#learn ordinal numbers

[udable]

Learn Ordinal Numbers 1 to 100: Fun & Easy Guide for Hindi and Urdu Speaker | Udable

[infoanalysishub]

Best Guide to Learning English Numbers for Beginners

Learn English numbers from 1 to billions with this complete guide. Includes pronunciation, grammar rules, real-life examples, FAQs, and fun activities. The Best English Numbers Learning Article: A Complete Guide for Beginners Best Guide to Learning English Numbers for Beginners 📝 Introduction Learning English numbers is a fundamental step for anyone beginning their English language journey.…

[k3n-dyll]

♱Sinful Deeds

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 ; 18+, wlw, fem!reader, lots of religious themes, internalized homophobia, religious guilt, sex in a church, cheating, blasphemy, reader's husband is an ass, dom!Abby, sub!reader, inexperienced!reader (with women), oral(r!receiving), fingering (r!receiving), spit, corruption (?)

𝐖𝐂 - 3k

𝐊𝐞𝐧'𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬 ☆ Read the content warnings, if it's not your thing just scroll ♡ . Also can't lie, I rushed the end a little I'm sorry I need to clear my drafts.

Priest!Abby who worked hard all her life to get where she is. Under her father's encouragement, she's made a good name for herself within a small community in this town. Despite setbacks, of course. To be ordained a priest, and to be a young woman is to be criticized - she'd known that from the beginning. Many people consider her a fraud. Consider her a disgrace amongst the church. Initially, her ordination damn near started a riot in front of the very chapel she preaches in.

That, she figured, would be the worst of it. The defamatory statements and the nasty rumors spread about her character and her morals; many families that had originally attended the church back when her father ran it either reluctantly accepted her or left the congregation entirely.

She had her days, of course. Where the rude comments and the disrespect nearly got to her. Nearly caused her to drop any semblance of professionalism within her body and let herself get angry. But with her trust in God and her strength of faith - all of the bitterly uttered words about her, the vitriol thrown her way - it slid right off of her like water off of a ducks feathered back.

If you were to ever ask her, she'd say that her real problems began with you. The day you had walked into the chapel in the midst of her sermon which was - ironically enough - pertaining to marriage, and sat down with your husband in the very back pew so as not to disturb anyone with your tardiness. It's almost shameful how vividly she remembers the dress you'd worn that day; a pretty, pale yellow number that stopped just above your ankles. The color combined so beautifully with your skin and brought out your eyes even from her place up front, the pleats of the modest dress flowing around your legs with each quiet step you'd taken. She'd been so tempted to take her speech elsewhere to get a better look at you. Tempted to stray from her stance behind the pulpit just to stare at you up close.

Temptation. The issue you had brought with your presence alone. Abby couldn't blame you, of course, she'd been dealing with these urges since she was a teenager and well...she's not perfect by any means. She's had her fair share of one-night stands and flings - a much looser version of herself that she normally keeps well hidden from the members of her church.

She'd been damn near giddy when she finally got the chance to speak to you once the service was over, only to find herself disappointed again at the way your husband seemed to interject himself into any conversation she attempted to start with you.

"Hello..." She said, a small smile plastered on her lips. Despite the way she had trained herself to speak to every person in the church with a similar, if not the same amount of intrigue and attention, her eyes never once left you as she spoke. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting either of you before?" You nodded, offering a polite smile back to her, but before you could even open your mouth to say something, your husband had piped up, introducing himself first, and then you as his wife.

Over time, Abby began to notice that it's a quite common behavior for your husband - the man often using your learned timidity as an opportunity to speak over you at every turn. And he often gets his way.

She'd seen it before. In the church, it's a tale as old as time; a man on a power trip marries a young woman who's likely been taught how to be a good and 'proper' wife from the moment she was born - quiet, submissive, a pretty doll that he can have on his arm but never actually have to listen to.

Priest!Abby who, after giving her sermons, preaching to others about self-control, and willing themselves against sin - finds herself with her hand stuffed down her boxers late at night in her bed, thick fingers curled deep into her pussy, a small, pink bullet pulsating in the other against her clit, touching herself to the thought of you. You're so sweet, and quiet, and delicate... and breakable. The image of you beneath her naked, writhing and panting underneath her touch is so clear in her mind, the blonde practically whimpering as she cums at the thought of your pretty body being so overwhelmed with pleasure that you shake and twitch at the lightest brush of her fingers.

She figured she'd never have you. As much as she craved it, as much as she wanted to trail her hands along your bare curves, Abby knew well in her mind that you would stay loyal and dedicated to the man you married. Still, the day you come to her alone with the intent to confess, excitement wells up in in her at the potential opportunity.

Saturday afternoons for Abby were generally the same, spending her time sitting on the other side of the partition in the small confession booth and listening to the perceived wrongdoings of those in her congregation. Most of the time she doesn't remember. She doesn't even put in the effort to recognize the voices of those she advises, as figuring out who committed what sin and who didn't isn't really what she's here for, but the moment she hears your voice - that soft, melodic tone of yours that she's fantasized about for weeks on end - she can't seem to help herself.

You aren't used to this kind of thing - it's never gotten this bad to the point where you feel you need to confess...but you can only run from your own mind so much. The silence is deafening as you settle yourself into the booth, and it only serves to make you more nervous. You can hear the subtle sound of Abby's breathing, the rhythmic thumping of your own heart pumping. Shakily, you sign the cross over your body, nipping at the very tip of your thumbnail before you speak.

"Forgive me...for I have sinned" you murmur. "This...this is my first confession."

You speak a lot more than you had originally intended, spilling your guts to the woman on the other side of the screen, the somewhat private setting making it easier for you to let go of everything you'd been suppressing. Abby's almost shocked to hear about your struggles with your urges. Your desires to be with someone that isn't your husband. With someone that isn't even a man in the first place. Years of training herself is the only thing that stops her from showing her irritation at the way you deem these things deeply immoral as well as, selfishly, her elation at the idea that she may have a chance.

Abby is silent for a moment after you finish speaking, letting herself sit with her thoughts, trying and failing not to allow her own greedy desires consume her mind though unbeknownst to her, her quiet only causes the pit of dread in your stomach to swell. It's when she clears her throat that you tense up even more, preparing yourself to be scolded, or worse, kicked out. You've seen it happen before - people shunned and shamed for so much as thinking of the same sex in that way.

"You aren't in any trouble child, calm down." She says finally and you realize you've been tapping your nails rhythmically against the wooden wall. Though she can't see you, you nod and stop, transferring the little assault to your thigh.

Abby knows full well that she should just wrap this up. She should give you something to do - tell you to say a prayer, to beg Christ for mercy on your soul in hopes that these 'immoral' thoughts stop weighing on you, but Abby of all people knows that it doesn't work that way. Not with this.

Before Abby can stop herself, she's already asked you up to her office, shocked by the lack of resistance to her request. Closing the door behind her, she stands, eyeing your frame as you take a seat in front of her desk. She can practically see the anxiety seeping through your pores - the constant tapping at your leg, the shifting in your spot. Without much thought, she walks over and places a hand on your shoulder, squeezing gently to calm you down.

"This isn't something I typically do." She starts. "I honestly probably shouldn't be doing this right now at all, but I do think we need to talk. No judgment, no barriers, okay?"

You nod but your body is still rigid, the warmth of her large palm on your shoulder is almost enough to send tingles through your body, guilt swarming in your gut at the unconscious reaction.

"I could just send you on your way. I could tell you to repent and beg and plead with God to make you better but..." Abby sighs, removing her hand from your shoulder to stand at her desk, leaning up against it to face you as she tries to think of ways to word what she wants to say. "...I don't want to lie to you."

"Lie to me?" You ask, dumbfounded, to which Abby just chuckles quietly. She knows what the Bible says is law to you, and to hear a priest refute that in any way is likely confusing.

"What I'm saying is: this isn't something that can be prayed away. No matter how badly you may want it to be, it simply isn't."

You shake your head at her words, finding it ridiculous. Or at least you want to, but deep down you know she's right. You've tried praying more than enough times to know that it will end in nothing changing. Still, you're stubborn.

"But my husband. I-I love him"

"Do you?"

"I-" The lie dies in the back of your throat. The fact that you can't bring yourself to answer confidently, or at all for that matter is all the confirmation Abby needs. A beat of silence passes before Abby says anything else, giving you time to sit in your lack of certainty before moving on.

"That's not to say I don't have a...solution in mind" As she speaks, she inches close until she's standing directly in front of you, forcing you to crane your neck to look up at her towering frame above your seated one. Your senses suddenly feel foggy, the scent of pine and musk filling your nose, your eyes unable to focus anywhere but on the stretched fabric outlining her biceps and torso. You could swear she wears a uniform that size just to show off. You blink a few times in a failed attempt to snap yourself out of it.

"I thought you said there was no way to fix it"

Abby's eyes darken, a soft chuckle escaping her at your words. "No. It can't be 'fixed', honey. Desires like that don't just go away... but they can be satiated. Temporarily at least." Gently, she catches your chin between her thumb and forefinger to keep you looking at her.

"I'm...I'm married, it wouldn't be right. I can't do that to him.." You start in half-hearted protest, the implication of her words clear. Your eyes shift to the side, though you make no move to pull away.

"He isn't a factor right now. My focus is you" The pad of her thumb lightly grazes against your lower lip. "Look, I won't push you. If that's not something you want to do, I understand, but really, how long do you think you can keep pretending, hm ? How long until you break?"

Your eyes flutter as she leans closer, the sensation of her warm breath on your skin sending shivers through your spine.

"I've been so...good at pretending..." Your voice is little more than a whisper, melting into her touch despite the alarms going off in your mind. You push it back. "I don't think I can do it anymore..."

"Oh, baby I know..."

It's only a split second between the words leaving her mouth and her lips pressing against yours, her strong palms cupping your cheeks. Though her hands are rough to the touch her hold on you is gentle. Reverent, even. Her fingers ghosting along your skin as if you're a precious jewel she's afraid to shatter. It's slow, yet overwhelming - her kisses tracing a path from your lips to your neck, from neck to collarbone. You feel her begin to massage your thighs, kneading them over the fabric of your dress before getting impatient and slipping them just underneath it.

You should be disgusted with yourself. Disgusted with her. With this. But the ungodly, hungry way at which she kisses and nips at your flesh only brings on an excitement within you that feels almost wild. Like something that had been leashed and caged within you was finally let free. You should pray. But instead of clasping together your hands begin to weave into Abby's hair, gripping and tugging at it to keep her close. The priestess whines at the sensation and you swear her knees buckle. That or her will is hanging by an invisible thread because she sinks to her knees in front of you.

"Let me taste you.." She breathes out, her gaze shifting from your face to your thighs, her hands still rubbing at them, slowly inching the skirt of your dress up further.

You think to hesitate but your body may as well be on autopilot, the mere thought of having her head between them enough to slowly pry your legs open without much coaxing. It'd be embarrassing if Abby didn't seem just as desperate as you.

Her hand slips between your thighs the second they're apart, a thick finger trailing along your slit just over your panties, the wet spot that's formed there amusing to her.

"See what I do to you?" She asks, a small, cocky smirk playing at her lips. "He could never get you like this, we both know it"

All you can do is give a pathetic nod and an even more pitiful whine as Abby teases you, her face inching closer until she's nosing your clothed clit, vivid blues unblinking as she takes in your reaction.

"Please, Abby..." You plea needily, voice cracking despite your attempts to sound stable.

She's merciful to you, wasting no time or words in pushing your panties to the side, parting her lips to allow her mouth to water freely, the coolness of her saliva sliding along your slit sending a jolt of electricity through your senses. Her fingers are first, the blonde collecting the slick mixture of spit and arousal to coat the two of the digits and carefully pushing them inside before she flicks her tongue teasingly against your clit.

Maybe you should feel guilt for this - unashamedly allowing a member of the clergy of all people, to defile you in such a way in a holy place. Throwing your head back, clasping your hands against the armrests of your seat, moaning and whining obnoxiously under the corruption of her tongue. Maybe you would feel guilty. If only it didn't feel so fucking good.

A loving deity would not deprive you of this feeling, at least that's how you justify it in your head as you cry out for more, eyes screwed shut as previously suppressed vulgarities spill past your lips.

"Abby, fuck, just like that - please!" Your cries are loud, tone little less than whorish in nature. "F-feels so fucking good, oh God"

Abby chuckles against you at that, but she doesn't speak. While the irony of you calling out for God amuses her somewhat, she can't tease. She can barely bring herself to pull away from you, her mouth and chin covered, glistening with your wetness, fingers ruthlessly sloshing in and out of your fluttering walls. You're like a drug to her in this moment. Something to be desired. Worshipped.

She finds her free hand stuffed down her slacks, her own core throbbing with need as she admires the pornographic image of your body writhing before her. The low vibrations that come from Abby's muffled moans only send you that much closer to the edge. Only that much closer to the release your body has practically been begging for and yet could never receive at the hands of your husband.

