#we’re only below china

[hier--soir]

under the night | six

pairing: joel miller x f!reader, set in jackson after the end of tlou part I warnings/tags: [18+ minors DNI] language, being held captive, angst, serious violence, torture, injury, blood, discussions of murder, threat of sexual assault [DOES NOT HAPPEN], very brief discussion of religion/the bible, idk if you think i missed anything please let me know word count: 6k part five | series masterlist | main masterlist

Clink, clink.

Maria was drinking a cup of earl grey tea. The bergamot has a calming effect, she’d said, would you like a cup? Her spoon swirled in the teacup, bumping against the china every so often as she mixed in a sugar cube. The cup was pretty, a cream colour with pale pink gerbera flowers painted along the porcelain. Clink, clink; the spoon knocked the side of it again, the woman still unsatisfied by the granules of sugar visible in the dark liquid. It was the only sound in the room, bar the soft pattering of rain on the roof, as the four of them sat silently around Maria and Tommy’s dinner table.

Joel huffed in frustration as she finally lifted the spoon from the liquid and placed it gingerly on the saucer, before raising the cup to her mouth and taking her first sip. She sighed happily, relaxing in her chair as she savoured the taste.

“Okay,” she murmured, looking around the table.

“Oh, we can talk now?” Joel snapped, his exhaustion getting the better of him. “You’ve got your fuckin’ tea and now you’re ready?”

“Joel,” Tommy warned his brother quietly. “We’re all on the same side here.”

“Well, she could’ve fuckin’ fooled me,” he said spitefully in the woman’s direction. “It’s been days, and you haven’t ordered any searches, haven’t questioned anyone.”

Maria raised her hand to stop him, “It’s a delicate situation.”

“No, Joel’s right,” Cal spoke up. The bags under his eyes were heavy, hair greasy and slicked back off his forehead; the appearance of a man who hadn’t slept in days. “You run things here, and I always thought you did a damn good job of it too. But she’s gone missing, and you’re just sitting back and waiting? For what?” 

“Things are returning to normal here,” she said lowly. “People are calming down, and I don’t want to raise any alarm bells if I don’t need to.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Joel all but snarled.

“It means that I wouldn’t be surprised if she chose to leave,” she levelled at him, one eyebrow raised accusatorially. Clink, clink. He flinched as she dipped her spoon back into the cup, tapping it against the rim. “Ellie told me.”

Joel’s eyes darkened, his hand forming a fist below the table. “Told you what exactly?” 

Maria gave him a conspiratorial look. “She told me about being strangled, Joel. She came here a few days ago, upset after hearing the news, and we talked. Ellie worries that she might have left out of guilt… and I must admit, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true.”

“Wait,” Cal’s eyebrows raised in alarm, eyes darting between Maria and Joel. “What the fuck are you talki-“

“No one was fuckin’ strangled,” Joel ground out, doing his best to stay calm. “Ellie wasn’t hurt. And she wouldn’t fuckin’ leave us; there’s no god damn way she’d even think to go outside those gates alone.”

Joel’s mouth twisted into a pained grimace at Maria’s insinuation, shaking his head jerkily. The last conversation he’d had with you played on his head in a constant loop, the image of your face distorted in despair, the feeling of your guilty tears on his neck – it tormented him. Kept him awake all night, and on edge all day. The idea that you might have decided to leave, out of a misplaced sense of guilt, or fear, or… or because of something he’d said. His chest tightened at the thought. He’d told you not to stay at the house if he wasn’t there, hadn’t he? That’s why you’d gone home alone that night, instead of coming back to him. It won’t happen again, is what you said. Joel mulled the words over in his mind endlessly, searching for a hidden meaning in your tone that he might have missed; a plan to leave him.

Tommy watched the three of them silently, the corners of his mouth downturned in dismay. To see Joel be so distraught was hard for him. Ellie had confided in Tommy that Joel had hardly spoken for the past three days. That he wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. She kept a close eye on him and didn’t pry; simply sat quietly in whatever room he resided in, and just kept a watchful eye on him. Tommy couldn’t thank her enough for it. He’d watched his brother experience so much loss, so much heartache, and he cringed to realise they were witnessing it happen to him all over again.

“She wouldn’t leave me,” Cal broke the silence, his voice cracking on the last word. He reached up hastily to wipe the corner of his eye. “We made an agreement when we first got here. If either one of us decides we aren’t happy, then we leave – together. No questions asked. She wouldn’t break a promise.”

Joel glanced at the younger man, absorbing his words with a blank expression. It still unnerved him sometimes; to gain further insights into the tightknit bond between you and Cal, but he pushed all negative feelings down, knowing the he was right.

“She’s still in Jackson,” Joel said with a tone of finality, straightening his shoulders.

“So what do you suggest we do?” Maria asked. “I’ve already asked so much of our community, I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here.”

“Some fuckin’ community it is,” he muttered. “Women gettin’ stolen out of their god damn homes.”

Tommy gave him a look that said, not helpful. Joel ignored him.

“We question them – all of them,” he asserted. “Ransack every fuckin’ house in this town if we have to. She’s here somewhere – whoever’s doin’ this can’t keep her hidden for long.”

Maria nodded slowly, sparing a short glance in her husband’s direction. “We’ll question people then. If we go to the right ones, someone is bound to spill something.”

Tommy stared at his brother, taking in the way he stared intensely at the woman. “You can’t be a part of it though,” he said softly. Joel’s head snapped in his direction, eyes narrowing.

“Tommy,” he glared, only to be quickly interrupted.

“You’re too high strung, both of you are,” Tommy said, glancing between Joel and Cal. “If you’re out there knockin’ down doors, you’re just gonna scare people off, and somebody will get hurt. We can’t risk you two causing a scene.”

“We can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Cal grunted, hand smacking down on the table.

“You won’t be,” Maria said firmly. “Someone needs to be waiting if she shows up. So wait. If she shows up at either of your homes, you’ll be there.”

“You’re fuckin’ delusional if you thin-“

“Stop,” Maria interrupted softly. “Have either of you taken a moment to consider it might already be too late? It’s been three days… Do you really want to be the ones to find her if she’s…. I’m trying to keep you both separated from this, for your sakes.”

“I’m not fuckin’ listenin’ to this,” Joel grunted, pushing his chair from the table and stalking towards the front door. With his hand gripping the doorknob, he turned his head to the side, staring back at them from the corner of a tear-filled eye.

“She is out there somewhere, alive, puttin’ up a goddamn fight. And when I find her,” he spoke with his back to them, voice dangerously quiet. “I’m going to kill everyone who had anything to do with this. And you two won’t be able to stop me.”

Joel didn’t need to look at him to know that Cal agreed.

The curtains were always the first thing you saw. When your eyelids managed to crack open, to break through the dried blood that crusted over your eyelashes, you would always notice them first. Large, bundled drapes that reached the floor, covering the walls, concealing the windows and any potential natural light. It was so dark all of the time, and so time had lost meaning. You couldn’t tell how many hours, or days, had passed. All you knew was that the curtains, made from a dark fabric, with pictures of small birds sewn onto them, were the first thing you saw every time you opened your eyes.

Sparrows, the thought whispered through your mind. Little sparrows sewn into the curtains.

A small metal table was positioned in the corner opposite to where you laid on a thin mattress, arms tied to a pipe protruding from the wall. Sometimes your eyes flickered to it, trying to glean what was on it, but it was futile because of the distance. Candles were placed sporadically around the edges of the room, providing a vague yellow light to the space which allowed you see these things. But no natural light meant not knowing when the sun rose and fell., so you learned to rely on a different schedule. Twice a day he would bring a meal into the room, and you did your best to note the time passing, but even that provided little relief. Dehydration and pain had you dropping in and out of consciousness, and you rejoiced in the respite that sleep brought. Sleep brought quiet. Waking, however, brought with it a stark reminder of where you were.

An unpleasant stretching sensation resided in your arms. The muscles burned from hyperextension from constantly stretching behind you to the wall, your hands numb from a lack of blood flow due to how taught the rope around your wrist was pulled. But no matter how uncomfortable, you never turned your back to the door. That way he couldn’t enter the room without you seeing him immediately.

The throbbing in your foot, and the smell of metal was always what you noticed next. Blood stained the lower half of the mattress, and you did your best not to look down. But the smell was overwhelming, and you knew you had to see how much blood you’d lost. Your right foot was caked in dried blood, and the sight of one of your toes missing was enough to make your stomach curl every time, as waves of violent nausea rolled through you.

“That’s fine,” you whispered hoarsely, attempting to convince yourself. “Never used that one anyway, can live without it.”

Talking to yourself helped. Although your thoughts were often delirious and half-baked, hearing your own voice out loud brought a certain sense of calm.

And you’d formed a routine. Where every time you woke, you calmed your breathing, and forced yourself to decide how you were going to behave. How to survive another encounter with him. You’d chosen violence the first time, and you came to sorely regret it.

He’d been watching you that first day; waiting for you to stir. It had been dark, but you still saw him instantly. Cross-legged on the floor beside the mattress you laid on, dark beady eyes bearing down on your skin like weights. The itchy burn of rope against your wrists wasn’t as noticeable at first, for you were distracted by the thick wad of material in your mouth, placed there to keep you silent. When your brain had fully woken up, you’d glared at him in a wide-eyed panic, moaning urgently against the cloth between your teeth, tears brimming in your eyes. No, no, no, no.

“Shh,” Lincoln had murmured, brushing the hair out of your eyes. “It’s okay, shh.”

Tentatively, he reached down and tugged the cloth out of your mouth. You sucked in sharp panicked breaths, staring up at him as the feeling of white-hot terror spread through your veins, all the way from your neck down to your feet. It was him. All along, all the women, it had been him. This embarrassing, weak man, who’d had you fucking fooled. You’d thought him a creep, but not this. Never this.

“Breathe,” he’d whispered, stroking your cheek with his fingers. Heaving sighs tore out of your mouth, and you turned your head in his hold, brushing your nose along the palm of his hand. His eyes shone with appreciation at the gesture, and he smiled. “You’re here with me now. It’s just you and me.”

Holding his gaze for a split second longer, you sank your teeth into the flesh of his hand. He shouted in pain, attempted to pull back, but you bit him harder, deeper. The taste of metal filled hit your tongue, but you didn’t let go until his other hand struck you across the face, knocking you back.

He'd hit your left side, and the all-too-familiar buzzing soared through your ear, exacerbating the pounding in your skull. “You cunt,” he spat, rising to his feet. He glared down at you, cradling his wounded hand against his chest.

And then his foot was slamming into your ribcage. “You stupid,” kick “fucking” kick “cunt” kick. The breath left your body, and you curled in on yourself on the thin mattress, wheezing, until he gave up.

“You won’t do that again,” his reedy voice called out from behind you. “Do you understand?”

Your back was to him, eyes clamped shut as you tried desperately to regulate your breathing. A stabbing pain burned in your right side, flaring every time your chest expanded with a breath. His hand came down on your shoulder, flattening you on the mattress.

“Speak,” he had snarled. “You will answer me when I talk to you, SPEAK.”

Your bloody lips stayed sealed in defiance, glaring up at him. Slowly, the corners of his mouth began to turn upward, lips stretching open to reveal a faded set of crooked teeth until he was grinning down at you. “Okay,” he nodded, reaching into his pocket and walking to the end of the mattress. “You want to see what happens when you disobey me in my house? I’ll show you what happens.”

It had been quick.

Flashes of it were burnt into your memory, but the feeling of the moment evaded you when you thought back on it. Him kneeling on your shins, saying “Do as I say, or I’ll clip your wings, little bird.” Pliers in his hand. The feeling of the cold metal on your foot. The smell of iron. A pinkie toe on the floor, by the mattress, in a crimson puddle.

Your hoarse, tormented wails had filled the room so suddenly that Lincoln was cursing while he stuffed the rag back between your lips, muttering something about people hearing you.

He had loomed over you, torso pressed against yours, gritting his teeth and laughing. Put his hands around your neck and whispered of the stories he’d heard about you, that he’d wondered about you since the day Tommy introduced him to you. “I think that was the moment I decided,” he said. “The moment I knew you were going to be mine – it was the very first time I saw you.”

“I wanted to know what he saw in you,” he’d jeered, breath hot against your neck. His hand gripped your throat, squeezing your windpipe intermittently, only ever letting up when your eyes started to roll back and the pressure inside your skull from a lack of oxygen started to become unbearable, only to increase the pressure again once you’d had a few seconds to breathe. “I’d always thought you must be a good lay, if you’ve got big bad Joel Miller whipped like a dog. Realised pretty damn quick I’d have to find out for myself.” Your arms fought tirelessly against the ropes that bound you to the wall, limbs thrashing beneath him, trying to inflict any sort of pain on him.

You frantically mouthed the word no around the rag, lungs heaving in search of oxygen. The last thing you saw before you passed out was his haunting grin.

And you were smarter after that.

Lincoln was hard to read. When he came to the room next, he acted as though the altercation had never happened. And so you followed suit. You listened when he spoke, and answered accordingly. You ate the food he slid across the floor to you. You held in a disgusted reaction when he gestured to the candles around the room one time, and said, “Romantic isn’t it? Candlelit dinner for two?”  

In the quiet moments, your mind would float away, and you’d allow yourself brief moments of respite, imagining that you were somewhere, anywhere, else. In your dreams, you were with Joel. Safe in his home, in his bed, playing scrabble with Ellie on his porch while he kept score. You tried to remember the way his laugh sounded, or the way his hands felt on your skin. But everything was warped, the memories unclear. Your brain lacked clarity, and the pain distracted you. And Lincoln could tell where your thoughts went in those moments; you almost feared he could read your mind. As if your brain was splayed open before him, and he was pecking at it in curiosity.

“No one will find you,” he’d say softly. Never nastily, but in a tone that was matter of fact. “They aren’t coming for you. It’s just you and me now, sweet girl.”

You would blink away the tears in your eyes and try not to let him see how afraid you were that he was right. Your memories with Joel felt so hazy, and the last time you’d seen him he had been devastated. He feared what you’d almost done to Ellie, feared how out of his control it had been. Maybe it’s for the best, the thought raced through your brain. Maybe they’ll be happier without you.

Those thoughts were the hardest to shake. And they cut deeper than any injury Lincoln could ever inflict.

One night, when it felt like almost a week had passed, Lincoln entered the room holding two plates.

“Dinner time,” his thin voiced called, and a chill ran down your spine. Slowly, you pushed yourself into a seated position, cringing as pain shot through your side.

He placed a plate beside the mattress before tenderly undoing the rope around your left wrist.

“Eat up,” he murmured, taking a few steps back before settling onto the ground and picking up his fork.

You gazed down at the raw red marks around your wrist, basking in your favourite moment of the day – just a few sweet minutes of ‘freedom’. With an aching chest, you saw what rested on the plate. A kind of dark meat, and a small serving of parsnips.

Oh, Joel.

Sucking your lips into you mouth, you willed the tears in your eyes to dry up, desperate not to let him see any sign of weakness.

Out of the corner of your eye you noticed Lincoln reaching out across the space between you, and then he placed his thumb and forefinger over the big toe on your right foot, squeezing it once in a silent threat. Your throat tightened, and you resisted the urge to pull away. Speak.

“Why are you doing this?” you whispered hoarsely, staring at the food.

“It’s dinner time, when else would I feed you?” he attempted to joke, hand leaving your foot to pick his fork up again. When you didn’t respond the smile slipped off his face. “You’re in a bad mood today,” he decided. “I suppose I understand.”

He watched you like a hawk, eyes raking over your features, your bloodstained clothes, the way you gazed despondently at the plate before you. “Surely you can appreciate though… I mean, it’s just… delightful, don’t you see? To see someone be brought down to their basest human form. No sunlight, minimal human interaction. You rely on me for water, for food, for company. I am all you have anymore, and it is simply… delicious.”

“You’re a fucking sadist,” you shuddered involuntarily, his words making goosebumps break out across your skin. 

