burying his tongue so deeply within her that Alix had to scrunch her eyes shut to keep from falling to pieces right then and there. 

“So fuckin’ sweet for me, aren’t ya, Zees?” 

“O-Oh God,” Alix gasped out, tugging at Joe's hair desperately. 

The pooling warmth in her stomach was getting stronger, deeper, her legs trembling as the waves of pleasure began to build, filling up like a balloon seconds from bursting. “Joey, I-I think-"

Joe groaned in excitement, lapping steadily at her core, before beginning to suckle on her clit, causing her vision to flash momentarily white. 

Alix let out a strangled cry, her back arching clear off the mattress and involuntarily thrusting her breasts into the air.

“Oh-Oh fuck, Joey,” she mewled, her voice carrying clear across the room as the dam broke. She tried to press her quivering thighs together, the overwhelming sensitivity like a tsunami of bliss completely flooding her senses, but Joe wasn’t done with her. 

Not even close. 

“Louder,” he urged as he coaxed her through her first orgasm, giving quick kitten licks to her most sensitive spot and teasing her slick entrance with a finger.

“C’mon, Zees, I wanna hear you.”

“Joey, if you keep this up, the whole hall is gonna hear me,” Alix half-sobbed, the pleasure so overwhelming that she could feel her vision swimming. 

Joe pressed a soft kiss to her knee before slipping a second finger inside her, sending her keening his name so loudly that she was sure even the clerks at the concierge desk could hear. 

“Good,” he affirmed, beginning to scissor his fingers inside her core as her breathing quickened to ragged, blissful gasps.

“Besides, we’re newlyweds, remember?” 

He shot her a wink. 

“We’re ‘sposed to be at it like rabbits.”

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

Alix had always thought the phrase “seeing stars” was just an expression but after the third or fourth orgasm Joe had ripped out of her, she was pretty sure there were lights dancing before her eyes after all. 

“You doin’ okay, Zees?” The paratrooper perked his head up from between her legs, the evidence of her arousal glistening on his chin.

His bangs were stuck to his forehead, the both of them covered in a sheen of sweat, but he looked as satisfied as she felt. 

“You need a break or somethin’?” 

Alix gave him a reassuring smile and shifted her still-trembling legs off of Joe’s shoulders. 

“I’m good, Joey.” 

He cocked his head and sat back on his heels, eyeing her inquisitively, a note of concern in his husky voice. 

“You sure?”

Alix nodded. 

“I promise.” She let out a shaky laugh. “I’m just taking a quick second to recover, that’s all.”

Satisfied with her answer, the paratrooper crawled up beside her, back against the headboard, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth as he searched the face beside him intently for a reaction.

“Pretty fuckin’ good, huh?” 

Alix giggled. 

“If you couldn’t tell from me screaming your name for however long it’s been, yes, it was ‘pretty fucking good’.” 

Joe gave her a playful nudge with his shoulder. 

“Just checkin’. Can’t leave Mrs. Liebgott unsatisfied on our honeymoon, y’know. What kinda husband would I be?”

Alix knew he was just joking but the reference still made something in her flutter with delight.

This paratrooper…This technician with the warm smile and the quick wit, who seemed to read her better than anyone else, he intrigued her like no one ever had.

He was an adventure, a revelation, an epiphany, everything she hadn’t known she’d been missing, all wrapped up into one charismatic person.

Feeling something stirring deep inside her again, Alix found herself gripped by a primal urge she couldn’t shake. 

She needed him, all of him. Now. 

Rolling over onto her side so that she was facing him completely, she could see the taut muscles of his thin, wiry frame, tensing like a panther as he looked at her.

How could he always read her mind?

Giving him a once-over, the spy glimpsed the same salacious shape straining against his underwear. 

Leaning over, she began to toy with the waistband of his skivvies, causing Joe's hips to buck up involuntarily as her smooth fingertips dipped below. 

“C’mon, Ziskeit,” Joe cajoled, those deep brown eyes full of unspoken pleas for release as Alix resumed kissing down his neck. “Don’t be a fuckin’ tease.”

“If I recall,” Alix murmured against his skin as she grazed her nails down his abs, making him inhale sharply. 

“A certain person made me beg for a full five minutes…” 

“Well that person's a fuckin’ idiot," Joe grunted desperately. 

As he was speaking, Alix slid his skivvies off and took him into her mouth, delicately tracing the head with her tongue.

"And I'm sure he – Oh fuckin’ Christ!” Joe hissed, tangling a hand in her hair desperately to keep some self-control as she went about her work, taking him deeper into her throat.

“Fuck, I’m sure he knows better now."  

Alix smirked, hollowing her cheeks and taking him still deeper, pushing him further down, savoring the taste of him, and she could feel his hips starting to buck. 

“God, you’re fuckin’ perfect,” he growled but as she deep-throated him again and again, he released her hair, his hands hurriedly finding their way to her shoulders. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Zees,” he choked out, pushing her away gently and it only took that warning tone for her to release him at once with a lewd pop.

“You okay, Joey?” she asked, her turn to be concerned, and he laughed nervously.

“Uh…” he chuckled, sheepishly running a hand through his hair.

“I…I wasn’t gonna last too much longer, if you kept that up. That was… Christ, that was somethin’ fuckin’ else.”

Alix hummed appreciatively before swinging a leg over and straddling his lap.

“Can we try this then?” she murmured, ghosting her fingers up and down his strong arms. 

"Jesus Christ," Joe whispered almost reverently from his half-propped position against the headboard, his heavily-lidded eyes roaming every inch of her nude form, still admiring her as though she was a priceless Caravaggio.

"You sure you're not a fuckin' dream or somethin'?" 

He slowly reached out, his fingertips ghosting across the valley of her breasts in mesmerized disbelief, as though he was afraid she might disappear at any moment if he was too rough with her.

"I'm real, tesoro," Alix assured him, guiding his hand to squeeze the supple flesh, sending a flood of warmth through her and she could feel him twitch beneath her, prodding her inner thigh with his arousal.

“I promise, I’m real.”

Carding a hand through his hair, she captured him in a long, passionate kiss which he returned just as fervently, the pair moaning deeply into each other’s mouths as she sank down on his cock.

She gasped as he bottomed out, the slight burn filling her with ecstasy, and he groaned deeply.

“Oh fuck, you feel so good.” 

Alix didn’t even have the words to reply. The feeling of fullness Joe supplied was unimaginably euphoric, blanking out her mind completely. 

Relying on animal instinct alone, she began to roll her hips, rutting against him as desperate keens and gasped curses fell from both their lips like prayers. 

Joe wrapped both arms around her waist, burying his face in her breasts with a deep, rumbling groan of ecstasy, gripping her to him as though she was a lifeline, the lifesaving driftwood to a drowning man. 

“Madonna mia,” Alix breathed, the fervent motion of her hips stuttering momentarily at the feeling of him latching onto the sensitive skin of her nipple. 

She rutted against him desperately, needing more and more of him, tugging on his hair in a silent plea for everything that only he could give her.

“Hey Ziskeit,” he murmurs seconds later, his voice husky with arousal, and she could feel her walls constricting around him tighter and tighter. “Goddammit, I think I’m gonna cum soon...” 

Her pace twice as insistent now, Alix bore down on him, Joe’s dog tags jingling musically against her chest as she rode him into oblivion. 

“Fuck, Joey, I need you,"  she murmured, chanting the last three words like a prayer as she felt herself teetering on a precipice for another time.

“Don’t say that," Joe gasped out, his grip around her hips so insistent that she was sure bruises would form later. "Don't fuckin' say that unless you mean it." 

He was bucking up against her too, matching her rhythm, every stroke so intense in her core that she was left a whimpering mess.

“I mean it, Joey,” Alix moaned as she pressed his face to her chest, "God, I fucking mean it."  

“Oh shit, Jesus Christ!” Panic and pleasure twisted Joe’s handsome features, his voice raising frantically. “Uh, Zees, I- FUCK!” 

His warning tone reached a fever pitch just as his orgasm jolted through him, ripping a guttural sound from his throat and leaving him slack-jawed and panting as his cock pulsed.

Alix was seconds behind him, burying her face into his shoulder with a broken sob as another orgasm overwhelmed her, plunging her instantly into white-hot bliss as he held her, murmuring praises in English and what she assumed to be German. 

Joe lolled his head back against the headboard, his murmuring voice farther and farther away now. Alix was too fucked out to think anymore and she found herself slumping over on top of his chest like a ragdoll as she drifted off.

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

Surfacing from sleep around 1am to find Joe still buried comfortably inside her, the pair of them still tangled in each other’s arms, Alix gently eased herself upright, wanting to take in the scene for a moment, not knowing if she’d ever have the chance to again. 

Was this a one-night stand? God, she hoped not. Was it her imagination or was there something more between them? 

A spark? No…a flame. More than a flame. An inferno. 

In one night, Joe had shown her an entirely different world, an entirely different life than the one she’d been trapped in before.

How could she just go back to normal now, as if she hadn’t been completely and totally changed? As if her entire world hadn’t been rocked by one cocky paratrooper with puppy-dog eyes?  

Their clothes, still damp from the sleet, lay discarded in messy bunches along the carpet like autumn leaves.

Thinking back on it, Alix couldn't remember how long it had been since they'd begun but the chill of the remaining frost that had coated them both at the start was long gone by now, replaced with the sticky-sweetness and feverish heat of sweat and sex.

Joe wasn't like Clay or any of the handful of guys she'd been with before, she mused. 

They'd all been selfish lovers, entirely focused on chasing their own wants while denying her hers. She was merely a vessel for them to get off, nothing more than a doll to be used and discarded once her purpose had been fulfilled.

In one night, Joe had treated her like the complete opposite. 

He was still as full of fire in the bedroom as he was out of it, but for once, it was only for Alix to see. He had been chasing her all night but not in the way the others were. For the first time in her life, someone seemed hungry to please her. The thought was so foreign that it sent another shiver of pleasure through her.

Even in his sleep, Joe’s breathing hitched at the sensation of her walls contracting around him and she couldn’t help but giggle into her hand. 

“Whassofunny?” Joe mumbled, cracking an eye open. 

“Nothing, cucciolo,” Alix assured him, running a hand through his sex-tousled hair. “Go back to sleep. You need it.” 

“I fuckin’ don’t,” Joe insisted doggedly, starting to sit up, but when Alix started to lift herself off of him, he hissed and shook his head. 

“Not yet, Ziskeit,” he pleaded, his words still running together a bit in his after-sex haze. “A little bit longer.” 

“Then go back to sleep and I'll stay put,” Alix countered.

