how does he make these anyway

four and twenty blackbirds

Summary: There were many things that could have caused Roman to be late to his therapy appointment ranging from forgetting his wallet to getting distracted by a dog, however, meeting a very attractive baker was possibly Roman’s new favourite reason.

Pairing: Royality

Warnings: Food mentions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Roman had walked this route dozens of times before; at this point, it was almost something of an established routine. He was a spontaneous person by nature, so he didn't necessarily like doing the same thing over and over again but it was good to have a little bit of consistency in his life—or so his therapist told him. So, yes, Roman had walked this route many times.

This, however, was definitely new.

It was a small little hole-in-the-wall place, the white paint on the storefront peeling slightly at the edges. The windows were frosted, the door was painted light blue and above that door was a sign that read, in a looping font, "Sweet Treats".

But, most importantly, crouching outside and drawing carefully on a chalkboard sign was one of the cutest boys Roman had ever seen.

He tried his best not to stare but he found it was almost impossible not to. The boy looked like a real-life angel—chubby cheeks and soft, dark curls and freckles, sticking his tongue out as he worked. His apron was covered in a light dusting of powder and Roman noticed a small amount on his face too, just a little bit by the bridge of his nose that Roman longed to reach out and dust off.

Instantly, Roman recognised that he was going to be late. He could not let this boy pass him by; he’s sure his therapist would understand.

"Hi, are you open?" Roman asked, tilting his head to the side slightly.

At the words, the boy looked up from where he was drawing on the sign, eyes wide and lips slightly parted. Clearly, he hadn't noticed Roman standing there—something Roman was incredibly glad for as he had been blatantly checking him out.

The surprise only lasted a moment before the boy was giving Roman a wide smile—delighted and maybe a tiny bit flustered, hooking Roman on the expression in less than a second.

"We absolutely are! Just give me one second..." The boy gestured vaguely towards the door, chalk in hand. "You can head inside if you like! See if there's anything in particular that strikes your fancy."

You, Roman’s brain supplied. Externally, however, Roman just nodded dumbly. He was belatedly realising that he wasn’t exactly sure what kind of store this was, however, he was also realising that it didn’t really matter—he was almost certain he’d buy something no matter what.

Pushing open the door, Roman was met with a burst of warm air and the subtle scent of cinnamon—a welcome change from the chill of wind outside.

As he glanced around, he noticed the store definitely seemed to prioritise comfort over aesthetic. There was a scattering of mismatched furniture—couches, coffee tables, barstools, etc.—and the walls were reminiscent of a kindergarten art project with splashes of colour found in seemingly random places.

Quite honestly, it really should have given Roman a headache and yet he only seemed to find it endearing.

He made his way over towards the counter, distractedly eyeing up the contents of the display cases. It appeared as though this was a bakery, which, upon reflection, is what Roman should have guessed based both on the name and the thin coating of what was probably flour covering the boy outside. Though, in all fairness, Roman had been much too distracted to have any modicum of common sense.

"You can take your coat off if you want! There's a rack just over by the door," a voice chimed out from behind him.

Spinning around, Roman watched as the boy approached the counter—eyes bright and a smile dancing at the corner of his lips. He rubbed his hands on the front of his apron a few times, attempting to remove the chalk dust from his fingertips before pulling the sleeves of his jumper back down and coming to a stop right next to Roman.

Realising he’d been silent for just a moment too long, Roman raised his eyebrows. "Oh! Uh, I would, but I can't stay."

Roman could have sworn he saw a flash of disappointment on the other boy's face, but, no, he was probably just imagining things. The boy slipped behind the counter, pinning Roman in place with a smile reminiscent of diamonds or distant stars—precious and sparkling and beautiful in a way that was almost impossible to describe.

"To take away then! No problem," he replied sweetly, "My name's Patton! What can I get for ya?"

In all honesty, Roman had been far too distracted with thoughts of the boy—Patton, he amended—to actually process any of the pastries he was looking at, so, instead, he decided to opt-out of having to make a decision.

Leaning on the counter in front of him, Roman gave Patton a small smirk, batting his eyelashes as subtly as possible. "I'm not sure; what's good?"

Patton's eyes flickered down to Roman's lips for a half-second and Roman felt his heartbeat pick up ever so slightly.

"Oh, well it's all good, I think! I mean, I hope so!" He chuckled slightly—shy but undeniably adorable. "If you wanted to know my preference, though, I like the apple pie.”

He directed Roman’s gaze to a large apple pie with a few slices cut from it and some pastry hearts sitting on top. It looked delicious. A quick scan of the cabinet revealed that they all looked delicious, which was fairly impressive considering Roman wasn’t really a huge fan of pastries to begin with.

“And in case that doesn't interest you,” Patton continued, “My brother likes the raspberry and white chocolate muffins; they're filled with Crofter’s jam, it's his favourite."

"Oh, that's funny, that's my roommate's favourite too! I'll definitely have to get one for him." Roman grinned; maybe if he bought Logan a muffin with Crofter’s in it, he would be less on his case about being late to therapy. "And I'll take a slice of the apple pie for myself."

Patton pressed a few buttons on the register before saying, "Wonderful! That'll be $7.20. Was that cash or card?"

"Card," Roman replied, and Patton set up the machine before moving to grab out Roman's order.

Roman watched him idly as he pulled open the cabinet, scrunching up his nose in an entirely too adorable manner as he tried to carefully separate a slice of the pie. He was fully aware that every second he stood there was another second closer to the transaction timing out but at the same time, he felt entirely unable to do anything about it.

Patton was just absolutely breathtaking.

Sure there was his physical appearance, of course, but it was more than that. Roman couldn’t explain it—the way the entire world seemed brighter the moment Roman saw him, how Patton’s smile had made something in Roman’s chest warm. He’d never wanted to get to know someone as much as he did this boy right now and so, against his better judgement, Roman spoke up again.

“Oh, Patton?” Roman called out, his face alight with a shy smile, “Actually, there was one more thing I wanted.”

Patton glanced up from where he’d been placing a muffin into a little paper bag, his gaze questioning. “Yeah, kiddo? What was that?”

“Your number.”

Instantly, Patton’s face turned bright red, his eyes widening in surprise.

To ease his conscience—which was loudly insisting that hitting on an employee was an awful thing to do—Roman hurriedly added, “There’s absolutely no pressure, of course. If these pastries taste as good as they look, you’ve earned a new customer either way.”

There was a moment where Patton didn’t reply—his brow furrowed and his lips twisted as he contemplated Roman’s request. Eventually, though, he settled Roman’s order down on the counter in front of him, grabbing a pen out of the pocket of his apron and scrawling something on the bag.

“There,” he said, sliding it across the counter to Roman, “My number.”

Roman’s answering grin was almost blinding as he finally completed the transaction and Patton gifted him a small smile in return, his cheeks still flushed.

With the order completed, Roman knew he had to set out again. His therapist was waiting for him and no matter how much Roman wished he could stay and talk to Patton forever—learn all of his quirks and his favourite things and everything about him—he was distantly aware of both the importance of keeping appointments and the lecture Logan would no doubt give him once he returned to the flat.

He ducked his head slightly in a mock bow, knowing that the glint in his eye betrayed how excited he truly was.

“Goodbye, my dear,” he spoke, voice soft yet earnest, “I’ll ensure to return to you again soon.”

The giggle the words pulled from Patton made something in Roman bubble up and over, like a fizzy drink or one of Logan’s science experiments, brightening Roman’s expression even more. Patton’s laughter was almost ethereal—like windchimes or the morning birdsong—and Roman felt calmer just hearing it.

He picked his order up off the counter, the sweet smell of raspberries lingering in the air around them as he reluctantly turned to leave. And, as he walked, Roman couldn’t help but note the way he hadn’t felt Patton’s gaze leave him until he’d finally slipped out of the door and out of sight.

So, with a smile born of anticipation and affection, Roman continued back down his familiar route, holding the bag of pastries close to his chest and so much potential for love in his heart.

Taglist: @mutechild @super-magical-wizard @shadowsfromthesun @teadays @sandersships @camcam774 @autism-goblin @deadlyhuggles6 @romanthestarstruckqueer @whispers-stuff-in-your-ear @rainboots-are-for-snobs @sanders-and-sides @spirits-in-my-thoughts @kee-and-co @autistic-virgil @stop-it-anxiety @figurative-falsehood @jadedfantasies231 @poisonedapples @sanders-screams @another-sandersidesblog @do-not-just-see-observe @mychemicalpanicattheemo @thomassandersenthusiast @localagendergrape @idosanderssidespromptssometimes .

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #241

Sun Dec 20 2020 [12:49 PM] Wack'd: Front-cover tagline is one font change away from being a Jeopardy! clue

[12:50 PM] maxwellelvis: Who is "Kang the Conqueror"? [12:51 PM] Wack'd: We open on Nick Fury showing the Four a digital map of Africa with a huge glowing spot indicating a massive power surge [12:51 PM] Umbramatic: welp [12:51 PM] Wack'd: Ben thinks "maybe the ay-rabs got some new power source" which, y'know, fun [12:51 PM] Umbramatic: oh geez [12:52 PM] Wack'd: Anyway the cover's got Black Panther on it, so naturally this surge is on the Wakandan border [12:53 PM] Wack'd: T'Challa won't let SHEILD in, and he's resigned as an Avenger, but Fury figures since the Four are old friends T'Challa might let them do some snooping [12:54 PM] Wack'd: Ben naturally is like "wait, if you're respecting Wakanda's sovereignty how did you guys flag this" [12:55 PM] Wack'd: Turns out SHEILD was following some other weird phenom and stumbled into this by accident. Said phenom turns out to be Attilan flying to the moon [12:55 PM] Umbramatic: oops [12:55 PM] maxwellelvis: Good thing Reed's collar stretches. [12:56 PM] Wack'd: Reed says he took special measures to make sure every airspace that got violated got a message not to worry about it which 1. seems like a good way to make folks worry and 2. I guess he forgot to send SHIELD that memo [12:58 PM] Wack'd: Hmmm. Not sure I like this

[12:58 PM] Wack'd: Also Raiders had like just come out which is weird to think about [12:58 PM] Umbramatic: ben is cosplaying [12:59 PM] Wack'd: He's cosplaying a Mightey Whitey character for an Africa trip which. There are worse options I guess [12:59 PM] Umbramatic: oh [01:00 PM] Umbramatic: that did not sink in at first [01:00 PM] Wack'd: We're still doing huts and loincloths, huh? I am increasingly wondering when he Afrofuturism kicks in and we get a Wakanda that's less...this

[01:01 PM] Umbramatic: ...same [01:01 PM] maxwellelvis: Not until black people start writing for Black Panther. [01:01 PM] Wack'd: (Probably once Black people get a crack at writing it tbh--yeah [01:01 PM] Wack'd: Also: did Bryne change Ben back to a lump for the sole purpose of justifying let's-you-and-him-fight bits [01:02 PM] Wack'd: Because if so that's...actually pretty clever [01:04 PM] Wack'd: Anyway the Four + Frankie go undercover as a safari complete with pith helmets and fatigues. Which always feels more like cosplay than realism when fictional characters do it no matter what the era [01:04 PM] Wack'd: Like when characters from the American south wear white suits. I always assume it's something that got come by thirdhand even though who knows maybe it's a thing [01:05 PM] Wack'd: Well something’s up

[01:07 PM] Wack'd: Hm. The implication that Wakanda has gotten less superstitious because of Europeans is certainly gross!

[01:08 PM] Wack'd: The Four get a closer look and find some Russians had also been investigating. Operative word being "had" because they're all skeletons now [01:08 PM] Bocaj: No telling where the meat ran off to [01:09 PM] Wack'd: No telling indeed [01:10 PM] Wack'd: No sooner do they start investigating than the team are ambushed by a squad of folks in gold-and-red Roman centurion cosplay. Not wanting to blow their cover, the team lets themselves get taken hostage, but Sue turns invisible before she's noticed so the team has an advantage if things need to pop off [01:10 PM] Umbramatic: spooky scary [01:11 PM] Umbramatic: what's with all the fucking cosplay this issue [01:11 PM] Wack'd: The team are led through a mountain stocked with Kirby-esque tech and led out the other side to:

[01:12 PM] Umbramatic: well [01:12 PM] Umbramatic: when in rome [01:13 PM] Wack'd: You know when I asked when the writers will realize Wakandans should probably have some degree of advanced architecture and whathaveyou this is not what I had in mind [01:14 PM] Wack'd: Frankie knows how to deal with sexual harassers and also racists

[01:14 PM] Umbramatic: good [01:14 PM] Wack'd: ...god I hope the guy under that helmet is white because if this isn't deliberate I'm gonna go apeshit [01:15 PM] Wack'd: ......unless I guess a white guy saying that doesn't necessarily mean the white guy writing it is deliberately writing a racist, considering *gestures at Wakanda's whole deal* [01:15 PM] Bocaj: I hope this isn’t nova roma [01:15 PM] Bocaj: That’s supposed to be in South America and also they tend to wear black face [01:15 PM] Bocaj: Not Claremont’s finest hour [01:16 PM] Wack'd: Does the name Gaius Tiberius Augustus Aggrippa mean anything to anyone. Also does it mean anything period, like, is that actual Latin [01:16 PM] maxwellelvis: It's just nouns [01:17 PM] Umbramatic: it sounds like a lot of emperor names mashed together and also that [01:17 PM] Bocaj: It sounds like all Roman names because there were only like twenty names and every Roman used every so far one [01:17 PM] Bocaj: Caligula’s real name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus [01:18 PM] Wack'd: Having lost the element of surprise Reed orders an ambush but GTAA manages to neutralize their powers. Including Sue's, which, how'd he even know she was there, c'mon [01:18 PM] Bocaj: Boo [01:18 PM] Umbramatic: boo [01:18 PM] Wack'd: It is time now for the traditional sequence in which the entire team is locked up and has to escape [01:19 PM] Bocaj: It sure happens to them a lot [01:19 PM] Bocaj: You’d think Mr Miracle was a fantastic four member at this rate [01:19 PM] Phantom: Hmm it's interesting how much I associate Latin with species names [01:20 PM] Wack'd: It turns out the deception vis-a-vis Black Panther was just the ol' Queen Amidala gambit. T'challa gets in a Batman boast about how you can't neutralize his powers because his powers are just having worked out a lot [01:20 PM] Umbramatic: MUSCLES [01:21 PM] maxwellelvis: This was before the Heart-Shaped Herb was a thing? [01:21 PM] Wack'd: T'Challa has been put in a slave gally because of course. Reed and Frankie are shackled in dungeons to the ceiling. Sue....has been stripped naked and left in a lavish bedroom [01:21 PM] Umbramatic: ...oh [01:21 PM] Phantom: of course [01:22 PM] Wack'd: GTAA has had "games called in [her] honor" which I assume means Gladiator. Maybe he'll surprise us by being big into baseball, who knows [01:22 PM] maxwellelvis: What are the odds that Byrne actually knows what gladiator games were like? [01:22 PM] maxwellelvis: I'm guessing not very good. [01:22 PM] Umbramatic: GTAA is really into esports [01:22 PM] Wack'd: Middling to low [01:23 PM] Wack'd: T'Challa tries to break Frankie out of her cell by just being like "hey, I'm your king, knock off this fuckery" but the guards aren't having it [01:23 PM] Bocaj: “You can’t neutralize my powers” is a weird flex when you get caught anyway [01:23 PM] Wack'd: Yeah [01:24 PM] Wack'd: GTAA decides to exposit his backstory to Sue [01:26 PM] Bocaj: I like to imagine that she makes the blah blah gesture while he talks [01:26 PM] Wack'd: He was an ancient Roman soldier sent to investigate a "falling star" which, of course, was actually an alien spaceship. He managed to dispatch its sole occupant and steal their armor, which imparted to him great smartitude [01:26 PM] Bocaj: Sure, of course [01:26 PM] maxwellelvis: Aaarrgh! No! Not another Prester John! [01:27 PM] maxwellelvis: John Byrne, have you no decency at all, sir?! [01:27 PM] Wack'd: By the time he got back his platoon had pulled out of the region for reasons unknown so he did what anyone from another culture with superior force and no mandate does when stranded across borders and take up dictatorship as a hobby [01:28 PM] Wack'd: So, uh. [01:28 PM] Wack'd: There are some...coloring discrepancies...in this book [01:29 PM] Umbramatic: oh [01:29 PM] Wack'd: I glossed over a panel with a Black Frankie Raye because, uh, I didn't really have a good joke about it, frankly [01:29 PM] Wack'd: But it seems instructive because there are two flashback panels where GTAA is colored Black and then a further three where he's a white guy [01:30 PM] Bocaj: In fairness [01:30 PM] Bocaj: That is in character for a Roman [01:30 PM] Bocaj: The dictatorship as a hobby I mean [01:31 PM] Wack'd: Dude has gone increasingly mask-off, racism-wise--during his backstory he boasts about rendering all his subjects mute because their language offended them and trying to teach them Roman was a bust because he still hated their "gibbering monkey voices" [01:31 PM] Wack'd: So, uh, I guess we'll see if this issue ends with An Aesop [01:31 PM] Bocaj: .... [01:31 PM] Umbramatic: wow dude [01:32 PM] maxwellelvis: He... DOES know there were black people in Rome, right? [01:32 PM] Wack'd: Bryne? I mean it's the 80s [01:32 PM] maxwellelvis: Either or [01:32 PM] Wack'd: Most pop culture assumed every country had monoracial societies in The Past until like ten years ago [01:33 PM] Bocaj: Not that rome wasn’t racist to anyone not from rome but [01:33 PM] Wack'd: You can pin a lot on Bryne but "yeah of course Romans were all white" is pretty on par [01:33 PM] Wack'd: Oh also GTAA deliberately named himself after Caligula so there's that settled [01:33 PM] Bocaj: Sure [01:34 PM] Umbramatic: so we can stop calling him Grand Theft Auto Anarchy [01:34 PM] Bocaj: We don’t have to [01:34 PM] Wack'd: Anyway GTAA wants Sue as his bride and if she refuses he will force Johnny and Ben to fight [01:35 PM] Wack'd: ...to the death, not like usual [01:35 PM] Bocaj: Ha [01:35 PM] Bocaj: It’d be funny if she was like “oh is it Tuesday already?” [01:35 PM] Wack'd: *long, deep sigh*

[01:36 PM] Wack'd: Thankfully Sue's immediately like "his powers come from his helmet, right? All I gotta do is take the helmet off" [01:37 PM] Wack'd: Turns out that helmet granted lots of powers [01:37 PM] Wack'd: Like immortality for him and his subjects [01:37 PM] Wack'd: And structural integrity for his city [01:37 PM] Wack'd: And the suppressive effect on the Four's powers [01:38 PM] Wack'd: Aaaaaaaaand there's no ontological inertia [01:38 PM] Umbramatic: ._. [01:38 PM] Wack'd: So just by taking the helmet off GTAA and all his slaves immediately die and the city crumbles [01:38 PM] Bocaj: Of course [01:38 PM] Wack'd: Kind of a bum deal for the people who spent twenty centuries in servitude [01:39 PM] Wack'd: "WE'RE FREE!" 💀 [01:39 PM] Bocaj: Sue: “well that’s the most people I’ve ever killed at once” [01:39 PM] Umbramatic: F [01:40 PM] Bocaj: “I never wanted to be dead, Surfer. Frankly, I only died out of peer pressure” [01:40 PM] Wack'd: And so everyone escapes, Reed does an exposition dump, and the story immediately ends [01:40 PM] Bocaj: No moral? [01:40 PM] Wack'd: Nope [01:41 PM] Umbramatic: "don't wear funky alien helmets kids" [01:41 PM] Wack'd: So...maybe Bryne was just being racist. I mean it seems probable but also it goes waaaaaaay mask-off in a way I don't think even Bryne woulda thought acceptable [01:43 PM] Wack'd: Anyway I do not think I have time for another issue before I gotta leave for work. Perhaps when I return later this evening we will do the next story, which is about everyone's favorite established Four baddie [01:43 PM] Wack'd: Terrax the Untamed [01:43 PM] Umbramatic: :O [01:43 PM] Wack'd: Who despite being from the 70s and thus far more recent I still had to look up

Everyone's talking about Virgil Angst but meanwhile I'm sitting here thinking about Roman because like?? Presumably he's on Broadway right? And to wake up finding you're a known broadway star has to be a dream come true even if it's jarring that suddenly finding yourself so much older. But like Roman has no memories of the years between hs and now. He wakes up, finds he's performing in a show that very day. bUT NOT ONLY THAT, it's a new show, one he's never heard of so he has no lines 1/?

no lyrics, noblocking memorized. And he's expected to perform. So a thespian's nightmareright there. Maybe for extra Angst points the understudy is out sick. Or hejust forces himself to perform, not wanting to disappoint or miss this"chance" to be on Broadway. Either way it doesn't go well and Romanis left with his spirits crushed and still completely lost as to how he endedup in the future. 2/2

Back to theFuture, part II

Fandom: Thomas Sanders,Sanders Sides

Pairings: platonic LAMP

Word Count: 2620

Masterlist Link

_______________________

Roman wakes up with a pillow beingthrown at his face.

“Chop, chop! Time to go.”

Roman groans, “Is it time forschool already?”

The person laughs.

It’s then that Roman realizes thatit’s neither of his parents, nor one of his friends who would sometimes sleepover.

Roman sits up, shirtless but that’susual. What’s not usual is the man fixing his hair in the mirror of a largevanity table.

“Who are you?” Roman asks,instantly suspicious. He snatches up a hair brush that’s lying on the bedsidetable, wielding it like a sword. “Where am I? What do you want with me?”

The man meets his eyes in themirror, sees something funny, and rolls his eyes with a laugh. “Alright, Mr.Big Shot. Save the acting for the stage. We’re gonna be late if you don’t hurryup and get dressed. And Dot will have both of our asses if we’re late foropening night.”

Opening night?

Stage?

Cute guy?

Oh, this had to be a dream.

Roman was good at dreams.

“Very well then. Wouldn’t want todisappoint all of my adoring fans, would I darling?” Roman boasts, to which theguy snorts and tells him to hurry up again.

Roman slips away and finds thebathroom. He’s debating whether or not to snap his fingers and conjure up amagnificent outfit. That is, until he catches a glimpse of himself in themirror.

He screams like he’s in a horrormovie, which maybe he is.

“What—what’s wrong?” the no-nameguy from earlier yells, banging on the bathroom door but Roman had locked it.

“I’M OLD!!!”

He’s over thirty now, and to a guywho was just seventeen yesterday, that’s pretty old my dude.

Frantic, Roman throws open thebathroom door and demands, “What magic did you cast on me?”

“What?”

“My face! Look at it!” Roman screeches,looking into the mirror once again and rubbing at his face as if the signs ofaging would disappear. “I mean, I’m still gorgeous, BUT I’M OLD!!!”

The guy looks at him like he’scrazy, which maybe he is but wow, no need to judge. “Uhhhh, are you going througha mid-life crisis right now? Because can you do that later? When, ya know, wedon’t have somewhere to be?”

“I was just seventeen yesterday,”Roman tells his reflection mournfully.

“Okay, if this is the kind ofbaggage Roman Prince has, remind me not to sleep with him again.”

Roman chokes at that.

“E-excuse me? We did what?!”

“Just cut the crap already,” theguy grunts and leaves. “I’ll be waiting outside,” he calls before a door slamsclosed.

Roman is left alone with hisreflection.

He snaps his fingers, but nothinghappens.

He gives a grin anyway. “Just gottaget into the swing of things is all.”

*

Roman meets the guy outside. Hedoesn’t bother asking for his name, since it’s not important to the dreamanyway. And really, this isn’t unlike a lot of Roman’s other dreams. Waking upto a cute guy? Check. Performing in a Broadway musical? Check.

Being the headlining actor for saidBroadway musical?

Super big check.

They’re in the theater now, andRoman is smiling and greeting a bunch of people who seem to know him. He goesalong with whatever they’re saying. He runs into the director Dot that theno-name guy mentioned earlier. And somewhat confusingly, he finds his dressingroom. It’s amazing and wonderful and in such detail, and sitting on the chair bythe dressing table is the script they’re performing tonight. Roman picks it upwith a wide grin.

