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artificialqueens · 3 years

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Chase the Shadows Away (Taywhora) - Juno

Summary: It’s April 2020, the UK is in lockdown, and Tayce gets a hand-delivered letter from her neighbour Aurora which may change her life.

A/N: So this is set during lockdown and does mention covid, so please bear this in mind when reading if this will be a worry, but otherwise I hope you enjoy. CWs in place for alcohol, mental health mentions, and non-adherence to lockdown rules at one point.

Otherwise it’s quite fluffy with some h/c. I hope you enjoy.

The first letter Tayce got was in early April.

She hadn’t had much post since the whole country had been locked down, no one allowed to move outside their front doors for more than once a day for threat of fines and penalties and even getting sick. Most of the letters she was getting this week had been birthday cards for her absent housemate. She’d put the various brightly-coloured cards and Amazon boxes in a pile outside Viv’s bedroom door, and gave the pile the middle finger every time she walked past it.

But today there was a plain, white envelope, with “Hi” written on it in glittery red pen, and when Tayce opened it, she found a piece of notebook paper that had been folded at least four times, and Tayce nearly threw it across the room with the effort it was taking to open.

This had better be worth it.

When she got it unfolded, she read the three lines in the same glitter pen, then again, and once more just in case.

‘Hi, I’m Aurora. I’m on my own in my flat 7D because my housemate moved home because of lockdown, and you seem to be alone too. Want to write to each other? X’

And Tayce couldn’t hold back the rush of emotion, as much as she tried - but she was alone, and she took comfort knowing only these four walls would see tears stream down her face.

——

Tayce was on her own in the flat.

In the day time she opened her work laptop, thanking god she was allowed to work from home; throwing a hoodie over her pyjama top just in time for the 9am meeting where her boss grinned at everyone and told them all to keep swimming and chin up and whatever other self-indulgent bullshit she had read in her How To Motivate Your Teammanual in the chapter about Managing Pandemics.

Tayce was still surprised at how much bullshit her workmates seemed to swallow; all of them with the same broad smiles and straightened hair and shaved chins and eyeliner, for fuck’s sake - but Tayce copied them, knowing that not painting her own smile and her own eyebrows on was damning herself for the inevitable call and the simpering It’s Good To Talk conversation, followed by u k hun xx to be flashing repeatedly in the work WhatsApp group from all the team.

In the evenings, the only noise was the clink of the glass bottle against the wine glass. One glass was enough to make her a little sleepy, two was enough to make her dance, and three was enough to make her post something cryptic on her insta story and see if anyone DMed her.

Sometimes they did.

Joe liked to crack a few morbid jokes about how it was the apocalypse and we were all going to be dead by 2021, which didn’t help Tayce in the slightest. Ginny would message “You alright, bab?” at three in the morning, but never reply to any other message. Tia would send Tayce a picture of the banana bread she’d baked as if that would cheer Tayce up.

And Cherry sent her a message one time, telling her to look after her mental health, and then Tayce felt bad because Cherry worked for the NHS and only seemed to work and sleep right now, her insta photos showing her looking more and more gaunt, with #ClapForHeroes and #ProtectTheNHS appearing at the bottom of all her posts.

Nothing curbed the gaping black hole in Tayce’s chest, sucking everything that was good from her body and leaving her a shell.

Until the letter arrived.

——

Two days after she’d posted her own letter back to 7D, another letter arrived, in the same glittery red pen, this time addressed to her, with Tayce written on the front of the envelope this time.

‘Hi Tayce (sp?) nice to meet you, don’t worry I don’t know what to say either! Where in Wales are you from? I’m from Nottingham but I came to London for uni and didn’t leave! Are you still working rn? I got furloughed which is a bit shit. And my housemate is staying with her boyfriend so she can’t move back. Have you been clapping for the NHS? Someone on my floor was banging a pan or something!! Hope your ok? WB Aurora xx’

“I’m making a new friend,” Tayce had said to her mum on the phone later that night.

“In lockdown?”

“She’s delivering me letters.”

“How?”

“By hand, mum.” Tayce forced a laugh. “You know. Through the letterbox like a normal letter.”

“I hope you’re washing your hands before and after you open them, are you?”

“Yeah, of course,” Tayce grimaced as she said it.

“Good. Stay safe. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

One of these days, Tayce thought as she disconnected the call, she might be able to say it without her voice breaking.

——

By mid-April, a full month since lockdown had started and two weeks after the first letters between them, Aurora had given Tayce her instagram handle, and Tayce had given hers in return. Tayce found herself spending all of her Good Friday skimming down the page on moreauroramore, looking through all of her new pen pal’s photos and trying desperately not to look like an idiot by accidentally double-tapping any that were obviously over a year old.

Tayce had pictured Aurora in her mind as being over-excitable, short, with dark hair and lots of dusty pinks and baby blues and other pastel colours as her aesthetic, maybe with pot plants and cat pictures and cutesy little slogans surrounded by hearts. Instead she’d found a smolderingly attractive woman with a ridiculously versatile and sophisticated sense of fashion; one photo in a rococo-inspired summer dress, and the next in a cerulean blazer, matching trousers, and stilettos. Her hair was platinum-blonde, but it was hard to tell her eye colour as she seemed to own a never-ending plethora of colour contacts; and the eyebrow ring in the early pictures was replaced by a silver septum ring in later ones.

Her own insta looked quite plain in comparison, Tayce thought to herself. The landscapes she liked to post were interesting to her but probably not to the magnificent person on Aurora’s insta. The last picture Tayce had taken was of herself with her brother and niece in red rugby shirts just before the Six Nations was on; the last selfie before the last time she’d gone home which was … only February, she realised.

February felt like years ago.

When Tayce had awoken the next morning, she was greeted by the doorbell, and an Amazon driver sprinting away the moment she opened the door. A letter was on the doormat, in the familiar red glittery pen, and a single chocolate Easter egg.

‘Happy Easter Tayce. Don’t know if you celebrate but lol thought you would like some chocolate anyway! Don’t eat it all at once. Aurora xx’

It made Tayce’s gut wrench with guilt that she hadn’t thought to get Aurora one.

But it made Tayce even more pained, once she had clicked onto her instagram, to see that moreauroramore had liked all thirteen of the pictures she’d posted this year.

——

The zoom call at the end of April with the others from her uni group, saw not just Cherry missing, but also Ellie and Veronica.

“Ellie’s moving this week,” Lawrence nodded at the screen, “but that was all she’d tell me. She didn’t say where. Or if she’s staying in Dundee or anything. I just know she’s still trying to get her internet set up and I think she’s a bit stuck.”

“What about Vee?” Ginny asked in a low voice.

They all recognised the somber tone. They’d all taken it up. A change in their voices that all of them recognised in a kind of collective telepathic awareness. A hush in the calls, as if someone were dying, or had just died. Whenever anyone was missing, it was always the same worry circling all of their minds: what if it’s covid what if it’s covid what if it’s -

Tia was shaking her head. “It’s not covid,” she said, reading the minds of everyone through the internet, but her voice was still solemn as she continued. “I spoke to her mum. She’s -“

“Say depressed, Tia, it’s fine.” Bimini spoke gently, but not all of them were as open as Bimini was. Especially when it came to Veronica, who was a brick wall when it came to showing what she was feeling.

“She’s - not in a good place.”

“Say mental health,” Bimini said, shaking their head. “It’s okay to not be okay.”

“I don’t think that’s gonna make her feel any better, Bim.” Tia rolled her eyes.

“We’re all feeling this,” Pip nodded. “We all need to talk to each other.”

“Veronica won’t. Not yet. We just need to be there for her when she does. Anyway, who’s done anything interesting? Anyone else been trying banana bread? Everyone managed to find bogroll from somewhere now? No one is having the same problem that Joe had when she -“

“I don’t think we need to go any further with that one, love,” Joe muttered.

“I’ve made a pen friend.”

Everyone sat in stunned silence at Tayce’s sentence, mouths open like fish at feeding time.

“A pen friend? What is this, 1986?”

“Shut up, Ginny. I think that’s kind of cute, actually,” Tia mused, tilting her head to one side.

Tayce nodded. “Something a bit different. She lives in my block of flats. Two floors up from me. Been nice, to talk to someone, ever since Viv buggered off to her boyfriend’s house. Seriously, as soon as Boris announced lockdown she was jumping in her car and off to Liverpool.”

“You said she was a bit flaky,” Tia said sympathetically. “What’s your new pen pal’s name?”

“Aurora.”

“A-what?” Ginny raised their eyebrows. “Can we just call her Rory?”

“No.”

“We should get her on a call with us when Veronica’s back. Ronni and Rory, sounds like Ant and Dec will have some stiff competition when they get wind of that.”

“Ginny -“ Tia began, but Tayce was trying to hold back a chuckle.

——

‘Someone is talking about a street party on the 8th of May. Are you gonna go? I was gonna stay indoors but if you’re gonna go outside i will too xx’

Tayce knew she shouldn’t be thinking of meeting strangers outside her flat while the pandemic was ongoing, but she hadn’t seen a familiar human since March other than on a zoom call screen.

‘Hi Aurora, yeah i will go outside for a little bit. Look forward to meeting you properly instead of over letters! Tayce’

And Tayce finally stopped hesitating, adding two kisses on the end for the first time.

The weather was meant to be lush for a May bank holiday, as Tayce knew because her colleagues wouldn’t shut up about it. Almost eight weeks of lockdown were beginning to show the cracks in all their faces - no more eyeliner, and even Linda in Accounts had stopped posting boomerang videos of her kids doing Joe Wicks workouts while she waved her arms behind them.

So Tayce was over the moon when Friday rolled around and she could slam the Dismiss button on her phone alarm, turn over and sleep in until noon. Once she woke up though, she sat up with a jolt in her bed and realised she’d have to get ready; somehow it was important that she looked right today.

It was a power play, she knew it. An armour. But there was just something about clothes that made her mood turn in an instant. Her favourite leather jacket was probably a bit too heavy for the warm sunshine - warm sunshine? In May? - so she opted for the black denim instead and a skirt that hugged her slender figure, leaving her hair loose and wishing she’d gone for a trim before the lockdown. Maybe she should take her scissors to it?

She held the only scissors she had to hand - a pair of craft scissors - and wondered what her hairdresser mum would say if she knew that her daughter had taken non-styling scissors to the 30-inches of hair that she had.

No - better not. Her mum could give her a go over once the lockdown period had ended.

Someone was playing tunes on a speaker already when Tayce came down the stairs, dragging the garden chair Viv had left behind and brushing the digestive crumbs off it. One of the neighbours she recognised from her floor handed her an ice-cold can of Fosters which she sipped, not really enjoying the taste but relishing the freedom of it all. She knew to keep two metres from everyone, and she knew Cherry would absolutely murder her if she disobeyed that rule.

As soon as Aurora came into view from the block of flats, Tayce knew that keeping to the two metre rule would prove a little harder than she had first thought.

Aurora’s insta pictures showed a fashion model trapped in a little box on a screen, striving to get out - but in the flesh, she looked as if she had just rolled out of the living room after a Tiger King marathon. The grey jogging bottoms paired with the crop top and zip-up hoodie were probably too warm for today - 23 degrees, the radio kept repeating - but she made them look so effortless and stylish that Tayce suddenly wanted to buy some. Her platinum hair was piled in a messy bun, dark brown roots showing but the lackadaisical nature made it seem like Aurora meant it that way.

On her insta page, Aurora was way out of Tayce’s league; but here in life, she seemed a lot more accessible, a lot calmer, a lot more real.

Maybe it’s armour for her too. All this perfection in the photos. God. Why did I wear this?

She dropped her own deck chair down a reasonable distance from Tayce, taking another can of Fosters from the same neighbour and cracking it open. She took a swig, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and waved.

“Hi, Tayce. Here we are, then!”

“Yeah,” was the only thing Tayce could think of in response. Really cool. Very clever.

But Aurora was talking animatedly about how much she’d missed the sun, as she pulled a pair of sunglasses from her pocket and leaned back against the deck chair, claiming “Tesco are having them on sale - two for £12, so I got two - what else am I gonna do on furlough other than sunbathe!”

And the more the Fosters flowed - their neighbour’s 24-pack almost completely gone before 5pm, he seemingly wanting to give a can to the whole block - the more Aurora opened up her life history to Tayce.

How much she wished she was still in Worksop and could go on the long walks into the forest. How she’d give anything to hug her mum, a care-worker, and how she FaceTimed her shielding grandad every Sunday at 6.30 just after he finished his tea.

But most of all, how lonely it was every single night being alone in a flat in a huge city. Aurora dabbed her watery eyes with her thumbs as she described how much she loved everything that London had to offer when it was full of people, not dead to the world like it was now - and in this hollow place that lockdown was, she’d discovered that a city - any city, however exciting - was just a built-up area if you had no one to share it with.

Tayce hadn’t expected to cry. She’d cried maybe once or twice this whole time in lockdown, still too numb to have taken everything in that was happening. But the moment she’d opened her mouth, suddenly the Fosters had started talking for her too, and she was spilling out her worries onto the pavement below them as Aurora rubbed her back.

How her mum was furloughed from the hairdresser and her dad was always out in the lorry up and down the country. Her brother and sister-in-law, and her niece, were all still fine in Newport, but Tayce had missed her niece’s birthday, having to settle for blowing her a kiss down FaceTime and promising her through gritted teeth and cold fear that she’d give her the biggest cwtch ever as soon as this was over.

But now Tayce was in tears again, this time on Aurora’s shoulder, releasing her sorrows onto this woman who she had only exchanged written words with; now seeing her true soul laid bare in emotions that just refused to stop once she started. Aurora’s gentle hands ghosted through her hair, but then gripped Tayce tightly to her chest, planting a long, tender kiss on her hairline.

How had this happened? How had social distancing become this? Two people, thinking they were islands, clinging to one another for dear life?

Tayce held her for too long.

Aurora’s hands froze as she realised what she had done at the same moment Tayce had.

Cherry is gonna kill me.

Aurora walked with Tayce back to her flat as the sun was setting. It was nine in the evening, the heat finally starting to break, and both of them were aching and tired, spent from their tears. Aurora gave Tayce’s hand a gentle squeeze but said nothing else, her eyes red underneath her sunglasses, and Tayce had felt herself harden once again, turning the key in the door and closing the outside world back to where it should be.

——

After two weeks had passed, both of them not developing any symptoms after their contact, Tayce had an idea.

She put the letter through the letterbox in 7D at midday when she broke for lunch, and had a reply by half past one, a new record for Aurora.

‘Tayce, I’d love to form a support bubble with you. I thought you would have one already thats why i didn’t ask! Want to put on a film tonight and just chill? Bubble bud? Aurora xx’

So Tayce saw inside Aurora’s flat for the first time that same evening. After work, she practically sprinted up the stairs, thankful to get away from more of u k hun xx and her still-simpering colleagues.

It was very clean, as if it had only just been cleaned that day - freshly-washed surfaces, hoovered carpets, a sparkling bathroom - and Tayce marvelled at how tidy and orderly things were, a stark contrast from her own living space which had evolved into a nest of mess by now. Aurora’s living room and kitchen space were one area, with a mismatched sofa and chair facing the tv screen, hooking up a PS4 - Tayce hadn’t counted Aurora as a Dishonoured player either. The wall opposite the window was filled with small pictures of past fashion models - Kate Moss, Agyness Deyn, Cara Delevigne - all with matte black frames which had obviously been painted in lockdown, as one was on the coffee table drying over a copy of Hello magazine.

“My housemate’s not coming back, I can see it happening now,” Aurora shrugged, “so why not make the house the way I like it while I look for someone else to live with?”

Aurora poured Tayce a huge glass of wine, and that was followed by another; while she topped up her own glass liberally and kept shifting on the sofa as if trying to get comfortable. Tayce, for her part, took the chair instead, while Aurora tapped on the PlayStation controller to try to get Netflix up. The more she drank, the more cumbersome the controller seemed to become in her hands, until Tayce leaned over and took it away from her, Aurora’s fingers lingering a little too long on it before relinquishing.

When Aurora got up, meaning to pour them both a fourth glass of wine, she slipped on something and tumbled into Tayce’s lap in the chair, tittering something that sounded like “god I’m clumsy” through the giggles that came from her, unable to stop. Tayce slapped her on the back as she started coughing, but as that died down, Aurora straightened up, picking up Tayce’s hand in hers and drawing her up and away to join her on the sofa.

Lockdown had been so fucking lonely.

Aurora’s hand in hers was all Tayce needed to dissolve every wall she was still rebuilding from May Bank Holiday.

Aurora’s eyes were on her, she knew; through her peripheral vision as she tried desperately to cling to her focus on whatever episode of Tiger King this was.

