#other boss said its 5 days off from positive result

[fanotastic]

FUCK I'm srill positive and my job kicked me out. I need TOKEN to participate in MONKEY CAPITALISM

[car-lozsigns]

A few minutes more (Pt19)

A few minutes more (Pt19)

Synopsis: You and Carlos had crossed paths more than you thought was possible over a short weekend but time was not on your side. A love story that’s about the slow burn and companionship built connection, and how sometimes right place wrong time is the best of the available options

Author Note: I'm back after a break from writing. Part 19 and 20 have been in draft for ages but here the first one is below. Thank you for your patience and hope you enjoy <3

Length:~4.8k

Warnings: Quarantine and covid mention

Previous parts: Link to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18

Part 19

Quarantine in the UK was much less fun than your time in Spain. Carlos’ home was an apartment not unlike your own, out of the way of the city centre but not quiet rural. It wasn’t much bigger than your own with an extremely small second room that Carlos had converted to a home gym. It was very apparent that this space was not lived in, majority of its contents were work related, logos strewn across everything. It has a very unloved and borderline desolate feeling to it.

Carlos closed the door behind him, sighed knowing that this was going to be more uncomfortable than he wanted. His apartment did not have access to his own courtyard or communal one and in order to meet both the teams and governments requirements , neither of you were allowed outside unless it was private space.

You hadn’t bothered stopping past your apartment when you both landed, Carlos’ place being, one closer to the airport, and two you had already purchased anything you might have needed whilst staying at the Sainz’s.

Dropping both your bags inside and closing the door behind you, you both tried to steel yourself for the next two weeks.

Both you and Carlos feel into a similar routine, except this time both of your days were work filled, as if you were both working regular jobs, majority of your time spent on your computers. You had claimed a corner of Carlos’ kitchen as your work spot, getting primo position as you had the most conventional job of the two. But both tried to alternate where you worked as days passed. You were conscious of Carlos appearing in your background of your calls which resulted in a few doggedly tilted camera angles and experimenting with the default backdrop setting when you heard his shuffling in from the other end of the apartment to see if you were free to distract him from his boredom.

It also turned out that he was quite a loud worker with all of his meeting broken up with impassioned burst either from one of his team or himself inputting their thoughts on whatever they were discussing. Hearing how much Carlos enjoyed his work couldn’t help but make you reflect on your own situation. You had always thought you enjoyed what you did. You had not dreaded waking up and working since moving to the UK but hearing how well Carlos got on with his colleagues made you reconsider. Even prior to covid the tone was much more subdued. You had an amazing boss but never were the conversations in that friendly tone that transcended work civility. It was always clipped at the opportunity for too much personal information shared. You had unintentionally curated your personality to suit this while at work, and one afternoon with Carlos walking into the kitchen laughing away at something about something said on his phone made you realise you had never laughed that deeply while at work. You tried to push this aside but instead of focusing on your screen whenever Carlos roamed around the apartment you found yourself distracted and wishing you had what he had.

Carlos had noticed you watching him and liked the attention so slowly reduced him stepping into a separate room when a team call happened, passing it off as pacing through the call to help his fidgeting through the often hour long team meetings.

Not that you realised his change in schedule trying to be more visibly present during the working hours. What did garner your conscious attention was when Carlos mixed up his workout by doing his circuit in the living room, in full view if you looked in the mirrored tinting of the apartment windows.

It wasn’t until it happened in a team call when he had finished his session and moved to splash his face with water at the kitchen sink in front of you that you pieced together that it was all for his benefit and to boost his ego. Carlos’ will power was weaker than yours but you both had agreed to let your personal lives stay private for now, not letting them interact with your professional ones, at least where there was a video call.

Day 8 of quarantine was when news came in from the teams changing your plans about career separation. Carlos had been sent the additional contracts received from the FIA for Carlos to sign. Each of these had been printed out and placed in a thick white envelope dropped off with Carlos’ mail. These new forms were on top of his pre-existing McLaren contract and included race specific information all participants had to abide by in order to be allowed to race. Carlos had mentioned that this was the case for a few of the tracks in the past, but based on the size of the envelope it appeared all seemed to adopt this additional security policy in response to the pandemic.

Carlos was flicking through them one evening while you were reading next to him, where the quicker shuffling of papers grabbed your attention. Carlos was flipping between each of the contracts seemingly trying to find something in each. As he placed the last of the papers down, you asked him what was wrong. “The contracts, they’ve changed since I last spoke with the team about it” you had known these would be required, you’d overhead, it was hard not to eavesdrop when Carlos was on the phone. “What’s changed in them?” Carlos looked at you, stressed. “Some tracks won’t allow anyone to be present aside from essential personnel.” He pulled out some that he had separated from the pile

“July, August those races have no attendance” he spoke more to himself, “the races after then don’t have the same clause in the contracts barring personal team members”

You stood up to find where you had drawn out the rough calendar on the flight home, finding it and flattening it against your thigh as you sat back down.

“So the earliest one I might be able to be there with you is middle September, Tuscan Gran Prix.” Carlos looked over at you sadly in response. “At least I can see you race in Italy, that’d pretty cool”. But you couldn’t hide the disappointment in your voice.

Your plans were thwarted, September was months away still, it seemed an impossible barrier. The clause that had been placed in the contracts were dependent upon local authority directives. They had the power to change these requirements however the timing of which was unknown. You read through them and a few other clauses had been added, blanket in all, one regarding no public attendance, onsite quarantine procedures and even specific processes that had to be following when travelling between tracks.

The tension hang heavy in the air for the rest of the evening, making you long to be back at the Sainz’ home walking off the headache that had formed. Laying next to Carlos that evening he held you tightly trying to soothe you with gentle rubbing of his thumb across your shoulders. You slowly fell into a doze knowing that at least for now, you were safe in the arms of another. Carlos’ embrace stayed tight as the headache still pulsing settling you into a lighter sleep than normal.

It was you in the morning that woke up before Carlos normally, getting coffee ready for you both, setting down a cup on the bedside table next to him, letting the aroma wake him up whilst you took a shower before work.

It turned out that Carlos had been as restless as you, him only drifting to sleep in the early hours. His gentle unwrapping of his arms with yours roused you, you not opening your eyes in time to see him leave the bedroom but the muted click of the door against the jam and warm light spreading in at the gap of the floor was enough for the temporary calm from earlier dissipate.

You rolled over to check your phone but found the beside table empty, phone forgotten in the living room likely tucked underneath the contracts. Stupid pandemic you told yourself. Life would be better if it had never happened you thought but caught yourself. Would it really have been? You wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see Carlos as much as you had, let alone fall in love with him in not only one, but two countries? You wouldn’t have been able to see his relationship with his parents or even have had the chance for your relationship to grow into what it is now. Sure you would have gotten there eventually you had no doubt but knowing Carlos schedule it may have taken years instead of months.

You still hated the pandemic but recognised that the circumstances you had found yourself in had landed you a boyfriend and loving in-laws at a time when you knew you would have struggled more than you had if you had been isolated in your apartment far away from your family and friends from home.

You were going to try to roll back to sleep in the warmth left behind by Carlos’ absent body but as you did, you heard Carlos’ voice soft from the other room. You couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but as you strained to focus it was clear that whatever was being said was important, volume increasing and speed of speech quickening. When the volume reached a pitch that was clearly no longer a whisper you pulled the blankets off to see what was happening.

Carlos was standing facing the bedroom door. His face already held in surprise and it didn’t come from you joining him. He gestured you to come closer and once you were within arms distance, he pulled you in tight to his left side , right hand holding the phone. Carlos pulled the phone from his ear and hit speaker. What was being said wasn’t in English or Spanish, it was a different language and after a few more sentences you picked up it was Italian. Carlos responded back to the man on the other line ending the conversation. He waddled you both closer to the kitchen and put the phone down on the counter. With both his hands now free, he shifted you from a side hug, up into the air in front of him, feet lifted from the floor. His hands were tight on your upper arms and as he lifted you higher and began to spin you both in a circle. Whatever was said over the phone had put Carlos into what was the happiest mood you had seen him in weeks, happier than the blissful moments after you confessed your love to each other. As he began to deliriously laugh you couldn’t help but break into a smile, infecting you with his joy.

“What …” you started as he spun you round once more before putting you down and pulling you in closer for a kiss.

Drawing back and taking a breathe, Carlos said “I think we have a solution to our problem”. You don’t know what was said, clear bemusement and confusion across your face. Carlos pulled you to the couch and opened up his laptop, clicking to his emails, and opening one that according to the date had been sent and received early this morning just after 1am. Your eyes darted to the corner of the screen and saw it was close to 3 in the morning. Whatever was in this email was important, important enough to call about.

Carlos double clicked it and opened it up, twisting the laptop to you him indicating to you to read what he had pulled up. You couldn’t read much at all scrolling through to see if there was a translation at the bottom of the message like there commonly was in whole company communications you received from work. No such luck, the email was relatively brief with a few attachments at the top, all titled with Carlos’ full name and a set of numbers. You recognised Carlos’ address and details at the top of the letter format but beyond that couldn’t decipher what was said. What you did recognise was the logo on the top right hand of the letter, a bright yellow crest with a black horse reared on its hind legs in the centre.

You looked back to Carlos, “Ferrari ?” Was all you said to him. The grin re-emerged. “I was on the phone to Mattia Binotto, the Ferrari team principal, the negotiations have been finalised and they want to have me in their team” Carlos had divulged in his discussions about his career what he wanted to achieve many a time; to get a seat, to win a race, to win a championship but what he wanted just as much was to achieve that with Ferrari, and here it was, opportunity in front of him.

“Did you say yes?” You asked back knowing it was probably covered on the phone call. “I did and need to sign the negotiated contract” he pointed at the screen. You hadn’t know he was in negotiations with Ferrari and thought it was a goal he had further in his future. He had told you his contract with McLaren was only to the end of 2020 but beyond that hardly talked about it. You knew his industry moved at a speed that was opposite to your own but it still surprised you he was ticking off one of his ultimate career goals, in your mind, very soon in his career.

But here it was in front of you, Ferrari wanted Carlos and you knew nothing short of them asking him to chop off his own hands would stop him from donning red next year.

“Have you read the attachments yet?”

Carlos shook his head

“I saw the email and called Mattia straight away. I probably should have waited for Caco but wanted to let him know I had seen it and will respond after reading through everything.”

You gave him a pointed look, if you were Carlos’ manager you’d have wanted to be told first. Carlos didn’t even bother to look sheepish.

“I wanted to tell you first, if you hadn’t come out, I would have woken you up with the news” he was beaming with a sense of accomplishment, and even though you felt extremely proud of him that he had achieved his dreams, the thoughts from earlier creeped back in, jealous that he was able to be so happy with his career choices. You wanted it, that, to feel what Carlos was feeling. You nodded at Carlos as he pulled the laptop back towards him, clicking open the attachments reading them through slowly.

You mind was far away, Carlos had achieved something that was practically impossible , only 2 out of 20 which had then been whittled down could drive for Ferrari. If Carlos had such self believe and confidence in achieving that impossible dream, why couldn’t you?

Luckily the contract had come through early Saturday morning, relieving you from having to work with this career dilemma on your plate. You couldn’t even busy yourself with Carlos’ news and plans, he was in call after call with his manager and family to ensure that before he signed everything was correct, and with the excitement, your rudimentary Spanish couldn’t keep up to be of help or even to follow along.

Knowing work wouldn’t help you, and nor could Carlos, you sat down to try to articulate your feelings. You weren’t usually one for written planning, you had seen your sister do this whenever she felt unsure of what to do. You wrote out a three columned list, a pros, a cons and dreams about your job.

After the first few points were written, your thoughts flowed freely. You wrote down item after item and found that after the cons heavily outweighed the pros. You had expected that, the dissatisfaction and jealously you were feeling should never be there. Jealous was a feeling that happened to those too scared to be courageous you mum had said to you when you first were toying with the idea of moving abroad. Your thoughts soon spilled away from the columns, you filling line after line with broken thoughts, irritations, dreams. They quickly turned from jealousy, to something more self-reflective. You didn’t have the dream of being a formula one driver but it was the start of helping you try to work out what you wanted to do.

Carlos had walked back into the room filling a glass with water from the tap giving you a little wave before settling himself back on the couch. You were perched at the counter laptop open, albeit it screen blank with paper in front of you, he had assumed you were working.

You re-read your thought and looked to your dreams column. It was empty. You had never had the opportunity to have a dream job. Your familial situation was very middle class, enough to afford you a good education but it was through long hours by your parents and saving at all times. You had afforded the move with you company subsidising the moving costs, only leaving you with the rent and perishable costs once settled. Without that you wouldn’t have been able to even be here.

You looked at your dreams, and thought ok maybe not a dream career, but what are other dreams. You filling in the gap on the page To be happy To be healthy To have loving family and friends For them to be healthy To be fulfilled

It was the last one, you had all the above ones but how to be fulfilled? You didn’t know, you underlined the last item before pushing the paper away , tucking it near your other work gear, standing up and joining Carlos , him wrapping an arm around you while you tried to think of what does fulfilled look like?

Negotiations with Carlos and his manager and family lasted all weekend bleeding into Monday. Early Monday morning, Carlos had sent off the finalised paperwork, closing the lid of the computer looked up to you. “So” he started, “How I said we have a solution with you not being able to attend races ?”

Your gaze shifted from your document to him, he was still as happy as he was when the email had arrived, you thought ruefully again I wish I had that. “Yeah” you tried to hide the sour tone but it still emerged a little. “With me being with Ferrari next year, they have asked me to do a tour of the factory before their home race in September, in order to be welcomed to the team.”

You didn’t see how this was a solution

“And what I’ve received permission for is that, can I bring some family along” Carlos had a smirk forming. “They said they would be more than happy to, and that they will set aside a private area for family to watch the races”

It clicked, you could watch him.

“So it’s confirmed?” You hazarded. “They’ve said I can have four people with me, I’ve sent them your details, my fathers, mothers and another friend of mine who is currently living in Italy”

He was so happy, he gave you a kiss to the forehead and sliding off the counter said “it is working out for us, see” as he walked away from you to the other end of his house no doubt to keep planning about Ferrari or something.

You couldn’t keep it up, you had to do something about your career, jealously finally driving you to action. You stood up and followed Carlos out of the room.

He had his phone in his hand but paused dialling as you rounded the corner.

“Carlos, I need to talk to you”

Carlos’ face held its smile but shuttered up a little. “Of course” he said as closing the distance between you.

“I need to be honest with you. I’m so excited you’re signed with Ferrari, you’ve achieved your dream “Carlos nodded seeing where this was going.

As you had gone to sleep on Sunday, he had seen what you had been writing on, the paper left not too out of the way in the small kitchen. “Seeing you, get all this” you waved your arms around “The first thing I thought was ‘why not me’ and that scared me. I’ve always worked so hard and achieved everything I’ve had on my career goals, but I don’t know, seeing and hearing you interact with your work, you love it.” He went to start but you shook your head, not quite finished “I always thought I loved what I do, but after spending time with you and your family, I don’t think I actually do. I’m proud of what I’ve done and achieved but I don’t get the joy out of it like you do, the continued joy even after you’ve ticked a goal, the joy to achieve a different target” Carlos nodded, he knew he was lucky to find his life passion so young and have it the same as his career. He also knew it was not very common. He had seen his sisters cycle though job after job trying to find one they liked enough to stay in. Only one of them had found that so far, the other still searching.

He pulled you closer “you don’t have to stay in a job you don’t like Yn. Life is too short to be stuck in something that drains you. It ok to recognise that”

You heard what he said but as you opened up your mouth to continue explaining, a sob was released instead, you hadn’t known you’d held it in but now you had started you couldn’t stop “Let it out, that’s it cry it out” Carlos soothed, rubbing your back, shirt soaking with your tears.

You stayed like that until your tears stopped flowing and your breaths steadied.

“We have a few more days of quarantine, let’s use that to talk about your career yeah?” He said, hoping he wasn’t over stepping. You nodded into his chest.

You were torn, you wanted change but didn’t know what to do. That itself was the problem you and Carlos worked through. In your time remaining you researched at the end of each of your workdays listing out any possible path to pursue. What it did confirm is that you hadn’t realised so many options were open to you. Seeing Carlos put down options you had always thought were out of reach either financially or competitiveness for positions or jobs that simply didn’t exist when you last had a serious career discussion in the later years of high school made you think how narrow minded you had been.

Carlos was more supportive than you could have imagined, ultimately he wanted you to be happy and seeing you think though every option brought up was drawing a curious spark behind your eyes he hadn’t seen before. Planning future scenarios for you was bringing back a portion of your personality you had long stifled and Carlos coaxing it out you were feeling free. It was actually Carlos that had suggested the side step you would pursue. What you had decided to do was to stay in the general industry you were currently working in, but transition away from broad services into a more specialised sector, one focusing on your strength of energy transition of brown to green projects, but with a motorsports lens, a space that you had always enjoyed but never had the financial capacity to pursue. Carlos didn’t see this as an issue though. With his family long embedded into racing, they were better versed than most on the impact of their sport, by which the family had decided to partner to build a team to be entered into a new division focusing on electrical power rallying, with the aim to spread awareness of major environmental issues globally.

Carlos knew how involved his father was in developing the team, it even being a namesake to be eventually entered once given the green light after covid settled down. And he had to admit now that he had you in his life, he was looking at things differently, one of those being separated from you for extended periods of time. Both Carlos’ had discussed at length whilst in Spain your work and had pulled you into conversations too, switching from talking about the extreme e details to details of your career, which had a good overlap of technical and management experience. Over those long chess games Carlos senior had picked your brain but never asking too much to make you think beyond someone curious about someone’s job.

In one of his frequent calls back home to his parents, he had raised your situation and it was Carlos senior who interjected and said he would start seeing internally if he could find a job for you with his team, allowing you to stay close to the family in work if not physically at races. Something Carlos was proud about, was not asking you to give up your life for his. Which so far you hadn’t, but if you were considering leaving your job, it wasn’t beneath him to plant the seeds of working closer to you than previously was possible.

Your quarantine was coming to an end and with it your deadline to yourself on what to do next. You had decided that you would reduce your work days to part time, allowing you to one provide support to Carlos when his racing season started again, secondly to allow yourself to start seeing a careers counsellor or helping you to flesh out your transition out of your current job into what was next.

You and Carlos had decided to celebrate your final night of confinement with a celebratory dinner, decorating the house with the limited supplies Carlos had, majority of it comprising of paper chains strewn from the doorframes and across the windows.

As you both sat down Carlos poured himself a small glass of wine, his last he said, prior to the season starting. He small treat before the regime was enforced.

“I have some news to share” Carlos started, his body emulating confidence

You raised your glass in response waiting for him to carry on

“Look under the place setting”

You settled your glass of wine down and moved the plate and placemat to the side. Beneath was sitting a piece of paper folded in half, you name scribbled in slanted letters on top in Carlos’ handwriting. You looked up at him and he was still looking at you intently. You opened the paper up and it was a print out of an email message received earlier during the day addressed between Carlos and the McLaren team principal. It read that Carlos had been granted permission for you to attend with him all of the races as part of his personal team, without the limitations placed on the track specific contracts.

You quickly read through again to make sure you hadn’t misread anything, and Carlos was still smiling at you.

“If you would like to attend all the races, you’re able to”

You had considered this, further time away to see if you could find perspective. And now here was the opportunity, literally in front of you, barriers removed.

You picked up your glass “I think I do”

Clarifying you added “I think I’m going to take extended leave to decide what I want, who knows maybe I’ll bump into someone following you around.” That’s exactly what Carlos had hoped for, your career so far was similar to his in similar industries, it was how you met after all, he was sure that once you got talking, you’d be able to find an opportunity. He believed not only would luck be on your side but your charisma too.

He clinked his glass lightly against yours in recognition and agreement to you taking up the plan to travel with him. You weren’t just excited for quarantine to end but were excited for now being able to clear your mind for the next.

[noonmutter]

Hellraisers Pt. 3.5: Hell in Heaven (cont)

DWC August 2022 Day 5: Fluff/Shiver

Cay sighed, a fizzle of crackling purple energy rolling from their head to their feet. "I'll- I'll tank then. T-try for the boxes." 

Speaking with a voice that seemed sourceless, an invisible Ansul said simply, "On it, boss." As the rogue began to move away, a flare fired into the glittering sky overhead, and a few seconds later, a dull thoonk from the same spot as the gunshot sent a small, ominous cylinder hurtling toward the wildseed. Thankfully, it wasn’t incendiary, but the resulting explosion coated everything it touched in clinging dust of an unpleasantly bright greenish tint.

Unable to do anything about the dust and sure that Ansul wasn’t hurt, Cay focused on the more immediate threat. They inhaled and let out a silent, deafening scream, hoping to scatter the worgen or draw all their attention.

They succeeded in making sure all five of the frothing worgen advancing on their position were focused entirely on them and not remotely interested in the crystal behind them. Unfortunately, they were suddenly and sharply reminded of how terrifying it was to have five frothing worgen focused entirely on them and heading toward them. For just a second, all Cay could do was whimper.

As much as Caythaes believed themself to be a bit of a cockroach, they hadn't actually ever fought more than one person at a time before, but it was too late to do anything besides deal with it. They picked one of the worgen from the center of the pack and lifted their hands, red anima gathering at their fists and around the beast's head.

Tactically speaking, Ansul knew it was the wrong choice not to pursue the sniper. But for all that he didn't care about the controlled worgen, he couldn’t leave someone in a robe to be swarmed. Swearing under his breath, he reappeared in dulled Alliance blue and grey armor above one of the worgen. As he fell onto the beast, he sank a pair of stiletto-style knives into its neck as casually as one might box its ears. Worgen didn't typically yowl that way; it was more of a cat thing to do–particularly a cat who'd been set on fire–but sudden knives in the neck had a way of changing the status quo. As Ansul's worgen collapsed in a thrashing heap, a second one turned to tackle him off its comrade with a vicious snarl. 

As their spell took hold of their chosen attacker and it slowed its own charge, Cay shouted, “No! Attack the BOXES!”

"They are trying to kill us!" Unable to disappear again thanks to whatever was in that dusty green shit, Ansul fell back on dodging and backpedaling while he pulled something from a pouch at his belt.

Cay's chosen target, now firmly under their control, had time to stop running and wind back for a swing at one of its two remaining fellows before its collar erupted in crackling blue. An electric surge brought it to its knees, howling in pain. The other two paused at the sight, and their collars likewise crackled to life until they made their final pounce at the caster.

As they watched their would-be minion fry, Cay breathed, "Shock collars..." and then threw up a shield before they could be bowled over. The attacking pair crashed into the shield and scrabbled at it with long, dull claws and sharp, yellow fangs screeching and gnashing uncomfortably close to their face, but thankfully, it held. 

They focused their attention on the collars, throwing out a volley of fireballs in the hopes that one would score a hit and break them. The impact sent the worgen flying backward, and they seemed inclined to stay where they landed before their collars jolted them back to their feet to try again. The controlled one on the ground had no chance to dodge the flames, and while it was also very unhappy from the impact, the collar did end up charred and fizzling around its neck, apparently ruined.

Taking advantage of the mayhem, the last furry assailant finally drew first blood for Team Furball when it lunged forward to swipe both sets of claws across the rogue's abdomen. It wasn’t quite the disembowelment the beast had been hoping for, but it was certainly a start, and it stung like a bitch regardless. Ansul dropped and rolled backward with the hit, coming back up on his feet and launching himself into a tackle against his assailant. There were no knives in his hand, just a small jamming device he slapped onto the worgen's collar as they tumbled across the grass. For a second, it seemed like Ansul’s gadget successfully shut down the collar before it crackled to angry life and gave them both a good hard jolt before they separated.

Utterly terrified by the sheer amount of snarling worgen in their face, Caythaes swallowed thickly before shouting, "Hanged man! Th-they're being controlled!" and throwing out a hand. Golden bolts flew forth, and one struck true, leaving one more worgen reorienting itself without a collar motivating it. That done, Cay’s attention shifted, throwing another shield around Ansul while reinforcing their own.

Almost like a reminder that it was there, another gunshot rang out from the trees, and Cay's new shield shattered like spun sugar practically the instant they put it up. The last worgen standing by Cay saw the opportunity it was given and clamped its teeth down on the elf’s fleshy arm to give it the worst kind of nomming imaginable. Dark magic wreathed Caythaes's arm, significantly dampening the amount of pain they felt, but it still staggered and frightened them. They let out a soft whimper before pulling their prosthetic hand back and aiming a punch at the worgen's face.

Hot off the heels of a profoundly uncomfortable equipment failure he’d barely managed to save himself from thanks entirely to Cay’s shield, Ansul hollered and swore up a storm. He didn’t have time to examine that failure right then; instead, he pulled another of those devices and a dagger as he charged toward Cay and their bitey little friend.

Bitey paid for that brief victory, first with a punch from a mechanical fist right to its delicate snoot and then to a dagger and a thing on its neck that made the collar go zap and--... then the zapping stopped, and oh yay! But then there was the matter of that dagger... The worgen didn't want to be stabbed, no matter what was going on, so it made a desperate grab for the knife. Ansul let the knife go and skittered back; he had more and could replace them if they went missing. "No more biting means no more stabbing!"

Caythaes dropped onto their rump with a soft grunt, chin wibbling as they steadied their breathing. For the moment, they trusted Ansul to deal with the worgen, and they closed their eyes, searching for the sniper's mind.

The worgen flung its newfound knife into the woods now that it was no longer being stabbed, then sat down to lick its palm. The other worgen (that weren't slaughtered) had lost whatever will they had to fight now that their collars were not creating an external source of it...

...and the giant, furry hand holding the remote control for that source irritably crushed it as Cay focused through his eyes. They could see him pick up an impressive, heavy rifle and step toward what seemed to be a handmade mortar tube, picking up a belt of very standard-looking explosive grenades. They heard a low, sneering growl practically curl into a purr of "Gotcha" before their connection to the gunman fizzled out.

"Ooookay," Caythaes murmured, their fingers drumming on the ground as they took a mental inventory of what was on them. A pistol probably wouldn't be enough, given the size of that rifle, and maybe their shields would hold up against an explosion, but they didn’t want to risk it. Scrambling to their feet, Caythaes ran to Ansul and made a grab for his bicep. "We- we need to get away? I- I don't know if he's going to aim for us, or Shedwyn, but- but I don't want him hitting both."

