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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

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

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

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themillionairethinking · 3 months

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The Millionaire Blueprint: Strategies for Wealth Creation

🌟 Unlock the secrets of wealth creation with 'The Millionaire Blueprint'! 💼💰💡 Message BLUEPRINT to get the secrets—make it a reality! #MillionaireBlueprint #WealthCreation #FinancialSuccess #MillionaireThinking #Success #Strategies #MillionaireMindset

Do you want to become a millionaire? Do you dream of living a life of financial freedom and abundance? If so, you need a blueprint. A blueprint is a plan that guides you towards your goals and helps you avoid common pitfalls. In this blog post, I will share with you some of the most effective strategies for wealth creation that have been proven by successful millionaires. These are not…

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borngeniusworld · 3 months

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A healthy relationship with money

Healthy relationship with money Maintaining a healthy and positive relationship with money involves a combination of mindset, behaviors, and practical strategies. Here are key aspects to consider:1. Mindset Shift: – Abundance vs. Scarcity: Adopt an abundance mindset, focusing on opportunities and possibilities rather than a scarcity mindset centered on limitations. – Gratitude: Acknowledge and…

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acielumumba-blog · 7 months

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"Steven Bartlett: Unveiling the 9 Habits That Sculpted a Millionaire's Journey 🌟 #MillionaireHabits #StevenBartlett"

🌟 Trailblazers, ready to unearth the 9 cardinal habits that fueled Steven Bartlett's journey from a dropout to a millionaire? Embrace the lessons from his odyssey to navigate your trail to success! 🌟 #TrailblazerTales

Introduction: The Odyssey from Dropout to Dynamo 🚀 #SuccessJourney Embark on the riveting tale of Steven Bartlett, who metamorphosed from a cash-strapped college dropout to the herald of a thriving enterprise. Originating from Botswana and venturing to the UK’s challenging terrains, Steven’s narrative is a tribute to resilience and ingenuity. Despite adversities, his flame of enterprise blazed…

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#StevenBartlett #Feedback Culture #Growth Mindset #Health and Wealth #Learning Lens #Life Harmony #Meaningful Work #Millionaire Habits #Steven Bartlett #Success Blueprint #Success Journey

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coderexman · 9 months

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MILLIONAIRE SECRETS!!!

"Embark on a Journey of Learning and Prosperity to Achieve Financial Success!"

"Explore the 'Millionaire Secrets' compendium, a comprehensive wealth-building resource that reveals coveted strategies for success in a variety of areas." Discover the Instagram Wealth Generator's powerful tactics, master the art of profitable Dropshipping with our carefully created guide, confidently traverse the complex world of Amazon FBA, and boost your financial chances with our Affiliate Marketing Guide. This collection provides you with the skills and insights you need to map a path to financial freedom, offering a comprehensive strategy to realizing your billionaire potential."

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successloops · 1 year

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WHAT'S A BUSINESS BLUEPRINT??

So after being told to 'blueprint' my customer journey I posted my Community 'Labyrinth Circle to Success' -it's a scroll down in my page feed. - Then I realized but what about my private coaching, so I created my 'Detour to Success' journey - pictured here.

Then that made me think oh crap - these are just parts of the whole picture so I'm busy creating the complete picture of the 'Universe Of Prosperity, Freedom & Fulfillment' & I'll post that asap - but first the 'Detour To Success' personal coaching blueprint that's a 3 month walk through the whole make-over. Here's an illustration of the process.

If you'd like to know more & claim 6 free success resources, then just join a community of mover-shakers - read more here:

#inspiration #success #selfdevelopment #wealth #prosperity #self improvement #success blueprint

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financialeducationservices · 2 years

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Finance planning for women and couples

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placeinthemiddleofnowhere · 1 year

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All I wanna do is go the distance

Pairing: König x Reader

Summary: You’re determined to find out why everyone thinks König is so scary, afterall he’s just some guy that’s taller than most people right? He’s probably harmless! Well, he’s a little scary, but you still like him anyway.

(No use of y/n or mention of gender/race)

AN: Hey guys, I'm super excited to give you guys this next chapter 💕 I have big things planned hehe

I would reccommend reading this oneshot, but as I am not jon favreau, you don't have to read extra stuff I make to understand the main stuff. Enjoy 😈

Part 7 of A Rocky Start - Full Masterlist Here

-☠️-

It had taken a few weeks for your head to get completely right again after the concussion. On some days you worried that you’d never get through the fluorescent infested hallways of the base without jamming your fists in your eyes ever again. Sometimes you’d catch Price staring at you with those concerned world weary eyes of his in the worst moments, when the headaches were screaming outwards, bursting through your skull. Though with enough time, and a lot of pain killers, the pain died down and dulled until you were completely back to normal.

It was a good thing too. For one, getting Price off your back while you were continuing to sneak around with König was a must, being under the microscope was only making the head trouble all the worse. And for another, which you were sometimes shocked to think was the secondary reason, you’d been going on more and more missions again as the 141 and KorTac got ever closer to tracking down Rousseau. Things were getting tense now, Ghost had been falling under a lot of pressure to perform and his temper was all over the place. Oftentimes you’d be the lucky one that had to chase him and calm him down.

In the months and missions after you’d come back you’d put away three of Rousseau’s men behind bars, including a very high level man that acted as his consigliere. Apparently he’d been worked on quite a bit since his capture. 141 weren’t privy to the intimate details of course, that was up to the CIA and KorTac, but as far as you’d all been told he’d given over a wealth of information on Rousseau’s location and even some limited blueprints of his hideout.

Price had told you all in advance that intelligence would be confirming your next mission in a matter of days, so you should all stick close to the base. You were actually getting ready for an upcoming training exercise, Rousseau’s man revealing the details on his base meant that command were adamant that you did a run through first and came up with a successful strategy for the big boss’ take down.

Luckily for you, because of the stay close order, that meant more time in your little airbnb paradise. The place was starting to feel like home. You were both etching yourselves into the apartment, carving your living narratives into it.

You could identify marks where König had been clumsy and dropped things or scuffed his boots against the wall. There was a tiny stain on the couch from where you’d come and sat after a mission. Lastly, but not least of all, was the curtain that had been sneakily stitched up to the railing after you and König had accidentally pulled it off several of its hooks when you’d grabbed it a little too enthusiastically one night. And on top of it all was the lingering smell of the room spray you’d bought a few weeks into renting the place, preferring the smell of ‘violet rain’ over the faint notes of tobacco that clung to the walls from other renters.

Sometimes you and König even liked to tell each other ‘see you back at the house’. It was becoming all so humdrum to you both.

You smiled as you glanced over at König one night, ruminating over your little routine. The warmth of you could’ve lifted the apartment into the air. It just felt so good to know that you had something that was yours, something that wasn’t your job, something that wasn’t a material thing, you had a life with König. It was most apparent to you when you watched him, when he was free of his hood and his armour and plates and he lay on the bed on his phone, unburdened from rules and duty. He undressed himself from the myth and lay comfortably as König the man, lounging in his boxers and T-shirt like any boyfriend would act with their partner.

Though that night, his brows were knit together in concentration and his lips were pursed, he was adamant that he be left alone for a minute to do whatever it was that he was doing. It intrigued you because he was rarely so mysterious, normally he’d tell you if it was a work thing, but this time he just waved you off and told you not to be nosy. That being the case, you were watching him closely trying to see if he’d give you any hints or signs of what was so captivating on that screen of his.

“I can feel those doe eyes burning a hole into me,” he chuckled, finally gracing you with his attentions.

“Can you blame me? You’re being all suspicious,” you shrugged, tilting your head a little to see if he’d explain himself.

“I’m not being suspicious, I just asked for some quiet.”

“You said ‘Sneaky, I have something I need to do, but don’t look’ and then when I asked if it was work stuff you said no. That - is suspicious.”

“Well it gave you an excuse to imitate me, so that’s something isn’t it,” he scoffed.

“Well, you know I do it so well,” you grinned, watching with delight as he rolled his eyes.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” you repeated, feeling as if you were copying him perfectly.

“If you think that’s how I sound then I'm surprised you have any kind of attraction to me,” he laughed.

“Well some days are a struggle more than others, but-”

You weren’t given the chance to finish your sentence, he’d forgotten all about his phone and thrown it from his lap, launching himself at you faster than any RPG you’d seen. In a matter of seconds you were pinned to the bed and fighting for your life, tears pouring from your eyes as he tickled you and trapped you underneath his annoyingly unyielding legs.

“What happened to the Sneaky that cried when I told them that I was bullied for my accent in school, hm? Now you’re making fun of me? I’ve got to say, that hurts me Sneak,” he said, an overdramatic fake upset lacing his tone. “You deserve every bit of this!”

You cried out and tried to protest, making a grab for his hands, but were merely shoved away when you made any kind of headway in distracting him. You wriggled and squirmed and screamed, but it was all for nothing. There was no way to make him stop until he wanted to.

“Kö- K…König, please!” you yelped, struggling to breathe. “Enough!”

You were beginning to feel like a struggling furnace as you endured his torture. Your lungs were burning from their failing efforts and you only screamed more as you grew tired of trying to fight back. The second he finally stopped his assault, you gasped in a huge lungful of air and laid back, groaning as you looked up at the blaring lights overhead and registered your sweaty forehead.

“Remind me not to bully you again,” you sighed, finally finding your voice again.

“Mhmm. I tell you all the time, but you just always insist on being so mean to me regardless,” he chuckled, unhooking his legs from your sides.

König came to rest beside you and tucked a stray strand of hair back in its place. His eyes scanned over your heaving chest and he laughed as he watched you attempt to struggle into a sit. Nevertheless you managed to wobble yourself upwards on the shaky mattress and looked down at him, then over to his forgotten phone.

“Will you do that again if I try to ask what you were doing so suspiciously on your phone?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” he smiled.

His new favourite line. The way he said it, it always had the undertones of a threat, but it was never said outright maliciously. König could affect his voice with so much masked intent it would have your head spinning sometimes trying to work out what he’d do next. Sometimes you’d get lost thinking about how long he’d practised that. The unfortunate people that had come across his path and challenged him, ending up with a far worse fate than just your tickling. Though you never liked to dwell on it for long.

“What were you suspiciously doing on your phone, König?” you said, pulling yourself out of your thoughts before you got too sucked in.

“Well, if you must know…” he trailed off and made a jump toward you, pretending he was going to attack again.

“No! No, no, no! Not again,” you cried out, leaping away from the bed.

You made a mental note to thank Soap and Ghost one day, all their messing with you had made you quick on your feet. Instinctively, you threw your hands up ready to fight and narrowed your eyes, watching his every movement like a hawk. König remained on the bed though and sat up, laughing and shaking his head to himself as he picked up his phone again and scrolled through it.