“I think so,” Lincoln nodded contemplatively. “It’s not inherently sexual though, I’ll have you know.” You stared, and he let out a low chuckle, hands raising defensively. “Not entirely, at least.”

“You’ll get caught,” you sneered, ignoring the way a cut on your upper lip reopened when your mouth pulled open to reveal your teeth. “You’ll slip up and someone will notice. Joel will notice.”

“Only time will tell,” he mused around a mouthful of food. “Never been caught before though, have I? Not with Milena, or any of the others before you. Not even with my wife; although it was certainly easier to get away with it in those days. The world had gone to shit – everyone was going missing; assumed to be dead or infected. It was so easy. Our girls never had a clue. They trusted me, you see? My beautiful little birds. Believed me when I told them she was lost, that she must’ve been infected. I think that’s what I adore the most – the trust. It was hard to come by here, in Jackson. People were so wary, I had to build up their confidence in me. Really ease into things, you know? But some of these women, they just saw what they wanted to see. A few kind smiles, some silly jokes, and they were mine.” Lincoln sighed wistfully, gazing absentmindedly at the curtains. “Do you like them?” he changed the subject suddenly. “They’re sparrows. Sewed them on myself.” Good God, he was still so fucking chatty.

Nausea twisted in your abdomen. Acidic bile burned in the back of your throat, threatening to bring up the pathetic contents of your stomach. “And your daughters?” you hesitated, wary of angering him. “I… I remember you saying they died.”

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, and you noticed one of his eyebrows twitch at the mention of his late children. “I let them go quickly,” he exhaled with a shrug. “Painlessly. It didn’t make sense to make them endure this world anymore. It was a mercy, if anything.”

“Fresh out of mercy then?” you asked bitterly. “If you’re so kind, and so fucking merciful, then why the are you dragging this out? Why won’t you just fucking end it?”

Fork dropping onto his plate with a loud clang, Lincoln murmured your name kindly. “Please understand,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll get the chance again. You might be my last for a few months… so I’m trying to savour every minute I have with you.”

You stared at him, blinking slowly as you absorbed his words. How long could you possibly survive down here in these conditions? But the truth was, you knew the answer to that. You knew because you’d survived for years out in the open, with less food and less water than this. Here you had shelter, warmth, food, and water. He could keep you alive for as long as he wanted you.

Realising it had been some time since you responded to him you offered a meek smile and said, “Tell me more about the sparrows.”

Lincoln looked at you curiously. Trying not to appear uncertain, you reached forward and scooped some food from the plate with your free hand and began to eat. The action alone reminded you of Cal. Of dark nights, huddled together in dusty broken-down buildings, eating whatever food you’d been able to find out of the palms of your hands. You sniffled pathetically and tried not to think about him again.

“Good girl,” he murmured almost inaudibly, and you fought off a shiver. Swallowing made your chest ache. Based on the swelling around the middle of your torso, you assumed at least one of your ribs was broken. Even inhaling brought a sharp pain to your right side, but swallowing? That was a whole other world of pain.

Lincoln spoke about the birds, told you how they symbolised joy and simplicity, and your eyes flitted around the room, taking in as much as you could in the dim yellow light. And then suddenly, he was turning his head fully to stare at the curtains. His back was almost entirely to you, and your heart stuttered painfully at the opportunity that had presented itself. From this angle, you were sure he wouldn’t be able to see you in his peripheral vision. Was this on purpose? Was it a test? Heart pounding, you worked silently to push the remaining food off your ceramic plate and onto the floor. Eyes focused on him, you waited for him to turn back, to check in on you, to do anything – but he didn’t.

“You know in the bible,” he said thoughtfully. “Sparrows represented God’s love and care for his creations.”

You hummed in response, gripping the plate in your hand and edging forward. Sweat tickled your forward, made your skin itch. You wanted to wipe away the fresh blood that had oozed from your lip onto your chin, but you refrained. No sudden movements. He was so close now, and this chance would not be wasted on you.

Do not be afraid, you thought.

Blood rushed in your ears as you propelled yourself forward, smashing the plate down upon the crown of his skull.

Lincoln pitched forward, his face knocking against the cold ground with a sickening thwack. He howled a ragged, guttural noise of pain, but his movements were sluggish, his reaction time too slow. A fiery pain roared in your side from the movement and you whimpered, dropping the jagged shard of the plate that remained in your hand. Gripping his ankle, you cried out at the strength required to tug his body toward you. He was writhing on the ground, trying to fight against the fog in his brain no doubt, but you pulled him still, until he was perfectly close.

He mumbled your name, and you brought your fist down over his nose, effectively shutting him up.

“Stop fucking saying my name,” you growled, angrily swiping perspiration off your upper lip. This was it. If this didn’t work out, if he regained the upper hand, you’d be dead, no questions asked. You’d started this, and now would certainly be your only chance to finish it. God, your ribs were on fire. You hastily dragged a fragment of the plate in a sawing movement across the rope keeping your other wrist tied, and when it broke away, you heaved a painful sigh of relief.

Planting your knees on either side of his body, you straddled his chest, trapping his arms to his torso. You patted down his body, searching his pockets until you found what you were looking for. The pliers were cold and heavy in your hand. Lincoln blinked lazily, gazing past your shoulder at the roof.

You reached down and gripped the sides of his head. “Look at me,” you seethed, before slamming his head back into the ground. He groaned loudly, but his eyes focused on your face. Blood poured from his nose, spilling into his open mouth and filling the gaps between tooth and gum.

“You won’t kill me,” he garbled out around the crimson liquid. “My little bird… I know you wouldn’t kill me.”

“Stop talking,” you moved to be beside his body and pressed your knee onto his left arm.

“You won’t,” he was speaking incessantly now, rambling. “I know you, you’re good. You’re so good, you sweet girl. You wouldn’t kill, and that’s why I like you. I could see it in you. You’re too good for this world, I’m trying to help you, don’t you see?”

“Shut up,” you snarled, pushing the pliers down until they were positioned around his pinkie finger. “You think you fucking know me? You have no idea of the things I’ve done.”

His eyes blinked lazily, trying listlessly to focus. His free hand reached sluggishly towards your face, and you batted it down roughly. Gripping the pliers in both hands, you pressed down. The sound of his screams filled the room as his pinkie finger rolled across the floor.

“You want me to come into my home,” you sneered. “Take me, hide me away, and then kill me?” Positioning the tool over his ring finger, you cut him slowly, revelling in the pained sounds leaving his body, the way his blood spilled onto your hands as you worked. “Oh, Lincoln. You’ll have to try harder than this.”

Again and again, you worked with a gruellingly slow pace, removing all five digits. You didn’t notice that his free hand was gripping your arm so tightly that his nails had drawn blood. Bile rose in your throat, but you swallowed it down. Do not be afraid.

“Please,” he was sobbing, his mouth wide open like a sore on his face, jagged teeth exposed through thin bloody lips.

And yet as he begged, you couldn’t bring yourself to feel remorse, because through the tears, and the snot, and the blood, it wasn’t just Lincoln that you saw. It was that boy, from a decade ago. That boy that climbed on top of you and laughed. Who enjoyed your fear. Who held you down that night, and every night after, plaguing you in your sleep for years. The boy you couldn’t fight. The boy you couldn’t kill. You wouldn’t let it happen again. Never again.

A memory flitted through your mind so quickly it almost didn’t register. But his voice was clear in your head. Joel, and the words you’d shared in front of the fireplace at your home so many weeks beforehand.

“I want to be strong, Joel.”

“You are strong.”

You refocused on Lincoln’s face.

“You want to be in control?” you sputtered, vaguely aware of how deranged your shrill voice sounded. “You want women to be quiet little toys for you to play with in this sick game you’ve created? I’m a fucking person! I’m real!” your voice cracked. “You want to kill me, Lincoln? Let’s see you do it without your fucking fingers.” You realised then that you were crying. Soundless tears streaked down your cheeks, leaving clear trails in the dirt and blood that stained your face.  

He looked on the verge of passing out, and you tore his hand off your arm, stumbling away from his body. You stepped awkwardly on your right foot and yelped in pain, grimacing at the bloody footprint that followed behind you when you walked. Wrapping an arm around your torso, against your ribs, you struggled to breathe. Running on pure adrenaline, your eyes drifted toward the table in the corner. A pocketknife and a lighter laid serenely on the top of it, and you stumbled toward it slowly.  

But a heavy blow landed on the back of your knee, stopping you in your tracks. Your arms flailed as you fell forward, and when you hit the ground, the table came toppling down with you.

“S-stop,” Lincoln was speaking, his speech slurred and disjointed. His bloodied hands clawed at your legs, pulling your body towards him while you thrashed against his hold. Your leg kicked backward desperately and connected with his face, and you screamed at the throbbing pain that shot through your foot.

Neither of you noticed how the table had knocked over multiple candles, or the way fire blazed along the bottom of the curtains. Little sparrows, turning to ash as flames snaked their way up the drapes, slowly engulfing the walls of the room in vibrant red.

You fumbled for the pocketknife on the floor, rolling onto your back just as his weight landed on top of you. His heavy breaths hit your face, blood dripping from his nose and splashing onto your skin.

“Little bird,” he whimpered brokenly. “Why would you ruin this?”

The temperature in the room had risen exponentially, and the pair of you were so close to the wall that it was impossible to ignore now. Wild flames licked at the bare skin of your arm, but you paid the burn no mind, pushing against his face, his neck, trying to get as much distance between you as possible.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” he howled, landing a heavy blow across your face. You coughed roughly, blood spitting up from your mouth onto your chin.

You gave up on pushing him back, instead using your hands to fumble with the knife. Lincoln’s good hand gripped your throat, his remaining fingers pressing down on your windpipe. Blood roared in your ears, and you were sweating, and god it was so hot. The air thickened with smoke, making it harder to breathe than it already was. Your hands were so slick with blood that it was difficult to unhook the small blade, but after a few moments you did it. Gasping for air as he bore his entire weight against your neck, you plunged the knife into his side.

A choked sound of surprise fell from his mouth, and then air was rushing into your lungs, and you were coughing harshly, watching as his body collapsed to the side of you.

He was still alive when you crawled on top of him, eyes bulging as he gripped the handle of the blade lodged in his side. You slammed your fist against his broken nose, and both of you cried out in pain. By this point, the fire was roaring through the room, the four walls covered in a beautiful mix of orange and red flames. The heat was sweltering, and so so close that sweat dripped from your nose and chin.

A deafening bang reverberated through the room and you covered your face instinctively. Shattered glass from the windows rained through the air and covered the ground, and moonlight streamed into the room.

Distantly, you thought you could hear voices, or the sound of a door opening, but you ignored it. Impossible. Your fingers wrapped around Lincoln’s spindly neck, and you positioned your thumbs over his windpipe, before pressing downward with all of the strength in your body. Exhaustion weighed heavily on you, but you pushed through it, gathering blood and spit in your mouth and releasing it in a spray onto his face. He flinched back at the sensation, and you grinned messily.

You imagined briefly what you must look like; covered in a mix of blood and dirt, hair matted to your head, straddling this man, and grinning down at him.

“Are you afraid?” you whispered.

You could see the light slowly fading from his eyes, and you pressed harder, arms burning with the effort. A burning sensation exploded in your left thigh, but you ignored it, digging your elbows into his chest for leverage and pushing. In the second you realised it was about to be over, there were hands on you. Gripping you, wrapping around your waist, wrenching you away from him.

The foreign hands were pulling you back, tugging you towards the door, but your eyes were trained on Lincoln, as he gasped for air on the floor, alive. You could hear shouting, male voices yelling so closely, but the words were indecipherable. And then suddenly, you were enveloped by cold, winter air. You were outside.

Hyperventilating, you dropped to your knees on the ground, burying your red hands in the wet grass, and wailed. Thick tears blurred your vision and rolled down your face in hot rivulets.

The relief was short lived though, as those hands returned to your body. Gliding over your back, squeezing your shoulders, touching your face. Your stomach rolled violently.

“Don’t touch me,” you begged, your voice an unfamiliar shriek as it ripped from somewhere deep inside your body. “Get your fucking hands off me, don’t fucking touch me, don-“

“Darlin’, it’s me, it’s me,” you could hear, but you just fought harder, beating against the solid wall of brick in front of you, pounding your fists against his chest.

“I’ll fucking,” you gasped for air, eyes clamped tightly shut. “I’ll fucking kill you, get away from me.”

But familiar hands were gripping your face, holding you tightly, forcing you to look, and when you did, it’s like your body went limp. All the fight in you disappeared.

You mumbled his name, and he nodded furiously, those brown eyes you loved gazing into yours, panic and concern evident in the harsh lines across his forehead, in that deep frown you knew so well.

“It’s me, baby, I’ve got you,” his voice was like a song in your ears, and you closed your eyes and let him hold you, listening to the desperate apologies he whispered into your ear. “You’re safe, I’m so sorry, I’m so fuckin’ sorry. I’ve got you now, it’s over, it’s over.”

part seven

tag list <3

@huffle-punk @n7cje @ghostofjoharvelle @nrmnie @sarahhxx03 @casa-boiardi @leeeesahhh @missgurrl

[jjmcquade-misc]

We’re losing more and more of our land every year to corporations and foreign interests. Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land has increased by 66% since 2010. In 2021, it was reported that foreign investors owned approximately 40 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, which is more than the entire state of Iowa. By 2022 that number had grown to 43.4 million acres. The rate at which U.S. farmland is being bought up by foreign interests grew by 2.2 million acres per year from 2015 to 2021. The number of U.S. farm acres owned by foreign entities grew more than 8% (3.4 million acres) in 2022.

We’re losing more and more of our businesses every year to foreign corporations and interests. Although China owns a small fraction of foreign-owned U.S. land at 380,000 acres (less than the state of Rhode Island), Chinese companies and investors are also buying up major food companies, commercial and residential real estate, and other businesses. As RetailWire explains, “Currently, many brands started by early American pioneers now wave international flags. This revolution is a direct result of globalization.” The growing list of once-notable American brands that have been sold to foreign corporations includes: U.S. Steel (now Japanese-owned); General Electric (Chinese-owned); Budweiser (Belgium); Burger King (Canada); 7-Eleven (Japan); Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge (Netherlands); and IBM (China). Continue reading in the link below.

You have only one choice this time. Don't underestimate Democrats' ability to fucking things up.

[part5of4podcast]

Have an unpopular opinion about a BL? Don't worry, we probably do too. Saying all the things you do or don’t wanna hear Part 5 (of 4) is here to engage with BL media from Japan, Thailand, China, Korea and more. We're talking film-making techniques, narrative analysis, fandom woes, while asking questions like, hey why don't the bottoms move their arms? We may not be experts, but we are loud, chaotic, and full of opinions.

In today’s episode we’re discussing the origins of our hosts De and Sinna’s friendship and Only Friends! Mainly Only Friends cause, whew, is there a lot to talk about. Anyone else still salty over that ending? Or just us?

Show Description: Mew, Ray, Boston and Namchueam; a group of business students running a hostel together-blur the lines between friendship and romance.

Where to Watch: Only Friends

Check out the read more below for further reading resources on topics we discussed in today's episode like framing devices, and color theory in film. Along with a list fanworks we loved from the fandom! Add any fanworks you loved as well, give the people their stars.

Listen to this podcast on: Spotify | Soundcloud | Youtube

References:

Framing Devices

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FRAMING DEVICES

A Story Inside a Story: Using Framing Devices in Fiction

10 Films that Utilize a Frame Narrative

Color Theory in Film

Color Theory in Film — Color Psychology for Directors

What Is Colour Theory In Film?

