#we were amateurs but we put a lot of effort and spirit

[tsukuyomiland]

In an alternate universe, I'm not a plastic artist but a music artist and I take part in musicals whatever composing or acting in them. I even am a good singer there. In my free time, I try to draw a bit and even if I'm not good at all I have a lot of fun.

In this one I have no idea about music at all because it's basically maths and I'm useless when it comes to numbers yet I have so much fun taking part in musicals, acting, singing and making props and costumes that if I were able to play an instrument beyond Twinkle twinkle little star it would have been my second artistic aspiration.

[vital-information]

“In fact, one of the big ironies of Waiting for Guffman is a self-reflexive one. This is a film about non-professional actors putting on a show, made by professional actors making a movie. This accomplished ensemble renders the people of Blaine so colorfully and truthfully that viewers never feel an ounce of condescension either from the actors or the man directing them, and that’s critical.

Instead, everybody behind the camera and in front of it really gets into the spirit of the show and into the heads of these quirky characters. The cast and crew has accomplished this task by modulating or tuning their talent level (some might say lowering it), to the level of the people they are depicting: enthusiastic amateurs with a flair for performing, but no real talent to speak of. This quality of zealous amateurism emerges in everything from the songs performed in Red, White and Blaine to the very stagecraft of the show itself, and it is all so charming and enthusiastic that it almost feels like admiration.

“We were trying to make ourselves laugh, but we were also trying not to write any better than they would have,” composer Harry Shearer explains.

“The fun part of these projects is that you’re never trying to write really bad stuff, but nor are you trying to write better than the characters are capable of. You’re trying to write in character. That’s part of your acting. You’re trying to be in the heads of these people, so you’re not judging them as you write. Instead, you inhabit them as you write.”

“These are not professional people,” Joseph Garrity stresses. “They live in an almost-hick town and they work with what they’ve got. I tend not to have a lot of money on these films, so I also work with what I’ve got. People put on shows in their community theater, so [in doing that] you become just like these people.

“How good are you?” Garrity asks. “If you are not very good, you are still doing the best you can. I think that’s what [Guest’s] films are all about: people doing the best they can.”

Sometimes, the best that people can muster just really isn’t that good, a fact Roberto Schaefer’s probing camera notices with subtlety through-out the film. For instance, during Ron and Sheila’s dreadful but amusing “Midnight at the Oasis” audition, O’Hara, as Sheila, visibly mouths all of Fred Willard’s dialogue as she interacts with him, a typical amateur’s mistake.

Yet the camera doesn’t highlight this gaffe. There is no close-up of O’Hara, and no reaction shot featuring Lloyd or Corky or even the domi­neering Ron, realizing that Sheila is mouthing her husband’s lines in an effort not to lose her place in the scene. Instead, in an all-encompassing master shot, Ron and Sheila simply do their thing, and O’Hara’s deliberate but subtle gaffe represents one funny element of many in the scene. Because the joke isn’t spotlighted, the audience feels rewarded when catching this minutiae, feeling it has discovered the punch line all on its own. Frankly, these laughs are always the best ones, when you realize the filmmaker isn’t talking down to you, or spoon-feeding you the humor.”

“The Making of Waiting for Guffman (1996),” Scraps from the Loft

[pochiperpe90]

[L’Officiel Hommes] Luca Marinelli, rising star of Italian cinema

To win his first film role, Luca Marinelli agreed to put on sixteen kilos. For the second, he had to shave his whole body and learn to walk in heels more than eight inches high.

"If I believe in the part, there is nothing I'm not willing to do," says the twenty-six-year-old protagonist of ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’, the film by Saverio Costanzo presented at last year's edition of the Venice Film Festival.

To play the role of a boy devoured by guilt due to an accident that happened to his sister, Marinelli did not hesitate to ruin his athletic physique by gorging himself on fats and carbohydrates, and giving up any activity for three months. As soon as he could, he started running again to lose the extra pounds. Between football and swimming he has always been used to playing sports. But the forced immobility had atrophied his muscles, and at the end of the first runs he ended up vomiting his soul from the effort. After a month of intense exercise, however, he had already lost the extra pounds.

"Changing your body makes you feel more vulnerable and you become prey to irrational fears: when I was fat I was afraid of dying every time I took the stairs, when I was hairless I was afraid that my eyebrows would never grow back," says the actor while he eats a salad sitting at the bar of the Palazzo della Triennale in Milan. "But it's always a very interesting experience", he continues, absently stroking the hairs on his forearm, still growing since the end of the shooting of “L’ultimo terrestre”, a film that will be released next year by Gipi, an Italian illustrator making his debut behind the movie camera. It’s a love story set against the backdrop of an invasion of extraterrestrials, in which Marinelli plays the role of a transvestite friend of the protagonist. To prepare for the part, the actor watched dozens of crossdresser and transgender footage and had to practice for hours walking with extravagant stilts instead of shoes.

“I was told that, as a woman, I move well and I'm quite beautiful. In short, the experience gave me a certain satisfaction”, he jokes, winking with gray-blue eyes.

Compared to the film debut of ‘Solitude of Prime Numbers’, this new film offers him a smaller role and visibility. But Marinelli is not concerned about this. He knows he was very lucky to end on the red carpet of one of the most important festivals in the world with the first film. And he would almost feel calmer if his career were to continue more gradually.

"It was so lightning fast that I was not prepared. Venice was a wonderful experience but I was in panic. In the evening I came home with a terrible headache, I felt like I had two tight screws in my skull. I almost felt at fault to start out so great. And now I'm happy to start again slowly”.

Marinelli finished high school in 2006 and three years later graduated from the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome. Before being chosen by Costanzo for the feature film that gave him notoriety with the public, he had already played several roles in the theater with directors such as Carlo Cecchi and Michele Monetta. His father, actor and film voice actor, tried to introduce him to the world of entertainment as a child, without achieving great results. He had made him voice the voices of Tip and Tap, the grandchildren of Mickey Mouse from the cartoons, and had offered him some amateur roles. Despite being fascinated by the profession, however, the son didn’t feel cut out to be an actor.

“As a child I was shy. I liked being the center of attention, but only with people I had a lot of confidence with. More than being observed, I was interested in observing the lives of others. Not the present ones, but the past ones”.

After high school, Marinelli enrolled in the faculty of archeology in Rome. But after two months in which he attended only lessons that had nothing to do with his course, he realized that the university wasn’t for him and threw himself into acting, overcoming the fears he carried within him since he was a child. Even today, however, it retains some of that shyness. To the point that, whenever he is about to go on stage, he has to resort to small exorcising rites to reduce tension and cancel thoughts. And when we ask him how it feels to tell a complete stranger about himself, he confesses to being a little nervous.

"This is my second interview. From the first, I came out as some kind of psycho. I hope this time it goes better”, he jokes.

He has pain in his neck from a fall that occurred a few days earlier and moves his torso in a slightly stiffly way. He jumped on the ball and crashed to the ground during a game of "calciotto", the eight-a-side football that is popular in Rome, the city where he was born and raised. Every time he turns his head he makes a grimace of pain. Apart from that, Marinelli seems to be quite at ease, and does not resort to clichés. Nor does he try to hide behind sophisticated characters: he wears a blue shirt, military green trousers and brown jacket, in a style that he simply defines "for men", made up of garments unearthed among vintage shops and thrift stalls rather than in the boutiques of the big names. He loves to run around with his bike, although he admits that the longest trip he has done was from Rome to Fregene with a friend. And as soon as he has a free moment he takes his dog Nonò, a foundling dachshund who also follows him on tour, and takes him around the capital for long walks in the company of Sandy, the dog who lives in his parents' house.

Even though he’s aware of the difficulties and uncertainties he risks facing in his profession, he speaks of his dreams with passion and without anguish. He would like to pursue a project as a director and is enthusiastic about the collaboration with Cecchi in “Sogno di una notte di mezza estate”, a piece with which he will tour Italy between November and February.

"I know that being an actor is a job with a very high risk of failure and depression, but for the moment I try to live this lucky moment to the fullest."

Marinelli is not religious, but he’s particularly fascinated by the figure of Christ. He loves reading books and watching films that tell the Nazarene in his human dimension (from the Gospel according to Matthew by Pasolini to Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ), because when he sees a miracle he feels the "smell of burning" and is immediately distracted.

"The story of Jesus, understood as a simple person, is a proof of the wonderful things that man is capable of. And studying it helps to understand how far we live from the example that has been given to us".

Among the dreams in the drawer, remains to work with Eimuntas Nekrošius, the Lithuanian theater director who recently staged Albert Camus' Caligula in Rome. And with Pedro Almodovar, the master of Spanish cinema whose language he knows well. In fact, Marinelli's father spent his childhood in Argentina and passed on to his son his love for Spanish, which Luca speaks with a slight South American inflection.

Of course, the situation in Italy for novice actors is not reassuring. Most of his fellow academics are still looking for work. The lucky ones earn a few euros by acting in the theater or making fiction which is exhausting for the body and demoralizing for the spirit. The others are making a living with alternative uses waiting to be discovered.

“I'm working, but not because I'm the best of those who came out of my class. Luck matters a lot. In Italy the environment is closed and there is little money. Abroad, however, it seems that this art is much more accessible".

His response is interrupted by a strange sigh that sounds like a whale song. It’s the ringtone of his cell phone, a reconstruction of the original music used in the Greek tragedy. Marinelli doesn’t respond, but begins to show signs of unease. He noted that the Palazzo della Triennale hosts an exhibition of Pasolini's portraits that he would like to see. He has little time left, but he adores the poet and insists on entering.

Inside the exhibition, observe the black and white photos taken by Dino Pedriali in 1975 which show the artist reading in his villa in Chia, writing on an Olivetti 22 and walking on a bridge in Sabaudia with his hair down from the wind. Then he stops in front of a photo of Pasolini naked, portrayed in his bedroom.

"What a fascinating man, in this image he reminds me of the bad lieutenant in Abel Ferrara's film," he says as he heads towards the exit. Then, unexpectedly, he turns to his interviewer and asks him with the relieved tone of someone who knows he has completed a business: "Prof, how did the exam go?".

“I'd give you a nice twenty-eight”, we reply according to the game.

"Okay, I accept it".

L’Officiel Hommes

Just wanted to translate this old interview for the non-italian’s fans ^^ (sorry for my English)  

[lovee-infected]

hi hi!!! i love your vil analysis post!! just wondering though...why does vil force epel to do traditionally “cute, feminine” things. i get that it’s, like, to counter neige for the vdc, but it kind of goes against vil’s ideology? like, how i see it, vil advocates for people to express themselves how they want without being bound by gender roles. i feel like if epel tried forcing his manliness ideology onto other people, he’d be justified in his “forcing epel to do cute things” plan, but i don’t think epel has ever shamed feminine guys? he just wants to be manly himself. could this be an allusion to how the evil queen turned ugly just to fulfill her goals? vil going against his core ideals and becoming “ugly” just to win?

Glad you enjoyed it dear! As for your question, I believe that'll be better if I go into details because I've seen many asking similar questions regarding chapter 5, and I guess that's causing some misunderstandings towards both Vil and Epel. Well, we're soon getting the rest of the Pomefiore Chapter, so I guess it's the best time for an analysis on Epel and Vil's relationship and how Chapter 5 has been going so far

First off, let me state something really really important about the Pomefiore chapter, this arc has got pretty wild spirits that are quite new compared to the previous chapters. We've got Neige, the first RSA character to appear as a real rival of a NRC student, Vil and Epel's rough relationship, Ace and Deuce joining MC on the new adventure once again and finally, the VDC: an event with is potentially important to not only the whole NRC but also Twisted Wonderland!

While all fans are surely excited to see what we'll be going through next, there are quite a few of misunderstandings and wrong interpretations that are considerably important regarding the Pomefiore chapter. In order to avoid possible dramas and more misinterpretions between the fans, let's try to take a better look at this Chapter and important Pomefiore hints that we've got so far:

(1)Epel's feelings; the most important element of chapter 5

One of the quite brilliant facts about Chapter 5, is the unique presence of characters and their roles in the story. This might seem quite unrecognizable, but right now Epel's appearance is effecting the audience way more than Vil's! This arc is mainly focusing on making the audience feel his pain and hard time, and I can say that they're doing it pretty well! We'll talk about how his feelings are being presented in part (6). Now, you may wonder why his feelings are so important in the Pomefiore arc? Isn't it supposed to be mostly about Vil? Well of course, the story is most likely leading us to Vil's overblot so he's the heart of this chapter, but the important thing is too see how crucial Epel's role is here. Watching how Epel is in pain, silenty crying and forced into doing something that he doesn't want to by Vil is savagely effecting this fandom's interpretation of Vil, some are commenting on how he's the worst or how horrible he is or hundreds of not really friendly critiques which is awfully frustrating... We'd continue to talk about this point in part (5)!

(2) Epel's relationship with Vil

Let's review what we've got through the side stories. To begin with, Epel obviously doesn't really like Vil, (I'm trying to cooperate and not say that he hates him) he didn't appreciate having him as the dorm leader from the very beginning. But he's got some strong reasons to dislike Vil so we can't really blame him:

1)Vil slapped him all of a sudden just because of his poor posture at the dinner table 2)Vil almost crashed Epels head between his hands while teaching him some manners 3)Vil's idealistic are just the opposite of Epel's 4)Vil is trying to change Epel, especially during chaptet 5. It sometimes feels like Vil is treating Epel like his puppet and Epel doesn't appreciate this all.

At the end of his SR lab story Epel stated how he's going to study his hardest in magic and potions, so maybe at some point he'd beat Vil, which goes to prove that he considers Vil a rival.

"Why is it so though? Isn't this pretty risky for Epel to challenge Vil, especially as Vil is a dorm leader and Epel's just a first year who's still an amateur at magic?"

Farewell, let me mention something about Epel, he's got a really strong will to the point of not giving up until proving everyone wrong. He's often looked down on, is called to be useless and dumb, and is sometimes insulted for being innocent and naïve. True, he still has a lot he needs to learn and he's aware, but he won't take being underestimated easily.

Just look at him! He's been raised in a farm and he still found his way to this school filled with stunning students coming from noble families while Epel is a simple country boy! He proved the point to us once again in his lab coat story where Crewel gave him an impossible task just to push him into giving up and coming to apologize afterwards. When Epel realized that he was just tricked by Crewel, he felt quite frustrated and started to cry, yet he didn't give up and used his personal experiments and what he'd learned back in his farm life and paved his road to success and impressing everyone including Crewel!

This is why he isn't backing up now, he doesn't want and isn't going to lose to Vil. Another important reason might be how Vil seems to have control over Epel, his manners, his attitude, the way he looks and basically, the person Epel is. Epel has indirectly said that Vil may be currently bounding his actions and life, but someday this will change. He mentioned similar lines several times and you can see he really has a strong will to prove everyone, especially Vil, that he's not a cute apple boy to sit still and look pretty. And if he's been waiting for the right time to stand against Vil, chapter 5 has got it. In part (7) you'll see why.

(3)What is happening in chapter 5?

Okay before we continue, let's just focus on what we've got in Pomefiore chapter: This year's vocal and dance championship has an unbelievable amount of media focused on it , because two of the world-famous influencers,Vil Schoenheit & Neige Leblanche, are joining. Both are great influencers and talented designers, but recently Neige has been getting really popular through the social media and TV, thus Vil realizes that the time to face his well-known rival, Neige, has come.

The VDC is no joke to him because hundreds of people are coming to watch this competition between two Celebrities, and his career is surely at risk. If the VDC doesn't go as well as he's planned, that'll be an end to his fame and clout, possibly his whole career! Therefore he has to make sure that nothing is going to ruin his plans for the big day, and that's why he is going to use his ultimate weapon, the red poisoned apple. Note that this isn't just about Vil, it's about protecting NRC's clout against RSA as well, so losing the VDC would seriously effect NRC's picture throughout the whole twisted wonderland. So a really important part of NRC's future is relying on Vil's hands right now.

Look, unlike the previous chapters, Vil's story is about nothing fictional or exaggerated; it's something that's pretty normal to see in real life! Two famous fashion designers joining a competition, both are giving in their best, aren't planning to lose, are going to be awfully strict towards training their models and making sure that nothing would be messed up, and are SERIOUS about winning because losing it to the other side would end in losing their clout and having the reports of their unfortunate fall-down spread worldwide.

Unlike the previous overblots, Vil's strictness and seriousness has NOTHING to do with being evil or crazy, he's just doing what he's supposed to be doing, working his hardest to defend his career. Anyone else who were in Vil's shoes would've done the same, and nothing about it chaotic, heartless or mad. His being pretty strict towards Epel because he's his main hope, Epel is the perfect beauty material and is definitely capable of achieving all the best through the VDC, that's why Vil's counting on him. Just as a fashion designer is strict with training their model, Vil is all serious with his way of couching Epel. And it's just about being professional, not being evil!

(4) It's not about Vil, it's about Epel

This is more of a continuation to part (3), but let's talk seriously about how wrong chapter 5 is being interpreted. "Vil is the worst! Can't he see that Epel doesn't want this?" or "Ew gross! People like Vil who use others for their very own benefits are just horrible" are some of the aggressive comments I've recently heard about how Vil is doing in Chapter 5, which is mainly because of Epel. I mentioned that Epel's feelings are most important element of chapter 5 and this is why!! Vil isn't doing anything that savage or mean but his actions seem to be a lot more appealing to fans due to how Epel's frustration and pain is being focused on. It's not because of Vil, it's because of Epel. Vil had been just the same with Leona back in the fairy gala event and most of the fans considered the story to be much of a comedy, but when Vil's treating Epel just the same way it sounds mean, cruel, harsh and heartless. See what I meant? Epel's presence was crucial to give Vil an evil perspective and make him seem just as bad as Azul or Leona.

I'm not defending his action since Epel as well is surely under a serious pressure. He doesn't even want to be joining the VDC, let alone having to follow all these strict rules that Vil's been teaching him so far. But since Epel forcedly made the deal with Vil and promised to help him for the VDC, there's no turning back now. Vil is counting on him as his very last hope and is putting his hardest of work and effort into training Epel, just like any professional fashion designer would've done.

(5)Vil is NOT the Evil Queen!

As for Vil's biggest difference with the Evil Queen, I must say that Vil does really work his hardest for what he desires. Evil Queen simply wanted Snow White dead while we've got Vil, working his ass off preparing everything for the VDC. He isn't just going to get mad and envies of Neige because his becoming popular, he doesn't want Neige dead either. All Vil has been doing so far was working and working and working and getting to be called cruel and heartless in return, I mean can't you just feel the amount of effort and nerve he's giving into work?

See, a considerable majority of the fandom is exaggerating the story of chapter 5 while Vil hasn't even shown a simple sign of having any ill intentions or evil plans in mind! We don't know what is going to happen i the next episodes but let's say that he hasn't done a single evil thing so far.

Just take a look at previous chapters! Leona was openly planning to unfairly harm and injure other students and Azul fooled nearly 200 students, took away their magic and forced them to work for him in Mostrolounge until they graduate from the very beginning. Heartslabyul and Scarabia weren't as severe as these two but they still did have some sort of a visibly unhealthy aura. Vil's current impression as the villain of chapter 5 is high-kay normal and chill compared to the previous chapters as he literally has done nothing evil so far, NOTHING. Most of the fandom is currently giving him the malicious aura that he doesn't have, or at least he doesn't yet have. Look, Vil's just doing his job. This doesn't even have anything to do with the Evil Queen! Also, Vil's rival ship with Neige has nothing to do with beauty, it's about fame, net-worth and popularity.

We don't know if he'd come up with any ill plans or serious intentions to harm Neige or anyone else in the new episodes, but his current impression in nothing more than going hard on Epel as his coach which is just being overly exaggerated by the fandom. A real life fashion designer would've done JUST the same thing! I know that this story is most likely going to end in Vil's overblot and him revealing his inner villain but come on, he hasn't done anything horrible so far!

(6)How Epel is being presented through Chapter 5

This point is the cause of many misunderstandings and confusions regarding Chapter 5, many find the context of Epel being forced to do what he doesn't like so cruel, some on the other hand are confused becaused Vil has clearly stated that his terms of beauty are gender neutral, so why would he force Epel to do these in the first place? As I said before, it's because of Epel, not Vil.

When it comes to perspectives on beauty, Epel's idealistics are just the opposite of Vil's. Look, Epel hates being mistaken with a girl or being considered soft and cute, this is something that has been bothering him for quite a long time. Being misgendered because of his appearance all over his life has had some negative effects on his perspective toward anything cute or feminine, as it just reminds him as how he often gets misunderstood because of his unwanted appearance and cuteness. Epel is awfully similar to Deuce and wants nothing more than getting to reveal the manliness he's holding within, through not only tastes but also abilities.

This is why he's been feeling quite uncomfortable in chapter 5 because Vil's basically pushing him into doing what he hates the most, looking cute and, well, something that Epel would consider feminine. The thing is, Vil does not consider stuff like 'Being able to sing beautifully, performing eye-catching movements voice, wearing stunning clothes and applying makeup' feminine at all, to Vil these are gender neutral terms of beauty and he doesn't get why Epel might consider them girlish or feminine either. Epel's comment on not wanting to do girlish things sounded naïve and low key rude to Vil because beauty isn't bound to being male or female, and he doesn't appreciate the idea of these works being called girlish at all.

This is neither Epel nor Vil's fault, it's just the difference in idealistics.

(7) Vil's on thin ice right now

Let me tell you a secret, 'choosing Epel to become the red poisoned apple wasn't an accidental act AT ALL'. Vil has been watching over Epel ever since he entered NRC and this is why he was so strict about changing this "Mudded potato" into a well-behaved Pomefiore student. Vil knew Epel's name and had discussed his case with Rook right at Epel's first day, and this is why he treated Epel so harshly at the dinner table because his plan to turn Epel into his red poisoned apple had already begun. He was preparing Epel from the very beginning and was just expecting the big day to arrive, the day he'd need Epel to defeat his rival, Neige.

Remember that I said how Epel's been waiting for a chance to stand against Vil and how Chapter 5 would be his BEST opportunity to do this? Before we explain this point, let's have a review on how Vil has been effecting and changing him so far. During his first days in NRC, Epel was more comfortable with shouting, fighting and opposing to other students including Vil. He used to disagree until Vil slapped him but now in Chapter 5, he doesn't even say a word when Vil tells him to do something, he just silently obeys as tears fall from his eyes. He no longer fights back as much as he used to.

But right now, Vil's career, status and future is bound to Epel. Vil has been working harder than ever trying to turn him into the Red poisoned Apple he's been expecting him to become, and if Epel backs up or decides to ruin the show and stop letting Vil have control over him, that'll seriously make Vil explode. And if you think that Vil deserves to be hurt like this, I gotta say that he doesn't, he seriously doesn't deserve this after all he's been going through. Just imagine being on Gil's shoes, how would you feel about having the result of all that hard work and effort you've given into work for YEARS ruined like this? Look, we need to judge this situation nonetheless, even is you don't really like Vil it's important to realize the unfairness of this possible future to the story.

