#t and eventually scrap together the whole cast

[un-pearable]

a teeny bit of doodling that is actually cute enough to share

[sweet-s0rr0w]

Microfic: Without Sunshine

A little something for the two lovelies @shealwaysreads and @sitp-recs on their birthdays <3 I hope you both had a wonderful day!!

T, 1.1k, apocalyptic flower shop strangeness, fits the @drarrymicrofic prompt 'thunder'. This is the first thing I've written in many months, so please be kind! Thanks to @tackytigerfic for sharp eyes and endless patience.

The end of their world, when it happens, begins on a Tuesday morning.

It’s surprisingly easy. The concealment charms evaporate the minute the Leaky falls, leaving the whole of Diagon caught unaware, belly-up vulnerable. Shopping is abandoned on the cobblestones as witches and wizards grope for their wands, casting blindly while all around them bombs drop and buildings fall. Those who can leave do, as the tanks move in off Charing Cross Road, over broken glass and broken bones, tracks like rolling thunder along the narrow streets. Owls and ravens spill out through the blown-out Menagerie window, disappearing into the darkening sky, as Nifflers scrap loudly over stray bullet casings below.

It's several minutes before Harry, cloaked in the Azkaban-strength wards of the little flower shop, even notices that anything’s wrong.

“In theory, indefinitely,” Draco tells him, thoughtfully. He’s perfect, Harry thinks absently, bathed in high summer light, a puffy, peach-coloured rose held in delicate balance between finger and thumb. “The problem is that ethically harvested unicorn hairs are–”

And that's when everything goes dark.

By the faint blue phosphorescent glow of the ghost orchids, they peer out through the glass. Draco starts at a burst of gunfire, his breath coming fast, the rose still clutched in his hand beginning to tremble. Unthinking, Harry curls his own fingers around Draco’s, stilling him.

“There’s no Floo here, is there?” he asks softly, although he already knows the answer.

“We’re on the list,” Draco replies, distant. “Next week, they said, maybe–”

“And your anti-Apparition wards–?”

Draco just gives a jerky nod, lips pressed together, and that’s that. There’s nothing to be done about it, Harry knows – no duel to win, no long, lonely walk out into the Forbidden Forest – and in a strange way, it’s a relief.

The warded air around them is silent but for the oblivious tinkling of bellflowers. Across the way, a sharp burst of light heralds an explosion inside Fortescue’s, sending slick blue rooftiles crashing one by one to the ground below. For a long, uncertain moment the whole building seems to shiver, its ancient magic struggling against the onslaught, before, like a sigh released, the walls begin to sag in on themselves. Beside Harry, Draco is holding himself stiffly upright; the occasional twitch of his fingers the only nod towards the horror unfolding before them.

“Well,” he says eventually, looking down at their joined hands, “their timing’s dreadful.”

Harry lets out a surprised burst of laughter. “It really is. I was working up the courage, you know–” he looks at Draco “–but there was time. We had time.”

“We did. We had time.”

Their view is blurry now, both windows coated with a thick film of dust, the alley a smeared thumbprint of impressions: shadowy figures moving back and forth, spells cast in quick, colourful flares, the returning staccato bursts of gunfire from every side. Harry turns to watch the reflections in Draco’s eyes, benign as fireworks.

Draco doesn’t return Harry’s gaze. “Give me a second,” he says quietly. He pulls away, rose in hand, and begins darting around the shop, gathering up blooms, humming with approval as he goes. The wards are struggling now, Harry can tell – cracks appearing alongside the window frames, smoke curling in from beneath the door, tremors beneath his feet – but if Draco even notices, he doesn’t show it. Harry’s breath catches as he watches Draco pick out the largest of his precious ever-blooming lilies to add to the bunch: dainty pink-tipped lisanthus, sprays of baby blue speedwell, all cast in the eerie, flickering half-light of the shop.

“Here,” Draco says finally, thrusting the enormous bouquet towards Harry. The fragrance is overwhelming, damp petals tickling Harry’s chin as he takes it into his arms. “That is to say–” Draco clarifies, chin raised, “I had planned – if you had asked me–”

He tails off, the blush on his cheeks apparent even through the gloom, and Harry lifts the flowers to hide his smile. “They’re perfect,” is all he says.

“Not a patch on what I’d intended, really,” Draco says, quickly. “I’d hoped to have perfected the maturation charms, you know, and of course no-one can get hold of luminous larkspur at this time of year–”

“I’ve never been given flowers before.”

Draco pauses, mid-sentence, frowning. “Really?”

“Really.”

“I’d have given you more,” says Draco, and there’s a rueful edge to his smile. “Hundreds, probably. Tulips from Keukenhof, sakura from Hokkaido, mountain lupine from my mother’s garden… you’d have been sick of them in weeks, I’m sure.”

Harry opens his mouth, thinking to object, but is interrupted by an ominous splintering – the first audible indication of the chaos outside – as thin streams of plaster dust begin to cascade down from above the counter. Another crack, louder this time, Draco’s sizzling snapdragons snarling and straining upwards as one edge of the coving crumbles away, uncovering a narrow chink of daylight. The wards are beginning to flicker, more outside sounds audible now – the whir of a helicopter, the clatter of boots – and that’s when Harry feels the first tendrils of hope winding their way beneath his ribs.

“Still got those Seeker reflexes?” he asks Draco with a grin.

Draco’s brow furrows, but then he cottons on, eyes widening. “What, you think we can Apparate before–?” He brings his palm down smartly against the back of his other hand, a gruesome demonstration of their impending fate.

Harry swallows. “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t honestly know, but I want to try.” Louder this time: “I mean, I want to try with you.”

Harry’s never been one to look back once a decision’s been made, but he forces himself to wait, heart in his throat, as Draco chews his lip, eyes fixed warily on the ceiling. He looks genuinely uncertain, and he’s not wrong, either: an end now – quick and painless – versus… what? What will the future look like, if they run?

But a second more, and Draco looks back down at him, jaw set. “Alright,” he says, and Harry leans forward, warm and giddy with adrenaline, to press their lips together – once, a beginning, and then again – flower heads crushed between their bodies as time stands still.

They wait.

***

When it’s finally over, black-clad soldiers spread out across the street. They work in pairs to sweep up the leftover crumbs of magic, guns nosing along the rubble beneath their steel-capped toes.

“Hey, look,” says one of them, voice tinny through his mask. “Someone’s left us a souvenir. You should take ‘em home to the wife.”

“Yeah,” his partner says thoughtfully, stooping to collect the scattered stems, “You know, I just might.”

[watermelonlipstick]

Dreams, Chapter 16

If you haven’t read this series before, you might want to start on Chapter 1, or check out the Dreams Masterlist! Here’s the series description:

When Dean dies for good leaving Sam and his girlfriend (the reader) behind, they must figure out how to carry on without him. Alone, reeling, and unsure what to do next, trying to honor Dean’s memory and follow their hearts gets even more complicated when their nightmares become dreams that feel a little too real.

Title: Dreams, Chapter 16

Pairing: (past) Dean Winchester x Reader, (eventual) Sam Winchester x Reader

Word Count: 1754

Summary: Some of Sam’s efforts to ‘nest’ in their new life together reveal new possibilities.

Warnings: angst, FLUFF, swearing, s l o w  b u r n

           Water laps at the weather-beaten wood of the dock underneath you slowly and the rhythm feels like hypnosis with the sun beating down a blanket. You sense Dean at your side without opening your eyes.

           “So…was he any good?”

           You can’t help but laugh, hearing the echo go out over the small lake, and get up to your elbows. It’s bright enough that you have to squint over at Dean where he lays next to a couple fishing poles and a cooler, t shirt hitched up to show a sliver of his stomach with his arms behind his head. His smile is devilish, made even more smug with eyes closed against the sun so his lashes cast an inch-long shadow on the dusting of freckles across his cheeks. “You can’t ask that!” you giggle.

           His lips flatten into a knowing line. “So that’s a no?”

           “Jesus Christ, of course it’s not a n—you know what, I’m not talking to you about this,” you smile, laying back down.

           “Ooh, so it’s a yes,” he teases as he turns on his side to face you. “Go Sammy. That mean you two are, like, going steady now?”

           You let your head loll over to him and roll your eyes. “Are you done?”

           “Not yet. Is he going to let you wear his letterman jacket? Take you to junior prom?”

           “I’m giving you ten more seconds.”

           Dean laughs, free and easy. “Fine, okay, I’m done. Wait—did he wrap it?”

           “DEAN!” you yell, covering your face in embarrassment.

           “Okay, alright, okay.” He’s still chuckling when you open your eyes to look over at him and reaches over to slip a piece of hair behind your ear. “You, ah, you seem happy.”

           You search his eyes for any hidden anger and find only the softness of calm affection with a pinch of solemnity. Where his hand lingers in your hair you turn into it, pressing your lips to Dean’s palm. “I am.”

           Dean smiles, straight teeth a perfect row of pearls so white you think for a second they might ‘ding’ with sparkle like a cartoon, and he looks relaxed enough as he puts his hands back behind his head that it calls up images of a kitten falling asleep in a sunny spot like this even as he keeps his eyes on you. “Took you guys long enough.”

           “And you’re still okay with this?”

           “Yeah, hell yeah. That’s the best I could ever ask for, you two happy. So, what do you say? Want to see if we can catch some fish?”

           Spring was a blessing; clean greenness breaking through the grey and white purifying the air and breathing new life into you, Sam, and the community you’d come to be a part of. The cabin was that much nicer with the new hours of sunlight pouring through the windows and all the upgrades you had put into it, to the point that you began to feel truly comfortable there. You even invited the Kaisers over for dinner a few times, feeling more like equal partners in your burgeoning friendship with them.

           You started to feel stable enough to get things; picked up a bookshelf at the combination flea/farmer’s market that happened in the K-12 school’s field every Saturday morning and got higher quality spatulas to cook with, the kinds of nonessential stuff you never would’ve bought before knowing you were going to stay in one place long enough to get good use out of them. Sam, in turn, kept building: changing the locks to sturdier ones and erecting a shed big enough to hold a lawn mower.

           You’d been cooking on an early Sunday afternoon when Sam came home and crossed the cabin in a few strides, giving you a kiss on the cheek before setting a thick paper bag down on the kitchen counter. “Smells great, what’re you making?”

           “Ratatouille!” you buzzed, placing a slice of eggplant carefully into its slot. “I’ve never had it, but I’ve always thought it looks so pretty. Hopefully it’s good. Where were you?”

           “Hardware store. I thought maybe I could build a greenhouse; see if we could grow anything. Might be enough to work against the cold.”

           You raised your eyebrows in appreciative surprise. “Look at you! What’re you thinking? Poppies? Platinum OG? Purple Haze?”

           Setting a box of screws down, Sam rolled his eyes through a smile. “My plan was more along the lines of tomatoes or something, but I’ll, uh, take those suggestions under advisement.” You had a sudden urge to twist a gentle finger into the dimple that stayed on his cheek as he unloaded the rest of his supplies but didn’t want to embarrass him, instead sweeping some garlic skins into your hand to throw into the small bucket Sam kept under the sink to collect scraps for the compost pile. When the bag was empty he refolded it and took off his jacket, passing by you to put it on its hook by the door. “Want any help?” he asked, sounding about as breezy as you’d ever heard him.

           “It just has to bake for about an hour. Does a late lunch work with your construction schedule?”

           Sam leaned over to slip a hand around your waist and kissed the top of your head before grabbing an armful of stuff to take outside. “Definitely. Just yell when you’re ready for me.”

           You giggled and waggled your eyebrows suggestively. “I’m always ready for you.”

           He tried his best not to blush but bit his lip in spite of himself, looking up at you with a bashful twinkle in his eye. “I walked into that one, didn’t I?”

           In response you held up a spare slice of zucchini that Sam readily accepted, opening his mouth like an obedient puppy and chewing as he went out the back door.

           You loved watching Sam work on his greenhouse in the weeks that followed, getting so excited about the tiny shoots sprouting up from the soil that he sometimes woke up early to check on them before starting his day. After a few weeks he woke you up one morning with a cup of coffee, bare-chested under slightly sleep-tangled hair and the hems of his flannel pants sloppily half inside his boots. “I wanna show you something,” he said, throat still gravelly. You accepted the mug and got out of bed, following him drowsily and jamming your feet inside your shoes at the door, too tired to worry about the laces.

           He led you into the greenhouse with its clear plastic walls and pointed down at a petite bud on top of a green stalk. It had the telltale waviness of a basil leaf, and when you bent down to look closer at it the plant already smelled herbaceous. “It’s so cute!” you hummed. Sam practically glowed with satisfaction, an unbridled smile the perfect accessory to the broad span of his chest where it was backlit by the fuzzy light through the greenhouse walls. You straightened and rubbed his back in congratulations, staring down at the plant together with your coffees like parents on Christmas morning. Tucked in the corner of the greenhouse behind the basil, a scattering of bitty white flowers caught your eye against the burnt umber soil.

           “Wait, you already have stuff flowering in here? What’s that?” you asked, tiptoeing around the wooden stakes in the soil to get closer.

           “Oh—I, uh—” he stammered behind you.

           At arm’s length the flowers looked vaguely familiar and you stopped short. “Is that—?” You turned back to Sam, who seemed not to be able to come up with anything to say, his face the kind of blank surprise that indicated he didn’t know whether you were about to be upset. “Really? Where’d you even…how did you get some?”

           He tucked his hair behind his ears to stall for even a half second. “I—well, I found a guy who got me—got us—some.”

           “You still have an African dream root hookup?”

           Sam’s lips pressed into a well-practiced silent ‘I guess?’ and he reached back to ruffle the hair at the nape of his neck, the movement stretching his side distractingly enough that if you hadn’t been so startled by the discovery of a plot of dream root literally in your own backyard you might’ve forgotten what you were talking about altogether.

           You raised your eyebrows expectantly, waiting for him to explain.

           “I made some calls, found someone in Milwaukee who got his hands on some and he mailed it here. I didn’t want to, uh, tell you in case I couldn’t get it to grow.”

           All kinds of possibilities and frustrations raced through your head. “So you’ve had this for weeks? That’s why you built the greenhouse?” Sam didn’t answer fast enough. “Never mind, I don’t care,” you found yourself saying, and surprisingly, actually meaning. You took a deep breath to stop the words from jumbling together. “Do you think it’ll work?” you breathed, knowing he would understand the real question: would we be able to see Dean together?

           “Only one way to find out.”

           For whatever reason you’d gotten freshly showered, made up, and dressed before brewing the tea with Sam on your next day off of work. It felt like there should be some level of pomp and circumstance about it, this giant undertaking that might be able to change your whole life again, even knowing that your prep wouldn’t translate into a dream. You were giddy with anxiety and almost wished you could reasonably put it off, the idea of this new possibility being yet another dead end making you nauseous.

           “Your place or mine?” you asked, trying to put a little sheen of humor on your nerves.

           Sam chuckled but you could tell he was nervous too, rubbing his palms dry on the knees of his jeans over and over again. “You haven’t done it before, right?”

           You shook your head. “Is there a learning curve or something?”

           “Honestly it’s been long enough that I don’t really remember. Hold on—hold still.” He reached out and very gingerly swept a finger across your cheekbone, drawing back to show you an eyelash stuck to the whorl of its pad.

           You straightened where you sat on the edge of the bed. “That’s as good a sign as any. Cheers, I guess.” Sam dropped the tiny hair into his mug and touched the ceramic to yours, his eyes hopeful and reassuring as you took tandem sips.

           And then you were off.

-

Continue to Dreams, Chapter 17

Thanks again for reading! If you liked it, check out my Masterlist or send me a request!

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[aconstantstateofbladerunner]

101 Open MHA Gen Prompts

I had a very long ask game where people gave me fake titles and I came up with fic ideas to go with them.  Multiple people asked to use some of them as prompts, and some of my friends have lately maligned the lack of gen prompts out there, so I decided to compile them all into a single post.  Almost all of these are gen, aka not shipping, but you can do what you want I’m not your boss.  Everything is free and open to use WITH CREDIT, so have fun with my word vomit.

1. In Dreams I Had the Sun - Being the number one hero isn’t all it’a cracked up to be, Toshinori realizes early on

2. The Chainlink Fence that Held the Ocean - In his new book post-retirement, All Might opens up about his regrets, struggles with mental health, and his issues with the hero system as a whole.  The backlash is swift and intense.

3. Welcome to the Loud Silence - After an injury, Izuku is rendered deaf.

4. Water Since Turned Red - After a villain attack nearly kills All Might, the beach where Izuku used to go to find comfort now feels tainted.

5. all scrap left untouched is bound together - A group hero students who failed the provincial license exam for the third time, effectively ending their careers before they start, get together to take revenge on UA’s first years who beat them out.

6. You’ve saved more more times than you know - Times All Might saved people without his powers, just by being a cool, nice dude.

7. No Amount of Tragedy Can Justify Your Actions - A dying All for One tries to justify his centuries of cruelty to an uncaring Toshinori.

8. To Leave a Cage Locked - One for All is conscious and has a will of its own, one that doesn’t always line up with Izuku’s wellbeing.

9. Okay, who let in the Kraken? - Izuku is the reincarnation of an ancient eldritch horror.

10. keep us alive up above - Izuku and Shigaraki get trapped together somewhere.  Izuku knows he needs the villain’s help to survive and escape, but the other would rather they both die.

11. The world will revolve around me neither less - The ebbs and flows of AFO’s influence over the years.

12. More Roulette, Not Russian - Kids get their quirks swapped.

13. Patron Saints - Toshinori teaches a class about pre-quirk superhero comic characters and their influence.

14. Don't Come Back - Touya Todoroki’s first few weeks after a severe injury resulted in his father abandoning him.

15. The Blessed and the Fool - Toshinori meets up with a few of his ua classmates after retiring.

16. Not Your Sacrifice - Some of the other kids have started adopting some of Izuku’s self sacrificing habits and the teachers are concerned.

17. Break in the Storm - Villains use a power outage as an opening to break into ua.

18. One Day Those Consequences Will Finally Catch Up - Even though the teachers don’t take her concerns seriously, Inko saves every piece of evidence regarding people hurting her son.

19. a garden in their eyes - Izuku meets a fan who got injured after trying to step into a villain fight, just like he did, and it makes him question some things.

20. what could have been, if not for you - After Inko divorces him, Hisashi’s goes to the press to say All Might stole his wife and son.

21. Promised Misery - All Might finds out the severity of Bakugou’s bullying, and warns him he’s on thin ice with him.

22. Fly Up Higher, Blossom Brighter - Izuku has to write a paper for middle school about being positive, intercut with all the bullshit he has to deal with.

23. Libre Me from Hell - One of Izuku’s new quirks is spiral related.

24. No One to Blame but Yourself - Izuku’s kindness doesn’t extend to murderers, tragic backstory or not.

25. At Its Finest - Izuku accidentally gets involved in a hero commission coverup.

26. A Rising Issue - Izuku starts developing more severe side effects of his injuries.  He’s convinced he’s under the influence of a quirk, while the adults thing he’s finally gone too far hurting himself.

27. What you are in the Dark - Izuku usually keeps most of his anger to himself until he can’t.

28. nowhere to go - Inko moves into UA after their home was destroyed.

29. Something Without - My theory about the 2 OFA vestiges that are blurred out is they don’t approve of izuku as a successor.  Izuku tries to figure out why. 

30. Walking with a Ghost - Toshinori joins the OFA dreams while he’s in a coma.  He gets to reunite with nana, and is more open to Izuku about his past and feelings.  Part of his starts to wonder if it’s worth waking up, since he will die and join the others eventually.

31. Death By Crying - Izuku is affected by a quirk that will suffocate him if he expresses any emotion.

32. Justice is Subjective - The hero commission gets to Shigaraki before AFO does.  

33. Undo / Underdog - Death loop fic.  Izuku keeps reliving the day he met all might after being killed by the sludge villain.  he has to find a way to break the loop and survive, but he gets s little weaker every time he restarts.

34. Like Wildfire - A rumor that Izuku is All Might’s bio son picks up steam, and the characters have to decide whether to deny it but risk suspicion or play along and add a new layer to the lies protecting one for all.

35. Once Upon A December - All Might and Inko actually met in the past trope.

36. Some Legends Are Told - All Might’s first interview post-retirement.

37. Will The Real Mentor Please Stand Up - Aizawa considers himself the better teacher, but a lot of the kids seem to like All Might more.

38. I don't want the cure, I want the POISON! - Inko is killed in a hit and run, and Izuku becomes desperate to find the killer.

