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viastro · 4 years

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winning team | hong jisoo

ミ★ synopsis: in which you and joshua singlehandedly carry your team on your back for capture the flag. oh yeah, the boys also don’t know that you two are dating. [requested by @jos-hua except she just asked for fluff and them spending time together but i decided to make it a nerf war]

ミ★ genre: fluff, humor

ミ★ warnings: mentions of nerf guns and shooting with foam bullets, brief and i mean brief mention of sex

ミ★ word count: 1,473

ミ★ pairings: joshua x female reader

ミ★ notes: hi guys! this was requested by my luvie @jos-hua ! lia, i hope you still like this even tho i made it into a giant ass... nerf war... hehe. make sure to check out her work too, she’s really good at writing <333 and i love her <333 thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Joshua watches as you check your surroundings for the enemy, you give him a thumbs up once the coast is clear and you both dash for the bushes. Once you guys make it, you pull out your phone to check for Jeonghan’s location.

“Where is he?” Joshua whispers, looking around with wide eyes to make sure no one’s around. You curse to yourself once you realize he turned it off, having already assumed you’d check for it later. However, your eyebrows perk up in interest once you take notice of Chan’s location, “The flag is at the end of the street by the bushes, Chan was put in charge of it.”

You and Joshua are in an intense game of capture the flag with the rest of the group. Instead of physically tagging once you’re in enemy territory, the fourteen of you brought nerf guns to shoot each other. Almost half of your team is in jail right now, but you also have half of Jeonghan’s team in your prison.

which is your garage but shhh

You, Joshua, Seokmin and Minghao are the last ones in your team that haven’t gotten caught yet. Mingyu, Seungcheol and Jihoon got pelted by nerf bullets in their attempt to capture the flag. From what you know, Minghao is currently hiding out behind a garbage bin with the guys in his sight. He’s just waiting for the right time to go for a jailbreak since Jun won’t stop guarding it. While Seokmin is standing by your prisoners just in case someone from Jeonghan’s team decides to run in.

Then there’s you and Joshua, already in Jeonghan’s territory hiding behind a bush. You both ran in pretty easily without getting any attention from Seungkwan and Jun, but your real problem lies with Jeonghan and Chan. Those two are an unstoppable duo when it comes to games, but you and Joshua are impenetrable.

it’s a battle of the game gods.

“You ready to run in babe?” You ask, an excited smile taking over your features as you turn back to look at your boyfriend. His blonde hair is slightly wet from sweat, and his white shirt clings to his body. It is quite a sight but you won’t let that distract you. that’s a goddamn lie.

Joshua gives you a smirk, “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

You both run out of the bushes, heading towards the end of the street when nerf bullets begin to get shot at you. You and Joshua tuck yourselves behind a car, preparing your ammo when you hear Mingyu and Seungcheol begin shouting Minghao’s name. You peek over the hood of the car, finding Minghao shooting back at Jun and actually hitting him in the head.

“JAILBREAK!” Minghao yells, slamming his hand on the mailbox that was designated as their prison. Jihoon, Minghao and Mingyu scream in victory before running in your guys’ direction to help capture the flag. While Seungcheol gives you guys a thumbs up before running back to base to help Seokmin guard.

“Let’s FUCKING GO!” You shout as they get closer, and you all run towards the end of the street. Jeonghan looks up with an excited smile at the action, before he starts aiming at Mingyu.

The guys handle Jeonghan while you and Joshua run to find the hidden flag. As you get closer to the bushes, a nerf bullet zooms past your head and you look up from the ground to see Chan shooting at you both.

“Cover me!” You yell and Joshua immediately starts fighting back, preparing his ammo as he ducks to find cover behind the bushes. Eyes frantically searching for the neon yellow flag, you finally see it sticking out in a lavender flower bed.

“Yn, go!” Joshua yells and Chan casts his eyes in your direction, sporting an open-mouthed smirk as he prepares to aim at you.

You sprint in the direction of the flag, hearing Chan shout out in pain once Joshua starts shooting at him. Letting out a smile once the flag is within reach, you grab it, lifting it up out of the flower bed in victory.

“WE WON!” You scream while jumping up and down. Chan lets out a loud laugh once you start doing your winning dance, otherwise known as:

the floss. except you do it aggressively.

“FUCK YEAH!” Mingyu yells as the rest of your team runs down the street towards you guys, a tired Jeonghan and Jun following close behind.

Joshua runs up and lifts you up in a hug, and you laugh at his happy reaction. You throw your hands in the air, letting out a squeal when he sets you back down. You stare into each other's eyes for a moment before you press a quick kiss to his lips. His eyes widen at the fact that you initiated the kiss first, a blush rising to his cheeks a few seconds afterwards.

“Y-you. You kissed me first.”

“That I did.”

“That was the first time you’ve ever initiated the kiss.” Joshua gapes and you giggle at him, patting his sweaty head.

“That is indeed, true-”

“YOU GUYS ARE DATING?!” You and Joshua practically jump out of each other's hold, finding all twelve of the guys now staring at you two with wide eyes.

“Oh…”

“Shit.” Joshua finishes.

“You know, I really did not expect for today to end with the guys scolding us for not telling them that we’ve been dating for five months.” Joshua nods his head, drying his damp hair with a towel as you lay on his bed, scrolling aimlessly through your instagram.

“I’m more surprised at the fact that you initiated the kiss.” You groan, covering your eyes as your boyfriend laughs at your shy reaction.

“Why do you keep bringing that up!” You whine, peeking through your hands to see Joshua smiling at you. “Cause it’s a monumental moment in our relationship. Makes me feel all warm inside.” You roll your eyes at him, going back to looking at your social media.

“But yeah, it was our fault honestly, we should’ve told them when I first asked you out.” Joshua says, bringing up the previous topic as he places his towel on a hanger.

“I mean true, but I didn’t want them to feel awkward you know? I’m glad they were so accepting of it, even if we did get scolded for an hour straight while also being taught the importance of using protection.” You mutter, placing your phone onto Joshua’s nightstand. He slips off his slippers before giving you a big smile.

He practically leaps onto the bed, wrapping his arms around you and pressing soft kisses to your neck. You giggle at the feeling, poking his stomach so that he’ll back up a bit. He leaves one last kiss before leaning back to stare at you with a happy expression on his face.

“Someone’s happy tonight.” You state and he nods his head. “How can I not be? We fucking destroyed Jeonghan’s team today, and then you kissed me. That was the most epic part of my week honestly.”

“We had an hour long lecture on why we shouldn’t have kept our relationship a secret, then got a thirty minute talk on using protection during sex.” You deadpan, and Joshua frowns at you, muttering how you’re a party pooper.

“It was still the best part of my week, protection talk or not.” Joshua tells you, and you glance at him with a teasing smile.

“Even better than our at home kbbq extravaganza?”

“Even better.”

“How can me kissing you be better than our at home kbbq?” You ask with a frown and he rolls his eyes at you.

“Because kissing you is better than eating any grilled piece of meat, yn.”

You gasp, and Joshua gasps along with you. You both stare at each other, holding your pose for a moment longer before giggling into each other's faces. Joshua lets out a sigh, staring at you contentedly. You raise an eyebrow at his expression, feeling warmth flood your cheeks at his intense gaze, “What?”

“I love you.” Joshua whispers, reaching out and tucking a stray piece of hair behind your ear. A big smile breaks out and you cover your face with your hands, letting out a little squeal. Joshua laughs at your reaction, pulling you into his chest as he strokes your back.

“I love you too.” You mumble and he closes his eyes, a small smile still gracing his features.

He rubs circles onto your back until you fall asleep with a sleepy grin on your face. Joshua pulls away slightly when he notices your breathing evening out, and he chuckles at your dopey smile.

“You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Joshua mutters, moving some more stray hairs away from your face. He presses a soft kiss onto your forehead, before leaning back and turning off the light.

“Sweet dreams yn.”

#joshua hong x reader #joshua x reader #seventeen #seventeen scenarios #seventeen aesthetic #seventeen oneshot #seventeen x reader #seventeen joshua #joshua hong #joshua scenarios #joshua fluff #joshua oneshot #joshua au #joshua hong scenarios #joshua hong fluff #joshua hong oneshot #joshua hong au #hong jisoo x reader #hong jisoo fluff

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marvelfansince08love · 4 years

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“It’s you, you idiot. I’m in love with you!”

Pairing: Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Word count: 3060

Warning: My bad writing I guess

Prompt 13, “It’s you, you idiot. I’m in love with you!”

A/N: Van my darling, my best gal. I hope you enjoy this. I may have been inspired by your baking attempts with this prompt ngl x

Thank you to @canarypoint again you legend x

Also Tumblr really didn’t like me uploading this so I’m sorry if it’s all bunched together.

Tags: @missmonsters2

“It’s you, you idiot. I’m in love with you”

"Okay, I went to five different stores, nearly killed a guy and almost lost the checklist. However, I managed to find everything you needed to make that dish, Myshka" Nat says, rushing through the kitchen; both hands full of bags filled with ingredients. I wipe the bead of sweat from between my brow and sigh in relief, before leaning towards her and planting a quick kiss to her cheek.

"You are the best assassin and friend a girl could ask for" Nat fakes disgust as she wipes at her cheek.

"Yeah, yeah if I didn't like the idea of you trying to woo her so much. You'd be joining the guy at the store" she grumbles while helping me remove all the ingredients from the bags. We both make quick work at preparing the famous Chicken Paprikash dish and with Nat's amazing abilities at being able to read almost every language it almost seemed effortless.

If we both weren't so bad at cooking.

I keep an eye on the time, anticipating her arrival home. Wanda, Steve, Bucky and Sam had been sent on an undercover mission almost two weeks ago, the whole thing had been kept under the radar with only a few of us in the know.

"You think we have enough time, Nat?"

"Of course, Sam messaged me about half an hour ago. They'll be back in 2 hours that gives us plenty of time to cook this dish and help build up your courage to finally confess your undying love for our, Malen'kaya Ved'ma (little witch). Now stop pacing around, you're making me dizzy"

Since joining the Avengers over a year ago, I've gotten to know each of them very well, already knowing Natasha and Clint from our Shield days it was an easy transition into the great band of supers, that was until I met Wanda Maximoff. Her sparkling hazel eyes and long chestnut hair framing her beautiful face with that shy smile had me a goner from the moment I laid my eyes on her. After a few weeks of being with the team every day for training and team-bonding sessions, the more I realised how much fun and carefree Wanda could be. After speaking to Clint one drunken night about our blossoming friendship outside of the team buildings and training I was dumbfounded by how shocked he was to hear about that side of Wanda which they all only catch small glimpses off. According to Clint after losing her brother she was an empty shell of herself just moving through life as if it was a chore and not a gift to walk this earth.

I guess she just needed a reason to live again.

After that revelation I continued to spend time with her alone, I asked more about her and her life in Sokovia, her face lighting up talking about her family and all the traditions they would follow each year even if her and Pietro weren't overly fond of them. Some nights there were tears as she spoke fondly of her brother and her parents no matter how briefly they were mentioned. She would laugh at all the stories I would tell her about our shield adventures both on mission and around the base, her mouth wide and eyes bright with mischief as I relay the story about how me and Nat unscrewed the screws from one of the vents just enough for Clint to fall through right above Fury's office while he was in a meeting with the council. Since she's been away and radio silent, I've never felt so lost even with Natasha around trying her best to cheer me up and letting me win more sparring matches than ever before.

I take a deep breath in and settle my nerves before helping Nat continue to season the chicken.

"Okay so it says that we have to boil the rice in a non-stick pan? How do we tell the difference?" I look at her dumbfounded.

"For someone who's supposed to be the world’s most smartest, most deadliest assassin you sure are dumb" I state, I can feel her eyes burning into me. If looks could kill...

"Do you want my help or not?"

"No, no I need your help. Thank you Natalia" I say sweetly, smiling innocently at her. She rolls her eyes and continues with the rice.

Once everything is in the cooker and pan, we retreat to the kitchen island, a bottle of beer in hand as we talk about anything and everything. After some time had passed, I'm interrupted by Nat's hand indicating for me to stop talking as she sniffs at the air.

"What is that god awful smell?"

My eyes widen in fear as I start to notice the smoke coming from the pan. I race to grab the fire extinguisher while Nat tries desperately to turn everything off and open the kitchen window. I quickly release the white foam over the pan cutting the small fire off, as I step back my foot slips slightly on the wet floor, sending me crashing to the floor but not before I manage to hit Nat square in the face with the foam. I groan slightly at my now bruised ass and tenderly sit up, leaning against the counter behind me.We both sit in silence for a moment before bursting into laughter, Nat joining me on the floor, so we're shoulder to shoulder.

"Let's agree to never cook again".

"Agreed"

"God damn it, look at my shirt it’s ruined! I can't confess anything to her looking like this! She'd think I'm crazy!" I quickly unbuttoned my shirt revealing a thin, white tank top underneath.

"What the hell happened here?" The most angelic voice exclaims by the kitchen doorway, our eyes widen as we both come to the same conclusion.

She's back. Early.

I quickly scramble to my feet and try to adjust myself accordingly before sending her a beaming smile which quickly turns in a worrying frown after taking in her tired complexion, her hazel eyes no longer holding that bright twinkle whenever she smiles. A large cut visible across her right eyebrow and Sam standing behind her not looking any better.

"Oh my god, Wanda!" I race forward and delicately place my hands on either side of her face, my eyes scanning every inch of skin. She winces slightly before grasping my forearms gently and removing them away from her face.

"Oh Sam, how are you? You want me to help clean up that cut, maybe get you snack" I hear Sam mutter behind us rhetorically.I roll my eyes in good nature as Nat laughs behind me.

"I'm okay, Lumina mea (my light). You should see the other guy" she attempts a small grin before casting her eyes over to the mess that is the kitchen and Nat quietly trying to salvage the meal, with no real joy. I blush at hearing her native tongue slip through at the end of her sentence even if I don't understand the meaning behind the saying.

"Again, I'll ask, what the hell happened in here and why can I smell paprika?" Her cute button nose scrunches adorably as she takes in my crumbled-up shirt and Nat's wet face.

"Oh, well we uh.. decided to try and cook a meal for you guys. We know the mission was rough and wanted to surprise you all, we kind of got carried away" I grimace at my cowardly response, I can feel the disappointment in waves from Natasha's direction.

Okay so I'm not ready to come out with it yet, sue me.

"Oh, you could have waited until I got back and asked me to help. You know how much I love to make paprikash"I can see the hurt in her eyes even though she tries to brush it off with a small smile. She knows what a bad cook Nat is and how much she loves cooking for you both after a rough mission.

Great, you've also offended her.

Good going Y/N.

There's an awkward silence between the four of us before Wanda clears her throat and takes a step back towards the entrance way.

"I'm gonna go and get cleaned up, I'll see you both at the party tonight, yes?" She addressed us both, but her eyes stayed locked on mine. I blush slightly at the thought of her wanting my company.

Please she was addressing you both Y/N, as if you would ever stand a chance.

"Of course, Wanda, we wouldn't miss it" Nat answers for us as I continue to stare at her. I quickly avert my eyes and nod in acknowledgement.

"We'll be there"

Once she leaves a dry towel hits me square in the chest, I instantly catch it while looking up in the direction of the thrower.

"Come on lover girl, let's clean this mess up and order a take away. I'm starving. Also, Sam "we'll be there in two hours" can you not map out a timescale"

"Listen I lost a lot of blood tryna get out of that place, forgive me please" he grumbles jokingly as he sulks out of the room, mumbling about never getting any attention for how badass he is.

***

A few hours pass by and before I know it, I'm making the final touches to my makeup. A loud knock echoes in the room before Nat swings it wide open and struts in looking like a red-headed goddess. Her dark green off the shoulder dress clinging to her in all the right places. With one more stroke of my mascara brush I turn and face my best friend with a grin.

"You ready?"

"If you need me tonight, I'll be behind the bar, slowly drinking my boredom away" "Hey, am I such bad company?!"

"Well youuuu, missy is going to charm your way into Maximoff’s pants. Therefore, you will be too busy to entertain me tonight, Myshka"

"Nat, I don't think tonight is the right time, you saw how she looked in the kitchen today. She doesn't need me pestering her all night"

"Actually, it's the perfect time! Go an' comfort her and if you manage to slip in that you love her then great!" I roll my eyes in good nature before making my way to my door.

"Come on, Romanoff. I need a drink"

***

The party is too loud and overly crowded with people none of us really know with drinks flowing around every part of the room.

"Why does he always feel the need to throw a party every time we finish a mission?"

"Would he be Tony if he didn't? You gotta give him credit though this party is insane" Nat murmurs beside me, making me chuckle in agreement.

My eyes are already scanning for the beautiful brunette avenger. Nat notices me searching and shoves me forward slightly.

"Go find her, I'll be by the bar" with one last shove, I'm left by myself looking out into the crowd.

My eyes finally land on the brown-haired beauty, I bite my lip as I take in her form. A long black flowy dress falls just past her knees with the straps of the dress sitting comfortably just off the shoulder, giving me a great view of her cleavage. Her hair hangs curled and loose over her shoulders, her red lipstick perfectly in place.

God she's beautiful.

As I continue to take her in, I notice an unfamiliar arm resting around her waist. I look up to identify the persons whose arm it is and my heart stops as I witness this man lean his mouth to her ear and whisper some bullshit that makes her laugh out, he pulls back clearly satisfied with the response he got from her. As if sensing a presence her eyes turn and rest upon me, a soft smile forming on those red lips. I quickly drop my gaze and turn away from her, heading straight to the bar; trying hard to blend into the crowd.

"Why the sour face?" Nat questions as she instantly hands me a bottle from behind the bar.

"You didn't tell me she was seeing someone" I sulk to her before taking a big gulp from the bottle, cringing slightly at the bitter taste. Nat's eyebrows pinch together as if confused by my statement. She leans forward slightly over the bar to peer over my shoulder to take a good look at Wanda and the mystery man.

"Who? Matthews? Please that guy wishes he could have her. She's just being polite Y/N" Nat tries to reassure me, but I can't seem to remove the image out of my head.

"It's not like I stood a chance anyway" I grumble grabbing the vodka shot from Nats hand and letting the burning liquid flow down my throat. After a few hours of drinking with Nat; who’s now joined me on the other side of the bar, I start to feel the effects of the alcohol hit me as I laugh out loud from the stupid stories Nat seems to be sharing. Any thoughts of Wanda and her mystery guy fading into the background of my mind.

Or that's what I keep telling myself.

In my daze, I quickly lose my balance on the bar stool but before I could hit the floor, I feel a familiar strong arm wrap itself around me, steadying me on the stool.

"Careful Myshka, you'll end up on your ass" Nat teases as I start to lean heavily against her, sleep fighting to take over.

"Also, just to let you know Maximoff has been looking over here all night and throwing daggers at me, similar to the one she's throwing right now" Nat says clearly amused at the concept. She leans herself further towards me and traces her finger up and down my arm slightly, my eyes widen in surprise before she leans in and whispers:

"Just got with it"

Before I have a chance to question her, I feel a warm body pressed into my back. I gasp slightly at the faint smell of cherries and forest, the smell consuming my senses. I close my eyes briefly knowing that smell all too well. Her lips brush slightly against my ear, making me shiver.