“Can’t,” Joe yawned. “Can’t sleep much normally, ‘cept after…y’know.” 

He made a vague gesture to their situation and Alix cocked an eyebrow, dark eyes sparkling with mirth. 

“If that was your way of trying to come onto me again,” she commented drolly. “I appreciate the creativity. I don’t think ‘Fuck me to sleep’ is a line I’ve heard before.”

“Wasn’t a line,” Joe responded with a shrug. “I really can’t sleep for shit."

His warm brown eyes were boring into hers again and she could feel the playful chuckle he was trying to suppress in his voice when he added slyly, 

“But y’know, just outta curiosity… if it had been a line, would it’ve worked…?” 

She was now hyper-aware of his hands resting gently on her bare back as he held her, the roughness of his calloused fingertips sending sparks dancing deliciously across her soft skin. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know, flyboy,” she teased with a soft roll of her hips, but the slight catch of desire in her voice when she felt him stiffen betrayed her.  

"Shit," Joe grunted at the sudden movement, pupils blown with desire. "You're such a fuckin' minx, y'know that?" 

"Am I?" Alix blinked innocently before clenching the muscles in her core around his cock in a vise grip, making him hiss. "I hadn't noticed." 

"Okay that's it," Joe hissed, the rasp in his slightly nasal-tenor coming out as almost a primal growl. Keeping one hand steady on her back, he pulled out and flipped her over, pinning her firmly underneath him. 

Alix sunk her nails into his back to keep herself from moaning needily as he buried himself within her once again, rougher this time, the heavenly ache between her legs as he bottomed out causing a small whimper to escape. 

“Gotta be quiet now, dollface,” he mumbled, crashing his lips to hers to keep himself from groaning out loud.

“People’re probably sleeping. Like we would be if you weren’t so goddamn gorgeous.”

“Such a charmer, cucciolo, I- Oh fuck!” 

Working up speed, Joe began pounding into her mercilessly, seemingly determined to make her pay for teasing him so cruelly earlier, and Alix wrapped her legs around him, craving him impossibly closer to her.

“Tesoro, fuck, I think–” she whimpered from beneath him. “I think I might-”

“Yeah?” he grunted, the vigor of his pace only increasing. 

Thinking back on it, his dog tags had been clinking so loudly against his Star of David pendant that Alix hadn’t even heard the door open.

“Real sorry I took so long, Pops,” a soft-spoken but familiar voice rang from the entrance. “But Doc said-” 

Shifty Powers, the sweet-faced trooper who’d waved to Joe in the lobby earlier, was now frozen dead in his tracks, his eyes dinner-plate wide as the tall glass of water he’d been carrying slid from his hands, shattering into several glistening chunks on the floor with a CRACK!

He was beet-red but rooted to the spot, his horrified gaze dropping down to the shattered glass at his feet and then back up to the still-intertwined Alix and Joe like he was tied to the tracks of an oncoming train.

“Shit,” he mumbled, stammering out excuses and apologies, half to himself and half to the couple as he immediately dropped to his knees and began busying himself with trying to collect the glass shards. “I- This-this isn’t…and y’all aren’t…But I thought-”

Alix lunged for the comforter, which she hurriedly wrapped around herself like an oversized towel.

“Don’t worry about the glass,” she reassured him kindly, his eyes glued firmly to the ground. “We’ll take care of it. You just get where you need to go.” 

“A-Are y’all sure?" He was speaking entirely to the carpet, head dipped to avoid any more accidental views.

If it hadn't been such a humiliating situation, Alix might've giggled.

"I wouldn’t wanna cause y’all any trouble.”

“It isn’t any trouble,” Alix insisted. “Isn’t that right, Joe?” 

Joe made a skeptical noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between a cough and a grunt, but the glare she shot him could’ve wilted even fake flowers and he finally relented.

“Yeah sure,” Liebgott replied, dulling the sharpness of the irritation in his tone. “No trouble at all.”

“Well alright, if y’all are sure…” Shifty mumbled, his face still a bright cherry red. “I’ll, uh, I guess I’ll just see y’all around. I'm just gonna-"

 

With that, he fled the room like a bat out of hell, leaving a disgruntled Joe and a mortified Alix in his wake. 

"God, I cannot believe that just happened." Alix squeaked into her palms, wishing that the Earth would just swallow her whole.

Even the exquisite soreness between her thighs wasn't worth that.

Joe meanwhile, was muttering to himself as he stepped over the glass shards strewn along a small patch of carpet.

"Going somewhere?" Alix asked with a cocked eyebrow.

“Yeah," Joe grumbled. "To latch and lock that goddamn door.” 

[seishun-emergency]

ACTUALLY. HOLY SHIT okay it's soooo topical that i was studying victorian literature this year because. there was a huge debate in the victorian era around the "condition of england" debate as it related to industrialization and art and its so unbelievably fucking applicable to what's happening with valkyrie during the war, with shu's view of art and perfectionism

so a big talking point during the victorian era was about industrialization and the role of the working class and how, effectively, they were being turned into materials or machines for the sake of "progress" - namely, the progress or benefit of the elite few at the cost of their humanity. this eventually extended into art . there's this guy john ruskin that wrote an entire thing called the stones of venice about the debate of perfection/imperfection in art, and how he believes that imperfection in art is necessary, because perfection in art/artisan craft (as was prized during the victorian era and in england) was achieved by "geniuses" at the cost of the humanity and individual creative spirit of "regular" people who could help them achieve this perfection in their craft by splitting the load. effectively, turning these humans into tools or machines for the "genius" creator to wield in order to achieve the perfect art.

sound familiar?

some quotes from ruskin's stones of venice:

"Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one [...] and to carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision [...] but if you ask him to think about any of those forms [...] he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong [...] he makes a mistake [...] but you have made of him a man for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

And, observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them [...] you must unhumanize them."

ruskin also has a few paragraphs talking about the idea that art or goods can be made both genuine and perfect by having a gentleman or artisan or genius design the form of the art/goods, and "common workmen" do the actual creation process, allowing for "design and finish". ruskin challenges this, saying that it's founded on "two mistaken suppositions" that 1) one person's thoughts can be accurately executed by another person's hands and 2) that the kind of manual labour necessary to actually make the finished products is a downgrade from the creative work of design

"We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always be thinking, and another to always be working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative. [...] As it is, we make both ungentle [...] and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers."

"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. [...] For since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing in all perfection, cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen [...] or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength, which will involve [...] imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the age can make it."

and finally: "But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand of perfection is always a sign of misunderstanding of the ends of art."

"but leo! shu makes all the costumes and songs and stuff for valkyrie the argument you make isn't true because it's not like shu ISN'T doing the work" I MEAN. OKAY. SURE shu IS doing a lot! but also it isn't necessarily the creation of the songs or the costumes or the choregraphy that's the focus here, the final "product" to be consumed. its the PERFORMANCE.

and mika and nazuna, during the exvalk days, essentially function like tools. their goal is to be honed to perform perfectly by shu's hand, in order to present the completely perfect final product that shu wants for his art. the analysis through ruskin's view of tools and perfection still applies, i think

anyways. i dont know if akira meant This much of an anything but it's really interesting to connect shu's victorian aesthetic of valkyrie and perfectionism at all costs to actual discourses happening in victorian england around art and perfection and industrialization and dehumanization. i hope it was meant as this much of a something i think that's a really fucking smart way to incorporate victorian debates into valkyrie and shu's characterization and i had fun pulling all this apart and putting things together

[arch-godenvy]

AGENT JESTER , LEVEL III

name  genevieve castillo nicknames  jester, jes, jessie age  thirty-nine date of birth  august 13, 1984 zodiac  leo place of birth  new brunswick, new jersey current residence  brooklyn gender  genderfluid pronouns  she/he/they sexuality  bisexual, women preference occupation  artist / level iii cerberus agent

faceclaim  aubrey plaza height  5'6 tattoos  many... secret :) piercings  lip, healed. both ears. distinguishing features  big eyes, knowing smile positive traits  creative, relaxed, imaginative, expressive negative traits  foolish, immature, tactless, unserious labels / tropes  class clown, beware the silly ones, blatant lies, hidden depths, lonely rich kid likes  pulling pranks, art, people watching, baked goods dislikes  meetings, serious missions, level i agents fears  death hobbies  painting, sketching habits  clicking tongue, rolling eyes, tapping foot

002.  EXTRA ORDINARY

near death experience… 

jester was having a normal day. the most normal a day can get for her. her roommate left. her boyfriend broke up with her. her favorite bakery didn't have her favorite little treat. that's fine! she goes to the met because that's where she's able to think and relax. jester had no idea that this would be the location for a cerberus corp mission. between one step and the next, jester is dead on the steps of the met, the extra ordinary that practically ran through her in pursuit of a villain not even turning back to check what happened. very sad very terrible. she's revived by a do-gooder that saw the entire thing happen, shocked back to life. when asked about her experience, she details that it felt like she was in a prism, her reflection everywhere she looked, though each was a little different, showing jester on a separate path that she could have taken at any time in her life.

power… 

self-replication / duplication. jester can duplicate herself into tangible perfect replicates. the limit she's found is 10 replicants. each is able of individual thought and action, though she had to have given them the initial thought as she created the duplicate. it is impossible to tell which jester is the real one, and it makes her pranks nearly deadly. she discovered her power when she was wishing she could bake, paint, and relax / watch tv at the same time and she immediately split into three.

drawbacks / vulnerabilities… 

as of right now, the duplicates need to be within 100 ft & she needs to have them in her line of sight. the more she has up, the closer they have to stay. as soon as a duplicate is attacked, it disappears as if it was an illusion. a hit against a duplicate does not effect her, but a hit against her may cause her to lose concentration and therefore all duplicates will disappear as well. ever since her death a few months back, her thoughts have been racing and more scrambled, and being split into duplicates helps her manage things.

(if applicable)  cerberus corp… 

jester auditioned for cerberus on a whim when her friend said that her power could probably be used to do some good. she has no desire to 'do good' but at least working at cerberus gives her something to occupy her time. no one thinks that she'll be able to make it past level iii considering her lack of motivation, but if she puts in the work, it's certainly possible. jester's recent mission was successful, just barely, and is under investigation because she ran off from the higher level agents that were on the mission with her. she's here for a good time not a long time tbh.

codename… 

jester is a childhood nickname that she chose as her codename on the basis that 1) its cute and 2) fits her ability & personality. cerberus does not give a damn...