Epel now has the opportunity to BREAK Vil like no one has ever done, after all Vil has been going through to coach Epel, teach him manners, change his nature and prepare him for the VDC this would certainly be the worst thing that may happen to him and it'll make him mad, like really really mad. The Vil we've seen through the story so far was nothing more than Vil's normal calm self so we can't even imagine how it might be to see him mad. At this point he won't be bound to any manners or consderations, and keep this in mind: "We won't like it when Vil is evil, and we can't imagine how evil he can be,"

I'm honestly so excited and terrified at the same time to see what we'll get to see in the rest of the Pomefiore chapter, the atmosphere is so nerve-wrecking right now and I can't help but to pray that the rest of this story doesn't traumatize us as much as it can- “Yana please, have mercy on us”

[fitzs-trained-monkey]

Chapter Thirty-Six: How I Did It - By Jack The Ripper

Rated PG-13: For dark themes and language

Masterlist

~We'll never get free Lamb to the slaughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water? The price of your greed Is your son and your daughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water?

Beg me for mercy Admit you were toxic You poisoned me just for Another dollar in your pocket Now I am the violence I am the sickness Won't accept your silence Beg me for forgiveness~

"He's here."

Crossing the Event-Horizon

That's what that's called. I've always thought that's the most beautiful way of putting it. The words have a certain ring to them.

Crossing the Event-Horizon

It means crossing the point of no return. That itself - the point of no return - could mean a lot of things. It could mean the beginning. It could mean the end. It could mean the infinite. It could mean life. It could mean death. It could mean war, peace, happiness, sadness, or anything in between.

But it means one thing for sure.

Crossing the Event-Horizon means there's no going back.

If I had to identify a beginning to the end of my story, then I think that little red dot on the map of time is where I'd stick my proverbial pin. That one little sentence, those two little words.

Yes, it was that moment, I think.

That was when it all started to go wrong.

"Felix is here," I said quietly, "He's outside."

I didn't know what I was going to do to get my revenge from that point. All I knew was, in order to kill Felix, I would need to get to him. And that meant getting away from Jack. Getting away from the son of the devil is something certainly easier said than done.

I would have to do it in a manner which would compel him and the Winchesters to come 'save me'. Of course, I could just knock Jack out and ditch him, but then I would have no back-up if things with Felix went sour. Now, if there was one thing I had learned in the five years leading up to my presence in that lighthouse, it was redundancy. It never hurts to have a safety net. Mine just happened to be a Nephilim.

"You remembered to lock the door, right?" Jack joked. I huffed a laugh. "We're safe in here. Don't worry, Marty. I'll protect you."

Isaac shook his head. "Felix has hostages. Two of 'em." He informed me.

"It's not me I'm worried about," I said to Jack, "This is a hostage situation."

The Nephilim's expression darkened and Isaac rolled his eyes.

"Personally, I say we go on the offensive. I mean, ya boyfriend here has more than enough juice to disintegrate seven dudes, right? Just waltz out there like we own the place, boom, clap, poof, TA-DA!"

"Ya know, that's actually not that bad of a plan," I said, nodding. I relayed the message to Jack who nodded.

"I could do it." He seemed confident.

"Felix brought six helpers. Have you ever dusted that many guys before?" I asked.

"I have, yes. Many more, in fact."

Well, that was... thoroughly disturbing. He seemed so calm about it. As if anyone who stood against him was nothing more than an obstacle. That could be me one day. That could be me tomorrow.

"Alright then, lead the way," I said, smirking.

Is it bad that I hoped something would happen to Jack? Nothing deadly, of course. Just something that would stop him from using his powers to take my revenge for me. Felix was mine. I needed to be the one to kill him. If Jack did it then what had been the point of it all? So, was it bad of me to hope that the quickest, cleanest solution wouldn't be the one that played out?

Was that wrong?

Did that make me evil?

Did I care if it did?

"Everything's going to be fine, Marty. You'll see." And Jack smiled at me softly and I wondered how long that would last.

I found myself standing beside him at the door to the lighthouse. My blood was boiling for a fight because this was it. Felix was on the other side of that door and in a few hours, I would be free, one way or another. Jack turned the handle.

Across the Event-Horizon.

A vampire, a ghost, and a Nephilim stepped out into the muggy night air. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it was more the beginning of a new era, at least for me. I stayed mostly hidden beside Jack, maintaining my air of powerlessness. Isaac stepped into place at the Nephilim's other side to match. I could feel the heat of Felix's presence bleeding through the space between us. He carried with him the foul stench of burning tar and just his scent made me want to wrinkle my nose.

He stood about ten feet away from Isaac, Jack, and me, flanked by six other vampires. There was no army, not that I had expected there to be - that wasn't how Felix worked. He didn't need an army, he'd brought two hostages. Two humans knelt on the ground in front of each of Felix's lackeys, poised to die.

Felix's lips stretched into something that approximated a smile but his little ruse was transparent. I could see the hate simmering in his eyes.

"This little game of ours has been fun but a score still stands to be settled and its resolution, I do believe, is long overdue. There is no place left for you to run, child. Are you finally ready to face judgment for your crimes, Martina?" He said. A smile spread across my face to match his.

"Are you?" I challenged, leaving all human emotion out of my voice. I had been so afraid of him before, but that fear was in the past. I had come to witness true power, I had seen it up close and Felix Ashton Monroe was nothing in comparison. I wasn't afraid of him anymore.

"I suppose you'll just have to find that out," He said. "Now, I've just had a rather unsavory chat with one Samuel Winchester. Barbarians those boys are - him and his brother. I do so hope you'll remember the manners I taught you and come along like a civilized being."

"Ready when you are," Isaac reported. His Darth Vader figure was tucked safely in my boot and I counted the fact that Felix didn't know about him as one of the few advantages I had. Both Isaac and I knew that in order to keep that advantage my brother would have to suffer through being dragged behind a car via his attachment to the figure to prevent Felix from noticing his presence. We had decided a long time ago that I wouldn't face Felix alone. Isaac had protested against us facing him at all.

It was ironic, really. He was the ghost, yet out of the two of us, I was the vengeful one. See, Isaac had never sought revenge against Felix. The only person Isaac wanted vengeance against was himself. He sought punishment for his failure to keep me safe, to keep any of us safe. I suppose he got his wish. Ever since that night, Isaac remained trapped on earth with what was less of a mission and more of a duty. To keep me alive. If one looked at it properly, that was another advantage. Isaac had been formidable when he was alive, but as a vengeful spirit and with a threat on my life to power him up, Isaac was alarmingly deadly.

I didn't need to send him a discreet nod to acknowledge his words. The two of us had been preparing for this moment for five years. We knew our roles. We knew what we had to do.

"Marty isn't going anywhere with you," Jack cut in, his voice firm.

"You're Jack Kline I presume," Felix said in his usual drawling tone. His voice too reminded me of tar with the way it oozed lazily around his words. Everything about him was so clean and sharp yet somehow it was all horrifically revolting.

"I am, yes." Jack nodded. He was trying to sound confident and authoritative, mimicking Sam or Dean or Castiel. But he wasn't like them, it wasn't in his nature. Jack was too soft. Felix regarded him with a smirk, studying the boy in a calculating manner as if Jack were merely a rare antiquity he was appraising in an effort to determine its value.

"The boy born to rule..." He hummed, drawing out the words almost reverently. "Yer smaller than the rumors describe ye to be."

"So are you," Jack replied, standing up straighter and lifting his chin confidently.

"Oh, I'm afraid not." That slime ball cracked a smile. "I'm much too careful to allow for rumors of my physical appearance to drift beyond my reach."

"Really?" Jack challenged. "Because it seems like Martina found us. She told us everything about you."

Felix just laughed like he was talking to something as insignificant as a flea.

"Do ye never listen, young one? I said I don't allow rumors to drift beyond my reach. Seeing as Martina is standing directly ahead of me, I'd say she is well within my grasp. That which is mine does not escape me, laddie. She knows that better than anyone," Felix said.

"If you're so careful, then why come here yourself?" Jack asked, struggling to remain impassive. He didn't really have a poker face.

"Why, because unlike an amateur I actually quite enjoy getting my hands dirty every now and again. Especially with a vendetta this personal. Isn't that right, Martina?" Felix taunted. "Will you be coming willingly or not?"

"I said you can't have her," The half-angel forcefully growled. Jack pushed me behind him, shielding me from my creator's gaze.

"Is that so? I was unaware you had a choice in the matter," Felix accosted, seemingly amused. "Were your circumstances not clearly implicit in the situation? No? Very well! If you insist against using so much as a modicum of intelligence, I suppose I'll have to explain this situation to you. See, these dirty, pathetic excuses for intelligent life forms you see trembling before you are called humans, dear boy. I hear you're quite fond of them, and today they are playing the role which we in the criminal world usually refer to as the hostage. Now, their miserable little lives are in your hands, Jack. I am a man of my word thus I will gladly release them, alive and well, upon the prompt return of my property. However, I will not hesitate to rip them both to shreds right in front of you if I don't get my way. Do you understand that , boy?"

Jack didn't respond. He appeared torn between protecting me and saving the lives of the hostages.

"Good," Felix droned, "Now, are you ready to leave, Martina dear?"

" You don't get to speak to her ," Jack snarled. His teeth snapped together with an audible click as he threw his arm out in front of me, not quite ready to give up. Felix rolled his eyes.

"Must we really do this the hard way?" He asked, boredom evident in his tone.

"Yes."

Felix tilted his head and his gaze flicked to me. I could see a hint of amusement in his expression.

"Tell me, lassie. Have you kissed him yet?" He chuckled. Then, abruptly, his expression darkened. "Or is he just that stupid? "

"Who says I did anything?" I replied evenly. Felix huffed, rolling his eyes.

"So you have?" He turned his attention to Jack who just seemed confused. "Did you enjoy it, me boy? If you'll recall, I did wish you a very exciting first, did I not?"

"Marty, what's he talking about?" Jack asked, doubt wavering in his voice. I didn't answer him. Felix was taking a chisel to the wall I'd built in that boy's head. Not causing enough damage to send it crumbling, but planting enough doubt for it to hurt even worse when it did.

"Ah, my devious little Martina," Felix sighed, shaking his head dramatically. "You're as predictable as you are appallingly cruel."

"Guess I learned from the best," I hissed, glaring at him.

"Does that mean you'll be sensible?" He asked, raising a brow.

"You're not taking her!" My angel boy yelled. "She's mine. " A shock ran through my bones as Jack's powers ignited and his metaphysical wings spread out in front of me in a terrifying reminder of what he truly was.

Felix didn't flinch. Instead, he chuckled.

"That's cute," He said, gesturing to Jack's massive wings. Then, he straightened the cuffs of his suit and sighed. From out of his pocket he retrieved a box of matches, pulling one out and striking it. He tossed the match lazily in front of him, the reflection of its tiny flame dancing in his eyes.

The match hit the sand and flickering orange flames erupted from where it landed. The fire spread outward in a ring that encompassed the entire lighthouse, trapping me, Jack, and Isaac inside.

Jack hissed through his teeth as he watched the flames die down. They were low enough to pass easily through, so how were they supposed to contain us?

"In case ye can't tell, that there is holy fire," Felix informed, tucking the matches back in his pocket. "Any angel who finds themselves encircled by holy fire is rendered powerless, and if one tries to step through those flames, one will be instantly vaporized." He looked up again, unimpressed. "Don't get smart with me, boy . I am thousands of years your senior. I'll do with that disgusting whore whatever I damn please."

"No, you won't !"Jack yelled. His wings flared out and a blazing golden light poured from him like molten metal. The air buzzed with a divine power that burned my skin from standing so close. He was like sunlight, and it burned. I cowered away but watched in awe as Jack's veins lit beneath his skin as if gold were pumping through them instead of blood. Because that's what Jack Kline was. He was power. With a sudden ferocity, the flames leaped up, roaring around his body in an effort to keep him trapped inside. But Jack did the impossible and stepped beyond the ring with a cry of effort.

Felix did not cower away as his underlings did; he merely tilted his head with slight interest.

"How intriguing," He mused, folding his hands in front of him. "Tell me, lad. How did you manage that?"

Jack glared at Felix, his chest heaving, for I could tell that act had caused him pain.

"I'm not an angel."

Jack raised his hand, poised to snap the monsters all into dust.

"Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you," Felix half-heartedly warned.

"Why not?" The Nephilim ground out.

The vampire smiled coolly. "Because these fine specimens here are not my only hostages." Of course, he had more. He was always prepared.

"Where are the others?" Jack demanded, eyes flaring.

"They're safe and sound, I assure ye. Unless, of course, you try to do somethin' stupid, such as kill me. If that's the case, and I do hope it's not, then my people have orders to do some rather unsavory things to a room full of children." Felix raised a brow, daring Jack to make a move against him.

"I can save them," Jack said, confident.

"Please! Ye don't even know where they are!" He scoffed. "Do what ye must, Jack Kline. But I really do fear for the children." Jack gritted his teeth but said nothing. He knew he was beaten. "That's better." Felix turned his attention to me. "Give up this pitiful act of yours, Martina. Come on out. You know this is checkmate."

I stepped away from Jack and stood tall, allowing the thing that had made me to see the steel in my eyes. I passed Jack and planted myself in front of Felix.

"This isn't checkmate, Monroe. This is merely check. I'll be damned before I walk into something with no way out, you know that better than anyone." My voice was calm and cool and I let it chill him. It was my real voice, not that other one I always used to put people at ease. My real voice was the one that makes people do what I want.

The corner of Felix's mouth twitched up. "Oh, yes. I know." He leaned down, his face merely an inch away from mine. "I'm looking forward to it."

"So, where's the car?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.

"Right this way, m'dear." He gestured towards the dirt road a ways away and started toward it. I began to follow but Jack's voice made me stop.

"You're a monster," He spat, shaking with rage. His pained expression had morphed into one of hatred and his glowing golden eyes fixed on Felix.

Felix twisted around, mildly amused more than anything.

"Empathy, humanity, and morality make you weak, boy. Alas, weakness is a bitch , isn't it?" He smirked, basking in the pain he caused.

"I SWEAR I WILL KILL YOU!" Jack screamed. His power flared with his anger but there was nothing he could do. The absolute helplessness and hopelessness of his situation finally dawned on him. He never could stand feeling helpless.

"Hold on, I'm confused. Is that not what you do ?" Felix jeered, lifting a brow. Jack froze, his eyes going wide and puppy-like as the vampire's words hit him in the heart. His rage and power dimmed.

"W-What?" Poor thing. His voice sounded so small. He had never been made for this.

"You're the Winchester's attack dog, are ye' not?" Felix clarified. "Playing judge, jury, and executioner for anything you deem a monster."

"You are a monster," Jack scowled, clenching his fists.

"Oh, I know that!" Felix laughed. "But I like to think I've done quite a bit to earn me that title. There are, however, six quite innocent and quite human patients in critical condition at a Manhattan hospital. Six patients, who you put there. Those weren't monsters now, were they?"

Jack's face paled. Sam and Dean had said everyone was fine. Sam and Dean had lied. "H-How did- How did you-"

"That was some stunt you pulled in Times Square, boy," He mused. "Did you really think I wouldn't know about it?"

"Th-that w-was... I-it wasn't... I didn't mean to I-" Jack shook his head in denial. "It was an accident!"

"Why, of course it was!" Felix laughed. "You've not a malicious heart nor the disposition to take an innocent life. Dear boy, you are but a loaded gun for the Winchesters aim at anything they don't like."

Jack shook his head. "T-that's not true! I kill things that are evil because they hurt people." His words sounded hollow like they were something practiced. Like something that had been pounded into him.

"Do ye now? Because as I recall, you killed your own mother and ye' don't even know why. Sad, that." Felix smiled. "You kill because you were bred to; it's your purpose. It's almost cute, the son of the devil thinking he's a hero."

"I am ! I'm a hunter!" Jack insisted.

"You are not a hero," Felix sneered, shaking his head. "You are a murderer, Jack Kline. What else could ya be?" The Scottish man turned on his heel, not caring much to hear what the Nephilim had to say.

"Y-you're wrong. You're wrong about me!" That was all Jack could force out. He tried so hard to keep the tears at bay. I shook my head and turned away from him to follow my creator. "M-Marty?" Jack called out from behind me, his voice laced with desperation and confusion.

I stopped.

In that moment, I finally stripped away the final pieces of the human girl I'd made for him. The girl I'd designed for him to love. Jack would never see her again. That girl was gone now. And good riddance to her; I hoped she'd never come back.

Because she was weak.

And I was not.

Because she was human.

And I was a monster.

Because she was kind.

And I was cruel.

Because she was innocent.

And I was insane.

Because she was honest and grateful.

And I was a deceitful manipulator.

Because she was the blissful mirage.

And I was the horrid reality.

Because she was perfect.

And I never could be.

Because Jack Kline loved that sweet girl.

But that girl wasn't ME.

She never had been.

Of course, I still loved him which only made this harder. But I supposed that in a few hours that would be of no consequence. He wouldn't care. And that fact hurt like a needle to the heart, but pain only brings power to those with nothing left to lose. So, I threw my head back and I laughed as I embraced that pain, just as I did for every other cut and bruise I had ever received. That needle was one in a million and all that pain was what made me real. So, I sighed and turned back to where my angel boy stood, staring at me like some lost puppy.

"I'm sorry, Jack," I said sweetly, "Thanks for getting me this far, I don't think I could have done it without you. Unfortunately, this is something I have to do on my own. This is my last page and nobody can write it for me."

"You can't go," He said, shaking his head. There were tears in his eyes but none in mine. I smiled at him and that was the first he'd seen from me that was real, because, for the first time, Jack was talking to me.

"Why are you worried, Jack?" I was surprised at how smooth and pleasing my own voice sounded, now that I took notice. My real voice was why I was dangerous; when I used it I could make anyone do anything. But there was a reason I had been masking it for so long. It was what had gotten me into this in the first place. "I know you'll come to save me."

"What if I'm too late?" He asked, his voice breaking.

"Then I'll be there waiting for you," I answered.

"You'll die," Jack whispered. I laughed lightly, shaking my head.

"I'm not going to die today, Jack."

"You don't know that!"

"I've known for longer than you think," I said. I watched his teary, desperate expression and copied it to my memory as best as I could. It was the last time he'd look at me that way. At least for a while. "Just do me one last favor?"

"Anything," Jack promised.

"There's a girl you haven't met yet, try not to hate her when you do." I smiled and Jack nodded, trying his best to stay strong.

Then I left him there.

Alone in the sand, he watched a stranger he thought he loved going to what he thought was her death and vowed to save her from it.

Was it wrong for me to deceive him?

Did I care if it was?

***

Sam paced back and forth along the length of the lighthouse as he waited for Dean and Castiel to return. Every few minutes or so he would check his watch anxiously and run a hand through his hair, muttering something unintelligible under his breath before he resumed his pacing.

But Jack wasn't paying attention to that. He was busy staring at his hands. There were too many thoughts racing through his head for him to focus on any one of them. It had all happened so fast and there was nothing he could have done, but it didn't feel that way. Jack felt responsible. Martina was going to die because of him. It was his fault.

It was always his fault.

The door of the Lighthouse burst open, revealing Dean and Cas standing there in the driving rain that had come on before anyone had time to notice. Dean threw himself inside and Cas trailed after him, taking the time to close the lighthouse door while Dean shook the rain off like an oversized dog.

"What took you so long?" Sam was immediately questioning. "Where were you?"

"Gettin' information," Dean smirked. "It took a while, but one of the bloodsuckers squealed. What happened here, Jack?"

"I kissed Martina," Jack blurted out.

"What?" Sam, Dean, and Cas asked in unison, sharing the same disbelieving expression.

Jack hadn't meant to say it but it just sort of came out. It probably wasn't his fault, though. Jack simply couldn't stop thinking about every detail of his time with the girl in the lighthouse. He wanted to focus on what had happened after, but his brain simply wouldn't cooperate.

"I, um... I kissed Martina..." He repeated, somewhat nervously. "And I think I liked it..."

Had he liked it? Jack thought so; he was pretty sure. But something about it felt off.

Why had he kissed her in the first place? What had compelled him to do that? Jack didn't know.

His memories of the kiss were strange. He remembered clearly the emotions he'd felt, and the intensity of them. Yet, for some reason, Jack couldn't seem to recall where those feelings had come from. He had wanted to kiss Martina, but not like that... Or... maybe he had? It felt to Jack as if the decisions he'd made weren't his own. He couldn't even remember making any decisions, really. All he remembered was those feelings and acting on them. Something about that seemed off to him but Jack wasn't sure. He supposed it wasn't that out of the ordinary for him to behave impulsively. On the contrary, he tended to do that quite a lot. So, what was bothering him?

"Wait..." Dean paled, "You and Marty... You- You two didn't, like... do it in a lighthouse, right?"

Jack tilted his head, brows furrowing. "Do what?"

"C-Cas?" Dean's face whitened another shade as he turned to the seraph. "Please tell me your son didn't-" Castiel gave a long-suffering sigh.

"No, Dean. I really don't think they did anything," He said, rolling his eyes.

"Not everyone is like you," Sam added. Dean waved him off.

"Yeah, okay, but why am I the only one gettin' weirded out by this?" He exclaimed.

"Because we have bigger problems, Dean!" Sam pointed out, exasperated. Sam seemed anxious and Jack wondered what he wanted to tell them.

"Well, I think this is pretty big!" Dean insisted, turning to Jack. "Dude, what the hell?"

"I don't understand what you mean. Martina and I kissed." Jack said simply.

"Dean, seriously. I-" Sam tried. Dean held up a hand, sighing.

Dean sighed. "Jack... Y-You don't do that."

"Dean! Listen-"

"Not now, Sam!" Dean cut him off again.

"Why not? Jack asked, frowning.

"Look, ya just- Ya gotta wait a little while, man!" Dean said, running a hand over his face. "I mean, Marty's like, twelve!" He insisted. By then, Sam had decided he'd had it.

"No, Dean! She's really not!" The younger Winchester yelled, throwing his hands in the air.

"What?" Dean was shocked by his brother's sudden outburst. Sam took a deep breath to calm himself now that he had everyone's attention.

"Martina's not as young as we think she is. I-I think she's older, m-much older." Sam said, stress leaking into his tone.

"What are you saying, Sam?" Cas asked.

"I'm saying we've been played."

***

The car ride was smooth and it was the first time I'd been in a limo, so naturally, I took the comforts offered me. I stretched out across the seat, lounging as I stared out the tinted window. I didn't worry about Felix sitting directly across from me. I knew he didn't want to kill me. Not yet anyway.

"I'm curious, how did you manage to fool them?" He asked, watching me with a comfortable expression.

I shrugged. "Long story, lots of boring details."

"Indulge me," He insisted.

"Why should I?" I asked. He shrugged, mimicking me.

"I'm simply curious."

I hummed. "I bet you are."

He smirked. "Well, what can I say? It's just my nature." I nodded vaguely, continuing to stare out the window. We both knew how this would end. There was no real reason not to tell him.