He nearly drops it.

He’s the headlining actor for aplay he’s never even heard of.

Okay. Okay, okay okay.

Roman is in his dressing room—HISDRESSING ROOM ON BROADWAY. This whole place is designed by him to work how hepleases. If he just looks away and looks back again it’ll change—

Nope, that didn’t work. He squintsdown at the font, hoping to place the title.

“A New Lease on Life.”

From a skim through it’s somethingabout a parasitic demon trapped in the body of a magically gifted human?Roman’s character is the parasite.

“I know musicals are weird, butwhat in the name of Julie Andrews,” Roman says to himself.

But this is a dream. It’s okay. Hecan just…get up on stage and have the time of his life!

That’s not how it happens though.They do last minute run throughs. Roman is not magically landing the lines.Hell, he doesn’t even know them! The director yells at him to stop messingaround, and Roman is honestly hurt and disoriented enough to start crying rightthen.

But this is supposed to be hisdream! He can’t cry. He’s a Broadway actor! He’s got this!

*

Remember when he said ‘he’s gotthis’?

Yeeaaah . . .

The evening is upon them, theaudience files in, and Roman is standing on stage with no clue as to what he’sdoing.

He skimmed the script earlier,curious because usually he couldn’t read things in his dreams. He says thelines he remembers, but he misses a cue, and then the actor who’s playing therole of the character he’s possessing hisses under their breath what his lineis. It’s appreciated, but Roman can’t hear it over the thundering roar in hisears. The audience is waiting for something incredible to happen and Roman . ..

Roman’s waiting too.

*

This isn’t one of Roman’s dreams.

This is a nightmare.

Roman is a deer caught in theheadlights. He’s sweating and breathing so loudly that surely the audience musthear it. The lights are too bright and he’s standing on the edge of the stagein the middle of what’s supposed to be this sinister monologue.

This isn’t working. He just needsto take a breath, take a step back, listen more carefully to his costar’s constanthissing, and maybe things will get back on track.

Roman’s leg buckles when he triesto move it. He’s too close to the edge of the stage. He thinks for a momentthat he can catch himself, but his palms are slick with sweat and he slipsright over. He lands on his back, the wind knocked out of him, and he doesn’tremember much after that.

He wakes up, not in his bedroom athome but in his Broadway dressing room. Someone’s there, someone that Romandoesn’t recognize.

“Sloan picked up where you leftoff,” she says. She’s looking at Roman with pity.

“Sloan?” he questions. In thedistance, he can hear the muffled noises of the show going on.

She looks pissed off now. “Youknow, your understudy? Maybe if your head wasn’t shoved up your ass all thetime, you’d remember the names of us little people.”

She storms out of the room.

Roman lets his head thump back downon the bench someone laid him on.

He could wallow in his misery. Hecould let this nightmare beat him down. He could curl up and have himself anice cry. Princes are made for bawls after all.

“Sorry, but this prince has toleave before midnight,” he says.

He hops up to his feet. His headhurts and there’s a painful twinge in his leg and arm from where he must havefallen on them. But he can still move. He has to.

Roman turns his back on Broadway togo search for answers.

As he’s walking down the sidewalk,he ignores the busy city life. He pulls out his phone, immediately searchingfor his emo sidekick’s number.

He doesn’t find it.

What he does find though areseveral missed calls from Patton.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” hequotes. He calls Patton up.

“Roman?!” Patton answers after thefirst ring.

“Hey Padré! I hope you’ve got sometime to chat because you will not believe where I am right now!”

*

Roman was all the way in New York.

That’s a little more than a carride from Florida.

Logan had known that Roman became aBroadway star. He’d even told Roman that he would one day become one, but thatwas back in high school when Roman was an upset seventeen-year-old and Loganwas an eleven-year-old kid who knew too much. The news might have given Romansome form of comfort when he was figuratively down, but he certainly hadn’tbelieved it as Logan foretelling the future.

When Logan woke up as twenty-nineagain—after the initial freaking out period—he decided to contact his friendsto test a hypothesis. He needed to encounter someone who he’d never been affiliatedwith before in his future time, people like Roman, Virgil, and Patton.

Roman was too far off however. Notto mention it’d prove difficult to request a celebrity’s time, one that wasn’tsupposed to know you.

And Logan did doubt that any ofthem knew him. He suspected that he hadn’t been pushed forward through time butreplaced back into his own time, a timeline separate from the past one he’dbeen in. Nothing in his house had changed, no signs of his friends. No texts orcontacts on his phone to match.

So Logan searched for the othertwo. Virgil proved to be all but nonexistent upon his initial online researching.Patton immediately garnered results.

“An advice columnist,” Logan hadsaid to himself, unable to smother down the smile that tugged up his lips.Patton had made quite a name for himself in northern Florida. He’d been hostedseveral times on talk shows and was working on promoting his second self-helpbook that had recently released.

Logan had set off to find Patton,and find him he did.

And Patton . . . Patton had rememberedhim.

And even though Logan felt trulysorry that this disorienting situation caused his friend a great deal ofdistress, he couldn’t help but feel a wash of relief knock into him at the factthat his friend was still his friend. That those memories weren’t worthless ora vivid dream.

And then, once they had workedthrough establishing the existence of time travel, Patton suggests that theothers might be in the same boat.

“What boat? We’re not in a boat.”

“Figure of speech, Lo,” Pattonsmiles a little, despite himself.

If he and Patton are here afterjumping through time, it’s not impossible that Roman and Virgil could be thesame.

“They might not be here,” Logansuggests, swallowing down a sharp feeling of disappointment. “Whatever happenedto us, they may not have been a part of it.”

“Or they might have,” Patton pushesstubbornly. He can see the same hope welling in him, the same selfish desire tonot be alone. “We’re always hanging out together. They might have . . . gottencaught up in it? Whatever it is.”

“. . . and you already tried callingRoman?”

Patton tries all day. Logan wandersthe house a lot, investigating what kind of person Patton grew up to be. It’s .. . interesting to say the least, seeing his friend who had previously been ateenager suddenly as a grown adult, older than himself at that. Logan pondersover whether Patton feels the same amount of puzzlement. Although, Patton doesn’tseem to be interested in much that requires moving from the couch.

Ever since Logan theorized them notbeing friends in this timeline, Patton has become lethargic. Logan is ill-preparedto deal with this kind of Patton.

That night, Logan hears Patton’sphone ring. Logan doesn’t pay it much mind. The phone had been ringing off andon ever since Patton had run away from work that morning. Logan continues to pokearound the kitchen, relishing his normal body and the height that allows him toeasily reach into the tall cabinets.

“Roman?!” Patton screams from theliving room.

Logan immediately abandons any notionof dinner.

“Did he call you?” Logan blurtsout, racing into the room. It’s an unnecessary question, because what elsecould have happened? Patton waves his hand at him to shush him.

“Where are you kiddo? Are you okay?”Patton asks. He clutches the phone to his ear with both hands as if he couldhold Roman there.

Impatient, Logan sits right besidePatton and leans in to eavesdrop.

“Where else would a star like me beother than Broadway?”

Yes, that’s Roman’s proud voicefiltering through.

“Broadway?” Patton repeats, lookingat Logan questioningly.

“He’s in New York,” Logan affirms.

“What is he doing there?” Pattonasks.

“Is someone else there?” Roman interrupts.“You’re talking to someone else when you have me on the phone?”

“Sorry, Ro. I was just talking to—um . . .”

“To?”

“To, um . . . Logan.”

“Oh, well tell that nerd that I’mon Broadway and I’m fabulous, even if I am old now.”

Patton and Logan share a look.

Logan pries the phone out of Patton’shold and puts it on speaker. “You remember who I am?”

“Who? Wait, who’s that?”

“That’s Logey, kiddo.”

“That doesn’t sound like the littletwerp I know. Wait, is he super old now too? Are we all old geezers? Man, thisis a really weird dream.”

“Yes, it’s me. Yes, we’re older,”Logan answers. At least Roman is understanding the situation they’ve beendropped in. “Roman, I need you to answer a couple of questions for me please.”

“If I’m older now, why do I have toput up with more study sessions from you?”

“This isn’t school-related, Roman.”

“Please, Ro. It’s important,”Patton urges.

“Fiiine, if you must.”

“Did you wake up today in anunfamiliar setting with no memory of how you got there?”

“Yeah? Nothing too unusual.”

“How—how is that not unusual foryou?”

“Happens all the time in dreams,duh. Use that big brain of yours, Jimmy Neutron—wait, you’re not a kid geniusanymore. I’m going to have to come up with new nicknames. Not to worry, I’mgreat at improvising!”

Great at ignoring reality as wellit seems.

“Um, Roman?” Patton prompts. “Whatdo you mean by dreams?”

“This isn’t a dream,” Loganpresses.

“What else could it be?” Romanlaughs, and it doesn’t matter that the sound is slightly distorted through thephone. Both Logan and Patton can tell that there’s something off about it.

“Roman, that’s not—” Patton starts,but Logan cuts him off.

“Roman, do you have Virgil’scontact saved perhaps?”

“No, I don’t actually. Weird,right? Oh, I know! He must be hidden away from us in a tall tower in amonster-filled forest. Never fear, we shall rescue our emo in distress!”

Patton bites his lip, staring atLogan. “He doesn’t have his number either? What does it mean, Logan?”

“It could mean that Virgil doesn’thave a phone,” Logan tries, but neither of them buys it.

“Virge . . .” Patton whispers, eyeswelling up.

Logan focuses back on the phone.Roman keeps asking if they’re still there. “Yes, we’re here. And that soundslike an excellent idea, Roman. Why don’t you meet up with us here in Floridaand we’ll brainstorm a plan of action in order to locate Virgil.”

“Can do!”

Later, after Logan has helped Romango over how to book a plane ticket (“No Roman, you can’t just teleport here.Think of this as a . . . side quest, like in the video games you like.”), heends the call and turns to Patton. Patton’s sitting there, arms wrapped aroundhis legs and face buried in his knees.

“We’ll find out what happened tohim,” Logan tells him.

Patton doesn’t respond.

_____________________________

General Tag list: @spectralheartt @a-pastel-pan @notalwaysthevillian @rose-gold-roman @ijustrealizedhowdumbmynamewas @katie-the-noble-fangirl @yourroyalydramaticanxiousness @aroundofapplesauce @merlybird500 @beach-fan @jemthebookworm @whats-going-on-kiddos @randomsandersides @gamerfreddie @unring-this-bell @analogicallythinking @lilygold23 @punsterterry @levy-the-b00kw0rm @tacohippy56900 @accio-hufflepuff-power1 @just-another-rainbowblog @georganabanana @grey-says-heck @crookedlyoptimisticdestiny @thesynysterunknown @idont-know-what-im-doing @idioticsky @fadingglowcloud @whizzie72 @theinvisiblespoon @greyyy523 @opaque-puppet @just-fic-me-up @wowimsogoddamnoriginal @sos-fandoms @loganeatsbooks @trust-is-overrated @theitalianalchemist @im-crunchie @mourning--star @4amanxiety @hogwarts-my-love @enby-phoenix @justanotherpurplebutterfly @internet-or-sleep @absolutesandersidestrash @seaspider10 @nonasficcollection @small-words-to-say @satanblessi @an-absolute-failure @analogical-mess @noisyeggpizzapatrol @hamilsandersfam @cefinitely-rolo @thgjclw @knight-shives @no-no-no-no-6 @savingshae @rabbitsartcorner @buddypallady @midnight-tragedyy

Kid Logan AU list: @under-the-blue-moonlight @broadwaytheanimatedseries @joyful-milkshake-observation @absolutesandersidestrash @midnightmagi @justcallmepancake @nerd-in-space @thestrangedino @deathshadowrules @entitydark @vintage-squid @max-is-tired @deceitfullyanxiousprince  @shai-uwu @teacupfulofstarshine @the5thcoy @occasionally-pauciloquent @oakskull @teepee-honesty @mrtacothethird @fandomobsessed-nerd @mychemicalcheezwhiz @that-smol-tired-gay @skittlesun @caterpiller-tea @sanders-sides-rebloger @penguinkool @its-the-cat-queen @liz-a-bell @theresneverenoughfandoms @i-know-im-smart @ever-after-aaa @007ardra @starbucks-remy @lovebug5151 @yyeeeeeeeeett @adoratato @theobsessor1 @soijusthavetoask @ab-artist @always-in-a-fandom @iris-sanders-athena @doing-my-demibest @connors-writing-sux @lizziepopanime @charakitcat @dall-off-weekes @wowimsogoddamnoriginal @sign-from-god-complex @pumpkinminette @cosmic-melodies @sullycreatesstuff @lovesupportandcookies @som3thing-cr3ativ3 @unicornlogansanders @rainysharkfreaklover @potato--justpotato @ghostscantdie @virgilneedsahug @thatonenerdphotographer @the-cactus-lord @cocobearthe4th @neverasherpoetry @midnight--fox @falsehoodx @crazy-rat-man @lokinas @rosiepupper @insert--self--hatred @dorkoverse @herestheanxietea @spirits-in-my-thoughts

Choosing Fonts for Your Manga or Webcomic (Part 1)

Fonts are one of those funny things. A lot of people never even notice them- unless they’re bad. They’re one of those silent glues holding a work of fiction together, noticeable only ever by their failings.

The world of fonts is really confusing, and it took me ages to get my bearings and figure out how I wanted to go forward with typesetting my manga. So I wanted to give other artists a bit of a leg up by sharing some of what I’ve learnt. I’m going to focus primarily on font choices for manga here, but this information should hopefully be applicable to any type of comic!

Fonts in Manga

Starting with manga! At some point, when deciding what type of font to use in English translated manga, one type won out. I don’t know why, because I think it’s pretty ill-suited to most manga, but it’s basically the same type of font you see in a lot of Western comic books and newspaper comic strips. It looks like this:

I personally don’t think these fonts are that suited to a lot of manga.  It works great for shounen- you want reading to be as easy and quick as possible so that you aren’t distracted from fast-paced fight scenes. But it’s not well-suited to shoujo, or to more introspective manga aimed at adult readers, either. It’s become a lazy choice for manga typsetting, the easy default regardless of whether it suits a series or not. They get the job done and they’re wonderful fonts, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think they add anything to the manga they’re used in a lot of the time, and my personal opinion is that your font choices should do just that.

Back in the 90s Tokyopop did try a few different options. Cardcaptor Sakura and Magic Knight Rayearth both used Times New Roman (yes, seriously, they were that cheap) in its original run. Not the most exciting choice, perhaps, but on the other hand it does lend a nice novel-like feel to the typesetting.

The one where I really think they hit gold was Sailor Moon. (Yes, I know, what a shock, I love something about SM). The font they used for it probably ALSO came for free on their programmes back then (it’s called Formal 436 and can still be bought today), but its delicate curves were particularly well-suited to a shoujo manga with fantasy and magical girl themes.

The other main font they used was...wait, it has a ton of names. Cascade, Cassia, Formal 471... This leads into a different discussion about what a nightmare font licensing is, so let’s leave that alone for now! Anyway, it’s an absolutely beautiful font with elements of brush painting, woodcut, and calligraphy. It’s very, very uniquely suited to a shoujo series.

All in all, these font choices were great for a feminine series with fantasy and scifi elements. It seems like Tokyopop really pulled out all the stops for their flagship license, and it shows. These pages are really dynamic and fun to read, and I think the fonts definitely contribute to it.

In Japanese manga, switching between different Japanese scripts can lend a lot of flavour to the text.

At the top is a hand-drawn word with a bubbly appearance. Then Mina says ‘ii otoko’ in katakana just to make it stand out from the rest of the text. The ‘V’ in Sailor V is written in English, which stands out better than only spelling out the Japanese pronunciation of ‘bui’. Then ‘The End’ is written in English. So it all stands out!

English doesn’t have multiple alphabets (thank goodness!). So we can instead create this effect by mixing up our font choices. More on that later!

Lettering in Western Comics

This is not a subject which I’m particularly familiar with, I’ll admit right away. But I still thought it was important to touch on it. A lot of Western comics actually don’t use fonts- they’re hand lettered! In general a lot of Western comics published in the more traditional model are collaborative efforts. You’ll see separate credits for writers, pencils, inks, colours, lettering... A different person handles each task.

I’m only familiar with a couple of hand-lettered comics, including Bee and Puppycat and Fionna and Cake, which have really adorable lettering which combines elements of a cute girly handwritten appearance with a more script like appearance. And without the limitations of a digital font, all sorts of creative things can be done with them. The font can basically just go anywhere you want it to.

You can see that in some cases the speech bubble is curved, and the letters curve with it! Doing that sort of thing with a digital font is an absolute nightmare, and much easier with hand-lettering. And it looks so cute and dynamic on the page!

And of course, the standard font used in English translated manga today is based on the lettering styles used in both newspaper comic strips and superhero comics.

Its primary purpose is to be easy to read- very useful in particular for newspaper strips which were printed in small sizes and on cheap paper.

Creatively, hand-lettering offers you a lot of freedom and the ability to make some really artistic choices. But it’s also not very practical for single artists. It’s a totally different skill to drawing- I’m sure I’m not the only artist out there who has ‘doctor’s handwriting’ and couldn’t letter a comic to save her life! And not only do I not have the resources to hire someone to letter my manga for me- I don’t want to. I like making every page 100% by myself and having full creative control. So whether this approach works for you may depend both on your skills (if you’re already into, say, calligraphy, you might be able to letter your comic yourself!) and your preferences regarding collaborative work.

-

This is some of the stuff to keep in mind stylistically, but before we continue with adding fonts to comics, there’s a lot of fuss to go through when actually finding fonts which you can safely use! Font licensing is a total mess, to be frank. I’ll be going over that in part two, along with covering the main types of fonts out there and where to find fonts to use in your comics!

Please join me then! If you want to make sure you see when I post it, please consider following me!

Part Two (coming soon!)

I'm having bad anxiety so I'm just going to answer these questions rn

Okay so when having anxiety I over think and I barely have any friends so I thought if using these questions to keep my mind off things and it kinda works it's also why some are long because I'm trying my best to think about other things then my stress. Maybe some of yall can try this if you want. Could help idk

Questions belong to @tr33-g1rl

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?

Soda cans

2. chocolate bars or lollipops?

I LOVE chocolate bro

3. bubblegum or cotton candy?

Cotton candy because let's all be honest bubble gum doesn't even tast good so that just leaves texture and cotton candy dissolves abs you could always have normal gum

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?

Some would say nice hard working smart and dyslexic but that's what they say not actually think

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?

I've never really had the soda bottles but for now Ig soda cans because I feel like it keeps it fresher then the plastic and plastic is bad

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?

Umm out of all these ig tomboy my style that I try to go for more rn is kinda like bille eyelash baddie style

7. earbuds or headphones?

Def earbuds cuz headphones if left on too long start hurting and squeezing my head

8. movies or tv shows?

TV shows 100% I cant consum media for long (my anxiety)so cartoons are the best for me because they're usually 11 minutes and light hearted

9. favorite smell in the summer?

Hmm this is good question in my head summer looks so good ahh but I've never really had a sent for it cuz the past few years I've been in my room but I love the sun oh and you know when your about to go in the pool and you can smell the Clorox mixed with the sun block and that smell just smells like a soft nice energy and there is this one tropical sent havent really smelt it in years I remember the one time I got to smell it was in middle school in the girls locker room so ig it was a perfume idk if it was really associated with summer or it was just tropical perfume my mom could spray on anytime of the year

10. game you were best at in p.e.?

Lol none I hated p.e I was also pretty tall at the time so people expected me to play but I just wanted to hide in the corner

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?

Well I don't really like breakfast that much I think food in the morning makes me nauseous but I have to eat it cuz I can't eat school lunch food cuz that shit is nasty but breakfast school food is 😉 so I usually get banana bread and good ass duch chocolate milk

12. name of your favorite playlist?

Por Vida is one of my favorite albums if that counts

13. lanyard or key ring?

I hate things being around my neck so key ring

14. favorite non-chocolate candy?

Mexican candy

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

The outsiders

16. most comfortable position to sit in?

Your butt relaxing ig and not hunched over idk how some people do their work not hunched over like how do you see what your working on

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?

These white Adidas with 3 halo strips and tan boots

18. ideal weather?

To wear you can soak in the sun but not have it burn you right when you go outside and kinda breezy not a fan of the cold and whatever weather that isn't effected by global warming is the best

19. sleeping position?

I always try not to sleep on my back cuz then they say that the demons come for you

20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?

I have a lot of journals and books to write

21. obsession from childhood?

My little pet shops, barbies, fnaf, teen titans, monster high dolls, beanie babes, never brats or the ever after high dolls cuz I had a fear of big heads as a kid

22. role model?

Em their are not many people to look up to these days but Quenlin Blackwell is even though she struggles with depression and seasonal depression she still is a qween love her

23. strange habits?

24. favorite crystal?

Hmm maybe amethyst one of the only ones I have

25. first song you remember hearing?

No idea

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?

Be in the sun

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?

Not have the seasonal depression come for me

38. lemonade or tea?

Lemonade bro tea is kinda weak and for BrItish blocks , but today I did have a bunch of lemons and they got me sick cuz I dont have a healthy balanced diet if anybody knows simple healthy recipes that have little to no cooking pls share

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?

I've never actually have had lemon pie but I have been thinking about making pie. I've had peacon pie and water burger apple pie and McDonald's apple pie and I think another fast food pie but I can't remember the flavor. I know the other flavor exist because my mom order a different pie flavor from me once and she said we can both try each others. Maybe it was lemon. I think lemon tast is quit forgettable thow idk I always put other things on my lemon and lemonade has all that sugar and speaking of Britain I think they carbonate their lemons . But I think I've only had lemon cake 2 times , so if the cake

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

School is lame and that's on period pooh

41. last person you texted?

Umm this girl I barely know and I'm going to leave it at that cuz this story makes me kinda sad and worried and I'm answering these questions to avoid that

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?

Hmm good question , I think jacket because they are bigger and girl Jean's have the pockets different to make the booty look better and sometimes that leads to uncomfortable pockets and front pockets barely exit for girls and jackets sometimes have those secret pockets only you have assess too like the ones on the inside and jacket pockets are bigger

43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?

1. hoodies are good for when you dont have a bra on and they come with one BIG pocket and you dont need to worry about a shirt

2. Leather jackets are for cool kidz and carry a nice vibe and still thick enough to keep you warm , but you can't really get them wet I think so you can't wash em , but they can come with cool designs on the back but their better fitted on perfectly on a person and if you grow they just look odd on you then you have to buy another and that's not fun

3.Bomber jacket , it's a whole style but one I try to pull of but just cant do it well

4.Cardigans kinda umm not a fan but good if your wearing a dress that's shows your shoulders and you are insecure about that being shown. Remember when somewhere in the 2000s they told us that cardigans where so easy to put on and throw more into your outfit so people bought quit a few. I do

5.I feel like jeans jackets aren't warm enough maybe their more for the summer?

44. favorite scent for soap?

Hmm maybe something tropical or just those cool lavender ones that have oats that's cool I like oats in my soap

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

I hate sci-fi uhhhg and super hero kinda ties in with that so fantasy and when reading fan fic just sweet simple domestic fluff

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?

Hmm not sure but the shirt has to be soft. I only experience soft shirts like that few times in my life

47. favorite type of cheese?

Mexican cheese and blue cheese uhg and mozzarella with that crust, yum🤤

48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be? Errrum maybe a watermelon cuz they are very hydrated. Oh and watermelon with the big black seeds is better then that soul less watermelon

49. what saying or quote do you live by?

None dawg I really need to find one but I do have a lot written down In a book

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?

Omg my aunt had some funny looking ass dogs I couldn't stop laughing. One of her dogs hate me tho now

51. current stresses? I dont want to talk about it cuz I dont want to worry but I was crying for more then 6 hours probably 8 when I think about it and then today as well and it's so bad I'm not even going to school

52. favorite font? I like the one kali uchis uses in one of her albums I think it's called fairy tell or something

53. what is the current state of your hands?pretty dry cuz I wash them alot and kinda long nails cuz of genetics

54. what did you learn from your first job?

I havent had a first job

55. favorite fairy tale?