When your thighs clamp against her head, her jaw worn and slightly pained, she doesn't let up even a little bit, lapping at you with her tongue as if watching you unravel was critical to her existence. It just might be with how intently she stares up at you, not letting a drop of your cum escape her mouth as you finally let go, fingers still slipping in and out of you in languid motions. Abby's completely disregarded her own need in place of your own, her hand stilled in her boxers, something she only realizes when you begin to calm down.

"You didn't-" You start to question her, pushing golden strands away from her freckled face with your hand when you notice.

"It's okay, baby" She interrupts, her words coming as a pleased murmur. "This wasn't about me"

You shake your head a little, but before you can protest she's pulled you toward her, her pink puffed lips catching your own in a messy kiss, strings of saliva and cum breaking between your mouths with each breath taken. You let it happen for a while. It's oddly...comfortable. A sense of warmth calming your body in a way it hasn't in a long time before this.

As if on cue, a loud, grating tune breaks the illusion. The sound of a phone ringing. Your phone.

The 4 missed calls from your husband stare reality back into you both and utter dread sends that all too familiar chill through your bones once again.

Donations 4 Palestine - TLOU2 Masterlist

Taglist ; @half-of-a-gay, @porcelainmystery , @tohoko, @rkivedpages, @misfits-army-van,

@andersonfilms,

[aarkady]

the initial tense exchange between Benítez and Bellini in the book, as well as the scene in the script where Bellini can't place a finger on why he is reacting so strongly to the ordination in pectore, is something I wish the film had not cut off...

because what we are looking at here is not jealousy or "hate", I don't think so. Aldo Bellini has (valid) diplomatic concerns, but I also think he perceives that the previous Pope had something going on behind his back. his close friend and mentor had been machinating without telling him the whole story...and, as the plot thickens, we learn that he had been taking steps to ensure someone worthy would take the chalice, because he knew that Aldo wouldn't get enough support.

In Aldo's eyes, Benítez represents the realisation that, maybe, the Pope had never seen him as the number one pick for a successor; that's the idea that he's so immediately, instinctively opposed against.

and it also makes it all the more powerful that, after all his character development and acknowledgement of fault during the film, he would understand that Benítez, and not him or Lawrence, is the best pick for the future of the church at large. and it is all the more meaningful that Benítez would choose him as the Secretary of State by his side.

[psychotrenny]

Despite the distorted ideas that a number of "libertarian" leftists hold, Marxist-Leninists have nothing against local level, grassroots organisation. As both theory and practice, they tend to heavily favour them in fact. Unlike many those aforementioned "libertarian" types however, MLs do recognise the limitations of such organisation and don't see them as a panacea to all social ills. These groups generally do their best work when supported and co-ordinated by some sort of higher level centralised institution, creating a dialectical interplay that allows each form of organisation to maximise its strengths and cover its weaknesses.

An example of this relationship in practice can be seen with the "Inhabitants' Committees" that emerged in Tibet during the period of Democratic Reform following the failed reactionary uprisings of 1959. This is well illustrated by Anna Louise Strong's interview with members of an Inhabitants' Committee in the southern end of Lhasa, as described in her 1959 book When the Serfs Stood up in Tibet

It was Pintso who made it clear, with the members all nodding assent, that the "inhabitants' committee" was not "state power". It did not even expect to become "state power" but would remain an association of citizens for neighborhood improvement. As such it would help set up "state power" and assist it. This distinction seemed very clear to these Tibetans, though most of them were illiterate and had only a few weeks experience in politics. They already knew in experience that the four regular schools of Lhasa, three primary and one secondary, were run by "state power", but that the hunger for education was far beyond what the state could supply and so the "inhabitants' committees" had organized thirty-five special night-schools and courses for illiterates with two thousand pupils. Their own committee ran both a primary school for ninety pupils and an evening school for thirty-five adults. Through the "inhabitants' committee" the citizens were awakening to a democratic political life, and learning their relations to "state power". The 110,000 pounds of "relief grain" for the hungry unemployed of Lhasa and the two and a half million pounds of seed grain given on loan without interest to the peasants came from "state power" as emergency relief, but Purbu had personally organized some of its distribution. "State power" repaired the damages of battle to Potala, Jewel Park, Jokhang, Ramogia and other buildings in Lhasa and made the six miles of new road. But the "inhabitants' committees" were cleaning up their own neighborhoods, sweeping streets and yards with a vigor unknown before, and turning swamp land that bred disease into vegetable gardens that gave food to the poor. It was they who located homes for the homeless and brought the sixty-nine orphans to the primary school where "state power" then took charge of their maintenance. Already these relations were becoming clear.

[mixelation]

have some reborn au. tori's second chunin exams arc

i think i've posted some of this before, and some of it i..... don't think i have? the beginning i'm like 90% sure i posted, so don't just skip the whole post if it seems familiar.

there's a [...] where there's missing scenes. also i think the reason i never posted sections of this are i didn't like certain details or wanted a few scenes to be better. however i'm in a Posting Mood

xXx

Tori was having a problem. Several problems, actually. 

“I’m not even allowed to submit a proposal without some idiot chunin co-signing,” she complained, pacing back and forth in front of Deidara. He was seated on his bed, rubbing ointment into the pink patches of his feet and legs that his medic hadn’t quite healed all the way. 

Deidara had… set a field on fire, or something, on his mission. Whatever. Kushina-sensei had gently hinted at Tori that she should go over and make sure he didn’t need help cooking or cleaning, as while Konoha hospital could fix up most things, Deidara had still landed himself three weeks leave with foot injuries. 

Obviously, Deidara had yelled at her and set a clay flea off in her face for even hinting he might need help. Convincing him to let her ladle the big pot of her mediocre curry soup she’d lugged over into his own tupperware had been a whole ordeal filled with yelling and a couple minor explosions. But once she had that out of the way and a bunch of tupperwares in his fridge, she was taking his presence in town as an excuse to rant about her own problems in her new lab assignment.

“My new supervisor wants me on dish duty,” she went on, gesturing furiously with both hands. “I know every piece of research fuinjutsu better than anyone there, and I get dish duty? I wouldn’t mind cleaning my own dishes, or if everyone was cleaning dishes, but my ideas for projects just get ignored. Who cares that I’m a genin? I have more experience than any of the chunin in that lab.”

She’d complained to higher management and attempted to get reassigned, but it seemed she was being ignored. She was afraid she’d have to go through Kushina to get facetime with the Hokage. She didn’t want to play nepotism; she wanted to earn this herself. 

Deidara looked at her like she was stupid. 

“If it’s a rank problem,” he said, “then just go get promoted to chunin, yeah.”

Tori stared back at him, flummoxed. This idea hadn’t occurred to her. She was quite confident she could handle any task any chunin might encounter in a lab. She was reasonably certain she could perform better than some of the jounin in a lab, even, especially if she got to head her own projects in her own specialties. But… chunin were meant to lead missions. They had to be able to fight things, had to know some set number of jutsu, had to have all the rules and ordinances memorized. 

“Do you think I’m qualified?” Tori wondered out loud. 

She really only had a grab bag of jutsu under her belt, the product of only bothering to learn things that interested her. Her combat skills mostly revolved around hitting things with a stick, or irreversibly destroying flesh in an extremely slipshod way. It seemed like a vast overestimation that she might be qualified for a promotion. 

Deidara managed to look even more unimpressed with her. 

“What the hell do you think chunin are?” he asked. 

“Squadron leaders?” Tori tried. 

“Not the baby ones,” Deidara told her. “Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can make chunin. The only reason you’re not already promoted is that Iwa is filled with assholes, yeah.”

This seemed… wrong, somehow. She’d mostly just gotten as far as she did in the Iwa exam by relying on others. But, maybe, she could swing an internal promotion? 

Tori went and looked up the official minimum qualifications for chunin promotion. She did qualify, it seemed. Apparently you only needed the Academy three ninjutsu to make chunin, although more were recommended. And maybe she should review all these rules and internal structures she was supposed to know… 

The minimum mission requirement was also only one C-rank, which seemed too low. It also seemed like her various higher ranking missions maybe shouldn’t count. The Iwa fiasco had mostly just been her playing side-kick, up until she basically just lied through her teeth for a very stressful few hours. The Sasori fiasco wasn’t exactly a shining moment for her either. It all really depended on her being on a team with a bunch of monsters rather than her own talents, honestly. 

Oh well. It wouldn’t hurt to try, she supposed. It wasn’t like the Hokage’s office didn’t know exactly who she was and the details of her on-paper accomplishments. 

She filled out a form for promotion-by-mission and turned it in. Two days later she was called into the Hokage’s office. Minato was literally eating a sandwich while he talked to her, apparently on his lunch break. 

“Right,” Minato said, swallowing. He picked her application off a pile of papers and slid it across his desk to her. “I’m not approving this.”

“Okay,” Tori said, having expected as much. 

“Because I want you to go to the next exam,” he continued. “It’s in Kiri.”

“Oh,” Tori replied, surprised. So she’d have to prove her qualifications? Annoying. 

“I think you should aim to win the tournament,” Minato said through another mouthful of sandwich. “Make it flashy. It’ll be a good showing for Konoha.”

“Wait—” Tori started. “I’m not—”

“I’m going to okay you to reduce lab hours if you feel like you need training,” Minato continued, unperturbed by the madness he was spitting. He passed another, stamped form across the desk for her, brushing sandwich crumbs off of it. “You have six weeks. Kushina said she’d register you. Let me know if you need anything.”

He dismissed her. Tori wandered out of his office gripping her exemption paperwork in both hands. Less lab time was the opposite of what she wanted!

Deidara laughed at her when she reported what happened. There was, she noted, empty curry-stained tupperware in his sink. 

“I can’t win the tournament,” Tori bemoaned as he snickered. She was really more of a “promoted due to clever thinking” type of kunoichi. “Make it flashy? What is he thinking?”

“Probably that most genin actually just suck, yeah,” Deidara told her. “Do you think Kushina-sensei could convince him to let me go to the tournament?”

Apparently the idea of watching her fight was deeply funny to Deidara. He talked for a very long time about wanting to see her panic and melt a small child into goo in front of all their friends and family. Tori buried her face in her hands. 

“Oh, then you’d get a pay raise,” Deidara said, eyes suddenly brightening. “We could move somewhere better, yeah.”

“Deidaraaa,” she whined. 

xXx

The lab sink was already filled with dirty test tubes in the morning. The new chunin had mislabeled several samples the day before, and now the experiment was ruined, and Tori was in charge of clean-up. Tori listened to the chunin explain this, glaring at the sink. 

“So I’ll be setting it up again while you clean,” the chunin said. 

It wasn’t that Tori thought she’d never mislabel something. It was that she had enough experience to know to double-check, and if she managed to screw it up anyway, she’d clean up her own fuck-ups. 

Plus, everyone had ignored that she’d pointed out their control for this experiment made no sense. There was a huge risk that whatever results they got, if this chunin could get it to work at all, would be totally uninterpretable. 

“Actually, I have an exemption,” Tori told the chunin. “I just came in to say I’ll be out for a while.”

She fled the lab. Kushina’s office door was always open. 

“Oh!” Kushina said when Tori knocked. “You’re getting started on training earlier than I thought. Donut?”

She had a small box of donut holes she pushed at Tori. Kushina always had snacks on hand, because she liked bribing people into see her in person. 

“I talked it over with Minato,” Kushina said, twirling a pen in her fingers as she spoke. “Basically, we think it’d be a good PR move if you sort of showed off that Konoha is basically the best at fuuinjutsu.” 

“Okay,” Tori said. She could do that, at least… probably. 

“You weren’t really flashy with it in the Iwa tournament,” Kushina continued. “So we’ll have to come up with something. Maybe you can work on giving some speeches about how your jutsu works like some weirdos do. Oh, but don’t show off you can use nonhuman chakra; we don’t want that getting out until it has to.” Kushina frowned slightly. “And I guess you shouldn’t melt any other genin. That’d be bad for international relations.”

“Okay,” Tori repeated. That just severely limited her combat capabilities. “Um, Hokage-sama told me to… win the tournament?”

She waited for Kushina to say Minato was being ridiculous. Instead she beamed and said, “Well, of course! I want my team to be three-for-three, you know!”

Kushina then made her take the rest of the box of donuts and shooed her out of the office, with a promise they’d make a training schedule. 

“It’ll only be like twice a week,” Kushina said as Tori gathered up her bag. “Don’t want to distract you from the lab!”

“But,” Tori started. She needed… more than that, if she was even going to pass, let alone win a tournament. 

“Bye!” Kushina replied. 

Tori walked out of Hokage Tower feeling completely unsure of what to do. She could go… think about combat fuuinjutsu? Except, she’d moved most of her materials to her desk in R&D in a bid for separate work and personal time, and she did not want to go back there right now. 

Well, she knew Deidara was in town and not doing anything. She went and asked him if he wanted to train. 

Deidara took at her in deep distrust. “Who are you and what did you do with Tori?”

“Come on,” Tori whined. “I brought you donuts.”

