#puffins impossible

[bebx]

Johnny Depp with his Puffins Impossible character, Johnny Puff, by ILBE Studios in honor of Johnny’s 60th birthday ♡

[vfxserbia]

Puffins Impossible Interview

[austerulous]

Good morning gang! I’m still sick, and still isolating with the kids. My plan for today is to carry on with the web weavings and visit inboxes like a li’l positivity fairy. I’m also going to clean out my followers again. Might purge the dustiest asks from my inbox too.

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Comet Donati [Chapter 3: Steal My Girl]

A/N: Hello lovely readers! Thank you so so so much for the love this fic has received. I wanted to give you a heads up that I will be co-leading a field trip to Japan from July 4th-14th and will therefore have much less time to write. HOPEFULLY I won’t have to skip a Sunday update, but I wanted to make you aware just in case. I hope you enjoy Chapter 3!!! 💜

Series Summary: Sex, drugs, boy bands. You are a kinda-therapist recruited (via nepotism) to help Comet Donati through a recent crisis. Things are casual with Aegon, very not-casual with Aemond. Loosely inspired by One Direction.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sexual content (18+), drugs, alcohol, smoking, mental health struggles, Aegon-induced chaos, ANGST, Iceland, you cannot escape the Cookie Monster pajama pants.

Selected Chapter Quote: “So what, you don’t like me anymore?”

Word count: 8.3k (wtf I need to chill).

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @doingfondue @catalina-howard @randomdragonfires @myspotofcraziness @arcielee @fan-goddess @talesofoldandnew @marvelescvpe @tinykryptonitewerewolf @mariahossain @chainsawsangel @darkenchantress @not-a-glad-gladiator @gemini-mama @trifoliumviridi @herfantasyworldd @babyblue711 @namelesslosers @thelittleswanao3 @daenysx @moonlightfoxx @libroparaiso @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @mizfortuna @florent1s @heimtathurs @bhanclegane @poohxlove @narwhal-swimmingintheocean​ @heavenly1927 @mariahossain @echos-muses @padfooteyes​ @minttea07​

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist! 💜  

Athens, Madrid, Porto, Vienna, Stockholm, and now: descending into Reykjavik through clouds like iron. The North Atlantic is an endless sheen of cold overcast blue, a mirror of the sky. The earth is rocky and anemic. There are no jewel tones here, no sapphires or emeralds or aquamarines or fire opals or topazes. It is impossible to look down at Iceland, this dominion of impassionate jaggedness, and not think of how the Vikings had to reap their treasures from every other corner of Europe, silver and gold and glass and slaves piled into ships to be rowed back to the hostile earth they clung to, perhaps just to prove they could.

Across the aisle of the private jet—more like a penthouse than a plane, posh neutral colors and hand-stitched leather—Luke is showing Aemond his latest lyrics, loops of silver on matte black pages. They’re good, from what you’ve heard. They’re really good. And that tells you what kind of person Aemond truly is as he helps Luke polish rocks into gemstones. Anybody can soften the blow of mediocrity. It takes courage to build ladders for people who might one day outclimb you.

Daeron is playing his Nintendo 64, which is hooked up to a 98-inch flat screen tv; Mario is leaping through paintings into worlds of lava, ice, sentient ticking bombs. Criston is answering emails. Cregan is sprawled across a couch with his sunglasses on, presumably sound asleep. Jace is leering at you, dark hair hanging in his face and slurping a Vesper.

You ask him half-mocking: “What tattoo are you going to get for Reykjavik?”

He yanks off his sequined red blazer—nothing underneath, as usual—and twists around to show you the puffin on his left shoulder blade. Comet, at some point in time that preceded you, has already been to Iceland. “Cute, right? Wanna pet it?”

You roll your eyes. “I’m sorry I asked.”

He grins. “No you’re not.”

Aegon kicks the back of Jace’s chair. He’s scribbling some notes of his own, which is unusual. In place of a spiral notebook with onyx pages, Aegon is writing on crinkled Starbucks receipts with a Sharpie. He’s wearing his favorite aviator sunglasses, khaki cargo pants, an excessively bright cyan tank top, and matching Crocs.

Baela stares blankly out the window for a few seconds—like she’s buffering, a lagging connection—and then she looks to you hopefully. “Shopping when we land?”

“Does Iceland have shops…?”

“Probably more than Kansas,” Aemond says, then smiles mischieviously.

“Missouri,” you fling back. He returns his attention to Luke.

“They totally have shops in Iceland,” Baela assures you.

“Then I am amenable. I need more concert outfits.” You mostly wear your boy band t-shirts from home, which has become a joke: One Direction, Backstreet Boys, New Kids On The Block, NSYNC, the Jonas Brothers, Boyz II Men, 98 Degrees, BTS…but never Comet Donati. Anyone but them. Aegon calls you a traitor. Aemond teases, smirks, tries to hide how much he watches you the same way people contemplate art on museum walls, a little confounded, a little entranced.

“Rhaena?” Baela says. “Hello? Hello? Hola? Bonjour? Rhaena?”

Rhaena startles, peering up from her novel: Jurassic Park. Once upon a time, as you’ve learned, she had planned to study paleontology. She wants to be alone in the middle of a field someplace digging up bones. Well, no great tragedy there; one is never too old to be a paleontologist. She can take off five years, or ten years, or twenty, or thirty to see Luke through his touring days and then pick back up her own ambitions like keys left on a hook. But Baela gave up a ballet scholarship to follow Jace across the globe, puddle to puddle, land to land, and in your albeit limited understanding, ballerinas age in something like dog years. Their career is a brilliant, lightning-brief flash and then long, anonymous decades running out their mortal clock as choreographers, backup dancers, personal trainers, instructors for blue-blooded five-year-olds. Baela won’t be able to reclaim that dream for much longer. It might be too late already. She is out of practice; but she misses ballet. When Jace is being snide or oblivious, you’ve seen her gazing out windows—Escalades, hotels, jets—wondering if it was all worth it. You gut yourself for someone and they don’t even have the courtesy to put up a gravestone. It’s only natural to develop a propensity to haunt.

“What?” Rhaena asks.

“Shopping. This afternoon. Interested?”

Rhaena’s eyes go wide. She fidgets: closing and then opening her book, touching a hand to her earrings, delicate strings of small silver hearts. “Um…I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Oh, not this again,” Baela groans.

“Just go without me. Bring me back something, you know what I like.”

“What’s the problem?” You are investigative but not accusatory. The tone is essential.

“She’s scared of store employees,” Baela says.

“Well you don’t have to make it sound like that—!”

“What’s so scary about store employees?” you ask Rhaena, calm, cool, collected, nonjudgmental. Aemond glances over, as he often does when you’re working, like he can’t get enough of watching that switch flip, when you slink covertly into therapist mode like a water moccasin weaves through swamps, subtle ripples in the muddied water and vigilant eyes.

“I just hate it when people are watching me,” Rhaena says, twirling an earring. “They’re always waiting right by the door—especially at the posh places like the ones Baela goes to—and they want to know what I’m shopping for, and they want to make suggestions, and they follow me to the fitting room and ask what I like and what I don’t. And I can’t get rid of them! Even if I’m like ‘Just looking, thanks!’ they’ll circle back every five minutes to check on me. I can’t stand it. I get so frazzled I can’t decide how I really feel about a skirt or dress or whatever because I’m too busy trying to make conversation with someone I don’t want to talk to anyway. I end up with a headache and a shopping bag full of regrets. I’d rather click a button on my MacBook Air and save myself the suffering.”

You nod sagely. “What is it about talking to the employees that stresses you out so much?”

“I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. I don’t want to cause problems.”

“But it’s not like you’re going to do anything they haven’t experienced before. They see hundreds, maybe even thousands of customers a month. And even if you did something ridiculously, dementedly embarrassing, like…um…hey, Aegon, what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done while clothes shopping?”

“I fell asleep in a fitting room. I pissed on the floor. I set something on fire. I vandalized One Direction merchandise.”

“No, there was that other time,” Daeron says. Mario is swimming through rings of underwater coins; they chime gleefully as he collects them.

“What other time?” Aegon says.

Daeron grins. “Come on. You know.”

Aegon remembers. “Oh yeah. Once I bit a girl’s feet until I accidentally ripped off part of a toenail and she bled everywhere. But that wasn’t my fault. She was begging for it. It was consensual.”

Criston, not looking away from his emails, says: “And that’s why Aegon is now banned from all Michael Kors locations for life.”

“Right.” You turn back to Rhaena. “So you would never do anything that deranged. But even if somehow you did, what’s the actual worst-case scenario? What, realistically, could happen as a result?”

Rhaena considers this. “The employees will think I’m weird, I guess.”

“So what you’re so concerned about is that the store employees—who are literally paid to be inconvenienced by you—might think you’re weird? Which they’ll remember for, what, maybe an hour before some other customer gives them a more memorable calamity to focus on? You don’t think they’re more annoyed by purse-dog-toting heiresses screeching at them or cokeheads pissing on their floors?”

“Rude,” Aegon says.

Rhaena smiles guiltily. “I mean, when you put it that way, it does sound stupid.”

“Not stupid,” you insist. “Just out of proportion.”

“Okay,” Rhaena says. She takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Okay. I guess I’ll go shopping.”

“Yes!” Baela cheers, already scrolling through Reykjavik shops on her iPhone.

“Hey, Stargirl,” Aegon says, and then hurls something at you like a frisbee. It’s an Amex Black Card.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

You raise an eyebrow at him. “What’s my budget?”

“No budget. As long as it’s slutty.”

“I will buy nothing but cardigans and mom jeans.” You crane your neck to peek at his receipts. The black Sharpie squiggles aren’t words; they’re shapes, pictures. “What are you drawing?”

“New merch designs!” Aegon holds up the receipts so you can see.

“Circles…?”

He is somewhat wounded. “Donuts!”

You don’t even know where to begin. “Why donuts, Aegon?”

“Because that’s his code word for doing lines in the bathroom,” Criston says.

“No!” Aegon objects. “Because Donati sounds like donuts! So we could have all these mini donuts, print them on hats or shirts or whatever, and then in the frosting where the sprinkles would be we can put tiny stars, suns, moons, planets, galaxies…and comets, obviously.”

Jace scoffs. “I think you spend a little too much time thinking about donuts.”

Aegon goes quiet. So does everyone else. Gazes flit nervously around the cabin. The only sounds are the roar of the jet and Mario 64, although Daeron has turned his back on the cheerful Italian protagonist and is looking pensively over his shoulder at Jace. Aegon resumes sketching his cosmic Sharpie donuts, his lips pressed tightly together.

“Hey,” you say to Jace, and then once you have his attention, wicked dark eyes: “Shut the fuck up.”

“What?”

“It’s a great idea. It’s a really adorable idea, actually. Let’s see you come up with something better. Go on, whenever you’re ready. I’m waiting. I’m still waiting. But you’re not much of an ideas guy, are you, Jace? Fortunately, you’ve always had other people around to pull that weight.”

