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#it was v useful to fight the same face syndrome at least
burningexeter · 1 month
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As an aspiring writer and filmmaker, what are the connections or "themes" that my work has and share with each other. It's actually much more simple on my end with this:
• They tend to always focus on unconventional type of protagonists fighting against the highest stakes there is. But despite that sounding fairly interesting for a simple paragraph, there's much more to it than that. First off, the protagonists or even the ensembles are not at all the type of characters you'd ever expect or think of being the heroes. They're the bullies, criminals, blue collar workers, CDC doctors, rat exterminators, cynical schlubs, elderly grandfathers or grandmothers, spoiled brats, cheerleaders, truck drivers, shady and sleazy private detectives, sarcastic grumps, priests, former deadbeat parents trying to put their lives back together, the sexy but quick-tempered goth girl, drug dealers, cartel members, morticians, dysfunctional families, the town drunk, struggling drug addicts or even a little girl with a burnt scar on the side of her face. These are all no matter what the numerous type of people who you don't usually see as the heroic characters who save the day. These aren't the strong jawed, posing, good-looking Hollywood heroes like Superman, the Guardians Of The Galaxy, Optimus Prime, Luke Skywalker or Wonder Woman — god no, instead these are heroes in the exact same category as Jack Sparrow from the Pirates Of The Caribbean Trilogy, Walter White from Breaking Bad, Koichi Shikishima from Godzilla Minus One, Aldo Raine from Inglourious Basterds and Trevor Philips from Grand Theft Auto V.
That said however, all of the protagonists do grow, develop and even at times become better people over the course of the story. Most of them all have moral codes (standards basically) and always end up doing the right thing.
As for the stakes, these aren't just the odds. These are big. Big stakes that affect them and even everything and everyone they've ever loved or cared about. The stakes in my work are always - and I mean ALWAYS - huge. And no, it's not "Oh, it's the end of the world and the final battle is in New York City" but they are big, deadly, dangerous, high-edge stakes.
• Another thing is that the events of any of my work are either caused, furthered or BOTH by the protagonists and characters' actions and thus are more than character-driven. They make HUGE decisions, they even sometimes depending on which or who make the wrong choices, they don't do what they should've done and regardless of whether what they did was right, all of this leads to repercussions that build and culminate to the climax and end.
• The villains are never these one dimensional, generic, mustache-twirling villains who are just 100% evil all the way. Instead, the villains are intimidating, scary, charismatic, intelligent, threatening and even at times tragic characters. The ones who are tragic show it through moments and go out on their own sacrificial terms while the ones who aren't tragic have codes to them and make their presence known whenever they're on screen. We're not talking about again strong jawed, posing, good-looking Hollywood villains like Loki, Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom, Evelyn Deavor (good lord, that pun name is just dumb as hell) or Hans of the Southern Isles — nah, god no, instead these are the villains in the exact same category as Jared Nomak from Blade II, Dr. Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man 2, Davy Jones from Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest & At World's End, Syndrome from The Incredibles and Dr. Thaddeus Sivana from Shazam!.
• Last but not least, all of my work have genuinely bittersweet endings where the villain or villains and threat are defeated for good with no chance of coming back but sacrifices are made on the heroes side therefore they don't always end very happily. It shows us that not everything has a happy ending regardless of what it is.
Here's an example:
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I have this whole entire, fully fleshed-out idea for a Kim Possible reboot called Global Justice and this is how it'll end:
After Kim and Shego have a heated argument about the former's future now that she's about to graduate high school, Shego realizes that she was wrong and that her reasons for not letting Kim go are selfish of her. But when she goes to apologize to Kim and admit her mistake, she shockingly finds that Kim has gone behind her back and done something that sets in motion the events of the series finale.
The bittersweet ending here is that the main threat that's been built up since the ending of the five-part premiere is finally defeated, all heroes come together and the day is at long last saved with the surviving villains being put to rest.... BUT due to everything that's just happened because of her, Shego has lost all trust in Kim that's been built and earned throughout the whole series with the final scene in the show being this —
Flying through the night sky over a now safe Middleton in their purple car as a full-on homage to the final moment in the original series, Kim in the front seat and Shego driving are sitting in complete silence with their hair blowing in the wind. It's then that a guilty and almost somber Kim says "I'm sorry, Shego. For everything".
To which Shego replies with this....
"I know you are, Kim. You're my girlfriend and nothing will ever change that. I brought you into all this from day one and nothing will ever change that. I will always love you no matter what and nothing will ever change that. But after everything that's just happened, from now until I don't know when, my trust is something that you're gonna have to earn back".
Kim then hangs her head down in shame, visibly heartbroken, while Shego continues driving emotionlessly into the moon.
Cue end credits.
Kim ended up fulfilling her goal in the show but at the cost of a loved one's trust. And it's Shego of all people.
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thoughts-on-bangtan · 3 years
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BTS at Golden Disc Awards 2021
by Admin 1
On the 9th and 10th of January 2021 BTS attended the Golden Disc Awards, and performed on the second day as well. Being there they won the Digital Bonsang for Dynamite on the 9th and the Bonsang, as well as the Album Daesang for Map of the Soul : 7, on the 10th. Amazing achievements which I sincerely congratulate them on.
When it comes to the performance, it was, most certainly, another amazing collection of stages bringing something new once more, even if they presented songs we’ve already seen at previous award shows this season. The opening came in form of Black Swan, though they didn’t sing any of it. It was more an intro showcasing the entrance of the members and highlighted Yoongi’s return to the stage, at least partially. 
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The stage featured big metal winds, low lighting, and the members clad in black and white clothing including leather elbow length gloves for Namjoon and Yoongi, and pretty chockers for Taehyung and Jimin. The highlight though was Jungkook’s hair which isn’t dark anymore, but instead has been bleached and dyed a pretty blond. Personally I think it suits him pretty well. 
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More below the cut since this is shaping up to be pretty long:
Next up was ON, which was powerful and fierce, though still missing Yoongi, which is all too understandable. Even though he can stand on stage again and hold his mic in his left hand (his surgery was on the left shoulder), it will still be a while until he’ll be able to dance with the members. ON has certainly grown a lot on me and I enjoy their performances of it immensely, and it was much the case this time as well.
The transition from ON to Life Goes On came in form of the stage being made to look like their individual rooms from BE which appeared on the digital walls around them. Their clothes were mostly comfy, though Jimin’s resembled their outfits from all the way back during I NEED U/RUN era. The transition/VCR like moment ended with the instrumental to We Are Bulletproof : The Eternal and the stage looking much the way the MV did with the whale swimming around them in an ocean of shades of purple, blue and pink.
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For Life Goes On they had miniature versions of some of their most iconic MV sets on pedestals. It was a really cute idea and I enjoyed the execution a lot. The members seemed relaxed and enjoying themselves, Jimin and Taehyung even having their little moment of looking at each other twice, these moments certainly having become something I always kind of look forward to when it comes to LGO stages. 
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Another tiny Jimin and Taehyung detail was Jimin sending a brief, barely noticeable (by the viewer) finger heart which I hadn’t even noticed until my fourth rewatch. It definitely fits with all these other small gestures we’ve seen from these two in recent months, like the finger hearts and kissy faces during their Lotte Family Concert performance of Boy with Luv or hugging each other on day 1 and doing a fun handshake and dance on day 2 during Dionysus at the MOTS ON:E concert visible only on one of the side cameras, not the main one.
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The grand finale was the Slow Jam remix of Dynamite which worked perfectly with the chill out lounge/bar atmosphere created on stage fitting with the Great Gatsby theme. The members wore mostly suits in white, blue in Namjoon’s case, and a bright yellow when it comes to Taehyung, as well as Hoseok who had a white button down which Tae did not. While a normal person would look ridiculous in it, Taehyung looked absolutely stunning and made it more than work. After so many energetic performances of Dynamite since its release, seeing such a calm version was really nice and refreshing, showing how versatile BTS and their music are, how they can captivate an audience with fast songs made for big choreographies and stage productions, but also these slow, more chill types of tracks. A marvelous idea, truly.
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There was also an encore stage where they sang ON again but this time along with Yoongi on stage which had some hilarious moments, especially Namjoon and Seokjin being silly waving their arms around while kneeling opposite each other on stage during Jungkook’s bridge. Cute.
Afterward the members were at something like a red carpet after interview where they took pictures with their awards (Jungkook and Taehyung even making their Bonsang and Daesang awards kiss much the way film director Bong Joon Ho made his two Oscars kiss last year) and were asked to do a relay of saying something to each other. 
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All translations of their words are taken from Vernal_Bom on twitter.
J-hope to Jimin 
“I didn’t feel lonely in 2020 thanks to Jimin. Thank you for making me laugh. Give me happiness and laugh in 2021 as well.”  Jimin (turning to Namjoon): “It seems he can never live without me” 
Honestly the bond between Jimin and Hoseok is so cute and wonderful and you can see, and hear in their words, how important they are to each other, and how grateful Hobi is. We know the members were having a really hard time in 2020 so it doesn’t surprise me that Hobi would highlight the other members, or in this case Jimin, as one of the main reasons why he made it through it. After all we also know that those two made a song together which unfortunately didn’t make it onto BE. Hopefully we might get it one day at least as SoundCloud release, or perhaps on the next album instead.
Jimin to RM 
It was you who made us pull ourselves together to go through 2020. I am always grateful, and it’d be nice if you share you height a little with me in 2021, be healthy and happy. RM: Okay thank you
I love how Jimin used this (public) opportunity to tell/remind Namjoon of how important he was for them especially in 2020, as leader and surely also as friend, yet still also made a little joke to still keep the atmosphere light. After he was done speaking Jimin also hugged Namjoon, which showed once more how tiny he is in comparison.
RM to JK 
It’s finally today, Jungkook-si, in 10 years! You are Golden Maknae! The day that you will prove your nickname! You are proving it right now with your hair color, but in 2021, I hope the year will be filled with gold, like your nickname. Stay healthy. Let’s ‘Jje-kkit-up’ together this year too! (check it up.. the usual Namjoon saying lol)
It’s quite something to think about and realize, isn’t it, this year 10 years pass since Jungkook became a BigHit trainee and moved into their first dorm with Namjoon, Hoseok, Yoongi and Seokjin. I’m curious if Bangtan, as well as BigHit, have some kind of plan for JK specifically for this year that Namjoon chose to highlight his Golden Maknae nickname in such a way, or if it was more of a reminder to JK, that he’s so worthy despite how he doubts himself, and despite how he himself said he’s been going through tough times in 2020.
JK to V 
V hyung, when we were trainees we were getting along so well, (V: We are not now???) No!!! i didn’t mean it. You are becoming so much of an stand-up (reliable, I assume in this context) guy. Thank you for doing all the schedules with us.  jhope: who’s hyung here?
The bond these two share might just be one of the biggest mysteries and causes for conflicts and fights within the fandom, or particular parts of it. After their conversation In The SOOP, I’d like to believe they’ve figured out whatever issue might've arisen between them in the past, found a way to solve and move past it slowly, and rekindled their friendship once more. Seeing at how well they’ve been getting along (on camera) these past few months, I think it might've been so. It’s curious to me though that JK chose to say this instead of something more akin to what Jimin said to Namjoon, or Hoseok to Jimin.
V to Jin 
V: (turns to Jin)  Jin: This is too close V: I listened to Abyss and that makes my heart ache too... Jin: Thank you V: hyung, your song is so good. Make more songs in 2021, let Army and us listen to your song more. Jin: Okayokay  V: and I play game with you to relieve stress.... sorry for talking in ban-mal (informal form). —(also speaking in informal way) Jin: No no it was so fun V: I love you Jin: I love you too
I absolutely adore the bond these two share and I love that Tae chose to say what he did. We know Seokjin has been going through a hard time in 2020, that he dealt with something I’d call imposter syndrome, so I’m glad we got to know even more about how Tae was there for him, something we otherwise would’ve never known. Certain people try to portray Tae as the one member that is almost estranged from his other members, who barely has anything to do with the group outside of schedules, and yet it’s moments like this--as well as Seokjin telling us in his birthday vlive that Tae organized for everyone including his non-BTS friends to send Seokjin birthday wishes in video form to show him how loved and appreciated he is--are the proof that those people are wrong. Tae is very close with his members, and he’s the ambassador of OT7 or nothing, the members his closest friends and brothers, his found and chosen family.
Jin to Suga 
Jin: Yoongi ya, do it well. Suga: Okay.... Jin: Do well on your rehab, and...uh... let’s do well going forward. Suga: Okay.. I will...
These two are so close yet due to their introverted nature their interactions such as this one are just so hilarious and adorable at the same time. Their dynamic is wonderful and this just seems like peak Yoongi-Jin behavior.
Suga to j-hope 
SG: (unable to look into hobi’s eyes) Our hobi JH: Suga! SG: You did work hard in 2020 (evading eye contact) JH: hahhahahah and? SG: Let’s not fall sick in 2021, and hwaiting...  JH: “Hwaiting hyung, and take good care of your health!”
The saga of Yoongi being unable to look Hoseok in the eye continues and it’s just as precious as ever. They stood so close, and while Yoongi wasn’t able to look into Hoseok’s eyes, it’s funny how he was the one who initiated the whole “them standing so close together” thing. I love the difference between how Seokjin didn’t even try to make eye-contact while Hoseok playfully challenged Yoongi and tried to coax him into it anyway knowing it’ll make Yoongi laugh and smile. It’s such a Yoongi-Hoseok thing, I love it.
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And with that, the award was over and now also my post. I hope you enjoyed reading it! :3
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solena2 · 3 years
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Hey y’all so I watched a YouTube video that I think was wrong, and as you know it’s illegal to be wrong on the internet, so I wrote a response!
Video is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8LF_KkrCJs
youtube
Spoilers for BNHA, in both the video and my response (which I wanted to put in the comments on the video, but apparently YouTube gets pissy about copypasting? Anyway)
Also, probably watch the video before reading this, since a lot of this is a direct response to the points they brought up.
I’d like to preface this by saying that you’ve made some valid comments, and that I understand where you’re coming from here.
My Hero Academia is, overall, a story about amazing people with amazing powers doing amazing things, and it’s difficult to see where someone with no power at all might fit in to this, which is the main emotional conflict Izuku faces throughout his childhood, that fundamental dichotomy between his wanting to save people, and his (assumed) inability to do so without a quirk.
But My Hero Academia is also a story that likes to repeatedly assert that anyone can be a hero. From Aizawa with his non-physical quirk, who primarily uses support gear to defeat enemies many times stronger than him, to Shinsou, whose quirk is seen as villainous, who would likely have to fight against other heroes as often as he would villains thanks to the prejudice that’s positively dripping from BNHA’s world.
So I’d like to explain why I disagree.
First, you begin the video by talking about the people who claim that Izuku’s getting a quirk ruins the story. I would like to make it clear, right off the bat, that I don’t hold this view. I believe that while Izuku having a quirk weakens the impact of the story and cheapens a lot of its messages, there is still undoubtedly a story there to be told, and one that is worth telling.
The reason I believe that Izuku receiving One For All weakens the story is because BNHA is all about the consequences of the kind of society wide prejudice that exists within its world. Every villain the characters face and every problem they overcome is one spawned by the very status quo they’ve spent their childhoods dreaming of upholding- the hero system.
Stain exists because heroes are held in awe by the general population without truly being worthy of it, treated as saviors despite being little more than glorified cops, which spawns anger and resentment from people intelligent enough to see past their facades.
Dabi exists because pro heroes are allowed to get away with just about anything so long as they’re covert about it, and in fact might have grown up to be a hero himself if Endeavor had been held to a higher moral standard by those around him, or had been appropriately punished for his behavior.
All For One exists because “strong” quirks are revered, and those who hold them are taught early to take what they want by force.
Shigaraki exists because those with “unpleasant” quirks are reviled and held in disgust by the general population, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation by outside forces due to their lacking support systems.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.
In my opinion, BNHA has always been centered around the society quirks have created and the consequences therein. I dare you to find a major character arc that doesn’t intersect with the universe’s social issues in some way.
Thus, I believe the message that BNHA attempts to convey would be significantly stronger I’d Izuku had remained quirkless, demonstrating once and for all that quirks and heroism aren’t so intertwined as it might seem.
Instead, it shoots itself in the foot, saying repeatedly that it’s not a quirk that makes a hero, but rather their spirit, while at the same time leaving it implied that the most important character of all would never have been able to help people if not for being given All Might’s power. (Again, it doesn’t ruin the story, but it does hamstring the core message somewhat.)
You say here that Izuku getting saved by All Might is the only reason he became a hero at all, being “saved from his fate of irrelevance”.
This is… Not something I agree with, to state it politely.
Izuku was planning to attend UA’s entrance exam long before he met All Might. Given that he is, you know, Izuku, I don’t think any amount of shittiness from Katsuki would have deterred him from trying. In fact, trying despite the odds against him making it seem idiotic to do so is one the largest parts of his character.
The way you speak of needing to give him a “resilient streak” for him to keep trying despite All Might’s discouragement implies that he doesn’t already have one wide enough to suffer through 14 years of being told he’d never make it as a hero. With how much he’s already pushed through by the time the story even starts, I really doubt All Might would succeed again breaking his will any more than anyone else has.
You say that Izuku’s arc is all about facing the guilt of having reached his goals purely through chance while so many others remain downtrodden.
That’s valid, and I agree.
You also say that this is not a character arc he could have had without One For All, which is not.
Merely being the first quirkless person to make it into UA would likely start this, as he would definitely still have to get through the exam on rescue points, which could feel unearned to him, what with his massive case of imposter syndrome.
Thus, it would still be entirely possible to give him the same overall character arc he has in canon, and it might in fact end up even more pronounced, due to all the discrimination he’d face from the general public.
You say that for this Izuku to continue, even despite All Might’s rejection, he would already have to have the sense of self worth such a character arc eventually gives him.
