Me: Oh hey! It’d be fun to drive out on this mountain road and find a hike!

Me, an hour later: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Vacation of an Economic student

The semester was over, mid-summer vacations were just around the corner and I was very excited to go back home after a long time I was going to meet my parents, friends, and my cousins. I didn’t even realize how fast the initial days of my vacation went and my holiday was almost over. One sunny morning of mid-summer I stood ready for the new day. Holding a warm cup of coffee I glanced at my schedule for the next few days wondering whether I should extend my holiday or go back to my hostel sooner so I can study for the next semester. It was very difficult to choose because I didn’t want to leave my hometown so early but at the same time, my studies were important as well. The trade-off between the two made me think more practically and I decided to start studying from where I was now; my hometown. This was suggested by my mom which I find quite thoughtful because I can be productive as well as enjoy my last days of vacation.

I was so dwelled in my thoughts about making the right decision that I didn’t even realize my coffee was finished. It was 9:30 already and I was late for the movie so I had to give up my breakfast or else I would have missed the movie. The movie was finished and it was almost afternoon and I had no food in my stomach then I realized that the cost of my hunger was way too much to reach on time at the movie theatre. As I was hungry I decided to go to the old Italian café where I and my friends used to hang out when we all were younger but now everyone is busy with their studies. Reaching there the manager quickly recognized me and asked me how I was. It was quite unexpected to see that the manager remembered me after so many years.

The manager offered me a free lunch for that day out of his kindness to his old customers. I was filled with joy and food after I left the café It was late afternoon at the moment and I had to buy some notebooks and stationary for my next semester so I went to the place where they sold academic things at the wholesale rate, the market economy of that place favored the customers and the sellers as well at some extent. The sun started to go down indicating it was going to get dusk soon and it was time for me to meet my old friends after a long time. I opened my phone to book a cab but I was not quite sure whether I should take an Uber or Ola and then I noticed that there was an offer on Uber; quite like an incentive which led me to book an Uber cab instead of Ola, the driver arrived and I left for my friend’s house. In the middle of my ride, the driver pointed out that he had to fill the petrol in his car so we went to the nearest petrol station. There was a long line of cars and bikes waiting to fill up with petrol. The liter meter above the station showed that it was almost out of petrol but we still waited for an hour-long queue just to find out that they ran out of petrol. We had to wait for another 30 minutes so that they could refill the pump with petrol from the truck. This short incident showed me the reason for the high petrol prices, it was because petroleum was scarce and the quantity demanded was increasing day by day. It is necessary for us to understand that we have to use petrol very efficiently. We can do that by minimizing the use of petrol by traveling by public transport instead of traveling alone in your 4 wheeler or maybe doing a car-pool. Anyway, after wasting 1hr 30mins, I requested the driver to drive a little faster as I was late. I reached at my friend’s house 45 minutes late, everyone was waiting for me. At first, I was not able to recognize his house. There were many marginal changes here and there in his living room which made it look like a whole new living room. 

We had a nice time with each other, everybody discussed the problems they faced at their new university. Some said that they had a hard time making new friends while others couldn’t adapt to the new climate change and food. I had somewhat similar problems that my friends were going through, I wasn’t able to adapt to the humid climate, it also affected my skin and it took me a couple of days to make new friends. Our conversations slowly drifted towards our younger days when everything was way easier and simpler, We cherished our childhood memories when we all used to travel, eat, and enjoy together but now everything has changed and no one has time to meet each other. After we finished talking, everybody wanted to dance and sing so we had a nice dancing and singing session, soon Everyone was hungry so we decided to order food at his house instead of going out to eat which was planned initially. After a long discussion about what should we eat, we finally decided to order pizza. I was low-key flabbergasted when I saw the bill because the price was too high as compared to how it was 2 years earlier or so; the prices were almost 10% more. After a long wait, the pizza finally arrived and we realized it was not going to satisfy everyone’s hunger, The quantity of pizza we were expecting was not up to the mark but the taste of the pizza was surprisingly good and everyone loved it. As we were still hungry we decided to go to an ice cream parlor which was near my friend’s house. It was a privately owned ice cream parlor that was famous in the whole colony which gave him the authority to alter the prices in his favor kind of like a monopolistic competition, but the prices were reasonable so everyone preferred to go to that ice cream parlor instead of other parlors in the colony.

So after eating ice cream everybody was satisfied and full, it was time for me to leave because I wanted to start studying the next morning. The stars and the moon illuminated the night, street lamps lit up the streets with warm yellow lights. One of my friends was going to drop me off at my place but at the last moment, he backed off because he wanted to stay at our friend’s house for the night. Due to his actions, I had to book a cab and leave. His actions acted like an external cause because of which I had to suffer. Anyway, I reached home quite late because Uber took a lot of time for booking a cab for me as it was night. I was very exhausted today, even though the day was very joyful and filled with adventures. I wanted to remember this day so I jotted down the whole day in my personal diary. I learned so many things today like breakfast is the most important meal in our day and we should try not to skip it, also it felt very nice meeting my old friends, I used to miss them a lot before when I was in Delhi for my undergraduate program; I feel it is very important for us to take some free time every six months from our busy and hectic schedule to meet our old friends because according to me it is the purest form of friendship that we should never let go where as the friendship we make when we get old are temporary in most cases, thinking all of these made me very sleepy so I fell asleep earlier than usual after all I had to fix my sleep schedule as well. I could see that soon my vacation was going to get over and my college was going to get started. Again I was going to leave my home and return to my hostel for the next semester. Even though I was sad I felt quite excited about the new chapter in my life, new experiences, and new friends I was going to meet, I was very happy and content with the experience I had on this vacation, especially today’s day because I could notice so many economic concepts which I could relate to, these concepts were invisible to me before I studied economics. My interest in economics has increased since this vacation, now I can now see economics being used in every day-to-day aspect of life. I feel that economics is a subject that is very necessary to learn because it helps us to survive in the world in the most efficient way possible.     

Mysticus Chapter 6

Ezra x F!Reader Soulmates AU

Pairing: Ezra x F!Reader

Word Count: 1.5K

Warnings: None - Fluff

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Masterlist

If you thought he was touchy before, you were sorely mistaken. It was as though you were tethered together, some invisible string connecting you to one another. His hand always found yours and your body always seemed to carry you right to him.

He would absentmindedly draw little circles in your palm as he drove, and reached over to play with the hair at the base of your neck while you drove. He seemed to do it without even realizing and you found yourself doing the same. Your hand always drifted to his knee, always itching to touch his hair, absentmindedly fingering the little blonde patch. He always leaned into it; you had the sense that both of you had gone without human contact for a long time and were trying desperately to make up for lost time.

After that night -and next day- in the motel, you never slept apart. If either of you left the bed, the other woke up soon after. You vaguely wondered how the hell you had ever slept without him.

-

“We’re running low on funds, we should stop at the next town and figure something out.” You spoke as you counted through your pooled money. He kept his eyes on the road as read the highway signs, switching lanes to make sure he’d be able to take the next exit.

“Understood Birdie, I suspect we will do well here.” He spoke so confidently - he was good at charming people into hiring him for quick jobs. Manual labour, setting up events, he was a jack of all trades and didn’t ask any questions. Sometimes if he was sure the job was safe and easy he would manage to get you both hired. Whether it be for a few hours or a few days. Unless there was a fair or carnival in town, then you could do your palm readings.

On your way into town you noticed some signs advertising a drive-in and it sent a shiver down your spine. That was another place that made your skin crawl. Being inside the car and watching the movie was okay, it was everything else that gave you the creeps. There was a sense that nothing ever changed, a creeping nostalgia.

“Birdie, would you do me the great honour of accompanying me to the drive in? I’d very much enjoy taking my girls out on a real date.” The dog lifted her head sensing he was speaking about her, she sniffed his ear and settled back in the backseat.

His smile faltered slightly upon seeing the look of wild panic on your face.

“Don’t laugh, but the drive in kind of freaks me out.” You admitted almost shyly. He smiled at you but it wasn’t malicious, he grabbed your hand as he pulled into the nearest motel and pressed soft kisses to your knuckles.

“I would never laugh at you Birdie, if you are decidedly opposed then I will of course find somewhere else to woo you as you deserve. However, I’m sure I can find a way to give you a positively lovely experience.” He gave you the secret smile as he playfully nipped at your fingers. You shuddered as you tried to imagine what he was imagining and agreed. Who were you kidding? You would have agreed to anything he said in order to have him looking at you like that.

“Okay, fine.” You couldn’t help but smile at him.

“Splendid. I’ll get us checked in while you make sure our girl here attends to her business.” He patted the dog warmly as he made his way over to the front desk. Within 20 minutes you were getting settled into your meagre accommodations, the dog sniffing around the room like she usually did. Satisfied the room was up to her standards she plopped down in the floor with a huff. Ezra then clapped his hands together excitedly turning to you and giving you a devastating smile.

“Alright Birdie, I inquired at the front desk and the first showing just started, I am partial to the late show myself and with your consent we’ll leave here in an hour. Now, if you’ll be so kind, I would humbly implore you to wear that lovely sundress I adore so much.”

* * * * *

You were torn as you pulled in, Ezra’s hand on your thigh was reassuring - a grounding force that communicated pure safety. You were safe when you were with him - no doubt about that - your mind however didn’t care. The drive-in was creepy and you couldn’t help but feel it. Like always - he sensed it.

“Birdie, would you like to leave? You are not obligated to be here if you are truly frightened. I am content with your company and your company alone. Everything else is immaterial.” He was looking at you intensely - wanting your complete honesty.

“I’m a little nervous - but I’ll be okay once the movie starts.” You leaned into him unconsciously - his touch made you feel better.

“If at any point you find you’ve reached your limit - simply say the word and we will depart.” He winked as he found a good spot for you to park. Knowing that you could leave at any moment made it marginally better, you could focus on having a good time.

He pulled a bag of goodies out from the back and handed them to you with a smile on his face, all of your favourites.

All in all it was actually fun, the two of you talking throughout the film, making bets on how it would turn out. You both leaned into one another over the little console, always connected in one way or another.

You watching him during one of your quiet moments, you knew you loved him - that was obvious, but there was something more. Something massive prickling at your brain, something that itched in your hand whenever you touched him. He gave you the secret smile when he caught you looking at him and the prickling grew more intense. Everything had to do with that smile - you knew it. There was something bigger that for one reason or another you refused to confront. What were you afraid of?

“Why do you smile at me like that?” You asked it playfully, in low tones and his grin widened. He knew - he always knew.

“I have no idea what you’re referring to Birdie.” He kissed your palm and you narrowed your eyes at him - he was teasing you.

“Yes you do - it’s like you know something that I don’t.” You were skirting around it now, getting perilously closer, were you really ready for this? He sensed your sudden panic and the smile faltered.

“What scares you so? Is it me?” His hand held yours and he drew those little circles into your palm, you had to be honest.

“No - never you.” you saw him let go of a deep breath then - “I don’t know - I get the feeling you know something and you’re not telling me. Am I crazy?” You looked into his eyes, trying hard to see if you could glean any insight into your suspicions.

“I am convinced you know more than you think, you may not be ready to face it though.” He drew your attention to your palm. To the mark you shared and you stared at them, you felt him willing you to see what he saw. “When I was a boy, my grandmother told me stories to calm me. I was a hellion, always moving. She was somewhat of a romantic, she would say this mark on my palm was special. That if I was lucky enough to find it’s twin on another person, that it would mean something.” he didn’t look up at you. This was it. This was what you’d been skirting around. You already knew you loved him, that he was essential to you, that you were glad you’d found each other but thinking it was preordained or destiny was almost inconceivable to you.

“What did you say when she told you?” You were imagining him as a little boy, the shock of blonde and those wild eyes. It made you a little sad to not have been a part of his life back then.

“I was disgusted!” He laughed then, and you couldn’t help but smile at the image. His little arms crossed stomping away as his grandmother laughed. “I told her she was crazy and that I was too wild, that I did not desire anyone. She laughed at me and informed me - quite correctly - that my mind would change as I got older.”

“Have you? Do you still think she was crazy?” you knew the answer, you knew then finally, what was so infuriatingly obvious. The smile dropped from his face completely, being replaced with a fierce intensity, his eyes almost burning into you.

“I have Birdie, she knew even then, what I know now.” He seemed to be guiding you - the hope that you would finally understand shining at you in the darkness of the car. The movie, long forgotten, the dog sleeping in the backseat.

“Us.. You and I…” You trailed off as the smile returned, only this time you were in on the secret.

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Honestly? I think what tangled failed to do was make sure characters had good chemistry as friends. Seriously Cass and Rapunzel where like crude oil and the ocean. One single match from destruction. Season one is bottom barrel because it goes out of it's way to excuse Frederick for his shit. Season two was actually really good because Rapunzel was still herself and was making tough choices left and right. Season 3? Ohhhh boy. Season 3 was a half good half bad because while I do applaud her trying to bring her friend back into the fold? Cassandra wasn't wrong when she said "this has to stop now. This thing where you THINK you've been my friend". Cuz as far as I could tell? They were never friends. Hell even when being a slow burn villain, Varian had better friend chemistry with Rapunzel. When the show expects me to swallow "Cass and I are besties.and sisters!" whole sale? I'm not buying it.

Oooooh boy! This ask is just dripping with potential rant power. Sorry in advance for how long this answer is destinied to be!

First things first. I absolutely agree with you on how badly TTS handles chemistry amongst the main characters. Cass gets the worst of it because she is shoehorned as Rapunzel’s BFF off screen and suddenly she has equal sway on Rapunzel as Eugene? Her character can’t even be allowed to breathe most of the time because the show is obsessed with sticking her next to Rapunzel to the point that she can’t grow any further away from her. At least other show original characters like Lance and Varian have an actual introduction and a place in the world outside of Rapunzel, but even then they suffer because Rapunzel is upfront and center and there is very little wiggle room for interactions that don’t have at least have some involvement with her. It’s here where our opinions differ however.

I would make the bold claim by sayin that S1 of TTS is by far and away the best out of the three. Yes it has the glaring flaw of bias for Frederic and against Varian that makes me question whether or not it should be considered “good” but it’s much better balanced than the other two seasons that follow it. In S1 we actually get character who aren’t Rapunzel more chances to shine without her stealing the spotlight away at the last moment. In S1 we actually have an actual conflict that drives the story forward and at least pretends to care about developing the characters. Even the obnoxious bias could have still worked out in the shows favor if they were ever properly addressed in story and not swept under the rug like they were in later seasons. Heck, I would go as far as to argue that the worst parts of S1 is the fact that S2 and S3 make it worse retroactively.

S2 in my opinion is the dullest of the three, by a wide margin. With them never addressing what the mains left behind in S1 as well as taking the threat of the rocks away WAY too early, the conflict is particularly nonexistent. Not only that, but it does what I think is the worst thing a show can do during a season long journey. They never actually develop the world outside of Corona. They established that there are 6 other kingdoms in the alliance with Corona, but the most we get of any of them is the one throwaway line about them being close to the mountains of Koto in Freebird. Other than that we overstay in three separate places that end up being worthless to the plot as a whole. After spending three episodes in Vardaros right out the bat, we never return or what’s become of them afterwards. Them mains stranded on the Island is pretty dull and is only memorable to me because they had the guts of mentioning Varian again and established that Rapunzel STILL has an unhealthily delusional bias for Frederic despite of everything. The House of Yesterday’s tomorrow is just an excuse of shoehorning a bunch of magical hijink cliches that aren’t done very interesting. Heck, despite them spending a whole season getting to the Dark Kingdom, they only spend an episode and a half there and only a single night in universe. The rest of S2 is just filler that don’t even develop the characters or tell any interesting stories. Like, an enchanted forest episode even though the mid season finale takes place in another enchanted forest? A repeat of the first part of Tangled the movie with Cass replacing Eugene? Whatever the heck “Curses” was supposed to accomplish? The only thing interesting that S2 introduces is the Brotherhood, and we all know how little they are used afterwards.

I would also like to point out that at the start of S2, the mains just…. Stop developing almost entirely? Cass and Eugene never have any meaningful moments together like they do in S1, and are reduced to just taking potshots at each other to remind us that they have some sort of relationship. Lance is reduced strictly to comedic relief and in my opinion is just there to give Eugene something to do when he is removed from the plot because once again, the show is obsessed with making Rapunzel and Cass’ friendship be a thing that only matters. Hookfoot is just there to give his stand up routine about how marriage is terrible in the first episode of the season and just to exist afterwards, yet he SOMEHOW gets actual episodes focused on him while Lance suffers. Even characters properly introduced this season are cursed to never flesh out because Adira keeps pulling a vanishing act for no established reason, Hector is only gets any lines in his debut episode and never given any real focus again, and Edmund gets the same treatment as the other dads (except maybe Captain) by getting his entire character reduced to one trope later on in S3. Speaking of…

S3…. Ooooh boy S3. It’s not as boring as S2 for me, but that’s only because it’s a media equivalent of a train wreck that I couldn’t look away from. It’s like they took the two major issues of the past two seasons (the clear bias and shallow filler) and mashed them together while trying to savage it by inserting what worked in S1, (actual conflict) but completely missed the point why it worked in the first place. All pretense of caring about any other character other than Rapunzel and Cass is gone in this season. Even episodes that focus on anyone outside of Rapunzel, ends up ending with Rapunzel saving the day because she is the only one allowed to be heroic anymore.

They try to make Cass’ villain arc as complex as Varian’s but for some reason they think her blaming a literal baby for being kidnapped is enough grounds to go on a murder streak without one episode of hesitation. Lance is just there for bottom barrel dumb humor, yet the show thinks he is responsible enough to raise two kids on his own. Varian falls into the pigeon hole of just being the “kid character that hangs with the grown up mains” trope that he managed to avoid in S1 while also being just a plot device to not only give the mains access to tech, but also get shoehorned into scenes to keep the audience somewhat invested. Eugene is literal retconned in universe to be just a bland supportive boyfriend. Rapunzel, my gosh Rapunzel…. She treated is so painfully “perfect” to the point that she is completely unrelated. I’m not calling her a Mary Sue because they only ACT like she is perfect. She is still a hugely flawed human being, but the other characters just applaud her because she is “the magical, wonderous sundrop” and very little else. Also yes, Rapunzel being obsessed over Cass while playing off all the horrible actions her BFF as her being lost is the most frustrating thing ever. It’s as if she became Frederic from S1 and abandoned everyone else well being in favor of one person who doesn’t even want her attention, only worse because it’s made into a good thing. Again, S1 is made retroactively worse because of the seasons that follow it.

There is much more things wrong with S3 than S2, but honestly I find myself changing my mind a lot whether which one is objectively worse. Like making a show boring is arguably the worst thing you can do, but the choices, morals, and all around writing of S3 is just bad. Then again the writing in S2 is honestly pretty on par with S3 at times, so again, it’s a toss up.

Sorry again if this answer is a lot, but it was pretty fun at the same time. Thanks for the ask. ^^

A pretty decent entry in the genre of “arguing over meritocracy by left wing and contrarian pundits.” You should read it. @slatestarscratchpad couple weeks ago had his own entry in the genre when reviewing Freddie deBoer’s book.

