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buckyownsmylife · 3 years

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white winter hymnal - tom hardy smut

The one where you’re Tom’s PA and you two get snowed in.

Warnings: smut, boss/employee relationship, dirty talk, kind of sexist remarks?, that wasn’t my intention, but maybe that’s how you’ll see it, so I should warn you about it, reader is very sex positive in this fic, idiot in lust, PA!Reader, jealous!Tom, kinda possessive! or maybe asshole!Tom, again it wasn’t my intention, I just wanted to write some dirty talk, use of the term cockslut and another that I can’t remember, or maybe it was cockslut twice

A/N: I’m not really satisfied with this collage, but this will have to do 🤷‍♀️ Anyway, here’s another anon request I received a while back. Please take everything Tom says as nothing more than dirty talk. Also, I did that thing where I wrote a pre-POV intro, idk if it’s any good but when the inspiration hits, I just roll with it ✌

Y/N wasn’t having a good week at work. It wasn’t that something wrong had happened - actually when you considered the cold facts about what had left her feeling so high strung that a simple touch almost made her moan, anyone would think she was crazy. Those were nice things, good situations that she’d found herself in.

But she’d disagree emphatically. There was nothing nice about the fuck-me eyes with which Tom, her boss, had regarded her when she arrived on set with the pencil skirt that she knew made her ass look great. There was nothing nice about the way he’d commented on how she was out to get him, making his life more difficult because of the way she was dressing. There was nothing nice about how he had kept on complimenting her, telling her how pretty she looked with her hair down, or how he joked about how it must have hurt when she fell from heaven.

And especially, there was absolutely nothing nice about the subtle, fleeting touches he’d decided to shower her with, leaving her burning and more aroused than she cared to admit, considering how innocent they actually were. Tom had been flirting with her ever since her job interview, it was nothing new and she should have gotten used to it by now.

But the truth was that she didn’t, she couldn’t. And who could really blame her, when every day it seemed like Tom stepped up a notch, making it harder and harder for her to ignore his advances and keep things professional between them?

Especially considering just how badly she needed to get off and just how attracted she was to him and his stupidly perfect body and damn hypnotizing smirk. She was only human, after all. A human woman with healthy desires that seemed to revolve exclusively about her boss.

God, she was pathetic. At least, she could always count on Saturday nights. That was the time she managed to escape the acting world and the craziness of the set where they had been filming for the last month to go to the bar and find someone who’d take her home and help her deal with her growing levels of horny.

If it weren’t for random strangers who knew what to do in bed, she wasn’t too sure she wouldn’t have succumbed to Tom’s spell and climbed him like a tree already. And that’s where she was headed, just after she stopped by his rental house and went over their schedule for the week ahead.

She’d get through this, she thought as she made sure her coat was tightly wrapped around her waist before exiting her car and running towards the front door, ignoring the snow that had been lightly falling since that morning. Just two more hours and she would be on her way to drowning her needs in another stranger’s body, just to pretend that she didn’t think about Tom during the entire act.

Yeah. She could totally do this.

Tom was screwed.

He had been since he first laid his eyes on her, some five months ago, just before they moved to this fucking freezing country to start filming for his next movie. He knew even back then, he should have thanked her with a smile, explained that she wasn’t right for the job, and asked her out. The fact that she was the best person for the job shouldn’t even have counted, because he was head over heels for her in that first meeting, how the fuck could he keep himself away when she was supposed to be working by his side every minute of every day?

In the end, the idea of having to wait until the end of filming to actually get to spend some time with her made him take the impulsive decision that led him to this situation. Having her so close, but nowhere near what he wished for.

It was hell on Earth. Especially since he knew she felt the same way, he could see it in her eyes, in the way she squeezed her thighs together every time he so much as looked her way. If only she wasn’t so unbelievably professional.

“Tom?” He heard her sweet voice calling out from downstairs and casted a glance at the window. The snow had been gradually building up since that morning, it was a surprise she had managed to reach his house in the first place. But of course, she would never let something as silly as the weather keep her away from her responsibilities.

With a low chuckle, he made his way to the living room, rubbing his hands together to create some warmth despite the heaters that were working overtime since he arrived at that house. It didn’t matter, it was still too fucking cold.

“Ready to go over your schedule?” He trailed his eyes over her body, taking notice of the dress she was wearing over the warm leggings. What day was it? Oh, right. Her day off started the minute she finished this one last task, and then she’d be off to…

He knew where she’d be off to. Thinking about it made him see red, especially since he didn’t have the opportunity to do the same where they were. He envied her, but he envied the lucky bastard that got to fuck her tonight even more.

“Of course,” was all he said, assuming a spot on the seat next to hers on the couch. She visibly tensed, but then threw him a small smile that seemed to try to ease her own nerves, to which he returned with a grin of his own.

“What are you all smiley about?” It was nice to see her more laidback, it was clear that the prospect of letting off some steam tonight was relaxing her. Tom could work with that. In fact, it just made his plans that much easier.

“I can’t imagine how someone could be near a woman as beautiful and not be happy, sweetheart.” Her smile immediately dropped, her eyes growing twice their size as he maintained his grin. “But let’s get on with it, shall we? I have a lot to plan out with you.”

She raised an eyebrow at his lack of interest in continuing to mess with her but shrugged it off before opening her planner. They did have a lot to talk about before she could finally leave to the nearest bar.

Tom chanced a glance out the window as she tried to locate their current week on her faithful notebook. This might just turn out the way he needed it to be.

Y/N’s P.O.V.

“Aaaand… I guess this finalizes your schedule for the next week,” I commented as I made sure to correct the time for a phone interview Tom would be having on the following Friday, before glancing up at him. He’d been mostly quiet for the last few minutes, a stark difference from how he had behaved during the entire meeting. Through all my time working for him, it had been the first time he was actually really present for the scheduling of his following week, making changes and trying to be sure that it would go as smoothly as he wanted it to be.

It wasn’t an unwelcome change, but it sure was peculiar. And by now, I knew him enough to get that there was definitely a hidden reason for him to be behaving this way. Still, I couldn’t yet grasp what it was that he had planned, so I resigned myself to getting through with what I intended to do for the day, and thankfully, that was now done.

“Well, if you won’t be needing me anymore, I’ll be getting out of your hair now.” I smiled softly down at him when I left the sofa, making quick work of my scattered papers and random pens before straightening out to say goodbye. “What?” I had to ask since he was looking at me like he was trying to contain his laughter.

“Well, first of all, sweetheart, I always need you. Perhaps not in the way you’re supposed to help with, according to your job description, but it’s the truth.” I had difficulty maintaining eye contact after that, opting to stare at the mountain of documents in my hands while I fidgeted from one foot to the other, feeling the arousal inside of me sparkle before starting to burn even more intensely. Why did he have to be so honest about wanting me?

“Second and perhaps most importantly… I think you’re stuck with me for the rest of the evening, love.” That made me look at him again, desperate to find any signs that he was only toying with my emotions, anything to show me that he was only playing. But all I got was a nod of his head, pointing towards the windows, and that’s when it hit me.

We were snowed in.

A lot of different feelings took over me at the realization. First, there was despair. What would I do now that I couldn’t go to the bar? Then, there was anxiety. How the fuck was I supposed to survive spending the night with my boss - to whom I was attracted to - in a house with a single room in it?

Finally, sheer panic set in, making me shake my head in frustration. I’d never be able to find enough control to resist him without the release that my weekly escapades granted me. And by the way he stared up at me, with those darkened eyes filled with lust, I could tell that he knew.

I watched with a trembling body as he slowly rose from the seat and made his way to me until we were chest to chest. His eyes ran up and down my body until they finally settled on mine again, and I had to bite down a whimper.

That’s how weak I was for him. He could reduce me to a wanton mess with a fucking stare.

“You’re scared.” It wasn’t a question. Both he and I recognized it as a fact. Still, I whispered into the air between us, “Yes.” Immediately, he pressed on. “Of me?” I almost melted at the sight of such a burly, strong man, towering over me and devastated at the prospect of threatening me.

Tom’s P.O.V.

I waited for her answer with a heavy heart, but the hopeful expectation that she did actually feel just the same as I did: scared at the prospect of what could happen between us, but equally excited.

“No.” I tilted my head at the word, curious as to what was her explanation, then.

“Then what?”

“Of what could happen if I let go of my control. Of what I would become.” Slowly, a smile took over my face, and I finally felt confident enough in her feelings to feel like I could touch her. So I raised my hands to hold her hips, rejoicing in just how small she was in comparison to me. It felt like I could very easily pick her up and take her - in whichever way I wanted. And there were a lot of them.

“Let go,” I whispered in her ear, having leaned down so I could compensate for our difference in height. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to see you without that precious control of yours.”

Goosebumps had spread all over her skin at the difference in temperature of my breath and her skin. I watched in fascination, following their trail, rubbing my nose across her jaw before finally, her lips were inches from mine. And then they were mine.

I possessed her mouth just like I’d fantasized for so long, desperate to make up for the lost time, for all the nights I spent alone thinking about her while she was off with someone else. And she responded just in kind, her arms barely able to embrace my body, but her palms were spread over my back, pulling me closer, and that was more than enough for me.

For now, at least. Now that I’d captured her on my web, there was no way I was letting her go before I fulfilled each and every one of the dirty, dirty dreams I had about the two of us. I was going to ravish her. I was going to ruin her.

She let out a tiny whimper when I pried her lips open with my tongue, before melting in my arms as I explored her mouth, basked on her taste. “You know there’s no way I’m letting you go now, right?”

By the way she looked at me with hazy eyes, it was clear that there would be no resistance from her whatsoever. She was pliant and soft in my hands, easily following when I picked her up and climbed up the stairs to my room with her in my arms. And then, when she was on the bed, there was just no way I could control myself anymore, not even long enough to take off our clothes properly. So I just flipped her skirt up, before ripping apart her leggings and finding her underwear absolutely drenched for me.

“Fuck,” I whispered, already reaching out to rub my thumb over her nub, making her gasp and cry out for me. “I can smell you dripping through the fabric, sweetheart.” To my pleasure, she didn’t seem coy about it at all.

Oh, no. My little assistant, the picture-perfect of professionality was licking her lips, frantically nodding to my indication. “For you, I’m always dripping for you.” A smirk took over my face at her confession, my cock hardening even more at hearing that while I was suffering silently all that time, so was she.

So I ripped her underwear to shreds, spreading my hands over the inside of her thighs to get the perfect view of that pussy that had been haunting my dreams. “Shit, I can’t wait to eat that.” And with only those words as warning, I dove right in, attracted by the sweet smell that made my mouth water.

She was just as sweet as I thought, but the sounds with which she filled my bedroom were what drove me crazy. I couldn’t close my eyes to fully appreciate her taste, too transfixed by her beauty, unable to believe that I finally had her, that it was her pussy I was currently lapping.

“Damn, look at you,” I hummed against her clit, making her jerk and try to pull away for a split second before I threw an arm over her hips to secure her position. “You fought so hard against your instincts, only to end up right here, spread open for me.”

With each word that left my lips, she seemed to get closer and closer to her release. “And to think you could have had my mouth on you all this time. Tell me, darling, do you think a stranger could make you feel better? Were any of the people you fucked, trying to ignore our connection, this great at making you cum?”

I could feel her muscles quiver under the soft skin of the inside of her thigh, and I doubled my efforts on her pussy, determined to see her cum at least once before I finally got my cock in her. It was throbbing now, begging for any sort of attention, but I was too transfixed by the sight of her reaching her high, the way her chest heaved as I quickly rubbed her clit with my tongue before sucking it into my mouth.

“Gimme your cum, baby. C’mon. Been waiting so long to get you in my bed…” She came as I hummed against her, the sensations obviously flipping her over that edge. “Fuck, you’re sweet.”

I kept on slowly cleaning her up, mindful of not hurting her, as she struggled to get her breathing in check. Despite her sensitivity, I couldn’t get myself to part with her taste just yet, even considering the possibility of eating her out some more, making her cum one or two more times before I fucked her properly.

But that was all before she fractured my control with two simple sentences. “Want some help with that? I’ve really been looking forward to getting your cock in my mouth.” I hadn’t even realized that I had been grinding against the mattress as I pleasured her, just to relieve my needy member at least a little bit.

What I knew was that I most definitely would not be able to hold back enough to feel her mouth around me. At least this first time. So all she got was a growl as I pounced on her, forcing her to taste her cum as I kissed those gorgeous lips and held her knees open to accept my weight between them.

“Right now, I’m gonna fuck this little pussy until you’re sobbing for me, okay, love? If you beg nicely, I might let you taste me later.” She whimpered in response, and a smirk took over my face. “Wow, you really are cockdrunk for me, aren’t you sweetheart?” The whine I got only made me laugh, giving me a little bit more control to tease her some more.

“You think you’re ready for me?” I asked, pressing the head of my cock against her clit, rubbing it with my member. “Are you sure you can handle my dick, darling?” Watching her thrash around the bed in an effort to get me to push into her was something I never thought I’d get to see. It made that moment of victory just that much sweeter.

Y/N’s P.O.V.

I was trembling in anticipation to finally have him inside of me. To feel that fat cock stretching me open, filling me up like I’d always wanted it to. It was enough to drive me absolutely crazy with desire.

“Yes, yes, please, I can handle it. Please, stop teasing me,” I begged, my hands not able to choose what to hold as I struggled to keep myself from losing my mind over my boss’ cock. From the depths of my desire, I took notice of the way he smirked, one eyebrow raised up as he stared down at me, still slowly running the head of his cock between my pussy lips.

“Teasing? This isn’t teasing, love. Teasing is what you did to me, every single day since we met, parading everywhere with those fucking skintight skirts.” And with those words as preamble, he finally slid home, only stopping when he was completely inside of me, hitting my cervix and difficulting the now herculean task of remembering how to breathe again.

“Fuck, I knew you’d be this tight. I just fucking knew it.” Those were the last things I heard before he started pounding me against the mattress, barely having given me any time to get used to his thickness.

If I thought I was losing my mind before, it became clear from the way he was bruising my insides that there was no possibility of me ever leaving this bed as a sane woman. Tom had managed to reduce me to a blubbering, stupid mess. He truly had turned me into his cockslut, I realized. I’d do anything just to keep being filled by him, over and over again.

