#treadmill engineer

[treadmillrepairnearme]

Mastering Gym Equipment Maintenance: The Art of Preserving Your Workout Arsenal

Maintaining your gym equipment isn't just about keeping them clean; it's about nurturing the lifeline of your fitness journey. Picture your treadmill as a trusty steed or your dumbbells as loyal companions - they need care to thrive. Let's unravel the secrets of home gym equipment repair near me and unveil why it's the cornerstone of a successful workout regimen.

Understanding the Need for Maintenance

1. Wear and Tear: The Unavoidable Reality

Gym equipment faces a daily battle, enduring the weight of countless reps and the strain of rigorous workouts. Like a marathon runner's shoes, these machines undergo wear and tear, affecting their efficiency and longevity.

2. Dust and Grime: The Silent Culprits

Sweat, dust, and microscopic debris - they're the covert adversaries of your machines. They lurk in the corners, causing friction and hindering seamless operation. It's like dirt sneaking into the gears of a well-oiled clock.

3. Safety First: Protecting Your Workout Haven

Ever heard the saying, "Safety first"? Well, it applies to your fitness equipment too. Regular maintenance isn't just about preserving the machines; it's about safeguarding yourself from potential hazards and ensuring injury-free workouts.

The Perks of Regular Maintenance

1. Prolonged Lifespan: Aging Gracefully

Imagine maintenance as the fountain of youth for your gym gear. It breathes new life into them, prolonging their lifespan and maintaining their peak performance, just like regular check-ups keep you in top form.

2. Optimal Performance: Maximizing Efficiency

Well-maintained equipment operates like a well-tuned instrument. Every stride on the elliptical or lift of the weights feels smoother and more effective, amplifying your workout experience.

3. Safety Assurance: Your Protective Shield

Picture maintenance as your guardian angel during workouts. It identifies and resolves potential safety hazards, allowing you to push your limits without worry, akin to a trusty spotter during weightlifting sessions.

DIY vs. Professional Maintenance

1. DIY: The Initial Temptation

Wiping down machines and a bit of oiling might seem like enough. However, it's akin to applying a band-aid to a deeper wound. DIY maintenance often misses underlying issues that demand professional expertise.

2. Professional Maintenance: The Gold Standard

Think of professional maintenance as a spa day for your gym equipment. Seasoned technicians dive into the nitty-gritty, diagnosing hidden issues and giving your machines the VIP treatment they deserve.

Signs It's Time for Maintenance

1. Listen to the Clues

Your equipment often communicates when it needs attention. Unusual noises, resistance fluctuations, or uneven movements are cries for help. Don't ignore these red flags; they're your equipment's distress signals.

2. Scheduled Check-ups

Prevention is better than cure, they say. Establish a routine maintenance schedule, aligning with manufacturer recommendations. This proactive approach prevents potential issues from escalating.

Choosing the Right Maintenance Partner

1. Expertise Counts

Seek certified technicians well-versed in maintaining gym equipment. Experience matters when it comes to understanding the intricacies of different machines.

2. Customer Reviews: The Real Testimonials

Before entrusting your equipment to a service provider, dive into customer feedback. It's like peering into a crystal ball, offering insights into their reliability and service quality.

The Cost of Maintenance: Investment or Expense?

1. Investing in Longevity

Consider maintenance an investment rather than a cost. The value it adds in terms of equipment lifespan, performance, and safety far outweighs the financial expenditure.

2. Long-Term Savings

Regular maintenance might seem like an added expense initially, but it's a cost-effective strategy in the long run. Extending your equipment's life saves you from frequent replacements, easing the burden on your wallet.

Nurturing Your Fitness Arsenal

Gym equipment maintenance isn't just a chore; it's a nurturing process for your workout partners. Treat them well, and they'll reward you with sustained performance, longevity, and a safe environment to pursue your fitness aspirations. Embrace maintenance as an integral part of your fitness journey, ensuring every rep, every step, and every lift is a step closer to your goals. After all, a well-maintained gym setup isn't just a collection of equipment; it's your path to a healthier, fitter you.

[frownyalfred]

Bruce has million dollar tech in his suit that he sometimes just has to smash into the face of some villain as a last resort and it’s like, whoops, there goes the new prototype fingerprint tech, punching Clayface was too important sorry Lucius

[gloamses]

underdiscussed instance of touchscreens/smart tech in places where it shouldn’t be: cardio machines. yeah great job you put a touchscreen on an item where people are going to sweat all over it and it’s going to glitch because it can’t handle contact with moisture

[nebulations]

[ID: Intricate sequin embroidery featuring people working in computer rooms with a retrofuturistic style. The main colors of the first are gold and silver, and the second is mostly in gold tones with green and teal accents. End ID]

Control Room, 2004 (embroidery on black velvet) & Space Station, 2006 (embroidery on canvas)

Farhad Moshiri

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[intaktuah]

Sweat For Me

Genre: Smut, 18+ mdni

WC: 4.3k

Pairing: Dom!Intak x sub!m-reader

CW: Begging, breeding, teasing, overstimulation, body worship (armpits & abs), riding, Intak likes to be called 'sir', sex on the floor,

You rarely visited the gym at night. After work you barely even had enough energy to drive home, but you were pissed tonight. Being a receptionist was a pain in the ass, especially when the customers are being so inconsiderate. For example today an elderly man who knew perfectly our schedule showed up 15 minutes before closing. He seemed to have enjoyed taking his sweet time looking around while you just stared waiting for him to leave.

To top it all off, your car’s engine light had turned on on your way back home. “I guess this day could in fact get worse.” You mumbled curses to yourself wanting to just crawl into a hole and forget everything. You were so angry at the world for seemingly putting every obstacle in your path. The only way to get over this was to blow off some steam. At the next stop light you made a sharp return making sure no cars were nearby and headed directly towards your local gym.

Something told you that a late night gym session would bring you some much needed relaxation, it would soon ease the tension you were feeling all over.

When you arrived at the almost empty gym parking lot you grabbed your extra set of clothes from the backseat and your headphones. With the shut down of your car you locked the doors and made your way inside.

Most of the machines were not being used and everyone seemed to be in their own jam they wouldn't even have noticed that you walked in.

You walked to the back of the gym where the locker rooms were located and spotted an empty bench where you could change into your workout clothes. As you slipped off your shirt over your head you couldn't help but feel a pair of eyes staring at you. To your surprise, you turned to see a man around 5’11 wearing a black tank top with a matching set of black shorts. Dang that top was doing him favors in all the right places. His bulging muscles looked big like he had just finished his workout and his forehead was red with sweat. He stared directly into your eyes for a few seconds before making a small smirk with his lips and walking away.

“Was he checking me out?” The question lingered in your head as you slipped on your workout shirt and headed back out to the main floor.

At first your workout routine went as normal, some weights mixed in with some core workouts, eventually you decided to end the night with some cardio. You were walking towards the treadmill and checked the time on your phone, 10:45pm. The gym had almost no one anymore beside the people who come to workout before their night shifts or the ones destressing after a long day.

When you stepped onto the treadmill you felt a sense of turning back. And there he was again.

His presence felt different this time, more intimidating. From afar you could see his platinum blonde hair face onto his face, it was wet you could assume he had just gotten out of the showers. The other clear sign he had just gotten out of the shower was his bare skin exposed. His figure had to have been sculpted by the greatest artists of time. His glistening abs flexed on their own and his chest was firm; you could imagine having them within your grasps.

What is happening? Why would you be thinking these thoughts about a guy you don't even know?

Your consciousness returned and you turned all over to see if anyone else was looking at the sight in front of you. Everyone was so occupied they didn't even bother to turn around. When you stopped being paranoid you turned back to where the mysterious man was standing, but he was gone. Was it a hallucination?

Your brain was telling you to just shrug it off and finish your workout, but your heart and body wanted something else. They wanted to find out who this man was, and if he was real.

Your movements got the best of you and you couldn't think twice before you were heading straight for the locker rooms still looking around paranoid to see if maybe someone was aware of what was about to happen. The locker room was empty as far as your eyes could see. All of the showers were off and not a single soul was sitting at the benches. Maybe you had imagined him.

As you were about to head out a sound from deep down the hall made you freeze. Chills ran over your body when you realized you had forgotten to check the gym’s sauna at the end of the hall.

You made your way over to the entrance of the sauna with caution as if you were trying to avoid waking a bear from its nap. With a small creak you opened up the door just a smidge to find him sitting there playing with the towel wrapped around his waist. He hadn't seen you looking at him and you backed away from the door just in time to go unnoticed.

“What am I doing? Spying on him is crazy!” You couldn't help but try and whisper some sense to yourself. Just as you tried to peek through the hole again a face emerged from the sauna entrance. You would have yelped from the jumpscare if a hand had not come up and covered your mouth.

The blonde man brought up his right hand to his face making a gesture for you to “Shh”. “You don't want to cause a scene do you?”

His tone was condescending, making you feel stupid for almost screaming in a public space. But still you were shaken to your core. Who was he to have his hand covering your mouth? You questioned as you came to your senses and slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me! Why have you been following me?” You tried your best to sound demanding but it only caused a smile from the man.

“Why don’t you get more appropriate for a sauna, and then we can talk.” He leaned in to whisper his words even though no one was around. It causes electricity to be sent down your body. Were you turned on?

The blonde man seemed to notice because he just looked you up and down and went back into the sauna.

You were frozen in place. You couldn’t possibly fall for this, what even is this guy’s catch? You seemed to stay stuck for what felt like forever before you finally started to move away from the sauna.

You walked over to your duffel bag where your original work clothes laid out. If you went home now all that would be is sleep and another tiring day of work tomorrow. Why waste an opportunity for something new tonight, right?

Your curiosity seemed to get the best of you because by the time you realized you had stripped your shirt and shorts off only remaining in your tight boxers that pressed nicely across your ass. Your semi visible bulge peeking out in front.

If you were going to do this you were going to play your cards right. So before heading to the sauna you slid off your boxers and placed them with the rest of your clothes. Your length was now hanging free, but you didn’t want anyone else to see you like this so you quickly grabbed one of the sauna towels from outside the entrance and made your way inside.

As you entered the sauna with the towel wrapped at your waist you turned to see your gym stalker sitting with his back against the wall, legs up on one of the sauna benches. He smiled and patted the empty space next to him. However you weren't as trusting as you seemed so you decided to sit across from him mocking his position with your legs up on the bench.