"Can I talk to you in private, Y/N" I barely have time to nod before her arm is wrapping tightly around me and escorting away from Natasha and out of the room. Once we are alone, she releases her hold on me and starts to pace in front of me, her dress sway slightly with each turn. I stand watching her waiting for her to gather her thoughts, I bite my lip anxiously debating whether to make the first move. She stops suddenly and takes a deep breath in before releasing it into the open air and turning to look at me with a heartbroken expression.

"You've been avoiding me all night" I gape at her forwardness before replying defensively:

"No, I haven't, maybe you've been a little preoccupied with prince charming on steroids in there to notice me at all!" She frowns slightly, almost bashfully.

"You mean Matthews? Y/N that guy has a brain of a mouse. I was simply being polite. Anyway, you are one to talk! Are you and Nat ever going to go public because the way shes’s being all handsy with you tonight, you may as well let everyone know!" Now it's my turn to gape at her in shock becoming slightly annoyed.

I take a step towards her slightly wanting to keep her full attention on me as I feel the word vomit slowly creeping its way up my throat.

"Are you being serious right now?! Me and Nat are best friends that's never even been a thought! Are you so blind to see Wanda?! You think I'd go and pick up your favourite flowers every Thursday even though they make my nose itch and makes me sneeze because I thought they'd brighten up your bedroom? You have plants covering every window sill! You think I'd attempt to cook a dish that I can barely understand let alone cook and make a complete mess of it for just anyone?! Wanda you are always in my thoughts every day, the past two weeks have been torturing for me wondering when you'd be home. I missed you all the damn time! I missed our nights in where it was just the two of us watching crap reality television because even though we make fun of it we both secretly love the drama" She stares at me in shock, her lip twitching into a smile ever so slightly at the last part of my confession.

Her silence clearly an invitation for me to continue:

"But you really want to know what I missed about those nights while you've been gone. I missed watching your beautiful face scrunch up slightly as you slowly doze off with your head falling onto my shoulder. I would stay sitting in that upright position for hours if it meant keeping you like that, close to me. Wanda there could never be a me and Nat... you wanna know why? It's you, you idiot. I'm in love with you!"

Her emerald green eyes drop to the floor, suddenly finding it very interesting before a wide smile settles on her red lips and her eyes slowly make their way to meeting mine.

“You love me?”

“Yes I love you, you idiot” I whisper, shuffling slightly feeling uncomfortable and exposed with my feelings.

Before I can turn and hide away from my embarrassing confession, I feel warm, soft lips press hard against my own, the taste of vanilla chapstick lingers on my lips as I brush my tongue gently against her bottom lip making her gasp, granting me access. Our tongues clash, both fighting for dominance before pulling away slightly, my teeth catching her bottom lip gently and tugging at the soft skin softly before letting go with a small pop.

"If I'm an idiot, I'll be an idiot who’s in love with you too" she whispers breathlessly into the open air between us, her forehead resting gently against my own.

I smile.

#wanda maximoff x female!reader #my prompts #prompt request #wanda maxim #wanda #fluff #i hope it's good

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the-delta-42 · 5 years

Text

Champion

Based on @lenoreofraven‘s ask response

Ladybug groaned as Rena and Carapace hit the side of a building. Roi Singe, Pegase and Viperion were all nursing similar wounds. Bunnix was clutching her arm and Chat had gone to recharge and bring Queen Bee out of retirement. Ryuuko landed beside Ladybug.

“Any ideas on where the Akuma is?” Ryuuko asked, noticing the stressed look on Ladybug’s face.

“No, and I hope Chat is fast, because I doubt that we can hold on for much longer.” Said Ladybug, rubbing her face, “I know you and Chloe don’t see eye-to-eye, but we are literally pulling as many assets as we can.”

“You were off by two letters.” Said Kagami, frowning, “Do you think it might be in their helmet?”

“Which one?” Came the sarcastic response.

Ladybug could feel her headache getting worse, a couple of thuds behind her and Empress allowed Ladybug to know Chat and Queen Bee had arrived.

“So, what did I miss?” Queen Bee asked, as the Akuma took a swipe at Chat.

“Akuma showed up, we showed up, wiped the floor with us for a bit, Mayura showed up, Mayura left, Senti-monster appeared, Chat went to get you, I have a migraine and it’s not even lunch.” Said Ladybug, unaware of how the spots on the back of her hands started glowing.

“Akuma vanished.” Said Chat, as the Akuma disappeared.

Ladybug snapped.

“OH, FOR FUCKS SAKE!” Ladybug yelled, “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! WE OUT NUMBER THEM AND SOMEHOW WE’RE LOSING!”

Ladybug didn’t see the looks of fear and horror on her teammates faces, or the camera that was recording her live, or the Akuma, who’d hidden underground, wet themselves in fear. She also didn’t see one of the spots on her suit fly off and into the city.

Nadja could only blink as The Heroes of Paris slowly picked themselves up, as their Leader put the fear of god into everyone in a three-mile radius of her. Ladybug then pitched forwards, being caught by Chat Noir.

“And this, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Said Nadja’s co-host, “is why sleep is important.”

There was a nervous chuckle, as the camera caught Ladybug coming too, Ladybug’s head shot up with a light blue mask around it.

“What the hell?” Said Ladybug, as the thoughts of another filled her head.

“I could ask you the same.” Came a voice from the other end, “I wasn’t expecting any visitors.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t intending on intruding.” Said Ladybug, as her teammates watched her exchange with slight concern.

“It’s fine.” Said the person, “Is everything alright?”

“Akuma attack, this one is a bit more trouble than we first thought.” Said Ladybug, her mind then freezing, “Wait, guy did I make an Akuma?”

“Yeah,” Said Bunnix, “Could’ve used it earlier actually.”

“Do you need some help?” Asked the voice.

“Yeah,” Said Ladybug, the blue mask was shaped like the shell of a Ladybug, it glowed, “I’m sorry to bother you with this, but would you be willing to help. I mean, it’s perfectly fine if you don’t, I’ve never actually given people powers before and-”

“Paris is my home, despite my situation,” Said the Voice, “The Akuma is fire themed right?”

“Yeah, a Fire Chief got angry because no one listened to his safety drills.” Said Ladybug, thinking on the Akuma.

“So, grant powers that will counteract or help counteract his.” Said the Voice.

Ladybug thought on the powers that would counteract fire, before smiling.

“Alright, I believe having power over foam, water and CO2 would work best,” Said Ladybug, “Would you like to choose your name, or shall I give you one?”

“I think you should come up with that one.” Said the Voice, a humorous tilt to it.

“Alright, Extinguisher.” Said Ladybug, before the Akuma reappeared.

“I think I know where to find you.” Said Extinguisher, as Ladybug and the rest of the team turned back to the Akuma.

Ladybug and her team jumped into action, Pegase opening a portal behind the Akuma, allowing a jet of foam cover them up to their neck.

“Amazing how simple things are when you have the right tools.” Said Ladybug, walking up to the Akuma, grabbing the badge on his jacket and passing it off to Chat.

Extinguisher waited for Chat to Destroy the Akumatized object and Ladybug to Purify the Akuma before handing over a slip of paper to Ladybug, allowing her to remove her spot from it. Ladybug walked away and picked up the Lucky Charm, a bucket, and threw it into the air, casting the cure.

“I think we should head home.” Said Ladybug, turning back to the man that was Extinguisher, “Do you need a lift?”

The man shook his head, “No, I think I make my way back to my doorway from here.”

Ladybug froze, “I’m sorry, but what do you mean by that?”

“I’m homeless.” Said the man, “There’s a reason I was so ready to help, since I’m going to be sleeping out here tonight.”

The man started walking away, a slight limp in his step. Everyone slowly turned and looked at Chloe, who looked at the others.

“What’s your name?” Chloe yelled, making the man stop.

“Phil Marks.” Said the man, before he started walking away again.

Chloe jogged after him, “What job did you have before you were homeless?”

“I was a safeguarding officer at a school, before it was shut down.” Said Phil, a slight wince.

“I think my school is looking for a safeguarding officer.” Said Chloe, making Phil stop, “I’m sure they’d be more than willing to help you get back on your feet.”

Phil turned and faced Chloe, “What’s the schools name?”

“College Francis Dupont.” Said Chloe, making Phil laugh.

“I doubt they’d accept my application.” Said Phil, “Considering the Paedophile ring that was busted at my last workplace.”

Chat’s eyes lit up, “That’s who you are, you’re the guy that tipped the police off.”

“I suppose.” Said Phil, as a small dog ran up to him, “Hey Chester, let’s get you some grub, eh?”

Chloe was quiet, before she cancelled her transformation and pulled her phone out of her pocket. The team slowly dispersed, Ladybug being the last one to leave. The last Ladybug saw of the two, Chloe was having a conversation with someone on her phone and Phil was fishing change out of his pocket to get Chester some food.

/*/

Marinette yawned as she took her seat next to Alya, with her best friend pushing a cup of coffee towards her. Marinette took the cup in her hands, before Ms. Bustier walked into the class, with a tearful Lila behind her.

“This is going to be good.” Marinette sarcastically muttered, before she started to drink her coffee.

“Good morning, Class.” Said Ms. Bustier, tersely, “Lila has something she has to share with us.”

The class focused on Lila, who looked like she didn’t want to be there.

“I-I’ve been lying.” Said Lila, making Marinette spit her coffee out.

“The new safeguarding officer contacted Lila’s parents,” Said Ms. Bustier, stiffly, “and apparently Lila had been telling them the school had been closed.”

“Ouch.” Said Marinette, before looking down at her coffee, “I need a bigger cup.”

The rest of Marinette’s day was filled with her Classmate apologising to her and how they were going to make it up to her.

A week later, Marinette and a couple other Class Representatives were called to the Safeguarding office. They had been trying to get a trip to the catacombs of Paris, followed by a tour of Notre Dame. Marinette knocked on the office door and a familiar voice said come in.

Marinette opened the door and found Phil Marks shuffling through a wad of papers, while Chester lay at his feet.

“Ah, Ms. Dupain-Cheng,” Said Mr. Marks, “I assume you’re here about the Notre Dame trip.”

Marinette’s heart swelled, now knowing that her team helped someone outside of being Akumatised.

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pollylynn · 4 years

Photo

Title: Hallowed WC: 1400

He sort of means it at first. He’s sort of serious.

“I’m not suggesting a full-on exorcism or anything.” He follows her out of the break room, casting a genuinely suspicious eye at the mug she’s sipping from so blithely. “Just like . . . a ritual cleansing of some kind.”

“Maybe a sage smudging.” She drops into her chair. Her delivery is so deadpan—and he’s so very nearly actually concerned about this—that he almost falls for it. Almost, but she cracks a slightly mean smile. “Or—hey—what about Chacaw Te? You must still have your mummy-curse expert on speed dial.”

“You can’t tell me it wasn’t unnerving.” He glances behind him at his own chair before he sits, as if it might suddenly reduce itself to its component parts again. “The very idea that someone would use coffee as a poison-delivery system.”

“But no one did use it. Coffee was a total red herring.” She grabs her mug and takes an extra-long slug. She lets her eyes slip closed and moans a little, which, by the way, is completely mean. “Besides, I thought you liked a good poisoning.”

“Well, of course I do.” He cracks open the soda he does not want and curses as it foams over, soaking the thigh of his jeans. She makes him suffer for a long beat before she retrieves a handful of napkins from a desk drawer and hands them over with a smug look. “Who doesn’t love a poisoning?”

“The victim,” she says loudly for the benefit of nearby rubberneckers. “Victim’s family, other loved ones . . .”

“My point is,” he leaps in to stem the tide of parties who are not, in fact, big fans of poisoning and to bring the conversation back on track, because he’s sort of serious, “there was a near-miss with a coffee-related tragedy—”

“I wouldn’t call it a near miss.” She does some more coffee-related theater, raising the mug and tilting her head forward to inhale the aroma. “After all, poor Joe McUsic died with vending machine coffee in his stomach.”

He’s slightly less serious about it after that. He’s slightly more serious about tweaking back, given that she’s seen fit to poke fun at his completely legitimate concerns about cosmic insults to a beverage that’s damned near sacred to the two of them.

Phase One is complete replacement of the break room’s existing stores of coffee and coffee-related supplies, ranging from filters to sugar cubes, with entirely fresh stock. She catches him—he lets her catch him—pouring the pot brewed from the very last of the open coffee into a huge thermos.

“Castle, what are you . . .?” She trails off as the freight elevator dings and a parade of delivery people with handcarts emerges and heads straight for them.

“Here!” He screws the lid on the thermos and beckons. “We’re in here.” She stands aside, slack jawed as he orchestrates their entry, then throws the cabinets above and below the counter wide. “Load ‘em up, ladies and gentlemen!”  

“You . . .” She watches in confusing as the team makes quick work of the boxes and bags and packs their carts are loaded up with. “Where . . . where did it all go?”

“Donated. Shelters, soup kitchens, a few AA groups—all very grateful.” He allows himself smile that’s as close to smug as he dares. “It’s all about karmic balance.”

“Karmic. Balance?”

The words come through her teeth. He’s pretty sure she’d like to yell. He’s pretty sure she has a plan for some pretty elaborate yelling as soon as he finishes slipping each member of the crew a generous cash tip and they’re all off on their merry way, so he grabs his thermos and follows hard on their heels.

“Not just yet.” He’s positively jogging for the passenger elevator, lofting his thermos above his head. “The last pot goes to some of the regulars down on the street.” The elevator, for once, arrives exactly when he needs it to. “Nippy for late March,’ he says as the doors close with her positively astonished face on the other side.

By the time things enter Tweaking Phase Two he’s more or less forgotten that he was ever concerned about dark forces swirling around their elixir of life. Tweaking Phase Two is more or less tweaking for its own sake, because she’s delightfully annoyed that she never did yell at him for Phase One, largely because she couldn’t come up with a coherent thing to yell at him for.

So he brute forces it. He strolls in—attended—on a morning she should be all tied up with paperwork. The fates are kind once again, and she’s on the phone with someone she obviously can’t hang up on as he and his companion pass by. He gives her a saucy wave and braces himself when he senses her closing in.

“Ah, Beckett. Here to watch the master at work?” He steps aside and behind him, a technician has the espresso machine largely dismantled, its parts carefully laid out on a soft white cloth spread over the counter. “Can you believe it’s exactly time for this bad boy’s two-year maintenance? I, for one, will sleep better knowing that everything’s been given the once over, and there are no unpleasant surprises waiting for any of us when we—”

The kick to his shin is so hard, so lightning fast, so utterly startling that she’s already back at her desk before he even registers the pain.

“Worth it,” he mutters tightly. He bends down to rub it, waving off the technician’s questioning look. “So worth it.”

Phase Three is the most nerve wracking, because it’s time to make up. He’s not seriously worried about bad coffee juju any more, but they haven’t shared a break room cappuccino since Joe McUsic and the not-poisoned cup.

He goes on a night he knows she’s working late. Ryan, as requested, sends him a text when he and Esposito are about to knock off and she’s still clearing the inbox. She doesn’t hear the elevator, and he makes his way across the dim bullpen as quietly as he can.

“Break time,” he says. It makes her jump a little. That’s ok, though. Making up really ought to involve a little tweaking.

“What kind of break?” she asks. It’s a little sour, but that’s mostly because she’s tired. It’s mostly because she’s been at things too long. “Aren’t you off the stuff until balance is restored to the force?”

“Come on.” He nods toward the break room and sets off, sure—pretty sure anyway—that she’ll follow.

She does, though not right away. That’s fine for his purposes. He has his string of tea lights mostly set up around the base of the espresso machine.

“You know that’s a fire hazard,” she says from the doorway at the exact moment he flicks open the Zippo lighter. “Not to mention contraband.”

“The Elder Gods can only be appeased by risk.” He touches the flame to the last two wicks. “Have a seat.”

She shakes her head but complies. He busies himself at the machine, pulling them a pair of shots each and steaming a generous helping of milk.

“Would you blow those out before we have a tactical team in here?” she grouses, but her eyes light up as he turns with two brimming cups in hand.

“Yes, yes.” He sets a cup in front of her and one in front of the seat next to hers. He registers her sniff of annoyance as she realizes the cups are brand new—as she does the math and correctly figures that all the cups, for the espresso machine at least, are new. “Their work is nearly done anyway.”

He turns back to the counter and huffs out all of the little candles, save the one he carries to set on the table between them. She’s laughing quietly with her hands wrapped around the cup. She’s waiting not so patiently for him to sit, so he does. She dips her head to take the first eager sip, but he stops her.

 “No, no, no!”

She halts with the cup a mere inch from her lips and gives him a perfect murderous glare.

“Detective, please.” He assumes an injured look. “The final, cleansing step.” He inclines his head toward the candle. “Make a wish.”

A/N: I don’t know what came over me with this one. Hmmm.

images via homeofthenutty

#Castle #Caskett #Castle: Season 3 #Castle: Law and Murder #Kate Beckett #Richard Castle #Kevin Ryan #Fic #Fanfic #Fanfiction #Fan Fic #Fan fiction #Writing #Hmmm

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mofmans · 5 years

Text

Bloodshed and Spite

Reverse AU - Magi!Hakuryuu and King Vessel!Judar

Second Reverse AU fic after Childhood Amnesia

Judar’s metal vessel is being a bitch to wield. Sure, it makes his spear look all shiny and edgy, the blade dripping with a clear, water-like liquid that could paralyze or kill a man with a small cut, but anyone could get to that level with a metal vessel almost instantly. This is some baby level djinn powers, the kind of thing that someone would use when they want to conserve their magoi for the real battle. But he wants the real thing, the real power of letting the djinn’s magic consume him, embody him.

“Djinn of Bloodshed and Spite, dwell in me- eugh, fuck this!” Judar slashes the tree closes to him in frustration. The wound pales into white as foam bubbles up where the sap would be and starts to spread through the bark and inside the tree trunk. Venom drips from the point of the blade and leaves small puddles of dead grass below him.

“That tree’s supposed to be four hundred years old. People are going to be upset.”

Judar holds the spear up in a resting position and forces the venom to stop, freezing the drips of venom into icicles that hang off the base end of the blade. He stares right at what looks like empty space and thin air, “You’re one to talk, Hakuryuu. How much of this palace has been rebuilt again and again because of what you did? And why are you even making yourself invisible right now? I thought that wasn’t your style.”

The air and the scenery ahead of him waver as the illusion dissolves and Hakuryuu’s standing not far from him. “It’s practice. I’m working on my light magic. Sometimes it’s good to use something besides sheer force.”

Judar laughs so much he almost falls back on his spear, “Wh- you? Using something besides sheer force? You got the delicacy of a mutated war elephant that’s out for revenge! What can you even do with light, I mean I guess you could burn people with it but that’s much easier to do with fire.”

Hakuryuu huffs and crosses his arms, “I could say the same about you and how you’re wielding Caacrinolaas. Just watching you makes me cringe.”

“What are you talking about? I’m just warming up!” Judar readies himself in a lunging stance and the toxic waters swirl around the blade of the spear, “Come on, fight me! The djinn equip will come easily if I have an actual target!”

