#listen i know its mixing metaphor with something more literal but i don't give a shit

[watercolourcritters]

i’ve been having a lot of thoughts about hunger and love

[ID: an illustrated hand written poem that reads:

they say “love makes you hungry” they say “it hollows you out leaves a pit in your stomach makes you ravenous”

I say “that’s alright - I know how to bake bread and make soup and peel oranges, segment each piece for us to share.”

“I know how to feed someone,” I say. my kitchen is always open and there is space for you to come in.

A watercolour and ink illustration below the poem shows a bowl of steaming butternut squash soup. The bowl is brown with grey flowers, the soup is orange, and the steam curls up around the words of the poem. The artistic style is loose and a bit sketchy, with thick lines drawn in ink. Similarly, the handwriting of the poem is a bit of a scrawl.

The artist’s signature reads h. graves. End ID.]

[ineedahugesticktobeatyou]

RNM 4x11

Am I the only one thinking that emotions could have run a little higher? No? Just me? I mean, I was hoping for a little less controlled relief and a bit more of a visceral reaction at the moment of the Malex's reunion. Even the prospect of Alex dying didn't arise the reaction I was expecting. I don't know, I can understand Alex's resignation and the urgency of his actions, but where was the panic on the other side of the news? I mean, let Michael freak the f**k out first and then rein in his emotions. Instead, it was all so controlled. All the gravity of the situation was in Alex's face and in his trembling words, the rest fell flat for me. But, in all honesty, the entire season has been emotionally lacking so far, with every possible emotional beat no meeting its full potential, not even once (or completely missing the mark in some cases).

It's a shame, because it could have been better and this is something that is on the writers and the writers alone. They chose how to handle Alex's absence on screen, how to pace the whole thing, how to use - again and again - the same old conflicts for Max and Liz, how many new characters to throw in the mix and how much time to spend on them. I can go on, but I think it's enough to underline, again, that the criticisms of the writers are justified. I can be a fan of the show, have a favorite, be well aware that there are real, important reasons for his absence and still be upset by it, even more if it is not handled well. And this was not a well handled absence, let's be honest. Again, it could have been better or, at least, we could have had the suspance and urgency this storyline deserved and that were nowhere to be found.

And now, with the disappointment out of the way, a couple of random thoughts on the episode. 

It pleased me no end seeing Alex's resourcefulness on display, the proud smile when his trap worked. He is smart and capable and I love when the show remembers it. 

I loved the proposal, the way Michael said yes, his happy little laugh. Beautiful! I still think it is a rushed decision and, I mean, Alex is dying at the moment, so, literally and canonically it's a "we are running out of time" thing (yes, that last scene got me in my feelings). But I'm at a point where I'm on board with everything that makes Alex happy, so, let's go get them married. After they save Alex, of course. Or they can have two weddings, before and after, in and out of the pocket dimension. I'm not picky at this point. 

Another moment that I loved was the bit before Rosa's mindscape, with her wedging herself between Kyle and Isobel! They were perfect, all three of them 😂 I'm team Kyle, so I hope he will listen and make another move 'cause the moment is right. He just needs to trust what he feels. 

Echo, on the other hand, continues to tell me nothing, apart from annoying me with this turquoise metaphor. It has never been their thing and every time it comes up, all I can think is that it's something stolen from Malex.

Two more episodes, RNM, give me the more cliché, tropey, imperfect and impromptu happy ending you are capable of, I'm ready! I will love it, with all of my disappointed self. 

[lilmissbacon]

Frozen 3 concept

I'mma start off with explaining that I'm not the biggest fan of Frozen and I'm definitely not a fan of Elsa's character in general.

But as much as I love the songs and outfits of the second movie, the inconsistencies and how it never explains how sh🤬 works in the world with magic and such are just infuriating. As well as why the spirit that connects them controls ice which is just a variation of water. And how the Frozen franchise just loves to make Elsa more special within every installment.