The sauna was pretty spacious for being part of a gym. In the middle sat a pit filled with those dark hot rocks seen in movies, and on either side sat spare towels you could only assume for other members.

You didn't dare make eye contact with the mysterious man who had been drilling into you with his eyes. You figured that instead a sauna was exactly what you needed to relax and take your mind off of all the stresses in your life. With your eyes closed you took in deep breaths trying to focus only on your breathing. But your meditating state lasted only mere minutes before another sound of breathing pulled your attention away from your own.

You tried to push it away but it only seemed to get louder. You slowly opened your eyes and slowly turned your head in the direction of where he was sitting. Your eyes seemed to widen when you saw what he was doing because a slight smirk spread on the side of his face.

Is he jerking off? You took note of how the man was moving his hand in an up and down motion underneath his towel. His breathing had become more staggered causing his mouth to hang open. His forehead drenched in sweat from his movements, and his hair fell so beautifully in front of him. His hips would occasionally jerk upwards causing him to halt his movements, but when he came back down he would just start over. But this wasn't the most insane part of it all. He was staring directly at you.

You were hypnotized, mesmerized on the way his chest heaved up and down with each one of his fast paced movements you were sure he would be finishing any minute now. His words took you out of the trance, “I can stop if you want, I’d rather save this load for you.” He smiled fully now even letting out a small chuckle. Did he think you were a prostitute? Why would he have brought you in?

You clapped back almost immediately, “Who are you? What do you think this is? Because I am not someone who sells themselves.” Your body finally made the correct decision to get up off the bench and exit the same way you came in. However, the man was faster than you thought. He got up off the bench and ran to block the door, turning a lock you hadn't noticed before.

“My name is Intak, my father owns this gym, which answers your question about there being a lock on the door.” Intak placed his hand on your chest and seemingly pushed you back until you fell onto a bench. His built frame was towering over you and if you stared forward you would come in contact with his hard length. So you just kept your eyes locked with him that was until he crouched down so he was now in between your legs.

“You caught my eye when I first saw you in the locker room. Sometimes guys come this late at night only looking for one thing. I figured that was you, but now I'm thinking I was mistaken.” He was wrong about what you had originally come for but now that you were here you felt a hot feeling all around you. You weren't sure if it was the sauna’s steam or maybe.

Intak caught onto the shift in your eyes, “Or maybe I wasn’t.” Suddenly he grasped onto the bench you were sitting on and pulled himself up now looking at you face to face. There were only mere inches between your lips. Intak would look at your lips and then look back up at your eyes. You couldn't control your shivers but they weren't out of fear. You needed Intak, whatever spell he had casted on you worked because in an instant you broke the space between you two.

Intak must've been caught off guard because he let go on the bench and instead shifted his position to standing on his knees, all the while keeping his lips in touch with yours. Your kisses were rough and urgent like you had been poisoned and the cure was all over Intak’s lips. Lucky for you he was able to keep up with your fast pace. You could feel his smile while kissing him, he enjoyed the rush you were giving him and the way the steam from the sauna was driving you both over the edge.

He placed a few more kisses on your mouth before pulling away to catch his breath. You hadn't even realized how out of breath you were too. “Fuck your lips taste amazing.” Intak rubbed your hand as he moved his hands over to the towel that still wrapped around your waist. But you stopped him.

“I have another idea.” You brought Intak up to sit beside you on the bench but then immediately pushed his body down so he was on his back. You removed your own towel to show Intak your own hardening dick that had been gathering some precum from the makeout sesh. Intak was in awe he gulped down the knot that had formed in his throat and all he was able to mutter out was a small “wow”

You straddled Intak’s lap slightly rubbing your ass on his dick making him close his eyes and let out a small groan. Before he could have opened his eyes again you brought your mouth down to meet him again as you mashed lips together. You could feel Intak slide his tongue down your mouth exploring every inch of you. Your hands were climbing his head grabbing at pieces of his hair and pulling them back. The tug made Intak lift his head.

“You're pretty kinky aren't you.” He found your dirty actions fascinating. He took his own hands and reached down for your ass smacking down onto them and moving them so they would rub against his pelvis.

You had been kissing his neck and jaw while he did this but you stopped to look into his eyes. “Oh you have no idea.” But Intak wanted to test you. He slightly pushed you off of him, making you give him a confused look. He then slid on the bench bringing the upper half of his body up onto a wall in the corner while the other half still laid on the bench.

You were about to mount him again when he stopped you. He lifted his left arm and placed it behind his head with his right hand. He grabbed the back of your head and jerked you roughly towards his armpit. You could have swore he couldn't drive you anymore crazy but here you were taking in his masculine scent. “Well don't just sniff it” Intak sounded annoyed by the lack of actions, “Get yourself a taste.” The suggestion itself would have made you nut right then and there. You hesitated but knew that your horniness was too much to stop. You started from the bottom of his pit and placed your tongue on his fairly tanned skin. Tastes of sweat and salt attacked your senses as you explored Intak’s pit. Above you Intak was enjoying the sight of you being a mess for his armpit; he couldn't help but let out tiny moans.

“Fuck yeah keep doing that. Your tongue feels amazing.” You couldn't believe how horned up he was and you hadn't even sucked his dick yet. Intak eventually grabbed your head and moved you to his other armpit where you would repeat the same process of licking his hair free armpit. You wish it could have stayed like that forever but Intak brought you up to catch your breath. “I cant believe I’ve been so horny for you this whole time I don't even know your name.” He chuckled to himself sitting up letting you find a seat on the warm floor. “It's y/n. But you can call me anything you want.” You wanted to tease him.

“Huh, y/n. I like it. I'll be sure to use it later.” Intak slid over to have your face in between his legs. This time you were sure to make eye contact with his hard cock that was filled with his precum from jerking off earlier. He didn't need to say anything you knew what he wanted, and so did you.

You made your way over on your knees and slowly grabbed him from the base of his dick, Intak looked down at you with hunger in his eyes. He wanted to use you in every way he possibly could. He wasn't alone however, You wanted to feel every inch of Intak inside of you. So you started by slowly licking the tip of his cock making him squirm underneath you. You smiled knowing you had at least some power over Intak even if it was just for a moment.

“Enough with the teasing y/n, start sucking my dick before I make you regret coming in here.” His words shouldn't have turned you on as much as they did but he was right. You wrapped your lips around his uncircumcised tip and made your way down the 7 inch length. “Oh fuck y/n yeah just like that, you sure know you to swallow a cock.” Intak struggled to get his words out as your head bobbed up and down. You were going halfway while using your right hand to jerk the other half. Your left hand was rather occupied trying to touch yourself. Intak noticed you were trying to please yourself and grabbed your hair roughly making you spit out his cock.

He brought his face down making sure he was close to you. “Did I say you could touch yourself? It looks like you haven't understood who's the one in charge here.” Intak looked pissed like he was a spoiled child who was just told they were getting their way.

“Im sorry, Intak I won't do it anymore.” Bur Intak just looked at you before saying something that caught you off guard. “Call me Sir.” You looked at him with innocent eyes making sure you had heard what he said correctly. “Did you hear me? Because I really hate repeating myself.” Intak still had you in his grasp so you had no choice but to respond. “Yes sir.”

“That's more like it.” Intak did not allow you to process what had just happened before he brought you down to his dick once again but this time he didn't let you use your hands to jerk him or yourself off. Intak was more aggressive, making you go up and down on his cock. He brought you down forcing yourself to take all seven inches. You were gagging and you could feel tears swell up in your eyes from the pressure.

“Don't cry, you can take cant you y/n. You're my good little boy making sure I'm getting my pleasure first.” Intak had now let you go completely, you came off his cock coughing and grabbing your neck. “Next time you think of touching yourself without my consent you're going to see just how aggressive I can be.” Intak threatened you but you didnt care you wanted to feel it again.

He was somewhat shocked when you crawled back to his cock and immediately went to work again. He breath hitched and he rolled his eyes in pleasure as he felt your tongue swirling around the tip. Then you tried deepthroating his cock once again, your face turned bright red and you gagged at the pressure but it was worth it. Intak was a mess. “Oh y/n stop stop stop I’m gonna cum I don't want to cum yet.” He pushed you off his dick and stood up from the bench. He threw you completely down onto the floor “Woah Intak what’re you doing?” You barely managed to ask your question before Intak turned you over so your stomach was now flat on the floor. You couldn't see what was happening behind you until a short warning came from Intak. “Don't worry about it my boy, you're going to love what I am going to do with you.

Suddenly the sharpest of pains blazed in your tight hole as you slightly turned your head to see Intak sticking his tip into your entrance. His jaw hung open and he was filled with sweat all over his body. “Ngh~ Intak I think maybe you should have prepared me before.” You tried to reason but he wouldn't budge. Instead he laughed, “Oh y/n a little slut like you doesn't need prep, besides my cock is all lubed up from your spit. Trust me it is better this way.” So there he went with no condom, no lube, no preparation. Intak started to slowly thrust into you trying to keep himself up. Soon enough his thrusts started to pick up pace. “Intak please, it's so big, I don't think I can take it.”

You whined but it seemed Intak was tired of hearing you complain because he started to go faster making you moan and scream instead of talking. You could feel the way his uncut cock curved slightly to the left and how he was filling up your hole with his hard length. The sounds of skin slapping echoed through the sauna. You were surprised that nobody had heard all the sounds coming from inside. Intak had been fucking you so hard you felt weak and limp. You didn't even have the energy to try and pleasure yourself the size of his cock was pleasure enough inside of you.

Intak meanwhile was having the greatest sex of his life, he had now lifted up on his knees to get a better angle at digging into you. One of his hands was placed on your ass where he would occasionally give some smacks to make you nudge even a little. His right hand had traveled up to place your head down into the ground. You felt his immense body weight pressed onto you, his biceps flexing and twitching trying to maintain your head down but the pleasure was making you moan so much your head was moving around.

“Intak please~” You were feeling too much pleasure all around, Intak had you in the palm of his hands. But still there was something you wanted that you were sure he would love. “Intak. I~ I want to ride your dick.” The dominant man above you slowed his pace, thinking about your suggestion. “How bad do you want my sweet boy?” Oh so now he was teasing.

“Bad, I need it Intak please give it to me sir.”