“Please, Sneaky, you really think I’m going to be threatened by those fists?” he tutted, not even looking at you as you remained in your defensive stance. “Put them away and come sit down.”

“These hands have killed people!” you defended.

“Yes, I know that, you’re a good soldier.”

“Exactly, so you should be threatened,” you retorted.

“If I was anyone else, sure. You’d never hurt me though,” he said, looking up from his phone with a smug grin. “I’m your boyfriend after all.”

You felt your cheeks heat up and immediately covered your face in your hands. Every little bit of you was drowning in the feeling of your thundering heart.

König didn’t much care for that particular title, he usually preferred to say partner, but he knew how it made you feel and he weaponised it as much as he possibly could. Knowing that he was all yours still scattered the butterflies in your stomach and you always felt like a little kid in the face of his teasing. You couldn’t help that him being officially yours still got you so excited.

“Are you ever going to stop using that against me?” you mumbled, finally coming to sit by him.

“No. I like watching you get flustered,” he chuckled. “It’s very cute.”

Before you could protest anymore though, he slung his arm around your waist and pulled you in for a kiss, softly releasing all the fight you had left with his teasing lips and tongue. You were locked together for a few moments and sighed contentedly when he broke away, pressing your head to his shoulder and feeling ready to sink down into the bed with him.

Though it wasn’t time for that yet.

“Would you like me to show you what I’ve been working on?”

You opened your eyes and faced him again, watching his nervous smile grow. Seeing him look so sheepish re-sparked your curiosity and you nodded, ready to see what it was. He hurriedly entered his password and the screen flashed open, landing on the homepage screen with a shot of you both from one of your photobooth pictures from an impromptu date months before, before your concussion. Pictures he was adamant that he couldn’t let you keep because he had to protect his image, even if he was wearing his half mask at the time. As if he was somehow a much better secret keeper than you.

You smirked at the memory of all the playful bickering you’d done over those photos and shook your head, eyeing the screen again as König brought up his tabs. He clicked onto the latest one and it opened onto a confirmation email. It wasn’t what you’d expected, not that you were sure of what you even were expecting. As you read it you raised your brows and looked up at him, wondering what was happening.

“This is a confirmation email for renting a hire car from some company in Austria,” you stated.

“Some company has a name,” he retorted.

“I’m not going to insult you by trying to pronounce that.”

“I see you’re restraining yourself now,” he laughed. “Well yes, it is a hire car confirmation for a cheap company in Vienna.”

“And you’re hiring a car in Vienna because?”

“Because, in a few months time, I’m taking you to Austria. Now, wait! Before you protest, I’ve thought it all out and you don’t need to worry about explaining any passport stamps to Price. I’ve found us flights to Slovakia and a train that can take us from Bucharest into Vienna, and from there I can take you around to see the country for a few days.”

He hastily explained himself and you smiled as you watched his hurried hand movements, his body in a flurry of motion. It was particularly fun to see him turn his hand into, what you figured, was a high speed train. He looked at you seriously as he finished, waiting in a suspended state of worry to see what you’d say.

As if you’d disappoint him.

“You sat and booked all that just for us?”

“Of course. I’ve really wanted to take you for a while now, so when you said you had time booked off and the higher ups indicated this mission will be coming to a close soon...I thought, this is the time. So what do you say? Will you come with me?”

“Obviously! I’m so excited, I can’t believe it. I’m getting to go on holiday with my Boyfriend,” you laughed, this time making yourself squeal. “It's gonna be so good! We’re gonna eat so much good food and see so many cool places and oh- I wanna see those mountains you were talking about! Can we go?”

“We will see the mountains, yes. I’ve put time aside for that,” he laughed.

“You’ve planned the whole trip already?” you asked incredulously.

“Sneaky I’ve been planning this for weeks,” he smiled. “I just finished the last arrangements there. I want to keep most of it a surprise, but…I actually have one thing on there that I need to ask you about before we go though.”

“Oh?”

He pursed his lips again and looked away before looking back to you.

“I was wondering if you’d like to go out to Burgenland? To my mothers house.”

Your heart skipped a beat and somehow you managed to reach new levels of excitement. Meeting König’s mum meant a lot more to him that it did for most people. It came with a lot more meaning. Meeting König’s mum meant that he was accepting you as part of his family, it meant that he wanted you to know more of his annoyingly buried secrets. It meant that he’d have to tell you his name.

It’s not like his own mother would call him König.

It had been a sore subject for a little while. The cause of your only serious fights so far. You’d pushed to know a couple times, complaining that he wasn’t letting you in and that it was ridiculous that you were a couple and you wouldn’t even know what to call him if anything should happen. Something could happen to him out in the field and all you’d know is a codename, he could be taken away from you and you’d never know who he was.

Of course König argued that that was ridiculous and you knew more than almost anyone knew about him - excluding his mum of course. He claimed that his name was just a burden, that it was just something that would give people an excuse to take from you. Though you argued about that as well, if someone wanted to hurt you to get to him then they’d do it anyway. It didn’t matter if they believed you knew his true identity or not.

The last time you’d gone almost hysterical because the whole thing was so silly to you. The little airbnb walls felt like they were going to go flying with all the verbal mortars being thrown, like you were going to be swept up like something from the wizard of Oz. You’d both bickered back and forth, forming a dark comedy sketch, two squeaky little cartoon characters that were on the verge of strangling each other as you both held your ground.

“Why does it matter if I know! You keep saying people will come for me, and that it's more dangerous to know you, but it's not that. I know it's not that! Otherwise you wouldn’t be seen with me, you wouldn’t have let me come this close. You just can’t face that all your walls would have to come down. You just don’t want to let me in.”

“It is dangerous to know who I am, how many times must I list the reasons? But you know what, fine, you’re right.You win! I’d love to let you in fully, but yes I am afraid of letting you close! Even though you have no idea how much you’ve taken already. I’ve given you more of me than anyone else has ever gotten, even while it’s been hard. You have no idea how hard all this is for me.”

“Hard for You? I’m in a relationship with someone that won’t tell me their name!”

“Because it's the last thing I have to protect myself! If you leave me, what then? You could decide you want out of all this complication and find someone nice and simple and then where would I be? You’d have taken everything from me.”

“What am I taking from you? Knowing who you are is not taking anything from you König. Besides, I’m not leaving you. Why do you think I’m so hell bent on trying to find someone else when I spend all my time jeopardising my job just to be here with you? You think I like facing down Price knowing that he’d turn on me if he knew what I got up to in my spare time? I put the respect of someone that I deeply care about on the line, just so that I can be with you and you’re acting like I’m ready to run off at the first chance!”

“Because you’ve done it before!”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

König may as well have turned and stuck a ten foot spear through your heart. You’d felt a tide of tears wash up in your eyes and you’d walked away from him then, not willing to let him see how much he’d hurt you. Not that that was an option. From his widened eyes alone, you knew that he’d known it was a mistake to dredge up old wounds, his sparkling blue irises dimming as he lost his self conviction.

“Wait! Hold on, I’m sorry.”

König raced up to you and stopped you in your tracks. His strong arms wrapped around you fast and held you snugly against his chest as pathetic droplets of tears streaked your burning cheeks. You didn’t bother trying to free yourself from him. You just whimpered and clung to him as he shushed you and apologised for what he’d said, kissing your dampened face like it was nothing.

“I’m so sorry. What I just said was stupid. Will you please come sit with me for a moment… I have something I want to tell you.”

A flare of anger and rebellion flared in you for a second. It was stamped out immediately, but just for a moment you wanted to storm off and tell him that if he wanted to keep you from knowing him then he’d done a great job - that that was it. Though, you couldn’t bring yourself to follow through. Even when you hated him at that moment, you couldn’t bear to see him upset again. You knew that you’d hurt him badly already that day you’d run from him in the park outside the base, you knew that you couldn’t bring yourself to do that again.

“Ok,” you’d sniffled.

He’d sighed and taken you to the couch, sitting across from you after propping you up against your favourite fluffy pillow. You held onto it with one of your hands, losing yourself in its soft textures as you threaded your fingers through it. König watched you play with the loose strands for a second before looking you in the eyes, his face a perfect picture of remorse.

“You didn’t really run away from me, that was silly of me to say.”

“I did run from you though, I ran from you that day you tried to explain yourself after the mission” you frowned, not able to help your crackling feebly. “You were right, I can’t act like I haven’t given you reasons to be wary.”

“No. You didn’t leave me then though. You agreed to work through things and I suppose that’s what we’ve been doing…with mixed results,” he said, laughing dryly. “You haven’t really given me reason to be like this. This is what has happened after years of keeping people out and I suppose…I’m just having a hard time adjusting to what it feels like to let someone in.”

“I know. I know that really,” you sighed. “It's just hard sometimes because sometimes it feels like things are as they should be, like everything we have is so normal. Then I snap back to reality and there’s all this stuff with work where we have to pretend to hate each other and then we have missions that don’t line up and we don’t get to speak, like not even a phone call a lot of the time. Then there’s this intrusive voice I have over it all saying- well saying ‘you don’t even know his name, what is it we really even have together’ and I know its ridiculous and we care about each other and I should ignore it all-”

“It’s not ridiculous,” König soothed. “I feel the strain of these things too.”

He leaned forward then and grabbed your hands, making you jump as you were taken out of worrying at the pillow. His calloused fingers rubbed against yours and his warm grip kept you grounded into reality. The scars that scraped up the backs of his arms jumped up at you in the warmth of the yellow lights, his whole body a patchwork of battered skin. You traced your eyes from his rough hands and arms, up to his bobbing adam's apple and to the depths of his ocean eyes and worried face.

König’s jaw was tensed and he breathed as he worked up to what he was going to say. Your own breath was held then, lungs burning as you waited for him to speak.

“Other people have let me down in the past. My mother moved us to Germany for a manipulative piece of shit that hated me and looked to rid himself of me at every opportunity. I grew up with few friends, in a country that wasn’t mine, and fought so hard for so long that I didn’t know how to be vulnerable. I met a woman after I was forced to join the army that told me I was a hollow shell of a man, and that no one should have to be sentenced to dealing with me…There’s times I’ve agreed with her too, I’ve moved through life feeling like half a person some days. Then I met you. None of what I’ve told you is any excuse to treat you badly, but sometimes I’m so set in my distrust that I can’t let myself cross the lines I need to be able to get to where you are….And- and for you…I’m working on crossing those lines, because you’re the only person I’d ever want to give myself to, but for now its a slow process. You’ve seen my full face, we’ve made love and I have given you almost everything that I can give you for right now. All of this is to say…well - to ask - if you would give me a little more time and allow me to keep working on things with you.”