Hmmm something with the tooth fairy

56. favorite tradition?

Idk holidays cuz I get school off

57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome?

Depression and I would say anxiety but no

58. four talents you’re proud of having?

I dont have any talents

59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be?

Uuuuyg idk too stressed to really think that I dont even know what type of video game I would be in

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?

nothing stressful maybe something calm like a farm anime, some light magic, pokemon things like that

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?

I was never ment to live life like a sim - megan the stallion

62. seven characters you relate to?

Anybody with anxiety, kinda pearl from Steven universe, the nerdy part of dipper from gravity falls , Roman from sander sides if virgil too sense he has anxiety okay and that's all I can think of I think early I said I dont really watch media or stuff so yeah

63. five songs that would play in your club?

Gosolina kali uchis songs and bank account that's all I can think about rn

64. favorite website from your childhood?64. favorite website from your childhood?

Y8 brooo oh and there was Disney or Nickelodeon websites you know that show with the hands and they had the googly eyes they had a g as new for that loved it and for Disney they had zack and cody games on their website and it's not a website but the one thing on windows that would work without wifi you know and you could make cakes and give them faces and try matching the cards

65. any permanent scars?

One time a cat scratched me more the like 8 years ago and I can still faintly see the mark

66. favorite flower(s)?

The one that grows on the cactus

67. good luck charms?

I know a rabbits foot is one and 4 leaf clovers,and markipliers flannel. I sadly dont have any personal good luck charms

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried?

I don't want to talk about bad foods rn cut the cameras

69. a fun fact that you don’t know how you learned?

idk I think I can vaguely remember every facts orgin that I know

70. left or right handed?

Basic right handed but my dad used to be left but then the school forced him to be right

71. least favorite pattern?

Anything 80s uhg that shit is disgusting and terrifying

72. worst subject?

Chemistry but I just got out of that so that's fun

73. favorite weird flavor combo?

People day hot cheetos and sour cream is odd but I like it . I would wat some rn but I think I got sick cuz of my poor diet so I'm not. Someone pls suggested simple easy foods for your girl who can cook

74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen?

1 I am big baby

75. when did you lose your first tooth?

I dont know

76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?

Tater tots are good and fries

77. best plant to grow on a windowsill?

Idk no green thumb

78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?

Idk ig coffee

80. earth tones or jewel tones?

Jewel tones

81. fireflies or lightning bugs?

Theirs a difference?

82. pc or console?

Console it's just simpler

83. writing or drawing?

Uhhheg ig drawing I'm bad at grammar

84. podcasts or talk radio?

Podcast, podcast are just more plans out then talk radio and talk radio is a morning thing and I'm not the biggest fan of mornings

85. fairy tales or mythology?

Fairy tales mythology kinda ruff ya know

86. cookies or cupcakes?

Cookies their just more sturdy and their is always normal cake

87. your greatest fear?

Tooo many things and I'm having an anxiety attack right now so like no

88. your greatest wish?

Well it's cute and all idk to live peacefully is one part the other parts a secret for now

X.o.x.o gossip girl ya know ya love me

89. who would you put before everyone else?

Umm maybe myself Idk

90. luckiest mistake?

One time my mom ordered a foam sord for my brother and a real one came. It was some anime sword

91. boxes or bags?

Bags cuz they look cute and you can take em every where with you. Disposable I would have to say boxes tho because its less damaging to the environment

92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?

Sunlight is so warm and it fills something inside of me makes me feel cozy

Lamps are great for when sleeping and your scared of the dark

Fairy lights are cute but are they neccessary

Overhead lights are good for when you just need light in your life

Am I the only one who gets sad and sometimes cant clean if it's dark in the house?

94. favorite season?

Summer I think. I know it's harder for me to function in the winter cuz depression but then summer is anxiety sometimes ya know

95. favorite app on your phone?

Littetly no idea I don't really love/like the things on my phone if their more distractions or time wasters but I do love how I can search up useful things on YouTube to try to calm down my anxiety and I was definitely not a fan of tumblr at all but I kind have made it my safe place a bit

96. desktop background?

Well the computers my dad's so it has deadpool on i

97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized?

Barely 2 ,I am kinda a dummy sorry unggv

98. favorite historical era?

Well idk heehaww cowboys?