39. I will kill my heart before I dance on stage for these bigots - Izuku is interviewed as a rising star of UA, and the interviewer brings in some of his old bullies because they claimed to be his friends from middle school.  Izuku does not play along.

40. Split Ends - A quirk gives Izuku brief visions of what would have happened if he made different decisions.

41. Dreamless Sleep - A One for All dream leaves Izuku with a cryptic half-warning, and he desperately experiments to try and figure out how to trigger the visions to get the rest of it.

42. toxic flowers and pretty blades - Young Inko escapes the constricting life of her cruel wealthy family by becoming a vigilante.

43. The Suns we Orbit - Some of the other teachers believe Izuku is too codependent on Toshinori, and separate them for a time.

44. Submerged - Similar to those buried alive fics only someone’s in a box at the bottom of the ocean.

45. Deprive - Izuku also loses his stomach to an injury, and struggles to adjust to the necessary lifestyle changes.

46. The ashes fall like snow - Post Kamino cleanup.

47. Home will always be here - Inko cares for Izuku after he’s sent home due to “trouble at work study” but he refuses to clarify what that means.

48. Playing Favorites - A look at several times where Izuku was punished, while Bakugou got off scot free.

49. Elusive Dreams - Some kind of training or issue forces the kids to stay away for several consecutive day, and they start losing it.

50. Fracture - Izuku struggles through physical therapy after a severe injury that leaves his hero career in question.

51. Starlight, Starbright - Space cadet au

52. Someone in Your Corner - Gran Torino looking after Nana, Toshi, and finally Izuku through the years.

53. I cast magic missile into the darkness - Generic “the gang plays d&d” fic.

54. One Month At A Time - Izuku breaks a limb, and has to let in heal naturally over the course of several months.

55. Head Above Water - Izuku runs out of his pain meds and can’t get access to more doses for a while, so he has to endure not only the pain, but the withdrawal symptoms.

56. Are you going to leave a path to trace - All Might uses a new strategy to try and get Izuku to be less self sacrificial: what about all the young kids who are going to look up to him?

57. The View from Halfway Down - Izuku realizes that a risky move has just landed him with a potentially life threatening injury, but the fight it still going.

58. The Dust Bites Back - A villain All Might defeated early in his career is back and out for revenge.

59. The Absence of your Worth - Nighteye thinks he’s put together a rock solid case for why izuku isn’t worthy of One for All.  All Might’s response is to ask if he has something against quirkless people.

60. Behind the Screens Nobody is Afraid - All Might explains some of the context of his most popular hero videos to Izuku.  They are much more tragic than the media has spun them in hindsight.

61. Under the Light of the Moon - Someone gets turned into a werewolf.  And I ain’t talking the wattpad piss shit.  I’m talking full-on back-breaking monstrous transformations into a bloodthirsty abomination set to Bad Moon Rising.

62. some dreams were made to be broken - Bakugou crosses a line and finally gets expelled.

63. You Say You're Into Closure - Izuku finally beats Bakugou in a one on one fight fair and square, but Bakugou is a sore loser.

64. Something or Someone Missing - AU’s memories of Izuku get wiped, but those closest to him can’t help but feel an absence.

65. Too Little Too Late - Izuku’s father returns to find he’s been replaced.

66. Collecting Dust - Inko goes through the stuff Izuku didn’t take to the dorms.

67. Where the souls of wanderers go - Toshi meets up with a retired hero support group.

68. Fragility of Trust - Suspected traitor au

69. no one answered - Izuku is trapped in a cell in a building that’s collapsing in slow motion due to a quirk.

70. Eye of the Storm - One of the other kids has a panic attack for the first time between public appearances.  izuku has never seen from from the outside.

71. To Whom It May Concern - The kids find a mysterious collection of letters from previous students hidden in the ceiling of the classroom.  Some are ominous, some are incomprehensible.  Aizawa has no answers.  They enthusiastically go to try and solve the mystery within, but that excitement quickly diminishes the more they find out.

72. Of Popsicles and Ponytails - All Might gets in a discussion with the other teachers about whether the Clark Kent glasses thing would actually work.  All Might bets them it does, so he goes around town with no disguise other than his hair being up, and no one bats an eye.

73. All Men are Not Born Equal - Word gets out to the public that izuku used to be quirkless.  Everyone finds out just how deep anti-quirkless sentiments run when some begin to question whether a quirkless kid should be at ua, regardless of whether or not he has a quirk now.

74. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies - Something about encountering death in person for the first time being the dividing line between child and adult.

75. Sins of the Father - All for One has had many children over the centuries, and has made numerous attempts to groom them into the ideal heir with several different methods.  None of them worked though.

76. Where The Dead Come To Rest - The kids come home after a long, grueling mission where they saw some shit, and are too tired to process what they went through.  They take off their gear for plain clothes, then sit in the common room in silence long into the night, not wanting to open themselves up but also not wanting to be alone.

77. Rivalry - Nighteye tries to pit Izuku and Mirio against one another.  It goes right over Mirio’s head, but Izuku becomes convinced the other boy is in on Nighteye’s plan to wear him down until he gives up One for All.

78. A Subtle Language - All Might and Nana never said out loud that they loved each other, but little things told them that they did.  All Might hopes to pass a similar love down to his own successor.  But Izuku is very different than himself as a kid, and he needs to learn a new subtle language of affection.

79. It’s Gone - One for All stops working one day.

80. A Sight For Sore Eyes - All Might looking after Izuku in the aftermath of the second movie.

81. Loose Lips (sink ships) - Bakugou blurts out something about One for All during a rage, so the rest of the class jump on him and Izuku for answers.

82. No Expectations - Word gets out that All Might is going to choose a successor.  None of the theories or speculation online resemble Izuku in the slightest.

83. Eden was Only a Garden - Izuku gets hit with a quirk that erases some of his most traumatic memories, but in doing so loses part of who he is.

84. Run it Down - With all Izuku’s new quirks and his incredible skill, some of the other students with similar powers (Iida, Sero, Uraraka) start to feel like izuku is upstaging them.  And it affects their friendship.

85. Fool's Gold - Bakugou grows even more jealous of Izuku having One for All, and his relationship with All Might.  He thinks that if he could just prove himself to be more worthy, All Might would change his mind and name him his successor.  But in reality, he ends up jeopardizing the relationship they already have.

86. somewhere down the road - The final deadline for Nighteye’s predictions passes, and All Might lives.  He debates telling Izuku, as even though it would be a weight off the boy’s mind, he doesn’t want to jinx it.  He will still die eventually after all.

87. Just For You - All Might has certain rules and boundaries for fan interactions that he completely ignores for Izuku.

88. if these walls could talk (their whispers would be maddening) - Montage of training accidents in a ‘cursed’ ua gym

89. If Only I Could... - Nighteye tells Mirio about One for All, including that he thinks he’s more deserving than Izuku and he plans to pressure him into giving it up.  Mirio struggles with the knowledge that his mentor, someone he respected more than anything, only saw him as a replacement for All Might, meanwhile watching Izuku strain under the pressure of that mentor’s impossible expectations.

90. This is a Test Designed to Provoke an Emotional Response - shameless Blade Runner AU

91. Once and for All - Retelling of the Superman story “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” with All Might.  Some new heroes use much more aggressive and violent tactics against villains while also upstaging All Might.  That, and there general approval from the public cause All Might to question his moral code.

92. Sitting In The Rain - Tsuyu likes to just sit out in the rain sometimes.  Not do anything, just sit there.  Some friends decide to join her.

93. At Sundown - Mysterious creatures start attacking ua every night.  The gang works tirelessly during the day to find the cause and a solution, while defending their school and each other at night.

94. The 1000th time's the charm - Uraraka has been practicing a new move in secret but they just can’t get it right.  She wants it to be perfect before showing it off.  But one attempt gets her seriously hurt while training alone at night in one of the gyms, and she’s too hurt to get up to the phone to call for help.

95. Sunflower Seeds - All Might attempts to start a garden as a new hobby.

96. What It Means To Be Human - Sun god Toshi starts living among people.

97. Eyes on Me - All Might teaches Izuku some unarmed fighting moves to defend himself from bullies.

98. one remains - Izuku has developed all but one of the quirks he’s slated to, and he has no idea what it will be.  Anxiety ensues.

99. Come Back Home - Izuku vanishes from campus and everyone assumes he was kidnapped, but in reality he ran away to try and clear his head after a depressive spiral.  He goes by train as far away as he can until he comes to his senses and calls the others.

100. I Won - Izuku accidentally managed to kill Shigaraki during a skirmish, and while everyone around him praises his heroics, he struggles to deal with the fact that he killed someone.

101. Ivory Tower - All Might grapples with how much izuku suffered as a quirkless person, how he could have done more for quirkless rights in his time as a hero, and how now people may not care as much because he’s retired.

Reminder to credit me if you use any of these prompts, and a special thanks to everyone who submitted titles!

[psychedaleka]

all my stumbling phrases

an angbang @officialtolkiensecretsanta 2020 gift fic for @celebbun :) hope you enjoy!

Rating: T | No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Melkor/Mairon Characters: Melkor, Mairon Word count: 2.7k

Summary: A winter day in Utumno, an outdoor excursion, and a conversation.

---

“You want to do what?” Mairon levels a flat stare at Melkor, who’s looking at him with an expression that would be unreadable to anyone else.

To Mairon, it’s the I-have-an-idea-and-it-just-might-end-in-a-disaster look.

“Strap knives to our feet and glide on ice,” Melkor says, matter of fact, as though it’s something that anyone would think to do.

read the rest on ao3! or below the cut

Mairon sets down his quill and closes the inventory records. The cover slams shut with a bang. He can feel a headache building. No—not a headache. Not exactly. But it’s an ache of some sort, something he can’t put into words. The feeling he keeps getting whenever he’s in the same room as Melkor but like he doesn’t know what he should do, what he should say.

Like he’s flustered.

Mairon has never been flustered in his life.

“You need a break,” Melkor says. “You’ve been staring at that for how long now, a week?”

“Less than a day, for this particular record,” Mairon corrects. “I have been auditing your storerooms for a week.”

“Exactly!” Melkor says. “Does it matter if we have 3400 or 3401 shields?”

“Yes,” Mairon says, but doesn’t bother to offer more explanation.

He wants to double check and cross reference the math, because it’s simple, and straightforward, and if there’s something he doesn’t recognize, there’s inevitably a solution.

It distracts him, too, from staring at Melkor too much, from watching everything he does. It is probably, Mairon tells himself, that Melkor is a Valar, and he commands attention. There’s no other possible explanation as to why Mairon might lose track of everything else when he’s around.

“Listen,” Melkor says, shifting tactics, “the inventories will keep for another day. Just give an order that whichever storeroom you’re investigating shouldn’t be touched, and come back to it later. It isn’t as though the shields will run away.”

Mairon considers it.

“Fine,” he says.

“Excellent!” Melkor says. “Now, I have some ideas about how we could achieve this—”

Of course, those ideas happen to be Melkor describing what he wants to achieve, and Mairon scrambling to find a way to realize it. It’s very typical, and Mairon’s used to it now.

Melkor’s a big picture thinker, and that was what drew Mairon to him in the beginning. Mairon can’t really complain about that now. Even if Melkor occasionally shows up to dump a pile of half formed plans and ideas on him, leaving him to drop what he’s doing and piece together the scraps and trace Melkor’s—often disjointed—logic.

Even so, Mairon’s quite pleased with the end result—ice skates, they’ll probably be called. The blade is separate from the shoe, with a platform that attaches to the sheo by two leather straps. The blade is not as sharp as the knives Mairon prefers, no, but it will glide across ice and support the wearer’s weight.

It will help with icy expeditions and complaints that frozen lakes are impossible to cross.

“All that’s left to do is test them,” Mairon tells Melkor, who’s been sitting on a bench in his—no, the forge, Mairon can’t forget that it technically doesn’t belong to him. Melkor’s presence has surprised and scared quite a few of the other maiar and a not insignificant number of orcs. “I’m certain I’ll be able to find a few orcs willing to volunteer—”

“No, no,” Melkor says. “Let’s go test them.”

Mairon opens his mouth, then closes it again.

“I have work to do,” he says, a weak excuse.

“Get someone else to do it,” he says. “Surely, counting can’t be so difficult a task that you need to attend to it?”

“No one will organize the storerooms in the optimal configuration,” Mairon says.

“Optimal configuration, you say,” Melkor says, and Mairon knows he’s laughing at him, but he doesn’t say anything. “It can be just the two of us.”

Mairon tries to parse the implications of that sentence.

“Besides, I’m bored,” Melkor continues.

Mairon remembers the last time Melkor had been bored. It involved several explosions, a near incomprehensible scoreboard, and half a year to clean up. Mairon considers it, and looks up at Melkor—who seems to know exactly what he’s doing.

“Fine,” Mairon says. Productivity in the forges has been down, anyways, since Melkor first started watching him work on the ice skates. His normally competent assistants have ruined a batch of swords, broken three hammers, and nearly dropped a ton of molten iron on the ground. He needs to get Melkor out of here before his presence causes a larger disaster.

“I knew you would agree eventually.”

There are underground lakes and rivers beneath the foundation of Utumno, used for the drinking and other miscellaneous needs of the fortress’ inhabitants. It’s liquid year round, even in the middle of winter, insulated from the aboveground temperature by layers of rock. The paths to this reservoir are many, but it’s not there that they head for, and for that, Mairon is secretly glad. The last thing he needs is to field panicked reports of the plumbing not working because Melkor had frozen the whole thing. Even if he had designed and tested it himself.

Some distance from Utumno is a lake, nestled between mountain peaks. Fed by rainwater and melting snow from the mountains, it had formed when the Lamps were destroyed.

It was also where Mairon had landed, when he came to Utumno permanently.

It’s there that Melkor leads him, now, some distance away from straying gazes and open ears.

The surface of the lake is frozen over, in a layer of clear ice.

“Will the ice hold?” Mairon asks.

“One way to find out,” Melkor says, and Mairon fights the urge to tell him that there absolutely are more ways to find out. “You first.”

Mairon’s already come this far. He might as well—and if he falls over, well, there’s no one around to see except Melkor, and he doesn’t care if he embarasses himself in front of Melkor.

That’s a lie. He cares very much of what Melkor thinks about him.

Mairon straps the skates to his shoes with cold fingers. He should have brought gloves.

It isn’t difficult to balance on solid ground, but the moment Mairon steps onto the ice, he slips and falls. He can hear Melkor’s muffled laughter.

Well, he thinks, at least Melkor has the awareness to muffle his laughter—as though that’s any better.

His cheeks flush red, and it’s not just because of the cold.

He pushes himself up from the ice. His fingers are cold. This time, Mairon manages to stay upright for a few more seconds, but when he starts trying to move, he’s wobbly and falls soon after. He scrambles for a few seconds, trying to push himself up again, before Melkor interjects.

“Need some help?” Melkor asks, gliding on the second pair of skates as though this isn’t his first time skating. Melkor offers an arm, and Mairon clings to it, dragging himself up.

“Thanks,” Mairon says.

“Here, hold my hands,” Melkor says. “You won’t fall over as much.”

“Perhaps it’s a design flaw,” Mairon says, trying to concentrate on something other than how close Melkor is. “How much balance is needed to effectively operate them, I mean.”

“I don’t think so,” Melkor says. “All you need is some practice.”

Melkor starts skating backwards, slowly—the showoff—and he takes Mairon with him. Mairon glides, pulled along by Melkor, inexorably drawn by his trajectory, trusting him not to lead Mairon to a fall.

“See, it isn’t so hard,” Melkor says. “Why don’t you try?”

Mairon lets go of Melkor’s hands—reluctantly, and he doesn’t want to think of the implications of that. He wobbles along, for a short while—he’s getting better, he thinks—and falls. Again.

Melkor muffles his laughter, again, as Mairon drags himself up.

“Not all of us have your sense of balance,” Mairon says, annoyed.

“Oh, yes, I’m very well aware,” Melkor says, not bothering to hide his grin.

Mairon glares at him.

“Here, we can keep holding hands,” Melkor says. “Let’s go around the lake.”

Mairon casts a glance at the other shore of the lake, barely lit by starlight filtering through a thick layer of clouds.

“Are you sure the ice will hold?” Mairon asks.

“Oh, yes,” Melkor says. “There shouldn’t be any issues.”

A few hours later, Mairon is chilled to the bone and decently competent at skating.

“That was fun,” Melkor says.

“More importantly, the skates are tested,” Mairon says.

Melkor stares at him, for a long moment.

“What?” Mairon asks.

“Did you really think this was about testing skates?” Melkor asks.

“Yes?” Mairon says. “What else?”

“You and I, spending some time together,” Melkor says.

“We spend plenty of time together,” Mairon says. “When you come and watch me work, when I report to you about the status of Utumno—”

“No,” Melkor says. “Not about work. On a personal basis.”

Mairon blinks.

On a personal basis? What could Melkor want from him ‘on a personal basis?’

He asks as much, but Melkor doesn’t answer that question.

“You were unhappy in Almaren,” Melkor says, a statement more than a question. “That was easy to tell. But harder, I think, to tell if you’re happy here.”

A pause.

“Mairon, are you happy?”

“Yes?” Mairon answers. He doesn’t know why Melkor would ask him this.

“I mean it,” Melkor says. “If there’s anything you dislike—if there’s anything that you want to be different, don’t hesitate to change it.”

There is. There is that maddeningly incomprehensible feeling he gets when he’s around Melkor, but that’s not something he can articulate, let alone make concrete plans for.

“I hadn’t thought my personal wellbeing mattered to you,” Mairon says, instead.

“Why would it not?”

“Because—well, because you’re you, and I’m me,” Mairon answers.

“That’s not an answer.”

“As though you haven’t been giving me non answers the whole day.”

“Like for what question?”

“What do you want from me on a personal basis?”

Melkor—for probably the first time in his very long life—thinks about what he says before he says it.

“The work you have done for me is commendable,” Melkor says. “The structure, organizational, and technological improvements have been greatly beneficial to my forces, and I—would not have been able to achieve these changes without you. But what you could do for me was not the only reason I wanted you to be mine.”

What other reason could there be, Mairon thinks, but doesn’t ask.

“I—” Melkor glances around, as though someone could be eavesdropping on their conversation— “I love you.”

Mairon stands there, frozen, not just because of the cold.

He opens his mouth, and closes it.

“You—what?” Mairon asks, finally, when the implications of what Melkor just said hits him. “I—what?”

Melkor turns sharply, skates grinding across the ice. There’s tension in his shoulders.

“Forget it,” he says. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, I—” Mairon falls silent. He doesn’t know how to proceed.

“We ought to return,” Melkor says.

The thing is: Mairon doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to go back to his inventories and reports. He wants to stay out here, even though he’s freezing cold, because—because—because—

Because Melkor is here, with him. With only him.

But Melkor is skating towards the opposite end of the lake, and Mairon rushes to follow.

Only—he shifts his weight, and there’s a cracking noise, and before Mairon can realize what’s happened, the ice breaks beneath him, swallowing him beneath the icy water.

Mairon is a Maia, and he doesn’t need anything as paltry as oxygen, but he’s exhausted from his week of auditing, and trying to ensure the forges don’t fall to chaos as he and Melkor design the ice skates, and the cold air while he skated, and the love confession, and the icy shock.

Mairon is a Maia, but his nature is that of fire and stone, and he doesn’t do well with cold water.

He slips into unconsciousness.

The next thing Mairon is aware of is a heavy weight on his body, and the fact that he is lying on something soft. He blinks his way to wakefulness, slowly, slowly, and the world around him sharpens in degrees.

He’s lying on a bed—a feather bed, with stuffed pillows, underneath several layers of thick blankets. The bed frame is carved dark wood, and the richly embroidered curtains are half closed, giving him a faint view of the room outside. There’s a roaring fire opposite him, with the faint smell of wood smoke, and tapestries hanging on the stone walls.

This isn’t his room, with his sparse cot and makeshift blankets that he had chosen over a proper bed.

Mairon sits upright, too quickly.

The room is empty. He had hoped it wouldn’t be.

Mairon tries, desperately, to parse what happened.

Melkor had said he loved him. He loved him.

Mairon had thought—this was impossible, not because Aule had implied Melkor was incapable of love, but because Mairon was a Maia, and Melkor’s subordinate, and—

He had rejected that possibility, and his own feelings, because he never thought it would be possible.

But it isn’t impossible. It isn’t even improbable.

It happened. Melkor had said he loved him.

And Mairon had—he flops back down onto the bed. Mairon had frozen, entirely.

He lies there, for a few more minutes, before making up his mind. He needs to do something about this.

He pushes himself out of bed—maybe too fast, because the world swoops around him.