"Sam Winchester and Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel..." I said their names thoughtfully, allowing the corner of my lips to twitch up into a sly smile. "They seem so simple at first glance. You have the poor unfortunate soul who lost so much yet kept his kindness, the perfect killer who spent his whole life at war, and the fallen angel who found a home. But if that was all there was then I never would have fooled them. However, for men who claim to be so faithless, there's so much they want to believe in."

"Whot do ye mean?" Felix asked, tilting his head. I smirked lazily. T

"I'll start with Sam. Sam is kind because he's damaged, but the last thing he is is a fool. When someone's good at unraveling lies, the last thing you do is give them a really big one to unravel. If you do that, then they'll cut right through and they'll figure you out easily. So, what do you do? You give them distractions. Hide puzzles within puzzles and Sam will stop to solve each one because he loves it. But how do you get him to ignore the big picture?" I stopped and grinned.

"It's easy really. All I had to do was appeal to his hate. Sam Winchester is so extraordinarily full of such raw and powerful hate, that if you simply aim it at a conceivable target, he can ignore anything else. And of course, with his hate blinding him to the truth, Sam can't figure out the lie. All one has to do to fool Sam is give him a puzzle to solve and something to hate.

"So, I made him hate you."

***

"How?" Castiel asked, tilting his head.

"It's Marty. We can't trust her," Sam said. Dean scoffed

"After all that lecturing earlier? Why the hell not?" He demanded. Sam took a nervous breath.

"Because she's been lying to us, Dean," He said. "I-I think she's been lying to us this whole time."

Dean's jaw clenched and he crossed his arms over his chest. "What are you talking about, Sam?" His voice was tight and guarded.

"I talked to Felix after I saved the little girl," Sam admitted.

"You just stood there and talked to that son of a bitch! He's a sick, messed up, psychopath! Sam, what the hell is wrong with you?!" Dean yelled. Sam held out his hands in a peacemaking gesture.

"I know w-what he is, Dean. A-and, believe me, I thought the same things you are now and I swear it was over the phone a-and all he did w-was tell me things. But-" Sam hissed through his teeth and tugged at his hair, seemingly at war with himself.

"But what, Sam?"

"I don't know. He- he just-"

"You don't know?!" Dean interrupted accusingly.

"H-He said things, alright! Felix told me things. Things about Marty. A-and they- they made - They just made so much sense! And I hate him just as much as you do and I don't wanna believe him but-" Sam's voice faltered and he shook his head seeming lost.

"What did he tell you?" Castiel pressed, gentle but still firm.

"He told me Martina killed his wife."

***

"Now, Dean? Dean's a little harder," I said as the driver made a sharp left-hand turn. "Dean's not just a hardened killer, though that's mostly what he wants people to see. He wants people to see the machine without a heart so no one will see how horrifically broken he really is." Thinking of what Dean was really like made me laugh and I flicked my gaze at Felix. "And believe me when I say that there's nothing that could fix him by now."

"But there's so much more to him than the killer and the brokenness. Dean's the righteous man who's never known a day away from war. There are so many things he wants so desperately. Dean dreams of walking peacefully along a beach yet he's never even been to one. For all he's never had Dean tries to give it to others. For all the blood and death he's seen he's remarkably full of love. Love is the key, really. Dean Winchester loves more powerfully than anyone I've ever met. If Dean loves someone he'll do anything for them.

"He sees my age and sees in me the child he never was. He sees me afraid and wants to provide me the protection no one gave him. He sees me flinch when someone yells and wants to offer me the security he never knew. He sees an orphan and wants to give me the parental love he never had. All one has to do to fool Dean Winchester is give him a child to love.

"So, I made him love me."

***

"And you believed him?" Dean scoffed. "Marty is a kid, Sam! She's a kid! Just a scared kid who needs our protection! Marty never could have done something like that."

"Why not?" Cas spoke up. All eyes snapped to the angel.

"BECAUSE SHE'S A KID!" Dean roared. Jack flinched away from him, he'd always hated when Dean yelled. It scared him. Though, this time Dean sounded less angry and more desperate. As if there was something he didn't want to believe. As if yelling the words would make them true.

"T-that's what I thought too. But what if we're wrong?" Sam asked.

"How could we be wrong?" Dean demanded.

"What if Marty's not a kid?" Sam carefully spoke, "What if she's not human?"

Dean shook his head. "No," He said, "No, you're wrong. I know what you're thinkin' and you're wrong." Jack shook his head too. There was no way... was there? Something itched at the back of his mind. He didn't know what it was. Did he want to?

"Dean, I know this is hard to accept, but we need to think this through," Sam said, holding his hands out beseechingly.

"We don't have time for that!" Jack spoke up. "Felix is going to kill Marty! We can't just let her die!"

Sam held up a hand. "He's not gonna kill her, not for a while. We have time."

"No, you don't get it! I promised I'd save her!" Jack said.

"Exactly!" Sam pointed out. "Jack, that's exactly what she wants! She's been planning this the whole time."

"What do you mean 'the whole time'?" Dean inquired, crossing his arms.

"Think back to the beginning, w-when we first met Marty," Sam said, walking them through it. "Why were we in Copper Harbor?"

"For a ghost hunt," Jack answered, impatience leaking through his tone.

"You're right, but there was another case there. What was it?"

"Blood was being stolen from the hospital..." Cas said slowly as if remembering.

"Exactly! Exactly." Sam took a breath. "Now, that ghost in the viral video, who was it? Was it whoever's bones we burned?"

"No, it was..." Jack made the connection. Why hadn't he noticed that before? "It was Isaac."

"Okay, so that means..." He trailed off.

"That Marty was lying about the hunt and the bones," Cas finished.

"Right, now why would she do that?"

"I dunno, professor. Maybe so we wouldn't torch her brother?" Dean rolled his eyes.

Sam pursed his lips, sighing. "Well, yes, b-but no! This isn't about Isaac, this is about Marty. What would she have been hiding?"

"The blood theft," Cas said decisively. Dean shook his head.

"That's a coincidence. Marty can't be - She can't-" He couldn't even say it. He could hardly think it. "Marty can't be a vampire."

***

"Castiel was harder," I continued. "Aside from the fact that he's a multi-billion-year-old cosmic being, Castiel also lacks a soul. That made tapping into his emotions significantly more difficult, but once I did that it was quite clear that I could never fool him. At least, not directly. He's intelligent, not easily deceived, and he always tries to do what he thinks is best. Whatever that course of action might be, more often than not, it hasn't been the right one.

"Castiel is, primarily, a screw-up. There's a lot of history and even more drama involving his fellow angels and the Winchesters, and he has consistently attempted to fight for both sides of the war between them. His torn loyalties have caused a great many more problems than they've fixed and it seems as though any attempt to fix one of said problems breeds yet more chaos. Castiel is rebellious. He can never seem to do what he's supposed to. So, naturally, that makes him the most dangerous piece on the board.

"When Castiel sets his mind on something, there isn't much that can sway him. His actions have proven, repeatedly I might add, that he is even willing to go behind the backs of the Winchesters if he believes it's for the greater good. But his destructive pattern stops only for the one person he's never betrayed. Thus, to fool Castiel one has to fool his son.

"So, I got my hands on Jack."

***

"Why not?" Cas snapped.

"'Cause she just can't!" Dean's voice broke.

"She single-handedly killed five vampires, Dean! Remember?" Cas pressed. "There's no way a mere child her age could have done that."

Jack shook his head, refusing to believe it. "Marty can't be a vampire. Dad, she just can't be."

Castiel sighed, his eyes soft. "I know you want to believe that."

"Why shouldn't we?" Dean challenged.

"Because she killed five vampires single handedly! What part of that escapes your understanding?!" Cas repeated with frustration.

"We don't know what happened in there!" Dean persisted.

"Exactly! WE DON'T KNOW!" Cas yelled.

"THEN WE CAN'T ACCUSE, CAN WE?" Dean shouted back. Jack flinched again and Cas took notice, forcibly relaxing his posture in hopes of reassuring his son.

Sam groaned. "Look at the facts, Dean. The research!"

"Damn the research, Sammy! This is Marty! We know her!"

"We know she's an empath!" Sam spat. "She's been playing with all our emotions, we know that! We need to look at this objectively and, as hard as that might be, it means looking at the facts!"

"What about the facts?" Dean asked reluctantly.

"Think about it," The younger brother said. "W-we did the research, remember? Remember how none of it lined up?"

"Yeah, because Felix messed with it!" Dean tried.

"Not all of it," Sam pointed out, "Marty said she was nine when she died, but her youngest brother was ten. Remember that? How could she have been younger than her youngest sibling?"

"Sam, that-"

"Because she wasn't, Dean," He hissed, "She wasn't nine. Marty was sixteen."

"I-I remember..." Dean froze, his eyes flicking up to meet his brother. "Sammy..." He said, his voice tense and shaking, "How did I forget that?"

Dread coated Castiel's tone as he answered instead.

"I think she wanted us to."

***

"Jack is a very special boy," I said, sarcasm lacing my tone. "Although, he is the offspring of a fallen archangel, so I'd assume that 'special' comes rather naturally. Thanks for that clue, by the way. It would have taken me much longer to figure him out if it wasn't for that itty bitty little detail."

"You would have gotten it regardless." Felix shrugged.

"Of course I would've!" I snorted, shaking my head. "I didn't think my abilities were of any question."

"They weren't," Felix replied. "I know what you're capable of, lassie."

I smirked devilishly. "You should." Felix's hand clenched into a fist and he sent me a tight smile.

"Indeed." He forced the word through his teeth. "Which is why I'm surprised you enlisted to lie to that boy so completely. Doesn't that violate whatever moral code of Donoghue's it is that you've adopted?" I nodded and shrugged with a sigh.

"You're right, it does. Jack is in many senses young and vulnerable and on top of that, he's dreadfully naïve. He could never deserve what I did to him." I huffed out a humorless laugh as my face twisted into a sneer. "But you do. So I made an exception."

Felix shook his head as if disappointed. "Now, now, Martina. When one has a goal, one does not make exceptions. Lest they desire to fail, of course. Only hypocrites make exceptions. Did I teach you nothing?"

"I'm not like you," I spat.

"Is that what it looks like from where you sit?" He mused quietly. I flashed him a barred toothed grin and continued.

"There's only one that Jack Kline truly wants in this world. He wants to be good - to prove to himself and those around him that despite his parentage, he can be good. He's been told that there's something wrong with him, so he wants to find a way to somehow purge it. But he can't because there's nothing wrong and there never was. Yet, he can't believe that. So it leaves him with an insatiable desire to please.

"It's pathetic, really. He seeks validation in everything. He thinks he has to be useful to be loved. Otherwise, he's just a burden, one that nobody wanted. Jack doesn't want to believe that; he wants to be told that isn't true. Jack Kline may be powerful but he's also soft - moldable if you will. See, he's so haplessly needy that it's honestly sickening. He'll do anything for you to tell him what he wants to hear. And he'll do anything to keep hearing it.

"Jack is a combination of his three guardians. He's desperate. Like Dean, he doesn't want to see what's right in front of him. But he's not stupid. I had to erase his memory more than once. Then, like Sam, I simply distracted him and, much like Castiel, I had to keep him in line by appealing to that insatiable need of his. To fool Jack Kline one has to give him someone to save.

"He thinks he's saving me." I smiled fondly when I'd finished, glancing up at Felix with a challenge in my gaze.

"Well, we both know that's impossible," He said, eyeing me with a smirk, "There's nothing left in that cold shell of yours worth saving." I grinned, showing him the insane thing he'd created.

"You're damn right."

***

Then, like a memory, there were words running through Jack's head. Words and voices, but he didn't remember hearing them.

'You said you were nine then! But y-you - you weren't!' That was his voice in his ears. But Jack couldn't remember saying those words. 'You haven't aged a day... Five years and you haven't aged a day.'

'I aged about a month, actually.'

The other voice was Marty. The words buzzed like static, making his headache. Jack shook his head. It was like Deja Vue but entirely more vivid. Sam, Dean, and Cas kept talking. It was hard to hear them through the ringing in his ears.

"Cas, are you saying she can wipe memories?" Dean asked.

"I'm not sure," Castiel replied, shaking his head. "But she can certainly suppress them."

"But it-it must only work when she's around b-because when she's gone - I know for me - When Marty's not around I-I start to remember," Sam said.

The ringing in Jack's ears intensified, making him groan and grasp at his head. He clamped his hands over his ears but the ringing only grew louder. It was like angel radio, but instead of being surrounded by fire, Jack felt like he was burning from the inside out.

"Jack?" Cas was calling his name. "What's going on?"

"I-I don't- I-" Jack gasped, the pain growing stronger. "It hurts! Dad, please make it stop!"

"Jack? JACK!"

He stumbled into Cas's arms as another blurred memory hit him like a train.

'I'm gonna need you to forget that,' Marty's voice whispered in his head. She sounded so gentle, so inviting. She sounded like a spider.

'I wish I could,' His own voice shook as Jack listened to himself say words he couldn't remember speaking. It felt like a memory that didn't belong to him.

There was more to it this time. There was a picture frame, but the picture inside was out of focus. There was an image. It was Martina. She had fangs. And there was something else too. Jack could feel it like a phantom pain. It was terror. The paralyzing kind. The feeling of being trapped. Jack felt the shadow of limbs and he couldn't move. He was trapped. Jack couldn't get out. He was trapped like a fly in a web. Marty was the spider. He couldn't get away. He couldn't get away from her.

She wouldn't let him.

'I can make you forget,' She was going to hurt him. ' Take us back to the night we met. '

'What do you mean?' His voice asked cautiously. He was scared. He was so scared. He couldn't get out.

'I'm going to talk to you, and then you're going to forget, and everything will be back to the way it was.'

'You're a monster.' He'd said

The ringing in Jack's ears faded and he bolted upright, gasping and shaking as panic set in. He needed to tell Sam, Dean, and Castiel what he'd remembered but he couldn't seem to find the words.

"S-She lied." That was all he could force out.

"Jack, what happened? Are you okay?" Castiel worried, checking over him. Jack just shook his head.

"She did something to me," He choked out, shaking. "I don't know. I can't remember. Why can't I remember? She did something to me!" He felt sick. There was something wrong with him.

No.

There was something wrong with Marty.

She was sick.

"What? What did she do?" Dean demanded, eyes wide.

"She-She made me forget. I knew. I-I knew and she made me forget!"

"Forget what?" Sam asked.

"I figured her out a-and she made me forget but I remembered." Jack stopped and only then did he realize he was crying. "She's one of them."

Because she had betrayed him. Marty had betrayed all of them. Jack didn't even know what to believe anymore. Had any of it been real? Or was it all some twisted lie?

"I'm sorry, Jack," Cas offered quietly.

"You were right, Sam," Jack whispered. He couldn't stop his voice from shattering. "Martina is a monster. A-And she lied."

There was silence for a moment. Then, Dean spoke up. Because someone had to take the lead and it was always him. It wasn't fair, but it was always him.

"We gotta go," He said, struggling to make his voice sound cold and firm. But he'd lost a daughter today.

"W-Where?" Sam asked.

"Me and Cas know where Felix is taking Marty. That kid's got some answering to do," Dean answered, his green eyes darkening with his tone. Castiel stood, helping Jack climb to his feet.

"Martina is dangerous, Dean. Are you sure you're willing to do what may be necessary?" Cas asked, watching Dean with a somber expression.

"It's not gonna come to that," Dean said.

"And if it does?"

"I will." Jack's voice was quiet but it caught the adult's attention.

"Jack, are you- Are you really sure?" Cas asked gently. Jack shook his head.

"I don't want to kill Martina. But you're right, she is dangerous." His voice faltered. "I can't let her hurt anybody else."

***

Felix's limo pulled into the garage of what was easily a multi-million dollar home. It was four stories and it reminded me of a castle with its dull grey stone and tall windows. The interior of the garage was constructed simply of polished cement and was entirely empty aside from the car now parked within it. I sent Felix a smirk and climbed from the vehicle, slamming the door shut behind me. The car was surrounded. Twenty or so of Felix's vamps stood guard but I knew they were more for display than anything else. Some of them I recognized, some I didn't.

"And here I thought this little girl's night was just gonna be you and me," I huffed dramatically upon seeing them, "You had me feeling all special."

"Sorry to disappoint, Lassie," Felix drawled. "But don't worry, I invited some of your friends too. Well, just one to be exact."

I shot him a curious glance but shrugged before sauntering my way past Felix's lackeys like I owned the place. I supposed I had, but that was so long ago. Were his minions really still so afraid of me? I surveyed one of the vamps as I passed him, taking notice of the bead of sweat dripping down his neck. He was clearly terrified.

So, they remembered who their queen was. Good.

Spinning on my toe like a ballerina, I let a bubbling laugh escape my throat. All of Felix's soldiers turned to face me, watching with careful eyes.

"Hello, Lovelies!" I called, grinning. A few of them shifted nervously. "Just thought you all should know, both your beloved Prince and Princess are dead! I killed them!" Murmurs spread around the empty garage, echoing off the polished grey walls. "That's right! Boyd's head I ripped off with a tractor, though I'm sure your leader was glad to finally be rid of his bastard son." I glanced at Felix who stood there stoically and winked. "I knew about that, by the way. As for Elwyn, I had the Devil's son snap her into dust like Peter Parker in Infinity War. 'Cept she ain't comin' back!" I giggled in reaction to the horrified expressions of Felix's soldiers and send the man himself a smirk before whipping around again.

"Ye know, Martina?" His voice made me pause though I kept my back to him. "I look at you and I don't see anyone looking back..." He trailed off, his tone thoughtful. "Where is that soul you used to have?"

"Just like I told your daughter, I lost it in the woods in favor of something else. You wanted me to learn something and I learned it!" I eyed him over my shoulder. "You never should have sent me there."

"I know that now." Felix sounded almost solemn. "Whatever Sampson brought back with him wasn't the girl I tossed in, was it?"

I shrugged. "That's where you're wrong. It's still me. Like I said, I just learned something over there is all."

"And what did you learn?" He wondered.

"That you were wrong."

"It doesn't seem I was," He said. I chuckled softly.

"You said I was made to be a queen. You were wrong."

"Aye?"

"I'm not a queen, Monroe." I turned to face him. "I'm a damn Empress." I grinned. "And, honey, you should see me in your crown."

I didn't bother to watch his expression. I just turned and walked.

Pushing my way through the garage door, I skipped down a long, dark hallway decorated with dark wooden pieces that I was sure had cost more money than they were worth. I smirked upon hearing Felix's footsteps trailing behind me. Whirling around and walking backward, I grinned at my former torturer.

"Got anything you didn't wanna say in front of your minions?" I taunted.

"I do, actually." He huffed a laugh that held no humor. "For the record, I'm sorry."

My expression soured. "No you're not."

"I am, truly." He placed his hand over his heart in a gesture of sincerity. "I apologize for my greed and my stupidity. I unleashed you upon this world; that will be my greatest regret, I think. I made you into a plague and I lost control over you."

"You never controlled me," I hissed.

"And I the second I realized that I should have put you down," Felix said. "I just hope the Winchester's don't make the same mistake."

I shook my head. "That's the think, Felix. They will."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not." He shrugged.

"I guess I'll find out, won't I? So! Where's this friend of mine?" I asked, rubbing my hands together.

"Two doors down on your right," Felix answered. I glanced at the door he was referring to then back to him.

"Ooh, goodie. Before I open it, why do I get a present?"

Felix shrugged. "Call it a joke."

I nodded. "Dope."

Then I skipped over to the dark wooden door and grasped the handle. It wasn't locked, of course, so I pulled it open. I didn't look for traps. I knew Felix would never stoop that low. The room was pitch black and there were no windows, but I found the light switch easily enough. Bright fluorescent bulbs flicked on and washed the space with light.

Sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room, was a rather muscular man. His arms and legs were tied to the chair and his head was tilted down. I may not have been able to see his face, but I would have recognized that old, grungy cap almost anywhere. I crossed the space between us and tapped him on the shoulder. The man inclined his head, squinting against the light, but when he caught a glance of my face, his usually bright eyes filled with terror.

I had forgotten how fun it was to instill that level of fear. I smirked.

"Hey there, Benny! I haven't seen you since the Hunger Games!"

~We'll never get free Lamb to the slaughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water? The price of your greed Is your son and your daughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water?

Beg me for mercy Admit you were toxic You poisoned me just for Another dollar in your pocket Now I am the violence I am the sickness Won't accept your silence Beg me for forgiveness~

Lyrics from: Blood In The Water by grandson

[nutty1005]

Xiao Zhan: Extraordinary Journey, Starting from This

Translator’s Note: This article comes from Harper’s Bazaar Oct 2019 Side Issue.

To Xiao Zhan, the Summer of 2019 was destined to belong to “The Untamed”. The drama’s popularity and high viewership garnered Xiao Zhan, who was the lead role in “The Untamed” as “Wei Wuxian”, the most attention of this summer. Our extraordinary journey shall stop its time in the summer. The Abu Dhabi Emirates Palace Hotel glistens under the brilliant sunlight. This grand palace, costing 3 billion USD, carries with it the lovely dreams of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with hopes that it will become a local landmark building. Whereas for us, this is where we will start our extraordinary journey.

This summer was very hot, and there was not a single shower that was memorable.

We strolled on the Sir Bani Yas Island, the “Noah’s Ark” of Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE, measuring 5,963km away from Beijing, with ground temperatures at 45°C.

If there were really a “Noah’s Ark”, it probably looked like Sir Bani Yas Island. It carried the hopes of the founding father of UAE – in its history, the clan family of UAE used their enormous wealth on this desert island and created the biggest wild animal reserve; they grew more than 3.5m fruit trees on this arid land and carefully cultivated them everyday; they brought in more than 30 different endangered species onto this island for release.

Xiao Zhan was just 20 meters away from a 4 day old giraffe calf. The young calf stumbled ahead, learning its steps. This was the first time Xiao Zhan was up close to a wild giraffe. Everyone was bending low and looking down, moving carefully and silently, so that we would not provoke the alert mother giraffe. The guide informed us that these seemingly gentle animals actually have a irritable temper, and an angry giraffe could easily kill a grown lion with their kicks. As our jeep got closer to them, the hidden giraffes became clearer, and we saw 5 to 6 adult giraffes surrounding the trees, quietly eating the leaves. Under the sunlight, Xiao Zhan slowly moved closer, until he was standing next to them, quietly observing them, and enjoying the rare peace and serenity of this summer.

“Packing my bags for an unknown journey”

The Summer of 2019 was destined to belong to “The Untamed”. This web drama, adapted from “The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation”, became one of the hottest topic online after a few days of broadcast. Xiao Zhan, who starred as “Wei Wuxian” in the drama, also became one of the hottest names of this summer.

The first time Xiao Zhan performed on stage was on X-Fire, a talent search show, as an amateur contestant. Thereafter, the first real big performance was when he was part of the performance for Zhejiang New Year Eve broadcast. After multiple rehearsals, as he stood onstage and the spotlights came on with a “pa” sound. Instantly, his mind went blank, and he said that his movements were entirely based on survival instincts.

“I remembered I was especially nervous, and when I was backstage, I was so nervous that I was shaking nonstop, I could not say a word. When the spotlights came onto us, there was one or two seconds of memory loss, as in my mind went blank. After that I had no choice, I saw that my teammates got into their positions, so I quickly walked to mine.”

