#Source: Class of 1999

[janmisali]

Number Tournament: NINE vs THE FAST INVERSE SQUARE ROOT "WHAT THE FUCK?" CONSTANT

9 (nine)

seed: 18 (33 nominations)

class: power of three

definition: the number eaten by seven

hex 5F3759DF (// what the fuck?)

seed: 47 (9 nominations)

class: hex constant

definition: a magic number used in the fast inverse square root algorithm, a method of quickly computing 1/(sqrt(x)) very quickly first used in the source code for the game Quake III Arena (1999)

#number tournament #polls #math #mathblr #nine #putting the letter x between two numbers is automatically converted by tumblr #0x5F3759DF #quake #jan misali

[dionysus-complex]

you mentioned you specialize in roman violence. can you rec any good works on the subject, especially during the late antique period? how much (or little) time/writing did latin authors spend on the question of the necessity/morality/glory of violence, especially when bound up with empire and borders? did rhetoric around domestic violence evolve?

It's obviously a massive topic, so it's difficult to know where to begin! For looking at violence in Late Antiquity, I highly recommend the work of Maijastina Kahlos as a starting point - most of her scholarship deals with tensions between religious communities in the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity, and I've found it extremely clear and illuminating. For Late Antique slavery, I'd look at Jennifer Trimble's work, especially "The Zoninus Collar and the Archaeology of Roman Slavery" (2016, JSTOR link here). On the intersections of violence and the legal system, I'd recommend Sarah Bond's 2014 article "Altering Infamy: Status, Violence, and Civic Exclusion in Late Antiquity" (JSTOR link here) as well as Julia Hillner's 2015 book Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity. Amy Richlin is essential reading on Roman violence in general, and I'd highly highly recommend her piece "Cicero's Head" in Constructions of the Classical Body (ed. James Porter, 1999) if you have access to an academic library and can get a hold of it; it's explicitly framed as a Jewish, post-Holocaust reflection on the violence of the Roman proscriptions and civil wars and has been profoundly influential on my own thinking.

In general, Imperial-era Latin authors spend a lot of time thinking about the necessity/morality/glory of violence, to the point that I'd say violence is the key theme in Imperial Latin literature. It's often bound up with Stoic philosophy (in the 1st-2nd c. CE; Seneca's De Ira is a key text - you might take a look at sections 3.18-19 on torture under Caligula), and given the bias of our sources which skew toward the elite/senatorial-class perspective, it can be harder to track down texts that explicitly make the link between violence and Roman imperium. One famous example is the speech of Calgacus in Tacitus' Agricola 29-32 (link to a translation here), which purports to be the speech of a Celtic general in Britain rousing his troops to battle against the Romans in the 80s CE. Given that speeches in Roman historiography are generally regarded as being compositions by the historian, it's important to ask why exactly Tacitus of all people gives a prominent place to a scathing critique of Roman imperium - there are lots of ideas on this and few definitive answers, but it's a startling passage to say the least.

Imperial Latin epic poetry (e.g. Lucan's Bellum Civile; Statius' Thebaid) is well known for being graphically violent in the extreme (as in brutal torture, dismemberment, and one infamous instance of brain-eating in Thebaid 8), and there's a lot of work on how and why violence becomes highly aestheticized for Imperial Latin poets. There's also the genre of Roman declamation (difficult to explain, but essentially something like mock trial cases that were used for rhetorical education and showmanship), which frequently explores extremely violent scenarios involving torture, kin-killing, etc. Most scholars these days tend to read declamation as a space where (elite, male) Romans worked out and interrogated various cultural anxieties and taboos. Because of this, you get some of the strongest condemnations of violence found anywhere in Latin literature in the declamatory corpus, but it's difficult to extrapolate from that because again it's something like mock trial and rhetorical showmanship that does not necessarily map on to real-life Roman attitudes.

I've barely scratched the surface and there's a lot more I could say but I'll cut myself off here - I might be able to offer more specific recs if you're interested in e.g. violence as spectacle, aesthetics and artistic representations of violence, etc.

#thanks for the ask!

[atiny-for-life]

Ateez's Full Storyline Explained - Part 0

Masterlist

Glossary (contains spoilers!)

A-World

home of an alternate version of our Ateez

a city made up of a maze of cement walls and deserted side roads

their hideout is an abandoned factory/warehouse

Ateez viewed their music and dance as dull and insignificant due to their belief that it couldn't have an impact on people

the members were about to part ways indefinitely before their journey to the Z-World began

Z-World

Halateez's/Black Pirates' World (also referred to as Strictland)

the 4th Industrial Revolution already took place and led to a 200 year average lifespan and 40 years of education

the central government, aka the Sciensalvar political party led by 'Z', wants absolute power

-> to remove all possible unpredictable variables keeping them from achieving this, they developed a self-learning A.I. system

-> their ultimate conclusion drawn from this system's gathered data: the only thing keeping them from achieving absolute power is human emotions

-> as a result, they prohibited all forms of art and emotional expression

Cromer

For more details and a full list of its abilities, click here

appearance of an hourglass

enables travel between realities and into another's dreams, as well as teleportation while in direct contact with the object

Sciensalvar

The name "Sciensalvar" is likely just a combination of "Scien" from "science" and "salvar" which is Spanish for "to save, to rescue" - saved by science

In the A-World:

"religious" organization founded in 1999, led by Henry Jo (a scientist of some kind)

ideology: humans are a collection of energy, science can resolve uncertainties of the future, the energy in the Cromer can save humanity

never appeared outside of the Fever Epilogue Diary Version

In the Z-World:

pseudo-religious scientific organization spearheaded by 'Z'

invented the AI simulation for the 'best solution'

created a political party under the catchphrase: "The pursuit of a peaceful world without religious conflict and terror through emotional control."

said party grew in size until they were powerful enough to pass the 'Emotional Regulation Act' which lead to the solidification of the class system to the point where 'defective' people are now being 'disposed of'.

Android Guardians

only exist in the Z-World

tall, wearing white masks, decidedly non-human

burn people's memories as an energy source

-> the resulting smoke gets them drunk

-> this new energy market was created by the government's A.I.

their mission: obtain the Cromer, capture Ateez, the Black Pirates/Halateez and their supporters/sympathizers, as well as anyone deemed 'defective'

take orders exclusively from the Head Guardian, Z and presumably also the Sciensalvar party

guard the prison island (a bunker formerly used as an art gallery) and Z's hideout due to their non-human nature which prevents emotional corruption by revolutionists

Halateez/The Black Pirates

resistance fighters in the Z-World

mission: overthrow the government and free people's minds by returning the arts to Strictland

-> use the prohibited arts as a weapon

-> the alternate version of A-World's Ateez and their supporters

Left Eye

lives in Z-World where he used to run a boutique after studying fashion design

his daughter was killed by a speeding car while trying to save a flower on the road

-> she died slowly while passersby ignored her, too focused on moving forward

the yellow fumes of the Strictland dump made him hallucinate his dead daughter, trapping him

-> the Android Guardians found him there and made him the dump's new manager

he later becomes an ally to the revolution

Thunder

originally a group of elite students at Prestige Academy in charge of reporting any students who show emotions who have now joined the resistance

their leader: a girl resembling the one Seonghwa saw dance back in the A-World who dropped a bracelet inscribed with the words 'Be Free', she was inspired by the Grimes Siblings (who first helped Ateez when they arrived in the Z-World) to join the resistance

as the elitest of the elite who were supposed to be the future leaders of Strictland, they have access to top secret information on Z and are willing to share it with the Black Pirates to free everyone

their home base is located in a forest village away from all surveillance

#Ateez #ateez lore #left eye #strictland #sciensalvar

[sailoryooons]

Don't Read Dead Languages | knj (m)

☾ Pairing: professor!namjoon x tomb raider! female reader

☾ Summary: Namjoon is determined to visit the Living City of the Dead. Amtenemhat is the Egyptian ruins that the locals fear. Archaeologists have gone missing and strange things lurk in the night. But Namjoon’s work as a historian isn’t perfect if he doesn’t go to the source of the legend, and hiring a weaponized tomb raider seems his best bet at surviving.

☾ Word Count: 17,449

☾ Genre: enemies/ partners to lovers, supernatural, mythology

☾ Rating: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging and reading this content. It contains explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately. 

☾ Warnings:Joon and OC bicker a lot, large theories and a lot of mythology, historical accounts and objects I made up, mentions of diseases and plagues, explicit language, mentions of murder and death, depictions of blood and dead creatures/ people, weapons and brief action sequences, sexual tension and arguing, graphic depiction of mummies coming back to life and looking gross, sexually explicit content including: oral (f. and m. receiving - m. is brief) dirty talk, fingering, nipple play, unprotected sex, big dick Joon (obvi),

☾ Published: May 29, 2022

☾ A/N: I am so sorry this is so late! But HAPPY HALFWAY TO HALLOWEEN. This is the second and final installment of my halfway to Halloween duology. This is way longer than I expected because I went way too much into the world building and myth-building. This is only half-edited because i'm like two days and three hours late and honestly I should not have been so crazy about the deadline because my back is cramping and I'm tired. I completely make several myths and stories my own. This is not at all historically accurate, as I am not a historian and uses Egyptian myths and lore and made them work for me.

☾ A/N 2: There are elements of this story inspired by the 1999 film The Mummy directed by Steven Sommers and Indiana Jones directed by Steven Speilberg.

☾ Disclaimer: All members of BTS are faces and name claims for this story. This is entirely a work of fiction and by no means is meant to be a projection, judgment or representation of real-life people. Any scenarios or representations of the people and places mentioned in works are not representative of real-life scenarios.

Masterlist | Ask | Read the sister story: Bite Me, Jeon 

Kim Namjoon stared at the head of his department, brows raised. Though he was surprised they had accepted his petition to travel to Egypt for his research, Namjoon was even more surprised that the school was willing to dole out money for Namjoon to hire help.

Though the school did incredibly well for itself with donations from alumni, they didn’t care much for the history and arts departments. Namjoon had remembered arguing for a new projector in his Ancient Civilizations class for four semesters straight before they gave him a hand-me-down from the STEM department.

So being told that they had no problem with him using the winter break to travel to a distant country and archaeological site was shocking. He had been prepared to argue his position much more.

“We have long had interest in the ruins at Amtenemhat. Yale has been sniffing around sending an expedition as of late, and well…”

“You’d like to get there first,” Namjoon finishes, leveling a stare at Dean Tarik. “When you say that you’re willing to provide a financial stipend for assistance, are we talking about taking other members of the department?”

“No. You’ve done extensive research on the famed City of the Dead. People go missing, people get hurt. We’d like to hire you an escort who is not only well-versed in historical artifacts, but one who is from the private sector and is available to play by their own rules.”

Namjoon frowns. The dean isn’t telling him something.

Though there is a lot of myth and rumor surrounding Amtenemhat, Namjoon didn’t expect to have to take… security. He believed that most of the people who were injured or vanished were unprepared for the dangerous of an ancient city. It was sure to be fill with pitfalls and dangerous walkways and unsupported ceilings. Namjoon imagines it is dangerous to explore if you weren’t careful.

Namjoon had been studying the city for almost three years. It was one of the world’s favorite ghost stories. The city near the ruins refused to house anyone who was going to visit the city. The citizens refused to even talk about it to the press.

After years of failed attempts at recovering anything from the city and after the presumed death of a prominent National Geographic reporter, the local government had outlawed most travel there. And if one did manage to get a permit to travel there, the local police and hospital wouldn’t help in a time of need.

Cursed, they call the city.

“What kind of rules do they need to play by?” Namjoon asks, frowning. “Surely the school can get a permit for a professional exploration- “

“The city no longer gives permits as of last year. There was an incident with a group of researchers from Oxford that made it officially illegal to travel there.”

“And you’re still willing to send me?”

“We’re invested in your research of the city and determining what worth the archeological site has. So, we need someone who is willing to help you for a lump sum who is private, discreet and doesn’t care about legal ramifications.”

Namjoon’s frown intensifies. Adjusting the glasses on the brim of his nose, Namjoon sighs. While he isn’t opposed to bending the rules for the sake of research, something about the offer seems slicked with oil.

He chews on his lip. “What kind of company offers a service like that?”

“It’s private acquisition company that focuses on recovering ancient artifacts and documents for sale and preservation.”

Namjoon scoffs. “A tomb raider?” He demands. “You’re talking about a company who is willing to illegally acquire ancient artifacts and sell them for private profits to the highest bidder or to individuals who hired them outright.”

“Tomb raider is a barbaric term.”

“This is a barbaric idea.”

Namjoon runs a hand through his silver hair. The office is stifling hot, and he feels like the sleeves of his button up are constricting him more than they did earlier. He shuffles in the seat, eyes drifting to the wall where photos of past professor's hand.

It is a wall of fame, in a way. There are famous historians on the walls of this office. Men and women who uncovered ancient histories or shed light on new stories all over the world. His school was a fine one- and though it didn’t fund the history department the way it did its STEM programs, they were happy to ride the coattails of those who were now gilded members of society.

It’s a lie for Namjoon to say he doesn’t want to be a part of that. Ever since he was a child reading stories of world mythologies, he wanted to delve into that. He idolized Indiana Jones, watching the movies over and over again. To be that kind of professor, running around the world and uncovering amazing things- getting the girl.

Namjoon hates to admit how much he loved the idea of it. Even if it wasn’t realistic.

But the idea of using a Tomb Raider is distasteful. Namjoon knew that they existed far more than the public did. Trained professionals who robbed ancient sites of worship and historical worth. They made millions of dollars off of selling cultural objects and historical items that belonged in museums. Somewhere they would be safe. Somewhere they would be preserved.

Knowing that the school wants to hire one is the second warning that Namjoon has that something is amiss. The first was how easily they approved his expedition.

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Namjoon leans forward. “Is this a requirement for my trip? We have to hire someone?”

“They’ve already been hired, to be quite honest with you.”

“What?”

“Your request for the trip came right after we negotiated with a local acquisition company. We figured- who better than to assure our assets are protected?” Dean Tarik adjusts his belt. He’s a portly man whose cheeks are red with the heat of the room and sweaty jewels. Namjoon doesn’t like him much, but it’s above his pay grade. “Here is the information on the contact you should meet with. She comes highly recommended.”

Sighing, Namjoon takes the slip of paper. “You’re sure this is the best course of action?”

“Of course we are,” the dean smiles. It reminds Namjoon of the Cheshire Cat. “We believe in your research, Professor Kim.”

-

A dark, velvet sky stretches overhead. Namjoon yawns as he checks the GPS, ensuring that he’s going the right direction. He’s unfamiliar with the northern suburb just outside the city. Evergreens stretch on either side of him as the world stretches up. He’s driving toward the hills. Every once in a while he catches the glowing lights between trees of houses far bigger than he’s ever lived in, hidden behind wrought iron gates and long, gravel driveways.

Anticipation grows as he turned down an unmarked road. It’s past his bedtime. Namjoon prefers to be in bed by 9 PM with a hot cup of tea and his latest book. His life is simple, filled with routine. He likes that about himself, that he can usually predict how his day is going to go. It’s an organization he didn’t have as a kid. A structure that he so badly craved.

His structure is being interrupted by the woman he’s to meet for the evening. Though he didn’t talk to her himself- she apparently has an assistant with a soft, nervous voice- the assistant made it clear the Miss L/N took evening appointments only, and that he may have the first available.

It was 11 PM.

Namjoon scoffs at the thought. 11 PM certainly isn’t evening – it’s well into the night and her home is nowhere near his small apartment tucked away in the arts district downtown.

The nameless road ends at a massive, wrought iron gate with a single guard house. He raises his brow as he slows the car, rolling down the window as a security guard dressed in all black steps out of the small building.

“Kim Namjoon,” he says. “I have an appointment at 11 PM with Miss L/N.”

“ID please,” the security guard asks, holding his hand out. Namjoon is surprised- he digs in his pocket and pulls out his license, handing it over. The man takes it and walks back to the guard house, touching a piece in his ear.”

Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, Namjoon turns to look beyond the gate. He can’t see the house- the road curves to the west, the line of trees blocking it out. What he does see are cameras on the wall and a guard walking the circumference of the wall.

“What kind of place is this?” Namjoon mutters to himself, turning when the guard returns with his ID.

“You’ve been granted permission to enter. Follow the drive and park behind the Mercedes.”

“Thanks.”

Gold lights in the ground line the driveway. Namjoon drives slowly, swinging his head from side to side as he looks down the rows and rows of trees. He follows the curve before it straightens out, dark eyes dragging upwards to see the home in question.

“Holy shit,” Namjoon breathes.

He isn’t driving up to a house. He is driving up to an estate. The home is four stories tall in the middle, the main wing a soft white. There are wings on either side of the main building, creating a u-shape. The driveway is circular, built around a massive fountain depicting the fight between the Titans and Olympians.