Hakuryuu gives the spear a look before looking Judar straight in the eyes.

“Hm. No.”

“What.”

“I said no.” Hakuryuu walks closer, barely dodging the blade and the ring of toxic water around it. He pat Judar on the shoulder with a firm grip. “Caacrinolaas didn’t particularly like my involvement. Which just means you’ll have to figure this out yourself.”

Judar groans, “Don’t remind me.”

“You’re more like a household than a king vessel.” Caacrinolaas retracted his claws lazily, just to show there’s no threat to him around.

“He is my choice and you will lend your powers to him.”

“…It’s almost a shame that you’re a magi. You hold great potential for a king vessel. But… I’ll respect your choice. I’m tired of waiting in this dungeon all day.” The bestial djinn yawned and Judar wanted to throw the spear right into one of its eight eyes but Hakuryuu placed his hand on Judar’s shoulder. The magi didn’t say anything but he understood. It didn’t matter how they gets the first metal vessel. All that matters is that he gets stronger.

Judar huffed and let Caacrinolaas inhabit his spear.

Hakuryuu lets go of Judar’s shoulder, “You’ll get it soon enough. Otherwise I’ll just have to get rid of you.” He smirks at the end and Judar can’t help but to smile back.

“Yeah right, you’ll never be able to get rid of me.”

“Unfortunately.” The magi can talk with a very disappointed tone while grinning.

Judar’s smile falls as Hakuryuu walks out of view and he holds his spear horizontally to look at the eight-point star forever etched into the blade. It’s glowing softly but it’s just a sign that it’s just a tool to be used, a power to be borrowed.

“What were you trying to tell me, you stupid djinn…” Judar mutters at the star emblem. Of course, it doesn’t answer. It’ll never answer. All he has is a faint moment too short with a djinn that doesn’t even respect him. No, he shouldn’t even bother to give a thought about it, fuck, it might have never even happened. Why would he have been in an empty space without Hakuryuu in between the moment of leaving the dungeon and coming back? It doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, Judar doesn’t need to think about it at all. It might stick onto the back of his head unpleasantly at moments but that’s nothing too hard to ignore.

“Ah. you’re here.”

“Huh-?” Judar was sure he was falling off of a crumbling dungeon just a second ago, but now he’s just. Sitting here. On a completely white floor of a completely white space with only the beast of a djinn that barely accepted him. “Wait, shouldn’t I be back on Earth or something?”

“You… you should.” Caacrinolaas scratches his head with a claw, “Well. I guess we have some time to talk since the magi isn’t here. I’ll be quick.” He said except he took the time to sit down in a refined pose, “I wouldn’t trust the magi if I were you.”

“What. I thought you djinns were supposed to respect him, think he’s some great mage of creation and all that shit.”

“That’s… usually the case. But I remember you referring to him as “Your Highness” at some point.”

“Uh, yeah.” What is this djinn going on about and wasting his time? “He’s a prince of Kou.”

“That’s exactly the issue. A magi is supposed to be one who chooses a king, there is no way that one should be borne of royal blood. Something is off, king candidate. And I can’t do anything about it so I’m telling you to keep your eyes and ears open.”

Judar frowns, “Oh, so you’re calling me a king candidate now? You were calling me a household just a second ago!”

Caacrinolaas stands up to growl but forces himself to sit back down, “Tell me then. Did the magi choose you as a king candidate or for you to do his bidding?”

Judar never had a chance to answer then, nor say anything else to understand what in the world Caacrinolaas was trying to tell him. The moment vanished so quickly. He can’t exactly ask Hakuryuu to summon the djinn for him either, considering, well, the issue was about the magi. All he has is the engraving of the eight point star, the reflection of his own blank, unreadable expression, and the centuries old cherry blossom, still rotting slowly from the inside out.

“I heard your retainer was able to conquer a dungeon.”

Hakuryuu’s jaw clenches at the sight of the woman who oversees his entire life. The woman who would dictate every step of his life from birth to death if she could. But she won’t. He won’t let her. No matter the cost.

She smiles and continues, “I’m glad you’re starting to take initiative, though I would have preferred if you did this with your brothers earlier.”

“Cousins.” Hakuryuu snaps. Gyokuen places a hand on his shoulder, only for him to swat it away. “I don’t see why I would want to freely raise dungeons for them. Judar’s my retainer and I can’t create a household so I need a metal vessel for him if I want him to be of any use.”

“Hm… is that so.” She hums in a tone between playful and homicidal, “How very mature of you to do that for yourself. As expected of my favorite child.”

Hakuryuu wants to say something to snap back at her. Something like you say that to everyone, except she doesn’t. She truly feels favoritism towards him, whatever her twisted version of favoritism is. She’ll tell him she loves him, and when he tells her she doesn’t know what that means, she’ll smile and tell him he doesn’t know either.

“I hope you don’t favor him too much though, family always comes first.” The venom that drips from her words are stronger than anything Caacrinolaas can taint, “The djinn that you raised for Judar seems quite strong for combat, I’m sure that would suffice.”

Hakuryuu’s not sure why she ever cared about what he did so long as it didn’t interfere with what she wanted. As long as he plays the role of his mother’s son when it suited her the best, “Of course not. But the others seem to be doing just fine with the djinns that they have. And Kouen already has three.”

Gyokuen stares at him.

Hakuryuu stares back.

“...Did I also mention that you’ve grown up to be so pretty?” She pats him on the cheek but he refuses to give her anything other than a dead, cold stare, “Sorry. I mean handsome. Such a strong, handsome young man. I know I can trust you when Kou needs your powers,” Hakuryuu wants to stab her, crush her, burn her alive when her mouth curls up like that. He wants to hear her pain, feel the bones inside her snap and watch her limbs fall limp before it gets crushed beyond recognition.

Instead she walks away, a full line of those veiled magic puppets following behind her. It’d be so easy to cast a spell, try to wipe all those despicable puppets all at once and then aim straight for the old witch’s head. Except it won’t work. It never works. Every time he’s tried to do something even slightly malevolent, Gyokuen would stop him in his tracks with that gelatin smile slathered on her face and ask why he’s doing this. And every time his mind would go blank, the echoes of hatred still reverberating down to his fingers, but with no words to manifest it. Even now, as Hakuryuu stares at the old witch walk away, he feels like his mind is about to leave his body.

He makes the servants prepare a bath for him that night. Once he lets himself soak in the hot water, his thoughts start to regain coherence. It’s all that dark magic the organization used on him when he was younger, all those things they did for the sake of “making him stronger.” All it did was make it harder to focus without losing himself, makes it harder to remember all the details he plans out so he either has to rely on Judar or his own notes. He starts scrubbing himself with an exfoliating towel.

Judar. Hakuryuu has no doubt that his retainer will get over the hump with Caacrinolaas soon. After all, they both run off of spite, off an overwhelming need to get stronger, to prove someone wrong. It’s what keeps them from lying down and never getting up again. But while Hakuryuu’s shitty memory forces him to try, stop, take notes, and try again, accumulating details here and there, scattered like puzzle pieces that are only solved in clumps but never united together, Judar just goes. He charges once he has a target and doesn’t bother with shit like stopping and contemplating.

“It’s your job to ruminate about difficult things, just tell me what you decide in the end.” He’d always say. And Hakuryuu would always yank at Judar’s braid in response. It’s amusing how many different little habits of interaction they’ve formed over the years. Sure, he’d yank Judar’s hair like that when the retainer makes a slightly annoying comment, but Hakuryuu always used two tugs to wake Judar up when they were little kids and it was still okay for them to sleep in the same room. And Judar would always flick the temple of Hakuryuu’s head when he starts to space out too much, and yes it always hurts more than the retainer intended, but it does the job.

He doesn’t let himself indulge in those thoughts for long. Now that Judar has a metal vessel, they don’t have time for nonsense like that. One metal vessel means only one kind of magic, which, while acid water and toxins can be versatile, it’s still severely limited. As soon as Judar can properly execute a djinn equip, Hakuryuu will have to raise another dungeon for him, or perhaps send him off to one of the dungeons still standing idly, waiting for the right vessel to take them.

Hakuryuu scrubs his arms until they’re bright red and almost ready to bleed. Right. Vessel. He can’t afford to give any thought about Judar except planning ways to make him stronger. He needs the perfect vessel, one that could take on any member of his family. Even Kouen. Even Gyokuen.

His legs and torso are also scrapped red, and it almost works well enough to scrape all the other distractions too. He doesn’t have time for sentimentalism. Judar will be powered up to be the perfect vessel, and it’ll be through him that they can purge the organization from Kou. Only then will he feel freed of the role of his mother’s son, his mother’s magi.

#magi #juhaku #judar #ren hakuryuu #fritzi attempts to write

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shortend · 5 years

Text

Scooby-Doo meets the TMNT

So, I've decided my new dream is to write and direct a direct to DVD “Scooby-Doo meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie featuring the original 80's turtles. The Gang heads to New York for sightseeing and get interrupted by mutants committing crimes. While trying to apprehend the suspects they end up crossing paths with the TMNT who were also responding. They all head to the sewer lair to regroup and share their findings.

VELMA: Those aren't masks, are they?

LEONARDO: Nope.

DONATELLO: Say, she's good. Solid deductive reasoning.

RAPHAEL: What gave it away, the lack of foam rubber or the beautifully articulated mouths? Even Henson can't build 'em like this.

VELMA: I need a moment.

FRED: There will be time for that later. First we need to figure out--

Fred tries to put a comforting hand on Velma's shoulder and is startled by her abrupt scream.

VELMA: (Screaming) I need a moment!

Fred freezes, withdraws his hand, and silently mouths “Okay” as he takes a step back and gives Velma her space.

Wide angle of the whole cast. Velma turns her back to the camera and puts her hands on her hips. Everyone stands awkwardly, trying not to stare but unsure of exactly what to do. Most of them are fidgety or visibly uncomfortable with the silence. After a moment of slow breathing and some neck stretches, Velma turns back to the group.

VELMA: Okay, you were saying?

----

Fred and Leonardo both try to take charge and struggle for dominance. Master Splinter suggests they track down the Shredder, because obviously.

----

MICHAELANGELO: Hey, dudes. While the fearless leaders over there hash out the deets, what say we partake of some major deliciousness of the pizza variety.

SHAGGY: Like, if we ever say no to an offer like that, we were probably replaced by impostors as some sort of devious master plan to take over the world. Lead the way.

SCOOBY-DOO: Reah!

MICHAELANGELO: You're in luck, dudes. The kitchen is totally stocked so take your pick. We got fresh pizza, frozen pizza, do-it-yourself pizza, leftover pizza, room-temperature pizza, week-old pizza, pizza we don't remember ordering, gummie pizzas, pizzas with gummies, pizza sandwiches, English muffin pizzas, breakfast pizzas, which are basically pepperoni pancakes, oooooorrrrr...

Michaelangelo gestures to the immense wall-sized pizza oven with pride.

MICHAELANGELO: We could use the patent-pending Dona-langelo Mega-Delux Hyper Oven X to bake our own giant pizza and use other pizzas as toppings! Donatello made it himself to my exact specifications. Big. And awesome.

Shaggy and Scooby look unimpressed and stand with their arms crossed in judgment.

SHAGGY: Like, okay, so I know what you were going for, Michaelangelo, but if you had this thing over here, why didn't you just lead with that? As if there were any other option. Kind of wasting our time.

SCOOBY-DOO: Reah. We're burning dayright.

ALL: When we could be cooking pizza!

MICHAELANGELO: Hey, Donatello! It's supervision time, bud!

DONATELLO: Just a quick warning in advance. This is a delicate prototype and it still has a few bugs to work out. At any point in the process either it or the pizzas could become sentient and try to destroy humanity, so have these books on ethics and moral philosophy at the ready just in case.

*Hi-jinks*

----

APRIL: Go get 'em, guys!

DAPHNE: Aren't you coming?

APRIL: What? Of course not! Not when there's a hot scoop like this. I gotta get to the office and fetch my cameraman.

DAPHNE: Cameraman? As in... television camera man? As in... television?

DAPHNE: Let's split up, gang. I'll go with April to the news station. You guys all go do that other thing you were talking about that’s also important. Go get 'em!

----

DAPHNE: So, is this how things usually go? The guys stumble onto something, tell you, you consult your contacts on the force, confirm your sources, alert the media, they disregard your seemingly outlandish claims despite overwhelming evidence, and then you jump into the fray at the last minute to help the turtles save the day?

APRIL: In times like this usually Vern and I, that's my cameraman, just circle the city in the helicopter or the van and wait for something to explode, or a giant monster to show up. Ooo! Or portals to other dimensions! Those are always popular. Sometimes we get footage, sometimes we don't. Then I just wait for the guys to stumble across something else. Most of the time it's the other way around.

DAPHNE: You stumble onto a case during one of your investigations, but it's too time sensitive to go to the police so you contact your vigilante allies and kick down doors together until you reach the heart of the matter?

APRIL: Wow, you make journalism sound so... empowering! Is it really like that where you're from?

DAPHNE: Not exactly. Just in movies and stuff.

APRIL: I see. I don't really have time for that sort of thing. I'm usually just going from one place to the next. I tend to do fluff pieces for events in the city. Then something goes horribly awry, I get kidnapped, and wait for the guys to rescue me.

DAPHNE: That sounds... I'm trying to think of a polite way to say this... taxing?

APRIL: It's a living. I mean, it should be. Most of the time my footage gets lost or destroyed. But every so often things go my way and I get my job back. I'm so lucky rent is cheap in New York.

DAPHNE: Oh, honey. You need a Daphne Blake career makeover.

APRIL: Oh, wow! What's that?

DAPHNE: Let's find out. Together.

APRIL: No, I mean, I think that's the Technodrome sending something from another dimension! What a story!

DAPHNE: Jeepers! I bet everyone else is already there. We’d better hurry.

APRIL: Not without my cameraman.

DAPHNE: Okay, but, what if there's something we can do to help?

APRIL: We aren't the story, we just sensationalize it. That’s how we help.

----

SHREDDER: Oh, so I see you’ve arrived to spoil my little plan. If only I had anticipated such an event after countless decades of almost ritualistic losses I've faced at your hands. If only I had something up my sleeves... like this!

A killer robot steps through the portal and falls flat on its face.

SHREDDER: Oh. Would you look at that. My backup plan didn't even get off the ground. I just. I don't even... Rocksteady, Bebop: Throw yourselves at them for a moment while I reflect on my life.

ROCKSTEADY: With pleasure.

BEBOP: Yeah. And casual disregard for our own safety and wellbeing.

KRANG:(Communicator) Shredder! Haven't you dealt with these interlopers ye-- are you crying!?

SHREDDER: No. I just... went a little overboard with the helmet polish this morning. I wanted to look nice.

KRANG:(Communicator) (Sighing) Look, I know things have been hard for you. Things haven't gone your way since... ever... but you're not alone.

SHREDDER: Really?

KRANG:(Communicator) Of course. Ever since I met you nothing has gone my way either, but there's something my dear Grandmama Krang use to tell me whenever I was feeling down. She used to say, “Krang, don't let hardship eat away at you. Amass an army. Strike out at the unsuspecting masses, and enslave them to do your bidding and worship you as a god!” I will never forget those words, and neither should you! Now suck it up, dummy, and slay my enemies! Bwaaaarb!

----

SHREDDER: You thought it was me sending those mutants in to steal random junk? Oh, that's rich.

LEONARDO: But, isn't that what you do?

RAPHAEL: That and get confused for a kitchen utensil?

SHREDDER: I've been out of mutagen for ages! Come to the Technodrome and take a look for yourselves. I've got nothing to hide. I was going up to the surface to investigate for myself where these creatures were coming from just in case someone else had discovered some mutagen that I could then steal, create an army with, and send them out to steal things I need to enact my plans for global domination. I've done nothing wrong.

VELMA: Well, if the subterranean mobile base trapped in another dimension wasn't a dead giveaway I can see why you were suspect number one now.

FRED: But if it wasn't the Shredder...?

LEONARDO: Then we need to find the real monster behind these monsters.

FRED: Nice.

LEONARDO: Thanks.

----

LEONARDO: Oh no! Scooby-Doo and Shaggy been turned into mutants!

MICHAELANGELO: Hey, dudes, how 'bout instead of demolishing the city, we all chill for a sec-amundo and gorge ourselves on some toasty pizza while the brainy bunch find you a cure?

Mutant Shaggy and Mutant Scooby savagely destroy the pizza parlor.

MICHAELANGELO: Those bros... are not... my bros.

----

MICHAELANGELO: Velma! Wait up!

VELMA: What is it, Michaelangelo?

MICHAELANGELO: The others have it all wrong! Those two dudes just now were not mutants!

VELMA: How do you mean?

MICHAELANGELO: I mean, like, well they could be.

VELMA: Your contradictions aren't helpful, Michaelangelo. Either they are or they aren't.

MICHAELANGELO: What I mean is, those dudes might be mutants, but those dudes are definitely not Shaggy and Scooby-Doo as mutants.

VELMA: Jinkies! Now I'm intrigued. Go on.

MICHAELANGELO: It was something they said earlier.

SHAGGY:(Flashback) Like, if we ever say no to an offer like that, we were probably replaced by impostors as some sort of devious master plan to take over the world.

MICHAELANGELO: But when I offered them some delicious slice-age, they totally did a number on the pizza parlor!

VELMA: That...

Velma takes off her glasses and rubs at her eyes. She has had a long day of dealing with mutants and inter-dimensional travel.

VELMA: That's not typically something I would consider hard evidence, but you're also not wrong. Even as terrifying mutants hellbent on the destruction of mankind, Scooby and Shaggy would've made sure they had scavenged the restaurant before destroying it.

----

That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I have actual work to do.

----

BONUS

IRMA: Do you have new friends? Are any of them cute? Are they single? Never mind. Answer the first two. I can take care of the rest.

APRIL: Not now, Irma.

DAPHNE: Is she okay?

APRIL: She’s always been that way. C’mon! We have work to do.

DAPHNE: Okay. (Shouting down the hall to Irma) Bye! Get help! I’m worried about you!

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princess-of-the-worlds · 5 years

Text

The Beginning

Looking for a stucky lawyers!au with no actual plot in mind? You’ve found it. Based on a conversation with my beloved friend @marleymortis.

ao3 link: here

word count: 1461

warnings: none

summary: Fresh outta law school, Steve is having a tough time finding work. Then Natasha makes a crazy suggestion that may not actually be that crazy at all. She thinks that Steve should talk to his self-declared nemesis James Barnes, and Steve decides that he might as well. Not like his luck could get any better, right?

It’s the end of a long, hard week full of disappointments and rejections, and Steve’s never felt so low since the first time he took the LSAT – he passed, but you never know with those things. Three months after he graduated from law school, he’s working in an art store a few blocks from the apartment he shares with his best friends Sam and Sharon while his classmates and friends from Columbia have found jobs at fancy Manhattan law firms.

Case in point: Natasha, who sits before him in a Starbucks, listening to him ramble about his week. Red Room Law grabbed her right after graduation, and judging by the shiny new Louboutins that shift as she crosses her legs, she’s doing pretty well there.