Your pleads were enough for Intak’s hunger. He slowly pulled out of you and laid on the sauna floor; his hands motioned for you to come over. Crawling with the little strength you had left you climbed onto Intak. His eyes themselves were fucking you, examining every tired inch of your muscled body. You could tell he wanted this more than you did, so you positioned yourself facing directly at Intak wanting to keep fucking him with your eyes as well. “Are you ready?” You shot a smile at Intak making him smile back in anticipation as his smile turned into a big ‘O’ when you sank down onto him.

Riding Intak’s 7 inch cock was more pleasing than you ever could have predicted. His hips thrusted up into giving him the slight satisfaction that he was still the one in control, but you knew deep down that you had the power. Intak was going to lift half his body up to you but you pushed him back down. Instead you leaned down to place your lips to Intak’s chest. You placed soft kisses to his bare sweaty chest, licking his hard nipples. Both of the feelings of satisfaction were driving intak over the edge. “Y/n please I can’t do it, I want to fill you up.” You smiled at his words and continued your work even taking your hands to his abs grappling at them, leaving your mark on them.

“Fuck y/n I think I’m getting close.” Intak said as he fucked up harder into you making you moan in pleasure. “Cum in me, Intak.” He opened his eyes in shock, but you gave him a nod confirming where you wanted him to finish. Intak didn't hesitate for much longer, he started getting sloppy and with one final thrust he finished inside you. “Y/n~ fuck.”

The feeling of his seed inside of you filling every inch of you drove you insane as well. “Intak I’m cumming to!” You shouted as you kept bouncing on him, you dug your nails into his sharp abdomen. You stopped bouncing on him and felt as your load exploded out of your dick and all over your abdomen and Intak’s, some of it even reaching his face.

After coming off of your high you felt yourself fall down onto Intak’s body. You could feel him leak out of your hole and it was one of your favorite feelings. Intak grabbed some cum off his abs, “You wanna taste yourself babe?” You looked directly into his eyes as you sucked on his fingers, having the sweet taste of your own cum in your mouth.

“Y/n you are insane, I mean cumming without even touching yourself!” You chuckle at his words “I would love to do this again sometime.” Your suggestion made Intak’s eyes light up like he was a puppy who had just been offered to play. “Well I mean this sauna is technically mine, so it wouldn't be a problem having you in here.” With his sentence you both smiled at each other before having your lips meet together again still being able to feel the intense heat between the two of you.

Author's Note: Hi guys! I hope you enjoyed my fic this is my first time writing smut. I wrote this as a request for a friend of mine so I hope they enjoyed this to. Also I am not really familiar with tumblr so please bare with me, but i would love to receive and requests from anyone!

[ckret2]

The second dimension has burned, all its neighbors are burning, Bill's mutated Dimension Zero into some sort of non-euclidean horror land where he's setting up a ghoulish undead kingdom and pretending that he's fine, and every five minutes the Axolotl sees something new he's gonna have nightmares about for the next billion years.

Naturally, the gods of the multiverse have got to do something:

Make sure the non-euclidean horror land complies with local construction codes.

Here, have a fic. 

This is part 4 of a series about the Axolotl—and various local gods—trying to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of what will one day be called the Euclidean Massacre. Here are parts one, two, and three.

####

As the Time Giant inspected Dimension Zero, she took a dizzying array of measurements and performed several tests on the unstable cosmic foam that seemingly made up the dimension. To the Axolotl's untrained eye, the tests looked more like alchemy than engineering. She even momentarily popped out to a point in her timeline when she was in her office to pick up some more specialized equipment.

Dimension Zero operated like an omnidirectional treadmill, the Axolotl discovered; if you flew far enough to the left, you ended up looping around to the right, far enough up and you ended up down, far enough forward and you ended up in the back. The distances were vast, certainly, but finite. Which meant that finding the "edge" of Dimension Zero to escape it was near impossible—it had no edges. The Axolotl was amazed at his luck in having successfully found an exit the last time he was in here. Locating the border of this impossible dimension was like navigating a four-dimensional labyrinth.

But apparently the Time Giant was very good at navigating labyrinths, because again and again she effortlessly located Dimension Zero's border. It was like a thin layer of incorporeal cellophane you could move straight through without leaving Dimension Zero; but if you looked at it just right, from just the right time and place, it became real, and you saw through it into the neighboring dimensions. She spent a long time grimly examining the burning first and second dimensions "above" Dimension Zero—and a long time inspecting the places where the neighboring dimensions had already been incinerated completely, and Dimension Zero bloated out toward the third dimensions like an overfilled trash bag. 

And meanwhile, the "Magister Mentium," de facto ruler of this grotesque domain, decided that while he was waiting for news, the most magisterial thing he could do was returned to his party.

To the Axolotl's amazement, the triangle did actually seem to be dancing with his people. There was still some intelligence in some of the living and the dying-but-never-dead shapes.

Some of them knew a dance that involve interlacing their fingers, right hands to right hands, and whirling together around their joined grip, then switching to lace their left hands together and twirl the other way; and the triangle couldn't be puppeting them—not all of them, not all the time—because sometimes his dance partners were the ones who got the steps right while he fumbled the timing. The Axolotl watched as he missed grabbing a line's hand because he'd somehow gotten slightly skewed into the third dimension and his hand went over hers instead; she teasingly jabbed him in the side with her point, and in retaliation he knocked into her with one of his lower corners and snapped her in half; with a wave of his hand she was repaired and bewildered. In his shock, the Axolotl hadn't seen it the last time he'd been here—but the triangle's eternal dance party was both the horror of a root system digging deep into rotting flesh, and the hope of a flower blooming from an unmarked grave. How many of the dancers were voluntarily dancing forever? 

He didn't have an opportunity to find out. When the Time Giant had finished her inspection, she waved over the triangle again. (Not that she needed to; in spite of being back at the party, he'd also somehow remained at the Time Giant's elbow the whole time, watching what she did without blinking.) "All right, I've got the verdict on your dimension. Do you wanna start with the bad news, the worse news, or the ugly news?"

"Ease me into it," the triangle said. "So what's the matter with my dream realm?"

"The matter."

"That's what I'm asking."

"The matter's what's the matter with it."

"What?"

"Every reading I've taken indicates there's a dimension's worth of matter in here. The mass is here for it, all right. I'm picking it up no problem. I just can't find your matter." She gestured out at the infinite dance party, the swirling colors, the twinkling faraway lights, "Everything visible adds up to so little matter that I didn't even bring any tools sensitive enough to register it. It doesn't account for all the mass I'm measuring."

He surveyed the view warily. "So you're saying my place's mass is... what, invisible?"

"Invisible, stuck in pocket dimensions...  Y'all said any rubble left over from Dimension 2 Delta would've fallen in here, right? You got it hidden away somewhere?"

His eye lit up. "Oh! Are you looking for this?" He pulled a tall black hat out from seemingly nowhere and reached his arm all the way down into it to pull out a speck of dust: radiating blinding light in every direction, but so dark that staring into it made the Axolotl feel like his eyes were being sucked out of his skull into a black hole. "This is 2Δ's matter."

"Is that all that's left?"

"The whole shebang!"

"Then nah, that's not it. If that had all the matter of a dimension, and it was that small. it'd be the nuke of nukes. The seed of a Big Bang. All it'd take is a dimension's worth of energy to thaw that turkey, and pfft! You've got a baby dimension on your hands." She gestured dismissively at the speck, "No way a mortal could handle an object like that without its gravity crushing you—never mind have the energy to move it."

The triangle stared down at his little pearl of matter. "Huh." It was an oddly intense stare for just a fleck of dust.

"If you don't know where all the hidden matter is, then ten to one odds, you've got a dark matter problem," the Time Giant said. "Nasty stuff. It'll exponentially speed up the heat death of your dimension. You'll have to get a specialist in here to see if there's anything you can do about that dark matter. You want referrals?"

He was silent for a moment, still not looking up; then he said, "No, no—I don't need them." He stuffed the speck back into his hat, tossed aside the party hat he'd been wearing, and put on the black one. "I'm a DIY kind of triangle! I'll figure out what dark matter is."

The Time Giant snorted. "Suit yourself. Problem two: this dimension's a singularity. A really big, spread out singularity, which by the definition of a singularity is impossible—"

"We like impossible around here!"

"Uh huh, I can tell. But it means things that should be separate things are crushed together into one thing—including the landscape and the mindscape. Dreams and reality are occurring on the same level of existence. There's no clear distinction between facts and fiction."

"Okay," he said. "So, is that a problem, or...?"

"For starters," she jerked a thumb toward the distant-and-yet-somehow-ever-present dance party, "it means that the dead and the living are on the same plane. Can't separate life from an afterlife here. And it means anything could happen just by imagining it too hard. Some traumatized vet gets war flashbacks? The war's actually happening again. Have a nightmare about your wife dying? Your wife's dead. If everyone stops thinking about a building for a moment, it could stop existing. Contracts are useless—what you think you remembered them saying becomes what they actually said."

"So, is that a problem, orrr...?"

She paused. "Shoot, it's your universe. If you're fine with it, whatever."

"I call it the dream realm for a reason!"

"Issue three's the ugly one: this dimension's completely unstable," the Time Giant said.

"Yeah, I know," the triangle sighed. "The electromagnetism..."

"The electromagnetism ain't the half of it. I mean it is really unstable. I don't know how it's lasted as long as it has. I can see half a dozen ways the dimension could completely collapse on itself in the next ten minutes."

"What! Where?!"

She pointed. "For one thing, a whole pillar of spacetime right there is about to implode and form a wormhole."

He zoomed over to the pillar, multiplying into a dozen copies to examine it from every angle. (He looked the same small size as always, but the Axolotl realized that with the distance the pillar was at, he must be lightyears across to be visible from here—either that, or somehow he hadn't gotten any further away. The triangle shouldn't even visible when the light from his position shouldn't reach them for thousands of years. A realm that operated on dream logic.)

While he inspected the unstable structure, the Time Giant said, "Nothing about the structure of this place is self-sustaining. It should've collapsed back into a singularity as soon as 2Δ fell in. I got no idea how it just keeps propping itself back up..."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it," the triangle snapped.

The Time Giant paused. "What?"