But I’m going to point to and expand upon a minor point Yglesias makes.

***

The fun thing is to argue over meritocracy at the level of principles. Is it ethically sound to reward some people more than others for things somewhat outside their control? Everyone has a take!

But look, there is a difference between:

The most productive quartile of people in a field earn 25% more than the least productive quartile.

and

The top five people in a field earn ten thousand times more money than everyone else.

And both of these are meritocracy! They are rewarding people who are better at things. They both might even be unfair in certain ways, depending on what your definition of “is better at your job” is.

But you can see why the first scenario is “a fairly boring reward structure that incentivizes some people but does not create large scale injustice” and the second scenario is possibly society destroying inequality. If parts of your meritocratic judgment are unfair (like being influenced by social connections or inherited benefits from your family or just cultural affinity rather than “pure smarts and effort”) then it will be even more disgusting in the world where that leads the winner to earn 10,000 times as much. Especially if the non-winners aren’t even earning living wages. You’re going to see new workers, and even their parents, stress themselves out to an extreme degree to try to be one of the “winners” in that scenario. It introduces more *distortion* to the system.

People argue a lot about the principles of meritocracy a lot, but really what’s *causing* all this obsession with our economic system of rewards is the vast gulf between winners and losers in our current system.

Part of this is just laziness. Not on the part of thinkers but the broader society. For various reasons - good and bad - we let capitalist competition determine how large the reward for the “winners” of the system will be, and we just kind of accept that coefficient, and then argue endlessly about whether there should be a reward gap at all. MAYBE THE GAP BETWEEN WINNERS AND LOSERS SHOULD JUST BE SMALLER. Maybe we can be meritocratic without “one SAT score means you have two houses and a yacht, and a slightly smaller score means you live off food stamps in an apartment you share with three roommates.” 

And maybe you don’t want to mess with the capitalist system that led to this since you like the other materialist progress it has given us, but then there’s no reason to argue about meritocracy writ large if you are already going to back the status quo. Except for the fact that from the perspective of the pro-capitalists, it’s a lot safer to argue “meritocracy: yay or nay” than to argue over “should we make ten thousand times as much as the middle of the curve, or only a hundred times as much?”

I think Matt, Scott, and Freddie all have good points at the margins, about the ways we define meritocracy and ways it is unfair or useful and can be modified. But none of those are nearly as important as the *size* of the rewards under our current system, which is what is really driving the stress and anger around this issue.

hi friend!!! PLEASE keep in mind there is NO RUSH or ANY REQUIREMENT TO WRITE THIS IF YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE WRITING I'M JUST GIVING PROMPT BECAUSE YOU SAID YOU FEEL LIKE WRITING AND I LOVE YOUR WRITING!! what about canon-era POTS Jon? infections can cause really bad POTS flares (my understanding is that it lowers your BP). it could be after any of his many injuries, but even just a cold can mess with it. and ONLY IF YOU FEEL BORED AND UP TO WRITING <3 TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!!

hello my dear!!!! you are going THROUGH IT right now!!!! I love you very very much and I hope that this fic will make your day a little brighter <3

So have a little Jon with the flu and a POTS flare up! And friends who love him!

CW nausea, fainting

This was a mistake.

Jon knows it, his body knows it—the entire train car probably knows it too. It’s barely a ten minute’s ride from his flat to the Institute, but it might as well have been an hour trapped in a boiler room for all he can tell. Suffocating, you’re suffocating—is the only message his brain will send him, as he sits squeezed in between two very unfortunate passengers on this snowy Monday morning, trying very hard both not to cough and to stop himself from tearing off his coat and scarf this instant.

Being ill always hits him hard—far harder than it has any right to; harder than he is willing to acknowledge, really—as it always seems to trigger his POTS in the most frustrating of ways. Last time he’d been ill, truly ill, Tim may have paid the price for his stubbornness more than he had himself. What with him refusing to do anything to look after himself, being caught by surprise by a fainting spell, and ending up dragging Tim to the A&E with him to be treated for a nasty head wound. This time around, he has actually taken several precautions, with his compression stockings on, a water bottle, and TENS unit in his bag, just in case the muscle aches from whatever hell bug he’s managed to catch compound the pain from his EDS.

Tim ought to be proud.

Mouth twisting in a smile in spite of himself, Jon resists the urge to bolt out of the train car as soon as the stop is announced, forcing himself instead to stand slowly and carefully before exiting.

—

As luck would have it, the lift had been broken down, forcing Jon to climb the flight of stairs up to the street. Legs nearly giving out on him before he could half-sit, mostly collapse onto the bench at the top, his chest heaves as he tries to convince his body not to faint. With somewhat limited success.

So long as the fading in and out of his vision is not followed by a lapse in awareness, he’ll be alright.

Suffocating suffocating

Whether rational or not, Jon has to pull of his coat and scarf right now, or he’s sure his brain will short out on him completely. He tears at it all as quickly as possible, fingers shaking over the large buttons of his peacoat. Anything to relieve the pressure on his chest, whether brought on by POTS or his congestion, he’s soon to find out. Preferably, he’d like to slow down his breathing a bit before coughing again, but there’s very little he can do to control that—and buries it all in the folds of his scarf, hoping to avoid as many stares from passers-by as possible.

The lightheadedness only bangs against his eyes again as the fit continues, forcing him to fold his legs beneath himself and bend forward in an effort to breathe, breathe. Surely it hadn’t been so bad this morning when he had stepped out of the door—he had been quite certain of his ability to control it enough to get by, and hopefully without raising the alarm about his health throughout the archives. By the sound of it, though, he just hadn’t been getting deep enough breaths to force it all out, as the crackling depth of it alarms even him.

All the same, after a few minutes of breathing deeply with marginally-clearer lungs, he feels finally able to look up again—even shuddering against the soft padding of snowflakes against his shoulders and greying hair, rather than panicking about being boiled alive by his own jacket.

He’ll take what improvement he can get.

Steeling himself to walk the block down to the Institute, Jon pulls up his compression stockings from where they had slipped a bit and pushes on.

—

“So I’m sitting there, right? I’m sitting there, barbecue sauce on my titties…”

“You were NOT!” Sasha bellows at Tim, struggling to raise her voice over the sound of Martin’s cackling. “Don’t encourage him, Martin, he always puts this in his fucking stories.”

“HEY! It’s true!! It could have happened more than once, you know.”

“God I hate you so much,” she shouts, sending both Martin and Tim for another round of uncontrollable laughter.

It’s the perfect opportunity for Jon—who exits the lift as quickly as he can, heading for his office with the all the single-mindedness of a particularly winded and dizzy man. Perfect, because no one saw him beyond a shadow darkening the doorstep. No one to raise the alarm as he sinks into his chair, trembling at the exertion of making the journey from the lobby to the basement.

Burying his face in his hands, he sniffs back against the congestion plaguing him, adjusts his position to take pressure off his throbbing legs, and tries to collect his scattered thoughts enough to get to work.

—

Spinning, spinning, spinning are the walls of his office around him, worsening with every cough he stifles into the sleeves of his cardigan. After the initial recovery period when he had finally been able to sit in his office, chest aching with exertion, he had truly felt alright for those first couple of hours—even finding himself able to get lost in statements for a while, barely noticing an hour tick by, two, three. Until his vision started to go out again, and he found himself leaning aching elbows on aching knees, feeling the nausea that had caused him to lose his breakfast that morning rise up again in his throat.

Please, not now. Please.

He’s got to get something in him, knows it would help to at least keep something with salt down, if he can manage it. Regretfully, the only way to stop the dizziness is sure to worsen it first—as his emergency Gatorade supply happens to be in the break room refrigerator.

Text Tim, the rational part of his mind supplies at once, the sound advice on it falling on entirely deaf ears.

Can manage this myself.

I put it there, I can go get it.

Wishing more than anything he had brought his walker, he moves slowly, ever so slow and careful to standing—and stars explode in his vision at once, driving him right back down to the chair again, head between his knees and panting.

Damn it damn it damn it

Calm, just—

Calm down.

Heart pounding in double time to the ticking of the clock on the wall, Jon does everything he can to slow it down, slow it down, ease the stabbing pain of his overworked heart in his chest with the deepest breaths he can manage. It’s not enough, can’t see, can’t breathe—

No no no—

—

Thud.

The sound drives Tim into Jon’s office at once, not for the first time—though never with any less worry or concern. Even knowing what happened, that Jon was almost certainly fine, would never truly take away the way his stomach clenches every time this happens, every time he sees Jon hit the ground, even if he’s able to catch him on the way. And today was especially worrying, with the damp coughing he had heard slipping beneath the office door since this morning.

Please be okay please be okay—

“Jon?” he calls gently, swinging the door open to find him on the ground, rolling onto his back with a groan. “Did you faint?”

“I—yeah,” he replies, more vague-sounding than Tim would like, rubbing the back of his head as he starts to sit up.

Not good.

“You hit your head?” Tim asks as he kneels next to him, already reaching forward to card through Jon’s hair, looking for any sign of swelling or bleeding.

“I don’t—not badly, if I—oh,” he trails off at once, eyes beginning to flutter.

“Alright, easy, now,” Tim mutters, supporting Jon’s head as he shifts back to lying flat again, eyes clenched again the returning dizziness. “It’s really bad today, huh? And you’re ill too.”

In response, all Jon will give is a sigh, draping an arm over his mouth as it turns into a cough, before placing it over his eyes. Something twinges in Tim’s chest at the sight—knowing how much Jon hates this, hates anyone fussing over him even more—and squeezes gently above his knee in acknowledgement.

“What can I do? Anything?”

Still nothing verbal from him for a few seconds—seconds Tim is willing to wait as Jon sorts through both his own unwillingness to ask for help, as well as through his own likely-scattered thoughts. It had taken a lot for Jon to tell him about his POTS in the first place—in fact, that trust had not been built until Tim had to take him to A&E after a particularly bad fall. Now that he thinks of it, Jon had been ill then too—and even grouchier than his current persona of “Boss-man.”

“Was trying to—ugh,” starts, cutting off for a moment to clutch at his stomach, against what is most likely rising nausea. “Was trying to get—get some Gatorade.”

“That’s what all this is about? Getting your nasty-ass purple Gatorade?”

When Jon huffs out a little laugh with a smile, Tim feels very much pumping his fist in the air for joy—but refrains, if only for Jon’s sake.

“Tastes good. Don’t know what you’re missing.”

And a joke?

Should I call an ambulance?

“Tastes like purple,” Tim replies, letting a smile filter heavily into his own expression now. “I don’t mess with shit that tastes like a color.”

A sharp gasp from behind alerts him to Martin’s presence in the doorway.

“Oh Jon, what happened? Are you alright?” he asks, with such deep concern that Jon immediately buries his face in his hands and groans.

“Just fainted, is all,” Tim says at once, waving a sharp hand by his throat to cut off his well-meaning sympathy.

“Right,” he replies with raised eyebrows, carefully schooling his expression in a way that Tim very much appreciates. “Right. Anything I can do?”

“Could grab him some Gatorade from the fridge, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“On it,” he nods at once, and sets off.

Just then, Jon starts up coughing again, so harsh and damp it sets Tim’s teeth on edge.

“That sounds rough, Jon,” he grimaces, reaching up to his desk to grab tissues from atop it and set them on the floor.

“It’s—fine,” comes the reply, of course, accented in between by a hitching at the back of his throat that drives him upwards to sitting.

“Right. Sure,” Tim mutters, rolling his eyes as he braces Jon, whose harsh coughing bends him double with effort.

When he begins to sway a bit, eyes fluttering again—Tim is already to prepared to push his head gently forward and between his knees.

“Easy, easy.”

“Fuck.”

“I’ve got you.”

The shaking beneath Tim’s hands is not altogether a rarity after a bad faint, but something tells him there might be another cause this time. A fever, namely.

“When’s the last time you’ve eaten?” he asks, after waiting for Jon’s breathing to come a bit back under control.

“Didn’t—don’t. Don’t feel well,” he whispers, bending even further forward, enough to have Tim reaching for the bin, just in case.

“Alright, that’s alright,” he whispers in response, feeling powerless to do anything but sit and rub his back.

“Tried,” he starts up again after a moment, altogether shocking an unsuspecting Tim with his verbosity.

“Tried? Tried what?”

“Tried to be careful,” he clarifies, coughing once more into his elbow, and letting it double him back down. “Promise, I—heh—tried. Thought I was fine.”

“I know, Jon,” Tim assures at once, rubbing at his back once again against the trembling, wishing it was doing anything to really help him. “I know, alright? Just save your breath. It’s not your fault.”

Thankfully, by the time Martin reappears with the Gatorade, he’s quite a bit steadier, after the coughing fit has reached it’s end. Much to Tim’s surprise, he even offers Martin a small smile as he cast a long shadow through the office, blocking out the fluorescent light of the hall behind him.

“Alright, time for electrolytes!” Tim cheers, as Martin opens the lid to the bottle before handing it to Jon, who begins sipping at it cautiously.

“You’re shaking—are you cold?” Martin asks, already removing his cardigan and kneeling to place it over Jon’s trembling shoulders.

“No,” he snaps sharply, pushing off the cardigan and shifting around, preparing himself to stand. “I’m alright, just—”

“Hang on, hang on,” Tim soothes, pressing back against Jon’s chest as gently as possible to stop his movement. “Just—hold on a second, alright? Let me get the cot set up in here before you try that.”

“Tim—”

“I know, I know, perish the thought. I get it.”

“You don’t—”

“BUT! But,” he cuts in loudly, holding up a hand to shush him. “You shouldn’t even be here, Jon. You’ve probably got the flu, or something, judging by whatever—whatever is clearly going on here. So please. Just have a lie down for, like, an hour. That’s all I’m asking.”

All I’m brave enough to ask, really.

Another pause, during which it’s Tim’s turn for his heart to pound, watching Jon try to formulate an argument against him with furrowed brows.

And then—everything that had been hunched and furrowed goes slack, as Jon starts to sway dizzily again.

“Oh—oh, Jon,” Martin gasps nervously, helping him slowly lower back to lying on the ground.

“M’fine, fine,” he assures, words slurring a bit as Martin checks his forehead for fever—and if the meaningful glance he gives Tim is anything to go by, he can be pretty certain of Martin’s findings.

“Right. Cot. I’m going to get it, and I’ll be back,” he says firmly, glancing back one more time to find Martin carefully placing his cardigan beneath Jon’s head.

Of course, Tim knows there is still a good deal of fighting to do on the “force Jonathan Sims to take care of himself” front, but this will do.

This will have to do for now.

Ok listen Bokuto would simultaneously be the best and worst best man ever. He would throw the biggest ranger for the bachelor’s party, complete with a stocked liquor cabinet, strippers, the whole nine yards right?

He would also be the best hype man the day of. Like say Akaashi is getting married. This mans would be hyping him up before the main event, would be like “You got this, she’s gonna see you at the end of they aisle and burst into tears.” Then when they’re on the altar, he would be silently but somewhat obviously cheering his man on.

But when it comes time for the best mans speech, you already know that thing is gonna be an experience. He is probably already slightly intoxicated, just enough to lower his already low inhibitions, so he’s just rambling about how they’re best friends and how he and Akaashi made the best team in high school and then goes into an embarrassing story about how one of the teammates stole his pants once and he had to chase them around the campus in just his boxers.

And dont even get me started on drunk Bo on the dance floor stg this man tries to break dance and do the worm and just blows everyone’s minds bc he can actually do it incredibly well but almost puked afterward. Ugh I could go on and on about this boy

— from elle ! aaah bokuto 🥺 wait i love this, he’d be pretty much the life of the party, wouldn’t he? also just the world’s greatest hypeman and would just generally be running around trying to help everyone and make sure things go as smoothly as possible; definitely takes his best man role really seriously. like if the bouquet had suddenly gone missing, he’s driving to the nearest flower store or if one of the groomsmen had a loose button on their shirt, he’s suddenly googling how to sew. i love him sm—- as usual, short lil scenario under the cut. tysm for this and i hope you are having a wonderful day <3

᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃

bokuto was exhausted, practically crashing down on his assigned seat, taking the his first breather for the entire day. his coat had been gently folded across the back of the wooden chair, the first two buttons of his shirt undone, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and tie loosened. a quiet exhale moves past his lips, briefly closing his eyes to take a moment’s reprieve from the brightly coloured lights that flashed across the room.

he practically made a home in the dance floor the second his speech ended, but the alcohol was now wearing off, the excitement that carried him throughout the day slowly dissipating. the music is low, the wedding band now playing a much more gentle sound as the night finally begins to wind down.

“how are you doing, bokuto-san?” akaashi pulls up the seat beside him, giving him a small smile in the process.

bokuto shook his head, leaning back, “i feel like i should be the one to ask you that.”

he turned to face akaashi, clapping a hand on his shoulder, shaking it slightly. there’s a tired grin that spread across his features as he exclaimed, “you just got married.”

“i got married.” akaashi breathed out, like he hadn’t been able to process it himself. “time’s just a little too quick, isn’t it?”

“it is.” bokuto nodded, there was a hint of solemness in his tone and features. life was moving much quicker than he had hoped, change didn’t always frighten him; more often than not, he found it to be most exciting part of life. but it had finally fully sunk in now, that they were no longer two teenagers in tokyo who spent all their time on volleyball practices in the afternoon, whose greatest concern was whether or not they’d pass their math exam.

they were adults now, with their own lives, very much different from the other. truth be told, bokuto was surprised that they managed to maintain their friendship. but he was grateful for it nonetheless. 

and as much as bokuto loved the life he lived, all the fame and glory that came from playing volleyball — the thing he argued he was pretty much born to do — he couldn’t help but want just a little more.

his eyes are now trained on the dance floor, at the two or so couples that swayed to the slow beats of music, the bright multicoloured lights finally dimming down to a much softer tone. 

“what are you thinking about?” akaashi asked, noticing the faraway look in bokuto’s eyes.

he turned back to face akaashi once more, noticing the peacefulness and serenity that surrounded him. bokuto couldn’t help but want that for himself too.  but he could only shake his head, not wanting to put a damper on akaashi’s big day, especially since he spent so much of his energy making sure the day had gone well.

but akaashi knew better, he would’ve prodded forward if he hadn’t heard his name being called. a family member of his spouse’s was waving him over, hoping to get a few words in before they left. 

“they’re calling for you.” bokuto smiled, waving a hand to signal that he was truly feeling fine. that akaashi had absolutely nothing to worry about.

akaashi frowned, but found himself having no choice as the calls of his name got more impatient and incessant, “i'll talk to you soon.”

he nodded, shooing his friend away to the direction of whoever called for him. a wistful smile makes its way to his lips, gazing around the romantically decorated reception hall. maybe someday, he’d get all of this too. but for now, seeing akaashi holding his spouse’s hand, or konoha and sarukui laughing it up at their table, or komi and washio holding their respective partners on the dance floor, seeing everyone together once again after all these years, that was more than enough for him. 

᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃

a question: what would the hq characters be like at a wedding?  |  written on the margins masterlist

taglist : @haikyuutothetop @crystal-lilac @tobioespresso @sushijimawakatoshi @itsmeaudrieee @pantherhappy @jesssobs @mysticstrawberryballoon @cloudedsky_29 @sakusasimpbot​

join my hq taglist here. <3

In The Darkness Chapter 62 - To Find A Horcrux

Noragami x Harry Potter AU

Words: 1,632

Summary: The trio has done their Quidditch tryouts, and Yato gets some advice.

Also available on Yatorihell AO3

“The question is, what is the horcrux?” Yukine empathised. “It could be something we would never find, like Excalibur.”

He and Hiyori watched as Yato shoved his leather gloves on his hands and tightened the straps with his teeth, securing them around his wrists before clapping them together. Despite the faintly annoyed look on Yato’s face, the conversation drawled onwards.

“We know where Excalibur is,” Hiyori corrected. She stole a glance at Yato with her next words. “And like Madame Kofuku said, there may be more than one.”

“If there is more than one, then we’re screwed,” Yato said flatly.

Hiyori and Yukine exchanged guilty looks as Yato sighed, already feeling guilty for snapping.

All they had done since Potions class – where Madame Kofuku had revealed the Sorcerers very soul was divided and practically immortal – was talk about horcruxes; what they were, where they might be hidden, how many exactly there could be. It was beginning to drive Yato mad; not with his friends, but with the idea that the Sorcerer would need to be ‘killed’ multiple times before becoming mortal.

Their previous quest for the prophecy now seemed useless, as well as a failure. Sakura had practically died for nothing…

Yato threw a glance at them as he secured his padded arm protectors and tugged at his cloak. “Look, we can’t do anything over here. The Order is already looking for horcruxes, and there won’t be any in Hogwarts.”

Though Yukine and Hiyori didn’t reply, Yato could sense the mutual apology. Fighting and speculating wasn’t going to help them, and he didn’t want his mind to be preoccupied right now.

Yato picked up his broom, feeling the polished wood slide over fresh leather in his grip. The bristles grazed the ground as he, Yukine and Hiyori made their way to the Quidditch pitch through the blustering wind.

Whilst it was an unspoken truth, returning to Quidditch was Yukine’s idea of a distraction after the last two years of death and doom they had been through. Something they could enjoy again without the looming threat of Dementors ready to knock them out of the sky or being kidnapped mid-air.

They spilt up once they reached the pitch, wishing Yato good luck as they meandered their way to the stands with their scarf tails flying out behind them. Yato watched, knowing that both Yukine and Hiyori had secured their places on their teams, and now it was his turn to do the same.

The Quidditch teams seemed to have become somewhat rusty, with older, more experienced students dropping out in favour of focusing on their N.E.W.T.s – something Yato really should have been doing.

Admittedly, he was relieved to find out that it wasn’t just him neglecting his studies. Bishamon and Kazuma – each now Head Girl and Head Boy – were still captaining the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Quidditch teams. Then again, they had been Prefects and team captains for a while now; being Head Students would be a walk in the park.

Yet, here he was, stood on waterlogged mud and patches of grass, surrounded by fresh faces and awaiting his chance to prove he was still the best Seeker Hogwarts had seen – for Slytherin, at least.

Yato could spot a few dots in the surrounding stands, spectators come to watch newbies fall out of the sky or support their friends. Yato had the latter as a distant shape waved down at him from the closest stand of his left – Hiyori and Yukine.

Yato took a deep breath when his name was called by the team captain – someone he didn’t recognise but had sharp features. His eyes raked over Yato’s crop of dark hair that brushed his brow and hovered on the dated broomstick in his hand, immediately judging his ability whilst his feet were still on the ground.

Yato’s mouth quirked in cocky arrogance when their eyes met.

If they wanted a Seeker, they would get a Seeker.

~

Yato sighed into his cauldron. Every spare class on his timetable was filed with Potions, yet he was not improving at all. He wished Yukine were here to scold him – instead, Yato saw a sea of seventh-years brewing the same potion as him to varying degrees of success.

His eyes flicked to Nora at the back of the class. She hadn’t said a word to him nor looked in his direction since the incident on the train. Well, maybe she had been watching him, but he just didn’t know it.

Yato looked back into the goopy mess in his cauldron as the bell rang out, signalling the end of the day. The students clamoured to throw their cauldrons into the sink at the back of the class in a cacophony of noise and shouts. Yato hung back from the crowd, and when he saw Nora leave, he too dropped his failure into the sink. Wooden hand brushes had already picked themselves up and begun to scrub at the melding mess as it oozed down the sink.

Yato examined the potion mixture that had ended upon his robes and sighed again. He was useless at this.

“Still no luck?”

Yato turned and found Madame Kofuku stood behind him, gently smiling. His eyes flicked to the door, found it shut, and flicked back to Madame Kofuku. It was just the two of them. “No, Miss.”

He could see disappointment flicker briefly in her eyes, but it was quickly replaced by a genial warmth.“You’ll get better,” Madame Kofuku reassured. “I’ll make sure of it.”

A small silence stretched out between them, and Yato already knew there was bad news as soon as he saw the door was shut.

Madame Kofuku shuffled and her voice dropped slightly. “The Order thinks they may have discovered something.”

Yato’s head cocked to the side and his hands rested on the sink edge behind him. Half of him didn’t want to know, but the other half was desperate to make this end, to go back to his normal life.

Nevertheless, Madame Kofuku told him.

“We think the horcruxes may have been made recently. The people we’ve spoke to… they alluded to the idea that the Sorcerer was making horcruxes after the First Wizarding War. It seemed he came so close to death that he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Then again, we can’t be sure if we can trust this information.”

Yato exhaled. It was news, but this information came from acquitted Deatheaters – claimers that they had been forced to fight for the Sorcerer under the Imperius Curse. Whether or not that was true, it wasn’t much to go on.

“I’ve also had… an idea.” Madame Kofuku spoke carefully, and Yato caught the guilty undertone as her eyes shifted away from his when he made eye contact.

“With your Legilimency link to the Sorcerer, your ability to see what he is doing, we thought you may also be able to access his memories.”

Yato frowned. “I thought that only works with eye contact?”

“Normally, yes.” Madame Kofuku confirmed. “But you were able to see Daikoku in the Ministry through the Sorcerer’s eyes. Your link is strong; I don’t know how but you are the key to his mind. You might be able to find the horcruxes faster than we can.”

Technically he saw the attack through a snake’s eyes, but who’s to say the Sorcerer wasn’t an Animagus like Sakura? However, Madame Kofuku had a point. He could see through the Sorcerer’s eyes just the same as he could. Maybe his memories weren’t off-limits?

Madame Kofuku could see Yato processing the information, the dull scrape of brushes working away behind him. Guilt clawed at her throat. “I’m sorry to have to ask this of you, Yato. I may not be able to help you find the horcruxes, but I can help you with your classes.”

With that, Madame Kofuku turned on her heel and paced across the room to her desk. Yato followed in her wake, scooping up his bag and shouldering it, his mind already whirling.

The click of a lock and an ear-numbing scrape of a drawer being opened made Yato wince, but a second later Madame Kofuku’s pink hair remerged from behind the desk. In her hand was a dog-eared, discoloured copy of a book. The cover was nearly obscured by a multitude of spills and stains, but Yato could make out the title ‘Advanced Potion Making’.

“I used this for my N.E.W.T. exams when I was a student,” Madame Kofuku said. She looked down at the stained book with a smile, fond memories of her younger days resurfacing. Days when she would concoct potions and have accidents that would leave her hair pink and the classrooms in disarray. She looked up at Yato and held out the book. “And now it’s yours.”

Yato tentatively took the book in his hands and thumbed through the yellowed pages. Hundreds of handwritten scribbles stared back at him; slantways in the margins, squished in between text, or written above crossed out sentences. Each one a modification or note about ingredients; a perfect guide on potion making.

Yato looked back at Madame Kofuku, lost for words. She smiled in return.

“I hope this helps you more than I can,” Madame Kofuku said, but her tone turned to one of cautious advice. “But if I can only give you one word of advice for finding the Sorcerer’s memories, it will be to open your mind and let him come to you.”

Yato winced inside. Madame Kofuku had taught him less than a year ago to raise his guard to stop the invasions that plagued his dreams, and now she was telling him to let them down.

And it was precisely what he was afraid of.

Escape Room 123movies Review

Regardless of the banner, there is an astonishing absence of jigsaw astounds in this film. Or on the other hand skeletons, really. 

So at the beginning of today, escape room 123movies I took myself to the films and saw Escape Room, which I've been interested about since the trailers were delivered. I love escape rooms, I've played through The Room and every one of its spin-offs on numerous occasions, give me some old fashioned riddle unraveling and I am SO there! While I was anticipating a few panics, I was trusting there wouldn't be anything excessively horrifying since it conveys a PG-13 rating. Ideally there would be more sharp climatic alarms than violent passing scenes, and I was correct! 

(Fun certainty: did you realize that there were two films that turned out in 2017 likewise called Escape Room? I didn't until I was attempting to discover pictures for this film! Evidently, those two motion pictures are… not incredible, however I can't by and by vouch for them.) 

THE PLOT 

Escape room 123movies begins in, amusingly enough, an escape room! It at first appears as though a richly beautified front room, and everything is quiet until Logan Miller drops through the roof. He's limping, beat-up, and in all out frenzy mode as he totters to a convoluted looking number-labyrinth lock thing on the entryway. He understands that he needs four numbers, however when he pulls on the 1, the divider inverse him begins shutting in. Fantastic. We're in that spot with him as he battles to search for hints to locate the four numbers required as increasingly more of the excellent room gets decimated and squashed behind him. He finds the four numbers required, so he thinks, however they don't work, and we watch as he gradually gets squashed… .. … ..and afterward we flashback to three days earlier. Here we meet three of our fundamental characters, Zoey (played by Taylor Russell), Jason (played by Jay Ellis), and obviously, Ben (played by Logan Miller). If you don't mind, note that Ben appears to be marginally more assembled here, as in, he's not being squashed in an escape room… yet. These three characters are unfathomably unique in relation to one another, and they each get a strange riddle box from somebody they know. The riddle box drives them to Minos Escape Rooms with the guarantee of ~fabulous money prizes~ on the off chance that they can fathom the unsolvable escape room. It is here we meet our other three principle cast individuals: Danny (played by Nik Dodani), Mike (played by Tyler Labine), and Amanda (played by Deborah Ann Woll). After Ben apparently breaks the door handle in the lounge area, the six unfortunates find that the sitting area IS the escape room, and the game has started. The remainder of the film is, you got it, an escape room! We learn all through the remainder of the film more about the characters and why they were picked for this lethal game through shockingly explicit subtleties in all the rooms, and furthermore, who sent them here in any case? 

There's a great deal of extremely sullen riddle understanding. Like, a great deal. 

THE REVIEW 

This film is incredibly fun. That feels wrong to state about a "mental loathsomeness spine chiller," however I swear it is enjoyable. As I would like to think, the film makes a captivating showing of uncovering minor character subtleties all through without dropping the huge bend until the correct second. I love things like this where you sense that you need to focus on everything about you'll miss something and genuinely perhaps you should watch it again to truly get everything?? I live for stuff that way. It was upsetting a result of what was going on and invigorating when something at long last went right. I truly appreciated it all in all, and I think my assessment of the film showed signs of escape room 123movies improvement the more I pondered it a short time later. Those are my preferred sorts of movies, the ones that make you consider them a while later. 

Presently it's an ideal opportunity to escape into the following room of this survey, (I don't know whether I'll have the option to keep up the play on words game for each audit, fam) so Spoiler Warning currently in actuality, and I truly suggest for this film you see it first totally ignorant concerning any spoilers or significant plot details!\ 

this room? This room directly here?? This is the most noticeably terrible room, undoubtedly 

THE MUSIC 

The music for this film was extremely novel when I saw it, and it's one explanation I need to watch it once more, since I'm certain there were prominent music minutes I missed. The score truly set up for anxiety and anticipation, and it helped me to remember the music played in each film where somebody's attempting to hack into a PC under a period limit. You know the one. Prominent music minutes incorporate the initial tune that sets the room we see Ben fall into, the melody that plays during the montage of Ben, Jason, and Zoey attempting to understand their riddle boxes, the end credits music, and obviously, that AWFUL contorted version of Petula Clark's "Downtown" that plays as a clock in the topsy turvy Pool Room, presented previously. Awful room. Most noticeably terrible room. Loathe it. 

Zoey is all that is unadulterated and acceptable known to mankind 

THE CHARACTERS 

By and large, there were a ton of affable characters in Escape Room, which is somewhat lamentable in light of the fact that a significant number of them don't, well, escape. All the characters were one of a kind, and I acknowledged how every one of them had various responses to the stressors in each room, as indicated by their character. Zoey is my supreme top choice, she was a joy to watch the whole film, and I so valued her being the outright brainiac of the gathering. More virtuoso WOC jobs in films, it would be ideal if you There was additionally an extraordinary character circular segment for Ben, which I incredibly delighted in, and there was a great deal of heart given to both Mike and Amanda too. Sadly, Danny isn't around sufficiently long to truly be created, and Jason ends up being a survivalist butt nugget with a significant predominance complex. Yet, for the most part, you felt for all the characters, and you needed to see them escape, which implied that their demise scenes for the most part hit you similarly as hard as they hit the survivors. Danny's passing is a stunner for every one of them, particularly Ben, and the manner in which Amanda's demise hits Zoey is grievous to observe however it puts Zoey into in-your-face survivor boss mode, which is entirely incredible. This implies, nonetheless, that Zoey is resolved to cut down the degenerate AF organization behind Minos escape room 123movies, which cool, yet in addition based off that last scene, NOOOOOOOOO!! 

This scene fools you into deduction everybody will be fine.

THE SCENERY 

Presently when I initially observed the trailer for Escape Room, I believed that each room would be intended for one of the characters explicitly. That is not really the situation, yet each room is definitely unique and extraordinarily fatal, with character-explicit subtleties woven-all through. They're totally structured so that you could see them being a real escape room in reality, with the exception of they all have an ACTUAL fatal curve, rather than entertainers and phony results. The little subtleties were extremely sharp and in some cases sort of tragic. The fire and stopped vent slither set off Amanda's PTSD in a truly gutting scene and prologue to her character. The tusk trophies in the room presented over each spoke to one of the notable reindeer from the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" tune, which was unpleasant for Ben due to his flashback and harsh for the crowd since that is unmistakably intimating that the reindeer have been butchered which like, impolite, keep Christmas separate from this?? My least most loved room is the cold winter horrendousness essentially in light of the fact that it was pulverizing watching them cooperate to both arrangement with Danny's demise and attempt to dissolve the key required out of the focal point of a strong square of ice while they're sharing ONE coat among them. Ugh. In any case, a nearby second is that dumb topsy turvy pool room. Plan shrewd it's extraordinary, however generally? Detest it. Abhor what occurs. Probably not. 

Goodness hello look! There are skeletons in this film! 

THE TWIST 

Alright, on the off chance that you've perused this far and haven't seen the film yet, trust me when I state you actually most likely wanna see it first before I proceed. 

For every other person? Here we go. 

Escape Room has really, two or three turns when you consider it. The underlying turn is, obviously, the way that all the risky snares are in reality genuine and dangerous. The stakes are REAL high. 

The following turn comes in the room equipped like an emergency clinic. Each character is attracted to a particular bed, set up in an unexpected way. It turns out, each character invested energy sooner or later in the emergency clinic, and each bed is an ideal amusement of their room. Through conversation, they discover that every one of them was the sole overcomer of something horrendous that transpired (we get little blazes about what these occasions could be all through the film). Zoey makes sense of that whoever is running the escape room must need to see who, among them, is the "most fortunate of the fortunate." 

After a couple more rooms and a couple more passings, we find Ben, who did undoubtedly endure getting squashed in the sumptuous lounge escape room 123movies (so I surmise in fact he simply didn't get squashed). He stumbles into a type of stockroom with an enormous screen that shows every one of their photos, and every one of them, put something aside for his, have a huge red "X" up and over. In his image, he is marked the "Champ." A hairy British man goes into the room to uncover the following turn: this whole thing was set up by a gathering of exhausted, rich individuals who are entranced by the human will to endure. English Beard declares that people have consistently adored viewing different people in close demise circumstances, and they have run these escape rooms on various occasions, similar to an investigation, to attempt to make sense of what it is that makes up a definitive victor (sidenote: notice how this is likewise sort of a burrow at the crowd to the film? 

A Framework for a Healthier YouTube

-by Andrew Cherry

YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google that we all rely on for one reason or another, is routinely cited as one of the top used websites from around the world. There are few other places you can get daily long form vlogs, makeup demonstrations, cooking tutorials, cat video compilations, and television show breakdowns while being a click away from intense political analysis or video tutorials of open heart surgery. Part of the draw of this goliath website is the ever-expanding quantity and variety of videos available to the consumer for “free.” I use the phrase “free” here because while users don’t have to monetarily pay to access video content, there are major drawbacks to the site that end up negatively impacting both content creators and the general viewing public. My goal here as an active user of YouTube is to provide a set of recommendations that I believe would work to push back against some of the more harmful and toxic effects of the site. I hope not to change the fundamental structure of the site or stifle people’s creativity, but rather, I hope that these changes would make the site safer for everybody and work to ensure healthy discourse both online and in real life.

Re-Design the YouTube Algorithm

One of YouTube’s biggest issues is the way that their video recommendation algorithm suggests viewers to watch more and more extreme videos, in what is being called by some as the Alt-Right Pipeline. While the site has evolved to become much more than just a company in a lot of ways, it still strives to make money, and thus, the algorithm suggests similar but more extreme videos knowing that this gradual escalation will keep people actively engaged and generating more ad revenue. This Vox article does a good job of laying out the issue, whereas people start watching conservative YouTubers like Ben Shapiro who himself has explicitly disavowed the alt-right, but then YouTube’s algorithm continues to direct these viewers to further-right videos and cements their radicalization to the far-right over time. While I do see the irony of linking to a YouTube video here to drive my point home, this video titled “The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie” takes a pretty comprehensive, step-by-step approach to demonstrating how this radicalization can happen online.

The Vox article above notes how persuasive these extreme YouTube videos can be and even quotes sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in saying that “given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” Given the long term and deeply alarming implications of that quote, it’s necessary to unpack why the site wields such influence in the minds of its users. I would argue, in terms of Cialdini’s Six Principles of Persuasion, that authority and social validation are the two strongest feelings associated with YouTube’s persuasiveness. With respect to his concept of authority, I argue that YouTubers like Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, and Joe Rogan become expert authority figures in the minds of their frequent viewers, which then makes these viewers more inclined to check out the videos produced by frequent guests on these shows. These guests, however, are often content creators even further to the right than the original hosts, which compounds with the perceived authority of the YouTube algorithm to push people further down the Alt-Right Pipeline even quicker.

Furthermore, I argue that the YouTube ends up plays on people’s lack of social validation to encourage them to stay on the site longer. This principle explains that as you see people around you doing something, you are more likely to also do that thing in order to fit in. In a time when people around my age are often incredibly anxious and feeling isolated from the world at large, it can be more common for people to latch onto social groups where they feel somewhat understood. One such area is alt-right comment sections on YouTube or by following alt-right YouTubers on Twitter. By deriving their social validation from these circles and by delving deeper into that online bubble, people are more likely to follow the examples set by these online agents, regurgitate their toxic talking points, and influence more people to go down that path.