She’s Clueless, Cupid

On Monday, February 11th, Ralph created the Valentine’s Day Lottery. Cute and inconsequential at first glance, as Ralph’s terrible ideas always were, this time the Valentine’s Day Lottery in fact seemed really not so bad. After some convincing. “Secret Valentine’s Day Santa!” Ralph said simply, standing in the middle of the Cortex and trying to change all the blank stares. “It’s team bonding guys. With all this Cicada stuff we need some mushy gushy cheer—And I actually have friends now to do something like this with.” “....Secret Valentine’s Day Santa? That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.” Ralph rolled his shoulders back, unscathed by catty remarks. “You think of something better then.” Cisco threw his pen in the air. “Won’t take long.” “—Anyways,” Ralph continued, “Ralphy’s on a budget so why don’t we keep this easy? We all draw a name out of a hat.” He pointed at Sherloque and before he could protest Ralph snatched Sherloque’s black hat off his head with his stretchy hand. “Whoever you get you write them a Valentine’s Day card. Type it up, 12 point font, single spaced, Times New Roman. Make it meaningful but don’t sign your name.” Iris frowned. “Why not?” “Mystery,” Sherloque mused. “J’aime ça.” “Exactly Shirley. At the end of the day we have to figure out who wrote the card.” “Valentine’s Day Lottery!” Cisco exclaimed suddenly, his thrown pen clattering to the ground, forgotten. “That’s it. That’s the name.” Barry shrugged, thinking it over. “That doesn’t sound so bad. Could be fun?” Caitlin smiled, “It would be very sweet to do, Ralph. We could all do with a little positivity. I say why not?” Ralph grinned at Caitlin and gave her a high five. “See? Caitlin Snow, everyone. She’s the best. A literal angel. Thanks girl.” Caitlin smiled at the praise, sharing it with Cisco, who was ready with a wink. She rolled her eyes playfully. “No problem.” Ralph urged them all to tear off pieces of paper to write their names so they could draw right away. Sherloque, Barry, Cisco, Iris, Caitlin and Ralph all participated, stuffing their names in Sherloque’s hat. One by one they were then called up by Ralph to pick the lottery, closing their eyes and looking away as they grabbed one of their friend’s names. The silence was slightly awkward as everyone fumbled around each other, now painfully aware they all had to keep a secret, knowing they’ve never been particularly good at it. Once Caitlin slipped her lottery into her lab coat, the very last crumpled name in the hat, the show was over and they all dispelled to continue working on tracking Cicada’s next move. ♡ Cisco got Iris. He folded the paper into his fist and walked out, heading to his workshop. “Hey man, wait up.” Cisco turned to see Barry jogging after him. “Who’d you get?” Cisco stared at him blankly, but Barry continued, nudging his shoulder with his sharp elbow. “C’mon, man. Who’d you get?” “This isn’t how the game is supposed to work. What if I have you?” “Do you?” Cisco crossed his arms. “What’s the point?” Barry looked a little smug. “Well, I was hoping to pick Iris but I have Caitlin—“ Before Barry could finish that sentence, Cisco snatched the scrap of paper out of Barry’s hand, throwing his own at him. Barry looked down at Iris’s scrawl and smirked. “Glad to do business with you.” “How did you know?” “I didn’t.” Barry sped off, not giving Cisco any time to respond. Barry could be weird like that, especially when it came to Iris. But Cisco didn’t care this time, Barry’s quirkiness working to his benefit. He opened the little paper with Caitlin’s name on it and smiled to himself. He tucked it gently into his pocket and began whistling a popular song on the radio. ♡ On Tuesday, February 12th, Team Flash had a completely, regular, ordinary day. As regular as Team Flash could get, all of them sneezing, wheezing and itching irritated eyes from excess pollen. The flower power meta they defeated had germinated at least three million dandelion seeds into Central City’s atmosphere and Caitlin was still picking fluff out of her hair hours later. Cisco was laughing, watching Ralph’s allergies making his nose stretch five feet as Barry sneezed repetitively, zig zag crashing into furniture from the force of it. Cisco hopped off his desk when Caitlin groaned, exasperated. “Just wash it,” he suggested, flicking more of it off her scalp. “Or not. I have to admit, it’s pretty adorable. Caitlin Snow, flower child.” She looked up at him and scowled. “It is not. It’s ridiculous, is what it is. And I just washed it this morning.” “So that’s why it smells so good,” he mused. He took another sniff. “Or maybe it’s the lily petals you’ve still got stuck there.” “Nooo,” she whined. “I thought I picked those out.” “Let me help.” She passed him her brush and he stood behind her, taking her silky hair and brushing it out smoothly. Caitlin leaned her elbow against her desk as Cisco played hairdresser, relaxing like a petted cat. It was lovely, and her attention faded, drifting up into the clouds in a mindless haze. “You know what you should do?” he asked, blowing more fluff into her face. “That you don’t anymore?” She wrinkled her nose, breaking out of the spell. “What?” “Wear ponytails.” “I wear ponytails,” she argued, amused. He ran his fingers through her hair. “But not enooooooough. It’ll solve your issue. Everyone knows you tie your hair back in a fight.” He sounded very insistent, so she satisfied him. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Ralph staggered forward then, miserable, and begged Caitlin for some softer tissues. She asked Ralph to hand her the purse she left in the corner of the Cortex as Cisco kept picking twigs out of her hair. He plopped them into the little garbage bin she had sitting on her lap. “Wait…” she said, after noticing a pattern to his light tugs. She tilted her head up to quirk an upside down eyebrow at him, “Are you braiding it?” “Shhhhhhhhh. It’s soft,” Cisco shushed her, tapping her head back upright so that he wouldn’t be making his braid lopsided. Ralph passed her the bag and she rummaged for the Puffs with extra lotion, finding it in an interior zipper. “There you go,” she smiled, handing it to him. Ralph moaned through his obnoxiously nasal tone. “You’re a godsend.” She wiped at her watery eyes herself, then looked around at her friends all suffering, cringing when Barry sneeze-slammed particularly violently into the wall, glad that she gave him elbow and knee pads to soften any blows. “Cisco,” she asked slowly. “Why aren’t you affected?” “I was wearing my Vibe goggles, remember?” he answered. “....And antihistamines.” They all had antihistamine. That didn’t add up. She narrowed her eyes, even if he couldn’t see it. “...How many?” “Too many,” Cisco mumbled into her hair. That explained his funny giddiness. He was drugged up on Allegra. “Cisco! That’s not safe!” “Not the whole bottle,” he was quick to defend. “Just...Uh, almost half of the spare you keep in your cabinet?” She tried not to panic, wondering if she had the number for poison control. She racked her brain for intoxication symptoms associated with over-the-counter drug abuse. “Do you feel drowsy? Dizzy? Blurry vision?” “Not yet!” he replied rather cheerfully, but she couldn’t help notice the hoarseness to his voice, a symptom of dry throat. And a weird side effect of allergy medicine. Caitlin crossed and uncrossed her legs, shifting the bin on her lap, and made herself roll her eyes. She considered his answer. He did seem to be fine for now and she knew he would never lie to her about something serious if she asked, not after what they went through with the shrapnel in his hands. He probably wasn’t in any immediate danger. “So, hey, what are you doing on Thursday?” Caitlin felt like laughing, confused by the random question. Drugged Cisco was just like Drunk Cisco: Not making any sense. “Um, going to work. Like every day?” “Anything special?” She frowned. Oh, that was right. It was Valentine’s Day. She shook her head, feeling his nails move with it. “You would have already known about it if I did. Aren’t you done, yet?” Cisco laughed, but didn’t stop with the brush. “Oh, yeah. I was done ten minutes ago.” Ralph interjected from his corner. “Caitlin, you’re going to the Lottery Reveal! I’m making it a whole party and everything.” Caitlin dropped the bin back to the floor and folded her hands neatly. “That’s what I’m doing, then.” Her eyes trailed across the room, watching Barry catch his breath in the corner, finally calming down from his bout. “What about you?” she tried to say casually. “Do you have special plans?” “Yes, I do,” Cisco confirmed. Caitlin lost some of her smile, and she swallowed, looking at her nails. “That’s nice. I hope it goes well.” “So do I,” he said roughly, sounding sleepy. He placed his palm at the back of Caitlin’s neck. The room got too hot, and Caitlin was worried that Cisco might actually be overdosing after all, so she got off her chair. The conversation switched over to Cicada. Caitlin was relieved. Ralph and Barry talked strategy as she took Cisco to the Med Bay to check him over, flicking her braided hair over her shoulder as she led the way. ♡ On Thursday, February 14th, Caitlin found her Valentine’s Day lottery card on her desk. She opened it, read it, and sat down heavily in her office chair, nearly moved to tears. She read it again, feeling tingles all the way down to her toes. She curled her fingers into the letter protectively, like if she didn’t cling to it tightly it would grow wings and fly away. When Caitlin picked Sherloque, she decided on giving him a nice simple letter of appreciation with a special touch of writing it in French. She put some effort into it, specifically a lot of time conjugating verbs she forgot had such complicated endings, but it was simply a cute card that took her less than half an hour to finish. This was something else entirely. What she got wasn’t a Valentine's Day card. It was a masterpiece. Cisco walked into her lab, first knocking on her door lightly. He gasped, “A ponytail!” Caitlin’s free hand flew to her head, having forgotten she’d followed his styling advice. “Yeah,” she said distractedly, still feeling flooded with sentiment, staring down at the Times New Roman font, blinking away the blurriness of her emotional tears. “You look happy,” he commented, “You must’ve gotten a nice letter.” Caitlin looked up at him, a wobbly smile spreading across her face. She brushed away a stray tear, wondering why he was stretching. “I did. It was lovely, and, poignant, and, um, very inspiring.” “...Inspiring?” His arms dropped to his sides. Caitlin nodded. “Do you think Iris wrote it to empower me? That’s so sweet. I know we’re supposed to wait until the end of the day, but this letter is so beautiful, I should thank her right away.” She stood up, gathering her purse and throwing out the waste bin from her lab into the bio-sink. Cisco grabbed her wrist. “What makes you say it was Iris?” Caitlin thought about it. “Well, she’s the writer, she’s the one who could compose something as eloquent and powerful as that.” She squeezed his arm as she passed him, rushing off to go find her. She missed the way Cisco’s confused smile froze in place, how he wrapped his arms around himself and frowned very deeply. ♡ Caitlin belatedly realized she should have asked Cisco to breach her to Iris’s newspaper office when she hit traffic south of Killmare street. Parking was tight, but she found a spot right around the corner. She ran up the steps two-by-two and burst into Iris’s still pretty baren brand new office, giving her a giant hug. “Woah, Caitlin.” Iris closed her laptop, and awkwardly patted her back. “What’s wrong?” “What’s wrong?” Caitlin repeated, stepping back. “Nothing’s wrong! The Valentine’s Day Lottery! That was the most thoughtful, caring thing anyone has ever said to me in a very long time!” Iris brushed some hair out of her eyes, still caught off guard. “You need to rewind a bit. I’m really confused.” Caitlin swatted Iris’s shoulder, “Oh, come on, Ralph’s game will be over in a few hours anyway. No need to play dumb.” “I’m not playing dumb, Caitlin. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Caitlin’s smile fell off her face, realizing Iris wasn’t lying. “...You didn’t pick me for the lottery?” Iris shook her head. “No.” Caitlin didn’t understand. “But you’re the journalist. I thought...” She trailed off, frowning a little, looking out the wide window. She could see the roof of Star Labs from here. Her hand went to her peacoat jacket and held on tightly to the folder paper. Iris tapped her polished desk with her manicured nails, clearing some cluttered police report copies about the murder of Grace Gibbons’s parents out of the way. “Show me the card.” Caitlin didn’t exactly want to, now that she knew it wasn’t written by Iris. Those words were for her eyes only. And whoever gave them to her. But Iris was the investigative journalist, and she was her closest woman friend. She’d probably be able to help figure out who it belonged to. Caitlin pulled it out of her pocket. She watched as Iris scanned it, lazily at first, but then she scooted her chair in, leaning closer to the paper with focus. “What?” Caitlin asked her, when Iris returned it looking a little flushed. “Honey, this is a love letter. Read it again.” “What? No, it isn’t!” “Caitlin. That was more heartfelt than my own wedding vows.” She stared down at the words on the page, going over it again. Iris was right, and Caitlin began to startlingly realize that she was very mistaken in believing that ‘inspiring’ was the most appropriate adjective to describe what was in her hands. Every sentence Caitlin first interpreted as purely friendly was suddenly not so, each word, each phrase dipped with passion, longing, and a deeply intimate tenderness. It was romantic. Caitlin felt the ground tilt beneath her feet. “But nobody on Team Flash is in love with me!” Caitlin cried, starting to feel a little hysterical. How was this possible? Barry and Iris were happily married, Sherloque only fell in love with the same woman over and over again and— “Ralph!” she exclaimed out loud, then recoiled, horrified. “Oh, god.” Iris blinked. “Um, you think it’s Ralph?” Caitlin saw the last twenty months or so flash before her eyes. All of the creepy flirting about her measurements before he shaped up, his checking up on her, the advice he kept giving her. In fact, he was very blunt about his crush on her Frost. He was the one who found her father’s faked death certificate unprompted. Caitlin covered her hand with her mouth, he even went with her to go visit her mother. “It has to be! He called me an angel on Monday. Oh my gosh. And — And a godsend on Tuesday!” Iris opened her mouth, then closed it. “Um,” she said again. “You don’t like Ralph, do you?” Caitlin’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “Iris!” Iris held her hands up defensively, “Just checking! What are you going to do?” “I don’t know,” Caitlin said as she paced the floor. She checked her watch. Screw the sulphate fusions Barry asked her to do today, her Cicada plans have now been officially thrown out the window. “What do you think I should do?” Iris opened her laptop again, booting the system. “I dooon’t knooow,” Iris drawled. “Well, that’s not helpful!” Iris turned to Caitlin. “I’m sorry, Caitlin. I appreciate you coming here and for this chat, I do, but considering I’m not a prodigy genius or have any superspeed, I’m going to need some time to piece together my next article before we congregate back at Star Labs for the Lottery Reveal.” Caitlin looked around the new space, becoming self-aware. What Iris said was true. She just flew into Iris’s work office uninvited, interrupting her while she was busy. She picked her purse back up from the floor. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll go back to Star Labs.” “Don’t be, I hope you figure it out soon. I’ll see you later.” Caitlin threw a thanks over her shoulder, and hurried her way out. ♡ She almost bulldozed over Cisco in the hallway on her way in, distracted in her haste, thinking of ways to firmly reject Ralph without hurting his feelings. She tripped into him, and he held her steady as she teetered in her heels. “Oh, there you are. You okay?” She looked into his warm familiar eyes, feeling relief, so glad to have found him. “You have to help me!” Cisco was still holding her as he answered, listening intently. “With what?” “You need to help me turn Ralph down!” “What.” It came out all in one whooshed breath, not even a question. Bland. She veered him to the right so she could explain, pressing the hidden switch that unlocked the Time Vault. “Ralph is in love with me,” she hissed, her ponytail whipping violently behind her as she gripped Cisco’s arm. Cisco bristled. “He better not be.” Caitlin didn’t hear that, too busy trying not to panic. Cisco ran a hand through his hair, getting stressed by Caitlin’s franticness. “Why are you freaking out?” “Because I don’t love Ralph, Cisco!” He fidgeted, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Okay. Good to know... And why exactly do you think Ralph is in love with you? Did he tell you that?” “Yes!” Cisco grew quiet, “He did?” Something dark washed over his expression, his gaze said something Caitlin couldn’t quite understand. She could hardly comprehend how Ralph fell for her either, but he wasn’t the devil, there was no need for Cisco to amass pitchforks and rouse an angry mob. Though she could see why he might want to. Hunter and Julian ended terribly the moment love confessions started pouring out, but they both had red flags about them they should’ve seen from miles away, and Ralph, the reformed Ralph, hasn’t ever given them any reason to worry. “Well, not exactly,” she admitted. “Not directly. But his language, his words. And once Iris mentioned the love letter I started to think about Sherloque and his doppleganger ex-wives. I pieced it together after that.” Cisco leaned against the silver wall of the Time Vault, waiting for Caitlin to finish rambling. “Take a breath, Caitlin. Start from the beginning.” She did, exhaling deeply. “I went to Iris. She didn’t write it. The Valentine’s Day card. She said it was a love letter.” Cisco let out an “Ahhhh,” understanding her, now. “You think Ralph wrote you a love letter.” “I know, I know, it’s crazy,” she wrigned her hands. “How am I going to tell him I don’t return his feelings nicely?” He snorted, “It doesn’t have to be nice. Just tell him no and get on your way.” “I don’t want to crush him, Cisco! Not on Valentine’s Day. He’s sensitive. This is probably why he came up with this idea in the first place. Think about it. He wanted a way to be able to confess his feelings anonymously. This was the perfect set up to do that. And he was the one holding the hat. Maybe he never put my name in it.” “Hey, hey,” he said, not liking the way she was biting her nails with worry. If she conspired any more she might start linking this to illuminati. “Don’t stress, okay? Talk to Ralph. He’s a big boy, he can take it.” She nodded, looking up at him through her lashes when he tucked a flyaway hair behind her ear, comforted as always by Cisco’s encouragement. He always believed in her. “Yeah?” Cisco pushed himself off the wall and opened the door. “Absolutely.” “Will you come with me?” Cisco made a face. “Oh, Caitlin. I would. But I have to work on the blueprints for the reverse dagger. I think this is something you need to do alone.” He rubbed her shoulder affectionately, his hand lingering there for an extra moment. “Hey, Caitlin,” he said softly. She met his gaze, wondering why he sounded a little forlorn. “Yes?” He gave her a small smile. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” Caitlin bit her lip, watching him breach away before she could say it in return. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Cisco,” she mumbled quietly to herself, alone in the hallway. She straightened up, squaring her shoulders, and ignored the dread settling in her stomach like stones. ♡ Ralph was in the lounge, decorating for the Lottery Reveal. She walked in slowly, leaning her elbow against the counter of the island, watching him stretch his arm up to stick heart balloons to the ceiling. “Who do you think gave you your card?” He spun around, not expecting to see her there. “Hi, Caitlin. That’s a nice sweater. Dressed for the occasion, I see.” She looked down at her red sweater dress. Yes, she thought so too this morning. Ralph had always complimented her style. It used to make Caitlin feel nice. Now it made her nervous. “I dunno,” he continued, answering her question. “I was thinking it was Barry, but now I think it might be Iris. Does she make a lot of grammar mistakes?” “You’re asking me if the one person out of our friend group who has a degree in journalism can spell?” “Well, when you put it like that…” He chuckled. “I guess it must be Barry then.” He stuck the last inflated balloon from the batch and threw an empty plastic bag into the recycling. “Did you know Star Labs has a bunch of Valentine’s Day decor in the storage room? I only had to buy the balloons.” “H.R,” Caitlin reminisced, remembering he was before Ralph’s time. That was the last time they did anything like this, even though that was for his eccentric Friends Day. It was a pretty similar concept. H.R. even made them all cards. She thought H.R. and Ralph would have gotten along. “Huh? Star Labs Human Resources?” “No no. A man we used to work with. That was his name.” “Oh. Okay.” Caitlin swallowed. Was that jealousy? She winced at what was to follow. She really really hated deliberately causing people pain. She stared at her own hands, unable to look him in the face. “Look, Ralph—“ “Do you mind holding this for me?” It was a red streamer. She took it hesitantly, walking to the corner of the room he wanted her to hang it up. He unravelled the rest, going to the opposite end. It said ‘be mine be mine be mine be mine be mine be mine’ on it and Caitlin prayed this wasn’t some sort of subtext. “Ralph,” she found herself saying, pinning the streamer to the wall. “You’ve become a good man, and a great friend. I am very proud of you.” “I—Wow—“ “—And I’m so flattered that you think I’m breathtakingly beautiful, I really am. Your words touched my heart. But I don’t have feelings for you and I never will. I’m sorry.” The streamer fell to the floor between them, slipping out of Ralph’s extended hand. He stared at her with his mouth hanging open. She left the streamer half taped up, walking to him. She took his hand after hesitating, unsure if he could handle her touch. “Ralph, please forgive me. I know how it feels to love someone who doesn’t love you back the way you want.” He looked at their joint hands and pulled his away. “I’m not in love with you, Caitlin.” Caitlin’s lips parted but no sound came out. Ralph waved a hand over her face. “Hellooooo? You need me to say it again? I’m not in love with you. Stop looking like you’re in a tank with King Shark.” Caitlin blinked, coming back to herself. “No! But that’s not possible! You have to be!” Ralph chuckled, tilting his head. “Uh?” She listed all of her points on her fingers, “You think what I wear is pretty, and you give me nicknames, and you came with me to interrogate my mom!” Ralph sat down on the couch, clearly needing some support. “One, I call you pretty because you are. So is Iris. And Cecile. And Nora. It’s just a fact, Caitlin, I don’t cry myself to sleep over it.” He shook his head, “Two, Cisco gives you nicknames first, I just copy him, and three, I’m both a detective and your friend. I do the nice things I can for you because I like you.” Caitlin opened her mouth to argue— “— As a friend. It’s like I said, before I met you guys I had nobody.” He reached for a new bag of balloons and took a deep breath to blow one up. “But you wrote me that wonderful letter!” Ralph gasped, a blast of air attacking his esophagus. He coughed as the balloon noisily flew to the floor. “Oh. Oh no. Oh no no no no no. I swear you were not my Valentine’s Day Lottery.” This was an absolute disaster. Ralph swore to himself, appalled, “Damnit, I broke the rules to my own damn game.” Caitlin was so frustrated she felt like she was about to cry. Her hands went to her hair, extremely close to pulling at it, desperate. “Ralph, if it wasn’t you, then who was it?” “Your card was romantic?” She nodded miserably. “I felt so special reading that message. Now I’m starting to wish I never got it.” Ralph grimaced. “Caitlin, you know I will never be as smart as you, but this is simple logic. I’m begging you. Please just think about this.” She sank down on the couch next to him, burying her head in her hands. “Ralph I’m so embarrassed. Can we please please forget that this conversation ever happened?” He checked her side with his shoulder, nearly knocking her over. “Done, sister.” She spared him a glance, still blushing red with mortification. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I guess I’m glad I’m not breaking your heart.” Ralph shrugged, “I mean, if you did, I have my book to get me through it. It works every time.” Caitlin huffed a laugh staring at her hands in her lap. “The Book of Ralph never fails.” “Wait…” Ralph said. Caitlin looked up. “Are you in love with someone?” Caitlin’s throat went dry and she immediately broke eye contact, reaching for the deflated pink balloon left abandoned where it landed. She stretched the latex in her hands, jittery. “No. Why?” Ralph pointed at her triumphantly. “Ha! Frost lies the exact same way!” “No,” Caitlin said again on reflex, then wished she could stuff those words back into her mouth. “Yes, she does. What, are we just going to pretend you didn’t tell me you know how it feels to have unrequited love?” “That’s not what I said,” she insisted, “I said I know how it felt to be vulnerable!” Ralph was looking way too amused for Caitlin’s comfort. “That’s not what you said.” She should’ve kept quiet. She should have ran out of there the moment she realized she grossly screwed up with Ralph and her letter. Caitlin jumped up, snapping her fingers, desperately wanting to change the subject. And then she realized, she didn’t have to. “Unrequited love! That’s it! It’s Sherloque.” Ralph stared at her. And she didn’t like it. Couldn’t stand the fear creeping over her skin at Ralph possibly learning her secret. “...You lost me.” “Sherloque. He’s trying to get over Renee with me.” She made a face. “Oh dear.” Ralph shared her cringe. “Shirley? The hots for you? Really?” Caitlin sighed. Somehow she felt breaking it to Sherloque that she didn’t want to be his cherie wouldn’t be so bad. “Let’s get it over with.” “Me?” Ralph exclaimed, “I can’t go anywhere. I have heart shaped cookies in the oven.” Caitlin groaned, forcing herself to shuffle out of the lounge. “Wish me luck, Ralph.” “Uh, yeah. You sure need it.” ♡ Cisco saw a blur of red knit, and called out to stop Caitlin from twisting an ankle. “Caitlin! Did you, uh, talk to Ralph?” She didn’t stop running, but her voice carried down the corridor as she tossed her head over her shoulder after passing him. “I’m so sorry, Cisco, we’ll talk later, I have to go!” He stood there trying to understand what happened, pretty sure he had whiplash. There was only so much more of this Cisco could handle before he’d explode. ♡ He does, in fact, explode. ♡ “Barry!” Cisco all but marched into the Speed Lab minutes later, where Barry was running laps. Barry came to a screeching halt in front of Cisco. “Yeah?” “I”m done,” he burst out, vibe blasting one of the Star Labs coat racks in the corner where they kept their workout crewnecks. The stand went crashing to the floor. Cisco blasted it again, releasing his pent up frustration, and it went rolling. “She thinks it’s Ralph. She thinks it’s fucking Ralph.” Barry was still panting, hands on his knees. Cisco side-eyed Barry’s dramatics. He was the fastest man alive, Cisco would have to be paid a quarter million dollars to believe that actually tired Barry out. Barry made an incredulous noise. “She thinks you wrote the letter for Ralph?” “No! She doesn’t know that I wrote the letter at all!” Barry stood up straight, aghast. “What?” Cisco sat down on the steps, defeated. “She’s my best friend and she didn’t think for one second it could be me.” “Maybe it wasn’t clear enough.” “I threw up rainbows on that thing. Barry, I poured my heart out. It couldn’t be clearer.” “Well, yes, but it doesn’t have your name on it.” Cisco sulked. Barry carted his hand through his hair, trying to come up with ideas. “Buy her roses!” He exclaimed. “A dozen! Sing her Frank Sinatra? And a parade!” Cisco’s voice was dead flat. “A parade?” Barry zipped away. He returned with a single red rose. He threw it at Cisco. His aim was way off, but Cisco reached forward and caught it between two fingers when he stretched. “It’s the last one in Central City. I just checked.” Cisco studied the flower. It was velvet to the touch, red with a water droplet or two hidden in a crevice. “What if she doesn’t love me, Barry?” Barry was quick to sit next to his best friend, ready to pull up the pep talk he’s had saved for this moment for many years. “Dude, come on. You’re the most important person in her life.” “That doesn’t mean she loves me,” Cisco snapped. “I thought I was ready to deal with it when I wrote the letter, but maybe I was kidding myself. Was probably still high on antihistamine.” His laugh was a little watery, and he glanced at the clock. “I thought we’d be together by now.” Barry stopped and levelled him straight. “Did you mean the things you wrote about her?” “Of course I did.” “And do you still now?” “Barry, yes. Look, this isn’t about Ralph’s game, or Valentine’s Day. It’s bigger than that. It was a long time coming.” “Then that’s what you have to tell her. Straight up. Look her in the eyes and say, ‘Caitlin, I love you.’” Cisco nodded to himself, knowing it was true. But that didn’t make it easy, no matter how something as simple as how much she meant to him should be. He lifted his gaze and shared a secret with his best friend. “You know I’ve never told her that? I think I came up with everything under the sun these past few years except those exact three words.” “How come?” “They get stuck in my throat. I was always afraid that if I said it, even just in a friendly way, she’d see right through me, and know what I really mean. I’ve kept this buried for so long. It’s almost like, these feelings for her I’ve kept private are a part of me and I’ve tricked myself into pretending that’s where they belonged. But then I...I wrote the letter. Once it was all out on paper, I knew it would be impossible to go back to pretending.” Barry patted him on the back. “Cisco, take a chance. You already made it halfway, just take it home. Then you’d have done your part. The rest is up to her.” Cisco nodded, twirling the rose stem. Barry stood up, “Listen, I gotta go pick up Iris’s present before she comes back from the newspaper. Will you be alright?” Cisco closed his eyes, inhaling sharply through his nose, gathering his courage once again. “Yeah. I’m going to go find her.” ♡ Caitlin knocked on Sherloque’s station. He was squinting at a monitor, looking very concerned over some ancient greek symbols. “Ah, Dr. Snow, vas-y, come in.” He turned the computer off, giving her his full attention. She sat on a stool across from him. “How’s your day going, Sherloque?” “Fine, thanks to your kind words.” She blinked, having forgotten that he was her lottery pick. “You knew it was me,” she said, although she wasn’t quite sure why she was surprised. This was Sherloque, after all, he noticed these things in his sleep. “Bien sur,” he responded, “Those verb tenses were near perfect.” She ducked her head, “I tried.” He hummed, tapping his nose, “But you’re not here for that.” “No,” she replied. “Sherloque, did you write this letter?” She unearthed the card from her coat, handing it him. “Because if you did, I think we need to talk.” He took it from her, reading it as he stroked his beard. “Mon dieu,” he muttered. “This has so much passion.” Caitlin blushed. “Have you read it?” He asked rather bluntly. Caitlin huffed, affronted. “Of course I read it! I must have read it at least six times!” “Non,” he argued, “À la voix haut, Doctor Snow. Out loud. It will help you.” He raised an eyebrow challengingly, and their eyes locked, tense. This felt like a test. The crisp paper crinkled under her touch. She swallowed, staring down at it. “My dearest Caitlin,” she began, “It is late at night and I have written this twenty-five times, trying to say what I want to perfectly. It has only now dawned on me that I simply can’t. What I feel for you cannot be properly described with words. You are an enigma, Caitlin Snow. A breathtakingly beautiful, intelligent, lovely enigma.” She looked up, and Sherloque gestured for her to continue. She wasn’t sure she could. “Do you feel it yet?” Sherloque inquired. “Feel what?” “Tes rêves." “My dreams?” she translated, a little lost. This letter wasn’t about her dreams. And she wasn’t sure why, but something about Sherloque’s game wasn’t so nice. Still, she soldiered on. “Your hands are lethal, dangerous and cold and yet your eyes melt the hardest hearts. You breathe fire into my life but give frostbite to those you mistrust. I sit and wonder, how could the world’s kindest person be so bold and strong minded.” Her back was turned away from the door, facing Sherloque, so she didn’t see Cisco pass by in the hallway then stop abruptly at the door. She didn’t notice the rose in his hand, the way his mouth quirked up gently. She didn’t notice Sherloque tilting his hat in Cisco’s direction, satisfied with his successful deduction. She didn’t notice Cisco lean against the wall and close his eyes, listening to her talk. Caitlin wasn’t sure why her hands were shaking, why her voice started to crack, “You have taught my life’s greatest lessons. To love, not hate. To stand up when you want to cry. To fight for what you believe in until your dying breath. That good comes to those who wait. That even the worse winters have days of sun, and that you move on. You keep moving on.” “All I could ever hope for—“ Caitlin stumbled over the phrase, realizing she was no longer the only one reciting the letter. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, goosebumps running along her arms under her sweater dress. Someone was speaking along with her. Not Sherloque, who was sitting in front of her, deathly quiet. Not Iris, blocks away in her newspaper office. Not Ralph nearly burning the cookies upstairs. Not him or her or him, either. It was another voice. One she knew very well. Cisco restarted the line along with her, “All I could ever hope for is a life moving on, too.” Caitlin faltered, her throat constricting, heart pounding. She turned around, trembling, and there he was, pushing himself off the wall, coming forward. Her eyes fell back to the letter, and then there was harmony. “Laughing with you. Smiling with you. Saving the world with you. Saving every world with you.” Her cheeks were wet. She touched her face in shock, her own tears at her fingertips. Cisco approached her slowly, expecting her to back away. But she didn't. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but stand still. Cisco took another step and Sherloque took his leave. He knew it off by heart, something inside her screamed, he said every word effortlessly. He said them clearly, strongly, but softly too. She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t have to anymore. Every moment with Cisco she could remember suddenly changed, and the rose-tinted glasses she stubbornly refused to wear opened her eyes, bringing her vision to focus. Every touch on her skin. Like the arms around her shoulder, his hands on her back, the caresses he gave her, his hip checks and how he always leaned to her side. Always sat next to her. Always stood by her. Like the way he always said ‘Us’ and ‘We’. The lingering hands, the deep soulful glances, his winks and grins. His nicknames. His compliments about her hair. His compliments about her everything, actually. How he ran to her the way Barry ran to Iris when fighting metas. How when he vibed with someone he grabbed their shoulder stiffly, but with her, they always clasped hands. How he said her name like it was reverent, sacred, like a prayer. Caitlin. Cait-lin. How after waking up in the Med Bay, her name was always the first on his lips. His sweet devotion and resounding faith in her, not because he saw her as his family, but because she was who he desired. Just like she dreamed and dreamed and dreamed and then pushed away for years now because it would never be. “We are seamless, and honestly do I believe I was made to exist with you. I think about all the memories I cherish, Caitlin, and there’s always you,” Cisco said, the last line coming out in a whisper. It fell silent. When Caitlin looked up, he was right there. Close enough for her to accept the rose, close enough that he could brush away the moisture from under her right eye with his thumb. She pressed the rose stem until her index finger pricked a thorn, but didn’t flinch, her regenerative healing ebbing the cut away. “You wrote it,” she finally said, dumbfounded. He hummed and inched closer, some hair falling in his face as he leaned in so that they were inches apart. “What does it mean?” “What do you think it means?” he murmured. His gaze kept flicking from her eyes down to her mouth and she licked her lips subconsciously. “Say it.” “I just did, Caitlin.” “I need you to say it,” she begged. “Caitlin,” Cisco took a deep shuddery breath. He was expressive, open, his heart on his sleeve. “I’m very much in love with you.” The sentence rang in Caitlin’s ears. A noise escaped from her throat, a quiet whimpered thing. He stepped back, having said his piece. He squeezed both her arms at her side warmly and said, “I’ll see you at the Lottery Reveal, okay?” She blinked and they were no longer a breath apart. This wasn’t a dream or a trick or something Caitlin made up or got wrong. This wasn’t a nightmare or a meta or the speed force or a time remnant or a broken timeline or another earth. These were Cisco’s words both in writing and from his very lips, his revealed heart and soul and body and mind and everything in between. And he loved her. “Wait!” she yelped, unfreezing, realizing he was going away. He turned around and she ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck. Cisco hugged her, and she couldn’t help but breathe him in, his strong arms wrapped around her waist. Caitlin buried her face into his hair where it fell over his shoulder, just breathing, feeling his heart beating against her chest for a very long time. He held her tightly, and she was shaking because she was overwhelmed. She couldn’t believe it. The rose fell to the floor and the letter crumpled slightly, smushing against Cisco’s back in their embrace. Eventually the letter joined the flower on the ground as Caitlin forced herself to pull back. It was ridiculously difficult, like tearing two magnets apart. She drank in the crease in his forehead, his jaw, his eyelashes and the beautiful eyes they framed, his cheekbones and then his lips. Her hands trailed up the sides of his face, grazing his soft skin and she saw the effect she had on him, she saw the way he melts. She tilted her head closer and then he was gasping into her mouth. He cupped the back of her head, right below her ponytail, fingers tangling into the baby hair at the nape of her neck. The kiss broke softly, and then there was nothing but the pounding in their ears. Their eyes met, hers shining, his blown back and wide and Caitlin couldn’t help the exceptional smile that naturally followed. He searched her face for something, for an answer to his very important question, and it was up to her to grant it. So she did. She nodded and it was like something in Cisco shattered, his reserve or his years of self-control and he lurched forward, yanking her to him so hard she bent backwards, stumbling and then somehow he had her against the wall, really having his way. His kisses were wild and desperate and Caitlin tried to keep up, drowning in the new sensation of doing this with Cisco, of being ravished and loving every single second of it. He was talking. Mumbling things into her skin as he pushed her hair back, kissing up the slope of her neck. Things like her name and his secrets. Caitlin let out a small cry, thumping her head back against the wall, thrumming under his touch. He stopped and moved his hand to where she bumped her head, pulling away. “Sorry, sorry,” he rushed, fingers feeling for bruises. “You okay? Does it hurt?” She shook herself off and pushed him, kissed him more, walking them forwards, kissing him deeply, kissing him the way he made her feel, hot and loved and alive. Cisco slowed, but Caitlin kept chasing, addicted, stealing kisses from him until it was impossible because he was starting to laugh. He dug his fingers into Caitlin’s hair, blowing a puff of air against her cheek. She felt weak, lightheaded, like she hadn’t ate all day, but this woozy, dizziness was just about the best thing that has ever happened to her. “What’s so funny?” she asked, giggling as his frame shook. “You thought it was Ralph!” Caitlin bit her lip, heat rising, not knowing what to say. “How could you not think it was me?” He was teasing her, but she could detect the hurt beneath the words. She didn’t answer right away and he immediately subdued. She stepped backwards so that he could see her face, and picked up her precious letter from off the floor. “Because,” she said seriously. “Thinking it was Iris and being wrong was confusing. Believing it was Ralph and getting that wrong was embarrassing. With Sherloque it was a relief. ” She let herself be sensitive, honest with both him and herself for once. Her voice wobbled. “But if it was you, Cisco, who I was convinced about, if it was you and I was wrong. That would have broken me. That would have hurt so much.” She was welling up with tears again. “So I didn’t let myself think it at all.” His face softened. “Because,” she continued, “I thought I accepted some time ago that just being your Caitlin, your best friend, would be enough to get me by, but that’s just not true.” “Caitlin,” he said. “I didn’t know. I wish I did. I should’ve just told you in the beginning when you didn’t get it. I’m sorry.” She shook her head, reaching for him again. “I was silly to think it could be anyone but you.” She let herself be kissed, her eyes fluttering closed, smiling against his lips. “The party's just about to— Woaaaah.” They sprang apart, caught. “Guess you found out who was in love with you after all, huh, Caitlin?” Caitlin blushed, and Cisco pulled her to his chest, glaring. “Go away Ralph,” he all but growled. “We’re going home.” “You can’t go home!” he exclaimed, “It’s the Valentine’s Day Lottery Reveal! You have to show up. Tell him, Caitlin.” They both ganged up on Cisco, giving him matching pleading looks. “The cookies, Cisco,” she pouted. “And you need to guess who wrote yours!” He was unable to resist her, not with the way she snuggled closer, blinking her eyelashes up at him. “Wow okay, you’re playing dirty and I don’t know how I feel about it.” Caitlin twirled a lock of her hair from the ponytail all askew, “You wanna see me play dirty? Come with me to the party and you’ll find out,” she flirted, not knowing where the hell that came from or even meant, but the way his pupils widened gave her a pretty good idea that Cisco liked it. “Fine!” he exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “Fine, we’ll go to the Lottery Reveal!” Caitlin and Ralph cheered. ♡ Cisco was feeding Caitlin heart shaped, red dyed cookies at the island in the lounge as Ralph clapped his hands. “I’ll go first, Barry thank you for your card.” Barry laughed, “Nah, dude. Wasn’t me. I know you’re mine though.” “How’d you know it was him?” Iris asked where she was sitting on Barry’s lap, still admiring the necklace he bought her. “It said ‘thank you for saving me from DeVoe.’” He gave Ralph a very pointed look. Ralph scoffed, “That could’ve been anyone here.” “Bien non. But it was you,” Sherloque interjected playing with a balloon. “Are we wrong?” “No,” said Ralph, shaking his strawberry shake. “So then who wrote mine?” “Moi!” Sherloque said, stealing the last cookie from the plate. “Puis la mademoiselle Caitlin wrote mine.” Caitlin smiled around her mouthful, half distracted as Cisco’s fingers brushed the crumbs off her lips. She wasn’t even sure he was paying any attention to what was going on around them at all. “And we all know who wrote Caitlin’s,” Iris said, and they all turned around to stare at them. Caitlin swallowed the last bit of cookie and kissed Cisco’s cheek. “Yes, well. It might’ve taken me all day but at least I got a boyfriend out of it.” “Hell yeah you did,” Cisco responded. He took her hand and tangled their fingers together, kissing it. “Who do you think had you, Cisco?” Ralph prompted him. Cisco didn’t hear him, and Caitlin had to nudge him out of his lovesick stupor. “Huh?” “Your Valentine,” Caitlin reminded him, touching his face. “You,” he gushed. Caitlin’s cheeks burned as Team Flash laughed. “No, sweetheart, I mean who wrote your letter?” Iris, having had enough of this whole game the moment she found out her husband rigged the lottery, rose her voice. “It was me! I wrote his letter! Not that he’ll even remember it. You’re welcome, Cisco.” She stood up and pulled Barry off the chair, dragging him out the room. “Party’s over. I really want to go home with my husband, can we leave now?” ♡ When Cisco vibed Caitlin to his apartment, she was surprised to find the dining table all nicely set up. “Is this for me?” He hummed and turned on the stove to heat the food. “It’s like I said on Tuesday,” he said, pointing his wooden spoon at the chair for her to sit down. He pushed her in and gave her a fancy tablecloth to place over her lap. “I had special plans.” “Oh,” Caitlin replied, feeling a little stupid. She watched him pull out a bottle of wine and light some candles. “What would you have done if this didn’t go well?” Cisco folded his arms over his chest. “Then I would’ve had a very awkward Valentine’s Day date with Ralph.” He came forward and sat across from her at the table. Caitlin couldn’t help giggling at that image, of Ralph stuck in her place, and cursed it ever crossing Cisco’s mind. He watched her as she laughed into her napkin, eyes full of light. She sobered and placed her chin in her hand, elbow next to her cutlery, mirroring Cisco’s look of incandescent happiness. It fell silent, and Cisco’s dinner simmered on the stove. “Lucky Ralph,” she whispered. Cisco’s face glowed amber in the candlelight. It was playful and ardent and hot. “No.” His finger went under her jaw, tilting it up slightly. Caitlin’s breath caught in her throat, holding his burning gaze until the moment she surrendered, eyelashes fanning closed as she was kissed and he murmured, “Lucky me.”

A funny interaction with Jazz and Prowl?

Jazz plops himself right beside Prowl, who is busy working on a paper. The font is 12 point, times new roman and the text is left aligned, double-spaced, and perfect. It’s a rare occurrence when Prowl isn’t in his office, dealing with whatever duties is passed his way. But now, he is in one of the open spaces, and Jazz is finally able to inform the mech about his discoveries of the world wide web.

The past few weeks, Jazz had been occupying himself with the internet. He had swam at the surface, scrolling through Instagram, fooling around with Snapchat, and figuring out how to use Netflix. That was a whole other topic to delve into.

“Prowl, I have found a world of information at our very digits. It’s a place filled with creativity, opinions, justice, and imagery! And it’s so easy to access, too. You know, I never would have thought there was so much on the internet. Of course, we’ve been so busy the last few months, fighting off Decepticons and all that, but wow. I think I found the cat’s meow.”

Prowl sighed, setting down the datapad.

“Jazz, I’m in the middle of something. Can we do this later?”

“No.”

“Primus…”

“Anyways, as I was saying, I have found so… so much. Look at this! It’s called… a meme!”

“At first, I did not understand what it was referencing. But, with further research, I have found that humanity is so… complex. Their sense of humor is, well, what the humans would say, wild! This man is sad because… ‘that boi’ is joining all the other dead memes.”

Prowl stares at it with mild annoyance in his optics. He clenches and unclenches his jaw frame, watching as Jazz continues to show him these memes.

“There’s this one, too. It comes from YouTube, which is a broadcasting network, essentially, where people can post their ideas, opinions, art, all of that wicked shit.” Then, Jazz’s voice lowers, quieting itself, almost as if Jazz is trying to keep it quiet.

“There’s this war between two of the most powerful YouTubers ever. Pewdiepie and… um… this YouTuber called T-Series.” Prowl is staring at Jazz’s tablet in disbelief, mildly intrigued.

“A war? Why haven’t I heard about this before? I would have heard about the battles. Does Optimus know?”

All of a sudden, the room is blaring with music. 

“So come on T-Series looking for some Drama? I’ll just serve you some-”

“Bitch lasagna! Bitch Lasagna!”

Prowl had no idea how to handle this. There was something so powerful about it that he finds in unnerving.

“I also found this website called… Tumblr.”

“Please, no.”

I rewrote an obscure Transformers comic from the 1980s.

