#it has a wide selection. even of very unknown works and the page itself worked really well

[cacaitos]

Tu antes eras chévere...

#txt #it has a wide selection. even of very unknown works and the page itself worked really well #but they had to change domain and server a while ago and now everything runs slow and half of the pages don't even load sometimes #Eh. at least they kept their library-_- #Arriba los de Tumangaonline originales

[yostresswritinggirl]

Meister of the Stars

Genshin Impact College!AU but it’s in canon universe with canon elements

Otherwise: Hogwarts in Teyvat, Sumeru Academia

Welcome to Exiled’s first public domain post! What does that mean? Well that just means that this work is entirely repriseable and can be used by other authors for their own plots, fics, stories, or even AU characters. So long as you credit me appropriately by either tagging this post or just tagging my url hehe.

Why is this Public Domain? It’s too big and extensive of a plot for me to write alone and I’m sure other authors can do this plot justice than I do. Besides, with my schedule and writing manner, I won’t be delving into this plot anytime soon. Or at all.

Story Prologue Summary:

Sumeru Academia, the oasis of knowledge in the vast continent of Teyvat, is a constitution inhabiting scholars around the world. Within its walls harbors great minds and masters of elemental prowess and higher intelligence. Only select people can enter or even pass the trials of the scholars, some are gifted by invitation by the Headmaster and leader of the nation, the Dendro Archon.

When you had been gifted your Dendro Vision one day when you encountered and rejuvenated one of the many ley lines connecting the world together, it was guaranteed the next day that you were to receive a letter by a majestic hawk: within its claws it clutched a cured scroll, locked by a tie and the logo of Dendro, and the insignia of the famed Academia.

The Archon, shut and reserved as he may be, he knows and keeps close the gifted ones who received a sprinkle of his power.

Sumeru Academia does not value itself with how long you had been under scholarly guidance, students are not recognized by how many years they have been in the constitution, no. Instead the students are split into three different systems of prestige: elemental, mastery, and admission.

Elemental System separates students into different, well, elements corresponding to their Visions: Dendro, Pyro, Cryo, Hydro, Electro, Geo and Anemo. There are no titles do scholars who enter the Academia, but scholarly jargons had opted for either ‘awakening’ or ‘waiting shell’, because more often than not, many scholars had been blessed while inside the walls of the Academia, as well as the obvious fact that being blessed by a Vision comes at a natural time and age in your life.

Mastery System comes in four main hierarchies and two sub-categories, all of which are determined by the Trials of the Scholars upon being allowed admission into the Academia. The four main hierarchies are classified by prestige stars or which the amount you are allowed pinned on your Academian sash:

Six stars are those who come near the grace of Celestia’s understanding of the universe, very rarely are scholars placed into this category, and many scholars even dispute the existence of such a class. However, they do exist as they are honored by the God of Wisdom himself deeming them to carry the blessings of the wisdoms from the stars. A Six star only comes one in a generation, some say. Many speculations linked to this class are supernatural and absurd rumors.

Five stars are those who master the flow of their visions powered by their undeniable talents in their major scholarly interest, renowned as true geniuses of their professions, a lot of them turn into prodigies after leaving the Academia and even serving under ruling kingdoms with high roles.

Four stars are the base level a Vision-holder can reach and is the starting system for said Vision-holders; even tho this is the default level of Vision holders, wielders of Visions in Academia are not to be trifled with, as they are expected to exceed their mastery over Vision-holders residing outside the Academia.

Three stars are non-Vision scholars that have an adeptness in both academics and weapon mastery, they are proficient in combat prowess enough to par those who have basic grasp of their Visions outside of the Academia. Most three star scholars are also known to have a higher chance of receiving their Visions.

There has been no record of Two Stars or One Star scholars in the records of the Academia.

Sub-category of the Mastery System are reliant on physical properties of a scholar: Adepts are those with mixed blood with mystical beings of the continent, or simply put, scholars that are not just of mortal origins. Mortals are simply normal mortals. These sub-category, meaningless as it may seem, are actually used to observe patterns for research purposes regarding power and skill differences.

Admission System is the plainest and easiest judge for all scholars and is not that much given attention to unlike the other systems, except for the last one. Entrance Admission simply means you have taken the appropriate customary tests of the mind, body and element (if you are a Vision-wielder) and passed the marks to enter the Academia. Letter of Recommendation means that you were either transferred from another academy besides Sumeru or some prestigious bloodline convinced the headmasters of Sumeru to allow such easy admission. Meisters are those who wield Dendro Visions with full potential, invited by the Dendro Archon himself to join the ranks of the Academia.

During the Rite of Prominence in the main hall of the Academia, the Dendro Archon descends from his temple to hold this important annual event for new scholars, together with the Headmasters. Rite of Prominence is where new scholars are given their first prestige systems, and those who are convinced to have ascended gets their new titles.

Your knees almost buckled when your name echoed through the wide building, calling you upon the presence of the Headmasters to finally receive your classification. Your first friend and fellow newcomer Chongyun pats you in the back, urging you to approach the aisle that leads to the stage up front. His smile was enough to push your legs to a subtle tremble as you made your way through the carpeted path, standing before the Headmasters.

There was a beat of silence and unmoving, and then the Headmaster starts to raise his hand- before the Dendro Archon himself suddenly stands up from his large throne of a seat at the very back. The movement caused a series of gasps to erupt from the scholars and staff behind you, and you must have hallucinated one from the cloaked Headmasters, as the God of Wisdom made his way to stand in front of you.

His presence was both ethereal and overwhelming as his imposing figure looms over you. You politely raised your head to rest your view by the bridge of his nose, not wanting to offend by making direct contact. “Child,” he extends his large hand and you looked at it, “Your hand.” Your eyes fleet back to his with wary but his gaze softened in assurance. With a sharp inhale, you finally placed your hand into his-

And a burst of gold streams flew out from your connected hands, with enough force to send a pulse of a wave through the building. Hanging cloths were whisked by the elemental burst, flames of candles extinguished, as suddenly all the Visions in the building began glowing. You blinked the surge of nausea away, and it was only the Dendro Archon that noticed the golden glow that pulsed from your iris, and looked around in confusion.

“(Y/N) (L/N),” you felt the hand under your palm move away as six glowing rocks manifested and twirled around you. Scholars knowledgeable enough gasped once again at the sight. And you warily watched the glowing rocks forge themselves into star-shaped badges, slowing down as they descend in front of you and on to your palm. “Welcome to this new age, Six Stars Meister of the Stars.” And the hall blows into a series of thunderous claps.

(This area is a WIP)

In the back of the Ancient libraries of Sumeru Academia resides the domain of the record holder, and there upon are bookshelves of numerous records about every scholar that has been admitted into the Academia. Each book corresponds to a student and its first pages carry their basic information, however the pages after that are hexed with powerful lexical charms to make it unreadable to anyone that dare looks at the other pages:

Albedo: Geo Vision. A Five Star, Adept scholar who has been in the Academia for two years through a letter of recommendation. Albedo is a master of the sword too, but his expertise lies in his expert handling of the concept of Alchemy. Hailing from an unknown continent, Albedo aims to spread his knowledge and master it enough to become a Six Star, a prestige title his master once held before mysteriously disappearing. Upon your appearance, the master alchemist had been not so subtly observing and following you around whenever you were in the vicinity. You're not sure if you saw this right, but when you once had seen his passing look, you swore you saw a slight squint when he looks down at your sash.

Amber: Pyro Vision. A Four Star, Mortal hailing from Mondstadt. Her grandfather was an alumni of the Academia who mastered the arts of gliding, and was thus allowed the opportunity to accept his letter of recommendation for Amber when she reached the age of 15. She continued her grandfather's work in the Academia and carried the Outrider title, focusing on aerodynamics and her bow mastery. Seeing as she was around your age range but having been admitted years prior, Amber took it upon herself to tour you around the campus and also introduce you to her friends from Mond. During the weekends, you find yourself gliding over the university's towering buildings with her.

Baizhu

Beidou

Bennett

Chongyun: Cryo Vision. A Four Star, Mortal from Liyue with ties to the spiritual realm. His expertise in exorcism had earned him the title of Master of Spirits despite being a newcomer, and many of services are seeked out even in the new continent. With his mischievous Liyuean friends, he's seen roaming around the halls of the Academia during ungodly hours. Chongyun was your first friend in the Academia after you both rendezvous at the entrance as newcomers and finding solace with the company of each other. When you earned your Six Stars title, Chongyun had become protective of you yet still treated you as a normal friend, not wanting you to think he was only there for prestige. During random nights, you'd find yourself in the darkest and secluded areas of the Academia as he pulls you around with Xingqiu, hoping to find roaming spirits of scholars from years ago.

Collei

Cyno: Pyro Vision. A Five Star, Mortal that had been in the Sumeru Academia for years. He is one of the senior scholars and running for Headmaster after his graduation. In the Pyro Visions, he is one of the renowned masters of the element, and can usually be found tending the books of the ancient libraries of the Academia. As of Sumerian descent and strong ties with the Academia, under the buddy system Cyno became your senior buddy on your first year to make sure you do not incur a failing grade nor misunderstood the practices and customs of the Academia. Because of this, you meet with him daily for check-ups and tutoring.

Diluc

Fischl

Ganyu

Jean

Kaeya

Keqing

Lisa

Mona

Razor

Sucrose: Anemo Vision. A Four Star, Adept of an unknown cat species from Mondstadt. Master of Bio-Alchemy as renowned of her multiple contributions to the field, Sucrose made her way to Sumeru Academia at the news that it harbors the one and only Master of Alchemy in it. She passed the entrance exam with expected ease and has then exhausted the laboratories and resources of the Academia for her researches. You've ran into her once when you were lost in the halls of the large Academia, stumbling on her unsupervised experiments in one of the laboratories. Her cat ears caught your attention and had since then become engrossed in researching about it, with her next to you, you were both brought together into a friendship focused on nature and a thirst for discovery.

Tartaglia: Hydro Vision. A Five Star, Mortal that carried with him a different aura opposite of the stars. Childe entered the Academia after near perfecting all his scores in all the tests, before the Headmasters realized that he carried a letter of recommendation from the Tsaritsa, which was then useless by the time he revealed it. One of the few Masters of Hydro, Childe was more fond and known in the arts of combat, Warmonger was a title he was more confident in as he shows prowess in all weaponry he touches. When Childe heard about the existence of a Six Star, his first instinct was to test out the difference between him and the fabled child. But his mastery in combat alone was enough to show he was still ever more superior. Irked yet still curious of a hidden potential, Childe ended up tortur- tutoring you in mastering weapon proficiency. He manages to persuade you in his test spars (still looking for that six star glory) by a promise of an expensive dinner everytime. Damn rich people.

Venti: Anemo Vision. A Five Star, Adept that was personally invited by the Dendro Archon after his retirement from his position as archon of Mondstadt. Despite the idea being absolutely preposterous and against his principles, clearly he had nothing better to do, he was ultimately persuaded after hearing his fellow retired archon resided in the Academia as well. The Master of Winds and Weaver of Tales had become your partner in your Anemo classes, and what better way to teach you about Anemo than flinging you into the sky to 'feel the fresh air' up there? He'd always make sure that you were there everytime he performed for the Academia, and lingers around you whenever you were free just to loiter around before the next class.

Xiangling:

Xiao: Anemo Vision. Five Star, Adept that passed the examination in hopes to follow his master in search for the truth. Master of the Polearm is the title he boasts, and a lot of pupils under him are always devastated upon entering combat with him. Although he's only been there for a year, he has secretly been enjoying the new atmosphere. Xiao had noticed you during the Rite of Prominence when he felt the familiar touch of the Gods, and he had found that whenever you are near, there is a cleansing aura that silences the demonic whispers in his head. Ever since then he'd be found usually in your vicinity yet unapproaching, subtle. When Zhongli officially entrusted him of your safety during your stay in the Academia, he doesn't know whether to scuff or sigh in relief as he was finally introduced.

Xingqiu

Zhongli: Geo Vision. A Five Star Adept that was also invited by the God of Wisdom but was dependently persuaded by Venti. He carries with him 6000 years of knowledge and had since then assisted in collating those sacred years to be immortalized in the Academia's libraries. As the Wielder of Earth he prides himself with his elemental mastery despite the removal of his true power, and yet he is more known of his title as Historian of the Wars. Zhongli was no ordinary student, he carries himself like that of a Headmaster and yet he does not situate himself with matters of either scholar of staff interests. You encountered him during a nightly walk to calm yourself over the burden of your academics and Meister title, and his presence had been the best comfort. Ever since then you'd always find him when you need him, and he always helps you with any troubles, if you count a 500 words dialogue as such.

Storyline - Arcs

Arc Socrates : the foundation

i. Rite of Prominence - earning ones title

ii. Welcome to Sumeru Academia - the dormitories

iii. The Seven Majors - first classes for the seven corresponding elements

iv. Buddy System - newcomers are always paired with senior scholars on their first year in the Academia

v. Labyrinth - the libraries of Sumeru Academia is large and secretive, hence the perfect domain for treasure hunt exercises

vi. Combat Mastery - dive into the trials of weapons, another major

vii. Science Side of Sumeru (SSS) - numerous laboratories harbor different individuals and strands, from alchemy to biology to— wine-making?

ending. The Walk of Scholars - every midyear, scholars are entitled to a week long fieldtrip/vacation in the nation of Sumeru, beyond the walls of the Academia

Plato : the calling of the stars

i. The Midyear Examinations - annual exam to retest your standing in the Academia

ii. Divine Intervention - archonistic convention of a looming celestial presence

iii. The Leyline Disorder - a leyline in the Academia became corrupted, forcing a halt in the academics as malignous forces plague the Academia

iv. The First Miracle - as the Six Stars scholar with a touch blessed by the stars, you were the only one to succeed in repairing the problem

ending. Advancement of Medicine - after the First Miracle, the Six Star scholar was plagued with eternal sleep. With this new case, the Academia scrambles for medical intervention

*shrugs*

This is not a series I'll be working on, but may be referenced in oneshots in the future.

#genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #exile.circlet #genshin impact imagines #long post goddamn #childe x reader #zhongli x reader #kaeya x reader #diluc x reader #albedo x reader #chongyun x reader #xingqiu x reader #Baizhu x reader #cyno x reader #lisa x reader #jean x reader #amber x reader #sucrose x reader #bennett x reader #beidou x reader #fischl x reader #ganyu x reader #mona x reader #razor x reader #keqing x reader #Venti x reader #xiao x reader #college au but not really lmao #I'm tired #genshin impact headcanons

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Moe Moe Mallekei Kyun~

In which Malleus and Cater go to a maid café, and shenanigans ensue.

... I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time.

***Warning: mild spoilers for Malleus’s PE Uniform personal story!***

Imagine this...

“Lilia-sama.”

Two bodyguards fell into line, saluting simultaneously to their vice dorm leader.

“We just finished combing through the prime gargoyle locations around campus,” Silver reported. “Unfortunately, there was no sight of Malleus-sama to be found. The accounts of the various students we interviewed also corroborate that the Young Master has not recently been spotted in the area.”

“I see. Thank you, Silver.” Lilia sighed, cupping his cheek in one hand. “Hm, this is a bit odd. Wherever could he have wandered off to this time?”

At that moment, a ping! sounded off. Lilia fished his phone out of his pocket and, with one glance at the screen, his expression softened.

“You don’t suppose some dastardly villain has… kidnapped the Young Master and is holding him for ransom, do you?!” Sebek’s eyes nearly bulged out of his skull at the thought. “If that is the case… THEN WE HAVE FAILED AS MALLEUS-SAMA’S KNIGHTS!!”

“Now, now--let’s not jump to conclusions. Even if that were true, I’m certain that Malleus would be able to easily fend off assailants on his own. Perhaps he has simply lost his way, or headed off campus to run an errand.”

“... Without warning us in advance?”

“I would have happily accompanied the Young Master wherever he went--EVEN TO THE ENDS OF TWISTED WONDERLAND ITSELF!!”

“Kufufu. Malleus is still young at heart. Let us allow him this moment of independence, just this once. He will find his way home eventually.”

“Welcome home, my masters!!”

Malleus skidded to a stop in the doorway—for beyond it laid unknown territory. The interior sported cream walls, with fairy lights, streamers, and paper flowers strung up. A number of tables and chairs, populated with people, were set against flowing white curtains.

Young ladies flitted about, balancing trays of food and drinks, cameras, and microphones. Each wore the same outfit, consisting of a frilly headdress, an apron, and a black dress with lace trim and ribbons.

And now, one of those uniformed girls extended a hand to him and a warm, welcoming smile.

Malleus frowned and turned to the orange haired young man beside him. “... Diamond. What is this strange establishment you’ve brought me to?”

“Mm? It’s a maid café,” Cater chirped, glancing up from his phone. “You said you’ve never been before, right?”

“Well, yes… However, when you invited me to join you for an outing, I did not expect this to be our destination.”

“It’ll be fine~ We’re already here, so let’s get seated!” Cater insisted cheerily, ushering the fae through the door. 

“Right this way, my masters!” The greeter giggled and led the way, eventually stopping at a vacant table set for two. As the duo slipped into their seats, she handed them menus and moistened towels. “We have a wide selection of special services and delicious dishes for your enjoyment!”

Malleus hesitantly flipped open the (very pink) menu and ran his eyes down the page of available items. Along with the expected offerings of desserts, savory foods, and beverages were odd listings: massage, ear cleaning, karaoke, game, arts and crafts, picture, spoon feeding, live song and dance...

He stared quizzically at Cater, who seemed to be taking everything in stride.

“I’ll take a plate of omurice! How about you, Malleus-kun?”

He stared back at his menu, trying to make rhyme or reason of the unique names. What in the Great Seven was a Pyon ❤ Pyon Sunshine Bar…? Or a Lucky☆Happy☆Cookie? Malleus’s brows furrowed in both concentration and confusion.

“I… I shall have the local specialty, whatever that may be,” the fae prince declared at last.

“Excellent choices! And would you like a bunny, or a kitty?”

“You hand out animals at this eating establishment? Is that not a health code violation?”

“Aaah, Malleus-kun, she doesn’t mean real rabbits and cats. Look--you’ll see when she brings them, okay?” Cater laughed awkwardly. Then, turning to the waitress, he held up his index finger. “One of each, little lady~”

“Of course!” She scribbled down a few words on her heart shaped notepad before prancing off.

“... Diamond. Are you certain this is the fabled maid café of which you spoke of?” Malleus asked, folding his arms. “I find it difficult to believe that every patron here is descended from a high class lineage. Furthermore, the servers are wearing attire entirely unlike that of a traditional household servant.”

Cater blinked once, twice—then chuckled.

“Maid cafés are like normal cafés. Anyone can go to them to play pretend and chill for a while! The difference is that the waitresses are dressed cutely and offer fun services. Singing, dancing, playing games—that kinda thing!”

“I do not understand.” Malleus swept a hand at their surroundings. “The purpose of this establishment is merely for… amusement?”

“Yup! People get tired of the daily grind sometimes, so they go to places like this to see cute stuff and just take a load off.”

“I… I see.” Malleus tucked his thumb and forefinger under his chin. “We do not have anything like your maid cafes in the Valley of Thorns.”

“You don’t? What sort of things do you do back home for fun, then?”

“I was not allowed to venture far from the palace grounds. Most of my time was spent indoors, studying spells or honing my magical abilities.”

Cater inclined his head. “Oooh, right! Because you’re a prince and all, you weren’t able to do much—but hey! Things are different now! You’ve got Cay-kun to show you a good time!”

“Ah, yes. A ‘good time’...” Malleus attempted at a smile, which came out more wary than he had intended.

“Thank you for waiting!” a girlish voice chirped—their waitress had returned, wearing a tray of food in one hand and two headbands in the other. “Here is your omurice and Nyan ✨ Nyan ✨ Kitty-chan Parfait, plus one pair of kitty ears and one pair of bunny ears!”

She handed Cater his dish—a bed of ketchup flavored fried rice, sealed by a wobbling omelet and garnished with a sprig of parsley.

“Mm! Smells delicious. Thanks a bunch~” Cater grinned, winking at his server.

The maid giggled and placed Malleus’s dessert before him, along with the headbands.

“Would you like me to draw or write something special for you on your meal, master?” she asked, gesturing to Cater’s omurice.

“Sure thing! Could you write ‘Mallekei’? Oh, and a couple of hearts would be cute, too!”

“As you wish!”

As the maid set to work, Malleus marveled at the sight of his parfait.

Colorful scoops of ice-cream, granola, and sliced fruits were layered inside of a tall glass cup. A generous crown of whipped cream and a drizzle of strawberry sauce topped it off. Sticking out from the whipped cream were two wafer triangles and dots of chocolate candies, forming a cat-like face.

How adorable.

… But not adorable enough to be spared.

“Thank you for the food.” The fae raised his spoon to demolish the poor parfait kitten—

“Stop, stop, Malleus-kun!!” Cater cried, frantically waving his arms. “N-Not yet!!”

Malleus lowered his spoon with a frown. “Food is meant to be consumed, Diamond. Is there an issue you have with my table etiquette?”

“Well—no, but…” Cater played with a lock of his orange hair and sighed. “There’s certain rituals we need to do first!”

“Rituals? Oh, my apologies. I was not aware. Please proceed with your regularly scheduled… rituals.”

“Ahaha, you’re a quick learner! First thing’s first, let’s put on our headbands!” Cater swept up the cat ears and passed them over. “Here, to match your parfait! I’ll take the rabbit.”

Malleus gingerly nestled the cat ears on his head, copying Cater’s movements. It was a bit tricky maneuvering around his horns, but somehow, he managed.

“Oh!! Those ears suit you so well!” the waitress said, glancing up from decorating the omurice. Carefully placed splotches of ketchup spelled out ‘Mallekei’, hearts and little sparkles littering the space around the boys’ combined names.

“... Do they?” Malleus doubted it.

“They do!!” Cater reassured him with a laugh. “Ne, ne, miss! Can you take our picture so my friend here can have a souvenir to take home with him?” 

“Certainly!” She replaced the bottle of ketchup and hurried off, returning shortly after with a polaroid camera. “Are you ready, my masters?”

“Ready, Malleus-kun?”

“Hmph. Of course. I will have you know that my posing abilities have improved considerably since our last encounter. Do not underestimate me.”

“Oh, that’s great! You’ve been practicing! Then… on the count of three, we nyah, okay?”

“... What is ‘nyah’?” Malleus inquired, his confidence suddenly waning.

“Eh?” A blip of surprise crossed Cater’s face. “Like, y’know… nyah!”

The influencer curled both of his hands into balls and made a pawing motion at his friend. “Now you try!”

“Like this?” Malleus mimicked him. He was more stiff—definitely not as practiced—but the general motion was still recognizable.

“Very good, master!!” the waitress gushed, raising the polaroid up. “On three?”

“1, 2, 3… Nyah!”

A flash went off, sending stars into Malleus’s vision. As he rubbed the daze out of his eyes, Cater’s voice called out to him.

“Are you okay there?”

“I am well. There is no need for your concern,” the fae insisted. “This ritual… it is more confounding that I took it to be.”

“Eeeh? It’s not meant to be hard or anything. Just relax, relax!” Cater paused before adding, “It’s part of the ritual’s requirements! You need to be nice and loose for the last step!”

“What is this last step?”

“We need to cast a magic spell to make your food taste extra tasty!” the waitress declared cheerily.

“Hoh?” A smirk found its way onto Malleus’s face. “That can easily be arranged. Allow me to do the honors.”

He put his hand before his parfait, an eerie green glow emulating from his palm. The sinister light engulfed his dish and Cater’s, sending them floating midair. Radioactive ice-cream and omurice hovered above their heads, causing both Cater and their maid to recoil in shock.

Other customers stared at the spectacle from their own tables. One man’s jaw dropped, the forkful of spaghetti bolognese in his mouth clattering onto the floor.

“You, who provides sustenance to the masses, become that which is delici—“

“H-Hold on a sec, Malleus-kun!!” Cater practically leapt over the table to seize his friend’s glowing hand. “Not that kind of spell!!”

Eyes wide with surprise, Malleus allowed his magic to settle down. The parfait and omurice gently floated back onto their table, and the maid sighed with relief.

“Is there a different spell needed for this occasion? I assure you that I am well-versed in practical magic—you need only speak its name, and I can conjure the proper…”

“No, no! It’s—“ Cater casted a look at their server and nervously chuckled. “Ne, Maid-chan~ Think you can give us a demonstration of the right spell?”

“Yes, master!” the girl, ever professional, flashed a perky grin. “Please watch carefully!!”

The maid set down her polaroid on the table. She then arched her fingers into C-like shapes, thumb extended straight. Pushing her hands together, she formed a heart and aimed it in the direction of the boy’s dishes.

“Moe moe kyuuuuuun!”

“What an odd spell. In all my years, I have never heard of such an enchantment…”

“Well, there’s a first for everything, right?” Cater flicked one of his floppy rabbit ears. “Plus, it should be no problem for the great Malleus-sama to pull off this spell, right?”

“This is child’s play,” Malleus’s laugh was like the earth itself rumbling. His lips quirked into a small smile. “You will join me in performing this sacred ritual, will you not, Diamond?”

“Of course~”

“Very well.”

They made hearts and thrust them upon their meals. And together, they uttered those three magic words.

“Moe moe kyuuuuun!!”

“Welcome back, Malleus,” Lilia greeted. The vice dorm leader nonchalantly hung from the ceiling, his raven and magenta bangs suspended midair. “Did you have fun on your outing?”

“Lilia. You knew?” Malleus slowly shut the door behind him, chasing away the cool air of the night. He spoke softly, knowing that sounds carried in the dusty hallways of Diasomnia and could disturb its residents.

“The wonders of modern technology,” Lilia trilled, expertly landing beside his young master. He brandished his phone in a gloved hand, a text message displayed on the screen.

hey hey lilia-chan! gonna steal malmal-kun for the day~ he’ll be back later, but do me a solid and keep it a secret from s&s til then, ‘kay? thnx!! (✿˶˘ ³˘)~♡

“It looks as though I have been exposed.”

“There is no shame in making new friends. In fact, I’m proud of you for expanding your horizons.” Lilia beamed. “Though what a shame it is that I was not present to grab a few pictures. Hopefully Cater fulfilled that task for me.”

The ancient fae tilted forward in his toes and peered up at his prince. “Soooo? Where did you sneak off to?”

“Fufu. Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“My. Is that any way to treat the man that kept Silver and Sebek from hunting you down?” Lilia teased, wagging a finger.

“Such loyalty,” Malleus smirked, hands on his hips, “deserves to be rewarded.”

He produced a polaroid photograph from his breast pocket and presented it with a flourish. The image, forever captured in time, was that of Malleus and Cater—the former with cat ears, the latter with bunny ears—with hands balled to resemble paws. Cater cheekily winked, while Malleus looked slightly bewildered.

The edges of the polaroid were dotted with stickers—smiley faces, flowers, and hearts. Marker had been used to scrawl on whiskers and blushes over both boys’ cheeks.

Overall, cutesy—overwhelming so.

But the Malleus and Cater in the picture were happy.

Their eyes shining like jewels.

Nyah-ing their hearts out.

