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27dragons · 3 months ago

Note

For FFWF: any deleted scenes from the Sandbridge verse that you can tell us about? ❤️ (for purely selfish remix sequel motivation reasons 😅)

ACTUALLY, yes! Though I don't know how useful it's going to be for your remix sequel (which I am ardently looking forward to!)

In Chapter 4 of My Three Dads, Tony and Bucky are at a gala in New York with Maria, and Tony gets cornered by Ty, who says some very surprising things and suggests that Tony come over the next day to collect some things he'd left behind.

Tisfan and I actually wrote that scene, but when we got to the editing stage, it just... didn't fit quite right. So we threw in a quick reference to it at the beginning of Chapter 5 and cut it.

But I did actually LIKE the scene. And I'd filed it away in my "clips and cuts" folder. So here you go, the Deleted Scene of the last time Tony ever talks to Ty:

[Fair warning, this is 100% unedited.]

The neighborhood had gotten nicer; several renovation projects had updated the older shops in the area with brighter, cleaner ones. Tony noticed with amusement that these post-modern stores were catering to an “old fashioned” hipster feel, even though they were much cleaner, with better lighting, than the previous places had been.

The high rise where Tony had once lived was both strange and familiar. He hadn’t thought about this place in years, hadn’t missed it once those first few months of living in Virginia had passed. But everything was so very familiar; he even remembered the dips in the front stairs. The stylised elephant statues had been replaced at some point with elegant stone cranes, but the brass numbers on the front of the building were the same, as was the fading green linoleum tile in the entryway near the rack of mailboxes.

Tony stared around the little entryway like he was seeing ghosts. He was grateful for Bucky’s presence at his back, strong and certain, more grateful than he could ever say. It took an effort of will to walk over to the intercom system and punch in the apartment number. “It’s us,” he said when it crackled to life. “For my stuff.”

“Come on up,” Ty said, cheerfully, buzzing them through the door.

Bucky was looking around with a wary sort of curiosity, and his hand was on the security door when it buzzed. The last few times they’d been in New York City, everyone either had their own home, or rented in a building with a doorman, but he pulled the door open as soon as it clicked and ushered Tony through. “It’s okay, baby,” Bucky said, putting his hand on the small of Tony’s back as they stepped into the building’s aging elevator. “Worst comes to worst, Happy can come back us up.” They’d borrowed Maria’s car while the girls were playing with the oversized dollhouse that Maria kept at her house, just for special granddaughter visits.

(Well, Billie was playing. Olivia was cruising around the table it sat on, and probably occasionally trying to eat the furniture.)

“If he’s even a little bit of an asshole to you,” Tony said, not for the first time, “we’re leaving. I don’t care about any stuff enough to put up with whatever he thinks he can get away with.” He thumbed the floor button on the elevator and leaned into Bucky’s side. “Maybe this was a dumb idea.”

“Could be,” Bucky said, “but we’ve come this far, and I don’t reckon Stone wants t’ be arrested any more than I do. So we’ll try an’ keep the punching to a nice round number, like zero. It’ll be okay. Everyone saw him talkin’ with you last night, big fancy party. People he needs to impress. Your mom’s still got pull with those people -- or has it back, leastways. He’s not gonna waste that on petty revenge.”

“This is Ty we’re talking about,” Tony muttered, but the elevator stuttered to a halt and let out a sad ding as the doors slid open. Tony took a breath. It was going to be okay. They were going to get his stuff, and then leave, and everyone was going to pretend to be polite. For the sake of... something. Right? Right.

Ty had repainted the door to the apartment, added an art-deco style geometric border. Tony knocked, and didn’t let himself fidget.

When the door opened, Tony wasn’t sure what to expect, but Zeke Stane standing there with Tony’s engineering kit in one hand was not it. Not ever, not even a little bit, not even if the moon turned into bleu cheese and crashed into the ocean. “Hey Tony,” he said. “James. Good to see you. We weren’t sure you’d come. Ty… Ty thought if this was too weird for you, you can take your kit and just go, now. Or… you can come inside?”

Ty thought that? Ty had bothered to think about someone else’s comfort? Or maybe that was Zeke projecting, but Zeke had never rated very high on empathy, either.

Why was Zeke Stane in Ty’s apartment, saying we like he and Ty were...

Oh, god.

“You’re together?” he blurted. He pushed past Zeke into the apartment, looking for Ty. “That whole thing last night, that was you trying to stall me so I couldn’t get between Mom and Obie,” he gritted. “Was any of it real?”

“Of course we were trying to stall you,” Ty said. He had a mug of coffee in one hand and was waiting for the machine to pour a second cup. “I can’t… politically it would be a very bad move to end up on my soon-to-be father-in-law’s bad side right now. Your mom handled it. I admit, I was impressed.”

“You’re not a bad sort,” Zeke added, “but I don’t want you as a step-brother, Tony. We had a back-up plan, if we needed one. But Dad has to think I’m doing what he wants. You know how that is, right?”

There were the rest of Tony’s things, in boxes, neatly labeled. “I know, it looks bad,” Ty said. “And this… if things had gone south, we… well, we thought it would be best if you and I could come to some sort of peace. If we were going to end up being family.”

That thought made Tony’s brain stutter to a halt. He turned to look at Bucky. “Yyyeah,” he managed after a moment. “Probably for the best that’s not happening.” Resolutely, he turned to the stack of boxes. “I... appreciate this,” he said, grudgingly.

Bucky was looking back and forth between Zeke and Ty like he was getting whiplash. “How… how did you two even meet? I thought Ty didn’t run with th’ big players, up this way.”

“Rude,” Ty muttered.

“It’s cliche,” Zeke admitted. “We met at Howard’s funeral, few years back. Look, James, gimme a hand with these, yeah? I’ll help you take them down to your car. Bear’s got a few things he wants to say. And then it’ll be done, okay?” He glanced at Tony. “Yeah?”

Childishly, Tony didn’t want to hear anything from Ty. Not a single fucking word. Not even if he was going to actually apologize for once. But they’d come up with the intention of pretending to be polite and nice, and anyway, Ty couldn’t do anything to hurt him, not anymore. He took a breath, blew it out hard. “Yeah,” he said, looking to Bucky for confirmation. “It’ll be okay.” He hoped that came out as a statement and not a question.

There was a threat and a promise on Bucky’s face as he glanced between Ty and then Zeke. It might as well have been written on Bucky’s forehead -- you touch him, and don’t forget who’s with me. Tony had never been on the wrong side of that look. Nonetheless, it was chilling, and a reminder that Bucky could be violent, if the situation called for it. The situation wasn’t going to call for it. Tony had to believe that, or he wasn’t going to get through this.

“I’ll be right back,” Bucky said.

“Stick to the plan, Bear,” Zeke told Ty, seriously. “You can get through this.”

And the two of them grabbed the remainder of Tony’s stuff, aside from the tool kit that was still in Tony’s stunned hands, and headed down the elevator.

Tony tightened his grip on the tool kit. It was real and solid. Something he could hold onto. He lifted his chin and met Ty’s pale gaze. “Go on.”

“You were right to go,” Ty said. He kept his gaze on Tony’s face, even though he looked like he’d really rather be doing anything else. “I’m not… I’m not going to apologize. You wouldn’t believe me and I don’t think it would help either of us. What I did… that goes beyond the ability for an apology to fix. I was wrong. I hurt you. Intentionally, maliciously, and for my own ends. I can’t make up for that.”

Tony nodded, and hoped he didn’t look as poleaxed as he felt. “Yeah, you did. You took away everything that made me who I was. It’s. It’s good to hear you acknowledge it.”

“He was right,” Ty said, jerking his chin in the direction that Bucky had vanished. “I kept telling myself I didn’t mean it, that I’d make it up to you. But it wasn’t an accident. I was careless with your affection and I abused your trust. I used you to quiet my own inadequacy.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. That’s… uh, that’s what I needed to say. I’ll. Let you get on with your life now, and I wish you the best.”

The sun might have turned to blue, outside the wide picture window, and Tony wouldn’t have noticed. The whole world had turned upside down: Ty had apologized, and it even seemed sincere. Tony scrambled after thought, and words. “I... hope you mean that,” he said. “I hope you’re getting better. If you mean it, then I hope you have a good life, and that you’re able to make him happy. Really happy, not...” He was going to start babbling. He clenched his jaw. “Yeah. You know. I’m... I’m just going to go, before I say something stupid.”

He hesitated, though, trying to read Ty’s expression, trying to see the truth of things in those clear blue eyes. He’d never been able to read Ty before, though, and he couldn’t trust the apparent sincerity there now. Tony swallowed. He couldn’t quite forgive Ty, but for whatever it was worth... “Apology accepted.” He walked out the door and waited for it to close behind him before he stopped and leaned against the wall, shaking.

The elevator dinged and two sets of footsteps came out, a rapid patter, and then Bucky was there, one hand on Tony’s arm. “Baby, you--” He broke off and snapped, “no, just you keep right on walkin’. You both done just about enough for one day.”

“Tony,” Zeke said, and Bucky was right there, in Zeke Stane’s face.

“Go. Inside. You don’t get t’ touch him, or apologize or excuse your boyfriend or whatever. You done enough.”

Zeke shrugged and went into the apartment.

“Baby?”

“I’m okay,” Tony said. He reached out and pulled Bucky to him, tucking his face into the curve of Bucky’s neck. “I’m okay,” he repeated, and if it wasn’t quite the truth, it would be, soon. “It’s all done.”

“Bastards,” Bucky spat, glaring at the door. “Come on, come on, honey, let’s get the fuck out of here. God damnit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’ta…” Bucky had his arm around Tony’s shoulders, reaching across himself to take Tony’s hand. Once Bucky had Tony in the elevator, private. “Do I even want to know what he said, or should I just go back and kick his ass for you?”

Tony laced his fingers through Bucky’s, keeping him close. “He apologized, actually. No ass-kicking needed. I’m just kind of... stunned.”

Tugging Tony closer, Bucky kissed his hair and forehead several times, as if reassuring himself that Tony was okay. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, finally. “Doesn’t change anything. He’s a bastard, an’ I’m going to make sure you never, ever have to see him again.” He heaved out a great breath. “Zeke spent th’ whole time we were loadin’ the car tellin’ me how Ty needed to do this. For them. For their relationship. God, what a selfish bastard.”

“They’re well matched, then,” Tony said. “And I have no intention of ever seeing them ever again, not if I don’t have to.” He wrapped his arm around Bucky’s waist as the elevator slowed to a stop. “C’mon, let’s go home. I feel like taking the girls out for ice cream. Wanna see how much of a mess Livvy can make if we let her have her own?”

“Oh, my god, your mother will have a coronary,” Bucky said. “We should definitely do that. Absolutely.”

Fanfic Writer Friday!

#backchat #ffwf #weethreequarter #my writing #also tisfan's writing #sandbridge #winteriron

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max1461 · 2 years ago

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I will reiterate again my views on private property, for those who have not heard them:

Property is a legal construct, by which an individual is recognized by the state as having essentially unilateral authority over some bundle of resources, and whereby this control is enforced by the state at the behest of the individual using the state's monopoly on violence.

Right-libertarians view the right to private property as a fundamental individual liberty that must be respected any just state, akin to freedom of speech. However, I believe this view is incorrect. At the most basic level, the difference is that freedom of speech puts restrictions on what the state may do—it may not arrest us for what we say. On the other hand, the "right to property" demands an enormous amount of active interference by the state in everyday life—to decide who is the legitimate owner of what, and thereby who may use what and step where, what is trespassing or copyright infringement and what is not. It demands that if you use the wrong resources in the wrong way, resources not recognized as yours, you must be jailed. It demands a constant management by the state of exactly who is using what where. Far from being the actions of a "small government", a pervasive system of private property is a status quo that can only be maintained by an extraordinarily large and everywhere-reaching government.

This difference needn't mean that private property is bad. In fact, I don't think it is in general bad! But I also don't think it is in general good, or in general conducive to the ideal of individual liberty and autonomy.

In our present society, private property serves a variety of social functions that I think are very positive. For instance, private ownership (or something basically akin to private ownership) of one's home provides them with certain guarantees of privacy and autonomy within their own living space that I think are vital in any free society. At the same time, when a home's resident is not its owner, as in the case where a home is owned by a landlord, the right to property is instead an obstacle to these basic individual liberties.

Furthermore, I think that owning a very large amount of property makes one a kind of de facto autocrat, backed by state force in the exercise of their own private whims. As goes the old quip: who has more control over your life, the president, or your boss? And which one is democratically elected?

