#this year should have only ONE extra day why it feels like we went throught 5 months already

[caemidraws]

The poses that Mars is constantly making while contemplating life are just so relatable to me (we literally have the same exact poses and expressions and I find that wonderful)

Ty for the ask anon I made you a bad collage

[yandere-romanticaa]

Not all that glitters is gold.

The library was filled with quiet chatter from various students as the gentle rays of sunlight illuminated the ancient books in front of you, giving them an even more mysterious aura. You were preparing yourself for an upcoming assigment and seeing that you were a new student and that you couldn't peform any sort of magic, headmaster Crowley made it his mission to help you adjust in this quirky academy. But to be frank, assigments were the last thing you wanted to do. The headmaster also often made you clean up various parts of the castle which was in itself very tiresome and if you add the stress from the classes you took, it was safe to say that all you really wanted was to nap and maybe have a snack. It also didn't help that Grimm bearly lifted a paw to help you too...

But still, even in a dire situation like this you did your absolute best to remain positive. There was no use in panicking. Tapping your fingers against the wodden table, you looked at the window and was met with your own complexion and only then did you realize just how messy you were. You hair was messy and all over the place, your clothes were slightly filthy and your face had seen better days. You sighed as you retuned your gaze back to your books, waiting for your so called partner to show up. Headmaster Crowley assigned you a partner to work with for the next few weeks and you figured that he was going to be at least a year ahead of you. A part of you was overjoyed by the news since you really could use the extra help. The other part though couldn't help but to feel slightly nervous as you had no clue just who in the world he could be. Headmaster Crowley said that he was a competent and brilliant student and that you shouldn't have too much trouble with him.

As if on cue, the large wooden doors to the library were open and the distinct sound of shoes clicking against the tile floor could be heard as at least half of the students there stopped with their activites to marvel at the one who entered.

Vil Schoenheit.

You heard about him before, he was a well known figure in not just Night Raven but in the entire Twisted Wonderland. He was known for his breathtaking beauty and intelligence and the entire student body couldn't help but admire him. Head tilted up proudly, he sauntered towards your table and before you knew it he was standing right in front of you. You finally got a good look at him as you realized just how utterly flawless he was.

"No need to stare dear, beauty isn't something so contagious."

You couldn't help but to blush a little by his statement as you slightly pouted and looked down, too embarrassed to look him in the eye.

"Before we even beging doing anything else may I ask, why do you look like that? When was the last time you took a bath, slept properly, hm?"

...Not even five minutes had past and this guy was already getting on your nerves. Your confidence grew back a little as you looked up at him, (e/c) eyed slightly narrowed in annoyance. His purple ones stared right back at you, his own distaste being put on display.

"Well? Aren't you going to answer me?"

You didn't have the patience for this.

He let out a sigh, closing his eyes in the process as he messaged his temples to calm himself down. He wordlessly sat in front of you, crossing his arms. Deep violet orbs stared back in to your own as neither one of you was willing to break eye contact. The air around you seemed to thicked as the perfume he wore started to invade your nostrils, the slightly flowery scent only causing you to furrow your brows even more. You two stayed like that for a few minutes, just studying each other in this thick silence. A few students who passed your table were weirded out by your behaviour but you paid no mind to them, and he seemed to be doing so as well. It felt like an eternity had passed until you finally decided to break the silence:

"Are we going to start working or what? We don't have all day."

"No, no we do not. But I absolutely refuse to work with someone who looks as filthy as you. At least take a shower!"

You couldn't help but to smirk a little knowing that you were getting to him. Being dirty was bothering you as well but he was just blowing this entire thing out of proportion.

"Don't you know that if you want to be the best you must look your best?!"

His teeth were gritted as his deep gaze seem to shot daggers in to your very soul but oddly enough he didn't intimidate you. A sudden wave of confidence washed over you as you found your voice once more, pure annoyance and determination lacing your voice.

