#there’s probably some flexibility in the material right? or nah

[worstloki]

Do u think Hela can make more than weapons. Do you think she can make a raincoat if she needs it. Or a skateboard.

[vintagedolan]

mixtape | track seven

| masterlist | faceclaims | playlist |

*contains smut*

When Nicole died, Indiana convinced herself that someone was holding down a fast forward button on her life. Some greater power with a universal remote, carelessly keeping a finger shoved down on the little button with the double arrows, with no regard to the fleeting few days she had left with her most important person.

History seemed to be repeating itself, with the best physical representation being the very quickly evolving tiny homes.

The first thing on Grayson’s agenda when they’d made it back to NYC was to decorate the property for Halloween. It hadn’t seemed like the most sound plan to Indy, considering last time they were out in the field it was just raw building materials, a platform and lots of grass. But when she climbed off the back of the quad, away from Grayson’s warmth and into the chilly air, she was standing in front of a house, or at least the bones of one, with the beginnings of the loft and stairs formed inside. It wasn’t polished yet - in fact, there wasn’t even a front door to hang the spider wreath that he had bought at Home Depot. But there was a house, and it stood as a reminder that time was passing quickly.

Despite how over the top the Dolan’s were about it, Halloween was a blink. Ethan was still in California, spending a few more days with Eden, but they facetimed in their costumes anyways - Indy had been convinced into dressing up at the last minute, which resulted in a witch costume that consisted of black leggings and a black bodysuit, which got covered up by a spare hoodie of Grayson’s early in the evening, brought on by the ever-dropping Jersey temperatures. But they celebrated with Lisa, and with E squared across the miles with a bonfire and too many pieces of candy, and Indy realized at the end of the night that it was the first holiday she’d had with family in years. It filled a vacant room in a back hallway of her heart that she didn’t realize had been abandoned, and as soon as the calendar turned to November, she was determined.

“Thanksgiving. Me, you, Lisa, Ethan, Eden, Cam, Charlie and Devin. Thoughts, opinions?”

Grayson quirked an eyebrow from the other side of the couch, face lit by his laptop screen.

“Vegan thanksgiving?”

She nudged him in the side with her foot, getting the perfect angle from where she was laying to tickle him. “Nah, we’re gonna cook a whole meal that 25% of the participants can’t eat. Sounds like the holiday of dreams.”

He poked her with a toe. “Yeah, that sounds good to me. Might have to find an extra table at Ma’s though.”

“I can plan out a menu, make sure everyone brings something. Charlie can bring plates, for all our sakes.”

“Then Ethan can bring cups, cause god knows he doesn’t know what the fuck to do in a kitchen. And I can do the menu, you’ve got enough on your plate.”

“It’s not that bad this week,” she countered, but before she could say anything else he’d picked up her planner, looking at all the little color coordinated blocks that she’d drawn out. Grayson had never had a planner before, much less an hourly one, and it stressed him out a bit just to see how little time she didn’t have allotted to something. His finger moved over a little block in dark blue, a tiny scribble inside it - time with g :).

“You block out time for us to hang out?”

“I block out time to do just about everything but pee,” she laughed, keeping her eyes on her textbook as he continued to look through her pages.

“You haven’t peed in like… 3 hours. Drink your water.”

She stuck her tongue out but did as he asked, watching the way he found something on the page and frowned, eyebrows creasing across his forehead.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He answered it too quickly, and it was her turn to frown.

“Babe. What is it?”

“It just says, uh, ‘deposit from Kenneth’. Who’s Kenneth?”

Her breathing stopped for a moment. She hadn’t heard that name said aloud in years.

“Oh um. That’s my dad. Kenneth Cross.”

He switched from realization to guilt in an instant, flipping the planner shut. Grayson wasn’t privy to much information about Indiana’s father, but he didn’t need much to know that the relationship wasn’t great.

“Shit, Dee, sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

She closed her textbook, sitting it aside with a sigh. Sitting up, she crossed her legs on the couch, a bid to get a little closer to him.

“No, it’s okay. We probably should have talked about it by now anyways. What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you want to tell me.” He offered her his hand, knowing she liked to toy with her fingers when she talked, hoping it would help.

“Well. He wasn’t always a shit head. Actually, he used to be a pretty good dad. When Charlie and I were growing up, he was always there. He coached Charlie’s basketball team, then mine. He helped mom with dinner, we all went on vacation together. I mean, I had a good childhood, I really did. But things changed when mom got sick.”

“How long was she sick?”

“Six months. It took her fast, much faster than usual with her stage and her type. I thought my dad would step up, but he didn’t. He shut down. And I get that, it was hard, but we needed him and he just… wasn’t there. Charlie had to take her to appointments because I couldn’t drive yet. He stayed at home and worked, and drank, and then drank some more and called it work. He never talked about mom, never even admitted to himself she was sick I don’t think. So Charlie and I did our best, and we stayed with her as much as we could, especially towards the end. I’d ride the subway out of the city to get to school cause I slept at the hospital most nights. And I guess Charlie and I didn’t realize, but he was working on selling the house while we were doing all that, before she was even fucking gone. So, when she did go, all of a sudden she was gone, and my house was gone, and Charlie was going to school, so it was just me and him.

“We moved into a smaller house. He didn’t talk to me. He was a shell without my mom. And I thought it would get better but it didn’t. So, I taught myself how to be okay without him, and without my mom… without anyone. I think he realized it too, and some part of him felt bad. But he knew he couldn’t fix it. So, the summer before college, he said he’d pay for wherever I wanted to live for school. I couldn’t swing rent on a Jet’s salary, and I wanted to get out of his house, so I agreed. I moved in here freshman year, and we haven’t seen each other since. Haven’t even talked on the phone really. He deposits rent in my account each month, and as soon as I can get enough money to not have him do that, I’m going to tell him to stop. I don’t want him to think I need him, for anything.”

Indy looked up for the first time since her story started, and she sucked in a breath at the sight of Grayson’s watery eyes. He blinked it away and cleared his throat, but the way he opened his arms up told a different story.

“I don’t like hating him. But I don’t know how to forgive him either.”

“C’mere,” he mumbled, waiting for her to readjust and climb on top of him. His arms wrapped around her tightly, like he wanted to press her into him and make her a part of him.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that with your mom like that, I can’t imagine.”

Indy lifted her head and looked at him with sad eyes.

“Yes you can.”

The knot in his throat grew, and he kissed her head when she relaxed against him again. He let the silence settle for a few minutes, tracing a heart against her back and pressing his lips into her hair over and over.

“I had my mom though. She helped us through the entire thing. And I had Ethan, and Cam. And I know you had Charlie, but thinking about you having to do that without a parent.” He shook his head. “I hate it. Not to mention the rest of the bullshit he’s probably put you through that you’re too nice to tell me about.”

It was her turn to get teary.  

“Well, I’m okay now. I made it, and so did you.”

He ran a thumb over her cheek with a soft smile.

“Wish you didn’t have to make it through it at all.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

Grayson shifted then, rolled them over to the side so Indy was between him and the back of the couch, coiling his arms around her tightly, shifting her up enough for him to kiss her. He let his hand roam down her back, over her ass, grabbing and moving until her leg slotted above his.

“I love you,” he said, hoping she knew just how much. She moved her hand from his cheek, let her arm wrap around him, trapping him closer to her.

“Love you more.”

He shook his head at her, making her laugh against his skin.

“You don’t have a nap written in your schedule, am I gonna screw it all up?”

“I can shift things. I’m flexible.”

He laughed again, a beautiful sound that bounced off the walls of the apartment and filled the space. Indy kept her leg wrapped around him, holding him close and finding his lips with hers again, breathing him in - her favorite distraction.

“Flexible hm? How flexible?” His voice had dropped slightly, throat gruff.

She knew they weren’t going to sleep, so she gave in, dipping down to kiss along his neck, taking charge a bit more than usual.

“You know, I think we might be the only couple who can switch from parental trauma to horny within 60 seconds,” she mused, smiling at the rumbling laugh it got out of him.

“Maybe we’re just built different.”

“Hate that,” Indy mumbled, moving back up to kiss him again. He wasted no time in coaxing her shirt off, sitting them up with her in his lap so he could do the same to his own, getting her bra off quickly after his own sweatshirt was gone. There was no better feeling than her skin against his, he was sure. Her hand landed on the middle of his chest and she hummed, smiling.

“You didn’t shave your chest hair.”

He pulled back a bit with an incredulous look. He hadn't even thought about it, but she was right. “You noticed that?”

“I notice everything about you. You’re my favorite thing to study,” she smiled, and his heart melted in his chest. The only way he knew to respond was to pull her back to him. In a bed, he would have rolled them over, climbed above her, but the couch limited him and he was at her mercy for the time being.

She didn’t seem to be in much of a rush, and between the slow roll of her hips and the kisses she pressed along a path from his jaw to his collarbone, he was very much wishing she would pick up the pace. His hands slid down to her hips, pressing her down against him in a bid for friction.

“Easy,” Indy laughed his favorite laugh, the breathy one that seemed like an afterthought. “If I’m gonna rearrange my schedule, I get to set the pace.”

“Well then, take it away,” he chuckled, but it faded into more of a groan when she nipped at his shoulder, letting her hands run down his sides. She left goosebumps in the wake of her nails, and he couldn’t help but shudder as she toyed with the waistband of his sweats for a moment, like she was playing a game. Grayson Dolan wasn’t used to being at the whim of anyone, and it was liberating in a way that had his nerves buzzing.

Indiana was perhaps enjoying herself a bit too much. Usually, she was so overwhelmed by him that she didn’t have time to really take him in. So, she soaked up the opportunity of having him displayed out for her, tracing her fingers over every plane of him - the v of his hips, the muscles over his ribs. Down his arms, back up to his shoulders, running her thumbs over his scruff as she cupped his face. When she made it back down to his abs she felt them flex under her hands, his hips bucking up just barely against hers.

“Baby.” His tone was stern, and she played into a bit, looking at him as innocently as she could.

“Hmmm?”

“You’re teasing.”

“I’m admiring.”

“Okay, then you’re cheesy and you’re teasing.”

“Guilty as charged,” she murmured, shrugging a bit.

Bad move.

His arms wrapped around her tightly, ensuring he didn’t lose his grip as he planted a foot on the floor and rose up just enough to roll them, getting her underneath him on the couch. It happened so fast that all she could do was gasp, eyes wide as she stared up at him, the blues bright with shock.

“Now, where were we.”

His cockiness was back in full swing, but he paused at the pout that came over Indy’s face.

“What?”

“I kinda liked being up there,” she said, running her hands along his arms as he held himself up above her.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna switch again?”

“Kinda.”

“Okay, I’ll make you a deal. Pants off, then we switch.”

“Deal.”

He stood up first, taking her hand and pulling her up to her feet. They shimmied out of the pants and underwear quickly, leaving them in a pile on the rug in a rush to get back to each other. The mood shifted yet again when he guided her onto his lap as he sat down, lighthearted and fun as she got herself settled. Grayson had never had lighthearted sex before he met Indiana Cross. It was always scratching an itch, even when it was with people he was in a relationship with. She seemed to unlock another side of him, one that made it so much more fun to have her above him, struggling to keep her hair out of her face and get close enough to him at the same time. He wasn’t sure how she managed to be adorable and sexy at the same time, but when she finally got herself lined up and began to sink down onto him, he didn’t have the brain power left to care.

“Shit Dee,” he groaned, using every bit of self control he had to keep his hips still, letting her set her agonizingly slow pace.

She whimpered with every inch that she moved down, finally taking all of him somehow, arching her back for a moment before she caved, leaning forward onto his chest, burying her face in his neck.

He started as slow as his body would let him, groaning as she started to grind her hips, searching out an angle that kept the pressure building. It took a moment, like it always did when they tried a new position, but when she found it Grayson knew by the way her nails dug into his shoulders. He grabbed her hips to hold her there, memorizing the way their bodies fit together so he could get right back to that same spot over and over again.

“Gray,” she whimpered into his ear, bracing her forearms on his shoulders as he chased her high for her, determined to have her shaking. All she could do was moan and hold on as he thrusted into her faster with a renewed purpose, only stopping when she clenched so hard that he could barely move.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Indy whined, every muscle in her body tightening down in defense of how overwhelmed she suddenly felt, breath catching in her throat as her orgasm ripped through her. His arms coiled around her back as if he was trying to hold her together as she shook, and he chased the last of his high, lifting her off of him at the last possible second before he came, white streaks landing on his torso. He knew it would be a mess and he didn’t care - he pressed her back to him, wrapping her up for a moment in his arms and letting the two of them come down.

“Woah. Good woah,” Indy mumbled, pressing kisses to his neck where she could reach.

“I second your good woah.”

“Good.”

“Do you have time in your flexible schedule for a shower? I got you all sticky.”

She sat up and pretended to ponder it for a moment, making a show of quirking her eyebrow just to make him laugh. “I suppose I could pencil it in. C’mon.”

She climbed off him and took his hand, leading him to her bathroom with a smile. They paused in front of the mirror for a moment, and it was the first time in a long time that Indy felt happy to be looking in one. But still, she turned around and looked up at her boyfriend - he looked better in real life than in his reflection anyways.

“You know, if you play your cards right, you might just win yourself a round two.”

That was all it took for him to pick her up so fast she squealed, carrying her behind the privacy of the shower curtain for a second taste.

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

Bekah’s hands were always cold, but they felt like ice cubes in Indy’s hands. She rubbed along her skin in a bid to warm her up, eyes wandering over to Grayson.

“She’s pale,” he murmured, keeping his distance as he stood at the end of the bed. The sight of her so still in her hospital bed was unsettling. He had expected their first visit back to be filled with smiles, and ‘I miss you’s’, stories of California and her recovery.

Instead, they’d walked into Bekah’s room to find her fast asleep underneath her Halloween blanket, brows furrowed in what he hoped was concern and not pain.

“Her body is probably just trying to get used to the new cells. Not making enough blood, she’s probably up for another transfusion soon.”

“How do you know?”

Indy nodded towards what Grayson had assumed was an IV pole - he supposed it was, but instead of the usual bags of clear or milky liquid, there were just empty hooks.

“An hour.”

Bekah’s voice was dry and horse, and although it was quiet, it made both of them jump.

“Hey! How’re you feeling?” Indy immediately perked up, painting that smile across her face that Grayson had started to associate with everything hospital, from the sounds to the smell of bleach.

“Tired. My next transfusion is in an hour.”

“Did the doctor say anything about your counts?”

Bekah looked at her and rolled her eyes, wincing as she tried to sit up in bed. Indy reached to help her but she held a hand up.

“I have a transfusion in an hour, you tell me what my counts are,” she muttered, sitting up for a moment before she let out a sigh and put her face in her hands.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay Beks,” Grayson said.

“No, it’s not. You all came to see me and I’m being an asshole.”

“No one is nice when they don’t feel good,” Gray offered, moving to the other side of the bed and resting a hand on her shoulder. It was a simple gesture, a small attempt at consoling, but it was too much for Bekah. The sniffles turned into broken sobs that shook her entire body so hard it looked like she would come apart.

“I’m just tired of this. I’m tired.”

There wasn’t an adequate response to give, so the room filled with silence apart from her sobs as they did their best to hold her together, wrapping their arms around her, around each other. Indy’s eyes were red by the time Bekah’s cries quieted, and Grayson scrambled to come up with something, anything, to lighten the mood.

“Well, if we have an hour, that means we have time for an episode of something. Didn’t you say you were watching Vampire Diaries while we were gone?”

Bekah nodded, laying back against the pillows.

“Then let’s watch one and just chill. Save your energy.”

He set it up quickly, turning off the lights and pulling his chair over to the side of her bed as it started to play. When he looked over, there was just enough light to see that Bekah had reached for Indy’s hand. And to his surprise, she reached for his too. He took it, trying to ignore the way his throat tightened at the feeling of her squeezing weakly - a silent thank you as the episode began to play.

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

The first two weeks of November passed with unrelenting speed. Indiana buried herself in her school work, carving out what she could for quality time for Grayson, even if it was just going out to Jersey with him for a movie night that ended with her asleep on his lap before the opening scene was done. He didn’t mind - he just liked having her around, watching her get closer with Ethan and his mom, knowing she was safe because she was there with him. It was hard to help someone who was so determined on being independent, but he did what he could and she did the same, spending what little time she had encouraging him and supporting him.

Grayson had his own work to focus on, and it filled the time nicely as they worked to get their brands up and running through the holidays, plus the task of finalizing the plans for the details of the tiny homes. Somehow, it was already the week of Thanksgiving before he stopped to take a breath, which he found in the backyard with his brother the day before the holiday.

“Listen. I can make rolls. I can’t fuck that up.”

“Ethan, you could fuck anything up, including rolls. Just get cups. And things to put in the cups.”

“Fuck you,” Ethan grumbled, tossing the football a bit harder than necessary across the back lot. Grayson wished he’d put on gloves, but

“When is evil coming in?”

“She lands tonight, gotta go pick her up at 10:30. Is Indy staying out here tonight too?”

“No, I’m staying at her place, her sister and her boyfriend fly in tomorrow morning so we gotta pick them up. You’re picking up Cam tonight too right?”