A hand catches his arm, pulls him upright.

“Careful there,” Melkor says, standing right next to Mairon. He’s watching Mairon, with an expression that is utterly unreadable to Mairon.

Mairon doesn’t like it.

“What happened?”

“You fell into the lake,” Melkor says, and Mairon thinks Melkor should be amused, he should find it funny that Mairon actually fell into the lake after worrying that he would, but Melkor isn’t laughing.

He looks dead serious.

“I thought you said the ice would hold,” Mairon says, because he doesn’t like this. He wants Melkor to be making fun of him.

“If you’re implying that I deliberately made you fall in—”

“Did you?”

“No!” Melkor snaps.

Is he angry? Mairon doesn’t know. He sits down—and something in him says, this is improper, you shouldn’t be sitting when he isn’t, but Mairon’s passed improper hours ago.

“It was very cold,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Melkor doesn’t respond. “Where am I?”

“My rooms,” Melkor says. “Yours were hardly sufficient. You don’t even have a bed.”

He sounds—annoyed? Angry on Mairon’s behalf? Mairon isn’t sure why, except—the words I love you rings in his mind, and Mairon wonders, then, if Melkor cares about him beyond the way a lord should for his servant.

But of course, Mairon chides himself.

“Perhaps I should start stealing your bed,” Mairon says, after far too long a silence.

Melkor doesn’t respond to that.

“I should go,” Mairon says, but he makes no move to leave.

But Melkor doesn’t make him leave.

“I love you too,” Mairon blurts out. He should be leaving. He should really, really be leaving. But when he makes for the door, Melkor stops him with a firm grip on his arm.

“Don’t say that just because you feel obligated to,” Melkor says.

“I’m not,” Mairon says, feeling the room grow several degrees warmer. Or maybe it’s just his face. “I don’t—feel obligated to—I just. Wanted to tell you how I felt. Feel. Still do.”

Melkor brushes a thumb across Mairon’s cheekbone.

Then Melkor kisses him.

After an eternity, and too short a time, they pull away from each other.

“You can steal my bed anytime you’d like,” Melkor says, with a wink.

Mairon, flustered, is speechless.

“My auditing,” Mairon says.

“Forget about it,” Melkor says. “You can easily go back to it tomorrow. Stay here. With me.”

With him.

“Sure,” Mairon says. “What do you want to do?”

Melkor’s watching Mairon with his I-have-an-idea look. But this time, it just might not end in a disaster.

[chaosworthyarchive]

                                                                      7.07.3227                                                           Location ¦ Scrap Brain

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

     “Hey!”

     It was funny, Sonic thought, how one word could completely ruin a day. How just the tone of one syllable could make him feel like there was a boulder in his chest when he had been fine, happy even, just moments before. He had actually had a very good day with Amy, window shopping and chatting mostly, and the two of them had just been heading back to their respective flats together when the exclamation came. Maybe it was because their day had been sullied, or just her natural protectiveness, but something had Amy turning on her heels towards the voice, hands on her hips and eyes narrowing. 

     “Did you need something?”

     The blue hedgehog had turned right after her, hardly surprised to see an angry-looking stranger, a tiger, standing just a few feet behind them. The heroine’s question had made him bare sharp teeth, a scoff coming forth as he returned the glare.

     “I’m not talkin’ to you, I’m talkin’ to him,” disregarding the female he raised a claw to point at the hero, his demeanor likely threatening to anyone else but his target. “You’re not welcome here, ya know that?”

     “I picked up on it,” Sonic answered, somewhat bitter but still matter of fact as he held up his hands. “Listen, I don’t want any trouble. I’m just passing through. Last time I checked ’s not a crime.”

     “That’s rich, coming from you. You’re nothing but trouble, that whole ‘hero’ guise can’t fool me,” the feline snorted, making a grand gesture around them and it was only then the two hedgehogs noticed they had more than a few eyes on them there on the sidewalk, just a few meters from a construction site. “You’re the reason we have to go through any of this in the first place.”

     “As if!” Amy shot back, and angrily at that. “He’s the reason you’re even alive to begin with, or that this city is even still standing.”

     While there were murmurs from the crowd around them, some of agreement and some of argument, there was a definite tension in the air. Sonic couldn’t help the natural rise of his quills, an involuntary defense, as the feline took a step forward. There was such a livid glare in the stranger’s eyes, he just knew that something was going to go wrong there if the tiger had their way. It was a thought that was annoying as it was sobering, and a thought that was cut through by them speaking again.

     Or perhaps ‘speaking’ was too kind a term given their tone.

     “He’s the reason it’s like this at all! If it hadn’t been for him none of this would have happened! People like him are dangerous,” he snapped, and the hero flinched much to his own distaste, but it was the next words that seemed to ignite something not only in Amy, but the crowd around them. “He should have joined the rest of the people in Grand Metropolis.”

     “And people like you should be locked up!” Amy shot back, fist clenched. She either didn’t notice the ruckus the crowd had started or was ignoring it. “He’s never done anything so leave him alone!”

     The murmurs from their unwanted audience grew to a crescendo at that moment, turning the once quiet street into madness. People were yelling now, trying to be heard over one another as they chimed in with their own opinion, or to argue with the one of the people closest to them who said otherwise.

     “She’s right!” 

     “Don’t be stupid! He’s a menace.”

     “He saved us!”

     “He’s a threat!”

     During it all, the tiger’s eyes never left the blue hedgehog. There was something almost triumphant in their eyes, as if fueled by the chaos they had created. And all the while the hero never broke eye contact with them, a careful and level expression on his face despite the heavy feeling in his chest. He couldn’t say what exactly, but something…wasn’t right, like there was another thing entirely just beneath the surface. A real reason for this. 

     Unfortunately Sonic didn’t get too much time to decipher what he had seen in the feline’s eyes because something happened. He didn’t know what but one second the crowd had been unruly and the next all hell had broken loose. Someone had clearly made a wrong move, or perhaps said something just on the side of wrong, because it didn’t take the hedgehog long to realize that the sidewalk and parallel street had turned into pandemonium. Sharp shouts, bitter curses and smaller fights had broken out all around them, all in an instant.

     Being in the middle of it, and yet not the target of any assault, the hero felt a surefire relief when Amy shifted next to him, putting them back to back in the growing madness. Looking back to see the apologetic expression on her face, the hero only offered a small, half-hearted one back. What a dramatic change to the day. What an unwanted turn of events.

     The next few minutes, frankly, were a blur. It hadn’t taken long for someone to either notify the authorities or for them to notice themselves but getting the crowd under control was a task on its own. Eventually, somehow, a line of officers divided the two quarreling sections though the harsh words would continue to be thrown back and forth. Having ended on opposite sides, the two hedgehogs were acutely aware of the feline’s tilted glare from across the line, thankful for the distance but not breaking eye contact. They seemed frozen in that position, even as the clamor around them settled down and the police began funneling people out of the area in safe numbers.

     It wasn’t until it was their time to move that Sonic shifted, though it wasn’t to follow the light pull Amy had given his arm. Just the opposite. He remained where he was, eyes narrowing at the feline who merely scoffed before trying to slink away into the other half of the throng. 

     “Wait.”

     How ironic, still, that one word could hold so much power. Or perhaps it had been the authority in which the hero had spoken it. Either way, he hadn’t expected the sudden stillness in the air, for the crowd and cops to freeze as they had. He had only wanted the tiger's attention, and he had gotten it. 

     “Sonic?”

     He ignored Amy, eyes locked on the feline’s and emeralds being bored into as a result. For a moment, during that tension, it seemed one or the other would snap. That one word, or action, would send that part of the city into chaos again. But nothing came, not like that. There was only a growing realization in the hero’s eyes, a sense of familiarity as he stared into the other’s eyes, into something deeper. He knew that look. He had seen it far too many times.

     “Who did you lose?” The question was abrupt, but soft, though the hero took no satisfaction in the surprised expression on the feline’s face. So…that was it. Did it justify the other’s behavior? Yes, in a way but the hero still spoke, unrelenting. “If you’re going t’ stand there and tear me down, I want t’ know why.”

     The tiger growled, fangs bared. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

     “But you want t’.” Again, quick words, spoken matter of fact as he frowned. “Who was it?” 

     There was a pause, weighted, debating before the feline spoke in a voice that hadn’t been heard thus far that day. Broken, fractured. The sound of loss. “…My wife.”

     The word struck a chord with the blue hedgehog, had cast a sense of sympathy and dread over him that he couldn’t hope to hide. That he didn’t want to hide. “What happened…?”

     If a glare had been able to kill, Sonic imagined he would have died on that very spot. The feline’s hatred was near palpable, creating a tension in the air that had stuck all nearby silent, a nervousness falling over the crowd as the tiger stepped forward, only to be stopped by one of the police officers. It only served to make him angrier, venom in his voice as he spat in the hedgehog’s direction. “We were coming back from dinner when those…things attacked. We didn’t stand a chance…she was there one second, and the next…”

     They didn’t complete the sentence, he didn’t need to. Even the officer holding them seemed sad, understanding, but their stance remained firm much to Sonic’s relief. The hedgehog knew the tiger was no real threat, not to him, but it was better not to risk it. Besides, he couldn’t even get a word out before a new voice cut across the tight silence on the street.

     “It’s not his fault.”

     Every pair of eyes in the area shifted to the left, towards the new arrivals. A tall, slender black cat and a bushy-haired, brown, stout canine. A well-known and utterly respected pair in the city, their advance alone had an unspoken weight to it, an air that demanded respect. It was Amy who broke the resulting shock, surprised but relief in her tone. “Ebony? Pyjamas?”

     The former nodded to the pink hedgehog, slitted eyes lingering on Sonic with a sympathetic expression before turning to the tiger with a cold, matter-of-fact demeanor. Pyjamas, meanwhile, stood at the hero’s side. “You have the wrong person. If you’re looking to lay blame, turn it towards Robotnik. It was his robots that attacked, it was his goals that brought our city to ruin. Like all of us, Sonic did his best to stop things from getting to the point of no return.”

     “But he leads you band of freaks, doesn’t he? He should have known better! He should have stopped it!” Anger rose in the tiger anew at the new resistance, taloned hands clenched and fangs bearing all over again. 

     “How?” One word, short and teeming with an unspoken impatience. “How could he have known when it was happening all over the planet? Our few forces scattered, fighting for not only their lives but to keep innocents alive. While you did…what, again?”  

     The black feline’s words were short, as were the ones that came next from her partner. There was a coldness to even Pyjamas' voice, a rare but chilling thing as her gaze bore into the tiger’s. “You never even thought to help, did you? Because you just assumed he’d be there, like he always was.”

     Whatever the tiger was going to say next fell dead in his throat, the briefest flash of guilt in his eyes before the scowl returned. Yet, he said nothing. No one, in fact, said anything for a long time. Not even as glances were exchanged between the other bystanders, some of guilt and some of uncertainty. Pyjamas' words, it seemed, had hit a note with more than just the unnamed tiger. 

     For a few moments the hedgehog and orange-hued feline looked at each other once more, and this time there was something more in the meeting. Something the hero couldn’t quite put a finger on but he sighed, slowly and softly nonetheless before speaking. “It’s not easy…” 

     The words were quiet but in the silence there on the street he may as well have shouted. All eyes were on him, every breath on the street bated, the other Freedom Fighters wary and the officers tense. The feline, however, was listening and that was all that mattered. 

     “It was never easy. Just for the record I never gave myself that title, being a hero was never something I set out t' do.” The firm truth in those words wasn’t to be doubted, the conviction in Sonic’s tone leaving very little to the imagination. The distaste in his tone was clear. He may have been addressing the tiger, but all had stopped to listen. “I’ve only ever done what I thought was right but everyone always wanted t' jump on the chance t' have it be more than that. They wanted t' paint me in a perfect light, they never thought that I could do anything wrong because that's the image they painted in their heads. You an' everyone else are the ones who put me on a pedestal, you never bothered t' think that your expectations were too much, and you never thought I could mess up until it affected you personally. You never bothered t' remember that I was just one person.”

     The hero hadn’t meant to but there was an ire in his voice, a long ripened bitterness as his eyes swept over the crowd before settling on the tiger, eyes narrowed but betraying the sorrow in them. “She wasn’t the first, and she wasn’t the last. But…Chaos, I tried…”

     Sonic always did. Yet for all his efforts the hedgehog still came up short more times than he cared to think about. A part of him knew it was inevitable, but a much larger part of him hated that fact. It never failed to leave a bitter taste in his mouth, a looming sense of failure that seeped into his voice as he stared the tiger dead in the eyes. 

     “I’m sorry about your wife. If I could trade places with her, know that I would in a heartbeat…but I can’t. Things just don’t work that way. All I can do is keep moving forward and try t' keep anything like it from happening again, if I can. If I don’t then everyone who died would have done so for nothing.

     “So, no, I’m not a hero, I’m just a guy who fucked up and now has t’ live with that knowledge every day. But ’s not going t’ stop me from doing what’s right, it’s not going to stop me from protecting the people who are left.”

     It was all he had to say, and perhaps it was a good thing given the heavy air about the hero. Good given the breeze that had started to blow through the crowd, and how the hero’s hand had clenched at his side tight enough for nails to draw blood from a red-clad palm. Be it those things or something else, Amy placed a gentle hand on his back and, while there was hesitation as their eyes met, there was little resistance as the heroine started to lead the blue hedgehog away, goading him to walk. 

     No one tried to stop them. In fact, the crowd had parted to let the two hedgehogs through, leaving the older feline and canine psychics behind. Both of whom had fixed their gazes, hard and cold, on the tiger who, for the first time that day, seemed struck to silence. 

     “Still think he’s the bad guy?” 

[bananaofswifts]

Taylor Swift – ‘Folklore’ review: pop superstar undergoes an extraordinary indie-folk makeover

4 STARTS

This rich isolation album boasts collaborations with Bon Iver and The National's Aaron Dessner, and might just feature Taylor's best song ever

This summer, Taylor Swift was meant to headline Glastonbury. In fact, she was meant to be playing a whole host of festivals and shows on an international tour as well as hosting her own two-part ‘Lover Fest’ in America, all in celebration of her seventh studio album ‘Lover’, which was released last August). The global pandemic, of course, meant these plans were scrapped, leaving Swift with bountiful spare time. No longer locked into rehearsals or jetting around the globe performing to tens of thousands, she used these hours to write.

The results of these unforeseen quarantine writing sessions have come together on Swift’s new, eighth studio album, ‘Folklore’. She’s uncharacteristically ‘done a Beyoncé‘, announcing the album less than 24 hours before it drops, a stark change to the very deliberate, calculated release schedules we’ve seen from Swift in the past. In a simple statement posted to social media, she acknowledged that she’d usually wait and release the album at the “perfect” time, but said the global situation acted as a reminder to her that “nothing is guaranteed”. These shock release tactics go hand-in-hand with a change in musical direction for Swift; ‘Folklore’ is something totally unexpected from one of the world’s biggest pop stars.

Over the course of seven albums, we’ve seen Swift evolve from a fresh-faced, teenage country crossover hopeful to sleek synth-pop chart-juggernaut. Each record has brought with it gradual changes – 2010’s ‘Speak Now’ was rockier and 2012’s ‘Red’ saw more pop-leaning production, and by the time we got to 2014’s ‘1989’ she’d cast the cowboy hat aside entirely for pure pop bangers. On album eight, Swift dives headfirst into the world of folk, alternative rock and indie.

It was written in isolation; she remotely teamed up with a handful of her musical heroes – and indie legends – including The National‘s Aaron Dessner (who worked on 11 of the 16 songs), Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon (he makes the record’s only guest appearance on ‘Exile’) and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff. In her pre-release statement, she claims to have worked with another ‘hero’, the mysterious William Bowery – though no known details exist about him elsewhere and fans have speculated that this is a pseudonym for her brother or boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn.

Whoever Bowery is, the results are unexpected, and sometimes astonishing – ‘Folklore’ feels like Swift has travelled to a metaphorical cabin in the woods – albeit one with a very strong WiFI connection – and concocted a gorgeous, relaxed record filled with modern folk songs.

Dessner’s fingerprints permeate most of ‘Folklore’. The trickling piano on ‘The 1’ and ‘Mad Woman’ are reminiscent of last year’s The National album ‘I Am Easy to Find’ and ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ evokes the glitchy production heard on the band’s 2017 album ‘Sleep Well Beast’. These brooding instrumentals are always complemented by Swift’s distinctive vocals and ear-worm hooks, though, a reminder that this is the artist behind some of the biggest songs of the past decade. Meanwhile Bon Iver collaboration ‘Exile’ is a melancholy duet, a slow-burner that eventually erupts into a climax of glittering euphoria filled with chorused vocals and soaring strings reminiscent of Vernon’s fourth Bon Iver album, last year’s ‘i, i’.

Despite the bold new direction, there are moments of nostalgia for Swift albums gone by, too. ‘Betty’, a sweet tune about high school romance written by Swift and the enigmatic Bowery, fuses this new folk-rock sound with moments of country we’ve not heard for several albums. ‘My Tears Ricochet’ feels like a sister to the Imogen Heap co-written ‘Clean’ from ‘1989’, only this time a megawatt pop song is encased in layered vocals and twinkling music box instrumentals.

True: at 16 songs (17, if you count bonus track ‘The Lakes’) ‘Folklore’ can sometimes drag slightly. ‘Mirrorball’, a saccharine declaration of romance, lacks the bite of the rest of the album, while ‘Epiphany’ feels slightly sluggish. Yet for the most part, the elegant melodies, glittering production and, crucially, Swift’s songwriting and lyricism pull it back from the brink.

In fact, it’s Swift’s vivid storytelling that makes ‘Folklore’ such an impressive album. This facet has always been a keystone in her music, but her discography twinkles with gems in which it’s heightened (the gut-punch couplet of “you call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest” on ‘Red”s ‘All Too Well’; the rich description of a gaudy wedding in the title track to ‘Speak Now’).

‘Folklore’ is infused with this sort of storytelling. Take ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’, which is a contender for the best Taylor Swift song ever written. Describing one woman’s life crumbling around her, the descriptive lyrics evoke those of ’80s singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, or the complex tales Bob Dylan spins in his lengthy, winding verses. ‘Invisible String’, filled with an unusual turn of phrase – “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to LA” – is a candid glimpse inside Swift’s current relationship. And, of course, there are plenty of pithy kiss-offs perfect for your next Instagram caption, the greatest arriving when Swift whispers “And if I’m dead to you why are you at the wake?” on ‘My Tears Ricochet’.

‘Folklore’ feels fresh, forward-thinking and, most of all, honest. The glossy production she’s lent on for the past half-decade is cast aside for simpler, softer melodies and wistful instrumentation. It’s the sound of an artist who’s bored of calculated releases and wanted to try something different. Swift disappeared into the metaphorical woods while writing ‘Folklore’, and she’s emerged stronger than ever.

[ericsonclan]

A Steady Hand and A Kind Heart

Summary: Ruby visits Ms. Martin's grave and tells her what's been going on.

Read on A03:

“I-I don’t know Ms. Martin,” Ruby felt her hands shake while she tried to thread the needle. Her fingers kept trembling so much that whenever it looked like it was getting close to going through the needle head it would veer slightly to the left or right. “Darn it!” Ruby threw aside the needle onto the table with a huff.

“It’s going to be alright, Ruby,” Ms. Martin looked at her with a warm, comforting smile. “I know that we’ve only had you work on veggies and such when it’s come to stitches, but now,” Ms. Martin lifted up her right leg, placing it gingerly up on a chair. A slow, steady stream of blood oozed out of the cut that was just below her knee. “This is the best opportunity that you’re going to get as a good starting point for a person.” Ms. Martin looked up to see the still conflicted face of the eleven year old. She couldn’t blame Ruby for how she was feeling. If only they didn’t live in a world that needed Ruby to learn as fast as she could, then she would give her all the time she needed. But sadly now that the world had ended so did any luxuries that kids her age got.

“But…” Ruby stared at the bleeding leg, “What if I mess up? I don’t know if I can do it,” Ruby looked away, staring at the needle that she had thrown aside. All her fears and nerves were starting to get the better of her, consuming her mind and paralyzing her. It was only when she felt a warm sensation evelop her hand that she looked over and saw Ms. Martin’s hand on her own.

“I know it’s scary, learning all of this, practicing your skills when you’ve just started learning them.” Ms. Martin’s tone was gentle and comforting but it seemed to fail to make Ruby feel any better.

“I wanna help, but… I’m never gonna be as good as you, Ms. Martin.”

“That’s not true. You’re a fast learner and besides it’s something you need to know how to do in case anything were to happen to me.”