"Vil, have you ever heard of the phrase "Not all that glitters is gold"? Looking good is not the be all and end all."

Your words stung the blond haired male as he continued to glare at you but no words came out of his mouth.

You two continued to bicker like this for the rest of the afternoon until the sun finally came down. The warm orange glow casted a shadown upon yours and Vil's table, only separating the two of you even more. You bearly got anything done that day and just before you could turn to leave, Vil's voice stopped you.

"Be back here tomorrow at the same time, and don't be late. Understood?"

You slammed the door shut, not giving him an answer.

♡♡♡

"Not all that glitters is gold."

Your words ran through Vil's head as he angrily paced around his room, checking his reflection every now and then. He couldn't believe that headmaster Crowley had partnered him up with someone like that, it was just disgraceful! His blood was boiling and it felt as though it was going to burst from the raw and sheer anger he was feeling at that moment. What made him even more mad was that he was still thinking about you. Why the Hell was he doing that?! He has better things to do anyway...!

♡♡♡

Hours turned in to days, and days turned in to weeks and you just could not seem to understand Vil. It bothered you greatly by just how arrogant he acted at times and his harshness towards you only made you dislike him even more. It also didn't help that he had such a strong presence in Night Raven so no matter where you went with Vil someone was bound to show up.

It was annoying.

Vil on the other hand pretty much never left your side and would pester you about literally everything you did. Your hair was too messy, that top didn't go with those pants, your back wasn't straight enough, your handwriting was poor, you were carrying the wrong book, you couldn't use any magic. It was getting to you, it honestly was. Just when you thought you could maybe get some time alone and gather your thoughts, Vil demanded that you eat lunch with him in order to keep and eye on you. He was driving you insane but it had become common for the two of you to fight, so much so that as a joke Rook even made a schedule. One Saturday morning though, Vil woke up in a rather bitter mood which was quite unusal for him. He did his usual morning routine, did his hair and make up, got dressed and took his books. Just as he was about to leave, the reality of the situation hit him like a truck.

It was Saturday.

You two didn't have to study together.

That thought should have brought him piece of mind but oddly enough, it didn't. His heartbeat quickened as a light sheen of sweat started to form on his forehead.

Why was he feeling like this?! He should be glad that he was no longer in your presence...! But he couldn't deny that at times, you were quite entertaining. Even if you were pretty much useless when it came to magic you were good with your words and just had this sort of charm that drew people in from time to time. When you bothered to get dressed nicely though, dare he say you looked absolutely stunning...

...What the Hell was wrong with him?!

♡♡♡

Exiting the Heartslabyul dorm, you continued to laugh as Grim, Deuce and Ace walked by your side, Grim pouting while the other two could not contain their laughter.

"You stupid raccoon, you burned that cake to a crisp! You should have seen Riddle's face, he was soooo pissed~!"

"How many times do I have to tell you explosion head, I'm not a raccoon!"

Vil was annoyed by the noise the three of you were causing but just when he was ready to give you all a piece of his mind, he saw you, smiling and laughing your heart out. He'd never seen you in such a cheery state, the closest thing he'd ever gotten from you that could resemble a smile but even then it was always a teasing one, meant to drive him up the wall. He soundlessly watched your little group up from the staircase, millions of diffirent thoughts running throught his troubled mind. You were so oblivious, weren't you? Did you really fail to notice just how much attention you were getting by simply smiling?

Just as about you were going to leave the main hallway, you stopped dead in your tracks an odd sense of fear filling your stomach. Your gut was screaming at you that something was wrong, that someone was watching you and your every move and whoever that someone was, they were damning your very soul to the deepest parts of Hell. You finally got the bright idea to look up and once you did, nothing could prepare you for the subtle but cold terror that was creeping upon you. Up the staircase stood Vil in all his glory, but his face was stern, his red lips pressed in a thin line but it were his eyes that unsettled you the most. You've never seen so much raw hatred directed towards someone and for the first time in a while, you were left speechless. You had no smartass comebacks this time, no sassy or cute jokes to fire back at the vain student. All you could do was stare and stay still in your place and just pray for him to just move, even if it was just his pinkie finger.