Deidara was walking with a slight limp, but he did accept the rest of the donut holes and then shuffled out the door.

“We can use my grounds, yeah,” he said, still sounding suspicious that she wanted to train at all. 

Deidara had his own assigned training ground, out in a field away from anything else. It was filled with half-made sculptures covered in tarp that Tori had decorated in fuuinjutsu herself, to reduce the chance of random explosions. 

The field was also completely riddled with potholes, blown into the ground by Deidara’s various experiments. Deidara wasn’t exactly quick on his feet right now, but he did spend the rest of the morning attempting to shove Tori into various holes and then close them over her, making fun of her the entire time. 

So probably she was improving at… something. Getting out of death traps, maybe. 

Kushina, at least, did get back to her with a schedule fairly quickly. Kushina had blocked off some time in the afternoons on Mondays and Thursdays, and gone ahead and made training ground reservations. 

“Do you have anything you want to do?” Kushina asked while she tied her hair up in preparation for what Tori assumed was two hours of kicking Tori’s ass. 

“I mean, I can come up with something,” Tori said. Then she added slowly, “But I’m not sure it would be… flashy.”

“Nah, flashy isn’t really your style,” Kushina agreed. “I figured I’d just give you something from the ol’ vault.”

“‘The vault’?” Tori repeated. 

“An Uzushio technique,” Kushina clarified. 

“But isn’t that…” Tori started, and then was unsure how to finish her sentence. 

The Konoha school of fuuinjutsu— which was ultimately closest to what Tori had ended up teaching herself, since her main instructor at the very beginning of her convoluted journey was Orochimaru— was the most similar amongst shinobi villages to traditional Uzushio practices, due to generations of intellectual trade between Uzushio and various Fire Country shinobi clans, especially the Senju. 

Konoha fuuinjutsu and Uzushio fuuinjutsu weren’t synonymous though. A lot of Uzushio practices had been completely lost. Kushina had immigrated to Konoha with an entire trunk of scrolls, and one of her long term projects as Konoha’s head of fuuinjutsu was hunting down and recovering Uzushio techniques for preservation. These techniques were highly prized and rarely taught even to Konoha ninja, and Tori was barely even Konoha. 

“Isn’t that like… for your family?” Tori asked. 

Kushina frowned down at her. 

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re my student. Of course I’m teaching you my techniques.”

Kushina did proceed to kick Tori’s ass for the next two hours, except instead of just hitting things at her, Kushina threw in some “what do you think of THIS technique?” moves. The training ground ended up completely ripped to shreds. Afterwards, Kushina lined up a bunch of scrolls containing the techniques which had nearly just murdered Tori and went over the pros and cons. 

“I want something more subtle,” Tori said, clutching her bruised ribs, because what the fuck?

“No,” Kushina chided, “it has to be big and flashy, you know! We went over this!”

Tori was assigned a scroll and sent off to study it. 

xXx

Tori attempted to demonstrate it for Deidara. She dropped the sealing paper into a bucket of water. The water inside twisted into gentle swirls. 

“Uh huh,” Deidara said, unimpressed. He held out a hand and a clay water strider hopped onto the water’s surface. It zipped around, not the least bit disturbed by the slowly moving water. 

Tori frowned and made a hand sign, attempting to add more chakra to the seal. The water picked up slightly. The clay bug was still unperturbed. 

“A whirlpool, you said?” Deidara said, a mean smile pulling at the corners of his lips. 

“Shut up,” Tori replied. 

xXx

[...]

xXx

The problem with doing anything with Kushina was that there was a small but very real chance the Hokage would just be there. 

Tori had expected to speak to him. He was their ride to and from the beach. She assumed the necessity of his presence was why she was meeting Kushina at her house and not some more central location. Tori had also assumed that Minato’s presence would be temporary. 

Instead, Minato was in swim trunks and holding a large straw bag. Naruto was behind him, also in swim trunks, swinging a shovel around like some sort of weapon and making whooshing noises with his mouth. 

“Uh,” Tori said. 

“Don’t mind them,” Kushina replied. She was also dressed for the beach, in a mesh dress over a one piece. A pair of sunglasses sat on top of her head. She held a second straw bag in her hands. “They’ll just be hanging out.”

“But…” the protest died on Tori’s lips. It was an extreme act of favoritism for her to get to go to a beach for training for a day. It would be rude to complain that Minato and Naruto also wanted to hang out with Kushina. “Okay.”

The beach Minato teleported them to was on an island, out in the middle of nowhere off the southern coast of Fire Country. Unlike a lot of his Hiraishin markers, this one was not here as the result of a war mission, because this place had seen no fighting. 

The marker he took them to was in an old outpost building on the eastern most point of the island, left over from generations ago during the warring clans ers, when there was fear of an attack from the sea in this area. But since Konoha had unified all the ninja in Fire Country, all the in-fighting had halted. The only true risk of attack came from Water Country, and there were more and better placed outposts to monitor their waters. This building was abandoned and basically falling apart, and only good for providing shade. 

“Remember when your dad abandoned us here,” Kushina was saying to Naruto, tone humorous, “and it stormed, and we had to hide inside for hours?”

“Oooh yeah,” Naruto nodded knowingly, “because he had an ‘emergency meeting’ about something dumb, and he said he’d come right back, but then he didn’t.”

“The fruit vendors’ union was in a state of extreme duress,” Kushina said solemnly. 

“They’re never going to let me live that one down,” Minato said to Tori with a good humored smile. 

Kushina led them down the beach and around to the side of the island that faced the mainland. There were barely any waves on this side of the island, and the tide was far in enough that there was only a thin strip of white sand between the water and the tree line. Naruto kicked joyfully in the shallow water, running ahead and then running back. 

They hung their stuff in the trees, with Kushina pulling out a belt of scrolls and strapping it around her waist. 

“Is Mom going to do something cool?” Naruto said, vibrating in place. 

“We can watch,” Minato said, squatting next to him. “Here.”

Naruto climbed onto his back, giggling as he went. 

Oh god, I’m their entertainment, Tori thought. She did not, actually, want the Hokage to watch her embarrass herself. She didn’t even want a ten year old kid to watch her. 

(Maybe she especially didn’t want the ten year old kid watching her? Little kids could be mean and judgemental, and Minato had taught Obito. He’d definitely seen more embarrassing stuff than whatever Tori was about to fail at.)

They walked out over the water. It was shallow for a long while, and the water was clear enough that Tori could see all sorts of big rocks waiting to appear when the tide went out. When they reached deeper water, the water beneath them suddenly went dark. 

“Don’t like that,” Naruto said, squinting down at it. It was kind of spooky, Tori privately agreed. 

Kushina motioned for them to stop, then walked out further by herself. Then she turned to them and pulled a scroll from her belt. 

“Okay!” she called. “Get ready!”

She then bounded backwards, putting even more distance between them, and tossed the scroll out from herself. It unrolled at her feet and across the surface of the water, and then ink rapidly crawled out from it. Tori squinted at it. It looked like the lines of characters crawled out from the scroll and then sank into the water. 

There was maybe a thirty second delay between Kushina unrolling the scroll and then the water in front of them suddenly moving. It swept sideways, and then grew in velocity such that both Tori and Minato had to leap back to avoid being swept away. The giant whirlpool’s center dipped down into the water. If they’d started off closer to Kushina, Tori wasn’t sure she would have been able to escape being sucked in. If Tori hadn’t known exactly what was going to happen and not been warned, she probably wouldn’t have expected the attack to have this sort of range and not backed off quick enough. 

“Whoa!” Naruto cried. “Mom’s so cool!”

“Right?” Minato replied. 

Kushina skirted the edge of the whirlpool back to them.  

“Ta-da!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. She had to pitch her voice loud over the sound of the water. “These used to be all around Uzushio, to keep people out. And we used to use little ones to fish. But I don’t see why you couldn’t use it for that very flashy attack you want, Tori, right?”

Tori hadn’t actually wanted a flashy attack, but she didn’t point that out with the guy who ordered her to be flashy standing right there. 

“You’re going to use that in a fight?” Naruto asked, peering down at Tori from his perch on his father’s back. “I thought you were the lame one on your team.”

“Naruto,” Kushina scolded immediately. 

“That’s the plan,” Tori told Naruto, unperturbed. “I’m supposed to convince everyone I’m cool.”

“I thought you were just going to win the tournament,” Naruto said. “Everyone would think you’re cool if you won.”

Oh god, what has Kushina-sensei been saying about me? Tori wondered. Outloud, she said, “Sometimes the goal of a fight isn’t to win.”

“Really?” Naruto asked, wrinkling his nose like this was perplexing. He aimed his question at the back of Minato’s head rather than Tori. 

“She’s right,” Minato said. “You and I can talk about it more when we go make a sand castle.”

“She is going to win though, you know,” Kushina said, hands on hips. 

“Just keep in mind the goal is to show off fuuinjutsu,” Minato said, turning to Tori. “You want the audience to see what you’re doing. Don’t be sneaky.”

“What?” Tori said. She pointed at the whirlpool. “That took like half a minute to activate. How am I supposed to use it without being sneaky?”

“Thirty seconds is pretty fast for a genin,” Minato said. 

Tori chewed her lip, unsure how to answer. So he thought she’d be even slower? How did pointing that out help her?

“It would also be good for PR if you seemed…” Minato arranged Naruto on his back awkwardly. “I don’t know, peppy?”

“Peppy?” Kushina repeated with a barking laugh. 

“I don’t know, what makes people want to hire a teenaged girl?” Minato asked. 

“Coolness,” Naruto said immediately. 

“Oh, you think she should be cute?” Kushina said, frowning slightly. She tapped her chin. “Tori, you can be charming for a couple hours, right?”

“No?” Tori tried, voice cracking. Well, probably if she was playing off a specific person. But she had no idea how to charm a whole audience and then also do all this crazy combat stuff at the same time. 

“I’m sure you can manage,” Minato said, smiling at her with more confidence than his opinion deserved. “C’mon, Naruto, let’s go play.”

He left. Tori watched them, and when they were back at the beach, she asked:

“Did you give Deidara this many caveats?”

“Hm?” Kushina said. “No, of course not. You think Deidara could be anything but a screaming maniac in a fight? We just told him not to kill anyone and figured the explosions would make anyone want to hire him.”

Wow, Tori thought as Kushina turned to deactivate her whirlpool. I can’t believe marketability is this important to being a ninja. 

Tori spent the rest of the morning squatting on the water with scrolls in her lap, making seals for whirlpools while Kushina stood over her with arms crossed. The seal required a certain amount of chakra manipulation from the user, which wasn’t the way Tori liked to design her own seals, and her misunderstanding of this was what had been causing her problems. It took several tries to get an actual whirlpool. 

It was… very small, only the size of her palm. It was almost cute. 

“Well, it worked,” Tori deadpanned. “Could I catch fish in it?”

“Absolutely not,” Kushina said, but her tone was good-humored. “You definitely got the jutsu down though; good job. You just need to put in more chakra to make it bigger.”

“More chakra?” Tori asked, peering up at Kushina. She did a few calculations in her head. If the amount of chakra was proportional to the size of the whirlpool… “I’m not sure I even have enough chakra to make a whirlpool as big as yours.”

“Eh, you probably won’t even have that much water,” Kushina said dismissively. “Do it again, and we’ll see how big you can make it.”

Tori went back to the shore for lunch feeling deeply dissatisfied and weak-limbed from chakra loss. Naruto ran over to them the second Kushina’s foot hit the shore, Minato following him.

“It’s not a big deal,” Kushina said as she unpacked their food. “Lots of jutsu have high chakra costs, and shinobi deal with that everyday. Minato, how many times can you use rasengan in one fight?”

Presumably because the limitations of a Hokage’s signature jutsu were state secrets, Minato took a long chug of water instead of answering. 

“I don’t like it,” Tori muttered, accepting a bento box. “It doesn’t feel… safe. I’d rather use algae chakra or something.” 

“Okay, this isn’t going to be life or death, you know,” Kushina said. “This is a perfectly safe opportunity to get comfortable with risk assessment for when you can or should use a chakra-heavy technique or not.” 

“She’s right,” Minato agreed. “Our relations with Kiri are good. This isn’t going to be like your other exam. No one’s going to try and kill you.” 

I don’t think that’s true, Tori thought. People were always trying to kill her. It was part of her charm. 

“Are you worried about pushing through a fight low on chakra?” Kushina asked, settling down on a beach towel with her own lunch. Naruto plopped down next to her, immediately getting sand all over the towel. 

“No, I’m confident I can handle that,” Tori said. She didn’t favor chakra-heavy techniques, but she’d definitely fucked up a lot of jutsu experiments and spent way more chakra than she meant, and being in Oto ment sometimes you just had to do a task post losing all your chakra to an experiment. 

“Good,” Kushina said, nodding to herself. “Because I know you’ve been sparring with Deidara, and… well, I don’t think he or I are good for advice on that.”

Tori snorted. No, she didn’t think they would be. 