Ms. Martin’s words cause Ruby’s eyes to widen in fear at the thought. “But that’s never going to happen. We won’t let it! We’re all gonna get through this together!”

Ms. Martin smiled at the fiery determination she saw in Ruby’s eyes and the kindness in her voice. “Ruby, you have a gift and it’s one that you can use to help the others here at the school. Just like how Mitch always wants to protect the younger kids and how Louis tries to lift everyone’s spirits.” Ms. Martin’s hand took hold of Ruby’s right shoulder as she locked eyes with her. “You have a way to protect the others. Not everything has to do with those monsters out there. It doesn’t always have to be the only way to protect someone.” Ms. Martin’s hands wandered down, grasping Ruby’s. “Healing someone, making sure they get through a tough injury... With a steady hand and a kind heart, you can help protect the others at this school.”

Ruby’s eyes grew large at that statement, her mouth slightly open in awe at her mentor’s words. Her eyes still held a level of fear to them but were soon consumed by her newfound resolve. “Alright, I’m gonna try my best,” Ruby turned, snatching up the needle and thread once more. Her hands were much steadier now as she moved the thread closer to the needle head. Once it was through, she turned back to the leg. Ms. Martin guided her through each step, quizzing her and making sure she did each part right. When it was finally time to start stitching up the injury, Ruby felt her fear bubble up inside her but she quickly pushed it down. This is how I’m gonna protect the others. The needle hovered over the gash before puncturing the skin and starting the first of many stitches.

----

“I’m really sorry, Ruby,” Willy looked down with sad eyes before wincing when the needle pulled through the first stitch. His hand on his shirt gripped the fabric tighter to try and deal with the pain. “I was just trying to help Clem with the walkers that were surrounding her and when I took some steps back to get a better shot, I didn’t notice the tree branch,”

Ruby looked up at the fifteen year old boy with a warm smile. “Aww Sug, I know that. And I’m sure Clem appreciates your help,” Ruby turned her focus back to the task at hand, pulling another stitch through. When Clemenetine had returned back to Ericson with Willy’s arm draped around her shoulder, it had caused the whole group to freak out. But luckily it seemed like it wasn’t too bad of an injury, especially compared to some of the others Ruby had had to deal with over her many years in this new world.

After she had taken out the debris and splinters from his wound, cleaned and disinfected it, all that was left to do was stitching. That felt like second nature at this point to the redhead. The two sat in silence for a few minutes while Ruby continued to work on the stitches.

After a while Ruby stood up, stretching her back, and looked down at Willy with a content smile. “Well, that should about do it,”

Willy’s face instantly brightened at that news. He jumped up to his feet only to wince in pain once again.

“Now don’t go pushing yourself anymore than you got to. It may not be the worst injury, but it’s still delicate. Don’t go running around and tearing out your stitches,” Ruby glared up with her hands on her hips at Willy who was now much taller than her. Willy’s expression turned serious.

“Of course, Ruby. Thanks again!” Willy waved one final time before sprinting out the door and in the direction of the picnic tables where he was sure to find AJ and Garbage.

Ruby shook her head with a small smile. That boy will never learn, will he? Ruby’s eyes wandered over to the open door. There should still be some time before dinner. Maybe I’ll have time for a visit. Ruby thought on the topic for a minute before making her way outside.

Aasim looked up from his dinner prep with Omar and Prisha, a loving smile on his face as he waved at her. Ruby felt her own smile grow as she returned the gesture. Moving past the picnic tables and past the graveyards, Ruby continued to stroll through Ericson until she reached her destination: the greenhouse. She looked around for a moment to see if anyone else was nearby then proceeded through the door.

Ruby smiled down at the different planters she moved by only for her smile to fade when she entered the second room and her eyes fell upon the planter with the white fenced wall. Long, strong vines weaved up and around the wall as bright yellow flowers grew there. Young and full of life. The image of Ms. Martin appeared in Ruby’s mind, an empty husk of her mentor who reached out towards Ruby and the others. The only care she had for them was the desire to bite into them. The flowers and weeds that had grown in and around her rotting walker form swayed with her sudden movement.

Ruby felt overwhelmed by the image but closed her eyes and shook her head in hopes to cast it away. It took a few minutes and some slow, deep breaths but eventually the image was gone and she was left viewing the flourishing planter. Delicately she picked off some on the yellow flowers, making sure to get enough of the stem without destroying the vines. Ruby looked down with a content expression at the bouquet of yellow flowers she had gotten when her eyes traveled over to the small patch of light purple flowers that bloomed in one of the corners.

Maybe I should grab some of those too. She stared at it for a minute before turning sharply on her heel. No, I’ll save those for the next time I visit Brody. Ruby wandered out of the greenhouse and closed the door behind her. But instead of turning to the left to make her way through the gate and back towards the center of the school, she spun to the right and walked to a mound of dirt that protruded from the ground. Ruby sat down in front of it and placed down the bouquet of flowers.

“Hi there, Ms. Martin. Been some time since I’ve visited you here,” Ruby gave a weak smile. “Hard to find alone time out here or any time that I ain't busy.” Ruby’s hand hovered over the pile of flowers before grabbing two flowers by the stem. Gently she began to spin the stems together, intertwining them until they were locked together. “So I thought I’d visit today seeing as I finally got the chance.” Her hands grabbed a few more flowers to add to the two stems already connected.

“Willy ended up getting hurt today, but it wasn’t anything too bad. Just needed a few stitches. But golly does that boy get himself into scraps often. He reminds me a lot of Mitch sometimes,” Ruby’s face fell at her own words. She remained silent for a minute, continuing to spin the stems together until the first flower wreath was done. Ruby looked at it with pride before moving on to begin the next one. “I always am able to help though, get Willy and the others through a tough injury or silly scrape even if…” Ruby felt her throat tighten. Swallowing her tears back, she began again, her voice slightly rough. “Even if I wasn’t able to help everyone. I’m still protecting the others in my own way. Just like you taught me.” Ruby felt a few tears roll down her cheeks. Pausing from making the second flower wreath, she brushed away at her tears and gave a loud sniffle. “I hope I’m making you proud.”

Ruby felt a sad smile pull on her lips while she finished up the second wreath. “I’m sure you’d say I was doing a great job and you’d give that shocked, happy smile like you always did whenever you saw how much I’d learned,” Ruby took a shaky breath. She held the flower wreath in her hands, twirling it for a minute before rising up to her feet. “Well, I bet dinner is almost ready and I gotta drop off one of these at the graveyard for you.” Ruby looked down at the pile of dirt where her mentor lay for a few seconds, her emotions pouring out of her heart and clouding her eyesight.

Leaning over, she placed one of the wreaths down. “I promise I’ll keep looking out for the others. Just keep watching over me, alright?” Ruby gave a gentle smile before picking up the other flower wreath and walking to the gate.

She looked back one final time at the grave site, the words of her mentor rising back to the surface of her mind. ‘With a steady hand and a kind heart you can help protect the others at this school.’ Ruby turned back, opening up the gate and walking towards the picnic tables. Her eyes shone with the same fiery determination born anew within her. I’ll be sure to keep them safe.

[virtual-crisis]

⭐Alpha Centauri⭐, Part Twelve

What better way to kick off Raccoon Appreciation Day than coming out with fursuits?

...That came out wrong.

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A few months passed. I had another class to completely dissociate in and somehow still succeed at, a rare mortal I could discuss very not-human things with, and the looming dread of the day Lucifer would pluck me out of human society like Mister Miyagi snatching a fly. Slowly getting closer, day by day.

...Yes, my mind was still drifting to weeb shit now and then.

Mom made some off-handed remark about Scape sounding familiar to her, and to stay cautious about the yokai duo. Nebb and Polly were business as usual, with Polly seeing Scape as a delight of a demon and both skeptically warning me to not randomly summon fellow demons. Scape agreed on their notions, and apparently knew about Monty from the start—in fact, Monty was in Careme’s class, just a different period than me. Chialer, meanwhile, was tenser by the day.

As this last thought registered to me, we were heading out of the boys’ locker room to cheer practice. The school board demanded anyone with Chialer’s ‘trouser contents’ stay in the lane they started in as far as bathrooms went, though I was riding the median on that road.

Since the coach and squad already knew this [go Team Progressive flow, eh], I decided to embarrass Ty in a different way as we stepped onto the astroturf. “Hey how come you’ve been so pissy lately, Ty?”

The other girls cut their gossiping short. One of the few guys spat his sports drink.

“Shiiiit, her own roomie.”

Chai groaned in frustration, walking forward after having stopped for a moment. “I’m not ‘pissy’, I’m anxious. We’re running against the mitts next week.”

“Wait, really?” “You hadn’t heard?” “I thought that wasn’t until next quarter.”

I started to jog back to Chai until the coach sounded feedback on his megaphone. “Great timing to bring that up, actually, the Terriers are going up against the M.I.T. Dragons next week. And better yet? They’re competing for a place at SB fifty-one.”

Super Bowl LI? Okay, sure. M.I.T.? Makes sense. But, uh…

“I thought it was the Beavers?”

I sidled up to Ty, leaning our arms together and tugging her around to face the coach with me as he nodded. “Yeah, was. Some rich frat boy on their football team yanked some strings and got it changed.”

I yelped as Chialer gripped the back of my hand tightly with hers, digging her nails in.

“Hell, they’ve already got a suit for that mascot. My wife’s one of their department chairs, so she’d sent me pictures.”

My knees buckled together as Chai crumpled my fingers over eachother, probably clenching the other hand tightly as a fist. “Yeah, so what if they put together a stupid fursuit? We’ll just kick their asses and show them it was a waste of money!” she spat. I was stamping my heel on the field, wheezing from her vice grip.

The coach clapped, grinning. “That’s the spirit! Let’s practice our routines and lead the team to victory!”

Almost everyone shouted agreement as the coach pumped a fist in the air—but I was a little preoccupied, Chialer wasn’t in the mood, and one of the other girls…

“Oh my God, Ally, how is your blood black?!”

Chai and I both seized up. Chai’s grip loosened reflexively, and I quickly covered my right hand with the left.

“B-b-b-bad tattoo....” I sputtered out, briefly glancing down at the damage. Damn Chai cut her nails into sharp tips… Again.

The coach put a hand to his face, shaking his head. “Goddamnit…” both of us winced in pain. The power of Christ does, in fact, compel us. “Tyler, what’ve I said about cutting your nails like that?! You’re NOT getting me sued by scratching people with those on the field again.”

Ty coughed. “...I scheduled to trim them down this week.”

Coach just sighed as the other guys started whispering to eachother. “Ugh… Tyler, you go do that, I’ll be writing you up later. Alyssa, go get bandaged up, you know your parts in the routine.”

I nodded shakily, grabbing Chai by the elbow as I turned to run back to the main campus.

“Ow…” I whined after slowing to walk normally in the halls.

Chai gripped a hand on her upper arm, rolling her eyes. “...Puncture wound or wordplay?”

I glared at her, rubbing my head for a moment. “Which one do you think, asshole?”

She sighed in frustration. “Yeah, sorry. He just pisses me the home off.”

“Who, Coach Dickinson?”

“My brother. He’s the one the coach mentioned!” she spat.

“You… Have a brother…”

“That I never mentioned, yeah whatever, it’s because I fuckin’ hate him. I have a lot of siblings, but he’s the only one in my generation, ‘cause he’s my twin.”

“Oh, so he’s a pride demon,” I remarked, lowering my voice.

“You mean a smug cockhead? Because he’s a smug cockhead.”

The temptation to confront Chai with how rich that was coming from her was unbearable.

“Sooooooo, you guys are twins, pride and envy… Dunno why I never suspected that.”

“Only time E’n’P aren’t born in pairs like that is when they’re straight spawned out of the ether,” Chialer said, glancing over her shoulder. Nobody in the hall but us. “...Why are we going through the offices?”

I stopped at a door, putting up a finger after letting go of her, and knocking six times on the wood. “Goat dad’s. Nebb gave me directions.”

Chai nodded as we stood there for an awkward minute. There was eventually a deep, muffled yawn, before the door opened, with the culinary professor rubbing one of his eyes. “Alyssa…? Tyler? Not the best timing, I had locked up to take a nap…”

I put up my right hand. “She cut me with her nails.”

Scape perked up, and quickly ushered us in. “Come in then, I’ll get you some bandages…”

Chai started biting her nails down flat as I took the liberty of settling into his cushy office chair. The office’s lights and camera had been tampered with, leaving it dim and unmonitored for Scape to set up a couple soft LED candelabras. The walls looked smooth as carved stone, so black they seemed to drain any excess light. It was very comfy, and definitely very against regulations.

Scape grunted, loosening his belt as his body morphed into its more caprine form, reddish-brown fur showing around and through his clothes, and horns curling around the back then sides of his head to widely straddle his chin.

“...Just like in that dream.” I muttered to myself as he opened and rifled through a first-aid kit. He chortled heartily, smiling when he brought a roll of gauze and a scrap of some sort of dark fabric over.

“I get that a lot from your type. Very in tune with subconsciousness,” he remarked, wrapping the fabric in two layers around my hand, then binding it with the gauze like sports tape. “Now keep that on like a cast. Ichor doesn’t belong in the sewage system, trust me.”

I nodded affirmatively, but Chai raised her brows in amusement. “So you’re gonna eat it later?” she quipped.

“Best way to dispose of it,” Scape replied, seemingly oblivious to Chai’s teasing of him.

I glanced at the door. “Sooooo, Chai got mad because we’re gonna be running across her twin at a football game next week.”

“That so? She’s never mentioned her,” Scape mused, looking to her.

“...Him,” Chai corrected. “I’m… Y’know.”

Scape blinked, then shrugged and nodded. “Right, him then. I suppose it’d befit a pride demon—entering a ‘fancier’ establishment than their envy counterpart to incite jealousy…”

“Yeah, and it fuckin’ works. Bastard accomplished my goal with the sports mascots before I even started on it.”

I jumped at the opportunity to lean against Scape. “She means getting the mascot changed to her likeness, which I’m gonna do here.”

“Your mom said it’d be a competition!” Chai spat.

Scape chuckled, stepping away from me to lounge on a couch that definitely wouldn’t have fit through the door by normal means. “Well either way, that’s going to engorge his ego and power, so watch out,” he quipped.

“What?” I took on a look of confusion, now leaning awkwardly over the side of the chair. Chai smacked her fists against her thighs, breathing out harshly as her outfit shifted into her hazmat suit (she’d finished with her human form’s nails by now).

Scape gestured a hand in the air. “Pride demons live for idolatry. Even something like football mascots can greatly empower them. After all, football is adored nationwide, and ‘rugby’ across many parts of the planet.”

Chai crossed her arms as she went to sit on an open part of the couch. “So we definitely need to take him down a peg. If his team wins the superbowl, the whole world’s fucked.”

“Is that a problem?” Scape quipped.

“Ooh yeah, she can’t have someone outdo her!” I teased. Chai gave me a foul look, but Scape just laughed.

“Sure, we’re here to spread chaos, but I don’t want HIM doing that in MY home.”

“You could always work together.”

“Hell to the no!? I dunno what you’ve seen in your time, but envy and pride are like—”

“A very fragile A and B point bridged by a need for superiority?” Scape said, patting Chai on the back coyly. “There’re two kinds of twins, kiddo: those who hate eachother, and those who value one another’s strengths and help eachother’s weaknesses.”

I giggled, while the lenses of Chai’s mask glowed a bright green.

“Yikes, mind the Geiger counter,” I joked.

[randomwoohoo]

Judy: Previously on Zoomorphia

Nick: Judy survived the bull Savage attack. Hooray!! Thank Mr. Big for his kind help~

Judy: Luckily, he is one of a few mammals who know the truth of Hybrid.

Nick: Not to mention he’s a mafia boss with more than enough personal medical supplies. That’s icing on the cake!

Judy: But that Bolt the silver wolf then showed up and played havoc. He wanted our MidniDrivers for some reasons.

Nick: What would happen next? Let’s find out in this chapter, chapter 16!

Judy: Actually, it’s chapter 17, Nick.

Nick: Wait? Did I miss one whole chapter?

Judy: No, it’s just that the last chapter was a flashback-

Nick: Or we have like a secret chapter that is too ‘spicy’ to be published publicly?

Judy: There’s no such thing!

Nick: Yet

Judy: Nick!!

Fanfiction.net

.-.. . - .----. ... / -.-. --- -. - .. -. ..- .

A penumbral lunar eclipse cast a light upon a snow covered front yard of a luxurious house in the icy Easternmost district.

“Judy… We should use my body to transform...” Nick suggested while he together with Judy as Hybrid Police form was at a disadvantage fighting against Bolt the silver wolf.

After she reminisced about the night she and her partner first transformed into the armored hybrid mammal, “No! It’s too risky.” she objected to the idea.

Although Hybrid’s form which required Nick’s body was undoubtedly powerful, capable of putting an end to four Savages even when they were inexperienced, it was likely that the duo would lose control and go berserk.

They cannot let anyone fall to the same fate as Professor Woolworth the ram, who was still in a coma after risking his life to detransform them at that night.

However, she was fully aware that they cannot gave in to Bolt either. If they did, the wolf would continued taking justice into his own paws. No one would stop him from going on a killing spree.

Not pressuring Judy to come up with a solution, Nick knew well that Judy was beating her brains out figuring out how to overcome their opponent. Nick himself was thinking hard too.

Both thought back to past fights in order to analyze them. They lost to Bolt even though Hybrid possessed greater strength than him due to the fact that they were unable to catch up with his extraordinary speed.

Judy looked back further, eventually recalling the first time they met the silver wolf. At that time, he came to rescue them from mid-sized macropodine Savages on the downtown elementary school’s courtyard after Hybrid Archer form’s monitor detected something…

The monitor detected… She reflected.

“I’ve got one idea but it’s a long shot.” She said.

Nick somehow could hear her thought loud and clear, thereby being able to guess what idea she had in mind. “Worth trying” He responded.

While the armored mammal in Police form, dropping the pistol in the left paw, was struggling to rise and hold the handle tightly, “Ain’t you giving up yet?” Bolt asked the united duo.

“Sorry… but I dunno when to quit” Judy twisted the handle forth twice. “FORM SHIFT-ARCHER”

MidniDriver and gaps of the suit of armor simultaneously emitted purple fog spreading over Hybrid and the nearby area on the front yard with snow. The thick mist, hiding the armored mammal, obscured Bolt’s view.

Suddenly, an arrow pierced the fog.

“Accel!” Bolt, accelerating his system, dodged the high-speed arrow, fired from lower angle, in the nick of time.

Immediately following that, “ACTIVATE” Bolt heard the robotic voice before the bio-armored mammal in green leather tunic, hood with red feather, and charcoal mark on face that resembles eye mask, Hybrid Archer form, dashed close to the wolf’s side with a bow in the left paw and a gladius sword in the right paw.

“Double accel!” Increasing his acceleration, the silver wolf moved away from the swung blade.

Bolt flashed around, which made the purple thick mist fade away, allowing Mr. Big the old shrew and his polar bear henchmen see the situation clearly again.

They found out that the silver wolf was briskly circling the armored mammal with doe figure and fox characteristics in the hooded tunic.

Afterwards, Hybrid stabbed the sword into the ground, then moved the right paw to grip the maroon handle of MidniDriver before twisting it. “CRITICAL BREAK”

Next, Hybrid, right palm glowing, drew the sword up. When the armored mammal got the paw on the sword’s grip, a glow was transferred to the blade.

The silver wolf later tried seizing the smaller flamingo red animal from behind. Hybrid whose monitor tracked motion of the mechanical mammal spun to swing the glowing sword at him.

He therefore went backwards like lightning to avoid the attack, then ran in curve to backside of the armored mammal.

After that, the monitor of Archer form started to calculate the wolf’s movement while Hybrid was drawing the bow.

Nick turned the armored mammal back before he discharged the glowing sword an arrow at the silver wolf.

It flew like the wind towards Bolt. “Oh scrap! Triple-” Unable to activate the greater acceleration in time, he got penetrated by the sharp blade in one of his thighs. As a result, he, losing his balance, fell on the ground.

Although this Archer form’s finishing move was not the strongest among all of forms’ finishers, it was indeed the fastest the duo had and fortunately, it was fast enough to win this fight.

“Looks like the tables have turned.” Nick said to Bolt as Hybrid’s weapons vanished into thin air, the sword stuck in his leg disappearing.

The armored mammal proceeded towards the lying down silver wolf who had few electric sparks coming out from a damage on his thigh.

“Bolt, if that’s really your name, you’re under arrest for multiple murders.” Judy stated in stern tone.