This is not the case. There are many instances in real life of people pushing past impossible odds and still not feeling as if they deserve to have made it to the other side. In fact, what would likely happen is that he’d try to be a hero anyway and then feel guilty for attempting it even after being discouraged by his hero.
So no, he’s not Naruto, because the personality changes you propose wouldn’t actually be necessary to give him a fighting chance as a hero without a quirk.
The next big point you make is that it would be difficult to give Izuku the standard shounen power crawl without a cool quirk.
You’re correct that technology would have a difficult time stacking up to One For All without feeling like an asspull, making him a Mary Sue, or needing to give him a seemingly infinite array of gadgets, a la Batman.
Notice I said difficult, NOT impossible. While it can be much harder to turn technology into a realistic way to fight superpowered villains, it CAN be done.
Not to mention, there is already a character in BNHA who does it and does it well.
Aizawa doesn’t have a combat oriented quirk, instead fighting almost exclusively with the use of his capture scarf, using which he is shown to be able to take out upwards of ten villains, depending on where you want to pull from. I really don’t think it would be so unrealistic to give a quirkless Izuku something along these lines.
Not that we even need to. We can have Izuku beating villains without the use of any technology he couldn’t buy for himself. (At least in a place with lax safety laws, which I imagine his world likely is due to how pointless it would be to heavily restrict the purchase of things like guns when there are people running around who can shoot glaciers from their hands)
Ninety percent of villains are as vulnerable to getting shot as a normal human. If that’s too violent and bloody for the tone of the show, there are dozens of ways to beat the villains with things like hairspray flamethrowers, slingshots, and traditional weapons (just look at Stain). While quirks certainly are powerful, they aren’t perfect and every ability has a counter, even if it’s not always immediately obvious.
This eliminates the problem of him needing to get his tech from somewhere entirely. (Which is almost a con, because Mei needs more screentime, man)
Actually your point of possibly making Izuku a “super genius” reminds me of something else. Izuku has an almost supernatural ability to identify and counter quirks. Gee, I wonder how that could be useful in a possible plot line where he’s unable to rely on being able to smash his way through problems…
You say that if Izuku getting a quirk is an issue for BNHA, giving him overpowered tech would be a problem as well. Though I already solved this problem by proposing less tech heavy solutions, I’ve decided not to skip over this point because it seems like the right place for me to bring up a piece of context you may be missing for why some people are so against Izuku being given a quirk.
Let’s talk about the disability angle.
Now, as someone with mental disabilities myself, I’m not exactly unbiased here. I’m not going to deny that I have a knee jerk reaction to any story that gives a character a disability (or something analogous within the setting to a disability, like quirklessness) and then “cures” it while implying that they never would have gotten anywhere if their disability had persisted. This is actually why I took so long to get into the BNHA fandom, since I saw a loose outline of the plot and immediately went “oh hell no”.
I did end up joining the fandom in the end, simply because I’m almost certain that this parallel was unintentional.
Anyway, the reason why giving him an overpowered quirk and giving him overpowered tech are so different from a lot of people’s perspectives is that giving him tech doesn’t erase his “disability”. If you give a quirkless Izuku powerful tech, he’ll still be quirkless, with all the hurdles and challenges that implies. (Especially the discrimination related ones) Meanwhile, giving Izuku a quirk removes the disability entirely, as well as most associated difficulties.
I’m sure you can see why one seems so ableist, from a disabled perspective.
You say that you would likely run out of ways to meaningfully progress his tech, in a series as long as BNHA likely will be by its conclusion, but I’d like to point out that this is just as much of a problem with superpowered media. It’s very common in shounen for power progression to feel like more and more of an asspull as the story progresses. Thus, you solve the problem in the same way, by relying more on clever use of what the hero already possesses than you do on creating a new application or ability in every fight.
And no, I can think of several ways to beat both Dabi and Shigaraki without “science magic”. Obviously, neither of them are immune to bullets, though again, that’s probably a bit too quick for this show. You could take down Shigaraki if you could numb his hands somehow, or if you protected yourself with something made of many interlocking parts, like chain mail. You could beat Dabi if you used something like a taser, if you could get close enough to use it. You could also just find a way to outlast him, since he’s not immune to his own fire. Maybe bring some gasoline?
I’m going to skip over the points you make while talking about setting, since I don’t believe you’d have to alter the setting to make a quirkless Izuku feasible.
I will talk acknowledge one point you make while discussing setting simply so I can say: inequality and societal imbalance do not require much, or even any, actual disparity in ability to both exist and be prevalent enough to disenfranchise huge chunks of a population. Just look at how autistic and ADHD people are treated for that. (Or gay people, or women, or the Poors(™)...)
In conclusion, your opinion is valid but I think you lack knowledge of where most of this criticism is actually coming from, which isn’t something you should be ashamed of.
I think the reason mine and your opinions are so fundamentally different here is that we’re coming from very different places, and our thoughts on a piece of media like this are always going to be shaped by our environment.
Thank you for reading.
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venusmages · 3 years
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Cyberpunk 2077 non-spoiler review
Anyways here’s my writeup about my least favorite parts of 2077 for people who are interested in seeing if it’s for them. Both going to talk about content as well as gameplay. This is for PC version, too, because I know last gen consoles are suffering terribly rn and I wouldn’t recommend the game if you’re not going to be playing on PC. At least not until it’s on sale or the issues have been resolved. It really, really shouldn’t have been released on last gen consoles at all in my opinion - or at least should’ve been released on consoles LATER.
If you like Saints Row, GTA, Mass Effect, Shadowrun, or the Cyberpunk genre in general - I definitely think this is something you might want to take a peek at! I wasn’t anticipating the game until about a month or two before release - so maybe that’s why I’m having a blast - but It’s one of my favorite stories from the past decade as far as sci-fi goes. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and It’s really impressed me. I can’t even go into detail about all the things I LOVE because I really want folks to experience it themselves. Just know there’s a very intricately detailed world, all the characters are memorable and insanely well realized and complex, and the story is great fun. Also made me cry like 5 times. It’s become one of my FAVORITE games very quickly.
I’d also recommend Neon Arcade if you want someone who’s been covering the game for quite a while, including the technical and game industry aspect. He does well to go into some detail and even though he’s a fan, I’ve found him to be largely unbiased. I’m not going to go into industry politics here because I feel that’s up for everyone to decide on their own terms.
No spoilers, things to keep in mind, content warnings, etc. below!
CONTENT WARNINGS and issues with plot/story
this setting is dark. very dark. if you struggle stomaching things like dystopian landscapes, body horror, physical, mental and sexual abuse, corporate and gang violence, abuse of children, harsh language, and concepts that mess with the perception of reality - this game might not be for you. It’s a very mature setting, and I don’t mean that in the Adult Swim kind of way. I mean it in the ‘oh shit, it went there’ way. In my opinion I haven’t run across anything in it that was handled distastefully when it dipped into the depressing, but dark and gritty isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I wanted to give a disclaimer.
The game’s universe in advertising and working for the lower class also exploits sex/sex work quite a bit. This is part of the lore itself because in this universe everyone’s become desensitized to sex and violence to the point that marketing embraces it and makes it ridiculous. I feel it’s very obvious that it doesn’t condone this message and is instead a commentary on consumerism - but people still might be uncomfortable seeing a lot of suggestive stuff all over the place regardless. 
Women in game are naked more often than men - even though there is nudity for both. This is likely a mix of appealing to the Gamer Boy demographic (even though the story does NOT actually), or the fact that media is way more cool with seeing naked women than seeing full frontal nudity on men. They probably had to tone some of it down to avoid going above an M rating. 
The story is amazing, but sometimes it dumps a lot onto you at once. It’s one of those sci-fi stories that you have to really be following the names, faces, and concepts continually to get it all down. There’s a lot of betrayal, background players, etc. I think by the mid-way point I’d mostly had it, but It’s pretty dense. However it’s still amazing. You might just need two playthroughs before every tiny detail clicks - because there’s a LOT of details. 
Honestly I think it would help to read up on the lore first so you’re not going ‘what’ constantly. But people have seemed to manage fine without that also! Neon Arcade has a really nice series of videos (like 2 or 3) that get you up to speed with the universe. It also helps you decide if the tone is right for you. 
I think the main story should’ve been longer, also. I don’t mind a 20 hr story, especially in a massive RPG, but It feels like they really struggled to cram as much into that time frame as possible. It skirts the edge of being nice and concise, snappy, and tight - and needing just a few more moments to take a breath and wait a second. This is helped if you do a lot of side quests.
The straight male romance option, River, is INCREDIBLY well written but he doesn’t tie into the main plot in any way whatsoever. It’s very strange and feels like they either ran out of time with him, or slapped together a romance with him at the last second. All the other romances at least know what’s going on with V’s story - meanwhile River has no idea, and you can never tell him. He’s an amazing guy though and I highly recommend his questline. He appears in ACT 2.
In general I’d say not to bother with the romances. There are only 4 total, and while the romancible characters on their own are really well written, the romances themselves are just kinda meh. One romance you don’t even meet until act 3. I don’t think they should’ve been included in the game at all, because they definitely don’t feel as fleshed out as everything else. 
CDPR also sometimes forget that women players or gay men exist. Panam and Judy have a lot more content than River and Kerry for example. I don’t think this is intentional, they just have a large fanbase of dudebros. It only shows in the romance content and the nudity thing though.
Johnny, Takemura, and Claire should’ve been romances and I will fight to the death on that. 
There are gay and trans characters in the game and their stories don’t revolve around their sexualities. It’s very Fallout: New Vegas in it’s approach to characters: IE. you’re going to love them. All of them. 
V’s gender isn’t locked to their body type or their genitals- but to to their voice. I don’t think it’s the best solution they could’ve used but given how the game is heavily voice acted I assume that was what they had to work with. 
Some of the romances are locked to both cis voices AND body types (not genitals if I recall but body shapes). That’s disappointing but I assume it was because of scripted scene issues and/or ignorance on the dev’s part considering the LGBT NPCS are so AMAZINGLY done. There’s no homophobic or transphobic language in the game - though there are gendered curse words and insults if that bothers you. 
Some characters MAY suffer from ‘bilingual people don’t talk like that’ syndrome. But it can be hard to say for sure given that translators exist in this universe and the way they operate aren’t fully described. It’s only momentarily distracting, not enough to take away from how charming the NPCs are.
The endings are really good don’t get me wrong but I want fix it fic :(. All of the endings out of like 6 (?) in the game are bittersweet. 
Both gender V’s are very good but female V’s voice acting is out of this world. If you don’t know what voice to go with/are neutral I’d highly recommend female V. Male V is charming and good but he feels much more monotone compared to female V. 
V has their own personality. To some this won’t be a detractor - but a lot of people thought they’d be making absolutely everything from the ground up. V is more of a commander shepard or geralt than a skyrim or d&d pc, if that makes sense. You can customize and influence them to a HUGE degree, some aspects of V will always be the same.
Streetkid is the most boring background - at least for it’s introduction/prologue.
GAMEPLAY/TECHNICAL
If you can run your game on ultra, don’t. It actually looks best with a mix of high and medium settings. Unless you have a beast that has ray-tracing - then by all means use ray tracing and see how absolutely insanely good it looks.
There are color blind modes for the UI, but not for some of the AI/Netrunning segments in cutscenes. Idk how much this will effect folks with colorblindness but those segments are thankfully short. 
There was an issue with braindances being an epilepsy trigger because for some reason they decided to mirror the flashing pattern after real epilepsy tests - probably because it ‘looks cool’. I don’t have epilepsy but it even hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. Massive oversight and really goddamn weird. Thankfully this was fixed.
There is no driving AI. Like at all. If you leave your car in the street the traffic is just going to pile up behind it. It’s one of the very few immersion breaking things I’ve encountered.
Sometimes when an NPC is driving with you in the car, they’ll drive on the curb and/or run into people. It’s kind of funny but can occasionally result in something weird. Feels very GTA  - but nothing excruciating. 
The camera angle feels a little too low in first person mode when driving on cars. You get used to it though. 
The police in this game feel slapped on and I hope they improve it. Right now if you commit a crime, you can never tell what will actually trigger it. And if you just run away a few blocks the police forget about it. 
Bikes are just way more fun to ride than the cars are. 
You CANNOT respec your character after you make them. Ever. it sucks. Go in with an idea ahead of time what you wanna do - it’s better than being a jack of all trades.
as of now you also CANNOT change their appearance after you exit the character creator. This, also, sucks. Make sure you REALLY like your V or you’re gonna be replaying the openings over and over like I did. 
Photomode on PC is the N key. Had to look it up. The mode itself is great though
Shooting and Mele fighting feel pretty standard. I don’t have a lot of shooter experience besides Bethesda games so anything feels better than that to me. So far I’ve enjoyed stealth and mele the best, but that’s just my own taste! The combat and driving aren’t groundbreaking by any means, but they’re still very fun. I look forward to running at people with swords or mantis blades, and zipping around the city on a motorcycle to see the sights. The story, lore, and interesting quests and characters are the real draw here.
I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs in 80-ish hours of play time. One or two T-poses, a few overlays not loading or floating objects - but nothing terrible. Again, my experience is with Bethesda games. This is all usually fixed by either opening your inventory and closing it again, or exiting out and reloading your save. 
The C button is mapped for crouching AND skipping dialogue by default. That’s terrible. Change it in the settings to be HOLDING C skips dialogue and you’ll be gucci.
There’s apparently a crafting system. I have never been inclined to touch it. But I also play on easy like a pleb so IDK how it all scales otherwise.
The mirror reflections can be a little bit weird, at least on my end. They always end up a teeny bit grainy despite my computer being able to run everything on Ultra Max. You can still get good screens out of it though!
So many people text me to sell me cars and I want them to stop. Please. also the texting menu is abysmal. The rest is ok tho
It’s pretty clear when you’re going to go into a ‘cutscene’. all cutscenes are rendered in-engine BUT you often will be talking to other characters at a specific angle or setting. The game locks you into this usually by having you sit down. It works for me - after all we do a lot of sitting- but it IS very obvious that it’s a way for the game to get you in the frame it wants to display.
That’s all I can think of rn! If you’re interested but wanted to get a slightly better idea of whats going on, I hope this helps. I’m really enjoying it and despite my issues it’s exceeding my expectations. I’m going to be thinking about and replaying this game for quite a while. 
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skvaderarts · 3 years
Text
Hiraeth Chapter 21: Upbringing
Masterlist can be found Here!
Chapter Twenty-One: Upbringing
Note: These comments are pure comedy gold omfg! Especially the ones about Vergil's parenting skills! I live for the chaotic energy that this story provided me on a weekly basis. Thank you for all the amazing memories. And here's to a million more!
(-~-)
Within moments of rounding the corner onto the block, the van pulled up in front of the young summoner’s new abode, narrowly missing the sidewalk as it somehow plopped perfectly into place just outside of V’s home. Nico’s driving technique was once again a total mystery to anyone with a logical thought process and a brain that functioned on the same alignment as most of the human race, but that didn’t stop them from getting in the van with her and allowing her to drive them places. At this point, it was a strange combination of Stockholm Syndrome and an apparent death wish that kept them coming back, but they didn’t really have anything detrimental to say about it that they hadn’t said already, so they just let it be.
The crew members that were present exited the van in various forms of disarray. Having to ride in the front seat wasn’t something that V was entirely used to, especially considering his penchant to sit on the couch and attempt to relax during rides to and from places, but Nico didn’t actually remember where they were going for once. She had only been there once before, and she hadn’t realized that the house in question was, in fact, the same one that she had waylaid V and Magnolia in front of before. But now that she did, he suspected that she wouldn’t have much trouble finding it in the future.
Stepping out of the van and stretching out her back, Nico glanced over at the house, a slightly surprised look on her face. She stepped just in front of V, attempting not to cause him to run into her, but almost leading to that outcome regardless of her efforts. She went entirely agape as she realized that this was, in fact, where V now lived. Now she fully understood what he and Magnolia had been doing there that day. Despite the fact that she had known that V was moving out about a week before he had done so, she hadn’t realized that this was where he had gone. Talk about a step up in quality from any place she had ever lived.
“Holy crap. This place is ginormous, V! What, ya living here alone? Dontcha get lost or anything? Cause I’d need a map just to find the bathroom every day.” Nico practically ran up the steps, inspecting everything in closer detail now that she had the chance to actually do so. She had noticed that the neighborhood was on the newer side with larger, more traditional homes that seemed to possess a modern twist, but she hadn’t had the chance to really appreciate the fine details on one of the houses until now. It was astounding how much work had probably gone into making the houses in this neighborhood look so… trendy? Was trendy the right word?
V chuckled lightly for a moment, a barely audible response that he was certain none of them had probably actually heard. Nico was always an exciting person to be around, even if she didn’t realize it. Her high octane, no-nonsense personality was something that he had come to enjoy, and he was admittedly interested in seeing how she was going to react to the fact that there was so much work to be done with the house. He had basically not even begun to furnish the house, for the most part, and that was something that he knew he needed to start doing sometime soon. Still, there were beds in some of the rooms, and there was a couch in the living room. It was a start, and he did actually have the money to do what he wanted with the place. He just hoped that contentiously paying Dante’s utility bills without him knowing wouldn’t tap too far into his savings. It was all he could do to keep the peace between his father and uncle, and he didn’t want Vergil to come over in the morning alone, only to calmly announce that he had finally eliminated his brother, once and for all.
In truth, he’d had enough conversation with his father for a while after tonight.
Lucia stumbled out behind her, slightly dazed from the rapid trip over. It was just as Dante had said. Nico did in fact drive that way literally everywhere. That was going to take some getting used to. She glanced over at the front door and then up at the building, quickly realizing what all the fuss was about. It was quite tall, at least two stories smaller than her home back on Vie De Marli, but the architecture style was entirely different. Her home was not nearly as modern as this one, but it was longer and more spread out. This one was built for a totally different demographic.