Ansul looked at Cay like they were bonkers for a moment, but he had a very good idea of where the sniper was because he saw him just before this all started. After half a second to orient himself and say, "Okay, go!" he took off in that direction, zig-zagging because sniper and stupid fucking green dust.

Just as Ansul broke away, Cay noticed an odd shimmering along the tree line that they recognized but couldn’t quite place. It clicked into place at the same time the sound of a rifle cocking reached their ears from about ten feet behind them. The same voice cheerfully piped up, "Wotcher, knife-ear? Li'l off th' top?"

The cock of the rifle had Cay staggering to a halt almost before they started running. They sighed, taking a moment to collect themself before whirling around and throwing out their hands. A pillar of fire burst to life over the gunman's head and dropped down towards him. Even in a heavy, oiled duster and covered in a nigh-Liefeldian number of pouches, pockets, and bandoliers, the decidedly unferal worgen moved fast, tucking and rolling as soon as he saw the elf's hands move. 

Once again swearing a blue streak (they really shouldn't let him out of his office with that kind of potty mouth), Ansul slid to a stop and sprinted back toward Cay. Throwing knives out in one hand and the pistol based on Terry’s Babygirl in the other, he unloaded all his shots as soon as he thought he was remotely in range.

The gunman was a guy with survival instincts and obvious training, though there was only so much he could dodge with almost no cover before he ran out of luck. One of the bullets ripped across the duster, grazing his back and making him swear before he took a couple potshots toward the pair to keep them from volleying more. "Tha' slag can't be tha' bloody important t' you!"

As the gun went off, Caythaes reflexively raised their hands, creating a wall-shaped magic barrier in front of them and Ansul. The rogue barely pulled up short of face-planting against it.

Cay shrugged. "I- I feel like at this point, it's- it's a bit more self-defense, really. I- I have no idea what's going on."

Ansul almost didn’t respond at all but came up with, “Just don't like racists," as he moved to put himself between the iceblocked wildseed and the gunman. His pistol was empty, but he still kept it pointed at the worgen.

"Good! Then I'll get rid o' that'un for you an' we'll both get what we want, an' I won't 'ave t' kill you both. Ev'ryone wins!" 

"I-I think M-Miss Shedwyn and Terry's children lose," Caythaes mutters to themself, their ears tipping back.

The gunman poked his head out, just barely, from behind the rock he'd chosen for the moment, jerking his thumb at the crystal. "Lotta people want 'im dead an' I bet you know 'ow much 'e deserves it."

With a shake of their head, Cay raised their voice and said, "Actually, I don't! So, um- as far as I'm concerned, y-you just started attacking for no reason!" They paused, flicking a hand towards Ansul, imbuing him with haste. "A-anyway, y-you called me knife-ears, so. Y-you've been more racist to me than Terry." They wondered if they could keep him monologuing long enough for Terry to hatch.

"Wh- hey, I- ..." Ansul looked away like he was running some calculations in his head, "Actually nah, I just wanna shoot him myself!" He didn’t use that speed boost to make a beeline for the guy, but rather for another spot of cover safely away from Cay, the gunman, and the hunk of crystal containing the wildseed.

The latter of which was starting to glow blue.

The gunman was annoyed and done talking once he heard running that was much too fast for his liking. Instead of opening fire, he lobbed a grenade out after Ansul. When Caythaes saw it, they released a tired sigh and dropped the barrier, switching back to a personal bubble. There was some relief when they managed to catch the remnants of a void-based, directional teleport after the explosive went off. It was accompanied by the flailing of someone trying to hide their glowing greenness behind the cover they managed to reach.

They squeaked and ducked their head reflexively as the gunman took aim to fire at the stammering elf that was still too close to his actual target. The shot pinged off the shield, so Cay took off running right at Mister Shooty McShooterson. They pulled back their left sleeve and popped a panel on their prosthetic, pulling out a small pistol. They didn't take the time to aim, just providing cover fire.

Cay's pot-shots did save them from being hit by the gunman’s retaliation, but not from the absolute whoopin’ of a furry wall slamming into their much smaller frame. They didn’t know how else to handle a full-on tackle, hitting the ground flat on their back and gasping for air. The best they could do was roll out of the way before the worgen gunman trampled them.

Blue light began to swirl inward and around Shedwyn within the crystal, taking on green tones, then gold tones as it became downright painful to look at. Fortunately, the only one trying to look at it was the gunman, who solved his problem by looking down at his rifle to reload it as fast as he could. The protective rock cooked off in a final, brilliant flash of light, dissipating back into motes of arcane energy and hanging in the air around Shedwyn’s floating body. The wildseed it had been protecting alongside the wee mage had practically burst open, not unlike a popcorn kernel, from the top.

Shedwyn raised her head, looked directly at the gunman, and growled, "YOU," with a darkly satisfied sense of recognition that reverberated through the trees. She wasn’t expecting the worgen to snarl the same word right back at her in response, though he was furious rather than pleased. Staring up at her in nearly frothing hate, he planted his feet, took aim, and fired straight at her face.

The motes around her snapped into a wall of spinning 2-dimensional shapes, like glowing shards of glass. She stared at the bullet as a few shards enveloped it, then reached for it. The rest turned 90 degrees and launched at the gunman almost as an afterthought.

As soon as Caythaes realized the gunman was ignoring them, they rolled to their knees and clawed at the air, summoning red anima to their hands once again. It swirled around the worgen's head, trying to take control of him long enough that one shot was all he got.

A low, ominous growl rumbled up from within the burst wildseed. With a final flash of green light and the briefest glimpse of Eonar's smirking visage in the air above it, a black-and-tan worgen erupted from the pod, entire body aglow in golden circuitry underneath his thick, bristly fur. 

Terry reached up with one massive hand to grab Shedwyn by the ankle, snarled "Mine!" and threw her, shield and all, straight at their enemy. 

Shedwyn was a tad more in practice with this particular move than the last time she was around Terry's worgen form–It turned out Kyrian could be pretty disrespectful once you gave them the idea and permission. Still, the joy that lit her face at the sound of his horrible voice became panic, and she yelped, "No, not-!"

The gunman was too busy shielding his face with his duster and trying to stave off the intrusion of another mind to see the freight train coming, but he could hear it. This, unfortunately, meant only that he was aware of how fucked he was in the couple of seconds he had before Dwyn crashed into him like a tiny missile.

Caythaes had been concentrating with all their might on keeping the gunman distracted. So, when Terry weaponized his wife, they weren't paying any attention, and the impact of wife on wolf caught them off guard, making them yelp and scramble to their feet as the worgen skidded towards them.

Shedwyn curled nearly fetal as she slammed down into the gunman, so she wasn’t too stunned to immediately pull her shield shards back in and backhand him across the nose with all the strength her rage could bring to bear. Smacking a dog with a rolled-up newspaper got the same sort of yelping noise that being straight-up bitchslapped did. She wasn’t weak, but he was a furry tank, and the noise was mainly because he wasn’t expecting her to slap him, of all things. A slap was something he could recover from, though it took a lot more effort when she kept fucking slapping him.

Eventually, he managed to wriggle his rifle up between them enough to shove hard and get the screaming little banshee the fuck off of him. 

And so arrives Terry, given ample time to crawl the rest of the way out of his cocoon…seed…thing…and shake out the cobwebs. His lip curled back to reveal every single crooked nightmare tooth, and he stomped steadily faster toward Dwyn and the gunman with nothing but murder in them glowing golden eyes.

He wasn’t fifteen feet tall like in Revendreth anymore, and he wasn’t controlling six armored minions. But a nine-foot-tall worgen empowered by a Titan and full of pent-up aggression was more than enough.

Ansul, finally recovered from his close brush with a grenade, staggered out of cover and took in the entire messy scuffle. Nope. He then decided to stagger over to the nearest feral worgen that he didn’t know was feral. "Hey. Sup? We cool?"

Caythaes took one look at what was about to happen, then watched Ansul stumble out of the bush and decided, "Mmm, yeah, Miss Shedwyn's got this." They likewise staggered over to Ansul, eyeing his chosen worgen before saying, "Ah, good, you're in one piece. Uh. As- if he doesn't bite, I need you to catch me."

The feral stared at Ansul like he had seven heads for a minute, made a confused 'baroo?' sort of sound, then finally scrabbled to its feet and ran like hell into the trees. The others took this as their cue and followed. They would be very confused when they couldn’t figure out where Darkshire was.

Ansul shrugged, bringing up a lighter to a cigarette. Caythaes watched the beast run for a bit, hummed, nodded, then said, "Falling now," and swooned. Ansul leaped to catch Cay without dropping lighter or cigarette.

Shedwyn reeled back as she was levered away. Looking up at the stomping, she immediately realized that it was Terry, but it was not her husband. She glanced toward Cay and Ansul and, frustrated, grabbed the gunman by a finger and shrieked, "I said NOT NOW!" With a faint blong noise, both of them were contained in a sphere of energy that was just slightly too small for them. The gunman, unable to easily move and not a complete idiot, silently thanked his lucky stars he was inside the sphere and didn’t fight anymore. 

Might’ve also peed a little.

Terry rammed into the sphere with a very frustrated "NOOOoooo" that practically screamed petulant four-year-old and suggested Dwyn had denied him things this way many, many times. Clawing and scrabbling at the sphere ineffectually, he was just an angry dog instead of a psychopath just looking for something to devour like the first encounter in Revendreth.

He was also completely unprepared for a full-grown, bellowing bull moose to come storming up the path and barrel into him at full speed. The glowing worgen went tumbling, briefly stunned but thankfully not gored. After he got to his feet and saw what hit him, his ears pinned back, and he thought about it. Even a nearly-feral giant of a worgen understood the implicit threat of a moose. Especially Terry’s own well-trained, extremely loyal moose.

The glowing worgen finished doing math and, with the signature sounds of bones snapping and organs squishing, decided he was done too, leaving a very wobbly, glowing, naked man standing there in his place.

"DWYN! DO I NEED T' KILL ANYBODY OR ARE THIN'S IN 'AND NOW?!" echoed across the grove after silence fell.

Ah. Leon. That explained where Toffee came from.

The sphere split just a little so Shedwyn could answer, "NEED HEALING, MANACLES, AND CLOTHES, PLEASE."

The shouting snapped Cay out of their swoon, and they came to first by tensing, then by letting out a groan that said they really wished they hadn't woken up and going limp in Ansul's arms. Dwyn's call for healing made them groan even harder.

"Noooooo," they whine, twisting as if they were going to try and roll to the ground. "I don't wanna yet.... need juice and a nap."

Hearing whining settled Leon's nerves some; whining wasn't screaming or wailing, so there wasn't necessarily an emergency. That meant it was safe to come up the rest of the way with the rest of his so-called cavalry: Lucien and Praecormu. "Well, if you can't, th' boy could use th' practice..."

Terry, for his part, went back to the wildseed and sat down before the kids saw his junk.

"No, I can," Caythaes sighed, holding up their mauled arm. "But-but probably I should have- have someone else heal me first." After a pause, they added, "And after some juice. Or tea. Is- is the teapot still upright?"

With a little frown of concentration that made him look exactly like his mother, Lucien bore down on Cay and Ansul, hands out.

A bit gravelly, which made sense since he hadn’t had occasion to speak much in the last few years, Terry answered, "Teapot fell in. S'not cracked, though."

"Oooh, tea~" Caythaes cooed, sounding a bit (or perhaps a lot) like Theotar at the moment. Someone was tired and woozy. They started to extract themself from Ansul but decided to behave for Lucien. "Um. Y-you can- yeah, just- I can sit."

Lucien’s head whipped around at the sound of Terry’s voice, and he hesitated. The little troll boy accompanying him–presumably Praecormu–placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently toward Cay, then split off and moved toward Terry. As soon as he came within reach, Terry eagerly scooped the boy up–troll or not–to hug him. There were too many people around, so Prae didn’t say anything that might embarrass Terry, just folding himself up against him.

Lucien nodded his thanks to Cay for being a decent patient, and after a quick once-over to assess, he placed his hands on either side of that crazy bite wound on their arm. "What did this?" He didn’t wait for a response before the sweet relief of holy magic started pouring into their arm.

Caythaes had had enough uncooperative patients that they were not going to inflict that on a novice. Plus, the pain in their arm was extraordinarily distracting, and the feeling of the holy magic was a relief. "Worgen bite. Not your father! A- another one that's uh. Probably very confused right now. Anyway-"

They paused as a thought occurred to them, scowling down at the bitemark. "Oh. Uh. Sh-should I worry about acquiring the affliction? I- I don't know how well that's going to, uh. Mix? With the whole, um... phoenix thing."

Lucien closed his eyes and concentrated. "Terry's bites are far messier than this. And the curse is largely broken, so it can no longer be transmitted. I was very worried about that when I first found out about him!"

Half-wearing his armor and carrying the rest over his shoulder, Leon brought up the rear, going to Shedwyn and the gunman to investigate them. "Luv...are you aware yer bleedin'?"

Dwyn glowered up at Leon from basically the gunman’s lap. "I was shot, but Eonar healed me." Leon was a touch skeptical since he could see flesh through that exit wound in her chest, not just skin. Before he had a chance to question her, she went a bit cross-eyed, leaned toward the sphere's edge, and the bubble popped as she passed out. Leon sighed a little bit, leaning down to carefully pick Dwyn up. He looked down at the glaring gunman, said only, "Stay put," then whistled softly at Toffee. Though the moose desperately wanted to go to his poppa, Toffee also recognized a threat when he saw one, so he trotted over and sat down on the gunman's chest. Leon heard a few bones crack, but for some odd reason, he couldn’t find any sympathy to spare for him and walked away.

The gunman, if he'd been planning to do any talking, was briefly very, very loud as a moose sat on him and then very, very quiet. He was definitely not dead, but he was now nursing a broken rib or two and disinclined toward further upsetting the moose.

Terry was utterly unconcerned with anything but the little boy in his arms. After a minute, though, he dragged himself to sit up again and stare out at Cay. "...I know you?"

Caythaes looked over at him and flashed a smile. "Nope! I'm, um- I'm with Leon. I'm helping!"

Leon approached the wildseed, looking down at his brother and Praecormu for a minute. He leaned down, thumped his forehead gently on Terry's, muttered something only Terry and Prae could hear, then dropped a pair of pants and a tatty linen shirt on his big brother's head. Terry didn’t even care that he was crying a little bit; he just put the frickin' clothes on.

Caythaes looked at the moose with a concerned expression, then decided they didn't care enough and returned their attention to Lucien. "Th-thank you for the healing. I- I can take care of Mister Ansul and Miss Shedwyn, if- if you want to go hug your father."

Leon padded up alongside Lucien and touched the boy's shoulder, "It's fine. I've got 'em now, hey?"

Lucien was, for several moments, torn between his duty as a healer (which he was trying to take very seriously!) and the offer. But y'know what, he hadn't seen his papa since his little brothers were born. So with a quick bow, he excused himself and went to tackle Terry and Praecormu.

Caythaes smiled softly as Lucien took off, humming a warm note before they got to their feet and followed him over. "I still want that tea!" They chirped, ignoring Terry as they grabbed the pot from the seed and found a cup from the ground. Terry, in turn, ignored Cay in favor of his eldest son throwing himself bodily toward him, hugging the kid while muttering an awful lot of Thalassian comforts to him. "Kept my promise" was easy to catch before Cay left with the teapot.

After pouring themself a cup and taking a sip, they hummed happily and returned to Leon. "So! Th-that could have gone worse. How are you?"

Leon leaned back on his hands once they settled. "Briefly terrified, but all thin's considered, seems I missed all th' fun... yer all right, then?"

"Th-the bite was the worst of it. M-Mister Ansul had- had a grenade thrown at him, but- but given that he's up and about, he- I presume he dodged it well enough." 

Ansul grunted and continued to not mention the pounding headache and throbbing pain all along his back and belly. Finally, he lit his damn cigarette and went for a walk. He could get his own round of healing later.

Cay sipped their tea as they sat down and leaned heavily against Leon's side, their eye closing briefly. "T-tired now, mostly. A- a lot is catching up with me."

He cradled Cay's head a little bit, patting their cheek and watching the others with a faint smile on his face. "This's rather a lot more'n I ever intended t' ask o' you. Thank you."

"Mmm, b-but you know me," Caythaes murmured, melting even more against Leon as they reached up to give his hand a squeeze. "I- I'm always ready to help. And- and I was here, anyway. Wh-what was I supposed to do? L-let Terry be murdered after- after all I did to put him back together? Nope."

"Tch. Spoken like a Meddler, luv." Leon huffed a soft chuckle, rubbing Cay's hand with his thumb. "'Ope yer ready t' find out wha' it feels like t' 'ave a debt this big repaid."

(YES THE REST IS COMING THIS ONE TOOK THREE DAYS TO EDIT I JUST HAVE RAID NOW )

( @daily-writing-challenge​ @mekandawn​ @shedwyn​ )

[jj-babebank]

Camp Willowdale / JJ Maybank AU / PART 5

Synopsis: Camp Willowdale is buzzing with new campers. It’s Caroline Windsor’s first year as a camp counsellor after attending the camp as a camper for ten years. Little does she know that this year Willowdale Lake is going to be a little different from what she is used to it being… Warnings: future chapters may include curse words, mentions of drugs, mentions of alcohol, mentions of sexual activities, mentions of death. Pairings: JJ Maybank x fem OC Part 1 ; Part 2 ; Part 3 ; Part 4 Masterlist

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Part 5 -

53 days of camp left

The first day at Camp Willowdale was usually pretty straightforward – campers arrive, sign in, move into their designated cabins where they meet their counselors, then all gather in the Wildcat Lodge to get their schedules, maps, badges and compasses. Ever since Pricilla’s daughter left her, she ditched the idea of having a stable with horses at camp (saying it reminded her way too much of Wendy, and also cost a lot of money to maintain), and settled for scavenger hunts in full scout mode in the forest, hence the compasses and badges. Every camper was given a first badge for participation and would get the chance to earn new badges to add to their collection during their nine week stay. Pricilla made sure that there was a badge for literally everything – from successfully starting a fire to throwing out the trash. She liked to do this to make all the campers feel included and special, which on its own sounded like a wonderful thing, however her actual motives were selfish – happy kids meant happy parents, and happy parents meant money. She also liked to turn everything into a competition, so she established a scoring system that nobody but her understood, where she’d award or deduct points from different groups and the group with the most points at the end of the summer will be crowned conquerors of the camp at a made up end-of-summer event Pricilla named the “Camp Will-all-hail banquet”. Caroline always found the name to be extremely tacky, but much like mostly everything that Pricilla put her finger onto, it wasn’t surprising.

JJ and Caroline had gotten assigned to Teens 2. Unsurprisingly, everyone in their group was almost their age, which seemed like somewhat of a recipe for disaster, as Caroline feared that this could result in the teens refusing to follow orders from someone who is basically their age. She was pleasantly surprised to find out that their group of teens was actually quite well-mannered and well-behaved. John B and Sarah’s teens, however, were a whole different story.

“You sure you got T2 and not T1?” panted Sarah after finally sitting down at the counselors table beside Caroline for dinner.

Caroline smirked, “Positive,” she confirmed, not being able to hide her amusement at the sight of an already tired Sarah, “Why’d you ask?”

“Oh, no reason,” said Sarah sarcastically, “Well, besides all the girls, and I’m pretty sure one of the boys, having a massive thing for John B, and them all quite literally being the spawns of Satan, hm… no reason,”

Caroline laughed at Sarah’s words, looking over at the table where her group and Sarah’s were seated at. Two of the T1 girls were giggling while telling a story, while everyone else’s attention was on them. Caroline came to the conclusion that they would be the It Girls at this year’s camp, bossing everyone around. She couldn’t help but laugh at the irony that it was Sarah who got these two as they were literally mini versions of her.

“Heard my name being called,” John B slid onto the bench across the table from the girls. Now that everyone had been sorted, the Wildcat Lodge seating area had been rearranged so that the groups would be sat together according to their ages, and the counselors would be sat together according to their groups. The head staff had their own table at the very foot of the podium, right next to where the food was, conveniently.

JJ was quick to join their group at their respective table, “What’d I miss?”

“Oh, nothing,” Caroline said nonchalantly, “Just Sarah being jealous over her girls liking John B, no biggie,” Sarah kicked her under the table, earning an, “Ow!”

John B’s eyes immediately shot up, that familiar twinkle of excitement swimming through his honey orbs, “Jealous?”

“As if,” barked Sarah, squinting her eyes at him threateningly.

“We’ll see about that, baby cakes,” John B winked, diving into his dinner.

“So,” said JJ, lowering his voice in case any of the neighboring tables were listening, “What’s the plan, guys?”

Caroline shook her head, “I don’t even know where we could start, I mean, the only clue we’ve got so far is that message we had to scrub off the rock this morning before the campers arrived…”

John B thought for a second, “Hey, wasn’t Topper paired up with her?” he said suddenly.

Caroline’s eyes widened in realization, “John B, you’re a genius!” she said, earning a proud smile from the boy, “Last night at the counting, Topper said something about feeling guilty for not offering her his jacket!” the four of them turned to look towards Topper’s table. He was sitting quietly, barely poking at his food, while the rest of his fellow counselors were having an animated conversation around him. Caroline turned back towards her friends, “Chances are he was the one who saw her last!”

“Yeah, and judging by the look of his face, he doesn’t seem too excited about it,” remarked JJ.

“Can you blame him? I’d be pissed if I was paired with Madison, too,” muttered Sarah, scrunching her nose at the leafy salad in her plate.

“Tonight at the bonfire,” said Caroline, “Sarah’s going to offer him some help with his girls, seeing as he’s dealing with all of his kids alone,”

“Hey, why me?” Sarah frowned at the plan.

“Because you’re the one who had a massive crush on him back in the day,” Caroline whispered in Sarah’s ear, resulting in Sarah kicking her under the table again. Caroline bit back a groan as she smiled forcefully, looking at the two boys in front of her, “Okay, well, sounds like we’ve got a plan.”

-------------------------------------------------

After handing out the songbooks and marshmallows to all of their teens, Caroline, JJ, Sarah and John B took a seat at their designated log next to their groups, which had somehow bonded during dinner and were all laughing together.

“Alright, settle down kids!” Pricilla said, causing everyone’s chatter to die down, “As you have already been informed, it is a Willowdale tradition to perform our very own rendition of Bomfiara every morning and night until the end of camp. The songbooks you’ve been kindly given by your counselors contain the lyrics to all of the camp songs we’re going to be singing this summer, but I’m sure that by the end of it you won’t be needing the books anymore,” Pricilla fake-laughed at her own joke while everyone just started at her blankly, “Okay, well, let’s sing!” she gave the tone and everyone started signing.

“This is so lame,” said one of the girls Caroline proclaimed as “It Girls” earlier that evening, “We’re too old for this BS,”

“You got that right,” mumbled Sarah.

“Oh, come on, I love it, it used to be our favorite tradition!” whined John B.

The two girls squealed and started pinching each other, immediately opening their songbooks and joining in on the singing, making intense eye contact with John B with their best seductive looks. Sarah rolled her eyes at the scene.

“See?” she whispered to Caroline, “This is what I meant!”

Caroline smirked at the blonde girl, “Am I sensing… jealousy?”

Sarah scoffed at the remark, “Pf, yeah right,” she said defensively, “I’m just annoyed that they’re only listening to what he’s saying and we’re supposed to be counselors together.”

Caroline nodded slowly, pretending to be buying the story, “Yeah, sure,” she turned to look at Topper, who regardless of the fact that he was surrounded by his group and fellow counselors, still seemed down, the camp fire illuminating his distant face, “Speaking of together, when do you wanna go talk to Topper?”

Sarah followed Caroline’s gaze towards the boy, “Once this stupid song is over,”

Caroline nodded and both girls turned towards their group again, where the It Girls were still making sexy eyes at John B, who seemed totally clueless to their approach as he was belting the lyrics of the much familiar song out loud, waving JJ’s hands every so often.

Once the song was over and everyone got back to their regular chitchat, Sarah stood up and straightened her shorts and camp sweatshirt as she made her way towards Topper.

“Hey, Top, this seat taken?” she said, referring to the empty spot on the log next to him where Madison was supposed to be sat.

Topper looked at Sarah as if she’d just said a distasteful joke, “Hey, Sarah…” he muttered, “Obviously not,”

“Awesome!” Sarah smiled widely, plopping down next to the boy.

“So,” Topper started awkwardly, “What brings you here?”

“Saw you from across the pit,” she explained directly, “Couldn’t help but notice that you seem lonely,”

“Yeah, well,” Topper looked at her with a look of disapproval once again, “I sort of am,”

Sarah pretended to only just realize what he was talking about, “Riiight… So, about that,” she chirped again, “Last night you said something about a jacket?”

Topper sighed, “Yeah, Madison said she was cold when we were in our cabin and instead of offering her my jacket, I sort of felt… relieved that she was going to leave me for a second to go grab hers. I should’ve known that something was wrong when she was gone for over 10 minutes, instead I just laughed around with Kelce and the boys and then we heard the scream…”

Sarah rolled her eyes, “Oh, please, you’re not blaming yourself for it, are you?”

“I mean, I kinda am,” Topper confessed, “If I wasn’t too caught up in being annoyed that I’d been paired up with her, I’d have just given her my jacket or followed her to your cabin to get hers and none of this would’ve happened,”

Sarah tried putting on her best apologetic smile as she reached for Topper’s hand, taking him by surprise, “Look, Top, I hate Madison just as much as the next person, but I hardly think any of this was your fault. She probably just used the jacket as an excuse to ditch and got excited to see her rookie boyfriend, hence the scream,”

Topper frowned, “Don’t tell me you actually believe all that?”

Sarah shrugged, “I mean, she was a drama queen,”

Topper pulled his hands away from Sarah’s, shaking his head, “Just go, Sarah,”

Sarah looked over towards her friends across the fire pit who were all staring at her in anticipation, as she shrugged her shoulders and mouthed them a, “Sorry, I tried,” making her way back to where they were seated.

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A/N: Camp has finally officially begun and so has the search for truth ~~ As always, let me know what you think, I hope you are enjoying the story so far, I'm super excited to be writing this xxx

tags: @k-k0129 ; @hayleyy-l ; @marvellover04

Part 6 here

[fandom-blackhole]

Sinful Sunday

AN: Oh boy....guys, I just want to say that this month has left me very frustrated, and I apologize for the first THOT, but at the same time, I am not sorry because at least to me it is VERY hot. Anyway, I hope this week treats you all well, and I hope this week goes smoothly for me, but if you all hear screaming and dull thuds, it's just me bashing my head in trying not to kill someone :). Love you all, and!!!! We hit 666 followers last night so this week we will be doing supernatural asks starting today until Friday!!! Thank you all!!

