#look me in the eye and tell me you can differentiate them based on silhouette alone

[aspenous]

Korean Manwha has such a issue with same face/body syndrome when it comes to women it aint funny anymore 😭

[lideria]

Wayfaring. | Winter.

➥ characters: genderneutral!reader, mark, johnny, jaehyun, yuta, taeyong, haechan; to be added

➥ genre: apocalyptic!au (apocalypse based on the game “the last of us”), very much angsty, kind of action-y, sad, sometimes fluff 

➥ warnings: violent themes, blood&gore (detailed depictions), gun use, mentions of killing/m*rder, mentions of s*icide, depictions of corpses, swearing, zombies ofc, i would like to guess that that’s it but please contact me if there is anything i need to add, and as always English is not my first language so if there are any errors, please excuse me!

➥ word count: 19.3k

➥ summary: every little thing you had, had been built and preserved in the pool of nothingness. and now, you lost it all.

➥ author’s note: !!PLEASE READ!! hoping after all this time that i’ve not posted this doesn’t get taken off the tags. after much thinking i decided to make this big story a series, because i’m pretty positive the overall product will be over 60k words. this is the 1st part and there will be 3 parts. to make it a bit more meaningful, i’ll be releasing the winter part now (in winter for where i live), spring part in mid-spring (possibly around april), and summer in again, around mid-summer. the playlist will also be revealed then. i am hungry for feedback, any and all is much appreciated! also, i’m not over tlou still haha fu- there’s also going to be a taglist since the updates will be so slow, so please drop by my asks if you like it and i’ll gladly add you to the taglist!

➥ taglist: @nct-writers

i hope everyone enjoys this, have a great morning/day/evening/night!

The night was freezing cold.

You walk through the streets of a mix of stone and wooden buildings, lights mostly dim because of the scarce population. Most of the people were at the city square. They were laughing and dancing the night away as groups of people sang for them with the old, occupied instruments that belonged to who-knows-who all those years ago when all of this first started. ‘This’ as in survival of the fittest, as some would say. And from what science could explain, a fungal infection that took over the brain and body that eats away at your tissues until it has completely taken over your motor functions and skin, and can spread its spores to others freely. An infection that could basically ‘zombify’ and fungi-ify people.

That is what everybody who has experienced the outbreak day would tell you, at least.

Being born into it is apparently easier, that is what the older adults tell. Because people have it figured out, there are communities like the one you are in; nobody has to roam around alone and lose so many people in the process. You did not agree to that. Nothing was easier, except for maybe gathering the knowledge of handy survival skills.

Perhaps living in a community was easier, as well. You loved it. You specifically loved your community. The stone and wooden houses, the olden cafés and restaurants, actual electricity that was not a thing outside of the gates, fairy lights hanging across porches and roofs, kids and bicycles around, horses, elderly people. Schools. A whole cinema and market places. People who were hunters, people who were guards, people who were wanderers, people who were recruiters; people who had the luxury of just being parents or students or more. And people, perhaps after seeing the world fire up and fall apart, were filled with love towards each other. Compassion, respect; a lot of things that the outsiders did not have. For the most part, of course. Evil was still a thing even within the community.

You smile at the children hurrying towards the square with a few apples in their hands, laughing and skipping around with joy— one of them waving at you as they pass you by. You wave at them as well, chuckling at one of the boys’ claims on how he will make a run for the sugar in the cafeteria so they can caramelize them.

This is why you love it. Even though it is hard.

Just as snow starts to fall from the sky that was clear with visible stars just moments ago, you take your last turn and make your way to your destination. The light shines from their porch and emphasizes their house as you pick your pace up with your boots that are crunching the asphalt that is too old for its own good, cracked and overgrown with the unkempt vegetation.

And surely enough, he is there. You cannot see him clearly since his silhouette’s too dark with the light hitting from behind, but there is only one person who can be as tall in that household even when they are doubled over.

Not making eye-contact even once as you approach the house, you take big strides through their garden and get on the porch. He does not turn to you and opts to stay silent, still doubled over with his elbows placed on the somewhat high fence. You do the same and let out a huff; a laugh too airy and low to be considered one. “What are you doing out here all alone?”

Johnny smiles, still not meeting your eyes. “I freaked out.”

“Over a kiss?” One more huff. “Sounds nothing like the Johnny I know.”

“Yeah,” He nibbles on his lip a little, and smiles at their neighbor whose kitchen window is just across their porch that is grabbing a glass of water in greetings. “I just don’t like the idea of kissing someone and having it not mean anything anymore. Feel like I’ve passed that stage.”

Your eyes lock on a star in particular when he turns his head to look at you. “Reasonable,” You let out nodding your head. A witty smile creeps up onto your face at that second, and you turn to look at him also. “I guess it comes with growing old.”

That makes him giggle and playfully punch you on the side of your shoulder, prompting you to let out an ow, motherfucker, because he is too strong for his own damn good and he seems to never realize that. “I’m not old.”

“Yeah, yeah,” You brush him off, massaging the side of your shoulder, the smile still on your face. “Tell me though, was the kiss good? It looked good.”

His brows furrow in unfiltered concern. “You watched me kiss?”

“Well if you just adhere onto someone’s lips like they glued you to each other in front of the bar I’m trying to get a drink from, Johnny, I’m kind of obligated to see it for like a second at the least.” He laughs at your ramble and breaks the furrow of his brows. As if he is defeated, he nods at the end a little. “It was amazing.”

“Oh so it’s like that,” You lean into him, hardly containing your giggle. “What does that mean?” He asks back with his own smile still on his face, clearly amused. Your eyebrows furrow this time albeit not seriously. “You damn well know what that means.”

Johnny sighs. Long and deep. Then, he speaks. “I love you, you know. You’re the best annoyer I never would’ve asked for.”

At that you chuckle, letting your shoulders shake with the force of it. “Good thing they didn’t ask you then.”

He does not say anything after that for a while. The two of you stand in silence, you looking at the stars and him looking at the street— or maybe the overgrown plants, you do not know. He fiddles with his calloused hands slightly, and it is only then that you realize that the house is much quieter than how it usually is. His parents must still be at the square, even though you have not seen them at all that day.

That night, to be more honest. During the day it was not really like you could see a lot of the folk.

Johnny must have somehow read your mind, because he speaks up again with only a heavy huff. “I heard about this morning,” His gaze is directed at you again. You break your smile and lean further, letting your head drop lower to the fence as you sigh yourself. One of your hands instinctively go to your face and to the spot where everything aches right on your cheekbone, tracing over the few burn scratches you got when you fell onto the ground. “It was nothing.”

“That wouldn’t have been believable even if I hadn’t known you.” He stands upright then. You see his hands come into your vision before they pick your arms off the fence and force you to straighten up as well. He inspects your face for a bit, tracing your red spots and scratches with his fingertips, and frowns. “Sometimes I think you’re a bit too careless.” Johnny mumbles just above a whisper, making you smile. Not particularly with happiness or being flattered, but something rooted more from embarrassment. “You say that a lot.”

“Yeah, because I want you to come home in one piece.” He takes his hands off of your face. “So you can finally get it on with Jaehyun.”

He immediately receives a shove to his chest and full on laughs at that, watching your pissed off face that is rather scary for anybody else. After years of knowing you ever since you first walked into this place only with another survivor, coming from a smaller settlement that went to absolute chaos, Johnny could not ever fear you. Fear you in a respectful sense, yes, absolutely. Because he has seen what you are capable of doing outside to survive. And in actuality, it is not the capability that made him fear you in that respectful sense; it is that he has seen you melt into the nature of it all, sometimes losing yourself in the things that surround you and the things you are feeling. Johnny has always differentiated himself from everything, so seeing that was what made him fear you.

The very same things made people fear you, as well. A lot of people stayed away from you, which always made him feel bad. He found it extremely admirable that as a teenager you were able to look for a settlement without any guardians and with only a companion, even though your earlier settlement was not too far from the city. At the same time, he could not fear you knowing how you can get with people when you care about them. He had learnt about it all first-hand when he was the first to approach you at the grey and distressing identification center after you arrived, after his parents encouraged him to ask you over for dinner, after visiting you many times at the lonely dorms and helping you fall asleep by tiring you out with his jokes and conversations, after helping you move into your own place when you were old enough, after going on patrols with you and much, much more.

“You’re disgusting, does anybody ever tell you that?” Your annoyed voice almost echoes to his ears after the many shouted singings and overall shouts he had heard that night. “The word you’re looking for would be ‘teasing’ and I just know it’s on the way. That relationship is long overdue.”

“Hey!” A familiar voice interrupts your bickering, and when you turn to the direction it is coming from, you see Yuta just behind the fence. He climbs up a bit and hangs off the railing, not fully climbing onto the porch. “Hey, man. Why don’t you just come to the porch?”

Yuta holds a hand up and waves it around, and both you and Johnny fear that he will fall down with only one hand on the fence helping him sling over, so you both take a step towards him in a hurry. But he does not fall and places his hand back. “I’ll just go home. I’m very cold and kinda drunk.”

Johnny mumbles a we can see that under his breath, but he cannot say it louder because Yuta points a finger at you, prompting you to take another step. “You are patrolling with me tomorrow.”

You finally get a hold of his arm and Johnny takes care of the other one, so now his feet are planted to the ledge of the porch and you two are basically holding a whole grown man up on his feet. That does not hold you back from complaining, though. “What, why? I was out just today.”

The drunken man shrugs. “Don’t know why you, but I think I saw Jaehyun sign your name up with us.”

A closed-mouthed snicker comes from Johnny at Yuta’s words and you snap your head at him, looking into his eyes, warning him not to do the very thing he is doing right now and to shut up about it afterwards. “Fine, I’ll come with you tomorrow.”

“You didn’t exactly have a choice.”

The knock on your door wakes you up the next morning.

Groggy a little from drinking the night before, and from the soreness of your face, you are not the happiest when you open the door up to greet Yuta and Jaehyun. They are standing on the thick snow that has covered the ground overnight, all equipped up and ready to go. The two of them look noticeably more content as well whereas you are just there basically ready to beg them to let you sleep some more. Actually, ready to beg them to leave you alone altogether.

You could really use a day off after falling face-first to the concrete yesterday. It has been long since you have had a day off anyway. Lately it was either you were going out on a patrol or sweep, or you were training the new recruits and the volunteers. You kind of did not remember the concept of sleeping in at this point.

“I would say good morning, but your morning looks far from any of that.” Yuta says in an annoyingly bright tone, and then he points at your face. “Your face didn’t swell up. I don’t know if you can tell, but that’s magical.”

Your fingers reach up to your sore cheekbone once again. Yuta is all true, there is no swelling up although it hurts so bad still as if you had not cleaned it up, when you did. Multiple times. “Just come in. I’ll wash up and grab my coat.”

They walk in when you hold the door open for them and scoot to the side, and make their way to your couch, plopping down on it without any care. You make your way to the bathroom in silence and quickly wash your mouth and face, only bothering to change your clothes because you see a change hanging over the shower cabin. After doing so you hurry over to your wardrobe in your room and grab your coat along with your gear, and make your way to the pair of boots you had been wearing for quite long. You ask your question while you are struggling with putting them on. “Why are we going out anyway? I thought every spot was clear.”

“Someone said that the crops are dead already outside the walls,” Jaehyun answers. “Means the winter’s coming faster and harder. And that means herds may come in faster. Taeyong just wants to make sure nothing’s out of control.” Which does make sense that him and the council would decide on something like that, especially after the chaos that was a couple of years ago. Uncontrollable increase in infected meant uncontrollable increase in herds moving around, and that meant uncontrollable fullness of areas, which meant hunting for supplies were almost halted, which meant there was a serious shortage in supplies. “Plus, we’re running low on medicine. So if we find any on the way,”

“Yeah, okay.” You nod as you let your foot fall after tying the last knot. “Is it only us three?”

“No,” Yuta jumps at the question, almost. “Donghyuck’s coming as well. Said he needs to let off some steam.”

“Why?” You chuckle. He looked dandy fine last night at the square, warming himself up by the fire and chatting and laughing with people. “I heard they fought with Mark.” Jaehyun, once again, answers.

“Again?” Grunting as you wear your coat, you zip it up before opening the door and holding it out once more. The boys stand up and walk towards the door. “Why can’t they keep their stuff to themselves?” You laugh, dearly hoping this fight is not another one feisty enough to keep them from talking to each other for months.

“Wouldn’t know.” Jaehyun mumbles, and waits for you to close your door before starting to walk with you. You smile at the close proximity he keeps with you as you two walk behind Yuta, following him to the stables near the big metal gates through the lively streets.

Donghyuck is already waiting for you when you arrive. He complains about his horse being taken by someone else first thing when he spots your group, prompting the stable staff to laugh behind him, presumably at the fact that he is not complaining that he will be going out for a patrol in the freezing cold, no, but that he is complaining about ‘his’ horse that is technically not his being taken away. He does not really bother to greet you as well. It is a common theme with him, so you do not take offense.

Once you are handed your horses over to you, you make your way to the gates, holding them from their reins— just in case if they ever get freaked out from the sounds the gates decide to make.

You spot a familiar face at the gate. Walking over to him is basically an instinct. “Hey,”

“Hi.” Mark smiles at you, and pets your horse on the nose a little.

Mark is important to you.

He is the person that has accompanied you on your way here after your last settlement got raided by a large group of people that belonged to a community called Nox— the largest community ever established after everything went wrong with the world, and the most developed, as well. Their recruiting process was very disciplined, they had spread all over the country in years and mostly aimed specifically for the big cities, which allowed them to have plenty of resources and people with ‘greater’ professions (like doctors, scientists, military officials, agents, anything that was deemed to be handy in an apocalypse) in their communities.

That had been what happened. It was supposed to be a recruitment, but once people denied to be a part of them and stood up for themselves, they did not like that. At least the branch that they had sent out did not like that.

Your settlement was up in flames by the time you and Mark made it out of there. The night had brightened up as if it was the morning.

Then, it was a month full of almost-dying. The two of you had been out of your settlement before, but not for long periods where you also had to look for some place that would take you. Infected wanted to get you, and if they did not, it was the people. Sometimes they would take you in for a short while, letting you use their resources before changing their paths and letting you go with a bit of a help; maybe weaponry, maybe food, maybe medicine.

Mark and you would have to find hiding spots and places to sleep, and a lot of the times you would just make do with sleeping under a vehicle in the cold in unpopulated areas. Although hard to believe, those spots were one of the least visible and most secure.

The two of you had saved each other perhaps countless times from dying. You were not friends before you ran away from your settlement. You did not exactly know a lot about each other beforehand, only acquainted as a familiar face you would see on the street. Yet when you ended up together, you cared about each other so unexpectedly much.

After you came to the city, though, it had changed a lot. They put you on schedules and dorms and houses that mostly did not go with each other, so the communication had broken— except for slight communication through Johnny who was your middle ground with his role of being a mutual friend. The sheer care you had for each other had stayed the same, though. It would have been difficult to let go of that.

“What happened to your face?” Mark asks and instinctively reaches out for it, making you hiss when his fingers come into contact with the sore red spot. He immediately retracts. “I fell.”

His brows furrow as if he is not believing it, so you laugh to calm him down. “No, I really fell. Planted face first onto the concrete.” That makes him chuckle, but his brows are still furrowed. “Of course you’d do that.”

Mark takes a deep breath. “You have everything you need?”

Someone shouts from behind, one of the watches. “Herd patrol, open the gates!”

“Yeah, I do.” You answer him, and he smiles a bit more reassuringly. “Be safe out there. Let me see you from the gate when you come back.”

There is the screeching sound that the gates do whenever they open that would surely attract some infected if there were any of them around, so you could only hope there were not. Your hold on the rein gets tighter when your horse gets a bit agitated from it. “I’m coming back and you know it, Mark.” Smirking, you step on the foot hold and mount onto the saddle.

He says only one thing before he lets you go. “I do.”

Outside the gates could have been just as pretty as it always was if it was not for the thick snow that coated everywhere and made it hard to travel.

Underneath the thick cover of snow would be overgrown grass and wild plants and flowers that definitely were made to not be natives of the land before any of this had happened, but were now claiming their home to themselves and growing freely without any control. You did not know what most of the plants or flowers even were, even though they had taught you back in school— but you knew you would never be a farmer or a wanderer. You knew you would never have to rely on that knowledge so giving up on it was pretty much an instant thing.

Above the snow, though, were pines and willows thriving in the humid cold. Corkscrew willows, narrow leaf willows and glaucous willows were painting the very much white and grey scenery some lighter shades of green and pink, glistening with the snow sitting on them when the silver but blinding sunlight hit their surface.

You were pretty much on watch the whole time as the possibility of a herd passing through occupied your mind. There were the occasional wildlife passing through the valley, mostly rabbits, dogs and squirrels, and the occasional deer. They run around, sometimes passing under the horses or too close to them and scaring them a bit off. It was nothing that you could not take care of though.

Through a mutual agreement, you go to the town first since it is a good distance away from the city still and is one of the places that is sure to have any signs of a herd if they are coming in. That was because there were not a lot of traces of the infection since there is no people that still live in that town, and the infected would just roam through to potentially find a host.

Some of them would just die on their own from the cold and spew out spores in hopes of reaching something. They usually did not.

When you are in the Western-looking, red and brown brick-borne town, you divide the sections and go your separate ways. You probably would not have done that had the entrance of the town been crowded, but it had not been anything close to that. Yuta insists on his advice for all of you to do everything as quietly as you can just in case, and you all seem to agree on that, considering this is only a patrol and not a sweep and you do not have that much ammo.

The South of the town was mostly empty to your delight. Definitely more crowded than how it usually was this time of the year, but nothing you could not take care of. You did not even have to waste too much of your ammo taking out the infected that were already there— ones mostly freshly infected. Runners, who could still see you and who could still run and who still looked like humans except for their blood covered mouth and hands. They looked alive. They grunted, they made humanly noises, they twitched in their place. It almost looked like whoever they used to be was still inside them and was trying to fight that damn thing off.

It made your blood go cold at the thought every single time.

Once you are done with the infected you could see so far by the help of your trusted stealth skills and dagger and only some of your ammo, you check on a couple of buildings that were on your list that had not been explored yet. But after being open for anybody to come and loot year after year, there was not much that you could find. Some rubbing alcohol hiding away in a stash of unusable supplies, some canned food that were very suspiciously still not out of date, and a few more things. Nothing too useful.

Within a bit over a couple of hours at the least, you make it back to your meeting point at the main street of the entrance, the supplies stacked behind your horse and on the board she was equipped with that would help her in being able to drag everything comfortably. To your relief, everyone is already there, and there are no infected in sight. “Anything useful?” Jaehyun asks, and you shake your head.

“I could get some rubbing alcohol and some gas for the generators, but that’s about it.” Yuta nods at your words. “Same here— except I found this stash of ammo and some meds, but I didn’t take any of it.”

Donghyuck glares at him with an obviously visible amount of anger in his eyes, which makes Yuta further explain himself. “I don’t want to mess with them if they’re a trespasser. I’ll give it a week, and if it’s still there then, I’m just gonna dive in because the prick had some good stuff in there.” He sighs. “I also left a note, saying you’re kind of fucked, friend, because the herd’s coming. Told them to head down to the river following the valley and that the place with working lights and big metal gates would welcome them if they’re smart about it.”