“Yeah. Damn, I feel like dad,” Ethan laughed, a puff of white in the cold air.

Grayson waited for him to elaborate, throwing the ball back.

“He was always the chauffeur. I mean jesus, how many times do you think he picked us up from the airport when we came home?”

“True, he fucking hated that drive too. Complained about it the whole time, every time.”

“Like you don’t hate driving into the city.”

Grayson quirked an eyebrow at him, tossing the ball a bit harder, trying to put a different spin on it.

“Okay, fine, used to hate it. Now you just like it cause you get laid at the end of it.”

“True,” Gray grinned. “That makes me sound like a douchebag though.”

“You are a douchebag.”

“We’re identical twins, so if I’m a douchebag you’re a douchebag by association,” Grayson said.

“True. You aren’t a douchebag when you’re around Indiana, I’ll give you that.”

“Yeah, she wouldn’t put up with that shit.”

“You are a simp though.”

“Says you.”

“I never said I wasn’t.” Ethan shrugged, offering up a smile as he threw. “Eden really likes her by the way. Says they’d be great sister-in-laws in the future. I told her to chill with that shit though.”

Grayson missed the ball, not even bothering to watch it bounce away on the ground.

“Why?”

“Well, you said you were never going to ask her to leave, or move or whatever. And you live in LA, we live in LA, so... I mean, being here this long is just because of the tiny houses. And I know you, you can’t do long distance bro, you’re too physical.”

“Oh fuck you, I can survive without getting my dick wet if it means being with somebody I love.”

“That’s not what I fucking meant, I mean you’re touchy, and you need to be close to the people you love. Like physically close, as in in the same room, in the same house at least. That’s why I haven’t said shit about you being at her place every night of the week. I get it Gray, it’s how you are. But that shit won’t work when you’re on the other side of the country, and I know you aren’t going to ask her to fly out there to see you after how bad those flights were for her. And I love you, and I’m gonna support you, but you can’t fly home every weekend either. We have businesses, we have shit to do. Work.”

“I know that, I’m not stupid.”

“And it makes me feel like a shit brother but you always tell me that I’m supposed to keep you on track, so if that means being the bad guy then that means being the bad guy.”

“E I know.”

“I’m not saying you have to like break up with her or anything but, I just, I think it’s gonna be hard. Like really really hard.”

“Ethan. I know.”

“I just don’t want to see you hurt, that’s all.”

“Yeah. I get it. But can you just drop it for two fucking seconds? It’s almost Thanksgiving, let’s just focus on that. Besides, you’re the one who said to wait to cross the bridge when we come to it,” Grayson huffed.

“It’s the last week of November almost. Hate to break it to you, but the bridge is right in front of you.”

The thought made his stomach drop.

“Let’s go inside. S’cold.”

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

It felt unnatural to have her sister in the back seat, but that’s where Charlie climbed in after Grayson had helped them load their minimal luggage into the back of the car and made his introductions. They’d borrowed Lisa’s SUV for Devin’s sake, knowing that his long legs would be cramped in the backseat of anything, especially the truck.

“How was your flight?” Indy turned almost fully in her seat, trying to soak in every minute she had with her sister - they had to fly out bright and early the next morning.

“Bumpy,” Charlie laughed, picking at her nails in her lap. Indy frowned when she noticed - it was her nervous tick.

“Devin I have no idea how you fit in coach bro, I barely fit and I’m tiny compared to you,” Grayson chimed in, checking over his shoulder as he pulled out of the pick up lane.

“It’s a struggle my man, it’s a struggle. But I don’t think anyone in their right mind would look at you and call you tiny. You’ve got me beat in every department but leg length.”

“Hey, if you’re actually serious about growing muscle I can throw together a workout for you while you’re here.”

“For real? That would be sick bro, I could really use the help.”

Indy held back her laugh at how they both slipped into bro mode so quickly, and Charlie seemed to be on the same page as she snickered. Eventually conversation gave way to music, Indy proud of herself for finding a perfect 2000’s throwback playlist that had everyone singing and bouncing around in their seats. By the time they made it to the house, they were all a bit breathless and full of nostalgia.

When they climbed out onto the gravel, Charlie stuck close to her sister.

“Lisa is mom. And Ethan is the twin, Eden is the sister, Cameron is the girlfriend?”

“Cameron is sister, Eden is girlfriend,” Indy laughed. “Thank god you asked.”

Charlie gave a bit of a chuckle, and Indy nudged her.

“They’re good people Char. Don’t worry, they’ll love you.”

“I just… haven’t done this in a while.”

She wrapped her arm around her older sister’s shoulders as they approached the house, squeezing her lightly.

“I know sis. I know.”

Inside, Eden was trying to be subtle as she peeked through the blinds on the windows, watching the whole crew approach.

“They’re here! Come to the door, they’re here!”

“Babe, that’s creepy. Just come sit down,” Ethan laughed, waiting for Cameron to make her next move in chess.

“It’s not creepy, it’s friendly,” she countered, but she stood back from the door at the last moment to try to make it less intimidating.

“Hey guys!” Grayson’s voice boomed loud through the house as soon as he opened the door, his excitement obvious. Cam and Ethan abandoned their chess game for a moment, and Lisa came from the kitchen with a warm smile.

Indiana officially met Cameron for the first time, happy that she went in for the hug. Lisa hugged everyone, making everyone laugh when she looked up at Devin and said “my god you’re tall.”

Once everyone had met everyone, Lisa clapped her hands.

“Alright, let’s get to work!”

The Dolan’s did things in stations it seemed, which pleased Indy’s organizational side that usually went a bit crazy around the holidays. Lisa was nice enough to assign each couple a dish to work on, which of course became a competition, like everything seemed to. Indy wasn’t sure how they were going to truly compare E squared’s vegan stuffing to Charlie and Devin’s vegan mac and cheese, but she didn’t care.

Because Grayson was beaming beside her as they worked on peeling potatoes over the trash can, and everywhere she looked she saw smiles. Devin was swaying his hips to the music while Charlie tried to copy him, just a blip behind the beat. Ethan and Eden raced to see who could chop vegetables quicker until Lisa told them to slow down so someone didn’t end up needing stitches.

LIsa was the master of the operation, working on three different things at once, waving off Indy’s offer of help.

“I used to feed all three of them and their dad. Cooking for an army is second nature,” she teased, but that familiar tone was in her voice that tugged at Indy’s heart. Ethan eventually connected to the speakers and shuffled a playlist filled with everything, from Elton John to Cudi. Grayson got vegan butter on his shirt at one point while dancing too hard, and when Indy laughed he swiped it off with a finger and smeared it on her nose. The kitchen got so hot they cracked a window, with the revolving door of the oven trying to handle all the dishes and all the bodies close together.

By 2pm, everyone took turns carrying everything into the dining room to the massive which Cameron had decorated. Everyone took their places at the table, with LIsa at the head, Grayson and Ethan beside her with the girls beside them, and Charlie beside Indy, Devin beside Eden, who had seemed to hit it off with him in their short few hours of knowing each other, and Cam at the other head.

“Before we start, I think we should all go around and share something that we’re thankful for,” Lisa proposed. “I’ll start. I’m very thankful for my health, and for my family. For my wonderful daughter, and my amazing boys, and my husband, who I love and who watches over us every day.”

She could only speak for herself, but it was a safe bet that everyone’s throats tightened. Ethan cleared his before he spoke.

“I’m thankful for my family, for the quality time we get to spend together. For my brother’s ability to deal with my ass and his help in chasing our dreams and making that shit happen. And for Eden, because… well just because.”

Eden laid her head against his shoulder for a moment before she spoke up.

“I’m thankful for my dream job, and getting to do something I love every day. I’m thankful for Ethan, for loving me and keeping me sane. And I’m thankful for all of you, especially you Lisa, for welcoming me into the family.”

“I’m thankful to be here, to meet new people and get to eat some awesome food. Thank you, for inviting us in and sharing your holiday with us,” Devin said, polite as ever.

“I’m thankful for the wine,” Cam grinned, sipping from her glass quickly just to get an eye roll out of her mom. “And for all of you, and good food, and for family. Charlie?”

Charlie threw Indy a nervous glance before she spoke.

“I’m thankful for my sister, and my boyfriend, who always keep me together and on track, and who make me laugh. And I’m thankful for new friends, and good food.”

Indy had been so intent on listening to everyone else that she hadn’t even thought of her own response.

“I’m thankful for my sister, and for all of you guys, who have been so kind to me. I’m thankful for this guy,” she bumped Grayson’s shoulder. “For loving me, and supporting me in everything I do. And, I’m thankful for the years I had with my mom. I wish she could be here today, but I know she’s up there watching, and she’s thankful that I have you guys.”

She ignored the way her eyes stung, turning to Grayson, who squeezed her thigh under the table.

“I’m thankful for my family, and for the way that dad guided us to be who we are today - all of us Dolan’s. And I’m thankful for Indy for showing me what strength and determination looks like. And for everyone here, because we’re all family. I love you guys.”

The weight of his words hung in the air for a moment as everyone soaked them in.

“Alright, dig in!” Lisa broke the silence, reaching for the rolls.

Grayson squeezed Indy’s thigh once, tracing a little heart with his index finger when she leaned over to kiss his cheek before turning back to the table. They all ate until their plates were clear, almost all of them heading back in for seconds. The final verdict was that the vegan mac and cheese was the winner of the side dish competition, much to the pride of Devin. The evening settled into various activities, from Grayson teaching Devin proper pull up form to Charlie letting Eden take test shots on her camera. Indy mostly watched from the sidelines, happy to see all the people she loved all together in one place.

Her family.

“Thank you for this.” Lisa’s voice startled her a bit, but she relaxed when the older woman moved to stand beside her.

“I should be thanking you!”

“No. We didn’t do Thanksgiving last year. Everything was still too… raw, I suppose. Everyone is here because you asked them to be. So, thank you, truly.”

The tears that Indy had been fighting all day finally found their place on her cheeks, and she sniffled through a laugh when Lisa hugged her.

“Well, thanks for sharing your family.”

“It’s not sharing if you’re a part of it my dear.”

She pulled her close for a hug before the two of them folded themselves into the mix, running around in the cold air of the backyard and enjoying each other’s company as the night drew to a close. They opted for pie and vegan ice cream to finish off the night, and Charlie insisted they take some pictures before the food comas took over. She’d thought ahead enough to bring a tripod, and she sat it up in the living room, making sure every couple got a few that they liked, and that they all got one together. Lisa requested one of just her kids where they of course all goofed off enough to annoy her. Charlie would send them all in the next few days, Indy’s favorite being the one of her on Grayson’s back, wrapped around to kiss his cheek while he grinned with his eyes squeezed shut. It became her lock screen as soon as she saved it, and Lisa went on to get the family one framed, as well as the one of all of them together too, both beside each other on the mantel held with equal importance.

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

The Thanksgiving leftovers only lasted two days in Indy’s fridge. With the stress of preparing for four cumulative finals, she didn’t have time to cook anything, and the microwaveable vegan leftovers were a god send. So was Grayson, who stayed by her side each day as she studied, quietly keeping himself busy with work until she needed him. It was a nice co-existence, both of them understanding the need for quiet but enjoying each other’s presence nonetheless. By Wednesday, she was only left with one last final, though it was her hardest, and she couldn’t convince herself that she’d prepared enough despite pulling multiple all nighters. He quizzed her when she asked, even though he butchered half the pronunciations. His commentary was the comedic relief she needed to get through it though, and she was more than grateful that he was there.

“Last set, and then you need to take a break.”

“But-”

“No buts. Unless you’re talking gluteus maximus.” He grinned when she rolled her eyes. “Baby you’ve been going non stop for 4 hours now.”

“Okay fine, hit me with it.”

“Soleus.” She pointed to the side of his calf. “Extensor carpi ulnaris.” The outer side of his forearm. “Zygomaticus major.” His cheek. “Iliopsoas.” The inside of his thigh.

“Dee, you know these. You literally don’t even have to think about it, you know them.”

She shook her head before he even finished his sentence. “I need more practice.”

“The only thing you need more of is sleep,” he countered. “C’mon, we’re both exhausted, let’s just take a nap.”

“Once we finish the set, then we can.”

“Fine. Serratus anterior.”

She tickled his ribs, making him squirm away from her.

“Biceps femoris.” She heaved his leg up from where it was resting on the couch, pointing to a spot in the middle of the back of his thigh.

“Teres major.” It was a reach, but she made it around to the back of his armpit.

“Teres minor.” She poked the same spot, just a bit harder.

“Okay, ouch, don’t abuse my teres. Uh, gastrocnemius.” She was gentler on his calf.

They went through the rest of the stack like that, with Grayson doing his best to say them correctly while Indy poked and prodded.  

As soon as he flipped the last card he yawned, sitting the stack aside and leaning forward to grab her, dragging her on top of him and nuzzling his nose into her hair. Indy sighed and relaxed into him, his warmth and the weight of his arms settling her body down. She could remember the days where she’d always wanted something as simple as this, just laying on her couch with someone to hold, and she tried to soak it in.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you more,” Grayson countered, pressing a kiss to her forehead. His hands moved under her shirt over her back, finding space.

R-E-L-A-X

“Can’t. My mind won’t stop.”

“Well, I’d offer to sing to you or some shit, but your ears would probably bleed,” he chuckled.

“S’okay. I’ll just dream about muscles or something. Innervations.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“Oh yeah, riveting stuff.”

She wiggled around to get comfortable, her cheek squished against his chest as he rubbed her back.

“Sleep, have your little anatomy dreams,” he teased, reaching over the back of the couch for a blanket to drape over the two of them.

It took a little while, but she managed to drift off to the soothing sound of his heartbeat and the feeling of his fingers against her skin.

And she dreamed.

Indiana was in a hallway. White, smooth walls with doorways that stood black and brooding on either side. Her stomach turned a bit, unease washing through her veins as she took a few small steps forward, moving to peek past one of the frames.

“Don’t sweetheart.”

Her head shot up. At the end of the hall was Nicole. She looked young, even younger than Indy’s last memories of her. Youthful, and full of life, her blonde hair familiar as it hung down and framed her face.

“Mom.”

“Hi my love.”

Indiana ran. She barreled past the doors, not even giving them a second thought as she finally, finally landed in her mother’s arms. The tears were inevitable, but she didn’t care that she shook as Nicole held her, the way only a mom could. Held her body, but held her soul.

“Where have you been? Where’d you go?”

“I’ve been here the whole time. Right here with you.”

“I miss you. I miss you so much.”

“I know. But I’m here.”

She pulled back, letting her mom brush her hair behind her ear the way she always used to when it fell into her eyes.

“Look at you. You’re all grown up. Look at those beautiful eyes. So blue.”

“Just like yours,” Indy said.

“Just like mine.”

A part of her knew that she was dreaming. She knew her mother was gone, that this wasn’t real. But her heart refused to accept it, because she could feel her mother’s skin, hear her voice, feel her like she hadn’t been able to in so long. So she just stared. Tried to memorize every part of her face, every smile line, every freckle. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, but Nicole was the one to break the silence.

“Baby. I need you to be careful.”

Indy frowned. “Careful?”

“With your heart. I need you to be careful with your heart, with my heart.”

“Momma what do you mean?”

Nicole looked to the left. Indy followed her gaze, surprised to see that the light was on in the doorway.

The doorway to Bekah’s room.

“Beks,” she breathed. Her feet automatically moved, taking her into the room until Nicole’s arms wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her back.

“Indiana,” Nicole cautioned. “No.”

“No, no Mom it’s okay, she’s getting better, see? Look, she’s fine.”

She pushed forward, but Nicole’s grip only tightened.

“No baby. Look.”

Indy listened. And she watched. Watched Bekah try to sit up in her bed. She was probably calling for Jessica, or Emily, or maybe even Indy. Her mouth opened, and no sound came out, her eyes going wide for a moment before she fell back against the pillows, chest rising too fast, too shallow. Indy knew what that meant.

“No. NO! Beks! Bekah!”

“Shhhhh baby, there’s nothing you can do, Indiana stop, there’s nothing you can do.”

“BEKAH!” She cried anyways, fighting her mother’s grip as she watched the monitors light up, heard their mocking monotone calls as they alarmed. Nurses appeared, and Indy watched them do all the right things, give all the right medicine.

She didn’t wake up.

“No, no no no no,” Indy wailed, thrashing in her mother’s arms.

“Indiana. Indiana. Dee!”

She was back in her living room, and Grayson was scared.

“Wha-” she looked around, bewildered. She was sitting up, which disoriented her a bit, though she was with it enough to realize she was still in Grayson’s lap.

“Hey, you’re okay, you’re safe,” Grayson said, eyes still wide. He pushed her hair back out of her face as she looked down, only then realizing that she’d balled up his shirt in her hands. She let go, looking at the disheveled fabric, which was also splotched with dark spots.

“I’m- sorry, I don’t… I uh… I had a nightmare. Sorry.”

“It’s okay baby,” Grayson murmured. “You okay?”

Those two words brought on a whole other wave of tears, and she crumpled into him, shaking her head as she cried.

