#they go through the restricted zone and just leave them in random places

[feroluce]

Given that Belobog is so full of snow, I'm kinda sad we never get to see any snowmen anywhere. Like that would have made for such a cute bg decoration!

And I think it would be especially funny for Sampo to make them, not out of pure, innocent whimsy and joy, but like specifically to be a menace smzhnsjd

Like Gepard keeps finding little snowmen out around the frontlines. And normally he would just turn a blind eye to this like he does with other things (like the shitty amateur distillery no one thinks he knows about); war sucks, their own damn leader is trying to kill them and Gepard is treading water just trying to keep Cocolia from using his guards as cannon fodder. If his soldiers want to make some snowmen in their downtime, then they should be allowed that. God knows they've earned it.

BUT SOMEONE IS MAKING SNOWMEN THAT LOOK LIKE HIM, DAMMIT!!!

Gepard keeps finding them down the back alleys and more hidden parts of the frontlines! And they all have the same grumpy little face, with blue-painted rocks for eyes and sometimes even gold-colored bullet casings for hair! And he knows who it is the second he finds another little blue haired, green eyed snowman next to it! Fuckin' Koski is sneaking in here, and easily enough that he has the time to taunt him!

Gepard once found a little Snow Geppie with angry eyebrows and red roses stuck in its blushing cheeks that was handcuffed to a weapons rack, which was when he realized someone had pickpocketed his handcuffs. He punches the head clean off the little Snow Sampo nearby, only to discover that it is also holding his wallet, minus all the shield he'd had in it that morning. Gepard kicks it for good measure.

One time he found a little Snow Sampo offering roses to a little Snow Geppie, and he quickly knocked those over too before anyone else could see them or his red face. He swears he can feel Sampo snickering and mocking him nearby.

Sometimes, Gepard finds little Snow Sampos with tiny sacks thrown over their shoulders, all filled with items that are SUPPOSED to be in the depths of the guarded Silvermane storehouses. Sampo technically isn't even stealing anything, he's just showing Gepard that he could if he wanted to, and poor Gepard is going to pop an aneurysm.

Pela: Good morning, Captain. Have you been outside of your tent yet?

Gepard: No. ....Why.

Pela: No reason. Say, have you heard of any break ins recently?

Gepard: No, why.

And Pela holds open the tent flap and there's a ton of tiny little Silvermane Guards snowmen in tight neat rows, all with their little stick arms up in salute, and each one with an actual, stolen official helmet-mask.

Pela: You run a real tight ship out here, huh.

Gepard: (looooong weary muffled sigh as he drags a hand down his face)

[objectcreations]

Object Universe Theory: Sketch Zone

Please know that this is entirely my opinion. You don’t have to agree with it, but this is just how I think the object show universe works in my mind. Please be respectful, thank you😁!

Whenever we see the first episode of an object show, most of the time they’re shown to be in a random location, commonly grassy areas such as fields/valleys. This always seemed odd to me as anyone knows that a bunch of objects didn’t start their lives in a field, no. In fact, I think where objects begin their lives is in an entirely different place.

Whenever we create an asset for an object, we go through rough drafts, trial and error, sketches of numerous designs. I believe that when we discard these attempts they go somewhere, more specifically, a different dimension.

The Sketch Zone was given its name due to the only inhabitants being poorly drawn circles. These circles are stuck in this void like dimension, with nothing but other circles in sight. Due to this, it didn’t take long for them to go mad, some more than others I dare say.

However, that soon changed when a mysterious voice appeared, and offered them something they couldn’t refuse, individuality, and uniqueness. These two things were what the circles have been craving for since they gained consciousness.

The voice gave them several stacks of sheets, listing thousands, if not millions of different objects to become. They were given the option to fully become their own self. There were little to no restrictions. They were even able to choose their personalities, which limbs they kept, amongst many other things as well.

Once the circles were done, they transformed in to their new bodies, and were able to leave the sketch zone once and for all. The price however, would be that their memories would be erased of this universe. They didn’t care, as they finally had what they dreamed of all along.

And with that, the first group of objects was created.

[blankdblank]

Poke Pt 5 - Graduation

…

Names bled on and on in the coliseum shaped event center where your ceremony was being held after having giggled your way through the excited hugs and chatter of your adopted brother who now sat filming from his seat still smiling. Underneath the crimson robe and silver sash you had settled on a black sleeveless blouse with a floppy ribbon bow in the front that bled to blush to match the dress slacks you had on that bled from black at the waist to blush on your hips and hung in circles around your nude colored wedges entirely.

Speeches from the school officials had already been given and more than a few glances at the small barrel beside the podium were stolen until with diploma in hand after everyone else had accepted theirs you listened to Cindy give her speech as Salutatorian. Waiting off to the side of the stage once you tied the ponytail of your curls not held in the braids down the sides of your head to help heel them in control.

Tucked in your trembling hands pressed to the front of your legs was the diploma and framed plaque stating that you had been granted one of the six offered scholarships matched by the medal on the ribbon around your neck. You wanted your mask and with a glance at Eddie you couldn’t help but grin and giggle to yourself at the weird face he made your way even with view of the anxious and curious Avengers who sat to the side of the three teenagers who sat whispering about the project with phones ready to film the demonstration.

Cindy stepped aside and gave you a comforting grin tapping her finger on the mug rested on the podium you had almost lost three times in the back halls before the walk out to take your seats. Up to the podium the Dean walked with a smile stating, “Thank you Cindy. And now our Valedictorian, Pluto Pear has not just a speech but a demonstration of a project she has been perfecting in the final semester of her time here at Midtown. And we are so proud to say she chose our school to attend after immigrating to the United States from her studies in Sweden and Russia.”

He smiled your way in his step aside to his own seat after another glance at the barrel on your step forward to the round of cheers and excited whistles. Forcing out a grin you said, “I think the one thing that my teachers can agree on is that I tend to ramble when not on a crisp outline, so when I was told I was expected to come up with a speech things got a bit on a tangent. I went from about five sheets of torn up ideas of motivational things to try and say obviously my mind went to what we could aspire to do, which I am halfway anticipating myself to end up with a fancy hat shop in the end thanks to my indecisiveness on which way I’m going.”

Chuckles rippled through your classmates and you said, “Which had my mind wander naturally as it was Christmas time talks of Howard Stark and his son both personally flying in the big tree for the lighting ceremony easing the usual transportation nightmare we’ve faced for now on half a century. And I came up with these.” You said lifting the rings that had been laid on the top of the barrels lid after settling your diploma and framed plaque on the podium.

Eyes scanned over the rather unimpressive rings that with a shift of the camera across the monitors that closed in on your upper body and the rings allowing Tony to use his enhanced glasses to try and analyze the rings himself from his seat that from the distance he got confused at the lack of known metal in them. “There’s big money and hassle in transportation of agriculture and if we could just get the plant from the ground to the location it’s going to be planted in.” Your eyes dropped from the crowd to the rings and the handheld calculator like controller you pulled from your pocket that had the matte grey rings of sideways laying circles that upon its green glow inside they now took spiral shapes in their rotation around the charged reaction almost like a double helix from a distance. The colors soon rippling to a spectrum of colors enough to fill out a pastel rainbow, the reaction that had Loki mutter in Ancient Asgardian, “Thor, I may be incorrect in my assumption-,”

Thor in awe replied, “That’s a rainbow portal. She’s tapped Yggdrasil.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd while you were watched using your fingertips to expand the rings to about two feet around. And in a couple waves of the controller one ring floated a couple feet off the ground next to you on one side of the podium and the other above your head on your right a few feet away. The mug with cow patterns on it was lifted and you said, “I started with a couple mugs, which are now broken, but I finally got the field right for the exit.”

From your palm the mug flipped at the fling of your hand to spiral in its drop to fall through the hoop that sparked up and was mirrored by the beam of rainbow light that shone out the other ring aimed at the ground the mug fell through to hover a couple feet from the ground. Tight and sharp MJ’s hand gripped Peter’s sleeve shaking his open mouthed self as she squeaked out, “She did it! Beam me up Scotty, right there!”

Ned open mouthed said, “Someone from our school built a teleporter. This is beyond cool!” his comments died to excited comments from the entire crowd.

In their silence you said after fetching the mug, “Which, it’s a mug. Where’s the fun in that? I forgot to bring my daisies for a living example, so-,” Shrieks of excitement and gasps came in a surge of people to their feet watching your spring over the ring that expanded to morph around your body which vanished in a poof of your gown and lift of your cap from your stubborn curls fighting it all day.

You appeared first, expected but shockingly so at the same time, to fall from the ring on the other side. Awkwardly to one knee you forced the landing, as if you couldn’t naturally stick it and the place erupted as Tony stood open mouthed still recording your downward gaze and muffled giggles at the response to the project. To your side the cap dropped to a hover and was grabbed by you and put on again. When your eyes rose out of the beam you stepped and rose up again to fetch the controller that in the spark of the ring you had leapt into had it hover to be lowered into the barrel of salt to douse the reaction. “And that’s what the salt is for.”

To your side the second ring hovered and began to spark while being lowered in the barrel you added the lid to again and said after another giggle when the crowd had silenced again. “So this year aliens fell from the sky, none of us really know what to do with that news and I might end up with nothing more than a fancy hat shop to my name when I earn my headstone, but who knows where we’ll be. Because that’s all we really have in the end, the limits we set for ourselves for the stance of impossible. Thank you so very much for working with my randomness all of these years I will never forget the impression each and every one of you have made upon the school and my experience in it.” You gave the cheering crowd an anxious wave and lifted the diploma, plaque and mug you set on the barrel you hoisted up to your hip and smiled at the still awe struck Dean and staff on your way to your seat to sit partially hiding behind your barrel.

Pats and excited hugs came from the students around you in the rain of graduation caps all the way back to the back halls you went and waded through a barrage of requests for pictures out to the front hall. There both the Princes smiled proudly as Eddie scooped you and your barrel up in a tight hug the teens followed with their own hugs between questions and excited chatter.

“Let’s feed you!” Eddie said and out to the front entrance where the cars Tony had ordered were filled to take you to the high end eatery that took up the whole floor of a hotel. A place Tony assured your brother was open to ‘substitutions’ on the menu after his having heard from Peter about your troubles on school trips and places to eat before.

“You can leave the barrel over there.” He said gesturing to an empty table where you also left the robe, sash and the medal you removed to hang over one of the chairs. With a free swipe of his phone Tony read the results of the scan he took of the contents, namely the ring and asked, “That wasn’t electricity, and, the barrel is giving off oxygen. How’d you do it?”

“There’s stronger forces on the planet than electricity.”

“It’s not radioactive, and it’s in a barrel so solar and wind is out.”

Thor said, “Shieldmaiden Pear has tapped into the strength of Yggdrasil.”

Tony looked at you saying, “Eggs, you powered the rings with eggs?”

Loki said in his glide of your chair out to usher you away from the nosy scientist in the politest of ways. “Yggdrasil is the tree that joins the nine realms.”

“Photosynthesis is far more powerful than people give it credit.” Crossing to his side you lowered to ease onto the chair the Prince slid in closer to the table at Eddie’s side then Loki strolled around the table to claim his own seat across from yours.

“Flower power, and here I thought we were getting somewhere intelligent.”

Loki says, “You should listen to her. She’s the first mortal to have grasped the concept of harnessing that power source or even recognizing it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Don’t be ridiculous. Flowers?” Stark said taking his own seat while the others took theirs and Peter stole a glance at his friends who settled on your other side past him.

“People plant sunflowers and mushrooms in radioactive zones to neutralize the radiation. People never knew electricity existed for a huge chunk of our history, they used to drink radium before they realized how potent and dangerous it was. Mint and blackberry plants can take over civilizations if not kept in check. You have no idea what power you water in those tiny bright colored pots on your windowsill. You harness that you can change the world in a way that can’t be governed or restricted or hoarded to be used against your enemies. Countries keep drilling for energy when all they need is to just think outside of the box. It’s so much more than Mother Nature at work here. Every seed knows what to do, how?”

He shakes his head, “In their DNA I would assume. Same as us.”

“And like us we have a power center. Our brains. Theirs is just smaller. This whole planet down to its molten core is alive.”

MJ said, “Just like that DR Who episode with the flying space whale.”

“Exactly. We need to stop electrocuting the Pilot of this ship and let it take us to where we’re going.”

Loki, “Finally, someone brilliant on this planet. Only took six thousand years.”

“You know people aren’t going to believe you right?” Banner said in a reach for the wine glass of water left on the table in front of him.

“Oh they will. And they’ll start burning the planet down to make sure they keep control. Because there’s nothing more dangerous in the history of our race than a human who feels like they are close to being powerless. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Tony looked you over with a purse of his lips for a moment. “They’ll believe me. Then like so many brilliant minds before me one day I’ll just be gone, or discredited and branded as deranged.”

Bruce asked, “So how does some mystical tree link to those rings?”

Thor chuckled, “The rings are a Rainbow Portal similar to our Bifrost transportation system.”

Tony asked as the waiter offered out the menus to each of you, “She can go to other planets with those rings?”

“They only work about a mile apart right now.” You said lowering your eyes to the menu your fingers blindly flipped open.

Thor, “Mainly due to the current setting I would wager. However it would merely be a matter of linking the system to one of our gateways and the distance could be heightened exponentially.”

Tony said, “But she could go to another planet?”

Bruce asked, “And you came up with that from a giant Christmas tree?”

“More or less.”

Tony, “How?”

“Not saying, or selling it. Not to who will have access to it through you.”

“Ah,” he said and gave a nod, “Very bold statement.”

MJ said, “She’s got a point. You help the government who will want to use it, next thing we know another Hiroshima happens without any alarm system to warn the targets.”

Tony scoffed and Eddie said, “No shortage of History proving that logical response,” he looked to the Princes asking, “They ask you about the Bifrost yet and how it works?”

Thor, “We refused to grant access. The planet is not prepared for this technology.”

Bruce teased, “And yet a child figured it out.”

Loki said, “Yggdrasil trusts very few gatekeepers. Were anyone to steal the technology from Miss Pear they would find them uncooperative, and that mile limit is the stretch between root channels where the power is the strongest.”

Bruce, “So the tree won’t let anyone else use the rings?”

“Not a soul,” Thor said.

And Tony asked, “Why her?”

Loki answered, “She listens. Clearly.”

Tony looked to you as Bucky said, “You must really love plants, build that to just move them.”

Peter said, “You know there are Mother trees, who adopt whole forests of smaller trees. And their roots can stretch and tangle for miles around the trunks. Trees share nutrients and food they get from sunlight even if they grow in the shade of taller trees. They talk and help each other.” Everyone looked at him and he said, “If people were like trees we’d be living in Eden. We have to protect the trees, and if we can move them safer, could help everyone.”

Bucky asked you, “So you’re going to study plants?”

“Among other things. Did you go to school, internet says Steve went to Art School?”

“I was actually in study to be a real estate agent. Which seemed to be a good way to earn some scratch back then.”

“You gonna pick it up again? I’m sure the team could help you find something to sell. After all they have the Captain in propaganda infomercials for our school to try and compel us to be our better selves.”

Steve glanced away out of embarrassment as Ned and MJ started parroting their favorite clips back to him that had Bucky smirk and eager to hear more on what his friend had been up to for a living while they were apart.

Steve asked, “You have a job for school?”

“I usually keep four during summers and two part time jobs the rest of the year.”

Bruce said, “Can’t imagine the scholarship will help much. What did you get?”

“Ten grand. It’ll help me pay for the rest of my Bachelor’s Degrees, and maybe half of one class into my bigger degrees.”

Tony said, “So I would assume you would be in need of a paid internship then? With a certain intelligent entrepreneur who has a lab at his disposal.”

“I think I might not be the person you would want to hire. I rarely share my ideas and tend to change designs of others to improve upon them.”

Tony, “And how would you improve upon my super suit, for example?”

“I would certainly reverse the audio pulses it emits into your body and those around you.”

“My suit doesn’t give off pulses. I’ve tested it.” He replied and you nodded turning the page in the menu after you had given your drink order to the waiter. His eyes scanned over you and he asked, “How did you test that theory of yours?”

“You aren’t very good at keeping your suit to yourself if you didn’t want other people scanning it. Even videos on YouTube show the signs.”

Bruce said, “The other guy doesn’t like being near your suit very long, could be something there.”

The delivery of drinks had their argument over what it could be stop as he noticed Eddie’s hushed conversation with you and pat of his hand on your hand rested on top of your lap. The motion had Tony’s eyes linger on you while you gave a brow twitching butcher of the Chef’s favorite dish to fit your own preference that had enough of a reaction to cause the Princes to do the same and see how obedient the Chef would be to Stark’s paycheck. And when you were alone in the room again he said, “I suppose now would be as good a time as any. You now have 50 grand to go to your schooling.”

“I’m not selling you anything and I have enough jobs to fund my way.”

“You would prefer to struggle your way through years of debt and then be lost to the abyss of not having a job and applying to the few locations possible?”

“Your grandfather worked a fruit stand and his wife worked in a shirt factory when they came to this country.” That had Steve and Bucky glance between you, “I’m gonna carve my own future. I’ll be fine. Builds character. Thank you though. I know you won’t miss it but all the same, no thank you.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” he scoffed, “You obviously don’t know the worth of even a grand.”

“Coming from the Billionaire who could change the lives of everyone in this country and still have ample funds to retire on above Middle Class, you’re the one who doesn’t know what it would mean to someone who needs $20 to make it to Friday. I can work, I have some savings. Put your money where it can be useful to someone who doesn’t.”

“And who says it won’t be useful with you?”

“Who says I won’t just donate it to underprivileged schools to tide some teachers over when their checks are bound to be cut yet again thanks to that new bill Senate is pushing?”

“Who says I haven’t already donated to teacher salaries before?”

“There would be more schools named after you if you had. Big name like yours pays attention to the little people suddenly everyone cares, for a few minutes at least.”

“You don’t want some of that attention?” He asked and you shook your head. “You gave that presentation.”

“I’d have flunked an exam if I would have known I’d have to give a speech at all to run in third.” Making Bruce chuckle at the shared hatred of public speaking.

Thor broke the stalemate and asked, “Shieldmaiden Pear, which one of your parents does your brother resemble most?”

Eddie smirked and laid his hand across your lap and smiled when your hands settled around his forearm when he said, “I’m adopted. Found this one in the park, some assholes had roughed her up. Took her home and patched her up, never could get shaken free.”

Steve asked, “They catch the guys who did it?”

Eddie said, “Venom ate them. Got caught in a trap at the wrong time.”

Loki drew your eyes to him when he said, “Yes, the Symbiote. Known to be quite fond of children, and it is no bit of chance that him and that Misique character have grown close. Only way to find peace with their race is to allow them to find a host and then form a familial bond. Otherwise they decimate the population of the planet they are dropped on.”

Natasha asked, “Venom’s an alien?”

Bruce, “Symbiote? Like a parasite?”

Thor, “No more a parasite then your Hulk. Mutually protective entities who share the same physical space.”

Steve, “Alien, and he’s been here for years. How many more of him are there?”

Ned, “No wonder Misique was so skilled in taking the bad aliens down.”

Across the table in the flurry of chatter while you sat quiet a glance at the brothers was stolen. The blonde who gave you a puffy cheeked smile and Loki, who mid answer to Bucky shifted his gaze to follow the source of the gaze and looked over your face when you finished chewing your bite and lifted your glass of raspberry tea. A couple bites later and he looked again when the chair across from him was empty and Natasha took the chance to slip out behind you.

On the other side of the incredibly upscale stall she turned at the sound of your steps to the sink beside hers with a smile. “Impressive job today. And for the record I am proud of your want to build yourself up. Not easy, I’ve been there more than once. Plus you aren’t wrong, those rings out of your control would only spell disaster.”

You smirked through washing your hands and you asked, “How likely am I to end up with a check shoved into my pocket when I leave?”

“Fairly likely. Maybe not in your pocket, you impressed him. No matter what he says.”

Back to your seat you went and continued listening until it was time to gather your things and head for the car that Tony opened the door to saying, “You should take the money. Change your mind let me know. And we’ll get you as many degrees as you like.”

Loki said in his turn to say farewell after his brother had, “Celebrate today. You gave a fine demonstration to the other mortals and have discovered things far beyond their capabilities. Continue your research.”

“Thank you. And I know it was a bit of a lengthy ceremony.”

Thor chuckled teasing, “Clearly you are ignorant of the monotony of Asgardian Royal processions which can take up to half a day on occasion.”

“Not sure how I’d be anything but ignorant on anything royal. This planet or otherwise. Enjoy your day hope it turns out magnificent, Your Majesties. I’ll be off to take my barrel of salt home.”

They chuckled and nodded their heads to Eddie in his dip into the car behind you, eager to get you home and celebrate on your own. Off to the side however Tony asked Peter, “What was that with the tree bit at the table?”

Peter answered, “Bumble told me. We watched Prom night drives home together.”

“Pete, don’t go down that path.” He sighed and Rhodey stepped closer with the others.

Rhodey asked, “What else she say?”

Peter, “Said she’s been looking in to SHIELD, said there’s spies,” that had faces drop and he continued, “She’s got PTSD. When she moved here what happened to her parents, she saw stories in the press about people hurting kids and she started having flashbacks.”

Natasha said, “She did say she was in therapy now.”

Steve asked Rhodey, “What’s PTSD?” quietly to not interrupt the teen.

Peter said, “She’s not a bad person, she’s just healing from some very bad stuff. And she’s trying to help people, maybe not the government, but the people.”

Tony said, “And just why hasn’t she said anything about that to me then?”

Reluctantly the teen said, “She said you haven’t been hurt by the system yet and you still trust it.”

Tony said, “So I trust the system and there’s spies in the organization that’s defending our country and possibly world. Sure, let’s distrust that.”

Bucky said, “If I wanted to bring down SHIELD I know where I’d get hired.”

And Peter said, “Hey, that’s what she said too.” He looked to the car that MJ called out from and he said, “Just give her a chance, she just needs some friends. Helped to save the world. Could be great for the team.”

Tony sighed and said to himself, “That would be useful, if she could be a team player.”

Pt 6

All –

@sherala007​, @mariannetora​​, @jesgisborne​, @knitastically​, @catthefearless​​, @theincaprincess​, ggbbhehe4455, @lilith15000​​, @alishlieb​​,

Not nsfw(smut) - @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore​

X Loki - @pastelhexmaniac

[creepy-crowleys]

[A security feed is uploaded.]

[And if the room shown is the one Crowley’s coming up on, there’s a new problem: It’s occupied, not by robots or drones or tanks, but by people. Seemingly ordinary people in lightweight Orochi armor, fighting against the facility’s computer system.]

Hm... Out of toys right now. But looks like you have new playmates.

[There’s no place to hide with the room’s glass walls and open layout; Crowley’s spotted immediately as she comes up the ramp. She and the three people working the terminals pause a moment to process each other’s sudden appearance - and just as suddenly weapons are drawn and a brand new three-on-one fight commences.

Crowley holds nothing back. An old man the first unfortunate to be grabbed, his head dashed viciously open against the terminal he had just occupied while Crowley fires potshots at the other two. The two hardly stand there and take it either, rifle and shotgun drawn to return fire as Crowley attempts to navigate deeper into the facility.

The feed jumps to a corridor slightly beyond where Crowley had entered, the sound of rapidly approaching combat echoing through the sterile environment. Crowley soon backs into view, sneaking looks at the barriered doorway behind her as shouts are raised from unseen rooms at either end of the corridor. One of the people from before also rushes into view, the other gone quiet and lost somewhere between the change of cameras.

The PA system blares.]

THE CORE IS A RESTRICTED ZONE. PERMISSION FROM THE ENTIRE TEAM IS REQUIRED.

[Back against a locked door, Crowley chooses a direction seemingly at random and dashes towards that end of the corridor.]

Honest, I don’t know who to root for.

[The feed jumps again to the room Crowley chose, unfortunately an apparent dead end. She charges through the two addition workers in the room regardless, stone spikes erupting from the floor to impale them as she goes, vaulting over and skidding across the terminal they’d been working at.

She works frantically at the terminal for any indication on how to unlock the door in the narrow moments before the group converges on her once more. 

Somehow, the old man, the first to be killed, is leading the pack, sword cleaving through the terminal like butter.

Hexagon-patterned panels on the floor glow to life as Crowley breaks from the room, tearing through the small crowd in the process.]

This is all very Sisyphean. Eh, Chuck?

[The feed returns to the corridor only briefly as Crowley sprints through to the unexplored room on the other side, an unfortunate mirror of the one she was just in with equally no way out or much at all beyond another terminal. There’s nowhere for her to go.

What follows is a drawn-out battle of attrition. While seems to be more than capable of holding her own against the group, attentive viewers will notice that the same people, once killed, return to the fight not even minutes later, seemingly unharmed. Familiar golden magic pulses from the hexagonal panels with every broken body that is pieced back together in full view of the feed.

It’s a mercy Crowley doesn’t get, and the constant assault takes its toll.

She crumples finally to bolt of conjured lightning by an elementalist in the group, fatigue and electricity leaving her twitching and vulnerable when the old man with sword pins her to the floor with it - a mistake in hindsight. 

There’s something to be said for wanting to live badly enough you’d kill yourself for it.

But after a brief exchange, Crowley twists on the blade, slicing herself all the deeper before any of the group can stop her. The camera glitches for only an instant, and her body is gone.

The feed flips through a few cameras in an attempt to find her before finally cutting out.]

Immortality doesn’t curb the agony, does it, Chuck?

[zodiactalks]

Understanding Gemini Woman

Conversations are meant to be exciting things. There is no better woman to enjoy random banter with than the Gemini woman. This energetic, charming individual is bound to entertain you for days. The Gemini woman’s seemingly airy personality is attributable to her sign being an air sign. Want to understand this absolute joy of a woman a bit more? Watch on as we delve deeper into the various aspects that make up a Gemini woman.

In this video, we will talk about personality traits, likes/dislikes, love, relationships, career, money, friendships, fashion, style and a lot more of Gemini Woman.

Personality Traits of Gemini Woman

There exists no amount of words that can fully describe the personality of a Gemini Woman. She is flamboyant, and extra to say the list.

#1. Energetic

A Gemini woman will breathe life into any situation thanks to her insane amounts of energy. She loves the great outdoors and is up for any amount of fun. The best way to describe the amount of energy housed within this zodiac sign is to liken it to that of a two year old.

#2. Flexible

Gemini women are go with the flow kind of individuals. They tend to be comfortable no matter their surroundings. Every zone is a comfort zone. Their flexibility and adaptability to various situations not only make them great people to be around but opens doors to opportunities others would easily shy away from.

#3. Intelligent

Gemini women tend to attract people due to their enjoyable conversations. Their love for books and inquisitive nature allows them to gain knowledge on various subject matters.

#4. Witty

A sense of humour comes naturally to the Gemini woman. Witty comments are second nature. Do not be surprised if your comments are met by a witty retort from this ball of energy. Her intelligent and curious nature gives her context for almost every situation or context she finds herself in.

#5. Adventurous

It really is no surprise that Gemini women are adventurous and outgoing. They are curious about all things life. They will experiment with anything at least one time. The Gemini woman’s bucket list is therefore bound to be full of fun adventures

#6. Indecisive

Making even the simplest of decisions can be a tall order for the Gemini woman. She tends to overthink things leading them to develop unwarranted anxiety about everything. It’s probably not the wisest of choices to rely on her to make decisions that are time sensitive in nature.

#7. Impulsive

The flexibility of a Gemini is a double edged sword as it makes them equally impulsive. The fact that they are comfortable in almost any environment makes them up and leave without giving much thought to their actions. Better have a backup plan if you are reliant on a Gemini woman to come through for you.