Sometimes Yuta could be extremely innocent, wanting to believe everyone is good, but he had something about him where most of these people he left notes for would actually turn out to be decent people that would join your community. So you could only hope whoever this was would be the same. “That is so sweet of you, but I think some of the herd is already here.” Donghyuck says, and all of you turn your heads to him. “You know the hotel half of it’s said farewell? It was flooded with infected. Of all kinds.”

“Sounds like a fucking dream.” Jaehyun murmurs, kicking around the snow a bit with his boots, looking down. You lay a supportive hand on his forearm. “Sweepers will be lucky though. Some of them are loaded with stuff— backpacks on and everything.”

But his words still hold a heavy weight to them, because these poor souls just did not survive for as long as they planned for. And it makes you wonder, wonder if they were alone or in a group, moving or not moving, had a family or not, had friends or not; what was their original plan? Did they even have a plan, or did everything just happen when they were hidden away in somewhere?

“I found a safe, like a whole dark room,” Jaehyun says. “Inside an apartment. I guess they were a pharmacist or a doctor or something— there are a lot of bottles and boxes of medicine and compounds. And I hardly think they belong to anyone at this point because the door lock was literally rotting away.”

“You think it’s okay to take?” Donghyuck asks Yuta, who nods promptly. “Let’s not take all of it just yet, though. Leave it for the next patrol or the sweepers, they can get the remainder later.”

And then he clears his throat. “Why don’t you two go ahead?”

You two. Jaehyun and you.

Before you know it, you are already sent that way and are trotting your way down to the apartment with your horses. The apartment is definitely not close to the meeting point, especially had you been on foot, but with trotting your way down it was much easier to access. You see the infected Jaehyun has taken down, and again, most of them were Runners; the only explanation you could come up with was that the actual herd had had a feast in another settlement or an area ridden with survivor groups, and since they are Runners they can move faster which is why they are already here with the cold. Basically that they are the herd before the herd.

You dismount when you arrive at the brick and brown, dirty looking building and follow Jaehyun up the stairs that by some miracle do not just collapse, watching him easily open up the doors after having broken into them.

Like he said, the room is there, mostly dark but only lit when its door is open and light spills in through the shutters, and it really is packed with medical supplies.

“I randomly inspected some of them, most of it’s not out of date yet.” You nod at him when he looks at you. “Okay.”

But something genuinely pisses you off. It has been pissing you off for some time, so the only thing you can do is confront him when you are alone. “Jaehyun,”

“Yeah?” He kneels onto the floor and starts inspecting things again, placing some of them into the bag he had grabbed from the side of the saddle before you made your way in. You kneel in front of him and sigh, looking down at his hands and spotting the slightly scarred knuckles. Probably from subconsciously pushing on doors while breaking in. “I know it was weird a few nights ago because everyone was around, but it’s weirder right now because you have a thing where you go awkward and quiet when you feel that way,” His eyes bore into yours. “And I really can’t stand that,” You let out an airy chuckle, and he kind of smiles as well. “So either kiss me like you mean it next time or never do and let us stay as friends.”

It was supposed to be a basic thing.

Jaehyun had kissed you a few nights ago at a movie screening. He had asked you to watch the old sci-fi movie with him, and had waited for you in front of the cinema, stuck between the crowds of people of all ages. Throughout the movie you had just whisper-chatted back and forth, almost none of your attention on any of the scenes even when they got louder. The topics of your chats had been lighthearted and fun as well, gossiping a bit about your friends and telling each other about funny encounters you recently had with people around the city or outside. Sometimes the chats were about the movie, with questions of what would you do if you were living in that universe instead of this one, which one would you prefer and more, debating on the questionable answers; throwing your dried and seasoned corn at each other if either of you thought the other had absolutely ran out of any sanity.

After the screening he had just asked you if he could kiss you as if it was the most normal thing he could ask, saying he could not wait any more, and you had let him because the mutual attraction had been there for too long and you wanted him to kiss you just as much as you had been wanting to kiss him.

But he had gotten shy about it— crowds were never Jaehyun’s thing, and that was fine. The thing that was not fine was how he acted around you for days after that, quiet and somewhat cold and awkward, when you were okay with it all and had expected him to make a move last night at the square.

He breathes out a laugh through his nose and looks down, playing with his hangnails and the traces of the rein that is left on his fingers, not deep but definitely visible still and a bit pink around the outlines. He smiles under his nose, you can see it because the lines of light that hits his face illuminate the side of his lips that is curled up, and when he picks his head up and the lines hit his brown eyes, you are smiling too.

Because Jaehyun places his hand at the back of your neck and kisses you.

Firmly, with care, and like nobody else is there— there is nobody there, but this time it feels like even if there were people he would have been fine with it. He lets you place your hands on the spots between his chest and shoulders, and lets you pull him further down with ease, spreading his other hand that is holding you on your back to give you better support. He opens his mouth first for you, maybe to show he is meaning this and he means so much more, and you give into it. That goes on for a while with hands roaming wherever they can. You only come back to your senses when his teeth scratch your bottom lip.

He stops when your hands push against him lightly. “Any longer and Yuta will never let this die down.”

Nibbling on his lip with his teeth, Jaehyun huffs a smile and nods. “He really won’t.” And he leans in again, only pecking you this time.

Johnny and his predictions that gave you the bravery and encouragement to do these kinds of things could go fall face first onto the concrete.

The rest of the patrol and getting back to the city go almost seamless, except for the fact that you had to pass by a couple of groups of infected— some Runners who had spotted you and alerted the Clickers (one of the older stages of infected where the infection has taken over most of their skin and has made its way out, taking over their eyes and using echolocation with the clicking sounds that comes from their throats) with the sound they made. They caused a bit of a hassle, but nothing you could not take care of; not with Jaehyun’s quick bow skills as you galloped through the occupied areas of the valley and all of your leftover ammo. “You’re losing a lot of arrows, don’t you think?” Donghyuck asks Jaehyun, shouting a bit out of breath since the galloping motion is taking a toll on him.

Jaehyun pulls the reins to himself harshly. “Yeah,” His horse halts without any discomfort, and you see him from the corner of your eye before he is left behind. “I’ll meet you at the gate!”

And he starts galloping to the opposite way.

If it was anybody else, any and most probably all of you would have started screaming some sense into him. But it was Jaehyun. Whose way of doing things outside, although stealthy, was very impulsive. So you do not take your gaze away from the road ahead of you, locking your eyes on the city just now visible as you make your way down.

It is already dusk by the time you are at the gates and the watches see you, asking where the hell Jaehyun is and offering to open the gates when Yuta tells them he is collecting his arrows back from a small area, so he should be back any minute. All of you agree that you do not want the gates to open before he comes so the noise does not attract anything more than it needs to.

Just as you expect, the missing person of your quad comes sooner than later. A proud smile is on his face as he goes on about being able to get back five of the seven arrows he had used, waiting for all of you to make your ways in before walking in himself.

“We have some gas and some meds,” You tell the watch who is there the second you walk in, to unleash the supplies behind your horse. “With plenty of infected on the side.” Donghyuck adds, too upbeat for the news he is delivering. One of the gatekeepers is quite mortified to hear that which is why he feels inclined to add more to his words. “Not a dooming amount, but we definitely need a few sweeps. It’d be worse if the herd caught up to them.”

“Why don’t you just go tell that to Taeyong?” Mark cuts in, and you can immediately tell how irritated Donghyuck gets. His face gets red, his eyes drop and squint, and he completely forgets about getting off his horse which all of you do at that point. “Oh would you look at that,”

Mark tries to hold a snicker in, you can tell, because his lips curl inwards. “It’s almost as if that’s not exactly what I was about to do. Fucking asshole.”

Mark finally gives in then, letting his shoulders shake when he greets you, giggling. He tries to check if you have any bites since it is a procedure he needs to do, but he cannot do it effectively with how much he is giggling— which was fine, because he could very clearly see you did not have any bites. None of your clothes were torn, and your face, hands and neck that was not covered up was just very visibly in quite okay condition.

“I’m having dinner at Johnny’s tonight,” You tell Mark as he lets go of your hands, making him pick his head up. “Just saying.”

“I’ll see if I can pay a visit.”

You smile at him and make your way over to Jaehyun, letting him put an arm around your shoulders and walk away with you, planting a kiss on the side of your head.

He does pay a visit.

The night is pierced through with Mark’s laughter when Johnny’s mouth drops open. He stops mindlessly strumming his guitar when it takes over him. “Dude, I’m telling you,” He says between his laughs. “They didn’t even look at each other when they were leaving, and somehow they were all lovey-dovey by the time they got back.”

“Fuck you,” Johnny nudges you rather hard in your side, and this time you are snickering along with Mark just at the sight of his face. “You called me creepy when I knew all along.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Johnny. I apologize for not crediting you enough on your talent of predicting relationships.” Your smile dies down a little after that, and your voice goes a bit quieter with the confusion. “Well I don’t know if it’s a relationship yet. It just happened, sort of.”

Johnny shrugs at that and puts his arm around your shoulders, pulling you closer to him on the couch with one of your legs dangling over and one of them propped up. “That’s fine. You guys can let it brew for a bit more. Just test the waters.” A breath of a chuckle makes its way out of your nose at his words and how the high you had felt a few hours ago had crashed down into this weird oblivion, but Mark nods in agreement.

You do not see it, but Johnny smiles down at you while you fix your eyes on the photographs on his wall. Some of his, some of his parents’, some of his newborn days— the final days just before the infection started taking all over the country and the world. There are a few with you and Mark, too, a couple of them looking downright awkward with Mark and you too numb to the friendship he was offering you after coming to the brink of death maybe tens or maybe hundreds of times, and another couple of them where the photos are just blurry with how much you were laughing and it made steadying his parents’ old camera harder.

He turns his head to the opposite side, facing Mark. “You got any sick raps, Mark?”

“What is that question?” Mark howls out, laughing his chest off like he always does. “When you say it like that I don’t wanna rap ever again.”

But he does, because Mark is like that.

Johnny and you do your best in hyping him up, shouting and howling and springing in your place to the beat of his lyrics. You two let him rap until he really does not feel like it anymore, and you listen to him when he goes back to strumming his guitar, softly singing some things every now and then. So quietly that you almost do not even hear it.

The night goes on like that. You just lounge around, Johnny between you and Mark, cozy and warm.

If there was anything about them two, it was that they made you feel normal somehow. Which is maybe why you cherished them so much, and what the three of you have.

Unfortunately, you wake up early once again in your own room in the morning even though you do not have any reason to.

There are some upsides to that when you have the day off, as much as you hate it. You get to take a shower with all cold, yet much appreciated water, and properly change your clothes into new ones after a long while, to make a breakfast with what you have stored away in your cupboards, and maybe even do laundry if you had any leftover homemade soap.

Sometimes you paid a visit to the dorms, checking up on lonely recruits if there were any that you had grown some kind of attachment to.

That morning you do all of that, too. You get your hair and body feeling and looking all clean, eat somewhat of a nutritious breakfast that is much better when compared with just going with an all empty stomach, change into some of your newest clothes that Johnny and Jaehyun had gifted you once after an outing for hoarding. Except while you are making your way to the dorms just to check on the newest recruits, you stumble upon a group of people lining in front of the entrance to the stables.

Your interest peaks when you spot Johnny, who is writing his name down on the board at the gates that open to the place. You hurry over to him as best you can in your still sleepy state. “Morning,”

He hears you but does not bother to turn his head to look at you, knowing you would come to stand next to him. “Hey.”

As expected, you halt when you are there. You look at his name on the board and his signature along with the date, and you know for a fact he is going out. “Sweep?”

“Yeah,” He lends the pen to the person next to him, and moves out of the line, prompting you to move away with him. “Signing up last minute. Taeyong and Yuta can’t make it out today, so.”

“Why?” You furrow your brows, and he shrugs a little. “Yuta’s needed at the training grounds today, and who knows what Taeyong has to take care of.”

He watches you as you sigh, truly tired of it, but the inner conflict is louder than any type of exhaustion you could possibly have. “Well I’m coming with you.”

When you try to walk into the line he steps in front of you, and puts a stop to whatever madness you are planning. His hands physically stop you as well as he places them on your shoulders. “No you aren’t,” Johnny’s voice is firm, and his brows are furrowed just slightly. “You need a day off. Your whole face looks purple with the cold, the lack of sleep, and the scar— and you look awful.”

He smiles then as if he had not just dragged the way you look all over the floor. “Just go and relax. Maybe spend some time with Jae, hm?”

You bite down on the insides of your lips and nibble on them, and furrow your eyebrows at the squeeze of your heart. “Just do me a favor and be careful. There are a lot of Runners around,” One of your hands come up half-bothered to point at the people in the line. “Tell that to the group as well.”

There is a silence that lasts a couple of seconds, but then Johnny pulls you in for a hug. “You know,” He mumbles. “If you actually talked to more people they’d like you better.” He knew what you would say, that you do not like the stares that people throw at you anywhere and everywhere, and that it stops you from approaching them. So, he stops that from happening before it can. “I’ll take your horse if that will make you feel any better.”

Stepping away from him, you smile and shove him a little. “Take my horse if it will make you feel any more secure, and send her back if your ass can’t make it.”

“Will do.”

Dusk comes, and the sun sets.

Some people do not return that evening, and Johnny is one of them.

Supposedly, his whole group is missing— which is a good thing, because it is not completely uncommon that people camp in some sort of a hide-out if the infected in the area are too much for them to handle with the amount of people they have and they think it is better to wait it out.

Which is why, although bitter, there is hope inside of you.

His parents are distressed when Taeyong comes to tell them the news, and they remain just as distressed afterwards if not more. Whenever you see them, you cannot help but notice how their faces are overborne with concern. Their brows are always furrowed, their mouths are always pointed downwards in a frown, their eyes always glazed over with what looked like thousands of thoughts racing all around, and the wrinkles on their faces are deepened in some areas with the weight and tension.

You grow distressed and restless as well, as hours— days pass. The concept of night and day loses its significance because you are too distracted during the day when you are supposed to be training the recruits, and too uncomfortable during the night rolling all over the bed without a drop of sleep in your eyes.

And it must be not only you that is feeling that way, because Taeyong knocks on your door in the dead of the night a few days after Johnny’s disappearance. When you open the door his arms are crossed over his chest, and he looks a lot paler than he usually is, his eyes red all around.

He gets straight to the point. “You, Yuta, Jaehyun and Mark. I want you to search for them while another group goes for a sweep.” His voice breaks at some point because of how tired he must be feeling and how scared. You nod slightly, the tension pulling and burdening your face. “Okay.”

After your mumbled, quick and short answer Taeyong turns right back on his heel and walks down the stairs of the porch. You cannot bring yourself to close the door just yet when you see him, a friend of a friend but a figure as protective and wise, walk away with his guards clearly down. “You should try and get some sleep,” You advise after him, even though you yourself are suffering from the same problem he is. “What you do matters.”

Taeyong does not slow down, and is out of your sight within seconds after he leaves your backyard.

Next morning, it is as if you had done a mutual agreement between the four of you, because you are all by the stables with the slightest hue of sunlight.

No one is smiling or looking content in any way or shape, but no one is agitated, either. The most healthy thing at that moment is to force yourselves to go numb altogether and you all know it.

With so much as some collective huffs you write your names down on the board and sign in the hand-drawn boxes next to them, being able to see all of the missing people’s names that were out just before you— it was never a pretty situation. The stables are kind of empty from all the horses that are missing as well and it feels weird to not be able to go out with the horse, your horse that you had considered a companion for years on end.

But Anubis, the black horse assigned to you that day, was a good compensation. He was surprisingly comfortable with you from the get-go.

The stable you were in got too empty after all of the search and sweep groups took their horses with only a couple of them left behind, and before you knew it, you were on them and stationed in front of the gate. Handwritten documents were in Yuta’s hands mapping out yesterday’s group’s sweeping locations.

And as he said just before you all mounted on your horses, no one would be parting ways that day.

When the gates open, you immediately start galloping behind the sweepers— they collectively had more ammo than your group, and they were going in the same direction for a while, so they could be some sort of a shield for you if the groups had somehow started moving much faster all of a sudden. Your group would be heading to the settlement just a bit further away from the town you had gone through yesterday; most probably what used to be its business district if any of your predictions were true. The sweepers would be going to the town, figuring the groups that were saturated behind the town must be at its downtown now.

The way up the valley is rather empty, which is almost more unsettling when you think of how many people are missing.

Six, to be exact, counting Johnny.

You try to focus on different things, like how your backside hurts as you gallop upwards and Anubis pants under you. On the fact that he is a rather strong horse and you had never noticed that when anybody else was riding him. How he is maybe the most elevated horse you have ever had, and how his back is very uncomfortable to ride on even with a saddle. How he is very enduring considering he does not slow down in the slightest even after the valley starts getting a little rough, not falling behind any horses and even passing some of them if it was not for you that took him back under control.

It helps you, focusing on him, because you do not want to focus on things that might get your guard down.

The sweepers part their way with you at the point they need to, making a turn for the northeast once you enter the town, letting you pass straight through. Without any goodbyes because you have officially entered the danger zone.

And you truly have, because there are Runners around with not as many Clickers roaming through in the visible distance where the sweepers are headed. You can only internally wish them good luck.

It takes less than an hour to get to the probable business district that is filled with concrete and glass covered buildings unlike the town, overtaken by vegetation (and snow) that has washed over its blues and greys and beiges and the financial personality it once had— again unlike its brown and red brick counterpart.

All of you make your horses come to a halt once you enter the environment, again, just to make sure there is as little noise as possible. Dismounting from them and taking the reins in your hands is an instinct. “Where do we go first?”

Yuta looks down at the papers with Mark’s question. His fingers trace over the words until they find what they are looking for. “Well,” He huffs, placing a hand on his nape with a wince. “They were going to the law firm, the bank in southwest, the city hall and they would meet at the conference hall. They must be around these areas if we’re lucky.”

“And if they’re lucky.” Jaehyun says under his breath, but you hear him loud and clear. And you have a feeling that everybody does.

Yuta drops his hand that is holding the papers and sighs. “The bank’s the farthest one, let’s go.”

They are not at the bank.

Not in the bank, not around the bank, not in the subway station under the bank where there is a hide-out in one of the conductor rooms, not inside the surrounding business buildings all of which have of their doors opened whether it is one of the back/staff doors or the front entrances as if it is an all-you-can-get open buffet of places to roam around for the infected. When in actuality, your people’s strategy is to close the doors and lightly barricade them after coming into any contact, trying to keep as many infected on the roads so it is somewhat easier to wipe them out by narrowing their moving space. It also helped indicating whether there had been any recent trespassers at all, because most people not acquainted with your settlement would not bother with closing the doors behind them as they lost themselves in all the possible places to hoard.

And it all just means that there must have been trespassers recently, making the infected harder to find since they were free to go into the buildings, which must have messed up with the sweeping.

It does not feel right at all.

The law firm which is a rather small building is of no help as well. No alive, normal human is inside, not in any of the five floors that you have to clear out a little or around, and once again the doors are open. All you can find are supplies lying around the fifth floor that are definitely from the city’s storage so you know that they must have stayed for some time there at some point. You take them back. But there is nothing more.