To the amateur Xiao Zhan then, the entertainment business was all glitz and glory – an interesting world filled with the unknown. Only after he really entered the business, he realized that everyone had to put in a lot of effort in order to gain a little bit of attention. After entering an idol group, Xiao Zhan spent a great deal of effort practicing singing and dancing, wanting to use hard work to catch up with the others’ professional training – once he practiced until his toe nail came off, but even then, he never stopped. His character is warm but tenacious, when he encounters difficulties he rarely speaks of them, instead he will learn to cope, he always says “it will be fine after a night’s rest”, and continue to fight the next day. In 2017, he joined the production of two dramas consecutively, “Battle Through the Heavens” 《斗破苍穹》 and “The Wolf” 《狼殿下》. These two dramas opened the doors to an actor’s world to him. From the first scene until the last, from the winters of Shangri-La to the hot summers of the Elephant Mountains, his exhausted body could not contain his itching desire to become an actor. He was deeply fascinated by the roles and lives of the people in the scripts.

When he first received the script for “The Untamed”, Xiao Zhan felt that he was totally different from “Wei Wuxian”. Xiao Zhan is not a talkative person, instead, he is a very quiet person. When they were script reading for the first time, the producer was there as well, and Xiao Zhan had to continuously remind himself that “I am Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian is me, I am WeiWuxian, I am now a very lively talkative person, I have to make everyone adore me”. After establishing this belief, he blended into his character, and allowed the character’s emotions and his merge into one. After the broadcast of the drama, he himself would read reviews online – “It seemed like his smiles are different every time, possibly even his cries are different as well, did he design it as such?”

However, it is precisely that Xiao Zhan does not know all these techniques, but instead he blended into the role, and allowed the story to direct the character’s emotions, and used that character’s status and feelings in his acting.

Xiao Zhan said “The role is really very big, and the span is really long. Because when we shoot dramas, it is according to scenes, for example, the final scenes were shot like 2 days into the start of the shoot, and I needed to quickly get into the situation. And then the next day could be another different scene, switching back and forth, I would get into a confused state. I remembered the most anxious period was in Heng Dian, I would be drowsily doing my make up in the morning, after which I got pushed onto the bus by my assistant, dragged to the studio, start shooting, after that was done my assistant would say ‘We are OK with this side, let’s go to B group’. At that moment made me feel like ‘Am I alright? Is it alright performing this way?’, it was a very concerning period for me.”

But when it was time to shoot, another actor told Xiao Zhan that no matter what happened behind the scenes, as long as the director shouted “Action”, you need to adjust yourself to your best status, you need to give your greatest passion, because the audience will only see what is done after “Action”. Even if you are in low spirits that day, you might be going through the darkest days of your life, but once you are at the studio, standing in front of a camera, the director yelled to start shooting, from that moment on you are no longer yourself.

Xiao Zhan smiled as he said, “That’s cruel, but that’s an actor’s job.”

“I am not a brave person, but I need to become a brave person”

In the winds, a herd of antelopes and deer ran past us, Xiao Zhan grasped the dagger that signified strength and bravery, as he stood on the red rocks on the side of the cliff. The scenery before us are a rarity – it took billions of years of tectonic movements to create this miraculous sight. On an island in the Gulf of Arab, there actually exists such an alien sight. In order to get to this cliff, you need professional guides and you need to climb up and down for half an hour or so. The usually quiet Xiao Zhan also exclaimed “So beautiful!” in spite of himself. We could use an unknown adventure to describe life – the more mysterious it is, the more you want to explore.

Xiao Zhan said that he is not a brave person, but it is life required him to become braver – only the brave can face all of the unknown and mysteries in an unknown adventure. Previously, he had to face the transition from an amateur to an artist, the adjustment from a commoner’s life to a life under the bright spotlights of the stage; now he faced the tight scrutiny of his life under the spotlight.

After the end of shooting of “The Untamed”, many felt that Xiao Zhan became more lively than before, and he spoke more often. In the past, he was always uncomfortable facing strangers, but now he will use a very active attitude to communicate with others, in hopes of receiving more information from that. The role not only gave him more attention, it also gave him strength and growth.

For his future planning, he laughed as he said that he had not decided. He was just passionate about acting and hoped that he could move ahead in the path of becoming a good actor, one problem at a time, and become braver and stronger. He felt that this is not just about himself, many of his friends and young people are the same – undaunted by the difficulties in life, and become stronger as a result. This is like the antelopes who are almost being baked under the intense heat of the desert, unafraid of the sun, sprinting ahead, never looking back.

“No one will like you for no reason”

Xiao Zhan’s father once said this “No one will like you for no reason, if someone likes you, you have to cherish that person’s feelings.” Xiao Zhan truly believes in this.

In his youth, Xiao Zhan liked Stefanie Sun, and went to her concerts and album sales events. He hoped that he could catch a glimpse of her from afar, watch her shine onstage, immerse himself in her voice, and learn from her, become a better person, become a star who could shine for another person. He said that that was how the youth of his era fan an idol. The idol is a truly an idol, the motivation to encourage himself forward. Now, he cherishes all of his fans’ love for him, and he does not reject the term “traffic” – this is a term that many would avoid. (TN: Traffic is a term that is used in China to describe idols with a lot of fan following.)

“You might feel that traffic is not good, right? Feel that traffic is another derogatory term? Actually I feel that traffic is quite fine, of course the term to me means that a lot of people know you, like you, I feel that’s a good thing. At least I feel that no one can be high traffic forever, what’s most important is how you handle it, how you face the traffic, and let this traffic become a motivation to move forward, I think this is very important.”

He hopes that he can translate the love from his fans to become his motivation to move forward. An actor could depend on a popular drama to quickly accumulate fame and attention, but the art of performance requires professional training and experience accumulation. Xiao Zhan’s favorite actress is Zhou Xun. When he spoke of her, his tone utterly reveals him as a fanboy, “I don’t know how she evolved to this.” Our answer was simple, time and talent, both of which you cannot do without. Talent will help your potential in the domain of acting, and if fate ordinates, help you grasp the opportunities that knock on your door. Whereas time is the sharpening stone, every minute and second spent on the acting career will show itself in the performances thereafter.

“There are no small roles, only small actors.” Staying true to his original intentions and initial thoughts, doing his best in his own profession, seriously working hard in the acting domain, he will eventually find his own place.

Xiao Zhan said, “In this era where traffic comes and goes, staying true to myself, staying real, I feel this is the eventual goal. But it is so difficult to do this.”

Wish him well.

Q&A

Q: Before you came to Abu Dhabi, what you did imagine it to be? A: The image I had was that, endless deserts and wilderness, soaring majestic buildings.

Q: When you knew that our journey is somewhat similar to an adventure, being with animals, what did you imagine it to be? A: I thought about it. Something like African savanna, sort of like animal migration, herds of animals moving past you, especially spectacular. However, the animals on the African savanna are wilder, over here, the wild animals are mostly the gentler antelopes, giraffes.

Q: In your personal life, are you a person who also likes adventures? A: Yes, I can be considered as such.

Q: When there are many things that the results are unknown, does that excite you? A: If there are many things in my life that I already know the results, my interest in the new and unknown will wane. I prefer not knowing the results, there are many paths to take, and the destinations could all be different, this makes me feel more excited.

Q: So in your imagination, Abu Dhabi suits your sense of unknown? A: Yes. It is just very mysterious, a feeling of an unknown land, to be explored, and full of endless treasures.

Q: There are so many animals on the island of Sir Bani Yas, which do you want to contact or wish to take a picture with? A: The giraffes. To be able to take a picture with them, to get up close with them, I just feel this is very exciting. I have never had the opportunity, I used to only go to the zoo. Being able to contact animals in the wild is very rare.

Q: This time you were able to look into a giraffe in the eye, how did you felt? A: Just that I am able to look at it in the eye.

Q: Aren’t you afraid of giraffes? A: I am not afraid, I feel that giraffes are quite cute, why do I need to be afraid of it?

Q: They are quite strong. A: The giraffes?

Q: Did you know that in the culture of Abu Dhabi, daggers signify strength. In the ancient times, the Emirates used them as a self-defense accessory. Their founding father, Sheikh Zayed, almost wore one for half his lifetime, and daggers are found in many of his portraits. Even now, the young Emirates frequently wore them in public. A: The sign of bravery and strength. Actually, when I saw this dagger, I felt that it gave me bravery and strength, the start of an adventurous journey.

Q: Holding the dagger and walking along the cliffs, how did it feel like? A: Wow, every inch of this land is mine, I felt that I could jump down that cliff, there was nothing to fear. Especially when the wind came and blew open my windbreaker, it was especially refreshing.

Q: What did is the biggest feeling this journey gave you? A: Actually, not many people understood Abu Dhabi, after I came here, I was surprised to find that there were many beautiful scenery and interesting cultural traditions, and the underlying adventurous spirit within. It is like a pair of eyes, showing us new discoveries. Actually, the interesting discoveries that we don’t usually find in our daily lives, and this journey is tinted with the colors of adventure and mystery, makes me feel very excited. This city, it has its own cultural background, the collision with new things, is a very wondrous feeling.

Q: If your friend wants to go to Abu Dhabi for an adventure, what recommendations do you have? A: Actually there are plenty. I feel that if the friends around me were to come to Abu Dhabi, they have to experience the unique Arabic culture, the buildings here and their totems, I feel that these have special meanings. Those of my friends who loves art can go to Abu Dhabi Louvre. And there’s one more thing that cannot be missed, that is the adventurous journey to get in touch with nature, I feel this is especially great. Abu Dhabi’s deserts and islands, will really satisfy your adventurous desires to explore the world, you can look up and see the flying saker falcons, then look down to see the running antelopes and cheetahs, and turn around to see the giraffes standing behind you.

[shrivedog]

Pre's Triangle Our long journey to find a home has brought us to Eugene, Oregon. As though by fate, we landed smack in the middle of "Tracktown USA". As a distance runner who began his involvement in Cross Country, Track & Field, and Road Racing in the mid-1970's, I was familiar with the Bill Hayward, Bill Dellinger, and Bill Bowerman legacies. I also was a fan of the late Steve Prefontaine, sometimes referred to even now as "Eugene's favorite son". While closing the deal on our new home we found ourselves at a hotel directly across from the Willamette River, and just down the mountain from where Steve Prefontaine was killed in a car crash on May 30, 1975. At the time of his death, "Pre", as he was called by all who knew him; and heard shouted by the fans who used to chant his name during his many racing victories at Hayward Field; held every American Record from 2,000 through 10,000 meters. His former Junior National 5,000 meter record of 13:39.6 is still one of the fastest junior marks ever run. Pre was an Olympic finalist at the mere age of 23. He threw every gear he had into a race that he nearly won. Unfortunately, anything less than winning was unacceptable for the young upstart that was Steve Prefontaine. He faded to fourth on the home straight just yards from the finish losing the gold medal to Lasse Viren of Finland by just 1.7 seconds. Viren won both the 5,000 and 10,000 meter golds at both the 1972 Games in Munich and again in Montreal four years later. The Finn also finished fifth in the 1976 Olympic Marathon. The 1972 5,000 meters (same as 5 kilometers = 3.107 miles = 12 1/2 laps on a 400 meter track) was the race in which Prefontaine warded off several challenges before fading in those last steps over what was still a 4:04 final mile. Some have since said that Pre gave up, staggering the final yards and appearing to let up off the pace. I don't agree with that assessment. I believe that Pre made that race happen. Advised by his coach, Bill Bowermann, to not run from the front, as was Pre's want, because of the caliber of competition he was up against, Pre took a pedestrian pace from the first two thirds of the distance to an insanely world-class run. He went for the win and simply ran out of gas. Had Pre run safely for a medal, or waited just a while longer than he did, he likely would have walked away with at least the bronze. Leading into the final curve Pre held off one last charge by Viren before the Finn began to pull away on the home straight. Then Pre was passed for the silver by Mohammed Ghamoudi of Tunisia, and the bronze by a late surging Dave Bedford of Great Britain. Pre's finishing time of 13:27.6 was still less than five seconds off his own American record. The experience affected Pre greatly. He had a hard time coping with the loss, but eventually shook it off. On May 29, 1975 Pre participated in a meet at Hayward Field held to raise funds for the restoration of the ailing stadium. He even had a hand in organizing the meet. That was something Pre did regularly during his tenure at the University of Oregon, and the short time following his graduation. He decisively won the 5,000 in 13:23.5, defeating 72 Olympic Marathon champion Frank Shorter. That night Pre gave Shorter a ride to his place of lodging before returning to meet his girlfriend, Mary Marcyx, back at a post-meet party put on for participants and organizers of the Hayward restoration meet. He never made it to his destination. His death is still shrouded in mystery. The medical examiner's report concluded that Pre's blood alcohol was 0.14, above Oregon's legal limit of 0.10. Both Shorter, and Kenny Moore; another Olympic athlete; visited the scene the next day. Both contend there was no way that Pre was drunk. Both also contended that he knew the roads too well to have done anything reckless. One local witness claims that he heard the crash and, when coming to the scene to help Pre, saw another vehicle speed off. Others questioned local officials

motives, including the coroner's report, when a cherry picker was brought out to take photos of the scene. That just wasn't done, especially in the mid 1970's. Were officials trying to use Pre's fame to make an example of him? It is unlikely anyone will ever know what really happened at the site that is now called Pre's Rock, on Skyline Drive just yards from the corner of Skyline and Birch Lane in the wee hours of May 30, 1975. However, 46 years after his death, people still flock to the roadside monument and leave tributes; t-shirts, race bibs, medals, flowers, carvings, decorative stones, and other memorabilia. A local woman removes these gifts each month, discarding those that succumb to the elements, and donating others to museums. Still, more appear. From Skyline Drive, within sight of Pre's Rock, one can look down from the ridge and see the Willamette River, the large arched Interstate-5 Bridge, the Knickerbocker Bicycle Bridge, and Pre's Trail. The new torch on the very recently rebuilt Hayward Field is visible from Birch Lane as one loops just below Pre's Rock and heads North toward the center of town. Pre's trail was the result of his efforts to give the community a pedestrian trail that was much like those he saw while competing in Scandinavian countries. It is a series of woodchip trails that run over a two mile stretch of Alton Baker Park from below "The Pipe", about a half mile south of the I-5 bridge, to Day Island, past Autzen Stadium, to the north. If one were to cover every stretch of the woodchip paths, they would accumulate about 5 miles worth of exercise. It was a monumental effort to install and is well maintained. It is but one of the things that Pre gave back to the community. He did a lot for kids, the University, and to help athletes not be taken advantage of by the governing bodies of sport; giving the athletes more control over their own careers. Pre fought the corruption that was part of the old Amateur Athletic Union, reforming that body to become the Track Athletics Congress. Athletes were then able to establish trust funds to give them control over how prize money they won in competition was spent to help them compete, and still maintain their amateur status. Eventually, the TAC was dissolved and USA Track & Field was formed. Today, the sport still thrives. Even with the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, events are in revival, and a new Hayward Field awaits another U.S. Olympic Trials, and, perhaps, a future Olympic Games. I have an area that I have dubbed "Pre's Triangle". I drew a line from Hayward Field to Pre's Rock, then out to the middle of Pre's Trail, and back to Hayward Field. It is an uncanny representation of the heart of Pre's legacy. I have now raced at Alton Baker Park within sight of Pre's Trail, as well as run quite a few training miles on the trail itself. Pre's spirit is still alive and well in Eugene.

Illus. - Yellow dot = Hayward Field location (Agate Street) ; Red dot = Pre's Trail (also marked in its entirety from a workout I did, located in Alton Baker Park); Purple dot = Pre's Rock (Skyline Drive near Birch Lane, not far from Hendricks Park).

[youllallriseintheink]

Secrets and Lies, chapter 3

This is a Death and Taxes fic. It takes the typical, predator-prey dynamic that one often sees in one-offs and tells a story with it. It’s going to be the edgiest thing I’ve written thusfar, so buckle up.

tw for internalized homophobia, regular homophobia, and discussion of rape and abuse

---

Blood was on his bed sheets and Joey was asleep on them. Grant let him sleep- he didn’t feel like dealing with him yet. Looking in the mirror, he was met with purple bruises on his face and neck from the night before. Thankfully not much swelling. After Joey had woken up and gotten out of his house, Grant headed into town to buy some liquid foundation to cover up the marks Joey had left on him. Buying makeup was mildly embarrassing, but he was not wearing his shame to work on Monday.

Was this life now? Letting Joey do what he wanted with him and licking his wounds in secret? It seemed that way. Over the coming two weeks, over which Joey came to him three times- twice in Grant’s own office- Grant learned that trying to lessen the amount of anger Joey released onto him was pointless. Joey didn’t want an amateur therapist or a sub, nor was this a method of punishment or control- Joey just wanted a fuckable punching bag. And especially after Joey assaulted him in his office, work began to feel like a very unsafe place to be.

In those two weeks, Grant also counted up the price of leaving the studio and Joey behind. He’d been spending more lunch hours than usual with Norman- spending time with the man could always lift Grant’s spirits a little, and Norman was so intimidating that he felt (irrationally, of course) like Joey couldn’t lay a finger on him as long as they were close. Norman could tell that something was up, but he didn’t say anything, thankfully.

Grant didn’t want to look at Norman and see someone he’d have to leave behind if he chose to get out of the studio and have the pictures come out. He couldn’t bring himself to broach the subject of how Norman viewed homosexuality. There were a few other people Grant cared about at work- a few from his department that he knew casually, and Shawn and Lacie who he’d gone out drinking with a couple times. Aside from Norman, no one worth staying for, though.

Even before the affair with Joey had happened, most of the reason Grant was still a part of the studio was because he wasn’t sure he could land another job in this economy. But, the economy was recovering. It would be safest to try and land something else before fleeing the studio, so just in case Joey decided to do sabotage him professionally- assuming Joey cared enough to, which he probably didn’t. It was hard not to get paranoid. He could quit right away if things escalated, but for now he’d spend at least a few weeks looking for a job.

There was still the matter of his next of kin. He didn’t remember who he’d put down as his next of kin- it was either his ex-wife or his mother. Neither were attractive options, but his parents he could deal with more easily than he could deal with Joey.

A knock on his office door jolted Grant from his train of thought. Oh God… Joey? Cautiously, as though caution could save him, Grant went over to the door and opened it slowly. He let out a sigh of relief when it turned out to be Toby, their overly friendly treasurer.

“You alright, there? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Grant forced a smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. What can I help you with?”

“Just here to drop off some ordering forms.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Grant had always noticed that, although Toby was downright bubbly with everyone else, he seemed very uncomfortable with Mr. Dew. And, well, he did fulfill certain stereotypes- the way he walked (Grant hoped that wasn’t what he looked like- good God was it effeminate!), his love of aesthetics... Maybe…

“Joey makes us budget for some strange things, doesn’t he Toby?” Grant asked. He knew how ominous he must have sounded despite his best efforts. But he would have done anything for someone to talk to about this. “Has he ever made you budget for something like this?”

Grant pulled a bottle of liquid foundation from his desk- the same liquid foundation that was currently smeared over the bruises that Joey had given him a few days ago before. Toby eyed the bottle.

“I-I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you talking about… unprofessional relations?”

“…Yes.”

“Oh. Ouch. Sorry to hear about this. Yeah, Joey and I were hooking up for a while, but he never… compelled me to buy that. Look, he’ll probably forget you in a month. Okay? Hang in there.”

Grant didn’t know if he could or should explain that he was more than one of Joey’s hookups. He supposed it didn’t matter. “Could you help me with something?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I need to access my file without Joey knowing. I have a meeting with him tomorrow at three pm- could you do me a favour and tell him there’s an issue he has to see to elsewhere? I just need a couple minutes alone in his office. Please. I’ll do anything.”

Toby looked concerned, and a bit overwhelmed. “Sure. Seems easy.”

“Thank you.”

The plan went as expected. Toby came in at 3:10, telling Joey that there was an issue in the music department that he had to see. When Joey arrived with him in the music department and there was no disaster, he said that they must have taken care of it. Joey gave him a harsh look, but that was all before they headed back to their respective offices.

Meanwhile, digging through Joey’s filing cabinet, Grant found what he was looking for. His next of kin was his mother. Good. Everything was back in place by the time Joey returned- as though it had never been touched at all.

Well, now he knew what the hardest part of all this would be. It was a few days before Grant could bring himself to do it.

Grant took a deep breath. In front of him was a prepared speech written on note-cards- he knew that that was the only way he would be able to go through with it. And if getting away from Joey meant his next of kin receiving that photo, he’d never have the courage to leave Joey otherwise. He dialed the familiar number on his phone.

“Hello?”

“Mom? I have something to confess. I’m bisexual.” Not that he was- but there was a chance she would take this better than if he’d admitted to being gay. “I never acted on it in my life until a about a month ago. I fell into an abusive relationship with my employer. He’s threatened that if I don’t do what he wants, he will fire me and release a photo that he took of me while I was in a sexually compromising position. I’m telling you because he threatened to send it to my next of kin, and I thought that this would be a better way for you to find out. I’m going to try to get away from him, and after that I want to turn my back on the lifestyle. Permanently. I promise.”

There was a long silence.

“You’re… you’re what?” her shocked voice made Grant pity her.

“Bisexual- half straight, half gay.”

“I need to talk with your father about this. That- and you being in a position like that is just… a lot. I’ll call you back in a while, okay? I love you.” She hung up.

Grant spent the next twenty minutes too stunned to do much of anything other than worry about what this would mean for his relationship with his family. His mother had always been emotionally fragile, and he hated hurting her like this. His father’s potential reaction scared him more, though. His father had grown up religious and was still in close contact with family members who were, and whose opinions he cared greatly about. And while his mother would never think for a second to disown him… well, his father loved him, too, but…

If only he hadn’t liked being helpless so much! There had been times- several times before the night that Joey had first raped him- where he could have told him, “no, I won’t sleep with you, I’m straight,” but he’d told himself that Joey wouldn’t take no for an answer, that the situation was temporary, that he was passive in it instead of actively choosing it every time. He’d chosen this.

The phone rang. “Hello?

“Hey,” it was her mother’s voice. It sounded a bit teary, but calm- probably a good sign. “So, we talked about it. Most important part first- do you have a plan to get out of this abusive situation you’re in?”

“Yes. I’ll be out within a month. Ironically, once you get that picture in the mail is when you’ll know I’m out.”

“Good. Secondly- your father and I talked about it, and we don’t think you’re half-gay- it’s more like you have the potential to be gay, and you rejected it. I mean, you could live like you’re normal the rest of your life and no one would know any different. So, it’s okay. Right? You just got misguided for a while.”

“Right. Soon, this will be a memory.”

���Thank you. I needed to hear that,” she said. With that they said their goodbyes and hung up.