Pairings: Modern!Boba Fett x Reader, Commander Fox x Reader

Sinful Sunday Masterlist

Boba Fett x Reader

This is ENTIRELY self-indulgent, and completely revolves around how my work is gonna go, and how I wish a certain bounty hunter would come and give me some stress relief…

This job was going to be the death of you. Wait no, a select few high school students and your asshole supervisor were going to be the death of you. When you signed up to supervise this summer program you had not expected it to go so far south. Hell, you'd been in the program when you were in high school and it was never this bad, so why was it your luck that it was when you were on the adult side of things that everything just went by the wayside. 

When you were in the program all of the adults got along, the head never accused the others of being rude, targeting the students, or being power-hungry like yours was now. When you were in the program, sure there was drama, I mean its high school students what did you expect, but never this bad, and never in multiple different groups, it was usually one, but now it seemed like all but five of the students were at each other's throats for one thing or another. And honestly, if it were up to you at this point, you'd be getting paid more for doing your supervisor's job for him, and you wouldn't be going on the end of the month trip, but you had to go on the trip to get paid and there was no way you were going to be getting more money at this point.

It was fine though, you only had to work with that asshole prick and with the students for 5 more days… 24/5…. before you were home free….to start prepping for university. You know what, this adult ingredient thing is not your cup of tea and you wanted out, fuck.

The first day of the trip went relatively ok, you only had to yell at the boys a couple of hundred times, and pop several headache pills while your supervisor continued to avoid his job, but you know, it could be worse. When you got to the hotel, you were all but dead on your feet, and the thought of having to be up at an ungodly hour the next morning had you groaning, but collecting your room key from your head boss with a smile anyway.

What you hadn't expected was one of the girls' meltdown, nor when you were tiredly trying to calm her and keep your temper at bay for her to shove you hard, and while on already unsteady feet to stumble backward and trip over a foot and start to fall. You gasped and reached out to catch yourself, as well as the foot's owner grabbing you, resulting in a very awkward position of you grabbing the man's suit jacket, while he held you in what looked to be a very low dip, almost like the two of you had been dancing.

You immediately felt heat rise in your face as your eyes widened in shock and you started apologizing all over yourself as you righted yourself and bent over to grab your bag. The stranger just laughed and steadied you, before pushing your chin to look at him saying, "It’s fine, little one, no harm done. Don't worry about it, you seem to have your hands full already."

As he finished speaking, he motioned his head over to where two of the three of your head bosses were talking to the girl that shoved you, and the third was walking over to check on you. They said your name and asked frantically, "Are you alright? We are taking care of the situation, feel free to sit down if you need to."

"I'm fine, I promise. Mr….."

"Fett, Boba Fett," the stranger supplied and reached over to shake your boss' hand, and much to your shame you couldn't help but gulp at how Mr. Fett's hand dwarfed your bosses. Clearing your throat you smiled at your boss as they nodded and left, and continued, "Mr. Fett so graciously, saved me from the fall I would have had onto these stone floors," then turning to Mr. Fett, you smiled at him, your breath catching in your throat as your eyes made contact with his swirling eyes that reminded you of the enticing smoky quartz you had at home, "Thank you very much, Mr. Fett, I am more thankful for your quick reflexes than I can express."

"Please, Mr. Fett was my father, Boba is quite alright, and you don't need to thank me, I would have felt guilty if I had not been able to catch you in time."

“Well still, Mr,” as you started Mr. Fett narrowed his eyes at you with a glint in his eyes, that made you smile and look down, “Boba, thank you.”

With that, you looked up and met his eyes one last time, before nodding and walking away, flushing from head to toe as you walked into the elevator and turned to find him still watching you with a smile. Once the doors finally shut you let out a shuddering breath and wrapped your arms around yourself as you waited for your floor. You weren’t sure if it was the stress you had been under this past month, or if it was a good-looking man saving you from getting injured, but you couldn’t get Boba Fett’s face or voice out of your mind. You should really blame being so touch starved for the way you replayed the way he had looked at you, his eyes aglow with something that was more than just friendly, from the way your mind rolled over the way his lips had spoken each rumbling word, and as you walked into your room and collapsed back onto the bed your groaned knowing that tonight it was going to be hard not to touch yourself to the thought of the man who had been nothing but kind to you.

It wasn’t until later, as you were saying good night to your colleagues and your bosses after taping the students’ doors for the night that you saw him again. You had been headed to your room, listening to each of the rooms as you passed making sure none of the kids were being loud or making too much noise. You were so caught up in listening, that you again ran into Boba, and as you apologized and looked up you felt the flush from earlier returning to your face. 

“Mr. Fett I am so sorry! I should have been paying attention to where I was walking!”

“Little one, what did I tell you, you only have to call me Boba,” he waited until you nodded, before tilting your chin up with his finger again and continued, “Good, now tell me. Are you done working for the night?”

His gaze was engulfing and made your mouth go dry, stealing all the words from your mouth so you only nodded, and melted when Boba’s lips turned up into a smile. Then, surprising you, even more, he leaned down and sealed your lips together in a consuming kiss that stole your breath and pulled a whimper out of you. When Boba pulled back from the kiss, he didn’t move far, staying close enough, that his lips brushed yours as he spoke.

“Little one, I have to say that I have been thinking about you since I saw you, even before you literally fell for me,” he chuckled as he pressed another kiss to your lips, before saying, “and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t ask. Little one, I would love to treat you right tonight, if you would let me?”

The second the words left his lips, your eyes shot open, not having realized they had fallen closed in the soft moment. Only when they were open, you found Boba’s eye burning with desire and a promise that had you shuddering out a yes, before your brain could even process what was happening. You, in a daze, lead him to your room and keyed in, as he crowded you against the door, as Boba’s lips graced along your neck and he ground his hardening cock against your ass.

 The second the door opened, Boba had you pushed against the floor-length mirror hung on the wall not far from the door. It didn’t take long at all for him to have you a panting mess as he alternated between nipping at your jaw, whispering about how good you looked in his arms earlier, and kissing you senseless. You moaned his name softly as one of his hands pushed underneath your shirt and squeezed your nipple through the thin fabric of your sports bra, before pulling the shirt off altogether and shedding his suit jacket and sharp green tie. 

The two of you were all hands, groping at each other and tearing fabric away as quickly as possible while sharing moans and groans through kisses. Boba had consumed your thoughts, to the point where you couldn’t even worry about your volume and the fact that your coworker may hear you through the wall. No, the only thing you were worried about, was the fact that you were so worked up that your hands couldn’t even undo Boba’s belt as you continued to fumble with it as Boba had you already stripped to your panties and was leaving red marks all along your shoulders. 

Finally, when you gave of a pitiful needy whine, Boba pulled back, and with almost completely black eyes from lust ordered you to turn around. The second you did as you were told, you flushed at the sight that greeted you. In the mirror, you saw the way your lips were red and shiny from all the kisses you had shared and from how Boba had nipped at your bottom lip. You saw how hungry your eyes looked and how wet you felt looking at the tiny bruises Boba had put on your shoulders where only you would see. Then, you looked over your shoulder and found Boba watching you in your needy state, making direct eye contact with you as you heard him fisting his cock and rubbing it while just watching you in the mirror. 

“Bend over, princess. Let me see that pretty pussy of yours.”

Moaning you did as you were told, even wiggling your ass a little in an attempt to get him to move quicker, which only resulted in Boba grabbing a handful of your ass before growling out quietly, “Patience, princess, be patient.”

Then he was pulling your panties to the side with a drawn-out groan as he took the middle finger of his other hand, and swiped it through your wet folds, and shoved it into your hungry walls. He growled out a few obscenities as he started to earnestly fuck his finger up into you, watching as your mouth dropped open into an O and you gave out tiny moans and pushed back onto his finger. Then he was pressing a second finger inside of you and you felt your eyes roll upwards as you moaned out, “Yes yes yes yes, please, don’t stop, of fuck, yesssssss.”

Boba grinned in the mirror and kept fucking up into you, making sure to scissor out his fingers to open your tight walls up to fit his cock. He watched as you climbed higher and higher, gushing around his fingers and sucking them back in with each thrust. He loved watching your face in the mirror, watching each twitch and facial expression of pleasure he was bringing you. And he more than enjoyed knowing, from the look on your face alone just how close you were to peeking. It was when you tightened impossibly around his fingers that he knew you were right on the precipice of cumming, and he quickly yanked his fingers out, nearly cumming himself from the downright needy and torn moan you gave him when he robbed you of your orgasm. 

“Don’t worry, little one, you’ll get to cum, but only when this pussy is wrapped around my cock.”

Then you heard him tear open a wrapper, looking up to see the condom wrapper in between his teeth as he rolled it over his cock, before spitting the wrapper away and making eye contact with you as he rubbed himself along your entrance, “Are you ready, princess? I’ll warn you, I am much bigger than my fingers.”

You just whimpered and nodded, only being able to think about how much you needed him inside you, how much you wanted him to stretch your walls. Boba smirked and wrapped one hand along your waist while he guided his cock inside of you, sinking in about halfway, before pulling out and thrusting back in. And he was right, he was MUCH larger than his fingers, you swore he was spreading you to your limit, but it still felt so good. By the time he was fully seated inside of you, and you could feel his open zipper and open belt along your ass and thighs, you just needed him to move, desperate for the friction and pleasure that his cock could bring you, so you ground back into him. Boba responded by pulling out until his cock head was the only thing still inside of you, before slamming back in and setting a brutal pace. 

Your hands splayed out on the mirror, needing them there to help you keep your balance as Boba’s powerful thrusts slammed into you, pushing you so that your head almost hit the mirror and your breath fogged up the mirror with every moan of his name. It was all almost too much, and your eyes slipped closed trying to focus on the rocking thrusts that were inching you closer and closer to that familiar edge but Boba was having none of that. He grabbed the back of your neck, never halting his pace, and pull you up against his stomach saying, “Open those eyes, little one. I want you to watch yourself as I wreck this perfect body of yours. I want you to see what you look like when I give you an orgasm no one else can, while I give you pleasure nobody else ever will.”

Moaning you cracked your eyes open and made eye contact with Boba, watching as he sunk his teeth into your shoulder and groped at your chest, pulling one of your breasts free as he impaled you on his cock over and over. In this new position, Boba was angled just right to brush against that devastating spot inside of you the one that had you throwing your head back and clawing at Boba’s thighs as you balanced on the edge of cumming. Only falling over that edge, when Boba’s free hand moved down and he circled your clit with two fingers a few times and growled, “Cum for me princess.”

And you did. You came hard, and with a breathless scream of Boba’s name. You clenched down tightly around him, your walls pulsating as he continued thrusting deep inside of you and playing with your clit dragging out your high before you felt Boba’s cock twitch a few times and he gave a few shallow thrusts with a curse.

You both stilled after that, Boba resting his head on the back of your neck and your head resting against your chest as you tried to catch your breath with his slowly softening cock still buried inside of you. When you both finally came back to yourselves, Boba pulled out completely and whispered, “Come on, little one, let’s take a shower and then get you to bed.”

“Mmmm, you’ll stay? Just until I fall asleep?”

“Anything for you princess, anything for you.”

Commander Fox x Reader

I haven't written Fox in a while, so I figured I'd indulge myself with a soft little drabble for him…

Fox was tired, no past tired, he was exhausted. He was past being able to function on caf alone, and to the point that he had actually listened when Thorn had sent him away telling him to rest and eat something. But as much as he had listened to his brother, he had also ignored him, and instead of going to rest or find something nutritional, he had instead made the trek across the city to you. He knew it was late, and you had no doubt been in bed asleep for several hours, but with being away from you for days on end after the newest attack on the senate, he knew that he would not be sleeping unless it was curled against your side.

It was easy to slip past the security of your building, especially since he'd down it on multiple occasions and once while drunk. He reminded himself once again, to send in an anonymous request for better security around the building, ask he climbed into the elevator and made his way to your floor. He wasn't sure if he had fallen asleep on the ride, but he seemed to arrive sooner than usual, and he stumbled out walking right to your door and putting in your code with a smile, having known the four digit code longer than it had been your apartment code, having had the number been assigned to him as a child before you took it and made it your own. 

He only paused at the door for a second to listen and make sure you were asleep, and his sneaking in had not woke you. After confirming you were still asleep, he careful pulled the armor from his body, it having been a weighted burden for days now, and setting it aside on the floor of your living room, before walking towards the bedroom. He knew for a fact, if he wanted, he could walk this apartment in his sleep, not entirely sure that isn't what he was doing right now.

Only, he paused again as he reached the bedroom, taking in your sleeping face that was lit by the soft glow of the bright lights shining through your bedroom curtains. Fox knew he could watch you like this for hours, you looked so soft it made his heart stutter. So carefree and free of the stress you held during the day. Your fave completely relaxed, nose occasionally scrunching up as you dreamed, and letting out soft mumbles that were indecipherable, but never failed to bring a smile to his face. 

Eventually Fox did crawl into bed behind you, and relaxed only when you pressed up against him, and in your sleep, sighed out his name. It was in that moment that he wished more than anything to just pause time and hold you like this until the end of the galaxy.

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To Be Continued - Part 2

Summary: As an author, you had created Brian Kang for your current trilogy series to represent the ultimate man that everyone would love, along with Charli Evers - your female protagonist. What you hadn’t expected was for him to find a way out of the story and begin shaping up your world instead

Pairing: Brian Kang x female writer (ft. Park Sungjin)

Genre: writer au / romance / fantasy

Warnings: fictional characters coming to life / a bit of angst here and there / Sungjin as a cop (or does that only affect me?) >_>

Word count: 2205

Preview | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Epilogue 

Once you stopped laughing with your panic, you did what any other logically thinking person would do and rang the police. And you waited at your front door, not touching anything within your home in case you tampered the evidence further. You were already scolding yourself for eating the food prepared for you. What if it had been poisoned? You thankfully didn’t feel any worse off with your cold, if anything, you felt loads better.

Still, the anxiety ran high within you until the two officers finished checking everything over.

“It looks like the person who did this knows you intimately,” Constable Park said with a brief frown. “We’ll run the fingerprints we’ve managed to find through our system to see if they’re in it but I’m not sure what more help we can give you, Miss L/N.”

“Thank you, Constable, I appreciate your efforts all the same.”

“You said you’re a famous author, right?”

You grimaced. “I wouldn’t say famous.”

“I’ve heard of your name before,” Officer Yoon mentioned with a sheepish grin when you glanced at him in surprise. He chuckled as he rubbed the back of his neck. “My girlfriend reads your stories.”

“Ah. Please tell her I said thanks.”

“Could I actually get your autograph to give to her? I’d be in her best books for-”

“Dowoon!” Constable Park cut in sternly, causing the taller man to shrink back.

“I don’t mind,” you offered and headed back to your office for a pen and paper. You stopped when you noticed your favourite pen was missing. Surmising it had been moved during the police search; you reached for another pen and then wrote down a quick message for the young officer’s girlfriend before signing it.

You stopped again, staring at the message still displayed on your screen.

Your biggest fan.

Constable Park was back at your side again and you glanced up at him. “You mentioned just now about me being known and the message here…”

“Just make sure you keep the doors locked and maybe invite someone around to stay with you for the time being. As harmless as it’s all been, we do have more than one fingerprint detected today. Since you live alone and haven’t had anyone over in some time, we can confirm there was a second person in here last night. I know it’s easy to spend time being grateful to your avid followers but be careful with who you share your personal information with.”

A chill shuddered its way down your spine and you nodded hastily, taking the card the man held out. He smiled comfortingly. “If you have any other problems, Miss L/N, this is my direct line. Contact me right away, okay?”

“Thank you, Constable Park,” you replied weakly, reading the card and finding that his first name was Sungjin. You smiled when you looked back up at him. “I appreciate it.”

“Alright Dowoon, let’s head out and I’ll be in contact when we’ve checked the database,” Sungjin – Constable Park – stated and you nodded once more as you handed the autograph to his colleague. Dowoon grinned bashfully and thanked you all the way back to your front door, where you fare-welled the pair.

And promptly locked and latched the front door.

You had lived alone since your early twenties, too independent to work well with roommates. Whilst you had started out in a small, frigid apartment, you had cherished the space alone to create your fantasies into novels. You had only moved to your modest villa within the last year and adopted Binks, the only company you needed on a daily basis outside of your characters.

You weren’t recluse by any means, you just preferred your own company. Socialising was exhausting for your introverted ways, and even though you wanted to play it safe, you slumped down on the couch after the police left and groaned at how exhausting today had been so far.

“I’m sick, that’s adding to it,” you said out loud, and then caught yourself doing so, snapping back upright in your position. “I talk out loud to myself a lot, don’t I?”

Of course, your belongings didn’t reply. And Binks had gone into hiding when Sungjin and Dowoon were here, being afraid of men entirely.

Thinking over the care the stranger had given to even your cat, you decided they had to be female. It didn’t ease your mind any assigning a gender to this person. But it did help you feel as if you were getting somewhere with the mystery behind it.

“And once the police run all the necessary checks, hopefully, I’ll have more answers,” you announced, groaning when you had realised you spoke out loud again. “Oh, whatever! I don’t have to keep my thoughts locked up inside my head or spoken through my fingertips into a word document either! My house, my life!”

And with that, you got up and went back to your desk where you tried to seek out some normalcy for the rest of your day.

You checked emails before conversing with Lily who was animatedly retelling you of her reactions to the final part of the manuscript you sent her. You mentioned to her about what happened too. Lily, however, seemed to be more concerned about something you had written, after exclaiming over your safety. You watched the video screen where your editor, and probably the person who knew you the most aside from your mother, struggled with something.

You frowned. “What is it?”

“You didn’t put your usual The End at the final part for me.”

“Yes I did,” you corrected, leaning back in your chair. “You know me. I always put it at the end of every manuscript so you can’t nag me for more words. The End means I’m not adding to this story anymore!”

“You didn’t put it, Y/N,” she repeated, glancing up at you curiously through her laptop’s camera. “You put something else.”

“Look, I’ll prove it to you,” you announced with pure conviction, clicking on the word document icon on the taskbar and then stopped momentarily when you finally noticed that the story was still open. “That’s strange. I know I closed out of it last night.”

“Out of what?” she asked as you clicked on the tab and watched the document appear on the screen.

You immediately gasped. There, after the final scene of Charli and Brian, was no longer The End as Lily had announced. Instead, the words, To Be Continued had been placed there.

“I didn’t put that there,” you whispered and Lily laughed, unconvinced.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Y/N! Who else would have?”

“I sent it to you right after I finished and I swear I had The End written there.”

“Maybe your writing muse changed it on you,” she teased but you didn’t join her in the amusement. She sensed your shock and blinked a couple of times before focusing back on you. “You really didn’t do it?”

“What if they changed the whole story?!” you shrieked as you jumped to the worst conclusion, scrolling up until you found the line that Brian had spoken to Charli about waiting for an eternity for her. You relaxed a little when everything appeared to be in order. “Maybe I’ll name the third book in this series, Eternity.”

“Wow, just like that, you calmed down,” Lily observed and then nodded. “I like that.”

“I don’t know. I’m just a little sensitive.”

“You were taking medicine last night for the cold, right?” You nodded at Lily’s question and the woman smiled knowingly. “Maybe you took too much at once and hallucinated a little. Or blacked out and can’t remember much.”

“I’m changing it back to The End,” you told her, typing it as you did so. Closing the document, you smiled brightly at the video call. “I’m not adding any further words to Captivated, you hear me? You work your editing magic and I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Yes, Boss!” she cheered, waving to end the call and you powered off your laptop then, making sure to shut the lid down as well.

After finding Binks, you scooped him up in your arms, checked all the doors a final time before heading off to bed for much-needed rest.

You were still a little sick, after all.

You awoke to the sound of your phone ringing the following morning and blearily reached out to silence it. “Hello?”

“Miss L/N?” a deep voice asked and you sat up a little, blinking away your sleep. “This is Constable Park. We met yesterday regarding your intrusion issue?”

“Sungjin,” you immediately said and then gripped at your blankets at your first name slip-up. Clearly, you were still grappling with becoming alert enough for proper etiquette.

He chuckled lightly. “Yes, shall I call you Y/N?”

“If it makes the situation still work well, be my guest.”

“Well, I’m not sure how happy you’ll be to have me calling you by your name, Y/N, in a moment.”

“No?”

“The results are in and there’s no fingerprint matching that in our database. Whilst that’s bad news for us to immediately act upon it, it doesn’t diminish the fact that someone had been there either.”

Despite being under your blankets, you ran cold, wrapping your spare arm around you to try and warm yourself back up. “I see. Does this mean you can’t do anything?”

“I’m afraid so. If you find anyone suspicious in your house or lurking around the outside, don’t hesitate to call me, okay?”

“Of course, thank you, Sungjin.”

“You’re the first person I’ve been called out to that’s called me by my first name, you know.”

“Do you find me rude for doing so?”

“It’s refreshing,” he admitted and you couldn’t help but smile at the thought of being something different for the man. You then bit at your lip, realising you were overreacting all because a man in uniform had stepped into your home.

Okay, so Sungjin was really handsome. And you were deprived of seeing such handsome outside of your stories. Whilst he was no Brian Kang, he would definitely make for a great love story counterpart in a new world. Perhaps he helped the main protagonist and became her protector. Or maybe –

“Y/N?” Sungjin said and you blinked rapidly out of your racing thoughts, coughing a little to cover your embarrassment. “You okay?”

“Sorry, I’m still recovering from this fever,” you admitted, fanning at your face for effect. “Did you say anything else?”

“Yeah, I just told you to keep safe, okay? I don’t need to be worrying about you needlessly, right?”

Oh, you were so going to get up right after this phone call and start typing out these ideas flashing through your mind. However, you gave a moment more to the police officer and confirmed you would call him at the first sign of trouble before ending the call.

Springing up from your bedding, you dashed into your office and perched on the edge of your chair as you opened your laptop and turned it on. You were relieved to find everything in your office in the right place as you opened a new word document and tapped furiously on your keyboard to get down all your ideas for your new police officer au story.

And when you were finally done, you leaned back in your chair and giggled. You weren’t always inspired by people who stepped into your world, but this was solid content you couldn’t ignore.

“Perhaps it’ll help me live out my Sungjin desires too,” you admitted sheepishly before glancing at your pen stand. You remembered about the missing pen and searched on top of your desk and then scooted your chair back to look on the floor. “Where did you go, favourite pen?”

Not finding it anywhere, you pouted right as your stomach grumbled. “Ah,” you said weakly, clutching your stomach in your hand. “I best feed myself and Binks. Hopefully, that pen will turn back up.”

Once you had eaten and quietened Binks’ demands for his morning affection, you got dressed and readied yourself for a trip out to the grocery store. Next, you had to write out a list of what you needed and went back into your office, sitting down at your desk and reaching for some paper.

Your attention turned to your laptop, where you found your favourite pen sitting upon it. “What the…”

And looking up at the screen, another message awaited you.

 Sorry, I didn’t realise I had taken it with me after writing you the notes.

 Glancing around yourself, you froze with the fear that rose within. You hadn’t heard anyone inside the house during this time. Yet, there was proof someone had come in again. You looked to the window, it was firmly shut. There was no way anyone could have gotten inside the house without walking passed you first.

You then started to shake.

Had they been in here all night long again?

Just as you went to get up and fetch your phone to ring Sungjin back, you noticed a second tab open on the document screen.

It was Captivated. And once again, the last words read, To Be Continued.

_________________

Part 3

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Top 7 Law Of Attraction Tips To Manifest More Of What You Want!

By Heather Mathews Author of Manifestation Miracle      “Everything is within your power, and your power is within you.” ― Janice Trachtman Charlie, a stay at home dad, works out of his living room while looking after his three-year-old toddler. As a social media consultant, he depends on his laptop to make a living. The problem is that his beat up computer was as old as his kid, and it was always glitching on him. So Charlie kept focusing on getting a new computer – a 13-inch Macbook Pro in particular. Eventually, his old laptop gave out, which made him panic a bit. So Charlie went online to look for another one while having the shiny new Macbook in the back of his mind. After hours of searching, he couldn’t find a reasonably priced model. So he was about to settle on another type of laptop and was close to closing the sale. But at the last minute, Charlie decided to check the price listings for a used version of the computer that he REALLY wanted. And just like that, someone was selling a six-month old Macbook Pro for a price significantly cheaper than a store-bought one. So Charlie got what he wanted, and at a better deal than he had hoped for! Now, Charlie’s incredible stroke of luck seemed like a fluke to him at first, but then another awesome thing happened shortly after. You see, Charlie was also looking for a new job because he felt stuck in his current one. So he had his sights set on another company with a position in mind. The truth was that he wasn’t all that confident he was even qualified for the position, but he went over the job description again and again. Charlie even printed the job ad and put it on his refrigerator door so he could see it every day. A couple of weeks after his interview, he got a call from the company and said he got the job. On Charlie’s first day, his new boss told him, “Honestly, your skillset isn’t an exact match for what we were looking for. But I really liked how you did at the interview…and besides, we can train you for the other things you need to learn, anyway. You have a great attitude and that’s more important than being 100% qualified for the job.” Click Here To Discover the Lazy Person’s Secret To Get Everything You’ve Ever Wished For      Is It Coincidence - Or Something Else at Work? It’s easy to brush off Charlie’s streak as plain dumb luck, but could he have WILLED his good fortune to happen? After all, the common element between getting his new laptop and the new job was that he focused on both things intensely. Charlie kept it in his thoughts all the time. More than that, he created a detailed picture of his desired state in his mind. He imagined what it would be like to hold his new laptop and how he’d feel working in the new job he was aiming for. Charlie visualized both scenarios so vividly that he could almost taste it. Whether he knew it or not, he was putting the basic principle of The Law of Attraction to work - and it served him well. As the name implies, this law decrees that “like attracts like.” There’s a global movement behind this belief, and it says that the kind of thoughts you send out to the Universe emit a certain frequency – be it helpful or harmful. And you have the power to control the wavelength you operate on, which in turn attracts circumstances that match your energy. So by focusing on positive outcomes and giving out positive vibrations, you can turn your thoughts into a tangible force of good in your life! On the other side of the coin, dwelling on the negative aspects of life and focusing your attention on the things you resent attracts even MORE negativity into your world. Like Charlie, you can think of something specific you want, and hold that image in your mind. Create all the details that bring the picture to life, then believe that you already have it. When you go about your day thinking that the object of your desire is already a matter of fact… …this sends out a clear, strong message to the Universe that you truly WANT and BELIEVE it. But this is just the tip of the iceberg; there are other ways to raise your frequency even higher. By following these 7 Tips to Create the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of, you’ll naturally attract everything you’ve ever wanted – and MORE:

#1: Set aside time to focus on what you desire

    The first habit is simple enough: give yourself at least 5-7 minutes daily to visualize the things you want to turn into reality.