Color Symbolism in Literature: Examples and Meanings

Stain: Phenomenal and Literary Approaches to Color Studies

BL Budgets

The Storyboard: Interview with the Dee Hup House director Tee Bundit - Original Interview | Translation

BL Production Info from Strongberry - Original Interview | Translation

Fanworks We Loved:

ONLY FRIENDS as SZA Lyrics 2/? -> SMOKING ON MY EX PACK by @firelise Run away fast as you can by @iwantoceans GIF Set BostonNick by @taeminie Boston GIF Set by @khaotunq Top x Boston | Only Friends | Crazy in Love by stb Boston & Nick | Angels like you can't fly down hell with me by Scodders sand x ray | ''i need somewhere to begin by thanxxjessie “Compared to Boston, you're a saint” by @rabbiitte If Boston has a million fans by @no2tinngunshipper Only Friends FMV | Cardigan | BostonNick by @technicallyverycowboy Told You So by CaffeineAddict94 You’re On Your Own by technicallyverycowboy “Boston was ostracized, isolated and berated to the point that it completely shattered his sense of self” and “Boston and his “friends”” by @neuroticbookworm “Dear Boston” by @lurkingshan "go for it." by @gunsatthaphan

Goodbye Forever (Until Next Time) by Anonymous

Credits:

Chaotic Hosts: Dé & Sinna Beloved Editor: Bones Creative Kingpin: Libby

Support the podcast

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Horsey

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 11, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 12, 2024

“We’re producing more energy than ever before in this nation. We have the strongest economy in the world, and we are beating China for the first time in decades. More people went to work this morning in America than at any other time in our nation’s history. So I’ve got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining: Stop sh*t talking America. This is the greatest country on earth, and it’s time that we all start acting like it.”

Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s words to Jen Psaki on MSNBC yesterday illustrated that Democrats are flipping the script on the MAGA Republicans. 

Since he decided to run for president in 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, Trump’s narrative has been that the United States is in terrible decline and that only he can “make America great again.” In his speech announcing his candidacy on that June day in 2015, he claimed that “our country is in serious trouble” and complained that China, Japan, and Mexico were all “beating” the U.S. and “laughing at us, at our stupidity…. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he said before launching into the idea that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists across the border. “Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger…, and we as a country are getting weaker,” he said. “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.”

Trump claimed—falsely—that the nation’s gross domestic product was below zero, that the labor participation rate was “the worst since 1978,” that unemployment was between 18 and 20 percent, and that while Obamacare was “amazingly destructive,” he would replace it with something cheaper and better. 

Trump continued this theme of decline and what he called “American carnage” in his inaugural address. He described “[m]others and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

Trump initially seemed to blame inept politicians and bureaucrats for what he claimed was America’s decline, assuring the audience at his 2015 campaign announcement: “Well, you need somebody, because politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing’s gonna get done. They will not bring us—believe me—to the promised land. They will not.” But when then–FBI director James Comey refused to drop the investigation into the relationship between Russian operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign, Trump and his loyalists began to warn of a secretive “deep state” that was working to undermine Trump and, with him, the nation. 

Trump’s narrative that he is the true defender of the United States, under attack by dark forces, maps beautifully over white evangelical narratives of religious decline. Trump continued that storyline even after voters turned him out of the White House, insisting that a nefarious conspiracy of Democrats, undocumented immigrants, and foreigners stole the election from him. 

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol estimated that Trump raised $250 million in donations from supporters for an “election defense fund” to pay the legal fees to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But the Trump team never actually set up that fund. Instead, the money went to the Save America political action committee founded and controlled by Trump, and from there the money went to Trump loyalists and pro-Trump organizations.

And therein lies a key reason for Trump’s story of an apocalyptic America: describing the nation as a hellhole that only he can fix also maps over a common pattern of American grifters. So long as supporters send him money, he claims, they will be able to defend the country against dark forces: communists, Marxists, atheists, immigrants, pedophiles, feminists—just what the dark forces are matters far less than that they are a foil for the grifter. 

When Trump made that argument in 2015, it was not all that far-fetched. Economists estimate that the supply-side economics of the past 40 years had shifted $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. Schools had been chronically underfunded, and the opioid epidemic, which began in 1999, was claiming more than 10,000 Americans a year (a number that has continued to rise ever since). And by weaponizing the filibuster and gerrymandering states, Republicans had made it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to accomplish anything that would address these issues.

When Biden took office, he was in the unusual position of signing executive orders to establish policies that were not unpopular, like Trump‘s, but that were extraordinarily popular. This began the process of showing that the government could, in fact, represent the people. 

Then, thanks to the election of Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in a runoff election on January 6, 2021—that was the seismic shift of January 6, 2021, that is often forgotten—the Democrats continued to demonstrate that the government could work for the people. They passed the American Rescue Plan to shore up the U.S. economy after the pandemic shutdowns, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to rebuild roads and bridges and improve broadband access, the CHIPS and Science Act to promote semiconductor manufacturing, the Inflation Reduction Act to invest in climate change mitigation and permit the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to close loopholes in gun purchases.  

Those changes have created a roaring economy with an unemployment rate that has just last month ticked up to 4% after 27 months below that number, with wages growing faster than the inflation that plagued the U.S.—and the world—after the pandemic eased. The highest wage growth has gone to the lowest earners, helping to cut the nation’s extreme wealth inequality.

That booming economy might be partly what’s behind another significant change: for all that Trump and MAGA Republicans still talk about Democratic cities as hellholes, the FBI yesterday released a report showing that violent crime in fact dropped by more than 15% in the U.S. during the first three months of 2024.  As Jim Sciutto of CNN pointed out today, “Murders fell 26.4% and rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased by 12.5%, according to the data, robberies fell 17.8%.” In his own assessment, Biden attributed those dropping numbers to “putting more cops on the beat, holding violent criminals accountable, and getting illegal guns off the street.” 

On June 1, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd anticipated Shapiro’s pro-American stance when he pushed back on the Republican idea that the country is a dystopian nightmare. “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”

Today, Biden pointedly illustrated one more difference between Trump and the real world. In the wake of his own conviction on 34 criminal counts, Trump has amped up his insistence that the Department of Justice is rigged against him and must be purged of nonpartisan civil servants and repopulated with his own loyalists. Biden today underscored his own respect for the rule of law. 

This afternoon a jury found Biden’s 54-year-old son Hunter Biden guilty on three charges of lying on a form required to purchase a gun in 2018 when he checked the “no” box that asked if he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to,” drugs. That lie permitted him to buy the gun that he owned for 11 days. His lawyer argued that he did not consider himself an addict because he was trying at the time to end his drug dependence. 

The news made the Trump team rush back to their narrative. “This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. Echoing the false allegations MAGA Republicans have made about President Biden, she added: “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.”

But there is no Biden family business, and Hunter Biden is not in the administration. President Biden has kept his distance from the case. Today he said, “I am the president, but I am also a dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery. As I…said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[docholligay]

She Who Became The Sun

I want to thank @amhrancas for commissioning me to read a book I have been so so curious about, and I hope y'all will thank her too! She's also letting me, next month, talk about a movie I FUCKING LOVE.

nonspoilery: A plot-driven book that takes place over a long period of time in China during the time oof the Khans. There’s a lot to like in it, and i think a lot of people would really connect with this storyline, but there’s something slightly off about it that didn’t quite make it with me, that I pin down to a certain lack of character depth. It’s a pretty decent book overall, with some great description though, and the character thing is in no way jarring--it took me a bit to figure out what made the book not quite hit for me. 

SPOILERS BELOW:

I really wanted to like this book, and I still want to like this book, and I don’t NOT like this book, but I was prepared to love it. I don’t. I wish I did. 

And this isn’t me trying to satisfy the people I know love this book, or hedge about my feelings: I know how many of y’all loved GtN, and my response was essentially, “Hey, quick question, what the fuck is wrong with you?” (affectionate) so it’s not that I’m afraid to come out as not liking something well received by my peers. It’s just, I felt so close to really liking the book, and just could not get myself there. 

We’ll come back to that, but it’s one of the less-relevant bits of the review, so we’ll move on from it for now. So this is a historical fiction novel: KINDA. I admit that I know nothing about larger Chinese history, I never studied it, so I actually was not even aware that this was about a real person except for my commissioner telling me so when asking me questions to consider for the book. Some of the back of the book comments are calling it a historical fantasy, and aside from, I guess, the ghosts, the only reason I can see for this is that this is not at all representing the historical person Zhu Yuanzhang (I didn’t let myself look him up until after I had finished the book) so I would, personally, actually call this an alt-history, but I understand tht has some baggage with it the author may not have wanted to engage in. 

I was asked about the idea of narratively reworking a historic figure to be totally different from who they were. I have no problem with it! I feel like as long as we’re all HONEST about it--and I feel like this book is pretty honest about it, though, what choice does it have--it’s fun to sometimes have a historical blorbo and make them do what you want. I think that real people do not have symbolism and foreshadowing and motifs, and so, as a Lit major, I think it can somehow make people more REAL, by making them fictional. 

Also, as a History major, I kind of do not like it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the ACT of it, and more with the idea that so many people do not ever venture beyond the fictional work and so have completely incorrect notions of historical figures, and they feel ways about these human beings based on the very much fictional avatars presented. This tends to lead to a thing I LOATHE, where we do bad history because we need these people we admire to have been ‘like us’ or to hold values we hold or feel like we could have been friends with them, ignoring the reality of their personality, their social and temporal position, the fullness of who they were as a person, etc. I see a lot of bad fucking history based on this idea, and that is not new, this has been going on for a million years, but I have never liked it. Fictional accounts can convince people of things that aren’t necessarily the factual kind of true. 

That complicated feeling of mine goes on beyond this book, and, frankly, this takes it to such an extreme that I doubt very sincerely I’m going to see scholarship done about a great emperor of China being a woman secretly. So, I feel complex ways about it, but with a smart audience that realizes it’s fiction, I don’t have a problem with it, though in the same way I tend to prefer Not!Europes or Not!New Yorks, I tend to prefer, for example Not!Billy the Kids or what have you. But it didn’t affect my feelings about the book at all, this is a common thing in literature and the multitudes I contain today I will still contain tomorrow. 

Let’s talk about our main characters. 

Zhu. I think this is where the book didn’t lose me, but failed to engage me. I want to like Zhu so bad, but I just don’t, and I don’t mean I dislike her, I just mean I don’t…care much. I feel like I have no idea of the interiority of who she is other than trying to hide being a woman. I don’t get a grasp of her personality otherwise. I know she does what it takes to survive, I know she sees ghosts, and I know she becomes ruthless in a way that I found a bit shocking not in a “oh my god! Twist! Way but in a way where I felt like there wasn’t a clear enough path for people named Doc, who are me, from “I can kill a bad man” to “I can murder a child” or maybe there was, i don’t know, I just felt like there was a wall kept up between me and Zhu*. She murders a child, and Ma is all, “You said you wanted me for my kindness but you don’t care about it” and then Ma is at her side anyhow, so I guess it didn’t actually matter to Ma that much either, close of business, and I am just sitting there going, ‘Okay the book is over now, right?”

Ouyang. Probably my favorite character in the whole book, and yet, I mean I don’t like him in an “Ouyang is an innocent meow meow.” Ouyang is a bitter, hateful person who has intentionally forced himself not to feel joy or comfort or love because he made himself into a weapon and a weapon alone. Like Zhu, he took the steel he was given, but he bent it to his will. I love him as a character, I think his approach to everything is fascinating, and, inevitable, and I frankly find him much better written than Zhu. I was not at all surprised when he killed Esen. I saw it coming very early on, not in a ‘predictable trope’ way but in a ‘I hear the howl from far off and don’t get shocked when the wolves come in” way. He did it, and the way that was written was so great, and I was sitting there going, “You are going to blow up every good thing, the only good thing, that you have, out of a love for people you don’t even remember and a culture that is only yours in the way a shadow is you.” He looks straight at me and goes, “And what of it?” Extremely taken with him. 

Revenge is a huge thing in this book, and the necessity of it, almost. Is there redemption in revenge, what does it mean to find redemption, and is there value in holding onto an old pain for so long? Ouyang waits til near the end of the book for his revenge, but does he feel satisfaction from it? He carries his need to kill Esen like a bag of bricks, but he never for one moment imagines that he can set it down. I think there’s something to be said for a lack of flexibility in that. What does revenge bring him? What did his revenge against Zhu bring him? He suffers so much at the end, when he kills Esen, in what is very likely my favorite scene from the whole book, the absolute perfect ending to their story, and even then he cannot imagine a different way. He takes this idea of revenge as his way of being man, his fucking fixation on manhood and being a son, and what he is and what he is not, and he lets it eat him alive, and it brings him NOTHING. At the end of the day, it brings him only suffering and pain, and instead of having one dead family, he has two. 

 Though I suppose it could be said that Esen suffers for his near-inability to be capable of revenge. Not that he’s a weak man, he isn’t, and not a cruel one either, though often a thoughtless one. (And maybe this is, after it all, why Ouyang can kill him. He was always kind to Ouyang in every way Esen could think of, but he never thought about Ouyang, from Ouyang’s view.) But he doesn’t have the sense of revenge that other people in his life do, he doesn’t have the instinct. Not even what i would call full on revenge, he can hardly make the people he cares about pay for the things they do. 

Maybe the way to live is between them, I don’t know. 

So, obviously, at the end I absolutely salivating over everything that is happening with Esen and Ouyang, but find myself very much left cold by whatever the hell Zhu is doing. This is a problem as a reader! This isn’t even me saying, “Oh nooooo Zhu turns ruthless and naughty” I actually think that’s a great middle point for a story, but for the end to be like, “So then Zhu murders a child, and is now king. The end.” I was sitting there going, “so what…am I supposed to take from this, exactly?” A good story has a moral, not always a good moral, and maybe moral isn’t even the right word, but stories teach us things, and with the B-track story of Esen and Ouyang I feel like I got that, but with Zhu’s story I came away utterly plussed about the whole thing. Diversity win! The warrior-king who ruthlessly grasps for power is a gender noncomforming woman! Ahaha I mean I’m oversimplifying obviously, but it feels in many ways unfinished to me. 

I really did like the descriptions and vocabulary in the book, though, and I think this is part of what broke my heart about not loving it. PLEASE use words like palimpsest and internecine and facile. PLEASE describe things as being “like froth on a dead man’s mouth” and “ held on as if it were a slipping deck at sea” and  “the particular combination of awe and pity one gets from seeing fragile pear blossoms in the rain” my god. WHAT. I was fucking SPOILED by the language of the piece.  To a degree that was almost frustrating. 

The experience of this book was the experience of an ex where it should have worked, where it should have been everything and more, and it wasn’t even BAD, it just did not reach what it should have. I feel an echoing ache that I could not really ever LOVE this book despite wanting to so badly. It feels frustrating, ina way that hating a book doesn’t. I do think people who are interested in this book should read it for themselves and make a judgment call, as I’m sure and know that there are plenty of people who enjoy this book exactly as it is. I’m not chomping at the bit to read the sequel but not opposed to it, either, and maybe in that shrug is the harshest condemnation I can realistically offer. It’s not a bad book. It’s even a pretty good book. But it does not give me passion for its main character. 

*It might be that this book is so so fast-paced. It is slamming from year to year with military movements and the Mongol court and the Red Turbans and betrayals and successes and there are few breaths taken in between. Some people will love that, but I felt it robbed me of a bit of knowing the people I’m reading about. 

[mizukagami-takamagahara]

Crest Analysis = Taokaka

I was messing around with some stuff today, and somehow ended up really staring at Taokaka’s crest.  After hours of wasting my day staring at this, I realized...

It’s Cats.  It’s All Cats.

It’s pretty easy to see that the whole crest itself is a cat’s face.  We’ve got a big toothy grin (much like Tao’s) and a little nose, whiskers on either side, some eyes and ears.

The expression on the cat’s face here (the big mouth and how the eyes are designed) makes me think of the Komainu statues seen in Japan/Shishi statues seen in China and of Chinese lion dancer puppets.  Though when I pull up pictures to compare, I find it more difficult to pinpoint the common thread that’s making my brain associate the imagery.  Like, it’s definitely there, but I’m unable to articulate it, and it may be a link that only exists in my own head.