Likes & Dislikes of Gemini Woman

The Gemini woman likes to have fun. She is constantly seeking the next thrill. Good company, a good book and a good conversation are amongst her most favourite things to do. Her bubbly personality makes it easy for her to interact with almost everyone. Socializing and making friends is therefore another of her favourite things to do. Traveling in search of one adventure or the other is an enjoyable activity. If you are looking for a travel buddy then the Gemini woman might just be the one for you.

Gemini women, just like their Aquarius sisters, value their freedom. They are creative and like to push boundaries. Trying to restrict their freedom and creativity in any way is bound to cause friction with them. They dislike dull conversations and engagements. Routine is also a major don’t for these women. Their free spirited nature will not allow them to be bogged down by a predetermined life.

Gemini Woman in Love and Relationships

Love is a beautiful thing that transforms even the dullest of persons into glowing individuals. This is no different for the Gemini woman. Her seemingly flighty nature makes settling down for her a rather difficult decision. However, once made, she will devote herself to you. The downside to dating a Gemini woman is that she bore easily. She likes adventure and loves to discover things. She has a full and vibrant social life. Be ready to deal with this the constant invites to social events and her changing pleasures.

Jealousy and possessiveness has no place in a relationship with this air sign. Her independence and intelligence will not allow her to be comfortable in a possessive and controlling relationship. She is quick to distance herself from relationships that seem to dim he light.

Sex with the Gemini woman is bound to be interesting. She is experimental in this department as she is with every other thing in life. If she wants you, there is no way not to know as she will simply make clear as day.

Gemini Woman in Career and Money

The energy, eloquent communication and creativity of a Gemini woman makes her well suited for a career in the creative arts, performing arts, communications and law industries. She loves to shine and as such, she is not afraid of the lime light.

A career in sales and marketing will suit her just fine. She loves talking to and interacting with different people. This together with her excellent communication skills make her a sales and marketing force like no other. Her interactions with and understanding of different types of people gives her the competitive edge when it comes to selling since she knows the right heart strings to tag at.

Her relationship with money is a rather fleeting one. This is not to mean that she doesn’t easily come into money, she does. It is her impulsive spending that makes this a fleeting relationship. While saving is an option that she is well capable of pulling off, the Gemini woman would much rather spend her money in pursuit of happiness. She is also generous and will not hesitate to come to the aid of those that need her.

Gemini Woman in Friendships

Friendships come easy to the Gemini woman. She is intelligent and has a wealth of knowledge about almost every topic. Interacting with people from varying backgrounds is therefore a breeze for her. She is fun and energetic. Hanging out with her is a fun filed and adventurous experience.

A Gemini woman is a social creature and as such she has a wide circle of friends. She plays a crucial role within her friendship circles as she is often the advisor and mediator of the group. She easily understands people and will seek out both sides of the story before passing judgement.

To maintain a lasting friendship with her, you need to be able to keep up with her energy. Just like in a romantic relationship, a friendship with a Gemini woman requires one to stimulate her mentally and engage her intellect. The next time you are looking for someone to bring energy, fun and lots and lots of love into your life, try befriending a Gemini woman.

Fashion & Style of Gemini Woman

A Gemini woman’s fashion sense is as quirky, eclectic and flamboyant as her personality. Being an expressive woman keen on communication, her outfits are an extension of her communication tools. Her choice in fabrics, accessories, colours, bags, and shoes will be her way of expressing her thoughts and feelings.

Trying to pin down her fashion sense to just one style is rather difficult. She dresses in the pieces that work for her mind and body. She is known for being ahead of trends and adapting trends to her own style.

Jewellery is a must have for her. Neck pieces while welcome, are not part of her top priority as far as accessories go. Bangles, bracelets and rings are a different case. It is very rare to spot a Gemini woman without any bling on her hands. This is because her hands are important as she uses them to express herself. So why not make these tools of communication attention grabbing?

[murderousginger]

Mr. Rattlebone

Word count: 2,289

Warnings: So. Much. Angst. Little smut.

When Tommy Shelby first went to see Lizzie after the war, it was with little conversation. Sure, he was polite and even respectful, but he didn't come to speak. He came like a ghost or a wisp of smoke that slipped through the cracks and appeared for his purpose and he left just the same. His touch was soft until it wasn't and he would always leave the money on the nightstand or table before he disappeared again. It was always in the night, when the city and it's people slept. Not even God would have his eye on Small Heath when he appeared, if he ever did in the first place. He was a ghost that haunted her home, slinking in the shadows and claiming her body only to disappear in the daylight. The only trace of his haunting was the wad of bills on the dresser.

Lizzie often thought of him like he was made of glass. In a way, he was. He was a shell that needed to remember what life was, and those few moments together reminded him that he was still alive. She knew that he needed those nights with her because she wasn't someone he had to protect. Tommy Shelby was a man that was always in his head and worried about caring for those around him. Lizzie was a release. So she took his money and let him have his way, because she knew he wouldn't let her in his head to talk about what really bothered him. It wasn't Tommy Shelby's way. 

Tommy had taken Lizzie and made her stop whoring -- except for him when the need arose -- by providing her with a job that used the typing course she had taken. She didn't particularly mind the times he had bent her over the desk, breathing deeply into her ear and mumbling nonsense to himself. She knew that most times his mind was elsewhere and not with her, but Tommy had always been upfront about that. She knew it wasn't particularly love that brought him back to her, but familiarity and a sense of understanding. 

That didn't stop the surprise she felt when she woke up one rainy night to find him at her door, soaked and off his head. 

"Lizzie," he breathed, his eyes moved wildly and he slipped into her flat so quickly she hadn't even realized she moved back to allow him in. The breeze from the winter night blew right through her thin nightgown and she shivered before she shut the door.

"Tommy, it's late," Lizzie said as he frantically paced her entry. "What's happening, what's wrong?"

Lizzie tried to stop his pacing, grabbed for his arms as he cradled his head in his hands and paced, but he jolted from her grip like a timid horse and ran to her living room. She followed after him, arms extended but never quite close enough to touch him. He collapsed on her couch, staring into her fireplace and the embers that glowed within it. She slowly sat on the other side of the couch and sidled closer before she gently touched his shoulder.

Tommy jumped, looking up from his hands to her, but looked through her, his pupils restricting and expanding at random. 

"I saw her, Liz."

Tommy licked his dry lips and finally focused on Lizzie's face, noting the concern that lie between her eyebrows and the rigidity of her back as soon as he said 'her.'

"I saw Grace," he whispered, turning back to the fire. It was easier than looking at Lizzie's face. 

"Tommy," she said before her voice faltered. 

She squeezed his shoulder and tried again, voice softer.

"You know she's gone, Tom. She was shot. She's dead. You buried her months ago."

"Doesn't mean she's gone," Tommy said, his eyes scanning the fire before he abruptly stood up and grabbed a poker and stirred the flames. 

"She's around me," he said as he added a log to the fire. "She's in the house. She's watching me and Charlie. I can't get her voice out of my head. But tonight she appeared, Lizzie."

Tommy looked at her expectantly and defiantly, like he knew she would fight him. All she did was nod. He sat back down.

"I smoked again," he went on. "It's been years, but with her gone... I can't sleep. The house is too big. Too quiet. So I went to Chinatown. I set it up. And she appeared as soon as I leaned back, Liz. I can't -- she spoke to me."

"It's the drugs," Lizzie said as she scooted closer and took his hands. "You're soaked. Let's get you closer to the fire to dry down. I'm afraid I don't have anything for you to change into. Let me get you a blanket."

Lizzie stood up. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down and held her face in his hands. She grabbed his forearms and watched his blue eyes search her face for the shadows that haunted his mind.

"No no no no, Lizzie, no," he mumbled as he leaned into her. "Don't leave me alone. She'll come back. I can't. I can't, Lizzie, I can't."

She hushed him as she touched their foreheads together, watching his eyes zone in and out in front of her. 

"It's just the drugs," she whispered as he muttered in Romani under his breath. "It's just the drugs and the grief. Jesus, Tommy, you're scaring me."

"She's telling me to die," he said as he looked behind her. "She's telling me I caused this and I should join her."

Lizzie grabbed his chin, forcing his eyes back to her. 

"She's not real, Tom."

Her eyes searched his pale face. He jumped at every movement, every noise. This was not even the shell of Tommy Shelby. This was something else entirely. He was completely lost in his grief and she wasn't sure if his family would ever get him back. 

"She's not real," she said louder and watched his eyes focus back to her, to now. "You're high and shivering wet and lost in your head. You've got to come back."

"Come back?" He breathed and his eyes cleared for a moment.

"Charlie is going to miss you in the morning," she said as she gave him a stern look. "A boy needs his father."

Tommy's face hardened for a moment, a storm alight in his eyes. Lizzie knew he was fighting something in his head, but could only guess. This conversation was the closest she'd ever been into Tommy Shelby's mind, and it was as broken and treacherous as she had imagined it to be. 

"I'm going to get you that blanket, Tommy," she said slowly.

She pulled his hands from her and raised to her feet slowly, as if she was afraid to set him off again. He was a tripwire to maneuver around. A bomb that could go off at any time. She walked backward from him, afraid that if she took her eyes from him he would disappear. He would become an apparition and slip into the cracks and be gone into the night again. Instead, he followed her into her bedroom with pleading eyes.

"I can't be alone, Liz," he mumbled, eye glassy. "She'll find me here. I didn't know where else to go, I--"

He crumbled at her feet, colliding his head into her stomach and wrapping his arms around her. Instinctively her hands ran through his hair and caressed his ailing head. Her stomach was instantly drenched by the rain on his head or the tears from his eyes, she wasn't sure if there was a difference. He nuzzled into her stomach and muttered more words she didn't understand. She curled herself around him and rocked him humming a tune, hoping it helped soothe him. 

"It's okay, you're okay," she said once the rocking seemed to calm him. His shoulders slumped and his grip loosened as his red eyes looked up at her. She melted, softened before him when she noticed how lost and young the deadliest man in Birmingham looked sitting at her feet.

"I've got one foot on each side, Liz," he croaked as he searched her face. "I need a foothold into reality. I need you."

Lizzie froze as his hands dropped to her legs and pushed her nightgown up up up past her knees, her hips, her stomach, her breasts. He kissed feverishly up up up as he lifted and threw the fabric across the room, ending his kiss on her lips. Her arms were still raised over her head as his hands circled her face and he kissed her with abandon. 

She softened into his touch as his hands dropped from her face and flitted across her body, trading soft touches for rough grabbing as he pushed her backward onto her bed, lost within his mutterings and kissing as he picked her up and pushed her across the bed under him. She reached for his shirt, pulling the vest and white button up from his pants, deftly unbuttoning everything and placing it to the side around his feverish worship of her form. If this is what he needed to ground himself into reality, he would get it. She could do this much for him, as she's always done.

She shut her brain off, bottled her feelings and cares to take care of the broken man before her. She let him lead as he liked, watched the wild blue eyes focus on her as he caressed and grabbed and growled as she undid his trousers. She soothed him as his growl hiccuped and cracked as her hand felt his length. His eyes clamped shut as she felt him grow. His tears fell on her before his knee pushed her legs apart and he entered her in a grunt, rocking them together through the dark storm of the night. 

She rocked with him, lifting her hands to his chest, up his neck, through his hair. She writhed below him and pulled on his hair. 

"Tommy," she moaned as he opened his eyes, looking at her. "You're here with me, you're alive with me."

"Say it," she said through gritted teeth as he increased the pace. "Say you're here."

"I'm here," he growled as his hips stuttered and he rocked faster and faster. "I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm alive."

He cursed under his breath as she felt the warmth between her legs. He collapsed on top of her, his head on her breast. He could hear her rapid heart beat beneath his ear and her breath as he relaxed into her touch. Her hands found his hair and she kissed the top of his head, running her fingers along his scalp as she looked at the shadows along the ceiling. 

"You're still here, Tommy," she said quietly into the dark. "Grace would want you to live, for your boy." 

Lizzie bit her lip as he sunk deeper against her body and wet her chest with his tears at the sound of her name. 

Lizzie might not have liked Grace -- God knows she hadn't trusted her. She was always green about how Tommy treated the woman, like she was a prized possession to be valued. Lizzie's only value to Tommy was secret visits that were easily swept under the rug with money. A transaction and nothing more. Grace was love. Lizzie was a means to escape, barely a person in his eyes. 

Lizzie wiped her own tear away quickly before knotting her hands back into Tommy's hair, massaging his scalp as his breath evened.

"Whatever is visiting you isn't her, Tommy," she whispered, feeling him relax and drift to sleep on top of her. "If she really loved you, she wouldn't ask you to end your life."

"She looks so real, Liz," he mumbled, holding her tighter for a moment as his brows furrowed and he looked up at her. "She sounds so real."

"I know," she hummed, massaging his scalp until his face softened and he nuzzled back into her chest. "I know, Tom."

"Liz?" Tommy said softly. "Thank you."

"I know," she repeated softly, listening as he finally fell asleep on top of her, leaving her to her own broken thoughts. 

The torture she allowed herself to feel for a moment ripped thorough her. She shivered but froze in fear of waking the man who had found peace in her arms. She shut off her feelings in order to help the only man she'd ever truly loved. Many had come and gone from her arms throughout the years, but he kept returning, quietly, sneakily, to find himself buried in her seeking peace. Maybe this time was different. Maybe he needed more than a night from her. This was the first time he'd ever slept after. 

Before Grace, it was haphazard, irregular meetings. He would come into the office and call her to his desk to be bent over like a breeding mare or he would slip into her flat like tonight, silent but wanting. He always would nod, leave the money on the dresser and be on his way. Tonight he slept. Tonight brought her hope. 

She caressed the sleeping man on her chest and allowed herself to drift off as well. As she was nearly asleep, Tommy whined the very word that broke her heart, shattering any hope she had. She fell asleep to him crying out for Grace in her arms.

Lizzie woke up to the morning light, alone with the throw blanket from the chair across the room over her body. She rolled to her side, clutching the blanket as a tear leaked from her eye. Money lay on her dresser.

Masterlist

[obxdrewseph]

Hard to Love - Rafe Cameron

Description: Pushing away people came easy to you. You pushed away your friends when they urged you to get out more and you pushed away your family when they urged you to eat more. You felt like a burden to everyone and you didn’t want that. You were hard to love with your harsh attitude and pickiness. Once Rafe Cameron, your new friend and classmate, tries to convince you to give him a chance, you wonder what it would mean to be a girlfriend-- someone who gives love and receives it... you wonder: are you even capable of being loved? 

so this is sort of a continuation of High Maintenance, but also can be read as a standalone? I thought it would be interesting to explore the romantic relationship that didn’t get to develop in that fic ... so here ya go! :D

--------

Being your friend was hard, but being your boyfriend was much harder (not that you had one yet, just for future reference). 

Being your friend was hard because you cancelled plans last minute because of chronic pain/aching or because you were going through a depressive episode that made you unable to socialize. 

No one talks about the mental side of physical pain. 

Trust me, you wouldn’t be nice either if you were hungry half of the day and in pain the other half. 

You didn’t want your diet to define you, yet it was like you revolved your entire life around your meal times. 

You pushed your friends away who wouldn’t do enough research on your condition. You obviously didn’t expect them to look up everything about it, but when they gave you food you couldn’t eat or asked you to go on hikes you couldn’t trek without feeling dizzy (or even fainting), you couldn’t help but distance yourself. 

You didn’t want to share all your negativity with them; they didn’t deserve that. 

You were used to being the rock of your group; not exactly the mom friend, but the happy, funny friend everyone went to for a laugh or to have fun. You weren’t the one with problems. You didn’t get to be that person. 

You didn’t want to be that person. 

“I’m a fucking idiot!” You shouted at no one in particular.

“We know!” 

You glared at the girl standing in the hallway who happened to be your best friend and your house mate. You and 3 other girls decided to stay in apartment together for your freshman year and you never regretted your decision. You could never live in the dorms with people making noise all day and night. 

You were already agitated all the time. 

“Go away, Ames.” 

The girl sighed. 

“I made some rice krispies. Do you want some?” 

Yes.

“No. I’m not hungry.” 

That was a lie. 

“Ok, well then why are you so upset today?” 

You paused, wondering if you should confide in her. Despite you guys being best friends, you never truly felt like you could confide in anyone. It was a fucking miracle that you spilled so much to Rafe Cameron, a boy you never thought would become one of your best friends. You honestly thought he would leave you the second you got off that wooden bench, yet you two hang out all the time.

You decided to give her a lighthearted version of what you were feeling.

“I’m not it’s just... random question: am I high maintenance?” You asked finally.

The girl snorted. 

“Yeah, everyone knows that.” 

Your heart sank. You were starting to hate that joke. You knew you had a lot of dietary restrictions and people had to work around what you ate, and before you didn’t mind that, but now you hated when people did that for you. 

You just wanted people to stop asking you out to eat or asking you to hang out. You just wanted people to leave you alone. 

“Fuck you.” You said laughing, it was fake. But she didn’t need to know that.

“Whatever, is that all you wanted to ask?” 

“Nope, I wanted to ask are you still having your bachorlette party next Saturday?”

“Yup, you better be there! No ditching me for whoever old lady author you wanted to see.”

You bristled at her harsh tone and flinched when she slammed your door shut so that you couldn’t argue with her. 

You heard her soft footsteps fade away which allowed you to slip back into your negative feelings. 

All you could think about is that if your best friend didn’t even want to deal with you or fully understand you, how could anyone else? 

---------

“Hello~ Earth to y/n?”

A black line skitted across your face, snapping you out of your trance. You swatted at the pencil floating in front of your face with an angry look.

You were currently in the library, working hard on your essay that seemed like it would never end.

“What do you want?” You snapped.

You were in the middle of focusing your attention on a small dot at the back of the room. You did this to try to take your attention off of the discomfort in your stomach. You wouldn’t exactly call it pain, but it didn’t feel great.

The poor boy’s eyes drooped at your anger.

“Um, sorry you just were spacing out.”

“Well, don’t interrupt my space outs.”

“Got it.”

Why were you being so mean? You never were like this before you got diagnosed. You were so irritable all the time and felt anger build up in you faster than expected.

It wasn’t fair to the boy sitting across from you.

Rafe Cameron.

The boy was dedicated, you could give him that.

You didn’t expect much from the obviously Southern boy who sat next to you in a Shakespeare class. You felt like you were sitting on pins and needles until Rafe started talking to you; you didn’t know why you took a male-dominant class. You weren’t used to talking to guys so often, but you wanted to push yourself. Get out of your comfort zone you embraced so much in high school.

After he apologized for being a dick about eating standards, you easily started to fall for him a bit more.

But that didn’t matter.

His feelings wouldn’t last.

They never did.

“Um, are you okay?” Rafe finally said. You wanted to snap at him once again, but when you saw his concerned blue eyes, you lost your bite. 

You forced a smile. “I’m fine, just a bit tired.” If you had a nickel for every time you gave that excuse, you’d be a billionaire.

“Oh, then we should finish here.”

“No!”

You said abruptly. He lifted a brow.

“No?”

When he saw your face turn a soft pink color, his eyes lit up and he softly bit his lip. He knew what he did to you.

“Um... no, it’s ok. I can still study. I’m ... I’m mostly just upset because I wanted to go to this book signing that’s like a week from now, but I have to go to my friend’s bachelorette party. I really love this author, but I won’t get to see her and she rarely goes on tour... But it’s fine, I’ll get over it and studying helps me keep my mind off things.” You shrugged. 

Yes, your friends were getting married that young. You simultaneously loved and hated your friends. You seemed to always be dropping things you loved for them, but you knew they wouldn’t do the same for you. 

Your friends were great to live with, harder to be friends with. Plus, two were avid bakers and another was an aspiring chef. You hated all of the temptations of their baked goods. 

He laughed at your nerdy confession which rubbed you the wrong way. He stopped laughing when he saw your dark expression.

“Sorry, I was only laughing because I totally get that. There are some authors that just leave an impact on you and you would die to meet them. And plus, those parties are lame. All they do is drink and drink and drink, which you can’t do because it’s not on the low fodmap diet.” 

Well, boy definitely did his research. 

“Exactly! Finally, someone who understands.” You turned your head away so he wouldn’t see you blush-- it wasn’t because you were shy, but it always happened when you got excited about something. 

He nodded and saw your head wobble. A sharp pain fluttered through your head. You probably needed to eat something. 

“Are you... hungry?” The boy said hesitantly.

This got you in the mood to be mean again.

“No, I’ll tell you when I get hungry, Rafe.”

The bite in his words made him move away from you. You hated this. You wanted someone to comfort you, but you pushed everyone away.

Self-sabotage was your middle name.

--------

You felt a warm hand softly tap your shoulder. 

“Library closes in less than 10 minutes.” Rafe whispered to you. 

Shit, I fell asleep. 

You lifted your head and saw the once full library empty out. 

“Shit. I fell asleep.” You said your thoughts. 

Rafe chuckled. God, you loved his laugh so much.

“Yeah, I know. You look cute when you sleep.” 

You smiled, but can’t believe you fell asleep in public. You weren’t the type to let your guard down so easily. When did you get this tired? When did you become this weak?

You felt your stomach rumble silently, signaling your hunger. 

“Um, do you wanna get out of here and get some food?” 

You began to say no, but he stopped you.

“Ok, let me ask that once again, do you want to get out of here and I can cook you food?” 

You felt anxiety build up in your chest. You never trusted other people to cook for you. You had this irrational fear that people would deliberately try to sabotage your meals, but truly people just didn’t know what you can and can’t eat. 

“Uh... you know.”

“Yes, I know, strict diet. I’ll look it all up to be safe.” 

You were going to say no, but you wanted this so badly. You just wanted to hang out with a really cute and nice guy without feeling abnormal. It was almost 11pm, but you weren’t going to pass up the chance to hang out with him.

“Ok, take me to your place.”

-------

His apartment was dark and organized. You tried not to laugh at the display of books on the ground... you definitely needed to get him a bookshelf. 

“Do the books feel better on the ground or something?” You teased. 

“Yup, they need their sleep too.” 

He nudged you on the shoulder to let you know he was joking. 

“Oh, and watch the hiking supplies. I went last weekend and haven’t had time to clean it up since I’m going on Sunday again.” 

Hiking... 

“You like to hike?” 

The boy nodded, his face brightening. “Yup, I’m an outdoorsy kind of guy. Love hiking, going to the beach, sports, all that jazz.” 

You nodded, not relating to any of that. 

You looked around, but realized there were only two doors, and one leading to the bathroom. 

“Oh, you live alone?” 

You fiddled with the hem of your shirt nervously.

“Yeah... is that ok?” He asked softly. 

Yes, yes, it’s more than ok.

“Of course! It’s just I don’t know many sophomores who live alone.” 

What you meant to say is you didn’t know many sophomores who could afford to live alone. JJ always joked about Rafe being rich, but you weren’t aware of the extent of his wallet. 

He chuckled. “Yeah well, it’s easier to focus on my studies this way. No distractions.” 

You nodded. You would live alone if you could afford it. 

“Got it. Perfect for the ladies too, right?” You winked. 

Rafe choke on air. You enjoyed flustering the usually confident Mr. Cameron. 

“God, um, I don’t know how to respond to that.” 

You shrugged. “Can’t deny the facts.” 

He gave you a gentle look. “Y/n, you’re the first girl I’ve had in here since my last girlfriend.” Your jaw dropped.

“Really? You haven’t had a single girl in here for... a month?” 

“Unless you count my little sister, then yup.” 

“How does a guy as hot as you not bring a single lady friend here for over a month?” He let out a strangled laugh.

“You think I’m hot?” 

“I know you’re hot. And you know you’re hot.” 

The pink blush that formed on his face made you want to run over and kiss his cheeks. 

But friends didn’t do that. 

“Well, I guess... I guess I’ve been waiting for the special girl to come along.” 

He gave you a look you couldn’t quite decipher. 

“Yes, I’m the most special girl in your life, right?” You teased, trying to be nonchalant about the tension in the room. 

He just smiled at you. 

“So! What are you cooking?” You said, changing the subject. 

This distracted him. “Well, I have leftovers from yesterday... I have rice noodles with chicken broth--”

“Um, I can’t eat pre-made chicken broth.” You interrupted before he could get too excited. Thankfully, you hadn’t gotten your hopes up about eating much at his place. People could rarely accommodate to your needs. 

“Oh don’t worry, I made the chicken stock last night with... a real chicken. So it’s not out of a box.” He opened his fridge and you saw a cooked chicken that was sitting there. “See?” 

You paused and evaluated the situation. 

“So... you made chicken pho?” You said blankly. 

He blushed. “Yeah, yeah I did.” 

You thought back to that night. That night when you confessed to him your deepest and insecurities. 

You yelled at him about how you basically only ate Asian food exclusively. 

“Did... Rafe... Ok, if I didn’t know any better, I would say that you expected me to come over today. Unless you just happened to have IBS friendly food.” 

You were joking, well half-joking. You guys always met on Thursday nights to study, so he knew you would be hanging out then. You hated the excitement and fondness filling in your chest; it would be only a matter of time before you pushed him away. Or until he left. Whichever came first.

His face was red now. “Um, I may have anticipated it.” 

Oh God, your heart was so full right now. You didn’t even want the food anymore, you just wanted him. 

But he had put great effort into this. You had to eat it.

“Thank you.” You whispered. 

He shrugged off your words. “It’s no biggie, I know I see you Thursdays and we always study pretty late.” 

You set the table while he dipped the noodles in water to cook them. He made two bowls, one being larger than the other. He remembered that you rarely ate big meals. 

As soon as he set your food down, you realized he had to watch you eat. And you had to make conversation while eating. You hated talking and eating. 

And you got a lot of gas while you ate. Shit. This was a bad idea. 

You pushed those thoughts aside and took a sip of the soup. 

It was amazing. 

“This is really good.” 

He smiled widely. “Thanks, I tried my best.” 

Thankfully, you didn’t have to talk much while you ate. The TV served as a good distraction to that. When you finished your bowl, you waited for the pain to hit you. You felt your stomach gurgle around and you clenched your fists to avoid the pain. 

You had good and bad stomach days. Some days you could go the whole day without feeling any pain, but then you had days where you ate any food and felt a mild discomfort and had to lay in bed. 

You felt a mild discomfort, but it faded quickly enough. Thank God, a good stomach day.

After you both finished eating, Drew put both the bowls in the sink. You tried to do the dishes, but he wouldn’t let you. 

“Thanks for the meal again.” You said, anxious to leave.

It wasn’t eating that was the worst part of IBS, it was the anxiety afterwards. You were always nervous that your stomach would flare up hours after you eating, which it sometimes did if you ate something not IBS friendly. 

“You’re always welcome here.” 

You checked your phone. “Um, it’s getting late. I should go.” You turned to leave, but he caught your wrist softly. 

“Wait, y/n.” 

You stopped and turned to face him. He looked nervous as he was still holding your hand gently. 

“Yeah?” You tried to say casually, but you were now extremely anxious for a reason besides food.

He let go of your wrist to brush his fingers through his hair. You loved his messy hair. 

“Um, ok, well... ok I’m just gonna say it.”

“Say it then.” You said out of habit. He glared at you, but you knew he didn’t mean it.

“Fine, well, you’re... you’re really fun to hang out with. Do you want to... go out with me sometime?” 

“We go out together all the time.” You said stupidly. 

He let out a strangled laugh. “Yeah but... like ... as a date.” 

Your heart stopped. 

“A date.” 

“Yes, a date, if you want.” 