You can do this by finding a quiet place to contemplate, then sit upright with your eyes closed. While keeping your desires front and center in your thoughts, breathe deeply in and out.

Focus on your breath and the sensations your body is feeling, and use that as anchor to keep your thoughts from straying.

If your mind does go on a tangent, gently bring yourself back to your breathing AND your desired future state.

You’ll get a lot of benefits from doing this for just a few minutes every day. For instance, many studies have proven the stress-reducing properties of meditation.

A study at the Massachusetts General Hospital showed that people who tried their meditation program experienced significantly less health problems than before.

They ended up not having to see a doctor or go to the emergency room, saving them about $2,300 in medical costs for EACH person!

On top of that of course, meditation also helps you keep your eye on the prize and give you the determination to make it happen.

Some people however, have trouble meditating and get easily distracted.

If you need a little guidance with this habit, I’ve got a special gift for you – but more on that later…

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#2: Be grateful and practice gratitude

    Ever hear the expression “Thank your lucky stars”?

Back in ancient times, people believed that celestial bodies played a huge role in someone’s destiny.

Today, many still believe that these same external forces affect our lives.

The Law of Attraction draws from this belief, and it states that we should be gratefull whenever the Universe sends something good our way.

This is another way of fine tuning your frequency. When you actively pay attention to the positive things that happen around you, it acts like a magnet that attracts similar things.

And by being thankful for your blessings, you’re sending a powerful message to the Universe that essentially translates to:

“Thank you, that was awesome! More please!”

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#3: Take a leap of faith

    The main challenge that people have with manifesting their desires is dealing with the world of the intangible.

It can be daunting (and even discouraging) to imagine a future outcome that hasn’t happened yet.

It takes some faith to push past that hazy uncertainty, and not everyone has it in them to do so.

So you need to check your inner Doubting Thomas at the door for a moment and appreciate how other people have used the Law of Attraction to succeed.

Consider the great figures from the past: Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Marie Curie, Vincent Van Gogh and Nikola Tesla.

All of them were shining examples of how they used their mind and willpower to create something valuable in this world.

They raised their own frequency and as result, had a different energy from the rest of humanity.

Even though they’re gone, their legacy lives on, and we can still feel its impact today.

It’s all because they took a brave step into the unknown.

Even though they couldn’t see how their work would ripple through the next several decades, they still powered through.

The skepticism that people have is the result of growing up.

As you get older and have more experiences, a certain amount of jadedness sets in.

That’s why you won’t find any of that in kids. Just think about how children play make-believe.

When they yell, “The floor is lava!” you can bet they’ll be scrambling for the nearest couch or chair to avoid getting “burned.”

On a certain level, they TRULY believe that the floor is literally molten rock.

They can see the hot, glowing lava, burning everything its path…

…and they do everything to stay out of its way.

That’s the power the mind and imagination in action.

Learn how to see the world on this level again. That way, you can see a bright future before it happens – then go on to make it a reality.

Click Here To Learn How to Force the Universe to Manifest Your Dream Life 

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#4: Keep on keepin’ on

One of the realities of this world is that you can’t eliminate adversity.

It’s always going to be an uphill climb at some point, especially when you’ve just taken on a new challenge.

You’ve been eating right and working out, but the pounds aren’t quite flying off as you’d hoped.

You started a side income project, but your cash flow hasn’t been anything more than a trickle.

You’ve tried beating your depression with exercise, therapy and medication, but the dark thoughts still charge at you like a freight train.

That’s called RESISTANCE.

It will always be there, even as you dig deep and do everything in your power to manifest the reality you want.

Being a grown-up means expecting those external circumstances to work against you.

Your best response? PUSH BACK.

Keep your inner world together, and the outside world will follow suit.

Dumbledore once told Harry Potter, “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.”

Remember: the hero of the story is never a one-person army.

Harry had Hermione and Ron.

Luke had Obi-Wan and Yoda.

And you don’t have to fly solo in YOUR journey.

Think about the people in your inner circle – are they giving you the energy, motivation and inspiration to succeed?

If the company you keep sneers at growth and being better, maybe it’s time to look for other friends to round out your squad.

Seek people who lead by example and can show you how to overcome that resistance in your life.

Learn from them and let their enthusiasm rub off you.

While you’re at it, use technology to connect to like-minded folks who can help you in your quest. Open your phone or laptop and fire up YouTube, Vimeo or any other video streaming site.

TED talks, self-help lectures and tons of other empowering content are literally at your fingertips.

The Universe has too much abundance for you to ignore.

We’re part of a vast human network, and our collective energy affects everyone else in ways we can’t yet fully comprehend.

This network has always been around; the Internet merely accelerated it. Tap into it and unleash its power.

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#5: Tune out your Negative Ned (or Nancy)

    There’s always that voice in the back of your head that kicks in when life gets tough.

It loves whispering things in your ear, usually at the height of your frustration and despair:

- “You totally blew that one, why do you even bother trying?”

- “You had one job and you screwed it up like always…I’m not even surprised.”

- “Getting back on the horse, are we? I give it a week before you go back to your old ways. Better to quit while you’re ahead!”

- “You actually thought he was complimenting you? Oh, bless your heart…it’s called ‘small talk’ and ‘being nice’.”

If you’re like the rest of the human species, you’re going to run into those nasty folks called insecurity, self-doubt and fear.

They’re going to take up space in your head and try to drown you out with their noise.

Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet and scholar, knew this well. It his poem “The Guest House”, he spoke an ancient truth about the human condition.

He likened all our thoughts and feelings – both good and bad – as visitors who stopped by the guest house of the soul.

And this line struck me the most:

“The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.”

Once I understood what it meant, I realized that I didn’t have to resist it. I could simply let my obnoxious guests do their thing, and see them out.

It’s not about covering your ears and going, “La la la la! I can’t hear you!”

Acknowledging their existence in your head is NOT the same as letting them win.

The world’s greatest achievers go through bouts of darkness and anger like everyone else.

The main difference is that they use their failures as material for an instruction manual called “What NOT to Do and How to Do It Better The Next Time Around”.

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#6: Ditch your story

    You shouldn’t stop at managing your negative thoughts, however. You need to peel back another layer and go deeper.

Here’s the thing: you grew up on a set of beliefs, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Your parents, teachers, friends and pretty much everyone you knew growing up contributed to your programming.

You don’t know it, but you operate on this programming on a daily basis.

And it influences every decision you make – and how you choose to see the world.

Now this can be a good thing if you grew up around people who were positive, motivated and had a good outlook on life…

…but this is the real world we’re talking about, so NOT everyone had that kind of effect on you.

Somewhere along your journey, someone discouraged you in a subtle way, or put some sort of label that you can’t shake off.

Words like “Underachiever”, “Oddball”, “Loser”, “Nerd”, “Small Fry”, “Ugly Duckling” and “Black Sheep” come to mind…

…and each one is damaging in its own toxic way.

Sadly, most people carry this invisible weight their whole life.

But starting today, you can lay those bricks on the ground and walk away for good. You don’t have to carry that weight for anyone, especially not for THEM.

Stop living your story based on the false narrative that your negative programming created.

All those preconceived beliefs need to go if you want to attract happiness and prosperity in your life.

I’ve seen people achieve INCREDIBLE things – even the impossible – just by doing this one thing.

Lionel, a heroin addict from Michigan, was in and out of jail for the longest time.

But after overdosing within an inch of his life, he decided to ditch his old story.

Even after everyone gave up on Lionel and called him a “screw-up”, he turned it all around.

He let go of the labels that people had been putting on him for YEARS…

…and Lionel decided he didn’t have to be any of those things anymore.

Lionel created a NEW story for himself – one where he was finally free of his crippling addiction and lived a clean, sober life.

What kind of story do YOU want to live out?

MORE ABOUT  Motivational / Transformational

#7: Make your affirmations “pop”

    You might have heard of people making declarations about themselves to manifest them as truth, and not just as an opinion.

When you affirm some truth about yourself, it validates the awesomeness within you.

Words of kindness heal the soul and help forgive past failures.

In short, it’s about LOVING yourself.

After all, you can’t give what you don’t have.

However, saying “Boy I sure love myself!” doesn’t quite do the trick.

To make your affirmations stick in your subconscious, it needs to have a little something extra.

Don’t stop at “I love me!”- take it up another notch to really drive the point home.

Try these on for size:

- “I love myself so much that I want to use my gifts and share them with the world. I want to take this love inside me and use it to lift other people up.”

- “By sharing the love I have, I possess the power to change myself for the better, and the world around me.”

- “I am love, light, peace and prosperity. Anger, hate and scarcity have no power over me.”

- Aside from loving yourself, you can also infuse a dash of humor in your affirmations. Who says you have to be so grim with his Law of Attraction stuff, anyway?

When you add a bit of levity while you affirm yourself, it shushes your Negative Ned (or Nancy) into silence.

Try coming up with statements like these:

- “I’m so awesome that I kick mediocrity in its big fat butt!”

- “I’ve come here to be awesome at everything I do and kick major butt. And I’m all out of butts to kick.”

- “Did you say something, self-doubt? Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my awesomeness!”

It’s all a matter of finding the right attitude and tone that suits you. Take a crack at making these affirmations, and you’ll soon find your true inner voice.

What matters is that you inject your affirmations with a serious amount of attitude, and above all, ENERGY.

Without that energy, you won’t give your messages enough “juice” to reach the Universe and show up on its radar.

Those who practice the Law of Attraction often combine these affirmations with their meditation sessions to hit two birds with one stone.

And the results are nothing short of phenomenal.

Now, about that gift I promised you earlier…

To make the MOST out of your meditation, I’ve got a series of audio tracks to help you manifest incredible benefits in your life.

If you want to be the picture of health…

…naturally create wealth wherever you go…

…and enjoy authentic, fulfilling relationships…

…you can achieve ALL of that by simply claiming your FREE gift below:

100% FREE Meditation MP3 Audio Tracks – DOWNLOAD THEM HERE 

[papermoonloveslucy]

LUCY SHUNS AUDITIONS

July 21, 1950

[In the below article, reprinted verbatim, Johnson writes using a lot of imagery and insider jargon.  This sort of article was common in trade papers like Variety, but seems odd in a daily newspaper.]

Hollywood—(NEA) Lucille Ball slipped me the lowdown on her failure to pin to the canvas the dumb chick role in “Born Yesterday” and make it holler uncle. (1)

She’s got a touch of Francis the mule in her when it comes to auditions. (2)

Instead of scrimmaging for the role with Evelyn Keyes, Judy Holliday, Marie Wilson, Shelly Winters and Jan Sterling, (3) Lucille went bolting the other way. 

The “let’s-see-if-you’re-it” boys pleaded and cajoled. 

But Miss Anti-Auditions wasn’t having any of the competition, thank you. 

“I figure if they want you, they want you,” Lucille plainspoke it. If you’ve got to read and test for it, to heck with it.’

She isn’t chronicled in Hollywood history, but once, badgered by her RKO bosses, Lucille went tripping over to David O. Selznick’s office for a whack at the Scarlett O’Hara role in “Gone With the Wind.” 

That’s what curdled her in the first place. 

“It was awful,’’ Lucille shudders. I was shaking all over when I hit Selznick’s office. My knees gave way. I did the whole audition in scrubwoman position. Selznick laughs and says thanks a lot. (4)

Judy Holliday landed the junkman’s doll role and Lucille grabbed a railroad ticket for a personal appearance tour with hubby Desi Arnaz. She strutted to Latin rhythms, swung a glittering purse in a manner dear to runaway girls and wisecracked for the customers. (5)

MIMICS OSCAR WINNER 

At the last moment she nixed a dancing and singing routine. The star with the forest-fire hair shrugged: 

“I decided it would be silly to compete with Grable.” (6)

A lot of movie queens laid in fresh supplies of smelling salts, ice beanies and copies of “Release From Nervous Tension” when word got around that Lucille was about to whoop it up on the six-a-day circuit. (7)

She’s a blister-raiser from way back and the air was shrill with ouches about a year ago when she whipped up an impression of an Academy Award winner. 

But the girls can go back to worrying about other things—like shrinking from larger-than-life to television screen size. 

Lucille didn’t let any “furriners” see the routine. 

“It's for Hollywood only," she said. “I should take radio-active material on the road?” 

Her Oscar-grabber routine is strictly for unreal anyhow, she says. and no blood relation to Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman or any other Screen Duse. (8) She insisted:

“She's any movie star, even me. This character has to go up on that stage and act surprised. She’s only been rehearsing what she's going say flor eight weeks. So she says, ‘Ye gads, me?  But I’m so unprepared. Really, I didn’t dream...” Lucille is generally is as unflinching about the movie queen business as Pearl White was about onrushing trains. (9)

But her knees executed some wobbles that aren’t in Arthur Murray’s rhumba dance book when she checked into her first vaudeville dressing room. (10)

“Those stages—they’re so big.” she gasped. “Hey, I’d hate to get caught in the middle of one of those stages without bread and water.” 

Lucille didn’t take any chances with out-of-town press interviews, either. “I once did a personal appearance tour with Maureen O'Hara and had to show up at a press party,” she grinned. (11)

My sinus - I just die from it - was acting up. The reporter next to me didn’t understand my puffed eyes and cold sores. He called Maureen a lady in his story. But he referred to me as a whisky tenor with red-runny eyes.” 

Lucille’s brain cells work on direct current and she’s not one to make with the figure eights when a straight glide to home base would get her there quicker. 

They still laugh about her exit line to Louis B. Mayer. (12) Mayer always referred to her as a thoroughbred and sometimes compared her to his famous horses. "Yes, and like your other nags, I'm leaving your stable," Lucille said when she decided to bow out of her contract. 

She has high hopes for her new picture “The Fuller Brush Man.” Not that she enjoyed it: (13)

“Honey, this ones that I don t enjoy turn out be the best ones.  This one put me in the hospital. My feet are still bandaged up. I’m a mess. No more physical-type pictures for me.”

#   #   #    FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) The 1946 Broadway hit comedy Born Yesterday by Garsin Kanin was bought by Columbia Pictures. Things got complicated when its stage star, Judy Holliday, swore she would not do the film version. Columbia used this as fuel for publicity about who would win the role.  Naturally, Lucille Ball was considered a top contender.  As the article states, she was not eager, however, to prove her worth to the ‘let’s-see-if-you’re-it’ boys (aka producers).  There was talk of Lucille performing the play in London, or summer stock, but her film contracts would not allow her time off for a stage run. 

(2) Mules are supposedly notoriously stubborn animals - just like Lucy. Francis the Talking Mule was the star of seven popular Universal-International film comedies. The character originated in the 1946 novel Francis by David Stern III, adapting his own script for the first entry, simply titled Francis.  On “I Love Lucy” Fred Mertz sometimes called Ethel “Francis” to indicate she was being stubborn about something. 

(3) These were some of the Hollywood stars looking to play the part of Billie Dawn in the film Born Yesterday. Evelyn Keyes (1916 – 2008) was best known for playing Sue Ellen, Scarlett O’Hara’s kid sister, in Gone With The Wind (1939).  Judy Holliday (1921-65), changed her mind about playing the role she originated on Broadway, but by then the casting net was cast, and she was just another performer on the short list. She eventually got the role, which defined her career. Marie Wilson (1916-72) was a zany comedic actress in the style of Gracie Burns. She was widely known as the star of radio and TV’s “My Friend Irma”. Shelley Winters (1920-2006) would be nominated for an Oscar the year after this article. She was adept at playing drama and comedy, and had a long-lasting career in Hollywood.  She appeared on “Here’s Lucy” in 1968; Critics raved about her Jan Sterling’s portrayal of Billie Dawn in the Chicago touring company of Born Yesterday and Columbia brought her out to the West Coast to test for the film. At one point, she was actually announced to play the part but the role ultimately went to Holliday.

(4) Lucille Ball did indeed read (not screen test) for the role of Scarlet O’Hara, just like nearly all of the women in Hollywood in 1938. Ball told the story several times on television, each time with varying details, but probably most completely on “Bob Hope’s Unrehearsed Antics of The Stars” (1984).

(5) This is a vivid description of the “Cuban Pete / Sally Sweet” portion of Lucy and Desi’s nightclub act to convince sponsors to buy them as a couple. 

(6) Betty Grable (1916-73) was considered one of the most famous pin-up girls in history. In addition to her million dollar gams (legs), she could sing, dance, and act, too. She guest starred with her then-husband Harry James on “Lucy Wins A Racehorse”, an installment of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” aired on February 3, 1958.

(7) “Release from Nervous Tension” was an actual best-selling book by Dr. David Harold Fink, published in 1950. Vaudeville and Burlesque shows were often known as the ‘six-a-day circuit’ because sometimes there would be as many as six performances of the same act in a day.  Naturally, this did not apply to Lucy and Desi, who were big film and radio stars at the time. 

(8)  These were some of Hollywood’s top-line dramatic actors. Bette Davis (1908-89) had won two Oscars, and was nominated for several others during her long career. She was supposed to guest-star on “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” in “The Celebrity Next Door” in 1957 but dropped out after a horse-riding accident, leaving the role to Tallulah Bankhead; Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020) had also won two Oscars, the second the year this article was published. She was best remembered for playing Melanie Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (1939); Ingrid Bergman (1915-82) was a Swedish-born actress, who, by career’s end, had scored three Academy Awards.  When Johnson talks about “any other screen Duse” he is referring to Eleonor Duse (1858-1924), an Italian-born stage actress known for her grand, dramatic style.  

(9) Pearl White (1889-1938) was best known as the silent film actress who was tied to the railroad tracks in “The Perils of Pauline” (1914).  

(10) Arthur Murray (1895-1991) was a ballroom dancer and businessman best known for the chain of dancing schools that bear his name. Murray was often a punchline on “I Love Lucy,” especially when the subject of dancing came up. The Rhumba was a Latin dance that took America by storm in the late 1940s and 1950. Desi Arnaz often called his orchestra a ‘rhumba band.’ 

(11) Maureen O’Hara (1920-2015) and Lucille Ball had starred in Dance, Girl, Dance in 1940. As a result, the two went on a promotional tour that took them to several US cities, including the nation’s capitol. 

(12) Louis B. Meyer (1884-1957), along with Samuel Goldwyn and Marcus Loew of Metro Pictures, had formed a new motion picture company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1918. Over the next 25 years, MGM was "the Tiffany of the studios," producing more films and movie stars than any other studio in the world. Mayer became the highest-paid man in America, and one of the country's most successful horse breeders. Both he and MGM reached their peaks at the end of World War II, and Mayer was forced out in 1951, just a year after this article was written. 

(13) Erskine Johnson gets the title wrong. Lucille had madeThe Fuller Brush Girl, a sequel to The Fuller Brush Man (1948).  The film was released in mid-September 1950. 

[natsubeatsrock]

So, I’ve been watching Sword Art Online: Abridged Parody, and...

I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that SAO Abridged has become the gold standard for what a good abridged series can do. While Team Four Star took 3 legendary IPs, Final Fantasy VII, Hellsing Ultimate, Dragon Ball Z are all generally considered to be fairly decent as stories. As much as people complain about DBZ’s random power ups, it’s not as if it was incoherent. Things make a decent amount of sense and that was the worst of the bunch.

Sword Art Online is notoriously problematic. No doubt I’m not the first person to say that. Plenty of people have said as much all over Tumblr and Youtube. In abridging SAO, Something Witty Entertainment managed to improve on what happened originally.

Now, I want to do something incredibly nerdy. (As if I haven’t done nerdy things on this blog before.) One of my favorite things about SAO Abridged is its insane sense of connections between episodes. Things are referenced that don’t matter until much later and jokes are often built on previous events long before the present episode. Two of the big plot points of the current arc are built on information we learned in a few previous episodes. I want to argue that episode 2 is the most important episode of the first arc because of its connections to every other episode in the arc.

To start, the narrator in the cold open connects this episode to the one before it by saying that a number of players died after being idiots. Notably some jumped into fire. If you remember, Klein struggled to kill a pig and named his avatar Ballsdeep69. In episode 2, this is shown in this episode in that players haven’t read the manual compiled by beta testers.

Though, it’s not as if that;s  the only reason they’d fail. In episode 3, the leader of the Black Cats took some of the tutorial NPCs from missions. Kayaba blames this as a factor in people failing miserably in the season finale. But we’ll get to him soon enough.

The intro plays and we’re in a meeting of players who are trying to beat a boss. The idea is that people will strategize to beat a boss by working together. This doesn’t pan out well throughout the series. Kirito is able to tank hits from seven lower level players in episode 4. In episode 5, the meeting to beat Sheeptar happens after 7 people. When they go after the meeting, 5 more died.

Now Kibaou makes his only appearance in the series. I don’t want to make too many “this character makes their debut here” connections. Asuna and Tiffany make their debut and are important characters in this series, but I’m not talking about them in this way. Kibaou is minor enough that I can mention him here. His stupid entrance makes his takeover of the Aincrad Liberation Front in episode 10 seem like a negative statement about them more than a positive one for him.

Though, episode 8 shows a bit of their incompetence on their own. While Corbax thinks his strategy of “group up and hit it till it dies” is revolutionary, it’s about as revolutionary as he is Hispanic. The strategy’s true origin is episode 2, as an alternative to Kirito’s “final solution”. That doesn’t work well and Kibaou starts to take power as a result of Corvax dying.

We then get Asuna’s troubles with menus. She’s not the only one with these issues, considering we learn Yoko has issues with the menu in episode 6. However, this is one of many clever ways to hint at Asuna’s ineptitude with the game early on. While she’s shown to have a lot of innate skill in this episode, that’s despite her inexperience. For all the changes made from the original, this was best shown in both versions by Asuna using her real name as her avatar name in the final episode of the arc.

Something I didn’t pick up on right away was that the setup for Laughing Coffin comes from episode 2. One player receives messages he believed to be from Jesus. At the end of the fight, he gets the command to kill them all and the end card is preluded with a creepy version of “Jesus Loves Me”. They come up in episodes 6 and 9. In episode 4, it comes up that other groups like Titan’s Hand have come up.

But the big thing that you see from this episode is a theme that runs through the first arc of this show. Kirito sees this game as an alternative to the real world. It would be easiest to make this the only real connection to this episode, but that would be lazy. (Clearly, this was written before I realized how crazy this “one post a day” idea was.)

Kirito mentions that he has power he didn’t in the real world in episode 1. While that may have felt like a throwaway line at the time. In episode 2, he uses that power to tell off the idiots around him, just like he wishes he could have done in real life. And to be honest, he might not be right about being able to solo the boss, but he’s definitely better than most everyone else in the boss room. Asuna might be on par with him skillwise, but he has more experience than her.

I almost called this section of connections “Kirito is better than those around him.” While he’s not the strongest player in SAO, as we end up learning, he’s certainly better than most of the people he’s playing alongside. This ego serves as fuel for tagging with Silica in episode 4 under the supposed threat of Laughing Coffin. It’s why we get the formation of “The Kirito is Always Right Foundation” in episodes 5 and 6. It’s why he challenges Heathcliff in episodes 9 and 11.

But something happens.

In episode 3, he unwittingly joins a guild because he’s such an amazing player. However, that wasn’t enough to save his guild mates from dying. Sadly, he had just decided to open up to people and the ordeal closed him off to people and even emotions according to episode 4. In episodes 4, 5, 7, and 8 we get the sense that this event had a serious emotional impact on him.

However, through these events he learns to open up to people more. Going on missions and teaming up with othes, he starts to open up to people. This obviously leads to a relationship with Asuna and Yui original. As stupid as he still feels the people around him are, he still has respect for him.

In episode 2, he tells the people, “Shoot for the stars. It will make it more fun when I kick you back into the dirt.” In episode 8, we see a change in his epic rant, which happens to be my favorite moment in the series. On humans he says, “They are without question a complete write-off as a species. And how dare you make me care about them!” And when Kayaba goes on a similar rant to Kirito’s after his identity is revealed, Kirito plays defense for them, lukewarm as it is.

And wouldn’t you know? Kirito is told that he could have served as a leader and inspiration to the people in SAO because he is better than so many of them. Sure, Kayaba bring the idea up that same episode and a few episodes earlier in trying to recruit him for the Knights of the Blood Oath. However, the idea first came up in episode 2.

[dovechim]

a remedy for mondays 01 (m)

➾ 11.2k

➾ summary: all you wanted was just one day off work. but for that to happen, you need to invent a plausible reason. and then somehow, somewhere along the way, things get out of hand, and now people think you’re having a baby with your co-worker Park Jimin after a one-night stand. confused? join the club.

➾ warnings: impregnation kink (all that jazz, u guys should know by now), brief mention of pregnancy termination, future smut 

➾ a/n: this is written purely for fun & i hope you can understand my humour!!! please don’t go having babies just for some time off work. by the time i post this, it will be monday where i live. i hope this brings you all some joy :-) 

ps: thank you to @jimlingss, who always hears my crazy ideas out and encourages me to go for them. heck, sometimes she even brings it out of me. idk where i would be without you :”D

You hate this.

The saying goes: work to live, not live to work. But at this rate, you’d rather just not exist at all if you have to continue work at this god.darn.fucking.job.

All around you, people are huddled into their seats, heads bowed below the partition that separates the desks. Frankly, you think this whole open-plan office thing is just bullshit. Who the fuck wants to make eye contact with Jeon Jeongguk when he’s picking his nose in the middle of editing a spreadsheet?

Not you, that’s who.

You sink even lower down in your seat as you continue to stare your screen with a pounding headache. The numerous open windows on your desktop are just mocking you at this point. The morning seems to be crawling by. Usually, you ration out your morning coffee and breakfast to keep you going; so your morning goes a little something like this: arrive 8.30am, check emails, get water from the pantry and fuck about while your bosses aren’t here yet till 9.15am. Reply to some emails till about 9.45am, then sit in a daze till it’s 10am and time for you to drink your morning espresso and nibble at the small bun you bought from the bakery nearby.