But outside of the main face, there are tons of cats making up the crest.  Here’s all the ones I was able to find.

First we have the most prominent duo at the bottom of the crest.  We’ve got two mirrored cats.  The entirety of their head/ears are pretty apparent.  We can see one of their legs stretched out and displaying their claws, and two other legs lower down the body.  The loop connecting them could be their tails, though the lines above that also look like tails on these images.  Beside both of their heads we see a little circular image that, alongside all the other cat theming, looks to me like a paw print.

So, if we count the whole face of the Crest as one cat, these give us... Cat Count: 3

Now we’re moving on to the cats that I never noticed until I really analyzed the Crest.  The ears on the cat’s face???  They’re cats.  On the left here I circled the whole cat/ear, while on the right I’ve doodled a bit to show the cat’s head, whiskers, front legs, visible back leg, and tail.

But I’m not even done with THIS image.  While highlighting this, I found more cats.

We got another lil’ cat connected to the ear cats.  What would this be?  An eyebrow cat???  I’m not sure, but let’s take a closer look- I’ll trace the one on the right, like one would a constellation, and circle the same part on the left.

^ This bit here???  Ears. ^

^ Front and back legs ^

And by now you probably saw the tail yourself.

No cats connected to THESE ones, as far as I can tell, so that means Cat Count: 7

Next we’ve got another prominent set of cats that are, as far as I can tell, not hiding or connected to any smaller cats.  It’s just these guys, on either side of the face, right above the whiskers.

We can see the ears, head, nose, arguably an eye- though if it’s open or closed depends on how you interpret the image- and we see another extended arm with some claws out.

This is paralleled on the other side of the face, which means Cat Count: 9

But wait.  What’s that???  Right between the topmost whisker and the one below...

You may call this a stretch, but you know what I’m calling it?  A cat.  And again it’s paralleled on the other side of the Crest.

I would also be inclined to argue that this chunk here resembles another outstretched arm with two claws displayed, given the shapes making up said ‘claws,’ but with no face attached to that arm I won’t be adding it or its mirror to the count.

Cat Count: 11

And you know what I see when looking at the eyes???  More cats.  Three for each eye, specifically.  On the right here I’ve just blocked out the eye, while on the left I’ve circled each individual cat shape, as I see it.

Which, unless I’m missing stuff, leaves us with... Total Cat Count:  17

And even all this rambling doesn’t account for all the long lines with curved ends that could look like cat tails.  I’d be here all day if I tried to count those for you though if you ask, I might give it a shot.  Or the many sets of three parallel lines often used in art to suggest (cat) scratch marks.  OR the overlapping lines seen in the nose that, again, suggest scratches.

NOR am I counting all the FISH hidden in the Crest.  There are so many fish in this image.  I’m counting 20 at a glance.  Wait, no, 22.  Actually I could add to that if I was willing to get a little more abstract...  Hell, more, if you’re willing to say that the images making up the most notable fish’s spines also look like a different kind of fish...

If you want the final fish count, let me know.

[the-archangel]

Friday's Job

Been thinking about V and Johnny going out on jobs together and what their days would be like, so this came from that

Kerry's not happy V has gone back to the merc life with Johnny, but that doesn't mean there's no room for a bit of fluffy smut between them later on!

The neon colours the rain with hues of blue and pink as it teems down onto the City below. The few people around in these early hours keep their eyes to the floor, either to ward off the worst of the weather on their way to work, or to keep away prying eyes on their way home, but one pair of eyes are looking upwards, one rain-soaked face is searching the building towering above for a signal in the eighth-floor window. Two flashes of yellow light, that’s it, he makes his way towards the imposing glass doors of the office block and slips inside.

The reception area is empty at this time of night, protected by the double doors – now unlocked, and several security cameras – now disabled. The lifts were disabled along with the cameras so he finds the stairs and takes them two at a time reaching the eight floor only a little out of breath a short time later. He has to push the door hard to access the Corpo offices he knows to be on the other side, the body leaning against it seems to be tangled in something stopping him from pulling it away, “Hang on,” a voice tells him from the other side, and the unfortunate woman is lifted and moved, the electrical cord around her neck clattering onto the floor.

He stands in the doorway surveying the scene, apart from the woman, a further maybe six bodies are scattered around – quite literally – taking a deep breath he steps over the human detritus, avoiding making a mess of his boots as much as possible, and reaches his partner on the other side of the room. It always fascinates him to watch how he effortlessly hacks into computer systems, the calm look on his face belies the difficulty of what he’s attempting, only the golden glow around his emerald irises gives away his intent. Behind them, a laptop springs into life, they both grin as the information is transferred to the shard in its port, which is retrieved and safely stowed away.

“I thought the office was gonna be empty.”

“Killing Corpos is a problem all of a sudden?”

“Nah, but Kerry’s gonna be pissed, you’ve got a breakfast date in an hour and you’re not exactly dressed for it.”

V looks down grimacing at his blood-soaked shirt and pants, “So do what you’re here to do then and we can delta, he hates it when I’m late.”

Johnny takes the device out of the bag and places it gingerly under the desk in the middle of the room, V is already making for the stairs as he sets the timer and then follows. They make it to the other side of the street just in time to see the windows above light up, all evidence that they were ever there erased by the fire currently ripping through the floor.

“I’ll see you later, gotta delta, I’ll tell Kerry you said ‘hi’.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Johnny mutters watching V’s bike disappear towards Little China.

-

Slightly less than an hour later, a cleaned up but still hyper V strolls into the high-class restaurant like he’s been used to it his whole life. The waiter shows him to the window table where he is met with his partner’s tired but happy smile and a warm hug. “Shit, I hate having to do mornings,” Kerry grumbles as he re-takes his seat.

“It was your idea to meet here for breakfast Ker,”

“I know,” he says more softly, “I just wanted to see you, you’ve been so busy with work and shit I feel like it’s been forever.”

“It’s been four days,” smiles V, “and next week we’re together for a whole ten days, you’ll be sick of the sight of me!”

The waiter brings over coffee and a selection of pastries, setting them down quietly and efficiently before leaving them to their conversation.

“I get scared for you Vince, you could be at the club safe and sound, but you have to keep going on jobs with that fucking gonk, risking your life and for what?”

V carefully takes a sip of the hot coffee looking over the rim of the cup at his mainline’s worried face. It’s true, the club is his, he can do what the fuck he wants, never needs to go on another job in his life if he doesn’t want to. But he made Johnny his responsibility the moment he chose to bring him back – a move that Kerry neither understood nor approved of, though did finance for V’s sake – and Johnny wants to train to be a merc, so who better than V to do that?

“It’s not forever, only until he’s ready to go it alone. How about I make a deal with you? If he can do the job on Friday without much help, then I’ll go back to runnin’ the club.”

Friday’s job had been on Kerry’s radar for a couple of weeks, he’d heard V talking about it over the holo a couple of times and it was one of the reasons that he was so unsettled.

Breaking into an Arasaka run facility after everything V had been through with them seemed like the dumbest idea ever to Kerry, they surely would have his metrics on file and he’d be caught before he even got into the building, preem netrunner that V was, Kerry could not see how he was going to get away with this. He didn’t even know why he was doing it, it wasn’t a contract he knew that, what was so damn important in there that V had to have it before next week? Whatever it was, he wasn’t telling, he’d just shrug and change the subject whenever Kerry tried to bring it up.

Reluctantly, Kerry nods in agreement at the suggestion, it was the best he was going to get and at least if V was taking a step back it might be Johnny, not V who is in the firing line.

“’Sides, most of what we do isn’t that dangerous, this morning we were just doing a hacking job.”

Kerry studies V for a moment before asking with a raised eyebrow, “Is that why you’ve got dried blood under your fingernails and a bullet hole in the arm of your jacket?”

V looks quickly from his hands to his jacket, swearing under his breath. Luckily the bullet had gone through the material without touching him, but he can’t believe he hadn’t noticed it. He shrugs, “There were…complications, but it was fine, look, I’m fine.” He offers Kerry a cheesy smile, receiving a frown in return,

“Mhm, well let’s just get Friday over with, you coming home tonight?”

Covering his mainline’s hands with his own V answers softly, “It’ll be pretty late, but sure, I’ll be home.”

-

Way past 2AM, Kerry is sleeping fitfully, waking every half hour or so unable to settle until V’s promised return. He’s going to have a wait, V and Johnny have got themselves into a bit of a predicament.

“Shit Johnny, I told you to leave it alone!”

Johnny feels very slightly bad for getting them into this, but how could he be blamed if someone left a pile of interesting-looking gear just lying around? Of course he was going to go and have a look through it. In the time it took him to cross the room, the shutters had crashed down and now they were stuck in a warehouse in fucking Kabuki with a bunch of Maelstromers hunting them down.

V was seriously unimpressed, he’d managed to get down their numbers with some quick hacks, contagion had spread quickly and taken five out, he short-circuited another three and got one with a synapse burn, the floor was mostly clear as far as he could tell, but the computer controlling the doors was in the basement and there were at least another six or seven of them down there – and now they knew he and Johnny were here.

Even before turning to mercenary work, Johnny had been an OK shot, the only good thing his father ever did for him was to teach him how to hunt and the army had taught him how to use pistols and automatic weapons, so he leads the two of them towards the steps leading to the lower floor, gun in hand and on high alert. Of course V isn’t a bad shot either, but he’s increasingly reliant on his netrunning skills these days and follows scanning the area for danger.

In front of the door to the lower level, V puts his finger to his lips and listens. His enhancements mean that even from some distance away he can hear a whispered conversation pretty clearly,

“We’re like rats in a pipe down here Roach, what’re we gonna do?”

“Quit your whining, you wired the door up right? Soon as they walk in they’ll be flambé.”

That’s all V needs, ushering Johnny back up the stairs he aims an incendiary grenade at the door and runs as far and as fast as he can in the other direction covering his ears. The explosion rocks the entire building, fortunately leaving the stairs intact but the same can’t be said of the door or of one of the lurking gang members. Johnny manages to pick a couple more of them off as they ran towards them through the burning doorway, V shoots through the flames and gets a lucky hit on a third leaving two cowering at the back of the room.

The intense heat coming from the still burning doorway is a barrier to them entering the lower level, but V is quite capable of finishing then off without going anywhere near and does so with a minimum of fuss before remotely hacking the computer to open the shutters.

The sun is beginning to rise over the City as they step out, V hates turning up at Kerry’s grimy and stinking of smoke, but he’s too tired to go home to shower first, so he drops Johnny at his apartment before making his way to North Oak. V has been awake for around 27 hours at this point and is feeling every second of it as he swings the Apollo into the drive, he’s almost too tired to register surprise that Kerry is up at this time, or to argue as he herds him into the shower.

Kerry watches V sleep for a long time before finally nodding off himself, he’s still not – nor will he ever be – over the fear that everything he’s been through will catch up with him one day and Alt’s dark prediction will finally come true, so he watches the rise and fall of V’s chest and is lulled to sleep by the motion under his hand and the soft regular breathing beside him.

-

A clatter wakes V up with a start, it’s nearly dark again outside, not for the first time he’s slept the day away. Kerry appears with some coffee, “Sorry babe, the dumb silverware drawer wouldn’t close so I had to give it a nudge.”

V grins into his coffee, “With your boot?”

“Yeah, didn’t work though.”

“Gimme a few minutes to wake up and I’ll have a look at it.”

Kerry sits on the bed next to V smoothing the covers and frowning, “You working tonight?”

“Nah, Thursdays are quiet, Clair can run the bar and Johnny’s got a real straightforward klepping gig that even he can’t fuck up.” V watches his lover’s face brighten, “Why? You wanna do something?”

Biting his lip Kerry looks through his lashes at the other man, “Well there’s this industry thing tonight… I know you hate them but we don’t have to stay long and there’s free sushi.”

“Course we can go,” Kerry knows V can never resist his puppy-dog eyes, “I’ll even let you pick out my outfit.”

-

The sushi was good, the wine was OK, the company was dire, so V and Kerry sit in a corner away from the crowds sharing a plate and chatting. An observer would note the way their fingers are entwined over the table, how their knees are touching, the closeness of their faces despite the relative quiet of the club and the soft voices they use exclusively with each other. Promoters send over photographers, but the couple barely notice only having eyes for each other, the intrusion used to bother V but Kerry always remained unflustered knowing that yet another picture of him with the same blurry-faced man was hardly going to set the world on fire.

V had been ignoring calls all evening, having disconnected his phone from his holo and turned off his alerts. With Kerry on his way to the bathroom he chances a quick look at his phone and sighs as he sees the increasingly irate stream of messages from Johnny’s number, and one from Clair’s warning him that Johnny was on the warpath. It seems the job had gone well, goods were klepped and returned, Johnny got his payday, but this is the problem, the eddies that Wakako sent were not the same as those promised and Johnny had made the gonk move of going to confront her about it. V could’ve told him that the promised rate was for himself only, an experienced merc with an excellent rep, not for Johnny, an unknown quantity, but of course V hadn’t been answering his phone – shit.

Kerry returns to see V shrugging on his jacket and promising to explain when he gets home, he puts the car fob into Kerry’s hand and runs into the warm night air of Corpo Plaza hopping into the cab he’d called and messaging Johnny to tell him he was on the way. He’s beginning to regret the monkey suit that he’d wound up wearing, but at least he still had Archangel and his monowires. The cab is taking forever, the last message V had from Johnny was over an hour ago and made little sense, something about the Tyger Claws and a large knife. Finally pulling up in Japantown, V sprints out of the cab and into the back room where the fixer conducts her business.

“Ah, V. How pleasant of you to visit, I thought our paths might cross tonight.”

“Hey Wakako, I’m looking for…”

“Yes, yes, your annoying friend. I’m afraid some of my boys have had to have a word with him about his manners.”

Shit, “It was my fault, he called but I didn’t answer. I should’ve dealt with it personally.”

“Yes, even just as a professional courtesy you should have come yourself, but we cannot change what has been done. I will have my boys bring him to you, wait here.”

A quick call later and soon V hears an ominous dragging noise coming from outside the door, two of the biggest Tyger Claws V has ever seen manoeuvre their way through with a lank haired, bloody faced Johnny barely suspended between them, they unceremoniously let him fall to the floor before leaving the way they came. The dark-haired merc looks up through his blood-crusted eyelashes and spits a gobbet of blood into his hand.

“V dear, give the boy a towel to wipe his face would you?”

Looking around the room he sees a stack of towels by the sink and picks out the top one before wetting it and passing it to Johnny who grabs it angrily wipes his face and hands and passes it back.

“I trust that our business here is both concluded and forgotten?”

Not giving the other man even a chance to speak, V drags him up from the floor and towards the door. “Of course Wakako, have a pleasant evening,” he says through gritted teeth.

-

A safe distance outside Johnny is exactly as pissed as you would expect, V listens patiently while he lists all of his shortcomings both as a person and a fixer and tells him what a terrible friend he is, all the while supporting himself with an arm around V’s neck and limping along beside him. “What were you doin’ anyway that was so important? Why the suit?”

“It was supposed to be my night off if you remember, we were at a shit party if you must know.”

“Well I’m glad it was shit, I hope you get food poisoning from whatever nasty Corpo scop you’ve been eating.”

V sniggers at Johnny’s half-meant sentiment, Johnny smiles at V’s snigger, “So, how’s your face, any permanent damage d’ya think?”

“Only to my ego,” Johnny admits, “I’ll go see Vik in the morning, just need to sleep right now.”

“Nah let’s get you there now, not good to sleep on a concussion or something.”

Johnny had parked the Porsche a couple of streets away, so they take it across town to a sleepy Vik who confirms V’s suspicions.

“Yep, looks like a concussion and a fractured eye socket, can fix one easily enough, the other just needs you to rest for a few days.”