In order to combat this issue, I recommend that YouTube take a serious look at how their algorithm is designed and make changes accordingly. It should no longer be the sole motive of the algorithm to keep people engaged to drive ad revenue. There should be a team of human moderators involved who understand the dangerous nature of online radicalization and work to prevent it from happening. This is not to say that conservative thinkers should be censored online, but rather to say that YouTube has an outsized influence on modern culture and should be aware of the role their site has played in disseminating fascist ideologies as simply free speech from right wing thinkers.

Make Monetization Practices more Transparent

In the past few years, YouTube has faced extensive criticism for the ways in which they control monetization practices on the site. Content creators who make videos and upload them on the site sometimes come to find that their content had been age-gated, hidden, or simply demonetized. This means that for people who rely on YouTube as their primary source of income, demonetization on popular videos means significantly less money coming in and they are often not provided with any explanation from the company as to why a video was demonetized. This article on The Verge highlights the accompanying problem to larger demonetization issues, which are the arguments that YouTube was automatically demonetizing videos from LGBTQ+ creators simply because of their identities. While they deny these claims, YouTube was also accused of showing anti-gay ads before LGBTQ+ videos, further contributing to the belief that the site says they support these lifestyles but then acts rather differently. It is important to note here as well that even if the videos become remonetized after YouTube reviewers check it out, the creators of the video do not get reimbursed for the money lost in that time frame and these types of practices can work to hide this type of information from the marginalized people who may need it.

Thus, I argue that YouTube needs to make their monetization practices more transparent and provide YouTubers with more in-depth responses after demonetization happens which explain why it happened and how to quickly appeal if they feel it was unjust. If they need to hire more reviewers to engage personally with videos and decide more quickly whether they should be monetized or not, then so be it because the site surely has the money to do so. Not only would this help to retain active YouTubers that are starting to feel sidelined, but it would help to bring in more users because as authors Kraut and Resnick explain on page 199 of Building Successful Online Communities, “Providing potential new members with an accurate and complete picture of what the members’ experience will be once they join increases the fit of those who join.”

Increase Child Protections and Age Restrictions

As mentioned previously above, setting 18+ age restrictions on LGBTQ+ content simply because of the creator’s identity is harmful because it prevents young, questioning individuals from viewing potentially validating and reassuring information that they could not get elsewhere. On the other hand, however, there needs to be a larger effort by the site to ensure that the videos that are allowed in the family/kid friendly side of YouTube are actually safe for children to watch. Last year, Wired reported that they found videos “containing violence against child characters, age-inappropriate sexualisation, Paw Patrol characters attempting suicide and Peppa Pig being tricked into eating bacon” that were discovered by following YouTube’s recommended section or just allowing the site’s autoplay function to do its job.

These horrifying videos would be scarring even to an adult, and I cannot imagine the type of long-term psychological damage that it could inflict upon children without their parents even being aware of what is happening. It is imperative then for YouTube to do a better job of ensuring that the content allowed to be viewed by children is safe for their eyes by improving the age restriction settings and increasing human involvement in the scanning of these videos for child protection. This will have to be done carefully, however, because subjecting people to scanning these types of videos all day long would also likely have negative lasting mental health effects. I would recommend ensuring that the workers have proper mental health services to go along with it and allowing for the rotation of workers in and out of this type of moderation position.

I am not naïve enough to think that these are all simple solutions to such complicated and encompassing problems. Alt-right fascists will not simply disappear if we better regulate YouTube content and fix the radicalization aspects of their recommendation algorithm. Certain videos will most likely always get demonetized or age-restricted even when their creators don’t think its necessary. It can be hard to catch every single disturbing video uploaded to the site when there are over 500 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute. But, it is my hope that these recommendations are taken seriously and at the least, start a conversation about how the site can do better, and at most, can be used as a framework for how YouTube can become a better, more healthy site for all parties.

NVIDIA VS AMD

In case you're anticipating purchasing Graphics cards, you will be similarly content with either. Genuinely. At a similar value point, both the organizations make comparably performing GPUs. Its practically like retailers measure the in game execution before choosing the cost relatively.

Other than that, both these organizations adopt an alternate strategy to making GPUs and consequently they have marginally extraordinary plan choices going into them. Here I will attempt to rattle off the design contrasts:

Reason fabricated v/s Raw Power

NVidia's chips are without a doubt gaming machines. They are exceptionally streamlined for the assessed outstanding task at hand of most of the games to be discharged alongside the GPU. Everything from bunch size, raster administrators, register document, reserve pecking order and memory transfer speed is adjusted. The ideal mix is chosen before the structure leaves the planning phase. AMD then again puts stock in animal power. They transport the most extreme number of shaders at a given cost and normally have 20-25% all the more preparing power (likewise upto 4X twofold accuracy handling force and 10-12X whole number handling). Notwithstanding, the condescend isn't as productive as that of NVidia and they normally require 30-40% all the more preparing power (generally accessible at a similar cost) than NVidia to get practically identical execution. One drawback to NVidia is that enhancements are not changeless. When outstanding tasks at hand change - which for the most part happens 2-3 years down the path - all the improvements they made reverse discharge and this is the place AMD's sheer force sparkles. Consequently AMD cards are progressively future evidence.

Drivability v/s Scalability

NVidia are increasingly drivable and AMD are progressively versatile. Allow me to clarify. The littlest unit of processing is called SMM/SMX for NVidia's Maxwell engineering and GCN center for AMD's GCN design. A SMX has 128 ALUs (additionally called shaders) which can work on 256 numbers each clock cycle. A GCN center has 64 ALUs which can work on 128 buoys per clock cycle. Henceforth the littlest execution feasible for AMD is 64 and that for NVidia is 128. This gives AMD more prominent adaptability for usage size over NVidia. Additionally with little centers come little planning obligations. Thus control rationale of GCN is relatively littler than SMX. Which implies for the equivalent shader check, AMD chips will be littler and consequently altogether less expensive than NVidia chips. In any case, on the drawback, for the equivalent shader tally, there will be twice the same number of GCN centers as that of SMX centers. For instance, 32 GCN centers and 16 SMX centers for a 2048 shader execution. This implies the framework managing an AMD chip as a rule needs to manage double the quantity of figure components as a NVidia. This makes NVidias increasingly "drivable", a similar way a 4 speed gearbox is simpler to drive than a 8 speed gearbox. The driver invests less energy cutting up the heap to be taken care of into the GPU and the memory transport possibly manages a large portion of the quantity of exchanges. Most of AMDs execution punishments are acquired along these lines - adaptability.

NVIDIA VS AMD

Effectiveness v/s economy

This is a greater amount of an execution distinction than compositional and the thing that matters is pretty much gone with NVidia GTX 900 arrangement and AMD Rx 300 arrangement. Be that as it may, this distinction is progressively articulated in more seasoned items so I will continue in any case. A similar rationale exhibit can be executed utilizing distinctive rationale types to get the ideal parity of speed, productivity and economy. It mostly includes advancing the usage for various clock rates. I don't review a lot however for the most part goes this way - little and tight executions are effective for low clockrates, spread out formats for high clockrates. This implies high recurrence parts should be made greater. However, AMD decided to look different ways until ongoing past and made littler, wasteful usage which are generally less expensive. Consequently we wound up with either AMD cards with crazy measures of crude force that draw an excess of intensity and connect an excessive amount of CPU and were extremely inexpensive OR we had NVidia cards which were over the top expensive yet completed the work and were simple on the force supply. Starting late, this has gotten unessential.

I for one went with NVidia GTX 960 as of late on the grounds that my CPU and Power supply were becoming unreasonably old for this.

Well a great deal really; the undeniable distinction is obviously that they are various organizations. Taking it somewhat further however, we can see, as a matter of first importance, that AMD realistic card normally focus on crude execution, while NVIDIA groups it realistic cards with more programming (some may be helpful). Another striking contrast is that NVIDIA bolsters CUDA.Jason Ewing had a significant complete and apparently target answer. I can include for my A2A just what I know and opine on. I know nVidia has a VERY cozy relationship with the fundamental gaming organizations, Activision, ID, and so on and has new drivers out frequently, when another game comes out and they can include extra usefulness or realistic capacities to help the new game. I for one have had three driver refreshes in three weeks, concurring with the arrival of Call of Duty, Destiny, and another game whose name gets away from me now. Furthermore I have played with the 3D cards from AMD and ATI and not loved them, however nVidia's 3D kicks butt (IMHO)!

Not certain how best in class the REALLY propelled AMD cards are, however the super-progressed nVidia cards that are utilized in a propelled designs needs like continuous video, video improvement, and so forth (you know, for use by the three-letter gov't associations) are fantastically skilled, and demonstrate the degree of specialized aptitude in the organization. I have utilized these inconceivably progressed (and incredibly $$$) cards, and they have especially intrigued me. On the off chance that an organization can make cards that way, I accept they truly recognize what they are doing, which is the reason I purchase nVidia.

NVIDIA AND AMD

As I have said before, nvidia is greatly improved as a driver and programming than AMD, however that said with regards to gaming, AMD is a similar speed as nvidia and less expensive really; check AMD 7750 for instance for it is extremely modest and as a little something extra, it requires least force. Be that as it may, it can deal with all that you toss at it. So the inquiry is whether you are going to utilize the video card for gaming? In the event that the appropriate response is truly, the go for AMD, then again, in the event that you utilize your realistic card for GPU processing and plan and business related stuff go for NVIDIA.

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Fides

Chapter 5

It’s a point-blank shot.

Stiles doesn’t even get the chance to scream. For an agonizingly painful fraction of a second, it burns as if he’s suddenly been submerged in molten lava, as if magma is eating away his flesh, his insides, and leaving nothing behind. Then, his brain screeches to a halt, unable to process more, and he feels nothing.

“STILES!”

Like a puppet with its strings cut down, Stiles slumps heavily to the side, nearly crushing some of the fairies under his dead weight. Some shout his name, panicked, while the others simply scream in denial. At that very same instant, the bullet rebounds against seemingly nothing before even reaching him, making Sterling’s head snap backwards unnaturally. Then the momentum makes her fall like a log to the ground, where she remains motionless, her hand still holding the gun but completely limp.

There’s a second of shocked silence before the fairies scramble to move under Stiles’ numb stare. Beriadan, Eglantine, others, are trying to get his attention and it takes him a bit to understand that they keep repeating the same thing again and again. At their behest he searches inside once more and, when he finds it, he absently cuts the flow. When did that happen? Dark starts advancing from the edge of his vision and he doesn’t care, he just wants to sleep forever.

“No, Stiles! You can’t sleep! Quick, do it or we’ll lose him! No, not you! At least three of us need to be able to fly just in case!”

Everything becomes overwhelming at once. His vision whites, his nerves light as if on fire and there’s a shrill ringing in his ears. Then, as fast as it came, it all comes to an abrupt ending, the pain reaching agonizing heights before disappearing. His stomach does a somersault that has him gagging for a moment before it settles a bit. He opens his eyes when it finally feels safe to do so, his vision blurry but clearing gradually. His body feels disconnected, as if his nerves have overheated and snapped, and sensation is seeping back in but tortuously slow. His brain is sluggish too, as if it only has energy to turn back on each neuron one at a time. The fact that he nearly died, that he didn’t care whether that happened or not, begins to set in.

Stiles swallows, his saliva so thick in his mouth that he almost chokes with it. He breathes in deeply, closing his eyes and pressing the heels of his hands to them. There’s a headache pulsing dully in his temples but its intensity is increasing steadily as the seconds pass. It’s scarily similar to the beginnings of the migraines he gets after pulling two all-nighters in a row, when he’s exhausted and needs to sleep but he can’t because insomnia has settled in. He knows he has to get out of here in case that happens, but he can’t seem to able to gather the will nor the wit to do so, much less the strength.

“Stiles, come on, honey. Up with you. We can’t be caught here!”

Right, Stiles knows that.

He breathes deeply again.

One step at a time.

He twists until he can push himself up with arms that feel newborn weak. It takes a couple of failed attempts, but he perseveres. Once he’s on all fours, he gets his feet under himself and finishes getting himself upright. He looks around, willing his mind to start working again. The more he moves, the easier it gets.

Stiles is strong. He can do this. Last year, at the worst possible moment, some assholes decided to steal from his computer some programs that Stiles had refused to sell to them. If he was able to do advanced hacking while the sounds of his own tapping on the keyboard were making him feel like his brain was liquefying, he can do this, no problem. He fried their computers and destroyed their reputations (consequently building up his own) in one fell swoop, walking out of here should be nothing.

“My prints,” Stiles rasps, the pain making his eyes squint, but fortunately, not getting worse. He needs to get out of here now. He’s so thirsty too… He remembers he has half a bottle of water and a couple of painkillers and takes them out. He shallows one pill and drinks most of the water before using what little remains to wash his face. He feels marginally less sluggish at the sudden coolness on his temples. He wishes he had the luxury of being able to wait for the painkiller to kick in but that’s not the case. “My prints are everywhere and this place is off limits,” he elaborates looking to where he was hiding. His bag is there but the papers he was holding are gone and he panics. “My papers!”

“They burned,” Eglantine answers promptly, catching on easily.

“What?”

“When you deflected that bullet they burned to ashes,” she explains.

Stiles tries to wrap his head around it and desists immediately. Now is not the time to think about how it happened. It happened and he’s alive, that’s all that is important right now. There’s a dead woman mere steps away from him, blood already pooled around her head like a macabre halo that's steadily expanding and tons of incriminating evidence against Stiles. His prints, his hair, his presence itself. The only thing he needs to know right now about those papers is that they’re not flying around the school grounds or the rooftop to point anyone in Stiles’ direction.

Belatedly, Stiles also realizes that out of all the fairies present, only three seem to be able to fly and their light is still shining brightly. The others’ glow is dull and almost nonexistent, which means that their energy is about to run out.

“Can you fly?” he asks them and they shake their heads. “Get inside my backpack just in case. We don’t know where the night guard is and if I have to hide quickly I’m not gonna be able to grab you all without being caught.” He frowns as they climb inside, thinking about the suspiciously absent guard, who should have noticed something already. “Did you see him before you came up?” he asks as he picks up the bag and puts it on. Eglantine climbs inside his hood almost instantly and answers with a negative. “That’s so weird…” Stiles murmurs and turns his attention to the fairies that still can fly. “Can you localize and distract the guard for a moment, Aelfwine? Maybe,” he swallows. “Maybe we’re lucky and he hasn’t noticed anything yet.”

“Done,” the blond answers immediately. “Srindin, come with me. Tarnsin, remain here.”

They leave and Stiles looks around himself. There’s blood and other things on the railing and the ground behind where Sterling was standing. He can’t touch that. He eyes the part where he knows his fingertips are again. Inside the little cranny where he was hiding, there will probably be traces of sweat and maybe even hair too. He has to make that evidence disappear.

He frowns. If a huntress was killed does that mean that more hunters will come? More hunters that don’t follow the code, that will use this to start a witch hunt or maybe will use it to incriminate and justify taking out the creatures she was hunting? Or even if they follow the code, how can Stiles prove that this was self-defense when he himself doesn’t even know exactly what happened?

So what now? Does he only erase his presence here or does he have to get rid of the body? And blood. And the gun. Maybe make it look like she left and send an email in her name resigning due to extreme circumstances? And create a fake trail of her leaving, make her car disappear… but he doesn’t know how to drive… and how is he going to carry her body?

This is insane.

And completely impossible.

It’s just…

He’s exhausted and hurt, but even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be able to carry her dead weight (pun not intended), much less do that while avoiding the night guard. He wouldn’t be able to pull that off even if the fairies weren’t exhausted too. There’s no way to do it, it’s impossible and insane and really dangerous and he’s completely in over his head, and everything is going to explode in his face. There’s. No. Way. Damn the twins, damn his classmates, damn Sterling. Damn himself, damn his choices. Damn everyone. And fuck them too. Fuck everything. And…

Except…

Kate admitted that she didn’t think him a supernatural creature… so maybe she hasn’t talked about him to anyone yet? So he can call the police and… tell the truth? The thought of having to talk about the bullying makes him shiver in revulsion but there’s no other way around it. He’ll have to tell the truth about hiding (but say that the door was open, he can pin that on her) and waiting for all his classmates to leave. He’ll tell them about seeing her with that boy and waiting even longer to leave. He’ll tell them that he was caught leaving and that she took the gun out and started spouting nonsense about monsters. He’ll tell them that he ran back to the rooftop when she was blocking the exit, hit her as she passed and somehow got the gun.

Which means that he has to check if the keys she used to enter are still in the door, because, unless she locked it behind her to close the escape route, he doubts that she waited to take the keys when she was in the middle of a pursuit and that would contradict his version of the events. Also… He shallows thickly. He has to get his prints on the gun.

He limps toward the door first, pointedly not looking at the body yet, and looks at the door. It’s closed. Just as he’s turning to go back to the body, Srindin comes back though the gap in a corner, clearly winded and panting from the effort.

“There are more of them!”

“What.”

“Quick, Aelfwine is distracting them! Hide!”

“They’ll catch me for sure if I hide here!” he whispers furiously, looking around fast, trying to get his still somewhat sluggish brain to cooperate. His panic rises and his adrenaline with it, which instantly fires him up. “Where are they?”

“We tried to get them to follow us to the other building but they caught on. Last time they were near the stairs on the end and coming here! We have to hide!”

“Just- Let me think!”

Stiles knows he’s running out of time. He can’t risk searching for the keys, leaving his prints all over the body, and, also, taking the stairs is the worst thing he could do because not only is Aelfwine leading the hunters on a merry chase on that level but at some point he's going to have to beat a hasty retreat and follow Srindin upstairs to escape them. If he tries hiding in the cranny from before, it will be suicide because that’s the first place they’re going to look if they have any brains at all.

He looks around himself, heart pounding and his eyes settle on the gun. Should he? He’s defenseless right now… He takes a couple of steps, closes his eyes and takes in a trembling breath. No, taking it would be the worst thing he could do. His dad is the sheriff and he hasn’t been able to erase the evidence. If they investigate this, he still can claim ignorance even after admitting to his presence on the rooftop. But leaving it loaded… but to unload it he has to touch it...

“Stiles, what are you doing?” Beriadan yells, prompting him into snapping out of it.

He has to leave it behind and pray that is the best decision. He turns his back to her.

Stiles can either remain here and die, or try his luck over the railing, trying to climb down to a level below. His ankle is not hurting horribly thanks to the painkiller and the headache has gone back to a manageable level, so he might even make it. He runs directly to the other side of the door and climbs over the railing, his breath stuttering at the height. He wraps his hands around the start of the drain to help himself climb down and goes for it.

“Foolish child!” Aelfdene hisses alarmed. "Are you out of-!"

“There’s no other-!”

“Tarnsin,” Aelfdene interrupts him, “make his feet stick to the wall to help him climb down. Put this array on the wall under his shoes and deactivate it when he needs to take another step, quick!” Not even a minute later, the points of Stiles’ shoes are stuck to the wall and the relief nearly makes his knees weak.