I am so very tired of it. So I came up with a way that it could all be fixed and make sense if they make a third movie.

Also to note that Anna and Elsa are supposed to be two halves of the fifth spirit but that's VERY briefly touched in movie (quote: well actually a bridge has two sides and mother had two daughters) and Disney themselves take Elsa as the fifth spirit alone so that's stupid.

Why Elsa specifically controls ice

We all know how we're frustrated with the fact that Elsa is supposed to connect all the elements when she only controls ice.

But let's think about it from another prospective. The first movie is based about the seasons. It's a seasonal theme rather than an elemental theme like in its sequel. So why not bring that back?

The enchanted forest cannot be the ONLY place that has mystical spirits. What if there were three other forests with their own fifth spirits and each fifth spirit represented a season?

And each seasonal spirit's magic is a mix of two elements.

Elsa/Winter: Ice = water + air

Spring: Plants = water + earth

Summer: Lava = earth + fire

Fall: Lightning/Storms = air + fire

This still fits in with the fact that the fifth spirit can play back moments in time as well. Each spirit has their own Ahtohallan. Elsa's is made of ice because it's just frozen water and the water is was plays back those moments in time.

Spring's would be like an island made of plants, fungi and marsh. Plants have water running within them so they can take the form of moments in time like Elsa's ice statues.

Summer's would be a volcano with a river flowing through it. Lava and water can mix to create lava rocks. When doing so the memories within that water would be imbedded into the rocks they form and therefore be able to play moments in time as rock statues.

Autumn's would basically be a fog bank with almost ghostly figures making up the memories since fog is a mist, aka: water. Kinda like the scene where Elsa fights the wind spirit and their powers mix for a moment.

Where the others come from

For this, I decided to look around other lands within that side of the world that has legends of spirits. I decided upon:

Spring = Scotland

Summer = Arabia

Fall/Autumn = Japan

I chose for Arabia to be summer, of course , because it's a desert country so it very hot. Japan is autumn because it's culture and everything just always reminded be of the beauty of fall. And Scotland is spring because that's what was left and when I think of Scotland, I think of it's green forests and plants.

Nothing too deep.

Personalities

You think I'd make Summer hotheaded and spring, giddy and bouncy, right?

No, because you see, as I've stated in another post of mine; Why Frozen Doesn't Work In The Big Four, I explained how Elsa's personality reconciles more with summer. The opposite season of her own.

Elsa is kinda quiet, gentle, diplomatic, practical, worries silently and is angelically innocent (even though she doesn't deserve to be).

All are traits relating to summer. So if her personality is opposed to her season, then it'd be the same for the other fifth spirits.

Spring would be a leader, confident, energetic, true to a cause, dependable, easily irritated and stubborn.

Summer would be reserved, well mannered, a good listener, natural poise and pessimistic.

And autumn would be energetic, tender-hearted, optimistic, friendly and overly talkative.

How the spirits work

I fully believe that the spirits have no physical form but rather inhabit certain things. Basically possession but the spirits don't have control over themselves once they choose a vessel and depending on the solidarity of what their element is, determines what kind of vessel they need.

The wind spirit is said to be a playful spirit and would want to make its own choices. Being an element you can't hold, it doesn't really need a host.

Water is liquid and needs something to be it's host but doesn't necessarily need something alive. Therefore it can inhabit a small animal or it inhabits its own element, hence a water horse.

Fire isn't a solid or liquid but it's not necessarily a gas either. Fire always needs to burn on something in order to burn. Therefore it cannot just make out it's own body like water but it doesn't need a large vessel. Hence, a little salamander.

Earth is the most solid of them all so it would need multiple hosts in order to sustain itself. That's why there are multiple earth giants and not just one like the other spirits.

I believe the spirits don't have control over their actions once they choose a host because all the spirits (besides wind) seem to not know what's even going on most of the time. And that would explain why the spirits didn't get rid of the dam themselves, because their vessels didn't know that was the problem.