Jace opens his mouth to say something, then snaps it shut as Cregan stands up. He towers over you both, as tall as Aemond but more muscly all over, in the chest and the shoulders and the legs. He lowers his sunglasses to show his eyes: greyish, cold, flinty. He glares at Jace, and then at you, and then at Jace again. Jace holds up both hands, showing his palms. You bow your head in capitulation. Cregan lies back down on the couch and repositions his sunglasses just as the pilot turns on the fasten seatbelts signs. As you click yours into place, you exchange a glance with Aemond across the aisle. He is smiling, foxlike and approving, as if he can’t wait to see what else you have left to show him.

“So!” Baela says. “Guess who found a shop in Reykjavik that sells Gucci!”

The jet glides through mist and fog to make a rather bumpy landing at Keflavik International Airport, fighting against gusts of wind coming in off the North Atlantic Ocean, the same water that swallowed the Titanic, the Faucett Peru Boeing 727, the Free Life hot air balloon, whaling vessels and Viking longships, countless cruisers and destroyers and submarines that blasted holes into each other during the world wars. As the band prepares to disembark, Aemond reaches into the front pocket of his shirt—black, with white circling koi fish—and slides out a pair of sunglasses. He doesn’t like wearing them. They limit his vision even more than it already is. But he never walks into an airport without sunglasses on, you’ve discovered. Just in case paparazzi are there snapping photos.

“You don’t have to do that,” you tell Aemond.

He gestures to his scar and his blind eye, a pale cloudy blue. “I’ve thought about just getting it cut out. But then I’d have to worry about shoving in a fake one.”

“I think it’s kind of beautiful,” you say. “It reminds me of Neptune or something.”

And the look he gives you, the look, like he’s never heard anything like this before, like he didn’t know that words could fit together in that order. You hold out your hand to him. He lays the sunglasses in your palm. You put them on, grinning up at him.

“Now I’m the one who looks like a multi-millionaire popstar.”

“Hey, we match!” Aegon says as he follows you and Aemond out of the jet, massaging your shoulders and clopping noisily in his Crocs.

There are paparazzi at the airport, but only two of them, young men in black hoodies who dart around loosing flashes into the stuffy, aggressively heated air. Jace, Baela, Daeron, and Aegon beam and wave, radiant, magnetic, born celebrities. Rhaena smiles politely but hides behind Luke. Cregan saunters and smolders, knowing exactly what his devotees expect from him. Criston and the security guards are loaded up with suitcases like pack mules. The paparazzi don’t pay much attention to Aemond—a former heartthrob, a cracked relic, a fossil or a ruin—but one of them snaps a few pictures of him. Aemond turns his face so they’ll get his good side, his unmarred side…and then he grabs for your hand. You try not to reveal how ecstatic you are, how wildly, uncoolly, over-the-moon thrilled. Your expression might end up commemorated forever in a tabloid, after all.

Shopping in Reykjavik is mostly wool sweaters, hiking boots, and weather-proof jackets, but Baela leads you and Rhaena to a boutique that carries something more her speed: Gucci, Burberry, Balenciaga, Valentino, Saint Laurent. You and Baela try to distract the employees as much as possible; still, they find time to nettle Rhaena with those bothersome, predictable, unnecessary questions. She gets a little flustered, but she fights the instinct to run and hide, to allow herself to sink into a frenetic puddle of self-inquisition. You can almost see the words scrolling behind her dark gentle eyes like a news ticker: They get paid to help me. They aren’t going to remember any of this in a few hours. I’m not on a stage. I’m not being judged.

In the fitting room, you take two selfies to send to Aemond’s WhatsApp account: one in a flowing neon yellow gown, the other in a short, velvet, sparkly black dress embroidered with silver stars.

You ask: Day or night?

He answers before you’ve changed back into your jeans and pink Harry Styles hoodie. Night, obviously. And then he adds: Which constellation are you? Vulpecula the fox? Cygnus the swan?

“God, he’s such a dork,” you murmur to yourself, smiling. You have to think for a while before you reply. You don’t know many constellations; that makes it difficult to rattle off something witty. Then you are inspired. You type: Definitely not Virgo :)

He responds immediately: :)))))

“What does that mean?” you whisper to yourself in the solitude of the boxlike fitting room. “What the hell does that mean???” He spends nearly all of his time with you, but he rarely touches you. He’s never made a move. He’s never even kissed you. You wouldn’t mind if he did. No, fuck the coyness that women are supposed to cloak themselves in to preserve their worth. You’re waiting for him to kiss you like someone drowning waits for a gasp of air.

Despite Aemond’s vote, you can’t help yourself. You buy both dresses. You don’t look much like an Aegon Targaryen, but the cashier doesn’t seem too troubled by this. Baela and Rhaena are still trying on outfits, so you swing your bag around boredly and wander over to see what Criston is up to. At Aemond’s insistence, he accompanied you on this shopping expedition and left the rest of the security detail back at the Reykjavik EDITION, a luxury hotel overlooking the harbor. Criston is in the jewelry section and holding up a medallion necklace, rotating it to see how the light reflects off the speckling of tiny gemstones, the wise golden face. His own face is distant and melancholy.

“Oh, that’s lovely, Criston!” you say. “All those emeralds. Who’s pictured on it?”

“Saint Jude. Lost causes.”

Interesting. “Are you religious?”

“Not especially. But Alicent is.”

“Who…?”

Criston walks off to the cash register. You watch him go, curious and perplexed.

Back at the hotel, you enter your suite to find a blond Targaryen lounging in your bed…but perhaps not the right one. Aegon still has his Crocs on and is, for some reason, clutching a plushie puffin. He glances over at you, noting your shopping bag.

“Fashion show?” he says. “I hope it’s nothing but miniskirts and bikinis.”

“Don’t you have places to be? Substances to snort?”

“Cregan is currently trying to locate some.”

“That’s really not good for you. Physically or mentally. You might be addicted.”

He barks a laugh, like it’s absurd. “You can’t get addicted to coke, Stargirl.”

“You definitely can.”

He suddenly looks panicked, like he’s never considered this before.

“So.” You hesitate. “Aemond.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the concept.”

“He’s insecure. Very insecure, though he’s learned how to hide it.”

Aegon throws and catches the puffin, bouncing it off the ceiling. “I wouldn’t disagree.”

“It goes deeper than the accident, I think. The scar, his eye, what happened with the band…that awakened it again. That freed something that he’d had locked away. But where did it start?”

Aegon stares up at the ceiling. He tosses the puffin a few more times, abusing it terribly. “Whoever you are when you’re in high school…that’s sort of who you are forever, you know? If you’re popular and beloved and understood, you carry a certain self-confidence into the rest of your life with you like a suitcase. It’s an assumption that people care about what you have to say. It’s a conviction of your own value. It’s a presupposition the world would have to wrestle away from you. But if you’re a loser in high school, that stays with you too. And it’s one hell of a heavy suitcase to lug around.”

You try to imagine seeing Aemond through eyes that aren’t awed, craving, quietly adoring. It’s simply not possible. “He was alone?” you ask softly, dreading the answer.

“I had friends. He had grudges.” Aegon’s mouth twists as he tries to stop it from trembling. “My father…”

“I know, Aegon.” Your voice is gentle. “You told me in Kansas City, that night at the bar. You don’t have to say it again.”

He is relieved. “Yeah. So people respond to that in different ways, right? I lived in the present. I talked to anybody who would listen to me, and I partied and I got high and I got laid, and I was the antithesis of the kind of son my father would have wanted just to spite him. Aemond escaped into the past. He read books, traced bloodlines, collected old obsolete things. Maybe that gave him hope that a better place was waiting for him out there somewhere, a better time. He got to be cool for three years. That’s it, and that’s all he’ll ever have. He was the one with vision. He said he was going to audition for The X Factor, and I only went with him to meet girls. Then he made it through the first round and I did too. And when they were going to cut us, he found Jace and Luke and Cregan and convinced everyone to start performing together. The show wanted to replace Luke, did you know that? They thought he was too boyish, too innocent. Aemond fought for him. And then Comet finished in second place, and all the sudden we were signed to a label, and we were selling millions of records and we were touring, and we were winning Grammys, and we were buying our parents and siblings houses…and two months after our third album came out, Aemond was maimed at the Budokan and it was time for him to get off the ride.”

You stare at Aegon, tremendously sad, not knowing what to say. Sometimes the right words don’t exist.

Aegon smirks. “He really likes you.”

“Maybe.” And then, with guileless vulnerability: “I hope so.”

“That’s dangerous.”

Your brow knits into fearful grooves. “Why?”

“I know how to enjoy something without owning it. I don’t think Aemond does.”

You don’t want to ask, but you have to. “What was Shelby like?”

Aegon considers this for a long time before he answers. “She was simultaneously too good for him and not good enough.”

Too gorgeous. Too cool. Too Pinterest-board perfect, airy like summer. But not deep. A river, a glimmer, but with no understanding of the abyss. You aren’t sure how you know that this is what Aegon means, but you do. You don’t want to think about Shelby anymore. You pivot. “So Aemond is the past and you’re the present. Who’s the future? Daeron?”

Aegon smiles, lazy and warm. “I think you’re the future.”

“Yeah right. Get your Crocs off my bed.”

He complies, groaning, flopping onto the floor gracelessly.

“Where’d you get the puffin?”

“Some Icelandic kid recognized me in the elevator. He wanted to give me a present. In return, I signed an autograph and got him and his dad front row seats to the show tomorrow. So I’d say it was a very favorable exchange for him.”

“You’re a saint,” you say, and then find yourself thinking randomly of Saint Jude again. Lost causes. Lost causes.

Aegon grins at you as he crawls to his feet and makes for the door. “Patron saint of mayhem.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You’re watching old Comet Donati performances on YouTube when the hotel fire alarm goes off. And it’s strange, because the unscarred, clear-eyed boy on the screen is Aemond but also isn’t him; he smiles more easily, he looks at people without suspicion, he is ebullient and confident and carefree like kids blowing bubbles on front porches. When you open your suite door, dressed in your favorite Cookie Monster pajama pants and an oversized New Kids On The Block t-shirt, Aemond is just arriving.

“Oh good,” he says. “You’re still awake.” And then he walks with you to the nearest stairwell.

Outside, the hotel guests are clustered together with their travel companions, shuddering under coats and sweaters and blankets clasped around their shoulders like capes. Even at the start of July, Iceland is cold: fifties during the day as Americans like you measure in Fahrenheit, forties at night, nearly always overcast. It’s 11 p.m., but the sun won’t set until midnight, and even then only for a few short hours; the sky is wearing the colors of dusk, lilac, rose pink, pale blue, fire and gold. You’re shivering, rubbing your bare forearms and feeling the goosebumps that have risen there like braille. Aemond tugs off his black and white Calvin Klein hoodie and offers it to you. As you pull it over your head, you breathe in the pieces of him that have snared in the fabric: smoke and cologne, gin and soap and the brine of the seaside air. Now wearing only his jeans and his koi fish shirt, Aemond lights a cigarette and gazes up at the hotel, postmodern angles and semi-transparent glass.

“No one’s going to give me a hoodie?” Aegon says, quaking in his cyan tank top. Criston reluctantly unzips his bomber jacket and hands it over.