To be truthful about things, none of you had your hopes up about the city hall. It was an extremely open space and was most definitely not the safest in this situation, nor the most resourceful place to hide or camp in anytime— or to hoard things with nothing but once-fancy tiles all over the interior and no leftover supplies from passing groups. However, they would have gone there to check if there was anybody hiding away, because people (especially in groups) who passed through did that since it is a quite distinctive and low building in between all of the higher buildings for those unfamiliar with the area. They would have brought them back to the city if any of them were there. So it does not surprise you when you find the city hall empty as well, except for the sea of infected that swarm the grand entrance to the hall that make your eyes widen and immediately shut the door close when you first open it up. Plus holding onto dear life pushing against the doors with Jaehyun when some of them are attracted to the noise and make a run for it.

Sweep season was the worst season.

Through a mutual agreement, you barricade the doors a little (a lot) tighter with fire truck hoses that have long been detached from the abandoned truck between the hall and one of the high-rise buildings that most probably was sitting there since the outbreak day, where fire trucks were not only used for the countless fires that started especially in the traffic, but also to rescue people stuck in upper floors of buildings that were taken over by the Runners.

There is no way the infected trapped in the hall can open the doors through layers upon layers of a thick hose wrapped and tied around the handles of the entrance, at least you all would like to believe that.

When your heart rate picks up is when you spot a building with its visible doors closed on the way to the conference hall. “Wait.”

Everyone stops, prompting their horses to do the same as them. The guys look at the direction of your gaze, and they all seem to come to a realization. “Do you think-?”

“I think there’s no reason we shouldn’t.” But Yuta does not look too keen on it, so you have to agree further. “There’s something obvious here, and I think it’s an objective point when I say that.”

He nods at that and clears his throat, looking up at the building for a split second. “Is it okay if you search with Mark? Jaehyun and I’ll be here, I kind of need a second thought as I plan out the mapping for if they aren’t here or at the conference hall.”

“That’s fine.” You assure him, and nod your head at Mark. “Let’s go.”

Inside the building is eerily quiet, but brightly lit with the afternoon sun shining through all the glass. You have never been in this building before, at least you do not think so, because the lobby does not ring the slightest bell to you.

There are bodies of infected that are taken out lying all around. They paint the light creme flooring red with their blood, but it is comforting. Because it is for certain that they have been here, at least.

A fire exit door is all that you are looking for, or a staff room that could possibly lead to the stairway, but it takes a bit of an embarrassingly long time for you two to spot anything in the seemingly open-spaced, bright lobby. You come to learn a bit after starting to walk around that the entry to the stairway beside the elevators just outside of the oval lobby is also blocked with something on the other side.

“There’s a crack in the elevator doors,” Mark suggests, and although ladders are the one thing you hate the most, you agree to take them to the upper floors.

It is so dark and humid inside with years upon years of unventilated air, the smell of rust and rot is absolutely disgusting, and you fear that the years-old ladders will break any second with both you and Mark’s weight on them. Not to mention how tiring climbing up a ladder can be for your arms and legs when you hold onto the thin and flimsy metal waiting for the other to separate one of the elevator doors, most of which are rightfully blocked.

On one of the far upper floors, though, there is no blockage, and you can swing yourselves onto the hallway. Which is scary to be honest, especially when you are all this way up and if you miss anything your way down will be met with an old, hard, rusting top of an elevator on your back.

But god bless the planners (maybe their souls) of this place, because the ladder is close to the opening enough that you can swing onto the floor without too much hassle. Neither of you slip after jumping down onto it.

“Do you think,” Mark dusts himself off as if it would help with anything, takes a deep breath in his tired lungs, and rephrases his words. “Do you think they came all the way up here through that?”

“Maybe they blocked the stairway and the doors,” You suggest instead, and it sounds a lot more like the option the two of you would like to believe in. “Right half yours left half mine?”

“Sure.” He answers, and the two of you go your separate ways on the big office floor.

A few doors open to the empty, messy office rooms and you check through the drawers for anything worthy to take back with you even though there is not much of it. One of them provides you with some scissors and lighter liquid, which end up being the most usable things you get out of them. Some doors do not even budge with whatever is blocking your way.

But there is a room at the visible end of the hall where the door will budge, but will not open.

You resort to using your shoulders to break into the room rather quickly. There is not any particularly loud sound coming from behind the thick, polished wooden door, and something about it being left secure but still accessible made you think there must be something behind that door that is useful. Maybe a stash of actually usable supplies or much preferably, anything that leads you to your missing people.

The door opens with your fifth push, and you hear the sound of a broken lock clink on the ground.

You also hear the shriek of a Runner who jumps you immediately after being attracted to the sound.

With the force of your push you have basically thrown yourself into the arms of the Runner which is never a good thing or in any way close to an ideal situation, and you have to duck away by kneeling lower and throwing yourself to the sharp opposite side of where the infected is facing to make sure it does not grab your arms. You take a few steps away but it is just as fast as you are, so you have to use your quick wit and draw out your gun in the blink of your eyes, shooting it in the head— impractically unable to care whether there were any infected on Mark’s side or not because it was either you or whoever they were with the shock and the pace of things.

The mess of a creature falls down with a slump, your heart absolutely racing but also dropping— because as you look down at it you can see that you know who she used to be. You were not friends or even really acquaintances, but you know for a fact that she lives in the city. So you turn back around to the open-planned office with your fast approaching panic and adrenaline.

Which is when you see it.

Johnny, slumped onto the floor, sitting with his legs spread out. Johnny, whose ankle looks broken. Johnny, who has his gun in his hand.

Johnny, who has a bite mark on his exposed right arm where orange-salmon colored fungi is growing out, extending upwards to his shoulders and neck.

Johnny, who has a hole on the left side of his chest, red spatter over the wall behind him, slumped on the floor with fungi growing out of his arm ready to grow all over his glowing skin until he grows into the wall and starts letting out spores.

Johnny, dead.

You do not know if any air makes its way into your lungs. It surely does not feel like it. Your ears ring and your eyes go dark with purple spots all over your vision and you get dizzy and nauseous, but somehow, you stand.

“Mark!” You shout out, surprising yourself, calling and alerting him when you can already hear his fast approaching steps thumping on the floor at the sound of the gun fire. Before barely a few seconds can pass he barges into the room with his gun in his hand but stops when he sees you frozen in place. Then, he follows your gaze.

Even from the side of your eye, it is obvious he flinches. “What the hell happened here?” His voice is not above a whisper.

You look at the less familiar face lying on the ground, and its shoulder. “The bite marks look similar.” There is no sense of stillness in your voice as you speak. “I guess they just locked themselves away,” Teeth grinding tightly, you let out a silent and choked sob, because you cannot believe any of this bullshit your eyes are seeing.

Mark takes a few steps towards Johnny and picks something up from the ground— a paper— making his way to you. But he stands on his own while he reads with his slightly shaky hands, and crumples the paper once he is done skimming over it. He sits next to you on the hard, carpeted but otherwise concrete floor. “They got bit while they were clearing out the basement,” His lips wobble a bit, but he quickly covers it up by placing his fist over his mouth until it goes away. “Locked themselves in here so they wouldn’t harm anybody.”

“If the trespassers didn’t go through the district leaving every goddamn door open, none of this would’ve fucking happened.” Maybe you were trying to blame it on someone, or maybe you really were mad at them for their ignorance as they went through the city. You did not know for certain, although it felt a whole lot like it was the latter. Because they would not have had to camp here anyway. There would not have been infected in the buildings in the first place.

You sit down where you are standing, looking at Johnny.

All you know is that this was unfair. If anyone deserved surviving long in this world it was Johnny. He was physically strong, and he had a good mental attitude, and he was so purely good that the last thing he deserved was to die the way everybody did, alone and scared and not wanting to turn into one of those things. He deserved to die of old age if anything after living a happy and healthy life, continuing to help lonely recruits like you and Mark— doing what he likes to do until his very last days. Training, falling in love, teasing and pestering his friends whenever and wherever, giving advice, making people’s stomachs hurt with his smooth and not-so-smooth jokes, doing photography as long as that camera of his would survive, spending time with his family and not moving out of their house even though there are available houses until the time comes when he absolutely has to.

But he cannot do any of those things anymore.

He also cannot be there for you or Mark anymore.

Your trembling hand comes up to spread over your eyes and your fingers rest on your temples, and you hitch a breath in. “What are we going to do?” You ask Mark with your just as trembling voice as if he would know. The question is not necessarily about this particular moment in time, but about the far future as well. He lets it linger in the air as his eyes switch between the two bodies.

“Well,” He clears his throat when his voice shakes violently and looks at you, his hands playing with the carpet, picking and tearing away. He chooses to ignore the far future, at least for now. “We’ll have to tell his parents first.”

The hand on your face falls down. You look at Mark, and he notices how wide your eyes are. He knows you cannot comprehend it by the way your eyes look, looking right through him with your shell shocked, hundred-yard stare. “No,” You whisper. “Mark, I can’t.”

“That’s fine,” He looks into your eyes with his own that are glazed over, and nods reassuringly. “I can.”

But it does not feel better. Instead, it makes you feel worse immediately, because you feel like you at least owe Johnny and his parents this. It makes you feel ashamed that you will not do even one thing about it, because you do not think you would ever be able to look into his parents’ eyes again; knowing you joked about it before he left and you were too unbothered to go out after him before you were ordered to do so. There is nothing in your heart, mind, or body, that tells you that you can do it without completely losing yourself in the process.

The two of you collect yourselves and come back to your senses as quickly as you can, because you knew Yuta and Jaehyun would be on you if you were any more late.

Mark helps you in carrying the bodies down the stairs which is an extremely tiring task considering you go down several floors, and the mental toll it has on you. The two of you unblock the fire exit door and push the metal drawers and organizers aside, opening the door and carrying them to the lobby.

Then, you head outside. Yuta and Jaehyun do not spot Mark and you until you get closer, but when they do, their brows immediately furrow. “We need two bags.” You mutter, feeling your chest stutter with the words. Their faces fall at that very second. The grip Yuta has on his map that he is holding tightens and his knuckles go white, and he sighs with utter disappointment. Knowing Yuta, it is at himself.

“One of them’s Johnny.”

The muscles on their faces relax only for their eyes to widen.

It takes a few hours for all of you to get back to the city once you put them in bags and start riding, not galloping nor trotting; deciding not to look for the others knowing it would take a longer time to get back and not wanting to stress out anyone in the city further. A night group could easily replace yours.

When you are at the gates the sun has long set. Questions arise once the gates open and the bags dragged by the horses are seen. You and Mark answer them since you are the ones who found them in that state, where you found them, which building, which floor, was there anything written around them, any symbols, any human spotted around the area— anything useful.

You give them the answers still in a daze, and let them take Anubis from your hand. Without waiting for anybody you start walking, on the way to your house.

Except, you do not end up in your house for a while. You wait in the dark, just around the corner leading to Johnny’s house and you watch Mark deliver the news to them. Although you cannot hear what he says to them, you can see it clearly with the light on their porch. How Mark delivers the news with his hands linked in the front, fiddling with his fingers a little as he looks at their expectant faces. How Johnny’s mother hugs into his father once she hears the situation, both of them shaking with sobs. How Mark’s shoulders drop and how he tries to console them, but stopping when Johnny’s mother does not take a step away from her husband and he waves at Mark presumably wanting some space and time alone to themselves.

You watch as Mark nods and leaves, and you head to your house. Hurrying into your backyard, you swing open the door and kick off your boots. Not bothering to put them in their place, you take your bag off your shoulders and the only reason that you do not let it fall onto the floor is because of the guns packed inside. Then, you make a move to take your coat off.

And the damn zipper gets stuck.

With a sigh, you force it down. But it does not budge. So you try again, but it will not move. You wait, nibble on your lips, give it time to change its mind: maybe it was frozen and it needed to thaw.

But when you try again, it just does not want to move down.

Pissed off, you try to strip out of the coat. But that proves to be almost harder. Everybody wears thin but warm, lightweight coats to make their movability better, especially outside. But moving your whole arm to yourself and then down while holding the two layers of clothes, one thick sweater and the thin coat on top of it was undoable— because then they were fully limiting your movement.

And you had to take it off. You need to take it off.

Your hands then start picking and grabbing at the coat trying to rip it off, and that is when your door opens without any alert beforehand and Jaehyun walks in.

“What are you doing?” He whispers and walks over to you near your couch. You only stop struggling when he stands in front of you. “I can’t get it off, it’s stuck.”

He notices how you will not look into his eyes in the dark, and he notices the tears streaming down your face that you probably are not realizing. “Okay.”

Jaehyun walks over to your bathroom and takes a bar of soap you have. He walks right back to you in complete silence and dabs at your zipper with the sleeves of his hoodie up and down to take off the excess moisture, and starts slathering on the soap along the zipper until its sharp corner has visibly softened and the zipper looks white with the coat of it. He then fumbles with the zipper for a few seconds before it slides right down.

It makes you feel a mixture of embarrassment and anger, and you sniffle, only then realizing that you are crying after feeling the wetness in your inhale. Your lips waver as you try not to let a sob out. “There you go.” He mumbles as he helps you out of the coat and places it on the arm of your couch. He picks your boots up and places them next to the door.

“Let’s wash your hands.” He suggests, and you look down at your hands, seeing the blood from that Runner.

Jaehyun is almost late to hold you once your face violently scrunches up and you start fully letting it out, shaking with choked sobs.

Because your crying does not subside for several minutes, he ends up going to the bathroom again and comes back with a couple of wet rags, soaping one up and cleaning your hands delicately before wiping them off. He leads you to your bed then and lets you lie down, pulls the cover up, and kneels down in front of your face. “Try to sleep, okay? Force yourself to if you need it.”

You nod at him, and let him leave after he smiles at you.

His eyes had looked empty, which was always the worst for Jaehyun.

The next morning you hear your door lightly opening in your sleep, and being carefully shut. A few steps make their way over to you slowly and the empty side of your bed sinks with a somewhat loud huff.

Whoever it is waits for a bit, lets you sleep a little more even though you are not deep in it. That goes on for a few minutes before your bed sinks closer to your back, and it sinks a bit less than before— an elbow.

Fingers start running through and playing with your hair. It must be Jaehyun. And you are right. “Taeyong let me and Donghyuck take over you and Mark’s work for a couple of days, so you don’t have to go in today.” He softly whispers, and you nod slightly. “How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping?” You ask in hopes of distracting yourself from the thoughts and views that race over your eyelids, and open your eyes when it does not exactly work out.

He answers with a slight smile. “Your lashes fluttered when I walked in.” You feel him place his chin on your shoulder. “You slept any?”

Gulping, you shake your head. “Just got some shut-eye.”

“That’s okay.” Jaehyun whispers. “Better than keeping your eyes open. I’m happy you got some sort of rest.”

He sighs and takes his hand off your hair then. “Yuta wants to see you and Mark eating so he’s preparing breakfast. I have to leave, but head out soon and try to eat for me. A few bites is all I’m asking for.”

“Okay.”

Porridge and bergamot tea.

The breakfast Yuta has prepared for you and Mark, with some dried plums and apples inside that he fried on the pan a little. It smells nice, looks less so.

There is no one to greet and welcome you initially when you are in front of his house that is on the same street as Johnny’s. But it does not matter because you barge in to avoid being seen by his parents, taking big strides from the start of the street. You hear the stir of the wooden spoon inside the metal pot, and the fruit that spills in while you make your way to the kitchen.

Mark is sitting at the island counter of Yuta’s kitchen with his elbow on the surface, his head leant against his hand.

Yuta turns away from the cream colored counters and his electric stove once he hears the footsteps. “Morning.”

You see Mark’s head only tilt a little, but not fully to the extent that he can look back at you. “Hey.” Your voice does not really come out, so you clear your throat. Yuta’s face falls a little at that. “Is there tension in your throat?”

“Yeah.” You sit down next to Mark. With your hands placed on the surface, you turn your head to look at him but his face is covered by his hand and arm. “There’s some powdered ginger you can take in the pantry. But you should try and relax your muscles first.”

With that he pours the porridge into the bowls he has taken out for you, and serves them with a slight smile on his face. Then he pours the hot tea inside two small jars and hands them out as well. “Dig up.”

It does not feel right. The atmosphere is too heavy, but you know you will not get out of it unless you really eat something, so you pick up the spoon and take a spoonful of the meal, gathering a piece of everything. Letting it steam for a few seconds as you watch it, you contemplate putting it in your mouth because ever since yesterday you feel this sickness in your stomach. It is more fragile than it ever could be on any given normal day.

Even so, you take a bite. At first it feels like you will throw up at the sheer hue of sweetness in it.

But you chew, and continue chewing, and you do not throw up.

“I heard you’re going out again today.” Mark mumbles, which makes you perk up, looking at Yuta. His eyes widen in the slightest. “I am,” He says, his eyes looking boringly only at Mark.

You chuckle drily. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Taeyong wants me there. He’s going out too.” His explanation does not calm your heart, which feels like it is being squeezed, at all. You turn back to your bowl and continue picking some porridge. Just to avoid his gaze.

Yuta does not say that he would come back or that he would be okay. Because he knows that those words do not hold any meaning to them whatsoever, especially now. “I have to go soon, so you should better be finished with these before I do. I’ll let you drink the tea by yourselves.”

Mark and you start eating in complete silence. Mostly because Yuta is watching you eat and it is extremely uncomfortable, and it would be awkward to just talk as if he was not there.

It makes you both rush your meals as well. The bowls empty out in a matter of minutes and your stomach feels heavy, though in all honesty, it was a pretty good breakfast Yuta had prepared for you. It was a fact that you would not have bothered to cook or even to prepare something that did not need to be cooked.

When the two of you are done with your meals, Yuta smiles and takes the bowls away to wash them quickly. Mark tries to intervene and says that Yuta could go out and he would take care of the dishes, but Yuta shuts him right up saying he needs the distraction anyway.

You can see Yuta’s hands shaking slightly.

It is always difficult to know for sure what he is feeling. But if you had to give it a shot, you would say he is feeling either anxious or shocked, or both. He is the type to live his emotions very secretively, and you could never recall an instance where Yuta’s grief was noticeable. Maybe only when he had lost one of his recruited, young survivors on the way back home. That had changed him as a whole; losing someone (especially much younger than him) under his responsibility.

He leaves once the bowls are washed, not looking at your way or telling you goodbye. You are simultaneously thankful and angry at him for doing that.

The bergamot tea is still steamy. It somewhat burns your hands when you put them around the jar to warm yourself up and start looking into the dark substance, looking so deep into it that you start feeling as if you are part of the dark liquid.

Mark clears his throat. “You’re wearing the same things as yesterday.”

That is true: even though there is nothing that you want more than to take them off and trash them to never see them again. But at the same time, there is something inside of you that does not want to let go of them. Even if it is just taking them off.

You look at the side of his face, and see him taking a sip from the jar. “Could you sleep?”

He shakes his head with a gulp. “No, no. You?”

The two of you make eye contact when he finally properly looks at you, and you shake your head as well. “I kept seeing it like a picture— like something projected at the backs of my eyelids.”