A date? What could you both possible do on a date? You hated eating at restaurants, you can’t go hiking or backpacking because who knew when your symptoms would pop in and you were stuck on a mountain with no bathrooms and nowhere to sit. Not to mention, you didn’t eat much so you got lightheaded easily. You weren’t compatible. You would just be a burden to him. 

“y/n?” You almost forgot you were in the middle of a conversation.

You looked up at his pretty blue eyes that were full of hope. You couldn’t do this to him. You couldn’t hold him back like that.

“I... I’m sorry, Rafe... I can’t.” His face fell. “You’re an awesome guy, I swear to God you’re the best guy I’ve ever met. But... you just... we’re just... we’re just different.” 

That was a cop out answer and you knew it. 

“Different.” He echoed. 

You nodded. 

He paused, like he was wondering whether to keep talking to you or just kick you out. You wouldn’t blame him if he chose the latter. 

He then laughed bitterly. 

“That’s bullshit, y/n and you know it.” 

His harsh answer stunned you.

“What are you talking about?” You bristled. Now you were irritated.

“Oh, c’mon, you know I like you, and I know you like me. You can’t ignore what we have.” 

“We’re just friends, Rafe. Just friends.” 

“But I want more.” He said sadly. 

You were on the brink of tears too. 

“I do too.” You blurt. 

“Then why-”

“Because Rafe! You want to go out and do things. You want to treat your girlfriend like a princess-- you’ve said that to me before. And you just can’t do that for me because it’s not possible.

He scoffed. “What do you mean by that? You think you’re undeserving of love? Are you trying to say ‘it’s not you, it’s me’?” He was angry, and he had a right to be. You were running him in circles and you felt bad. 

“That’s not it! I just--” You felt your legs becoming weak, you could never stand for too long, especially in a heated conversation like this. 

“Y/n? Do you need to sit down?” 

You nodded as he was already guiding you to his couch. 

“Finish what you were saying earlier.” He said softly. God, you hated how kind he was to you even during an argument. You were trying to push him away!

“Right, well, I don’t think I’m undeserving of love, but it’s too hard to love me.” 

“What does that even mean?”

“It means, you don’t know how to love me! You can’t take me on dates-- I hate eating at restaurants which is a normal date, so you can cross that off your list of fancy dinners or whatever. I can’t go hiking because what if my stomach starts to hurt on the mountain? And you just fucking saw me getting woozy standing and talking for you too long while arguing. I’ll just be a burden to you.” 

He grabbed my hands and forced me to look at him. 

“Listen to me. You will never, ever, be a burden to me. Got that?” 

His voice was low and pained, like it hurt him for you to think about yourself like that. You didn’t need his pity so you pulled away from his hands.

“You don’t deserve someone who can’t do all the things you love.” 

“Relationships are all about compromise, y/n. I can do those things with my friends.” 

You shook your head.

“Rafe, you’re a great guy. Too good if I might add. And I’m so picky about everything. When I’m mad at you one day and you want to make it up to me, you can’t buy me chocolates or ice cream or whatever. For anniversaries, you can’t just take me out to a fancy restaurant. There might be a day where you run out of tricks and you’ll realize how hard it is to love me.” You laughed bitterly. 

“I can learn what makes you feel good. I can learn how to love you--”

“You can’t learn how to love me! I don’t even know how to love myself!” You shouted. 

A deafening silence washed over the room. 

I don’t even know how to love myself.

The honesty in your own answer made you cry.

How could anyone love you when didn’t even know how to love yourself? You didn’t even know how to make yourself happy. You didn’t know how to spoil yourself. You lived your life just to get by. 

How sad. 

“I’m sorry Rafe, I just can’t do this.”

This time, he just nodded. 

He’d already given up.

----------

Around two weeks had gone by since Rafe asked you out and you embarrassed yourself. You had never been the type to be so negative or so insecure. You hated what you had become. 

You hated how you felt some sort of relief when Rafe let you go. He grabbed you an uber and you went home. 

You both were ignoring the obvious conversation that needed to happen, but it was better this way. You were back to being the chatty girl in his English class and he was back to being the guy who laughed at all of your jokes. Normal. Everything was back to normal. 

“Sup, y/n, how’s it goin’?” 

You tried not to look surprised as JJ Maybank said hi to you. 

You two weren’t exactly friends, but you were friendly to one another. Yes, he could be a dick sometimes, but he was clueless about it.

“Oh hey, it’s going good so far. How about you?” 

“He and his ‘girlfriend’ got into a fight yesterday and needs advice.” Pope blurted. You tried not to laugh at the bluntness of his friend. 

JJ hit the boy. “Dude!”

“Hey, she was going to figure it out soon enough. You can’t shut up about it.” Their banter was always fun to watch. 

“What are you guys talking about?” Rafe asked when he sat down. 

“JJ got into a fight with his ‘girlfriend’”. You made sure to use the same air quotes like Pope. 

“Yes, thank you for embarrassing me further.” You shrugged. 

“It’s not like Rafe knows her.” 

JJ sighed and adjusted his hat to hide his tired face. 

You grew soft on the poor guy. “What kind of advice do you need, JJ?” 

JJ looked at you with sad eyes, but hopped right into his story. 

“Well, so this girl I’m into, she’s this big city girl. Grew up in Los Angeles, and you know me, I grew up in a small town in Alaska. We’re just so... different. She likes doing all this city girl stuff like going to the malls and just walking around a crowded town which is so different from me who didn’t even have a big mall where I was at and you could walk miles without running into another person. 

“I just don’t know how to keep up with her all the time... and she’s rich so she has to go to these fancy events. She told me I had to dress up if I wanted to meet her parents. 

“And she doesn’t like to be on the water ‘cause she gets seasick. And I practically lived on the water when I was in Alaska! What should I do?”

You paused, taking in his situation. 

You heard Rafe scoff. 

“Dude, it’s fucking obvious. Man the fuck up and buy better clothes and learn how to hold all of her shopping bags. Isn’t it obvious?” 

JJ nodded, like this made sense.

You nudged Rafe harshly. “What are you talking about? JJ, you guys sound really different, you have to ask yourself: do I like how I have to change myself to be with her? Am I ok with that? Am I ok with sacrificing things I love to be with this girl?” 

JJ nodded, soaking in your words. 

“Relationships are about compromise.” You rolled your eyes at these familiar words. “If you really like her, you are going to be willing to change.” 

“You shouldn’t have to change for someone else.” 

“Everyone should change, it’s good for the soul. Staying static is boring.” 

“Guys, guys,” JJ stopped you and Rafe. 

“Ok, I get both points. But, I do really like her. I’ve been pining after her for a while now and... and I don’t know, I just want to win her heart over. She’s already starting to push me away because she also doesn’t want me to change who I am. But I’m willing to put in the extra effort.”

“See? Putting in extra effort to impress the girl he likes, that’s what you should do.” Rafe commented. 

You grit your teeth. 

“I agree, JJ, you should always try to be better in a relationship. If she’s pushing you away because of her own fears, that only means you need to work harder.” Pope noted. 

“Or maybe she’s right, maybe you shouldn’t push people to make them feel like a burden to you. Maybe she just wants the best for you because she obviously knows you very well!”

“Maybe he wants to challenge himself because he wants her to feel safe and comfortable around him!” Rafe raised his voice. 

“Maybe he just wants to do that because of his ego.” You said with an equally angry tone. 

“Or maybe he wants to do that because he loves her!” Rafe slammed his hands on the desk and suddenly the room was silent. 

“Um... are you guys good?” JJ whispered, his problems now forgotten. 

--------

Because he loves her.

Loves her.

Love. 

Was Rafe still talking about the hypothetical JJ in this situation or was he talking about himself? 

Because you knew you were talking about yourself. 

Was he doing the same? 

You sprinted out of that classroom once your professor dismissed you. 

“Y/n, wait.” 

You paused outside the door. If you left, it would make you look mighty suspicious. If you stayed, then you could pretend everything was ok and that the “argument” you just had wasn’t about yourselves. 

You decided to make a run for it.

Unfortunately, Rafe jumped in front of you before you could leave. 

“Y/n, please. Talk to me.” 

“What? There’s nothing to talk about. JJ can make his own decisions. What a handful of a girl, right?” You tried to step around him, but Rafe kept blocking you. “Move-”

“We need to talk and I have a class soon. Meet me at my apartment when your classes end, ok?” 

You hesitated, but the desperation in his eyes made it hard for you to say no. 

“Ok.”

-------

Rafe’s apartment wasn’t too far of a walk from campus, plus you took the bus for part of the way. You secretly ate a bowl of rice with beef and broccoli before going just in case he didn’t have any more pho left at his apartment. 

You felt your heart beating out of control as you plucked up the courage to knock on his door.

“C’mon, you can do this.” You whispered to yourself. You raised your hand to knock, but the door flung open. 

Rafe had been back for a while since he was a morning person and finished his classes before noon. You on the other hand, finished classes at 5pm. No hate in the game, this was college. 

You took in his appearance and looked him up and down. 

He was wearing gray sweatpants with a white tank top and a red flannel over it. He looked too good right now for being casual. Fuck. 

You gulped. “Hey.” 

He gave you a tight smile. “Hey.”

You both stood there awkwardly. 

“Can I come in?”

“Oh shit, yeah, of course.” 

As you stepped into the well-lit apartment, you noticed he was sweaty; it seemed like he just got done with working out. All you wanted to do was to take off that flannel and see what he was hiding underneath. 

“Did you just come from the gym?” You asked nonchalantly. 

He raised a brow at your random question, but nodded. “Yup.”

You both stood in silence for a hot minute, the tension filling the air. You noticed his eyes trailing down your body; you knew you wore tighter clothes up top to try and impress the boy. You didn’t think it would work... but it did. 

“Oh fuck it.” You spat. His eyes grew confused at your sudden outburst, but when you took 3 large steps and grabbed his face, they widened.

“Can I kiss you?” You whispered.

“Please.”

And then you kissed him. 

His lips were soft, but his hands were rough on your body. He pulled you close enough so that your chests touched, making you groan at the contact. He deepened the kiss, teasing you with his tongue. 

“Rafe,” you chanted. You didn’t know what you were asking for, you just wanted him. 

He smiled, moving to kiss you all over your face and your neck. He smoothly pulled you into his bedroom. 

His bedroom was bare; only a bed sat in the middle and one desk to the side of it. You didn’t care, as long as there was a bed in there, that’s all that mattered.

Except you happened to miss a large box near the side of the bed that almost made you hit your head on the wooden floor. 

“Oops.” Rafe caught you before you fell.

“Sorry, I forgot to move those.”

Before he could move them out of sight, you noticed something familiar looking.

“Wait... are these--?”

“Wait-”

You picked up the box before he could stop you. You grew confused staring down at the object inside of it.

“Are these... what I think they are?” 

He ruffled his hair and nodded, trying to hide his red face. “Um, yeah. It’s... yeah.” He finished lamely.

You looked down and gently traced your fingers across the extravagant book covers. When you looked inside, they were all signed by your favorite author with a cute message. You felt tears well up in your eyes. 

“You went to the book signing.” You said numbly. 

He nodded hesitantly. He wasn’t sure how you would react. “I did...I wasn’t sure which book you liked from her so I got all 3.”

He played with the bottom of his flannel, anxiously waiting for your next move. 

You set the books down and pulled him in by his shirt. 

“Kiss me.” 

He paused, but only for a moment before he stripped off his flannel. 

Yes, finally.

He laughed. “You’ve been waiting for this to come off?” Shit, you said that out loud. 

He wasted no time pressing his lips to yours. You clung onto his neck, not being able to get close enough to him. Kissing was great, it was fantastic even. But you wanted more. You gently lifted your hips to meet his, rocking back and forth experimentally. 

He groaned at your movement. “Baby,” He whispered. 

You thought you would hate that pet name. 

You didn’t. 

“Yes?” You teased, planting little kisses on his neck, his collarbone, right under his ear. When he didn’t answer, you tugged him back down to you by his hair. 

You’re sure you had been making out for at least half an hour at this point when suddenly he lifted his head up. 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yes.” 

And you meant it. 

-------

You woke up in the morning with the best sleep you’ve had in years. You immediately turned to your side and saw Rafe still fast asleep. You saw his bare chest move up and down, up and down. It was hypnotic. 

You gently moved your fingers across his chest, soaking in the smoothness of it. The feeling of soft pleasure woke Rafe up. He smiled when he saw your mischievous look. 

“Good morning, gorgeous. How’re ya feelin’?” 

“Hmmm, alright.” 

He gently kissed your shoulder blade. What a tease.

“Only alright?” 

He tried to pull the blankets down to uncover your naked body, but it was the morning and you were still shy. 

You laughed at his attempts to turn you on. 

“Stop, Rafe, you horny ba-”

He then leaned in closely to you and whispered in your ear. 

“If I knew getting you books would get me laid, I would’ve done it years ago.” 

You laughed. 

“You didn’t know me years ago!” 

He gave you a crooked smile. 

“Plus, my love language is receiving gifts, so you got lucky.” 

He shrugged, but his eyes softened when he stared at you longer. 

He pulled you down for another soft kiss. You wanted more, but he pulled away before it could get too racy. 

“Told you I would learn how to love you.” 

[keelywolfe]

FIC: Welcome to Backwater ch.7 (spicyhoney)

Summary: Stretch knows he can't really depend on the kindness of strangers, but oh, sometimes he wishes he could.

~~*~~

Read ‘The Kindness of Strangers’ on AO3

or

Read it here!

~~*~~

It was with a heavy, weird-ass book in hand that Stretch returned to the heat of the afternoon. This time he made haste getting back to the store while his knees were cooperating, almost jogging on the sidewalk and waving to any regular customers as he passed. The sun was on its downward path by now and the strollers were out in full force, the Human moms and pops pushing them hardly paying him any mind past a ‘good afternoon’ as he went by.

His knees were back to the wibble-wobbles when he slipped through the door, the bell announcing him with a muted clank. The first thing he noticed was that Red wasn’t behind the counter. He was standing at the back of the store, leaning on his cane and blocking off the hallway that led to both their living quarters. Yeah, that looked like insurance that Stretch couldn’t hurry on past him upstairs; Red wasn’t quick, but he also wasn’t stupid, and Stretch could feel his hard gaze scrutinizing him from across the store.

Wonderbar.

Stretch pasted on a grin and tried to act like someone who hadn’t been recently felt up by Red’s little brother in the public library. Not that Red said that he couldn’t, but some things, (for example, random groping) could probably be inferred.

“hey, what’s up?” Stretch said brightly.

“my bro called,” Red said bluntly, and Stretch’s feeble hopes deflated like yesterday’s party balloon. So much for discretion.

“i can explain,” Stretch blurted, “it wasn’t my idea, seriously, i was only—"

Red interrupted him with an amused snort. “easy, kid, don’t haul out your guilty conscience on my account. all he did was give me the gist of things, said you had yourself an unexpected adventure.” Red jerked his head towards the hallway. “g’wan, string bean, you can use my bathroom. take a shower and cool off.”

A cool shower pouring down on his dirty, sweaty bones sounded like Eden itself right about now, apple not included.

“thanks,” Stretch said gratefully. He skirted around Red, who didn’t move, only squatted there like a grouchy stump in the middle of the doorway while Stretch squeezed around him. Must be tempering his kindness with a little extra asshole to keep things even.

On his way to showerland, Stretch took a quick detour to leave the book on the coffee table amidst the clutter. Maybe he could ask Red about it, get the cliff notes version.

The shower in the downstairs bathroom was stuck with the same crappy water heater as upstairs, not that it mattered since Stretch was about ready to cuddle with an iceberg to cool off. Added bonus, the showerhead was a lot better and it managed to crank the feeble water pressure up to its max. There was a cheap plastic stool sitting in the tub, way too short for Stretch. He sat on it anyway, knees almost up to his chin as the cool water poured down on him and washed away the sweat and filth.

He was shivering a little by the time he was done, dragging a ratty towel over his dripping bones. The pile of his clothes was missing and there a new folded bundle sitting on the closed toilet lid. He must’ve been out of it more than he thought, he’d never even heard Red coming in. Unless laundry fairies were a thing and wasn’t that idea a lot more pertinent than it was yesterday.

Stretch picked up the bundle and part of it fell on the floor. Pajama pants, luckily not a pair of Red’s although it might’ve been hilarious to see Stretch wandering around like a scrawny hulk who sprouted upward out of his clothes instead of sideways. They were red plaid flannel and worn to the stage of being shiny at the knees and elbows. Probably an old pair of Edge’s, the fit was pretty close and not too many Humans wore their waistband quite as skinny as a guy without a waist.

(he was not getting a cheap thrill out of wearing a pair of Edge’s pajamas, no matter what his libido was trying to tell him)

He wandered out into Red’s living room, still squeegeeing his skull dry with the damp towel, and saw the sofa was made up with some blankets and a pillow, the television remote set helpfully in reach.

“you done?” Red’s voice echoed up from the store and his peculiar gait made its way down the hallway until he appeared again in the doorway. “then lay down and turn on the boob tube, zone out awhile. you’ll feel better.”

“what did your brother tell you?” Stretch asked. Not that he wasn’t willing to do what he was told. The couch was saggy in the middle, but the blankets were clean and smelling of laundry detergent. They felt blissfully cozy after the cold shower.

“said you met edgar allen,” Red said. “under less than stellar circumstances, i’m guessin’, since i don’t think ya got an invite for a meet and greet with the local scarecrow.”

This time his shiver had nothing to do with the temperature. Edgar Allen was an okay guy, (guy?) but Stretch was still on the fence about the corn’s attitude problems. “not exactly, no. thanks for the heads up, by the way.”

Red tilted his skull to one side, baffled, “heads up about what?”

“i dunno,” Stretch leaned up on an elbow to see him better and hopefully increase the effect of his dirty look, “maybe when you’re warning me off from the local landmarks, you could’ve touch on that fact that a stroll through the fields might involve the corn trying to hold me as a captive audience?”

“naaah,” Red scoffed. Stretch didn’t miss the way he absently started picking at his gold tooth; that was a nervous tell right there and maybe all this wasn’t just concern but dealing with a little guilt that Stretch’s latest town bonding experience was less than top notch. “that's why the damn scarecrow is there t'begin with. ‘sides, even without him you’d have gotten out before dark. anyway, never expected you to go tromping off into the corn in search of a maze, sorry i misgauged the direction of your dumbass.”

“no, i’m sorry, not your fault.” Stretch couldn’t hold back a yawn so wide it nearly split his skull, yeesh, it wasn’t even dinner time and he was ready to sleep for a week. The imaginary hamster running on the wheel in his head wasn’t quite as ready and it decided to race back to thoughts of Edge sitting in the library, alone. Researching he’d said, so intent on his books from the so-called restricted section, like a bargain basement Hogwarts. “hey, what does your brother do?”

“mostly he’s a pain in my ass.”

It was said with great feeling and Stretch snerked out a laugh. Yeah, kinda a universal trait with little brothers. “no, seriously, i mean, for a living, what does he do?”

Red shifted his feet, his cane scraping the floor. “why are ya askin’?”

“curious. bored,” Stretch shrugged, “take your pick.” He didn’t really want to explain to Red that his brother wasn’t just a sexy pair of legs in boots anymore, (but those hips would never be forgotten). He was interesting, no, fascinating. This whole town was turning out to be some kind of puzzle and it seemed to him that Edge might be a big piece. He’d said that figuring out Backwater was a fool’s errand, but he’d never met Stretch’s kind of fool before.

“kid—” Red sighed and that resigned tone snapped Stretch out of his whimsies. He cringed internally. What was he even trying to do here, he owed Red so much and not just for the job, and here he was digging for information about his bro after Red already warned him off, not once, but twice, so maybe what he was really digging was his own grave, if he didn’t knock it off.

“nevermind,” Stretch said hurriedly. “i shouldn’t’ve asked, none of my business, i get it.”

Red shook his head. “that ain’t it.”

Stretch tried on a little laugh, ha ha, see, it wasn’t that big a deal, right? “look, the state of your brother’s ass aside, i get it. that’s your little brother, and i didn’t forget what you said. we only bumped into each other at the library, i’m really not trying to get into his pants.”

He left off on making it a promise; he was telling the truth, but why take the chance on not keeping it.

He didn’t expected the hand that suddenly scruffed over his skull, like the noogies he used to give to Blue when he was little…well, okay, Blue was still little but noogieing was off the table since he’d started his guard training.

This wasn’t like that childish roughhousing, Red’s knuckles only scraped softly along his coronal sutures. “no, kid, you don’t get it. my bro can handle himself, it ain’t him i’m worried about. but you? don’t ya got the feeling you ain’t up to any new affairs of the soul right now? might want to take it easy awhile.”

That unexpectedly gruff kindness made tears sting in his sockets. Stretch guiltily leaned into that touch to absorb every drop, and how was it he could accept it from Red when he couldn’t take it from his own brother? “i don’t get you. you barely even know me. why are you so nice to me?”

Red huffed out a laugh. “you want i should be an asshole? okay, but i gotta warn ya, i’m a contender when it comes to dick moves.”

“thanks, but you can keep your dick in your pants.”

“your loss.”

“seriously, though, what i mean is. i just don’t get it. this place is so weird, but everyone is nice.” It didn’t exactly line up with Stretch’s view of the world. His brother was always nice sure and Snowdin hadn’t been too bad, if you didn’t count the fact that all his friends were from drinking his nights away at Muffet’s. The surface world ran about fifty-fifty with Monsters being on the kinder side of the scale…until he got dumped and found out he lost all his friends in the divorce, how was that for loyalty.

Red only chuckled. “now you’ve gone and cursed yourself. can’t say everyone is nice, you ain’t met everyone yet.”

That was true, fuck, he hoped the universe wasn’t listening and if it was, that it didn’t decide to drum up a little drama. “red?”

“yeah, kid?”

Stretch craned his head back on the pillow and met Red’s crimson gaze upside-down. “thank you for being nice.”

“don’t tell anyone. i’ll lose my resident asshole status.

“secret is safe with me, promise.” Stretch yawned again and the cow bell suddenly jangled loudly out front, startling them both.

Red shouted. “yeah, i’m coming!” He tossed over his shoulder back at Stretch, “take tomorrow off, sleep in, you ain’t had a day off since ya got here.”

“thanks, boss.”

Stretch started to settle in, nap ahoy, captain, hard to starboard and all that, and his eye lights snagged on the book. Shit, he forgot to ask Red about it. Probably didn’t matter, Red’s ingredient label kinda went equal parts of cryptic and cryptid, so he probably wasn’t gonna give the right answers even if Stretch figured out what to ask.

Wait.

If Red and Edge want to share the part of the local Obi-Wan with their mysterious ways, that was fine. He already had the perfect person lined up to ask about the town’s history. Well, part of a person, anyway, the most important part.

Plan formed, Stretch turned on the television and snuggled into the blankets, letting the dulcet tones of Pat Sajak lull him to sleep.

He didn’t dream.

~~*~~

The next day, Stretch headed over to the theater bright and early, still munching on the muffin Red handed off to him as he settled on the stool for the day with his latest book, this one with a bare-chested pirate embracing a busty Human woman as the ocean sprayed up over the hull over them. Seemed to Stretch that would be less smokin’ sexytimes and more cold and wet, but what did he know, his closest encounter with the ocean was extra salt on his Applebee’s margarita.

“thanks, mom,” Stretch said as he took the little paper lunch bag Red held out to him. Red only grunted and didn’t look up from his book. In the midst of rummaging for his tasty free breakfast, Stretch hesitated at the front door.

He felt a little guilty even though Red was the one who told him to take the day. Before he started working at the store, was Red really sitting there all day long, twelve hours of a cash register and customers while he drank beer and soaked up a little romance language in the form of a cheap paperback?

Not that Stretch was judging, hell, if that made Red happy, more power to him. Still, there had to be more to his life than that, didn’t there? Maybe he’d see if Mitch sold sudoku pads at the gas station, pick him up one along with a six-pack. Hard to guess if they carried that kind of entertainment; Mitch was either some kind of crossword grand champion or the kind of guy who ate ketchup on his cheerios and Stretch still wasn’t sure which.

The first movie showing wasn’t for another hour, but Igor didn’t make a fuss when Stretch asked him if he could go sit down early. (and holy shit, the proprietor’s name was actually Igor? He wasn’t sure if the guy’s parents hated him or if the universe sense of irony rolled a natural D20 when it hit this town.)

Igor only grunted and handed over two cups of popcorn without being asked, handing back a crumpled dollar in change. Aww, Stretch had a usual, see, he was settling into town just fine, suck it, Edge.

(don’t think it, don’t think it, don’t think it…)

Stretch made his way to the theater to his regular seat, propping his sneakers up on the chair in front of him. The popcorn he set aside for now, it wasn’t exactly his idea of a breakfast treat and that muffin Red gave him was still settling into his magic. To be honest, he wasn’t entirely sure if Doris could show up very long before the movie. He was no expert, but he did know that ghosts could have some peculiar rules about manifesting. Hopefully this wouldn’t mess with her morning routine, whatever it was.

He didn’t have to wait long. Maybe Doris could sense him or maybe she could just feel it when a living person came into the theater. She slowly came into focus next to him, pale ectoplasm coalescing, and the already cool air chilled even further.

Doris happily sniffed at her popcorn as she said, whispery soft, “Good morning, Stretch, you’re here very early.”

“yeah, took the day off work,” Stretch said. His voice sounded too loud in the empty theater, not even the elevator music was playing yet. “i need your help with something.”

He might as well have flipped Doris’s switch to ‘on’. She lit up, a smile curving her pretty mouth and seeming more solid than ever. The seat behind her was barely visible through her pale pink dress as she said eagerly, “Of course, anything that I can do.”

So that was how Stretch came to tell her the story about Edgar Allen. He didn’t leave out any details, including the bit about the kids shouting at him not to go in the field, the corn closing in around him in a dizzying maze of green, Edgar Allen’s assistance, and Edge’s cryptic warning that the scarecrow would disappear with the harvest.

Doris listened to it all raptly, her eyes wide and startlingly blue, and she never flickered once the entire time. The only unsettling sight was a single trickle of blood running down the side of her face, gathering in a heavy droplet on her chin.

“My, that sounds terrifying,” Doris breathed, unaware of the irony of her saying that while a slender thread of ghostly blood ran down her cheek. The droplet swelled fatly, growing until it finally fell with a plip onto her dress, leaving behind a perfectly round spot that would slowly vanish, only to be replaced by the next drop.

It didn’t really bother Stretch much anymore; he was getting used to it and an old memory of blood was nothing compared to his recent woes. “yeah, it was spooky all right.”

“But I’m not sure I can help you,” Doris continued sadly, “There wasn’t a scarecrow in my day, not that I remember. But the corn. Yes. That I recall.” She shivered delicately and her chair let out a strange groan of springs. “A person could get lost for days in the corn. I remember…” Her already faint voice went softer and Stretch strained to hear her, her gaze distant. “I remember one year at harvest time, they found a skeleton in the field, it was awful. Oh!” She gasped and pressed a gloved hand to her mouth, “I’m so sorry, it was a dead person, not a skeleton like you!”

“no offense taken,” Stretch assured her. He slouched down in his seat even more and waggled his feet, his untied shoelaces laces bobbing against the seatback “huh. so at least one person died out in the corn.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember much about it,” Doris admitted. “whoever it was, they weren’t local.”

“uh huh.” An outsider, then, like him, getting munched up by the corn triffids. “who owns the corn fields, anyway?”

“I…” she hesitated, then apologetically. “I’m not sure. I don’t know if I’ve forgotten or if I never knew.”

Another mystery. If he was gonna play at Sherlock Holmes, he really needed to start taking notes. Maybe get a pipe.