It took him by surprise for a moment - he knew she didn’t like to cry, and he’d never really seen her so upset. So he took a moment to process, and then he lifted her arms up over his shoulders, coiling his own around her and squeezing her to him as tight as he could without crushing her. He didn’t speak. He just held her, let her get it out of her system, whatever it was.

When her sobs turned to sniffles and his shirt was fully soaked through on the shoulder, he spoke up.

“What do you need? What can I do?”

She pulled back from him, frame seeming even smaller somehow as she sat there.

“Can you go check on Bekah? I know it’s Wednesday, and I know we’re going to tomorrow but… you don’t have to, I just, I know she’s alone up there, but I have so much work to do, and-”

“I can go. I’ll go,” he said. The pieces fell together in his brain, and he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“Thank you,” she exhaled, shoulders slumping back down.

“Are you gonna be okay here by yourself while I’m gone?”

“Yeah, I need to study anyways, I’ll keep myself busy. Just need to know she’s okay.”

“Okay. I’ll make sure she’s good, might hang out for a bit and watch something if she’s up for it.”

“That sounds amazing. Thank you.”

He didn’t like the idea of leaving her there, but he could tell she wouldn’t have any peace of mind until she knew that Bekah was okay. It reminded him off all the times he’d called his mother in the middle of the night in those last few months before he’d officially come home, just to make sure his dad was still there.

“If you need me, call me okay? I’ll turn back around.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. I love you,” she said, kissing him quickly.

“I love you more.”

He shifted her off him onto the couch and got up, putting his shoes and coat on quickly before he could convince himself to stay. It was already dark outside despite it only being 6pm, and he kept his head down on the streets on his way to the hospital, mind racing until he got up to the unit and signed in.

He half expected Bekah to be lying still in her bed, on her back with all her machines on. Or, at least for her to be drained and tired like she had been the last few times they saw her. But when he cleared the doorway she was sitting up in bed on her phone, random Tik Tok audio’s playing. She looked up at him and smiled her brightest smile.

“Earrings! It’s a Wednesday, the fuck are you doing here?!”

He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“You get an extra dose of me this week, deal with it,” he teased, unzipping his coat and laying it over one of the chairs.

“Where’s Indy?”

“Studying for finals. It’s a me you date tonight, you pick. What’re we doing?”

“Well, I restarted Vampire Diaries.”

“Restarted? Bro, you were on season 7 yesterday!”

“Yeah so? The best seasons are the first two, we’ve been over this.”

“Whatever, scootch over.”

She did as he asked, though he had to put the bedrails down to even fit halfway on the mattress.

“Here, get in here so we can send some motivation to Dee,” he said, pulling out his phone and opening snapchat. They moved so just their noses-up were on screen, making Bekah laugh as he sent it off.

She screenshotted it and sent back a heart, which put his mind at ease enough to relax and attempt to enjoy an episode, though he wasn’t really following the plot considering they were almost halfway through the first season.

“So, what’s happening exactly?” He finally asked 20 minutes into the episode.

“Stefan is trying to be all ‘you deserve better than me’, and Damon just doesn’t give a shit. Essentially, Stefan doesn’t want to hurt Elena so he wants her to make the decision to break it off so he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t want to be the bad guy.”

“But if he loves her, then why does he want to break it off at all?”

“Well cause he’s bad for her. She would have to give up so much for him. She’s having to lie to her friends, hide all this stuff for him. Change her whole life really. But she wants to, because she loves him, he just doesn’t think it’s fair to ask that of her. But like… he’s still asking her to do it just by being with her, you know?”

He knew.

“I mean, and he’s a fucking vampire. Yah know, suck suck and all that jazz,” Bekah laughed. “If the rest isn’t a deal breaker, then that definitely is. I mean, yeah, Damon’s a vampire too but at least he just accepts it, and he doesn’t ask her to change or anything.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m Team Damon, if you couldn’t tell,” she tried again.

“Yeah. Me too.”

Grayson tried to shake himself out of his thoughts, but it was proving difficult. Luckily, Bekah just mistook it as him being super invested in the show, which made her happy. Jessica let him stay an extra fifteen minutes, and he took a quick video of Bekah wishing Indy luck on her last final before he left and headed out.

The walk home was worse. It was darker somehow, colder as his mind raced with realization after realization. He did his best to do the math in his head. It was December 3rd, which meant 30 days until he was supposed to go back to LA. All the way to the other side of the country, only coming back to Jersey every few months if he was able to. Ethan’s voice rang in his head as he trudged through the lobby and into the elevator.

That shit won’t work when you’re on the other side of the country.

He tried to breathe it off, put on a positive face before he opened Indy’s apartment door, smiling when he saw her on the couch, pencil tucked behind her ear as she looked over diagrams.

“Hi! How was it?”

“It was good, she’s good. Looks great actually.”

His phone buzzed in his pocket once, then again, and he pulled it out to check it.

A notification of a payment from the joint bank account, and then a text from E.

Booked the flights for the 2nd. Hope that’s cool.

“Everything okay?” Indy asked.

He put his phone back in his pocket and smiled.

“Yeah. Everything is fine.”

[ramblinganthropologist]

Writober 2020 - 30 (Dream)

Summary: The cast of Blight is about to get a very important visitor. What will Cherche have to tell them from beyond the grave? Well... a lot, basically. Like make sure she’s bi this time, guys.

---

“Hey. Are you awake or what?”

No, his fucking alarm wasn't due to go off until 5:30...

Eli woke, not because he wanted to, but because the sudden weight on his lower body made him sit up in bed. He glanced around his room, frowning. It looked... normal. His cat was sleeping, nobody was there. Yet he was pretty sure...

Nah.

“Fuck, maybe I need to go to the bathroom...”

“Or maybe you need to listen.”

There was that voice again, only now there was a body to go with it. Well, body was a bit much. Sure, it looked like a body, but it was pretty much see-through and kind of blue tinged. He got the idea anyway, though. There was a strange elf in his bedroom, wearing armor, and looking rather pissed off at him.

A very pissed off elf with red hair and familiar tattoos in black...

“Just checking, you're not Shianni messing with me, right?” Doubtful, he was pretty sure she didn't know where he lived, much less be able to get into his apartment on her own. Besides, Shianni was probably in bed with her wife. The last thing she'd want to do was come bother him in the middle of the night in costume.

So... the alternative...

“Catch on, then?” Cherche Mahariel, in the spiritual flesh, was standing in his bedroom. She nudged a fallen plush toy with her foot, her hand passing through as she tried to pick it up. “I didn't see any kids, so this would be yours?”

Yeah... it went with all the other cute stuffed skeletons in the room. Eli might have talked a good game... but when he was at home, he had a theme going: cute and dead. Maybe that made his bedroom look a little too juvenile, but it wasn't like he was inviting people over. He was strictly a fuck at their place kind of guy.

“Guess this is why you haven't invited Jake over.” She shot him a look. “Besides the whole being a massive dick thing.”

Eli held up his hands, scowling. “The guy's a mess, if he can't handle my criticism-”

Cherche's ghostly finger passed through his chest, causing him to shiver. “It's not his fault you have a stick up your ass for not being cast as Zevran. Let it the fuck go already, they were looking for trans actors anyway.”

Apparently, ghosts got to sit in on casting calls. Who knew?

He scowled as he backed up. “I do not have a stick up my ass about that! He's just completely wrong for the role! His Antivan is atrocious at best, and we have zero chemistry!”

Of course, it was hard to have chemistry with anyone when they were stumbling over their lines and he was coated in fake mud. Miris Tabris wasn't exactly like his other roles, to say the least. The taciturn warrior was really stretching his ability to act, and that was saying something. Unlike his costar, he at least had the accent.

Other things... well, he couldn't help having a dick. It was there.

“Well maybe that's because he's fucking terrified of you. You keep snapping at him every step he makes.” Cherche scowled at him again. “Is  this how you treat everyone you have a crush on, or just the people who won't sleep with you?”

Eli felt his face heat up as he turned away. Now they were just getting ridiculous. Well, besides the whole arguing with a ghost thing. To actually imply he liked the Starkhaven stuntman turned actor was ludicrous. Ok, maybe in costume he wasn't so bad... but in an everyday situation, forget about it. He was like a dead fish.

A very muscular, incredibly flexible dead fish, mind you...

Nope, not going there.

“I do not like him.” His voice came out flat. “And if you haven't noticed, I do ok on the sex front.”

The elf rolled her eyes. “You haven't had anyone over in six months because the last one almost found out where your union dues actually go to. It can't seriously still be a big deal that you're a necromancer, can it?”

She didn't get an answer right away. Eli was too busy watching as the skeleton of a cat rose from a plush pet bed and came to rest at Cherche's feet. Then the bones of a squirrel zoomed onto his shoulder. At least Rocky had his back.

He patted the skeleton on the bony head. “It doesn't go with my image, ok?”

“Dorian Pavus seems to prove necromancers can be sexy.” Cherche's hand made contact with Mrs. Kitty, and the skeleton rubbed against her for more pets. “You're just afraid to let anyone actually know who you are. That's why you act like an asshole to everyone.”

Eli didn't have an argument to that. Instead, there was a dark feeling in the pit of his stomach that refused to go away, try as he might to ignore it. Even on his best days, it was always there, waiting for him to drop into it.

Of course he was... people thought he was a freak when they actually knew him. The sexy costar was a fine role to play instead.

Cherche shook her head as she watched him. “Stop being such a dick to Jake. Maybe talk with your coworkers a little bit more. I doubt they'd care you're a dorky necromancer.”

“I am not-”

She shot him a look. “How many skele-friends plushies surround your damn bed, Rodriguez? It looks like a toy store in there.”

Ouch, low blow...

Eli shook his head, frowning. He was starting to feel exhausted, like his body weighed a thousand pounds. The walls were starting to look a little thin too. Even though it had been a while since he had last used magic, he remembered enough. This was the Fade, and he was clearly dreaming this conversation.

Well, that or Cherche had come to personally kick his ass. That was a possibility.

“Just try to give a shit and see where it gets you.” She knocked him on the shoulder. “Or else I'm coming back.”

Then she pushed him back to his bed. “Now get back to sleep,  I got two other stops to make tonight and none of them involve you.”

Eli was left sitting on his fade bed, staring as she disappeared from view. In the morning, he would probably chalk this up as a strange dream brought on by reading the script. At least he would tell himself that as he settled back in.

Fucking Fade ghosts... acting like they knew everything.

…

No, it was just his imagination. Had to be.

---

“Rin-Rin, you getting up or what lethallin?”

Five more minutes...

Merin yawned as he rubbed his eyes. The time on his phone said he still had a few hours left to sleep, yet he was definitely awake. He would have considered rolling over and going back to bed, but there was a problem with that. See, he wasn't alone in bed – someone was sitting on the other side, keeping him from getting back to sleep.

Somebody in hunter armor with Sylaise vallaslin...

“You're not Shianni...” He blinked, the details foggy. “Why is Cherche Mahariel in my bedroom?”

She nodded, and maybe looked a little pleased. “You caught on faster than the last guy, thank the gods.”

Apparently, she was dream hopping too. Would wonders never cease?

Merin knew enough about dreams and the Fade to not worry too much. It wasn't like he was a mage anyway – its influence on him was minimal. Still, it wasn't every day he got to talk to source material, he might as well use it.

Besides, he had always been a Cherche fan.

“So... why come visit me? Am I not playing Cahel right?”

Cherche, thankfully, shook her head. “No, he's pretty pleased with your work. Besides, if he wasn't he'd be the one visiting. Even when dead, da'len is stubborn.”

Her eyes were laser focused on him. “No, this is about your love life. Are you going to get that or  what?”

His face turned a mix of red and purple as he blushed furiously. “Oh come on, you've got to be kidding me... that's why you're here?”

Talk about humiliating. Here he had thought they were going to actually have a talk about something important. Instead, it was turning into gossip hour at the cafeteria table. He was missing out on sleep for that?

Damn his inability to say no to an elder... especially a dead one as well known as Cherche.

Cherche adjusted her position in bed, stretching out her legs. She was taller than him – damn it all. “Well, yeah. You two keep dancing around each other and it's making me wonder if I've got a bad case of deja-vu.”

Merin's face only got redder as he turned away. “It's not that easy... he's the hottest guy in Orlais and I'm...”

A previously unknown actor who was currently playing the young Warden in his rise to power.  The most awkward son of a dick to come out of clan Lavellan since Kaaras Adaar himself. There were plenty of options, and none of them were particularly pleasant as he chewed them over, trying to pick the best one.

Cherche pushed him lightly on the head to make him stop thinking – her hand went through, as if she was tying to grab the thought. “You're worse than they were. Remi's clearly into you, you just don't see it.”

The wind was knocked from Merin's lungs as he sat there, numb. “This is a dream, so how can I believe that? My brain might just want to believe it...”

“Well, then it's clear you want him to want you. Might as well act on it and see where it gets you.” She shrugged. “Worst he could do is say no and then you have to pretend to have sex with him on the throne of Ferelden in a couple seasons.”

Gods, he was still hoping they weren't going to cover that part... it was hard enough covering up the tattoos on his face...

“That's easy for you to say, you're dead.” Merin sighed, running a hand over his hair as he did. “I just get so nervous when we're not talking about work. He's so... nice.”

His ghostly adopted ancestor nodded along. “Yes, he's nice. So if he doesn't feel that way, he'll let you down nicely. But he's totally into you, I've seen him checking you out in and out of costume. Ask him for coffee or something.”

Right... just ask the hottest guy in Orlais if he wanted to grab coffee some time. Like the fans wouldn't eat him alive.

“Rin-Rin, I don't hear confident thoughts coming out of you.”

And there was the nickname. Merin sighed again, feeling the heat from his cheeks slowly leak away. There was no way he was getting out of this without agreeing to her terms. So... he was setting himself up for disaster.

Maybe he could at least get experience for filming out of it.

“Alright, I'll... see if he's free when we're on set tomorrow.”

She gave him a little grin and patted him on the head. “There we go, you're much easier to work with then Eli.”

Then her hand went to the chain he wore around his neck. On it was an old ring, carved from halla antler. It had been passed down his family line for generations, going all the way back to his great-great something grandpa Kaaras. As oldest, he got first dibs.

As oldest, he also knew it came from the antler of the halla that had brought Cherche Mahariel to clan Sabrae as a child.

“This is Kaaras' wedding ring.” Her voice was soft. “Funny, you don't look like you have any qunari in you, Rin-Rin.”

This was where he smiled a little. “I don't have the horns, but I can wear vitaar without getting sick. Don't ask me how I found that one out, it's a long story.”

And then she chuckled softly as she let the ring fall back to his chest. “That's how I know they got the right guy for Cahel.”

She was starting to look less solid – maybe the dream was ending. “You better talk to him tomorrow, Rin-Rin, or I'm coming back.”

Merin was already settling back into bed, sleep starting to take him over. “I will... goodnight, Cherche. Pleasant travels wherever you're heading.”

Then she was gone, and he was left to his dreams. In the morning, he would have to psych himself up to speak to Remi about that coffee. No doubt it was going to come out terribly, but he didn't need the ghost of a Warden haunting him. So... do or die time.

Fuck... he so wasn't ready for this.

---

“Hey, we need to talk.”

Anyone interrupting her sleep was risking a knife in the gut.

Shianni cracked one eye open, glancing around the dark room. Next to her, Maria was still fast asleep. It hadn't been her voice anyway, the accent was all wrong. This one belonged to someone Dalish, but... nobody else was there.

Except the ghost standing at the foot of her bed. Maybe it came from her.

Cherche nodded to her. “So... this is weird.”

Yeah.” She nodded. “Got a final wish or something?”

The elf nodded as well – looks like she had the gestures down pat. Really, it was kind of eerie seeing her standing there. While it wasn't exact, they did look pretty damn similar. If not for her vallaslin being a different color, maybe they could've been twins.

Twins with a dead person – damn her dreams were weird.

Cherche was right down to business, as Shianni figured she would be. She crossed her arms over her chest, eyes burning. “Make sure they make me bisexual in this damn show.”

Shianni would have laughed if it wouldn't have risked waking up her wife. “Wait until Denerim, we're doing the Pearl.”

“Nice. Who'd they get for Isabela? She's gotta be hot as hell to make it work.”

This time, Shianni really did laugh. Luckily, it didn't wake up her hot as hell wife who was still fast asleep. Though, thinking about it, this was probably the Fade, so that most likely was just a projection of Maria sleeping next to her. The actual Maria was in he own dreams, unaware of what was going on over here.

Too bad, she would've enjoyed meeting Cherche.

“I'd introduce you to her, but she's sleeping.”

The elf at the foot of the bed looked Maria over, whistling. “Ok, they're doing a damn fine job of casting then. Lucky you, getting to have a scene with your wife.”

Yep, Shianni was still laughing at about that. Talk about luck.

“Well, you got it handled here.” She was already starting to fade. Looks like the mission was complete. “Keep an eye out on Rin-Rin tomorrow, he's going to be asking Remi out for coffee. I told Eli not to be a dick, but he probably won't listen.”

Shianni nodded as she settled back into bed, eyes heavy. “I'll handle him. Good on you for Rin-Rin, he needs to get that before somebody else does.”