“Do ninja have to fight a lot with no chakra?” Naruto asked, sounding concerned. 

Minato, seated on his own towel rolled out next to them, poked Naruto’s leg with one foot. 

“You probably won’t have that problem,” Minato said. “Because you’re your mother’s son. But yes, it’s normal to have to do a mission low on chakra, or tired, or hungry.”

“That sounds like it sucks,” Naruto said, frowning. “Why would you assign a mission that sucks?”

Minato grinned back at him. “Well, I try really hard to make missions as easy as possible, but sometimes things go wrong.”

“Like a storm during the fruit vendor union’s meeting,” Kushina said brightly. 

“Er. Yes, like that…” 

Tori sat on her own towel across from them, eating in silence as she watched the family tease each other. It seemed wild they were all being this nonchalant while she was freaking out. Then again, why would they care about her, when they had their own little happy family to concern themselves with? 

The problem with practicing high-chakra techniques was that Tori had already spent so much chakra that not even resting and eating had recouped enough to make anything besides a tiny whirlpool. She was done with that training for the day, whether she wanted to be or not. 

“I guess Minato can take you home, if you want,” Kushina said. “Or you can stay. Have you ever been on a beach before, Tori?”

Tori hadn’t seen a beach in years. Tori did actually quite like the beach; she probably would have been overjoyed if she hadn’t come here already stressed and upset. She agreed to stay. 

The tide had gone out, leaving a wide stretch of wet sand that glinted in the sunlight, algae-covered boulders, and shallow tide pools. Tori watched the Namikaze-Uzumaki family walk out over it, led by Naruto’s screams of delight. 

Tori stripped off her kunoichi dress, down to her bathing suit, and kicked off her sandals. She’d been swimming in plenty of rivers and lakes, but she’d missed the sensation of sand between her toes. 

“Whoa!” Naruto cried. “Look at this guy!”

He held up a horseshoe crab. Tori jogged over to them, eager to look at it herself. 

“They have blue blood,” she told Naruto excitedly. He looked up at her curiously. “Because their blood cells use copper as an oxygen carrier instead of iron. Isn’t that cool?”

Naruto’s face of wonder at the idea of blue blood shifted to confusion. Tori wasn’t sure this kid had understood a single thing she’d told him, possibly ever. Kushina laughed at them. 

They spent the afternoon combing the tide pools for cool little creatures. Kushina knew the names for almost all of them, from the two different types of mudskippers they unearthed, to a bunch of different types of crabs, to a handful of sea cucumbers, to a rainbow of anemones and seaweeds. 

“Tide pool hopping was my favorite game, back in Uzushio, you know,” Kushina told Tori with a hint of sadness in her voice. She held up the tiny hermit crab in her palm. “I used to keep a bunch of these. I was always hoping they’d move into the prettier shells I’d find for them. They never did, though.”

She laughed, but the sound was quieter than Kushina’s laughs usually were. 

Tori opened her mouth to say she’d always begged her parents for a hermit crab when she was a kid, because she liked the painted shells seaside shops sold with them. The story died on her lips before she could make a single syllable. That part of her life was way over. She only ever let herself think about it in the darkest part of the night now. 

Instead she said, “Yeah, tide pools are super cool. I like reading about them. I’m glad I could see them in person.”

Kushina grinned at her. 

“I’m lucky I can still share stuff like this with my family,” Kushina said, voice brighter now. She gently replaced the hermit crab on the edge of its tide pool. “If you ever want to join us again, sometimes we also go to a mainland beach in…”

Kushina babbled. At some point, Minato disappeared and reappeared with a bunch of popsicles. Tori found a spiral of shark eggs and attempted to convince a giggling Naruto he should eat them. They went back to their things only to discover biting ants had invaded all of their bags. 

“We could put out food and draw them away!” Naruto said, a handful of chips from their lunch suddenly in his hands. 

“Do not do that,” Minato yelped, grabbing for Naruto’s wrist. 

They went home all covered in ant bites. Apparently not even a Kage could win against mother nature. 

Tori walked home with a smile on her face, happy with her afternoon. It wasn’t until she was home and heating up water for instant noodles that she realized she hadn’t actually solved any of her problems. She could make a medium whirlpool now, but she’d only get one shot at it, and she had no idea how to approach that. 

Oh god, she thought, heartbeat suddenly increasing. And I only have two weeks left!

xXx

Kushina and Deidara just spammed high-chakra techniques as much as they wanted. They wouldn’t be good for advice. But Tori did have another teammate. 

Itachi was annoyingly hard to track down nowadays. He took a lot of away missions in ANBU, which Minato was tightlipped about with even Kushina, so that route of tracking his movements was limited. If Tori wanted to find him, she had to talk to his family, which she always felt super awkward about. 

“He didn’t give us a return date, dear,” Mikoto told her when she answered the door, smile serene. Tori wondered if she seemed dumb in Mikoto’s eyes. Yes, she knew ANBU agents often couldn’t say when they’d be back. She just thought she’d ask on the off chance that he had!

Mikoto offered to let her stay for tea. Tori fled as quickly and politely as she could. 

Tori started doing increasingly unhinged things, like watching the Academy when it let out because she knew Itachi liked picking up Sasuke and would prioritize getting home in time to do it if he could. She spent a lot of time haunting the outside of ANBU HQ and Itachi’s favorite bakery. None of these things, her anxiety-riddled brain pointed out, helped her train at all. 

She didn’t even find Itachi doing this. Instead, Kakashi tapped her on the shoulder while she was sneaking into the ANBU breakroom after hours. 

“Fantastically illegal activities you’re up to, my sweet ninja sibling,” he drawled. 

Tori had basically jumped out of her skin, but she’d managed not to scream. God, Kakashi could hide his presence completely. 

“I’m trying to find Itachi,” she said, voice strangled. Then she cocked her head to the side as she considered Kakashi. “Actually, maybe you can help instead. Got a few minutes for some mentoring?”

Kakashi was in full ANBU uniform, so she couldn’t see his face. He did lean back slightly, regarding her. She knew that, despite his posturing about calling Team 4 his “siblings,” Kakashi was pretty hit-or-miss about actually wanting to hang out with anyone at all. He liked privacy and was allergic to intimacy, and she had no idea if helping a genin out of the goodness of his heart was pushing it or not. 

After a long, awkward silence, Kakashi finally said. “Alright. Give me twenty minutes to shower and change.”

He sent her to a nearby teahouse to meet and then didn’t show up for another forty-five minutes. The tea Tori ordered for them was lukewarm by the time he walked in. 

“I became lost in thought in the shower,” he said dreamily. 

“Gross,” Tori told him. 

Kakashi blinked lethargically at her. “I did not imply that at all, my dirty-minded sibling.” 

Tori cut to the chase, explaining her current mess of a situation to him. She was supposed to win a bunch of fights, act charming and cool while she did it, and on top of all that, she had to use a high-chakra fuuinjutsu technique she was unlikely to get comfortable with in the current timeframe. 

“What… exactly… are you asking for advice on?” Kakashi asked when she was finished. 

“You end up with chakra exhaustion a lot,” Tori said pointblank. “I guess I was wondering… I don’t know, how do you deal with not having enough chakra for your own techniques?”

“Hmm,” Kakashi said, drumming his fingers on the table between them. “You know, you’re right. Maybe being charming and ‘peppy’ is impossible for you. That was pretty mean.”

Tori kicked him under the table. 

“I still don’t understand what you’re torn up about,” Kakashi said, his eye crinkling up in a teasing grin at her. “When I met you, you had no accessible chakra, and that didn’t slow you down at all. Why does the idea of spending it all on one technique upset you so much?”

“I guess…” Tori fidgeted with the cup in her hands. “If I just had to win a fight, that would be one thing. But I’m supposed to do a very specific thing, and I’ll only really get one shot at it.”

“Ah,” Kakashi said. There was a long pause. Then he said, “I am trying to think of a joke appropriate for a fourteen year old.”

“Gross!” Tori laughed. 

“Maa,” Kakashi said. “Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a very good answer to your conundrum. If you screw up, you screw up. Any big technique is like that. If it helps, you’re at a normal part of any ninja’s journey.” 

Tori wasn’t… she wasn’t a proper ninja, though. She felt like a pretender, a fake, a kid playing make believe. She had no idea how to communicate this to Kakashi without sounding completely insane. 

“I think maybe,” Kakashi continued, leaning back in his seat, “you’re more anxious because it’s not your original technique, so you’re not as confident with it. You’re used to having done all the development and troubleshooting yourself, and the lack of control on that end is freaking you out.”

“...Huh,” Tori said. That… that definitely could be part of it. 

“I’m not the person to ask about original techniques,” Kakashi drawled. “But I will say that the key to mastering someone else’s technique is to make it your own. You don’t have to use it exactly the way Kushina does. You have to figure out how to make it work with your style.”

“That’s actually really helpful,” Tori said with a weak smile. “Thanks, Kakashi.”

“Anytime,” Kakashi replied, and then disappeared into a puff of smoke, leaving her with the bill. 

xXx

Tori felt slightly at peace for a few more days, spending time analyzing the jutsu scroll and cross-referencing pieces of it with her research materials. This seemed closer to who she actually was. It soothed her. 

Then Deidara spiked her anxiety all over again by showing her a lease he’d signed. There was another line with an X next to it, for her to sign as well. 

“I haven’t even seen the apartment,” Tori said, feeling hysterical. Why was everyone making all these insane decisions for her?!

“It’s cool, I promise,” Deidara said. “But we have to sign quick. The landlord only gave me a couple days to decide, yeah.”

Tori leafed through the lease furiously. The address was in a really nice neighborhood, the square footage was impressive, and the lease listed patio furniture among assets they’d be liable for, implying the existence of that outdoor space she wanted. Half the total rent would be a huge stretch even on a chunin salary, and she might not even get that. 

“I’m willing to divide up rent proportional to our salaries, but I get the bigger bedroom,” Deidara said. 

“Even if I stay a genin?” Tori snapped. She shoved the paper and the pen at him. 

“You’re not going to stay a genin, yeah,” he replied, annoyed, and shoved it back at her.  

“The average age of promotion is fifteen,” Tori said, her voice cracking embarrassingly. “Thirty percent of shinobi never even make chunin.”

Tori had less than a week to prepare before heading out. She felt like she needed months to practice as much as she wanted, and she didn’t have the time or energy to deal with this. And yet, she found herself skipping her training ground booking to take a tour of an apartment.

“Be quick,” the landlord said. “The current tenants only agreed to thirty minutes.”

The apartment was really nice. Nicer than she’d even ever considered an apartment could be, really. All three of the bedrooms and their own narrow balconies, not quite enough for furniture but enough for a potted plant and to step out onto in the morning, and there was a rooftop terrace. 

“We could make this one an office,” Deidara said, gesturing at the smallest bedroom, which was the size of a very determined closet and currently done up as a baby room. The current tenants wanted an actual house for their growing family, apparently. 

Deidara could easily afford a pretty nice apartment on a Jounin salary, even if he had zero savings to fall back on. Tori assumed his insistence on her rooming with him was the little income bump to get him something even better than “pretty nice.” He probably felt like he deserved it, after all those years as a feral forest child. 

She certainly couldn’t afford anything approaching this good on her own. If she wanted anything bigger than her dorm room on her own, she’d have to either get incredibly lucky or look in one of the shittier outer neighborhoods, which was why she hadn’t done it. 

When they were done with the tour, the landlord stared expectantly at them. Deidara cleared his throat and looked meaningfully at her. 

Oh, so he’d gotten this last minute tour because he’d promised the landlord she’d sign. 

Tori low-key felt like flipping them both off and stomping off. Her hand balled into a fist. 

“The café on the corner is supposed to have the best coffee in Konoha, yeah,” Deidara said, eyes glinting. 

“Fine,” Tori seethed. “I’ll sign.”

If she didn’t make chunin, her life really was going to turn into a shit show. 

So long, take-out lunches, she thought as she signed her life away. 

As they walked back to the dorms, Tori actually thought a little harder about what they’d just done. She’d never rented an apartment herself before, but Deidara had been working on moving out since he made chunin. She’d listened to a lot of rants about biases landlords had against younger ninja, even if they had high salaries. Usually ninja got charged high, multi-month deposits, to cover the landlord in case the renter should randomly die. It prevented younger ninja, who didn’t have savings, from renting higher-end places even if they could afford the monthly rent. 

“There wasn’t anything in the lease about a deposit,” Tori said, confused. Was that a separate thing she’d also suddenly have shoved in front of her? “Or… key money?”

Deidara beamed at her. “I found a way around that! I just got a cosigner to cover us, yeah.”

“Cosigner…?” Tori repeated. “That wasn’t on the lease…”

“Yeah, usually that’d be in there and it wouldn’t get you out of a deposit,” Deidara agreed. “But turns out you can get away with anything with a letter from Hokage-sama, yeah!”

Tori stopped dead in her tracks. Oh good, now if she didn’t make chunin, the Hokage would know she couldn’t make rent. 