“Bolt!” Mittens bawled to him on their private wireless communication. “Your leg received too much damage! Retreat! Right now!”

“Are you sure that laws apply to machine?” He asked Judy in a humorous manner and then disappeared. The mammals in the area were surprised at first. Eventually, the united duo noticed a trail of footprints on the snow.

“He escaped huh?” Nick assumed that Bolt used his extraordinary speed to run away.

“That’d the case.” Judy replied.

The bow gradually disappearing, Hybrid shifted the left paw to pull the syringe in order to detransform. After the armor, discharging purple steam, was gone and Judy changed back to normal, Mr. Big’s henchmen rejoiced at the duo’s victory.

Subsequently, the doe rabbit fell over in the snow, so the polar bears stopped cheering. Some of them rushed to help her.

“Please let me take a little break.” She said tiredly before falling asleep.

Mr. Big the old shrew on the paw of his most trusted henchman sighed relievedly, then turned to the red fox who had just woken up in the bear’s arm. “Incidentally, Nicky, have you put on weight?” He became aware of the fox’s bloated tummy not long ago.

“Your house’s so icy I’d love to hibernate.” He joked wearily, pushing the syringe to inject the blood.

- .-. -.-- / - .. .-.. .-.. / .-- .. -.

The next day, Judy believed headstrongly that she should go to work. However, Clawhauser insisted that both she and Nick had better take another day off. He had got them covered. Besides, Mr. Big’s family was more than glad to have the doe and the tod as guests.

Luckily, there was no Savage terrorizing Zootopia city on that day. Judy accordingly had some proper rest while Nick could have free time to lose excess weight.

The day after,

“Y’know. I wouldn’t mind you being portly.” The doe was ambling across a parking lot.

“Admit it~ I’m irresistible~” The red fox in a neat navy blue police uniform, Senior officer Wilde, was prancing next to the grey European bunny, Senior officer Hopps, on their way to ZPD headquarters. He showed his slender waist off.

“Well, good thing we don’t have to get you a larger-sized uniform.” She responded.

When other officers perceived that both of them made an entrance into the station, they came to tease them. It seemed that Clawhauser reported that Senior officer Hopps was still sick, so Senior officer Wilde took another day off to look after his partner.

Later that day, Jasmine Fangmeyer the bengal tigress SCU agent, dressed in a green V-neck T-shirt with SCU logo, visited her old workplace, the station. She used the opportunity to catch up with some of her old co-workers, Judy, Nick and Jackson Rajah the bengal tiger officer, in a break room.

“By the way, thank you again, Jacky, for your help the other day.” Sitting at the head of the table with a smile on her face, Jasmine thanked Rajah, who took a seat at one side of a rectangle table near the corner.

“N-No problem.” He stammered, getting a little bit embarrassed. “A-And please don’t call me like that again. You haven’t called me ‘Jacky’ since-”

“Since middle school graduation! Time sure flies.” She nudged the turning-pink tiger officer.

“You look quite lively today, Fangmeyer. Did something good happen?” Nick, leaning against a backrest, sat on the same side with Judy opposite to Rajah.

“Nothing gets past you huh?” Jasmine rubbed her flushing neck while the male tiger was observing her body language.

She then started telling a story. “Do you remember the time I went undercover for the investigation and the total stranger saved me from some thugs?”

Nick and judy nodded their heads as a response.

Jasmine therefore continued. “Back then all I knew was that guy name is Al cuz those thugs called him like that but the point is… a few days ago, I chanced on him again and discovered that he’s a hustler.”

“I followed him to find that he gave stolen loaves of bread to poor kits and pups in a slum. That’s why I just gave him a warning and a pass.” She said further.

“Does he happen to be an arabian leopard?” Nick recollected the hustler whose nickname is Al.

“Yes! He is!” Jasmine confirmed.

“You know him?” Judy asked her partner.

“I know everyone~ His name is Allan Bubba.” Nick said the leopard hustler’s name to boastfully prove that he really knew him.

Subsequently, the bunny officer paid attention to the blushing tigress agent bowing her head as if... “Hang on! Do you have a crush on him!?” She unintentionally blurted a question out.

“Don’t judge me!!” Jasmine shouted out of embarrassment. “You even have feelings for an ex-con-artist fox!” She accidentally let what many of their co-workers believed slip.

“What are you talking about?” Judy seriously had no clue what Jasmine meant.

The tigress speedily covered her mouth with both paws, just remembering that the doe had not realized it yet, as the tod brought his right paw to his face.

“Let me guess. You wanna know this ‘Al’ guy better, right?” Nick peeped at Jasmine through gaps between his fingers of the paw covering his face.

“You saw through me, didn’t ya?” She smiled sheepishly.

“Based on you information, I suppose the leopard you’re referring to must be Bubba but I need to at least see a picture of him to be sure.” He moved both paws to over his head.

Rajah, who sat at the table with Jasmine and the duo from the beginning, smiled with sorrow-filled eyes. “I’ve just recalled that I have to do some checking on the missing mammal cases. Later mates.” He made an excuse to leave the room.

“Wait for me!” Judy hopped off the chair and followed Rajah out of the break room.

Once her doe rabbit friend was not there, the tigress used the opportunity to change the subject. “Wilde, be honest with me. Are you really okay with this?”

“What do you mean?” Although Nick vaguely knew what Jasmine was talking about, he would rather beat around the bush.

“I mean this whole Jude not aware of feelings for you thing...” She clarified.

“You two get along so well! And think about how kindly she treats you! Truth be told, despite appearing generous, most of us, including me, were skeptical of you at first. Your partner was the one who convinced us that you are trustworthy.”

“even though I’m a fox.”

Jasmine was taken aback by Nick’s words because he really hit the nail on the head.

“But hey, we live in the world where a bunny can be such an amazing cop. Anything’s possible at this point~” He cracked a joke to light up the mood.

“Yeah…” She laughed awkwardly before she composed herself. “The issue here is… don’t you like like Jude?”

“I... do”

“Are there any downsides of being with her or are you not into interspecies relationship?”

“No”

“Or actually, you’re not into females?”

“That’s not the case.”

“So what’s holding you back from going out with her!? What if somebody decides to ask her out before you do??”

“I think that’ll be all for the best.”

The tigress got shocked by the tod’s reply. After a few moments pause, he explained. “Assuming that we’re in a relationship, I will eventually bring her down… No doubt.”

Nick put on a smile, an empty smile, while Jasmine fell silent, not knowing what to say.

-.-. --- -. ..-. .-.. .. -.-. - .. -. --. / ..-. . . .-.. .. -. --. …

Following that the bengal tiger and the grey rabbit left the break room, she led him to a rooftop of the station to have a private conversation with him.

“I’m gonna be frank with you. You’re in love with Jasmine, aren’t you?” Judy initiated a heart-to-heart talk.

“How did you know?” The surprised tiger responded to a question with another question.

“It’s obvious. Anyway, why don’t you make any moves?”

“Well, Fangmeyer is my friend and I’m indebted to her… I don’t wanna ruin our friendship.”

Despite her curiosity, Judy did not want to go in-depth into the story behind Rajah being in Jasmine’s debt. Consequently, she chose to stick to the main subject.

“You should at the very least tell her how you feel. No need to be flashy, just tell her.”

“But she’s already have a crush-”

“Even so, do you intend to hide your true feelings forever? You know how Jasmine is as a mammal. If it turns out she doesn’t feel the same way after you confess your love to her, she wouldn’t cut you off, right? Keeping bottling up your feelings may lead you to regret it later.”

“Thank you, Hopps. I’ll keep that in mind.” Rajah genuinely appreciated Judy’s benevolent advice; hence, he would like to return the favor. “Anyhow, when are you going to get together with Wilde? Or are you waiting for him to take action first?”

“What!?” Judy exclaimed. “Nick and I are just friends! What makes you jump to that conclusion!?”

“To be honest, it’s quite obvious. You spend an awful lot of time with each other both on and off shift. There’s serious chemistry between you two.” He replied.

“Because Nick and I are such good friends and partners, plus the chemistry thing is just we get along well, that’s all.” She explained earnestly.

“You even do things together at his place.”

“That...” Judy tried to think up an argument.

“Second evidence, you both are beyond close. Third evidence, you clearly care for each other so much. Fourth evidence, you can comfortably be next to one another in silence. Fifth evidence-”

“OK! OK! You proved your point...” She stopped him listing proofs.

Nevertheless, what Rajah the bengal tiger said got her thinking. Come to think of it, I really don’t spend much free time with other male mammals except Nick. We crash with each other every now and then. What’s more, I don’t mind getting physically close to him…

I enjoy Nick’s company… I wanna be with him… Wait… Why do all of these sound like a relationship? That was the moment Judy realized her feelings for her partner, her friend. “Oh my tod, am I in relationship with Nick without knowing it?”

The realization hit her hard.

“You said ‘my tod’ as an exclamation or a claim for ownership?” Rajah wondered.

“Both” She accidentally answered without thinking before realizing what she had just said. “I mean the latter. I mean as a claim! I mean! As the exclaimation!” She had a rough time regaining her composure, wishing for something or someone to take her out of this awkward situation.

Shortly afterwards, her wish came true. Rajah got a call from Jasmine that there was a report on Savages’ attack in the north-west of Downtown. She accordingly phoned him to let him know that she had to leave the station.

Judy considered contacting Nick in order to go together to deal with the Savages as Hybrid but the only problem was that just thinking about him made her heart skip a beat.

.-.. --- ...- . / ..- -. -.. . .-. / .- - - .- -.-. -.-

After Jasmine left to do her job, Nick pondered whether he should tell Judy about Savages’ attack or not. When he thought back to the previous encounter with the bull Savage, he believed that I would be better to keep her out of this. His phone then rang once, interrupting his , so he brought it out to check the notifications.

“I should see this coming.” He saw a text from Judy. She told him that they would head down to the scene as soon as possible.

When they met up the lobby, “Take me with you guys” Clawhauser showed up.

Judy got concerned. “But this is-”

“Dangerous, I know. In case anything happened, I’ll be there to protect Nick’s unconscious body.” He convinced the duo.

They consequently let the chubby cheetah officer accompany them to the north-western part of Savanna Central.

Meanwhile, SCU agents were handling problems associated with three Savages, a purple caprid, a purple maned lion and a purple wolverine. They would not dare shoot guns in a crowded public place. The risk of civilians getting shot by accident was too high. Accordingly, their priority at that time was to evacuate civilians in the area in the shortest possible time.

“Report the status of an evacuation!” Maximus the white stallion, the SCU team leader, yelled.

However, the horse was confused by the fact that these monsters only either did minor physical harms to mammals or snarled at them. He wondered why they did not charge at the mammals.

Once Nick, Judy and Clawhauser finally reached the scene, the Savages made a move, going towards a commercial area. Hence, the mammals in the area moved away scaredly to let the monsters get through.

A panther, one of the agents, made an attempt to shoot the purple beasts. Unfortunately, they dodged the shots, so the bullets hit a tall lamp post, which greatly startled several civilians.

“Stop freaking firing!” Maximus ordered angrily.

The duo and Clawhauser hurriedly went by an indirect route to catch up with the running monsters.

Judy put MidniDriver, the black morpher, on her waist while rushing through a deserted alleyway. Close behind her, Nick looked at his morpher in his paw hesitantly before wearing it and “DRAW BLOOD” transferring a dose of his blood to the other device.

After “INJECT” She injected his blood into herself, the panting cheetah caught the fainting fox, preventing him from falling to the ground.

Next, she twisted the handle once “IGNITE” to transform. Following the purple mist explosion, the flamingo red armored mammal mixed between a rabbit and a fox, Hybrid Hustler form, charged out of the boiling hot fog.

When the united duo turned around the corner, “It looks like our target took the bait.” they heard a male fruity voice coming from the silver chrome wolf with a black bar over his eyes, solar panels on both chest and shoulders, and two thunderbolt stripes on abdomen.

He was standing relaxedly, surrounded by three Savages in a wide blind alley.

“Good as new” Bolt the silver wolf showed his repaired thigh to the united duo.

Despite the past conflicts between the wolf and them, the duo especially Judy could not sit by and let him be attacked by the monsters. The united duo therefore launched Hybrid with a purpose of saving him.

Without warning, Bolt leapt forward, then threw a left hook at Hybrid. The united duo did not expect the punch, so they almost did not block Bolt’s left glowing fist with the right arm in time.

Consequently, Hybrid flew quickly to the side and landed on the ground with the shaking right arm. It seemed the wolf added some electricity to his attack, messing nerves in the right arm.

“What’s going on here!? What’s with those Savages!?” Judy got dazed.

“I don’t wanna brag but...” Bolt bopped his left palm repeatedly. “Are you impressed in my friend’s works. Mam, she hacked into their control systems and now, they follow every single order- Ow! Keep your voice down pretty please...” He covered his ears although it did not help since Mittens shouted through wireless communication system that is directly connected to him. She told him to focus on the task.

The duo did not notice at the first glance because most mammals could barely recognize the purple creatures but this purple maned lion reminded them of the time they helped Bolt to stop the purple lion before he did something to it.

Control? Nick and Judy doubted.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Give me your drivers or else...” He threatened them.

Both thought that if they did beat him once, they could pull it off again; thus, they moved the left paw to hold the handle, intending to change into Archer form.

Suddenly, the purple caprid crashed into Hybrid, making the armored mammal fall.

“Go get ‘em, boys.” Bolt said.

Right after his simple order, the lion Savage and the wolverine Savage charged at the armored mammal.

The united duo got up hastily. Thanks to rapid healing, Hybrid was able to use both arms to deal with the Savages.

Meanwhile, Bolt merely stood there, observing the fight, as Clawhauser, holding the unconscious fox body in his arms, peeked around the corner.

When the monsters encircled Hybrid, the armored mammal pushed the silver syringe “ACTIVATE” to activate the instantaneous movement ability. The purple beasts collided with each other as Hybrid teleported to a spot that was a few steps far from them.

At that moment, “Accel!!” Bolt, aware of Hybrid’s weakness about becoming vulnerable after teleportation, rushed to kick the armored mammal in the stomach.

The kick sent the united duo flying backward before they in one body hit the ground hard. Once the accelerated mechanical wolf approached the armored mammal lying on the ground in a mere second, he pulled the syringe of MidniDriver on Hybrid, forcing the partners as one to detransform.

The attack took its toll on the doe rabbit. Soon following that Judy turned back to normal, she was knocked out by pain.

“One down, one to go.” Bolt knew that Nick along with Clawhauser was not far away because Mittens told him when she saw them on a hacked CCTV camera. He was about to go after the other morpher.

As a result, “This is bad! This is bad! This is bad!” Clawhauser hastily fled with Nick, who was regaining his consciousness, in his arms.

Nick wanted to tell Clawhauser to leave him and run away. Unfortunately, he was suffering fatigue too much to communicate at that time, so he pushed the syringe to inject the dose of blood into himself in order to cure his extreme tiredness.

Bolt pursued the officers to crooked alleyways, thinking that it would be a piece of cake; thus, he had already deactivated his acceleration. However, by the time he found the panting cheetah officer staying put, the fox officer, Bolt’s another main target, was nowhere to be found. Even Mittens lost him.

“Where is Officer Wilde?” Bolt asked Clawhauser in a friendly tone.

Clawhauser shrugged his shoulders in a response, pretending to be fearless in front of the silver chrome wolf.

“Alright, for the heads up, I don’t have anything against you.” Bolt jumped over Clawhauser and tapped the back of the cheetah’s neck, sending electricity to knock him off.

“Okay~ Officer Wilde, I know you can hear me~” Bolt spoked louder.

As a matter of fact, Nick certainly heard him. He was hiding not far from Bolt but in a spot that cannot be seen by CCTVs. Owing to his past experiences as a con-artist, he knew the blind spots around Zootopia.

So he can observe through CCTVs… or he has an accomplice assisting him… Nick analysed.

“I’m taking your cheetah pal and Ms. Hopps as hostages. If you want me to free them, bring your driver to me at a warehouse row in Rainforest District and don’t be tricky~” The silver wolf picked the senseless chubby cheetah up easily to some extent.

“You have 48 hours- No, that’s too much. How about 24? Rhino, what do you think?” He quieted down for some seconds like he waited for someone to reply. “8 It is. You have 8 hours, Officer Wilde~ See ya~”

Bolt went back to pick Judy up too, then disappeared from the blind alley with his controlled Savages, leaving Nick leaning against the wall alone while pondering.

He took her away… The fox clenched a fist as his emotions rose, so did his… returning abnormal hunger.

- --- / -... . / -.-. --- -. - .. -. ..- . -..

[artnerd1123]

Not My Fight

Chapter One --------------------

Y’all asked, so y’all shall receive ;3c Happy reading yo Chapters list can be found here

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

The sounds of swords clashing rang out in a small courtyard; the metal glinting in the afternoon sunlight. Two opponents faced off together. One large, and one small.

“Give it all you've got! Don't just block my attacks, counter them!” The larger one yelled. With a cry, the smaller one tried for a stab at the larger one’s middle, but was too slow. Their sword fell to the ground with a clatter as the larger leveled theirs with its neck.

“You'll never be a knight if you don't learn to attack, Avery,” huffed his teacher.

Avery bit back a smart remark, instead saying “I'll try harder next fight. Just give me more time, Peter.”

Peter just rolled his eyes.

Peter was the older of the two, and a lion to boot. He had a regal looking mane, and it was a deep maroon in color. His fur was golden and shimmered slightly under the sun. His large muscled form was enough to silence most who were thinking of fighting him hand to hand.

“You've said that every time. You never improve. Maybe if you spent more time training with your weapon instead of your magic, you'd be better,” he snarled. Avery took a step back. Peter wasn't someone you wanted to make angry while he had a sword in his paws. “Get back to training. I'll expect better results tomorrow,” Peter growled. Then he left the training courtyard, ears back and tail twitching.

“Magic is easier to control,” Avery mumbled after his teacher left. He picked up his sword. “Why can't I be a knight with magic…?” He got into his fighting stance and brandished his sword at an imaginary enemy. Might as well do some training, he thought.

Avery was a young silver goat and lion hybrid. He had the long tufted tail, paws, and the retractable claws of a lion, but otherwise he looked like a goat. His paw ends, tips of his ears, and tip of his tail were black. This was due to his hybrid status as well. His father was a black lion and his mother was a silver goat. His mother told him that his coloring made him look unique. He thought he looked a little odd, and not in a good way. Though he was proud of his short horns. All goats, and goat hybrids with horns, began to grow them around age 10. He was 15 and a half.

After a little while of attempting to go through some fighting moves, Avery set his sword down. He didn't like the weapon. It felt dangerous and unwieldy in his paws.

His magic, however…

He took in a deep breath, then exhaled it slowly. Small purple flames erupted in the centers of his paws. Their heat was comforting. He smiled, slowly circling his paws around one another. The flames grew as they came together until he was holding two medium sized fireballs. He shifted his stance, eyeing a target at the far side of the training yard. He drew back his paw and threw one fireball, then the other. Both seared through the air to hit perfect bullseyes. He stomped his foot on a small panel nearby, and more targets popped up. This time, they were moving. He grinned. Myrick, his magic advisor, had made them faster. Myrick knew how much Avery liked a challenge. Racing back and forth, jumping to reach the high targets, he barely missed the center of any of the targets.

Many people said he could've been a deer with talent like that.

But that was not what Avery wanted. Magic wasn’t his real passion. He may have been slightly better than others with his magic, but he wanted to be a knight. His parents had been knights, as had their parents, and their parents, and so on. The thought of protecting a noble or even the royals made him almost glow with pride and excitement. The only problem was that knights primarily used weapons, not magic.

Avery sighed, extinguishing his paws and stamping on the panel again. The targets slowed to a stop, then lowered back below the flagstones. He picked up his sword from where he’d put it down. Looking it over, he sighed. What use was a knight that couldn't properly use a sword?

-----

An hour or so later, Avery left the training yard. He’d practiced his stances and fought off a few invisible foes, but he knew it was no good trying to practice while he was in a bad mood. He walked through the long halls of the castle quietly. Some servants, mostly bugs, scuttled about. They bowed slightly when he passed, and he nodded and smiled in turn. It wasn't long before he’d reached the magic corridor. He wanted to thank Myrick for fixing the magic targets in the training yard.

As he pushed open the door to the room, a huge wave of papers came flurrying out. In the ensuing panic of the magic specialists’ he was nearly trampled. From the frantic ramblings of the specialists, he gathered that someone had accidentally broken open a jar that had contained air magic. More specifically, a wind spell.