“welp, either way, edgar allen bro out there saved my ass,” Stretch told her. He picked up a piece of popcorn and didn’t eat it, only crumpled it between his fingers and let the mangled bits fall to the floor, “and he’s gonna die come harvest time. i feel like i owe it to him to at least hear his story, you know? edge wouldn’t tell me much, just gave me that book and a scavenger hunt.”

“This Edge person doesn’t sound very nice,” Doris said disapprovingly. Her mouth pulled down into a frown that flashed briefly to a bloody smear. “Is he local?”

“kinda? he’s a monster like me, so he could only have been in town for a coupla years. since we came to the surface, anyway.”

Sudden relief washed over Doris’s pretty face. “He’s not a human, then.”

“nope, he’s another skeleton monster.” That seemed to satisfy her. Note to self, Doris wasn’t real keen on Humans, in a way that didn’t seem like it was only about the way they ran away when they got a good look at her. That mystery wasn’t all too mysterious, not with a big, bloody clue flickering in and out of view like a gory version of a kid’s flipbook. If that was a going away present from another Human, he didn’t blame her for being wary. He wondered if she’d met Edge before but Stretch hesitated to bring up that idea, or to mention Red; he didn’t want her to feel bad if she didn’t remember. “yep, another skeleton monster in town. he’s kinda rough around the edges, but he’s okay.”

“Okay, is that all?” Doris said with unexpected mischievousness, “he didn’t sound simply ‘okay’ when you were describing him.”

A blush flared hotly in his cheekbones and Stretch hunched down in his seat, weirdly embarrassed in a way he hadn’t been with Red. At least Red could see what he was staring at, Doris only had him waxing poetically about Edge’s hips to go by, and Shakespeare he wasn’t.

“yeah, yeah,” Stretch grumbled, and damn, he should’ve brought along his hoodie, at least he could’ve hidden from the laughter shining in her translucent eyes. She had a dimple in the cheek on her good side and it deepened as Stretch admitted, “could be that i enjoy the view. but that’s it, okay? just a little sightseeing, i don’t need any souvenirs.”

“Uh huh,” Doris clicked her tongue thoughtfully, “Stretch, my mama always told me you can’t hurry up a good time by waiting for it.”

Other people were starting to come into the theater now. One of them gave him a curious look, but they didn’t stop, only followed the others down to the front row.

“the only time i’m looking for is in the nick of,” Stretch sighed. “guess there’s no way around it, i’ll have to read the book.”

He should’ve known not to try to find an easy way out; seemed like all his shortcuts had abandoned him, lately.

Doris laid a hand on his arm and a sudden chill sank its teeth in deep enough for his bones to ache. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help,” Doris said softly.

“nah, you helped plenty,” Stretch told her. She had. Now he knew that scarecrows were slightly more recent, at least within the past century and that maybe the cornfield wasn’t quiet as safe as it’d been played off to be. At least a cornfield without Edgar Allen in it.

The lights started dimming, the first credits beginning to roll. His popcorn was cold, the butter congealing it into clumps of greasy blobs that stuck to his fingers. Stretch ate it anyway, hey, it cost him a dollar, and laughed with Doris as Buster Keaton escaped from a bumbling crowd of cops by grabbing onto a passing car.

His phone was in his pocket, tucked in deep and only lightly pressing against his femur through the thin cloth of his shorts. It vibrated once in a quick, staccato burst while the movie was playing but Stretch ignored it.

That was one lesson he’d learned very well while they still lived under the mountain; if you focused on the task at hand, you didn’t have to think about the ones you left behind.

~~*~~

tbc

[yuvon-writes-letters]

Yuvon (and Jake),

I'm actually glad you understand my suspicions and still, I think you convinced me to trust you for now. Maybe that goes both ways.

So, helping each other with those weird situations over letters, hm?

I never would've dreamed of my life becoming this...messed up? Weird? Crazy? But hey, at least it is not boring.

Yes, I was saying the stuff with the chinese food (which I really cooked btw) because of the motel room :)

So, four hours only...But that's something we could have expected: Different universes (as far as we know), different 'time zones' if you wanna call it like that.

Jake didn't I still was not able to reach my Jake, but I took a closer look on the picture. Sadly I didn't find anything. In the moment I'll stay where I am, I don't want to leave my home, but I hope I'll find a way to contact the Crow-Crew soon. Or maybe what (or who) ever is responsible for the stasis desides to 'help' me a bit. The thought of the MWAF (at least that's what I think) being out of the stasis with me is not really calming. I am also thinking about calling other people I know from Duskwood, or had contact with. Maybe Alan, Darkness or even Phil in prison. I have to figure out with whom I can stay in contact.

To help you, maybe you can figure out a bit more of where you are and maybe why you're there? You said something of a library and game room, also a comfy room. Is there something, anything that could give you hints?

Or is there something you haven't talked about yet that you know which could give more hints on your situation? Everything could help you now (even though going or plotting against an entity would be rather difficult) [a little figure that seems to think really hard is sketched next to the sentence]

So yeah, I think that's it for now. Maybe Rai will answer again soon, then we'd be three people :)

Stay safe Yuron, and Jake too!

[Jakes red eye is drawn here]

Liska🐾🔥

Liska,

I'm inclined to at least give SOME trust to anyone who gets these letters, since I'm 99% sure everyone who gets these is an alternate amateur investigator in the exact same position as I was in before being drawn here. You saw me talking about the parallel universe theory with Rai, right? My opinion there still stands. Maybe it's a bit naive, but the shared circumstances make me trust y'all more off the bat.

Yep, we might be trapped in cosmic horror stories, but no one could ever say this is boring XD

I was hoping not to deal with time bullshit. I was so happy when I learned that Rai and I's universes ran on the same time. Guess I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up XD Still, yeah, I really should've expected it.

Calling them would be an interesting idea. However, calling Phil might be difficult, and calling Alan may or may not cause issues; hard to tell with what we know so far. Sounds like Darkness is your best shot, at least in my opinion. (The writing here grows a little shaky.) I think that

Sorry, I started laughing and my lines started going crazy. I can’t ever NOT find Darkness hilarious, he reminds me of me when I was in my edgy phase. Anyhow, you’re probably going to need some type of pretext for talking to him, unless you want to frame it as just striking up a conversation. Maybe send him that picture of the MWAF’s mask you just got and ask him if it’s the one from the legend? You’ve come to him for info on the MWAF before, it probably won’t come off as an odd question.

I mean, odd for reasons other than you being sent a photo of the MWAF’s mask. Whatever, you get what I mean.

As for the rooms: there’s been something I’ve been obsessing over for a while, now, but I haven’t been able to get anywhere with it. I don’t know how much you know about video games, but for purposes of what I’m talking about, there’s basically three types: Singleplayer games are self-explanatory, and I have more than a few in the game room. Multiplayer games, on the other hand, come in two variants. There are ONLINE multiplayer games, where you play with random people on the internet. I have none of those, which is probably not surprising given all my other restrictions.

What I DO have are what are called LOCAL multiplayer games. These games are basically meant to be played by someone in the same room as you, on the same console (I’m usually a PC gamer but local multiplayer is generally a console thing.) There are also board games (multiplayer!) and even some DnD handbooks!

What’s most interesting to me, though, is that almost everything so far has been tailored to my interests. Books are all genres I enjoy, games are all genres I enjoy, etc etc. But buried under some other stuff is a chessboard. I’m AWFUL at chess and generally avoid playing it to avoid humiliating myself.

So something’s definitely up with that, though I’m not entirely sure what.

(Blacked out) (Blacked out harshly) (Blacked out) fe No, nothing of particular note I haven’t said yet. There’s those three rooms to the “south”, “east”, and “west”. There’s infinite paper. Whenever I get out of here I’m gonna get hit with a fine for littering XD   I have a pen that doesn’t run out of ink, a pencil that doesn’t seem to get dull, a paper clip with all the letters I’ve gotten or sent so far, and my malfunctioning phone which doesn’t run out of charge.

For a rehash of the rules I’ve learned of this place: I don’t need to eat or drink. I don’t get injuries. Nothing can pass through the invisible barrier. The trees are pass-through-able if there’s a room on the other side. I am not allowed to contact anybody not somehow related to the Duskwood case. Unless I take action to spur them on first, the Crow Crew remains in stasis except for on landmark days like Father’s Day. (Jake is no longer in stasis, exactly, but he can’t get anything new on the case either. He considers it a variation on the stasis.)

:) Yeah, hope Rai’s doing okay. They probably just had something come up in their life, and that’s why they haven’t written for a little bit. Or maybe they moved and the entity keeping me here didn’t update the address XD

Jake wants to try to figure out if there’s a “conversion rate” for time between our universes. I suspect there isn’t a conversion rate, but it’d be good to figure out one way or the other. We’re taking notes on the approximate times we get your letters and send ours back to you. Your letter was received about 12 hours after I sent the last letter, and I’m sending this one somewhere about about 2 hours after I got yours.

Jake highly recommends you don’t call Alan. And while he personally doesn’t mind if you call Phil, he says that based on his own previous behavior, your Jake might not be too happy about it XD

He also suggests that maybe the reason my letters sent so oddly in the first place (introductory, then all the others at once,) had something to do with the time bullshit. Seems possible, I guess, but that might imply your stasis doesn’t have anything to do with my stasis; I figure if my entity was the one doing your stasis it could bypass the stasis to deliver the letters.

Speaking of stasis: I know it’s dangerous, and I know you’d be breaking your promise... but what would happen if you physically went to Duskwood? Probably too bad of an idea to actually try unless you get really desperate, but it’s something to think about.

You be safe too, Lis :)

—Yuvon and Jake

(The letter tucks itself into the paper clip with the others.)

[kareofbears]

day 30: dusk

Hawaii is hot, beautiful, crowded, and decidedly not downtown Tokyo.

---

(Or, the Hawaii school trip rewritten.)

He's about to leave his hotel room when his phone starts ringing. Akira sighs, and swipes up.

"I said to call when you get there."

"Hello to you too, Futaba," Akira greets the pouting girl on the screen. "Sorry, things got busy."

"For five days!? Do you hate me?"

"I could never!" He exclaims, mock offended. "I just wanted to get you the perfect souvenir, unless you don't want the super cool Featherman stickers I saw in a gift shop—"

She gasps, pushing her face right up against the camera, screen blurring as she shakes her phone around. "You’re lying, Kurusu! There's no way you found the limited edition American Featherman laptop stickers there!"

"Mm, I'd be willing to cough it up, but only if an annoying brat is willing to forgive me."

"I forgive you, I forgive you!" She shrieks, eyes glimmering with excitement in a near dangerous way. "Okay, go have fun! Buy more of the stickers, too! I could sell them for big bucks in Japan."

"We are not ruining the merch economy, Futaba."

"You're no fun."

"I'm going now. Be good, you monster."

"Over my dead body would I ever do something good."

----

"That looks fun."

Makoto looks up from her place in the sand, a bucket in her hand. "It is. Would you like to join me?"

Akira nods, and sits beside her. He peers at her mediocre pile. There’s no design or meaning to it—It’s truly just a small mound of sand. "Is that supposed to be a sand castle?"

"Yes," she sighs. "I'm glad you can tell, at least. I've been trying to train myself to accept not being good at some things right away, so I decided to try and create a sandcastle; a task I've never practiced before."

"You never take a break, do you?"

"Well, I wouldn't exactly call this working," Makoto replies, filling her bucket with white sand. "Though how people create such tall sand castles are beyond me. How do they do it without some adhesive of some kind?" She then dumps the entire bucket onto her pile, grains sliding down as gravity takes hold. It settles back to its original, lackluster heap of sand. "Quite the predicament."

Akira stares at her. "Is that how you've been doing it this whole time?"

"Yes. Is something wrong?" She fills up another bucket of sand.

"Well—" Dump. "That's not...really how you do it."

She frowns. "I wish you'd told me that sooner, I've been working on this for fifteen minutes, and it would be a waste of time to—" Suddenly, a screaming child runs through her pile, flinging sand into both of their eyes.

After a solid minute of coughing and aggressive rubbing, Makoto turns to Akira. "A lesson would be excellent, thank you."

----

“Ooo, look at this one!” Ann exclaims, peering closely at massive, floral-themed sunglasses.

The two of them are strolling through the shopping district of their resort, pointing at random knick-knacks and giving their hot takes on them. To everyone’s surprise, Ann and Yusuke make excellent shopping partners; Yusuke is really the only one who can keep up with Ann’s insatiable need to shop, and he never butters up his response. In return, Ann listens closely to whatever advice he can give about aesthetics and color coding outfits.

“Tacky, but definitely in with the spirit of our island here,” he nods. “I think you should buy it. It will definitely bring some color into the dreariness of Tokyo.”

“You think?” Ann wears them, and looks in a mirror. “Not too much?”

“No, especially if you pair them with the blouse you bought in Shibuya.”

“The white one? Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Alright,” Ann nods. “I trust you! But if Ryuji laughs at me, I will be throwing these at his head.”

“What on earth does he know about the art of aesthetics and fashion? Certainly not close to the knowledge that you and I possess, surely?”

Ann grins. “This is why you rock, Yusuke.”

“Thank you.”

They pay for her shades before continuing their stroll through the pavilion.

“Thanks for helping me out!” Ann says, basking in the sun. “Ever since Shiho moved, I don’t really feel like I have a friend who I can shop with. I mean, there’s Haru, or Makoto, or even Akira, but I feel like I bore them after a while.”

“My pleasure,” Yusuke replies, every step he takes deliberately putting himself underneath the shade. “I can see no better use of my schedule than practicing the art of color-coding in real time rather than in front of a canvas.”

She hums. “Are you gonna buy anything?”

“Oh, lord no,” he scoffs. “To spend my money on something such as souvenirs when I can hardly imagine paying for my next meal is laughable. No, I’m perfectly content with simply aiding you on your journey.”

Ann blinks at him, before gasping loudly. “I know, I know!” She whirls in front of Yusuke, clapping her hands together. “To thank you for always being with me on my shopping trips, how about I, Takamaki Ann, will buy you one thing in this entire shopping district, free of charge!”

Yusuke frowns. “I can’t possibly do that to you.”

“Sure you can! Think of it as a thank you for being my shopping best friend!” She grips his forearm tightly, eyes twinkling. “Come on, it’ll be fun! Please!”

Yusuke shifts in place, torn. “Only if you’re certain—”

“Heck yeah, I am! Let’s go!”

=

“How about a nice shirt?”

Yusuke tilts his head, holding an armful of fake coconuts. “I have a shirt back at home.”

“Yeah, but…okay, nevermind.” Ann sighs. Shopping for Yusuke is turning out to be a headache. Every time she offers something, he always seems to find a reason not to get it.

“Oo, how about a hat?” She says, showing him a very cheesy red hat with the word ‘Aloha’ written on the top.

“I’m not a fan of hats. To restrict the brain would be to restrict the mind.”

Ann holds back a groan. She wishes Akira were here—his mental alignment with Yusuke is miles better than hers. “Sorry, Yusuke, I’m out of ideas.”

“That’s quite alright,” Yusuke smiles. “I do have to thank you for the offer--” He stops, eyes zoning in on something behind her. “My goodness,” he whispers, before running.

“Wh-what? Wait up!”

Yusuke lifts a massive tiki head, mouth agape. “It’s brilliant…” he mutters, gently brushing the wood with his thumb. “Look at the intricate carving, the colors, the size!” He gasps, before turning to her desperately, still clutching his artifact. “Ann. I need it.”

Ann opens her mouth, before closing it, teeth clacking together. It’s better not to question Yusuke, and she has to wonder why she even tried to offer something normal to him when, in reality, he’s anything but. “Sure thing.”

They walk out of the store five minutes later, Ann’s shades still perched on top of her head and Yusuke happily carrying a 3 foot tiki head.

----

Akira's sitting underneath the shade of an umbrella when Haru decides to visit.

"Hello, there."

He looks up, sunglasses darkening the figure in front of him. She’s wearing her bright teal swimsuit with a large, white sun hat on her head. "Wanna join?" he asks, patting the sand beside him.

"I'd love to," she replies, settling down beside him. "What are you doing?"

"Making sure Ryuji doesn't drown." At her inquisitive look, he continues, "He's been trying to surf for the past twenty minutes."

"Ah, I see. Are you not interested in joining?"

"Not a fan of getting in water if I can help it. You?"

"I prefer to enjoy the sun with some reading," she gestures to the book in her hands: Flowerpedia.

"I'm surprised you haven't read that one before."

"I have!" She smiles, and he mimics her in return. It's nice to see Haru happy despite all odds. "But I like to reread it when I can't actually garden. It still lets me feel as though I'm on the school rooftop this way."

"I'll let you get to it then."

Akira enjoys the sun as Haru flicks open her book. With the waves crashing, the winds blowing, and people around them laughing amongst themselves, it makes for a calming atmosphere.

After a few minutes, Haru looks up from her book. "Oh, would you look at that,” They both watch as Ryuji finally stands on his surfboard, knees shaking. His brow is furrowed in intense concentration, even more so than in group study sessions (which, in reality, doesn’t mean much). "He's doing quite well."

Akira raises his hands and cups it over his mouth. His voice turns high pitched, "Looking cool, Sakamoto-senpai!"

Ryuji looks up, eagerly looking to see which cute kouhai is calling his name before slipping off the board, submerging in water completely as his surfboard continues to ride the current without him.

Haru purses her lips, trying not to laugh. "Too cruel, Akira-kun."

"I think of it as ‘just right.’"

----

“Yo, Haru! Ann!”

The girls turn around to see Ryuji enthusiastically running towards them, a hand behind his back.

“Hello Ryuji-kun,” Haru smiles. “You seem happy.”

“You bet I am! Because, I, Sakamoto Ryuji,” he rips his hand up, showcasing a neon green frisbee. “Bought a motherfuckin’ frisbee! Oops, sorry Haru.”

“I told you, I don’t mind if you swear.”

“A frisbee?” Ann asks, skeptical. “You’re that excited over a piece of plastic?"

“Hey! Have you ever played frisbee on a beach? It’s fu-frick, ugh, whatever, it’s amazing! It tires you out like crazy and it’s super fun. Plus, there ain’t much places to throw a frisbee around in Tokyo, unless you wanna get hit by a car or something.” He grins widely, jumping in place. “So? How about it? Wanna play a few rounds?”

“Ugh, pass. Sounds lame."

“What?! I spent a crazy amount of money on this thing—screw gift shops by the way, they're monsters—and you’re gonna call it lame?”

“Don’t worry Ryuji-kun!” Haru says kindly. “I’d love to play frisbee with you”

“Aw, you’re a lifesaver!” Ryuji whoops. “Unlike this killjoy over here.”

Ann rolls her eyes. “Whatever. I’m meeting with Akira. Later, Haru.”

Ryuji and Haru separate a good few meters apart and begin to lightly throw the frisbee from each other.

“Would you like to have more distance between us?” Haru calls after a few minutes of tossing. “I’d hate to feel like I’m boring you.”

“Only if you want! Don’t wanna make you sweat or nothin’.”

“I want to!” Haru says, determined. “To learn a skill like proper throwing and the technicalities of a perfect aim is helpful in our endeavor!”

“Hell yeah, that’s the badass Haru I know! Okay, let’s get some distance in here.”

The two of them separate even further, to the point where they have to scream in order to have a conversation.

“Is this good?!” Haru yells, holding the frisbee in her hand.

“Totally!” Ryuji shouts back. “Throw it!”

Haru takes a deep breath, and throws the frisbee with all her might. Perhaps it was her passion for learning new things, or maybe it was simply because she really, really wanted it to reach Ryuji in a beautiful arc where it would land directly in his waiting hands—instead, the neon green frisbee that was lovingly bought with Ryuji's pocket money is flung, gliding into the ocean. They watch in silence as it floats, far and away, until it’s out of sight.

Ryuji does his best to go through the five stages of grief in as little time as possible.

Haru sprints towards him, apologies already bubbling from her lips, promising to buy him ten frisbees and ‘I'm so sorry I don't know what happened Ryuji-kun, come on let's go back to the gift shop.’ In the end, Ryuji successfully turns down her offer, opting instead that they split a banana split back in the hotel.

"I don't know what happened," Haru sighs, shoving strawberry ice cream in her mouth. "I must have thrown it much too hard, I'm—"

"If you say sorry again, I'm making you eat the banana."

She frowns. "Do you not like the banana part of a banana split?"

"Of course not, do I look like someone who likes fruits? Anyway, point is, stop apologizin'! No harm, no foul."

"You looked devastated, Ryuji-kun."

He waves it off. "That's fine. What do they say in English? C'est la vie?"

"I'm... pretty sure that's not English. But please, one last time, allow to me apologize—"

"What, for being too strong?" He asks, eyebrow quirking up. "Look, I know you're my senpai and all, but lemme say this." Ryuji scoops a spoonful of chocolate in his mouth before continuing. "Never apologize for being too strong, especially in a shi-crappy world like this, okay? Lotsa people wish they have what you have, and people who are strong seem to be doin' awesome! I mean, look at Ann—she can probably kick my ass!"

"But she wouldn't."

"She wouldn't," he shrugs. "Doesn't mean that she can't, though. Anyway, for the last time," he points his spoon at her seriously, dripping with melting ice cream. "It's chill. You’re strong and that's awesome. Probably from all the dirt you carry, or weeds you pull out, or something."

Haru giggles. "Thank you, Ryuji-kun."

"No prob! Hey, let's see if we can get away with fillin’ up an entire bowl with caramel sauce!"

"I don't think that's the best idea."

----

"Akiraaaaa~"

"Yes, Ann?"

She grins, donned in her bikini and proudly shoving her phone in his face. Her beach bag hangs off of her shoulders. "Photoshoot?"

He pretends to think about it. "Only if I get compensated."

"You'll get compensated through a movie when we get back?"

"Deal."

Ann chooses a nice, empty spot on the beach; a seemingly impossible task given that Hawaii is a magnet for tourists. "This place is perfect!"

"It is," he agrees. "Any particular angles you're feeling right now?"

"You know my good ones," Ann says, throwing her bag down. She'd dragged him to enough of her photoshoots that he can practically mimic them, in order, alongside her.

Akira nods, and they get to work. She gives him a variety of poses—playful, confident, flirty, and he tries his best to channel his inner Ohya and get the best shots possible (at least, enough for ‘the ‘Gram,’ as she would affectionately call it). At one point, Akira has his stomach against the sand to capture her angles, to the amusement of the people watching.

"Ooo, what a cameraman!" Ann calls, one leg in the air, mid-pose.

"Only the best for the next Vogue superstar."

She laughs, but abruptly stops when a rough, deep, unknown voice yells at them.

"Show us more, sweetheart!"

Ann makes eye contact with a massive bodybuilder, eyeing her. She giggles. "Only if you come here!"

Akira clenches his jaw as the man saunters over to her, clearly thrilled to have Ann's attention. "What's your name, honey?"

Ann smiles, leaning over, having the man salivating behind her. Then, she picks up her bag and slams it across the guy's jaw. "My name is eat shit, asshole!"

He stumbles back, shocked and clutching his jaw. "You're fucking crazy!" He spits out, backing away from her, before stomping in another direction.

Akira sits up, smiling, and puts his hand up to her. "Good one."

"Thanks!" She enthusiastically high-fives him. "Was it too much?"

"The ‘eat shit’ thing? No, it's pretty classy."

"Right? It really gets the message across!"

"You want more pictures?"

After a second, she answers, "Nah, I’m good. I am down for a selfie though."

He smiles, and they both throw bunny ears around each other, both grinning at the camera.

----

"You okay there?"

Yusuke groans, eyes closed, leaning his head back on the sofa. His hand absent-mindedly rubs his bloated stomach. The two of them are sitting alone in the hotel buffet lounge on a table that's too big for them. Everyone else had left already, too impatient to wait for Yusuke to finish. "I feel that death is approaching."

Akira grimaces in sympathy. "Was it before or after the third plate of fried squid?"

"Before." He sighs. "I am not accustomed to so much food being available to me that I may have been a tad too eager."

"I can see that," Akira pushes his glass of water towards his mildly green-looking friend. "Drink that when you can."

"Thank you, but if I attempt to put anything in my mouth right now..." he shivers. "I cannot imagine it."

"Wanna try walking it off?"

Yusuke considers it. "Yes, that would suffice."

Akira helps Yusuke up, not unlike helping an aging Saint Bernard stand, and together they make their way to the beach.

He breathes in deeply, smiling ever so slightly. "As always, a great decision, leader. I feel my insides cleansing with the salt of the ocean."

"Do you like the ocean?"

"Yes. In truth, this is only my second time going; the first being when we went in the summer," he hesitates, before admitting, "Sensei didn't like to take us places as it could have been a distraction from making art."

"That's weird," Akira says. "Since places and experiences can help you make art, can't it?"

"My thoughts exactly. Sensei seemed to have forgotten how art is truly created, instead remembering how art can be acquired," he looks to the ocean, eyes distant. "A shame, since the ocean truly is something remarkable that cannot be captured without seeing it in real life."

He takes in Yusuke's expression, the way he stares longingly at the sea, and asks, "Do you want to make art now?"

"I'd love to, but my canvases were taken away during customs," he grimaces. "A shame, since I had brought five as well. What a waste of good supplies."

Akira tugs on his fringe. "You know, sand is almost like a textured canvas, isn't it?" He traces a smiley face on the sand with his heel. "Check it out."

Yusuke blinks. "Yes, but then I won't be able to take it back with me. It would eventually be washed away, or stepped on, or—"

"Yeah but you're not doing this to put it in a gallery, aren't you?" Akira asks, smiling at Yusuke. "This is just so you have a way to make art and enjoy it."

His eyes widen, before Yusuke chuckles quietly. "You truly have an interesting mind, leader."

"You and me both."

"Alright!" Yusuke starts, clapping his hands together. "Allow me to make art, not for a museum, nor for any of these pedestrians, but for myself."

Akira watches Yusuke make intricate patterns on the white sand for forty minutes; true to his word, he was constantly interrupted by kids sprinting across his make-shift canvas, waves washing it away, and at one point someone had dropped their entire surfboard right in the middle of it all.

Yusuke steps back, and admires his work. It’s barely comprehensible—just a lot of swirls and lines, but he's smiling wider than Akira’s ever seen.

"What do you think?"

"Does it matter what I think?" Akira shrugs. "I thought you never liked making art for others' opinion."

"I'd be willing to say you're the exception."

He grins, and claps his hand on Yusuke’s shoulder. "If that's the case, then I'd say it's perfect."

----

"Three-on-three, girls against boys."

Haru puts her hand up politely. "Pardon the accusation Mako-chan, but it seems that the teams may be unfair to us girls. After all, the tallest of us is Ann, who's only 5'6."

"Nah," Ryuji shakes his head, pointing an accusatory finger at Makoto. "You weren't there when we went to the beach before. She spikes down on us, no problem. Fuckin' hurts to try and block her, too. If anything, girls’ll have the advantage here.”

"But don’t worry about them, either," Ann pipes up. "They'll have Akira on the team. He makes a great setter."

"Not to mention that Yusuke is literally 5'11," Akira points out, hand raised to block out the intense Hawaiian sun.

Ryuji looks at Yusuke, as if only now seeing his height. "Huh. Damn, you're tall, huh? Like a telephone post, or something."

"I'll take that as a compliment; without telephone posts, we cannot use telephones."

"Hell yeah, we can't!" he grins, despite Yusuke's lackluster response. "You'll earn us a ton of points dude!"

Yusuke smiles. "You can rely on me."

=

"Yusuke!" Ryuji wails, frustrated. "You can't just stand and put your arms up to block! You gotta jump! Like this!" He demonstrates. "You're just letting all her spikes in at this rate!"

"But," Yusuke frowns. "If I jump too much, I start to sweat."