Listening to him then, as his voice crackled and wavered with emotion, was so very difficult. He kept a hold of your hands the whole time, his fingers shaking as he went on. His whole body looked ready to crumble as he explained himself.

Though before he could be brought down by everything you leaned over and held him, winding your arms around him as tightly as they would go. You hugged him close for the rest of the night and whispered to each other in the darkness when you went to bed, giving your affirmations, like a secret promise, that everything would be ok.

As you thought back to that night, your body shook with an icy cold shock of frisson. You didn’t want to go through that again.

“I would love to meet your mum, König,” you said softly, swallowing as you tried to tactfully avoid another horrific argument. “Does this mean…that you’ll tell me your name soon?”

He smiled knowingly at you and nodded, stroking the warm apple of your cheeks fondly.

“I will tell you sometime soon, yes,” he confirmed, speaking warmly.

You felt a beaming smile shine brightly over your face and jumped on König, feeling full force of excitement as things seemed to be heading in a good direction. Everything was lining up. Your mission would be done soon, you and König wouldn’t have to worry about sneaking around anymore because the taskforce would have some downtime until you were called upon again for some other earth shattering mission. After that you were going to finally learn his name.

You sighed. It was almost too good to be true.

“You just gotta promise me one thing,” you said, shifting your tone seriously.

“What?” he asked, breaking away from your hug so that he could look at you properly.

“If it’s something ridiculous you have to prepare me in advance.”

He rolled his eyes and groaned, falling comically backwards onto the couch.

“I’m being serious,” you laughed. “If it’s something crazy like Wolfgang or Ferdinand I need to be prepared!”

“Do you really think that that’s what Austrian people are called?” he giggled.

“I have no idea! This is what I’ve been saying, I could see your passport in a few months time and could be having to fight myself not to laugh!”

“You would really laugh at my name if you thought it was silly?” he snorted.

“All I can promise that I’ll try not to,” you grinned, crossing your hands over your heart while he stared back at you with a displeased glare. “All I’m saying is that if I see something mad I can’t be held accountable for my actions.”

He rolled his eyes again and sighed dramatically, throwing his hands up into the air.

“I can’t believe I’m being lectured on silly names by someone called ‘Sneaky’.”

“Hey!”

-☠️-

When Price called you all in the next day, nothing could’ve prepared you for the shitstorm that was going to ensue. Though you were feeling the full force of it as you stood in the darkened labyrinth of the warehouse that had been set up to emulate Rousseau’s hideout. The 141 and KorTac had been told to find the best way to clear the base and get to Rousseau, but the problem was that you were taking too long and being overwhelmed by too many of Price’s fake men. There were just so many rooms that were connected to other rooms and it meant that a lot of men could get by each other undetected. It was a nightmare.

You’d run through the exercise around eight times already and the more that Price was making you reset, the more tension was being put on the team. It was only a matter of time till someone snapped. Although, given their quick temper and worn down attitude in the last few months, you were sure of who that person was going to be the entire time.

In the latest reset, you stood next to one of the floppy wooden walls and bit your tongue, watching on with fear as Ghost marched up to König and got in his face. They were almost mask to mask, eye to eye as Ghost took what little gap there was between them and cinched it tight. You felt every little notch in the wood then, backing yourself into it just so that you could force yourself not to get yourself in trouble by intervening.

“Stop fucking around you useless pile of shitting cloth!”

ouch.

“You’re blaming me for the reset?” König scoffed, squaring up his shoulders. “If you would stop lagging through the hallways and would get them cleared properly, then we might be able to get through one of these attempts successfully, Lieutenant.”

“It was your bright idea to split off with Soap and Gaz and leave us with Horangi. So far it’s been nothing but problems with you and your team rushing and getting hasty and now I’m done. We’re doing it my way again. Slow and methodical. Like it or lump it, king cunt.”

“Problems aren’t from me going too fast, they’re occurring because your team isn't clearing the halls properly, Ghost. I need Soap because Fender is out of the country, I need someone to blow the doors so I can breach plus the extra cover. Your idea failed five times already, why don’t we try to execute mine properly, hm?”

“I’ll fucking show you an execution, König!”

Ghost rammed König and sent him back peddling into the wall you were leaning against with heavy thud. You were sent flying forward as the wood bounced and watched as it rattled with the men’s efforts to take each other down.

It was like watching two stags lock horns, they were grabbing onto each other furiously and neither man seemed to want to let the other go. König swung his fist and Ghost dodged. Ghost tried to knock König unbalanced with a kick, and only succeeded in almost sticking his boot through the cheap chipboard.

The rest of you watched on helplessly. There was very little anyone of you could do to pull the two titans off of each other - Not if you didn’t want to get taken out of action in the process.

“Right! That’s enough boys!”

Price’s voice echoed through the warehouse, powerful and commanding as it sailed through the air like a brick. It smashed through the two fighters and in a matter of seconds König and Ghost were standing to attention, looking up at Price from his spot on the balcony. The blue light of the warehouse shone starkly against the white in Ghost’s mask, but it failed to stick on the inky black of König’s hood.

“I appreciate that its been a long day gentlemen, but that doesn’t mean you get the luxury of turning into little school boys that can’t contain their fucking tantrums!” Price bellowed, continuing to reset the temperature. “König, stop pushing so hard when the others are still trying to clear the rooms on the left side. Ghost, work faster and spread your team out. Reset and do it again!”

The Captain’s word was final. Even at the height he stood, illuminated by a few bulbs that flickered like burnt orange like cigarettes, you saw that he was in no mood to be argued with. He’d stood watch for all of the attempts and with every one that failed he grew more and more dissatisfied as your joint teams disintegrated into in-fighting.

Well, that wasn’t going to be a problem on this attempt. Not unless anyone was in the mood to invoke Price’s wrath.

All you marched off without another word, dragging your feet as you made your way back to the start point. Ghost was glaring so hard at König it seemed like all of you were staying purposefully clear of his path; attempting to avoid the crossfire. Soap and Gaz grunted a few words of annoyance toward each other on the way, but luckily you all made it in one piece.

A few tense moments proceeded to ebb slowly by. The clatter of doors and scrape of fallen soldiers and obstacles being reset was echoing throughout the building, the heavy breaths of men around you intermingled and all too eerily you began to feel like you were in the belly of a beast. It certainly appeared that way to your eyes, you couldn’t see much through the darkness. You’d have to position your night vision down again.

In the briefing before training, when you’d had the blueprints and locations revealed to you, you’d been told that your guys would be able to cut the power beforehand. They were sending your two teams in while Price waited with another team on standby. That way if Rousseau tried to make a clever escape, Price would be there to close in on him while you rid his headquarters of his followers.

All of it was easier said than done though apparently.

“If we fuck this up again I’m going home. Fuck the dessertion charges, prison’s better than this,” Gaz muttered.

“If we fuck this up again,” Ghost growled in disbelief. “You mean If your team fuck it up, Garrick.”

“Aw, putting the blame on us, LT?” Soap chuckled. “You’re so sweet. Maybe it's me just looking to spend a little more time with you.”

His laugh still held a little humour in it, even for all the torture you’d all been through. Although he knew for a fact that he had nothing to do with it. It was his big lumbering steam train of a teammate that couldn’t be let off so easily.

It was true what Price said, he had been moving too quickly. König was frustrated. Somehow, despite not even being able to see him most of the time, and at times just barely through the green haze of your goggles, you could tell he was finally feeling the strain of working with your team. He was getting antsy and forceful, trying to power through so that he could escape the stifling atmosphere that the other men created for him.

You wanted to tell him he’d only make it worse by prolonging the day. Though it wouldn’t have been a good idea to speak to him then - not with Ghost feeling the way he was.

“If we spend any more time down here you’ll all be wishing for a nice cosy jail cell by the time I’m done,” Ghost spat.

You flickered your eyes over to König and held your breath. He looked like he desperately wanted to make a comment on the situation, his eyes were narrowing in a familiar way, the kind of look he got when he was about to fight a point. You silently begged him to stand down and cast a wary glance over at Horangi, hoping he’d stop his friend from doing anything dumb.

Though in the end it didn’t matter. Price interjected before König could air his thoughts, entering the scene like a benevolent god shouting from above.

“Alright. Begin again in 5…4…3…2…and…”

The warehouse descended into complete darkness, all lights were off and it was just you and your two teams, huddled together in the lonely gloom. Ghost silently gestured for you all to get moving and with the rehearsed speed of a broadway play, you filed into two teams and braced as Soap got the first charge ready.

You drew in a breath and felt your heart thudding in your chest, it made you tighten your grip on your gun as every booming beat cracked out like thunder. You swallowed and scanned your eyes through the green fog, watching bleary eyed as Soap set the first charge. You looked away and hunched your shoulders, already tensing for the first explosion.

The door broke away and the charge sounded off with a dull boom, soon enough your teams were ‘firing’ on your fake enemy with your fake rounds. The guns clacked and clicked in a foreign kind of way and instead of screaming or disappearing in a spray they took a moment to notice the hits and would drop to the ground like seasoned actors.

Even despite that all though, the adrenaline felt all too real. The soldiers were growing smarter smarter, even hindered by the darkness,they had begun to forsee your oncoming attacks and fought back twice as hard as before now that they'd seen your strategy a few times. It was taking longer and longer to clear the first room.

Nevertheless, determined to stay in the exercise and take it through to its bitter end. You kept down behind Ghost and shot out at the hostiles, doing your duty and hoping it would be enough. Luckily for you the men fell after trading a couple rounds of fire.

“Horangi, stay on me. Sneak when I say the word I want you to move up ahead to the first room on the left. Horangi and I will cover you while you clear it and block the entrance on the otherside,” Ghost ordered.

“Copy that,” you responded, also hearing Horangi sound off similarly.

König had moved up already, but rather than have Soap and Gaz blow the next door, they were all taking cover and helping your team with the oncoming flood of men. Even as two separate teams you were now united in a common purpose - to improve the strategy and ensure you’d never be put through the exercise again.

Most of you hated having to do those sessions, rehearsing for the main event. After All It’s not like you can account for everything that can happen when the real mission goes live. Its not like the men would be expecting you like the hapless new recruits, that was only natural as you reset the mission for the ninth time in a row.

With that in mind, you kept your gun in your hands like it was superglued to you and marched on, following through with Ghost’s plan as he directed you forward. You gulped and sprinted toward the room, taking cover behind the door and angling your head so that you could spot the men that were spraying heavy fire just inches from where you stood. You blinked and took a breath, reminding yourself that you had the edge. You had night vision.

In a flash you whirled around and took out one of the men closest to you, diving behind a desk before anyone else could get to you. Already marking out your next target, you were relieved when you spotted Ghost in your peripheral and shot up.