V takes the doc by the elbow and leads him out of Johnny’s earshot, “Vik, I really need him compos mentis tomorrow, is there anything you can give him to… you know… hurry it along?”

Frowning, Vik takes off his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose, “There’s a couple of things I could do I guess, one’s illegal and the other is merely unethical.”

“Thanks Vik, I owe you big time.”

The eye-socket is fixed and Johnny is given a shot of something that makes him feel both indestructible and brittle at the same time, with some pills to chase it up with in the morning. “He shouldn’t be left alone tonight V, once he’s asleep he’ll be out for a good 7 hours and you’ll need to check on him regularly.”

“Sure Vik, no problem and thanks.”

V drives back to Johnny’s apartment punching him in the arm whenever he sees him nodding and manages to get him into the lift and onto a couch before he’s out for the count. He messages Kerry broadly explaining what happened and promising to see him later, then sets an alert to go off every 90 minutes and settles to sleep on the other sofa. V sleeps brokenly, checking on Johnny throughout the night and is finally woken by the sound of the shower late the next morning.

“Hey V, dunno what was in that shit Vik gave me but woo! I feel awesome this morning. Better hop in there yourself and get changed, got a big day today.”

V wishes he’d had a dose of whatever it is Johnny’s had cuz he’s tired as hell and feels like shit. He gets a shower and borrows some of Johnny’s clothes – which on closer inspection are actually V’s clothes some of which he’d previously borrowed from Kerry. Coffee and toast go some way to improving V’s mood, but he suspects it’ll be later today safe at home with Kerry and looking forward to the next few days before he truly feels OK.

-

Unlike a large proportion of the jobs he and Johnny take on, today’s job had been intricately planned down to the tiniest detail. Security guard’s routines had been noted to the second, every camera and sensor had been mapped, nothing had been left to chance. The facility holding what they were after was off a dirt track way into the Eastern Badlands and V had been tuning the Rattler for weeks getting her ready for the trip, all they needed to do was grab their gear and go.

The early afternoon sun was almost unbearable, even with the AC on full blast the car was like an oven, but to make good time stopping was not an option so they guzzle some of the gallons of water they have brought along and try their best not to pass out from the heat. A few hours after setting off it is two hot, sweaty, irritable mercs that emerge gratefully from the stifling heat of the car and make their way towards the shadow of the warehouse facility that is their target.

As arranged with an easily bribed employee, the door to the staff kitchens had been left unlocked so they slip inside, V working through his list of cameras and sensors to disable and Johnny scouting ahead. Everything was exactly as they had expected, good old Arasaka efficiency, and everyone was where they were supposed to be. Having no desire to kill anyone unnecessarily, guards and staff are brought down either through V’s hacks or Johnny’s deftly applied stranglehold, they reach the vault with zero casualties and zero problems.

Easily opening the lock they swing open the door and look at the bank of refrigerated storage devices taking up the main part of the large room. Each has its own unique code which V now scans to find the one that they came for – and then one other one that Johnny insisted was important too. Stashing what they have found in the holdall they brought specially, they slip away into the still stifling desert air, quietly celebrating a job well done.

V had got them here so Johnny drives back, despite the adrenaline rush tiredness has caught up with the fixer and he sleeps peacefully for most of the journey home allowing Johnny to indulge in his guilty pleasure of listening to the Country music station on the radio. By evening they are nearing the City once more, North Oak is in sight and Johnny nudges V awake as they approach the Villa. “Wake up princess, your castle’s up ahead.”

Groggily, V swipes Johnny’s arm, yawns and watches as the lights of home get closer, Johnny pulls up the drive, but doesn’t get out of the car, his and Kerry’s relationship is still pretty rocky, “Thanks Johnny, I’ll come by in the morning to get the gear.” Kerry sees the headlights sweep up the path and is waiting on the step as V gets there, Johnny rolls his eyes as he turns the car around and sees them hug before disappearing inside.

-

“Still not gonna tell me what that was all about?” Kerry asks as he lies in bed waiting for V to finish getting ready to join him.

“Nu uh, gonna have to wait until tomorrow.”

Kerry is a man of many – well some – virtues, but none of them are patience, and he’s finding the fact that Johnny knows when he doesn’t particularly hard to deal with. “Ah c’mon V baby, give Kerry a hint.”

Usually, V succumbs to Kerry’s sweet-talking pretty quickly, but this time he won’t be swayed, “You’ll find out soon enough Ker,” he tells him slipping between the cool covers, “I guess I’ll just have to find a way to distract you from thinking about it.”

“I guess you will,” Kerry agrees, grinning that he has his man back where he belongs.

-

Shortly after dawn, V reluctantly leaves Kerry sleeping peacefully, he has a few things to do before they can begin their break together, so it’s several hours later that Kerry awakens to the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. He watches the other man drop a holdall gently onto the bedroom floor and rub his hands over his face and neck before crossing the room to sit on the bed.

“Mornin’ beautiful,” he says brightly, running his thumb over the implants on Kerry’s cheekbones, “sleep well?”

“Eventually,” Kerry answers leaning into V’s soft touch, “where’ve you been?”

“Just had a couple of errands to run, all yours now though.”

Kerry hums contentedly, rubbing against V’s hand like a contented cat, “Hmm, come back to bed baby, nowhere to be for a few hours yet.”

“You know I want to, but I brought coffee, and there’s pancakes in the kitchen.”

Frowning a little the Rockerboy looks up through his eyelashes, “They’ll keep,” he instructs the fixer, “besides you literally just said that you’re all mine and I want you in this bed, now.”

V smirks a little, how can he refuse such a request? He shrugs his jacket onto the floor and kicks off his boots pulling his shirt off on his way around to the other side of the bed and his pants off as he arrives. Kerry pulls back the covers and he slides inside allowing the other man’s arms to wrap around his waist and pull him, his back to Kerry’s chest, into a heated embrace. Calloused hands run over V’s chest, pausing to pinch at his nipples then continuing downwards, pressing against his taught stomach, pulling his hips back towards Kerry’s. Soft lips sink into V’s shoulder, gentle nips and a searching tongue tracing the veins and raising groans and sighs from the increasingly compliant merc.

The thick length of Kerry’s cock rubs up against the small of V’s back leaving drops of precum where it touches, a lube slicked hand reaches down between them and coats V’s opening and Kerry’s shaft, it’s unusual for the Rockerboy to want to top, but today is an unusual day so V leans into his touch, groans turning to gasps as first one, then two fingers slide inside him curling and massaging his prostrate, before pulling gently out to be replaced by the tip of Kerry’s impressively thick cock. “This OK baby?” he croons into V’s ear.

“Mhm, god…yes.” comes the reply.

Kerry shuffles V onto his front being careful to never lose contact and begins a slow, shallow rhythm that he knows drives his mainline wild. With his head buried in the pillow, V bites his lower lip enjoying the sensation of being filled by his lover and of the increasingly deep and frantic thrusts, until finally Kerry throws back his head and with an exclamation somewhere between a curse and a grunt pumps his load into V’s welcoming ass.

Both sink breathlessly onto the bed, Kerry’s soaked forehead resting on V’s shoulder, “Turn over Vince honey.” V sleepily complies brushing a kiss onto the top of the other man’s head as he turns allowing Kerry to flutter kisses down his stomach and wrap his lips around V’s semi-hard cock.

It’s possible, V reflects, that Kerry gives the best blow jobs on the planet, the perfect warmth, the intuitive rhythm, the way he sucks in his cheeks to create just the right amount of friction and of course one of the (un)fortunate side effects of the cyberware in his throat is that he no longer has a gag reflex, but the main thing that makes him good at it is – as  with his music – he fucking loves it, absolutely adores it in fact, the filthy noises he’s making right now as he works V’s dick betray the fact that he’s having at least as much fun as V is, if not a fair amount more. Relaxing into the feeling of building euphoria, V clings onto either side of the pillow – he’s scared he’d hurt Kerry if he laid a hand on him right now such is the intensity of what he’s feeling – and groans out a warning, but he knows Kerry will take it all, and he does, licking his lips lazily afterwards like a cat.

“Preem way to start the day, thanks Ker.” says V softly.

“Aw c’mon V, no need to thank me, just pay me back in kind later.” he purrs with a wink, before heading into the shower and leaving V to a cheeky ten-minute nap.

-

After a shower and a breakfast of reheated coffee and cold pancakes, the two men sit quietly on the veranda looking out over the city, chairs close enough for their fingers to be entwined between them.

“So, you gonna tell me what all the secrecy’s been about then?” Kerry asks, lowering his shades to look the other man in the eye.

V grins, “Nah, not yet, not long, but not yet.”

Pouting prettily, Kerry lights a cigarette, “Should probably start getting ready soon, need to delta in a couple of hours.”

-

It’s going to be a hell of a party; Kerry’s been planning it for weeks and has booked out the whole of Dark Matter for the occasion.

They have a lot to celebrate, V turned 30 a few weeks ago and there was a time not so long ago that they were sure that that would never happen, Kerry had managed to get out of his contract with MSM and had set up his own record company – it was going to cost him big time but was worth every enny, and it had been two years to the day since their first kiss right here on the balcony, not that Kerry had remembered – he was terrible with dates, but V had never forgotten.

“Two years huh?” Kerry asks blowing a plume of vanilla scented smoke down to the City below, “Two years since you promised to chase the shadows away.”

“How’d I do?”

Kerry looks into his mainline’s eyes, “Those fuckers wouldn’t dare come near me now, you’d kick their asses.”

“We’d kick their asses,” corrects V, “together.”

A tender look passes between them, fingertips slide across the chrome handrail to tangle together, the maître d' diplomatically coughs into his hand turning their attention to the guests currently exiting the elevator.

“Ker, before the party gets going, I want to give you something.”

“Do I finally get to find out what all the secrecy has been about?”

“Mhm,” V retrieves something from his inside jacket pocket while Kerry tries to hide his excitement, V rarely brings him actual gifts, but when he does, they are always extraordinarily special. A largish velvet pouch appears which V opens delicately, fishing inside and pulling out a gold chain with some sort of pendant hanging on it. Kerry stares at it for a moment then takes it cautiously into his hand,

“Is this…?”

“Mhm,”

He allows V to fasten it around his neck, then holds the pendant in the palm of his hand, running a finger over it and shaking his head, “How did you get it? I thought they kept it when…Oh, that’s what the job was all about, gettin’ this, I mean I love it, but…why?”

Kerry looks up quizzically at his mainline, still holding the pendant in his palm, V leans in and covers his hand with his own, “This is why we met, it’s why I’m here and not sat in a bloody heap in a doorway somewhere, it’s why Arasaka are manufacturing third-rate novelties instead of tanks these days, it’s part of me, part of us, it changed the world and now it’s yours.”

“The gold-plating is a nice touch.”

“Yeah well, nothin but the best for you Ker.”

-

Johnny wasn’t much one for refined parties, he much preferred an evening in a dive bar with a bottle of tequila and a couple of chooms, he’d hung around for an hour then driven back to his apartment smiling to himself when he remembered what was waiting for him there. He’d picked it up this morning but not had chance to get it out of the wrapping yet.

He sat on his couch carefully peeling off the brown paper cover then sat back and admired the job that the store had done of mounting it inside the Perspex case, his new arm was fine, virtually indistinguishable from an organic one, but this one, this one had played with Samurai, had held Alt Cunningham, had punched countless gonks and had been worth all the trouble to get it back.

[4noki-vns]

Consummation Proof of Concept: Fun Facts

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Time is nothing but an illusion… in many ways.

If you haven’t read the demo for Consummation ~wind above the dragon sea~ yet, then I recommend checking it out first! It’s a short hour long read introducing you to a much longer yuri chuunige that I’d like to make in the future.

Download @ https://4noki.itch.io/consummation-prototype

my childhood dreams

You may have seen me say that Consummation is a story that I’ve wanted to create for a very long time. How long; how long is very long?

To answer to that question: almost ten years.

I can’t quite remember when exactly this story entered my brain and decided not to leave, but I can vividly remember drawing the characters on notebook paper during my high school freshman year Biology class. (Consummation, by the same name, was probably conceptualized that year.)

The Four Gods, four territories.

A freelancer called Suzukaze, beloved by the wind.

An info broker called Qin, wearing a qipao.

And a beloved “Senpai” by the name of Kagura.

Those are the key factors that existed back then and still exist to this day.

Of course, since high school, lots of things have changed as Consummation sat around in the ideas document waiting for the light of day, being dusted off now and then in different forms.

For example:

The protagonist switched to Qin from Suzukaze for a period! (Although we’re back to my wind-blessed freelancer daughter)

Senpai (Kagura) was explicitly dead in most early iterations of the story, making it a revenge plot

Characters like Belka and Juhyeon were only created within the last two iterations of Consummation

I’m looking forward to seeing how Consummation evolves from now on, still so much the same yet so much changing.

But for now, I’m happy to ramble a bit about the parts that were exposed in the prototype demo!

-

Q. world building?

First, let’s talk about the world building. Consummation is set in an unspecified era after the world as we know it was destroyed by a calamity that left the majority of the world uninhabitable and dangerous to return to.

We can consider the genre to be modern fantasy, the setting post-apocalyptic.

The plot takes place on an artificial island built in the Sea of Japan, a smattering of cities built upon the artificial land and manufacturing/infrastructure set below the earth in order to sustain an island that has no external trade. The level of technology is similar to ours but possibly slightly more advanced, even as the end of the world would have destroyed a lot of progress.

Whether or not there is any life beyond the island is unknown to the people living on the island; the belief is that they are the last humans on the face of the earth.

The island, which is usually referred to as just the island, is split into four territories in the four cardinal directions, each territory ruled by a group from each of the countries that helped create the island.

Fun fact: It used to be called the “Scrapyard.”

Should we call this a confederacy of dictatorships? Certainly, it wouldn’t exactly be false. (The island is not a democracy.)

For someone like our protagonist Suzukaze, the specifics of government and politics are beyond the scope of her focus, but you’ll see how the characters live on the island regardless.

-

Q. What are the four territories?

In story, the countries that built up the island are Japan, Korea (unspecified), China, and Russia. As such, the territories are split between their groups and mostly run along their ethnic lines although movement between territories is not difficult.

There also exists a neutral city-territory, governed jointly by the four groups ruling over the territories, called Central, the location of the main story.

-

Fun fact: While the Chinese territory and Japanese territory existed in the earliest iterations of Consummation, the other two territories were initially different groups (Italian and MENA).

However, taking into consideration the focus on East Asian mythology and the location of the island, I decided to go with countries from within the geographical region around the Sea of Japan that would be reasonably involved in the joint development of such an island.

(Maybe my Italian and MENA girls are somewhere out there in their own version of an island…)

Q. Who are the ruling groups of the four territories?

However, despite speaking in broad strokes of countries above, it quickly becomes clear that the ruling groups of the four territories are not quite the former state governments but rather families with the blessings of the Four Gods (the cardinal beasts, however you would like to call them).

The ruling groups can be considered powerful families that existed in their respective countries before the end of the world. They were able to gain positions overseeing the island before the collapse and then consolidated power as the de facto government after the collapse.

-

In earlier iterations of Consummation, the story was also more focused on gangs and gang warfare (a mafia story?). However, for the sake of certain plot points, the four groups turned from their initial characterization as string-pullers influencing a weak government to the government themselves.

This is what we call the monopoly of legal violence.

Q. Cults?

Yes.

Q. language?

Given the four countries that led to the four territories, it would make sense that multiple languages should be spoken on the island.

At the very least, Russian, Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin), and Korean are spoken on the island. For the time being, I won’t specify if there’s a common language used for cross group communication or if everyone can just magically understand each other like Tekken characters. (o´▽`o)

Q. Senpai?

But you might notice that a very important character is referred to as “Senpai.”

Given the differences in types of relationships that exist across cultures (e.g,, there are so many ways to refer to various relatives in Chinese), I was unable to find a good word to describe the relationship between Suzukaze and Kagura aside from “Senpai.”