"Then take off that goddamn hoodie!"

"Hmm, that's possible. However, too much sun isn't good for me. It makes me sweat."

Ryuji screams, and Akira pats his back.

The score is roughly 22 - 8, girls in the lead. Haru makes for a good setter with her steady hands, and Makoto has never hesitated about anything in her life, which both add up to a dangerous combo. On the other side of the net, the only reason they earned their meager set of points is from Akira's setter dumps. Anytime he tries to set to Ryuji, Ryuji gets so excited that he either misses the timing, or simply forgets to jump. Though, Ryuji is fantastic at receiving the ball, from his stamina and fast reflexes. Yusuke, however, refuses to receive any of Makoto's spikes, opting instead to tilt his body out of her line of fire.

"It's okay, Yusuke!" Haru calls encouragingly from the other side. "Volleyballs are pretty scary sometimes!"

"Thank you Haru, but I am truly unperturbed by the point gap."

"You should be!" Ryuji screeches.

"It's not just his fault, you idiot!" Ann yells back, all too happy to pick on Ryuji. "You're the one that can't run and jump at the same time!"

"Sh-shut up! You're letting Haru and Makoto do all the work!"

"That's way better than losing by fourteen points!"

“How long did it take you to do that mental math, Takamaki? Or did Makoto whisper the answer to you?”

“Which one of us got 29% on the last math practice exam, because it wasn’t me!”

"How about we grab food?" Makoto cuts in. "It's about that time, anyway."

"Food sounds good," Akira says quickly, eager to lower Ryuji’s blood pressure.

Yusuke nods, pleased. "Yes, I was just about famished, anyway."

"Akira told me you almost threw up."

"That was nearly two hours ago. Everything has been digested."

"I worry about you, Yusuke."

----

"Hey."

Akira turns around to see Ryuji kicking the ground, making tiny sand clouds with his flip flops. The sun is about to set soon, casting their chunk of Hawaiian beach in an ethereal golden glow. Thankfully, with the lack of heat, there are substantially less people wandering around, and it can almost be considered peaceful. Quiet, even.

"Hey, yourself."

Ryuji rubs the back of his neck, "I'm not really hungry yet. You?"

Akira feels himself smile. "Can't say that I am. Wanna walk?"

"Almost like you read my mind."

So they walk along the shoreline, flip flops in their hands as they talk, waves lapping at their feet as they laugh about nothing and everything, basking in the sunlight and in each other's company. Akira kicks sand at Ryuji's feet which led to him trying to push Akira into the waves, losing his balance, and falling into the ocean himself. After they both nearly cry with laughter, they both decided to take a break on a nearby bench.

"Man," Ryuji sighs, hair still wet with salt water. “Hawaii is nice as hell. Can’t find a beach like this in Japan, ya know?” Ryuji looks at the sunset in front of them wistfully. “Makes me wish my Ma could see it. She’s always wanted to visit warm places, but she’s always working, never got the time.” His eyes light up, “Maybe I could take a couple pictures! I bet she’d love that.”

“She would,” Akira agrees. In the few times he’s met Sakamoto-san, she’s a huge sentimental sweetheart who thinks the world of her son. “Want me to take some of you?”

Ryuji thinks about it. “How about let’s take one together? She’d be happy to have proof that I’m not just making shit up about having friends.”

“Sure thing.”

The two of them crowd around Ryuji’s phone, Akira smiling softly while Ryuji grins, throwing peace signs, snapping a photo, before pulling back again. “Aw, she’d love this!” He grins. “This ain’t actually half bad, either.”

“Send it to me,” Akira says, peering over his shoulder. “I’ve been needing a new background, anyway.”

Ryuji stares at Akira, ears red. “S-sure, dude.”

They watch the waves crash against the shore. "I can't believe today's our last day,” Ryuji sighs. “I feel like nothing even happened."

Akira hums, making mindless circles into the sand with the very tip of his toes. "Did you want something to happen?"

"I mean, nothing specific. All I know about Hawaii was that they had beaches and shit," he shifts slightly. "The one thing I actually wanted to happen was to hang out with you a whole bunch, and even then I feel like I didn't get that."

"Well, we're here now, aren't we?"

Ryuji looks up at Akira, and after a beat of silence, he laughs. "Yeah, I guess we are." He bumps shoulders with him, grinning. "Look at you, sayin' shit like that, thinking you're so cool."

"Oh, I am the coolest. Arguably, I'd say I'm the coolest guy around."

"Yeah, next to Mishima, maybe."

"You don't think I'm cool?"

"I didn't say that!"

"So you do think I'm cool?"

It might be the warm sun or the general heat of the island, but his face flushes a bright red. After a moment of spluttering, he mumbles, "I think you're cool as hell."

Akira blinks, completely caught off guard. He tries to say a joke, like hell can’t be cool, Ryuji, but his heart is hammering so hard that his body can’t seem to cooperate.

"Oh," Ryuji goes on, shoving his hands in his pockets. "I was looking through the gift shop for my Ma’s souvenir and I found something for you!"

He fishes out two small keychains; two flip flops, one left, one right. They're designed with a tacky Hawaiian print and coconuts all over. Ryuji hands one to Akira. "We could match, see?" He rubs the back of his neck again. "Thought it was neat cause if we both have one, it's like we're walking side by side! Or, you know, something like that." His flush deepens, spreading all the way down his neck and splitting his chest. "Or not, it's probably super lame and tacky, it only cost like, 4 dollars, which is like 40 yen, right? Anyway, my bad for ruining the mood—"

"I love it," Akira breathes.

Ryuji's eyes widen before he quickly turns away. "Cool, cool." He looks to the sunset, too overwhelmed to look at the boy next to him. "We should probably head back, yeah? Bet Yusuke and Ann are eating half the buffet by now."

Akira scoots closer, shoulder to shoulder with the boy beside him. "Then let them."

They sit there for a few more minutes, watching the sky slowly turn violet, matching keychains hanging loosely from their fingertips.

[grace-likes-things]

Chapter Five - Something Different

Masterlist

A/N: for a minute writing this chapter I really felt some golden-trio style convo going on lol, how nostalgic. This is the longest chapter yet, so have fun reading!