He squeezed past the group of distressed magicians into the room. It was usually an untidy place, with stacks of scrolls, books, jars, and ink pots everywhere. Now it looked even worse. The wind spell had blown half of the room into a chaotic pile of paper and ink. Avery shook his head and looked around. A small deer with large ears, short antlers, and thick glasses was kneeling down by a shattered jar. It's fur was rumpled, as if it had gotten caught in a blast of wind full on.

“Hey Myrick. Bad day?” Avery asked, tilting his head. The small deer, Myrick, looked up and sighed, ears drooping.

“I was j-just trying t-to organize the j-jars…” he mumbled, pushing up his glasses with his slender hoof.

“Ah… well at least it was while you were trying to help. They can't yell at you for that,”Avery replied. “Here, why don't I help you with that?”

He kneeled down and helped Myrick pick up the glass shards. There was a scrap of paper stuck under one of the larger pieces of glass. Avery picked it up gingerly, wondering what it could be a part of. Myrick gave a small gasp and took it from him.

“Oh my- this is- aaah thank you A-Avery!” Myrick exclaimed, “this is the p-paper the spell was c-cast from! S-someone can replicate i-it now!” Avery grinned, and gave Myrick a pat on the back.

“That’s great Myrick! Maybe you can try and replicate it too,” he chuckled.

“M-maybe… my magic m-might be air magic!” Myrick stammered hopefully, “maybe th-this will help me u-unlock it!” With that, the little deer rushed from the room, chattering excitedly. Avery shook his head, still smiling. He was glad he was able to help his friend.

Myrick still hadn’t discovered what his magic was. Monsters usually found out when they were young, about five or so, but very delayed cases were possible. However, it was highly unusual for deer, especially a 14-year-old like Myrick. Despite his best efforts, no magic would come from his hooves. But he was a hard worker. Avery knew he’d find it eventually.

At least he can use his magic once he discovers it, Avery griped.

He shook his head to dispel the resentful thoughts. Slipping out of the door and squeezing past the magicians, he continued his walk towards the castle exit. There was another monster he wanted to see. But this one didn't live in the main castle.

The main town in the kingdom of Eitilte was small but homely. Everyone knew everyone else. The appearances of the ramshackle shops and houses were enough to lift most’s spirits, as well as the cheery chatter that wound through the air.

It was busy, as usual, and monsters moved quickly through the streets. But there was something off about the whole scene. Avery stood hesitantly at the main walkway. The difference came to him after a moment of listening.

It was quiet. The town was barely ever quiet. Everyone seemed tense and suspicious.

Avery wondered what he had missed.

Quickly, he made it to a small bakery. The smell of freshly baked bread drew him in as much as his want to get out of the strange silence in the streets. The warmth of the inside instantly put him at ease.

There were small shelves lined up against the walls, with the center of the main room left open. On these shelves were the goods that monsters came to buy. The fresh loaves of bread, small pastries, and salted pretzels created a mouth-watering smell. Avery felt himself start to lean towards the nearest shelves and shook himself out of it. As good as the food looked, he had someone to see.

“Can ah help you?” A soft lilting voice called from behind the counter. Avery turned and smiled upon seeing the owner.

“Hello Krystal.”

“Oh! Howdy Avery! Sorry, ah didn' recognize ya at first,” Krystal said. She hopped over the counter and landed by him. She was a rabbit, about his height and age, with fluffy purple and brown fur.

They had first met years ago when Avery had been sent in by his parents to pick up some bread. he’d gotten confused and krystal was sent over to help him. They eventually forgot all about the bread he was to be purchasing and got lost in conversation. They’d been good friends since that day, and went out to walk the town streets or fool around in the woods that surrounded the town as often as they could.

Krystal smoothed out her apron before speaking again.

“Whut brings ya here today…?” She asked in a low whisper.

“I just wanted to go say hi since I hadn't seen you in awhile,” Avery responded hesitantly, “is something wrong…?”

“Haven't ya heard?” Krystal asked, shooting him a surprised glance, “there’s been a whole heckova lot of thievin recently. Shops ‘n bakeries are bein’ robbed left an’ raht. You castle folk must not hear anythin about the town, all cooped up like a bunch a squizzers in a squrrow.”

Avery’s mouth dropped open slightly. The past few weeks had been so full of training and swords and official business concerning a royal ball that he hadn’t had much contact with the town. He shook his head.

“No, I hadn't heard anything about this,” he mumbled.

“It's alraht,” Krystal said soothingly, “yer workin’ hard like the rest of us… Just… Maybe try an’ stay more in the loop, ok?”

Avery nodded, then huffed, his tail flicking uneasily.

“Has your bakery been hit?”

“Nope,” Krystal replied proudly, “my family and ah’ve been puttin empty buckets an’ bowls by the windows an’ doors during the naiht. We take turns watching the store front during the day too. Ain’t no thievin’ varmints takin our stuff.” She seemed to swell with pride and determination.

“Well at least that’s something… does anyone have any idea who’s doing it?” He queried.

“Naw. Besides the usual rats n monkeys, we don't know. They claim they're innocent, an they ain’t got no money, so we gotta take em at their word,” she huffed, foot tapping in irritation. “Ah jus don' know who would do this kind of thing. It's making erybody seem all untrustworthy.”

“No kidding,” Avery retorted, “it’s way too quiet outside. I got too many suspicious glances for my liking…”

Looking around, he was still amazed that Krystal’s bakery remained unrobbed. The food was delicious and always warm. Then there was the fact that the family of bunnies had a little more gold than the average monster family. Avery just hoped they could outlast the thieving streak.

“Ya probly have to go now, don't ya?” asked krystal, shaking him out of his worried thoughts.

“Oh, yeah…” he sighed, mumbling, “not that I want to go…”

“Is that gosh darn lion giving ya trouble again?!” Krystal demanded, her ears swiveling back in anger.

“He’s my teacher. He’s supposed to give me trouble,” Avery grumbled, “it wouldn't be so bad if I could just use my magic during sword training.”

Krystal raised and eyebrow and tapped her foot, looking him over. Avery caught himself staring at her and glanced away.

“What? Why are you staring?” He inquired.

“The only one stopping yeh from usin yer magic is yerself, ya silly goat,” she replied with a giggle. “Ya need ta stop tryin ta do erythin the traditional way. It's alraht to branch out,” she said softly, putting a paw on his arm. He twitched a little at her touch. A soft warm feeling welled up inside him. He wasn't sure what it was about. Pushing the warmth in his chest away, he smiled over at her.

“Thanks Kry, but try telling that to Peter,” he snorted, “he and everyone else in the castle is bent on preserving old traditions. Trying to get him to change his mind is like arguing with a fuzzy wall.” They both stared at each other for a minute, the mental image of a fuzzy wall occupying them, before erupting into laughter. It was quite some time before they both managed to quit, as when they glanced at each other they simply began laughing again.

Finally, they both managed to stop the giggles.

“Well, I gotta go Kry. I'll write you letters every day in case I don't get to visit!” He explained, tail swishing behind him eagerly.

“That sounds mighty nice Avery,” she smiled, “Ah'll look forward to em. See ya around!”

“See ya!” He called, then left the store. A soft purr rose in his throat. He allowed it, and a small smile, to make themselves known. He loved spending time with Krystal, but there was just barely any time at all these days.

Between training, studying, and all the formalities of castle life, he felt there was never enough time.

[thepanicoffice]

Plebiscite, Out Of Mind

[...]

It is surely no coincidence that the word ‘Plebiscite’ sounds like some sort of virulent bacteria – a gruesome, writhing spirochete – that burrows into the brain, inducing erratic behaviour, gradually shutting down vital functions, and eventually destroying the host before moving on. A sort of gleefully-contracted syphilis for the body politic…

Anyway, that’s all by the bye. To mark this auspicious day, that of the United Kingdom’s first abortive Independence Day, I thought it would be appropriate to look back and reflect on this own esteemed Office’s use of referendums/referenda/referendi over the years.

They have certainly been the cause of some especially vigorous campaigns and more than a little acrimony and inter-office tension in recent times. Indeed, the herons that staff our legal department have expressed in no uncertain terms that the use of referendums is fundamentally incompatible with the Panic Office’s unwritten constitution [1].

Nevertheless, sometimes, when one has a particularly bold or reckless idea, one must go to extreme lengths to bring it into existence. As Gramsci had it, everywhere the Old is dying and the New cannot be born. Consider me simply as a sort of deranged and slightly inebriated midwife, delivering – wet, pink, and screaming – the hideous New. Sometimes, if it is in breech, one simply has to get one’s hand in there and give it a yank.

[...]

1975: The first threatened rumblings of significant constitutional chaos. In order to meet legal requirements to effect a merger between the Panic Office and her sister publications – the long-since forgotten Holbeck’s Almanac of Cads, The British Journal of Gynaecological Studies, and the organ of political satire The Flagrant Act – a referendum of all staff was necessary. Owing to my position as majority shareholder and executive of each magazine, I used all of my wit and guile, and none of my tact and moral rectitude, to circumvent the problem. By placing the journalists of the three other publications on temporary secondment to Tangier, the only staff present to cast a vote were those of the good ship Panic. The proposition was passed by a landslide and the other periodicals were devoured, like helpless grapes popped in the Office’s ravenous maw.

2001: Following a protracted period of the kind of political calm that can only coming from the effective running of a well-oiled dictatorship, a contentious vote was held on the redirecting of employer pension contributions towards the installation and maintenance of a luxury pool with wave machine on the eighth floor of the Panic Office building. While many of the staff were not initially keen (claiming ‘a concern with their own financial planning and future subsistence’ or something equally tedious) I did subsequently whip the votes – both figuratively and in a more direct and painful literal sense. The vote was carried 85:15.

Regrettably the keys to the pool were lost at the infamous 2004 Christmas Hootenanny. At nights, though, you can still hear the muted sloshing of the mechanised maelstrom behind the bolted door. And occasionally there is a leak through the ceiling of Bulstrode’s office on the seventh floor. I think that reminder brings him some comfort and relief from the knowledge of his decimated pension and the penury that awaits him after his impending retirement.

2014: Following a particularly unpleasant exchange of (i) letters; (ii) childish verbal insults; and (iii) broken bottles, between myself and the Deputy Vice-Editor, I threatened to relocate the entire Panic Office to Edinburgh. I did so knowing full well that Jones’s delicate constitution prevents him from digesting any food prepared north of Hadrian’s Wall. After an intensive three days of campaigning, the votes were cast. The result of the ballot we will never know: I had a snooze and forgot about the whole affair. Were it not for that pint of warm cream and novocaine (a concoction of my own named, as regular readers will know, the Milkmaid’s Treat) we could at this very moment be smothered in tartan and typing out our pointless screeds to the pitiless strains of the pibroch.

2016: The event that would create division and internecine strife for a generation. Brought about by years of in-fighting amongst the Office’s top brass, following a pledge by the Deputy Vice-Editor to stand on a platform [2] of introducing ‘casual Fridays’. The fact that such a thing was very definitely contrary to the protocols of the Declaration of Panic and the constitution itself – indeed, represented the very opposite of what this organ stands for – was evidently of little concern as he attempted to incite the base tides of populism to sweep the incumbent Editor from office. He promised staff that they could wear t-shirts. T-shirts. On a Friday of all days. I of course campaigned to maintain the status quo, pumping literally millions in my own money into the effort, and utilising the full power of misleading messaging on social media (i.e. the kitchen noticeboards).

In the end, the powerful communications produced by the ‘No’ campaign (‘Sleeve means sleeve’; ‘Britain: A Nation Built on Collars’; ‘Only Socialists Wear Jeans’, etc.) [3] eventually carried the day. But the ill-feeling generated by the campaign remains. However, I am currently drafting proposals that will instead give staff the right not to wear a bowler hat on Fridays instead; a sartorial compromise that pains me but will at least go some way towards healing the raw wounds that the referendum has opened.

Hopefully then we can move forward, together, in Panic.

---------

[1] Unwritten in that I spilled port over the last remaining written copy and it now exists only as scraps of memory clinging to the inside of my diseased brain.

[2] Regrettably not one that would drop away while he had a noose round his neck.

[3] In no way aided by what independent observers hysterically described as “shameless trickery at the ballot box”.

[thetaekswoon]

BTS Jin| Cast Away AU

**Warning!  This AU depicts very traumatic situations and have many depictions of blood, death, injury, and anything else you could imagine for a plane crash/tragic accident.  Briefly nsfw.  Read at your own risk.

Jin

The last thing you could have expected when you woke up this morning was for your plane to crash on an island somewhere in the middle of the pacific.

You had never been a nervous flyer, knowing that thousands of flights left every hour of everyday and you only ever heard of some tragic accident happening once every few years or so.

No one knows for sure what actually sent your plane spiralling down, but you can only thank whatever you might believe in that you managed to crash on land.

Your plane was small and compact, less than thirty passengers on board, so somewhere during the impact the plane broke apart, sending about ten of the passengers, not including you, to fly out of the aircraft.

Besides the trauma of actually crashing and a few scrapes and bruises, you are unharmed, just a long cut above your eyebrow.

And now, you are in one of your later years of studying to become a nurse and are currently interning at hospitals,

so as soon as you can you duck out of the gaping hole in the airplane and rush around to check all the people who have been thrown out of the plane.

As you check the first person who was only a few feet from the plane you can already see that the man is dead, his head must have hit a rock or something, and as you are continuing your rounds you see that this is mostly the case for the people who were pulled out of the plane.

That or they were crushed by some of the metal pieces.

And tbh if it wasn’t for your history helping patients you would not have been able to look at all these dead people without throwing up.

By now some of the other survivors in the plane are making their way out, stumbling and clutching their arms or heads,

and you are about to determine that everyone who has been thrown out of the plane is dead, and go help the rest of the passengers when you hear someone gasping in pain further away in the sand.

So of course you rush over and there, halfway underneath a significant part of the exterior of the plane is the most attractive young man you have ever seen in your whole life.

You remember seeing him in the airport’s terminal, reading a book - you were pretty sure it was a cook book and that made you laugh a little to yourself - with his headphones in, 

, and you couldn’t help but watch him as you were waiting to board the plane because well as mentioned before,,,

HE’S THE MOST ATTRACTIVE HUMAN BEING YOU HAVE EVER HAD THE PLEASURE TO LAY YOUR EYES ON LIKE EVER

But now his face is bright red and his legs and trapped under part of the plane, and he’s having a hard time catching his breath.

You rush over to this man, and introduce yourself and quickly as possible, simultaneously explaining how you are a nurse - kinda - and yelling for the other survivors to help you get this piece of metal off of him because it is too heavy for you to lift off yourself.

The man is gasping from the intense pain he’s clearly feeling, but somehow is still able to say cooly, “Y/N’s a pretty name, I’m Seokjin, just Jin please.”

And when you are able to finally pull the piece off of him and his legs, you have an oh fuck moment because his legs are completely destroyed, how he has not been screaming in agony for the last minute or so finally makes sense to you because there’s no way that he can still feel anything below his waist.

Jin’s legs are completely torn up, the bones in both crushed by the impact and the weight of the exterior plane part, his left femur is also projected through the skin,

and theres so much blood how has he not bleed out to death yet?

And you’re just there shaking because omg, what do you do, what CAN you do?  Is there even anything you can do for Jin?

So you’re just like, “Jin, stay calm, I’m not going to bullshit you but this isn’t good, this is bad, like really bad.”

and he’s just like, ok ok just do what you can,

, You yell for someone to run back into the plane and grab the medical supply kit and to your relief one of the older men on the flight has already thought ahead of you and immediately hands the kit off to you.

To start you just try stopping his bleeding so he doesn’t bleed out, and you tear off the bottoms of your jeans to make tourniquets only to find that his thighs are just way too LARGE for that fabric to wrap around, so again the older man is one step ahead and hands off his sweater to you.

eventually as the other passengers are gathering their bearings and start scavenging around for supplies and to scope out the island, you are able to stabilize Jin enough for you to try and figure out just how bad the nerve damage is,

You start out on his feet, poking him around, asking if he is able to feel anything... he says no,

, so you move up to his calves... which he can’t feel, to his knees... which he can’t feel either, but then somewhere halfway up his thigh he starts yelling something, 

and you’re just like, oh thank god he’s in pain, HE CAN FEEL.

And even though he can’t feel all of his legs it’s a lot farther down than you had expected it to be, which means that there is a better chance for recovery!

“Hey Y/N?” Jin says, and you’re like oh what do you need another painkiller?  I think there might be more in the kit give me a sec,,,”

and Jin is just like no listen to me, “You’re head, it’s bleeding.” and it is, the cut on your eyebrow has started to bleed and you can feel the blood start to trickle down the side of your face,

and Jin leans up, the best that he can, and is like, “Now it’s my time to take care of you,” and reaches for the gauze in the kit.

And his hands are so soft, like so unexpected, and his fingers are so long and his touch is delicate on your face and you’re just like oooooo

oooooooo, HOLY SHIT YOUR LEFT FIBULA IS STICKING OUT OF YOUR LEG AGAIN HOLD ON I GOT THIS!

By the end of the first day, you and one of the other survivors, a young man who is strong enough to actually carry another man, helps you move Jin into the temporary shelter that was made of plane scraps, blankets and literally whatever people could scavenge together.

The pilot has certainly taken a leadership position among the rest of the survivors and says that since you are the only one with any advanced medical training that you are the “doctor” and should just focus on keeping Jin alive,

that first night you don’t get a wink of sleep because you are too busy attending to anyone else that was injured in the crash, which was most people, though no one else had anything more than a broken wrist, and checking on Jin’s sleeping form to make sure he didn’t just die in his sleep.

And when the sun was finally starting to rise and everyone else was starting to wake up, you finally had your first chance to pass out, and you settle down a foot away from Jin so that you could sleep with one eye still open checking on him, 

, and Jin is sitting up now and is just like, “You’re can sleep now, I’m fine trust me, if I start spasming or whatever I’ll wake you, and don’t be afraid I’ll protect you from whatever bears or lions or whatever might try to eat us,”

you can’t help but chuckle at his joke, you can’t help but admire how he is trying to stay hopeful in this situation.

You are able to sleep for a few hours, and you wake up with a face full of sand and Jin’s arm resting on your back, playing around with the ends of your hair.

For the next week till you are rescued, you watch over Jin like a hawk, helping him with any situation he could possibly need help with and for the most part just talking and keeping each other entertained while everyone else is running around trying to get work done or find food.

You learn that you both went to universities within the same city, but just different ones, and that he recently graduated and got a job at a publishing company in that city for - - wait for it, cooking books.

“Do you know what island we crashed on?”

“No Jin, what island is this?”

“It’s Handsome, you know cause I’m here.”

Overtime you notice that the facade that Jin is putting up around the others, the one that shows him still as a cocky and self aware about his looks, crumbles during the day while they aren’t around, 

, and that the fact that he doesn’t know if he can walk again actually really worries him a lot and he whispers something about how being handsome doesn’t always help when girls will always look at him as a cripple with a bunch of baggage, and you’re just like,

well screw those girls and only hang out with me, and Jin gives you this look that no other guy has ever given to you before, and for a moment you actually think that he is about to kiss you but he never does,

“I gotta make you wait and really want me”

The next day he kisses you because the rescue units that have been searching for your plane have finally found you guys, and you’re all so happy and cheering,,, and kissing.

For the next several weeks after you guys are rescued you visit him recovering in the hospital because your university is so close

His injuries are really bad, and part of his left leg even needed to be amputated in order to save the rest of the limb, but you had mentioned that amputation was a likely option for him back on the island, so it wasn’t that much of a shock to hear a doctor actually say it for real.

You bring him pink flowers every time you visit and he gets really happy because pink is his favorite color, and he promises that one day when he’s not trapped in a hospital that he’ll be the one to buy YOU flowers because he’s so thankful for everything you’ve done to help him.

You’re dating, I didn’t say that yet, but you start dating as soon as you kiss and you never really mind the fact that his legs don’t really work because he’s all you’ve ever wanted in a guy and let’s face it, his FACE is so P R E T T Y.

After a long time recovering in the hospital Jin is finally released and to celebrate you and his family go out for dinner to celebrate, and Jin just whispers in your ear,

I have no idea how to have sex like this, but I can still make you a mean lasagna.

<><> do not edit/remove anything from the original post <><> this AU belongs to me <><>

[hub-pub-bub]

In 1939, at the age of thirty-five, Theodor Seuss Geisel was tinkering with an invention that was doomed to failure. Geisel had published a few books under the name Dr. Seuss, but he was hoping that a device he had patented, the Infantograph, would be a money-maker at the techno-utopian New York World’s Fair, which was opening that year. “If you were to marry the person you are with,” the banner that Geisel designed for his pavilion asked, “what would your children look like? Come in and have your INFANTOGRAPH taken!” In the tent, a couple would sit side by side; a double-lensed camera would blend their features together, then plop a composite mug shot atop an image of a baby’s body. “It was a wonderful idea,” Geisel insisted, but, as a feat of engineering, it was more of an evocation of outlandish, off-kilter Seussian machinery than it was a functional prototype. After much fiddling, he scrapped his plans, admitting, “All the babies tended to look like William Randolph Hearst.”