“Did you do this?” Criston asks him, meaning the fire alarm.

“What?! No! No way, man! It wasn’t me!”

Criston turns to Cregan for confirmation. Cregan shrugs, ambiguous. “I knew it!” Criston exclaims. He is distraught.

Several fire engines arrive, red lights strobing, and firefighters enter the hotel to investigate. Baela and Jace are standing near each other but not speaking, arms crossed, faces tense. Luke, Rhaena, and Daeron are watching an episode of The Crown on Luke’s iPhone. Cregan lights a cigarette and manages to take two drags before Criston notices and lunges to bat it out of his hand.

“Stop it!” Criston orders. “You’ll ruin your voice!” Nobody tells Aemond not to smoke. His voice doesn’t matter anymore.

Aegon asks you, his hands buried in the pockets of Criston’s jacket: “Would you run into a burning building to save me?”

“Why would you be in a burning building?”

“That’s really not the point.”

“I’d think about it.”

Luke says, the glow of his iPhone dancing across his face: “Wow, Prince Charles is a bitch.”

“You’d think about it?” Aegon says to you. “You’d think about it?!”

“You have no excuse to be in a burning building. You have now experienced an evacuation, you know exactly how to leave a building successfully, if you’re still in it for some reason then that’s your problem.”

“You hear that, Criston?” Aegon says. “This is a good thing. Now everyone knows what to do if there’s a real fire! And we’re in hotels all the time, so this is super helpful!”

“Please shut up,” Criston begs.

“Hey Cregan, share with the class, what did you learn about fire safety from this fortuitous occasion?”

“I already knew what to do.”

Aegon is grinning. “Yeah? What’s that, Cregan?”

“Get in the shower and wait for the fire department to come rescue me.”

Everyone laughs—even Jace and Baela—and Cregan’s lips quirk up in one corner, the only hint that he is joking. A parade of firefighters exit the hotel. One of them is carrying a toaster. Black smoke pours out of the slits in the top.

She says something in Icelandic that you can’t understand, then repeats in English: “Who was trying to cook hotdogs in a toaster?”

The guests chatter incredulously among themselves: Who would do such a thing?

You, Aemond, Luke, Rhaena, Daeron, Cregan, Jace, Baela, and Criston are mindful to look anywhere except at Aegon. You gaze out at the horizon, the kaleidoscopic midnight sun. Aegon peers down at his Crocs, hair tangled and blue eyes wide.

“Very well,” the firefighter with the toaster says, a little smugly. “We will consult with the hotel staff and see which guest was registered to that room.”

“Goddammit!” Criston hisses, and shoves by the band to go meet the firefighters. You can’t hear what’s being said, but his hands move in exaggerated gestures of humiliation, apology, restitution. Fortunately, the Icelandic people seem to be forgiving.

Daeron turns to Aegon. All he says is: “Why?”

“I couldn’t figure out the buttons on the stove!”

Criston comes trudging back to the band. Guests are being admitted into the hotel to return to their drinks, their television shows and mystery novels, their families, their lovers, their beds. “Alright, it’s taken care of. Go to your rooms. All of you, right now, go.”

No one has the heart to argue with him; he looks half-broken already. Everybody disperses. You and Aemond end up alone together as the elevator zooms to the fifth floor. He takes his small, square metal lighter out of his jeans pocket and toys with it, repeatedly flicking the lid open and then shutting it again.

You point to it. “Vintage lighter. Vintage bike. And yet you write with glittery gel pens instead of quills and ink. Poser.”

“I like old things,” he says, smiling. “I think history is important.”

And you hear Aegon’s words like an echo: That’s dangerous. You start pulling off Aemond’s hoodie to give it back to him.

“No,” he says, sounding pleased. “You keep it.” So you do, finding excuses to bring the sleeves close to your face—touching your hair, your lips, your eyelashes—so you can inhale him.

Aemond leaves you at the door of your suite, but you don’t go inside. You wait for another five minutes until Criston steps out of an elevator and into the hallway, alone and agitated. Still, he has concern to spare for you.

“You okay? Locked yourself out?”

“No. I was just hoping to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.” Criston is tired, but his eyes, dark like fertile earth, are attentive.

“When Aemond was hurt…when the label yanked him out of Comet…no one fought for him?”

“Luke did,” Criston says.

And then he continues down the hall, shoulders low, a man troubled by both the past and the future.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Blue Lagoon is like Aemond’s sightless left eye: a milky blue, opaque, something you could drown in. The band spends several hours splashing and wading in water warmer than the blood in your veins. The white silica mud that forms the floor is soft beneath your bare feet, squishing between your toes; people spread it over their skin like a skin shedding its scales in reverse. Criston orders strawberry-banana smoothies from the in-water bar, trying to distract Aegon and Jace from the beer and the wine. Currently, Comet’s most worrisome performers are locked in combat: Daeron is on Aegon’s shoulders, Luke on Jace’s, entangled in a spirited chicken fight. This is much preferable to their first choice, Marco Polo, which led to Jace ‘accidentally’—and repeatedly—bumping into various early-twenties female tourists, whereupon he would inevitably profusely apologize, introduce himself, and pose for selfies, beads of turbid mineral water dripping from his curls. Cregan has drifted to the other side of the lagoon, floating on his back and basking beneath the overcast midday sun.

“I can’t believe they made everyone shower naked before getting in here,” Rhaena says, drinking her smoothie, submerged in rippling blue up to her collarbones. She had nearly refused to go through with it—I’ll wait in the car! I’ll be fine! I’ll just watch The Crown on my phone for three hours!—until you and Baela offered to hold up your towels to shield her from view and insisted that none of the other guests (all female, as the showers are sorted by gender) were paying attention. Nudity is not a big deal in Iceland. It’s quite a far cry from Missouri.

“You gotta honor the local culture, babe.” Baela flashes Rhaena a teasing grin. “Scandinavians are super progressive. No shame about bodies or relationships. Very sex-positive.”

“Well Jace is certainly blending in.”

Now Baela isn’t grinning anymore. She frowns broodingly out over the lagoon. Rhaena, regretting that she said it but knowing it can’t be taken back, noisily slurps at her smoothie even when it’s gone. You and Aemond exchange an uncomfortable glance. Baela has never broached the topic of her relationship with you, but you know it’s coming. You can sometimes see her working up the nerve like a bucket filling with water, drop by drop.

You change the subject. “See, Rhaena? The naked shower thing wasn’t even that bad. It was over in two minutes, and absolutely nobody was judging you. And if you hadn’t done it, you would have missed out on this amazing experience!”

“You weren’t nervous?” she asks you. “Not at all?”

“I little bit, yeah. Of course. I’m an American.” Everyone chuckles. “But logically, I knew no one would really be watching me. I’m not that interesting. And also…I wasn’t truly naked.”

“Huh…?”

You wiggle your eyebrows and, smiling radiantly, spin around and point to the black-ink tattoo between your shoulder blades, underscored by the straps of your swimsuit that cross just below it: a comet with a streaming tail, lyrics that Aemond dreamed up in a kinder world. Rhaena laughs.

“Oh, right, of course.”

“You are obsessed with that thing!” Baela says, but she sounds relatively happy again.

“It’s true. I am. I admit it.” Sometimes you find yourself staring at it in hotel bathroom mirrors still foggy with steam, wiping away condensation to marvel at the irrevocable ways in which Aemond has marked you, ways you are thankful cannot be erased. When you wear anything that reveals your upper back like a spilled secret, you often catch Aemond gazing at it too. Now he reaches over and skims a fingerprint along the circle that his lyrics form around the comet:

I’ll come back for you if it kills me

Comets clip by again after eons and so can I

There’s a jolt down your spine like lightning, but more eager than jarring. All other thoughts vanish from you. You look over at Aemond, and he looks back, his lips slightly parted, his right eye beckoning to you. And you know it will be good with him, if it happens, when it happens. It will be more than good. It will be laced with an intensity, with a dire breed of necessity that you’ve never tasted before. All at once, you and Aemond realize what you’ve done and drift away from each other again, weakening gravity, elliptical orbits.

“No shame, guys,” Baela quips, raising her smoothie glass in a toast. “Sex-positive, remember?”

After the 45-minute drive back to Reykjavik, and after the concert, the band coalesces in Jace’s suite. There aren’t many hangers-on for this stop of the tour; Reykjavik is isolated and peaceful and not particularly desirable for friends of convenience who are more interested in clubbing and drugs than camaraderie. You wouldn’t trade nights like this for anything in the world.

Aemond is reading off his latest notes, white ink on black paper, stars on the backdrop of the universe. A Benson & Hedges cigarette smolders between two fingers on his left hand. Smoke curls up around his face. “Aegon, you were three steps behind the choreography for basically the entire show.”

“Yeah, that was on purpose.”

“It wasn’t,” Aemond counters, but he can’t help but smile.

“Women love a tragic disaster of a man who is screaming to be fixed.”

“Daeron,” Aemond continues. “I really like that hair flip you’ve started doing…”

Aegon is knocking back dark glass bottles of Gædingur Stout and slurring, very drunk and sinking deeper by the minute. In the absence of coke, he has resorted to other crutches. You are squeezed between Aemond and Baela on one of the couches. And Aemond isn’t really touching you, but he also is: the delicious subtle pressure of his thigh against yours, occasional nudges of his elbow, ostensibly unintentional grazes of knuckles and palms. He’s drinking his usual, a Bramble, and so are you, swirls of slow-moving pink like drops of blood in open water. And you think in a hazy bliss like listening to ground-level conversations from the bottom of a swimming pool: Tonight, tonight, tonight, he’s going to come back to my room with me tonight.

“Oh great,” you mumble as you check your Facebook messages on your iPhone.

“What’s wrong?” Rhaena asks. She’s nestled against Luke on the opposite couch, twirling locks of his hair around her benign, delicate fingers. Jace is sitting beside Luke, drinking a Vesper and trying not to make eye contact with Baela. Daeron is in the fuzzy white sheepskin lounge chair, Cregan perched on a bar stool, Criston standing watchfully with a vivid green bottle of Perrier in one hand. When he briefly steps out onto the balcony to take a call from the label, you can hear only the most dim, indistinct murmurings through the thick tinted glass, sounds but not words. Aegon is sitting—and occasionally crawling around—on the floor. The Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way is playing.

“I’m subletting my apartment in Kansas City and there is a strict no pet policy. But my neighbors snitched on the new tenant and apparently she’s got a Flemish Giant rabbit living there with her.”

“Not even a normal rabbit,” Baela muses. “A giant rabbit.”

You sigh. “All the rugs are going to be chewed up by the time I get back.” And Aemond glances over anxiously, like he doesn’t want any reminders that you won’t always be around.

“What’s your apartment like?” he says.

“Old. Vintage. Most of it hasn’t been updated since the 1950s. You’d appreciate it, actually. It would match your aesthetic.”

“Maybe I’ll have to see it sometime.”

You smirk at him, flirtatious, baiting, the silver stars on your dress reflecting golden lamplight. “Maybe. If I invite you.”

He leans in to whisper so only you can hear: “You will.”