Staring up at it for a moment, Lucia nodded to herself. Yes, it was quite nice, but she did see Nico’s point. She would probably get lost in a house with this many stories to it. She imagined that she would quickly learn the layout, but to live here alone? V must have really enjoyed his solitude. Perhaps it was the prevalent silence that someone could only find in a large, empty space? The abundance of space to do with as he wished? She didn’t know him well enough to say at this point. All she knew was that he was polite, intelligent, and exceedingly quiet, two things that didn’t come as a total surprise to her after knowing Dante for as long as she had, but that seemed to be a unique mixture that he embodied on a singular level that most of his family didn’t in that respect. From what she could tell, the other three members of his family were only ever one of those things at a time, and as far as silence went… well, she wasn’t sure that anyone she had ever met talked less than he did. She herself wasn’t the most talkative sort, but she was practically a chatterbox compared to the longer-haired descendant of the Dark Knight Sparda. 
There was a part of her that immediately noticed that his particular brand of silence was something different. This rest of his family seemed to have their moments, but there was a certain mournful contemplation that she had come to associate with the young man that she had only seen one other time in her life, and that was with Dante when they had first met. She couldn’t even begin to imagine everything that he had gone through up until that point to mold him into the type of person that she had met back then, but she recognized the profound silence suffering that he had once possessed now in V, only there was a part of her that wondered what it was about in his case. He was quite young to be so… resigned, but she figured that had something to do with his life experiences. One was never too young to experience tragedy, especially the kind that could reshape the rest of their life. And from what she could tell, V had already been through something like that, despite his young age. What a shame.
“What Nico said is very true. This is a very nice place you have here. I can only imagine that the inside is just as grand.” She smiled politely as she headed up the stairs, shaking her head in amusement as she took in the sight of Nico scampering back and forth across the porch as she took in all the small details and fine metalwork that encompassed the space they currently occupied. “Thank you for inviting us over.”
V blanched slightly, thankful that he wasn’t facing any of his counterparts. Nero knew what the inside of the house looked like, but none of the rest of them did. Well, at least to his knowledge. He couldn’t see how they might. Maybe Sirrus had been there before? It was unlikely, as far as he was concerned, considering the fact that they seemed to be about the same age, and Magnolia had told him when they had first come there that the house had sat empty almost as long as he had been alive. He would have had to be very young if he had been there before, and for him to remember that? It was unlikely.
“I am sorry to disappoint you, but that most likely won’t be the case. I have yet to purchase any furniture, and although what came with the house is quince nice, actually, it probably won’t impress anyone.” V shook his head, taking the stairs one at a time as he approached the front door and produced the key from a pocket inside of his pants. He turned the key and unlocked the door, pushing it open. He then stepped back out of the way as he allowed the rest of them to enter before he did, internally acknowledging the fact that he would need to lock the door again after they entered. “But at least no one will be caught in the crossfire between my father and uncle when they inevitably get into a fight here. Small mercies.”
Lucia covered her hand with her mouth as she attempted to stifle a small laugh. “Oh, goodness. Do they fight often, then? I got that impression from how casually Vergil stabbed Dante a few days ago. I imagine that there is quite a lot of history there.”
Now it was Nero’s turn to interject at that statement. “Oh, you have no idea. They are both a goddamn mess. But I have to give them credit where credit’s due, they are a lot better than they used to be.” Nero shrugged as he entered the house, unsure as to what he could really say about it. He didn’t know how much Lucia already knew about their past interactions. For all he knew, he could just be treading ground that had already been walked on. Lucia had known Dante for longer than he had, from what he could tell. There were things that she should probably be telling them at this point. “A few months ago I literally had to stop them from murdering each other after my dad pulled one of his trademark dick moves and almost destroyed an entire continent. I don’t know what happened while they were down there in the underworld for like two months, but they’ve seemingly calmed down a little bit. Maybe they talked it out? Brain damage? I don’t know, you’d have to ask them.”
V shook his head as if to signify that he both agreed and disagreed. “I can’t say that I have much to add to that. Being temporarily… displaced from this reality removes one’s ability to add commentary on events that they did not witness. I will simply default to Nero’s account of the events that transpired.” He hadn’t considered what had happened in the time that he had been gone very much before now, if he was being honest. It was kind of a lot to take in, and he didn’t really know what he thought of it. Perhaps not thinking about it was the best thing that he could do, at least for now. “What I will say is that what few fights they have had are somehow significantly less awful than the ones that they have had previously, and I was not even alive or present for any of them. One does not simply just wake up one day and cut off their son’s arm and raise the Qliphoth from hell on a whim as their first offense. He’s clearly done something like this before and I just have no knowledge of it transpiring.”
“You weren’t there? Were you out of town?” Lucia blanched slightly as she watched Sirrus enter the house behind them. V then began to unlock the door. She had so many questions now. “And you both have another brother? Neither of you seems to be missing an arm…”
“I was dead. Or, at least in limbo or something akin to it. My father’s doing, though not intentionally. At least, that’s what I chose to believe.” V spoke as though what he was talking about held no consequence. He was surprised that he couldn’t say more about it, now that the subject had been brought up. That was probably something he should know about. “It’s complicated. You would have to ask Magnolia Ludwig for the specifics in that case. She’s the one that did… whatever it is that she did. I honestly don’t want to know. In regards to us having another sibling… I have no knowledge of that, but a part of me would not be surprised to find out that that was the case. Nothing shocks me anymore.”
“Magnolia Ludwig? I don’t believe I’ve met her before.” Now this conversation had taken quite the turn. Where to even start with the influx of horrifying information. It seemed that everyone in this family had issues that ran deep, and now she understood more as to why V’s somber demeanor might be so prevalent. He had died and no one seemed to mention anything about it. Was he alright after something like that? One could only imagine that going through something like that and then trying to return to everyday life was probably exceedingly difficult, if not utterly impossible. Maybe he needed someone to talk to about it?
“She is a friend of our dad’s. Or maybe Dante’s. I don’t actually know who met her first. I never asked. Pretty sure she’s Vergil’s friend, though. Dante didn’t seem like he’d met her before. I honestly don’t remember. There was a lot going on at the time.” Nero said casually as he flopped down on the couch. He wasn’t quite tired yet, but that didn’t mean he’d say no to sitting down. “We don’t know much about all of that. We weren’t around. Didn’t grow up around them. Orphans and all that. It’s… kinda a lot to talk about.”
Suddenly V had a terrible headache. He didn’t know either.
Nico scoffed. “And as for the one who got his arm cut off, that was Nero. Freakin weird little freakshow just grew it back like a lizard or somethin! I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I never wanna again!”
The short-haired man with the white hair shook his head and gave her a disapproving look. “You're just gonna keep bringing that back up every time you get the chance, aren’t you?”
With a look of certainly on her face, the plucky mechanic nodded. “Yup. You bet your ass I am. That’s freakin weird, man! And don't you even try and act like I'm wrong or something!”
A soft sigh escaped Nero's lips. Yes, of course she was. Why had he doubted that, even for a moment? It was simply what she did when she was excited about something, be it for a good or bad reason. And to be fair, she was right. On the list of weird things a person could do, growing back an entire limb was so far into the impossible side of left field that it qualified for its own individual section. Nero could only hope that he never needed to find out if it was something that he could do a second time. One lost limb was more than enough for one lifetime.
Lucia glanced over at V who simply shrugged unknowingly. He couldn’t explain that either. “Sorry, I wasn’t here for that, either. I find that just as strange as the both of you probably do. Nero manifested several incredible new abilities during my brief absence. He also managed to learn the ability to devil trigger and fly along with that. It’s quite fascinating.”
She seemed almost excited to hear V say that. “Oh, I can do that myself. I was not aware of the fact that you could do so as well. That makes perfect sense, but it is still a pleasant surprise."
It occurred to everyone present at that moment that none of them had actually asked Lucia what she was. They had taken for granted that she was human, but upon hearing that, it was clear that she was anything but. For a moment, Nero considered the possible reasons as to why Dante might not have mentioned that his longtime friend wasn't as human as she might have seemed at first glance, but then again, he hadn't exactly explained what Trish was or anything about their past when they had first met. He had been floored when he had realized that she was the woman he had known as Gloria back during the time of the Savior incident. Sometimes Dante just didn't elaborate on those sorts of things. That probably didn't matter to him very much considering the fact that he himself wasn't entirely human. And in truth, it didn't really matter all that much to Nero, either.
With a slight laugh, Sirrus sighed and sat down on the couch, carefully brushing off the thin layer of dust that had accumulated during the short time that they had been away. It took a long time to air out a place like this, and his penchant for wearing black clothing, much like V's wasn't helping things at all. It seemed that they were both cursed by their wardrobe choices, or they both just liked to suffer.
“Quite the lively bunch you four are, aren’t you? As unorthodox as my family is, even we can’t grow back limbs.” He attempted to stifle his amusement, but failed for the most part. It seemed that there was still much he didn't know about the people he had opted to spend his time with. That made perfect sense to him, but it seemed that the range of things that he didn't know about them was considerably more cast than he had assumed. "I mean, there are certainly certain things that we can do that would be considered abnormal, even taboo… but this is another thing entirely."
"One of these days you have to tell us what the hell you are," Nero said with a humorous tint to his voice. Despite this, both he and Sirrus could tell that there was some glimmer of seriousness to his statement. He was admittedly curious. There was something admittedly supernatural about their new friend, but he had no way of truly knowing unless the man with the red hair told him. And for now, there didn't seem to be any compelling reason for him to do so.
Realizing that everyone was settling in at this point and making themselves comfortable, Sirrus decided that it was time to try and break the awkward atmosphere in the room and actually relax. The stakes had been set very high from the moment that they had attended their meeting about the demon prince Belial. Trying to turn down the anxiety in the air might be worth a shot.
"Alright then, everyone. I have a question for you." Sirrus said as he stood up and clapped his hands together, anticipation brimming from every fiber of his being. "Is anyone hungry? Because I've been looking for an excuse to cook for ages now, and should our host permit it, I would be happy to entertain you."
Everyone glanced over at V who shrugged indifferently. He had no objections to the plan. If nothing else, it was an opportunity to see if his stove worked. As long as his strange new acquaintance didn’t burn down the house, he couldn’t see a fault in this plan. "Be my guest."
(-~-)
Let's hope they don't get food poisoning… Enjoy the peace and quiet now, guys. It won't last for much longer *evil laugh*. Anyway, thanks for checking out this chapter. I hope it hasn't been too slow! See you next week on Wednesday and in the comments! Hope you've had a good week!
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ladyfluff · 4 years
Text
Be The Queen, Baby.
AN: Got that damn song from Toy Story 2 stuck in my head, NO IDEA WHY SO DON’T ASK! lmao
The Song In Question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaeDvWXscPE
@terry-perry​ @beccaliciooouuusss​ @sweetgoodangel​ @sweetheart-syndrome​ @stellargirlie​ @gloomybih​ @tomshelbystits​
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You tried to pretend that you weren't at home, ever since the riots became worse. After Arthur lost it on the Murray show, you didn't want any more reporters or any more police visits. You were done, you couldn't live in Gotham much longer. Having already tried to seek any way out for you and your daughter Joyce, you didn't want to see him anymore. That man that loved you and you loved in return, he wasn't there anymore though you swore you could still see him in his eyes. The moment you saw his photo on the news, you couldn't believe it. You had seen the show as well, he told you to watch it and out of love for him you did. Being on the show meant a great deal for him and he had been so excited, you couldn't just not see it. It could've been his big break and finally he'd be able to start his road to comedy like he had dreamt of but that wasn't the case. The jokes he told weren't funny, he admitted to killing those three men in the subway. He was the face behind this so called revolution, this movement that was to fight for the little people. You admitted to Arthur that you had been a part of the protests in front of the bank just three months ago, you had liked that people were fighting for their rights. You joined the many women, the many mothers of Gotham. Fighting for the survival of you and your daughter, after learning what and who was the cause of it. You couldn't believe it, Arthur had always been that sweet guy you had known since high school. Tall and a little clumsy but you adored that about him, Arthur was different from everyone else. Now he was most definitely different from back then.
You had moved out of Arthur’s apartment and into your own, you were very grateful that your address wasn’t made public. Not immediately anyway, you and your daughter needed space for yourselves. A safe place, Arthur’s apartment hadn’t been suitable for all four of you anyway. No matter how long you lived in that apartment, you hated how small it was. You and Arthur took turns sleeping on the sofa, often spooning the night away or sleeping up right while Joyce and Penny slept in the bedroom. On occasion you filled the bathtub with cushions and slept in there, enough was enough. You would’ve gladly endured it some more had this not happened but now you had your own two bedroom apartment. Your daughter had her own room and her own bed, just down the hall was your own. The kitchen and the living room weren’t all that big but that wasn’t the main focus for you, the biggest plus to this place was your daughters own bedroom. She was growing so fast, there was no way you could live in a one bedroom apartment forever. You needed the expansion, Arthur had promised you this sort of life once but now that he was on the loose and being hunted down by Gotham police. That future wasn’t viable, you didn’t want to see him. Your yawn was interrupted by sharp knocks on the door, six rhythmical knocks.
Your heart froze in your chest, inching towards the door. The knocks repeated themselves, you were afraid. Every night you were afraid of who might come to your door, you knew he’d find you. You press your palms against the door, looking through the peephole. You saw him there, his clown makeup somehow intact from the rain. He stood there with the biggest smile on his face, looking directly at the peephole.
‘‘Daddy’s home!’‘
The sound of his voice stirred something inside you and so you cursed yourself out, he knew you were home. It was obvious he’d know, Arthur had always been this way with you. He once followed you to work every morning when you first dated him, wanting to make sure that you’d get there alright. At first you thought it to be sweet but looking back at it now, it’s been tainted by whoever was standing outside your door. You could hear him knocking again, you didn’t know what came over you the moment you unlocked the door. Making sure that the door chain was still employed in order to stop him from fully opening the door, you yelp as Arthur opened the door only to groan at the door chain rattling. His hand gripped the chain and rattled it, almost sadly.
‘‘Come on sweet cheeks, don’t leave me hanging...’‘
‘‘You shouldn’t be here!’‘
‘‘You’re being very cold Mrs. Fleck!’‘
In that moment you knew, he’s been watching you the past few months. A small voice in your head had convinced you that Arthur would turn himself in, that he’d get the help he needed. That he’d go back to being your Arthur, you kept your wedding ring on. You were legally still married to him, he was your husband. He’d always be, he had seen you wear it. He wouldn’t emphasise that way if he hadn’t, you saw his fingers slide further in and unhooking the door chain. Before you could rush forward to push the door against him he flung the door open, accidentally slamming it against the coat rack. He giggles and covers his red painted smile like a little boy would after getting caught sneaking treats. A duffel bag in his hand, he tossed it onto the couch without much thought.
‘‘Now where is the little peanut, huh?!’‘
‘‘Sleeping.’‘
Arthur walks further in to your apartment, you quickly close the door. The phone in your field of vision, he started looking around the small living room. He was looking for his daughter, you knew he wanted to see her. A part of you wanted to just give in and take him into your arms, beg him to stop but it was too late. After all of the things he’s gone through, the irreversible damage dealt to his soul over the years. You wished you could’ve done more, your eyes well up. There were moments that you wanted to cry, you wanted to scream and just rip everything around you to pieces. Even now that he’s there in front of you, you could still see him. The man you married, underneath all of that white paint and green dye that was now starting to fade. His roots turning back to that lovely rich brown that your daughter had inherited from him, your own thoughts ran around in circles. Your heart didn’t know whether to slow down or speed up or stand still, you couldn’t get over the confidence and the lack of care in his demeanour as he looked around your home.
‘‘Mommy?’‘
Your eyes widened to see Joyce hiding behind the corner that led to the hallway, she had woken up. Bunching up the bottom of her little dress, the soft blue one Arthur had given her for Christmas. Joyce refused to sleep in anything else since her father’s been gone, you sniffled. Arthur instantly turned around, spreading his arms wide. There was something so familiar about the scene playing in front of you, the past playing in front of your eyes like so many times before.
‘‘Daddy!’‘
Joyce smiled so widely, she scampered over and threw herself into her father’s arms who immediately tossed her in the air with much delight, Joyce squeals and lets out those loving little giggles that you hadn’t heard in a while. Your knees gave out, you lean up against the door as you watch your daughter be devoured by your husband who peppered a world record number of kisses to her cheeks and her forehead. His face paint infected Joyce’s skin and she was left with smears of white, blue and red.
‘‘Daddy missed you so much! Oh yes he did!’‘
You couldn’t help yourself, a smile stretched across your face. Seeing Joyce so happy, her little arms wrapped around Arthur’s neck. She refused to let go, it would be wise of you to call the police. You somehow lost that window a few minutes ago as you got lost in the sound of laughter, he wasn’t cackling painfully. He was laughing so softy, so real and loving.
‘‘Tell me a story, please!?’‘
‘‘Oh, I don’t know- Daddy’s got a lot of things to do!’‘
‘‘Mommy please?! Just one story!?’‘
‘‘Yeah mommy, just one story?!’‘
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He stayed on, he went on to use your bathroom and then he put Joyce to bed by himself. You were busy trying to distract yourself, folding laundry and putting it way. Making Joyce’s lunch for tomorrow, cleaning up the kitchen just to make things go away. The way she smiled at her father, like she had just discovered the feeling of being happy and laughter for the first time. It was something you never managed to bring her no matter how hard you try, she didn’t laugh like this as often as she did with Arthur. You had to give the man at least one thing, he was a good father despite of everything that has happened. You close your eyes, firmly gripping the counter top. Your lips trembled at the thought of Arthur coming back home but it won’t ever be the same as it used to be. No more him, coming home to you and Joyce. No more loud splashing in the bathtub, no more family TV or story time late at night on Saturdays. The trips to the playground where you and your husband would hold Joyce’s hands and hoist her into the air.
‘‘Baby?’‘
You didn’t dare look at him, what if he came back to take Joyce from you? What if he wanted to hurt you or worse? You knew Arthur wouldn’t dare but you tried to convince yourself that he was in fact dangerous. Just to give you the excuse to hate him, you didn’t want to but what else were you supposed to do.