Perhaps if they were in school, then I’d call it something like “upperclassman” or “senior sister” (haha, no way), but it’s something that I can only describe as “Senpai.”

As such, you may see terms like “Senpai” used throughout the story for character relationships that are difficult to describe in English.

Q. What about honorifics?

However, I will refrain from using honorifics throughout the story. It would quickly become confusing with so many in-story languages, and my familiarity with Korean and Russian is relatively poor.

The lack of honorifics may be considered a loss of information, but as the story is originally written in English anyhow, I imagine that shouldn’t be a huge problem. Overall, I’d like to be consistent within the story.

Thus, no honorifics here!

Maybe next time.

misc

Q. Who are the heroines/love interests?

Given that Consummation is a yuri game, I figure that I should specify who the love interests are before I close off this ramble.

They are Qin, Kagura, Juhyeon!

My daughter Juhyeon will get revenge for her flirting being ignored…

(There is a minor chance of Belka having a route as well, but currently no plans are in place for a Belka route.)

-

I hope I’ll be able to elevate Consummation to active project status soon. There is currently no timeline for that change, and I have at least one project queued up before Consummation.

So, for now, stay yuri!

shino

[sixminutestoriesblog]

Singing Sand

I thought we’d do something different today.  Let’s take a trip across the world and back in time.

The story goes like this:

The desert heat was dry, first soaking into every crevasse and fold of clothing and then become a heavy weight there, pressing down from above, pressing in from the sides.  As the day progressed, the heat soaked into lungs, breathed down through covered noses, filling the body, baking the travelers from both the outside of their bodies and now the inside as well.  Their shadows ran long before them and then trailed, even longer and darker behind them.  Wind blew off the sand dunes and the grit of that sand seeped, like small, persistent fingers, past barriers of cloth.  The only sound was the sighing of the wind over the sand, the soft steady chime of the bells on the camels blankets and the occasional clicked tongue from one of the camel’s guides.  It was like traveling through time, backward and backward again into the past.  It was like being caught in amber, a moment that stretched on and would never end, never change to the next moment.

At first the sound might only be the wind.  A low, solemn sound, coming from somewhere far away.  A droning rise and fall that vibrated through the air, that hit the chest and shook persistently through the lungs and heart there.  Slow, as the travelers seemed to grow nearer, the sound clarified into low chanting, sometimes louder, sometimes fading, following a song that  changed without warning or pattern.  Low, always vibrating low, filling the air with the continuous, sad song.  

It was a song that Marco Polo recorded in his journals and one the locals knew well.  

A song sung in the quiet, secret, hidden places of the desert.

We’re talking about singing sand, a rare, naturally occurring phenomena that science can - almost - explain.  

Singing sand can happen on beaches but the most impressive songs come from sand dunes lost in the desert. Ancient people described the noise as moans, drums, chanting or thunder.  Marco Polo, traveling along the Silk Road, wrote that the sounds were caused by evil spirit and sounded like musical instruments or the clash of arms.  The songs aren’t just limited to the China either.  Singing sand can be found world-wide and no two places will sing the same song.  According to science, the ‘song’ of the dunes and beaches are caused by very specific types of sand grains, ones with a silica, caught in very specific circumstances, rubbing against each other as they move.  The makeup of the sand influences what sounds it will produce, with small sand grains making the softest sounds and large grains vibrating more bass.  Sand grains of different sizes will create different harmonies while uniform grain size creates uniform sound.  And though the sand usually has to be very dry to sing, a small amount of water can apparently change the pitch of the song.  The ‘singing’ is believed to happen when wind or footsteps start the sand sliding, the avalanche causing minuscule layer to rub against minuscule layer of sand until the grains resonate and create sound.  Singing sand can be found in the US, Africa, Wales, Hawai’I, China, Japan, Australia and the Middle East - anywhere the sand and the climate is right for the music to start.  While science is still trying to figure out, exactly, how singing sand works, the people of the past already knew.

In Dunhuang, China the stories say that the area around its famous Crescent Moon Lake was once mountainous and full of temples.  One day the chanting and singing from the temples woke a Yellow Dragon Prince who was sleeping in the nearby desert.  Angry at being woken, he covered the entire area with desert sand, entombing everyone in the temples.  The sounds you hear in the region are the spirits of those still trapped below the dunes, eternally chanting their songs.

The Bete Grise Beach in Michigan also sings.  Local legend says that a Native American woman lost her lover to Lake Superior and every day after he drowned, she would stand on the beach and call his name into the wind coming off the water.   The sand still calls for him to this day and whenever it is disturbed, the long dead ghost of the woman whispers her lover's name in memory. The sand, it is said, will not sing if you remove it from its beach.

We know that people sing. Whales sing. Birds sing. And now, apparently, even the sand has something to add to the choir.

[fymoonbyul]

[INTERVIEW] MAMAMOO Talks Excitement for Their First American Tour and Meeting Their U.S. Moomoo

MAMAMOO are some of the fastest-growing stars in K-pop, and in less than a week, the sensations are set to make their American debut on the U.S. leg of their first-ever World Tour, "MY CON."

The quartet recently returned from a sold-out Asia World Tour across Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, but the magic is only getting started. The nine-date U.S. tour kicks off on May 16 in New York City before wrapping up on the other side of the country in Los Angeles on June 4, and it seems the four are just as excited to come to the States and meet their U.S. Moomoo fandom as we are to see them. Ahead of the tour, we got the chance to chat with the icons about the tour and what it means to them to be coming to America. Read the full interview below.

Sweety High: What does the name "MY CON" mean to the group? Why did that feel like the perfect name for this tour?

MAMAMOO: "MY CON" is where Mamamoo and Moomoo become one, so it truly means it's everyone's concert. It allows us to cherish the precious moments when we get together with our dear Moomoo.

SH: How excited are you to tour in the U.S. for the very first time?

SOLAR: I'm very anxious but also excited. I recently heard that our pre-sale tickets were sold out. It made me feel apologetic to all the Moomoo who have waited for so long, and it also got me determined to put my all into this tour. I'm also curious about what the U.S. Moomoo will be like, how they will react and how they will enjoy our stage. I'm honestly looking forward to everything.

HWA SA: I'm so nervous wondering what the U.S. Moomoo will be like. In general, just thinking about the tour gives me butterflies.

SH: Are there any songs that you're most looking forward to performing for your American audience?

MOON BYUL: Honestly, I would love to show every stage possible. We haven't performed much for U.S. Moomoo so far, so we'd love to show them everything we have.

WHEE IN: I would love to show as much as we can. But if I had to choose, I would like to perform our title songs since they're fun songs we can all dance to.

SH: Is there a specific type of energy you're anticipating from American MooMoos that might be different from your fans elsewhere?

SOLAR: I'm really looking forward to how fun it'll be, bonding with U.S. Moomoo through our performances.

SH: Is there one American city you're most excited to visit? Is there anything big outside of your performances that you plan to do while you're in the U.S.?

WHEE IN: It's so difficult to choose, and truly, every city is a place I've been longing to visit. Besides performing, I'd love to enjoy the scenery and take some nice, quiet walks around the neighborhood!

HWA SA: I'm looking forward to L.A., and I'm curious about Las Vegas as well. But honestly, I would love to visit any city.

SH: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

SOLAR: Thank you for waiting! Hey Moomoo legggggggo❤

MOON BYUL: As we're finally keeping our promise—that we'll go wherever our Moomoo are—we are so happy and excited to go on this tour! Let's make lots of wonderful memories!

WHEE IN: It's been a long time since our last visit to the States. Thank you so much for waiting and for your sustained anticipation.

HWA SA: Since this is our first tour in the States, we were all very nervous and even slightly worried about Moomoo turnout. But now, we're just purely excited, and we'll be there super soon!

Check out the full "MY CON" tour schedule below:

May 16 – New York, New York

May 18 – Baltimore, Maryland

May 20 – Atlanta, Georgia

May 22 – Nashville, Tennessee

May 24 – Fort Worth, Texas

May 27 – Chicago, Illinois

May 31 – Glendale, Arizona

June 2 – Oakland, California

June 4 – Los Angeles, California

[satoshi-mochida]

Chinese developer S-GAME has announced action RPG Phantom Blade Zero for PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store). A release date was not announced.

Get the first details below, via PlayStation Blog.

“What’s your plan, knowing you have only 66 days to live?” This journey began with Rainblood: Town of Death, an indie game I made back in 2010. The development process was a creative outlet for me as an architecture student, first in Beijing and later New Haven. When I returned to China, I founded my own development studio, S-GAME, and Rainblood grew into a franchise that would later become Phantom Blade. Most of these titles were for smartphones and never released outside of China, but we still managed to build a fan base of over 20 million players. Now, allow me to introduce Phantom Blade Zero, the spiritual rebirth of the original Rainblood and the game we always wanted to make.

Kung-Fu Punk Phantom World, the universe in which the game is set, is a place where many kinds of powers converge. Here you’ll find Chinese Kung-Fu, intricate machines reminiscent of steampunk, arts of the occult, and other intriguing elements that don’t quite fit into any of these categories. In Phantom Blade Zero, you play as Soul, an elite assassin serving an elusive but powerful organization known simply as “The Order.” Soul is framed for the murder of The Order’s patriarch, gravely injured in the ensuing manhunt, and, though his life is saved by a mystic healer, the makeshift cure will only last for 66 days. Now, he must fight against powerful foes and inhuman monstrosities, all while seeking out the mastermind behind it all before his time runs out. From Louis Cha’s Wuxia stories and Bruce Lee’s films to Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once and Donnie Yen in John Wick: Chapter 4, Phantom Blade Zero draws on a wide range of martial arts icons, but with a twist of its own. What we call “Kung-Fu Punk” instills a heavy dose of punk spirit and our unique visual aesthetic.

Worldbuilding

Phantom Blade Zero unfolds in a semi-open world, consisting of multiple large maps filled with diverse, handcrafted activities. This world of Phantom Blade Zero is bleak and punishing, a constant reminder to never let your guard down. Seeking out the game’s many challenges and power foes will reward you with weapons, armor, artifacts, skills, and other ways to customize or progress your character.

Authentic Action by Mr. Kenji Tanigaki, Action Director

Having a decade of mobile development under our belts, we’ve learned to simplify control inputs for touchscreens, giving players ways to execute elaborate moves without mindless “button-mashing.” We’ve taken these lessons and applied them to action gameplay with a controller. And we’re honored to have Mr. Kenji Tanigaki as our action director, the fight choreography master behind many of the classic martial arts films that inspired us. For Phantom Blade Zero, Kenji-san physically demonstrated each move in the game to be scanned by a camera matrix. This data was then used as reference material for our animation artists, who would then rebuild these moves by hand for use in the game. This is all we can disclose for now, but there is much more to come.

Watch the announcement trailer below. View the first screenshots at the gallery.

Announce Trailer

English

Chinese

[cosmicanger]

You almost never hear about the yellow fever outbreak of 1793. Wealthy slave owners brought it to Philadelphia that year, fleeing revolutions in the Caribbean. During its peak, a hundred people were dying every day. Back then Philadelphia was a city of 50,000 people. The city government collapsed under the pressure, and almost everyone evacuated. Doctors thought it was spread by rotting vegetables. They were wrong. It didn’t end until a cold front came through in October, killing off carrier mosquitoes. The death toll settled to 20 or so a day, and people began to return. In the end, the epidemic killed more than 5,000 people.

It was 10 percent of their population.

You hear this a lot: Apparently humans have lived with germs and diseases for millions of years. There’s no need for masks or vaccines. Nobody needs clean air. Natural immunity works just fine.

It’s wrong.

It couldn’t be more wrong.

We’ve never been able to live with diseases, not like we do now. Most westerners have no idea. Before medicine, life looked different.

You couldn’t even drink the water.

As an article in Scientific American points out, “water was unsafe to drink for most of human history.” According to Paul Lukacs, humans had to drink wine. It wasn’t fun, either. Ancient texts describe wine as “wretched, horrible, vinegary, foul.” The only thing worse was plain water. You often had no idea if it was safe to drink. For thousands of years, humans opted for beer and wine instead. There was just enough alcohol to kill germs. Even coffee had antiviral and bacterial properties, so it became a preferred beverage in other parts of the world.

When Jesus turned water into wine, he wasn’t throwing a party.

He was killing germs.

Scientists and historians from all disciplines agree on this point: For most of our history, our lives were short. Average life expectancy remained well below 50 for millennia. We didn’t get eaten by tigers.

We got eaten by plagues.

When you look at the last 2,000 years across the world, you see the same thing. About half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Scientists confirm this trend all the way back to the stone age. As Oxford scholar Max Roser says, “Whether in Ancient Rome, in hunter-gatherer societies, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in Medieval Japan or Medieval England, in the European Renaissance, or in Imperial China, every second child died.”

Epidemics have upended countless civilizations, from Rome to the Akkadian Empire. These societies didn’t just live with it. Death and grief played a central role in their cultures, because it happened all the time. It was a different world that most people today can’t wrap their heads around.

They didn’t shrug it off.

They chased answers.

History is full of doctors and scientists who devoted their entire lives trying to treat and cure diseases that plagued us. It’s also full of quacks and charlatans who made fortunes by selling fake miracle cures. There’s a reason why historical novels and movies feature apothecaries and snake oil salesmen. Almost everyone was sick or scared of getting sick and dying.

They got desperate.

Doctors even tried bleeding their patients. Women often bore several children to offset the astonishing infant mortality rate. Despite that, global population growth remained close to zero.

It was flat.

Politicians and billionaires complain about declining birthrates now. Well, that was the norm before modern medicine.

Societies didn’t grow.

They treaded.

Historians say we’re probably underestimating child mortality. During certain periods, it was higher than 50 percent. Every few years, an outbreak of disease drove infant deaths upward to 75 percent.

During the 18th century, big cities like London actually shrank due to awful sanitation and living conditions. More people died in a given year than were born. They relied on a steady stream of gullible migrants from the countryside. Raw sewage frequently contaminated the drinking water. Garbage rotted in the streets. Rats and fleas nested practically everywhere, even in rich homes. Graveyards overflowed. The city buried their excess dead in “poor holes” next to homes and businesses. If you lived anywhere near a cemetery, decaying corpses could leach into your wellwater and poison you. Nobody really understood how disease spread. Doctors operated with dirty surgical instruments and unwashed hands.

These conditions persisted through the 19th century.

In the 1830s, a series of especially bad outbreaks of cholera, flu, and typhoid ravaged London. Social activists and public health experts pushed for sanitation. The city finally started listening in the late 1840s. They passed laws and formed a board of public health. Even then, it took several more outbreaks to motivate investment in a modern sewer system. Politicians waited until the stench of human waste became unbearable in every corner of the city.

The 19th century was a brutal time.

As city populations grew, diseases flourished and wiped out millions of people. Most of them died in agony, without medicine or painkillers, literally puking themselves to death. The world spent decades fighting endless pandemics. Mortality rates for a disease like cholera ranged between 3 and 10 percent. At any given moment, there were three or four major killers circulating.

Before modern medicine, there was a good chance you’d die from plague, cholera, smallpox, typhoid, malaria, polio, flu, tuberculosis, or scarlet fever. Every single one of these diseases terrified people. Without treatment, you might as well flip a coin as to whether you’d live, die, or wind up with lifelong illness. In many places, life expectancy hovered around 40.

Diseases have always hit the poor worse than everyone else. Throughout history, the rich have invested in sanitation for themselves first while leaving everyone else behind and blaming them for their own deaths. According to an article in Science, “the mortality rate from infectious diseases among nonwhite people living in the U.S. was a shocking 1,123 deaths per 100,000 people.” That’s more than the death rate for white people during 1918 flu pandemic. As one sociologist says, it was like living through the 1918 flu, every year.

The last 100 years changed everything.