“See? This is what you could have been having this entire time. Me and my cock. Instead, you just had to leave me for those random men. And while you were out, having your fun, all I had to keep me company was my own hand.” Tom never stopped the torturing pace with which he kept on fucking me as he slowly drove me crazy with his words. It was just unbelievable how great he was at dirty talk, I felt like I could cum already from the rhythmic attack on my sweet spot and the filth he was spilling.

The mental image he elicited of him touching himself didn’t hurt, either.

“You’re so egoistic, sweetheart. Wasn’t it your job to serve me? Instead, I had to get off all by myself.” Despite the teasing nature of his remarks and the still brutal pace of his thrusts, his touch over my body was gentle, as he gathered my hair away from my face so he could bury his head in the crook of my neck.

“You… You could have had anyone you wanted,” I managed to remind him, starting to mirror his movements, fucking myself up on his cock. “You could have had anyone at all.” Abruptly, he stopped hiding his face against my skin, pushing away just enough to watch my expression - or maybe to show me his, in all of its seriousness.

“The only one I wanted was you. This was everything I wished for, since day one.” Tom raised himself slightly, changing the angle of his thrusts in a way that had me gasping in surprise, while also preventing me from being able to figure out what I could possibly say to that. So he continued, slowing the movements only a bit, but fucking me deeper, his eyes searching mine for something I couldn’t pinpoint.

Tom’s P.O.V.

She gasped, finally giving up that last little bit of control and allowing herself to relax against the mattress as I did all of the work. “But now I have you, huh? And this is where you should be spending your days, with my cock deep inside of your pussy, keeping me warm, keeping me happy.” I kissed her before finishing, “Keeping me fulfilled.”

With a moan that electrified every single cell of my body, she came and prompted my own orgasm, and I spilled inside of her with a roar, momentarily losing my strength and falling on top of her body.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, darling. Let me get out of you.” But she stopped me from leaving her arms and her pussy, hugging me to her chest until I had no other choice but to cuddle her.

“It’s okay,” she said, fingers lightly running through my short hair. “I like it.”

I fell asleep that night happy because I understood that was her way of saying that she was satisfied with this development in our once strictly professional relationship. And I couldn’t wait to wake her up with another reason why she shouldn’t regret this.

#my fics #tom hardy smut #tom hardy #smut #tom hardy reader #tom hardy fanfiction #tom hardy oneshot #tom hardy oneshots #tom hardy imagine #tom hardy imagines #tom hardy x reader #tom hardy insert fanfiction

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bestillmyslashyheart · 3 years

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0 to 60 in 3.5..

2/?

Alex spent almost two months undercover before he was able to make any kind of real contact with his targets. The Bureau had set him up with a minimum wage job selling car parts. His new ‘boss’ Forrest had gotten caught making sales off the books and was leveraging his cooperation for a reduced sentence. He was easy enough on the eyes but Alex didn’t particularly like the man and he knew Forrest would really rather see the back of him then have to put up with him for one more shift. Unfortunately for them both, making contact with the Evans gang was harder than Alex had anticipated.

They ran a shitty little shop out of an old building down the street from their garage. It carried overpriced necessities that rarely sold and boasted a cafe that had a truly terrible selection of food. Jenna Cameron seemed to run it and Alex was half convinced she was using him to test out new ways of covertly poisoning people. He stopped by every few days for something small and to try and find one halfway decent thing on the menu. Alex spent about five minutes trying awkwardly to flirt with her the first day before she shut him down.

“Be honest,” she had mercifully cut him off, “when was the last time you flirted with a woman?”

Alex hadn’t bothered playing dumb. “I was just trying to be friendly,” he denied.

Jenna hummed mockingly. “Try something else.”

So Alex had. Jenna was never busy when he stopped by so he could usually wrangle her attention away from her phone for a few minutes of idle chat. It wasn’t much, was in fact very little, but it wasn’t nothing.

It was more than he had with his other four targets. Until the day Michael Guerin and Noah Bracken showed up during his visit.

Both men ignored him at first. Noah tossed Jenna an absentminded hello as he wandered to the back of the store. Michael gave Alex a cursory look before summarily ignoring him in favor of leering at Jenna.

“Be honest Cameron,” he stretched across the counter, the pose allowing his jeans to slip down his hips enough that Alex got a glimpse of a strip of tanned golden skin. “What are my odds?” He fluttered his eyelashes and Alex felt a tug in his gut. Fuck.

“Well,” Jenna’s voice took on a distinctly flirty tone as she leaned across the counter until her face was an inch away from Michael’s. Her top slid down to display her cleavage but Michael’s eyes never wavered from hers. “She thinks you’re a jerk.” Alex blinked in surprise. “And that you’re bad in bed.”

Michael’s jaw dropped. “Did you correct her?” He sounded genuinely offended.

Jenna rolled her eyes as she straightened up. “You’re an asshole Guerin and you know it.”

“Well yeah sure but I’m not bad in bed. I’m great in bed,” Michael scoffed. He stood up too and Alex lamented the fact that the action caused his shirt to slip down and hide the stretch of skin Alex had adamantly not been ogling.

“If you say so.”

“Cameron! Come on! You can’t let her ruin my reputation!” Michael nearly whined.

Jenna laughed. She turned to grab a pair of beers from the small fridge under the counter. “She didn’t give you that reputation Michael. And I’m not gonna bother correcting her.”

“But it’s wrong.”

“So?” Jenna popped the tops off and handed one to Michael and one to Alex. The motion drew Michael’s attention to him. He raked his eyes up and down Alex’s body, first assessing, and then again, this time appreciating. Michael slid onto the stool next to Alex.

“Hi.” This close, his eyes were a warm honey brown and his curls caught the sunlight in a way that made them glow. Not that Alex was looking. His mission parameters did not include getting personally involved with one of his targets. “Who are you?” He grinned and that tug in Alex’s gut got worse.

“Alex,” he supplied.

“Alex,” Michael repeated, his tongue curling around his name like he was savoring the sound of it. “Michael.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Michael’s face darkened. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

Alex couldn’t help but smile as he tipped his beer towards Jenna. “She just said it. Why, is there somewhere else I should have heard it? Or something else I should have heard about you?”

“Possibly. But why listen to other people when you can find out yourself?” Alex choked on his next sip when Michael leaned closer and put his hand on Alex’s knee.

Jenna smacked Michael’s shoulder. “Could you pretend to have some shame?”

Michael leaned back and pretended to think. Alex briefly mourned the loss of his hand. “Shame’s boring.”

“Jenna!” A shout from the back sounded before anyone could say anything else. A second later, the back door crashed open, knocking over a shelf, and Noah stormed in. He held up a fist full of papers and shook it angrily. “What the hell is this bullshit?!”

He stormed over to the counter, a look on his face that Alex was all too familiar with, and Alex didn’t hesitate. He stood up and put himself between Noah and Jenna, uncaring, that there was a counter already between them. “Calm down,” he said quietly.

Noah had ignored him at first, seemingly looking straight through him to Jenna behind him, but now he turned his eyes on Alex. It was a cold stare that sent chills up Alex’s spine but Alex didn’t waver. It had been a long time since he backed down from a fight. “Who the fuck are you?” Noah demanded.

Alex shrugged. “No one. Just think you should calm down before you talk about whatever your deal is.”

“Alex, it’s fine,” Jenna said from behind. She sounded exasperated but not scared. It soothed some of Alex’s worry but not all of it. Not enough.

In front of him, Noah’s stare turned colder. Alex had seconds to calculate it before Noah jerked his head forward into Alex’s nose. Pain bloomed across Alex’s face and he inhaled sharply to try and contain his cry. “Fuck off. This ain’t your business.”

Alex punched him in the face.

They each got a few hits in before Jenna got between them and forced them apart. The second he spotted her, Alex backed off, unwilling to chance hitting her by accident but Noah swung at him one more time. He was rewarded for it by Jenna twisting his arm behind his back and forcing him to his knees. “That’s enough,” she stated calmly. She waited until Noah nodded before letting him go.

“As for you,” she turned to Alex, “I don’t need anyone to step in for me.”

“Understood.” Alex wiped at his mouth and spat out a small bit of blood. One of Noah’s hits had busted the inside of his cheek against his teeth and his nose was still bleeding. Other than that, he was fine. Noah, on the other hand, was cradling his wrist and stepping gingerly from the kick Alex got at his knee.

“So,” a new voice said coolly. “Who is this?”

Alex turned to see both of the Evans twins behind him. Max gave Alex and Noah a quick appraisal before settling in a stool next to Michael and stealing his beer. Alex blinked in surprise, just now realizing that Michael hadn’t moved at all during the encounter. He still didn’t move, his eyes fixed on Alex.

“I asked who you were.” Isobel was much closer now. Alex hadn’t noticed her move, too caught up in the sight of Michael’s splayed legs. He cursed the distraction when he focused on her again only to find her scarcely a foot from his face, her heels making her a few inches taller. She arched one eyebrow in question and Alex hurried to answer.

“Alex.” The ma’am caught in his throat.

“He works over at Forrest’s,” Jenna added. “Stops by for lunch a couple times a week.” She ushered Noah onto a stool and handed him a cold beer to press against his face. He put it against his wrist instead.

“Our food sucks,” Isobel announced.

“It’s shit,” Alex agreed readily. “Still trying to find something that stands a chance of not being poisoned.” He heard a snort from the bar but he didn’t look over to see who it was.

“So why keep coming back?” Isobel tilted her head slightly and stared at him like she could read the answer right out of his head.

“It’s two blocks from work and it’s cheap,” Alex admitted. “Forrest pays shit and I don’t feel like blowing all of it on lunch.”

“That’s a shame,” Isobel muses. “You should have appreciated it more.”

Alex furrowed his brow. “Sorry?”

“Jenna,” she called over to the others. “Tell Forrest he needs to hire a new guy. His old one isn’t working out.” Isobel turned away, summarily dismissing him.

“Wait, what?” Alex reached for her. He froze a hair's breadth away when all four people sitting at the bar stood up in reaction. Alex slowly pulled back and lifted his hands to show he meant no harm. “You can’t get me fired.”

Isobel smirked. “I already did. Now get the fuck out of here.”

Alex hesitated but when no one else said anything he turned and left.

Behind him, he heard a smack and short cry of pain that sounded like it came from Noah. “Why are you getting into fights?” Isobel asked. “You never win any of them.”

Alex had to turn the corner before he heard Noah’s reply.

---

Forrest was with a customer when Alex got back to the shop. Alex lowered his face to try and hide the blood as he ducked through to the back but the quiet ‘oh my god’ from the woman told him he hadn’t succeeded.

“What did you do?” Forrest hissed a moment later. Behind him, Alex saw the woman exit the store, leaving them alone.

“Noah Bracken’s an ass,” Alex replied calmly.

Forrest scoffed. “No shit. But that doesn’t mean you get in a fist fight with the guy.”

“It’s fine,” Alex assured him.

“No it isn’t,” Forrest argued. “I’ve got to let you go.”

Alex huffed. “Then go to jail.”

Forrest slammed the door closed and stepped in close. “I’m not going to jail, Alex, but I can’t just ignore Isobel Evans when she tells me to fire the guy who messed up her crew. You’re going to have to figure something else out.”

“Tell her it’s hard to find good help these days or something. I don’t care. But I’m not going anywhere.”

Alex’s nose was still bleeding when he swiped at it again so he shoved past Forrest to find a bathroom to clean up in. Behind him, Forrest let out a loud groan. “I really hate you,” he told Alex sincerely. “You’re gonna get me killed.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Alex replied, equally sincere. He was pretty sure the Evans’ wouldn’t actually kill him. It wasn’t their style.

#malex fic #rnm #my fic #previous parts are under my fic tag

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rayofdawnworld · 3 years

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A Good Girl

So, for context: Earlier this year our darling @saiyanprincessswanie got sick and needed surgery. I being a worried friend, reached out wished her luck promised her a get well fic, and then prayed for her. All good and dandy. But not. See, the incredible idiot that I am, NEVER POSTED THE FIC!!! I PUT THE STORY IN MY POSTED FILE BUT I DIDN'T GIVE IT TO HER!!! I. Am. A. Moran... But, this has allowed me to re-read my work and I can make it better. So, I'm posting part one now and I'll post part two next Monday. Our beloved @saiyanprincessswanie deserves more than just a one-shot at this point. I'm so sorry my Dear. I so hope you like it.

For those interested, Tag list is open for this fic.

Moodboard by me. :)

Grey!Steve/Sassy!OC

A Good Girl

Part One- Warnings: None

She was a good girl. Anyone with half a brain cell could see that. Steve looked at the young man once again stunned. Not only was the young woman beautiful, she looked soft and sweet,he could hardly believe that she looked so young. If asked, Steve would have sworn the beautiful woman was a young girl of eighteen and not a woman of twenty-seven, but she did have an inner lining of steel running through her, she had a fire, judging by the way she was ranting with the younger man. Steve found himself drawn to her, captivated in a way that no one ever managed to captivate him. Not even peggy. A man can get up to some very bad things for just a chance at getting a Girl like her. He thought to himself with a half formed idea backing at the back of his head.

In hindsight, he was glad that he came with the idiot. They had met in one of his Support Group Meetings. The young man was in bed in the “act” when his girlfriend was dusted. But the relationship had been rocky, and he had been thinking about an old girlfriend of his, more and more. From what he gathered the girl had been left alone. An orphan, she had gotten a scholarship in Forensic accounting where they had met. They had dated throughout their college years but had sadly drifted apart when they hit the workforce despite having both been accepted in a prestigious firm. The stress had simply been too much. That's when things had ended.

One of the many consequences of the snap had been unemployment. Companies had gone bankrupt either because they had lost all or most of their workforce or because the owners and shareholders had evaporated and there was no one to sign the paychecks and pay the bills. The snap had caused more problems than solved them, at least on earth. Such, in point, was the young girl's case. Steve hadn't understood why she had quit her job at the firm and had gone to a much smaller firm with a significant downgrade in income, but now he understood. She was working as a waitress in a rundown diner. The smaller firm had lost everyone. She had been the only one left.

Steve had only just managed to dodge a flying cup aimed for the young man but alas, she didn’t have a very good aim. This argument had been going on for the better part of forty minutes. She knew she was going to get fired, so she may have decided to go all out.