003.  HEADCANONS

will recruit people into a prank war without warning

(un)intentionally sabotages missions

dad is a politician and mom is a famous actress. neither have had contact with her since her birth as she was raised by a rotating team of nannies. her mom and dad's relationship was an affair on both sides and it would be a scandal if it were to come out, even forty years later.

a very good liar

does have depth despite the front she puts on!

her art is reflective of people she meets, though it has become increasingly more abstract and chaotic since her death and resurrection.

always smiling in a sort of sinister way like she knows too much

does not train. will duplicate herself and have the duplicate train in her place.

004. CONNECTIONS

(on main wc page) a housemate that doesnt have to pay rent but she asks them to pay anyway just to see if they will. she goes through roommates like theyre nothing, usually because they end up leaving her, fed up with her antics.

(on main wc page) the eo that was responsible for her death

ex-relationships.. yes plural. she falls in love easily but people seem to fall out of it much faster

muse / inspiration for her art

a level i or ii agent that is assigned to help her train and hates every second of it

???? idk. profit.

let her get into prank wars with your muse thanks.

[nochd]

Naturism as social justice

Part 1: Gender

"However we dress, wherever we go, Yes means yes, no means no."

If you take the "However we dress" part of that completely seriously, and follow it to its natural conclusion, you have the founding premise of naturism.

No amount of exposed skin constitutes a sexual invitation. That's what the rhyme means. But if it's not a sexual invitation, why does it carry legal and social penalties?

I know there's an instinctive reaction that says "Ewww, I don't want to see most people naked." I want you to have a think about why that's your response. I put it to you that it's because, at some level, you don't believe me about it not being a sexual invitation.

I do know that when I was first getting into naturism, the moment I properly accepted that the nudity really truly wasn't sexual was the moment the "Ewww" response vanished away like evaporating steam. Obviously it's unpleasant to receive sexual attention from someone you're not attracted to; but if it turns out it's not sexual, there's nothing left to feel "Ewww" about.

Now that I think about it -- there exist some men who loudly express their revulsion over various women's appearance, especially online. Could this be because, in these men's heads, existing in public while female constitutes a sexual invitation? And whenever they see a woman they're not attracted to, that makes them feel "Ewww"?

The application of this surmise to homophobia and transphobia I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Whenever you hear of a man overstepping a woman's boundaries, there always seems to be someone somewhere saying "Look what she was wearing -- she was asking for it." Society agrees that exposing some parts of our skin is "asking for it", because that's why those parts of our skin are forbidden. Once you've agreed to that, you're just haggling over where to draw the dotted line.

Part of the fallout is that people with breasts are required to keep them covered at all times, including on social media, culminating in the absurdity of breastfeeding becoming taboo.

I mean, we can keep on haggling for as long as we want, but I can't see this problem going away until we chuck out the entire concept of any body part being inherently a sexual signal.

Another social injustice that falls disproportionately on women is body judgement. Women are systematically valued more for their appearance than their competence; I believe we've made progress over recent decades, but the problem remains. A small fraction of women are held up as having the right kind of bodies, from which it follows that everyone else's must be the wrong kind of bodies. If we actually got to see each other's bodies, we'd see what nonsense this is.

Speaking of bodies society deems to be the wrong kind, consider the issues faced by trans and nonbinary people, and in particular the public toilet issue.

The main justification for keeping trans people out of public toilets for their true gender is apparently that other toilet users might see the kind of body parts they are not allowed to see. If there were no body parts we were not allowed to see, the problem would disappear, and the transphobes would have to find something else to exclude trans people from instead. Which, sadly, probably wouldn't take them long.

Naturism stands against all forms of body judgement. There are no wrong bodies.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 →

[tyrantisterror]

As has become tradition for the release of my novels, it’s time to do a trivia thread for Wizard School Mysteries Book 2: Tournament of Death (available now at amazon.com!).  That’s right, I’m going to make a long, self-indulgent post about all the nerd shit I did while writing this book, for you to gawk at in abject horror. 

(Shit, did I not do one of these for No Sympathies?  I should correct that, I packed so many references to classic literature in that bad boy.  But that’s for another time!) 

For now, let’s talk about wizards, tournaments, and the long term side effects of being a child of the 90′s anime boom.  Oh, and there will be spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book yet... probably don’t read this until you do?  I mean it’s a mystery story, I assume you want to go in blind.

- Wizard School Mysteries as a whole is intentionally patterned after anime and JRPGs.  I’ve touched on this before when talking about the series, but when thinking about trivia for this second book it becomes pretty clear that elaborating on this point is warranted.  I mean, it’s pretty obvious if you know some of the more prominent influences within that sphere - the a great deal of the series’s overall structure is ripped off from patterned off of the Persona series, for example, particularly the tarot motif (although that’s not exclusive to Persona - a LOT of anime and JRPGs use tarot motifs, from the prominent use of them in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure - which in turn heavily inspired Persona - to the subtle application of it in Fire Emblem Three Houses).  You’ve got Serena Takeuchi, whose name is a big homage to Sailor Moon and whose use of a wand and glittery crystal magic should at least visually call back to the Magical Girl trope, I could go on but we should narrow our focus a bit.  The two big anime/JRPG elements of this particular book are as follows: The Tournament Arc, and The Filler Episode.  Got it?  Ok, let’s expand on that in the next two bullet points.

- I wrote a lot in the forward about why I chose a tournament arc as the basic structure of this second book so I’m going to try to keep my thoughts on it here brief.  Tournament arcs rule!  Obviously they exist outside of anime, and indeed predate the existence of animation itself, but the structure of the tournament arc here is very heavily based on the ones that appeared in shows like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, which, incidentally, were part of the 90′s/early 2000′s anime boom that I grew up in.  The basic setup of heroes fighting a bunch of really weird opponents one after another, each more dangerous and bizarre than the last, while simultaneously trying to unravel a villain’s crazy scheme (ok that didn’t happen in Pokemon’s but it holds true for the other two) is just really fun and compelling, and I had fun trying to capture that magic while showing off the zany powers magic grants you in my fantasy setting.  The fight scenes should ideally make you feel like you just got home from school and turned on the TV to catch some weird but fun Japanese cartoon on Toonami.

- Now, Filler Episodes... again, it’s a term that extends to stuff outside of and predating anime, but I want to talk about this idea in the context of anime.  A lot of anime is adapted from manga, as you probably already know, and a there have been times where the anime adaptation of a manga runs out of a material to adapt.  So, while they wait for the manga to give them more of the “main” plot, they’d make episodes and even entire story lines to fill in the gap.  Hence, filler episodes.  Filler episodes get a bad rap because, by their nature, they can’t be too relevant to the plot - you can’t kill the big bad in a filler episode, because then you can’t adapt the material from the manga that hasn’t been written yet where the big bad is still alive.  A filler episode is, by its nature, expendable.

...that is, if you think the only important part of a story is the plot.

A good writer or writing team, however, can use a filler episode to their advantage. Because as important as plot is to a story, it’s only one core element.  Characters, setting, and theme are all just as important, and you can easily use a filler episode to expand on those elements in important and intriguing ways.  Like, for example, I spent this weekend watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time, and if you were focused solely on the main plot of Utena dueling people to protect Anthy, then you could cut, like, half of the episodes out and still have a functional story.  But some of those episodes are the best episodes!  While light on developing the main plot, they do so much to flesh out the characters, setting, and theme, and without those episodes the series would be so much less impactful.

And I feel a well-utilized filler episode can in fact strengthen your main plot.  A story that’s focused entirely on its main conflict may neglect to stop and flesh out its characters, and that’s a problem because to care about a conflict, you kind of need to care about the characters involved.  If the conflict threatens the world they live in, then you need to care about that setting too.  And if you really want that conflict to resonate with your audience, you need it to have well developed themes that make it matter beyond “the hero is fighting the bad guy!”

Now, of course, my book is, well, a book, a novel, and not a TV series, so there aren’t really “episodes” in the TV sense.  But there are chapters, and scenes, and subplots, and one of my goals with this series and this book in particular was to make sure there were the equivalent of filler episodes here, moments where the main plot paused just long enough for our characters to catch their breath, and for us to see who they are when they’re not dealing with some murder mystery bullshit.  Maybe in one of the next volumes I’ll figure out how to do a beach episode (at the moment I’m unsure of how to get over the hurdle that, in a vaguely medieval fantasy land, most people’s equivalent of a beach trip would be skinny dipping...)

- The first WSM book was focused on introducing our core eight meddling kids, which was a pretty big task in of itself, and as such the setting took a bit of a backseat.  I mean, it was still there, obviously, but it wasn’t the focus.  While the characters are still very much the focus of book 2 (as they are in all my writing - I’m a character-focused storyteller), I really wanted this one to give the setting more spotlight than the first.  Book 2, more so than book 1, is the proper introduction of our setting - of the nations of Midgaheim, of the staff of the AAAM, and indeed, of the nature of that school itself.

Like, in the first book we have four teachers, and as a result of all the stuff that book had to pack in, those teachers end up fitting a simplified sort of Goofus and Gallant dichotomy: Oomlowt’s our good teacher, Gernderf and Alys are different shades of awful, and Mewcosa starts out as bad but eventually makes a turn with some student help.  It’s the kind of approach most school stories take to their fictional teaching staff - one good teacher and a sea of dull to actively bad ones around them.

Now, if you know me and the fact that I’ve worked quite a bit in education, you should not be surprised to learn that I dislike this kind of reductive portrayal of teachers.  It really couldn’t be helped in book 1, but that was ok, because this is an eight book series, and with this second entry I wanted to complicate our teaching staff.  We get Juno Panopte, who is a good teacher with a very different style and approach than Oomlowt’s (enough that it briefly throws our heroes off when they first meet her).  We get Lacey Spidergrin, who only has one scene but is hopefully enough of a presence in it to establish her strange but kind personality.  We get bombastic Heka Tlancheb and acerbic Prospera Bubos, both of whom clearly hold some differing views but care deeply about their students, and we get a scene of (most of) the teaching staff hanging out together away from the students to show who these people are when they’re not teaching.  My aim is that by the end of this book, or barring that then at least by the end of the series, the teaching staff of the AAAM aren’t cookie cutter good and bad teacher stereotypes, but, well, people, you know?  There’s not a lot of fiction where teachers get to be people.

- The wizard students descending onto a nearby town and changing it utterly is an exaggeration of my own experience in college at Western Michigan University.  Kalamazoo, the city that WMU resides in, can be kind of cleanly divided into the parts that are a more or less normal city, and the parts that are a College Town Filled with College Kids.  Of course, college kids being college kids, which is to say, young adults who suddenly have the ability to go wherever the hell they want and do more or less whatever the hell they want with their time, there was nothing stopping you from wandering out of the college part of town into the non-college city parts, and I always found that an interesting experience.  And there were a LOT of businesses in both the college and non college parts of Kalamazoo that actively courted (or preyed on, if you want to be more cynical about it) student customers, which I again exaggerated for my own book.  The name of the town in WSM, Calampen, is even a play on Kalamazoo.  Kalam.  Zoo.  Zoo = place where you hold animals = pen.  Kalam Pen.  Calampen.  Clever?  No, not really, but it makes me smile.