Grant cried- probably from relief. Thank God his parents had accepted this- only because he’d massaged the truth, but nonetheless. That was a lie he’d have to keep up for the rest of his life- and maybe that was for the better. Joey was awfully close to the stereotype, wasn’t he? A sexual predator who targets men- men who considered themselves normal not too long ago- and brings them to the point of buying makeup, crying regularly, and accepting a woman’s place in bed. Lust wasn’t worth that, or hurting his parents, or being like Toby, who, nice as likable as he was, might as well have had “wipe your feet on me! Everyone else does!" Written across his forehead. No, that wasn’t the man he wanted to be- he needed to leave this world of predators and prey behind.

[fluffypeachwriting]

Ten✧Shi makes their debut!

Everybody meet my idol oc group! I’m so excited to finally start making content for them, and I hope people like them! Under the read more are profiles and introductions to the group and members! Art by me!

Feel free to use the inbox to ask them questions! Give them a warm welcome!

Group Intro:

Hello everyone! We are Ten✧Shi! We are a group of four high school teachers in Japan and an idol group! This is our first group interview so please enjoy!

We chose the name Ten✧Shi because there are four (四/shi) of us and our kind students said we were like angels (天使/tenshi) of the idol world! The four pointed star in our name represents each of us coming together to be brighter, but it also represents a compass and our hopes of guiding people to their shiniest future!

For our debut we’ve gone with a more mature concept, taking the theme of angels and putting a modern spin on it!

We were previously school idols, formerly two duos known as ‘Savvy x Spiffy’ (featuring Natsuki and Ryu) and ‘FINEST♡’ (featuring Yui and Haru). Our school idol careers mainly consisted of a local rivalry, but a friendly one. Now we realise that our duo concepts were too different to compare fairly, which is why our competition ended in a stalemate during our third year. However we want to thank our fans, friends and family for supporting us back then.

Ten years on from our last performances we’re back as a quartet! We hope to inspire people around the world with our live shows, with our new concepts and songs. As adults in our late 20’s we want to show the world what we’ve learned since then and just how powerful we are!

We want to thank our students for pushing us to form a group like this, and due to their amazing support we couldn’t have entered the upcoming amateur adult idol tournament, designed for people like us!

Natsuki:

Profile

Height: 6’2 / 187cm

Birthday: July 19th

Star Sign: Cancer

Pronouns: He/him or They/Them

Image Colour: Mint Green

Self-Introduction

“Hi everybody! I’m Natsuki, the leader of Ten✧Shi! I didn’t think I could be a leader, but the other three were so insistent, I couldn’t resist their cute little faces! They said I’m the glue that keeps us together, but I don’t think I put special effort in, I just want to see everyone be the best they can be, Y’know? I just wanna take you all in and squeeze you tight! If I had all the time in the world I’d talk to each fan because you’re all so valuable to us!

I only became a trainee teacher in the past few years, but I’m sooo happy to see my old pals again! I love exploring lyrics in music, I am a Literature teacher after all!! I hope the songs I write in the future will inspire all of you to do your best! There’s so many different types of idol music, but I do love electro swing the most. It’s just the kind of music you can put on and dance around with! I’m so excited to dance with my friends again!

My charm point? Hmm… I don’t really think about that too much, but I’d say it’s that I’m willing to drop everything if my friends need me! I guess I also get compliments on my voice a lot. Of course I train hard as an idol, but I’ve been singing since I was tiny! Maybe that’s why I can’t sing so loudly… Oh you meant something physical? Ahaha… well, it’s a little embarrassing, but I overheard Ryu say I have “like, super toned abs. It’s so unfair.” Does that count? What?! No!! I’m wearing my work clothes I can’t just take it off!! I can’t let the students see me like this!!!”

Journalist’s Note: Due to popular demand, an exclusive shirtless photoshoot was taken shortly after the interview. Please view our Instagram page for a sneak preview.

Ryu:

Profile

Height: 5’11 / 180cm

Birthday: March 5th

Star Sign: Pisces

Pronouns: He/Him

Image Colour: Light Blue

Self-Introduction

“Make this quick, I don’t want to lose track of time and be late for- Oh you’re recording already? Fine. I’m Ryu. And I want to start this by making something clear. I’m not the same teenage boy I was last time I was on camera. The whole playboy persona isn’t gonna fly as an adult. I have a reputation to uphold. I’m a senior staff member of the school now, I can’t be seen dancing in shirts that are barely buttoned up anymore. And I’m especially not calling any of my fans ‘my kittens’. That shit’s embarrassing. Wait, I mean that it’s unacceptable. Can you edit that?

As I said, I’m high up in the school now, so I have a lot more to worry about than back then. And that also includes being part of a bigger group. Yeah, I love those guys, but you can’t deny they’re a handful. It’s kinda weird. In the old days I’d be the one running off and getting us into trouble, but now I’m… uhh… am I stuck-up to you? I really don’t wanna seem that way to students. Why are you laughing? Oi, what’s that face for?

Huh? Charm point? Who cares about that? Oh yeah, I’m the visual center. Okay, whatever. As an idol I like to focus on my body as a whole, but if I had to highlight an area I’d choose my legs. I’m not super tall, but my legs are kinda long, and sometimes Natsuki would latch onto them so they can’t be unattractive. The guy’s got some strange taste but I guess I trust his judgement. He is our leader, after all. Hm? When does he do that? I mean just like if we’re chillin before we go to bed. Yeah? Yeah, we live together. Wait!! Don’t cut the camera let me explain!”

Journalist’s Note: We didn’t cut the camera.

Yui:

Profile

Height: 5’8 / 172cm

Birthday: August 30th

Star Sign: Virgo

Pronouns: She/Her

Image Colour: Light Pink

Self-Introduction

“Hi hi! I’m Yui! I’m a PE teacher and the choreographer of the group! I love love love to dance, even without thinking about it! Dancing is such an amazing way to express yourself. If you’re alone and you need to get some energy out just move your body to the rhythm of your heart! Dancing as a group is so amazing too! Watching our lives shows back and seeing everyone do the moves I made is such an indescribable feeling!

I never thought I’d be a teacher, but I really love it! There’s a lot of hard work involved, but it’s all totally worth it. I know PE can put a lot of stress on students, so I don’t force anyone to do anything, and I try to make everything super fun and accessible! All of my students are so lovely, people really don’t get that kids are humans too, with such rich lives and stories to tell. Honestly I’d rather help out kids that need guidance than spend time with some of the grouches that teach here. EW!

My charm point…. Is my eyes! Connecting to our audience is so important, and I always focus on making the right expression, it’s just another way I can get across my feelings! People say my eyes are always full of life! I also love love love seeing students get inspired by my dances. When their eyes light up it’s like a whole new path has opened up in the world! I hope everyone supports us and we can all make new paths together! Love you!!!”

Journalist’s Note: Yui’s interview is an hour longer than the others. For the uncut version, please visit our site.

Haru:

Profile

Height: 5’5 / 165cm

Birthday: July 29th

Star Sign: Leo

Pronouns: He/Him

Image Colour: Yellow

Self-Introduction

“This is Haru. If I sound moody during this interview, blame the others for waking me up this early. This is earlier than I get up for work. But this isn’t about work so I shouldn’t complain. Hm? Yeah, I’m a maths teacher. I know it’s like the least interesting subject for most people. And I feel the same way. But when I was a kid all of my teachers were hell-bent on teaching their way or no way, so I chose to use my good grades to get a job here, and understand how these kids work as individuals so I can teach them in a way that they understand.

I’m the composer for the group. After high school I was in a rock band for a while. The split wasn’t in vain so it’s all good. And they’re fans of my idol stuff. Being able to write music helps out now, but I’ve still got a lot to learn! Music’s so great, it can lift your spirits or bring you down, which isn’t always for the best, but that really shows how powerful it is! Getting up on stage and feeling the adrenaline shoot through you is addicting and I feel so alive when everyone’s into the rhythm and you feel like the night could last forever... Looking back on some of our recorded performances, I notice how intense I get on stage. It’s a little weird to see myself so… energetic. Is it weird? No? Wait, people like it? You’re just saying that because I’m here. Hey, don’t show me comments on our debut MV, that’s unnecessary.

Charm point… The dark circles under my eyes don’t count even thought people point them out a lot, so I’d say my fang. I have a canine tooth that sticks out a bit, see? The others think it’s cute, but there’s nothing cute about me. What? My fans would say- No I don’t need to hear any of it. There’s no such thing as a charisma centre! I’m not cute and my face isn’t red!”

Journalist’s Note: As a school idol Haru won #1 ‘Cutest New Idol’ as voted by the public. As of the date of the interview, he holds the highest all-time number of votes in a single poll.

[soundofez]

for @mastar-week 2020, day 3// legacy

yet another star-centric side story to We Fill the Skies, set as always in the Leagues & Legends universe. i have a lot of emotions for both max albarn and sebastian black and i need to compensate for how little screen time they had.

(slight spoilers to we fill the skies, btw, but who cares about that when you can have Feelings.)

—

Max Albarn was usually all wiry strength and indomitable pride, a ramrod straight spine and perfect square posture, but now his back was bowed, his shoulders quietly sloped. Oscar had never realized before how thin his classmate was, how small and fragile. It looked wrong.

He turned back to his paper. They weren't friends, he reminded himself. And Albarn had plenty, anyway, if he needed a shoulder to cry on.

- We Fill the Skies, Chapter 2: Promises to Keep

—

Sebastian Black was tired.

It wasn’t the exhaustion of travelling for two weeks— travelling didn’t tire Seb like that. Seb didn’t get tired, usually, except from Elsewhere storms, and that wasn’t exhaustion so much as it was nauseated sickness, brought on by the feeling of magic trying to escape from his body to that mysterious other plane via fishhoks in his gut.

Seb didn’t get tired, except that now he was.

He hadn’t seen the note when he’d gotten back— it had been late, and he hadn’t want to wake the roommate he’d thought asleep in the next room. Instead, he’d crashed straight into his bed and gone to sleep himself, already looking forward to catching up in the morning.

Now, the desert sun was shining through the kitchen window, promising a hot day. Seb stood at the kitchen table, note in hand, and he was tired.

Papa died, the note read. I’m taking his ashes back to the Forest. Be back a week before classes start.

—

Seb was the only University affiliate to come home from the expedition. He didn’t like thinking about that, about how his professor and his classmate had gone missing, about how the other three students had all stayed behind while he’d gone home like a coward.

They hadn’t told him, either. That’s what hurt the most, if he thought too hard: that they’d simply agreed without him. And maybe Seb hadn’t talked to Ford much, but he’d spent every day with Kilik and Casper, and still they’d said nothing. They’d waited until the last second to tell him, too late for him to do anything, when even the Academy people had seemed to know what they were up to. They hadn’t given him a choice.

Max hadn’t told him, either, back before they’d even left on the expedition. Max had been chosen, not Ford, and yet when Seb had first arrived at the announced point of departure, he’d found Ford waiting there instead.

“What are you doing here?” Seb had asked.

“He didn’t tell you?” Ford had replied. “He gave me his place on the expedition.”

Max hadn’t told him. Seb hadn’t admitted that to Ford, had ignored Ford’s silent pity. It wasn’t Ford’s business.

And Ford had seemed to agree. They’d talked on the expedition— the group was too small for them not to— but Seb had kept him at a steady distance, even as he’d listened with rapt attention to Ford’s many stories.

Maybe he shouldn’t have kept that distance. Maybe Ford would have said something if he had.

Seb didn’t do regret. The concept was anathema to him. You couldn’t change the past: your only option was to do your best in the present. He got frustrated with Max, sometimes, because Max seemed to regret everything.

Seb didn’t do regret, and he wasn’t about to start. He stuffed some coin into his pocket and left the empty apartment to find some food.

—

Ford wrote to him first.

Seb was surprised. He wasn’t much for letters, preferring action instead. (Max scolded him for this all the time, but Seb was vaguely aware of the hypocrisy. Seb wasn’t the one who furiously applied twice to the University with different genders to prove a point, and then had to scramble for housing when the point was proved.)

Seb wasn’t stupid. He knew he wasn’t normal, not just because his already-rare gift for magic was especially strong, but because his mind ran on different tracks from everyone else. His classmates teased him for asking dumb questions in class, but Seb had some of the best grades in the University, and it was only a little bit because Max helped him study. (You’re an auditory learner, Max had once told him. There’s nothing wrong with that.)

Point being, Seb could read, he just didn’t like to because it took so much effort. It was with some surprise that he found his eyes on Ford’s neat signature, having devoured the rest of the letter. He’d enjoyed listening to Ford’s stories during the expedition, but he hadn’t expected the enjoyment to transfer to Ford’s writing.

His eyes dropped to the last line, tucked plainly under the signature:

P.S. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.

Seb read the postscript several times. It would be just like Ford to get it, the creep. He shook his head, but he grabbed a pen and paper from the kitchen’s junk drawer and sat down to write a reply.

When he was done with Ford’s letter, he grabbed more paper and started another.

—

Max’s letter came a day before Max did. It sounded almost normal, filled with their usual banter (You picked up a pen without me? Is there someone you want to tell me about?), but it also told Seb when Max would be home.

Seb spent the entire day at home doing chores. When he heard Max’s familiar footsteps on the stairs outside, he immediately positioned himself at the front door.

It worked. Max opened the door and walked directly into Seb’s open arms.

“You should have told me,” Seb grumbled into Max’s hair. It had grown since he’d last seen her. Underneath the smell of sweat and desert sand and sun was a hint of green earth. “I would’ve stayed.”

“I didn’t want you to,” Max mumbled, and burst into tears. “Damn it. Damn it.”

Seb hugged her tighter, rocking gently on his feet. “They didn’t wring you out in the Forest, did they?” he teases gently. “Amateurs.”

They didn’t bother untangling themselves as they sank onto the couch of their tiny living room. Seb shared memories of cool mountain air, of red dust seeping into his boots and staining his clothes, his chin knocking against the top of Max’s head. Max returned the favor, recalling the damp shade of the Forest’s enormous trees, the looming closeness of the canopy as it blocked out the stars, her breath warm against his collar.

When their stomachs growled, Seb shooed Max away to clean up while Seb toasted some bread with the Elsewhere’s fire. They settled around the kitchen table for a simple meal of buttered bread and a wedge of cheese, and this time Max asked after Ford.

Seb snorted. “Why do you care about that creep?”

Max shrugged. “He knows what he’s doing. After me, he’s the obvious choice.” She scowled. “And I want to make sure he didn’t mess around too much. I recommended him, so his performance affects me, too.”

“He stayed.”

Max looked up. “What?”

Seb’s throat was unexpectedly tight. He tore off a mouthful of bread, chewed slowly, swallowed. “It went wrong. The expedition.”

Max looked livid. “What did he do.”

Seb shook his head. “No, it wasn’t Ford’s fault, it was Kim.” He made a face.

Max’s anger didn’t complete subside, but she still snorted. “I should’ve known.”

Seb grinned at her, but the expression died quickly. “The expedition went wrong,” he repeated. “Everyone else... stayed in the mountains.”

Finally, Max seemed to sense his emotions. “What happened?” she asked.

Seb exploded, suddenly frustrated. “Nobody told me!” he snapped. “First Jack and Kim go missing, then Professor Montero disappears— they say he’s dead! And then we just— kept researching with Professor Yumi, and I thought maybe that was it, because what the hell was anyone supposed to do?

“Then, as we’re leaving, Kilik and Casper and Ford all say they’re staying, they have ‘relatives’ or something—” he adorned the words with finger quotes— “but I know they’re looking into it! And they didn’t tell me— they’d all let the University know, or something, but not me.

“Professor Yumi escorted me home. Just me!” He looked at his hands, dragged his fingers like claws through the air, yanking at the magic that hung there and everywhere else. Gold fire pooled into his palms. “Because I’m a mage. Because I’m powerful, but that puts me in danger up there, or something. But hey, Kilik got to stay, and he’s a better mage than me!” He ripped more and more gold from the air, snarled, “Stupid Sebastian doesn’t know anything, so why bother telling him?”

He quieted when Max wrapped her hands around his fingers. He was shaking, he noticed dimly. His vision was a golden blur. His lungs heaved with the effort of drawing so much raw magic.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know I should have told you. I just— I couldn’t. Not then. I c-couldn’t say anything about Papa, not then, so I just... didn’t.”

Seb didn’t get it, not really. It felt like their differences surrounding regret: he simply didn’t look at the past, but Max overflowed with what-ifs and if-onlys. He sensed it now, something fundamentally different about them, that while he sought company to relieve his pain, Max retreated from people to... to drown in it, maybe. (To digest, Max would tell him later.)

Seb didn’t get it, but this wasn’t the first time he didn’t get something. At least he knew how to ask.

He breathed, and slowly the gold faded from his vision. All the remained was just Max, just Maka, his oldest friend.

“What happened?” he asked her, and this time she told him.

The bustle of the Albarn clan had felt so much like her Papa, yet not. Maka hadn’t grown up in the Forest, and Spirit Albarn hadn’t spoken of his family, only of his beloved wife, Maka’s mother. The Albarns had loved Maka, but she hadn’t been family like Spirit was. It had hurt, so much, to see her Papa’s smothering affection directed at everyone but her.

“I would have gone with you,” Seb said. (I would have smothered you, if only you’d told me to, he would have said, if only he could find the words.)

“I know,” Maka replied, and smiled sadly. “But it wouldn’t be the same.” But she let him hug her anyway, and instead of going to their separate rooms they curled up on the couch together and fell asleep catching up.

[nicolewoo]

I’m not a scotch connoisseur

New Year’s Eve brings big surprises to the shy girl on NXT.

Pairing Drew McIntyre X Reader

Warnings: A severely drunk girl, and memories of a bad childhood.

Just a bit of fluff to put a smile on your face before 2020.

“Did you hear about New Year's Eve?” Rhea asked as she sat in the makeup chair next to mine.

“New Year's Eve? No.” I replied.

“Girl! It's going down this year. Dakota Kai said. “I can't wait!”

Perfectly timed, my cell phone vibrated in my hand. I peaked down to find I had a text from Drew McIntyre of all people. Drew had never texted me. He barely even spoke to me. So why the heck is he texting me now? I pulled up the message.

Hey, New Year's Eve Party at Club Eve in Orlando. I'm inviting all of NXT. I've booked  private VIP room for us.  Hope you can make it. Well, that was odd, but I guess if he was inviting everyone at NXT, it made sense.

“I'm guessing you guys are talking about Drew's party at Eve Orlando?” I asked Rhea as I turned my phone so she could see the text.

“Yeah, baby!” Dakota said. “It's gonna be lit!”

Ugh.... a crowded bar on amateur night? Sounded like hell to me. I had big plans for NYE.... A great night of sleep in my warm comfy bed where I wouldn't have to deal with drunks. “You've gotta come, Y/N!” Rhea said. “It's gonna be my first New Year's in America! Plus, Drew said he was bringing some RAW and Smackdown talent! We get to rub elbows with the other brands and drink for FREE!”

No! No! Stop trying to get me to go. I don't want to leave my house. I had a full day to myself with no wrestling, no press, no plans at all, and I was happy about that. On the other hand, if the RAW and Smackdown talent was going to be there, it was going to be a great opportunity to get my name out there. Ugh! I guess I HAVE to go. There goes my plans for not even getting dressed on NYE.

“Yeah, I guess I'll stop by.” I was already calculating in my head how long I'd have to stay before I could escape.

=========================================================

Why the heck am I wearing this ridiculous dress? I asked myself. Rhea and Dakota were insistent that I buy it when I tried it on..... at Rhea's request. This wasn't something I'd normally wear. It was cut too low on the top and the slit in the skirt went way too high for my taste. And that's not even including that it hugged my body so NOTHING was left to the imagination. I'd rather wear jeans and a baggy hoodie, but all the girls had insisted that I needed a dress. They were right of course. I couldn't go to the best club in Orlando wearing jeans and a hoodie.... which to me was another reason I shouldn't have to go.

I looked into the mirror and sighed. I guess I didn't look too bad. I kept finding flaws as I looked, and fidgeted with my hair trying to get it perfect, which it never would be. A car horn outside told me it was time to go. I took a deep breath and reminded myself this was good for my career.  I grabbed my clutch and went out to the car.

As I neared, the passenger window rolled down and Rhea gave me a cat call. “Holy cow, Y/N!” Dakota said as I got in the car. “You look amazing!” She smiled to me. The driver closed my door and we started toward Eve Orlando. I complimented Dakota on her beautiful green dress, and Rhea on her smart, blue suit.

I kept lamenting how I could be home and warm in my own bed as we pulled up to the club. My heart sank as I saw that the parking lot was completely full and a huge line was at the front door. I groaned to myself, but the driver didn't stop at the parking lot. He drove us around to a side entrance to the building. “Let's do this!” Rhea said as she practically bounced out of the car. She was so excited, and I have to admit it was fun to watch her.

My car door opened and a hand reached out to help me up. “I'll be outside whenever you ladies want to go home.” The driver told me, and I thanked him profusely, hoping I'd be leaving in less than an hour. The bouncer at the side door must have been a wrestling fan, because he waived us right on into the club.

Once inside, my spirits were lifted a bit as I realized we'd come straight into the VIP club and completely by-passed the crowds out front. This place was posh! There was food and drink being served by waiters in tuxes, and everyone was dressed up. Bailey was the first to greet us. “Hey! You're here!” She looked surprised to see me. “and you look stunning, Y/N!” She told me. “I'm glad they got you out of the house.” Hugs and compliments were exchanged as Rhea signaled to a waiter to bring her tray of champagne to us. She grabbed two glasses, handing them to Dakota and I before grabbing a glass for herself!

“Here's to a great 2020!” She raised her glass in a toast. “The year of NXT!”

“To the year of NXT!” we said as we toasted our glasses and sipped the sweet liquid.

As I scanned the party, taking inventory of everyone here, I saw Drew McIntyre looking at me. He looked positively gorgeous in slacks and a light blue button down shirt, arms rolled up and top button undone. His hair was gathered neatly at the nape of his neck, and the shirt showed off his grey eyes. He raised his glass up in a toast to me, and smiled, his dimple made me melt a bit. He seemed happy that they got me to come to the party too. “Hmm.” Bailey said as she saw the exchange.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just.... just nothing.” She mused and walked away before I could question her more. That was odd. I mused to myself.

Dakota sidled up to me. “He looks like a snack tonight.” She ogled him like a piece of meat.

I pretended I didn't care. “Who?” I turned away from Drew to face her.

“Don't play coy with me.......DREW! He looks so sexy tonight. Don't you think?”

“He.... uh.... he looks nice.” I replied trying to cover up my adoration of him.

“Nice?” She asked. “That's all you have to say? Nice?” Thankfully, Rhea rejoined us right then. “Rhea, doesn't drew look good tonight?”

Rhea found him in the crowd and said “I'd climb him like a tree.” The phrase made us all laugh. “Let's dance!” She insisted and grabbed my arm to drag me into the club and onto the dance floor.

“Rhea, You got me into a dress and here at the party. Don't push your luck.” I told her.

“All right. All right.” She raised her hands in surrender and dragged Dakota to the dance floor.

I found an empty couch and sat down alone. As I looked around, I saw Drew looking at me again, but he looked away when he saw me looking. I wasn't alone for long though, because Keith Lee came to sit by me. “You look like a fish out of water.” He said.