"I'm working on it! I'd be working on it right now if you hadn't dragged me away from the party!" The nearest iteration of the triangle groaned, dragging his eyelid down with his hands. "I've been spending ages trying to keep this stupid leaky balloon inflated, and now look at this!" He gestured in exasperation at the pillar preparing to wormhole itself. "I have to start again! Do you know how many times I've tried to fold the... the dumb... the plane?" He tried to pantomime the act of folding something with his hands; as he did, apparently without noticing what he was doing, he folded himself up, like a triangular origami paper. "Fold it in a way that'll get it to stay put? And it just won't! It keeps flopping over! It's driving me nuts!"

"The 'plane'?" 

He unfolded himself with a sharp snap. "You know what I'm talking about! The plane! The plane that everything's made out of! The..." Frustrated, the triangle grabbed a wad of existence itself and shook it in the Time Giant's and Axolotl's faces. "This stuff!"

"The fabric of reality?" the Time Giant asked, flummoxed. "You can detect the fabric of reality? You can interactwith it?"

"Is that what it is?" He flung it down in disgust. "Well, it won't stay put when I fold it!"

"Yeah, fabric tends not to do that."

"Right. Right." Grimly, the triangle said, "I need the starch of reality."

"Don't starch reality."

He flung up his hands in defeat. "Well, I've tried everything else!"

Softly, the Time Giant said, "Huh." As if she'd just figured out the answer to a question she hadn't even had a chance to ask.

On the other hand, the Axolotl just had more questions. He may not know very much about the fabric of reality, but... well, that was just the thing. He didn't know much about the fabric of reality. Sure, if he ran into a fraying timeline he could tie up the loose ends and snip off the damaged threads; he could summon up his pocket afterlife at any time, opening a liminal space into his tank from anywhere in the multiverse; but that was the most complex thing he could manage by himself. He certainly didn't know enough to do anything as complicated as keep an unstable dimension from imploding on itself.

But he did know that he didn't know nearly enough for it to be safe for him to even try... and he at least knew what the fabric of reality was. For someone even more ignorant than him to try it...

The Time Giant asked, "Didn'cha... say you're a mortal?"

"Yeah?" the triangle said defensively. He didn't even waste time looking at them; his full focus was back on the pillar, which was beginning to twist around itself. "Last I checked? And?"

She held up her hands. "S'fine. Nothing wrong with that."

Just before the pillar could fully transform into a wormhole, the triangle muttered irritably to himself and snapped his fingers. The pillar inverted like a flower bud turning inside-out. There was an infinitely vast creaking groan—but nevertheless, this immediately solved the pending wormhole issue. And also promptly caused four more things to go catastrophically wrong.

The triangle let out a strangled scream of frustration as half the firmament inverted colors and the stars glowed black. "No no no no no—!" He skidded across existence to the reversed sky, a thousand hands trying to twist the stars back on before the damage spread; another copy of him was knitting closed a rapidly unraveling corner of reality with his own arms as the thread; and the Axolotl wasn't sure what the other dozen shining yellow triangles he saw whizzing by were doing, but a ringing sound he hadn't previously noticed suddenly stopped.

Throughout Dimension Zero, there was a grinding, rumbling noise that filled all of existence. The Axolotl and Time Giant both flinched at a couple of great, splintering cracking noises, so deep that they were felt rather than heard. From every direction, the Axolotl could see soot and souls rain into the dimension. The Time Giant watched the grisly rain, jaw slack in amazement.

The Axolotl saw black hands catch the souls as they fell.

In a moment the triangle was back, looking a little worse for the wear: twitchy, dazed, eye dilated too wide, clearly even more distracted than he'd been a minute ago. He didn't look exhausted, per se—the Axolotl thought he should look exhausted—but it uncomfortably dawned on him that, if the triangle was powerful enough to knit the fabric of reality back together despite not even knowing what the fabric of reality was... maybe he was too powerful to get exhausted.

Where had a mortal gotten that power?

The triangle let out a heavy sigh. "Okay—"

And then a nearby star immediately collapsed into a black hole and started slurping down the raw fabric of reality rather than any of the regular matter hovering just outside its event horizon.

He froze a moment, eye squeezed shut in an expression of pure agony; and then he was zipping across the dimension again to fix one more crisis.

All this time, the Axolotl had thought the triangle was inebriated. He wasn't inebriated at all. It was pain. He had to be near delirious with pain, struggling to control everything without a moment's rest. Weaving back and forth and popping here and there across the dimension as he tweaked and fixed small crises before they became large ones, trying to convince himself that he was at a party as he danced frenziedly with his ever-dying people even as he simultaneously knit and taped and stapled existence back together with his own body. Every time they'd spoken to him, he'd been distracted. They were distracting him from keeping his entire reality from falling apart.

The Time Giant watched him zoom around with her thumbs hooked in her belt and a grin across her face. "Man. I wanna set you loose in an infinite hardware store and see what you do with it."

The triangle gave her an unamused, dead-eyed look. (And somewhere else, he was also picking up the black hole, eyeing it tiredly, and finally just punting it in a random direction. Existence rumbled again.)  "Hey, if you know a hardware store that's got whatever it'll take to keep this place from falling to pieces, and you think you can babysit the dream realm until I'm back...

Her smile faded. "Don't think that's gonna work."

He was immediately on his guard. "Oh?"

"That's what I was trying to explain: it's not just your dimension that's unstable; it's destabilizing all the dimensions around it, too."

He flung up his hands exasperatedly. Pale blue flames ignited around his hands. "Yeah, I know!" He hastily shook out the flames on his fingers as he said, "Tell the neighbors to keep their stupid pants on, I'm working on getting this place stable—" (The Axolotl stared at his hands long after the flames were gone.)

"No, you don't get it," she said. "Trying to stabilize it is what's destabilizing the other dimensions."

He paused. "What are you talking about."

"This 'dream realm' is supposed to be a singularity in an empty void at the bottom of everything. The dimensions above are designed to support the higher dimensions weighing down on them without collapsing. They're not structured to take pressure pushing up on them from below." The Time Giant gestured around at Dimension Zero, "And that's what we've got now! Your renovations have filled up the void. That's where that grinding when you 'move' is coming from: every time you try to prop up this dimension, it crashes against all the neighbors—and they push back and destabilize you again. Just based on what little I saw when I was checking the place out, the other second dimensions must be taking heavy damage. We're talking planes fracturing apart, physics destabilizing, wormholes, temperature fluctuations from absolute zero to near Big Bang-level heat—"

"And fires," the Axolotl said in realization, remembering the ashes he'd seen raining into Dimension Zero when the triangle had fixed the wormhole. "The dimensions that were around 2Δ are burning. Nobody could figure out why we couldn't get them under control. It was you."

All of Dimension Zero fell several degrees colder.

The music faltered. The distant dancers that could stop did, shaken out of their trances to look around for their magister. For a moment, the Axolotl could hear the dimension's hissing background radiation almost clearly enough to understand what it was saying—whispers, they were whispers, the Axolotl hadn't been imagining that they sounded like voices. They really were.

He thought he could hear screams in the whispers.

The triangle stared at them, eye wide and empty.

The Time Giant gave him a moment. "You good?"

"No, I— Yes, of course I'm good! I'm great!" He squeezed his eye shut and rubbed it harshly between his thumb and forefinger. He did not look great. "I'm not destroying any dimensions, that's insane! You're insane!" His voice was rising toward a shriek. "Nothing's on fire! I don't know what you're talking about! How would you know?! I heard you out there early, the rest of you are—what, what are you doing, arguing about whose district the ashes are in?! Trying to shift the blame to each other instead of doing anything? And meanwhile I've been here all this time! I'm the only one fixing anything! I'm the one who's been liberating my people from their stupid flat little dimensions before the apocalypse can reach them, so—what do you know about anything here!"

"'Liberating'?" the Time Giant said. "What in the multiverse are you talking about?" The Axolotl's stomach sank.

"You think I can't see out of this place?" He drew them closer and closer as Dimension Zero moved around them and grew larger and larger as he spoke, forcing them to look up at him. "You think I haven't noticed my people out there dying while you big shot so-called 'gods' stand around and watch?! I can see through all their eyes! I see everything! I feel it when they die! I've been the only one saving them!"

As clear as if it were real, the Axolotl saw his memory of Dimension 2 Epsilon burning. (The Time Giant sucked in a breath—the way the mindscape worked here, could she see his memory too? Could the triangle?) The shapes spontaneously combusting and plummeting into Dimension Zero. Reality seeming to twist around them, grasp them, crush them. He saw a frightened green triangle—except for the color, a triangle so like the Magister Mentium as he'd been on the day he met the "eclipse," young and small and terrified of the cosmic forces around him—crushed and burned in the folds of the fabric of reality. Only the shapes were taken—none of the creatures around them. The triangle's people. "You're not saving anyone! You're the one killing them!"

The triangle blazed red in rage.

Everything ignited. Searing, white-hot pain. The fire was on the Axolotl's skin, in his eyes, in his gills, inside his body. He felt the voices in the cosmic radiation screaming.

Everything unignited. The Axolotl was unharmed. (Was it a hallucination? A dream? Had it been too brief to leave damage?)

The Time Giant was holding the Axolotl in front of her chest like a big plushie shield.

The triangle was small and black and still. White light traced his edges like the halo around a black hole. He didn't say anything.

He was staring at the Axolotl's memory. And the Axolotl could see the triangle's memory: from above, the plane of Dimension 2 Epsilon melted and folded around a small frightened green triangle, crushing and burning it within the fabric of reality; from below the plane, a trembling black hand reached up, stretching into the fabric of 2Ε like it was a glove, trying so hard, so carefully to catch and cradle the other triangle before it fell, confused when the fingers opened and once again all that was left in the palm was ashes.

Both memories burned up and vanished.

The Axolotl shook himself free of the Time Giant's grip and cautiously swam closer to the triangle. "Magister...?"

The universe quietly moved, carrying the Axolotl and the Time Giant away and rotating around the triangle so they were placed behind him. Okay, fine. He'd wait.

When the triangle finally spoke again, his voice was hoarse and flat. "I can't just stop fixing the dream realm. It'll collapse on us." He turned slowly to face the Time Giant. His color was starting to come back. "You've got some kind of... divine home renovation crew that can repair everything?"

She shook her head. "Sorry. I still had some hope for this place when I thought it was banging against the neighbors when it was collapsing. But if fixing it is what's breaking everything... There's nothing we can do."

"Some god," the triangle muttered ruefully. "So... what are we supposed to do."