#twst #twisted wonderland #Malleus Draconia #Cater Diamond #twisted wonderland imagines #disney twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland headcanons #twisted wonderland scenarios #something no one asked for #spoilers

[nyerus]

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Please read through these if you have any questions first before sending in an ask, as it's probably answered here (or the previous guide)!!! If you don't see it here, or still have confusions afterwards, then feel free to send in an ask or DM me!

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✨Important Notes/Updates✨

Bilibili is allowing non-members to watch for free! No region locks, and you don’t even need to make an account. Free watchers will be one week behind paid members. But this is a legal and free way to support the donghua if you’re unable to pay! (This actually means that you’ll be able to see the episodes faster and for free on Bilibili than you would on YouTube, because YouTube has a two week delay instead of just one week.)

Funimation is broadcasting TGCF in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. These are some of the regions which are blocked by YouTube, so this is an available alternative for those who don’t want to go through Bilibili. They have also stated they will launch in Mexico and Brazil this winter.

ALL broadcasts are in Chinese with hard-coded/embedded English and Chinese subs. (I.e., they come with the broadcast itself, on top of the image. Nothing to toggle on/off, they are automatically there.) They are the exact same across all the platforms.

Please support official releases so that we can get more seasons, and high quality! This is still niche content, believe it or not!

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✨Frequntly Asked Questions✨

🔹GENERAL FAQs:🔹

1.) "Where is the best place to watch?"

I still reccomend Bilibili's native website/app over all other streaming platforms. This is due to some key points:

Bilibili's website/app gets the episode the very second they drop. There is no delay whatsoever. YouTube and Funimation have been delayed the last two weeks. It's unknown if this is just a hiccup or what, but if watching new episodes ASAP is important to you, going through Bilibili ensures you will not have to worry about any uncertainty.

Price breakdowns: Bilibili's website/app 3-month membership is $10-11 USD. Their YouTube channel's "MBBM Lv2" membership varies by region, but in many places is similar or just a tad more. In the US, the MBBM Lv2 membership and Funimation membership is the same price ($5.99 per month, or $17.97 for 3 months). So you can actually save some cash by going through Bilibili directly.

In the end, this is largely up to personal choice and comfort. Some people may find it difficult to navigate Bilibili's website even with guides and google translate's auto-translate feature. In this case, YouTube or Funimation are fine alternatives. If you also have an existing Funimation sub or plan to use it to watch other shows, then that's perfectly valid too. Similar with the MBBM lv2 sub on YouTube, especially if you want to use it to see other shows (e.g. Legend of Exorcism which is only English-subbed on YouTube).

2.) "Where do I watch for free?"

On Bilibili's website, you can watch episodes for free! You will be one episode behind paid members, but it's a legal way to support the donghua. You don't even need to create an account!

3.) "What episode will be airing when/where?"

Check out the table below for the differences in airing times. Time is 11AM China Time.*

NOTE: Funimation is technically supposed to be the same as Bilibili members/YouTube MBBM Lv2, but the last few episodes have been delayed so I have no clue.... *Additionally, YouTube's episodes have been delayed by a little bit, but they've aired the same day.

4.) "How can I support the donghua?"

Free, on YouTube: Subscribe to Bilibili's YouTube Channel, give likes to TGCF videos/clips, and leave nice comments!

Free, on Bilibili: Everyone can follow the official TGCF account and page, plus leave likes on videos. All this following stuff requires you to have passed the Bilibili quiz to unlock levels: If you are lv2+, you can leave comments and give coins to offical TGCF videos. (Log in daily to get 1 coin/day if you're lv1+!) If you are lv4+, leave a good 5-star review!

Paid: Buy subscriptions to watch the donghua! Also, merchhhhh~

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🔸YOUTUBE-RELATED FAQs🔸

1.) "What's the difference between Bilibili's YouTube Channel's MBBM Lv1 and Lv2 memberships?"

MBBM Lv2 allows you to watch the episodes on the same day as Bilibili's website broadcast.

MBBM Lv1 has new episodes delayed by one week, meaning you will be one episode behind the others. There actually is zero point in subscribing to MBBM Lv1 (unless you want to watch other subbed donghua) because you can watch the same content on Bilibili for absolutely free, since Bilibili is allowing non-members to watch TGCF one episode behind paid members.

You can also watch two episodes behind on YouTube.

2.) "If I have YouTube Premium/Red, do I still need a membership on Bilibili's YouTube page?"

Yes. YouTube premium is completely separate from the channel-specific memberships.

3.) "Are episodes simulcast on YouTube?"

While originally stated as being simulcast, there actually seems to be a bit of a delay on YouTube as of now. It's unclear if this will change with future episodes.

4.) "Do I need a VPN?"

If you are from one of the restricted countries, then yes, you'll need to use a VPN. You can still pay for the subscription as normal, and then use a VPN to watch the donghua. It will not affect payment.

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🔹BILIBILI-RELATED FAQs:🔹

1.) "Do I need to take that 100-question quiz to sign up for Bilibili or the membership?!"

No, it's totally optional! You do not need it to either watch the free episodes or to buy a membership. It's only if you want to comment and stuff. It might make you think you gotta do it, or enter a code, but it's actually not needed. Check out THIS post for more info!!! (However, you may still want to do it in order to level up and eventually leave a nice review for the donghua!)

2.) "I'm only able to watch 6min on Bilibili's website when I watch from my phone. Do I need the app?"

You do not need the app. Switch your browser to Desktop Mode in order to watch the video in full.

Be sure to download a browser like Google Chrome, Firefox, etc that supports this mode if your native browser doesn't allow for it.

3.) "Can I get the app on iPhone/iOS?"

This depends on if you are in a country where the app is not region locked in the app store. If you're able to download it that way, great! If not, try using a VPN and setting your region to mainland China. It may work. APKs are not useable on iPhones, so unless you know how to sideload apps onto your device, you may be stuck with the app store only.

Do note that you might be unable to pay for a Bilibili membership through the app, depending on version, but you can always simply pay through the website and then use the app as normal. It will apply account-wide on all devices.

4.) "Why are there two versions of the app?"

One seems to be the international version, which is more basic and lets you pay via GooglePay/ApplePay. The other one seems to be made for mainland China, and allows you to even buy merchandise through it (Chinese address/bank acc required). Mostly, both have to be downloaded via APK on Android. But some iOS users have reported different versions of the app being available for them through the app store (namely the int'l ver, and some have said they can use a VPN to get the mainland one).

5.) "Is there any benefit to having the app over just using the website?"

Not really, no. With the app you can buy very cute hualian themed skins for your profile, though (if you have the mainland version of the app). Plus you can save videos for offline viewing.

6.) "Do I need to enter my area code for Bilibili when signing up/in?"

NO, you do not enter your area code in the phone number field. Select your country from the drop-down list and it will automatically consider your area code. (E.g. if you're in America, select 美国 and enter in your number like 5557779999.)

7.) "I didn't get to set a password when signing up, so how do I log into my Bilibili account after being logged out?"

Use the same phone number you did to sign up. Instead of a password, you'll enter in a one-time key that is sent to your phone via text message. (NOTE: some people have reported not receiving these messages, which may vary by phone carrier!)

As mentioned above, don't include your area code when filling out your number.

Also, if you are signed in on the app on your phone, you can scan the QR code on the log-in page through the app.

8.) "How do I turn off the barrage comments filling up the video I'm watching?"

Select the little button that reads "弹" under the video:

(Website vs App)

9.) Is the Bilibili subscription auto-renewing?

No, the 1-month (¥25), 3-month (¥68), 1-year (¥168) subscriptions will not automatically renew. They are a one-time payment only!

Notice that the renewing payments all say "连续" in front of them, which means "continuing" or "successive" types of subscriptions. They are also cheaper than the one-time payment. (E.g. the renewing 3-month sub is ¥45 instead of ¥68.) Moreover, the renewing types are not even available to purchase with PayPal, afaik. You need Alipay or WeChat Pay, etc.

10.) "Can I use the app/membership to read the manhua too?"

Unfortunately, not quite! Your Bilibili account is universal, but you'll need to download the manhua app seperately and topping up M-coins to pay for the manhua. (One-time purchases, either by volume or by chapter as per your choice.)

11.) "What resolutions are available?"

You can watch up to 480p as a free member. Paid members can watch at 1080p and high-bit-rate 1080p. It's possible to chromecast it to TV, too. (I haven't tried it, but others have!)

12.) "Can I watch across multiple devices?"

Yes, you can!

13.) "Do I need a VPN?"

No, Bilibili is not region-locked. However, some particular countries may have Chinese apps blocked.... :(

14.) "I want to leave a comment/review. How do I level up on Bilibili?"

Log in daily, watch at least one video per day, give coins (attained by logging in) to your fave videos, etc! It will definitely take a while haha.

15.) "Will I be able to watch other donghua like MDZS or SVSSS with my membership on Bilibili?"

No, those two donghuas are produced by TenCent, not Bilibili. You will need either a TenCent/WeTV account, or you can watch them on their YouTube channel (free).

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🔸FUNIMATION-RELATED FAQs🔸

1.) "Is Funimation's broadcast a simulcast?"

It is supposed to be, according to their initial announcements. They seem to be having some technical difficulties, but those may be resolved soon. I suggest keeping an eye on their twitter for updates if you are interested in watching through them!

2.) "Do I have to pay extra on my Funimation sub to watch TGCF?"

No, afaik, the regular $5.99 sub covers TGCF too.

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I hope this helps out people further, so we can all have an easy time watching the donghua! And please do support it legally! 🙏

If you still need help, feel free to send in an ask!

#tgcf #tian guan ci fu #heaven offical's blessing #hob #tgcf donghua

[davidmann95]

For definitely no reason whatsoever, in response to nothing specific, can you rank the DC Multiverse Earths and tell us a bit about why each is in its place on the list?

Were this in response to an article, I could assure that I generally enjoy the writer’s output perfectly well from what I’ve seen and was absolutely baffled by the bizarrely selective research that went into it. Anyway, I hope you feel guilty enabling the amount of work I put into this truly ridiculous task by the end.

Cliff notes for the relatively uninitiated: that gorgeous monstrosity up above is The Map Of The Multiverse from the miniseries Multiversity, presented as a series of concentric circles bordered by the ‘Overvoid’ that all of reality is suspended in (and framed in such a way as to make clear it is the white of the pages comics are printed on). You go inwards from the borders of creation - moving moreso with each sphere from abstraction to the realm of the physical - to the Monitor Sphere in which once lived the near-omnipotent, now nearly extinct Monitor race that observed and maintained the multiverse, into the Sphere of Gods where the various beings of myth and divinity dwell, and into the innermost sphere where ‘we’ live. The 52 Earths you see within aren’t the whole of the multiverse but the ‘local’ 52 worlds, with infinite other Earths dwelling in their own dimensional pockets; all these universes actually exist in the same three-dimensional space at the same time but suspended in a higher-dimensional substance called ‘the Bleed’, and vibrating at distinct frequencies. Also there’s a ‘Dark Multiverse’ that’s cosmologically speaking ‘beneath’ the map, disintegrating half-formed potential realities that new proper universes are culled from. There’s a lot more to it than even all of that, but that’s enough to explain what’s up with these.

My ranking here is obviously subjective, but mostly comes down to a mix of ‘how cool is this Earth’, ‘how much would this Earth be worth using again’, ‘how well does it work in the context of being part of a shared multiverse’, and ‘do I seriously see creators unearthing any of this Earth’s potential down the road’. Also, Earths 24, 27, 28, 46, and 49 aren’t here, as they’re among the 7 Unknown Earths on the map that were left behind for future creators to define; 14 and apparently 25 have since been revealed.

64. Earth 14

A worthy bottom-place entry, Earth 14 is at the top of the Multiverse Map, and is shown as physically different from the other Earths, seemingly vibrating as if in two places at once; map co-designer and illustrator Rian Hughes suggested in an interview the intent was that this was where new universes entered the multiverse. Instead, ending up the first Unknown Earth to be revealed after the doors were opened to other creative teams, it was shown as a generic dystopian world home to a ‘Justice League of Assassins’ that were quickly dispatched by a generic cosmic threat. A monumental tribute to contextual ignorance and creative laziness.

63. Flashpoint

This is one of several Earths I’ll touch on that exist in neither the ‘local’ nor Dark Multiverse, but has directly crossed over or been framed in reference to the currently operating version of the DC Universe and so is probably worth a mention even if I’m not going over every Elseworlds and Imaginary Story DC has ever published. Another dystopian world, in this one an attempt by The Flash at fixing a change to history resulted in an Earth torn apart by war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman, where Cyborg was America’s greatest hero and Kal-El was held captive his entire life in a military bunker rather than becoming Superman. Aside from the prospect of a Thomas Wayne who became Batman when Bruce was gunned down as a child rather than vice-versa - resulting in him being pulled into a recent Batman run after this worlds’ destruction, the reason for this Earth’s inclusion - absolutely nothing of value came of this or the stories tied into it, such that astonishingly in spite of being the impetus for one of the biggest DC reboots of all time with theoretically an entire revised history to play with, essentially no one cares about this anymore.

62. Earth 1

The site of DC’s standalone, bookstore-market oriented ‘Earth One’ graphic novels. The incredible tunnel vision of marketing these for that purpose with titles that exist in reference to their multiversal structure aside, the Green Lantern book is the only one of those I’ve heard about being even kind of good; the rest top out at an interesting failure in Wonder Woman, with a standard forgettable failure in Teen Titans and truly flabbergasting misfires in Superman and Batman. Even Multiverse Map co-designer and writer Grant Morrison described this Earth in a blurb as having a history ‘in flux’, implicitly permitting the reader to believe it’s something else if they really want to, but as it stands in spite of the theoretical wide-open possibilities the foundations have already been built on salted Earth.