"Uh, hello, Earth to (y/n)?! You still with us??"

You were brought back down to Earth by your friends touch on your shoulder. The hand belonged to Deuce and when his hand came in to contact with your shoulder, Vil's expression hardened even more. You laughed nervously, just trying to brush of Vil and you continued to walk with your friends.

So that's how we're going to play, hm?

♡♡♡

No amount of preparation could prepare you for the horrors that awaited you on Monday morning. You were awoken by Rook who was given direct orders from Vil to bring you to the Pomfiore dormitory. Apparently, Vil made a little deal with the headmaster, and the headmaster approved. According to the arrangements, you could now sleep in the Pomfiore dormitory and you were to accompany Vil to all of his classes in order for you to better grasp certain subjects. The scariest part of everything though wasn't just this sudden change, but Vil's attitude towards you. If you two were in a crowd he was very nice to you, downright sweet even. In private though, his behavior would change and he would become a lot more controling and demanding. You could no longer be alone, it was a rule to be by Vil's side 24/7 and if you tried to break it Rook would just appear out of nowhere and deliver you to Vil.

His presence became overbearing as he demanded to be the one to dress you, wash your hair, do literally everything for you. You couldn't tell what was going on with him but something was surely wrong. His behaviour would shift so unexpectedly that you were never quite prepared for it. If you behaved well and did what he told you, Vil would spoil you with more undivided attention and gifts that most likely cost a fortune and then some. Some students even began to ship the two of you, cooing at Night Raven's "power couple". A lot of people were enchanted by the tale of the beauty Vil Schoenheit falling for a non magic user, but that person simply must be something special in order to catch his watchful eye.

You on the other hand felt like you could no longer breathe. Looking at your own reflection in the mirror, you bearly paid attention to the stunning purple dress that perfectly hugged your curves and the exquisite make up that Vil himself put on you.

You were a perfect doll, just like how Vil wanted you to be. He was going to break you, he was going to teach you a lesson about being oh so careless with his poor heart. And then he was going to mold you back together, in to the perfect little darling, worthy of being by his side.

♡♡♡

Tagging @poisonepel because I would love to hear your opinion on this! You are a Vil Schoenheit connoisseur, please, do tell if you think he'd be like this? And sorry if this was bad, I'm new for writing Vil!

[suranflower]

Tips for starting college: my back to school post

I said college, but this is also useful for anyone studying at the moment.

It is possible I am not the most indicated to do this kind of post since I am a very messy person myself, but after studying all my life, I know what works and what doesn't. With this post, I hope I can help you a little if you feel clueless as where to start with your study, and also encourage myself to follow these things I know first hand are useful and very helpful. If with my experience I can give you just a clue as where to start, I’ll be grateful. So here we go!

Get yourself an agenda

An agenda is basic. I personally buy one literally every year and only use it for about two months and then forget about it, but the truth is that they are useful and should be used all throughout the academic year. I recommend a physical agenda/diary to note down everything you have to do. A calendar is, in my opinion, just as useful or even more.

You may use an app for this as well! I personally have tried about three different ones. Right now, I have School Planner installed and it works good. Agendas and apps like this are great since they allow you to have everything —dates, teacher's names, contacts, and to do lists— in one place. I must add that many of the best organized and most efficient students I know use Google Calendar, which you can easily access in any device using your account. The virtue of non-physical agendas and calendars is that you can take them everywhere and get notifications as reminders, but you might prefer the traditional way, which allows you yo personalize the planning even more. Both ways are good and I highly recommend using a combination.

Some of my friends have also used other methods such as bullet journals but from what they told me, the experience was not the greatest and went back to more traditional planning methods. My advice is you try it all and see what suits you best.