This usually gets you to about 11am, only an hour more to go till lunch.

A job in the public service is perceived to be prestigious by most; so you suppose you should be thankful for your job dealing with family policy. But what outsiders don’t realise is that working in a governmental organisation as the utmost bottom rung absolutely sucks. There are so many standard operation procedures for nearly every single fucking thing, even emails to senior management needs to be vetted by someone in a higher position than you. As a result, things get done very slowly and even if they do get through to senior management, it might just get rejected because they decide that it’s not good enough. Then the work comes all the way back to you, and the whole dreary process starts again.

Not to mention your asshole boss. Bae Joohyun. Senior Director. She has a notorious reputation throughout the entire department for being a hell witch from Satan’s posse. In her meetings she demands utter silence from everyone other than the presenter; sneezes and coughs or pen clicks and typing are strictly forbidden.

Technically, she isn’t your direct superior, and you don’t work super closely with her, but she has this mandate that all leave requests for the entire department have to be approved by her. You’ve submitted requests 5 times in the past year, none of which have gone through. As a result you haven’t taken a day off in a good three years since you started working here. You still remember that one time she rejected your medical leave and called you to her desk. You’d been nursing a terrible flu, your complexion washed out and almost falling off your feet. Looking in the mirror that morning had been a complete shock. You thought a zombie was staring back at you.

Bae Joohyun had narrowed her eyes at you. “What’s wrong with you that you need to take emergency medical leave, _____?”

“I-it’s this cold, ma’am,” your voice was nasal and stuck in your throat.

Bae Joohyun had rolled her eyes and motioned for you to speak up. “I can’t hear you, stop mumbling for heaven’s sake!”

“I have a cold, ma’am! Has been so for the past three days,” you sniffled and pressed a tissue to your nose.

“A cold?” Bae Joohyun raised an eyebrow sceptically. “You seem fine to me. You look the same as you usually do. Get back to work.”

Sometimes you feel like this company, in all its pro-family views, treats married employees with children better.

The resentment grows inside you as you tap on your keyboard harder and harder, earning you a timid glance from Jeon Jeongguk opposite you. But you ignore him, continuing to type out a reply to someone who somehow failed to read your previous email and continued to ask the exact same questions.

“______?”

You absolutely hate it when someone approaches you from the back in your blind spot and startles you like this. Forcing a smile on your face, you sit up straighter in your chair and turn around. It’s Taehyung from the Baby Bonus Team, and he’s holding a folder with a smile on his face.

“Morning, ______!” He chirps with a sunny expression, and you can barely muster enough energy to greet him back, let alone match his level of enthusiasm on a Monday morning. “Could I just trouble you to update this for me? It’s just our operations manual for the Baby Bonus Team that hasn’t been touched in like… ages. I just need the HR section updated. Is that ok?”

Before you can even reply, Taehyung places a folder on your desk and his email appears on your screen, and he’s off. It’s not a secret that Taehyung loves his job to pieces. He loves children, loves babies, and loves it that he’s doing his part to contribute to the nation’s falling birth rate.

Well, not likethat,since you’re pretty sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

But everyone else here seems to love children. Over lunch with your team, all they do is exchange pictures of their children, their friends’ children, or some random baby from Facebook and coo over how chubby and cute they are. You stopped going to lunch with them after Mingyu from Pre-Schools team showed everyone a picture of his niece in a soiled diaper.

Most of your older coworkers who are married with their own families have pictures of their children on their desks. You’re forced to stare at these pictures with the resentment bubbling up inside you as you listen to their latest rant about how your proposal is too skimpy, lacks real research, that email of yours is poorly worded, needs to be recalled etc; so can anyone really blame you when you’re unable to dredge up even the slightest bit of adoration for those grubby faced gremlins?

Clicking open Taehyung’s email and finding the document he attached, you scroll down to the section he mentioned. You realise that he was being modest when he said that it needed an update. The whole fucking section comprises of just a single sentence, and you’ll probably have to write it from scratch.

Sighing through your nose, you click open an internet browser and do a quick google search for the general HR benefits for expecting women and their partners. You also open up the intranet to take a look at your own company’s mandates, which seem to be quite a whole lot more substantial than the general ones (which is only natural since your organisation is so pro-family in its viewpoints).  16 weeks of paid maternity leave, for a start.

Good god. 16 whole weeks? That’s practically 4 months. That’s almost half a year!!!

Obviously you know that having a baby wrecks the mother’s body, and is a major life change; that’s why they need that much leave time. But right now the concept of not having to go to work for that amount of time is simply blowing your mind. Especially since it feels as if you’ve been working non-stop for as long as you can remember.

On top of the 16 weeks is increased medical leave that can be taken any time before the baby is born. Your company is incredibly sympathetic towards pregnant women, which is only natural considering the line of work that you do in family planning. In fact, you know of a few colleagues from the Baby Bonus Team who took almost a whole month of medical leave, spread out, before they had their babies.

Not to mention the actual baby bonus itself.

Curious, you click back to Taehyung’s document and scroll up to the section on Baby Bonus. You scan through and gather that it comprises of a cash gift of $8,000 to $10,000, on top of several other schemes such as a savings account with the amount matched by the government. The total amount of cash receivable just for having one child is listed at the bottom of the page.

You sit back in your chair with a sharp breath. You never realised it was this lucrative to have a baby. Imagine receiving free money from the government, and having all that paid time off. All you need to do is just pop out one (1) baby, and that’s it. You can suck the government dry if you devote the rest of your life to being a baby making machine. See what Bae Joohyun has to say when you slam your maternity leave application on her desk.

The thought makes you smirk triumphantly.

But a moment later, the triumph fades as you remember your very, very single self. Without a boyfriend to knock you up, there’s no way this scheme would work.

Sighing, you shake your head to get rid of all the useless fantasies as you get back to work.

*

“Hey, _____. Meet our new joiner,” Jeongguk’s voice stirs you from the zoned out state you’re in, frantically typing away.

It’s well after lunch now; somehow the time had flown past while you were working on Taehyung’s document.

You look up to meet Jeongguk’s eyes, and then your gaze shifts to the slightly shorter man beside him. He is wearing a large pair of black glasses that cover nearly half his face; his blonde hair is parted down the middle and neatly slicked back. This man can’t even meet your eyes; he gives you a nervous little smile but his gaze is off, fixed somewhere on your shoulder. His white dress shirt is tucked in neatly to his black dress pants, but he is constantly fidgeting.

“Park Jimin. Welcome to the team, buddy,” Jeongguk slaps Jimin on the shoulder with a grin. “You’re sitting beside me.”

“Welcome, nice to meet you,” you smile and nod at him, but otherwise remain seated. No one can or will distract you from this document. You need to finish this by today, or else you’ll have to bring it home to work on it.

Park Jimin nods shyly as Jeongguk shows him to his seat. With this current arrangement, it means that the three of you are all facing each other in this cluster of desks. Sighing internally, you watch Jimin take his seat and arrange his things, see him glance shyly at you from behind his enormous glasses before his eyes dart away and he hides behind his desktop.

What a weird guy. He hasn’t said a single thing. Whatever. You turn back and resume typing, but then your phone chimes with an email notification.

CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOU HAVE WON MEET AND GREET PASSES TO MEET agust d TOMORROW!!!

Your heart skips a beat and you abandon typing just to open the email. You bid for these meet and greet passes months ago when you bought tickets to see your favourite rapper in concert. No news had resulted in you concluding that you hadn’t won after all, and you were contented with the chance just to see agust d in real life.

But now…

You scroll down to look at the details of the meet and greet.

24 September 2019, from 4pm (please see your specific timeslot on your attached passes)

Each meet and greet session comprises of: an up close, INTIMATE, one on one opportunity to chat and take photos with agust d, lasting for 15 minutes

Your heart sinks as you check the time on your pass. You end work only at 6pm, and when you’d bought the tickets you thought it’d be fine for you to go straight after work since the concert only starts at 7pm. There’s no way you’ll be able to take half day leave to attend the meet and greet. There’s no way Bae Joohyun would let you.

Sitting back in your seat in despair, feeling the angry tears well up in your eyes and the frustration cloud your chest, you don’t notice a pair of meek eyes behind black glasses peek out behind the desktop.

All that’s going through your head is: there has to be a way, there has to be a way.

There’s no way you’re letting these passes go to waste just like that. There’s no way you’re not meeting agust d just because Bae Joohyun has a stick up her ass.

*

Tuesday morning finds you at Bae Joohyun’s desk with a leave application filled out. You carefully set it on her desk, knowing full well that she comes in at 9.30am on the dot every day.

Rumour has it that she colour codes her outfits based on her mood that day. As you slink back to your desk, you catch a glance of her clad fully in black, striding powerfully into the office in her black pumps.

Your heart sinks as Jeongguk sings out a cheerful good morning to you and Park Jimin, whom you hadn’t even noticed was already at his desk.

“Morning, Jeongguk,” you mutter under your breath. “Morning to you too, Jimin.”

The newcomer does nothing more than nod at you as he ducks back behind his computer. But today you don’t have the bandwidth to wonder about him as you click over to Taehyung’s email about the document from yesterday.

“Hey, aren’t you going to see agust d tonight?” Jeongguk sits up straighter.

“Yeah, why?” Your reply comes clipped, already in a bad mood just from anticipating your rejected leave application.

“I heard the results of the balloting for the meet and greet passes came out yesterday,” Jeongguk’s bright eyes are on your face. “Do you know agust d, Jimin?”

The blonde haired man shrugs as part of his face appears from behind his computer.

“Anyway, I think only like five people got the passes, and as of yesterday night, there are already bidders on the black market willing to pay almost a thousand just for one pass,” Jeongguk continues on.

“Huh, really? Who’d be that crazy to pay that much money?” You muse, looking at your phone.

“Right?” Jeongguk sighs dramatically. You know he’d be extra salty if you told him you won passes to the meet and greet. You’d already made the mistake of letting slip that you managed to get a VIP ticket, and Jeongguk had sulked for an entire week after that. “I mean, what are the chances anyway? If you think about it, those people who won the passes must be die-hard fans, since you can only win one if you managed to get a VIP ticket. Which die-hard fan would sell their hard won passes like that?”

The conversation tapers off as you reply to some emails, but you can’t help but glance back at your phone. A thousand dollars just for a meet and greet pass. That’s just crazy. The amount of money some people are willing to spend… it almost makes you wonder if you could… sell it since you can’t make it anyway…

No. No. You can’t sell agust d’s love just for a thousand dollars. You wouldn’t even sell it for a million dollars. Shame on you.

Hushed whispers suddenly erupt around you, and Jeongguk hisses like a startled cat.

“Shit, SD’s coming! Fuck, I was in the middle of a game,” Jeongguk scrambles to turn off his phone, muttering under his breath that his teammates are going to kick him off the team next time.

You sit straighter in your seat and turn your head towards the aisle. Sure enough, Bae Joohyun is fast approaching like a hurricane bent on destruction. Her face is as black as her outfit.

“Jimin, since you’re new, just copy what I do. Look at your computer and don’t speak unless spoken to,” Jeongguk’s eyes are wide with fear, but he is frantically typing away on his keyboard, turning to glance at the timid man beside him. “Got it? Don’t show any fear, she can scent it like a shark with blood in the water. No matter what you do, don’t make eye contact with her if she isn’t talking to you.”

When Jimin doesn’t respond, Jeongguk glances hurriedly to the younger man. “Did you hear me?!”

“Y-yes.” It’s the first word you’ve heard this man utter, and it is somewhat strangled and you barely catch it over the rising panic that unfolds around you.

“Who d’you think she’s here for?” Jeongguk whispers to you.

“No idea,” you choke out with a closed throat, even though you have a very good idea who she’s here for.

As Bae Joohyun nears your cluster of desks, she slows down. Her eagle eyes scan the floor where all the employees are huddled at their seats, typing away with hunched shoulders. You can feel her gaze land on you, and you close your eyes briefly to say a prayer for mercy.

“______.”

Your name is uttered into the silence, and Jeongguk’s eyes shift just a fraction to glance at you. They are wide with fear. Beside him, Park Jimin’s eyes dart to yours from behind his thick black glasses. But none of them move.

“Y-yes?” You turn in your chair to face Bae Joohyun.

“You applied for emergency half day leave this pm, am I correct?” The witch herself holds up your leave application form. “Seeing as it’s this last minute, it must be urgent. What’s wrong with you this time?”  

It’s dead silent. Everyone is pretending to work at their desks, but you know all too well that what they’re really doing is eavesdropping on this conversation. Well, eavesdropping is too generous a term, considering that this conversation is made fully public.

“I… I’m…” You stutter and stumble over your words, struggling to think of a plausible excuse. Some part of you had hoped for a miracle, prayed to the gods eight times last night that Bae Joohyun would be in a merciful mood this morning and grant you the leave without asking.

You glance at Jeongguk, and by now he’s worked everything out silently in his head. His expression says everything. But he doesn’t dare to even look you in the eye.

Instead of him, you realise that another pair of eyes are watching you instead. Park Jimin’s head is tilted to the side, his eyes are observing your mini panic attack without darting away for once.

“Well? What’s wrong with you, I asked,” Bae Joohyun demands.

You can practically hear the clock ticking off the seconds till her patience runs out. Between that and Park Jimin’s persistent stare, your mind just goes blank, and you utter the first words that come to mind.

“I… I’m having morning sickness!”

“What?” Bae Joohyun’s tone is, for the first time, one of shock. “What did you just say?”

Despite Bae Joohyun’s presence, Taehyung from Baby Bonus has turned around in his seat. “Morning sickness? You don’t mean to say you’re…”

Your eyes dart around wildly all over the place in response to what you think Taehyung is implying. God dammit, if not for his fucking comment, you could have diverted it down a less conspicuous path.

“Pregnant?” Namjoon from HR pipes up. “______, are you pregnant? When were you planning on notifying HR?”

Oh god. Things are moving too fast. Slowly, people are turning around in their chairs and inviting themselves into what should be a private conversation between you and Bae Joohyun. Curious looks are directed your way, and you are tongue tied.

“______, I didn’t know you were married! You’ve been keeping it from us this whole time?” Someone from Pre-Schools, you think his name is Seokjin, exclaims in a chiding tone.

“No!” Your voice bursts out from somewhere. It sounds far away to your ears. “No, I’m not married!! I just had a… a… a one night stand.”

Fuck. You’re digging yourself into a deeper hole.

“A one-night stand?” Bae Joohyun narrows her eyes. Somehow you can see that she doesn’t really buy it. She is scanning your face intently, and if there’s even a shred of uncertainty, she will catch it.

“With him!” Pointing at the one person who’s been silent all this time, you can feel the gazes shift from you. You know what they say about a liar. They always have this compulsive need to supplement their lies with arbitrary details.

But it works, and everyone’s attention is now on Park Jimin. You can see his eyes dart around briefly for a moment before they return to yours. But they don’t seem any more panicked or surprised than they usually do. He is as cool and collected as he always is, and he doesn’t say a word, as usual.

“Damn, you and Park Jimin?” It’s Jeongguk who speaks up this time. “Who would have thought? I mean, the guy just started yesterday, that must have been hell of a welcome party you gave him.”

Several giggles and snickers break out in response to his lewd joke.

“Shut up Jeon, that’s not how pregnancy works,” Namjoon rolls his eyes. “They must have met each other months ago. Is this going to be another HR concern though? Inter-departmental relationships?”

Bae Joohyun glances down her nose at you derisively. “I have no wish to know what you do in your free time. But I must ask, Ms _____, that you inform HR immediately of any condition you have that might affect your ability to work.”

The intimidation wrought by Bae Joohyun is replaced by anger at her words. No wish to know about your personal matters, when she was the one who decided it was appropriate to ask why you need to take leave in front of the whole department? What if this was a real situation and you were facing an unplanned pregnancy? Instead of being offered sympathy and support, you’re faced with judgement. This woman is entirely heartless and should not be the head of a pro-family planning division. Not to mention that discussing your leave application publicly is utterly inappropriate. It’s this thought that gives you the courage to speak.

“So can I be approved?” You look her directly in the eye, throwing your shame out the window. What’s done is done. Since the whole department thinks you got knocked up from a one-night stand with a colleague, you might as well use it to your advantage. “For my half day leave. Can it be approved?”

A few beats of silence follow as Bae Joohyun looks cornered for the first time. There is an unspoken pressure even as people turn back to their desks to continue working. If she turns you down in front of everyone like this, she could quite possibly get reported for discrimination against pregnant women. Though it is unspoken, your shoulders relax as you realise you have the upper hand in this situation.

Bae Joohyun takes a deep breath.

“Fine. Approved.”

*

Wednesday morning, Jeongguk is an eager puppy trailing after you, begging for pictures and a blow by blow account of the concert.

“Just watch my Instagram story or something, I literally have no voice to talk to you right now,” you roll your eyes. Truth be told, your voice isn’t that bad off, but you just want to bask in that post concert afterglow for a moment.

“What was he like in person? Did you pass him my fan letter?” Jeongguk is relentless this morning, and his never ending chatter makes Park Jimin peek out curiously from behind his computer.

When your eyes meet, you freeze on the spot like a deer in the headlights. On Tuesday you left right after Bae Joohyun approved you, seeing as it was almost lunch time anyway. You decided that after winning a war, one rightly deserves to enjoy a stress free, worryless night out before returning to the battlegrounds once more.

But now that you’re here, it is a whole different story. Park Jimin glances at you wordlessly before resuming typing, and the awkwardness is killing you. You feel bad enough that you implicated him in this whole mess, probably ruined his reputation around here and maybe even giving HR a reason to keep a closer eye on him. But regardless, you probably should talk to the man and attempt to explain things, and at the very least, apologise.

“…ask him when his next mixtape is dropping?” Jeongguk is still at it.

“Hey, um, Jimin? If you have a moment this morning, can I speak to you in private?” You lean to the side to attempt to catch a glimpse of Park Jimin.

There is a slight pause before Jimin’s head appears, and he meets your eye for a moment before looking away again. He nods once before turning his head in the direction of an empty meeting room.

“Woah, should you be doing that in your condition, though?” Jeongguk comments with a lewd smirk even as his eyes lower to your mid-section, and you give him a scathing glare in response as you close your laptop.

“Shut up, Jeon. Just for the record, I ripped up and threw your letter in the trash,” you hiss at him, eliciting a horrified gasp as you follow Jimin to the meeting room.

*

“So, um…” You start off awkwardly once the door is closed.

Park Jimin is twiddling his thumbs, head bowed shyly and he refuses to make eye contact with you. Now that you think of it, his nerd glasses actually suit him quite well, but it’s just a shame that he’s too painfully shy to actually look anyone in the eye. He is quite a good looking guy, but maybe he has issues with his self-esteem is all.

“I wanted to apologise, first of all. And also explain myself,” you take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged you into my mess. It’s just that- I… I just haven’t had a fucking break from Bae Joohyun ever since I started working in this fucking place.”

All the resentment just pours right out, and you’d be ashamed of yourself for using vulgarities at the workplace were it not for Park Jimin finally glancing up at you with a tiny smile on his face.

“I heard the rumours about her. So they’re true.” Jimin’s voice is still a little hesitant, wondering how much he should be gossiping about Bae Joohyun with another co-worker who could so easily rat him out and get him in trouble. But then, seeing as you’ve already managed to implicate him within a day of knowing him, how much dirtier can you do him, really? The thought brings a wry smile to his face once more. But then again, it seems like everyone here is more or less united by their intense dislike for Bae Joohyun. You of all people probably dislike her the most.

“True? What kind of rumours did you hear? And from where?” Intrigued by the man whom you’ve exchanged less than two words with before claiming to have had a one-night stand and a resulting pregnancy with, you lean forward in your seat.

Jimin shrugs. “Glassdoor.”

His response catches you off guard, and you are laughing with your hands over your mouth. “Oh my god. Please tell me you read the one where someone spit in her coffee. That was me.”

Jimin raises an eyebrow. “Really? I thought that was by a 54 year old IT engineer.”

“I can’t be putting my real age and designation on there, can I?” You point out.

“Were you the one who bagged dog shit and hid it in her office?” Jimin has that tiny smile again, and you have to admit it’s sort of cute when he comes out of his shell. He is even more handsome when he smiles, brighter and somewhat infectious.

“19 year old marketing intern? Yep, that was me,” you sigh in contentment as you remember rage writing all those Glassdoor reviews after a particularly bad meeting that one week. You didn’t actually do all of those things, but just imagining it and writing public reviews was enough for you to get your imagined revenge.

“ ‘Hid some dog shit in her office so she can be reminded of how shitty her management style is’,” Jimin recites from memory. “You know, I almost withdrew my application because of that review.”

Jimin’s dead serious tone makes you laugh again. The sound of your laughter fills the empty meeting room, and you have to admit that this is the most relaxed and carefree you’ve felt while working here.

But belatedly you realise that you’ve gone very off topic, so you sober up and attempt to try to get things back on track again. “So anyway, about the um… one-night stand thing. We can just lie low for a while and make up some shit later. Tell them the baby didn’t make it or something.”

Jimin nods thoughtfully, tapping his chin. “Or we can say it was a false positive. Less for you to go through since people would be all over you with pity and sympathy if we said that. I don’t think you’d wanna be pretend to be distraught over an imaginary baby.”

“That’s right, you’re a genius!” You marvel the way he just comes up with these ideas so easily. “How did you know about false positives?”

Jimin only shrugs, pushes his glasses up on his nose a little and he seems to be blushing. “I studied biology as an elective back in university.”

There’s a pause of silence before you look him in the eye again. “I really am sorry, you know. For making you go through all this. I kind of just panicked and didn’t think before speaking.”

But Jimin doesn’t seem to be making as big of a deal of it as you are. “Y’know, it’s fine. It ispretty exciting to be accused of having a one-night stand on my very first day. Aside from that, things can only go up, right?’

It takes you a moment or two to realise that he’s making a joke, delivered in that deadpan way of his that betrays his sweet, innocent face. At your harried expression, Jimin breaks the act and giggles, and you nearly slump over with relief.

“So, I guess we have to act like we’re in a relationship too?” Jimin adds as an afterthought.

“It’s up to you, we don’t really have to make it that obvious,” you shrug as you get up from your seat and push the chair back to its original position. “I’m fine with being an unwed mother for a bit. I wouldn’t wanna trouble you any more than I already have. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”

Jimin is silent as he follows your lead toward the door. When the both of you are almost halfway back to your seats, he stops you with a brief clearing of his throat. “It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

You look back at him for a moment, and he just gives you another one of those shy little smiles as he goes back to his desk. For the rest of the afternoon, you find that you don’t really mind having an open office policy, not if it allows you glimpses of cute Park Jimin in his nerd glasses sitting opposite you.

*

The ruse goes on without a hitch for at least a few weeks. Here and there you get the odd look of curiosity and perhaps a little judgement from a few of the older ladies who tsk behind your back about you being a single unwed mother, but otherwise, things are better than ever. Just knowing that you have the freedom to take medical leave whenever you feel like it has improved your mood greatly, and the other day Namjoon from HR even came to tell you that you can come into work later if the morning sickness is really bothering you.

Most of all, people are also curious about the relationship between you and Park Jimin. Word has spread that he is the father of your pseudo baby by now, but thankfully no one is tactless enough to outright ask if you and Park Jimin are a couple now. Not even Namjoon from HR.

Monday morning comes, and you drag yourself into work, feeling slightly more worse for wear than usual. Every Monday, you have a progress meeting with your immediate superior that always leaves you in a bad mood after. It’s the same old tirade; getting piled with things that others have no time for, having previously submitted proposals rejected and being asked to redo them.

Today after the meeting, Jimin comes up to you just as you’re downing your fourth cup of coffee before 10am. He has a slightly anxious look on his face, one that’s out of place on his usual calm and composed self.

“Do you have a minute? We need to talk. Now.” Jimin turns immediately and starts walking towards the nearest meeting room, and in spite of yourself, your eyes are drawn to his ass in those pants. It almost makes up for the earful you got from your manager this morning. Almost.

“We’re in trouble,” Jimin says once you close the door to the meeting room. He is seated with his laptop open in front of him.

“What happened? Is it Taehyung from Baby Bonus again? I swear, if he accidentally deleted the whole archive, I’m going to shove a chair up his ass-“

“No, no it’s not about work,” Jimin swallows hard as he types something and turns his laptop to face you. “Over the weekend, someone wrote on my wall. They said- they wrote- just… just see for yourself.”

“Oh my god.” You hand flies to your mouth as horror slams into your gut. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill that stupid punk with my own two hands. Delete it now!!!”

“That’s not the point,” Jimin’s voice sounds strangled as he directs your attention to the comments. “That’s my Granny. She saw it.”

The full extent of the damage done doesn’t hit you until you read Park JungMin’s comment.

“What was your granny doing up at freaking 5am???” You hiss in anger, poking Jimin’s shoulder.

“I don’t know- she’s an old person! She probably couldn’t sleep!” Jimin snaps back.

“Why didn’t you delete it immediately after you saw it!?” You accuse Jimin, pointing a finger at him. “None of this would have happened if you just deleted the post!!!”

“I only saw it this morning, for your information,” Jimin turns his head away from you and crosses his arms. “Forgive me for having a normal sleep schedule.”

“Fucking Jeon Jeongguk, I’ll kill him, I really will,” you mutter as you start to pace back and forth, already contemplating the numerous ways in which you can torture him.

“What are we going to do?” Jimin’s hands hover nervously over his laptop. “Granny will be so disappointed if she finds out it’s a lie. Maybe we should just come clean.”

You whirl around in indignance. “We can’t do that!!! It’s far too soon, if the truth comes out now, everyone will know I was just faking it. We need to wait at least three months. I researched, that’s the most likely time for a woman to have a miscarriage. Why did you have to add your grandmother on Facebook??”

“Hey-! She just wants updates on my life because she lives all the way in Busan!!” Jimin looks affronted when you mention his granny like that. “And if we’re playing the blame game here, if it weren’t for your concert, none of this would have happened in the first place.”

“That was agust d,” you say simply, as if it explains everything. “And that’s not the point. You have to tell your granny that it’s all a lie and tell her to keep it to herself.”

“But what am I supposed to say?” Jimin whines, his bottom lip jutting out and you swear you almost see him stamp his foot like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum.