When Tayce finally met her gaze, she averted it, turning her face to the window opposite them. Almost … playfully.

So Tayce looked back at the TV screen, but Aurora’s hand squeezed at hers, thumb in her palm pressing right in the centre, the pressure somehow travelling all the way to her gut. Tayce turned back to her, and this time Aurora did not look away.

“God, you’re gorgeous.”

Aurora looked at her through her eyelashes, lips parted in a smirk, curiously searching Tayce with her gaze as if wondering what her next move would be.

Tayce blinked incredulously. “Me? Like this? What do you mean, I’m gorgeous? Have you seen yourself?”

“And that accent, oh my days -“

“Go to Newport, we all sound like this.”

But the wine was hitting hard now and oh god lockdown is so fucking lonely and Tayce’s feet on the floor suddenly felt unsteady and Aurora was so fucking close to her on the sofa -

——

Once the hangover was gone, the memory of rest of the night felt like a dream, or maybe a nightmare. Tayce wasn’t entirely sure when she’d gone back to her flat, but she had, long before night had fully fallen and long after she was sure the burgeoning friendship she was finally making with someone lay in tatters two floors up from her.

The wine had washed away the strength she’d had, leaving her raw and vulnerable, and all the affection that had been growing since Aurora had first held her bubbled and burst into life. And Aurora must have felt the same magnetic pull, drawing them together across the sofa, nail marks still present in Tayce’s back that she could see in the mirror, a bruise forming on Tayce’s collarbone as Aurora had dipped a little lower.

It had been Tayce who had halted it - not because she hadn’t wanted to, but because she couldn’t decipher how much of this was affection and how much of this was just two lonely people, starved of company, starved of normality, seeking and clinging to it in any form.

And now it was the following day, and Tayce still didn’t know.

The group call at the end of the day was interesting. She stretched over the back of the sofa in her living room to grab her water, and that must have been enough to flash a sliver of skin.

“What’s that?” Lawrence asked loudly, prompting everyone else to go quiet. “Tayce? What’s that on your chest, hmm?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“You’re not wearing your glasses, Ginny, you can’t see shit. What’s that on your chest? Why d’you have a bruise there?”

“Hi!” Ellie’s voice as she joined the call unexpectedly saved Tayce any further embarrassment; everyone shrieked when she came on, having missed the last two zoom calls following her move. “Thank God my internet is working now, I’ve missed all your faces!”

Tayce silently thanked Ellie’s timing and contentedly listened to the rest of them as they chatted about everything and nothing that they’d all missed. All of them were there; even Cherry showed up about twenty minutes in to wave at them and blow them kisses, her face even more pallid than before; before ducking back out to go to bed.

Only Veronica was still missing.

“She’s been messaging me,” Tia explained, “and she said she’s feeling a bit better, but since she got furloughed, she’s feeling like there’s no point getting out of bed or getting ready because there’s nowhere to go.”

“Send her some love,” Tayce said, but Tia snorted.

“You send her it! She’s gonna feel better if she knows we all miss her.”

It was true though, Tayce realised after they all disconnected. They all seemed to be drifting apart, no more energy to continue with these online gatherings, even though there were so many virtual meetup groups and apps that there almost seemed to be no excuse now.

She looked back through her phone messages. She hadn’t messaged Veronica since early April, taking her silence as a sign that she wanted to be left alone; but what if it wasn’t? Veronica was a closed fist, everyone knew that. And Tayce’s brother? Again, early April, and a quick call the week after for her niece’s birthday.

Lockdown, and self-isolation, seemed to be one and the same.

So Tayce spent the rest of the afternoon sending messages to everyone she had neglected since then. Maybe they would reply, and maybe they wouldn’t - but there was no harm in reaching out, no negative consequences.

By the end of the day, she was fielding messages back and forth from everyone she thought she’d lost through lockdown, the grey cloud over her head starting to lift, the fuzzy feeling disappearing and clarity settling in. She felt light, lighter than she had in weeks; and warm as the summery days they were getting in this late-May spring.

Towards the end of the day, she got a message back from Veronica at last.

Veronica: I’m doing ok. I got up and went for a walk today just to the park and back. It’s really nice although my hay fever sucks. Thanks for checking in on me i appreciate it x Veronica: Oh also Tia said you had a hickey on the group call haha tell me what her name is x

Tayce was surprised to realise she was grinning at the phone as she read Veronica’s message, her fingers stroking the mark on her collarbone as if to savour the vivid image that it sparked in her head.

——

It was three days after their drunken kiss on the sofa that Tayce had another letter through the door. The same red glittery pen, the same scrawl, but the writing a little smaller as if Aurora wanted to diminish herself.

‘Hi Tayce. I’m really sorry if i came on too strong this week. Can we go back to friends? Want to hang out tonight, bubble bud? Aurora xx’

Tayce swallowed down the part of her that immediately rose up and cried that she … didn’t want to just be friends.

Then it hit her.

God. I only met this girl properly this month. What’s wrong with me?

But she replied and immediately started clearing the house.

She put the pile of Viv’s birthday cards and presents from the hallway floor into a cupboard under the sink, giving it the middle finger again; put the six-weeks worth of laundry on to wash; cleaned all the dishes; and dragged the hoover out of the tiny airing cupboard and got to work on the carpets. The hard floors she swept, and carried the bin bags out to the communal bins, all before midday.

“Who needs Joe Wicks workouts?” She muttered to herself, panting, as she tugged some marigolds over her hands to sort out the rest of the kitchen.

By the time it was six, and time for Aurora to arrive, Tayce thought the house looked much better, and honestly, she felt much better too. The little spring clean she’d given the place had cleared a little clutter from her head as well.

It’s nothing to worry about. She’d just coming over for food and -

Tayce grimaced as she realised she hadn’t thought of what to do for food. She thought back to the beans on toast she’d had at four and kicked herself for not thinking of that. Dominos was still delivering, so she brought up the app and busied herself looking through the list of pizzas.

Aurora hadn’t arrived by ten past six, and Tayce started to worry.

Maybe she’s changed her mind.

But Tayce refused to let that thought take any root. She looked at the clock, which of course seemed to slow down from having eyes on it, and firmly told herself that she would message Aurora at quarter past if she wasn’t here before.

With a minute to spare, Aurora turned up, grinning merrily and waving the bottle of rose in Tayce’s face.

“Hey bubble bud! Sorry I’m late, well I’m always late, sorry in advance if you expect me on time for anything!” Aurora took a step inside and her jaw dropped. “Wow, your place is well nice!”

“Thanks,” Tayce grinned, although she wasn’t sure what Aurora was looking at. Tayce wasn’t allowed anything on the walls from what her landlord said, but Aurora wouldn’t stay still - checking out the titles of the handful of CDs Tayce had brought down to London with her; scanning a nail along the books on the shelf above the TV.

“It’s nice to hold a book sometimes,” Tayce shrugged, “rather than just read it on the kindle app.”

When Aurora got to the kitchen, Tayce cringed. She’d have to confess.

“I haven’t got in anything to eat. Only - only some bread.”

“And pot noodles,” Aurora added, opening a cupboard and helping herself to the contents as if she’d lived here her whole life.

“And pot - oh, are you thinking, maybe …”

“No way!” Aurora slammed the cupboard door and grabbed her keys again. “Be right back!”

Ten minutes later and Tayce was at the hob over the oven with Aurora, dicing onions while she cut up a red pepper, mince that Aurora had grabbed from her own fridge was out and ready to go in too.

“I needed to use that up anyway,” she shrugged. “Please tell me you don’t just eat bread and pot noodles, Tayce, please. I need to give you a cooking crash course if you do! Didn’t you learn to cook at uni? Or didn’t you do much cooking before you went? Oh my days - no fry the onion off first, with the garlic - I’ll chop the mushrooms, Jesus Christ pot noodles …”

“I know how to cook, give me some credit!” Tayce murmured, but she couldn’t stop smiling. “I just haven’t been to the shop yet, it’s been a long week.”

Aurora closed her eyes and hummed in appreciation. “Just keep talking to me, please.”

“What about?”

“Anything! Your life, your family - I don’t know, house prices, I don’t care - but that accent, ugh -“ Aurora shivered.

“Yours is cute, too,” Tayce smirked.

Aurora looked at her reproachfully. “You’re lying.”

“Yeah, I am.”

It was no use. The air was full of electricity, static around them, and before Tayce knew what was happening, suddenly they were kissing again, this time stone-cold sober, while the onions burned shadows into the bottom of the pan.

——

Viv gave her notice on the flat at the start of June.

“I just can’t afford to live here anymore,” she explained, sighing, when she got back and started to pack up everything in her room. “I’m gonna see if I can get some work back home.”

Tayce was numb, although she knew Viv didn’t mean it personally. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been made redundant straight after the lockdown ended, and it made sense that she wanted to be near her family. It was now four months since Tayce had seen hers, and she missed them every day, although she had been sticking religiously to her new routine of calling her parents every Saturday night and her brother’s family every Sunday afternoon.

“I’m sorry that’s putting you in a tight spot, Tayce,” Viv muttered, hugging her, and Tayce hugged her back.

“Can’t be helped,” Tayce replied, which was all she could think to respond with that wasn’t an inarticulate growl in frustration.

Viv was adamant she would pay her final month’s rent, and pay her half the utilities even though she wasn’t there. But she had to go home.

“How was your move?” Tayce asked Ellie on the next group call on zoom.

“Shite,” Ellie replied, “but partly because we struggled finding someone to move us. There’s plenty of places around, plenty of places to rent and stuff, because everyone’s moved back to where they came from.”

“You’ll find somewhere else to live, bab,” Ginny murmured in a soothing voice to Tayce, stroking the side of the laptop screen as she liked to do to show affection now that she couldn’t hug anyone.

“I know,” Tayce sighed. “It’s just a pain in the arse.”

She wasted no time. One of the spare room websites was always open in the background, and she was refreshing, looking maybe a little further out from central London to see if anywhere was cheaper, but nowhere was.

Then she spotted the dot in her own block of flats, and clicked the advert.

That’s - that’s Aurora’s flat.

Now she remembered. Aurora had mentioned something about her housemate moving out! It must now be official.

She read through the advert - how was it £50 cheaper than what she was already paying? - and looked at the contact name for the housemate, and there it was in black and white pixels: Aurora Martin, use form below.

Grabbing a piece of notebook paper - one of the last bits left, she’d been ripping them all out to write to Aurora - she penned a letter, one of what might well be the last ones, and jogged upstairs to post it through her letterbox.

The response came back to her in less than an hour, a new record for Aurora.

‘Tayce! I’d love it if you wanted to move in here! OMG. My landlord will want references from yours, but if you can get them quick then he can approve you really fast, he’s working from home. OMG you made my day. Come up at 7pm xx’

“Work contacted me today too,” Aurora beamed as she settled with Tayce on the sofa. “They want me to start back next week! Can’t wait. Need to get that coin again now! I mean, I’m dead grateful, you know, that I still have my job and I was on furlough so the government paid most of my wages, but it will be nice to have the full package again!”

“What is it you do again?” Tayce asked.

“Oh - I work as a fashion buyer. But because fashion’s kind of stopped right now, most of the designers are shut. Reopening now, especially the ones in mainland Europe! Can’t wait to be on the phone to them all again.”

“Wait. You speak to designers in other countries?”

Aurora nodded. “I speak French and Spanish.”

“You -“ Tayce was dazed. “I didn’t know that!”

“Well why would you? I mean you’ve only known me a couple of months!” Aurora laughed, and leaned back closer to Tayce, her perfume overwhelmingly sweet in the air. “You’re not gonna know everything about me yet, bubble bud.”

“No,” Tayce purred, “but I can’t wait to find out.”

——

By the Monday after the move, early July, Tayce was all set up to go. She’d moved the bed into the corner as she liked it, arranged her books into a rainbow as she liked them, and unfurled the posters she’d been unable to hang in her last flat, mostly punk bands that she liked, Bimini’s band’s poster, and the noticeboard with all the tickets tacked to it of all the gigs she’d been to. The vanity with the mirror that she’d brought from home fitted perfectly next to the window so she could do her makeup with natural light; and it was large enough for her work setup, which was where she was now.

The flat layout was almost identical to the one she’d just left, and the room was the same one - Aurora having the slightly bigger room - but it felt a lot more comforting, knowing she wasn’t alone here any more, knowing she had a little more freedom in decorations, and knowing that the hollow feeling in her chest was starting to slow down for good.

She turned off her work laptop at five as normal, which was when Aurora came in. Tayce pulled her in, giving her a peck on the lips.

“They’re gonna love you, I promise.”

Aurora just made a moan in the back of her throat and put her face in her hands, shrinking away from the vanity.

Tayce turned on her personal laptop, logging into zoom and connecting to the group chat. Her monthly uni call was set to half four today for some reason, and everyone else was already all there.

“Tayce! We wondered where you’d got to!”

It was Veronica’s voice, and Veronica’s face was in the top left. She still looked a little tired, and the shirt she was wearing looked suspiciously like a pyjama top, but she was here with them all, and this was a big step for her.

Tayce beamed at her. “So good to see you!”

“The move went alright then, bab?” Ginny asked.

Tayce nodded. “And there’s someone you should meet.” She pulled Aurora into frame, who still looked uncharacteristically shy for a moment before waving at the people on the screen. “This is Aurora.”

“Aurora!” Tia squeaked. “Like the princess!”

Aurora rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

“So we’ve got Rory and Ronni here together at last!” Lawrence exclaimed, while Veronica gave the camera two fingers.

But Tayce just grinned at her friends on the screen, far apart but together in this strange way. Aurora’s nails dug into her shoulder, still a little nervous, but even that was fading as she got more comfortable.

Aurora had been right - the city was just a lot of bricks in intricate patterns without someone in it that made it a home.

And this just might be becoming one.

#rpdr fanfiction #rpdr uk #tayce #a'whora #taywhora #ginny lemon #lawrence chaney #veronica green #tia kofi #ellie diamond #uk2 #lesbian au #fluff #hurt/comfort #juno #tw covid lockdown #tw mental health mentions #submission

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crowleyellestair · 4 years

Text

Imagine Why - Din djarin (The Mandalorian

This isn’t apart of my last fic even though it has a similar small plot point

Here’s my other fic: Din Djarin

“And Perry swung his sword towards the three headed creatures.” I tried to keep quiet but keep the excitement in my voice. Letting the book drop slightly, I leaned in closer to the baby. “What do you think, bud? What will happen?” He peered up to me best he could and gargled with what I could only hope was excitement. We had been laying on the cot for what seemed to be a short while. In reality it had been a couple of hours of the kid resting against my chest and me reading to him.

“I don’t wanna have to do this to ya, but I think that’s enough for tonight. Let’s get some soup in you before tucking you in.” I placed a slip of parchment I found lying around a while back into the pages to hold our place. Swooping him up, we make our way out of the room to our ration’s cabinet on the other side of the Razor Crest. Preparing the soup was easy, but trying to keep quiet was proving to be harder.

Din and I had a great arrangement after one too many awkward run ins with each other’s sleeping spots. Too many times has he tripped over me finding a comfortable position on the ground somewhere or me finding solitude in the cockpit when he had tried to fall asleep. Usually I would rest on the cot when he was out on a job and he would take rest when I watched the kid after he came back.

He had gotten back to the ship after a job while the babe and I were cuddling on the cot and having story time. He went straight to the cockpit without a word, which was unusual. I assumed he was just exhausted and wanted seclusion. Din wasn’t known to be a man of many words, but recently he’d opened up a little more.

I’ve been on the Razor Crest for a couple of cycles to watch the child. He took a job on my home planet and the thug happened to be my next-door neighbor. A lot went down and the child ended up in the cross hairs of the fight. After everything died down, Din started to be hostile towards me as I had his son. I explained my situation of just wanting to see the boy safe and he asked me to join.

I could be quiet when I wanted to be, but usually I ramble to make small talk. I stopped after a while, but Din admitted he appreciated the effort to try and create trust and security between us. Little did he know that I wanted more than trust. Maybe it was because of his love for his space boy. Maybe because I’m one of the few he has apparently told his real name to. Maybe it was the many nights of silence sitting together in the cockpit, looking out at the stars, comfortably keeping each other company.

Whatever it was, it made me care about his well-being more than mine.

So, I make the babes soup as quietly as possible, not knowing if Din was resting up there. I tried to put the book down a couple of times prior as to keep quiet, but the kid just wasn’t having it. Which was troublesome to my plan to be respectful, but also to our relationship. I came to the ship with the bare essentials. Din has always been by my side in any city or village we scout into. One day I was telling a story to the boy to pass the time, and thought maybe he’d like being read to. In our crazy life, Din and I try to make it as normal as possible for the baby. I thought bedtime stories would be just the thing to bring a safe, relaxing, and fun time for the wee lad. I had acquired the book, however, by sneaking away from the ship one day to buy one.