“I think I’d be a landlord if I wasn’t famous,” Jace says, nursing his Vesper meditatively like an aspiring philosopher. “I’d just sit back and collect the checks as they rolled in. And you get to raise the rent every year.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you,” Aegon says, grinning up at him saccharinely.

“What would you be, Stargirl?” Jace asks; and you realize you hate the sound of him using Aegon’s name for you.

“I mean, a therapist.” And everyone laughs, even Criston.

Jace flushes, brushing his curls back from his face with one hand. “Oh yeah. Clearly.”

You look to Aemond. “You’d be a historian or an archivist or something.”

“Or a writer,” Luke says.

“Maybe,” Aemond agrees, a tad uncomfortable with the attention. “Or an animal activist, maybe. I’d like to do some sort of good in the world.”

Aegon shouts, far more loudly than necessary: “What would you be, Criston?”

“Thousands of miles away from you.” More laughter, riotous; but Criston is smiling a little.

“What about you, Cregan?” Jace asks. “What would you want to be if Comet didn’t exist?”

Cregan downs a shot of Absolut Vodka. “A plastic surgeon.”

“What? Why?”

Cregan shrugs. “You get to see tits all the time.”

There are scandalized squeals and guffaws. Baela says: “I would not let you anywhere near my tits.”

“And not just tits!” Daeron adds brightly. “Don’t they do, what’s it called, vaginal rejuvenation?”

Cregan points at him with his empty shot glass. “Exactly.”

“Oh God, that sounds painful.” Rhaena hides her face behind a flute of champagne.

“Yeah,” you say. “I don’t think I’m interested.”

Aegon snorts, drips of Gaedingur Stout flying from his nose. “Like you’d ever need it. You’ve got a pornstar pussy, fucking gorgeous.”

A hush sweeps through the room like a dust storm. Baffled glances dart around wildly. Immediately, Aegon realizes his mistake. He gazes up at you from the floor with large, glazed, drunken blue eyes that glisten with apology. You gape back, half-furious and half-petrified.

“Wait, what?” Aemond says. Ashes build on his cigarette, forgotten.

“Oh, wow.” Jace gestures from you to Aegon. “You guys…you guys have…?”

“It was once, a long time ago,” you say quickly. “Like, a really long time ago. Over a year ago.”

Aegon is trying to help. “Ages ago. Ancient history.”

“Where? In Kansas City?!” Baela gasps, stunned.

Aegon tells her: “You remember that bar we all went to after the show, right? The one on the roof?”

Baela is blinking at you, not comprehending. “You hooked up with him? In a bar?! Aegon?!”

“Um, yeah.”

Jace brays out a laugh, shaking his head. “Damn, Stargirl. I thought you had better taste than that.”

You feel like you’re fighting for your life. You feel like you can’t breathe. “It really wasn’t serious…” Not the sex part, anyway.

“No, no, it totally wasn’t,” Aegon agrees gamely. “It was like, what? How long were we in that bathroom? Maybe ten minutes total?”

Daeron is giggling. “Bruh, stop roasting yourself!”

As the chatter flies, you hide your face in your hands; beneath your palms, your cheeks are hot. You can feel Aemond pulling away from you, spaces opening up between your thighs and shoulders and arms like the ever-expanding void of the universe. When you steal a glimpse of him through the cracks in your fingers, he is staring down at the floor. He is silent, but you can see the thoughts—the images—riddling him like bullets. You can see him filling up with them like a punctured ship fills with seawater. He smokes until his cigarette is gone, and then immediately lights another.

Luke is the one to mercifully intercede. “Hey, Criston, where are we going next?”

“Uh,” Criston says, trying not to gawk at you or Aegon. “Let me think. Uh. Oh, right. Paris.”

Jace cackles. “The city of love! How appropriate!”

Criston ignores him. “You have some press interviews and then you’re doing two shows at the Accor Arena on July 7th and 8th…”

Aemond gulps down the rest of his Bramble and then walks out onto the balcony, closing the sliding glass door behind him.

“Fuck,” Aegon sighs miserably, then guzzles his Gaedingur Stout.

You bolt off the couch and go after Aemond. The heavy sliding glass door growls as you roll it open and then shut it again. Outside, Reykjavik is cold and windswept. The midnight sun is aflame. It’s still too bright to see the Northern Lights; even if they were there, you would have no way of knowing. Aemond is smoking with his back to you. He’s looking out over the boats bobbing in the harbor, sunbeams glinting on the crests of waves. Flapping gulls swoop and scream.

You say cuttingly, like a surgeon slicing away malignancies: “So what, you don’t like me anymore?”

Aemond flicks ashes over the balcony railing. “I just think I understand you better.”

“What does that mean?”

He whirls to you and says pointedly: “Why are you here?”

A disorienting question. Too easy. “I followed you out onto the balcony.”

“No, here with the band, here in Reykjavik, why are you here?”

You know how the truth sounds, but you can’t rewrite it. “Because Aegon asked me to be.”

“Because he asked you to come fix me, right?” Aemond demands. “To crack open my skull and stir things around until I’m okay with the fact that my life ended seven months ago.”

“No!” you shout into the wind. “I mean, yes, he thought I’d be able to help you, to help Comet, but that’s not what this is about for me anymore—”

“Why would I believe you? You’re a liar, you’re a confirmed liar, why would I believe a single goddamn word of what you have to say?!”

“I didn’t lie to you!”

“Friends!” Aemond roars. He doesn’t touch you, but his rage is horrifying, ageless and deep like lava bubbling beneath tectonic plates. “You said you and Aegon were friends!”

“We are friends—”

“No, you’re not. You met him, you fucked him, and then when he invited you to join the tour you dropped everything to do it, why, because you still want him? And I’m the charity case? Or I was just next in line? Maybe you were planning to work your way through the whole band. Who’s next, Jace? I don’t think he’d object.”

“No—!”

“You and Aegon. And you didn’t even have the guts to tell me.”

“Because I didn’t want to have this conversation, the one where you eviscerate me for something that happened before I even met you!”

“You chose him,” Aemond says, venomous. “At the bar in Kansas City, you chose him.”

“What?! Aemond, I don’t even remember seeing you, I don’t think you were there at all—”

“I was there.” He glares at you, thunderstorms, tornadoes, the earth splitting in two. “Last June. Rooftop bar. String lights. View of the river. I remember it, I was there.”

“Well then you didn’t notice me either and you probably spent the whole night with Pilates princess, Malibu Barbie Shelby, so what’s the fucking point?!”

He glowers at the horizon. Iceland DOES have jewel tones, you think erratically. But they only come out at night, like owls or bats. “It’s different.”

“It’s not different! You’re so convinced people don’t like you that you do insane, irrational things that make people not like you! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy! It’s a fucking circle, you idiot!”

“I’ve had enough psychoanalysis, thanks.”

“No, you could use some more of it, you could use a lot more, you have so many demons it’s like Paranormal Activity in your brain, they’re in there all day tearing things off the walls and kicking over chairs and sabotaging anything you dare to care about and you let them!”

He turns away from you. “Just go the fuck back to Kansas.”

“I’m from Missouri!”

Aemond pitches the end of his cigarette over the balcony. His good eye flicks to the sliding glass door. The curtains rustle as the faces that hovered there just seconds ago disappear back into the suite. Very muffled through the thick glass, you can hear Criston chastising people.

You ask Aemond, embers in your throat: “This is really something you consider unforgiveable?”

He shakes his head, mournful, violently disappointed. “You’re just a groupie. You’re just a slut.”

Slut. It’s not the word, it’s the way he said it, with dismissiveness, with condemnation, the same way men love to use it as a blade to carve off every other piece of you—kindness, coldness, ferocity, loyalty, wit, passion, talent, triumphs, failures, ghosts—until that one little word is all that’s left. You’re dismantled into a clutter of loose bolts and bent nails. You’re a beef cow that was led into the maze of a gnashing, metal-and-blood processing plant and came out the other side a brainless, raw-pink patty just the right size to fit in a Big Mac box, something to be consumed but not remembered. “What did you say to me?”

He’s staring out into the twilight sky, both hands on the balcony railing. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe I…”

“Are you kidding me?! I can’t believe I got your lyrics tattooed on my fucking back, what am I supposed to do about that now, rip my own skin off?!”

“So get it covered up. I’m sure Aegon would be thrilled to help you choose a new design, or Jace, or Cregan, or Daeron, or whoever.”

“You know what I think?” you say, caustic like acid.

“Don’t say it,” he threatens, low and dark.

“I think you haven’t fucked anyone since the accident, and you’re terrified to. But you shouldn’t be, Aemond. Because there’s nothing wrong with you. There has never been anything wrong with you.”

But he doesn’t hear that part. He only hears the first thing, what you never should have said at all. It’s true, but that doesn’t mean you should have said it. “I hate you,” he says softly, and you can’t think of a reply. The space between you fills up with wind, cold, dying sunlight. Aemond looks at the sliding glass door. “I don’t want to go back in there.”

“Well, we’re five stories off the ground, so you’ll probably have to.”

He studies the series of balconies that run along this side of the hotel, each separated by perhaps three feet of open air. Then he starts climbing over the metal railing.

“Aemond, don’t!”

But it’s too late. Fortunately, he has long limbs. He scrambles onto the next balcony, and then the one after that, and then one more, until he reaches the balcony for his own suite. He tries the sliding glass door—locked—and then sits down to wait for someone to open it. You go back inside Jace’s suite, where everyone pretends to have been talking about something other than you.

“Where’s Aemond?” Criston says, alarmed.

“He’s on the balcony of his suite. You should go let him in.”

“What?!” Criston yells, and then sprints out into the hallway.

You flee too. Both Baela and Aegon try to stop you, try to talk to you. They’re asking what Aemond said. They’re asking if you’re okay. You tell them you’re fine and that you want to be left alone. They argue. You insist. You walk back to your own room and start packing.

Your suitcase fills up with crumpled clothes and souvenirs: a Colosseum pencil sharpener from Rome, a tiny alabaster Apollo from Athens, a Spanish fighting bull refrigerator magnet from Madrid, handmade soap from Porto, a bar of chocolate from Vienna, a moose snow globe from Stockholm, a silica mud mask from the Blue Lagoon, a tiny stuffed comet that Rhaena crocheted for you. You reach back to touch your fingertips to the comet tattooed over your spine, tears biting in your eyes. If I had told him from the start, would that have made a difference? If I had met him first, would we have had a chance? You are gathering up your makeup when you hear a knock on the doorframe.

Cregan lurks there. When he speaks, he sounds startled; he sounds afraid. “You can’t leave.”

“I’ve literally never had a conversation with you, so thanks for the input but I’m still going.”

“No,” he says, persistent. “You can’t leave.”

“Aemond doesn’t want me here.” Your voice is fragile, shattering. “I can’t help him anymore.”

“It’s not just about Aemond. It’s about everyone. They’re all fucked up. They all need you.”

You stare at Cregan, not understanding. “I really don’t think I’m equipped for this.”

He fixes his cool greyish eyes on you. He is harsh but somehow not unkind. “You would never be able to comprehend where I came from. I’m not going back to that. The band has given me everything. I’m not going to let anyone take that away from me. You have to stay. You have to fix Comet. You can’t leave.”