In “Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination,” a new biography by Brian Jay Jones, this anecdote is mostly played for a laugh. But the impulse behind Geisel’s gadget is indicative of deeper concerns. Ever since John Locke articulated his thoughts on education, we have puzzled over what to project upon the blank slate of a child’s mind, remembering the philosopher’s counsel that “the little, and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies, have very important and lasting consequences.” As Geisel grew into his role as Dr. Seuss, beloved children’s author, he came to represent a distinctly American repurposing of those reflections on childhood. As the mass-media landscape shifted and expanded throughout his life, Geisel eventually came to recognize the vital role of children’s literature. “Children’s reading and children’s thinking are the rock bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise,” he asserted in an editorial, from 1960, in the Los Angeles Times. “In these days of tension and confusion . . . books for children have a greater potential for good or evil, than any other form of literature on earth.”

The path to that realization was a long one, riddled with accidents and detours. The genius of Dr. Seuss was the outcome of a personal and artistic evolution that spanned every decade of the American century, and Geisel wouldn’t fully embrace his profession or achieve his most significant triumphs until midlife and beyond. He began his career as a hired hand, providing cartoons and illustrations for magazines, ads, and other people’s books. Though the ad work was lucrative, he would soon cast about for more meaningful creative outlets, including writing for children. “I’d like to say I got into children’s books because I had a burning passion, a great message to bring to the youth of the world,” he told an interviewer late in life, “but it was because I was going nuts.” As the Second World War loomed, Geisel also threw himself into political cartooning, railing against the pro-fascist, anti-Semitic isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. After the United States entered the war, he joined the Army Signal Corps and created propaganda films under Frank Capra’s watch. For a brief period after the war, Hollywood beckoned, but Geisel’s few film projects that saw fruition ranged from disappointing to disastrous.

Throughout this period, Geisel published about a dozen children’s books under the name Dr. Seuss, ranging from his first, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” in 1937, to “If I Ran the Circus,” in 1956, which were generally greeted by enthusiastic reviews but middling-to-decent sales. For the first two decades of his career, Dr. Seuss was hardly a household name. But, as the baby boom was hitting its peak and Sputnik was prompting much hand-wringing about the state of American education, a vigorous debate over literacy was beginning to take shape, and Geisel found himself thrust to the forefront of the battle.

For decades, schoolteachers had been parking their youngest students in front of basal readers or primers, exemplified by the Dick and Jane series. The pedagogical approach underlying these primers assumed that beginning readers learned new words best by associating them with pictures and memorizing them through dutiful repetition. By the middle of the nineteen-fifties, this “whole word” or “look and say” method was just starting to face pushback from proponents of phonics-based instruction, most visibly in Rudolf Flesch’s influential polemic “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”

It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have dubbed the dullest family on earth. The books were plotless, littered with mind-numbing, repetitious quasi-sentences. (“Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick.”) The illustrations were stodgy and bland. Flesch deemed the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless.” The author John Hersey, in an article on the literacy debate, for Life magazine, was not much kinder, calling the books “namby-pamby” and “insipid,” and the pictures “terribly literal.” Hersey wondered why primers couldn’t at least feature the talents of gifted children’s-book illustrators, and he listed Dr. Seuss among their ranks.

The head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” But for a wordsmith as playful and unconventional as Dr. Seuss—someone fond of phrases such as “howling mad hullaballoo,” who invented animals like the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz—there was a big catch: to qualify as a first-grade primer, the text would have to be tightly restricted to a list of three hundred and fifty simple, pre-approved vocabulary words, supplied by the publisher, with a preferred limit of just two hundred and twenty-five words. Could Dr. Seuss deliver a page-turner that contained itself to no more than two hundred and twenty-five real, English, mostly monosyllabic words?

Geisel agreed to give it a shot. For months, he pored over the word list, at times moaning and thrashing about on the couch, awaiting inspiration. According to one telling, Geisel “finally gave it one more chance and said, ‘If I find two words that rhyme and make sense to me, that’s the title.’ ” He was on the verge of giving up when “cat” and “hat” caught his eye. Several more months of excruciating writing and rewriting followed, as he wrested a coherent story from the restrictive word list. (His editor, Saxe Commins, who’d worked with the likes of Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, took the project every bit as seriously as adult literature—“he’d spend an hour talking about three or four lines,” Geisel recalled.) When Geisel went to deliver the final manuscript of “The Cat in the Hat,” Jones writes, “he knew he had something new and very different in his hands.”

In Jones’s summation, “With its likable and somewhat subversive main character, galloping verse, and deliberate sense of humor, ‘The Cat in the Hat’ was everything that ‘Dick and Jane’ was not.” And yet Geisel had not exactly flouted the prevailing pedagogical approach; he’d turned some of its defects into merits. The stultifying repetitions of the typical primer had been replaced with joyously musical ones. Some of the cat’s most comically absurd escapades are entirely consistent with the look-and-say method, minus the terrible literalness that Hersey decried. What child hasn’t marvelled at the delightfully drawn and boldly hued books, and cup, and cake, and rake, and little toy ship and little toy man, and red fan, and fish, and milk on a dish (all plucked from that word list) as they teeter on the cat’s extremities? On the other hand, with its reliance on memorable rhyming pairs and word families, “The Cat in the Hat,” beginning with its catchy title, accentuated for early readers how sound and symbol correspond. The book served as a gateway to the phonics-based approach, which eventually supplanted the whole-word pedagogy.

In addition to stirring up a revolution in reading instruction, “The Cat in the Hat” was an immediate commercial sensation. “By some accounts,” Jones writes, “ ‘The Cat in the Hat’ was selling more than a thousand copies per day, on its way to selling 250,000 copies by Christmas of 1957, and more than three million copies within three years.”

The success of the book finally turned being Dr. Seuss into a day job for Geisel. Assured of the value of children’s literature, Geisel worked tirelessly at it for the next three decades. With the demand for well-crafted alternatives to traditional primers established, he expanded his duties, co-founding the imprint Beginner Books. He worked with a talented roster of children’s authors and illustrators, and he published some of his own most memorable works, which were specifically for the youngest segment of his audience. “Hop on Pop,” “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish”, and “Green Eggs and Ham”—which was born out of a bet that Geisel couldn’t pare down his vocabulary to just fifty unique words—were all published by Beginner Books.

But alongside this monumental achievement on behalf of little readers lies the other, equally significant portion of Geisel’s legacy: the Cat in the Hat and Sam-I-Am have taught generations of children to read, but the likes of the Grinch and the Lorax have guided their thinking and feeling. For, even as the Beginner Books publications proliferated, Geisel continued to produce these “big books,” as he called them, a number of which have cemented their status as classic fables for the modern age.

Although it might be tempting to bestow a kind of secular sainthood upon Dr. Seuss, the persona, Jones resists such a simplified portrayal of Geisel, the man. “Becoming Dr. Seuss” is more compelling than mere pop hagiography; it is sweeping in scope, unstinting in detail, and willing to criticize or contextualize when needed. One of the most affecting sections in Jones’s biography examines Geisel’s moral evolution, demonstrating how an artist could answer to his conscience independently, if imperfectly, decades before the advent of cancel culture. Jones doesn’t shy away from confronting some ugly stains from early in Geisel’s career, including misogynistic humor and stereotypical depictions of foreigners. Most shamefully, Geisel drew some viciously anti-Japanese cartoons during the war. While he trained his ire on the leaders and militaries of Germany and Italy, many of his comics broadly vilified the Japanese people, relying on crass visual signifiers and other racist cheap shots. One comic cast suspicion upon the loyalties of Japanese-Americans just days before President Roosevelt authorized their internment. A decade later, on an assignment for Life magazine, Geisel visited Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, touring schools to observe “how the Japanese child’s thinking had changed” under American occupation. Geisel was delighted, and perhaps chastened, when he saw drawings the children had made of their aspirations. Though one teacher conceded, “If we had given them this assignment ten years ago, every boy in Japan would have drawn himself as a general,” Geisel recounted that “Most had visions of themselves working for a better world.”

Jones paints Geisel’s piece for Life as perhaps the start of a penance, one that many believe culminated in “Horton Hears a Who!” (which Geisel dedicated to the professor who hosted him in Kyoto, calling him a “great friend”). In Jones’s eyes, this book “marked the first time [Geisel] had deliberately written a book with an ethical point of view.” It’s hard not to interpret the book, in which a big-hearted elephant vows to protect the microscopic inhabitants of a speck of dust, as an apology for his earlier prejudice. “A person’s a person, no matter how small”—or far away, or foreign—is Horton’s motto.

At the end of “Horton Hears a Who!,” a young kangaroo and his mother agree to protect the vulnerable beings whom they had previously refused to acknowledge. Geisel also concluded his two most overtly ideological books—”The Lorax,” a plea for conservation, and “The Butter Battle Book,” an allegory about the nuclear-arms race—with scenes of a child reckoning with the behavior of adults. In the tense final scene of “Butter Battle,” a frightened youngster looks on as his grandfather and his grandfather’s nemesis threaten each other with mutually assured destruction. On the last page of “The Lorax,” all we see of the child are two outstretched arms, ready to catch the seed that might replenish a world devastated by grownups’ greed and recklessness. Geisel reminds us that this is what we most long to see when we wonder what a child of ours would look like: someone who might receive the lessons that we were too late to learn.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: An Artist Who Conveys Messages from the Dead

With its multitude of painted images and constructions, Kornegay’s art-filled yard both conveyed spiritual messages and was a kind of visible, tangible message in itself, early 1990s (photo © Kevin Duffy, courtesy of Shrine)

Will — or should — the United States’ current climate of potentially explosive racial tension affect the ways in which critics, curators, researchers, teachers, and other specialists in the world of art and culture think about and discuss their respective subject areas?

In the visual arts, that’s a question that, in their own ways, art museums in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now effectively exploring as they make room in their collections for numerous works by self-taught American artists of African descent from the Deep South.

A baby doll and an old clock formed part of an assemblage in the art environment that covered Kornegay’s property, early 1990s (photo ©Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

That’s because, since late 2014, these museums have purchased and/or received as donations a collective trove of such works from the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The self-taught artists whose technically innovative, thematically rich works have been added to these museums’ holdings include, among others, Thornton Dial; Ronald Lockett; Joe Minter; Lonnie Holley; Joe Light; Mary Proctor; the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; Mary T. Smith; Royal Robertson; Georgia Speller; and Purvis Young.

Acquiring such artists’ works obligates these museums to rethink the ways in which they tell the story of 20th-century art, making room for the achievements of these often visionary autodidacts who lived on the far margins of the mainstream art world’s critical debates, stylistic movements, and institutions.

It is against this backdrop of revisionist art-history-in-the-making that Rev. George Kornegay: New Jerusalem, an exhibition of paintings on paper and mixed-media assemblage sculptures by the late, Alabama-based self-taught artist George Kornegay (1913-2014) has just opened at Shrine on the Lower East Side. On view through October 8, it reinforces what is now understood about the mix of artistic, spiritual, and social traditions out of which the works of art-makers like Kornegay emerged, while highlighting his own art’s distinctive inflections.

Rev. George Kornegay at his home in Bibb County, Alabama, in an image from the 1990s (photo ©Ted Degener, courtesy of the photographer)

Kornegay was born in Bibb County, southeast of Tuscaloosa, in east-central Alabama. His father worked on a farm, in a coal mine, and in a barrel-making mill. George, the second of his parents’ 10 children, attended a rural school for several years but left to help farm the 28-acre parcel of land his father had eventually managed to purchase, leaving sharecropping behind.

George married and, with his wife, brought up 12 children; he worked at a foundry in Tuscalossa and eventually became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serving several rural congregations. In interviews from the late 1990s with the researcher and art collector William S. Arnett, who was also the founder of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Kornegay explained that he had received “a divine calling” to enter the ministry. He said, “I run from it at first. I think I was afraid of it, but God, he stayed at me. I ask him to give me these signs if this is what he mean for me. And he sent them. And the end of it come from a choir of angels come to visit my house.”

With its multitude of painted images and constructions, Kornegay’s art-filled yard both conveyed spiritual messages and was a kind of visible, tangible message in itself, early 1990s (photo © Kevin Duffy, courtesy of Shrine)

Around 1980, at his home in Brent, about half-way between Tuscaloosa and Selma, Kornegay began constructing a multi-part, outdoor art environment that would eventually dominate his family’s entire compound. Keenly aware of his mixed African and Native-American ancestry, in his late-1990s interviews, Kornegay, speaking in his region’s noticeable dialect, said of his home, “This property is a sacred place. This was a Indian village way back before my daddy got out here. It’s a burial place. My daughter at certain times can hear voices out here talking but she can’t tell us what they’re talking about.”

Commonly known by historians of folk or vernacular art forms as “yard art” or “yard shows,” creations like Kornegay’s, fashioned out of wood and metal scraps, old furniture, cast-off toys, tires, pots and pans, bottles, farm equipment, and other found objects, trace their roots to the central-African homelands of their makers’ ancestors, who had been enslaved in the American South.

A teepee-shaped element in Kornegay’s art environment alluded to his Native-American ancestry, early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

The anthropologist Grey Gundaker, a Williams & Mary College professor who has long specialized in the history of this vernacular art form, noted in a 1994 Metropolis magazine article describing her visit to Kornegay’s property that “the rubbish heap is a metaphor for the grave and a point of contact with the world of the dead.”

Gundaker wrote that such yard shows, which can be found throughout the Deep South, “serve as rambling altars, places where spirits can be summoned and communed with.” (The theorizing that surrounds this phenomenon continues to unfold; in recent years, the art dealer, researcher, and collector Randall Morris, a co-director of Cavin-Morris Gallery, in New York, has also referred to them as “spirit yards.”)

Rev. George Kornegay, wearing a kente cloth sash, at his home in rural Alabama, early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

Gundaker is the co-author, with Judith McWillie, a painter, photographer, and former, longtime professor of art at the University of Georgia, in Athens, of the book No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African-American Yard Work (University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Recently, by telephone, McWillie recalled, “While I was teaching at the university, I began doing my own research about certain vernacular art forms I encountered in the South, of which African-American yard art was by far one of the most interesting and powerful. Decades ago, even before the question of whether or not such works could be called ‘outsider art’ emerged, some people in the art world were arguing about whether they should mainly be regarded ethnographically or if they could — and should — be discussed and appreciated aesthetically.”

McWillie’s research flowed into such projects as Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways Through the Black Atlantic South, an exhibition she helped organize for New York’s INTAR Latin American Gallery, in 1989, and the book No Space Hidden. “I was presenting a talk near Tuscaloosa in the early 1990s,” she said, “when people took me to see Rev. Kornegay’s yard. I saw it when it was in its prime.”

One of the artist-researcher Judith McWillie’s shots of Kornegay’s “yard show,” from her visit to the minister and art-maker’s property in the early 1990s (photo © Judith McWillie, courtesy of the photographer)

“It was a terraced property,” McWillie recalled, “with Kornegay’s own house up at the crest, and each level filled with his sculptures. Even the brightly painted house, with its simple geometry, was an integral, expressive part of the whole experience.” The then-retired minister, she remembered, “was tall, thin, and elegant, with a sash of African kente cloth around his neck, and he proudly told me about his ancestry; in his facial features you could see evidence of his African and Native-American background.”

As Kornegay grew older, and word spread about his remarkable yard, he and his family sometimes made parts of his unusual creation available for sale, but only after deliberating about such transactions — and making sure that prospective collectors understood and appreciated their deeply spiritual character.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Animal)” (circa early 1990s), mixed media, 59 x 38  x 10 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

The current exhibition at Shrine has its roots in the longstanding interest of the gallery’s founder, Scott Ogden, in the works of self-taught artists, which he collects. Ogden, who is also an artist, grew up near Dallas and studied art at the University of Texas, in Austin, and at Queens College, in New York. He recalled, “During my first year in Austin, I heard a lecture about Texas prisoners’ art and the work of such self-taught artists as ‘The Magnificent Pretty Boy’ Henry Ray Clark and Frank Jones. Later, a teacher pointed me toward Bruce Lee Webb and Julie Webb of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, just south of Dallas. I was floored by the artworks on their walls, as well as by the stories they shared with me about how this kind of art had been created.”

Ogden acknowledged that, for better or worse, the often hardscrabble life stories of some of the best-known artists in the related outsider and self-taught art fields have become inseparable from showings of their work. Still, he pointed out, the art that has attracted him has always had “to be singular and outstanding in its own right,” irrespective of “the story of the individual who made it.” Ogden brought together his interest in the biographies and working methods of self-taught artists in Make (2011), a documentary he co-produced with the Canadian filmmaker Malcolm Hearn, which focused on Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005); the self-styled “prophet,” Royal Robertson (1936-1997); and Ike Morgan (all African-Americans from the South); as well as Judith Scott (1943-2005), a woman with Down syndrome who made unusual sculptural objects wrapped in thick layers of colored yarn and thread.

One of Rev. George Kornegay’s untitled, house-paint-on-paper images of a silhouetted figure, circa 1990s, 12 x 9 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

This exhibition is Kornegay’s first-ever solo presentation anywhere; Ogden organized it by tapping into several private collections. Whereas the simple, uncluttered, found-object assemblages of the blind Hawkins can feel eloquent and soulful, and those of Lonnie Holley often recall African-American yard art’s talismanic character, Kornegay’s works tend to address their subjects, both biblical and other themes, more literally, as well as with more quirky, formal-interpretive twists.

At Shrine, in works from the early 1990s, Kornegay’s “Untitled (Black Woman)” uses an oddly shaped board, scraps of black Naugahyde (artificial leather), sheet-metal shavings (for hair), and a few daubs of paint to fashion a female face and her robed figure. In both “Untitled (Animal)” and an untitled, bird-like form, whose face is white on one side and brown on the other, the artist used thick slices of tree trunks to craft unidentifiable creatures’ heads, trapping them in awkward, wood-and-metal frames or perching them on long, wooden legs.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Black Woman)” (circa early 1990s), mixed media, 28 x 27 x 3.5 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

Kornegay’s painting of what appears to be a member of a celestial choir employs a stripped-down palette of black, blue, red, and white on a scrap of corrugated metal. As clever as any classic modernist’s manipulation of found materials, here Kornegay used the vertical stripes created by the corrugation to suggest the folds in a long robe, literally giving them tangible form. Similarly, in his boldly colored works on paper, Kornegay used felt-tip markers or what appears to be plain house paint to produce abstracted, often silhouetted forms — of women, plants, and other, more indistinguishable creatures or objects. And then there is his multicolored toilet seat festooned with a cascade of shredded-fabric strips and dotted with white paint to render a simple, watchful face.

Rev. George Kornegay, “Untitled (Figure)” (circa 1980s), paint on corrugated metal, 73 x 40 x 2 inches (photo courtesy of Shrine)

Kornegay regarded his yard and the individual elements it contained as a means of communicating messages to the living from the dead (their legacies, teachings, and wisdom) as well as an embodiment of those messages themselves. According to McWillie, when she visited the artist, he pointed to the objects in his yard and told her, “These are the things that can’t be said,” by which he meant, she explained, “that the entire yard was a spirit-filled kind of energy field.”

That’s a tall order for any work of art, but even here, in a Manhattan gallery, far removed from their original site and fuller context, Kornegay’s creations exude a compelling, mysterious air.

Rev. George Kornegay: New Jerusalem continues at Shrine (191 Henry Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through October 8.

The post An Artist Who Conveys Messages from the Dead appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[itsworn]

Homemade, 50-Year-Old Fuel Motor Roars Back To Life

The Big Banger Theory

Fueler.

Improbable survival stories are standard equipment around here. HOT ROD Deluxe is known for telling resurrection tales that defy all odds and logic. Some of those story ideas surely would’ve been rejected outright by skeptical editors as borderline unbelievable, had photographic evidence not undeniably documented a journey from distant past to survivor. Forget “borderline”; this is one backyard project that’s been unreal from the very start, when a retired machinist began building his racing engine, literally—a gigantic four-banger that once again cackles with nitromethane—a half-century later.