Warnings: unusual behavior, light violence and blood.

~~~~~

“Waft! Do not directly smell the solution!”

Peter and I are in chem, trying to finish up a lab. It’s been a few days since our pleasant movie night when he crashed at my house, and the cookout is coming up this weekend. Which also means our date is getting sooner by the day.

“Pass me the iodine?” He asks, bringing my thoughts back to the real world. I go to grab the beaker when I hear another student speak loudly from the corner of the room.

“Hey, Ms. Elliot. Why are all these test tubes locked up?” Sarah Hildersen stands next to a tall glass cabinet against the back wall. It strikes me as unusual that she’s bringing attention to herself for a question so out of place, as from what I know about her she’s a very shy and reserved girl.

“Miss Hildersen, those are the highly reactive chemicals we keep, purely for demonstration,” the older woman says, “Please continue with your lab.”

I turn to give Peter a look, but when I glance back his features are contorted. He’s sensing something.

All off a sudden there’s a crash of shattering glass from the back of the room, I jump in my seat, as I see that Sarah has thrust her bare fist through the glass case, grabbing the nearest test tube and uncorking it.

“Sarah Hildersen!” Ms. Elliot exclaims, standing promptly at her desk and moving quickly toward the girl.

I watch in bewilderment as Sarah, without hesitation, pours the entire contents of the tube into the solution of her beaker.

The entire class takes cover as a loud reaction takes place, singeing Sarah’s shirt sleeves and ultimately setting off the fire alarms.

“What the hell?” I say, mostly to myself as I stare at the blood dripping from Sarah’s knuckles. Our classmates begin to cough, and Peter lifts a sleeve over his mouth and nose while he ushers me into the flow of our classmates out the door. Since when has Sarah ever been one to exhibit such reckless, weird behavior? Since when has anyone at Midtown? I take a final glance back before we pass through the doorway only to witness Sarah’s glazed and confused stare, her hands held forth in front of her.

When Peter and I finally reach the fire-safe zone Ned catches our attention.

“Hey! People are saying something happened in the chem lab?” he asks, “Did you guys see it?”

“Yeah, Sarah H. got all weird all of a sudden and broke into the restricted chemical cabinet,” he looks around and ducks close to the both of us before continuing, “and I could have sworn I got a feeling about it. Like, a feeling feeling.”

Ned looks quizzical, “But Peter, doesn’t that only happen when there’s, like, a real threat? I mean, that’s crazy and all but I don’t think it could put you in all that much danger, it’s not like — “

The boys continue to ramble to each other about Peter’s spidey-sense, but my attention is drawn past them toward the frenzy of students and staff fleeing the building. Some of our fellow chem students are still wearing their goggles and aprons. Others are stuck in P.E. uniforms. The fire department arrives soon, and I observe as a few of the firefighters speak with the principal and another member of the staff — Ms. Elliot? She seems to explain something to the crew, and they run quickly into the building. Several minutes pass. Kids complain about having to leave, some joke about the building actually burning and getting out of school. I try to ignore their comments when I finally see the doors re-open, revealing the firefighter crew marching out of the building with a coughing and shaken Sarah in tow, covering her face with an oxygen mask. Her gait is robotic, her eyes startled but distant.

“Something’s wrong with her,” I state.

“No kidding, she practically tried to poison your whole class.”

I turn back to the boys, “No, Ned, look at her. Peter, did you see the look on her face in class? And how she looks now? It’s like she has no idea what happened. She’s confused.”

“Okay?” Peter says, “And that means… what?”

I sigh, annoyed but without an answer, “I don't know, but that wasn’t like her. At all. She's probably had a spotless record since kindergarten and now this?”

“It’s weird, right, but she asked Ms. Elliot what they were and then turned back and shoved her fist through the glass anyway, we both saw it.”

“Yeah, we both saw it Peter, normal people don't just put their fist through a glass cabinet! I’m telling you, I don't know what, but there’s something up with her.”

The three of us turn to watch as she’s sat in the back of an ambulance, legs dangling over the side. The police have arrived and currently look like they’re trying to ask her about what happened. She doesn't seem to be answering — or even acknowledging — them. That moment, my shoulder is jostled by someone with lab goggles on their head, and I turn to see none other than Sarah’s lab partner.

“Hey, you were working with Sarah, right?” I ask, and the other girl nods, “Did she seem off before that stunt? That seemed really out of character.”

Obviously concerned for her friend, her gaze is past my shoulder where Sarah sits, still failing to answer questions. She answers nonetheless, “It was so strange. I mean, one minute we were just talking about the procedures and our English project, and the next thing I know she’s shut down. That’s when she stood up and asked Ms. Elliot about the test tubes.”

I want to ask her more, but my attention is torn when I hear a familiar voice.

“Hey, kids!” Peter and I spin to see Happy pulled up to the curb, shouting through the window of his car.

“Happy?” Peter says, “What are you doing here? They haven’t dismissed us yet.”

“Tony called the school, you and iron kid, hop in.” We say our goodbyes to Ned and join Happy in the car. I note that our belongings are still in the chem room, to which he responds, “They aren’t letting kids back in there ‘till the whole air system is filtered out. You’ll probably get your stuff back tomorrow. Gets you out of the homework at least, right?”

“Yeah. Good thing too, the calc packet was due tomorrow,” Peter turns to me, “Had you even started that yet?”

“What are you talking about?” I ask quizzically, “I finished it in study hall the day he assigned it.”

Peter gives me a bewildered look, severely confused by something, “What? You told me the other night you hadn’t started it yet.”

“When? There was no ‘night’ before I had it done?”

“At your house, after making cookies. When we fell asleep?”

“‘We’ fell asleep?” Happy butts in.

“Morgan was there!” I brush him off and return my attention back to Peter, “I don't remember that at all. I was probably only half awake or something.”

“Right, yeah,” and with that Peter decides to leave it be.

We arrive back at the lake house soon enough and hang out for a while until my parents deem it time for dinner. The table is set for the five of us, and Morgan feigns not wanting to sit for a minute before my dad promises her a cookie for dessert behind Pepper’s back. I give her a thumbs up before Peter and I join my family at the table, and we all start to enjoy the meal.

“So there was a chemical spill at school?” Pepper asks.

“I wouldn’t really call it a spill,” I say, “Do you guys remember Sarah Hildersen? She’s been in my class since middle school?”

“Vaguely,” my dad answers, “Quiet kid, right?”

“Exactly. And today she just decided to break into the restricted chemical cabinet with her bare fists, and dump a random test tube into her solution.”

“What?”

“It was so strange, she didn’t seem like herself at all.”

Peter clears his throat, “I don't know, maybe she’s just going through a thing?”

“Peter, even you said you felt it coming!” I exclaim frustratedly, “I really think there was something seriously off about her, it was just so… unusual. And you saw her face after, it was like she had no idea what was going on.”

“That is weird…” Tony agrees, “Even underoos had a sense about it?”

Peter nods, and I continue, “I’m telling you, it was seriously out of the ordinary.”

“Oh!” My dad drops the subject, “Speaking of, what the hell were you doing roaming around like a zombie last night? Morgan came to get me, nearly scared the shit out of her.”

“Tony!”

“Shit.”

“Don’t say that word!” He corrects the give year old before turning back to me, “But seriously, what was up with that?”

“I was walking around? I don't even remember, could I have been sleepwalking?”

“I mean, maybe, but you never have before. Not even when you were little.”

I sigh, pushing my food around my plate in confusion. What’s with these strange stories I’m suddenly hearing about myself while I should be asleep? First Peter claims sleep talking, and now sleepwalking?

I decide to let it rest for now, and soon enough dinner is finished. I say goodbye to Peter before he’s driven back into the city to patrol for a few hours. Because of the whole school incident I don't have any homework to do, so I head up to my room early, eventually drifting off to a hopefully restful sleep.

[blankdblank]

The Ice Cream Bandit

Day 20 – 

“Loving you is as easy as breathing.”

“But you’re asthmatic.”

“Your point?”

Day 21 –

“Get out of my face before I hit you.

“I don’t care if your 4 or 40, you don’t hit people.”

…

What you wouldn’t give for a Dragon about now. In a room of suitors you stared at yet another fake smiling three piece donning imbecile who pretended that the whole world didn’t know about his domestic assault charges an ex had filed and promptly dropped before the slew of yacht photos now flooding her social pages between pictures of the fleet of sports cars since having done so. Straight faced you greeted each of them as if you couldn’t feel your father’s eyes boring into you like drills demanding you choose the future owner of your life and crown. You had just gotten your books for your final year of University and had assumed you could be granted a tiny bit of freedom, unlike your mother who had mysteriously taken ill and was shipped back to her homeland to be with family before you could be brought home from middle school. It was since then that he had changed, a King with a secret is a dangerous thing.

At least you were allowed to school still for the time being, that is what you kept reminding yourself. The stroke of a finger against your shoulder down onto your chest granted the owner of said hand a heavy slam into his foot with your heel as you pleasantly said through his muffled groan, “Careful, someone else might take that contact the wrong way. I will give you ten minutes to hobble your chauvinistic ass out of the palace before I throw you off that balcony.”

A flash of a grin came in your pretending to notice another gentleman entering the room near the window to the balcony. The offender hobbled out and the entering male took it as his cue to lay on the charm while your threat was followed and your gaze lowered to the path outside the window overlooking the servant entrance to the kitchens. Again the same flash of blonde hair on the son of your family chef who you had seen and never been allowed to speak with outside of school. Always your allowed partner in classes, and in University the only one welcomed in the zone of nine chairs around you your guards kept for either themselves or to leave empty for monitoring.

Each time he would exit the door in between errands taking him either to the herb gardens or orchards for fresh supplies for the next course in a circle he would turn peering up at the windows. It was easy to find you today, head to toe in a white shimmering one shoulder gown hugging you to the knee where it flared out. Subtly his head would nod anytime he caught sight of you and a stolen stroke of his ear acted as your easily mistakable wave for a nervous twitch. It always meant the same when caught, ice cream would be waiting in your room, how he managed it each time you never knew but still even sharing your bowls in separate places was something, it had to be something, there had to be someone who would care about you and not who you were being forced to be.

“Loving you is as easy as breathing.”

That turned your gaze back to the visiting Lord, “But you’re asthmatic.”

His cocky grin only grew and he fired back, “Your point?”

Inhaling deeply you turned with a flash of a grin to return to your seat as the ‘entertainment’ was set to begin.

*

Past midnight screams rippled through the Royal Wing and with it Thranduil’s stomach clenched, they had only gotten worse since your last birthday and made it harder for him to remain silent. Even if he knew it was wrong he was held hostage to silence, where strangers would be thrown from the tallest tower for insulting your disrespecting you it seemed the King was exempt from that rule. Through a series of hidden tunnels he found your room and slipped inside, never would he use these forgotten pathways to spy on you or harm your reputation in any way but in your growing sadness he felt an urge to try and ease it, even if it was just a stolen bowl of ice cream with a nameless note on where to leave it for collection later.

Frozen in place he heard the King shout clearly, “YOU WILL BE BETROTHED BY NEXT METEOR FESTIVAL OR I WILL CHOOSE WHO SUCCEEDS MY CROWN MYSELF!!”

“FORGIVE ME FOR EVER ASSUMING THAT I WOULD BE TAKING UP THE CROWN AND WHO I WOULD BE FORCED TO LIVE WITH! I AM SO SORRY I DON’T HAVE THE REQUIRED APPENDAGE FOR A CROWN! ALL THOSE LESSONS ON RULING A KINGDOM JUST A WASTE FOR NO SON TO BENEFIT FROM THEM!! WHAT A FAILURE YOU MUST FEEL FOR NOT HAVING ANOTHER DICK TO FOLLOW YOU ONTO THE THRONE!!” Smirking to himself he heard a door slam and eased the bowl into the usual wardrobe hearing you storming your way back to your suite though for some reason he froze at the next slamming door and continued shouts from the clearly intoxicated King.

A heavy huff sounded in the bolting of your door and wide eyed in your entrance into your bedroom you froze seeing your ice cream bandit standing there equally as wide eyed. Hastily he pointed at the wardrobe, “Chocolate vanilla swirl, kiwi, strawberries, gummy bears and nerds, just how you like it.”

Unable to help it you smirked through a soft blush, “How can you say that with a straight face?” Shrugging in response in your glance at the wardrobe he slipped out of the room and into your study to pass through the door in the bookcase he closed behind him. Noticing you were alone you hurried to your study to turn around mumbling, “Where did you go?” An upward glance source of the shadow passing over you a white moth fluttering around the crystal coated light fixture on the ceiling had you mumble, “Can’t be you, my ice cream bandit. How could you get the bowl up here?”

Turning around you said, “Enjoy the light, and stay away from my sweaters.” Turning to change and curl up to your favorite late night court shows as you ate your ice cream.

.

In the kitchens again Thranduil froze once more seeing his father pointing at the candy pouches on the counter, “You are not avoiding the question this time, what are you doing with the Princesses’ candy stash? She leaves them specifically-,”

Thranduil huffed, “I took the Princess some ice cream.”

Oropher’s mouth dropped open, “We aren’t the wait staff! There are proper channels-!”

Thranduil, “I know! She didn’t see me!”

Oropher, “Even better! Sneaking into the Princesses’ suite! We could get sacked if you get caught! And you could get beheaded for damaging her reputation!”

Thranduil, “She’s my friend!” That stunned the chef even more, “She had a hard day, I didn’t take cocktails I left a bowl of ice cream and was gone before the King was through demanding she find a betrothed by the festival.”

Oropher was about to speak when his wife patted his shoulder saying, “I am certain he was careful, and does not cross this line often,” her eyes turned to her son who nodded.

“I would never! I just wanted to help her have something pleasant today to distract her form being bartered off.”

Oropher sighed, “Just be careful not to end your life over a bowl of ice cream.”

*

Three weeks of forced dinners weekly and events you would be dolled up for your true escape was another school party. Each time you were invited and the highest frat full of highly ranked children of Nobles would be there as usual each time you were demanded to go. It seemed the throne of Greater Greenwood was far too tempting for them to ignore, and as usual cameras were subtly stashed throughout with footage up for sale to the highest bidding tabloid for all the nonexistent gossip on you. Instantly they circled you and your skin began to crawl, a flash of white and you strolled after the life raft. Around your thighs your layered coral dress billowed and swayed on the breeze when you slipped out to the balcony.

*

Rolling his eyes Thranduil tugged at the tie he was forced to wear to attend this party, his braid was too tight and his vest was restrictive, but as always he found the balcony where he would sit watching the stars listening for any sign that you would need rescuing. Last time the ice sculpture tipped, a chair leg broke under a card player tipping him over the time before that, with a full power cut off as the worst he’d done with a snuck hand around your wrist tugging you to the night air guiding you out a back path your disguised guards had been relieved their allowed ally of yours was so prepped to aid in your protection. Heavily he dropped into the seat and sighed again releasing the button at the base of his neck then made work of his sleeves, unbuttoning one to roll up with the other after on his coral shirt matching your dress as per the allotted dress code for the evening.

The usual chatter sounded and then promptly died making him turn his head only to see you exiting the party on your way to his side making his brows inch up. Up at you he gazed and all at once you were wearing his jacket then on his lap with an arm slung around his shoulders with your lips pressed to his. Whispers flooded the party wondering where you’d gone as his jacket he’d set aside was eased on to hide your dress allowing you to be just another random couple in the crowd. It was meant to be one kiss and sure it still remained to be in the content rhythm broken into pace learning the motions of one another. Innocent yet growing more impassioned by the minute your fingers trailed along his cheek urging him on in a stolen flick of his tongue against your lip.

Surely you were just hiding, yet with his arms draped around your hips holding you on his lap flush against his chest that title and barrier of rank slipped away. Years he had left you treats to brighten your evening and now if all you wanted was this kiss he would savor it for as long as it lasted. No hint of alcohol was caught, only the hint of strawberries from your lip gloss that in a brush of your thumb under his lower lip was brushed away. Stolen fragments of glances at one another were taken in a pausing break for air, silent and uncertain how to carry on an inch closer from you brought his lips firmly back to yours again. Hours until the clock inside chimed a third time you remained fixed in his hold and grumbled at your arms retracting in a slow stroke over his shoulders.

He broke the silence, “We should get you back.” Wetting his lips he helped you up ensuring you remained blocked by his frame for the walk to the waiting car as the silently smirking guards followed along. Into the car he slid after you at a head nod from one of the guards who climbed onto the bench seat on the back while the other took the front seat. A subtle slide of his hand to yours along the seat calmed the tapping of your fingers when his palm covered the back of your hand in the folding of his fingers over your palm luring your fingers to fold in over his.

Parked again under the covered park a far from subtle call of the guards in your sheepish glance at Thranduil their heads dropped in bending to tie their shoes at once, though it was the tug on the Driver’s neck bringing him out of sight making you giggle under your breath in claiming another quick kiss once outside the car in passing over the jacket you had shrugged out of. In a whisper you flashed him a quick grin saying, “Night Dew Drop.”

In the rising of the guards and driver again he clenched his fingers around the jacket in his hands, “Goodnight, Princess Pear.” A yearning glance over your back in your path inside he waited for you to enter then turned to make way to the servant’s door, all the way to his room his grin spread with the warmth in his body from the feeling of your skin still lingering on his.

…

Sure enough by morning the pictures had hit the press, and wide eyed over their breakfast table the Greenleaves stared at their son with pinking ears shoveling down his meal before racing off to his chores. They were thankful he was nameless at least and his face was blocked by yours, it really was just those glimmering heels of yours with custom crowns in the soles each designer made just for you ensuring each pair was specially checked for your safety and comfort. A secret betrothal was rumored, though all that was cast out of attention as word exploded of the King suffering a fatal blow to the back of his head while you were found stabbed in the shoulder with a chord loosely around your neck.

It was everywhere, the guards flooded in around you seeing you to the hospital in Lothlorien under the watch of your distant cousin King Amroth, who had spent the better part of the day since your landing there fighting that you not be forced into marriage. Clearly distraught he sat waiting to hear how you were, the attack worsened in the media by the minute until he gathered himself enough to say that he had attacked you in a drug and alcohol induced rage. His balance clearly hindered as one kick sent him back into a fireplace mantel edge. Not two hours alter the surprisingly clean wound was sealed and the bruises around your neck said it all.

Where some had expected full refusal of your place you were the only heir and the council fell gladly in line, those all taking glee in the fact that their daughters now held a better standing in their futures in your being taken as the full and rightful ruler of the Greater Greenwood. Times had changed, and finally it seemed the monarchy was following the rest of the world, no more forced events, no more orders to marry anyone but the one of your choosing. A simple statement by you was had, bruises on full display, that you were taking up your place on the throne and anyone deeming themselves tempted to try stealing rule away by marriage was welcome to leave your lands in search for another crown.

It seemed a tad harsh, until the tidal wave inquiry you took into the actual deals your father had struck. School was on hold as you scoured through them all and the tipping point was found, a trio of Lords, all hung, who had been trifling of pieces of the crown for themselves had been flushed out into the public eye, fully stripped of their titles and financial assets you poured into public fundings that had been long over looked. A full month had passed and after a highly publicized coronation overshadowing the funeral of the fallen and badly used King had the lands settled calmly enough for a startling show of your place back to class. Sparsely at first, as you were due in meetings most days of the week, but you caught up your exams and even stole a highly photographed innocent lunch with Thranduil.

Each day you had settled more into your new tasks and also your new wing of the palace, a troubling thought for Thranduil as there had been no tunnels he could find to bring you your treats subtly, or chances to catch you through a window to see how you were that day. All he could find was a ledge leading to your balcony just across from his family cottage. Supplies in a bag he snuck to the wall staring at the ledge well above his reach.

A clearing of a throat made him flinch back looking one of your guards over, “Careful there, popping up on someone like that.”

Another guard behind him said, “Oh really? And just what is your reasoning for staring at this wall?”

Guard 1, “Someone might think you’re up to something.”

Thranduil shook his head saying, “Thought I saw a moth. Now, let me pass and get out of my face before I hit you.”

The pair smirked and Guard 2 replied, “I don’t care if you’re 4 or 40, you don’t hit people.”

Thranduil scoffed, “I hit people! You don’t know me.”

Guard 1 nodded and grabbed Thranduil’s wrist turning him around to face the wall before they crouched to grip his legs at the knee and said, “Hurry up there Tiny Tulkas and grab the ledge before the next patrol comes by.” When he made it onto the ledge he glanced down at the guards strolling away then turned to continue on. Through the open double doors on your balcony he strolled and looked around at the King’s quarters your Grandfather had once lived in now decorated to suit your own tastes. Setting down his bag on your coffee table he heard you changing in your bedroom, the turning of your doorknob as it was all set out he cleared his throat warning you of his place there.

A sheepish grin later and he saw you smirking up at him crossing the room in your pajamas to see just what he’d brought you. A faked need to wait for the guards to pass by led to his curling up beside you enjoying the sugary treat and eventually to your falling asleep on the couch. If there was concern of your reputation it didn’t last long as a trio of maids continued their verification checks on your safety and claimed the chance to cover you both up and leave keeping the secret with them. It seemed their new Queen had a secret too, but the matching acorn birthmarks on your ankles soon gave reason for why there was a new face attending the Meteor Festival who kept a firm hold on the Queen’s hand until you were pulled away. But little was left to imagine as per your relationship status when in looking up at the meteor shower he stood behind you with his arms draped around your middle grinning as you melted back against his chest with a spreading smile of your own at his kiss on your cheek.

[cmncisspnandmore]

Don’t Let Me Go

Hello my lovely readers! This is a fic i wanted to write because i have been feeling kind of down in the dumps lately and I wanted some Fluffy Reid to make me feel better. Not that my Fiance cant cheer me up but sometimes you just need to feel a little love from the guys you’ll never get ya know? Anyways this is a new series, i’m not sure how many parts this will be but enjoy!

Pairing: Spencer Reid X Reader Warnings: Anorexia, eating disorders, depression, drug use, mentions of past character death, extreme fluff? is that a warning? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

27 hours.

It had been 27 hours since you took the last bite of food. All that had passed your lips in the past 27 hours was black coffee and water.

Pulling open the door to the conference room, your team turn to look at you. Each member giving you a smile, and Dr. Spencer reid pulled the chair next to him out slightly, a steaming paper cup set in front of it.

“Alrighty my pretties. We got two women, one a Sandra Morey, 35, divorcee. Two kids that live with their father Henry Morey. And we have Aubrey Willison, also 35, has two kids that live with their dad a Mr. Ralph Willison. Both women were found in their homes with a single gunshot wound to the chest, that pierced their heart. Both ex husbands have been ruled out as suspects, and the icing on our lovely murder cake is that they were killed within 3 days of each other.” Garcia clicks through the slideshow of the victims.

The team listens intently, but your food deprived mind starts to drift, and you find yourself staring blankly down at the paper cup in front of you. There were 2 calories in black coffee. 1 in espresso, over the past day you had consumed 23 calories. 10 cups of piping hot coffee and an espresso that you grabbed on your way here. The barista gave you a weird look when you ordered a single shot of espresso, nothing else. No cream, no sugar, normally people ordered a latte, or a cappuccino. But not you. There were far too many calories, you didn’t even enjoy the taste of black coffee, it was far too bitter and left a gross taste in your mouth. But the feeling of the hot liquid sliding down your throat warming your permanently cold chest, was euphoric. You savored the way it felt in your empty stomach.

“Y/n, are you cold? You’re shivering..” Reid’s hand on your arm startled you, and you gave him a shy smile.

“Sorry, I should’ve grabbed a sweater before coming in I guess,”

“Here use mine.”

You watch as Reid shrugs off his brown cardigan and wraps it around your thin shoulders. You were surprised it fit. You felt like a elephant, your wrists were too thick, your thighs touched and your ribs didn’t stick out when you laid down. Your collarbones were hidden under puffy, mushy fat that clung to you like glue. You hated the way your stomach protrudes when you sit down. You can’t stand when people brush by you in small spaces, people should be able to effortlessly slip by you. If they couldn’t, then you were thin enough.

“Thank you, Reid. I appreciate it.” You smile lightly, a small blush creeping up your cheeks. Across the table Morgan watched as the Dr. smiled back, his hand lingering on your shoulder just a moment too long. Morgan smiled to himself, he had an inkling that the genius liked you as more than a friend. You had been the saviour for the doctors self destruction when he fell to the cold hand of Dilaudid. You had been fairly new to the team when Reid was kidnapped, and you didn't hesitate to hold Reids hand as he was carried away on the stretcher, and you actually got into a verbal argument with Hotch, when he told you to leave for the night to go home. You stuck by his bedside the entire night, and when he was discharged you even insisted you sleep at his house until his wounds healed.

Spencer at the time wasn't aware that you had known what it was like to be completely alone when fighting something you couldn't control. You knew that the Unsub had drugged Reid, you had found the vials, when Reid was suddenly acting strange a few months after the incident. When he had been cleared for the field again, and you picked up on it instantly. You had made it your personal mission to help him with this.

As you helped Reid get over his addiction to the harsh drug that had been forced upon him, your friendship grew, and for Spencer it grew into more than that. When Maeve died you were right there for him as well. You spent nights sitting outside his apartment door, reading him lines from his favorite books. You brought him coffee and just listened to him cry. You were the equivalent to a guardian angel for Spencer.

You had helped Spencer more than anyone could have imagined, and in return the kind, awkward Doctor had started to bring you coffee, and you would spend nights at his place and listen to his read his favorite books. You would often gift books to each other, share random facts you found interesting with one another. It was the small things that made Spencer fall for you, the way your nose crinkled when you found out what the names of the Unsubs. How you had to make sure that everyone got home safe after a case, and how you bought Garcia endless colorful pens for her office.

“Wheels up in 20” Hotch, grabs the file from the table in front of you and you jump. Your brain felt foggy, and logically you knew you needed to eat something if you were going on a case, but the calories you burned when you fasted for this long. When you fasted for this long, you desired to feel light and airy. Like nothing in the world could weigh you down.

“Y/N, are you okay? You’re awfully jumpy, and you barely drank any of your coffee..” Reid stood up, his brow knitted together in worry. Reid may be a profiler, but so were you, you knew what he was looking for, a tell, a sign that you werent okay. You hated that you had to lie to him, and to the team but if they knew what was happening with you they would call for you to have a evaluation and that would get you taken from the field.

You could handle this, only 15 pounds left, then you would finally be where you needed to be. Reid and the team, they would think you looked amazing. Morgan would be able to lift you up when he gave you a hug after a hard case. And Reid, he would be able to lift you off his lap when you fell asleep as he ran his long fingers through your hair, as he read to you. You would be able to ask for a smaller size of your vest because the bigger ones the rest of the team wore would restrict your movement. You would be able to wear spencers cardigans and have them hang to your knees, your slim legs would look great in them and you wouldn't feel like an elephant anymore. All you had to do was fast for another day or so and then you could allow the 300 calories you felt would be acceptable.

“I’m fine, Spence. I promise, just tired, I had a hard time sleeping last night.” You smile up at him and he holds out his hand for you, you greatly take it and wrap your thin fingers around his, and allow the tall Dr. to assist you in standing.

You walk with the rest of the team to the jet, everyone wearing light sweaters in the warm breeze, while you wrapped your down jacket around you a little tighter, the wind forcing violent shiver through you. You stood next to Spencer and JJ, waiting for the stairs of the jet to fold down. You couldn’t wait to sit in the last booth across from the Dr. as he read another book that you picked up from him on your way in to work this morning. You always picked the longest books you could find when buying books for Reid. His eidetic memory making reading books a short task for him, but he humored you often and tried to slow his reading so you wouldn't feel bad for taking a while longer to read the selections he picked for you.

You put your go bag in the compartment above the bench you claimed as your own, and sat on the bench, as Spencer sits across from you. “Oh Spencey. I got you this.” You reach into your purse a hand him the book, and he gives you a smile.

“Thanks Y/N, I’m sure im going to enjoy it. I always do,” He takes the book and tucks in under his arm and shrugs off his messenger bag. Placing it on his seat, he walks over to the cabinet on the back of jet and grabs a water for himself and brings you one.

“Here, i know your ears pop when you take off.” He hands you the bottle his fingers brushing against yours, and it takes everything in Spencer to not pull back from your alarmingly cold hand. Spencer had noticed over the past few months how you had dropped a few pounds, and at first it wasn't alarming, with the amount of cases increasing all of your diets had suffered. But when things had evened out and you were still dropping weight. And now that the last 6 times you had crashed at Reid’s apartment you refused dinner and the following morning breakfast, settling for a cup of black coffee on both occasions.

He had also noticed how you stopped carrying a lunch bag with you when the team was at the office, and had often opted for a protein bar you had in your purse. And now with the zoning out during meetings and the way your cheeks sunk in just a hint further than normal Reid was concerned. He had always thought of you as beautiful and he fell for you despite your looks. Your caring personality and your willingness to help a person who you only knew for a few days when Spencer was going through the aftermath of being held captive by Tobias.

He had fallen in love with you for everything about you, not just your looks. Spencer had hoped to talk to you about it this weekend but with the case he was afraid that he wouldn't make it in time. That something would go horribly wrong before he got the chance to confront you and help you with whatever you were going through. Like you had done for him twice before, Spencer took the book from the seat and sat down resting one arm on the armrest and flipped to the front page of the book, eyes scanning across the page, he got lost in the authors writing for a few minutes before movement across from him caught his eye.

He glanced up from the book and watched as you laid your head down on the seat, pulling two of the blankets provided over you, still in your down coat, and closed your eyes. Spencer watched for a few moments as you drifted off, shivering slightly in your sleep. Spencer had read a few books about eating disorders as a kid, when his mom first got really sick, he thought she might have one and read up on it to try and help her. But when he figured out his mother had Schizophrenia he stopped reading up on the topic.

But he recognized the signs in you as slept across from him on the plane. He knew it wasn't his job to save you but at the same time he felt like he needed to be the one to save you because he knew that in your mind your mind you were saving yourself, but in trying to save yourself you were killing yourself. When Reid had been on drugs you were the one to reach into his life and help him. Now it was his turn, he just needed to figure out how, he knew that this case would probably take up most of your time, seeing as you were a dedicated agent. When there was a case you threw yourself into it. He wouldn't be able to talk some sense into you over this case, he would either have to pull you away from the case or wait until after it was over.

His one hope was that it wouldn't be too late for you by the time the case was over. He could tell by the way you moved and how after you stood up you took a few moments too long to start walking that you were walking a dangerous line right now. You bumped into the table on the way out of the office, and now as Spencer watched you sleep he could see a bruise forming on your forearm. You barely bumped into the table but a bruise forming like that was a sure sign of later stages of anorexia.

Spencer fearing someone was watching his contemplative stare would try to figure out what he was looking at you for and draw attention to it. Something he knew could cause you go into a downward spiral, being publicly called out about this could damage you. Something Reid didn't want to happen, for he already thought you were just a little too fragile.  

[flicky1984]

The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games

Flicky (September 1984)

Maze games were very popular during the first half of the 1980s. Hits like Pac-Man had made large sums of money for Sega’s rivals, and though the video arcade industry was no longer moving at the same speed it had during its early years, the genre was still popular enough that publishers kept up a steady rhythm of releases. Sega looked to its R&D division to come up with something that could keep pace with Namco and Bally/Midway. What it got was a little blue bird named Flicky.

Flicky’s development team was led by Youji Ishii, a Sega designer who would one day be responsible for the classic game Fantasy Zone. Having joined Sega in April 1978 after graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, Ishii was interested in creating games that were bright and colorful, and he believed that his works should be happy experiences for players. He started working on sound effects for games like Deep Scan and Zaxxon and got his first chance at design with 1983’s Up’n Down, a pseudo–3D arcade driving game. It sold enough for Sega to assign him to another title, one that was likely more important to Ishii’s career as it was to his employer’s bottom line. Sega meant for Flicky to be its response to Namco’s Mappy, emulating the time-based maze dynamic that was popular at the time. The visual style and gameplay Ishii had in mind would give Sega the competitor it wanted (Derboo, “Flicky”; “Fantasy Zone—2014”).

Flicky put players in the role of a blue sparrow who must rescue her chick friends, called Chirps (In Japan, they were called “Piopio,” a misspelling of the Japanese word “pyopyo” which means “baby bird”). The chicks had run amok inside an apartment building, and Flicky had to gather them all and guide them to the exit. Hungry cats called “Tiger” in the Western version and “Nyannyan” in Japanese actively chased the chicks, as did an iguana named Iggy (Choro in Japan). Touching the chicks put them in line behind Flicky, who had to avoid enemies while bringing all the chicks to the door. Items such as cups and trumpets were scattered throughout the stages, and Flicky could shoot these items at the cats and iguana to temporarily incapacitate them. The Nyannyan couldn’t hurt the baby birds, but they could kill Flicky with a single touch. The game lasted 48 stages before looping with a harder difficulty (Derboo, “Flicky”).

Ishii’s adorable character designs were brought to life by the talented hand of Yoshiki Kawasaki, a young artist who had joined the company because it was the closest job offer to his home. He had been a big fan of pinball and driving games, playing in the dark arcades of Hibiya, Japan, so the chance to join Sega was an exciting opportunity for him. Kawasaki was hired at Sega in 1976 as a designer. Though he was an artist, he started out in the purchasing department, and he spent many an hour playing Head-On. His work soon came to the attention of Hideki Sato, who recognized his talent and moved him over to the visual design division of Sega’s research and development department. His first assignment was the SG-1000 version of Golgo 13. After working on the laserdisc game Albegas and another release called Sinbad Mystery, Kawasaki began to long for something more interesting. He got his chance when he was handed the proposal for Flicky from the game’s lead designer. Kawasaki would finally have his big chance to put his programming abilities to greater use (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

When Kawasaki was assigned to Flicky, all that existed was a simple four-page proposal. There was to be a labyrinth and a simple game character. The concept was just a derivation of Namco’s Pac-Man, where players would collect dots in the maze. Ishii liked maze games, and he knew he wanted the game to follow that motif. He was certain of one thing: Flicky would not penalize players for falling through the floors as Mappy did. This was the starting design premise for the game and the reason why a bird was chosen as the main character (“Fantasy Zone—2014”). The problem was that nothing was detailed; there wasn’t even a description of the game’s background. The character profiles were also incredibly vague, reading “since the maze can be simple lines, the characters can look simple too. You can leave the background black.” Kawasaki based the main character, Flicky, on a lyric from a popular 1977 song called “Densen Ondo,” which referred to three sparrows on an electric line. Kawasaki wondered why birds would move on electric lines when they could simply fly. He figured that perhaps they jumped, so he decided to have Flicky jump (or “heroically jump,” as he put it) instead of fly. The Chirps were an evolution of the dots in the maze. Kawasaki revealed how he developed the little birds in an interview for Sega of Japan’s website:

The dots were originally really just dots. When you collected one it would disappear. But then, I thought it would be interesting if the dots didn’t disappear but instead line up. So, I made the dots line up behind Flicky. That’s when I really started fleshing things out. I asked if I could make the dots 8 × 8 pixels big, but in the end, I couldn’t do anything with 8 × 8 pixels. Then I thought: If they were little birds, I could do it [“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”].

At first, he simply had the Chirps follow their bird friend back to the exit door. That was too simple, so he had them scatter when touched by a cat. When it proved too easy to gather up all the Chirps, Kawasaki spiced things up by having some of them race off in different directions. He gave these “Bad Chirps” sunglasses so that players would be able to recognize them (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Creating those cute little chicks with attitude wasn’t very easy; none of the character models were. Kawasaki had to use a rudimentary tool that was similar to Sega’s TV Oekaki, a tablet-like device that came with a light pen. It plugged directly into televisions and was made available commercially for Sega’s SG-1000 in 1985. Using such a simple tool was problematic, particularly getting it to draw single pixels. It would often draw three or four at once (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Kawasaki’s original level design had horizontal lines on the screen that resembled power lines. These lines were to act as the maze walls; however, once Flicky’s characters were completed, Kawasaki found the lines to be dull and unengaging. It was only after gazing out the window at an apartment building across the street from his third-floor window in Sega’s R&D annex building that Kawasaki found the perfect setting. Why not have the action take place in an apartment building? The residential setting let Kawasaki insert household items, like cups and baby bottles—things that would be found in a home with children. They would also help Flicky fight off Tiger and Iggy (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Flicky played differently than most games of its type, most notably in the way the main character jumped. The control was very floaty and heavy with inertia. Players had to time their jumps correctly, particularly when coming down from the top of the screen. Ishii believed this was the product of the hardware limitations of the System 1 arcade board. These restrictions also influenced the design of the labyrinth stages, which did a decent job of creating the illusion of size. Ishii commented about this challenge in a 2014 interview with STG Gameside. “With Flicky, we challenged ourselves to make the stages feel like wide, expansive spaces despite the tiny memory available” (“Fantasy Zone–2014”).