“Try to take big steps, Stiles. The less runes he has to place, the better,” Lorelle instructs, her voice so calm in the face of the storm that Stiles' frayed nerves soothe a bit.

Stiles nods and doesn’t let himself stop or doubt. His arms start shaking from the effort not long after he starts. He advances about half a meter, more out of sheer force of will and adrenaline, when he gets stuck. There’s a big separation between the drain and the window that doesn’t let him advance any more. If he lets go of the drain, he doesn't have anything to hold on to and Tarnsin is already stretching himself thin to keep up with sticking Stiles' feet to the wall. Srindin can fly too, but he's still winded, trying to recover from whatever happened to him after he left with Aelfwine, who hasn’t even returned yet.

He could keep descending, but he has no more time. When the hunters reach the rooftop they're going to find the door closed and assume whoever killed her is still there. If they look over the railing and down (and seeing as they hunt supernatural creatures that wouldn't be so strange) they'll see him easily in this darkness, because the moon's light is pretty bright today. He has to get to one of those windows.

Stiles' only chance is to not go any further, let himself hang from the drain and swing himself down to the windowsill. It isn't that far, with a good push he'll make it with no problems. The only tricky part is that he has to grab whatever he can to prevent himself from rebounding and falling to the ground below. And all of that without making any noise.

It's impossible.

He braces himself anyway, he can't waste any more time thinking. He has to act. He makes Tarnsin deactivate the runes and starts swinging himself. His arms are shaking and his grip is weak by now. His fingers slip before he’s ready, in the middle of the swing. He reaches blindly, his hands slapping deafeningly loud on the wall as he falls. He’s so terrified, his breath so caught in shock, that he can’t even scream. Then his hands are suddenly stuck to the wall and Srindin and Tarnsin are panting heavily, having rushed to place the runes to get him stuck. Stiles pants in terror, trying to get his body to stop trembling.

“Stiles,” Eglantine says, her voice soothing over the thundering in his ears. “Stiles, it’s ok, you’re ok. Come on, honey, it’s almost over. You can do it.”

Still shaking but knowing he can’t afford to stop now, Stiles looks downwards and finds nothing but a free fall. The easiest way would be to go down, but the next window is too small for Stiles to slip in (probably a toilet) and the next one is too far away. So up it is, because he has to hide the fastest he can and he can’t risk the two fairies running out of energy in the middle of the climb either, which would prove fatal for him.

Srindin and Tarnsin get to work again, one taking care of the runes of his feet while the other does the ones for the hands. Stiles startles when a phone starts ringing suddenly at the rooftop and he contains his breathing. The two fairies hide under him to conceal their rapidly diminishing glow. It takes them a moment to realize it’s Sterling’s phone and Stiles rushes to climb up as fast as his aching arms and trembling legs allow. His ankle is hurting fiercely by now but there’s nothing he can do about that. Beads of sweat are running down his face, his neck, his back.

The hunters make it to the rooftop at last, cursing up a storm. He hears them kicking the door open and calling for her. He forces himself to hasten his pace. Not even a minute later the cursing gets even angrier and he hears them moving, checking the rooftop.

There’s no sign of Aelfwine.

“Just a little bit more, honey,” Eglantine murmurs softly in his ear. “You can do it. I know you’re tired and I promise you can rest after you reach the window, ok? Look at that, you’re nearly there!”

When Stiles finally gets to the windowsill, he has to make a herculean effort to control his harsh breathing so that it doesn’t give him away. He plasters himself to the cool crystal of the window, but even he knows that he can’t rest yet, no matter how tired he is. Soon, but not yet. It’s unlocked, he tells himself, the window is unlocked. He’s going to be lucky on this, he thinks as he takes a shuddering breath. He reaches to test it and nearly sags with relief when it is unlocked. He pulls on the window painfully slow, desperate to make the gap big enough for him to slip inside as fast as possible but unable to just yank it open like he wants for fear of the noise alerting the hunters of his presence.

The two men are on the phone, but that’s as much as Stiles gets from their conversation, their voices too soft to understand anything. After what feels like an eternity, the gap is finally big enough and he slips inside. He recognizes the AV room, it’s the farthest one to the stairs, so they have to cross the whole floor to get to them to go downstairs. Before anything else, he gets everyone a secure place to stay inside the backpack without being squashed. Srindin and Tarnsin hide inside his hood, like Eglantine was doing. It takes a little convincing to get her to hide inside the bag too but she finally agrees.

“What about Aelfwine, we can’t leave without him,” Tarnsin says vehemently, echoed by Srindin.

“We’ll check all the floor as we get to the stairs. First, who can fly to the rooftop and see if the hunters are still there?”

“On it,” Tarnsin answers before going out the window.

While he waits for him to come back, Stiles takes off his shoes first and then checks the door, confirming it’s locked. Tarnsin hastily slips back inside and confirms that the hunters are still talking over the phone just by Sterling's body, so Stiles picks the lock and opens the door carefully. He gets out, heart in his throat, and closes the door behind him but doesn’t lock it again just in case. He creeps towards the stairs to the rooftop and lets Tarnsin and Srindin call softly to Aelfwine.

“He’s there,” Tarnsin says urgently, “He got stuck in the middle of the stairs because he can’t fly anymore.”

Stiles says mentally a big fuck it and quickly climbs up the stairs silently. Just as he spots Aelfwine, he hears the hunters coming back. He launches forward, grabs Aelfwine and then, hoping that the sound of his socked feet is deafened by the noise of their shoes, he runs the hell out of there, first down the stairs and then straight through the hallway. He makes it to the stairs at the far end, puts Aelfwine in his hood before he squeezes him to death out of nerves and listens silently. They’re still cursing down the hall and he breathes relieved.

He sprints down to the first floor, then into a classroom. He can’t hear anyone following him yet but that doesn’t mean anything with these people. He forces himself to be careful and not make a noise as he opens a window and then climbs through it to get outside. He’s even more careful as he leaves the school’s premises. When he’s finally three blocks over, he puts his shoes on again and then curses everything to hell and back as he prepares to half run, half walk home because his bicycle is who knows where.

(Damn the twins to hell, back and then again to hell, where the bastards rightfully belong. Stiles really, really, wants to make them pay.)

“Stiles,” Aelfwine calls and Stiles reaches for him. “I heard them talking on the phone.”

“What did they say?” Stiles asks as he ducks behind a dumpster at the sound of a passing car. By now he’s limping heavily, even after having taken the painkiller. The wonderful smell of rotten egg coming from somewhere inside the dumpster doesn’t help him one bit.

“They’re going to take care of the body and all the evidence themselves.”

“What? Why? That doesn’t make any sense,” Stiles protests, shocked but still whispering. Out of all the possible outcomes, he never expected something like that. He starts crawling from behind the dumpster but aborts at the sound of another vehicle that turns out to be a patrol car.

“From what I understood, the boy is a werewolf... Well, they called him mutt so I'm assuming that's what they were alluding to, in any case. Anyways, apparently he's part of the pack in this territory, and that pack is an old one that has never caused any problems. The Tribunal knows that they control the territory well and take care of any threats themselves, so they shouldn’t even be here.”

“Still, it doesn’t make any sense. If they pinned this on them, that would actually give them the excuse to do what they want without anyone accusing them of breaking the code. Sterling was hunting something,” Stiles grunts, explaining quickly what he saw her attempting to do as he pushes himself up after the car disappears around the corner.

“One of them did suggest using what happened, but then they’d have to explain what one of their hunters was doing with a fake identity and teaching at the school where most of the pack kids study.”

Stiles feels sick for a moment, remembering that boy with Sterling and what approach she was taking. If there are other kids, has she been doing the same with them? Or maybe she tried and tried until she hit the jackpot with that boy? How far would have she gotten if Stiles hadn't...?

He swallows, trying to force the bile down and forces himself to concentrate on the now. He’s alive, all the fairies are alive, he reminds himself as he creeps around and hides at the smallest noise. His house, his shower, his bed, everything is a breath away, he just has to endure it for a little bit more.

And he does just that.

The trek back home takes him nearly an hour and he barely can walk straight anymore halfway through it. His dad’s cruiser isn’t in the driveway yet when he makes it home and, for once, he’s happy about that because he doesn’t have to sneak in. He’s careful, of course, but once he’s hidden from view, he just opens the door and slips inside. He doesn’t turn on the lights until he’s in his room and has the blinds down.

The kids’ hugs are like a balm to his soul and he nearly falls asleep on the chair the moment he sits on it after helping everyone else but the elders into the terrarium.

“Stiles,” Lorelle says, looking ten times her age, just like Aelfdene and like everyone that has lived through tonight’s events, “we need to contact the alpha now.”

“If what you and Aelfwine have told us is right, that boy she was hunting was a werewolf,” Aelfdene adds, somber. “They may assume that the pack did it or use it as an excuse to retaliate, even if they’re covering it now.”

Stiles rubs his face tiredly, vision swimming and one hundred percent done with everything.

“Do you even know who is the alpha of the pack?” he asks after taking a fortifying breath.

“Sadly, no. When we came here following your magic, we were too weak to do anything. And with the huntress at large, we couldn’t risk giving ourselves away searching to inform the alpha of our presence. Only our king and queen knew who it was and... they didn't get to share the knowledge.”

Of course it wouldn’t be so easy. He feels like weeping his heart out and he can’t remember having ever cried since a while before his mom died.

Just one more push, he thinks. Just one.

“I need… I need a moment.”

Stiles can barely see straight by now. He rubs his eyes again, gets up and limps downstairs to wash his face with water straight from the bottle inside the fridge, hoping that the cold will help him keep awake now that the adrenaline is long gone. Then he drinks as much as he can in one go. It doesn’t work miracles, but at least he’s not falling asleep upright. Then he prepares the fastest and most carb filled food he can think of off the bat (which happens to be a lot of pop tarts) and a teeth-rotting sugary drink before getting back to his room.

“Ok,” he says as he munches on the pop tarts, turning on his laptop. “I can check the yearbook and see if it rings any bells. And also… if several members of the pack attend the school, they’ll share the same last name, right? Or most of them will in any case.”

“Unless the kid was adopted into the pack, they should.”

“Let’s hope it’s like that,” he sighs and, before even checking the yearbook, he searches on the school’s student database for kids sharing the same last name. While the search runs he keeps talking to help himself remain awake. “What happened to me? How did you know something was wrong?”

Lorelle takes a moment to answer, but not as if she’s trying to choose her words to hide something from Stiles. She makes a couple of aborted starts before she seems to find a way to explain things. “Do you recall what we explained to you about how your magic beckoned us?” Stiles nods. “And how our numbers make us weak right now and sometimes we use you as a support, like Eglantine did when you went to search for the kids?” Stiles nods again. “As we told you, your magic is still active on the terrarium and at the moment we use a small part of that magic to help us maintain the wards around it.” Stiles makes a humming noise. “Around nearly seven this afternoon, your magic wavered and it thinned so much and so abruptly that we had to take down the wards for fear of it breaking completely. We knew something was wrong and then we called your phone and you didn't pick up.”

Stiles startles, finally noticing that he can still spy the dull glow of the exhausted fairies and the bright one of the kids across the crystal when normally he can’t see a thing. He swallows around his mouthful. There are six missed calls on his phone. All done in the space of not even three minutes. “And… you came for me?”

“You came for us,” Aelfdene answers gruffly and looking as if admitting this tastes sour in his mouth. “And in more ways than one so we're in your debt.”

Stiles clears his throat feeling incredibly uncomfortable. “But why all of you? You didn’t need…”

“In our state right at this moment, it was all of us or none, or we wouldn’t make the trip there,” Lorelle answers, leaving clear with her expression that none was not an option. “Eglantine remembered the way.”

“We made it there and tracked you.” Aelfdene continues with a weary sigh. “We’re connected and you were still using your magic,” Stiles looks at the rune shaped burns on his wrist with his lips pursed. “so it wasn’t that difficult. However, that woman caught the tail of our group and we had to divide and distract her while the rest of us got to you. You were unconscious and we couldn’t even hear you breathing. Beriadan found the runes on you and we pushed our magic into you until you recovered enough energy to regain consciousness and deactivate the array, because we couldn’t do that for you.”

“It goes both ways,” Lorelle explains at Stiles’ confused expression. “You share with us, and we do the same. We are symbiotic,” she sighs ruefully, “or in normal circumstances we would be. Regretfully, right now we are taking more than we are giving.” She clears her throat and thanks Kendel distractedly when the kid appears with some food and water for them. “In any case, what happened is that you activated one of your arrays (and let me tell you, I haven’t seen that one before) and maybe in your panic at nearly getting caught, you pushed too much energy into it and during more time than you could handle.”

“But you said that if you push more or less than the energy necessary to activate an array it collapses!” Stiles protests, confused.

“We said that happens with fairy rune magic. Do remember that we were sure that your spark would act differently,” Aelfdene explains long-suffering.

“And as he said,” Lorelle adds, "the array you used is not one of ours. Entity, sound, void. We’ve never used that combination.“

"What was different, though?” Aelfdene asks frowning, as if he can't help himself. Over the last few weeks, Stiles has gotten to know him a bit even though the elder has tried to keep their interactions minimal. It took a while to understand that it's not that he hates Stiles per se, it's that after what happened to them, he doesn't trust humans. Having to trust Stiles because he has no other choice rankles him. “Beriadan says that you tried that one here already and it didn’t work. What else was in those papers? When that huntress shot you, you activated something from there that made them burn.”

Stiles rakes his mind, but for the life of him he can’t remember what else he scribbled on them that could deflect a bullet. He looks at his wrist, but the mark is almost gone. He blinks surprised and rubs what remains of it, but it doesn't even twinge. He files that little tidbit to go back to it later and focuses on more important things. What was he thinking when his magic worked, though? What was he doing? Because the only thing he remembers was being panicked about getting caught and repeating that it was impossible he was heard. And with the bullet, it was actually the opposite, he was numb, not feeling anything but convinced…

“Conviction,” he murmurs, skeptical to a certain degree. He fights a yawn before he continues speaking. “I was convinced that I couldn’t be heard and then I was convinced that I couldn’t be hurt.”

Could that be? When he tries to activate a fairy array, he knows he has magic and that the array is a valid one, so he’s convinced about that… but is he convinced about obtaining the intended result? He has to explore this more.

Tomorrow.

After sleeping all Saturday away…

Which he can’t do until he finds the alpha and sorts this whole debacle.

Dammit.

He forces his attention back to the search still running on his laptop. After he has the names, he loads the yearbook and focuses on the years around the age he assumes that boy to be and bingo, he gets lucky about ten minutes later.

“I hate everything right now,” he whines rubbing his face, deeply frustrated. He really wants to get into bed and forget about everything, but he knows he wouldn’t forgive himself if anything happened. He gets up with a groan and reaches inside the terrarium to fish out his burner phone. He stares at it for a moment after he sits again.

He has the name of the boy that was with Sterling (one Ben Wilcox) and finding out his phone number and address is easy. Now what?

Ben Wilcox is a supernatural or connected to them, that's for sure, because if not, Sterling wouldn't have targeted him. However, assuming that the rest of his family is too may be too big of an assumption to make and it can cost Stiles dearly. Because if Ben was bitten and assimilated into the pack, his family may not be in the know and either this will force the teen to out himself or the family member that picks up the call may think Stiles is either a lunatic, a prankster or a bully and hang up, closing that venue of communication with his only lead to the pack entirely until school tomorrow. Because, let's face it, Stiles is not only in no condition to brave the night in search of Ben Wilcox's house but also he hasn't the means to do so, even if it's only about three kilometers away.

It's late, but not so late that calling them will raise any suspicion if Ben's family isn't in the know, so if he's going to do it this way, it has to be now. He just hopes that Ben isn't a lovesick puppy that won't listen to him out of principle. Stiles is really unsure about how to broach the subject too and his exhaustion isn't helping his brain think up how to do it in the slightest. How can he say: hey, your paedophile prospect of a girlfriend was in reality a huntress that was trying to trick you so she could kill you and most likely your whole family, but don't you worry, I killed her instead when she was trying to put a bullet in my head; just calling to give you the heads-up, just in case?

That can't go wrong at all, really.

Stiles sighs and rubs his forehead tiredly. Lorelle and Aelfdene are looking at him expectantly and he sighs again, dialling the number.

"Hello?" a girl (Lisa, his mind supplies helpfully) answers through the receiver.

"Hi!" he chirps faux happily, hoping that his voice being obviously a kid's helps his chances of being passed through without raising any suspicions, even though he knows he sounds much younger than Ben. "Can I talk to Ben?"

"Give me a second," she replies before shouting for him loudly.

He waits with bated breath, going over and over the options in his head, thinking about how to say it, how to avoid Ben hanging up on him, how to talk to the alpha, how...

Then he starts hearing the screams.

---

Some love pretty please?

⭐ Previous | Next ⭐

Why Do Certain Ships Become So Popular? (And Why Should Writers Rethink When They Do?) - Part 3

<- Start at Part 1 for best understanding

<- And here’s Part 2 if you need it!

I’m going to end this discussion with a case-in-point comparing the mega-popularity of non-canon ships against semi-canon ships, and then discuss what this all means for writers, and how examining the popularity of ships in media can actually improve the way you write romance plot lines in your own works.

Pictures taken seconds before disaster

Although I’ve been reading My Hero Academia for a while, I haven’t been an active part of the fandom until recently and so there might be meta and other surrounding the series most popular ships that I’m not familiar with. But I want to talk about this series because it’s the absolute perfect model for the points I’ve been making in this whole discussion: shippers target pairs of characters with high emotional energy/tension, and the “canon” ship will always lag behind non-canon ships in popularity when the emotional energy between the romantic leads is not as strong as the tension between the male lead and another character.

My Hero Academia has the somewhat rare situation of having two almost equally popular non-canon ships for its main character: TodoDeku and BakuDeku. Technically, given what I can find using filters on AO3 and Google Trends, TodoDeku is the more popular of the two (at least in the U.S. except in Indiana; I have no idea what’s going on over there, but man they love BakuDeku) by a fair margin...

Which would actually make this a series that disproves the trend--because you can say what you want about Bakugou and his notorious assholeishness, but at the end of the day, I don’t think there are any readers who would really argue that the pair of students with the strongest emotional energy--the greatest degree of push and pull and the most effort, meaning, and time invested in their interactions--is Bakugou and Midoriya.

As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter that much of the emotional energy/tension between these two characters is negative in nature (in fact, for a lot of fans that probably just sweetens the deal because it increases the potential for progress and growth so much)--rather, what matters is the depth and intensity of the emotional interactions between the two characters. There’s certainly no short supply of--at times--almost nonsensically powerful emotions between Bakugou and Midoriya. They’re Extra™ in every meaning of the word, and the manga drums that message in fairly consistently, especially in arcs in which heavily feature the class.

Get out of my school

Bakugou’s inferiority-superiority complex is fixated on Midoriya (whom, deep-down, he recognizes as a “better” hero than himself, despite the fact that everyone is constantly praising him and his powerful quirk), which means that even the most inadvertent of Midoriya’s actions triggers a reaction in Bakugou and Bakugou’s character.