Lights buzz golden in the windows, giving the illusion of fireflies from a distance. Namjoon is hypnotized by the fountain, narrowing his eyes as he drives past it. The marble work is exquisite, parts of the fountain chipped and softened with time. Almost as if…

Namjoon almost crashes into the Mercedes, distracted by the fact that he’s almost positive even from a glance that the fountain is made from genuine marble in the style of Ancient Greece. He needs to touch it to make sure, but something in his gut tells Namjoon than the tomb raider whose house shadows his car has a genuine work of ancient history in her drive.

Sliding from the car, Namjoon glances at the row of vehicles parked in the drive. He doesn’t know much about cars, but his brows stretch upwards as he sees the G-class Merceds parked behind a vintage Aston Martin.

The wealth in the driveway alone is enough to upset Namjoon. He’s never been fond of the wealthy in general, but to see it in such heavy amounts before he’s even walked up the polished steps to the heavy wooden door. The knocker is peculiar- an eye within a triangle. It’s heavy in his hand when he uses it.

A man answers the door, bowing his head politely. “Mr. Kim, good evening, please come in.”

If the driveway was a precursor to the entry way, Namjoon was still unprepared. The grand foyer is exquisite, with high ceilings and a beautiful chandelier. But what commands his attention is-

“Is that a terracotta warrior?” Namjoon asks the man who answered the door. Namjoon doesn’t want to think the man is a butler- he’s dressed in black slacks and a button up and he looks like Alfred from Bat Man. “Like from Qin Shi Huang’s army?”

“The mistress has many artifacts in the estate. Please follow me, Mr. Kim. The mistress’ last appointment has run late.” Alfred look-alike leads Namjoon to an ornate sitting room. “Would you like tea, sir?”

“What kind do you have?”

The man smiles. “Whatever the kind Mr. Kim would prefer.”

“Give him the Da Hong Pao,” a female voice calls. Namjoon turns as he sits to you stick your head in the doorway. His breath catches at the brief smile. “The professor can appreciate ancient tea from the Ming Dynasty.”

“That sounds nice,”Namjoon manages, hating how his voice almost cracks.

You’re stunning- even though he can only see you from neck up for a moment. You flash him a smile and he’s struck. “I’ll be with you in a moment,” you tell him. “If there’s anything else you need while you wait, please let Alfred know.”

You disappear and Namjoon fight’s the urge to throw his fist in the air. So, the butler’s name is Alfred. How cliché and entirely hysterical.

As definitely Alfred busies himself elsewhere in the home, Namjoon takes a moment to look around. Rich, Persian rugs decorate the wooden floor. A wall is taken up by a bookshelf, though Namjoon bets it’s not the proper library. He can recognize a few first editions.

There are paints and scrolls on the walls. He recognizes Nihonga in the traditional Japanese style. He rubs his sweating palms on his pants, entirely torn between being impressed at the collection the beautiful woman displays and grossly disturbed at the millions of dollars' worth of artifacts and art.

Alfred appears and sets down the China cup on the table next to Namjoon. Namjoon bows his head as he accepts the tea. He brings the cup to eye level, inspecting it. He knows very little about ancient ceramics, but he’s sure that it’s made in some ancient style or material.

“It’s from IKEA,” you tell him, standing in the doorway. Namjoon flinches and the hot tea spills over the rum of the cup. You don’t move from the doorway as he scalds himself, hissing as he places the cup on the table. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“So, you have a cup from IKEA but genuine Nihonga, Ancient Greek statues as your fountain pieces, and first volume editions? That seems ridiculous.”

“Keen eye.” You smirk sideways as you nod your head. “Grab your tea. Let’s head to my office- the sitting room is for sitting. The office is for negotiating.”

You’re gone before he can grab his tea. He fumbles as he gets up, carful with the cup to scramble after you. Thankfully you’re in heels, the sound of your confident pace echoing in the ornate halls of your home.

Namjoon doesn’t know where to look. He walks past the stairway that curves upward through the fourth floor of the home, the sight dizzying with the glittering chandelier above head. He passes rugs that have colors so vivid they make his head spin and paintings that give him pause as he follows you.

He likes to think he has a good eye for art, and Namjoon swears he sees genuine Monets as he scurries after you, mindful of the tea.

Casting open two heavy, wooden doors, you enter your dim office. Namjoon steps through the door and feels as though he’s been transported to a museum. He says nothing as he sets down the cup of tea on its saucer, ignoring the fine wooden desk in favor of walking to the wall of swords to the left.

Firelight dances in the fireplace as you sit down, crossing one leg over the other to watch Namjoon. He’s fixated, craning his neck to look at the different broad swords, rapiers, katanas, scimitars… there’s so much on the wall and he doesn’t know where to look first.

Namjoon starts at eyelevel, tilting his head to the side and reading the inscription next to a beautiful long sword set with a gold handle, two lions roaring making up the cross guard. He recognizes the crest on the pommel, slowly turning to glance at you over his shoulder.

“Durandal?” he whispers, fingers hovering above the legendary sword of Roland. “This can’t be.”

“It is. Gifted to me by the previous Prime Minister of France for recovering the true scepter of Napoleon Bonaparte from an auction house in Moscow.”

“So, you are a tomb raider.”

“Hardly. I think acquisitions expert is more fitting.”

“Did you come by that sceptor by legal means?”

He hears the smile in your voice when you say, “Why don’t you take a break from the moral high ground and take a seat with me?”

Namjoon hates the glib way that you address him. He turns to glare at you through the tortoise shell rim of his glasses. With an annoyed air, he takes a seat. He’s usually able to rein in his irritations, but something about you pushes him over the edge already and the wealth around him… he can’t help but glare, despite the hospitality you’ve offered thus far.

As if to guilt him about it, you mention, “Have I offended you, professor? If my hosting skills have dampened your sprits in any way….”

He sighs and straightens. “No. I’ve had a long day, I apologize. I should be more polite in your home.”

“Perhaps you should,” you grin.

It’s self-satisfied. You knew he was annoyed with you, and you poked him anyway. He tries to tamper down his mounting frustration, opting to lift the cup and take a sip. The tea is bitter, but there’s something heady about the flavor, making Namjoon surprised.

“You said we needed to negotiate,” Namjoon mentions. “Negotiate what, exactly? I was under the impression you were already under contract.”

“Oh I am, but I want to know why I should bother to take you with me.”

Namjoon opens and closes his mouth. You lean back in your chair, watching him with a glint. Your lips are quirked to the side in a soft smirk, supple skin glowing in the firelight. Namjoon is glad his anger is mounting. Otherwise, he’d be entirely captivated by the way you watch him. You’re alluring in a way he can’t put his finger on.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can go by myself,” you assure him. “The contract was drafted without you in mind. I’m sure they’re just sending you along to ensure I act as promised.”

“Do you even know what Amtenemhat is? Or how to read hieroglyphics and hieratic? Do you even speak Arabic?”

“I speak over ten languages,” you respond in perfectly accented Korean. Namjoon blinks in surprise at the switch to his native language. Worse, you sound like a local, the vowels falling perfectly into a Satoori familiar with him. “And I read more than that. So, tell me- why bring you?”

“Because I’ve been researching Amtenemhat for years. I’m one of the most well-versed Egyptologists in the world and I’ve contributed pieces and research to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and I had an entire exhibit dedicated to my work on Nefertiti at the Metropolitan.”

You examine your nails. “I know plenty about Amtenemhat.”

“Sure,” Namjoon offers. “Please tell me in a brief summary when it was created.”

“The temple at Amtenemhat was created during the Old Kingdom as a place of worship and penance to the Goddess Sekhmet as an attempt to placate her. She was sent by the God Ra to punish the Old Kingdom as they began to deviate from- “

“I have a theory that it was built as far back as The Early Dynastic period and that it was not a place of worship for Sekhmet, but a place for her to live.”

You raise a brow at him. He sees that he has your interest, and he smirks a bit, dimples appearing. “I have a substantial amount of research that suggests the temple was created as her own foothold in this world and as a living place against Ra’s wishes.”

“Interesting theory.”

“It’s more than a theory. It’s a substantial hypothesis backed by three years' worth of research that there was a shift during the Early Dynastic period from Ra to Sekhmet before Ra’s worship picked up in the Old Kingdom again.”

“And what do you plan on finding there?”

“I believe the temple was built as the highest point of a city. I think there’s an entire city underground there that was dedicated in worship to Sekhmet. It would change everything we know about the mythology and worship in Ancient Egypt, and it may point to the collapse of the central government in the Old Kingdom.”

You smirk. Namjoon sips his tea as you contemplate his musings. He takes it as a chance to observe you. You’re dressed in loose trousers belted at the waist and a pillowing blazer. Your hair is pulled back, showing off the exquisite features of your face- specifically your eyes, which pin him to where he sits.

Namjoon doesn’t know what he expected when he drove up your drive, but he is both surprised at how attractive you are and unimpressed at the cliche. Smartly dressed. Witty. Flashy.

It’s all too perfect.

“Cute,” you muse. “And you have no qualms about how dangerous it is? Ceilings falling in on archaeologist, booby traps killing tourists, strange haunting making the city refuse service to those who enter its radius.”

“I think people love blaming the supernatural.”

“And you believe in the supernatural?”

“I believe there are things in history that cannot be explained. Every day someone sees something neither reason, history nor science can give a backing to.”

You hum. Leaning forward, you flip open a file on your desk, finger tracing whatever you’re reading before tapping the page. “You led a club on your campus in your final year of your graduate program that dedicated itself to the supernatural.”

He feels himself flush and scratch the back of his neck. He was very proud of History of the Supernatural club. It was a complete joke before he joined, a bunch of college kids dedicated to decoding the show Supernatural. Namjoon had made it more.

Now it at least had legitimate members who were interested in applying academics to the wonders of the world. Namjoon wasn’t sure if all supernatural beings were real. But he had seen substantial evidence for some, and his research paper on lycanthropy in Ancient Greece had won him his first award- even if it was because it had led him to uncovering an occult tomb with never-before-seen items from the Bronze Age.

You study him, long fingernail tapping the desk. “What if I told you that the supernatural were real? Maybe not in the way that media portrays them.”

“I’d ask you to provide substantial evidence. I can be persuaded with facts.”

“Even if they weren’t obtained by your standards?” Namjoon can’t help the grimace on his face, which makes you laugh. He knows you’re laughing at him, which makes him grind his teeth. “You don’t like me.”

“I think your methods are crude,” he agrees. “And you’re sitting in a home filled with things that belong in museums or places of preservations.”

“On the contrary, I am preserving them. Plus,” you add, standing. “Everything in my home was a gift for my preservation efforts.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“You couldn’t afford it anyway.”

The insult is so abrupt that Namjoon blinks in shock before realizing you’re standing at your office door, holding it open. “I’ll see you Thursday morning, Mr. Kim.”

-

Grey light filters through the edges of the dark curtains. You glance at your watch, realizing that its nearly time to head to the airport. The files on your desk are plentiful and bursting with information. You hate to admit that Namjoon’s historical work was well-thought and of value. The pieces he had on history and the supernatural were not as popular among his awarded-works and internationally recognized contributions.

But they were what piqued your interest the most.

On the corner of your desk was a black, leather folder with a cord tying it shut. Your eyes fell on it, staring at it. Inside was the contract that the school had given you. The contents were weighing heavier on you after meeting the self-righteous candor of Kim Namjoon.

You smile softly to yourself. He was smart, you’d give him that. But with that intelligence, there seems to be a naiveite about the world. It was going to get him in trouble or killed... so why are you taking him along with you?

Namjoon is cute. It would go against your honest nature to deny that- even to yourself. Dyed-silver hair, beautiful eyes that remind you of a terribly wise dragon, and dimples that you want to bite. Just a bit.

He is beautiful. You’re pretty sure he is unaware of that fact, with the way he carries himself with unsure steps, bumping into things because he seems to be unaware of how much space his broad shoulders take up. And his thighs in his dress pants...

Getting up from your desk, you grab your files and dump them into a carry on.

Grey skies promise rain overhead as you slide into the cool interior of the Mercedes. Alfred closes the door behind you and gets in, classical music playing softly as you peel away from the estate. Out of habit, you turn around and look back at the window to your office. It’s been years, but you still expect your father to be there, waving.

But he isn’t. So you turn around and swallow past the lump in your throat.

Rain mists the air as you step out onto the tarmac. A flight attendant waits for you at the foot of the private jet, bowing his head politely as you pull the Burberry trench closer to head up the narrow steps.

Namjoon is sitting stiffly in one of the reclining seats. He's poised at the edge, head craning around to look at the crème interior of the plane. There's a cup of steaming tea sitting in front of him- mint from the smell coming from near the hostess area at the cockpit- and he’s dressed in tan slacks, a white sweater, and his messenger bag at his feet.

“Good morning, professor.” You startle him. You grin as you sit in the seat adjacent to him, kicking one leg over the other. He rubs his hands on his knees, looking you up and down.

“You could have told me we were flying private. I purchased a ticket.”

“I hadn’t decided if I was going to let you on my plane or not.”

“So you own a private jet?” He ignores your jab. Good on him. “That seems cliché.”

“It’s the family jet.”

“So you have a rich family? It’s not just you?”

Instead of answering him, you pull folders out of your bag, tossing them onto the small table in front of him. The flight attendant appears with a vodka soda. You thank him and take a sip- it was perfectly made.

“Your thesis on Amtenemhat being the place where Sekhmet’s coin of power is good.” You cross your hands over your knees, linking your fingers as the workers prepare the cabin for takeoff. “When did you first get that idea?”

“You read my research?”

“For hours. I wanted to know if you were an idiot.”

“And what was the answer?”

You smirk. “Jury’s still out.” You gesture with your chin to the stack of papers. “Where did you get the idea?”

The plan taxies down the runway and you both pause as you’re cleared for takeoff. Namjoon clutches the armrest as the craft gains speed. You raise your brows as he squeezes his eyes shut behind his glasses, white knuckling the leather.

As the plane lifts, he winces, tucking his ear to his shoulder and rubbing slightly. You grab a piece of gum out of your pocket and stretch across the aisle, tapping him lightly. He cracks an eye open to see the peace offering. Tentatively, Namjoon accepts the gum, popping it in his mouth.

You wait for the ascent to level out and you’re at cruising speed. You turn so that your chair is facing Namjoon, kicking up the recliner to lean in comfort as you sip the vodka soda. Namjoon still looks uncomfortable, eyes dancing around the jet.

It is a bit much. But you grew up on this jet, flying around the world with your father. Even after he passed away, you couldn’t part with it. Plus, it comes in handy- you try to limit work’s resources as little as possible. It keeps them out of your business for the most part. Not to mention your father’s legacy among the Illuminati keeps some of the lurkers away.

Not forever though.

You try not to think about it. If you start thinking about all of the way you’re keeping secrets and back deal trades from the very organization that built most of the black market and governments around the world… an inky feeling slides down your spine.

“Tell me more,” you mention, tilting your head at Namjoon. “I want to know more. Your thesis appears to be a draft.”

“It was – it was rejected as my grad school assignment because it relied too heavily on mythology and magic. Where did you even find it?”

“Hacked into your email.”

“You what?”

You shrug, grinning. “Had to make sure you weren’t in this for the wrong reasons.”

“Like stealing artifacts and selling them on the black market.”

Your smile lessons. You try not to show how much the comment bothers you. Because even though this is just a random professor- someone who is a means to an end and who has little value to you- what he thinks of you holds weight.

On paper, Kim Namjoon is a good man. He’s highly rated among his students and his research is thought provoking. He also has dedicated a lot of his time outside of his classes and his own studies teaching classes for free to the under privileged.

Namjoon is the perfect picture person. He keeps house plants alive. He has a beautiful bookshelf- not with first volumes and special editions but with books creased with love and devotion.

He is the type of person you usually hate. At least, in your experience, people who appear nice on paper are not nice in real life. You get the feeling it may not be true for Namjoon, but you can never be sure.

“Yeah,” you agree because it’s easier to agree with him. “Like that.”

“Every other tomb dedicated to her has been overturned- no coin of power. And according to ancient documents, there is evidence of mass disease north of Cairo where the tomb is supposed to be.”

“And Sekhmet equals disease.”

“Among other things- she was a warrior too. We know. From the bloodshed at Alexandria that the violence of Egypt can be traced back to that area- and it made me wonder if that was her final resting place- she’d want to be buried with the coin.”

“What made you interested?”

“Honestly? I really liked The Mummy as a kid so when I came across the story, I fixated on it.

“I like that movie to. My methods are just more… O’Connell than Evie.”

“O’Connell didn’t sell items on the black market.”

Namjoon flinches at his own words. His eyes go wide behind his glasses and he bites his lip. But he doesn’t take the words back. You’ll give him that. He lets them hang in the air. His thoughts of you, painted neatly in his mind.

“You should combine the thesis with your current research.” You turn the seat away from him, settling in to take a nap. “I’d like to read it.”

-

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been to Egypt, it steals your breath away every time. The dessert palms dance in the breeze. The heat is omnipresent and the biting sand blowing through the edge of the city makes you wrap the scarf closer.

Egypt is not all desert and tombs, as Western media portrays. The city is booming with shining buildings and busy streets. Your quick to duck into the cool interior of the car, sliding in the driver’s seat while flicking through the GPS pulled up on your phone.