“That's what I said.” Cherche nodded again, almost completely gone. “Good talking to you. Keep your aim steady.”

Good talk indeed – approval from the woman herself. Shianni was more than happy to settle in for some more sleep, plans already cooking in her head for tomorrow. She had coworkers to keep an eye out on, especially if Merin was making his move.

It was going to be busy on set for sure, and none of it was coming from the acting. Somebody was going to cause a storm on social media for sure...

[princessofgayskull]

dude, I think Thor just wing-manned you

A Catradora gym au for the She Ra Pride Exchange! @spop-pride-exchange​

Summary: Catra just wanted to work out. Catra just wanted to bet the crap out of a punching bag before she had to teach yoga. She wasn’t expecting to come into the gym she worked at only to be nagged by her boss and then be approached by a strange dude who “supposedly” looks like Thor. And she doesn’t want to go out with his lesbian sister.

aka, when the God of Thunder/Lesbians is around, lightning strikes twice.

word count: 7.5k

read on ao3: x

dedicated to (and there was a little bit of a mixup so I’m just gonna go for it): @sweetlykissedadora​ - a lovely mutual, and @sweetlykissed just in case ;)

sfw, but warning for cursing

story under the cut!

“Ugh, Leon, you call that hit?”

“You call that keeping the fucking bag still, Ramon?” Whipping the stray curls catching the sweat on her face back, Catra bounced on her heels and curled her fingers deeper into the cotton tape coating her palms before throwing another punch. Her fist met hardened and coarse material, pain exploding in her knuckles and riveting down her arm as she threw another one with the other arm, and another, and another. Breathing in, she savored the rush despite the soreness settling into her shoulders and let herself fall into a pattern.

“Damn Catra, I’ve never seen you this sloppy.” Lonnie laughed as the punching bag rattled underneath her gloved grip. “You need to call it quits after twenty minutes?”

“You know for a personal trainer, you fucking suck.” Catra’s knuckles collided with swaying material ( keep the dumb thing still, Lonnie) again with a whap!

“I didn’t say I was your personal trainer, Leon.” she chuckled.

Catra rolled her eyes and stepped away from the bag, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Her form may have been sloppy today- not that she was going to admit that- but Lonnie’s salty insults were so much sloppier. Hands falling to her knees, Catra took advantage of her lazy taunts to catch her breath. “Doesn’t mean you get to screw with me- or is that just something you do with all your clients?”

“Well my clients sure as hell aren’t as sloppy as you. You look like an old lady who just tried to go up a flight of stairs. You need your walker, Catra?”

“Fuck you Lonnie.” Catra panted as her arms wobbled and her grip on her knees tightened. Okay, maybe she would admit- when no one was looking or listening or could perceive her in any way- that she was new to this. Never before in her life had she cared whether or not she could throw a “proper” punch, not when it landed whatever pervert or bigot or combo of the two was stalking her in the hospital with a broken and bloodied nose.

Catra was fine with her preferred methods of expunging all her pent up anger: running until she vomited or dancing until she tore something. Course’ her professional boxing roommate and her room mate’s MMA fighter to be didn’t give a flying fuck about that and after two years of listening to Scorpia and Lonnie critique her “strength work” Catra doubled down and hit the punching bag, literally, before she hit one of them.

Scorpia had been the only person Catra trusted to instruct her with all this punching crap, cause despite being the assistant manager at the gym and a personal trainer, Catra trusted Lonnie just about as far she could throw her. Plus Scorpia was a gentle giant, praised for her soft yet constructive teaching style; after years as a gymnast, Catra was so fucking down with abusive critique and was ready to try the opposite.

When Catra walked into The Horde, their gym, forty five minutes ago to squeeze in a short lesson with Scorpia before her class that evening, she was met with Lonnie stacking branded water bottles at the front desk and the news that Scorpia had to rush back to their apartment because Entrapta set it on fire, or flooded it, or something . Honestly Catra zoned out after that to whack her head on the front desk and send Lonnie’s precious water bottle tower tumbling down.

Wrapping her hands with her teeth and fishing in her bag for her bluetooth headphones (cause fuck airpods) , Catra walked over anyway to the worn down Everlast in the sketchier part of the gym, hellbent on beating it for a while to Halsey’s new song. She’d done this with Scorpia enough times to know how to hit a dumb leather bag by herself. Except Lonnie didn’t think so, ‘cause apparently she decided she had nothing better to do than to abandon her shift at the desk and come nag the hell out of Catra.

“I don’t need your help.” Catra sneered as the sharp, familiar pain in her lungs began to subside, using her shoulder to shove the massive bag into Lonnie just to catch her off her guard and off her footing. Course she had to dodge. That no fun bitch.

“Yeah, it doesn’t look like that.” Lonnie crossed her arms and clicked her tongue. “You sure Scorpia’s teaching you right? ‘Cause I’m starting to think she’s being too soft on you-”

“You tell her that then. She’s your girlfriend, not mine, Ramon.” Muscles straining in protest, Catra pushed herself off her knees and brought her fists back up. Ugh, how much longer was Lonnie gonna make her do this? At this rate she was gonna kill her arms before her class, which meant she’d have to strangle Lonnie with her fucking feet. Afterall, it was just as easy as using her hands. Because Catra was flexible like that.

“Look, your problem isn’t your speed, your arc is too wide- here, let me show you,” Coming around to Catra’s side, Lonnie put her arms up in position and just barely whisked Catra’s nose- “WATCH IT!”- as she made a sizeable indent in the punching bag.

“Get it?”

Catra rolled her eyes. No she did not get it. The only thing she got was how dumb this shit was. Really, she had to know how to throw a punch? None of these doofuses could even touch their toes, but Catra had to know the right way to hit something so she wasn’t the embarrassment of the gym? What a fucking scam. “Yeah, it’s much clearer now. You’re such a good teacher. Scorpia is such a lucky woman.”

“Just hit the damn bag, Princess Sarcasm.”

Wham!

It was a good four or five minutes of Catra bouncing back and forth on her feet and driving her fist at leather she imagined to be the ugly ass face a certain former bitchy gymnastic coach before Lonnie gave up drilling holes into her form with bored eyes and chimed in with more cryptic advice. “Wow you suck at this. Were you watching my demonstration?”

“Ugh,” Catra threw her sore hands up. “yes, I watched your ‘demonstration.’ Don’t give me that look! It’s not like I’m Kyle, okay? Flinging my arms around like some incel spaz? No! And you- you suck at training! Seriously, is there no one else in this dumb building who can ‘help’ me?”

“Nah, Rogelio is re-cleaning locker rooms cause Kyle ‘cleaned’ them yesterday, so you’re stuck with me. I can go get the incel spaz himself if you want-”

“No!” Catra blurted out way too damn loud, turning the attention of everyone working out to her. Damn it. “You sic’ing Kyle on me is worse than having to do this for another thirty minutes.” Or an hour. Or two. Or forever.

“Yeah, you’d probably just end up hitting him.” Lonnie nodded, grinning at the prospect of watching their co-worker get the crap beat out of him via Catra. Grabbing her water bottle from where it lay on the floor, Catra nodded as she took an extremely lady like gulp, letting the water that didn’t find her mouth travel down her neck and into her cleavage, enjoying the cool feeling as she reminisced about giving Kyle a black eye. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time she’d almost ripped him in half; failure to properly mop (seriously, what kind of fuckboy couldn’t even mop right?) the studio she was for a Zumba class she was subbing in for led to her falling less than spectacularly on her ass in front of a classroom of judgemental rich white woman; Not that those women would ever dare look at her wrong again after that class, ‘cause they all got the pleasure of watching Catra drag Kyle into the studio by his ear and then twist his limbs in ways only hers were practiced to bend. Rogelio was pissed. He stared her down after the class dispersed, all with vouchers for a free guest. No words were needed between them. All he had to do was glare at her as long as it took to send uncomfortable chills of guilt down Catra’s spine straight to her stomach.

So, Catra swallowed her pride, grumbled as she got some ice from the employee break room, and handed it to Kyle with a tight lipped apology (she never got one, by the way, for the giant pile of water her left for her to dance straight into) and it had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the fact that Rogelio could use his leverage with Octavia to get her fired.

Thinking back to Rogelio’s massive overreaction to the last time she dared mess with Kyle, Catra blanched in the moment and full on choked on her water. “Please don’t tell Rogelio I called his boyfriend an incel spaz.” she said, coughing up water violently between words while Lonnie threw her head back and fuckinng cackled.

“As funny as that would be to watch, I need you working here ‘cause I don’t know anyone else who can teach chair yoga.” Lonnie leaned into the bag after her obnoxious as hell laughter finally died down.

Running her tongue over her teeth, Catra soaked in the vindication.  It wasn’t every day Lonnie could admit that Catra paid the bills at The Horde, ‘cause all anybody else could do was lift weights. Her skills were un-fucking-paralleled around here. “Speaking of chair yoga, how much fucking longer do I have punch this dumb bag ‘cause unlike you infelixable meatheads, I need every part of my body to teach-”

“Oh shit! There he is!” Lonnie didn’t just interrupt Catra’s super justified question, she did so by swinging the wholeass punching bag into Catra’s body.

“Fuck! What the hell Lonnie?”

Catra stumbled to get back on her feet as the bag creaked, swinging back and forth, but Lonnie didn’t give her the satisfaction of a response. She just kept staring off into the distance with eyes sparkling and her mouth slightly agape. Letting out a dramatic, yet still unheard sigh, Catra made a big display out waving her hand in front of Lonnie’s face and asking, “Uh, what are you staring at?”

“He’s back! That guy I was telling you about!” Lonnie snapped out of her stupor long enough to explain what the hell was going on. Catra followed her direct line of sight only to find herself staring at just another muscley guy lifting weights and breathing in that awful, inefficient way that made her want to puke her guts out. All these ‘My Body is a Temple idiots’ but they treat their lungs like shit? Ugh, gross. Shuddering at the sound of another heaved groaned, Catra turned away from the weight section as the clang! of the bar hitting metal hit her ears. God, this is why she had her headphones in all the fucking time in the land of Grunt Central Station.

Catra put on a bored stare (it wasn’t hard around these idiots.) “So?”

If Catra was being completely honest, when Lonnie talked she did everything in her power to drown her out, so she actually had no memory of talking about tall, blond, and average straining under his weights over on the opposite side of the gym. Lonnie just wanted to talk about gym stuff like schedules or memberships or how Catra was not supposed to be looking on the local shelter’s adoption site at cats.

Or she wanted to talk about Scorpia because that’s how people in relationships operated. But the Scorpia talk made Catra want to scream, vomit, and tear her god damn curls out all at once; as begrudgingly happy as she was forcing herself to be for her friend and co-worker, their dopey, sappy relationship was a walking, annoying reminder that no woman would ever love a BPD nightmare like Catra and that she was going to die angry and alone, like everybody said she would. Sue her for tuning her boss out and missing the story about this random and fascinating stranger who looked like everyone else in their gym. Seriously, minus the affront to God that was Kyle and the occasional twunks in her yoga classes, there was not a single man in this building that did not have the same basic, boring-ass physique.

“Don’t you think he looks like Thor?” Lonnie waved her hand toward the weights like she was imitating Kyle that one time he accidentally did coke.

Thor? What? What the fuck, how much of that dumb conversation did I miss?   “That depends, which one is Thor? God Lonnie, how many times to I have to tell you that I don’t give a fuck about the Avengers or the MCU or whatever it’s called!” Now that was a conversation Catra remembered, because they had had it a million times.

Lonnie and Scorpia were movie people; they loved to watch and marathon and discuss and dress up as characters. It was lucky they’d found each other, ‘cause Catra on the other hand, couldn’t care physically give a damn. She just couldn’t sit through them without almost dying of boredom. But since Lonnie and Scorpia started “going steady” as Scorpia so gag-inducingly put it, Lonnie would crash their apartment, kick Catra off the TV while criticizing her for watching only one thing ever (“I can’t help it if every TV show except Bob’s Burgers is moronic, okay?”) and put on some stupid movie.

If Catra could stomach it- the movie, the Scorpia and Lonnie, the Entrapta whispering notes in her phone like it was recorder, she would stay and watch, reveling in how her dumb comments pissed everyone else in the apartment off. Most of the time though she gave up before Scorpia finished burning popcorn in their microwave and went for a run/hang out with all the outdoor cats in their neighborhood. Lonnie and Scorpia, to gear up for that Endgame movie, had been streaming all twenty something gross Marvel movies for the past couple of weekends, so suffice to say Catra hadn’t spent a lot of time in her own freaking home. Catra couldn’t help it if she felt the need to be an asshole about the whole MCU thing; it was her TV and her living room too.  

“Thor is the one with the hammer. Blond hair, chiseled jaw, played by Chris Hemsworth? Jesus, Leon you been living under a rock?” Lonnie lifted a judgey eyebrow at her and Catra rolled her eyes so far back in her head they almost got stuck. Well I definitely haven’t been living in my own damn apartment with you around all the time!

“Don’t they all look like that and have some stupid weapon or something?” snorted Catra as she reveled in Lonnie’s frustrated expression. Served her right. Catra was talking to the same woman who called her a nerd for three weeks after she’d memorized all 84 asanas.

This time Lonnie got to have a grand eyeroll. “You watched Ragnarok with us! The third one?” Of what? “You said you liked actually liked it and weren’t just saying that to make Scorpia feel better.” When Catra just blinked at her, fully enjoying Lonnie’s frustration- that’s what you get for not letting me punch shit in peace- Lonnie threw her hands up. “It’s the Thor movie with Cate Blanchett. Remember? You wouldn’t shut up about how hot she was? God, that was annoying.”

“Oh please, it’s not like you weren’t right there agreeing with me or talking about how you wanted the girl with a sword to step on you.” Catra took another swig of her water.

“No, that was still you Catra.” Lonnie shot back, “You’re the one with that weird fantasy about women with swords.”

“They’re hot, Ramon! Fucking sue me!” Catra brushed the comment off as she threw her head back, her tied back curls bouncing off the damp skin of her neck, throwing her water bottle back down on the ground. At least Lonnie wasn’t still riding her ass about her form anymore (she could thank Thor over there for distracting the trainer) and Catra’s near dead arms could just hang limp at her sides. Ugh, tonight’s class was going to be a bitch.

“Tessa Thompson can get it, don’t get me wrong- uh! You got me off topic! Damn it, Thor got up. Where’d he go? Hey, what do you think he was benching?” Lonnie swung around the bag straight into Catra’s face trying to look around for where this mystery man might have gone off to. Probably the water fountain, duh. Or a shower. Lonnie wouldn’t follow him in there, would she? Nah, she’d just throw Rogelio in there while she made Catra clean all Thor’s gross smelly sweat off the equipment.

Catra scoffed and pushed Lonnie back. “Like I care what “Thor” was benching. And if you’re so interested in this guy, why don’t you just look him up in the system?”

“Ugh, I can’t do that! Octavia says it’s illegal or some shit.” Lonnie sighed, earning a bewildered what-the-fuck look from her co-worker. “Rogelio and I tried to look up this chick who looked like Brie Larson in the system. Octavia found out and said it’s some kind of violation of privacy, which I do not get cause this is a gym! There’s no privacy here! I literally watch people take off their shoes and socks on in the freaking lobby almost every day. Disgusting freaks.”

“Ugh, why would you bring that up?” Now Catra was really going to throw up now. Like projectile vomit, blow chunks straight onto Lonnie. That brings back memories of gymnastics.

“Damn it! I really wanted to get a picture with him and rub it in Kyle’s face that I met Chris Hemsworth! What, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference!” Lonnie protested when Catra sent her a smug look and snorted again.

“Whatever, Lonnie, he’ll probably be back tomorrow because he’s obviously a basic dudebro with nothing better to do than stare at his muscles the mirror all day, so you can probably just save your groveling until then.” Catra stuck her tongue out, leaning in to turn the mockery up to 11, before a dangerous thought flashed in her mind. One about how much Lonnie gushed over 80’s action figure’s muscles, something she did not normally do unless that muscled specimen was her girlfriend.  “Ramon, you better not be going behind Scorpia’s back with this Thor douchebag,” Catra flashed her abnormally sharp incisors at the fitness trainer, “‘cause if you do anything to hurt her, I will fucking dismantle you in your damn sleep! I swear to fucking God you will wake up burning in insense and gasoline and tied up in every fucking yoga mat I can find-”

“Jesus, Catra!” Lonnie shouted, straight up pushing Catra into the bag as she went deeper and deeper off the crazy, neverending deep end of hers. “I’m not cheating on Scorpia! I just wanted a picture with the God of Lesbians, that’s all! Well, a false god ‘cause I don’t really think that was Chris Hemsworth. Guess I’m just gonna have to wait for our Comic Con roadtrip up to San Diego.”

“Lonnie, could you do me the amazing favor of standing here and then staying absolutely fucking still so I can hit you, instead of this emotionless sack of leather?” Lonnie’s dumb story about their Comic Con trip- like Catra needed anymore reminding of that- shut up anymore dangerous thoughts about cheating or affairs or exercise equipment that was flammable. On a second, more rational thought, Catra doubted Lonnie would be the kind of person to cheat. Yeah, she annoyed the crap out of Catra, but she took Scorpia as she was, something not a lot of people even tried, not because she pitied her or had some nasty ulterior motive, but because she legitimately enjoyed spending time with her. And like Catra, Lonnie hated pretty much everybody else.