Likewise, many of Midoriya’s significant plots and plot lines are driven by Bakugou--sometimes as a motivating factor (Deku is just as concerned about beating Bakugou as Bakugou is about beating him) and sometimes because the plot, rather hilariously, positions Bakugou in the role of Midoriya’s “damsel” in almost equal (actually it may even be more) proportion to the number of times Uraraka plays that role.

Bakugou and Midoriya’s combined progress is the emotional core of the student/class storyline, and they operate, in some ways, as joint protagonists whose play off each other drives the plot of the early sections of the manga, and whose rivalry fans can readily anticipate continuing to advance the main story in significant and meaningful ways. Bakugou, for example, still has plenty of growth to go through before he can really call himself a hero, and it’s only natural to assume that Midoriya, our premiere hero archetype, is going to be part of that growth--however grudgingly on Bakugou’s part.

Someone who actually ships this pairing (please don’t follow me for BakuDeku content, I got nothing guys!!) could probably go into much more detail on this and find much more support for it as a whole, but I brought it up to demonstrate that, once again, the pattern holds true: the greatest degree of emotional intensity, the core of these characters’ tensions and motivations, is another male character--and, equally on par with the pattern, they become an extremely popular ship.

But if Bakugou and Midoriya are the undisputed kings of emotional interaction energy among the students in My Hero Academia, why is TodoDeku the most popular Midoriya ship?

Well, besides the fact that Bakugou’s a grade-A asshole whose bullying crossed the lines for many fans, you can probably pretty safely blame Kirishima Eijirou.

My sunshine boy, where are the rest of your eyebrows???

In Kirishima’s emotional arc throughout the story, again, few people would argue that there’s any character more central than Bakugou.

This creates a viable ship that--importantly--plays well with others. Pairing Bakugou off with Kirishima leaves the series’ main hero free for shipping with anyone else, whether you prefer the semi-canon Deku/Uraraka or Deku/Literally-anyone-else-I’ve-even-seen-people-who-unironically-ship-him-with-Toga. In fact, this might be a little too much speculation on my part, but I almost feel like the degree of deliberate baiting this ship gets from actual staff (namely the anime and movie teams) is not only a ploy to appeal to female fans, but also an intentional way of deflecting some of the over-investment that’s gone into Bakugou and Midoriya’s storyline. Giving Bakugou someone else to focus on adds more variety to his scenes and provides Uraraka (or anyone else) a little more breathing room to interact with Midoriya.

The official media has to go this hard just so that Uraraka has any reasonable chance with Deku... Also god Bakugou, why are you so ugly in the anime...

Really, what I mean by all this is that part of TodoDeku’s popularity stems from it playing well with KiriBaku. Fans who want Midoriya with Todoroki are happy to ship KiriBaku on the side to get Bakugou out of the way, while even fans who don’t care much about Midoriya or Todoroki are happy to pair them together to free up Bakugou for their preferred Bakugou ship. It’s a symbiotic relationship, so to say, that helps elevate TodoDeku above BakuDeku in terms of popularity, even though without the presence of Kirishima, the stats would probably be skewed the other way.

That’s not to say that TodoDeku isn’t a perfectly valid ship or that it lacks the support or basis that BakuDeku has, because of course it doesn’t. It fits the pattern the same as all the other mega-popular ships do: if I were to ask “Who is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s story?”, the answer would inevitably be Midoriya.

Todoroki is an ice prince prior to being beaten with the Friendship stick, and his choice to open up to Midoriya in a way that he hadn’t with any of his other classmates becomes the catalyst that allows him to--quite literally--thaw out and begin to have positive experiences with his fellow students.

His fight with Midoriya allows him to remember his resolve and his mother’s words that he has the power to be an individual separate from the looming shadow of his abusive father, which becomes a profound turning point in his character. In his clash with Midoriya, he opens up access to his fire side which he had previously repressed, a move which is tantamount to embracing who he is as a person, bolstering his sense of self-worth and autonomy and helping him to begin moving out from under his father’s thumb. His experience with Midoriya is, in short, utterly life-changing, and Todoroki’s character has never been the same since (for the better)--to the point that characters nowadays are teasing Todoroki about how uptight and icy he used to be.

There’s plenty of, to use the phrase again, emotional energy between Midoriya and Todoroki attracting fan attention and serving as the spark for the mega-popularity of the ship.

Bakugou is the most important fellow student in Midoriya’s storyline. Midoriya is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s storyline. The interactions of these characters, however you choose to ship, is rich, meaningful, full of intense emotions (positive and negative), and--most importantly--strongly relevant to these characters’ individual arcs and even to the main plot overall.

But where does that leave Deku/Uraraka, the story’s semi-canon pairing and the (highly likely) endgame ship? Why is a pairing in which one of the characters has confirmed feelings for the other so far below non-canon ships in popularity?

Well, the premise holds true here--in reverse.

Say it with me, guys: the “real emotional energy” of Midoriya’s storyline has frustratingly little to do with Uraraka Ochako. She’s just not that important in his story.

The tension of Midoriya’s plot lines consistently has no personal connection to Uraraka, and all his most intense emotions and emotional scenes occur between him and other male characters. The problem I outlined in part two of this essay is in full effect here: female characters, especially in hero stories, are typically positioned in roles outside those which have major plot relevance. Uraraka might be “a hero,” but she’s not “The Hero.” She’s not the deuteragonist. She’s not the villain. She might qualify as a sidekick, except for the fact that the manga consistently prefers to pair Deku up with other male characters--such as Todoroki and Mirio--in the supporting roles. Uraraka, as a girl, simply wasn’t designed to serve in the same plot-mover-and-shaker capacity as the male characters. It’s the classic failure to write romantic female leads whose actions are central to the story, at it again.

I don’t mean that Uraraka has no impact on the plot--she did great against Kurogiri in the USJ arc, for example--nor to suggest that Uraraka isn’t a strong fighter (although of course, as a girl, she’ll never really measure up to the plot’s central males--sorry, can you feel my eyes rolling yet?). Her martial arts skills, clever use of her quirk, and, far more than that, her acumen for understanding people’s feelings mark her as a character with great potential... that’s just never really allowed to shine as much as it could be.

In her under-utilized position, Uraraka has less power and freedom to effect major changes to the main story compared to characters such as Bakugou. So far in the plot, she simply hasn’t occupied a position of importance or even enough individual screen time to put her personal arc in the spotlight heavily, at least in comparison to other characters like Todoroki, who, between himself and his family, now star in two whole arcs of their own. To quote Uraraka’s own bio, she has no “hidden side” or “ulterior motives”--two terms which might as well be synonymous with “fertile ground for creative fans to play with.” Being a simple and straightforward character is not the stuff of fan writer favorites, unfortunately.

More than that, Uraraka’s primary goal is no different than her classmates’--although she started with a somewhat interesting and unique reason for pursuing heroism (to help her parents financially), throughout the course of the series she evolves more into a character who embraces heroism for heroism’s sake. This is billed as progress, because the series comes down hard on those who seek to become heroes for their own gain. The only problem is... half the class at this point wants to become a hero because they believe in the merit of heroism itself. By growing into someone who wants to become a hero to genuinely help people and make a difference in the world, Uraraka actually becomes less unique and therefore more similar to just about everyone else in the class.

As time wears on, this problem of under-investment in Uraraka’s personal emotional journey becomes even more telling, as numerous battles for Uraraka devolve into little more than moments to reflect on her crush on Deku.

These are two separate occasions. Like are you kidding me--

If we were to remove Uraraka’s crush on Midoriya, she’d have absolutely zero tension between herself and other major characters. Literally no deeper emotional investment than “supporting friend.” It’s isn’t bad for a background character--but for what should be the main female character and romantic lead, it’s god awful. If we discount her newfound desire to punch herself in the face for jealous thoughts over Deku, Uraraka’s character hasn’t seen a lick of unique emotional growth since the Sports Festival. Worse, with her repeated entanglements with Toga, who also supposedly has a crush on Deku, I feel as if we’re almost inevitably going to get a chick fight scene in which they squabble over him. PLEASE MISS ME WITH THAT NONSENSE.

I like Uraraka. Or rather, I like what I think Uraraka could be. I want to root for her and I want to be impressed by her. But it’s hard when the writing of the story repeatedly tells me that she is less important than the male characters in her class, and that her own personal journey and motivations as a character could be reduced to “admiring the protagonist” and wanting to be like and be with him.

(“If I push down my feelings instead of accepting them, I can draw out our awkward romantic plotline for at least ten more volumes.”)

Who, at this point, isn’t motivated to greater heights of heroism by Midoriya? Even his role in her life isn’t unique to her... I almost feel bad for Horikoshi, in a way. Using other characters to inform the female lead of her romantic feelings for the hero is a classic trope that indicates a lack of experience writing and developing believable romantic plot lines. I guess when he said he wasn’t good at it, he really wasn’t lying.

The limited popularity of Deku/Uraraka plays word-for-word into the quote that sparked this entire discussion for me:

Many fans, particularly women, are disappointed by the contrived romantic story lines that are appended to ‘buddy’ series and movies in which the real emotional energy is between the heroic male leads (or between hero and villain) (McLelland 2006). [Source]  

This is a classic scenario of a semi-canon het ship that, by virtue of its own under-developed female character, will never achieve the same level of support and interest among fanwork-producing members of the fandom as more emotionally invested and intense relationships such as those between the starring male characters. (Of note here: Kacchako’s number of vocal fans isn’t surprising, given that Bakugou’s refusal to treat Uraraka with kid gloves was the most respect the series itself has ever given her...)

All right, all right, I’ll stop. (By the way, if you’re a Deku/Uraraka shipper, more power to you, my friends. I really feel bad that your ship isn’t getting the meaningful development and depth it deserves. There’s nothing wrong with this ship in theory... just in practice. T_T)

SO! FINALLY! AT LAST! Speaking of practice!

What’s the lesson? What is the take-away?

I didn’t write this monster of a rant because I wanted to shit on canon ships, het ships, or (often male) writers failing to write believable women. I didn’t write it to justify my favorite slash ships.

I wrote because as I was mulling over my answers to recent conversations and after I stumbled on the quote I’ve shared repeatedly now, I had a bit of a heart attack.

I’m writer. Many of my friends are writers. I have a Masters degree in creative writing. I took seven years of creative writing in school. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of both original work and fanfiction.

But never once have I sat down and consciously mapped out the “emotional energy” in my stories. Never once have I spent time actually examining the interactions of pairs of my characters and actively comparing them to really gauge where the core tensions and intensities in my stories really are.

I trusted in the notion that, as the author, I knew my own characters better than anyone else. If I wrote two characters in love, well then, surely it’s because they were meant to be in love.

In today’s discourse, the words “fan entitlement” are increasingly bandied around and often applied when fans get aggressive over their favorite ships not becoming canon. It’s easy to dismiss the frustrations of readers and viewers “as demanding something writers don’t owe them.” But this dismissal hinges on a central notion:

The original writer always knows best.

Whatever story the writers have written--whatever canon romances they have chosen--those are the “right ones,” and fans who piss and moan about that just “aren’t appreciating what they’ve been given.”

This is an easy mindset to understand in the face of fans who take their grievances to the extreme and harass creators. Harassment is obviously never acceptable.

But I don’t feel comfortable with the other side of the spectrum either. Blindly defending canon by completely ignoring cases where the fandom vastly prefers a non-canon ship to any canon alternatives... In the end, isn’t that the same as saying “It’s always the fans who are mistaken, never the authors”? Or, by extension: “As the author of this story, I can do no wrong.”

To me, authors who choose to simply dismiss their fans’ preferences--especially when the fans reject a canon relationship--are doing themselves a terrible disservice.

As a writer, I have never had nor wanted to have the thought that I’m perfect at what I’m doing. I am always keenly aware of the fact that my ability to write is limited. There are always things I felt I could have captured better. And more than that, I’m always trying to grow and improve my writing. I don’t want to be right all the time!

So why should I expect that my planned romances are always right?

Fans are not entitled to the ship they prefer. But if the fans prefer a ship you didn’t intend, that’s a good sign that something has gone wrong, and you might want to rethink the way you write romances, character interactions, character motivations, and potentially female characters in your next project.

A non-canon ship reaching mega-popularity in a fandom should provoke thought--not dismissal--from the series’ writers. And I don’t mean the kind of thought like “Would we have made more money if we’d caved to fan demands?” I mean things like “Where did I go wrong in writing my romance that led the fans to prefer something else? How can I fix that in the future?”

The take-away isn’t “I should give my fans what they want” but “How can I get my fans to want the same things I do?”

In order to align your fandom’s interest with the canon romance you’re writing, the canon main pair has to have meaningful, intense emotional interactions that are entwined with the central plot line or at least their own personal character development arcs--to greater or at least equal extent with any other potential pairing of characters in the story. Your romantic leads need to have interactions that are as compelling, as personal, as plot relevant as the hero and his (or her!) villain. As the hero and his or her sidekick/best friend/brother-or-sister-in-arms. It’s not enough for your main character’s romance to be “pretty interesting”--it’s got to be as interesting as his or her relationship with every other character in the story.

Now of course there are ways around this. A father-and-son story with a romance on the side doesn’t necessarily need to elevate the romance above the father-and-son dynamic. A hero and villain story where the villain is a complete monster that no one in their right mind would ship is probably safe, etc.  

But I guess the basic baseline is this: If you’re bothering to write in a romance for your main character... don’t you--shouldn’t you--want it to be as compelling, intense, and believable as the relationships you write for any other characters?

If you want fans to love the love you’re written into your stories, you’ve got to give that love the same attention and effort as everything else in your plot.

How do you do this? What actual actions can you take in your writing to apply this idea? I don’t have a definitive answer that will magically make everyone’s romances perfect, and really, none of this is particularly revolutionary, but I think these are all good reminders that even when we’re writing our own original stories, there’s stuff we can do to check if we’re “doing it right”:

Make a single chart of all major character interactions in your story, especially those which provoke strong emotional responses in your characters and those which are relevant to the story’s main plot. You can mark positive emotional interactions in one color, negative emotional interactions in another. Do something to indicate the level of intensity for these interactions. Then, step back and look at the big picture. Which characters really have the most interactions? The most intense interactions? The most plot relevant interactions? If the canon romance you’re planning doesn’t have as many, as much intensity, or as much plot relevance as the relationship between your main lead and another character, think about how you can change that.

Ask yourself the important questions: Where is the real emotional energy in my story? Which characters have the most tension (positive or negative)? Which characters promote the most growth in each other through their interactions? Which characters are the real “movers and shakers” of the main plots? How do interactions with other characters help to advance Character B’s individual character growth? Spend time consciously thinking about the flow and cores of emotion in your story. Who really makes the biggest difference in your hero’s life?

Remove the romance and look at the story again. If romance is not the main point of your story, go back to your character interaction chart and remove all the romance and romantically-led plot points. What does the interaction chart look like now? Do your romantic leads still have compelling interactions even with the romance removed? Do they still motivate and help each other grow as characters even if they’re not romantic partners? Are their remaining actions relevant to the main plot? And, most importantly: with the romance removed, do they still have intensity? Are they still part of the story’s “emotional core”? Is there still as much or more energy between them than between the main character and others? If the answer is no, that’s a good sign that you can probably develop your romantic lead and his/her relationship to the hero more fully--or better integrate it into the main story and their personal stories--in order to improve the depth and quality of their relationship in the eyes of fans.

Take another look at your female characters. Even if you’re a female writer yourself, that doesn’t mean you automatically write great women. In fact, we’re often so conditioned to see males as the drivers of narratives that even series by female authors, with female protagonists sometimes fall into the trap of having a male character doing all the real heavy-lifting in the plot. Check your girls again. Do they have as much meaningful influence on the main plot as your male characters? Do they have as much meaningful influence on other characters’ personal arcs? If you remove all the romance, do they still have these influences? Are your female characters allowed to have as much diversity in their emotional interactions with others as your male characters are? Do the intensities of these women’s feelings match the intensities of the men’s feelings, even (especially) when romance is removed from the equation?

And I’m sure there are many more things you can try along the same lines.

Really, the idea I want other writers--professional, amateur original writers, or even just fan writers--to take away from this is the notion that we should never rest on our laurels and assume we know what’s what. We should never just expect our fans to agree with us as writers.

And, more than that, when the fans prefer something other than what we intended, we should always, always use that gap as motivation to rethink our writing, to discover where we might have fumbled in our plotting and character creation.

Fans don’t (usually) ship randomly. Most of the time, there’s a logic and pattern to this “madness.” If a non-canon ship becomes mega-popular, it’s usually because the fans saw something the creators missed.

And that is always--always--an opportunity to reflect and grow for future projects.

PHEW. I’M DONE! I did it! Man, this was such a labor of love... I hope some people actually read it...

How to Apply Liquid Eyeliner

 When it\'s a day, then it\'s better to choose a milder, less eye-catching appearance that will still improve your eyes. In case you\'re heading out, do you visit an elegant occasion or visit a bar with flash lights where you are able to get mad about the colours and effects... It depends upon personal taste whether it reaches the appearance you 21, you feel to use. Assist -I smudged! However, it simple to go wrong-it flaky or may get filthy and it doesn\'t seem great. Amazon price: Purchase today ( I feel as she's nailed, don\'t you understand which colour of eyeliner I need to select? It is important to prepare the lid. How can you avoid this dilemma? First, clean your eyelids and remove. With eyes for needing them to be the most important focus of the colour, who will blame Nicole. Some girls are somewhat fearful of this experimentation whilst longing for look. You might feel awkward at first-it\'s a great idea to practice a couple of times. Stop looping When no place is located and eliminate any slots that are residual. if(! {spotFound) The moment has now arrived. Wear credit through the nighttime: at which you could have fun with shovel and be eye-catching as you can. Eyeshadow base, city Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion. The way to use Flickr charge: seem becomes popular since it's a fantastic way to make your eyes seem larger. Simply pointing out the facts. Enough distance between Advertising & (\". The eyes of credit \ reveal eyeliner and the lashes combine. I /component is situated after at the advertisement & the place! hasClass( The past's thought is that if there's a sheet which drives you mad and goes to your eyes, you need to put on mascara or a eyeliner. The thing that is crucial is-have enjoyable! It might appear odd at first, but the longer you do, the easier it'll be. These may provide you a look that is natural but improve your eyes. This seems different. Even earrings and her hair are easy, so nothing could be bothersome. 8 tsp ) Even in the event that you\'re not likely to wear colour eyeshadow, it\'s a fantastic idea to wear a color of skin tone simply to eliminate skin tone. You might draw tattoes with this eyeliner! It's \'s not always a fantastic idea to attempt to wear your clothing when you\'re racing against time, particularly once you begin. In case you need to take it off and begin, it is going to be simpler to add more, but harder. This produces the origin of your lashes seem darker and leaves your eyeliner appear more noticeable.