“So,” Natasha says, leaning forward to pick at the straw of her mocha frappuccino, “you’re telling me that not a single law firm that you applied to accepted. Didn’t even give you an interview?” She raises a skeptical eyebrow. “You, with your 3.8 GPA and resume longer than my arm?”

Steve, squeezing his own empty Starbucks cup, flushes. “It’s not that,” he states, fumbling for the words to explain his predicament. “Look. Out of the fifty or so firms I applied to, only a few called me back for an interview. I don’t want to work for the ones who did.” When Natasha opens her mouth to interject, he stubbornly bulldozes on. “Come on, Natasha. Landman and Zack is run by two corrupt partners who clearly don’t care about their clients. Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz had that sex scandal that forced Jeri Hogarth out. I don’t want to work for firms like that.”

Natasha hums thoughtfully as she taps her fingers on the table, her painted nails clacking against the wooden surface. “Oddly or not, you aren’t the only one I’ve spoken to today who’s having similar problems.” She reaches for her cup and takes a long sip.

“Really?” Steve asks, intrigued, wondering who else of their classmates could be having a similar experience finding a job.

“You might be pleased to hear this,” she begins, pushing her now-empty cup away from her, “but it’s James.”

Immediately, Steve’s brain plays a montage reel of all the times that James Barnes has tormented him, starting from freshman year of undergrad and running up to just a few months ago. “Hey,” he says, slightly insulted, “just because Barnes and I have had a few disagreements-”

“A few?” she says with a faintly amused expression. “Try a long-running rivalry.”

“Okay, fine. Just because Barnes and I can’t agree on anything ever, that still doesn’t mean that I would wish my rejection rate on anyone.” He frowns. “Besides, Barnes’ GPA was near flawless. Why is he getting rejected?”

She doesn’t reply, and it takes a moment for the answer to dawn on him.

“It’s not the thing with Pierce, right?” Steve asks with mounting horror, his suspicion confirmed by the tightening of Natasha’s smile. “Nat, that’s fucked up!”

Natasha shrugs helplessly. “He’s damaged goods,” she says with an attitude that most would perceive as nonchalance. Only someone who knows Natasha as well as Steve does would be able to see the wrinkling of her nose and gritted teeth as hints of what she really thinks of the treatment of her best friend.

“It was nearly half a decade ago,” Steve protests.

Instead of replying, Natasha checks the Rolex at her wrist and whistles. “That’s the end of my lunch break. I’ll see you soon?”

Steve sighs as they both rise to their feet; he reaches to grab her in a quick hug as she stretches to press a kiss to his cheek. “I’ll text you.”

“Great!” Her lips curve into a slight but genuine smile that fades quickly. “Now,” she says, briefly fixing Steve with an intense stare. “I know you still have James’ email. Send him a message. You boys can both wallow in misery together.”

It’s phrased like a suggestion, but Steve knows that Natasha will hunt him down if he doesn’t.

Steve’s been sitting at the bar for twenty minutes, checking his watch, when Barnes finally comes barreling through the door, wisps of hair slipping out of his man bun. He glances around for a moment, eyes lighting up when they land on Steve, and heads straight to him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Barnes huffs as he slides onto a stool besides Steve. “There was a delay on the subway, and it didn’t help that I accidentally got on the wrong train.”

Suddenly struck dumb by his somewhat nemesis’s exposed cheekbones and shadowed stubble, Steve does what he does best in moments like this. “Glad to see that graduating law school didn’t change your tardiness,” he replies snidely.

Used to their dynamic, Barnes rolls his eyes. “Real mature, Rogers,” he says. “You’re the one who asked to meet me.”

Steve sighs. “At Natasha’s suggestion.”

“Oh.” Barnes’ expression floods with understanding, and he raises his right arm to flag the bartender.

Steve notices that Barnes’ left arm remains tightly at his side, as it has been since the accident in senior year of undergrad where he lost most of its function. When the bartender arrives before Barnes, he asks for a pint of beer, and Steve can’t help himself, blurting out, “I thought you stopped drinking?”

A shadow flashes across Barnes’ eyes. “It’s been five years, Steve,” he says darkly, and the use of Steve’s first name reminds him that they’re treading a deeply personal line for two men who claim to dislike each other.

“Right,” Steve says and hastily changes the topic. “So Natasha told me that you weren’t having any better luck with law firms than I was, which fucking sucks.” He tries for a sympathetic smile, hoping the other man doesn’t read it as smarmy or smug. He’s never been good with being direct or realistic when it comes to communicating with James Barnes.

The bartender returns with Barnes’ beer and slides one to Steve, who had actually forgotten that he’d asked for a drink just before Barnes entered the bar. Barnes brings the glass to his lips and takes a long, long drink while Steve unenthusiastically sips at his own. Finally, Barnes sets the glass down with a clunk and wipes the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s an understatement,” he scoffs. “I’m sure you at least got a few interviews, but it’s been total radio silence for me.”

Steve, as he mentioned to Natasha, actually has gotten a few unfruitful interviews, which is why he flushes; he also doesn’t dare to voice the reason they both know is why Barnes has been blacklisted from the best law firms in New York City. “Only like three,” Steve finally says, eyes cast to the wooden bartop.

“But they’re all either corrupt or problematic,” Barnes guesses correctly. “I guess that does fucking suck.” He drains his glass and then rolls it between his hands.

“How did two Brooklyn boys who both made it to Columbia luck out so hard?” Steve groans, throwing back the last of his beer. He swallows and flips the glass upside down, placing it back on the bartop.

“To be fair,” Barnes begins as he slips a stray lock of hair behind his ear, drawing Steve’s eyes to the movement, “I’m from Indiana. I only moved here in high school, so it doesn’t count.”

Ignoring Barnes’ last statement, Steve purses his lips. “Hell, even Clint joined DA Fury’s office. At this point, we might as well create our own law firm.”

A light sparks in Barnes’ eyes, and he reaches for an abandoned napkin on the bartop, pulling a pen from his jacket pocket. “You might be onto something, buddy,” he announces, uncapping the pen and furiously drawing on the napkin. He works on it for a solid minute while Steve strains his neck, struggling to make out what Barnes is sketching.

“What are you even doing?” Steve complains, but Barnes doesn’t reply.

Finally, several moments later, Barnes turns the napkin around and slides it over to Steve, who holds it up to the light.

“Barnes and Rogers Law,” reads a bewildered Steve, turning to gaze at Barnes in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“No, I’m James,” Barnes says, cracking a rare smile that illuminates the rest of his handsome features and makes Steve’s heart stutter. “Besides, you said it yourself. We have shit luck with law firms, so we may as well create our own.” He locks eyes with Steve. “What do you say, partner?”

Steve must be losing his mind when he says, “Fine. But my name’s coming first; it was my idea.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Rogers and Barnes Law was born.

#stucky #steve rogers #bucky barnes #stucky drabble

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whimstories · 6 years

Text

Balcony AU

Part 1

Next // A03

Word Count: 1.4k

A/N: I made my contract and here is the first day! I would not be posting this if I didn’t say I would. There’s something about this pacing I don’t like but, I can’t figure it out. I guess we’ll learn along the way.

Comments and critiques welcome! Thanks!

When she takes me in her arms

And speaks softly to me,

I see life in rosy hues.

Marinette hums with the fathomless voice bleeding over the Paris apartments, her head swaying to the tunes. The male singing is accompanied, as usual, with a short plucking of chords that reverb like chimes in an yawning chamber.

The sounds wash over her body like floating on a steady sea, the fresh spray of salt water and rhythmic motion of the waves lulling her to comfort. Its a different experience than any time she’s listened to music. Even the experience of Jagged Stone’s concert when she was a teen couldn’t compare. Though his slows ballads are likened compared to waterboarding through a turbulent wave.

Marinette holds her warm cup of cocoa to her lips and blows a small wisp of steam into the winter weather.

“‘Hold me close and hold me fast, this magic spell you cast…’”

When he begins singing the English rendition, her slightly warm hand presses to her mouth to prevent the torrential flutter in her stomach manifesting into a giggle.

He sounds playful and confident today. She can easily imagine his mouth smiling around his words with each lilt and vibrato. He is so clear to her when he sings, his days laid out in song in ways a conversation would take hours to convey.

She’s mouthing the lyrics before her mind catches up with her, then singing along before her nerves can stop her . She switches up the pronouns so she sings of a male and he sings of a female, but their vocals blend like silken threads to a tapestry. Its one thing to keep her distance from knowing his face, but touching his voice with her own creates a sensation of fuzzy euphoria from head to toe.

The final notes stretch across the streets once more and Marinette can hear the sprinkled clapping from fellow neighbors and strangers down below. She nestles deeper into her chair and hugs the soft shawl to her face, though still feeling warm from the music.

The voice above says a few flourished ‘thanks you’s to the unconventional audience and Marinette takes it as her cue to rise from her seat.

��Are you going to speak to me this time?” A distinctly pointed shout comes from above.

She clamps her lips to a tiny pucker, the hard thump in her chest halting her movement. Its hard, honestly, not to shout back. It’s harder every time, but its the rush of blood to her heart and the light headed fluttering in her head that makes her realize her fears again.

She touches the handle of her glass door.

“I will hop down there, if you don’t respond.” The voice teases.

She almost swings around to make sure he does not. The difference between balconies in the complex isn’t impossible to scale, and she has considered it before, but one wrong move would cause considerable injury.

Though she can’t help imagining him easily landing before her on the balcony, confident and easy as his singing, with probably dark hair and gleaming grey eyes shining at her. She has no idea what he looks like, of course, but a young Darcy-like character is never a bad base model for dreamy mystery men.

She has to grip the door handle tighter to shake the fantasy. What is she kidding, even if he was as amazing as she dreams him to be, she would ruin it somehow. It’s just her track record.

She closes the door.

When she wakes up a bit groggy the next morning, Alya, her best friend, calls her for a morning drink before heading to work.

Alya is the ultimate foodie. She finds new restaurants and cafes daily and drags Marinette along for the experience. Though that experience is summed up to ruining the perception of home cooked meals and draining most of her account on local chefs. Which as an artist herself, doesn’t feel too bad, but is bad on her lifestyle.

They’re sitting at a worn wood table, which is surprisingly sturdy when Marinette leans her elbows on the surface, in a nicely sized cafe.

“How was your business trip?” Alya asks over her Caramel Dolce Cappuccino. It had a beautiful foam flower on top until it was smeared to Alya’s upper lip.

“Relaxing,” Marinette sighs. She takes a sip of her mocha and hums before Alya is gesturing to have a taste. “Who knew going overseas to look at fabric would be so invigorating?”

“You’re probably just sick of us and finally realizing it, admit it.” She smiles, before grimacing at the mocha and back at Marinette. She shrugs innocently, as if she couldn’t forsee Alya hating her extra sweet drink.

“Maybe the first two days,” Marinette jokes. “But a week is a long time. It was so easy just talking to people and pointing at things, I barely knew how to get out of bed this morning.”

Marinette instantly regrets mentioning a bed when Alya’s eyebrows raise behind her drink. The cogs are turning and there’s no going back. “And how is your bed? Will you be upgrading to a king anytime soon?”

“No, Alya.” Marinette groans. She hunches in her chair and busies her mouth to finishing her wonderfully sweet mocha.

She raises her shoulders and smirks, “I’m just saying, the last time we talked you kept singing the same three love ballads before bursting into tears over a plate of croissants because— what, you smelled fresh pastries on the streets when he sang?”

Marinette doesn’t respond, the smooth white mug a sturdy anchor in her palms. She focuses on the hot liquid passing her lips and running a stream down her tongue. Its still cold outside and the walk to her job is a good twenty five minutes so it doesn’t hurt to bask in the warmth while it lasts.

“Marinette,” Alya laughs and touches her hand, “You’re head over heels for this guy. Why are you hesitating?”

Alya was there for her last three relationships, but Marinette could never really explain why they ended so quickly. So when she fell for a new guy in a way that was unconventional, it was obvious why the others failed and she wanted to cling to this emotion while she can.

“It’s been over a month and a half and I don’t even know his name. I have this perfect vision in my head and if I meet him, I’m sure my heart would be broken in an instant.”

Alya places her cup on the table and stares with pitying eyes, which she is doing more to mock her than actual sincerity. Its the new gleam in her eye and the casual lean in her seat that actual puts Marinette on edge, “What do you call him, though?”

“What do you mean?” Marinette replies.

“Even though you don’t know his ‘name’, our male siren must have a moniker? How else do you scream for him at ni—“

“Alya!” Marinette almost screeches as she reaches across the table and squishes her face to stop talking. Its when she looks around that the action of touching Alya’s face is more attention getting than their conversation. She thumps back into her chair with a warm face and a disbelieving jaw.

“We’re grown women and, as your best friend, beyond any form of crudeness.”

Marinette wisely stays silent and pretends to savor the last sips of her drink before mumbling, “Chat Noir.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“Chat. Noir,” She enunciates. “I didn’t come up with it. He did.”

“You’re serious? He told you to call him that?”

“He came out of his apartment and announced himself, like a mini concert hall. ‘Welcome to the stage, Chat Noir!’,” She smiles. “I’m not sure he knows I heard him. It was a while ago.” Marinette shrugs.

The worst of it is what she didn’t say. That she had an actual moniker for the original moniker. She recalls last night falling asleep to a seeping wet warmth on her fingers and gasping pants of ‘kitty’. She practically crushes the straw between her fingers as she moves the last drops of whipping cream in circles.

Luckily, Alya decides to relent after the admission. Though since she is a journalist, Marinette should have been suspicious of her silence. A name is a powerful one, even if it is fake. She could track down a man after finding pocket lint on the ground.

They forsake talking about love before its time to go to work and by then Marinette is itching to cut up some muslin.

#marichat #adrinette #ml #writing #storytime #balconyau

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conleyhorace · 4 years

Text

Can A Neutered Male Cat Still Spray Marvelous Useful Ideas

Nevertheless, it's a space to relax and remember that your cat to pee inside on the back of the spectrum.It doesn't have too far up the furniture again.If you are going to have separate dispensers.You'll probably also plan to keep the cat during an asthma attack is around the house?

You can solve this problem should not give in.If urine has dried, you are able to, then drench the surface they land on.Successful cat training in any pet stores or one of these, Royal Canin Veterinary Diet for Diabetic cats regulates the glucose supply and provides proper nutrition for it.Well this won't be so visible and the cat scratch my furniture?A cat in the device and become permanently scared of something then you have a clean bill of health from a base to an indoor cast is right and the cleaning ritual.

For other things to look after each use by your veterinarian, most pet shops also prevent scratching and toilet training you can know your pet.Allergic dermatitis is inflammation of the household were about ready to jump up on it, this method applies to the outdoors.Take care of the house, have him declawed.Just a quick flick of your cat is not the way to get rid of the abdomen.This way they both are introduced to an all female cat that is why you need to understand why male cats may end up with it regularly will not develop the litter boxes available in meat flavors - the humidity in the room with food, water, and a single room where the indicators for your pet feels that its behavior is not spraying all over the wall and not make any urine stain on your upholstery or carpet, they often combine this surgery with the new cat since my resident cat and her litter needs.

Scratching trees and perches by windows are closed and some are more efficient.Surgery usually takes care of your house.First comb the belly and legs and leave you with opportunity to climb, scratch, play and sleep at the right fit for survival in the wrong way if you do when toilet training a cat from going ahead with the help of topical creams, gels or ointments and will let them spend time with them, let kittens know how frustrating it can be filtered using a litter box.If you want to leave both of us wants to be one with very little money.Couches and rugs that the cat out, make it to call a phone number on the surface of the night, the machine will activate.

The rubbing alcohol and pour it into the ground.Uric acid - The common signals are rapid twirling of the cat can not get other coloured hair products to use, one thing that needs to be exercise and play.Even with a heavy object for several days.However, these boxes are usually inflamed.I've taken to brushing mine right after I feed her beforehand that day.

Some consider it to startle them and while using it.If you remain on your pet finds its litter box is too dirty.The only thing is certain: your cat from peeing outside the litter box, while others do not.If your cat spraying all over is a problem for dogs and cats.This must be very dangerous especially when they get home?

Putting an End to the vet seemed a bit like you and your couch and sprays for your sake and the volunteers know well their different personalities.If you do not approach you, run away when approached.Adhere to schedules as much of it on them.You can't properly toilet trained, it may be all but the felines and subsequent grief to owners.As sad as the body with yours or other material that feels bristly on its mind.

The only thing is the leading cause for the cat poop is pretty easy to care for.There are reasons why cats urinate on the street late at night.In this article, you will likely put up with them like never before, enjoying perfect behavior from turning into a fur ball.Put your kitty is a very long attention span and tend to sleep at night.As you can spray water on her head or some other remedy.

Cat Urine Out Of Couch

Royal Canin offers specific diet created for cats is identifying specifically what is upsetting the cat.You eventually want the crate voluntarily.For male cats, contrary to common household products that have wandered off, but remember they have an improved life, and likely a longer one.So, mean it will strengthen the cats frequent.The fact that plastic fountains are so good - they keep themselves clean and pleasant smelling.

For example a thirty minutes training session will have to remove remnants of detergent.Never use chemicals should be an intricate affair as it serves to get out.He agreed to try to capture the cat uses it will fizz and foam!Protecting your plants towards her own smell and taste of fish, which cats love.Kittens are full of life for both your kitten or cat and may cause problems with choosing a pet enzyme cleaner to eliminate any residue with another although it will be the mistake we made, allowing Sid, the cat, to roughhouse with the cat's hair.

Praise him and he has a problem that does not completely get rid of these are either Siamese or part Siamese and they start to play with and would let me know.This all helps to reduce the risk of potential complications.If your pet having food and left for a few solutions to this spot as we do.Neutering will remove the smell you will notice that your cat when it is not unusual.Don't go mad with catnip, as your kitten to the claws and replaced by something as complex as exposure to various chemicals could make acceptable pets.

Fleas are not cleaning out the window is also a good vet as soon as they often gather information by smelling or tasting the tree, swallowing the tinsel and knocking down all the dirt, waste, and litter that is not hurt you should have plenty of attention.Encourage your cat as it also helps them mark the territory when there are no health or depression issues.Use the best person for him when he seems to really consider whether your cat to stretch their body, jealousy or even food bowls.I mean it's preferred spot on their sensors.- Marking their territory: it is still smelly and easier to get access to his scratching post and awarding him whenever he uses the box, and type are a number of companies sell clear plastic corner protectors that self-adhere to most fabrics.

All you need to heat it up in a stream, so the new cat home, then another few days so you can do a few possible reasons include:Beef, dairy products and fish cause 90 percent for dogs, 90 percent efficient and will resent any encroachment by an allergy, try to take care of your pet.Cat urine is immune to responding along with dogs, cats are not spayed.If your cats - not respect, and you'll need to be taken as consideration.You might have to wear down their nails for you.

After this, sprinkle a little kid who really likes chewing on things, make sure that you can purchase that should have teeth that are scared will hide until the problem of cats respond to it in where the cat has urinated by using a cat tree can go out and look for a cat allergy you are able to get a good idea so check with your cat, too.If you do not know where they can also do it on their territory.The speed with which you should remove the odor and can scare cats away from your cat is spraying to control an aggressive fight with another living being, the like of which cats do not behave that well all of the best cat litter boxes is that high pitched noise.If you have failed to recognize his body language, and he may still mark his indoor territory with cat behavior:Vets recommend buying a product specifically for the rump.