"Honestly? This void was never built to support a dimension. Best idea is to leave and set up your dancing hippie colony somewhere else," the Time Giant said. "The third dimension next to where 2Δ used to be is swarming with refugee services; if I were you, I'd talk to the guy with the planets to set you up somewhere until you can move into another dimension."

That snapped him out of his funk. "Are you kidding? I'd rather keep fixing this place for an eternity! We sacrificed everything to reach our paradise. We're not about to ditch it now!"

The Time Giant took in the wretched floating dance party huddled together in a lonely, landless, kaleidoscopic void, and silently mouthed, paradise. She shook her head and moved on. "Well, you can't keep this place even if you wanna. It's impossible to get this place up to cosmic construction code."

"Who cares about the code!" He zipped up to her face, hands outstretched to her beseechingly. "Can't you let it slide? I am willing to bribe you. Just tell me what it'll take!"

"Buddy." Her voice took on a steely edge. "The cosmic construction code defines how every dimension in the multiverse has to be built. It exists because any dimension that doesn't meet the code could destroy all of existence." (His eye widened.) "Your 'paradise' doesn't fit in the crawlspace beneath dimensions. One of two things will happen: eventually, you fail to stabilize it, it collapses in on itself, and everyone in here ceases to exist... or, you do stabilize it, and it destabilizes every dimension built above it, and the entire multiverse collapses in on itself—including your 'dream realm.' You like either of those options?"

The triangle's hands drooped helplessly. "I... But th... After all w... I can't..."

He fell silent. His light sank back toward black.

This triangle had made himself the leader of these people, he couldn't abandon them now. The Axolotl wasn't about to watch him lose himself in despair.

"Would you let your people die like that?" He circled behind the triangle, forcing him to turn to face the Axolotl—and face his people at the same time. "You said you liberated them." As misguided as he had been—and even if few of them, maybe none of them, were actually his people—it had to be an act of love, didn't it? He had to care about them, didn't he? "After everything you did to save them, do you want to lose them now?"

The triangle glanced at the shapes, and quickly looked away. "I..."

"Look at them," the Axolotl commanded. 

He looked at them.

Slowly, he floated over his eternal dance party. To the Axolotl's surprise, several of the clear-headed ones who had stopped dancing—the haggard, the ever-bleeding, the newer arrivals that were ever-burning—stretched their hands up toward him.

The triangle flinched, ever so slightly—just a twitch in his hands—and then he reached down to them in return. The line that the Axolotl had seen dancing with the triangle earlier brushed his fingertips; he stopped to squeeze her hand as he passed.

The Axolotl could see the guilt radiating out of the triangle.

He didn't know how he knew it was guilt. He didn't even know how he could see it—it had no color, no shape. Nevertheless, he saw it. The guilt spread out like ink in water, poisoning Dimension Zero, clinging to every surface. The Axolotl's skin was unusually sensitive to toxins; the guilt made him queasy.

One of the shapes asked the triangle something; the Axolotl couldn't hear the question, just the triangle's quiet answer: "Nah, don't worry about those losers. A few higher-dimensional beings got mad we liberated ourselves. They hate to see the second dimension winning. It's fine, I can kick their bases if they try to make any trouble."

(The Time Giant snorted. The Axolotl wasn't sure it was an empty threat.)

"Now why isn't everyone dancing! C'mon, chop chop, this is a celebration! I wanna see everyone shaking their sides! Talking to you, Graham!" The triangle raised a hand, threateningly preparing to snap his fingers; before he had to, all the shapes were dancing again, as enthusiastically/fearfully as ever.

He watched his people for a moment longer.

And then turned to the Time Giant and the Axolotl. "Okay," he said. "I'll talk to the guy with the planets."

####

(Thanks for reading!! If the art lured you in and this is the first chapter you read, this is part 4 of a 7-or-8 part fic that keeps getting more parts, about the Axolotl in the immediate aftermath of the Euclidean Massacre. I'll be posting one chapter a week, Fridays 5pm CST, so stick around if you wanna watch the Axolotl slowly discover just how much of a monster that silly triangle he likes really is.

It's ALSO chapter 64 of an ongoing post-canon post-TBOB very-reluctantly-human Bill fic. So if you wanna read more of me writing Bill, check it out. If you're not sold on the idea of a human Bill fic, I've also got a one-shot about normal triangle Bill escaping the Theraprism if you wanna read that.

If this is NOT your first time here and you already knew all of the above: the great thing about this plot is that almost every chapter has a new terrible reveal about what Bill's up to! Looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts on this latest bunch of revelations. Depending on how I split things up, next week might be another more low-key chapter to set up further horrors.

Nobody asked but the line Bill was dancing with is named Lynn Segment, and the Graham he spoke to is a quadrilateral with two older siblings: Perry, Lilo, & Graham. What's the point of making geometric shape characters if you aren't giving them pun names.)

[arahir]

Hi!! Do you follow any interesting podcast or youtubers? I kind of want something to watch/listen to while on the treadmill haha and you have nice taste!!

omg okay yes but our definition of interesting might be different

PODCASTS

FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS | the most soothingly voiced british man describes the rise and fall of various civilizations around the world. meticulously researched, beautifully produced, minimal or no commercials. he has youtube video versions of each one that look like a werner herzog documentary. each one is one to three hours long. i've listened to every ep three or four times.

WHO SHAT ON THE FLOOR AT MY WEDDING? | a lesbian couple tries to get to the bottom of the titular question. it's done like a true crime podcast. they bring on all their friends and do hard hitting interviews. one half of the couple is dead fucking serious about it and the other half is trying not to lose it every single time. a true fave.

NORMAL GOSSIP | probably everyone has heard of this. basically there's a guest and then the host goes over some drama that a listener submitted. it's always the most insane story, the most in depth. like a listener's dad getting into the underground orchid market after inviting a stranger to live with them (iirc). so so much fun.

SEARCH ENGINE | we're not getting into the drama behind the creation of this podcast cough cough. they take a different listener question and deep dive on it, like: there's an exclusive club in germany that almost no one can get into and no one knows why so they go into the history of the club and go over the listeners' failed attempts to get in, etc.

YOUTUBERS

ANY AUSTIN | does deep dives on random video game shit like "where do the rivers in hyrule go" and "what's the unemployment rate in mondstadt" and stuff like that.

FUNKYFROGBAIT | they do really funny videos about current topics but with a really circumspect view.

JACOB GELLER | deep dives on cultural things like fear of the dark or loneliness but with pop culture/video game component. honestly has floored me before.

HBOMBERGUY | perennial. evergreen, even. have to rec.

CARI CAN READ | i love her. so calming to me. great reviews but i must recommend her going over the plots of the sara j maas books because she's so kind about it but so clearly cannot contain how idiotic the plot is. it's both soothing and hilarious.

ALEX AVILA | video essays in the truest form. really well produced. usually on musical artists. he did some like... past stuff about popular gay ships that i do not want to hear or think about.

[butterflyscribbles]

What do Tom, Sonic and Tails do when Maddie and Knuckles are away?

Outside of the house, I feel like Tom loves to take them on a drive once and a while. Sonic likes seeing the sights with company and Tails likes talking cars with Tom. Fishing isn’t Sonic’s thing as we’ve seen but Tails loves it. He’d be out all day if he could. They’ll get dinner at a local place and Tom will take them to the library where Sonic tears through their comic section and Tails reads up on engineering and coding.

If they’re home for the night, movies and cartoons a plenty. Anything animated. Tom makes dinner, chicken wings (if Tails has had a rough day) or chili dogs (if Sonic’s had a rough day) with mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert. He’ll also break out his old tunes for Tails to listen to as he works on a new invention and Sonic burns off steam on the treadmill. They’ll occasionally play old video games on an ancient console that has been stowed away in Tom’s closet for decades. He shows them no mercy just cause they’re his kids he’s here to win lol.

Bonus that no one asked for but I think about a lot:

When it’s just Knuckles and Tom, they spar. Tom grew up with brothers and solves all his problems with his fists….I feel like he and Knuckles would bond tremendously over that fact. Knuckles also loves Tom’s music and enjoys watching him grill on days where weather allows. Smokey flavors are a fave for both of them.

[artbyblastweave]

So with superhero origins, what's basically always been the case is that the writers exploit whichever area of cutting-edge science is currently in the zeitgeist, banking heavily that the audience will be unlikely to understand the actual effective limits of the science under discussion. In the pulp era many of the protocapes are getting whatever "power" they have from souped-up training regimens, healthy living, "Eastern Wisdom," whatever. In the thirties and forties it trends chemical- they're taking "miracle pills" or inhaling weird vapors or whatever, its steroids, they're on steroids, or possibly meth. In the sixties, in the atomic age, its particles, its radiation, its rays. Eventually, you know, it's pretty well understood that radiation can't do that either, so they migrate over to genetic engineering, cybernetics, nanobots. Every cape and their brother was some kind of cyborg or lab experiment in the 90s. These days it's quantum this, string-theory that, dimensional wonkery, cats in boxes. In 20 or 30 years we'll have a better sense of what all of that actually means in practice (likely not much) and then it'll be something else.

I've observed that Dr. Strange and other magical characters are actually basically immune to this treadmill, because they're magic- that's already post-modern and fluid and squishy and immune to the expectation of real-world scientific rigor. They're vulnerable to changing cultural perceptions of magic, the Strange of the 60s isn't interchangeable with the Strange from the 2010s, but it's not as drastic a shift. From the other direction Green Lantern is also kind of resistant to the treadmill because the lantern tech is, and always has been, ludicrously advanced and totally divorced from any real-world techno-logic- It's Clarke's third law shit. Flash was forcibly made immune to the treadmill through the introduction of The Speed Force into the mythos- it's not a chemical accident, it's a higher fundamental power, it's just how this universe is metaphysically structured, now stop asking questions.

In due time I suspect that all superheroic origins will converge on one of these. Unfalsifiable magic, unfalsifiable alien toys, unfalsifiable higher unifying forces. Or else they'll fall into the gaping maw of the secret fourth thing that lurks beneath and intersects with all three of these- that you got powers instead of radiation poisoning from that accident because we're in a story, the thing happened instead of not happening because it was more interesting, because "narrative" is a force as real, if not realer, than gravity. Of course it goes without saying that you need to be really, really good at writing to pull off the secret fourth thing. Start fucking around with the secret fourth thing and the result is either going to be genuinely transcendent metafiction or something so self-absorbed and tautological that it disappears up its own ass.