He watches you, and you watch him, and you aren’t sure who has the upper hand here, who is the predator and who is the prey. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe everyone is a patchwork of strengths and deficits, fields of gold strewn with landmines.

At last, you relent. And Cregan doesn’t vanish until you’ve begun taking your souvenirs out of your suitcase and placing each of them—carefully, reverently—back on your nightstand where they were before.

[jnnul]

nct dream in college

a/n: my third fucking time posting this istg this is why i quit the first time tumblr let me post things in peace

word count: 2.6k

tags: idk the frattiest boys in town doing what college dudes do, just fluff, hinting at insecurity + fear for the future, and a couple mentions of ppl not following their dreams for practicality sake but what can u do tw: mentions of drinking & underage drinking, mentions of sex but no graphics

Originally posted by choi-soobin

gif creds: @choi-soobin​

finance bro w a music minor

i’m so sorry to all of the ppl who hc him as a nerdy music kid who just always thinks abt music

but that boy is a finance bro thru and thru and i will die on that hill

he’s in a frat but he’s honestly rlly shitty abt act going to the non-party frat stuff

and even the parties, he rlly only goes to bc he dj’s every single time

ppl get annoyed sometimes bc mark always tries to slip in some of his stuff into the mix but it’s honestly so good that he gets away w it

his homies make fun of him for it but he sits in the first three rows bc a) he’s fucking blind and b) he act rlly likes finance

like he enjoys the idea of finance + what he could do w it in the future

even if he doesn’t necessarily like business calc

goes to church on sundays (if he’s not hungover) and will be so respectful abt it that he convinces some of his non-christian friends to go to

mark has a good rep on campus for being an all around pretty chill dude

everyone’s also half convinced that he’s a plug

swears up and down that he doesn’t smoke but ppl have videos of him puffin like it’s his side hustle

it is

kinda sticks to his own friend group bc he’s a little shy

but when he’s drunk (when someone wrestles him out of his little dj booth to do shots w them)

he knows everyone and their mother all of a sudden

kinda cute when he’s drunk cause he’s rlly lovey

ppl kinda like like him as that cute guy in their class but he never rlly goes out of his way to pursue anyone so anyone who’s interested has to be the one who chases

isn’t clueless but is oblivious until one day you’re basically sitting on his lap during lecture and he’s like 😟🤨🧐😏

the day he gets cuffed tho literally no one can pull him apart from his girl

Originally posted by rainbowrenjun

gif creds: @rainbowrenjun​

so...this might be controversial

but i think renjun would be a international relations major, not an art major

i feel like he’s a practical guy and he likes art but not enough to pursue it as a livelihood yannowhatimean

isn’t that well connected on campus bc he keeps his friend circle very exclusive but literally everybody and their mother knows him

kinda has a reputation for being a little cliquey but he gets away w it bc he’s just genuinely a decent guy who’s on the more private side

you will never catch him drunk

like he def won’t be sober at parties but you’re never gonna see him stumbling around

the type of guy to keep an eye on a girl’s cup if she leaves it somewhere, even if no one asks him to

also volunteers on the weekends at a local shelter for ppl of different nationalities

a private guy tho. ppl rlly don’t get to know or understand him unless they’re part of his friend group

which is nearly impossible to join

just kinda cruisin’ thru life bc he’s unproblematic and just rlly wants to get a degree and dip

gets the some of the best grades out of his friends (jeno is the only one who does better and jaemin make a close second) but donghyuck insists it’s bc renjun’s major isn’t a real major

chenle threatens to send the video of donghyuck and renjun slipping on their asses and falling into the pool as renjun tried to fight donghyuck to every single person that renjun even considers seeing romantically

probably dates once a year, eventually falls out of attraction and then swears off dating

until donghyuck gets on his ass abt not having sex and then renjun’s competitive streak gets activated

during which he speed dates for like three weeks before finding someone and then trying to date them

isn’t very emotionally invested in his romantic relationships

except for one of them, and ever since they told renjun off, he was unseperable from them

renjun may or may not have a masochist streak it’s still unclear

Originally posted by poppypeachy

gif creds: @jaemtens​

a physics and education double major

he didn’t really know what he wanted to go into so he was undeclared for the longest time until he took a physics gen ed and ever since then, he’s been super into physics

only added education as his second major after he ta’d for physics 1 and for the first time, could actually see himself in that career

gets the most shit for being in a frat and simultaneously being the biggest fucking nerd but he just thinks its funny

isn’t super smart (like he’s not a genius or anything) but he works rlly hard for his grades so even tho his friends (donghyuck) make fun of him, everyone is inspired by his work ethic

until it’s the weekend

and then it’s like he’s another person altogether

he’s downing shots like there’s no tomorrow and if jeno lee attends a party by himself, then he’s leaving with at least one person

on a particularly daring occasion, he was seen leaving with three

people are convinced that jeno has a twin brother bc of how bold, lively, and undeniably charismatic he gets when he lets go of his inhibitions

jeno just smiles a sweet smile and redirects the conversation

a very much go with a flow type of guy

he’s down for pretty much anything as long as he makes it home in time to study for the next day

spontaneous camping trip? sure. smoke a blunt? sure. join a threesome w one of his best friends and his girlfriend? sure.

he just didn’t take a lot of things too seriously (besides his academics and whether or not his dick got wet)

and that was why a lot of ppl liked him

he was also a rlly easy person to talk to

everyone knew that the first half of his office hours were for actual physics and stuff and the second half was just for chilling w him

which is how he met his s/o, actually

they used to come for office hours every single time jeno held them and would stay the whole time; it was only two weeks later when jeno accidentally saw their test scores (straight 90s without the curve) that he realized that maybe, he was in the clear to make a move

after the semester is over ofc

Originally posted by donghyuckkies

gif creds: @donghyuckkies​

a poli sci major with a minor (or as he likes to call it, a concentration) in criminal justice

will not let you forget that he’s in a frat

no one has the heart to tell him that he almost got kicked out of the frat 3 times but they keep him around bc he’s just a good guy overall

plus he brings the most girls to parties so it’s rlly not all that bad

the dude who’s surprisingly quiet and intellectual, but only when you catch him on his own

when he’s with his friends, he acts completely differently, even if he turns around and mouths “i’m sorry” while no one is looking

probably runs a club like devil’s advocate club but it’s just a silly club that uses university money to buy snacks, chill, and talk about controversial opinions

lowkey the guy to go to if you need something or need something done because the man knows everyone

and everyone knows him

will make fun of you for studying, and might even steal your textbook, but sends you a quizlet with last year’s answers bc that’s just the type of person he is

does not study. will not study. would rather listen to music w mark or party w jeno.

still has pretty decent grades bc he’s charming and persuasive and what is political science besides the art of professional bullshitting

once you get close to him, he becomes one of the best ppl for advice

will not let you go after the sneaky link turned situationship

mostly bc he knows exactly what said situationship is rlly up to behind the scenes (i’m telling you, the fbi wishes that had him; he knows everyone’s business)

will die before he tells anyone but probs runs one of those confession pages

partly how he gets all of his info from

thinks it’ll ruin his street cred if he tells ppl he’s secretly playing cupid and that’s why he’s always messing w seemingly random combos of ppl

until one day, a confession comes in for him

def one of those boys who ‘reforms’ after he meets his s/o but is a loving menace nonetheless

Originally posted by jae-min

gif creds: @jae-min​ 

microbiology major on the pre-med track with a minor in visual art

has tried dropping the pre-med track at least 4 times but absolutely will not bc he gets too much fomo

also wants a job. with guaranteed 401k compensation and benefits. so.

is one of the less toxic pre-med kids but only because he’s so close to dropping out that he just can’t seem to take or give a shit anymore

lives in a perpetual state of caffeine high bc he will be damned if jeno gets better grades than him

lowkey, i feel like he’s one of those guys who only goes to parties to find ppl to fuck

like he doesn’t rlly like to drink or smoke (although he will take the occasional eddie)

but mans is stressed from the constant personality clash (within himself) so he literally jackhammers his stress away

too crude? sorry.

was once upon a time in every single club known to mankind

dropped out of almost all of them when he made the friends he wanted to make

somehow always ends up having to pay when everyone goes out

doesn’t tell anyone that he always loses on purpose (unless it’s to chenle) bc he knows that college is tough and not everyone has the same financial freedom as he does

exclusively studies at the school library bc he doesn’t rlly spend time w his friends outside of his main friend group unless its while he’s studying or at a party

although he’s not rlly studying bc he probably already got the notes and answers from the people who took the class a semester earlier than him

but again, he’s got a competitive streak about his grades so studies anyway

which is where he meets his s/o bc they’re always sitting in the same spot, looking stressed as fuck as they study

one time, jaemin and the other person are the only two ppl left studying post 3 am during hell week and he offers to buy them coffee

studies w his lovely s/o from then onwards and offers to bite donghyuck whenever he tries to disturb them <3

Originally posted by istjun

gif creds: @istjun​

marketing major i’m so sorry

he’s just such a finance bro + business major but he hates finance so he goes into marketing instead

school is a fucking joke to him

he’ll try hard enough to get by in his classes (and bc just being around poor stressed out jisung gives him motivation to study) but no more and no less than that

the first one to call it quits when they’re all studying together but renjun practically tapes him to a chair

also surprisingly intuitive and good at marketing so even if he barely tries, professors love him and somehow make him pass anyway

knows every international kid on campus bc he gets what it’s like and makes an effort to make them feel more at home

gets invited to every party that the international kids throw and never looks at a frat ever again

they go so fucking hard at those parties that chenle, THE business major, gets tired and has to turn in pre-2 am to avoid alcohol poisoning

doesn’t get home until 7 pm the next day bc a) he’s hungover and b) they love him so much and force him to stay so he just bums at their place until he’s good to go

will make fun of you and your bad decisions (even if they aren’t that bad) but will protect you at every turn if anyone else tries to say smth

will fucking go to bat for ppl he doesn’t even know that well bc chenle hates mean ppl

is on the intramural basketball team w a couple other guys

is very popular on the team bc he always knows the best restaurants and has been known to pay when he knows someone’s a tight spot

is very lowkey abt his wealth bc ppl like to take advantage of it so the ppl he does choose to help out are also very lowkey abt it

the type of dude to spot you like $50 and won’t ask you abt it

but ppl always pay him back whenever they can bc they know he’s helping a lot of ppl in rough situations, even if he’s very hush hush abt it

is the reason why jisung joins a frat and singlehandedly boosts his rizz by a decameter

probably has a childhood sweetheart that lives at home so he doesn’t partake in the romance scene on campus at all

is in love with them and will boast abt being taken

Originally posted by fool4nct

gif creds: @fool4nct​

a dance major

impractical? maybe. but the world’s going to shit anyway so might as well do what you want, right?

that’s what chenle says to jisung the day that he’s applying to his top school

is literally the student that the school begs to have join

offered every single scholarship under the sun to have him join bc such raw talent is rare nowadays and he’s just stuck like 😟😟😟

bc he had no idea that he would get in, much less have them like him so much

but for all his talent, he’s always fucking stressed abt something

sometimes it’ll be about a choreo and other times it’ll be abt the fact that he’s almost 98% sure he won’t get a job after college but his friends always get him out of his head

has abt 6 friends on campus (total) and it’s bc of chenle

so after freshman year, he decides to get out of his shell a little bit

and jisung park is the MAN to be around when he does

he’s charismatic, tall, an amazing performer, and really, just such a suave guy that straight men kinda have that weird jealousy where he’s so cool ppl wanna be friends w him and also hate him

still gets insecure abt his skills or his future but has ppl around him who love him and help him out of it every time

i’m ngl i think that he singlehandedly makes the dance team tryout numbers go from 12 - 15 ppl to 50 - 60 ppl

dance is his entire life and when he’s not rizzing up ppl (or honestly, getting rizzed up by them; he can’t flirt for shit when he rlly wants to) he’s on the dance floor

donghyuck has had to physically rip him off the floor to get dinner after a particularly rough night

even his fave dance teacher revoked his after class dance room privileges bc ppl got worried abt how much time he spent in there

decides to take a break when he realizes just how empty his days are w/o dance

gets into music production and has worked w mark more than once under pseudonyms

won’t say anything but listens to what everyone says abt the song when mark plays it at a party

still working on himself so a s/o isn’t rlly in the picture but ppl are not mad abt it bc he’s a good time with or w/o commitment

[the-forest-library]

Twenty Books Challenge

Hypothetically, you are only able to keep 20 of your books. Only one book per author/series. So what books are you keeping?