Catra doubted she’d ever find something like Lonnie and Scorpia had. Lightening only struck once, and this time it struck two people that weren’t her. Well deserving people, but still, it fucking sucked. Ugh, she was gonna die alone. Her hypothetical cats were all gonna fucking eat her.

“Ugh, Leon, you’re no fun! Why can’t you appreciate how cool it is that a fake Thor is coming to our gym?”

“Because that’s literally the lamest sentence I’ve ever fucking heard and I am a bartender who has to teach yoga because I still can’t make my damn rent!” No longer were any of these gym rats allowed to give her shit about that when they were stalking celebrity look-a-likes in their free time.

The next time Lonnie or Rogelio or Octavia or Kyle, if that vaping asshole had a deathwish, brought up how she’s actually a giant softie ‘cause she liked doing yoga- something Scorpia recommended she start in place of therapy (none of them could afford it) after she the epic mental breakdown of the century her senior year of college and set Coach Weaver’s car on fire, as well as a bunch of other shit- she was going to bend herself into a flawless handstand, ask them if they’d stalked Chris Evans yet, and walk away, backwards, on her hands sticking her tongue out.

“Pfft, it’s not lame.” scoffed Lonnie. “You just don’t know how to have fun. Is there a yoga pose that will get that stick out of your ass?”

“Why, so I can shove it up yours? Seriously, how the hell is watching random people exercise fun?” Catra practically screamed, running her nails down her face like she was trying to claw all her skin off.

Lonnie crossed her arms and planted her feet, 100% committed to her stupid crusade at this point. “It’s not a random guy! I’m talking the fake God of Lesbians! That’s basically your whole religion, Catra! Hey, maybe he can help you get a girlfriend since you’re always bitching about being alone and all.”

“What?” Catra squealed with as much indignation as possible. How dare Lonnie bring up the harrowing fact that she was single and refused to mingle ‘cause that was fucking gross and picky as hell and also a nightmare of a human being “I don’t need anything from the crusty ass, dick for brains, piece of-”

“Uh, Hello?”

Shit!

Whirling around straight into Lonnie at the sound of an unfamiliar masculine voice, Catra tried to keep the fuck together when she realized who had audacity to approach her while her back was turned. Are you fucking kidding me? Tall, blond, and basic had decided to make a surprise appearance just to scare the shit out of her, sweat drenched towel draped over his moist Nike shirt and airpods in hand.

Catra did her best not to visibly gag; whether it was the musky smell (why did she work at a gym again?) or his pit stains about to make her barf water and stomach acid at his feet was completely lost on her. Despite the kind-of-sort-of friendly smile on his face and his relaxed posture, all Catra could do was stare at his extended hand like it was the deepest offense in the world.

“Hey, you’re Catra, right?”

“Uh-”

“Yeah, this is Catra.” When Catra turned her head to look at Lonnie, she was met with a traitorous smirk and devious eyes that said this is what you get for talking shit about the fake God of Lesbians! How dare you besmirch our lord and savior!? For a split second, Catra wondered if Fake Thor might enjoy watching her murder her boss in cold blood.

“I’m Adam.” Fake Thor introduced himself and once again, pushed his hand forward. Ballsy, considering the daggers Catra was staring into his empty skull. Oh, she could take this ‘Adam’ down in three fucking seconds; less, if he did what Catra thought he was about to do. Okay, what’s it going to be, Mr. Bimbo? You came over to ask me to come look at your collection of Dave Matthews vinyls in your Star Wars theme man cave or invite me to happy hour at a dirty TGI Friday’s? Ugh, these fucking meatheads are so predictable they take all the fun out of it.

Catra yawned and leaned back into her hips. “Okay?” At that moment she swore she heard Lonnie’s jaw drop. Oh, this? This was fucking sweet. Lonnie stalks him all day- possibly for longer than a week just to get a stupid picture with someone who wasn’t even who they thought he was- and he approaches Catra instead. Lonnie’s precious God of Lesbians picked a whole ass, different lesbian- to be a disgusting, horny man with, but still, Catra was going to be rubbing it in her dumb face that she got to turn fake Thor down, not any of these other lame idiots!

“You teach the yoga flow class right?” he flashed a perfect smile at her and Catra, miffed he wasn’t reading the do-not-fuck-with-me vibe she was oh so famous for, swallowed and showed him the canines in her own mouth. Why was he asking her about a class? There was no way ‘Adam’ had ever stretched into any warrior pose ever without pulling something. And Catra would have remembered him sauntering into the studio and knocking everything and everyone over with his giant, sweaty body.

“Yeah? Why do ask?” Catra glanced down at her fingernails. This was taking too long.

“Um, so I haven’t taken it,” yeah, that much was obvious, “but my twin sister has a couple times.” Adam- and Lonnie- perked up at the mention of his sister. Oh my God. That must be where this dull, useless conversation was going at a snail’s pace towards.

“She’s actually taken a couple of your classes, like restorative yoga and another one that escapes me, oof that’s embarrassing.” Everything, from the carefree movements of his shoulders to the wild gesturing of his hands, plus his chill tone, showed Catra that he was just gonna go ahead and act like they were close friends. What the hell is his game here? Catra wondered.

“Sorry about that. I don’t know if you know her, she usually stays in the back ‘cause she’s not very good and she has like, a perfectionist problem. And an anxiety problem. That’s why she’s taking yoga in the first place, you know, to be less high strung. Anyways, got a little off track there, but I wanted to tell you that she thinks you’re a really great teacher.” Adam broke his spiel off there with a wink.

What the HELL does that mean? Catra curled her fingers into tight fists. To keep from indenting Adam’s perfect jawline or to indent Adam’s jawline, she had no fucking idea.

While she was trying to keep her own sneaker out of this strange guy’s ass, Catra tried to think back to her classes the past few weeks ad searched her memory for a woman that looked like him. A blonde, young woman in the back. There was no way, Adam was fucking with her. Catra definitely remembered blue eyes that deep and the kindest smile that made her forget that the world was a fucking cruel and intent on killing her.

Adam, hellbent on screwing with her more, then way to casually added, “She talks about you a lot, whenever she gets out of class. I think she kinda has thing for you.”

Of course Lonnie- who was still just standing there for some reason- just had to burst out laughing and then scramble to turn that noise into a cough before a) Adam and his flawless eyebrows suspected anything, and b) Catra kicked her in the shin and earned a disappointed lecture from Scorpia for hurting her “Lonnie-Boo.”

“Anyways…” Adam continued, narrowing those baby blue eyes of his before relaxing into that annoyingly cordial posture, “I overheard you guys mentioning you were lesbians? I mean, I wasn’t eavesdropping but-”

“We were just being loud, we get it a lot.” Uh, no we don’t! This is fucking weird! Catra indulged her panicked thoughts as Lonnie cut Adam off. Then, to take things to an even weirder level, Lonnie leaned her way and whispered “Oh my God, Catra, he is the God of Lesbians.”

“Well, Adora- my sister- she’s also a lesbian. And- and she’s single.” Catra sunk her teeth into her bottom lip. How were Lonnie and Adam both looking at her with the same eager as fuck expression? And how could she knock both of them unconscious at the same time? And god fucking damn it! Why couldn’t Catra remember this angelic, goddess, gay twin of his?

“She had a friend emergency today, but she usually works out the same time as me. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

Lonnie just had to speak up, she just had too. Because the universe hated Catra and took every opportunity to make her life shitty. “Oh? I think Catra will be here the same time tomorrow too.”

What. The. Actual. FUCK?!!?

“Awesome!” Adam gave a little fist pump. “I gotta go, but it was nice meeting you, Catra. And uh, you too.” He finger gunned in Lonnie’s direction as he pirouetted on his sneakers, walking backwards towards the exist. Mouths agape, Catra and Lonnie watched him stick his airpods back in and jog out the sliding doors, like this was just another normal day at The Horde.  

The fake God of Lesbians left behind the most fucking awkward silence between Catra and her boss/improtu and unwanted personal trainer. They must’ve stood there in disbelief for at least three minutes, the only sounds of people working out behind them Catra wanted to speak- she really did before Lonnie started talking some serious bullshit- but no matter how many she played recent events in her head could Catra come up with anything to say other than "Uh, what the fuck just happened?”

“Dude,” Lonnie smacked her arm and cackled, “I think Those just wingmanned you!”

~

“So are you gonna do it?”

“Uh, do what?”

“Work out with the the God of Lesbian’s gay twin sister?”

“Leave me alone, Lonnie.” Catra whined into her hands.

“Woah, woah, woah, wait- the God of Lesbians? You mean Thor? He doesn’t have a twin sister.” Scorpia interjected. Ugh, when did she get here? “I mean, recently in the comic books the mantle of Thor has been given to a woman, but I don’t think Marvel has confirmed her sexuality.”

Fuck me. Catra couldn’t even get a moments peace after her studio class that her co-workers always seemed to forget included her bending over a fucking chair in multiple, unnatural ways for a whole hour. Probably because none of these asshats could do it or even bothered to try. Legs pulsing with pain, she slammed her yoga mat down on the Welcome Center desk and stole Rogelio’s empty chair five minutes after she dismissed everyone in her class.

Rogelio could stare her down all he wanted when he got back, Catra didn’t care at this point. She just wanted to fucking rest before she had to get her aching body out of the chair and go work the closing shift serving alcohol she couldn’t even drink (dumb stabilizing meds) at Erelandia but Lonnie was, apparently, not going to drop this whole idiotic Thor-thing. Didn’t help that Catra’s brain hadn’t dropped the topic either; she was completely spaced out trying to teach, too busy scanning the attendees for a familiar hot blonde.

It also didn’t help that Scorpia was also here, probably to pick up her loud mouth girlfriend.

As Catra moaned into her hands again, she heard a fucking weasel pop out of nowhere and loudly insist “They didn’t make Thor a woman!”

“Uh, yeah they did, Kyle.” Lonnie countered back without missing a beat. Catra looked up only to open her eyes to the horrifying sight that not only had Kyle shown up, but Rogelio was there too nodding in agreement with Scorpia and Lonnie. Great. Now everyone was here.

Channeling his inner asshole, Kyle demanded to know “How would they even do that?”

“She was given the hammer, Kyle!” Scorpia said, like it was obvious. “Whoever holds melnor, mielnar, mjiler-”

“Take your time, babe.” Lonnie rubbed her girlfriends arm as her face scrunched up trying to pronounce whatever stupid name Thor’s hammer. Just to show what she thought of the whole conversation, Catra let out a long, and loud, dramatic sigh.

“Millie…your?”

“No you guys,” Oh so now Lonnie was going to elaborate. “not the real Thor!”

“Melanin?”

“Uh, duh, he’s not real.”

“Shut the fuck up Kyle.”

“Melon baller?”

“I’m talking about that guy who looks like Thor. You know the one that’s been coming to our gym for awhile?” Lonnie clarifications sent a ripple of “ohhhhs” through the group. “Turns out his name is Adam, and he has a twin sister! He wants to set Catra up!”

A sudden force over took Catra and almost threw her out of the chair the second Lonnie finally shut her blabbermouth. One minute Catra was fine, she was relaxed if not irritated with her choice of friends, the next minute she was being suffocated by Scorpia’s giant mutant arms. “Oh Catra, this is amazing news!”

“GET…offme!”

Scorpia ignored the squealing and squirming, taking the obnoxious show of friendship up an unnecessary notch by rocking her limp body back and forth. “You have finally have someone to go out with! And she’s probably hot if she’s related to Thor!”

“Fake Thor.” coughed Lonnie as a reminder.

“We can finally go on double dates-”

“Auggh!” Catra twisted Scorpia’s arm over her, “I’m not going out with Not Thor’s gay sister!”

Scorpia’s face fell into that pout that always made Catra feel like she’d punched in the stomach. “What- why not?”

“‘Cause she’s not real, duh! ” Catra threw her hands up, her curls flying everywhere around her head like a crazed halo. Look, Catra understood that she was suspicious to the point of like, actual paranoia, and that it just came with her brand of crazy, but she also knew when someone was flat out manipulating her, i.e. lying straight to her face. She’d only dealt with it her entire gymnastics career.

Adam didn’t show picture and only said his sister’s name once. Catra, whose studio was full of wall to wall mirrors that allowed her to seeeverything, would’ve remembered a stunning lesbian copy of him. This was bullshit, is what it was.

“What’s her name again?” from across the desk, Kyle asked with piqued interest.

“Adora, or some other obviously made up name.” Catra rolled her eyes so far back in her head it hurt, “God, he didn’t even try-”

“Found her.”

“WHAT?” In a quick and graceful blur, Catra, Lonnie, and Scorpia rushed over to the other end of the desk were Rogelio was bunched over Kyle typing into the computer.

“Yeah, Adora Smith.” Kyle shrugged, pointing to the monitor where Adam’s sister’s information was pulled up in their membership database. “It looks like she mostly comes as a guest with Adam for the past few weeks- huh, Adam’s last name is Walker, what do you guys think that’s about? Oh, here’s her picture.”

Kyle didn’t have to gesture to the screen. Catra was already staring. Fuck, she’s gorgeous. And so his twin. Piercing blue eyes, blonde ponytail, amazing flawless skin. Stunning, warm smile that almost Catra melt right into a puddle right then and there. Pull it together, Leon! Try not to act like you’d throw all these people under an actual bus just to get to know her.

“Not my type, but she’s pretty.” commented Lonnie.

Pretty? She’s the reason faces were invented, you idiot!

“Well, that’s relief-”

“Oh my God, shut up Scorpia, I remember her!” throwing her hand back, Catra’s hand met Scorpia’s boobs- Catra was aiming for her mouth, wasn’t her fault her room mate was 6’2”- and pushed Kyle out of the seat and onto the floor, making Rogelio squeal in horror. “Remember, Adam said she was taking some of my classes but that’s why I thought it was total bull, ‘cause of course I would have remembered her!”

Catra gestured wildly as Scorpia and Lonnie raised their eyebrows in tandem. “But Adam was right, she was in the back and I remember ‘cause she kept needing extra help. She was like a baby penguin trying to learn how to walk! Like she fell on her fucking face, twice. It was awesome!”

“Well it sounds like she made an impression.” Lonnie smirked and Scorpia didn’t even wait a beat to pile on.

“Yeah, Catra! Dumb blondes, that’s totally your type! You should go out with her! Hey, I bet she needs some one on one help.”

“Not gonna happen.” throwing up her defenses without a second thought, Catra hissed back at her friends.

“‘Cause you’re a chicken?” Lonnie raised her eyebrow, just asking to be decked in the jaw. What a perfect opportunity to see if Catra’s training had come through.

“No, ‘cause-” I’m unstable. I’m fucking insane, medically speaking. I’m good at like, one thing. And, oh don’t forget, I’m completely, totally unlovable. “Uh, whatever, you guys probably don’t even care,” she muttered the last part under her breath, just in case Scorpia heard and made a big deal out of proving her wrong.  

“Okay well, I’m gonna need you to come in around three tomorrow. Kyle’s calling in sick with mono again, that dumbass.” Lonnie sighed, leaning onto the desk.

“I am? I’m what?” blubbered Kyle as Rogelio pulled him off the floor.

Three? That’s around the time I came in today- ARE YOU SHITTING ME? “Seriously? Fuck you, Lonnie!”

“Melvin-jorge. That’s it!”

~

“I cannot believe you, Adam!”

After dragging her ass to the gym at exactly three p.m- because she fully believed Lonnie would have her fired and banned from the building if she didn’t at least strike up some form of conversation with this girl- Catra was trying her best not to think about twins or Thor or whatever disaster was about to go down as she halfassed wiped down equipment when she heard Adora walk in. At least she assumed it was Adora; she wasn’t sure who else would yelling Adam’s name randomly with like, that much annoyance.

“Oh c’mon, don’t be like that Adora!”

Oh, so it was Adora. Having a full on argument with her twin brother in the middle of their gym. Catra resisted the tormenting desire to turn around and forced her focus to the wipes crumpling in her hand as she ran them down leather seat of their ergometer. Don’t, don’t, don’t don’t you fucking turn around and stare like a creep Catra Maria Leon!

“We’ve talked about this,” wow, she sounds pissed. That’s hot. “You can’t go around setting me up with random woman you think is gay! Not every girl at a gym is gay, Adam!”

Having to literally sink her teeth into her tongue, Catra stifled a laugh. So Adora was upset about this whole thing too? Guess they had that in common.

“Catra is a lesbian! She was yelling about it with her trainer!” Adam insisted.

This is what I get for not keeping my fucking mouth shut. At least he didn’t bring up how we called him Thor and Fake Thor over and over and over again.

“Plus, you have a thing for her Adora. I know because you wouldn’t shut up about how  pretty and smoking hot she was and how she smells like cinnamon! That’s way too much detail for me!”

The more Adam described how Adora had described her, the more Catra’s face was overcome with a tingling heat that spread from her face, to her neck, to her chest. Still, she refused to turn around. Even if she dying, dying to see the look on Adora’s face.