61. Watchmen

Home to the cast of characters of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal miniseries. Crossed over with the DC Universe 30+ year later in Doomsday Clock, which clearly intended to set up this world as one ripe for future stories and development rather than a singular text, but instead misinterpreted, stripmined, and otherwise nuked essentially everything that might have had one interested in exploring it further in the first place (in spite of the source text’s very definitive conclusions to all major narrative threads and characters). The only reason this is not ranked even lower is the possibility that the upcoming, as-yet untitled Watchmen project by Tom King and Jorge Fornes might manage to dredge something out of this.

60. Earth Negative 11

The first of the Dark Multiverse Earths here, a gender-flipped Earth where Bryce Wayne generically altered herself into an Atlantean in order to do battle with Aquawoman and the forces of Atlantis. As the Dark Multiverse worlds we have seen thus far are described as being borne of Bruce Wayne’s fears, it’s odd that as opposed to the ‘want of a nail’ scenarios shown on all others, this includes the additional twist of making Bruce a woman, yet does nothing with that. Anyway, this is a very clear product of the Dark Multiverse’s debut in Dark Nights: Metal wanting an evil Batman to correspond to each member of the Justice League, and it’s the oddest, most perfunctory of the lot.

59. Earth 34

Home to the heroes of the Light Brigade, defenders of Cosmoville, this is an Earth meant to evoke the classic creator-owned superhero comic Astro City. However, as Astro City is itself made up of archetypal signifiers yet isn’t meta about its usage of them, being defined by its storytelling principles rather than the shared universe it builds up in the background, there are essentially no stories to be told here that couldn’t be told with the regular heroes of the DC universe. Which is a shame, those are some neat character designs.

58. Earth Negative 12

A Dark Multiverse Earth where believing Wonder Woman killed in a battle with the war god Ares, Batman took up the deity’s helm in hopes of redefining war, instead being corrupted by it and becoming an unstoppable monster. There’s basically nothing here.

57. Earth Negative 44

A Dark Multiverse Earth where a computer program meant to replicate Alfred after the butler’s untimely death, attempting to protect its charge, takes control of Batman by way of mechanizing him and turns Gotham into a digital nightmare. A little more on-point than the previous entry, but still not much here.

56. Earth Negative 22

A Dark Multiverse Earth where Batman is finally pushed into killing the Joker, but the Clown Prince of Crime secretes a particularly potent Joker Toxin upon his death that corrupts the Caped Crusader into a second Joker known as The Batman Who Laughs, who slaughters his way across his universe before ultimately making his way to the ‘main’ DCU. The prospect of a Batman/Joker combination is interesting, but an origin for the ultimate corrupted Batman ‘he got drugged into going bad’ falls short.

55. Earth Negative 32

A Dark Multiverse Earth where Bruce Wayne moments after his parents’ deaths was judged worthy of a Green Lantern ring, but having only his hatred of crime rather than the discipline and morality he would come to develop becomes the murderous terror of the underworld, with even the Corps unable to stop him when he manages to force the darkness of his heart through the ring into ‘dark constructs’. Another ultimately throwaway Earth, this at least illustrates the properties of the Dark Multiverse in an interesting way: the constructs he creates aren’t something that’s ever been indicated as being possible or even sensible with the ‘real’ Green Lantern, but as this is a world literally made of nightmares that’s irrelevant.

54. Earth 39

Home to the United Nations superspies the Agents of W.O.N.D.E.R., who operating using super-technology with eventually deleterious side-effects. A pastiche of the obscure T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, it’s hard to imagine anyone with much to say about them wouldn’t simply wish to write an actual comic about them under the current rights-holders, though the concepts described in Morrison’s provided information are enticing.

53. Earth 41

A riff on several of the superheroes published by Image Comics over the years, they’re worth having around for the occasional heroes of the multiverse groupshots for your big crossover comics and Dino-Cop turned out to be charming, but it’s doubtful someone with a big Spawn story in them for instance would use Spore as their outlet.

52. Earth 9

All I know about this is that this is a ‘what if superheroes really changed the world’ Earth, and when those are a dime a dozen, the additional conceits of the names of the various characters not at all corresponding to their traditional backstories and attributes, and being the brainchild of creator Dan Jurgens, are far from enough to sway me. I understand there are some fans out there who may heartily disagree, to be fair.

51. Earth Negative 52

Another Dark Multiverse throwaway Earth, this time one where a Batman shattered by losing his various partners taps into the Speed Force so that he can finally be everywhere at once to stop all crime. This is distinct however in that he achieves this by defeating The Flash, chaining him to the hood of the Batmobile, and driving it so fast their atoms explode and merge, which is thoroughly rad and gets it big-time bonus points next to its contemporaries.

50. Earth 37

An Earth based on the DC works of creator Howard Chaykin, its conceit of being a world that progressed technologically far faster than our world but culturally remains decades behind us is interesting, but I’m not much of a fan of his work that I’ve read and most of what’s been drawn upon here doesn’t seem to have much of a following.

49. Earth 30

The world of Superman: Red Son, where Kal-L landed in the Ukraine and grew up to become leader of a global Soviet Union, before realizing he had deformed humanity’s development and faking his death. Leaving Earth in the hands of a Lex Luthor who while still very much a bastard found public approval in America for fighting Superman, Lex ultimately led Earth into a utopia that over time fell into complacency and became its universe’s version of Krypton, Jor-L (Luthor’s distant descendant) and Lara sending their baby back in time to survive and establishing a predestination loop. While several elements of the DC Universe are present in a limited capacity that could in theory be expanded on, Superman and Wonder Woman are the only superheroes of long-term note and both their stories are very much concluded, seemingly leaving little to do here except have the Superman with the hammer and sickle logo show up in event comics.

48. Earth 6

The world of the Just Imagine Stan Lee Created The DC Universe series, where the father of the Marvel Universe rebuilt several DC figureheads from the name and a few pieces of imagery up. The results were mixed at best, but a series of gorgeous artists involved in the projects mean the characters certainly look interesting even if it’s hard to imagine creators going back here in any meaningful capacity.

47. Earth Negative 1

A Dark Multiverse world where Superman turned on humanity for reasons unknown, and Batman deliberately infected himself with the ‘Doomsday Virus’ to gain the properties of the hulking monster and defeat his former friend. Now numbed to human emotion and vulnerability, this Batman hopes to spread the virus as to make humanity similarly indestructible, as well as shield them emotionally from what he has come to see as the false hope Superman represents. This Batman didn’t end up a major figure in the same way as The Batman Who Laughs, but the conceit is killer and I hope someone picks up on it one day.

46. Earth-52

A universe somewhere outside the local 52, a ‘remnant’ of sorts of the main DC universe circa 2011-2016 prior to cosmic revisions resulting in the current setup. A world where superheroes had emerged approximately 5 years earlier and home to lots of dudes in very dumb battle-armor, most fan-favorite stories from this era have been carried forward into the current history, and its unique version of Superman under Grant Morrison - a socialist crusader in a t-shirt and jeans who battled corrupt institutions and cosmic supervillainy in equal measure - was depicted as set loose from his world after 2016′s continuity changes as a defender of the multiverse. While a significant part of DC history both in-universe and publishing-wise, there wouldn’t seem to be all that much left here worth exploring.

45. Earth 2

A world where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman alone represented the first wave of superheroes, they nobly fell in battle repelling an invasion of Earth by Darkseid. In time a new generation would emerge that were modernized, youthful iterations of the Justice Society of America, the superhero team predating the Justice League in DC’s publishing history. While the logline’s an interesting one and the successor to Superman Val-Zod debuted to some acclaim, for the most part this reinvention didn’t end up received well by either new or longtime fans, and a last-minute overhaul where this bunch was transplanted into a rebooted world without superheroes probably didn’t help. You still see them in crossovers and there are promising concepts, but this world seems basically dead.

44. Earth 50

When Lex Luthor ascended to the presidency and soon thereafter executed The Flash, Superman snapped, executed him, and took over the world alongside his allies as the Justice Lords, until they were ultimately overthrown by way of a parallel universe Justice League and a repentant Lord Batman. A Better World unequivocally rules, but given this is supposed to be those specific versions of the Lords rather than a new iteration, it’d be weird to see them up against any universe other than the DCAU. And, well...

43. Earth 12

The DCAU, currently world of Batman Beyond and a future Justice League. The DCAU, you may be aware, extremely rules, but is also somewhat redundant in this context - the ‘regular’ DCU already has all its core components without too much aesthetic differentiation, and there’s already frequently a Batman Beyond in the future of said universe. It has its unique attributes that make people love it, it’s cool that it’s here, but on the macro scale it’s too clean an adaptation to bring much to the table to crossovers and whatnot, and you’d never see any further stories told there otherwise as really being part of the DCU cosmic landscape so much as a comic tie-in to the TV show.

(Also it’s odd this is placed here with the Justice Lords Earth as if to go ‘it’s secretly been part of the 52 all along, you just never noticed when it only crossed over with the one other!’ when there were two other parallel universes in the DCAU.)

42. Earth 43

A nightmare world haunted by the once-heroic, now vampiric Blood League, the obvious potential would be for this world to function as DC’s equivalent to Marvel Zombies. Recently however DCeased has come to fill that position, and while this world in practice if not concept skews more closely towards that source material as the former heroes still have vestiges of their old personalities - in theory distinguishing it as its own spin worth keeping around - it’s hard to imagine most takes on ‘Justice League but monsters’ won’t come out under the DCeased banner for the foreseeable future.

41. Earth 40

A world of pulp villains made to oppose Earth 20, these guys are simple but a hoot.

40. Earth 35 aka the Pseudoverse

More analogues to analogues, this time of the Awesome Comics characters largely defined by Alan Moore in Supreme. This opens up the promising vista of ‘DC if it were designed by Alan Moore’, but in practice as demonstrated by his work with both DC and the analogues these mimic, that would just be...well, good DC comics, which you don’t need a whole extra universe for. The notion of this as a universe artificially created by Monitor ‘ideominers’ however both gives it a unique place in the multiverse, tackles its status as a pastiche in a unique way, and gets back to ideas of the power of imagination in both Supreme and Moore’s other works, so it’s likely there could be something to be done here.

39. Earth 11

A bit of a study in contradictions. This is seemingly a rather straightforward ‘gender swap’ Earth with Superwoman, Wonderous Man, and so forth. Also, its version of Star Sapphire implied it’s not subjected to constant crises in the same way as the main universe it mirrors, maintaining a greater degree of consistency in the process. At the same time however it’s mentioned that the Amazons rather than leaving Man’s World for Themyscira shared its technology and philosophy with the world, changing it forever, suggesting a far different world from what we’ve seen in glimpses here. Until it decides one way or another whether it’s a simple mirror to the regular DCU or a radically different take, it hovers in a state of uncertainty.

38. Earth-2 aka Earth Two

The original version of Earth-2, home to the DC Universe of the 1940s with aged versions of Superman and company and the original Justice Society of America. The first take on a DC universe that would progress in something resembling ‘real time’ rather than keeping the headliners as perpetual twenty-to-thirty-somethings, this was also the birthplace of heroes such as Power Girl and Huntress. I’m of the perhaps controversial opinion that this is a concept that was explored better in later takes: there’s a sense here that the largely forgotten follow-up generation eventually introduced, with the exception of the two heroes mentioned above, will never really matter in the same way as their still fully-active predecessors in spite of ostensibly taking over the family business, meaning you never quite actually get what you want here, which is to see a DC where things meaningfully change and move on - well into his middle age and his mentor’s death long behind him, Dick Grayson is still Robin. Add in the odd, ignominious demise of the original Batman and its Superman’s odd eventual fate - which slide from bizarre to intolerable if you accept the frequent implication that these are meant to be the original versions of them from the 1930s - and I can’t help but think the enjoyable high concept was never realized as well as it could be here.

37. Earth 4

The Earth of the characters of Charlton Comics who would go on to inspire Watchmen, this initially seemed like one of the most promising worlds after its debut in Pax Americana drew perhaps the most pronounced critical acclaim of any single issue in the past decade as the site for creators with something to say to work with Watchmen without actually touching that property. Now, however, Watchmen itself is in the mix: most wouldn’t reasonably go here while the material they’re truly referencing is now freely available (especially those simply wanting to draw fan attention by visibly playing with those toys, the way Earth 4 sidestepped) even though that world itself is now massively compromised past the original text, and with the ‘Watchmen Earth’ no longer an option and the characters themselves - if cleaned-up, more mainstream versions of them - existing in the DCU proper, this world’s role seems to have been largely stripped from it. I have to imagine there’s still potential here for those with the talent and commitment though.

36. Earth 44

A world where in the absence of natural superhuman beings, Doc Tornado created a Metal League of robot superheroes to protect the Earth. A promising concept definitely worth a few stories.

35. Earth 15

Once a perfect universe destroyed in a rampage by another Earth’s Superman, it was artificially reborn through the will of Countess Belzebeth - a cosmic vampire - as a copy of the Prime universe with the Green Lantern Corps replaced by Belzebeth’s despotic Blackstars, the uncertain and bitter heroes of this universe warped through the lens of Belzebeth’s perceptions of them had no chance against her forces. While its inhabitants are a bit samey what with all life having been subsumed into the diamond will of Blackstar Controller Mu, the idea of a conceptually weakened DCU being turned into an army against the rest of the multiverse makes for a terrific threat, and the prophecy of the ‘Cosmic Grail’ (a Green Lantern power battery lost somewhere in the multiverse) and that the First Lantern of the multiverse Volthoom hail from its original incarnation lend it some extra mythological weight.