Mark nods, and that is it for a while. No one speaks for some time and you sip your beverages together as if it is a chore that you have to do, as if Yuta would see you two if you spill the tea into the drain of the sink and would come after you, trying to get done as quickly as possible so both of you could leave to be by yourselves. And it goes on until Mark decides to speak in a low voice. “They buried him early in the morning. His parents didn’t want anybody to see.”

Your eyes burn and the lump forms back in your throat because you can understand why they would not want anyone to see, but at the same time, you cannot. “Some of his older recruits left him flowers and letters, seeing that made me feel a bit better.”

You nod. “He deserves that.” And so much more. Despite yourself you smile slightly, and Mark joins in understandably grim, nodding. “He does.”

The day goes by extremely slow, yet so fast once you are back at your house.

You let yourself take refuge on the bed and do not move much throughout the day, trying to sleep. Expectedly, you are not too good at doing that. You toss and turn and huff and look up at the ceiling meaninglessly until you can no longer hear kids playing outside and the adults going about with their daily duties; until daylight loses all of its significance. Until you realize you have melted into this state of mind and have completely forgotten about your needs, using the toilet, eating, or drinking water.

Yesterday’s clothes are still on you. And you cannot bring yourself to change out of them, again, even though there is nothing in this world you want more than to never see them again.

The night would have not had any significance whatsoever as well if it was not for the sounds of hurried shuffles through the snow that were coming out of your room’s window at whoever knows o’clock. Before you could even show any type of physical response to it- whether it be surprise or suspicion- there were loud and hard knocks on your door.

It takes probably all of the strength you have in you to get up and walk to the door. You laze your way over to it and swing it open, rubbing your eyes.

You would have expected it to be Jaehyun, since he must have gotten done with his duties. But it was not him. It was Mark.

Mark, whose eyes and face were lit up with adrenaline. There is not a single emotion you can make out from the way his face looks. The world could actually be ending for all you know, or the community might have been getting raided.

You cannot make anything out from the way his voice sounds, either, when you hear him speak the millisecond after the door knob turns. “They found the trespassers.”

The look in his eyes- whatever it was, shifts into concern for a split second before he carries on with his words. “One of them’s the one Yuta left a note for, they were making their way over here when Yuta found them.”

Those words spark a light in your chest because of course. Of course they were the ones that caused this whole thing in the first place and it sounds stupid to you now that you had not even thought about them when you noticed the doors were open.

Which is because the doors at the nearer town were, in fact, closed while you were there.

Now it does not make sense. “Wh- how- that doesn’t make any sense. The doors were closed when we were out earlier.”

Mark shrugs. “I don’t know, I guess they got the theme by the time they were there. Yuta told me about the whole interrogation,” He chuckles humorlessly, shaking his head. “They claimed everything before they could even ask the questions.”

“Do they know they fucking killed people?” You ask, and Mark flinches at the harshness of the words. However, he nods promptly. “Yuta told them. They said they were sorry-”

It makes you laugh at the sheer comedy of it. “They were sorry? That doesn’t bring them back or make up for anything.”

“Nobody ever said it does-” Mark defends, but you are too angry at them to stop. “You know how fucking miraculous it is to survive twenty five years- the whole ordeal, especially when you go outside frequently. His parents pushed through thick and thicker with a newborn baby just to get to where they are now, to give him a damn chance at life and this is how Johnny goes? Because of someone else’s stupidity and inconsideration?” Shaking from anger, you wipe at your eyes that have gotten a little wet while your blow-up was going on. You gulp and shake your head, feeling the tension in your jaws. “They should save their apologies because not even a billion of them,” Faster than lightning, you hold a finger up in the air in between you and Mark. “Would make up for a single hair of Johnny’s that got hurt nor for a single tear of his parents.”

Mark, your poor friend and companion, only nods a little. He knows how you get when you are angry, and he knows how fed up you must be feeling, and he can see how tired and out-of-it you look, so he does not talk. He knows that if he were to say anything you would spill words from your mouth you would either regret saying or would only upset you more, and he did not want that to happen.

Though, Mark did have to say one thing. A part of the truth that would concern the two of you. “They’re from the Nox.”

He watches your eyes slowly widen. In a matter of seconds, you look awake and aware as if you did get all the sleep you had lost the past two days within those few moments. You lean your shoulder against the door for support or from the shock, he cannot be sure. “What?” You whisper.

Mark shifts from his place, the tips of his shoes touching your socks as he leans in much closer- most probably to drown his voice out. The neighbors should not hear more than what they might have already heard so far, even though you had been conversing in low tones. “From the headquarters,” He whispers, looking into your eyes. “They came to recruit people from this area. The others are with them.”

Your brows furrow with the oncoming nerves. “So there were more of them and they just joined?”

After a second’s hesitation, Mark nods. “Seems so.”

“Why would they?” Upon the question, Mark takes a deep breath and pushes his shoulders back much like a school kid being questioned on a topic they have not studied, and looks at the side. The yellow lights from other people’s windows hit his face as he nibbles on his bottom lip indecisively. When he turns back to face you, the lights still illuminating the right side of his face, he shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Mark does not get surprised when you chuckle humorlessly. “Well I think it’s pathetic to run with people who’ve killed your own.”

It is quiet for a few seconds as he nibbles on his lip some more, but in the end something- that looked much like defeat- washes over him before he just nods a little. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Maybe five seconds of quiet before he speaks, looking down at his hands where his fingers are picking at scabs formed over his knuckles that seemed to be there every living day. “Um,” He swallows the words that would come after that at first, but he thinks, and thinks some more. It takes a couple of seconds, but he does decide to speak up. “You know what, nevermind. Maybe later.”

You get a bit taken aback but he cannot tell, because your brows are still furrowed a bit angrily and there is no other emotion over your face. “Do you know where Jaehyun is? He said he’d come straight after his duties.”

Mark’s mouth opens but no word leaves it. “He uh,” It closes and opens once again, his eyes widening a little. “He’s- he volunteered,” He clears his throat and looks down. “He volunteered for filiation.”

“Of what?” Your heartbeats have gotten significantly faster, stronger and heavier, but you cannot say if it is worry or the oncoming anger. “The trespassers’ base. Taeyong was looking for someone he could trust and he-,”

“Amazing,” You chuckle and shuffle on your feet, crossing your arms over your chest. “That’s amazing.” Mark sees you lower your head and your tongue swipe over your bottom lip as you smile bitterly, and when you raise your head back up, he can see the unshed liquid shine with the moonlight. “Why does nobody act responsible?” You whisper, and he sees the falter in your furrowed brows- the stutter.

But Mark knows you better.

He knows this is not how you truly think. He knows you out of all people want to move at the front, he knows you want that the most, and Mark knows you blame yourself for the things you are (in his opinion, rightfully) unable to do. He knows it is because you are scared. He knows you are terrified. Because it has been long, so long since either of you two have even gotten close to properly surviving outside and in all honesty: through these years of routinely going out for shorter periods of time and not having to dwell on things out of the gates, you two have grown accustomed to the feeling of homely safety. It really had felt like nothing and nobody would be able to reach you or anyone around you, even if it felt like it just inside the walls. The bubble of routine reality hidden in the much chaotic and unforgiving reality that was this community had slowly but surely implanted the expectation of seeing your loved ones get back home as if it was just a shift of a pre-apocalypse job- what they called 9-to-5.

And Mark knows this is almost like a reset, and that the sense of security and whatever this place has brought you feels like it is gone. He feels like it too.

Mark hates to see you this way. He hates to feel this way. He hates that Johnny was the one who had to go out of everyone, because he was the best of you.

But he knows he should take care of who he has left. In whatever way he can.

When he looks at you, the concerned look in his eyes from a few moments ago is back. “Have you slept any?”

You shake your head. “No.”

He nods as if he expected the murmured answer. “We’re going back to duties tomorrow, you need to sleep some.” Mark sees you chuckle just once and hears you mutter an ‘Easy to say.’ while tilting your gaze down, but he interrupts you by pointing inside, albeit a bit reluctantly. “Do you want me to help?”

“Would you?” He nods, the genuinity somehow visible from the way he does, and steps in gladly when you get away from the door and open it wide enough for him to walk in.

It had been long since the last time he had helped you sleep. It was a few years ago when you were on your own, having just separated from a group of survivors the two of you had become somewhat attached to. Their goals with life were much different than Mark’s and yours- two mere teenagers whose only wish was to not be much farther from home in hopes of reuniting with the people you had grown with.

Who could ever know that a little over three weeks of traveling on foot would already be too far from home, and too impossible to ever cross paths with? A miracle, really, ‘for kids your age’ (as people who were around the age of your parents would say).

Some nights the hopelessness and the feeling of never belonging to any group would take over you. Mark was the only person you could depend on, and you were the only person he could depend on. With how young you both were it was only natural that both of you had times where the cycle of hunger, loneliness, the paranoia of surviving and being infected, almost-dying but being saved, seeing the only person you depend on almost die but saving them, either being showered with love from other survivors or being hated for whatever reason, and getting left behind either way would get too much to deal with.

The two of you were camping overnight inside a completely empty water tower, warm and dark in the winter night- the last gift of the survivor group you had tagged along with had been an old map marked all over with safe and hopefully clear places to settle in. Plus the groups you should never encounter.

So he had done what he was doing right now. He made you lay down like right now, that time on the hard concrete and now on your kind of soft mattress that was slowly rotting away, knelt in front of you unlike in the past when he laid down beside you, started playing (more like softly scratching) with your hair and scalp because he knew it worked well to make you sleep, and sang in a low tone because he knew you loved it, and found comfort in it.

His voice sounds rougher than ever when he starts.

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,” This song is much too familiar, and it is Mark’s favorite verse of it. It means so much to him, having been brought up with faith in a world he once stated he felt was ‘too far from it’.

“And I will dwell on this earth forevermore,” His voice is soothing and soft, even though you knew he preferred his rapping much better over his singing. “Said, I walk beside the still waters and they restore my soul,”

He stops a little to take a breath, an unnecessary one, yet heavy. “But I can’t walk on the path of the right because I’m wrong.”

Mark’s voice is working its charm- or maybe it is knowing you are not alone, you do not know. But your head was getting clouded and dazed with the sleep creeping up to take you over already. He, however, continues. “Well, I came upon a man at the top of a hill,”

His voice cracks a little. “Called himself the savior of the human race,”

Through the cloud of sleep, you try to reach him. Only mentally, but you try to reach him. You wanted to hear him until the end. “Said he come to save the world from destruction and pain, but I said ‘How can you save the world from itself?’”

You barely make it to the end of the line, only hearing a glimpse of his sporadic whistling.

When you open your eyes you see Johnny sitting down next to your hand laid in front of your face, hugging the pillow. He smiles down at you, ruffling your hair for a bit. The room is dim- only the wall lights are on. The environment is mostly dark, even Johnny’s face that is much closer to you than anything. You can still see him pretty well, though, in the dim, warm yellow lighting.

His clothes are relatively clean. A few stains and tears here and there, but nothing unusual. Him and his parents’ ways of doing laundry were always superior to many others. You wanted to learn how but Johnny said you would have to come and do it with them once to properly learn once you are out of the dorms. Sometimes he would offer to do your laundry for you when the queues and waiting periods of the laundry got too long in the dorms- it was easier to have problems with water at a rather small place where a lot of people lived, and when they got their clothes really dirty almost every single day while getting educated on survival skills and agriculture.

His face is bright. His eyes are puffy just the right amount; he looks energetic. His smile is of genuine fondness towards you, and it makes you smile as well.

“Sleeping too deep?” He asks quietly. The dorm room is unoccupied excluding the two of you; your roommate had gotten a bad cold and was kept in the small hospital ward. You shake your head at his question but the yawn you let out contradicts with the motion. “I was just taking a nap.”

Johnny nods and looks down for a second, sighing a little before looking back at you and slightly raising his hand which held a tea cloth, showing off the little pouch. “Eomma sent some cornbread. I brought some dried figs as well.”

Excitement washes over you, and you take the cloth out of his hand gratefully when he holds it out for you. Unable to hold yourself back, you break a small piece off of a slice of cornbread and happily put it inside your mouth- giggling in delight when you notice the fresh corn taste and the fluffy texture. Johnny chuckles at your reaction and coos only a little.

His smile dies down pretty fast despite its brightness just a moment ago. Which is unusual for him, who likes to stretch his smiles out for as long as he possibly could.

“Can I lie down?” He asks and points at the pillow reluctantly. You nod and scoot closer to the wall, arching your back a little and tilting your head back to secure the tea cloth of snacks inside the small, empty vase placed on the windowsill. It operated as a whatever-holder: sometimes it was actual flowers, sometimes it was small jewellery or gifts you had gotten on your birthdays, sometimes the very occasional letter from Mark even though he was just two buildings down, but usually it was snacks from Johnny.

He lies down next to you and does not bother to get under the blanket, placing his hands on his stomach as he looks at the ceiling. You watch his chest rise and fall three, maybe four times before he can start speaking. “Did you ever observe one?”

“An infected?” He hums at your question. You look at the ceiling and try to remember a time you might have but nothing resurfaces. “Not really. Was too busy trying to save my ass. Or Mark’s.”

“You never went outside before the raid?” Johnny asks, quite curious. You shake your head again even though you are not sure if he would see it. “Not never, but we were in school mostly. It was high up in an apartment so it was the safest place. I did not have to worry much about them until we were older.”

An exhausted sigh makes its way past your lips and it is not only because you are physically exhausted. “And then we ran.” Turning your head to the side to look at his face, you smile. “And now I’m in a different kind of school.” Calling the dormitories a school was simultaneously a far reach and not. It was mostly to train people to not be shenanigans until they became adults, and to be responsible with their duties and communal living once they were one.

A hand laid on his stomach reaches out for one of yours and he holds it, squeezing in a way that could not be described as tightly but rather, strongly. In a way that reassured you and calmed you down, in the way that made all your past worth the present. “You’ll get to be a Wanderer soon enough. Just a few months more.”

“I just like the idea of having my own place,” You chuckle as you shrug, acting like being a Wanderer was the least of your interests. “A bathroom all to myself, a less shitty bed and having the freedom to walk around whenever…”

“Just make sure you don’t forget about us when you get your luxury.” He smiles and looks at you, and you smile back at him devilishly. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” At that, Johnny’s mouth drops open in surprise and happiness, but you cut him off before he can even start, playing your game further. “You see, unfortunately most people I consider friends in here aren’t peaceful, calm farmers or healers or-”

“Yeah, we all have a fucked-up liking of the outside,” He nods as he talks to himself, eyes slightly squinted. But he comes to his own rescue with a protest. “It’s not like anybody can blame us. Being lost in the old world is quite dreamy when there aren’t screeching mushrooms running around.”

It makes you laugh the way he addresses once-people back from the dead, even snort a little. It had been long since you had seen one. Young recruits, or recruits that basically were not at the age of maturity, were not allowed to go on patrols, research scouts, or sweeps unless it was absolutely necessary. From what Taeyong had told you the first time you ever stepped foot into the dorms and were told about the way things went around the city, it was to give people, especially teens, a chance.

A chance to live at least until the day they were considered adults.

“Speaking of,” Johnny’s smile dies down once more. He takes a big breath, and his chest rises with it, and he holds it there for a few seconds. When it is let out, it sounds sad more than anything. Maybe even a bit depressed. “When we were out on a patrol today with Taeyong, there was this small group of Runners at one of the checkpoints,”

He looks at you, but you do not say anything, so he continues. “So we were clearing the place out as we do, and I went upstairs while Taeyong stayed behind just to be safe. I went into the studio to write down the report,”

With that he turns his gaze back to the ceiling, scrunching his eyebrows slightly. “And there was this.. Runner, it- he didn’t hear or see me so I hid behind a table. But he wasn’t moving around, you know? Just standing at the same spot. It was very early stage, he had just turned. Maybe a couple of days ago, I don’t know,”

He starts fiddling with his fingers. “He looked around the same age as me, or maybe a bit younger. Wasn’t flimsy, didn’t look like he’d been starving- he just looked healthy otherwise. But as I looked at him and the way he flinched, the way his hands moved and his shoulders cramped; the way he grunted.. it sounded too human.”

There is silence for a second or so, but he picks his words right back up. “And his eyes- his eyes,” Johnny breathes, and the sound that comes from his nose sounds a bit too stuffed and wet to be normal. “They didn’t look completely empty. Not even meaningless.”

He looks down at his hands that are still fiddling, his lips hanging out a bit the way they did whenever he was sleepy or sad. Then, he nods a little, confirms whatever is going through his mind. “I think he was there,” His voice cracks and stutters. “Inside. Trapped and waiting until it consumed his brain whole. Trying to fight back as if it would be any help.”

“And I couldn’t help but think, as I shot him down,” He shrugs and shakes his head. “That I’d never want to be trapped in my own body and have to wait until I have no control over it, if it ever happened to me.” And he looks at you.

Johnny looks at you.

With his sad, brown, dark eyes. His empathy for the Runner and for his own self. He looks at you so deep, almost like he is frozen.

Because he is.

You reach out your hand to touch his arm, and find it to be extremely cold, and stiff.

He is gone.

You wake up breathless and almost shoot yourself out of your bed with the force you are sitting up. Mark is gone, and nobody else is there. You are completely alone. The sky is just turning a bit grey, signalling the coming of the morning.

Sighing, you try to relieve some of the pain in your jaws and chest; trying to forget the memory of Johnny that was now your nightmare. You had clenched up too much, it felt stiff everywhere. Now, your head was hurting too.

There is not a single drop of sleep left in you- even if there was, you hardly think you would be able to go back.

So you get up.

Walking to your closet in a hurry, you pick out some clothes in the dark. In all honesty you do not even know what you are picking, but it does not matter. There would be very few people outside at the dead of the night if at all, and you could not care less about how they thought your outfit was.

This felt like the only time you could actually visit him. You just wanted to be alone with him, and the silence.

Once you wear your coat you are already half outside. You shut your door as quietly as you possibly could in your hurry, which was undeniably a little loud even if it had been a reasonable time to leave your house, but it was not like people would care. Unless someone or something was screaming, nobody really cared.

From your house to the cemetery took around ten minutes of walking, which was a reasonable distance given how spread out this city was. How it came to be this big you did not exactly know. Johnny had told you sometime that the bigger series of stone buildings belonged to a winery- the wines would be fermented in the summer and then shipped out here in the fall to age before being sold, which was what his parents told to him. It made sense, because the stone buildings all had underground basements that were all connected, some of which were used as a hospital ward and some of which were used as a communal living space for people who did not really have families nor a role in the community like a Farmer, Wanderer or Sweeper. Basically for people who were deemed unqualified to have their own houses.

It kind of sucked, but then again, some people actually preferred being there. The director of the basements and dorms, this lovely woman called Sarwendah, had told you once that even though it was not the majority, some people found comfort in living with other people openly since it made them forget the reality of everything as long as they were in that bubble.

The wooden buildings were either built after the gates were built- which, the gates were built after the army claimed the zone to themselves at the start of the outbreak, whose control over the area for something around 11 years, Johnny remembered those times in his childhood- or they were the ones already built for the winery’s workers and their families.