I also believe that they need a host to begin with because they are actually susceptible to death. As it has been confirmed that Elsa is NOT immortal and there wouldn't have been a legend of a fifth spirit if people hadn't seen one before.

It would also explain how the spirits drove the citizens out of Arendelle without physically being there; they managed to leave their hosts for a time in order to do so. Along with what the light that Elsa was following at Ahtohallan, was. The fifth spirit was able to sustain itself by staying in its birth place and activated the memory of Elsa's mom singing, to bring Elsa there and when Elsa's dress transforms is when the spirit possesses her.

Why does the fifth spirit need to be human? Because humans are more durable. The fifth spirit doesn't control anything completely solid like rock so it doesn't need multiple vessels but it also controls more than a single element, therefore is too much to figure out/control for just any animal.

That's why it chose a very young child to give it's powers to rather than the person who actually did the deed of saving their enemy. It needs to be someone who will have the time to learn and control their powers by adulthood.

(Despite Elsa not truly being worthy and being a horrible sister, she was already chosen at birth and she at least gets the job done. At everyone else's expense but still.)

Plot

How would the seasonal spirits meet? Why would they leave their homes for this? What brings them together?

The four sided snowflake represents the elements connected to the winter spirit. Every season would have their own version of this. But there are also four seasons just like there are four elements.

So, could there be a fifth spirit for the fifth spirits? A fifth spirit to connect the seasons and if so, what is it? What's their power?

I believe, much like the winter spirit called to Elsa, the ultimate fifth spirit will call all the seasonal spirit's to come together at a single location. Anna would come with Elsa as well, of course, and during their journey, they'd all eventually meet each other along the way.

Eventually Anna would start to feel a little neglected when Elsa keeps talking to / about the other people who also have magic. Anna doesn't wish for magic, but she wishes for Elsa to finally see herself and Anna as equals (because Elsa clearly wouldn't after finding others like herself, let's be real). So Anna goes off to have her own sort of "Show Yourself" moment and is the one to find the location they've been looking for which is where she becomes their fifth spirit; the Aurora Borealis.

It was in one of the original scripts for the first movie that Anna was gonna have the power to control the Aurora Borealis, but then the creators decided that took away from Elsa's agency for self isolation due to her powers.

It's true that Anna having been able to accomplish what she did without powers is one of her best attributes but Anna becoming the light spirit is really the only way she's gonna get any appreciation within the fan base or the disney community. Plus Anna's done all the work to begin with so she deserves it.

With the other spirits being seasonal & elemental, it would only make sense for the one to connect them all would be light.

But all the spirits also have an opposite to balance them out:

Fire | Water

Earth | Air

Winter | Summer

Spring | Autumn

So maybe the reason they were all being called there is because Light's opposite is Darkness and it's plotting to take them all out. They are in charge of keeping balance and darkness wants to create chaos. But you also need darkness for balance, so maybe someone else will be with them through the journey and become the vessel for darkness in order to control it. Because, again, spirits have no control once they have a host.

This could be a possible redemption arc for Hans. We could learn about what he's been through and what truly drove him to be the bad guy because from what we know of his brothers, they were really bad. I think he just really lost a nerve due to unintentional (or intentional) abuse and was trying to prove to his family that he was better than they believed. People who suffer from abuse can be irrational like that.

I think it would be a phenomenal thing for him to overcome his inner darkness while also taking control of the literal spirit of darkness.

Metaphorical-wise it's beautiful.

Art/Designs

I edited the other seasons + Anna off of concept art for Elsa's white dress while Hans is kinda my own creation but I still used his concept art for a base. Everything after that are purely original.

Location they are led to ⬇️

Let me know what you all think 👍

[jinruihokankeikaku]

"Communicating Doors" by The Extra Lens (John S. Darnielle and Franklin Bruno)

A somewhat close reading that got a bit out of hand, because I couldn't find any interpretations of this song online. First, the song in question -

Campaign down from Atlanta Five-hour drive to the coast...