“What?” Deidara said, putting his hand on his hip. “You wanted to read his note too? Tori, you're such a nerd–”

Tori resisted the urge to scream. 

xXx

Itachi finally found her two days before she was set to leave. He found her setting up at the training ground she had booked for the morning.

“Both my mother and Kakashi-sempai said you were looking for me,” he said, eyeing the line of bamboo poles she set out in the packed dirt. 

“Yeah,” Tori said, pointing accusingly at him. “You are impossible to find, asshole.”

“I apologize,” Itachi said, not sounding the least sorry. “I’ve been… increasingly uncomfortable at home, and have been taking longer missions.”

Tori squinted at him. She’d thought Danzo being gone would make his family situation better, not worse. 

“Is something wrong?” she asked carefully. 

Itachi, being an uncommunicative asshole, just shook his head. He didn’t look any more stressed than he usually did: he had killer bags under his eyes, but that was his normal state of being. His hair was recently washed and shiny, not gross from too much time on missions and not enough time with shower access. His body language was calm and lacked the weird twitchy movements he’d get when he was trying not to lose his shit on someone. 

He was at least physically taking care of himself, then. She had no idea what went on in his messed up little brain, but Sasuke had seemed perfectly happy and sociable those days she’d clandestinely stalked him, which was a good predictor of Itachi’s anxiety levels. 

“Did you want something from me?” Itachi prompted. 

“Oh,” Tori said. “Kakashi ended up helping me out, actually.”

She briefly explained her current conundrum. 

“Kiri?” Itachi asked, and Tori noted he brightened ever so much. This was basically the Itachi version of perking up like a dog hearing the treat bag rustle. It was almost cute. 

“Yeah,” Tori said. “The other thing I wanted to ask was if you want me to tell you-know-who anything.”

“Hmm, no,” Itachi said, without the slightest hint of malice in his voice.

“Really?” 

“If I had something to say,” Itachi said blandly, “I would simply send a crow.”

Tori’s lips thinned. Itachi was… not a very good friend, in her opinion. But it also wasn’t in her place to micromanage his friendship with Kisame. 

“Perhaps you can ask how he’s doing,” Itachi said mildly. “I would like to know.”

That was… that was cute, actually. 

“Sure,” Tori agreed. 

Itachi next turned back to her bamboo poles. 

“Is this for your mission?” he asked. 

“Mm,” Tori said. “I’m making an overly complicated jutsu to look cool. Wanna help? I need someone to swing a sword at me.”

Itachi was happy to comply. He was, Tori abruptly remembered, a terrifying person to have swing a sword at you. 

But she did get her jutsu working.

[incorrect-mtg]

The Argent Etchings teach no fear

Fez Xa'ktiz knew no fear as he stepped through the omenpath, even though it was the first time he would be in a world not his own. He was the First Vanguard of the Choir within the Seven Hundred and Forty Eighth Expedition Force of the Alabaster Host and through his lips the song of the Mother of Machines would be spread, her presence was always with — within — him.

Fear was a weakness of the incompleat, of those not yet blessed by the light of Phyrexia, not yet held in the sweet embrace of the Mother of Machines, not yet baptized in ichor. It was the inevitable result of imperfection and lack of unity, something that would soon be eradicated through their work, where the entire multiverse would find purpose and belonging.

Fez Xa'ktiz was not born to feel fear, he was born to sing. He was not born to be alone, he forever heard the whispers of the Mother of Machines, the guiding force of his own voice.

"In the Argent Etchings we each learn our appointed duties and so we understand our purpose" he heard the Mother whisper within him, and so it was with delight that he fully crossed the boundary into a nameless world.

As the rest of the Expedition Force stepped through the omenpath behind him — alongside a number of members of the Chrome Host — he did a first survey of the site of their arrival. Although the Machine Orthodoxy held knowledge of countless worlds, eagerly gathered in preparation of the events now unfolding, there were countless more about which they had known little to nothing. He had been trusted with charting one such world, hence the presence of the Chrome Host, and so any insight would be beneficial.

The most noticeable aspect was the material of the walls that surrounded him — organic, disgusting wood — and then the realization that they had, indeed, arrived in a room. A large hall, rectangular in shape, its dark and stained walls covered by peeling and roting paper and littered with assorted objects that might have long ago implied a living presence. At the each of the most distant ends of the hall, flimsy doors hid the rest of the world from sight.

Curious... although the Mother of Machines guaranteed that their feet would find stable ground to cross on arrival, he thought it unlikely for said ground to be in a building, much less an abandoned one.

His duty was not to ask questions, however, unlike the members of the Chrome Host that had immediately set upon their given task of setting up observation devices, scanners and other such contraptions. Typical of apostates who saw observation of their surroundings as a better path to perfection than the much more enlightened learning through the Argent Etchings themselves.

"In the Argent Etchings we see the world as it should be, and so they light the path towards perfection" whispered the voice of the Mother of Machines again as he turned towards his fellows in the Alabaster Host. Unlike their Gitaxian counterparts, they had organized themselves single file, silent and waiting for orders. Sixteen divisions of sixteen soldiers, each led by another Vanguard of the Choir, the perfect ordination for the forces of Phyrexia.

Fez Xa'ktiz opened his mouth and let ring the song to which he had been entrusted, its metallic shrieking and undulating depths shaking the walls around them at the same time it gave the soldiers purpose. As each member of the Choir echoed in delightfully rending harmony, they set out to do their work. The forces split in two and moved towards each door, followed by quickly assembled Gitaxian probes. As both doors opened into new halls, each splitting off into different directions, the Host split up further into smaller forces, until finally each division pressed on individually, mapping out the path that they took and noting all other paths they missed, which would likely be explored by the drones the Chrome Host was sending off.

Although not able to see through their eyes, the resonance of their singing allowed Fez Xa'ktiz a measure of understanding of the surroundings each division passed through, which let him see that whatever building had been unwittingly chosen as the landing spot of their invasion was still large enough that none of their forces had arrived at an outside. Odd, although not beyond the realm of possibility — perhaps this place was a crude and disgustingly organic facsimile of the Fair Basilica, an entire world brought within a greater structure — and something that would definitely be worth noting.

Of perhaps equal note was the first living being found within the plane: a moth, its gray fluttering wings carrying it through the doors and right by him. Perhaps it had sat in a hidden alcove, and the passing forces had awoken it? How serendipitous, then, that it had been drawn by the light of the omenpath right towards them.

Bringing forth a hand towards the insect, Fez Xa'ktiz was delighted to see it land upon his claw, its wings closing and antennae fluttering as they regarded each other, black eyes meeting perfectly polished ivory... This creature, insignificant as it might be, would be fitting first initiate for this world. A moth reaching for the light and finding its own perfection upon arrival.

Extending his tongue, he let it be cut by one of his sharp fangs, black ichor dripping through the wound. Leaning his head down, he let it drip directly onto the moth until its gray wings turned black. Surprisingly it had no reaction to such a treatment, even though he knew compleation was supposed to be — meant to be — a painful process.

"Weakness burrows deep in the flesh of the incompleat. It bites down and refuses to let go. Their first step towards perfection is to extricate it and bleed out its rot" taught the Mother of Machines, even though the vermin on his claw seemed to defy such clear teachings... Until the entire thing came undone, breaking apart like petals falling off a dead flower.

Perhaps... Perhaps it was simply too weak. If someone — something — was wholly comprised of weakness, how could they remove it without ceasing to exist entirely? Yes, that made sense. To react in pain, to shake and twist and cry, one would need parts of themselves to remain, the parts that weren't corrupted by weakness. The insect likely had nothing to offer and so could not even muster a reaction.

He put the moth out of his mind, focusing on more important matters: one division had finally met living beings to oppose its passage. Not insignificant vermin, but actual fighters charging directly at them.

The walls rumbled and shook as Fez Xa'ktiz increased the volume of his song, the lessons and tactics etched in his mind echoing towards the legions of soldiers now finally seeing battle. Like the beasts of the Hunter Maze, warriors seemed to come out of the woodwork, their rusty and jagged weapons doing little and nothing against perfect phyrexian soldiers-

No, that wasn't right... The walls, they had not shaken due to his song, had they? Or had they? He didn't understand why it mattered, but he would swear that they shook first, then he had intensified his singing...

"The enem- even some of our al- see meri- ception- crush- overwhel-" murmured... The Mother of Machines? Why could he not hear her clearly?

He sang louder still, certain his voice would reach all members of their force — be it Alabaster or Chrome — and through the omenpath itself to the Mother of Machines. In the echo of his song, he would find stable ground-

His next step — had it been a step forward, towards his soldiers, or backwards, towards the omenpath? — found nothing but empty air, the wood underneath him rotting and opening into an abyss.

He quickly spread his wings, trying to stabilize and go back to where he had been even as he was spun around by gravity and air resistance, until his body met the ground with a loud crack and roaring pain and his consciousness left him.

When he woke up, one of his wings broken after taking most of the force of his fall, he did not know how long he had laid there. It could not have been long, certainly, for the Chrome Host would have certainly sent a drone to retrieve him given enough time — shameful as it might have been — and yet he laid alone, the silence of the room cut only by a dripping sound.

(Why was he alone? Why could he not hear the voice of the Mother of Machines)

He looked around, taking stock of the room and how its smooth white walls were almost as beautiful as those of the Fair Basilica, except instead of being made of ivory they seemed covered by... Wax?

His gaze finally fell upon his remaining wing. Rather than being bent out of shape like its counterpart, the limb has been spread behind and to the side of him, and was covered in the same material that covered the rest of the room, already in the process of solidifying. Another drip, directly onto it, served as confirmation.

To fly back with a single wing would prove a challenge, but with two wings damaged it would be impossible. Furthermore, if he was to be forced to drag himself up the hole he had fallen through, the weight of the wax would simply make things harder. Without hesitation, he pushed his claws under the material, right where feathers met wax: Even if some of it had dried already, the ichor that would pour through the wounds would close them quickly, he was certain-

That certainty lasted only until the pain — beyond what he had ever felt, ever knew could be felt — spread from his wing as he pulled the wax off. This- this wasn't normal. He-

The liquid that poured out of his wounds, where wax had pulled feathers and skin and bones alongside it, was not ichor.

It was red... Why was it red?

"What foolish prey, that wanders into an open maw thinking themselves the predators" whispered the Mother- no, this was not her voice. These were not her words.

The walls surrounding him rumbled once again, so hard it seemed the entire world was shaking, before stopping. Then again, before stopping, repeating, stopping, and on and on and on.

As Fez Xa'ktiz laid alone, his wounds bleeding a liquid that should not be there, he knew that the rumbling was certainly the consequences of battle: the Mother of Machines must have heard his last cries and sent forth more soldiers to tame this accursed world.

And yet a small part of him couldn't help but fear that the rumbling felt like a delighted and cruel laughter.

[noicevibes]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐙𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐔𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐬, oo. 𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐳𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐲𝐫

Time is not prejudiced. It gives and takes as the ordinance of life sees fit. Time begets loss and fear, but it also spawns warmth. After centuries worth of time having passed for you, you learn that time also sires impatience, and does not wait for a lost soul to find their way. Time carries on, and flows likes the current of a river. Ironically, so, too, does blood.

𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 • jing yuan x reader, blade x reader, dan heng & reader (no pronouns used this chapter)

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚��𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 • 18+ (mdni), no explicit smut but suggestive & insinuative; partially beta'ed.

𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬 • can be read as a gn!stand-alone fic! • extended lifespan reader; reader is the records’ master for the Seat of Divine Foresight; allusions to ptsd. • this chapter is introductory and is meant to be vague toward the true plot... the real story begins in the official first chapter. • this originally had a different title, "it ain't the heat, it's the humility" before being reformatted for the series.

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 • seat of divine foresight npcs, yanqing

𝐰𝐜 3.1k

zephyr -> a soft, gentle breeze.

𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 • 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬' 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 • 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞

It didn’t matter where you’d tried taking refuge. Your apartment, or your friends’; the streets of the Luofu, or the various fountains littering them; the Exalting Sanctum’s new little dessert parlour with the delicious ice treats, or the sparse number of trees along the way to it. Shelter is far and few, you’d been quick to learn, and none of them with enough of the protection you’d been hoping to find since two days ago when the heatwave began.

It’s hot. Too hot. Too hot for your thoughts to thread themselves into proper sentences whilst on auto-pilot. No, it takes your entire conscious focus for you to even complain about the heat, and even that works up a sweat. It’s disgusting. I’m disgusting, you remind yourself as another thick bead of sweat rolls down your neck and into your shirt. So gross. No matter how many cool showers you’d taken that only had your water bill racking up in dues, no matter how popsicles you’d indulged in, or how many times you’d stared at one of the public fountains in longing and wished it could be a public pool, instead, there’d still been no means to an end when it’d came to such brutal weather.

In your many decades of life, you don’t recall it ever being this hot aboard the Xianzhou Luofu. Perhaps the Sky-Faring Commission might have a little historical insight on record temperatures, but putting your curiosity aside, looking into something like that to try and distract yourself from the current temperature? The thought exhausts you.