“How so?” I asked.

“I'm guessing this isn't your idea of fun?”

I laughed softly, “No. I had plans to curl up in bed with a good book and sleep my way into 2020.”

His deep laugh resonated through the room, “That does sound nice. So why did you come?”

I sighed deeply and said, “Rhea and Dakota were insistent. Plus, it's a great way to get my name known among the other brands.”

“After that killer match at NXT Takeover: Smackdown, I'm sure everyone knows your name, but I'm glad you came anyway. You never come out to social events.” A server approached us with a plate of appetizers, and Keith and I grabbed a few bites to nibble on. “That's a great dress, by the way. Did Rhea and Dakota talk you into that too?” He nibbled on a shrimp.

“How did you know?” I smiled at him.

“I never see ya dressed up. You seem more like a blue jeans and t-shirt kinda girl. You look very nice tonight though.”

“Thank you.” I popped a puff pastry into my mouth. “You clean up pretty well yourself.”

“Ya think so?” Keith smoothed down the lapel of his suit coat.

“Absolutely.” I assured him.

We sat talking a while, and I realized to my surprise, I was having a good time. This wasn't near as bad as I thought it was going to be. As we sat and talked, people came to visit and moved on. I didn't even have to move, and still got to talk to almost everyone. So honestly, short of this crazy dress, it was almost as good as sitting at home, just louder.

When Rhea and Dakota returned to the VIP room, they dragged along a very drunk Paige with them. Internally, I rolled my eyes. drunk Paige was obnoxious, and if she was drunk, others would follow closely behind. If I wasn't having such a nice conversation with Keith, I would have left.

As I peered around the room, I realized I'd talked to everyone except Drew. He must be busy with his hosting duties. I searched for him, only to find him looking at me again.

“Girl! Come dance with us!” Paige grabbed my hands and tried to drag me off the comfortable couch. She pulled so hard, I started rising despite my efforts to stay seated. “You look so hot. You gotta show off that dress.” She slurred out.

“Paige, no.” I insisted as I tried to sit back down.

Suddenly, Drew was behind her wrapping an arm around her waist. “Leave her be, Paige.” He pulled her back hard enough she lost her grip on me. She pouted as he handed her over to Rhea. “Please take care of her,” He asked, and Rhea agreed, dragging Paige across the room. Drew looked to me, “Are ye alright?”

I smiled warmly at him, “Yes. Thank you.”

“You don't wanna dance?” He questioned.

Shaking my head no, I answered, “I've been having a great time talking to Keith here.” That earned a smile from Keith.

He stood up after, “I have to get going, though. I want to get home before all the drunks hit the road.” We said our goodbyes and he left me with a warm hug.

“You donnae look like yer havin' fun.” Drew said as he slid into the chair Keith had been sitting on.

“I am. I promise.” I answered him. “Thanks for inviting me.”

Drew looked lost for a second as the conversation died. “So, if ya donnae wanna dance and ya donnae like parties, what do ya do for fun?” he asked as he flagged down a waiter and ordered a couple of scotches. “Do ye like scotch?” he asked when the waiter left.

“I can't say I've ever had a scotch of any quality. My mother liked scotch, but I'm pretty sure it was awful scotch. Probably the cheapest brand she could find.” I answered, and my stomach churned at the memory of it. “It was great for getting rid of hiccups though.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Hiccups? What would ya do with the scotch to cure hiccups?”

I laughed at his incredulous voice, “Take a shot. When you're a kid, it gets rid of hiccups.”

He chuckled so quietly, I barely heard him. “Would ya be willin' ta try a good brand with me? I've got a 27 year old bottle of Macallan behind the bar. Just for me, and whomever I choose to share it with.”

The sweet offer warmed my heart. “Sure, but I'm not an scotch connoisseur.” I said with a grin.

“No worries.” He said “But I'd wager this is better than the scotch you had as a kid.”

The waiter returned with two lowball glasses filled with the amber liquor. “To 2020” he toasted before taking a sip.

He'd been right. This scotch was completely different than anything I'd tasted. There was no burn. It was almost like drinking scotch flavored water. No wonder I'd seen him sipping it all night. This was smooth! “It's wonderful.” I admitted to him.

“Ye have great taste.” He joked and I laughed with him. “Thank ya for coming out. I was hoping you'd come.”

Now I quirked my eyebrow at him, “You were? Why?” I asked.

“I've neva had a chance ta get ta know ya. I was hoping to get some time with ya tonight.” He smiled shyly, and I thought I saw a bit of a blush on his cheek. Before I could be sure though, Paige returned with Rhea in tow.

“Sorry. Sorry.” Rhea said. “She moves fast when she's drunk.” She admitted and tried to pulled Paige back away from us.

Drew laughed a bit and stood. “Paige, It's time fur ya to go home.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and started heading toward the door while she argued with him. I watched in amusement as she did everything she could to escape his grip. The end result was that he picked her up, flung her over his shoulder and started to walk her outside. They didn't make it though, as the DJ announced it was 5 minutes until midnight. I heard Paige beg to stay until midnight. She promised to go home after that.  He grimaced as he handed her back to Rhea with a stern, “Send her home right after midnight.”

As the clock neared midnight, Dakota came over with noisemakers and funny hats. She handed each of us a noisemaker, and we rose to join the rest of the group. Waiters circled quickly with flutes of champagne for everyone. I assumed Drew would have hosting duties when the new year hit, so I slowly drifted away from him to let him know he didn't need to babysit me. I joined Dakota who was standing with The Undisputed Era and their spouses.

“Wanna kiss me at midnight?” I joked to her as I realized we were the only two in our area who didn't have anyone to kiss.

She looked around, seeing all the couples, and agreed. We both laughed. Then the countdown began. 20-19-18-17. The couples were coming closer to each other, so I jokingly snaked my arm around Dakota and she snaked her arm around me. 16-15. We watched the ball dropping on the TV screens scattered around the room. 14-13-12-11-10. Dakota looked up at me and her jaw dropped. She immediately released me as she looked behind me. 9 I looked at her. 8 I noticed she was looking behind me. 7 I noticed quite a few people looking behind me. 6 I turned to see what was happening. 5 My eyes met Drew's as he walked up to me. 4 He placed one hand on my hip. 3 He cradled my cheek in his hand. 2 My breath hitched at his warm touch. 1 He began leaning down to me.

The room went wild as horns were blown, streamers were thrown, champagne was gulped down, and I didn't notice any of it. Drew's lips touched mine and the whole world disappeared. It was a soft, gentle kiss where his lips barely brushed mine. When he pulled away, he looked down at me with a tentative smile. I smiled back and hooked my hand into the top of his shirt, gently pulling him back down to me.

The second kiss wasn't gentle. It was wild, passionate, needy. He pressed his tongue to my lips and I opened to let him in. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against him, but it wasn't enough. I wanted more. I wanted him closer. I wrapped my arms around him and held on for dear life. I couldn't believe Drew was kissing me. I couldn't believe what a great kisser he was. I couldn't believe he was holding me.

Slowly, I realized there was a new noise growing in the room. Applause... Applause and cat calls. Drew pulled away from me slowly. I whimpered, but so quietly he probably didn't hear. It was then I realized the people were staring at us, applauding and cheering us on. I couldn't bring myself to look around, but was fairly certain the whole room saw us. I blushed and buried my head in his chest. He laughed as he held me. “Alright. Alright. Enough o' that. Haven't ya ever seen a kiss before? Go back to yur party.” I peaked up to see that he had blushed also. Much slower than I wanted, the guests turned their attention away from us, and I slowly pulled my head away from his chest, which was hard to do, because he smelled wonderful. He was already looking down at me by the time I looked up into his eyes. “Hi.” He smirked. “You ok?”

Just looking into his eyes quelled my embarrassment. “Yes.”

[honeymoonjin]

bts reaction - doing porn together (sub version)

dom version coming soon

Jin

you and jin often thought about filming yourselves fucking, often in an offhand way, but never really considered it because of the logistics

not only did jin have an extremely recognisable face, but the two of you almost always had sex completely on top of each other, not really giving either one of you enough distance to hold a camera and record anything decent

you joked one day that the only way would be to take turns at filming each other getting off, and jin latched on to it with a passion you weren’t expecting

so the two of you decided to make an account, not expecting much, and first you filmed a video of jin’s crotch and lower torso as he jacked off

unable to control your domme side, you scooted a little closer and stretched your legs out until you were pinning him down with them, zooming out a little to catch the way he writhed around and whined under the pressure of your hold, hand speeding up impossibly until he was spilling all over his hand

the two of you later had the awkward job of meticulously going through and putting a black bar over where his face was shown, since you pushing him down gave the camera a perfect shot of his face from his jaw up, but once it was uploaded, the views grew pretty steadily

next it was your turn, but instead of just getting yourself off as he filmed, you decided you might as well use all the tools at your disposal

which meant him trying to muffle his groans and keep his hands steady as you rode him for your own release, with one hand on his chest and the other rubbing at your clit

the video ended with you cumming just as jin was close, and pulling away from him and grabbing onto the base of his cock before he can reach his own end

his desperate moans when you deny him an orgasm are now your new favorite sound, and the viewers seem to love them too

Yoongi

when it comes to subbing, yoongi really lets his yoonji persona take over

for him, there’s something so liberating about dressing up in feminine clothes

a lot of the time in his public life, he feels kind of tied to the strong, aggressive, more masculine sides of himself, like agust d

so it becomes almost pavlovian to finally let go when he puts on his costumes

white stockings, skirts, lacy underwear that’s so small the tip of his cock sticks out the edge

letting you take over and take care of him while he’s in that mindspace is addictive

it’s your idea to shoot porn together; you hate taking money from him even though he has plenty, so you wanted to earn something for yourself - i.e. filming him from the chest-down as you dom him

normally he’d be hesitant, but with the assurance that it’s so far removed from his image that nobody would think it would be him, he decides to give it One Try Only

your first video is shot from your phone as you tease him mercilessly with a vibrator for fifteen minutes, only to make him come untouched

the camera quality is shit and your hand was shaky but it got onto the trending page of the site you put it into somehow and started churning out some serious numbers

yoongi didn’t care about those numbers, but what he did care about were the comments, and since then, he was hooked

you’d shoot videos often, but saved them up to post regularly so that there weren’t massive gaps when he was on tour

often you’d wake up at three in the morning to see his face lit up with a cool-toned wash from his phone, trawling through comments of your latest video

“hey baby, cumguzzler98 said they liked the plug we used yesterday, the one that vibrated”

“mhm, go to sleep please yoongs”

“so i was thinking next time we should get a size up, i bet cumguzzler98 would like that”

“yoongi, if you say cumguzzler98 one more time i’m not touching your dick for a month”

“.......goodnight baby, i love you”

yoongi once confessed to you that when he went on tour and felt lonely, he’d watch one of your videos and relive it, and it would feel like you were there with him, taking care of him like he wished you were

unfortunately namjoon caught him once, without realizing that it was actually yoongi in the video, and now makes a weird point of sending yoongi recommendations when they go on tour

Hoseok

hoseok has always been one to like a little more aggression in the bedroom

and while he loves the idea of you two filming something, that aggression is what concerns him

you two aren’t exactly staying in one position the whole time, so it wouldn’t be easy to frame a shot that blocked your faces, especially since hoseok loves when you manhandle him and throw him around the place in different positions as you please

so the idea came up and went away pretty quickly

but for his birthday, after all the public celebrations, you two are lying in bed and you present him with an additional gift

a stretchy lace band, similar to a blindfold but wide enough to cover his face from his forehead to the cleft of his chin

he takes it for a test run a couple times before he accepts, but you can tell that he loves the way it restricts his vision and his breathing just enough to heighten every other sensation

you yourself wear a simple band of black silk across your face with gaps for the eyes, and within a week, you’ve set up an account on an amateur sight

for hoseok, the enjoyment in filming porn isn’t really the videos doing really well, but just the fact that people could see him being wrecked by you in the most delicious ways

however, the thrill of an audience has made you a little trigger happy a few times, and hoseok has had to get the make-up stylists to cover up a few red streaks and bruises that aren’t covered up by clothing

not that hoseok would complain. after all, he loves it when you get that way

the two of you do the odd livestream every now and again, since it has a tipping function which the normal uploading doesn’t have, and hoseok swears he never comes as hard as he does on those occasions

hearing you read comments out loud to him, one filthy insult after another in time of your spanks raining down on his ass, gets him hard like nothing else

and you always make sure to take extra good care of him after the stream ends, the two of you cuddling peacefully on the couch with steaming mugs of hot chocolate and a sleeve of biscuits between you

hoseok is always twice as energetic and bouncy the day after a shoot, even if maybe he’s a little achy

Namjoon

for namjoon, the joy of subbing is that for once in his life, all pressure is lifted off of him

he doesn’t have to make decisions or be responsible and aware of others relying on him

that’s why his favorite playtimes always involve sensory deprivation and/or bondage

being put into a space where you make all the choices and all he can do is sit there and really feel it

your journey into porn starts off with you taking pictures of him tied up to show him later how pretty he is like that

soon enough, his appetite grows, and he wants you to film little clips that he can take with him when he’s away from you, hoping that the visual could put him in that mindspace so that he could jack off and relax amongst the stress of promotions and tours

you comment offhand one day that it’s a shame you were the only one who got to hear his moans

he goes rigid and quietly suggests that maybe you didn’t have to be the only one

of course, namjoon is a leader of a internationally recognised pop group, so he realizes it’s not wise to have footage of himself like that online

mistakes can happen, and he doesn’t want a fan recognizing a mole of his or something small like that, and then his reputation being ruined

he points out to you audio is a lot harder to connect to someone

for a couple weeks or so, you convert your little videos to mp3s and upload them as audio files

they do well, but soon you realize the problem is that in the moment you were too focussed on the visual that the audio isn’t that descriptive

so of course, being the good girlfriend you are, you propose recording new audio

this time, namjoon’s bound to a chair with his legs open so that the microphone you bought could rest on the table beside him, and you haven’t gagged him like you often do

he’s got a blindfold on, and you’ve been teasing him for over an hour before you start recording

you make an effort to describe what you were doing to him, and namjoon was louder than he ever had been before, letting himself shout in pleasure rather than just sighing

the audio performs a lot better, and the two of you become a little addicted to uploading new ones semi-regularly, always with a different combination of toys and methods to keep it fresh

Jimin

jimin’s always been a sucker for praise

in the bedroom, it’s still there but it sometimes comes out a different way

it starts off with him wanting you to film him as you finger him open, so that he can see how much of a good boy he was for you

the two of you go through a slight rough patch when he’s convinced that you’re only telling him these nice things because you love him, and you don’t really mean it

so you’re solution is to film some videos of him and post them online, letting him see the whole world agree with you

jimin quickly becomes obsessed with the numbers, and starts to ask you for more and more

one day it’s your fingers spreading him open, the next it’s glass anal beads, and soon enough a million viewers a pop are watching you fuck him with a strapon

he’s unbelievably noisy on those days, and it’s a wonder your apartment neighbors haven’t complained, and one day he’s almost screaming, so you freak out and shove two fingers in his mouth, pushing down on the root of his tongue

of course the viewers can’t see anything above his shoulder blades, but the sound of him choking around uncontrollable moans sends them crazy

jimin is strutting around in high spirits for days after that video, and he keeps begging you to film more of him

he says he’s happy to cover most of his face with a blindfold or something, but he’s worried they’ll get sick of just seeing his ass all the time

you insist you’ve seen his gorgeous ass every day for years now and you’re not sick of it yet, but he’s unconvinced

finally, you give in, and film a longer video in which he sucks off the strap-on as you’re wearing it before you fuck him with it

you’d never admit it to him, but the night you uploaded it you didn’t get a wink of sleep, too scared that some horny ARMY would recognise his gorgeous lips stretched around the silicon, and make the connection

luckily, no one did, and so it became the norm to shoot videos of his entire body writhing beneath you, with a blindfold and usually a face mask too keeping his identity a secret

Taehyung

taehyung always had a bad habit of taking photos and videos of you two during sex

most of the time you’d catch him, slap his dick around a little as a punishment and continue on

taehyung had become a little too fond of the punishment and so he was being a lot more overt about it in more recent times, so you decided to take things to another level

“you’ll feel sorry for that later” you whispered into his ear at the time

that night, you sent him a link while he was in the bathroom brushing his teeth

you grinned as you heard him choke and start spitting out toothpaste before calling out your name in shock

you’d uploaded a video onto a well-known porn site of the two of you, one where you had started jerking him off beneath his pants when you two were watching a movie and he had decided to film it

neither of your faces were in it, of course you had made sure of that, but the delicious sounds of his sighs and breathy moans echoed in the room through his phone’s speakers

he ignored you for a day or so, sulking away, but you saw him go back and check the page several times, clearly reading through to see what everyone had to say

and then, that night before bed, he wound his legs around yours and asked quietly if you’d do it again

since then, you had developed a routine of him filming the two of you, and you screening them to make sure they were anonymous and uploading them

taehyung didn’t like a lot of the heavier kinks like degradation or bondage, but he loved nothing better than to let you take control

often he’d lie down with his back to your chest and you’d hold him down with one arm across his chest as you jerked him off, slower than he’d like, but leading towards a powerful orgasm

occasionally there’d be videos taken from him as he sat on the couch while you rode him

he did have a bad habit of forgoing filming the actual action to just zoom in on your tits, and many a time you would tug on his hair to remind him to lower the camera, only to delight in the little grunt he’d involuntarily give out

although he was the sub, you two were really partners when it came to the videos, so you always gave him the freedom to be the one filming

Jungkook

jungkook loves acting out to get punished

everyone knows him as the golden maknae, and he certainly lives up to the nickname in the bedroom too, but often when you’re tired and wanting him to take control he’ll sloppily eat you out or take his sweet time fucking you, just so that you’ll get fed up and take over, showing him how it should be done

even though he’s the director of the couple, you were the first one to bring cameras into the bedroom

he was being bratty in every regard, and so you shoved him away from between your legs and walked out, commanding him to stay where he was until you returned

he had disobeyed you and started jerking off when you got back, which riled you up even more, and you took his expensive digital camera in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other and shoved his face into your pussy as you filmed, talking about how this might give him a reminder that if he wouldn’t do as you asked, you’d just take what you wanted from him

he watched the video obsessively for almost a month before he asked you if you’d want to do it again

he joked that you could make your own GCFs - golden cunt films

(you didn’t talk to him for the rest of the day after that godawful line)

he even promised that he’d behave if you let him get out the camera again, so you agreed

for a while he fucked you like you wanted, and you two did the old cam couple circuit, but after five or six videos he got bored, and decided it was time to act up again

because you couldn’t show his face on camera, you settled for grabbing it off him, pushing him onto his back and jacking him off at your fastest pace

he let himself relax, assuming you were just taking control to take care of him, but your punishment came in the form of you not letting up your brutal strokes, even after he had dirtied your hand with his cum

that video of you making him come twice in a row instantly became your most successful, and after that night jungkook asked you to dom him in all of the videos

you agreed on the condition that you’d never tell him what you had planned for a video until it was time to shoot, and that he had to sit there and take it unless he wanted to use his safe word

and while he may have been a brat, he was a good boy at heart, and the two of you had never tried out so many toys and kinks before then

[theblessedbee]

🇨​🇱​🇮​🇨​🇰​ 🇹​🇴​ 🇸​🇪​🇪​ 🇹​🇭​🇪​ 🇴​🇷​🇮​🇬​🇮​🇳​🇦​🇱​ 🇧​🇱​🇴​🇬​ 🇵​🇴​🇸​🇹​

• ᑤᑗᖇSᙍ & ᕼᙍ᙭ ᙘᖇᙍᗅᖽᐸᓿᘉᘜ •

ᛉ . ꍏ ꃅꍟ꒒ᖘꎇꀎ꒒ ꃅꍏꈤꀸ . ᛉ

Just the thought of a curse for some is enough to send the mind on a terrible tangent. I'm here today to tell you not to fear, because I'm bringing you an arsenal of curse and hex breaking tips and tools.

• So what is a Curse? •

A curse is defined as a negative energy attack put upon someone or something normally to cause harm, misfortune or to take something away from another. Sometimes practitioners of malevolent magick can place this upon you, or even someone with strong feelings, normally negative. Sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking we have been cursed, which can cause curse symptoms in itself. I wrote this guide for the cursed and uncursed, so those can be aware of what they are, what they do and how to escape its grasp.

• All about Curses •

☠ Comes in many forms ☠

Curses come in all shapes and sizes. The entropy or chaos curse, The binding, The lesson, and The special-purpose curse. It can even come from jealousy or admiration and manifest as the Evil Eye curse.

☠ Timing is everything ☠

Curses in general can become effective immediately or may be dormant for years, and some curses laid on families have been known to have plagued them for generations. The problem is often not solved unless you discover you have been cursed!

☠ Keep your lips sealed ☠

The more personal information someone knows about you, the easier it will be for them to inflict harm upon you. Such things are your appearance, your full name, and your magickal name. It's best to keep quiet about these things around people you aren't so trusting of, or when meshing with other practitioners. Either way, it's always good to be safe!

☠ Is your foe a pro? ☠

If you are cursed, then it is most likely low-end magick practiced by an amateur. Professionals are generally doing more important things with their magick abilities. However, amateurs can have a lot of raw power even when they lack technique, their curses can still be very harmful and dangerous.

☠ Most distastefully bad juju ☠

When life starts feeling like a real life horror movie, you have a special-purpose curse and they can cause a great deal of disaster and havoc in your life. The evil eye curse is considered a special-purpose curse. You can wear a protective talisman called a Nazar that sheilds from the curse being put upon you.

☠ Avoid phony bologna ☠

Be very skeptical if a psychic tells you in a random reading that you have been cursed if you have not suspected yourself that anything has been going on. Some may even try to charge you fees to remove it for you. Be very wary especially if the reading was offered to you for free or very very cheap. That technique is called the bait and switch. If you think you are really cursed, I recommend that you get a second opinion or find a trusted practitioner.

☠ Purify and protect ☠

There are a couple of ways to deal with a curse. The first is to become an initiate of magick and learn to protect yourself. Sometimes other banishing rituals or protective spell workings are used to overpower the curse, protective amulets and talismans can be worn, and blessed oils and sacred washes can be used to attempt to lift the curse’s effect. A major side effect in removing a curse is that when the curse is broken, its energy can recoil on the person who cast it, and if the person has not taken the adequate precautions, it could very easily backfire.

☠ Seek Heavenly Help ☠

Call upon your spirit guides and ancestors for help and guidance. Family members can protect you from psychic harm from the beyond, but you must ask for the help yourself. Speak to them and let them know how you feel about that you need guidance. I also highly recommend decorating common objects around you such as pencils and lighters with angelic symbols, seals and runes, such as Algiz the rune for protection. This will give you the reassurance and extra protection you need during a crisis.

☠ Are there real remedies? ☠

You can find remedies for specific curses online. You don’t need to practice before you do this, but it is very important to follow all the instructions carefully and conscientiously. Remember to carry some form of protection with you such as a crystal, amulet or talisman or a charm, so you don’t end up being a curse victim in the first place!