34. Earth 32

A mashup world hosting the likes of the Justice Titans, Young Justice International, and the Doom Society. A world that’s home to Aquaflash will probably never have an ongoing all its own, but plenty of stories, miniseries, and even a brief line of comics have been based on mashup characters before, so there’s plenty of proof of concept for this being able to endure.

33. Earth 23

An Earth where Batman (naturally) is the only white guy on the Justice League, and Superman is not only President of the United States in his secret identity as Calvin Ellis, but the leader of the multiverse-spanning superteam Justice Incarnate. It reads like Morrison trying to do his idealized take on an ‘Ultimate DC’, a more diverse and politically engaged superhero landscape that doesn’t scale down its big ideas in turn, and if I were ranking it at the time it was introduced it would go much higher. The problem is that its version of Superman is modeled after Barack Obama, and that guy isn’t President anymore (and for that matter his legacy seems to grow more complicated by the year). As a result the vibe goes from triumphant to wistful mourning if not outright bitterly ironic, and that’s a needle that would have to be threaded before doing any substantial work here.

(Also, since several Justice Leaguers here rather than being made black are replaced with various black counterparts they’ve had over the years, that means Wonder Woman here is the 70s Amazon Nubia. And, uh, that name is something that would have to be...something.)

32. Earth 19

Steampunk superheroics; superhero period pieces are usually fun, and this is built on a foundation of pretty Mike Mignola art (though confession that I’ve never read Gotham By Gaslight), so sure, this one has potential.

31. Earth 18

Same as above but cowboys instead. This gets extra credit because cowboys mesh better with superhero conventions, and the additional twist of this world being frozen in history by the Time Trapper, forcing them to approximate modern technology with 19th century resources.

30. Earth 31

A post-apocalyptic waterworld where humanity is protected by Captain Leatherwing and assorted other pirate superheroes. Another ‘superheroes but in another genre’ setup, the post-apocalyptic, environmental twist makes it unfortunately more relevant than its peers, though I don’t think it’s quite the best end of the world as we know it on the list.

29. Earth 42

Home to the adorable, innocent world of the chibified Little League...secretly robots unwittingly enacting an endless stage play for the malevolent being known as the Empty Hand, running scenarios of his devising in preparation for a coming war with the rest of the multiverse. It’s a neat little multipurpose world, able to be played both as amusing contrast, or as parody whether light-hearted or cynical, in their endless ‘playtime’.

28. Earth 7

Formerly home to counterparts of the heroes of Earth 8, it was shattered by the Empty Hand’s forces and its desiccated cities made his throne, the zombie hordes that were once its champions his armies. The ‘Ultimate Marvel’ to Earth 8′s Marvel proper (and now Marvel Zombies), the idea of the broken remains of the cool version of the cool superhero universe as the lair of the ultimate evil has a certain appeal.

27. Earth 52

The last of the Earth 52s on this list, this newly added 53rd core Earth is home to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight books. Much as the reception to it over the years has become...mixed, at best (for my money Dark Knight III is the only one that’s not at least bad in a very interesting way, and even it still has its moments), the surprised generally positive reception to the most recent entry in Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child suggests there’s still life in this oddball corner of the cosmos yet.

(Fun fact: this was Earth 31 in a previous version of the multiverse, and Morrison intended it to be included as such in Multiversity - hence why Earth 31 is made up of inky scratches on the Map - but Miller requested he not since he wanted to keep his domain separate from DC’s ongoing storylines. Instead he agreed later to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s use of it in Dark Nights: Metal as DKR is famously Snyder’s favorite comic, bringing it in as Earth 52.)

26. Earth 47 aka Dreamworld

Where the Love Syndicate of Dreamworld dwells, baby: all is groovy. It’s incredibly specific in both era and theme, but a psychedelic universe with heroes to match invites tons of possibilities.

25. Earth 10 aka Earth X

It’s the Nazi Earth that sucks. It has superheroes who unnervingly are about as well-intentioned and effective as the standard set in the New Reischman, opposed by the few remaining dregs of the Freedom Fighters led by Uncle Sam; only their Kal-L, Overman, once Hitler’s weapon, truly understands the scope of the atrocities that led to their ‘utopia’, having grown a conscience too late and ever-aware that no feat in the present can ever redeem the oceans of blood on his hands. You can do horrifying introspective stuff with them as in their Multiversity chapter, you can tell Freedom Fighters stories like the recent miniseries, or you can just have the Justice League show up to fight the Nazi Justice League. A Nazi world is a standard one in multiverse stories for a reason, you don’t get easier targets.

24. Earth 5G

The DC universe that’s...sort of here and sort of not. Doomsday Clock and other upcoming stories appear to be shifting us over to this, but in most of DC’s line of titles the leap hasn’t taken place yet. As we haven’t seen the bench of successor heroes apparently primed to take over only so much can be judged, but the vast changes suggested by the new ‘official timeline’ that’s been leaked suggest a bizarre attempt at incorporating as many of their editorially-favored biggest hits as possible into a bizarre selective mishmash, without particularly serving the status quos any of the constituent characters said history is meant to bolster (with the exception of Wonder Woman, now framed as the first superhero, which would at least be interesting and a deserved bolster to her profile if there were any particular impression her new standing would be meaningfully followed-through on), while also not only reinstating the mutually destructive retcon of the JSA as preceding Superman, but taking the absurd extra step of actively presenting them as his inspiration. Of course we haven’t seen it in practice yet, and at the end of the day good stories will surely still be told here, but the foundations here are about as shaky as they’ve ever been for the ‘core’ DCU as a wholehearted capitulation to placing dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s over the actual narrative logistics of making a shared universe function smoothly.

23. Earth Negative Zero aka Betwixt

A world where those whose senses of self entire disintegrate fade away to seeking to feed on those still well-defined, this bears similarities to the realm of Limbo where ignored superheroes reside, but with just enough conceptual differences and a hellish, malleable twist that makes it the best thing anyone’s come up with to date to do with the Dark Multiverse.

22. Earth 48 aka Warworld

While its iconography is rooted of all things in castoff characters from Crisis On Infinite Earths and no-hopers from Countdown To Final Crisis, the actual conceit here of a world where literally everyone and everything is a superhero that operates by superhero rules, a world built by the New Gods as defenders of reality, is wide-open and tantalizing.

21. Earth 38

Another major shot at a DCU that aged in real time, this version has its own idiosyncrasies but far more of a sense of forward momentum and meaningful change, with the original Superman and Batman still leading the pack one way or another but successors to both them and the rest of the heroes truly stepping up. Also the predominant hero of the 21st century is Knightwing, the grandson of both Superman and Batman who has only partial Superman powers but also Batman training, which is just really cool.

20. Earth 3

The good ‘ol classic evil mirror universe, where strength is the only law, the forces of evil always win in the end no matter how bright the day may become, and thus the Crime Syndicate operates as it pleases. It’s never quite as interesting as you want it to be - its villains are largely one-note - but its warped societal and cosmic rules, and that each character has a handful of twists on the mythology of their counterparts rather than being an exact (if morally inverted) duplicate, means it could easily one day come to live up to its obvious potential in the right hands.

19. Earth 21

Here, most superheroes were forced into retirement after World War II by McCarthyist paranoia, but at the dawn of the 1960s the few remaining and a new generation are emboldened to step back into the light, spearheaded by the Justice League of America. DC: The New Frontier is a modern classic, with a direct standalone follow-up virtually out of the question; as it doesn’t quite lead into the world of the actual 1960s DC Comics either, its sole function in its capacity as a world in the multiverse is as a 60s ‘period piece’ Earth. Given that’s where most of the architecture of DC as we now know it was built however, that’s hardly a problem.

18. Earth 26 aka Earth C

Funny animals are fun, and in a superhero universe that means you get superhero funny animals, courtesy of Captain Carrot and his amazing Zoo Crew. What’s not to love?

17. Earth 22

While time has somewhat dimmed the acclaim that originally surrounded it, Kingdom Come and its tale of a Superman coming out of retirement alongside his allies to try and reign in an out-of-control new generation remains a landmark moment in the genre, and in many aspects still holds up. Unlike many stories of its stature this world has always played nice with the mainline universe in terms of guest appearances and crossovers, including works by the original creators Mark Waid and Alex Ross, and as the most iconic and conceptually expansive work to date set in a DC universe that has joined in the march of time, that makes it a prominent and useful one to have around.

16. The Antimatter Universe of Qward aka The Reversoverse aka the Anti-Verse

The original dark flipside of DC reality, this has occasionally also played home to the Crime Syndicate - and their best stories by far, to boot - but mainly serves as a home base to the Weaponeers of Qward and occasionally Sinestro. While largely unexplored it has a massively central place in DC’s cosmology and the birth of the multiverse, the glimpses of a society of pure evil in early Silver Age Green Lantern and JLA: Earth 2 are far more fun and interesting than anything seen in Earth 3′s history, it’s about to get even more room under Morrison to find definition, and as the ultimate mysterious Forbidden Realm of the DCU the possibilities could be essentially endless in the right hands.

15. Earth-1985 aka Earth One

The DC universe of 1956-1986, and the dragon an entire generation of creators have spent their livelihoods chasing as the ‘classic’ iteration, as evidenced by one of them flat-out confirming it still exists somewhere out there. While that makes it frequently redundant when the main DCU is trying hard to mimic its feel - a few divergent notes such as Maggin’s idiosyncratic take on latter-day Superman and its version of Jason Todd aside - the prospect of a DCU that remained in that mold forever to a greater or lesser extent even if time may have moved forward could, in principle, free the main universe to go off in wildly different directions, knowing this image of DC always exists in its own space to return to when so desired rather than actively turning the current status quo to face backwards.

14. Earth 17

The Atomic Knights of Justice quest across the radioactive landscape of Novamerika in a world decimated by nuclear was in 1963 in search of Earth 15′s Cosmic Grail, their only hope against the coming of Darkseid. A mashup of the Justice League with the protagonists of one of the most fascinatingly bizarre comics of DC’s Silver Age in the Atomic Knights, a mythic quest, and most relevantly “What if Fallout had superheroes?” leaves this feeling like it’s just waiting for its moment to shine.

13. Earth 8 aka Angor

Known across the rest of the multiverse as the protagonists of the Major movies and comics (as opposed to the sub-imprint Essential Major reflecting Earth 7), in actuality the non-actionable champions of Angor - the Retaltiators, the G-Men, the Future Family, and The Bug, among others - are as real as any other superheroes, and while they struggle under the weight of both mistrust by the general public and frequent in-fighting, they’ve thus far protected their world from threats global, universal, and multiversal alike. The Big Two having stand-ins for each other is a longstanding tradition for good reasons: it not only allows for crossovers where the legal stars don’t align (and adds an extra fun shock of recognition whenever the reader realizes what’s happening), but provides each of them an ongoing version of those archetypes to play with within the confines of their own narrative, whether as contrasts or bending them to fit the tone of a very different shared universe than they were originally created for.

12. Earth 16 aka #earthme

The world where every sidekick, super-son, successor, and short-lived ‘new generation - of HERO!’ at last seize their moment in the sun...in a world already saved by their predecessors, with little left to do but lap up lives of super-celebrity and wish for one, just one little alien invasion or immortal tyrant to justify their existences for them. The best of DC’s futuristic/what-if-time-mattered alternate Earths in my opinion, taking to its logical conclusion the notion as stated by Morrison in interviews that as the Justice League will stick around as long as there are evils that need fighting, the ever-present promise of the torch being passed could only ever truly, permanently take place in a world where the job was already redundant. Playing as it does with in-universe history, real-life publishing realities, celebrity culture, generational divides, and the question of what being a superhero even means sans the usual confrontational justifications, it’s by its nature only going to become more expansive and interesting a commentary as time goes by and the regular DCU goes through its cycles of reboots, rebirths, and returns to form.

11. Pocket Universe 54471

Exactly what you see: Superman made a little pocket universe a half mile wide to go fishing in and he was gonna take Bruce and Dick there for the former’s bachelor party, and he knows about and/or created at least 54470 others. It’s absolutely delightful not only in its own right, but as an opening of the door to what the multiverse can mean in DC comics as a sci-fi idea generator beyond riffs on existing properties, while still being presented with a distinctly DC sense of playfulness.

10. Earth 45 aka Earth 45™

The origin of one of the best Superman villains of all time in Superdoomsday - the Superman idea in a world without him brought to life but twisted by committee into a murderous living brand - a horrifying corporatocracy standing for all Superman and company are meant to stand against, and an enduring threat with the world still in shackles and those in power still able to dream to life whatever vision they please of absolute power to be wielded in their name.

9. Earth 36 aka Terra

Justice 9, the defenders of Terra - or I suppose Justice 7 now after the losses of Optiman and Red Racer, though how long does that matter in a superhero universe? - is the most interesting of the direct analogue groups for my money. Technically speaking they’re another twice-removed set like 34 and 35, standing in for the heroes of Big Bang Comics, but given my understanding is that there’s no major “Like the DC heroes, BUT” twist in that book the way Astro City and Supreme have other than a retro ‘good old days’ bent (which definitely isn’t the case here with at least two queer members), Justice 9 basically function as direct analogues for the Justice League...in the same comics as the Justice League. To me, that’s actually fascinating: one of the most useful elements of stand-in characters like this is the ability to tap into the iconic power of archetypes without the familiarity surrounding the actual figures, in the way Planetary for instance uses just enough distance from the source material to make a couple dozen decades-old pop culture touchstones feel completely new, and this implements that approach to the material to the DC characters with heroes who can actually themselves team up with DC proper. As many approaches as could be taken with that though, that potential alone probably wouldn’t be enough to shoot it this high up the list if not for a major additional factor: in the same way that in the old-school DC universe the heroes of Earth-1 had comics reflecting the adventures of the heroes of Earth-2 long before learning they were real in another universe, DC Comics are published on Earth 36. Aside from the neat trick of putting our leads in the same position as the Golden Age heroes, it means Justice 9 grew up with the Justice League as their heroes in the same way as us the audience before becoming heroes themselves, and then they grew up to learn they were real. These folks absolutely deserve to become multiverse standbys.