The trunk rattles as Namjoon loads the last of his bags into the SUV, walking around the car and slowing as the attendant bows to you just beyond the hood, leaving the rented car in your care. Namjoon opens the passenger door, hesitating as he stares at you over the rim of his sunglasses.

“You’re driving?”

“Been here before,” you muse. “It’s nothing like driving on the freeway in Athens, I can assure you.”

“Do you even know how to navigate?”

“I can follow a GPS and read Arabic-“ You glance up at him. “Problem, professor?”

Namjoon slides in and closes the door firmly. You don’t miss the way that he clicks his seat belt and pulls it as tightly to his chest as he can- which is a feat, given how large his chest is.

You blink, hating the way your thoughts wander. You have no idea how his students manage to absorb an ounce of information with him standing in front of the room. you have a sneaking suspicion it’s part of the reason his ratings are so high.

And well- he is intelligent.

“I thought you might hire a driver.”

“And risk the life of another person? No.”

He frowns as you shift gears, pulling into the lane to leave the airport. “Risk a life? What do you think this is? Indiana Jones?”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten, Professor: I was hired to protect you and help you navigate the city. You think I’m a tomb raider? I can assure you that if we ran into real thieves, you’ll think quite differently.” He makes no comment, the silence stretching between you. “Plus,” you mumble. “I don’t know what’s in there, you know?”

“Mummies?”

You glare from the corner of your eye and you’re surprised when you get a smile, that dimple of his appearing. You twist your hands on the steering wheel, fighting a matching smile that threatens to break across your face. “Obviously. But I’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“Like what?”

“Classified.”

He scoffs. “Please.”

“What is it that you think my company is, Professor?”

“Please stop calling me that. I have a name.” You raise your brows as you exit the airport and turn onto the highway, joining the other cars in the traffic of trying to get away from the planes taking off and touching down. “Honestly? It just seemed like an insurance company for archaeology. I thought you’d be like… an adjustor.”

“That is… almost accurate.”

“Almost?”

“I protect assets. In this case- it would be your research and your findings.”

“Not going to take anything while we’re there?”

“I told you.” Your hands grip the wheel tighter. “Everything in that house was gifted to my family and I. You have an interesting narrative of me, professor. While I do resort to illegal means of obtaining items, I don’t traffic them. And before you protest- illegal is a relative term in my field.”

“And your field is…”

You pause. “The supernatural.”

For a while, it’s just the hum of the car as you switch gears. You briefly think of the time your father taught you stick shift. The memory makes your lip twitch as you switch lanes. You lost count of how many times you stalled out, but your father was always persistent, always patient.

He was always patient.

“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of the subject matter of most of my works.”

“I’m not.”

He turns toward you in the seat. Being under his inquisitive gaze makes you want to squirm, but you hold still. How a gentle professor from a private university makes you feel like you’re in the hot seat is beyond you. Men with much larger titles and much more power don’t make you feel on the spot nearly as much as the professor sitting next to you does.

“What do you mean your field is in the supernatural?”

“My division of Ilum focuses on acquisitions that have potential supernatural elements.” You glance to see that he’s just staring at you. His eyes are creased and his brows are pinched. He doesn’t believe you, so you push forward. “You led a supernatural club and you’re looking at me as though creatures don’t exist.”

“I already told you- show me proof and I’ll believe you.”

“Alright then,” you sigh. “Let’s go find you proof.”

-

Night sky stretches over a sea of sand. Namjoon’s head is pressed against the window as he dozes, lightly snoring. You’re fixed on the road as sand brushes delicate strokes across the pavement. There’s nothing of note on either side of you as you drive through small towns on the outskirts of the cities.

Above, thousands of stars glitter in the night. You wish that they looked that way back home. the light pollution of the city hides the stories of the gods for you, forcing you to find solace in the books and the maps in your library.

It’s been a quite car ride. Namjoon didn’t seem ready for the supernatural talk, so you let him lean his head on the window and fall in and out of sleep. Once he seemed to trust that you could navigate your way around, he fell asleep in earnest, body sagging into the door.

Tapping a nail on the steering wheel, you glance at Namjoon again. His features are soft and smooth. He looks younger without that stoic expression on his face. His breath fogs the window lightly, glasses slightly askew from the angle of his head.

It’s become entirely obvious that Namjoon wants to believe in his research, but has to see things with his own eyes. You have a suspicion that if he truly knew the dangers of unexplored tombs and ruins, he might not be so eager to research.

The cut on your thigh that burns whenever Min Yoongi walks into your house is enough proof that the world is a dangerous place for you. Lucky for you and Yoongi, you had aligned goals back then. Still do, on occasion, which is the only reason you helped a Greater Demon gain access to the Illuminati.

The Illuminati.

You hate calling the organization you work for by it’s true name. A virtual boogey man in American culture, the Illuminati has implications that you’re some sort of all-powerful society pulling strings and planning assassinations.

National Treasure didn’t exactly help.

The scope of the Illuminati is more than that. It is to illuminate themselves on the world that humans didn’t understand: the supernatural, magic, aliens, multi-dimensions. The branches and the reach of the Illuminati are far reaching and incredibly powerful. You are a tiny cog in a massive monster of a machine.

And you are breaking over a hundred of their rules and requirements every single time you manage to convince them a fake artifact was a real artifact, and gave the real one to the people it belonged to. To the native cultures that worshiped it not for its price and material, but for the peace and faith that it brought them.

Of course, Seokjin is a part of that success. No one in the world creates magical replicas the way Seokjin does. And while it is becoming increasingly painful to keep him in your payroll, you do it anyway. And you call yourself a tomb raider all the while, letting the façade protect your real work.

Tomb raider.

It was a title that you accepted because it’s safe. Because it mostly keeps the people writing your paycheck away from you. But not everyone trusts you. Many have suspected that your father had long since been using resources of the Illuminati to deceive them and protect ancient peoples, creatures and artifacts.

Your hands tighten on the wheel.

Now your father is dead. His good will didn’t get him far. You suspect it won’t get you far either.

You wonder if Namjoon knows that his survival in the event of a supernatural enemy is encounter wasn’t considered paramount by his school. You wonder if he has any idea that many of the patrons you work for graduated from his school. That his dean knows that you have killed people to defend yourself. Killed people to get what you needed.

Namjoon’s assessment of you is not exactly wrong, but his guesses on your motives are off.

You let him think the worst. It’s easier for him to do so, and it’s easier for you to do your job without having to convince him that you’re a good person.

Because you need him. Because the way his mind works is different from his, and you need his research. You know the languages, you know the stories. But Namjoon has three years worth of knowledge stored in his head.

Somewhere in that head of Namjoon’s is a theory or an idea. And you have no doubt in your mind that it will lead you directly to the tomb of Sehkmet and the coin Dean Tarik so badly needs.

-

Before the temple is a small town. The lights in the windows are all out as you step out of the car. The gas station has a sign that marks it as closed inside, but available for gas. Namjoon rouses when you shut the door, startled as you round the vehicle to pump gas.

Dust coats the SUV. It's quiet outside save for the wind and the swinging sign around the side of the building for a fruit stand that has long since shut up shop for the day. Namjoon gets out of the car and stretches, his sweat revealing a small sliver of tan, firm muscle.

You direct your gaze to the thumb pad as you jam in the digits to your credit card.

“Nice nap?”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Seemed like you needed it.” Your card clears and you remove the dust-caked handle, popping the nozzle into the car. The gas starts pumping slowly, a metal sounds thumping as it pulls the liquid from underneath. “Plus, we’re at the unexciting part.”

“Why is this temple so far from Cairo?” Namjoon muses, turning to the north. “Aren’t we close to Alexandria?”

“Sort of. And my guess? Sekhmet is a goddess who can cause mass destruction and chaos when she was in a rage. Wouldn’t you build a home for such far away from people?”

“I suppose.”

A cool wind makes you shiver. No one comes out of their homes as you look around. The moon is full, shining a grey light over the town. Everything looks like a painting, frozen in time. The hair stands up on the back of your neck as you glance over your shoulder and see a man at the edge of the light casted by the gas pumps.

You duck underneath the pump line and stand in front of Namjoon, never taking your eyes off of him as he stands, watching. Namjoon is confused at what you’re doing when you step in front of him. You feel him go rigid behind you as the man watches.

He’s beautiful- dark ebony hair that falls in tight coils. Walnut brown skin that nearly glows under the moonlight and sharp, grey eyes that watch the pair of you. He’s in all black garb, gold stitching at his sleeves. There is a gold collar around his neck, and two bracelets on either wrist.

Carefully, you palm a knife, watching him as your spine shivers.

“Why do you have a knife?” Namjoon demands. “What if he needs help- excuse me, sir?”

Namjoon pushes past you to go to the man. You grab him by the wrist, yanking him backwards and using his momentum to slam him against the SUV and step around him. Namjoon makes a strangled noise of pain and surprise, but you ignore him, eyes on the stranger.

His eyes glitter in the night as he watches you.

“You should not wake her,” the man says. His voice is deep, ancient. You recognize an outdated form of Arabic- so old that it’s not really Arabic at all. “Her disciples wait.”

“Who?” You ask as the man turns and walks deeper into the shadows of the night. You realize you’ve asked in standard Arabic and search for the ancient word, “Who?”

“Should you find nothing but death, you may summon me. I cannot physically enter the City of the Living Dead, but a Chosen may.” He glances at you over his shoulders and it root you in the spot.

You swear you hear the crying and chatter of jackals in the distance. You whip your head, looking for the source. A terrible feeling seizes you as the cacophony raises into a frenzy and the jackals are screaming.

Then they stop. The man bows his head and murmurs, “You may be accepted as Chosen. When you are ready, say the words: I am the humble vessel of Anubis. I am his sword, his jackal, his servant.”  

You blink and the man vanishes. The hand on your knife grips it tighter, trying to stop the shaking that ripples up your arm. The gas pump beeps, making you flinch and whirl around as it tells you the car is full. Namjoon is leaning against the car, staring at where the man vanished before his eyes drag back to you, mouth open slightly.

Carefully, you return to him. He’s staring beyond you, dark eyes fixed. It’s only when you nudge him after returning the gas nozzle to the pump that he looks at you.

“Was he a ghost?” his words are soft.

“I don’t know,” you tell him honestly, looking back to the darkness pressing around the town.

“I think… I think we should talk about the supernatural now. Who do you think that was?”

“If I had to guess?” You open the driver’s side and slide back into the car. “I think it may have been Anubis.”

“Are you telling me that was a god that just appeared out of thin air?”

You start the car. “Did you hear jackals?”

“What? No. I didn’t hear anything, I couldn’t even hear what he was saying to you. What was he saying to you?”

-

Namjoon can’t fall back asleep. He doesn’t try. Instead, he quizzes you in the car about what it is you do. When you told him you’re focus in archaeology was in the supernatural, he thought you were making fun of him. He felt himself shut down, his irritation with you growing more.

But after seeing that man- who you believe to be Anubis- Namjoon realizes you’re not joking at all.

It feels as though he has stepped into a fever dream. Silver light paints the world as you decide not to stay in the town. No one comes out and there’s no sign of life. It feels eerie. You have tents for sleeping outside the site, so you drive on.

Namjoon notices that the lines near your mouth are tighter now. You grip the wheel harder and though you don’t mention the goddess again, your eyes dart into the rearview often.

He’s glad the moon is full, painting the world in light where the headlights do not reach. You turn off of the road and begin driving in the open sand, careful to follow the GPS. He notices signs in multiple languages that tell you to turn back. That you’re now trespassing. You drive past them easily, uncaring.

The site is not protected by military or police. No one wants to waste the resources after the past units have gone missing or have come running back with their minds cracked open like yolks.

It occurs to Namjoon after seeing the man- the god- vanish, that perhaps this is the worst idea he’s ever had. And yet, a huge part of him wants to see it through.

“So what supernatural creatures are real?” Namjoon ventures, needing to break the silence. “I’m willing to listen.”

“Vampires for starters,” you answer. You seem unfocused as you drive, the words coming out on auto-pilot. “Not many of them left. There is a sector of the Illuminati that kills the ones who won’t behave and tests on the ones they catch. Nasty business that I have no interest in and no part of. The vampires I’ve met are quite polite- except Kim Tae-“

“I’m sorry- did you just say the Illuminati?”

You pop your mouth shut. It’s obvious you hadn’t meant to tell him, but Namjoon suspects seeing Anubis has you focused on something else. You’ve been distracted since you got back in the car, but Namjoon isn’t sure why.

When you say nothing, he tries again, “You work for the Illuminati?”

“I would keep that bit to yourself. They’re fond of murdering people who know they exist.”

“Then perhaps they should get a better name than Illum Corporations United.”

Your mouth flickers in a smile, the first one he has seen in hours. It warms him, a bit. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Did you guys really plan the assassination of JFK? Is Elvis still alive? Did you invent-“

“I have no idea,” you cut him off, giving him a look. He can tell you’re not actually irritated. You do this thing where you smirk sideways when you’re trying to fight a smile. Despite himself, Namjoon thinks it’s cute. “Supernatural sector, remember?”

“So you take artifacts and knowledge and sell it on behalf of the Illuminati?”

“Technically.”

Namjoon tries to swallow past the distaste. He’s seen the tablet that you carry around with you. If he can swipe it or destroy it on the trip home, there’s no research for you to sell. And he certainly has no intention of letting you walk out with prized artifacts.

“Vampires, huh?”

“Demons as well, though not in the context of Western religions. Demons of all religious are a thing. There are… multiple dimensions and things we have no idea exist.”

“Like Marvel.”

You snort. “Yeah, like Marvel.”

“What’s the coolest creature you’ve ever seen?”

Namjoon can’t help the excitement in his voice. You don’t tease him for it, which is nice. He remembers being teased by pretty girls who thought he was a nerd growing up and despite your moral differences, it’s nice to talk to someone who likes the same things he does. Who can keep up with where his mind is going.

And you do.

You tell him about a clan of kitsunes who had been dealing with a void spirit corrupting their countryside down in Japan. You show him the knife they gifted you and though he can’t see anything particularly special about it, the blade is so black it seems to swallow light.

You tell him about helping a pack of werewolves in Romania hunt down a stolen moon stone that kept them from turning every full moon. Your face darkens when you mention the black market owned and operated by the Illuminati. He stops himself from asking the question: if you don’t like it, why do you contribute?

He isn’t sure you would answer.

It’s a nice car ride. He slowly forgets the terrifying image of the maybe goddess melting into the night. Your voice is soothing as you reflect on your adventures and he… well fuck, he believes you.

Early morning touches the distant horizon. Namjoon watches as the gold spills over the edge like a cup too full. It’s breathtaking watching the sands turn from grey to gold. And the ruins in front of him appear, as though obscured by the dark of the morning.

“Holy shit,” he breaths, leaning forward in his seat to look out of the dash.

Though they theorized there was an underground city, Namjoon doesn’t expected the massive temple with broken and collapsed columns. Two lions- not sphinxes, he notes- sit guard before the temple. Their faces have deteriorated with time, but he can still mostly see the detail.

When the car comes to a stop, he slides out, looking up at the two stone lines. His heart is pounding as he makes a beeline for them. There’s shrubbery at their feet and parts of the temple. There are a few palms sprouted near the temple, but there’s nothing else.

“Woah, slow down!” you call after him. “We need to set up. You can’t just charge in there after we’ve driven most of the night.”

“I’m well rested,” he protests. He is a little tired, but he’s more than awake now that it’s in front of him.

How many times had he imagined being here? He shields his eyes from the rising sun and smiles. The temple doors have long since fallen. A single column has collapsed in front of it, but it’s more than passable.

As he nears the two towering lions, the air changes. Namjoon drops his hand from his face and looks up. He can’t see a disturbance, but the air feels cooler near the lions. They stretch up up and up, several meters tall.

A soft buzz bothers him. He can’t pin point if it’s a sound or a feeling. Something brushes up against him, making him flinch and stumble back. You don’t notice, pulling bags out of the trunk of the car parked several meters away. Slowly, Namjoon backs aware from the lions, glancing between them.

Maybe he is more tired than he thought he was.

Turning back to the car, he helps you unpack and begin setting up canvas tents. He doesn’t tell you the strange feeling that he had at the lions, not wanting you to make fun of him for being more fatigued than he realizes.

The tent is massive and you move with efficiency, making him realize how many times you must have done something similar before. You move with a tactfulness than he can’t help but stand and watch.

You catch him stair, brushing the hair that escapes your braid out of your face. “What?”

“Nothing,” he mumbles, bending over to pick up his bag of tools and walk toward the open flap of the tent. “You’re really fast at this stuff.”

“Yeah, my dad and I used to have contests of who could build our tent the fastest. It was his way of making sure I helped instead of dicking around camp.”

“You explored a lot with your dad?” Namjoon enters the tent. It’s a little taller than him- but barely. He feels the static scraping the top of his head as he goes over to a plastic folding table you used for supplies, placing his pack on it. “That must have been cool.”