‘‘You have to go...’’
’‘Y/N, come on! Turn that frown upside do-’‘
You threw the towel on the floor as you turned around.
‘‘Arthur!’‘
His eyebrows knit together, there was no way you were calling him by that other name. In your home, he was to be called Arthur. Even if he was long gone, in your house and in your eyes Arthur’s memory still lived on. Seeing him now, without that clown painted all over himself. It was almost like seeing a ghost, he still smiled at you like the way he did before. Your tears start dripping, you curse and turn around. Reaching for paper towels to dry them, you think back to the numerous excuses you’ve made up in the last few months since his appearance on the Murray show. Since his confession and breaking out of Arkham, the many times you had to tell Joyce that her father wouldn’t be picking her up anymore or even coming home for that matter. You didn’t want her to hate him, he had always been so good to you and to your daughter. Joyce should remember those times, she shouldn’t have to listen to the news. Hearing about what Arthur had done or see his face in the papers. Going as far as to transfer her from Gotham West to another school, you sniffled as you dried your eyes.
‘‘Come on, I’m home now! No need to be so upset.’’
‘‘In the top drawer in the den, behind the TV are papers that I want you to sign.’‘
You came right out with it, what was the point now? Why should you put your daughter through the same persecution you go through every day? Your last name was no good now, you hear Arthur padding over to the chest of drawers. Rooting around for the papers you had mentioned, you heard him let out a deep sigh. It was the best for the both of you, how was he ever going to escape the things he’s done. You turned to see him scratching the back of his head, looking at the divorce papers in his hands.
‘‘This is some real heavy shit doll.’‘
‘‘What did you expect? For me to just go along with everything you say from now on? I can’t keep lying to her, Joy deserves better than that! You know what she asks me every single day? ‘Is daddy going to get me today?’ or ‘Will daddy come home tonight?’, do you think that we have any real chance to survive beyond this point?’‘
You could see that Arthur didn’t like the things you were saying, he frowned but in way that showed you that he understood what you were saying. You still loved him, you wanted nothing more than to just jump into his arms right here and now. Let him take everything from you, just keep things the way they used to be even if just for a night. Where the two of you would snuggle on the couch, listen to the city life outside. The sirens and the people arguing on different floors, reminding yourselves that your marriage would never go sour like it does for so many other people. Maybe that sort of thinking was the reason why it was falling apart, maybe you weren’t doing enough to keep Arthur grounded but the world’s treatment of him had been absolutely horrendous. Learning of who he truly was, what his mother had put him through and what he had to go through every single day to take care of you and Joyce. Having little to no time to think about himself, maybe if you pushed a little more things would’ve been different but there was no chance of that now. If Arthur truly loved you, he would consider this for you.
‘‘Can I still see her?’‘
‘‘I don’t know- Judging by what you are doing, probably not...’‘
Arthur tosses the unsigned papers on the coffee table and shakes his head, you back up as he gets closer to you. His brow furrowed, just looking at him, hearing his voice and smelling him was enough to drive you up the wall. It was like a vivid dream, where you could almost feel and smell everything in sight. The many dreams you had of your husband while he was missing, running around with his new posse of followers. Causing chaos around the city, though he seemed to be doing good deeds for the people of Gotham it wasn’t without bloodshed. Police officers and high authority figures had been killed in order to bring the working class the rights they deserved. You stopped going to the all female protests, you didn’t have the time nor did you feel brave enough to get back out there. You and your colleagues wanted the best from Gotham, equality, better pay and job prospect. Safety, more police patrolling the neighbourhoods. You wanted a life for your daughter, you just didn’t want it to happen the way Arthur was making it happen. Things were violent, too violent.
‘‘Y/N-’‘
You took a step away from him as he approached you with his arms open. Backing into the kitchen counter behind you, you stuttered.
‘‘Stop-’‘
Arthur grabs your wrists tightly, holding you still as you struggle against him.
‘‘Look at me.’‘
You open your eyes, your lips pressed tightly together. You could still see your husband standing in front of you, he still existed. Somewhere behind the eyes of the Joker, Arthur carefully cupped your face with his hands. His thumb carefully grazing your lower lip, you wanted him to stay so badly. You would throw yourself at him and beg him to never leave you again but you stood there frozen, Arthur chuckles. His eyes softened as he pressed his forehead against your own, breathing in deeply and exhaling through his nose.
‘‘Arthur-’‘
‘‘That morning in homeroom, your hair smelled like lavender soap and I couldn’t get enough of it- I followed you everywhere that day, you still smell like lavender soap. I went a whole year being in love with you and not talking to you and then I dropped out. On the bright side, a few years later I saw you get splashed by that car and I dove in to rescue you, which you still owe me for by the way.’‘
You couldn’t help but let out a little laugh, you knew you were getting what was left over of who he used to be. He saved the rest of himself for you and Joyce, you pressed your lips to his. Throwing your arms around his shoulders, Arthur chuckles and lifts you up, setting you down on the counter. Your legs wrapped around him, pulling Arthur closer to you. At this very moment, you didn’t care about what he did or who he had become. Right now he was the same Arthur that you fell in love with, he will always be Arthur but he won’t be yours anymore.
‘‘I know that I may have, sorta most definitely fucked up our chances at a normal happily ever after but I will always love you, I will always love Joyce- I will never regret the years I’ve had with you or our daughter but I will not sign any shitty divorce papers.’’
Your stare into his eyes, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he smiles.
‘’Own it, work with what you’ve got baby. Show anyone and everyone who you are and who you’re married to, no one will ever mess with you and no one will dare put their hands on you. Teach Gotham to fear your name, be the queen, one word from you and I’ll come save you. With or without the guns, just one word...’‘
You couldn’t help but give him a smile, Arthur pinched your cheeks.
‘‘There she is!’‘
You yip as Arthur picks you up from the counter, carrying you down the hall.
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He was gone, you sigh as you look at the empty side of the bed he had slept on after the two of you rolled around together, last night had felt exactly the same as if he had just touched you for the first time. Everything was so intense, so soft. You scold yourself for sounding like teenage school girl lusting after some troubled boy but then when you think about it, it was true. You still loved him, still wanted him just the same. You couldn’t help but think whether you had made the right choice, bringing up those divorce papers, turning him away. You knew however that he’d never be too far away from you and Joyce, though he might not come hold your hands as you walk through the park. He’ll still watch over you, watch over Joyce. Hopefully she’ll come to understand what has happened to her father when she grows but you will never teach her to hate him, Joyce will always miss him but she would never hate him. Not while you were around. You gather the used pillow in your arms and press your face into it. You could still smell him, you let out a broken laugh as you see that he left his blue cardigan hanging on the radiator.
‘‘Mommy!’‘
You get up and reach for your husbands cardigan, putting it over your nightie. Joyce was obviously up but she seemed to be panicked over something. You run out of the bedroom only to see Joyce sitting on the ground with the bag that Arthur had brought into the apartment last night, your eyes widened as you noticed the big wads of cash inside of it. Joyce couldn’t help but smile at you.
‘‘Daddy left us a present!’‘
You notice the papers on the coffee table, making your way over to the couch you sat down. Hesitating for a moment before picking up the papers, he hadn’t signed them. You scoff, of course he didn’t. You flip the pages around to see his messy handwriting, your heart melted at the sight of it. All the little smileys and the hearts he drew around it, you knew this divorce contract was obsolete now but you didn’t care, you were going to throw it out anyway. You could still hear his voice in the back of your head.
I meant what I said yesterday, own it. As long as I’m still alive, you are and will always be the only Mrs. Fleck. I’m not signing shit, get out there and strut your stuff! Not too much though, I’m not sure if I could stay away from you if you did. No low cut dresses, unless it’s for me and I’m in the area obviously and take care of our baby. Tell Joy I’ll be home for Christmas! By the way, don’t worry about the money doll. Just hide it somewhere or use it to get out of that shitty neighbourhood at least, get yourself a nice place! Don’t worry about me, I’ll always find you. I love you and Joyce so much, I understand that being married to me might’ve been a chore but I love every minute of it.
PS: I ate all of the cookies, you might want to get more of those for Joy.
PPS: I love you, just making sure you got that!
You giggle, biting down on your lower lip. You may not condone the things that he’s done but you couldn’t help but love him, that awkward boy you met in high school was still inside of him. He was still just as sweet as he used to be, he just had a city to run. Joyce runs towards you and crawls onto the sofa, snuggling into your side. You wrap your arm around your daughter as you smile down at the note, he’ll be back for you and you somehow couldn’t wait.
‘‘He certainly did...’‘
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oliverzafar · 5 years
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CHANGE WILL COME FROM THE CHILDREN
Oliver Zafar officially announced his bid for the presidency in February of 2019, doing so as a left-leaning Independent candidate. His core values are based on progressivism and looking towards the future, ensuring a better America for both its present and future citizens.
Read more below about where he stands on the core issues facing Americans today!
CLIMATE CHANGE. Incredibly vocal about doing everything possible to stop climate change and vouches that the Green Movement can boost economic growth and create millions of new careers for those in the fossil fuel industry worried about losing their jobs. Launch a 10 to 15-year plan to transition to 100% clean energy and net-zero greenhouse gas pollution. Remove subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry and implement a Carbon Tax. Ban fracking and all fossil fuel exports. Require plastic bags in stores only be given out at a price. His own campaign is incredibly clean, offsetting all carbon emissions produced from travel activities and events by investing in renewable energy and carbon reduction projects.
GENDER AND RACE ISSUES. Mandate a universal paid parental leave policy for either or both parents. Fight the gender and race-based pay gap by requiring businesses to report salaries, promotions, and dismissals as broken down by gender and race to the public. Codify Roe v. Wade to continue ensuring safe and legal abortions. Conduct regular random, unannounced investigations into police officers to ensure no race or gender bias takes place. Work to decrease the disproportionate amount of women of color affected by infant mortality.
LGBTQ+ ISSUES. Describes the murder of black trans women in America as a “national crisis”. Include members of the LGBTQ+ community in the Equal Housing Act. Remove all legal loopholes that allow individuals to lose their jobs due to their sexuality in twenty-two states. Ban conversation therapy. Repeal the FDA’s policy that disallows gay men from donating blood.
HEALTHCARE: Work towards “Healthcare for All” by: a) sponsoring a buy-in program for Medicaid so that not only low-income individuals have the option to use public healthcare, and b) expanding Medicare by allowing people ages 50 to 64 to still buy into it. Have the government manufacture cheap generic drugs if prescription drug costs rise too high to stop excessive pharmaceutical price-gouging. Allow Americans to purchase medications from other countries as a way to lower consumer costs. Push to pass the Affordable Medications Act in the Senate to allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices with insurance companies under Medicare.
FOREIGN RELATIONS. Build a public and private international coalition against China’s intellectual property theft and compete against China in Asia with a TPP-style trade deal. Limit drone strikes, if not discontinue them completely. No military intervention in Venezuela’s current political climate.
ECONOMICS. Cut taxes on small businesses and farmers, raise them on corporations. Incorporate a VAT Tax to pay for many of his proposals, which he loves to emphasize is a tax already used by every developed country besides the US. Encourage more union-positive thinking throughout corporate America (he’s very proud of the fact that his own staff is unionized!). Stronger anti-trust regulations to break up monopolies and encourage companies to invest profits in their employees and communities.
IMMIGRATION. Repeal criminal penalties for people crossing the border. Reexamine the current immigration process and try to expedite/ease the process so that families are not forced to enter illegally. Conduct a comprehensive review of current ICE procedures and implement serious retraining based on federally approved security protocols. If this is still unsuccessful, abolish ICE and redistribute its responsibilities to other agencies. Increase foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries in crisis to thus reduce the flow of asylum seekers to the U.S.
STUDENT DEBT. Expand access to college by providing interest-free federal loans. Allow employers to make tax-free contributions to pay off their employees’ student debt and help those in work-study programs graduate without owing anything.  
EDUCATION. Introduce a free universal pre-K program to ensure all children have the same successful start. Introduce initiatives to increase the US’ advancement in science, technology, and mathematics when compared to other much more advanced developed countries. Research the amount of homework and schoolwork given at public schools and whether or not it’s the most productive to produce actual results.
DEFENSE. Lower military spending by ending regime-change wars and reducing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
GUN REFORM. Enact the Disarmament Act with some modifications. Invest into research and development of “smart gun” technology and other technological preventative measures.
PACS: Reform campaign finance laws so that representatives don’t answer to donors, they answer to voters. Force every company that wants government contracts to disclose every campaign donation. Outlaw superPACs and overturn Citizens United.
— Please specify their target voter audience [age, ethnicity, region, income, etc]
Young, young, young! Oliver’s support is distributed between 18 to 44 years old, with very few older generations outside of his home state of Massachusetts willing to even hear him out. The quintessential Oliver voter is a grad student – high in education level but low in income. He’s also attracted a lot of support from people who are fed up with the two-party system that seems to permeate American politics and would instead prefer a more Independent candidate who doesn’t need to preen to Democratic powerhouses to make a decision. He polls very favorably among members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, especially Asians, Middle-Easterners, and Indians who want to see their region represented through either him or his fiancé. Both sides of the coast are the areas that his support is most concentrated in, especially Northeastern intellectual elites, while his spouts of passionate progressivism are lost on most of Middle America.
— What do their supporters love and believe in when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What’s people’s reasoning for voting for your character?
The first thing Oliver’s supporters will cite as the reason that they vote for him is his passion. He speaks and campaigns with a kind of fire that most politicians lost before they even became elected. They love his youth after having grown up with generation of old white dirtbags ruling the country, and believe that as the first Millennial presidential candidate he understands the problems plaguing America’s most indebted, most stressed, and most socially conscious generation better than anyone else running. Progressives also appreciate how incredibly vocal he is about his experience as a gay man and a person of color who experienced an incredible amount of discrimination following 911.
— What does the opposition hate when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What points are brought up when trying to convince others your character isn’t a good choice for the seat?
Take a seat y’all, this is gonna take a while: His youth is usually the first criticism people bring up, because it’s the one that’s least controversial as opposed to his sexuality or race (but we’ll get to that too). Even though he’s got over a decade of experience in politics, people hesitate to endorse someone who’s just a few years above the legal age to even run for president. His opposition will also bring up the hypocritical nature of his marriage, since Oliver’s this stalwart progressive while his fiancé writes for Republicans. Democrats and moderate Republicans usually stop there in terms of his personal life, but of course conservatives will reference his homosexuality as something “the country isn’t ready for” or bring up his Arabic roots as “something a post-911 USA shouldn’t trust”.
Aside from just personal issues, Oliver’s also received a lot of backlash for running as an Independent. Though he’s doing it for the sake of proving that a divisive two-party system is only going to ultimately hurt America (he’s got Madison 10 like… framed twice in his office), people are harsh to point out that he’s only going to take votes away from Berkeley and essentially hinder a Democratic victory. Oliver also doesn’t know how to just give no comment when asked questions by reporters (much to the exhaustion of his staff), which while seen as “endearingly passionate” by some is seen as “an inability to keep his goddamn mouth shut” by others. He’s also incredibly uncompromising on his key issues (climate change, healthcare, gun control, and student loans most prominently), which doesn’t resonate well with moderates who aren’t 100% committed to his radicalities. And as much as Oliver claims to fight for the people, he suffers from a chronic syndrome of Northeastern Elitism as a result of being an intellectually-raised, Harvard-educated, I’ve-read-The-Republic-in-its-original-Greek kind of guy that doesn’t hold Middle America at too high of a regard.
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shaykeijser · 6 years
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riverdale 2x16
 here are my thoughts/reactions to this weeks episode that no one asked for, which will include spoilers (obviously) so i’m putting them under the cut. i’ve already watched the episode so these aren’t my first reactions technically but they’ll be the same. 
caution: i’m not a fan of jughead or the core four. so i’ll be poking fun/getting annoyed at them.
- why did betty not go straight to alice with the dna test? why would she give chic, who she thinks is capable of hurting her, the opportunity to last out at her? i also still don’t get why she didn’t just get a normal dna test. like you’re a journalist, get the full truth, not just some of it
- i fucking called it!! why do ya think hal wanted nothing to do with chic? remember when he said “you’re letting this stranger into our house��? he wouldn’t call his own son a stranger
- fp is the dad and that’s the facts (that wouldn’t make bughead wrong don’t even try to defend that)
- chic is such a good creep IM LIVING FOR IT
- if it wasn’t a for-profit prison it wouldn’t be the worst idea. but it is so :///
- southside high was falling apart at the seems. the old students were aware of that and were plenty happy to go away! yes the lodge’s had other intentions with shutting down the school, but overall it was a good thing. there’s other, more valid reasons to not like the prisons that aren’t being talked about!!
- lol we know that veronica running for stuco wouldn’t end up well
- fred getting more screen time <333 (even if i don’t totally agree with him)
- does everybody at this school watch the same tv shows how is jughead quoting scandal (which i had to google) universally understood? i’m actually a sophomore and my friends and i quote vines.
- why isn’t ronnie defending herself? she gave that look to archie so he could defend her. where did kick ass veronica i don’t take no shit’ lodge go??