This only leaves you with one other option, one you’ve left as your absolute last resort, one you know will free you from the pain and suffering plaguing the Luofu and instead, tethering you to another kind of pain— returning to your post within the walls of the Seat of Divine Foresight, where the cooling system had shut down due to overheating. When it did, you conveniently disappeared without a word. Now that it’s fixed, really, you have no excuse to not return to your post.

It’s just unfortunate that it’d dawned on you two days later, the fact that you never told anyone there, including the Arbiter-General you worked directly alongside. You didn’t tell him, either, that you’d abruptly chosen to go absent without any official leave taken on account of the weather.

How does he do it? Those thick, tight clothes, that heavy armour, his thick, heavy hair— in this heat? He must have been suffering, too, you realize much too late. And I left my post and all of my work for him to… Crap.

Your pace quickens, your agility proving surprisingly capable today as you weave in and out and around the crowds littering the Exalting Sanctum until you’re finally able to break into a run. Why is it so busy today?! Why are they all out in the sun?! Are they insane?! Have they all collectively been struck by mara?! Go find shade or shelter! Maniacs! Get out of my way!!

“Chiyan!” you shout from the other end of the dock, not only startling the messenger of the Divine Foresight, but the patrons passing behind you.

Chiyan huffs, shaking his helmeted head at you as you approach.

“And here I thought you’d quit,” he dares to muse during your heat-inspired bad mood.

Nearly gasping now, you tug at the neck of your shirt to puff air down it. “I do not have the energy to tell you off right now, so move it.”

“Yeah, I bet I can guess why. You look…” He just shakes his head again. “Anyway. You’ve got great timing.”

“T-The cooling system is working again, right? That was true?”

“Should’ve placed money on that bet,” he grumbles. “That’s right. The Seat of Divine Foresight is back to its former, air-conditioned glory.” He steps aside. “Please, after you. Go on— go enjoy working in comfort, and out of this heat.”

You nod once, extremely curt with the gesture, and without guilt when you speak your farewell.

“Yeah. I will. See ya.”

For decades, you’ve said this, sworn this, but after the hell you’d gone through over the past fourty-eight hours, you now promise to never complain about the colder seasons, nor take for granted the refreshing chill they brought aboard the Luofu. You can simply throw more layers on then, but in the summer? Not like I can peel off my skin to cool down.

The noise of relief you make upon the doors of the Seat of Divine Foresight shutting behind you is loud, borderline obnoxious, and, if your coworkers were any kind of honest about it, downright pornographic. They quickly avert their eyes and return to their work and their conversations before you can catch their stares.

The difference between the temperature of this room versus even the hallway leading to it is painfully staggering. It seems like they’ve chosen to completely divert the path of the cooling system to the main chamber, you note, glancing up and around you. It’s probably only until they can fix the entire system, but it looks like even the employees of the smaller offices are working here today.

To your disappointment, so is the General. And it’s your bad fortune that it isn’t his usual hologram self.

Despite being on the complete other end of the room, he notices you right away, and the two of you lock gazes. His conversation with Qingzu ends with an abrupt raise of his hand and a brief apology— she bows away, descending the staircase to join Yong Hai and Yong Nian.

I suppose it’s time to play it on thick, you think, before clearing your throat with a harsh cough.

“General,” you call out in exasperation, voice echoing across the hall as you exaggeratedly stagger past the guards with a wave of greeting. “Generaaaaal.” They bow in return, a little too low to be considered a normal sign of respect for someone in your modest position, until you hear a snicker slip out from under one of their helmets and realize they’d been trying to hold in and hide their laughter. You pause, lips parting as if to speak, but you keep in character.

“General Jing Yuaaaaaan.”

From his spot atop the helm, Jing Yuan smiles small and sweet at your dramatic, child-like display put on just for him— the fact that the rest of the chamber gets to experience it for themselves today makes them lucky, as there are only two instances where you, the Divine Foresight’s - normally - dutiful records’ master would display yourself like this. The first instance is just this— you’ve done something wrong and at the very least, you know what it is and are now hoping that sucking up to the boss will help you work it out. The second instance? The circumstances aren’t so different. But it takes place in the privacy of your shared abode, instead of his office.

Your trudging across the floor of the massive strategy-slash-starchess board is squeaky, the soles of your shoes catching on the smooth tiling until you reach the General.

“General Jing Yuan,” you whine, still bothering to salute to him. “It’s hot.”

He chuckles, tucking his arms behind his back as he moves to descend the staircase closest to you to reach you.

“I figured that could be the only explanation behind your sudden disappearing act,” he says, still smiling. “Two whole days you were gone! Imagine my surprise when it’d been Qingzu to tell me of your absence and not you.”

You, you easily infer of him, My partner. Not just my subordinate.

You’ve heard from other outworlders and their testimonies that relationships between mortals in comparison to relationships between those with extended lifespans greatly differ. The flow of time is easily the heaviest hitter— average mortal lifespans range between eighty to one-hundred years old. As life expectancy goes for most those aboard the Xianzhou Luofu, each calendar days’ time differs, too— mortals, Foxians, and those native Xianzhou all have different clocks that tick within them.

Being on the "older" side of the spectrum of age immortality, you tend to fall into dissimilar habits, as opposed to the ones your aging friends do, such as forgetting to send a message back to someone, or informing them of an absence?

Unfortunately, this is why the Arbiter-General still smiles at you, why his response had been just barely teetering on passive aggressive. You know you haven’t heard anything bad from him yet, that the only reason you’ve yet to be chastised as a repeat offender is because the room remains full of other Divine Foresight employees. To the General, you aren’t just one of his most trusted allies. You’re also his lover. And to not know where and not hear from his lover even once within fourty-eight hours after existing together for so many years, you realize that you’d be agonizing over it, too.

Immediately, the act drops, your eyes widening down at your feet.

Oh, god. That’s definitely so much worse than me not saying anything as his subordinate.

“Jing Yuan.” Lip pinched between your teeth, you look to him and muster as much of an apologetic look as you can. “I’m sorry.”

A dark eyebrow raises at you inquisitively. “For?”

You bite back a huff—you already know what for. So, you decide to list everything but what he wants to hear.

“For disappearing without a word to anyone. For not requesting time off first. For not finishing my duties before leaving. For abandoning my post for two days.” To hide the smirk that’d begun to twitch onto your face at the sight of his expression growing more and more stolid, you bow your head, similar to the guards at the entrance to the chamber. “I’m sorry, General.”

He hums, and not thoughtfully. Strangely, you no longer feel his eyes on the back of your head, and by the time you raise it to find out why, you see him stalking back up to the helm.

His timing couldn’t be more perfect when a loud, mechanical groan suddenly sounds throughout the room.

“Ah!” Jing Yuan exclaims, seemingly agreeing with your wordless sentiment— he peers down at you where you stand steeping in your petulance. “The second stage of the cooling system must have kicked in. Friends,” he calls across the hall. “I do believe you should be able to return to your original chambers now; no need to linger and loiter around here any longer. In fact, how about you all take an extra break today? Starting now. A gift, on account of this weather, of course.”

Thanks and bows of appreciation are quick to be thrown to the helm where the Arbiter-General stands; unfortunately for you, your coworkers have never been ones to stare a gift horse in the mouth, and flee out the doors as quickly as they’d earlier arrived. Maybe you had no trouble playing with the General, but they’d wanted no part whatsoever in it— the look Qingzu throws over her should at you as the last person to leave confirms this.

Ah. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so petty, after all.

The sound finally settles into a dull hum, barely noticeable over the doors to the chamber slamming shut.

“Those were a lot of apologies,” Jing Yuan points out. Looking to the helm, you find him wearing a perfect poker face. “Are you sure you didn’t miss a couple?”

You sigh at him, hands on your hips now.

“You already know that I did, and you know that I did it on purpose, too.”

He matches your attitude with the crossing of his arms.

“And?”

“… and I’m sorry if I made you worry by not telling you where I’d gone,” you mumble.

“What was that, dear?”

Your cheeks burn. “I’m sorry if I made you worry. I didn’t mean to not tell you. I know that with this whole… Stellaron thing, you might’ve been busy. I didn’t want to distract you by telling you I wasn’t feeling well.”

“______. I’d want to know if you got even a paper cut.”

You can’t help yourself when a laugh bubbles up and out of your throat.

“We both agreed that we wouldn’t let things like this affect how we perform our duties, right? This is a perfect instance of that agreement; I asked you to set these boundaries with me for a reason.”

“Reporting on our well-being is much different than perhaps sending the other a picture of what we ate for lunch.” He scratches at his chin. “Although, I did want to send you what I had for mine today. I would have liked to have shared it with you.”

“Jing Yuan…” Quickly, you clamber up the steps to stand before him. “I love you with every fibre of my being. I promise not to do something so thoughtless like this again, but please… I need you to properly honour our agreement. I don’t want to have to afford anymore missteps in this lifetime. Not after… no… I-I can’t. Never again.”

To either side of your face, the General’s hands rise, claiming them in his cool palms. You sigh, your own coming up to hold them to you.

“You were on the front lines for a long time, ______,” Jing Yuan reminds you. “Even before the incident. And when we live as long as we do, the memories won’t simply fade away with time.

“I understand how you feel, exactly how you feel. And when I say to you what I am about to say, please know that I don’t wish to diminish or dismiss those feelings, either.” He thumbs your cheeks, pulling you closer into him, lips ghosting the crease between your brows and smoothing it down with his affection. “Even when I don’t hear from you, you are always on my mind. And for as long as we’ve been together, that has never changed. If you ever find yourself burdened by those feelings, I wish to share the load with you. Paper cuts and all.”

“Even over something as silly as my impromptu two day vacation…?”

“Fu Xuan did mention there’d been a nice breeze over at the Divination Commission, last I spoke to her. If only my love didn’t forget about me in their search for some shade… Surely, I could have invented some reason to send you over there…”

“Ah, so a guilt trip and not a work trip, then, huh?”

“No, not at all.” You shoot a playfully disapproving glance to the man. For a moment, he simply stares back, his one unshielded eye sparkling with obvious mischief. Little warning is given when he steps toward you again, hands reclaiming their rightful place at your waist. Fingers curl into the loops securing your belt and tug your hips to meet his.

Your cheeks instantly heat at the contact, at the knowing glance he dares to send you at such close range.

“You know,” he says, breath fanning your face. “We could always try building up a different kind of sweat— you know. To take your mind off the heat.”

Jing Yuan doesn’t give you a chance to answer, instead sliding his one hand from your side to curl beneath your right ass cheek and hoist you up into the air. Instinctively, you’d raised your legs to curl around his middle as he’d turned to carry you toward his seat. If this is my punishment, I accept it gratefully and gracefully, you think, almost dizzyingly.

“That break you sent the others on was more for you than it was for them, wasn’t it?” you ask him, hand curled around his neck as he lowers you onto the cushion. Without missing a beat and with a single hand, Jing Yuan’s fingers are deft to remove your belt and unbutton your trousers.

“Naturally, they assume their “dozing general” merely wants to take another nap…” He taps your thigh, encouraging the lift of your bottom. You shift your weight into your palms and rise, and he removes your pants to rest around your ankles. “… or that I’ll be reprimanding you.”

“I suppose it’s a relief that they’re aware you don’t pick favourites around here. Well, the exception being Yanqing. He’s everyone’s favourite, after all.”

“Not yours, I’d hope?”

“Definitely mine.”

“And why not me?” Still hovering above you, he bends over to nose at your throat— you shudder, unable to stop yourself. “Considering how I have you… and how I’m about to have you. Tell me that I’m not your favourite?”

You scoff lightly at him, even when he presses kisses deep into your throat, strong against your jawline, and gently against your lips.

“W-With how long you insist on teasing me like this…? W-Who likes a hot dinner served cold—” you’re cut off by his tongue prodding against your lips; you part them, eagerly, hungrily, the joke about eating somehow making the craving to have him have you even stronger, more obnoxious the more he makes you wait.

He is barely gentle now, showing little restraint in how his tongue plunders the inside of your mouth. Jing Yuan is a giver and a taker, of pleasure and of oxygen— your gasps are sharp, not being given a chance to breathe, a chance to win whatever battle he’d entered with you. “Jing Yu—” the butterflies that swim in the pit of your stomach are traitorous in his repetition; they know how good he makes you feel, strictly in the way he takes your breath away with each kiss, each suckle and swirl of his tongue around yours, each stroke of his calloused hands sliding to grip the fat of your thighs, and they make you weaker and weaker with each ministration.

With a final swipe of his wet muscle across your spit-soaked and kiss-numbed lips, he draws away, eyes lidded and panting.

“G-General Jing Yuan,” you rasp almost chidingly. Your hand is quick to brace him away from you; he chuckles at your weak attempt, instead returning it to where it once kept you entirely upright. You huff, every inch of your skin flaming and dewy with a thin layer of sweat. I just finally cooled down, too…

“You’re going to need that there,” he tells you, rising to his full height. He tugs on his own trousers to give them a generous amount of slack before kneeling down before you, nestled between your already shaking thighs. “We still have twenty minutes, after all. You’d better get comfortable.”