Creator’s Commentary

It’s 1984. Marvel’s four-issue Transformers miniseries has been a smash hit, and they’re already expanding it into a full monthly ongoing. Marvel’s UK branch is looking to import the book, but they have a problem - the newsagents want weekly issues, and there simply isn’t enough comic to fill those pages.

To meet demand, they bring on Simon Furman to write extra comics weaving into the US material. Because he’s the only one with any idea what's going on, he continues to churn out Transformers stories for almost ten years - with only occasional contributions from other authors.

“Peace” is one such interloper.

Written by letterer/editor Richard Starkings under his “Richard Alan” pseudonym for the 1989 Transformers Annual (which was actually published in 1988), it presents one of Cybertron’s alternate futures. Its exact placement in continuity was contentious - even within the comics’ own letters pages, where the editors (writing in-character as Transformers) gave several contradictory answers to questions regarding its canonicity.

The comic opens when the final Decepticon is killed by the Wreckers - an elite group of Autobot shock-troopers. With the war over, the very-very-tired Autobot leader Rodimus Prime announces that he’s going to step down - letting the Wreckers’ leader, Springer, take his place.

Unbeknownst to the Autobots, not all of the Decepticons are dead after all - the double agent Triton still hides amongst their ranks. In an attempt to incite conflict, Triton suggests that Ultra Magnus would make a better leader. The Technobot combiner team agrees, and an argument breaks out between them and the Wreckers. Whirl argues with Triton, Triton punches Whirl, Roadbuster pulls a gun on Triton, Scattorshot shoots Roadbuster, Sandstorm shoots Triton, and the war begins again.

It’s a grimly interesting story, one forever doomed to remain a footnote in Transformers history. Fittingly for a bot of subterfuge, Triton’s alternate mode was a submarine - at least according to Dreadwind in the letters pages. Marvel UK fanboy-turned-creator Nick Roche much later reinvented him as a member of Squadron X - sworn enemies of the Wreckers in IDW Publishing’s Transformers continuity.

In its most recent reprint as part of the twenty-second volume of The Definitive G1 Collection, “Peace” was left stranded as an afterthought alongside Regeneration One - with the rest of the UK strips being collected across the first twenty volumes alongside their contemporary US material. That partwork was curated by Simon Furman, who still writes Transformers stories to this day - despite pleas from some corners of the fandom for him to just call it quits already.

Richard Starkings, meanwhile, went on to found Comicraft - bringing lettering into the 21st century by pioneering the use of digital fonts in comic books.

I wasn’t alive when most of that happened. My first brush with Transformers - at least, as far as I remember - came when I saw Transformers: Armada’s Land Military Mini-Con Team on the shelves of my local Woolworths (a much-loved now-defunct chain of British department stores). I didn’t get it at the time, but when our birthdays rolled around (or maybe Christmas? I was young; I barely remember any of this and neither do my parents) my brother and I got a bunch of Mini-Cons. Our first brush with Generation 1 would come much later, when we found a knackered Strafe at a car boot sale.

For a long time, my only experience with Transformers fiction came in the form of the cartoons - they didn’t show Armada on Freeview so I missed most of that, but Energon and Cybertron both aired in their entirety on CITV. I had the pack-in comics, and the Armada and Energon annuals - which basically just collected random Dreamwave comics without context. All of which is to say that, at the time, I felt pretty starved for good Transformers stories.

Finding the 1989 Annual in a secondhand bookshop, then, was like finding the holy grail.

I won’t lie. I had basically no idea who any of these characters were, or what was going on. But damn if I didn’t pore over every inch of those pages trying to work it out. And I sure as hell was gonna sign the thing, lest those abominable Firecons paid me a visit to finally incinerate what was presumably the only Annual they’d missed back in 1988.

Years passed. Some movies came out. I drifted away from Transformers for a while after my parents said “aren’t you a little too old for these” one time too many. Well, it was either that or the hordes of overpriced Bumblebees clogging the shelves at the time.

Eventually, though, I was drawn back to the franchise. A Humble Bundle of IDW’s comics and Thrilling 30 Sandstorm was all it took.

For some reason, at some point I decided to start a meme page. I don’t know why. Please don’t look at it. I don’t want to talk about it. Most of the edits I made were atrocious, although I’ll admit there’s a few I still find pretty funny. I actually referenced Transformers a bunch of times. There was this whole thing where I tried to work in a plot, so really the whole thing was much closer to a terrible webcomic than an actual meme page.

Perhaps the most involved reference to the franchise came in the form of a relettering of “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”, a 4-page comic originally published in a 1985 issue of Women’s Day. Why did I make that thing? I don’t know. Maybe a little more context would help.

Y’see, waaay back when the first Armada toys hit shelves, fans weren’t too impressed - to say the least. They’d seen pictures of highly-articulated prototypes, only to find that articulation completely absent in the finalised figures. To make matters worse, the first pack-in comic was pretty lacklustre - thanks to the trilingual dialogue squeezed into its speech bubbles.

One enterprising fan (Yartek, now better known as Blueshift) expressed their dissatisfaction by completely rewriting that pack-in comic’s dialogue - reimagining Hot Shot as a deranged, jam-obsessed cannibal. It was an idle joke, but one that tapped into the collective consciousness of the fandom at the time. Its popularity grew to the point where it was even referenced on the license plate of a later Hot Shot figure.

By Blueshift’s own admission, the comic isn’t all that great. Nowadays, the atmosphere surrounding Armada’s launch is but a hazy memory for most of the fandom - leaving the comic’s depiction of Hot Shot looking more like an uncomfortably ableist caricature than anything approximating a real parody.

But I digress. I was barely aware of Transformers when all of this happened. My point is that JaAm was like an abridged series, only presented as a comic, and I thought that was a neat idea. I was looking to make a post that was a little bit different for Christmas Day, and remembered the existence of that old Women’s Day comic. Thus was born “its christmas... so what??”

My process for that one was pretty straightforward. After reading the comic once to get a broad sense of its plot, I went through it again panel-by-panel - blocking out each narration box with an autoshape and adding my own text. Mustard features pretty heavily in it... I guess as a reference to jam? Honestly, I was writing this thing entirely by the seat of my pants and - with the exception of the choice panels I’m including here - it’s pretty unfunny as a result. I’m not proud of it. Even at the time, I felt like I could’ve done better. So, half a year later, I did.

When the mood eventually took me, there was only one option in my head - Richard Starkings’ “Peace”. This time, I took a moment to plan the whole thing out in my head before diving in.

I think my idea for the plot came about simply as a result of Rodimus’ body language and expressions on the second page. I reckon I looked at them and thought, “man, he looks like he’s just caught a whiff of something pretty nasty.” From there, my mind jumped to Triton... the culprit, naturally.

When you go back and read some of the early Marvel stuff, there’s a bit of dissonance between the Furman-esque galaxy-spanning conflicts and the more offbeat “the Transformers crash a wrestling match / concert / car wash” stories written by US author Bob Budiansky. At times, the Transformers could be figures of real gravitas - and at others, they were almost like children.

For both “its christmas” and “PASS” I tried to lean into the latter interpretation as much as possible. As a reflection of that, the dialogue and narration - both written in Times New Roman - are completely devoid of punctuation, capital letters, or special formatting. Well, mostly...

There’s a few instances in “its christmas” where capital letters are used for emphasis.

Roadbuster’s dialogue gets to keep its punctuation, and is written in (I think) Arial, because he’s supposed to be more mature than the rest.

Each comic had one panel which retained some of its original dialogue - the fourth on the first page of “its christmas”, and the fourth on the fourth page of “PASS”.

There’s a couple of instances in the comic where characters use swear words, only the wrong letter’s censored - “sh*t” became “*hit”, “f*ck” became “*uck”. That’s simply an artefact of the comic’s origins in my old meme page, where that was a running joke.

In addition to changing the text, I also made a few visual edits...

I changed the comic’s title from “PEACE” to “PASS” (as in, to pass gas) by chopping up and rotating bits of it.

I changed the credits for “RICHARD ALAN” (writer) and “GLIB” (letterer) to “ME” and “ME AGAIN”.

On the fifth page, I rotated Springer’s, Ultra Magnus’ and Sandstorm’s mouths by 180 degrees - changing them from horrified grimaces to jaunty smirks. That’s why they’re kind of lopsided relative to the rest of their expressions! Honestly, the original version looks pretty strange to me now.

I likewise modified Sandstorm’s and Ultra Magnus’ expressions in the first panel of the final page, and Nosecone’s in the second panel.

I scribbled out the question mark in the little “THE END?” box on the final page. This is the definitely the end; no need to beat around the bush.

The idea to make Roadbuster a butt monkey stemmed from the fact that he was the only non-triple-changer to appear on the first page. I saw that panel with the four of them together and thought “one of these guys is not like the others.” And of course, I knew that he’d be dead in a few more pages.

Once I’d established Springer as a bully, I started to get a sense for what life was like amongst the Autobots - but there were still things I wanted to leave open to interpretation...

Why does Roadbuster hang around with the other Autobots so persistently, when all he receives is abuse?

Is Triton’s fixation on “cred” overblown, or is it the only reason he’s survived as long as he has?

Is Rodimus really past his Prime?

Who’s really the coolest Autobot?

Are the Autobots inherently bad people, or simply products of their environment?

If they’re the latter, does that excuse their actions?

If these are the Autobots... then what were the Decepticons like?

Here’s some other miscellaneous notes...

There’s a single speech bubble on the fourth page where the speaker’s off-panel. In the original comic it belonged to Triton, shouting “HEY!” Here, I like to think it’s Whirl speaking.

In the narration of the second panel, I refer to the Transformers as “car robots” - a nod to the Japanese name of the Transformers: Robots in Disguise series.

Rodimus’ “light their darkest hour” line is, of course, a quote from the 1986 animated Transformers movie. Yes, I’m as tired of those references as you are, but no, I couldn’t resist.

I can’t remember if it was deliberate, but I’m pretty sure “if you catch my drift” was a nod to The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye - where original character Drift stars as Rodimus’ third-in-command.

Speaking of More than Meets the Eye - when it was relaunched as Lost Light, Rodimus got a brand new purple colour scheme. In “Pass”, Rodimus agonises over whether or not to get that same paint job.

“Mucho cred” is kind of a memetic phrase amongst readers of the superhero web serial Worm. I feel like “cred” is one of those inherently funny words (along with “cahoots”), so that was enough to justify its inclusion here. If you’ve somehow made it this far into this post, trust me when I say that Worm is a rabbit hole well worth tumbling down.

“Peace” has a very strong atmosphere. It’s about a group of individuals - who’ve known nothing but conflict for thousands of years - suddenly finding themselves with nobody to point their guns at. That exact same scenario played out decades later in IDW Publishing’s Transformers continuity, where it was explored in much greater depth - but in just six standalone pages, “Peace” presents its broad themes with impressive clarity.

I think we’re very much invited to root for Triton - he’s a real worm, but he’s also an underdog. When characters are created whole cloth in Transformers stories, they’re marked for death.

“Pass”, on the other hand, is about a group of kids who’ve lost all sense of perspective. The most important thing to each of the group’s members is how they are perceived by the rest. They’ve been living under ever-increasing social pressure, and things are finally reaching a boiling point - and people die as a result.

And I say “kids”, but the truth is that I still see these dynamics amongst grown adults today - admittedly without the death. For any given subculture, you’re going to find ingroups, outgroups, and the awkward middle ground between them. If I thought there was a clear-cut solution, I would’ve put it in the comic. But oftentimes - like I said in the closing panels - there isn’t really anyone at fault.

If you fart in public, don’t stress about it too much. Nobody really minds. Just own up. And whatever you do, don’t try to pass the blame - or else...

As one final nod to Marvel UK’s Transformers comics... here are some short AtoZ profiles for the entire cast!

You can follow me on twitter if you want to see more of my Transformers ramblings. The rest of my writing can be found right here on this blog - I recommend starting with Everything Is Red Now, a dumb comic about Spider-Man.

Family Sketch

Helen Schatvet Ullmann, CG, FASG [adapted from the author’s article in New England Ancestors 8:3 (Summer 2007):41–42, 45]

Do you have a thick file or a notebook full of information you’d like to write up for your family? Or even boxes and boxes of it? Maybe your data is in Family Tree Maker or some other program. Or maybe you’re just in the beginning stages of your research. In any case, whether you just want to write about your grandparents or compile a whole book, the basic building block is the family sketch, treating a couple and their children in an organized and interesting way. Word processing, extremely flexible, is a wonderful tool for genealogists. Remember the old days when we had to cut and paste and retype, perhaps introducing new errors as we went along? About twenty years ago, NEHGS sponsored a seminar held at the Museum of Science here in Boston. My only memory of the whole day is Alicia Crane Williams saying, “As soon as you get a little information, put it in Register style. This is part of the research process.” So I went home and on my quaint little Apple IIe began transcribing old family group sheets crammed with information. My descendants might just take them to the dump! What is a family sketch? It’s just a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the first paragraph that contains the vital information about the parents — all of it. So, if the reader later wants to check back to see just when your great-grandmother married her second husband, it’s easy to find. The middle is whatever you want, usually a biography in chronological order. It could include funny stories or a serious analysis distinguishing between your grandfather and another fellow who bore the same name. At the end is a list of children with their vital data. You may have mentioned each child as he or she joined the family, married, or died, in the biography above, but it’s still important to have a straightforward list of children at the end. Children for whom there is a lot of information may be continued in their own sketches. You can begin with just shreds of information. I started one sketch with my mother’s memories, her grandparents’ names and the recollection that she would sit on her grandfather’s lap and braid his side whiskers — plus the fact that he was a Congregational minister. Then I listed her mother, her aunt, and her uncles, using “Conversation with . . . ” and her name and relationship in footnotes. On the other hand, I have many folders of notes gleaned in the ’70s and ’80s, b.c. (before computers). It’s fun to open one, outline the family structure, and start adding information almost at random as I go through the file. As I work, I can see where I need to bolster a statement with pertinent analysis or where I could undertake more research. Before starting to write, you might read some sections in Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century,[1] especially the pages that diagram the different elements of the parents’ and children’s paragraphs. There isn’t space here to discuss all the fine points, including numbering systems.[2] Many other matters, such as whether to use abbreviations, are really your own personal preference. Generally the fewer the abbreviations, the smoother the reading. Complete sentences, rather than lots of semicolons, also make reading easier. Now you can just start writing. But here’s a suggestion: if you are going to start from scratch (as opposed to creating a “report” from your genealogy database), go to AmericanAncestors.org. Click on the Publication tab, then on theRegister, and then under Side Links, on “Download a Register Style Template for Microsoft Word.” Then “Download the Template!” If you have Microsoft Word on your computer, a document that can function as a template will open. I won’t repeat all that the template says, but it will help you format your sketch, especially those pesky children who appear in hanging paragraphs. This template contains all the “styles” that we use in the Register, everything from title to footnotes. The word “style” here does not refer to Register “style.” It is a word-processing term that refers to the format of each paragraph. When you open Word, you will be in “normal” style, but this paragraph is being written in “body text indent.” The only difference is that the first line is indented. Hanging paragraphs for children are more complicated. These paragraphs line up roman numerals on a “right tab.” There are even styles for quotations and grandchildren. If you’ve already arranged some material and want to use that template, simply copy your work into the blank template. First select your whole document and make sure it’s in normal style. Go to “Format,” then “Style,” and select “normal.” Delete all tabs and spaces you added to format the children. After pasting your work into the new document, save it under the name you want to use. Then review the text and select the “style” for each paragraph by placing your cursor in the paragraph and choosing the style from the Format menu. There should be a little window on your toolbar that lists the styles and offers a quicker route. You can select many paragraphs at once. (A technical detail: if you want to edit the style in any way, say choosing a different font or left-justified text, go to the Format menu, choose “Style,” and click on “Modify.”) In the Register we generally use “normal” style for the first paragraph where the parents’ vital data appear. Then we switch to “body text indent” for the biography. We introduce the children with a “kid’s intro” style and then choose “kids.” When you use that style, hit tab, then the first Roman numeral and a period, then hit tab again. Both tabs will then appear, and you can start typing the child’s name. Small caps are very elegant here. Notice that we include the surname for each child. Then there’s no doubt about the surname and indexing is easier. If you want to list grandchildren, you’ll find the “grandkids” style works a little differently. No tabs needed. Just type the arabic numeral and a period. Then two hard spaces help the names line up nicely [use Control-Shift-Space]. In the Register we use italics for grandchildren’s names. Even the footnotes and footnote references have their own styles. We encourage you to cite your sources for everything. Footnotes are much handier if your readers will really use them, but endnotes may seem less intimidating. The basics of citation format are not difficult. Look at issues of the Register for examples. A current guide is Evidence!,[3] good to have at hand, but the Register often uses simpler formats. The Chicago Manual of Style is also helpful.[4] It saves time to enter the notes correctly the first time. (By the way, the footnote reference number goes after the punctuation.) A further hint about writing style: try reading your work out loud. Are you using empty phrases you would never use when talking? Can you say something more concisely? Are your sentences really sentences? Passive voice — “The ball was hit by the boy,” rather than “The boy hit the ball” — deadens the tone. And proofread, proofread, proofread. You’ll improve your sketch every time.

All the best Family Sketch Images 38+ collected on this page. Feel free to explore, study and enjoy paintings with PaintingValley.com. As I look toward shifting to a different family line in my own research, I think I’m going to take the time to write a bio sketch for the main ancestor I’ve been researching, George Washington Adams (1845-1938) before I say goodby to him for a little while. I think it should be a fun exercise. 93,432 family sketch stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free. See family sketch stock video clips. Family future plan group of sketch family people walking in the garden building a family sketches of future family design interior family sketch color family and money family with money thinking wall.

Finally, for the “icing on the cake,” dress up your sketch with illustrations! Insert photos, autographs, pictures of houses and gravestones, the ship on which your ancestors crossed the ocean, maps — whatever you can find. Your final product should be elegant and attractive, not just to your children but to their grandchildren and beyond.

Sidebar:

A few little tips

Commas and periods go inside a closing quote; semicolons outside.

Footnote reference numbers come after the punctuation.

Titles of published books should be italicized.

Titles of articles and unpublished materials need quotation marks.

Titles of sources such as land, probate, and vital records do not need italics or quotes unless they are published.

Proofread on another day.

Try reading your prose out loud!

Sidebar 2:

Polishing that database reports

In word processing you can discuss all sorts of nuances of dates, places, and identities wherever they seem to fit. Such additions are not so easy when working with a genealogy database. There are quite a few differences between what we consider Register style and the quasi-Register-style report generated by most genealogy programs. If you are using one of these programs, here are some things to consider.

Once you have generated a report, it will carry its own set of word-processing “styles.” You can just accept them, or eliminate all of them by selecting the whole document and putting it in “normal” style as described above, then copying it into a blank Register template. If you do so, eliminate any sex designations for the children first. (You can easily comment on any unusual name in the text or a footnote.)

Family Sketch Clipart Black And White

You should make some other changes as well. First, consider the order of the information. Do the wife’s name and vital data appear after the husband’s notes, with notes on her following? Move information on the wife into the husband’s paragraph and integrate her notes with his. Next, did you document those notes with citations in parentheses? All citations need to be moved into footnotes (or endnotes if you prefer). Multiple footnotes for the same piece of data should be combined into one note, with semicolons between the different sources. You must also consider the format of names, dates, and places. Small caps are good for names, but your report will probably have a mixture of lower and upper case. Capitalizing names of the parents of husband and wife would be distracting. Place names don’t require a county or state after first use in each sketch, but it’s helpful to the reader to add “County” where appropriate. Postal codes are also distracting. In the Register we spell out the names of months and states in the main text and abbreviate them (except those with five letters or less), with periods, in the children’s paragraph

Family Sketch Picture

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1Michael J. Leclerc and Henry B. Hoff, ed., Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (Boston: NEHGS, 2006). 2See Joan Ferris Curran, Madilyn Coen Crane, and John H. Wray, Numbering Your Genealogy: Basic Systems, Complex Families, and International Kin, National Genealogical Society Special Publication No. 64 (Arlington, Va.: National Genealogical Society, 1999). 3Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1997). The introductory sections of this book are especially valuable. 4The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Cartoon Drawing Of A Family

This book publishes, for the first time in full, the two most revealing of Mark Twain’s private writings. Here he turns his mind to the daily life he shared with his wife Livy, their three daughters, a great many servants, and an imposing array of pets. These first-hand accounts display this gifted and loving family in the period of its flourishing. Mark Twain began to write “A Family Sketch” in response to the early death of his eldest daughter, Susy, but the manuscript grew under his hands to become an exuberant account of the entire household. His record of the childrens’ sayings—“Small Foolishnesses”—is next, followed by the related manuscript “At the Farm.” Also included are selections from Livy’s 1885 diary and an authoritative edition of Susy’s biography of her father, written when she was a teenager. Newly edited from the original manuscripts, this anthology is a unique record of a fascinating family.

Greta Gerwig Is a Director, Not a Muse

By Noreen Malone, October 31, 2017.

source: http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/greta-gerwig-director-lady-bird.html

Dave Matthews Band is generally not considered cool anymore. Almost certainly, it never was in the downtown New York world of which the actress and writer Greta Gerwig has become a cool-girl-real-girl avatar in recent years. But in a time and place (America’s vast, yearning middle-class suburbs, in the cultural desert of the Clinton and early Bush years) and to a certain kind of person (such as a teenager aching for the jazz-adjacent cred that jam-band fandom could provide but more comfortable with white ball caps and lacrosse than ponchos and hallucinogens), Dave Matthews Band was Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1966. And so there is a crucial moment in Lady Bird, Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, in which the title character, a Sacramento high-school senior in 2003, confronts the cruelest heartbreak imaginable to her by blasting the band’s ballad “Crash Into Me”: “Sweet like candy to my soul / Sweet you rock and sweet you roll.” The result is both sympathetic, and very funny.

“There was no other song it ever was going to be,” Gerwig said. “In preproduction, I realized I didn’t know what I was going to do if Dave said no [to its use]. I wrote him a letter. ‘Dear Mr. Dave Matthews … ’ ”

Gerwig was sitting at a small corner table near the window at Morandi in the West Village, not far from where she lives with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. “I thought it was a really romantic song when I was a teenager. I would listen to it on repeat on a yellow CD player,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine a world in which a guy would feel that way about me.”

Maybe it was because of her sexy dirndl skirt of a name, maybe because of her squinting physical resemblance to indie Gen-X avatar Chloë Sevigny, maybe simply because of her distinctive delivery. But since the very beginning of Gerwig’s career, she has been a generational lightning rod of sorts. As what the New York Observer once called “the Meryl Streep of mumblecore” — the hyperlow-budget late-aughts movie movement led by directors like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers — Gerwig was near-instantly labeled an “It” girl and invested with all sorts of theories about what her success and acting style meant. Her brand of hipness was confusing — was she really that earnest? Were they all that earnest? How could that possibly be cool? Critics, especially those of an older generation, were suspicious.

She was, unmistakably, a gifted actress. But the Guardian also called her “the poster girl for wayward, brittle middle-youth,” a “galumphing work in progress.” In The New Yorker, Ian Parker wrote that, despite having a “precise, literate mind,” Gerwig “has the air, not uncommon among her contemporaries, of having swallowed a very low dose of LSD.” “Ms. Gerwig, most likely without intending to be anything of the kind, may well be the definitive screen actress of her generation, a judgment I offer with all sincerity and a measure of ambivalence,” A. O. Scott wrote in the New York Times. “Part of her accomplishment is that most of the time she doesn’t seem to be acting at all. The transparency of her performances has less to do with exquisitely refined technique than with the apparent absence of any method.” And then there was this sort of thing: “While watching Greta Gerwig on screen, you might be tempted to kiss her,” wrote Stephen Heyman in T in 2010. “This is not meant purely as praise. Gerwig, 26, plays characters who are given to discursive verbal forays with oodles of ‘ummmms.’ So planting an unexpected kiss would not only be a recognition of her adorableness but also a useful way to shut her up.”