“Support pillar, LT!” you shouted, marking out your ‘kill’.

Ghost acknowledged you and directed his gun toward the other two, and soon enough you were standing in an empty room, listening to the fire outside. Though you weren’t done, you hustled over to the entrance on the other side and tipped a desk over the doorway, making entry very difficult. Then seconds later another explosion went off and Ghost signalled for you to follow him, covering the rear of team König.

“On me, team!”

Horangi and you followed Ghost as closely as possible, heeding his every command as you cleared the rest of the rooms with slow and steady precision. König battered down every door with Soap’s help and with he and Gaz ploughing forward, you were able to keep watch of the rear as more men crawled out of the woodwork in an attempt to surprise you.

Even with the fake ammo your blood was pumping around your body like white water rapids and your breathing came fast and heavy. The clack of the guns and the sound of feet scrabbling against the crumbly warehouse floors were echoing around your head and before long you were beginning to feel wired, could feel your body shake as you grew ever closer to the end. This was it. An escape from the labyrinth and the endless blurry green of the night vision goggles.

“Ready?” König asked, standing prone at the last door.

Ghost and Horangi took out a couple of stragglers, and once they were down and static silence was ringing all around you, König was given the go ahead.

“One last door and then we’re home free, Gazzy,” Soap grinned, setting the door to blow.

“Yeah yeah, just blow the door, Soap,” Ghost growled.

The last breach felt strong enough to shake the ground you were standing on. Though you’d concede that by the time the charge went off, you were starting to shiver a little. You were full of anticipation, ready to sit down and get some rest before the actual mission. A good night’s sleep was within your grasp.

Once that door swung out, you’d realised that you’d never been so relieved to see a potential hostage.

The new recruit made a mighty effort to mimic Rousseau, he tried to go down fighting and raised his gun at you all. Though with six people on him he didn’t have a chance. All of you shrank back from his shots while he attempted to flee, though when you noticed that the recruits back was turning to run, you took your chance and barrelled toward him.

With every ounce of strength that was left in your body you tackled the man to the ground, landing softly on his thick padding - something Rousseau definitely wouldn’t have when it came time to dive on him. Even with your body protesting, exacerbated limbs crying out for a break, you wrestled his gun from his hands and pinned them to the ground. Fake Rousseau had nowhere to go after that, he was stuck below your body even as you heaved out heavy breaths and soon was surrounded by the rest of your team.

At long last it was game over.

“Alright, very good team,” Price’s voice called, “You can take off the night vision and we’ll turn the lights up.”

You were all too eager to follow Price’s command. You whipped the goggles up and looked around in the sheer darkness for a moment until the blue lights faded on and were then chased up by the stark flicker of the overhead lights.

Everyone was blinking hard, adjusting to the brilliance and grimacing as you all looked around the grotty old warehouse with new eyes. When it was set up with low lighting there was something very intimidating about the training area, though now that you looked at it in the new light you couldn’t help but compare it to waking up the morning after a one night stand.

The chip boards looked floppy and pathetic and the huge towering walls beyond your little simulated maze were covered in warning signs and caution notices. The mirage had cleared, and finally you could look up at Price properly, settling your strained eyes on his terse expression.

“Much better. That’s the sort of performance I expect from you lot, and that’s what I want when we launch tomorrow. Get yourselves cleaned up and get ready to meet in the hanger for oh-four hundred. You’re all dismissed.”

-☠️-

“Fucking Training exercises.”

You lumbered behind Ghost and made your way to the bathrooms, getting ready to wash up with the rest of the team, hearing bed calling out to you sweetly before your early start. Soap and Gaz were unsuaully quiet, meanwhile König and Horangi were their usual type of quiet. Ghost wasn’t satisfied with that though, he was muttering to himself and stomping down the hallway like a man about to fly himself off to Rousseau and end the mission himself.

“At least it’s over now,” you sighed.

“Would’ve been over a long time ago if we hadn’t started improvising with the hired help,” Ghost groused.

“How many times, Ghost. We tried your plan and we failed, we worked mine out and we passed,” König growled. “Doesn’t matter how many times you whine about it, the plan worked and that’s all that matters.”

“Is it? Is that all that matters?”

“Yes. We all wanted out and now we’re out. Job done,” König groaned. “What else is there to bitch about?”

“It’s not bitching when I have legitimate concerns about letting a private contractor shit all over my team’s dynamic and split us up!”

“What dynamic is that? The one where you get them all killed?”

Ghost flew toward König again, except this time none of you were allowing it. You, Gaz and Soap leapt toward your Lieutenant while Horangi acted as a barrier, keeping a steady hand on König’s flaring chest. All of you struggled as Ghost threatened to explode, but in a matter of seconds he calmed enough to see he wasn’t going to be allowed his revenge and broke away, grumbling that he’d leave it.

König watched the exchange between you all and laughed to himself, the little titter escaping the thick fabric of his hood even as he tried to keep it soft. You glared over at him, not appreciating his antagonising just as you’d managed to get a grip of Ghost, though he rolled his eyes at you and walked off.

Only when he was around the corner did you finally feel it was fit to let Ghost have it.

“What the fuck was that, LT?”

“What do you mean what the fuck was that?” he growled.

The way Ghost looked at you, the way his eyes glinted like he was settling on a new target, normally would’ve had you crumbling like brittle harling in a storm but you were resolute in your mission. You straightened your shoulders and walked up to him, not letting the disappointment fade from your face.

In your periphery, you caught your fellow teammates giving you a shared look of fear. Soap and Gaz more than made up for what you lacked in that moment, but you ignored them keeping your mind focused completely on Ghost.

“Price cleared the op to run just as we practised it there, just as it was successfully run and you want to have a go at König because he happened to make a valid suggestion?”

“I’m not having a go, I’m pissed that we’re taking orders from paid guns that shouldn’t even be here in the first place! This was supposed to be our mission, Price assembled our taskforce back together all to take down Rousseau and what happens? The government get involved with KorTac and suddenly we have to play nice with money grubbing slime balls. It’s all not right, Sneaky, and I won’t sit by and take it!”

“It might not be right, but it's the situation we’re in. You might not like König, and things have been…not ideal with all thats happened, but like it or not he made a good call and Price recognised it for what it was.”

Ghost grunted and was about to fire back another load of verbal ammunition, though Soap interjected before he could say anything else.

“Sneak’s right, Ghost. If they’re telling you to let the König thing go, then let it go. Sneak has the most right out of anyone to be pissed about König calling the shots, and they’re not. Fuck sake, Ghost, even Price hates the man. If Price likes his plan, then its a good plan.”

You raised your brows, surprised at seeing Soap opposing Ghost for once. He walked over to you and stood shoulder to shoulder, holding the giant back as he teetered on the verge of a rampage. The warmth of Soap brought a calm to your bones and now that you knew you had someone else supporting you, you let out a breath you’d barely been aware of holding.

You so rarely had to butt heads with your Lieutenant, you’d never get used to the feeling. Your bones felt like they were rattling with the energy it required.

“You don’t have to worry about the team dynamic, Ghost,” you continued, hoping to expel the last of his anger. “In fact arguing with König is more of an issue than anything that he or any of KorTac can do. We get through this mission and take down Rousseau, then KorTac will leave and we can get back to our jobs until the 141 is called on again. If we fuck this up then we’ll be dealing with losses and we’ll have to keep working with them. We just need to get through this and its done…ok?”

Ghost sighed and cast his eyes down to the floor. Silence reigned for a few beats, but eventually he looked back up and eyed you and Soap and Gaz who’d moved to your other side. The blue in his darkened irises could’ve been swamp water with the way they’d been tainted with frustration. Though even with all of his anger at the situation, he had visibly sagged as he recognised he was looking at things wrong.

“You’re right,” he grunted, rubbing his head and furling up his mask. “I’ll go apologise and see if I can’t get through the rest of our time together without murdering the bastard. Like you say, Sneak - not long till he fucks off.”

With that he left to go slink down the hall and catch König, still grumbling to himself even as he retreated. You and the rest of 141 laughed as he turned the corner and eyed each other, smiles slowly spreading across your mouths as if you’d just turned up to a mad hatters tea party. A moment of euphoria shared as you thanked your lucky stars that Ghost didn’t go Godzilla on all of you before he carried on with murdering König just as he’d said.

Though a small part of you still worried for your boyfriend. You’d winced a little when Ghost insulted him, but on the other side of the coin, you realised that with the mission coming to a close soon you’d be able to stop the obligatory concerns that came with König being on base. Soon you could carry on with your illicit affair and not worry one bit that Price would be any the wiser. What you can’t see can’t hurt you, right?

“Thought for sure ma neck was gonna get snapped there,” Soap chuckled.

“I know, I was picturing being the next skull he wore,” Gaz laughed, his nervousness expelled in a low rasp. “Fuck, Sneak. Next time you want to go on a crusade, give us a bit of warning.”

“I’d have loved to have given myself warning,” you snorted, still in disbelief you’d stood up to Ghost. “It just came out of me out of nowhere. If anyone was getting scalped there, it was gonna be me.”

“Well…at the very least, thank jesus,” Soap smirked, “Ghost listened rather than wringing yer little brass neck. But you know what, Sneaky? Next time you decide to have a brave moment like that, leave us the fuck out of it!”

“Yeah, let us get out of the blast radius first, and then go at him,” Gaz laughed, slapping your shoulder.

With that they both walked off to the showers together and you rolled your eyes, following after them so that you weren’t hanging around the hallway by yourself. Your weary boots slapped against the floors and you continued to joke as you rounded the corner, feeling at ease as you got your mind focused on getting ready for the mission and the calm that would ensue after its completion.

When you got to the changing room though, you frowned when you saw König’s things scattered. Normally he wasn’t one for throwing things around, he was usually quite careful to pile things up. However his shirt was sprawled on the ground and his trousers were hung over the benches like a set of bowlegs straddling a horse. Most unsettling of all was when you’d glanced down and saw the wooden bird you’d given him months before laying on the floor just under his upturned pockets.

“Huh, big man must’ve been in a hurry to shower,” Soap noted.

“Probably wanted to try and hurry to avoid Ghost,” Gaz snorted. “Not that I can blame him, I’d hide from the LT too if I knew he was after me.”

You laughed along with the guys because it seemed like the thing to do, but the smile on your face dropped instantly afterward. Something wasn’t right. You gulped and looked over the mess of his clothes one last time and bit your lip, barely feeling the harsh scrape of your canine against your soft flesh.

“You gonna wash up, Sneak?” Gaz asked, elbowing you out of your thoughts.

“Huh?”

“You’re standing there like a spare prick, Sneaky,” Soap laughed. “You gonna shower? Or are you cooking up a little pre-mission prank?”