Eyeliner Tips: Some makeup artists recommend beginning with excellent eyeliner since they're often more easy to apply and provide finish result. Point between lashes. You\'re all set to draw eyeliner. Many girls like to initiate the eyeliner at nighttime in precisely the exact same manner as throughout the day-I. e. It took them to locate the model with eyes. See how the line thins down since it dives upwards and out within her eye. When were accustomed to long gone are those days. Now like makeup that were new have come up. If you think your eyelids still have a bit creases, pull on your eyelids smooth out of the outer rim along with another hand. They seem softer if you're blond or skinnier. Should you want to test it a couple of times Nobody is going to do this. Diversifying is a great expansion approach, as it permits Beauty Secret Cosmetics to have several streams of income which could fill voids that are seasonal and, obviously, improve sales and profit margins. Give it a couple of minutes to dry and you are able to create up. It made her eyeliner stick out. A professional makeup artist with years of expertise and the cosmetics money can purchase has spent hours making this appearance. This makes it a lot more easy to wash up as any sheet will be set on the powder rather than in your own skin or base. Another suggestion when performing \"flashing\" would be to employ colored eyeshadow such as Nicole Ritchie ( This is particularly true since you're able to set the brush on your 19, when you use a brush applicator. 00Buy Today ( The eyes aren't too wonderful. To start with, you want to ask yourself exactly what appearance your aim is. Afterward, a photographer took plenty of pictures and took this image. Sit and put your elbows on the desk. 55 ml/0. You can begin drawing on your line. Put on a bit of time. But there\'s nothing wrong with practicing out of a funding purchase-until you determine whether you are actually suited by the eyeliner. Gently but firmly draw on the pencil or brush across the edge of the lid into the surface. Minimum space from var in the base Don\'t expect to perform well for your first or next time... It's virtually impossible to put on a eyeliner while the eyes are closed or squeezed. You can try grey or brown, Should you wear it throughout the daytime. Standing of Var Kat Von D's eyeliner is really a brush, but it was made to be as good as a pencil. The result is well worth it! Watch how Mila Kunis retains all her faces, such as her eyelids, in organic tones. This will provide the illusion of black, thick lashes with no eye line being spectacular. With her eyes shut, she seemed inviting and sultry. /Element isn't marketing &($(this). top - 1 method to fix this issue is to purchase a palette of bare sunglasses, pick a few which best matches, then blend, blend. Such as Mila and Nicole, she retains the rest of her cosmetics natural in the photograph, but generally prefers to place lipstick that is bright to balance her mouth and eyes. top; Move your mind a bit backward as your eyelids a bit can close -- J It truly has the impact of starting your eyes and cause them to seem larger. Blinc Liquid Eyeliner namasong Price: $26. 00 Purchase Now( Additionally, it creates the eyeliner on the top cover seem darker and more notable. The simplest way is to utilize a eyeliner. Kat walked and has begun queuing at the center of her uterus, as she moves, and the lineup is becoming thicker. Prevent thick lines to this appearance since this can make your eyes seem younger and we're searching for an open, sober appearance. As a heeled glitter eyeshadow firm that is high, we carry on a number of the world non shimmer highlighter challenges. Shenzhen Beauty Secret Tech Co., Limited have a complete collection of eyebrow spots that could fix your natural makeup issue in an effective way. Test it. Prepare your eyelids at precisely the exact same manner. You can go mad with colours that are dark and include some metallic components. Stila Waterproof Liquid eye mask daily, powerful dark Amazon price: $22. 00 Purchase Now( To create the app simpler purchase yourself a mirror and sit next to the lights. Particularly if you're in a rush! Use a moisturizer that is mild. The more proficient you should wear lashes, the need. The problem will get worse because the grease wills raise as you get old. NYX decorative eye shadow palette 10 colours, caviar and bubbles, 0. Charge: to improve your eyes, an extremely old cosmetics trick would be to line your waterline using a white pen. You are able to fill any openings. Beauty Secret Makeup succinctly and clearly conveys exactly what our firm is all about. Brands shed light and cut to catch the audience. Much like Mila Kunis, the additional make-up of Nicole \ stays natural and sets her eyes that are emphasized on the point. googletag. Enough distance from the base of the post | $ (that ). hasClass( It a fantastic idea to invest, at the same time you outside at night Should you draw eyeliner. The makeup formulation has come a very long way, and so long as you shop it is possible to discover a eyeliner which may be put also for contact lens wearers and set up. Such as the base, a lot of women find it hard to select. It \'s simpler to apply than previously, the reason why it's gaining popularity and that \'s. Come such as and, in several types, and all of them provide option for our requirements. I not trying to dissuade you. 00 Purchase Now( You might choose to apply mascara. When you're getting used to doing so, you are able to boost the strain as you proceed so the lines will get thicker as you proceed. {Function articleAdMiddleLoad () {= \"undefined\") I use contact lenses... /The preceding element is a slip ))Come such as and, in several types, and all of them provide option for our requirements. Prevent thick lines to this appearance since this can make your eyes seem younger and we're searching for an open, sober appearance. Enough distance between Advertising & (\". The eyes of credit \ reveal eyeliner and the lashes combine. You\'re all set to draw eyeliner. You can begin drawing on your line. Watch how Mila Kunis retains all her faces, such as her eyelids, in organic tones. googletag. This will provide the illusion of black, thick lashes with no eye line being spectacular. This makes it a lot more easy to wash up as any sheet will be set on the powder rather than in your own skin or base. Diversifying is a great expansion approach, as it permits Beauty Secret Cosmetics to have several streams of income which could fill voids that are seasonal and, obviously, improve sales and profit margins. The thing that is crucial is-have enjoyable! You might draw tattoes with this eyeliner! Don\'t expect to perform well for your first or next time... Just dip a cotton swab if you exercise in your home and eliminate the area that you don\'t need. Charge: to improve your eyes, an extremely old cosmetics trick would be to line your waterline using a white pen. When you're getting used to doing so, you are able to boost the strain as you proceed so the lines will get thicker as you proceed. The eyes aren't too wonderful. I use contact lenses... Many girls like to initiate the eyeliner at nighttime in precisely the exact same manner as throughout the day-I. e. Amazon price: Purchase today ( The more proficient you should wear lashes, the need. 00 Purchase Now( The makeup formulation has come a very long way, and so long as you shop it is possible to discover a eyeliner which may be put also for contact lens wearers and set up. Simply stick to it till you are feeling natural and relaxed, and you may get what you would like. Minimum space from var in the base It's \'s not always a fantastic idea to attempt to wear your clothing when you\'re racing against time, particularly once you begin. Eyeliner TipsSome makeup artists recommend beginning with excellent eyeliner since they're often more easy to apply and provide finish result. Even earrings and her hair are easy, so nothing could be bothersome. This block you and may illuminate your eyes. Much like Mila Kunis, the additional make-up of Nicole \ stays natural and sets her eyes that are emphasized on the point. Sprinkle a translation powder, when you complete the makeup of your own eyes. /The preceding element is a slip ))undefined); Blinc namasong Price: $26. 00 Purchase Now( When were accustomed to long gone are those days. Now like makeup that were new have come up. If you think your eyelids still have a bit creases, pull on your eyelids smooth out of the outer rim along with another hand. The problem will get worse because the grease wills raise as you get old. The simplest way is to utilize a eyeliner. Wear credit through the nighttime: at which you could have fun with shovel and be eye-catching as you can. I feel as she's nailed, don\'t you understand which colour of eyeliner I need to select? This is particularly true since you're able to set the brush on your 19, when you use a brush applicator. 8 tsp ) It is important to prepare the lid. With her eyes shut, she seemed inviting and sultry. Enough distance from the base of the post | $ (that ). hasClass( Eye shadow charge: you place this on the first and also will apply eye shadow. Stila Waterproof Liquid eye mask daily, powerful dark Amazon price: $22. 00 Purchase Now( With eyes for needing them to be the most important focus of the colour, who will blame Nicole. Use a moisturizer that is mild. How can you avoid this dilemma? First, clean your eyelids and remove. I /component is situated after at the advertisement & the place! hasClass( {Function articleAdMiddleLoad () {= \"undefined\") Having said this, nothing can prevent you you have. Simply pointing out the facts. Prepare your eyelids at precisely the exact same manner. Charge: you wear any sort of false lashes, which are more easy before applying eyeliner to wear. See how the line thins down since it dives upwards and out within her eye. If You'd like a Complete appearance, begin your lines in the inner corner of the eye (from the nose) To create the app simpler purchase yourself a mirror and sit next to the lights. It depends upon personal taste whether it reaches the appearance you 21, you feel to use. Assist -I smudged! 55 ml/0. Besides diamond earrings and her hairstyle, Adele is magical here. Afterward, a photographer took plenty of pictures and took this image. You'll be pleased. Women find it hard from slipping off their eyelids to reduce eyeliner or eye shadow. Eyeshadow base, city Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion. It \'s simpler to apply than previously, the reason why it's gaining popularity and that \'s. However, it simple to go wrong-it flaky or may get filthy and it doesn\'t seem great. The past's thought is that if there's a sheet which drives you mad and goes to your eyes, you need to put on mascara or a eyeliner. Gently but firmly draw on the pencil or brush across the edge of the lid into the surface. Beauty editors require a very long time pick the photograph and to check at every unit around the Lightbox. Standing of Var Put on a bit of time. It is excellent for wearing at night and provides the appearance time. Educate your paletteCredit: cosmetics needs the eyebrow and a fantastic base are not any exception. Beauty Secret Makeup succinctly and clearly conveys exactly what our firm is all about. Brands shed light and cut to catch the audience. Charge: Don\'t forget have taken a very long time to create. It made her eyeliner stick out. Additionally, it creates the eyeliner on the top cover seem darker and more notable. Some girls are somewhat fearful of this experimentation whilst longing for look. Such as the base, a lot of women find it hard to select. Charge: excellent looking \"afternoon \", attempt to click between lashes using a nice pen applicator. The moment has now arrived. After the skin around your eyes is quite thin and the very last thing you need to do is promote cavities, do so lightly. These may provide you a look that is natural but improve your eyes. But there\'s nothing wrong with practicing out of a funding purchase-until you determine whether you are actually suited by the eyeliner. The way to use Flickr charge: seem becomes popular since it's a fantastic way to make your eyes seem larger. Another suggestion when performing \"flashing\" would be to employ colored eyeshadow such as Nicole Ritchie ( When you've mastered this, you might like to keep on using the brush applicator. Kat walked and has begun queuing at the center of her uterus, as she moves, and the lineup is becoming thicker. Kat Von D's eyeliner is really a brush, but it was made to be as good as a pencil. top; Minor flaws are dismissed. No wonder-when employing it properly, your eyes may open and make them the focus on your face. As a heeled glitter eyeshadow firm that is high, we carry on a number of the world non shimmer highlighter challenges. Shenzhen Beauty Secret Tech Co., Limited have a complete collection of eyebrow spots that could fix your natural makeup issue in an effective way. Test it. A professional makeup artist with years of expertise and the cosmetics money can purchase has spent hours making this appearance. Particularly if you're in a rush! You can go mad with colours that are dark and include some metallic components. Point between lashes. Minimum space between Advertising var = 1200; 1 debate that supports this is that if you're able to master a appearance that is great looking with a version that is less costly, it'll be simple to utilize a edition that is more expensive! You will be given more control on it by Acquiring the liner stick near the tip. You are able to fill any openings. This seems different. It time. In case you need to take it off and begin, it is going to be simpler to add more, but harder. Give it a couple of minutes to dry and you are able to create up. Even in the event that you\'re not likely to wear colour eyeshadow, it\'s a fantastic idea to wear a color of skin tone simply to eliminate skin tone. These are simpler to use than brushes and will be the perfect way to get started using eyeliner. /Element isn't marketing &($(this). top - You can try grey or brown, Should you wear it throughout the daytime. It's virtually impossible to put on a eyeliner while the eyes are closed or squeezed. This produces the origin of your lashes seem darker and leaves your eyeliner appear more noticeable. Such as Mila and Nicole, she retains the rest of her cosmetics natural in the photograph, but generally prefers to place lipstick that is bright to balance her mouth and eyes. I am able to \'t make my eyes look as a movie in a magazine... Move your mind a bit backward as your eyelids a bit can close -- It took them to locate the model with eyes. In case you\'re heading out, do you visit an elegant occasion or visit a bar with flash lights where you are able to get mad about the colours and effects... They seem softer if you're blond or skinnier. 1 method to fix this issue is to purchase a palette of bare sunglasses, pick a few which best matches, then blend, blend. Actors has been in use and love eyeliner. Stop looping When no place is located and eliminate any slots that are residual. if(! {spotFound) It truly has the impact of starting your eyes and cause them to seem larger. In case you are dispelled by the eyeliner below your lens can I wear liquid eyeliner, don\'t worry! This can help even the skin of the eyelid. J Cost: $11. 00Buy Today ( To start with, you want to ask yourself exactly what appearance your aim is. If the eyes of Kat \ start, you are able to observe that the line looks like a different one --more -eyelash. Should you want to test it a couple of times Nobody is going to do this. The result is well worth it! When it\'s a day, then it\'s better to choose a milder, less eye-catching appearance that will still improve your eyes. Sit and put your elbows on the desk. It might appear odd at first, but the longer you do, the easier it'll be. 00Buy Today ( They weren't caught. You might feel awkward at first-it\'s a great idea to practice a couple of times. BrushA pencil eyeliner or pen is a beginning.|Come such as and, in several types, and all of them provide option for our requirements. 8 tsp ) It \'s simpler to apply than previously, the reason why it's gaining popularity and that \'s. To start with, you want to ask yourself exactly what appearance your aim is. Such as the base, a lot of women find it hard to select. You are able to fill any openings. This produces the origin of your lashes seem darker and leaves your eyeliner appear more noticeable. Kat walked and has begun queuing at the center of her uterus, as she moves, and the lineup is becoming thicker. In case you need to take it off and begin, it is going to be simpler to add more, but harder. Prepare your eyelids at precisely the exact same manner. I feel as she's nailed, don\'t you understand which colour of eyeliner I need to select? When it\'s a day, then it\'s better to choose a milder, less eye-catching appearance that will still improve your eyes. But there\'s nothing wrong with practicing out of a funding purchase-until you determine whether you are actually suited by the eyeliner. You will be given more control on it by Acquiring the liner stick near the tip. Use a moisturizer that is mild. It made her eyeliner stick out. Wear credit through the nighttime: at which you could have fun with shovel and be eye-catching as you can. You might draw tattoes with this eyeliner! Beauty editors require a very long time pick the photograph and to check at every unit around the Lightbox. Sit and put your elbows on the desk. Sprinkle a translation powder, when you complete the makeup of your own eyes. I /component is situated after at the advertisement & the place! hasClass( If You'd like a Complete appearance, begin your lines in the inner corner of the eye (from the nose) Eye shadow charge: you place this on the first and also will apply eye shadow. NYX decorative eye shadow palette 10 colours, caviar and bubbles, 0. Besides diamond earrings and her hairstyle, Adele is magical here. When you're getting used to doing so, you are able to boost the strain as you proceed so the lines will get thicker as you proceed. This makes it a lot more easy to wash up as any sheet will be set on the powder rather than in your own skin or base. The eyes of credit \ reveal eyeliner and the lashes combine. The makeup formulation has come a very long way, and so long as you shop it is possible to discover a eyeliner which may be put also for contact lens wearers and set up. 00 Purchase Now( They weren't caught. You can begin drawing on your line. You might choose to apply mascara. In case you are dispelled by the eyeliner below your lens can I wear liquid liner, don\'t worry! Don\'t expect to perform well for your first or next time... Standing of Var If the eyes of Kat \ start, you are able to observe that the line looks like a different one --more -eyelash. It is important to prepare the lid. It's virtually impossible to put on a eyeliner while the eyes are closed or squeezed. This will provide the illusion of black, thick lashes with no eye line being spectacular. Much like Mila Kunis, the additional make-up of Nicole \ stays natural and sets her eyes that are emphasized on the point. It time. Even earrings and her hair are easy, so nothing could be bothersome. The moment has now arrived. 1 method to fix this issue is to purchase a palette of bare sunglasses, pick a few which best matches, then blend, blend. Here's a manual to draw on eyeliner. Additionally, it creates the eyeliner on the top cover seem darker and more notable. I use contact lenses... Simply pointing out the facts. This is particularly true since you're able to set the brush on your 19, when you use a brush applicator. As a heeled glitter eyeshadow firm that is high, we carry on a number of the world non shimmer highlighter challenges. Shenzhen Beauty Secret Tech Co., Limited have a complete collection of eyebrow spots that could fix your natural makeup issue in an effective way. Test it. Charge: to improve your eyes, an extremely old cosmetics trick would be to line your waterline using a white pen. The simplest way is to utilize a eyeliner. Eyeshadow base, city Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion. The result is well worth it! Beauty Secret Makeup succinctly and clearly conveys exactly what our firm is all about. Brands shed light and cut to catch the audience. You can go mad with colours that are dark and include some metallic components. See how the line thins down since it dives upwards and out within her eye. Some girls are somewhat fearful of this experimentation whilst longing for look. I am able to \'t make my eyes look as a movie in a magazine... 55 ml/0. Put on a bit of time. Charge: excellent looking \"afternoon \", attempt to click between lashes using a nice pen applicator. It's \'s not always a fantastic idea to attempt to wear your clothing when you\'re racing against time, particularly once you begin. Give it a couple of minutes to dry and you are able to create up. After the skin around your eyes is quite thin and the very last thing you need to do is promote cavities, do so lightly. This block you and may illuminate your eyes. These may provide you a look that is natural but improve your eyes. The more proficient you should wear lashes, the need. The thing that is crucial is-have enjoyable! 00Buy Today ( Kat Von D's eyeliner is really a brush, but it was made to be as good as a pencil. /The preceding element is a slip )) Even in the event that you\'re not likely to wear colour eyeshadow, it\'s a fantastic idea to wear a color of skin tone simply to eliminate skin tone. Actors has been in use and love eyeliner. Eyeliner TipsSome makeup artists recommend beginning with excellent eyeliner since they're often more easy to apply and provide finish result. Diversifying is a great expansion approach, as it permits Beauty Secret Cosmetics to have several streams of income which could fill voids that are seasonal and, obviously, improve sales and profit margins. A professional makeup artist with years of expertise and the cosmetics money can purchase has spent hours making this appearance. Women find it hard from slipping off their eyelids to reduce eyeliner or eye shadow. To create the app simpler purchase yourself a mirror and sit next to the lights. Educate your paletteCredit: cosmetics needs the eyebrow and a fantastic base are not any exception. You'll be pleased. If you think your eyelids still have a bit creases, pull on your eyelids smooth out of the outer rim along with another hand.

I couldn't decide on the kiss prompt so I will share both I was thinking of and you can pick if one strikes your fancy between Hardy/Hannah 34. to pretend orrrrrrrr Ten/Rose 26. as an apology.

A kiss to pretend

Hardy x Hannah. 1920s/Gangsters AU. Hardy is working undercover and infiltrated a criminal gang. Hannah is the mistress of the dangerous gang leader. 

2700 words. 

A/N: For UK folks, by “suspenders” I mean braces, the kind that hold up trousers, not the lingerie type.

➙ Kiss prompts

London, 1922

They both pretend to be other people. He pretends to be Emmett Carver, henchman for Enzo “The Ruby” Crawford, an infamous gangster. She goes by Belle and pretends to love Enzo.