“By the way, how many times did you fall in class? Like seven times? Klutz.”

Adora scoff echoed all through the gym. “I’m not the klutz, you’re the klutz! And by the way, I didn’t fall on accident, my balance is impeccable! Coach Hordak once made me bounce a soccer ball on my head for a mile! And, get this, I did it for two! That’s how good my balance is!”

She was falling… on purpose?

“Did that man ever let you sleep?”

“No, he didn’t, and you know what, I’m not gonna let you sleep either after this! And you are so uninvited to Best Friend Squad Netflix nights!” Catra heard a whack! and Adam yelp.

“Glimmer will invite me back! And you have to get back out there, Adora! It’s been, what, like a year and a half since you and Serenia broke up?”

This time, Catra let herself turn around. Okay, she moved her neck to the side like three inches. Part of her was curious to see if they’d seen her. The other part of her just wanted to stare in wonder at Adora for pretty much the rest of her life.

“Ugh, don’t bring that up, this is not about that!” With every word Adora yelled at her twin, Catra came closer to making that 180 that would allow her to see the two of them. And for them to see her. “This about you being weird and just going up to random people to see if they wanna go out with me!”

“Look she’s right over there, why don’t you just go talk to her? Because I don’t think your face can take much more damage from you falling down in yoga , Adora.” Damn, Adam. Maybe I should introduce you to Lonnie ‘cause you’d be great friends. I kinda wanna be friends, what the hell?

At this point, Catra didn’t know what else to do with her body but stand there with her hip cocked and her arms crossed, an amused smirk on her face. Didn’t matter that her neck and chest were still on fire and her heart was beating like she’d just run a fucking mile.

Adora looked away from her brother, only to catch Catra’s waiting eyes, and given the way she squeaked, threw her hands in her face, and walked/tumbled back towards her brother, Catra maybe got the vibe she wasn’t expecting her to be literally right there.

“Hey, Adora.” Catra gave a little sultry wave, the corner of her mouth upturned, unsure of what the hell had just come over her. Seriously, was she fucking possessed? Or was Adora just so freaking cute and so much better in person that she could ever imagine and was maybe, maybe worth taking a chance on? Also, the chance to embarrass her just to see her face turn red was something Catra couldn’t resist .

A panicked whine slipped from Adora’s lips as she bumped into Adam’s shoulder. “I hate you, I hate you, and I wish we’d stayed separated.”

“Yeah, yeah, hate you too. Now go get her chief.” Catra didn’t see what happened next coming. But she should have, given that mischievous sparkles Adam got in his eyes. The next thing she knew, Adora was shrieking, Catra blinked, and then fell to the ground as a body slammed into her. Holy shit! Catra’s teeth caught her tongue as she hit concrete hard, pain exploding through her sore body. What the FUCK just happened?

When Catra opened her eyes, a nasty cocktail of shock and pain paralyzing her muscles from making any kind of move, she looked down to find Adora exactly in her lap, muttering “Ow, my ass.”

“Uh…”

Adora’s own shocking blue eyes flew open and in them, Catra could see the exact second she put everything together in that pretty little head of hers. “Oh, oh! I’m sorry, I- that was, ah man.” she scrambled away, out of Catra’s lap- hey, wait!- and let out another embarrassed whine.

Lifting her head up to glare at the ceiling, Adora whispered, “I hate you Adam.” before taking a deep breath. “I- hi, I’m, um, Adora.” she stuttered, blush overtaking her pale skin. Catra smiled. Oh, she was cute.

“Catra.”

“Yeah, I know I’ve been taking your classes- I, uh” Adora’s closed her mouth and fiddled with her fingers as she bit back a smile. A really beautiful smile. “I’m sorry, I’m really bad at this.”

Snorting, Catra added. “Trust me, you’re not the only one who’s totally out of her comfort zone right now.”

“Do you wanna just work out? Like together?” she asked, bright smile still on her face. Getting up on one knee, Adora extended a hand.

“Yes!” Catra replied way too quickly, having to slap on a less desperate as fuck approach, “I mean, yeah I’d like that.”

As Adora led her to the treadmills, Catra heard Adam claim in victory, “Yes! My work here is done. Oh man, where did my airpods go?”

Catra stifled a laugh. Some God of Lesbians/thunder. Hmm, thunder right and storms and shit? Catra thought to herself as Adora started going on about how annoying and intrusive Adam could just generally be, maybe with him around, lightning can strike the same place twice.

Thank you so much for reading! I hoped you enjoyed it Lily! Likes and REBLOGS are always appreciated!

and once again, thank you to those you organized this event! Happy Pride!

[thatfairyfangirl]

True Colors Chapter 2

After all these years you couldn’t believe your old uniform still fit...sure it was a little snug in some areas, but hey, you weren’t exactly in highschool anymore, what else did you expect? You could feel your heart pounding in your chest and your stomach flipping as you paced the floor of the tower, waiting for the living legend himself...Captain America. You never planned on this being your life, you never WANTED to be a superhero...but when Steve Rogers needs help with something how exactly could anyone say no? Besides, you were all for this free the heroes movement going on, and for good reason. You’ve seen all this before, lived this all before. The Sokovia Accords was just the Mutant Registration Act 2.0. Too bad you didn’t hold enough sway to actually speak up about it to anyone who really mattered.

“Alright Tony, what is it you wanted to talk about?” You heard echoing through the hall as the star spangled man himself entered the room. You stood with your back as straight as you could make it, holding your breath without realizing.

“Steve, I would like to introduce to you a long time friend of mine.” He gestured to you. “This is (Y/N).” You both watched as Steve folded his arms and quirked a brow. “Look, I know I was in the wrong...Let the two of us at least help make things as right as we can.”

Your heart stopped as Steve’s blue eyes looked over you. In the back of your mind you knew this was one of those life changing moments. “No offence ma’am, but you don’t exactly look combat ready.”

The corners of your lips tugged downward as you looked over yourself. “I don’t think I see what you mean Captain. This suit was designed by someone arguably smarter than Mr. ‘Too many character flaws to be considered a hero’ over here. Lined with nacre...I’m probably more combat ready than half of your team was.” You watched Tony’s brow rise when you mentioned the material as he began poking at the iridescent patches of armor wondering just how they were able to make it flexible enough to wear as a suit yet as strong as you boasted.

“I admire your intentions here ma’am, but having a fancy suit doesn’t mean you’re ready to head into a battle.” Steve’s ocean blue eyes stared into you then over to Tony. “Some of us learned that the hard way. How is Rhodey anyway?”

“Well, making a nice recovery with the help of some of my genius.” And then what you said finally clicked in his brain. “And wait a minute! Who exactly are you hanging out with that is smarter than me?” You couldn’t help but chuckle, letting him stew in that question as long as possible.

“This isn’t funny! And it isn’t a game!” Cap scolded, his eyes growing harsher. “Tony they are in that oceanic hell hole because of you. I’m not going to allow you to send in some untrained girl just because she’s been outfitted with new tech. Especially with the Accords still in place. Breaking them once they are signed is just as bad as not signing them at all.”

“Okay, first of all...From what I’ve been hearing in the mutant community, this,” you tugged at the material you wore, “is actually old news. Second,” you paused letting your hands glow hot and bright, “yes I said I’m a mutant,” that fact didn’t seem to phase him, “and I’ve been trained by some of the best.” Finished showing off you let the glow die down as you bent the light in the room around you to demonstrate exactly why you were brought on for this mission. Fully concealed from sight you stepped around Cap as he searched the room for any trace of you. “The great thing about light is that it pretty much controls everything we see. You want to get into that base undetected, I’m pretty much the best chance that you’ve got.” You paused as you reappeared behind him. “Oh, and who ever said I signed the Accords? I’ll be going in rogue just like you. And once everyone is out I’ll be helping you keep it that way.” You watched as a boyish smile crept onto Steve’s face. He had to admit that this did seem like a pretty bulletproof plan. Of course that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take a moment to consider all of the pros and cons before finally agreeing.

~ ~ ~ ~

The plan was simple, and went over well. With your talents you and Steve remained out of sight as you both worked your way through the highest of high security prisons. It was too bad the bubble of where your powers of light bending for the sake of invisibility was so small...years of being out of practice...You made a mental note to work on that. But it did mean that as the two of you got to the final floor while you were busy being the unseen force beating on the poor defenseless security guards Steve moving closer to the cells brought him into full view. But at least by the time this happened the only ones left conscious was the ones you were here to rescue.

“So where’s your friend?” You asked letting the cloak of invisibility down.

“Well that’s a cool trick.” Clint muttered as he watched the rescue.

“Not...here…” Steve answered sounding more than a bit concerned for Bucky’s safety.

“He’s in there.” Clint offered as he pointed to a door on the other side of the room. “Been keeping him on ice.”

“(Y/N), will that light thing you do work on that?” Steve asked as the two of you make quick work of opening the cell doors. “I doubt they made it as easy as just press this button.” As he spoke you began to wonder if the charm of that smile was a 40s thing or something unique to only Steve Rogers.

“Yeah,” you nodded, “well, umm I can try I suppose. I never tried using it like that before.” You made your way into the room looking around, praying that there would just be a button that said ‘press me to thaw out the walking communist weapon.’...There wasn’t one. Plenty of little buttons you’d apparently have to push in just the right order to start the thawing process the safe way. Looks like it was all up to Light Girl….no, that’s a terrible superhero name...Rainbow Girl? Nah that one’s taken...something for you to work on later. Everyone seemed to hover over you as you concentrate the light finding just the right wavelength to bring the Winter Soldier back to life, but you knew you had to be careful, go slow and test the frequency of the light waves over his prosthetic first for less of a chance to hurt him. “This could take a while...maybe get the exit plan going while we wait?” You suggested, feeling rather uncomfortable with everyone looming over you like that. The eventual move of metal fingers was definitely a promising sign that you weren’t actually killing the poor guy. Ice fell from metal in chunks before finally the soldier burst free, metal hand clamping tightly around your neck.

“Who are you? What do you want?” He growled, icy eyes digging into your soul as you gasped for air.

“I…” you gagged, “I’m with Steve.” The bitter sting of metallic fingers one by one released you, letting the air once again reach your lungs...You heard rumors of his strength...never thought you would experience it first hand. “Wonderful way to thank someone.” You half scolded as you gulped in sweet sweet air. “Come on, he’s upstairs.” You added with a bitter tone as you rubbed your neck, feeling the bruises already beginning to form where he gripped you.

Tag List:

@sillydecoy​

Announcement from the writer:

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[osmw1]

Dimension Wave   Chapter 4—The Bright Fishing Idea

The first meal I had since coming to Dimension Wave was mackerel and herring. Alto got in contact with the girl who is leveling up her cooking skill and I had her grill some fish for me. It might seem like I’m bragging since I was the one who caught the fish, but they were big and delicious. I gave the girl 10 herrings as thanks. Alto was quite happy for the three herrings I gave him for introducing me to the girl. Perhaps herring is the key to friendship.

“You seem to be well-connected, Alto. Were you a beta tester?”

I recall that they were recruiting for the beta test.

“Nah, I haven’t played the beta at all. In fact, I think they intentionally accepting only a few people for it.”

According to Alto, it seems like they did indeed have a beta version of the game, but there were zero changes for the gold release. Not only that, but the company didn’t want beta characters to be mixed in new players, so everyone was reset to level 1.

“I see.” “I heard there was leaked content.” “Oh, I’ve heard about that too, though I don’t know the details.”

They say a beta tester leaked details about the game on an anonymous textboard, including content protected by the non-disclosure agreement. That’s what I read about at least, though I wasn’t there to witness it in real time.

“What kind of information was leaked?” “Pretty much everyone in the game knows about it, y’know? It’s basically about how Spirits are way underpowered. As far as I remember, though they can get unlimited skills, their stats are the lowest of all races.” “… you don’t know?” “Speaking of which, what race are you playing as? I haven’t seen any like your kind before.”

I take an awkward look at myself. From time to time, I’m half transparent. That’s one of the traits of Spirits.

“The exact Spirit we’re talking about. They seem pretty unusual, but I just learned that they’re not really strong.” “Oh, that’s it. So? What’s it like?” “Ehh. I’ve only been fishing up ‘til now, so I haven’t run into any difficulties so far.”

Since my status and Energy are one and the same, any slight mistake might put my life into jeopardy. If you think about it that way, you could say it’s pretty weak. It seems pretty well-suited for me if I’m just fishing or crafting in town, seeing how I don’t have to do anything to get more Energy or Mana. Well, I guess Dimension Wave focuses more on the combat aspects though.

“I see. Let me know if Spirits are easy to use. I don’t think many people are playing as one because of the leaks.” “Yeah, if I feel like it.” “Alrighty then, I’m gonna head off. Contact me if you have anything you want to trade with me, okay?” “Aye, aye.”

I respond to his wave with my own. After taking a bow, Alto sets off to find his next customer.

“Whew…”

I heave a sigh before opening my inventory to look at the fishing rod that I had Alto’s acquaintance make for me. Wooden Rod +2. It’s made from a flexible stick, silk line, and a copper fishhook. All of these things are from different places, so Alto must have run around quite a bit.

Though Alto says the +2 was merely incidental, I don’t think that’s the case. It’s probably more to do with the crafter’s skill and the quality of materials. When he showed me the stick, line, and hook, it already seemed like they were of nice quality, so I think I’m right.

It also costed me 700 serin, but it seems like it’d perform a lot better than the 600 serin Shoddy Rod. And since it was specially made for me, I’ll be extra careful not to let it get stolen away this time. Oh, isn’t it about time my Energy ticked up?

Name/ Kizuna†Exceed Race/ Spirit Energy/ 1,320 Mana/ 60 Serin/ 2,000

Skills/ Energy Production II, Mana Production II

Energy Production II → Energy Production III Generates 200 Energy per hour → Generates 400 Energy per hour Costs 50 Mana to upgrade

I’ve got enough Mana now, so I’ll upgrade my Energy Production to rank III. Give it another two hours, and I’ll take Fishing Mastery too.

“I’ve got an upgraded skill and rod plus a full stomach. Time for round two, I think… oh!”

A light bulb came on above my head. I know it’s an old cliché, but in any case, it’s a bright idea.

—The fish at night will probably be different than the ones at noon, right?

If I get pangs of hunger, then surely, I’ll get sleepy too. I can’t risk falling asleep while fishing. At the very least, I’ll take a cat nap at an inn. After deciding on that, I decided to report to my sisters.

I select “Chat” from my menu. Now that I think about it, I haven’t added them as friends yet. I type in “ Tsugumi†Exceed” and send them a chat. The game plays a dial tone like a telephone would. I have a feeling this is why Tsugumi mistook the chat to be a phone call before.

“Big Bro Kizuna? What’s up?” “Oh, I was just about to hit the sack. Figured I’d give you a call first.” “What, already? Isn’t it a little early?” “Nah, I was hoping to see if there’s a different between the fish during day and at night.” “Is that right? Okie dokie. I’ll let Big Sis know for you too then.” “’preciate it. How are things over at your end?” “ Mm, just fighting like normal.” “Hey… you alright?” “Ahaha. I’m being surrounded by five of them.” “Concentrate!”

Jeez!

I figuratively slam the receiver down. She’d do that too when we game together. We’d play an FPS together and she’d be chatting with Kanata. I’m in the game too, you know? I kept it to myself, but it ticked me off. What’s worse is that she’d top the scoreboard with the highest kill/death ratio. Thinking about it again, it was Tsugumi who got our passes for Dimension Wave. Being surrounded by five of anything would likely be nothing to her.

… I’m still not happy about it, but whatever. Time to look for an inn. I open up the map from the menu. There’s a few places marked with “ZZZ” here in town. I take a look at which of the five seem good. Well, this is a game after all, so there’s probably not a huge difference, but the prices differ. In the end, I chose the one in the middle of the pack that’s neither cheap nor expensive.

“—That will be 150 serin for one night’s stay,” says the lady who is seemingly the innkeeper.

I feel like I’ve heard her voice actress before somewhere. Handing over 150 serin rewarded me with a key. I head towards my room. It seems like you get to use the room for a full 24 hours too. That means I can catch some sleep and go shopping afterwards. I feel like I’m here on vacation.

In any case, I look around the inn. Looks like I’m the only one here. Well, today being the first day, it’d be rare for anyone to head to bed to early. Out of the five, this one seemed the most average. The walls in the cheapest inn were chipped and cracked. Why would anyone choose that, I wonder.

“This is it.”

I arrive at room 101—the same number marked on the key—and unlock the door. It’s a normal room. It’s quite a bit smaller than hotels in real life. I take a seat on the bed. It’s as soft as the bed in my room. To put it mildly, it’s not nearly plush enough to be a hotel bed. Well, it was only 150 serin to stay here.

“… let’s get some shut eye for now.”

I don’t feel right sleeping in my clothes and shoes. I put my shoes aside and take my clothes off. What was left was a little girl in her underwear.

—

———

—————

‘Well, nothing wrong with taking more off,’ the demon on my shoulder suggests.

Just to sate my curiosity, I tried to take my underwear off but to no avail. Well, the game’s not rated R after all, so there’s no way I can do anything lewd.

”Tsk.”

