Univeristy is back in three days… wish me luck. And yes that does mean I will probably be absent for long periods of time.

The Syndicate - Chapter 6 : Un-Killable

Pairings: Choi San X Female Reader, Park Seonghwa X Female Reader, Ateez X Female Reader

Genre: Lots of angst, Romance, Crime Fiction, Psychological Drama

Word Count: 5.8k

Tags/Warnings: For Mature Audiences, Language, Graphic Violence, Mentions of Illegal activities (i.e Kidnapping, extortion, assassination etc.), y/n gets roughed up by Wooyoung like twice , Slow Burn, Fluff sometimes, Work In Progress, Non-Idol AU, Mafia AU, Very suggestive at times, y/n cries alot, y/n having inner turmoil, Ateez being bad boys, Wooyoung and Yeosang are a little mean in this story tbh, Guns, Gunshot wounds, Assassination attempt(s), mentions death and acts of violence

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!!

Spotify Playlist🎵 | Series Masterlist📝

Author's Note 💌: Hi, It's been about two weeks since I posted the last chapter so I'm here to keep my promise about posting at least twice every month! Unfortunately I didn't realize how short this chapter actually is. Either way it's a good one though, there are also some parts I may fix and add onto later since I'm posting this close to 2 am and I'm exhausted so I hope you guys still enjoy it either way! ^^

‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆.

A whole 2 months passes by and I notice San has become somewhat distant and has been spending most of the time either in his office by himself or in the conference room with the rest of the guys. Although Seonghwa, Jongho, Yunho and Mingi still interact with me they become very vague anytime I ask them about San. There were a few occasions where I wanted to try and see what exactly they were talking about but because there's always a goon outside the door now keeping a lookout so I could never get close enough to hear. One day I asked Seonghwa why they spent so much time in the conference room and the only thing he told me is "We're sorting things out." As for me, this whole time after I ran the 3 people’s names in the police database and nothing came up I realized these people are basically ghosts with no paper trails on the database meaning I’ve been having to investigate on foot and tailing them. The only thing San left for me as a place of reference and a place to start was a club on the east side of the city which actually turned out to be a club named "Enigma" that they own under a fake identity but another thing San left on the note is that these 3 people are brothers who run an underground black market out of it. So far everything is fine with them, no meetings with any other rival groups. If anything, these brothers definitely know how to treat their allies by providing them with weapons and other resources that are otherwise considered inaccessible to which I'm assuming this is the reason San wants to work with them. Which leads me to where I am right now, heading home after a long couple of days of consecutively tailing and observing these people. What's been really weird is that San called me at least once everyday to check in on me in the beginning but it's been 2 weeks and nothing. I sigh while I look at the dark road ahead of me, taking in the scene of complete emptiness with a beautifully glittery night sky which left me feeling a bit emotional. I slowly begin to tighten my grip on the steering wheel. I’ve had so many chances to leave but why aren’t I taking them? Have I seriously grown attached?

I reach for my phone and very anxiously I glance at the screen while I keep my eyes on the road and look at my recent calls, the last time I called San was two days ago. I stare at his name on my screen for a few seconds and decide to just hit the call button. The ringing starts and by the 4th ring I'm sent to voicemail immediately making my heart sink. He didn't answer, again. My vision begins to blur the bright headlights and the road ahead of me slightly begins to distort until warm tears stream down my cheeks then I let out a small sigh “Why? What did you do to me?” Why do I have to make things more difficult for myself? The original plan was to have San trust me enough to let me leave his headquarters, but now that he's given me that permission I can't seem to leave. Why?

I try to compose myself and wipe my tears away with one hand while I keep my other hand on the steering wheel. In the distance I see the headquarters, and realize that most of the drive home I spent it worrying about him and questioning myself. When I arrive I walk inside headquarters I notice it seems empty, and by empty I mean too quiet. There's almost always someone in the building, whether it's Seonghwa drinking his tea in the lounge, Hongjoong on his computer in the server room, Wooyoung playing cards with Mingi, Yeosang and Yunho in the living room, even Jongho's occasional little breaks after he's been working all afternoon. So when I walk over to the lounge and notice it's completely empty my stomach feels like it flipped upside down. Where is everyone? I walk around the building and no one was there except of course the goons who keep watch on the building 24/7 now so I decide I'm going to just ask one of them as to why it's so empty because this is weird.

There’s a very tall and heavy build goon outside of San's office, he was so scary looking. Although his suit made him look a little less scary. "Um excuse me but where is everyone? Why is it so empty here?" Without flinching the man simply responds with "They're sorting out a few things they'll be back soon Miss y/n." I exhale then I run my fingers through my loosely curled hair "Okay yes, but where are they? What are they doing?" Keeping a straight face without even looking at me he responds "I'm sorry Miss y/n but that's all I know." I narrow my eyes in disbelief. Does he really think I’m that stupid? "That can't be, you have to know where they are. You were given orders by San not to tell me anything weren't you?" The man stands there looking straight ahead pretending he didn't hear me. I look at him for a few seconds more waiting if he'll say anything but he never does then I clench my jaw and say through my teeth "Fine, I'll take that as a yes." I scoff and walk away to my room, when I get there I throw myself onto my bed. I lay there in bed for a few minutes until I fall asleep.

A few hours later I hear commotion downstairs, it was San and the guys. ”I’m exhausted. Now all we need is to kill that old bastard.” Wooyoung comments. ”Well at least we’re done now, I thought it was going to take a lot longer to pull this off.” Hongjoong responds. I look over at the clock and it was around 4 am then I get up and hurriedly head downstairs and notice they’re all dressed in black like they were in a robbery of some sort. All the talking stops and becomes dead silent when everyone notices I’m in the room then Seonghwa walks towards me and nervously smiles “Hey, what are you doing here? Weren’t you on an errand?” I shrug with a straight face “I just got back a few hours ago, what about you guys? Why’s everyone dressed like this? Did I miss something?” San walks up to me and pats my back and smiles “Nothing, we just went to go handle something don’t worry about it.” I furrow my brows and look directly into San’s eyes “Let me guess you still went even after I told you not to…” San shakes his head and reassuringly pats my head “Didn’t we agree to forget about this? I said I wasn’t going to..” Seonghwa, MIngi, and Yunho look over at San with a very odd facial expression then Wooyoung says “You have your jobs and we have ours. San’s allowed to do what he wants it’s not like you’re his girlfriend.” I slowly nod and give Wooyoung and San a fake smile “Of course, you’re right. I was just wondering considering I've barely seen any of you at all I was just a bit worried.” Yeosang stares right at me with a deadpan face “Why do you even care? It’s not like we’re your friends.” Gosh, I know he’s right but wow that hurt. San's expression grows dark and Seonghwa puts his hand on Yeosang’s shoulder causing him to ease up a bit then I let out a frustrated sigh. Here we go again. “Well, maybe you might not be my friend but if you haven’t noticed there are other people I am friends with.” Wooyoung lets out a mocking laugh “Oh really? They’re your friends? If they were your friends they would have told you what was going on but clearly no one trusts you. You’ve only been here like what? 3 or 4 months and you already want to be let in on everything we do? Sounds just about right for an entitled cop.” San pushes Wooyoung and angrily says “Can you ever shut up?!” Yunho and Jongho rush over to separate them, Yunho holding San and Jongho holds Wooyoung respectively. As much as I’d love to be petty with Wooyoung and drop the bomb on San that his best friend thought it was a great idea to nearly kill me, I’ll keep that to myself. All in due time I guess. I don’t want to create anymore issues for these people. I bite the inside of my cheek trying to recover from that verbal jab. This is embarrassing, maybe Wooyoung is right they do have a right for not trusting me. Just because I gave them access to all these things doesn’t mean anything, for all they know I could be leading them to a trap so I don’t blame them for not trusting me. San angrily stares at Wooyoung "Oh come on San, calm down. I was just expressing everything in everyone's mind." Wooyoung fights back a smirk and San tries to reach over to him causing Yunho to tighten his grip on him.

"You don't speak for everyone here." Seonghwa speaks up looking directly at me reassuringly. Jongho speaks from behind Wooyoung "I agree with San and Seonghwa. You really don't speak for everyone here." Hongjoong sighs and nods "She's not so bad Wooyoung. You know this. You're just being hard headed and paranoid over this situation not to mention overtly territorial over San." Wooyoung lets out a laugh "Me paranoid?! Territorrial?! I know what these cops are capable of doing?! Did you guys forget what happened to San's father?! They easily get into your head and mess with it, they're master manipulators just like Lee. She's just like him and I'm only trying to protect him from things repeating themselves." There's a long silence, evreyone awkwardly looking at eachother. That's when I step in between San and Wooyoung causing evreyone's gaze to shift over to me. I slightly part my lips to speak but then a knot grows in my throat and press them shut. Maybe it's a good idea not to say anything right now and keep the peace. All this fighting isn't going to be worth it in the end. I can't change someone's mind whose already been made. Wooyoung can think anything he wants, I just don't want to hear it anymore. I turn my back to them and walk in the direction of my room.

In the distance I hear Yunho say “Come back just give her some time alone.” followed by fast paced footsteps until a few moments later I feel someone grab my wrist then I look back and it was San. He gently tugs my arm closer to him and I look down still slightly embarrassed for running off in a cowardly way. “y/n, wait… I’m sorry some of them haven’t warmed up to you but I promise it’s not your fault. I know you were just worried.” Beginning to feel drained I shake my head “I’m exhausted, we can talk tomorrow. Right now I just want to be alone.” San gently pushes back a few strands of hair “I understand, but please pay no attention to them especially Wooyoung. Nothing he says has an ounce of truth. I need you here with me, remember that.” I let go of San’s hand and walk towards my room leaving him behind me. When I walk into my room I lay there silently for a few moments until warm tears begin to sting my eyes. Once I get rid of Captain Lee I’m going to leave this place despite how deeply in love I am, or at least try to. I can’t keep putting myself through this.

The next morning while laying in bed I hear Wooyoung shouting in a panicked voice from outside in the hallway “San, they took down all security!” I sit up and quickly change clothes while listening closely to the commotion in the hallways, from what it sounds like someone took down the people guarding the HQ gates which is still kind of far considering we’re in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly San barges into my room with a slightly worried expression and says “y/n, the cops are on their way as we speak. Burn everything you can, everything on your computer wipe it and burn it too.” He hands me a gasoline can and some matches and pats my head “Everything will be okay I promise.” He smiles nervously and before he can walk away I pull on the sleeve of his rolled up dress shirt “Why are the cops coming? Is it because of what you guys were doing earlier today?” San’s smile disappears into a straight line and a serious expression then he runs his fingers through his hair “Please don’t get mad, I know you said you didn’t want me to follow through with breaking into the evidence room but I went ahead and did it anyway. I’m sorry. I genuinely thought everything went well I swear I made sure no one followed us but I guess I was wrong.”

I clench my free hand to the point my knuckles turn white. The silence between us lasted as a long instant, and while the anger welled up in my chest. He was looking at me with his gaze of expectation for me to simply forgive him and move on but as of right now I can’t. I won't. Instead it pisses me off because it seems like everything I tell him Is being ignored. Everything that’s happening right now was because of him but what do I expect from a criminal anyway? If anything I shouldn’t even be surprised, I should have known he was going to pull something like this. I raise my hand back and throw my hand forward as hard as I can, whipping it across his face. The crack of skin contacting skin echoed off the metal walls of my room. His face then turns back to me while he slowly runs his hand along his cheek and without another word I walk away. Part of me knows and is well aware I’m running away from my problems but at the moment I was more focused on escaping the police and wiping the computer of any evidence, I can’t get caught now. Nobody can find out I was kept alive.

I run into my work room and over to the computer and begin trying to reimage it to delete all the data on the hard drive then the screen shows a percentage bar and on the bottom of it read “Time Remaining: 35 minutes” I rub my forehead in frustration and grab the tower of the computer, toss it across the room a few times until it eventually splits open then I grab the can of gasoline and pour most of it on the motherboard and the hard drive. I pull out a match from the match box in my pocket and light it then flick it directly inside the computer case immediately igniting a huge fire. After burning a few papers and files I head down the hallway and I notice Yeosang looking out the window and calmly loading his gun while gazing into the distance then I realize he was looking at the various police cars, a helicopter and a few SWAT vehicles getting in position. Someone taps my shoulder and when I turn it was Mingi, he hands me a gun and says “Good luck” I nod taking the gun making sure there was ammo “Same to you.” Out of seemingly nowhere Yeosang begins to shoot causing me to slightly jump. San immediately runs out of his office with a gun in hand then he grabs my hand and leads me downstairs towards the back exit. “We’re going to head outside, there’s a secret escape route I built in the forest so I hope you have your walking shoes on because it’s going to be a long walk.” While he opens the door I say “Where’s everyone else?” He peaks outside and says “Mingi and Yeosang are going to buy us time. Everyone else is already in the forest.” Suddenly Wooyoung runs up behind us and pats San’s shoulder. “Everything is clear, lower associates were sent to distract the feds.” San nods and says “Did you turn on the self destruct device in the server room?” Wooyoung nods and smirks “Yep, everything is in order.” He steps outside in front of San and hides behind a car outside then motions us to follow behind him and just a few seconds after giving us the signal he motions us to stop and stay low. Then I hear a familiar voice.

“Let the girl go Choi San…” My stomach drops and I look up and see that In the helicopter was my partner Detective Chris and Captain Lee looking over his shoulder and right next to them was a sniper. I tightly squeeze his hand and San turns and looks at me “You’ll be okay, worst case is they’ll shoot me and not you.” Captain Lee speaks into the mega phone and says “Give it up son, you lost and it was all because you’re so reckless. You got so sloppy but don’t worry though I’ll clean the mess you left and I’ll start by shooting your little friend over here.” The red laser from the sniper’s gun points right at Wooyoung’s head “And then you.” Wooyoung looks at San and slightly nods and begins to run towards the forest. Almost instantly he gets shot in the chest instead from the sudden movement. His body falls limply on his side while he clutches onto his chest and struggles to breathe. My stomach drops and San lets out a scream calling out Wooyoung’s name with tears welling up in his eyes in anger “I’m going to kill you bastard!!” I clutch onto San's arm holding the gun in my other hand tightly with my eyes blurring with tears. Captain Lee smirks “You know what, I take it back. I won’t shoot you that’s letting you off easy...I want you to suffer by watching all your little mobster trash die.”

Seeing Wooyoung on the ground didn’t bring me satisfaction, instead I begin to cry at the sight of his breathing slowing down. Despite everything he’s done to me I couldn’t let San suffer again, as angry and pissed off as I am with him right now for putting us in this situation he doesn’t deserve to lose his bestfriend. Wooyoung needed help and fast but the only way to get him that help is if I turn myself in and somehow convince them to step back. I hate the idea that I won't have that anonymity anymore but this is a matter of life or death. If I can prevent someone from dying then I'm sure it'll be worth it no matter how painful it is. Suddenly, an idea pops up in my head, it was one I really didn't want to do but my only hope is that it all goes smoothly. I step in front of San with my back facing the helicopter which causes San to pull me closer to him into a hug. i gently press the barrel of the gun I have onto his stomach and he leans in close to my ear and whispers “What are you doing angel eyes? Whatever is going on in that little head of yours just stop, I don’t want you to get hurt. Please.” He sniffles burying his face in my hair trying to hide the fact that he was slightly teary eyed “Sannie, do you trust me?” He talks into my neck “Yes of course I trust you.” Staying still and keeping my voice calm I say “Keep your head down and shoot the sniper.” His voice goes an octave higher while keeping his head down buried into my neck and says “What?! Why?!” Keeping my calm I press the gun a little more onto his stomach “Do it. Shoot the sniper, trust me.” From the corner of my eye I see San’s arm go up and shoot in the sniper’s direction and as soon as he shoots I move just a bit to where the sniper’s bullet hits my right shoulder. I let out a scream in agonizing pain from the impact of the hot metal burning deep in my shoulder causes me to slightly jerk forward and drop the gun in my hand. I push San with the strength from the adrenaline coursing through my veins back into the building and I run towards the helicopter while I clutch onto my shoulder with tears in my eyes. This was all for nothing, so much for getting rid of this man from the shadows.

“There’s a bomb in there! Please Captain Lee, Chris we have to get out of here and remove everyone from the perimeter!” I look back and see San was no longer in the doorway, both Chris and Captain Lee look at me in awe then look at each other a few seconds. Eventually Chris lets down a ladder, helps me climb up and sit down. He sits next to me and looks over at Captain Lee “Captain, we have to take her to the hospital now!” I lay there growing more exhausted by the second due to blood loss until I manage to mutter “Captain, remove everyone from this perimeter now or we’re all going to die.” Chris looks at me and shakes his head while he keeps pressure on my wound “No, we can’t. We have a warrant for San’s arrest we can’t just let him escape” I grab Chris’s forearm and squeeze it from the pain and slight impatience “Trust me, I know he’s going to fuck up again this won’t be the last time. The bomb, please. We have to get out of here we don’t have much time left..” Chris turns to Captain Lee giving him a worried look then Captain Lee looks down at the building for a few moments that felt like an eternity and eventually looks over at me and Chris “Alright, but only because I trust Detective y/ln and know she’ll be able to catch this scum again.” He looks over at the pilot and says “Take us to the nearest hospital please.”