The idea had been to go with the dolt, as moral support, go talk to the girl. He had sat in a booth, while the younger man had sat in another. Her face had soured from the sweet smile she had the moment she had recognized her ex-boyfriend. She had been polite, asked him what he had wanted, he said he wanted coffee and a chance to talk. She had agreed and went to get his order. Her boss had given her ten minutes that would be reduced from her lunch hour. He listened in thanks to his superior hearing. It had been a simple conversation at first. The air stiled when, the Moran had said that he missed her. Things became frosty when he informed her that the other woman had been dusted. It took a turn for the worst when he said that he wanted her back. At first, she just laughed, then… Then the argument started. That's when Steve got the truth. He had always suspected that there was something off about the sap story the other asshole had shared with the group. Now he knew. My poor sweet girl. Don’t worry I'll take care of you.

Sadie was done. Just done. All her life she had been a good girl. She always did what the nuns told her to do. She never broke the rules, worked hard, was kind to all even when she was bullied. She did her damn best, to tell the truth, she saved herself waiting for “the one”, she had been faithful, loyal. She was humble, modest. And for what? To be called boring and humiliated by being compared with another woman. She had felt so small when Kevin had said that, what’s her name was sexier and better in bed. She had rebuffed that she had been a virgin when they had met. Not to mention that he never wanted to try anything new, telling her that she shouldn’t try to be someone she wasn’t, whatever THAT meant. Kevin then had the gall of saying it was all her fault he slept with the other woman. She should have done more, tried better. Learned more. When she asked him acidly, if the point of exploring one's sexuality was to do it as a couple, the bastard had accused her of making a scene. She had quit her job and left the apartment they shared that very day. He had called her accusing her of being childish and overreacting, she threw her phone away, just in case he could track the serial number. Sadie wondered how long it would take the firm and his new flame to find out that eighty percent of his so-called excellent work was done by her, at home. In some misguided and deluded idea of good to him.

The world had changed a year after that. She was still hurt. But not in the way most thought. She was hurt and angry at herself. For not saying what she wanted. For not realizing what a jackass Kevin was. But above all, she wished she could have punched him. And now here he was… Telling her how sorry he was, what a mistake he had made, and how much he missed her and how much he wanted her back. Everything went red after that, she didn’t know what she said but she did remember throwing something at him. She nearly hit the client sitting in the booth behind them. She was going to get fired for that. She just knew it. She didn’t care. It was a lousy job anyway. She did on the other hand get to do something she had dreamed of ever since they had broken up, no ever since she had caught him cheating and left him. It wasn’t a punch, no. But it had been a slap. And a very big mighty slap.

Later that evening, Frank had been gracious enough to “let” her finish her shift, with no job and slim prospects, she was still smiling. Her smile dropped when she saw Captain America himself waiting outside for her with an apologetic face. Now that she thought back on it. Kevin had walked in with him. Before she could say anything the tall Adonis took a step forward and smiled minutely.

“I’m sorry about today. I didn’t know the whole story. If I had I would have stopped him from coming here.” Steve Grant Rogers was talking to her. Apologizing to her. Sadie smiled stunned but sadly.

“It’s alright. Kevin has always had this way about him. It takes a bit for you to see past his bulshit.” Steve chuckled and shook his head. We’ll have to do something about this language though. “I’m not surprised you fell for it. You're a good man, Captain.”

Hearing that did things to him. She was perfect in every way. Sweet, pure, good-natured. She deserved better than Kevin. She deserved someone who would keep her safe from the ugliness that this word had become. She deserved to be cherished. Taken care of. And HE wanted to be the one to do all those things for her. But he also realized that he would have to pace himself.

“Well, to make it up to you how about I offer you a job? I was going to give it to Kevin, but I think there's a story he’s not telling us about him being fired from the firm you were both working at, so I feel my safest bet is offering it to you.” Steve said shifting his weight from foot to foot. Sadie smiled at that.

“Yea, someone at the firm must have found out that he was a slacker. I did most of his work for him remotely from home at night. And with no hot, exciting girlfriend in HR to cover up for him…” was all she had to say. “What kind of job are you talking about?”

“Simple accounting. Nothing out of the ordinary. Howard Stark stopped the government from declaring me dead so the hundred dollars I invested in his company have grown in stock value ever since. He also apparently bought a bunch of Real Estate and a lot of other stuff, so now I don't know what I have or what I owe to the IRS. I need someone to look at my books… that have been untouched since nineteen ninety-one.” Steve explained, a bit overwhelmed. Sadie wished she could have told him that she needed to think about it. But she didn’t. Without any job prospects, she wasn’t in a place to decline Steve's offer. The fact that she would be working for America's Golden Boy and getting one over Kevin was just a bonus. Thanking him he gave her the compound address and they parted ways.

He followed her from a safe distance. He wanted to make sure she got home alright. At least that's what he told himself as he melted into the darkness.

#greysteve #fan fiction #greysteve/femoc #fem!OC #mcu fanfiction

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ieattaperecorders · 4 years

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Something’s Different About You Lately - Chapter 2

The three archival assistants engage in some highly unprofessional office gossip, showing a lack of respect for the esteemed academic institution that employs them.

Read on Ao3

“He’s going to fire me, I just know it.”

Martin sat miserably at his desk - head down, hands at his temples, trying in vain to banish the tension headache forming behind his eyes. Tim leaned over him, casually tossing one of Martin’s little desk toys from hand to hand. It was a stress ball shaped like a Snorlax, and had done very little to reduce Martin’s stress of late.

“Don’t really think that adds up,” Tim said, “why start being friendly if he’s planning to fire you? And wouldn’t he have, y’know, done it by now?”

“Elias, then. He’s going to fire me and Jon knows about it, so he’s acting nice to soften the blow.” Martin pulled at his hair, dragging a few messy curls down over his face. “Or - - or else he’s just happy I’ll be gone soon. Either way.”

“Or, here’s a thought - -” Tim reached over and set the stress ball down on the desk, about an inch from Martin’s nose. “He’s just decided to be nice. Something nice is actually happening to Martin Blackwood but he can’t accept it, because he’s got worms in his brain.”

Martin glared tiredly up through his hands. “I did ask you to stop with the worm jokes, Tim.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Tim put his hands up. “But that’s a thought, right? He probably just feels bad that you, y’know. . . got attacked by a stalker and her army of flesh eating parasites?”

There was some sense in that, Martin had to admit. It hadn’t been long after his encounter with Prentiss that he’d begun to notice changes in the things Jon said and did. Some of them were nice enough - he snapped a lot less, for one thing. He didn’t grumble and complain over little things Martin did or forgot to do, at least not where Martin could hear it. But other things were just baffling. He seemed to ask after Martin a whole lot more. He’d make strange comments and look at Martin like he expected him to laugh. And more than once, Martin had turned around to catch Jon staring at him with an expression that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. It left him feeling scrutinized. As if it was just a matter of time before he slipped up somehow, made some mistake that would upend his life even more.

Oh yes, and then there was the incident two weeks ago when he’d nearly smashed Jon’s head in with a wrench, and he’d said it was fine and they shouldn’t worry about it. Martin almost had a heart attack with that one. And then, then Jon said to call him if he thought he heard something at night? What did that even mean? Was he concerned that his employee would be making frivolous 999 calls from the institute every time he heard the floor creak if he didn’t keep him from it?

If so, well . . . he probably wasn’t far from right, to be honest. Martin had been doing his best to keep it to himself, but he'd been pretty badly wound up lately. Especially at night, when everyone else was gone and it was just him and a thousand files filled with spooky stories to keep him company. And there was always that sensation of eyes on the back of his neck, no matter how many times he told himself that no one else was there.

To say nothing of the creepy noises. It was an old building, and everything creaked at night. The pipes were especially bad, the uncanny susurration of rushing water that through the walls at night. He tried to ignore it, even block it out with music. But as the long, empty nights wore on, it always crept back into his mind. His sleep-deprived brain making it sound like muffled, unintelligible voices. As if there was something just beyond the walls whispering or singing to him. It made him feel sick inside.

He really needed to get better sleep.

Still. If Jon just felt sorry for Martin after everything that had happened, it would at least explain why he was grumbling less and hovering more. Really, Martin should be enjoying the better treatment while it lasted, because he doubted it would stay for long. Jon probably wasn’t going to ever actually like him. But if Martin could gain some ground with his new boss out of pity, well. That was something, wasn’t it? Better than being hated. And despite everything, he still really needed this job.

Tim’s eyes suddenly widened. He gripped Martin’s arm and smiled brightly, looking over his shoulder to the door.

“Hiya boss,” he called, “how’s decoding Gertrude’s filing system going?”

Martin turned to see Jon enter, a rueful smile on his face.

“It’s a challenge,” he said. “I’m afraid it will be some time before we can expect any progress.”

“We really should come up with a name for it,” Tim replied. “Creepy Card Catalog? Dewey Decimal of the Damned? Oh! How about Old Lady Robinson’s Disaster-o-pedia?”

“‘Disaster’ is certainly appropriate.” Jon's tone was neutral, but he didn't hide his smile. He turned to Martin, setting a mug in front of him. “I ah, I’ve noticed you’re always making tea for the rest of us, Martin. I thought it might be nice if someone else brought you a cup.”

It was the mug that Tim had bought Martin as a gag gift shortly after they’d started working in the archive. The one with a black and white pattern that looked like a Jersey cow, with a pink three-dimension udder sticking out of the side. Martin looked at it, then back at Jon who was smiling expectantly.

“Oh. . . thanks?” Martin smiled back, a little awkwardly. “That’s nice of you.”

Jon’s smile widened. It widened a lot, actually. His whole practically face lit up and it was way too much, and it was weird. Maybe Jon didn’t hear people call him nice very often?

"Least I can do. Given, ah - -" Jon hesitated, as if trying to remember what he was supposed to be grateful for. "Well. Given how hard you've been working, I suppose."

“What, nothing for me?” Tim teased.

“Ah . . . I didn’t think to--” Jon frowned, an expression of mild distress on his face. “But I could? I’ll just be a moment.”

Jon turned back towards the break room, and it was clear that even Tim was startled by that reaction. He’d obviously been joking, setting Jon up for a retort or an excuse to complain. It’s what he'd have normally responded with.

“See?” Martin gestured to where Jon had been standing. “That’s weird, right? That’s not just being friendly, it’s . . . I don’t know what it is. It’s an entire personality change.”

“Hmm. Yeah.” Tim blinked at the doorway. “He’s definitely planning to kill you.”

“Don’t joke about that either.” Martin groaned, rubbing his brow. The stress headache had not left, and he doubted it was going to any time soon.

“It starts with tea.” Tim continued, feigning a solemn tone. “Then, bit by bit, he’ll begin slipping you teeny tiny amounts of poison. Once you’re too weak to fight back or run, bam. Briefcase full of snakes.” He shook his head. “The perfect crime.”

"Come on."

"Snakes can't talk, Martin. That means no witnesses."

Martin sighed and reached for the mug. Whatever was going on, he supposed he was at least getting tea that he didn’t have to make. As he took a sip, a familiar flavor bloomed on his tongue and he choked in surprise.

“Yikes.” Tim looked at him with concern. “Is his tea that bad?”

“No . . . no it’s - -” Martin set the mug down, coughing a little, and wiped his mouth. “There’s jam in it. Strawberry jam.”

“Seriously?” Tim wrinkled his nose. “Who puts jam in tea?”

“I do! Sometimes . . . .”

“And you have the nerve to call anybody else weird?”

“I like it! It’s sweet and - - and anyway that’s not the point.” Martin frowned. “How does he know that? I know I never mentioned it.”

“Eh. He remembers strange things sometimes.” Tim shrugged. “He’ll forget that you had to show him how to use the copier, but he’ll rattle off a thousand details about how it works. He’s probably got an encyclopedic knowledge of how everyone in the institute likes their tea.”

At that moment, Jon’s head appeared back in the doorway. “Tim. I forgot to ask. Do you take sugar or milk?”

“Oh, you know it’s both.” Tim grinned, pointing in Jon’s direction.

Jon nodded and ducked back out. Martin looked at Tim, who shrugged.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve known Jon a lot longer than you. And one thing I can say about him is this - he’s a prick, but he’s not an asshole.”

“What does that even mean?” Martin sighed, picking up the mug again.

“It means . . . he’s just sort of like that,” Tim gestured vaguely towards the door. “He’s insensitive, and kind of snobby, and when he’s in a bad mood he makes it everyone else’s problem. But he’s not mean-spirited. Most of the time I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it, honestly.”

“Realize it or not,” Martin muttered into his tea - - which damn it, was delicious and he was going to enjoy it regardless. “It’s not very nice being on the other end of it.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Tim smirked. “Like I said, he’s a total prick. But I don’t think he wants to be mean. And he doesn’t like thinking he’s hurt someone. You want to know my guess?”

“. . . Sure.”

“The whole worm thing made him take a look at how he’s been acting, especially with you,” Tim said. “And now he feels guilty. Covertly figuring out your awful, deviant tea preferences is probably his way of trying to make amends.”

“Mmm.”

Martin tapped Tim’s arm and looked at the door, which he’d been watching more closely ever since the first interruption. Jon appeared with a second cup of tea, this one in a mug that read “Over Sixty and Still Sexy!” in pink bubble letters.

“Here we are,” he handed it to Tim, looking pleased with himself.

“Thanks, chief.” Tim snapped his fingers. “Oh, hey! Almost forgot, I followed up on Statement 0162102. The woman in Sussex who saw a manifestation in her backyard? You know. The one with the uncanny, owl-like features?”

“Oh.” Jon raised an eyebrow. “What did you find?”

“Well. I looked up her address and as it turns out she lives half a mile from an owl sanctuary.”

“Ah.”

“Went to investigate like you said. Really nice old lady. He scones were a little dry, but she had all sorts of interesting knickknacks that she wanted to show me.”

“Sounds profoundly fascinating.”

“Anyway, I managed to tear myself away long enough to check out the yard. Shockingly enough, found some owl pellets there. So, stop me if you’ve heard this one, but--” he clicked his tongue loudly. “Think maybe she saw an owl?”

Jon smirked. “Another one for the discredited section.”

“That thing’s filling up fast.” Tim observed.