I half-jokingly click my tongue because it’s not like I actually wanted to do anything. It doesn’t really matter anyway and so I lie down as I had originally intended to. I pull up the blanket—again, just as warm as the one in my room—and closed my eyes.

I fall asleep right away as if I had taken sleeping pills. Perhaps they designed the game so that it’d be easy to fall asleep. I’d be quite happy if it were this easy in real life. My thoughts start drifting, and before I realized, my consciousness had drifted away too.

previously: /prologue/ /ch001/ /ch002/ /ch003/ /ch004/ /next/

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(check out the other title I’m translating—written by the same author!)

[domina-alba]

Seditionis Adamas

XXVII Two hours later the components for Peridot's limb enhancers had been re-assembled into Peridot's first prototype. Domina was continually being astounded by Yellow Pearl’s wealth of knowledge. Surely, Yellow Diamond had to know something about this. How could Yellow Pearl just keep this all hidden? Then again, Domina had to remind herself that not everyone adhered to the system as loosely as those in the fleet, especially not Yellow Diamond.

They stayed and chatted for a while, Yellow Pearl, slowly warming up to the group.  It wasn’t until they were getting ready to leave that Domina paid attention to the nagging thought in the back of her mind.

“Sabina may I ask you something?” Domina approached the woman, fiddling with the edge of her shirt.

“Sure, what’s up?” Sabina asked slamming the gate on her vehicle’s trunk. Domina could see that Yellow Pearl was waiting on her, off to the side, not unlike her pink counterpart. Domina would tell her to go but... really, was that fair to Yellow? She had already been kicked out of the call to the rebellion’s base. Still, Domina really didn’t want to make this any more awkward than it already was.

“I... Steven has said in the past that your pink hair isn’t natural and that you chemically alter its pigment.” She started. Sabina smiled broadly and nodded.

“Sure can.”

“Well, I was wondering if it was possible to only do that for humans with lower amounts of pre-existing pigment or if-”

“If it was possible to bleach a section of hair, maybe about yea big?” Sabina interrupted her, gesturing to her hair roughly in the same spot where Steven’s hair was discolored. Domina’s embarrassment overshadowed her irritation about being interrupted.

“I- yes.”

“Yeah, it’s doable. You want me to do it for you?” Sabina asked, she seemed eager.

“If... though I suppose it’s a bit ridiculous.” Domina muttered. It wasn’t as if temporarily modifying her hair was going to make up for what she did to Steven.

“Nah.” Sabina said. “An empathetic gesture is always worth doing. Steven’ll appreciate it too.” Sabina gestured to the truck behind her. “If you’re not doing anything, we can do this now.”

“...Alright.” Domina said.

“Sweet.” Sabina grinned “Hop in then. You coming too Yellow?” Domina gave the pearl her best ‘up to you’ shrug.

“I suppose.” Yellow said nervously.

“Awesome.”

Sabina’s house was much different than Steven’s. It was divided into many rooms, though Domina could only see glimpses of them from her place in the kitchen. She was sitting in a wooden chair across from Sabina, trying to stay still as the woman applied a foul smelling paste to the front of her hair. Yellow Pearl looked on with a combination of horror and fascination.

“You’re not attached to this shirt are you?” Sabina asked

“Considering it’s one of my last ones, yes, but, no sentimental attachment.” Domina said, she closed her eyes against the harsh fumes of the chemicals.

“Well, that we can fix,” Sabina said. Domina could hear her setting down the plastic bowl she was using to hold the compound. “You’re basically just a skinnier version of me, kinda like how my brother is. Anyway, just wanted to be sure, this stuff stains pretty badly and we’re probably going to have to do a few coats.” There was something being wrapped around her hair, carefully avoiding her gem.

“Why are you so tall?” Domina asked “I thought it was unusual for humans to be much taller than like... Greg.” She opened her eyes. Sabina nodded and turned to wash her hands.

Yeah, I had an issue with my pituitary gland growing up. It basically never gave the shut off orders for the growth hormone, so they had to remove it.” She turned back to the two of them. “Alright, so I gotta ask, what’s it like growing up on a spaceship? Cause that’s the second coolest thing I’ve ever heard.” Domina blinked.

“I don’t really have a point of reference to compare it to but... it was nice?” Domina said hesitantly. “I spent about 12 years with the fleet and then 12 years on Homeworld with Yellow.” Domina paused and gestured to Yellow Pearl. “Not um... well kind of.”

“I’m surprised that's not more confusing.” Sabina went through the motions she had watched Steven perform in the past to make tea. Filling a kettle, getting out cups, Sabina hesitated and then added a third to the two she had grabbed.

“Under normal circumstances...” Yellow Pearl trailed off as she glanced at Domina, who simply gave her an encouraging smile. “We wouldn’t be in a situation where I would be referred to at all.” Sabina’s smile faded slightly.

“Right. Do you have a cut number though? Amethyst was telling me she’s like 8xm or something.”

“No, no,” Yellow said shaking her head, “Pearls aren’t real gems.”

“Bullshit!” Domina said. Both people looked equally startled by Domina’s outburst and she flushed red. “Sorry.”

“No, it just didn’t occur to me that you knew that phrase. Continue.” Sabina said, setting down a cup in front of each of them and pulling up a seat to the table. Yellow Pearl eyed the drink and Domina nervously. Domina internally cursed again.

“I mean... pearls aren’t ‘real’ gems, in that they’re not made like other gems. They have to be produced individually.” Domina stared at the whorls on on the table, trying not to remember the sound of nursery tanks shattering. “Regular gems are basically just injected into the ground, with a few exceptions. It means you can make a lot of them.”

“I know that. I’ve seen Amethyst’s kindergarten.” Sabina said.

“So we’re not real gems” Yellow said, there was a hint of irritation in her voice. The words were too close to ‘just a pearl’ for Domina’s liking.

“No, I mean yes, ugh.” Domina rubbed the setting of her gem and looked directly at Yellow. The pearl flinched back. “We can make quartzes or spinels or whatever the same way, individually in labs. There’s been trials done, millenia ago, before even Yellow Diamond popped out of her hole. Around the same time they came up with pearls.”

“So, why don’t you do that?” Sabina asked.

“Because it’s slow. It takes four times the time and three times the material to get a single gem.” Domina said. “But for whatever reason that’s not with pearls.” Yellow Pearl blinked.

“Really, where did you read this?” she asked

“My mother’s logs.” Domina said. She hadn’t read much from them since the video, but that section she had studied almost religiously when she had found it. “But, none of that means that pearls aren’t gems. They might actually be one of the most flexible gem types ever created, I mean, obviously The Renegade but even you and Blue and Pearl!” Domina said, a slight breeze was running through the room. “You aren’t supposed to be anything more than accessories, but you managed to reprogram one of the most complicated pieces of technology in history. And Blue negotiates as well as any Sodalite I’ve ever met, maybe better!” Domina took a drink of the tea, it was different than what Steven made, more sour. When she stopped to breathe she could see Yellow covering her face, edges of orange creeping from around her fingers. Sabina leaned over and refilled her cup.

“And your pearl?” Sabina asked

“She’s not really mine.” Domina squirmed uncomfortably.

“You know what I mean.” Sabina waved off her protests.

“She... I mean she can fly the Styx as well as I can. I’ve seen her make an Emerald cower in her cape, and... she’s put up with all my nonsense for almost 5000 years now, not to mention my mother before that, and Pink diamond before that!” Domina said, “And on top of that she’s been dealing with the rebellion stuff since... since...” Domina glanced at Yellow who looked at her sheepishly.

“At least since you were first on Homeworld, White D-....Domina. I apologize, I should have told you.” Yellow Pearl said. Domina smiled, finally some headway with her name.

“It’s fine. Thanks for not revealing her like that.” Domina sighed, “She kept at it, and did what she could to help me, to help the rebellion. She’s better than me. We can’t keep treating pearls like they’re inconsequential.” Yellow Pearl’s eyes went wide. And, for a moment, there was silence.

“Well, it looks to me like you’ve got a good head start.” Sabina said. She patted Domina on the back. “Let’s wash that out and see if we need to do another application, then I’ll see what I’ve got clothing-wise for you.”

****

Pink Pearl waited with Steven and Connie for Yellow and Domina. The boy had been in contact with White’s ‘girlfriend’ and in a long roundabout conversation, they had decided on regrouping at Greg’s. There, Steven and Connie were going through Greg’s music collection. Pink had heard everything Steven had been sending Domina, and had to admit, a lot of it was quite good. Seeing Blue’s reaction to Earth music, however, was priceless. Especially when Steven, Connie, and Amethyst started dancing.

“Quartzes don’t dance.” Blue said softly to White and Pink. White smiled.

“Welcome to Earth.” Sabina’s truck pulled up shortly after. And Sabina got out, followed by Yellow and... oh star’s what had she done to her hair?

“Domina!” Steven said cheerfully. “Did Sabina dye your hair?” Domina looked at the group, clearly embarrassed and twiddled with the front of her hair. It still had the iridescent quality that the rest of hair had, but now it was almost pure white. She had new clothes too, a pair of slightly baggy jeans and a shirt that was striped from top to bottom, black, grey, white, and purple. She looked much more relaxed than she had the last few days, which was definitely a good sign.

“Yes, I um...” Domina looked at Sabina, then awkwardly back at Steven. “I thought we could match.” She finished. Steven looked at Domina then pulled his own section of hair in front of his face to look at it. Then, he nodded.

“Yeah, here!” Steven dug his phone out of his pocket. “Take a picture with me?”

Off to the side Sabina, Greg and Connie were sorting through the music again.

“Oh, Pearl!” Sabina said suddenly. The music had changed to something slower, a song she actually recognized from the small collection that Steven had sent Domina. A slow song about dancing actually, which was a very strange thing to write a song about. White glanced over and went momentarily blue before allowing Sabina to pull her into a dance.

“Ugh, she’s so sappy.” Amethyst said in a good-natured tone.

“She always has been,” Blue muttered.

Yellow leaned over to Pink.

“Is she trying to dance?” Yellow asked, gesturing at Domina who was in fact trying to dance, emphasis on ‘trying’. Pink had spent a large portion of Domina’s childhood trying to keep the diamond from copying her and was largely unsuccessful. Domina didn’t so much as dance as vaguely sway in time with the music and occasionally move into forms that were a close match to the ones Pink favored.

“Domina, no...” Pink said with a sigh. Domina stopped and blushed as she saw the smiles from Garnet and Amethyst. After a moment of hesitation, Pink went over. What did it matter? It wasn’t as if they were on Homeworld anymore. She adjusted Domina’s feet and hands then led the dance. Domina smiled broader that Pink had seen in a while.  

“I thought you were against me dancing?” Domina asked.

“I think I’m more against you making a fool of yourself. Then again, with the hair...”

“I... thought an empathetic gesture would be nice.” Domina said sheepishly. Pink smiled and shook her head. This was something she should have done a long time ago. And part of her wondered if she was simply too late now.

Should she have shown her attachment earlier? If Domina knew how much she meant to Pink, would she be pushing her away now? If Domina knew how proud Pearl was of her, would she be so hesitant about talking about the motives behind her actions?

The music changed to something faster and Pearl picked up the pace to something closer to a swing dance. Usually, she didn’t have anyone to dance with, and this was not perfect by any means, but it was fun. Domina laughed as they spun, and Pearl grinned, then pulled her into a dip, only to fall over completely. Domina was much heavier than your average pearl.

They collapsed on each other. Domina still laughing and Pearl practically dissolving into giggles. At ease for the first time in so many weeks, her gem was warm as she got to her feet and offered a hand to Domina as she had so many times before.

There was a flash of light, and Pink faded away, leaving only Sunstone.

[ohsoethical]

September Exposé: Louis Vuitton

Hey guys! Another exposé and this time it’s slightly different.

Generally, there is a wide assumption that, due to the hugely excessive price tags luxury brands place on their products, more money is invested in fair wages, safe work conditions, ethically sourced materials etc.

NAH B.

This month, I’m going to prove that this is not the case, by exposing a rather well known luxury brand…

LOUIS VUITTON

We see our faves wearing their attire, the A list models stunting on the catwalk in all LV everything, their over the top blockbuster-esque adverts that make me think wow is it really that deep. But don’t be fooled by the glitz and glam of it all. 

From torturing animals, to poor working conditions, to refusing to disclose any information regarding their supply chain, its time we digged a lil deeper into why we need to be wary of luxury brands such as this one.

P.S. I really struggled to get the line ‘Louis Vuitton under her underarm’ out of my head during this whole process #pray4yisha

ANIMAL CRUELTY

Firstly, I disagree with the murder of animals for the sake of fashion. It literally makes no sense to me, is messed up, and cannot be justified. 

Obviously then, I was absolutely horrified when I read and watched the extent of the torture animals are enduring to provide the materials LV use for their products. I’ve linked the videos, but be warned, they are extremely graphic and hard to watch.

Rabbit farms: 

In 2014, the animal welfare campaigning group Last Chance for Animals released research they had been conducting for two years on 70 rabbit farms in Spain, from which high end brands including LV had sourced from. Rabbits were found confined to tiny cages with unstable flooring for their entire two year lives and workers were found “callously bashing sick rabbits to death.” The crippled, diseased and severely wounded rabbits were left to suffer with no medical treatment. Sometimes farmers strangled baby rabbits and left them to die. Honestly, the video is absolutely heartbreaking, I literally cannot understand how such behaviour can be normalised and practiced so carelessly. https://vimeo.com/105515629

Crocodile farms: 

(I actually made the decision to make a post on LV after reading about this particular case in Tansy Hoskins’ ‘The Anticapitalist Book of Fashion’- a great book!)

Earlier this year, PETA bought a stake in Louis Vuitton’s owner LVMH, to pressure them to stop using crocodile skin, and giving them the right to attend shareholder meetings and question the board. 

This comes after an investigation in crocodile farms in Vietnam, where tens of thousands of them are raised and killed to make ‘luxury’ leather bags. They found crocodiles living in crammed filthy pits, hacked apart and left to die. Workers electroshocked crocodiles then attempted to kill them by cutting into their necks and ramming metal rods down their spines. The animals shake vigorously when this happens, and can still be alive after having been cut open and left to bleed out. Indeed, experts have found that crocodiles remain conscious for over an hour after their spinal cord has been severed and their blood vessels cut. Can you imagine that kind of pain!? The investigators also witnessed the skin being cut off crocodiles, observing one crocodile that continued to move after being skinned, clearly still alive.  In just one farm, 1,500 crocodiles were slaughtered every three months. About 5,000 were kept in concrete enclosures, some narrower than the length of their bodies, and kept in these conditions for 15 months before being killed. https://investigations.peta.org/vietnam-crocodile-skin-farm/

POOR WORKING CONDITIONS IN ITALY

Researchers have found poor working conditions among workers producing shoes for big brands, including Louis Vuitton, in Italy. For example, while a family requires at least €1600 to afford a decent standard of living, workers at entry level were found receiving wages that wouldn't go any higher than €1200, with home workers receiving just €850. The illegal industry is also growing, with subcontracting firms secretly hiring workers at lower prices, and workers receiving contracts requiring them to work excessive hours, or work on day rates which severely cut their wages. This move towards insecure and flexible labour and thus the overall reduction of social protection is the result of Italy competing with countries such as Bangladesh to provide cheap labour to brands.

POTENTIAL RIGHTS ABUSES IN BANGLADESH

In Bangladesh, two mobile telephone systems have been set up, allowing garment workers to anonymously report signs of human trafficking, delayed wages and child labour. From Jan-June 2016, there were responses from 85 factories (about 3% of sector), and Louis Vuitton was found to be among many brands who sourced from these factories. Altogether, 5200 workers dialled into the system, reporting at least 500 incidents of child labour. The data found that 20% of the sample were at an elevated or high risk of child labour, while 60% were at an elevated or high risk of fire safety violations.

In particular, one article has reported on workers toiling in leather tanneries in Bangladesh, which provide the leather used to make products for brands including Louis Vuitton. Those working in these tanneries in Bangladesh take high health risks and frequently fall ill, due to the chemicals they are required to use without protective equipment and the laborious tasks required of them. Workers are found suffering from chronic skin diseases, respiratory illnesses and gastric problems, however continue to work in these conditions, due to their desperate financial situation. There is also concerns regarding the number of young people found working in these tanneries, including a 13 year old who was found working 10-hour days.

“Every month I am ill. Any time I can get sick because this environment is so bad, but I don’t have any other employment options.” Mohammed Belal- a 30 year old tannery worker who has worked in leather tanneries since he was 10, he suffers from gastric problems and headaches

HIDING THEIR ABUSE

You may notice that this exposé is shorter than previous ones. That’s because Louis Vuitton is hiding pretty much EVERYTHING. They refuse to disclose information regarding their supplies, their main production countries, nor do they disclose the names and addresses of their supplier factories. Indeed, Louis Vuitton and many other luxury brands are rated very low in terms of transparency, at just 15%.  This allows them to get away with much more than is probably mentioned in this post. We are even told to assume the worst, considering there is literally no information on their website regarding sourcing or labour standards policies.