© nc-vb 2023 please don’t repost! reblogs & comments are always appreciated.

[brattypagansub]

Conservative numbers

(Originally posted to AO3)

Steve is having way too much fun with this

Rule one, lay a hand on Bucky and die

Rule two, send Bucky into a war zone and the enemy dies

This has been the Steve Rogers raison d'etre since 1943. You learn real fast that Bucky is off limits unless you want an angry super soldier locked onto you. Put this in the context of war time and you have god tier level fuckery. Case in point, the marine corps has lost more motorcycles. When Steven ‘yeet that bitch’ Grant Rogers decides that they’re an effective projectile weapon.

This particular time the enemies new pronouns were here and over there. Thanks to Bucky’s excellent shooting. Though maybe next time he’ll remember to wait until Rogers is clear of the blast radius. Super soldier doesn’t equal indestructible and getting blown up hurts. More than you would think given he’s survived a direct hit from high tech Hydra ordinances. That most definitely would’ve killed a regular soldier.

Fast forward and all Bucky has to do is yell then next thing you know you’ve got an angry blonde looking to send you to god.

So what did Bucky do with his newfound attack dog in the form of his best friend? Exploit the holy hellfire out of it of course as any sane person would. Their new tactic involved Bucky would be both the bait and the Trojan horse. Then before you can say ‘what the fuck’ Bucky screams and Steve takes it as a personal challenge. To see how many Hydra soldiers he can maim in five minutes. The answer is a lot actually with Dum Dum loosing that bet.

Ever since receiving the serum from Erskin Steve has had a life changing revelation. That he was put on this earth to do two things and two things only. One is protect the Bucky and the other is stomp in as many Nazi skills as humanly possible. And he’s very quickly running out of nazis to turn into paste under his boots. When they aren’t blowing up cars, bases, tanks and generally raising hell across Europe. Steve isn’t letting Bucky out of his sight for fear he’ll end up captive again.

The chain of command has long since given up on trying reign in the Howling Commandos and their crack headed energy. So they just keep track and hope these guys stay on their side.

[ulysses-but-somehow-more-transer]

i love it when numbers dont number normal. i love you surreal numbers i love you p-adics i love you modular arithmetic i love you finite fields i love you hyperreals i love you alternate bases i love you ultraproducts i love you floating point i love you (hyper)complex numbers i love you ordinals i love you all the sets of weird little guys im yet to learn about <3

[coochiequeens]

Ladies in Guelph Ontario please look into this.

The workshop is April 13 at the Delta Marriott in Guelph

By Karis Mapp 

Following an increase in the number of sexual assaults reported in Guelph last month, Nathan Skoufis and his mom Sophie at the Guelph Family Martial Arts studio are preparing to host a free self defence workshop for women. Originally planned as a series of classes, the overwhelming community response prompted the studio to hold a workshop to equip women with tools and confidence to feel safe in public. CBC K-W's Karis Mapp stopped by the studio to learn more about the event.

A Guelph martial arts studio is fighting to keep the community safe. 

Guelph Family Martial Arts is hosting a free self-defence workshop for women in hopes of equipping them with the tools to protect themselves in worst-case scenarios. 

This comes after an increase of sexual assaults reported in the city last month.

"I think there's just been a lot of troubling things that have happened in the area," said Nathan Skoufis, owner of the studio.

"We were getting different community leaders, organizations, individuals that were calling and emailing and coming in the studio and talking about it."

According to Guelph police, on March 14, a stranger sexually assaulted a young woman around 6 a.m. while she was walking home. She was taken into a vehicle and assaulted.

"That was on a Friday and then the following Monday, we had a young woman who was followed by a stranger and was the victim of a sexual assault at the intersection of Speedvale Avenue and the Hanlon Expressway," said Guelph police media relations co-ordinator Scott Tracey.

That assault happened in the middle of the afternoon, with dozens of witnesses stepping in to help. 

Police have made arrests in both assaults.

Prior to the two assaults, Guelph police also notified the public of a high-risk offender being released into the community.

"Included on his record was sexual assaults on strangers," Tracey said. 

Though the offender was not involved with the two assaults, Guelph police posted a reminder of safety tips including:

Walk with a purposeful stride. Know where you are going and walk with confidence.

Avoid isolated areas and try to use high-traffic, well-lit routes.

Don't let other people get too close, even if they appear to have a reason such as asking for the time.

Tracey confirmed that women are more frequently, and almost exclusively, the victims of sexual assaults in the area.

Making an impact

After receiving an overwhelming response to a social media post about the idea of the self-defence classes, Skoufis chose to start with a big workshop. 

It will feature how to defend against wrist grabs, front and back chokes, as well as what to do if someone grabs your hair from the back.

"We've heard people [say] that they don't feel comfortable going on a walk, they don't feel comfortable walking their dog, they don't feel comfortable doing things on their own," said Skoufis. 

Currently a member of Team Canada's kickboxing team and a sixth degree blackbelt, Skoufis adds that the basics are more than enough for people to feel safer out in the community. 

The workshop is happening April 13 in the conference centre at the Delta Marriott in Guelph from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

While teaching the moves is the main focus, Skoufis says building confidence and a sense of community is just as essential.

Nathan Skoufis and his mother Sophie run classes at the Guelph Family Martial Arts. (Karis Mapp/CBC)

"I think it's very important, especially as a woman, to have a little bit of knowledge if someone does attack you because the first thing is to freeze up," said Nathan's mother Sophie. 

"It really would make a difference. Just awareness and a little self-defence goes a long way."

The workshop is open to anyone, including people who aren't Guelph residents. People interested are asked to contact the studio before the event. 

In the future, Skoufis said, they plan to open the offering to men as well with a variety of classes to come.

[oqmemphis]

John Gabriel and Mathematical Ignorance

Have you ever watched a flat earth conspiracy video? If not, the usual format is pretty straightforward: the presenter rambles, unscripted and unedited, into a cheap microphone while using some shitty screen recording software to film themselves drawing lines on top of random jpegs in paint.net for five to ten minutes, before sitting back and proudly claiming that their unmatched genius has proven all human knowledge from the last several millennia to be hopelessly fraudulent.

John Gabriel is a flat earther for mathematics.

Mr. Gabriel writes and speaks at great length about an invention which he calls "the New Calculus", a theory most briefly described as an attempt to reformulate all of mathematics starting from (what he perceives to be) the base principles used by the Ancient Greeks. He believes that mathematics as a field of study has been practiced almost exclusively by idiots for approximately the last two thousand years, or nine hundred, or a hundred and fifty (the exact time at which things went to shit seems to vary a lot; he rejects much of Euler and Fermat, but also calls Cantor "the father of all cranks") and claims that only he can understand numbers "properly".

Whenever a popular maths YouTube channel makes a video about infinity (see Numberphile on -1/12 or Vsauce on transfinite ordinals), there are inevitably people in the comments arguing that the video's premise is misleading, wrong, unnecessary or incoherent, or that the concept of doing mathematics with infinite sets is fundamentally invalid. Mr. Gabriel takes this finitist view to its logical extreme.

In his 152-page tirade against modern academia, he argues that any "infinite process" is outright unmathematical and should not be allowed; his definition of "infinite process" includes convergent limits, such as the unending decimal expansion required to express irrational numbers. A significant basis of his work is that irrationals like π and √2 are not numbers, but rather "constants" or "incommensurable magnitudes". Why this is a useful distinction, given that these "constants" behave like numbers in nearly every regard, is never explained. He additionally claims that 0 is not only not a number, but is "not even required at all in mathematics". He spends the entire first half of the book re-deriving all of arithmetic and algebra based entirely on principles of Euclidean geometry, while repeating, mantra-like, that only integer ratios are numbers and that anyone who claims otherwise is an ignorant buffoon. I wonder if he writes RPF of himself throwing Hippasus into the sea.

He has then taken this idiosyncratic worldview as a starting point from which to reinvent calculus.

He is straightforwardly wrong.

Mr. Gabriel frequently complains that his critics mindlessly hurl insults at him without seriously engaging with his work, so as a show of absurdly generous good faith I will engage with it now. Any fellow masochists reading this are invited to take a look at Mr. Gabriel's manuscript - specifically his demonstration of how to take a derivative without the use of limits - and try and figure out where the problem is.

Ignoring Mr. Gabriel's apparent inability to find the subscript button in Microsoft Word, he has taken an nth-degree polynomial (which could contain many terms), and transformed it into a single term of degree n-1. This, you will be astounded to learn, is not the correct result when taking the derivative of anything more complicated than f(x) = x^p. Notably, he never attempts to do this.

In fairness, the above demonstration is not actually the New Calculus. Mr. Gabriel explains that he has helpfully preceded his earth-shattering revelations with a less rigorous, more geometrically-derived formulation. I'm sure we'll get some real mathematics in a minute.

What we get is him complaining that the Encyclopaedia Britannica does not provide sufficient intuition for the work of Newton and Leibniz, before claiming that his New Calculus is "the first and only rigorous formulation of calculus in human history". He uses this exact phrasing (or nearly) at least four other times in his PDF; if he is unhappy with the Britannica, I might politely advise him to try reading Roget's Thesaurus instead.

Finally, on page 120 of 152, we are given an explanation of the epiphany to which the entire monograph has been building.

"Left as an exercise for the reader" is a phrase used by cowards (and to his credit, John Gabriel is not a coward), so I will point out the slight issue here: it is not possible to calculate values for m and n unless you already know the tangent slope. In his example of how to compute the derivative of sin(x), he expresses the function in its Taylor series form (so much for shunning infinite summations), and then simply replaces said series with the one for cos(x) without comment; he then manages to successfully determine his secant intersection values, and then calculates the value of the derivative function he just shoved into his pile of equations a few lines further up. Thus, his bafflingly circular logic is enabled almost invisibly.

This is it. This is all that this book is. John Gabriel's magnum opus, the thing he has been building up to for 119 pages amid paragraphs of bluster about the idiocy of irrationals and his own vaunted genius, is the ability to compute the derivative of a function as long as you know the derivative of the function. And as long as that derivative is not a zero found at one of the function's inflection points, because apparently that doesn't count as drawing a tangent line (for reasons that I'm sure are unrelated to the fact that Mr. Gabriel's secant method fails for such points).

I don't want to go deep into personal insults here - that's John Gabriel's job - but this is not useful mathematics. The logic is circular, the motivation is worthless, and it enables no new insights not already achievable with the current mainstream understanding of calculus. No statement is proven that has not already been shown to be true within the framework of Newton and Leibniz; there are only restatements of existing theorems based on the shaky-at-best logic of these new principles. So what is it for?

This is a question I kept coming back to while reading Mr. Gabriel's PDF. What is this for? What is gained by stubbornly insisting that π and e are not numbers, but rather "constants of incommensurate magnitude"? How does rejecting the usual definition of division as a multiplicative inverse in favour of some guff about "measuring in equal parts of an abstract unit" expand the horizons of mathematical knowledge? Of course, it doesn't.

John Gabriel, ultimately, is not important. There are thousands of other flat-earthers and similar grifters just as laughable as him, and to my knowledge there is roughly nobody who takes him seriously. (And if anyone does, the chance of some random guy on Tumblr convincing them otherwise is vanishingly small.) But I find his writing fascinating precisely because of the way in which he is wrong. He seems firmly rooted in the idea that mathematics is all discovery and no invention; that we can derive mathematical truths out of absolutely nothing. He rejects the notion of logical axioms as a starting point for derivation, instead seeking answers grounded in reality (by proxy, via "pure geometry"), and he is incensed when people ignore his demands.

But mathematics is not physics. Mathematical objects don't exist independent of their definitions, but they do exist independent of the real world. The rules of mathematics are defined by mathematicians only; if we want π to be a number, all we have to do is say "let π qualify as a number"; if we want to define an infinite sum as being equal to its limit, we can. If the rules disallow something, nobody can stop us picking different rules, reality be damned. John Gabriel has in fact done this too, even if he doesn't realise it - it's just that his starting axiom around which the rest of his theory is based is "I am the greatest mathematician in the world, and everyone who has come before me is a moron". I do not exaggerate when I say this; a pinned comment under one of his recent videos reads:

I, the GREAT JOHN GABRIEL explained why calculus works and I defined NUMBER correctly for the FIRST TIME in human history. For this, I am called a crank by your ignorant, incompetent and incorrigibly stupid mainstream math professors and teachers. I shall keep reminding students of your venom and your hatefulness towards me. You are vile, disgusting excuses for human beings. The longer you deny me as the greatest mathematician, the more shit will accumulate in your diapers.

If Mr. Gabriel objects to logical premises that are rooted in fiction, I have some suggestions for ideas he might want to discard.