“It was,” you agree. You don’t elaborate as you drag a rolled duffle bag to the foot of your very uncomfortable looking cot. Gone is the luxury from the jet.

“Can I ask you something?”

“If I say no, would you ask anyway, Professor?”

He smirks a bit. “Probably.”

You sit on the cot to catch your breath. You’re flushed in your face and neck, and your hair catches you on the temples where you sweat. You still look painfully beautiful, even dressed in dark pants and a dark t-shirt. “You have all these resources- so why are we here alone?”

“I don’t like partners. I also don’t like people in my business.”

“Sorry.”

You wave him off. “I don’t mean you. People associated with the Illuminati are all academics who think they’re better than everyone and that they know the secrets of the world. I don’t get along with them. My family name is the only thing that keeps them off my back- mostly.”

“How did your father die, if you don’t mind me asking?”

You shrug. “Don’t know. Get some rest. We should do some light survey work this afternoon before the sun sets and then we can explore in earnest tomorrow. I’m going to set up some security points.”

Namjoon tries not to let it bother him that you change the subject every time he wants to ask you about yourself. Getting to know you… well it won’t make betraying you later any better, but it makes it easier to work with you.

“Security points?”

“Land mines,” you announce as you walk out the tent.

Namjoon throws himself on his cot and laughs. It only occurs to him right as he’s about to fall asleep that you may not have been kidding.

-

It’s night. The moon is in the sky and you’re standing in front of the two lions at the entrance to the tomb. It’s never been confirmed, but you know there is a tomb deep under the surface of the earth. The temple is empty and bleached, nothing but bone in the night.

A presence weighs on you. You turn your head to look behind you. Far in the distance on the dunes is a black figure. You see the robes flapping in the wind and you feel cold. You don’t know who it is out there, but the figure sends a buzzing sensation over your skin.

You turn back to the temple and stare at it. There is something like a voice on the wind, but you can’t quite understand.

You take a step closer. Something about the lions on either side of you feel like they hum with life. The wind dies down and the soft whispers of many voices brush up against you.

We know where your father is. We know we know we know. We know where your father is.

The voices are getting louder. You try to convince yourself to move, but you can’t, staring as the whispers crescendo.

We know where your father is we know where your father is we know where your father is we know where your father is we know where your father is we know where your father is

The temperature drops and a cloud goes over the moon. The world goes dark and still. You hold your breath, a terror like never before begins to stir inside of you. You can’t remember ever being this afraid as something appears in the doorway of the tomb, a figure whose shape is undetectable with two, glowing eyes.

The sound of jackals catches the wind, sailing over the dunes to where you stand, staring and shaking at the gates of the City of the Living Dead. The jackals rise in volume as a single hand- dead and crumbling- appears from the doorway. The jackals begin to drown out the sound of the hundreds of voice, high pitched and barking.

You’re frozen. Your heart is pounding as you stare and stare-

The sound of jackals reaches a frenzy and a deep voice hums, Should you find nothing but death, you may summon me.

You gasp as you launch forward, clawing at the sheets suffocating you. Your heart is panicking as you scream, throwing the sheets off you and falling to your knees off the cot. You can barely see in the dark, panting as you stumble to your feet.

Strong hands grab you. You scream, reaching for your knife under your pillow but the hands are firm.

“Hey! Y/n it’s just me! It’s Namjoon!”

His voice breaks through the panic and you blink a few times. Namjoon is standing in front of you in the dark shadow of the night. A single candle burns near the map he’s been trying to draw of what he thinks the layout of the temple is based on traditional architecture of Egyptian tombs.

Namjoon’s hair is disheveled. His glasses are gone, his warm brown eyes piercing right through you as you try to catch your breath. You can feel the panic subsiding as his hands hold you by the forearms. He’s in a t-shirt and sweat pants and you catch the smell coming from him- lemon essential oils.

Your head is spinning. You pull away from him, mumbling and apology and clumsily leaving the tent. You gulp down cool night air and hurry away from the tent, trying to put distance between you and the nightmare.

Sitting, you put your head between your knees, breathing in and out slowly. The dream still lingers, the sound of the voice and the jackals not far off. You wipe at your eyes as tears free fall.

It takes a few minutes, but Namjoon’s footsteps approach firmly. You say nothing as he sits next to you. For a while, you’re both quiet, save for the sniffling you’re trying to hide from him.

“Do you want me to ask you to talk about it? Or are you mercenary-types too tough to do those things?”

You laugh, despite the knife in your throat. “First, I was a tomb raider, now I’m am mercenary?”

“I upgraded your title when you joked about planting mines.”

“Who said I was joking?”

You look up at Namjoon and he’s smiling down at the sand, elbows resting on his knees. His dimples appear again, shadowed in the moonlight. “See,” he jibes, knocking your knee with his. “Mercenary.”

“I had a nightmare.”

“Really? I thought it was rather pleasant from the sound of it. Though perhaps you were lounging among luxurious Persian rugs and looking at all your fancy swords of death.”

“Professor, is that sarcasm I detect? So you can be funny.” He rolls his eyes and glances at you side-long. You give him a small smile. “Swords of death is a bit repetitive, Professor.”

“Wanted to emphasize it, you know- for the mercenary bit.”

You hum. You pick up a handful of sand, letting it run through your fingers. The wind is gentle, picking it up and carrying it until your palm is empty. “It was a nightmare about my dad,” you murmur. “I get them sometimes. My dad was um- he was murdered. He had this position before me. Made a lot of enemies.”

“I’m incredibly sorry to hear that.”

You shrug. “Like I said – there are a lot of people in this organization who think they know everything. He had as many supporters as he did enemies.”

“And you?”

“A lot of enemies, but I’ve learned from his mistakes.”

“Did you ever find out who did it?”

You nod and the mark on your leg burns at the thought, remembering the way Yoongi’s blade cut into your flesh, burning and burning. “Someone who wasn’t his enemy at all, but had no choice in the matter. I’ve come to terms with the man who wielded the blade, but not the one who ordered the kill.”

“Is he- alive?” you glance at him and see him struggle to get the words out. “Either of them?”

“Yeah, Yoongi sort of works with me. Kane – the man who ordered my father dead – no, he is not alive.”

“And that Is what you’ve not come to terms with?” You nod. Namjoon has practically heard you confess murder. And yet he sighs and says, “I hope you find that peace, one day. You should get some rest if you can. We explore in full tomorrow.”

-

“At least take a knife,” You snap, holding out a knife that is… well it’s of the larger variety. Namjoon stares at it. He’s dressed in cargo pants, a forest green long-sleeve that hugs his chest far too well, and a backpack full of research items, books and snacks. “What happens if you get stuck on something or if you need to repel and can’t get off?”

“I don’t need a knife!”

“So our working theory is that the God of the Dead, Anubis, randomly showed his face last night and you don’t want to take a knife. Do I have that right?”

“What is a knife going to do against the God of the Dead? Tickle him, probably.”

You make a sound and stomp your foot. “It’s not just a knife,” you answer, mimicking his voice. “It’s a demon blade. It’ll send anything that shouldn’t be topside, downside.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

You grab his wrist against his will shoveling the sheathed blade into his hand. “Use that university brain of yours to figure it out.”

Storming out of the tent, you head for the two lions who had haunted you the night before. During your survey with Namjoon, the temple seemed pretty basic. You had only stuck your head in, but the main building was mostly intact, narrow stone walls leading in a maze to different chambers.

You don’t mean to be annoyed with Namjoon. After him comforting you the night before and admitting that he’s not as terribly annoying as you originally perceived, you think you could almost be friends with him.

Almost.

Refusing to take basic protection was not the first time he got on your nerves that morning. The first mistake was having an absolute fit when you rolled open the duffle bag to reveal weapons. He was so angry he was red in the face, deciding that you were in fact the terrible mercenary he thought you were.

It had been fifteen minutes of arguing before he gave up trying to convince you to leave the weapons behind.

The second irritation came when you disagreed on where to go first. Namjoon wanted to look for the burial chamber, where most of the hieroglyphics would list who was buried – if someone was – and be the largest source of information.

The burial chamber was the last place you wanted to be. You argued to look for paths leading further into the earth that would indicate a world underneath the Egypt above, or at the least- a throne room which would also have helpful information.

Then Namjoon claimed you wanted to look for treasure in the throne room- which you didn’t. But you did want to know where you could look for Sehkmet’s coin. The object that Dean Tarik wanted. That the Illuminate also wanted.

If their reports were correct, flipping the coin gave the person holding it her power.

Namjoon joins you, adjusting his back pack. There’s a scowl on his face as he walks past you. “I’ll take your stupid knife, if only to show you I won’t need it.”

“Better fucking hope not,” you mutter. “And on the topic of things we shouldn’t do: don’t read from anything in there.”

“What do you mean? The entire reason we’re here involves reading.”

“Out loud,” you clarify. “My father used to say it to me all the time: don’t read dead languages. Not here. Not out loud.”

“Whatever.”

 You both approach the temple. The darkness of the door haunts you and you slow your steps as you approach. Namjoon slows behind you, both of you craning to look upward. The building is huge, a feat of ancient technology. Or aliens, the Illuminati believes.

Wordlessly, you climb up and over the fallen column. Dirt clouds at your feet when you land with a solid thud. Slowly standing, you hesitate just beyond the shadow of the temple. The whispers from the night before come back to you and though you don’t see anything, a sense of dread weighs on you as you look into the darkness.

The antechamber is square, crumbling ceilings with exposed sky and walls covered in dust and dirt. The floors are scuffed and smooth, like there’s been feet wearing them down. You catch a dark patch near one of the darker hallways and you grimace. It looks like blood.

Taking a breath, you step into the temple. A shiver curls through you as you stand in the dark room. Namjoon stands before you, looking up and around the inside of the temple. “Let’s look for any writing,” he suggests, head still tilted up. “I don’t trust that our configuration will work as a true map.”

“Deal.” You turn to the dark patch near the darker hallway. “I’ll go this way,” you mutter, removing a large glow stick and cracking it. Orange light grows as you shake it, pausing by the stain in the dirt. Definitely blood. “Call if you need me.”

The air isn’t as stale as you thought it would be as you slowly enter the hall. It’s long and narrow, with cobwebs and dust coating the sides. You hold the glow stick up near the walls as you walk, looking for any sign of instructions, stories or artwork.

Another hall branches to the left and down. The stairs are mostly intact, but you’re careful as you descend them anyway.

It’s dry as you descend. Turning over your shoulder, you see you’ve only made it a couple of yards. Down you go, holding the light so that you can see. Just when you think maybe the stairs won’t end, you meet rubble. The ceiling has caved in, blocking your path.

Signing, you go back up to the main level and continue your search. It’s almost half an hour later when Namjoon calls your name. You rush through the maze of halls and to the other side of the temple, palming a knife as you enter the hall. You can see the glow of his light as he holds it high on the wall, revealing a crumbled sconce.

“Look,” he says, gesturing to the wall under the sconce. He brushes his hand over the dust, clearing it to reveal a groove in the wall. “Burial chamber.”

You look at the dead end. Approaching slowly, you crouch and look at the bottom of the wall carefully. There’s dust and rocks. Gently, you nudge the rocks toward a seam in the wall. They fall between and disappear.

“The floor drops down,” you note, backing away from it. “Pull the sconce.”

Namjoon does. There’s a loud creaking and crash as the floor slants downwards, turning into a ramp. Dust and dirt explode upwards, making you cough and wave your hand to clear the air. Namjoon removes a cloth from his pocket and hands it to you. You both proceed slowly with the cloth pressed over your face.

Orange light leads the way as you go down down.

Dirt and gravel crack under your feet as you go. Namjoon takes he lead, keeping his light higher than you to look for any more symbols on the wall. The floor shifts beneath your right foot and you stumble, grabbing the wall. A grinding sound makes you both turn, watching as the ramp you came up retracts and closes, leaving you in the pitch black of the hall with two glow sticks.

You turn to look at Namjoon, who visibly gulps. “Surely there’s another way out or another lever.”

Turning around, you both look for exactly that. After almost another hour of looking, there’s nothing. Sweating and nervous, you both push forward. Ancient ruins are famous for their halls and doors, never having one way out or one way in. Especially in the event that earth quakes or floods plagued the ruins, multiple exits were necessary.

Time seems not to pass. You know from the analog watch on your wrist that the day is moving. The hall seems to go forever, sloping downward.

As you adjust your foot placement as the slope increases, something catches your eye. You barely get Namjoon’s name out before his foot breaks a thin because of rope. You dive for him, slamming into him and knocking you two further down the hall as spears with sharpened iron heads explode from the wall where Namjoon was just standing.

You both scramble backwards. “Are you okay?” Namjoon shouts, pulling you toward him. You’re mutely aware that he has you against his chest, heart pounding against your back and arms around your shoulders, holding you to him. “You just saved my life.”

“Yeah. Thanks for checking- are you trying to flirt?”

“Yeah right.”

You both struggle to your feet, wiping yourself off. “You should do it more often, girls are into that.”

“The girls I’ve gone after aren’t into men who had shelves dedicated to Egyptology.”

Your lips twitch. “I have a pretty cool collection.”

“Yeah, we’ll you’re not the girls I go after.”

“Wow.”

Namjoon looks at you as you shove past him. “That’s not what I meant-“

“I get it. Tomb Raider, Mercenary. Look let’s just make the priority finding a way out of here. My job might be to protect you, but I might also kill you if I’m stuck down here for all eternity.”

Namjoon says thing. You lead the way, walking down the hall with your light. You continue downwards for a while until a soft gust of air hits you in the face. You walk faster. The hallway ends abruptly and levels out into a massive room with high ceilings.

The breath leaves you. A round chamber with a raised dais stands in front of you. A stone table sits on it. Organ jars surround the base of the table, gauze and tools on top of it. Rows of closed, plain sarcophagi’s line the walls of the room. They’re undecorated and plain.

“Preparation chamber,” Namjoon murmurs. He charges into the room, looking around and laughing. You watch him, rooted in place. He’s running his hands through his hair as he runs up to the dais. “There are mummification tools here!”

It’s like watching a kid in a candy store and you can’t help but smile as he runs around the room, camera out and snapping pictures. You step into the room fully, wandering around. It looks like other burial preparation chambers you’ve been in, but untouched and untainted.

Namjoon is laughing to himself and smiling as he explores the room. You smile, letting him have his fun as he wanders up the dais. “There’s writing on here-“

“Don’t read it out loud.”

He laughs. “Got it.”

You join him on the dais, looking at the table. You tilt your head. “To the underworld.”

“I mean… this room does send them to the underworld.”

“But they didn’t call it that. Duat wasn’t really an underworld to them.”

Namjoon pauses before bending down, moving around all of the ceramic jars. You hate to think they’re filled with the organs of the dead. He finds one that’s fixed to the ground and pulls it. The floor beneath you shakes and the dais begins to descend, making you clutch the funeral rites table. Namjoon straightens, holding the table with you as the grinding sound of stone on stone rattles your teeth.

Skirting toward you, Namjoon holds up his light. The walls have tracks in them where the dais slides downward. The ground vibrates, rattling up through your bones. “Under the world.”

“Smart boy.”

Namjoon blushes but says nothing as you go down down down.

Your ears pop at some point as you descend into a dark, low ceiling room.

Dark hallways line the circular room. In the middle is a gilded sarcophagus with the face of a lion and crossed paws. You step into the room tentatively. The hallways are black as pitch, more like tunnels into the earth than anything.

“That’s…”

Namjoon trails off as the two of you approach. There are jewels and golden objects that surround the sarcophagus. It’s beautiful, but your lights are the only thing in the room. carefully, the two of you work together to crack and toss the orange lights on the ground.

Sweat beads down your neck. When you finish lighting the room. Namjoon’s shirt sticks to him, sweat dripping down his tan neck when. You offer him a water from your pack and he takes it with a nod. You eye him as you chug water.

How did he think women didn’t find him attractive? He was either crazy or naïve.

Or both.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” he murmurs. “That’s Sekhmet- or an ancient pharoh.”

You smirk. “Wouldn’t have found our way without you noticing those symbols.”

He blushes. Or maybe he’s flushed from the excitement and heat.

You finish your water and begin exploring the room. Namjoon takes picture of the wall and tomb as you get to work translating the writing and symbols on the wall. The clock is ticking to find the coin- you suspect it might be buried with Sekhmet, but you can’t just open her sarcophagus while Namjoon is around.

So you work in silence.

A wall at the far south of the room has an entire section dedicated to a story. You hold your light upwards and slowly begin piecing the story together. There’s not a lot of hieroglyphics, but there’s pictures.

Sekhmet comes down from the heavens and bows to Ra. She creates plague and carnage in Cairo and Memphis, purging the lands of those who spite him. She carries her sword across the lands, slicing as she goes.

People begin to pray to Sekhmet. They ask her for her mercy and pledge themselves to her. The kneel before the goddess and ask for forgiveness. She judges them and declares them her disciples, worthy of carrying her justice and word of Ra.

Your heart begins picking up spread as the images grow darker and more grotesque.