I was tagged by @theinquisitxor and @godzilla-reads - thank you for subjecting me to this torture. 😅

They're all favorites and some have lots of sentimental value (additional thoughts included below).

Little Women (I have several copies of this book, but I selected this lovely edition because it's part of the Puffin in Bloom series)

The Wee Free Men (representing Pratchett and gets me both Tiffany Aching and Granny Weatherwax - my favorite Pratchett leads)

The Hero and the Crown (representing Robin McKinley - and it would be impossible for me to pick a favorite McKinley - so I went with this one because it's one of my all-time favorite covers)

Carry On (one of my most-adored copies of one of my most-adored books - it's signed and dedicated with a Wham reference (!) - and is immensely re-readable)

The Naming (I could get lost in the world of Pellinor forever - it had me at talking horses and all of the descriptions of food)

Get a Life, Chloe Brown (representing Talia Hibbert, I could re-read it forever and feel so seen with the disability rep)

Red, White, & Royal Blue (One of the only books I've re-read multiple times and always puts me in the best mood)

In Other Lands (Original and fun, with characters that have stuck with me)

The Left Hand of Darkness (I have prettier copies, but this is the edition I read and annotated in high school)

Three Tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear (Got this edition at a Scholastic book fair and used it in high school and college - it's annotated and falling apart, but holds lots of memories)

Lolita (Stunning prose and includes one of my all-time favorite quotes)

Demian (I read this book in high school with one of my best friends, and this is the edition that she gifted me, which includes a lovely note from her)

The English Patient (A wonderful friend got this gorgeous edition signed and dedicated for me)

Jane Eyre (Jane and Rochester live rent free in my soul forever, and I love the cover on this one)

The Time Traveler's Wife (This book was so formative and is why I want to time travel solely so I can attend concerts)

Possession (Worth keeping it for the epilogue alone, but also contains one of my favorite quotes)

Into Thin Air (Started my love affair with non-fiction)

The Wind in the Willows (A gorgeously illustrated edition)

Anne of Green Gables (I was tempted to pick The Blue Castle for my Montgomery representation, but had to stick with AOGG for Matthew Cuthbert, and this edition because it's part of the Puffin + Pantone series)

Black Beauty (I read it just a few year years ago, and it started my adult horse girl phase)

Tagging (no pressure, just fun!): @lizziethereader, @aliteraryprincess, @brightbeautifulthings, @freckles-and-books, @thereadingchallengechallenge, @literarymagpie, @mountainmaven, and anyone else that would like to do it!

[plumbtales]

Sims 2 Aspiration Calculators

I wanted to know how the different aspiration calculators out there compared to each other,

I decided to find the available aspiration calculators I know of and calculate what 1st and 2nd aspirations the sims from Pleasantview would have according to the calculators. 

I choose the Pleasantview premades since most people know of and have opinions about the premades’ personalities. So it would be easy for people to decide which calculator they think fits their idea of the premades the most.

Toddlers and children can’t have any other aspiration except Grow Up but I decided to just go ahead and calculate them anyway for the sake of it.

———————————————-

@pleasantsims Secondary Aspiration Calculator (No Grilled Cheese Version)

Calculates only interests

Counts high interest in sci-fi as a Pleasure aspiration trait instead of Knowledge aspiration trait

———————————————-

@simgigglegirl’s Aspiration Sheet

Calculates interests + personality + zodiac sign + one true hobby

Calculates 3t2 traits from the Traits Project

Includes the Grilled Cheese aspiration

———————————————-

@belladovah’s Aspiration Calculator

Calculates interests + personality

Has a separate calculator for YA/teen sims, where high interest in school counts to Knowledge aspiration instead of Family aspiration

Allows negative aspiration scores

———————————————-

Sophie the puffin’s Aspiration Calculator

Calculates interests + personality

Divides every aspiration into 2 subcategories with descriptions for each subcategory

Renders some aspirations impossible if certain interests & personality points are too low/too high

Suggests fitting LTW’s for every subcategory

———————————————-

@delijume-sims​' Aspiration Calculator

Calculates interests + personality

Divides every aspiration into 2 subcategories (inspired by Sophie the puffin’s calculator)

Also calculates OTH, favorite music etc.

———————————————-

@aorticsims​ Aspiration Calculator

Calculates interests + personality + OTH + zodiac sign

Includes creativity and power aspiration (accomodates a mod for TS4)

Sims that roll the same thing for 1st & 2nd aspiration will only get a primary aspiration

———————————————-

Click on images to zoom in

Pleasantsims/ Sophie the puffin / BellaDovah / Simgigglegirl:

Delijume-sims:​

AORTiCSims:

[firstginger]

Would you be willing to list out the guide animals and their analyses from your ATLA bender quiz?

I understand that's a big request, so if not, could you further explain the armadillo bear? 🔥

of course! 48 is shorter than most of my quizzes, so i'll post it here but tuck it behind a read more.

for the armadillo bear specifically, as you can see below, their primary element is going to be of fire: associated with ambition, power, and willpower. they're a more rare option as their secondary is earth: associated with sturdiness, determined, and personal morals/intentions. and finally they're the fire/earth guide that is most intentioned towards survival: the one who knows when to stand firm and when to bend, the one who will always come out of struggles, no matter if it's broken and alone.

to elaborate more on this form, i think your result best describes someone who's ambitious and passionate but more like ever-burning cinders than a roaring fire. you're strong in your convictions and flare when someone pokes the bear (ha ha) but you are not someone who other acts without thought or even rests without the certainty there's nothing at their back. you may be strong-willed and determined, but like the armadillo bear, you keep your wits about you and don't persist at an impossible task for the sake of glory. sometimes it is better to change tactics and center yourself so that you may burn brighter tomorrow. you are admirable for your longevity, passion, and vision; you are wounded in how your instinct is to rely solely on yourself and your perspective.

and all of the results:

firebender fire - dragon (avatar of strength) - mongoose lizard (avatar of survival) - dragon moose (avatar of service)

water - iguana seal (avatar of strength) - badgerfrog (avatar of survival) - flying dolphin fish (avatar of service)

earth - tigerdillo (avatar of strength) - armadillo bear (avatar of survival) - komodo rhino (avatar of service)

air - tiger monkey (avatar of strength) - fire ferret (avatar of survival) - koala sheep (avatar of service)

waterbender fire - serpent (avatar of strength) - tiger seal (avatar of survival) - owl wolf (avatar of service)

water - snow leopard caribou (avatar of strength) - polar leopard (avatar of survival) - polar bear dog (avatar of service)

earth - arctic camel (avatar of strength) - turtle seal (avatar of survival) - buffalo yak (avatar of service)

air - snow rat (avatar of strength) - otter penguin (avatar of survival) - koalaotter (avatar of service)

earthbender fire - saber-toothed moose lion (avatar of strength) - hog monkey (avatar of survival) - shirshu (avatar of service)

water - elephant koi (avatar of strength) - catgator (avatar of survival) - eel hound (avatar of service)

earth - badgermole (avatar of strength) - platypus bear (avatar of survival) - camelephant (avatar of service)

air - giant rhinoceros beetle (avatar of strength) - fox antelope (avatar of survival) - jackalope (avatar of service)

airbender fire - raven eagle (avatar of strength) - lizard crow (avatar of survival) - lion vulture (avatar of service)

water - cranefish (avatar of strength) - sea vulture (avatar of survival) - toucan puffin (avatar of service)

earth - wolfbat (avatar of strength) - iguana parrot (avatar of survival) - wolfbat (avatar of service)

air - flying bison (avatar of strength) - winged lemur (avatar of survival) - kitten moth (avatar of service)

[writer652]

Astro Boy: Day of the Living Dead.

Chapter 1: Taku and Frank.

Taku Fujimoto considered himself the luckiest boy in the world.

Why?

Because he had the best robot caretaker ever: Frank, a new model launched last week. The machine was three meters tall, with big arms joined by a metal alloy that made them quite resistant.

Looking at him was like watching a cartoon. His chest was round like a pot, his arms protruded from his shoulders, and both had the shape and size of a tube; his hands could easily carry three small children. His stomach was a cylinder connected to his hips, another large piece of metal, with his feet was the same case was repeated as with his arms.

But without a doubt, the most outstanding feature of Frank was his head. Although his neck was made up of the cables that joined it to the rest of his body, the skull had a shape that was impossible not to associate with Frankenstein's monster. Since it had a rectangular shape, and for ears, he had two headphones that looked like screws, his name was not surprising.

In short, his appearance was terrifying, but Frank was programmed to be harmless unless his owner was threatened. As for Taku, he was eight years old, with green pickle hair, the same color as his eyes, and a student in the prestigious Metro City Elementary School. As with many children in the metropolis, parents were too busy working or having fun to look after their children, so robots did the job.

While many kids were depressed, Taku didn't care because he loved going everywhere with Frank. Although the time they shared was short, the two became great friends. Frank took him to school, prepared his food, and played with him. The best thing was that he was programmed to keep playing until the boy got tired since his battery lasted 48 hours before his next charge. And if the power source was powerful, it would be as good as new in less than an hour.

So that's why Taku considered himself the luckiest boy in the world. That day was just another example of that. Frank had just picked him up from school, and they were heading home, passing over one of the many motor-suspended bridges in the city.

Taku happily hummed a song while Frank stopped at a red light.

"Casey Junior's comin' down the track, comin' down the track, with a smoky stack," Taku hummed as he waved a finger, and then, he pointed at Frank.

"Hear him puffin', comin' round the hill, Casey's here to thrill, every Jack and Jill," Frank continued, drawing invisible circles in the air.