We’ve developed vaccines and treatments. We’ve learned how diseases spread. We’ve educated the public on sanitation. We’ve done it despite resistance from a vocal minority who thought it wasn’t necessary or couldn’t be done. They wanted us to keep watching half our children die every year.

We made major progress.

Now we’re backsliding.

Life expectancy is falling. Infant mortality is rising. Vaccine skepticism grows by the year, egged on by sociopaths in politics and media who think they’re practicing their free speech. We face crucial shortages of antibiotics and other drugs, with predictions we’ll run out later this year. Healthcare workers are quitting. ER departments are closing over staffing shortages. Everywhere you look, the healthcare systems we spent generations building are falling apart.

That’s not fear talking.

As history shows, we’ve been here before. We’ve seen life without vaccines and masks. We’ve seen life without clean air and drinkable water. That’s how humans lived for 95 percent of our existence.

We hated it.

Humans invested in public health and sanitation because they got tired of dying from diseases. They dragged their leaders kicking and screaming into public health, after it became painfully clear there was no alternative.

Well, here we are again. It would be nice if we could pay attention to history instead of constantly repeating it.

We don’t have to speculate about what our dystopian future looks like. It’s a return to the 18th and 19th centuries when life expectancy hovered in the mid 40s and deadly outbreaks of diseases shut down entire cities and civilizations. The only difference is that many of us will remember a brighter past.

A massive reinvestment in public health would stop this, but it can’t be just for rich people. It has to be for everyone.

We’ll see.

[the-au-queen]

Our Transfer Student Can’t Be This Cute! (1/?)

Giftee: @vindhler Rating: Teen and Up (some cussing) Words: 2644 Pairings: Adrinette, later JuleRose as well Warnings: None Beta reader: @faunusroman Event: @mlsecretsanta

Prefer AO3? Here you go! It includes me rambling about stuff in the notes.

Summary:  When a new transfer student from Shanghai arrives, Adrien gets assigned to guide her around. In his purely objective opinion, she's unbelievably cute. Also, Chat Noir makes friends with a trickster. Bonheur Rouge is not amused.

“Everyone, please welcome your new transfer student, Marinette Dupain-Cheng.” Mlle Bustier led a small girl with black hair into the classroom. “While she is half French, she lived her whole life in China with her family and only speaks Chinese. Please be nice to her, and help her if she needs anything.” 

The girl bowed and smiled. 

“Now, about your seat…” Mlle Bustier pointed at a seat behind Adrien. “M. Agreste speaks Chinese. He can help you if you need it.” 

Adrien watched the girl pass him and sit behind him. He turned around and smiled. “Welcome to our class. The teacher said you can ask me if you need anything, since I speak Mandarin.”

Marinette looked surprised, but returned the smile. Oh god, she was cute. “Thank you. It’s nice knowing I’m not completely alone in here. I didn’t expect anyone to speak Mandarin.”

“Yeah, it’s not a common language to learn.”

Marinette looked like she wanted to ask more, but Mlle Bustier called for attention and began the class. Adrien reluctantly turned back and focused on the lesson instead. He wouldn’t have minded talking with Marinette some more.

---

“..... and here’s the cafeteria. The food’s pretty good here, but you can bring your own, too.”

Marinette nodded and took a curious look around. “It’s much smaller than in Shanghai.”

Adrien laughed. “I can imagine. Let me show you the locker rooms next.”

“That sounds nice.” Marinette smiled and walked along with him. “Say, why did you learn Mandarin? Do you like the country?”

“Oh.” Adrien tried not to show the uncomfortableness show. “My father made me learn it. He said it’s a useful skill to have.”

Marinette seemed to have sensed his unease, because she elbowed him lightly. “Hey, it has some use now! I’m glad you’re here to help me.” And in that moment, Adrien’s heart was stolen.

“Thanks.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I can also show you around Paris, if y-” He was interrupted by his phone beeping with an akuma alert. Really? Right now? He looked back at Marinette, who still smiled innocently. Right. She didn’t know about them. She just moved here.

“That was an akuma alert.” He explained. “We’re kinda dealing with a supervillain around here. He akumatises people when they feel angry or sad. This one is…” He glanced at his phone. “... pretty close. We have superheroes like Bonheur Rouge and Chat Noir to deal with them, but we better get to safety nonetheless. It can get pretty crazy.”

Marinette nodded, looking a bit confused, but determined. “Okay. We will get to safety.”

“Yeah. You, uh-” Adrien tried to think of a reason to separate. He had to help Bonehur Rouge, and she wasn’t fond of him being late. “You go hide in the toilets. I’ll check if our class is safe.”

“If you say so.” Marinette looked unsure, but still ran off to the toilets. Adrien sighed in relief. Good, now to find a place to transform.

“Plagg?” He whispered to his inner shirt pocket. “Are you awake?”

“Wide awake and ready to go, boy!” The kwami peeked out of the pocket. “Just say the word.”

Adrien ducked into an unused classroom. “Plagg, transform me!”

---

Chat Noir hopped from roof to roof and landed next to Bonheur Rouge.

“Kitty reporting for duty.” He grinned at her. She only rolled her eyes. “What kind of akuma are we dealing with?”

Bonheur regarded the chaos below them with a calculated look. “It seems like a tree based akuma. He’s been rooting people in place, quite literally. Everyone hit grows roots from their legs and can’t move.”

Chat Noir shuddered. He loved the freedom that came with his powers. He was forced to stay in one place against his will often enough that he absolutely did not want to get hit by that guy.

“Any thoughts on the item?”

“I haven’t gotten that close to him yet, but I think he’s holding it in his right hand. He’s not letting go of whatever it is, so it’s fairly obvious.”

“Alright.” Chat bounced and got ready to jump down and fight the akuma, but Bonheur held him back by pulling on his tail.

“What did I tell you about his powers? If you’re hit, I’ll be all by myself.”

Chat placed his hand on his chest in mock hurt. “You wound me, Bonheur. I’m a nimble cat. I’d never get hit like that.” 

She raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Okay, maybe sometimes I get hit. But not by this guy! He’s my absolute nightmare!”

“If you say so.” She let go of his tail. “Be careful. I will need your Cataclysm.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle.” He saluted at her and jumped off. On the ground, he was met with people janking at their feet or trying to take their shoes off, trying to escape the roots holding them in place.

“Ah, Chat Noir,” a deep voice rang out, and when he turned, he could see the akuma approaching. 

It was a weird concoction of man and tree, his left arm transformed into a branch that grabbed people and made them grow roots. His right arm, the one that was holding the item, was the most human looking thing about him, but everything else just gave Chat the creeps. Covered in bark, the man couldn’t move much, except for the left arm that grabbed people. But not moving much didn’t mean he wasn’t fast. His left arm grew at will and sometimes even grabbed several people at once. 

“I am Racineur. Welcome to my forest.” 

Chat jumped on a mailbox when the arm branch lashed out to grab him.

“Sorry, this kitty prefers to run around.” 

He jumped from object to object –a car, a fire hydrant, another car, a lamppost, a trapped person’s head, a café umbrella– each time elegantly escaping the branch that was trying to take hold of him. It was effective for not getting grabbed, but he couldn’t get any closer. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he could spot Bonheur struggling similarly. It seemed like Racineur had more than just his arm to trap people. She didn’t even have enough time to call for her Lucky Charm. He was this close to just using Cataclysm on the ground to give them some breathing time when a giggle distracted him.

“Need help?”

Chat almost fell from the lamppost that he had just landed on. He spotted a girl in white, sitting on a nearby windowsill, seemingly undisturbed by the whole chaos. How was she so calm? She almost looked like she enjoyed watching the two heroes struggle.

“Who are you?” 

Chat barely escaped Racineur’s branch and landed on another car, briefly looking back to see the previous car he had stood on grow roots from its tires. Chat had enough of this and decided to jump on the window sill the girl was sitting on. Her legs were crossed leisurely, and she watched Racineur with a hint of amusement. 

Her face was covered by a white half mask with pointy ears, and Chat could see whiskers painted on her cheeks. The eye holes on her mask were lined with black eyeliner and one spot of red on each corner of her eye. Above them were two thick black spots, probably because the mask covered her eyebrows. Her top seemed to be some kind of variant of Asian traditional clothing. 

Chat remembered seeing some similar clothes pictured in the decorations of some Chinese restaurants, the kind with overly long sleeves that covered the hands and seemed generally impractical. He couldn’t quite remember the name of that particular piece of clothing, but he could always ask his Mandarin teacher some time. 

Her top stopped shortly below her chest and the rest of her torso was wrapped in a broad sash. The sash held up a pair of wide pants that were stuck in leather boots that had bells attached at the top of them. Chat could spot two more bells dangling off the ornamental hair sticks in her almost ribbon shaped updo. From her get up, he would guess that she was another hero, but what kind of hero just watched as people were being terrorized by the minion of a supervillain? 

“Why are you just sitting there? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Oh, how rude.” The grin didn’t leave her face. “I was just holding back, since I didn’t want to get in the way of the local authorities.” 

Was she kidding him? Any help would be appreciated. Bonheur wouldn’t complain either. 

She must have been reading his mind, since she gave him a look. “My powers are the type that can confuse friend and foe alike. So it would be detrimental, had I just done what I thought would be best.” 

Fine, he’d give her that point. His thoughts were interrupted when Racineur spotted them again, and he had to leap out of the way. The strange heroine just jumped one floor up to the next windowsill. Chat could see three tails trailing after her, attached to her top. He still couldn’t quite grasp why she was so calm about this, but just as he landed next to her, ready to grill her, Bonheur landed on the windowsill as well.

“What are you doing? This is no time to stand around and chat!” Her eyes fell on the heroine in white. “Oh.” She narrowed her eyes. “And who are you?”

“You may call me Hu Shen.” Hu Shen…. fox god. Hu Shen let her legs dangle. “I am new to this city. I thought I’d lend my power.” Bonheur looked like she was about to ask something, but they were once again interrupted by Racineur reaching for them.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Bonheur conceded. “We can’t talk like this, and we do need to talk.”

“Great!” Hu Shen smiled. “Follow me!” And she was off. Bonheur and Chat had no choice but to follow.

“What’s with her?” Bonheur’s voice was low, but Chat could still hear her. “Wouldn’t we pick a spot to talk? Why is she just taking the lead like that? Who does she think she is?” 

Chat had no answer for that either. 

Hu Shen landed on the railing of a small roof garden somewhere close to their school and made an inviting gesture.

“Make yourselves comfortable.”

Bonheur looked skeptical. “What about the civilians that live here? Won’t we be discovered?”

Hu Shen giggled. “I’ve come here plenty of times. We’re safe.”

“I don’t see what’s so funny about all this.”

“How serious you are, of course!” She pushed Bonheur’s shoulder. “No one’s dying! We can relax for a little.”

“No one’s dying?!” Now she had done it. Bonheur was furious. “We’re in the middle of an akuma attack and you tell us to relax because ‘no one’s dying’?! Are you insane?!” 

Chat couldn’t understand how Hu Shen could meet Bonheur’s furious gaze and still smile like nothing was wrong. 

“You have five seconds to explain yourself or else I’m leaving. I’ve got civilians to save.”

“Oh, Bonheur.” Hu Shen was at Bonheur’s other side in an instant. How did she move so fast? “You need to learn how to enjoy life. Live the fox way.” 

Bonheur lashed out at her, but she jumped up and Bonheur’s arm only met air. 

“I didn’t help because my power is tricky. If the ally doesn’t know about my illusions, it can only waste time, instead of giving them a chance to trick the enemy.” 

Chat heard the faint ringing of bells behind him and whipped around to see her drop down on the railing again. 

“Who knows, you might have even attacked me, if I joined the fight without introducing myself. Which I suppose I should do.” She bowed deeply, meeting their eyes with a playful grin. Chat noticed that she had slit eyes, just like him. “Hu Shen, the white fox, trickster, illusionist, lady of tricks and benevolence alike. At your service.”

Chat saw his opportunity and returned the bow with one of his own. “Chat Noir, master of destruction and puns.” He winked at her. “Purr-leased to meow-t you.”

“Not another one of you,” Bonheur groaned. “Fine, we know you now. Let’s get back to Racineur. You tell us what you’re gonna do, and we use the confusion to take his item. But I don’t trust you yet.”

Hu Shen tilted her head, the bells attached to her hair ornaments ringing quietly. “The fox is never fully trusted. A wise judgement, Bonheur Rouge.” She pulled a flute out of her sash and twirled it. “Where do you hide a tree? The forest.” 

She set the flute to her lips and played a melody made out of strong, playful notes. A red fog formed at the end of her flute and she took it off her lips, whipping the fog down at the ground. Bonheur and Chat materialized. Then again. And again. And again. Over and over, until even the roof couldn’t fit them any more. She flicked her flute and one by one, the pairs departed, presumably towards the akuma. Chat had to admit, he was impressed. 

Hu Shen bowed once more. “If you need any further help, please request so, within the next five minutes.”

“No, thank you.” Bonheur watched the last fake Chat and Bonheur depart. “This is as far as my trust goes. I appreciate your help, but we need to go now, before Racineur sees through the ruse.” She nodded at Chat. “Let’s go.” Chat watched her jump off the roof and turned to Hu Shen one last time.

“She’s just cautious.” Hu Shen shrugged, as if it didn’t bother her. “But if you ever need a partner in crime, just ask this cat. I’m always up for some mischief.”

“The white fox and the black cat, huh?” Hu Shen hid a sly smile behind one of her long sleeves. “I look forward to it.” 

She bowed, and moments later she was gone, jumping from roof to roof before dropping down in some alley. Chat watched her disappear, then made off after Bonheur. Time to test those illusions of hers.

The illusions worked perhaps a bit too well. Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure which the real Bonheur was, until Racineur managed to get one of them, only for her to turn into red smoke. Several times he shouted out to his partner, only to realise she was somewhere else entirely. He started to get why Hu Shen didn’t help immediately. 

He was about to push one of the Bonheurs out of Racineur’s reach, when a red yo-yo wrapped itself around Racineur’s human arm and a triumphant Bonheur snatched the item, a self made bookmark, out of his hand and tore it in half. Racineur transformed back into a young man, and after Bonheur cast her cure, the people hit by him were rid of their roots. Chat even spotted one guy so happy, he kissed his own freed feet.

“What happened?” The young man that was Racineur looked around in confusion, “My tree…. Where is my tree?”

“You were akumatized,” Bonheur explained calmly. 

Usually, akuma victims felt better after she had cast her cure, but this man only looked distraught. Chat gave her a look of ‘I’ll handle this’ when he heard her earrings beep. He hadn’t used his Cataclysm, so he had more time than her. He kneeled down next to the man and rested one hand on his shoulder.

“Do you remember what set you off?”

“They cut down my tree!” The young man’s lip trembled. “Just to make space for some condos!” It seemed like Chat would be here for a while. This wasn’t something easily solvable. He offered the man a hand.

“Let’s get some coffee. You look like you need it.”

[coochiequeens]

China did this to themselves

Ming Ming, a boisterous six-year-old, longs to have a playmate, but his mother is adamant that she will not have another child.

“No way! One is quite enough,” Li Hong gasps. “Childcare, after-school activities, tutoring … you want them to have a good education but it costs money. We’re just ordinary working folks, not the super rich. The cost of bringing up two kids would kill us!” says the 43-year-old supermarket cashier from the southern province of Guangdong.

Li herself was born just before the one-child policy began in 1980. As an only child, she says the cost of bringing up her son on top of caring for her elderly parents and those of her husband were her main concerns.

The Covid pandemic has not helped. It began when her son was starting kindergarten, but the regular class suspensions meant she could not work full-time. Looking after a toddler all day in a small flat left her constantly exhausted. “I simply don’t have the energy for two,” she said.

Women are ‘invisible’

For three-and-a-half decades, the one-child policy that was meant to control the population exacted a huge social and human cost on Chinese society. Forced abortions, sterilisations, the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices as well as hefty financial penalties left physical and emotional scars on millions of women and traumatised families.