The most important thing is you don't stop using them and rely on your friends telling you deadlines and last minute all-nighters and working. Trust me, you'll miss many of the deadlines and only get more stressed; trust me I spent a whole semester like this and the results were pretty terrible psychologically wise. Just be patient and constant!

Get an all-purpose little notebook

Now, this is a tip I don't see often, but it is something I think many students do and has proven to be useful, at least in my experience. A small, all-purpose notebook you can take with you anywhere will allow you to put all information needed in a certain moment in one place. You ran out of paper, your computer won't work, you forgot your agenda, need to prepare a presentation or your professor is saying something that doesn't quite fit the rest of the notes? You can use this all purpose notebook. Because it's small, you can take it anywhere with you. It allows you to put all these things together and it's always easier to search inside one notebook that try to look into all your lose papers or something similar. It's all in one place. This probably won't work for writing all your notes or doing all your study there, but it can be very useful for punctual things.

Note taking

You can use almost anything for note taking in class. Some people use notebooks, which I don't recommend since there will be days where you will need to take many notebooks with you, as well as books and other things so it will be heavy and bad for your back.

Some other people use file cabinets, which allows you to have the right amount of papers needed for each subject's notes so you won't carry extra weight. If you do this —which I did all six years of high-school— I highly recommend you putting numbers in the pages. And use separators for each subject. While I think pretty much everyone uses separators, not many people number the pages, which —believe me— will result in mixing papers, or losing them. If you give your notes to a friend, it is easier to relocate the pages later. I know this is very basic but I can't stop talking about how important this is. You'd be surprised how many messy notes, lost pages and stuff I have seen throughout these years that could be so easily avoided with just numbering the pages.

These days, I use my laptop (same as this can apply for tablets) for taking notes in class because a) I can type way faster than I can write b) having my notes written in my computer is more useful for later corrections and understanding and all you need to do to get them on paper is print them. I used to use OpenOffice Writer for taking my notes, using one archive per subject. What I liked the most about it was how easy it was to convert to PDF, the options for reducing the borders and the fact that it is a free software. It rarely crashed though I'll admit it did more than Microsoft Office Word, which I used too occasionally.

However, what I have been using since last semester is OneNote, and I couldn't be any happier. It comes with the Microsoft Office pack —which by the way, is FREE for students, you only need to check the conditions for your country and your college web site will probably have a link to it— but you can access it from the web too, and they have a free app (both for Android and iPhone). I believe the OneNote software alone is free to download in the official site. With this program you can have all your notes in sync and check them and edit them from any device, while your notes will be safe in an online storage, as well as in your computer. It is very easy to use and has many interesting features that writers don't have, such as voice recording, automatically adding date and time, easy way of writing formulas, archive linking, free writing, sharing and much more. I think this one is the best yet and throught the checklists you can even turn it into an agenda. Aditional tip: add the date to all your notes. I never did it until last year, and trust me when I say it's one of the best things I've done. When starting to write down, just add "Monday 26th September" and life becomes easier.

When note-taking: don't write down everything the teacher says. It is useless and will get tiring. It's more important you follow the thread of the class, understand what they are talking about and note only the most important things or the answer to the doubts you had. You can find everything they say on books, don't stress trying to copy everything. I know it can be hard to distinguish between the most important things, but it is essential you learn it in order to study better. Also, you don’t need to re-write everything. It takes way too much time and remember that functionality is more important than aesthetic. Therefore, following a wel-known tip, I sugest making summaries and schemes or writing down in a neaty way the most important stuff, instead of rewriting everything. Finally, you don’t need to change your handwriting. It is fine, just try to keep it clean and clear, but your handwriting is unique and you shouldn’t changing it for the sake of following the studyblr aesthetic or something like that. Because it says a lot about you, just try keeping your handwriting as clear and clean as possible, as I said before.