• The Curse Cures •

Lets explore the different methods we can use to cure a curse...

☠ Anti-Curse Bath ☠

This is by far the easiest way to cure a curse, and that's by taking a bath using salt, oil and hex breaking herbs. It will remove the negative energy attached to you from the curse.

You can use uncrossing herbs and oils of your choosing and steeping them a while before entering the bath. Be careful to choose ingredients that won't irritate the skin. This is best done under a Waning Moon, but timing isn't essential if you are in a desperate situation. Repeat this as much as you feel is needed. This will only work if it is you who is cursed, and it isn't caused by an external object and if so, you could risk being re-cursed.

☠ Gather ☠

Hexbreaking herbs

White Candle

Incense

Oils (Olive or Essential)

Salt

Moon Water, Gem Elixirs (Optional)

The Cursed Person

🛠 Process 🛠

☠Gather Ingredients

☠Visualize a magick circle around you

☠Light your candle and incense

☠Begin to fill the tub, use moon water, gem elixirs, and steep your herbs

☠Add the oil and salt, imagine your bath becoming pure

☠You can make a purifying scrub for your skin using salt and olive oil as a mixture

☠Step in to the tub and cleanse your body thoroughly, imagining the energetic ties being removed as you wash them off

☠Enjoy the bath until it's too cold. Blow out the candles and incense, uncast your circle and dry off

☠ A Vessel for the Vile ☠

Curses can sometimes be drawn out into a vessel of some sort. Back then, animals were sometimes used as vessels and sacrificed afterward. Eggs for one, have been popular vessels for uncrossing in Italian, as well as African American traditions.

An egg is normally used as a vessel because it can be broken open to examine the contents to determine the results. You will need a person to help you with this, preferably someone experienced in magick.

☠ Gather ☠

A White Bowl

A White Candle

Incense

An Egg

Moon Water (or any water)

The Cursed Person

A Helper

🛠 Process 🛠

☠Gather Ingredients

☠Visualize a magick circle around you

☠Light your candle and incense

☠Get the cursed person to lay down on their back

☠Begin to pass the egg over their body, starting at the head moving in smooth downward motions, being careful not to swish the yolk

☠Say a prayer of the persons choosing. After saying the prayer, crack the egg open into a bowl of water and examine what you see...

☠Close the Circle. Discard the bowls contents at the base of a tree or at crossroads far away from the home of the victim. This process may need to be repeated several times to be effective, to "trap" the curse

☠ Get rid of that thing ☠

If you have a cursed object and you can find it, you should take it and bury it far away from you! If you can't manage to find it, you might be able to locate it using astral projection to follow the link to locate the object. A pendulum might be useful for this as well.

Don't hang onto cursed things, no matter how pretty. They will only make you suffer endless misfortune. Here's what you can do...

☠Take it far out into the country

☠Throw it in a river so it washes away

☠Destroy it, and dispose of the parts in running water

☠Burn and flush the ashes down, set them free in the wind or bury them far away

☠Use Astral travel to get to the object, or its astral double, and destroy it there. You may need to cast a binding spell to find out who cursed you. Cut the cords and free yourself from their ties

💣Don't rehome it 💣

Cursed objects should be destroyed and discarded, don't give these objects to people you love, you may be passing your misfortune on to them!

🌼 Try your best 🌼

You may not be able to try every method that I have mentioned here, as everyone has different skills. Certain curses may take more effort to get rid of than others. Uncrossing requires copious amounts of time, energy and materials and it can also be dangerous. Be sure to exercise caution and use protection when doing this work.

• Curse & Hex Breaking Ingredients •

Heres a list of ingredients I put together that you can use to break curses and hexes.

💣 Watch out! 💣

Please do your research before using them anywhere on or in your body, or even burning! Your safety comes first!

☠ Angelica root ☠

☠ Eyebright ☠

☠ Agrimony ☠

☠ Batwing Herb ☠

☠ Frankinsense ☠

☠ Calamus Root ☠

☠ Hyssop ☠

☠ Myrrh ☠

☠ Alkanet root ☠

☠ Ginseng ☠

☠ Peppermint ☠

☠ Hydrangea ☠

☠ Rosemary ☠

☠ Feverfew ☠

☠ Elder Flowers ☠

☠ Basil ☠

☠ Jasmine ☠

☠ Galangal root ☠

☠ Pepper (black or cayenne) ☠

☠ Bay leaves ☠

☠ Lemon verbena ☠

☠ Sage ☠

☠ Fumitory ☠

☠ Hemlock ☠

☠ Blackthorn ☠

☠ Devil’s Bit ☠

☠ Licorice root or fennel ☠

☠ Stinging nettle ☠

☠ Chamomile ☠

☠ Mandrake ☠

☠ Vetiver ☠

☠ Cinquefoil ☠

☠ Mugwort ☠

☠ Wisteria ☠

☠ Linden Flowers ☠

☠ Red Clover ☠

☠ Dragon’s Blood ☠

☠ Mullein ☠

☠ Juniper Berries ☠

☠ Woods: Ash, Hazel, Oak, Rue, Sandalwood, West Indian Elm, Willow, Wormwood ☠

☠ Brimstone ☠

• Curse & Hex Breaking Crystals •

Heres a list of Crystals, Rocks & Minerals that I put together that you can use to break curses and hexes.

☠ Fire Opal ☠

☠ Amethyst ☠

☠ Hematite ☠

☠ Bloodstone ☠

☠ Moldavite ☠

☠ Sapphire ☠

☠ Jade ☠

☠ Smokey Quartz ☠

☠ Carnelian ☠

☠ Obsidian ☠

☠ Black Tourmaline ☠

☠ Amber ☠

☠ Labradorite ☠

☠ Kunzite ☠

☠ Malachite ☠

☠ Clear Quartz ☠

☠ Selenite ☠

☠ Tigers Eye ☠

☠ Howlite ☠

☠ Apache Tear ☠

☠ Rose Quartz ☠

☠ Jet ☠

☠ Staurolyte ☠

☠ Blue Kyanite ☠

☠ Spirit Quartz ☠

☠ Celestite ☠

☠ Fire Agate ☠

☠ Jasper ☠

☠ Fluorite ☠

I really hope you learned a bit about curses, and how to get rid of them. I hope makes you feel ready to take on the cruel, dark world. Even if you do encounter this one day, you will be prepared, and armed with an arsenal of knowledge that you can use to help yourself and others.

Thank you so much for reading,

and blessed be!

*images found on giphy

🇧​🇾​ 🇹​🇭​🇪​ 🇧​🇱​🇪​🇸​🇸​🇪​🇩​ 🇧​🇪​🇪

[initiala]

Call Me By My Name

“If we are to be intimate this evening, I’ll have to insist on one condition.”

His words are as soft as his hands running down her arms, light and simple touches to keep her buzzing from the dizzying kisses they’d shared. Emma keeps staring at his lips, wanting them to come back and touch hers, wondering why they’re still talking and not ‘being intimate’ as he’s calling it. “What is it?” she asks, her voice just as soft, willing do do just about anything to see if he’s as good kissing her in other places as he is kissing her on the mouth.

His hands skim her shoulders and her neck, reaching up to cup her face. “I’d prefer it if you called me ‘Killian’.”

His hands make it so she’s looking up at him, his eyes soft and pleading and God damn him for having such blue, blue eyes for her to get lost in, she almost forgets his request.

Almost.

He’s been Jones for as long as either of them can remember. Jones and Swan, thick as thieves, never one without the other too far behind, their other friends had often joked about them running a private investigation firm. He was Jones, she was Swan. Always and forever. Calling him Killian, especially during this…

She swallows hard and she knows he sees it, knows he sees the hesitation and the flash of fear and the rising urge to run, run, run, because he’s Jo--he’s Killian and he always sees it.

He always sees her.

This is too intimate. Too real. Too much. Too…

His lips touch hers, soft as his hands, as his hair between her fingers, as the way he makes her feel inside, and she relents. She molds herself against him, her mouth working against his as his tongue slips between her lips and he slides the straps of her dress down her shoulders. She whimpers against him when he unzips her dress and the fabric falls around her hips. “Killian.”

He stills. “Say that again?” he asks, almost desperate.

Pulling back, Emma’s surprised to see how nervous he is about this. Killian Jones, the man who walks into any room and commands attention, bold as brass, nervous.

And it calms her, slightly, to see he’s just a little bit scared of crossing this line as she is.

She takes his face between her hands just as he’d done earlier, his scruff scratchy against her palms, and brings him down to her. “Kiss me, Killian.”

“Emma.”

Not only does he kiss her, but he lifts her right out of her goddamn dress -- or at least that’s what it feels like. Her dress falls from her hips onto the floor and her legs immediately wrap around his waist as he carries her from the hall into his bedroom. She bounces a little with each step, her panty-clad core jutting against the thick erection she can feel in his jeans; the fire inside builds higher with each step, little flares of arousal licking up her spine.

She squeaks when he presses her against the wall, using it as leverage to rut against her. Her toes curl as she breaks the kiss, gasping his name and clinging to his shirt for purchase, his lips finding her neck and his teeth immediately seeking to mark her as a reminder of tonight.

As if she’d forget.

“Bed,” she gasps. “Bed, please, Killian.”

He groans at the sound of his name and does as she asks, both of them collapsing in a tangled heap and working to rid him of his clothes. She gets distracted for a moment when he gets his shirt off, her fingers wandering through the thick hair spread all over his chest, mapping the hard planes of his body hidden under it. She smiles when her fingers graze over his sides and he wriggles away. “I didn’t know you were ticklish,” she says softly, watching him undo his belt and drop his pants to the floor.

“Few people do,” he says, then drops to his knees on the floor.

He takes her by the ankle and pulls her forward until her ass is just about hanging off the edge of the bed. His thumbs hook under the sides of her panties and he yanks them down, eager to reveal her center and Emma shivers under his intense gaze. He appears to be inspecting her, his head tilting to the side a little as his eyes roam this small part of her body that she’d never thought deserved this much consideration before. Then his finger touches her, gently running down the length of her slit and she almost cries out -- her core clenches, desperate to be touched, filled, and she has to bite her lip to stop herself from begging. “Ah,” Killian says and catches her eye. “Emma, no holding back. I want to hear everything I’m doing to you.”

Her tongue darts out and wets her lips. She nods and his grin toes the line between pleasure and sin, and she feels his fingers part her core. “Beautiful,” he whispers, then ducks his head between her legs.

She sucks in a breath at the first touch of his tongue against her sensitive skin, a gentle probe before he pulls back and considers her again. “Let’s see how she likes it,” he murmurs, as if to himself, and then lowers his head once more.

If she thought he was good at kissing her lips, it was almost amateur hour compared to how he was kissing her cunt. His tongue sweeps a dirty circle around her clit before he licks the full length of her, laying the flat of his tongue against her and moving up and down and up and down. Emma arches against the bed, his name flying from her lips as he begins a relentless assault -- “Killian!”

“Again,” he mumbles, his lips tickling against her.

“Killian.” His tongue curls up inside of her and she whines, “Please.”

It’s a perfect mix, trading between fingering her and fucking her with his tongue, keeping her simmering just below the threshold of orgasm as he delights in tormenting her for what feels like an age. His name leave her lips in a chant, in pleas, in threats, and he just hums against her and thrusts his tongue back into her dripping cunt, drinking her in greedily and driving her absolutely crazy.

She almost decks him when he finally pulls away, her clit throbbing and her core aching to be filled. She rises up on her elbows to glare at him, but he’s digging through his pants pockets and ignoring her look. He pulls out a condom and wastes no time in ripping the packet open and rolling the sheath over his cock, the slight tremble in his fingers the only hint at how much this is affecting him as well. Emma’s temper cools slightly and she slides back so her head rests on the pillows; Killian climbs up on the bed, neatly caging her in with his body and looking down at her with what she could really only describe as a mix of longing and nerves.

“Emma, are you sure?”

This was just supposed to be a romp, caving in to what they’d both been dancing around for years -- sexual tension and the stupid crush she’s been nursing and stashing away and apparently his stupid crush on her and --

It’s too much.

It’s never going to be enough.

She’s going to jump into the deep end and hope he’s there to join her.

“Killian.” His eyes flutter close and his breath quickens as she says his name and she reaches up to caress his cheek. “If I wasn’t sure, or if I didn’t want to, do you really think I’d still be here?”

Swan and Jones. Thick as thieves. He knows her better than anyone else and he knows the answer to that question after years of dishing dirt on bad dates and apparently both of them sitting there wishing they had the gonads to actually act on their feelings towards each other.

Oh well. They’re acting on them now. Or they would be, if he’d actually get the fuck inside of her.

“Emma.”

His weight on top of her feels good, his lips on hers even better -- especially when she can taste his efforts from earlier -- and the head of his cock sliding through her folds feels the best of all. “Killian,” she mumbles, moving against him, trying to get him inside of her. “Killian.”

“Again, love,” he breathes.

She growls in frustration. “Killian, put your fucking cock inside of me.”

That startles a laugh out of him, but to his credit he does shift up enough to get a hand between them and guide his cock to her entrance and -- oh. Emma inhales as he slowly pushes inside, filling her, stretching her, the feel of him gliding against her walls better than she ever could have dreamed. He pulls one of her legs up over his hip and she groans when he bottoms out, filling her completely.

She never wants this feeling to end.

He starts to move, a litany of praise and what sounds like prayers falling from his lips. She wraps her other leg around him, meeting him thrust for thrust. He feels wonderful, every stroke making her skin tingle and her spirit sing with pleasure. “More, please,” she whispers, her fingers going to his hair. “Killian.”

She feels the shudder roll up his spine, the desperate growl he emits as he buries his face against her neck, and she gasps at the next thrust -- hard and needy. His next movements grow more and more frantic as she whispers his own name in his ear again and again, and she feels the curl of pleasure tightening inside -- close, so close, so--

She chokes out his name as she convulses, her orgasm washing over her as she slipped into delirium. He thrusts into her just a few more times, drawing out her pleasure before falling himself, his breaths coming harsh in her ear as they lazily drift back down from cloud nine.

Hell, maybe cloud ten.

Her legs don’t really want to work properly, which prevents her from pulling a usual Emma-move of fuck-and-dash; when Killian returns from tossing the condom and cleaning himself, he looks just as nervous as she feels about what should happen next.

“I don’t want you to leave,” he admits. “Emma.”

Her tongue darts out and wets her lips and his eyes follow the movement. His voices caresses her name, softness she’s known he possesses but rarely shows to anyone else. Hearing it doesn’t affect her the same way it affects him, but it does make her pause, makes her reconsider what should happen next.

Makes her want.

“I… don’t want to leave,” she says and this feels a lot like feelings and change, but wasn’t that the whole point of all of this in the first place?

He lends her one of his shirts and she can’t count the number of times they’ve fallen asleep together in his apartment before, but this time it’s different -- she’s only wearing the shirt and he hasn’t even bothered putting anything on and they’re not cuddling but…

It’s close enough.

In her defense, he smells really, unfairly good after sex.

[superchartisland]

Lemmings (Psygnosis, Amiga, 1991)

Gallup all formats individual formats chart, Computer & Video Games Issue 114, May 1991

[Elements of this post are based on sections of a previous piece I wrote on Oh No! More Lemmings.]

AAA of the 1980s has been a story of computer games as a source of surging creativity in the UK, but also a story of a local audience in splendid isolation. The compromised remakes of Japanese games that made it to #1 in the UK were pretty much a one-way trade. By the end of the 1990s, British developers would be responsible for two of the world's most famous and successful games. Those games would be made to a much bigger scale. In 1991, as mainstream games got more complex, for them to be the effort of one or two individual programmers was already increasingly rare. It was a time when having the right conditions for teamwork paid off.

A small team called DMA Design made Lemmings, which is not quite one of those giant British games but did sell millions and get ported to a large proportion of the world's game formats. Lemmings’ hook is inspired by the Disney-constructed idea that the rodents of the title deal with over-population by rushing off cliffs en masse. The game’s ‘lemmings’ are more human, tiny people with white skin, blue clothes and green hair who drop into each level from an undisclosed location and walk steadily forward until instructed otherwise, even if it's to their own doom. Each level has an exit back out of its world, and your task in Lemmings is to use a set of limited abilities to work out a route to get your team of charges from A to B, where sometimes B is across the C, or A and B are both in L. You can get lemmings to knock through walls, block others from moving forwards, build bridges, blow shit up, and so on, with each level giving you both a different map and a different number of each of the abilities.

Once Lemmings has got through teaching you how its abilities work, it moves on fast to both using them in increasingly complicated combinations and making you think laterally about ways to use each one. The form of the appeal of this is highlighted in a mock warning on the game’s cover and title screen text scroll disclaiming responsibility for “loss of sanity, loss of hair, loss of sleep”. The suggestion is that the appeal to the player lies in their own frustration, or at least in building that frustration to the point where the relief of release from it is ecstatic. The ideal Lemmings level, perhaps, should appear initially impossible until a sudden mental breakthrough that reveals it’s really easy, followed by the realisation of a complication that renders it impossible again. And so on, perception swinging wildly but settling in on a mid-point final realisation that yes, everything is accounted for and it’s just about doable. Here is where the decision to make each level goal a percentage of lemmings safely to the exit, and often a percentage below the optimum outcome, is a particularly smart one. The slack sometimes allows a sudden realisation that you are losing lemmings to lead to an improvised solution on the fly and resultant success, and that’s another exhilarating feeling of its own.

As a logic puzzle loving, computer game playing child, when I got a brief chance to play Lemmings on a family friend’s Amiga it immediately became one of my favourite things ever. It was an unusual type of game, but it’s easy for me to see how its developers’ policy of getting as many demos of it as they could out there worked so successfully, and how Lemmings had such an impact across the UK and beyond.

There is still a statue of lemmings in Dundee, the game’s hometown. A port city on the East coast of Scotland, Dundee is something like the 50th biggest urban area in the UK and has a totally outsized place in the UK video games story. You could put it down to random happenstance that the handful of people led by Dave Jones who made up DMA Design were from Dundee. But a game like Lemmings coming from Dundee is no more complete coincidence than the procedural space exploration of Elite being the work of Cambridge maths and science students was.

Dundee was once the centre of the jute industry, making fibre for bags and ropes. As the economic viability of that dried up, many skilled (and mostly female) workers transferred to working in a new form of production at the Timex watch factory. Later on, watch sales not being what they had been, that factory diversified into making other technology. It was perfect for our old friend the ZX Spectrum. For Dundee, that meant lots of Spectrum computers available on the cheap, a low-risk chance to experiment, and other opportunities besides. And with that availability, there was an increased chance for connections and community. The Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, where many of the makers of Lemmings met, for instance. For Dave Jones in particular, the Timex connection was more direct as he worked there as a Spectrum tester. When he was made redundant, he used the money to support him and his friends in Dundee to form DMA Design and a few years later they developed Lemmings.

With their own experience with home computers and with British audiences in mind, they made Lemmings for the Amiga first. DMA also drew on a recent British lineage of games led by resource management and clicking on menu options, like Supremacy and Populous (almost as crucial to Lemmings’ form as the lemming was that other rodent-derived computer item, the mouse). Lemmings was a collaboration right from the start, even the most basic animation of the tiny characters being the work of two people. Lemmings wouldn’t be the same without all of those contributions. To take one obvious example, it wouldn’t have the same warmth without Brain Johnston and Tim Wright’s familiar but copyright-avoiding soundtrack, taking “Ten Green Bottles”, “London Bridge is Falling Down” et al on a toytown funk trip. Beyond even a list of credits though, as the series of particular circumstances which brought DMA together in Dundee show, every game is the result of a whole community, providing skills and resources in the right place and right time along the way.

Even above its problem-solving, what stands out about playing Lemmings is that the same message of collaboration is integral to the game itself. So many games that I’ve played for AAA have been about the lone wolf, the highly able individual prevailing against the odds. In the Britain of the late ‘80s, perhaps it’s no surprise that messages of individualism resonated with the prevailing culture. For alternatives, we have seen sports games where you take collective charge of a group of people, and there were precedents for successful games that had you overseeing large populations, even if Populous and SimCity didn’t make it to my UK #1s list. But sports games are limited to a different kind of competitive narrative, Populous had the player as a God and SimCity as combination planner-architect-builder. You were still the one responsible for taking all of the actions. In the more radical Lemmings, you can’t create earthquakes or new electricity supply lines or do anything at the macro level. All actions must be carried out via an individual lemming. The player is but an advisor, or as Martin called the player’s role in the Lemmings post for his original AAA, “an avatar of community spirit”.

It’s not long into Lemmings before you reach situations where you need different lemmings to support each other. Two lemmings might need to be send ahead so one can turn the other around to dig their way back to the group. One lemming might need to build a staircase to put another in place to remove another obstacle. Individual lemmings take actions but afterwards they get subsumed back into the herd. You can only succeed by getting lemmings organised to work together, and they succeed or fail as a group. Each lemming that reaches the end of a level has depended on the resources of the level and the skills of other lemmings being in place along the way. Text on the title screen tells players to remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

The lack of narrative ego is striking. While as the player you are in a head-to-head battle of minds with the level designers, within the narrative world of Lemmings the player is taken out altogether. Even outside of the game itself, Lemmings welcomes further collaboration. There are tests of physical precision and speed in some levels, but with so much of test the game provides being mental, it lends itself to sharing thoughts and ideas. My best memories of playing Lemmings aren’t of playing it by myself, but of sitting with my mum and my brother and working as a team to come up with different possible solutions. Fittingly, it turns out that this was similar to the process by which DMA themselves designed the levels.

There are signs of something darker in Lemmings too, particularly in hindsight. It's in the choice it offers you each time you play a level, a more dramatic version of the deal in Dizzy that if you lose, at least the game will entertain you in the process. If you decide that you can’t complete a level, or you just get bored, you can double click the mushroom cloud icon and watch all of your lemmings explode to maximum dramatic effect, a choreographed carnival of cute violence. The lemmings’ tiny stature and outsized physical expressions, wonders done with a few pixels like the way they shrug when they finish building a staircase, encourage the player to care for them, but the player can blow them all up too.

That’s only a discordant note if you don't look too closely. The game is filled with grizzly traps that kill lemmings in inventive ways, squashing or incinerating them out of nowhere. It turns out, in fact, that those animations were the origin of the whole game, the point in another project at which it became clear that the tiny animated people had the personality to stand alone. There's an irreverence and black humour very recognisable from other British culture in going on to make the cute save-the-lemmings game but still leaving the horror in there. Lurking within Lemmings is the power of a particular kind of anarchic freedom and its possibilities. DMA would go on to take the idea of just letting the player blow everything up and make Grand Theft Auto, after all.

Wherever it started from as a game, though, the strongest message that comes through from Lemmings is the generous one about the importance of people working together. Without everything that community and collaboration provided along the way, Lemmings wouldn’t have been possible, just as its lemmings can only reach their goal by building on the work of many.

[47pictures]

“Sedona”

Road trips were always fun, even if I didn’t get to go on a lot of them. I was invited to tag along for a visit to Sedona, Arizona, along with three other people - my younger sister Janice (19), Kenneth (25), and Matt (27). I was 23-years-old and a recent college graduate. For now, there was a little free time while I applied and waited to hear back from several employers.