He speaks into his radio “We’ve got a code 4, change of plans, we found Detective y/n y/ln alive and well. Clear the area, over.” Is he really going to act like he didn’t leave me for dead? Is this a favor that later on he’s going to try to use as leverage to somehow blackmail me? A voice answers back on the radio “Disregarding, all units will return back to the station. Over.” I did it, but this was too easy… Luckily the server room self distructing came in handy so technically I wasn’t lying. Chri’s voice interrupts my thoughts and says “So you’re alive? I’m so glad you’re okay but how? I saw your dead body, how is that possible?” I struggle to breathe then I sit there focusing on my breaths until Captain Lee sits next to the seat where Chris and I were sitting and says “Detective Bang stop asking her questions, can’t you see she has a bullet inside her?” Chris’s voice slightly shakes a bit and says “I’m sorry sir, I’m just in shock she’s alive. I saw her charred body, her police badge, everything." I feel my eyes slowly begin to close, my consciousness felt like it was slipping away until everything goes dark.

When I wake up, I scan the room and realize I'm at the hospital. That’s when it all comes back to me, I hope San is okay and he managed to escape along with everyone else. Especially Wooyoung, I really hope he made it as well. I turn and notice Chris is asleep then In a low whisper I say “Chris?” Immediately I see Chris sit up and say “Oh hey y/ln you’re up, how are you feeling?” I nod my head slightly and look down at the IV needle in my hand while he proceeds to talk “I’m so glad it wasn't anything serious, I waited for you to wake up and ask if you wanted to see your family. I’m sure you miss them. I didn’t call them right away since I didn’t want you to be overwhelmed.” I shake my head and I say in a low voice “Don’t tell them I’m alive... Please.” Chris furrows his brows and gives me an odd look “Why not?” I stare off into the distance trying not to make eye contact with him “Promise me you won’t tell anyone especially Captain Lee.”

Chris leans in close to me then I lean in a bit more and whisper “I’m going to run away. I think it’s best for me to disappear considering AS is going after me and I don’t want my family to get killed.” I still can’t believe I’m lying through my teeth, who am I trying to save? San or me? Maybe both. Chris responds in a worried tone “It’s okay we can get you into the Witness Protection Program., you can get your life back.” I sigh and shake my head “No Chris, I’m doing this without the help of the government or the police.” Chris’s jaw tenses up and sits there looking at the ground for a few seconds. “Please, don’t tell anyone Chris. Promise me. You also have to make sure Captain Lee doesn’t release the news of me being alive to the media as this is going to make it even harder for me.” He lifts his gaze and meets my eyes and smiles “Of course I promise, we’re partners after all. We’re under oath to protect one another but promise, you’ll reach out to me occasionally. I just want to make sure you’re alive and well.” I nod then I sit up “Of course as long as you keep my existence a secret, but I do have one more thing to tell you and this one is much more serious because it’s about Captain Lee.” I hope he doesn’t tell him, but who else can I trust? Besides having someone to lean on he might be of help. He scrunches his face in curiosity then looks at the door “What about him? Is it something bad?” I bite the inside of my lip then I take a deep breath and blurt out “Captain Lee works for The Obsidian Dragon, Aurora Syndicate’s rival. I know this because I saw a whole file documenting him being associated with the mafia with pictures and everything.” Chris smirks holding in a small laugh “What? Are you sure that’s not the morphine talking? Why would he even work for the mafia to begin with?” Oh no, he’s asking questions. “He was a close friend of the Choi family, specifically The Phantom. He’s the reason that the whole shootout happened, he sold The Phantom’s location in exchange for money.” Chris’ hand reaches up to his mouth then says “Wait what? So he knew who was behind all of that? No wonder he would always breathe down our necks and constantly check the leads. How much was he given?” I tap my finger on my chin “50 grand if I remember correctly.” He blinks in shock then says “Okay wow that’s quite a bit of money. Yeah, I get why you’re in a hurry to hide. You know too much.” And I know so much more but I can’t tell you the rest.

“Yep..” There was a long silence but Chris clears his throat and says “So uh I have a question and it’s kind of random...Why was San holding you like that?” I raise my eyebrow “How so? What do you mean?” He rests his cheek on his hand “You know like weirdly close, like he had a thing for you. His hand around your waist.” I shrug and look out the window “I don’t know, maybe because he thought of me as an object more than a person. His meat shield.” Hopefully by telling him everything he wants to hear it’ll help me get him off my back, even if those said answers aren’t how I truly feel at all. He can’t find out I’m protecting San. From the corner of my eye I see Chris’s eyes move from looking at the door back to me “Did he ever do anything to you?” While looking out the window I run my finger along the IV tube “I don’t know I was drugged the majority of the time I was there, I can’t remember anything.” Chris puts his head down and rubs his forehead while gently tapping his foot on the floor “I swear to god y/n if he did anything to you…” I shake my head “Nah, despite how scary he is he never put his hands on me.” He raises an eyebrow “How do you know? You were drugged the whole time..” I look down at the dusty pink blanket on my body “Because he was the one who would make the beatings stop, besides I’m sure if he did anything to me my body would remember it. Instead I just remember that evreytime I was being beat he’d scold the person doing it.” That feeling, that pit in my stomach. My eyes well up with tears and Chris reaches for my hand “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this. Just remembering it brings it all back” Chris nods giving me a reassuring hand squeeze “I’m sorry, we don’t have to talk about it anymore. You should rest, we'll talk about it later when you feel better.” He adjusts my pillow slightly so that I'm able to lay back a little bit again. "Thanks Chris, you should nap too. You look exhausted." He gives me a weak smile "I should be watching you. It's okay." I shake my head "I insist, it's kind of weird knowing you're just watching me sleep. A nap will most definitely not hurt you." He looks into the distance and slowly nods his head almost like he was thinking whether or not he should do it "Alright, if that makes you comfortable y/ln, just know if I hear the door open I will wake up.." I chuckle nervously "Yeah, I know" I hope he falls into a deep sleep otherwise I'm screwed.

A few hours later I wait until Chris is fast asleep in his seat then I begin taking the tubes and IV’s off of me and I put on my pants and shoes making sure I also take the phone San gave me. I look over and glance over at chris to make sure he was still asleep then I carefully open the door wide enough for me to slip out the hospital. Luckily because of the lack of use my phone still had battery so I enter a gas station restroom near the hospital and call San. I anxiously hold the phone to my ear while it rang a few times then on the other line San answers the phone and excitedly I say “San?!” In a surprised tone he answers “y/n?! Where are you? Are you okay?” Relieved to hear his voice again I say in a slight hushed tone “I’m at the gas station bathroom a few blocks from the hospital, I escaped but um what about Wooyoung, is he okay?” I anxiously brush my index finger over the smooth surface of the back of the phone while I wait for him to answer. “He’s fine now angel eyes. He got a pierced lung but he’ll be okay don’t worry.” I let out a sigh of relief and smile “I’m glad he’s okay. I’m glad your best friend is still here with you.” He exhales a bit before he admiringly says “He wouldn’t have been saved if it wasn’t for you and your quick thinking, I don’t know how you did it but I’m so thankful.” There’s a long silence then he continues “ Do you want me to send someone to pick you up?” Immediately I respond “Yes please, I want to get out of here before anyone notices I’m gone” San answers me reassuringly “Don’t worry I’ll send your location to the nearest Associate just hang tight okay? Their code word will be “snow”, I’ll see you in a bit angel eyes I love you.” I gently bite my lip " I love you too. Sannie” I hear San chuckle on the other side of the line and immediately after the line goes dead. I turn and see myself in the mirror and realize I was wearing my ugly hospital gown so I decide to turn it inside out and make a makeshift tie up shirt out of it.. After I finish I sit on the counter of the bathroom and not even 10 minutes later there’s a knock at the door. I stay silent until a deep voice says “Snow.” I jump off the counter and run to open the door and see an average build man with a buzz cut and tattoos and a dark blue track suit “y/n ?” I nod then he motions me to walk behind him and says “Come on, the boss asked me to take you where they’re in hiding.” I nod and follow him into a black average looking car with dark tinted windows, his car reeked of cigarettes and the seats were pretty worn out, a nice way to blend in. Smart.

After 2 hours of driving we arrive at a parking lot at an undisclosed area since I couldn't tell where exactly we were because of how dark it was, all I know it was far away from both Ulwood and Lulens but unlike the HQ last time this location was in a city. I get out of the car and follow the heavily tattooed man into a weird tattoo shop, the buzzing of the tattoo gun was the very first thing I hear when I enter. Everyone in there (which wasn’t alot) seemed to either not notice or not to care kind of like it was a regular occurrence here. So when we make it to the back I notice a black metal door with a key pad, and as soon as he punches in the code the door clicks open and he motions me to walk inside then closes the door behind me. Which reminds me of this tough pill to swallow, I am once again under San's mercy by coming back..

‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆.

If you would like to be on the taglist DM me or leave a comment!✨

Tag List: @cromerteez @thanxx1117 @kisaane-not @atinyreads @hxneebxbee @itsvxlentine @ahhhhhhhhhghh @atinytinaa @atinyluv238 @damagelove @altgojo @steviesbergthuis @yourfatherlucifer @yeosangsbbg @tunaasan @lovjensoo

Please Reblog if you liked it! 🔁

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

some rambling observations about being an autistic fan

So I've been thinking a lot about ✨The History of the Internet✨ lately, and in particular the history of how fans find community, and I thought I'd share these observations into the void. I'd be curious to know others' experiences!

Specifically, I'm thinking about how my autistic way of communicating and socializing maps (or doesn't) to fannish norms and how that's changed over the years.

Some facts about my specific neurotype (because every neurodivergent brain is different!):

I strongly dislike small talk, but I LOVE going on at length with someone about a special interest.

Shared SQUEEE is super affirming to me.

I tend to think in systems and lists, so I love to do things like think through the details of worldbuilding.

I'm on the ace spectrum, and I both experience a lot of my sexuality through my muses and interacting on their behalf and don't really have a personal feeling of desire towards actors (and sometimes squee based in sexual attraction makes me uncomfortable because it feels like I'm misrepresenting my own identity if folks don't get the whole muse thing).

I have highly variable spoons and social anxiety.

I tend to hoard information, and if I like a creator I want to see EVERYTHING they put out, and it makes me anxious to think about missing things.

Okay, cool, so given all that, here's how I've experienced socializing in fandom, and what I'm realizing in retrospect about how different "waves" of this map to my communication and social needs. Note that the "waves" are just how I personally interacted with fandom, of course your mileage may vary!

Wave One (2004ish-2008ish): LiveJournal, mostly. In this era, I was primarily interacting through LJ, and finding fic on random sites around the Internet. I didn't have a ton of sense of connection to other fans, except those I met in real life.

Wave Two (2008ish-2013ish): Dreamwidth, Ao3, and RP. And then DW and Ao3 were born, and choirs of angels rejoiced. This was my personal golden era. First, DW, where I started forming more personal connections through a journal site and its communities. This was the point at which I felt like I actually knew people through being "mutuals," and I generally tried to read everything on my feed, interacting regularly. I went to ConTxT a few times and met fans in person, as well as a few local hangouts hosted by fans. I also started RPing in this era, and for a few years spent regular time in an AIM chatroom pretty much daily with RP partners. I started dating two people long distance from this group, and most of my friends were here. Ao3 also came out in this era and made reading fic SO much easier. My brain fucking loves a database and structured tagging! I also did a bunch of prompt challenges, big bangs, and the like, which I think really helped structure my participation in fandom. Through co-writing I was getting a lot of my sexual needs met (though I didn't really understand that at the time, since it wasn't "real") and the nature of the RP chatroom meant that I could focus on a fictional world and building relationships there, which was far more interesting to me than hearing about the minutae of people's lives.

Wave Three (2014ish-now): Since that golden era, I've mostly been engaging with fandom just through writing and reading, with the exception of one fantastic RP partner I met two years ago through the comments on my fic, who's become one of my best friends. I tried Discord for a little while, but got super overwhelmed. Creating a Tumblr, I'm noticing how spoiled I've been by Ao3! I'm so used to engaging with fic in a way that I can easily see when there's new stuff, and it's really freaking me out that I can't do that here, unless I'm able to dedicate the time to reading everything the author posts about their life in addition to their stories. I think we hypothetically did that back in the DW days, but maybe the difference is that folks are used to social media here, so rather than posting a couple of essays a week like a blog, it's standard to do a bunch of short posts per day? Perhaps in some ways, Discord is more autism-friendly, because it's possible to say "I only want to communicate about THESE topics" and then get to know who the people are who are talking about those things. It's weirdly isolating, I think, to show up to a platform like "HERE ARE MY SPECIAL INTERESTS I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEM" and then to see others doing that but not be clear on how to engage. To be fair, that may be aging more than autism 😂

I'm not sure if this is, uh, actually reaching any conclusions, but hey, having space to process the thoughts and feelings is nice nonetheless!

Interested to know your 7, 12 and 16 for the ask game.

Thank you for the ask!!! 😊😊😊

7. Emotional or physical whump? Ooooh. Generically, it would be physical whump, because I only care about emotional whump when it's about specific characters that I care about. Or when it's research into certain types of whump and their effects. So yeah, when reading others' whump content, it's usually physical whump!

12. Favourite type of whumper? Confident, knowledgeable, intimate whumper. Doesn't always have to be smut, but being up in the whumpee's space, being handsy, manhandling, or even doing necessary hands-on caretaking is allll good stuff.

16. What made you create this blog? Do you have any regrets/things you wish you did differently? I created it specifically to have an archive of whump that I like! Turns out the liked stuff section of my tumblr blog isn't searchable and isn't a good personal database. That's why I always try to tag what I determine to be appropriate tags - it's for my future use and inspiration. 2% of the time I get lazy though. Additionally, I wanted to bring more of my fandom (Bungou Stray Dogs) into the pleasures of whump, and maybe introduce some whumpers to the potentials of Bungou Stray Dogs.

Regarding blog content, there is not much to change other than wishing I had more time to create original content and not just reblog. As it is, probably 98% is reblog, 2% is original, despite me being an active writer and artist. Hence any original posts I make will receive very little attention, because I don't have that audience built up. (Although honestly the same is true for simply reblogging at large).

No, the real thing I regret is not standing up publicly for an individual who was wrongly persecuted by this very whump 'community'. That individual is no longer around. This 'community' as a whole is toxically silent when it comes to members being attacked by other 'members' regarding fictional tropes. Despite this being the 'whump community,' people within still attack others for fictional likes and dislikes. People who see it don't want to be involved so they say nothing, do nothing. As a result, I will never allow that sort of nonsense to happen again. I just wish others had the balls and backbone to boot out toxic trolls as well, because the only way to deal with it is to be very loud and very public and to educate newcomers that toxic behavior is not accepted.

Well, that's true in every fandom.

So I initially deleted this because I didn’t want to get into it, but I also think the question is genuine and I wanted to explain my thinking. CW for emotional and physical abuse and sexual assault.

I am tagging @silverlinedeyes​ because this ask concerns them and I don’t appreciate being vagued, whether it’s a blogger or someone answering an ask that mentions me. I try not to vague other people and I’m not perfect but... just getting this all out in the open.

So I can’t speak for everyone who was upset at the initial post comparing Ianthe and Gwyn. Personally, I kind-of grimaced and was mostly confused about what in the world they could possibly have in common and why such a comparison would be necessary. As people, they are fundamentally different. And to me, the comparison is incredibly thin. Eye color and priestesses? How many priestesses have that eye color? And to use that to connect them to a creature we’ve only read about in two sentences in the whole series, a creature we’ve never actually seen on page and know next to nothing about? Basically, the intention or purpose behind the comparison didn’t make sense to me.

Now I’ll be perfectly transparent - I didn’t read the whole post because I could tell that it wasn’t for me. I also didn’t go around vaguing it. It was mentioned in some asks that I got and I tried to limit my commentary on that post and focus on the comparisons I had made, intentionally. Because 1) I can’t speak from the position of a SA survivor, and those are the people that post concerned, and 2) I didn’t fully read it, and 3) I don’t want to vague people! This fandom is divided enough. I know I made a joke after acosf came out how we are all having separate, loud conversations in the same room and refusing to acknowledge the other conversations while somehow responding to one another. And it was kinda funny at first, but now it’s exhausting.