“Quite unsurprising, all thing considered.” Jon sighed, feigning disappointment, badly disguising how smug he was about it. Given his attitude towards the paranormal, Martin expected he believed that every statement should go straight into that pile. “Still. Progress is progress, and elimination is a form of progress on its own. I’ll let you know when I have something new for you.”

“Sure thing. Still waiting for my chance to unmask the creepy old mill owner trying to scare those meddling kids off his property.”

Jon laughed, sharp and loud, before catching himself and putting a hand over his mouth. There was something in his expression when he looked at Tim that Martin couldn’t quite place, and he found himself wondering if Jon had any interest in men. If so, it would make sense for him to be interested in Tim. Everyone was interested in Tim.

“Yes, well. I’d best be going,” he added hastily, nodding at Tim and then Martin. “Work to do. Good afternoon.”

Off he went again, ducking through the door and heading back towards his office. Tim turned to Martin once Jon was out of earshot.

“See?” he said, sipping his tea. “Deep down, the man’s a teddy bear.”

“Hmnn.” Martin fiddled with the handle on his mug. “Well. You and Sasha have known him for longer.”

“We were a duo of infamous murderers in a past life,” Tim said, “and now we’re being punished for it.”

“I suppose if you guys think this is normal for him - -”

He was interrupted by the loud thunk as Sasha appeared beside them, setting a box full of files down on the desk next to his. She looked at them both and smiled brightly.

“Oh, are we talking about how weird Jon’s been lately?” she asked. “Because he’s acting super weird, don’t let this guy over here tell you differently.”

“Right? Thank you!” Martin exhaled, relieved.

Tim gave Sasha an annoyed look. “Thanks, Sash.”

“Welcome, Tim!”

“It’s tough for me to say this," Tim leaned back, shaking his head, "but I’m honestly not sure that we can trust him anymore.”

“Jon?” Sasha asked.

“No, Martin,” he made a show of putting a hand over his mouth, loudly whispering. “I found out he’s got this weird jam thing going on. Highly suspicious.”

“It’s not even that unusual!” Martin gesturing towards Tim. “See, he thinks Jon just feels guilty because I almost got murdered by worms.”

“Well, sure. I could believe that was it if he was just being less of a grouch. But there’s other things.” Sasha leaned in, lowering her voice. “I was talking to Cora today about some of the things in artifact storage? Jon overheard as he was walking by and he got . . . oddly upset. Went off on a whole rant about how there was nothing good down there and it would be better for everyone to keep their distance.”

“Well, I sort of get that.” Martin had been at the institute long enough to notice the high turnover rate in artifact storage. He’d heard stories. “That place is really creepy.”

“Sure. I don’t like going down there anyway.” Sasha shrugged. “But he was so intense about it. Like he’s trying to keep something shut up there . . . not sure what, though. Kind of thinking of taking a look around, just to see if anything came in recently.”

She reached over towards Tim and grabbed the mug out of his hand, taking a sip from it. He glared at her in mock annoyance.

“And you know when I hurt my shoulder just a few days ago?” she continued. “I asked if he’d let me record a statement about what happened, since some of it was a little bit odd --”

“What did happen anyway?” Tim asked, “you keep dodging me on the details.”

“Why stop now?” Sasha grinned, taking another sip of Tim’s tea. “At any rate, he wouldn’t let me just tell him about it. Handed me a form and said that I should write it down and he would read it afterwards. Was insistent about it, too, even though Elias says we should be committing as many statements to audio as possible.” Her eyes lit up. “Oh, and there’s something going on there. Have you noticed the way he looks at Elias now?”

Martin blinked. “Not really.”

“Hate.” Sasha said. “Not his usual - ‘ah, how dare you have the temerity to exist in my immediate area while I’m working’ thing. I mean real, proper hatred.”

She paused dramatically to let that sink in. Martin frowned. He wasn’t entirely sure what it meant if she was right, but he didn’t like the thought of it. Elias was an okay boss, as far as he could tell - not that he had much experience. But there’d always been this edge to him, something in his eyes that made Martin never want to be on his bad side.

“At first I thought it was an ego thing, you know?” Sasha continued. “That Jon had some new ideas about how things should be done around here, that Elias pushed back on them, and now they were having a pissing contest.”

“Thank you for that horrible image.” Tim said.

“But aside from the recording, he’s not doing anything differently. There’s just this tension between them all of a sudden. Feels like something happened.” Sasha continued, taking another sip of tea. “Not that I have a clue what it is. Yet.”

“Okay Poirot.” Tim reached to grab the now mostly-empty mug back from her. “As long as you’re solving mysteries around here, how about you catch the villain that keeps stealing snacks from my desk? Sometimes in front of me, while I watch her do it?”

“Oooh. Dunno, Tim.” Sasha smiled. “Got to deal with one thing at a time, don’t I? Don’t want to overwork myself on an empty stomach.”

“Speaking of . . . I should probably get back to work.” Martin said, glancing at the pad of notes he’d been ignoring since Tim sat down and started chatting with him. “Got a lot to get through.”

Work had been piling up since he moved into the archive. He wasn’t getting the best sleep, and during the day he was distracted too often. Occasionally he’d spot what looked like one of Jane’s worms and have to drop everything to lift up boxes and move furniture, make certain there was nothing there. Not the best circumstances for productivity. Jon hadn’t commented on it yet, but he was sure to notice if he hadn’t already, and Martin didn’t want to spoil whatever tentative good will he’d gained too quickly.

“I can take some of it off your hands.” Tim said. “I’ve got nothing to do anyway.”

“Oh, uh --” Martin hesitated, looking at the small stack of folders beside him. “Are you sure? I mean, if you don’t mind. . . .”

“Sure. Archival assistants gotta stick together, right?” Tim smiled and gave Martin’s shoulder a gentle shove. Martin smiled back, something soft and grateful rising in him at the gesture.

“Well . . . take your pick, then- -” he held up the two folders containing statements he hadn’t started on yet. “We’ve got, let’s see . . . a guy who thinks his car is haunted because it’s been making funny noises and, uh . . . someone who claims her parrot is the reincarnation of her late husband.”

“Thrilling stuff.” Sasha muttered.

“I’ll take the parrot one.” Tim said, holding out a hand for the file. “I’m good with birds.”

Sasha shook her head and sighed. “Is it just me, or have all the cases we’ve been working on been really, really dull lately?”

“Hey, I’m developing a real appreciation for dull.” Martin held up a hand. “The last interesting case I looked into got me locked in my apartment for a week. I’m pretty happy to have something where the follow-up’s probably going to involve recommending a mechanic.”

“Hmm.” Sasha sighed, glancing with disinterest at the files she’d brought in. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Got some follow-up of my own to do.”

Martin saw Sasha grab her coat off a chair and walk back out the door, leaving the files untouched. He turned his attention back to his own work.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fanfic #looks like i'm still writing this #time travel au

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jme-crocodile · 5 years

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(TW: my catholic school trauma)

Reading “The Boy Who Could Change the World”

It’s difficult to even imagine what America was like before the industrial revolution. Their notion of freedom was far stronger than the one we have today. For many Americans, life wasn’t about showing up at a job at a specified hour, following orders all day, and returning home for a couple hours of “free time”—that would be considered slavery. A free American was one who worked on their own or with their family, worked from home, worked whatever hours they liked, and got paid based on what they accomplished.

Under the putting-out system, for example, merchants would deliver raw materials like cotton to your house. When you felt like it, you’d card, spin, and weave the raw cotton into cloth. And then the next week the merchant would come by to buy from you whatever cloth you had produced.

He goes on to discuss mill workers in New England, who were mostly young girls, some around the age of 10. This was before our modern day labor laws, so the girls were working fourteen hour days. They still found time to read & discuss books/ideas, though.

And through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees’ pay, the girls walked out.

What these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the Voice of Industry, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.

[..]

But their writing in the Voice shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves—wage slaves—and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.

Their bosses didn't like this, at all. The mill owners fired the girls, blacklisted their names, and then did something strange: they sent girls to school.

The schools they built—the common schools—would be easily recognizable by any modern student. “The door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.” (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) “Each teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes … in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.” The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing “30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.”

Instead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order “by the mildest possible means” to instill “a regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the children themselves.”* Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered “cheating” and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)"

[...]

Careful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.*

So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits … and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.”

As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.”"

As the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: “The proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.” Why? “When [their laborers] are well educated … controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.”*

Indeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. “No language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,” warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is “our surest safety against internal commotions.”‡ The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,” warned the committee. “Unsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses … are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.”

More accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.║ In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%. The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school."

And so the spread of schools and factories destroys the American model of freedom. Instead of being independent farmers or self-employed manufacturers, Americans are herded into factories enmasse, forced to work for someone else because they cannot earn a living any other way. But thanks to schools, this seems normal, even natural. After all, isn’t that just the way the world works?

The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular “text features,” they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple-choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. “The joy of finding things out” is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.”

School hasn’t seemed to have changed much since the early 1800s, at least the not sort of schooling geared for the masses. As a child, I was strongly discouraged from risk taking, ridiculed by teachers when I gave the wrong answer, punished for asking questions, had to ask permission to use the bathroom (and was often refused), refused permission to get a drink of water (the school had no air conditioning & it was June in Pennsylvania. Yes, multiple children got heat exhaustion, daily. Our parents commiserated, but thought this was normal. Teachers treated this as normal. We were told to “toughen up” and respect our elders when we complained.) We were taught to need someone’s permission to get medical attention.

I was once refused when I needed to see the nurse (I was going to vomit.) The teacher accused me of lying & told me to sit down. I sat down, and about two minutes later threw up. I half expected to get a demerit for dirtying the floor. I burst into tears, blubbering out humiliated apologies to my classmates and to the teacher. Above my concern for my dignity and health had been placed my teacher. That was my mentality as a kid.

(Normal is whatever you’re used to, but people shouldn’t be used to this.)

The thing that stands out in all of this, now, was how the other students remained frozen. I don’t know how to interpret their freeze -- they didn’t move to get me a tissue, or towels, or anything. The teacher had forbade me from moving to clean up myself, so I had to wait for the nurse to arrive in a puddle of my own vomit. I obeyed. My classmates were staring at their desks, at the wall, anywhere but the teacher or myself. Maybe they were suffering second-hand embarrassment, or pity, or even fear that the teacher would lash out at them, next.

That was the sort of environment we grew up in, for 14 years of our lives.

In all of this, I notice this kind of moral fragmentation that society today seems to encourage. There’s a sense that people have abrogated all responsibility: “oh, that’s not my department, I’m not the one who makes the rules.” So we ignore people in pain, and accept on an instinctive level that there’s nothing we can do.

Except that isn’t true, even that asshole Lowell said, “The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine.””

This submissive attitude people have comes from fear, from an underestimation of our own strength and compassion.

---

Like, do people get what this does to a person’s self-esteem? Maybe not, because they’re all suffering from the same blindness.

Last week during the heat wave, I started experiencing heat exhaustion and my instinctive thoughts were to move as little as possible, and wait for it to be over.

I mean, what does that sound like to you?

Like, maybe my experiences at school were unusually bad, but it looks to me a lot like our society is systematically abusing kids into submissively accepting poor treatment by their superiors.

#unschooling #aaron swartz #tw-school

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musicalluna · 5 years

Text

epistaxis, 7/7

this was originally a not fic written by @samurljacksonwho is allowing me to make it in to a full fic since i’m obssessed

warning: there will be quite a lot of blood in this fic :p

read part 1 read part 2 read part 3 read part 4 read part 5 read part 6

Steve is only partially aware of what's going on around him as the surgery wraps up and the doctors wheel him out of the OR. His face hurts so badly he feels blind with it. Breathing hurts and making faces hurts and crying hurts—everything hurts.

Someone puts a hand on his arm and says, “We're going to give you some pain medication, Captain. It should help a little bit.”

They have a few things, that, if carefully administered, can help him manage his pain. Steve waits desperately, praying with every second that passes that it will kick in soon.

Finally, finally after what feels like another eternity, the pain starts to draw back. He relaxes shakily against the bed, just now realizing how tense he'd been. He doesn't like feeling slow and foggy, but right now anything is better than the sensation of his face feeling inside out.

“Welcome back, old man.” Natasha leans into his field of view and smiles at him, one hand cupping his jaw. “I know you probably feel like you got hit by a Mack truck, but you're okay. The surgery went as well as could be expected. Tony is verbally eviscerating the team of anesthesiologists, and we're here. Do you know where you are?”

Steve starts to nod and then stops when it sends pain sparking out in a starburst through his face.

“Blink once for yes and twice for no.”

He blinks once.

“Okay good,” she says, voice warm and smooth as honey. “Where are you pain-wise? Use your fingers.”

Steve curls his fingers to indicate a six. Not feeling great, but not the worst he's felt either. He starts to ask how long it's been and the moment his throat starts to move, everything explodes with searing level-nine agony.

“...it's all right, ride it out, Steve, you'll be okay. Are you with us again?”

Steve twitches his head in a nod, because his eyelashes are clumped together with tears. That had been fucking excruciating, he won't do it again.

“You're probably not going to be able to talk for a little while, Steve,” Bruce says and steps into view on Steve's other side. “Everything is connected and it's going to cause you a fair amount of pain.”

No shit. Steve wants to say, but he doesn't dare try.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Steve's hand judders in a gesture that means sort of and thankfully it's understood.

“You underwent surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel caught at the back of your nose near the top of your throat. It went well, except you woke up during surgery, which was something I hope to god none of us have to witness ever again.”

Steve vaguely recalls the sense of panic when he'd woken, and he hopes not either.

“Your job now is to rest. Are you thirsty?”

Steve blinks once and someone hands Nat a cup. She carefully feeds a piece of chipped ice into his mouth. If he weren't tired to his bones, Steve would be more embarrassed. He tries not to move his mouth too much, nudging the ice around with the smallest movements possible.

Exhausted, he closes his eyes even though Bruce is still talking.

When Steve opens his eyes again, the sun is coming up. He feels groggy, eyes sticky and his mouth is horrible. To his relief, the pain has banked, reduced to a steady, low-level throb.

He looks around the room and discovers Tony slumped in the chair next to the bed with his head tipped back on the seat back. His mouth is hanging open a little and he's snoring. Natasha is curled up in a chair on his other side, eyes fixed on the screen of her phone, which is casting shifting blue light across her face. Last, he spots Clint tucked back in one of the corners sitting on a countertop. He's watching Steve.