- There are some nods to other stories I’ve worked on and/or have in the works in Calampen market scene.  Fans of Offbeat Melody might recognize a certain golden-haired curio seller, for example, and we have more than a few mentions of the dread wizard Vormadon, who you’ll all get to meet when I finish writing Maude and Mordi (it’s high on the docket, don’t worry!)

- Serena and James splitting off together serves two purposes: first, it lets Gretchen and Margot have goofy jealousy antics, which I think is fun.  Second, it makes up for a fact that Serena is the only member of the team who didn’t get a solo scene with James in book 1.  Poor girl was so left out!

- James Chaucer identifying with snakes is not only an homage to my own love for the scaly beasts AND a fun metaphor for coming out, but also a bit of shade for the Terf Queen’s opus, where the magical boy hates being associated with snakes because he’s a huge loser who hufflepuffs farts or whatever.

- All of the youths have different skills to bring to their detective enterprise, and I like to think Serena’s is her Columbo-esque ability to throw people off by posing a seemingly innocent question.  I watched the entire series of Columbo while writing this book, it had to bleed out somewhere.

- Let’s talk about some obscure Tarot shit!  Helseng refers to the villain of the previous book as “The Apostle,” and likewise refers to the villains of this book as “The Centurion” and “The Thunderbolt.”  Now, if you have a basic grasp of the major arcana, that may seem odd to you, because those aren’t among the twenty two arcana cards.  Except they actually are!  Sort of!  See, there have been a LOT of different tarot decks over the centuries, produced in different countries with different languages in different time periods, and as a result the total number of arcana, the order of the arcana, and yes, the very names of the arcana themselves, have varied a bit.  While initially I only mapped out twenty-one main characters to the major arcana of Tarot, as I researched into the history of the game I saw these variations and thought it would be interesting to try and make some of the other supporting characters fit them as well, and the first ones that came to mind were the series’ villains.

The Apostle is an alternate name for The Heirophant, which represents a patriarchal authority figure.  Oomlowt Schwaa is our heirophant proper, and showcases the benign elements of that card, taking on a sort of fatherly role with James and the youths as a whole.  The Summer Prince from book 1, by contrast, showcases its negative qualities, being conceited, condescending, and oppressive, with the power structure he both leads and represents making him a terrible force in the narrative as a result.

Our villains for this book at the Centurion, which is an alternate name for the Chariot, and the Thunderbolt, which is an alternate name for the Tower.  We’ll talk about them a bit more later in this trivia post, but for now I ask you to think about the heroic counterparts here - Margot is a heroic Chariot, and Polybeus is a heroic Tower.  God what a weird sentence that is.

- I also wanted there to be some supporting characters who are never directly involved with the plot but still had roles to play in our heroes life, because again, going off of that screed I wrote about filler episodes, the stakes can actually feel higher if you know there’s more to the hero’s life than just the core conflict.  So I made some supporting cast members based on alternate arcana names as well - Columbina and Godfrey, for example, are the Juggler and the Magus respectively, which are both alternate names for the Magician.  The Magician is a friend and ally to the fool and likes to get into schemes and plans, many of which are too clever by half, and that’s very much what Columbina and Godfrey are, just to a lesser degree than our main Magician, Ivan Muromets.   I like to imagine that in an alternate timeline either one of them might have been the Magician to the Fool in the story.  But maybe that’s too self indulgent a thought even for this trivia post.

- If the joke of Lord Dhenregirr’s name was too subtle in book one, I’m pretty sure chapter four of book two hits it with a big hammer so it’s impossible to miss.  Not-coincidentally, this chapter is all about introducing red herrings - not just Lord Dhenregirr himself, but the many, MANY characters involved in the tournament, from the contestants to bystanders like Prospera Bubos and Grammy Crumblebuttons.  Which is the real villain and which are the red herrings?  Well, hopefully you heeded my advice and didn’t read this until after reading the book, and thus already know the answer to that question.

- Heka Tlancheb’s speech gives us as close to a unifying creation myth for Midgaheim as you will get, given that there are multiple pantheons at play here.  It’s basically a nod to the idea of a prototypical monomyth, i.e. the theory that the original humans created a first mythology that evolved with them over time into the many we have today, possibly explaining several odd similarities between otherwise unrelated mythologies, like the prevalence of thunder gods, big floods, etc.  The idea that there was some force of chaos that the gods had to kill, dismember, and/or overthrow is a common one, especially in European mythologies, and Heka’s assertion that magic is its breath, and wizard in turn are chaotic by nature for using it, is a nod to the similarly common belief that magic is a dangerous and somewhat sacrilegious force.  The second half of her speech, meanwhile, is just an homage to the opening speech of Elden Ring.

- Heka Tlancheb herself is a joke at the expense of my own crush on Cate Blanchett, particularly when she plays gothy witch roles like Hela or Galadriel in that one scene where she makes Frodo shit his pants.

- We get to meet another member of the Claw Gang in this chapter!  If you don’t remember them, they were a group of recurring background extras in book one, and if you followed closely you could see the broad strokes of their own mini-adventure running parallel to that of our Meddlesome Youths.  I like the idea of stories where the adventure of the heroes is just one of many in the setting, with others clearly happening outside the book’s focus.  It makes things feel more full, and I feel that making it so the world doesn’t always revolve around your heroes actually makes it more impactful when the heroes make a stand for that world - because while they may only be a part of it, they care about the whole, you know?  Anyway, we’ve named two of the three Claw Gang members in the books so far, and we’ll name the final member in book 3.  They may not be important to the central conflict, but they’re important to my heart.

- Oh, speaking of obscure Tarot bullshit again - there’s a card game that’s considered a parody of Tarot called Minchiate, which took the major arcana and then added a whole bunch of extra bullshit to it somewhat haphazardly, including the four elements and the Western Zodiac.  So, when I set about making a cast of minor character students for WSM, I decided what the hell, let’s include the Zodiac arcana (along with all the minor arcana, i.e. the number and court cards).  Shere Statchel, Andreea Vacaputere, and The Great Nyaa, who appear in this book as contestants in the tournament, are three of those Zodiac characters, being the Scorpio, Taurus, and Leo respectively.  Not sure when the others will show up in the later books - they’re all part of a large pile of minor characters I draw from when I need a crowd to be filled, and there’s more than sixty of the fuckers so I can’t guarantee they’ll all have memorable roles, but at least these three got a little spotlight.

- This is Lord Dhenregirr’s only scene in this book, but I made it a juicy one to compensate.  Him referring to his skeletons as “children of the dragon’s teeth” is a reference to Jason and the Argonauts - not just the myth, mind you, but specifically the Ray Harryhausen movie, which calls them “children of the hydra’s teeth” verbatim.  The fact that they’re skeletons rather than flesh and blood men is another sign this is an homage to the Harryhausen take (in Midgaheim canon, you can use this spell to make either flesh and blood humans or animate skeletons, and Dhenregirr chooses to do the later purely because he’s goth and likes the idea of having skeleton henchmen).

- Structure-wise, I wanted the fight with Dhenregirr to not only be fun, but to refute some of the things other characters have claimed about magic.  Earlier in this chapter Miguel Esmerejon chides Ivan for reciting magic words to cast spells, claiming that strong wizards don’t need to do that.  We’re also told that most wizards couldn’t make a homunculus in the arena because it would take too much time and power to pull off.  Yet here Dhenregirr both manages to pull off that very feat, and does so with a big long poetic chant no less!  And while he may have some personality quirks that soften the threat he poses, the fact is that Dhenregirr is a very skilled and deadly wizard when he has his head in the game.  In this chapter we get to see a glimpse of Dhenregirr’s other purpose in the narrative, beyond being a red herring joke villain: he’s the counterpoint to the dean’s philosophy of education, right down to being the one who (possibly accidentally, possibly on purpose) encourages James to try all four elements of magic where Gernderf had tried to make him stick with one.  Gernderf and Dhenregirr aren’t just hated rivals, you see - they’re foils.

- This is also where Dhenregirr, like Polybeus before him, takes a radically different direction than the Henry Pansley Herbie Porber Harry Potter character he’s a loose analogue of.  Harry and Voldemort begin the narrative hating each other and just increase in that hatred as the story goes along.  Here, James and Dhenregirr come to an understanding of sorts, and while they’re still on opposing sides, it’s clear their relationship from here on out isn’t going to be as clear cut as hero vs. villain anymore.

- I first thought up the specifics of Lord Dhenregirr’s fight scene while listening to Man on the Internet’s Lyrics for the Chaos King song from Deltarune.  Music is pretty important to my writing process, especially action scenes, and I always end up making soundtracks for my books to help with the writing and revision process.  In this case the song for this scene was so helpful that I gave it a little nod, having Lord Dhenregirr paraphrase its rawest line: “You lost before you picked this fight.”

- Gyrion Clodson, the first victim (though luckily for him, not in a lethal sense) of the villain plot in this book, gets his first name from two different iconic fantasy works.  The bulk of his name comes from Tyrion, the (human) dwarf character from A Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones.  Swapping out one letter of that name to make a new one is itself taken from the naming conventions of the (nonhuman) dwarves in Tolkien’s The Hobbit - you know, Gloin and Moin, Kili and Fili, Dwalin and Balin, etc.  There’s no deeper meaning intended here, I just thought it was slightly amusing.  I should probably note here that the equivalent of fantasy nonhuman dwarves in my setting are called gnomes specifically to avoid confusion with real life humans with dwarfism - in a similar vein, giants are uniformly called ogres so I can avoid confusing them with, like, the adjective for things that are big.

- Chapter Five’s title is “The Sundown’s Shine” for a couple of reasons.  First, a good chunk of it takes place in the afternoon, and it’s a breather chapter - sundown is often when we stop working and catch our breaths.  Second and more importantly though, it’s when we introduce Geoffrey Travers, who, in addition to being our Moon Arcana character, is something of an extended reference.  See, Wizard School Mysteries is built in part by mixing aspects of college life with high fantasy, and so one of the questions I asked myself when planning it was “What would your average high fantasy uber wizard who’s seen the shape of the universe and has knowledge beyond comprehension be like when he was a college student?”  And, perhaps because of the popularity of this movie among college kids, at least in my day, my answer ended up being: The Dude from The Big Lebowski, but in his twenties.  So that was my baseline for Geoffrey Travers: he’s The Dude, as a college kid, and also a wizard.  Even his name is a play on it - Geoffrey is the dude’s real name, but also, Geoff = Jeff, Travers = Bridges, Jeff Bridges is the actor who played The Dude, you see what I did there?  And one of the iconic songs from The Big Lebowski is “I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” which contains the lyrics “I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in...”  Eh?  Eh?  See what I did there?