The truth is that we almost all spend the majority of our waking lives within the workplace, a domain ruled autocratically by an unelected, unaccountable authority. Yes, we each have the meager freedom to choose which autocratic authority to submit to, or to submit to none and starve on the street. But this is not freedom in any sane sense. And I think the notion that we live in a free society when the majority of most of our lives are spent in submission to the arbitrary whims of state backed authority is ridiculous.

Does this mean that I think private property should be replaced with nothing? That all rivalrous resources should be allocated by first-come first-serve, or according to who can guard them by exercise of the most individual force? No, of course not! Rather, I merely think property as it exists today is something of an arbitrary system, an accretion of history, steered at every turn by the powerful to guard their own interests. I would like to see a wholesale reworking of the way that resources and their use are coordinated by society—this time, engineered from the ground up specifically to empower the greatest number of people with the greatest amount of personal autonomy. I think anyone who defends the present system of property against such efforts has no business calling themselves "libertarian".

This is no simple project, and though I have many ideas (which you can find by perusing my posts), I am almost certainly not equipped with the full set of skills necessary to envision an ideal system. This is a project which must be approached at the same time with a technical eye towards economic issues and a humanistic eye towards the broader effects of the new system on people and their wellbeing. I am, as always, interested in talking with anyone who can contribute towards a vision of better system.

#society

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marlowethelibrarian · 1 year ago

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Writeblr intro!

Hi, I'm Marlowe, they/them, late 20's, not white, not straight, not cis. But I am a magical wizard. (also i have an MLIS degree though im not currently working in a library)

I've been writing this n that for a long time now, but I'm starting this blog now bc I wanted a place to aggregate and post some of my stuff as I continue to work on my writing. I usually write adult fantasy or scifi, though I guess it might play to a YA audience. I like to look at themes of trauma and scarcity and what that does to a person.

I also like to analyze and liveblog about stuff that I am reading/watching and pick apart writing decisions, so that's going to go here too.

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WIPS

Raviaki Versus

Status: Waiting for Round 1 results

Word Count: Approx 30k words

Warnings for: Disease, eye trauma

Project Tag | Character Tag | Worldbuilding Tag | Snippet Tag

My contribution to the storytelling competition, the Summer Leagues Original Character Tournament.

Ravi, the genius halfling alchemist and unrepentant drug dealer has been sacrificed to seal the plague goddess Irra. However, they get the opportunity to enter an interdimensional tournament with a blanket wish as a prize. Is it their opportunity for freedom or are they simply providing Irra an opportunity to escape?

Available to read here:

Now available on Ao3!

Currently up to: Round 2 vs Kiriata and Aztachronopilas

Also Ravi's DAO Adventure, a Dragon Age Origins AU Where Ravi is The Grey Warden.

_________________

Project: Salted Earth

Status: First draft in progress

Word Count: ~33k atm

Genre: Queer Adult Fantasy, Political intrigue

Warnings for: Infanticide, violence, implied sexual assault, abuse, transphobia and ableism

Project Tag | Character Tag | Worldbuilding Tag | Snippet Tag | WIP Intro post

The story for Project Salted Earth centers on a pair of identical twins, separated by birth. One raised in the temple of Suyo as a talented priestess, the other a genius alchemist that has run out of luck and time and realizes they have an uncanny resemblance to the up and coming priestess…. However, they find themself with more than they can chew, as the aging queen priestess and her heir are at odds with each other, and their twin is being groomed to possibly replace the crown priestess.

_________________

Project Hail Mary

Status: Draft 1

Word Count: 5k currently

Genre: Horror

Warnings: Gore, Weird Pregnancy, transphobia, claustrophobia

Project Tag | Snippet Tag

Inspired by a spooktober challenge with the words RIP and SPORE

A team of five scientists and engineers travel to the depths of the Hail Mary Cavern system, in order to help establish a habitat away from the ravages of climate change on the surface. Things don't go as planned.

Project: Void City

Status: Draft 2

Word Count: 4k

Genre: Supernatural Urban Fantasy

Warnings for: Gore

Project Tag | Character Tag | Worldbuilding Tag | Snippet Tag

An old short story, How to Break a Vampire’s Heart with some potential to rework

Adrian, supernatural cop with an unusual super power faces down a real vampire at the vampire costume contest

#writeblr intro #writing community #writers on tumblr #Ive been on the tumble for awhile but I tend to find it difficult to engage with social media sometimes.#this is me trying to break out of that!

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maklodes · 1 year ago

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I feel like I barely have the right to get into “Star Wars would be so good if it were good” posting given that I haven’t actually watched VII-IX, but I keep thinking about the myriad plots and subplots that could follow VI, after the fireworks stop, all without slamming the reset button.

Like, as of Episode VI’s end, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader, and Grand Moff Tarkin are all dead, but much of the rest of the Imperial bureaucracy and military are still intact. Maybe there’s a legal chain of succession that establishes who’s next, but probably it’s pretty weak, because tyrants generally don’t like saying “you know who would benefit greatly if I were to ‘accidentally’ drink poisoned blue milk and die? That guy!” So there’s a likelihood of power struggles, different factions emerging among moffs and admirals. How would the Alliance respond to two moffs waging a brutal war against each other, extorting civilians to death for supplies, bombarding civilian population centers that are not logistically accessible enough for their side to extort but that they think the other side will, etc? Can the Alliance afford to intervene to help the innocents suffering in this conflict, or is it best to just let their enemies weaken themselves and clean up afterwards?

Meanwhile, some moffs and governors see the writing on the wall, and are approaching the Alliance and saying “Yes, I was a high official in the Empire, but I was one of the good ones, working within the system to make it as humane and decent as possible. Now I am preparing to join the New Republic, and preparing to hold free elections on my planet(s) (supervised, of course, by the erstwhile-Imperial bureaucracy under my control – who else is around that could competently manage such an affair?) Yes, there are a few incidents during my reign that can be classified as atrocities, but I can assure you that if anyone else in the empire had been in charge, they would have been more numerous and severe (anyone harsher than me would’ve been worse, and anyone gentler would’ve been force-choked to death by Darth Vader and replaced), so let’s just leave those in the past and work together toward a better future.” Can the Alliance accept such a defector on those terms? Can the Alliance afford not to?

At the same time, former members of the senate – dissolved at the beginning of IV – are saying “Alright! With that tyrannical emperor gone, we are ready to get back into the action and help rebuild the Republic,” while more radical members of the Alliance are like “no, FUCK those old senators. Those were the guys who elected Palpatine chancellor. Then they kept giving him more and more emergency powers. Then they voted to make him emperor. Then they stuck around as a rubber stamp Imperial Senate for like fifteen years legitimizing the Empire, before the emperor finally dissolved the senate. A few of them may be okay, but they are all on probationary status in the politics of the New Republic at best, and many of them should be charged with corruption/oath violation/etc and barred from politics and maybe incarcerated/executed.”

Some people might even question the whole idea of One Galaxy Government going forward. Sure, there are advantages to having a singular Republic/Empire coordinating things, but there are risks. Maybe local control – with the risk of the occasional local dictator, or local border war – is safer than putting all eggs into one basket? Coordinating the resources of a galaxy has proven useful in destructive massive scale projects like planet-killer battle stations. Is there a more productive use case for that much broad scale coordination?

As more systems democratize and lift censorship and restrictions on holonet, you get paranoia and rumors going around that this or that office-seeking politician is the Next Palpatine. When a planet’s leading candidate for senator faces rumors of being a Dark Sider, the runner-up currently polling at 48% clears her throat and says “The threat of the Dark Side is too serious to be turned into a political issue, and unfounded rumors and partisan smears do nothing to help us re-establish our still-fragile democratic norms. At the same time, any credible allegations of Dark Side influence merit a thorough and independent investigation. After all, recent experience has shown just how destructive the Dark Side can be: whole inhabited planets got destroyed! Once we establish a transparent, impartial process to examine these claims, we can move beyond all this baseless speculation about my opponent (and the baseless speculation that the first anonymous rumors were traced to a holonet account belonging to my campaign’s chief of staff).” You could have HUAC / McCarthy hearings type shit.

You could have some genuine (aspiring) Dark Side guys – no one who knows the true Sith teachings, but maybe some force sensitives who see the force as a Will To Power thing. (The Jedi haven’t been abducting children who show force potential for decades, and the Sith had no room beyond two, so I guess force sensitives have mostly sorta been figuring out what they could of this stuff themselves for a few decades? Most of them are probably pretty weaksauce compared to trained Sith/Jedi like Yoda or Palpatine, but maybe they can influence weak minds and shit) You could have any combination of actual Dark Side influence and rumors: have some people correctly accuse real Dark Side guys, have Dark Side guys spreading false rumors that their innocent opponents are on the Dark Side, have two different candidates both being Dark force sensitives, spreading rumors about each other (or one spreading rumors, being a down and dirty political fighter, and the other refusing to stoop to that and going for the Stately Above the Fray vibe, but secretly being comparably ruthless), or (perhaps most common) rumors of Dark Side influence being spread in politics when no one involved is actually even Force sensitive let alone in touch with the Dark Side.

You could go a little deeper: some people in the aftermath of the Empire might think that the Force – both the Dark and Light sides – has held the galaxy kind of kind of technical and moral cul-de-sac, accounting for the ways in which the whole setting combines backwardness and advancement:

Why is it that in spite of having overcome the light barrier many millennia ago and being able to build small planet-sized battle stations, they seem to have made negligible progress against senescence and death generally? Because the Force provides a frame in which you either embrace the Dark Side, in which case triumph over mortality is a personal achievement to be hoarded and lorded over your inferiors, or you adhere to the Light Side, in which case you reject the “unnatural abilities” of Dark immortality. Progress against mortality at a collective, civilizational level doesn’t make sense from either of those perspectives.

Why is it that in spite of apparently being fully sentient in many cases, droids are still treated as chattel property without rights? Why is it that they still seem to have widespread animal agriculture? Maybe because the Force doesn’t notice forms of sentience that have no or negligible midichlorian counts or force sensitivity or whatever. Obi-Wan could probably walk past a droid refurbishing facility where droids are getting reset to factory settings, or a slaughterhouse, and not feel any “disturbance in the force, voices crying out in terror and suddenly being silenced” etc, and when the Light Side is treated in some respects as the moral arbiter of the setting, and when a big part of the Light Side is “trust your feelings,” and when the “force feelings” don’t really apply to beasts or droids, they don't get a lot of consideration.

Why is it that the only visions of authority are somewhere on a spectrum from “centralized, despotic autocracy” (the Empire) to “decentralized, semi-feudal oligarchy” (the Republic, with a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-style weak senatorial authority, proliferation of local nobles like counts and princesses, etc, and, perhaps to an even further extent along that spectrum, the Confederacy of Independent Systems)? Maybe because it reflects how the Force tends to structure itself: the Dark Side tends to concentrate power in the hands of a couple of megalomaniacs. The Light Side tends to distribute it across a broader order of Force-wielding elites, but still very rare as a fraction of the population.

You might say that these ideas don’t really get to the essence of the core appeal of Star Wars, which is more like stuff like starfighter battles and lightsaber duels and such, but I’m not saying these themes would necessarily be debated in great detail to the exclusion of action and stuff. They just could be the reason for the lightsaber duels and starfighter battles and such. Consider: in Episode I, the pretext for a lot of the action was a dispute over tariffs. Stated baldly, I think that’s drier than anything I mentioned.

#star wars

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kawaiichibiart · 8 months ago

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Sunny☆Wonders

WONDERHOY!! Say hello to Sunny☆Wonders, the adorable and whimsical idols who'll bring a smile to your face!! They're the second of the five idol groups to debut and the third most popular.

Sunny☆Wonders's goal is to spread joy to others, especially those who could use a bit of light in dark times. It took some time for them to really mesh together, and it wasn't until Haruka officially joined that they would feel complete.

Haruka, much like Shizuku, is the only girl there with experience being an idol. Emu Otori, Mafuyu Asahina and Kohane Asuzawa don't have that experience.

Although, Emu does have an advantage over the other two due to her own performing experiences. While she wasn't an idol, for a small, brief, moment, she was an actress who did her own stunt work.

And due to her prior status as an idol, Haruka accepts being the face for Sunny☆Wonders. This, combined with their appearances at PXL, is what ultimately gains them the most fans.

TRIVIA:

Emu and Mafuyu have actually gotten closer due to being in Sunny☆Wonders together

Sunny☆Wonders was originally going to be a trio: Emu, Mafuyu and Kohane. Haruka was only going to train the three girls but ultimately ended joining the group after her own passion for being an idol was rekindled.*

Mafuyu's mother didn't want her to join the idol industry, but she was talked into it by their manager, who promised to give Mafuyu the necessary time needed to study for her medical career.