Sekhmet’s followers drink the blood of the evil. They grow stronger and spread throughout Egypt, taking her justice and carnage with them. They only move at night, becoming her warriors of the moon.

Bloodshed. There is so much bloodshed and all the while, her followers bathe themselves in blood.

Anubis rises to oppose Sekhmet. She has upset the balance of the world and Anubis and his Jackals created chase Sekhmet to her temple. She binds her remaining followers to her, and does not allow Anubis and his jackals to enter.

They live eternal.

You recognize the work for eternal written over and over again.

Eternal. Undead. Eternal. Children of the moon.

A sense of terror begins to seep in. You look toward a tunnel and see how dark it is. Slowly, you walk toward it. Holding your light up, you look into the hall. Rows and rows of open sarcophagi line the walls. The people in them are tan and unharmed by time, hands crossed over their chests.

Your breath quickens as you step in the hall. Namjoon is talking to you but you can’t hear him well over the roaring in your ears.

Eternal. Drinking the blood of the evil.

“Namjoon,” you call faintly, voice shaking. You unholster the gun from your hip. You have no bullets that will help this- you don’t even know what breed this is. “Remember what I said about vampires?”

Namjoon’s voice carries over the room. You back out of the tunnel and turn to him to see him looking at an inscription at the foot of Sekhmet. His voice is questioning as he finishes sounding out a sentence.

“Namjoon!” you screech. Namjoon stops reading.

There is a loud thump that echoes from in front of Namjoon. He backs away from the sarcophagus, dropping his tools as the boom sounds again. Whispers echo from down the hall and you hear shuffling as you enter the room, going right for Namjoon.

You grab him by the shoulders and shove him behind you as the lid begins to move. “What did I tell you?”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot?” you demand as the lid shakes again. It rattles until it’s knocked off entirely.

Namjoon grabs your waist as you take a wide stance, aiming your gun. You don’t have bullets that can kill vampires- if that’s what Sekhmet is. You don’t even know what breed or variation was in the hall.

A mummified hand grabs the edge of the sarcophagus and you don’t even think. You fire the weapon. Namjoon flinches wildly behind you as you shoot the hand off the mummy. It screeches and you hear shuffling as it sits up.

“It’s your time to shine, Brenden Fraser!”

You fire the gun again and the bullets rip through the struggling mummy, but they do nothing. “I have a plan,” you assure him. “Magical objects are the way out, I think. Not guns.”

You reach for your knife.

“Is this your plan?” Namjoon screeches at you as you pull a knife from your tactical vest, spinning it dangerously and taking a defensive stance. “You’re going to knife the mummy?”

“This is Plan A, yes. The knife in question was a very expensive one and holds the cursed spirit of a Nogitsune,” you explain easily. The mummy looks at Namjoon with glowing eyes and you don’t know how you know, but it wants the professor. It begins to struggle out of its tomb. “When the knife pierces its intended target, it releases a void spirit that destroys the host immediately. Feel free to be awed- I am way cooler than Brendan Fraser.”

Palming the knife, you step in front of Namjoon, staring as the creature nearly falls out of the sarcophagus. It recovers quickly, righting itself and turning it’s burning, white eyes on the man behind you. You bare your teeth, despite being absolutely terrified at the thing- the mummy- in front of you.

You’re just doing your job. That’s what you tell yourself when Namjoon clutches your waist behind you, steading you as you watch the creature figure out its mobility level. You try not to become distracted with Namjoon’s panicked breathing behind you, or the fact that you can smell the light lemon scent of his essential oils on his skin.

You shake the thoughts from your head, gripping the dagger tighter.

Its flesh is dried and stuck to the bones, parts of it eaten away by time and gods know what else. The mummy steps forward, the crackling sound and stink of dried, aged skin making you want to vomit. They don’t tell you how disgusting the smell in the movies, and you’re fighting back a retch as you firmly hold you ground.

“Holy fuck,” Namjoon swears. It’s the first time he’s done so much as cuss, and you smile, despite the fact that there is a mummy gaining traction in its crooked walking toward you. “Why is it staring at me?”

“What did I tell you about reading dead languages?” you snap. Placing your finger in the circle at the pommel of the knife, you spin it expertly and launch it at the creature, hitting it directly between the eyes. “Take that, fucker!”

The mummy blinks, stopping its movement. Slowly, it reaches for the knife, arm movement disjointed and unfamiliar. Wrapping old, broken fingers around the handle, it yanks the knife out before breathing on it. The knife disintegrates.

Oh god. You are not cooler than Branden Fraser.

“Plan C,” you squeak, watching as it destroys a very powerful, very expensive cursed object like nothing. You grip Namjoon’s wrist and yank him toward the closest tunnel to your left- one you have yet to explore. “Run like hell!”

“What was Plan B?” Namjoon hollers, taking off at your side.

“Leaving your ass to be eaten by the fucking mummy!”

Namjoon veers towards the hall where hissing is echoing out of- the same one you saw the frozen faces. You yank him and stumble the other direction, pumping your arms by your side as you scream, “Not that hall! It’s full of vampires!”

“What?” he demands. The mummy is moving slowly, but you hear a snarl. You look over your shoulder to see a woman dressed in traditional robes crouched, silver eyes gleaming. Namjoon looks over his shoulder and screams. “FUCK! DIDN’T YOU SAY YOU KNOW HOW TO KILL THEM?”

You enter a dark hall, thankful there’s no creatures. You run as the snarls increase. You can hear them pursuing now as you run. “I have no idea what kind these are! Not all of them require wooden stakes!”

“What the fuck do we do?”

“Hide!”

Fear sets in as you turn a corner, shoving Namjoon into a room before you. A massive shelf with items is on the wall next to the door. You throw it into the door way, crashing into the first creature that breaches the door. Namjoon arms himself with the knife you gave him- thankfully- and backs up toward a wall dedicated to the story of Ra.

There’s nowhere to go as the creatures slither into the room.

“Shit,” you whisper, backing up. You grab at a flare and rip the tag, igniting it and tossing it at one of them. The fire hits it and it begins to scream, thrashing and setting another one on fire as they collapse into one another.

“Do you have any more of those?”

“Nope,” you squeak. The vampires are more careful as they filter into the room. There’s eight of them. The mummy enters the room, stumbling. “She’s fucking ugly.”

“My children are hungry,” she whispers. “Won’t you let them drink? Let us drink from the one who brought me to life, for his life force is mine to bathe in. There is only death for you. Only death in this place.”

You pause. Only death in this place.

You turn to look at Namjoon. “Get ready to fight.”

“Those things?”

The vampires chitter among themselves as you step forward and slice your hand open. They grow excited, teeth gnashing as you say, “I am the humble vessel of Anubis. I am his sword, his jackal, his servant.”

The world goes black in an instant.

-

Namjoon watches in horror as you slice your hand open. A scream gets suck in his throat as you speak in guttural, dead Arabic. He doesn’t recognize the words but he knows it’s the language of the first Egyptians. He doesn’t know where you learned the words, but he almost drops the knife as the vampires take a few steps back.

Sekhmet – the mummy – screams at you. Namjoon hears the barking of dogs. They howl and cackle, the noise building until he’s covering his ears. You begin to glow for a moment before two gold cuffs flash into existence on your wrists, an Egyptian glaive appearing in each hand. The blades are sharp and a little over a foot long, handles golden.

There’s a glow about you – Namjoon has no idea what is happening, but he gasps when you turn to look at him. He decided a while ago that he liked your eyes- they were kind and playful- but now they are burning silver like the main from the night before.

Like Anubis.

“Y/N?”

“I am the servant of Anubis,” you announce, turning to face the vampires. “I am Chosen. And I will finish what he started.”

It’s nearly impossible to catch which vampire launches themselves at you first. One does, and Namjoon screams but you move faster than he can follow. Your glaive slices through the vampires head, instantly turning it to ash.

Chaos explodes into the room. The vampires go after you as you spin, slicing with your swords. Sekhmet turns, burning eyes on Namjoon as she stumbles forward, pointing a hand toward him. He skirts the room as another vampire gets turned to dust.

It’s hard to keep his eyes on you and Sekhmet at the same time. You’re moving with a force he’s never seen, wielding the dual blades with a fury of- a god. The shadow behind you on the wall is tall and dark, with pointed ears.

The shadow of Anubis.

Namjoon turns his eyes to Sekhmet. She approaches him, arm outstretched. Namjoon slices at her, cutting off her hand. She looks at the severed limb and back at him. It’s disgusting. He starts to feel proud- and the hand begins growing back.

The mummy charges him faster than she moved before. Namjoon ducks under her reach, spinning around. She charges him over and over and he plays a game of evading. He bumps into a vampire and is startled as it claws at him, taking it down.

Pushing against its gnashing face, Namjoon screams. The vampire is strong and its teeth are getting closer and- the point of a blade appears through its chest, turning it to ash. Namjoon scrambles backwards.

“The coin is on her neck!” you yell at him.

Namjoon realizes the glow sticks are glinting in the gold coin around her dead throat.

Pushing himself to his feet, Namjoon dives at the mummy. It catches her off guard as he slams into her, clawing at her neck. She bites at him, teeth fanged and dangerous. She almost sinks her teeth in him as he wraps his hand around the coin and rips, rolling off of her.

Electricity shoots up his arm. Namjoon can barely breath as power trembles up his arms. He’s panting as he struggles, feeling as though his bones are turning to iron. Something swells inside of him and for a moment, Namjoon can only hear ringing in his ears.

You appear next to his side, spinning a sword. He doesn’t know where the other one is, and you’re bleeding. “You have the power of Sekhmet,” you pant, eyes only for the mummy who gets to her feet. You look at him with the power of a god in your eyes. “End her.”

Namjoon thinks of the phrase on the foot of her tomb. Be risen again. Be vengeance. Be rage. Be power. Come forth come forth come forth, and be sealed with my life.

It was a spell to wake her- and Namjoon has a suspicion that his blood would root her into life for good.

So he changes it.

Gripping the coin so hard his hand begins to bleed, Namjoon holds it up. “Be bound again. Be vengeance. Be rage. Be power. Go forth go forth go forth, and be sealed in my life.”

“In?” You screech. “IN YOUR LIFE?”

Namjoon doesn’t listen. The mummy screams, head tilted toward the ceiling. Light pours out of her as she begins to shake. The light pulls from her chest, spinning up like a shimmering mist. It slams into Namjoon’s chest, knocking him backward.

The last thing he remembers is his head smacking against the floor.

-

You wipe your eyes and sniff as you finish wrapping your arms. Namjoon is still on the cot. He has been for a while, even though his head healed over. The cuffs are still on your wrists, thrumming with power. You can feel Anubis with you- his voice is not in your head, but something like a thought brushes up against you every once in a while.

Dragging Namjoon out of the temple was easy. Suddenly, it felt like you knew the way. He no longer weighed anything as you carried him, both of you bleeding and still shaking with adrenaline. You’re sure that Anubis led the way, the sound of his jackals guiding you.

Something moves outside the tent. Grabbing a glaive, you step outside.

Anubis is standing facing the temple. Up close, he is magnificent. He smells of sandalwood and cedar, and like incense and smoke. He doesn’t look at you as you keep the sword in your hand, taking a step forward.

“The man carries Sekhmet in him.”

“Will he live?” Anubis pauses before he nods once. “He is like you.”

“And what am I?”

“A servant.”

“To do what?”

“Keep the balance of the dead.”

“What will happen to him?”

Anubis hums. “Sekhmet is not inherently evil. But she lived in rage for too long- it is the fault of Ra. The man seems to have a good heart- I bet he would pass the Scales. He is not a fighter?” You shake your head. “Good. Perhaps a calm mind will give the goddess the peace she needs.”

“Does he- have to serve her will?”

“Not if he does not wish. He bound her to him.” Anubis’ eyes are silver as he looks at you. “You are bound to me.”

“What now?”

Anubis shrugs. “You answer when I call.” He turns to where your hand is going for your belt. “The knife of that demon do not work on me, child.” You drop your hand, chastised though he smiles. “Your father would be proud.”

“My father?”

He nods. “There are many after lives in the universe. He is at peace in his. And he is very proud of you.” Anubis nods his head. “I will call on you.”

“Please don’t.”

“Be well,” he murmurs in ancient Arabic.

“Be well,” you reply.

Back in the tent, Namjoon is sitting up. You dart over to him, grabbing his face and tilting it so that you can see his eyes. There’s no glow like there was in the temple, no other person or god. He blinks as though he’s having a hard time see.

“You fucking idiot,” you laugh, sniffing. “You almost got us killed.”

He laughs. The sound is dry. You grab a water and hand it to him, scooting closer on the bed. He finishes the water in a few gulps. You catch him up to speed briefly on your situation. He listens to you, nodding softly.

“I dreamt of her.”

You frown. “What did she say?”

“She… thanked me. She says it is nice inside me.” He smiles and you join him. “She says she is at peace, but that she will serve me when needed.”

“Good.”

Awkward silence passes between you. “You didn’t take anything from the temple?”

You shake your head. “Never want to go in there again.”

Namjoon chews his lip. “You don’t steal anything at all, do you?” Slowly you shake your head. “Tell me the truth- what are you doing for the Illuminati? Why did you want that coin- don’t look surprised, of course you wanted the coin.”

“I wanted it to replicate it and give the fake to the Illuminati. It’s… mostly what I do. I help pass them off as real so that no one can have the real objects. I have a contact in Cairo I trust very strongly that would have taken care of it.”

“You… return things to their rightful place.”

You laugh. “Yeah.”

“Why let me believe otherwise?”

“Because I never intended on letting you take it. So it was easier for you to think that of me when I betrayed you. You already had the idea that I was-“

“I was wrong.” Namjoon reaches for your hand, turning it over in his. He sees dried blood and he doesn’t know if it’s his or yours. “I like the idea of you being terrible because you surprised- you were charming in your weird way and smart and… nice.”

“Still think so now that I’m a giant scary Anubis host?”

His smile is genuine. His caresses your palm with his fingers and it’s sending tingles up your arm. You sway lightly, liking the way that it feels. “I like you even more, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You saved my life.”

“You saved mine back.”

“Shut up,” Namjoon mumbles, gripping your hand in his and pulling you toward him. “Take the compliment like the arrogant, brilliant person I know you are.”

Namjoon crashes his lips into yours and you’ve never been happier. You pull him toward you, forgetting your new strength. He topples over you but you don’t care. You smell the lemon on him as he molds his mouth to yours, tongue swiping the seam of your lips.

You grant him entrance and he hums into the kiss as your hands trail up his chest and around his shoulders, wrapping in the collar of his shirt. Everything is consumed by the kiss, his mouth hot and perfect and him.

You moan against him and he echoes it, pulling away from your lips to pepper your face with kisses. “Finally you shut up,” he mumbles as he presses kisses on your jaw. He leans down to your ear, nipping. “Can I shut you up even more?”

“Probably,” you mumble, chest heaving.

He chuckles. “Let’s see.”

Namjoon moves his mouth to your neck. He begins mouthing at the column of your neck, biting softly into the flesh. He pulls your skin between his teeth, sucking on the surface. Continuing his way down, he pulls at your shirt “Off.”

You lift up so that he peels your shirt off, tossing as he works on your pants, fingers dancing. You pull at his shirt and he rips it off, revealing a toned chest and thick arms. “Oh my god, you’ve been hiding your body under there? Fuck, professor.”

Namjoon groans. “You’re gorgeous,” he mumbles as he strips you of your bra and underwear. Cold air hits your chest and you shiver. Namjoon’s heated gaze takes in the newly exposed flesh, a deep sound in his throat as his lips find your skin. “A pain in the ass, but fucking beautiful.

You crest into him, back coming off the cot as his teeth find a nipple, pulling it playfully before his tongue wrapped around it, pulling it into his hot mouth. You can’t stop the loud whine that leaves your mouth, surprising yourself with the volume. Namjoon’s hooded eyes flick up to yours, pausing his movements before swirling his tongue around the bud again, eliciting the same response. 

Namjoon’s laugh was guttural. “Fuck baby, if you sound like that when my tongue is here… I wonder.”

You don’t have time to consider the implications of his words. He licks a bold trail down the valley of your breasts to your navel, stopping to nip at the soft flesh of your stomach. He continues his descent, dropping to his knees between your thighs.

You’re shivering, thighs shutting slightly. He pries them open with his hands, pressing your thighs open firmly. You lifted herself on you elbows, looking down at Namjoon as he slowly kisses your thighs. You moan in tandem. You can feel yourself dripping for him, needing him to do something.

“Look how fucking soaked you are,” he mumbles. “That for me baby?”

“You’re very confident now, Professor.”

He grins. “Near death experiences have reminded me to take what I want.”

“So do it.”

Namjoon doesn’t hesitate. He leans forward in a swift motion, flattening his tongue and licking you from core to clit. Namjoon hums, delighted as he continues to lick your folds up and down lazily. He slithers his tongue to your clit, circling it before he attaches his mouth and sucks gently.

“Oh fuck Namjoon.”

            “Mm, say my name more,” Namjoon murmurs as he shuffles so that he’s holding you against his mouth. “I want to hear you. You taste so fucking, Y/N.”