They both laughed, and Taku placed a hand on Frank's arm; he was happy to have a friend like him. Frank smiled back. Everybody said that robots did not love their owners and were just machines programmed to pretend.

But Frank disagreed; he loved Taku not because some silly program in his head forced him to but because Taku was funny, kind, and-- innocent. He couldn't imagine being with anyone other than his boy.

The light changed, and Frank returned his attention to the front, taking his foot off the brake when the earth shook. He held onto the steering wheel so hard that he broke it. While Taku jumped out of his seat. Luckily, he had his safety belt on.

"Frank! What happened?!" the scared boy asked.

"I dunno, Taku," he admitted, "but don't worry, it mustn't be anything serious, just engine failure or--"

He didn't have time to finish because of an explosion in the city; a great cloud of smoke stretched close to the Ministry of Science. Taku yelled as he saw debris flying in his direction. Frank's fatherly instinct kicked in. He grabbed him with both hands and yanked the boy off the seat, taking the belt.

"Don't be scared, Taku! I won't let anything bad happen to you," he said as he hugged him.

Taku began to cry into his big metal shoulder. Wasting no time, Frank jumped out of the car, destroying his own belt, and in the blink of an eye, he was out. Just after they left the vehicle, a large block of concrete fell on the car, smashing it to shreds like a crushed can.

"Frank!" Taku cried.

"Don't worry, Taku. I'm getting you out of here safe and sound!"

Frank hugged him tighter, but not enough to hurt him. More debris kept falling, and people were getting out of their cars and running on the bridge, trying to avoid the missiles. Frank zigzagged as more rubble fell, Taku screaming with each new impact. In the distance, the robot could see the exit, which led to a control room where they would be safe.

"Hang in there, Taku! We are almost there!"

There was another explosion, but it came from behind them. The ground began to collapse, and the people who stayed behind fell to their deaths. As the bridge was floating at the city limits, if the construction failed, everyone would fall fifty meters until colliding with the Surface. The screams soon turned into echoes. Frank looked over his shoulder. The crack had reached them, and before he could act, the floor collapsed, and they both fell into the abyss.

Taku screamed as he felt his body collapse, closing his eyes because he didn't want to see his terrible fate. Frank's body turned slightly in the air, almost ending on his head. His arms failed him, and he released his child.

"Taku, no!"

Tears floated in the air, marking Jack's descent. The young man never thought of death, but there he was, falling to his perdition. Until he felt someone grab his arm. Taku opened his eyes, and what he saw comforted him. The bridge had stopped collapsing, and Frank was holding onto the edge of the structure with one hand while holding him with the other.

"Taku, listen to me! I'm gonna push you up, okay?!"

He nodded; he would do anything to get out of there, not wanting to look down; if Taku did, he would pee in his pants.

"Alright, one," he swung Taku a bit, "two."

Taku swallowed and braced himself.

"Thr--"

Their bodies trembled because of the powerful air that hit them mercilessly, and then a roar came along. They both turned to see the city and what they saw made Taku urinate.

A gigantic robot was in the center, it was bigger than all the buildings, what's more, it seemed that skyscrapers were coming out of its back. Its color was metallic black, and red energy ran through its body, eyes, and chest. But the worst thing was that one of his hands was The Spirit of Freedom, the most potent weapon in all of Metro City, a battleship equipped with all the weaponry known to man. The robot roared again as it smashed another building. Taku yelled; until that day, he believed that monsters only existed in stories, but now he saw a real one. He started to cry and shake. Frank groaned; his hand was slipping off the edge. Taku's sudden movements didn't let him get a good grip; he understood why he was scared. Hell, if that robot got close to them, they wouldn't stand a chance, but he had to calm him down, or they would both fall into the void.

"Taku, listen to me!" He shouted at him, "We can get out of this! But you need to calm down! I'm here; I won't let anything happen to you!"

Taku stopped agitating, lowered his head, closed his eyes, then raised them. Their eyes met, and Frank smiled; he was terrified but knew that if he smiled, he would calm the little boy down. After all, he trusted him completely. Seeing the serenity of the robot, Taku settled down; Frank would never let anything happen to him.

"That's my boy! Now, I'm gonna throw you up; are you ready?"

Taku nodded.

"Okay, here we go."

Frank swung him back and forth, then tossed him over the bridge; Taku screamed as he flew into the air. He fell on the hard metal with a thud. His arm would be purple, but that would be it, anyway; the pain did not matter to him.

"Frank!" Without wasting time, he went to peek out; his robot friend was still hanging.

"Don't worry, Taku," he held onto the edge with his other hand and started to climb, "I'm going after--"

The part he was holding on to broke. Taku's eyes widened, and his heart stopped. Frank had both arms outstretched as he fell towards the clouds.

"Taku!!!!"

"Frank!" He yelled in response, stretching an arm as if he could reach the robot.

But Frank didn't stop falling, fading more until he was out of sight.

"Nooooooooooooooooooooo!" Taku howled in sorrow, his scream louder than the monster.

[fleurcareil]

East & South Labrador

Drove this day another 406km through the boreal forest from Happy Valley - Goose Bay to the tiny hamlet of Port Hope Simpson, which brought me back to the coast, this time the eastern Labrador shore! Apart from Labrador being the "Big Land" of forests, it's also the big land of flies, which is a bit of a shock to the system after not having had any yet in my travels so far (mosquitos yes but flies are worse). There's the huge flies that sound like a bomb is ready to go off when circling your head 😳 and the tiny ones that are barely noticeable but swarm you in their hundreds. Like a woman told me earlier this week; "they all bite and they're hungry!" 🥺. I had managed to dodge the large flies as they're rather slow but impossible to escape the midgets, however generally there's much less of anything on the coast so that's good news!

I won't bore you with more pictures of ugly trees, but instead here are two from Port Hope Simpson, where - you'll guess it - the first stop was at the gas bar (although I'm back now into safe territory with more gas pumps) and then checked in before 2pm already, even including an extra 30 minute Newfoundland time change, which happens somewhere obscure on the road (doesn't really matter where, as there's nothing anyway 😅). Walked a bit around the harbour and then spent à few lovely hours along the water reading a book - A History of Time by Stephen Hawking that my sister gave me 20 years ago and which is interesting but needs to be read piecemeal, it's been a while since I brushed up on my physics! 😝

In the morning, the weather had done a 180, and changed from a sunny 28 degrees to a foggy & rainy 10 degrees😢. For the next few days, I was bundled up in my thermal underwear, woollen socks (thanks Tara for knitting them!), 3 layers of sweaters, winter coat, hat & gloves, whereas record heat temperatures were broken around the world...

I arrived early at the Mary's Harbour ferry dock so that I could still do a short hike up & down the hill to Gin Cove, which is not too special but still pretty enough and got me warmed up before boarding the little boat to Battle Harbour Historic site where I'm staying the night on the island. Despite the poor weather, I preferred to stay outside to watch for icebergs & whales (none) but I do see a puffin! 😊 With me are two elderly couples from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland who I find out are hyperactive, still scuba diving, skiing and planning a 3-week ATV road trip on their 70th, something to aspire!

Battle Harbour used to be the unofficial capital of Labrador in its heyday when it was the largest cod fishing village on the east coast and had amongst others the first hospital and Marconi wireless station. Some fishermen would stay all year, but most would travel from Newfoundland for the summer. It started declining when the school was relocated to Mary's Harbour but still operated until the cod fishing moratorium was imposed in 1992. The village is now restored and run by a historic trust, which provides visitors an opportunity to stay through all-inclusive packages. Seeing slowly the buildings come out of the clouds as the boat approaches made it even more mystical!

I'm staying in the bunkhouse all by myself (which I had already been counting on 😁) which was the original cookhouse built in the 1770's. After delicious lunch, we were given an elaborate tour of the buildings, which was really interesting as it was led by a 6th generation islander, who had lots of personal stories of how she helped salt the cod. Similarly, the handyman on the boat was one of the 10-year old boys who found a plane wreck the day after it had crashed in the fog  (and which I saw myself also in the fog), so that truly connects the history to the present...unsurprisingly, they're still bitter about what happened with the fishery as it destroyed their community, and some of the blame was given to the sharply increasing seal population since the hunt was forbidden in the 80's, which likely has a grain of truth (though most of the blame went to the federal government)... Despite the pouring rain, I decide to take a little hike around the island in the hope to spot icebergs (as there were 3 the day before) but all I got were beautiful landscapes and getting fully soaked. 😜

Over the communal dinner table, I got to know the rest of the guests; an (apparently famous) painter from Newfoundland - Jean-Claude Roy who shares the same first name as my father & comes from the same French region, his somewhat eccentric wife and a guy from North Carolina who is shooting a documentary about JCs relationship with Battle Harbour where he's been painting for over 10 years. The other group consisted of 5 Swedish sailors who toured the world on a yacht, showing breathtaking pics of Antarctica and leaving the next morning for Greenland.... Needless to say that the evening, including a black-white 1930's movie about an Artic exploration followed by beers in the pub, provided lots of interesting conversations! Compared to this lot, my road trip is really not that special😁.

I try another hike in the morning but the fog is even worse, so I give up quickly and instead play a patience card game in front of the wood stove, much better! The way back on the boat is quite rough but all is forgotten when the captain steers us along an iceberg!!💖 I had already seen quite a few in 2010 in Newfoundland but very happy I saw one again! Back on the road, the fog was really bad but when I turned the corner onto the south shore, it suddenly disappeared and I see not one but 3 white blobs on the sea! 😊 Iceberg Alley made its name true and in the next two days I saw a total of 41 icebergs; anything from little "bergy bits" to tabular, drydock, dome & pinnacle shapes, very very cool & unique in the world! Most were farther away and could only be properly seen with the binoculars, but a few were close to shore.               

The Red Bay world heritage site has an interesting history of Basque whaling and a ferry ride to Saddle Island for an interpretative hike, but there's basically nothing left (or it was reburied for preservation) so there's a lot of imagination needed to gather what was there 😂.

After a late lunch I was ready to crash in the hotel being hangover from the night before, but decided to at least drive to the start of the Tracy Hill trail, which is notorious for its 689 steps. The trail builders included corny inspirational quotes to keep you walking, and I must confess that the first one did get me to actually start: "One day or Day one?".  Apart from pretty scenery, every step seemed to show more icebergs; 22 from the top, which was a perfect way to close the day!

The next morning, I woke up again in fog (getting fed up with it now!) so at the lighthouse at L'Anse Amour, I first drank my cup of tea in the car while checking out icebergs and birds. It's the tallest lighthouse in Atlantic Canada which my legs definitely felt when walking up the steps to the Fresnel lens & active light at the top. The Strait of Belle Isle provides a 200km shorter route to Europe than around Newfoundland, but has strong currents, up to 200km/hr winds & often ice, so it has had its fair share of shipwrecks & heroic tales of rescue.

Nearby, a 9,000-year-old burial mound of a Maritime Archaic Indian child was found, representing the oldest known human remains in North America but there's now nothing to see apart from pretty dunes. In L'Anse au Clair I stop at the lovely visitor centre in an old church and do a small hike to an abandoned fishing village called the Jersey Room, after the families that settled here from Jersey island near France.