Sunny☆Wonders will sometimes perform on the Wonder Stage. The stage is set for demolition, so this is kinda Emu's way of saying goodbye.

While she did cut her own hair, Kohane still wears glasses. The only time she takes them off and replaces them with contacts is when Sunny☆Wonders is performing.

Kohane still ends up lost in Vivid Street and meeting An. The two girls will sometimes talk and it's very obvious to Ken, An's father, that the two girls have feelings for one another.

Because Mafuyu is a year above them, during practice she'll sometimes offer the three younger girls tutoring.

Emu does sometimes wonder if becoming an idol was the right decision. Part of her still wants to save the Wonder Stage, but she can't help but feel like it's not possible. No one wants to work on the old stage. Very little people showed up when she put on shows. It was only once Sunny☆Wonders became a thing that people began to show up, and that still doesn't feel like enough to save it.

Mafuyu was pleasantly surprised when she met Kanade. While the two girls never saw each other, they did talk over Nightcord if they didn't just use the chat. It was more surprising when she learned she was part of YUME YUME JUMP! Like, no offense, she looked like a breeze could knock her over.

Emu does still go to Kamiyama from time to time. This is mostly (at first anyways) because she wants to see Tsukasa. He did, after all, audition to be part of the Phoenix Stage troupe. The two have a tentative friendship, which grows**, moreso once Tsukasa introduces her to Rui, his fellow idol, and Nene, Rui's neighbor and childhood friend.

*** Haruka accepted being the face for Sunny☆Wonders mostly due to not wanting anyone else to carry that burden. Mafuyu wouldn't have the time, what with her contract strictly saying she'd need schedule time off to further her future (which also meant she wouldn't be in the idol industry for long). Kohane would likely collapse under the pressure, and while Emu probably could handle it, she just... doesn't want her to.

*Haruka's passion for being an idol was rekindled by Minori. While they don't talk as much, there was something about seeing Minori try and try, and just not give up that gave Haruka that hope she needed. With that, she began partaking more and more in Sunny☆Wonders's practice and became their fourth and final member.

**As I mentioned in my last post about this AU, I gave a hint for a future edit for PASSION♡proJECT ("This is What Dreams are Made Of") alongside some gifs. Yeah, this is another hint. Again, it feels very obvious, but I don't wanna say it.

*** It's completely different from what Shizuku does. Both girls have been idols previously, and both were willing to accept being the face of their respective groups. The difference is Shizuku was willing to let someone else take that spot and would only step in if they said no, even though she herself didn't want the position. Haruka didn't want any of the other girls to have to go through with what it means being the face of their group, so she just accepts the position, no questions asked, despite not wanting it either. Neither is wrong for doing what they did in the end.

Bonus video:

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mariacallous · 9 months ago

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Germany’s 2021 national election campaign to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor became a competition among various candidates to imitate her cautious political style. The ultimate winner of the election—Olaf Scholz, the leader of the Social Democratic Party—demonstrated his affinity by avoiding any hint of polarizing rhetoric during the campaign. He even adopted Merkel’s signature hand gesture from photo ops and press conferences, pressing together his fingertips from opposite hands to form what had come to be known as the “Merkel rhombus.”

But in the immediate post-Merkel era, it was not her many imitators, but rather Scholz’s vice chancellor and minister for economics and climate change, the 53-year-old Green Party leader Robert Habeck, who emerged as the country’s most popular politician. For years previous, Habeck had been the most prominent exception to the trend of Merkel mimicry on Germany’s political scene. Whereas Merkel offered agendas comprised of a series of small incremental steps, Habeck preferred to start political discussions with an abstract analysis of the status quo. Whereas Merkel would justify policies by presenting them as lacking any viable alternative, Habeck declared that “nothing is alternative-less.”

The person least surprised by his initial success as climate minister might have been Habeck himself. They were the results of a plan he long ago developed for the Green Party. His vision has always been to transform the party—both its image among the German public, and its members’ own self-understanding. But what would remain the same would be the party’s desire for radical changes in society, especially on climate policy. “Whoever votes for us knows that they’re changing something of enormous consequence,” he said in 2019.

Rather than Merkel, Habeck has cited former U.S. President Barack Obama as an inspiration for political leadership. Like Obama, Habeck was a successful author before he was a politician, and at the source of both men’s charisma is their reflective use of language—the use of rhetoric to simultaneously project both emotion and doubt, intimacy and remove. But the resemblance also carries over to the content of their respective political projects. Like Obama, Habeck is trying to translate the energy of activism into the service of practical policy. The Green Party is Habeck’s vehicle. It’s just not yet clear if he will reach his goal. The current evidence suggests he’s instead moving in the opposite direction.

Habeck has recently declared his intention to run as the Green Party’s chancellor candidate in next year’s national election, to potentially replace Scholz. But Habeck’s personal popularity never durably translated to his party more broadly, or to the policies necessary to stem climate change. Three years after Habeck and his party entered government, the Greens are in greater disarray than ever before. This past week, after a series of disappointing regional elections, the leadership of both the national party and its youth wing resigned, the latter vowing to create a more activist party of their own. And climate policy has rarely felt more marginalized in national politics, crowded out by concerns over migration and refugees.

And so, the longer he stays in office, the more Habeck may be deepening the social divisions over climate policy that he always wanted to overcome.

In his first weeks as climate minister, Habeck seemed to follow Scholz’s lead in avoiding the spotlight. But then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the epochal consequences. Politicians were obliged to respond to the dramatically changed political circumstances, and Habeck didn’t shy from the challenge.

For months on end, Habeck made regular appearances on nightly newscasts announcing new infrastructure to replace Russian gas; offering tips to German consumers about how much energy could be saved by taking shorter showers; or delivering chastising homilies about Germany’s moral responsibility for not taking the origins of its energy into account for so long. He was occupied with braiding the various strands of the crisis into a portrait of its wider meaning—the way the war in Ukraine illuminated the structural weaknesses of the German economy, the urgency of climate policy, and the very fragility of freedom.

These early interventions were greeted with ubiquitous praise—including from parts of German society, such as populist tabloids and traditionalist CEOs, that had never previously been sympathetic to the Greens. Habeck earned a 60 percent approval rating for his work as climate and economics minister. And the popularity of the vice chancellor carried over to his party at first. According to contemporaneous polls, the German public believed by a wide margin the Greens were the party most capable of addressing the country’s problems.

This was the culmination of Habeck’s long-gestating strategy for the Greens. His plan was to start with the activists and their sympathizers who had always comprised the party’s base. He would then expand beyond their ideological milieu by persuading those same activists that if the boundaries of their existing political commitments were wider, they would not have to compromise their principles in reaching out to other parts of the public. The only way to govern in a way that could effectively change the country was to arrange constant dialogue across all of society.

“The job is to understand our time,” Habeck said in 2018. “The party that most succeeds at identifying our era’s contradictions and showing paths out will win.” This is what is at stake for Habeck in the transformation of the Greens into Germany’s new hegemonic party of the center-left. The Greens must become the vehicle for gathering social consensus behind the idea that climate change requires radical solutions, from tens of billions of euros of investment in renewable energy to higher carbon taxes to new regulations on industry.

The Greens had always described themselves as an anti-party party. That was an expression used to describe the party’s closeness to its grassroots activists and their collective distance from standard parliamentary politics. Under Habeck, the Greens have become an anti-party party of an entirely different kind—one that is trying to transcend the country’s history of ideological division. In one 2018 interview, he admitted, “I hate moral rigor and ideology.”

Habeck’s distinct approach to managing the Green Party has clearly also informed his work as minister of economics and climate. From the beginning of his term, the vice chancellor exploited classically conservative rhetoric for a program of progressive change. When Habeck made his initial appeal for a dramatic expansion of the country’s wind-power infrastructure, he did so as part of an argument for “ecological patriotism.”

In the early months of the war in Ukraine, Habeck embraced a new role as a teller of uncomfortable truths about Germany’s patterns of consumption, earning credit for acknowledging what other politicians tried to repress as part of their own calculations of political advantage. Even his pep talks to the nation, as it anxiously approached its first winter facing the threat of energy shortages, were threaded with a certain wistfulness. “We know that we’re going to have to live with many impositions,” he said in August 2022, “but we also know why we’re doing so.” In a more philosophical mode, he reminded Germans that their consumption habits have always had a negative impact on the planet. “Our daily life leaves a trail of destruction behind on the Earth,” he said in one evening newscast.

This rhetoric has been a reversal of the rhetoric from the national election, in which every candidate for chancellor both acknowledged the reality of climate change but also tried to downplay the changes to normal life that would be necessary to address it. The suggestion was that everything would have to change but also everything could remain the same. Habeck was now putting an end to that illusion—and it briefly made him Germany’s most beloved politician.

There is a flipside to Habeck’s post-ideological transformation of the Green Party: It has privileged the amassing of political capital over the spending of it. Habeck has won support for ambitious climate policy, but he doesn’t act as if he enjoys the legitimacy to enact it at a time of war. To ask Germans to sacrifice the comfort of a perfectly warm home or shower is one thing. To ask Germany to risk any aspect of its national security for the sake of the climate’s future needs is a step that Habeck clearly believes he can’t justify.

Notably, Habeck hasn’t treated the war in Ukraine, and the reduction in access to Russian gas that has resulted, as a particular opportunity to accelerate Germany’s transition to renewables. In 2022, he did manage to pass an initial package of climate policies that would accelerate the expansion of the country’s renewable energy infrastructure, including by loosening permitting regulations. But those efforts have been overshadowed by his insistence on guaranteeing the existing volume of German energy without any interruption.

That, in turn, has meant searching for new sources of fossil fuels. In March 2022, Habeck traveled to Qatar to pose for photos with Doha’s leaders and tout the potential for new “energy partnerships”—that is, for new contracts to guarantee delivery of gas years into the future. He also gave his consent to the German government funding new gas fields in Africa and offered new subsidies for gasoline for cars. He fast-tracked new liquid natural gas infrastructure in Germany’s North Sea, infrastructure that the Greens have always vehemently opposed. And he explicitly gave permission to restart coal power plants that had already been shut down.

Habeck has done all this to respond to an unexpected crisis and the entirely expected German fears that it has produced. He talks constantly about doing everything in his power to maintain German “wealth”—not because wealth is inherently virtuous, but because he argues its absence would lead to social disorder. This is the fatalistic side to Habeck’s intellectualism: the sense that social consensus for policy changes rests on a basis of material cohesion, and that, for even the greatest literary talent, there are limits to rhetoric’s ability to create consensus. “Politics isn’t about knowing how to apply power, it’s about knowing how to be humble about power,” Habeck wrote in his 2018 book Who We Could Be.

For the Greens’ traditional base, this was the downside of having made an intellectual, rather than an activist, the leader of Germany’s traditional climate-focused party. Climate policy was a vehicle for Habeck to achieve a deeper aim—embodying a new modern sensibility of political responsibility that reconciles realism with progressivism. And what is more responsible than recognizing reality has changed at a time of war?

By the spring of 2023, after a winter of economic anxiety, the government agreed to a revised climate program over several days of negotiations among all three coalition parties. The new consensus had moved so far from the Greens’ original vision that it was hard not to treat the changes as an imposed defeat. The government dissolved binding carbon-emission targets for individual industrial sectors, weakened environmental regulations on infrastructure projects, and carved out various loopholes for the legally mandated transition over the next several decades to carbon-neutral home-heating technologies.

Habeck achieved only minimal face-saving concessions in return. The parties agreed to accelerate the construction of highways across the country—but those highways would now have to be flanked by solar panels. There was no indication that the German government was willing to abandon its climate goals—but also no indication those goals were urgent enough to justify deploying the full regulatory power of the state to achieve them. Habeck nevertheless soldiered onto news talk shows immediately after the announcement of the compromise to sell it as a sign of progress. “One has to say,” he said in a video published on Twitter, “it’s just not possible to achieve more in this coalition.”

If Habeck’s favorite rhetorical devices—the indulgence of paradoxes, the shifts to higher levels of generality—seem to be drawn from sophisticated types of discourse, that may be because he knows that his party is still fundamentally comprised of well-off intellectuals. The more urban and high-income a German constituency, the more likely it is to vote Green. This was true at the founding of the party four decades ago and hasn’t changed since. In the 2021 national election, only 8 percent of working-class voters supported the Greens.