8. Earth 51

The Earth where all Jack Kirby’s ideas live as a single cohesive world and adventure. No further justification is needed.

7. Earth 13

A world of occult danger where DC’s traditionally superheroic magical figures such as Zatanna and Deadman are given the full Vertigo horror treatment, while the more intimidating and morally dubious figures such as Etrigan and John Constantine get logos and codenames. Not only an expansion but an offputting inversion of one of DC’s most acclaimed corners, this oddball bunch could bounce off of the capes and tights crowd as easily as your Shadowpacts and Justice League Darks, in ways no other team from any corner of the multiverse could.

6. Earth 20

Pulp champions of a 21st century that remains aesthetically moored in the early 20th, of the handful of Earths converting DC standbys into different genre territory in the local 52 the homeworld of the Society of Superheroes hits hardest, given the role the likes of Doc Savage and The Shadow played in that time shaping the conventions of superheroes as we know them. Add the wealth of concepts presented in their oneshot and the decision to hew away from the traditional Justice League riffs of parallel Earths, and of all the truly new worlds introduced in Multiversity, Earth 20 is the one that most feels like it could support an ongoing all its own.

5. Earth 29 aka Htrae

You gotta have Bizarro World. You just gotta.

4. Earth 33 aka Earth Prime

The in-universe representation of our very own pale blue dot. Whether it’s the birthplace of Superboy Prime where assorted DC creators had to deal with a visiting Flash and Superman throughout the 60s and 70s, meta games with the various incarnations of Ultra/Ultraa, a looming threat yet also victim in need of rescue through the eyes of Justice Incarnate, or the unwitting home of the ‘Superman’ or ‘Batman’ of Kurt Busiek’s off-center takes on the characters in Secret Identity and Creature of the Night, over the years DC has shown a decent amount of restraint in not going back to this particular well too often unless someone has a really clever tale to tell, and as a result it has maybe the single best batting average of all the ‘parallel Earths’ that have been regularly returned to by DC over the years. Give yourselves a hand, folks!

3. Earth 5 aka Thunderworld

Home not to ‘Shazam’, but Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family in all their glory, a technicolor world playing by the rules set down by Otto Binder and company where a superhero can literally battle planets and the most dangerous villain of all may be a very, very mean worm with glasses, a place of dream logic and childish innocence even by the standards of superhero comics. Captain Marvel at his best is one of DC’s most iconically potent players yet many seem to agree that much of his woes in recent years have come down to trying to find a unique space for him in the DCU proper. While I don’t know that it’s at all impossible to make that work, it’s certainly true that Marvel as he was originally presented doesn’t quite make sense in that world, whereas back in his own he keeps a flavor entirely unique to himself and his partners, whether for solo adventures or teamups with the heroes of the other worlds, playing it straight or examining some of the unsettling implications established by Thunderworld or finding a new way to make it work. Much like Bizarro World, it’s simply a locale the place doesn’t quite feel whole without.

2. Earth 25 (?)

While I’m a bit dubious on it definitely being Earth 25 in the core 52 based on interpretation of an offhanded line from Mr. Terrific (it has a multiverse all its own!), the fact of the matter is that America’s Best Comics came roaring out of the gate as proof of its own title, and basically didn’t stop until it ended. A couple after-the-fact Tom Strong miniseries (containing perhaps the most singularly cowardly hack move in the history of shared universe comics in undoing the end of Promethea) can’t detract from the core ABC lineup being made up of some of the most singularly clever, gorgeous, and heartfelt superhero titles to hit the stands, pretty much the platonic ideal of what you want books like these to look like. If this universe can hang around in any capacity at all until someone god willing picks them up again in a big way, it’s a win in my book.

1. Earth 0 aka Prime Earth

The extant version of the main DCU for at least a little longer, it really does feel like more than just about any version before it - at least for my money - they finally got all their ducks in a row, albeit right before blowing everything to hell. Most of the stories you really want to still have some sort of weight for the major characters are still in play to be built on, and most of the stories that clearly needed to be dropped are dropped. The cosmology’s fleshed out and expanding, the big names mostly work as they should ideally work while still heading into new territory, the JSA is mysteriously somehow around in the past without interfering with the primacy of Superman and the Justice League as the first known superheroes (a mystery that will never be resolved now due to the current reboot; damn shame) and the Legion of Superheroes have a new coat of paint, and there’s room for stories cosmically massive and intimately personal and utterly bizarre throughout the line rather than there being a single overriding idea of what these books should be. It may not be the perfect DC Universe by any means, but it’s a real, real damn good one, and of course without that thing, none of the rest of these universes would have been there in the first place.

#DC Comics #Multiversity #Opinion

[winfredmirams-blog]

How To Convert File Ogg To Wav In C#

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[hencethebravery]

TITLE: CS 0155 Data Witchcraft, 1/1 (Ao3)

SUMMARY: All the books and movies seem keen on operating under the assumption that magic is supposed to make your life easier. But apparently it was all lies, because being in one’s 20s seems to suck no matter what kind of spells you’re prone to casting. Emma Swan and Killian Jones, while “blessed” with the gift of magic, are certified emotional disasters—it’s a relief to know that at least they’ve found each other. A Contemporary CS Witches AU.

CONTENT WARNING (RATED M): Contains brief mentions of childhood sexual abuse; swearing; casual, non-depressing drug use; implicit and consensual sexual content between adults. The sexual abuse is mentioned in passing and not described in explicit detail. If you need further details before reading, feel free to send me a message!

AUTHOR’S NOTES: This was a story that I planned on finishing with about 9k. It ended up being completed about 41 words under the 15k limit, and imo it should probably be longer, but since that’s not an option, this is what we’re left with! I’d like to thank a few ppl that made this possible: @the-reason-to-sail-home, @pritkins-little-witch, @initiala, and @wellhellotragic for all of their time and helpful thoughts. This fic ended up being far more challenging than I had anticipated and I couldn’t have done it without y’all. Especially Tessa and Kat, you are both my shining stars. Thank you for never letting me give up on myself. Literally incredible freaking artwork that I cannot stop staring at provided by @clockadile and @princesse-swan, both found here and here (respectively). If you’re interested in listening to the soundtrack I made to suit the particular vibe of this story, you can listen on 8tracks, here. 

“Watch carefully that magic that occurs when you give a person enough comfort to just be themselves." — Atticus, Love Her Wild: Poems

i. ugly_duckling

Emma Swan learns about magic the same way that most children do—slipped in between the pages of a book. She is not granted the privilege of enjoying a conversation typical of most children; that of parents soothing the inevitable disappointment with the truth that magic is not real. The parents might, for the most part, keep the dream alive for a certain number of years. And so, for that certain number of years, the child will be allowed to live in a world where magic exists. That child will spend a few blissful years staring a little too hard at the creepy house at the end of their street; that child will throw a packet of salt over their shoulder, even at the risk of being yelled at by their parents after the fact. Most children will grow up feeling afraid, and not much can be done about it—but to be able to quell that fear, at least temporarily, with the suggestion that there’s a magical world at the heart of it all, waiting to be discovered? That kind of thinking might make the pain of all those unknown variables worth it, at least for most children.

Emma Swan was not most children. She was “most children,” in the sense that she wandered into a library and plucked a book off the shelf with a flying girl on the cover (she rode a broomstick and wore a black hat). She was “most children,” in the way she jumped off picnic tables and prayed that her feet would never touch the ground. But she was not “most children,” when she brought the book home and showed her new “mother” the particular book in question.

“Oh, you silly thing,” Mrs. Swan had so gleefully informed her, a sharp smirk on her stiff, something not quite right about it face. “Hasn’t anyone told you? There’s no such thing as magic.”

In the Swan household there was no such thing as magic. There was a roof over Emma’s head, and a hot meal three times a day, but in all other matters of importance, it may as well have been another orphanage. To make matters worse there was Betsy Swan’s husband, Mitchell Swan—a man who, on his very best days, could hardly summon the courage to lift his ass from the couch, and on his very worst, slip into Emma’s room every other night when his wife was asleep.

As a child, Emma would disappear into her own head, creating elaborate escape attempts from her supposed home. Sometimes she would don her own pointy black hat, put a spell on her own boring broomstick, and turn Mr. Swan into some small, nasty insect she could crush beneath her shoe.

When Emma turns seven, the Swans buy their first computer. It’s a Power Macintosh G3, which matters little to Emma at the time. At first, when she overhears them talking about it, Betsy mentions something about a mouse, and she finds herself unnaturally excited at the prospect of there being an actual animal in the house. That is until she actually sees the thing, and becomes confused and disappointed at the sight of this small, oddly shaped piece of plastic attached to a length of cord. She stares curiously at the blackened screen for a few moments until Betsy returns, yelling at her to get her “behind” away from the most expensive thing in the house.

Like most major developments that might occur within the pages of any generic fantasy novel, Emma makes her first acquaintance with the digital universe in the dead of night. Closer to midnight, if we’re being specific. A clock chimes from the dining room, and the Swan house is blessedly silent as she sneaks down the hall, past the flickering light of the television, the soft sounds of Mitchell’s snores emitting from his armchair.

The machine sits quiet and imposing atop the desk in the office; the light from the moon casting an eerie glow about the room, the dark screen a seemingly infinite void staring back into her wide, curious eyes. She sneaks a glance back towards where she came, expecting to hear Mitchell’s heavy footsteps, or Betsy’s cruel laughter, but she’s only greeted with silence, the odd creak of an old house.

When she finally works up the nerve to power it on there’s a kind of yawning, high-pitched static that hits her ears in a not entirely unpleasant way. It’s just enough that she finds herself overcome with the urge to open and close her mouth comically wide, like when your ears pop inside the cabin of an airplane and you have to re-adjust all the loose air inside your head. There’s a sound afterwards, a low hum that would never really go away. In later years, she would come to understand that there’s always a vague humming associated with most electronics. What was different in Emma’s case was the sound beneath the hum, or rather, the sounds.

She would learn to ignore them after a time, picking and choosing the most relevant or useful voices. Sometimes they were people, other times they were… something else. The first night she boots up the Power Macintosh, it’s all white noise, and she assumes it’s a thing that everyone can hear. It’s a lot of excited whispers, so hushed and quickly spoken that she has a difficult time making out any one word or phrase.

“Hello?” she utters quietly, still silently praying for the Swans to remain asleep and unaware of her trespassing. “Is there anyone out there?”

The humming cacophony of distant voices and dissonant beeps are the only answer, as if her own voice has gotten lost in the din, and her eyes search the desktop until they land on an oddly familiar image of a piece of paper. It is unlike any other piece of paper she’s ever seen, this bold, flat image outlined in blocks of color—untouchable, and with no discernible smell or texture. She has stumbled upon a word processor, a blank document with a blinking, vertical line that waits and waits.

The moon grows a bit brighter in the wake of her excitement, but Emma is too eager to notice the way the darker corners of the room become less so; even the way in which the computer itself has begun to emit its own soft, illuminated ring of greenish light, as if the office has been submerged in water.

“Hello,” Emma writes slowly, one key at a time. With each selection of every letter beneath her fingertips sounds a satisfying clunk, and she grins as she continues, “My name is Emma Swan.”

The silence that follows in the wake of all those voices is nearly deafening, but there’s a clear answer that sounds from within the four walls of her newly christened safe haven; murky and quiet, getting comfortable from her place seated at the bottom of a pool, “Hello, Emma Swan. It is very nice to meet you.”

As it turns out, there is quite a lot about the Swans’ Power Macintosh G3 that they are not privy to. The Swans, in point of fact, seem to be ignorant of a great many things occurring out in the world and even in their own home about 99% of the time. They have never heard the hum of voices coming from the computer room, nor do they seem to receive the same kind of unsettling, predictive programming that Emma can suss out from within the apparent blankness of a darkened television screen. It’s a blessing and a curse. While it’s nice to know she’s not quite so alone as she used to be—while it seems as if she’s been able to lift a veil and spot the real world underneath, there’s still the reality of the Swans always hovering in another room, at her back, or in her bed.

Betsy catches Emma on the computer late one night about a month or so after her first midnight rendezvous, and the subsequent consequences are about as bad as she assumed they would be. There’s a harsh smack to the back of the head, even harsher words, and a rough tugging of her arm towards her bedroom door, tossing her inside and slamming it shut before Emma can say a word in her own defense. She cries and seethes, the tightness at the back of her throat a painful and vicious reminder of the fact that she is little more than a prisoner.

And while Emma stewed inside her room, her small feet pacing back and forth from door to window and back again, Betsy Swan had tried and failed to turn on her new computer after it had shut off quite unexpectedly. It’s screen remained stubbornly dark, and there was Betsy, angrily and futilely attempting to turn it back on, only to give up about 20 minutes later, returning to her own bedroom, mumbling to herself about how they would have to lug the fucking thing back to the store.

It’s all a bit of a different game after that. Emma has to be more careful about how and when she visits that place she’s found behind the curtain. She’s sure to cover her tracks online, deleting files or browsing data as if she had never been. She spends the next few years doing her best to become a ghost—in both of her lives. Within the walls of her “home,” in the hallways at school, and in the cold, impersonal well of the Internet. She studies everything as carefully as she can, but does her best to leave as little an impression as possible. She excels a little too well in her typing class at school, earning her some impressive marks from a teacher, so she fumbles a few weeks later and drops down a grade.

It goes on this way for two or three years, and it’s about when she starts yearning for more that she obtains a bus pass and starts regularly visiting the library. It is during these regular visitations that she meets Lily Page, and wonderfully, her life is never the same.