“I don’t know, anything! Make something up!” You throw your hands up in exasperation.

“She has a weak heart, she can’t take it,” Jimin insists as he stands up and crosses his arms. “She’ll keel over in shock if I tell her there’s no baby. And she told me she’s already booked on the first flight to Seoul. You have to take responsibility.”

The absurdity of this situation means that you can’t decide if you should laugh or cry. “Well what do you want me to do? I can’t just magic a baby into my stomach like that!”

Jimin stays silent, and the implication dawns on you.

“No way. You’re insane. You can’t possibly mean that we should-“

“She wants you to come over for dinner tomorrow night.” Jimin says finally, his eyes now pleading. “She just wants to meet you. We don’t have to tell her that there’s no baby yet. Please?”

Oh. Well, for a second there, you thought Park Jimin was about to suggest something else entirely.

“It’s just one dinner,” Park Jimin pleads eagerly.

Your head is pounding, and the stress of the entire morning has caught up with you. Everything is too overwhelming, things are moving too fast and you’re too tired to argue with him any longer.

“Fine. Just one dinner. After that, we’re coming clean with Granny.” You fix him with a meaningful stare as his face lights up in glee.

“I promise!” Park Jimin grins as he claps his hands together. “Oh and ______... you might want to go easy on the coffee there. Pregnant women can’t have too much caffeine.”

*

This is ridiculous.

Just thinking that you could be curled up at home with a nice glass of wine in bed, instead of standing nervously outside some stranger’s house makes you more huffy and annoyed than usual.

Jimin beside you shoots you a look, and you roll your eyes.

“Did you hear me? Or do I have to repeat the entire story of how we met and ended up secretly dating for five months again?” Jimin nudges you in the ribs with his elbow.

“When I said make something up, I didn’t think you were going to become a scriptwriter for Marvel,” you roll your eyes back at him. “I’m just gonna let you do the talking. Ok? If they direct any tricky questions my way, I’ll just pretend I need to puke.”

Jimin sighs a long suffering sigh as he reaches for his keys. He always envisioned the first time he brought a girl home to meet his family as a wholesome affair. He imagined himself to be feeling over the moon, a little nervous but that was to be expected, and most of all, irrevocably in love with the woman standing at his side. Taking a glance at you now, Jimin can’t say this situation is ideal.

But hey, when life gives you lemons, right?

He opens the door and leads the way in, only to be accosted by a hug from his Granny having made it only about five steps in. Her comforting embrace and familiarity makes him relax again, and he hugs her back tightly.

“Granny! I missed you! How was the flight? Does your back hurt? You should have rested more! You should have let me pick you up at the airport,” Jimin says in a chiding tone as he places an arm around her, trying to steer her towards the living room area to take a seat.

But the stubborn old woman refuses with a smile that lights up her entire face when she catches a glimpse of you. “Ah, this must be ______! She looks so pretty! Too good for our little Jimin, I must say. Come in, come in!!! Take a seat and take a load off!!! You must be tired after working the entire day, and with the baby too.”

You can barely keep yourself from wincing when she mentions the baby, but otherwise, Jimin’s Granny is a very pleasant person. She exudes an aura of warmth and you feel at home with her immediately. Her compliments make you soft; and she seems to be incredibly genuine about them too. For the next five minutes, all she does is admire you; how smooth your hands are, how good your complexion is, how smart, kind and gentle you look, and also my oh my our little Park Jimin has managed to snag such a professional for a girlfriend.

“Granny, you’re embarrassing her,” Jimin mutters with a rosy blush spread across his cheeks as he stands beside the old woman. “And me as well.”

“Nonsense,” Granny chides Jimin as she turns to you with a smile that wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. “This is the first time our little Jimin has brought a girl home, you see. We were all worried that he was… you know, batting for the other team, which would be perfectly fine, but…”

“Granny!!!” Jimin actually does stomp his foot and cross his arms. The tips of his ears are red, the blush on his cheeks is prominent. “Granny, I’m hungry. Can we eat?”

It seems like Jimin knows exactly what works on Granny, because she turns around immediately and pats Jimin’s cheek. “Alright, alright puppy. We can eat now. Come, _____, you must be hungry too now that you’re eating for two. I asked Jimin about your favourites, I hope you like them.”

You glance questioningly at Jimin for a moment over Granny’s head as the two of you follow her to the dining table and have a seat opposite each other. While Granny’s warmth is nothing but welcoming, you can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed. This, at least, is not what you were expecting. Granny seems perfectly fine with the notion of you being pregnant with Jimin’s child without getting married first. Perhaps society is shedding its traditionalist viewpoints and you just hadn’t realised it.

“You know dear, when Jimin told me the news, I was so overjoyed,” Granny says with a wistful smile on her face. “It’s one of my wishes to see Jimin happy with a girl he loves. And looking at the two of you now, even if I die tomorrow, I’ll be content.”

“Granny!” Jimin admonishes sharply. “You can’t say that! Your health has been getting better, hasn’t it? Are you taking your medicines? Three times a day, like the doctor said!”

Granny pats her grandson’s hand. “I am, puppy, I am. What does an old woman like me have to live for if her only grandson doesn’t even visit her anymore? At least now I’ll have the baby to look forward to. You’ll let me take care of it for you, won’t you?”

This last part she directs to you, and you glance nervously at Jimin. This is most definitely not what you signed up for when you agreed to this dinner. With every passing second, the guilt just piles higher and higher, till you feel like you might have trouble swallowing your food.

“Mrs… Mrs Park,” you say hesitantly, speaking for the first time since you set foot in this house. Pseudo baby or not, it just wouldn’t do to hurt this kind old woman, especially since she seems so excited and happy to meet you.

“Call me Granny, please,” she says as she pushes an extra bowl of rice towards you. “You should have this too.”

“Oh no,” you say automatically. “I’m watching my weight, so I shouldn’t…”

But it was the wrong thing to say. Granny immediately perks up, sitting straight in her seat, her eagle eyes on you. “Watching your weight, dear? Why would you be doing that now? You should be eating well for the baby! Is it this little punk who’s making comments about your weight?”

Granny seizes hold of Jimin’s ear and pulls, and he whimpers in the midst of spooning a giant bite of rice into his mouth.

“NO!” You blurt out in a panic, seeing your coworker’s face screw up in pain. You have to admit that you’ve been in a number of interesting situations with Park Jimin thus far, but something tells you that this isn’t the worst of it just yet. “No, Granny! I- I take it back. I’ll eat.”

Granny lets out a hmph as she releases Jimin’s ear with a warning glance towards her grandson. As Jimin reaches for a juicy looking sparerib, Granny’s chopsticks dart out and intercept him, causing the piece of meat to fall back onto the plate. She then expertly picks it up with her own chopsticks and drops it on top of your rice with a satisfied smile.

Jimin turns to Granny with a pout on his lips, and when your heart skips a tiny, little beat, you know you’re in trouble.

*

Somehow, bad news always comes on Monday mornings.

Today it comes in the form of Park Jimin, again, as he drags you into a meeting room the moment you finish your meeting with your manager.

“What is it now?” You hiss at him as he locks the door suspiciously. “Do you really need to do that? You know people think we’re like, fucking in here, don’t you? Thanks to your buddy Jeon Jeongguk.”

“Wait, what?” Jimin does a double take. “No, that doesn’t matter. My parents. They want me to marry you.”

“WHAT?” You screech so loudly that Jimin winces and covers his ears. “Tell them no, for fuck’s sake!”

“They already apparently bought an entire plot of land in the baby’s name,” Jimin goes on adding to the bad news as if he were adding fuel to the fire. “It’s in Baby Park’s name.”

“Oh my god.” Your head swirls and you wobble on your feet, and Jimin reaches out to steady you as if you were actually pregnant. You push his hand away with an irritated glare to remind him that all this is just a ruse. One that you’re beginning to seriously regret having cooked up all those weeks ago.

“What are we going to do?” Jimin sighs as he runs a hand through his hair, taking off his glasses for a moment to rub at his temples.

“We?” You exclaim. “What do you mean, we? Why are you talking as if we’re already married? You need to resolve this situation on your own, buddy. It’s not my fault your family likes to jump the gun!”

“What about you then?” Jimin snaps back with a raised eyebrow. “Look, it’s been two months, almost three, and I don’t see you making any plans to hide a watermelon under your clothes or tell people that it’s all just a scheme you cooked up.”

You gasp indignantly. “I was- I was working up to that! You know, coming up with my cover story, setting the stage, all that!”

Park Jimin crosses his arms in disbelief. “Oh really? So you’re planning on coming clean with everyone and telling them you’re not actually pregnant? Is that why you’ve been taking medical leave every week, running to the bathroom to ‘throw up’ every morning that you’re noton leave?”

“Have you been watching me?”

“A little hard not to, considering you sit right opposite me!”

The two of you are panting and staring hard at each other, both wrapped up in your own anger.

“Look, I’ll forget everything else. Just tell your parents to sell the land or something. The price of land has gone up recently, I’m sure they can still make a valuable profit if they sell now…”

Jimin’s eyebrow twitches. “Sell the land? When they think it’s for their precious grandchild?”

“There. Is. No. Grandchild,” you spit back at him. “Oh my god. We’re just going in circles here. I need to get back to work. My manager already gave me hell this morning, and I don’t need this from you too.”

You leave him in the meeting room and make your way swiftly back your desk, waking your laptop and checking your emails. A few minutes pass before you can fully calm yourself down and reorientate to what needs to be done. First, you redo that spreadsheet, feeling slightly better once you drown out the entire world and just focus on the numbers and cells in front of you. In fact, you forget about this whole terrible mess for a moment or two.

“Hey, _______?” There is a tap on your shoulder, and you turn around to see your manager hovering behind you. She bends down to squint at your screen, “You’re not still redoing the spreadsheet, are you? Our meeting ended an hour ago, you should be done with that by now!”

“I-I’m sorry, something came up, and I…” your voice is weak compared to hers, and vaguely you can see Park Jimin lean over slightly in his seat. “I’m done with it now. I’ll send it over.”

“Good. And get started on the operations manual. I need it all by 5pm today.” Your manager gives you a pat on the back, starts to walk off, and then hesitates. “I know you’re in a rather… delicate situation, but that shouldn’t affect your ability to work. It’s a busy period of time, _____, and I expect nothing but the best from my team. Got it?”

You swallow hard as you try and return her smile. “Got, it, Manager.”

Turning back to your screen, tears are blurring your vision as you attach the document to an email and send it off. You can feel the curious stares of your coworkers all on you, and you feel more self-conscious than ever. Never mind that pretending to be pregnant is all a ruse. It was supposed to make your life better, give you some breathing space, but you feel more suffocated than ever.

You need some air. Now.

Standing up, you grab your phone and dip your head, striding for the exit quickly so that no one catches the expression on your face. Hopefully, they’ll think you need to puke or something, and not pathetically hide in a corner and cry your eyes out. Thankfully, this morning you had the foresight not to apply any eye makeup, so you can rub your eyes as much as you want.

This corner is actually pretty nice. It’s secluded that no one would accidentally wander in and find a hysterically sobbing woman, yet it’s not too far that you can’t make it back to your desk within five minutes if your manager calls. You wipe your face with the back of your sleeve, taking a deep breath and getting ready to go back and face everything once more, when you notice a pair of loafers standing a few steps away.

“Are you okay?” Park Jimin’s voice is familiar. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… intrude, but you just looked so upset and… she was totally unreasonable. Using that as an excuse to comment on your work ethic. Just unacceptable.”

He is shaking his head with a serious expression on his face, and it makes you laugh suddenly. Jimin looks up in surprise, eyes wide, but then a small smile spreads across his face as well as he tucks his hands into his pockets. It occurs to you that if Park Jimin weren’t here, no one else would have come to check up on you.

“I’m used to it,” you shrug as you check your reflection in your phone screen. “It’s just… I just need to cry once and I’m fine. You weren’t supposed to see this side of me,” you attempt a weak laugh. “You’re only supposed to know the bad bitch side of me.”

“You can still be a bad bitch even if you cry every now and then,” Jimin shrugs as if it’s obvious. “If you’re done crying, can we go for lunch? I’m starving.”

*

You make Jimin buy you some meat and you wolf it down in front of him as if you really were eating for two. To his benefit, Jimin says nothing and only takes out his wallet when it’s time to pay.

On the way back to the office, feeling decently satisfied and absolutely sure that you have a tiny little food baby (with today’s dress being particularly unforgiving around the midsection), you can’t help but feel a little bit better. Maybe Park Jimin isn’t so bad after all.

“______? Oh my god, ______? Is that you?” A far off voice calls, and you turn back.

And you wish you hadn’t.

Min Yoongi comes striding towards you with a huge grin on his face, waving as if he can’t believe it’s really you.

“Shit shit shit,” you swear under your breath. How much unluckier can this day get?

Jimin looks at you quizzically.

“It’s my bastard ex who cheated on me by getting another girl pregnant,” you whisper to him by way of explanation. “They got married last month but I never responded to their invitation.”

“Oh,” Jimin says, immediately grasping the situation. “I got it. Don’t worry.”

“What?” You look at him in panic, seeing the expression on his face and not liking it one bit. “What are you gonna-“

But it’s too late now for any further conversation, since Min Yoongi is now in earshot. He grins again as he looks you up and down. “_____! What a surprise! Do you work around here?”

“Y-yeah, what a surprise too,” you say weakly.

“I haven’t seen you in ages!” Yoongi’s eyes dart to Jimin standing beside you for a moment, before they fall to your midsection. “But might as well. I wanted to congratulate you on the baby, because what a coincidence, right?”

He hands you a beautifully embossed invitation card with the words ‘Baby Shower’ on it, and you can feel your face draining of all colour. You swear under your breath.

“Oh! And this must be… the father-to-be?” Yoongi somehow doesn’t pick up on the escalating horror on your face, because he turns to Jimin and extends a hand of congratulations. “Congrats, man! How’s it feel? Excited to become a dad?”

Jimin sneaks a quick peek at your horrified expression. “Y-yes! Absolutely…. Um, thrilled, we are.”

At Jimin’s confirmation, Yoongi’s face seems to fall a little, and seeing it makes your heart clench in vindication. Serves that cheating little bastard right.

“I didn’t know you were seeing anyone, ______... let alone serious enough to… have a baby and all that,” Yoongi’s voice mellows a little as he directs his gaze back to you. “I thought you didn’t want to have children… for a while, at least.”

You detect a little bit of regret in Yoongi’s voice, and maybe a little bit of something you can’t quite put your finger on right now. In your five-year long relationship with him, Yoongi always made it clear that he wanted to have children as soon as possible. It was one of the major roadblocks in your relationship, and eventually it became the tipping point that drove him into the arms of another woman who was desperate enough to pop out his babies for him.

Wait a minute. It almost sounds as if Min Yoongi is trying to blame you for making him cheat. All of a sudden, you want to show him how you’ve been living all these months. Completely fine and happy without him. Better off, even. You want to make this cheating bastard realise that you’re not pathetic. You open your mouth in indignation, but before you can say anything, you hear Jimin’s voice.

“It all happened so fast, really,” Jimin shrugs as if it’s no big deal. “When I saw her I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and you know how life is… We aren’t getting any younger either, so we thought why not try for a baby while we’re at it? She’s perfect for me, and we’re very happy together.”

Jimin does it better than you ever would have been able to. His words are so smooth that even you are convinced that the two of you are in a stable relationship together. Glancing at him, Jimin looks so self-assured and confident that he puts Min Yoongi to shame.

Min Yoongi looks shell shocked. “R-right. Th-that’s really nice, I’m ha-happy for you guys. Congratulations again.”  

You have no idea how Jimin is making all of this up, but the look on Min Yoongi’s face is enough. It almost makes up for when you found out about the breakup through the pre-wedding invitations he sent you.

“But we- we haven’t really told anyone yet, so how did you find out?” A frown creases your brow as you mentally run through a list of people who know about this pseudo pregnancy. The whole company, for one. Jimin’s Granny. Jimin’s family. And now Min Yoongi. But the question is, who told Min Yoongi? It’s not like he has any links with Jimin’s family.

“I mean… I saw the bump,” Yoongi scratches the back of his neck as his eyes drop briefly to your waist. “And um… I know you blocked me on social media a while ago. But I just wanted to check in on you and see how you’re doing. And I saw someone post on Jimin’s wall about the baby. So I kind of put two and two together.”  

There’s an awkward silence as your hands immediately fold over your waist, your cheeks heating up self-consciously. You can feel Jimin struggle not to burst into laughter beside you, and you surreptitiously elbow him hard in the ribs.

“Anyway, um… I hope you’ll come to the shower,” Yoongi nods at the invitation again. “It’s on Sunday, and feel free to bring Jimin too. I uh… invited your mom too. I mean, it’s just… Your family wanted to know how Yeji and I were getting along with the baby and… we were so close so I figured…”

At this point the humiliation can’t get any worse. So you decide to just cut him off with a formal smile that you hope doesn’t look too forced.

“We’ll be there, Yoongi. See you.”

*

It’s fine. It’s all fine. Even if Min Yoongi knows, it’s all fine. You can just attend this baby shower, just show your face for about an hour or so and then disappear from his life altogether. And then he won’t even know that you didn’t have a baby.

The very definition of co-workers means that you only see each other on weekdays from 9am to 6pm. But if that’s true, then somehow along the way, you and Jimin had progressed far beyond the point of just being co-workers, to the point that you’re somehow spending half of your weekend with him.

You sigh to yourself as you watch all your friends’ kids run about screaming at the top of your lungs. You’re already beginning to get a headache from all these irritating little gremlins making so much noise. At least you’re not being asked to play with or look after any of the children. Seeing that you and Yoongi had dated for a substantial amount of time, most of the attendees at this baby shower are your mutual friends, and it’s awkward to say the least.

At least you have Park Jimin with you to be your pretend boyfriend slash husband so you won’t seem like the pathetic ex-girlfriend attending her cheater ex-boyfriend’s baby shower for his new wife. So far there haven’t been any difficult questions, just curious looks from your friends whom you haven’t seen in a really long time because you’re just so tied up with work.

“Hey babe, come here! This is really fun,” Jimin shouts to you from one of the game stations, and you have no choice but to stop sulking in the corner like an evil brooding witch.

(One of your friend’s kids had pointed an accusing finger at you the moment you arrived at the shower with a not so thrilled expression on your face.

“Mama, why is the evil witch wearing yellow, mama? Is she here to curse Sleeping Beauty?”)

“This is really fun,” Jimin says again as he pulls the blindfold off with a grin on his face. “Pin the diaper on the baby poo.”

He points to a target board with a questionable looking substance smeared all over the centre of it. The person next in line is blindfolded and trying to pin the diaper in the centre of the board, and there are disappointed yells when he misses.

To his credit, Jimin really does look as if he’s having fun. He’s been the only person to score a point at this game, and he’s acing all the other games: guess the baby food, pin the sperm on the egg, etc etc.

“I’m notpinning the diaper on the baby poo,” you frown at him. Who the hell comes up with these games? “Is there any wine here? God, I need a drink.”

Before you can wander away, Jimin grasps your elbow. “You can’t drink,” he says with a serious, chiding look on his face. “You’re pregnant.”

“No one here knows that, do they?” You roll your eyes at him and sidestep a screaming toddler who is barrelling down the walkway. For someone who was present at the time of conception of this scheme, Park Jimin really is taking this way too seriously.

Jimin sighs and follows you to the beverages table in defeat. If he can’t stop you from drinking, the least he can do is hold up his jacket around you to make sure you don’t get caught. But then, a very rounded, glowing looking pregnant woman suddenly accosts you, and by the look on your face, Jimin surmises that this can only be Yeji, the woman Yoongi cheated on you with.

“Ye-Yeji, you look… um… wonderful!” Your strangled voice gets lost as Yeji envelopes you in a huge hug, forcing you to squeeze up against her bump. “Congratulations!”

The mother-to-be is all smiles, her makeup is perfectly done and there is an ever present glow on her face. She looks like an absolute goddess in her flowy white dress and wavy hair, and its moments like this that remind you that Yoongi left you for someone better.

“I feel wonderful, thank you!” She places a hand on her protruding belly. “Oh, I was just chatting with your mother over here, you haven’t said hi to her have you? She’s been complaining to me that you don’t have time for her anymore!”

Fuck. Your mother. You’ve been avoiding her calls and messages for the past few months, and you give her a weak smile as she comes over with a dark look on her face. It’s not that you’re doing this on purpose, it’s just that the breakup with Yoongi was beyond messy. Everyone’s parents are naturally on their side after a breakup, but somehow your parents remained on Yoongi’s. Every call would be about Yeji’s pregnancy, how their baby room was progressing, how many kicks she felt in a day, all those needless details that only felt like repeated stabs to the heart when you were trying to heal and get on with your life.

“…I’m so glad you could come. When Yoongi told me the news, I was so excited I thought my water was going to break!” Yeji is gesturing excitedly as she gushes to your mother, and you freeze in panic.

She couldn’t have…

“_____, I can’t believe you’re pregnant too!”

Her exclamation has a few of your friends nearby turning around, and a few of them start to clap. Yoongi elbows his way through the crowd, his hair matted with sweat as he pants with exertion.

“Baby, you were supposed to wait for my cue!” He admonishes his wife with a slight frown, but then he kisses her lips when Yeji pouts.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t wait! It’s all just so exciting, I can’t believe _____ is going to have a baby too! I remember feeling so guilty in my first few months of pregnancy that I could barely sleep…”

“I know, I know, baby,” Yoongi shushes her with a kiss to her forehead. “Anyway, _____ and Jimin, we uh… we prepared something for you. We hope you like it, and uh… _____, I hope it can make up for all the shit I put you through in the past year.”

At this point, you don’t even dare to look at your mother. “Wh-what did you prepare?”

“It’s over there! In front of the photowall,” Yeji claps in excitement. “Go on! Everyone’s waiting!”

Everyone at the party clears a path for you and Jimin to make your way to the colourfully decorated photowall at the front of the party. On the floor in front of it sits a brown cardboard box.

With all eyes on you, you swallow hard and start to make your way to the photowall. Jimin follows behind you, whispering under his breath. “What the fuck is this?”

“Probably another lame party game or something… just play along,” you whisper back, your mind too preoccupied with thinking about how you’re going to explain your pseudo pregnancy to your mother. Knowing her disposition, it’s entirely possible that your father knows about it already, and maybe even your entire extended family, and… oh god-

The moment you step in front of the photowall, someone standing to the side of the box pulls something, and an explosion of balloons and streamers burst from the box. You are quite literally showered in confetti, and when you look up, there are four balloons spelling out the word ‘baby’, and another balloon with ‘congratulations’ on it.

“Congratulations on your baby!!!!” Someone shouts, and people are taking out their phones to take pictures of you and Jimin drenched in confetti. Someone claps, and soon, the entire party is clapping. There are hoots of congratulations, someone proposes a toast, your college friends are almost in tears, your sister is loudly announcing that this should go on Instagram, your mother is half crying and half glowering at you for not telling her sooner, and everyone is talking about you and your non-existent baby.

Beside you, Jimin is equally stunned, but unlike you, he isn’t at a loss for words. He pulls you in close, pretending to pose for the cameras with a jovial smile on his face.

He still has the gall to joke around as he says, “maybe we should have that baby after all.”

In the blink of an eye, things just got very, very out of hand.

*

Number of people who know about pregnancy

Whole company: (estimated 200 people)

Jimin’s Granny

Jimin’s family

Min Yoongi and wife

Attendees of Yoongi’s baby shower (estimated 50 people)

Your family

Total: 265 people

*

[olkapippin]

hard to love | pt.5

pairing - chanyeol x reader x baekhyun

genre - angst

description - Who would want to be married off to a man they barely knew? Who would want to be married to a man who resented your very presence? You didn’t love him, your heart belonged with another, but how could you love someone who had hurt you so much?

series - part 1 part 2 part 3

Everyday you spent with Chanyeol were unbearable. The days were long and monotonous and the fact that he hardly ever seemed to be there didn’t make it any better. 

Every morning you woke up, either to find that he was not there, he hadn’t returned from the night before, or that he had left before you had even woken up. In the evenings when you came back from work you came home to an empty apartment, the food had already been made by the cook who came in everyday, and the place had been cleaned by the cleaner who came in every afternoon. There was nothing that needed to be done, except for work. The situation had given you the opportunity to become immersed in your work, and your thoughts. The latter was not necessarily a good thing. 

Your mind was clouded with emptiness all the time and there was hardly ever any change to you routine. When there was, it wasn’t good change either. 

You had been called out by Chanyeol’s mother several times since the day of your marriage. She was a wretched heartless woman, and stays at the Park family home were even more unbearable than staying in your own apartment. Despite having an army of servants to do her bidding, the awful woman always picked on you. Whenever you went to their house you were expected to dust, cook and clean, apparently it was a coincidence that whenever you went, most of the staff were on holiday or had gone out to run errands. Atleast in your own apartment you could do as you wished, within the certain perimeters that had been set.

You would never be good enough for them. They couldn’t criticise you for your parents’s company, familial connections or wealth, so they criticised you for everything else. They mocked your appearance, lack of close friendships, way of talking, the way you cooked, the way you cleaned and your capabilities. 

You were sneered upon and teased for not being able to get a sustainable, high up job in your parents company. You had been working in the family business ever since you graduated from high school, balancing the university work load and the endless tasks your father’s persistent subordinates gave you. When you had graduated from university you had expected to get a good job in the company, a job deserving of the heiress of the company to have. However, your father instructed for you to be given a useless job, it was a lot of work, a lot of work however the job itself was one that barely paid and could easily be done by someone with minimal skills. 

You had been infuriated when you had received this notice, you were a graduate of Seoul National University, every exam you had taken had been a hundred percent and you were in the top one percent of the entire country. To your fathers dismay, you had inherited his remarkable intelligence and then some. Even if he gave you one of the top positions in the running of the business people couldn’t say it was favouritism or that you didn’t deserve it because you did. But he didn’t, instead you were given a lowly position and were often ordered about by your superiors who were jealous of you for being the CEO’s daughter.

Chanyeol had been given a rather different position, in his own family company he held the role that you had desperately wanted yourself, he was in-charge, the boss, people looked up to him and admired him, he always had his plate full, but in this case, with things that mattered. And if that wasn’t enough, as soon as you had married him he had been given the job of overseeing new business matters in your own parents company, meaning that he was above you in the hierarchy. People couldn’t imagine the humiliation you faced whenever he came into your department, and you, his wife, were obliged to give him a ninety degree bow.