Ishii was also able to make Flicky seem larger than it really was using free-scrolling stages. Players could move either left or right almost indefinitely, giving the stages a larger sense of scale. The inspiration for this design came from two sources: Williams Electronics’ 1981 smash Defender and a far-lesser known Commodore 64 title named Drol, which involved a flying and shooting robot. “Basically,” Ishii explained to Shooting Gameside in 2014, “I just like that style. I like how you can rush forward, then turn around really quick and retreat if you need to.” Ishii would revisit this design for his 1986 hit, Fantasy Zone (“Fantasy Zone—2014; Ishii).

The stages themselves weren’t random scenery. There was an overall theme to them that was very close to the team, particularly Kawasaki. As the gameplay centered on the concept of saving children, Kawasaki’s group wanted this objective to be Flicky’s driving theme. It wasn’t just about bringing some birds to a door for points; there was more to it than that. Kawasaki wanted players to feel the maternal instinct of protecting defenseless children from predators. He felt they could sympathize, even though the chicks were merely game characters on a screen. After all, Flicky was a sparrow, not a chicken, and while she was only the chicks’ friend and not their mother (despite being labeled as such in the SG-1000 port of the game) she could still want to protect them. “Children face a variety of dangers when they go outside,” he commented in a 2016 interview, “and the feeling of ‘wanting to return them safely to the nest’ is something that I think is experienced 80 The Sega Arcade Revolution by not just parents, but anyone who is around children. And it’s that emotion that drives Flicky, a sparrow, to protect the chicks, even though their parents are actually chickens.” Examples of this design are present throughout the game. The bicycle and balloons (which symbolize dreams) on the title screen, the apartment resident in the bonus stage windows—all were meant to drive the point home that the chicks were children who were in mortal danger. The later stages developed this narrative. For example, the outer space background represented the future, one that would be cut short if Tiger and Iggy got their way. Such themes were not uncommon to games made by Kawasaki. None of his games featured characters dying, and he preferred to make friendlier and cuter games to counteract the bad reputation arcades had in Japan at the time (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak).

In development for a year, Flicky could have been much larger than it finally was. The design team had around 100 stages done but few backgrounds, and there was very little memory space left. Kawasaki opted to keep only four backgrounds, differentiating them by color, and the stages were reduced to a total of 40. After playtesting the game, the team added a monster that would appear in windows and breathe fire. Iggy was also conceived at this point, primarily to keep players from standing still in a stage. He ran throughout the level, making it unsafe to remain too long in a single spot. Kawasaki wasn’t too fond of the lizard because he was added at the end of development. He had wanted Iggy to be an insect, but his lack of motivation for the character made the design look more reptilian. During Flicky’s development, Kawasaki developed something of a reputation for taking such shortcuts, a behavior that earned him the humorous nickname “Sabori Kawasaki,” or “Slacker Kawasaki” (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”)

Flicky changed names twice during development. The original title of Busty was switched to Flippy due to a trademark issue in the U.S. (Bally/Midway also noted that “busty” was American slang for women with large breasts). The next choice, Flippy, was eventually deemed to sound too much like Mappy, so the title was changed again (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak). The game—with its final title of Flicky—was released in Japan in May 1984 and worldwide that September. A decent seller, it would sadly never receive a sequel. Ports of Flicky were released on multiple home consoles and later in compilations, and Flicky herself has made several cameos in other Sega games but has otherwise been forgotten as a character. The closest she’s come to fame has been in Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series as one of the animals released when Sonic defeated Eggman and cleared a zone. All the bird friends that Sonic rescues are called “flickies” and resemble her (“Flicky”).

While it’s unfortunate that Flicky has not been given a second chance, the original game remains an important step for both Ishii and Sega. Much of what Ishii learned from making Flicky would manifest itself in a major way in his masterpiece Fantasy Zone only two years later. His experience with Flicky would also be influential in his later work on other platformers like Teddy Boy Blues (both arcade and Master System versions) and Ristar (Genesis). Sega, on the other hand, got a solid maze-chase game that provided valuable experience to someone who would become one of its most talented and prolific producers. Ishii was part of a major pool of talent that would explode over the next few years, soaring to incredible heights on the wings of a little blue bird.

[essenceoffilm]

“Is She Real?” and Other Distant Dreams within Dreams: Fifteen Films Which Are Completely Their Own Thing

There are films which stick to one’s mind due to their greatness as well as those which do the same for their extreme inferiority. Mediocre films have a tendency to leave one’s mind like an uneventful day once the night falls. Then there are films which one keeps coming back to because they are completely their own thing. These are films which stay in memory due to their striking originality. They might be masterpieces, and thus greatness could be among the explanans for the phenomenon of preservation, but they do not have to be. In terms of quality or personal preference, these films might be somewhere in the middle. They elude the nightfall of oblivion on other grounds. Although their survival of the test of time can thus be explained by reference to uniqueness, it should be emphasized that uniqueness in this case does not mean any conventional weirdness or doing the extraordinary. The notion I am interested here is not what you might call in-your-face uniqueness (feel free to insert a list of contemporary “indie” directors). Rather, I am interested in the unique unique. I am talking about films which stay with you, but you can’t really point your finger at them and say why; they stay with you not because of quirkiness, of artistic mastery, of historical significance, of intricate story or peculiar characters, but because of an utterly original approach to cinematic discourse -- which might, of course, include all of these to altering degrees. Such originality might be less obvious, but it is there, it is real, and it is singular.

The following list of fifteen unique films will not include the obvious candidates from the first films which did this or that to the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird adventures. I have tried to resist the urge to go where the fence is lowest and make a list of “weird movies”; instead I have tried to focus on a more subtle notion of uniqueness. The challenge as well as the allure of list-making are the constant limitations one sets for oneself. That is also the reason why no director pops up twice in the list. Another yardstick for a unique film of this kind is that the film in question cannot really be compared to anything else. Or if it can, the comparison remains loose at best. Hence the absence of films from auteurs whose bodies of work form distinct unique wholes but precisely as wholes, not singular parts. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Rouch, Michelangelo Antonioni, you name it. All of them managed to craft an original cinematic discourse, but they developed the execution of that discourse in countless films that form an admirable whole of aesthetic consistency. 

So, here, I am not interested in cultural peculiarity, a director’s originality, or uniqueness within a genre. I am interested in a slightly different kind of personality with regard to cinematic discourse. Although each of the following fifteen films exemplifying this unique uniqueness obviously belong to a director’s oeuvre, I believe that all of them stick out in one way or another. They have not been listed in order of personal preference or quality but in terms of uniqueness (which is, of course, a notion difficult to define, and which is a notion not completely free from personal preference and quality, I’m sure). As such, they tell another story, perhaps unique by nature, about the enigma of the seventh art.

15. Cria cuervos (1976, Carlos Saura, SPAIN)

It is an indescribable delight to witness Carlos Saura’s magnum opus Cria cuervos (1976) unfold before you for the very first time. Since the film, which tells the story about a young girl and her two sisters who try to cope with growing up after the death of their parents, was released one year after Francisco Franco’s death, it has become something of a standard interpretation to watch Cria cuervos as an allegorical tale of "the children of Spain” coping with the loss of their patriarchal leader in a new social reality. Yet any serious spectator will tell you that this is just one side of the film’s multi-layered coin of meanings. Its ambiguous structure might tie in with the prevalent narrative tendencies of Saura’s generation of left-wing Spanish directors, but it also works as a metaphor for the vague human mind. Not only cutting but also panning between the present, the past, and an imagined future, the film unfolds as a poignant story about loss and longing, the desire to be somewhere else, something else, some other time.  One of the best films about childhood ever made, Cria cuervos denies romantic innocence without falling into the trap of naive pessimism. It embraces childhood as a part of being human, being mortal, being without something, being toward loss, being as always losing something.

The most famous scene from the film -- and an example of just this -- is definitely the scene where the young girl, played by the unforgettable Ana Torrent, listens to a pop song “Porque te vas” by Jeanette, a nostalgic love song about leaving that reminds the girl of her mother’s death.  A touching moment beyond words that can only happen in the cinema, this scene exemplifies beautifully the tendency of children to cling onto seemingly insignificant objects that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The images where the girl quietly moves her lips in synchronization with the song are breath-taking and heart-breaking. The way how Saura executes this brief scene, in one sequence shot, is just so original, so inimitable, and so Saura. The emotions are not clearly visible on the child’s face, most likely because she is unable to understand let alone express them, but they come from another place that lies somewhere in between of sound and image. The context for this scene is her frustration with her aunt, who she briefly impersonates (”turn down the music”), which further pushes the obvious meanings and the obvious feelings outside. Maybe it is just a random pop song? What is left is the ambiguity of meaning and feeling. And that resonates. Powerfully. I have never seen anything quite like it. These are unique images which speak loudly about the power of cinema. Some might say that what makes Cria cuervos as unique as it is are Ana Torrent’s dark button eyes, but, in reality, it is how Saura frames them, how he lights them, and how he cuts from them. Cria cuervos has no single detail which would exhaust Saura’s style; yet his sense of composition, his choice of shot scale, his sense of color, sound, and movement are in every second of the film; they are characterized by the subtlest nuances which distinguish an ordinary beautiful object from a true work of art.

14. Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Abbas Kiarostami, IRAN)

Abbas Kiarostami’s penchant for meta-cinematic discourse, which addresses enduring human themes through postmodern questioning of the possibilities of representation, reaches a peak in Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Close-Up). Based on true events, it tells the peculiar story about a poor Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian (played by himself, like all the performers in the film) who pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf for the Ahankas, an upper-class Iranian family to whom Sabzian told that he wanted to use them and their house for his next film. When Sabzian’s hoax was revealed, the Ahankha family sued him only to drop charges after Sabzian’s intentions proved out to be more complex than those of a traditional impostor. Kiarostami mixes documentary footage with staged scenes of what happened to the extent that it is impossible for the spectator to make a distinction. Not because of slyness, or Kiarostami’s talent to cover his tracks, but precisely because the distinction disappears: when the people involved are placed in front of the camera, acting out what has happened in the not-so-distant past, there is no longer a sense of staging but of being.

In a marvelous moment of poetic intuition and cinematic genius, Kiarostami’s camera picks up an empty spray can rolling downhill on asphalt. In the spirit of the “phenomenological realism” of the Italian neorealists, Kiarostami’s objets trouvés, like the empty spray can, are not symbols for something else. It might be juicy to see meaning written in the code of the empty spray can, say, in terms of the looming void behind the roles we all play, but Kiarostami’s camera uncovers it as a mere abandoned tool. Heidegger would call it Vorhanden, a being present-at-hand, whose factual existence is obvious to us after it has lost its functional purpose in its appropriate context, its primordial being as Zuhanden, a being ready-to-hand that one surrounds oneself with in the everyday reality of practical life. Even if this coarsely rolling empty spray can was the postmodern alternative to Sisyphus’ rock, it would be more a metonymy than a metaphor. It is a desolate, cast-off tool whose lonely mundane being paradoxically charms us in its banality. It is, what we might call in the spirit of anticipation, the taste of cherry.

Here, in the peculiar zone between metaphor and metonomy, meaning and the lack of it (or independent meaning), inhabited by empty spray cans, lies the uniqueness of Nema-ye Nazdik. There is nothing holy or sacred in Kiarostami’s images. The material density of the rough texture of the depicted reality drains from them. The close-ups of the film -- whether in actual shot scale or in narrative intimacy achieved by precisely restrictive framing and extensive use of the off-screen space -- startle us with this banality of the facticity of being and the phenomenal surface of reality. The final close-up of the film shows us Sabzian, looking down, holding a bouquet at the gate of the Ahanka residence where Makhmalbaf has taken him to make amends. One senses the Chaplinesque tragedy of life in close-up. It is tragic because there is no comfort from contextualization; there is a factual detail thrown at us in its strange existential disclosure. A rolling empty spray can or a structured identity at ruins -- revealed, stripped, naked. The human theme of longing coalesces with the meta-cinematic theme of the possibility of representation as one feels the unquenchable thirst for escape, the yearning to be someone else in this banal world of objects-at-present. Where else in the cinema does one find all of this? 

13. The Wrong Man (1956, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

Although Hitchcock is definitely a genre director, meaning that he really devoted his whole career to the genre of suspense (whether in thriller, horror, espionage, or adventure), he made a lot of films which pushed the limits of genre aesthetics, conventional narration, and classical style toward unexplored territories in the land of film. Hitchcock’s legacy is in fact constituted precisely by his relentless desire to look for new ways of cinematic expression. The most obvious example would probably be the “trilogy” in which Hitchcock tested -- and, perhaps to popular opinion, failed -- the slow aesthetics of the long take: Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), and Stage Fright (1950). Their uniqueness is admirable, and the two latter border on masterpiece, but the most unique of Hitchcock’s films is, I believe, The Wrong Man (1956).

If Hitchcock, the great manipulator of his audience whose “buttons” he loved to push, is placed in the group of directors who mastered formalist montage over realist mise-en-scène, following a heavily Bazinian distinction, we might conclude that The Wrong Man is the closest Hitchcock ever got to cinematic realism. Although the film does manipulate the spectator, guiding their gaze throughout rather than giving them the freedom of deep focus and multiplanar composition (the cardinal virtues of Bazin’s theory), its austere mise-en-scène, economic narration, and minimalist editing make it Hitchcock’s most Bressonian film. Interestingly enough, and this will bring us to the film’s uniqueness in a moment, Hitchcock’s biggest fan and André Bazin’s most famous disciple, François Truffaut first expressed great appreciation for The Wrong Man when it came out and later disowned the film in his famous interview book with Hitchcock [1].

The passage where Truffaut challenges Hitchcock, not in order to humiliate him but in order to get him to defend his artistic choices, is among the best parts of the whole interview book. Their discussion concerns the scene where the protagonist, played by Henry Fonda, is taken to his prison cell where he does not belong to because he really has not committed the crime he is being accused of committing. There is no dialogue or voice-over narration to tell us what the character is going through, but Hitchcock’s cinematic narration still visually focalizes into his internal, first-person point of view, while switching to an external, non-focalized third-person perspective in medium shots of the character in captivity. Hitchcock cuts between these medium close-ups of the character’s face as he is looking at something and point of view shots of the austere cell that serves as the object of his gaze. There is no music, no sound -- just stark images of a narrow, grey space. The calm cutting between these two types of shots manages to reflect the character’s inner life which becomes, so to speak, externalized by cinematic means. It is as though his mind extended to the space whose austerity became to articulate his experience of imprisonment, isolation, and, ultimately, loss of self. The non-subjective space turns subjective; its concrete features start to channel the character’s mental states in ways which contemporary directors like Lucrecia Martel have mastered.

The problem Truffaut has with the scene is its ending. The scene concludes with a medium shot where the protagonist leans against the wall of his cell, eyes closed, distraught, powerless. Suddenly, non-diegetic music starts playing on the soundtrack and the camera begins swirling in a circular loop around the character. As the movement of the camera accelerates, the music intensifies and finally reaches a crescendo coinciding with a fade-to-black to the next scene. Truffaut disliked this shot because it seemed to break with the Bressonian asceticism that Hitchcock had been practicing prior to it. It is also noteworthy to add that never again is there anything like this in the rest of the film (and thus the shot does break against the norm of consistency): The Wrong Man returns to its minimalist, Bressonian roots, letting go of the striking expressivity of such camera movement (which is not used to follow a character or reveal further details of narrative significance in the diegetic space). One might recall, for example, the unforgettable shot which dissolves the praying protagonist’s face with the “right man’s” face, and what a completely different feel that shot has to it -- it is something Bresson would never do, but it is something the Bressonian side of Hitchcock does.

Despite Truffaut’s challenge, Hitchcock refused to defend his film, disappointingly noticing that it was not that important to him. That might be the case, but it might also be that Hitchcock was not sure of his artistic choice, or he didn’t know how to explain his intuition, or he didn’t want to argue about such matters. Maybe he thought he had failed in his experiment. Either way, it is this moment which always gets me. It feels a little awkward, and it always pushes me just a little away from the film, to a strange borderline zone of cringe -- but, at the same time, it feels wonderful. It’s the moment where one can so clearly see Hitchcock’s legacy as an innovator and a re-generator, looking for new ways to make films -- and not always with success. It’s the moment when you realize that you are not watching Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped) but The Wrong Man. It goes against the realist style which avoids blatant and outspoken expression, but it goes so well with Hitchcock’s own style where a sudden cut to an extreme long shot from an extreme high-angle on the top of the United Nations building is completely natural. It’s also one of those moments, definitely alongside the great dissolve of the two faces, where one can sense the presence of cinematic uniqueness. Although I think Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is a better film, there is really nothing like The Wrong Man. From Hitchcock’s startling opening monologue to the inexplicable happy end, bordering on Sirkian irony, The Wrong Man is really its own idiosyncratic thing.

12. Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, FRANCE)

Master director Max Ophüls’ final film and cinematic legacy Lola Montès (1955) is the definitive cult film. It’s strange, it’s wild, and its off-the-rails uniqueness made it a massive flop. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of... the dreams in cult film land. A lavishly told story about a woman with hundreds of lovers, who is now presented to us as a circus attraction, did not resonate with contemporary audiences. With the exception of the new film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who were to define the cinema of the following decade, everybody hated the film. To those who understood the magic, however, it was wonderful. To those who still do, it is beyond divine. The combination of box-office and critical failure with a huge budget and an unprecedented desire to challenge convention from the 50-year-old director, who was soon to pass away, turned Ophüls into a martyr figure for the new generation of French filmmakers. Like Orson Welles, Ophüls was -- to them in their own land -- a misunderstood genius, a maestro who died two years after the release of his final film that found too few kindred spirits.

What makes the case of Ophüls’ martyrdom so fascinating is the fact that on paper Lola Montès sounds like everything Truffaut et co. hated. It is based on a novel, its script has other writers in addition to Ophüls, it has an all-star cast (and without the obvious choice, the Ophüls favorite of the 50′s, Danielle Darrieux!), and it has lavish production values backed by a big budget. Does this not sound like le cinéma de qualité par excellence?

The fact that Lola Montès sounds like dull quality cinema on paper, however, does not mean that it looks like it on celluloid. And that’s what makes it unique. Known for his penchant for sumptuously elaborate camera movement (to the extent that a camera which is not moving on tracks simply looks naked in the Ophüls universe), Ophüls went an extra mile to make his forward-tracking dolly shots work in a wide circus arena without revealing the tracks. Resonating with the width of the diegetic space and the volume brought to it by such cinematography, Ophüls also widened his film into color and the CinemaScope aspect ratio for the first time in his career. Unlike anyone prior to him and few after, during a time when CinemaScope had not been around for longer than two years, Ophüls made the unexpected decision to play with the aspect ratio. For most of the screen time, we see the events unfold in 2.55:1, but, every now and then, when mood or character identification so requires, Ophüls narrows the aspect ratio back to the Academy ratio by placing curtains on both sides of the lens. The peculiar technique of altering the aspect ratio within shots in itself is enough to make Lola Montès unique, but the way it connects to the theme of the theater -- not only as the circus milieu but also as the publicization of the private sphere -- and the surprising yet accurate (which never feel too much on-the-nose) choices Ophüls makes in using it turn Lola Montès into a bizarre marvel. 

11. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)

On paper, again, Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947) seems like nothing but a love triangle done to death. Joan Crawford plays a woman who is having an affair with a married man, played by the impeccable Dana Andrews, but in the middle of their troubled affair -- that would suffice to constitute a love triangle -- enters a returning war veteran, played by Henry Fonda (the only actor to appear twice on this list!), who also catches the woman’s eye. The film unfolds as a series of moments which push the female protagonist to the embrace of one man or the other. What makes the film so unique, however, is its original cinematic discourse, its use of style and narration. In his admirably insightful new book on 40′s Hollywood, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2018), professor of film studies, David Bordwell calls Daisy Kenyon “one of the most psychologically opaque films of 1940′s” [2]. Preminger’s cinematic narration is characteristically restrictive of narrative information. There is no voice-over, which would provide the spectator information about the characters’ inner motivations and feelings, but this is only made more ambiguous by the dialogue where the characters keep making contradictory statements about themselves and others. It is difficult to keep track of their mood swings as well as their cognitive discontinuities, and make any cohesive conception of their true motivations and feelings. This was yet to become the dominant characteristic of modern European cinema (mainly Antonioni, above all), but here it blends with classical Hollywood.

The film is filled with strange moments of peculiar, recurring pauses in dialogue which enhance an ambiguity that starts to feel bigger than the characters and their petty worries. Fonda’s character suddenly ends a moment of conversation with Crawford’s by saying “my wife’s dead” without receiving a response of any kind from his romantic interlocutor. Similarly, he nonchalantly proclaims his love to her -- “I love you” -- but gets no response in another passing moment of indifferent quietude. There are no typical responses nor are there typical initiatives. There are only words that try to grab onto something but most often miss their targets that perhaps never even existed.

The lack of conventional non-diegetic music, the use of deep-focus cinematography, deep space compositions, and lingering shots create a mood of emptiness and despair, which reflect a deeper difficulty in expressing oneself. This theme is articulated on the formal level of style and narration, but it also becomes knitted into the story world toward the end when the courtroom sequence plays with the ideas of illogical human behavior and the impossibilities of finding out what people have done and felt. When one of the two men and the Crawford character embrace one another in the film's final shot, it is equally impossible for the spectator to believe that this is the stable, happy end of a typical Hollywood romance. It is merely another dumbfounded pause, another pointless initiative, another unnoticed response, which will soon be followed by quietude, distance, and alienation.

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir, AUSTRALIA)

Australian director Peter Weir has made a lot of weak films (I am not a fan of the sentimental Dead Poets Society [1989] or the pseudo-intellectual The Truman Show [1998] -- though I do have a little thing for Fearless [1993]), but his breakthrough film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is a real treat. A fictional account of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during an all-girls boarding school’s picnic on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, Picnic at Hanging Rock begins with a quasi-documentary opening text and concludes with an extra-diegetic voice-over discussing the case, making it seem as if the story was true. More than fooling the audience, this device guides them into another world, where something like this might have happened, and into the hypnotic trance of a mystery, all of which is enhanced, of course, by the first images of a foggy landscape and the girl’s words in voice-over:

What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

Weir’s greatest film leaves a lasting impression with its unique, impressionist aesthetics of pale colors, quiet sounds, soft focus, lush cinematography, eerie panpipes music, and an often strictly limited field of focus. It is as if the film had been shot through lace or a veil, giving the effect of the faded fantasy image of the romantic belle époque. The final jaded slow-motion shots of the group before the disappearance have an otherworldly quality. They bear a resemblance to impressionist paintings, but the jaded pace of the visual stream of the images emphasizes their mechanic artificiality as though these were paintings made with the first motion picture cameras. Weir’s narrative structure is likewise closer to poetry or painting than to prose as the focalization of the narration is constantly switching, the characters remain a mystery with their inner world and their psychological motives left completely in the dark, the relations between the diegetic events are vague to say the least, and Weir cuts between them in an unconventional fashion. It is nothing short of cinematic uniqueness which stays with the spectator for the rest of their life. One of the most sensitive and clever mystery films of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps astonishing with its whimsical combination of mystery and reportage, impressionism and mystique, the fantastical and the real.

9. A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Made in the days of Capra’s wartime propaganda series Why We Fight (1942-1945), whose patriotic spirit spread across the Atlantic to films calling for Anglo-American solidarity, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) defies tired cliches and patriotic sentiments in its utterly unique rhythm and tone. Taking Chaucer’s classic as an inter-textual framework, A Canterbury Tale focuses on three characters who, on their way to Canterbury, stop at a small village where a mysterious “glue-man” is terrorizing young women who dare to date soldiers. In contrast to most of the wartime productions of the time, Powell and Pressburger’s film turns its gaze from the grandiose to the minuscule, a small village that is unafraid to show its quirky silliness but as such grows into a metaphor for western civilization.

One of the famous director duo’s biggest critical and commercial flops, A Canterbury Tale defies easy classifications. What makes the film unique in a timeless sense lies in its tone and rhythm that are hard to describe. The set-up could mark the beginning of a frivolous farce, and the film is definitely not lost on moments of genuine hilarity, but, as a whole, A Canterbury Tale develops toward the area of peculiar pathos, humanistic tenderness, and profound melancholy. The mythic and the mundane, the romantic and the realist, the everyday and the sublime, the eternal and the transient all find their strange fusion in the film’s rendez-vous of distinct tones, moods, and ideas. Classical studio artificiality gets mixed with on-location authenticity, which is characterized by historical uniqueness as the contemporary spectator realizes that these places are no longer there, creating a tone like no other. In terms of rhythm, the film is always flowing without a hurry, yet never too slowly to announce itself as different or weird. The film’s uniqueness seems so simple, encapsulated in the smallest of things (the co-presence of the past and the present, the smell of the countryside that is imagined through the images, the allure of the any-space-whatevers), but it is so difficult to describe let alone achieve. It must be seen to be believed...

8. Dong (1998, Tsai Ming-Liang, TAIWAN)

The late 1990′s attracted some filmmakers to imagine eschatological scenarios and project them on the big screen. The approaching arrival of the new millennium generated visions of both anxiety and hope, but man’s relentless tendency toward end-of-the-world nightmares drew him closer to the former. These cinematic efforts on the brink of the new millennium usually vary between downright awful (Armageddon, 1998; End of Days, 1999) and surprisingly tolerable (12 Monkeys, 1995), but Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s -- who had made a reputation for himself with the understated tale of eroticism Ai qing wan sui(1994, Vive L’Amour), whose final shot in itself might earn its own prize of uniqueness -- Dong (1998, The Hole) shows not only genuine originality and imagination before new times but also a unique tonal combination of both emotions associated with the historic transition: fear and hope.

These emotions are tied together in the film’s thematic nexus of encountering something new, a theme that is treated by Ming-Liang appropriately in an utterly novel fashion. The story takes place in a block of flats in the semi-urban outskirts of a Taiwanese city where people live in quarantine due to the lack of clean water, a problem that has some dire consequences, fitting for the new millennium: without water, people turn into cockroach-like entities that crawl in the dark spaces of moist dirt and dry trash. Two people, a man and a woman, who try to survive in this situation, are united when a hole appears on the man’s floor (being the woman’s roof) due to plumbing renovations. This hole, which is both physical and emotional -- concrete to the point that we can sense its material urgency and abstract to the point that words are not enough to express it -- begins to generate unprecedented intimacy between the two. The characters rarely communicate. At best, they might yell at each other when the woman, the neighbor beneath, finds her ceiling leaking. But there is a more tender connection, one that cannot be expressed by them. In a stroke of charming genius, Ming-Liang uses 50′s-style musical sequences, where well-dressed characters sing Grace Chang’s songs and perform dance numbers that convey the introverted characters silent feelings in a manner that obfuscates more than it clarifies (there is no aha-moment tailored for the spectator). As these musical sequences take place in the same desolate urban spaces where the characters exist, Ming-Liang’s realist aesthetics of the long take, deep space compositions, and a detailed naturalist mise-en-scène of faded colors and flickering lights are challenged by romantic artifice. The space, which turns into its own character, starts dreaming. It dreams of becoming something else, somewhere else, far and away, safe from the arrival of the new.

As the world prepares for never-before-seen destruction, the holes in the characters’ souls become tangible in the form of a narrow gap, not only the grey chasm between the two apartments but also the distinction between these two diegetic dimensions (the world of song and the world of silence). As the new both anxiety-inducing and hope-awakening millennium approaches, the two characters encounter love, something they had not expected, something they had forgotten, something that appears in a totally unprecedented form -- to them as well as to us, the audience. This unique story provides us with an interlude to reflect. Where are we going? New times are coming. We can always look back to the past. We can find solace in its embrace. What is collapsing? What can be recovered? What will the abyss of the hole engulf? And what will it bring about in times of chaos? A new connection, a new intimacy, a new cinema?

7. Herz aus Glas (1976, Werner Herzog, GERMANY)

Shot mainly in director Werner Herzog’s home environment of Bavaria, accompanied with gorgeous landscape shots from all over the world which still merge with the same central milieu, as well as Popol Vuh’s score, Swiss yodeling, and medieval music, Herz aus Glas (1976, Heart of Glass) is the shining ruby in Herzog’s prolific yet familiar oeuvre. Although Herzog is often celebrated as an eccentric filmmaker whose cinema constitutes an entirely unique thing of its own, his films are usually quite clearly connected to one another, and one knows what to expect from them (which is also a compliment to Herzog’s auteur caliber). Herz aus Glas, however, brings a breath of fresh air into a catalog that already seems to be as fresh as fresh can be. It is definitely the film that sticks out. No other Herzog film employs his unquenchable desire to pursue new profound images as strongly and startlingly.

The story concerns a Bavarian town in late 18th century whose main source of income comes from blowing a rare type of ruby glass. When the secret of the ruby glass passes away with the town’s deceased master, a prophetic seer from the hills descends to the townspeople and foresees their destruction. To anyone who has seen the film, it is quite clear that the story is secondary to the film’s strange, private discourse which might be better left unanalyzed since its mere verbal description seems to aggregate an insult at worst and a failure at best.

While there are certainly more than one factor which explain the film’s incomparable uniqueness (the presence of seemingly unrelated landscape shots as an additional level of discourse, the ambiguous story as well as its elusive structure, the extremely stylized mise-en-scène that creates a sense of alienation and distance), the raison d’être for the film’s reputation obviously derives from Herzog’s exceptional decision to shoot the whole film with the actors under hypnosis. Consequently, the film is rife with images of hypnotized people who stare very attentively at something in the off-screen space -- something, an object, a sight, an event, something that remains a mystery to the hopelessly unaware spectator. In the physical space, the actors are obviously looking at something Herzog the hypnotist has guided them to look at, but in the diegetic space, the characters are looking with great attention and focus on their pre-determined doom. Their focus is startling because, despite their attentiveness, they do nothing but walk towards their demise. This works because, though pre-determined, their doom is indeterminate in the sense that they cannot really make any sense out of it. A stroke of genius on Herzog’s part, this heavily stylized acting turns into a metaphorical framework for a community which is under collective hypnosis heading out to the horizon of destruction with a sense of blind determination.

The film is totally alienated from classical story-telling, and many of its scenes take place in spaces which we might see only once and whose relations to the rest of the spaces remain unclear. Mapmakers of fictive worlds, beware. They are places which Herzog remembers from his childhood, or places which he has imagined for his past or future. There are many elements which would annoy the regular movie-goer from the slowly developing cry of a woman as she witnesses two seemingly dead men on the ground to the inexplicable bursts of laughter from the old man. There are plenty of scenes which seem to serve no clear purpose. There is a scene where a painting falls from the wall behind a man after which he tries to lift it, fails, and then returns to his original posture as if nothing had happened. There is also a sequence shot of a glassblower making a glass horse out of the melt matter. This scene has no obvious meaning in the film, nor should it; the shot is just there. It is there for us to marvel at it and to reflect on the beauty of craftsmanship, the art of glassblowing.

If the quest of Herzog’s cinema is to always look for new images, then Herz aus Glas delivers more than any of his films. One of the many peculiarities of the film are the recurring landscape shots from all over the world which remind one of Herzog’s brilliant documentary Fata Morgana (1971). These landscapes might be the visions of the attentively looking townspeople or not. As such, they might be images of destruction, of the end, or of the beginning -- or not. They might be an imagined landscape of origins. My personal favorite is the shot, which has been done mechanically by a frame-by-frame technique, of a river of clouds on the top of a forest. There is an enchanting mystique to this hypnotic image. When we look at it, we might think that it is about something, but we should not make the mistake of trying to explain what that something is. Nor should we find an external point of reference to call it a metaphor for something else. We should embrace its mere cinematic aboutness.

6. The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford, USA)

John Ford, the man who made westerns, is to modern America what Homer is to ancient Greece. Beyond the genre of lonely travelers in the wild west, Ford took his cinematic myth-making to other worlds. They Were Expendable (1944) provided the first signs of Ford’s unadorned and unsung sensitivities beyond the desert, which, after initial opposition, he was able to appreciate (sort of) after Lindsay Anderson pressed him on the emotional depth of the film in his celebrated interview book. The real deal when it comes to Ford’s hidden personality, his artistic ambition, and his aesthetic sensitivity, however, is The Quiet Man (1952), a film like no other if there ever was one. It is a unique, poetic fable of pastoral idyll, understated modern anxieties, battling dialectics of reality and fantasy.

A classical love story where a man, Sean Thornton, played by Ford soulmate John Wayne, returns to Ireland from America where he falls in love with Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara, The Quiet Man is like an idyllic postcard, a tale of the fantastical countryside that is presented in an overly romanticized fashion. Its humor, varying between masculine slapstick and battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy, would make the advocates of the me-too era cringe. However, I believe that Peter von Bagh was right in seeing the film as greater than life. To him, its scenes of love carry “metaphysical might.” [3] There is more to them than the eye can see. When Sean pulls Mary away from the door opened by ferocious wind to kiss her for the first time, there is a sense of baroque awe as Mary’s hems bend against her rigid legs in a gust of divine wind. Perhaps telling of its uniqueness, the film’s closest kindred spirit seems to be a film that looks totally different, Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which carries similar “metaphysical might.” 