- Extended Big Lebowski reference aside, Geoffrey plays a vital role of being a peer who opens our heroes’ minds to new ideas.  Professors do a lot of teachin in college, don’t get me wrong, but some of the most valuable lessons I got during my college years came from the older kids I met there, who had been what I was going through just a few years prior and kindly decided to give some advice and guidance of their own accord on how to deal with, like, just life stuff in general.  Which, again, goes with the idea of “what is the college equivalent of the next level wizard who has seen things you’ve never dreamt of” - it’s the older student who knows how to be a functional and independent adult who gets what they need.

- The game the gargoyles, mudmen, and scarecrow are playing isn’t D&D.  It’s Pathfinder, first edition, invented by the great wizard Pie-zo.  I included this scene both as a gag and to show that the homunculi of the AAAM aren’t mindless automatons, but rather sapient beings that most wizards treat like mindless automatons because they don’t understand the full scope of what they’ve done in making them.  It’s not a big plot point in this book, but it will be later!

- We get a glimpse of Gretchen’s life outside the youths here, namely her rivalry with a fellow nerd, Joan Tatou.  Joan is a bit of an in-joke, as she’s an amalgamation of some ideas that I initially wrote down in my series outline only to reject.  As I said before, Margot’s name was originally going to be Joan, both as a reference to Joan of Arc and because of my own fondness for the name, but I changed it when I realized people might see it as a reference to the Terf Queen.  I also initially planned for the character who would become Gretchen to be Frankish and for the one who would become Margot to be either Ruslovakian or Germanorean, but it seemed a bit too stereotypical for the bookish girl to be from the fantasy equivalent of France and the big buff girl to be from a land of hard consonants - I like the idea of big, intimidating Margot having a soft voice with gentle inflections, while bookish Gretchen has all these fierce harsh consonants when she speaks.  So Joan is proto-Gretchen with proto-Margot’s name, which might be why she and Gretchen don’t get on so much - Gretchen stole her part!

- The book Gretchen and Joan fell out over, the Nosfero Ex Mortis, is a combination of some of the less-well-known alternate names for the malevolent grimmoire in The Evil Dead series, which you probably know best as the Necronomicon, in part because that’s what it’s called in the third film, Army of Darkness.  Army of Darkness, of course, was the Evil Dead movie that takes place in the middle ages, and involves (among other things) a kingdom led by Henry the Red, and a big fight against Kandarian demons.  So in other words, Joan and Gretchen’s feud is over whether or not the events of Army of Darkness are canon in Midgaheim.  Listen, I had an Army of Darkness poster in my dorm room and Bruce Campbell was one of the big reasons I chose to attend WMU and make short horror films with my friends during summer vacation in college, I had to pay the Evil Dead series homage in my book series about college.

- The Sanguine Dormitory is the perpetually trashed party dorm, because if you know anything about the four humors, that’s very much what you’d expect from a place with a lot of people who have sanguine temperaments.

- Ok, another stupid joke for you.  So, in tv shows and movies that take place in colleges, it’s common for the dorm rooms to be, like, LUDICROUSLY huge, which anyone who’s attended a college knows is fucking ridiculous because real life dorm rooms never get much bigger than a walk-in closet.  There’s a reason for this: shooting scenes in a room the size of a walk in closet is a pain in the ass, and if you’re setting your entire story in a college, you kinda need to have those little quiet drama scenes in a location that, you know, isn’t comically cramped and shitty.  So in WSM, our heroes start off with realistic cramped shitty dorm rooms, but then, through the power of physics defying magic that makes dreams come true, manage to get a spacious cool dorm room like those that appear in 90% of media set in a college.  Because that’s the only way you’d ever get a dorm room that big.

- Chivalric ballads are the equivalent of trashy romance novels and soap operas in WSM - and, also, their equivalent in the real middle ages.  The ones Margot lists in chapter 6 are all made up by me, but the different versions of her favorite ballad (and her staunch favoritism of one version over the other based on how the characters were interpreted) is loosely inspired by the way Arthuriana is composed of different authors who clearly have WILDLY different takes on certain characters and deeply despise the takes that came before theirs.

- Margot’s opponent in this chapter, Sarkani Charmil, has a few references mixed into her.  Her first name is derived from a dragon in Slavic mythology, Sarkany, which, combined with her status as the heir to a tyrannical monarchy that rules a kingdom called Kastelvania (or, if you prefer, Castlevania) makes her a loose homage to, who else, Vlad “Tepes” Dracula, with her distinctive red armor drawing on the iconic red armor worn by Count Dracula in the beautiful-yet-terribly-written Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula movie.  Her last name, Charmil, is a double reference, with Char being the red-clad charismatic antagonist from the original Gundam, while Carmil is a shortened version of Carmilla, the most famous female vampire in literature.  Sarkani Charmil, child of dragons, heir to a warlord’s kingdom, possible vampire?  Only time and the remaining six books will tell.

- Hey, guess what time it is?  It’s Harry Potter rebuttal time!  Ok, so, Harry Potter had a tournament arc of sorts too, namely the fourth book, Goblet of Fire.  And the structure of the Harry Potter series is that everything has to revolve around, well, Harry Potter.  So obviously Harry has to win the tournament, because otherwise this story wouldn’t revolve around him, right?  That’s not necessarily a flaw - I mean, there’s tradeoffs here, namely how the tension of “will Harry win?” that the book tries to build falls flat if you think about the structure of things for more than five seconds, but in return for that you have the narrative satisfaction provided by things being focused.

But there’s no reason that tradeoff can’t work the other way, right?  Till this chapter in the book, I’ve tried to set you up to think we’re following that same pattern.  James Chaucer is our lead character, our first boy, our protagonist.  Obviously he’s going to make it to the final round.  Obviously he can’t lose his fight, especially not in the second round.  He’s the main guy!

Then he does, because this isn’t Harry Potter.  This is not a story that revolves around one character.  This is the story of the Meddlesome Youths, and while James may be their leader, he’s not the only one that matters, and that means he can lose.  And if he, the main guy, can lose, then doesn’t that mean any of our heroes could lose?  Yes, we lose some of the focus that the more famous wizard school story has, and with it I risk losing the narrative satisfaction that simpler, more straight-forward structure provides - but the tradeoff is that we have a bit more uncertainty, and uncertainty can make for a very fun mystery.

- Speaking of Goblet of Fire, remember how Cedric Diggory was a big bland nonentity of a character whose death was more or less an afterthought once that book was over.  A plot device more than a character, really.  Gabriev Zelgad is my attempt to... well, not do that.  Again, don’t mistake this for a criticism.  Murder mysteries don’t need to flesh out their victims to be effective.  A murder mystery victim’s primary job is to establish and/or raise the stakes of the conflict while also providing both clues and questions for the detective figure to notice.  If they manage that without having a personality to speak of, the mystery is still functional, and you can compensate with different elements of your story.

But, that said, there is a benefit to giving at least one of your murder mystery victims some sympathy.  I mean, fairly obviously, right?  The emotional impact of murder and the threat it presents is going to feel far more stark if we actually give a shit about the people who die.  You want an emotionally invested audience, and making us care about the victim is a way to get it.

It just also means that you have to juggle elements of your victim character that don’t have to do with their plot-specific role.  They have to have dimensions that don’t serve their bare minimum narrative role.  You need to be willing to, you know, take a narrative diversion, which is risky.  Some people hate “filler,” after all.  But I wanted to take that risk.  I wanted Gabriev’s death to hurt, and I didn’t want him to be an afterthought.  For Polybeus at least, his death has weight, and it’s going to keep having weight well after he’s gone.

- Gabriev’s chivalric code is paraphrased from the chivalric code in Dragonheart.  “It was a good [story]!  Had a dragon in it.”  Dragonheart was one of the first fantasy movies I ever saw and one of the things that cemented my love of this genre, and also that code is fucking badass.

- Gabriev comforting Polybeus by showing him a different form of heroism by way of the medieval concept of chivalry is loosely based on my own experience of reading medieval chivalric ballads and finding them to be very different than the modern masculine heroes I grew up with, and specifically different in ways that resonated with me.  For all the violence of medieval tales, chivalric heroes spend a great deal of time crying, pining after pretty women, and talking about their feelings with their friends in great and vulnerable detail, which is a far cry from the stoic murder men society told me to view as Peak Masculinity when I was a kid.  This isn’t to say there’s nothing of value in those modern day masculine heroes, or for that matter in the Greco-Roman mythic heroes that are standing in for them in Polybeus’s story, but just that learning there are different forms of heroism and masculinity is, well, freeing.

- I wasn’t sure initially when we were going to properly meet the Justice Arcana, Maxeral the head gargoyle.  I had loose plans for him to step into the narrative proper in either book 3 or 4, but in the process of writing this one I realized there was a natural place for him to slip in.  Maxeral’s tricky because he’s designed to fill that “friend on the force” role you often get in detective stories, because that role is both narratively useful and a fun character dynamic to explore.  But I also wanted him to be, like, firmly not a cop, because I know my audience and I know myself, and we both think ACAB.  So I tried to make Maxeral an anti-cop in as many ways as possible, in that the limits to his authority are literally written into his brain, and the fact that he cannot view himself as above the people he protects, but rather as beneath them.  He, like all homunculi at the AAAM, is a servant, and while that might be an injustice in itself (we’ll explore it in a later book, don’t worry), the fact remains that Maxeral is incapable of lording his power over his charges.  He calls you sir, not the other way around, and as a protector he understands his role is that of a servant, not a master.  Maxeral also thinks the boundaries between him and his charges are just, and values people who work outside the scope of his power if they do so for good reasons.  So yeah, not a cop, hopefully.

- You might have noticed that Maxeral is unique among the gargoyles we’ve seen beyond his size and rank.  He’s far more serious, for one (in fact his dynamic with his underlings is patterned on the stoic and stuffy version of Ultra Magnus from the comic Transformers: More than Meets the Eye), a bit better at his job, and lives in very spartan quarters.  While you could claim the bare nature of his room is a result of him being a homunculi that was designed to have no interests beyond the purpose he was written with, remember how we saw gargoyles playing D&D earlier.  Is there more to homunculi than even Maxeral is aware of?  Probably not a question you considered since it’s not relevant to this particular book, but remember this is an eight book series...