So here's our establishing shot. We establish the setting - somewhere on the Atlantic or Gulf coast in the Deep South - Jacksonville, Destin, Pensacola, Mobile, Panama City, and Charleston/Folly/Sullivan's Island are all possibilities. But what really stands out about this line, and sets the tone for the song as a whole, is the usage of "campaign" - a protracted venture to establish political or military control. The narrator is on a mission. They're struggling against some kind of opposing force.

...brought whatever we thought we'd need To pierce the skin of a ghost.

So the extreme ambiguity here is deliberate; it's a device JD uses fairly often, usually to comic (or at least tragicomic) effect. The narrator's deflecting, ensconcing the truth in what seems at first a slightly awkward metaphor (do ghosts even have skin?) to avoid the shame or embarrassment of saying it in so many words (despite the fact that he seems to assume we already know what he's referring to). So what exactly is the narrator referring to here? This becomes...slightly more clear as the story develops, but here we get an important hint both as to whatever "whatever" may be, and as to the object of the narrator's campaign.

In JD's oeuvre, ghosts show up quite often indeed, and this isn't even the only time they appear to be less-ghostly than they seem - for example, in "The Young Thousands", "ghosts...are prepared to take on substance...[and] have been learning how to breathe," and in the unreleased "We Shall All Be Healed (Rose Quarter Drifting)" a ghost is referred to as having once been able to "bite" the narrator. An outtake from Get Lonely, "Keeping House", establishes this as explicitly and as matter-of-factly as anything, and several times over - "Cursing the moment that saw him draw breath / The ghost on your doorstep is starving to death.... [S]oaked wet with rain...he clutches his stomach / And howls at the pain.... [T]he ghost on your doorstep has to eat / Same as you." This example makes it clear that the ghost in question is a bodily thing, and that the narrator and his newly introduced cohort(?) mean to do it bodily harm.

What makes a ghost a ghost, then, if it's still breathing, still hungry, still contained within fragile skin? A few vague ideas come to mind, but as the narrative presses forward, a more clearly defined notion of ghostliness begins to take form.

Left your car at the hotel, rode up seventeen floors And checked ourselves into separate rooms With communicating doors.

So, there's the titular refrain. Before we unpack the really interesting part - that is to say, the character of the relationship between our narrator and his companion - it's probably important to establish what the term "communicating doors" could be referring to. I had a vague idea, but I wanted confirmation, so I searched the Web - and was rather surprised to find little in the way of architectural jargon, and a whole lot in the way of articles on a 1994 stage play of the same title, written by Alan Ayckbourn, which - without derailing this post even further - seems to be a sex-comedy slash farce slash thriller, set - perhaps notably - in a hotel suite that travels through time. Now, to be clear, I have no idea if John Darnielle and/or Franklin Bruno had even heard of this production, and it would be a stretch further still to suggest that they were inspired by it - it premiered in England and seems to have received little recognition beyond three sentences on Wikipedia and a number of (mixed) reviews. However, the play predates the song by over 25 years, and is the first thing that shows up when one enters "communicating doors" into one's search engine so, like, make of that what you will.

Incidentally, the term "communicating door(s)" doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page of its own, or even a dictionary entry. However, a trip to the StackExchange "English" forum proved that I was not the only one asking this question! There were several answers presented, with the common consensus seeming to be that a communicating door is any door between two rooms, among which rooms neither was a corridor, antechamber, hallway, or other common/shared space. They're sharing a suite and a car, but they're staying in separate rooms. This ghost-hunting partnership is strictly business, I guess...