Emma is close to turning eleven when she gets a private message from a user called “spyro-huntr3ss” on a public message board. At first her instinct is to block the user—she’s been around long enough to know that people are scum wherever you go, even in this digital world where she had felt so safe at first, this place she had decided to call her own.

“I know what it is you’re trolling for,” her mysterious new contact, likely trying to get her age, number, or address had sent, followed by, “and I can help you find it.”

From what Emma has been able to discern thus far, most people using the Internet were just as oblivious as the Swans, which was disappointing. She had been hoping, in vain it would seem, that once she’d been able to locate more users that they might be able to help explain it. The humming, and the voices, and the stories in the static—the songs lost in the high-pitched chorus of a dial-up tone. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Most people thought she was being metaphorical, or just plain paranoid. Message boards were a breeding ground for those folks made of cracks and dark places; lost people looking for patterns and meaning where there were none to be found.

The unsettling shiver that shrieked down the length of her spine had her head swiveling atop her thin, spindly neck as if she were some kind of anxious, wide-eyed owl; her mouth going dry at the sight of her own name staring back at her in bold, black text. To her profound relief, the library appeared to be just as empty as it had been when she walked in that morning. Not many people would brave the snow-filled streets a few days before Christmas to hang out in a public library, but then again, not many people had the Swans waiting for them at home.

Emma felt her heart beat anxiously in time with the blinking cursor inside her text box, a taunting slowness that seemed to be daring her to refuse the offer. She glimpsed at the library entrance and observed the snow falling heavily atop the empty city streets, tried to ignore the sickeningly sweet melodies of holiday cheer emanating from the head librarian’s office. The truth had been all she ever wanted, wasn’t it? From the very first moment she’d realized that she had come from nothing, that no one had wanted her, and could that be true? From the feeling of Mitchell’s hands and eyes where they shouldn’t be—wondering if all fathers were like this. From the first time she’d booted up the Power Mac, the ghostly chorus ringing in her ears, always ringing, ringing, ringing—

Lily’s “truth” is every bit as exciting as Emma’s painfully beating heart had hoped it would be. That yes, Emma Swan, there is a world behind the world and you have been invited to be a part of it. The people who are “in charge?” Those people that have hurt you, that have convinced you that you don’t matter, that what you might want for your life doesn’t matter—those people are powerless here. But not you, Emma Swan, not us. We’re the powerful ones now.

It takes her some time to truly trust her new informant, “spyro-huntr3ss,” who, while forthcoming about the realities of this world, the potential for what they could do, of what was waiting for them a few years down the line, was quite tight-lipped concerning personal details of her own life. Which was understandable, if not a bit frustrating, especially since she had known Emma’s name without having asked for it.

According to her new source (Emma’s not certain “spyro-huntr3ss” will ever be a friend), there are ways to pick apart the cacophony of sound constantly washing over her in dizzying regularity. There are also, blessedly, ways to tune out the noise. “Invest in a good pair of headphones,” had been one of the first things she’d advised, and after Emma, not yet a teenager, trapped between the freedom of the web and the reign of her parents, had quite logically argued that she had no money for such things, Lily had “laughed,” a peaky mechanical noise echoing in Emma’s ears.

Despite the fact that she was still technically a child and living under the Swans’ supervision, Emma had never in her life felt so independent. If not for her inconvenient need to eat and drink every once in awhile, the Swans might have forgotten she was there at all. There was of course the unfortunate recurrence of Mr. Swan; still coerced by some dark, unspoken perversions that it was his God-given right to appear by Emma’s bedside every few nights. Until Lily had learned of it, of course. It had been a secret Emma had always kept to herself, except for that first night she had run to Betsy, hoping for a savior and finding a stern hand instead. A disgusted voice of disbelief, calling Emma the sick one, the wrong one. “Mr. Swan would never do that you wicked little thing,” she had hissed into Emma’s small, red face. “You’re lucky I don’t send you right back to the orphanage for this disgusting stunt.”

And of course, Mitchell had found out, because the dutiful wife informs her stalwart husband of every single thing going on in their house, and he had made damn sure that Emma never said a word of their “visits” to anyone, especially not Mrs. Swan.

They had been messaging one another back and forth for about two years before Lily discovered her dirty little secret, and Emma was quite happy to finally be able to think of her as a friend. Even still, she had never been tempted to reveal the truth—she was embarrassed and ashamed, and she assumed that Lily would never speak to her again should she ever slip-up. Ultimately, it had been Emma’s penchant for frequently keeping extremely late hours, coupled with her recent cell phone acquisition, which she had been keeping underneath her pillow.

Emma had only recently started cursing, and found that it was one of the few things she genuinely enjoyed. It made her feel like she was older than she was, and the older she was, the closer she was to being free of this fucking place.

When she wasn’t getting lost within the dark, less than reputable corners of the Internet, Emma learned that she loved to read. Lately, she seems to have gotten into the habit of reading the same kind of story—the same kind of journey, over and over again. She’s read these stories so many times, in point of fact, that she’s begun to seek out these same patterns as they might appear in her own life. Is this beginning? She might ask herself, stepping off the bus and colliding with a polite stranger. Is this the end? She would nervously wonder, thinking she had heard footsteps outside the door to the computer room.

Staring at Lily’s direct yet subtle offer on the screen, she knew that this must be one of those moments; the moment where the story is about to take a turn, and no amount of deus ex machina, or praying, or wishing will ever bring back the life you had once lived.

Mitchell Swan is stunned to find an ungodly (and almost certainly illegal) amount of money in his bank accounts the next day, and he arrives home from work in an alcohol-fueled panic. Emma watches the two of them, quiet and unbothered from the darkened hallway as they titter and yell at one another like a pair of screeching birds. Her phone feels warm in her pocket, and she smiles at the thought of what’s in store—all those atrocious, sickening pictures hidden away on his work computer. What will the world think of you, Mr. Swan?

ii. [email protected]

Killian Jones often feels trapped by the city—little more than a lifeless, concrete prison; he despises nearly everything about the place. And to make matters worse, he has the misfortune to have been cursed with the burden of having too reliable a memory. It is far too easy to be able to slip back, back, back—all the way back until he’s suddenly standing in the middle of his mother’s garden. Until he can hear her voice in his head, laughing, singing, scolding. In these brief yet harrowing moments of nostalgia he can almost always hear her tears as well; her cries of pain that he had been helpless to alleviate. Logically, he knows he had been little else but a boy when she had first fallen ill, but it matters little. He feels responsible for her illness, even more so for her eventual death, alone and searching for a son that was no longer there.

Killian and Cordelia Jones owned a farm about five hours north of the city. Mr. Jones is long gone, and Killian, while in possession of an exceptionally good memory, remembers little of the man who his mother assures him was his father. She maintained his innocence for many years, wanting her son to know that he was loved, but as he approached a certain stubborn, righteous age, she had been forced to admit that no, he was not the man that Cordelia had hoped he would be.

“But it has not a thing to do with you, my love,” she said quietly, allowing him the benefit of thinking she hadn’t noticed his tears. It was truly astonishing that she never once raised her voice to the boy, especially given his behavior in later years. It was almost always at a level tempo, calm and direct, with just a hint of an Irish brogue that her own mother had possessed, although Killian had never actually met the woman.

“She wouldn’t have put up with your nonsense for a single moment.” Shaking her head at the sight of a broken lamp, or a carton of milk left to spoil on the counter. “You are one lucky lad.”

His mother insisted that the Jones’ were a lucky family. But as an adult he would come to believe that they had never been anything other than cursed. It would always be unclear to him exactly why that was, but he assumed it had something to do with the magic. That was always the case, wasn’t it? “All magic comes with a price,” says every single fantasy novel he had ever read, every magically-inclined film he had ever seen. Their downfall, in later years, seemed to him inevitable. If his mother were still alive, he would have asked her, “Did our family make a deal with the wrong demon?”

His bitterness, however, would still take a few more years to develop. As a child, he was enthralled with the sight of the vines and the flowers crawling their way inside the house. The way his mother would reach her hands deep within the soil and a few moments later, up would sprout the stubborn seeds. Cordelia made their living with her magic, often receiving visitors from the surrounding towns looking for quick-fix solutions to their various troubles. They would often come late at night, or when he was out in the fields, trying to make things grow or flourish, or wilt, as the case may be. But when he would see them walking nervously down the drive, quietly knocking on their aged blue door, he would drop whatever it was he was working on and try to sneak a peek at their meetings.

“What do they ask you for?” he wondered one night as she tucked him into bed, his eyes wide and curious, bright with all kinds of vivid imaginings. “Love,” she answered happily, bringing the blanket up to rest beneath his chin.

“Love?” he asked with a grimace, as if he were about to become infected with a terrible disease at the mere mention of the word. “And sickness,” she continued, chuckling at his obvious disapproval. “And loneliness. Or success in their businesses.”

“Can I help?” he asked sleepily, feeling the effect of the chamomile tea his mother had made him drink every evening before bed.

“One day,” she answered, kissing him on the forehead. “Soon.”

Ten years later and he’s not so sure how she would feel about the kind of man that he’s become. What he’s been using his “gifts” for. The harshest parts of him imagine telling her that heis helping them—helping them forget how terrible the world can be; the blissfulness of ignorance. And if he makes some extra money in the process? Well, then so bloody be it. He can almost imagine himself cruelly bragging of it even, taking pleasure in the heartbroken, disappointed look on her thin, pale face.

It hadn’t started this way, to be sure. Initially, the plan had been to go to the city temporarily, to make some extra money to afford the kind of medicine that would keep her alive for longer than just a few months. Of course she had been lying to his face when she had suggested it. Made him think that there was even the slightest chance that she would live another six months. Unbeknownst to him, she had apparently contracted an illness that even magic couldn’t cure (wasn’t supposed to cure, according to her).

“Then what good is it?” he had yelled despairingly, trying to ignore the pitying look on her face from where she was laid up in bed; small, weak, and complacent. No, not complacent.

“Accepting,” she had sternly tried to correct him. “Magic is not meant to prolong that which should end. You know this, Killian.”

But he had been too angry, too determined to seek out a cure, and Cordelia Jones, knowing her son, knowing his stubbornness, his inability to give up, to grapple with the helplessness of being human, had suggested that if he went to the city, used his abilities to make some extra money, perhaps they would be able to afford the medicine that could save her life.

“And take the cat, would you?” she had asked on his way out the door, shakily calling after him from where she dozed. “I want to make sure she’s well-looked after.”

Chammy was a calico with poor eyesight and an even poorer temperament. Most of the time. If you gave her some extra food or a good brushing she might deign to sit with you on the couch for a bit, but most of the time she was content to sit on a ratty armchair that he had pulled in off the street, her ears and tail flicking at the stray vines or weeds when they would grow too close.

The plan had always been to return. As soon as he had stepped foot off the bus, he had felt suffocated. By the polluted air, the distracting, flickering lights, the sounds and smells of too many human beings packed into one place like sardines in a tin. With Chammy’s crate in one hand and a packed duffle in another, he had wandered angrily through the streets until he’d found the shitty apartment he had managed to rent from a property owner who lived nearer to the farm.

“It’s not much,” he had warned Killian, clearly uncomfortable with the knowledge that Mrs. Jones was wasting away at the back of the house somewhere, “but it’ll do for a time.”

“I’m certain it will,” Killian had answered with a bitter grin, “Thanks for your help.”

Dealing in illicit substances hadn’t been the plan at first either. He had seen the kinds of services his mother provided; there wasn’t really a “modern” term for what she practiced other than “holistic medicine,” which wealthy business people in coastal cities seemed to love opening their wallets for. Unfortunately for Killian, he had never had much of a head for such things. The plants he had managed to cultivate back home, for himself and his friends, the kinds of things the local cops had busted him for on more than one occasion, those were the kinds of things he was good at. However, getting scolded by the cops back home was one thing, winding up in a city prison was quite another.

It had taken many frustrated evenings of trial and error, and even a few angry customers, before he was forced to admit to himself that the “healing” part of it was simply not where his true talents lay.

“This is good shit,” one of his recent acquaintances (the people you sell to should never really be considered anything more) had told him late one night from their perch on his fire escape, “You could make some good money with this.”

And that’s where it had all started; a steady stream of high quality product, and more than enough people willing to pay top dollar for it. He had been just about ready to afford the medicine, the whole reason he had moved to this awful city in the first place, to retrieve the cure and bring it back to his mother, when he had gotten a call from his landlord that Cordelia had passed in her sleep.

“I’m sorry for your loss, son,” he had said quietly in a grating tone of pitying condescension, “you should come back soon, collect her things. Figure out what to do with the place.”

“Yeah,” Killian had barked back, his vision going fuzzy and his throat tightening, “Thanks.”

And he had planned to return home for the burial. He knew that was what he was supposed to do. He had even gone so far as to get a babysitter for Chammy, had bought a bus ticket and packed a bag. Only he had smoked a little bit too much one morning (in preparation for the nightmarish journey home) and when he returned to himself a few hours later, found that he had missed his bus by several days. There were a few voicemail messages, mostly from people back home who had watched him grow up—some of them angry and scolding, others sympathetic and patient, reminding him that legally the farm was still his, that he could take as much time as he needed.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and suddenly it had felt too hard, and he was too much of a coward. So, ten years later and here he was—still trapped in his box like every other human-shaped sardine he would often glare at on the subway. He has managed to turn the apartment into something of a home, bringing in some potted plants that he had encouraged to grow a bit above their station. It’s something of an oasis in an otherwise barren hellscape, and while it is rare for him to not feel the occasional pang of regret and longing for what his life should have been, there’s still the nagging cowardice that has left him paralyzed in a life that feels unnervingly unfinished.