To me, comparing Ianthe, who is universally reviled as a r*pist, and Gwyn, who we know is a SA survivor, is unnecessary. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Why do we need to do this? What is it telling us about any of the characters? About relationships? I know a lot of people found it anything from distasteful to downright offensive, and while I think that just about anything is fair game when it comes to fictional characters, I also personally think that the intention behind the comparison was confusing. I just personally don’t understand why we would need to talk about those characters in the same breath. What purpose does it serve? Someone who can speak from the position of a SA can please feel free to add on, if comfortable!

The reason that I compare Az and Tamlin is to analyze them as people, as characters, because I see a lot of similarities in who they are on a (currently) fundamental level - their anger, their loneliness, their attempts to restrain their destructive impulses. These are major parts of who they are as people and how they interact with the world. There were red flags present in acotar that I recognized from my personal life and that I can now see in Azriel. Frankly, it concerns me that people see Tamlin as a completely irredeemable villain, while not recognizing that Azriel shares some of the same personality traits. 

Comparing a r*apist and a SA survivor is an unequal comparison. Emotional and physical abuse, on the other hand, tends to be generational. I’m not an expert on a professional or academic level, but I did a quick search on my university’s database, and found this from “Interrupting the Intergenerational Transmission of Violence”, and please note that these lines were the context or background - this article didn’t set out to prove these statements to be true, they are already commonly accepted knowledge and so their research was looking to solve the problem:

Children exposed to domestic violence are at increased risk for a wide range of emotional and behavioural disorders. Conduct disorder, in particular, may ultimately lead to the perpetration of further domestic violence in the next generation. Parental characteristics such as warmth and positive attributions may mitigate the risk for intergenerational transmission of violence.

I think that as a fandom, people really, really tend to mischaracterize Azriel. It bothers me. He’s not soft. I’m sorry, he’s just not. We have multiple examples of him being described, using words like “rage”, “cruel”, “temper”. One of the first posts I ever made in this fandom that got a lot of attention (over four years ago) was trying to correct these mischaracterizations. They keep happening.

There was an icy rage in Azriel I had never been able to thaw. In the centuries I’d known him, he’d said little about his life, those years in his father’s keep, locked in darkness. (ACOMAF)

One moment, Azriel was seated. The next, he’d blasted through Eris’s shield with a flare of blue light and tackled him backward, wood shattering beneath them. “Shit,” Cassian spat, and was instantly there— And met a wall of blue. Azriel had sealed them in, and as his scarred hands wrapped around Eris’s throat, Rhys said, “Enough.” (ACOWAR)

Az didn’t answer. I held his gaze, though. Held that ice-cold stare that still sometimes scared the shit out of me. (ACOFAS)

Az had a vicious competitive streak... quiet and cruel and utterly lethal. (ACOSF)

Azriel stiffened, an outright sign of temper (ACOSF)

These are just a few of the examples, but we can also think about acofas when he gets angry at dinner thinking about how his mother was treated as a servant, when he can’t handle being around people who are happy on Solstice. I could make a whole post but I’m kinda sick of talking about Azriel at this point.

I have experienced an emotionally abusive relationship much like feylin was. I made myself so small, for years, because this person’s anger and anxiety and grief took up so much space in the world. I felt like I had to overcompensate, to not make them feel jealous if I was having a good day, and to not take on my negative feelings if I had a bad day. So I just stopped feeling things. For years. It didn’t go well. I’m still dealing with the aftermath. 

I have also witnessed physical domestic violence, as a child. I don’t think I need to explain further than that.

My fanfiction A Loveless Romantic deals heavily with the feylin abuse, and I only feel comfortable writing it because of my personal experiences. I’ve written posts about Nesta and alcohol and another post that I can’t currently find about why acotar is such a good book because it shows us all of those red flags for abuse before many people knew they were red flags. (If I can find it I’ll reblog.) My point is, when I go into analyses and metas like these, they aren’t just an exercise in “oh hey what if?!” It’s “here is my experience with this topic and so here’s how I read this with that background.”

The comparison between Azriel and Tamlin is deeply personal to me, and I didn’t exactly expect to have to disclose my personal history when making it, but when I see people vaguing about how the comparison “hurts people who have experienced abuse”, hi, OP knows exactly what she’s talking about on a personal level, thanks. So I’m going to keep talking about it, because I know what I’m talking about, and it bothers me that people can’t see it in fiction because I worry that they then won’t be able to see it IRL until it’s too late. I’m going to keep writing my “thinkpieces” because this is a topic I know a lot about, it’s important to me, and it’s something that I think a lot of people can and should learn more about.

A Soul to Mend His Own | Ch. 10

Warning, if it hasn’t been obvious in the movies there is Nazi symbolism within the First Order. I will expand on this much more throughout the story. If this is something that bothers you, please just exit the story. The author does not condone any Nazi ideals, this is just for fictional uses only.

A Kylo Ren x Modern! Reader in a soulmate au with some canon divergence. —————————————SLOWBURN————————————–He is already the Supreme leader, searching the universe to find you, his Empress. Your name on his wrist has been the only constant in his life, while you have doubts about his existence and his acceptance of you. He isn’t in the database and why did the name Kylo Ren cover Ben Solo?

Originally posted on my Ao3 Crystallclover (If you can’t find it here)

Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7a | 7b | 8 | 9a | 9b | 

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Chapter 10: Of Pageantry and Health

Summary: “It is an honor to meet you, ma’am,” said General Pryde who bowed slightly. This made you feel weird, being treated as something you are not, or at least not yet. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Now strapped in the general received a message on his data pad. “The Supreme Leader would like it if I talked you through how this evening will go, both at the public address and when we return to the Steadfast tonight. Once the first step of First Order occupation of Earth is complete, the Supreme Leader will leave a general in charge and you will be taken to the Supremacy,” said Allegiant General Armitage Hux. 

“May I take some notes,” you ask. The general nodded and you proceeded to take out a small notebook from your work tote. 

“Tonight you will not be on main display at the public address but you will be present. At precisely 7 PM EST the Supreme Leader will give his public address on the dais outside the White House to all media. It will be brief but effective, then I will give my own public address immediately afterward once that it is finished it will be the first time your planet will hear the First Order anthem, which will conclude the address. You will most likely be standing off to the side with the other High Command officers. Once the address has been concluded you will be taken to an Upsilon-class command shuttle, Supreme Leader Ren’s private shuttle, and you will be escorted by TIE fighters to the Steadfast,” the general said pausing as you were struggling to keep up with the information. When he had seen that you had caught up he continued.

“When you embark on the Steadfast there will be a full salute from on-duty officers and a battalion of stormtroopers in the hanger bay. You and he will probably pause, you behind him, and they will salute and you will go on your way to his quarters. He will probably give you a tour of the Steadfast tomorrow morning or that evening if there is time. Moving about the ship you will use your FOI to gain access to different places,” noted the general. 

“You will also notice that day and night on the ship are simulated when the night is simulated the lights and hallways of the ship are darker. The worker shifts are split up into 6-hour increments, Alpha from 04:00-10:00 hours, Beta from 10:00-16:00 hours, Gamma 16:00-20:00 hours, and Delta from 20:00-04:00. Currently, we are matching Earth’s cycle and matching to EST, as that is most convenient for the Supreme Leader and High Command Officers. This should be something worth noting as we have yet to have a base planet so you may be spending lots of time onboard ships,” said the general.

You caught up to the general again now realizing something, “I wasn’t given a First Order Identification number. I didn’t really finish my registration, they escorted me in the middle of it I believe.”

“Yes, I’ll pull up your file,” he said while pulling out a data pad. “That is easy for your identification

The number is AA-0002. The Supreme Leader’s is AA-0001. That should be easy for you to remember but I will have dog tags commissioned for you so you will not have to enter it every time you want to change basic access rooms.” With that, you saw him type in some messages into the data pad and he returned back to you. “Do you have any other questions so far? We are almost there.”

“I will just be standing off to the side during the public address and will not need to do anything else, correct,” you ask.

“Correct, unless the Supreme Leader asks you to, but I doubt he will make you do anything more today.” Then the pilot informed the general of your arrival back at the White House and you departed the ship. This time you were graced by the presence of the Supreme Leader himself. 

“Do you have everything you need,” asked Kylo, his voice still distorted under the mask. 

“I believe so. How much time until your address,” you ask. 

“An hour, we can return to the sitting room if you would like,” you nodded in response. Kylo had ordered a junior officer to take your bags to his ship. You took your phone and notebook out of your work tote before handing it over. You followed Kylo to the same red sitting room you were in before. He ordered a junior officer to bring you some refreshments. Once the officer left he took off the helmet. “I hope that your flights today weren’t too exhausting.”

“They were fine, more like long car rides than flights. Did your meeting last the entire time while I was gone,” you asked.

“No, I have had two more since then. Trying to bring your home planet up to speed. Today we discussing health regulations. Unfortunately, many people on your planet are behind on simple things such as vaccinations and health check-ups, some places lake basic hygiene. Along with education, this is a priority within the First Order. Unfortunately, this will make the first step much longer. I have had to call upon the Finalizer to be based here so we can speed up the process but even with light speed they will take 3 days two get here,” commented Kylo. 

There was a knock on the door which prompted him to put on his helmet. He told the junior officer to come in and leave the tray of coffee and light snack food. Once the officer had left he removed his helmet and joined you. “I hope you don’t mind we will be eating dinner on board the Steadfast tonight after the address.”

You shook your head no in response, enjoying your coffee. “The general informed me of how tonight was going to go, I assumed because we were getting back so close to the address and that we would be leaving right after that this was a possibility.”

You saw him give a ghost of a smile at this. You had so many questions you wanted to ask but now didn’t seem to be the time, nor the place. Finishing your coffee and a light snack you placed your cup back on the tray. 

There was a knock on the door, Kylo once again put on his helmet and told whoever was at the door to come in. 

General Hux walked in, “Supreme Leader, the preparations for the address are about to begin. It has been requested that we go to the dais.”

“Very well,” responded Kylo who moved to stand. You followed his lead and followed both of them down the hall and out to the front lawn. 

There you could really see what you only saw on the tv the past few days. The large red banners, the battalion of stormtroopers. The line of officers off the side of the stage. The huge number of media personnel, waiting for your arrival. While Kylo took to the stage the general took the time to bring you to the other officers and instructed you that General Pryde would help you during the address. 

“It is an honor to meet you, ma’am,” said General Pryde who bowed slightly. 

This made you feel weird, being treated as something you are not, or at least not yet. 

“If you will stand next to me, we shall be standing during the whole address. During the anthem stand at attention and place your left hand over your heart, I believe you do something similar for the U.S. anthem anyways,” said the general with an eerie air about him. 

You moved to stand next to him. He on the outside of the aisle in the front row and you the next person in line. About 20 other officers were in your row and about for rows deep were the ones present. You glanced up at the stage knowing it would be soon that the address would begin, you saw Kylo glance in your direction to you it seemed as if he was looking directly at you, but with the mask, you couldn’t be sure. But you swore he was looking at you, a small shock went through your spine and made you break your unknown eye contact. 7 PM struck. 

Kylo or Supreme Leader Ren began to speak, “The First Order takes pride in the health of its citizens. Currently, the health of your planet is substandard to the high standards that the First Order keeps. 

When intergalactic trade becomes available to Earth you will be exposed to a number of possible new diseases. The First Order takes many precautions to the health of its citizens so a new mandatory health regime will begin once you have been registered. 

Vaccines against intergalactic diseases will be administered. This is so we can preserve life and prevent any death that we can. 

First Order citizens are the healthiest and happiest in the galaxy. We are pleased that Earth will now be brought up to speed medically. That is all.” With that, he stepped back from the podium and Allegiant General Hux stepped forward. 

“Starting tomorrow alongside registration stations you will find medical facilities to be able to receive these new vaccines and health check-ups. Only once you are registered may you receive these vaccines. Once you have received this health check-up you will receive a health schedule and regime along with standard-issue medications from the top of the lIne First Order medical staff. 

It is paramount that all First Order citizens take their health seriously. A strong individual makes for a strong empire. A strong and healthy citizen is a good citizen within the First Order. Any citizen who has an issue with this health regime should direct their comments and concerns to any Stormtrooper or First Order officer at their local health station. Personal health is part of the foundation of organizational purity.” With that, the general stepped back and Kylo stepped forward. 

The anthem started, TIE fighters flew overhead in a blue angels sort of style. There were no words being spoken. The anthem had a march-like quality to it, and a dark one too. At the end

You saw all of the officers and stormtroopers raise their left hand into the air as a sort of salute. Kylo had his left hand over his heart in a fist with his index and thumb showing. You kept your position as it was what General Pryde had instructed you to do. 

Once Kylo dropped his hand the officers did too and then the stormtroopers. He moved to leave the stage as did General Hux. 

“Follow me,” said General Pryde. And you did, he brought you over to where a large closed book looking ship was, and where Kylo and General Hux where along with the silver armored stormtrooper you know to be Captain Phasma. 

Kylo gestured for you to enter the ship first, which was somewhat of a shock to the generals, but you obliged. You entered and paused not knowing where you were to sit. Kylo was right behind you. He sat in the middle right, you sat to the left of him and started to buckle. Once you were buckled in he reached over to check the straps, to make sure they were secured. This made you blush and sneak a peek at him. He glanced up at you, although still wearing his mask you felt as if you locked eyes for a second before he sat back in his seat and buckled himself. The pilot informed you of departure and you were off to the Steadfast.

Not A Ghost - part 42 (epilogue)

A/N - Multi-part fic. Colossus x OC where OC has come home after being wrongfully imprisoned in the Icebox. Warnings for whole fic - references and flashbacks to harsh prison environment, including various types of abuse.

NEW WARNING - fictional police brutality. Takes place shortly after events in Deadpool 2. Whole thing will end up on my AO3 eventually.

Masterlist on my profile!

Taglist: @emma-frxst  @ra-ra-rasputiin  @holamor ​  @empressme-bitch  @marvel-is-perfection  @hazilyimagine ​ @marvelhead17 @rovvboat @angstybadboytrash ​ @whitewitchdown ​ @master-sass-blast ​ @mori-fandom @mooleche @dandyqueen @emberbent @leo-writer @silver-stormy . Wanna be added or removed? Holla at me.

-------------------------------------

Three years later.

After the Icebox rescue, Piotr had taken another leave of absence from the X-Men until he was sure Rhonda could take care of herself. The Rasputins argued for months about whether he should rejoin at all, knowing all too keenly the possibility of being snatched up by the DMC. They had settled on a reluctant compromise that he would alternate a month of active duty with a month off.

Rhonda never rejoined the X-Men, and never again tagged along with Piotr on a mission, no matter how Wade tried to bait her. She did, however, hammer into every single active duty member about being careful and made them promise that if they ran into DMC, to either kill them or run. Scott and some of the other members shook their heads and whispered about Rhonda being paranoid, but Piotr, Ororo, Ellie, Yukio, Hank, and Kurt knew better, and they frequently drilled simulations of fighting the DMC. Just in case.

When Piotr eventually resumed active duty, Rhonda was so anxious that she would be nauseous until he came home. Though she had been resistant to getting into therapy at first, she’d found an unexpected friend in Michelle. When they got past their tension and awkwardness of seeing each other as “the other woman,” Michelle made a lot of helpful suggestions. Rhonda started seeing someone Michelle had highly recommended - a therapist who was also a mutant and specialized in helping other mutants. They worked together well, and over time Rhonda worked past her trauma to a life she cherished.

--

A dance class sprang up at the Xavier School. It wasn’t quite ballet or modern dance, but it encouraged students to seek out multiple forms of dance and see how they can fit together. Rhonda studied and gained certification to teach aerial silks and started teaching a handful of students in an additional silks class. Yukio was her first silks student, and she became a skilled aerialist in her own right.

Rhonda found she enjoyed making choreography and videos to her favorite songs. She got her prison tattoos completely covered with a floral pattern that matched the zhostovo tray from her in-laws, just like the way Piotr had painted on her a few times. It was a lengthy process, but once her cover-up sleeve was done, Rhonda started posting videos under the pseudonym Zhostovo. When her following had built enough that people in the comments were begging for lessons, she realized she had outgrown the single room in the Xavier house.

A short drive away, Piotr and Rhonda found a great spot to build a larger studio. There was enough space to teach good sized classes and with the equipment put away, it converted to a beautiful soundstage for recording videos. Friends frequently visited and collaborated - Cable moved the camera or Rhonda herself for dreamlike effects, Russell had developed incredibly fine control with his abilities and was sometimes asked to help with some pyrotechnics. Piotr, Ellie, Yukio, and Wade found themselves in front of the camera a few times when Rhonda asked them to feature or perform a duet with her. Yukio was by far her favorite silks collaborator - it helped that they had similar electric abilities and made that part of their choreography as well.

Piotr lent his talents to paint gorgeous backdrops for some of the videos, and painted murals around the exterior of the studio, which eventually came to be called the Rasputin Performing Arts Center.