Johnny. That bit of knowledge came from Johnny too, as well as many others.

And when you are in the cemetery walking through the graves, looking for his name and spotting it without much time passing, you see a silhouette standing right at the foot of the grave.

Who, upon walking closer, turns out to be Mark.

Who, also upon walking closer, seems to be fully equipped with bags and his gun.

“Why so equipped?” You ask, and it startles him, but he does turn around and watch you as you walk over to him. “You’re going outside to join Jaehyun?”

He clears his throat. “No, he got back,” There is a split second of silence that feels a bit too long in your confusion for how long it actually is. Mark rolls his shoulders back and takes a deep breath, lets it out, creating a rather long-lasting vapor. “But yeah, I’m going outside.”

“Where?” You ask further, and he visibly winces. He avoids the question to play with the stones around Johnny’s grave with his foot, nibbling on the inside of his mouth before mumbling. “I should’ve told you before but I couldn’t.”

Your brows furrow as a string is pulled at your heart with the suspicion and the piecing of things together. “What were you going to say?”

One more exhale, but this time sharp and clear-cut. Controlled. He looks at you, looks in your eyes, and tells you the words you would have never imagined he would. “They’re releasing the trespassers and I’m leaving with them.”

Everything kind of slows down at that moment if that is even possible with the lack of action-filled things around you. Shock, was it? Or utter betrayal? “I’m sorry?”

Mark takes a step closer to you and fully turns his body to face you, towering above you not so much with his height but more so with his body language. “They’re working on a vaccine. They trust what they’ve got in their hands and they’re traveling around recruiting people to guard the headquarters. They’re afraid someone might-”

It was all too much.

“Mark, what the fuck are you talking about?” You snarl, and it shuts him up effectively. Yet, after that, you do not say anything. You wait for him to explain himself and after a couple of overwhelmed inhales, he takes the opportunity. “I’m going there to work as a guard. They’re afraid of the possibility of someone stealing the samples, or worse, attacking the lab. They need every volunteer they can get right now.”

Anger.

Pure anger is what you are feeling, and it is indescribable. It covers you from head to toe, right to left, inside and out; it feels hot and yet, icy cold. “Johnny’s blood hasn’t even dried yet, and you’re leaving with the very people who caused his death?”

Mark looks taken aback. “Be sensible. They couldn’t have known about the doors, they’re the first group from the headquarters to come here in years. It’s life or death out there, and they probably didn’t have the time for details.”

You take a step closer to him as if it is possible, and hit his shoulder lightly. “How about you be a little sensible? How can you trust them so easily? What if they’re saying these just to recruit all those people- and to travel all the way through there-”

“They have a car. Takes three days.” Mark cuts in, which makes you chuckle humorlessly. “Okay, great. What if they just recruit you to use you as a scapegoat for when they encounter bandits? Or, like I said, they just recruit you to have more guards? The vaccine has been a word since forever, Mark, and we know it. It’s a stupid hopeless rumor.”

“I’m telling you, they have scientists and they have evidence-” Mark starts, but you cut him off. “Yes! But their people also raid towns, and these people themselves are inconsiderate enough to screw up our whole system and kill our friends along the way-” You are basically trying to make sense to him with your whole body, pointing at the grave and getting closer to him and looking at his eyes to make him regain some of his sense. Just enough to keep him here, where he should be. “How can you trust them with your own life when they’ve been so inconsiderate of the others’ time and time again? You walk out of here with them and the next thing you know, you’re dead, Mark.” You point to your left, which is the direction of the big gates where the trespassers must be leaving, as they need to leave under the Leaders’ watch.

He is silent upon that. It takes him a few moments to come up with the words he is going to say, and his eyes flicker around under the confused sunlight signalling the coming of the early morning.

But he comes up with them nonetheless. “I owe it to people and to him,” He points at the grave. “To do whatever part I can to end this someday. And if I need to go to great extents and forgive them, so be it.”

And with a determined gaze in his eyes you had never seen from Mark before, he says what he really thinks. “I’d rather die running after something I believe in than live with the shame every day.”

You understand.

Not him, but that he is going.

That maybe, he is already gone.

“You leave,” You look at the grave and bite the inside of your cheek before looking back at Mark. “And I’ll come looking after you.” You whisper.

He looks away and bites down on his lip, placing his hands on either side of his hips. And then, he shrugs, not even trying to think it through. “That’d be up to you.”

And he starts walking towards the left, leaving you at the cemetery.

For the first time, you are alone.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/7/2020

I missed THE GOLDEN GLOVE at Fantastic Fest last year. It was one of my only regrets of the whole experience, but it was basically mandatory since the available screenings were opposite the much-hyped PARASITE. As annoying as that sounds, it was actually a major compliment, since what could possibly serve as a consolation prize for the most hotly anticipated movie of the year? Needless to say, I heard great things, but I could never have imagined what it was actually like. I'm still wrapping my mind around it.

Between 1970 and 1975, an exceptionally depraved serial killer named Fritz Honka murdered at least four prostitutes in Hamburg's red light district. Today, we tend to think of the archetypal serial killer in terms of ironic contradictions: The public is attracted by Ted Bundy's dashing looks and suave manner, and John Wayne Gayce's dual careers as politician and party clown. Lacking anything so remarkable, we associate psychopathy with Norman Bates' boy-next-door charm, and repeat "It's always the quiet ones" with a smirk whenever a new Jeffrey Dahmer or Dennis Nilsen is exposed to the public. The popular conception of a bloodthirsty maniac is not the fairytale monster of yore, but a wolf in sheep's clothing, whose hygienic appearance and lifestyle belie his twisted desires. In our post-everything world, the ironic surprise has become the rule. In this light, THE GOLDEN GLOVE represents a refreshing return to naked truth.

To say that writer-director Fatih Akin's version of the Fritz Honka story is shocking, repulsive, and utterly degenerated would be a gross understatement. We first meet the killer frantically trying to dispose of a corpse in his filthy flat, wallpapered with porno pinups, strewn with broken toys, and virtually projecting smell lines off of the screen. One's sense of embodiment is oppressive, even claustrophobic, as the petite Honka tries and fails to collapse the full dead weight of a human corpse into a garbage bag, before giving up and dismembering it, with nearly equal difficulty. The scene is appalling, utterly debased, and yet nothing is as shocking as the killer's visage. When he finally turns to look into the camera, it's hard to believe he's even human: the rolling glass eye, the smashed and inflated nose, the tombstone teeth and cratered skin, are almost too extreme to bear. Actually, suffering from a touch of facial blindness, I had to stare intently at Honka's face for nearly half the movie before I could fully convince myself that I was, in fact, looking at an elaborate prosthetic operation used to transform 23 year old boy band candidate Jonas Dassler into the disfigured 35 year old serial murderer.

Though West Germany remained on a steady economic upturn beginning in the 1950s and throughout the 1970s, you wouldn't know it from THE GOLDEN GLOVE. If Honka's outsides match his insides, they are further matched by his stomping grounds in the Reeperbahn, a dirty, violent, booze-soaked repository for the dregs of humanity. Though its denizens may come from different walks of life, one thing is certain: Whoever winds up there, belongs there. Honka was the child of a communist and grew up in a concentration camp, yet he swills vodka side by side with an ex-SS officer, among other societal rejects, in a crumbling dive called The Golden Glove. The scene is an excellent source of hopeless prostitutes at the end of their career, who are Honka's prime victims, as he is too frightful-looking to ensnare an attractive young girl. These pitiful women all display a peculiarly hypnotic willingness to go along with Honka, no matter how sadistic he becomes; this seems to have less to do with money, which rarely comes up, and more to do with their shared awareness that for them, and for Honka too, it's been all over, for a long time.

Not to reduce someone’s performance to their physical appearance, but ???

To call Dassler's portrayal of Honka "sympathetic" would be a bridge too far, but it is undeniably compelling. He supports the startling impact of his facial prostheses with a performance of rare intensity, a full-body transformation into a person in so much pain that a normal life will never become an option. His physical vocabulary reminded me of the stage version of The Elephant Man, in which the lead actor wears no makeup, but conveys John Merrick's deformities using his body alone. Although there is an abundance of makeup in THE GOLDEN GLOVE, Dassler's silhouette and agonized movements would be recognizable from a mile away. In spite of his near-constant screaming rage, the actor manages to craft a rich and convincing persona. During a chapter in which Honka experiments with sobriety, we find a stunning image of him hunched in the corner of his ordinarily chaotic flat, now deathly still, his eyes gazing at nothing as cigarette smoke seeps from his pores, having no idea what to do with himself when he isn't in a rolling alcoholic rampage. The moment is brief but haunting in its contrast to the rest of the film, having everything to do with Dassler's quietly vibrating anxiety.

Performances are roundly excellent here, not that least of which are from Honka's victims. The cast of middle-aged actresses looking their most disastrous is hugely responsible for the film's impact. These are the kinds of performances people call "brave", which is a euphemism for making audiences uncomfortable with an uncompromising presentation of one's own self, unvarnished by any masturbatory solicitation. Among these women is Margarete Tiesel, herself no stranger to difficult cinema: She was the star of 2012's PARADISE: LOVE, a harrowing drama about a woman who copes with her midlife crisis by pursuing sex tourism in Kenya. Her brilliant, instinctive performance as one of Honka's only survivors--though she nearly meets a fate worse than death--makes her the leading lady of a movie that was never meant to have one.

So, what does all this unpleasantness add up to, you might be asking? It's hard to say. THE GOLDEN GLOVE is a film of enormous power, but it can be difficult to explain what the point of it is, in a world where most people feel that the purpose of art is to produce some form of pleasure. This is the challenge faced by difficult movies throughout history, like THE GOLDEN GLOVE's obvious ancestors, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, MANIAC and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Describing unremitting cruelty with relentless realism is not considered a worthy endeavor by many, even if there is real artistry in your execution; some people will even mistake you for advocating and enjoying violence and despair, as we live in a world where huge amount of movie and TV production is devoted to aspirational subjects. (The fact that people won't turn away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, no matter how monotonous and condescending they become, should tell you something) How do you justify to such people, that you want to make or see work that portrays ugliness and evil with as much commitment as other movies seek to portray love, beauty, and family values? Why isn't it enough to say that these things exist, and their existence alone makes them worth contemplation?

A rare, perhaps exclusive “beautiful image” in THE GOLDEN GLOVE, from Fritz Honka’s absurd fantasies.

You may detect that I have attempted to have this frustrating conversation with many people, strangers, enemies, and friends I love and respect. I find that for some, it is simply too hard to divorce themselves from the pleasure principle. I don't say this to demean them; some hold the philosophy that art be reserved for beauty, and others have a more literary feeling that it's ok to show characters in grim circumstances, as long as the ultimate goal is to uplift the human spirit. Even I draw the line somewhere; I appreciate the punk rebellion of Troma movies as a cultural force, but I do not enjoy watching them, because I dislike what I perceive as contempt for the audience and the aestheticization of laziness--making something shitty more or less on purpose. A step or three up from that, you land in Todd Solondz territory, where you find materially gorgeous movies whose explicit statement is that our collective reverence for a quality called "humanity" is based on nothing. I like some of those movies, and sometimes I even like them when I don't like them, because I'm entranced by Solondz's technical proficiency...and maybe, deep down, I'm not completely convinced about "humanity", either. However, I don't fight very hard in arguments about him; I understand the objections. Still, I've been surprised by peers who I think of as bright and tasteful, who absolutely hated movies I thought were unassailable, like OLDBOY and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. In both cases, the ultimate objection was that they accuse humans of being pretentious and self-deceptive, aspiring to heroism or bemoaning their victimhood while wallowing in their own cowardice and perversity. Ok, I get it...but, not really. Why isn't it ever wholly acceptable to discuss, honestly, what we do not like about ourselves?

The beguiling thing about THE GOLDEN GLOVE is that, although it is instantly horrifying, is it also an impeccable production. The director can't help showing you crime scene photos during the ending credits, and I can't really blame him, when his crew worked so hard to bring us a vision of Fritz Honka's world that approaches virtual reality. But it isn't just slavishly realistic; it is vivid, immersive, an experience of total sensory overload. Not a square inch of this movie has been left to chance, and the product of all this graceful control is totally spellbinding. I started to think to myself that, when you've achieved this level of artifice, what really differentiates a movie like THE GOLDEN GLOVE from something like THE RED SHOES? I mean, aside from their obvious narrative differences. Both films plunge the viewer into a world that is complete beyond imagination, crafted with a rigor and sincerity that is rarely paralleled. And, I will dare to say, both films penetrate to the depths of the human soul. What Fatih Akin finds there is not the same as what Powell and Pressburger found, of course, but I don't think that makes it any less real. Akin's film is adapted from a novel by Heinz Strunk, and apparently, some critics have accused Akin of leaving behind the depth and nuance of the book, to focus instead on all that is gruesome about it. This may be true, on some level; I wouldn't know. For now, I can only insist that on watching THE GOLDEN GLOVE, for all its grotesquerie, I still got the message.

[amphtaminedreams]

S/S 2020 Fashion Month: A Basic, Uneducated Fashion Heaux’s A-Z of Everything Noteworthy (Part 2/3)

Hi to anyone reading,

Back at it again with the giving my unsolicited opinion on 2020′s spring/summer offering, I’m gonna hop straight into part 2 of my fashion month review!

Sorry to start with an underwhelming few but my compulsive tendencies are making it really hard to break out of this alphabetical structure (cry laughs whilst thinking about how long it took me to face up at my retail job last night because it would give me vaguely homicidal urges and make my fingers tingle every time a customer moved something slightly out of line), so I’m gonna whizz through a handful of collections. First up, Halpern:

Not much to say but I’m envious of the heavy liner (my hooded eyes could never) and I like the colour scheme. As for the 80s style metallic pink dress?

Helmut Lang:

And Hermes:

Of these 3 collections, Hermes is definitely the most interesting. I like the colour scheme and the utilitarian shapes and the tan coloured jackets are an absolute shoot. This is how you make safari look fresh, D&G take note.

Isabel Marant was okay. It’s cute, sure, reminds me of something Mary-Kate and Ashley would’ve come out with/worn in the 2000s, and there’s definitely some things I would wear, but I wouldn’t say it looks all that luxury. Pricey, sure, but like, Free People pricey, not designer pricey. As a collection, it’s not all that conceptual, unless the concept is L.A girl does a Starbucks run after her bikram yoga class. What I will say though is that some of the S/S 2020 commercial trends are becoming clear: white cheesecloth pieces, peasant blouses, cowboy boots, scrappy sandals, neutral tones, and bandana print. 

Now onto the darling of high fashion Twitter: Jacquemus.

As far as presentation goes, this has to be one of my favourite set-ups of the season; a hot pink runway running through a lavender meadow is as canny and serene as those who sing the praises of Simon Porte Jacquemus would have you expect, and the clothes were easy, breezy and beautiful, even if there is an element of getting dressed in the dark going on with the styling which put me off including a few otherwise gorgeous pieces. It might not be 100% my style but you can tell this is a brand of the future which is only going to go from strength to strength.

And everything was beautifully and purposefully crafted on the runway with J.W Anderson this year. The pieces are graceful and timeless whilst still easy to envision as something a modern woman would throw on to (very fashionably) run some errands in the city. This was also one of the handful of shows (IIRC! This might be a case of extreme deja-vu!) where we saw the sandal straps tied over the trousers, I’m guessing to accentuate the ankles, and...I’m surprisingly here for it? Though in a sense it kinda resembles when I accidentally get my work trousers tucked into my slipper socks, it’s an interesting touch and adds a bit of a shape to otherwise billowing bottom halves.

Following Jacquemus’ lead (or vice versa, I’m way too deep into this fashion month haze to work out who went first at this point), Lacoste also put on a co-ed show. Otherwise crisp and preppy as per, the neckerchiefs (even if seeing them all next to one another does give off a bit of a Disneyland Main Street barbershop quartet vibe) and vinyl/wet-look/PVC/I’m still not sure what differentiates the 3 coats were an out of the box touch for them and I really liked it. It’s athleisure, but more like something Hayley Bieber would’ve worn as part of her Princess Diana inspired shoot than anything I’d wear to the gym.

LMAO, as if I go the gym. But you get my point. Next, Loewe:

Delicate, feminine and all around delightful, the S/S 2020 Loewe collection is up there with Chloe and Brock when it comes to most spring appropriate. More chiffon, lace and doily-like detailing, please, the old woman in me lives for this kinda thing made fashionable. Like with J.W Anderson, you can tell the design team wanted to do something different without just throwing shit onto their pieces for the sake of being wacky, and so we end up with these dramatic, slightly geometric waistlines and almost angelic Victorian nightgown inspired dresses that kinda make me wished that 1). ghosts existed and that 2). I lived back in that era so I could die some tragic death wearing any one of the dresses on the left in the top 3 rows and then haunt the shit out of everyone. That would really be an iconic fashion moment. Also wonderful, imo, was Louis Vuitton:

The mix between 60s and Edwardian I never knew I needed, as opposed to Gucci’s forward thinking take on the former decade, Louis Vuitton takes it back even further and throws in late 19th/early 20th century structures and references. I adore the what seems to be a mix between brocade and paisley print and the exaggerated collars are a very cute touch. The jacket on the top left is a highlight, a more neutral version of the similar catsuit seen at the Longchamp show (I couldn’t personally pick enough highlights from that to include it), and I now more than ever really want to try and pull off a sweater vest. The shoes might not be the most exciting thing ever but they’re also a personal favourite, from the knee high boots to the loafers with the LV moniker.

Maison Margiela was very cool and again, I’m in love with the shoes and just the accessories in general, ESPECIALLY those hats. I don’t know if I’m way off base here but this show is almost a modernised, fashionable version of a 1940s period drama about WW2 pilots and evacuees. Yes, maybe I am just getting that solely from the trench coats and the naval influences and the exaggerated collars but I think with that list I made quite a case for that perspective, right? Right.

And completing this holy trinity (appropriating the term I usually reserve for Emma Watson, Emma Stone and Emma Roberts is not without careful consideration) is Marc Jacobs. One of my ultimate favourites of this season, this collection is absolutely EVERYTHING: kitschy, dream-like, whimsical, over-the-top, and totally appropriate for your slightly eccentric aunt who always drinks too much wine and talks a lot of shit every time she comes over for dinner. I really feel like I walked into wonderland looking at this collection, and in the best way possible, it gives me a female Russell Brand in the 2000s’ wardrobe on crack. On the one hand we have these insanely beautiful and ethereal chiffon floral dresses but then we also have fricken top hats. Basically, it’s everything I love about fashion and I don’t know if anything can top it. Periodt (and I type that with a totally straight face). 

Next, onto another personal fave, Marchesa:

Which is as always, beautiful. I was going to write that if Disney princesses came to life and lived in the modern world (so, in other words, Elle Fanning), they would be wearing Marchesa and then I remembered that the film Enchanted exists and had a lightbulb moment and thought OH MY GOD IF THEY REMADE THAT IN 2019, THE DRESS ON THE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE ROW WOULD BE A PERFECT LEVELLING UP OF THE CURTAIN DRESS.

Anyways, favourites of the favourites are the bottom row; I would die for that feather trim. 