- Ivan’s conversation with Polybeus builds on/responds to the one Gabriev had with Polybeus earlier, albeit unintentionally on Ivan’s part.  If Gabriev vocalized my own revelation at reading about chivalric heroes, then Ivan likewise illustrates what I learned about modern heroes when I looked at them with older eyes.  As a kid, the hero narratives sold to me seemed pretty unappealing - superheroes like Batman and Superman were fit, conventionally attractive jocks who beat up ugly out of shape guys who liked snakes and dressing in dark clothes.  There was more of my bullies in the heroes sold to me, and more of me in the villains they tormented.  But when I grew up and revisited those stories, and the comics they were based on for that matter, I realized there was more to them than the initial shallow impression I got as a kid.  As tormented by the normative masculine heroic ideal as I was as a kid, an adult me could see nuances and interpretations where I could fit.  It wasn’t necessarily the fault of the heroes of my time, but with the way those heroes had been sold to me, if that makes sense.

And I think the Greco-Roman mythic heroes are a good stand-in for that.  Shallow, simplified modern versions of their myths will reduce them to Good Heroes Who Slay Ugly Monsters, and that can feel alienating if you relate to the monsters more.  But if you explore their roots and see all the different versions of them, you can see they are complex, nuanced, and more than just a simple ideal.  Just because the stories now make them stoic manly men doesn’t mean that’s all they’ve ever been, or all they could be.  They can cry, they can love, they can feel, they can be human.  It just depends on how you want to look at them, and what version of them you want to see.  And sometimes the thing you need to appreciate a story you’ve heard a million times before is to see it through the eyes of someone else who’s fresh to it - sometimes a Polybeus needs an Ivan.

- As I said, I’m a character-focused storyteller.  The first thing I tried to hash out in outlining this series, before even figuring out how many books it would be, was what the personal arcs of our eight main kids would be.  I wanted them each to have a hook of their own outside the main conflict and we’d examine and resolve them throughout the eight books.  Some haven’t been fully exposed yet (either because I’m rethinking them or have decided they can just wait a bit), while others are already pretty prominent.

Margot’s was the first I figured out, and her duel with Alys here was the first scene I outlined in detail for this series.  So to say I REALLY wanted to get to this chapter is an understatement.  There are several other big moments I planned for this series that I’m excited to get to, and we got to one of them before this (James Chaucer tricking the Summer Prince into buying his dead name), but man, I am happy to have this moment out there for your perusal.

- When figuring out how the eight Meddlesome Youths differed as spellcasters, I thought about them partly in JRPG terms, and partly in anime archetypes.  When it came to Margot, the muscle of the group, I felt there was one style that fit better than most: she fights like a DBZ villain, to the point where her ultimate attack is basically Freeza’s Death Ball.  In final fantasy terms, she’s the Black Mage, i.e. the character who is almost exclusively limited to offensive magic, though after this battle she’s on the path to diversifying her magic portfolio.

- There’s a moment in this book and in the previous where the idea of teachers being taught by their students is brought up in a pithy way, but I’d like to note that this is actually a true phenomenon.  One of the best ways to learn something - that is, to reinforce your knowledge of it and deepen your understanding of it - is to teach it to someone else, and an interaction with students can illuminate things for teachers just as much as it can for their pupils.  Education is by its nature a communication process (the education philosopher John Dewey has whole books that explain this better than I could), and communication is by it’s nature a two-way street.  So while these moments function as little jokes - “the teachers need to be taught” - I also feel there’s a truth to it, and a lesson to learn, I guess.  Education’s a lot more complicated than fiction often makes it seem.

- Yes, our wizards kids hit the bar, like college kids are wont to do.  I tried to make them responsible about it without getting into after-school PSA territory, because I want this story to feel authentic (as much as a fantasy story filled with dragons and magic can) while not glamorizing dangerous behavior to any theoretical young people who might read this.  Did I succeed?  Who can say.

- Hey, another stupid joke!  So the story of Achilles and Patroclus is very clearly one of two men romantically loving each other, but over the centuries writers have tried to patch that out because of, well, homophobia, with many versions saying their affection was because they were cousins.  You know what other story that happened to?  Sailor Moon, albeit with two girls who loved each other rather than two guys.  So in Midgaheim’s version of history, the real historical figures of Achilles and Patroclus had their romance covered up in one version of their tale by a writer named Forr Kydd.  Four Kids, as you may know, dubbed various anime, and while they didn’t dub Sailor Moon, they were notorious for bowdlerizing the anime they dubbed to make it more child-friendly, and also to remove references to Japanese culture that Americans might not understand.  Hence we have Forr Kydd, the translator who tried to de-gay the story of Achilles and Patroclus.

- Charlotte expects to get drunk off caffeine because spiders in real life are intoxicated by it, spining really shitty webs when under the influence.  Poor girl had no reason to suspect her human body would react so differently.

- I tried to work in a MLM romance into ATOM volume 2, but it quickly became clear to me there wasn’t room for it with all the other stuff going on in my story.  So I decided that the first canon consummated romance of WSM would be MLM to compensate.  Rodrigo and Ivan’s romance is the first one to be hinted at in book 1, and they’re the first couple to get together as of book 2.

- While most of the ballads listed in this book are made up by me, Tam Lin is real, being one of the famous Childe Ballads, and a personal favorite of mine thanks to the awesome version of it the Fairport Convention did.

- Geoffrey Travers teaches James Chaucer about using magic for passive buffs, a thing I have to constantly remind myself to do when playing RPGs (left to my own devices, I just spam attacks).

- Chungo Maximo’s knack for turning into animals homages a number of ogre folk tales, but primarily Puss in Boots.

- If Margot is a black mage, then Serena is a blue mage - a less well known Final Fantasy class, which draws its power by absorbing magic from others and reflecting it back at them.  I mean, she’s not just that, she can attack on her own just fine, but I thought it’d be a fun way to customize her battle set, and play off the idea of crystals being able to magically story energy and channel it back to the user.

- Ivan’s fears about his sillylusions not being worthy in the eyes of a teacher who’s taught him a lot about realism echoes some of my own academic anxieties, as I had many great teachers who taught me about serious non-genre fiction texts, and were very supportive and encouraging of me as I analyzed them without knowing that what I really wanted to use their lessons for was to  get better at writing silly stories about fire-breathing dinosaurs and magical wizards.  Like Ivan, I accidentally had this side of me exposed to one of my respected mentors when I submitted a short story I had written to the campus’s english studies congress (not even of my own volition, I was encouraged to do so by a pretty older girl on campus I liked), got it in, and then found one of my professors in the audience.  He loved it, though, and asked me a lot of questions, and a couple years later, when I got an award from the English department for my five years of work, he presented it and talked not only about my achievements in class, but about how I had also written fiction on the side of it all.  It was a scary but ultimately gratifying experience.  Ivan’s fears about his sillylusions lacking value because of their non-realistic nature also mirrors anxieties I had about my art back then - I strived for realism for a while, but ultimately found stylization worked better for me, even if it meant my art would never be taken as seriously as stuff that’s, you know, more detailed or whatever.

- Clowns being a variety of half-demon sprang about from me wanting clowns to be a gothic horror monster on par with vampires or werewolves in my setting, and since we’ve got at least one clown-themed demon in this universe anyway, it seemed like a natural choice.

- Of course Gernderf ponders orbs.  He’s a wizard.

- Godfrey and Columbina filling the dean’s office with ballons is inspired by a similar prank my friends pulled on our RA during my freshman year of college.  We liked our RA, though, she was cool, and she took the prank in good humor.

- The fun thing about creating and publishing your own fiction is that you don’t have people above you who can slap your hands and tell you “No that’s stupid” when you want to do something silly like make a war with mimes a canon part of your in-universe lore.  A bad part of creating and publishing your own fiction is that there’s no one who can stop you from doing something stupid like making a war with mimes a canon part of your in-universe lore.

- Though he doesn’t know it, Eruz Tobael is a nephilim, i.e. a half-angel.  His appearance and spell of choice give you a hint to what kind of angel his mother was.  I like the idea that angels and demons are an outside-of-context problem in this setting - all these pagan wizards are running around with their pantheons of gods and wildernesses of magic monsters, and every now and then a Biblical beastie pops up to throw everything they know on its head.  We’ll get more of that in the next book.

- Aldonza Dulcinea was originally going to be one of our major arcana characters!  Originally Charlotte would have been the Hanged Man in her place, but in the planning stages one of my friends suggested I should do a parody of Voldemort to match the Dumbledore parody I made with Gernderf, and the more I thought about the idea the more I felt he had to be a major character, and, if that was the case, he’d have to be the Hanged Man.  Because who’s a better rival to The Judgement than the card that faced it and inexplicably survived?  That left Charlotte in need of an arcana, so Aldonza got the boot and Charlotte got the Star.  To make up for it, I establish Aldonza as the hero of her own story here - albeit one we’ll only ever see glimpses of.  Her name comes from the love interest of Don Quixote - Dulcinea is what Don Quixote calls her, while Aldonza is her actual name.

- Having Polybeus meet Gabriev’s mom to discuss his death SEVERAL chapters after it happened was another attempt on my part to avert the Cedric Diggory situation here.  He might not have had a big role, but it’s going to leave a mark - and now Polybeus has a helmet to forever remind him of the man he only knew for one of the most important moments in his life.

- So, our two villains!  Richard Rainsford, the Centurion, is named for King Richard III (specifically Shakespeare’s take on the nasty fucker) and Sanger Rainsford, the protagonist of The Most Dangerous Game.  Richard III (as written by Shakespeare) is a tormented and haunted man who has chosen to become a villain because of his daddy issues and anxieties about never living up to what his family expects of him, and excels at putting on a kind and friendly persona while plotting to stab people in the back.  Sanger Rainsford, meanwhile, is a great hunter who prides himself on bringing down dangerous prey who unexpectedly finds himself getting a taste of his own medicine.  In short, Richard is well named.  The Centurion is an alternate name for the Chariot, a card that represents moving forward and victory, among other things.  Richard shows how the desire to constantly win and excel can be poisonous.

Miguel is the Thunderbolt, an alternate name for the Tower.  The Tower has a LOT of negative connotations, representing chaos, destruction, and sudden & violent change that disrupts all around it, which is very much what Miguel has achieved by setting the sabotage plot in motion.

- Polybeus claiming that “This time, the disaster will be theirs!” is a little nod to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, where, after several different moments where the Phantom screwed things up for the opera, including creating a lethal accident, the heroes finally decided to set a trap for him in turn.  The way Raoul says the line is deliciously hammy, at least on the original London cast’s soundtrack, so it felt like a fun line to give Polybeus.