- ‘hunger strike for southside high’ BOI 
- ‘for it to re-open’ i had to pause this when i first watched this scene. he went there for like 2 weeks. toni was his only true friend for the majority of it. he didn’t like the idea of it and didn’t like what he had to do to survive there. the other students were happy with it closing!! why you gotta be so extra?? and if he really wants to get out of riverdale to be a writer he shouldn’t be trying to go back to a school that had teachers who gave up hope on their students
- ew ethel (i was eh with her all together but i’m still >:( over how she got mad at veronica for what hiram did to her father. veronica was one of the only people who was comforting her and tried to make amends. we can’t forget that when that all was going down veronica didn’t like her dad)
- WHY ARE KEVIN AND JOSIE SITTING ALONE
- wait jk i remembered 
- HAHAHA ok i’m josie (don’t get me wrong i like veronica and is the only tolerable lead for me atm but that slushie thing is really funny. it was sorta uncalled for, but she is working with her father soz)
- props to veronica for being the bigger person in this scenario
- 'what are the odds your father’s gonna be the first inmate in that prison?’ #boomroasted #thatwasatheofficereference #didanyonegetit
- lol at least veronica kept her cool for a little bit (go her btw)
- MY POOR CHERYL NO
- mama blossom is shady and nana rose is sassy
- that tea’s gonna be poison i’m calling it
- why would ethel’s dad want a job at the prison? he was a businessman
- veronica’s own parents are threatening her UGH
- power to veronica for wanting to run but this isn’t gonna end well
- TONI’S HOT & even if her audition flopped cheryl still would’ve made her member #lovemybabies
- tbh i didn’t like the lodges being the main plot point and i’d still prefer for the serpents to get more screentime than them BUT this is getting interesting
- drag him archie
- i want to see other south siders fighting for this why does jughead get to be the leader of this revolution (that i’m here for!! except for the school thing bc it doesn’t make sense)
- y’all have been having friendship problems since the ms. gr**** thing i think the trains have been getting closer than you think jug
- FINALLY, THE CHONI I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
- something bad is gonna happen to cheryl i’m calling it, and nana rose
- (about what betty said after cheryl opened up) betty let chic into her and her family’s life can she not just be cautious from a distance and let her mom enjoy having her son back
- of course toni’s in the bed you sly little bird cheryl
- y’all gonna fuck? kidding this the cw that’s only for het couples
- THEY GONNA KISS AWE
- ok fuck why can’t we have some happiness for once
- penelope and claudius pushed her, i mean penelope had obviously prepared a back up plan incase she didn’t die (mentioning sundowners syndrome)
- #ProtectCherylBlossom
- aw archie’s mom is back i’m happy 
- YES SCHOOL THAT BOY FOR DISRESPECTING FRED GO MAMA ANDREWS
- charles melton looks really hot with a bruised face oi oi (so does jordan connor)
- that lowkey sounds like a bribe veronica.... 
- fang, toni, and pea are in this scene?? new favorite scene
- honestly, if any other serpent was the one in jugheads spot i think i would be all for it lmao
- i thought mary (andrews) was gonna also give archie the safe sex talk that he archie never got dang
- mary’s giving good advice though let’s just hope archie will listen to it
- I LOVE KEVIN 
- kevin had the right to tell chic, she was the one who forced him into the poorly planned catfishing (like seriously - she shouldn’t have been there and they shouldn’t have done it at a school). kevin has barely got any good storylines that actually continue and i’m so damn happy that he’s sticking up for himself. betty only reaches out to him when she needs help.
- betty talking about her darkness and saying ‘darkness’ in general is the most cringey thing ever. she has some sort of mental illness. i don’t know what but they shouldn’t have taken this ‘darkness inside of me’ approach.
- i wish V tried to become josie’s friend before asking her for an endorsement. actually, i wish the show resolved their friendship ages ago. they’re the one of the few WOC and overall i’m tired of girl x girl friendships being ruined like this
- it’s got so bad that veronica had to bribe josie to endorse her. i know this isn’t gonna go well
- sweet pea looking like an out of focus snack <333
- DRAG HIM JUGHEAD (lol you can tell how much i don’t like archie being up hiram’s ass that i’m praising jughead)
- give betty cooper therapy, you cowards
- ‘i caught the black hood’ bitch no you didn’t that hoe still out there & i’m taking that theory to the grave
- sheriff keller woah i forgot about him
- my boy fp!!
- omfg imagine when betty tells jughead that chic’s dad isn’t hal they better have him be like “...what if it’s mine” (i just realized that sorta sounds like jughead saying ‘what if the kid aka chic is mine’ and that’s not what i meant, i meant that chic’s dad is jughead’s dad but that made me laugh so i’m keeping it)
- oh sHIT something’s gonna happen @ this concert/rally for veronica’s campaign thing
- kevin’s filming it yeps something’s happening
- ope i knew it ethel is passing papers out 
- woop there it is
- i don’t ~really~ get why betty’s mad 
- JOSIE’S APART OF IT WTF I DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING but i should have :(
- this show tries to be all about female empowerment but then they have two girls banding together to bully an already manipulated and hurting girl. smh
- again, i don’t ~really~ get why betty can’t trust her anymore
- :((( i feel so bad for ronnie. she’s being manipulated by her parents and i really want her out of lodge industries. she’s taking blame for the shit that her parents have done
- THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
- HAHAHAA THE WIG OH MY GOD
- “i was guessing” congrats betty, you’ve played yourself
- the offer that hiram made to fp actually sounds nice :((( if only he wasn’t so shady 
- archie is so far up hiram’s ass he sounds exactly like him
- YOU GO MARY! SCHOOL YO CHILD
- finally a parent (alice) talks bout safe sex to their kid (betty)!!! my mom is gonna be so happy when she watches this episode (yes i watch riverdale with my mom, no it’s not awkward during sex scenes because we watch every show together so we’re used to it)
- “absolutely not.” keep telling that to yourself alice
- alice cooper is my favorite cooper
- “he’s dangerous.” bitch so are you? you held a lighter up to his face?
- i thought alice killed that drug dealer is that what betty is saying he did
- cheryl doesn’t have red lipstick on in this hospital scene something’s gonna happen
- nana was being poisoned by the tea :((
- i guess i’m remembering this wrong i thought alice shot him (about the scene in chic’s room)
- how did betty not remember that he didn’t touch anything
- CHERYL DROP AND ROLL OUT OF THAT CAR NOW
- look at archie being all smart aw
- why is betty next to kevin?? stay away from my baby (kevin)
- this scene is actually really powerful? even though them chaining themselves to the school is a repetitive and cliche thing to do, the aesthetics and the filming of it is really cool
- can we see all those young serpents more often pls
- what is jughead talking about why does he think they’re gonna lose riverdale high? is it because of veronica running? bc no one’s gonna vote for her after those flyers
- uGH i can see him being a good president
- why is betty so done with her and veronica’s friendship? i really don’t get why she’s so mad at her?
- jughead, betty, and fp all living together. that’s a concept
- SOMEONE WRITE A HEADCANON OF ALICE BUSTING INTO THE TRAILER TO GET BETTY BACK AND THEN WE GET SOME CUTE FALICE ANGST
- i’m happy mary’s staying bc maybe with her around we’ll get more fred screen time #canyoutellilovefred
- FUCK YEAH FRED IS RUNNING
- toni topaz is the caring type of girlfriend who goes to her girl’s house when they aren’t in school pass it on!!
- but really though where is cheryl what are they doing to her
- CHERYL DOESN’T DESERVE THIS SHE’S BEEN EMOTIONALLY ABUSED FOR YEARS AND HAS LOST A BROTHER, FATHER, AND BEST FRIEND 
main takeaways
~ veronica is being manipulated by her parents and doesn’t deserve half of the shit that’s getting thrown at her
~ jughead is still cringey and extra
~ toni is the girlfriend of all of our dreams let’s be honest here
~ cheryl blossom doesn’t deserve this bullshit
~ betty cooper is mentally ill
~ chic is fp and alice’s son
~ #FredForMayor
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jennylamb2006 · 6 years
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Decline 45th High School Reunion
I cannot attend the reunion for reasons cited below but rest assured that my spirit will be there.
I remember attending 9th grade home room in the fall of 1969 as a skinny 14 year old not knowing what my future will be at East Paterson High School. Well I am 63 years old and the results are nearly in.
I had just finished 8 years at St. Anne's Parochial School. I had a good friend named George Wolfe who had dated Rhonda Frattolillo. He attended Fair Lawn High School so I felt lost in the new environment.
Growing up on 18th Avenue I had also known Tommy Moriarty. I spoke to a childhood friend the other day. She told me about the passing of Tommy who died at the age of 62. Tommy had down syndrome. He lived with his rather large family on 16th Avenue. My memory is hazy but some of the details of my childhood have stayed with me. We grew up together for the period of roughly 1965-1968. Many hours were spent sleigh riding on the small hill located near Tommy's house on 16th Avenue. One day my family's dog ran out the door and it seemed like at least 20 children including Tommy tried to catch him. Pepper ran into the woods near the Garfield Water Works. Eventually despite the snow and other dangers Pepper was returned. I asked my Mom about Tommy being different and at the time the term retarded was used. My Mom who was generally soft spoken told me that God made all children in his likeness. Soon after this I was standing on top of 16th Avenue hill waiting to sleigh down it. Tommy was there and asked me if I was his friend. We rode down the hill on the sleigh together. Rest in peace Tommy.
At East Paterson High School I remember being called to Dr Varese the Principal's office in 1972. I was nervous but he congratulated me on receiving a New Jersey State Scholarship. I believe my father who was a Veteran of World War II at Pearl Harbor had something to do with it. I did not serve in the military the draft had ended when I became eligible. Besides I had seen enough fighting outside the third wing of the high school to realize that it was just plain stupid.
I was interested in sports especially baseball throughout my high school years. I am enclosing a picture of my high  school jacket. I was too nervous to ask any girls to the proms but if I had the nerve I would have asked Roberta Fisher. Please hug her for me at the reunion. She is a good friend and a wonderful lady. I remember wrestling with you and realizing that you were a skilled wrestler. I remember playing one on one Basketball with Tony Zappala and losing but I was not intimidated by his New Jersey All State superior skills. I remember pitching my first inning in Varsity baseball and realizing that my 80 MPH fastball was not enough to win a ticket to the Major Leagues. But I loved the competition and had some meager success to build on.
After high school I attended College and continued to play baseball. In 1974 I pitched a three hitter against the 11th ranked community college in the nation putting our team in first place. I remember Dennis Walling hitting a double off me in the first inning. When I walked back to the bench my coach told me he was a really good hitter and somehow I got him out the next three times I faced him. Walling went on to have a Hall of fame career in the major leagues. But my ego grew really large that day. I wanted to pitch the 2nd game of the doubleheader but the coach thought otherwise.
In 1974 I heard Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run and my life was changed. If you are ever in a bad mood play this song and you will know what I mean.
In 1976 I dated the first love of my life named Linda Lane. Her father was a wealthy businessman from Paterson New Jersey. Linda attended College in Pennsylvania. I remember driving down to see her and wondering what the future holds for me. In 1977 I proposed to Linda at Valley Forge State Park. She said yes if we could resolve our religious differences. This was true love only encumbered by my Roman Catholic faith vs. her born again Christian beliefs despite the fact that her father was Jewish and her mother was Roman Catholic.
I broke up with Linda and decided to take my 1968 Chevy Nova (I had rebuilt the engine in the snow of the 1977 winter) and move to California. I lost the opportunity for inherited wealth for the California dream by humming the Beach boys songs of the 60's as my friend Lamont and I drove to Long Beach California. I also had an Accounting degree from William Paterson College and $5,000.00. I planned to retire by age 40 with $100,000.00. I remember saying that I had no intention of reading another book until I have some fun. While we looked for apartments I found one but when Lamont turned up to sign the papers it was rented. I found another and made sure Lamont was not there to sign papers. There are bigots apparently all of the country. I really hate bigots.
In late 1978 I met a California girl with a golden smile named Laura Lambert that has graced my life for 40 years. That year I also met Ron Beaman from Nebraska. We have been friends all these years which I consider myself lucky. The next 8 years were spent living in a two bedroom apartment one block from the beach playing basketball with about 40 friends every weekend. I owned a small accounting business.
In 1980 I cried when John Lennon died.
In 1986, Laura and I bought our first piece of Real Estate, a one bedroom condo. It was a bit intimidating. By 2008 we bought/sold over 100 properties, so much for being nervous.
In the late 80’s I met the first of two attorneys that I am also friends with. Gene Goldman is a good attorney whose only deficiency is being weak in billable hours. I believe his calming disposition helped me in dealing with homeowners associations.
By 1994 Laura and I had accumulated 10 pieces of real estate and I had obtained real estate Brokers licenses in California and Nevada. My first real estate sale was to a single mom. She cried when I gave her the keys and I did too when I received a check for $2,200.00 for about 4 hours of work. It seemed so easy. At the loan signing her parents apologized for her being gay. I did not know what to say to the assholes. I wanted the deal to go through so I kept my mouth shut. In 1996 my daughter Rhiannon was born (named after the Fleetwood Mac song of 1977).
In 2002 I attended two concerts, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in Las Vegas. This makes up for not seeing Bruce Springsteen at Mr. D’s on the corner of Market Street and Midland Avenue. I realized that Paul McCartney and the Beatles were God’s gift to mankind. How lucky were we to experience this?
By 2004 I had a million dollars in the bank and 8 properties. I would go down to the Las Vegas courthouse to buy foreclosures. One property I did not have any information on started bidding at $30,000. I knew the people bidding were attorneys who regularly bought so when the bidding reached $400,000 I started chirping in. I bought it sight unseen for $425,000.00. As I paid the lady one of the attorneys said he was upset and wanted it. I drove my Lexus quickly to the property which was in a gated community. It was a fixer upper that I hoped to sell $575,000.00 and make $30,000.00 on. Well in 4 months after remodeling the price had soared to $675,000.00. I had made $100,000.00 on a house bought sight unseen. My ego grew again.
In 2005 at Christmas time I walked into Wells Fargo Bank in Henderson Nevada with my daughter Rhiannon and asked the teller how much the Wells Fargo Stuffed Stagecoach was. She responded by giving it to my daughter telling her that I was their biggest customer. My ego expanded again.
In 2006 Laura and I met Lon and Mary Searle and their fine family. They are mormons that have great values. Of course we do not agree on Joseph Smith.
By 2008 my material wealth had diminished considerably but luck would have it I found out that my ancestors arrived at Jamestown Virginia in 1629 and I was the 12th generation. I decided to take Laura and Rhiannon and move to Williamsburg Virginia. There was no stopping my love for United States History which began reading about Ethan Allen and the Green mountain Boys at St. Anne's in 2nd grade. Sure Kennedy was shot that same year but if the truth be known it wasn't Oswald who did it. There was a severe recession on except I did not notice it because of my families history unfolded before my eyes. I found the original family cemetery and plantation and a historical figure named Dred Scott who did not have his birthplace recognized. I fixed that in a couple of years by connecting two documents 40 years and 700 miles apart. Isn’t history grand?
In 2009 I met Richard Lincoln Francis, clerk of the Southampton County Court in Virginia. He is descended from Abraham Lincoln and I consider him a good friend who is qualified to be President of the United States. He is my East coast attorney, we have had more fun than should be allowed. To give you an example we had a trial over a Hines lucky rock that rivals the OJ Simpson trial of the century. I have taught Rick the 8 things to drive a golf ball successfully. He is a terrible student who has a tendency to make phone calls while teeing off. I believe this violates some rules.
Since moving to Williamsburg Virginia I have written five books. My disdain for reading that occurred after college was over. The second book involving the research to discover Dred Scott's birthplace is being converted into a movie. It is entitled Walk With You, the story of Dred Scott and the Blow Family of Virginia. It is about 8 children 6 white and 2 black that grew up and bonded together to take on the President and Chief Justice of the United States. I have met Hollywood stars including Ed Asner. My time is currently possessed in seeing this venture is completed to fruition.
My life has been blessed by God and living in the greatest country in  the world. I have lived the American dream which consists of association with all ethnic groups. My first twenty two years living in New Jersey were great. My next twenty three years in California were better. My next 8 years in Henderson Nevada were living the dream. The next 5 years in Williamsburg were amazing. And the last few years touring the United States with Laura are the best ever. Opportunities if you use education to  advance yourself. If these members of our class are among the living: Robert Motta, Robert Hurley, and Joseph Lasica, please give them my best.
Our democracy is currently under attack by a greedy lying moron who has no business occupying the world's beacon of freedom head office. This will change soon. If any of the morons who voted for this clown have issue I will be happy to meet them outside the 3rd wing at EPHS and give them a taste of true Democracy from someone who has lived it. I have had only two fights in my life. I am undefeated and plan to stay that way.
Warmest Regards,
Jeffrey Allen Hines
Class of 1973
#walkwithyou
#neveragain
#bluewave2018
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beevean · 6 years
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I’ve always liked to describe music and rate it, so I thought to put here my top 30 Sonic Forces tracks, and maybe in the future I’ll do the same for other games.
Under the cut because it’s a top 30, so it’s pretty long :V I couldn’t do less, I’m sorry!
@bookvideogamemaniac @ramenbomber  @dizzydennis
30) Eggman Empire Fortress: Iron Fortress
This is what happens when you mix the intensity of Scrap Brain and the dissonance of Death Egg. It’s suitably dramatic, and the harsh Genesis-esque sounds help the sense of being surrounded by cold, deadly metal. It feels very heavy for some reason. *insert joke about Classic’s physics*
29) Green Hill: Arsenal Pyramid - Interior
More Eggman bases should have a dance theme. This track manages to fit the sterile, technological environment, the context of a base infiltration and, while it does remind a bit of White Acropolis, manages also to be unique in the OST.
28) Green Hill: Arsenal Pyramid
While I’m happy there are some guitars, here they were really needed as the main instrument, as the saw wave not only doesn’t fit with the general Green Hill environment, but makes the whole track sound really similar to Sunset Heights. What stands out, at least, is how serious it is, especially the climax. It wouldn’t be out of place in a final level.
I also really like the piano at the beginning. It’s a nice touch.
27) Mystic Jungle: Casino Forest
I had no idea this one was composed by Tomoya Ohtani! I was so sure it was Naofumi Hataya, it just screams “Genesis-era”! The whole track fits perfectly the setting of a deranged casino area - somewhat spooky, but still with that bouncy feeling of many casino themes. (wish the level itself complemented the pinball gimmick with the forest background...)
Also when it was first revealed the official Sonic account pointed out the amazing bass, so... listen to that amazing bass. Very reminiscent of Casino Night’s, but more energetic.