If that already sounds unbelievable, prepare to suspend disbelief long enough to hear the rest of the story. The happy ending depicted by these current photos followed decades of neglect, disassembly, and even theft that could’ve, would’ve, and certainly should’ve written a far sadder story. The magical intervention of a young Springfield, Oregon, engine builder was the last link in a long chain of unlikely coincidences—or was it something else?

“I feel like Grandpa led me to him,” says Carol Stange, a since-retired meter reader for the Springfield Utility Board in Oregon whose monthly route included a joint named Tim’s Muscle Cars. She’d never met or even seen anyone on the grounds until the day she spied an old Lyndwood dragster chassis out front. As a lifelong gearhead from Long Beach, California, whose grandfather had exposed the whole family to nearby Lions Drag Strip, Carol couldn’t resist knocking on the office door. When nobody answered, she walked inside and to the back of the building, following male voices.

“A buddy and I were painting his GTO in my spray booth,” Tim Riel recalls. “We both had respirators on. I thought, ‘Wow, this lady has a lot of nerve, walking up to a couple of strangers wearing masks!’” Tim and Carol agree that their introductory conversation began something like this:

“Hi, I saw your dragster out front. My grandfather had one of those.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, in the mid-1960s. He built his own engine. Car Craft wrote about it.”

“Is your grandpa Byron Barnes?”

Imagine Carol’s shock, hearing a total stranger utter the name of her late grandfather. “I followed him up to the front office, where Tim had a big stack of magazines. He went right to the issue and pulled it out. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the article.’ I couldn’t believe this was happening! Tim seemed intrigued that the chassis survived, was still in the family, and was here in Oregon.”

A magazine published seven years before Tim Riel was born just happened to be among several milk crates of “moldy, smelly, old paper” that he’d recently purchased from a swap-meet vendor. Tim and his machinist father, Rod Riel, had been going through the pile that very week. “We kept coming back to that Car Craft and that one article. We couldn’t get over how much work went into the engine. It still amazes me. This guy not only made his own engine parts; first, he had to design and build the tooling to make them. Everything had to be perfectly aligned for those pistons to go up and down. Even with today’s technology, not many people would—or even could—do what her grandpa did 50 years ago.”

So, as an engineering exercise, this project was pretty hard to beat; as a race car, not so much. In fact, it never got past the testing stage. When the late, great writer A.B. Shuman submitted his tech story around March 1967, Byron had run the rail twice. First time out, injected on nitro, netted “a quite respectable 120 mph in eleven seconds, shutting off at the halfway mark and coasting through the traps,” CC reported. Switching to dual Weber carbs and, presumably, gasoline for a second try, there was another half-pass of 129 mph but no e.t reported by Shuman. Gifford Barnes counts three trips to Lions Drag Strip with his dad, all plagued by bogging off the line: “He couldn’t get the fuel system right,” he explains. “After the car stumbled, it really charged, but Mickey [Okahara, the driver] couldn’t get away clean.” The wide variety of used parts visible in photos and recovered by Tim Riel point to additional experimentation, as does the only time slip left behind. On the back is scrawled, “50% nitro.” If, in fact, the indicated 8.74 and 164 were recorded by this car, it would’ve been one of the swiftest four-bangers of the era—but not competitive for the type of racing Byron initially envisioned.

Considering how many years one old guy, working alone, needed to bring this engine, particularly, plus a homebuilt chassis all the way from conception to completion—the crankshaft alone required 30 days, according to CC—it’s hardly surprising that classification rules would evolve. The article cites so-called “junior fuelers” for Byron’s inspiration. After Lions bowed out of the fuel ban in 1962, that unofficial term came to be loosely applied to single-engined, normally aspirated dragsters burning nitromethane and/or methanol, regardless of engine type or size. Those not quick enough to qualify for Top Fuel Eliminator might’ve run Top Gas or amongst themselves. Byron’s decision to make his sheetmetal cylinder block tall enough to displace either 353 or 392 ci hardly seems coincidental at a time when 354 and 392 Chryslers were fashionable. Some injected Chevys were poked ’n’ stroked to 358 and even 389 cubes.

By the time Byron was ready to go, Lions had banished fuel burners from Top Gas and created an official Junior Fuel category for unblown engines no larger than 310 cubes. Bigger motors moved into either C/Fuel Dragster (up to 350 ci) or B/FD (to 400 ci), both of which were dominated by small-inch, blown Hemis and Chevys. No wonder Byron lost interest in 1968 or ’69 and parked this car. Indeed, but for one old magazine article and however few firsthand witnesses remain, nearly nobody would know it ever existed.

Getting back to Tim’s Muscle Cars, the Springfield meter reader regularly returned to share leisurely lunch breaks and talk shop. “All I knew was that the bare chassis was hanging in her uncle’s barn,” Tim says. “Carol never got over there to take pictures. I told her that I’d be interested in buying whatever was left.”

“Oh, yeah, he bugged me for over a year,” Carol confirms, laughing. “He’d say, ‘Can I just go see it, please?’ I didn’t want to bug my uncle Giff just so someone could look up in his rafters. But my family always hoped to get Grandpa’s dragster running. My cousin Frank, Giff’s son, started on that about 20 years ago. He took the car apart, spread the parts out on the bench, but it never went back together. When I finally called to tell my uncle I’d met a young guy with his own engine shop who might want to buy the car, Giff said, ‘Nope, he can’t buy it. If you really think he’ll do something with it, tell him to come get it.'”

What Carol didn’t know at the time was that thieves had recently removed critical components from Giff’s unlocked boat barn and sold them for scrap. Luckily, her uncle and cousin noticed parts missing in time to track down the metals dealer before he got around to melting or reselling most, though the rare quick-change rearend was already gone. They went to court to recover what remained and prevailed, eventually.

“All I expected to get was a chassis, or part of one,” Tim says. “I planned to look for dragster parts at swap meets, maybe put in an early Hemi or small-block. Carol’s mom, uncle, aunt, cousin, brother, and sister were all there to say goodbye to Grandpa’s dragster. I walked into this big metal shed with a huge fishing boat on one side. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Byron’s short-block was sitting on a crate. Piles of parts were on the floor. Both M&H slicks were still mounted on Halibrands. The original parachute was hanging from the rafters. We found the complete clutch assembly and can, all the mag body panels, even a firesuit. After everything was laid out at home the next day, I was amazed by how complete the car was. I saw it as a giant erector set, minus the rearend and some small pieces that my dad and I could probably make. We were lucky to have the Car Craft for reference.

“I was worried that Byron’s two children wouldn’t be around long enough to see it get done,” he adds. “I’d made them a promise to try, but Giff’s health was not good. He and his sister, Carol’s mom, were in their eighties. This was important. I wanted that engine to run again, on nitro. I really got into it.”

He sure did, gradually assembling the erector set most nights and weekends for eight months, in between engine work for patient patrons of Tim’s Muscle Cars. When he proudly unveiled the sum of those parts, Byron’s descendants were there to witness the resurrection of a father and grandfather, along with an old dragster. “We were all in tears,” Tim admits.

“To me, it’s just amazing how things worked out,” says Carol Stange, the fearless meter reader whose knock on one door opened so many more. “It was fun, and I just felt like it was meant to be.”

The all-homemade engine was designed to displace either 353 or 392 ci, depending on crankshaft selection. To minimize weight, designer-builder Byron Barnes settled on four cylinders (versus eight), a sheetmetal crankcase (versus cast iron), and valves in the block (versus overhead). Note the 3-inch offset, to counteract torque.

Both the dragster and the former Romania Chevrolet store were operational in the 1960s. Despite its lengthy wheelbase of 152 inches and maze of suspension tubing, the car weighed just 710 pounds, wet.

Everything orange was powdercoated by McKenzie Chrome Plating (Springfield, Oregon). All four wheels and tires are original. After the original mag body was ruined by a careless sandblaster—and Tim Riel was quoted a price of $3,500 per magnesium sheet—buddy Les Schoonover (Springfield) replicated the cowl and side panels in aluminum.

Restorer-caretaker Tim Riel estimates that no fewer than 100 pieces of sheet steel were welded together to create the 116-pound bare block.

Byron Barnes obviously had his own ideas about weight transfer, probably influenced by his oval-track history. He formed the fuel tank by cutting and merging two military-surplus water kettles engraved with the words “U.S. Army.”

The aluminum cover contains the coolant sitting on top of four individual cylinder heads. Water enters through the open hole (which still lacks a pressure cap to replace the tiny original). Boiling water exits through the overflow tube. Mike Maher did the pinstriping and lettering. The rear-main seal is a small-block Chevy item.

The parachute, M&H 8.20-15 Racemasters, and magnesium Halibrand wheels are original. The Portland Swap Meet produced a virtual duplicate of the stolen rearend assembly, including Halibrand champ-car quick-change, that fit perfectly.

Rod Riel, Tim’s machinist dad, reproduced one of the Anglia-style spindles and some missing suspension pieces on his CNC machines. The shocks are Volkswagen. The aluminum fuel line is original.

The custom tri-drive system is a work of art. A spur gear on the crank runs the cam, which drives the Bendix Mini-Mag, Hilborn fuel pump, and a Ford six-cylinder oil pump at the bottom that fills a custom dry-sump pan. A piece of leather that seals the timing cover to the crankcase is the closet thing to a gasket in the entire engine. Byron even built his own injectors. The original velocity stacks and Hilborn barrel valve survived, but not the exhaust flange and headers, which Rod Riel replicated. Since our photo session, Tim has completed the complicated linkage and added a mini-starter to the front of the crank. Previously, he hand-operated the throttle with a long rod connecting the individual injectors and fired the engine on a stand, since none of the Riels can squeeze into the cockpit for push starting.

Since stumbling onto this photography location in Eugene, Oregon, we’ve learned that the former home of Lew Williams and, later, Joe Romania Chevrolet is infamous for 2000 and 2001 arson attacks by local “ecoterrorists” targeting gas guzzlers. In the first incident, three light trucks collectively valued at $28,000 were torched by activists who happened to be under surveillance by a terrorism task force that night. Nine months later, a different gang set fire to 35 new Suburbans and Tahoes worth $959,000. The Chevy store was sold shortly thereafter and ultimately closed in 2005 when the University of Oregon purchased the prime, four-and-a-half-acre property adjoining the campus for storage. The wooden panels were installed after rock-throwing vandals found the original glass irresistible.

Machinists’ Union

It took a father-son team of master machinists in Long Beach, California, to create this engine, and it took another to restore it to running condition, a half-century later and 900 miles north. The shared experience has tightly bonded the Barnes-Garwood and Riel families to this day.

Gifford Barnes, 86, machined the individual cylinder heads for his late dad’s engine. He inherited Byron’s last race car in 1981 and stored it for 34 years. The Barnes-Garwood family photo album produced a rare 1930s snapshot of father and son together.

Kay Barnes Garwood, 84, is Byron’s daughter. Nearly eight decades after posing with the family dog and midget at home in Long Beach, she lives with daughter Linda Garwood (left) in Port Orford, Oregon.

Tim and Jan Riel rescued and revived their rail with invaluable assistance from Rod Riel (left), a semiretired CNC machinist. Its new home is Tim’s Muscle Cars, a restoration and engine shop in Springfield, Oregon.

Social Media, Old School

For 400 years before digital devices connected us senders and receivers, magazines did that job. This one still does, albeit with a time delay measured in months or years, not nanoseconds. You know the drill: HOT ROD Deluxe publishes an article or column or photo caption that thrills/irritates you into sending love letters/hate mail. Correspondence deemed worthy of print shows up in stores and mailboxes two or three issues later to thrill/irritate fellow readers. See, just like Facebook posts, minus fake news.

Despite modern production technology, “slick” magazines still take forfriggin’ever to print, bind, and transport, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. Our bimonthly infrequency automatically puts HRD another month behind the monthlies. If you’re reading this on the West Coast, add another week for trains and trucks to move the bundles all the way from the Midwest, where most of America’s ink gets spilled. Finally, your copy shows up in, say, Springfield, Oregon. Reading from front to back (as editors and the good Lord intended), you eventually get to a couple of 50-year-old, unpublished outtakes from a 1968 Car Craft story. The caption asks if any reader knows what happened to an obscure race car that vanished 15 years before you were born, a car that happens to be parked in your shop.

Reader Tim Riel responded almost as soon as his heart settled back into his chest. Editor Hardin couldn’t wait to print the letter and photos Tim sent of the restored rail. Meanwhile, though, another issue’s bimonthly production cycle came and went, delaying publication by one more edition. When the car reappeared in color in January 2016’s Scrapbook section, Mr. Ed. promised in print to send contributor Dave Wallace—who claimed a personal connection to its builder—to shoot a proper feature. In consideration of the Northwest’s notorious rainy season, we postponed that photo session until the late spring. Finally, the Byron Barnes rail returns to these pages, completing a print conversation started nearly two years ago—if not 50 years ago this December, when Petersen Publishing Company staffers Bob Swaim and A.B. Shuman visited the car both at home and at Lions Drag Strip.

Original Car Craft article, June 1968

From HRD’s “The Golden Age Of Drag Racing,” September 2015

From HRD’s letters section, January 2016

Shortly after Tim Riel’s letter and photos appeared in HRD, another stranger showed up at Tim’s Muscle Cars. He told Tim that, as a kid, he lived in Byron’s neighborhood and helped clean out the home shop after Mr. and Mrs. Barnes died weeks apart in 1981. He was given the blueprint as a souvenir. He thought it belonged with the race car. Sure enough, these cockpit measurements match. Byron evidently purchased a partial kit from little-known H&L Metals. Tim was so stunned by the gift that he never got a name. He’s hopeful that the generous mystery man will see this and identify himself to HRD—extending the series of old-school, ink-on-paper “posts” described above.

Lost And Found

On the snowy morning in January 2014 that Tim and Rod Riel dragged a trailer to the Oregon coast, a bare chassis was all they expected to find. Imagine their surprise!

For the first time, Tim Riel laid his hands—and eyes—on the remnants of a chassis he’d seen only in a Car Craft issue printed four years before he was born.

Carol Garwood Stange (right) is the retired Oregon meter reader who put Tim Riel (left) together with Grandpa’s slingshot. Her big sister, Linda Garwood, held up the nose while their uncle Giff supervised.

The rotating assembly stayed inside of Byron’s sheetmetal block since he last ran the car, circa 1968-69. Three types of steel were pressed together, then arc-welded with titanium-nickel rod, to form a hollow crankshaft with a 4.5-inch stroke.

Gifford Barnes machined the individual cylinder heads so precisely that they seal to the sheet-steel crankcase without gaskets. His dad used 40 capscrews made of aircraft-grade titanium, likely left over from one of Byron’s aerospace projects. All but a few of the original fasteners were located, cleaned up, and reinstalled by Tim Riel. Threaded tubes around the spark plugs prevent coolant from grounding out the plugs.

The camshaft is hollow. Byron fused individual lobes onto the tube, then had Iskenderian grind them to deliver 230 degrees of duration with 0.400-inch lift. “The cam wasn’t even in the engine, so I had no idea about where to degree it or set the lash,” Tim says. “The drive gear is slotted about 70 degrees where the bolt goes, for advance and retard. So I called and talked to Isky’s son, who remembered Ed playing cards with Byron. He said his dad would call after he got back from lunch. I thought, ‘Oh, sure, like Ed Iskenderian is gonna personally call some little engine builder in the middle of nowhere.’ That same afternoon, I answer the phone, and Mr. Isky says, ‘Old man Barnes still owes me 40 bucks from our weekly card game!’ He said he’d look around and let me know if he found anything. About two weeks later, I get a box with the original cam card with all of the specs, a new set of valvesprings, and a handwritten note: ‘Best wishes, Ed Iskenderian.'”

Jahns Pistons cast five of these aluminum, 5-inch-diameter monsters in the wooden mold. Byron finish-machined four to arrive at 10:1 compression. He also made five 4130 chrome-moly connecting rods, welding the ends to the tubular beams. This spare was never run.

The worn main bearings proved to be the most difficult replacement parts to find, plus the most expensive. Because all crank journals are identical, Tim had to spend $1,200 on five complete sets of obsolete aircraft bearings to get the five pieces. An old-timer at Federal-Mogul successfully cross-referenced the original part numbers by searching old paper catalogs. The valvetrain combines original, slipper-style lifters with Chrysler Hemi springs, retainers, and locks.

Everything here was formed from steel. First, though, Byron had to make wooden or cardboard templates for each piece, then construct a flame-cutting rig with a tracing stylus at one end and an oxy-acetylene cutting torch at the other. The intake and exhaust ports are two pieces of steel stampings, welded together. Also note the six water jackets per cylinder.

The original, giant 2-5/8-inch intake and exhaust valves are stainless heads on chrome-moly stems.

Half a century after this big banger first went together, it’s as good as new, plus much prettier. Of many missing parts reproduced by the Riels, the most difficult to design were the spur gears and shaft driving the magneto and fuel and oil pumps. In some old photos of the engine wearing Weber carbs, the two-hole bracket contained a different mag and a coil.

Who Was Byron Barnes?

This writer should know, having met him a few times in the mid-1970s. We even lived on the same Huntington Beach street for a while, yet I never really knew the man. Among my regrets is not spending more time in the large shop behind his house on Old Pirates Lane that held both the Hudson he’d customized and his fully assembled slingshot, covered in dusty plastic. I was introduced by my then-girlfriend as the editor of Drag News, but to him I was the longhair sleeping with his beloved granddaughter, Carol Garwood—now Carol Stange, the retired Oregon meter reader responsible for connecting his last race car to the young guy destined to rescue and restore it.

Byron’s family revealed that he was born in 1907 in Nebraska. In 1911, his parents moved to Long Beach. At age 16, Byron’s first homebuilt hot rod got him arrested and jailed. Since his dad was then running for city council, the folks shipped him offshore to herd goats on San Clemente Island until the election was over. He and a buddy later assembled an airplane that Byron flew before building and driving his first midget. When World War II halted auto racing, he worked for Douglas Aircraft Company as a mechanics’ instructor and design engineer developing tooling for the B-17 bomber. In the mid-1950s, Byron designed, built, and patented oil field equipment that enabled an early retirement. For the next 25 years, he indulged automotive passions ranging from the dragster and Hudson custom to off-road racing with local pals Bill Stroppe and Parnelli Jones.

Though Byron could likely afford any new car, I saw him driving Ford Pintos exclusively. Rather than bother changing fluids, he’d torture an engine until it rattled or smoked, swap motors in an afternoon, then perform an autopsy on the dead player. (The same boat shed that stored the dragster’s engine held another big surprise for Tim Riel: “There must’ve been 70 Pinto 2000- and 2300cc motors stacked up in there!”) Byron’s last daily driver was reportedly returning nearly 50 mpg when emphysema ended an incredible journey in April 1981, just shy of his 74th birthday.

Byron (right) was also a pilot. During the Depression, he earned money repairing and reselling crashed planes. Neither his son nor daughter recognized the other dapper dude.

The crowd at San Diego’s Balboa Stadium illustrates the huge popularity of midget racing before WWII and immediately after, until free competition from television kept people home on weekends. The fourth car back appears to be Byron’s.

This flathead is thought to be the first that Byron built from scratch, during the 1930s. It disappeared with a fast-talking salesman who promised to take it from track to track, nationwide, and write orders for production copies. Byron also constructed a DOHC prototype that might be the motor pictured in his wrecked racer. Historian Greg Sharp tells us that more than 100 different engine types powered midgets, all limited to 105 ci.

A page from Byron’s logbook documents eight events in five weeks at L.A.’s Gilmore and Atlantic Boulevard Stadium tracks during the summer of 1939.

Unlike most midgets of the era, Byron’s looked as good as they ran.

Gifford Barnes doesn’t know whether this could be his dad’s overhead cammer, but it’s the only DOHC engine shot in the family scrapbook.

Evidence that Byron’s hot rods attracted hot drivers includes this steamy shot of a guy recognized by historian Greg as Mel Hansen, “a big-name midget driver who qualified six times for the Indy 500, with a best finish of eighth.”

The forward-leaning positions of both drivers suggest this to be the moment of impact after Byron’s unknown shoe spun. We’re guessing that the background cars belonged to the two workers behind the wall.

The dragster’s finished block and crank are shown in the Long Beach shop where Byron handbuilt his last racing engine. The Barnes-Garwood family still owns the building on Signal Hill. Appropriately, it’s currently leased to a company making parts for Smart cars.

In the early 1970s, granddaughter Carol paid $100 for this Northern California barn find. It was original and complete except for a front seat. Once Carol got the engine running, her mom drove the 400-plus miles home to Long Beach sitting on a crate. Never content to follow a crowd, Grandpa Barnes hopped up the straight eight and built himself the only Hudson custom we’ve ever seen.

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