--

The court case against the DMC was messy, to say the least. Including Rhonda, there had been nine mutants who had been proven to be kidnapped and thrown into the Icebox with none of their rights honored - no phone call, no lawyer, nothing. For most of the Icebox Nine, as the media had called them, there weren’t even records of them in the Department of Mutant Control’s databases. The DMC itself dodged and weaved around accusations, using the lack of official record to try to discredit the prosecution, declaring it a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Public perception was mired in reconciling the facts that there were many dangerous criminal mutants imprisoned in the Icebox, and also many who had been detained illegally - the true number of which was impossible to determine if they weren’t even on record. Never mind guessing how many had died over the years before they could be rescued. People didn’t want to believe both things were possible and true, and it gave Rhonda and Piotr a sick feeling their case would ultimately go nowhere, no matter how determined their attorney was.

Rumor had it that the DMC had closed the Icebox and had built a new prison in an undisclosed location. Professor Charles Xavier enlisted hackers to once again find whatever plans they could, but came up dry.

--

The Zhostovo YouTube channel grew quickly. Zhostovo herself was known for incredibly expressive choreography. At first, her videos were uncut wide shots of her rolling some floorwork across her studio space, or wrapped in silks in the air with her hair dyed to match, or sometimes moving through thin air, suspended by nothing the camera could see. She started with performing to songs from the early 2000s, before branching out to more recent hits. Her videos became more complex, with multiple camera angles, close ups, and special effects that at first viewers assumed were digital, until she published a video revealing that she was a mutant, and introduced the other mutants who helped make her videos by adding fire, fog, glowing sparks, and numerous other effects. In a matter of months, maybe a year, people started saying they preferred her videos over the musicians’ official, record label-produced videos.

Zhostovo’s performances for “Work Song” and “Someone New” by Hozier were what skyrocketed her channel’s popularity. There was a bone-chilling soulfulness she poured into those that resonated with many Hozier fans. Zhostovo made a few TV appearances, always flanked by her husband, whose steel form towered over everyone else, and at least one other mutant from the group she had introduced in her videos. She wasn’t young, but her hair was always dyed bright colors, and she had flower petals tattooed on one cheek, matching the folk painting style of the sleeve on her right arm. She was also an outspoken mutant rights activist, and made it clear that she wanted to show the world - humans and mutants alike - that extraordinary abilities can be used for fun and art and self-expression. She emphasized that most mutants were not the violent monsters conservative news stations made them out to be, and that believing them would cost lives every day.

--

On an early spring day, when things were green but there was still a little chill in the air if the sun wasn't out, Rhonda and Piotr were having a picnic on her grave, a special date they did a few times a year. The plot had been converted into a little garden, with just enough of a clear spot in the middle to fit two people having lunch. The granite headstone still stood with the erroneous year of death chipped away, but it was surrounded with rosemary and wildflowers. The season’s first bees bobbed along, looking for the most open flowers, and Rhonda’s grave was easily the brightest and most lively spot in the private cemetery. 

Rhonda’s smile tugged at the flower petal tattoos that covered the old prison tear drops. She gently waved a bee away from her sandwich before taking a bite. Piotr plucked a little sprig of rosemary and added the leaves to his sandwich before starting in on it. 

“You’re quiet today,” Piotr observed. “You seem like you’re in a good mood, but quiet.” He sipped some of the white wine they had packed. He had armored down, and was now able to hold it for hours at a time. He'd kept his beard - it was thick, neatly trimmed, and had just gotten its first touches of grey.

Her eyes crinkled more as she smiled around her bite of food. When she swallowed, she took a deep breath. “I got an email this morning,” she began. “I didn’t wanna say anything about it until I was sure it was real, you know?”

Piotr regarded his wife carefully, playful suspicion growing. “Sladkaya, an email from who?”

The cemetery was quiet, but she looked around anyway, as if checking for an unwelcome eavesdropper. The wildflowers and herbs rustled in the breeze. She grinned so big Piotr was sure he could count all her teeth. Her shoulders lifted as she took a deep breath, “Hozier wants to collaborate on a music video. A real one, not the copyright infringement videos I do.”

Piotr almost dropped his sandwich before he remembered it was in his hand. He set it down and reached for her. Rhonda jumped to her feet and hugged his head to her stomach, both laughing. “That’s wonderful news!” His fingers pressed into her thighs. “Amazing! Is it for a new song? Or one already out?”

She was bouncing with excitement and squealing for a solid minute or two before she sat down again, still fidgeting and twisting with excitement. “I think a new one! His people sent over a contract and an NDA I have to sign before I can hear the song he wants to work on. Do you think Matthew would look it over? I know he’s not an entertainment lawyer, but a contract’s a contract, right?”

“We can ask,” he agreed as they toasted their plastic wine glasses. He watched her eyes sparkle with tears of excitement, the way her curls bounced as she laughed, dyed dark green to match the foliage in her tattoo. The lush blooms and leaves that filled her arm still had a raised texture of the Xs they covered if you looked closely, but the black spaces and gold scrollwork were striking any time she moved. “Is this what you wanted when we were young?” he asked.

“When I thought I was gonna go to Julliard and join a dance troupe?” She thought for a long minute, then shook her head. “It’s better.”

They shared beaming smiles, Piotr’s eyes brimming with tears for his wife's joy, when a fat little bumble bee landed on one of the flowers on Rhonda’s arm. “Oh!” he exclaimed softly. “Hold still, Sladkaya.”

He pulled out the camera he always brought along for these picnics, and captured the moment of Rhonda's surprise, noticing the bee on her tattoo, as she delicately held her wine glass with her four fingered right hand, her gravestone behind her, sunlight playing on her forest green curls.

11 Questions WIP tag meme:

Thanks for tagging me, @pomegranate-belle!

I’ll tag: @blackflirtlarping, @kiichu, @transezual, @eatingfireflies and @i-demand-a-hug.

1. How long have you been writing?

I’ve tried to start writing something a bunch of times during my life, but I only really got anywhere when I did some writing for the college magazine when I was at uni. Which was... eight years ago now oh fuck I’m old.

2. What are the major themes of your current wip(s)?

The main theme of TUoHS has to be, ‘Haruhi Suzumiya would be a dangerous fucking nightmare in any piece of fiction that wasn’t at its base slice-of-life.’ Because, duh, she would be. I’ll also need to work in my take on the usual Danganronpa hope/despair themes, but I’m willing to let that develop as I come up with later murders rather than lock it in precisely now.

3. What do you want people to take away from your story once they’ve read it?

An experience similar to playing the Danganronpa games. If readers can enjoy the murder mysteries - following along closely enough to enjoy working out some things in advance but not finding the whole thing too obvious - I’ll be happy.

4. Would you be excited if people write fanfiction about your wip(s)?

Probably? There’s some good hooks in the past half of the story which might attract some recursive fanfiction. And maybe people will like the OCs and want to do fluffier stuff with them that I wouldn’t consider. I think I would feel more comfortable if people were to contact me before doing something so I could vet it. Everything before the story is fair game, but there’s quite a bit of idea-space after the story that I’d want to reserve for sequels I want to write.

5. What’s your go-to writing beverage?

When I’m doing ‘write drunk, edit sober’ my go to drink is vodka-coke.

6. Who is your favorite oc? Tell me about them!

Ooh! Close choice between two:

Mayumi Uehara (The Ultimate Mathematician): Is essentially a self-insert (I knew long before starting to plan that I wanted an Ultimate Mathematician character) and also the OC slotting into one of my favourite Danganronpa archetypes. Plus my favourite line from TUoHS, the one I go and re-read when I’m feeling down, is a line of dialogue by her.

Hitomi Maeda (The Ultimate Chemist): I’ve got a database of all my characters, and one section is for descriptions of their personalities: quite a few paragraphs of text for most OCs as I’ve built them up. Hitomi’s now just reads ‘I have a massive crush on her.’ That’s enough to make her the easiest character for me to write by far. Plus she’s gotten me out of a couple of dead-ends while writing.

7. Do you feel that mistakes are important learning tools in the writing journey?

Not really? Unlike with maths or chess, I don’t really learn from my writing mistakes as I look over them. I just get locked-in on them, unable to change them without the help of the help of a beta-reader.

8. Rank your ocs by their capability in a footchase (either running after or from smth, your choice)

Let’s see:

Katsuya Terasaki (The Ultimate Firefighter)

Taichi Fujino (The Ultimate Driver)

Arata Nakayama (The Ultimate Archaeologist)

Ikko Watari (The Ultimate Scam Artist)

Satoru Ishihara (The Ultimate Journalist)

Hitomi Maeda (The Ultimate Chemist)

Yayoi Mikawa (The Ultimate Cosplayer)

Konosuke Kamio (The Ultimate Film Critic)

Mayumi Uehara (The Ultimate Mathematician)

I’ve long had a similar list ranking (both my OCs and the Haruhi Suzumiya characters) by who would win a fight. The big changes for this list are that Ikko Watari has shot up from last-but-one place, while Yayoi has dropped from third among my OCs. Also, while Katsuya is first out of my OCs on both lists, I’ve decided that his Talent has enough of an impact that he’s about equal to Haruhi in a race, rather than significantly worse than her in a fight.

9. Does your wip have romance? tell me about it!! if not tell me about a friendship/important relationship in your wip!!

I was about halfway through the sixth chapter when I realised that Arata Nakayama was crushing like hell on Mayumi Uehara. Had a bit of a think about it, decided it was mutual, and edited back to chapter four to hint at more of it. It doesn’t come from a particularly positive place for either of them: Mayumi is one of the few Ultimate students who doesn’t trigger Arata’s hangups about Hope’s Peak, while Mayumi (who as a self-insert - of me, no less - is about as close to an existence of pure selfishness as you can get) notices that Arata treats her better than the rest of the cast, and likes it. But I’ve decided that their romance itself will be happy and healthy.  It’s not a major part of the story - just offstage and a side detail like most of the other romances are in DR - but it does have effects on the plot. I’ve also decided that they will also get together in the past half of TUoHS, and that they would in any non-killing-game AU.

10. Do you believe in the advice kill your darlings?

Yeah: I have had cases where getting out of a block has needed me to get rid of a particularly witty but dead-end-aimed sentence. Most recent one was during the last part of the first trial, where I had three clues left to use and wrote a pithy way of introducing the first of them. But I quickly realised that talking about that clue would set the killer off, so no-one would get the chance to bring up the other two. I had to go back and use a different clue first, even if it wasn’t quite the same slam-dunk. That’s a general point, really: ‘Kill your darlings’ is particularly important in a mystery story like TUoHS, where controlling the information each character has is crucial for keeping the story on track. If a pretty phrase gives or requires from a character details they shouldn’t know, then it needs to go.

11. Do you prefer plotting or worldbuilding? Why?

The stories I’ve written haven’t needed lots of worldbuilding; they’ve all been hugging close to the world of the originals. I’d like to be good at worldbuilding, but I suspect I won’t be nearly as good as I am at plotting.

Mpd Client For Mac

Mpd Client For Mac Free

Mpd Client For Mac Download

Mpd Client Mac Os X

It has been almost 10 years since I published my article Back to Mac OS 9, Because It’s All I Need on Low End Mac. Lots of things changed in my life since then – I got married, became a dad of three kids and I changed my job. But one thing remained in my life – Mac OS 9.

From the website: “Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.” Wikipedia has a more comprehensive description. An MPD client for macOS, written in Swift. Download M.A.L.P. MPD Client for Android to this application is a remote control for the music player daemon (www.musicpd.org). Cantata - MPD Client programs used in Windows PC, Mac OS X. MpcOSX - MPD Client programs used in Mac OS X. Theremin - MPD Client programs used in Mac OS X. This example video will help you to understand about MPD Client. As like all other music player programs, MPD also creates and manages the database for tag and path informations of music.

One could certainly ask if something is wrong with us for sticking with a 20+ year old operating system. Everyone has his/her individual answer to that. To me, Mac OS is the pinnacle of Personal Computing. I’m reminded of it every time I tweak my system to better fit my personal workflow.

Mpd Client For Mac Free

Seeing that there is still life in our community, I decided to undust my old Edelweiss column on Low End Mac. I hope to cover the latest news on Mac OS scattered around the web. And I’d like to share some practical “how-to” tips for using your Mac OS9 machine in today’s world. Because you can still do many things on them once you realize that a computer is not just a terminal to Facebook / Google / Amazon.

That said, let’s start our first LowEndMac OS9 news roundup. Bear in mind that we have to catch up with some news, so forgive me if some stuff is rather added for the sake of completeness rather than currentness.

SSHeven – a modern SSH client

Thought SSH and Mac OS was a dead end? Well, not so much anymore. “CY384” created a new SSH client for Mac OS 7 / 8 / 9. While still in an early version, it is “a functional SSH client with decent terminal emulation, able to run programs like htop and nano” as the author puts it. Needs a ‘040 Mac or PowerPC machine. Definitely one very exciting project to keep an eye on!

URL: https://github.com/cy384/ssheven

MacMPD

Every once in a while we still see cool new software for Mac OS released. Ivan Holmes’ MPD client (Music Player Daemon) for Mac OS falls into that category. Ivan created an app that lets you use your vintage Mac to connect to an instance of MPD running on another machine. If you’d like the music to play through speakers connected to your Mac, you can set up your MPD to output to an MP3 stream and then configure MacMPD to play this. Full feature-list, screenshots and downloads can be found over on his website.

URL: http://ivanholmes.co.uk/mac/macmpd/

New game: The Queen’s Footsteps

When was the last time you bought a new boxed & sealed Macintosh game? Too long ago? Then this might be your chance! The Queen’s Footsteps is a new Interactive Fiction (think Infocom!) game in which you play a female archeologist going on an adventure in the world of 1904.

The boxed copy is around 20$ + shipping and includes a floppy disk of the game as well as some goodies (a poster, stickers, …). If you’re the modern minimalist who likes his stuff only virtual, you can also download the game for free. (but it’s only half the fun, really)

The game requires System 7 and a 68000 CPU. Maybe a good reason to undust your old Macintosh SE.

URL: https://www.polyplay.xyz/The-Queens-Footsteps-Collectors-Edition-Macintosh-Diskette_1

Free image & web hosting

The Macintosh Garden has added two interesting new features – one is a very lightweight image uploader. Upload and share photos & screenshots directly from your old Mac. Pick an image and upload. You’ll get an URL for sharing. According to the Garden, there is no time constraint and the images retain full quality. However, 3 MB is the upload limit. I prefer it over any other solution on the web because it’s ad-free, reliable and fast.

URL: http://images.macintosh.garden

The second new feature is essentially a free web hosting. After sign-up you’ll receive 100 MB of storage on their server. Using an FTP client like Fetch or Transmit you can upload your assets & stuff or using it to put up a simple Website. There’s no support for PHP & databases, but then it’s completely free! If you feel you missed out on something because you never had your very own geocities website, well … this is the closest you’ll ever get!

And that is it for now! Make sure to let me know if I missed out on something and I’ll gladly add it to this or the next Mac OS news roundup. In the meantime, stay healthy and enjoy the time with your trusty old Macintosh.

Cornica – the Quicktime video archive

Cornica attempts to recreate late 90s media fascination of the young internet. It’s essentially an archive of Apple related video clips – served solely in Quicktime format. There are low-resolution versions for 68K Macs as well as “high resolution” ones. Bear in mind, high-res in 1998 was something like 640×480 🙂

Mpd Client For Mac Download

The page was specifically written in HTML 3.2, so you can take good ol’ Netscape out of the garage for a test drive. Great trip back to our youth on a rainy saturday …

URL: http://www.cornica.org

At last !

It took me more time than expected, but I finally got the beast properly compiled and bundled for Mac OS X.

Go grab Claws Mail for Mac OS X here

Beware, it’s a PPC only bundle for now. Universal bundle should follow in some weeks.

And of course the usual screenshot :

So now some explanation. In my previous post, I explained roughly how to compile Claws on Mac OS X. Since then, I have successfully embedded the whole application in a bundle, and made an image of it. More information are available on the developper page.

Mpd Client Mac Os X

Next step : recompile using GTK+ natively on Mac OS X.

The Syndicate - Chapter 5 : A last goodbye?

Pairings: Choi San X Female Reader, Park Seonghwa X Female Reader, Ateez X Female Reader

Genre: Lots of angst, Romance, Crime Fiction, Psychological Drama

Word Count: 6.7k

Tags/Warnings: For Mature Audiences, Language, Graphic Violence, Mentions of Illegal activities (i.e Kidnapping, extortion, assassination etc.), y/n gets roughed up by Wooyoung like twice , Slow Burn, Fluff sometimes, Work In Progress, Non-Idol AU, Mafia AU, Very suggestive at times, y/n cries alot, y/n having inner turmoil, Ateez being bad boys, Wooyoung and Yeosang are a little mean in this story tbh, Guns, Gunshot wounds, Assassination attempt(s), mentions death and acts of violence

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!!

Spotify Playlist🎵 | Series Masterlist📝

‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆.