Kenneth and Matt were doing this for their new ‘horror’ podcast, where they covered a variety of creepy, unexplained stories and phenomena around the world. Typical things you’d expect from an amateur horror podcaster. Several of the listeners recommended they cover the topic of certain ‘hot spots’ or zones that seem to harbor paranormal and downright strange activity. So to suffice, they decided to pay the city of Sedona a visit themselves, since they were adventurous like that.

The area had a reputation for being what’s known as a ‘spiritual vortex,’ a zone where people seem to be at a sense of peace, calming, and thought to bring healing capabilities to whoever stands in it long enough.

So why use it as the topic of a horror podcast? Well, it’s also known to be the sightings of many UFOs and other paranormal events from time to time that can’t quite be explained. Supposedly, there are other ‘zones’ like this in the world. Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. Taos, New Mexico. Aokigahara forest in Japan. The Bermuda Triangle. They all have the same thing in common.

Energy. Lots of peculiar energy compared to the rest of the world. Matt and Kenneth, being the urban explorers that they were, wanted to nosedive right into the heart of Sedona’s vortexes. The main one we planned on hitting first was Bell Rock, a large butte with one helluva peak that gives a panoramic view to die for.

Usually, I’d say fuck no to things like this, but then Janice agreed to tag along. As a matter of fact, she agreed without hesitation, as she was more adventurous than I was, always getting into things, in both a good and bad way. She also got into more trouble than I did. It was just me and her growing up, and you can imagine how much blame I’d get for when something unfortunate would happen to her. She was 100-percent on board, and even wanted to hike some of the trails with the two guys while she insisted I could stay in the van if I wanted.

Nope.

I knew Kenneth and Matt well enough to assume they were good people, truly, but older sibling instincts refused to let her go by herself with two older men. Even if I was overthinking it, that just wasn’t something I could afford to risk.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I knew of van dwellers and people who’d put a lot of effort into making their home on wheels look and feel like an actual home, but damn, Matt and Kenneth weren’t playing around. It was a high-top conversion van with more room than you’d expect from the outside looking in.

They fit a couch, beanbag, tabletop and chair, computer, mini-fridge, sink, mini-oven, and stovetop all in such a compact yet roomy living space. It was also decorated with various stickers and posters, and the floral pattern curtains paired nicely with the brown wooden interior of the walls.

What really set the mood, though, were the strands of LED lights taped around the corners and along the walls, each circuit lit in a combination of colors ranging from red, blue, green, and yellow, making it look like Christmas.

Janice and I were inside the back, sorting through our things and getting settled in.

“I’m glad you decided to come along,” she mentioned.

“What, you thought I was just gonna let you go by yourself?” I remarked.

“You know I’m an adult now, right?”

“Yes, and you’re still naive.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Think about it, me leaving you with two grown men?” I added.

“Um, have you seen the two of them?” Janice retorted. “Like, I’m just saying, I think even you could take them by yourself. Hell, even Mama could.”

“That’s because Mama can actually fight.”

“I can fight,” she argued, sounding offended.

“Eh, you talk a good talk.”

She scoffed. “Whatever, you know I can scrap when I need to.”

“Suuure.”

She hit me on the shoulder, as I teasingly smiled.

Then Kenneth came into the back where we were.

“Got everything?” he asked both of us.

“Yeah, think so,” Janice said.

“Sorry there’s not another bed for you to sleep in, Joe,” he said to me.

“Oh that’s okay, Janice will be perfectly fine on the beanbag in the corner,” I dryly humored.

“Ha-ha,” she remarked.

In one hand, Kenneth held two walkie-talkies by their antennas and raised them.

“Brought some two-way radios, just ‘cause,” said. “In case we feel like playing around or testing other points at the summit and other spots.”

“Ooh, sounds fun,” Janice sounded pleased. She then took note of the thing in his other hand. “What’s that?”

“Oh, this?” Kenneth said, raising the device for us to see.

It was a small wooden contraption in the shape of a triangle and what looked like a gemstone tied to the end of a string.

“It’s a pendulum,” he noted.

“What’s it for?” she asked.

He then walked over to the tabletop and placed the pendulum on its legs to stand freely, as the gemstone now began to swivel left and right on a single axis from the string.

“Well,” he started, “They say when you’re near a site that’s full of paranormal or high amounts of energy, the pendulum’s supposed to swing nearer in that direction or whatever.”

“Who’s they?” Janice remarked.

Kenneth looked at her then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said frankly.

Janice laughed amusedly.

“Apparently, that’s what it does,” Kenneth went on.

“What kind of rock is that?” she pointed.

“Oh, that’s amethyst. Supposedly it wards off bad spirits, so, you know, probably a good idea to have it around while we’re camping out there.”

“I thought the vortexes harbor good energy only?”

“They do, but, you never know.”

You never know…

“Oh that’s okay,” Janice said as she clasped her hands on my shoulder. “Joe here will protect us, because our grandmother said he’s special,” she said in a mocking tone and a big smile.

Janice then walked out of the van.

“O… kay,” Kenneth replied.

But I knew exactly what she was referring to.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We made a rest stop at a gas station seemingly in the middle of nowhere. No big-name shop like Shell or Texaco, but a compact blue wooden exterior structure with two gas pumps that look something straight out of the 70s. They did, however, have a good selection of snacks and drinks on par with a 7-Eleven.

Everyone used the restroom and got something of nourishment at the least. I decided to grab a water and head back to the van before everyone else so that I could light and smoke a cigarette (or ‘cancer stick,’ as Janice referred to them as). Soon after, Matt followed, while Janice and Kenneth were still in the station looking for something to buy, or probably laughing and bullshitting. Those two, I swear. They shouldn’t shut up the whole drive.

Matt and I sat along the edge at the back of the van with the door open. From where we parked, the view of a wide range of mountains and desert terrain was ethereal, something I wasn’t used to from North Florida.

“Those two are something, aren’t they?” Matt said as he cracked open his Red Bull.

“Hmm,” I scoffed, taking a hit of my cigarette.

“He is on the older tip, though, so…”

“I don’t care who she sees, if that’s what it is,” I responded. “Kenneth’s all right, I think.”

“No bad vibes from him?”

I shook my head. “Nope,” then took another hit.

“No bad vibes from me?”

I turned to him and glared into his eyes. The intention was to make him uncomfortable. My humor was dry like that. After a few seconds, I backed off.

“No,” I said.

Matt chuckled. “That’s good to know,” he said.

“At least I don’t think so.”

“Would you have tagged along if you thought otherwise?”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Janice tagged along, so I did.”

“And if she didn’t?”

“If she didn’t what?”

“If she didn’t decide to come along, would you have still?”

I took another hit from my cigarette, taking in and exhaling the menthol, thinking of how nicely to put this.

“Honestly, probably not,” I answered. It was really definitely not, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“At least you’re honest,” Matt noted.

I shook my head. “It’s nothing against you or Kenneth or your guys’ podcast. It’s just… I don’t like to play with energies like that.”

Matt furrowed his brow. “Energies?”

I nodded. “The vortex?”

“But it’s supposed to be peaceful. You know, a ‘positive’ energy.”

“Yeah, it may be peaceful for some, hell, even most. But for others… you just never know.”

Matt paused, tapping his foot on the ground, then took a sip of his drink. After a while, he spoke again.

“Have you had bad experiences before?” he asked.

I looked at him. “No,” I answered.

“You believe in… possession? Or being overtaken by another force?”

“I believe in protecting your aura. At all times. Like you would your own life.” Matt nodded with content. “My grandmother, before she passed, told me when I was younger that me and a few other people in the family had ‘the gift.’”

“The gift?” Matt said.

“Like a… not necessarily psychic or anything like that, but that me and the others were just more… sensitive to certain energies. Vibrational frequencies, they say.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how true it all actually is, though. I don’t believe in absolutes. Angels, demons, gods, divine intervention. But that grey area always tests my faith every now and then…”

Then I saw the look in Matt’s eyes. Maybe he was wary or maybe he was regretting me coming along. Wasn’t too sure.

“Does Janice have the gift, too?” he asked.

“My grandmother says no,” I answered. “Then again, she never seemed to take a liking to Janice, for whatever reason. She seemed to cherish me more. I’m not surprised Janice is the way she is.”

“How’s that?”

“Just… free-spirited. Unhinged. Spiritual. Into yoga. Trying to find an inner peace and being one with the universe. Stuff like that. I see it as a way of compensating for our grandmother’s indifference. Basically a ‘fuck you’ to her.”

“Wow. What do you think might happen if you get near the vortex?” he asked.

I slowly shook my head. “I have no idea.“

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We hit the road again. About another 4 hours before we’d make it to Bell Rock. Janice and I played cards for a bit, chit-chatted here and there, and Kenneth, Matt, and I rotated between taking turns driving the van.

Eventually, we made it to the first stop, and found a good spot to camp out not too far from Bell Rock, according to Matt. We decided to take a short hike around the area, take some pictures and vlogs, etc.

Sedona is in a league of its own, I thought to myself. It didn’t seem quite like the typical American city I was used to. It was akin to stepping on Mars. Rock, sand, mountains, complemented with patches of grass and cacti. It felt like I was in another world entirely.

As we walked, I took note of a tall saguaro cactus surrounded by other shorter cacti and flowers. I told Janice it’d be a nice backdrop for a photo shoot. I had the good camera while she just had her phone.

She stood next to the tall plant - taller than her - and she began to strike various silly and some very Instagram-worthy poses.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Photographer,” she played around.

“My, my, madame, you’ve gotten fat,” I teased in a heavy French accent.

“Oh please!”

She really wasn’t fat in the slightest, I just liked to mess with her from time to time. She definitely was in better shape than the rest of us. I couldn’t knock her for that.

As I snapped various pictures of her, taking different angles, poses, trying to get better lighting, I got down on one knee, pointing the lens at just the right angle, finding the perfect shot.

“That’s money right there,” I commented.

“Well shit, watcha waitin’ for?” Janice exclaimed, holding her smile.

But before I could snap the photo, a loud ringing noise emerged in both of my ears. It crescendoed, then lowered, then raised in volume again, a pulsating sort of sensation. Regardless, the sound was distracting and unusual. Were my ears ringing? Probably, but they never rang like this.

“Joe?” Janice said impatiently.

I lowered the camera, where she could now see my face was disgruntled.

“You okay?” she asked, concerned.

I stood up. “Do you hear that?” I said.

“Hear what?”

“That sound. That ringing.”

She looked puzzled. “No…”

I turned my head in every which way across the desert, unsure of what I would even be looking for until suddenly, it stopped. The ringing was gone, and it fell silent. Only thing I could hear was the slight breeze of wind.

“Are you fucking with me?” she said.

“What? No, why would I be?” I said, seriously. I messed with her a lot, but not like that. Never pranked her once in her entire life.

She chuckled and walked past me to catch up with the other two, patting me on the shoulder as she did so. “Never mind, ‘gifted one.’”

I stood there for a moment. I didn’t understand what the heck just happened, but decided to brush it off and keep on moving down the trail.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I don’t remember how long I’d been asleep, but I woke up and found myself alone in the van. It was nighttime outside. Worried, I quickly got up and looked outside the window to check and see if maybe they were in the front.

Nobody.

I went out and saw that we were parked atop a sandy hill. They’d set up a small camp of some sort with three pull-out chairs and a large mat laid flat, which I already knew was Janice’s yoga mat. In the distance, I saw the three of them down about 23 yards away walking towards a mountain top. Could that be it? The vortex? I thought I told this chick not to leave without me, especially once they started the hike.

I saw Janice turn back to look, and she noticed me.

“Joe!” she called to me. I shook my head. “Come on! We’re gonna take some videos of the vortex!”

I thought about it. Really thought about it. At this point, I just decided F it. Something told me that she’d be all right. After my many objections to Janice going by herself with the two, finally, my intuition spoke to me. My gut never lies, so I knew I could trust it. Only this one time, though.

"I’m good,” I declined. “Go on without me.”

“You sure, bro?” Kenneth asked.

“I’ll stay behind and watch the van.”

“Ah, no one’s gonna steal it.”

I cocked my brow. “You sure about that? It’s a nice van.”

“Nobody’s gonna steal that junk.”

Matt hit him on the shoulder. “Fuck you,” he said, and Kenneth laughed.

I turned and started walking back towards the van.

“Whatever,” Janice spoke. “But you’re coming to take pictures with me when the sun comes up, ya hear?”

I raised my hand and gave her a firm thumbs up.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I laid on the comfy bed in the van with my noise-canceling headphones over my ears as I listened to music. The inside Christmas lights kept the area illuminated. Through the window, the night sky bathed in stars of various different shapes. I recognized the Sagittarius constellation, just aside from Gemini, but couldn’t make out much more from this view.

Abruptly, my ears began to ring again. The same one from before. It grew louder in pitch the more I listened. So loud to the point where I couldn’t even hear the music anymore. I removed my headphones and scratched and rubbed against my ears, wincing at the sound. The noise wasn’t exactly painful, but grew noticeably more discomforting.

I got up to look around, to see if maybe there was a device inside that might be the source of the noise, but it was hard to tell the direction from which it came. I checked the walkie-talkie to see if that could be it, but pressing it to my ear, I still heard the sound radiating from elsewhere.

I stopped for a moment to listen, and when I did, I realized it wasn’t exactly a ring, but more in resemblance to a hum. Crossing the line between the stroke of a chord of an instrument… or the audible sound of something else entirely that I couldn’t decipher at the moment.

Just as suddenly as the humming initiated, it ceased at once. The van fell silent. Dead silent.

I stepped outside again, finding it unusual that the same volume from within the vehicle matched the desert. Pure silence. It was almost distracting to all five of my senses. My body was confused.

I saw the three of them in the distance still, nearing the vortex, about to reach the edge any minute now to begin their ascent.

I decided to sit in one of the foldout chairs in front of the van and light a 'cancer stick.’ I gazed at the night sky where I could now see the full layout of the celestial bodies above. Breathtaking, needless to say. Out here where there were no city lights, the entire display of stars and constellations were there for us to take in. If anything, this was worth the long trip.

The pendulum sat just beyond where myself and the other chairs stood, in place of where I figured a campfire should’ve been. I was surprised to see that it swiveled just barely left and right.

“Hmm,” I laughed internally, taking another drag from my cigarette.

As I sat and smoked, I noticed that not only was there no noise, but likewise, even so much as a tiny breeze was nonexistent. I had no sensation of the air around me, no feel for any particular temperature, neither hot nor cold, dry or damp. It was as if I were sitting in a vacuum. How was the pendulum moving, now that I think about it? Couldn’t do that without the wind, right?

I took note of the smoke as I exhaled, following its trail. Bizarrely, the smoke didn’t merely dissolve into the air, but shot in a clear pathway upwards in a stream, curving inward in the direction south of me. Yet still, I felt no wind blowing in that direction. No wind whatsoever.

The humming resumed. Thrown off, the hairs on my neck raised at the abrupt return.

I could hear it clearly and audibly as I did in the van like it was right next to me. I looked around again to see if there was any possible direction for the sound to be emitting from again, but it was still very hard to tell. It was so strange.

When I looked down at the pendulum again, I grew wide-eyed.

The crystal stopped swinging entirely, and instead was pulled completely in one direction, suspended in an impossibly still state. I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but I went over and kneeled to get a closer look, and saw that it did seem to be pulled at one clear angle, as though it were attracted to an invisible force - or a magnetic field of sorts.

I turned to face the direction the crystal was, which pointed directly to the van, and was taken aback by the lights inside. They each began to flash in a sequence that made it appear as though they were looping in a complete circle inside - a phi phenomenon. All of the colors - red, blue, yellow, green - alternated and moved down the line of each circuit one by one.

Could they do that? I hadn’t played with the settings or seen Matt show us any other sorts of tricks and sequences it could perform. Either way, how could they just do that by themselves? Did he set it from his phone? Impossible, I thought. They were way too far away for the Bluetooth to even work. Even still, it wouldn’t make sense for him to do so.

I turned to face the three in the distance again, seeing that they were now starting the climb up the rock. It was right then and there that I noticed something very particular about the structure as a whole. It had twin peaks at the summit, identical in shape, almost like cone pyramids, as the base took the form of a rocky pyramid. There also was hardly anything surrounding the vicinity. No grass, cacti, anything. Only barren desert and rock. Around where we parked and set up our camping site only lie a few remnants of any sort of vegetation. Then I knew…

We weren’t at Bell Rock at all. This was the wrong spot.

I looked back down at the pendulum, and to my shock, it was now pointed downwards at full rest. Not even swinging. I turned to face the van and saw that the lights were now completely off. My eyes narrowed. I put out my cigarette, dropping it to the ground and stomping out the bud.

Hopefully at least one of the walkie-talkies Kenneth brought was in the van. I opened the door to the back and entered, shutting it behind me. It was too dark now with the lights off, so I used my phone flashlight to search for it. Bingo, one was sitting on the table, and I grabbed and pressed the push-to-talk button.

“Janice, can you hear me?” I spoke.

I waited a moment for a response. Nothing. I pressed it again.

“Janice, can you hear me?” I said loudly and clearly.

A few moments passed. Then her voice sounded from the other end, readable but very staticky.

“What’s up, chickenbutt?” she said back.

I rolled my eyes. “Hey, I don’t think we’re at the right spot.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“I mean, I don’t think this is Bell Rock.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just look at the peak. It’s nothing like it. It’s not even shaped like it.”

“But Joe, I feel it. Like, we haven’t even reached the top yet, but I swear, I feel its energy, Joe. It’s real. It’s… it’s alive. It’s beautiful.”

I’m sure there was no doubt about it. I’m glad that whatever energy she was taking in felt good on her end, but whatever energy that began to overtake what now surrounded the campsite didn’t match hers. It felt wrong. I knew something wasn’t right. Something felt off…

“We’ve been climbing and… so f… ar it’s… been… ve… er… y…”

She was breaking up badly, as more static overpowered her transmission. Were they too far? I don’t know, but the reach should’ve been well within good range from where we were from each other.

“Janice?” I transmitted.

No answer.

Screw this. I reached for my phone in my pocket and decided to just call her instead. I waited as it dialed, putting the phone on speaker. Lo and behold, I heard her phone ring from inside the van. She left it behind.

“Fucking idiot,” I muttered.

I hung up the phone and dialed for Matt, when suddenly another transmission came through the radio.

It wasn’t Janice’s voice.

Under a heavy load of static, the hum faintly emerged.

In the corner of my eye, further from me towards the sink, a single red light remained on. It was the only thing illuminated inside the van. Then it shut off, but was quickly replaced by the one next to it, giving the illusion that the light was moving. It did the same thing again, inching closer towards my direction, as though it had a life of its own. As it inched over, the hum grew more and more resonant, feeling closer.

The single red orb trailed down the string of circuits until eventually, it was right across from me from where I stood. The light remained for a moment, burning brightly as I locked eyes on it.

And just like that, the humming ceased again, and the light suddenly died, fading to black.

In the blink of an eye, red lights filled every circuit along the van, a crimson luminescence engulfing the interior around me. Startled, I quickly tried to push the button again to call the others, but a loud error beep kept emitting along with a red light on the radio, letting me know that someone else was currently using the channel. I heard nothing, though.

Then the lights rapidly strobed in quick bursts of terrifyingly disorienting red flashes, as the humming returned louder than before, like the unified chant of hundreds of people around me.

Panicked now, I darted out of there and stood at the edge of the hill, waving my arms to get the three’s attention.

“Janice!” I called.

Curious, I looked at the pendulum again, seeing that it was now swaying side-to-side in a frantic motion, going haywire.

I glanced at the three turning back to face my direction. I doubt we’d be able to hear exactly what the other was saying. From what I could make out, Janice pulled out her binoculars. As she did so, I began motioning with hand signals for them to call it off.

I then jumped at the sound of Janice’s bloodcurdling scream across the distance.

I turned to the van. The red lights continued to emit for a moment, only for all but two of them to remain. From where I stood, they were positioned in a way that looked as though it were two glaring eyes peering directly at me.

Fearful, I slowly stepped back, eyes still fixated on the ones now staring at me. The amplitude of the lights began to grow, and diagonal lines curved inward from the glare, like the deadly eyes of a viper. I knew I didn’t have astigmatism. What I was seeing was unreal.

Janice’s voice transmitted through the radio again, clearer more than ever this time.

“Joe! Just run! If you can hear me, just run!”

I wasn’t paying attention as I kept stepping away, as the incline became too steep from where I stepped off. Before I knew it, I tripped and started to fall backwards, rolling violently down the hill.

Once I’d managed to stop myself, I forced myself up and turned to look behind at the van again. Those eyes… they kept staring into my soul. They were captivating and enticing. But I knew that if I stood there, I probably wouldn’t make it…

I ran towards my sister and the other two, as I saw the three of them were now climbing back down and racing my way also. I ran faster than I ever had before. I don’t know what was back there or what energy was inside the van, but I refused to look again for another second as I kept running towards the three of them.

When I finally reached them, Janice ran to me and tightly hugged me, squeezing the air from my lungs.

“Thank you, God,” she cried. “Oh, thank you.”

“What the hell happened?” Kenneth said.

I shook my head frantically. “I-I don’t know.”

“Did you see something?” Matt asked Janice.

She didn’t answer either one of them. She instead kept hugging me tightly, relieved that I was okay. And to think I was more worried about her.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

We decided that it was time to go, and hit the road again very shortly after. Janice and I just wanted to get the hell out of there, and undoubtedly, so did Matt and Kenneth after us causing such a commotion. We contemplated whether we should keep on going with the trip and try to make it to the real Bell Rock, but it was still undecided. At this point, we had enough adventure, and likewise, Matt and Kenneth enough spooks for their podcast for sure.

After some time on the road again, we’d both calmed down, and Janice finally let up the nerve to talk.

“You scared me back there,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. I think you might’ve saved my life. I don’t know how, but I just feel it.”

Janice stirred, nervously rubbed her arm. It was what she always did when she was troubled by something.

“Why’d you scream?” I asked.

She grew fearful again. I didn’t know if she would even tell, her mouth opening, then closing, then opening again, until finally mustering the courage to speak.

“Back at the butte, when we were climbing and you called to me, I looked through the binoculars and saw something in the van behind you.”

Chills waved throughout my body.

“The lights kept alternating and moving in a weird circle in the van,” she continued. “Matt said that they were supposed to do that. They were all supposed to just stay whatever color they were. And then they turned solid red… and then I saw a figure in the van. Like, a silhouette of someone… or something. It was peaking back at you. Back at me, too, I think.”

“Jesus…” I muttered.

“The lights just blinked and then it was fucking gone. Whatever it was, it just disappeared. I know I’m not crazy, Joe. I know what I saw.”

I now realized the answer to Matt’s question earlier when I told him about my grandmother’s premonition about me, and as to whether Janice shared the same power that the others in the family also held. The answer was yes. She had the gift. I could only hear it, but she could see it. Whatever presence was near me in the van the whole time, she was fully conscious that it was there.

“I believe you,” I assured.