In fact, this was highlighted in an attempted investigation by The Guardian. They found that many of LV’s shoes that were stamped as ‘Made in Italy’ were actually made in Transylvania, in secret, hidden factories. Management apparently make great efforts to avoid LV factories turning up on a Google Search. The factory they attempted to investigate had no mention of LV, just a shadow of the Louis Vuitton checkerboard print on the factory walls. 

While these shoes were made in Transylvania, they were ‘finished’ in France and Italy (soles are added). This is because, according to European parliament laws,  the country of origin for a product is the one where the items underwent “the last, substantial, economically justified processing”.This means that, by having the soles added in Italy or France, LV can have that prestige ‘made in Italy/France’ title on their products, while exploiting the low-wage labour in Romania, where a worker’s earnings for six months is equal to a single pair of mid-priced Louis Vuitton leather court shoes (idk what they are either).

As the Guardian researchers came across a big glass window overlooking the factory floor, with hundreds of workers inside, they were quickly ushered away from the glass and the factory visit was then abruptly ended.

So there you go. It’s important to note that most of these criticisms apply to the majority of luxury brands, so please don’t exempt them from criticism because they are equally as clapped.

 What pisses me off the most about these luxury brands is that they continue to exploit workers and torture animals, while being held in high esteem by society and the media, as though to possess anything by these criminals, or be associated with them in anyway is a sign that you have ‘made it’ or have safely secured a spot in the upper echelons of life. There is nothing prestige or distinguished about skinning crocodiles alive or hiding your workers so no one knows about the abuses you’re committing just for you to become one of the most profitable brands in the world.

Once again, we need to get our voices heard and call them out on their bullshit. Below are ways in which you can contact Louis Vuitton and let them know we are fully aware of their corruption.

Twitter: @LouisVuitton_UK @LouisVuitton

https://www.lvmh.com/contact/

Insta: @lmvh

Sources:

https://www.fashionunited.com/fashion-news/fashion/fashion-labels-deny-sourcing-from-horror-fur-farms-in-spain-20141709497081

https://investigations.peta.org/vietnam-crocodile-skin-farm/

http://www.triplepundit.com/2016/10/early-warning-systems-reveals-child-labor-bangladeshs-garment-industry/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/17/revealed-the-romanian-site-where-louis-vuitton-makes-its-italian-shoes

https://issuu.com/fashionrevolution/docs/fr_fashiontransparencyindex2017

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/peta-buys-louis-vuitton-fashion-moet-hennessey-shares-stocks-lvmh-crocodile-skin-products-exotic-a7525631.html

https://cleanclothes.org/news/2015/01/23/italian-factory-conditions-deteriorate

http://www.ucanews.com/news/the-extremely-unhealthy-life-of-the-bangladesh-tannery-worker/70421

[falconisms]

Mr.Lang - Ch 1

Fandom: Marvel Pairing: Scott Lang/Sam Wilson Warnings: None Word Count: 2,977 Summary: Scott is a single, overworked dad that has come to the realization that he can’t keep asking his ex-wife and friends to watch Cassie five days of the week when he comes across an old babysitter ad by a Sam Wilson.  

A/N: i got lazy editing so if theres any mistakes or if it flows weird i M SORRY

ao3 link

“What do you mean you can’t watch Cassie?”

“Scott, it’s a two hour drive out. I can’t be doing it three times a week.”

“I’m working four jobs to make sure I can care for her. Isn’t this what you wanted Maggie? Me to clean up my act and be able to support Cassie?”

“It is, but isn’t four jobs a little excessive? She’s your daughter, you need to be able spend more time with her. Finding people to watch her in such short notice was bound to stop working.”

“I can’t afford to have daycare five days outta the week Maggie. Sometimes I can barely make rent.”

“I’ll take her this time but seriously Scott, I’m sure you can find a babysitter that will change wages because of your situation. I know it’s hard, but you really are doing a great job.” Scott briefly heard someone whisper to Maggie on the other line. “ Alright, I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow when you get off work.”

“Thanks Mags.” Scott let out and pulled the phone away from his ear, watching the call end. Find a babysitter that’s willing to work five days a week and willing to change their pay rate because of Scott’s sob story. No problem.

**

Turns out finding a babysitter to do just that was a big problem. Either they were willing to work five days a week but didn’t even blink at Scott’s story or they felt bad for his situation but weren’t willing to put in the time. Having lost all hope, he moped around his whole shift at his gas station job.

The store was run down and dead silent except one old man who was actually dying as he looked slowly over all the lottery tickets, and back over them again. Searching for anything to keep Scott from falling asleep, he pulled out one of the month old newspapers they had shoved behind the newer ones. Turning from sports to comics to local news, he ended up in the job search.

Scott already was tossing around four jobs on top of raising a kid, he shouldn’t be looking at old job offers. It’s just light reading material, don’t get any ideas Lang. He thought to himself. So that’s what he did, mindlessly scanned over the words until one ad actually caught his eye.

Babysitter for hire. Flexible, open hours and cheap. Everything Scott needs.

Should he really trust an old babysitter ad that charges $5 an hour? Probably not. Who knows, the person might not be a great babysitter at that rate, or their offer might not  be open with all the time that’s passed. But he’s willing to try, he has to. Looking closer at the fihe print, Scott sees a name.

Sam Wilson.

Under the name simply has a phone number. Alright, this is just something Scott will have to do. He’ll call this “Sam Wilson”, talk to them about the ad and then he’ll leave them with Cassie for a few hours and report back to see how it went on her standards. If she’s willing to try a babysitter.

Scott grabbed some scissors from the managers keep behind the counter and cut out the full ad and shoved it into his pocket. To look like he was working, he sorted the papers by date and threw away all the older ones.

**

A sweet cry of “Daddy!” and sounds of sock covered feet running down the cramped hallway when he opened the front door put smile on Scott’s face immediately. He bent down right when Cassie came into sight. Her hair was braided into pigtails and a crown sat on top of her head. She barreled towards her dad with her short arms spread for a hug. Scott scooped her up as soon as there was contact between the two.

“Hey Princess!” He beamed, lifting Cassie up. “Did I miss the tea party this afternoon? I never got an invitation.” She laughed while shaking her head, making her pigtails bounce back and forth. “I didn’t miss it? Then what are we standing around for Cass? We got a tea party to throw.” Scott gently put her down so he could take off his shoes and put his keys away.

“No Daddy!” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head again. Scott bent down to meet her face to face, raising an eyebrow in question. “I didn’t invite you ‘cause you’re busy all the time.” He immediately placed his hands on her small shoulders and  ran them up and down the upper half of her arms.

“Oh but I’m never too busy to spend time with you Peanut.” Scott looked up from Cassie to meet Luis’ gaze, hoping he’ll get the message that they need to speak before he heads out. “Now, would you look at the time?” He looked at an imaginary watch on his wrist, causing Cassie to laugh a little, “It’s time for the after party tea party!  Is the table all set for your guests?” Cassie’s eyes were wide as she quickly shook her head. Crossing his arms, Scott puffed out his chested, “Well, you better go set it! Your guests will be arriving shortly Princess!” Cassie let out a short scream and ran back towards her room to set up for a second tea party.

“Two tea parties in one day? That’s a lot for one little girl to handle.” Luis had a cheeky smile on his face at the sight of Cassie running excitedly into her bedroom. He lifted off the tiara Cassie surely convinced him to wear.

“Ah, Princess Luis,” Scott stood up from his kneeling to speak to his daughter to do a deep bow towards his best friend. “How was this evening with Princess Cassie?” Standing up straight again, he walked over to Luis to clap their right hands together, pull each other in and patting each other sharply on the back.

“As good as you can expect, you got a great kid Scotty.” They both looked down the cramped hallway leading towards the two bedrooms in the small apartment. Cassie’s door was open and you could hear her humming as she set up her plastic tea set.

Nodding, Scott turned back to Luis, “Well man, thanks again for watching after her today. I’ll make it up to you somehow, promise.”

“Nah, you’ve done enough for me man.” Luis shook his head and walked over to the stuff he brought along. Slinging his backpack on, slipping his shoes on and handing Scott the small tiara, Luis headed towards the door to leave. “You and Cass have fun, I’ll see ya later.”

“Hey before you go, I need your advice on something.” Luis turned back to Scott at that in time to see him pull out the newspaper ad he got earlier at work. He held it out for Luis to grab and look over. “It’s a babysitter ad. A cheap, flexible one, like it’s too good to be true.”

“And that’s exactly what’s setting you off,” He replied, taking the ad from Scott and looked it over. “So what’s on your mind?”

“I need to take it up with the Princess,” Scott pointed his thumb over his shoulder, “ and depending on how she reacts, hire them for an hour or so and see what Cassie thinks of them?” Scott fidgeted with the hem of his polo work shirt. “But isn’t that weird? Hiring a stranger to watch your kid for a few hours and asking send kid to tell you how it went? Yeah that’s too weird. Maybe there’s a coworker at one of my jobs who’s kid coul-”

“Scotty.” Scott snapped his mouth shut at the tone of Luis’ voice. “Give it a try. Cassie will be totally ok with a babysitter. How much is at risk here really? Ten dollars?” Luis handed the ad back to Scott and opened the front door. “Whatever happens, you’ll figure it out amigo, you always do.” With that, Luis waved his hand up and left Scott to decide on his own.

However when a “Daddy!” was called out from down the hall, Scott knew he wasn’t totally alone in this decision.

Heading down the hallway to the little girl’s room with a bright smile on his face, Scott called down to her “I’m coming Princess.” When he appeared in Cassie’s doorway, she took hold of three of his fingers, her way of holding his hand, and led him towards her small table with plastic china set out on it for a tea party.

“You’ll sit here Daddy,” She pointed at a spot on the ground, Scott sat down at with his legs crossed. The table was low to the ground and had chipping paint, it was missing its matching chairs so instead Cassie took pillows and cushions from around the apartment when she sat at it. Around the table on the other cushions sat Cassie’s favorite stuffed bears and toys, playing the part as the other guests at the party.

The eight year old sat straight across from Scott and began to pour imaginary tea into each plastic cup. She started on her left, making it around to each guest, asking if they want any sugar or milk. “Milk for your tea?” She looked up at Scott once she was done pouring him his own cup of tea.

He place the small silver tiara Luis was previously wearing on his head and nodded with gusto, “Of course Princess Cassie, you always remember how I enjoy my tea.” Scott sat up straight and spoke in some sort of accent. Cassie giggled with a wrinkled nose, finishing her cup of tea with three imaginary sugar cubes. She lifted her tea cup with her pinkie extended out, sat up straight like her father and tried to mock his accent.

“Thank you for coming Princess Daddy,” Cassie held the cup towards Scott to initiate a delicate cheers. Scott followed her lead, lifting the cup with his pinkie finger out and carefully met his daughter’s plastic tea cup halfway. A soft clink of the plastic signaled them to left the cups to their mouths and pretend to take a sip of the tea.

“Ah! The best tea as always Princess Cassie!” Scott exclaimed after he took a sip of his imaginary tea.

“Daddy?” Cassie put down her teacup and looked intently at Scott. “What’s wrong?” He blinked, taken aback.

“What do you mean Cass?” She lead forward over the short table and placed her small hands on his face.

“Your face is all crinkled.” She rubs up and down his cheeks, stretching his skin down slightly. Scott didn’t realize his brows were furrowed this whole time, constant worry on his face. Of course Cassie picked up on it. He relaxed his face and gave her a small smile while grabbing her hands.

“I have a question for you.” He pulled his daughters hands off his cheeks and let out a sigh through his nose, “Would you be okay with having a babysitter that watches you when I’m not home?”

“But I have Mommy and Uncle Luis to watch me.” Cassie said, “I don’t need a babysitter.” Scott nodded and stood up, still holding one of Cassie’s hands, leading her out of the room and down to the apartments kitchen.

“I know Peanut, but Mommy and Luis can’t be here every time I need them to be.” The kitchen was cramped, holding one counter top and a square dinner table in the corner. Scott lifted Cassie up to sit in her spot at the dining table. “A babysitter can be here when I can’t.” Cassie pursed her lips while kicking her short legs back and forth.

Scott pulled out a tub of vanilla ice cream from the freezer in the fridge that was only a short distance away from the table. Scooping three scoops into a bowl and grabbing two spoons, he brought the bowl to Cassie. As soon as the bowl touched the table Scott held up one finger towards the young girl and went to put the tub away.

“Also,” He came back with sprinkles, “We’ll do a test run.” He poured some sprinkles on Cassie’s half of the ice cream and handed her one of the spoons.

“A test run?” She questioned before taking a bite.

“Yup. Tomorrow is Saturday, I don’t have to work. But I do need to get groceries. So I’ll ask them to watch after you for a few hours while I shop.” Scott took a large bite of ice cream.

“What’s their name?” She asked, a bit of ice cream on the corner of her mouth. Scott smiled, wiping the food off her face and pulled out the newspaper ad. “Sam Wilson.” She read. “Will they have tea parties with me?”

“I’m sure if you ask nicely they will have tea parties with you.” Scott ruffled her hair, “Now let’s finish up, it’s almost your bedtime.” Cassie nodded and shortly after they cleaned out the bowl of ice cream.

**

The clock read 8:45 pm by the time Cassie fell asleep. Scott left her bedroom door slightly ajar and headed back to the kitchen. He grabbed an apple for the fridge, the newspaper ad from the table and made his way to the ratty couch that resided in the living room area. Taking a bite of the apple, Scott pulled out his phone to dial the phone number on the ad. Soon he realized that it was late to make business related calls, and maybe they weren’t even available tomorrow, it was the weekend for god sake. They can afford a personal ad, they must be an adult. And if they don’t answer tonight, I’ll leave a voicemail. Cassie will understand. Besides she loved to go to the grocery store. Scott nodded to himself and pressed the call button before he talked himself back out of it.

The line rang a few times before being answered with a “Hello?” and some loud background noise.

Scott stuttered, “Hello, is this Sam Wilson?” He raised an eyebrow at the sound of glass clinking together.

“This is he, may I ask who is calling?” The man on the other end was now trying to speak over the background noise now.

“Oh. Yeah, This is Scott Lang?” He immediately slapped himself mentally for adding a question mark after his name. “I’m calling about your babysitting ad. In the paper. Babysitter for hire. That’s you right?” Scott placed his hand over his mouth before he rambled more.

“Babysitter ad?” Sam went quiet under the noises in the background, it sounded like voices and music? “Wait, that ad I put out like a month ago? I didn’t think anyone saw it.” Sam let out a breathy laugh, “Give me one second man.”

“Okay,” Scott stuttered again, left to the loud background until it suddenly stopped. “Hello?”

“Hey, I’m still here.” Sam’s voice replied immediately, “Sorry about that. So, the babysitting ad?”

“Um,” Scott blanked out from hearing Sam Wilson’s voice fully. It was smooth, calming even. “Are you still looking for a job?” He rushed out quickly.

“When do I start?”

“Wait. Really? Just like that you’re ready to start?” This Sam Wilson really seems like something else, thought Scott.

“Yeah, you’re the only person who has called me about that ad. You’re probably the only one who actually saw it.” Scott snorted at that. “So, what’s your story?”

“My story?”

“You call me about a month old babysitter ad. You have to have some life to lead you to this conversation.” Was Scott really that easy to figure out? That a mystery man that he’s been on the phone with for two minutes can come to the conclusion that Scott is in a tough spot.

Life could always be described as a ‘tough spot’ for Scott, ever since he was young with his sick mom. From theft to jail to release to starting his life back up while taking care of Cassie, calling a tough spot would be taking it lightly. But he can’t drop all that on a babysitter, a stranger, one that could be temporary no less. So Scott breathed in through his nose, gathering the courage to tell the other man how he sees it.

“I do lead some life, and the most important thing to me in that life is my daughter.” He nearly whispered. “Being a single dad in New York is nearly impossible. So here’s the deal. The idea of a babysitter is new to Cassie, I want her to be able to tell me if she’s okay with it or not. If you’re available, can you watch her for a couple of hours tomorrow morning?” Scott rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, clutching the apple he’s been holding. “If she likes you, I’ll tell you my story.”

Silence, he quickly brought the phone away from his ear to check if the call was still going and back. “Sounds like I got an impression to make. How old is she?” Sam asked after a while.

“Eight.” Answered Scott, hints of pride in his voice.

“Alright. Text this number with your address and when you want me to watch Cassie tomorrow and I’ll be there.” Sam ended the call before Scott had a chance to react. Pulling the phone away from his ear, he took another bite of the apple to collect his thoughts.

What’s done is done, it’s up to Cassie now. Scott concluded while pulling his phone back into his range of sight. He began to compose a new text to Sam Wilson. Running all the things he could say through his head, he decided to keep it to the point.

5621 43rd Ave Queens. 9:30 am. -Scott Lang

[fairchildlingpo1]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[mariasolemarionqi]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[mercedessharonwo1]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[kraussoutene]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[byronheeutgm]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[dainiaolivahm]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

[conniecogeie]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

Contact form submission

Quote request form submission

Phone call

Text message

Chat

Appointment booking

Newsletter signup

E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

Navigate to the Admin screen.

Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.

You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.

Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google Medium: organic Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?

How does that compare to the month before? Last year?

How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?

Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?

Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..

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