....and that brings us back to the question of what the deal with ghosts is. Our protagonists (deuteragonists?) want to harm it physically, which is something that - if the rest of JD's body of work is to be believed, can be done to a ghost. The ghost's not dead. It's not spiritual, divine, or even especially ephemeral. If we assume that its description precludes its being a literal lingering mortal soul, we might need, then, to return to other ghosts that haunt the discography of them Goats et alia. A brief overview of the mentions of ghosts in the Kyle Barbour's The Annotated Mountain Goats, which covers the vast majority of John Darnielle's public songwriting between the early 90's and the mid-2010's, suggests that ghosts are typically - but not always - difficult or painful to interact with, and in many cases are actively malevolent. They haunt not only former / temporary domiciles (see "Genesis 3:23", "We Shall All Be Healed", "The Young Thousands"), and doorways (communicating or no) (besides the song currently on the dissection tray, see "Keeping House") but also dreams and traumatic memories, sometimes even in "armies....numbers far too high to measure" (see Tallahassee's "Idylls of the King" and All Eternals Deck's "Outer Scorpion Squadron"). The common thread here is, of course, liminality: an old apartment, a hotel suite, an illicitly infiltrated childhood home, and the depths of troubled sleep are all points of transition, places one has left or is soon to be leaving. Ghosts - living, breathing, and hungrily biting as they may be - are remains, artefacts, vestiges lifted out of time. With that in mind, let's return to our narrator's campaign.

Lay on top of the covers, turn the fan up to full Chase a memory around my head - silver satin, and wool. Close the bar at the harbor, say goodnight in the hall Smash the lock with a midnight knock - and the rest I don't recall.

That seems to have escalated rather quickly. The narrator tries to cool off, both literally and figuratively, because it gets hot down here. Once alone, he continue his pursuit of "a memory" which is, if not identical to the "ghost" in question, almost certainly a sort of synecdoche for it. After an unspecified length of time in futile pursuit, he comes up with only a few disjointed shocks of fabric. Sheets, perhaps, which might seem like ghosts from a great distance- you see where I'm going with this. He comes up empty-handed, give or take, and reunites with his companion at a bar down by the Harbor (this is totally me projecting, but I want to believe that this reinforces my theory that it could be Charleston, a city known for having one of those). They stay there - presumably arming themselves for the hunt - until they are politely asked to not stay there anymore and leave without any quarrel whatsoever, I'm sure. They make it back to their suite more or less intact, return to their respective rooms from the hall (which is to say, through strictly non-communicating doors), whereupon - true to JD-narratorial-form, he recalls only "smashing the lock" on the titular doors before we fade to black by way of Franklin Bruno's delightfully jaunty instrumental bridge. (And...scene.)

When our narrator's anterograde amnesia abates, we return with a final verse and another establishing shot, perhaps from a balcony 17 stories above the harbor:

Stones rise out of the water; water eats at the stones. I know people who dig up graves Just to label the bones. All that poison we swallowed, seeping out through the pores And floating over the transoms Of communicating doors.

The particular significance of the water, and the stones rising out of it, is of course open to any number of interpretations, or none at all. However, I do think it's worth noting that the opening line in this verse is the only line in the song to describe the natural world. It's stated directly and impersonally, as though the curtains have pulled back to expose something primal and eternal. On this brief threshold between oblivion and wakefulness, the narrator is experiencing a moment of enlightenment and/or disillusionment. He witnesses the Earth eating itself from high above, and then returns abruptly to his internal monologue (though in this verse, of course, he could as well be addressing his companion as could he the listener).

The narrator's return from liminal clarity, the passing of the moment at which the veil between the ghosts and the rest of us is "pierced", is evidenced by his abrupt change in tone in the following line. He re-asserts is subjectivity twice, here, in one line - first by stating for the record that he "knows people" (of which people he is not one), establishing a degree of separation between himself and what he's about to say, and second by returning to his original evasive metaphorical conceit - which conceit is, of course, now totally transparent to the listener. These guys he happens to know "...dig up graves / Just to label the bones." The fact that he's not, of course, just referring to some guys he happens to know, is evidenced by the fact that the two (marginally) distinct euphemisms he uses - "piercing the skin of a ghost" and "digging up graves" are both idiomatic stand-ins for the same process - that of "chasing down [memories]", of reaching bodily into the past. The only difference here is that, in the final verse, he admits that he knows why "people" do this - something he'd been hitherto unable or unwilling to do. He knows the motivations of the people he's referring to - and he provides no evidence, because he doesn't need to. Both he and the person he's now addressing, presumably from within the same room, know what he's talking about.