“We will be poorer than we were before,” Habeck declared at the outset of the war. But the term we obscures as much as it reveals. It’s Habeck and the government he’s serving that will decide exactly who will be poorer. This is where intellectual exercise meets the hard constraints of material politics. Who should pay, and how much, for the investments necessary to transition to renewable energy? On what timeline should that transition take place?

And who should be forced to pay more for their existing energy consumption? Germany’s sudden wartime scarcity of gas has already obliged Habeck to offer an answer to this question. Over the summer in 2022, his ministry announced a plan to universally charge German gas consumers a fee, proportionate to their usage, that would be transferred to energy wholesalers. The policy immediately came under attack: Why should German citizens, many of whom were struggling to make ends meet, be forced to bail out energy companies? The government’s immediate response was to lower energy taxes on German consumers to even out the bailout surcharge. But with that decision, the energy-saving and climate-mitigating effects of higher gas prices were canceled out too.

The episode was only a prelude to Habeck’s next political failure, one that did even greater damage to his reputation. In the spring of 2023, Habeck proposed a new energy law banning the installation of new gas and oil-fired heating systems as of the start of the following year. Homeowners would instead be obliged to install more expensive renewable heating systems, such as heat pumps. When a preliminary draft of the law leaked, the conservative opposition protested in fiery terms. The Christian Democratic Union’s national leader, Friedrich Merz, claimed that Habeck’s ministry had lost touch with “normal” people, while the party leader in the state of Thuringia claimed Habeck was trying to create an “energy Stasi,” a reference to the eastern German secret police that used to compile dossiers on citizens’ private lives.

But Habeck’s bigger problem was that his own coalition partners saw the proposed law as an invitation to do damage to him personally. The free-market Free Democratic Party demanded a litany of loopholes be introduced to better protect homeowners, at the expense of the law’s effectiveness as climate policy; when those demands were met, the party claimed the law needed to be scrapped entirely. Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party was more circumspect, but the chancellor assured the public that he would defend working people’s concerns in the final version of the law, while doing little to dispel the depiction of Habeck in the tabloid press as a political dilettante. A watered-down version of the heating law eventually passed in the summer, but not without major damage having been done to Habeck’s reputation, with half of Germans claiming they wanted him to resign.

And so Habeck’s leadership has not changed the basic dynamics of climate policy. The other parties still tend to indulge in scare tactics to highlight precisely the moral costs of prioritizing it too highly: If coal is phased out too quickly, as the Green Party has advocated, Germans’ electricity bills could skyrocket. And a high carbon tax would similarly take money out of the pockets of hardworking German families through their utility bills and at the gas station. (How else are families with young kids supposed to get around other than with German-made cars?) And, yes, regulations making it harder to build single-family homes might reduce emissions—but why rob people of enjoying a backyard of their own where they can one day host a grill party?

After two years in office, the Greens are now both leaderless and rudderless. Habeck is a candidate for chancellor but seemingly in name only. And his capacity for reconciliation as climate minister has been tested beyond its very limits. Not every contradiction he has encountered has been able to be dissolved in some higher intellectual synthesis. And so he has exposed a truth he had tried to deny: that it’s in the nature of politics that some policy dilemmas can only be resolved by forcefully taking one side—precisely against the other.

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malue-505 · 2 years ago

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Slenderman Proxy Ranks

(The info below are my headcanons, I am very open to suggestions for changing the names of the Tertiaries and Quatenaries and maybe the SICs. The other main part of my Slenderman Proxy headcanons will be posted soon hopefully! The ranks are ordered from Proxies with the least to most authority, this is based off of both Creepypasta and Slenderverse Proxies.)

Main Info

10. Retirees - Retirees are Proxies that have since retired from their Proxy duties. Proxies of this Rank are usually Veteran or Senior Proxies that have either grown too old to work or Slenderman finds no more use of them and allows them to retire peacefully or get their memories wiped and are dumped back into human society.

9. Trainees - Trainees are soon-to-be Proxies. Until their training is done, they cannot go on any solo missions without a Worker or above accompanying them. Trainees can be assigned as a higher rank Proxy’s apprentice if it becomes more effective than being in a Training Fleet. Trainees usually finish their training in their late teens, some finish earlier in childhood while some finish their training later on if they joined the Organization as adults. Sleepers who have been taken in the Organization will enter in as Trainees.

8. Hollowed - Mindless puppets hollowed out mentally by Slenderman for the harassment of Runners, being decoys and as a scare tactic with no other purpose. They are only in the Scouts Branch.

7. Sleepers - Sleepers have their original personalities kept intact, and are left unaware of their status as Proxies. Sleepers tend to lead normal lives but with the constant Slender Sickness, amnesia and blackouts. Some Sleepers get taken in as Workers while others spend the rest of their lives as a Sleeper. They do not have control over their lives as a Proxy. Sleepers are only in the Scouts Branch.

6. Semi-Retirees - Proxies that have semi-retired still continue to do some Proxy work part-time. Proxies here are usually Veteran Proxies that have slightly aged past their use and have ranked down. Other reasons could include having sustainable injuries or ranking down to be semi-replaced with another Proxy. Semi-Retirees usually don’t have control over if they semi-retire or not, it depends on their condition and if Slenderman deems it necessary or acceptable.

5. Associates - The only rank that includes people that are not Proxies in the traditional sense. Associates are people that Slenderman personally knows and calls on them as acting Proxies in case of certain situations, assistance, training and/or supplying. The best comparison would be is to contractors. Despite being ranked lower than Workers, they are treated as either equals or above them depending on how essential they are. They have slightly less control over their life as a Proxy due to them and Slenderman having a mutual agreement to help each other.

4. Workers - This rank is often considered and treated as the default and/or average Proxy rank in the Organization. Trainees are usually training to fill the role of a Worker. Proxies of this rank don’t have much control over their life as a Proxy since the SIC/s they work under, as well as Slenderman, determine their workload and schedules. If they’re lucky, their SIC/s will be a good “secondary bosses” to work for and give them easy hours, this also goes for the two ranks above them.

3. Quaternaries - Proxies that have been usually promoted by Tertiaries, they get the same treatment as Workers and are the heads of the smaller missions/projects within a Tertiary’s order.

2. Tertiaries - Proxies that have been usually promoted by SICs and Slenderman, they get the same treatment as Workers and are usually the head of smaller missions/projects within their designated Branch assigned to them by their respective SIC/s.

1. Second-in-Commands - SICs are Slenderman’s Secondary Proxy Masters and are the highest Proxy Rank in his organization. How a Proxy becomes a SIC is by Slenderman’s personal choice or if a Proxy has shown to be extremely capable and reliable through their work. A SIC has authority to decide a lower ranked Proxy’s fate if given approval from either Slenderman himself or their fellow SICs from the same Branch or Unit. If a SIC is in serious danger, Slenderman will rescue them personally and are deemed the highest priority.

Extra Info

SICs have the power and authority to rank up and rank down a Proxy whenever they want less that Slenderman intervenes.

They are currently only 31 current SICs, making it the least populated Proxy rank in the organization.

One of these 31 SICs are Masky and Hoodie, only after the events of Marble Hornets and El Salvador (made by Trashy-Blaze)

Proxies can only rank up based mostly on if they caught Slenderman/an SIC’s special attention, if they have proven to be a good leader or are an absolute expert in their area of expertise.

The SICs hold monthly meetings to discuss their progress and also the overall direction of the organization, this is so that the organization can stand on its own two feet whenever Slenderman becomes heavily occupied.

(More info might be added over time)

#creepypasta au #creepypasta fandom #creepypasta headcanon #slenderman #proxy #proxy headcanon #slenderverse

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antihibikase · 1 year ago

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"i'll make sure that all my secret sins, everything my heart has hid, all the feelings deep within, beating in my heart's the truth, amen."

🍑 my name is reese.

♓ i am 23 years old. my birthday is february 17 2002.

🐰 my pronouns are she/they/he.

🔆 i am filipino, and i post in english, taglish, and tagalog.

💝 i am aroace. im not sure about my gender yet.

🧠 i am a writer, artist, and psychology student.

Currently in my last year of my psychology course in college.

[ in this blog i post ]

🎨 my art and my writing.

🧸 my interests. i like video games, toys, vocaloid, anime, plushies, and cute things.

🧶 my bw/bw2 rewrite project - pokemon : blight / blur, as well as other stories and projects derivative of it.

💬 thoughts and ramblings, often under the #antihibikase.txt tag. i sometimes write essays and analysis posts.

🌐 important posts, often ones that are about politics or mental health.

Posts that have not safe for work content are tagged with #nsfwtxt.

[ status ]

📭 my ask box is open.

❓ anonymous messages are on.

💌 my private messages are open.

All my posts are okay to reblog, unless stated otherwise.

[ other blogs ]

@pokemon-blightblur - my verse blog

@antihibikase2 - my writing blog

@cheriebim - my character aesthetic blog for cheren slater

@eucharist-i-deify - my character aesthetic blog for nikolai colress

[ social media ]

👾 discord : antihibikase

🐤 personal twitter : antihibikase

🎀 art twitter : apricot_arts

📍 pinterest : antihibikase2

[ reminders ]

My blog and my experiences are my own.

I tag my things appropriately, though feel free to tell me if I need to tag for additional triggers and warnings.

I do not have a dni posted here, and I tend to just block bots; but please be warned that if I blocked you, please do not try to circumvent my block by creating a new account or throwaway account, especially if it is with intention to interact with me through anonymous messages, or to keep track of what I post and/or talk about.

For clarification on certain posts I write, feel free to ask me; English is my second language.

[ credits ]

sunset slater by scootillust

matryoshka slater by megumari

dividers by pommecita.

"if you're gonna replace me, at least have the audacity to kill me thoroughly"

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bluesdesk · 1 year ago

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I've had a story in my drafts for a really long time.

I have so many things to do for university, projects, exams and so on, and I don't have time to do anything else, but once the session has ended, I'll surely complete it! Do you remember this post?

The story I have is going to be the full plot of this concept! I have the first part ready, here's a snippet!

Link and Zelda had just found some ruins under the castle. Zelda suggested to investigate, as always. She really loved doing researches, being a scholar, and now that she was a teacher too, for all those kids, she was really, and seriously, happy. He often found himself thinking about their own possible future kids, but didn't tell her, they had just gotten together. When she asked him if they could share the house, he couldn't and of course wouldn't ever want to say no. Maybe it was a bit small for them, Zela needed a study room for all her stuff, and he surely needed more space for his weapons and shields. He should find a better one. Maybe he could ask Hudson and Rhodson. He had to have a trip to Tarrey once this research under the castle was finished! The walls were covered in murals, depicting various eras. People descending from the sky, people during what looked like a ceremony, a mural depicting a festivity and tiny beings, the first appearance of Ganondorf, the era of the shadows, and the era of the huge war. Where the walls didn't have murals, statues almost as tall as the ceiling decorated the rooms and corridors. They depicted a man with mustaches and a long tunic, and a woman with a dress and tattoos. They also found one different statue, too damaged to be recognizable, but it surely wasn't that man or that woman. Both Link and Zelda guessed it must have been destroyed on purpose by their ancestors. Maybe, it was the menace of their time, like Calamity Ganon for them.

A set of stairs and a really narrow corridor made them go even further down. They found themselves on a balcony thing in a room with a huge green light the shape of a hand, gripped in what looked like a really old dead body, skin and bones, but with long hair. Zelda wanted to take some photos, get a sample of hair from the body maybe to know how old it really was, and mostly she wanted to know if the hand was pure light magic or maybe it was physical too. Link told her it was dangerous, she didn't listen. He, while reaching for her, shouted the phrase again. "I SENSE DANGER! DON'T GO!" It was too late. The dead body was somehow revived, the light hand disappeared and... she was falling. He hadn't saved her, he had jumped off to the void in which his princess, scholar, other half, fell, and the hand appeared right behind him and brought him back to the surface. The Master Sword was broken, and he had lost an arm in the process thanks to what looked like an enhanced malice Zelda had called "gloom". Link woke up and found himself in what looked like a temple. It was just a room, a huge round room with tall walls. There was a pedestal there, that looked pretty much like the one for the Master Sword, but older. Though, there was nothing there, other than some torches around the pedestal. Feeling lost, he impulsively tried to wield the broken sword, but as soon as he looked at himself for the first time, he noticed he had only his underwear on, and his right arm was gone. Instead, he had what looked like a prosthesis, but filled with the same light magic of the hand. He tried to move it and it worked. It looked like an old sheikah tech but it wasn't even a bit rusty, and he could sense it was made to contain more power than what it actually had. What was that? Who did that? Who saved him and literally replaced his injured and hopeless arm with an old but new sheikah tech?