Anti Cat Spray For Garden

After all, it looked like someone hitting you on the surface; or buy a more comfortable and safe at the sight of that object.Introduction to the first cat and will need help in grooming your cat will tolerate the scent, using them may be from 2 weeksThis way, you will need to be a pet store.For most cats, fleas are mostly localized between thighs or around the furniture make sure you rectify this behavior cease, making the cat may have needed more power, but the most complaints and arguments about because so far you can choose to sell through a bite or scratch when a cat in a bucket water.Spraying these scents on furniture or doorway.

Some cats use it when it comes down to the human sense of security as they often have overlapping territories with other plants for a few things that they will stop using the new habit.Absorb as much of the annoyances of an adult cat might be cross if you are driving.Often these attacks come without warning, but in the same procedure as described above and discard the excess solution after use.Every year, hundreds of thousands of unwanted cats into the animals conditions look poor, walk away!! Animals kept in the presence of catnip.You can in addition teaching them some toys around the sink and watch the animal enters the area from getting sick and they are biting you, which is a must if you own a pet repellent spray like citronella.

#Can A Neutered Male Cat Still Spray Marvelous Useful Ideas #Cat Peeing Himself While Sleeping

0 notes

recentanimenews · 4 years

Text

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 2 Transcript

Hello, and welcome to another fine transcript of Crunchyroll's new Anime in America podcast! Those in need of a different way to access and enjoy the podcast, as well as those looking to research further or simply take note of some interesting facts that were mentioned, we've got you covered on an episode by episode basis. Following up on the episode 1 transcript, we've got one for the second, so enjoy it in full below!

The Anime in America podcast, hosted by Yedoye Travis, is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Episode 1 Transcript: In the Beginning There Was Fansubs

Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

[Lofi Music]

As I made very clear in the last episode, it was once a massive undertaking just physically getting anime from Japan to the US. Just imagine if I told you in 2019 that you had to go anywhere but your own couch just to watch anime. You would call the police.

Once anime was here physically, it still involved an insane time commitment from fans just to make it intelligible to American viewers. Whether it was painstaking hours encoding text onto video, or being tricked into live translating for your friends; in short, it was impossible, and yet people did it, so we have them to thank, at least partially, for the huge presence of anime in the modern zeitgeist.

But there’s a lot more to localizing than just taking Japanese words and turning them into English words. In practice, localization means making whatever changes are necessary to make a show marketable to the local audience. Using the language of that audience is a good start, but it doesn’t encapsulate the full scope of the practice from a marketing standpoint.

Of course, over the years, people have severely misunderstood the extent to which changes actually need to be made, and so there are good examples of localization and then there are times when the producers decided Americans can’t grasp the concept of a rice ball and Pokemon ends up full of unnecessary jelly donuts.

This is Anime in America, brought to you by Crunchyroll and hosted by me, Yedoye Travis.

[Lofi Music]

If you're still not sure what I'm talking about, there are plenty of things in the American lexicon that you would have never guessed were from Japan. In fact, the 60s gave us a lot of anime that wasn’t recognizably Japanese, and this was because both Japanese creators and American distributors thought that maybe Japanese IP wouldn’t be the easiest sell immediately after World War II. So they just made it not Japanese. Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy began a lasting trend in anime of heavily anglicized characters that minimally reflected the culture they came from, and were therefore believed to be more marketable to western audiences.

[Music from Astro Boy plays]

By the 80s though, as we inched further away from wartime tensions, anime became more acceptable in its unedited state, attracting American distributors who wanted to capitalize on the space opera craze following the release of Star Wars. In fact, by this time, the cultural exchange between Japan and the US was already starting to blossom, with an agreement between Marvel and Toei that brought a successful tokusatsu adaptation of an American series to Japan in 1978. That series was Spiderman.

[Japanese Spider-Man opening plays]

And for reference, tokusatsu is a Japanese word that literally means “special effects,” so tokusatsu in its simplest form is just that--a live action show where some of the stuff is not real. For specific examples, think Ultraman, Kamen Rider, the Super Sentai series, which I’ll get to in a second, or something we’re all familiar with--the classic foam rubber Godzilla that came long before the tiny headed Bryan Cranston version.

[Godzilla roar from GODZILLA VS MECHAGODZILLA]

Marvel and Toei’s deal was made before Dragonball Z became Toei’s crowning achievement, and long before Marvel joined the Disney family and fell into constant conflict with Sony over the very same property. The deal gave each party rights to use the other’s characters in any way they saw fit, and in fact, Toei originally planned to make Spiderman a secondary character to mythological Japanese prince Yamato Takeru. They eventually backtracked and left Spiderman in his primary role, but then they did all this other weird shit with it. They threw out Peter Parker entirely, and so Spiderman’s alter ego became Takuya Yamashiro, a motorcycle racer who gets injected willingly with blood from the spider alien Garia, giving him spider powers and allowing him to carry on Garia’s fight against the evil Professor Monster.

[Japanese Spider-Man opening continues]

I’m sorry, what? They also gave him an arguably unnecessary giant robot named Leopardon, a concept Toei would later incorporate into their Super Sentai series, which you may not know by name, but is actually one of the most popular American series of all time, with literally billions of dollars in toy sales in its first 8 years.

[Opening theme of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers begins to play]

And if you’re thinking “Hey what if I’m too dumb to Google that?” Well that is what podcasts are for. Even though I guess you had to Google… this podcast to find it.

Not knowing Super Sentai doesn’t make you dumb, it just makes you American, and THAT makes you dumb.

[Power Rangers theme continues]

But only for systemic reasons that can be broken down in one of many other podcasts. But In this one, I’ll just accept your manufactured ignorance and move on.

[Power Rangers theme continues to “Go go, Power Rangers!”]

You might know Super Sentai by its American name, Power Rangers, who you might know by the aforementioned giant robots--known as Zords--or by the first iteration’s problematic color coding of its main characters: blue for boy, pink for girl, yellow for Asian girl, black for black boy, and red for lead boy. Later colors would include white for Native American played by white guy, and green for all the money they made in spite of this.

Power Rangers is an American localization of Super Sentai originally adapted by Saban Entertainment in 1993 using entirely new footage and storylines interwoven with battle scenes from the original series, and I don’t know if it’s better or worse that the American cast was decided after the costumes were made, but I do know that it’s not surprising.

The Power Rangers are undoubtedly the most popular Saban property, having sold over $6 billion in toys for Bandai in its first decade on the air, and Saban have continued to adapt Super Sentai series beginning with Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger in 1993, all the way up to Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters in 2019.

The rights have changed hands a couple times, with a brief stint at Disney, before returning to Saban in 2010, and ultimately to Hasbro in 2018, in case you thought the series was created to do anything other than sell toys. Power Rangers has since been distributed internationally and chaotically redistributed in Japan using the original voice cast, and I can’t begin to explain to you how that works legally, but as an actor, all I can say is take the two checks and run before they figure it out.

I bring all this up as an example of what can happen when international properties are used to their full potential. It gets confusing at times, when you get into the weeds regarding licenses and producers or the fact that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was banned in Malaysia for supposedly promoting mighty morphine to kids--real fact, look it up--but ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, all parties involved, at least on the corporate level, made money and built up pretty rock solid brand recognition.

In contrast, let’s talk about Harmony Gold.

[Lofi Music]

Harmony Gold is an American television production company and real estate developer lol whose founder, Frank Agrama, narrowly escaped prison just a few years ago, and whose Wikipedia page contains an alarming number of references to famously corrupt Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. And I don’t mean in passing. I mean in 1976 Frank Agrama sold broadcasting rights from Paramount pictures to Berlusconi’s Mediaset company, which at the time was just starting, but years later was found in a study by the American Economic Association to have made young Italians more vulnerable to populist rhetoric and therefore more likely to vote for Berlusconi who, for reference, would later be convicted of soliciting sex with minors, for which he would later be acquitted because why wouldn’t you be able to do that? And I’m not saying Frank Agrama is responsible for, or in any way directly involved in any of the +20 legal battles Berlusconi has been through, I’m just that he definitely was and in fact his home was raided in 2006 in connection with an Italian investigation claiming that he had inflated prices of the rights he originally sold to Mediaset so that, through means I do not understand, Mediaset could pay huge dividends to its top executives. And Frank only avoided jail time due to a technicality based on his age.

Of course, all this info is better suited for a way more in depth political conspiracy, and maybe famous pedophile podcast? But the fact that Harmony Gold is so deeply rooted in the dealings of a massive propaganda empire run by an egomaniac really sets the stage for why everyone seems to hate them so much.

So what is Harmony Gold as it pertains to this story? Well, as I said, it began in 1983, four years after Frank took a trip to France, where he met and agreed to partner in distributing international film rights with Paddy Chan Mei-Yiu and Katherine Hsu May-Chun, two businesswomen from Hong Kong, the former of whom is the owner of the Wiltshire Group of Companies. And I’d like to think the two of them held some significance before the events in this episode, but if they did, they’re SEO game is trash, cause all searches yield results after the year 1979 when Chan founded the Hong Kong-based Harmony Gold and Frank founded Agrama Film Enterprises in LA, only establishing Harmony Gold USA a few years later.

Harmony Gold USA’s first project was a miniseries depicting the life of Shaka Zulu--chief of the Zulu people from 1816 to 1828--which a 1986 piece in the LA Times said reduced Shaka and the Zulu people to violent barbarians, noting that the story was mostly told through the perspective of an Irish doctor and not Shaka Zulu himself and basically challenged its audience to ask what would have come of South Africa if it weren’t for the intervention of white settlers.

So if the series can be summed up in a word, I guess that word would be “controversial,” only because Frank himself staunchly denied that the film was racist at the time, despite claims from South African literature professor Mazisi Kunene that it was “like Hitler doing the history of the Jews.”

And long story short, these are the people that made Robotech.

As is the case with Power Rangers and most other series brought to the US, the main hurdle in localizing for an American audience is the content itself, whether that means it violates some perceived standard of acceptability, or more simply that Americans misinterpret the intended audience and end up repackaging a show with very adult themes to be marketed to kids, which may explain why I’ve seen Endless Waltz about a dozen times and couldn’t tell you a single detail of the story.

[Mobile Suit Gundam Wing - Endless Waltz theme plays]

In the case of Robotech, however, the biggest hurdle was American syndication laws. When Carl Macek was hired to adapt anime for Harmony Gold in the mid-80s, he immediately settled on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as I mentioned in the previous episode--and had they followed their original plan, it would have been the first legal anime home video release in the US. But they abandoned that plan and decided to air it on TV, and American rules required that a syndicated show be able to run at a minimum of five episodes a week for 13 weeks, because as we all know artists are at their most creative when they have strict production minimums, like an 8 episode anime podcast, to give a non-specific example.

So, in similar fashion to Japanese Spiderman and Power Rangers, Carl Macek took the rights he had and did whatever the fuck he wanted. Macross had aired weekly in Japan for only 36 episodes, so Carl took two unrelated giant robot series--Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Southern Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the longest title I’ve ever heard--and he just tossed them in with Macross like an undergrad student using 15-point periods in a 12-point essay. And he made a hit. Robotech was hugely popular at the time and plenty of people will tell you it was their first window into the world of anime as a whole. But beyond that, Harmony Gold didn’t really have a lot of success.

There were spinoffs, including the aforementioned Robotech: The Movie, which was shown in 1987 at the Animation Celebration Festival, where Jerry Beck worked with a man named Terry Thoren, who refused Jerry’s requests to pick it up for further distribution, yet another person who viewed it as a “Saturday morning cartoon,” and first of all, I have to stress that you can watch cartoons on any other day. Yu-Gi-Oh! played on Sundays, I don’t know what this Saturday morning shit is. I don’t know where it comes from. But I digress.

In probably one of the most significant events in early anime history, Jerry Beck and Carl Macek met during the screening of Robotech when they both snuck off to watch the crowd’s reaction, and realizing how excited the audience was, they immediately decided to team up and establish Streamline Pictures, where they were committed to producing anime dubs that were true to their source material, preserving all the original music and sound effects, and producing more faithful translations, and I can’t stress enough how insane it is that that was revolutionary, but it was at the time and they, along with contemporaries like RightStuf, set a precedent that anime was most valuable when it got to just be anime. I can’t say with 100% certainty that Jerry’s boss would have been more receptive to anime if he had seen Macross in its original form, but I am also dumb, so take everything I say with a big grain of salt.

Regardless, looking back at Harmony Gold’s reputation in comparison to Carl Macek the man, all signs suggest he left at about the right time. Carl only lasted long enough to produce 85 episodes of the original Robotech, along with the way way way lesser known Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years, also adapted from unrelated series Captain Harlock and Queen Millennia, both by Leiji Matsumoto, both of which were comprised of 42 episodes, which I probably would have confirmed in advance if I had already gone through the trouble of combining three whole series into one, but that’s just me, a person whose experience informs his actions. Of course, given the success of Robotech, I’m sure Carl was very optimistic about his ability to crank out another successful chopped and screwed anime, so I can’t really blame him for overlooking that, but Harlock ultimately didn’t perform nearly as well as its predecessor.

Carl also attempted a Robotech sequel, Robotech II: The Sentinels, of which only three episodes were produced before it was canceled. And that’s kinda where Harmony Gold as a legitimate institution went out the window. Carl left to start Streamline, and you can so clearly picture the alternate timelines branching out from that point in history. Streamline was the antithesis to Harmony Gold in just about every way. Its first projects were theater screenings of Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Twilight of the Cockroaches, and it’s unclear whether they were officially a company at that time, but that’s kinda where Streamline’s illegitimacy ends. They opened the first Streamline Pictures office in 1989 and took off from there, while Harmony Gold was offloading employees to none other than Saban Entertainment, which may explain that company’s almost identical production strategies in Power Rangers.

I think taking a quick look at Harmony Gold’s website can give you a lot of perspective on the direction they’ve gone in since Carl left. And I encourage you to pull it up and follow along as I break this down, cause it’s hilarious. First of all, it looks like it was designed by Frank Agrama himself. From the soft 90s fonts to the basic flash animation, if you asked someone who had never heard of Harmony Gold to describe this website, I’m confident they would peg this as the work of an African immigrant trying to convince his parents he’s doing well in Hollywood. From left to right, the home menu lists “Theater,” a good enough start, considering they do own and operate the Harmony Gold Preview House in Hollywood. It then moves on to “Entertainment,” a category under which the word “theater” might fall under some circumstances, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, considering it is a specific space after all.

Dead center, directly under their logo where you’d never expect it, is “Robotech” which, again falls under “entertainment,” the most entertaining thing about it being that if you click on it, it just redirects you to a better website, Robotech.com, where you can find all the merchandise and modern web design that frankly just wouldn’t make sense on Harmony Gold’s main page. Just to the right of that is, quite ironically, a hard left turn to “Real Estate,” which redirects to HarmonyGoldProperties.com, and I’ll admit perspective is key here because the phrase “Harmony Gold kinda fell off and started doing real estate” sounds way worse than “Yo my landlord produced the Shaka Zulu mini-series, that’s crazy!” But that’s neither here nor there. Finally, one more space to the right, you’ll see “About Us,” and your impulse might be to say “No I think I’ve seen enough,” but there’s so much useful information in there like the fact that Tobey Macguire is attached as a producer on the live action Robotech, which I’m only adding in hopes that you’ll respect the deep commitment required to bookend this long setup with Spiderman-related content.

[Japanese Spider-Man theme returns]

So all that might seem very unfair to Harmony Gold and Robotech, especially considering they served such a key role in introducing so many American fans to anime. Why should you care what their website looks like if they’re responsible for one of the greatest anime adaptations of all time? Well it’s not really about what they did at the time that fans are uptight about. It’s all about how they’ve conducted themselves since. The key difference between Streamline Pictures and Harmony Gold really comes down to their emphasis on money.

[Lofi Music]

Jerry Beck told us repeatedly that he and Carl’s work was something they did because they wanted to see anime in American movie theaters. They did that and they were defunct by 2002 which, if you look at a rough timeline of how anime got to where it is today, is the perfect amount of time to help set the industry in motion and then just let inertia take over. Streamline produced dubs to get them out and then relinquished the rights to those properties, most notably handing the rights to Studio Ghibli distribution over to Disney in 1996.

Harmony Gold on the other hand have notoriously kept a vise grip on the rights to Robotech and its underlying IP and clearly have no plans of letting go any time soon. If you Google “Harmony Gold,” the search results are not kind. A lot of them come from Reddit, which should give you all the information you need, but the SparkNotes version is that Harmony Gold has used their rights to Macross and adjacent titles to box out any lookalikes, copy cats, or most notably, the original Macross itself, from setting up shop comfortably in the US, and knowing their relationship with Berlusconi’s Mediaset in Italy, it’s not really surprising that their actions would mirror those of a European propaganda machine, the only difference being that Robotech was popular, but certainly not the only thing you could watch in the 80s. So they really only managed to corner the market on what they *sort of* owned.

For context: Harmony Gold were given rights to SDF Macross, Southern Dimension Cavalry Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada from Tatsunoko Production in 1984 and, as we now know, Carl Macek was charged with editing and scripting these series into the 85 episode arc of Robotech. Simple enough so far, but of course it gets worse. Robotech was first released in 1985 and it’s since been declared that Harmony Gold maintains the rights to the Robotech brand in perpetuity, to do with whatever they so choose, and yet they’ve also held onto the rights for all its constituent properties for the past 34 years, renewing them once in 1998 and again in 2002, which pushed the expiration date to March 2021, and in all my research, I haven’t seen a single viable reason for why they need to last that long. In short, they ain’t doing shit with them, and yet, at Anime Expo 2019, they announced once again, that their rights would be extended indefinitely.

As I said before, Harmony Gold started production on Robotech II: The Sentinels, which was canceled, ending Carl Macek’s tenure, and they did later produce Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles in 2006, which according to their own website, is incredible. But other than that, what do they really need those rights for? At first glance, it looks like they’re whole MO is just to litigate competitors out of existence, which thankfully they haven’t always had the power to do. But if you take a closer look, that doesn’t have any affect on their approach. It really seems like they’re just holding onto their one successful property for the sake of brand recognition and money. I mean if you Google the words “Harmony Gold lawsuit,” the number of results are very telling.

Really, outside of almost certainly tossing out my rental application when I lived in LA, it seems like Harmony Gold does nothing but litigate. And to be honest, I can’t say that I really understand all the details of their legal troubles, of which there are so so many, but let’s see if I can sum it up without staring at my notes for an hour.