Sometimes it becomes necessary - or, at the very least, comes to feel necessary to label the past, to classify it, because a memory without context is a frightening, saddening, and confusing thing. A memory without context is a hungry ghost, "scanning the hallways nightly....searching for a sign." And just as the rising tide, over millennia, eats away at stone, the things one doesn't understand about one's own past add up, eroding - first imperceptibly, then catastrophically - the terra firma of one's identity in the present.

"But," - to borrow a quote from "Going to Marrakesh" another, earlier Darnielle-Bruno collaboration - "it's not right, and it's not nice / to try to kill the same thing twice." As our narrator and his companion are sweating out the poison, imagining that all that's toxic within themselves drifting away, over the transom, across the threshold to another place and time - the question of the ghost's whereabouts remains unanswered. As is the case with so many of John S. Darnielle's stories, we, the listeners, don't know what happens next. We don't know what ghosts yet haunt our narrator. The narrator probably doesn't either. So it goes.

~~~

[skyblue-369]

When it rains, flowers bloom

A little disclaimer before starting: I know what you're thinking. I know it doesn't look so good. I'm not an artist (or a writer lmao), I just wanted to give a general idea of how I designed the character. Remember! Criticism is acceptable, just be polite.

(I'd like to put a "read more" link on the tunblr app but I can't. If anyone reading this knows how, I'll appreciate your help.)

Plus, bonus gif at the end of the post ⬇️

Word count: 1341

"Be one of you? A member of your superhero team or something?" asked the blonde girl, finally sitting on a cut tree trunk, because at the moment all of her energy had to be switched from her limbs to her thoughts. In her mindset it was already confusing that someone had broken her daily routine. Surely accidents happened before, like the time some ravens started chasing her because her hair looked like a nest, or the time she believed covering in mud was the perfect idea to become invisible at night and almost got caught. As i said, accidents happened, but never on this level.

Moreover, those six kids were offering her to change life nonchalantly, and she didn't know if she had the strenght to do it, not again. Although living for three years in a cave all by yourself can make you crave some company, Maria wasn't sure if becoming a superhero was the right path to take. It sounded weird in her head.

<p/>"I'd prefer to use the term family."

Luckily, Ben giggled at the comment and added a clarification that would make her change point of view. "Family" was the magic word because, at the end, wasn't it everything she ever wanted?

"Wait, so they are brothers? How? Oh wait, adoption...An orphan that doesn't know siblings don't always look the same. How ironic."

Just the idea of a family, of a mum, a dad, and brothers and sisters that couldn't be afraid or jealous of her was more than tempting.

She could tolerate to use her powers more often if it meant that her reward was love.

However, the sparkle in her eyes was blown away very soon. It seemed clear that the Hargreeves had different opinions on the matter.

For example Diego, who was standing far from her until now, snapped and pointed his finger so sharply against the girl that he could almost stab her. Maybe because he was literally holding a knife in said hand.

"Wait! Wait! Wait! Not everybody agreed on this! We're already full of problems, don't you think? We don't need to add another weird kid to the list."

"He's saying that as if he wasn't one." Maria mumbled glancing at the only other girl in the room. She would rather speak Italian in order not to be understood, but there she believed she was in good faith because she wasn't mocking, just explaining her misunderstanding to Allison.

"Stop behaving like a jerk, Diego." Three caught the signal and replied, while getting off the table to protect the blondie, almost covering her view. Obviously One had to join the discussion. In fact, as Number Seven will explain to her the next day in the comfy living room of the mansion, Two's rage acts like a tornado. It is sudden and aggressive and destroys everything around it, especially Luther's patience. Moreover, It looked like One shared the same brain as his sister because they tend to agree on anything, but this time Luther's way of laying out words only made her facepalm.