[i-was-today-years-old-when]

i learned that Treadmills Were Originally Created as a Form of Torture

The treadmill was invented as a rehabilitation device by a British man named William Cubitt in 1818. It was originally designed as a way to make prisoners more productive by milling corn, and pumping water at the same time. However it became a popular “atonement” device for lower level criminals.

It was a lot like the sport of log-rolling, only instead of falling safely into the water, participants would end up falling onto the hard ground below, and run the risk of becoming gravely injured.

Cubitt created several different versions of the treadmill. The most popular one was originally located at Brixton Prison in London and consisted of a wide wheel that prisoners had to run on. It could hold 24 prisoners. Most included partitions to prevent the prisoners from socializing.

The treadmill proved to be so popular that half of all prisons had them by 1842. Those unlucky enough to receive this punishment often did so for up to ten hours per day. One of the most famous people to endure it was Oscar Wilde, during his imprisonment for gross indecency.

The popularity of the treadmill, however declined. The British started to emphasize education as a means to rehabilitate their prisoners. Many argued that the treadmill was a dangerous practice that led to an unusually high death rate of prisoners. By 1898, they were outlawed.

Designs for a new type of treadmill designed for exercise emerged in 1913 when American inventor CL Hagen was issued a patent for a “training-machine.”

Later on, an American engineer named William Staub would create the modern form of the treadmill, called the Pacemaster 600.

Today, treadmills are one of the most popular types of exercise equipment in the world, though I’m pretty sure they are still considered to be a type of torture for some.

[shadesofmauve]

Alliance Normandy SR-2 redesign: Deck 5

We've finally arrived at the bottom: deck 5, home of the hangar, the Kodiak shuttles, and now, Marine Land!

There are some oddities with this deck, because I was guessing at how fast the hull tapers towards the bottom at the back (I'm working off references that show front and rear elevations, but that only shows you the broadest points). I messed up something with my core chamber measurements and had to make the entire rear end (heh) slightly bigger here before posting, but the deck design errs on the side of narrower.

Hangar

When I wrote A Star To Steer Her By I ignored the silly shipbuilding because I was focused on a relationship (and because it wasn't supposed to be a door-stopper novel. Oops), but as I went on things like "this hangar should be regularly exposed to vacuum, how can you leave gym equipment in here" bothered me more and more. By the time of Sunset and Evening Star I couldn't let that state of affairs stand. So: this hangar is regularly exposed to vacuum. No fancy force fields that keep in the air but let out shuttles. You don't leave anything in here that isn't protected from vacuum and strapped down.

The hangar is the limiting factor in the size of the entire ship; it has to fit between the central elevator and the hangar door, and it must fit two Kodiaks. To reach this size I had to make the Kodiaks boxier; my drawings are taller for their length than the game models. They still seat twelve, and there's room for one to do a 180 on it's axis while the other is in its cradle. The hangar floor slopes down slightly towards the door in the middle, and the Kodiaks are 'shelved' to the sides.

Cortez runs the flight deck from the exact same place he is in game, but now he has bulkheads and windows between himself and the cold death of space. Airlocks on either side give access to the flight deck. There are also giant doors straight into the deck 4 cargo bays, but those won't open unless the hangar is pressurized.

Marine Land

Jack's Sulking Pit is now a gym, with weights, treadmill, stationary bike, heavy bags, and mats for sparing (and occasionally making pillow forts for evacuee toddlers). Mats are usually stored stowed against the wall, and other equipment can be moved as needed.

To port are the marine berths. The usual compliment of marines is a dozen, including their unit leader, but there are twelve bunks as well as the officer's tiny cabin (because there's no point wasting the space, and you never know). Other than their semi-privacy, the marine racks are no different from the enlisted racks on the two decks above.*

*"Except for the smell." — the rest of the crew, probably.

Berthing the marines on deck 5 is all about quick access to their arms, armor, and transport. Directly across from the marine berths is the entrance to the locker room and armory. After armoring up they grab their weapons and can get to the shuttle through an airlock entrance in the armory. On the way back, they reverse the process; stow weapons, strip off armor — often dropping damaged plating into the recycler chute as they go by — strip down, and shower.

The Alliance military is gender neutral, and nowhere is this as obvious as the marine lockers. The marine unit regularly strips down in front of each other; it's just part of getting ready for work. You can't be body-shy and be an Alliance Marine.

(I like to think the separate bathrooms on the crew deck were the Illusive Man's weird traditionalist decision. Sometimes the gendered-bathroom thing starts to grate on Bo Huan, the third-watch pilot, so they come down to deck five to use the locker room showers, leading Joker to quip "Ah, the third gender: marine!")

More engineering, and the answers to a few questions

Ladders from deck 4 lead down to another engineering area on the hangar level. It's not connected to the main areas of the deck by conventional corridors, but it is accessible through the warren of service passages that run throughout the ship. More of those access-ways lead aft of the eezo core chamber to the fusion plant (not shown). Because the core chamber narrows faster than the ship, it's easier to get around it here than it is on the engineering deck, where the core chamber is at it's widest but the hull has started to narrow. These access tunnels are rarely comfortable to get through, though they often open out into areas that are easier to work in, or into surprising pockets of unused space. They may require crawling or climbing, or clambering over obstacles.

All the maintenance accesses are kept pressurized and aired up, but the habitable area shown on these posts is wrapped in an inner hull, and the doors for maintenance access are all pressure doors: if a hit damages the tunnel you use to access the ship's innards, it won't kill all the crew in the room next to it.**

**It will obliterate the illicit still and the not-actually-a-secret-make-out-nest, as well as anyone stupid enough to be distilling and***/or fucking in those locations, which is why we don't lollygag between the hulls in combat, private!

***AND?****

****Some people are remarkably talented.

Normandy redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

Hangar

[stxrsniolo]

𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒕 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝒕͟𝒉͟𝒆͟ ͟𝒆͟𝒕͟𝒉͟𝒆͟𝒓 𝑓𝑒𝑎𝑡. 𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒔

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 : alright, babe, heads-up! this thing you’re about to dive into? it’s a total mashup of fluffy feels and angsty vibes, straight from chris’s pov. i tried to keep it vague, bouncing around like his mind’s on a treadmill going way too fast with half-processed thoughts all over the place, just like he’s always saying, so buckle up .ᐟ

it’s late, the kind of late where the house is quiet except for the hum of the fridge and the occasional creak of the floorboards.

i’m slouched on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling aimlessly through the mess of the internet; memes, thirst traps, bullshit ads... when it catches my eye.

buy a sensory experience. taste pure desire distilled from another soul.

the words hit like a punch, weird and wild, some next-level tech shit i’d never even thought about. i’ve got cash from the latest brand deal burning a hole in my bank account, and my curiosity’s buzzing like a live wire.

fuck it, i think, tapping through.

the site’s slick with black background, neon text, promising a trip into someone else’s rawest want. slots are vanishing fast, red “booked” tags popping up like warning lights.

only one left, an hour from now.

“oh, fuck,” i mutter, my thumb hovering over the screen. every other time’s gone, snatched up by whoever’s jumping on this hype train. my heart’s thumping but not from fear, just that restless itch i get when i’m about to do something dumb and thrilling.

i smash “buy now,” lock in the spot, and i’m up, adrenaline kicking in hard.

i stumble to the bathroom, stripping as i go, hoodie hitting the floor, socks sliding off, sweatpants pooling at my ankles. the shower’s old, pipes groaning as i crank the knob, and water blasts out, cold at first, making me hiss through my teeth. it warms fast, steam curling up, fogging the cracked mirror. i step in, letting the heat pound my shoulders, my back, washing off the day’s grime, the faint sweat from filming, the lingering smell of takeout.

shampoo stings my eyes as i scrub my hair, dark strands sticking to my forehead, and i rinse quick, soap suds swirling down the drain. my skin’s pink when i step out, dripping, grabbing a towel that’s seen better days; rough against my chest, my arms, my thighs. i dry off fast, water still beading on my neck as i yank open the bathroom door.

“yo, nick, matt—i’m out!” i yell, voice bouncing off the walls as i dart to my room.

nick’s “where the hell you goin’?” and matt’s lazy “what now?” chase me, but i don’t stop to answer.

my closet’s a mess of clothes spilling out and sneakers tangled in the corner. i grab a fresh pair of sweatpants, soft and loose, tugging them on, the waistband settling low on my hips.

no boxers, too rushed.

a black t-shirt’s next, clinging a little to my damp skin, and i throw on my favorite hoodie, the one with the faded logo, sleeves frayed from overuse. socks, mismatched, who cares, then my sneakers, laces sloppy as i tie them. keys jingle in my hand, phone shoved in my pocket, and i’m out the door.

the night’s cool, air sharp against my wet hair as i slide into the car, making the engine roar to life, headlights cutting through the dark, and i peel out, tires squealing on the asphalt.

the streets are alive, cars honking, lights flashing, my pulse matching the chaos as i weave through traffic, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping the dash, nerves and excitement mixing like a fucked-up cocktail.

my phone buzzes—some notification i ignore—while the gps drones directions in that robotic voice. “turn left in 200 feet.” i crank the radio, bass thumping, drowning out my thoughts as the city blurs past, neon signs, shadowed alleys, people laughing on sidewalks.

the building looms up fast: a towering slab of glass and steel, all sleek lines and moneyed shine. i park crooked, still new to all this driver thing, slamming the door, my sneakers scuffing the pavement as i jog to the entrance.

inside, everything felt like entering another world; marble floors gleaming, air cool and sterile, tech humming faintly like a heartbeat. suits and heels click past, all business, while i’m this scruffy kid in sweatpants, hoodie pulled up, sticking out like a sore thumb. i catch a glimpse of a girl down a side hall as i move, hair messy, jeans ripped, a vibe that screams “i don’t belong here either.” she’s gone before i can blink, disappearing around a corner.

a woman in a crisp blazer meets me, clipboard in hand, her heels tapping as she leads me down a hall. “this way, mr. sturniolo,” she says, voice smooth and clipped.

we pass glass doors, screens flashing data, people in lab coats murmuring. she stops at a room with white walls and a single recliner in the center, all clinical and cold. “you’ll sit here,” she explains, gesturing to the chair. “we’ll fit you with a headset, inject a compound, then leave you alone. it’s a lucid hallucination with pure sensory immersion into someone’s distilled desire.” she slides a contract over, pages thick with text, and i scrawl my name, too amped to read the fine print, just a quick “chris” in messy loops.

what’s the worst that could happen?

they sit me down, the chair soft but firm, leather creaking under me. the headset’s cold metal presses my temples, wires dangling, and a tech guy adjusts it, muttering about calibration.

then the needle all sharp, glinting, filled with some weird, silvery liquid. it stabs my arm, and i flinch, the burn spreading fast, racing through my veins like liquid fire.