You whimper, dropping your hand to the bed where you fist the sheets. Namjoon’s mouth is overwhelming, wanton sounds leaving your lips as you cuss and hiss his name.

A gasp stutters from your lips as Namjoon pushed a finger into your heat, the sensation sending you into white hot pleasure. Namjoon moans where his mouth works you, slowly sliding his finger in rhythm with his tongue. 

“Fuck,” he pants. "Gripping me like a vice. You’re fucking greedy. You’re so fucking hot, baby. Gonna cum on my finger and tongue?”

You nod. You have no idea where the demon between your legs has come from, but he’s making you hurdle toward an orgasm with blinding ferocity.

 “I’m gonna- fuck, Joon right there!”

“Cum for my baby,” he grows before fastening his mouth to you. 

Your orgasm hits you and you cum with a scream, seizing into him. Namjoon holds you down, licking you softly through it, eyes watching you hungrily the entire time you shake under him.

Namjoon detaches when you start to whimper from over stimulation, hovering over you, mouth slick with your cum. You don’t care, grabbing at him and smashing his mouth to yours. He tases like you and you him, biting his bottom lip.

“Look at you,” he whispers as he looks down at you. “All fucked out from just my tongue and fingers.” Your body is pliant underneath his hands, melting into the cot. “Gonna cum again on my cock?”

“Yes,” you gasp, pressing your chest against his. “Make me cum again, please.”

Namjoon is a work of art. You drop your eyes to his cock and nearly moan again. How does he not carry himself around like he has a huge cock? Because he does, dick proud, thick length looking delicious as you reach out to wrap your hands around his velvety shaft. 

Namjoon’s eyes flutter shut for a moment as your small hands work him, wrist moving expertly. Your mouth waters at the signs of precum on the head of his dick, luring you to lean forward and kitten lick the tip, the salty flavor heaven on your tongue. Namjoon bucks in surprise, a deep moan falling from his lips as you look up at him with innocent eyes.

“Fuck,” he mutters. He pulls your hands away from him and grabs you, throwing you further up on the cot. He looks like a predator, blown eyes looking at you like a man starving. He kisses you firmly. “I’ll let you suck my cock another time. I really want to be deep in you.”

The absolute filth that leaves his mouth turns you on.

Goosebumps skitter up your arms as you wrap your arms around Namjoon’s neck. He rubs the head of his dick against your slick, coating himself before he pushes in, stealing your breath away. He slides in slow and smooth stretching you to your maximum as he bottoms out. His breath fans your neck, face buried against you skin.

Namjoon pauses for a moment, his back rising and falling under your fingertips as he held himself there, fully sheathed inside you. “You feel fucking divine,” he whispers. “So fucking sweet and tight for me.”

“You feel so good,” you moan loudly as he begins to move his hips, pulling all the way out before slamming back in. “Namjoon.”

“Say it again,” he demands on a particularly hard thrust. He repeats the motion, hitting so deep that you gasp. “Say my name again.”

“Fuck it feels so good, Namjoon.”

Namjoon sets a steady, firm pace, fucking you into the cot hard- you’re worried it’ll break. You can feel his length drag deliciously along your walls. He doesn’t go gentle, pain laced on the edge of your bliss as your mouths met, tongues tangling as he bears down on you, hips shoving you into the cot. Your hips lift to meet his efforts, thighs straining with effort, weak from your previous orgasms. 

You’re passed the point of coherency. A string of nonsense falls from your lips. The pleasure crashes into you out of nowhere and you twitch forward, tightening your grip on Namjoon as you cum loudly, orgasm taking full control. You almost cry into his chest as he fucks you through your high.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, panting in your ear. Your hands press against his hot skin, sliding against the sweat. Namjoon catches your lips briefly as your orgasm subsides. “Such a sweet girl for me.”

Namjoon curses loudly, the force of your orgasm sending him over the edge. His thrusts became disorganized whimpering against your neck, pressing kisses against your salty skin between jerky twitches of pleasure. 

Namjoon is shaking. Holding himself above you is taking visible effort. You turn your face, pressing kisses on his forearms gently, hands ghosting over his sweaty skin. He was warm all over, muscles jumping under your feather light touch. With a sigh, he rolls over and falls next to you, grabbing you by the waist and pulling you to him.

“Honesty time?” he pants. You nod your head, turning to look at him. You brush his silver strands back fondly, smiling a bit. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I saw you in your sitting room.”

“Honesty time?”

He nods, pressing a kiss to your brow. “I’ve wanted to do that since I looked you up when you set the meeting.”

“Of course you did. I had to make sure you weren’t crazy, professor.”

“Says the mercenary.”

You smile. It’s not mean, this time. It’s not an accusation. His voice is teasing and deep and soft. The wind outside cools you. “Come work for me. Your dean is involved in the Illuminati and quite frankly, I don’t think he cares about your safety.”

He tucks his chin on your shoulder. You can feel his breath on your face. “I kind of figured something was going on there.”

“You’re too smart for them. Come work for me. Seriously – I help people. I do have to play a part, but it’s just that. A part.”

“You sure I won’t drive you crazy?”

You kiss him. “I think you discovered a way to shut me up.”

Namjoon hums, pressing the softest kiss to your lips. You smile into it, letting him lead the kiss. “Fine. My job as a professor was short lived, but there’s work to do.”

“Exactly. Oh, and one rule,” you add. “Don’t read dead languages.”

Namjoon’s laugh is as bright as the sun outside and you smile, watching him tilt his face up, face golden and beautiful. “Advice of the century.”

-

"Wait," Namjoon asks as he unpacks the last box in his office. "Would you have actually left me for the mummy that day?"

You smirk as you walk by him, kissing your boyfriend briefly. "No, but your reaction was priceless."

#kim namjoon smut #namjoon smut #knj #namjoon fluff #namjoon fanfic #kim namjoon fanfic #bts smut #bts fanfic #haliiimede writes #rm bts #namjoon #kim namjoon #namjoon bts #minors dni #minors do not interact

[filthybonnet]

why Ramin when there's literally EVERY other Phantom tho

I'm going to answer this legit instead of being like "like whoever you like."

So 2004 I was super excited to go the midnight showing of "The Phantom of the Opera" movie. I hadn't had the chance to see the musical in person, coming from a family in which I was their main introduction to theatre when I was accidentally put into theatre class my freshman year of high school and decided I loved it. My sister and I fell in love the proshot of "Cats" (which my drama teacher introduced me to) and that was the first professional theatre show we saw live. We saw a tour of it in 1999.

Anyway...so 2004 I'm in college super excited to finally see Phantom. I leave that movie theater so disappointed. I was like "I thought he was supposed to be able to sing. Also the fuck was Minnie Driver doing there?" After that I'm like "Ew I want nothing to do with Phantom."

2011: I'm in NYC for the first time but I'm with major red flag boyfriend (which is a different story). We're walking by what I later learn is The Majestic to get to our hotel. At the time I just see lots of Phantom posters and ads. I stop and look at them and am like The stage production has to be better than that movie. I ask Ex if we can go see it and he's all like we don't have the time. (of course we had the time, it was just not what he wanted to do).

End of 2017/Early 2018: I got "unlawfully terminated" from my job. I'm wasting a lot of time on tumblr. A few of my mutuals post a lot of Phantom content, lots of pictures of various Christine's in the dressing robe is what I remember the most. I like what I see and I'm like I should give Phantom another chance, I have all this free time. HOWEVER, I decide this time as I was a literature major, I'm going to the source material first. I look up the novel, read up on the newer translations, pick the one I like best. I fall in love. I finish the thing in two days.

I decide I'm going to suck it up and give the 2004 movie another chance after loving the novel so much. I contact my sister because I know she has a copy as an actress and a Gerald Butler lover. I tell her my reason. She replies, "No, I have something better for you. Come over." So while her husband is at work we have lunch, she curls my hair and she puts on The Phantom of the Opera Royal Albert Hall.

I wasn't paying too much attention at the moment because my sister was asking something about my hair but at that same exact moment Ramin's "Insolent Boy!" boomed through her sound system. No lie (and TMI) but my nipples instantly went hard and I turned towards the TV and was like "Hello! Who is this?" Him and Sierra were barely out on stage in the boat and I was already googling Ramin Karimloo.

In two seconds with just his voice, Ramin Karimloo made me fall back in love with "The Phantom of the Opera" In 2004 when I left that movie theater saying "I thought the Phantom was supposed to be able to sing" Ramin turned that around in two seconds. And then I saw him act. And then while watching it I found shirtless pictures of him on the internet.

I have seen many boots since and have seen 4 Phantoms live (5 counting Ramin but not for this point) and none of them do it for me like Ramin. I've had other Christine's impress me more than Sierra since (like Holly Ann Hull is my top now. Saw her 3 times live). And after seeing Ramin as Phantom 4 times that's it. Even his Phantom in Italy had differences from his RAH Phantom but still just such perfection. Seeing it person he just becomes the Phantom. It was like I knew I it was Ramin but all you could see was Phantom, not Ramin acting Phantom.

This might not satisfy you because the way your question is worded seems to imply you're not that fond of him. And I know some of the "phandom" considers him a gateway Phantom. However he's very much loved by lots of people and was chosen for reasons.

#ramin karimloo #the phantom of the opera

[mediumtires]

Weird brain worm but: Toto’s ralley years w Red Bull coincide w Christian’s early years w the f1 team. Opportunity for meeting possibly?? 👀👀👀

urgh okay my sources on this are pretty slim but i’ve tried to piece this together best as i can.

so toto did some rallying “for fun” starting 1999 and stretching as far as 2013 actually. in the early 2000s toto drove mainly GT world championships and a few long long distance races for porsche, BMW, and ferrari. now my sources tell me red bull was a sponsor for some of those race teams which is why toto can be seen wearing red bull suits and driving red bull sponsored cars, mainly between 2004 and 2006.

between 2006 and 2013 he was driving for BRR (raimund baumschlager’s team) and red bull wasn’t a sponsor for them.

now, i think toto’s rallying was limited to a few races during his time as it really was more of a hobby to him. he was running his investment companies and also supporting young racing drivers at the same time so pretty busy overall. through his connections to the Mercedes junior programme he later bought the Mercedes DTM team, then co-invested in HWA which then led to his interest in f1 and williams inviting him to the factory. all of this happened between 1999 and 2009, but as far as i’m aware toto’s rallying was limited to a few races during this time and all of them in GT classes.

christian took over at jaguar/red bull in 2005. he was never really invested in GT or DTM, even during his own racing days he preferred single seaters; formula renault, formula 3000, british f2/3.

red bull as a company is known to invest in many many different sporting categories, one of which are different motorsports classes, so i don’t think it’s surprising that they sponsored GT cars. only christian wasn’t and isn’t involved in any of that; he doesn’t do sponsorships, he doesn’t do and never did GT/DTM, he’s obviously only concerned with the f1 division of red bull racing.

so i think chances of them meeting prior to toto joining forces with williams in 2009 are pretty slim. but not impossible! could make for a fun fic for sure!!

(here’s a fun red bull bulletin article on toto called “the secret life of toto wolff” published in 2021. they’re so unhinged)

#christian horner #toto wolff #i love when you guys send me stuff like this and i get to go away and do research and come back and write silly posts like this

[thislovintime]

Photos by Henry Diltz, Richard E. Aaron, © LIFE/Shutterstock, and Nurit Wilde. (Photos 4 & 5 are from the “Heart and Soul” video shoot.)

For Father’s Day. Thoughts go out to Peter’s kids.

“I was never inherently afraid of my situation. When I found myself in a boardinghouse with my daughter in a room for twenty-five dollars a month, sleeping on a mat on the floor, I was not discouraged. I had already made my connection with my source.” - Peter Tork, When The Music Mattered (1984)

“[Hallie and Ivan] go to an alternative school locally. We [Peter and Barbara Iannoli] decided on it because it’s a place where if the kids wanted to do something they can insist on it. My kids have whale watching classes where they rent a boat and go and watch whales. I have never seen it, but they tell me it is a transcendental experience.” - Peter Tork, Evening Standard, July 26, 1983

Rosie O’Donnell: “You think you’re a good dad or do you…?” Peter: “No, actually, I’m not a very good, no, not as a good as I want to be. But then, I don’t know any dad who is, so...” Rosie: “That’s true, that’s true. I’m sure you do very well.” - VH1, late 1988

“Tork’s children don’t think of his celebrity one way or another, he said, although they wish their father had a more private life. ‘They take the bitter with the sweet,’ he said adding that he’s just Dad ‘in large measures.’ His 26-year-old daughter is pursuing a teaching degree. His 20-year-old son is a drummer in a reggae band
. ‘I am so impressed with him that way,’ Tork said, pride evident. ‘I wish he’d put his back to it more; he’d get more out of it, but you can’t tell someone something like that. They learn from what you do, not what you say.’” - Intelligencer Journal, July 19, 1996

Peter Tork: “David [Crosby] let me stay there for most of a year. It was sort of by way of interest on the loan I gave him to buy his boat, and I stayed there with my, with my then-girlfriend, and our daughter was born in that house.” Q: “In the house?” PT: “In the house, yeah, live, at-home birth —” Q: “On purpose or you just…?” PT: “That’s right, at-home birth, yeah, that was what we wanted.” Q: “(to Peter) [The second radio host is] expecting a baby. His wife.” PT: “Yeah? Cool! Oh, man. Oh, yeah? Excited, aren’t you? His eyes just brightened up, it’s great.” - GOLD 104.5, 1999

Q: “You have good relationships with your kids?” 
Peter Tork: “Yes, I do.” Q: “Oh, cool.” PT: “Very good. [...] [O]f my two daughters, the adult daughter says that she has a better relationship with me than any of her friends have with their fathers. It’s a good thing for us, and I hope that the others aren’t catastrophic. Because otherwise, it means (laughs), otherwise it’s small praise. But, you know, yeah, we’re doing fine, it’s wonderful.” - WDBB, February 2006

“[After his first cancer surgery, says Peter] ‘I couldn’t chew anything for a month. I was drinking my dinner — lots of milkshakes.’ It also took time for Peter to fully get back the power of speech. ‘For months, I was speaking with a lisp,’ he says. ‘It was a matter of me learning how to get my tongue under control again. I did my vocal exercises and the doctors decided I didn’t need speech therapy. It was a tough time but my daughter, Hallie, was a real support to me.’” - Daily Mail, August 16, 2011

From about the 8:36 min. mark, Peter speaks about Hallie and Ivan (who was in the audience) in this portion of The Monkees on People Are Talking in 1989; also featuring a tour anecdote about Ivan from Davy.

#Peter Tork #Reine Stewart #Hallie Iannoli #Tork quotes #60s Tork #70s Tork #90s Tork #00s Tork #Ivan Iannoli #Erica Thorkelson #so much respect for PT #bearded Peter #Barbara Iannoli #Jennifer McLeod #long read #<3 #more for the solid Tork advice files #'although they wish their father had a more private life' (always trying to remember that when fan page posting) #When The Music Mattered #Evening Standard #Intelligencer Journal #WGLD Radio #can you queue it

[denaliwrites]

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Feel free to request other fandoms that aren’t listed! If it’s something I don’t want to write for that’s not listed below, I’ll let you know!

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If there is a particular source you’d like me to use in the essay, please include it in the request.

You can cite me, but you can’t copy me.

I will not write your class essays for you.

If you’re a teacher / professor and you’ve been personally victimized by my essays, I am so sorry that you don’t think I’m funny.

I reserve the right to not take any requests I don’t like or don’t vibe with or feel like I can’t do justice to! I’m also a super busy college student, so if a request is taking a long time to be fulfilled, assume I’m drowning in schoolwork first, and one of the other reasons second!

#fic writing #essay writing #fic requests #essay requests #policies

[tomwambsmilk]

What are some of the characteristics of these white middle class men you speak of or how do you know someone is middle class? and why would prestige tv cater to only this dempgrpahic?

This is honestly a great question, and one that's surprisingly difficult to answer in a concise way. I've done my best, but in case you don't want to read, the TL;DR is: HBO (a cable frontrunner who defined the strategy for other competitors who emerged later) intentionally catered to men in its early (pre-prestige) days because they knew the networks were intentionally catering to women. This meant that when it shifted into prestige TV in the late 90s, the existing subscriber base was middle-class white men. It's first big flagship "prestige TV" drama, The Sopranos, appealed heavily to that demo and was wildly commercially successful. The Wire, while airing at the same time with equal critical acclaim, did not appeal to that demo and actively critiqued societal structures which benefitted that demo, and flopped both commercially and in the awards circuit. These two shows came very early in the "Prestige TV era", and execs took note of their respective receptions; consequently, much of the prestige TV which came after was selected with that middle-class white male demo in mind.