“What’s this?” I jump at his voice, not realizing I zoned out about the repercussions of the book. Turning, I can see the boy pushing the book against Din’s feet. It’s a cute sight as the book is half his size. I tried to find one that would last. He must have waddled back to grab it and try to convince me to read again. Din leans down to grab it, bringing it close enough to his where the beskar reflected the blue cover.

“It’s a book.” I start making my way towards them, small bowl in hand. His visor turned to me, and I could tell he was trying to convey that he obviously knew that it was, indeed, a book. “I made soup; would you like some? Sorry I took up more time on the cot. The room is all yours.” I bend down, giving the bundle of joy the bowl.

“When did you get a book?” I stiffen, but try and play it off. But the thing is, he knows that he doesn’t know where it came from.

“Are you ok?” He apparently wasn’t expecting that as his posture shifts back just slightly.

“That’s not an answer.”

“You didn’t say anything when you got back. You always acknowledge us, which makes me assume something bad happened. I obviously respect that, but now, the first words we’ve spoken since you accepted the job is going to start a fight.” He started to deflate just in the slightest until my last statement. Before he spoke, the baby placed an empty bowl on top of Din’s shoe. He grabbed the bowl, putting it into the small sink behind him in the refresher.

“Why would we fight?” He tilts his head as he asks. Maybe I fell for that small tilt. Damn that cute tilt.

“I think we both know what I did to get the book without you knowing already.” I could hear the leather of his gloves against the book as his fist starts to clench. His voice came out louder than expected, making me flinch.

“That’s not safe, y/n.”

“I know, Din, but I just wanted a normalcy for the kid.”

“That’s not a good enough reason to risk yourself out there. Alone.”

“I brought a blaster and stayed low- “

“That doesn’t matter!”

I’ve never heard Din raise his voice to me before. The Mandalorians where known to be strong. I didn’t know they’d be strong enough to reach into my chest and clench my heart with just a voice. A voice I’ve truly heard twice. Maybe it was because there was always a sense of gentleness towards me that wasn’t spared for others that had me surrendering my heart and mind to the man in front of me.

“I was brought here because you trust me and my ability to protect the child. The child that I would lay my life down for. If I can protect him, I can protect myself.” Din make quick work of the ladder into the cockpit, leaving me standing there, I go to bend down, but he drops back to the previous spot. A quick beep catches my attention. My eyes go to the tracker in his hand. He makes a show of putting the tracker to the boy, the beeps only slightly slowing. He brings it towards me, and it quickens. Din then reaches for his pocket and brings out a puck, turning it on to show my face. “I don’t… I haven’t done anything.” He sighs, handing me the puck.

“You’re with me.” Realization sunk in. Obviously, someone would report that the ex-guild member and ‘the asset’ was traveling with a new companion.

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry I didn’t know- “

“Sorry isn’t good enough.” Din quickly sidestepped my frozen body to his portion of soup. Did he not accept my apology for not knowing a bounty has been placed on me? Din starts walking with his bowl towards us and the room, but I turn, minding the child that has plopped himself in the same spot and blocked the door. “I’m tired.” He tries to push past but my arm flies towards the frame of the door my body doesn’t cover.

“Sorry’s not good enough?” He tightly sighs

“No.” I peer into the visor that isn’t returning my gaze.

“I can’t change a bounty on my head, Din.”

“No,” he states as he finally meets my eyes. “But you can change your actions.”

“What?” My question is almost completely hidden by the breathless, humorless laugh that escapes me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Din leans in closer, his voice eerily steady and quiet.

“Don’t be reckless and leave without me.” I lean in closer, only millimeters separated us.

“We established I can handle myself.”

“And I established that that is not good enough.” He pushes past my arm and closes the door.

It had been a couple of days without speech. The only words uttered was towards the little boy, wo seemed none the wiser of our fight or situation. Din mainly stayed in the cockpit, and I stayed towards the back of the ship, doing maintenance. Din, strangely enough, kept a manual of overall maintenance for the ship in a random box. I wanted to learn the ship inside and out to be able to do quick work if we were in a sticky situation. Sparks had been flying for a while as I worked on soldering a tank joint back to the tank itself. I want to do a good job, but it’s hard when I can feel my heart in the sparks. I felt sparks anytime I accidentally brushed his shoulder with mine. Anytime he checked me over after a shootout. Anytime I caught him cradling his son when he thought I was sleeping. Even when we fought days ago, I couldn’t feel true anger or malice. I could only feel love. Maker, I can’t handle it.

I let out a yelp as I nicked myself with the soldering tool.

“Shit- Maker- Damn it!” I was too focus on the medium sized hole on the outside of my thumb to notice Din all but fly down from the cockpit to my side. The wound had half cauterized itself, but blood was still gushing. He assessed the damage and left to grab the healing spray and bandages. He grabbed my hand and I could feel the sparks again.

“What happened?” He started to wipe away the blood, and barely spared a glance to meet my eyes when I didn’t answer.

“I misjudged my hand placement.” There was a pause as he focused on my hand. Once he was done, he marched back to the ladder, but gave a finishing statement.

“Be more careful next time.” I scoff which stopped him in his tracks.

“I’m on the ship. Haven’t left, as you said. It was a little mishap, I’m not dead.” I turned, trying to hide the redness in my face. I couldn’t truly be angry at him, but this is getting ridiculous. I didn’t hear him leave but still jumped at his loud voice.

“No, you’re not, but you could be. I want you safe on the ship, y/n. I want you on the ship because I care. I want you to be more careful because I care. I don’t really know… If you got…Hurt? The kid would be devastated but I…” Din shook his head and made more headway on the ladder. I don’t want us to be on silent terms again.

“I care about you too, but I don’t stop you from doing what I trust you’re good at.” He stopped again. “Imagine it: you’re here on the ship, day-in and day-out. You’ve fallen for a known bounty hunter that risks her life every day to make money for you and her newfound son. To make money, she has to put herself in danger and the line of fire, just to make you happy. But you can’t help. You have to sit here and wait. Wait, not knowing if she will ever come back. So, all you have is yourself and that beautiful boy, wallowing in love a-and fear and-and not knowing what could happen- “

“Y/n- “

“What!?” In my rant, I hadn’t noticed that he grew closer. No words were spoken. All I could feel was him turning me around into his arms, hugging the life out of me. I quickly give it back, tears filling my eyes. “Imagine not knowing why you fell so hard or if it’s actually requited.” Din’s hand made quick work of finding my cheek, moving my head to peer into his visor.

“It is. I know I’m not… good at showing it, but I think I love you. I’ve never really…. Felt this way before.”

It’s like a dream come true. Smiling, I place my forehead against where I assume his sat behind the helmet. I could feel him pressing back to show his affection.

Din had decided to fly to a closer planet than we usually land on when changing hideouts. This requires an actual pilot, especially since our new destination has more traffic than our usual. I look to the hatch when a loud plop could be heard. Din and I were enjoying a quiet, peaceful time in the cockpit together while the child was sleeping. Or so we thought.

All I could see was the book, then a cute green head pop up next to it. I smile to him as he waddles toward me, dragging the book behind him. I hadn’t picked I leaned down to meet him.

“Hey, bud. Not now, ok? Maybe a little later.” I normally wouldn’t mind, but I didn’t know if Din would want to hear me read for hours. I pat his head and sit right back up. After a minute, I hear a gargle. I look down to his pleading eyes. I smile but shake my head. “Honey, we’re halfway.” I lean down really close again and whisper. “I don’t think your dad would want to start in the middle. We can read later.” He looked like he gave me what seemed to be a nod. I sat up again and another minute passed. This time, the book quickly flew up, landing in Din’s lap. Din, alarmed, quickly looked down. The child tried clawing his way up his cape, and Din picked him up, placing him onto his lap. With his still free hand, he hands me the book. I watch as the kid wraps himself in Din’s loose cape, looking like a little burrito. His darling head peaked out and looked at me, waiting. I smile and flip to the beginning.

“Perry Johanason and the Evil of Endor, by S. Morganstern, chapter one. Ani lived on the far end of the base.” I snuck a quick glance upward to find Din relaxed in his chair, free hand over the kid, resting it on his back. The kid’s eyes were closed and snuggled securely against Din’s cape. It will take time for us to open up more, but now knowing how the others feel has opened a door to a whole new galaxy.

#dyn jarren #dyn jarren imagine #the mandalorian #the mandalorian imagine #mandalorian imagine #reader insert #one shot #x reader #star wars imagine #din djarin imagine

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official-archivist-keith · 4 years

Text

Keith sat down with the paper and the statement before turning on the tape recorder. He took a breath, he was starving... hopefully this would help.

"Statement of Sunil Maraj regarding their work as a security guard and the disappearance of their co-worker, Samson Stiller. Original statement given 3rd April, 2011. Audio recording by Keith Kogane, the Archivist.

Statement begins."

"So I lost my job last week. I mean, I quit, they didn’t fire me or nothing. But you know how like sometimes you quit because you want to, and sometimes you quit because you’ve got to? Well, this was the second, although I’m not gonna pretend I’m not glad to see the back of the place.

It’s ‘cause I kept asking about Samson, you know? And what I saw. And they really, really don’t want me to make a stink about that. Because if he just disappeared one day, didn’t come into work, that’s fine - I mean, not fine for his family, obviously, or the police who have to find him, but fine for the company. If he disappeared at work, though - if what I think happened is even close to what actually happened - then that’s real bad news for them, and opens them up to all sorts of lawsuits and liability.

I mean, it’s fine, I can get other jobs, and it’s not like I really want to be working there after what happened, but I just wish someone would take it seriously. It’s messed up, and I’m having a real hard time getting out of my head.

So, I work security right? Used to be, a company or shop would have its own little security force they put together, did all the in-store and CCTV vigilance stuff. These days, it’s all centralized, though. You tend to have a building or a shopping central contract all the security work out to a single company, who’ll then cover all the businesses or shops. It’s easier, from a centralizing point of view, and cheaper, if that’s what the owners like.

But it does mean that there tends to be a lot less stability and how it’s all structured, personnel-wise, at least. If you’re lucky, you’ll be assigned to a post and stay there for years, getting to know the place, the systems, your co-workers. If you’re unlucky, or there’s contract difficulties, you could easily end up moving through two or three different places in as many months.

That was kind of the case for me and Samson. We were the odd men out in a lot of ways. We’d originally been brought in for a big corporate office block near Liverpool Street, but there’d been some problem and the whole place had to be closed up for months. Samson said they found asbestos, I heard it was a lease issue, but it doesn’t really matter. Point is, they hired us for a job that no longer existed.

I expected they’d just get rid of us, but I mean to their credit, they did try to do right. They did their best to fit us in with other security teams: I mean, over the last two years we did a couple of data centers, a digital marketing hub - whatever that is - three different office buildings near Kings Cross… trouble was, every time, almost as soon as we got there, there’d be some personnel changes, or expiring contracts, or some other trouble, and generally, as the last in the door, we were the first to get reassigned. Started to feel a bit like we were cursed, you know?

Samson took it harder than I did. I mean, I’m young, my mum’s got a flat in Hackney, and to be honest, most of my evenings are out with friends or in with black ops, so the moving around was pretty much fine with me. Sam had a three-year-old, though, and lived way down in Morden, so being thrown from one post to another all the time was really kind of getting to him. He tried to talk to me about it a few times, but honestly, we weren’t that close. Or rather, we were close because we’d always worked together, but we didn’t have a huge amount in common. I mean, I tried to talk to him about football for a while, but I think he could tell I was talking out of my ass. Anyway, point is, when we were reassigned to a shopping centre in Stratford, he wasn’t in a great place.

Now, I’m not sure I can legally name the shopping center I was working in to you guys, but let’s just say it wasn’t the Westfield. It was old, clearly been around decades, and the security systems really showed it. I mean, one of the shops still had the original alarms from the late 70s, and plenty of them still had cameras that recorded to VHS, for God’s sake.

The security office was a mess. The company I worked for - again, dunno if I can legally say them, but you can look it up, you know - they have a package where they replace all your equipment and systems with the stuff we use. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it, if only because we all know exactly how to use that stuff.

Whoever was running this shopping center had very much not opted for that particular contract. I mean, the teams before us had made a valiant effort to centralize and integrate all the feeds and setups into just the one control room, but… damn, that place was a mess. Flat screens, next to banks of old CRT monitors that some of the cameras had to feed into, next to racks of channel banks, and a few actual, honest-to-god computers, that tried their best to wrestle everything into something that was almost usable.

I found it properly overwhelming, didn’t like the place at all. But Sam actually seemed to get on with it pretty well almost from the get-go. He’d apparently been an engineer back in the day, and something about all those old surveillance systems, all tied together, all wrapping into and around each other like some weird nest of cameras… it seemed to really appeal to him. The first week he was there he spent almost the entire time playing with the system and the wiring… left me to do most of the other work on my own. Well, I mean… there were the other guys working there, of course, but even the ones who’d been there awhile started to get the picture and gave Samson a bit of a wide berth after a few days.

He really did seem to get the place in a bit better order. I mean, some of it, only he really understood, but soon enough it actually made sense - what we were watching and when - and he managed to get rid of some of the delay, so that we even managed to catch a couple of shoplifters.

There was only one piece of equipment that seemed to give him any trouble. It was this old Tecton multicamera recorder from the late 80s, managed the feeds for one of the various budget shoe shops that lined the promenade.

It didn’t seem all that complicated when you just looked at it, but trying to use it was an absolute nightmare. None the buttons seemed to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and there were all sorts of sequences where pressing a button, holding a button, pressing it three times, all that - they’d all do really different things.

Sam spent almost a whole month wrestling with it, before he finally cracked and he asked Dave - the bearded old guy who we all sort of assumed had been there the longest? - whether they still had any of the old operating manuals.

I remember the smell of dust when Dave went and cracked open the filing cabinet in the back room, before waving his arms in the direction of the drawer and shrugging. I mean, I’d have just left it, obviously, but I think Samson was taking the whole knowing how the system works thing as like - a point of pride? Something he could salvage from the whole situation. Just a way of getting some control over his life, you know?

So he found the manual. More of a pamphlet, really. Can’t have been more than ten pages of A5 in the whole thing, yellowed and water-damaged. Well-used, though. Someone had even put their name in the front, like they were afraid people were gonna steal a manky instruction book.

Still, Sam just couldn’t put it down. I mean, it was like 10 in the morning when we finally found it, and when I went in at 2:00 to see if he’d taken his lunch break yet, he was still sat there, just staring at it. I mean, I’m not a fast reader, or anything but that’s a lot, right?

And like - okay, so this is the part that you’re definitely gonna think I’m having a joke with you, but I’m honestly not, I’m dead serious. Because I saw some of the pages over his shoulder, and on one of them there was, there was a picture of me.

Like, a black-and-white photo of my face. I didn’t get a good look, but it certainly wasn’t one that I remember having taken. Not that would make it any less weird for it to be printed in an old CCTV manual from back when I was doing nappies. And I’m not making it up, I swear.

Then Samson turned, and he looked at me, and I don’t know, I got real spooked. His eyes were all - messed up. Like, weird. And glassy. It was really, really freaky, and I just turned and I got out of there. That wasn’t the end of it, though. If it had been then sure, maybe I write it off as a weird dream, where I was tired or whatever, but no. Because from that point, on Samson just gets creepier.

For a start, he’s always at work. I mean, we’re not always on the same shift, so it takes me a while to notice, but when I ask him about it, he just says that our schedules must have synced up weird. But whenever I arrived, there he was, staring at the monitors, watching all the people come and go, his eyes wide like he was drinking it all in. And whenever I was there late, and it was my turn to close up, he’d always say that he was happy to do it, say I could head off a few minutes early.

So, I never actually saw him leave. I tried to stay once, said I needed to do it myself, but he just got real quiet, like… real quiet, and stared at me.

The bank of monitors was behind him, and I’m just trying to come up with something to say, get him to talk to me… and one by one, they began to just wink off, turning dark.

And I got this feeling, deep in my gut, that if that last monitor turned off, then something really bad was gonna happen to me. It was one of the old CRT sets, big, and bulky, and the picture on it was never that clear, but for a moment it looked like it was me on there. Staring right back at myself as the screens slowly went black, getting closer and closer. The face on the monitor looked absolutely terrified, and I was starting to feel it myself.

So I just tried to smile, told him not to worry about it, and I headed out as quick as I could. My legs were shaking so hard I almost fell on the way out.

Then there were the actual cameras. I mean, you work in a shopping center, obviously you do a bunch of shopping there. I used to get my lunch, for one, and usually pick up any of the essentials I needed. Sometimes, if I was feeling hard done by and it was payday, I might buy myself a new shirt, or a game, or something.