Just like with note taking, not everything you read is equally important. Many teachers won't admit it, but with some texts you can do a superficial reading and understand the general concept while others require deep reading. This means a 30 page text can take you 30 minutes to read in some occasions, but a same length text can take you hours. It is your work to learn when you have to do a deep reading and when not to. This isn't easy neither and I can't really give you tips about it. Another thing you should do is taking notes from these readings: underline and write down important things, use sticky notes, etc. In my experience, the best thing when doing a deep writing is highlighting when girst-reading and oing your notes-to-self, and then making a summary with the most important things and ideas. The Cornell method is wonderful for this and I have always got good results using it —comprehension wise, but also with grades. In my major we have to read so much, and the quality of the writings, translatios or just the content isn’t always the same. Keep that in mind.

Get a color code when studying

The truth is I don’t really do this myself. Instead of having a fixed color-code for highlightig and writing, I use the colors that are disponible in the moment. It works for me, but the truth is that having the same color-code always is more useful. Still I must add that I usually use yellow highlighter for less important things and another color, like blue, green or pink for the most important things. For keywords, I usually use the “most important thing” color and then circle or underline the word with my pen. When writing, I usually use bright colors for the titles, black for keywords, red for subtitles and bullet points and  blue for everything else. As I said, none of this is fixed and depends on the material I can use at the moment. Just create something that works for you ^.^

Optimize your time but also rest

I am working on this myself, I know it’s hard. But don’t ever stop taking care of your mental health. Your mind, safety and psychological well being is more important than your grades. Need to study for hours? Do it, but then take your time for sleeping, eating, taking care of your skin and doing your hobbies as well.

Try to keep yourself motivated

It can be through goals (”I want to become a doctor”), mid-term goals (”I am going to get a great grade for this exam”) or just motivating yourself for the sake of self improvement (”I can do this and will do it because I will feel great when I achieve it”). It can be anything, just do your best. I know it is hard, I know you struggle when studying. I have asked myself so many times why am I doing this? Why am I here? This class is terrible, I’d rather be at home. But remember without hard work, you cannot achieve anything. Do your best, don’t push yourself too much, stay healthy and active and keep going. I honestly don’t have any long term goals and have to constantly push myself to do things and struggle to find motivation, but I have discovered it is about going step by step and putting yourself achiveable day-by-day, week-by-week goals. You are doing great, and remember that hard work always pays off -sooner or later.

Remember not measuring your self worth by other people

Stop comparing yourself to your classmates: you are both different and doing what you can. Try not letting other’s comments hurt you. And I know somethimes parents pressuere you a  and have high stardard to meet, but remember YOUR standards are more important and YOUR mental and physical health is more important than trying to meet the goals other’s set for you. I know making your parents proud feels great, it’s not worth it if it sends you to exhaustion.

When studying a language, even more important than the study itself, it is keeping in contact with said language

Listen to podcasts, read whenever you can, listen to music, watch TV shows in that language. You don’t have to understand everything, just keep that contact so you won’t forget those words, the pronunciation, etc. Don’t have time for German class this semester? Ok, you have apps like Duolingo that allow you to practise in a casual way. Cannot afford Japanese classes and don’t really have time for self-study right now? Alright, keep watching that anime. With social networks, it is as easy as following people that speaks said language. Just don’t give up!

Talk to your teachers. They don’t bite and actually many — in my experience most of them — are actually grateful that you approach them

I am working on this as well because I am a very shy person, but truly, this is so important. Have doubts? Tell them after classes. Further doubts or you don’t know how to approach the subject? Arrange a meeting in their office. Are you really interested in this and don’t know where to start? Teachers always have resources. Your teacher is also a person and their duty is to help you out. Forming a bond with your teacher is always a good thing, studying gets better and more interesting, and it’s even useful for networking in anticipation for future job finding. It will be good for you and it will probably make them happy as well seing that you have interest. Just don’t abuse it, they have other things to do and other student’s as well.