Longer explanation below the cut:

I should first clarify that when I say "Prestige TV" I'm using it more in the academic sense, of referring to a specific type of television which emerged in the "Prestige TV era", also called the "Second Golden Age" (around 1999-2020, although the precise end date depends on who you ask). A large range of shows fall into that category, but the common characteristics include heavy serialization (ie an emphasis on long-form storytelling, rather than standalone episodes), morally ambiguous characters, complex plots, diverse perspectives, and "R-rated" content. It's pretty widely agreed that this era was "kicked off" by The Sopranos; if I had to list other key Prestige TV/Second Golden Age shows, I'd probably default to the other eleven Alan Sepinwall analyzes in The Revolution Was Televised, his book about how television changed during the Prestige TV era (those eleven are: Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. Not all of those are commonly thought of as Prestige TV, because that label is now so removed from its source that it's only applied to a very narrow subsection of shows, but they are Prestige TV in the proper academic sense because of the impact they had on the era).

Not all of those shows were targeted at middle-class white men, and it wasn't my intention to suggest that every individual Prestige TV show is. But generally speaking, with only a few exceptions, the shows that defined the Prestige TV era and had the most commercial success while airing were the ones which appealed to that white, male, middle-class demo. And that's not a demo HBO picked up accidentally. It was explicitly built into their early strategies to go after that demographic, and so that was the demographic that had access to Prestige TV before people thought of it as Prestige TV, which means their opinions did a lot to influence how it developed.

HBO's primary strategy for survival in its early years, especially before other cable networks emerged, was differentiation. The problem they faced was there was lots of television that people could watch for free on network TV, and there wasn't the same distaste for advertising we have now which might have pushed people to pay for a subscription. Their solution was to try and target the people who a) had disposable income, and b) were dissatisfied with what was on the networks. Studio execs knew that the primary target market network execs had in mind when they were buying shows was middle-class white women, because that's the demo that their advertisers wanted to hit. Obviously, the definition of middle-class is contentious now, but I'm using it to mean people with disposable income, which is what made them attractive; white, because the middle class was disproportionately white, and also because network TV was trying to target a generic default 'American' audience, which to their minds was white; and women because advertisers believed women made most of the household purchasing decisions. HBO also needed people with disposable income, so it also targeted middle-class whites by default. However, the main place it decided to differentiate was by going after men, in an extremely intentional programming strategy developed by HBO CEO Michael Fuchs. Sheila Nevins, who was in charge of documentary programming, developed several documentary series, called, respectively, Real Sex, G-String Divas, Cathouse, and Sex Bytes, intentionally to try and cater to men - and it worked! Subscriber numbers increased in droves. And sure, we don't definitively know most of those subscribers were men. But... anecdotally, and in terms of the extremely limited market data we do have, the evidence for those subscribers and viewers being mostly men is quite strong.

White middle-class men weren't by any means the only group they targeted; another part of HBO's strategy was to create a wide variety of content catered to many different groups of people. But those white middle-class men became the most reliable paying subscribers, so HBO's content strategy leaned heavily on catering to their tastes to bring in funding they could use for "brand projects" - weightier, more artistic projects that improved HBO's brand image. When competitors like Showtime emerged, they developed their own spins on HBO's strategy; they targeted their markets in different ways, but ultimately everyone was trying to appeal to the groups who were unsatisfied with network TV, and everyone wanted the white middle-class male subscriber's dollar because it was considered the most "reliable". That demo essentially became to cable TV what advertisers were to network TV.

To trace cable TV's history from the 70s to The Sopranos would take a while and also involve spending more time talking about boxing and Mike Tyson than you would expect. HBO continued to stick to this strategy of differentiation and slowly achieved more market dominance. Ultimately, that brought HBO a combination of funding and creative respect that allowed them to gamble on The Sopranos, a show that several networks passed on before it was pitched to HBO, who ordered the pilot, only to have it perform extremely poorly in the test screening. So poorly that no sane executive would have ordered more episodes.

Except.

The head of HBO at the time, Chris Albrecht (considered by many to be the 'godfather of prestige tv'), heavily related to Tony Soprano, and he felt that his (very male) social networks also would. He's quoted as repeatedly saying, "The only difference between Tony Soprano and every guy I know is that he's the don of New Jersey." Which might sound like hyperbole, but.... In that history of HBO we skipped over there is also a long and unsettling history of misogyny and violence (including sexual violence) sanctioned and covered up by the network which, even by our desensitized modern standards, I actually found pretty shocking. It's bad, y'all. Chris Albrecht (and his fellow execs) didn't relate to Tony despite the violence of the show and his anger issues - they related to him because of it. The most famous incident concerning Albrecht specifically involves him strangling a female subordinate during a disagreement in her office, an allegation which led to HBO paying her a $400,000 settlement. And that's unfortunately not an outlier. (By the way, Albrecht objected to one of Sopranos most famous season 1 episodes, "College", because he felt Tony strangling another character to death would make him 'too unlikable', and viewers wouldn't be able to 'see his humour and charm').

Of course, The Sopranos turned out to be a massive hit, and deservedly so. But I think it's notable that its first season was only ordered because a small group of male executives steeped in violence, misogyny, and toxic masculinity personally related to Tony. And it's also worth noting that at the time, Tony Soprano was often compared to Mike Tyson, who many consider to be HBO's "first antihero". HBO was very involved in his career largely because the controversy around him brought in that middle-class male demo; Tony Soprano was considered to be a continuation of that strategy.

(To be clear, not all men who liked The Sopranos liked it for those reasons. But if we want to get in the weeds about it, HBO catered not just to men in general, but in a very particular way, to the subsection of men who did).

Another thing to note is that part of the success of The Sopranos was the way it catered to the anxieties of the now-shrinking middle class. When the series aired, the stock market was booming, but a spree of mega-mergers and consolidations resulted in record layoffs. CEO pay was skyrocketing while median family income was dropping, and the "middle class" that HBO had always catered to (bc of the disposable income) was disappearing. At its core, The Sopranos was very much about the anxiety which surrounds a way of life disappearing; consequently, the middle-class demo HBO had worked so hard to cultivate was immediately hooked. And yeah, a lot of them were no longer middle-class, strictly speaking. But HBO was still very much trying to cater to, for example, white-collar workers who recently fell out of that income bracket, rather than blue-collar workers or lower income brackets.

Let's also look at The Wire, a show essentially pitched as an audience bait-and-switch. Creator David Simon wanted it to look like a standard-issue broadcast police procedural, like pretty much every TV network had. But what would make it different is that, as the show developed, it would become increasingly subversive - instead of wondering "whether the bad guys would get caught", he wanted the audience to wonder "who the real bad guys are, and whether catching them means anything at all". In his pitch to HBO, he wrote: "You will not be stealing market share from the networks by only venturing into worlds where they can't; you will be stealing it by taking their worlds and transforming them with honesty and wit and a darker, cynical, and more piercing viewpoint than they would undertake."

While The Wire is textbook Prestige TV, it actually didn't hit that middle-class white male demo. David Simon wasn't concerned with hitting demos or relatability; he wanted to create a far-ranging critique of the police system, neo-liberalism, and capitalism. These were topics that simply didn't resonate with the demographic HBO had built up in its subscriber base, many of whom were quite happy with the police system, neo-liberalism, and capitalism, since they were benefitting pretty heavily from it. The only subscriber demo it did consistently hit was critics, academics, and journalists. And even then - despite its massive critical acclaim, The Wire was heavily snubbed in the awards circuit. The awards snubs are especially telling, given how much the critics claimed to love the show, calling it "Dickensian" - a lot of these people were the same ones voting in the Emmys, so what gives? A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, and what they keep coming back to time and time again is that the majority of the cast of The Wire was black. (It's also worth noting that the original plans for season 1 involved killing off the character of Kima Greggs, a black lesbian, until executive Carolyn Strauss pushed - hard - to reverse the decision, on the grounds that HBO's programming was already too white, male, and heterosexual. Greggs eventually went on to become a particular favourite of the show's extremely small fanbase, which I think is indicative of the kind of demographic the show picked up.) The response was so disappointing that it was nearly cancelled several times; in the first near-cancellation, Albrecht joked that he'd heard from "all 250 of the viewers".

These are just two shows, obviously. But they're two shows that came very early in the era, and so heavily influenced what came after. The Sopranos especially redefined what TV could be; it proved that morally complex, serialized stories with antihero protagonists had a market - and the limitations on network television meant that market could only be reached by cable networks like HBO, which had built up a specific sort of subscriber base. We have to make a distinction between what David Chase wanted to communicate with The Sopranos and why it succeeded the way that it did. Chase didn't set out to create a show that would resonate with white middle-class men, but he did, and it was wildly successful. David Simon's show, while equally critically acclaimed and airing in largely the same time period, did not resonate with white middle-class men, and it never achieved the sort of viewer ratings during its run that other shows of comparable quality did. Studio execs inside and outside of HBO saw that and took note.

Again, the decisions that go into the creation of TV shows are extremely complex, and to say "all Prestige TV is targeted at white middle-class men" is a huge oversimplification. There's a lot more to the history of HBO than just Sopranos and The Wire. But a reliance on that demo, and an active desire to cater to their interests, has heavily defined the kinds of shows which are considered to be Prestige TV, as well as the kinds of shows that cable TV studios are willing to put money into developing. If you want to really examine the context that the "Second Golden Age" is rooted in, you have to be willing to grapple with that history.

#asks #anon #there's a whole history which comes after this as well so. its complicated #I hope this is clear. happy to further clarify any point. I'm trying to condense a LOT of info w/o missing anything important #also belatedly realized you asked about middle class and I focussed on men. I hope it’s clear enough to just say middle class here means #people with disposable income #and #that middle class demo was picked up in the 60s and 70s when the middle class WAS a thing #the financial demo they hit now might not be considered middle class anymore #but it’s still that same demo of white-collar suburbia they cater to #rather then lower income or blue collar demos

[deathlygristly]

Sometimes I read posts on here and I realize that things I thought were fairly universal aren't, actually.

Got a post saved in my drafts about critical thinking so I can check the notes and think about it. It features a story about a high school teacher - note high school, not elementary - doing a really really basic exercise about critical thinking. And the notes are full of people saying wow I wish I had a teacher like that and great teaching and that sort of thing. It also mentions the students being a bit upset at first and accusing the teacher of confusing them, because they automatically believed anything the teacher said and when the teacher offered two sides of something and asked them to research and make up their own minds it weirded them out.

I am trying to remember if I have any stories from school but honestly I don't remember my classes very much. The formative experience from my childhood that I do remember and that I very often reference is when I read every book the local library had on the Holocaust when I was 9.

Wait....I am remembering something from sixth grade now. A research paper on escapes from POW camps during WWII. And an 8th grade group report on..I want to say WWII because if we got to pick our war of course I went with that one...that the teacher said my group should kiss my feet for. I'm not sure though because I think I remember playing a Johnny Horton song for the presentation and the only Johnny Horton song I can remember right now about war is The Battle Of New Orleans which is about the War of 1812. Wait wait, there's Sink The Bismarck about WWII!

Anyway, my point is that high school seems really late for learning about propaganda and learning to tell decent sources from obvious propaganda. But then like I've said before, I graduated in 1999 so I don't know what school is like now with NCLB.

Also I went to rural working class schools and the local library was of course a small rural library, so nothing special or particularly privileged or anything. So I never think that I was particularly privileged or weird or an outlier until I see Tumblr posts like that one where a lot of people agree that they had experiences completely different than mine, and I'm like ohhhh this explains a lot about the internet.

I bet they don't even let them watch ACC basketball tournament games in class anymore. Our teachers would roll in those TVs and we'd get to watch the games as long as we also quietly did our work.

#one thing the spousal person and I both definitely remember from our childhoods #Is Christian Laettner's three pointer from half court #to win against Michigan in the 1992 NCAA tournament #if you grow up in NC you are a college basketball fan #you don't get a choice in that

[the-paper-monkey]

You are so right Tom Ripley is what you would get if you put Draco Malfoy and Tom Riddle in a blender lmao a well seasoned taco if you will 🌮

Sorry to bring the 1999 film to you awareness…I’ve almost finished the series and am debating checking out the film but the vibes seem a little off. Is it at all worth watching? It seems weirdly sappy and generally off brand for the source material

Tl;dr a bad adaptation but a... good film? According to people that aren't massive haters (ie. NOT me).

TALENTED MR RIPLEY SPOILERS FORTHCOMING

It's... the kind of film that is good if you're watching it without having read (and liked) the source material. Sort of like Kubric's The Shining. A lot of people enjoyed it, including people who have read the book, so bear that in mind. I tend to have extremely strong opinions on most things so you may still enjoy it but I loathed it lol. Brevity is not my strength so this is going to be long, sry.

You can read the following quote from the director and see if you want to see an adaptation of Ripley by someone with this opinion:

A legitimate gripe that fans of the novel might voice is that I entirely missed the point of the book, because the book celebrates an amoral central character who gets away with murder and doesn't seem to suffer for it. And part of the fun of the novel is that he doesn't seem to care. [...] You know that he'll have no remorse about killing other people to get what he wants. And there's a kind of glee in seeing him do it. But it's not a glee that I wanted to transform into the film, partly because of the nature of the way you experience film. But, if that's my technical position, it's also my moral position. I don't want to tell a story about a man who gets away with murder and doesn't care. It doesn't interest me.

Minghella

Sorry, but WHY did you adapt RIPLEY if that was how you felt about the source material. Tom is a deeply sensitive, emotional person, but also a stone-cold psychopath who not only doesn't feel remorse—bar brief moments of clarity—but also believes he's entirely morally justified in his crimes.

Minghella's adaptation manages to be both less progressive and less nuanced than the 1955 book, despite being made almost half a century later. It is also less true to the essence of the book than the French 1960 adaptation, Plein Soleil, despite that film being beholden to the standards and censorship of the mid-20th century. Minghella's film is, I think, a great demonstration of why the American audience on the whole never 'got' Highsmith. She was always far more popular in Europe and I do believe that is because your standard American audience couldn't handle the moral ambiguity of her books.

There's a lot you can read into with TTMR but, to me, the book has always primarily been about class, not sexuality. It has more in common with a film like Parasite than Brokeback Mountain or Maurice. Tom is the American Dream taken to its perverse extreme—a ruthless, ambitious, dishonest character who will do anything to get ahead in a world stacked against him. The class element is near completely erased from the Minghella film, with the focus instead on Dickie as some sort of manic pixie dream girl who Tom stumbles into the thrall of and becomes infatuated and obsessed with to the point of snapping and killing him when he rejects Tom's feelings. Yes, Minghella managed to play into every homophobic stereotype out there by depicting Tom as an explicitly homosexual character and... a violent incel who can't take a hint.

In contrast, book Dickie is stunningly mediocre to the point of being an embarrassment to Tom, far from Jude Law's character. If anything, Tom is the one who brings excitement into Dickie's life . Minghella's Ripley is a shy, ungainly nerd; Highsmith's Ripley has his clumsy moments—certainly never managed to win Marge over lol—but is a capable, charismatic and driven person in his own right.

E Shannon's paper 'Where was the sex?' does a better job of discussing the altered interpretation of Ripley than I can. I've linked SciHub as it's locked behind institution login on JSTOR.

Highsmith certainly explores sexuality with great sophistication, but ultimately sexuality remains subtext in the novel, while it dominates the film. To pursue its concerns, Minghella's film revises the novel's characters and invents others, all with the aim of redefining Tom Ripley for a Hollywood audience. Minghella's Tom is first and foremost a gay man besieged by a hostile, straight world and only secondarily an American social climber on the hunt in Europe. Ironically, Minghella's focus on Tom's "taboo" homosexuality leads to a story that is less-not more-subversive than Highsmith's, whose critique of American ideas of class is lost to the film's paradoxically conventional sexual conflicts. In fact, in one sense, the film altogether inverts the sexual context of the novel. Where the novel uses Tom's sexuality to critique contemporary ideas of class, the film uses Tom's class to critique contemporary ideas of sexuality. Highsmith's Tom Ripley is a diabolical "culmination of the American success ethic" (Cochran 162), while Minghella's Tom Ripley is a misunderstood casualty of sexual bigotry and provincialism and a victim of his own frustrated sexual desire.

And also:

Minghella's audience is encouraged to criticize the monolithic presence of the "straight culture" and sympathize with Tom's dilemma, while Highsmith's readers are asked to consider aspects of culture beyond gay or straight sexual identity. For Minghella, Tom is either gay or straight. Either Dickie loves Tom or he loves Marge. The complex, sometimes asexual relationships of the 1950s novel are replaced with the simpler, blunter sexual truths of 1990s Hollywood, where "homosexual" is becoming almost as normalized as "heterosexual."

They also make a good point about Dickie being arguably closer implied to being a closeted gay man than Tom, which is actually quite a depressing thought. You can understand why he chooses estrangement from his family with that interpretation. Also, his assertion that Tom is in love with Dickie's material possessions, rather than him as a person is something I agree with. Tom doesn't miss Dickie after he dies, because he views Dickie as the sum of his parts—those being his signet ring, his fancy watches, his shiny cufflinks and his nice shoes. Again, deranged <3

Ultimately, I don't believe that even the shadow of a character like Ripley can be adapted to the screen. Dostoevsky being a major influence of Highsmith's is no surprise. Tom reads a lot like one of his rambling, neurotic characters, his inner dialogue being his most critical, defining feature, and not one that can be brought to the screen. Still, Minghella doesn't even try lol. I hate it.