26) Mystic Jungle: Luminous Forest
Unfitting with the stage? Yes. Didn’t need the saw wave at all? Absolutely. Catchy? Also absolutely. It helps that here the wave is accompanied by some very nice guitars reminiscent of the Adventure series - this whole soundtrack needs more of them, so any track with rocking guitars gains instant points from me. The funky bass solo near the end of the loop is just the cherry on top. An energetic old-school tune all around, it could’ve been much higher on the list if it didn’t suffer from Sonic Adventure 2 syndrome and wasn’t so unfitting for the level.
I once compared it to a Bad Future version of Savannah Citadel Day, and it was nice to see I wasn’t the only one thinking that!
25) Metropolis: Metropolitan Highway
This song is so happy! I still call it “Skyscraper Scamper Day Good Future”, and with good reason. It wouldn’t be out of places in a Riders game!
I don’t know what else to say. It just puts a smile on my face every time I listen to it. It’s very Sonic-y, that’s the best way to put it.
24) Boss: Infinite (Showdown)
As I pointed out a while ago, this one was composed not by Ohtani, but by Yutaka Minobe, a far less famous composer and pianist who’s largely responsible for a good chunk of the first two Advance games’ OSTs and miscellaneous tracks like Black Doom. From the tracks I’ve linked it’s easy to recognize his style in this orchestral piece that barely resembles the original theme anymore, unless you pay attention to it.
I’m disappointed in how little dubstep there’s here, but while the track doesn’t have a clear melody (aside for those short sections that call back Infinite’s theme, and to be fair they are really good reprises), it compensates by being highly atmospheric and making the final showdown with Infinite feel far more epic than it actually was.
Maybe there’s not much dubstep to symbolize how Infinite is going to lose control of the Ruby? Just speculating.
23) Boss: Infinite (First Bout & Second Bout)
Infinite’s boss remix is a wonderful mess of metal, dubstep and... a genre that I’ve seen multiple times being compared to k-pop, for some reason. It may take a while to grow on you, but it’s catchy from the get-go. Who could’ve thought this style would fit our new favorite edgelord so well?
I put these together because there are mininal differences within each other. However I slightly prefer the second version, it’s more danceable and not as repetitive as the first one.
22) Mystic Jungle: Aqua Road (Moonlight Battlefield)
While I admit this one dropped down a lot since it was first revealed (my only problem is that it’s pretty repetitive), it’s still pretty good, and it continues the sweet tradition of having a piano for the aquatic stage (if you want to call the slides gimmick “aquatic”).
I like how the echoing piano feels very light and how at the same time it’s contrasted by the strong synth bass and the electronic drums. The singer’s voice just makes everything prettier. A lovely theme with melancholic lyrics.
21) Mystic Jungle: Eggman's Facility
I’m not a fan of Sonic Adventure 2′s soundtrack, but I can at least appreciate White Jungle for standing out among the endless buttrock and for fitting both the stage and Shadow’s emotional state at that point. DnB really suits him.
This remix emphasises pretty much everything that made the original good, making both the lyrics and the guitars clearer. It’s pretty much a modernized remastered version, and it seems it was composed precisely for Shadow infiltrating Eggman’s base in Mystic Jungle. They choose the right track.
20) City: Enemy Territory
I have a mixed relationship with ShTH, and the same goes for its soundtrack: I hate half of the OST and love the other one, no in-between. In the half I love there’s the Westopolis theme - I don’t care if you’re forced to hear it 10 times in one of the dullest level in the game, the track itself is pretty badass, and yes, nostalgic for me.
So you can imagine how much I squeed when I realized they remixed it for the Shadow DLC.
I especially like how they made the main melody clearer and not as drowned under the edgy noises, while still keeping the overly-badass mood of the original. It even fits the aesthetic of Sunset Heights! And it even includes a Radical Highway cameo for free, because why not.
The PC version (beta version?) is not so bad either! It’s just more subdued.
19) Chemical Plant: Space Port (Fighting Onward)
A perfect introduction to the Avatar music style. The cold synths couples with the steady rhythm makes me imagine the Avatar walking in the middle of a blizzard, and the bass gives that touch of determination.
18) City: Red Gate Bridge
Very tranquil and somber, with a “calm before the storm” vibe to it. The piano and the strings go very well with the saw wave and the synth bass. Not easily hummable but memorable nonetheless.
A shame the main stage wastes it, but at least this one plays during those mini acts... other tracks aren’t so lucky.
17) Metropolis: Capital City (Virtual Enemies)
We will defeat insanity~
There’s something about the chords and the overly distorted voice that really fit both the futuristic, shiny, and sterile look of the city and the unsettling context of being mindraped by Infinite. It’s also pretty fun to sing out loud! Another track that could’ve come out from a Riders game, albeit more downbeat than others.
16) City: Park Avenue (Justice)
How can a track from June 2017 feel already nostalgic? This was the first music theme officially revealed, and what an impression it made. Like many, many other tracks in this soundtrack, it took me a while to fully appreciate it, but now it’s pretty much a classic in my book. Here the synths used truly shine - the chords at the beginning immediately set the mood and both solos convey the Avatar’s strenght and determination. Energetic and catchy, with cheesy (in a good way!) lyrics, it might as well be the symbol of the Avatar music style.
15) City: Sunset Heights
Another track that by now feels familiar. I just never get tired of this one, I could listen to it in a loop for twenty minutes straight. It reminds at the same time of Sonic Runners and Sonic Heroes, if not ShTH, almost a much more lighthearted version of Westopolis - fitting, all things considered - or Final Haunt. While the saw wave here goes very well, it’s the clean guitar that makes it for me, it gives the composition a nostalgic feeling. This is pretty much the very first theme that comes to my mind when I think of Forces.
14) Metropolis: Null Space
Poor track. You deserved so much better than what you got.
Even without knowing the context, you can perfectly picture in your head a vast, empty, dark, otherwordly place, and the eerie reverberating piano, the ethereal choir, and the subtle glitching noises are sure to send shivers down your spine. It being a dark reprise of the piano bridge of Fist Bump doesn’t help.
(side note: this was co-composed by the aforementioned Yutaka Minobe. I’m sure he’s also the one who plays it)
13) Green Hill: Virtual Reality
Who doesn’t love Supporting Me? It’s a fan favorite for obvious reasons. It’s been remixed in Generations 3DS, and once again in Forces, and each version is better than the last. This version is much less somber, with the added guitars, the synths replacing the strings, and the more frantic drums, and the whole remix feels like it mixes both genres that represented Shadow in Adventure 2 - heavy rock and DnB.
This is also the only track in the Shadow DLC that features dubstep to represent Infinite’s influence, which I think is a nice touch. The only downside is that the chorus isn’t a dark reprise of Live and Learn anymore.
At first I found it very odd that this plays in the bright Green Hill, but the soundtrack dissonance helps the feeling of creepiness and uncanniness Infinite was aiming at in the story. The lyrics also talk about illusions, so...
The PC version lacks most of the guitars, but that means you can enjoy the synths more, especially in the chorus. I almost prefer this version for this reason.
12) Fist Bump - Piano Ver.
Hey, remember when Aaron trolled us all by implying Tails was gonna die? :D
But even if this melancholy rendition of the main theme plays just in the theater option, it’s still lovely, the kind of piece you’d listen to in a rainy day with a mug of hot chocolate in hand. You can almost hear the gentleness of the player’s fingers.
11) Fist Bump
Speaking of the main theme!
This song just screams “early-2000s”, and it’s food for all the Adventure children inside of us. It’s corny and proud of it. It will never ever leave you head. It’s pure adrenaline in musical form. It has a piano bridge and a sweet guitar solo. You can’t ask for more from a Sonic song.
Shout out also to the Invincibility theme, a catchy 16-bit rendition of the chorus! And of course, the very first piece of music revealed, the instrumental version that goes well with everything.
10) This Is Who You Are
They didn’t need to go so hard for something as simple as the character customization theme. But they did. And I’m so glad.
There’s a certain cleverness into mixing a boppy square wave to the simple orchestral background, as not only the Avatar is mainly associated with synths but it also somewhat alleviates the serious mood, which is perfect for our rookie. The fluttering piano is gorgeous, and I have to mention that swelling climax. You really feel like you’re building up a hero from scratch.
9) This Is Our World (Eggman, War, Resistance)
What a cool title for a world map.
I put them all together because they’re very similar to each other, but the three different versions are great at setting up different moods with little tweaks. The first version has steady, powerful drums that remind of Eggman’s machinery and factories, but the overall tone is of a great war incoming. The second one cranks up the intensity and the mechanical noises, fitting for the definitive showdown between the Eggman Empire and the Resistance. And the final one is pure triumph and peace.
8) Eggman Empire Fortress: Final Judgement
... or is it Last Judgement? The OST isn’t quite clear. But in any case, this track is both intense and energetic, fitting for the very last stage, and somewhat melancholic. Amy does feel sorry for Infinite for being allegedly created here, but without context it actually makes me think of an imminent heroic sacrifice necessary to save the world. It definitely spells out “last stand”.
7) Boss: Zavok (Battle with Death Queen)
I’ll never understand why they named the track after the robotic wasp. Anyway, Zavok’s theme in Sonic Lost World wasn’t anything special, a menacing orchestral remix of the Deadly Six leitmotif (although it barely sounds like it). But the Zavok replica gets a sick dubstep strings remix! Twice as fast, with the intense violins getting drowned by the arhythmic, glitchy dubstep noises, it does a perfect job to pump you blood. To fight... the Death Queen, apparently. (rip zavok nobody loves him)
(I also have to point out that this is one of the only two major tracks Kenichi Tokoi had an hand in, the other being the Metal Sonic boss theme. I wish he did much more because boy he was on fire!)
6) Death Egg: Egg Gate
I learned to play this on my keyboard purely because I love it so much! It’s so badass! It could fit with Flash In The Dark or other Wily themes! Too bad it’s so short, but I feel it’s more complex than others, so it compensates. Not gonna lie, this theme coupled with the gorgeous background of the base in space made my jaw drop like few things in the series yet.
While here the saw wave actually fits, I would’ve died of happiness if it was played on an electric guitar. Bring me all the rock covers <3
5) Eggman Empire Fortress: Mortar Canyon
I can already tell this will be the most underrated track in the OST. It’s a shame it plays in the shortest level in the game, because it ends just as the music gets to the truly awesome part - and I don’t mean “awesome” in its more common sense, I truly mean “awe-inspiring”.
It starts out with the saw wave (which here would’ve also fit nicely), but slowly it fades in the background, the lead being replaced by a piano, then a choir, then strings, to create something that feels bigger than Sonic and the player. There’s a sense of despair, with only the slightest twinge of quiet, detemined hope. You’re so close to save the world from total destruction.
Chilling. One of the best “final level” themes in the series. Take the time to listen to it with headphones to enjoy all the tiny details, you won’t regret it.
4) Infinite
And after the remixes we get to the original version. This is, by far, my favorite character theme of the series, if only because it fits Infinite so well.
It manages to be ironically edgy, both with the overuse of HEAVY METAL RUMBLING GUITARS and lyrics such as I AM THE SHARPEST OF BLADES I’LL CUT YOU DOWN IN A SECOND... and yet it’s also unironically cool, especially if you grew up with this kind of music. The lyrics were also incredibly fun to analyze, even though at the end of it the meaning was just “I’m the best and y’all suck”, which perfectly reflects Infinite trying to appear more powerful and menacing than he actually was. 
Also, like I already mentioned, metal and dubstep go so well together.
When everything you know has come and gone... only scars remain through it all...
3) Boss: Mega Death Egg Robot Phase 2
Pure despair. You really feel like you’re facing something much bigger and more powerful than you are. It only needs a choir, some strings and a flute to achieve all of this - its semplicity it’s what makes it so effective.
It also seems it takes some inspiration from Egg Nega Wisp Phase 1, which I can be only happy about.
2) Boss: Mega Death Egg Robot Phase 3
Let’s get that one flaw out of the way: the loop is too short. But everything in the loop is spectacular.
It’s in the same style as Dr. Eggman Showdown, and while it’s not quite at the same level, it is pretty close, and I do prefer this guitar solo.
What truly makes this track great, however, is the buildup. It starts with a light, high choir that feels hopeless... then the drums kick in... then the guitars... and finally it explodes in a wonderful, triumpant mix of orchestra and rock. Eggman is on his last rope, you’ve already won. And when you defeat the final boss, it ends abruptly with the same choir of the beginning, in a satisfying book end.
And don’t miss that Fist Bump riff! I know some people would’ve preferred a full remix of the main theme, but I actually like this approach.
1) The Light of Hope
All that I see now, it’s not the same...
All you remember, has gone away...
But you’re still standing here...
The first stanza alone made me tear up, and I didn’t stop until the end. What a gorgeous song.
This song alone made me feel proud and accomplished... after watching a stream and being severely disappointed in what I had seen in the last hour. This one song almost fixed everything. And the new title screen, with the instrumental version in the background and the flower in the shining Resistance quarters... touching. It reminds me so much of Wiosna from Katawa Shoujo, a track I hold dear.
Kudos to Amy Hannam and her lovely voice - this song is much harder than it sounds, and she nailes every single note.
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thecoroutfitters · 6 years
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Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.
Editors Note: The second of a two-article submission from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share as well as being entered into the Prepper Writing Contest and have a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today!
So, we’re ready to dig up our yards and grow food. Having figured out how and where we want our future plants to pop up, it’s time to deal with what’s already there. But, man, sometimes that grass looks daunting.
If you’re going after it with a broadfork and a shovel, it should – lush and thick or hard and patchy.
Even if you have a handy tractor or rototiller waiting in a shed, there are some tools and practices that can help make the conversion from grass to groceries a little easier. If you’re hacking out of forest, woods, or scrub, you have a ton of challenges. Once you have the thick brush tackled, some of the follow-on methods will apply to you, too.
If we’re crunched, plotting dedicated, permanent beds requires less labor and materials for the lawn-removal stage. We mow, de-sod, till, and cover only those spaces, and deal with access lanes and aisles … some other time.
Cover Kill
One of the simplest ways to convert lawns is with cover kills. Cover kills mean we cover the patches where we want to plant with something. A lot of times, that means tarps of some sort, and tarps have a lot of advantages over other options. (“Tarps” includes things like salvaged plastic baby pools and boat/automobile wrap.)
We can also use sheets of cardboard, plywood/OSB, or interior paneling. Dark curtains or blankets, landscaping fabric (high-density and doubled/tripled up), and tripled-over carpets can also work for cover kills.
In the simplest form, we go for the smother and re-smother method, or the smother-scorch method.
It starts by mowing/bush-hogging our yards to get them low and manageable, and covering them with one of the materials above. We also edge the area – 8-12” or deeper if possible – to cut rhizomes and stolons from beyond our tarp. We peek under our covers here and there, and go after anything that pushes out from the sides with a mower, weed eater, shears, or a hoe.
The plants underneath get starved of light and start turning white in 1-4 weeks. From there, we have a few options. Our best fit is going to depend on the time, labor, and equipment we have to play with.
One option is to take advantage of the grasses’ weakened state. We flip the covers off, go along with a garden rake, and pull out as much of the growth as possible. (Do not compost this.)
Then we play hokey-pokey with our tarps.
We flip them on and off checking things. If it’s dry, go ahead and water the patch(es). It’ll help encourage germination (a good thing). By type of tarp, it’ll also help warm the soil, which can be helpful when we’re doing this in winter, spring, and autumn.
When our beds show signs of new baby weeds emerging, we uncover them, and either burn them off (propane or hairspray-lighter “flame weeding”) or repeat our raking/pulling.
If we aren’t in a rush to start producing and are short on time on a daily basis, and if our tools are a garden rake, shovel, and hoe, we can go simpler yet and just leave those covers right where they are, or remove our tarps for 2-4 days and then replace them. The seeds will germinate, but they’re never able to get enough sun for developing true leaves, and they die off. The “runner root” weeds go through the sprout-anew cycle, too, and eventually run out of stored energy in their roots.  Eventually, the lawn will die-die.
If we can buy 1-9 months for this process, it’s pretty labor minimal to get a patch with significantly lower weed pressure.
If we can leave tarps in place during the warmer seasons, that weed pressure goes down even further. Not only do we kill and remove the first set, it takes less time for the next 2-8 rounds of killing off new sprouts, and the tarps generate enough heat underneath to steam or scorch some of those roots, rhizomes, stolons, and seeds. (That really only works with dark tarps – not so great with white or cardboard, fabric, or lumber.)
Till Kill
If we have them available, tillers also get used in hacking out gardens and farms (manual equivalent: double dig). There’s good and bad. If you’re heavy on rhizome and stolon weeds (Bermuda grass, creeping charlie) tilling slices those apart. You get 10-100 times as many to kill as you started with.
That said, it is an option. And it’s not a bad first or middle step, even for future no-till systems.
One way it’s super effective is to go ahead and till, then cover the areas you’re going to plant as discussed above. You can smother kill once, or play the hokey-pokey – letting in light and moisture, then covering again after baby weeds pop up.
Till kill is also done as a multi-step process of just tilling. You till, then you come back and till again in 1-6 weeks, and again, and again.
When your weed coverage has decreased, you can plant something fast enough out of the gate to compete with weeds (radish), a grass-based herbicide-resistant crop (so you can spray), or a smother-capable cover crop (mustard, buckwheat, vetch). That always applies, but with till kills it’s really helpful.
Tilthing vs. Tilling
Once you have tilled enough (once, or repeatedly) to get a head start on the weeds, seriously think about going to surface-only soil disturbance. Every time you till, you are redistributing 6-12” (or as much as 18”) of soil.
Beyond all the “greenie” and “eco-freak” reasons that include nitrogen “flash” and predator-prey and microbial balances, when you redistribute that soil, you’re redistributing more weed seeds.
Those boogers will last decades in some cases, just waiting to get close enough to the surface to sprout. Some of those stolons and rhizomes will grow through 4-6” of material, run sideways 8-15’, or lurk for up to 2-3 years after being cut. Then they, too, will spring back to life.