[erbiumspectrum]

Subatomic particles from a chemist's point of view - part II: the proton

[part I: the electron]

Proton

In my subjective opinion, the runner-up in this informal ranking of subatomic particles that are important in chemistry. Protons may not form chemical bonds like electrons do, but they still play an important role in many chemical reactions, especially in organic chemistry. But their most meaningful task that places them right below the electron on my list is this: they quite literally define the elements.

Atomic number

Let’s put our Mendeleev hats on and have a look at the periodic table. Here, I’ll upload it for you so you don’t have to google it:

It doesn’t take a genius to realize the elements are compiled in an orderly fashion rather than a random one. What is the property that generates this order? You could say mass – that the elements are arranged by their increasing mass – but that’s not quite true.  Sure, most of the time it is true, but there’s a handful of oddballs that refuse to fit this scheme. Argon and potassium, for example: argon has a mass of 39,948 u (units) while potassium has a slightly lower mass of 39,098 u. The difference isn’t big, but nevertheless if we want to arrange our elements by mass, we have to place potassium underneath neon and argon underneath sodium.

Obviously, we can’t do that. The cool thing about the periodic table is that there are several trends encoded in it, one of them being that the elements of any given group are usually fairly similar to each other. Group 18, where argon normally resides, is reserved for noble gases that are extremely chill and not eager to react (they might’ve taught you in school that noble gases never ever react with anything ever; THAT’S A LIE! But it is true that their chemistry is scant and their reactions rare). Potassium could never fit in with them. Fucker explodes in water the same way sodium does – which is yet another proof it belongs in the same group! Also, COOL EXPLOSION HERE!

This isn’t the only such strange pair in the periodic table: cobalt and nickel are like that too, and so are tellurium and iodine. It isn’t much – but it’s enough that we have to look for some other physical property to define the order of the elements. For some time, chemists and physicists had to accept this discrepancy (not that they were happy about it; I imagine they’d wake up at night drenched in sweat, screaming, “GODFORSAKEN ARGON!”). The atomic number, this sort of ordinal number that put every element in its place, was actually random, as in, not based on any known physical property. Yeah, potassium has an atomic number of 19, but why?

ENTER HENRY MOSELEY!

Henry Moseley conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped various elements with X-rays (I’m so jealous), then analyzed the resulting emission spectra. It turned out that the atomic number is proportional to the square root of the emitted radiation, which in turn depends on the proton count in the nucleus. This is what defines any given element: the number of protons it has. This is THE definition, the one you learn very early in your chemistry journey. The number of neutrons may vary among the atoms of the same element (because isotopes) and atoms can gain or lose electrons by becoming ions, but that doesn’t turn them into different elements. Only the number of protons is always constant for one and the same chemical element.

Organic chemists love protons too

And for more than one reason at that – because hoo boy, does a proton stir some shit in ochem!

My ochem lab instructor pointed to the mechanism I’d written on my lab report once and asked, “What does the acid do in this reaction?”. Very plainly I said, “It’s a source of protons which act as a catalyst,” to which he gave me his standard shit-eating grin and said, “They all are.”

And he wasn’t wrong! If you analyze a bunch of organic reaction mechanisms then you’ll see they very often begin with a proton (so H+) attaching itself to the substrate (or a lone electron pair on the substrate to be precise, because Coulomb force, right?) and thus initiating a chain reaction of sorts that leads, frequently through many infuriating steps, to the product. Take a look at the synthesis of aspirin, for example:

[via wikipedia]

You don’t need to understand everything that happens here. What matters is this first step I circled: a proton attaches itself to one of the substrates and starts the whole reaction.

The second reason I have in mind for why organic chemists love protons is NMR: nuclear magnetic resonance. NMR is a method of instrumental analysis and it’s cool as all fucks actually (as long as you don’t have to analyze the spectra because what the heck are those spikes), but this post is about protons, not NMR, so here’s the gist: you put your organic sample in the NMR spectrometer. The spectrometer drenches your sample in a magnetic field (which is probably why small dogs with metallic collars aren’t advised in an NMR lab). The spins of the protons in your sample (yes, protons have spin too!) go wooo! and align themselves in a specific manner. The computer connected to the spectrometer spits out a spectrum that tells you what your sample looks like.

Properties of the proton

Charge: positive one elementary electric charge, the exact opposite of an electron (how convenient!): +1.602×10^(−19) C

Mass: 1.673 × 10^(-27) kg – which is roughly 1837 times the mass of an electron. I want you to say, "Whoa, that's a lot!" right now because shit, it really is! And that's a great thing, because it gives us cool stuff like the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.

Radius: 0.841 fm (femtometers), but make no mistake: just like electrons, protons abide by the wave-particle duality, because they hate us all. I just remembered when my quantum chem professor told us during a lecture that even buckminsterfullerenes exhibit wave-particle duality. These are molecules made up of 60 carbon atoms. Sixty carbon atoms!! I almost cried, but I was sitting in the front, so I had to compose myself.

[ryin-silverfish]

What are monks and what do they do?

are they religious leaders like priest or are they schoolers or something else?

How did someone become a monk in ancient times? Was it a boys only position? Could just anybody become a monk or did you have to do something or be something to qualify?

By monk, I assume you mean "Buddhist monks"?

Well, they are members of the Sangha, one of the "Three Jewels" (三宝) of Buddhism, which consists of the Buddha, the Dharma (Buddhist Teachings), and the Monastic Community.

(Once again, I can only talk about Mahayana Buddhist monks in imperial China. If you want more info, I recommend talking to an actual Buddhist.)

Usually, when we say "monk" (僧/和尚), we don't just mean "adherents of the Buddhist religion", since you can offer incense at a temple, copy sutras, or have a statue of Bodhisattva Guan Yin on your private altar without becoming a monk.

These are people who 1) have gone through the relevant ordination rites and swear to abide by a set of religious vows, and 2) are part of a monastic community.

In other words, they are "cloistered" (出家人), leaving their home to learn and practice their religion in a temple, as opposed to lay practitioners (在家人) who carry out their religious activities in daily life.

And no, it's not a boy-only position——there are plenty of Buddhist nuns (比丘尼/尼姑) too.

Officially, to become a monk, you need to leave your worldly life behind. Which means, if your parents are still alive, you need to get their permission, if you are a court official, you need to quit your job, and if you are married, well, you cannot remain married.

Also, living in a monastic community means you were no longer considered viable for conscripted labor or taxation, and temples owned private lands, the increase of which could, well, depriving the imperial court of available land.

(This is one main motivation for historical prosecutions of Buddhism by certain emperors: the seizing of temple property + returning the monks and nuns back into the taxable population.)

As such, the imperial court tended to keep a firm control on the number of monks and the size of the temple. Basically, you need an official permit (度牒) from the state too, given out to each temple by the officials, and the monks didn't have the authority to make you one of their own in private.

Those who have committed one of the five grave crimes——killing their father, killing their mother, killing an arhat, destroying the unity of the monastic community, and "wounding the Buddha"——cannot become a monk either.

The most visible change one must make is shaving their head, like, entirely bald.

Those above the age of 7 but under 20 can become monks-in-training, called 沙弥/沙弥尼, but not formal member of the clergy because they are still considered too young to endure the physical and mental hardships.

(Similarly, adults who seek to become a formal monk must also pass through this training stage first.)

An aspiring monk, after receiving his permit, must first find a respectable monk, answer a series of questions that assess his fitness for monastic life, pay his respect to the Buddha and the monks of the temple he's joining, then becomes the disciple of one of those monks.

One monk will shave his head and bath him, while his master clothes him in his monk robes. Then, on the next day, he will receive his ordinations inside a temple hall, in front of the entire community, where he recites the monastic percepts (read: rules a monk must follow) and agrees to abide by them.

At this point, he has become a monk-in-training, which is a prerequiste stage for formal monk ordination, 比丘戒.

Usually, the latter ceremony is carried out at an actual altar, and the candidate must have already bought the "six necessasities" of monkhood ——three sets of robes, almsbowl, sitting cushion, and water container.

In Chinese Buddhism post-Yuan dynasty, the ordination rites may also include using burning incense sticks to leave a bunch of little marks (usually 12) onto one's head.

(Source: 《中国古代僧人生活》)

[hadleysmis]

One of the things I didn't expect to find myself in while going down a semi-deep search of Les Misérables adaptations, was to find myself having been fooled by obvious British propaganda. Of course with this revelation, I have to undo its damage by educating myself, but more importantly, this is about the portrayal of the Quit India Movement (1942-5) from Kundan, released in 1955.

I know many of the people who interact with me online are not British (lucky you), I do want to explain what the misleading education is for us in the education system: no mention of India.

When we talk about the British Empire, it was very brief and not a proper topic to be questioned on, etc. Of course, with this knowledge of the gigantic holes in education, one wouldn't be surprised to know that we were not officially taught of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. (We also weren't taught of other countries under the Empire.)

One of the very few things we were given were quotes from leaders who 'liberated' India, by saying that the British were so moved by the peaceful protests, that we let them go. This is harmful thinking, and obviously not true.

For the longest time, I thought the way it was phrased was wrong and that the leaders were racists still; however I never questioned the contents of the words. That yes indeed it was a completely peaceful protest (with no civil disobedience either), and only from watching a Hindi movie about the protest movement was I able to find out that this was way further from the truth than I imagined.

There were fights, guns, smokes, arson, flogging: violence. It was a protest. A successful protest which violence played a role in.

India fought long, and very long they officially fought and argued with the Brits for better treatment, and they fought hard. That's something I will try not let swept under the rug. (Not to mention that the Empire stole tens of trillions of pounds from India and then subsequently fractured the country.)

It's art like these which wakes people up from propaganda. Art is also educational.

I know this can be frustrating (and obvious in its conclusion) to read this post if you knew about basic recent Indian history, but I am truly trying to learn and undo the colonial mindset that I was brought up in when I moved to England. I've linked sources for others like me who may not have encountered educational materials surrounding the Quit India Movement, so if anyone is interested, click the 'keep reading' button.

Anyways, if you know me you already know Kundan is my favourite on-screen adaptation of Les Misérables; but jic this reaches to people outside of my small audience in a big stroke of luck, then yeah, I want to reiterate that this adaptation is goated. Have a nice day, everybody.

Have a read:

https://southasia.ucla.edu/history-politics/gandhi/quit-india/

"Women were prominent in the Quit India Movement that began in 1942. When the movement spread to the countryside, large number of peasant women joined men in protesting taxes, land tenure, and landholder's rights. At the end of September 1942, peasants attacked police stations and destroyed telegraph lines in four sub-divisions of Medinipur district. When people of Tamluk sub-division marched on the town, Matangini Hazra, a 73-year old widow, stepped forward, lifted the Congress flag, and gave her first public speech. She was shot first in the hand holding the flag and then in the head.

Two Bengali women, Aruna Ganguli Asaf Ali (1909-1996) and Sucheta Mazumdar Kripalani (1908-1974), both domiciled in other parts of the country, became all-India leaders in this movement. In 1942 Aruna Asaf Ali went underground to organise the resistance and hinder the war effort. Sucheta Kripalani also went into hiding in 1942, but she worked to co-ordinate non-violent activity to bring the government to a standstill.

The Bengal Famine of 1943-1944 caused the death of at least 3.5 million people and the impoverishment and dislocation of millions more. Women who previously earned a living by husking paddy or trading in the local market were deprived of their incomes. In addition to food shortages, women faced sexual harassment when they sought employment or help from relief centres. During the famine years, women were visible both as victims and activists. Starving women begged for food in public places, while middle-class women worked to provide relief." -Banglapedia, titled 'Women'

Kundan:

[virgoanmaenad]

WHOO tysm!! brains are so weird and cool dksjdjskds (i mean this in the best way possible im a well meaning nerd i promise) :DDDDDDD

what kind of synesthesia do u have?

how/ when did u first learn about it!

depending on the kind u have lol do u have any fave associations (songs, names, numbers..) if thats the right word for it

anything you wish is more common knowledge?

fave thing about synesthesia

least favourite thing also :')

can i ask follow up questions after this also jfdksjd

1. I have Associative Synesthesia (which is feeling a very strong and involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.) Someone with the more commonly known projective synesthesia would actually see something caused by a stimulus. I feel a strong connection between the stimulus and the sense.

As to what my synesthesia entails I have two types: Grapheme-color Synesthesia (seeing numbers/letters and feeling a sense) and Ordinal Linguistic Personification (personifying ordered sequences like months or weekdays).

2. I discovered synesthesia as a whole when Fall Out Boy’s album ‘Mania’ came out in 2018. Their lead singer has synesthesia and I looked into, did a little research and figured out I had it! I thought everyone associated or felt certain things/ways with numbers and stuff!

3. 2 and 14 are my favorite numbers because they look so pretty. 2 reminds me of apple blossoms, pinky-reds, and blue skies. 14 is peachy and bright.

4. 631 (which is a number associated with where I live so I see it often) is kinda ugly to me. Swampy and uneven, kinda dripping too, maybe slimy? It’s unpleasant and a shame I see it so much lol.

5. Of course! I am an open book, feel free so ask me anything!!!