"I don't know you, but for all of my childhood I had been wondering if other people with our kind of abilities even existed. Now that we found one, the least we can do is report her to Father."

"Are you listening to yourself, Luther? What childhood? If Father lays his hands on her, he'll make her suffer as he did with us, treating her like some sort of machine. We're doing her a favour."

The air was becoming thicker, both metaphorically and literally. The cave already had a little airflow owing to the fact that the entrance had to be hidden by two doors, which were a layer of plants and a sheet of iron.

Maria felt her breath even heavier. It was the first conversation when she wasn't just staring from afar since a long time. She wasn't used to talking, let alone arguing. She wanted to light the mood but didn't know how, and tried to find advice in Ben's eyes, still in contact with hers.

"Don't want to interrupt you guys or something, but shouldn't we be asking her? Anyway honey, how can you not get your boobs stuck into this thing? Tell me your secret!"

Who could tell that the miracle could reside in the only person who didn't speak a single syllable in the whole fight, if we count that Five was muttering to himself!

That kind soul of Klaus was laying on his stomach on the girl's floating bed, that wasn't so practical to sleep in. What would you expect from a net, "purchased" by some gentle fishermen, attached to the roof of the cave and decorated with some pillows?

In fact, the boy was having fun tracing the outline of its holes, while gazing at Maria through one of them.

The poor girl was trying to cover her almost flat chest with her arms, her blush fading into the orange light of the candles. Everybody seemed to empathize with her embarassment and fell into silence for a second.

"Not that she can really choose, Klaus. Tell me, how long did you think you could live like this?" Five was too serious to get distracted from his brother's nonsense and actually heard his only logical sentence.

"Scostumato (Rude)! You have no idea how many things I had to steal just to give some colour to this room!" finally Maria managed to talk back and wanted to approach that old-young man. On the other side, Five's eyes were moving around so fast to analyze every piece of furniture, but could never stop to look at the blondie.

That's the change of subject that the "rescue team" needed to shot the final question.

"So what do you say? Wanna come?" almost sang Ben to sound more convincing, causing Four to laugh a little.

Maria told them without any frills how amazing it would have been to join them.

"I'd like to, but I respect every opinion, even Diego's..." these were her words.

They didn't show the complete truth, she was just being polite.

"Don't listen to him, he's always so grumpy." Allison tried to calm her down, while glancing at Number Two, who was already stepping outside.

"I'm going. Reach me when you finish this puppet show." he growled, right before putting in act his dramatic exit.

He was just moving the door when his hand was caught by Maria's.

"Where do you think you're going? We're deep in the forest, you'd get lost for sure." she gave him a lovable smile, mixed of concern and satisfaction, which made Diego freeze subtly. He felt trapped by some memories.

This allowed the girl to pass him, make a little turn and march backwards to see if everything was at its place.

"You have to go to the main road, right? Let me guide you myself! And can the last one who comes out turn the candles off, please? We don't want to start a fire."

One at a time, they all passed around the little lake avoiding to step into the water.

The only exception was for Klaus, who didn't care about the waterfall when he ran to the others. Turning off the lights didn't take a lot, he was just stealing a jar full of suspicious herbs.

"So, what's the verdict, my partner in crime?" he asked, hugging Ben from behind.

"I'll take it as a yes..."

"Welcome to our dysfunctional family, honey!" he shouted, as on the other side of the line the blonde girl crawled a little on herself, putting her arms around her waist. A golden tear fell straight to the ground, giving birth to a daisy.

She was leaving that place as if she just slept there for a night. She's never had a connection with it, really. The only thing that attracted her was the beauty of nature, which could be found everywhere. And then, all the good memories she wanted to keep were already treasured in her blue t-shirt.

Preparing to get childhood traumas with the Hargreeves be like:

(Kiernan Shipka looks so cute in this I can't)