It’s been about a week since the police discovered my “body”, so a change in hair color and style completely shedding everything from past me thus turning me into Someone whom I don’t fully recognize anymore. I just didn't realize how weird that was going to be. From the start I decided I wanted to attend my funeral and see my family and friends one last time and today was the day but of course I wasn’t allowed to attend by myself. San for obvious reasons wasn’t going to be the one going with me since his face is already widely known by the police. A mafia kingpin attending a police funeral was out of the question and dangerous so Seonghwa volunteered to come with me since he’s not in any of the federal databases. Not to mention the funeral will be a public one so many civilians of Ulwood and Lulens along with others from the surrounding towns will be visiting so we have a very low chance of being discovered.

While I look at myself one last time in the mirror, I make sure that nothing appearance wise was out of place. My once dark makeup has now been replaced with a more sophisticated and more glamour take on it, a tight form fitting black dress and a black trench coat over the whole ensemble with some black Mary Jane high heels to tie it all together. Definitely not something I would have normally worn but none the less it's cute at least. I stare at my freshly dyed and styled hair making me realize that seeing myself in the mirror is so haunting. I get the chills to the point it makes me feel physically sick. Internally I’m not ready to let go but on the outside I look like a completely different person now meaning I kind of have to. For my family's sake at least. I don’t look like y/n anymore so there’s no reason to hang on to my old identity. It hurts even more knowing that I’m going to have to live like this for the rest of my life all because of one selfish person. I wish I could stop feeling because maybe, just maybe it’ll make everything much more tolerable or who knows maybe i'll just grow to live with it. A knock at the door startles me, and shortly after when the door is opened I realize it’s San. He holds my hand and gently places a kiss on it looking deeply into my eyes. “You look stunning angel eyes, Seonghwa says everything is ready to go but please do me a favor and stay close to him and be careful.” I nod and tightly hug him “I really wish you could go with me.” He wraps his arms around me and kisses my shoulder “I know baby, but you know why I can’t.” I sigh burying my face in his neck, his hand immediately rests on the back of my head for a bit until he pulls back and gives me a pained smile “I promise when you come back I’ll be here okay?” I bite the inside of my lip and nod. San leads me out of my room and helps me make my way outside holding my hand down the stairs.

Immediately upon stepping foot outside I see it’s very downcast, how fitting. Shitty weather for a shitty day. Either way I decide to put on some sunglasses realizing my eyes are probably not going to be open unless I’m wearing them since despite it being cloudy and a bit rainy it was oddly bright out. After San helps me make my way into to the car where Seonghwa was waiting, he looks over at me and chuckles “Wow, you really do look like a different person now but, in a good way.” I force a smile and say under my breath “Yep, now to keep up the act. If anyone asks I’m Lola, one of y/n’s friends and you’re my boyfriend. Got it?” He turns on the ignition and he turns to me with a slight grin on his face “Okay, got it. Luckily we somewhat match.” I look over and notice Seonghwa wearing a simple black dress shirt and black tailored dress up pants with a black wool overcoat, his undercut slightly styled for a more dressed up look. I bite the inside of my lip and stifle a laugh. “Well I mean of course it’s a funeral Hwa.” He turns away hiding his smile. "Right, my mistake darling."

Once we arrive it was raining, but not very hard to where we needed an umbrella. Just in case Seonghwa takes the umbrella in the glove box. He gives me a very faint smile and offers me his free arm “Ready?” I nod and link my arm with his, while walking to the ceremony site I notice a lot of familiar faces, some being the commissioner of the Ulwood police, Detective Chris, my family, and Captain Lee just to name a few. The ceremony begins and Seonghwa gently nudges me and leans in and whispers “If you need to cry, do it. It will give you closure.” I nod and I stand there watching my own funeral. For a few minutes I can’t wrap my head around what I’m watching until I see my own mother and father cry over their own daughter’s death. I don’t know why but it broke something in me, I felt it. I tighten my grip around Seonghwa’s arm while I swallow hard to try and get rid of the huge knot in my throat. Seonghwa looks over at me and has my head rest on the side of his arm. It isn’t until I notice my former partner Chris who was there comforting my mother while my father stood there with a very empty look in his eyes that my vision slowly blurs and I silently begin to cry. I hug Seonghwa’s arm tightly and he pulls me into a hug gently patting my head. Never again after this will I see my family and the people I care about, I can’t even give them a proper goodbye. My heart hurts for my family and friends, the fucking balls that old geezer has to even show his face here. This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for him. Once the commissioner makes an opening speech Captain Lee stands close by the commissioner where he calls him up to the podium. Before anything he briefly looks around to the attendees before speaking. “Detective y/n/ln was a one of a kind subordinate, she worked hard and was great at her job. To her being a detective wasn’t just a job, it was in her blood to serve and protect the community she loved and grew up in. Sadly she was taken from us too soon and she will be dearly missed. I promise we will bring justice to her and her memory, just how she brought justice to many people in her community. I, Captain Steven Lee will make sure those people pay.” I clench my fists in my pockets.

Seeing that man lie through his teeth makes my insides churn, and if it wasn’t for all these people I would have risked it all to kill this dirty old man already. A few moments after Captain Lee finishes his speech Detective Chris takes the stand and unfolds a piece of paper presumably his speech “Well, I never thought I’d be having to stand here recalling memories of how great my partner Detective y/ln was but here we are, the sad reality of it.” Chris stops for a moment, takes a deep breath and continues. “She was someone you could really count on, the amount of times she saved me from getting in trouble was pretty comical. She was also very hardworking and was determined to always solve the case she was working on because in her own words she “Wanted to bring peace to the victims and family.” She was also the kindest person I knew, so much so that she always bought me coffee every morning just to help me wake up because of my tendency to stay up working. Me and her were a dynamic duo, the best partner anyone could ask for but at the same time she was a prodigy in the making in her own line of work. So to you y/ln, I hope you’re doing alright. I’ll finish what you started and will always be a great inspiration to me.” Chris’ gaze lowers, his eyes looking very sleepless and tired. He folds up the piece of paper and walks over to retrieve my parents. He helps adjust the microphone for my mother and stands next to her in case my parents needed help. She then says in the most broken tone of voice I've ever heard my mom speak in “Burying one’s child is a mother’s worst nightmare, but the way my daughter was killed was a very violent and horrible death. My only wish is for those people to be caught and bring my daughter the justice she deserves.”

Hearing my mother’s broken voice causes tears to begin running down my cheeks again, seeing those eyes of sadness. “My daughter was the sweetest girl you’d ever meet, so caring and loving. I’m proud to say that I’m her mother because she was so talented at catching the bad people out there, she was committed in blood, sweat and tears to helping people because it was something she really loved. She was a very kind soul. Sweetheart…” Her voice trails off and both my dad and Chris gently hold and pats her back. “Sweetheart, my little y/n I hope you’re in a better place. You know mom, dad and everyone close to you loves you so much. Especially me and your dad, we love you so much and we very much miss you everyday that you’ve been gone, I love you so much my little angel and may you be in peace my beautiful little girl.” Right after finishing her speech my mom begins to cry, while my teary eyed father and Chris help walk my mom off the stand. I heard the pain in her cries, she was hurt. Who could blame her, she thinks I’m dead. Almost like if it was on queue a low rumble of thunder echoes and the rain begins to fall heavily. I turn to Seonghwa and in a very hushed tone I say “Let’s go.” I turn around with a huge knot in my throat and begin to walk away as fast as my legs could take me not caring how the heeled part of my shoes sunk into the already muddy ground. Eventually when he catches up to me after I've come to a hard halt, and in one swift motion he puts the umbrella over me. One of my aunts looks over to Seonghwa and I slowly approaching us

"Hi sweetheart I don't want to be a bother but I swear you look familiar, I don't think I've ever seen you before though." My stomach drops and I gently squeeze Seonghwa's arm while a small smile forms on my lips "I'm very certain we've never met before ma'am I'm one of y/n's closest friends. My name is Lola and this is my boyfriend." Seonghwa extends his hand and shakes my aunt's hand and says "I'm Jun, another close friend of y/n, It's very nice meeting you ma'am." My aunt reaches over to shake Seonghwa's hand and while reaching over to hold mine she says "Wow, looking at you closely you look and sound kind of like her too but I think it's just my head playing tricks on me. It still just hasn't dawned on me her she's gone. None of this feels real." I nod then I rest my other hand over hers gently squeezing it and not letting go. Something inside me isn’t letting me let go. "Yes, few people have commented we looked alike pretty frequently and even called us sisters but in all honesty we're polar opposites. She was always way funnier that's for sure but I see where you're coming from because me and Jun miss her so much, right babe?" I look back at Seonghwa and he nods and says in a somber tone "Yes we do miss her alot, she loved coming over to our place and have dinner with us since she lived alone." My aunt smiles "I'm glad she had some very sweet friends who looked out for her and helped her feel less alone. She always did tell me she felt lonely." She looks over where the gathering was being held and says "Well I'll let you guys go now, it was nice meeting you two, please take care." I wave goodbye in fear of her hearing my voice break and under my breath with the smallest whisper I respond "You too, please take care."

I don’t even make it inside the car before I remove my sunglasses and I break down, my legs giving out from under me causing me to kneel holding onto the side of the car. Seonghwa gives me a look of worry and kneels over to my side making sure he's covering the both of us under the umbrella and he holds me tight. He stays quiet for a while listing to my sobs then he lets out a sigh “I’m so sorry y/n. I can’t imagine how you feel, it must be the worst pain imaginable.” He helps me up while I bury my face in his chest unable to keep it together “Hwa...It hurts. I can’t live with myself knowing I’ve inflicted so much pain. I can’t do it. I can't live with this for the rest of my life.” I hold the fabric of his wool jacket tightly. I feel him rest his chin on top of my head while clearing the stray hairs away from my face. He slightly lowers his face down to my ear and with a voice low enough so that only I could hear him he gently rests his forehead on the side of my head “Please don’t say that, I know it hurts but just remember they’ll be okay. The pain they’re feeling now is only temporary. Think about it this way, he can’t threaten you with anything because he thinks you’re dead. I promise you we’re all going to help you, San is going to help you. You both have the same goal and it’s to get rid this guy, you’ve got the upper hand now he’ll be gone much sooner than originally planned.” He gently pats my head and steps back gently wiping away the tears under my eyes. I look up at him still teary eyed and bottom lip still slightly trembling “Thank you for being the brother I never had Hwa.” He furrows his eyebrows and gives me a melancholy expression clearly forcing a smile “Of course, I’ve grown to care a lot about you so It hurts to see you hurting like this.” He breaks eye contact causing us to both look around and realize the ceremony was about to end so he turns back to me and softly says “Come on let’s go, you need some rest. You’re probably exhausted.”

When we arrive back at the headquarters I kick off my shoes immediately upon stepping into my room, I remove my coat and wrap myself under my covers and lay there not really caring that my dress and legs are still slightly wet from the funeral. I lay there crying to the point my eyes could no longer cry feeling completely numb for what felt like hours, it wasn’t until there was a knock at my door. I decide not to answer from the lack of energy I had left in me. Suddenly the door opens and it was San, he walks in and quietly closes the door behind him. He glances at me and notices I’m awake and sits next to me. “Hey, how are you doing? Seonghwa told me what happened, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to comfort you. ” He gently strokes my hair and continues “Look at you, I can’t stand seeing you like this, I’ll stay here for as long as you need me.” I shake my head and finally gather up the strength to say in a low voice “Just go. Just leave me here, I don’t have the energy to talk to anyone.” He gently strokes my cheek with his thumb and says “We don’t have to talk, I can just sit here and give you company. You’re in a really delicate state right now and I can’t just leave you to dwell in your own thoughts like that. I know how dark it can get.” I lay there staring at the ground with an expressionless gaze, San lays down behind me and turns me around so that my head is comfortably resting on his chest. His scent being something that’s become a thing of comfort, something to help remind me that I’m not alone. Sadly at the moment, my emotions aren’t registering it at all and I lay there completely still with my brain constantly replaying everything again from the way my mother cried and my dad’s empty gaze to Chris’ sleepless and exhausted look in his eyes. I don't think any of that is going to leave me anytime soon. San presses his lips on my shoulder from behind me “What am I going to do now?” he hums in response and I continue "After all this is over, will I have to start over or am I going to have to come clean to my family?” San rests his chin on my shoulder “Well, I think that’s your call babe. It all depends on what you feel is right. I think when the moment comes you'll figure it out.” Well that didn’t help. Maybe I should just wait until it happens, maybe things will change for the better. I turn in San’s direction and gently stroke his cheek with my thumb. “You’re right, I guess I just need a little more time to think about it.” He smiles and kisses my forehead showing me his dimpled smile.

“Don't think about it too much right now. How about we just relax and get your mind off of it." San clears my hair from my face and lovingly looks into my eyes and leans in to place his lips onto mine while holding onto my face. His free hand slowly roams around my body before settling on my lower back. He slowly kisses down to my neck gently leaving a soft trail of kisses. "I can make you feel good baby." His hand gently squeezes my thigh and bites my neck causing me to let out a soft sigh. I can't do this, it doesn't feel right. I'm supposed to be mourning, or at least for tonight. It'll be so wrong of me to give in to temptation under this circumstance. Before he's able to kiss me any lower I pull away "Wait no, San. Stop." He worriedly furrows his eyebrows and responds slightly out of breath from working himself up "y/n? Is everything okay?" I gently cup my hands onto his face "Please let's not do this.. I-I can't right now. It doesn't feel right. I know you wanted to help me forget but I can't right now. " He gives me a soft dimpled smile "Of course princess. I won't force you to do anything you don't want to. I'm so sorry I even tried something like that it was very disrespectful of me." Wow, he apologized and accepted the boundaries I set? Any other guy would have definitely gotten upset about that. "It's just, it's not the right time right now." He kisses my forehead and pulls me closer to him "I understand angel eyes you don't need to apologize, just close your eyes baby. I'll stay here with you." He really is very convincing at being someone's boyfriend, I just can't help but to think how nice it would have been if we were both just regular people. If maybe I still wasn't so scared of him. Maybe I can dream about it without it breaking my heart because in all honesty I can only imagine how he'd feel knowing I still struggle to see the "real" San despite how kind he's been. I close my eyes slowly drifting off to sleep while he gently strokes my hair.

Eventually my thoughts put me to sleep till the next morning, San was sleeping next to me only to realize my makeup wasn’t on anymore. Did he actually remove my makeup while I was asleep? If so, that was very thoughtful of him. I get up and walk into the shower and just stand there with a blank mind until I find the strength to finish showering. As much as I want to stay in bed and mope around and just dwell in my sadness I can’t, and I won’t rest until that man has paid his debts. I know I'm pretty weak minded in things like love but for sure not when it comes to getting people back. Once I’m done I slowly open the door to the bathroom, careful not to wake San up from his sleep. I tippy toe back into the bed and cuddle with him for a few minutes, he realizes my soapy scent and buries his face on the crook of my neck clearly very comfortable until I very delicately and gently stroke his hair and kiss his cheek “Sannie, time to wake up.” I hear a pouty groan escape his lips and says under his breath “5 more minutes.” I gently kiss his cheek and I say “Sannie please?” He sleepily looks up at me, gives me a small smile and pulls me into a soft kiss and says “Well, good morning angel eyes.” I smile and I say “Good morning.” San gently cups his hand on my cheek and gently rubs my cheek with his thumb giving me a dimpled smile “Your smile, it came back.” I nod and look at San reassuringly “Well, as much as I don’t have the strength for anything and I wish I could lay here and do nothing but be sad and cry. It’s not going to fix anything.” San sits up and sighs. “That was me when I lost my father, I felt exactly that same way. So, I know where you’re coming from. I know you didn’t exactly lose anyone to death but the fact that you won’t be seeing them again kind of counts as one.” I nod silently and feel San’s arms wrap around me and says “Again, I’m sorry I wasn’t there but knowing Seonghwa was there to comfort you makes me feel a little better. Although I’m jealous because he’s not recognized at all meanwhile the whole police department knows who I am and what I look like. I hate to think that at one point I didn’t think it even mattered, I just wanted to be feared. But now it hurts knowing that for being so easily recognizable I couldn’t attend an event so important to you.”