Suddenly, a voice sounding like an old man got his attention. He had seen spirits before, but this... he couldn't see anyone. The voice presented itself as Rauru, and Link knew he had read about someone named Rauru somewhere... right! Zelda said he was the first king of Hyrule! Rauru informed Link that place was once adored and praised by every population. There, the first hero, chosen by the goddess Hylia, had wielded the Goddess Sword for the first time, and forged her into the Master Sword, the sword that banishes evil. During the eras, the original temple, as well as another huge one, the Sealed Temple, got buried and later the temple of Time was built over them. Now, Link was in the Depths, under the Great Plateau. Rauru invited him to go out and look at the magnificence of the temple. A huge statue of the goddess, that, while not having any power source, emanated a celestial light, enough to see the building perfectly, and even clear a portion of ground around it. The Sealed Temple was in front of it, the light of the goddess temple illuminated it too. There was grass, there were flowers around both the temples, but where the light didn't reach, there were only cold stones and dirt. All around, in the distance, he could see gloom encrusted to tall stone and dirt walls that seemed to reach the top, the "ceiling". And probably monsters, but he wasn't in shape to fight. He wasn't still acquainted with the hand, and arm of course, and his only weapon was the decayed sword. As Link could see, there was no exit from there. The entrances to the depths, as he had had time to see before the research, were huge chasms covered in gloom, too high to be reached by anyone, and even if he did manage to reach them, the gloom would have killed him in few seconds. One of the chasms was about in the centre of the enclosed area.

Right there, standing on the floor, was a strange-looking smaller statue. This one, unlike the temples, was rusty and some pieces were clearly missing. The bottom of the statue looked kind of like a stand for something, but the subject was missing, and Rauru instructed Link to go find a stone bird. After finding the stone bird, he had to put it back on the stand. Link couldn't do anything but accept. The bird statue was restored, but still old and without any sign of power. Rauru's voice instructed him to find 3 stone tablets. they were once used by the very first hero to create beams of light, capable of breaking the cloud barrier and activate the statues. Now, their power had surely faded out, but maybe the power of the 3 of them combined could at least make him go back to the surface. Link finally had to fight some monsters with the broken sword and with what he could find around the area. It felt like the beginning of his first adventure, like if he was still unexperienced, goofy, and so damn tired. He had to do it. It was an enclosed space, but big enough to host one huge Goddes Statue Temple and the Sealed Temple, and a vast space around. Some enemies had decayed but still functional weapons, he stole them. The 3 tablets were found in different spots. When he found them all, Rauru told him to go put them in the Goddess Temple. A stone panel with a missing rectangular piece emerged from the ground. The tablets were put together and they fitted. Outside, a blue light beam had appeared right in the middle of the chasm, bathing the bird statue with holy light, it was now as good as new and ready to be used. A treasure chest appeared there, with his paraglider, sewed and taped with white and sky blue pieces of cloth and sewing threads. That style was surely from another culture.

Link couldn't imagine the power of that light beam was still strong enough to launch him right to the sky. With the help of his paraglider, he landed safely on a floating island. There, he saw the source of Rauru's voice. The first king's ghost was exactly like one of the statues he and Zelda had seen under the castle. The white mustache, the long orange vest, the wise face. He was now standing before him. He could see a huge palace on another island. Somehow, he knew he had to go there. Rauru nodded. That palace was once the home of a sky tribe that refused to go to the surface when Hylia told them to, and now it was a temple, to remember those who gave their life to protect the land and what's good, from the depths to the sky. Link had to go there, in that temple as old as the kingdom itself. Someone was waiting for him in there. Though, the sky islands weren't reachable with a simple jump, he had to build devices. Rauru informed him that the construct hand was in fact able to hold more power, and increase its abilities. It wasn't just a hand. The sheikah, with the help of the Hylians and some familiar robots, the scrappers or, as they renamed them, the constructs, had built devices infused with Hylia's holy power. They had no equals, because Hylia herself had given them her power time ago, in her mortal form. Only the sages could restore his new hand, as Hylia had transferred each facet of her powers to them, chosen by herself and the 3 goddesses. Rauru told Link he could restore one power, being the original sage of light, and moreover, her son.

#lioness posts #lioness writes #zelda #the legend of zelda skyward sword #the legend of zelda #the legend of zelda tears of the kingdom #totk #zelda tears of the kingdom #zelda skyward sword #skyward sword #rauru #totk sonia #sksw #linked universe

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brassandblue · 2 years ago

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ALASTOR (the RADIO DEMON) // INTEREST TRACKER

MUSE STATUS: PRIMARY

(By liking this post, you are indicating interest in plotting with this character, and are OK with me sending memes/prompts to your inbox!)

NAME: Alastor

PSEUDONYM(S): The Radio Demon; Al

TITLE(S): Overlord

OCCUPATION: Sinner Demon/Demon Overlord/Radio Host/Whole Lotta Murder

SEX/GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male, he/him

SEXUALITY: Asexual

FACECLAIM: ---

AGE: Died in his 30s/40s

NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY: American/United States; mixed-race Creole

HEIGHT: 6'4"

BUILD/BODY TYPE: Tall, thin, wiry, broad shoulders

HAIR: Red (As a human: Black)

EYES: Red (As a human: Dark amber-gold)

PINTEREST BOARD

ALL ABOUT ALASTOR:

**Sources on Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure, can be found at the bottom of this post.**

**WARNING: Hazbin Hotel's canonical material contains blood, gore, cannibalism, murder, suggestive and potentially sexually explicit content. Alastor's wiki and comic are to be viewed with discretion.**

**NOTE #1:** (Written as of 01/26/2024) Most things I have pulled either from canonical instances or "word of God" (hah!) from Vivzie. Some things I have extrapolated, due to the (current) lack of content, and others I have inserted from my own bullshit. The rest is from research from a variety of cultural, religious, and heritage sources. I still try to stick to the core aspects of his character as seen in canon; and he is subject to change when more material becomes available on new episodes this coming January.

**NOTE #2:** To avoid misappropriating New Orleans Voodoo traditions, as well as hoodoo practices, I will be implementing a sound-based magic system to replace the use of veve. Essentially, the veve will NOT be used, and I will have him use musical notations instead. I cannot abide by cultural erasure, however, nor am I entitled to the use of symbols STILL used in religion and folk practices belonging to groups that have been enslaved, colonized, and oppressed. I want to acknowledge Alastor's Creole heritage without appropriating it and without perpetuating harmful depictions of the past.

ALASTOR'S BACKGROUND:

Alastor is an Overlord in the Pride Ring of Hell and a notorious deal-making demon-- a former serial killer radio host on Earth in 1930s Louisiana. Once he'd died and arrived in Hell, it is said he suddenly began to wreak havoc, toppling other Sinner Demons (humans who have died and gained power in Hell) with terrifying abilities of reality and shadow manipulation. He became feared by the denizens of the Pride Ring after his massacre and broadcast of the carnage across all of Hell.

In the pilot, Alastor shows up to offer assistance to Charlie Morningstar (Lucifer's daughter/Princess of Hell) with her hotel project to rehabilitate Sinners and hopefully send them to Heaven, thus dealing with the overcrowding of formerly human Sinners in the Pride Ring. Alastor has made it clear, however, that he has no faith in this project working and believes that his fellow Sinners had their chance up on Earth.

His stated reason for wanting to assist Charlie is boredom: Specifically, he gets great enjoyment out of watching Sinners climb and climb, only to end in failure. He claims he's been bored for decades, and in the first episode of the series proper, it's revealed he has been "absent" from Hell for seven years. What he was doing, why, and where he actually was, are all still a mystery.

PERSONALITY:

(From the Wiki, linked below. I'll write a proper bio soon enough.)

Alastor stands out from many of the more chaotic residents of hell for his well maintained amiable persona. He gives the first-impression of a good-natured and charming man, wearing a permanently wide grin on his face at all times. Alastor's behavior, mannerisms, and even his voice are similar to an old-fashioned radio announcer and speaks with a transatlantic accent, often using quaint anachronisms such as "the picture show" and refers to Charlie as a "charming demon belle". This playful dandyish exterior, however, obscures a much darker side to him - one with high levels of self-importance - and he will not hesitate to use physical violence when others don't act in line with his very particular values or expectations. Alastor is described as a man of duality. He values good manners, affability and intelligence very highly in others, and will actively look down on those who do not meet his standards, however he will often play fast and loose with these arbitrary rules in regards to himself and his own conduct. His smiling is also a show of power and dominance, and miserable people are seen by him as weak.[23] Alastor has an odd sense of morality, which is described as "not normal",[24] and has been noted to be quite sadistic, even cannibalistic, devouring lesser demons or those that have incurred his anger. Despite this, he keeps close friends with the other cannibals of Hell, including the denizens at the Cannibal Colony. He is noted to be narcissistic, not seeing many people quite up to his level. However, that does not make him reckless. Despite being extremely powerful, Alastor is aware that there are other demons and entities that rival him in terms of power, such as other Overlords. For this reason, he is wary around such demons, as they could potentially harm him if he is not careful.[25] Despite everything, Alastor does genuinely seem to want to help Charlie run the Happy Hotel, albeit for his own amusement and hopes for its failure over siding with her idealism. Alastor also dismisses the idea that redemption is possible as laughable, nevertheless, he fulfills his role as patron as promised, providing the hotel with staff, and protecting Charlie and her business from outside threats. He views the whole endeavor as a fun distraction from his decades of boredom.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

----

(WIKI HERE)

(COMIC HERE)

**Sources on Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure are below. This list is subject to change over time to be pruned/updated.**

WEBPAGES/DISCUSSIONS:

"Is voodoo a closed practice?" Answered by a Priest of West African Vodou (Quora)

"Is voodoo a closed practice? If so, who is it open to?" Answered by a Haitian Vodou Initiated Practitioner (Reddit)

"Is hoodoo/voodoo closed?" General discussion (Reddit)

"Who can/can't practise hoodoo/voodoo ?" General discussion (Reddit)

"A Visual Guide to Vèvè: Vodou Symbols and Cosmograms" (VisitHaiti.com)

DIGITAL MEDIA:

Yronwode, Catherine. Hoodoo in Theory and Practice, An Introduction to African-American Rootwork. 2019(?) / (Lucky Mojo Curio Co.)

[Incomplete/Potentially Outdated Bibliography for the Above] via Wayback Machine

Louisiana Voodoo (Wikipedia)

Hoodoo [Spirituality] (Wikipedia)

African Disaspora Religions (Wikipedia)

Kennon, Alexandra. A Conversation with a High Priest of Vodou. 2021 (Country Roads Magazine)

Crone, Moira. Lives of Voodoo in New Orleans. 2012 (Country Roads Magazine)

Lee, Nadia. The Appropriation of Magic: How White People Demonised Voodoo. 2020. (Brizo Magazine)

https://visithaiti.com/haiti-up-close/haitian-vodou-gods-goddesses/

https://visithaiti.com/haiti-up-close/haitian-vodou-revealed/

PRINTED MEDIA:

Seven books on Haitian Vodou (VisitHaiti.com)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872865746/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0872865746&linkCode=as2&tag=mawozo03-20&linkId=5b0b9aae316802e47b757f6928c4c121

WARNINGS: RPing with this character may involve sensitive topics such as various world religions/religious beliefs, occultism, murder, s*rial murder, as well as topics on mental illness/depression/PTSD, sexuality/sexual themes, drug addiction/substance abuse, war/violence/gore/injuries, cannibalism.

By liking this post and indicating your interest to engage in RP with this character, you are accepting the above warnings and have read the rules posted here on this blog.

#.// a formal feeling comes (character pages)#.// turn on--tune in--drop dead (alastor)

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boxeboxer · 2 years ago

Text

CASSANDRA MALLORY

Origin: asalee

Status: posthuman, piloting a standard Class-1D civilian 2028 CHOSHI-II vessel (modern Delhi variant) distributed by OURO

Nationality/Ethnicity: British

Age: 86 (date of birth 5/30/1956, transferred in 2019) (posthuman vessel reflects how she wishes to appear, and is not reflective of her actual age)

Occupation: head of R&D at OURO

About:

Cassandra Mallory is the daughter of Orville Mallory and heir to the Mallory estate as its oldest and last surviving member. She trained directly under her father and took over his research after his death.

While growing up, Cassandra was an accomplished athlete. She particularly had an affinity for archery and shooting sports, where she excelled the most. This would follow her well into adulthood—she owns an expansive weapon collection consisting of rifles, swords, blades, throwing knives, and more. After her father's violent death, she carries a revolver on her person at all times.