Steve lifts his fingers in greeting and Clint's single-minded focus eases a little. “Hey, Cap. How you feeling?” he asks, keeping his voice low.

Remembering how bad it hurt last time he tried to speak, Steve swallows carefully, testing how it feels. It sharpens the discomfort in the back of his throat briefly, but compared to how it felt before it's not bad. “Better,” he tries. His voice sounds terrible, but it works.

“Good.” Clint tosses a small object at Tony and it hits him in the forehead before Steve can protest.

Tony jerks awake, blinking blearily.

He stares at Steve for a moment and then shoves himself upright, scrubbing his face. “Steve! Hey, hey, you're awake. Hallelujah, I don't want to be the boss anymore.”

“You're not,” Steve replies and Tony winces at the sound of his voice. “Nat is.”

Clint snickers.

Tony ignores him. “How's your face?”

“Aches,” Steve admits. “'s better though.” He's surprised when Tony puts a hand on his head and pushes his fingers through Steve's hair. It feels nice, despite how weirdly intimate it is for Tony.

“You hungry? Thirsty?”

“Yes,” Steve says, aware of just how much the instant the thought is placed in his head.

Tony huffs. “All right. The docs said you should have cold, soft foods. Birdbrain—”

“Already on it,” Clint says mildly, fingers flying over his phone screen.

Meanwhile, there's movement on Steve's other side and he looks over to find Natasha has put aside her phone and gotten a cup of ice chips from somewhere.

She smirks at him and holds out a spoon with a chip. “Open wide for the airplane, Stevie.”

“You are the worst,” Steve informs her, but he opens his mouth and takes the ice. It's cool and refreshing, but he wishes he could have water instead. It's just enough to make him want more. “How long was I out?” he asks, the shrinking chip clicking against his teeth.

Tony shrugs. “Eight hours or so.”

That explains why it doesn't hurt as bad. It must be starting to heal.

Thor arrives then, carting a tub of Steve's favorite ice cream. “I come bearing a feast!”

Thor plops the tub down in Steve's lap and he grunts.

“You need help?” Tony asks when Steve accepts the spoon Thor offers and Steve's temper flares.

“I'm not an invalid,” he snaps.

Tony immediately draws back, his lips thinning. “Yeah, got it, never mind,” he mutters.

Natasha pinches the back of his arm and Steve yells, “Son of a bitch!” around the spoon in his mouth.

“Don't be an asshole,” she says severely.

“Then don't treat me like I'm helpless,” Steve retorts.

Natasha's hand darts out again, pinching and twisting the side of his nearest pec. He swears even louder this time, a sear of pain tearing through his throat. “You went through something traumatic, Steve, and we want to be here for you while you recover. If you could try not to be a self-centered asshole for thirty seconds maybe you'd realize that.”

“Besides, letting your friends help you when you're down is not the same as being an invalid or being helpless.” Clint raises his eyebrows. “Unless you think you guys helping me out after I lost my hearing was that.”

“That's...not the same,” Steve mutters.

“Uh, yeah, it fucking is,” Clint retorts. “You don't get your own set of rules. You're not that special.”

Steve's mouth pulls into an almost-smile.

“Let us love you!” Clint mostly yells, overdramatic.

“Believe it or not, this isn't entirely about you, Steve,” Natasha says, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Aye,” Thor agrees. “It comforts me to know that you remain here with us and have not gone on to Valhalla.”

“You may have felt it but you didn't have to see the way you looked on that table,” Tony says.

Before Steve can say anything in reply, the door opens again and Angavu steps inside. “Welcome back, Captain,” she says and then gently lobs a tiny glass jar at him. It lands with the faintest impact on the blankets over his chest and Steve looks down, picking it up.

Inside, there's a tiny shard of needle-sharp green plastic.

Staring at it, Steve can hardly believe this tiny piece of plastic is what nearly did him in. After everything he's been through and survived.

He hadn't realized how heavily he'd started relying on his new serum-fueled health. He's gotten cocky, expecting to come out the other side of just about anything unscathed. This is the first time something so insignificant has come so close to ending everything. All because he hadn't taken something minor more seriously. He should know that because of his enhanced body, seemingly insignificant issues could be signs of more serious problems.

He looks up at Tony and, swallowing his pride, says, “Thank you.”

Tony's head wobbles and pulls back. “What? Are you talking to me?”

“If it weren't for your paranoid fussing, I probably would have kept ignoring it and that...could have ended really badly. So thanks.”

“Oh, well.” Tony shrugs, eyes skipping nervously across the floor. “I'm happy to annoy the shit out of you in the name of keeping you alive. Kind of fond of you, you know, Rogers?”

Tony never fails to be better than Steve expects. Even after all this time, he's still letting the brash exterior fool him. He owes Tony better than that.

And, he realizes, looking down at the little piece of shrapnel again, he's still acting like that ninety-pound asthmatic with something to prove. His limits have shifted and he's probably worse now than ever about recognizing when he's reached them.

He needs to stop. He needs to rely on his teammates to recognize not only his strength but his weaknesses.

He holds out his hand and Tony steps forward uncertainly, fingers curling around the tiny bottle when Steve puts it in his palm. “Keep annoying the shit out of me,” Steve tells him. “You saved my life.”

“Holy shit,” Clint stage whispers, “I think he just had an existential epiphany.”

Tony curls his hand around Steve's and squeezes. “You got it, Cap.”

The impulse to prove himself strong enough, sturdy enough, worthy enough is always going to be there, but Steve wants to do better. His team deserves that.

#steve rogers #hurt!steve #hurt/comfort #musicalluna writes #captain america #epistaxis #draft #wip

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obfuscatedcarisi · 5 years

Text

All the times Sonny Could have kissed you but didn’t (and the one time he did)

Part 5 is here. I am so sorry this took so long. I’m week 3 at my new job and it’s been a real ride. My boss got into an accident on my first day and has been off work ever since and so I have had to hit the groud sprinting with no training I am barely alive rn.

Anyway. I hope you like this one - let me know what you think! Also shoutout to Kindergarten Cop!

Part 5 / ?

You walked into what felt like the 37th library of the day in search of someone who might recognize your perp. He'd been tearing out carefully selected pages from a library copy of The Divine Comedy and leaving them with his victims once he'd finished with them.

“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”

It was truly heinous.

So here you were, doing your absolute best to politely interrogate the sweet librarian with Carisi by your side. You were fed up, your patience wearing thin. You knew the fatigue was showing all over your face.

You huffed and turned away, pretending to inspect the surroundings and trying to squash the panic rising in your chest. You needed to catch a break. This felt like you were wasting valuable time but it was the only lead you had. Looking around, you saw nothing out of the ordinary; dark wooden tables marred by years of stains and scratches, metal chairs upholstered in burgundy burlap. Did it match the green carpet tiles? Of course not, but you didn’t suppose that was a consideration. There was a group of children, kindergartners you supposed, sat on the carpet in the kid’s corner and….seemingly unsupervised….

As one of them came running over, Carisi touched your elbow and turned you to face him.

“What was that?” You asked, straining a smile at the woman behind the desk.

“I said I can ask my supervisor, she remembers everyone and everything that passes through here.”

“I’ll come with you, Y/L/N you can wait here. Besides, Carisi nodded behind you, a glint in his eye. “I think you’ve made a friend.”

You looked around and the small child was grinning at you with a big gap toothed smile.

“Hi” you said, crouching down to meet them on their level.

“Hi” the child beamed “ Are you going to read us a story?” It was more of a plea than a question.

“Uhh, isn’t there someone else here who does that?” you looked around for someone who could looked like they might be already employed to do that kind of thing.

“They said they had to step out for a second. That was ages ago!”

So, probably just a few seconds, you thought. You pulled your most dramatic shocked face “Ages! Well. In that case, what are we reading?”

Despite your mood, you were not an asshole, and would not take your frustrations out on anyone, especially not children. You followed the child over to the group and was promptly handed a large, square, hardback, picture book.

The Birds and The Bees

Oh boy. This was surely inappropriate. And way, way above your pay grade.

“Ummmm. I’m not sure this is -”

You looked around and saw Carisi coming towards you. Disappointed. That was way too quick to be positive.

“Hey -” His voice was urgent. He was cut off.

“Where do babies come from?” A little voice piped up from the back. You’d never seen Carisi look so stunned. His mouth hung open.

“Uhhhhh”

He’d been reduced to only blinking. You bit down on your lip to keep from laughing.

“My dad’s a gynecologist. He looks at vaginas all day long.” another voice added.

Wow. Things were getting real over here. “Well. That’s. Um.” Carisi began, gesturing haphazardly with his hands.

“Our mom says our Dad’s a real sex machine.” A pair of identical twins decided to add to the discussion.

You choked on your own spit and doubled over. Tears springing to the corners of your eyes.

“Hey you OK” Sonny’s voice broke through the choking. This was Sonny checking on you, not just Carisi. One hand came to the small of you back, the other cupping your cheek, concern written over his face.

“I’m good” you laughed, not holding back anymore.

“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?” Another child teased.

Sonny didn’t look away. He was still checking you over. His eyes met yours, finally, he let himself go and gave you the biggest, brightest smile you’d ever seen on him.

“Well...We’re...uhhhh” He searched your face, looking for the right answer.

“Are you two going to kiss?!” a disgusted voice rang out “Yuck!” they screeched.

“KISS! KISS! KISS! KISS! KISS!”

He let out a nervous laugh but actually dipped his head down.

“Detective! That's him over there!” The librarian shouted out, pointing towards the doorway.

“Fuck!” You yelled as you both tore away from each other and sprinted in the direction of the man who was making a beeline for anywhere-but-here-and-now.

You couldn't tell if the gasps were because you were YELLING in a library, because you CURSED in front of kindergartners or because of the thrill of a live police chase. Sadly, you couldn't stick around to find out.

#all the times sonny could have kissed you #but didn't #and the one time he did #but not this time #sadly #sonny carisi x reader #carisi x reader #sonny carisi #law and order svu #fanfic #my fic #obfuscatedcarisi #kindergarten cop

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austinpanda · 3 years

Text

Dad Letter 062621

Scheduled for delivery 8:00 AM EST Sunday

27 June, 2021

Dear Dad--

Summer has reached Old Town, and we’re having highs in the 80s on some days! Still love it here. The days are still 20 hours long, which is driving me nuts a bit--it gets light before 4:00 a.m. now--but the days will get shorter now that the solstice has occurred and summer has officially started. It’s still disconcerting to wake up and see broad daylight and it’s still only 5:00 a.m.

This morning was spent going to the grocery store to get the things we forgot during yesterday’s big trip to the grocery store. We shopped together yesterday, something we don’t do very often since Covid, and I spent about a hundo ($100) on groceries, only to get home and find out we’d forgotten all the dairy; we were out of milk and half and half. That felt kind of stupid. And, to increase the stupid quotient, Zach feels like he’s getting sick, so this morning’s (FUCK MY LIFE I FORGOT TRASH BAGS) trip was solo, and fortunately, it went without incident. Except for the goddamn trash bags. If I go again, it’ll be four trips to the store in four days. (Curses! I hate inefficiency!)

Obviously, if that’s the biggest thing I have to tell you about, it hasn’t been an eventful week. I had another short work week, during a time when I wish the work week were longer, and did an unimpressive job trying to learn and execute the new audit I’m learning. The good news is, as of the last day I was there, I finally got to finish making the notes I need to get through the audit. Now I believe it will be easier. I believe my boss fell victim to one of the classic smart people blunders: Smart people sometimes suck at knowing which things are confusing to a new person, or else, as is more the case with me, someone who is new to the process. I don’t think he wanted me to make such comprehensive notes, for fear it would only make things more time-consuming and confusing. That makes logical sense, but it’s exactly wrong, because: kangaroo. Remember the movie Arrival?

She wants to use a white board to communicate with the aliens, but the army guy thinks it’ll take longer to learn to speak with the aliens if she involves reading and writing too, but she says, “Kangaroo.” And the point is, she tells the story of Captain So-and-so who, in 17 hundred and whatever, landed in Australia. He led a party into the country, and they found the aboriginal people, and asked what were those animals that hop around and keep their babies in pouches? And the aborigines said, “Kangaroo.” It wasn’t until later that the sailors learned “kangaroo” means “I don’t understand.” Her point was that she needed the white board to avoid misinterpretations, otherwise everything would take longer. And that’s what I did with my notes at work. They’re long, and comprehensive, and it took a while to make them, but with them, you can do the audit by yourself. Otherwise, it’s just too complex and confusing for a new person to do alone. I win, damnit.

So I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow for another unfortunately short work week, in part because I now have the tools I need to do the job, and also because I’ve decided to listen to my boss, who said I really don’t need to take so much work home with me. He actually doesn’t like how much time I’m spending in my off hours obsessing about this stupid new complicated audit. I’m not always sure how to respond to that, the accusation that I’m needlessly worrying too much about something. I like to think I do the exact right amount of worrying about everything. But he seems firm in his conviction that I need to lighten the hell up, so I’m considering actually trying to. I’m going to cease obsessing about this stupid audit, I’ll just keep doing it as well as I can until I’ve mastered it, and I’ll try not to let it make me frustrated to the point where I want to kick my computer all the way into the sun.

I’ve learned a new casino term! It’s a term for a certain type of bad behavior that the casino will generally want to keep its eye on, something called fast feeding. Fast feeding is a way of laundering money. You feed a bunch of “dirty” cash into a slot machine, gamble for five minutes, and tell the machine to give you a voucher for the extra money you fed into the machine. Then you take the voucher to the casino’s cage (its bank) and ask them to cash it out. And just like that, you turned your pile of dirty money into a pile of their clean money. The problem with that is, it’s really, really easy to spot. You don’t even need people, your computers can alert you, “Hey, this potential asshole just fast-fed a bunch of cash into a slot machine, played for eight minutes, and then requested a voucher to cash out. Malfeasance!” (I assume the part where it shouts, “Malfeasance!” is equally as necessary as all the other steps.) So that’s fast feeding. As casino revenue auditors, we are officially against that.