And obviously, because I work security, I know where all the cameras are. where they cover, even how they move. A lot of them are completely static, just pointing at one place. But gradually, I start to notice something when I’m shopping. It’s like a tickling, creeping sensation all over the back of my neck. Like I’m being watched.

So I start to keep an eye on the cameras when I’m in the shops, and you know what, I’m right. They’re following me. Whenever I look at them - doesn’t matter where it was they were meant to be aimed - they’re always focused right on me.

I keep staring at them, moving around, and they just shift to keep the lens pointed at me. But they’re not articulated, they don’t have any motor or swivel mount they just… move. Pointed right at me.

One time, when no one in the store was looking, I threw a can of deodorant at one of them. Hit it square on. Samson wore sunglasses for the next two days, and when I caught a glimpse of him without them, there was a crack right down the center of his eye.

I tried to talk to the others. I’m pretty sure that they were getting similar weirdness from them. they were all jumpy and nervous those last few months. But I was known as Sam’s friend. We’d come in together and everyone just assumed we were close. When I started to ask about it, about what was going on, they just clammed up like I was trying to get them in trouble. My nerves were all shot to hell.

I wasn’t in work the week he disappeared. I’d called in with a bullshit stomach thing. I just needed a break, some time to get my head right. It was almost working, you know? A little distance, a little space to relax. I was starting to feel good.

Then I got the call from Dave. He was frantic.

I couldn’t make out half of what he was saying over the bad line, but he kept saying Samson’s name. Asking me if I “knew,” if he’d “told me.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept screaming at me. He kept saying, I must know, he must have told me what was going on. He kept saying, “what do we do with his eyes?”

I mean, I didn’t know what the hell to say, I just went quiet listening to Dave as he started sobbing down the phone

“He won’t stop,” he said. “We can’t get rid of his face.”

I hung up. And Dave was gone when I went back in. A bunch of them were, all quit suddenly. I wanted to check in with them, find out what happened, but we’d never really been friends, and I didn’t know any of their details.

I never saw Samson again, either. Though, I did find his old work shirt in the back. It was torn to shreds, wrapped around that old instruction manual. I put it back in the filing cabinet, and I threw the shirt away.

I tried to stick around, to do my job, but I was asking too many questions for the folks upstairs, I think. I wanted to know why Samson hadn’t signed out of the building before he disappeared. Why, no matter who tried to reset the system, it always logged back in as him.

Why, whenever I was watching the monitors alone, I’d see him on that old CRT screen. Staring right back at me. Quietly calling for me to join him."

"Statement ends." Keith let out an exhale, "Much better..."

@zombieapocalypsekeith

#SORRY THIS IS SO LONG

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hpdabbles · 4 years

Text

Master of Death (In Training) Part 2

Sirius didn’t know what he was expecting when the suggestion was first made. The very air had held its breath as the Order voted, each nervously looking around, to see who had raised their hands in favor of summoning Death.

He hadn’t wanted to do it. After growing up with a dark family, and at the mercy of his mother’s ill-temper hexes, Sirius knew that trying this method would only cost them more than be able to help them. But Albus- it was so weird to now be old enough to call the headmaster by his first name. A part of him still felt like a Hogwarts student overstepping despite the fact he graduated three years ago- had insisted it was the best course of action.

With every new day, the Death Eaters rose in power and it was rapidly approaching a point where they could not be stopped. Already regular civilians were hiding away, slowly bowing to the control and the fear, and it wouldn’t be a far stretch to think no one would try to stop them.

People knew not to even use the name of the Death Eater’s leader, because any who did, died not long after. That wasn’t a fear that could easily be overcome. The people were losing hope, and once it was all gone, the war would be over.

The Death Eaters will win.

What’s worse, was that Albus had claimed a prophecy had been made, which strongly indicated to his unborn grandson or the unborn child of his friends being the only thing to stop Voldemort.

If they didn’t do the summons James, Lily, Frank, and Alice would have to go into hiding for who knows how many years. There wasn’t even a guarantee they will survive. This plan could save them from such a fate, could allow their kids to grow up in a world of peace.

Sirius knew this. He understood it. But he still didn’t want to summon Death, it was desperate and it may not even work.

But whatever the Order did, they did it together. The majority had ruled, and the summons took place a week later.

The moment the being arrived it was quite clear it wasn’t human. Dressed in a metallic green cloak that hid half it’s facing, and body through human-shaped- and rather nicely too. Sirius could admit the being was fit. If it was a regular bloke he would climb him like a tree- seemed almost otherworldly, that its mere presence had Padfoot’s instincts screaming at him to run.

Alice’s soft gasp of “What have we done” echoed every thought in Sirius's head even as he leveled his wand in order to protect Lily. It was alarming that the first thing Death did upon arriving was single out the two pregnant ladies and even if they couldn’t see its eyes, Sirius knew it was looking right at the round stomachs.

His stomach was rolling so terribly he almost missed Albus offering his soul to Greater Power, who stood there with its arms filled with objects and could almost be called awkward if it wasn’t scaring the living daylights out of everything in the room.

The outfit was sort of badass he could admit.

But the voice. Oh, the voice.

It echoed as if though it spoke from some deep cave, and it overlapped with other voices. To his ears, he could pick up different baritones, as if though he wandered into a male bathroom and everyone choose to speak at once. It was the one real sign that whatever stood before him wasn’t a human.

That’s why he, like an idiot, got the things attention when it pulled such a baffling action of checking its employee manual.

Thankfully it didn’t take offense and after a few flipped pages it names the price.

Now here he was handing over his black socks to the being that was smiling wildly at them all. It’s perfectly white teeth gleaming in the darkened room, as it thanks everyone politely for their socks, making more than one person uneasy.

Albus had truely seen pained to part with his pair, more so then his own soul, and that made no sense at all to Sirius until Death frown when it touched them. “Oh, these were the last thing your sister gave you, her last “I love you” that she made with her own two hands. I’m sorry for taking them.”

And it really did sound apologetic, but it made Albus tense like a wooden board and back away rapidly from the Great Power.

The being even folded all the socks with great care, leaving the objects it held hanging in the air as it casually did some quick laundry. Once the Order had handed over their clothing, it flipped through the silver binder again, visibly mouthing the words it read before it reached out a black-gloved hand to pat the socks, sending them away to who knows where.

Around him, a few of his friends gasp, and it wasn't until Sirius’ socks vanished did he realize it was because they, like he, sense a deal with Death be sealed. As if his very soul had been stamped. He felt dirty, Sirius really wanted to take a bath.

“Alright.” Death said, placing his hands on its hips and spreading its stand. For a moment it seemed young, and though Sirius could not tell what age it actually was, he got the feeling it was somewhere between late teens, early twenties. Wasn’t it just bizarre to think he is almost the same-physical at least- age as Death?

“So it says here, that you all hear me differently? To not be confusing my pronouns are he/him and you can call me Harry.”

Sirius's brain melted. “James?”

“Yeah?”

“Did Death just tell me its preferred pronouns and call itself Harry?”

“Yeah.” James at least sound just as confused as he was so Sirius didn’t feel too bad about not understanding what in the world was going on with this summon.

Harry-actual- Death frowns at them “What’s wrong with my name?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it” Lily is quick to assure, though she is most likely reconsidering the name she had picked out for his unborn godson. “It’s a lovely name.”

Harry-Actual-Death smiled at her, it could have been a friendly one if it didn’t feel like his life candle was about to be blown out. Sirius shifted to put himself beside James and have Lily safely behind him. On his right, Remus quickly fell into formation blocking the redhead woman more, while Peter shifted to Lily’s side with a whimper. “Thank you. I’m named after my grandpa on my mother’s side.”

No one knew what to say to that.

It was Fabian, in a fit of madness or brilliance who knows, that managed to get words out of his mouth. “I’m sure he’s very proud his grandson took over the family business?”

Harry-Actual-Death looked stumped, looking like someone just tried to pull down his trousers or something then he beamed. “No one’s ever said something like that to me. Thank you.”

Then he turns his head back to his binder flipping through it and reading a bit more. With a snap of its finger’s Fabian stumbled backward with a loud pain gasp turning deathly pale. Everyone froze while his brother bristled “What did you do to him!?”

Harry-Actual-Death turned its unseen eyes onto Gideon, who stood his ground despite the slight shake of his knees and smiled “I took away the Dragon Pox in his lungs. Until our contract is terminated I can heal you all within some limitations. He would have died in a year and I don’t want to make Mrs. Weasley sad.”

“My chest doesn’t hurt anymore.” Fabian breathes rubbing at his upper torso. He looks down at it with wonder in his eyes. “It’s...it’s been hurting for so long...I just...”

“Yeah about that.” Harry-Actual-Death jumps in. The rest of the Order swing their heads between the two groups unsure of who to look at, though none of them lower their wands. “I don’t understand why you didn’t get that checked out. If it hurt to take breathes you really should have gone to a healer.”

Gideon looks beyond pained “You were sick and you didn’t tell me?”

“We...we’re at war. I didn’t want to worry you more then you needed to when I realize I wasn’t going to live through it.” Fabian admits. Sirius is quite sure he is not the only one that wants to beat the idiot’s head in. How could he not have said anything!? His condition could have made everything that much more dangerous, what if he was in the middle of a fight and had an attack? He could have gotten himself and his brother killed!

The twins suddenly freeze, as they do that weird thing they do when both of them think the same thoughts and then jerk their heads to Harry-Actual-Death. “Wait, what does Molly have to do with this? She’s not part of the Order, she didn’t sign a contract with you!”

Sirius could understand their worried, a new fear of what that hinted at, meant that his baby brother could have just been unwillingly added to the contract. He hadn’t talked to Regulus in a few years but that didn’t mean he wanted his brother in Death’s hand!

Harry-Actual-Death shifts around on his feet awkwardly, almost as if embarrassed. “She’s really nice, she gives warm hugs and she gave me cookies once.”

At the while Order’s wide eye bafflement Death says defensively. “I was a kid back then and she didn’t know how much it meant to me. Plus she can be kind of scary when angry. I just don’t like seeing her upset.”

Sirius really, really, wanted to sleep now. Apparently, literal Death was scared of Molly Weasley. Tiny, plump, and motherly Molly Weasley. Also apparently being a grim reaper was a family business and Death could age while running around the mortal world in its childhood visiting people which made no sense whatsoever and- oh.

“You just inherited your position then?” Sirus asks forgetting himself. “That’s why you’re a trainee. You really are new on the job.”

Harry-Actual-Death nods “Yes”

“Then how are we supposed to win a war!” He doesn’t mean to sound so frustrated but Merlin’s beard they summoned Death, they were willing to give up their souls and they may have crossed more than one line, to end up with not prepared baby Death!

Harry-Actual-Death smiles at him, in a way that makes ice settle inside of his whole body and Sirius’s frustration disappears for full out mind-numbing terror. It’s a little crocked but it weary and confident with just the touch of non-human that gives it that extra fear-inducing touch. “Oh not to worry Sirius, I’ve killed enough. I can get the job done. The Death Eaters won’t win. You can’t cheat Death.”

The room falls into a tense silence everyone now more aware of what they have really done. A few minutes ago, Harry-Actual-Death, almost felt....well almost felt like a person, but now, they were once again reminded that this was a Great Power, the end.

Death.

“Y-you know my name” He manages to gasp out.

He gets a weary smile. “Yes. I know every living thing’s name because I know when they stop living.”

Well, what the flying fuck do you say to that? “That’s kind of hot”

Harry-Actual-Death's face turns red. It’s hard to say if it’s from anger or flustered. “Excuse me!?”

Sirius swings wild eyes to Remus begging for rescue all while cursing his loose tongue. He didn’t mean to say that, it was a reflex, born of years of sassing people and flirting with attractive blokes. His friend is quick to step forward. “Should we focus on how to stop the Death Eaters now?”

“Um, yeah, ugh sure” Harry-Actual-Death stutters in that strange multiple voices “Death Eaters. Got to go and....Death them. Yup.”

He moves it cloaked head to the whole room asking at large. “You all just wanted that right? Stopping the war, beat Voldemort, and making sure Neville and Harry grow up safe?”

Alice and Lily jerk in shock at mention of their kids but everyone nods or mumble agreement. Harry-Actual-Death accepts this with shuffling feet, grabbing the floating items and hastily bids them a farewell.

He bleeds into shadows that race across the room and disappears. But Sirius did not miss how he could feel Harry-Actual-Death’s gaze on him, his face a healthy red, and shy nervous little shifts on his feet right before he departed and he thinks with one startling moment of what that could mean.

As always James, his best mate who knows what he is always thinking figures it out and blurts. “Padfoot I think Death has a crush on you. How do you feel about that?”

“I....I’m a little flattered actually.” How metal is it to say Death has a crush on you? “Also scared Prongs. Very, very, scared.”

#hpdabbles #Master of Death (In training)#Part 2 #Harry Potter #Sirius POV #cursing and swearing #In which Sirius realizes they signed up for something out of their power #And now lives in fear of Death's Affection #Crack #What Death looks like to the Order of Phoniex #hinted Sirius/Harry???#It's more everyone assuming then a actual pairing

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anjalena123 · 3 years

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What are the cheaper, better alternatives to Mailchimp?

I was looking for free or cheapest alternatives and the first one I started using was Mailchimp but it’s not the best one for me.

Then I try GetResponse and find it the best and cheaper email marketing software. I am still using it. GetResponse is one of the most popular email marketing services.

With the addition of Autofunnel (now known as Conversion Funnel), GetResponse has become a great tool for building sales funnel as well.

GetResponse is a perfect tool for both beginners and professional marketers. It has tools to become an email marketing service, build a sales funnel, become a checkout software, or you can create social media ads using it.

It’s like a complete tool for internet marketers. Even if you require tools like drip automation, retargeting, and tagging for e-commerce, GetResponse has everything. You get a 100+ email template to match your brand and niche.

I’ve been a GetResponse user for a long time. I keep testing to multiple tools, but GetResponse is the best I’ve ever used. Not just me, but people that I’ve referred GetResponse, a bunch of clients, have never had any issues with it.

GetResponse allows you to build automation workflow, create autoresponders, retarget website visitors with drip campaigns, and more. You can even set up an e-commerce store using an in-built payment processor.

All in all, it does everything an internet marketer, blogger, small business owner, or e-course seller would ask for.

Here are some of it’s best features:

One of the best email marketing software that is beginner-friendly and equally powerful for scaling businesses.

·Conversion Funnel allows you to build sales funnels.

Webinar software integrated with GetResponse’s marketing platform.

·A checkout page with a payment processor already integrated.

Landing page builder with 50+ templates.

Marketing automation.

Opt-in form builder and integration with popular lead generation tools.

Retargeting automation workflow.

Drip campaigns.

Custom workflow builder with the visual editor.

·150+ email templates for various niches and industries

Facebook Ads integration and builder.

Unlimited email autoresponders.

GetResponse Email Marketing

The biggest challenge for any beginner is to setup automation workflows with email autoresponders. Most of the tools have a cluttered dashboard and a block-based automation builder.

GetResponse, on the other hand, has a visual automation builder.

Using the visual editor, you can create custom automation without much trouble. It’s easy, and with the help of pre-made templates, you can create autoresponder emails quickly and save tons of time.

The visual editor is fairly simple to use. GetResponse allows you to create autoresponder emails and use them in marketing automation.

You can set autoresponder cycles. A cycle will define how many days should pass after a subscriber is added to your email list.

You can choose which days the autoresponder is active. It could be active the whole week, only on weekends, and so on.

Well written emails should also look good, and based on your industry, how your emails look and feel will make a difference in conversions.

Take the pets niche, for example. Pet owners are extremely devoted and caring. They don’t compromise on quality. Emails that look basic won’t generate high conversions in such a niche.

What would work is an email written in a professional tone and looks like a pet lover sent it. And GetResponse has templates that’ll help you convert your emails in such a beautiful and personalized format.

GetResponse has email templates specifically curated for hundreds of niches and the purpose of your email.

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Selling products.

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Educate subscribers.

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Custom email templates are also a possibility. You can create a new HTML template using the CSS block-based drag n drop editor and save it for future purposes and repetitive use.

Speaking about templates, GetResponse has a landing page builder too. It’s not just a basic page builder. Just like emails, you have landing page templates too.

These landing page templates are also optimized for a high conversion rate. Host your landing pages on a custom domain or on a GetResponse URL. It’s your choice.

The pages connect with your funnels and email lists instantly.

You can upload media files straight to GetResponse to add them to your emails quickly. You get 2 GB of file storage.

Most of the time, you’ll send your email according to your regional timing. But your subscribers will receive your emails at their regional timing.