Thirty-five years after the one-child policy’s implementation, China is left with one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

Fearing the adverse social effects of an ageing population and a looming shortage of working-age people, the Chinese government has tried to boost the birthrate by partially lifting the one-child policy in 2013 and allowing couples to have two children if one of the spouses was an only child. In late 2015, the authorities announced all married couples could legally have two children.

But these measures failed to trigger a baby boom: In 2016, China reported 18.46 million births – just 1.4 million higher than the average number of births in the previous five years. The figure was well below the increase in births that the government had projected, which was between 2.3 and 4.3 million a year. Annual births continued to drop thereafter: from 17.23 million in 2017 to 15.23 million in 2018, 14.65 million in 2019, 12 million in 2020, then to 10.62 million in 2021. The authorities further eased the birth limit in 2021, raising it to three children per couple.

“The declining birthrates seem to be irreversible, but the government does not have a gameplan,” Dr Ye Liu, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London says. “It’s all about the power of men over women and utilisation of women’s bodies as economic means. In short, men make policies for women. In the recent party congress, there were many promises made but none for women. Women are ‘invisible’.”

Chinese scholars campaigned to scrap the one-child policy for more than a decade, on the grounds that the country’s total fertility rate was worryingly behind the replacement rate. In the 1970s, the total fertility rate (births per woman) fell from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979. In the 1980s, the rate hovered above the replacement level of 2.1 that would allow the population to replace itself, but since the 1990s, it has declined to below the replacement level. The 2010 and 2020 censuses yielded total fertility rates of 1.18 and 1.30 respectively. This further fell to an alarming 1.15 in 2021, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

More sticks than carrots

Key factors behind the low fertility rate include the rising costs of bringing up children amid rapid economic development in the past three decades, as well as the lack of social welfare provisions for families such as free or low-cost childcare, academic studies have found.

Fewer young Chinese people are getting married, and those who do are having children at a much older age, or not at all. When asked why, they routinely cite the rising cost of living, stagnating professional mobility, and the pressure of traditional gender roles on women.

see rest of article

[mariacallous]

Wally Adeyemo is no stranger to economic crises. The 41-year-old policymaker first served in the U.S. Treasury Department amid the Great Recession that began in 2007 as deputy chief of staff to then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and, later, to Jack Lew. Adeyemo went on to serve as then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s representative to the G-7 and G-20. Each of those roles have served as crucial preparation for his current job as deputy secretary of the treasury under Janet Yellen.

But while some of the economic woes confronting the Biden administration are familiar to a policymaker like Adeyemo—such as high energy prices and a global food crunch—others feel more historic, if not unprecedented. Inflation is at its highest since the 1970s, and Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to dominate diplomatic attention.

FP interviewed Adeyemo as part of FP Live, the magazine’s forum for live journalism. We discussed how Washington has and hasn’t been able to corral global support for its sanctions on Moscow, the future of the U.S. dollar, competition with China, inflation, and much more. Subscribers can watch the full video here. What follows is a greatly condensed but lightly edited transcript.

Foreign Policy: Let’s start with the news this week. The oil cartel OPEC agreed this week to slash oil production—on paper, at least—by some 2 million barrels a day. I want to point you to a comment from Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who tweeted on the news: “I thought the whole point of selling arms to the Gulf states despite their human rights abuses, nonsensical Yemen War, working against U.S. interests in Libya, Sudan, etc. was that when an international crisis came, the Gulf could choose America over Russia/China.” 

But it didn’t. How much has OPEC’s decision this week hurt American interests?

Wally Adeyemo: I think that you put it best when you said, “on paper, at least.” There’s often a difference in what OPEC says and what OPEC actually does. As you know well, OPEC has already been producing less than 3 million barrels below their quota. But regardless of what they actually do, the fact that they made the announcement was disappointing. OPEC had always made clear that their goal was to make sure that they provided oil to the market, to make sure that the market was well supplied. And what we know today is that the market has not been well supplied, and that is part of the reason that we’ve seen high levels of inflation—not only in the United States but around the world. 

FP: But one of the reasons why OPEC says it’s making this move is that it’s expecting a plunge in global demand and that their cuts in production are designed to buffer against that. 

WA: The idea that this was done in anticipation of a drop in demand does not make sense in light of the fact that one of the biggest drivers of that drop in demand is high inflation costs related to energy. And that’s why I think this doesn’t make sense for OPEC as well because, ultimately, they should care deeply about making sure that we have a strong, robust global economy that is growing, which will allow them to continue to be able to sell their product to the global economy. 

In the United States, one of the things that are encouraging for us is that we continue to see underlying momentum in our economy. We just had job numbers coming out in the United States that demonstrated that we continue to have job growth. While it’s come down from some of the highs, it’s gotten to where we expected it to be, which is a sustainable level of job growth in the United States. And while we’re trying to make sure we keep momentum in our economy, the Federal Reserve is taking steps to try and bring down inflation. So while we see that growth in the U.S. economy, we can’t say that that’s true for the rest of the global economy, where we’ve seen slowdowns—many of which have been driven by high energy prices. That’s why we’re so focused on the idea that we want to keep energy markets well supplied. 

And that’s why our strategy when it comes to Russian energy is one that is very nuanced and driven toward making sure that Russian oil can continue to reach the marketplace but trying to reduce the amount of revenue Russia makes in doing so. As you know, in the spring, the European Union decided that they were going to stop purchasing Russian oil by the end of this year. But in addition to taking that step, they put in place a prohibition on European services being used to move Russian oil. What we know is that that prohibition could, in some ways, restrain the ability of Russian supply to get on the market, which would have an impact on lower income economies because those developing economies are the ones that are still able to buy Russian oil. 

What we’ve done in anticipation of that potential disruption is to put in place a price cap, as it allows Russia to continue to use G-7 services as long as they sell the oil below a certain price. In no way are we demanding that Russia sell within the price cap. Russia has the ability to go out and sell its oil using alternative services to buyers. But what we know is those services will cost Russia more money. And those buyers of Russian oil will realize that the price cap exists and they’ll negotiate lower prices, which will again accomplish our goal, which is reducing Russia’s revenues. 

Our hope is that our interests are aligned with those of other producing countries because we all have an interest in making sure that the global economy continues to grow. 

FP: Let’s get to the underlying issue here, which is the war in Ukraine. I’m struck by the fact that every time Russia commits new atrocities—the sham referendums last week, for example—your administration rolls out new sanctions. But that also implies, then, that throughout the last year, you’ve kept a fair amount of economic ammunition in reserve. This strikes me as a bit of a tightrope walk. Talk us through how you assess how much to hurt Russia in a given moment and how much to hold back for later.

WA: When I took this job in March of 2021, one of the first things Secretary Yellen asked me to do was to conduct a review of how sanctions have been used by the United States since the terrorist attacks on 9/11. And part of that review was talking to our allies and partners about why and when they joined us in taking sanctions actions and why they didn’t. And one of the things that we discovered during that review and our conversations, both with allies and partners, but also a conversation in the U.S. government was that we needed to do rigorous economic analysis as to how we would have the intended impact on our target. That review concluded in October of 2021, and less than a month later, we were entering the conversations with those same allies and partners with regard to what we would do to Russia if they attacked and invaded Ukraine. And those conversations started by thinking through what actions we could take to try and impact Russia’s behavior. The two places that we decided to target were Russia’s revenues in order to reduce the amount of money that they would have to prop up their economy and fund their illegitimate war in Ukraine with. And the second one was going after Russia’s military industrial complex. 

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned during COVID is about the vulnerability of supply chains. So our goal was to make sure that we did everything we could to target Russia’s supply chains. And that’s why we took unprecedented actions immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the thing about sanctions is that Russia and any other actor tries to find ways to evade those sanctions. And as Russia has tried to find ways to evade those actions, it’s created new targeting opportunities for us. And that’s what we’ve done. And what you’ll see in the sanctions that we put in place last week was that we were targeting new supply chain vulnerabilities that had been created because Russia had designed new supply chains to get around the export controls and sanctions that we’ve put in place. 

The thing that we want to make clear to the Kremlin and to those who support Russia is that as they attempt to find ways to evade our sanctions, our sanctions and export controls are going to continue to make sure that Russia doesn’t have access to the revenues they need to fight this war but also that we make it hard for them to continue to build up their military supply chains. 

For example, there are two leading tank manufacturers that are no longer able to manufacture tanks because of the export controls and sanctions we’ve put in place. Russia is running low on precision missiles. They’re unable to continue to build those precision missiles because we have taken away the semiconductors that they need to do so. And what Russia, of course, is trying to do is to find alternative suppliers. And our message to those alternative suppliers is that if you provide material support to the Russia industrial complex, we are going to use our sanctions authorities throughout the G-7 and among our other allies and partners to come after you as well. 

FP: So let me ask you this. Let’s say tomorrow, if Russia were to try and use a tactical nuclear device, what is the economic policy response to something like that? 

WA: No one should contemplate ever using a nuclear weapon. It’s unacceptable. 

As long as Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to occur, we’re going to continue to put options in front of the president. We have an overarching strategy as an administration and as an alliance in terms of how we support the Ukrainians. That doesn’t only involve sanctions. So I would say that sanctions are an important tool, and it’s one where we’re continuing to refine our effort to do the two things that I’ve spoken about: which is to reduce revenues and go after the supply chains. But they are just a tool in service of a broader foreign-policy strategy. 

FP: There’s a school of thought that goes that the more Americans wield sanctions as an economic tool and the more Washington talks of, for example, a new Cold War versus Beijing, much of the global south, especially Asian countries, say they don’t like what they’re hearing. There’s talk of a new nonaligned movement or strategic autonomy—pretty much the type of which we see exhibited by India, which has not gone along with U.S. sanctions on Russia. So I have to ask, are we overusing sanctions? Do American policies actually end up dividing the world?

WA: I was just in India a few weeks ago. What I would say is that the U.S. relationship with India is as close as it’s ever been. And that partnership spans both strategic and economic issues. And what that demonstrates is the ability of the United States working to build alliances and partnerships to try to maintain a global world order that has benefited us since World War II but has also benefited other countries around the world. 

I think our goal is frankly not to create a new alignment but rather to make sure that we’re creating a level playing field when it comes to economics, one in which countries around the world are able to compete with each other but also cooperate with each other with regard to issues. 

FP: But doesn’t it worry you that much of the world doesn’t go along with many of the sanctions America tries to impose?

WA: I think it’s important to remember that with regard to Russia and Ukraine, for example, more than 30 countries have taken action when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

FP: But many more have not.

WA: The key there is that many of these countries that have not taken actions may not have the tools or the resources needed to prevent Russia from taking the actions that they had. But I point you to the vote at the United Nations, where a majority of countries around the world rebuked the war that is happening in Ukraine. 

Next week, we’re going to have the finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world here in Washington. They come every six months. And the last time they were here, finance ministers from Latin America and from Africa, while their countries may not be publicly rebuking Russia for their invasion of Ukraine, all of them raised concerns with me and with my colleagues about the price of energy and the price of food. And they all realized that these prices had been driven higher by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The key thing for us is that we want to build an alliance that will take actions to hold Russia accountable. 

FP: I’ll just point out that many of these same finance ministers also wonder whether the U.S. is devoting a disproportionate amount of attention to Europe right now. But let me ask you this: Given everything we’re discussing, do you think the U.S. dollar can remain the world’s reserve currency?

WA: We have a long-standing tradition in the U.S. government that only the secretary of the treasury speaks about the U.S. dollar. So I defer to her. 

What I’ll do is talk about the U.S. economy. And I think that when you look around the world, you see a bunch of headwinds, lots of economies that are struggling. But we’ve seen historic levels of job growth in the United States. You’re right to point out that we’re dealing with high costs and inflation, which is a global phenomenon. But what we’ve seen over the last several months have been encouraging in terms of the cost of gasoline at the pump coming down from high levels over the summer; we’ve gotten legislative approval to cut the costs of prescription drugs and other things that matter to our economy. 

I think that fundamentally, our economy is stronger and in a better position to deal with these headwinds than any economy around the world. But in addition to being strong now, we’ve passed three historic pieces of legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act in the bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act to make America competitive for decades to come. Part of my job is going to speak to business leaders both in the United States and also around the world. And when I do that, all of these business leaders are thinking about how they can invest more here in the United States. 

FP: Given the headwinds you mention, what would it take to lift tariffs on Chinese goods?

WA: Part of our goal when the tariffs were put in place was to create a level playing field for American firms and companies going forward. The president, of course, is thinking through how we can use tariffs in a strategic way to meet our overarching objectives. I’ll leave to him and others to figure out how we do that with regard to China. 

The broader issue is around the idea that for too long, China has been subsidizing industries and been operating in a way that doesn’t only create an unlevel playing field for American companies but not a level playing field for countries in their region and around the world. Our goal has got to be that China and every other country is able to compete on a level playing field.

FP: I’ll just point out that there is research suggesting that lifting the tariffs would also help American farmers, for example.

WA: What I would say is that ultimately for American workers like farmers, the most important thing for them is to have access to markets and markets here at home, which we are creating by making investments through the three historic pieces of legislation we’ve passed, which will not only help increase economic growth in the United States but also access to foreign markets on a level playing field.

[sylvandalism]

Last year my father bought a plot of land, at a great deal of course from a widow who wanted to move away. It’s within the same five miles that we’ve lived in for the past two decades, ever since we moved to my hometown. I was a little surprised by his choice, considering that he has always advocated for living below your means. Because (as I came to know incrementally) the plot is being transformed into a beautiful sprawling new build, a bright suburban New England house with a formal sitting room, a great room, a formal dining room, a master bedroom on the ground floor, and a lovely tiled foyer with vaulted ceilings that will eventually house the ubiquitous chandelier with acrylic beads. My sisters are mildly excited about it, bickering over who gets what room and whether they’ll have to share a bathroom. Now that the potential new house has four and a half bathrooms, they can be possessive, demanding of their privacy. I laughed and reminded them at one point we all shared one bathroom. I think it’s a little ironic because out of all of my sisters and perhaps even my parents, I wanted that house the most growing up. The luxury of having dedicated spaces for everything, separating the lived in clutter and mess from what guests would see. A beautiful mahagony china cabinet with carefully arranged Lenox dishes that would come out for special occasions, a study to work in with built in bookshelves, a den to which I could take my friends and we could prank call our classmates or watch Disney channel- all the idealized visions I picked up from our upper middle class family friends. And I although I knew even then that the trapping of suburbia were precisely that no matter how nicely they glittered, part of me still craved the comforts that my friends and classmates had so easily. What I had in comparison was a too cramped, perpetually cluttered, and sometimes sticky small house that was littered with half finished projects. The cabinets above the stove had foil on them since my mother was always cooking and she got tired of cleaning the grease off the wood. It felt embarrassing to admit: on the first level, that it wasn’t up too par with everyone else’s standard of living and on the second level that I was materialistic enough to be bothered by it. A classmate who used to bike by asked me once idly, “How do you guys all fit?” My face never burned faster. My mother often mentions the old house fondly, saying it served us well. My sisters never really seemed bothered by the house’s condition either and it seemed so vain and ungrateful to complain that I don’t think I ever verbalized it. Because the house did seem to expand for our needs (if not my wants): my parents let us paint our rooms and fill them with wall decals and picture frames and white princess beds. My mother sewed me gauzy purple curtains to match the exact color of my room. And in the basement, they got me two rows of bookshelves to display my books. We live and love openly, my mom often says. We’re  not quiet tidy little people. Having spent most of my life trying to be one of those people, it’s strange to come back and see my family planning for this new stage. I can’t help but be a little wary, knowing the significance of this lifestyle and the impact it can have on our perception of each other. My parents don’t really need to beckon to society considering that they’re closer to retirement age now. Only a few of my sisters live at home and they’re hardly socialites. It’s just a house, everyone says. I wonder how they’ll clean the chandelier.