Zach’s mom got us this decorative garden thing that’s like a little wooden tray you can fill up with wild critter chow, and now we’ve become an epicenter of little critter activity in our neighborhood. We fill this thing with a wild mammal mix of sunflower seeds and peanuts and dried corn kernels, and all kinds of cute little furry shits come up to eat from it. This has created one problem, which is that all this is occurring in the grassy space where I keep my car parked. And when I worked for Progressive, I set up a lot of claims for, “Rodents made a nest in my car’s wiring, chewed the wiring to pieces, and now the car is a paperweight.” So I don’t want any adorable little critters setting up house in the vital organs of my car. Also, there’s the concern that we’re going to drive over something cute and squash it. So now whenever we get into the car, we slam the door a couple of times, and kick the sides lightly, just to flush out any animals that might be taking a nap in the shade of my engine. And for God’s sake, don’t come inside; that’s where murder by kittycat awaits.

On the subject of animals, I just learned something that blew my mind about bats, so now it will be your misfortune to have to learn something about bats. It’s one of those, “Behold, the power of evolution/God,” kinda things. There are these bats called mustache bats. I will include a picture. They are not cute, and they don’t have a mustache, which left me feeling a bit screwed, but there you have it. Anyway, bats use echolocation to find food. And one way to look for lots of food at once is to scan lots of frequencies, by sending out a “cheep” that starts low, and goes up in pitch. That brings back lots of echo information, but it brings back too much echo information. What if bats could just use one frequency of “cheep” and just be really good at hearing that one frequency?

Well, these little shits can do that. They send out a cheep in one frequency, and they have just the right bone structure in the ear to make them super good at hearing the echoes that come back at that frequency. “But,” you may ask, “What about the doppler shift? These are sound waves. As the bat’s flying, and its speed changes, the cheeps that come back are going to be constantly changing in frequency because of the doppler shift, and it won’t hear them.” Well, the little shits apparently thought of that, too. What researchers figured out was that the bats just change the pitch of their cheeps to compensate for changes in how fast they’re flying. That blew my damn mind. The bats are great at hearing a certain frequency to catch food, but when they fly faster or slower, the sound leaves that sweet spot frequency, so they just adjust the frequency of the cheeps to compensate. *mind explodes*

And how did they figure this out? They put the bats on a little swing and gave them a push. Then they simply made a graph of the bat’s speed, and superimposed over it a graph showing the bat’s chirp frequency, the two mirror each other perfectly. Bat speeds up, and the frequency of its cheeps reduces. Bat slows down, cheeps go higher. (Except for the part when the swing goes backwards. Then, the cheeps don’t correspond with diddly poo, because bats don’t ever fly backwards, so the whole thing doesn’t work when they’re going backwards.)

Isn’t science just grand? Little bat swings. I’ll have more news next Sunday, and all my love to you both!

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crasherfly · 4 years

Text

Been Around

I’ve been working on an iteration of this tumble for a while.

My last one? Well. It was kinda. Sad?

Like, basically, oh hey I’m on the edge of ruin guess we’ll see what happens!

Obvs some time has passed since then. And like, I dunno, maybe people are wondering how things turned out?

So I’m here to talk about that. Oh, and yeah, talk about what I’ve been playing watching and listening to.

Question Corner time!!!

Um did you get fired or what?

Shockingly, no! I kept my job. In fact, kinda got a clean slate- new manager, a new schedule, the works.

What the fuck? How?

Right?

Basically, I kept my mouth shut when I needed to and stuck to one un-sophisticated but outrageously stupid lie about why my “work” wasn’t showing up in the reports.

And the person in charge of calling me on that bullshit just...didn’t.

I don’t know if it was kindness, or laziness, or what, but they basically let me off with a firm warning to not let my abject neglect of my job be so obvious next time around. Around the same time as all this was going down, there was also a big shakeup in management, and I got shifted to a new guy. Along with that, I also got approved to reduce my work week.

So my best guess is amidst all the change they decided to just give me a free pass, cuz firing a union employee in the time of covid would be...a lot of work.

Wow. Sick. So. New schedule?

Yup. My job is having a bit of a budget emergency so they have offered to let us take unpaid time off while retaining our benefits. I’m now working 30 hours a week until the end of the year. I’ll miss the money, but honestly? I’m fucking stoked. I straight up need to be at work less, and while it’s some shit that I have to take a paycut just to stay sane, you better believe I was ON THAT the minute I learned it was an option.

You didn’t get fired. You got a new sup, a new supervisor...so...are you gonna try in the future, to, like, not get in that position again?

Yeah. I’m very okay with not putting myself through any of this ever again.

I’m actually putting in a full day’s honest work. Logging in on time. Staying awake the entire shift. Doing actual work. It’s wild. And exhausting. And repetitive. So...so...so...repetitive.

Actually working my job the way it’s written out on paper is awful and draining. My work is deeply uninteresting and utterly without consequence. I don’t have any actual metrics to work towards because of how the pandemic has impacted things. You’d think that would be good! But actually, it sucks real bad cuz my bosses basically just say “you have no metrics, but you should also be demonstrably productive” which basically means BUSY AS FUCK. So every day is an exercise in how I can convincingly spin my tires for 10 hours a day.

The tradeoff for making a clean go at this whole gainful employment thing is that, presumably, I can forgo the stress of like, you know, having my entire life and sense of financial security implode at a moments notice. I guess it’s a fair trade.

Still, I’m so very, very tired.

So...how are you feeling about things?

Honestly...pretty okay?

Look, you gotta understand that for the past month I was unraveling at the seams. Barely sleeping, drinking way too much, gaining weight back and making zero progress on my creative hobbies. So any improvement at all? In 2020? Feels like a fucking windfall to end all windfalls, even if the job is still shit and the paycut is a bit of a kick in the ass.

Cool cool. You uh...still doin...?

Therapy? I mean you can just say therapy.

Yeah, I’m doing it. Results seem...limited?

I found out my therapist is a anti-vax covid truther so...that’s been an experience. But when she isn’t going on about how big pharma is just mining us for cash money (not totally untrue), she’s...aight?

I dunno. I have to talk a lot. I don’t usually do that, ya know? And sometimes I finish my sentences and I’m like lol that’s literally all I got and then have to wait for a response. And the response is usually something weird like “WELL THAT’S GREAT”.

I guess I was expecting to hear some high concept shit about my brain? And instead...it’s mostly just been affirmations of just how damn functional I am! I’m so functional! Look at me, being functional like I’m all sorts of hot shit.

I thought you were gonna fire her-

Yeah, uh, look. I’m...very bad at confrontation. I’ll fire the truther therapist next week, I promise.

Whatever, so...what are you gonna do now that you only work 3 days a work?

Hopefully more of this! I miss writing for an audience. I miss sharing what excites me with other people! I’ve missed having an online presence. I live my life on the internet these days. Like, yesterday, I had this distinct feeling that I was SO ONLINE that I was like, basically, on the verge of full Matrix. Like, between Spriteclub and Twitter and Youtube and my online games, just stick a fuckin’ needle in the back of my head and get it over with. I’m like fuckin’ Neuromancer over here, 3 monitors at once all day every day.

So...when do we talk about what you’ve been up to?

RIGHT NOW ASSHOLE! That’s right folks, let’s talk about what I’ve been gettin’ into during my free time.

WRITING-

Alice and the Pale Horse

I’m on page 123. Working on some edits. Seriously looking at how I can release my first few pages in an episodic format.

My dream is to someday have an animator for this story. A guy can hope, yeah?

Crash’s Corner

I’m gearing up for another anime post. I’m hoping it’ll be a bit shorter and more focused. Major show candidates include Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Gleipnir, and Deca-Dence.

Film Journal

I’ve been guest writing for Ryan Sanderson’s year-long film journal the past few weeks. The last entry was about the Alien franchise. Give it a look!

ANIME-

God of High School

Man, this show is so damn lukewarm until it hits these wild action sequences that make your soul just fucking sing. The story feels like total nonsense, even for a shonen, but then you hit moments like this and it just doesn’t matter. It’s so imaginative it just absolutely soars.

Gleipnir

OH MY GOD GLEIPNIR. Look, I can’t recommend this show to you. It’s that batshit off the walls wild. But...if you can handle the absolute of anime bullshit- and if you’re an anime fan, you know what I mean- then you might be able to handle this. I just finished the first season this week and it grabbed me by the neck and didn’t let go. If it doesn’t get renewed, I’ll absolutely find the manga. But just. Like. Holy shit. Yeah. (I said Holy Shit probably at least 2 or 3 times per ep, so be warned).

Fire Force

Honestly, season 2 has been a bit of a gas for me. It’s just lacked a certain juice that the first season had. Season 1 had so much wild worldbuilding going on, while season 2 seems to be all about tossing in as many tertiary characters as possible. Curious if the manga handles that better. As it stands, Fire Force still makes it onto my weekly rotation of anime I hit up while biking.

Deca-Dence

I heard hype for this on Twitter, and based on the stills and the trailer, I was kinda so-so. But I jumped in and gave it a couple ep’s and honestly? It kept my attention. It even surprised me several times. It’s deeply imaginative in its own right, and presents a couple of animation styles that play directly into the lore of its world presentation. I’m not resonating with it on an emotional level in the same way as I am with say, Gleipnir, but this is still a really damn good show that I’d have no reservations about recommending to anyone.

A Certain Scientific Railgun T

This one has me deeply conflicted. On the one hand, it is a gif generator, and I have a whole library of reaction gifs to show for it. The action is thrilling, the world gorgeous, the characters endearing and appropriately silly. But, like, also, it is the height of fan-service and there’s not much of a defense for it. So much so that I’ve only watched the first few episodes. I don’t know if I’ll keep on since the story hasn’t got its hooks in me yet. Reminds me a lot of Pandora in the Crimson Urn- deeply imaginative and funny but also full of yikes.

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU

I’m only a few ep’s into season 1 but I’m intrigued. It’s a rom-com/slice of life type anime, but it plays like a more straight-faced Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, but with the voice of the show centered around a deeply unlikable incel-type character surrounded by a terrifically enjoyable cast of fellow students who each bring their own quirks to the table. I’m interested to see how the plot continues to develop, as I’ve seen fans raving about the most recent season. However, this show has fallen to the wayside as I keep getting distracted by other anime. Kinda reminds me of Food Wars in the sense that I find its premise and characters compelling but also lose my focus on the story quickly.

Samurai Champloo

Finally finished it! Loved it, for the most part. As a guy who has watched his fair share of classic sword films, I deeply appreciated how much reverence the animators and writers had for the genre, while also infusing their own modern sensibilities. It’s not hard to see what this sword story is so well loved, even if its overwrought ending doesn’t come close to touching the charm of its early charm and wanderlust.

Kaguya-Sama: Love is War

The best damn rom-com slice of life anime I’ve ever seen. Season 2 blew me away. I laughed. I cried. I enjoyed the new tertiary characters and was gratefully surprised by how easily the story was able to sustain the pace, brevity and sneaky depth of season 1. This show is special.

Dragon Ball

I want to enjoy this, if only ‘cuz I want to understand the story that is considered so foundational to many other fans. And I LOVE the trademark animation, of course. But...also..there’s a whole lot of moments in this that are just uh...they require explaining in 2020. Maybe I just need to get over my scruples and power through, idk.

Katekyo Hitman Reborn!

My current shonen project. I’ve been stalled out on the timeskip arc for about...a year now? But I’m not willing to call it quits yet! I need to see this bonkers time-traveling mafia war through to its conclusion.

Gintama

I fucking adore Gintama. I love how it doesn’t give a fuck about skewering anime as a medium until it flips a switch and slaps you upside the head with some weirdly emotional and hopeful message. Every character is both hilarious and yet has this deeply emotional connection to the audience. It is perfect satire.

MANGA

Note: People often ask me where I get my manga. My answer can vary from title to title, but my usual go-to is Epilogue Books, owned and run by my dear friend and writing partner of many years. I have a semi-regular shipment of titles I receive from them depending on how quick I get through a given shipment. If you’re looking for these, or any other manga, give their site a gander or contact them directly. They’ll hook you up, and you’ll have the satisfaction of supporting literally anyone but Amazon.

One Piece

I’m on volume 33 of the Skypiea arc, which has been so-so compared to the previous arcs with Crocodile and the adventures in the Deep Blue. I do find the Kami to be a curious and compelling villain, but none of the Straw Hats have done much in the way of growth beyond “get separated, fight jobber bosses, come back together and let Luffy finish the fight”. I’m toward the end of the arc, however, so we’ll see how it rolls.

Berserk

Holy shit Berserk. A bunch of folks told me to read this when I asked for suggestions on twitter. I saw the cover art and was like “ok guy with big sword in a dark fantasy world, neat”. Wasn’t sure if it said more about the people who suggested it, or more about me that they thought I’d like it. I was also deeply nervous about dark fantasy after my fiasco with Goblin Slayer. But I went with it and gave the first volume a read and HOLY SMOKES. What a damn read. Not only does the story have me hooked, but also, it is GORGEOUS. It is dark. It is moody. It is occasionally humorous. But its STYLE just grabs me in a way that is reminiscent of the old Spawn comics from my youth. I immediately ordered more and I can’t wait.

Fairy Tail

Just finished the lullaby arc and now we are deep into the Deliora arc with the Cold Emperor. It’s really been fun to see how the manga differs from the anime. The anime was my first true shonen experience and a story that I credit with having saved my life, so I had high expectations coming into this. I’m happy to say that thus far, the manga of Fairy Tail is worth every bit of attention that the anime received. Can’t wait to keep going.

Fruits Basket

Fruits Basket is fucking precious and if you come at these characters I swear to god I will come back at you. *deep breath* Okay. Settle. This is a positively lovely story, centered in positivity, kindness, and found family. Each character is working through trauma in their own imperfect way, and I adore their journeys. You can tell the story was penned by a deeply vulnerable human and I can’t thank them enough for having the courage to share it. Read this manga- and then go see the equally gorgeous anime.

Eden’s Zero

Written and drawn by the same crew who did Fairy Tail, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call it Fairy Tail In Space. That said, volume 1 gave me just enough to get curious again about where Mashima is heading with his latest creative opus- and whether it will cross over with his wildly successful Fairy Tail universe. And yes, in case the above panel wasn’t enough of a cue- Mashima and co. can still play my heart for tears like no one’s business and it’s damn rude.

Sailor Moon

I love the Sailor Moon anime. I think it’s an adorable show with deeply relatable characters that approaches the monster of the week format with an effectiveness that would make even Buffy the Vampire Slayer jealous. The manga is just as wonderful- not to mention beautifully drawn. Volume 1 also works much, much faster than the show does, and I dare say it is better for it.