“relax,” the lady says, her voice fading as the door clicks shut. my heartbeat’s loud, thumping in my chest, my ears, and then, fuck, it hits.

i’m not in the chair anymore, i’m somewhere else, someone else’s world.

it’s warm, heavy, like sinking into a pool of molasses. my senses light up, sharp, overwhelming, and i’m in a bathroom, tiles cracked, air damp with the ghost of a shower.

there’s a girl, the one from the hall, curled up in the tub, her hair sticking to her tear-streaked face, knees hugged tight, her sobs quiet but gut-wrenching.

she’s fully clothed—jeans, a faded tee—shaking like she’s breaking apart.

this is her desire? this raw, jagged pain?

it’s not just seeing her, man, it’s feeling her.

everything crashes in at once; i taste the salt of her tears, bitter on my tongue, feel the weight of shouts pounding my skull, full angry voices, faceless, screaming her name like a curse.

memories flood me, not mine but hers: hands shoving her into walls, shoulders knocking her aside, eyes sliding past her like she’s air.

“you’re nothing.”

“get out of the way.”

“nobody gives a fuck.”

it’s a tidal wave of hurt, heavy as lead, and my chest caves, throat tightening. i’m too damn empathetic, always have been, and this is shredding me. she’s been through hell, and i’m drowning in it with her.

she doesn’t know i’m here, right? this is her fantasy, her distilled want, and i’m just a shadow in it; but it’s not wild or sexy like i thought. she craves normal, being heard, understood, loved. it’s so basic, so real, it punches me in the gut harder than any thrill ever could.

she’s rocking now, arms tight around herself, whispering, “why can’t it just stop?” and i can’t stand it.

i step forward, my sneakers squeaking on the tile, loud in the quiet. her head snaps up, eyes red and wide, like i’m a glitch she can’t process. “hey,” i say, soft, crouching down so i’m eye-level, my sweatpants damp against the floor. “y’okay?”

she blinks, wiping her face with a shaky hand. “who… who are you?” her voice is small, rough, but there’s a flicker in it of curiosity, maybe hope.

“just some dude,” i say, shrugging, keeping it chill. “name’s chris. saw you sittin’ here, lookin’ like you could use someone to talk to. what’s fuckin’ you up?”

she sniffs, sleeve dragging across her nose, hesitation in her eyes. “it’s… everything. people... they don’t care. i’m just… there. nobody listens. nobody stays.” her words crack, spilling out raw.

i nod, settling cross-legged on the tile, cold seeping through my pants. “yeah, i feel that. feels like you’re yellin’ into nothing, right? i’ve got brothers, loud as hell, but sometimes i’m just background noise to ‘em. fuckin’ sucks.”

a tiny laugh slips out of her, shaky but real. “sounds familiar. i’ve got… people around, but it’s like i’m a ghost.”

“that’s bullshit,” i say, leaning back on my hands, meeting her gaze. “y’ain’t a ghost to me right now. i’m here, listenin’. what’s your story, what’s got you holed up in this tub?”

she takes a deep breath, unfolding a little, her knees dropping. “it’s dumb. just… years of it. being shoved around, ignored, hurt. i keep thinking if i could just feel normal, like someone gave a damn... it’d be enough.”

“ain’t dumb,” i say, firm, my voice cutting through her doubt. “that’s real shit. i’ve had days where i’d kill to feel like i matter to someone outside my crew. you deserve that someone who sticks around, hears you out.”

her eyes soften, a tear slipping free, but she’s smiling now, faint and warm. “you’re… nice. weird, but nice. i don’t even know you.”

“chris,” i repeated with a grin, leaning closer. “and you’re what, tub warrior? you got a name?”

“y/n,” she says, her laugh stronger, still trembling but brighter. “guess i’m badass at crying in bathrooms.”

“fuck yeah, you are,” i tease, my grin widening. “but real talk, y’not alone in this. i’m feelin’ it with you, every damn bit. it’s heavy, but it’s okay to want more. you deserve more.”

she looks at me, really looks, and we sit there, two strangers in her mind, the bathroom cold and quiet, her tears slowing. “thanks,” she whispers, voice steadier. “i… i needed that.”

“anytime,” i say, meaning it, even if this is just some head-trip tech. “y’gonna be okay, y/n. i can tell you’re tougher than all this crap.”

the room starts to blur, the edges fading, pulling me back and her smile’s the last thing i see, soft and real, as the hallucination dissolves.

i blink, and i’m in the chair again, headset buzzing, my chest tight, eyes stinging with tears i didn’t know i’d shed. i didn’t just taste her desire: i lived it, breathed it, and fuck, it was heavy, beautiful, and so damn human.

╭ ❝ my dears, i truly cherish the affection you show through your reposts, and for that, i’m grateful; however, let us be unequivocally clear: my narratives are my sacred domain, not to be borrowed/reshaped without my consent 

𝐌𝐘 𝐁𝐀𝐃𝐃𝐈𝐄𝐒ㅤ: ㅤ @courta13 @chrislilcumslvt @marrykisskilled @chrislova @sturnshood @inspiredangel @strnilolover @emely9274 @sturns-mermaid @ariieeesworld @pixie-sticks-are-good @luvjaeeee @sturnslutz @mattswifeyy @mattswifeyy @oopsiedaisydeer @v4lsturn @pair-of-pantaloons @idkwhatthisevenislol @sturn777 @whore4mattsturniolo @mattchalattee @madifilipowiczisthebest @fratbrochrisgf @sturniolo101 @ivysturnss @mattsatellite @sturnsblogs @izzylovesmatt @allisonclairee @m4gz-png @mr-wrinkleton @bluestriips @surprisecurlyfriesbackup @ariestrxsh

╰ ★ in case that you desire to be tagged in future works, here's the taglist. 

[nasa]

For the Benefit of All: Assistive Tech Developed from NASA Tech

What do modern cochlear implants and robotic gloves have in common? They were derived from NASA technology. We’ve made it easier to find and use our patented inventions that could help create products that enhance life for people with disabilities.

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which highlights the contributions of American workers with disabilities – many of whom use assistive technology on the job. Take a look at these assistive technologies that are NASA spinoffs.

Low-Vision Headsets

The Joint Optical Reflective Display (JORDY) device is a headset that uses NASA image processing and head-mounted display technology to enable people with low vision to read and write. JORDY enhances individuals’ remaining sight by magnifying objects up to 50 times and allowing them to change contrast, brightness, and display modes. JORDY's name was inspired by Geordi La Forge, a blind character from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” whose futuristic visor enabled him to see.

Cochlear Implants

Work that led to the modern cochlear implant was patented by a NASA engineer in the 1970s. Following three failed corrective surgeries, Adam Kissiah combined his NASA electronics know-how with research in the Kennedy Space Center technical library to build his own solution for people with severe-to-profound hearing loss who receive little or no benefit from hearing aids. Several companies now make the devices, which have been implanted in hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Robotic Gloves

Ironhand, from Swedish company Bioservo Technologies, is the world’s first industrial-strength robotic glove for factory workers and others who perform repetitive manual tasks. It helps prevent stress injuries but has been especially warmly received by workers with preexisting hand injuries and conditions. The glove is based on a suite of patents for the technology developed by NASA and General Motors to build the hands of the Robonaut 2 humanoid robotic astronaut.

Smart Glasses

Neurofeedback technology NASA originally developed to improve pilots’ attention has been the basis for products aimed at helping people manage attention disorders without medication. The devices measure brainwave output to gauge attention levels according to the “engagement index” a NASA engineer created. Then, they show the results to users, helping them learn to voluntarily control their degree of concentration. One such device is a pair of smart glasses from Narbis, whose lenses darken as attention wanes.

Anti-Gravity Treadmills

A NASA scientist who developed ways to use air pressure to simulate gravity for astronauts exercising in space had the idea to apply the concept for the opposite effect on Earth. After licensing his technology, Alter-G Inc. developed its anti-gravity G-Trainer treadmill, which lets users offload some or all of their weight while exercising. The treadmills can help people recover from athletic or brain injuries, and they allow a safe exercise regimen for others with long-term conditions such as arthritis.

Wireless Muscle Sensors

Some of the most exciting assistive technologies to spin off may be yet to come. Delsys Inc. developed electromyographic technology to help NASA understand the effects of long-term weightlessness on astronauts’ muscles and movements. Electromyography detects and analyzes electrical signals emitted when motor nerves trigger movement. Among the company’s customers are physical therapists developing exercise routines to help patients recover from injuries. But some researchers are using the technology to attempt recoveries that once seemed impossible, such as helping paralyzed patients regain movement, letting laryngectomy patients speak, and outfitting amputees with artificial limbs that work like the real thing.  

To further enhance the lives of people with disabilities, NASA has identified a selection of patented technologies created for space missions that could spur the next generation of assistive technology here on Earth.

Want to learn more about assistive technologies already in action? Check out NASA Spinoff to find products and services that wouldn’t exist without space exploration.   

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[sherewrytes]

ℂ𝕆𝕄𝔼 ℂ𝕃𝕆𝕊𝔼

Gym Bro Satoru x Tom boy black reader

Synopsis: You met Satoru at your apartment complex's gym

It was a typical evening at the apartment complex's gym. You had decided to squeeze in a quick workout before dinner, hoping to burn off some stress from the day. As you approached the treadmill, you noticed someone already on it, running at a steady pace.

"Hey there," a voice greeted you, pulling your attention away from your thoughts.

You looked over to see a guy with a friendly smile, his white hair swept to the side and laced with sweat. He had a calm, inviting presence about him.

"Hey," you replied, offering a small smile in return as you stepped onto the treadmill beside him.

Satoru was eyeing you up next to him thinking "Damn, who's that?" he thought, his gaze lingering on your figure. Your confidence exuded as you warmed up on the treadmill next to him.

The way your black tank top hugged your curves, and your loc'd hair was pulled back into a ponytail and dyed red and the ends. It was like you were the only person in the room, and everything else faded into the background.