In a way, then, Lady Bird, a remarkably self-assured debut, feels like a rebuke. Or at least an assertion of artistic intent. At 34, and moving, finally, behind the camera, Gerwig is exiting the phase of her life where she’ll be asked to represent a mysterious, fascinating rising generation. The winds have shifted some, and the microgeneration after her is just as earnest (or more so) but culturally preoccupied less with its own emotional wanderings than with larger political questions of identity, and of race. Gerwig seems still to be considering, and even reclaiming, some of the traits that hers has been tagged with: nostalgia, that earnestness, parental attachment. In other words, what does it look like onscreen when millennial sincerity is treated not with mockery or puzzlement but with, well, sincerity?

Gerwig appears to be a genuinely sincere person, a kind of spiritually permanent college student, in a way that might get under the skin of someone with more ironic armor. She wears a giant Hello, Dolly! sweatshirt and an even more giant backpack. She references Tina Fey’s Bossypants like scripture and listens to podcasts about entrepreneurship (“The one about the woman who created Spanx made me sob”) and religion (“Krista Tippett” — the host of On Being — “is like my fucking queen”). She quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to express her sadness over the Harvey Weinstein mess: “In a free society, some are guilty; all are responsible.” She goes to church sometimes, and though she doesn’t subscribe to any particular denomination (“The Catholic theatrics are pretty high quality, but the Protestants have better hymns”), she’s really into the Quakers right now: “There’s nothing that you have to believe or avow. The only thing you have to believe is that the light of God exists within each person.” She really, really loved her single-sex education, both the high-school portion and at Barnard, where she was delighted to discover that all the doctors at the health center were gynecologists and enjoyed her time on the parliamentary debate team.

Gerwig’s enthusiasms extend also to Zumba, but what she really likes is a barre class run by this one woman from Portland, Oregon, whom she admires for her “body positivity,” and on the day we first met, she was, with some embarrassment, about to try something called the Class, in which Tribeca women combine burpees and cathartic screaming. “It seems like maybe the fitness equivalent of the toy poodle,” she said. “Like, you have to admit that you love them and you want one that’s tiny. You’d rather be the girl who has a German shepherd who goes for a run. Not one with a fluffy piece of lint who goes to a place where you chant with crystals.” She considered. “Before they poured the floor at the studio, I read, they put rose quartz everywhere, and I was like, I mean … I can get down with that.” She has a friend who works for Moon Juice, and so she speaks highly of its sprouted almonds, even if “I always thought it was kind of ironic when she’d be stressing out about the moon powders.”

The author and illustrator Leanne Shapton, who knows Gerwig and Baumbach from the neighborhood, spotted Gerwig and stopped to chitchat. Shapton, as it turned out, designed the font for Lady Bird’s title and credits: “She made an entire uppercase and lowercase alphabet and painted it ten times the size that it needed to be and shrunk it down so it looks like a font but has enough imperfections so there’s a density,” Gerwig told me after Shapton had walked away. “I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper.” She paused. “I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day.” She paused again, considering Shapton. “I also have a crush on her because she’s very beautiful. She is cool in the way that everyone wants to be, but she’s also a real person.”

“I’ve made so many films in New York,” Gerwig said, that “there was an assumption I think a lot of people had that I am a New Yorker, that I am from New York, and I always felt like nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve done a good job of convincing you, but I’m not, as so many people who live in New York are not.”

Lady Bird, which is also Gerwig’s solo writing debut, is the story of a high-school senior (Saoirse Ronan) at an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento who longs — despite her average grades — to be the star of the school play, to go to college on the East Coast, to be extraordinary. Though her name is Christine, she insists on being called “Lady Bird,” a pretension with which her salt-of-the-earth parents — a nurse and an out-of-work computer programmer, played with extraordinary sensitivity by Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts — comply. (It’s a complicated dynamic: Metcalf calls the mother character “totally passive-aggressive.”) The plot is a gentle one. Lady Bird acquires a couple of boyfriends (each recognizable as a classic type who might appeal to a smart-in-some-ways, really-not-in-others teenage girl), chases acceptance from the popular crowd, applies to colleges her family can’t afford to send her to.

Gerwig attended an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento, with parents who worked as a nurse and a loan officer at a credit union, who sent her off to an expensive East Coast college, and although the movie has been widely discussed as a roman à clef, she says it’s not. For starters, Lady Bird is set in 2003, Gerwig pointed out, and she graduated in 2002. “I never made anyone call me another name. I never had dyed-red hair. She’s so much more wild and outspoken, and I think I was only ever that way in my head. In a way, I felt like I kind of put into her the sheer confidence and the id I find in 8- or 9-year-old girls. They’re just brash, and they don’t know that they should feel anything but great about themselves.

“When you write something you know, you’re making a story that will work, whether or not there’s bits taken. It’s always funny to me when people say, ‘Well, it’s clearly autobiographical,’ and I say, ‘Well, how do you know my autobiography?’ ” she continued. “Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it’s a very interesting assumption. In some ways, it feels akin to the assumption that I’ve experienced as an actor when people say … ‘This is you.’ Which I’ve always taken as a compliment because it felt like you were watching a person.”

The teenage Gerwig was an extensive diarist, but she didn’t look up her old journals until after she’d finished the script, called “Mothers and Daughters” in a first draft that clocked in at 350 pages. (“It originally had a lot more dances,” she said.) When she opened the old pages, she was pleasantly surprised to find that she’d accurately remembered some of the tiny details — the rumor that clove cigarettes had fiberglass in them, the very fact of clove cigarettes at all — that make the movie so spot-on evocative of high school. But mostly it was the vividness of her feelings that struck Gerwig. “I would go on for pages and pages about this crush I had, dissecting every moment. ‘Did he notice that our arms were touching, or was that an accident?’ And then I wrote, ‘Upon further reflection, I think that this might’ve been a more vivid emotional experience for me than him.’ I was like, Oh, honey, nothing you’ve written is more true.”

When Gerwig was young, her parents made a point of taking her to local Sacramento theater — she proudly ticks off the names of the companies, and the playwrights whose work they put on, and even the directors. At Barnard, where she studied playwriting, she became a Kim’s Video devotee, methodically working her way through the director-organized shelves. (It was Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail, she said, that made her shift her focus from theater to movies.) She rejected traditional paths like law and medicine. “Chekhov was a country doctor, spent all his time with people and in their homes. I was like, Well, that’s good, and then I was like, Well, I’m not interested in it, and also I don’t like blood, and there are no country doctors anymore,” she said. “The idea that I would become a doctor to become more like Chekhov is a pretty circular route.”

After college, Gerwig lived all over Brooklyn — East Williamsburg, Prospect Heights, deep Park Slope, or “Park Slide,” as she says fondly. She had odd jobs, including at the Box, the Lower East Side cabaret, and began working with Swanberg, whom she had met through a college boyfriend and who was making interesting movies that were unlike anything that had been done before, for almost no money.

Mumblecore was a big deal, for a small movement, in part for what it seemed to reveal about a certain slice of young, college-educated, mostly white people trying to figure out how they related to the world. It was hailed in the Times as something that “bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience.”

Gerwig now physically cringes at the mere mention of the word mumblecore. “I just hate it,” she said. “It feels like a slight every time I hear it. Because of the improvisational quality of those movies, and the fact that everyone was nonprofessional, I have had a bit of an uphill battle just to say ‘I know how to act.’ I didn’t stumble into this. I wasn’t just a kid.” But she credits her roles in those films — Nights and Weekends, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead — with helping teach her to write. “We called them ‘devised films,’ because we’d know the characters and what was supposed to happen in the scenes but not the words. It was a way of writing while I was acting.”

It was also that set of films — which made a bigger splash in the indie-movie scene than in the culture at large — that put her on Baumbach’s radar. (He actually recommended her to his agent before the two had ever met.) When Baumbach cast her in 2010’s Greenberg, released when she was 26, it was her big break. Shortly after he divorced his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh (Gerwig had trained for the role, in part, by working as an assistant to Leigh’s mother), the two began their romance. Baumbach and Gerwig turned an email correspondence into a project: The duo co-wrote Frances Ha and Mistress America, both starring Gerwig and both markedly sweeter than anything Baumbach had worked on in the past. “I liked what she was writing so much that it made me work harder with my own to impress her,” Baumbach said.

This collaboration led to a spate of headlines referring to Gerwig not as a partner on the works but as their muse. “The actress Greta Gerwig has had the same liberating effect on Noah Baumbach as Diane Keaton had on Woody Allen: she has opened him up, lending his films a giddy sense of release,” went one typical summation in the Economist.

“I did not love being called a muse,” said Gerwig bluntly. “I didn’t want to be strident about it or say, ‘Hey, give me my due,’ but I did feel like I wasn’t a bystander. It was half-mine, and so that part was difficult. Also I knew secretly that I was engaged with this longer project, and wanted to be a writer and director in my own right, so I felt like the muse business, or whatever it was, was a position that I didn’t identify with in my heart. But I think one thing I learned early because of the group of movies that are called mumblecore” — she slowed down, a little archly, over the word, to acknowledge again her discomfort with it — “is not to attach too much to the moment you’re living through from a press perspective. I also had this sense of, Well, they’ll just eat their hat one day.”

TV was one idea when Gerwig hit a dry spell with acting gigs after making Frances Ha and Mistress America. “I felt like I had done things that I was incredibly proud of and I felt like I had authorship over, and done good work as an actor, but my wheels weren’t catching purchase with whatever the Zeitgeist was,” she said, forking her pasta. It was a curious double identity as an actress — plausibly the face of a generation, particularly of the privileged of that generation, and, just as plausibly, a near-anonymous actress who hadn’t yet made anything that any real number of people had actually seen. She met with the producers behind How I Met Your Dad, a planned spinoff of the long-running, quietly beloved CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and signed up for the starring role, along with a writing role. “It felt like this incredible lifeline for me. It felt like a place to give myself some structure,” she said of what looked from the outside like a bit of a career swerve. Not to mention that she was told it was a “sure thing.” The pilot wasn’t picked up. “They send the shows to Vegas, and people sit there with knobs, and they turn the knob down if they don’t like an actor,” Gerwig explained with a little embarrassment. “Nobody exactly told me I tested low, but it was insinuated that America did not like it.”

But that allowed her to turn to directing. “By the time I started, I felt like I had ten years of training. My film school was as an actor and co-writer and co-director, and whatever else I did, which included costuming, and holding the boom, and editing. It was a way for me to get my Malcolm Gladwell hours in.” She also benefited from more targeted instruction, in recent years, from DPs who’d heard she wanted to direct and let her sit with them while they constructed their shots. “When I finished the script, I had a moment with myself where I thought, You’re either going to do this now or you’re never going to do this,” she said. “Now you have to make your mistakes and get your gifts because you have to, at some point, jump. I think a lot of women have also particularly a need to feel that they can stand in their own expertise before doing something. A lot of my female friends will be so overqualified for what they do that by the time they do it, it’s like, Well, obviously.”

During the press tour for Mistress America, a journalist asked about whether dating Baumbach, and then writing with him, had opened certain doors for her. Gerwig acknowledged that perhaps it had, proximally, but refused to concede the larger point. “I don’t mean to sound annoying,” she told the reporter, “but I would have done it anyway. I will find that one door and then push it wide open. I’m lucky to find collaborators and kindred spirits. But I don’t need a man, and I would have done it anyway.”

A confident, direct version of ambition is another generational trait that Gerwig seems to comfortably inhabit. Recently, she saw Saoirse Ronan in London to promote the film; Ronan told her she was beginning to think about whether she could direct, inspired in part by watching her on set. “Greta is the one that I’d want to emulate,” Ronan told me. “She was incredibly clear about what she wanted but also supportive about finding our own way through the characters. We’ve been talking in a practical way, too, about stories that I’d like to do and if I could work with her in that regard. She’s a great one for the advice.”

Ronan was also struck by Gerwig’s actorly approach to directing. “She had very clearly mapped out each character’s journey, what it would be like to be a kid in post-9/11 America in California, how complicated it would be to think about leaving Sacramento for the first time,” but also “she gave us an awful lot of freedom to incorporate our own selves.” Gerwig even gave Timothée Chalamet, who plays one of Lady Bird’s love interests — a self-styled high-school intellectual — a syllabus for “what a paranoid anarchist type of thinker would have been reading back then,” he said, which included, in addition to the requisite Howard Zinn that shows up in the movie, The Internet Does Not Exist, an essay collection that warns of the dangers of a networked world. She also asked him to watch Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, which she told me contains a character who is an example of a long-standing type: “These guys who are just completely stuck on their ideas, whether music or progressive philosophy or whatever it is. Like, ‘I’m going to train you to like Pavement.’ ” Gerwig also gave specific directions on how to play the many comic moments in the script: Humor was to be achieved not through comic acting but by playing the situation with all the seriousness with which a high schooler would feel it. “I like things that are funny,” Gerwig said, “but I don’t like things that are in quotes.”

Gerwig plans to tip the balance of her work going forward more toward writing and directing (though she’d like to keep acting). “You just stay in it long enough, and eventually you’ll just be old.” Nobody will worry over whether you are an actor or a director or a writer. “Everyone will just think, Oh, she’s such a wonderful 75-year-old now. She’s our lady Clint Eastwood.”

She has one script, something she wrote before Lady Bird, in the drawer, but for her next project, “I have an inkling of wanting to make something that’s more silent, literally fewer words.” She wouldn’t give any more detail, however. “I worry if I put an idea out in the sunlight too early, it shrivels, and I don’t want to shrivel anything right now.”

Baumbach’s most recent film, The Meyerowitz Stories, was released on Netflix and in theaters just a few weeks before Lady Bird, which comes out on November 3. Both movies open with a parent and child, driving together, on the cusp of the difficult moment when college is about to force that relationship into its next, more distant, phase; both puncture the sweetness of the scene by someone melting down immaturely. In Baumbach’s film, it’s the parent. In Gerwig’s, it’s the daughter.

With Mistress America and Frances Ha, said Baumbach, the pair were able to create “a synthesis” of their two voices, “a kind of a third thing that allows you to try different selves on.” But the couple have strikingly different tones to their independent work, although they tread the same thematic ground (and give each other notes on drafts). Family, in much of Baumbach’s filmography, has been a source of neuroticism for his protagonists, often children picking up the pieces, learning to overcome the limits of a selfish, immature parent’s love. Lady Bird, by contrast, is about a child failing to recognize, in the moment, the expansiveness and totality of her parent’s love for her — as well as the complicated dynamic between teen girls and their mothers, even those who are fond of each other. Baumbach, though, sees their emotional truths as more related. Both movies, he said, are about “how hard it is to acknowledge positive things in someone you need to move away from, and how hard it is to leave.” Gerwig’s story is, in her phrasing, “a movie about wanting to leave a place that’s secretly a love letter to the place, and a movie ostensibly about a daughter that’s secretly about the mother.”

“Oh, I’ve got a lot of guilt,” Gerwig replied quickly when I mentioned that I had seen the film as, in part, a meditation on that particular emotion, and how deeply it can become intertwined with love. “We always joked that we should put up a title card at the end of the movie that said CALL YOUR MOTHER,” she said. The guilt kicked in. “I need to call my mother.”

Gerwig showed her parents and friends the script before shooting and screened the film for them before it premiered, but she also spent a lot of time considering how she’d treated her mother as a teenager. “I could only see the faults in clear relief, but as I’ve gotten older, it’s like, Goddamn, she was right about almost everything.”

For all that she insists Lady Bird isn’t exactly her own story, it feels like a coming-out of sorts for Gerwig’s own sensibility, her preoccupations. “I only ever write from a place of love,” said Gerwig, “which sounds goofy but is actually true. Some writers write from a place of anger or analysis, or something that feels more didactic, but that impulse means that I also write out of real love, which is complicated and changing.”

“Sincerity means a lot to me,” Gerwig continued. “Actually, in Frances Ha, at the beginning, she’s reading out of a literary-criticism book called Sincerity and Authenticity. Basically, the question she’s setting up is, what do we mean by sincerity, and does it diminish the thing?” She considered. “But I’ve always felt like it heightens it.”

NaPoWriMo 2020 Day 27: Review

small and rectangular with a pleasant metal clack though some of your words they baffle me so some don't belong yet others are missing whatever the case I think you're spectacular ____ Just three days to go!   Alternate Title: Ode to a Mini-Magnet This was one of those prompts where I had a little trouble picking a subject, but once I had that figured out it was smooth sailing. We were asked to review something that isn't normally reviewed. I settled on a little meta-narrative by "reviewing" the mini-magnets themselves. The thing about this prompt is that in the age of the internet, things that are reviewed and things that aren't have become wildly unbalanced. And to be fair, even the mini-magnets aren't truly safe in that regard either. The kits are available on Amazon, so they're equal grounds for review just like really any product you can buy online. Food? How about food critiques. Art supplies? Also reviewable. Music? Yes. I even think it's a stretch to say that days and years and such aren't normally reviewed in this day and age. People recount their days and determine if they were good or bad in blogposts and stuff all the time. How many Youtube videos exist at this very second with a title along the lines of "[year] in Review!" You can't get away from the human drive to judge things and tell other people about them! ...I think I just realized a not-so-hidden truth about the state of humanity... *Ahem* Anyway... The mini-magnets sufficed to me since, from the perspective of most, they're just words printed in a (I'm 97% sure) Times New Roman font on magnets. They either work by having a decent magnetic pull and being easily read, or they don't. And thus far I've yet to encounter any that don't do that, and I have arguably more mini-magnets than is reasonable. (Somewhere around 1,800 if you're curious) Thus, from an outsider's perspective, there's not really much to review here other than "Yep, they're magnets. They work." But by way of having so many of the little things at my disposal, I have noticed a couple of things that go a bit beyond that. For example, and the main feature here: Word choice. It's incredibly ironic that when I said, "yet others are missing," that I discovered the word "other" is in fact not among any of the magnets I have. And yet I have two "monkey" magnets that almost never get used unless I'm using them to build another word. These are far from the only words that fall into the "strange choices" category, either. Wouldn't we all agree that "just" is a fairly common word to use? Yes? Then why is it also one of the words I've yet to see? Oh, but I have "sausage" and two "dazzle"s. Those are super common words in everyday language... See what I mean? Also, this isn't quite the same thing, but the same applies to the single letters the kits provide. It took a very long time for me to get any single "e"s to use, despite e being one of, if not the most commonly used letter in English. There are also no singles of certain other letters that are less common that would make a ton of sense to have as single letters because they're less common, like K, Q, Z, and X. Or even actual single L's instead of me having to use capital I's. Likewise, I'm shocked there isn't an "Alphabet" kit that just has like 3-4 of every letter for you to supplement the other kits with. This can be pretty annoying sometimes, but at the same time, it's not a huge deal breaker because usually you still have the tools to make the words you need...even if it takes a bit of mini-magnetic rocket science to figure out the best way to do so. That's really one of the main attractions of the mini-magnets as a whole; because you have to stack the magnets to make other words, they make a very distinct visual effect. And in the process of putting them together, they have a wonderfully tactile sensation that you just don't get with most other forms of writing and/or visual poetry. As well as that satisfying clack when you plop them down on a metal/magnetic surface. Not to mention that physically having to craft words in this way makes you think about language and spelling in a very different way from just "put letters together in the correct order to make a word." You have to think about how to do that, what words make up other words, and the best way to string them together to get what you want. So, like the poem says, despite my bafflement over word choice at times, there is still a plethora of unique value to the mini-magnets, enough that I evidently can't seem to stop buying them.   ...Do you perhaps see now how much nuance is in what would appear to be something so unassuming?   I could go on, but I think I've made my point about three times over now. Also, a side note: I find it funny that the word "baffle" here is made up of "a bad fluff giggle." It seems oddly fitting and I will probably never be able to hear or say the word "baffle" again without thinking about that.   I did try something a bit different with the mandala this time, aside from some new shapes/motifs. I decided it would be most fitting if I did this one in all black since the mini-magnets themselves are simply black and white. Or, at least the ones I have are. I've seen some colored ones floating around, but I like the uniformity of having them all be relatively the same in both color and font. (Because I've seen some other fonts floating around too and also specifically avoided them for the same reason.) It was largely unintentional that it came out more squarish, but it is quite fitting, I think. Now, if the mini-magnets and I can just hold out a few more days, we'll both get a well-deserved break from the daily uploads.  They have served me well, but I think they're getting a bit tired themselves, as these poems as a group have been far more involved than anything I've attempted with the magnets before. ____ Artwork/Poem © me, MysticSparkleWings Inspired by FridgePoetProject ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Best Resume Tips + A Day to Night LBD

Are you ready for a really cute outfit AND some fun work advice?? Because we're packing up todays post and coming at you with some real knowledge. 

Felicity & Co: Rita Wrap Dress / Ralph Lauren: Wool Camel Coat (more affordable version HERE) / Givenchy: Mini Antigonia Bag / Sam Edelman: Hazel Black Pumps

Today will be the last day I have long hair on the blog so soak it all in because tomorrow I cut off like 5 inches!!

ANYWAY wanted to share a little two-for-one post today: resume tips and a great wear to work dress that transitions so well into nighttime. Perfect for the office or meetings AND for a date night out or drinks with friends. If you remember wayyyyy back when, I posted about this dress in red and loved it just as much then as I do now. 

Funny enough, I styled it pretty much the same, we're standing in the same part of my bedroom snapping the photos AND I shared that it's a great day to night dress. LOL how original am I!

Everything I've said about this dress holds true: it's a great price point for a wrap dress, coming in at right under $100. It's versatile (especially the black color) and can really be dressed up or down. It's comfortable and it makes you feel good wearing it! I love it so much I now have it in two colors!

And with this being a great work dress to have in your rotation, I also wanted to share some fun work TIPS and advice about how to rock your resume! I took to you guys on stories and asked for your best advice (who knew I had so many wonderful women in HR following me!!) and here's what we came up with:

Formatting:

1. Send as a PDF -- this will keep the look and formatting of the document the same no matter the computer or service. The last thing you want is a messed up resume you worked so hard on!

2. Use bullet points -- make sure they are clear and concise and easy to read

3. Make sure your margins are lined up and that it has an overall clean look to it -- you want your resume to be easy to read and follow. Anyone would have ocd looking at a resume that is tilted or off in terms of lines and spacing. 

4. White space is your friend -- don't write a novel and think you need to fill the entire page with words! White space is a good thing and should be treated as such.

5. Create it via Cava -- a lot of you recommended this as a great (and free) service to help build custom resumes! I will have to check it out for myself as well.

6. Keep it to one page -- heard this from just about everyone! Give them the best of the best and keep it to one page. I personally don't include any work past 5 years on the resume -- no one needs to see where I interned in college now that I'm 27!

7. Use Arial font -- (or a common font other than Times New Roman) A couple of you mentioned changing up the font, one just to change it up and two to help the resume readers read it better. I never thought of this!

8. Make it eye catching but still simple -- the debate between having something unique and eye catching vs keeping it simple lives on! I think there is a delicate balance where you can make it custom to yourself and different for the reader but also keep it simple and clean. You just need to find what is right for you!

9. Make sure everything is the same tense -- Never thought about this, but it totally makes sense! Keep all your word tenses the same when talking about your work and your overall resume.

10. Education should be last (for those with work experience) -- just drop that down at the bottom, make sure that the most important things are at the top like skills and job descriptions. 

On the Resume:

1. Pull words from the job description and edit your resume each time you send it out -- everyone should be doing this. A one size fits all resume just wont cut it nowadays. Always keep it truthful (duh) but spice it up for job to job. Pull out why you're a great fit for that particular role and share it in specifics on your resume!

2. Under your job description, focus on accomplishments and impacts vs the tasks you did -- I love this! Instead of saying what you did on a day to day basis, talk instead about your accomplishments and the impact you made on your role. This will help show real differences you've made in the past and help future job prospects inspired you can do the same for them.

3. Ditch the objective statement and cover letter -- Unless they ask for it of course! This is something that (in my opinion) is very old school resumes. We all know your objective is to get the role you're applying for. As for cover letters, when we were hiring at work I never liked reading any of them. I just wanted to know more about the persons work experience and past!

4. Don't put your address -- who knew! I guess this can cause bias on the hiring managers part and it's best to be more general in terms of where you live (i.e. "Greater New York City Area").