He takes a small pause and says in a very broken tone “I’m so sorry.” He buries his face in my neck while I gently pat his head “Hey it’s okay, I understand your situation but look to be fair you didn’t even know me back then anyway so how could you have known? It really is okay, as long as I have you here now it really doesn’t matter at all so don’t be so hard on yourself.” I sit there waiting for San to answer but he never does. “Come on, please don’t feel bad for me It really is okay I promise. Yes, I’m still sad about yesterday but seeing my parents and other people I care about brought me so much peace and closure. Even Seonghwa told me how now that Captain Lee thinks I’m dead he has nothing to try and threaten anyone with because I’m already dead and he doesn’t know I’m working for you.” I’m going to try and hide how much I’m dying on the inside for you, so I don’t make you feel responsible for any of my pain. The thought of burdening anyone with it doesn't settle well with me. “Ah come on, let’s go eat I know you’re hungry come on.” I get up and I grab both of his arms and try to pull him up “Come on!!” He looks at me with a and finally gets up “Okay, I am kind of hungry actually” While he buttons up his shirt he pulls me in for a kiss. I giggle amid the kiss and pull back "I was talking about food silly" He raises his eyebrow and feigns innocence "Yeah, that's what I was referring to. What were you thinking of you dirty girl?" I stammer feeling my cheeks burn "I thought that's why you-" He chuckles seeing me struggle to form a sentence "You're so cute when you're flustered, it makes it even more satisfying knowing It was because of me." He rolls up his sleeves and leans in to kiss my forehead "I'll see you downstairs in the kitchen angel eyes."

San manages to sneak out of my room unnoticed leaving me alone in the room trying to compose myself from whatever "that" was. Giving me plenty of time to get ready for the day but a few minutes later while heading down the hall I bump into Hongjoong “I was just about to come look for you but if you’re up for it could you come and help me?" I look at the white haired man and realize he was waiting for me to answer so I let out a small hum queuing to continue speaking "So I’m trying to overload the police department's servers...” I slightly raise an eyebrow “Wait, why do that? We have access to all of their documents, reports and stuff like that on the servers.” A small smirk creeps onto his face and says “True, but we’re going to override the security camera servers which is conveniently and stupidly connected to the police department servers and no, we’re not doing this to take information” I tilt my head “What’s it for then?” He shrugs realizing asking me was a mistake “I’m not sure?” I slightly narrow my eyes “What? I'm so confused. Please don’t tell me San is planning something..” Hongjoong shakes his head “Nah.” I cross my arm in front of my chest “Okay, then what’s it for?” He rolls his eyes and begins to walk past me “Nevermind..” I walk behind Hongjoong and grab onto the sleeve of his hoodie and immediately he turns and gives me a glare “Please don’t.” I hold onto his sleeve a little tighter “Just tell me, is it bad?” Hongjoong looks at me then shifts his gaze behind me and stays silent. “Wasn’t expecting you to ask so many questions, maybe you should just do as you’re told. That’s all you’re good for anyway.” A familiar voice booms behind me scaring me half to death, which is none other than Wooyoung. It was only now that I notice the delicate mole under his eye decorating his signature scowl so I let go of Hongjoong’s sleeve and fully turn to Wooyoung “Can’t I just ask why I’m doing something?” He forces a very ill intended smile narrowing his eyes “You do as you’re told around here last time I checked no questions asked.” I shake my head “Sorry, I’m under San’s command not yours because last time I checked San was the boss around here.” He darkly chuckles and slowly walks towards me “You really love to run your mouth don’t you?”

I only now realize that not only is Hongjoong long gone but Wooyoung is now cornering me in such a way where my back hits the railing to the indoor balcony right before going down the stairs. Without another word Wooyoung grabs me by the throat catching me off guard from how sudden it was and pushes me so far back to where my feet are off the ground and I’m teetering between falling down onto the marble floor below and being able to stand on my own feet. By instinct I reach over and claw at Wooyoung’s iron fist. “I hate you, you know that? I wish I could just see your itty little cop brain splatter onto the floor below.” He says with anger seething though his words “Wooyou-” I manage to hoarsely utter before he cuts me off “You wanted to know why I had Hongjoong ask you to help him overload the servers?” Without waiting for me to utter anything else he continues while keeping a constant iron grip around my throat. “Because we’re breaking into the Evidence room to get what we need. There, happy? See how anti climactic that was? And here you were making a huge deal about it by asking too many questions when you could have just agreed as you were asked.” He pulls me back and lets go of my throat causing me to fall to the ground and immediately reach for my throat while violently coughing. The dark haired male stifles a laugh “Oh come on I wasn’t even squeezing that hard.” I glare up at him while coughing only receiving a taunting smirk whilst he walks away “You won't speak to San about this or I'll make sure you don't speak again, see ya around..” After a few more seconds of coughing I mange to catch my breath and head downstairs. Fuming not only from the situation with Wooyoung but the fact that San is willing to not only sacrifice lives but also get ourselves caught all over something he could wait to retrieve.

I head to the kitchen and notice San was there eating a bowl of cereal, he smiles and waves at me while he signals me to sit next to him “This is sudden but, can I ask you something?” Feeling my eyes already threatening to betray me San nods while shoving a spoonful of cereal in his mouth “So when were you planning on telling me about AS breaking in to the police department’s evidence room?” I sit next to him and noticed he stopped chewing, and very carefully swallows his cereal “Who told you?” My stomach drops seeing him slowly turn his head to look at me. I know Wooyoung threatened me not to speak but I can't just take it silently and watch San screw himself over like that so I manage to swallow my fear and respond with an expressionless look. “Wooyoung, he told me needed me to help override the police department’s servers. San, you do know that most of the people that go on that heist might not come back at all right? Not only that but do you realize you’re risking all of us getting caught? ” He sits back on the chair and crosses his arms in front of his chest and lets out a sigh “Yeah I know, but just as easily as people die I can easily replace them and for the getting caught part that’s not going to happen because we’re all going to be extra careful..” I look away slightly taken a back from his statement trying to find words to answer him. Why am I not surprised? I know who this man is and what he does. I guess my love for him has somewhat turned into me seeing him with rose colored glasses. Something that if you asked me about a few months ago I would have refused to believe but here I am remembering the harsh reality that this isn’t just any guy. “Okay then why exactly am I here if we’re going to do things the way you’ve always done them, reckless and messily?” He shrugs “You know why, we’re not going to talk about it here.” He's shutting down. I look at him slightly irritated and tilt my head “Excuse me? You’re acting as if that cufflink is your top priority right now and it shouldn’t be, we need to take down Captain Lee before we even get to the cufflink understand that. Barging in like that will only upset him and you know that. Being impatient won’t work in your favor and it’s only going to get you caught much faster, you’re so reckless. It’s not all about you anymore, you promised we were both going to take him down. So either we do it the right way or I go and do it on my own. I’m sorry but I can’t leave that man to walk away free. He ruined my life!” He turns to me with a darkened gaze “No, you’re not going anywhere. You can’t leave.” I stare him down with anger seething in my gaze causing his to soften, in a soft voice he says while reaching over to hold my hand “Please...Don’t.” I get up, pull my hand away “Then think about it.” I get up and leave before he's able to respond.

I decide to walk around the headquarters aimlessly trying to calm myself down. It's the beginning of the day and already way too much has happened. Wooyoung is a problem, especially with the part where he nearly threw me off the second floor just because I asked a simple question. I really need to be careful around him, I need to tell someone but It can’t be San though. I know for a fact that he’ll make a rash decision, something tells me that he's crazy enough to kill him if I say something. I just can't let San be reckless anymore either, not just because of the Captain Lee situation but because I really grew to care about him and I don’t want him to end up in jail and possibly get murdered for his affiliations and ties in the Mafia world. I need him to realize he can’t just do what he wants without there being consequences for his actions. He has to understand things will never be solved if he keeps being reckless, because someone will always find a way to take advantage of that recklessness and it'll lead to what I fear the most these days which is him getting hurt or worse. San getting killed.

While stuck in my thoughts I bump into Jongho, he looks over at me and smiles “Hey y/n good morning.” I force a smile and say “Oh good morning Jongho.” He cocks his eyebrow with a puzzled look “What are you doing here, you’ve never been all the way over here. Are you looking for something?” I shake my head slowly and look down while fidgeting my hands, he puts his hand on my shoulder “y/n? Is something wrong?” I clasp my hands together and I very carefully look back up at him “Well, Wooyoung almost threw me over the railing and I thought I was going to die but I'll get to that later, because I also kinda got upset at San and told him he was being reckless because I’m sure you know of the heist he was planning to do right?” Jongho’s jaw drops and pats my shoulder and whispers “What?! What do you mean you almost died?! And yeah, I knew about it. In fact we all do.” I shake my head “You’re all going to get yourselves killed.” He blinks in confusion and I answer back in an increasingly irritated voice “Is everyone dumb around here?! We’re supposed to kill captain Lee first this heist is basically a suicide mission, you won’t get out alive and if you do you'll for sure be followed. I’m telling you this because I know.” Jongho pats my back again trying to calm me down “Okay, calm down. I think maybe San isn’t thinking very clearly but then again he isn’t really the type to care if any of his foot soldiers get hurt because he can always find new ones.” I cross my arms in front of my chest “Yeah, I’m trying to get him to be more low key about everything now, there’s no way we’ll get rid of Captain Lee if he’s expecting us.“ Jongho presses his lips together and lets out a small exhale “Yeah but San is...you know. He’s obsessed about making everyone fear him. Not to mention his father's death just made his hate towards Lee and everyone else more evident. He gets drunk off of feeling powerful which is why he’s so reckless, of course for a while he calmed down when you first arrived for some odd reason but he’s going at it again. The sad part is we all have to follow his orders even if we don’t agree with them..” I slowly nod while I focus my gaze at a distance. “Well, I made it very clear that if he doesn’t change his plans I was going to take matters into my own hands and handle it on my own.”

What else am I supposed to do? As scared as I am to defy San I can’t let that person live without paying for what he’s done. “Did he get upset?” he asks in a slightly worried tone, and I shrug. “I don't know, all I know is that it got him thinking.” Jongho stands there for a few seconds processing everything “Well, if you manage to change his mind that would be nice. If not, seeing you go off by yourself will most certainly worry me and Seonghwa considering you have nowhere to go.” I smile and I gently pat Jongho’s arm “Nah, don’t worry about me I’ll be fine. I have a feeling San isn’t going to tell me to leave.” San can’t be that selfish right? He's been nothing but caring and sweet, I hope he wasn’t just being nice to me and asked me to be his girlfriend just so he could find a way to control me. Jongho chuckles and says “Wait, what makes you say that?” Instantly I realize I just hinted at something I wasn’t supposed to. I shrug while I take a strand of my dyed hair and tuck it behind my right ear “I don’t know, I mean San and I grew pretty close, there’s no reason he'd send away a friend like that.” He approvingly nods “Honestly despite how violent San's schemes are he has a big heart. He protects it behind that tough exterior and pretends he doesn’t care but in reality I can tell he knows his heart is his major weakness which reminds me it’s actually rare for him to immediately trust someone so quickly and become so vulnerable. How did you do it?” I slightly force a laugh and say “Why the sudden interest? Is it really that weird?” He crosses his arms and gently taps his foot on the floor “Okay don’t take this the wrong way because I’m just being honest, but yes it kinda is a little weird.” I stand there with a million thoughts running through my mind then I blurt out “Not as weird as the hatred Wooyoung has for me, I’m still in shock I was a hair away from dying.” Jongho sighs looks around and slightly lowers his voice again “Wooyoung unfortunately acts on his own, and no one can keep a grip on him except San. I’m sorry you’re continuously having to endure trauma back to back. I'm sure it's very distressing.” I nod “I understand, I just wanted to tell someone here in case he actually does end up killing me.” He reaches for my shoulder again and gives me a squeeze of reassurance “Rest assured he won’t, he knows this because if he does San won’t hesitate to kill him. Wooyoung also respects San too much to ever defy him so I’m pretty sure he’s just picking on you because it’s the only thing he can get away with.”

Part of me has a feeling that most likely the simple answer is also because he hates cops, so he picks on me because he can't kill me. Which I understand. He just always seems to point it out. Before I’m able to even say a word San calls my name out from down the hallway. Both Jongho and I turn and look at San then at each other and while he walks towards us Jongho says under his breath “We’ll talk later, this stays between us.” Jongho looks over at San who was now a few feet away from us he says “ I’ll leave you two to talk” San grabs Jongho’s shoulder and stops him from walking away “No, actually I want you to listen too so you can help me tell everyone else but we’re actually postponing this heist. y/n made me realize we’re putting a lot at steak with the heist.. ” San looks at Jongho almost like he was telepathically telling him something, then Jongho nods in understandment “No need to worry, I’ll let everyone know.” A small smile grows onto San’s face as he pats Jongho’s shoulder “You can go now, I just wanted to let you know about this as soon as possible. You should gather everyone to let them know, I’d do it now but I have a special job I need y/n to work on that I need to explain to her.” I look over at San with a blank expression, I have no idea what’s happening or how he managed to change his mind so quickly. So he really does care about me and was serious about not wanting me to leave.

Jongho walks off leaving both San and I alone, eventually a few seconds later he breaks the silence. “So, I realized you’re probably bored and you probably want something to do right?” San shoves his hands in his pockets and we begin walking down the hall “I mean yeah I do kinda get bored sometimes why? Are we going to do something about Captain Lee now?” San presses his lips into a feigned smile “Actually, about that. Right now I have a few things up my sleeve but I’ll let you know about it later. What I really want you to do right now is I was wondering if you could run a few errands for me” My eyes immediately narrow and I turn to look at San “What kind of errands?” He fixes his rolled up sleeves “I’m going to give you a list of a few people I need you to investigate for me, we’re planning on working with these people but I’m still not sure if we should trust them. I need you to find their connections and see if they’re reliable. The moment I find out they’re working with the enemy I’m going to drop them. Also, you’ll also be able to leave the headquarters as you please in case you need to observe them.” I smile and tightly hug San, he responds by gently patting my back then returning my hug. “Oh?” I pull back and clasp my hands together “I'm sorry. I just got excited because I finally get to be of use now and because you trust me. That really means a lot. Not to mention this might benefit us...I mean you, not me.” His mouth curves into a warm smile “No, you’re right it’ll benefit you too. You’ll be able to gain more experience from this and you’ll be able to maintain your abilities sharp. I know you’re able to take care of yourself but remember that if things get difficult don’t hesitate to let me know, I don’t want you to get hurt. “ San walks up to a door in the hallway and opens it then looks back at me “I also made sure to get you your own workspace, I know it’s still somewhat empty but I was thinking maybe you’d like to decorate it yourself and make it your own.” I peek my head inside the dimly lit room and l notice there was a small desk and a computer. The room was small but not small enough to where it felt cramped. It was the perfect size. I turn to look at San who was already looking at me with a shy smile on his face “So, do you like it? Or is the room too small?” I quickly shake my head and reach over to grab his hand “No, It’s perfect. Back at the station I only had my work desk and computer in the same cramped room as everyone else and that’s it only higher ranking people had offices so this makes me feel a bit special. Thank you.” He walks over to the desk and gently pats it for me to sit down. I sit down on the crinkly new leather chair. When I meet San's eyes he gives me a weird indecipherable look.

He then pulls out a phone from his pocket and hands it to me and says “Please don’t make me regret giving this to you.” I take the phone and I shake my head “No, of course not. I promise I’m not going to do what you’re thinking. I promise I don’t have any plans of helping the police and you should know that. I'm all yours.” I give him a soft smile and he immediately says “Alright, so I’ll leave you to it. I have to go but remember, I love you.” I let out a soft scoff and I say “Stop phrasing things so weird, you sound like you’re going to die or something.” San forces a half hearted smile and says “Of course I’m not going to die I just wanted you to know that’s all.” He leans over to me and gently kisses my forehead reaching into his pocket and putting a fat wad of cash in the palm of my hand "I’ll get going now, get yourself something nice you deserve it.” Before I'm even able to say something I stay seated in my chair and stare at the phone and the wad of cash he gave me. He’s acting a bit weird, something tells me something bad is going to happen.

‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆. ✧˚₊‧⋆‧‧⋆ ✧˚₊‧⋆.

If you would like to be on the taglist DM me or leave a comment!✨

Tag List: @cromerteez @thanxx1117 @kisaane-not @atinyreads @hxneebxbee @itsvxlentine @ahhhhhhhhhghh @atinytinaa @atinyluv238 @damagelove @altgojo @steviesbergthuis @yourfatherlucifer @yeosangsbbg @tunaasan @lovjensoo

Please Reblog if you liked it! 🔁

Previous Chapter

8, 9 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 20

(I love you)

8. Which OC is your favorite?

DAMN. What kind of question is this, my word. I’ll go by WIP.

Vanishing Act: Victoria because of her personal growth.

Laws of Immortals (series): Vincent because of his heart, all he’s gone through and his dedication. And love for black. (I admit I also have a bit of a soft spot for Julius because he’s so open to being himself)

Absit Omen: Striker because despite all the trash he has to go through in this story he’s a ride or die with Deborah.

Coded: THADDEUS. Because he’s the voice of reason and the goth dad of everyone. Also love his marriage, 10/10 relationship goals, he loves Dante.

9. Which OC is an absolute pain to write?

Lol not long ago I wrote that it’s Keith Reeds from Coded because he’s damn stubborn. I can do as many OC development exercises and prompts, AUs, memes, anything, and I still struggle to get a hang of him. You can read my wails here.

11: Share the last paragraph you wrote.