#minghella - ie. 1999's puriteen #“how can i make a film about a guy who doesn't feel bad abt committing murder?? :(((” #- man who signed on to make film about a guy who doesn't feel bad abt committing murder #asks #anon #the talented mr ripley #long post #sorry but if we're talking sexuality... tom ripley is asexual #i could elaborate on that but feel like im getting off-topic lol

[miracuofficial]

𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅ 𝐌𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐔𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐒 is a seven-member fictional girl group that debuted on april 23, 2020 with their first single album BORN MIRACLE and are managed by source music.  The members consist of HYEMI, LILY, NANA, IVY, KUINA, ELLIE, and STELLA. As of December 2023, two former members DANI and JIHYE made the decision to discontinue promoting with the group. The girls explore different concepts consisting of retro, elegance, girl crush, and more.

A story line was created for the girls that discusses a group of high school girls who start off normal with different talents. A supernova hits the building while they’re attending their classes one day, fumes from the star leaking out as the girls inhale them. They weren’t toxic but they did contain different chemicals that managed to give the girls supernatural powers. It was a miracle.

୨୧ ‧₊˚ 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋.

⋆ GROUP NAME : MIRACULOUS (also known as MIRACLE)

⋆ COMPANY : source music

⋆ DEBUT DATE : april 23, 2020

⋆ DEBUT SONG : Bon Bon Chocolat

⋆ CONCEPT : elegant , retro , girl crush and more .

⋆ FANDOM : MAGIX ( magics )

⋆ GREETING : " unnatural to be supernatural. hello, we are MIRACULOUS! ”

୨୧ ‧₊˚ 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄-𝐔𝐏.

HYEMI : LEADER, MAIN VOCALIST, MAIN DANCER ( 1999 )

LILY : MAIN VOCALIST, SUB RAPPER ( 2000 )

NANA : LEAD RAPPER, LEAD DANCER, FACE OF THE GROUP ( 2000 )

IVY : LEAD VOCALIST, VISUAL ( 2001 )

KUINA : MAIN RAPPER, LEAD VOCALIST ( 2002 )

ELLIE : VOCALIST, LEAD DANCER, VISUAL ( 2002 )

STELLA : MAIN DANCER, VOCALIST, MAKNAE ( 2003 )

#✦ 미라큘러스 𝐌𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐔𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐒 — profile #fictional idol group #fictional idol community #fictional idol oc #miracle + miraculous #miracuofficial #kpop oc

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bertrand Cooper

Published: Jun 19, 2023

Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.

The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.

From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)

In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.

Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”

The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.

My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.

Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.

Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students  obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.

Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.

In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.

In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.

Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.

In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.

I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work  demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.

That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.

Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.

[ Via: https://archive.is/BimyF ]

==

Affirmative action is a perfect example of a Kendiian "antiracist" policy: instituting racism into the admissions system, while benefiting the elite class.

#Free Black Thought #Bertrand Cooper #affirmative action #racial discrimination #elite class #race based admissions #university admissions #college admissions #antiracism as religion #antiracism #Kendiism #systemic racism #religion is a mental illness

[genuineformality]

Rules: List ten comfort movies and tag ten people. Or not. I’m not your boss.

Thank you for tagging me @taralkariel! I don’t watch a lot of movies these days, partially because the way our house is set up isn’t really conducive to that, but… I do have some that I think about all the time and bring me joy.

Here are my comfort movies in the order in which I thought of them:

Pride and Prejudice (2005): It’s such a pleasant adaptation. Is the 90s miniseries objectively a better adaptation in terms of closeness to source material? Probably. But this does such an incredibly beautiful job of capturing the essence of the novel and doing some really lovely things with showing the differences in class that exist between impoverished and wealthy gentlepeople which gets missed in a lot of regency romance adaptations.  

White Christmas (1954): I love this film. It’s only kind of a Christmas movie, in that it takes place over the Christmas holiday and features the Irving Berlin’s (noted Jewish composer) White Christmas, but let’s face it: it’s really a thin excuse to smash as many completely ridiculous dance numbers together with only the tiniest hint of a plot.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992): Another completely ridiculous Christmas movie that I mostly love because it is probably the most faithful adaptation of A Christmas Carol that exists, even with the muppets. Possibly because of the muppets. I have a long, complicated history with Christmas (as someone who is Jewish; as someone whose mother tried to join cults a few times, and as a result, all holidays are weird; as someone with a lot of family trauma that often came to a head around holidays, both the ones we observed and sometimes especially when we were not observing them), but I found an uneasy détente with Christmas and now observe it in a way that makes sense for me and my (non-Jewish) family. So it seems weird that I have two Christmas movies on this list, but I cannot tell you how many good, fond, wonderful memories I have tied up with this movie. Just thinking about it lowers my blood pressure.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971): Angela Lansbury, my beloved. When I was growing up, we had a VCR and a very small collection of films on VHS, of which this was one. And this is definitely the one that I wore out through watching and rewatching. It’s such a weird, fun, lovely film.

The Birdcage (1996): Robin Williams and Nathan Lane clearly had so much fun making this. It’s a farce and looking at it any deeper than the surface means that the plot falls apart almost immediately, so you cannot take it seriously. And yet, it has such warmth and heart. I love this film, even though it has not aged well; even though it’s imperfect.

Empire Records (1995): What’s with TODAY, today? This came out when I was entering high school and it was the perfect film for that time in my life and it has remained a favorite ever since.

Auntie Mame (1958): Speaking of films that haven’t necessarily aged well, but are fun, hilarious, and heartfelt. Auntie Mame was a book (that also has not aged well) and was adapted to theater and film about making the best of the family you have and creating family from your friends as well as blood kin. My mom showed me this film when I was still in single digits and I knew then that my goal in life was to be Auntie Mame, the original wine aunt. And you know, I’m not doing a half bad job of it.

Galaxy Quest (1999): It’s the best star trek movie. Fight me.

Mystery Men (1999): It’s the best marvel movie. Fight me.

Persuasion (2007): Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel. When I was in high school/college, I was all about that Pride and Prejudice life, but as an adult (and one rapidly approaching middle age), I feel Persuasion to my core. There is something so incredibly human about grieving the life you might have had; of living with regrets and still living your life with as much integrity as you can; of having a terrible family and bearing with them; and of getting second chances that honestly were probably only available because of your lived experience, integrity, and living through that grief. Anne Elliot is my girl (and I’m actively mad about the Netflix adaptation, despite generally being very live and let live about adaptations being adaptations). Why is this one my comfort movie? Because this is the one that captured Anne for me. Sally Hawkins was beautiful casting and she shines with subtle, understated grace. 10/10, would Anne Elliot again.

Tagging (with no pressure whatsoever): @marycontraire, @saritasoyyo, @totchipanda, @capinejghafa, @whatanybodygets, @pyrrhlc, @tlonista, @feelinglikecleopatra; @jackwolfes; @carolinawrenn; @whimperandabang

#tag games #comfort films

[wontonsoupho]

THEN GOD

MADE THEM BLUE

© Artist the Author 2022

SYNOPSIS

This series was inspired by GOD HIMSELF , my personal life , my own spiritual experience , and journey of self. The people , places , and events that occur are loosely based from things I have witnessed or partook in; or are inspired by the lives of those whom surround me in which I love dearly. I wrote this series to have conversations about those uncomfortable and controversial topics , in hopes of bringing darkness to the light so that people can heal their hidden traumas. I’d kindly advise you NOT to steal any of my work as it is protected legally binding underneath Copyright Law with THE ARTIVERSE PRODUCTIONS and Wattpad Corp. — Artist the Author

GENRE : URBAN DRAMA / FICTION

LEADS : DAVE EAST X SHANNON THORNTON

SETTING : MACABRE , GEORGIA (fictional city in the belly of ATL)

“YOU DROVE ME AWAY and then they TOOK ME , only GOD can save me now.”

THEN GOD

MADE THEM BLUE

Has anyone ever heard of the saying ,

‘FATE HAS A FUNNY WAY OF WORKING ITS SELF OUT?’

On the dreary morning of October 14th , 1999 , sixteen year old Prodigy of The Arts , Goapele Scott was officially declared missing fourty-eighty hours after she was nowhere to be found within her self acclaimed hometown of Macabre , Georgia. Sources say that she was last spotted in a heated disagreement with longtime family friend Georgia State University's Star Basketball Player seventeen year old Xodus Casanova.

The two not only knew each other very well , but also allegedly concocted a plan to run away together which led authorities to believe that the Elite Division I Power Forward had involvement in Goapele's disappearance-however , that could not be any further from the case. Twenty long years , never ending pain , severe strife , and many tears later she mysteriously returns opening Pandora's box.

Two worlds collide after demons from their pasts force them both into a whirlwind of mayhem. Goapele and Xodus were two traumatized souls , but by the power of truth , God made them BLUE.

The question is , WILL THEY SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO WATCH IT COME INTO FRUITION ?

STARRING | LEADS

SHANNON THORNTON (circa 2019-present) as GOAPELE SCOTT

THE ANGELOU FROM HEAVEN

“I bet you NEVER thought you’d SEE ME AGAIN huh?”

DATE OF BIRTH : SEPTEMBER 22ND , 1985

HOMETOWN : BROOKLYN , NEW YORK

PHYSIQUE : 5 FT. 3 IN. — 127 LBS

DAVE EAST (circa 2016-present) as XODUS CASANOVA

GOLIATH REINCARNATED

“Our lives are like the fucking LIVING TESTAMENT Xo , can’t be surprised that it’s so damn treacherous.”

DATE OF BIRTH : MAY 23RD , 1984

HOMETOWN : QUEENS , NEW YORK

PHYSIQUE : 6 FT. 7 IN. — 253 LBS

FEATURING | SIDES

lela rochon as MAYOR CASANOVA

missy elliot MAMA QASIM

sonía braga as MAMA SOSA

jazzy amra as KAGOME

ava mcclure as NANI

faith jaggernauth as CHITTY

amil whitehead as MOTHER MACABRE

bia as PRINCESS

lola brooke as FLOJO

demetrius flenory jr. as KASPER

skepta as MAC 3

bandhunta izzy as DRAEKO

sebastian mikael as CHÖSEN

VISUAL AESTHETICS & CLOSING REMARKS | CINEMATOGRAPHY & AUTHOR’S NOTE

Hello my favorite heauxs!—and to those of you who don’t already know me I hope you’re enjoying your experience in the Artiverse. I want to start off by saying that my name is Artist Oriental , and I’m just an anomalous child of The Most High here baring gifts and fruits to give to the collective. For the past decade and a half I have been perfecting the craft of storytelling , and I’m at a point in my practice where I’m focused on broadening my horizons and expanding the audience I’ve been blessed to entertain and edify. From filling up notebooks all day long in class to hundreds and thousands of reads on Wattpad , my love for the art of literacy has never faded. Throughout the years I’ve been a breathing witness to the evolution of Artist as a person , creator , and soul—and may I say she’s come a mighty long way. As I grow older and enter my quarter century milestone , I find more and more that my work is often a reflection of my peculiar perception with the perfect blend of my eccentric imagination. With that being said; GOD WILL BE PRESENT IN ALL OF ARTIST THE AUTHOR’S CONTENT. I will not denounce the reality that I know to be true , experience , and choose to express. If that is unsettling for you my world may not be tailored to your liking , therefore feel free to roam at YOUR OWN DISCRETION. You can expect that the majority of work coming from me is more than likely to have some sort of spiritual aspect in it. There will also be lots of poetic vibes and a great deal of strong adult themes that usually hold HEAVY CONTROVERSY. At times my writing can get crude and dark , I tend to hound in on the gruesome details because I want readers to feel every raw emotion , but don’t be alarmed you’ll always be forewarned. Within The World of Artist have the opportunity to find all types of experiences from different genres like Urban Fiction all the way to Sci-Fi , so it’ll be hard not to get immersed. I chose this series as my debut piece because of how much it means to me at a soul level , and it further exhibits the growth I’ve had since deciding to master the element of literature. It’s also in hindsight my first ever official screenwriting piece which makes me all the more excited as I am intimated. Please take your time trekking through the universe I’ve created , and know that when you’re here things normally are vague and obscure at a first glance; sometimes it may feel a bit riddling to latch onto—but I promise you all there is a method to my madman ways. I’m gonna finish off with saying a big thank you to GOD for invoking divine favor upon everything that I am , Nothing would exist to be if it weren’t for my Guide and I’m standing under that irrefutable truth. All praise goes to The Most High , forever and ever. Remember that everything you need or desire is already within you; Create the World that’s Yours. Until next time my little Jezebels , be the influence not the influenced. — Artist the Author

Copyrights © Artist the Author 2022

#dave east #shannon thornton #daveeastff #tumblr fanfic #shannonthorntonff #p valley #sebastian mikael #skepta #lola brooke #lela rochon #sonia braga #missy elliott #lil meech #bandhunta izzy #jazzy amra #faith jaggernauth #bia #bia bia #amil #daveeastfanfic #shannonthorntonfanfic #artist the author | then god made them BLUE #tgmtb #the artiverse #artist the author | web series #wontonsoupho #fresh soup heauxs #an artist original #black fanfic writer #black fanfiction

[thespiderguide]

A (Very) Brief Overview of The Spider Tree of Life

Let's start with the basics. All spiders fall into the following classification, from least to most specific:

Kingdom: Animalia (animals - cannot produce their own food, can move voluntarily, and are multicellular) Phylum: Arthropoda (animals with jointed exoskeletons made of chitin) Subphylum: Chelicerata (chelicerates - possess feeding appendages called chelicerae) Class: Arachnida (arachnids - eight legs with an additional pair of appendages, fused head and thorax, and several more unique traits) Order: Araneae (spiders - chelicerates that possess spinnerets for silk production, and have special male copulatory organs that we'll get into some other time)

Okay, so we've reached the clade that includes all spiders: Araneae. This is the order level. Just below order, spiders have a level called the suborder ("sub" meaning "under"). Here, spiders split into two suborders: Mesothelae and Opisthothelae.

Mesothelae is an incredible group of spiders with only a few extant (non-extinct) taxa. The defining characteristic of its members is an abdomen that's segmented by plates called tergites. This is a trait that was also present in the ancestors of spiders, so we may consider the Mesothelae to be "primitive" since they possess ancestral traits. All other spiders (the Opisthothelae) have abdomens that are fused into a single unit, which is the derived (non-ancestral) trait.

Heptathela higoensis, a member of the suborder Mesothelae. Photo by Marshal Hedin

Okay, so now we know the two suborders of spiders: Mesothelae (the "primitive" segmented spiders) and Opisthothelae (the non-segmented spiders). But we're not done yet! Opisthothelae divides into two infraorders ("infra" meaning "below" or "further on"). These infraorders are Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae.

Mygalomorphae shares some common features with the Mesothelae - namely downward-facing chelicerae (mouthparts) and two pairs of book lungs (meaning four total). The araneomorphs, however, lack these ancestral features, instead sporting chelicerae that move in from the sides (causing the fangs to appear horizontal or "cross-acting") and fewer book lungs (only one pair or even zero!). Most araneomorphs also have tracheal systems, not unlike insects and myriapods (though the spider tracheal system evolved independently!).

Left: Atrax robustus, a mygalomorph with downward-facing chelicerae (photo by Tirin). Right: Cheiracanthium punctorium, an araneomorph with cross-acting chelicerae (photo by Rainer Altenkamp).

Finally, within the infraorders Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae exist a myriad of diverse spider families. Araneomorphae is by far the more speciose and diverse of the two, but they both have their own unique charms. As of April 2023, there are a whopping 132 spider families recognized!

Follow for future posts about the many different families of spiders!

Information sources can be found below:

Coddington, Jonathan A. & Levi, Herbert W. (1991). "Systematics and evolution of spiders (Araneae)". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 22: 565–592. doi:10.1146/annurev.es.22.110191.003025. JSTOR 2097274. S2CID 55647804.

Scientific name: Opisthothelae in Brands, S.J. (comp.) 1989-present. The Taxonomicon. Universal Taxonomic Services, Zwaag, The Netherlands. http://taxonomicon.taxonomy.nl/. Access date: 8 December 2010

Song, D.X.; Zhu, M.S. & Chen, J. (1999). The Spiders of China. Shijiazhuang, CN: Hebei University of Science and Technology Publishing House. ISBN 978-7-5375-1892-5.

Wheeler, W. C., Coddington, J. A., Crowley, L. M., Dimitrov, D., Goloboff, P. A., Griswold, C. E., … Zhang, J. (2016). The spider tree of life: phylogeny of Araneae based on target-gene analyses from an extensive taxon sampling. Cladistics, 33(6), 574–616. doi:10.1111/cla.12182

World Spider Catalog, 2023. Natural History Museum Bern. http://wsc.nmbe.ch, version 24.0 [accessed 30 April 2023].

#spiderblr #spiders #science #biology #taxonomy #zoology #arachnology #entomology #wildlife #animals #Araneae #bugblr #arthropods