All of this hadn’t been a secret and his family knew about it and they never passed an opportunity to trouble you for it. His sisters were the worst, he had two younger sisters and a female cousin that lived with them. The female cousin was alright, her name was Eunbyul and she rarely ever asked you to do anything. However, his sisters made up for it. They were mean and calculating, one slightly older than you, and the other just a teenager, about seventeen years old. 

Whilst Chanyeol seemed to have inherited his father’s dashing looks, his sisters didn’t seem to inherit anything from their outwardly beautiful mother, apart from her nature. Their appearance wasn’t anything out of the ordinary and they seemed rather plain. You, on the other hand, had rather striking features, large eyes and a beautifully set facial structure, it made people look again. You had been a target of jealousy your entire life but you couldn’t remember the last time it was as bad as this. 

The two sisters felt as if they were above you in every way and could not understand for the life of them why you were more intelligent, pretty and pleasant. Chanyeol went with you once and they immediately stopped, but when they saw how he treated you, they grew bolder and had no problem in troubling you in front of him, and he just turned a blind eye. 

You had felt as if you were all alone in this, you had no friends, your colleagues despised you, your family treated you as if you were dirt, and your husband pretended that you didn’t even existed. How brilliant. You almost felt as if you should end this, but the only way to end it was a truly horrible way indeed. 

People don’t realise how difficult it is to be in a situation like this and how people feel until they’ve done it alone, and it feels as if there’s no hope, the world feels grey and devoid of colour and it feels like no one can help you. That was what you felt like on most days, but there was one person that made you feel a little bit better. 

Chanyeol had previously mentioned that he had a brother who had married a girl against the wishes of his father, you hadn’t paid much attention to this fact until you had actually met her. Her name Seolhyun and she was one of those people that was greatly liked by everyone and made everyone smile. She was beautiful as well. She had previously been an announcer in one of the top news broadcasting companies in Seoul, before she married Chanyeol’s older brother, Park Changsub. She was the one friend you had and the only person who understood what you were going through, well, partly.

Changsub wasn’t like Chanyeol, he had married for love, against his parent’s wishes. He adored Seolhyun, always putting her needs first, making sure she wasn’t violated and harrased by his siblings and parents, that she had the freedom that you were denied. 

Their home was a distant, but stunning riverside apartment, overlooking the Han river. You had visited several times and each time felt like the first. The apartment could not be described as anything less than beautiful, from its high ceilings to its marble floors, it was one of the most lovely homes you had ever visited. It was your happy place, in a world that seemed desolate and hopeless, you often came here.

They had been so kind to you, the complete opposite to the way the other people in the family had treated you. Changsub was polar opposites to Chanyeol, he wasn’t cold and stand offish, but instead, he was compassionate, caring and gentle. He did not at all seem like the jealous older brother you had imagined, you had imagined someone seeking revenge after being pushed out from the line of succession in favour of his younger brother, but no, Changsub had seemed almost relieved. 

You often came to visit them, as much as your schedule would allow. It also felt nice to not be a burden for once. Seolhyun herself didn’t work anymore, it was one of the many sacrifices she had to make, whilst Changsub tried his best to ensure she could maintain her freedom and way of life, there was only so much he could do without being completely being cast out of the company. This had resulted in Seolhyun being left alone at home most of the time, with only the maids for company. This lead to insane boredom, there was only so much shopping one could do, which made her very happy whenever she saw you. She used to have other friends, she had told you, but when she had married Changsub, she had to be cautious about who she was seen with, one wrong move and she would come under severe criticism. She had told you that this lead to her friends becoming wary with her, eventually leading to the break down of most of her close friendships. 

You felt happy that you were both able to forge a friendship with each other but often had to keep it a secret as you weren’t sure how Chanyeol would react. As long as these visits were able to last, you felt as if you might just be able to make it through this. 

———

It was a chilly Thursday evening. The sky was dim and clouds hung low, it was almost impossible to see where you were going and you were just about to call your driver to pick you up. 

That was when you heard the screech of a cars breaks right next to you. You peered inside, trying to make out if it was someone you knew, and were quite startled when the windows suddenly rolled down and you came face to face with the man you had thought was the least likely to care about your whereabouts on a night like this. 

‘Get in!’ he said, stepping out and guiding you to the other side. He flung open the door and gave you a light but still forceful shove inside. He slammed the door shut and made his way back to the drivers seat. He placed his hands on the wheel, gripping the material hard, massaging it with his fingers, as if he was thinking about what he was going to say next very carefully. 

‘There’s a family gathering next week, everyone will be there,’ he paused and frowned at you, ‘My mother told me to ask you to come so you could meet the rest of the family but you don’t have to, like you can say you’re ill or something,’ he finished his half mumbled sentence. 

You knew that Chanyeol wanted you to say no, but you couldn’t help it. His mother would probably be mortified if you turned down her offer, only softening if Chanyeol stuck up for you, which was very unlikely to happen, and also, you did want to meet the rest of his family. You wondered if you find someone else that you could strike up a friendship with, you felt like you needed as many allies as possible in this family. You actually knew about this before and Seolhyun had told you it would be a good idea to go. She herself had never been invited to these gatherings as she and Chagsub were practically outcasted by the rest of the family, she had always wished for the opportunity to go but it wasn’t meant to be. 

‘I’ll go,’ you replied to Chanyeol. You earned a glare from him as he turned back to his steering wheel, starting the car rather roughly and turning onto the main road. 

‘I have to drive the both of us down, it’s nearly five hours away,’ he said, expecting you to change your mind after that, but you were a determined person and had made up your mind now. You knew that he could easily just fly there or take the train, he was only doing this to convince you not to go.

‘I don’t mind,’ you replied calmly. 

He scoffed as he turned back to the wheel, mumbling something inaudible. 

The journey was going to be a struggle, but maybe there was some light at the end of the tunnel.

[enduringsea]

( rules: you can usually tell a lot about a person by the kind of music they listen to! put your music on shuffle and list the first 10 songs, then tag 10 people! no skipping! ) / tagged by @yellowcrumpet​ ╭( ･ㅂ･)و )))

Thanks for the tag! I LOVE these things-- I don’t rlly have a playlist either though, just a mess of music files on a device I haven’t updated so I’ll be checking my YouTube history too lol. There’s a uhhh.... pattern to be found, mainly relating to Code Vein or other OCs.... which isn’t surprising ._. ;; I made it a separate post bc I knew this was going to get long and rambly with lyric snippets and crying about fictional characters, sorry :D

1. Repeat Until Death - Novo Amor don’t go / you’re half of me now / but i’m hardly stood proud / i said it, almost oh i’ve been low / but damn it i bet it don’t show / it was heaven a moment ago oh i can’t seem to let myself leave you / but i can’t breathe anymore This one gives me Loubeth vibes ok, partially bad end route ;-; While Elizabeth is a very strong person, her friends are the most prominent reason she tries to do anything at all & isn’t living day-to-day in a monotonous grind to survive without a solid purpose other than ‘help random ppl bc it’s the right thing to do’. If she loses them, it’d ruin her & hammers into her head how everything she’s ever done has been a failure. She suffered a major betrayal by her boss before the Collapse, she was unable to fully participate in proj. queen despite her incredible test results, she failed to defeat Cruz and take her blood during Operation Queenslayer, and if she fails to protect the people she’s finally found meaning with? She’d break down completely & destroy herself to save them. She’s always had some level of abandonment issues, and without her family around it’s so much worse, even if it isn’t the most obvious because she’s generally seen as very well put together-- I really can’t express how much it would hurt her to lose Louis, Yakumo, and the others. She’s just not one to show just how bad it can truly get for her mentally and emotionally-- she’s resilient as hell, she’s been through hell repeatedly and survived it all, so it’s easy for others to assume she’s fine all things considered. It makes her feel weak and ashamed of herself if she shows any level of vulnerability, so she doesn’t; she swallows it down and is afraid of disappointing those who look up to her as a fighter and friend-- of course, no one at Home Base would blame her for being vulnerable, they all have their moments, Bethy just sets herself to such a high standard it’s difficult for her to talk about her own suffering in spite of how well-versed she is in getting her thoughts and feelings across otherwise. Louis is the one most keen to how deeply she’s hurting, but he doesn’t understand just how deeply until she finally does fall apart. The final swell of the song and its desperate lyrics really relays the pain they both feel-- Louis too would not fare well if something happened to Elizabeth, because he blames himself she was even involved in Operation Queenslayer for a long time, I honestly did so bad in explaining coherently, this song just has so much emotion and hurt behind it adklfjdfdff </3

2. Looking Out For You - Joy Again this is a love song for a girl who will never know it’s about her she's beaming that smile / all the while i’m all tripped up on my own throat i guess there is no hope This song reminds me of Elizabeth & my friend’s character Takashi Fujioka, who gets-- vERY...FRIENDZONED, for lack of a better word, by Elizabeth in his story, it’s really summed up best as tragic (;﹏;) Before the Collapse they were hitting it off, then the Collapse happened, they were separated, he lost his sisters, Mido happened, he was experimented on + became a revenant, etc, etc; years have passed since then & she’s gotten her life together as much as one can in a world like Vein, but for Takashi it’s like no time has passed at all. Elizabeth is subtly older in appearance, she’s been working w Lou & Co. for a long time; Loubeth blatantly have a connection, & rather than bringing up his feelings + making it awkward bc he values their friendships, he just kinda. chokes on them & does his best to help out the team. It doesn’t help he can’t even be jealous bc Louis is a really solid friend to him too, IT’S JUST A MESS OF A SITUATION & the death of what could have been if things were different.

3. Closer - Teagan And Sara ( no lengthy explanation for this one thank goodness, I’ve just been watching BoJack Horseman again and I really like some of the songs they add in, I like listening to this one on loop when mindlessly coloring something )

4. Brutal - Olivia Rodrigo  all I did was try my best / this the kind of thanks I get? they say these are the golden years / but I wish I could disappear ego crush is so severe / god, it's brutal out here I have it on a playlist for Elizabeth somewhere, not all of it applies to her but it reflects some of her struggles she has both before & after the collapse. She’s-- always kind of been a mess while under immense pressure + has serious self image issues, this song hits that side of her well. She’s been held to humanly impossible standards by both herself and her family bc frankly? She can reach them, she’s NOT exactly human. She was born into her position as a hunter & intends to keep it for as long as she lives (like revenants, her kind is very much ‘either gets killed or lives 5ever), even if some days she really feels how heavy the burden can be. She didn’t have a normal childhood and she’s fine with it for the most part, but it alienates her from most of her peers-- she never got to date anyone, never had a close group of friends, never went to parties that weren’t formals, etc., while she feels a little childish about it, she does envy ‘normal’ and understands the pressure she’s lived under her entire life has caused damage-- she has been exploited for her abilities, there’s just not much she can do about it but to keep going, rlly.

5. Freaks - Surf Curse  don't kill me / just help me run away from everyone  i need a place to stay / where i can cover up my face don't cry / i am just a freak / i am just a freak UhhhHHH this song really makes me think of Oliver Collins :D;; thank TikTok for showing it to me. It makes me think of how scared he was, of both the world and the revenants who captured him. The song’s use of the word ‘parasites’ really makes me think of Revenants and the BOR parasites XD I’m hoping when I poke my video editor again, I can record some Oliver footage to make a short video to this song. Oliver deserves so much better, I wish you could save him, but that’s what AUs are for, hahah.... The second half of the lyrics make me think of the AU I have where he lives and has to grapple with the guilt of surviving and the things he did to other revenants to get by too.

6. All Eyes On Me - Bo Burnham you say the ocean’s rising / like i give a shit you say the whole world’s ending / honey it already did you’re not gonna slow it / heaven knows you tried got it? good / now get inside I haven’t seen the Netflix special yet but I’ve had this song on repeat since my move started. The lyrics hit too hard & resonate with my existential dread, covid exhaustion, and extreme burnout in my 20s, but bc I have Damage I can also relate it to CV ._. ‘you’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried. got it? good now get inside’ makes me think of--;; the bad end route again, and Elizabeth’s desperation to keep her found family together. It’s not like her to completely stop caring about an issue, but in the moment she realizes what’s being taken from her? She doesn’t want to save all of revenant-kind if it means she’s going to wind up alone all over again, her world is effectively over if she’s forced to be alone again. The MC frenzying means the only immediately identifiable hope she had of saving everyone else is gone, so why not just go home? If they’re all doomed, she wants to at least be together for a little while longer, it’s fine if they use her blood to survive & everyone else in the mist is out of luck, it’s soul-crushing bc I’ve never had her in a situation where she’s been this reckless, despondent/hopeless, and thinking irrationally where it’d impact more than herself-- especially when she’s normally goal-oriented, organized, meticulous, so on so forth: she’s not one to act without thinking something through first, but that last breath of light just got sucker-punched out of her. All she wants is home, comfort, and family, and ultimately in the bad end route she does manage to preserve their lives, maintain the mist, and supply blood beads, but her own condition leaves her on the throne-- it’s a mix of the bad, neutral, and true ending rlly ldkfjdf BUT YEAH enough rambling on that :D;; This song’s really good and touches a lot of different thoughts and ideas both in real life and my ocs, kind of embarrassing--;; thank u bo burnham for ruining me with this beautiful song

7. Yellow - Coldplay look at the stars / look how they shine for you / and everything you do your skin / oh yeah, your skin and bones / turn in to something beautiful do you know / for you I'd bleed myself dry Does this song make me think about JackEva? Yes. Yes it does. Star / night sky symbolism? Bam. Sappy lyrics about love and finding the person you’re with absolutely mesmerizing and worth dying for? BAM. If JackEva were capable of using their own blood to save each other, I can see it-- hJNGn they just care about each other so much, Jack cries for her even though they both knew that eventually one of them would succumb to their duty, and if the roles were reversed I can see Eva doing the same, I adore them beyond human language. On my CV RP blog, my Jack’s not shippable bc-- Eva, my friend even have them looking after his nephew (an oc--) at one point. I should seriously drop some headcanons down eventually....

8. Louder Than Thunder - The Devil Wears Prada  are we meant to be empty-handed? / i know i could, i could be better i don't think i deserve it / selflessness, find your way into my heart all stars could be brighter / all hearts could be warmer 

LMFAO throwback to my middle school playlist, I’m old-- I’ve applied this song to a lot of things back in the day, but I really connect it to Loubeth now, especially Louis. Lou & Bethy are both functional idiots who are too hard on themselves & have trouble recognizing their worth beyond what they can do for others. They’re trying to be better-- to make up for what they perceived wrongs they’ve done, but it’s hard, they don’t believe they’re worthy of the love and support the other gives, but they still yearn for that sense of security. After Louis’ memories are returned, he finally understands the guilt he’s felt since he became a revenant and it really skews his self-perception; he blames himself for so many things & Elizabeth, who has always been able to kill when necessary, sets it straight-- “It’s not your fault”, and it takes Louis some time to properly absorb that message. He thinks she’s just trying to comfort him, which she is tbh, but she’s not wrong: “It’s not your fault you couldn’t kill someone. It was never your job to kill anyone.” It’s up to people like her to do those sort of things-- Elizabeth may not have been present when Cruz frenzied, but if she had been? It would have been over before it started, that’s something she has regrets over, even if nothing could have been done since she was already on the field. Actually, she’s actually really quite angry that security failed to monitor Cruz properly and has a few select words for the ones there who could have actually done something before it got out of hand-- civilians and doctors are exempt from her shtlist bc they’re not meant to be killers (so don’t worry Artorias, she’s not ready to bite your head off!), but they had to have some kinda security detail rite o-q??? They’re probably hiding from her wrath-- BUT ANYWAY, she insists she’ll never blame Louis for not being able to do something as serious as killing another person. He was a normal human being who cared about his friend, not a failure, and he couldn’t have been expected to do something that shouldn’t have fallen on his shoulders in the first place. As many times as it takes, she’ll reaffirm that it wasn’t his fault, she’s not angry, he’s always done his best and her opinion of him hasn’t changed. He’s a good person and she loves him through all the hurt, though she doesn’t drop the word ‘love’ for a long time. It just-- takes Louis a while to accept she views him as someone worthy of the love and respect she has for him. It’s kind of ironic she’s so adamant on Louis not blaming himself considering she’s the one privately blaming herself for-- wow there’s too much to unpack, she feels guilty she was even born?? im so broken over these two. I love them and yet they SUFFER... 

9. What I’ve Done - Linkin Park i'll face myself / to cross out what i’ve become erase myself / and let go of what i’ve done today this ends / i'm forgiving what i’ve done

I have Louis Amamiya brainrot and I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks that this song fits him super well & it needs to become an AMV dsjfkldsfd. I’m a near life-long Linkin Park fan and this fits with Lou so well thematically. As much as I’ve gone on about Louis’ guilt, he does steel himself to keep going forward in spite of it and make things right, for everyone. Maybe it wasn’t really his fault, but at the end of the day his inability to kill Cruz in that moment left a disaster in its wake that got a countless number of people killed-- the MC included with Karen and Aurora. He doesn’t want to run away from the truth, doesn’t want to make excuses, he wants to take responsibility for it and he’ll work himself to death if it means things will be better-- it’s both admirable he’s got a strong resolve and VERY concerning with how willing he is to die for the cause, please don’t overdo it, Lou, you’ll break mine and Bethy’s hearts ._.;; It won’t always be easy, there are moments the grief gnaws at him, but in the end he does overcome it (and uh. as in the bad ending, we know he can actually do it this time). I know we can’t see everything, but I would have loved deeper character interactions, especially with Louis with an emphasis on grieving + forgiving himself properly-- but this song really is nice with the whole ‘I’m going to face my mistakes head on, forgive myself, and keep moving forward’. It’s what Louis deserves: self forgiveness and a damn break ‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥⌓˂̣̣̥ )‧º·˚

10. Call of Silence - Hiroyuki Sawano you will know you're reborn tonight / must be rough but i’ll stay by your side even if my body's bleached to the bones / i don't want go through that ever again so cry no more / oh my beloved ngl idk if those are the correct lyrics, buuuuuuut....... im a weenie and am internally weeping abt loubeth after midnight, what else is new lmfao- i’ll at least try to be brief :D I also used to really like Attack on Titan when I was in high school, I dropped the anime years ago because I was waiting for s2 and never got back to it once it started airing again, I thought I’d finish it once the anime was complete since I eventually caught up with the manga, such a good series BUT ANYWAY-- I think it’s a really pretty song and Loubeth fit with the tender lyrics. IT’S LATE, idk what to say about them other than what I’ve said already dsklfjdslf im sorry I really ramble a LOT and I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had the chance to >w>;;

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: January 2021

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of January 2021 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Once again, we knew that Donald Trump wasn’t going to take losing well, but when a legion of his most boneheaded supporters storm the Capitol demanding the election result be overturned because a certain thin-skinned orange gobshite had spent several weeks screaming about electoral fraud and, by the way, also set the date of January 6th for some major event, even Mike Pence couldn’t sanction his buffoonery any longer - especially when said buffoonery involved him saying “I love you” to people who were guilty of sedition and, by the way, murder - all of which led to him finally, finally, getting the boot from various social media platforms

...all while Lauren Boebert appeared to be trying to help out the insurrectionists by livetweeting the location of Nancy Pelosi, presumably because Boebert forgot about that Glock she claims to take to work with her every day and was looking for a convenient meat shield, which naturally has nothing to do with her tweeting the day would be like 1776 earlier that morning

...but the real victim in all of this was Melania Trump as it interrupted a photo shoot she was doing, which she somehow thought it was a good idea to mention several days later in a statement riddled with two opinions: “both sides” and “me, me, me” which shows she didn’t realise the optics of rearranging the china as Washington burned around her

...but according to Laura Kuenssberg it was merely a “scuffle” at Congress, as opposed to an organised group attempting to stage an armed insurrection against the government complete with at least one member carrying zip ties

...and finally, we had Ian Austin reminded us that he’s still alive by saying the exact same thing would have happened in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn supporters storming parliament, as if that happened in the four years Corbyn was wishing Austin would go away, then did go away, but sadly didn’t go away

Once again the Tory government think they know better than virologists, epidemiologists and pharmacists with their one-two punch of thinking they can just mix and match the various vaccines available rather than give people two doses of the same vaccine, but they further weaken any chance of vaccination succeeding by ignoring Pfizer’s recommendation the second dose be given within three weeks of the first by adopting a policy of the second dose is given three months later, and it it’s just as likely to be the less effective but cheaper Oxford vaccine they get a dose of

...swiftly followed by the BBC did their bit to encourage people to get vaccinated by reporting a story of a nurse getting a dose of Covid six weeks after her first vaccination jab not by reporting how she was three weeks overdue for the second dose (or, if you prefer, six weeks before her second one) but simply saying that people vaccinated can get Covid, which goes beyond the BBC’s sociopathic inability to criticise Tory fuckups into being downright fucking dangerous - as does their putting sentient testicle Toby Young on Newsnight to say how we’re all overreacting as it's not as bad as all that

Of all the things proven liar Boris Johnson should have said when the UK’s Covid death toll officially passed 100,000 (as opposed to unofficially, which would have been last December), “We have done our best” was not it, because if their best includes not going into lockdown in order to protect landlords, having Dominic Cummings dictate herd immunity in spite the fact that you need vaccinated people for it to work, refusing to have quarantine at airports until July, thinking it would be a bright idea to tell people it’s their patriotic duty to go to the pub, giving them £10 vouchers to go to restaurants, putting children going back to school ahead of any concerns about every single school could become a petri dish and countless other horrifically mismanaged instances, then we should be kept up at night dreading what their worst would be

The fact that Chartwells were given a contract to provide free school dinners with a budget of £30, and the supposed lunches that arrived had £5 worth of food in them which begged the obvious question where the other £25 went, is appalling - but not surprising, as the Tory government gave them the contract and, equally unsurprising, Chartwells was founded by a Tory donor, and equally unsurprising their response to their grift being exposed was to tell all the public school clients they cater to a pack of lies while hoping nobody found out about them doing so...which worked about as well as you can guess

Something possessed the EU to ramp up the row over the AstraZenica vaccine not passing the rigorous tests for over-65s by threatening to trigger Article 16 and limit the number of vaccines that Northern Ireland received, and that something was it was hopelessly misguided as it allowed the Tories to get their hapless response to the pandemic off the front pages for a few days and let the Leave headbangers say this is why we left the EU...in spite this threat would have never been in play if we were still in the EU

There is no way to make jokes about Kellyanne Conway posting what was, in effect, revenge porn photos of her 16-year old daughter, because that sentence is so far out there that it is borderline incomprehensible

In the space of less than twenty seconds proven liar Boris Johnson claimed that there was no prior warning of the new strain of Covid, he had the SAGE paper stating it was coming which was handed to him last September held up in his face, and then said the government acted accordingly.  Yes, you read that right, he claimed the government acted accordingly to something they had no prior warning about, which is literally impossible, all in the space of ten seconds

In the latest hire by the BBC which is cause for both comment and concern, they announced their new chairman would be Tory donor Richard Sharp, whose credentials for the position are being Rishi Sunak’s ex-boss at Goldman Sachs, donating at least £400,000 to the Tory party, and having no background in journalism whatsoever

Smirking bully Priti Patel said that the UK should have closed its borders in March 2020 in order to prevent the spread of Covid.  Presumably she forgot that she was a.) Home Secretary in Marsh 2020 so could have done that, and b.) Home Secretary when she said that the borders should have been closed as that indicates she doesn’t know what’s going on

The terrifying world which Alison Pearson lives in has now started to cross over into our reality due to her responding to one of the four people she hasn’t blocked on Twitter calling her what she is - namely a liar - by siccing the Torygraph’s lawyers on them claiming libel, doing the usual cry bully tactic of learning the person she is harassing works for GlaxoSmithKline so promptly went to their CEO demanding he be fired, and howling about the hate campaign being waged against her - while telling the person, who was saying he was thinking suicidal thoughts after the pile-on that Pearson had instigated even after he had deleted the tweet and apologised , that “You’re finished”

Someday in the future, scholars will study Ted Cruz responding to Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement within hours of getting his feet under the Oval Office desk by pontificating about how terrible it is that Biden is more interested in the citizens of Paris than the jobless of Pittsburgh and wonder just how somebody who doesn't know why the Paris Climate Agreement was named the Paris Climate Agreement ever got to be a senator

...and judging by how Lauren Boebert also latched onto this brainless rhetoric, not only can it be asked how she got to be a senator when she had the opportunity to actually realise Cruz’s mistake, she also begs the question how she can be a senator after her publicly trying to use Nancy Pelosi as a meat shield during the Capitol riots

Unifying force Keir Starmer stated that Labour should be devoting their time to fighting the Tory government rather than fighting court cases, somehow forgetting that by breaking the guidelines of the EHRC report (which he pledged to follow without question months before it was published) is the reason that they’re fighting court cases, and just so happens to be the reason why people are asking how a meeting attended by Starmer, Angela Rayner, Len McCluskey and others either didn't have a single person taking notes, which is David Evans’ entire defence, or they did take notes by quite conveniently lost them

Oh boy, did Wall Street cheerleaders not take it well when r/WallStreetbets exposed to the entire world that the stock market is little more than a game people play with other people’s money - because the teams the Wall Street cheerleaders support started losing, and all it took was a few Redditors investing in Gamestop and Bed Bath & Beyond 

Nice of Shaun Bailey to remind everyone that he’s a Tory by giving his suggestion for how the homeless could get on the property ladder, namely by saving a minimum of £5000

Clearly Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t get the memo about the Streisand Effect, as the first thing she did after taking her seat in the House of Representatives was go on a mass deleting spree of Facebook posts - which only served to draw attention to her video saying that Nancy Pelosi be executed for treason, her track record of spreading conspiracy theories about the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings, and her claims that a Jewish space laser is responsible for the 2018 California wildfires

Insufferable self-promoter Jess Phillips got her 2021 off to a good start by tweeting out that, as Britait has happened, we should shut up and accept it.  To the surprise of nobody other than insufferable self-promoter Jess Phillips, this led to a lot of people saying that, no, they will not accept an advisory referendum somehow being bolted onto the Ten Commandments, especially as numerous things that were promised wouldn’t happen such as a border in the Irish Sea, leaving Erasmus, losing freedom of movement, leaving the Common Market have all happened

It is wrong to say that smirking bully Priti Patel has lost 150,000 police files.  The actual figure is closer to 400,000 - which begs the obvious question as to what those files were, for example if those files also happened to fall under the same category as the ones that 55-year old ex-minister Mark Francois might want to have disappear for the sake of convenience

At last CD Projekt Red took some responsibility for Clusterpunk 2077 being such a cyberfuck...if by “taking responsibility” you mean “taking responsibility, dumping it all on the QA testers, and saying that everyone should blame them for everything” - and then with perfect comedic timing CD Projekt Red released an update for Clusterpunk 2077 that was so broken they had to release a hotfix for their broken patch

Expenses-fiddler Robert Jenrick decided that the most important thing to protect in the United Kingdom at this exact moment in time is...statues.  Not key workers, not the vulnerable, not any human life at all.  Statues.