VIDYA GAMES

Warzone

I’m just seven levels out from completing my third battlepass straight. I’m going to try the Black Ops alpha this week. I’ve played Warzone a whole lot less lately, dedicating my evenings to reading manga, napping, or watching wrestling with pals instead, but it still remains my favorite shooter at this time.

Cities: Skylines

I started a new city last week. It’s a shithole industrial city on a desert map. I had to set my sewer drainage in a manmade lake outside of town that quickly overflowed. At one point the sewage flood disabled my powerplants which in turn caused my entire town of 8k to flee. I went into 3 million in debt while waiting for the town to rebound. I came out of it eventually, repopulating the town to the tune of well over 11k, and restoring my budget surplus, but it was a huge fucking ordeal. I love this game.

Yakuza 0

After chapter 1 of Yakuza 0 I was ready to write this game off. The camera angles pissed me off. The fight commands felt simplistic. The story was boring. But as I thought back to my experience of chapter 1, I realized that it more closely resembled some of my favorite action film sequences than I had initially realized. Did the button mashing make my wrists beg for mercy? Absolutely. Was it satisfying to overcome an absurd amount of enemies using little more than my x button and my wits? Also yes. And did those fights build on each other to create a sense of violent urgency as I propelled myself toward the “boss”? Definitely yes. And then you leave chapter 1 and get your run of a map that includes karaoke bars, Sega arcades and ramen shops- and yes, you better believe that I spent way too much time playing Sega’s Outrun. While jogging between shops and minigames random mobs of enemies pop up and try to start shit with you- much as they might in a JRPG. In fact, the game itself has a lot of RPG elements in it- stat boosts and inventory management and even a relationship meter. The more time I put in, the more the game opens up. I’m going to keep giving Yakuza 0 a shot for as long as that continues to be the case. Also, it is a perfect option to play as a streamed game on my phone.

Mario 64

Can you believe I’ve never played Mario 64? Seems embarrassing to admit now. So here I am, many, many years late to the party. I’ll let y’all know how I like it. So far...I’m already lost on the first course, so...hopefully things pick up.

Sky

Sky has been a bizarre experience. It’s the latest game from That Game Company, their previous work including Journey and Flower. Sky has that same aimless charm, but I also just can’t get into it to save my life. It’s free-to-play, but abstractly so- I’m not sure what the paid content even really does. I have a few friends on Sky- they typically have to drag me to the places they want to go. There’s nothing at stake in the world of sky- there are spirits you can free and content you can unlock, and occasionally you do encounter foes who pose a danger to you, but for the most part it’s basically a fetch quest with social elements added in. I appreciate those social experiences, and the community seems very chill, but it’s also a bit of a stress to log in and have everyone flock to you demanding your attention and time. Also, this game is only playable on my mobile phone, which I am not used to gaming on, so...focus is limited. I mostly just vibe on the starter island and talk to acquaintances.

Music

Powfu

DJ Blyatman

fawlin x Naits

Josh A

Tekken 7 OST

gothurted

Beast in Black

Battle Beast

Legos

Hey! I’m doing legos! That seems like a totally normal hobby to have at my age...yeah. Totally.

Anyway, I’m working on the Pirates of Barracuda Bay set. It’s about 3k pieces. It’s been a fun build so far! Here’s my progress...

WRASTLIN

Yes, I’m still watching wrestling. I usually get an episode or two in every week with my pals on discord. It’s not as many as I’d like to watch, but it’s for the best. If my viewing wasn’t forcibly tempered I’d have likely lost the past few months entirely to wrestling. And as you might have guessed from above, I’m someone who is happiest when their hobbies are varied and numerous.

I’m in June of 1999 of the WWF storyline. Undertaker is the heavyweight champ, the Acolytes hold the tag belts, Jeff Jarrett has the intercontinental title belt and Owen Hart just died. King of the Ring is less than a week away. My friends and I have filled out brackets. I’m very excited to see who, if any of us, ends up being right about the winner.

SPORTS???

I gave baseball the old college try. I ended up giving up. It just isn’t the escape I need. Something about those empty stadiums and players half-wearing masks and the shortened games just throws me off. I don’t feel at ease watching baseball in 2020. When I first got into baseball back in 2014 or so, it was because I was sick and baseball promised an illusion of normalcy- I could watch the rest of the world function in relative stability and hope that someday I too could join them. Now it’s the rest of the world that’s sick, and I’m relatively well, and all baseball can do for me in 2020 is remind me that I’m damn lucky I’m as well as I am, and that if I’m careless (or just plain unlucky) that I’ll be pretty sick to.

So where did I turn for competitive entertainment?

Well, there was wrestling, to be sure, but the real joy I’ve found is at SpriteClub.

The quick pitch- people just like you or me create fighters in M.U.G.E.N., a 2-D fighting game engine. These fighters, or sprites, are guided by AI, also designed by people like you and I. Think of it like a gundam and its pilot. They’re tossed into a pool with a whole bunch of other community creations and left to duke it out while the viewers bet fake money on the winners.

You would think that the idea might only appeal to gambling junkies and fighting game addicts, but the truth is this eclectic channel has a much wider appeal than one might initially give it credit for.

For one, its catalogue of fighters includes everything from pop culture superheroes to obscure anime characters to widely shared memes. It is almost impossible to not find a character you’ll have some sense of loyalty to.

Beyond that, the crowd that populates the chat is courteous, kind, and downright educational- a remarkable mix for anywhere gamers populate. It’s a relatively small community, so the channel takes the feeling of an intimate corner bar. If you enter the chat respecting the chill and willing to listen, you will learn a great deal not just about the fighters, but about how the genre of 2D fighter works as a whole.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of SpriteClub is the exhibitions feature, which allows you to request custom matches with your favorite characters, which play out on the Twitch stream for others to view and bet on. Although often chaotic, the exhibition mode is home to a number of long-running series set up my stream regulars. These series take on a life and lore of their own that is frankly fascinating. Think of it like a more frenetic video game karaoke. Yes, picking good fighters is a goal, but so is finding a good angle for the match- the right level of humor, the right pairing of unlikely characters, and set-up for matches that are competitive, as opposed to predictable stomps.

I’ve never jumped into a Twitch channel as a regular before. I’ve never subbed to anything on Twitch before. The gamer community as a whole has always been one that’s left a bad taste in my mouth, rightfully so. But SpriteClub has been a lovely brightspot and proof that kind and informative gaming communities can and do continue to exist. I foresee myself being a regular viewer for some time to come.

And that’s it!

That’s pretty much everything I can think of sharing at this time! I hope y’all enjoyed it. As you can tell, I’ve done my best to keep busy. Hopefully I’ll have even more to share with you all in the immediate future. Until then, thanks for reading, and keep well!

0 notes

pinksweatergettingbetter · 6 years

Text

warning, the following has mainly snarky (and possibly furious) opinions on Spirit of Justice. Reader discretion is advised.

Okay folks. this is it. part 1 of the final chapter

here we go.

trial day 2?? oh yeah i forgot they split this game up in the worst, uneven way possible

wow that cutscene was

something alright

wow datz actually managed to hold onto the snow globe. kudos?

what the fuck

i think i heard it wrong but Dhurke’s objection sounds like an old man

I'm pretty sure i heard it wrong

missed the bass

who was that no– oh Garananana

i guess she's gonna be the final boss instead huh

im so tired i cant even snark properly

“is that kosher?”

i like it

oh god

what.... what is she wearing

i mean

fuckin

TALK about madonna-whore complex. oh yeah, time to turn super evil?? bear your midriff! show off dem tiddies!

look, SOJ. theres only one bad bitch in ace attorney who can pull off floaty tendril hair, and its NOT ga’ran.

i cant believe i have to look at this train wreck for the rest of the trial

“heh heh heh. its all coming back now. the feel of my blood pumping through my veins”

this is perhaps because youre actually moving now, your eminence.

can we just dispense with the trial and have a good old fashioned anime fight? cmon apollo, spike up that hair and grab your BFS.

“meep”

WHATS WITH THE MEEPING

BONNY DID THAT TOO

SOJ ITS 2016 ...ACTUALLY ITS 2028 YOU HOLES

everyone in the court: :O what??? whats wrong with rayfa??? why is she sad???

oh i dunno maybe because her fucking Father just got brutally murdered?? maybe??

what the fuck is up with SOJ characters being dumb as a bag of bricks when it comes to other peoples’ feelings regarding death of loved ones???

phoenix: shits fucked, thats why?? apollo: OHHHHHHHHHHHHH

“seems like she's worse off today than she was yesterday”

hey game you'd better not be implying any shit

“discipline”

soj

alright, back after another longass break. i can do this.

( That’s oddly compassionate of him, all things considered )

I was about to defend Nahyuta because what kind of person wouldn’t try to spare a child from witnessing that kind of trauma... but then again, this is the Sadmad who purposefully tried to trigger someone into losing a trial so

(shrug emoji)

grana’s gone into full HORHORHOR BITCH MODE

partially I'm totally numb because i dont have any stakes in her newfound ebilness, and partially I'm tired of this weird new trend of child abuse in the new games

“Barbed head.”

oh my god

the first person she goes to after realizing that her caretaker is gone is fucking Phoenix

im gonna cry

“ive been reduced to “royal robe remover”” NO NICK YOU’VE BEEN UPGRADED TO DAD BY SOMEONE WHO’S NOT YOU

( ‘It’s like she’s grooming Mr. Wright to be Nayna’s replacement’)

I know this game is all about confusing bullshit for heartwarming moments and vice versa but guys

good lord

my heart

i really needed that

(sigh) they really couldn’t get someone who sounded like a fucking 14 year old to do her voice?? really???

rayfa: (looks like she's going to die and collapses)

apollo: this is not good...

gee apollo you really think so?

wait a fuking second

we went through the whole dance cutscene and we’re not even going to see the pool??? does that mean the priestess has to be conscious and present for the images to be visible? ...and how does that work, anyway?

i just realized, a medium could use a pool to see the dead, but how the hell could they project it for others to see?? does she literally open a portal to hell???

(sigh) i just regret sitting through that cutscene again

“cabal of traitorous lawyers”

i love that

(Seriously Dhurke? This is no laughing matter.)

this basically sums up Dhurke’s entire personality

...yknow, i know what they were trying to do with his character– i really do. i know he’s supposed to come off as a dashing, cavalier rebel who laughs in the face of danger.

but they overshot endearingly irreverent and ploughed straight into fuckwaddome. if you want a character to be charming, they need softer moments too. Dhurke isn’t a bad person, but he’s kind of an asshole when you get right down to it, and nothing so far is proving otherwise.

ok ive heard Dhurke’s Objection again and it doesn't sound like an old man– it just sounds about as overblown and ridiculous as Manfred von Karma’s (not to mention about as deep)

LET DHURKE SAY BITCH

... i guess

another perfect example of Dhurke being kind of a fuckwad: he keeps needling the queen and baiting her in ways that could get himself killed, which would be all fine and dandy if he were the brave resistance leader being tortured for information in the bowels of a dungeon.

...but here’s the thing.

IF YOU DIE, DHURKE, APOLLO AND PHOENIX DIE TOO. DID YOU FORGET ABOUT THE GODDAMN DC ACT? ITS NOT JUST YOUR DEAD ASS ON THE LINE HERE SO SHUT YOUR SASSY TRAP AND THINK ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOUR *AMAZING WIT* FOR ONCE.

you’ve got 2 extra lives on the line here.

...3 if my suspicions are correct.

stop calling him son please you abandoned him in an orphanage and didnt contact him for 14 years.

...and if he can’t call you ‘dad’ you have no right to call him ‘son’

coming back to this after ghost trick has convinced me that one of ga’ran’s lackeys miiiiiight be related to Cabanela, baby

“Wright... I can see we are kindred spirits, you and I! Hah-ha ha ha ha ha!!”

FUCK YOU DHURKE

“It’s pretty easy to spot the difference between a soulless man and the soulless shell of a man”

ok that did get a laugh out of me, good job dhurke.

apollo: pls dont get us killed dhurke: mmmm ok ill try but I'm not promising anything lol

://///

“But remember, son, if you truly believe in me, you should be able to prove my innocence.”

do i even have to list how many reasons thats wrong and a shitty thing to say

“Such Insolence”

You’ve been beat out, Not So Fast

Ga’ran used Gust!

Apollo flinched and couldn’t move!

“I could behead you at any time”

she's got a point; she’s a fucking despot, there’s no reason to actually hold a trial. i mean i guess she wants to shut up the rebels but just killing them would be a lot easier and its not like she has any qualms about murder

“Aw shoot, ya got me.”

again, not an appropriate reaction for whats going on buddy

lol get fucked kjudge

DGFUFUS OH COOL

WE GOT GUILTY (excited cheers from the audience)

the applause and the shots of everyone with :O faces is making me feel like i just won a gameshow

wheres my cheesy jingle

also i love how Dhurke’s like “oh shit!! my assholishness has directly resulted in my son’s death!!! did NOT see that coming!!!!!!!!!”

again the sound mixing is drowning out the background music (sigh)

“your benevolence? I’d be happy to lend an ear if you’d like to talk!”

>this is it, this is why he leaves the series guys. Apollo is too good for these sinful games.

DAMNIT DHURKE, YOUR SHIT MOUTH IS RUBBING OFF ON YOUR SON

hmm

we’ve got an april may here

“Rayfa, I shall buy you a new servant”

so Kooraheen practices slavery..? I mean, she.... she said ‘buy’, not hire.

“she would have left shoeprints”

do you know what evaporation is your malevolence

wait wait wait

that doesn't make any sense

the only prints leading out are from Inga, but the prints inside the building are from Nayna? how did she avoid leaving prints leading inside, then?? did she just long-jump over the dirt path???

the guards are not fanboying, apollo, they’re toadying. there’s a difference.

apollo: maybe the place he was stabbed and the place he died were different

(the game only continues after you carefully explain what dying of blood loss is three years later)

to be completely fair, there are actually stories of people who were unaware of being stabbed

furthermore, when you get stabbed, you’re not going to be the most rational human being on earth.

phoenix, don’t give sadmad that point, especially when he’s currently assaulting your protege

now, as i was saying, Apollo’s suggestion that Inga was stabbed in the back and then ran into the temple is perfectly plausible; running to shelter from an attacker is probably the first thing you’d want to do when injured, and the tomb was a pretty safe place, i’d wager.

tbh i really don’t know why they’re arguing about him feeling the pain as that wouldn’t really impair his movement considering he was stabbed in a place that wouldn’t affect his ability to walk???

but yeah apparently he was doped up to shit so

...i highly doubt back pain medication is strong enough to negate a stab wound. on the other hand, if it is and your back pain is THAT intense, Inga, you need to see a fucking doctor pronto.