As you both continued your workouts, you found yourselves falling into an easy conversation. Satoru talked about his job as a freelance software engineer, and you shared stories from your own work as a graphic designer/ creative director.

Despite your different backgrounds, you found common ground in your love for fitness and shared interests.

Time flew by as you ran side by side, exchanging laughs and smiles. Before you knew it, your workouts were over, but the conversation continued as you cooled down.

"So, same time tomorrow?" Satoru asked, a hopeful glint in his eyes.

You grinned. "Definitely. It's nice to have a gym buddy."

The next day, you met Satoru at the gym again, and the day after that, and the day after that. Before long, your daily gym sessions became the highlight of your routine.

Outside the gym, your friendship blossomed. You grabbed post-workout smoothies together, went on evening jogs around the neighborhood, and even teamed up for the occasional Brazilian Ju Jitsu class.

Satoru found himself being more attracted to you the more time you guys spent together outside of the gym.

One day, as you were finishing up a particularly grueling workout, (one that Satoru crafted for you to get a more toned back and waist) Satoru looked over at you with a grin.

"Hey Ma, my friends are coming over to my apartment tonight wanna come over and hang with us."

"Sure, I'd love to," you replied, flashing him a smile. "I could use a break from all this sweating."

Satoru laughed, his eyes lighting up with amusement. "Great! It'll be fun, I promise."

Later that evening, you found yourself standing outside Satoru's apartment, nervously adjusting your casual fit. You took a deep breath before knocking on the door.

The door swung open, revealing Satoru with a wide grin on his face. "Hey, you made it!" You eyed Satoru up and down. He was wearing a black fitted vest with a gold chain and matching bracelet paired with grey sweatpants. He looked good you thought. Satoru caught you checking him out and smirked. He opened the door wider for you to walk in the apartment.

Satoru really loved your lil fit, he knew from you both always texting and talking that you were a bit insecure about your more tom boy side, but he always assured you that you looked damn good. You stepped inside, greeted by the cozy atmosphere of Satoru's apartment. Shoko, Geto, and Nanami were already there, lounging on the couch and chatting animatedly.

"Hey guys, this is y/n," Satoru introduced you, gesturing towards you. "She's my gym buddy."

"Nice to meet you," Shoko said with a smile, while Nanami nodded in greeting. Geto being the messy best friend of Satoru's piped up and said "Oh she's the baddie you won't stop yappin' about." Satoru's eyes cut to you then Geto.

You felt a blush creeping onto your cheeks at Geto's comment, but Satoru's reaction made your heart skip a beat. His eyes flickered to you, a mixture of surprise and amusement dancing in them.

Gojo hid his face a lil then said "Geto wtf man forreal. but yah that's y/n" he said, his tone teasing. "She's the one who's been kicking my butt at the gym."

You rolled your eyes playfully. "Please, you're the one who's been pushing me to lift heavier weights."

Shoko chuckled, shaking her head. "Well, it's nice to finally meet the infamous gym buddy. Satoru hasn't stopped talking about you."

Satoru's cheeks tinted pink at Shoko's words, and you couldn't help but smile at the sight. It was clear that his friends meant a lot to him, and you felt honored to be a part of this moment.

Geto nudged Satoru with an elbow, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. "Looks like you've got yourself a crush, bro."

Satoru's blush deepened, and he shot Geto a mock glare. "Shut up, man," he said with an amused tone, while he playfully shoved Geto.

Nanami, ever the voice of reason, simply nodded in agreement. "You two seem to get along well. It's nice to see."

The rest of the evening flew by in a blur of laughter and conversation. You found yourself fitting in seamlessly with Satoru's friends, sharing stories and inside jokes as if you'd known each other for years.

As the night came to a close, Satoru walked you to your door, a soft smile playing on his lips.

"Thanks for coming, i know the invite as kinda last minute" he said, his voice warm with sincerity.

You grinned up at him. "Thanks for inviting me. I had a great time."

Satoru hesitated for a moment before leaning in to give you a quick hug, his arms wrapping around you in a gentle embrace.

You felt a flutter in your stomach at the contact, a rush of warmth spreading through you. You felt his body pressed against yours, the light scent of cologne and Geto's cigarette smoke on his shirt.

"Let's do this again sometime," he said, pulling back to look at you with a smile.

You nodded, your heart racing with excitement. "Definitely."

As you walked inside your apartment, the memory of Satoru's hug lingered in your mind, sending shivers down your spine. The air felt charged with anticipation, and you couldn't shake the feeling of wanting more.

Thanks for reading. Wrote this in one go. lemme know if you want this to be explored more

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Blue and Fire Engine Red, Pt 2

Kara shuts the door of her car shut behind her, and smoothes her sweating palms down the front of her jeans. She should have stayed in uniform, she thinks. She’s no longer on shift, but she always feels more confident with a badge pinned to her chest. As it is, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, she feels exposed, as though anyone looking at her would be able to see just how fast her heart is racing.

But she’s come this far-- she can see this through. Exhaling deeply, Kara starts the short walk up the drive to the firehouse’s open bay doors. As she crosses the threshold sounds of activity fills her ears. She glimpses firefighters rolling hoses and mounting them on the engine, and others are buffing the chrome bumper of the ambulance. She catches the eye of one, she thinks she recognizes him from multiple calls– Brainy, she’s heard the others call him. He brightens at the sight of her, and to her horror comes trotting over to greet her. 

“You are approximately 32 minutes late, Sergeant Danvers,” he says precisely. He clasps his hands behind his back. 

“I–I’m sorry?” Kara asks. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming, let alone what time she planned to show up.

“Since I glimpsed you conversing with Lieutenant Reilly, I anticipated you would seek her out. Seeing as your shift ended one hour ago, and the precinct is 30 minutes from the firehouse, you are, by my calculations, late.”

Kara blinks. “There was traffic on the freeway… how did you–?”

“The lieutenant can be found in the gym,” Brainy clips, extending an arm towards the far corner of the engine bay. There, Kara glimpses a glass paneled wall and the outline of a pull-down machine. 

“Thank you,” Kara issues numbly.

“You are most welcome.” Brainy then turns and returns to the ambulance and his chores. By now Kara’s thundering heart has climbed to her throat, but it;s too late to back out now that she’s been seen.

Kara wipes her palms again, nodding to herself. “You can do this,” she murmurs. “Look sharp, Danvers.”

Kara follows the hum treadmills and the clink of weights to the back right corner, where a glass paneled room sat under the spiraling staircase up to the second floor. There she stops, mesmerized by a dark swinging ponytail. Lena.

Lena running.

Lena running in a tank top and spandex shorts. Muscled arms swing in rhythm with her bobbing head, and Kara can glimpse round earbuds nestled in her ears. 

She almost turns away, if only to keep from getting caught ogling. But a sweaty towel smacks Lena in the side of the head, pulling her attention to the young woman smirking off to Kara’s left. Nia, is it?

“Got a visitor, LT!”

Lena’s head swivels towards Kara without breaking stride. Her sweaty features brighten at the sight of her. 

“Sergeant Danvers!” she chirps. She hops onto the strats of the treadmill, taking a moment to tap the machine off before stepping down entirely. She uses Nia’s towel to wipe her glistening face and neck, her breath huffing lightly. Kara’s mouth goes dry. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

Kara blinks, giving herself a little shake to re-orientate herself. Then she gives as easy a grin as she can manage. “And give up a free autograph? Not on your life.”

A smirk crosses Lena’s features as Nia steps up to stand at her shoulder. “Autograph?”

Kara plucks her calendar from her bag, giving it a playful flourish. Nia’s brow furrows, then lifts in delight.

“Oh my god! Miss March has a fan?!”

Lena turns towards her coworker with a roll of her eyes. “Nal…”

“Yeah?” 

“Give us a minute, will you?”

“But–!” 

“Nia.”

Nia sighs. “Fiiiiine…” She grabs her water and phone from beside the weight bench, and all but prances out with a smug, knowing smile in Kara’s direction. “Nice seeing you, Sergeant.”

They wait until Nia slips out, leaning them together with nothing but charged air between them. Kara gazes at Lena, who gives a soft smile in return. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Lena smiles back. Her cheeks are flushed, and Kara feels a glimmer of satisfaction at the thought it might not be entirely from exertion. 

“So…” she says. “I have a place or two in mind for that drink. Someplace… friendly.”

Lena gives a slow nod. “I like friendly.”

“Someplace where we could get some privacy.”

Another nod, this time accompanied by a deliberate step forward. “Privacy is good.”

“And, ahhh… one of them just so happens to be walking distance from my place.”

Dark eyebrows lift in surprise, and suddenly Kara finds herself awkwardly trying to reel herself back.

“I mean, you know, in case we can’t drive after. I didn’t mean to imply– not that I expected… um, that.”

Pressing her lips together, Lena waits for Kara to talk herself out. It serves to jolt Kara back into herself; she chuckles. “You going to cut me a break here or what?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Lena returns, grinning. “I’m curious to see how far we’re not going to go on this date.”

Kara laughs. “Okay, okay. Look– what I mean is that I don’t expect anything more than a drink to get to know you better. That’s all.”

With a slow nod, Lena saunters even closer. “Message received,” she murmurs smoothly. “That said…”

She leans in close, until Kara can smell the tantalizing tang of sweat and the subtle fragrance of Lena’s shampoo. Her heart pounds so hard there’s no way Lena can’t hear it.

“If any of that,” Lena continues, “were to follow… I wouldn’t be averse to it.”

Unable to help her answering grin, Kara cocks her head. “Well, before we even get to that, we do have one order of business to get to first.”

She flips the calendar tauntingly between them, even going so far as to let the thing tap against Lena’s chest when she waggles it playfully. Lena glances down sharply, clearly having forgotten the “true” purpose of Kara’s visit. She throws her head back and laughs a full belly laugh that turns Kara’s insides to jello.

“Guess I’ll have to rustle up something to sign that with–”

A marker flies out of nowhere, bouncing off of Lena’s chest. She fumbles to catch it, and Kara lunges for it on reflex. Their heads crack together audibly, and they both stagger apart, cursing.

“Jesus fuck–!”

“Godammit!”

Nia’s voice calls cheerily from outside. “You’re welcome!”

Kara locks eyes with Lena, who grimaces at her. 

“You said something about privacy?”