Pre-transfer, Cassandra was ambitious and often hotheaded in her endeavors. Her high-energy charisma served as a disguise for her constant need to compete with others, always needing to be the most accomplished person in the room. This made her isolated from her peers, but her tenacity would prove fruitful to her academic career. Post-transfer, Cassandra's charisma has been replaced with emotional distance. Though her ambition is still a strong element of her character, she has become ruthless in order to get what she wants.

Background:

Cassandra, born into immense wealth, lived an extravagant childhood. She was given the highest possible education, and eventually studied neuroscience and psychology at university. She also began working with her father around this time.

In 1981, Mia kills Orville, leaving Cassandra to take his place. She is enraged by his death and largely takes it out on Mia, especially after learning that they are half-siblings. Despite her grief, however, she relishes in the newfound power granted to her by inheriting his expansive estate.

Now as her guardian, Cassandra mentors Mia in both academics and her athletic hobbies. Her ultimate goal is to have Mia reach her full potential as a human weapon, but grows to realize that she is too mentally and physically fragile to meet her expectations. When attempts to create another bicephalic chimera as her father once did fail, she assigns Mia to study new ways to create conjugates. Mia's cloning research shows promise, and she names the project after herself (Mallory clone).

Cassandra facilitates the acquisition of EBID, focusing on individuals she deems "unlikely to be missed," or those whose disappearance/disfigurement would not draw large social attention. One of these subjects was Yushfa Saeed, an elderly woman with brain cancer. She however dies during the EBID harvesting procedure. In her place, Cassandra offers her son Oman to undergo the same surgery with a cash payout.

When a Mallory clone is finally set to be created, Cassandra makes Mia choose one of the 19 procured EBID samples. The experiment is a success, and when Samantha is born, Cassandra wishes to raise her as her own daughter. However Sam is largely refuses to cooperate with any of the scientists besides Mia, which irritates her.

When Sam is six months old, Oman breaks into the lab as a result of her communicating with him clairvoyantly. Cassandra finds him and shoots him, but misses his heart, allowing him, Mia and Sam to escape. Though she uses all her resources to find them, she is ultimately unsuccessful.

With Mia's Mallory clone being a failure, she instead searches for another bicephalic chimera to continue where she left off. She discovers Mona Nibhanupudi, who claims he was a fused twin. With Cassandra's help, they search for his missing twin.

In 2019, Cassandra is murdered. Her throat is cut by one of her own blades, and her heart stops for several minutes before she was found and revived. When she regained a pulse, her consciousness was transferred to save her life. Due to the lack of oxygen to her brain, she has amnesia and drastic changes to her personality after the transfer. Most notably, she is unable to remember who murdered her.

#ouro #character #i'm not rewriting the plot verbatim so you just get cliff notes #cassandra #sandra

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ipsen · 2 years ago

Text

Blank Canvas, Chapter 2

Read on AO3 or down below.

Summary: A peek into a mysterious past, and Kaneki’s sketch in a park.

Word Count: 4641

Chapter 1 Chapter 3 Master Post

“A human heart in a cage. However, the cage is too small for the heart, and the bars pierce through it, making it bleed.”

— Alt text of Haise Sasaki’s first posted work

———

“Kuzen.”

“I know, Noroi.”

“She’s less than half your age.”

“I love her.”

“That isn’t what I’m saying! You’re taking advantage of her, and now you’re telling me she’s—”

“We’ll make it work, old friend.”

“Don’t you dare pull that card on me. I can’t believe you! What do you know about this girl?”

“Well, we met at a coffee shop, and we get along well.”

“… Is that it?”

“Yes, I believe that’s all. We enjoy each other’s company.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

—

“Kuzen.”

“Noroi, listen, I…”

“She was twenty-two. Barely an adult!”

“I-I know, but listen, I—”

“And now she’s gone?! What happened?!”

“There were complications with the birth. She had always been sickly, but neither of us imagined—”

“Neither of you predicted this? Really?”

“She wanted to go through with it, Noroi. It wasn’t my place to stop her.”

“She was your wife; you had every place to stop her!”

“I… Can we not do this? I need to know if you can take care of the child. Matasaka might be able to, but…”

“What do you mean, ‘the child’—?! This isn’t a possession, Kuzen. You can’t seriously be considering handing a baby off to me. Not when you're needed most!”

“I just can’t bear the thought of the Garden getting their hands on this one too.”

“And so you brought the child here?! Kuzen, this place is—“

“You don’t know what I’ve seen there! Those kids are… empty. I don’t want one of Ukina’s to become like that. I want one of us to live a life of joy and freedom, and I can’t be the one to do it.”

“Kuzen—“

“Please, Noroi. I can’t do this. It has to be someone else.”

“…”

“Please.”

“… What is the child’s name?”

“Oh, thank you, Noroi, thank you so—”

“Child. Name. Now.”

“Um, yes. Yes, of course. The child’s name is—”

———

“Sen Takatsuki?!” Hide exclaimed, grasping fistfuls of his hair. “She showed up?! Shit, Kaneki, I really tossed you to the wolves, didn’t I?! I’m so sorry!”

“H-Hide, it’s fine, really!” Kaneki tried his best to sound reassuring. “She was actually really pleasant to be around.”

It had been a few hours since the interview, and Hide had demanded Kaneki meet him and Touka at Anteiku for a status report. As for Kaneki himself, he was still reeling from the interview. Sen Takatsuki called his work incredible. Called him skilled. Not only that, but she was a longtime fan of Haise!! Was there really a part of him that caught her attention? Was there really some aspect of him that wasn’t a—

“Still! If I’d known, I’d’ve come with!” Hide threw his head back and groaned. “Sorry again, man.”

One side of Kaneki— the greedy, guilty side— was glad Hide didn’t come. Spending time alone with Ms. Takatsuki was nice, and it worked out for the better, anyway. He doubted Shiono would give him a job in the same situation.

Ms. Takatsuki herself was… different. Sitting in front of the one whose work resonated with his pain, he felt a little less alone. Not that Hide or Touka weren’t great company. He wouldn’t dare say that, even under torture. But their approach to life wasn’t like his, and he often felt himself left behind in their strides toward the future.

With Ms. Takatsuki, he felt like he could keep pace. When she had admired the works in his portfolio with great care, her friendly exterior had melted away, replaced with something deeper, something lonelier. Something familiar.

Alright, stop projecting on someone you barely know, creep. Maggot.

Touka, on break and sitting in a third chair, glanced at him. “So… did you get the job?”

He blinked, then scratched his head. “I-I think so?”

“What’s that mean?” She raised a brow. “You did or you didn’t, right?”

“Well, she gave me her card, and we’re supposed to meet again next Friday…” He fished it out to show her and Hide. “Then after, she said we’d… ‘iron out the hiring process’, I think?”

Hide examined the card, then the address scrawled on the back. “I can’t read this.”

“Huh?” Kaneki took the card back. “But it’s clear as day!”

Touka plucked it from between his fingers and checked it. “Oh, the Kazuichi Public Park, in the 11th ward,” she said matter-of-factly.

Hide gaped at her. “What the fuck, Touka? How can you read that?!”

“Doctor-in-training, remember?” She grinned at him cheekily as she gave Kaneki the card back.

“And you, Kaneki? What’s your secret?”

Kaneki scratched his chin. “A-Artist’s eye…” he muttered.

He couldn’t say out loud that he was once obsessed with the few handwritten things Ms. Takatsuki had put out, to the point he made a cheat sheet of her hiragana, katakana, and kanji, then memorized them. He made sure to shred the evidence when he realized just how messed up that was.

“Unbelievable. Unbelievable!” Hide stood up and made a few paces around the table. “I’m the one who travels the world here! And speaks six languages!”

Wait, it was six?!

Before Kaneki’s mind could unravel that thread, however, Hide’s phone buzzed. “Speaking of—” He checked it, then groaned. “Ah, shit, something came up. Chie’s gonna have my head for this one. Sorry guys, gotta go! ‘Grats on the job, Kaneki! Proud of you, man! Dinner’s on me tonight!”

Dinner was always on him, though. Honestly, if they wanted to celebrate that bad, Kaneki figured he should be the one paying, as both penance for years of unpaid meals and celebration of the change of their dynamic.

But Hide just ruffled Kaneki’s hair and grinned. “You won’t fuck this up, promise!”

He hoped gold struck twice.

Touka sighed as Hide gave her a thumbs up and jogged out the door. “How does he have more energy than both of us?” she wondered aloud.

“That’s Hide,” Kaneki replied, laughing. “He siphons ours away for his own nefarious means.”

“I believe that.” She leaned back in her chair to stretch. “Anyway, you got something to wear to the park?”

What kind of question was that? “Yes…?”

“Oh, you’re not picking up on it.” She leaned forth and put her palms on the table, taking up as much of his vision as possible. Why did both of his friends do that? “This park meeting thing is the second part of the interview, if you ask me; Takatsuki’s still testing you.”

Kaneki swallowed the information. It was sound logic. If the hiring process was after the park, that could mean that the park was to see if they worked well together. So dressing up couldn’t hurt. The only problem, really, was the one who’d be dressing up.

“Oh, you don’t have anything.” Touka took out her phone and typed something.

There was a beat of silence, and he thumbed his sorely-needed cup of coffee.

“Alright,” she said, standing up. “I’ve got the clear from Kaya. Let’s go.”

That wasn’t good. Kaya never let anyone end their shift early. What had Touka texted her?

“Go where…?” he asked cautiously, subconsciously leaning away from her.

No response. She just grabbed his jacket sleeve and dragged him out of the shop.

———

“T-Touka…”

“Shhh, shut up.”

“I can do it myself—”

“I said shut up!”

“Wait— Ow!”

“Shit. Sorry.”

Sweet release came in the form of Touka’s gel-covered fingers untangling themselves from Kaneki’s hair. Her taste in clothing was actually fine— better than his, he readily admitted— but when it came to hair in any way, Kaneki preferred she stayed out of the room. Especially after the incident with Ayato. He shuddered at the memory.

“I-I think my hair’s fine,” he said, ruffling it back to its original fluffy shape.

Touka puffed out her cheeks in disappointment. “If you say so.”

He did, but he’d never be so insistent.

In the small room on Anteiku’s second floor, there was a full body mirror. He looked at himself, brow furrowed. His usual taste for crew neck T shirts was enhanced with an unbuttoned collar shirt worn like a vest, while in place of his sweatpants were a pair of wide khaki capris that, fortunately, did not hug his legs.

“I’m honestly surprised at how basic your clothes are,” Touka commented. “And, if it were up to me, I’d start from scratch. But you’re gonna be working with Ms. Takatsuki a lot, so she’s gonna have to put up with what you have.”

“Um, thank you…?” Kaneki said, unsure if those were the right words. “Oh, Touka, how much do I owe you for the clothes?”

She palmed her face, thought for a bit, then placed both hands on either of his shoulders. Her exposed azure eye looked deep into his silver ones. “Pay me with a job.”

“What?”

“Get the job. That’s your payment.”

“Touka, I’m serious—”

“I’m serious too!” She dropped her hands to place them on her hips. “I don’t know if you realize it, but you’re not a half-bad guy, Kaneki. And if Takatsuki doesn’t see that, it’s her loss, not yours.”

But… the thought of Ms. Takatsuki publishing her next work with an artist that wasn’t him, after everything she’d said about his work, only created dread inside of him. At the same time, though, he wasn’t worthy of putting his name next to hers.

“Hey, stop that.” Touka punched him lightly in the chest, and her tone turned soft. “Worthy or not, she chose to meet you again. Make something of it. Okay?”

The thing about Touka was that Kaneki could never not believe her. Combine that with how she was always pushing him forward when he got stuck— He could only nod and accept her encouragement. It was a meek nod, but it was a nod nonetheless.

“Okay,” he said. “I… I’ve got this.”

———

Kaneki’s grip on his satchel, which held his sketchbook, his pencils, and his (unsigned) copy of Monochrome Rainbow, was iron.

He had this. Right?

The thought of failure tightened his grip around the poor strap.

Right.

That said, there was an immediate problem. The park— Kazuichi Public Park— was big. Not only that, it was crowded.

Families from all over Tokyo, maybe even all over Japan, gathered under the late spring sun, hoping to catch those last few precious moments of mid-May sun before June and summer forced everyone indoors. Children frolicked in the grass, the playground, and even the trees, while others relaxed on homemade picnic blankets with baskets of the day’s meals.

He wondered if Ms. Takatsuki was already here; he wondered if he could even find her if she was. Where would she be, if so? He scanned the park, stupidly believing he could pick out someone smaller than him with green hair in this green park full of green trees and green grass. Idiot.