BUT where Marchesa is everything opulent, overly ornate and err-ing on “fussy”, Margaret Howell’s S/S 2020 collection is completely stripped back and just as effective, if not as to my taste. Very cool, very current, and altogether effortless (in a good way!), with this show Margaret Howell made mid-20th century utilitarianism relevant. I never thought I’d be praising the combination of bermuda shorts, crew socks and a beanie and yet here I am. Character development.

Next is Marine Serre:

Which I really like! The bottom row isn’t really to my personal taste but I can acknowledge that if I saw somebody wearing any one of those outfits I’d think they looked sick, and as for the first two rows, those mesh tops and the slightly chintzy florals are right up my alley.

Marques Almeida put out a really strong collection, imo. The blending of luxurious silhouettes and fabrics with street wear inspired prints and styling is a really interesting and unique contrast and if Billie Eilish ever decided to stop wearing those tweenie clothes and wanted to actually seduce somebody’s dad (I LOVE BILLIE EILISH AND I KNOW WHY SHE DRESSES THE WAY SHE DOES, IT’S A JOKE, PLS DON’T HATE ME), I’d love to see her wearing something like this. It’s a blend of punk, urban, and 2019 e-girl and has the kind of edge that Topshop has lost over the past couple of years that used to make it so aspirational to my 13 year old self. Of all the shows, it also probably has the most personally wearable accessories, and a shit tonne of cool make up looks I’d love to try if it weren’t for my lack of visible eyelid, lol.

Make up looks were a highlight of the Max Mara show too, for me anyway.

I otherwise wasn’t hugely keen on the collection, it being a little too matronly/Miss.Trunchbull-esque for my liking (wild card fashion inspiration of 2019, apparently?). The light paisley print dresses are very dreamy, though, and I can never resist a good suit. 

As for Michael Kors, dare I say it, but the basic bitch in me loved it. I know as a designer he’s not held in very high regard by the fashion community and I'm not saying it’s at all original but it did what it set out to do well; I mean, it’s quite fitting that he cameo-d in an episode of Gossip Girl because every outfit would be perfect for the Constance attending incarnation of Blair Waldorf, which is probably why I like the collection. Like yeah, it’s a bit of a Polo Ralph Lauren/Lacoste rip off but it’s daintier and more feminine and so I’m not gonna lie, I’m on board with it. 

Next, Miu Miu.

One of the collections I was most excited for, I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the collection, but I have never once disliked anything Miu Miu and I usually love it. There are things I love about this line too: the cream, floral lace-up boots, the off-the-shoulder cardigans, the houndstooth oversized coats and of course the fur-lined gilets. My mum used to buy me similar ones when I was a little girl and so they give me childhood nostalgia in the best way possible. I mean, the collection is as girly and eccentric as ever. I think it’s just a little too on the primary school librarian side for me, this time round. Sorry Miu Miu xoxo

Now I’m just gonna speed through a couple, starting with MM6 Maison Margiela, the younger sister to the more expensive regular Maison Margiela line:

And Monique Lhuillier:

So that I can get to one of my other ultimate favourite collections for S/S 2020: Moschino.

Oh my god, where to even start. Firstly, I might be reaching, but if this show is even remotely to thank for art nouveau mesh tops showing up in the Urban Outfitters new in section, then a very sarcastic thank you to Jeremy Scott. You just made ethical shopping a lot harder. HOW am I supposed to not buy an Alphonse Mucha top? HOW!? I mean, I’m sure I’ll manage (I’m on month 3 without a shopping spree I can’t actually afford now and yes, I am very much patting myself on the back), but HOW!?

But on a serious level, if renaissance was the print of 2019, which I’m still very much into BTW, bring on modern art as its 2020 replacement. The Pablo Picasso inspired show not only livened up a generally pretty predictable fashion month but it’s also got me searching up other times art has met fashion on the runway and thrown me down a particularly aesthetically pleasing wormhole I’m not sure I ever want to escape from (https://frontrowmagazine.ca/art-inspired-looks-were-all-over-the-runways-of-fashion-week-a74e8bc7ff0d and https://www.vogue.com/article/spring-2017-ready-to-wear-fine-arts-trends are good starting points!).

Mugler was also up there with the best of them, imo:

See, if the Moschino collection was all about dabbling in art class, Mugler’s S/S 2020 collection is its more mathematically inclined sister, all about sharp lines and deconstructed silhouettes and symmetry all whilst looking hot as fuck. So very Mugler, basically. 

Now, this reference might be slightly off because I haven’t actually SEEN Ex-Machina yet but I imagine if Kim Kardashian were to channel that movie for a costume party she’d end up wearing something from this collection. That sounds like a roast because Kim has worn some questionable outfits but I blame Kanye for most of that and I’m referring to her on a good fashion day, alright!?

As for Off-White, it’s obviously a lot more commercial than most of the lines I’ve reviewed so far. Like, I can see a lot of these outfits on a mannequin in Urban Outfitters (no, I am not being paid to namedrop them, about 3 people in total read this Tumblr so any kind of sponsorship money would be severely wasted on me). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I love all of these looks; it just seems unfair to compare them to the the Mugler or Moschino collections, for example. 

The stand outs for me are all on the bottom row: I would buy the utility vest, leather blazer and the all mesh turtleneck under washed-out tie-dye on the spot if I saw them in a high street store. Unfortunately, I feel like that’s kinda where they belong. You just expect collections to be a bit more conceptual, and this one is a little watered down, as much as it’s my style.

Oscar de la Renta was beautiful, of course. Not like I’m shook by how beautiful it is but kinda just what you’d expect from a brand with a name as poetic and fun to say as Oscar de la Renta. The silhouettes are dreamy and the details are as fit for a fairy princess (lmao) as ever. Plus can I just say how happy I am to see butterflies on dresses for adult women again!? And dresses worn by Blanca Padilla nonetheless!? Very here for it.

Next up is another on one of my fashion month highlights: Paco Rabanne.

LOOK AT THIS SHIT!

I mean, don’t get me wrong, something about this collection (I’m pretty sure it’s the knee high coloured socks) is giving me primary school teacher vibes, but I'm not mad about it. It’d be the kind of teacher who’s actually really good at their job and has loads of cool hobbies and a really hot boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband who you secretly want to be then you grow up/and or have a huge crush on. 

Like with Marc Jacobs, there’s obvious flower child elements here, and whilst on the whole the former took my breath away slightly more, this is a lot more wearable. My favourites are the paisley print dress and cape on the left in the very bottom row and all the chainmail pieces (which remind me of the dress Naomi Smalls wore in that whole club ninety-sixxxxx skit on drag race), plus that floral cut out dress with the trailing flute sleeves, which is absolute PERFECTION. 

The 70s influence was clear in Peter Pilotto’s S/S 2020 collection too from the abundance of tie-dye to the knit v-neck dress, zany colour and print being the very on-brand focus. That being said, this is definitely more of a street-style inspired collection than usual and whilst the floral suits and dresses on the 3rd row down are very typical Peter Pilotto, the tie-dye corset and combat trousers on the far right, second row from the bottom, are very Jaded London. As for the reoccurrence of the bucket hat, I’ve remained steadfastly against them for several years now (even when our Lord and Saviour Miss Robyn Rihanna Fenty started wearing them) but the way they’re done in this collection even I could definitely get behind; all in all, the show surpassed my expectations.

The same goes for Ports 1961, which was a lot more eccentric than I gathered is the norm from a few google searches. Honestly, I hadn’t really heard of the brand which, upon reading up on it, I feel very dumb for considering it has been around since (in the shock twist of the century) 1961.

Yes, I know how that sounds! But forgive me, I’m still learning:)

Anyway, the fishnet detailing alone pretty much sold the looks I picked out. Seriously, I got a pair of those bloody tights, like, 2 years ago when they became a thing again and now any outfit where I have my legs out feels incomplete without them. 

Next is Prabal Gurung, which, as far as presentation goes, was fucking STUNNING:

I mean, you could say that I’m easily impressed and that the presence of the bouquets won me over (and you’d definitely have a point there), but it’s also this year’s Givenchy haute couture-esque feathers, the trailing pearl necklaces, the exaggerated shoulders, the dreamy colouring, the everything looking like it could’ve grown off a very fashionably-inclined tree. Like, there’s a lot to love here, from the naturalistic elements, to the context behind the show, an ode to American fashion history and those cast out of it (and the notion of “being American” in general) for so long. 

Going from a high to a (personal) low, however, next we have Prada:

I don’t know, I get that it’s supposed to be simple and stripped back and dignified and whatever and I like the looks I picked but it’s just a bit blah for me. The bonnets that kept cropping up just didn’t do it for me and almost ruined what is an otherwise nice skirt suit (top right). Nonetheless, I like the silhouette of the sheer black dress and the the brocade print suit is really luxurious looking, even if the pattern is a *little* Wetherspoons carpet. 

Anyways, here’s a quick overview of Rag and Bone:

So that I can stop moaning and get onto a collection I REALLY liked: 

I am of course talking about Ralph and Russo. See, this is kinda what I expected from, like, Chanel and yet it’s Ralph and Russo that delivered. Also, it gives me Alessandra Rich vibes which is very much a compliment considering how much I love her designs. I mean, if Valley of the Dolls were to get another film remake in 2019, this is exactly what I’d like to see the female leads wearing, from the pastel suits to the satin kaftan style dresses. The yellow feather trimmed dress is practically a copy of something Marchesa has already done but it’s cute all the same. In my top 10 collections of the season, for sure.

Rick Owens was another strong collection; it goes without saying that it’s not the most wearable but that’s not really what Rick Owens is known for, so I wouldn’t expect anything else. If you want fashion on an alien planet, or something Lady Gaga would’ve worn in 2010, he's your man.

Next, Rodarte:

Obviously the dresses are beautiful and the set is magnificent, BUT...I’m really not a fan of the whole celebrities filling in for high fashion models thing. I like Lili Reinhart and I adore Kirsten Dunst, she’s been in a load of my favourite films, but in a similar vein to Dolce and Gabbana’s influencer show, it’s just distracting from the actual garments, if even worse because I don’t WANT to be distracted here (the same can’t be said for the D&G show, lol).  If anybody has read this far, let me know your thoughts! 

Roland Mouret was nice, and I always like a coed show, especially when a designer isn’t afraid to blur the lines of masculine and feminine. It’s fresh, lightweight and luxurious looking, Cannes film festival street style eat your heart out, and I love the colour palette.

Similarly, colour was my favourite thing about Sally LaPointe’s S/S 2020 collection. 

I would never think that teal and burnt orange would work together, let alone in some kind of faux leather, and yet here we are. Orange is in itself always an interesting colour choice, perfect for the summer with a tan, and I really love monochrome outfits, even though they’re something that ends up being quite pricey to put together; slight differences in tone are okay but if you just randomly throw together a few things and they’re too off, it really doesn’t work and you’d have been better off wearing contrasting colours. For that reason, I’m just gonna admire that all-pink outfit from a distance. 

As for Schiaparelli, it’s one I always look forwards to for the sheer weirdness. RTW isn’t quite as kooky as haute couture but still, the interesting choices are still there; what at first glance appears to be flame print is actually coils of hair, and paired with a water print suit is a sequinned jacket emblazoned with a paradisiacal mirage. Ornament-like facial decorations as seen in the over-exaggerated glasses worn with the pony hair suit are also one of my favourite new things to happen in the high fashion scene in the past couple of months and I can’t wait to see how they get watered down to become more approachable for us...regular, non-structurally blessed folks who can’t pull off anything and everything.

Simone Rocha was STUNNING. Romantic and ethereal, it’s druid goddess crossed with upper class Victorian woman of leisure, equal parts delicate and grungy, like a modern, fashion version of Lady Gaga’s Scathach in the Roanoke season of American Horror Story. You know, in the flashbacks, not in present day when she was all gross and like...scalping people and shit. Each dress is so ornate and has such an interesting structure, and the fabric choices give off an organic kinda vibe that create a handmade feel; the collection is, imo, really worthy of being shown under a haute couture heading. When it comes to my favourite element of the show, I’m torn between the petticoats and the hair accessories. I’m just gonna give a cop-out answer and say both. 

Stella McCartney on the other hand, is very much a clear ready-to-wear collection. 

It’s pretty, for sure. The pastel blazers paired with delicate white mesh tops underneath are a gorgeous combination for spring and I like the reoccurrence of the chain glasses (Gucci, right?). But I mean, when you go from Simone Rocha to this, it’s a bit anticlimactic. Plus, if I’m honest, kaftans are always going to remind me of Honey Mahogany from season 5 of Drag Race. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she’s a lovely person but her runway looks aren’t really ones I look back fondly on, and you’re lying if you say you enjoyed them for anything other than meme purposes.

Temperley is equally meh, though the return of the Erdem-style boating hats is getting me excited that high street retailers might actually pick up on the trend and bring out some cheap ones for me to embarrass myself by wearing. 

I also love a good 70s suit, the neckerchiefs are cute and there are some really delightful prints here that are a more unique approach to florals for spring.

Coming towards the end now, next is Thom Browne:

I LOVE this. Like, don’t get me wrong Rick Owens was cool but I adore how on the nose the concept is here; time to bring back all the Marie Antoinette puns I didn’t get to use in my Versailles Instagram post. I don’t know if it’s the history buff in me or the Sofia Coppola Stan but I will always be willing to sign any kind of treaty for anything related to the excesses of the 18th century French monarchy, and this is that turned up to 1000 infused with a dash of the Teletubbies, which sounds like a nightmarish concept, I know, but as high fashion it WORKS.

Tory Burch was very commercial, seemingly half inspired by Monterey yoga moms and the other half by Hamptons socialites. 

And then there was Valentino, which was fucking exquisite, imo. LIKE, CALLING DOCLE & GABBANA: THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE TROPICAL PRINT INTERESTING. YOU MAKE THE VELVET MONKEY’S ARM THE FRICKEN WAISTBAND. 

Seriously, though, I am enamoured with this colour palette; all the whites and golds are angelic and fr, I didn’t know until now that you could make neons this elegant. I’m also getting an almost clerical feel from a lot of these looks, with the plaited waistband on the black dress that’s 7th row down in the middle, the stunning red cape and the multitude of exaggerated neck ruffs. I think I’ve mentioned before but I always love religious references in clothing-I don’t think I’ll ever get over the 2018 Met Gala-and so whether I’m reading too much into it or not, this collection really did it for me.

Whilst it’s probably as far removed a collection from Valentino’s S/S 2020 contribution you can get, I also loved Vera Wang this season. It might purely (I PROMISE THIS IS MY LAST GOSSIP GIRL REFERENCE) be because it gives me Jenny Humphrey vibes and *controversial* she did have my favourite style of any of the main characters, but sue me, this is just the right amount of late 90s/early 2000s grunge. Deconstructed trashy goth it girl is an interesting concept to see on the runway and I completely support it. 

Versace on the other hand was very hit or miss. The looks I picked out I really loved but ultimately, for one of the household name brands, a lot of the actual garments were a bit pedestrian. I will say though that for me, it’s a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The slicked back mermaid hair and the pops of colour in the makeup and the interesting necklines meant that when it was good, it was GOOD. However, overall, still a bit too 80s Miami businesswoman, and please GOD, can we leave that hideous J-Lo dress in the past, it should really not be the climax of the show in 20-fucking-19!

As for Victoria Beckham, I liked it, but it’s a bit of a Gucci copy, no? And no way near as interesting?

And on that note, I’m gonna have to cut this off. Super annoying but with only 5 collections left that I want to talk about, Tumblr is being a little bitch and will not let me add anything more to this post. So, see you in 5 for the final post!

Lauren x

[laetro]

Ritaban Das: Storyboarding for Effective Storytelling

Character designer, illustrator and storyboard artist, Ritaban Das, elaborates on the significance of storyboarding to effectively tell a story and thus also shares insights from his decade-long experience in animation.

Ritaban Das is a character designer, storyboard artist and illustrator working in the animation industry for the last decade. He’s worked on a wide range of national and international 2D and 3D animated projects for platforms like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Pogo. Recently, he shifted to Toronto, Canada for higher studies, looking to contribute his skills to the Canadian animation industry. He hopes to someday work on his own animated show.

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Q. How do you differentiate your approach between the roles of character designer, storyboard artist and illustrator?

Ritaban Das: At the end of the day it’s all interconnected; it all comes down to ‘story’. When I design a character, I start by thinking about what kind of personality the character has and their role in the story. I think about what I’m trying to communicate through the illustration. This helps me to figure out poses and expressions. As I’m drawing, I’m thinking about shapes, proportions and appeal. I also think about the composition of the illustration. When I make storyboards, I’m telling a story in motion by acting out the characters in them.

Q. What have been the greatest lessons you’ve learnt professionally and personally in your ten years of experience?

Ritaban Das: Draw what you like and the rest will fall into place. Only you know what motivates you.

Q. How did you find your calling to be an artist and, thereafter, how did you nurture your skills to hone your craft?

Ritaban Das: I’ve been drawing for as long as I remember and I’m always very passionate about it. To be very honest, I sucked at studies and my parents knew that very well. I remember spending most of my time with a box of chalk and slate gifted to me by my father. Like every other child, I also loved to sketch my favourite cartoons. I usually sketched these animated characters on the back pages of all my notebooks and also my classmates’ notebooks. It made me known amongst my seniors for my sketches.

That’s the only thing I was good at which I followed blindly. Honing my craft came from lots of practice. I draw almost every day. I also follow and study other artists’ work. Reading or watching their interviews, where they describe their work processes and the likes, helped me a lot to grow as an artist over the years. I try to open my eyes and ears to absorb everything.

Q. Could you take us through your process of how you envision a character and then execute it practically?

Ritaban Das: Being a Character Designer, most of my work is very much character-driven, blended with humour and very graphical too. I always try to convey some sort of story through every character or Illustration I make. I like to play with various shapes and silhouettes and usually keep things simple.

The character design process is, in a way, a combination of different things. I ask myself ‘Who am I drawing? What is his/her personality?’ I sometimes look at influential artists’ work to get some ideas or even start from a drawing I like and translate it into my style. Then, trying to forget those influences, I often start from scratch with a basic shape such as the face as it determines the rest of the character for me, then the body (this can be a circle, oval or even a pear shape – it all depends on the personality of the character I want to draw).

Q. Could you please elaborate on your current pursuit of higher studies and how you came to choose Canada for it?

Ritaban: I completed my studies at Humber College in 3D modelling & VFX and Graphic Design and got a job in an animation studio called House of Cool as a Story artist. I’m working on a very exciting project which will probably start airing next year.

I’ve always been well aware of the Canadian animation industry from the beginning and the kind of projects they do. I worked on a bunch of Canadian animation projects back in India.

We used to do a lot of outsourcing for studios here like Big Jump and Brown Bag Films. Canada’s animation industry always attracted me in terms of work culture, the kind of content they nurture, and the quality they produce, so I want to be a part of it.

“Whether you’re working on a commercial TV spot, web video or film, storyboards are an effective way to quickly tell a story. “

Q. What about the world of animation draws you towards it?

Ritaban: Animation is important because it enables us to tell stories and communicate emotions and ideas in a unique, easy-to-perceive way that both children and adults can understand. Animation has helped connect people throughout the world in a way that sometimes writing and live-action films cannot.