That’d be from Coded, and it was the following:

“He hates me.” Victoria said, drinking from the mug. Thaddeus took a very deep breath and said, “…yes.” Victoria clinked her nails with the mug and looked down.

“I never meant to let you guys down.” she whispered, then wiped a stray liquid drop from the corner of her mouth, “I was scared but…I let it take the best of me.”

“You did.” Thaddeus replied

“I don’t want to be like Titus.”

“You’re not.” Victoria turned to look at the mob boss, “For starters, you came back to us.” Victoria offered him a shy smile as Thaddeus went on, “Titus only thinks of himself and didn’t think twice about sacrificing his own friends. You came back to us, even after such a mistake, to own up to it and help. Oh, Vicky,” he pulled her into a hug, which she reciprocated by resting her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes, “You could never be like Titus.”

“Thanks, Thaddeus.”

12. Share a dumb line from an old WIP.

Although I delete old WIPs unless I keep working on them (which means I can’t find lines per se from old WIPs), I can tell you that Absit Omen was originally called “Trixie Trillian and the Soul Hunters” and was about a 20 something year old named (you guessed it) Trixie Trillian that had to hunt down specific souls and bring them to Death before some other guys got them in exchange of seeing her brother one last time. It was going to have a sequel, “Trixie Trillian and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” but I got bored with it and abandoned the WIP until I adapted the plot and characters to today’s Absit Omen.

14. How long does it take you to write 500 words on a good day? On a bad one? 

On a good day, 500 words come to me in an hour an a half, approximately. On a bad day, it takes me all day. Literally. There’s no in betweens.

15. How do you name settings/characters?

It depends, and varies on each case. I generally start by guiding myself with the setting of the story.

With Laws of Immortals, which is set in 2001-2009 England, I firstly looked through baby names databases/pages for English names for some characters, and kind of…felt it? Idk, I just would go like “don’t like Bruce…don’t like Ethan…don’t like Harold…hm, Derek’s fine. Ok, MC’s name is Derek. Derek what?…don’t like Harrison…don’t like Georges…don’t like McDonald…Wells? Derek Wells? Sure, why not.” Of course, there’s cases where I had to change the database to either another country (Jacques, Julius and his real name, Xitlali, Adam, Stefan, Paul) or another time era (Vincent, Marbella, Sylvester) because of other cultures in England and, y’know, vampires. I use real places in England/London so I didn’t have to make much up.

Coded is a sci-fi cyberpunk story where I had to make up settings as well as some names, so I used the “feeling” method a lot. I also took words on my native language (Spanish) and either changed the order or took away/added letters to already existing words to make names or surnames (one of the rebels is called Halley Kaderno, for her surname I grabbed the word “cuaderno”, notebook, and started to play around with it until I got “Kaderno”, or simply replacing an “a” with a “u” for Pandu). Some characters felt alright when I made up their names, others felt better with “normal” names that were adapted to this universe. It was pretty similar with places. I gave myself a bit more freedom to use “normal” names in Vanishing Act since it’s set in a steampunk-meets-1920′s world, so while there’s folks named Walter, Gabrielle, Zoe and Anna, I also wanted interesting names for the people in the circus, like Magnus and Balthazar.

Absit Omen is a mix of these two because while the town is set in fictional Sento, California (and, I admit I used the help of a generator for this one), people’s names were sought in baby name websites and I would just go through them until I found the one that would fit. Except Striker’s. Striker’s name came to me in a dream, no joke. And the AngerPassion’s was a headache to come up with. Had to read a whole lot of angelology and demonology for their name and the other angels’.

17. How far along are you in your current WIP? How long have you been working on it? 

I’m not as far as I’d like to be due to college and my own negligence when sitting down to write. I used NaNoWriMo in November 2017 to progress Laws of Immortals but real life got in the way, and pretty much the same happened during Camp NaNoWriMo earlier this year. However I’ve discovered that when I have people waiting and expecting for a new part of the story I’m writing, it’s easier for me to produce because I want people to enjoy something I made, so hopefully a tag for my art and telling more of my friends will help me write more.

As for the second question, I’ve spent on average 2 or 3 years per WIP because I like to take my time when fleshing them out, creating characters, settings, plot, etc. I want things to be ready and clear before writing.

20. What’s the most time you’ve ever spent on one WIP?

…this is the saddest answer I’ll ever give with my writing, it’s probably the two weeks in last year’s NaNoWriMo lmao that’s bad, but in those two weeks I progressed considerably so I know that if I organize myself this year and work daily and with discipline, I can progress much faster and maybe even finish one of my WIPs.

In The City Of Meatbot-Powered Killers (part 6) by molotok_c_518

(WARNING: I can only mark this as "Series." I can't tag this with cannibalism, strong language, disturbing images, etc. If you are at-all squeamish, click away now.)

Table of Contents

Part 5

The Army waited too long. The eclipse inadvertently took care of their plan.

Today, when the helicopter rolled through, it found a small knot of bot-ridden, maybe 75-100, waiting for them. A few more trickled in, but it was nowhere near the 1000-2000 that swarmed the area yesterday.

When the Army did their meat-dump yesterday, it seemed like the mass of bodies was set... but at the height of the feeding frenzy, when the Bacchanalia seemed to be ready to go on forever, the sky began to dim.

Every one of the afflicted looked up, and just stared at the Sun for the duration. It was eerie as hell, as the entire horde was absolutely still through the entire occlusion. When it was done, they all scattered haphazardly.

I'm pretty sure they're all blind, too, because most of them were running into each other, trees, benches... their retinas are all burned out now.

That makes my escape more complicated now, as I was actually going to use the planned cannibal barbecue as a diversion, and a trigger to kick off the detonation of all of my research and equipment. I have no idea what the Army will do, now that they can't eliminate a large chunk of the impediment to accessing me in one fell swoop.

Meanwhile, I've been tending to my little reclamation project.

Her name is {Jane}, and she was the CAD person on the ceramic car project. In a way, she was the third or fourth domino in the fall of [REDACTED]: It was she who got Steve fired for stalking her, which put a copy of his badge in Bobby's pocket.

She has been healing up very well physically. I've been feeding her as much as she'll eat, which is nowhere near as much as she needed when she was infested with the bad 'bots. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say she was close to what she weighed before all Hell broke loose.

Emotionally, though... that's a whole other story.

About 36 hours ago, I untied her hands so she could eat by herself. She made no move to attack me, but she made no move to escape, either. It was like she had put a large amount of distance between herself and the real world.

I'm patient... ish. I fed her some more, then hunted up some clothes for her. I gave them to her, untied the rest of her, then left the room for an hour to let her get changed.

With the weight back on her frame, her dark brown hair grown back in (thanks to some meatbot tweaks, which we programmed in to help chemo patients retain their coiffure and their dignity), and wearing baggy clothes several sizes too big, she looked kind of... alluring.

"Hi," I said. "Are you ready to try and talk?"

She nodded. An encouraging first step, I thought.

"How are you feeling?"

"Strange," she whispered. "Like... free, but not. I can leave?"

I nodded. "I wouldn't advise it, though. There are a lot of blind bot-ridden wandering around out there."

She shuddered. "I'll stay here with you until this is over, then. I don't want to go back to... that."

"You remember it all, then."

Nod.

"Tell me. I might be able to help."

She shuddered again. It did interesting things to her body... things I was not going to think about, because this is my patient, not my fuck-buddy.

"It was... terrible. I did terrible things, and I hated them, but I couldn't stop myself from doing them once I thought them.

"I was at home, by myself, when a crowd of them charged into the house. They ripped off my clothes, then started to... bite me.

"I thought they were going to rape me. What they did was far, far worse.

"In about 5 minutes, I had been ripped up so badly I thought I would die. Five minutes later, I was healing faster than I thought possible, and I was starving... so I took a bite out of the first thing at hand: the leg of a teenage girl."

She shivered.

"In about a half hour, there were only 4 or 5 of us left, ripping chunks out of each other. Softer bits were best. They were easy to rip off and... chew.

"They grew back quickly. It did kind of slow down if all you ate was the fatty tissues, but get a long muscle, and it grew back very quickly.

"It hurt... but in a very good way... because the healing felt amazing, and because the endorphins flooded you and got you super-high.

"After a few more hours, they drifted out of the house, having stripped my fridge of anything edible... and few things that shouldn't have been edible... and ran off. I got the idea to come to campus and try to raid a dining hall.

"I managed to get into the campus center, and got into a kitchen, but the pickings were slim. No deliveries, and college kids eat a lot.

"I found some more cannibal orgies... that's really the only way to describe them.., and we managed to keep each other fed for a while. Gradually, some of the smaller members would... 'disappear,' as it were..."

I shuddered at that one. I had a horrible idea that not many children would ever be found when the cleanup finished.

"...and we'd still be chewing away on each other.

"The absolute worst part, though, was that I knew what I was doing the whole time. I wasn't locked into my own head, screaming to get out... I was right there and it was okay, because I was hungry, and feeding that need was all that mattered. I was revolted, but I got the idea in my head that if I just kept eating, it would be okay. So I kept eating. Even when I knew it was killing us all.

"Then I saw you on campus, heading for the labs. I saw you duck into the building. I decided that you were a new meal, and just waited for you to come out so I could... feed."

"You climb very well," I said.

"I didn't know I could until I was driven to it."

I nodded. "You had the idea to climb after me, and it drove you to try."

She nodded.

"How... how did you 'bring me back,' as you put it?"

I hesitated.

How do you explain to someone who's been through... done... horrible things because of your creation?

She looked at me... those pale green eyes are kind of frightening in the wrong light, like zombie eyes... and I could tell she sensed I had some kind of hand in the outbreak.

"You were on that team bringing rats to life or some crazy thing, right?" she asked... and I knew I couldn't dodge the questions anymore.

"Yeah... I headed it. We were trying to cure cancer. See, my sister died of an inoperable brain tumor 15 years ago..."

Two hours later, I sat in another lab trying to play State of Decay and decompress.

The black eye was healing fast. Some of the meatbots I had used to counter the bad 'bots were still resident in my system, and would be for at least another month, as per their programming.

She hadn't taken the revelation that I had at least tertiary responsibility for the current situation very well. There were a lot of shouts, and some hitting.

I didn't try to explain, or excuse it away. I had turned a blind eye to the power struggle, in favor of trying to get the project into the FDA human trials pipeline as rapidly as possible to save lives. Three people had used that naïveté to hijack my project for their own purposes, and their hijacking had cost tens of thousands of lives.

This is the part of the movie where the door to the lab opens, and the woman (who was cast as a love interest for the protagonist) attacks the hero, and it devolves into a sweaty naked love scene.

This is no movie, though. She came into the lab, and sat quietly while I tried to swat down a swarm of zombies with a station wagon.

"I'm sorry I hit you."

I shook my head. "I kind of deserve it. For what my project did to you... for what it did to [REDACTED]... I actually deserve worse."

It was her turn to shake her head. "You didn't program them to lobotomize people. You didn't program them to make people hungry enough to eat each other. You didn't let them out of the lab.

"You tried to help people. You did the most cliché science trope in fiction, trying to cure cancer, and someone else did terrible things. You aren't to blame."

"I am, though!" I yelled. "I could have double-checked the code before we sent it to the gene forge! I could have insisted on stricter screening for our people! I could have fired Dr. A and Dr. B for trying to push ideology into our project, instead of doing what needed to be done!

"I COULD HAVE LED, INSTEAD OF DELEGATED.

"I let myself believe that it could be done without... without politics."

She nodded.

"We need to get out of here," I said. "We need a way to get into the campus, and find a place to lay low until the Army sweeps through and breaks up the quarantine."

"What's wrong with the steam tunnels?" she asked.

"The... what?"

"You don't know about the steam tunnels."

"No... I've been trying to cure cancer."

"In the basement, there is a door to the tunnels underneath the campus. Students use them in winter to get between buildings, go to classes, jog, skateboard... it's warm down there, the corridors are wide, they're brightly lit, and you can see people a long way off. You can't be ambushed..."

"...and we can get out of the lab complex. Into the main buildings. Lay low until they sweep through. You're a genius."

She frowned. "They have to have your face in the database somewhere. Facial recognition will pick you up if they see you."

I shook my head. "One problem at a time. Let's get the cart down into the basement, and load up some freeze-dried shit. Where's the best place on campus to hide out?"

"Northwest dorms. It's summer, no one is living on campus, and it's on the opposite side of the college from the labs. Also, each dorm building has a kitchen... there might be some food in there."

I looked her in the eye. "Once we get there, you can strike out on your own. Pick a room away from me, and hide there. Or leave campus and try to find somewhere to hide. I'll give you half of the food we have left."

She shook her head. "Safety in numbers. Also, you saved my life."

"I put it in danger..."

"Shush. я вам должен."

"I... don't speak German."

"It's Russian."

"Okay. No hablo."

"What?"

"Nevermind. I won't make you stay."

"Fair enough. Let's get to work."

...and that is how we will be standing in the basement, near the door to the steam tunnels under the campus, getting ready to make a break for it, tomorrow afternoon, when I'm sure that the Army will try to burn out the cluster of infested nearby.

The charges are set. She helped me solder a bunch of the burner phones to ignition devices... when we email the phones, the whole top floor will be engulfed in flames.

It's almost time to leave.

The Reading Tag

soooo I was tagged by @lmartinezwrites for this tag, thanks so much for that! Honestly I was debating doing this one because I’ve really been slacking on reading, well, much of anything for the past few years, but I figure I’ll try and do my best!

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Not just one book, but the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series has been with me for a long-ass time, since I was like, 11 or 12? I really value those books, whether or not they’re masterpieces or anything is a subject for another time, but they were really the catalyst (next to another Kathryn Lasky series “Wolves of the Beyond”) for getting me into writing my own characters and stories. 

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Current: The Handmaid’s Tale by  Margaret Atwood

Last: So Much I Want to Tell You: Letters to My Little Sister by Anna Akana

Next: Unstoppable by Bill Nye (I’ve been really into non-fiction, biography type books lately, which I used to hate?? weird)

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated?

PERCY JACKSON. The first book in the series specifically. I’m gonna get crucified for saying that, and I do not care, I’m sorry all the Percy Jackson fans out there but I just DETESTED that book. I hated the style of it, mainly. I just couldn’t get into it, I’m so sorry, I’ll pay for my sins in the corner. 

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

Classics, probably. My grandma loaned me some classic books like, YEARS ago, and I still haven’t touched them. I should probably just give those back!

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

Harry Potter?? Idk that’s a cop-out answer because I genuinely don’t know (but I’ve never touched a Harry Potter book ever so maybe if I read those I can get the angry mob off my back)

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

Of course I have to read it first, my curiosity can’t help it.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

I like acknowledgments, I think they’re just very nice! If you work years on a book, I for one would want to acknowledge some people! It’s a very thoughtful gesture in my opinion.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Gosh I don’t know, can I be like, Jay Gatsby, and have all his riches, and then just kinda SKIP the death and heartbreak and shady shit? 

I’d have a better answer if I wasn’t so out of the loop book wise, there’s probably a better answer that I just can’t think of but will as soon as I hit “post”.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

Warrior Cats books really remind me of me navigating my way through writing bad fanfiction and learning how the whole process worked. It was a nice, exploratory time, seriously. 

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

Uhhhh okay so there used to be this weird book in my middle school library, which I won’t go into too much detail about because I could honestly write a fucking novel on it, but basically it was this weird, giant book with a golden cover and was full of these strangely graphic drawings of saints getting tortured?? And everybody in my class would check it out at a time because we were morbid curious kids and the library had no clue about this weird book. Then one year I go to look for it and it’s just... Gone. I still think about it to this day and am on a hunt for it. 

This might not have been a good answer to this but I nEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS FUCKING BOOK, DUDE. It was like, mexican I think? Had mexican undertones for sure. If anyone knows what I’m talking about, please hit me up. For real.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

Nope! I’ve bought books for people as gifts but never given one away.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

Gosh I don’t even know! I don’t travel much with books, honestly. 

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Unfortunately I’ve disliked much of the required reading in school mainly because I hate being told what I need to read. Buuuuut I guess The Great Gatsby wasn’t TOO bad? I guess?

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

an old recipe, nothing groundbreaking

15. Used or brand new?

New, who wants somebody’s old, dog-earred book? I like dog-earring the pages all by myself!

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses? 

I haven’t read much of any of his work but my mom and millions of others love him so?? okay I suppose, not harmful to me at all

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Just gonna say it, I found the Hunger Games trilogy movies to be better than the books.. I was able to focus/understand the basics of the story a lot better with the movie. 

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

The Divergent series was fucking awful. Enough said. (the book kinda sucked too in my opinion but the mOVIES. OH NO.)

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

I don’t think so? I probably have and just aren’t thinking of it. 