This situation results in a lower open rate and an even lower clickthrough rate. GetResponse has a feature called Perfect Timing.

Perfect Timing is a feature that allows you to send emails at the time that each subscriber is more likely to open and read your email. Perfect Timing is based on data collected by GetResponse.

When you use Perfect Timing, even when you click on send, the email isn’t sent instantly. GetResponse analyzes each subscriber, then according to the generated data, emails are sent when the response rate is recorded at the highest.

Their email marketing software is robust. GetResponse looks very clean and the dashboard is well organized.

In fact, it is the best looking and put-together email marketing dashboard.

You will easily find mailing list sats, email reports, automation insights, sales numbers, and other settings right on the dashboard.

There are two versions of API offered by GetResponse V2 and V3. The API V3 gives you slightly more control and access to commands over the connection at GetResponse.

If you’re looking to survey your audience, you can create survey forms to collect leads using GetResponse.

You can create multiple email lists inside your GetResponse account. Multiple lists can be interconnected using segments inside automation workflows.

Each list allows you to tag individual subscribers. This tagging function works on two things:

·Automation

Lead generation tools/Manually

Firstly, you can tag subscribers by creating an automation workflow. I’ll show you how to in the tutorial below.

Secondly, you can use a lead generation tool like Privy or Thrive Leads to tag subscribers based on the opt-in form they signup from. Or you can also tag them manually.

Unlike other email marketing services, GetResponse allows you to send a double-optin confirmation email twice. Suppose someone subscribes to your list but forgets to confirm the double-optin.

In such a case, you can resend the confirmation email by going to your mailing list. To resend a confirmation email, go to your mailing list.

Then click on the list name and click on the “Unconfirmed” link. This will open a new page where everyone who hasn’t confirmed their subscription will appear. Click on the three dots and select “Re-send.”

You get tons of options for optimizing your email marketing campaigns. GetResponse has an active A/B testing feature. Using A/B testing, you can compare two different emails and identify which one got more open rate and clicks.

A/B testing is a good way to measure the success of email templates, colors, text font, writing style, etc. It shows you what your subscribers are really loving and what’s not working.

I actively use A/B testing to check the difference between multiple subject variations. This one practice has helped to increase the open rate of my RSS digest emails. I highly recommend you to test two subjects every time you send an email broadcast.

To automate things up a little bit, there is an option to use a blog RSS feed to automatically send emails to your subscribers. Every time you publish a blog post, your RSS feeds get’s updated as well. Utilizing your feeds, GetResponse prepares an email and automatically sends it to your subscribers.

Set how the email looks, whether it will be sent immediately when a post is published or weekly as a digest. I use it for sending a weekly digest to my subscribers.

Transactional emails are triggered by emails. Emails such as account creation details, password recovery, cart recovery, checkout assistance are all known as transactional emails. Since these emails are sent to individual subscribers, they are not considered as a typical marketing email sent to bulk email subscribers in a list.

It runs a spam check every time you write an email. If it doesn’t pass the spam score check, you’ll have to edit the email content.

You can send a test message to check how your email will look when it’s sent to your subscribers.

GetResponse also shows you the global preview where you can see your emails getting accessed live by different devices. This will help you to identify any HTML or CSS issues within your template before they get sent.

All in all, GetResponse has tons of features. It might sound overwhelming, but the platform is very well optimized for ease of access, and it makes managing your email marketing campaigns swift.

GetResponse also has a mobile application to help you manage your email marketing and sales funnels on the go. The app is supported on both Android and iOS.

The GetResponse smartphone app lets you:

·Send emails and track statistics.

Keep in touch with new contacts.

Manage your mailing list

Get marketing insights

You can also create social media ads using their Social Ads creator. You’ll get the app download link once you register for a GetResponse account.

GetResponse Conversion Funnel

Conversion Funnel basically helps you to create a sales funnel, with no prior knowledge required. Unlike other sales funnel software, GetResponse Conversion Funnel is built for beginners and small businesses.

It consisted of beginner-friendly sales funnel templates and a shop listing platform. The sales funnel templates are what make Conversion Funnel so much interesting and popular.

Using the sales funnel template, you can build a complete lead-to-sale funnel optimized for high conversion in a few clicks.

You can choose from a bunch of templates depending on your need and industry.

There are three categories of sales funnel inside the GetResponse conversion funnel:

That means you won’t have to bother building a sales funnel from scratch if you are going to sell a product, promote a webinar, or looking to build your email list.

Beginners will highly appreciate the pre-built sales funnels offered by Conversion Funnel. It eliminates the guesswork, which is why most beginners fail at creating a highly successful sales funnel.

Using the pre-built funnels, you’ll slightly ensure the success of your sales funnel. Because these templates are built by successful email marketers and CROs. If your product/service and customer onboarding system is solid, these sales funnels will not fail.

All GetResponse Conversion Funnel templates are optimized for higher customer retention and high sales. You just have to fill in the blank and edit the sales funnel templates with your product information, services, and other stuff. It’s that easy.

GetResponse has over 30 conversion-optimized scenarios created by professional marketers.

That’s just not it. Conversion Funnel is a combination of additional features such as:

Social Ads creator

Lead generation form builder including exit-intent popup forms

·Product manager and listing – both physical and digital (you can use the product listed directly in your emails)

·Sales page optimized for a higher click-through rate.

Perfectly timed emails to recover cart abandonment (automatic setup)

For example, if you choose to build a sales funnel to sell products, the default settings will:

·Automatically retarget your email subscribers and online store visitors.

·Send autoresponders to create specifically for selling products.

·Automatically send confirmation emails (you don’t have to pay for transactional email)

Process credit card, stripe, and PayPal payments

·Automatically display and send upsell offers.

Automatically recommend new products based on past transactions.

If your goal is to generate more leads, use the lead magnet funnel. Prepare a checklist, an eBook, or a free PDF report and offer it on your website as an incentive in exchange for an email.

Using GetResponse lead magnet funnel, you can deliver the lead agent and nurture the subscriber.

GetResponse Support

When it comes to supporting, GetResponse is not the best.

Their platform is good, so I haven’t’ had any frequent issues. But I’m an online marketer, so I can tackle most of the issues on the front-end myself.

However, not everyone using GetResponse will be a professional.

GetResponse says they are the world’s easiest email marketing platform, and yes, they are. Most of the issues are solved quickly.

There is live chat support, 24×7 accessible. You can send an email for ticket support in over 8 languages.

Resolutions come pretty fast for normal, day to day issues. You won’t have any delays in getting an answer as well as done-for-you support.

But GetResponse support is quite weak at resolving complex issues. Their support staff is knowledgeable just enough to answer and solve front-end software issues and errors.

GetRespone Integrations

One of the many reasons people are afraid to migrate to a new email marketing service is integrating their current software with the new platform.

Many times, the only reason you might not shift to a more powerful tool could be as simple as this:

You are afraid to lose control and disrupt the sync among the software you’re using. You don’t want the hassle of adding a new tool and changing the way you operate.

Well, that’s not an issue with GetResponse. It integrates with 120+ software, cloud-apps, and web services. It also connects with Zapier to further integrate with over 1300+ apps.

It integrates with all popular and not-so-popular landing page builders, funnels and pipeline software, CRM, and chatbot software, just to name a few.

You can also connect it with a custom app using the newer version of the GetResponse API key.

GetResponse Pricing & Plans Basic $15 plus $49 professional $99

GetResponse Pros

Things that I liked about GetResponse are:

Intuitive dashboard, quick navigation across all marketing software and apps.

Powerful email marketing templates for various niches. This makes it easy to generate more conversion, even if you are a novice.

Marketing automation to personalize and automate your email communication based on your audience habits and preferences.

Straight forward sales funnel builder. Sales funnel templates are possibly the biggest advantage over its competitors.

Ecommerce store platform built-in. You can list physical and digital products right inside GetResponse and sell using the integrated funnel and email marketing automation.

Allows affiliate marketers to send raw affiliate links.

The landing page builder is quite powerful and has the qualities of a full-fledged page builder.

Integrates with PayPal and other payment processors. You get a built-in high performing checkout page as standard.

Social Ads creator to publish Facebook and Instagram Ads. It’s much easier to use GetResponse Ads creator than Facebook.

GetResponse Cons

Here are the things I didn’t like about it:

The support is decent, but if you need solutions to complex marketing requirements, you’d better be buying the enterprise or Professional plan.

Deleted emails are still counted towards the invoice for the month.

The form builder is quite basic

GetResponse Review: The Conclusion

Overall, GetResponse is a complete marketing solution, but at the core, it is one of the best email marketing services.

It is a beginner-friendly, has tons of powerful features, and allows you to create complex marketing automation workflow with ease.

With its Autofunnel Conversion Funnel software, building sales funnels and lead pipelines are easy as it gets.

If you’re a beginner or small business, GetResponse seems to be the perfect tool for you.

But, if you’re looking for something to scale your e-commerce store or a tool that allows you to customize content for your customers, you might want to consider Drip or Keap.

Start a 30 days free trial.

#email marketing #email marketing tools #email marketing software #getresponse #digitalmarketing

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thanksjro · 4 years

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Eugenesis, Part Six Scene Four: Xenon Info-Dumps For Five-And-A-Half Pages

Alright, back to bullshit.

Galvatron is being a rude little turd to Xenon, calling his robot collection old and dusty, but Xenon’s too wrapped up in the Quintesson/Cybertronian lore to be bothered. Ultra Magnus just wants to know what the fuck he’s done with the Matrix.

You heard the man, out with it.

So, back when the Quintessons first started out, they were known as the Progenitors- yeah, I know- a quasi-organic race who went from caveman-level intelligence to full-blown hard sci-fi sons of guns at an incredibly rapid rate.

Problem is, they didn’t get any further than that. They tried, sure. They tried real hard, for millions of years. Then, once their inspiration had run out, they started looking to other races to try and figure something out.

This just in, god is dead and James Roberts killed him by turning him into a glorified OS.

So, P.R.I.M.U.S. is encoded onto these geodes, and they become sentient. Sometimes they think they’re god.

Just like everyone else in this story.

Now that the Quintessons knew about these little god-doodads, they wanted one for themselves, to try and reverse-engineer the secret to immortality. They hired some guys called the Weavers to nab one for them.

This is some serious nerd shit, y’all. Galvatron agrees with me- he’s never even heard of any of the things Xenon’s droning on about. Neither have I- this is all Roberts at this point.

The Weavers brought back two geodes to the Quintessons, who promptly hid them away until the Masters cooled off a bit, since they were a little miffed about the thievery and whatnot. Then they noticed a couple problems: A) the geodes were encrypted to the moon and back, and B) if you so much as looked at the thing wrong it would purge the Lifecode completely.

Didn’t Optimus throw this thing at Unicron a couple times? Maybe the geode just doesn’t like you, Xenon, ever thought of that?

In order to decode the geodes, the Quintessons needed massive computers. Y’know, like God. But before they could really get a head start on that, the Masters’ nanobot enforcers showed up, blocking out the sky like a giant swarm of angry wasps. They wrecked shopped on Quintyxia- the old one, not the new one- and the Quintessons ran for it. They headed for the planet where they’d buried the other geode, but something went wrong with their hyperspace drive, and they didn’t arrive until two million years after they’d set off.

They dug for the geode, hit something metal, and that’s when the quakes started. The Quintessons left, thinking the planet was unstable.

At this point, Magnus is begging Xenon to just get on with it.

The Quintessons headed back to Quintyxia, to find that their lush, green world had been turned into one made of metal. Cybertron. Quintyxia is Cybertron. New Quintyxia is Quintyxia. It’s like that time Prince named himself the Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

Of course that leaves the question of why the nanobots didn’t just destroy the planet instead of… doing whatever they did to make Cybertron Cybertron.

So, Cybertron is a planet-sized computer, tasked with the sole purpose of decoding the meaning of life.

You know, I remember reading somewhere- and don’t quote me on this, because I can’t for the life of me remember where exactly- that Roberts has never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now, either he’s lying- which I don’t know why he would, the guy loves references- or this is just a weird thing the collective brain of the English population does, where they all jump to the same ideas in absurdist sci-fi.

When the Quintessons showed up on Cybertron, they were met with the results of the cracked Lifecode- the first Transformers (but they couldn’t transform, that was a thing that developed alongside the war.) They couldn’t do much of anything, really.

Well, now we know where the protoform babies in IDW come from.

The Quintessons, not ones to squander an opportunity, decide to use these fragile, helpless proto-beings as slaves.

Yeah, the Quintessons have kind of been the worst since day one.

They build brain modules, stick them in the ground- Seedlings, Xenon calls them- and watch as the planet wrapped living metal around them and built bodies.

The Quintessons get pretty good at making the Auto-Bots, and get to a point where they’re drafting up blueprints for each solitary one. Blueprints that Xenon apparently kept, since he’s got all these copies in the pods right now.

If you couldn’t tell already, we’re going with the “the Quintessons made the Transformers” creation myth.

Of course, you make a big enough species, they’re going to need some corralling- that is, if you want to be an awful, controlling, overbearing parent. And the Quintessons definitely wanted that. So, what’s one to do?

…Look, it’s not that I necessarily disagree on a base level, but-

Xenon, you fucking neckbeard.

Because the Quintessons forgot that religion is not a one-set-outcome game, they were surprised to find that it had given their creations hope and will, things you really don’t want your enslaved masses to have.

The Covenant drove off the Quintessons, then fucked off into deep space to spread the message of Primus, with Maximo at the head of things. Maximo was the leader of the Cybertronian Empire and Megatron’s progenitor in the Marvel UK comics. They did leave someone behind to keep the masses within the faith- Primon. He’s important in the comics, just trust me on that.

Oh man, we’re finally getting some answers.

Xenon admits that the Quintessons didn’t come up with everything; there were parts that they just straight-up ripped out of the geode’s owner’s manual.

Oh. Well. That’s… underwhelming. Xenon’s really just dumping the entirety of the Cybertronian religion into the trash at this point, isn’t he? This info-dump has been going on for five pages, and we still aren’t done.

Turns out that kill switch code was pulled from the geode too- 4/11.002983712 is its serial number. That’s like if you called your dad by his first name and then immediately died afterwords.

But whatever happened to that second geode the Quintessons buried on the other planet?

Yeah, that turned into Unicron.

Turns out the virus that wipes the Lifecode from the geode messed up, and made the geode want to kill literally everything in the universe just for being alive.

Well, isn’t that all just fine and dandy~!

Because the Quintessons didn’t realize what Unicron’s whole deal was at first- the vore-planet had learned how to lie at some point before they met up- they worked together for a time.

At this point the Quintessons had gone from being quasi-organic to something more cybernetically-dependent, so that might have also made things a little difficult in the baby-making department. Or not. I don’t fucking know, things are just happening at this point.

MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU KNOW WHAT BOOK YOU’RE IN

THERE WILL BE NO HAPPY ANYTHING

Storytime’s over, back to the present day. Xenon’s going to take these podded robots and populate New Quintyxia with them. They won’t fight, they’ll be actual, normal people who don’t wage war.

Xenon must have gotten some new glasses, because that’s one hell of a rose-tinted worldview he’s got there.

Ultra Magnus at this point just asks for the Matrix back so they can go home. Xenon says “nah, but check this out tho” and powers on the pod-bots.

Xenon, that’s gross. Don’t make Galvatron and Magnus watch you be weird with the power of granting life, man.

All the robots wake up, stand, and stare up at Xenon, who’s floated up to the ceiling on his power trip. They… aren’t supposed to do that.

Turns out the Matrix is a friggin’ liar, and only promised power because it’s actually Unicron in there. Well, damn.

Galvatron shoots Xenon. Good.

Shoulda sprung for the waterproofing on your Uggs, Mags.

Galvatron’s on a roll, now. He aims at one of the zombies and fires, and they all go down, thanks to their interlinked minds. Crisis averted, I guess.

Magnus, though not happy with Galvatron’s wanton destruction of innocents, has bigger fish to fry at present; he’s convinced that the Matrix is still inside God. Boy oh boy, is he wrong, but the narrative demands he at least tries. He sticks his hand into the computer, up to the shoulder. That’s not good heavy-duty machinery safety.

Well, shit. He’s been possessed by a higher power.

You know, now that I think about it, there’s a good chance that Xenon putting the Matrix into God messed up the killswitch code, and that’s why Prowl had to use a wasting disease to try and end it all. Not really relevant at this exact moment in the story, just a thought I had.

Galvatron, having had enough mystical bullshit for one day, shoots his arm clean off, severing the connection. Magnus drops like a stone, and Galvatron bolts as everything starts coming down around them.

Oh no, Magnus is gonna be our first victim, isn’t he?