So either Rafael Behr wrote a column for The Guardian where he tried to blame Jeremy Corbyn for his heart attack which saw Guardian higher-ups remove that passage from their print edition but forgot to remove it from the online version of the article, or The Guardian deliberately left the passage in the online version of the column in order to get some form of engagement from rage clicks while allowing Behr to act as if he is suffering some great injustice

Of course it wouldn’t take long for Steve Baker to try and claim some spurious victory for Britait, namely him claiming that tampon tax he spent so long fighting against being abolished is proof of the sunlit uplands of our post-EU nation...which ignores the fact that a.) It had nothing to do with the EU in the first place, and b.) The fact that Baker voted to keep it in place in a 2015 Commons vote

Employer of the year WWE went for an interesting twofer, as one minute they were proudly stating that WrestleMania would go ahead with a prospective 30,000 in attendance without any concerns for social distancing or any other Covid preventative measures, and the next telling the wrestlers on their roster that they would not be supplying them with Covid vaccines at the exact same time the NBA were floating the idea of providing vaccines for all their players

Make no mistake, the criticism that Erik Lamela, Sergio Reguilon, Giovani Lo Celso and Manuel Lanzini have received due to the four of them flouting lockdown regulations to attend a New Year’s party is justified - however, the fact that Duncan Castles tried to chase a headline by claiming that Lo Celso and Lamela had tested positive for Covid in a swiftly-deleted tweet is a new low for the noted barrel scraping rumour monger

Self-awareness sceptic Laurence Fox was entirely predictable in his response to the news that talkRADIO had been booted from Youtube for repeated violations of their ToS, specifically the part about spreading Covid misinformation, screaming the usual things about being “cancelled” - and then, within hours, responded to the BBC announcing a plan of educational programming to help during Lockdown III by saying he will be shielding his children from being “indoctrinated” by the BBC’s “left-wing bias” - which not only means he’s cancelling the BBC, but also had people remember that Billie Piper has custody of his children so it's not like he can even enforce his rules on what his children can and cannot watch

...by the way, Fox said nothing about Lord Sumption appearing on the BBC’s Question Time (the same show where failed actor on the grift Laurence Fox announced his new career as a clueless right wing irritant) where he told a woman with bowel cancer that her life wasn’t valuable, it was merely less valuable as she has less life left.  Yes, that is eugenics getting free airtime on the BBC, thanks for noticing

Somehow the best choice of words the BBC could find when reporting the death of Phil Spector was “talented but flawed” as if murder is some character flaw instead of, oh I don’t know, a criminal activity?

You would have thought that Twitch would have simply retired the PogChamp emote permanently in the wake of Gootecks going all insurrectionist, but no, instead they thought of having a rotating cycle of emotes of various creators, in spite of those creators telling them this would be a bad idea - and those creators were proven right when Critical bard was inundated with racist and homophobic abuse in his chat that led him to close his social media profiles when he was selected for rotation, with Twitch doing fuck all about it

Fashion editor no matter what she claims she is Hadley Freeman had a really clever take about The Sopranos...actually, no she didn’t, she had an absurd belief that it’s the exact same show as Sex in the City but people overlook it Because Misogyny, and when she was lambasted for missing the point so badly she had noted dipshit David Baddiel rushing in to her rescue to mock those getting “triggered” by her insipid take while saying he never liked The Sopranos because, as he isn't an Italian-American mobster, the show did not speak to him - in other words, he made himself a subject of equal mockery

...but there was no sign of Baddiel when Hadley Freeman then jumped on the BidenErasedWomen bandwagon alongside the TERFs of Twitter as soon as Biden got his feet under the desk, which also happened to show hard centrist extremist Freeman say how she thought Trump did far more for women than Biden ever has, which as takes go is so bad that the best explanation is that she briefly forgot the difference between the words “for” and “to”, before she then deleted the tweet and tried to deny ever posting it with increasingly nonsensical explanations that rapidly looked uncannily like gaslighting

...although David Baddiel wasn’t quite done being a bellend, as he was soon yukking it up with professional victim Rachel Riley about his latest book which accuses the entire progressive left of antisemitism

The oppressed underclass known as Manchester United fans really showed their colours, first by responding to a loss to Sheffield United by sending racial abuse to Axel Tuanzebe and Anthony Martial on social media, and a couple of weeks later responded to a draw with Arsenal by sending racial abuse to Marcus Rashford, because apparently when your team drops points the most important thing is to look for which member of your team you can racially abuse

And finally, oh so finally, we have Donald Trump and his discovery of electoral fraud at last - electoral fraud that consisted of Donald Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he change the result and all he needs is Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes while also saying that he had proof of vote-counting machines being removed early...and when told they were still in Georgia, changed his lie to say the inner workings had been removed without anyone noticing.  By the way, the only reason anyone knows about this is because Raffensperger told Trump that he wouldn’t release the call to the public if Trump didn't say anything about it - so, of course, the Orange Overlord took to twitter, ran his mouth, and the Washington Post had one hell of an exclusive as a result

[killscreencinema]

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4)

We all have a precious work of art in our lives that made a profound impact on who we eventually grew up to be, whether it be an album, a painting, a movie, or especially nowadays, a video game.  Final Fantasy VII was that for me, and when it came out in 1997, it would go on to define my high school years.

Which would go a long way towards explaining why I never got laid during those said years.  Le sigh....

All kidding aside, I never got laid in high school mostly because I was a mess when it came to the social scene.  I had trouble connecting with others and taking what I perceived to be “big risks” like going to parties, joining after school clubs, or -GULP- asking out a girl I liked!  I was very withdrawn socially, but I did have friends, and one of them, whom I’d consider my best friend, managed to get his hands on the original Final Fantasy VII before I even owned a PlayStation (I had foolishly bought a Nintendo 64, believing the next Final Fantasy was going to be released on that). 

My friend and I were already very close, but we bonded even more as we experienced this new adventure together.  He had his own save file that he was pecking away at, but he created a new one for us both to play whenever I’d spend the night or vice versa.  The both of us were completely immersed in this world and these characters.  It was one of a few positive experiences I can remember from my high school years.

The reason for this preamble is to make you understand how much this game means to me on an emotional level.  So when the remake was announced years ago, I was extremely apprehensive.  First of all, Square Enix is a pale shadow of its former glory as Squaresoft.  Final Fantasy XIII was a goddamn mess and Final Fantasy XV was a step in the right direction, but hardly the stuff of legends like its PSone and SNES predecessors.  The Kingdom Hearts games... well, I’ll eventually talk about the rest of those in my blog.  Suffice it to say, I had completely lost faith in Square Enix as a company, whereas there was a day I’d play ANYTHING they released because I knew it would be quality.

So lets get to point - did they fuck up Final Fantasy VII Remake as well or is it an absolute masterpiece? 

Well... that’s kind of a hard question to answer right now as this is only “Part 1″ of what I assume will be a trilogy of releases that comprise the actual FULL game.  However, judging this game alone, I’m going to lean towards masterpiece... with huge “but”.  I’ll talk more about that below and warn of spoilers before I get to it.

Make no mistake about it, though, Final Fantasy VII Remake (part 1) is a goddamn masterpiece.  The care put into the game by the development team is evident from top-to-bottom, with even the most minute details from the original faithfully adapted.  However, this isn’t a strict beat-for-beat retread of FFVII, nor did I expect it to be.  While the game follows the basic story almost exactly, some tweaks have been made here or there to better pad out both the gameplay and the story as a whole.  I had no issue with any of these changes, until the final chapter revealed the implications of them, which I guess I’ll discuss next to get it off my chest...

SPOILERS

During the last chapter, your party is confronted by Sephiroth outside of Midgar, who then goads you into entering the “Singularity”, where you finally fight the ghostly “Whispers” who have been stalking you throughout the whole game.  These Whispers are a significant part of the new story “tweaks” that have been added, which I found annoying at first, but didn’t really mind so much as the story went on until now, because it is revealed that they are “arbiters of destiny”, whose jobs are to ensure fate plays out like its supposed to.  During your fight with them at the end of the game, after defeating each Whisper boss, the characters experience “flash forwards” to important story points in the future, such as Aerith’s death and the summoning of meteor, implying that they have more or less nullified these events now as a result of defeating “destiny”... I think.  Part of my problem with this portion of the game is Square Enix’s current “naval gazey, head-up-their-asses” story telling style is in full effect here, and I began to get Vietnam flashbacks to the completely incoherent plot of Final Fantasy XIII. 

Square Enix, it’s so simple - part of why Final Fantasy VII endures is because it’s a great story ALREADY.  By all means, give it a tweak here and there to give the characters more depth or make the story more dramatically impactful, but for the love of Jenova, please don’t tell me it’s going to turn into a philosophical shit show about the nature of destiny and fighting fate.  More importantly, Square Enix, please don’t tell me you are going to change CRITICAL plot points for shits n’ giggles or to “swerve” the audience.

For one, Aerith has to die. I love Aerith, especially his incarnation of Aerith in the Remake.  She’s so sweet and yet has a delightfully mischievous personality.  She’s absolutely perfect.  But the reason why her death still haunts fans of the game to this day is because THAT was the point in the story when shit got REAL.  The stakes were raised and Sephiroth cements himself as an evil son-of-a-bitch that must be stopped.  He doesn’t kill her just to be evil either - he kills her because she’s actively trying to foil his plans by using her white materia.  However, unbeknownst to Sephiroth, her death is what ultimately triggers the white materia to work when it needs to most.  It’s kind of like how Obi-Wan Kenobit warns Darth Vader “If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you an imagine”, but in this instance it actually makes sense.

So that has to happen.  It can’t be Tifa, or Yuffie, or Cid, or Marlene, or some other swervy “gotcha” bullshit - it has to be Aerith. 

Secondly, Sephiroth must successfully summon the meteor - it’s in the fucking logo for crying out loud!  I can’t imagine what “imminent threat” for the whole world they could do instead.  Fat Chocobo gains a massive amount of weight and jumps on Midgar?  It’s baffling to imagine the developers would even *flirt* with the idea of changing these important story elements of the game, so hopefully we’ve all just hysterically misinterpreted the meaning of the last chapter.

Oh, one more thing - the final boss fight with Sephiroth was dumb too, if only because it cheapens the eventual actual final boss fight with him at the end of the game.  I liked how in the original he was basically a phantom that kept evading your party, leaving behind Jenova pieces for you to fight instead.  It’s like how in wrestling, a heel character talks tough, but then runs away when the “baby face” comes out to confront him.  Fighting Sephiroth now, not to mention beating him, kind of makes him look weak sauce.  Ohh legendary SOLDIER, my ass - I beat him at the beginning of the whole story.  To borrow from Star Wars again, it would be like Luke fighting Darth Vader in A New Hope and kicking his ass immediately.  Vader sure wouldn’t seem like much of a threat after that.

Anyway..

SPOILERS OVER

God, sorry, this review is out of control and much too long, but I have a lot to say!

Okay, so my worries above aside, the game itself is very well done.  The graphics are beautiful, despite the environment being a constant barrage of grey, industrial imagery (hey, that’s Midgar for ya).  They find ways to change things up visually, depending on what part of Midgar you’re in, such as Sector 5 having more greenery than usual (cause, you know, it’s Aerith’s home, so that makes sense!).  Wall Market, the “red light district” of Midgar, is a treat for the senses, especially at night, what with all the lights and the music playing everywhere.  It really feels like a lively, party town. 

One major change that had me, and probably a lot of FFVII purists, concerned is the combat system.  Gone is the turn based combat of old, replaced now with a more fast paced hack-n-slash style reminiscent of a From Software game than Final Fantasy (though not even as remotely as sophisticated).  However, I enjoyed the change, as this makes the battles much more engaging and fun, as opposed to the tedium that can come with turn-based combat, not to mention random encounters.  You can still use magic, items, and Limit Breaks like in the old days, so it still feels like the original, but with tweaks that make it better.

And you know, that pretty much sums up my super long review nicely - the game feels like the original but with tweaks that make it better.  Even the soundtrack is improved, which is a feat I didn’t think possible considering the original FFVII’s soundtrack is some of the best video game movie ever composed.  The Remake does a superb job of weaving in certain themes and remixing themes at appropriate points in the story.  “Aerith’s Theme” is more tear jerking than ever, while “One Chosen by the Planet” (otherwise known as Sephiroth’s theme) is even more chilling and fearsome than ever before. 

So overall, I fucking loved this game.  I rarely get emotional while playing video games, unless you consider cursing and screaming “emotional”, but damned if this one didn’t constantly give me warm and fuzzy feelings (especially whenever Tifa was onscreen - *growl*).  I’m eager to play the next part and explore more of this “new” world, despite my concern it might be “too new” in the worst ways.

[notbecauseofvictories]

Can I ask what field your new job is in? I know you wanted to move away from law; I want to move away from the career path I've spent all the years since graduating university bolting myself to, and I just wondered how you did it/ if you did it, and what kind of sideways movements made sense for you?

For privacy reasons, I won’t talk explicitly about my new job, though you’re correct it’s not an attorney position. (I still love law but I’m not barred in Illinois and I haven’t been practicing long enough to waive in, which makes finding attorney jobs very difficult until I can retake the bar.)

I will say that if you want to move away from a particular career path, there are a couple questions I’ve found helpful to ask myself:

1.) What do I want to do when I grow up?

I am a big proponent of the game plan. 

You can, of course, jump off a cliff with no parachute or idea of what waits for you at the bottom. That is a certain kind of game plan! And some people pull it off with great aplomb, I’m not knocking it. However, I am a risk-adverse, pragmatic scaredy cat, and I absolutely never start something unless I have at least a vague idea of the best- and worst-case results. So when I’m about to make a life change like “get out of terrible job, move back to Chicago” I start by figuring out—well, what the hell does that actually look like?

But before I think about what that looks like, I take a step back and ask myself a whole battery of questions:

What is my ideal, perfect-world job? What’s my title? What are the hours I work? Do I travel often, not at all, somewhere in between?

What do my dream responsibilities consist of? 

How much interaction am I comfortable with—would I be happy sitting behind a desk all day, or do I want to be out among the people?

How much authority would be happy with? Do I want to be in charge, or is following orders where I’m most comfortable?

What else do I want in my life, such that I’m willing to make career tradeoffs? (e.g., do I want a family I spend lots of time with, a hobby I can devote myself to outside of the 9-to-5, a charity or start-up that I see as my real passion?)

Where do I want that perfect-world job to be? Am I happy changing cities, moving frequently, to pursue the work I want to do, or does location come first and drive what jobs I’m willing to take?

[An additional question you encounter a lot as a lawyer is: “are you okay not necessarily believing in the organization you serve? do you care whether  you serve a particular mission, or are you really just here to draw a paycheck and not break laws?” but I recognize that’s a conundrum probably….unique to lawyers.]

After answering the questions above, you might realize that your exact, ideal dream job doesn’t exist—that’s fine! but a valuable first step is understanding what your priorities are, where you see yourself being happy, and what you think is important in your professional life.

2.)  What steps would I very likely need to take to get there?

Even if it does exist, chances are you won’t be able to leapfrog from your current position to your exact, ideal dream job. (FYI, my current position is not my dream job or even really a stepping stone to the dream job; I made compromises based on other criteria.) So the next step is the inevitable plunge back into reality—namely, okay, so how the hell do I get to where I’m going???

If you don’t already know (which is likely, given that this isn’t your field) then this step is a knowledge-gathering endeavor. You’re trying to figure out what the path looks like, so naturally, consult other people on the path you’re interested in. 

Personally, I highly encourage you utilize the absolute crap out of your network. 

By which I mean: stalk facebook, LinkedIn, your school’(s) alumni pages, your parent’(s) friends, your friends’ friends, the people who work at the same place you do (even if you’ve never met them), everyone you have a mutual connection with via social media, individuals who belong to a professional association you hope to join, academics/journalists/lawyers/etc. with non-private twitters who you’ve looked up to for a long time and whose career you want to emulate, etc. If they’re nearby, invite them to a 15-20 minute coffee break. If they’re interested in mentoring, do lunch, dinner. Follow up with the professors who inspired you and email people who make news about stuff you want to work on. If you’re interested in going back to school for a degree (the clearest way to communicate a professional shift, fyi) then email the school you’re interested in and let them fete you. You’re going to be so obnoxious!!!*

* Do not be obnoxious. If you’re looking for a polite way to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know personally but hope to make a professional connection with, see me after class.

And honestly, sometimes the answer is a degree, a certification, a particular internship or a personal connection. Sometimes the answer is redrafting your resume. Sometimes the answer is “well, you’d really want to work as X or Y before I consider you for Z.” Sometimes the advice is, “sorry, we only consider graduates from this school/that internship/etc. and you aren’t so.” 

You end up having to keep looking, and looking and looking. There are a lot of ways to get rejected from a job these days. There are similarly a lot of ways to get where you’re going, whether you know about them or not.

………I’d also urge you to keep in mind that all advice (all of it, even mine!) is personal. When people talk about their careers, career paths, and their strategies for attaining both, they are speaking from a deeply private place—as much as “how to know your romantic partner is The One.” It’s just a bit more prosaic in its outlook. 

3.)What skills do I currently have, or can reasonable acquire in my current role, that will take me from A to X/Y/Z/or ultimately B?

Even if you could snap your fingers and go from point A (where you are) to point B (where you ideally, perfectly, want to be) chances are the you that currently, professionally exists wouldn’t be prepared for it. So as you think about transition to a stepping-stone job, or a new field, think seriously about what the hell you bring to the table and how you’ll convince that interviewer that actually, you’re perfect for the job. 

It does take some creative thinking and a little bit of conniving corporate wordplay (which is fair game, as the corporations invented it first.) For example:

Have you worked as a McDonalds’ drive-thru window representative and shift manager for the past 5 years? well, congratulations, you are, right now, an expert in customer service and human capital resource management. 

Are you currently a lowly typist-slash-clerk? well, mazel, because actually your specialty is in database management and particularly data cleansing, you could probably pass yourself off as an analyst if you knew a little R, python, or other programming languages.

Do you deal with disgruntled customers all day? Well done, because literally every industry will hire you, they all have angry people who call the hotline/helpline/tipline/etc. and are constantly on the lookout for humans who will not shout YOU ABSOLUTE ASSHOLE back at said disgruntled customers.

Have you been in a different industry, but are looking to transition to a similar role in a new industry? Well done, you, talk about your leadership, curiosity, and self-starter attitude. Managers love a self-starter, probably because they like to entertain visions of not having to do work.

If you feel you could attain the necessary skills in your current role, sometimes  it’s just matter of talking to your current boss (depending on the boss!) Saying, “hey, I’m really interested in Z, could you put me on Z? is there any Z to be had?” is a good first step. Even just to tell the interviewer for a position with a lot of Z duties that you went to your boss saying “I want to do Z, Z is def a priority for me.”

4(ish): Keep reevaluating, based on the new information you acquire.

Going through Step #1 now, answering those questions about myself and my ideal work/workplace/job, is a completely different experience than it was in early 2018. As a recent law school graduate, all I thought about was finding the best learning experience—a year and 6 months later, having been run through the wringer of one helluva a learning experience, I can tell you that there is other stuff to think about. It’s not that my answers have changed, I would still be happy traveling, working long hours, with diverse clients. But there’s other stuff I couldn’t even conceive of then, that I realized (the hard way) was very important to me.

So don’t be afraid to revisit your answers, to keep thinking, reevaluating, considering where you are and where you want to end up.

[hinabes]

A letter from the Food Fantasy writing team.

Source: xixi1226 on Lofter (They’re merely a relay, and so am I)

Touches on the writing of Food Fantasy as a whole and Black Forest Cake. Keep an open mind and be kind.

Only the parts specifically labeled as “TL note” is input by me (pretty sure there’s only one)

To all Master Attendants.

First of all, we may disappoint you, as we in the writing team are only responsible for the story, so we can't send out any in-game rewards. This is just the ramblings of some writing ladies.

Let's start with the past. Food Fantasy is almost 2 years old, and the writing team has been around for a long time as well.

From the bottom of our hearts, we know very well that our stories are mediocre, and very few members of the community actually read them.

At first, there were very few fan creations on Lofter, mostly inspired by the game arts. The first big burst in fanwork came from the haunted amusement park event.

When we saw the large amount (in our eyes) of fanworks, we were delighted.

That's right, we're lurking, watching from the shadows every day. Every! Day!

Though, due to work reasons and we've all got loose lips, we're not allowed to use our own accounts to like and comment on stuff.

Nonetheless, we're very thankful to everyone who comes to Lofter and uploads to the Food Fantasy tag!

To put it simply, a fanwork community like Lofter is built from all sorts of varying opinions, and that of course includes the dissatisfaction that some players have towards some characters.

As an author, our characters are like our children and seeing them hated, we can't deny that we're not saddened.

But of course, there must be a reason for a character to be hated.

A story, good or bad, must have an antagonist.

Whether people like or hate them, there's a reason for them to exist.

We created antagonists, besides out of necessity for the storyline, in hopes to show you a clearer Tierra, with all kinds of people with different points of view.

To be labeled an antagonist, these characters must have done some things unacceptable to the general public. They have their own stories to tell, and we would hate to claim any of them as completely innocent. The problem lies in something we hoped to doーーshow that bad people have pasts tooーーwe didn't do well enough.

This is our problem.

Be it because of a disliked ship or a character that's too grim.

We will use this experience and work even harder to write better characters and stories.

Once again, we thank everyone for putting your efforts into the tag, making your voices heard.

You've shown us, at the very least, that our efforts put into this or that character have been seen and that you're willing to voice out for them.

We take the time to read every single one of your posts. Perhaps putting it like that might make us seem egoistic.

Nevertheless, from the writing team, thank you!

We have seen lots and lots of the world of Tierra, it's not a pure world of only saints and innocents, it has a wide variety of characters.

The good, the bad, but no matter what, whatever anyone does is rooted in their own beliefs.

Such is the way in real life as well. Because of you, we have the motivation to push onwards.

At the same time, we wish that whatever negativity you have, you vent by enjoying the game, leaving the joy and happiness you have for reality. And that the game is able to release whatever pent up negativity you have from reality.

Thank you for voicing out your suggestions to us, and thank you for your love for the characters of Tierra!

From the bottoms of our hearts, we hope that the tag can thrive through the hard work of all of us, with more and more fan creations for everyone to look at. Because of your support, we have the courage to push onwards.

Thank you, everyone.

Formalities and heartfelt words done with, let's talk about things you're probably more interested in.

First off, we have seen everyone's dissatisfaction with Black Forest Cake.

Is she based off a certain unacceptable organization? Actually, no!

("You're wrong, I'm not!" Black Forest Cake yells)

The black forest cake is a famous German dessert that prides itself on its strict craftsmanship, maintaining its fame over its long history.

In Germany, if a patissier didn't make black forest cakes by the set recipe, such as swapping out ingredients and making it with vanilla sponge cake and strawberries instead and still selling it as "black forest cake", their shop would be swiftly shut down and the chef might even have to serve a term in prison, as the black forest cake is legally protected by the EU. (TL note: google "black forest cake protected status")

Compared to other desserts, the craftsmanship regulations for the black forest cake may be considered overly harsh. We've only seen Germans portrayed as strict on the internet as well. Combining these, we made Black Forest Cake a stickler for the rules.

Taking a step back, another factor is that when we were writing, we saw a lot of news reports about overbearing and manipulative parents, along with the stress and breakdowns of friends.

=-=.......

Um… At first, Black Forest Cake was modeled after a child who grew up with overbearing parents, who in turn enforced too many unreasonable rules on her own children, which resulted in their pent-up stress bursting out on her. The parent in this situation would never back off and would think it's the child at fault.

We're so sorry… Everyone, you think too highly of us… We know far less about military history than some of you do, and we're nowhere near as good at making connections… To bring up bad feelings, we're really… sorry…

Regarding the design of her clothing, this is the image we brought up as a suggestion: A punkish dress with military vibes.

(Gets on knees and apologizes)

We're so sorry, it's completely our fault that we didn't take into more consideration everyone's ability to make connections! But it's true, we really didn't! We really didn't!!!

QAQ We love this world! We're not an evil, anti-human organization!!

Black Forest Cake out of the way, let's talk about more stuff you might be interested in, the stuff many of you approach support about.

Q: Do Food Souls have genders? A: Food Souls' bodies are modeled after humans'. They're whatever gender they believe themselves to be, Hotdog's gender is hotdog.

Q: Can Food Souls [CENSORED]? A: ………..Modeled after…humans… um…….. when two Food Souls love each other very much… ummmm if we say more our boss is gonna beat us, you get the idea, don't come asking anymore!!!! Please!!!! QAQ

Q: Is there true love between Food Souls? A: Depends. The bigger your heart is, the more space you have in there. As they say, the stage extends as far as the heart goes.

Q: Are XXX and XXX shipped? What's the relationship between XXX and XXX!! A: … We said stop asking!!! We're gonna killed by our toxic male boss!!!! Please, please, please just read the story and make more fanworks. We definitely will see them.

Q: How much do you check Lofter? A: I know nobody asked this question, but. Your creations on Lofter may just become the inspiration for our next story, each of us checks Lofter as often as 4 or 5 times a day at most. Thanks, pl0x, next question.

Q: Anything to say? A: Thank you, everyone! We love you! (づ￣ 3￣)づ

Lastly, we hope that we can all take on the world with an open mind, express ourselves better, bring joy to everyone else, and with a strong positivity we can better ourselves as people.

Thank you to each and every one of you who read this far! We will continue working hard and do our best to deliver you heartfelt stories, both sad ones that have you bawling your eyes out and sweet ones that give you toothaches. Loving you always, the writing team.

ーーThoughts after half a month of overtime 21 August 2019