At least there was a lake, dotted with considerably less people than the rest of the park. Maybe he could start there? It was a landmark that stood out from the rest.

Fortunately, before he made the march down there, his phone buzzed.

From: Ms. Takatsuki turn around :P

He did so immediately, looking for the one to save him from his predicament. And, in the distance, far from prying eyes and waving and jumping, was Ms. Takatsuki. She was on time, like she promised.

Kaneki tried his best not to sprint over to escape the crowd and meet up with her, but there was urgency in his stride as he made his way up the hill to the tree where she was.

“Hey, Haise!” she called. “Over here!”

Haise. It was such a strange thing being called that, but at the same time, the name of his alternate persona was like a mask, and in a way, he was heading to a secret rendezvous. It was… rather exciting, when he put it like that.

As he got closer to the tree, he made out the details of Ms. Takatsuki’s outfit, and he was infinitely more grateful to Touka for taking him shopping. Ms. Takatsuki had haphazardly braided her hair this time, and she was wearing a thin burgundy batwing shirt with a high collar, a long cream skirt with a floral pattern, and— sneakers. Faded white sneakers, to be specific: the kind that were weathered in the sense that they had been worn plenty of times before.

A gust of wind blew her skirt against her legs, and he caught the slightest hint of black tights, and his mind wandered upward to—

Stop, stop, stop. Focus. Don’t be weird.

Kaneki cleared his throat and approached with an attempt at a straightened back. “H-Hello, Ms. Takatsuki,” he said, waving.

“Hey!” Ms. Takatsuki waved back. “Sorry for making you climb; I figured you preferred more isolated spots.”

“I-I do,” he assured her. “Thank you…”

“Nice vest.” She reached out and felt the material between her fingers, making him go rigid. “Is it comfy?”

He nodded, his neck feeling all kinds of warm and scratchy. “My, um, my friend got it for me…”

“Well, said friend knows what you look good in. Send them my compliments.” She winked at him, making him flush completely.

“I-I will…” He fumbled with his satchel. “Um, you… You look good too, Ms. Takatsuki.”

She blinked, then she chuckled. “You’re too kind.”

The sound of her laugh put him at ease, even though he got the feeling it was just a courtesy. She took a few steps back, then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and before I forget: I’d like it if you just called me Sen. If we’re gonna work together, I’d like for us to be friends too.”

He dipped his head a little too quickly. “Alright, S-S—” Him, Ken Kaneki, on a first name basis with Sen Takatsuki? But it was what she wanted! “S…” She called him Haise anyway, so it was only fair, but… “Er, sorry…”

She sighed, and Kaneki’s heart sank. “Or at least drop the honorific. ‘Takatsuki’ is fine too.”

He cleared his throat, suffering the prickling heat in his neck. “Okay… Takatsuki.”

He’d always been horrible when it came to first names; Hide had been lucky because they were young, but it had taken Touka two years to get him to willingly and consistently call her by her name.

The corner of Takatsuki’s lip curled upward. “Ready now?”

He nodded again. “A-After you.”

With a shocking gentleness, she pulled on the shoulder of his vest to bring him to her side, then led him down the hill. She still smelled like hibiscus flowers, he noticed, and now that he was closer, he saw her lips reflect a bit of sunlight. Chapstick, maybe? He didn’t dare presume it to be lip gloss. Not for this. Not for him, if he were a bit more presumptuous and idiotic than he already was.

She chose a bench under a different tree, where it was easier to see what visitors of the park were up to. She slid into an empty spot, throwing an inviting smile his way. Holding on to his satchel for dear life, he sat so that there was enough space for a whole other person between them. He watched her stare at the empty space for a moment, then back at him. Had he done something wrong?

“Alright, Haise,” she said. “Have you ever gone people-watching?”

“Can’t say I have,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, don’t be!” she assured him. “You have a fantastic understanding of anatomy already, and you’re used to drawing people repeatedly, yes?”

Kaneki nodded, recalling his comics. “More or less.”

“We’re here to gather intel, so to speak.” Takatsuki gestured to the breadth of the park. “Study the people and places that catch your eye here, and sketch them! I’ll be doing the same with words. We’ll compare notes afterward. Sound good?”

He swallowed. This was his first assignment with her. He couldn’t mess up this early. This was his job, and no one else’s.

He nodded and took out his sketchbook.

To mirror him, Takatsuki took out a notepad and a pen. She wrote in pen? Direct and difficult to erase. It certainly spoke to her impact on the world, for as much as people— especially more traditional folk— spurned her work for its criticism of systems that they hardly interacted with, there were others who praised it for staining the world with the burden of knowledge. A pen was just the kind of thing to do that: like paper being crumpled, it was nigh impossible to erase the act.

While he was admiring the pen, she had already started writing. How. Before long, he would be left behind, then she’d be disappointed in him. Sen Takatsuki, who admired his work, would forever have her view of him tainted. He might never get a job in the one field he had remotely any knowledge in; her word against his was not a contest, but an everyday slaughter.

Kaneki, at that thought, scanned the park desperately for something worth drawing, anything. That couple on a picnic blanket, whiling away the hours talking about their feelings? Wait, was that Nishiki and Kimi? No, no, it couldn’t be. Even if it was, he shouldn’t draw them; closeness wasn’t his forte, and while he’d capture their poses, he couldn’t capture their feelings. He had to be able to capture the emotions of people, because that was the cornerstone of every single Takatsuki work: the minds and feelings of people, floating in the ocean that was the world.

Speaking of, she flipped a page in her notebook. Already?! Kaneki felt his socks grow damp with sweat. What was he even doing here? He couldn’t even draw a simple scene next to her without freezing up.

There had to be something for him to draw: if not people, then perhaps scenery? But what should he pick first?

The building? Takatsuki’s works often took place in urban settings: if he demonstrated early that he was used to sketching out backgrounds like that, he’d also demonstrate that he was the man for her job. Oh, but what if it was somewhere else? He didn’t know what this story was about, after all. It was her first foray into the graphic novel industry; that could also mean her first foray into an entirely new genre of story.

In that case, maybe the lake instead? Give her comfort in the sense that he was knowledgeable about natural scenes? There was a scene in Industrial, where the main character, dying of terminal disease, retreated into a forest to appreciate the last few days he had left. Perhaps another scene like that would be present in the coming novel?

He had to make an impression. He had to. This was the second half of the interview. It was his only shot. His only shot, yet he was afraid of the recoil. Come on, half-wit, stupid, dumb trash—

“Haise,” Takatsuki suddenly said, getting his attention. When he looked down, she had put her pen down, and was staring at him. “Why do you like to read?”

Kaneki furrowed his brow. “I’m sorry?”

“Why do you like to read?” she repeated. “You’re clearly well-read; I’ve drawn parallels between your art and certain works in my collection. But what made you get into books?”

“Oh, um…” He fiddled with his pencil while the grip on his sketchbook tightened. “Well, I…”

Should he tell her? The last person he’d told about himself was Rize, and now that person had cut themself out of his life without another word. He’d made her too sad, he told himself. It was the only explanation: Rize, despite their mutual love for books, was as free and fleeting as a bird. He was foolish to think he could make a nest, however fragile, for someone like that: someone always migrating to where the sun shone warmest, where roosts would only tie them down.

Takatsuki, after a beat of silence, glanced out at the park. “I’m sorry. I seem to have brought up bad memories for you.”

He jolted. “N-No, it’s okay, really! I’m just, uh, thinking about my answer—”

“Haise,” she interrupted, suddenly turning away from him. “It’s okay. I don’t want to learn if it hurts you to teach.”

She turned her attention back to her latest muse, scratching down notes on her third page and ending the conversation. Despite that, Kaneki watched her and waited for… something. For a moment, it felt like he caught a glimpse of something he wasn’t supposed to see. Something ugly. Something exciting.

And then he realized: he didn’t know much about Takatsuki. No one did, not really. Not her family life, not what inspired her to write, nothing. Besides her birthday, the fact that she resided in Tokyo, and her appearance, she was a total mystery to the larger public. The only window people got into her soul was her writing itself, and even that was a highly debated topic.

She was watching a child on one of the seesaw sets, their parent on the other end. The pair were smiling gleefully at each other, jumping up and down on the contraption as though it were the greatest thing in the world. Her writing hand had slowed down, and she simply… stared.

Kaneki’s pencil was moving before he realized it. The strokes for her hair were plentiful and messy, but when he moved to her face, he took greater care. The curve of her jaw and shape of her lips, the crystals— no, emeralds— that were her eyes, and then the slight sprinkle of freckles. As for the expression: longing. Though, perhaps a better word would be ‘envy’: slightly lowered brow, gently parted lips, and a vacant stare.

He may as well have been looking at a mirror.

Someone who, despite everything around them, was sad. Lonely. Two things that shouldn’t belong in their circumstances. Two things that tethered them to a past they wanted nothing more than to escape from. Two things that, despite their weight, had yet to be cast off.

“So how’d you do?” Takatsuki’s voice made Kaneki jump out of his own mind, and he clutched his sketchbook to his chest.

“O-Oh! Um, well, I—” he scratched wildly at his chin— “I-I’m sorry, Takatsuki, I, um, I must be having an off-day! Because I, uh, I didn’t find anything… inspiring…”

“Really?” He immediately knew she didn’t believe him. “Nothing at all?”

He strove to look anywhere except in her direction. He couldn’t exactly say that she was his inspiration, and his only one at that. A singular piece, versus how she had jotted down all sorts of notes garnered from all sorts of people at a speed he couldn’t even begin to match. Plus, the idea of her seeing his first sketch of her— which wasn’t even good— was mortifying. He’d be seen as a total creep and she might even get a restraining order—!

“Let me see,” Takatsuki said.

No. “W-What? But I—”

“I could hear your pencil moving, you know.” She held out her hand. “If it’s nothing, then I’ll be the judge of that.”

She had no idea what she was asking of Kaneki. It was like asking him to sign off on his own death. “I-It’s really nothing…! I barely got anything done.”

“Then let me see that!” she insisted, scooting closer oh no she was in his personal space. “Really, we’re supposed to work together; if you can’t show me your art now, how am I supposed to trust you when we actually start?”

Trust.

He screwed his eyes shut, and his grip loosened. “Can you… promise not to laugh?” he asked weakly.

“I can’t promise something I know nothing about,” she pointed out, which was true enough.

He sighed, and handed over the sketchbook. “I… Nothing else compared,” he mumbled.

Takatsuki took the sketchbook with both hands, flipping it over to the portrait of her Kaneki had drawn. Her eyes, like with his portfolio, softened as she took in his messy strokes made in a trance. He braced himself for the loss of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He could already see it: him, in his room, collapsed against the wall, sobbing and lamenting what could never be. Because he just couldn’t choose something else.

Takatsuki’s lips parted to say something, but nothing came out. They closed and pursed together. Her eyes shifted around the sketch again, narrowed in concentration. Her hands lifted the sketchbook higher and hid her face.

“Haise,” she spoke so evenly, it made him uncomfortable. “What… inspired you for this?”

Kaneki froze. This… might actually be his chance. It crossed his mind to play it off, to try and salvage whatever semblance of pride resided in him, but another thought tore that one in two: the thought to be honest.

Takatsuki valued honesty, he knew that much. The protagonists in her stories, the one thing about her that she bore to the world, were often clashing with liars for antagonists. The type of people who hid information and twisted it for their own selfish ends. If he was right about this, then Takatsuki was the same way: an individual who valued knowledge based around the truth.

He breathed out his dignity. “You did,” he answered with all the conviction he could muster. “You… inspire me, Takatsuki. You’ve always inspired me. When you released Dear Kafka, I… My mother had just passed away. I never knew my father, so I was taken in by some relatives, who… They didn’t really understand what I was going through. No one did…

“Growing up, I never knew my father. He died when I was young, but his books and his notes were still at the house, so I read them to, you know, feel closer to him. And it’s good that I did; without those books, I never would have read yours.”

At this point, Takatsuki had lowered Kaneki’s sketchbook slightly, her eyes peeking above the edge, and he didn’t notice the way they shone as he spoke.

“Dear Kafka taught me that I wasn’t alone in my grief, that there were other people, even people like you, who had lost things. Family, homes, loves— Something, or someone, took it away from us somehow, because the world is wrong and unfair. It was comforting.”

He twiddled his thumbs, letting his thoughts run free from his grasp and toward her.

“I want to work with you, Takatsuki,” he said. “I want this job, and I want to— No, I can create something you’d be proud of. That we’d both be proud of.” He scratched his cheek, finally glancing up at her. “I-If you’ll have me?”