5. Add numbers -- Something I need to do for sure but people love numbers! Hit them with the growth %, total revenue managed, overall average impact. Give the people physical numbers to show success. 

Once done:

Proof read it! Check for spelling and grammar edits. Then send it out to your friends, family, mentors, people in the industry -- whomever!! -- to look over it, edit, give feedback, etc

And that's it! Do you have other recommendations for resume tips and advice? Do you agree/not agree with what we listed out above?? Would love to hear from you below!

Source: http://www.coveringbases.com/2019/02/best-resume-tips-day-to-night-lbd.html

Not The Real Molly

First off, I will say part of this was originally an add-on to this post. So, you can read the portions from other contributors, then switch to this one for what I added, as well as newer items.

The person wondered why Molly was looking directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall like John and Sherlock. Mary looking at Molly was an additional item of question. But, if Molly is under Mary’s control or Molly isn’t as she appears to be…?

As stated by others in the first meta, Molly wears the same colors as Eurus (via the sweater she wore as a John mirror in S3), and they have the same bracelet.

There is also the red in her hair, during TLD. Although a different shade than that of “E” or Amanda’s red wig, it’s still a bit different than her norm. Maybe just a mood-changer, since it’s brown at the beginning of T6T, and then darker toward the end of that episode. This isn’t conclusive evidence, just another thing that seems possibly off about her role.

There is also the fact we still never saw the footage where she is wearing the wig to make her look like Sherlock, and a shirt that looks like something John would wear (though in the tweet, she only references Sherlock). Odd, since that was her last day on set. If she posed as Sherlock to John though, and vice versa, then it makes more sense.

Meanwhile, almost everyone else in S4 is wearing blue, but not Molly...

The Woman In Green

Based on Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Empty House, this "Sherlock Holmes" entry finds Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) trying to solve the case of the "Finger Murders"...Though it isn't sporting to reveal Moriarty's nefarious scheme here, it can be noted that The Woman in Green comes to a nailbiting conclusion as a hypnotized Holmes wanders precariously along the ledge of a penthouse! ( x ) (This is the film where water is used as a mirror, and a means to hypnotize people.)

Inside the empty house Watson, looking through the window, believes that he sees a sniper shoot Holmes in his apartment. Holmes then appears at the house and explains that he put a bust of Julius Caesar there because of the bust's resemblance to his own face (Holmes realized that as soon as he sat there, Moriarty would have him killed). Inspector Gregson takes the sniper, a hypnotized ex-soldier, away, but the sniper is later killed on Holmes's doorstep.

Holmes now realizes that Moriarty's plan involves:

1) killing women and cutting off their forefingers, 2) making rich, single men believe they have committed the crime, 3) using this fake information to blackmail them, and 4) counting on the victims being too terrified to expose the scheme.

If we’re still in S2 or Molly is under Mary’s control, until Mary dies in T6T (possibly shot by John), this works. It just means she ends up with a new part.

Moving on...

Molly was aware of everything, when the others in the background weren’t.

She flat out says so in TLD…

Sherlock: Yeah but, to be fair, you work with murder victims. They tend to be quite young. Molly: Not funny. Sherlock: Little bit funny. Molly: If you keep taking what you’re taking at the rate you’re taking it, you’ve got weeks. Sherlock: Exactly, weeks. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Molly: For Christ’s sake, Sherlock, it’s not a game! Sherlock: I’m worried about you, Molly. You seem very stressed. Molly: I’m stressed; you’re dying. Sherlock: Yeah, well, I’m ahead, then. Stress can ruin every day of your life. Dying can only ruin one. John: So this is real? You’ve really lost it. You’re actually out of control. Sherlock: When have I ever been that? John: Since the day I met you. Sherlock: Oh, clever boy. I’ve missed you fumbling ’round the place. John: I thought this was some kind of … Sherlock: What? John: … trick. Sherlock: ’Course it’s not a trick. It’s a plan. (True, but not quite the one Sherlock implies.)

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One of the first things that bugged me about the flashbacks in TFP. As a child, Eurus Holmes has brown eyes, except when she is lighting the match. If it’s Molly, it makes more sense than just John’s imagining it all, without a basis. True, Eurus dyes her hair, and could be wearing contacts to make her eyes blue in TFP, but oh wait…She took the brown contacts out during TLD, so it’s not that.

And, Eurus says she wasn’t going to kill her, but look at the way it happens…

Eurus: This is an experiment.  There will be rigour.  Sherlock, pick up the gun. It’s your turn next.

Rewind briefly, to Sherlock pointing out to Molly in TLD that she works with murder victims. So, it’s that kind of rigour/rigor mortis.

Then, despite what Eurus said about the whole series of events in TFP, Molly says differently…

Sherlock: Molly, this is for a case. It’s … it’s a sort of experiment. Molly: I’m not an experiment, Sherlock.

Fast forward…

Eurus: Saved her? From what? Oh, do be sensible. There were no explosives in her little house. Why would I be so clumsy? You didn’t win. You lost.

So, is it a game or not? I would say no, but it is playing.

I theorized in this piece yesterday, that women of ‘eligible age’ became all one person in S4, because of someone trying to reason out of Sherlock and John being a couple. At least, until the woman in question either fulfills her role in the scenario (then suddenly vanishes) or the mirror of one of the men, does. It never happens to Mrs. Hudson, because she is a mother-figure, and she has her own role to play.

It always puzzled me that a character meant to only be in one episode, made it through all four seasons. Yes, Molly is likeable. But, what appeared to happen to her in TFP, was awful. If it’s not really Molly though, then it’s understandable why at the end of TFP, she is happy as a clam in the montage. Mary is gone, and the ill-fated phone call never actually happened. 

Molly or Moriarty...

The Adventures of Shirley Holmes (1997-2000)--the series follows the life of Shirley Holmes, the great-grandniece of Sherlock Holmes who, with the help of ex-gang member Bo Sawchuk, tackles a variety of mysteries in and around the fictional Canadian city of Redington. On some occasions, she found herself matching wits with nemesis Molly Hardy (whose name is a word play on Sherlock Holmes' archenemy Professor Moriarty).

A nod to Rathbone, and possibly The Woman in Green.

Old Habits New Sparks

Just some cute fluff. Enjoy.

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Mikey smiles over the counter at his little brother, Castel, playing with his friend of one year. They both lie on the floor, on their bellies, facing each other. Castel, the mini baby nerd he is, is reading his space book. While Joy on the other hand swings her feet back and forth in the air, humming loudly as she scribbles in her art book with her crayon—she’s actually got a lot of talent for a six-year-old.

Considering he won’t go back to school until February, Mikey has been babysitting his baby brother and Joy after they get out of school for the past few weeks. But today is Sunday and he’s not the only one watching after the two little tikes today. His mom sits on the couch watching her youngest son and his friend entertain themselves. Zack is helping their dad shovel the newly fallen snow from the driveway, while Mikey cooks up a warm lunch to have on such an icy day.

Mikey smiles and sprinkles in some more brown sugar into the bubbling creamy tomato soup, before flipping the sandwiches on his skillet. He’s glad Castel and Joy hit it off right away after they met that day in the park, Joy is the perfect counterpart for his dorky baby brother. Even at their young ages they each have shown so much personality and interests.

Joy loves art—finger painting, coloring, drawing, she even brought over a bunch of colored clay one time to model. She’s quite the quirky little tike, she’s silly and goofy, sweet and kind, a little bossy sometimes but she’s never mean. And even at her young age she seems to have a great sense of humor. She always tries to make you laugh—most of the time she’s very successful. Not only does she have a colorful personality she also has a colorful…everything else. She always wears mismatched clothes of all different kinds and colors; she looks like a little gypsy.

Even now as she draws in her art book she’s wearing a bright pink t-shirt, a lime green hoody, bright colored mismatched knee high socks, light up sneakers, beaded necklaces from their latest arts and crafts at school, a raspberry burette sits among her brown curly braid, and a big frilly rainbow tutu. Mikey chuckles a little at the splattered paint on her cheeks from their early morning finger painting project. And he smiles guessing her parents probably let her dress herself…and judging by the determination in the little sprout no one was going to get her to change.

He glances over his shoulder at his baby brother. An unruly mop of brown curls bounces ever so slightly when the boy turns his head to read the next page in his book. Dawning his favorite jean overalls with the little tiger on the front pocket, his favorite red flannel shirt, and his slightly muddy and untied red sneakers, the little boy lies on the floor next to a stack of books—each a reading level higher than the standard first grade books.

Castel wasn’t much for art on his own, although if it was something Joy wanted to do he’d join in. But he prefers reading over paint brushes. Castel also loves his Legos and his building blocks. He loves creating all kinds of things with his various blocks and connecting cubes. Even though he’s only been in school for a year now, his teacher has already seen a great deal of intelligence in him. He reads much faster than his peers, he has a great understanding and grasp on the information he reads, and he’s always the first one done his work—hardly ever having any answers incorrect.

After talking with his parents, the teacher decided to give Castel some second-grade work to see how he’d do. And to everyone’s amazement the work wasn’t hard at all for Castel, and since then she’s been giving him second grade level work and has let him borrow some second-grade level books from the school’s library. He had even asked their mom to teach him “that funny language she always talks in right before daddy’s cheeks turn red” as Castel had put it from his seven-year-old observations.

Castel is a sweet little boy and always has fun with Joy and his brothers. But when he’s alone he keeps to himself; engrossed in his book about cars, or computers, or dinosaurs. One thing that has grabbed the little boy’s attention is mysteries and monsters.

Often times when he and Joy go out in the yard to play he takes her around the yard scouring around for footprints of giants, or hairs of werewolves, or any signs of bats. But he always makes sure they go out with scarfs around their necks in case some stray vampire finds them. Joy doesn’t seem to mind the imaginary hunts; she always joins in helping him hunt around the yard following whatever trail he’s on.

Although most of their monster hunts come up empty—much to Castel’s dismay—they did however catch a creature one time. Castel has found some footprints in the dirt that lead to the garage where a greasy wrinkled monster was hunkered behind the opened door of the fridge. The two had screamed and charged the beast tackling him to the ground. Joy had thrown her sand pail over the monster’s head while Castel tied the beast’s ankles together with his jump rope. It wasn’t until everyone had run out into the garage that the two realizes the greasy wrinkled monster was Castel’s dad working on his car.

Mikey laughed at how disheveled their dad looked and how their mom teased him about how easily the big bad cop was taken down by two first graders. Mikey shakes his head at the memory as he cuts the sandwiches and puts them on their designated plates.

“Lunch is ready,” he announces as he takes the soup off of the stove.

Castel and Joy both spring up and race each other to the table while Mrs. Cubs goes outside to get Zack and Mr. Cubs. Joy kneels on the seat next to Castel and they both sit patiently waiting for the rest of the family. Once everyone is seated at the table Mikey brings over a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches and the pot of soup. He then brings over a green and orange plastic plates and bowls.

“Cheddar, Swiss, Mozzarella, ham, and tomato grilled cheese sandwiches with hot tomato soup.” He smiles and places the plates in front of Joy and Castel, “Cut into dinosaurs as requested.”

“Thanks Mikey,” Joy smiles a front-toothless grin up at him.

Joy goes to take her dinosaur shaped sandwich into her hands, but Castel grabs her tiny hand before she can. She looks at him a little surprised, but she quickly smiles watching Castel examine both of their sandwiches. Castel’s brow furrows in concentration and the little boy wiggles in his seat a moment and fidgets while he stares at their food. After a second he turns to his big brother and opens his mouth to speak, but Mikey beats him to it.

“Yes, I made them with garlic bread to keep away the vampires,” he chuckles down at his little brother.

Castel closes his mouth into a smile and nods. Mikey grins and tickles the little boy’s sides for a moment making the smaller male giggle and squirm in his seat—which in turn causes Joy to giggle as well and everyone else to smile. Mikey then places a kiss on top of the mop of curls before taking his seat next to his mom.

She puts her hand on his and smiles, “Thank you for cooking Michael.” She whispers to him, “He’s been so picky lately your sandwiches are among the few foods he’s willing to eat.”

Mikey smiles brightly, “It’s no problem Ma I love cooking. Especially for little Cassie,” he chuckles a little. “He’s very picky I know, but he’s my best customer.”

She smiles at her oldest son as everyone begins to eat. Castel picks up the warm sandwich with his chubby little hands, and bites into it. He smiles at how the cheese gushes out the sides as he does so. The table is quiet for all of ten seconds before Joy pipes up.

“Cassie and I are getting married!” She says smiling brightly.

Everyone at the table giggles and smiles at the two youngest of the group.

“Is that so?” Mrs. Cubs asks smiling brightly and folding her hands under her chin.

Joy nods, “Uh huh.” She grins and dunks her sandwich dinosaur’s head into the hot red soup. “See Mrs. Nikki gives the good kids a prize every Friday.” Joy explains and bites off the head of the now soggy dinosaur shaped sandwich. “You can either have a piece of candy from the candy bag or get a toy from the treasure chest.”

She swallows her half masticated mushed up cheesy meaty sandwich, before beaming. “Cassie always gets on the good list and he always gets a toy from the treasure chest. So when he gets a prize this week he’s gonna get one of those bubble container thingy-ma-bobs with the ring inside.”

She explains and dunks her sandwich again, “And I want to have one for him so I’m going to be extra good this week, so I can be on the good list.”

“You’re not on the good list?” Mr. Cubs smirks and raises a brow at the little girl.

Joy looks down bashfully and her cheeks turn pink, “Not always. Mrs. Nikki says I talk too much when I’m not supposed to.” Her smile brightens again, “But I’m gonna be good this whole week so I can get a prize for Cassie.”

“Another ring?” Zack asks stirring his soup.

“Nope,” Joy shakes her head popping her P. “Cassie likes ring pops so when Mrs. Nikki asks if I want candy bag or the treasure chest I’m going to say the candy bag. Then I’m gonna pick out a ring pop.”

“Sounds very thought out,” Mikey chuckles and bites into his sandwich.

“Where is the wedding happening?”

“At recess this Friday,” Joy says jubilantly. “It’s gonna be me and Cassie and my friends Jenny, and Bethany, and Holly, and Amber.” She bounces on her knees as she takes another bite of her sandwich, “We’re gonna get married under the jungle jim and Amber is gonna be the marrying person thingy.”

“Very thought out indeed,” Mr. Cubs chuckles. “So whose idea was all of this?”

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“Mine,” Joy smiles. “Well mine and Holly and Jenny and Bethany and Amber’s…I guess it was all of us.”

“I see,” Zack smiles and nudges Mikey with his elbow. The two brothers giggle for a moment before they smile at their kid brother.

“And Cassie,” Mikey grins. “How do you feel about this?”

“Ready to not be single anymore?” Zack laughs.

Castel puts down his sandwich and opts to stir his soup. The little boy doesn’t take his eyes off his dalmatian puppy spoon as it circles around in his soup. But he does acknowledge his brothers’ questions with a shrug.

“You’re all set to get hitched?” Zack teases, “Eerr married I mean.”

Castel just shrugs again, “I don’t mind really.” He looks up at his brothers and his eyes sparkle, “I’ve been searching the playground for weeks and I’m almost positive I’ve found where the abominable snowman lives.” His little face brightens, “Everyone is gonna help me look after the wedding. They all promised. We’re gonna catch him!” The little boy says happily and slurps up his soup.

Mr. and Mrs. Cubs exchange a worried glance about the same time Zack and Mikey do. But then they all smile again and go back to eating their lunch. Joy starts singing aloud and dunks her sandwich in her soup continuously; causing waves to ripple through her bowl, splashing out of the bowl. Mikey chuckles and watches the two little kids eat their lunches. Castel slurps his soup watching Joy play in her soup.

Joy stops and holds her sandwich in the bowl until the bread starts to fall apart in the red liquid. Castel watches for a moment as her sandwich descending down into the hot liquid. Just before Joy’s fingers touch the soup, Castel grabs her hand and yanks it away from the bowl. Joy makes a surprised yipping sound before looking at Castel. The two children narrow their eyes at one another, both glaring at the other with their lips in the same tight line. There is silence between them while they stare each other down—the only sound is some light snickering from the rest of the family. After a moment Castel picks up his napkin and hands it to Joy for her hand. She takes it and cleans herself up, while watching him take her splatter painted spoon into his hand. Carefully he scoops out the huge chunk out of her bowl and plops the mushy, nasty glob onto her plate.

They look at each other again and after another moment of glares their faces brighten and Castel smiles at her. Joy grins, grabs the straps of his overalls, and pulls him towards her. She plants a big sloppy, wet, cheesy, tomato soup-y kiss on his cheek with a very loud and acute ‘mwah!’ sound.

Castel whines noisily and wipes his cheek clean, “Gross!”

Joy bursts into giggles along with the rest of the family. After they finish eating Joy and Castel decide to go outside for a while. After Mrs. Cubs makes sure they are both bundled up so much they can hardly put their arms down, the two disappear into the frozen wonderland that fills the backyard. Mrs. Cubs watches them play for a few minutes before her smile falters and she looks down at the floor.

“What’s wrong, Felicity?” Mr. Cubs asks seeing the worried look in her face.

She smiles weakly, “I’m just…” she sighs and looks up at her husband. “Cassie hasn’t made any friends other than Joy. He’s been in school for a year now almost two, and he is still alone.”

“He’s not alone,” Mikey chimes in from his spot at the sink. “He has Joy.”

“I know that bébé,” Mrs. Cubs sighs. “And I’m grateful he has her it’s just…Joy has so many other friends than just Cassie.”

“He’s certainly not the social butterfly you two were,” Mr. Cubs chuckles and looks at his older sons. He smiles back at his wife, “Don’t worry sweetheart he’s only seven.”

“He’s got his entire life to make friends,” Zack nods. “And for now he’s got Joy.”

“And she seems to be enough for Cassie,” Mikey smiles.

“He looks happy yes?” Mr. Cubs asks and looks out at the two children playing in the yard. They are chasing each other with snowballs and laughing when they both fall. Mr. and Mrs. Cubs both smile warmly at the sight.

“Yes he is happy,” Mrs. Cubs nods. “As long as he at least has Joy he’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” Mr. Cubs smiles and kisses her cheek.

“Well apparently on Friday they’ll be bound together for life,” Zack snorts. And the kitchen fills with laughter.

That Friday Joy had made it to the good list as she had been determined to and picked a blue raspberry ring pop out of the candy bag. Castel got the little toy ring from the treasure chest and soon the two were standing under the jungle jim for the wedding. They exchanged their rings and Castel wiped his mouth after Joy has pecked his lips with little kiss, followed by her signature ‘mwah!’ sound—similar to the way she kissed his cheek on Sunday. Castel didn’t mind humoring the girls in their marriage game. He’s played house with Joy before and he didn’t see that much of a difference—except this time they’d follow her game up with a monster hunt.

However, all of Joy’s friends disappeared after the wedding leaving Castel on his own for the hunt; breaking their promise. They tried to get Joy to come play some silly game with them, but she insisted that she would much rather go on a monster hunt adventure with her ‘husband’ than play some silly little game. Castel smiled when she took his glove covered hand into her mitten covered one and ran off with him.

--------------

Joy smiles and chuckles a little to herself at the memory. The now twenty-five-year-old sits on the red shag carpet of the living room. It’s been about two years since Castel and Martha broke up; after Castel saw Martha’s true colors he was tore apart for several weeks. When Joy had found him he was curled up on the floor of his kitchen, his hair a disheveled mess, his clothes wrinkled, tear streaks stained his cheeks, and his eyes puffy and red. Very similar to how she’d find him after some girl rejected him in high school, or laughed in his face—except this time he had drunk himself silly. Which was a shock for Joy because Castel was no alcoholic in fact he hadn’t had more than a glass of wine since his twenty-first birthday.

Joy had stayed with him in the big empty house to make sure he could take care of himself again. After he was stable again she had planned to leave, but Castel had asked her to stay. She had her own wing of the mansion now, which was great since she had gotten thrown out of her apartment. Castel was happy to have his best friend with him again and now that it’s been two years since the horrendous break up he’s finally feeling like his old self again.

“What are you laughing at?” Castel asks and pokes her cheek.

She looks at him and it takes her a moment to focus on his face—the alcohol they’ve been drinking affecting her vision. She smiles at him loving how curly his hair has become again, his beard is nothing more than stubble lining his face, and his chocolate eyes are shinning bright again—though something tells her that sparkle is influenced by the alcohol in his system…but she likes to think it’s the happy sparkle that normally fills his eyes. She’s happy that Martha is finally gone, although she never said it so bluntly to him before she never really liked how Martha acted or treated him. She tried to change so much about him and Joy couldn’t stand it. If anything as far as Joy is concerned Castel got at least three things out of their break up. He’s learned how to say ‘no’—which is what caused most of their fights when Martha was being a diva. He’s so much more confident now, knowing he is worth more than the way Martha had treated him.

And finally he no longer has the food police in his house. Martha had always been on him about his body for the press and how he had to look like he just came out of a modeling ad. She was the definition of a health freak—no gluten, no sugar, no BPA, no MSG, no GMOs, no anything. Now free from his chains Castel was final able to go on not caring about what the press would say. He finally doesn’t look like a walking twig branch anymore, sure he always had his muscles but he was so thin. Now he’s got a fuller face and he looks like himself again physically; and Joy is so happy for that. 

“Joy,” he chuckles and pokes her nose. “You here with us?”

Joy giggles, “I’m here.”

He grins and sways a little until he leans back against the coffee table. “So why are you laughing?”

“No reason,” she smiles and looks around at the scattered empty bottles of champagne, strawberry wine, and hard cherry sodas.

It’s New Years Eve and they had planned to have a big party with their families, but Mrs. Cubs insisted they have a party at their house. So the families had gathered and played games and danced and had fun, more fun than Joy could even remember having in a long time. After the ball had dropped they had their toast and everyone headed back to their own homes. When Joy and Castel had gotten back to the house they both felt…well happy. Neither wanted the night to end so Castel offered the idea to relax by the fire and break into his cellar. Joy had agreed and now here they sit in front of the roaring fire, her favorite soundtrack playing in the background from her Iphone, and both feeling slightly tipsy and yet comfortable.

Castel smiles, “Come on sharing is caring.” He chuckles his head starting to swim from the two bottles of soda and half…ok a little more than half the bottle of strawberry wine.

Joy smiles softly at him before she pushes her heels off to side along with her sweater jacket. She slides down onto the carpet and is a little taken back by how soft the shag material feels. Castel smiles and looks at the wooden clock that sits on the mantel above the fire place. It reads two thirty in the morning. He chuckles a little and shoves his dress shoes out of the way along with his blazer. He unbuttons his vest and loosens his neck-tie before lying on the floor next to her. The sweet tasting liquor pooling in his gut, the sweet tangy taste of the nectar slowly sliding down from his throat like sap on tree bark. He smiles and hums a little feeling very content where he’s at right now—not just his life but this moment right now. He feels happy and warm and so pleased to be here with Joy. It’s just them again, him and his best friend and he’s so grateful she’s still here with him after all this time she’s still his friend. A fun night with his loved ones, a warm fire, good music, sweet drinks, this amazingly soft carpet, and Joy laying next to him. This moment of bliss feels so…perfect.

They are both silent for a while listening to the soft melody of Someone In The Crowd and the faint crackling of the fire. Joy slurs out that it sounds like that rice cereal that pops. Castel agrees and grins as she sings, “Snap, crackle, pop!” And he finishes with, “Rice Krispies!” They both laugh for a while at that—probably longer than they should have, but neither cares.

Silence falls again but it’s comfortable, it’s always comfortable. The music changes and shift into A Lovely Night the quick upbeat tune filling the air between them. Joy sighs a little and she stares up at the ceiling, still feeling the bubbly tingle of the alcohol but a kind of bittersweet feeling gnaws in her belly.

“Do you remember when we got married?” She asks not looking away from the ceiling.

He chuckles and nods, “Yes I do.” He turns on his side and smiles at her, “Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”

She smiles and looks at him now, “Yes.” She giggles a little, “It was so silly you know.”

“Not really,” he shrugs. “It was kind of sweet.” He chuckles, “I remember you were trying so hard to get onto the good list so you could get a prize.”

She giggles and nods, “Yes I wanted to get you a ring pop instead of that plastic little ring. And then we stood under the jungle jim and traded the two. The plastic one you got and the strawberry ring pop I got.”