“Don’t encourage that, Soap,” Gaz laughed. “We need to put all that to rest. Like Ghost said, this is the last time we have to see the guy. Let’s just get past it and pray we don’t ever work with KorTac again.”

“I’m not planning anything,” you said, stopping Soap in his tracks just as he picked up the hem of König’s shirt. “I agree with Gaz, let’s leave it, alright? I’m just gonna see where Ghost got to first then I’ll go shower. His stuff’s not here, so he must’ve gone off and I figure I should make sure he got away from König in one piece.”

“Ghost getting away from König?” Gaz snorted. “Think I’d worry more for the other way around…if I gave a shit about König that is.”

You gave another little weak laugh and walked off without anything else to say. You didn’t have anything else in the chamber. Your mind was too busy reeling and wondering where Ghost got to and why König’s stuff was laid out everywhere and all the ways you could combine those pieces of information into horrible conclusions.

You walked through the doorway to the opposite corridor and mindlessly carried yourself forward while your skin burned too hot and your stomach tightened into tiny knots.

Did they have an argument? Did Ghost notice something about König’s things that gave you both away? Had he seen the bird and known it was yours? If so, how? You’d never shown anyone else the bird that you could remember, but then you cursed to yourself as you remembered your less than sound mental state and struggled to try and remember if you possibly had told the guys or shown them the bird at any point.

Why did König have to carry it around with him? Why couldn’t he have left it in his room on base or secreted it away somewhere safe?

Were you being crazy? You reasoned you were being crazy. Maybe he really had just left his things in a hurry. Perhaps he did just want to get through his-

You felt your blood run cold when you heard a low growl tear you from your thoughts and speak your name, your real name.

“You look lost.”

You glanced up after trailing your eyes along the gloomy grey floor and shivered as you finally noticed Ghost towering above you, casting a mighty shadow. He had his eyes fixed on you like a shark, cold and deadly as he surveyed your trembling form. He was glaring hot pits into your skin and from that moment on you had absolutely no doubt that he was onto you.

He’d never looked at you like that in his entire time leading you. He looked furious, distressed, agitated, so many emotions were etched those glaring dark eyes of his and you were losing track trying to figure out how to best appeal to him.

“I was trying to find you,” you murmured, barely speaking above a whisper.

“Why would you be doing that then, ay?” he gritted out, walking toward you cornering you into a wall.

His boots sounded against the floor like canons. With the way he was acting, you worried he’d shove you and crush you underneath them. Though maybe that would be kinder than the fate he had in store for you…

“You.. you- uh, tossed König’s things didn’t you?” you whimpered.

“I did.”

“Why?” you breathed, feeling your eyes welling with tears before you could even attempt to think of calming yourself.

“I’ll admit I got angry at the thought of having to go crawling and apologising to him and I lost it. I knocked his things off the bench. It went everywhere and shit went scattering out his pockets, y’know he left his wallet in his trousers, stupid cunt. Shouldn’t even have personal shit on a training exercise, but I suppose that’s what happens when you hire a bunch of undisciplined mercs… you know what I happened to see when I spotted his wallet though? You have any guesses, Sneak?”

You gulped and all of a sudden, it became all too clear to you exactly how Ghost had caught you out.

“The photos,” you whispered.

“That’s right,” Ghost growled, “I saw the fucking photos of you two poking out of it.”

Next part here

#König #König x reader #konig x reader #konig #könig fanfiction #modern warfare 2 #modern warfare fanfiction #mw2

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punkpandapatrixk · 3 months

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🍯New Age Money ♦︎ Timeless Pick A Card

‘When I was small, God was around and curiously granted my every wish. Now a grownup, I still believe that miracles do happen and that alone gets me up in the morning with such gladness.

And if I am enveloped by a peaceful sun filtering through the branches as I open my curtains, I am sure, everything before my eyes is a message.

When I was small, God was around and sent Love my way every day. And now, it is time I opened that precious box that’s been forgotten, kept hidden in a corner of my heart.

And if I am enveloped by the soft fragrance of cape jasmine in a garden awash by rain, I am sure, everything before my eyes is a message.’

– When I’m Surrounded by Kindness from Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

あなたの特技！Surely everybody was born into this world carrying some precious boxes of God-given talents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to open those boxes and monetise such talents with Soul?

SONG: Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta nara by Matsutoya Yumi

MOVIE: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

[PAC Masterlist] [Part 2] [Part 3]

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – ‘Harry, you’re a Witch!’

untapped divine talents – Queen of Cups

Hey, magical creature~ You literally possess mystical powers but you probably didn’t even know~! You’re a sensual being, like a siren, who has an innate ability to feel what others can’t easily perceive. Naturally, this translates into your being highly intuitive, empathetic, imaginative—and you might’ve felt like this world wasn’t made for you. Psychics are incredibly sensitive people and you could’ve felt out of place most of your Life, but as the insightful Jiddu Krishnamurti said: sensitivity is the highest form of intelligence. We’re talkin’ EQ here😘

Someone like you was definitely not built for any kind of money-making endeavour that doesn’t allow you to be sensitive to the needs of others. There’s meaning in your being emotionally attuned and imaginative; even if—for example—you feel that your calling is to become an author, even in your writing it’s clear there’s a purpose of healing those who come into contact with your Art. If you’ve chosen this as your main pile, you literally possess some innate ability to heal others and this explains why you’ve always had the urge to make the world a better place🌍

You see, back in those long-gone days, those who were called witches were really scientists, teachers and healers. The word ‘witch’ comes from ‘wicca’ which means the wise one. Wicca (male) and wicce (female) were the knowledgeable ones who sought to apply their wealth of information and perspectives for the betterment of others as that’s how knowledge becomes wisdom. There is an untapped divine talent resting in you and it is your ability to feel through your psychic senses what society is lacking in terms of its maintenance of its own sanity🎭

YOU, literally hold all the ingredients necessary for a once in a lifetime breakthrough that could potentially heal all of Mankind for centuries to come~🌻

karmic/dharmic opportunities – XIII Death

I betcha you have significant Scorpio influences or 8th House placements or a specifically strong Pluto/Neptune presence in your natal chart. It could be that shortly before you were born someone quite spiritual/religious/magickal in your bloodline had passed away and it almost feels like you were born to pick up the pieces they had left. I betcha that some of your innate interests since childhood or pursuits you feel very strongly about that may have developed later in Life were inspired by or related to that relative/ancestor, one way or another. Like you just share similar patterns of behaviour, interests or even thought processes🦜

What you can really take away from all of this is that you have a purpose higher than yourself. That you came with specific blueprints and that your whole Life, your sense of purpose or mission, all of that is a group project you share with many Souls in the Higher Realms. Only high-vibrational peeps will really resonate with this message😊And that in itself is confirmation for you to know you have many opportunities in the healing and creative industries.

Seriously, you needn’t even have to worry about how you’re gonna make money with these opportunities even if they sound out of reach at the moment. Because it is your Destiny to be a cycle breaker—to start something completely new on your own—a path will be made for you just to fulfil your Destiny. And you can wholeheartedly trust in that to save yourself from excessive worry/anxiety🍷

the future of jobs – 5 of Pentacles

In the industry you’re meant to be part of, there will be a lot of chaos right before you make your debut. Like things are just falling apart and many of the players aren’t even sure what they’re there for anymore. There’s a lot of disillusionment that’s needing to be felt to the max until a breakthrough can really have any meaning. Either that, or some of you could be the one creating more chaos in the industry as you enter it LMAO We call you an industry disruptor, alright? You’re that breath of oxygen everybody was needing because they had been suffocating themselves with their own stupidity🍭

If you’ve resonated with this pile thus far, know that you’re meant to bring some healing—even enlightenment to some extent—to whichever industry you feel a calling to. And this is totally not a one-man’s show; you will be meeting a lot of kindred spirits in that industry and others associated with it. You’re meant to have an audience and serve a greater spiritual purpose for all involved. Bring back all those people into OG spirituality. All of this for what? For people’s mental health, obvi~💕

How does every one of these people expect themselves to be truly happy and abundant when their viewpoints are marred by childhood traumas and the excessive need for revenge? You of all people understand the innate darkness of the human psychology and the future of jobs within the industry of your calling is dependent on its people transcending above trauma and lack mentality so that a new, healthier paradigm can be established. Out with addictive behaviours; out with destructive habits; in with purer intents~ That’s the kind of New World you’re meant to be a part of to earn your keep in the most high-vibrational way👒

CURRENTS OF CHI (currency)🔻💛

being of service to Mankind – Gold Physician (Hippocrates)

delights of Life – Priestess of Contemplation

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – Paths Least Travelled Lead to the Greatest Stories

untapped divine talents – 9 of Cups

You…need to go and carve out a LYFE of your own, honey. Since you were quite young, you’ve always had this desire to go explore strange territories and come back to share grand stories only you could tell. A unique Life of your own that sets you apart from your family/community. Try to check what numerology has to say about, for example, your Life Path, Soul Urge, Expression and all that; there may be something there that validates this desire to be unique, to be different, to be a fucking unicorn, and perhaps, to be the FIRST to discover or invent something🦄

You have what it takes to thrive alone, that much I can assure you. Some of you probably even have Jupiter in Pisces/12th House or Neptune/Uranus in 9th House. Whatever it is, your Soul does intend for you to travel paths least travelled and discover magical things only you could have access to. What is this strange narrative for? For discovering your Soul’s heritage. I know it sounds weird. But you’ve come from very distinct bloodlines and I sense many of you have a strong affinity towards the faery realm? There’s a lot of historical truths to uncover as you walk the lonely path of the eccentric hermit🏞

The New Age of Aquarius is changing the way we receive truths. It’s such a glad thing that people are now more open to seeing things for what they truly are no matter how politically ‘incorrect’ or heartbreaking the truths are. Your untapped divine talents will naturally bring you towards avenues where you will arise as some kind of a whistleblower or you will be unearthing ancient esoteric wisdom and sharing it with the public. Your life path is definitely very exciting and will take you to wonderful places and meeting the most unique people in the world!⛵️

karmic/dharmic opportunities – 7 of Wands Rx

In many regards, your life path could even lead you to meeting some of the world’s most distinguished individuals OMO But the path is understandably not easy. This kind of calling will require a great deal of character and tenacity. You will be rocking the yachts of the Devil, right? Your Life Stories could get extra absurd and your discoveries might lead you to some dangerous encounters. Nevertheless, if you are nudged by a sense of being of service to Truth, you will decide it’s all worth it. When we die, our Souls carry only stories and memories of our heroism anyway🧬