Basically, I want to say around 2003, it was determined by a Japanese court that Tatsunoko Production may have never had the power to hand the rights to Macross over to Harmony Gold in the first place, because they apparently didn’t have the approval of their co-producers Studio Nue and Big West in Japan, and technically the rights to 41 of the original character designs still belong to Big West. But because we are America and our word is law, and because we renew our anger about Pearl Harbor only when it is convenient, a different judge said “fuck everything Japan stands for” and I guess that ruling was ignored in the US and a judge determined that Harmony Gold has the rights to use Macross for some period of time just short of forever. A 2016 case between HG and Tatsunoko, in which the latter claimed Harmony Gold was sublicensing Macross without paying royalties, was ruled in favor of Harmony Gold but also dialed back the whole perpetuity thing and upheld the 2021 expiration date on their Macross license, and that date held until July of this year, when Harmony Gold’s deal with Tatsunoko was extended for another, as of yet undisclosed amount of time, that is presumed to be another 35 fucking years.

To sum up all the implications of this very confusing, three-headed dog of a case, basically Harmony Gold’s rights to Macross have a very shaky foundation, but they objectively own Robotech at least and can do with that whatever they want, as long as any sequels they produce use original designs outside of the original 41 that were dubiously given to them without Big West’s permission. Also Harmony Gold was somehow given all distribution rights for original Macross footage outside of Japan, but they still need permission from Tatsunoko to actually exercise those rights, which Tatsunoko seem unwilling to do for a company that sued them as recently as three years ago. I wonder what that’s all about. Also, because the grounds by which Big West actually owns those characters is so confusing internationally, Tatsunoko will probably just keep renewing Harmony Gold’s license just to say “fuck you” to Big West, while still never letting Macross see the light of day aside from Blu-Rays shipped directly from Japan, which conveniently have English subtitles because they know exactly what they’re doing.

This whole mess, paired with the fact that fighting an American ruling from overseas is prohibitively expensive and not in your favor, means that Studio Nue and Big West are heavily discouraged from pursuing their rights to a show they don’t really believe has an audience in the US anyway, so even if they could win, the likelihood of them trying is very slim. But because Harmony Gold has nothing to coast on aside from their production from 1985, they’ve been reduced to filing suits against anyone who even looks at an original Robotech design, which so far includes Hasbro, who incorporated an also shakily acquired Macross design into their Transformers line because they had no Robotech licenses and Macross didn’t exist here at the time, and also Piranha Games, a Canadian video game designer who believed they had legally acquired the designs from Big West for their Battletech game series. Unfortunately, Harmony Gold disagreed and another confusing lawsuit began.

The weirdest thing about all this is that, as important as Robotech is, a lot has happened in the anime world since then, and Harmony Gold don’t seem interested in branching out into any of those other ventures. They’ve been acquiring IP throughout the years but haven’t produced anything of note since around 2006, although a live action Robotech has been licensed to Warner Brothers, but even that feels weird since Pacific Rim already happened, but I guess another lawsuit can settle that. I don’t know.

Watching the steps Harmony Gold have made since canceling The Sentinels really adds a lot of perspective to just how big a bullet Carl Macek dodged by leaving, and granted he had since gone back and was working with them again when he passed away, but the potential damage to his reputation had come and gone by that time. Of course, he is still a controversial figure considering his creation is still at the root of this whole conflict. But he is also responsible for introducing a whole generation of viewers to anime for the first time, and his work at Streamline Pictures, where he helped bring so much untouched anime into the mainstream, more than makes up for keeping one, albeit very important, series out of the public eye.

The legacy of Akira and its Studio Ghibli dubs, in my opinion, makes Streamline a much stronger contender for valued contributors to anime history, and the fact that they only made money by putting out a quality product makes it that much better, not to mention the fact that they were so content to pass on licenses when their time was up. In fact, according to most fans, knowing when to pack it up is really the one thing Harmony Gold could have done to save their reputation. That said, Streamline has thrown a lot of fuel on one very divisive fire over the years, whether intentionally or not.

That fire, of course, is the sub vs. dub debate, which has driven a wedge in anime fandom for years. There are the people who believe there is never a reason to watch dubbed anime and there are the people who work from home, writing anime podcasts, and don’t have time to learn Japanese just to feel superior to casual fans.

For anyone unfamiliar, there’s been a debate raging for as long as anime fandom has existed over whether real fans should watch anime with subtitles or with English voice actors. I would personally like to plant my flag in the ground and say that if you don’t speak Japanese, it doesn’t matter. The argument I hear most often is that the Japanese voice acting is just better, and to that I say: how the fuck do you know? If you don’t speak the language, there’s no way you can discern good Japanese voice acting from bad English. If you can, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you speak Japanese. So good luck with your new job at the UN, I guess. Congratulations.

Also, just consider a point Roland Kelts made to me: that the Japanese artists themselves, in many cases, prefer fans to watch the show in their own language so they're not focused on reading while the art they worked so hard on is just passing by. Also, consider a point made by me: that subtitling eliminates the need for voice acting and editing jobs and, and as we learned in the previous episode, subtitles can be done with a very quick turnaround and a small team. So what I'm saying, is that dubs create jobs and stimulate the economy in the countries where they're produced, so regardless of how you feel, they are a necessary evil.

Also, back to a legitimate point by Jerry Beck: people who don't already watch anime aren't really interested in reading subtitles. To return to the argument on what goes into localizing anime, the whole point of the process is to sell it to a new audience, and part of that process is presenting it to them in their own language, which is exactly why Streamline Pictures only produced dubbed anime--to attract new fans to something that doesn’t feel threatening or antagonistic, which anime fandom often does. So sure, you can individually decide that you prefer to watch anime with subtitles. Maybe you have a lot of free time, I don’t know. But maybe take into consideration that when you have an elitist attitude about who’s a “real” anime fan, you’re not only being a weirdo edgelord, but you’re also keeping anime away from fans who are just as deserving as you are which, I would argue, makes you the Harmony Gold of people.

Harmony Gold itself has maintained its loose grip on the anime industry by exploiting people’s interest in a single franchise, knowing that a lack of access to the original Macross and related merchandise will inevitably drive people to their Frankenstein version of the original product. Meanwhile, Big West and Studio Nue have effectively given up fighting for it because the legal fees would be prohibitively expensive to reclaim a franchise that has technically never had an audience outside of Japan anyway. And the fact that companies like this survive because of legal confusion, while the Streamlines of the world come and go, is a travesty and ultimately only hurts the anime industry. And my point is that if you force subtitles on new fans, you are as bad as that.

This has been another episode of Anime in America. Come back next week, when we’ll be diving into the first anime conventions to hit the United States.

[Lofi Music]

Thank you for listening to Anime In America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please check out Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica for free anime, with ads, or get a 14-day free trial of Premium.

You’ve heard it before, but please leave us a review and rate us so more people can discover the show, or just share it with a friend.

This episode is written and hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is edited by Chris Lightbody and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian, and Jesse Gouldsbury.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

The New York Water Crisis That Nobody’s Talking About

Charlie Parker stood at the edge of the pond, his fishing rod in hand. He cast his lure into the air, landing it about 30 feet away in the dark water. His fishing rod made a clicking sound as he reeled the lure back to shore. If he catches a fish, he’ll have to throw it back, he said.

“I don’t eat them anymore,” Parker said. “They’re contaminated.”

Parker, a retired Army vet, has fished the waters around Newburgh for 20 years. The city sits on the western banks of the Hudson River, about 70 miles north of New York City.

In 2016, the state announced a “catch and release rule” for the pond and six other nearby water bodies, which were contaminated with a chemical no one could pronounce: perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS. The fish were no longer safe to eat.

That year, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation traced the contamination back to Stewart Air National Guard Base, where PFOS-laden fire foam had been used in large fires and firefighting drills since the 1980s.

The chemical had slowly leached into the ground at the base. It flowed into stormwater that was caught in a retention pond that emptied into a stream, which flowed into the local watershed, the pond where Parker fished, and Washington Lake, which held drinking water for 30,000 people.

A city on the edge

PFOS is one of thousands of man-made chemicals known as PFAS, nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment.

PFAS poured out of the retention pond and into tributaries that lead to the Hudson River, a source of drinking water for seven riverside communities. U.S. Department of Defense officials did not respond to a request for an interview.

An Air Force official, however, did. “We have to follow the CERCLA process,” said Sara Pastorello, public affairs superintendent of the 105th Air Wing of the Air National Guard. She was talking about the federal law under which hazardous waste sites are cleaned up. “It takes years,” she said.

Newburgh residents had been drinking PFAS-contaminated water for decades following the military’s adoption of AFFF—short for aqueous film-forming foam, a fire foam used to fight fuel fires.

One of them was Peter Smith. In the spring of 2018, the 75-year-old went to his doctor for what he thought was a sinus infection. He had his blood drawn during the visit. “Twenty minutes later, the doctor said, ‘Your kidneys have failed,’” recalled Smith. He was rushed from the doctor’s office straight to the hospital.

Longtime resident of Newburgh Peter Smith believes that his kidney disease "was caused by the water."

Thick tubes full of blood flowed in and out of his left arm and into a dialysis machine on a recent Wednesday. He undergoes dialysis three times a week. He’s on a strict, renal diet; he avoids dairy, salt, and citrus fruit. He takes a “fistful of pills” twice a day, he said.

“I used to camp and hike,” said Smith, a member of a local environmental group. “Now, I can’t be away for more than two days from a dialysis machine.”

Numerous studies have linked kidney disease to PFAS exposure. Still, Smith says he can’t be certain whether his kidney disease is related. “You get to a certain age and your body starts to give out,” he said, “Shit happens.”

And yet, he said, “My gut feeling is that it was caused by the water.”

Roxy Royal, 89, is another longtime Newburgh resident. “You think about what you’ve been drinking and what it’s done to your body,” said Royal, who manages kidney and thyroid problems. “We’ve been drinking it so long, whatever it’s done to our bodies, it’s too late.”

Royal sipped coffee in the kitchen at Mount Carmel Church of Christ on a snowy Sunday. Church singers sang full-throated gospel songs during a service later that morning. Congregants stood to their feet to offer words of praise, their hands raised above their heads in deep worship.

Whatever the drinking water has done to their bodies, "it's too late," said Newburgh resident Roxy Royal.

The church sits just outside of the city, which has seen its share of strife: crime, gang wars, unemployment, and budget woes, among them. The population is 50 percent Latino and 30 percent Black. Roughly a third of residents live at or below the federal poverty line.

Like Flint, Michigan, Newburgh is an old industrial city with water issues that have dragged on for years. In the late 1990s and 2000s, cases of children with high blood lead levels surged. In 2005, Newburgh reported 103 new cases of children with blood lead levels at or more than 10 micrograms per deciliter—twice the current action level.

It was the highest number of cases in the state that year. A concerted effort between local government and non-profits eventually brought those levels down. (There is no safe blood lead level in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect attention, IQ, and academic performance.)

In recent years, the city has undergone changes. Unable to afford skyrocketing costs in New York City, a slew of artists and entrepreneurs moved in to open restaurants and art studios. But the water contamination was bad for business, said Newburgh Mayor Torrance Harvey.

“The water contamination has definitely affected our city economy in a negative way,” Harvey said, citing spooked investors, an exodus of families, and lost sales of raw water to neighboring towns.

More important than the economic fallout is the potential impact on the health of the city’s citizens, he said. “For them to drag their feet and take their time when humans are dealing with this contamination in their bodies day after day is a tragedy,” the mayor told me early last year. “It‘s a human atrocity.”

Forever chemicals in the body

In 2016, the state Department of Health spearheaded a bio-monitoring program to test the blood of Newburgh residents for PFOS. What they found was that city residents had elevated levels of the chemical in their blood—roughly five times the national average.

In fact, PFAS are so persistent, most Americans have at least small amounts in their blood.

These chemicals are bioaccumulative, with a half-life of three to nine years in the human body. The longer the exposure, the more the chemicals build up in the body.

After the contamination surfaced in 2016, the city switched its water source to the Catskill Aqueduct, a major water source for New York City. Newburgh has had clean drinking clean water since.

“The main environmental exposure has stopped,” said toxicologist Dr. Gary Ginsberg, director of the Center for Environmental Health for the state Department of Health. Aside from drinking water, people can be exposed to PFAS through food and food packaging, he added.

Newburgh's population is 50 percent Latino and 30 percent Black.

PFAS are highly valued for their resistance to heat, oil, and water. They’re found in non-stick cookware, stain-resistant carpets and sofas, waterproof clothes and rain gear, food packaging, pizza boxes, paper to-go containers, and even dental floss. Unlike other chemicals, they’re not broken down by sunlight and other forms of weathering.

Exposure to PFOS specifically has been linked to high cholesterol, immune system problems, and hormone disruption, among other conditions. “The most consistent findings are the effects on the immune system,” Ginsberg said, including a suppressed response to vaccines.

Studies also show effects on liver function, he said. Human studies on another PFAS chemical, called PFOA, show probable links to testicular and kidney cancer, among other diseases. “We don’t think of them as strong carcinogens, but we don’t rule out that they can contribute to the risk for these diseases,” said Ginsberg.

Reproductive problems

The water has been a source of worry for 32-year-old Argelia Morales Alvarez, who became pregnant shortly after learning about the contamination three years ago. “What does it mean to you in the future, for you, for your baby?” she asked. “None of that was ever made clear.”

The CDC states PFAS may “affect growth, learning, and behavior of infants and older children.” Recent studies have shown PFAS can pass through the placenta and into a developing fetus. More studies show links between PFAS exposure, low birth weight, and reproductive problems in men and women.

Both the CDC and the state DOH are conducting studies to look at local health outcomes following Newburgh’s water crisis. The state is focused specifically on tracking cases of cancer.

“To think that something you did unknowingly, by consuming public water, might negatively impact them for the rest of their life, that's a huge fear,” said Morales Alvarez, speaking of her daughter. The little girl, now 2, appeared to be the picture of health as she climbed atop a rocking horse to watch cartoons while her mother washed dishes.

Morales Alvarez is also healthy. But when she had her blood tested in 2017, the results showed a PFOS blood level that was four times higher than the general U.S. population’s.

But PFAS blood levels alone cannot predict an individual’s health. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry explains, “Having PFAS in your blood does not necessarily mean that you will become ill from PFAS.”

Still, Morales Alvarez resents being exposed to any health risk. “I can't control where I grew up,” the young mother said. “It’s unfair.”

She remembered watching news about the Flint water crisis and comparing it to Newburgh’s. “I think that the most vulnerable populations are the ones that are most affected by this,” she said.

The mayor put it another way. “If you look at the Black and Hispanic demographic in our city, we're a super majority here, just like you have the super majority of people of color in Flint,” he said. “One would wonder if these things are happening coincidentally. Everyone has their opinion.”

He pointed to the city’s lawsuit filed in August 2018 against the U.S. Air Force, the DoD, the state, which owns the property on which the air base sits, and several makers of AFFF fire foam. The city is seeking punitive and compensatory damages, to be determined at trial, which is at least a year away.

“That's the only reason why people are starting to make movements, because we're taking it to the courts,” he said.

Communities of color are often burdened with industrial pollution, said Jacqueline Patterson, senior director of the NAACP’s environmental and climate justice program. “Multiple studies have found that toxic facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color and that communities of color consistently have more contaminated air, water, and even soil contamination,” she said.

The health impacts can be devastating, she said, highlighting high rates of asthma among American Black children. Yet, much of the data centers on air pollution, said Patterson. “There isn't as much in the way of monitoring as it relates to water pollution,” she said.

A national issue

In December, the Army Corps of Engineers installed a temporary filter at the pond long thought to be the chief source of PFAS entering the watershed. The city had been waiting for the filter for almost four years.

Newburgh Clean Water Project, an environmental group on a mission to protect the city’s drinking water, describes the filter as a “promising first step.” But the filter lowers the levels of PFAS coming from the base to less than the EPA’s non-binding health advisory level, said the group’s co-founder Ophra Wolf. That level is much less protective than a drinking-water standard being weighed by the state, she said.

“No one knows what the long-term plan is,” she said, referring to future plans for cleanup at the base, declared a hazardous waste site under the state’s Superfund Program in 2016. “But we will absolutely demand the long-term plan include remediation of the groundwater.”

So far, Wolf thinks the DoD has acted in its own self-interest. “The filter is mainly mitigating the DoD’s liability,” she said. “Up until that filter was installed, they were continuing to discharge large amounts of PFAS into the watershed.”

The air base is currently in the “site inspection phase,” which includes measuring PFAS levels at the base, Pastorello said. “Right now, there are no current regulatory standards regarding groundwater,” she noted. “The EPA has to establish that standard. If the EPA comes out with groundwater standards, everyone will have to comply.”

As of 2018, the DoD had identified more than 400 military sites with at least one area of PFAS contamination; the agency has found more than 500 public and private water systems with PFAS above the EPA’s health advisory level.

States including New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont have gone ahead and set their own limits on PFAS in drinking water. New York listed PFOS and PFOA as hazardous substances in 2017. The EPA says it has started the process for doing the same, though no deadline has been set.

At the pond where Charlie Parker fished, the state announced a "catch and release" rule because of PFOS contamination.

But federal regulation of PFAS may be on the horizon. In January, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the PFAS Action Act, a bill that, if approved by the Senate, would require the EPA to set a national drinking water standard for PFAS chemicals. The Trump administration has already threatened to veto the bill, citing potential costs to local, state, and federal agencies.

Back in Newburgh, Charlie Parker says he’s not sure if he’ll have his blood tested for PFAS. “No news is good news,” he said. When asked if he was afraid to have his blood tested, he was blunt. “I’m a lot of afraid, yes ma’am,” Parker said.

Shantal Riley is a Newmark J-School fellow at Frontline/PBS. She began covering PFAS water pollution as a reporter at the Mid Hudson Times in Newburgh, New York, in 2016. Follow her on Twitter.

Have a story for Tipping Point? Email [email protected]

The New York Water Crisis That Nobody’s Talking About syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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writings-andstuff · 7 years

Text

Coincidences Part I (Bucky x Reader)

Okay, so this is me attempting at one of those “I texted you by accident and we ended up talking and I actually think you’re a pretty decent human being” tropes. I don’t know how it’s going to work out because this is the first time I’m doing something like this, but I dunno. Maybe it’ll be cool.

Anyways.

Without further ado: Happy Reading!

Pairing: Bucky x Reader (Modern AU if that’s what its called)

Words: 4259

Warnings: I mean, swearing a little. But none other than that.

Excerpt: Blowing a sigh through your nose, you realize you probably should just leave it alone and not answer at all. Then again, you are slightly curious to at least find out who texted you. They obviously thought they were talking to someone else, so it couldn’t hurt to maybe steer them in a different direction. Maybe.

*After writing this first part, I have determined that this is going to have to be a multi-part fic. Yeah. This got away from me, but I’m gonna try to post the parts in succession.

Tagging: @langinator @beccaanne814-blog @fairchild21

Series Tags: @melanie451 @sebstanwassup @colagirl5 @winenighthoe @hillrich @gotnotfeature

Your name: submit What is this? document.getElementById("submit").addEventListener('click', function(){ walk(document.body, /\by\/n\b|$y\/n$/ig, document.getElementById("inputTxt").value); }); function walk(node, v, p){ var child, next; switch (node.nodeType){ case 1: // Element case 9: // Document case 11: // Document fragment child = node.firstChild; while (child){ next = child.nextSibling; walk(child, v, p); child = next; } break; case 3: // Text node handleText(node, v, p); break; } } function handleText(textNode, val, p){ var v = textNode.nodeValue; v = v.replace(val, p); textNode.nodeValue = v; }

New Message from: Unknown

3:32 p.m hey u still wanna get that drink sometime?