“Blue raspberry,” he corrects. She looks at him with a quizzical expression and he smiles. “It was a blue raspberry ring pop you gave me, not strawberry.”

She blinks at him before she smiles, “Oh my gosh you’re right! How could I forget?”

He chuckles and shrugs, “I also remember everyone promising to go on some monster hunt after our little wedding.” He shakes his head.

“Not just any monster hunt Cassie,” she grins and turns on her side facing him. “A hunt for the illusive abominable snowman.” Her face falls into a crest-fallen look, “They all left afterwards.”

“Yeah they did,” he shrugs and looks down at the carpet. “But you didn’t.”

She smiles a little, “That’s cause I loved going on adventures with you.” He looks up at her and her eyes seem to twinkle, “I thought you’d always be a monster hunter.” She giggles, “Have your own paranormal hunting shows.”

He grins again, “Well it’s still a passion of mine.” He runs his hand through his hair kind of sloppily due to the alcohol messing with his sense of direction. “I got so engrossed with my projects I nearly forgot all about those creatures…but I kept it as a side hobby.” He laughs loudly, “I mean if I could leave the business to Amy I would leave right now and head out to West Virgin.”

Joy smiles at how his face brightens as he talks about his love for mysteries. His eyes seem to almost turn into a light brown; filled with excitement. She loves that look.

“The first one I’d hunt down would be Mothman,” he chuckles and lies on his back. “Then the Sheepsquatch and then the Devil Dog and then…well those are my top three.” He says feeling a bit bashful at how nerdy and crazy he must sound.

But Joy smiles, “I hope you’re not planning to run off on these adventures without me.”

He looks at her and sees the kind smile on her face, the same one she always wore when he would go on rants about monster hunts and anomalies when they were children. The look in her eyes he can only read as excitement and awe. She’s serious. She would want to run off into the woods with him hunting down monsters from old folklores. And honestly…there’s no one else he’d want by his side.

She never once thought he was crazy or weird for liking these things, or having theory upon theory about how these creatures came into existence. Or how he can prove their existence, or anything. She would always listen and give input or help him piece clues together, she didn’t care about the weird looks the other kids would give them as they hunted around the playground in search of signs of monsters. She never cared about anything other than having fun with him. Even now years later she still gets just as excited as he does.

“You are so not Martha,” he blurts out smiling. He had meant it as a positive but the slight contortion in her face proves that it didn’t come out that way. “No no I mean I’m glad you’re not.” He says trying to backtrack. He sits up and rubs the back of his neck, “Martha would always tell me to stop going on about non-sense about monsters. She made me feel like I was a freak because I found it interesting.” He sighs a little the pain stabbing his heart, “She never really wanted to share in any of my interests. She only ever wanted to do what she wanted…we could never compromise.”

“Well then I’m glad she’s gone,” Joy says bluntly and sits up. She blinks realizing what she just said and looks at him. “I mean…I’m sorry you didn’t get the happy ending you were hoping for but—”

“I was never happy with her,” he says and smiles at her. “I know what you meant. It’s ok Joy.” He chuckles, “I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out, can you imagine how controlling she’d be if we were married?” He laughs loudly, “It’d be more of a nightmare than when we were dating!

Joy giggles joining in his mirth, knowing that although the pain Martha caused him to feel is still there slightly; he is healing. He’s moving on, he is happy without her in his life. He can finally be himself and not the person she was trying to force him to be. They giggle for a moment before each taking another sip from the almost empty champagne bottle. The giggling continues and soon neither can clearly remember what it is they are laughing about.

Castel smiles and shrugs as a silly thought pops into his head, “Hey maybe it didn’t work out because I was already betrothed to someone else.” He grins at her and winks.

She giggles and shrugs, “Maybe so I mean we were bound together for life that day.”

He chuckles, “You called me your husband for several weeks after that.”

Joy giggles and nods, “I did.”

He smiles as they lay back down , and he’s starting to feel like they are lying a lot closer together than they probably should. He doesn’t say anything though; he just stares up at the ceiling one hand lying on his stomach the other on the floor. He knows her hand is somewhere near his because he can feel the faint warmth it gives off. As they lie there in silence he thinks back to when he first started dating Martha, how he struggled to really love her. How he could never shake the other feelings he had for Joy, feelings that are still very much alive. He rolls through his memories from the time he met her until now, he’s always loved her more than just friends. But he never thought she would ever feel the same and he didn’t want to risk ruining their friendship. But now Martha is gone, she’s been gone for almost two years now and he’s the happiest he’s been in a long time.

“Did it bother you?” Joy asks not looking at him.

“Did what bother me?” He asks still looking at the ceiling.

Joy fidgets on the floor for a moment, “That I called you my husband.”

They both look at each other. The look in her face is cross between love and fear, her cheeks are pink and her eyes are wide. Although he doesn’t understand the fear he smiles a tiny little grin and shakes his head, “Not at all.”

The fear is gone in an instant and her face brightens as she smiles, “I always wanted to ask you if it did, but it just seemed so long ago it was pointless to ask.

He smiles softly and shakes his head, “It never bothered me. I really kind of liked it.” He says before he can stop himself.

Her eyes sparkle a little and her cheeks flush a little more, “So you liked the idea of…us?” She asks in a hushed tone, just above a whisper. And now it’s his turn to blush.

The look in her eyes is so full of love and the fire’s glow highlights her face, making her hair glimmer. She looks beautiful lying next to him and her voice is so soft. It’s so gentle and sweet it’s like a feather trailing down his spine. An electric tingle fills his body, goose bumps to spread over his skin, and his hand twitches involuntarily on the floor. In that one little move he’s managed to find her hand, his pinkie finger now colliding with hers.

His stomach is swirling like mad and his heart is pounding so hard in his chest he’s certain it’s going to burst. He loves the idea of them, he loved that game they played—even if it seemed a little silly to him at the time. He loved being close to her, he’s always loved being with her, he loves her. Could she love him? More than just friends? Could he tell her how much he loves her? He could do it…if he had enough courage to do so; putting their friendship on the line. He doesn’t have that much courage, even with the fair amount of liquor in his system wouldn’t help him out at all. He’s never had liquid courage, he’s only ever gotta the buzz no courage. He swallows a little, wanting to take her hand in his but he can’t seem to get his fingers to work. So their hands remain on the floor just barley touching. Just one step at a time Cubs, he thinks to himself.

He gives her a tiny smile as he manages to finally get his lips moving. “Yes I did.” He says.

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Her eyes light up again and she giggles a little, “I did too.” She smiles, “I always wanted to ask you if you did but...”

“It was so far in the past?” He asks and she shakes her head.

“No I was scared.” She says through an airy giggle.

She was scared! She was afraid his answer would be that he didn’t like it! Why else would she be scared? Could she really love him back? He could ask. He wants to ask. But he can’t seem to form any words. Time feels like it has stopped as they lie there smiling at each other, the only thing letting them know that time wasn’t frozen was the soft melody of Here’s To The Hearts mixed with little crackles from the fire playing in the background. His heart hammers in his chest as he smiles feeling her fingers slide under his hand until he clasps her hand; their fingers intertwining.

He could do it! He could jump, he could risk it. He could do it! He can! He opens his mouth just ever so slightly to spew out the words that have been boiling in him since he was a teenager. How much he loves her, how he’s always loved her, even when he was with Martha he loved her. How she’s all he thinks about, how she’s the only one he wants, how if it was just them, just the two of them, the rest of his life and no one else at all he’d be the happiest man on earth. He could do it; he could say it all. But he doesn’t get the chance to because her lips cut him off. His eyes flutter closed as her soft warm lips press against his briefly. She hadn’t meant to kiss him first, but fueled by the alcohol in her tipsy giggly state she couldn’t stop herself. She realizes what she’s doing and her head screams that it was the wrong thing to do. She didn’t know if that’s how he felt to and jumping in like that was not the best way to go.

So she’s pulling away, preparing to see the shock in his eyes. But she doesn’t get to because she never gets away from his face. As soon as he felt her leaning and pulling away his brain went into overdrive.

Forget talking, forget confession, that can come later. Right now in this moment he can tell her how much he loves her without a single word. Before she gets too far away he captures her lips again. He moves his hand from his stomach to cup her cheek as he kisses her. Her naturally sweet taste now has a tang to it from their drinks, and he smiles at the mixed flavors of cherry, strawberry, and her own flavor.

He feels her press back against him, snaking her tongue into his mouth exploring and becoming reacquainted with the contours of his mouth. She smiles into the kiss as fireworks burst in her mind, flashes of millions of colors fill her brain as he devours her lips. Her heart is pounding so fast it feels as though it’s going to jump right out of her chest.

She loves him, she always has. When he was with Martha she forced herself to be happy for him, all she wanted was for him to be happy and if it wasn’t with her she would still be happy for him. She would always love him. And now Martha is gone, gone for good. And he’s hers.

He runs his hand through her hair until he finds her shoulder, where he rests his hand. He kisses her feverishly and deeply, holding her closer. Wow maybe he does have liquid courage. He feels her move her free hand to his shirt, gripping the material on his chest. He slides his hand down from her shoulder to her hip and pulls her close against him.

His heart pounds hard in his ears, and it’s becoming a real challenge to keep breathing steadily but he doesn’t care. His mind has gone into tunnel mode with his only focus on her. Several minutes have past before they break apart.

His cheeks are flushed just as red as hers. Her eyes almost have a dazed glaze over them as she smiles at him, her lips slightly parted as she breaths heavily. His eyes become lidded and smiles panting every so slightly, trying to catch his breath. The faint melody of City Of Stars plays in his ear as he chuckles a little, which causes her to giggle lightly.

“I love you, Joy.” He breaths out and he hears her breath hitch.

Her lips stretch into a wide smile before they are against his again. She pushes back against him kissing him again, before she lets out a breathy, “I love you too, Castel.”

He smiles and kisses her forehead, “Happy new year Joy.” He says before their lips are together again.

Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be?

Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line “???? ?????? ??? ????”?

I’ve been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren’t really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff. A couple of years ago, a beta tester for FogBUGZ was wondering whether it could handle incoming email in Japanese. Japanese? They have email in Japanese? I had no idea. When I looked closely at the commercial ActiveX control we were using to parse MIME email messages, we discovered it was doing exactly the wrong thing with character sets, so we actually had to write heroic code to undo the wrong conversion it had done and redo it correctly. When I looked into another commercial library, it, too, had a completely broken character code implementation. I corresponded with the developer of that package and he sort of thought they “couldn’t do anything about it.” Like many programmers, he just wished it would all blow over somehow.

But it won’t. When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.

So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.

And one more thing:

IT’S NOT THAT HARD.

In this article I’ll fill you in on exactly what every working programmershould know. All that stuff about “plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits” is not only wrong, it’s hopelessly wrong, and if you’re still programming that way, you’re not much better than a medical doctor who doesn’t believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.

Before I get started, I should warn you that if you are one of those rare people who knows about internationalization, you are going to find my entire discussion a little bit oversimplified. I’m really just trying to set a minimum bar here so that everyone can understand what’s going on and can write code that has a hope of working with text in any language other than the subset of English that doesn’t include words with accents. And I should warn you that character handling is only a tiny portion of what it takes to create software that works internationally, but I can only write about one thing at a time so today it’s character sets.

A Historical Perspective

The easiest way to understand this stuff is to go chronologically.

You probably think I’m going to talk about very old character sets like EBCDIC here. Well, I won’t. EBCDIC is not relevant to your life. We don’t have to go that far back in time.

Back in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&R were writing The C Programming Language, everything was very simple. EBCDIC was on its way out. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127. Space was 32, the letter “A” was 65, etc. This could conveniently be stored in 7 bits. Most computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes, so not only could you store every possible ASCII character, but you had a whole bit to spare, which, if you were wicked, you could use for your own devious purposes: the dim bulbs at WordStar actually turned on the high bit to indicate the last letter in a word, condemning WordStar to English text only. Codes below 32 were called unprintable and were used for cussing. Just kidding. They were used for control characters, like 7 which made your computer beep and 12 which caused the current page of paper to go flying out of the printer and a new one to be fed in.

And all was good, assuming you were an English speaker.

Because bytes have room for up to eight bits, lots of people got to thinking, “gosh, we can use the codes 128-255 for our own purposes.” The trouble was, lots of people had this idea at the same time, and they had their own ideas of what should go where in the space from 128 to 255. The IBM-PC had something that came to be known as the OEM character set which provided some accented characters for European languages and a bunch of line drawing characters… horizontal bars, vertical bars, horizontal bars with little dingle-dangles dangling off the right side, etc., and you could use these line drawing characters to make spiffy boxes and lines on the screen, which you can still see running on the 8088 computer at your dry cleaners’. In fact  as soon as people started buying PCs outside of America all kinds of different OEM character sets were dreamed up, which all used the top 128 characters for their own purposes. For example on some PCs the character code 130 would display as é, but on computers sold in Israel it was the Hebrew letter Gimel (), so when Americans would send their résumés to Israel they would arrive as rsums. In many cases, such as Russian, there were lots of different ideas of what to do with the upper-128 characters, so you couldn’t even reliably interchange Russian documents.

Eventually this OEM free-for-all got codified in the ANSI standard. In the ANSI standard, everybody agreed on what to do below 128, which was pretty much the same as ASCII, but there were lots of different ways to handle the characters from 128 and on up, depending on where you lived. These different systems were called code pages. So for example in Israel DOS used a code page called 862, while Greek users used 737. They were the same below 128 but different from 128 up, where all the funny letters resided. The national versions of MS-DOS had dozens of these code pages, handling everything from English to Icelandic and they even had a few “multilingual” code pages that could do Esperanto and Galician on the same computer! Wow! But getting, say, Hebrew and Greek on the same computer was a complete impossibility unless you wrote your own custom program that displayed everything using bitmapped graphics, because Hebrew and Greek required different code pages with different interpretations of the high numbers.

Meanwhile, in Asia, even more crazy things were going on to take into account the fact that Asian alphabets have thousands of letters, which were never going to fit into 8 bits. This was usually solved by the messy system called DBCS, the “double byte character set” in which someletters were stored in one byte and others took two. It was easy to move forward in a string, but dang near impossible to move backwards. Programmers were encouraged not to use s++ and s– to move backwards and forwards, but instead to call functions such as Windows’ AnsiNext and AnsiPrev which knew how to deal with the whole mess.

But still, most people just pretended that a byte was a character and a character was 8 bits and as long as you never moved a string from one computer to another, or spoke more than one language, it would sort of always work. But of course, as soon as the Internet happened, it became quite commonplace to move strings from one computer to another, and the whole mess came tumbling down. Luckily, Unicode had been invented.

Unicode

Unicode was a brave effort to create a single character set that included every reasonable writing system on the planet and some make-believe ones like Klingon, too. Some people are under the misconception that Unicode is simply a 16-bit code where each character takes 16 bits and therefore there are 65,536 possible characters. This is not, actually, correct. It is the single most common myth about Unicode, so if you thought that, don’t feel bad.

In fact, Unicode has a different way of thinking about characters, and you have to understand the Unicode way of thinking of things or nothing will make sense.

Until now, we’ve assumed that a letter maps to some bits which you can store on disk or in memory:

A -> 0100 0001

In Unicode, a letter maps to something called a code point which is still just a theoretical concept. How that code point is represented in memory or on disk is a whole nuther story.

In Unicode, the letter A is a platonic ideal. It’s just floating in heaven:

A

This platonic A is different than B, and different from a, but the same as A and A and A. The idea that A in a Times New Roman font is the same character as the A in a Helvetica font, but different from “a” in lower case, does not seem very controversial, but in some languages just figuring out what a letter is can cause controversy. Is the German letter ß a real letter or just a fancy way of writing ss? If a letter’s shape changes at the end of the word, is that a different letter? Hebrew says yes, Arabic says no. Anyway, the smart people at the Unicode consortium have been figuring this out for the last decade or so, accompanied by a great deal of highly political debate, and you don’t have to worry about it. They’ve figured it all out already.

Every platonic letter in every alphabet is assigned a magic number by the Unicode consortium which is written like this: U+0639.  This magic number is called a code point. The U+ means “Unicode” and the numbers are hexadecimal. U+0639 is the Arabic letter Ain. The English letter A would be U+0041. You can find them all using the charmaputility on Windows 2000/XP or visiting the Unicode web site.

There is no real limit on the number of letters that Unicode can define and in fact they have gone beyond 65,536 so not every unicode letter can really be squeezed into two bytes, but that was a myth anyway.

OK, so say we have a string:

Hello

which, in Unicode, corresponds to these five code points:

U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F.

Just a bunch of code points. Numbers, really. We haven’t yet said anything about how to store this in memory or represent it in an email message.

Encodings

That’s where encodings come in.

The earliest idea for Unicode encoding, which led to the myth about the two bytes, was, hey, let’s just store those numbers in two bytes each. So Hello becomes

00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F

Right? Not so fast! Couldn’t it also be:

48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00 ?

Well, technically, yes, I do believe it could, and, in fact, early implementors wanted to be able to store their Unicode code points in high-endian or low-endian mode, whichever their particular CPU was fastest at, and lo, it was evening and it was morning and there were already two ways to store Unicode. So the people were forced to come up with the bizarre convention of storing a FE FF at the beginning of every Unicode string; this is called a Unicode Byte Order Mark and if you are swapping your high and low bytes it will look like a FF FE and the person reading your string will know that they have to swap every other byte. Phew. Not every Unicode string in the wild has a byte order mark at the beginning.

For a while it seemed like that might be good enough, but programmers were complaining. “Look at all those zeros!” they said, since they were Americans and they were looking at English text which rarely used code points above U+00FF. Also they were liberal hippies in California who wanted to conserve (sneer). If they were Texans they wouldn’t have minded guzzling twice the number of bytes. But those Californian wimps couldn’t bear the idea of doubling the amount of storage it took for strings, and anyway, there were already all these doggone documents out there using various ANSI and DBCS character sets and who’s going to convert them all? Moi? For this reason alone most people decided to ignore Unicode for several years and in the meantime things got worse.

Thus was invented the brilliant concept of UTF-8. UTF-8 was another system for storing your string of Unicode code points, those magic U+ numbers, in memory using 8 bit bytes. In UTF-8, every code point from 0-127 is stored in a single byte. Only code points 128 and above are stored using 2, 3, in fact, up to 6 bytes.

This has the neat side effect that English text looks exactly the same in UTF-8 as it did in ASCII, so Americans don’t even notice anything wrong. Only the rest of the world has to jump through hoops. Specifically, Hello, which was U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F, will be stored as 48 65 6C 6C 6F, which, behold! is the same as it was stored in ASCII, and ANSI, and every OEM character set on the planet. Now, if you are so bold as to use accented letters or Greek letters or Klingon letters, you’ll have to use several bytes to store a single code point, but the Americans will never notice. (UTF-8 also has the nice property that ignorant old string-processing code that wants to use a single 0 byte as the null-terminator will not truncate strings).

So far I’ve told you three ways of encoding Unicode. The traditional store-it-in-two-byte methods are called UCS-2 (because it has two bytes) or UTF-16 (because it has 16 bits), and you still have to figure out if it’s high-endian UCS-2 or low-endian UCS-2. And there’s the popular new UTF-8 standard which has the nice property of also working respectably if you have the happy coincidence of English text and braindead programs that are completely unaware that there is anything other than ASCII.

There are actually a bunch of other ways of encoding Unicode. There’s something called UTF-7, which is a lot like UTF-8 but guarantees that the high bit will always be zero, so that if you have to pass Unicode through some kind of draconian police-state email system that thinks 7 bits are quite enough, thank you it can still squeeze through unscathed. There’s UCS-4, which stores each code point in 4 bytes, which has the nice property that every single code point can be stored in the same number of bytes, but, golly, even the Texans wouldn’t be so bold as to waste that much memory.

And in fact now that you’re thinking of things in terms of platonic ideal letters which are represented by Unicode code points, those unicode code points can be encoded in any old-school encoding scheme, too! For example, you could encode the Unicode string for Hello (U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F) in ASCII, or the old OEM Greek Encoding, or the Hebrew ANSI Encoding, or any of several hundred encodings that have been invented so far, with one catch: some of the letters might not show up! If there’s no equivalent for the Unicode code point you’re trying to represent in the encoding you’re trying to represent it in, you usually get a little question mark: ? or, if you’re reallygood, a box. Which did you get? -> �

There are hundreds of traditional encodings which can only store somecode points correctly and change all the other code points into question marks. Some popular encodings of English text are Windows-1252 (the Windows 9x standard for Western European languages) and ISO-8859-1, aka Latin-1 (also useful for any Western European language). But try to store Russian or Hebrew letters in these encodings and you get a bunch of question marks. UTF 7, 8, 16, and 32 all have the nice property of being able to store any code point correctly.

The Single Most Important Fact About Encodings

If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As Plain Text.

If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly.

Almost every stupid “my website looks like gibberish” or “she can’t read my emails when I use accents” problem comes down to one naive programmer who didn’t understand the simple fact that if you don’t tell me whether a particular string is encoded using UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western European), you simply cannot display it correctly or even figure out where it ends. There are over a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.

How do we preserve this information about what encoding a string uses? Well, there are standard ways to do this. For an email message, you are expected to have a string in the header of the form

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

For a web page, the original idea was that the web server would return a similar Content-Type http header along with the web page itself — not in the HTML itself, but as one of the response headers that are sent before the HTML page.

This causes problems. Suppose you have a big web server with lots of sites and hundreds of pages contributed by lots of people in lots of different languages and all using whatever encoding their copy of Microsoft FrontPage saw fit to generate. The web server itself wouldn’t really know what encoding each file was written in, so it couldn’t send the Content-Type header.

It would be convenient if you could put the Content-Type of the HTML file right in the HTML file itself, using some kind of special tag. Of course this drove purists crazy… how can you read the HTML file until you know what encoding it’s in?! Luckily, almost every encoding in common use does the same thing with characters between 32 and 127, so you can always get this far on the HTML page without starting to use funny letters:

<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

But that meta tag really has to be the very first thing in the <head> section because as soon as the web browser sees this tag it’s going to stop parsing the page and start over after reinterpreting the whole page using the encoding you specified.

What do web browsers do if they don’t find any Content-Type, either in the http headers or the meta tag? Internet Explorer actually does something quite interesting: it tries to guess, based on the frequency in which various bytes appear in typical text in typical encodings of various languages, what language and encoding was used. Because the various old 8 bit code pages tended to put their national letters in different ranges between 128 and 255, and because every human language has a different characteristic histogram of letter usage, this actually has a chance of working. It’s truly weird, but it does seem to work often enough that naïve web-page writers who never knew they needed a Content-Type header look at their page in a web browser and it looks ok, until one day, they write something that doesn’t exactly conform to the letter-frequency-distribution of their native language, and Internet Explorer decides it’s Korean and displays it thusly, proving, I think, the point that Postel’s Law about being “conservative in what you emit and liberal in what you accept” is quite frankly not a good engineering principle. Anyway, what does the poor reader of this website, which was written in Bulgarian but appears to be Korean (and not even cohesive Korean), do? He uses the View | Encoding menu and tries a bunch of different encodings (there are at least a dozen for Eastern European languages) until the picture comes in clearer. If he knew to do that, which most people don’t.

For the latest version of CityDesk, the web site management software published by my company, we decided to do everything internally in UCS-2 (two byte) Unicode, which is what Visual Basic, COM, and Windows NT/2000/XP use as their native string type. In C++ code we just declare strings as wchar_t (“wide char”) instead of char and use the wcs functions instead of the str functions (for example wcscat and wcslen instead of strcat and strlen). To create a literal UCS-2 string in C code you just put an L before it as so: L"Hello".

When CityDesk publishes the web page, it converts it to UTF-8 encoding, which has been well supported by web browsers for many years. That’s the way all 29 language versions of Joel on Software are encoded and I have not yet heard a single person who has had any trouble viewing them.

This article is getting rather long, and I can’t possibly cover everything there is to know about character encodings and Unicode, but I hope that if you’ve read this far, you know enough to go back to programming, using antibiotics instead of leeches and spells, a task to which I will leave you now.