  I can be stirring up weeds in the top 2-3” with a manual, gas/diesel, or electric tilther (or my weasel or rake). Or I can be bringing up fresh weeds from a 6-12” pool of dirt. Relativity comes into play, but there’s also simple math. I will exhaust the weed monsters contained in 2-4” a whole lot faster than in 6-12”. There’s just fewer of them to be fighting along with whatever gets blown/dropped in.
Same goes for all the little rocks I redistribute every time I till.
So long as I’m not walking/driving on my rows or beds, and if I can mulch, cover crop, or tarp/cardboard cover them in the off season, the deeper soil will stay plenty loose enough to be productive. From there, running a tilther or rake in the topmost layer is sufficient for amendments, seed-bed prep, and weed control.
Situations are going to vary, but at least think it through and make actual pro-con lists. Make sure to make them from the “prepper/survivalist” angle as well. Factor in the fuel cost and shelf life, maintenance needs, noise, etc., if this is something you plan to rely on in a crisis.
For example, my tilthers run off an electric drill and a string trimmer. On one hand, I consider that a “pro” – one base tool, many jobs; electric brrvvvvh vs. gas grumble; low energy to recharge, my small individual panels and hydro can handle it; lighter and more mobile, more people can use them more places. On the other hand, it puts additional wear and tear and discharge cycles on tools and batteries I rely on a lot, and it adds to “need” competition for them.
Removal  
There’s something to be said for cutting up our lawn and getting it out of the way when we’re hacking new production space. This can be the primary step, or it can be used ahead of tilling or cover kills. A combo starting with removal, hitting a double-dig or deep-till, and then going for cover kills is really effective.
You can do this with a shovel, a hoe, and a rake. You can buy or rent a manual machine that you kick every step. Or, you can rent or buy a diesel- or gas-powered version you push or tow.
I have a “kick” sod cutter. There are three very, very, very important things to note.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr24NWaVgFI
One, wear shoes/boots with good soles. This is where you’re going to make impact 400-600 times for an 8” cutter and 125 sqft (five 30”x10’ beds, a 10’x12’ plot). Aim for soles that will not slip off a narrow bar and create conditions for A.) doing the splits, or, B.) doing face plants. I have yet to fully decide if distinct heels are a detriment or an asset.
Two, wear shoes that fit well. Like, really well. Because you’re about to see just how much they slide around on the sides and heel of your foot. Loose boots x 500 = Blisters.
Three, typically we like damp earth for soil work. However, I’m on the fence about sod cutting dry vs. damp. If you are maybe not super graceful, for-sure do not go out to boot-stomp your way across the earth with a sod cutter when it’s full-on wet.
It has nothing to do with the accumulation of mud everywhere, and everything to do with how often you flap your non-wings and contort your body like a 13-year-old gymnast in hopes of avoiding what we like to call “fall-down-go-boom syndrome”.
We the most coordinated clowns in the circus are happy to have discovered these things for the good of humanity.
Other Considerations
This article specifically focused on ways to convert lawns into in-ground growing space. There are lots of ways to garden, and to grow fairly significant amounts of food. Methods abound that use basically yard debris and salvage materials to start from the grass and go up instead, although they’re going to require the purchase of at least some soil.
We’ll likely need soil amendments, no matter what. If we’ve been devotedly mowing grass lawns, it’s compacted, with limited microorganisms. Our dirt is likely to be especially low in micro-nutrients if we mow and bag, either for trash or to mulch trees. If we can look and see our yard is bare, patchy, and hard or sandy, we know we have problems.
Those soils aren’t healthy enough to buffer crops from pests, disease and nutrient deficiencies.
Soil tests for pH and NPK are $5-15. Ideally, get a few and do a test now, so you know if you’re already deficient. Then repeat when you’re ready to plant. Most extensions will do a micro-nutrient battery, with prices ranging from $10-50.
Regardless of the results, we’ll eventually need amendments for any garden. That means we stock them, or we start producing those, too.
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The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis
Karen Russell (2013)
THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).
This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.
And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.
“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.
Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”
“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.
And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.
I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?
“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.
“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”
It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.
Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”
The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:
MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK
The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)
Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.
We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)
Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.
Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”
My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.
The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.
“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”
“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”
“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”
“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”
Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”
“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”
“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”
“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”
“Shut up.”
“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”
“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.
“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”
Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.
“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.
“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.
“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.
“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”
Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.
“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?
“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.
“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.
“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”
Mondo turned to us, grinning.
“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”
“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”
I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.
Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”
Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.
In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.
It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.
“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”
“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.
Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.
“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.
Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”
Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.
In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.
The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?
“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.
“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.
“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”
“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”
And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?
Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.
In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.
“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.
More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)
“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”
“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.
Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”
“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”
“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”
We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?
The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.
“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”
Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”
Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.
“GUS!”
We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.
“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”
We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.
“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…
That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.
I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.
But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.
Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.
Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.
“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”
“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”
“Where did he move to again?”
“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”
At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.
“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.
Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.
Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”
Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.
I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.
“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”
“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.
“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”
“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”
“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”
“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.
“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”
This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.
Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”
“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”
“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”
“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”
Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”
I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.
Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.
That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.
“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.
“Oh my God.”
Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.
“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”
“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.
There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:
“Not it!”
“Not it!”
“Not it!”
“Not it!”
We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.
“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.
Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.
“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.
“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”
“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.
All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.
“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.
“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”
“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)
Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.
Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.
Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.
But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.
“Good one, Rubby!” they called.
I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”
“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”
“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.
“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”
Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.
“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?
“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”
I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.
“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.
A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.
“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.
“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”
I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.
“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”
“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”
What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:
On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.
By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.
“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”
“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.
“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”
“Are you crying, bro?”
Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?
On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.
“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”
Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.
“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”
“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”
And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.
“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.
“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.
Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.
When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.
They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.
“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”
“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”
“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.
Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.
“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”
Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.
“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”
It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.
Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.
“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”
“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”
For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.
“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.
“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”
I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.
That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.
“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.
“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.
“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”
Hypothesis 4.
I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.
“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”
“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.
About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.
Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.
“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.
Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.
“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.
“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).
“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”
And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.
“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.
Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”
“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.
“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”
“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”
“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”
“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:
ERIC MUTIS
SATURDAY
The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.
“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”
So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.
Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”
“You better now, Larry?”
“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.
“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”
I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”
Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.
“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.
“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”
I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.
“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”
Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.
“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”
But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?
I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”
“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.
Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.
“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.
“No.”
But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.
Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.
“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.
“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”
“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”
Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.
Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.
“Is that your father?”
Eric’s face was bright red.
“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”
Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.
“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”
I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?
Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”
For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.
“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”
And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.
I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.
“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”
She knew right away.
“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.
“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”
I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.
At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”
Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.
“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.
Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”
Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.
“I am not going.”
I said nothing.
“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.
“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”
“Let’s just get this done.”
An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.
“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”
“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”
Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.
“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”
Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.
“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.
“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”
I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.
“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”
So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.
I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.
“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.
Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.
“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.
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“Coffee and Brooklyn”
Summary: Bucky meets a woman who would change his perspective on relationships. And they meet in the strangest of circumstances; coffee, a chocolate muffin and Brooklyn.
 Warnings: A few cuss words
 Words: 1,636
 Pairing: Bucky x Character of Color
 A/N: While sitting on a cruise ship this past weekend, this story came to mind. I’m thinking about  Part Two. I’d love to continue their blossoming romance. Let me know what you think. Enjoy!
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For some people, love is a given. You meet, date, fall in love and so on. But, for James Buchanan Barnes, he never imaged love would come his way. At least not until Y/N.
 The coffee shop he frequents, “Coffee, Tea & Muffins Galore,” is two blocks from the Tower. Sure there’s a plethora of coffee at HQ, Bucky needed a change of scenery and in Y/N, he found it.
 She’s a mocha chocolate woman with a cute, short pixie cut, hypnotic Y/E/C, and a body to die for. When she smiled, Bucky swore he heard angels singing.
It began as subtle conversation. He’d come in, sitting specifically in her section, ordering the same thing; a cup of black coffee! Y/N found it strange he only ordered coffee and suggested trying a muffin.
 “Well hello,” Y/N smiled at Bucky. “Would you like something else with your coffee?
“What do you recommend?”
Y/N tapped an ink pen on her chin. “How about a chocolate chip muffin? They’re really delicious.”
“Hmmm, a muffin sounds good, along with another cup o’ joe.”
She giggled at Bucky’s choice of words and refilled his cup.
 Bucky noticed her name tag. “Thanks Y/N.”
“You’re very welcome. I’ll be right back.”
He noticed her hips swayed when she walked. She displayed class, beauty and poise.
If his eyes were fire, she’d be burnt to a crisp.
 Coming back with his muffin, Y/N sat it gently on the table.
“Enjoy Mr. Barnes.” Bucky was taken aback because she’d never mentioned his name.
“So you know who I am?”
“Sure! I have so much respect for you. After all the crap those horrible things you endured, look at you now.”
Bucky shook his head, “Truth be told, I’m still fighting a battle.”
“Hell, we all are. Look around this place. These courageous women and men have been given a second chance at a productive life.”
 Turning his gaze to the other waitresses, a smile crept on his face.
“Yeah, I see what you mean. Your boss is a really swell guy.”
Mr. Gerard, the manager, hires women and men with Down’s Syndrome because his daughter was born with it. Relentless bullying caused her to take her life. He vowed to make sure what she endured didn’t happen to anyone else, if he had anything to do with it.
“Yes he is. I believe strongly in what Mr. Gerard is doing and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work alongside these wonderful human beings.
“Wow, you’re beautiful inside and out! Where do you keep your wings?”
“In the closet silly with my halo.” Laughter erupted.
 “I’d really love to sit here and talk wit’cha but duty calls.”
Y/N slid a blank receipt to him and winked. “Just in case.”
Bucky was surprised as he turned it over and saw her phone number.
He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t utter a sound.
Standing up, Y/N noticed how handsome he was. Striking blue-grey orbs, chiseled jaw, and a kick ass body.
“Talk to you soon doll.”
“I’m counting on it.”
 Bucky swore his feet weren’t touching the ground walking back to the Tower. He whistled a happy tune and grinned like the chesire cat. Back in the day, a friendship with Y/N would be taboo but he was grateful things had changed! Yep, life was looking pretty darn good.
 Y/N’s POV
The end of my shift couldn’t come quick enough. I cannot believe how bold I was. Here’s this gorgeous specimen watching me. It actually was kinda hot. I’ve never been a bold woman but James Buchanan Barnes is intoxicating and I’d love to have a drink! I really hope he doesn’t think I’m too forward. He’s old school. Oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained!
 Bucky’s POV
She gave me her number. Damn, what a beautiful dame, er woman. Of all the men in New York city, Y/N’s interested in ME!
Hell, I ain’t nothing special. My demons come and go. Yet, she knows WHO I am and still wants to get acquainted. How lucky am I?
Time to bite the bullet and call. You know, make sure she made it home safe.
 Y/N quickly changed out of her uniform and slipped on a big night shirt and fuzzy slippers. Her phone was on the table. It startled her when it buzzed. Oh my gosh, it’s Bucky.
 “Hello Y/N, this is Bucky.” She knew he was nervous by his tone.
“Hello yourself. How are you?”
 “I’m much better now that I hear your voice.”
 “Why Mr. Barnes, are you flirting with me?
“Doll, I ain’t done that in a long time. Not sure I remember how.”
Y/N chuckled, “You’re doing a good job sir.”
 Bucky wanted to see her again, so he threw caution to the wind.
 “Would you like to meet and have a hot dog with me?”
 “I’d love to. When?”
 “Well, what are you doing tomorrow?”
 “As it turns out, I’m off. Where and what time?
 “How ‘bout Central Park West, 45th Street? Say around, 2:00?”
 “Cool. See you then Y/N.”
 “Goodnight Bucky, pleasant dreams.”
 “Goodnight Doll, pleasant dreams to you too.”
 Y/N smiled from ear to ear; so did Bucky. This was the beginning of something good. He could feel it.
 ***********
It was a beautiful afternoon in New York. The flowers were in full bloom and the smell of fresh cut grass greeted Bucky’s nostrils.
He arrived 10 minutes early only to discover Y/N was there waiting.
 “Hey there. I snagged us a bench. It’s private and near the famous Nathan’s Hot Dog cart. Best dogs in the city.”
“Really? Can’t say I’ve ever had one. Are they good?”
 “You’ll see in a minute or two.”
**********
 Y/N and Bucky strolled arm in arm to the hot dog stand and ordered 3 hot dogs with mustard, ketchup and chili, along with an ice cold Coke. Sitting on the bench, Bucky took one bite and fell in love.
 “I don’t think I’ve ever had a hot dog this good.”
 “Told ya so. They’re my favorite.”
 Bucky “inhaled” two more hot dogs and patted his belly.
“I’m gonna have to work out extra hard in the morning. I can’t get enough of these delicious dogs.
 “Oh honey,  you won’t have a problem working off those calories.”
 Bucky really wanted to get to know Y/N, thus began their “chew and talk.”
“So, Doll where’ya from?”
 “I’m a Brooklyn girl. Born and raised. Jamaica Avenue. That’s where my adopted parents lived.” Y/N’s tone was somber.
 “M’sorry. Are you alright?”
 Wiping a tear from her eye, Y/N continued talking.
 “Forgive me. Yeah, I’m alright. I lost them 5 years ago to a drunk driver. It hurts like hell.”
 “Awwww Doll, I’m so sorry. C’mere.”
 Bucky pulled Y/N into his strong arms as the waterworks flowed. He gently stroked her head. If he had only one weakness, it was seeing a woman cry.
 ***********
“Thanks. My biological mom was an addict. She left me home one night to get drugs and I wandered outside alone. This nice couple who lived down the block, saw me and took me inside. It was cold out and I was starving. Anyway, Child Services came, took me away. They found my mom dead in an alley; overdosed. The McAllisters adopted me. I was an only child.”
 “Hey, I’m sorry that happened to ya. Glad they were there to take ya in and all.”
 “Kids can be so cruel sometimes. I was bullied because of the color of their skin.”
 Bucky furrowed his eyebrows, then figured out what Y/N was saying.
 “Oh I get it now. That must’ve been really hard on ya.”
 “Yes it was. They’d call me the “zebra” rich kid. The McAllisters were wealthy and left me set for life. But, I’d give all of that up just to have one more day with them.”
 Tears pooled in Bucky’s eyes. He saw the love you have for your parents and the hurt in your eyes.
**********
 Wiping her eyes, Y/N regained her composure. “Okay, enough about me. I know you’re from Brooklyn also. You and Captain America are bff’s aren’t you?
 “Yeah. I pulled his ass outta so many scrapes. That is until he beefed up and all. I thought I’d lost’im years ago and he thought I was dead. You know the story.” He looked away, wringing his hands.
 Y/N gently turned Bucky’s head towards her and looked him in his eyes.
“I want you to listen to me and listen good. What happened to you wasn’t your fault. You died over and over again, exploited and tortured. I don’t care what was said in the media or anyone else, I see the real James Buchanan Barnes and THAT’S the man I see before me.”
 Bucky smiled and shook his head. “How did I get so lucky?”
 Y/N laughed. “I am an angel you know.”
 “Yes you are. Can I walk you home?”
 “I’d love that Sarge.”
*********** 
The walk to Y/N’s brownstone was filled with laughter and talk about Brooklyn.
Bucky suggested going to Brooklyn and paying his respects to her parents. And as weird as it sounded, she wanted to pay her respects to his mother and sister, Rebecca.
 Their friendship started with coffee, a chocolate chip muffin and Brooklyn. As strange as that combination is to some, worked just fine for James Buchanan Barnes and Y/N Y/M/N Y/L/N.
Special thanks to: @erisjade (You already know) and @omalleysgirl22, beta extraordinaire. 
TAGS:  @goody2shoessmut @c-a-v-a-l-r-y @sgtjamesbuchananbarnes107th @theimpossibleg1rl @c-a-v-a-l-r-y @cant-stop-the-fandoms @gingerbatchwife @gaybybirth @papi-chulo-bucky @the-witching-hours12-3 
@the-girl-without-a-face @flirtswithdanger @readerwinterbarnes @soldatbarnes @this-kitty-has-claws @mcuimxgine @buckywintersoldierbarnes2017 @promarvelfangirl @marvelous-imagining
@vvintersouldier @eve1978 @a-tale-of-two-comics @goodnightwife @sebbybooks @amrita31199 @not-moose-one-shots @bolontiku
@james-bionic-barnes @supersoldierslover @tatortot2701 
@thewinterswimmer @anbanananna @senselesssamii
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furederiko · 7 years
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The era has changed, so the ways of the past can no longer be applied to solve the same problem! That's the essence of Kyuranger episode 23. The 'Rivalry of the Reds'...