Today, anyone can pick up a drawing tablet and show their ideas to the world. Drawn figures can be funny, sad or serious. It can have a playful, less intimidating feel to it to make the viewer feel more comfortable. Often, it has simply served as a way to make a heart-warming story that makes you think.

Through live-action movies, people can form biases based on the appearance and real-life personality of an actor playing a character. But as an animated character, the character feels like their own being.

Q. What would you say are the most challenging aspects of working in the animation world and how do you tackle them?

Ritaban: Every project is challenging in different ways. The challenging ones are the projects where clients don’t have a clear understanding of their audience and outcome, goals or don’t have an investment or hierarchy for arriving at a consensus on feedback. The most challenging projects always boil down to size and scope and managing a team to produce the animation. Also, animating subject matter that I’m not interested in is challenging. But at the end of the day, we all survive because we all just love what we do.

Q. Could you take us through your process of creating a storyboard and highlight its most important aspects?

Ritaban: Whether you’re working on a commercial TV spot, web video, or film, storyboards are an effective way to quickly tell a story. A storyboard is a sequence of drawings that represent the shots planned for video production. It covers all of the major shots, angles and action of your film. The very first step is to read your script and visualise it as an audience would. As I go from scene to scene, I analyse the screenplay and decide how I want each scene to look.

A script breakdown tells you what storyboards you need to create. Then I start doing the rough thumbnails with all the necessary camera angles in Photoshop and chalk out the entire scene I’m planning to do. The important thing is to give anyone who looks at the storyboard a sense of space — where are the objects in relation to the space they’re standing in.

Once I finish locking the scene on thumbnail level, I pitch it to my art director or creative director and take their feedback. After passing the thumbnail phase, I start making the rough staging in Storyboard Pro and work on the required actions and move forward with the scene for the final animation. I might have to rework scenes over and over, combining different elements of the iterations until I finally have what the team is looking for.

Q. What ways do you apply to understand client needs better and thereby produce results that are in sync with them?

Ritaban Das : Whether I work in any studio or as a freelancer, I always listen to what clients need. Listening to your client will help you understand and retain the information you’re already receiving, even if it isn’t a formal meeting. You need to ask questions to identify needs and paraphrase what they say. It helps with clarification and to enhance your understanding of their needs.

Also, I bring new ideas to the table. I don’t hesitate to propose something other than what the client had in mind. You may have a better service in mind and, if nothing else, this again shows you’re listening and attempting to understand your client’s needs. Understanding client needs is one of the biggest challenges of any business but also one of the most important and rewarding tasks.

Q. Considering your range of work, could you please elaborate on significant projects and clients you’ve worked for?

Ritaban Das: Over the ten years of my career, I’ve worked on various national and international projects back in India for clients like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Pogo. I’ve been part of the projects like “Camp WWE”, “F is for Family,” “Kuu Kuu Harajuku,” “Evan the Epic,” “Penn Zero: Part-time Hero,” “DC Superhero Girls,” “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs” (series), “Rhythm Warriors” (series-in production) and other numerous animated TV shows.

Q. According to you, in what direction should animation be exploring and progressing now?

Ritaban Das: Animation is an incredibly versatile medium that is widely used in many different forms today. Animated films are big business nowadays. Companies such as Disney have had enormous success producing animated children’s films for many years. Animated characters such as The Simpsons and The Flintstones have long been familiar visitors to our television screens. The future of animation looks to be on an interesting journey as the quality of films is becoming higher and higher. Most people would now aim for a 4k film. Also, they’ve been experimenting and coming up with new techniques of animation.

One of the interesting ones is Mix Media, a technique that Disney has been experimenting with for a few years is mixing CGI and traditional 2D animation. The idea is to create an animated film using CGI and then to draw over each frame to give it a hand-drawn quality. The computer gaming industry is also pushing the boundaries of what is possible with animation, leading to the creation of some extremely realistic game footage. Computer game animation has certainly come a long way from the 2D graphics of early arcade games.

Now computer game animators can build environments and objects that react to the player’s actions. The animation looks set to continue delighting audiences for many years to come. With animated films continuing to rise in the blockbuster charts, capturing hearts and imaginations, there is no sign of this genre coming to an end.

[fabelgis4680]

Module 7

Malcom X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” – I appreciate the prologue on religion differences and how though their practice is different and may be conflicted over, the true conflict that needs to be united over despite differences is the overall oppression black people are experiencing under the white men in power. It is immediately stated right after that it does not mean that they are anti – white, but that they are anti-exploitation, anti-degradation, and anti-oppression. If white men don’t want to see it as them then they should stop exploiting, degrading, and oppressing. 1964 was only a few years before my parents were born. This illuminates the reality of post slavery oppression that continues to today. I have heard before of Malcolm X’s opinion on voting. What I am understanding is that he considers voting as a waste because their vote will give them nothing in return because the system is not in their favor and is under means to oppress them. I haven’t heard of a dixiecrat before.

W.E.B. DuBois’ “Strivings of the Negro People” – 1897 – I can compare the oppressed question that DuBois is given of “How does it feel to be a problem” to being persisted to today with people of color and specifically and almost identically to the book “How does it feel to be a problem” by Moustafa Bayoumi on being young and Arab in America. I had to google shades of the prison-house and it took me to a poem called “Immitations of Immorality.” He recounts the double consciousness and struggle of being black and an American. DuBois states over 50 years before Malcolm does “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith.” To quote “there is to-day no true American music but the sweet wild melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales are Indian and African; we are the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.” Is this contributing to the truths of music / stories being sourced from African Americans but not given the rightful accountability or profits?

Frantz Fanon’s “Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom” – 1959 – The whole first paragraph lends to a lot of information on colonialism, disrupting and conquering people, a cultural obliteration that is over simplified. Occupying power and banishing natives and systematically enslaving. Fences and signposts being an basic factor. Brings me to reflect on the start of property and claiming land just by fencing it off. Can be compared to the idea of walls that are a buzz of today. “The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.” And “Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt.” Then it goes into literature and colonialism and the different narratives and consciousness and national consciousness.

Stokely Carmichael’s “From Black Power to Pan-Africanism” – the listen is different from the read, but in the listen he states, “Brothers and sisters” uniting being African in America because there is unity from America’s history of all being stolen and brought to America and experiencing the same struggles and oppressions under slavery and post slavery. He is calling the fighting an extended war that America. Revolution relying on truth and justice. The read delves into many critical comparisons with pan Africanism, Malcolm x, Marxism-Leninism, Muhammad Ali getting paid substantially less, and continued consequences under capitalism.

Melvin B. Tolson’s “Dark Symphony” – “Thorns of greed on labors brow” and “Black slaves singing” their verses give visualization to the words. These rhymes remind me of what DuBois was talking about with original music / stories being sole from African Americans. The poem is expresses the grim, bloody, and pain. “Barricades of Jim Crowism” and calling to advance past.

Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus” - *May I just add I really appreciate the audio reads* There is low New York Art Quartet music playing in the background with Baraka in the recording. The website gives highlighted words with given definitions are very useful. It is explained that Baraka doesn’t actually want the gruesome stated lines to be true, but the gruesomeness needs to be accounted for to understand / hear the narrative that is given a shy eye when black people have been systemically fallen victim to the gruesome. It stated in the side bar “The New York Times critiqued the song for its violent imagery, specifically in these lines. The article goes on to describe Baraka’s “highly-political avant-garde” as a “call for black revolutionaries to rape and murder in the service of liberation.” I don’t think they understand.

three poems by Aimé Cesaire – To the Serpent – A little hard to read, searching for the right animal to adore then it gets to the serpent. “God gives not you hold supremely.” And “Serpent delirium and peace” going to how the serpent is a threat and that though “threat a sagacious hand that does not pardon cowards” I do not quite understand this poem or what it may be critically analyzed to be compared to. There may be euphemisms beyond my awareness. It sounds a little religious mentioning the fig and altar.

At the Locks of the Void -  This poem is more understandable than To the Serpent. There is more imagery and metaphors. There are a lot of comparisons. Cesaire is giving full amounts of detail to the text. Things that stick out to me are thirst, hunger, blood, disease, graphic, religion, and Europe. “Europe, eminent name of the turd”

Forfeiture – This poem is interesting. Closing with the line, “ay I am standing and in the sole whiteness that men have never recognized in me.” But preceding this includes mentioning genitalia, gruesome descriptions involving urine, snakes, the planets, and earth.  

“Bread” by Kamau Brathwaite – I do not understand this poem. The lines touch a little on a realistic bread “adding water” or kneading.  But I do not understand what the words are making around it. The ending states “rolled into night into night w/out morning rolled into dead into dead w/out vision rolled into life into life w/out dream” which I think is comparing the rolling of bread to these. I will search for a guide / explanation to this poem.

Decolonising the Mind by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o – Language and Culture. I remember in class talking about how language should be saved and continued through natives. I think written language differentiated from spoken language was also conversed about of importance. Like how Ngugi states him and his family speaking Gi kuyH in the fields and at home and the importance of telling and retelling stories. After some schooling with his native language, colonizing and nationalism had the schools taken over to formal English education. Because of the declaration of a state of emergency over Kenya in 1952, others had to “bow” before English in differences involving corporal punishment for using native Gi kuyH.

excerpt from Aimé Cesaire on Negritude – a revolt against the European feeling of superiority and the result of an active and attitude of the mind on the offense. Stating to refuse oppression and to be against inequality. The system to revolt against is “characterized by a certain number of prejudices, of assumptions which generate a very strict hierarchy” For Africa to forward on from colonialism.

Jean Michel Basquiat paintings – I really enjoy his art. I believe I have been exposed to Aaron Douglas’ Birth of the blues before or at least its color scheme style may have been used as inspiration elsewhere. I did a project on an artist Chris Ofili who also uses culture and music aspects in his art similarly.

“The Radiant Child” by Rene Ricard – On tags, graffiti, rapping. “Graffiti refutes the idea of anonymous art where we know everything about a work except who made it” therefore comes the tag. As talked about in class, Basquait’s was “SAMO”.

material on Aaron Douglas: - a part of the “New Negro Movement” or “Harlem Renaissance.” Used silhouette forms in a friezed format, is this like a “freeze” or paused picture? The commotion in his art does look like a paused moment. Aspiration itself shows many chained hands all paused in an upward reaching moment.

YouTube playlist of Black political music – The variety in this playlist is very wide. With Billie Holiday, Kendrick Lamar, NWA, Beyonce, Sun Ra Jazz, Sam Cooke and many more.

On NWA – I’ve heard Fuck The Police, Seen Ice Cube in the family movie “Are We There Yet” and in 21 Jump street, Heard Dr.Dre with some 2000’s hits but that just might be all I know. Reading into the socially conscious rap I perceive the wave returning and persisting with Kendrick Lamar, Vic Mensa, and Beyonce to “expose the truth” as well.

Fela Kuti – Lagos Nigeria, in the 70’s created the bold Afrobeat music. A style and movement inspired by the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, voiced anger and protest against military rulers and corrupt oil industry. Music for revolution.

Amiri Baraka articles – Diz, or Dizzy Gilliespie, the late 40’s to 60’s music to Sun Ra with Afro American Jazz with Brazilian Samba styles, Pan American Funk, and orchestras making music that drives itself and transforms.

Music & black – the Black Power playlist shows substantial music that is meant for revolution and exposing the truth on an artistic platform. With the political messages in soul, funk, and jazz  this music expressed problems that need accountability and change.

[rachel-alderson]

The Dinosaur Knight

I'm just going to start this post by saying that I've been posting the wrong name for this game all along! Well, it's not completely wrong, and it's not that I didn't know what it was called, but because I have a few client jobs I always just use something simple and easy to differentiate each project, so for this project that was 'Fusion Earth'. So just to clear things up, it's actually called 'Escape from Fusion Earth' which makes much more sense and something that should've clicked when I wrote the first post! Oops, sorry Riley! 

I hope that you guys are enjoying these posts introducing you to the Escape from Fusion Earth world and characters whilst also showing you the process behind the 2D art in the game. I feel like this project and the client have really encouraged me to push my creativity, ideas and techniques to take my work to the next level, which is always exciting because I felt at a stage in my work where I really needed a challenge and this project has been perfect for that. The project as a whole has challenged me and each character design has challenged me in it’s own way too, and the Dinosaur Knight was tough in areas that others weren’t and because of those obstacles it’s turned out to be one of my favourite illustrations I’ve done to date. So let’s get into it!

Now, anyone that knows me or has been familiar with my work for the past 2 years at least will know that I absolutely adore dinosaurs, I have always been fascinated by them since I was a kid, but only about 2 years ago did I start drawing them, this was when I finally got my head screwed on a bit and realised that I should be drawing what makes me happy, not what makes other people happy or want to give me likes on instagram. The dinosaurs I’d been drawing is partly what landed me the chance to work on Escape from Fusion Earth in the first place, and because I am so genuinely passionate about dinosaurs, I’ve always been into learning about them, new discoveries, reading about their defence features etc. which means that I had already built up quite a lot of information and sketches to give me a starting point for this particular card. However, as you can tell from the title, the dinosaur wasn’t the only character for this card, there was another character that needed to be designed, and that was the Dinosaur Knight himself.

When I started sketching the character, he was actually listed on the Escape from Fusion Earth document as ‘Dinosaur Savages’ (I’ll explain the name change later in this post). So I started to think about what this guys armour and weapons would look like, how would he protect himself? What kind of weapon would he have? What tools would he use to craft his gear? How would he sew the armour together? etc. It’s helpful to ask all of these questions and create a backstory for the character because it 100% helps you get a better idea of the character and who they are, how they should look, and it also helps to create a character story for the viewer, leading the viewer to discover through the design of the character how they got to where they are now. I sketched down quite a few ideas based off the brainstorms and thoughts that I’d had, and kind of felt in my element. Although both I and the client were happy with the character designs, there was just something not quite right.

It took us a while to work it out, but after a lot of sketching and ideas, my client, who is also a creative in the industry which is always super helpful when you need a fresh set of eyes, suggested that he was too similar to the Zombie Viking. On the surface people might not see that, but I completely got what he meant, when you’re a character designer, you know that the most important element of a successful character design is the silhouette. So even though the Dinosaur Savage was unique, I could instantly see without even creating filling in his silhouette that his shape and build was too similar to the Zombie Viking, so it was back to the drawing board! My client came up with the suggestion to have the human character as more of a knight, which would immediately create a much more unique character and create a bigger contrast between him and the Zombie Viking. I’ve never drawn a knight before, so I spent a couple of days researching real knights and knight armour, but I knew that I also wanted this knight to have a more stylised look, so I also got a lot of reference from games such as Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends, along with rooting through old sketchbooks for ideas.

I drew up quite a few ideas, and really liked two of the more refined ideas. I think that the one on the left still tied into the savage idea a little, his armour looked handmade and he looks like he has used a lot of found items, which wasn’t a problem now that he was clearly a knight. The one on the right looks a lot more gritty and dark, which wasn’t the direction I intended to take but after sketching him up I really liked the way he looked. The client was happy with both, and happy for me to go with which ever I felt was best. I was very keen on going with the knight on the left, but I knew that I wanted to try something different and felt like the guy on the right looked a lot more threatening, and I could imagine that if he was coming towards you, you’d feel a lot more worried. I also realise that he has no way to see through his helmet, but I kinda like that because I think it gives it a fantasy feeling, sort of as if he’s this cursed knight who just rides around and always hits his target.

Obviously now he needed his dinosaur companion, I was pretty confident in my ideas and where I wanted to go with it, so just drew up some rough sketches. Initially I drew up the dinosaur above, but the client made a good point about the card being portait so it would be better to have a bipedal dinosaur. I started thinking he either needed a big chunk dinosaur with a lot of power, like an even more bulked out T-Rex or a fast dinosaur such as a super sized raptor, I’d also drawn this dinosaur a while ago, sort of based on a T-Rex but with a really over exaggerated strong looking jaw which has loads of teeth sticking out everywhere, which was the one I decided to go with in the end. Of course he had to have a little skull helmet too!

When it came to designing the actual card, it was a little tricky getting the composition right as the client had a really awesome idea and wanted to make it look like the dinosaur was about to attack the viewer. After sketching up a few rough examples, I realised that it was difficult trying to fit such a pose on a portrait illustration, if it was landscape it would’ve worked perfectly, but these cards are portrait so I had to try something else. Instead, I went with a pose where the dinosaur is sprinting along and the knight has pulled him back as if to stop the dinosaur or slow him down. I felt like it fit in the frame better but was still a powerful post at the same time. The colouring of this piece was pretty straight forward, I used one of my dinosaur books to get a reference idea for the pattern on the dinosaur and then changed the colours up a little, using complimentary colours for the dinosaur and the knight. I’ve recently started learning more about digital painting and concept art for games, I obviously use a lot of line work in my work but I’m interested in trying to pull away from that a little and get a more concept art feeling across in my work, so painted in the birds just to try something new and feel like they give the illustration that extra pop and make it feel a little magical.

Cheers for reading guys, I'll be sharing another card next week, there's something a little different about the next character though....

[theinvinciblenoob]

Alice Lloyd George Contributor

Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.

More posts by this contributor

A conversation with Dean Kamen on the myth of “Eureka!”

Behind the scenes with Tezos, a new blockchain upstart

Below are excerpts from the most recent episode of the Flux podcast hosted by RRE Ventures principal Alice Lloyd George. 

AMLG: Welcome back to the pod. I’m excited to be here with Dr. Assaf Glazer. He is the co-founder and CEO of Nanit a leading human analytics company that uses computer vision to help parents navigate their child’s sleep.

Essentially it’s a baby data collector that every sleep-deprived geek parent has dreamed of. A little background on Assaf: He got his Ph.D. at the Technion in Israel and was previously at Applied Materials as well as Wales where he worked on solutions for missile defense systems. Nanit was born here in New York at Cornell Tech [disclosure — RRE is a long-standing investor in the company.] Welcome Assaf it’s great to have you. 

AG: Thank you for having me.

AMLG: I’ve got a stat here, that on average parents lose 44 days of sleep during the first year of their baby’s life and nearly 3 in 10 babies have problems sleeping at night. Those numbers sum up the nature of what you’re trying to solve, but can you lay out how you identified this problem and started the company?

AG: It started for me as a parent. You have your baby, you arrive home and you see that your life has changed. Pretty quickly you understand what your number one concern is — sleep. You’re tired, you’re sleep deprived. You wake up during the night and do everything necessary to go back to sleep. You’re going to Google and going to friends. This is where Nanit comes in. We are giving you the information that will allow you to make better decisions for your child. Six years ago I had my first child, Udi. He was born when I was at the Technion. I’m a computer vision guy. Before I was at the Technion I worked at Applied Materials in the semiconductor industry, on a camera that you put above the silicon slices, to see them from a bird’s eye perspective.

AMLG: So you were doing computer vision for chip manufacturing — on the assembly lines, you’d look for errors in the chips?

AG: Yes. And when my son was born I said, OK let’s do process control for my baby.

AMLG: As if the baby was on an assembly line like a chip, just run some computer vision on it. 