You will have friends though. People who share your passion for the real re-education of the people. I see professions in journalism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, criminology, even celebrity exposé stuff that reveal the scammy behaviours of the evil rich and famous. You could also be drawn intuitively to the studies of the REAL history of Planet Earth, her extraterrestrial history and the truths of the lost civilisations that have shaped the wars of our Time. You could secretly (or not so secretly) be part of the disclosure movement😉

The studies of Astronomy and Astrotheology will benefit you a great deal if you’ve resonated this far with this being your main pile. In everything that you do, there is a panacea for the brokenness of Humanity. Your sharing of outlandish discoveries and suppressed information could be what Humanity needs for it to mature and choose global peace and harmony. It will be a lifelong effort that may not end with your lifetime though. So make sure you leave enough material as your legacy for the next generations to continue on🍁

the future of jobs – King of Cups

I suppose it’s pretty clear to many of us now that the world is run by psychopaths. Indecent human beings with terrible hobbies that hurt others and the sheer disregard for the sustainability of the Planet and the livelihood of her inhabitants. With you, you will see for yourself pretty soon that the world is choosing to move to a more compassionate space, and you will have a role in giving a voice to those whose intentions for their societies are more honourable. You could be one to contribute an invention or two yourself; perhaps an exposé book, perhaps a channel, a website~ Idk, what do you feel called to?🎪

In the future you will be part of, you will see evil leaders getting replaced, thwarted even, by compassionate leaders of the New Age Money. Down to anarchy; we want real peace. Down to young psychopaths rebelling against old psychopaths only to start a new cycle of abuse. The future you will be seeing will see that those with a genuine heart rise to the top and begin taking charge of the wheel of society. Leading with a heart. People before profit. It’s really not that difficult to sow the seeds now~🌱

You yourself, and the people who share the same passion, vision and mission as yourself, you are a bunch of experts who will glue together different factions of society who want to work hand-in-hand to remedy all the destruction caused by the powerful psychopaths. There is diplomacy in what you share with the rest of the populace and there is kindness and grace. People’s mental wellbeing will be put at the forefront before profits are made. And if we really did go into a WWIII…

CURRENTS OF CHI (currency)🔻💜

being of service to Mankind – Red Astronomer (Johannes Kepler)

delights of Life – Priestess of Solitude

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – For You, It’s Never, Ever, Been About the Money

untapped divine talents – Queen of Pentacles Rx

Of all the piles, you’ve always resonated with loving being of service to the world since you were tiny. You could’ve been attracted to the service and hospitality industries since you were quite young, too. You were probably quite social when you were a kid and liked the idea of working jobs that would ensure other people have a good time, have a good experience with excellent customer service—basically, you liked the idea of helping/assisting others. If you could make your own choices, you’d rather have these types of job🩹

Unfortunately, growing up you were told that such jobs had no money or glamour. Some of you reading this could’ve come from a wealthy background in which working to service others is seen as uncool…even low. So this could’ve caused a great deal of psychological conflict in you. What you want and what your society deems worthwhile seemed to be in conflict. But let me tell you that your heart really knows what’s intended for your highest good🦉

From a very young age, you were already able to see that this world is sick and needing a lot of help when it comes to healing and transmuting negative aenergies. Your child brain couldn’t have verbalised that but your higher intuition knew you were put on Earth to tip the scale. You didn’t want to care about money; you wanted to pursue an authentic Life where your existence could be of some use to somebody👑

karmic/dharmic opportunities – III The Empress Rx

Some of you could’ve come from a rather impoverished background. This is easy to deal with. You were born face to face with this Devil called ‘lack’. But some of you could’ve come from a wealthier background or at least you weren’t necessarily starving and your society could’ve expected a lot from you. If the latter is the case with you, at some point in Life your Higher Self and team of Spirit Guides will force you to get down from the high horse of your inauthentic environment and have you experience Life from the perspective of those who haven’t got much in Life🐛

When this happens, your eyes will be opened to what truly matters in Life. That essentially, everybody in this world is sick to the bone because they’re trying to fill a hole in their hearts with weirdass purchases and hobbies. Part of your karmic reason to be born at this passage of time is to help Mankind transmute its unhealthy affinity towards excess indulgence via obtaining things that are truly fleeting. When you learn to overcome your own traumas and addictions, you help the collective conscious of Humanity transcend above that, too. This is very noble and you deserve a big bear hug just for existing in this realm~🧸

Rest assured, it is in your Soul’s blueprint that you must end up abundant yourself when all’s said and done. You’re destined to be very wealthy, from doing things that are high-vibrational and fully in alignment with what your Soul wishes for you to express as a Human being. You’re meant to set an example of what it means to do a job with Love~🎀

the future of jobs – 2 of Pentacles Rx

Many of you grew up in societies that taught you: passion doesn’t put food on the table. And you’ve observed many real examples of those who prioritise good deeds end up not having much money, indeed. And you could’ve believed that Life is about choosing between passion and duty. Bullshit. If people can’t thrive doing what they love, it’s the society that’s broken; how can there be no money to be made in those endeavours that are more exciting, more meaningful? You realise now that the System was designed to depress the common people in the pursuit of serving the Devil😰

You and your kindred spirits are the free spirits that are going to usher in an era of New Age Money where people no longer need to ruminate over sacrificing passion or freedom for a stable income. Back to before Industrial Revolution, maybe? Let’s reset the paradigm so we can recalibrate ourselves towards something more of a Solarpunk Society, or a Steampunk Society, that’s cool, too🍵

For you, it’s never ever been about the money. Career endeavours that would suit you most are whatever you feel an innate calling for. Many of your natural talents you’ve got since birth can be monetised in the service of your community, and better yet, online community. Some of you may feel a calling for being in the hospitality business, engineering, have an online presence or be a social media influencer, and some others may simply work in the aviation or F&B business, while some could want to become an eco-farmer or something. Whichever it may be, know that you have the unique power to elevate many aspects of the industry you are part of~🏹

CURRENTS OF CHI (currency)🔻💚

being of service to Mankind – Silver Astronomer (John Dee)

delights of Life – Priestess of Faith

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

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radiance1 · 9 months

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Phantom and Plasmius get miniaturized by Fenton technology, they became what the Fenton's deemed a 'harmless' size. Literally only as big as the average baby, then they got taken by the two scientists down into their lab.

Plasmius took this in stride, however, Jack was an eyesore as always, but he saw this as an opportunity to get close to Maddie. Danny actively mocked him for it, but he was looking for a way to get out of their lab.

He's honestly hoping Jazz would notice he's missing and put the pieces together.

Their powers were a bit wonky right now, even more so after the Fenton's made something small enough to put on them to suppress their more, dangerous, powers by disrupting the flow of ectoplasm inside their bodies in the form of a damn collar.

The experiments the Fenton's performed had to be modified of course, thanks to their smaller size, but they were no less cruel. Danny knew his parents hated ghosts, but he never knew the full brunt of that hate extended so far, they didn't even treat him like he was intelligent, they regarded him as a pet- no, less than a pet.

Meanwhile Vlad, he was at first self-assured, wanting to woo Maddie this way, then it turned into surprise and then horror. He wasn't all that surprised by the experiments, no, he could see himself doing them as well if he weren't half ghost, but he was horrified that he had to participate in them.

A part of him wondered what would happen if he were to expose that he was half human, and he tried. He tried to show them that he was human, but they just wrote it off as a ghost imitating their family friend.

If he thought the previous experiments were cruel, they had nothing on the ones to do after that.

Which just made Danny even more sure that he shouldn't reveal his identity.

So after a multitude of experiments, where neither Danny nor Vlad knew how long it went on for, they planned for an escape. A plan which they acted on when Jack and Maddie left for a rather long period of time, Vlad made Danny walk out of the ghost shield since he wasn't chained up like he was and turn off the ghost shield.

Vlad and Danny managed to find the blueprints for the collar, rewriting it until the damn thing fell off their necks and then escaped into the ghost portal. Vlad was a bit miffed about having to leave behind all his wealth and the packers, but he would get over it, meanwhile Danny had to leave basically his entire life behind.

Not everyone was socially for 20 years like Vlad, so.

They would still try and kill the other occasionally, but now it was more to the ghost standard of bonding by fighting. They also formed some weird, fucked up form of comradery via having both been experiments to people they knew and liked.

They landed in a new dimension, one where quite literally nobody knew who they were or what they were. Vlad did what he did before, overshadowing a multitude of small yet successful companies and taking over them and their wealth, only the 'corrupted' ones at Danny's very vocal insistence.

Perhaps you could call it sympathy, pity, or something of the like. But Vlad used a good portion of his newly acquired money to help along the 'meta-humans' that inhabit this new dimension, with the added benefit of helping himself of course as both he and Danny would be categorized as one because of their size and abilities most likely.

Vlad drowned himself in a fuck ton of work, throwing a part of his attention into taking care of his new business and getting it back on the level that the one he left behind was on. The other part of his attention was thrown into finding Danny schooling that wouldn't be bigoted towards Meta-humans and would also serve as a place where Danny could (hopefully) become well connected with the children of high society.

Which took him to Gotham city, while he cannot ensure that the other students wouldn't bully him for his extremely tiny size, he could at least ensure the education and opportunities would be adequate.

Now he just had to find a way to acquaint himself for one Brucie Wayne and the rest of the Gotham elites.

#dc x dp #dp x dc #dp x dc crossover #Honestly I have no idea what else to tag this with #But I looked through Vlad's ability list and I would like to impart you with this image #tiny Plasmius wrapping his cape around himself and disappearing into a puff of pink smoke #Would this make the Fenton's bad parents here?#yea #Probably #And bad friends #most likely

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2cutie · 3 months

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hear me out,

Shang Taung’s cat Hope is maine coon. Imagine his allies, Outworld or Earthrelm’s defenders’ reaction to his big cat :3

Okay but actually yes. I adore the way you think, mysterious anon.

Based off this previous prompt: Shang's Cat

So take this in either way if you still want the Hope to be a shapeshifter or just a maine coon!

You just *know* Shang would take great pride in Hope being larger than your average cat and that would be in some way fueling his ego. And then good ol' Cage would be like "The hell did you feel your housecat, anyways?"

1001% chance he trained you, as the cat, to attack. And you of course have duo attacks together. It's only natural, after all!

Shang is the greatest sorcerer, so of course he enhanced Hope in multiple ways - longer life, more strong and agile. Hope is a fighter and Shang sees you as a persona for the challenges he's overcome, so he make sure your polished and perfect to broadcast his new life & wealth.

While Shang takes great pride in you, he also likes you a bit secretive so people would not take him as soft or knowing he had a weakpoint. His allies would only know when they came to his palace for blueprinting plans of attacks.

Rain would be interested to know more about you and your breed, especially how Shang trained you to fight. It's intriguing, especially how he incorporated magic.