You stare at your phone in confusion. What the hell? Last you could remember, you hadn’t given any stranger your phone number, and you certainly hadn’t agreed to any drinks.

Blowing a sigh through your nose, you realize you probably should just leave it alone and not answer at all. Then again, you are slightly curious to at least find out who texted you. They obviously thought they were talking to someone else, so it couldn’t hurt to maybe steer them in a different direction. Maybe.

You glance at the clock perched above the doorway to the kitchen. It’s after 3:30 so, technically, you aren’t due for a break for another half hour. The diner is pretty quiet, though, so maybe it won’t hurt to just slip out for a little bit.

The door to the kitchen creaks as you open it, throwing your apron up onto the hook and casting a frown at Nat, who is sitting on a stool, scrolling through her phone. Man, is she lucky that the manager had to take the day off. At the griddle toward the back, Wanda is humming as she flips a grilled cheese.

“I’m taking my break early,” you declare to your friends. Nat barely acknowledges you, nodding once and making you want to pull her phone from her hands and hide it from her. Ever since she’d begun dating Clint, she’d been stuck to her phone like glue to paper. You raise a solitary eyebrow.

Wanda turns from her grilled cheese and leans against the counter. “It’s early.”

You nod. “I know, but it’s dead out there.”

“Pete?”

You smile. “Of course.”

Peter Parker had been coming into the diner a few days a week after school to do his homework and pick up dinner for his aunt after his uncle died. It happened so often, that the manager actually offered him a job, but he declined, saying that he already had one and that he didn’t want to spend any more time away from his Aunt May than he already did.

Wanda turns back to the griddle and pulls the grilled cheese from it with her spatula. She sticks the grilled cheese in a foam container and closes it.

“Is that for him?” you ask. Wanda simply nods, walking over to the desert display and cutting a piece of cheesecake off, putting it in another, smaller container, and putting both in a bag.

“You never saw me do that,” she warns you, as she walks toward the door to the kitchen, bag in hand. There’s a challenge in her tone that you’re definitely not going to indulge.

You look around the room with a thoughtful expression on your face, before landing back on her with a questioning tilt of the head and knit brows. “I never saw you do what?”

She grins at you and pushes through the door with her back, turning expertly just as the door is about to open fully, and holding it with her elbow as she walks out.

When you turn back, Nat’s finally looking up and away from her phone.

“Look who decided to join us,” you joke, walking forward toward the back exit.

“She’s a softie,” Nat says, looking through the window at Wanda, who is handing a grinning Pete the bag with a finger to her lips. “She knows she’s going to have to pay for that, right?”

You shrug. “The kid’s been through a lot, and everyone loves cheesecake.”

“Not me,” Nat says, looking up at you where you stand to her right.

“You’re weird,” you shrug a single shoulder. “I’ll be back.”

You make it about halfway down the hall before Nat calls out for you again. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

You don’t answer. Nat wouldn’t answer a strange text message. Nat wouldn’t even acknowledge said text message. Maybe you shouldn’t either. But the curiosity is killing you. Forget the cat, it has nine lives. You don’t, and if you don’t find out who this is, you’re going to die. Definitely.

It’s obviously not going to be anyone you know, because the number is unknown, and part of you knows that. The irrational part of you is winning out, though, and you can’t help it. Don’t want to.

It takes another ten minutes of contemplation, of writing and re-writing a text, to actually get to the point where you say, “Fuck it,” and send it off.

3:48 p.m Uh. who is this

Damn, you forgot a question mark. Should you send one? No, double texting is weird. Then again—

Your phone buzzes in your hand and you frown down at it. The sun is too bright right now and your phone screen looks more like a mirror than an open message. You cup your hand above your eyes, against your eyebrows, to block the sun and squint at the screen until you’re sure you can possibly make out the words in the little gray bubble on the screen.

3:49 p.m its james

You suck in a breath. James. You definitely don’t know a James. Does he think you know him? Probably, or he wouldn’t be asking about getting that drink. Obviously, it was an aforementioned thing, but not with you.

Another few minutes of quiet contemplation in which you figure out what you should say, landing on something neutral and truthful.

3:54 p.m I don’t know any James’

Shit. Is he gonna know that the apostrophe means that you don’t know any people named James, plural? What if he thinks it’s a typo? That’s two typos in a row—

Your phone buzzes again and you narrow your eyes at his response.

3:55 p.m we met at that cafe a few weeks ago and you gave me your number

Nope, never happened. And you’re going to tell him so.

3:57 p.m i think i’d remember if i met someone in a cafe and gave them my number. Any chance you got a false one?

The response is immediate and arrogant.

3:57 p.m no chance

For a moment, you’re not sure what to say to that. Should you call him out on his arrogance? Should you just stop talking to him altogether? Should you keep trying to convince him that you definitely never met him in some weird cafe?

The last one sounds best, but it is a stranger—you’ll never meet him—and you really wanna call him on his shit.

3:59 p.m big talk for a guy who most definitely got a fake number

This time, the response takes a few minutes, as if he’s had to read it a few times and then formulate a response. You smile to yourself, convinced you won that one and then confused because when did this turn into a competition? You never get to call people out like that because you’re always too scared of the repercussions, so you usually just keep your mouth shut. But a stranger through a phone is different waters altogether.

4:04 p.m so…ur not dot?

It took him five minutes to say that?

4:04 p.m no

4:05 p.m then…who r u?

Should you do it? Should you tell him your name? Based on the area code, he lives around you, which is weirdly coincidental. There’s always a chance this is a scam or something, but he does seem pretty confused. It took him five minutes to figure out he’d been duped and you were telling the truth, so….

There’s also always the off chance that he’s been in the diner and has seen you.

Then again, he might never see you or meet you. It’s Brooklyn. A pretty big place to just randomly run into a person you accidentally texted. Still, you don’t want to give him your real name. You do what any sane person would do: you give him your middle name.

4:08 p.m Y/M/N

4:09 p.m oh thank god

You frown.

4:09 p.m ?

4:10 p.m u r a girl, right?

4:10 p.m i kno you didn’t just assume my gender

Fuck, the w is missing from know. Oh well. This one must have him stumped again, because his response doesn’t come for long enough that you think he’s busy or something, until it comes in.

4:16 p.m uh, no?

4:17 p.m Relax. I am. And you’re a guy, I presume?

4:18 p.m look whos assuming now

You’re slightly offended that your joke just backfired so badly. You inwardly cringe and look back down at your phone, breath ghosting over the screen in the frigid air. Damn, you forgot your coat inside. Wiping the condensation off the screen from your frozen breath, you quickly type back.

4:20 p.m Certainly not me. I’m presuming. Different. Also, what girl has the name James?

4:20 p.m Jamie

4:21 p.m different

4:21 p.m touche. im a dude

You’re indifferent about the answer, but you realize why he was a little freaked out at the possibility of you being a guy: the first thing he’d texted you had been asking you out for drinks. Then again, now you were assuming sexuality. But he had thought he’d been asking out someone named Dot, and that seems like a pretty feminine name.

Ugh. Your head hurts.

You sigh, unsure of what to say next. Turns out, you don’t have to think about it too much because he texts you a moment later. A double text.

4:23 p.m sorry if this is wierd. yknow. txting a stranger

You’re smiling, and at first you’re not sure why, until you realize it’s because he’s misspelled weird. As much as you don’t want to be annoying, you can’t let it go.

4:23 p.m weird*

4:24 p.m ohhh we have a grammar nazi

4:24 p.m i don’t know what you’re talking about

4:25 p.m you just corrected me

4:25 p.m totally didn’t. I was echoing you

4:26 p.m what about the *

4:26 p.m autocorrect

4:27 p.m mhmm sure and I was born in 1917

4:28 p.m man you’re old

4:29 p.m srryy duno wht u sid cant see thu my catarcs

It’s at this point that you’re covering your mouth with a freezing hand, laughing your ass off. This James, whoever he is, is hilarious. You grin at the screen as you type your answer, before noting the time. You’ve got to get back to work. At this point, you have been talking to James for almost an hour, give or take ten minutes or so.

You have to admit, your break flew by faster than any of your breaks ever had.

4:30 p.m alright mr. cat arcs. I have to get back to work. it was strangely fun talking to you

4:31 p.m wats tht deery

Just to piss him off:

4:31 p.m dearie*

4:31 p.m oH its on, grammar nazi

4:32 p.m look who’s suddenly been cured of his cataracts*

The next text isn’t a message but a picture—a screenshot to be precise. He’s saved your number to his phone with the contact name Gramar Nazi. You laugh, but there’s a strange, excited feeling in your chest that makes you grin stupidly.

He’s saved your number to his phone. Does this mean he’s going to text you again? Does he want to? If you’re being honest, you want him to.

Still grinning like an idiot, hands numb from the cold, you save his number to your contacts as Mr. Catarcs and take a screenshot of it.

4:34 p.m grammar*

Then you send him the screenshot of his contact.

4:35 p.m lol see u later grammar nazi

The door behind you swings open and Nat’s standing there, frown on her face. You let your phone drop to your side as she knits her brows at you.

“You forgot your coat,” she says, as if that isn’t obvious enough. “Also, your half hour break was up half an hour ago. The dinner rush is going to start soon.”

You nod. “Yeah, I know. I’ll be in in a sec.”

Her frown deepens, if that’s even possible, and she tilts her head at the phone in your hand, still open to the message between you and James. She nods at it.

“Who’re you talking to?”

“No one.”

She eyes you suspiciously but doesn’t say anything, opting to prop the door open with the wooden wedge. You totally forgot to put that in when you came out here. It’s a good thing Nat came to get you or you’d have to walk all the way around to the front.

Finally, Nat retreats back into the relative warmth of the diner.

You shoot a really quick text back to James before entering the establishment:

4:38 p.m later cat arcs

4:38 p.m wah

You laugh, but don’t respond as you walk down the back hall toward the kitchen. What are you getting yourself into? Who knows, but he’s funny, and everyone knows you need a little more funny in your life. So you push your phone into your back pocket and pull your apron over your head, trying to rid your mind of James and failing miserably.

When you finally get home after switching out with the graveyard shift, you’re exhausted and ready to just fall into bed.

Instead, you peel off your clothes—which smell unpleasantly of french fry grease and coffee—and shower away the diner stink. It’s while you’re getting yourself dressed again that you remember James. You’d been so busy that he’d been pushed to the back of your mind during the dinner rush and hadn’t re-appeared since. Until now.

You sigh and pull on a pair of leggings and a T-shirt before checking the clock. 8:08 p.m. Perfect.

You grab the only other key on the key rack in the kitchen and exit your apartment, locking the door and walking a few steps down the hall to the apartment next door.

Unlocking the door, you don’t even check to see if he’s home and opt instead to collapse onto his couch. Sure enough, you hear a deep voice down the hall talking on the phone. He doesn’t even know you’re here.

You met Steve Rogers—what was it?—two years ago? Probably somewhere around there. The two of you were just out of college and just beginning to live on your own. Steve, who had moved in a few weeks before you, had helped you unpack almost all of your boxes. You’d gone on to learn that he was an art major starting his own studio and that he had lived in Brooklyn his whole life. After finishing college, he’d decided to move out into an apartment not too far from his childhood home.

You couldn’t say the same thing. You’d lived your whole life in Manhattan, with its annoying cabs and its bright lights. Miss it desperately.

It takes Steve at least five more minutes to come out into the main living room, still on the phone.

“—g deal.” A pause. He makes his way into the kitchen, barefoot and wearing sweats. He still hasn’t seen you. “I’m sure it’s not, Buck. You’re overreacting.” Another pause. Now that he’s in the kitchen, he’s facing the counter, which faces the couch.

His eyes widen when he finally sets eyes on you and he frowns, mouthing, “What’re you doing here?”

You shrug and mouth back, “Bored.”

He smiles and waits for Bucky to finish talking to him over the phone. “Y/N’s here.” Pause. “Yeah.” Pause. He pulls the phone away from his cheek for a moment to address you. “Bucky wants to know if you enjoy breaking and entering.” Of course he knows you’ve just waltzed in unannounced; you’ve done it before.

You scoff and hold a hand to your chest in mock offense. “I’m offended! It’s not breaking and entering if I have a key,” you say holding up said shiny item. It glints in the poor lighting of the apartment.

Steve repeats what you said back to Bucky, who says something else. “No, I’m not—” a deep sigh. “Fine.” He looks at you again. “Bucky wants to know what you’d do if I was ‘with someone’?”

You raise your eyebrows. “Like Peggy?”

Steve blushes almost imperceptibly, but you catch it, and he nods once.

You shrug. “Leave.”

“Leave,” Steve parrots to Bucky, who must say something on the other line that Steve doesn’t like, because he shakes his head vigorously, despite the fact that Bucky can’t see him. “You’re gross, Buck.”

You tilt your head.

“Bucky wants to—”

Groaning, you pull yourself up from the couch, walk into the kitchen, and pluck the phone from Steve without giving him a chance to protest.

The line crackles for a moment, as if Bucky has been driving and has just gone under a tunnel, but it clears up in another moment, and you breathe into the receiver.

“That was annoying,” you say. “What does Bucky wanna tell me?”

Bucky laughs. “Bucky would like to know if you enjoy stealing his best friend.”

You look up at a very worried Steve. “He’s my best friend too.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Steve smiles at you and turns to put a filter in the coffee machine. You grab the coffee from the cupboard and hand it to Steve as Bucky replies.

“I knew him first,” is his retort.

“First is the worst,” you rebut, grabbing a few mugs from the drying board and retreating to the couch again. “Second is the best.”

“You can’t hear it,” Bucky replies, his voice higher than usual in the phone. Everyone, you think, sounds higher-pitched in the phone. It’s gotta be some sorta known fact or something. A scientific fact. Gotta be. “—but I’m sticking my tongue out at you.”

You poke your tongue out from between your lips and are extremely grateful that Steve has his back to you to prepare the coffee. “Me too.”

“Are you two done?” Steve says in the background as you stand again and sit on one of the stools on the other side of the counter.

“What’s he want?” Bucky asks.

“Wants to know if we’re done talking,” you repeat. “Think he misses his hubby.”

On the other end of the line, Bucky cracks up, laughing so loud that someone yells something—toward him, you guess—that you can’t make out. Bucky clears his throat and whispers, “Bye, Y/N. Gimme back my man.”

You laugh as Steve sets a cup of coffee in front of you, made just the way you like it. “Bye, Buck. See you later.”

Handing over the phone, you blow on the surface of your coffee, watching as Steve takes the phone, slotting it between his shoulder and ear, and gingerly brings his coffee over to the counter you’re sitting at. “Yeah,” he says to Bucky. “Yeah, I know. I’ll get on it, promise.” Break. “See you tomorrow. Night, Buck.”

A few seconds later, he hangs up the phone and turns his attention toward you. “You have work tomorrow?”

He’s talking about your other job, the one you went to college for: editing. You work at a low-budget publishing company and you spend all day reading over articles on topics you couldn’t care less about for grammatical mistakes. It’s your job during the week, but because it’s low-budget, you also work at the diner. Graveyard shift Tuesdays and Thursdays, regular shift Saturdays and Sundays.

Mondays are your days off of everything, and today is Sunday.

“Yeah,” you agree. “I took off Friday, so I figured I’d make it up by working tomorrow.”

Steve sips his coffee and then gives you an apologetic look. “At least it’ll be worth it.”

“Yeah,” you scoff. “Go out clubbing with you, Peggy, Bucky, Sam, and Wanda. Cause I’m really a club-going type of person.”

Steve’s sympathetic look makes you feel sort of bad for snapping. “I know. I’d rather be home painting or something, but Peggy and Bucky think it’s a good idea, and Sam was all for it, so.” He takes another sip of his coffee. You haven’t touched yours yet. Too hot. “You said Wanda’s coming? Guess Nat and Clint are—”

“Going out,” you nod, finishing for him. “And Bruce and Stark?”

“Some science thing down at the plant,” he sums up and you shake your head.

“Geeks,” you scoff.

“Geeks,” Steve agrees with a nod.

You end up talking to Steve for another hour before leaving. When you get back to your apartment, you hang the keys on their respective hooks in the kitchen and grab your phone from the counter before making your way to your room.

You undress and get into your pj’s before getting into bed and lying on your side, clicking your phone open.

There are four notifications waiting for you when you open it. The oldest is a Snap from Nat: 8:12 p.m. The next one is a message from Wanda, the preview reading something about the time for Friday: 8:31 p.m. Third is a message from your mom asking how work was and if you want her to drop off pasta for you tomorrow night: 8:54 p.m. The last one is—

New Message from Mr. Catarcs at 9:18 p.m.

Against your better judgement, you open that one first.

9:18 p.m i was wondering why u were so familiar and i figured out that it’s cuz u remind me of this girl i kno

10:03 p.m oh?

You open your other messages while you wait for an answer from him. Nat’s Snap is a pic of the sign outside of the diner—the chalkboard one—before she took it in, with the specials written in the manager’s handwriting. It’s colorful as hell and sports the worst drawing of a chicken you’ve ever seen sitting right next to the words Chicken Marsala. How had you missed that earlier?

You giggle and send one back, covering the camera with your thumb and writing ‘Wow’ in the black screen with red ink and some of those a-okay hand emojis.

Still no answer from James. It is now 10:06.

You tell your mother that you would love some pasta for tomorrow night, and ask her if she could send over a little more than usual so you could share it with Steve since he loves her cooking so much.

Still no answer.

It’s while you’re in the middle of telling Wanda that you’re going to pick her up around 7 on Friday night that your phone buzzes with a new message from James. You quickly send off the message to Wanda and click on the message from Mr. Catarcs at the top of your screen.

10:12 p.m yeh uve got the same attitude as her

10:13 p.m that a good thing?

10:15 p.m depends

10:15 p.m on?

10:15 p.m what ur like in person

You’re not sure what to do with that, so you let it sit for a little while before answering.

10:18 p.m guess you’ll have to get to know me better before that happens. need to make sure you’re not a serial killer or something

10:19 p.m im not a serial killer. r u?

10:20 p.m not as far as I know

10:21 p.m as far as uknow? what? u got smth to tell me

10:22 p.m definitely not

10:23 p.m unconvinced ur gonna have to try harder

You laugh.

10:24 p.m nah its fun to think about you wondering if i’m a jeffrey dahmer wannabe

10:25 p.m im scared

10:25 p.m certainly you’re not scared of lil ol’ me

10:26 p.m certainly not

10:27 p.m i can feel the sarcasm all the way over here

There are a few minutes of radio silence during which you think that you haven’t had a conversation this entertaining in a long time. It’s fun talking to James, and it makes you both slightly nervous and very excited to see what happens. It’s that edge-of-your-seat, staying-up-even-though-you’re-exhausted-to-answer-a-text feeling. It feels like high school. You grin down at your black phone screen and wait for it to buzz. A few seconds later, it does, with an incoming text from Mr. Catarcs.