In reality, he’s Alec Hardy, an undercover detective investigating the East End gang’s activities.

In reality, she’s… well, Hardy doesn’t know her real name and doesn’t want to learn it. That way, he can’t betray her. But he knows she’s friendly and smarter than she pretends to be. He knows she fears Enzo.

Hardy went undercover a year ago. The Metropolitan police needed a copper from outside London to investigate the corruption amongst their own officers. Enzo’s gang has contacts in every police station, every branch of the government, every bank. Blackmail and bribery are the bricks and mortar of his criminal empire. He deals in illegal betting, protection rackets, black market weapons and opium. He built his reputation on cruelty: as far as Enzo’s concerned, everyone is fair game, even women and children. His nickname “The Ruby” is a reference to the colour of blood. The story goes that he loves to keep the stains on his clothes after a murder.

In the name of public protection and justice, Hardy replaced his suit and tie with rolled up shirtsleeves and steel-capped boots. Traded his police badge for the dark red suspenders symbolic of Enzo’s gang.

They told him he’d have to work his way up the ranks of the criminal organization. It could take months, years even, before Enzo trusted him with sensitive information. So for now, he’s relegated to menial tasks: surveillance, deliveries, dodgy transactions. Hardy’s not built for intimidation, but his accent alone forestalls backtalk.

Most policemen fear retaliation against their loved ones if their cover is blown. It’s not a problem for Hardy anymore. He came back from the Great War to find out that, while he was fighting for his life in the trenches of France, Tess had fallen in love with another man. They tried to put it all behind them and rebuild a life, they had a baby, but it only delayed the inevitable: Tess left and took their daughter with her. After that, for Hardy, becoming another person didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

One task he didn’t expect was driving the boss’s floozie to and from his home.

Chauffeur to the flapper.

These days, so many young women wear short dresses and makeup, at first he can’t tell whether Belle is a prostitute or fashionable. On the drive back, she counts bills, but it doesn’t mean anything either. Enzo sees other girls, of course, but Belle is his favourite, the only one he sends a car for.

Hardy watches her in the rear-view mirror. A cloche hat sits low over her blond bob and obscures her kohl-rimmed eyes. She gnaws at her bottom lip, wrings her hands in her lap. He escorts her to the fourth floor of the hotel, in the lift, she takes deep breaths. When the doors open with a ping, a smile springs on her lips.

“Honeybear!” she says, running into Enzo’s arms.

She arrives with bright red lipstick and returns home without it, as if Enzo himself drained the colour out of her.

Hardy wonders if she once cared about Enzo. Is he blackmailing her? What does she need the money for? Does she have other clients? And he wonders why he wonders about her so much.

They’re long car rides; she lives on the other side of town. But he comes to appreciate these moments more than any others. She sits in the back and therefore cannot see his face. He can relax. Somewhat.

She’s friendly to everyone from members of the gang to the hotel staff. Hardy’s grumpy attitude doesn’t deter her. It starts with small things, a kind smile, a funny comment on the latest Chaplin movie, a snack shared. “Did you bake those scones yourself?” he asks. She laughs and it fills the whole car. The tunes she hums that haunt him all day (“Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?”). The shine of her sequined dress against the drab backseat of the model T’s interior.

One day, he finds out she’s lying about where she lives. She forgets a novel in the car, but when he tries to return it to her, he finds she’s not a tenant in the building where he drops her off. He doesn’t try to find out her real address. The less he knows and all that… She doesn’t want anyone in the gang to know where she lives. Smart lass.

He gives her the book back later, and she immediately notices he’s read it. “What did you think of Poirot?”

For a second there, he panics, thinks she’s asking because she knows he’s a detective. “Too intelligent,” he answers carefully.

“I hope this Agatha Christie will write other books. Have you read Evelyn Waugh?”

They begin exchanging novellas and paperbacks, a book club of their own with little notes in the margins like coded messages. He tells himself it’s innocent, yet he hides the books carefully.

He eats some of her taffies. She drinks from his flask.

When she’s in a hurry, she changes outfits while he drives. She adjusts her garter straps when she knows he’s watching in the rear-view mirror.

He pays her a compliment. Her hand brushes against his in the elevator.

“Laters,” she says with a wink when they part ways. And he watches her hips sway, heart in his throat, as she walks down the hotel corridor to meet Enzo.

Theirs is a friendship built on things unsaid, on averted gazes, on lingering nothings. It’s fog. Unsubstantial, yet it can swallow the whole city.

Maybe it’s a test. A trap. Set up by Enzo himself. It’s plausible. More than. But he’s pretending to be another man, so he might as well pretend he’s the kind of man Belle could be attracted to.

Every day, he awaits the request to fetch her with a knot in his stomach: dread or eagerness, he can’t tell.

He drives slower. Stops fully at every sign. Offers to wait if she has errands along the way.

Now, when he stops in front of her fake house, he kills the engine. They share a cigarette and companionable silence.

He never invites her to sit at the front. He needs the physical barrier between them. To keep rumours at bay. To control his own yearnings.

It’s one of those days, when it seems winter will never end, that she tests the boundary. She leans forward, elbows atop the back of the front seat, chin rested on her hands. Very close. He keeps his eyes on the road and his hands firmly on the wheel, but he’s acutely aware of her proximity. Her perfume isn’t light or floral or sweet, it’s tangy, raw cocoa and smoke, linens tangled in heated bodies. It’s raspy like a tongue along his scruffy jaw. He swallows thickly, squirms on his seat. She brushes something off his shoulder. Her fingers linger on the worn out cotton. The first human touch in months that’s not a shove or a jab. His blood fizzles.

“Sit back, it’s not safe,” he says.

“If you really cared about my safety, you wouldn’t take me to him.”

Her anger isn’t directed at him. It’s unwarranted, but it cuts him deep. He halts the car on the side of the road.

“You only have ask,” he says, eyes trained on the windshield.

He’d lie for her. He knows it with blinding clarity.

“But if I didn’t go, then I wouldn’t see you,” she says.

He arm dangles over, on his side of the car. An offer. An overture.

His heart pounds in a way it hasn’t since the trenches. A flush creeps up his neck. He brushes the back of his fingers down her skin, from elbow wrist. He grazes her palm. Their little fingers wrap around each other.

If he drove away, who would find them?

“Emmett,” she says softly.

She doesn’t even know his real name. None of this is real, he tells himself. Then why is it so hard to let go of her hand?

“Maybe another time,” she says. “Keep driving or we’ll be in trouble.”

He hates himself for pressing on the gas pedal.

She leans over every time now. Always near, forgiving.

Hardy’s superiours at the Metropolitan police think she’s valuable. She might know something, sensitive information overheard or confessed by Enzo in a moment of post-orgasmic weakness. “Befriend her,” they say. He doesn’t want to use her, doesn’t want her mixed up in this. If the police act on knowledge revealed by Belle, and the leak is traced back to her, she would pay the price dearly. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her,” they say. But he has no faith in their words.

Inevitably, she does reveal something to him.

The car is parked in front of the house that’s not her house. She smokes the last of their shared cigarette and flicks it out the window. Normally, she’d leave now, but she stays. She runs a finger under his collar, as if smoothing it. He slopes down, rests his cheek on top of the seat, mirroring her position. She’s so close, his vision blurs, but he’s too tired to make his eyes focus.

“I won’t see you next week,” she says.

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“I mean, ‘cause Enzo will be in Bristol.”

“Right.”

“It’s like a vacation for me.”

“What will you do?”

She shrugs. He wonders if she’ll propose they meet. There’s a moment of silence, a pregnant pause, a crossroad of possibilities.

“Anyway.” She chuckles nervously. “Maybe I’ll learn to cook.”

“Lord have mercy.”

It’s only the next day, when the effect of her touch and smile has somewhat faded, that he realizes the significance of her words. If Enzo is in Bristol, he may be trying to create an alliance with the gang up there. He should warn the police right away. Yet he waits. Waits for someone else to mention the trip, but no one at his level seems aware the boss is out of town.

The next day, he’s asked to fetch Belle, and he thinks it’s too late to alert his colleagues now. But when she comes out of the hotel, her hair and lipstick are intact. She got paid to sit by herself in an empty hotel room. Obviously, they’re doing everything to keep the illusion the big boss is still in London. If word gets out, they’ll narrow down the list of suspects real fast.

Unaware of Hardy’s inner turmoil, Belle is in a great mood. As soon as they round the corner, out of sight, she wraps her arms around his neck from behind. Her breath brushes his ear when she says, “take the scenic route”.

Driving by Hyde Park is the closest thing to a scenic route London has to offer. They stay in the car, they can’t risk meeting someone they know. He drives around three times, and, through the window, they watch springtime London blooming to life: sheep graze on the lawn, children run, pushing old tires with sticks, young female factory workers stroll arm-in-arm.

Belle’s hand slips inside his shirt. His heart drums under her touch. He nearly crashes into another car.

He drives until the sun descends on the horizon.

It’s the happiest he’s been in a long time, but the dilemma eats at him. An alliance between London and Bristol means a wider network of criminal activities— wider than ever before— and more innocent bystanders caught in that web. But they’re faceless, anonymous bystanders whereas Belle is so very real. She’s flesh and bones and loveliness. Her life would be on the line. His too, he realizes belatedly.

In the end, his conscience wins. He’s a cop, not a crook. He sends the superintendent a coded message and waits with fear in his heart.

The next week, he’s sent to fetch Belle again. As usual, he escorts her to the fourth floor, but he keep his hand poised near the butt of his revolver. This time, Enzo shows up to welcome her.

“Hello, Babydoll.”

She jumps in his arms. “Honeybear! I missed you.”

Hardy grits his teeth and ignores the pang in his heart. He’d have preferred a bullet.

Rather than go back to the pub that doubles as the gang’s HQ as he usually would, he stays nearby. He sits in the service stairwell, attentive to any sound out of the ordinary.

A few hours later, she comes out, and one glance from her tells him she’s unwell. A tense silence fills the elevator, it’s not the place to talk.

In the car, she rests her forehead against the window and follows the path of raindrops with her finger.

Did they question her? Threaten her?

“You alright?”

“Yeah… I liked my little vacation.”

“What happened?”

“Enzo was pissed. Something happened, and he thought I’d said something I shouldn’t.”

Hardy gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles turned white.

“I didn’t even know what he was talking about. What could I have said?”

He hates the hint of doubt that creeps up his spine. The paranoid voice that asks: does she really not remember what she revealed about Bristol or is it a test?

“After a while, he believed me. I think. But then he wasn’t… as nice as usual.” Her voice is thin, vulnerable.

Anger flares in Hardy’s chest, and he punches the car horn. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not exactly. But I’m just, really—” She rubs up and down her own arms. “Can I come to the front?”

He parks the car in the shadow of a tall oak tree. She’s out and back in in a flash.

His whole body is still taut with anger. She slides closer on the seat, and it’s restraint now tensing his muscles.

“It’s okay, Emmett, don’t be shy.”

It’s not shyness, it’s survival. Full of hesitation, he stares at her. She’s so beautiful, and she needs him. A lump rises in his throat.

“Can I get a cuddle? Please.”

He thinks of the hand-grenades he used during the war.

He breathes out slowly, and opens his arms. He’s pulled the pin, there’s no going back now.

Seven seconds before the explosion.

She snuggles up to him, head on his chest, arm around his torso. His blood sparks to life.

Six.

He tightens his embrace around her. Holds on to her. Protects her.

Five.

His thawed heart swells against his ribs. Warmth spreads out from his chest.

Four.

Belle tilts her head back, gaze searching his face. She gently wipes the hair off his eyes and cups his cheek.

Three.

He rests his forehead on hers. Ragged breaths mingle between them.

Two.

Her lips brush against his.

One.

He captures her mouth.

Zero.

And they kiss. Desperately. And they pretend this can end well.

Sunday: Oslo to Gothenburg (Bye-Bye to our Car, for Now!) and on to Copenhagen

There are a few things I wanted to note, just in general, but I’ve been forgetting to do so.  One: there are wind turbines all over the countryside in Norway and Sweden.  Two: the recycling program in Norway is very ahead-of-our-time (or the U.S.’s time, and I know to roll out such programs on a nationwide scale is easier to do in a smaller country than a larger one) and everyone recycles and composts  and the robot-directed sorting of bags of garbage is a sight to see (I saw it in a video that Ryley showed me).  Three: there are sooooooo many Teslas in Norway.  It is an actual fact that there are more Teslas per capita in Norway than in any other country (per my source: Eric Engberg).  Now, you’d think that this must just mean the people are super stoked to protect the environment and have loads of money to spend on buying expensive electric cars, and that is partially true, but Ryley and Roar said that many people spend way beyond their means and the government really incentivized electric car ownership, and Tesla was a huge resulting beneficiary of that.  Electric cars could drive in the bus lane for a while and there were more benefits, too, which I am forgetting.  It is really crazy how many Teslas there are on the road, and aside from that, there are just a lot of new cars, with very few that would qualify as “old” in the central city.  When we drove out of town, we saw more older models, but in the city, nope. I’ve also been thinking a lot about immigration in the late-19th and early-20th century to the U.S. from Scandinavia.  So I will digress for a minute: I know that when countries are war-torn, it makes a lot of sense for individuals and families to leave those regions, when they can (and as we see globally today and throughout history, there are so many tragic regions in which civilians are stuck in unlivable circumstances with no respite from the wars surrounding them). I also know from my own family history that people fled, say, Ireland because of famine, or Lithuania to seek an improved life in the U.S., even before abject ethic and religious persecution made conditions unsurvivable. I need to learn more about the causes for migration out of Scandinavia during the turn of the last century.  But, the lure of the “American Dream” was strong, even when a country wasn’t in a depression or there wasn’t a crop failure (though Norway had a huge potato crop failure that made many people leave, at the same time as Ireland, according to Roar), as far as I know.  And we see that immigrants from the turn of the last century to the U.S. have, by and large, left improved socio-economic legacies for their  descendants. But, when I travel to these areas today, and see some of the beauties of their regions, and size of cities and how these countries are able to develop social systems where there are many fewer people in poverty per capita than there are in our own U.S., I realize I need to learn more about why so many people left in the first place, and what the crises they were fleeing were, or whether they were just leaving to pursue riches in the U.S. when its doors were more open to such waves of immigrants (I mean, I wrote a book about this period, so I know very well the increasingly tight immigration laws of the late-19th to early-20th centuries and what “kinds” of people they privileged).  Anyway, I thought this about my Grandpa Sam too when we were in Lithuania, since he could certainly not have predicted the genocide that would develop there thirty years after he left.  He came to the U.S. alone from his family of two parents and five siblings (all but one of whom perished in the Holocaust), and seems to have traveled with a cousin. I do think about the asylum seekers who I’ve volunteered with in Albuquerque and somewhat like my uncle, they were really going into the unknown, because they hoped that gamble would make their lives better.  In the case of the asylum seekers, they’re often fleeing so much death, corruption, and destruction around them, and they hope that in the U.S. they’ll have a safer home for their children and more viable earning options for themselves. So, I am sorry to go along this tangent for so long, but I really do drive through the countryside here and I wonder why so many people left in the first place – simple as that.  I am sure different people left in different decades for very different reasons. Anyway, our last morning in Oslo was leisurely. We had to go out and find an ATM, though, since I had to leave about $70 for our Airbnb hosts to pay for parking, since we’d agreed upon this. To find an ATM on Sunday, though, was no easy task, so we went on a long walk to get to the nearest one, but that actually turned out very well, because we didn’t have to be out of the apartment at a particular time and we got to see some more neighborhoods that we hadn’t seen before.  We even found a little park right near our place that had a high hill, and we could see quite a panorama from the top. So, around 1, we left Oslo, avoiding by the smallest margin a collision in a roundabout (the Volvo’s brakes work really well, we learned!), and then made it to Gothenburg without much trouble at all. Eric booked our Airbnb in a suburb, and by the time we got in, the kids were ragged, unruly, and wild as hyenas with their squawking and back-talking and general silliness.  It was a mess. It took some stern words and some taking away of things (Rowan’s beloved Blundstone boots) to get them to know that they needed to pull it together, which they did, and we went to the Willy’s grocery store and got some dinner and got back and ate dinner, and the kids ate voluminously. After that, we tried to get the kids to bed, but that, again, was more protracted than ideal, and they weren’t asleep until nearly 10 p.m.  I should mention that the navigation in this suburb called Askim was hilarious and so convoluted; it was like driving from driveway to driveway, on tiny, tiny roads that, before GPS, I have no idea how anyone could’ve given directions to anyone unfamiliar with the area. So, the kids needed one thing after the next at bedtime – a story “from your mouth” (specifically, the serial saga of the cats Pickles and Mr. Pink that I’ve been telling since last summer), a story from a book, some water, to go to the bathroom, it’s too hot, there’s too much light, I want to sleep in with Cece, I want to go downstairs, etc. etc.  It was endless.  But, finally, they both zonked out, and then I couldn’t fall asleep until after midnight. I hope it doesn’t seem like I am complaining about the kids or their behavior a lot, because really, they roll with all of this traveling and moving from town to town pretty well, and they seem to love the adventure, and Rowan even expresses how much he loves it, repeatedly, and how sad he’s going to be when it’s over (though he has his art camp later this summer, and he *is* excited for that). But, our kids really are the loudest kids in any given room and the goofiest, so that is fun for us sometimes, but sometimes we need a knob with which we can dial down their volume considerably. We dropped our Volvo off this morning for its journey home, and while we were there, we saw another family, with two kids ages probably 8 and 6, and they were just sitting at a table with their parents while they waited for their car to be brought out. Our kids, by contrast, were needling each other and I actually heard a scream out of Cece when I was in the bathroom right before we left. Some great things can come out of their energy and curiosity, and we’re grateful for that, but, as I noted, sometimes, a dial would be useful ;)  I guess what goes around, comes around, since my mom once left my brother and I (at ages 4 and 6) with the guard at the front of some Smithsonian museum because we were being intolerable and she wanted to see the exhibit without our annoying behavior, so with the guard we sat.  That was also the day I flat-out insisted on wearing pleather boots and jeans in the humid, insane D.C. summertime weather. Anyway, I guess my kids come by their low points honestly ;) Anyway, so we *did* return the Volvo for its ocean journey home!  And now, I write this from a train to Copenhagen, and we’ll spend two nights there before flying to Croatia, land of my grandmother’s mother and ancestors.  The kids and I know, from Grandma Marion, how to say “I love you!” in Yugoslavian (as she calls it), so we’re ready for our travels there! This train ride started a bit stressfully, a) because we have a lot of loot to get situated on board, and b) there are no seat numbers above all of the seats, so it was a total frustrating guessing game to figure out which seats are ours.  But we did, and since then, the ride has been uneventful, with some beautiful ocean scenery and small towns (and some not-so-small towns) with red houses and intensely green fields. The kids have had some iPad time (Cece is doing a Montessori “hundreds board” right now and Rowan was laughing loud enough for all in our car to hear to Shawn the Sheep).  They are going to be tired tonight in Copenhagen, but we might tow them around in a bike trailer, so we’ll see what develops! More soon!