It felt like an eternity waiting for her response, but Kaneki held firm. He kept Touka’s words in the back of his head for support: if Takatsuki didn’t accept him, then it was her, not him. Just like with Rize. He had value— to a degree. And he would always carry that value, no matter who or what spurned him for something else.

Takatsuki handed back his sketchbook. He took it gingerly with both hands. She took a few moments to put away her notebook and pen before facing him fully.

“I’m glad you think that,” she said finally, lifting the burden from his shoulders in a few short words. “Let’s create something amazing, Haise.”

She was wearing the same smile she’d worn when viewing his portfolio, and now it was directed at him.

It was everything he could have ever hoped for.

———

From: Touka cant stay at work emergency painter boy scored a date has nothing to wear

#tg #tokyo ghoul #fanfic #writing #blank canvas #etoken #ken kaneki #eto yoshimura #touka's in this one!

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frigid666 · 2 years ago

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is the “amber + johnny” tag on that post with the two shirts referring to amber heard and johnny depp ?

yup. amber was the substance of their relationship + johnny was an abusive vampire.

his clear jealousy of her as a rising star is not something ive seen many ppl discuss. a lot of the insults he directed at her career were something to the effect of "i can't wait till ur washed up + ugly/old + nobody cares abt u anymore." he clearly resented that his star was dwindling after having spent decades as a popular heart throb and was projecting his own deepseeded insecurities. he was past his prime already at that point, she was just getting started. for her, rum diaries was a starter movie, for him, it was a sign he would not longer be landing only A-list movies anymore. he anticipated a time where she would be irrelevant, which is really petty + mean, and definitely not something u say to someone u really love.

he tried to sabotage her career by isolating her and terrorizing her whenever she attended meetings with producers/her agent to try to wear her down until she gave up on her acting, and even complained to several ppl when she persisted.

he was insanely jealous whenever she starrred alongside actors younger + better looking than himself (like james franco), and frequently accused her of cheating on him with her co stars. there's been no credible evidence she was ever unfaithful to him, but the same can't be said about himself.

johnny depp seemed to believe that her increasing celebrity status would only open more doors to her and grant her access to potentially wealthier, more relevant men, whom she would replace him with. bc johnny depp only seems to value the women he courts for superficial reasons (i.e. youth, beauty; see: his dating pattern), this jealousy is likely the result of him once again projecting his own intentions onto amber.

#ask #reply #i stand with amber heard #mine

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mattved · 2 years ago

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Mega projects

Two years ago, I changed jobs.

The role of BI Analyst that I moved from was about 80% hard-skill based. I took on it while living with a disability resulting from post-operation difficulties and it served me well, providing me with great work-life balance at acceptable wage. Thanks to the arrangement, I was able to take care of myself, deal with my physical handicap, and finally undergo a couple of surgeries, which restored my somewhat healthy status.

Following that, I finally started properly recovering mentally. Soon, I had been able to take on many of my previous hobbies other than gaming. I bought a bicycle, which I'd driven the 20 odd kilometers to work couple of times and even managed to climb the way to the dorms where my then girlfriend (now wife) stayed. I also managed to recondition and sell off computer hardware that I had had piling up for a good while then. I started new electronics projects and fixed appliences for friends and family. I redesigned my blog, made a website, designed a brandbook for an acquaintance, and edited hours of videos. It was almost as if I were back at the uni with little extra money, which allowed me to invest into stuff.

The next obvious thing to happen for any purpose-driven individual was becoming more proactive at work. I suggested expansion and overall improvement of architecture behind the firm's BI suite, because it was clearly necessary - more on that in an earlier article. In spite of my being categorized under finance, there was no real budget for it and most of my proposals ended up in an abbyss. I even paid for Google Cloud resources to automate some of the data science stuff.

When a new CTO came in and things finally started to move, he was more keen on bringing his own people to do the important work. Myself, being previously involved in projects of country-level importance including system implementation and process redesign, even being offered a similar role in the Netherlands, albeit shortly before being diagnosed with cancer, I felt it was unfair not to give me the opportunity. So I left to seek it elsewhere.

I found it with a firm two miles from my birthplace, which was founded some two years after I was born. [Coincidence? Likely.] They (or rather we) are a used car retailer and at that point in time needed to replace an old CRM system. And that's what I was tasked with, all the way from technology and supplier tender to the launch and establishment of iterative development cycles. It was notch up from what I did some time before then, exactly the challenge I felt I needed.

Supported by the director of ICT with profound experience working with a global logistics giant, I completed the implementation in two years. The role encompassed project management, across business stakeholders and external suppliers, creating technical specifications, but most of all, doing a lot of the programming myself - especially the integrations. Along the way, I was joined by a teammate, whom I slowly handed over the responsibility of overseeing the operations and providing L1 - L2 support.

The final 9 months leading up to that were particularly difficult, though - finalizing every little bit to the continually adjusting requirements put forward by the key process owners. In the week before go-live, I worked double hours to finish everything and enable a "big bang" transition. D-Day 3 am, I had to abort due to not making the final data migration in time, meaning that the switch happened on Valentine's day.

The extended care period, over which we had to fix every single bug and reduce glitches took about two more months. And even though we managed to present the whole thing as complete, oversight and further expansion still take about two days of my week.

Over the duration of the CRM project, I was fully invested in it and still managed to deliver some extras, like helping out with reporting, integrating Windows users repository with chip-based attendance system from late '00s, working with some weird APIs, and administering two servers loaded with devops utilities.

Personal life did not suffer entirely. I dedicated most to spending time with my girlfriend, even managed to marry her during that period. There were some home-improvement activities that needed to be done and a small number of hurried vacations. But all my side-projects and hobbies ended up being on hold.

And that is literally the only thing I regret about the project and, to date, from the whole job change. Now is the time to try and pick up where I left off. Regaining the momentum in writing and video editing will be particularly difficult. My wife wants me to help out with her cosplay, so I have good motivation to return to being crafty again and refresh the experience from when I made a LARP crossbow and melee weapons. Furthering home-improvement is a big desire of mine but cost is an issue nowadays, with rent and utilities being entirely on my shoulders.

And then there are two things that I want to achieve that I failed at for way too long. Obtaining a driver's license (or possibly making my wife get it) and losing weight. The latter, I am working on with the handy calorie tracking app that dine4fit.com is, especially in my current region, and my Garmin watch. We will hopefully go swimming again soon as well. The former is a whole different story surrounded by plenty of trauma that still needs some recovery and obviously the sacrifice of cost and time to complete it.

I believe I have now strongly improved my work-life balance, by far not to what I was used to at the uni, but to a level that should let me do things that I want to do. And I wish to maintain it for a while. Maybe before embarking on yet another mega project, albeit with a much better starting point than the one I had in this case? Who knows.

And about the money, I believe a spike will come eventually, with transition to another employer, most likely. But the longer I am here, the more experience comes my way in doses much greater than those I would get elsewhere if I were to move just now. I'm 28 and if I lose weight and make sure to overcome obstacles of personal nature, I will do better. As for not being a millionaire by the age of 30, I should be able to handle that.

I almost died five years ago, gave up on pursuing my master's, lost the chance to take on the opportunity I had in the Netherlands, and now live where I'd wished, even managed temporarily, to move away from. I do well understand how scarce our time is, but I have to cut myself some slack when others don't (upcoming article "cancer perks"). For what it is, I still rock, don't I?!

#job #careers #hobbies #work life balance

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dankusner · 19 days ago

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London’s ‘Little America’ fades out

Grosvenor Square embassy area being recast for new era

LONDON — From the Eagle Bar on the top floor of the new Chancery Rosewood Hotel in Mayfair, the views across London are unobstructed, save for a gilded aluminum eagle, its wings spread wide, which crowns the midcentury modern building that once housed the U.S. Embassy to the United Kingdom.

The Americans pulled up stakes in 2018, relocating the embassy to a giant fortified cube on the south bank of the Thames.

They left behind the eagle, along with a collection of monuments and memorials in the adjoining Grosvenor Square — relics of what was once an American citadel in its ancestral land.

John Adams lived on the square. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had his wartime office there. A statue of Franklin Roosevelt gazes across the patchy lawn. Diplomats threw star-spangled election night parties, while hopeful travelers lined up outside for visas. During the Vietnam War, protesters clashed with police under the trees.

Now, Grosvenor Square is being recast for a post-American age. The Chancery plans to open to guests in early September, its Persian Gulf owners having converted the Brutalist landmark, designed by Eero Saarinen, into a Rosewood luxury hotel, with junior suites starting at nearly $1,900 a night.

The square, which lies in front of the hotel and has a different owner, is closing this week for a 13-month refurbishment.

The project will add lush plantings that celebrate biodiversity and link the 6-acre expanse, which has fallen into a state of neglect, more closely to its 18th-century Georgian roots.

The owner, Grosvenor Property, insists it is preserving the legacy of a place once known as “Little America.”

But Grosvenor Square attests to how much the world has changed, not least since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Start with the fact that the embassy was bought by investors from Qatar, whose government recently gave the Trump administration a Boeing 747 as a replacement for Air Force One.

“If you’re trying to attract people, if you’re trying make money, highlighting America’s prominence is not the way to do it,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a research group in London.

“It’s a good time to take a step back, to play it down a bit.”

Ties between Britain and the United States ebb and flow, she noted, in a “special relationship” that is neither as serene nor as harried as often portrayed.

A new global crisis could swiftly bring these old allies back together. But Trump’s acrimonious dealings with Europe have indisputably changed the mood.

“There is just a sense of pulling apart between the U.K. and the U.S.,” said Vinjamuri, who will leave London this month to become CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Trump, who has a soft spot for the royal family and other totems of imperial Britain, complained bitterly about the sale of the embassy.

He blamed it, wrongly, on his predecessor President Barack Obama.

The decision was made during the George W. Bush administration because of security concerns.

“We had the best site in all of London,” Trump said in 2018. The new location, in a redeveloped industrial section of London known as Nine Elms, was “lousy,” he said, spurning an invitation to a ribbon cutting. Indeed, since the days of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, Grosvenor Square has been synonymous with posh London.

The Grosvenor family laid it out in the 1720s to anchor the expansion of its property empire into West London.

With grand dimensions and an elegant oval shape, it attracted wealthy residents, who were given keys to their own private Eden in the capital. (It became a public park after World War II.)

It also attracted Americans, starting with Adams, who lived on the northeast corner from 1785 to 1788 as America’s first envoy to Britain.

After Eisenhower quartered himself there, it was nicknamed “Eisenhower Platz.” The Roosevelt statue was funded by donations from ordinary Britons as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for its aid in the war.

Nothing sealed the American connection like the opening of Saarinen’s chancery in 1960, a hulking nine-story building that was the first purpose-built embassy of any country in London. In its early days, it was reviled by some critics as a jarring intrusion on the genteel Georgian symmetry of the square.

“It had this sense of America being big and bold, and in a British context, a sense of ‘Wow, how American,’ ” said Matthew Barzun, the last U.S. ambassador to have an office in the building.

Barzun, who witnessed ups and downs in the trans-Atlantic relationship over Syria and Brexit, said the old embassy was designed to be “light and open and welcoming.” But after the terrorist bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, “we added more and more fences and bollards,” he said.

“You start out building things to keep people out,” Barzun said, “but you end up trapping people in.”

Converting a diplomatic fortress into a sleek, five-star hotel was a design and engineering test for Qatari Diar, a real estate company backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The Qataris brought in Rosewood, a luxury hotel chain that was started in Dallas and is now owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate.

“Creating warmth was the biggest challenge,” said Michael Bonsor, the hotel’s managing director, as he offered a sneak peek. “You have this juxtaposition of one of the most secure, fortified buildings in London, where Marines used to run around with machine guns. It wasn’t the most hospitable building in the world.”

Across the street, the proprietors of Grosvenor Square are similarly aware of the tug between past and present. While they will retain the FDR statue, as well as a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they plan to add serpentine paths and extensive plantings to soften the square’s stark appearance.

“The austere design, which was important during the Cold War period, has had its day,” said Cordula Zeidler, a heritage and design expert who advised Grosvenor Property. “Having more plantings is both a Georgian concept and something people want today.” James Raynor, the newly named CEO of Grosvenor, acknowledged the complicated political backdrop to the project. But he said, “I don’t think we should be altering it for the long term on the basis of short-term noise.”

In turbulent times, Raynor even holds out hope that the 18th-century square can still serve as a 21st-century bridge. “Will the park by itself change the diplomatic relationship between the countries?” he said. “I doubt it. But it will allow us to recognize what the two countries have done for each other.”

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