Quan Chi is less than interested but can appreciate an unexpected fighter. Bi-Han only seen you once and ignores you at all costs, though you're bit keen to get him to like you.

Shang Tsung: You don't like my cat? Don't tell me such a brazen warrior is afraid of such a... little thing.

Bi-Han: I'm not afraid of your stupid cat. It's just annoying.

Shang: Ah, don't underestimate them. I've trained them to be quite the fighter. Hope could very well be your next fight.

Bi-Han: ....You named your cat Hope?

First & last time Shang ever let you see Bi-Han. You were a lil sad he never pet you, even begrudgingly.

Earthrealm?

Welllll, Johnny and Kung-Lao both are laughing once they get over their initial surprise of how big you are. After all, they expect you to just be a lazy 'house cat'.

That was until Johnny talked too much and you scratched him right over his mouth. House opinion changed. You were terrifying and your teeth were freakier than your claws.

Raiden & Liu Kang are very intrigued by you and know the strength that you hold. Liu is surprised that Shang could even love anything without a gain of anything in return, which to him makes you a formidable enemy. Raiden would rather you be left out of the equation as he didn't want to fight you.

#mortal kombat 1 #mk1 #shang tsung #mortal kombat x reader #my art

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gabessquishytum · 6 months

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Dream is mob wife to 2nd son Alex Burgess - it was a political marriage to "unite" the families.

It's not just that old man Burgess doesn't respect Alex, so he runs nothing of importance, it's also, that Alex is a dumb-ass. Dream could run things better than Alex, and Dream doesn't even care. The biggest problem is that Alex's stupidity and lack of understanding about the business is going to get Dream killed along with him! Worse, Dream doesn't have a good path to extract himself from the mess.

Then he meets Hob Gadling and Hob has ideas and a plan to unseat old man Burgess as king of the city. Best of all, Hob is willing to make Dream as large a part of the plan as he is willing to claim - Hob sees Dream, and knows that he's more than a pretty face! Dream is dangerous too.

Hob's plan is good and the cover that they are using - that Hob and Dream are (just) lovers is an acceptable smoke screen - everyone "knows" Alex is ill-suited to keep his wife in line and someone as fine as Dream definitely needs to be taken care of by someone who can f*uck.

Well, it certainly helps sell the bit that Hob can actually f*uck, and is blowing Dream's back out on the regular.

Oh yeah this is FUN!!

As Dream’s lover, Hob gets access to Dream and Alex's home, which is crucial. Burgess doesn't give Alex many responsibilities but he DOES frequently have Alex clean up the inevitable messes that come with running the underground. And guess what? These "messes" contain a wealth of evidence about Burgess and his secrets. All the weak links in his empire, all the alliances that are on shaky ground? It's all practically spelled out in the paperwork in Alex's office.

And when Alex himself walks in to find those papers all over the place, scattered (and some of them missing), he doesn't suspect anything. Because there's Dream, sitting on the desk and shamelessly nude, with Hob Gadling grinning in between his thighs. It's a lovers tryst, and Alex quickly stumbles right out of the room. The indignity of seeing his wife being pleasured by another man is too much to bear. So he never even notices the missing documents.

Dream is able to collect further information and pass it on to Hob. Recordings of conversations overheard, screenshots of emails, it all helps. To keep up the facade of their affair, they meet often and get steamy in the back of Hob’s luxurious car. Dream even goes so far as to invite Hob to a family party when Alex is too sick to attend. Hob gets right in under Burgess's nose, gets the blueprint of his house, and is able to finalise his plan.

A few months later, Burgess senior is dead (mysterious circumstances, nothing was ever proved), and Hob has made his move in to replace him. With Dream (who technically represents the Burgess family and carries the name) at his side, no one stops him. Alex disappears with the gardener after signing the divorce papers. If he's got any sense, he won't come back.

Everyone knows that it's really Dream who runs the city, but he does it so damned well, who's going to stop him? Hob worships the ground he walks on. And when they marry its as equal partners. Hob still blows Dream’s back out, though. That's the one time when Dream allows himself to be ruled.

#the sandman #dreamling #nsft

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stevenbasic · 7 months

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Growing into the Job, Post 353: That was Then, This is Now, p5

Melissa was crouched down alongside me, excited about giving me this virtual tour of the new office spaces using her laptop. She was positively beaming, and her size made me feel like a child with his pretty teacher as I sat like a kid at my oversized desk that Monday morning. I’d normally struggle with keeping my eyes from drifting down into the neckline of her low-cut white dress, but I was rapt in awe, and more than a little apprehension as I stared at the screen. I struggled to grasp at the sheer scale and enormity of this thing. I hadn’t seen anything about this before, believe it or not. The girls hadn’t let me even step foot on the construction site for the past few weeks - ‘it’s a surprise!’ they’d said, but I suspect there was more to it than that - so all I’d seen were the early blueprints before things really got started. Even those were ridiculously extravagant, and impossibly adventurous, but this…this looked even more incredible. Did she say it was almost finished??

She'd just shown me the interactive, digital replica with the soaring, Roman-temple inspired atrium with its jaw-droppingly huge statue of M-…of, uh, ‘Female Health’ towering over a new, opulently modern reception desk. The glass ceiling left the whole space awash with sunlight. Then she showed me the humble new entrance to our old practice here. It was left virtually unchanged as if they had simply built around it. Melissa assured me that this was so things would stay nice and familiar for my geriatric patients, but I couldn't help but notice how small it looked. It was completely dwarfed by the grand entrances and size of whatever the hell was going to be going on in those two new wings of the building.

Turning the camera around, Melissa ‘walked’ us by the desk and over to face the entrance to the ‘Evolution Wing’. She explained to me that this area of the walkthrough wasn’t populated with imagery yet, so its onscreen doors remained locked.

Huh. Apparently that area would be for continuing pharm studies, etc. I guess I wasn’t clear on why they need a whole wing for that, but whatever. How much research did they really need us for? Well, it’s their money. Theirs…and my ex-wife Sheryl’s. Who, with her enormous wealth, technically owned this entire building.

Speaking of which, how this whole thing got funded was beyond me; this company’s pockets seemed limitless. But, I reminded myself, I’d decided to stop worrying about it weeks ago. There’s nothing wrong with growing the practice, is there? Growth is good, bigger is better…

I suddenly noticed my eyes had, as if on instinct, finally drifted down Melissa’s top.

“Let’s check out the ‘Women’s Health’ wing!” she sang, bringing my attention back to the screen. Our camera made its way towards the rear of the atrium, under the imposing presence of the giant statue, and into a well-lit suite of separate clinics. Each one had their own separate entrance from the main wing. Down this impressive hallway I saw signs for ‘Internal Medicine’, a ‘Fertility Clinic’, even an ‘Aesthetics Center’, where Melissa told me Karen, the new APRN, would run a squad of cosmetic nurses and plastic surgeons. And… “We’ll have an ‘Adolescent Care’ department’?” I asked, baffled at the scope of what this place was soon to be.

“Sure yes of course!” Melissa lauded, excited, “Even the youngest women will need a place to come where they can be encouraged to, like, grow into everything they can be!” She sounded like she was reciting something that had been told to her, for sure, but whatever it was it was clearly something she believed.

“But, pediatrics?” I pressed, incredulously. Frankly, I was afraid of how far away things were getting from geriatrics, the specialty of my practice. Far Horizons was drifting, and soon I was going to lose even more of the little control that I still had..

“Oh, you’ll see, this won’t be just kiddies and boo-boos,” Melissa continued, “this’ll be where girls are taught and trained and, like, developed into what this new, changing world is going to need. Strong and confident female leaders, scientists and athletes, young women that can take care of things. It's important that they become healthy, empowered women who can lead us into the future.” Again, it sounded like a marketing angle, but one that had obviously already worked.

The camera passed through the doors into the ‘Adolescent Care’ unit, and I was shown a small, but beautiful new waiting room, a modest gym, and several well-appointed, modernly elegant exam rooms. Further in I spotted a procedure room along with what looked like several offices for new providers. This was obviously concerning, but before I could really think about it my attention was pulled away by something in the air, away from the screen and settling, once again, down into Melissa’s cleavage. Her big lungs swelled her breasts up with every breath, and a new wave of perfume had drifted up from her flawless, velvety skin. Breathing her in felt…good. It helped me relax and forget my worries.

Melissa was, no doubt, enthusiastic from the start to show me this virtual tour, and she seemed to be getting more and more excited as we went along. I could tell she really wanted to show me something, but all I could think was: You smell really good.

“Thank you,” she said, and continued talking. “But speaking of what the new world’s going to need, let me show you this!” she twittered, quickly now backing the camera out and away from the adolescent unit. A new door came into view, further down the main hallway of the new wing. “We even have a small clinic for men, too, a little place for them inside us,” she said, “And here it is!”

I squinted at the door, not really comprehending what I was reading on the small sign aside it.

“‘R-regression Clinic’??” I asked, my radar suddenly up, “What’s that?”

“Oh, Jay, I can’t wait!” Melissa beamed, bouncing a bit on her haunches and sending new jiggles through her upper chest, “Haven’t you heard? It’s the newest thing, a new movement in therapy to help couples really bond, get them closer, open up, like, new pathways of communication, break down barriers.” Our camera stepped right up to the doorway but Melissa stopped us there. “Katerina and Shanette have done such a good job setting it up. The counseling rooms and procedure areas are really nice but, y’know what?” she continued, smiling with giddy anticipation, “I'm going to save showing those to you ‘til we can do it in person. I already booked an appointment for us!”

She what??

“In fact, we can save the rest of the clinics for when I show them to you for real,” she said, “In the meantime, why don't we check out the basement.”

“The basement?” Couldn’t be too much down there, right? At the time the basement of the building had been used for some storage.

“Yeah, it’s incredible what they’ve been able to do. Expanding it I mean. You must have heard the blasting, all hours of the night? They’ve added in two…or, wait, is it three?…new sub-basements. Like whole new floors.”

I watched as the camera quickly sped down a hall and up to an elevator. Even in this mock-up walkthrough, we had to wait a moment for the elevator in the hall to bring us down to another floor. Whoever designed this must have been a real stickler for details I thought as we waited for the doors. Melissa, I noticed, could barely keep herself still. When the doors finally slid open and we stepped in, she took us down past the first basement levels down to the very bottom before mentioning that the virtual walkthrough didn’t have images for the pool yet.

“Wait…There’s a pool?!?” I asked, in disbelief.

“Yes, of course silly,” she giggled, “on the first basement level. I’ve told you about that! You’re so cute, so scatterbrained. I love that! But, yes - pool! For trainings and exercise, and there’s a nice hot tub that I think the Regression Clinic is going to use until theirs is finished."

I felt a chill rise up my spine as I thought about the last time I was in a pool.