The Quiet Man was not received well during its initial release. Its fable-like illusions threw away all hopes of Ford’s return to the realist cinema of Hollywood he helped establish in the late 30′s and early 40′s. The far landscapes of the wild west were replaced by a postcard idyllic Irish village of Inisfree where trains are late, chores can be put on a halt to chit-chat, and traditions persevere. From the beginning locus amoreus of a boat by lakeside at dusk to pastoral iconography of a redhead shepherding sheep, a priest fooling fish, and drunkards playing the accordion, The Quiet Man is Irish pastoral of 50′s American optimism. Despite the film’s idyllic nature and the romantic mise-en-scène that gives birth to it, one would be making the mistake if one concluded that The Quiet Man was completely lost on realism. “Inisfree is far from heaven, Mr. Thornton!,” reminds one character. It is rather that in it Ford manages to find a totally unique combination of realism and romanticism, the modern and the traditional, the American and the Irish, in a fashion that reminds me of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Sean escapes America, the land of freedom and opportunities, to his home country of Ireland. Although never stated explicitly in the film, one can see a social undertone, as noticed by von Bagh: during the Korean War, which was still going on, disillusions scattered throughout America. Inisfree’s distance from heaven might be lost on Sean’s nostalgic eyes, but he seems to imply something about the looming vicinity of realism to us when, upon seeing Mary for the first time, his yet undiscovered love interest and wife-to-be, he states: “is she real?”

It is, in fact, this scene, this first encounter between the lovers-to-be, that always gets me. Its uniqueness escapes words. The scene begins with a long full shot of Mary amid sheep, which is motivated as Sean’s point of view shot as the scene progresses. There is a cut to a low-angle medium shot of Mary, which is followed by a reverse shot of Sean and then another low-angle medium shot of Mary, as she slowly vanishes beyond the frames of the screen space. A return to the long full shot of Mary amid sheep is followed by a medium shot of Sean. Dumbfounded, amazed, looking afar, and hopelessly in love, he says: “Is she real?” Ford’s brilliant choices in montage and shot scale articulate the distance between the characters, which will be a recurring theme in the film -- “There’ll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary Kate!” -- while also bringing them in close intimacy that still remains a mystery to both of them. There is a heavenly feeling to all of this. Where are we? The modern Sean, escaping the disillusions of 50′s American optimism, might be asking himself: “Is this -- Inisfree -- real?” We, the viewers, we, the lovers of the film, we, the lovers of cinema, might be asking ourselves: “Is this -- The Quiet Man -- real?”

5. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Sergei Parajanov, USSR/UKRAINE)

Ukraine-born director, Sergei Parajanov’s breakthrough film Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) is on fire. It is on fire like a mixture of jazz and opera, a blend of ancient epic and modernist poem, a mishmash of waltz and jitterbug that never, for some odd unfathomable reason, feels haphazard. It feels eternal, timeless, and archaic, but, at the same time, contemporary and modern. The truly marvelous thing about all this is the fact that the story itself is a fairly traditional love story. Ivan and Marichka, whose families are rivals by heart, fall in love at a young age. After Marichka drowns in an accident, Ivan falls into depression but then remarries. In his new life of work and dull everyday chores, he is tormented by the memory of his first love. In the end, he dies either due to a hit from a sorcerer, who has made passes at Ivan’s new wife, or due to his incurable loneliness in a void universe without love.

Such a classical romantic tale acquires an unprecedented energy from Parajanov’s cinematography that is characteristically free and mobile -- in stark contrast to that of Sayat Nova (1969, The Color of Pomegranates), the director’s best-known film. The handheld camera is always on the move. It does not shake in the sense that the contemporary spectator has become accustomed to identify “handheld camerawork;” in fact, it can be very steady at times, but it moves quickly and ferociously. It pans so fast from one place to another that the eye does not register the spaces between the two steady screen spaces before and after the pan. It can appear to be fixed on a spot, but then it starts gliding or flying as in the amazing shot of Ivan lying on the large raft on the river. Watching the film unfold on the big screen is like having your head dislocated in some strange non-physical sense. One might think that such energy is distracting and makes one pay too much attention to the cinematography. The effect, however, is the opposite. It’s hypnotic. Everything feels intuitive and natural. One simply feels bewildered before this film to the extent that one starts imagining new images to the film. It is as if the camera found freedom and was liberated from its physical ties, becoming a disembodied eye whose movements are impossible to be predicted. The spectator never knows where the camera is going to move next, what the next angle will be, or in which scale the next shot shall be.

As such, the camera turns into a lyrical speaker of a poem or a stream-of-consciousness narrator of prose who identifies with the characters’ experience that cannot be accessed unambiguously. The most obvious example is not surprisingly the use of point of view shot when Ivan’s father is axed to death: red blood fills the screen, which is followed by a strange image of red silhouettes of running horses. Less obviously subjectivized stylistic decisions, where the camera identifies with characters’ experience, include the beginning scene where there is a “point of view shot” from a falling tree’s perspective, which is followed by a hypnotic spin of the camera as though it detached from material reality after a character dies under the tree. During the first embrace of Ivan and Marichka, Parajanov’s camera keeps the characters in focus and in a tight medium close-up, but the intimacy is complicated by implied visual distance: the use of the telephoto lens coalesces multiple layers of tree branches and other flora as a soft, flat veil enfolding the lovers in their natural innocence as the camera encircles them in eternity. When Ivan falls into depression after Marichka’s death, not only are the colors replaced by a surprising shift to black-and-white but also the movement of the camera becomes significantly calmer and slower. When Ivan starts feeling the presence of the dead Marichka -- as a ghost, as a memory -- there is a series of jump cuts showing Marichka behind Ivan’s window, rather than a return to the previous stylistic program. All of these exemplify cinema’s ability to subjectivize without the use of point of view shot or voice-over. Parajanov realizes this potentiality beautifully and uses different cinematic means without restriction but never without a consistent vision.

There are shadows from the past which obstruct Ivan and Marichka’s innocent love, but there are also shadows from the new past which prevent Ivan from moving on with his life. In an unforgettable scene that is still unparalleled in film history, Marichka’s ghost entices the delirious Ivan, recently struck by the sorcerer, to death in a wintry forest. Both characters move toward each other, but they do not seem to be walking in the medium shots that only show their heads moving against the background of the white forest as their voices sing a song of love without their lips moving. There is a strange sense of movement and ceased time. There is a touching sense of the wonderful yet painful grip of love. There it is, unshadowed, unforgotten, now.

4. Sud pralad (2004, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, THAILAND)

In terms of mere structure, this film is bonkers. Hardly ever has a film dropped as many jaws as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breakthrough feature Sud pralad (2004, Tropical Malady) during its initial festival release. At first glance, it might be tedious, it might be irritating, it might be, well, just too mysterious. It might feel too private. As one allows the images and the sounds to sink in, however, this masterful, dualistically structured film starts to make sense like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Even more so than Lynch’s, I believe, Weerasethakul’s film is one of the best and most unique films ever made about love.

What begins as a love story between two men, a soldier and a country boy working at an ice factory, ending in an unexplained break-up, suddenly turns into a silent fable about a shape-shifting shaman and a soldier. The second part can be seen as an allegory for the first -- or vice versa. They comment on one another. They are co-dependent. They are lovers. There isn’t one without the other. What is more important than the logical connections between the two parts (one can either see them as flip sides of the same story or as a continuous story in the same fictive world) are their sensual and emotional resonances. Being a love story, the film’s English title (which is not a direct translation, one might add) already suggests a peculiar vision of love: not as a cure or as a utopia but as a malady, a sickness, something that consumes one’s body and soul. As the two men separate, they first devour each other. There is a sense of mystery in the air. What happened? Exactly. Who knows. Who’s to say?

Since their feelings -- both in initial infatuation and in the out-of-the-blue separation -- cannot be explained in words, they are articulated by the fable. The soldier is being consumed by the shaman, he is dying because of him, but he is also dependent on the shaman and must approach him. As the shaman shifts into a tiger, the aspect of consumption becomes poignantly discernible. Weerasethakul uses many lingering shots in the dark forest that suggest a fluctuation between the two characters. There is movement in the screen space, but is it the soldier or the tiger? They finally face each other in a bigger-than-life scene of intense stares that will haunt you for an eternity. The stare of the tiger occupies the screen space, dominating, hypnotizing the audience. There’s a strange sense of fear but also of lust; there’s an inexplicable desire to surrender as the malady takes over. Weerasethakul’s long take allows the tiger’s stare to sink in, to drill down to the spectator’s spine where its sensuous force begins to fester. The moment of devouring is at hand. This scene breaks hearts and sews them back together. 

Weerasethakul’s inimitable cinematic discourse, which operates on the immediate level of senses and sensations, uncovers animals and other natural entities in their own right, as they appear, rather than as conventional metaphors for something else. They are embraced as the Other. Indeed: Sud pralad is a film about primordial otherness of everything else beyond oneself, a theme that Weerasethakul tackles by telling a love story. Because in love one experiences otherness most intimately but also most painfully. One might be very close to the other, but one also experiences the growing distance. One must confront the insurmountable challenge to understand the other. There is one’s own mind to keep one company, and then there is the rest of the world. There is the man devouring one’s hand and then going away for good. There are street lights in the night. There is music in the air. There is a sense of heartrending wonder. There is the intensely staring tiger ready to devour the one. And there is the one ready to take the plunge.

3. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies, UK)

By its enigmatic title alone, Terence Davies’ heavily autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) invites expectations of originality, and those expectations are not disappointed to the slightest. The ambiguous title is rife with meaning, but at the most direct level it works as a structural point of reference since the film is distinctly divided into two separate parts. A story about a working-class family living in Liverpool, the film’s first part, “Distant Voices” focuses on the power the family’s father has on their co-existence in 1940′s, while the second part, “Still Lives” portrays the lives of the children in their early adulthood in the 1950′s -- away from the presence of the war but still far from the new youth culture that was about to emerge. Under the father’s abusive influence, they cried and sang in a bomb shelter; now, safe from heavy rain in a cinema, they cry as they watch Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). This is but one parallel in a film where things get entangled, where popular culture, communal singing, historical events, universal themes, and extremely personal memories fuse in an unprecedented network of cinematic thinking.

The peculiar two-part structure, made striking by the two-year gap in production and inevitable change in some of the crew, would be enough to mark the film as singular, but this narrative division is only one element in an idiosyncratic whole that constantly draws the spectator’s attention to the artificial nature of the cinematic representation in question. The film’s narration itself is self-aware to the extent that the spectator inevitably pays attention to it: the non-linear representation of past events in an order that seems associative at best is bound to make the spectator ponder representation. Davies thematizes representation or, more accurately put, memory, its mechanics, and the possibility of representing and remembering. On an immediately stylistic level, Davies employs heavy use of light coming from an off-screen source as well as over-exposed light in the screen space which, together with the pale and tainted colors that filter every image, give a peculiar, golden hue to the sepia-like, nostalgic mise-en-scène reminiscent of scuffed photographs. The cinematography, which varies between utter stillness and slow pans and dolly shots, often gives a strong impression of tableaux vivants from early cinema, which remind one of old family photographs. The same goes for the film’s strikingly exact and centralized compositions: never has a symmetrical two-shot felt this precise and powerful, static and dynamic at the same time -- artificial and proud of it.

On both levels of narration and style, Davies draws the spectator’s attention to the artificiality of everything: that all this has been “produced” -- structured and conditioned by a mind that is reminiscing something. That something belongs to a world that no longer is, and that never was just like this. It is an utterly unique world that is only here and now, in the moment one is watching this film and remembering it in their own mind. There is a sense of discipline and order which always leave something outside, making it absent, outside of memory’s reach, while encapsulating something, making it present, within memory’s constituted and conditioned sphere. On both levels, Davies’ film is strongly characterized by elements of distance and stillness as his filmic portrayal of family leaves his characters relatively distant, beyond our absolute reach, in picturesque mobile paintings that invite us to reflect what lies beyond their frames of stillness and distance, sight and sound.

2. Zerkalo (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR)

It’s nothing. Everything will be alright. Everything will be...

A monumental yet intimate masterpiece of memory, undoubtedly the best film on this list, if not simply the best film ever made, and one of the few films I have seen more than ten times, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal film Zerkalo (1975, Mirror) is beyond flawless. Like Bresson, Tarkovsky certainly has a very distinctive oeuvre that feels consistent in its stylistic unity, but there is something intensely singular about Zerkalo that elevates it above a body of six other masterpieces or fringe-masterpieces. Some directors have tried to follow Tarkovsky in creating their own mirrors, but none have achieved either the same level of quality or of uniqueness. The beautiful thing about the film is, and this is key to its uniqueness as well, that Tarkovsky manages to bring the private to the public (not only by juxtaposing his own experiences with Russian history but also by uncovering the universal structure in human experience) without ever coming close to sacrificing the innate privacy of some of his images at the altar of effortless intelligibility.

The first time viewer is bound to be confused by the enigma. In the course of repeated viewings, however, the fuzzy reflection begins to take shape. A dying poet recalls his life which unfolds in sequences that take place in three different time frames: his childhood in the early 30′s, his adolescence during WWII in the early 40′s, and his parenthood in the late 60′s. He ventures into the abyss of his suffering as well as that of his nation and humankind in general, but, in the midst of pain, a vague promise of peace is discovered. Mixing archival footage with traditional scenes of dialogue on different time frames, reciting poems and playing music, using oneiric images as well as concrete motifs of mirrors and fire, juxtaposing colors with sepia and black-and-white, Zerkalo coalesces the personal with the collective and the dreamlike with the material. It creates an unparalleled rhythm that has an eerie, otherworldly feel to it, which, nevertheless, feels so intimately tied to nature and sensation that one can almost touch it. But when you reach your hand toward the mirror, it once again reveals its elusive shape that escapes your grasp. 

In its stream of impressions and ideas, the poetically flowing narrative of Zerkalo works as a lucid parable of the human mind. The mere viewing experience of the film works as a cheap form of psychoanalysis for some. Film scholar and programmer Antti Alanen calls it “a space odyssey into the interior of the psyche” [4]. The ambiguously focalized narration flows in ways which resemble free association. There is an event and there is another; there is an image, then a sound; there are pauses and gaps, inexplicable connections of heart and soul, lines drawn by a tormented mind trying to comprehend and grasp something that, as he himself puts it, cannot be expressed by words. From grand sights such as the collapse of the house and the flight of a bird through a window to tender details of a human hand before a flame, a redhead with a blistered lip in the snow, and a cut from one gaze to another, the film’s narrative flow follows a logic of its own, a logic on a higher level, a logic that feels consistent but cannot be laid out in non-cinematic terms. To some, there is spiritual force in this, the power of both the subconscious and the Hegelian Weltgeist traversing across the images.

Zerkalo tackles questions that are no less than the biggest but also the simplest in life: What is human life? What is its meaning? What is its meaning to us as individuals and as mankind? Why and how is it experienced as meaningful? There are no answers, there is no great revelation, and how could there be, but there are little junctures of awe, touches with the world, small manifestations of fire before us. The protagonist’s ex-wife wonders why something like the burning bush never appeared to her. We might wonder the same. In Tarkovsky’s mind, it seems to me, this is due to the loss of connection to something transcendent to us and our petty affairs -- not necessarily to god but perhaps to nature, to values as such, to what really matter, to our primordial origin. Or, perhaps, more modestly, there is a loss of connection to the mirrors around us, manifesting as the inability to accept bewilderment and live in lack of comprehension. The film is full of moments of such transcendence: the bird landing on the boy’s head in a strikingly beautiful composition of Brueghelian proportions, the massive gust of wind blowing over the departing man on the serene field after a chance encounter, the mysterious fall of an oil lamp from the table on the wooden floor, and the disappearance of a faint ring stain on a table as the lady vanishes. What are these magical moments, these manifestations of burning bushes, other than Ereignisse that ask us to accept irrationality, to look into the mirror and marvel? The great revelation to the big questions might never come, but the reflection on the mirror keeps getting clearer only to be beclouded again and vice versa.

1. Sans soleil (1983, Chris Marker, FRANCE)

Contrarily to what people say, the use of the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: all I have to offer is myself. [5]

These are the words of Chris Marker. A private recluse, a documentarian, a poet and a reporter of the cinema, Marker escapes easy classification. The creator of the most unique short film La jétée (1962), Marker is also celebrated as the father of subjective documentary. After making what is most likely the best depiction of the political turmoil in the second half of the 20th century in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977, A Grin without a Cat), Marker turned inward -- or did he? -- in the pioneer piece of whatever you want to call it, poetic essay film or subjective documentary, Sans soleil (1983, Sunless). “I could tell you that the film intended to be,” Marker affirms, “and is nothing more than a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies.“ [6]

Anybody can make home movies, and everybody does in these pathetic days of YouTube vlogging, but only Marker can make home movies that are simultaneously ultimately his and ultimately ours. A home movie for the ages, Sans soleil tackles the perennial topic of French cinema (think of the whole oeuvre of Alain Resnais), the difficulty of memory, which has both individual and social implications for the representation of the past. In the beginning, there is an image of children in Iceland. Happiness signified. Is this a memory? Images signifying a happy childhood memory, any-memory-whatever. “How can you remember thirst,” asks the man behind the camera, whose letters the female voice-over, the alleged receiver of these letters with an alleged sender, another disembodied character like the man, reads out loud.

Marker’s Sans soleil does not develop ordinary motifs or conventional techniques in dealing with memory. No matter how innovative -- and groundbreaking -- Resnais’ methods are, they are no match for Marker’s meta-approach. Rather than thematizing memory with a device, Marker deals with the theme through itself, by trying to remember it, by trying to become conscious of itself. The man wonders how have people been able to remember anything without pictures. Pictures are the memory. Montage is the memory. Viewing the film is memory.

While timeless, Sans soleil is also absolutely a film of its time. It comes right out of the postmodern era when man’s relationship with history, time, memory, and space was challenged on all fronts of human thought and creativity. The history of the documentary film is filled with numerous travelogues -- from the ghost train films of early cinema to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) -- but Marker’s Sans soleil challenges the whole possibility and meaningfulness of the travelogue. In his mind, in the mind of Sans soleil, time and space cannot be conveyed over individual, experienced knowledge. The poetic narration of Sans soleil constantly turns to itself and challenges its representation. The film consists of shots, which are more or less separate from one another, that are organized by the letters read by the woman, letters that she has received from a man, the man behind the camera. Thus there is a double focalization, the word and the image. When the levels of the image and the words of the letters occasionally coincide, the spectator is tempted to think of the images as shot by the man from his point of view, but Marker’s film seems to escape such an easy way out of the puzzle. Marker takes man’s relationship with history and the past by dealing with the relation between real and reconstructed memory. Is there a difference? Is there a difference between our collective history and our personal histories? Is there a difference between a home movie and a movie? Is knowledge of the world possible?

We know little of Marker’s private life. His most private and personal film, Sans soleil, perhaps paradoxically, adds nothing to this lack of knowledge. In a strange way, it achieves an extremely intimate level by creating a peculiar distance. It hides behind images and words. We never see the central characters. We see reconstruction. We see implications. We see conclusions without premises. We see the end of the road but not the road.

There are no clichés in Sans soleil because it is beyond the definition of cliché and convention. The man behind the camera has seen so much that at the moment only banality interests him, as he states in a letter. The unique and the original have become dull. The banal is the new unique. He preys banality like a bounty hunter. In this quest, banality turns into something else -- or does it? In a synthesis of banal moments, the montage of images becomes its own living thing.

A filmic version of stream of consciousness, the only structure of Sans soleil is its lack of structure. There is fragmentation on both the level of the whole and the level of the part. The words stop and random notes put a pause on a flow that, for a moment, seemed to have a clear structure. “By the way, did I tell you that there are emus in the Île de France?” The images freeze, the words stop, the images continue, the images give rise to a continuation into an unprecedented series of separate images. Yet, despite all of this, the film has a rhythm like no other, and it never feels scattered. It is cohesive on another level. It follows the unknown logic of its private internal auteur. Sans soleil is not remembered for its words nor for its images, but for the synthesis of it all -- and, most importantly, the impressions and feelings that arise from this synthesis. We do not remember individual shots, individual sentences, or at least we do not think of them. We remember the film.

I remember the cut from the Japanese dancing to an emu. I remember the abrupt cuts from the serene desert to the chaotic Hong Kong. I remember the cats in the temple. I remember. I remember the electronic sounds accompanying swans in a lake. I remember the counterpoint. I remember the tension, the voltage, the trance of it all. I remember the lack and the absence. I remember the presence and the richness. I remember the unique, the one and only, Sans soleil, the distant voice that both fades and stays in memory.

Some runner-uppers, or the mandatory honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino apparatom (1929), Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987), Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986), Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930), Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952). Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Notes:

[1] Truffaut, François. 1984. Hitchcock. Revised Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, p. 239-243.

[2] Bordwell, David. 2018. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 220. 

[3] Bagh, Peter von. 1989. Elämää suuremmat elokuvat [Films Bigger Than Life]. Otava, p. 405. My own translation. 

[4] https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/785.

[5] https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/.

[6] Ibid.

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Rough Draft: Funeral for a MUEL

Genre: Science Fiction, HFY 

Based off of roomba empathy and EOD robot attachments.

3k words, feedback appreciated

This is a short story from a larger universe I am developing.

The Tok’ro system was a non distinctive system within the Jik’an Empire. A Class F star, with a few moderate sized exoplanets in orbit with an asteroid belt hovering at the far reach of the star. Named by an explorer nearly a century ago and nearly completely forgotten. Unexceptional in every way it still had one planet within the habitable zone. And thus it was secretly colonized by an independent faction of the Jik’an Empire some 60 standard cycles ago. The Lassarn as they called themselves were something of a spiritualist convent of the minimalist nature. They rejected the doctrines laid out by the Empire and often suffered persecution as a result. Seeking to explore freedoms heavily restricted under conventional rule the Lassasrn colony led a quiet and simple existence. The simple lifestyle were only a threat to those who deemed it.

It was only a matter of time before the colony was discovered by the Jik’kan EMpire. The small colony would come under fire as the Jikan Empire moved to crush the dissidents under the guise of ensuring national security. As the military forces moved into the system one of their first targets was a small mining base on the outer fringe of the system. To their chagrin this tiny base lodged in a random bit of floating space rock resisted the invasion forces. Successfully, hiding itself in the dense ring of asteroids. Placing asteroids to block out the bigger capital ships so that their mining frigates could pounce on fighter craft. The losses were small, and it was the delay that was vexing for the Empire. It was after the miners had cored several capital ships with mining laser drones that reinforcements were called. Elite Jik’kan shock troops swarmed the base in a frontal assault. Easily overwhelming the defenses and reaching the elusive mining base.

It was only after they stormed the base, slaughtering everyone aboard, that they realized their mistake. The crew of this mining base was of mixed races. Most notably several dozen humans.

Even though the system had been blockaded, news of the massacre got out. The outcry from human held sectors was immediate and loud. The abuses of the Jik’an Empire had long been a contentious point in the interstellar community but as it was an internal matter outsiders could only voice discontent. Yet the massacre of the miners provided the humans the excuse to do something about it. Proclaiming their intent to protect human lives in Tok’ro the humans made a declaration they would support Lassarn independence.

Battle Leader Luk’Ta was well into his yellowing years. Patches of yellow scale an indication to his age. He was a Lassarn, his scars from his removed cybernetics a sign of his faith, as well as an indication of his past. Of the people on this planet he was one of the fewest, and certainly the oldest to have military experience. Though his experience only cumulated to that of a First Follower he had been given the position of Battle Leader to lead in the defense of the Lassarn. It had been a losing battle. The Jik’kan soldiers were better trained, better equipped, and more numerous. The only advantage Luk’Ta knew they had was to disappear into the lands they knew so well. Fighting from shadows. But now it was time to emerge and strike back.

WIth that thought in the back of his head Luk’ta looked on at the blazing wreckage of a Mech. What had been a hulking nightmarish entity pursuing his troops across the mountains now burned fiendishly after being brought down in a hail of rocket fire. He would normally feel proud about defeating a war machine of the Empire but the victory wasn’t truly his. If it weren’t for the arrival of the humans and their weapons they would never had brought down the mechanized terror, but rather been hunted to the very last.

The humans, there were only seven of them, had distributed over a dozen dumbfire rocket launchers to his soldiers, most of whom were volunteer civilians before all this, before leading them to where the Mech had been lying in wait. Surprising it in an ambush the barrage of firepower quickly destroyed the monster. It was entirely thanks to them that the Mech had been destroyed with no losses. Letting go of his wounded pride he turned to his First Follower Kil’Ro.

“Where are the human’s?”

“They say they are burying a comrade.”

“They took a casualty?”

“No… it seems one of their robots was destroyed.”

Luk’Ta looked over to where the humans had gathered. He didn’t know much about their culture but as a fellow warrior he wondered why they seemed to mourn the loss of a machine.

SRT 3 was a specialist recon tactical squad of seven soldiers who were trained in conducting ground recon and hunting high value tactical targets. On Tok’Ro that meant hunting down Mechs. Mech designs varied from species to species. But in general they were large advanced war machines of significant tactical value. The Jik’kan Mech was a standardized 2 story machine with it’s own shield generators and weapon platforms capable of striking targets in orbit. It moved by a mix of thrusters and spider legs, though it moved at a low speed. It’s design was meant to facilitate an ability to drop small fortresses from orbit onto an enemy territory capable of withstanding counter attacks while at the same time supporting reserve forces.

The Jik’Kan empire had deployed over a thousand 2 story war machines across the planet. Spreading them out to cover all parts of the planet. Given the risk the Mechs posed with their ability to strike targets in orbit, Command had decided that specialist teams would have to create a gap in the defensive net before they could bring in the fleet for support.

A couple of the alphabet soup squads were picked for the job. ODSTs, SRTs, and even some companies of VSTs. Now the odds of sending infantry behind enemy lines were historically very low. Paratroopers of the old era faced many of the same problems the modern drop troopers did. Even with exo suits, infantry could only carry so much gear. And they often burned through what ammunition they carried quicker than a firecracker. Resupply was difficult and without fire support infantry squads could only do so much on their own. Yet a problem of this scale merely breeds an innovation to match it. The logistics of sending an infantry squad deep behind enemy lines to destroy heavily armored and defended Mechs was one solved with a pack animal. A mechanical pack animal.

The MUEL or Mobile Unmanned Equipment Loader has often been referred to as a mule. Like it’s earthly counterpart the MUEL is small cargo carrier. With 4 walking limbs that move a frame capable of carrying a heavy payload and a 12 lb sensory box unit on one end it strongly resembled a creature from the Equidae taxonomy. Designed as an infantry support unit it is often described as the most sophisticated supply crate R&D could come up with.

Despite its inglorious status the MUEL has a number of features that have kept it in production. It can move smoothly over uneven terrain, sprint quickly through open ground. On smooth ground the MUEL is able to extend wheels and reach speeds of up to 90 mph able to keep pace with mounted infantry. It lacks any offensive armaments. For defense it has a couple inches of ceramic armor and a Tier 4 neural net tied to it’s sensory receptors. It’s net is just advanced enough to understand verbal commands and counter basic ECM. While normally it functions on an autonomous mode it can be controlled with either voice command, or a PAD. The MUEL’s significance was in its performance of a singular function unaided with no complex training required to operate.

SRT 3 had started calling the MUEL assigned to them as Shrek. An inside joke, but the moniker stuck and the MUEL adapted to respond to it. Shrek was a constant companion to the squad. It followed them around base like a faithful dog. And on missions it would trot up to them after they had landed, ready to go. And at night it could help stand guard, electronic sensors cutting through the darkness. After missions they maintained it, changing out broken parts and damaged components. Giving it a wash to clean it of mud and grime.

Over time the squad had come to empathize with the dumb bot. They had hacked the OS so that it could play music and it would play tunes while they traveled to missions. They would pet it’s sensory unit. Taking turns to ride it like a horse. In a firefight Shrek would sprint up to them, dispensing ammo or providing cover. More than once they had loaded a wounded soldier onto Shrek to ride back to a medic.

Once while in retreat Shrek had taken 2 AP rounds through its body crippling both back legs. Unable to move the squad had been forced to leave Shrek behind. This had surprising effects on the squad who were lucky enough to retreat unscathed. The squad later joined the push to take back the area and after some searching found Shrek hiding in a bombed out garage. They had made repairs on the spot and brought back Shrek like a returning hero.

But now…

After unloading the extra rocket launchers from Shrek to the local militia it had been considerably lighter and practically prancing alongside their march. The Mech had been easy to find without unpacking the sophisticated equipment they brought with them, boldly broadcasting on an open frequency with hardly any masking. After scouting out its location the SRT and militia had prepared an ambush to catch the Mech.

The attack had gone off without a hitch. The Mech had burst out from cover when they painted it with a laser, it’s point defense had taken out most of the high flying missiles but the ones positioned below struck true.

Rocked by explosives it had toppled over onto the pre placed minefield which erupted in gouts of fire. Even with all that damage the crew of the Mech began emerging like insects from an agitated hive.

Most were killed within seconds, but one managed to get ahold of a hull mounted gun and open fire. Bullets that would shred a tank had spewed forth like fire. A pair of militiamen exposed to the fire line.

It was Shrek who saved them. Dashing the distance to intercede directly. It’s armor was instantly shredded, and it collapsed to the ground. The gunner had been taken out and the militiamen saved. But Shrek was gone. Its neural net components had taken several hits, it’s sensory unit detached by a round. It’s servos whined as some part of it’s programming tried to make it stand, but it was unable. The damage so complete and devastating.

SRT 3 had convened around Shrek. But the call was clear. The squad had offloaded the remaining supplies to the militia. A somber mood befell them as the squad leader held an incendiary grenade. Final words and memories had been shared, a can of oil poured over Shrek. First a spark and the a burst of flame as the remnants of Shrek caught fire. To prevent the technology and information from falling into enemy hands it had to be destroyed. A somber silence fell over the squad as they watched the flames devour the robot.

Shrek had upheld the mission, the least they could do was follow that through. With that the squad turned, more resolute than ever. The leader of the militia approached, now that the ceremony was over.

Luk’Ta glanced behind the soldiers at the burning robot. What remained was rapidly melting into slag. The humans seemed somber. They gave a nod to Luk’Ta as he approached. Luk’Ta approached the soldier in charge. These humans battle armor made them all look practically identical but Luk’Ta had learned to pick out the leader by his stance. The leader turned to the others and gave a few instructions and 5 of them walked off to perform their duties. The human soldier and companion turned to give Luk’Ta their attention. Luk’Ta glancing again at the flaming robot spoke slowly so the translator would pick up.

“I am sorry for your loss.”

The leader barked, a gesture of humor. Humans seemed to find humor in many things, even in war.

“I guess it must look like that.” The human leader, paused looking back. “It was just a bot.”

“It saved my people.” Luk’Ta pressed.

“That was lucky. I’m glad they are alright.” The human leader said waving the matter off. He spoke to his companion who held a projector to the ground. A map of the region was displayed with a number of markings. Luk’Ta was still unfamiliar with most of the designations humans used but he had learned a few. He pointed to a cluster of triangles.

“This is us correct.”

The human leader nodded, then catching himself spoke, “That is correct. So far all targets have been cleared, which makes for about 70% of clearance. The fleet will be arriving soon to take advantage of that.”

The projector flashed to another image of the system. The human leader drew a line from a point in space to the region some distance south of where they were on the planet.

“The landing zone is approximately here. Command doesn’t expect there to be any complications in engaging with the fleet in orbit. But we still have to clear out the remaining Mechs in the AO, area of operations.”

Luk’Ta shook his head in acknowledgement, this was all review. The human paused briefly before continuing, the display flickering to the continental map again.

“We also have reports that the evacuation corridor has been set up so you can start ordering your people to evacuate.” The human leader drew two lines in the dirt indicating the safe path created by the ODSTs. “Command has suggested that the militia would be best suited for helping civilians evacuate.”

“What about the remaining Mechs?” Luk’Ta knew from experience that even a few Mechs could wreak havoc on the landing forces and the evacuation.

“We’ll hunt them down, Command has made evacuation a priority and we need to do it quickly.”

Luk’Ta shook his head this time in agreement. The presentation disappeared as the soldier pocketed the projector.

“We can lead you to the rally point, we should march in 10 minutes.” The human leader turned to go. Luk’Ta watched them leave, behind him he heard his First Follower approach.

“Can we trust them?”

It was a question that had lingered on the Lossarn’s mind ever since the humans had declared their support for their cause. It seemed absurd that the humans would risk going to war for strangers over the death of just a few miners. To be accurate there were humans on Lossarn as well, but the lengths they were going to were far beyond a simple rescue of their own kind. The humans were no friends of the Jik’kan, but that didn’t make them friends of the Lossarn either.  The logical conclusion was that humans shouldn’t be helping the Lossarn so there had to be some reason.

Some had suspected the humans wanted the system itself. But the plan they proposed was an evacuation of the colonists to human space, to entirely abandon the system. They would be resettled far from the Empire once a suitable home could be decided on. It was an entirely gratuitous action. The Lossarn had no wealth, or valuable technology that the humans would have wanted. Nor had there been any significant contacts between the two. It was a conundrum that had stoked some resistance to the human’s plan. And Luk’Ta had heard some of the whispers behind closed doors among his men.

The flames of the robot pyre had died down, the smell of molten metal blended with that of the smoking Mech wreckage. Luk’Ta had come to realize something in that moment. The humans had exhibited grief for their robot, as though it were a living comrade. The ceremony had struck him as familiar because it reminded him of a military funeral. But for a robot. A bot, a dumb inorganic machine. A machine was a tool. To become attached to a tool seemed like the act of madness. Yet the humans had done so quite naturally. That was a level of empathy completely alien to Luk’Ta.

Empathy. The ability to understand another. Luk’Ta wondered to himself it that was why the humans were willing to commit themselves in defense of an entirely alien species. Why the human squad of elite soldiers had managed to ingratiate themselves with most of the men. Why trained killers laughed at Lossarn jokes, and managed to raise the mood from dire straits. Why they played with the children in the village, and joined them for meals. It seemed absurd. It would be absurd if that was the case. He decided to keep that conclusion to himself for now. Turning to face his First Follower he made a non committed gesture. What Luk’Ta didn’t know that he was largely right, though the background political motivation was to stick a hot poker in the eye of the Jik’kan military under the guise of a humanitarian action.