Magnus follows after Galvatron, leaving his arm. Hope he doesn’t run into any aqua fortis on the way back to the Trident, because his Pretender shell is beat all to hell.

Then Xenon pulls himself together and stops being dead.

Sigh.

This was ONE section.

#transformers #jro #eugenesis #part six #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #prose writing

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dschribe · 4 years

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What Would Jake Do?

I taped a photocopy of Jake’s latest press photo to the cinder block wall above my desk, and on it I wrote with a Sharpie in all caps, HERO.

If I looked over my shoulder, I could see the real Jake, across the hall, past the copier, though the open door to his office, beyond his assistant Joan’s desk, seated in profile on the couch he used as a desk chair, leaning over paperwork on the giant coffee table he used as a desk.

Sometimes he, JBC, would say, “DPS, you got a minute?”

I’d go across the hall to discuss a piece of copy, some item of marketing, or be handed a 5 x 7” index card with some notes on it, written in Sharpie, which is where I got the habit. (I once called his handwriting “angst-ridden” and he said immediately, “That’s not angst, it’s Sharpie.”)

I was a week out of college, a college I never once went to on a Thursday, because a midweek season’s pass to Stratton Mountain was way cheaper than the one for the weekends. Plus I had a growing skateboard and snowboard retail business I needed to tend to.

Burton, just a couple of hours up the road from me, was my biggest supplier and, I thought, likely the only one that would still be in business in ten years. So it was there, in my senior year, I sent the one and only unsolicited resume in my life. Nobody called for months.

About six weeks before I graduated, I was having the greatest game of my life on the Funhouse pinball machine outside my shop. The vendor who collected money from the games let me paint my quarters red. He’d fish them out and give them back to me, so long as I didn’t block paying customers. I got real good at that game; the phone rang about 45 times before I lost the ball.

The Burton HR woman scolded me for letting the phone ring so many times during business hours, but then told me that Burton folks wanted an interview. I thought I could hear an eye roll. But I scheduled a time, and a couple of weeks later I drove up to meet with Dennis Jenson, the head of marketing. A couple of more weeks went by. Then I got the callback to meet Jake.

I’d seen Jake a few times but never spoken to him. Although the sport was still small, we all looked up to him. He was older than all of us. Killing time in the UMass library I had stumbled across an issue of Time Magazine with a cover story called “Twenty Something.” It was about my generation. I didn’t realize I even had one until I read it. (It would be a little longer before they called us Generation X.) Our generation wasn’t supposed to have heroes, but we had Jake. And maybe Time had it all wrong; three years earlier they had called snowboarding "the worst new sport."

On the drive up to the Burton headquarters for my interview, I grew increasingly nervous about the meeting. When I got close, I pulled over in a panic and paced around the outside of my car. I contemplated turning around. Leaving my hometown of ten years, my friends, my business behind: it was all terrifying. It was also terrifying to go meet my hero. They say you never should.

I had a portfolio of my work—photos and press coverage of my shop, the skateboard and snowboard demos we held, and our skateboard camps. I had the letter that proved I had been the one to get “snowboards” as an entry into the Yellow Pages. I had the work I did to help get the word “snowboard" literally into the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, via my lexicography teacher. And there was a photo of a gang of kids, all mid-ollie, from skate camp.

The first time I taught anyone to ollie was the night before a skateboard contest I held to raise money to open my shop. As they signed up, the kids saw me building the ramps in the roller rink where it was going to be held, and demanded they get to skate them before the big day. Late evenings after the rink closed, we built and skated on the ramps. When any kid asked for help, I showed them what little I knew, and I knew enough to ollie.

One kid had been trying all week but not getting it. He told me it was impossible for him to learn it. I put out a scrap of 2x4 lumber. I pointed out that it wasn’t even that high; it was 1.5” x 3.5”. A few pointers and attempts later, and he cleared it. We high five-ed and I went back to my amateur ramp carpentry.

The contests was a success. The clear winner, who everyone knew would take the prize, snapped his board in half in the middle of his run. Nearly every kid in the place shoved their own board out onto the course so he could keep going. I started to see this wasn’t at all about competition. This became more clear to me as the kids were leaving: they all thanked me. That one kid I taught to ollie told me it was greatest week of his life. He was so genuine. The feeling of getting a kid to believe he could do something he thought he couldn’t do, changed me.

It took me a long time before I could see it, but ever after my life became a pursuit of trying to help people see that what seemed impossible for them, was possible, including levitating a wooden board with wheels off the ground. Snowboarding seemed just as impossible when I tried to learn it. Then it clicked and it was like walking on water. I sold snowboards knowing everyone who learned would be likewise transformed.

As I debated turning back from my interview, I flipped through the portfolio on the hood of my car. I studied the photos of skate camp, and thought about how snowboarding was starting to change how those kids saw the mountains and themselves. I had to go see Jake.

In the interview, he let me do most of the talking, and I went through my portfolio. Then I told him the story of teaching kids to ollie, of teaching a community to skateboard, and how snowboarding felt like the next step—maybe to teach a generation to ride.

He said, "Well in that way we’re a lot alike. That was a hell of a pitch. You should work in marketing.” I got the job, and with it, started a career I never imagined: in marketing.

I went to my graduation ceremony, car packed with all my possessions, then drove to Vermont that night.

My marketing coordinator job, as one of four people in the Burton marketing department, required writing a lot of copy. My first meeting with Jake was to write a press release about him, as we had no stock bio to give the media. In the process, I got to spend hours with him, hearing his whole story, and I hadn’t even gotten my first paycheck yet.

I came back to Jake a few days later with the piece. I titled it “Everyone Calls Him Jake.” I had no idea what the process would be when I handed it to him. He pulled out his Sharpie and started writing notes on it as he read. For the most part, it remained intact—but what he marked up was an impressive collection of notes on grammar, style, and narrative voice. He cared about the words. I had found a great editor.

He said, “This sounds like someone who went to college wrote it.”

I said, “Yeah, let’s not underestimate our riders’ intelligence.”

He nodded in agreement and kept reading.

In the opening paragraph I referred to Jake as the “patron saint of snowboarding.” He said he was’t sure if he was cool with the title. I explained to him that any other way to say it—inventor, pioneer, sponsor, champion, mogul—either wasn't accurate or would alienate core riders who didn’t want an authority figure in their sport. He finally put his pen down and said, “Okay, leave it.”

My writing continued that summer, on catalogs, hang tags, in store displays, and instruction manuals. There was a new snowboard binding, adjustable to over 2 million positions on a snowboard, that needed a lot of explanation. I wrote a lengthy manual for it and then the description for the catalog. Deep inside, I hid a little challenge: if anyone could show the math behind the stance options, they would get a prize.

The writing continued into the summer, but there were other projects, too, like making a video of all our riders. Jake came by the studio one night to see what we’d put together, a film I called, “Push.” He said he didn’t like the title, but as I did when we were writing copy together, I challenged him on it. The name stayed.

About a week later he came over to my desk and handed me a beanie that said “Push” on it, and told me he found it at one of our retailers he’d visited. “It’s to remind you not to push so hard for your ideas. Try to listen little more,” he said. “Oh and if you’re ever in one of our retailers, buy something. Those guys need our support. Even just a hat like this.”

I lived by both pieces of advice ever after.

With all the work, I’d forgotten about the math contest until five envelopes showed up one day in my mailbox. I had five winners. I needed to get them a prize.

Another of my projects that summer was to deliver a sign for Burton retailers, made out of a cross-section of a log. It was being produced by a sign maker down the street named H. G. Wells, as in Homer G. Wells. His ability to tell stories lived up to his literary name, and his business was called Sign Language. As a punning, snowboarding, English nerd, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Homer G. Wells while he worked. Each log slab had a metal inlay of Burton’s newest logo, dubbed the "B-13.” The B-13 came from the design team led my Michael Jager, whose agency JDK was a little further down the road from Homer. I hung out there a lot that summer, too, watching them make ads and design snowboard graphics.

With all these creative people around, I wanted to make things, too. Homer had a drawer full of experiments and spare parts for various Burton items he’d been prototyping. In it I found a few examples of the coveted “Air Disk” medallions that the pro riders had been seen wearing around their necks the past winter. He gave one to me. He also had a little brass cube of metal with a backwards B-13 on it. He told me he was working on a branding iron but he decided to use a different metal. He gave me that too.

I wore the Air Disk around my neck, but after watching Homer make a few more log signs, I had an Idea. I would make my own miniature version, one that I could wear like an Air Disk. I burned a B-13 into a little slice of a branch by putting the brass cube on a hot plate. Homer made me a rubber stamp with "Burton Snowboards" in a circle that fit around it so it looked like its big brother. With a screw eye and piece of twine, I made myself next year’s model of the Air Disk necklace. I felt like I was a Burton team rider.

Years before, I first met Burton team riders who worked at one of the country’s first snowboard schools at Stratton Mountain. When I discovered snowboarding and started selling boards in my shop, one of the kids who worked at the roller rink next door bought one. As a starving computer science student, I did not have a car, but he had access to his dad’s, so for a discount on the board he drove us to Stratton to take our first lesson.

We both struggled while our instructor, pro snowboarder Suzie Rueck, tried to get us to adopt the counter-intuitive stance that makes snowboarding possible.

When I finally got the hang of it and I could make turns, leaving Jeff behind, Suzie said to him, “Wow, your friend must be quite an athlete.”

“He’s not an athlete,” Jeff said, with a sneer, “He’s a fucking mathematician.”

Back at college, I eventually switched from Computer Science to English, but my respect for math continued. My Burton math winners deserved a great prize, so I made five more of my log necklaces, and dropped them into the mail bin.

The next day there were 50 right answers. The day after a couple hundred showed up. In all, the pile got to over a thousand, yet I was hellbent to make them all a log necklace.

The wood for Homer’s full-sized sign was from downed elm, found on the forest floor and full of worm holes. (Our discriminating Japanese distributor would reject their shipment of them because the inferior wood showed insect damage.) Likewise I wanted deadwood for my miniatures, so I had to scrounge fallen branches from the woods across the street from Burton during lunch. After work I hand-sawed disks into the night. I had the hot plate running with the branding-cube, the rubber stamp inked up, and the eyes and the twine set out—in the foyer between the two doors at the entrance to our building, where the light was good and I could reach an outlet with the hot plate’s cord.

The last person out that night happened to be Jake, who stopped to ask me what the hell I was doing. I explained the situation and he said to follow him, he'd show me a better way. He helped me carry my supplies out back to the now-empty snowboard factory, turning lights on as we went. He powered up the dust vacuum and showed me how to use the same radial-arm saw that cut wooden snowboard cores to length. He set up a production line with all my supplies, clamping things in place so I wouldn’t have to pick them up and put them down repeatedly. He explained how, in the beginning days of Burton, he’d gotten in over his head more than once on snowboard production; he had learned the hard way how to manufacture a product in quantity.

Once I was up and running, he handed the operation over to me. Before he left he said, “Two things. One, you know you don’t have to do this all by yourself. We’re all here to help. Two, I thought with all this college-level copy we’ve been writing, you’d know not to fucking underestimate the mathematical intelligence of snowboarders.” And he laughed.

Then he handed me a key, “Lock up when you’re done.”

I said I would leave the key on his desk.

He said, “Keep it. Now that you know how to use the factory, you might as well have a key to it.” And he left.

Just a few months after college, I was a professional writer, a marketer, and someone with the key to the building. But it was even bigger than that: I was trusted—trusted to be the voice of Burton, the messenger of the sport, and the night foreman of the greatest snowboard factory ever.

As the voice of Burton, I’d work with Jake to write everything from letters to our senators about what a snowboard boot was (for some tariff legislation, which I learned needed to be address to the “The Honorable Senator Patrick Leahy") to re-writing the mountain resorts’ “Skiers Code” to be inclusive of snowboarders. Some of the stuff I wrote would get faxed to our distributors around the world to get translated.

One time I wrote an unfortunate press release that made fun of one of our distributor's cultures. I left it as a joke for Jake. The next day his assistant Joan came across the hall to hand me the fax receipt that confirmed she’d gone ahead and saved me the step of faxing it to the distributor myself. I was mortified. Then Jake came in laughing and said, “Don’t make fun of other countries. We’re a global company. And besides, that kind of shit is just not funny.”

I’d write really long emails and Jake would print them out and hand them back to me with, “Just tell me what you want,” written in Sharpie.

One all-company meeting I wrote some notes for him on an index card, suggesting a few talking points based on what I’d been hearing in the halls. He handed it back to me after he spoke with Sharpie written over it, “Who’s running this company God dammit?” I saved that one; it always makes me laugh.

As a messenger, I had to represent snowboarding to the industry, the press, the resorts, the United States Olympic Committee, anyone who might help (or get in the way of) snowboarding’s growth. I also had to represent Burton to the pro riders, who Jake would remind me, I had to listen to.

“If you were good enough to decide what’s right in snowboarding, you’d be riding, not sitting at that desk. Plus the riders have two ways of being right. First, they should know, they ride more. Second, if they’re off, they’ll set a new direction and call it right."

When he made me head of marketing, he told the company that I was always brutally honest about how I felt about the direction of the company, and that he didn’t want that to change. He let me know that my views from behind a desk counted too.

As unofficial night foreman of the factory, I always had projects going. We built skate ramps, buried a time capsule, and pulled all-nighters collating press kits. I designed and helped build trade show booths in a corner of the warehouse before packing them into crates and shipping them to Las Vegas, San Diego, Montreal, and Tokyo. I made a sign that said, “My Boss is a Protestant Carpenter,” and someone came up with the idea of bracelets that said “W.W.J.D.”—What Would Jake Do. Some nights I'd skateboard around the factory with my friend Andy, the PA system blaring music from a telephone dialed into it, duct taped to the speaker of a boom box.

It was in the factory, at another all-employee meeting almost ten years later, when my title was president, that Jake said he trusted me implicitly as the conscience of the company. Standing there, I still had that key in my pocket, and a million lessons from Jake in my head. One of them: by all means, do meet your heroes.

Jake passed away 27 years after I first started working for him—when I was 27. So half my life, his words have been with me. He and the people he assembled at Burton gave me a home, a career, and I hope, an open mind. They gave me a platform to help teach generations to snowboard, along with the humility to step off of it and just listen. My experience with Burton led to a job at another company where I could help teach a world that if you have a body, you are an athlete.

They say when you die, you can’t take it with you. Another way of looking at it is that when you die, you get to leave all of you behind. Losing Jake, for me, is being left with everything he had to give. I don’t feel loss, just the unspeakable pain of permanently indebted gratitude.

The day he got the news, The Honorable Senator Patrick Leahy, still in office, tweeted of Jake, “He was the soul and patron saint of snowboarding, and a beloved Vermonter whose vision has had worldwide reach.”

It makes me so proud: the title Jake accepted in 1992 in my first week, something I was able to give to him. I am grateful I was invited there to push for it.