"Don't worry, sweetie, you’ll be safe,” she assured me, “Men aren't even allowed onto that level unless there’s a lifeguard on duty. That reminds me - we have to hire a lifeguard!” Melissa giggled, maybe picturing exactly what I was, a hot young thing in a red swimsuit. “Now, The other levels aren’t for patients, it’s like cubicles and computers and stuff, and they’re supposed to be for girls-eyes only. But I’ll show you the bottom one anyway. It’s so cool!”

“What’s down there?” I queried, as the elevator hit the bottom floor and the virtual doors slid open.

“So far it’s a place for the construction workers, a whole floor,” she began. In front of us was a big, simple, starkly lit room that looked like something of a community space, a common area with large tables and benches. Like what someone might see in a school or church basement. Or a prison.

“A lot of them…well, all of them really…have stopped going home at night. Like, when their shifts are done they just keep working. They’ve just started camping out among all the construction when they need to sleep, and just wake up to work. They feel better here than they do…out there.” Along with the weirdness of what she was describing, Melissa giggled strangely. “I guess they just like it here so much! Even the ones with homes still would rather stay here now.”

“For real?” I asked, incredulously, but suddenly I was reminded of the queasy feelings I got when I stepped outside for too long, and a looming sense of dread began to slowly creep over me. There was something terrifyingly wrong about all of this, but at that same time it was all darkly thrilling. I watched the screen as the camera slowly came out of the elevator into the big, open common room. Unlike the upper level, the ceilings here were low, and though the area was likely the footprint of a small gymnasium, it felt strangely claustrophobic.

“Yeah. But, the construction’s almost done,” she continued, as we drifted in among the plain plastic chairs around a simple round table, “and some of them are homeless now, and the rest don’t want to leave. So, we decided to make a place for them, and any other men we hire. If they need a place to stay."

That surprised me. “Hiring men?”

“Oh, for sure! I mean, we’ve been interviewing and hiring for so many new positions. Girls, of course, for the clinics, the administration and blah blah. But Evolution wants to do some community outreach, help out the less fortunate,” Melissa continued, “So many men are unemployed now, and we figure we can use them for maintenance, cleaning, laundry, landscaping, right? Maybe even some basic data entry in one of the lower levels.”

“I…I guess?” I answered, still disbelieving what I was seeing and hearing.

“…and some of these construction workers are pretty cute,” she giggled, as the camera brought us to one of several doorways at the back of the room, “the girls kinda want to keep them.” This entry led to a low hallway off of which came a number of hostel-type rooms. Each room had multiple iron bunk beds, allowing each to sleep a dozen, maybe more. “Just look at these cages I’ve made for them…”

“C-cages?” I blurted, suddenly noticing now that, yes, the doors to the rooms were barred, like a jail’s might be.

“Well, haha, not cages!” she quickly corrected, “We just…want it to be secure, and safe, right? If there’ll be men living here, underground, we don't want them getting into trouble do we?”

“O-okay…” I hesitated, trying to come to the logic of it all.

“They're more like living areas…” she added.

…than, like… some sort of pen? Yikes. But… there was some charity in it I guess. If these men were homeless, and without work, weren't we just doing them a favor? They seemed to like it here.

The camera looked further down the dark hallway. There were lots and lots of these rooms. “How many of these people will be living down here?”

“Well, right now we think there’s about twenty surviv-…A-about twenty of them. Plus we have plans to bring in about a dozen right away.” she answered, a strange tilt to her voice, some heavier breathing as she turned the camera around to go back to the common area, “But we have plenty of room for a lot more once we need it.” She was excited for this, for sure, and trying to hide it.

“It…it looks nice,” I tried, just imagining what the real thing would look like in person as I did and doing my best to ignore the lingering sense of foreboding, which continued to breath chills onto the back of my neck. Something about this wasn't quite right.

“It will be pretty nice for them,” Melissa continued, as she breezed the camera past what looked like a small cafeteria. “It’ll be our own little far-...our own little community of men. We’ve included a few more feeding areas, back that way, all sorts of…uh, like, games and places for them to explore and hang out when they’re not working.” The camera was sailing through a labyrinth of smaller spaces, now, little halls. A room of video games. “They seem to like looking at pictures but they won’t have phones or computers…”

Because they can’t afford them? Or because you won’t permit it? I didn’t dare ask.

“...and haha we noticed that now that we have the statue up in the atrium, they spend a lot of their free time at night hanging around, sometimes even kneeling in front of it,” she explained, “but we can’t have that anymore so haha we made a little room with a smaller version of the statue that they can go to.”

“Another statue of you?!?” I asked, totally flabbergasted at what I was seeing. The camera had glanced into a small, dark chamber, lit by flickering, computer-generated candles. Indeed a smaller, maybe eight-foot tall copy of ‘Female Health’, stood inside. Made of a similar white stone amalgam perhaps, this one was placed in more heroic of a pose. It stood on a raised platform at the far end of the room, to look down at its admirers. “For them to….what??” Jerk off to you?!? “Down here?!”

“Remember, it’s not me!” Melissa giggled, as the camera backed out of the room, “You don’t have to be jealous!”

Is that a sign above the door? They call that ‘The Chapel’ ?!?

I looked to my right, to Melissa, still squatting aside me. If I hadn’t noticed it before, I did now. Her dress today was toga-inspired, for sure. She looked like a Roman goddess, unsettlingly too much like the statue even now, here.

“And, don’t worry, I’ll make sure they behave,” she continued, as our point of view on-screen shifted, “I have cameras everywhere, so I can watch over them. I'll make sure they’re nice and safe.”

…and not doing anything you don’t allow, I gather?

“Okay well speaking of staying safe, I can’t wait to show you where you’ll be living!” Melissa said ebulliently. She was moving the camera around a bit through the men’s chambers again, and I was suddenly afraid that she’d had a cell set aside for me down there, in the depths. “But the upstairs isn’t done yet. We’re still working on finishing the design and moving the walls around. Especially the third floor.”

“I’ll be u-upstairs?” I asked, feeling a sense of immediate relief. Had I known I’d be moving?

And the building has three floors now?

She sensed the change in my voice and giggled. “Yes of course, silly! You’ll be living upstairs, cutie, with me and the girls,” she said, as she moved to click a few keys and the animation of the virtual walkthrough closed off her screen. “There’s a big suite planned for me, and you’ll have your own ca-...your own little room inside it.” Crouching alongside me, she shifted a bit. “It’ll be so nice, when…when I can take you back to my new nest, I can make it all so comfy for you,” she said, and I heard the first hint of the throaty growl that signaled her arousal. “We’ll move all your stuff in, or just get rid of it all,” she said, making herself even more excited with the thought of it, “I’m going to have everything you need, get you anything you want. Mmmm….rrrrr….”

Oh…oh crap…

Jesus I was getting so hard.

“Oooo just the thought of it is getting me all kinky haha,” she laughed, “Mama’ll take good care of youuu….”

Oh god.

I saw Melissa glance up at the camera, which Gianna had been using earlier in our video chat and had since stood forgotten attached to my desktop’s monitor. She’d clicked off power to the screen, but the camera’s red light still blinked. Melissa smirked.

“Mama and her girls, her huge, huge hive of girls,” she continued, in a tone that had started to sound like gloating as she settled her hand on my iron-hard cock, though my thin, ripped scrub pants. “We’re getting so big, here, our little home. And we’re going to be…nnngh…hiring. Hiring more. Hiring so…many…more…girls…”

“Oh jesus Melissa,” I moaned, as she began to squeeze me.

“Picture it, baby, picture all the girls,” she purred, her eyes gleaming as she glanced up again at the camera. And then, with her large smile pointed at its blinking red light, she slipped her hand though the tear Morgan had left, up the front of my pants. “There are going to be so many of us, your swarm of girls growing and growing and growing. Will you like that? Having that many more of us?”

“Oh g-god yes,” I admitted, already picturing a crushing throng of them and then gasping as I felt her palm and fingers slip below me, to cup my chicken-egg sized balls.

Feeling how swollen I was, she purred her approval. ”It’s good that he’s all nice and full now,” she said, massaging my sac gently and making my eyes cross, “all ready for a productive day.”

With her free hand she tore away, like tissue paper, the remaining portion of my scrub pants from my hips leaving me fully exposed and helpless to do anything about it. She took my shaft in hand and began speaking right to it, right to my cock. ”This weekend I got used to being with you every moment, baby,” she cooed, “And I started to miss you already.” One hand still played with my balls while the other slowly began to stroke me. She cooed and clucked down to it, treating my penis like it was directly her lover. “Now, I want to suck you until there’s nothing left inside.”

In an instant she had turned me in my chair, on her knees got between my legs, and reached up to - for some reason - adjust the position of the monitor and camera.

“M-Melissa!” I exclaimed, trying to figure out what was happening.

You wanted to frame the shot perfectly, so she could see you do this. I didn’t realize it right then but I do now. You wanted her to watch. And seethe.

“Shhh shh shh…I know we have work to do,” Melissa said, trying to control herself and keep the growl out of her voice as she continued to talk directly to my cock. “We have to make sure Gianna knows you’re a good worker, she has to know you can get to work on time, that you can finish your paperwork…” She took a moment to put her hair up into a loose bun. “But I also want her to see how good an Office Manager I am. How good I am at taking care of you….”

“Oh god…” I moaned, letting myself submit to the moment, feeling the eyes of both Melissa and Gianna on me as I collapsed.

“Good boy,” Melissa lauded, and suddenly I was in her mouth. Stars exploded in my vision, even as my eyes clamped shut. She had me fully in, down to the base, and the muscles of her throat vibrated around me. Girls, girls all around me, through these thin office walls, they all stood suddenly at attention.

They knew what was happening. They could feel it. Could they…see me, too?

I could picture them, all about the office, trying to keep from groaning or smiling too broadly, knowing what was coming. Melissa in the meantime purred and moaned, and barely had to move or caress my testicles at all because with just two deliberate passes up and down my length, her mouth had me exploding, my hips bucking up into her as she laughed with gurgling glee around my manhood.

“uuungh…unnngh…unnghh…” I mewled, just trying to stay focused, stay conscious as - yes - she seemed to be sucking everything I had right up out of me. She was draining me, unburdening me, granting me my morning relief. She let me come, come completely, come completely down into her throat until I was fully spent and flaccid. We both knew I’d need it again, but for now-

“How’s that?” she smiled, finally pulling herself back up and taking me again in her hands, so she could gently caress my softened length as she laid me back down again along my thigh. She wiped the corner of her lip with a finger, and swallowed demonstrably. “All better?”

I released one last shuddering breath, and let my head nod forwards.

I passed out.

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thank you muchly to RiF for his help in editing

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