...yeah shots straight into the spine is one step away from surgery; not to be an asshole but I'm not sure Inga was doing so well anyway before he went

huh. are they really gonna give us an actual choosable choice to abandon Dhurke and save our own skin? Cause that would be interesting; a lot like the old games where you could “”choose”” to defend a client or not.

to be clear here, though, i wouldn't choose “no” even as much as i dislike dhurke. we know (sigh) that he’s innocent, and even if i dont like him it’s our duty to defend his shitty ass

OH HOLY FUCK

THERES THE CHOICE

wow. y’know SOJ, i dont much like you, but you fuckin Did That. well done.

also thank you for the Justice pun it is much appreciated.

“And while I can’t say I’m used to it, this isn’t exactly my first rodeo”

FWHAT

>game flashes back to the Ahlbi case

DSKJFLS THIS IS LITERALLY THE “at second rodeo: this isn't my first rodeo” POST

YES OK WE’VE SEEN THIS CUTSCENE TWICE NOW ALREADY

WE GET IT, RAYFAS GOT COLD FEET ABOUT BEING QUEEN

MAYAS IN THE GAME

phoenix: allow me to mansplain how rayfa is feeling despite how fucking obvious it is. after all, we know our players have the mental and emotional capacity of goldfish!

oh hey mansplain is a legit word in the dictionary

cool!

why are they building this up?? just fucking tell Rayfa to do her stupid dance again and get on with it; we already did this at the beginning of the trial

“Hmm... Indeed. It would be problematic.”

ohohoooohohohhhihgjhgo

oh her nails are actually tiny pen

thats neat

thank goodness Kooraheeneese is an up-and-down written language– otherwise they’d have to make a whole new animation for the english game teehee

“....................But... Horn Head needs my help”

oh my heart

dan she just straight up begone’d her

see the one thing that falls flat here is that, during a regular trial, the prosecution saying “oh, ok, have it your way; you can try to prove your theory” holds up a little more since they... you know. don’t have absolute power.

where as, with Garananana, its more like she's just a huge posturing pushover. especially since every other minute she's saying “ok, I'm gonna kill you for REAL now.”

rayfa: b but if i fail you'll be killed!!! i dont get it...

apollo: i literally just finished explaining that I'm 100% ready to die for my shitty job that was like 5 minutes ago

it is sweet to see that he’s cheering her on though. good big bro

I'm finding small solace in this beautiful moment of “your foreign dad and bro are here for you babe reach for the stars”

Athena’s probably flashing a double thumbs up from the gallery too

“But... I finally know now. I know in what I can trust”

Bobby, from the afterlife: YOU’RE DOING AMAZING SWEETIE

Garan: What??? my tiny 14 year old daughter is going to do a thing i don’t want her to??? fuck there’s no way i can shut her up. not even with all of my large adult man guards who could easily just escort her out of the courtroom without any resistance because they’re my fucking royal guards and I'm the Queen

oh shit she took off her own cape

im so glad i muted the game so her awful voice actress couldn’t ruin this cool moment

and now as this long ass cutscene plays out again, i simply cannot help but wonder about the poor choir and how long they’ve been on standby

where do they keep the choir during trials

whats it like singing the dance of devotion song every trial

oh finally here we go. alright, lets see what the magic party pool has in store for us this time

...o ...ok then

OH! OH SHIT

Inga’s face blind?!

Y’know I did have a few thoughts about that when we discovered his notebook but I didn’t think they’d actually go that route... though, thinking about it now, it is pretty convenient.

...ok everyone’s freaking out. maybe they’ve never heard of face-blindness? ...or maybe its not face blindness after all

im pretty sure it is though

i dont know why but everyone being like FUCK ITS GOD and phoenix being like “whoops shits trippy now” made me laugh pretty hard

ok i gotta say I'm actually a little invested now, even if its just because i think face-blindness is an interesting thing to incorporate into a murder case. again, a convenient thing, but an interesting thing all the same.

ahh fuck i keep forgetting how the stupid seance works

welp, there goes one of my souls... (sigh)

..apollo you dont need to show her the picture of her dead father to say “he had a cell phone”.

the voice was coming from INSIDE THE PHONE

RAYFA HAS A PET FROG????

WHAT

SHOW US THE FROG SOJ

SHOW US THE FROG! SHOW US THE FROG! SHOW US THE FROG!

...why would Rayfa interpret the sound of the warbaa’d (something she’s familiar with) with a lion’s roar (something she’s unfamiliar with) ??

oh i see thats why Vore Machine is an idiot

for plot convenience

Datz Are’bal, a man who throws fire crackers at children.

...sounds like an are’bal guy.

bahdum-tshh

“The joker who got a kick out of startling Ahlbi with his Dragon Snot Snaps”

...something tells me that if Datz found out about Youtube, he’d be one of those “””prank””” channels.

also WHY ARE THEY CALLED SNOT SNAPS

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

“happy-go-lucky”

i think you mean vaguely sociopathic

(sigh) ive finally been worn down to the point where i need a walkthrough. ive... been beaten...

boy ahlbi’s just a font of knowledge isn't he

DID SHE JUST BREAK HER NAILS OFF

PLEASE SAY THOSE WERE STICK ONS

HOL SHIT

MMMM LAY IT ON ME NICK

face blindness

... i mean theyre not calling it that but thats what it is

yeah yeah channeling blah blah come on! youre in the LAND of channeling !

shduhjahdjk

I'm picturing Inga running into his own dead body and flipping his shit

oh man. thats the end of Trail 2 part 1.

guess i’ll see you guys on the other side... heheh.

#soj spoilers #sulking over SOJ #ooc #its a LONG one]

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prorevenge · 7 years

Text

I was doing you a favor by playing the long game...

I too was playing yet another long game by holding on to this for so long.

SO I had read earlier today the owner of a previous job of mine passed away. This was a place that tried to screw me pretty hard and I took some pro revenge on. It drug up some angry old feelings, so why not take an equal dose of catharsis?

WARNING: This is a doozy so strap in if you dare, no TL;DR it wouldn't do justice.

So this takes place almost a decade ago. I was working as a department manager for a fairly large privately owned pest control company. Their color scheme was black and yellow, much like the taxi's the owner's dad used to drive. Since the taxi industry would be around for ever(hello Uber/Lyft) so would this pest control company, (this is important later) or so the owner used to parrot constantly. My job was to over see the techs doing treatments and set their stops and generally manage assorted insect control services, inventory, payroll for that dept, etc etc. I had taken the job from the owners son who took it from the previous manager who they demoted and yet stayed in the dept...this is important later. The owners son was a late 30's early 40's man child. I mean if he had dialed it back a few degrees he would have been an awesome guy, but anytime booze was involved he was a mess. If it was weed, he turned into the stereo typical obnoxious stoner making nothing but bad Jamaican accented jokes. He also hit on anything younger than him that moved...while being married w a pregnant wife. But I digress, the owner was a piece of work too, old Jewish guy who was as racist as he was old, not with any kind of seething hatred. Just a "this is the way it is" type attitude. My fave line of his, "The sky is blue, Ch#@ks know math, N@&ers are lazy, Jews know gold. What else is new" Like it was the most clever thing of all time. Finally now on to the revenge and need for such.

I had been at said job for about two and a half years, while there I had gotten engaged about 6 month earlier. Due to the awesomeness of my staff I invited about 10 employees to my wedding(it was going to be big due to the wife's family and mine's tiny so..) including the owner his son and the previous manager. I should have felt the ripples in the water when I had planned the trip to propose. The day before I go the owner comes in to do something with a big job and I tell him of my vacation plans as he is looking at the schedule. After I tell him of the somewhat expensive accommodations (I was proposing to my then gf), he literally says, "that's a great idea I haven't been there in years, I think I'll go tomorrow too!" I think he is joking, but he immediately tells his son who was taking over my work that he needs to take over for him and be a presence at the job site. Then tries to demand I clear a day out of my booked vacation schedule for us to meet up with him so he can take us out to some expensive place or some crap. On that one day during the trip he ended up no call no show-ing after we invited him to meet and hang with our family. We spent about an hour trying to call/message/email the guy and he never responded the entire trip. I get back he starts cracking lame jokes about how I ditched him to get engaged...that really pissed me off.

It gets better. Over the course of the next few months strange shit starts happening. I am forced to let go of a few of my techs for BS reasons like the 3 strike rule of attendance randomly being enforced without writ-ups or even verbal warnings. One guy had a 3 month old kid with his GF and I had to let the guy go because of a 3rd lateness of over 5 min from almost 90 days earlier and the previous two being almost 2 years old with the notes of in-climate weather and no routes that day (they also denied him unemployment and tried to enforce a 90 day no compete clause that would have stopped him form getting a job w the competition). Then I get a high priority job of going through back logs of unpaid services and start trying to preform collections with me receiving a % of what I collect(that I was never paid). Over the next month or two I keep getting odd things thrown at me to make money which don't have much to do with my regular job. Till one week where the entire office gets the flu. The owners son, previous manager(now just an officer worker), my assistant and about half the techs call out over the course of the week. I still come in with a 102 fever and goddamn doctors note in case I need to bail, just to get everyone set up and do as much as I can before almost passing out 3 days in a row. I get the entire day's work done by 1pm and leave all with the boss's son's approval. He was thrilled things were still working while the plague rampaged on. But not the owner apparently. I got pulled into the office and yelled at about not taking initiative and calling out all these days...he sounds like he is about to fire me before he asks me if I have anything to say for my self. So I correct him and he looks really shaken and then tells me some BS about the EPA stepping in and making us reduce the number of services we are allowed to do from quarterly (4x a yr) to a trimester schedule (3x) all while paying the same price. Guess who got to call almost every paying customer and try to get them to swallow that? ::raises hand::. So I take care of that over another two weeks and once again get called in to the office. Saying we cannot have this anymore and the EPA is crashing down hard on us and I just keep giving out too many services because the EPA really said we are not allowed to treat more than 2x a year and they lied to me throwing me under the bus(turns out that was a lie too they were trying to get up to stop treatments all together). Knowing I never had the power to authorize a single extra service without consent from the owners. So they had to let me go...only 4 month before I was going to get married. It got a bit intense as emotions ran high, the asshole of a son tells, "My dad told me to fire you a while ago for attendance but I knew you were getting married and I didn't want to mess that up so I played the long game for you man...." In an office with no strict punch schedule for the office workers as we were salary and constantly did things like get food for the office or have to run errands for the business and get stock from another location. Along w/ the EPA bullshit he tells me he just couldn't have a dept with two other managers in it who made less than I do doing the same job. They also tried to block my unemployment with falsified paperwork, claiming unsatisfactory attendance. Tons of bullshit and I never got a strait answer as to why I was let go till I did some investigating. Turns out the old manager who was just an office hand was being put back in the spot she was fired form because she offered to take a 33% pay cut form her old salary and the son just didn't want the extra work.....So they tried to scapegoat me for EPA violations and tried to tell the rest of the office my fuckups were the reason people were let go and the department was going to close.

So now that you've read all that you may have a bit of a feel for why I took my revenge so far and for so long. Luckily I had snapped a few pics of the paperwork I signed upon leaving stating it was due to the EPA infractions. That gets printed out and sent to the department of labor with the rest of their awesome tactics(shorting over time and flat out not paying for paid vacations, time card edits). That lead to tens of thousands of dollars lost in pack pay and fines being levied. The guy w/ the 3 month kid I had to let go told me he eventually settled for almost 35k in back pay... My next stop was the EPA, who much to their surprise didn't even know the company had kept doing the treatments at all as it was supposed to be stopped altogether. Luckily they knew the deal and that it wasn't just me making treatments all willy nilly like. More fines, for each and every treatment performed by them from about 3 months before they fired me. That had to be in the 6 figure range as there was well over 1.5k treatments done in the time and the fine was supposed to be over 1k each. The problem with the treatments were they were too effective, and were wiping out the type of insect that has beneficial and necessary environmental roles. So the mfers were actually hurting the ecology of our goddamn state for their own profit. I created a few fake FB profiles to still be able to follow the owner and his son on FB and find out not 30 days after their EPA issues my department closed down.

Okay so that was 2006ish, two years pass and I keep seeing my POS old boss, speeding around the area (I lived near the place) in his old ass little red Mercedes. Guess who called the cops worrying about the safety of those on the road around this dangerous car? Guess who eventually got caught for DUI at 2pm in the afternoon?

Fast forward a few years to 2011. Mr Whiz Kahlifa drops the song Black and yellow. Decent track. But remember how my old boss was a super racist fellow? Remember the business' color scheme? So I spent about a month sending him different youtube links to that song, from random email accounts. And finally one of a commercial for the company with Whiz's song over it vs the lame jingle they used. Not two weeks after I stop they change the goddamn color scheme of the place to a horrible red white and blue one. But not exactly red white and blue like the American flag more like the Blue white red of the French one. I wait about a month after the Black and Yellow attack and send him a vid of the French national anthem while a the flag is waving in the background. The next goddamn day the place is covered in that cheesy car dealer red white and blue American bunting and American flags everywhere.

Fast forward again to about 2014 and fuck me if I am not out for a walk, and see that company's sign in a lawn advertising that same old treatment on the same old signs from 06'...guess who got sent yet another email to the EPA w pictures? That one got them in major and local news as being "no friend to the environment".

Last time I went by their place they seemingly had half fleet of what are now used blue white and red covered mini trucks. Plus their call center building was emptied of furniture. Unfortunately they are still in business but are sitting at about a 3 star rating on Yelp and that was after they did the damage control to get it back from 1.5 stars.

Sorry(not sorry) guys, I was just playing the long game for you....

(source) (story by StendhalSyndrome)

#pro revenge #by StendhalSyndrome #prorevenge #pro revenge stories #revenge stories #pro #revenge

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