- Serena’s second costume transformation and powerup is a reference to a pretty common trope in Magical girl anime.  Often such powerups come from the hero realizing how much they’re loved and/or how much their friends love them, which is kinda true here to, albeit in a more mundane way, where it’s Margot’s friendly act of sharing her magic that gives Serena her well-needed boost.  I like the idea of the heroes winning because they’re friends while the villains lose because they’re squabbling selfish assholes.

- As of this book, Margot has said two of the four one-liners her friends offered her in book one.  I don’t know if she’ll ever say “magic, shmagic” or “abra-ca-fuck you.”  Probably not that last one, since I’m trying to avoid using direct profanity as much as possible with this series, but who knows.  (abra-ca-fuck you is, of course, a reference to The Adventure Zone).

- Richard declaring he is the wizard slayer is an homage of sorts to Admiral Zhao in ATLA, who similarly shouted “I AM ZHOU THE MOONSLAYER!” in the height of his villainous hubris, shortly before being taken down a peg.

-  If you’re horrified at Gernderf sucking our two villains into an amulet, good, run with that feeling as we go into the next six books please.

And that’s it for this trivia round!  I hope you enjoyed, and thank you for reading all my self indulgent waffle!

[hasmephydoneanythingwrong]

Fate Fanservant: Bruce Cipher (Caster), the Summer Zirkusdirektor

A lot of this is going to be me spitballing, so don't expect full paragraphs. At best, you'll get a handful of coherent ideas at a time.

Ascension Stages

All of them are male-presenting, but still drawn as "anime twinks."

Stage 1:

Obligatory swimsuit stage (Will I even include this in the end? Maybe he’ll be a welfare with the Stage 2 design.)

Just swim trunks, with visible top surgery scars (This is the only thing keeping me from going with the welfare idea.)

He knows he can technically look like whatever he wants, but he decided to add the scars anyway as a mark of pride.

Stage 2:

Now we're getting into the good stuff.

Lolita-style ringmaster outfit, directly ripped off from Koyanskaya of Darkness's second ascension

(Picrew source, this isn’t the final design)

Traits

Class: Caster

Alternate Classes: Avenger, Berserker, Foreigner

Region: North America

Alignment: Chaotic Summer

Deck: QAAAB

Parameters

Strength: E

Endurance: <to be decided>

Agility: <to be decided>

Mana: A++

Luck: B+++

Noble Phantasm: A+

Passive Skills

Right-Hand Clown (Rankless)

Apply immunity to Charm.

Increase range of Active Skills and Noble Phantasm to include all [Mephistopheles] allies.

Lowers own Attack against all [Mephistopheles] allies.

Existence Outside the Domain D

The boost from the Foreigner class has been removed.

Gain 2 critical stars every turn.

Increase your debuff resistance by 4%.

Territory Creation B+

Bruce's "territory" consists of a small circus tent and its props. As expected of Territory Creation, however, it does not account for the circus crew. Therefore, Bruce has taken to forming a "troupe" out of whoever he deems fit.

Increase your own Arts Card effectiveness by 9%.

Item Construction D+

Bruce's new ringmaster cane takes up most of the energy for this skill, but he can briefly create prank items and toy weapons that can be used only once.

Increase your own Debuff Success Rate by 5%.

Active Skills

Mystic Eyes of Story Perception A

Changing from Foreigner to Caster decreased this skill's ranking slightly.

Chance to inflict Skill Seal upon one Servant opponent

Chance to decrease NP Strength for one Servant opponent

Summer Euphoria EX

A combat-optimized manifestation of rejoice from the different body type granted by this Spirit Origin. This change, while Bruce accepts that it is temporary, causes his confidence to skyrocket. However, his enthusiasm creates an unintentional "firewall" against bodies similar to his usual one.

Grants self Invincibility that grants a chance to ignore each attack for turns (similar to "The Beauty of Trouble With Women"), but only against Female and Feminine-Looking enemies

Lock Command Cards for three turns, but only if a Brave Chain from Bruce Cipher (Caster) is possible.

Let Your Freak Flag Fly! (rank to be decided)

Apply Special Attack against Human enemies for all [Monstrous] allies. (Heroic Spirits like Babbage, Xiang Yu, etc.)

Apply Flat Damage Reduction against Human enemies for all [Monstrous] allies.

If applicable, remove Non-Hominidae trait from any [Monstrous] allies.

Noble Phantasm Ideas

"Grand finale" that increases or even flat-out doubles drops from battle

The entire "troupe" comes together, increasing the number of Heroic Spirits on your side of the battlefield by however many [Monstrous] sub-members you have.

Support Arts NP with high chance to inflict "Hysterics" debuff to all enemies (increases length of enemy's Charge bar by 1)

Lean into the anti-Human niche?

Voice Line Ideas

Battle Start: It's time for a night that you will never forget.

Skill: Hoo hoo! The curtain shall fall on your miserable little time here.

Bond Level 1 (Unlocks through increasing Bond Levels): Ehe. Ehehehehe! Have you lost your nerve, "Master?" …What's the matter, not a fan of callbacks?

Conversation 2 (Requires Mephistopheles [Caster] or Mephistopheles [Assassin]): "Ah, mein traunes... my verntrauenswürtiger... my, uh... mein teufel! Mein trusty teufel! It's good to see you! S-sorry... I definitely got the word wrong, didn't I?"

Conversation 3 (Requires Mephistopheles [Pretender], Stage 1-2): <to be decided>

Conversation 4 (Requires Mephistopheles [Pretender], Stage 3): Ah, my precious teufel. What's with the outfit? Verrry fancy! Don't tell me you picked that out to impress me, did you? Aheeheehee!

Conversation 5 (Requires Abigail Williams [Summer]): <to be decided>

Conversation 6 (Requires a [Monstrous] Servant, with some exceptions): <to be decided>

Conversation 7 (Requires Mysterious Heroine X, Mysterious Heroine XX, Okita Souji, Okita J. Souji, Hijikata, Saito Hajime, or Yamanami Keisuke): What are you, a cop? Piss off.

Conversation 12 (Requires the Snow Queen): Mm? Have I always had the capacity to be this... brutal? Do I... Do I even have the strength?

During an Event (???): Hoo-whee! Events sure are busy things! Hm? Master, what are you doing here!? There're places to go! People to see! Let's get this trainwreck a-rollin', ahaha!

[arcane-ish]

So I wanted to write this long rambly post about how even after a year the ideological conflict between Vander and Silco (respectively: what other options are offered up by characters around them) still sticks with me and feels very current to my life.

But the more I tried to formulate my thoughts (for the record: my position is something along the lines of "they are both in the wrong, the right choice is probably closer to Ekko's position") the more I ran into the issue of:

1.) This is a fictional universe, in the end, regardless of what seems plausible to me about "what's the right way to deal with a problem" doesn't really change that they can decide what works in their universe.

(a core question would probably be something like: should you build up infrastructure to make sure your goals are being progressed even if you die, since we already know from statements that there will probably be people taking advantage of his death)

2.) As a rule of thumb, within the larger League universe, making definite choices is kind of antithetical to the entire concept.

As a game League is eternally in flux. You are supposed to play the same conflict over and over again. All characters are supposed to be equally viable. Definitely saying that one character is better (whether physically or morally) than another goes against the entire gameplay and monetization concept of League.

In my opinion, this played a large role in making Arcane as appealing as it is. Every character feels vibrant and fleshed out, almost if they could be a main character => yes because in their game, everybody is equal. There are no side characters. Everybody is designed to be instantly appealing and tantalizing, everybody is designed to invite you to empathize with them and want to step into them.

League story also kind of specializes in putting forth interesting concepts and setting up interesting contrasts and conflicts and never resolving them.

Because most of the time, it's not supposed to be a story about good guys getting together and defeating evil. Most conflicts are intentionally unresolved.

And yes, sometimes stories are progressed (ie Miss Fortune replaces Gangplank as Pirate King, Viego attacks Runeterra and in banished), but the base conflicts (like Solari vs Lunari, Piltover vs Zaun, Avarosans vs. Winter's Claw) are intentionally left open. Because all sides are supposed to have something compelling about them.

The whole "everybody is a hero of their own story" holds especially true here. You are supposed to attach to these characters and few people like to think they are bad or like to play as jerks.

When it comes to morals, I would roughly divide the characters of League into the following main categories to offer players more ways to morally justify the character to themselves:

Traditional white hat usually traditionally good looking well meaning characters. Can be enjoyed if you just want to attach to a nice seeming character and don't want to question things (after all League doesn't force you to engage with its lore). Or if "they mean well" is good enough for you. (ie Garen, Ashe, Lux, Irelia, Zeri)

"Quirky" rogueish well meaning good guys (I would actually put Caitlyn in here as well as characters like Miss Fortune or Akshan) and angsty well meaning good guys (ie Yasuo, Riven)

"Well actually!" characters who seem evil, but are actually secretly good or morally superior or at least potentially morally justified if you want to buy into their lore (ie Swain, Sylas, Lissandra, Viktor)

Evil or jerk characters, but they are basically forces of nature so moral concepts feel like they aren't really applicable (ie Fiddlesticks, Evelynn, Asol, Pyke)

Characters who are jerks or evil, if you really don't mind being playing as a jerk (ie Gangplank, Singed, Thresh, Jhin)

(though I guess one could argue for a category of characters who just don't take morality as seriously but aren't like outright straightlaced kill and torture everybody, ie Draven)

Now, the most interesting category has been the "well, actually!" characters to me. Because to me:

(1) It speaks to people being drawn to evil aesthetics but still kind of want them to be morally right (2) IMO it's Riots way of inviting people to debate and engage with their lore. To foster engagement. Like their way of saying something controversial so people will fight in the youtube comments. (3) But while I'm prone to being cynical, I also think that it's their way to genuinely add complexity to their world and throw up interesting moral questions, even if they usually have no interest in resolving them.

[silversoulstardust]

Tag Game To Better Know You! Send this to people you'd like to know better!

tagged by @abitofboth (thank you for the tag mills🥺)

what book are you currently reading?

under the whispering door by by TJ Klune. the book is fine, I like reading TJ Klune’s work but it’s taking me forever to finish because of its heavy subjects. (death and afterlife, and it’s hard for me because of recent losses)

what do you usually wear?

depends on what I’m doing, I guess. currently staying up in bed past midnight so i’m in my comfy jammy and a yellow sweater <3 

how tall are you?