#snowboard

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arabellaflynn · 5 years

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My roommate owns a sewing machine. I have been kindly given permission to use it pretty much whenever she's not. This machine is a 1977 Sears Kenmore 1625 behemoth that, judging from the weight, has been carved out of a single block of solid steel. His name is Pierre. Pierre runs quite well for a chunky monstrosity approaching middle age, but apparently he was a secondhand find, and sometime over the past 42 years all of the presser feet that were not attached to the machine have gone AWOL. This is kind of a little bit important, more so after I watched my poor roommate try to put boning into a ball gown bodice by hand. Presser feet are the little widgets that hold the fabric down onto the feed dogs -- the little tank treads that walk the fabric away from you as you sew -- and the size and shape of them determine what kind of stitches you can use, and what happens when they clamp down on the fabric. You can get all kinds of trick feet that overlock like a serger, fold the edge over to auto-hem fine fabrics, or the one said roommate really could have used, have a hinged base and only one prong so you don't have to engage in mortal combat to get the damn zipper to fit underneath. Forty-two years is approximately four eternities in small appliances time. Sears Roebuck has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Kenmore doesn't make any of its own stuff anymore, and sewing machines have gone from electromechanical to mainly electronic. Pierre takes universal needles, thank GOD, but who the hell knows if any of his innards and accessories are even manufactured anymore. By some miracle, Pierre's owner actually has his manual, or at least a photocopy of it. It seems to have all the pages, including a parts list in the back. Happily, Googling the parts number for his zipper foot gets me a hit on a Sears parts page. Unhappily, the part is no longer in stock. It appears to be extinct. The page feels the need to specify that's a "low shank" zipper foot, which sets off alarm bells. Nobody puts modifiers like that into a database entry without a reason. I know zero things about presser feet, other than what they do when they're on the machine, but the picture of a "low shank" foot didn't particularly look right. I go take a look for "presser foot" and "shank" and, while I find neither sewing machine-related porn nor entertaining stories of prison murders over crafting supplies, I do find out that there are two different heights of leg on these things. A low shank attaches about 3/4" up from the strike plate, and a high shank attaches 1" up. I went out to the living room to measure Pierre. The number I got was... not either of those. I would compliment Pierre on his uncommon length, but my roommate tells me he was named after a gay French pirate, so he probably wouldn't appreciate it from me. I go back to Google, and mainly what I find is that Sears is out of stock on literally every small object that has ever contributed to building one of these machines. Nothing on the internet ever really dies, and I watch enough of Techmoan and Retro Recipes and 8-Bit Guy to know that if it's old and gizmo-y, then someone, somewhere has made a sideline out of hoarding spare parts for one of these things in their garage. Tried a few sewing suppliers. No luck. They directed me to specialty stores for vintage sewing machines. None of them had any "Kenmore super-high shank" feet either, although one of them did helpfully tell me that Pierre's proper model number is 158.1625, which isn't on the manual cover. Good to know his full legal name, I guess; now we can shout the whole thing whenever he gets into trouble. So then I tried reddit, which is the best and worst of the internet all rolled into one. I figured either they would call me a fake geek girl ("beta cuck loser" is usually for male-majority subs, which a sewing sub probably wasn't) and try to doxx me, or be fucking brilliant. Reddit wasn't fucking brilliant, but they did point me at people who were. It turns out that people who are into vintage Kenmore sewing machines are really really REALLY into vintage Kenmore sewing machines, and they hold their secret cult meetings on Facebook. They're a very nice cult, and linked me to a place that had the Holy Grail I was looking for, an adapter so Pierre could get with the times and wear modern (read: cheap and easy to obtain) presser feet like everyone else. It cost $13, which is probably more than my roommate originally paid for Pierre, but it does mean she can now buy a set of a dozen presser feet for all occasions for about $14.95. He also needs the clutch on his bobbin winder replaced, which is probably eventually going to be my job, since I'm the most likely to own a set of tiny screwdrivers and have any idea what the hell I'm doing. But that is another quest for another time. from Blogger https://ift.tt/2WjBSeA via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

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hxuijzgophf-blog · 5 years

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Open authorized online tools of Instagram page later IG Apers on your browser and it will revoke the permission you've definite to any such suspicious apps. If you're yet hell-bent upon tracking your visitors, the now-popular Instagram stories feature is the best showing off to attain so, since the stories posted by public accounts are accessible to not far off from everyone (unless they are blocked from viewing it). The exact relation for the order of these lists is not can you see who views your instagram story enormously clear, but we know that it all goes support to the Instagram algorithm, who you engage considering the most on Instagram will likely appear at the summit of the list, which is why you often see your closest connections or buddies as the first listeners upon the list. Who Stalking My Instagram? as a result you cant look definitively who visits your Instagram profile, but is there a quirk to figure out your stalkers? Sadly, as well as no although there is more room for notes upon this question.The Instagram Algorithm shows you posts and orders your buddies and likes based on three factors: your interests, your relationships, and reference. By interests we set sights on what you next and engage gone every you have to realize is admission a credit and swipe up. click upon the eyeball icon and the list of people who have visited your story will be nimbly displayed. This includes users who aren't with your Instagram account. Can you look who views your Instagram videos? In sudden you can for that our site will urge on to realize so.The perfect description for the order of these lists is not entirely clear, but we know that it every goes urge on to the Instagram algorithm.who you engage bearing in mind the most upon Instagram will likely appear at the top of the list, which is why you often see your closest links or partners as the first spectators on the list. Who Stalking My Instagram?So you cant see definitively who visits your Instagram profile, but is there a way to figure out your stalkers? Sadly, furthermore no, although there is more room for who views my instagram comments upon this question. The Instagram Algorithm shows you posts and orders your buddies and likes based on three factors: your interests, your relationships, and reference. By interests we goal what you in the same way as and engage with.If you notice someone creepy, a tap upon the tiny fuming icon (next to the name) will block the person from viewing your highly developed Instagram Stories. Or, you may switch to a private account if you wish to keep your private data private. Manually checking the Instagram stories upon a daily basis could be annoying. However, that's the abandoned way, at least for now.

Things To Remember

There is an simple process in place which would let you see the names of your profile visitors. Now, not huge settlement for anyone to bust your Instagram stalkers. Just acquire it finished here following few simple steps. They are to stay a dull and rightly so. To look who viewed my Instagram you have go through our how to see who viewed your instagram video endorsed site. If you'd not similar to someone else to know that you've visited their profile (say, your ex). So, the next grow old curiosity gets the improved of you, you know better than to trust the third-party apps. Manually checking the Instagram Stories upon a daily basis could be annoying. However, that's the forlorn way, at least for now.

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viewprivateigram-blog · 5 years

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Some Choices of How to View Private Instagram Profiles without Following 2019

We will finally tell you how to view private instagram profiles on-line, without following! We've just released a brand new on-line tool which – as its name shows – permits customers to see any non-public instagram photograph and profile they desire. This is a groundbreaking fulfillment for us and the entire community. You may private viewer ig ultimately start the usage of it these days. Find out more about how we executed by way of studying this page or actually click at the button under to get right of entry to it and you may have the danger to see any non-public photograph on instagram inside seconds.

There may be no want to down load any shady files, that allows you to see non-public instagram profiles using our device you only need to have a working internet connection and a running net browser. You will now not be asked to down load or deploy anything for your device. We are able to additionally no longer ask for the information of your private instagram account or your password. We don’t need that. This could exchange your life for all time. When you view a non-public instagram profile using our tool there is sincerely no danger of anybody findig out that you have used this type of device or that you have considered someones profile or photographs. We are the one who do the viewing after which display the whole thing to you. Also, our online gear interface is fully encrypted so we have no idea which profiles you're viewing, all this records is encrypted. We also can’t see the snap shots that we display for you for the reason that connection among you and our website online is being encrypted and it's miles best decrypted on your tool and no longer ours. There is no want to pay us something, you can browse all of the private images and profiles without paying a dime to us. We didn’t develop this for money, we only want a bit little bit of it to pay for our devoted servers but we get enough from the non invasive commercials displayed on this internet site. Instagram has been the maximum famous social network for pretty some time now. It amassed hundreds of thousands of customers over a fantastically quick length. Being that it’s a social platform that is often based totally on sharing content that can be taken into consideration as non-public, it’s simplest herbal to question the protection of this records. So how secure is your content material on instagram? Founders of this highly simple yet first rate app paid a whole lot of attention to securing the privacy of every user.Instagram is making sure the protection of your content material in more than one manner.

By putting your profile protection settings to private, you may select your audience. This way only followers can be able to have get entry to for your content. The “fans” concept lets in you to choose to whom your content goes to be to be had. Furthermore, you may allow or deny a “following” request. This offers your whole control over your target audience as well as your private content material.Next to this, there may be an choice to select specific people so that it will be able to see your content. When you manually choose them and listing as users which you want to proportion your modern-day publish with, no person else however them can have get right of entry to to that content material. Furthermore, you can block a particular consumer on instagram. By way of blockading a person on instagram, you disable their follower’s privileges and deny get right of entry to in your content.That is a exquisite option because it offers similarly safety for instagram users. Because instagram profile viewer the remaining step of defense, you may file a user if their hobby regarding your posts is disrespectful or insulting in any way. But, you may ought to specify a cause for reporting that person. With these security settings, you on my own decide who is going to look your snap shots and posts. Being involved for the protection of your content material on instagram is one thing. However trying to find approaches to track the hobby of some other person, to ensure that no one is intruding your privateness, is an entirely distinctive element. No person is capable of see your content with out your approval. There are apps that allegedly allow customers to see non-public content material on instagram, but breaching instagram safety is no smooth project.There have been reviews that instagram bills were hacked inside the past, but again, there was no evidence behind those speculations both. Instagram founders invested a whole lot of price range inside the improvement in their protection settings. So it's miles extraordinarily not likely that a simple app can pass past their safety gadget and permit access for your content material. To finish on this topic.

No, you could’t see who's searching at your instagram profile only due to the fact no person can have get right of entry to in your posts except you allow them to. In case you had the option to display the activity of sure profiles, it wouldn’t make you any different from them. There is no need to impeach your protection on instagram as you alone determine how safe your content material is. With such a lot of options to shield your privateness, it’s fantastically not likely that someone will spend hours figuring out a way to view private instagram breach it. One element is for certain, if a person does manage to breach their protection system and get right of entry to your content material it gained’t be via an app. Every machine has a backdoor. Foremost organizations absolutely inspire professionals of reverse engineering to try to discover and exploit their gadget. However that is completed for the functions of enhancing the security device as opposed to exploiting it.

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mantis-lizbian · 5 years

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so i was just browsing through the Pathfinder Bestiary (basically the same Monster Manual, barring mechanical changes, for those who play D&D) and it something about monster alignment suddenly struck me... no, not the inherent racism of it; that’s certainly not news to me. but... like, this happened while i was looking through the giants, and i realized that there’s an incredibly strong relationship between a giant’s Intelligence and how evil they are. aside from True Neutral stone giants, every giant in the core MM/Bestiary whose intelligence is 10 or lower is Evil. cloud giants, with their Intelligence of 12 are either LG or LE, and only the 16 Int storm giants get to be unambiguously CG.

now, a few giants in later Bestiaries buck this trend slightly, but within the core Monster Manual and Bestiary, there is a strong correlation between low Intelligence and being Evil. any exception to the rule that low Intelligence means Evil alignment is an animal, or something portrayed as having an animal-like mind (and therefore being True Neutral). ogres, trolls, minotaurs - not to mention all the classic racist races - if your Int is less than 8, and you can’t get considered a fancy animal, like the girralon, then the chances that you’re anything other than CE are slim to none. yes, you have got your evil schemers and masterminds - most demons and devils have fairly high Intelligence, and while they’re not in Pathfinder, we can’t forget the mind flayers - but there isn’t really an opposite to that. even beyond the first Bestiary/Monster Manual, there are incredibly few low-Int Good-aligned creatures.

now, ever since Eberron came out, i’ve pretty much - even unconsciously, sometimes - been using its assumptions about alignment. namely that any alignment presented in a monster’s entry is, at best, merely an approximate trend among that species, and more often than not, completely meaningless. Lawful Good medusae and Chaotic Evil angels are canon in Eberron. pretty much the only creatures to buck this trend are the Eberron-original daelkyr. heck, it’s even stated that clerics can be of any alignment, regardless of the deity they worship (if you’re new in 5e, previous editions required that clerics be no more than “one step” away from their deity’s alignment, so a cleric of a LG deity had to be either LG, LN, or NG). but...

even though it’s often problematic. even though i don’t even really give it much regard. even though countless flame wars have been fought over the very concept of alignment, and what it means, and what each alignment means... i don’t know that i want it to be changed. not officially, at least. alignment is one of the most recognizable elements of D&D, and i’ve had a lot of fun in many campaigns because of it. there’s a lot of very interesting philosophy that can be explored through having a defined alignment system. and if you’re not interested in philosophical explorations in your game (and hey, surely we all enjoy the occasional kick-in-the-door style game, even if we do) alignment can be a really useful handwave for your murderhobo fun.

and so long as we’ve got alignment, it’s a useful thing to apply to the various monsters in order to provide the DM a shorthand for how this monster behaves. i mean, with the stat block taking up half a page, artwork taking up a quarter, you don’t really have that much room to provide a detailed description of every monster’s ecological role and societal structures. a kraken is a giant NE squidtopus. werebears are LG. satyrs are CN. it’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. but, of course, we could change the alignments. except...

one of the biggest reasons that 4e didn’t feel like D&D to me was, honestly, going through the Monster Manual and seeing the entry for archons. archons have appeared in every edition of D&D up to 4th, and they’ve always been something along these lines:

they’re celestials, like angels, and the hound archon in particular has been particularly iconic. in 4e, archons became...

basically elementals (elementals, in turn, became primarily combinations of the four-ish elements, rather than “pure” elementals like in every other edition of D&D). now, i’d definitely like to be clear that i did not dislike 4e’s archons (or elementals) by any means. i thought their designs were pretty cool, and they fit in really well with the other changes 4e had made both to the setting and mechanics. but... they weren’t D&D archons.

...archons were probably kind of a bad choice for the point i’’d like to make, though. because where i’m going with this is that... D&D has a legacy. obviously it does, it’s literally the oldest tabletop roleplaying game, how could it not? but... that legacy goes beyond D&D. orcs are CE because they come from the works of Tolkien, and in Middle-Earth, orcs were CE. hill giants are CE because they come from stories like David and Goliath and Jack and Beanstalk where giants are simply a monstrous threat to be overcome, and whose power comes entirely from brawn over brains. ogre magi were an early adaptation of Japanese oni. and i really like that you can look at the creatures in the Monster Manual and you can immediately tell exactly where they came from. this is as close as you can get to a blank canvas without having to just being handed a set of rules for how to build monsters and being told to make them all yourself. and what i love about blank canvases is that you can do whatever you want with them.

the D&D and Pathfinder books aren’t rulebooks, they’re cookbooks. they give you a bunch of recipes and some tips on how to use them, and then tell you to make of it what you will. what i would recommend isn’t changing the monsters, or scrapping alignment in an official capacity, but rather putting a sidebar or something at the front of the book that talks about this. inform the player of the legacy of alignment. give them some ideas for how it can be utilized to enhance your storytelling, not just as a shorthand label slapped onto a character. be upfront about the problematic aspects it has vis-a-vis racism and... i’m not really sure what the word is for the thing i was describing at the beginning of this post (i’d be very grateful if someone could inform me)... and then tell them that, as the DM - and even as the player - they are free to do with it what they will. just because hobgoblins are listed as LE in this book doesn’t mean all hobgoblins have to be. or even that hobgoblins as a whole have to be LE in your campaign setting. nothing’s stopping you from making your hobgoblin society to be a LG one built around noble warriors and honourable combat rather than despotic militarism and perpetual raiding. maybe your angels take inspiration from the Megami Tensei series and are LN dogmatic servants of an uncaring and impartial deity. make the stories you tell with the game your own.

#dnd #pathfinder #dungeons & dragons

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thebarsondaily · 6 years

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Author of the Month (2018)

tumblr || twitter || ffn || AO3

Ships/Fandoms:

SVU: Barba & Benson

Harry Potter: Draco & Hermione, Harry & Pansy

Favorite Completed Fic - A Barson Thanksgiving - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Barba & Benson or 12 Days of Barson Christmas - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Barba & Benson

Favorite W.I.P. - Spring Brings New Life - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Barba & Benson

What inspired you to begin writing fanfiction? I’ve been writing fanfiction since I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Han Solo was frozen in carbonite and I was beside myself. So I wrote my own fix-it, even though I had no idea that’s what it was. I was 12. Then I didn’t write any more again until I was in high school and fell in love with “Remington Steele”, “Scarecrow & Mrs. King” and “Moonlighting”. I had pages of 3-ring binder paper filled with post-episode or scene extensions or fix-its. I even wrote an original “Remington Steele” fic on my IBM Selectric typewriter. I used this yellow-orange scrap paper that my mom brought home from her Army Reserve office.

When I went to college and those shows were cancelled, I got away from it. Probably because I got to write for a living as a reporter. Then, this past summer, I discovered the world of fan fiction online. I don’t even remember how I stumbled on AO3, but I fell in love when I discovered a world of people who were writing about all my favorite tv and movie characters! After I started reading, new plot bunnies of my own started hopping around in my head.

My first Barson fic was born after I saw a rerun of “Sanctuary” last summer and essentially wanted a fix-it after the last scene when Barba asks Olivia if she’s disenchanted with him and then Dodds comes in, ruining the moment. As you can see in a recent chapter of SBNL I’m not a big fan of Deputy Chief Dodds.

Do you use a story outline or just let the story go wherever it takes you? I may have an outline in my head, but I’ve never written one down. I tend to just let the story go where it takes me. I usually start out with an end game and I work to get there, or a prompt from something I read or saw and start from there. Lately, I’ve been writing future chapters as I’m inspired, even though I’ll later have to go back and link them into the plot.

What helps get you through writer's block? Reading or writing something different. I write for two different fandoms, so switching between them helps. I try and take my mind completely off of what has me stuck.

Do you use music or anything else to help motivate you while you are writing? Please elaborate if you do. I like to listen to music, but I don’t know if it motivates me. I usually don’t need any other motivation than the thoughts in my head.