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

my friends! They have good taste, I trust them. 

and now I’ll take a couple of random people off an oh-so-helpful write-blr database because fuck if I know anybody who writes/reads on this site save for two people:

@robinbibliophile, @ablogofscribbles, @isnappedmypencil, @jamieanovels, @rosy-writes, @write-out-of-time, @writebruh, @scriptmedic, @maisiethewriter

and anybody else who sees this and wants to participate, feel free!

Reading your original works, I'm kind of inspired to post my own on Ao3 as well (I can't publish as I write mostly queer pairings but I live in a place where doing so would put my safety at risk). But I was wondering Pia, is it safe to do so in terms of plagiarizers? Since anyone could access my work for free, would they be able to copy it? (Thanks if you reply!)

The thing with copyright is that if you publish it - it’s yours. If you can establish provenance (i.e. prove that you have drafts on your computer and so on) it’s yours. Copyright protection for original works (artwork, writing and so on) doesn’t require you to do anything special to be eligible for copyright protection, basically.

And AO3 is amazing at chasing up copyright issues.

Also, like, people scaremonger. The chances of original works being plagiarised are exceedingly low. In um...oh god, like 15 years of writing fanfiction, I’ve had my works stolen exactly twice. Once was for a phishing database so I didn’t give a shit (it got shut down anyway - people remember that whole thing right?). And once was someone who basically rewrote all of SALverse in their own words, complete with including Augus and so on - but they accidentally left whole sections in that were mine; whoops. I chased it up on AO3 and it was removed, although the plagiarised version is still on fanfiction.net (honestly that place is trash for site support, don’t use it). That being said, I don’t really care, because it’s not like it’s taking readers away from me (it’s not, it’s pretty badly written).

But that’s like two times out of an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of hits over many many many years.

(Art is a different matter. I’ve had my art stolen a lot and I’m pretty zen about it. I have my template Cease and Desist letter, DeviantArt helps you out eventually, and Etsy is respectful when you chase up that shit.)

To be honest, the biggest risk with posting original work on AO3 is not actually about theft at all, but these matters (rest under a readmore in case you don’t care about the rest lol):

* AO3 explicitly states it’s not a database for original fiction. Which means support and tag wrangling and so on for original fiction vs. fanfiction is low. You can’t for example ‘categorise’ your original fiction into subgenre or anything like that.

* AO3 audiences are generally highly resistant to original fiction (i.e. most have never looked for it on AO3 and nor do they want to read it on AO3). They may read original fiction on Wattpad (and indeed this seems to be the place to put it, I think), but unless you’re releasing chapter-by-chapter or already have like...a fanfiction readerbase who will follow you to original work; it will be very hard to find readers. This is primarily because readers search first and foremost by fandom and not by tag. Original fiction gets drowned as a result.

* If you ever wish to make a profit off your original work that you put on AO3, you cannot link to any profit-making sites on AO3, nor can you ‘hold back’ sections of story and make people pay for it (this isn’t a problem for me (but this is the reason I never say I have a Patreon on AO3), or indeed a lot of people on AO3, but I’ve seen people use original fiction on AO3 for this matter getting swiftly and quickly warned and then sometimes banned from the site - this is so that AO3 can preserve their not-for-profit status, and it will never change as a result - I think it’s awesome and fully support this, and am tired of authors whining about it but that’s a whole other matter).

I would love to see more original work on AO3, and I don’t know your general fandom/fanfiction experience (i.e. if I knew you were a fanfiction writer I’d probably be wording things a little differently? Like, have you written queer fanfiction before? That helps a lot on AO3), but it’s definitely worth keeping in mind that AO3 is first and foremost a fanworks site, and that even if you’re putting up solely original content, it helps to orient to AO3 from a fandom / fanworks perspective (i.e. serialise longer works instead of releasing everything at once, list shorter works with fandom-friendly tags like PWP or hurt/comfort etc., establish a fandom-friendly presence elsewhere, like Tumblr or Twitter or Dreamwidth or something, so that people actually know you exist, because they won’t find you through the Original Works tag, let’s be real.)

As for plagiarism, honestly, people worry about it way more than necessary. To date, that I know of, no person has come to AO3 and stolen original fiction and tried to make a profit off it. (However, I have seen in the m/m original novel industry, people stealing actually published novels and republishing them under another name and making a profit off those, which is like, a consequence of so many novels flying under the radar due to self-publishing lol. And even then, it gets chased up, it gets dealt with.) Works can always be reported; and you know, they are. 9/10 I found out about art theft because someone who liked my art said ‘hey I saw this and am not sure you gave your permission for this’ or ‘this person is stealing your art.’ And that one time the SALverse was plagiarised, a reader told me. So that side of things helps a lot).

(I’m sorry to hear you can’t publish for safety reasons, as well. Make sure your protections online re: publishing are solid in that sense, because the same risks that exist for those who indie self-publish under pseudonyms, also exist for those who publish under the same on AO3, and obviously I don’t know what your situation is - and I think it’s awesome that you’re wanting to take the leap - just...yeah. I imagine this is all stuff you’ve considered already though, and AO3 is an often-overlooked site which makes it easier to fly under the radar on too. But so is Wattpad, and it’s a lot friendlier to original fiction - may be worth looking into as well? Good luck anon!

Language of Symbols and Symbolism

I am an art historian and my specialty is symbols and symbolism. What great artists have used throughout their work. By tracking old masters and what inspired them, you can find new things to inspire you. Here are snippets of a new book I’m working on to get you started 

The allegory and symbolism of the Grail bloodline go back to pagan times and lore. Chretien de Troyes’ wounded king dinner cabaret. When read as symbolism is a graphic fertility ritual. The beautiful girl represents sexual desire. The chalice represents the womb, because of its shape. The sword represents a penis pursuing desire and a womb for the penis to place his seed. 

Desire leading both the womb and the penis to come together. Medieval pornographic innuendo, popular before freedom of speech. At the same time the story is also talking about a bloodline. A special bloodline worthy of a mystical dinner cabaret and centuries of folklore.

Symbols are a universal language, invented before recorded history began. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Symbols give a lot of information in a small amount of imagery. How some art historians can read the symbol language is they track origins. An image or saying and the people and cultures around it. 

Symbols can solve world mysteries. Though they can be a lot to track, not a few centuries, but 5 or more millennia. It requires years and sometimes several lifetimes of compulsive obsessive history geeks.

There are similar symbols of the same primordial gods found all over the world. For example images and figurines of a goddess with her hands up. Found from California, USA, to Bronze age Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. From Egypt in Africa to remote Outback Australia. 

The solar cross was once thought of as a Nazi symbol. It is an ancient symbol of happiness and represents the Sun. The solar cross is all over the world and dates back to the Bronze Age in recorded history.

To me as an art historian, this says all these people at one time shared cultures and beliefs. At some time in history, they were communicating with each other. Trading and living with each other. The same as we live and trade with different cultures today.

In the modern Wiccan and New Age religions the five pointed star has all kinds of meanings. In mythology the five pointed star represents Venus. The primordial goddess of love and fertility. Diana in Rome, Isis in Egypt, Artemis in Greece, Inana in Sumeria, Ashera by the Hebrews, Anu by the Druids and Hindus. Her other symbols include the moon and sea shells. Venus also has a very interesting story, told by her symbols.

Modern Grail Bloodline Symbols

Not all records and ID tags have words and photos. Heraldry is a symbol system that tells us who a royal person is. Their family, social rank, occupation and military rank. 

Heraldry can identify where a royal person comes from and what family they married into. Sometimes heraldry will tell us if they ride a horse in battle or fight on the ground. Privacy isn’t a choice for royals. 

Heraldry in the 21st century has a lot more symbols and needs an expert to translate. 2000 years ago heraldry was simple Egyptian cartouches. 

3,500 years ago a whole bloodline was one person and their god, one avatar, one symbol for the bloodline. The other symbols were for the protection god avatars of their children. 

Some royal bloodline symbols still represent the same royal bloodlines 3500 years later. Often appearing in the decorations surrounding a modern heraldry shield as minor details. It is these minor details that can tell us the ancient origins of a royal family. 

A pearl, a lily, a chrysanthemum leaf, a spiral, a ram’s horn. Each can recall ancient histories of heroic queens and wise kings. Rather than the world wide web and words for search terms. The symbol language uses the human brain. Your brain is the computer and database, and pictures are search keywords. It makes apparent that using written words has dumbed down our brains. 

How Symbols Identify Somebody’s Employer

Old art is a non-digital selfie and photo book. People dress up and play out scenes of history and artists make pictures of it. We idolize celebrities as gods and act out their lives in selfies. Ancients idolized monarchies and acted out their lives in selfies.

They ancients weren’t into fiction, because a true story is more inspiring. Kings, queens, princes and princesses, heroines and heroes. Each with their own symbol or combination of symbols. How we identify who they are in art is with their symbols. A simple jar on a shelf in the background. A hand resting on a shoulder with a finger directed to a tower. A saint that hangs out with a pig. Each piece of art is a whole book or library of information. 

Self Portrait With Sunflower by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1663. Gold chain is a gift from his patron, the English monarch Charles I. A gold chain denotes duty. The artist is pointing to a sunflower and holds a chain over his shoulder pointing to himself. The sunflower represents a King and the chain, chained to duty. On the surface the painting is saying that a King is the artist's employer. 

Sir Anthony van Dyck was a court painter for the monarchies of Spain, Flanders and England. At court he learned many stories of Grail history and symbols to include in his court paintings.

Further study of Van Dyck’s Sunflower painting can tell a great many other things. In the background are clouds shaped like a face. Clouds and royals can reference the Olympian gods who lived in the clouds. In modern speak they were ancient peoples who lived in high mountains. The gods are a pre to early Bronze Age tribe who are the ancestors of all civilizations and real royals.

The Van Dyck’s other hand is pointing up is a Johnnite symbol, part of the Holy Grail bloodline story. It can also be pointing to something in the original picture frame. Picture frames and surrounds are also part of the artwork and coded with symbols. When a picture is cut from its frame by an art thief for example. Or cut from wall by museum archeologists. Whole chapters and contexts are sliced from the story and its history.

How Symbols Solve a World Mystery

A real-life identifier of Moses from the Bible and the Exodus is the timing of the mega volcano Thera near Crete. It sent tsunamis as far as Egypt and was the main cause of the Bronze age collapse. 15th to 16th century BC.

The other identifier is Moses’s horns. Moses was the adopted son of an Egyptian pharaoh. Each Pharaoh has their own god avatar or protection god. One of the Egyptian horned gods was the ram god Amun. The other the goat god Khnum.

Moses was an adopted son and by tradition took the name of his adopted family. There is a Pharaoh with Mose in his name and a horned protection God. He lived around the time of the Thera eruption, and his name was Pharaoh Ahmose. But theres a big twist to the story that is not in the Bible, which you can find for yourself. Or wait till this book is published where it has more context and source references.

Rewriting History

One of the most surprising discoveries from tracking Holy Grail and Bible symbols is that none of them are Jewish. They are pre Bronze Age pagan, Greek, Egyptian and Roman. Human remains found near the symbol artifacts were caucasian, not semite. Once you can wrap your head around it, history and the Bible start rewriting themselves.

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Jimmy Cowe of Crimibox, a brand that sells a detective game.Some stats:Product: Detective game.Revenue/mo: $8,000Retention rate: 38%Margin per box: 43%Website conversion rate: 4%Email list: 5,000Location: Brussels, BelgiumFounders: 1Employees: 0Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello, my name is Jimmy and I’m the founder of Crimibox. We develop and sell unsolved fictional murder cases. Our customers receive the police file, photos of the crime scene and bags of evidence. The goal is to catch the killer.Not only do our players (we call them detectives) need to use the items in the box, but they also need to investigate online. They’ll need to check the social media profiles of suspects, analyze surveillance footage, find locations through Google Maps, …Our customers are mostly people who love escaping from escape rooms. We sold more than 4,000 Crimiboxes so far. Our monthly revenue is a bit more than $8,000. Our retention rate (people who bought the first and a second case) is more than 38%.Here's what the game looks like.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?My day job is in the criminal investigations of the Federal Police in Belgium. Every day, I’m seeing dozens of cold cases on my desk. Over the last couple of years, most cases get solved at the detective’s desk instead of out in the field.This involves double-checking witness reports, alibis, motives, … So that got me thinking of creating fictional murder cases and letting people solve it with the police file and online media.Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.In designing the game, our first step is to make a roadmap of our criminal case.We come up with all the different characters involved in the case. The next step is thinking of the steps our detective needs to take to solve the crime. This whole process takes about one month.How does our game work? Our detectives receive a box at home. That box includes the police file, photos of the crime scene and bags of evidence.The first thing they need to do is read the whole police file. They should check all of the possible suspects with Google. Some of them have social media profiles which they should investigate closely.Through those social media profiles, they can find other trails and leads in the case. For example, one of the suspects seems to have a blog. On that blog, the suspect leaves his cell phone number at the contact page.Our detectives could call that number to get more information. In most cases, they will reach a voicemail message, and that could contain another hint.Included with the game is an app. We developed this app for iOS and Android. Within the app, they can use a chatbot to help them with their investigation. They can ask help if they are stuck in the investigation. They can give orders to interrogate another suspect. On that app, they can also search in a fictional police database. That database contains 1000’s of fake people, license plates, …We make dozens of social media profiles and websites. We also bought a lot of cell phone numbers. As you can tell, Crimibox is a true ARG game.All of the police files that our send to our detectives are based on the layout of real police files. The only difference is the Crimibox logo instead of the police logo. We use an online printer to print all the documents and most of the evidence.At this stage, we still use our garage to make and stock our boxes. But it’s a matter of time before we will have to move to a warehouse.We started out with $5000 and haven’t looked back. We did a pre-order campaign for our first case, so we got all the money from the customers first to be able to buy all the boxes attributes. A month before shipping our first boxes, people could pre-order through our webshop.Describe the process of launching the business.We bootstrapped our company. I learned all about making websites thanks to YouTube. To test our concept, I created a Facebook ad with only a few lines explaining our concept.Here’s what it looked likePeople who liked it got the option to leave their email address. We spent about $200 and got more than 1,000 people to give us their email address.We also had one month before the first batch of deliveries when people could pre-order our first case. We sent out an email to our email list, and after 4 hours, we already received 100+ orders.The most important thing we’ve learned was to start marketing before launching. Try to build up an email list before your launch.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?We tried almost everything.Our main source of acquiring customers is Facebook ads. On average we pay 4 dollars for a purchase via Facebook ads.Results of a small Facebook campaign.In the last couple of months, we’ve also been pouring a lot of money into Instagram Stories ads. We pay on average $0.08 for a website visit. After they visit the website, we make sure to do retargeting ads for those visitors.Results of an Instagram Stories campaign.Example of one of our Instagram Stories ads.A quick tip for Instagram Stories ads, test 100’s of photos. We discovered that the text is important, but the photo does the trick. Test which photos convert the best.FB Messenger marketingWe’re also experimenting with Messenger marketing. It’s like e-mail marketing on steroids.We hold contests through our Facebook page. We tell people they should tag a friend to participate in the contest. When they’ve done that, they get an automated Messenger message from our chatbot.The chatbot asks if they want to participate in the contest and asks if we can contact with more promotions or information about Crimibox. If they agree, they subscribe automatically to our chatbot. That means that we can send them easily a message through Messenger. So that way we can build up a chatbot list, just like an e-mail list.The big difference is that we get an average open rate of 25% on our e-mails, and we get an open rate of 95% with our chatbot messages.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?At this stage we are profitable. Our margin per box is about 43%. If we are able to grow, we can order in bigger quantities and get our margin up to 58%.We get about 300-400 website visitors a day with a conversion rate of 4%.We’ve grown our email list to 5,000 subscribers. We also got 800 subscribers to our Messenger chatbot.Next month, we are launching our newest murder case. Perfect timing for the upcoming Christmas period.Our future plans are making enough cases that we can offer a subscription plan to our customers. So they will get a new box every month. If we get that in place, we want to expand to the united states.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?I do believe we got a bit lucky with our timing. Since the escape rooms have been getting more and more popular, we have also received more attention. Our target audience is mostly people who love escaping from escape rooms.What also helped was getting into Messenger marketing. Once I saw how powerful it was, I knew this was another great way to get customers.What platform/tools do you use for your business?We made our webshop through WooCommerce (Wordpress). We tried Shopify first, but we felt we got more options with Wordpress.Our logo was made through a contest on 99 Designs. For small design tasks, we used a couple of designers via Fiverr. For our Messenger marketing, we use Manychat.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Like most entrepreneurs, I’m a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. Not only for motivation, but also for some tactical advice like the "$1.80 strategy on Instagram".I have two children so I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts in my car. I’m a big fan of Social Media Examiner, Masters of Scale, The Agents of Change and How I Built This.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just do it. Do enough tests. If you want to start something new, check if there’s a market.Try testing it through Facebook lead ads. And make sure you saved enough money to start.Where can we go to learn more?https://crimibox.com/en/E: [email protected] this text interview? Per reddit guidelines, we left some links/photos out. Check out the full interview.