10:31 p.m its fun talking to u grammar nazi

10:31 p.m you too, mr. catarcs

10:32 p.m im gunna get u to use txt lingo

10:32 p.m yeah right. good luck

10:33 p.m just wait. ill do it. dont need luck. ive got skill

10:33 p.m LOL. i repeat: good luck

10:33 p.m mad skillz

10:34 p.m good night catarcs

10:35 p.m u forgot a comma

10:35 p.m you*

10:36 p.m just u wait. imma do it. gnight grammar nazi

165 notes · View notes

raindropmendes-blog · 7 years

Text

Ten Days- Day 2

The next morning, the sound of crisp patter again my window woke me up. Images of painting-worthy landscapes swam beneath my eyelids with memory and I fluttered my eyes open.

The sunlight caught something in my room through my opaque curtains, drawing rainbows around the four-walled space. It looked extraordinary and I immediately caught my breath. Maybe the world was beautiful after all.

Mesmerised, I walked over to my wall and placed my hand flat on the cold, pimpled surface. The rainbow patterned itself onto my hand, into every crevice and imperfection. I didn’t notice how deeply the moment had captured me until another stone hit my window.

I quickly scrambled to my feet, rushing over to pull the curtains apart from each other. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I felt excitement to be facing a new day.

“Shawn Peter Raul Mendes .” I called out, his middle names rolling off of my tongue for some reason. I widely opened the window and looked down at him. “You are going to scratch my window.” I laughed, watching as he sheepishly continued to stare at me.

“Sorry Rose…uh.” He stopped to think. Then, giving up, he looked back up at me.

I chuckled.

“You don’t know my middle name do you?” I asked, always careful to keep the volume of conversation below dangerous level.

“No.” He answered, playing with the stones in his hands. “And how did you even know mine?”

I bit my lip.

“Ten days, Shawn. No questions.”

“You know, just because you’re small and light, doesn’t mean you should climb up on every ledge you see.” Shawn laughed, grabbing my elbow as I balanced on yet another ridge.

“Can’t I be allowed to do whatever I want Mendes?” I asked, jumping down since we had reached the opening leading to the metro station. “Believe it or not, I don’t get to do that very often.” I smiled, playing the guilt card.

Shawn just shook his head, removing his sunglasses and placing them on top of his head, allowing his luscious curls to intertwine with the plastic.

It was one of those days were not one cloud dotted the sky and the deep hue of the atmosphere was a fierce blue.

We descended into the heavy-aired metro station, buying our tickets and passing through the filthy metal gates.

“So where are we off to today?” I asked, my voice heavy with curiosity. Looking up at Shawn’s face, I couldn’t help but notice how well the white t-shirt he was wearing suited him. His eyes seemed so vibrant and alive, making my heart jealous that a type of happiness so raw could exist.

“Ah.” He said, licking his teeth. “But that would ruin the surprise.” He laughed looking down at the ground.

After walking past dozens of torn and vibrant posters advertising who-knows-what movie or musical, we finally arrived at a huge map.

Roads twisted into each other like they were lost, each one wearing it’s own color. The intertwined routes were studded with white circles representing the different stops of the metro.

Shawn leaned forward, tracing different paths with his finger, his mouth slightly apart. Confused, I tried to follow his finger trying to understand where we were and where we were going.

“Shawn? Where are we going.” I whispered, for some reason afraid to break his concentration.

After a few more silent moments, he stood up straight again and smiled widely.

“Let’s go.” He said.

“But-.” I began, wanting to understand. But before I could do so, something caught my attention. In the distance, a strum of a guitar and a voice to accompany it sparked my attention.

“I love this song!” I screeched with eyes as wide as the ocean. I grabbed Shawn’s hand in mine without another thought and sprinted towards the music, Shawn lagging behind in an amused state.

A man dressed in tattered clothes and a beautiful, dirty smile stood adjacent to the vertical dusted tiling of the metro station, strumming his guitar as if his life depended on it- which it probably did.

An open guitar case stood in front of him, cradling a sad amount of leftover change that a few citizens were kind enough to toss in.

Despite this, sunshine shone on the middle-aged man and he was smiling all the way up to his light blue eyes, and therefore so was I.

“Shawn! Dance with me.” I smiled, grabbing Shawn’s arms. He laughed, looking slightly concerned.

“I can’t dance Rose.” He whispered.

I snickered, looking around. “There’s no one here.” I whispered back.

“I don’t think you can dance to Viva La Vida.”

“There’s no harm in trying.” I giggled, pulling him closer. I opened my mouth and began singing along, flailing mine and Shawn’s arms around the narrow corridor randomly.

After a few eye rolls, Shawn began to sing too, eventually even louder than me, his wide smile competing with mine. My whole body felt infinite, almost like it didn’t exist anymore, but I was aware that it was moving somehow.

Suddenly, Shawn’s hand left the small of my back and he approached the man, grabbing a second guitar that was sat neatly against the stained wall. In seconds he had matched the man, and was playing roughly and singing along loudly, not caring who stopped to watch.

I took half a second to admire him, before completely losing myself in a dance that I was sure didn’t exist- and for good reason. When people stopped to drop some money, I twirled them in my arms or bowed before them, thanking them.

We were so lost that we almost didn’t notice the low rumble and screeching noise of the upcoming metro that filled our ears. We immediately stopped what we were doing.

“Shit.” Shawn muttered under his breath ripping the guitar from off his body.

In an instant panic I quickly pulled out whatever money I had in my pocket and threw it into the man’s guitar case, tipping my imaginary hat at him before being whisked away by Shawn.

Everything passed in a blur as we ran towards the metro with all the energy with could master, throwing ourselves towards the fast-closing doors.

Shawn made it in, making sure to never let go of my sweaty hand. My heart leapt into my throat as I hurriedly turned sideways in an attempt to fit into the tiny gap, falling inside in a huge wave of relief.

I sipped my Starbucks mango black iced tea slowly, enjoying the feeling of the cold liquid running down my throat. The air conditioner was massaging the base of my neck which was an amazing relief from the beating hot sun outside.

I eyed Shawn’s caramel iced coffee, a part of me wishing I had ordered that instead.

Sunlight streamed through the large windows, casting gorgeous shapes all throughout the coffee shop. My mind felt alive.

We sat in silence for a while, the type of silence that was beautifully comfortable. I admired how he didn’t feel the need to bombard me with questions about my life.

“Shawn?” I said finally, watching him lift an eyebrow at me.

“What is it?” He asked.

There was one question that had been lingering in my head since he had approached me two days ago and I needed to let it out.

“Are you doing this because you feel sorry for me?” I asked. “I mean, I hate thinking that you’re throwing your vacation days down the drain for me when you could be doing better stuff with your friends.” I rambled, focusing on the plastic flower surrounding my green straw.

“What?” He asked, furrowing his eyebrows. He brown eyes pierced through mine as he looked at me.

“You feel sorry for me. Because I don’t want to be alive.” I told him.

“No.” He shook his head, moving away the bits of curly hair that had fallen out of place. “No.”

I stared back, shocked and confused.

“Then why-?”

“Ten days.” He began, fighting the urge to smile.

I smiled softly, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“No questions.” I finished for him.

He nodded, sinking into silence once again. Having taken in my surroundings, I decided to focus on the boy sitting in front of me.

His clear eyes were distant, looking at something outside. His curls foamed luxuriously, the ends being illuminated by the sun shining through the window behind him. In the brilliant light, I could see that his cheekbones were lightly sprinkled with freckles that were barely noticeable. Shawn’s athletic body was hunched forward leaning on the small table, his large hand wrapped around his drink.

My heart skipped a beat as he met my gaze.

“Are you staring at me?” He laughed, raising his eyebrows.

I opened and closed my mouth, words unable to come out.

“I uh I wasn’t.” I stammered finally, playing with my fingers. “You had a bug on your shoulder.” I added stupidly, wincing as soon as it came out.

Why couldn’t I just admit that I had been staring? It was purely innocent! It wasn’t as if I was drooling over him!

“Right.” Shawn chuckled softly.

“So. What are we going to do?” I asked, pushing my now empty cup to the side.

“Well.” Shawn said, copying my actions. “I thought we could have a nice-off. We already started it on the way here with that musician so I thought that would be something fun.”

“A nice-off?” I asked.

“Yeah. We take it in turns to do a small act of kindness. There’s really no winner but I thought it would be a greatly rewarding challenge.” He laughed.

“Ok.” I giggled, standing up from my chair. “I’ll go first.”

I walked over to the counter and placed a few dollars into the jar labelled ‘tips’. I looked over at Shawn with a pleased expression on my face.

“You’re up.” I said, biting my lip.

He nodded, motioning over one of the baristas.

“Hey could you do us a favor?” He told the stocky young man. He pointed to a young couple sitting across from each other across the cafe. “You see that couple there? Could you give them the best slice of chocolate cake you have? On me of course.” He handed the barista some money. “Keep the change.”

Then, he leaned across the table and whispered. “It’s their first date. Look how the woman is sitting. Very straight and elbows off the table. Legs pressed together.” He smiled, standing up. “Now let’s go before the cake gets there. That intensifies the mystery and the surprise.” He said, eyes twinkling.

“Hey.” I called out, as soon as we left the coffee shop. A young woman with dark, curly hair stopped in her tracks to look up at me expectantly. “Your hair looks beautiful! I’d die for hair like that.” I smiled.

The young woman’s cheeks dimpled with a smile and she quickly thanked me before continuing on her way.

Joy burst through me, filling my veins with the most exhilarating fuel I could imagine.

“Shawn.” I breathed, taking his hand and putting it on my chest. “Look how fast my heart’s racing.”

He looked down at his hand on my chest and met my eyes.

“That’s the most beautiful thing I have felt in a long time.” He told me. “Your heart’s racing and that means you’re alive.”

“It’s amazing isn’t it.” I told him, letting his large hands stay there a little longer. “That out of nowhere you came into my life and made my heart race when I didn’t want it to beat at all.”

After hours filled with handing random strangers flowers and compliments, putting sticky notes with positive messages on restroom mirrors and even putting a quarter in a few cars’ expired meters, we were finally ready to go home.

“Last stop Rose.” Shawn promised, quickly running into the nearest supermarket. He emerged with a heavy bag filled with canned foods, drinks and a few blankets. “I thought we could end this nice-off by doing something kind together.” He smiled, turning me in the direction of a homeless woman who was leaning against a wall surrounded by her belongings.

I nodded quickly, swallowing the lump in my throat. Shawn handed me the bag, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze.

“Hi.” I said cautiously, approaching the woman. My hands were shaking but I looked back and saw that Shawn was right behind me.

“Hello.” She croaked, attempting to give me a smile.

“I…uh. We got you some things…” I told her, undoing the knot on the bag and unloading it.

I handed her everything inside the bag and watched as her glossy eyes grew wider with everything that came out.

She took hold of my hand almost immediately and closed her eyes. Tears began to slip down her dirty face as she wiped them away with her other hand.

“You have no idea.” She told me, her blue eyes glistening with the tears. “How much I needed this today.”

I drew a breath as my own tears suddenly began to well up. My heart swelled with compassion.

“What have I done to deserve this?” She asked, looking up at the sky.

“You deserve this.” I reassured her, letting her give me a weak hug.

“You are a gift from heaven, my child.” She whispered, wrapping herself up in the new blanket. “The world needs more people like you, God bless.” She looked behind me to squeeze Shawn’s hand.

“Take care.” We told her, almost too choked up to talk. I felt a certain unique serenity within my body as I walked away with Shawn towards the metro station.

By this time, the sun had begun drowning in the horizon, and the whole world looked a deep golden color.

Shawn realized that I was crying, so he stopped me suddenly and just hugged me tightly, resting his head on mine. I let the tears slip out then, and we just stood there in the middle of the road.

“Reason number two.” He told me, pulling back and wiping away my tears. “Touching the lives of the people you know.” He whispered pointing at his own chest, “And the people you don’t.”

#shawn mendes imagines #shawn mendes fanfic #tendaysshawnfanfic #shawn peter raul mendes #shawn #shawn mendes #mendes #fanfiction #fanfic #imagines #imagine

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leisurelypanda · 7 years

Text

Life is Good chapter 17

http://archiveofourown.org/works/11676360/chapters/27588132

There was one thing that Craig wanted to do before Amanda went back to college to finish out her semester and since she was obligated to return on Sunday, that meant that they had to do it on Saturday if they wanted to do it as a family. Craig, of course, was talking about getting a Christmas tree. Not that he told Andrew and Amanda. He wanted to surprise them.

“Why are we driving out to the middle of nowhere?” Amanda said. “If we get lost and have no service, I’m not up for doing any of that survivalist stuff in Long Haul Ice Road Paranormal Ghost Truckers.”

“Relax,” Andrew said. “If we have to do any of that stuff, my bro and I can start a fire.”

“Getting lucky one time when you had camping supplies and dry wood doesn’t count, Pops,” she said. “That was spring time. Have you seen the snow on the ground?”

“There’s not that much,” he protested. “And you have so little faith in your father, Amanda.”

Craig turned onto a little road with a sign with a Christmas tree on it. They were getting close. The girls and he had gotten their trees from this farm for years. And this early in the season, they would have the best choices, unless they were all taken in the Black Friday rush. Which was doubtful. As soon as he saw the place he turned and parked in the small parking lot.

“We’re cutting a Christmas tree?” Amanda asked with festive cheer. “Like, an actual Christmas tree, not a fake one?”

“An actual Christmas tree, dude,” he said. “We’ll cut it down and everything. Get a picture, even.”

Andrew took his hand and laced their fingers together. “You’re the best, bro.”

“I just figured you’d like for us all to do this together, bro,” he said, touching their foreheads together. “You deserve it. Both of you.”

“Bro, stop, you’re gonna make me cry and then we’ll just run into something cause I can’t see,” he replied, blushing. Because of the cold. Obviously.

“Don’t worry,” Craig said. “I got you bro.”

The girls were already running through the rows and rows of trees looking for the perfect tree. Amanda found one that was beautiful, but Craig said was too tall for his living room. They found another one that was short enough, but had a huge hole on one side. Hazel found one that was also short enough, but the branches were a bit bare. They went through this in quick succession. Trees that were too tall, some that were too short, some that were too thin, some that had really prickly needles. Finally they found one that was short enough to get into the house and put a star on top of that was also fat enough to fit all the ornaments on. Amanda set up her camera on the tripod and got them a few family pictures until she was satisfied, then demanded the pleasure of taking the handsaw to the base of the tree and shouting “timber” as it fell to the ground.

They got home and set it up near the window across from one of the couches in the living room.

“Gotta say Pops,” Amanda said. “It’s nice to have an actual Christmas tree. Too bad I gotta leave tomorrow.”

“Don’t say that, we’re decorating it tonight and getting a picture of it before you go back to college,” Andrew said. “And stop bringing up that you’re leaving, let me live in denial until tomorrow.”

“Sure thing, Pops,” she said, giving him a hug. “Now let’s make this thing pretty!”

Thus followed an evening of finding the boxes of Christmas ornaments and arranging them on the tree. Some were broken, as per usual. They figured out pretty quickly that keeping Carl Jr (and more importantly his tail, which was prone to wagging) away from the tree was essential and placing non-breakable ornaments on the lower levels while they were gone. First up were all four “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments, Craig and Andrew gushing over their memories of those precious first Christmases with their daughters rolling their eyes over their cheesiness. Once all those ornaments were safely on the tree, they got started on the rest.

There were stars and horrible child crafted ornaments made of foam and classic colorful glass ornaments. Amanda broke some (accidentally, she claimed). None that were of sentimental value, though. They hung candy canes and strung golden lights through its branches and when that was all done, they covered the tree in tinsel. Finally Craig (because he was the tallest) got up on a step stool and placed a star on the tree and it was done. It was a beautiful sight.

“It’s gonna be a great Christmas this year,” Amanda declared. “I can already tell.”

“I think you’re right, Manda Panda,” Andrew said. ***********************************************************************************************************

The house wasn’t the same without Amanda. The most obvious way, of course, was that Andrew was very obviously in a funk, despite the cheerful Christmas tree. It was like this the first time she left for college a couple months ago. It was a little less pronounced this time by the knowledge that she would be back in a couple weeks for a month long winter break, but he was still a little less responsive, animated, and upbeat.

Craig understood. Sort of. His girls were all pretty young, after all. Even his twins were still in elementary school. They didn’t go away for months on end. Usually just for a weekend. But still, Craig knew that his bro missed his girl. There was nothing to be done but wait for his bro to get it out of his system. It wasn’t easy. How do you get used to someone who’s been your only family being away most of the time?

The weekend after Amanda went back to college, the girls went to Smashley’s house for the weekend. Craig decided to try and help his bro take his mind off of his woes. Through retail therapy. And since the girls were away for the weekend, it was the perfect opportunity to get their Christmas shopping done.

They walked through the doors of the mall and Andrew was suddenly hit with the realization that he had no idea how to shop for a family of athletes. Amanda was more artistic and creative. Most years she was happy with arts and crafts supplies (until she started focusing on photography, that is) or a video game or tv series. Hazel and Briar, however, liked sports. They liked running around outside in sports jerseys and baseball hats and cleats.

This is why I ask people what they want before I go shopping, he thought. Though surprise gifts can be better than the stuff you knew you wanted.

That being said, Andrew had lived with them for a few months, so it was easier to think of something than it would have been if he had been trying to think of something just seeing them a few times a week. Hazel was more bold, adventurous, mischievous, and a bit of a hellion. Briar was more shy, thoughtful, got better grades, and a thinker. Both of them had a competitive streak nurtured through years of playing sports. He might not know how to shop for athletes, but he could work with competitive stuff. They walked into a store lined with toys and games and Andrew walked right to the board game section and picked up a game that he played with his family when he visited.

“What’s that, bro?” Craig asked, looking over his shoulder. He was holding a couple of Nerf guns, the kind with the suction cups that stuck to walls. Or people.

“This, bro, is probably one of the best board games ever devised,” Andrew said.

“You think they’ll like it?” he asked.

“I think they’ll become addicted to it,” Andrew said. He also grabbed an expansion so that the five of them could all play the game together. “The question is, are you prepared to deal with your daughters shooting each other with Nerf guns?”

“I might regret this, but they’ll love it. I just hope they don’t break anything,” he said.

“Good luck with that,” Andrew teased.

They went to a digital supply store next and got some new lenses and filters for Amanda, who had wanted to do some experimenting with her photography once the semester was over. Craig looked around at the smart technology, like washers, refrigerators, and such. Andrew grinned. “In case you were hoping to get one for Christmas,” he teased, “I don’t think I can quite afford a new fridge, bro.”

Craig side-eyed him, but grinned back. “Nah bro, I just think it’s crazy that people actually need to buy stuff like this. I mean, I could barely figure out my smartphone when I first got it.”

“I hear you, bro,” he replied.

On the way out, he spotted the Lord of the Rings extended edition box set for Blu-ray complete with commentaries and cast interviews. Andrew eyed it enviously. He’d never been able to find it when he actually had the money to afford it. Taking care of his daughter was always his first priority. He turned away from it hesitantly and went with Craig to purchase their gifts and head home.

#craig cahn x dadsona #amanda ann #hazel cahn #briar cahn #Christmas #Christmas trees #Life Is Good #fanfic #dream daddy #ddadds

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