Do you have any advice for aspiring fanfiction authors? Just write. Like that old Nike ad: Just do it. If you have an idea that you feel strongly about, chances are someone else does as well and will want to read it. But also, self edit. Proofread. Proofread again. Read it out loud to yourself. Picture the scene in your head to see if it makes sense. If you aren’t confident in your spelling, grammar, structure skills, ask someone to beta for you. Nothing turns me off faster as a reader than a wonderful plot that I can’t get past the first few paragraphs of because it has bad grammar or structure. I can overlook spelling errors and typos even. But not bad grammar and poor structure. And check your verb tenses! Pick one and stick with it. Don’t switch back and forth.

Does writing energize or exhaust you? I would say it energizes me while I’m doing it. But if it’s late at night when I’m done and put it away I’m exhausted.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be? Don’t throw any of it away! At some point I threw away all of my old, handwritten stuff from high school and now it makes me so sad! The only one I even can remember the littlest bit is the original “Remington Steele” one. I had just watched the Shogun miniseries on television so I sent them to Japan!

What was the hardest scene you've ever had to write? It was for a WIP in my other fandom and it was a love scene. I always have a hard time writing those to begin with, whether it’s rated PG or NC-17, but in this case, I didn’t want it to read like a how-to manual and needed to focus more on feelings and emotions than actual actions. It took me quite a while and several re-writes to get it the way I wanted it. But in the end it turned out perfectly.

Do reviews help or hinder your writing process? Reviews always help! I love to hear what people say about my chapters! So far I’ve only had positive feedback. I had one where the reader wasn’t particularly happy with a chapter and I felt SO guilty because I felt like I let her down that I actually contact her via IM and apologized. She told me that she still loved the story and in the end what mattered most was that it was my story and I had to write for myself. And I LOVE when I get a new reader who tells me they’re hooked!

Is there a quote that inspires you? If so, what is it? I don’t know if it inspires me, but it sums up my feelings about writing: “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” -- Isaac Asimov

What is your favorite fanfiction trope to write? Honestly, I’ve never written a trope. Not that I don’t enjoy reading them, but writing them has never appealed to me, although I have a bed sharing one started for Noah Benson and Jesse Rollins. It hasn’t gotten very far though.

Do you have any fanfiction recommendations? Please limit the recs to Barson fanfic only. I’ve read so so many wonderful ones, this is a VERY hard question to answer.

One of the very first ones I read was by @TribalVipe called “A Hand on Your Face in the Dark” and it kept me coming back for more by her. Another finished work by hers that I love is “Don’t Look Behind You” because it includes all three SVU couples I ship. She has a new WIP, “Paraíso Perdido“ that I’m eagerly waiting for an update.

Since the episode-that-shall-not-be-named, one of my favorite completed fix-its is “The Rediscovered Country” by @theoofoof.

I’ve not read anything by @adrianna-m-scovill that I wouldn’t recommend and I very much enjoy @khughes30’s Musical Notes one shots.

p.s. I think A Hand on Your Face in the Dark is actually written by rosehips. ~untapdtreasure

#& Author of the Month #Barson #author of the month (2018)#Olivia Benson #Rafael Barba

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starvire · 6 years

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Tag Game!

I was tagged by the kind and amazing @valiantalpacapeach

Name: Taylor

Star sign:Pisces

Height: 5′ 4″

Middle Name: Jean

Put your iTunes on shuffle. What are the first four songs that popped up?: The Howling - Within Temptation, The Phantom Agony - Epica, Numb - Marina and The diamonds, Most People are Good - Luke Bryan

Grab the book nearest you and turn to page 23, 17th line: I’m at work and only have car manuals laying around so I’m going to have to bet its gonna be like a part of sorts, I’m too lazy to go grab it

Had a poem or song written about you? As far as I know nope

Last time you played air guitar: Yesterday at Krav when Slipknot came on

Celebrity crush: Anna Torv, Dichen Lachman and Cate Blanchett are my top 3 at the moment

Sounds you hate and love: I loath grinding metal on asphalt, I enjoy the sounds of like the valiant said Thunderstorms

Do you believe in ghosts: In a sense

How about aliens? Indeed

Do you drive? Yes

Do you like the smell of gasoline? Depends on the gasoline, sometimes its not bad

Last movie you saw: Monster

Do you have any obsessions right now? I’ve been really into Destiny 2, Octopath traveler and Hyrule warriors. I can’t really count them as obsessions though

Do you tend to hold grudges against people who’ve wronged you? I couldn’t hold a grudge even if someone stabbed me then like cheated on me in the same instance, I tend to block it off and let it go and then blame myself for it xD

Tagging: @otterwater @alphawolfcub23 @nyuppypuppy @kuviraesthetic, only if you all want to of course

#me #personal #korra fit fam #tag game #lgbt #lesbian #korra fitness

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cecilspeaks · 6 years

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124 - A Door Ajar, part 1

Anxiety is just your body’s way of telling you something really, really terrible is about to happen. Welcome to Night Vale.

Three bodies were found behind The Pancake House this morning. Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so chipper, it must be the coffee, I just started caffeine again. Do-over! [still cheerfully] Three bodies were found behind The Pancake House this morning. The cause of death has been identified as drowning. As you know, this is particularly unsettling because The Pancake House does not border any body of water, nor does any body of water exist in Night Vale. Salt water and blobs of semi-animate clear jelly were found in the lungs of the victims, according to reports from coroner Lorelei Alvarez. Alvarez added that their clothing was salty to the taste.

The victims were discovered by a truck driver identified only as Enormous Jim, who pulled into the Pancake House parking lot around 6:30 this morning. “I knew something wasn’t right,” Jim said in his statement to the Secret Police. “I felt warm all over and kind of tingly, and I thought the fly larva had finally hatched in my hair. I got out of my truck and tried to swat the larva, but there was no larva there. And I was sad because I missed its company. That’s when I noticed what a beautiful sunrise we were having, so I stood and watched it for a while. You know that beautiful moment when you can’t tell the difference between orange and violet and the clouds look like sleeping gods? That’s when I noticed those dead bodies lying by the wall.” Oh Enormous Jim added, “It was a beautiful noiseless sunrise. I wish the larva could have seen it.”

Jim’s forehead was lined with sweat trails and his hands fluttered along his shirt buttons like clarinet keys. He explained in a shaky voice that he was hauling turnips from a farm in the south to a pulp factory in the north, where they would be turned into mulch and used to grow more turnips. He said he had a tight schedule to keep, and that he had nothing to do with any of this. And since lying is illegal, the Sheriff’s Secret Police released him from further questioning.

The victims have not yet been identified, but each held matching promotional coupons, good for one free hotcake at The Pancake House. The coupons stated they could only be used once per table, per visit. It is unclear whether the victims intended to sit at several tables and pretend no to know each other, in order to use all three coupons in the same visit. This is a developing story.

In related news, The Pancake House is having a grand reopening. It’s been closed down since the sandstorm of ’97 buried it under 200 tons of sand. It resurfaced in ’08 full of scorpions, who reopened the diner under the name Arachnid Hut. It disappeared again in ’09, after the scorpions filed chapter 7.

No one could see The Pancake House anymore, but if they walked atop the seemingly plain dune, they would run into a hard surface that felt exactly like a wall. Teenagers who had scratch heart-swaddled initials into the invisible concrete blocks could still feel the impression of their etchings suspended in the nothingness. And the area continued to smell of hash browns for a radius of nearly a mile.

Anyway, it’s back and under new, probably human ownership, and will hopefully be here to stay. Ah, so many memories from that place! Back in the 90’s, my friends and I would hang out there for all night sometimes. There was a young woman who sat in the corner booth and analyzed people’s dreams for a dollar. I once told her about this recurring nightmare I have where I am a pineapple farmer, but I have to grow each pineapple under a glass bottle. And when the pineapples grow big, the bottles break and I’m left standing in a field of broken glass. And sometimes when I woke up, I had little cuts all over the bottoms of my feet. I don’t remember what the woman said it means, but I found out later that she was Nina Gordon, frontperson for alternative rock band Veruca Salt.

There was a lot of great memorabilia in The Pancake House, like old postcards and ceramic chickens with human fingers for eyes, and this cool antique jukebox that would automatically play Buddy Holly’s “Every Day” when someone in town was about to day. I loved that place!

Oh, we’ve just received word from the coroner’s office that more saltwater has been discovered, this time in the potholes near the controversial new roundabout in Old Town. Alvarez also found blobs of clear jelly floating there, similar to those found in the lungs of the drowning victims. Samples of these blobs were collected by a girl scout splinter faction known as The Onyx Fist, and brought to the Marine Biology Association for further examination. A girl scout member and apparent leader of The Onyx Fist named Brandy Lance said, “We knocked on the marine biologist’s door and heard muffled shouts and loud crashes coming from inside. Then the blinds closed and the lights went out! When we forced our way in using telekinesis - I earned my Mountain Mover badge last year – we heard the backdoor slam shut. The only thing we found inside was a scribbled note that said: “Closed for the day”. But it was just lying on the floor, not posted anywhere. Brandy said her troupe will not rest until they track and locate the missing biologists. Good luck, kids! We’ll be waiting for your updates.

And now traffic. As I mentioned earlier there is a controversial new traffic roundabout in Old Town. The problem is, no one knows how a roundabout works. If you go to the right if you should go to the left, your headlights explode. If you go left when you should go right, you get a phone call that one of your family members is in the hospital. If you hesitate, a stranger dies. And if you just keep going, you’ll never stop. You’re never, ever, ever stop. You’ll drive endlessly, aging at a steady rate, watching the terrain change, the seasons pass and you’ll wonder, “Have I ever stopped? Have I ever stood still or slept, or sat in a chair that wasn’t hurdling ceaselessly into the future?” The emergency almonds you keep in the glove compartment can only sustain you for so long. What happens then? There’s only like, 15 of them in an airline bag, and you’ve never been on a plane. Where did you get them? Are they safe to eat? They’ve been in there a really long time. Probably since you got the car. Maybe they came with the car. You’ve started to forget things like your name and where you bought this car. Was it at a dealership or from someone on Craigslist? Did you build the car yourself or manifest it with your mind? You find the owner’s manual, but you can’t read it for some reason. It’s either in another language or you’ve lost the ability to read. The letters rearrange themselves and fall off the page. Your leg is burning where the letter L has landed on your knee. L, L! You remember the letter L, at least there’s that. This has been traffic.

Uodate on the drowning storty. The victims have been identified as the Traylor family who reportedly have not come out of their house in nine years. Annette, the adult daughter of the family, stil has braces from when she was 13. She just never returned to the orthodontist to get them removed. It’s possible that hotcakes from The Pancake House were the only thig she could eat anymore. You know come to think of it, 11 years ago was the lats time when The Pancake House was open. There are noooo coincidences. Or, everything is a coincidence. Or, only some things are. Yeah, those are the three possibilities.

An independent consultant has determined that the saltwater samples are oceanic in nature. This has Secret Police investigators scrambling to find where the ocean is located. One of them suggested north, and the consultant began walking in that direction. The investigators wanted to determine if the ocean is a continuing threat, and whether or not they’re allowed under state and physical law to apprehend it on charges of manslaughter. Law enforcement and volunteer search parties are forming to seek justice for the Traylors, although no one remembers every interacting with them before. But everyone cares, -really- cares a lot suddenly. The silver lining in events lie these is the togetherness it brings to a community, right befroe the paranoia and blameshifting sets in and divides it further into an ever-widening chasm, but let’s just try to enjoy the unity while we have it.

Ooh, speaking of togetherness: it looks like Carlos has brought a picnic lunch for us to eat here at the station. Aww, what a nice surprise, hon! Now while I look into this basket of goodies, let’s check in with the weather.

[“Lake Full of Regrets” by Devine Carama featuring River Greene and Devin Robert https://devinecarama.bandcamp.com.]

That was weird. Carlos came in, as I mentioned, with a lovely picnic lunch from the Ralph’s deli counter. His hair was wet from the rain and there were water droplets on the tips of his eyelashes that made him look like a cute little cartoon forest animal. The phone rang here at the station, and it was one of Carlos’ scientists, Mark, asking if Carlos was here. Carlos made a wild hand gesture and shook his head rigorously, so I told Mark that he was not. When I asked Carlos what that was all about, he told me the scientists were putting together a group t locate clues about the phantom ocean, and they wanted him to lead it. And I was confused. Didn’t he want to lead it? I Mean why didn’t he want to talk to them? He’s never refused a scientific call from a fellow scientist to do science before. He was just behaving unscientifically. In fact, come to think of it, I was a bit surprised to see Carlos here at all. I-I mean I figured with today’s investigation, he would already be out in the field, and I wouldn’t see him for days.

He said, since everyone else was out on search parties, it was the perfect time to go to the Ralph’s, because there wouldn’t be a line. I mean, that does sound scientific, it sounds like scientific reasoning but a- but (that), just something struck me about it as, I dunno, just off. I mean I don’t wanna say he was lying. Carlos doesn’t lie. Besides, lying is illegal. But it seemed like there was something he wasn’t telling me, like something that was bothering him. I asked him if there was anything he wanted to talk about, and he just said he had to go get the car washed and he left without even finishing his three-bean salad, and he loves that salad, made with his three favorite beans: garbanzo, kidney, and jelly.

I mean I know, I know, it might not sound like a big deal and maybe he was just having a moment. We all have moods, sometimes out of nowhere. You know, maybe I’m the one in a weird mood. I’m probably just being overly sensitive. I’m sure nothing is really wrong, not actually. Anyway you know, let’s just move on, I’m sure it’s fine. Everything is fine. It’s fine. Maybe I should go off caffeine again?

No, you know what, I really can’t shake this feeling. Nina Gordon, the former frontperson of Veruca Salt once told me that the subconscious is a powerful force. Maybe it’s all in my subconscious. Maybe if things are too good for too long, and you think about it too hard, it can start to make you nervous. And then, maybe you can’t take the pressure of waiting for things to wrong, and you start inventing problems just so you can have control over them. But you have to think about whatever can go wrong. Otherwise, you’re lazily enjoying a sunrise and dreaming of free hotcakes, and suddenly you’re drowning in a waterless parking lot before you even know what hit you.

No, this is silly! I’m just gonna call him. OK. [clears throat] Ringing… Ringing… no answer. Not unusual, really. He’s probably at the car wash like he said. Which can be very hypnotic. You know, sometimes you find yourself caught up in the rhythmic dance of the foaming brush, and you wake up in the parking lot hours later missing your wallet and part of your shirt, dry-mouthed and trying to remember how many teeth you have.

Oh good! I’ve just been handed some breaking news to distract me. Oh, oh. Well this is actually just a press release for the grand reopening of The Pancake House. Well, a press release is definitely a form of breaking news. They are announcing their new weekly menu specials. Quote: “We here at The Pancake House acknowledge that time is circular. Like a roundabout, not an unfathomable endless line with no beginning or end. We like repetition. It’s comforting. We know what’s behind us, and what’s ahead, and what will come again.

It means there are certain truths, no matter what else may happen. In honor of our innate preference for cyclical thinking, we can guarantee that every Monday, fluffy omelets will be on special. Every Tuesday, we will have corn beef hash. No matter what happens, there will be liver and onions on Wednesday. You can lose your job and have your car repossessed on Thursday and still know that there will be chicken fingers on special that night like clockwork. We often think of Friday was being better than other days. For this reason, if something bad happens on a Friday, it can be particularly disappointing. You won’t be disappointed by our ham patties. They are consistent and dependable. Saturday we are here for you with liver and onions again. On Sunday, you can rely on our fried eggs and toast points. They will provide you with unwavering support, even if something really bad happens. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing at all anymore. Even if all the buildings suddenly seem slanted to the right by a few degrees, and everything that used to look yellow now smells yellow. You can always come to The Pancake House, no matter what happens.”

Ah, well that’s a nice sentiment! Oo it also has a coupon attached here. “Good for one free hotcake, one per table per visit.” That’s very nice. OK, I’m just gonna try and call Carlos again. Straight to voicemail this time. Well, that happens. Everything’s fine. He always forgets to charge his phone, I-I-I tease him about it. you know, I like to buy him different novelty phone chargers and hide them in his jacket and car, and in his shoes and lunch bag, but still he forgets. He has a very busy mind. Maybe he doesn’t like me to tease him so much. Maybe I’m overthinking. Maybe it’s just too much coffee.

Or maybe I’ll head down to The Pancake House for dinner. Let’s it’s Thursday so let’s see. Chicken fingers! Or there’s always the hotcake coupon. Maybe I’ll see some of you down there. That would be nice. Or maybe you already have plans, which is totally fine too. I’ll just see you some other time. It’s no big deal. Everything’s fine. I need more coffee.

Stay tuned next for the sound of someone distracting you while you’re driving, and then yelling that you missed the turn.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Bite your tongue. Fun, right?

#welcome to night vale #welcome to night vale transcripst #episode 124 #a door ajar #part 1

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