5 ft 2. AND OLY @olyollyoxenfree BEFORE YOU COME FOR ME I AM TALL FOR AN ASIAN LMAO 

what’s your star sign? do you share a birthday with a celebrity or historical event? 

sagittarius. I share birthday with Scarlet Johanson, Mark Ruffalo and Jamie-Lee Curtis!

do you go by your name or a nickname?

I go by Chromie online. it’s a nickname given by someone I talked to on tumblr in the past, and I like it so much it stuck with me even though we part ways not on so good terms. wherever she is I hope she’s doing fine <3 

did you grow up to become what you wanted to be as a child?  

yeah but I kinda wish I didn’t, honestly. working in healthcare is taxing both mentally and physically, and I have assholes for colleagues. (tho I think that’s applicable everywhere.)

what’s something you’re good at vs something you’re bad at?

good at: showing up and being there for people I care about

bad at: asking for help

if you draw/write, or create in any way, what's your favorite picture/favorite line/favorite etc. from something you created this year? 

This is from my Steddie time travel fix it AU, and I don’t know why but I really loved it.

Steve never really had anyone to split chores with before. His parents are almost never home. Robin does stay over from time to time, but she prefers ordering pizza, it’s her comfort food that’s almost always denied when she’s home, so she takes the chance to order it whenever she’s sleeping over at Steve’s place. Steve never thought having someone do the dishes for him as romantic, but here he is, staring at this metalhead in his kitchen, with glorious long hair and tattoos all over his skin wearing all black ensemble, wiping a spatula using dry cloth over the sink, occasionally smiling at Steve, a domestic bliss in the unlikeliest of time. Eddie caught him staring and when he asks why, there’s just a jumbled up emotions inside Steve that he can’t possibly put into words. So instead he turns the stove off and makes out with Eddie against the counter, thinking that this, this is what he’s been missing his entire life.

dogs or cats?

a cat person through and through. cant live with them, cant live without them, y’know? 

what's something you would like to create content for?

thinking of writing some ronance fics in the future! maybe loid/yor tooth rotting fluff and some nanami kento/haibara yu content because those two deserve better than their fate in the manga 

what’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

if you’ve been on my tumblr for the last six months, you’d notice I have been entirely consumed by steddie brainrot and stranger things lol

what's something you were excited about that turned out to be disappointing this year?

Dr Strange: multiverse of madness. wandavision series was so spectacular and I was giddy for it until months later they revealed that the writer was mike waldron. the bar of my expectation was so low it was basically on the floor and yet I was still disappointed 

what’s a hidden talent of yours? 

I can write with both hands. does that count??

what's something you wish to have at this moment? 

a long hug and a shoulder to cry on would be nice. cant exactly cry on cue but I think if someone hold me long enough I might start crying lol 

tagging @mygeekcorner @olyollyoxenfree @harrringtons @steviesmunson @froof-of-the-loof @princessstevemunson @cursedfoxteeth @iprefertheterminsane @gundamthey17 <3

[ajpandey1]

AEM aaCS aka Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service

As the industry standard for digital experience management, Adobe Experience Manager is now being improved upon. Finally, Adobe is transferring Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), its final on-premises product, to the cloud.

AEM aaCS is a modern, cloud-native application that accelerates the delivery of omnichannel application.

The AEM Cloud Service introduces the next generation of the AEM product line, moving away from versioned releases like AEM 6.4, AEM 6.5, etc. to a continuous release with less versioning called "AEM as a Cloud Service."

AEM Cloud Service adopts all benefits of modern cloud based services:

Availability

The ability for all services to be always on, ensuring that our clients do not suffer any downtime, is one of the major advantages of switching to AEM Cloud Service. In the past, there was a requirement to regularly halt the service for various maintenance operations, including updates, patches, upgrades, and certain standard maintenance activities, notably on the author side.

Scalability

The AEM Cloud Service's instances are all generated with the same default size. AEM Cloud Service is built on an orchestration engine (Kubernetes) that dynamically scales up and down in accordance with the demands of our clients without requiring their involvement. both horizontally and vertically. Based on, scaling can be done manually or automatically.

Updated Code Base

This might be the most beneficial and much anticipated function that AEM Cloud Service offers to consumers. With the AEM Cloud Service, Adobe will handle upgrading all instances to the most recent code base. No downtime will be experienced throughout the update process.

Self Evolving

Continually improving and learning from the projects our clients deploy, AEM Cloud Service. We regularly examine and validate content, code, and settings against best practices to help our clients understand how to accomplish their business objectives. AEM cloud solution components that include health checks enable them to self-heal.

AEM as a Cloud Service: Changes and Challenges

When you begin your work, you will notice a lot of changes in the aem cloud jar. Here are a few significant changes that might have an effect on how we now operate with aem:-

1)The significant exhibition bottleneck that the greater part of huge endeavor DAM clients are confronting is mass transferring of resource on creator example and afterward DAM Update work process debase execution of entire creator occurrence. To determine this AEM Cloud administration brings Resource Microservices for serverless resource handling controlled by Adobe I/O. Presently when creator transfers any resource it will go straightforwardly to cloud paired capacity then adobe I/O is set off which will deal with additional handling by utilizing versions and different properties that has been designed.

2)Due to Adobe's complete management of AEM cloud service, developers and operations personnel may not be able to directly access logs. As of right now, the only way I know of to request access, error, dispatcher, and other logs will be via a cloud manager download link.

3)The only way for AEM Leads to deploy is through cloud manager, which is subject to stringent CI/CD pipeline quality checks. At this point, you should concentrate on test-driven development with greater than 50% test coverage. Go to https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/experience-manager-cloud-manager/using/how-to-use/understand-your-test-results.html for additional information.

4)AEM as a cloud service does not currently support AEM screens or AEM Adaptive forms.

5)Continuous updates will be pushed to the cloud-based AEM Base line image to support version-less solutions. Consequently, any Asset UI console or libs granite customizations: Up until AEM 6.5, the internal node, which could be used as a workaround to meet customer requirements, is no longer possible because it will be replaced with each base line image update.

6)Local sonar cannot use the code quality rules that are available in cloud manager before pushing to git. which I believe will result in increased development time and git commits. Once the development code is pushed to the git repository and the build is started, cloud manager will run sonar checks and tell you what's wrong. As a precaution, I recommend that you do not have any problems with the default rules in your local environment and that you continue to update the rules whenever you encounter them while pushing the code to cloud git.

AEM Cloud Service Does Not Support These Features

1.AEM Sites Commerce add-on 2.Screens add-on 3.Networks add-on 4.AEM Structures 5.Admittance to Exemplary UI. 6.Page Editor is in Developer Mode. 7./apps or /libs are ready-only in dev/stage/prod environment – changes need to come in via CI/CD pipeline that builds the code from the GIT repo. 8.OSGI bundles and settings: the dev, stage, and production environments do not support the web console.

If you encounter any difficulties or observe any issue , please let me know. It will be useful for AEM people group.

[klaineownsmysoul]

G/Lee practically limped to thr finish line at end of S6.. they had a reduced no. Of eps coz of decreased viewers.. they had nonsensical and absolutely ridiculous SLs.. Dalton burning?! Dedicated eps for a spoilt brat who non one liked, seriously who looked at that character and Said oh he's so inspiring!... Why are there rumours of reboot swirling is beyond me..

I believe the industry term you are looking for with regards to glee's ratings towards the end is "dumpster fire." Oddly enough, that term also covers the storylines and plots those of us who were left had the distinct displeasure of enduring. "Clusterfuck" would also be applicable here. Everyone I knew IRL - including my bff who turned me onto the show in season 1 - had long since abandoned it, which is why I was pretty sure it was just like me and 3 other people watching by the end.

Season 5 was dropped from the usual 22/23 episodes down to 20 and season 6 was limited to 13 eps and held until mid-season: that doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence in the direction of the show, does it? If show quality is any measure, it was pretty clear that RIB was done with glee by that point. They were completely checked out and just wanted to get this over and done with so they could move onto other things. Between them not caring, RM's love affair with his golden girl LM (more on her later), and his immature vendetta against the best thing he accidentally did - Klaine - there was very little to enjoy over those final 13 eps. When you focus so heavily on a main character who is as unlikable, selfish, and just downright horrible as Rachel, shit gets old real fast. I'm also pretty sure they had some kind of competition going in the writers' room to see who could come up with the worst storylines that allowed them to continually push Klaine to the backburner. Every week it was some new bs to focus on that wasn't their core couple: an out of left field sort of "romance" between Rachel and Sam that ended just as fast as it began but made sure to suck up plenty of story and song time while it lasted, that awfully stupid plot with the screechy 11 year old that made no sense at all but was the focus of an entire show, Kurt getting to do exciting things like holding Rachel's purse for her and continuing his lot in her life as second fiddle and ego booster, and let's not forget adding in a whole bunch of new kids no one asked for as the show moved back to a place (Lima) that no one wanted to see again, and of course the piece de resistance: the terrible horrible no good very bad thing with Blaine and DK.

Anyhoo...to your question about why rumors of a reboot are swirling around now? Its fairly simple I think: another stop on the LM Redemption Tour and a trip back in time for RM to his biggest hit. 2 birds, one stone. LM's career and image have taken a massive hit over the last couple of years and so why not go back to the role that made her a household name and work with one of the few people who not only tolerated her awful behavior but seemed to actually reward her for it with whatever she wanted, no matter how much the overall product suffered. RM could use a hit and so why not reboot his biggest and most lucrative one? The problem is that people are a little more hip to things now: consider the massive backlash he got when RM posted that little rumination about a reboot a while back on Insta. It was so bad he ended up deleting the post so you would think he'd have learned from that but apparently not. If he's involved and if the show goes forward with something resembling the idea posted in the blind - focusing on a Rachel-like character - that would be the easiest and quickest no I've ever uttered. No second thoughts necessary. No hemming, no hawing. Just No. No No No.

How would that be any different from the show we watched the first time around? I've had enough of Rachel to last me 3 lifetimes so there's no effing way I'd want to start a new show that I know going in will center around someone as insufferable as her.

No Klaine = no me. Its a simple equation. I don't think C would ever want to work with RIB again so no C = no Kurt so I'm out. You cannot recast them because no one else will have the chemistry that C and D shared as Klaine which is what made them special. We all know there are people out there capable of giving Klaine well written and meaningful stories to tell but those people do not include the ones who created them in the first place. The idea of someone else getting praised and cheered online for giving Klaine the kinds of moments they deserved would be such a massive hit to the oversized ego of RM that I don't see it happening.

I truly don't know who would watch this except for the Rachel and LM stans who think both are perfect angels. This is a bad idea that doesn't need to happen. Its nothing more than a pathetic attempt to relive old glory and the irony of it all is that the person wanting to go back is the one responsible for the original show's own downfall.