When I cross into Quebec, it's suddenly 1.5 hours earlier! The entire Atlantic and Newfoundland time zones are undone in a split second, which confuses me in my day-planning and makes it a very loooong day. Checking in at the ferry terminal (more on that later), doing groceries and lunch kept me busy for a bit and then I was off to a viewpoint where I was told you could see one of North America's largest puffin colonies... which are on that island far away in the picture below... I could definitely see with my binoculars it was full of birds but whether they were puffins or gulls?!? 😂 Nearby were again lots of Eider duck so don't think they're that special after all... they seem to do well!

Driving west to the end of the road, there were some more pretty viewpoints and a waterfall, until I reached the Salmon Bay Farm, which is actually a scallops farm located in Salmon Bay. I've toured an oyster farm when I was little in the Netherlands and didn't realize there were also scallop farms until now. After a tour of the on-land facilities and explanation how they're cultivated (interesting titbits; scallop shells grow year rings just like trees so you can count how old they are, and they have up to 200 eyes along the edge of the shell), I chose the left scallop to taste raw (both the muscle and the roe, which were very tender) and also tasted two steamed scallops, which included also the roe as well as the baleen-like frill which is used to filter the water for nutrients. All accompanied with a glass of wine & finished with local jam biscuits, great experience!

Only 15 minutes more to the west, I reach the end of the road, thereby finishing my tour of Labrador of close to 2,000km! It was a long drive of, as someone put it; "trees and rocks, then rocks and trees, and after that trees and rocks again" 🤣 but very happy to have done it and seen this part of Canada! 🍁💖

The only way to complete my loop back to Baie-Comeau is by a 2-day boat trip west until I reach the village of Kegaska where the road starts anew. There's no ferry but instead a cargo boat, so my car needs to be shipped into a container to make the voyage, a first for me! 😃 I was supposed to report this morning at 5:30am but when I dropped by yesterday, I was told that the boat got terribly delayed...likely until 10pm - midnight tonight. Good news is that I could sleep in this morning (although wide awake at 3:45 due to the time difference) and that I have an extra day here - going for a hike once this is posted, but on the flip side, I might now stay two nights onboard sleeping in a chair instead of a hotel, plus may need to cancel an excursion I had already booked for after my arrival. Mother nature is in control so hoping there won't be much more delays! 🤞

As a side note, it's shocking to realize that the time is here the same as it is in Thunder Bay, over 3,000 km to the west! No wonder that it's light so early here...

PS. the boat's departure time has just been updated to 9am tomorrow morning so I can luckily stay another night at the hotel here but will need to adjust my plans forward. It's going to be an interesting few days ahead...

Distance driven this week: 1,954km

Icebergs: 1 from Battle Harbour boat, 6 from the road, 22 from Tracy Hill, 3 from L'Anse Amour, 4 from L'anse au Clair, 6 from Blanc-Sablon

Wildlife: 1 puffin (Battle Harbour boat), 17 female Eider ducks (Red Bay) and 50+ male Eider ducks (Blanc-Sablon), 1 osprey & 50+ Merganser ducks (L'Anse Amour), 1 mink whale & 1 seal (L'Anse au Clair)

SUPs: none

Hikes: one at Mary's Harbour, one at Battle Harbour, two at Red Bay, one at L'Anse au Clair

[akorah]

My favorite sequel-era Star Wars fact is that porgs exist because it was impossible to control the puffin population when they filmed on location and just cgi'd porgs over the puffins instead.

[official-hawknose]

i think my favorite character I’ve written into my Courts is Rime, a cat that died and came back, and later would joke that they just couldn’t bear to leave their life partner, Opal

truthfully they DID die, of sickness, a mixture of starvation and dehydration, sickness sapping away any strength to eat or drink, making it impossible to keep anything down. He died, for a full night he was dead, and the next morning was awake again

There’s no nine lives system in my Courts, Leaders dont get any extra lives, if they die, they’re dead. And the funny thing is, Rime is part of a cult that worships death and its cycle in life. Cats are ceremoniously eaten by their group-mates, with both consent from the deceased and their closest family member. If their family member refuses, the cat is buried instead.

My favorite thing is detailing the changes that happened to Rime after coming back.

Rime basically dies and comes back very, very different. Personality wise, they’re the same. But he doesn’t have a scent anymore, no eyeshine, he rarely has to eat or drink water. A workaround, and a fav design note to him, is that Opal, his life partner, helps the insecurity of not having a scent(or at least, only having a faint scent of death) by tying a mixture of heather and lavender into his fur.

More context: Opal and Rime have been life partners for longer than they’ve been in the cult together. They met while young, and the bond between them was solidified when Opal picked a fight with a cat way bigger than both of them. Rime immediately threw himself in between them, and defended her. They got two scars on the bridge of their nose, between their eyes, for the trouble, and both of them ended up hightailing it out of there to avoid getting hurt more.

The relationship between them is currently the only one in my Courts - it's completely platonic, they’re dedicated life partners, call each other mates occasionally, and while Opal is pregnant, her kits aren’t Rime’s and Rime’s intention is only to help her raise the kits and act as an uncle rather than a parent. They’re both dedicated to each other and closely bonded. Opal and Rime’s designs are some of my favorites, alongside Puffin and Finch, two others in the cult, though Finch was born into it and Puffin was adopted as a kit.

the cult is one of my favorite aspects of the Court’s universe, the characters are some of my favorites and I absolutely adore them

[unlore]

fandomless original characters, based in original lore inspired by various cultures, mythologies, and religions. as told by puffin, sideblog to @shdwtouch. mutual exclusive. 18+. low activity. dark, mature, & triggering content present. this blog features four characters, all of which feature a universe for baldurs gate 3 !! these universes are the current primary focus of this blog, though interactions using their original lore can be discussed / requested ! read more about: zhu dai. miz eldere. yew. hulaimh.

rules found on shdwtouch. pinterest boards.

some quick rules & muse info below the cut !

quick rules / notes.

this sideblog is low activity & largely by request only. I hope to eventually move these muses to their own blog / multi, but for now I am just focusing on their universes for BG3 so I decided a sideblog would be fine. all interactions will default to their BG3 universes unless otherwise has been discussed !

my main blog is @shdwtouch. generally, if you aren't interacting with me there then I'm not going to interact with you here. also, my main blog is not strictly 18+, however due to the nature of these characters this sideblog is 18+, meaning I will not interact with minors from this sideblog.

I'm not super interested in shipping as it stands, though I won't say its impossible. nsf/w content will not be present on this blog, as I will not write smut.

please specify a muse. I will not pick someone for you. "anyone works" is an acceptable answer, however. I just know these characters are kinda esoteric and I don't want to force them on folks / make folks uncomfortable so letting me know who you're interested in interacting with is important !

curious about something ? ask ! I love to talk about their lore. also, goes without saying but... don't steal my lore. :,) please note that I take inspiration from history, various cultures, mythology, and theology ! but ultimately my characters are fantasy inspired and based, portrayed with an abundance of creative liberty.

also, I am fairly new to DnD lore. I might also stretch it to serve my purposes and stay true to the lore I have for my characters. please be patient / lenient with me, I'm trying my best, but I'm open to advice and suggestions !

quick muse info.

please be advised details might change !

zhunhatir daivura. she/they. asmodeus tiefling. barbarian + sorcerer. known as zhu dai or zhu-dai, she is a fierce soldier and rebel intent on the destruction of a secretive circle of powerful individuals responsible for her fall in avernus. an agent of rage and revenge, she reaps the chaos sown by those she hunts.

miz eldere. she/her. changeling. cleric + wizard. no one has seen the face of miz, a famed spymaster and procurer of information known to be neutral in the affairs of faerun. her identity unknown, she has used her skill as a changeling to take on the lives of many in pursuit of knowledge, namely a tiefling, llolth-sworn drow, and githzerai. all of which serve as "spies" to miz.

yew. she/her. more information coming soon !

hulaimh. she/her. more information coming soon !

[doeszoomworkinomanwithvpn]

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[whisperingofthepages]

The Whisperwicks: Labyrinth of the Lost and Found by Jordan Lees

Pages: 448 Publisher: Puffin Released: 28th of March 2024 A boy who doesn’t believe in magic. An impossible world that will change his mind. Eleven-year-old Benjamiah Creek believes in science, logic and the power of reason. He definitely does not believe in magic. But when he receives a mysterious gift in the post – a doll that can transform into a bird – he is led into the impossible (and…

[slowtravelingcat]

Living to eat and the Kenai Fjords

Monday, July 26, 2021

CAL - As a cat, I “eat to live”. The idea of “living to eat” has always perplexed me. The very idea that someone could love food for the sake of food seems incomprehensible when there are so many other aspects of life to focus on. 

Well, all of that changed this weekend. On Saturday evening, Michele shared with me a piece of food that was so delectable that both my mouth and my nose were changed forever. 

The consistency was somewhere between my wet food and dry food. I believe the word I am looking for is “flakey” (though you’ll need to bear with me as I just starting to develop a vocabulary around food).

The flavor was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was overcome by a sensation of all of my favorite things at once. It was like feeling the fresh breeze while catching a bug and cuddling with my large, bald one all at the same time! I know it sounds impossible that such a feeling could exist, but I swear to you it came washing over me just as I sank my teeth into the first bite of this delicious piece of food. 

The smell was also distinct. It was salty yet gently pungent at the same time. It smelled delicate and enticing, and part of my soul knew that I already had this experience in another life. 

I will spend the rest of my life attempting to find this food again. I now live to eat wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon. 

MICHELE - This week I celebrated our last weekend in lovely Alaska by treating myself to a seaside cabin in Miller’s Landing and a boat tour of the Kenai Fjords. 

Miller’s Landing is a little campground and fishing hub about 2 miles outside of Seward. Some planning ahead allowed me to rent one of three seaside cabins for Friday evening. They are all three “dry” cabins, meaning there is no bathroom or running water, but I didn’t mind as a pretty decent bathhouse was located just steps away. The cabin backs right up to Resurrection Bay and allows for a private, beachside fire pit - truly the best way to enjoy a fire in Alaska!

That evening as I watched the fire steadily burn in front of the beautiful water, salmon occasionally jumped as they progressed to the creeks that feed into the bay. It was 2am before dusk finally ended, but I could have stayed up much longer.

The next morning, my curtain-less cabin beamed sun into my recently closed eyes starting at 5am. I fought against nature and managed a few more hours of slumber before reporting to the pier in Seward for my 11am boat tour of the Kenai Fjords. 

The 6-hour boat tour featured bald eagles, puffins, stellar sea lions, sea otters, harbor seals, and one humpback whale. The highlight of the tour was Aialik Glacier, the largest glacier I had seen so far. As luck would have it, the glacier was very active that day. We watched in awe as it calved (meaning that ice broke off of it) for nearly 30 minutes. The ice thundered as it cracked and eventually broke off into the ocean. A family of seals watched calmly, perched on top of a cluster of icebergs nearby. 

Once the boat tour was complete, I grabbed a to-go box of fish and chips from Alaska Seafood  Grill and shamelessly ate it all with my hands as I made my way back up Seward Highway and into Anchorage by early evening.