AG: Yeah. So I wrote a paper on background subtraction algorithms — how to find a foreground object differentiated from the background — and applied those algorithms to my baby. I went to my advisors at the Technion and told them, you know, I’ve found that my baby is moving 134 times on average at night. But what can you do with that? I was looking at this data and I said sleep, sleep is what we need to solve here. I went to sleeping labs to try to understand sleep science. Then I moved as a postdoc to Cornell University where I joined the Runway Program, which aims to commercialize science.

The Jacobs institute is a joint venture between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, operating as an independent entity within Cornell Tech. The Institute emphasizes a trans-disciplinary view of science and encourages translational research to serves the common good, through a set of industry-focused “hubs” that address contemporary needs.

AMLG: So you moved from Israel.

AG: I moved from Israel to where the customers are, which is New York.

AMLG: We also have the most anxious parents on the planet.

AG: Haha yes. I would say that New York is very inspiring. In terms of the culture, the diversity, it’s a great place to be.

AMLG: Tell me about the program at Cornell.

AG: It’s a joint venture for Cornell and Technion University. We were six postdocs that started in this program. They really helped me. Peretz Lavie the president of the Technion, he’s a sleep expert, a sleep guru I would say. He helped us reach out to experts around the world in sleep development and cognitive development. Then we developed Nanit with them.

Dr Peretz Lavie is a world-renowned sleep expert and has been President of the Technion since 2009. Watch his interview on sleep research here. 

AMLG: Sleep science — as you got into that field, what did you discover and what were you surprised by as you engaged with the science for the first time — I imagine people have focused more on adults than babies?

AG: The development of infant sleep is fascinating. How we move between stages. How to differentiate between awake, asleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.

AMLG: Do babies have deep sleep and REM sleep as well?

AG: When they are born it’s a bit of a mix. They have two states, awake and asleep. And over time —

AMLG: Like an on off switch.

AG: Haha it’s a bit more, but I’m not sure that we fully understand all the processes during the first few weeks. They dream much more than adults. And you see their architecture developing. One of the first experts that I worked with is Professor Avi Sadeh. I reached out to him through Peretz Lavie, as he developed the gold standard of how to measure sleep. The hypothesis is that movement is an indication of asleep and awake states, and with a camera you know much more. You draw the silhouette of the baby, you can detect the eyes. You can track the different parts of the body and you have better resolution. Today we measure sleep better than the state of the art medical devices. When you do it with a camera it’s powerful because you can capture a lot of things around the sleep architecture. You build a picture. In our case we track the parent. When you look at this behavior — sleep and parent intervention patterns — you can give tips and recommendations for parents on how to improve, how to teach their baby to sleep on its own.

AMLG: As your user base gets bigger you’re going to have a lot of anonymized metadata that will give you insights—such as the more times you interrupt the baby’s sleep or the more times you leave it alone, this is the effect. So is it the parent-child insights that you’re looking to get?

Meet Nanit [on Youtube]

AG: If you look at studies on sleep, we’re talking about hundreds top. With Nanit you are exposed to thousands of babies sleeping in their natural environment. By looking at their behavior over time we learn new things. Sleep training is awareness and education. You’re building awareness with the data and the videos. We give parents information about how their week was in comparison to other babies of that age. There are no secrets — if you have the data you can use triggers to give tips to parents. For instance, I saw that your baby is capable of putting himself back to sleep during the night. Why don’t you wait one or two minutes before you enter the room.

AMLG: On the hardware side, can you share the journey there. You used to do manufacturing in the U.S. and you’ve moved that to China. What have you learned — how have margins improved? How did you scale up volume? What are your learnings about manufacturing?

China continues to dominate U.S. electronics imports. Source: IHS Mark

AG: I’ll try to make it short. It’s really hard to build mass production lines in the U.S. for commodity consumer goods. From a labor perspective, prices in the U.S. are high. Over time it won’t exist in the U.S. as there is strong competition from China. But because it is a consumer product, having your designer, engineers and even the line close to you geographically is much more convenient. If you’re looking at the U.S. market, the engineers are also parents, which helps you explain the value proposition of your product. It’s important that even the engineer who designs the circuit board understands what it means to have an LED that is strong enough above the bed. In general every engineer needs to have the product in mind when he does the design. Once we reached a stage that we had a line in the right yield and capacity, we did the transition to China. But it is expensive to work in this way, to start in the U.S. then move to China. There is no one recipe. Nanit also has an R&D center in Israel. Which means that now I’m working in three time zones. It is crazy. Most of our R&D is on the software side and on the hardware side we try to outsource when possible. If I had to choose I would choose Israel and the U.S.

AMLG: How have you found pulling those resources together and acquiring talent. You’ve obviously got a strategic advantage with the connection to Israel, but any insights on how you attract and retain the top talent, especially in machine learning?

AG: Finding the right talent for your company is a search problem. The world is big and in different parts of the world there are different types of talent. In Israel there is great talent for backend engineers and computer vision, and we hire those people in Israel. In the U.S. there’s great talent in marketing, sales, business development, brand development, human centric design — for those, New York is a great place to be. In China you find talent related to manufacturing and they are very good at it. In the past it was hard to build a company in this way. But the world changed. The world changed in the sense of how we communicate. The only thing that hasn’t been solved yet is time zones. If everyone slept at the same time that would help. But besides the time zones, technology today can solve a lot of problems. Nanit couldn’t exist a couple of years ago when we didn’t have this.

AMLG: Right you wouldn’t have been able to do it all in Israel or all in New York or all in China. What about on the machine learning side — what is going on on a more macro level there?

AG: Deep learning and convolutional neural networks are amazing tools that help us do things we weren’t able to do before. Thanks to deep learning, today I can tell you the baby’s position in the crib better than the human eye. But what happened is that it was so disruptive that many other parts of the computer vision field, you started seeing them less and less at conferences. Add to this the fact that it generates lots of value for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft —

AMLG: So machine learning has become dominated by big platforms like Google and Apple, and perhaps research for research’s sake is a valuable thing and not just having it all steered towards revenue or commercial applications. You’re saying it’s important to have pure research?

AG: This is what research is about. It should be pure.

AMLG: Do you know Gary Marcus? He came on this podcast last year, and his point about these companies is that when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you have a ton of data — you’re Google or Facebook — everything looks like you should apply deep learning to it. But that’s their bias and perhaps it skews out other approaches to machine learning.

AG: Also I would say it becomes a commodity over time. I believe the next innovation will be around behavioral analysis, which is the next level of computer vision. We are working on research collaborations that study small twitches of a baby, which could be an indicator of neurological disorders. There is a next level of behavioral neuroscience, it’s a fascinating field that is going to develop over the next couple of years.

AMLG: So you have this background in Israeli defense where you worked on missile defense systems. Can you share anything about that or how it’s informed what you’re doing now? Working in that environment is quite different than having a startup in New York.

AG: I was in a foundational team in the Nineties for a new defense system. It took me a couple of years to understand that I was a beta tester. They used me to understand the human factor. How to communicate between operators, how to design the screens. I cannot explain how much this experience has helped me to go through the design phase for Nanit. How to do design sprints with parents, how to design the screens. The army is an amazing human resource filter that allocates hundreds of thousands of teenagers to specific positions and trains them in a short time and gives them practical experience. They are doing an amazing job. There are mistakes of course, but they took me and others and decided this is what you are going to do. They gave me tools for things that in the future were of great benefit to me.

AMLG: How does working on missile defense UX or chip manufacturing compare to baby monitoring?

AG: Ha well I continue to serve as a major in reserve. But in life I decided that I wanted to make a shift to deal with more human problems. What is nice about semiconductors is that they are designed by humans not by nature. Babies were designed by nature, which is more complex. When you have a blueprint you know exactly what you’re looking for, what kind of patterns. Then you can reach a level of analysis, of process control that is much higher. But the challenges with babies you know is —

AMLG: They’re more of a mystery.

AG: It’s a lot of mystery. But my philosophy is to build the scientific fundamentals, the building blocks, and on top of that you think about how to make it approachable for the consumer space and how to build a value proposition. You start with science not marketing statements. This is where you start.

AMLG: A world of more ambient data capture where you’re continually monitored. Which feeds into preventative medicine. Obviously there’s a lot of people that get nervous about that, though it’s the way the whole world is going, we’re going to more data and it’s going to serve us. But as you push that conversation forward, do you feel like there’s challenges in terms of getting people used to the idea?

AG: You need to do it in a responsible way. But we can live a much better life. We will have better parenting experiences, sleep better at night. Even know things about ourselves that we didn’t know before.

U.S Census Bureau Research 1961-2008

***

Further reading:

Enchanted World of Sleep Draws upon a vast store of professional knowledge & innovative concepts of the physiology of sleep & dreams to tell us…www.amazon.com

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Solving the mystery of sleep

Alice Lloyd George Contributor

Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.

More posts by this contributor

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Below are excerpts from the most recent episode of the Flux podcast hosted by RRE Ventures principal Alice Lloyd George. 

AMLG: Welcome back to the pod. I’m excited to be here with Dr. Assaf Glazer. He is the co-founder and CEO of Nanit a leading human analytics company that uses computer vision to help parents navigate their child’s sleep.

Essentially it’s a baby data collector that every sleep-deprived geek parent has dreamed of. A little background on Assaf: He got his Ph.D. at the Technion in Israel and was previously at Applied Materials as well as Wales where he worked on solutions for missile defense systems. Nanit was born here in New York at Cornell Tech [disclosure — RRE is a long-standing investor in the company.] Welcome Assaf it’s great to have you. 

AG: Thank you for having me.

AMLG: I’ve got a stat here, that on average parents lose 44 days of sleep during the first year of their baby’s life and nearly 3 in 10 babies have problems sleeping at night. Those numbers sum up the nature of what you’re trying to solve, but can you lay out how you identified this problem and started the company?

AG: It started for me as a parent. You have your baby, you arrive home and you see that your life has changed. Pretty quickly you understand what your number one concern is — sleep. You’re tired, you’re sleep deprived. You wake up during the night and do everything necessary to go back to sleep. You’re going to Google and going to friends. This is where Nanit comes in. We are giving you the information that will allow you to make better decisions for your child. Six years ago I had my first child, Udi. He was born when I was at the Technion. I’m a computer vision guy. Before I was at the Technion I worked at Applied Materials in the semiconductor industry, on a camera that you put above the silicon slices, to see them from a bird’s eye perspective.

AMLG: So you were doing computer vision for chip manufacturing — on the assembly lines, you’d look for errors in the chips?

AG: Yes. And when my son was born I said, OK let’s do process control for my baby.

AMLG: As if the baby was on an assembly line like a chip, just run some computer vision on it. 

AG: Yeah. So I wrote a paper on background subtraction algorithms — how to find a foreground object differentiated from the background — and applied those algorithms to my baby. I went to my advisors at the Technion and told them, you know, I’ve found that my baby is moving 134 times on average at night. But what can you do with that? I was looking at this data and I said sleep, sleep is what we need to solve here. I went to sleeping labs to try to understand sleep science. Then I moved as a postdoc to Cornell University where I joined the Runway Program, which aims to commercialize science.

The Jacobs institute is a joint venture between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, operating as an independent entity within Cornell Tech. The Institute emphasizes a trans-disciplinary view of science and encourages translational research to serves the common good, through a set of industry-focused “hubs” that address contemporary needs.

AMLG: So you moved from Israel.

AG: I moved from Israel to where the customers are, which is New York.

AMLG: We also have the most anxious parents on the planet.

AG: Haha yes. I would say that New York is very inspiring. In terms of the culture, the diversity, it’s a great place to be.

AMLG: Tell me about the program at Cornell.

AG: It’s a joint venture for Cornell and Technion University. We were six postdocs that started in this program. They really helped me. Peretz Lavie the president of the Technion, he’s a sleep expert, a sleep guru I would say. He helped us reach out to experts around the world in sleep development and cognitive development. Then we developed Nanit with them.

Dr Peretz Lavie is a world-renowned sleep expert and has been President of the Technion since 2009. Watch his interview on sleep research here. 

AMLG: Sleep science — as you got into that field, what did you discover and what were you surprised by as you engaged with the science for the first time — I imagine people have focused more on adults than babies?

AG: The development of infant sleep is fascinating. How we move between stages. How to differentiate between awake, asleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.

AMLG: Do babies have deep sleep and REM sleep as well?

AG: When they are born it’s a bit of a mix. They have two states, awake and asleep. And over time —

AMLG: Like an on off switch.

AG: Haha it’s a bit more, but I’m not sure that we fully understand all the processes during the first few weeks. They dream much more than adults. And you see their architecture developing. One of the first experts that I worked with is Professor Avi Sadeh. I reached out to him through Peretz Lavie, as he developed the gold standard of how to measure sleep. The hypothesis is that movement is an indication of asleep and awake states, and with a camera you know much more. You draw the silhouette of the baby, you can detect the eyes. You can track the different parts of the body and you have better resolution. Today we measure sleep better than the state of the art medical devices. When you do it with a camera it’s powerful because you can capture a lot of things around the sleep architecture. You build a picture. In our case we track the parent. When you look at this behavior — sleep and parent intervention patterns — you can give tips and recommendations for parents on how to improve, how to teach their baby to sleep on its own.

AMLG: As your user base gets bigger you’re going to have a lot of anonymized metadata that will give you insights—such as the more times you interrupt the baby’s sleep or the more times you leave it alone, this is the effect. So is it the parent-child insights that you’re looking to get?

Meet Nanit [on Youtube]

AG: If you look at studies on sleep, we’re talking about hundreds top. With Nanit you are exposed to thousands of babies sleeping in their natural environment. By looking at their behavior over time we learn new things. Sleep training is awareness and education. You’re building awareness with the data and the videos. We give parents information about how their week was in comparison to other babies of that age. There are no secrets — if you have the data you can use triggers to give tips to parents. For instance, I saw that your baby is capable of putting himself back to sleep during the night. Why don’t you wait one or two minutes before you enter the room.

AMLG: On the hardware side, can you share the journey there. You used to do manufacturing in the U.S. and you’ve moved that to China. What have you learned — how have margins improved? How did you scale up volume? What are your learnings about manufacturing?

China continues to dominate U.S. electronics imports. Source: IHS Mark

AG: I’ll try to make it short. It’s really hard to build mass production lines in the U.S. for commodity consumer goods. From a labor perspective, prices in the U.S. are high. Over time it won’t exist in the U.S. as there is strong competition from China. But because it is a consumer product, having your designer, engineers and even the line close to you geographically is much more convenient. If you’re looking at the U.S. market, the engineers are also parents, which helps you explain the value proposition of your product. It’s important that even the engineer who designs the circuit board understands what it means to have an LED that is strong enough above the bed. In general every engineer needs to have the product in mind when he does the design. Once we reached a stage that we had a line in the right yield and capacity, we did the transition to China. But it is expensive to work in this way, to start in the U.S. then move to China. There is no one recipe. Nanit also has an R&D center in Israel. Which means that now I’m working in three time zones. It is crazy. Most of our R&D is on the software side and on the hardware side we try to outsource when possible. If I had to choose I would choose Israel and the U.S.

AMLG: How have you found pulling those resources together and acquiring talent. You’ve obviously got a strategic advantage with the connection to Israel, but any insights on how you attract and retain the top talent, especially in machine learning?

AG: Finding the right talent for your company is a search problem. The world is big and in different parts of the world there are different types of talent. In Israel there is great talent for backend engineers and computer vision, and we hire those people in Israel. In the U.S. there’s great talent in marketing, sales, business development, brand development, human centric design — for those, New York is a great place to be. In China you find talent related to manufacturing and they are very good at it. In the past it was hard to build a company in this way. But the world changed. The world changed in the sense of how we communicate. The only thing that hasn’t been solved yet is time zones. If everyone slept at the same time that would help. But besides the time zones, technology today can solve a lot of problems. Nanit couldn’t exist a couple of years ago when we didn’t have this.

AMLG: Right you wouldn’t have been able to do it all in Israel or all in New York or all in China. What about on the machine learning side — what is going on on a more macro level there?

AG: Deep learning and convolutional neural networks are amazing tools that help us do things we weren’t able to do before. Thanks to deep learning, today I can tell you the baby’s position in the crib better than the human eye. But what happened is that it was so disruptive that many other parts of the computer vision field, you started seeing them less and less at conferences. Add to this the fact that it generates lots of value for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft —

AMLG: So machine learning has become dominated by big platforms like Google and Apple, and perhaps research for research’s sake is a valuable thing and not just having it all steered towards revenue or commercial applications. You’re saying it’s important to have pure research?

AG: This is what research is about. It should be pure.

AMLG: Do you know Gary Marcus? He came on this podcast last year, and his point about these companies is that when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you have a ton of data — you’re Google or Facebook — everything looks like you should apply deep learning to it. But that’s their bias and perhaps it skews out other approaches to machine learning.

AG: Also I would say it becomes a commodity over time. I believe the next innovation will be around behavioral analysis, which is the next level of computer vision. We are working on research collaborations that study small twitches of a baby, which could be an indicator of neurological disorders. There is a next level of behavioral neuroscience, it’s a fascinating field that is going to develop over the next couple of years.

AMLG: So you have this background in Israeli defense where you worked on missile defense systems. Can you share anything about that or how it’s informed what you’re doing now? Working in that environment is quite different than having a startup in New York.

AG: I was in a foundational team in the Nineties for a new defense system. It took me a couple of years to understand that I was a beta tester. They used me to understand the human factor. How to communicate between operators, how to design the screens. I cannot explain how much this experience has helped me to go through the design phase for Nanit. How to do design sprints with parents, how to design the screens. The army is an amazing human resource filter that allocates hundreds of thousands of teenagers to specific positions and trains them in a short time and gives them practical experience. They are doing an amazing job. There are mistakes of course, but they took me and others and decided this is what you are going to do. They gave me tools for things that in the future were of great benefit to me.

AMLG: How does working on missile defense UX or chip manufacturing compare to baby monitoring?

AG: Ha well I continue to serve as a major in reserve. But in life I decided that I wanted to make a shift to deal with more human problems. What is nice about semiconductors is that they are designed by humans not by nature. Babies were designed by nature, which is more complex. When you have a blueprint you know exactly what you’re looking for, what kind of patterns. Then you can reach a level of analysis, of process control that is much higher. But the challenges with babies you know is —

AMLG: They’re more of a mystery.

AG: It’s a lot of mystery. But my philosophy is to build the scientific fundamentals, the building blocks, and on top of that you think about how to make it approachable for the consumer space and how to build a value proposition. You start with science not marketing statements. This is where you start.

AMLG: A world of more ambient data capture where you’re continually monitored. Which feeds into preventative medicine. Obviously there’s a lot of people that get nervous about that, though it’s the way the whole world is going, we’re going to more data and it’s going to serve us. But as you push that conversation forward, do you feel like there’s challenges in terms of getting people used to the idea?

AG: You need to do it in a responsible way. But we can live a much better life. We will have better parenting experiences, sleep better at night. Even know things about ourselves that we didn’t know before.

U.S Census Bureau Research 1961-2008

***

Further reading:

Enchanted World of Sleep Draws upon a vast store of professional knowledge & innovative concepts of the physiology of sleep & dreams to tell us…www.amazon.com

Via Jonathan Shieber https://techcrunch.com