- LOL at that opening intro speech. Spada's blatantly saying that Tsurugi is "so arrogant"! So what's going on with our bossy 'Sleeping Beast'? He is hungry. But instead of stopping down for some chow down, he takes his 'team' (Chef and assistant? Duh!) to... a TV Station. Wait, HUH? Is this a company visit to... TV Asahi? Nope, he's taking over Jark Matter News, and broadcasts a news about his heroic triumphant over Don Armage in the past to the... whole universe. Yes, using his Phoenix Station as the satellite. CONVENIENT! - Lucky is still mulling over Tsurugi's words that they should stop fighting. Of course, the livefeed announcement about Don Armage's secret surprises everyone in the Orion. Fortunately, Balance and Champ have discovered Eris, so hopefully that means they can clarify Tsurugi's bold statement. As soon as they can get her to talk, that is. LOL. Worried that Tsurugi's action might endanger the crew at the TV Station, Commander Xiao immediately dispatches an away team to the Station. - Clearly, Tsurugi's action is pissing off many people. Including Don Armage himself! The Shogun immediately commands his Vice-Shoguns to eliminate him, and the long-necked Tecchu is the first to head out. But publicity-hunter Malistrate Mediatsuyo-Indaver steps in to steal his spotlight before hand, attacking Tsurugi's team, as well as putting the civillians in danger. Precisely like what Xiao has feared. Trivia: Tecchu might be the only one speaking for now, but these three can be considered as 'Special' antagonists. How so? They are voiced by former Sentai heroes! Tecchu is voiced by Hiroshi Tsuchida, a now-regular VA for the franchise who debuted as Saizou/ Ninja Blue in the 1994 "Ninja Sentai Kakuranger". The female one, Akyanba (direct katakana romanization for now, not Over-Time's version), is voiced by Arisa Komiya. Fans would easily recognize her as Youko Usami/ Yellow Buster in the 2012 "Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters". And last but not least, Kukuruga (also, direct katakana romanization) is voiced by Naoya Uchida, the most 'veteran' of the three. He was Tatsuya Midorikawa/ Denzi Green in the 1980 "Denshi Sentai Denziman". Now a prolific stage actor, with "Les Miserables" and "Sakura Taisen V" as some of his most memorable performances. "It's SHOWTIME!!!" XD... - Tecchu's arrival changes thing. The fact that a Vice-Shogun, a higher rank than Menaster is joining the battlefield, means Don Armage is getting serious. But instead of focusing on rescuing the civillians, Phoenix Soldier gets all riled up to fight him. He's hinting that he and Tecchu have a history. They have battled before! But oddly, the latter doesn't seem to have ANY recollections of that. First Don Armage, now Tecchu? What's really happening here. - Tsurugi's action is placing everyone in jeopardy, and Aquila Pink ends up getting injured for shielding a crew member. Obviously, Lucky can't accept his reckless behavior, putting innocent lives in danger. Yet the older Red insists that "You won't be able to save the universe without some sacrifice". OUCH! Basically, it's the 'trolley problem' of saving the greater number of lives. Intriguingly, Tsurugi then tells the story of his old allies, who once acted as 'shield' for him before. One ended up never able to fight again, and another died. Now I don't know about you, but I'm more than certain that one of these two people he's referring about, has since become the new face behind 'Don Armage'. It's almost always, those closest to the hero, right? - Avoiding confrontation (Lucky almost punches him), the gang decides to walk away and return to the Orion. Thankfully they arrive just in time. After going through a bit of... 'situation', Balance and Champ are finally able to convince Eris, and ask her to extract some information to the team. At the same time, Tsurugi opens up about what happened in his past to Raptor and Spada (Yes, Xiao DID send them to do this after all). And well... - Tsurugi is telling the truth. It is confirmed that after gaining immortality from the Phoenix Kyu Globe, he indeed united the universe. He then led 88 Warriors (from each Constellation system) aboard the Argo, to defeat Don Armage whose Jark Matter began disrupting the peace. A battle hard fought that took the lives of almost everyone, Tsurugi ended up sacrificing his immortality by turning it into power to kill Don Armage. Eris then added, that Sir Olion was a surviving member of Tsurugi's force. This is likely the information she wanted to share before, but then the team got distracted by Scorpio. Judging from the silhouette, I think Olion is the one standing on Phoenix Soldier's right. Can we assume that he's the one who could never fight again then? Hmmm... intriguing. Eris assumes that Olion realized Don Armage's revival, and thus entrusted the Carina Kyu Globe in her safekeeping. He was also the one who put the badly injured Tsurugi to cold sleep prior to that. NOTE: Over-Time is still using the romanization 'Sir Orion', but I've decided to use the name 'Sir Olion' anyway, even if to set him apart from the Rebellion's ship. - This is where things get a little... melancholic. Turns out, Tsurugi is telling the Kyurangers to stop fighting, so that they won't suffer the same fate to his 88 Warriors. That's why he wants to handle things on his own. In a way, Tsurugi's harsh attitude is basically meant to protect the Kyurangers! Hold on, is this some kind of... a lone survivor's syndrome then? Aaaawww. But Lucky has a different ideal. He says it out loud to Tsurugi, that the Kyurangers are fighting together, simply because neither one of them can do it alone. An acknowledgement to why all these time, the entire team is needed to take down one Menaster. One is stronger with friends, he means. The power of UNITY!!! Of course... he somehow missed the point that it's exactly what Tsurugi did before with the 88 Warriors. And that it... didn't work. But let's save that discussion for another time... - Interestingly, Lucky's point is then put into solid proof almost immediately. Metal Death Worm that Tecchu sends out, is defeated through a rough co-op of him and Phoenix Soldier. While the other Kyurangers take down Mediatsuyo-Indaver in a very impressive (and neatly choreographed) group effort. Even the giant battle, requires all mechas because a Consumarz is added into the fray. In the end, it's about teamwork all along! WITH Phoenix Soldier among them. LOL. - Just like Ryutei Kyuren-Oh with 3 members absent, this time we're not seeing a complete set of Kyurangers at the battlefield either. Balance and Champ are still in Planet Keel, and Stinger stays behind on the Orion. So Ryutei-Oh heads out with Ophiucus as Scorpius replacement, while Kyuren-Oh with Aquila as Taurus' substitue. And speaking of Aquilla, the long awaited has come. The pink Voyager detaches as arm, and forms... a WING! Giving Kyuren-Oh aerial ability to chase the flying Consumarz. This gimmick was possible from the start, but was never used in the show until now. NOTE: By the way, Ryutei-Oh's combination in this episode with its LightBlue-Purple-Gray color scheme, could be a strong nod to those Extra Heroes on "Kyoryuger". As for Gigant Phoenix... I got very excited about the "Thunderbirds" nod, and the BGM song last week (which is NOT used in this episode... bummer), that I forgot to point out something. Its design is very similar to the style of a Machine Robo Rescue. And if you're looking for a more global comparison, it looks a lot like Transformers, instead of a Super Sentai robo! - Post battle, the friction isn't getting a solution just yet. Tsurugi still goes on his separate way (along with Spada and Raptor, of course). The Rivalry of the Reds is pretty much ongoing, due to their different point of views. However, it seems Lucky begins to warm up to needing the Phoenix, while Tsurugi himself is slowly warming up to having other people around. In fact, the latter's having a sweet 'Legendary Curry' moment with his team! Knowing this, I doubt it'll take long for them to work out their differences...
Overall: Tsurugi's presence continued to disrupt the balance of the show! Not only he's bringing a heft of altered history to the fray, he's also attracting scarier and more powerful enemies. As the kids nowadays are saying, "Things just got REAL". Despite the occasional attempts at humor, this episode felt tense and serious in general. The friction between Tsurugi and the Kyuranger felt loud and clear. But that's exactly why I think it's a great episode! As I've always said, conflict makes people grow, and in this case, it helped the Kyurangers to realize that they are nothing without each other. Next week: Rumble of the Reds. The 12 Stars are alligned... PS: A new trailer for the Summer Movie is shown after the episode. The opening sequence has already included scenes from it too. Not a surprise, because the movie is set to premiere this weekend, on August 5th, 2017. I think this movie looks fun and epic, so if you happen to be in Japan, don't miss it out, okay!
Episode 23 Score: 8,2 out of 10
Visit THIS LINK to view a continuously updated listing of the Kyutama / Kyu Globes. Last Updated: July 29th, 2017 - Version 2.09. (WARNING: It might contain spoilers for future episodes)
All images are screencaptured from the series, provided by the FanSubber Over-Time. "Uchu Sentai Kyuranger" is produced by TOEI, and airs every Sunday on TV-Asahi. Credits and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
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actualltr4sh · 4 years
Text
its been a while since i did oneuhdeez
basics what’s your name ➔ zarina do you have a nickname ➔ ‘z’ usually do you have a middle name ➔ i dew do you like your name ➔ luv  do people often mispronounce your name ➔ yeah, i get “serena” a lot but i cut that shit out do you like the meaning of your name ➔ luv. it means golden so that’s fire when is your birthday ➔  01/15 how old are you ➔ 5′4 do you like your age ➔ it’s okay. i’m old lmao what’s your zodiac sign ➔ good cap!
appearance what’s your hair colour ➔ blackityblackblackblack is your current hair colour your natural hair colour ➔ yeth do you dye your hair ➔ i have before, i don’t make a habit of it though do you have natural highlights ➔ nerp when was the last time you had a haircut ➔ recently! like a month ago lol what length is your hair right now ➔ um the back of it is like at the base of my neck but the front is short lol do you have straight, wavy or curly hair ➔ nigger curls boo do you have frizzy hair ➔ not usually do you use a curling iron ➔ not usually do you use a hair straightener ➔ not usually do you braid your hair ➔ almost always lmao what’s your eye colour ➔ brown do your eyes change colour ➔ this is not a john green novel lol do you wear contacts ➔ never!! if so, do you use colour contacts or regular contacts ➔ NEVER!! do you wear glasses ➔ yes i can not fucking see bro lmao do you have naturally long eyelashes ➔ not really ;/ they look so bare lol do you wear braces ➔ no do you have dimples ➔ no do you have moles ➔ a few, none on my face tho do you have outstanding cheekbones ➔ kinda? not really. i got a good jaw tho do you have freckles ➔ nerp. love em though do you have piercings ➔ i lost some :( i have 8 now do you have tattoos ➔ 6?? do you wear make up ➔ just my eyebrows cus i dont have any lol do you paint your nails ➔ sometimes. whenever im feeling edgy do you wear jewelry ➔ bracelets normally but my wrist just broke out so not now are you happy with your height ➔ it’s fine. im not like short but im not tall either
personality would you consider yourself outgoing or shy ➔ super shy and anxious baybee are you sarcastic  ➔ i used to be a lot worse but its toned down a lot. too anxious LMAO what’s your biggest fear ➔ being in a car accident.. didn’t used to be number 1 but now? yep what’s your guilty pleasure ➔ coke. not like cocaine but coca cola LMAO are you religious ➔ meh do you get easily along with people ➔ typically! do you cry easily ➔ if i cry a lot is that the same thing as crying easily? idk. i be stressed though lmao
school do you go to middle school ➔ like now??? do you go to high school ➔ ?????? do you go to a private school ➔ no lol are you home schooled ➔ nope have you gratuated from school ➔ ya ya ya ya yaaaa what grade are you in ➔ done done done done doneeeee have you skipped a grade ➔ nope have you been held back a grade ➔ almost! freshman year of high school was whooping my ASS okay have you ever failed a class  ➔ bitch several have you been sent to the principals office ➔ not to my knowledge have you skipped school ➔ yeah i used to be tripping have you cheated on a test ➔ how else would i have gotten my degree lol
family do you live with your biological parents ➔ hell nope do you get along with your parents ➔ mehhhhh my dad yeah my mom not really do you tell your parents everything ➔ man hell no lol do you have strict parents ➔ growing up my mom was v strict do you have siblings ➔ 5! are you the oldest ➔ nerp are you in the middle ➔ almost are you the youngest ➔ pretty much?? but not really are all of your grandparents still alive ➔ um... on my dads side maybe?? i think so
friendships do you have a best friend ➔ yeth  do you have more than 10 friends ➔ yall funny as fuck do you have at least 2 friends you can trust with your life ➔ i guess. i dont even trust myself with my life if we being real lmao do you have a lot of guy friends, a lot of girl friends or equal girl and guy friends ➔ i dont have a lot of friends period its probs equal or more girls do you text with your friends a lot ➔ two of them i talk to almost every day!
relationships what’s your relationship status ➔ dolla dolla bill yall! have you ever been in love ➔ i have and bitch oowee do you believe in love at first sight ➔ idk lmao have you ever been in a relationship ➔ one serious one and like some other shit have you ever had a secret admirer ➔ idk issa secret boo have you ever been asked out on a date ➔ yesss have you ever been kissed ➔ yeah the hoes love it have you ever made out with someone ➔ i haveeee have you ever been cheated on ➔ kinda. he got me on a technicality and that shit fucked me UP have you ever been proposed to ➔ no i hope so one day!! do you want to get married ➔ WIFE ME do you want kids ➔ one seems like enough but what if they get only child syndrome? you have to have 2 for their sanity lmao
country where were you born ➔ ugh where do you live right now ➔ UGH have you ever been out of the country ➔ canada lmao do you prefer country or city ➔ city me please do you like sightseeing ➔ sure! is one or more of your parents from another country ➔ yeth what places would you like to visit  ➔ antiguaaaaa are you fluent in more than one language ➔ black what languages can you speak ➔ colored and white if we being real LMFAOOO i be code switching like a mf
health do you have any allergies ➔ naw cuh are you lactose intolerant ➔ man hell yeah that shit is a serious barrier  have you had surgery ➔ noooo hopefully never have you had stitches ➔ no & never have you broken a bone ➔ no & never! bitch i be chilling has someone close to you died of a disease ➔ not to my knowledge.. wait yes im an asshole for forgetting do you exercise a lot  ➔ this is a joke
experiences have you ever had a near death experiene ➔ a few :/ have you ever been on a plane ➔ a couple times! have you ever had an allnighter ➔ freshman year lmao have you ever been to school/work after a sleepless night ➔ FRESHMAN YEAR have you ever been in a physical fight ➔ kinda lmao have you ever been to a wedding ➔ yesss i wanna go to one again so bad I LOVE LOVE have you ever been to a funeral ➔ :(  have you ever lived in a different country ➔ no have you ever been drunk ➔ i be fucked up have you ever been trick or treating ➔ yes free candy is weird but its cool lmao have you ever been in a school play ➔ i was in crew in HS lol have you ever been to a camp ➔ no actually why didnt i have that summer camp lifestyle in middle school have you ever driven a car ➔  barely bitch
skills how many languages are you fluent in ➔ i told you have you ever read a book in another language ➔ no can you roll your tongue ➔ not really? can you braid hair ➔ nope lmao can you do a handstand ➔ eye can
habits do you crack your knuckles ➔ not as much as i used to? if i do i really dont even notice it lmao do you bite your nails ➔ noooo do you bite your lips ➔ noooo
favourites what’s your favourite movie ➔ it’s different all the time today we’ll say bring it on lmao what’s your favourite tv show ➔ greys anatomy s1-8.. gotta clarify this new shit wack what’s your favourite book ➔ the mothers x britt bennett  what’s your favourite song ➔ idk... lets say my boy builds coffins Florence & the machine what’s your favourite colour ➔ blk what’s your favourite animal ➔ zebra. owl.  what’s your favourite season ➔ fall or spring!!
this or that summer or winter ➔ ugh honestly neither  day or night ➔ night me pls cats or dogs ➔ dog rain or shine ➔ rainnnn if im inside watching tv, sun if i have shit to do lol coffee or tea ➔ coffeeeee i don’t like tea that much tbh lol reading or writing ➔ writing probs humorous or serious ➔ humor me brown or blue eyes ➔ brwn single or group dates ➔ single i have too much anxiety for that lol texts or calls ➔ i think i like talking otp more but i genuinely hate both unless i love you driving or walking ➔ i walk everywhere if i can but cars are more efficient lol
last last phone call ➔ an apartment complex lol last text ➔ “her family pimpin her out smh” somebody said this about an old lady!!  last song you listened to ➔ savage x meg  last thing you ate ➔ some wack ass chips lmao last thing you drank ➔ raspberry lemonade last purchase ➔ the wack ass chips and the lemonade lol last time you cleaned your room ➔ technically a few weeks ago when i moved out lol last time you’ve been on a date ➔ january? yeah january
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unitygym20 · 5 years
Video
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Shoulder Pain [How To Fix Upper Cross Syndrome]
Are you your own worst enemy?
Tension headaches that never seem to stop!
Continual pulling on muscles and tendons from the base of the skull to the shoulders. Constant sharp pain at the point where your neck and shoulders join and shooting down between your shoulder blades.
Ad that to a frustrating sense of fragility, knowing injury to your shoulders is highly likely every time you attempt to lift weights.
These are a few of the symptoms faced when you have upper cross syndrome.
Upper crossed syndrome (UCS) occurs when the muscles in the neck, shoulders, and chest become deformed. The muscles in the front of the chest, called the pectoralis major and minor, become tight and shortened, and the muscles in the upper back and posterior shoulder become weak.
Usually caused by poor posture, but exercise can also contribute.
Take me for example.
Initially when I started to exercise a did boxing. It’s advantageous for boxers to have longer reach, so you tend to intentionally round your shoulders. 
When it came time to start working out in my early 20’s I was drawn to movements that made my chest, arms and abs look bigger because six years of boxing 30 hours per week had made me a very skinny kid.
As a result, I hit my 20’s obsessed with gaining some muscle mass. So for the first two or three years I spent most of my time at the gym doing a handful of exercises including chest press, bicep curls, lat pull downs and ab crunches.
I told myself that there was really no point doing legs because legs didn’t benefit boxing … so I thought … and bigger legs meant more weight. Gaining weight meant going up from light heavyweight to heavyweight. In ammeter boxing that’s a very big weight jump from 81kg’s to 91kg. 
Since there was no way I could fight at 91 kilograms, I did whatever I could to stay below 81!
What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was dramatically altering my posture and actually creating upper cross syndrome.
By my mid twenties short of fully blown genetic kyphosis, I had the worst posture you could possibly imagine. Severely rounded shoulders and a totally flat lower back. 
Sometime in 2006 (I was 26 years old) it happened. 
Attempting an acrobatic flip, (which I used to be able to do easily) my left shoulder packed it in. The injury was nearly as severe as my bad posture!
I woke the next day having torn the whole anterior portion of my cartilage labrum from the bone. I had also torn muscles in my rotator cuff. A life changing injury to say the least.
Funny as this may sound, it was a good thing. Although my left shoulder would never be the same again,  this was a turning point in my training that completely changed my life.
First, I had to learn how to treat upper cross syndrome, which I later found wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. (I’ll get to that shortly)
Second, I had to completely flip my training mindset, and for the first time, view lifting weights as a means to enhance my performance, with the added side effect of making me look good. Up until this point, I’d lifted weight to make myself look good, with the added benefit that it might make me punch harder …
In todays episode of Unity-V we launch a new mini-series on Upper Cross Syndrome and overcoming shoulder pain.
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