If he’s awake before sunrise, odds are whatever he thinks might be at his door at such an hour is more than likely a figment of his imagination. Especially if that figment is a grumpy, petite blonde who looks suspiciously like a Daria reject. Most of that blonde hair (imaginary as it is) would seem to be stuffed into an old, slouchy beanie in desperate need of stitching, but a few stray hairs have escaped to fall across her charmingly furrowed brow.

“Well, I must say this is a surprise,” managing to speak despite the dry mouth and still being half-asleep. “What do you say we continue this meeting at a more reasonable hour? Or preferably never? Never also works well for me.”

Normally he might not be so inclined to such rudeness, but a figment is a figment, and he needs his eight hours if he’s going to be remotely personable throughout the day. And drug dealers are famously nothing without their personalities.

One of the admittedly lovely, yet sadly fictional, woman’s eyebrows shoots quite delicately upwards, and he makes note of her especially twitchy fingers moving restlessly against her folded elbow. “Are you always this rude to potential customers?”

“Only when they interrupt my beauty sleep, darling, now if you’ll excuse me—”

He goes to close the door, only he’s found it blocked by a smallish, military-booted foot stuck between it and the frame, the ends of said boot all soft and scuffed; an experienced leather shoe on a tiny blonde female with impeccably groomed eyebrows. He should probably start laying off the more experimental strains. This was an unusually vivid hallucination.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re very pretty,” she says hurriedly, her own tired eyes trying desperately to meet his, “but I haven’t slept in about three days, so, could you maybe help me out?”

“I’m not in the habit of selling to imaginary wom—ow! Bloody hell, what on earth was that for?”

Her fingernails are painted a formidable shade of black, which was an odd detail to have stuck in one’s mind when they’re in the midst of pinching your chest hair unexpectedly viciously. Her eyes were also a little less tired, a lot more manic, and a particularly vivid and enticing shade of green. It made him think of something—a specific memory, locked away somewhere at the back of his mind where it was supposed to stay .

“I can assure you, I am very real,” she says on a grin, her hand still twisted up in his flannel. “And like I said, I am also very tired. So, please?”

It was the sudden, gentle note of desperation in her voice, paired with the residual nipple pain at the very least, that had his circuits re-firing a little bit better than they had earlier. A familiar kind of exhaustion, an intriguing feeling of despair that he had often felt stirring painfully within his own heart. It was the fact that, while he had only known this woman to be real for a few seconds, he knew that the gentility of her voice, the sudden nervousness—that these were hard things for the slight girl with the pale hands and heavy boots.

“My apologies. Please,” smiling and opening the door wider to allow her entrance, he gestures a hand inwards as she walks into the living room. Staring at the stiff slowness of her movements, the way she filled the space around her—that was when he had suddenly remembered. The sight of the farm in the heat of late summer and the dramatic, end-of-day light that would cast the garden in a fiery glow. The smell of the dirt under his bare feet, the warm flesh of ripening tomatoes. And was that his mother’s voice, calling his name from the porch?

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t,” she answered, no doubt distracted by the unusually green and “lively” look of the place. Not to mention Chammy’s guttural chirps at her feet. “It’s Emma,” she said, extending a thin, still hand. “Emma Swan.”

“Emma Swan,” hoping his grin was a little less frenzied than it felt, “Killian Jones.”

iii. vwthi3f

From the outside looking in, most people would probably suspect that the soul-crushing heartbreak, betrayal, and subsequent imprisonment would have left Emma Swan yearning for the so-called “carefree days” of her youth—but those people would be wrong. It would be safe to assume that those same people had probably lived fairly standard, mediocre lives, and there’s nothing wrong with having lived such a life. Mundane lives such as these, they’re usually of the pain-free variety. Aside from the occasional missed birthday, disappointing grade, or sneaking liquor from the cabinet before they’re able, childhood tends to pass quickly and blissfully. It’s one of those things that adults often recall with fondness; they imagine that if they could go back in time to an age before bills, home ownership, and a number of regretful sexual encounters, that they might be truly happy again. Emma Swan had dreamed of the mundane life even before she had started living with the Swans, and certainly afterwards she had desired it moreso. She wished that her pain (and even now, the labeling of her past as “pain,” felt pitiful and tiresome) was the kind of story you didn’t mind sharing, instead of the harsh, ugly thing that she preferred most people not know. Even if they were your friends.

From her prison cell, she often tries to make a list in her head of all the good things that have happened since leaving the Swans. Those times when she’s feeling a bit lonelier than usual, or after she’s spent a little too much time thinking about his smile. As if breaking one’s heart was the worst thing that could happen to a person. And sure, prison is pretty miserable, but it’s not a foster home, and it’s not the Swans. Prison has designated computer time, and there’s no sneaking down darkened hallways at night. And the prison system, unsurprisingly, knows very little of magic, which is how she so easily bypasses the archaic security software, reaches out across the void, and finds the comforting, if not vaguely biting, words of an old friend.

At the very least, she is gracious enough to avoid coming right out and saying “I told you so.”

One of the first things she notices about Lily Page (and isn’t that just irony at its finest) is her hair. It’s long, dark, pin straight, and some of the thickest she’s ever seen. She always threatens to chop most of it off, but never does (and never will), despite Emma’s playful needling. Unsurprisingly pale, with deep red lips and black, wet eyes that always make it appear as if she’s on the verge of tears. “Ask me if I’m ‘okay,’ one more fucking time, Swan,” she would frequently threaten before fleeing the room. She would eventually, and begrudgingly, admit that being on the receiving end of someone else’s “concern” made her feel slightly nauseous, which Emma had found to be pleasantly relatable.

Lily had been living in a very small studio at the tip-top of a tall, post-war building in the financial district. It was a charming place to live, but not particularly well-suited to housing two people, so they found another. As Emma had already been led to believe, money wasn’t much of a concern when most of it was digital these days anyway, and while they couldn’t go for something especially lavish (so as not to draw too much attention to themselves), it was still a nicer home than Emma could have ever imagined as a child.

The feeling of safety and comfort in her own home is one of the good things on her list. If nothing else, one of the very best. Having the security of a door with a lock on it—a roommate who always knocks. The first night in their new place she has the best night of sleep she’s ever had, and when she woke up in the early afternoon the following day, her blankets unmoved from the night before, her door still blessedly shut, she had to muffle her relieved sobs with the absurdly soft pillow beneath her head, lest she force Lily into an awkward moment of interpersonal comfort she often found distasteful.

“I’m better online,” she had humbly conceded after an awkward, consolatory pat on the back. But it was okay. She was still the best friend that Emma had ever known, and besides, she wasn’t great with people either.

Their apartment was a veritable hive of high-end, up-to-date tech. The walls practically hummed with it all, the various cords trailing in and out between rooms, framing windows and doorways. Another thing to add to the list; the small touches that made it both a home and impenetrable fortress from which they might change the world if they had a mind to. She’s got the friend, never really had one of those before, but on top of that, she gets a teacher—she gets power. A lot of it. She also gets an iBook G4 with 1.5 GB of memory (that she manages, with some magical prowess, to enlarge to around 3 or 4). She loves that it fits in her lap, that she can feel the warmth of it against the tops of her thighs when she hasn’t powered it down for 48 hours. The sounds of the keys beneath her fingertips, loud and decisive, wary of her at first, but after a few weeks, craving her touch.

“We all have different strengths and weaknesses,” Lily had explained over coffee, twirling the length of headphone cord round and round her finger. “You seem to be especially adept at Research.”

Emma huffs. “Couldn’t anyone be good at that?”

“Not when it involves talking to corpses and seeing the future.”

“I don’t think they liked to be called that,” Emma had said uncomfortably, turning the sound down on the phone in her pocket. “Well,” Lily answered smartly, forcing down her cold coffee with a grimace, “that’s why I’m not so good at it, isn’t it?”

Emma eventually learns that when Lily says “Research,” it doesn’t necessarily mean traditional forms of information gathering. She could hop on Google and find an article, probably quicker than most, sure, but what Lily really means is communication and knowledge; she means dipping her fingers into the void and coming back with Truth. Apparently there’s a whole freaking dictionary of witch-related vocabulary that she’s missed out on, and funnily enough, it’s not online.

“Where anyone could find it?” Lily explained, dropping the aged, poorly bound manuscript onto Emma’s lap, “Analog has its uses.” Knowledge is good. Answers are good. The world is vast and old and it’s all in one place, just waiting for her to hit the power button.

It sounds stupid, but she could eat ice cream whenever she wanted. It’s one of the good things, and as Lily had informed her, it’s also one of those things that kind of made her just like everyone else. “Most people enjoy the privilege of being able to eat ice cream whenever they want,” she said, distracted with something or other on the screen in front of her, “congratulations, you’re finally normal.”

There was a note of sarcasm in her tone (surprise, surprise), but  Emma couldn’t suppress the grin that had appeared on her face at the thought of being just like everyone else. If one were to totally ignore the “tech-savvy witch,” thing, obviously. Eating ice cream, “just like everyone else,” while a good thing at first, would ultimately return to bite her quite firmly on the ass, but for a while it had been Rum Raisin and Moose Tracks whenever the hell she wanted. Mercifully, it was sold cheap at the corner bodega and sometimes she would wander out of the apartment mere hours before the sun was due to rise and buy herself one or two pints (even though there were several unfinished sitting in the freezer). She met Neal Cassidy during yet another trip to the store in order to indulge in one or two flavors she hasn’t had the pleasure of trying yet. Like Cherry Garcia or the one with the caramel-filled chocolates shaped like fish. Lily had referred to the fish-shaped chocolate as a “crime against nature,” but she could be a tad dramatic sometimes.

“Gotta cure those night-bites somehow, I guess, right?”

Emma Swan dislikes and distrusts men as a general rule. So when she heard a distinctly male voice at her back, had sensed the way he stood over her, she had felt uncomfortable almost immediately. Her phone started to buzz quite incessantly in her pocket, despite the fact that she had left Lily sleeping and no one else had her number—she had, mistakenly, ignored it.

Emma had never entertained the prospect of a romantic relationship before Neal. At that point in her life she’d been getting closer to 18, so she knew it was about “that time,” but it had never really been something she wanted to pursue. She had only just started getting used to the feeling of Lily sitting next to her on the couch; the non-threatening way she might bump their hips together when she moved past her in order to get to the fridge. And it’s not like he managed to get under her skin quickly (if anything she remembers noting that he had quite the punchable face), but there was something about him she had found charming, and unfortunately she was not quite as repulsed as she might have expected herself to feel.

“What?” she had asked with some confusion, hoping her facial expression was not quite so dumb as she imagined it to be.

“Late night cravings,” he clarified, nodding at the ice cream in her hand, “I know the feeling.”

She managed to surmise he was talking about being high, not that she would have really known. But she nodded anyway, finding herself in the familiar predicament of having to pretend she’s “in on the joke,” so to speak. She had never done any kind of drug at that point, but she had preferred he assume she knew what he was talking about and let her off the hook, rather than come off as some kind of dense pre-teen. Luckily for her it had worked, and he simply smiled and walked off, snagging a candy bar and shoving it into his pocket as he went. Despite the obviousness of the lift the clerk had failed to notice, and Emma rolled her eyes, finally pulling the buzzing phone out of her pocket.

Idiot, read a text from an unknown number, the less frenzied hum of a few dozen voices scrolling in the darkness of her closed eyes, infinite, vertical rows of ones and zeroes. That’s a walking prison sentence if we’ve ever seen one.

Emma stares up at the ceiling of her bleak, unremarkable prison cell and thinks about how she might yell at those numbers now, if she could. Thinking they’re so smart all the time just because they’re dead. Or, ya know, “untethered by their human forms,” or whatever the fuck. In yet another teachable moment, Lily had tried to explain that while most of the time she was in conversation with the dead, sometimes she was just reaching out to other Techies wandering around in the same playground as her.

“You shouldn’t trust everything they say,” Lily had warned, “I know it seems like they know everything because they’re ‘one with the machine,’” her eyes rolling, “but most of them are just as lost and fucked up as we are. There’s no power greater than your own instinct.”

It’s too bad Emma never really got around to the whole “trusting herself” thing. Especially when it came to Neal Cassidy—the first boy to make her feel special. The asshole who had given her a taste of what it meant to love and be loved only to rip the still beating heart out of her chest and squish the particularly sensitive parts between his toes. Not that she had known that at the time. At the time she had simply been relieved to know that she wasn’t completely broken. That someone could care for her, that she could care for them in return. That she could bear the feeling of his hand wrapped around hers (ignoring the fact that she was often bothered by the unusual sweatiness of his palms).

When she’s not walking in circles around the prison yard or in the computer lab, she’s replaying her memories of the last year as if they were disassociated segments of a silent film—a distorted, desaturated mess of key scenes that would ultimately lead her to this very moment, to this hard bed beneath her back. That’s usually when the bad begins, when she goes back to adding good things to the list.

The dead ones always want to know because they’ve forgotten, and they’re hoping that she’ll be able to help them remember what it was like, being alive. Please, Emma Swan, please bore us with the details.

It’s not quite so bad at first. They flirt a lot, which Emma finds fun despite never having really done it before, and then there’s her first kiss, and the first time having sex she actuallyenjoys, and running through the darkened city streets without a care in the world. There’s sharing her story with someone who seemed to care, a lover and not a friend; who upon learning of her abilities got a gleam in his eye that she would live to regret ignoring. There was getting high for the first time and trying not to feel hurt when he had laughed at her obvious inexperience, despite having promised that he wasn’t going to. It was stupid to ignore the hint of warning in Lily’s eyes when she started spending more nights at Neal’s place. Not to mention the dozens of ominous text messages from unknown numbers.

Emma had become defensive and snarky almost immediately. Taking offense at the suggestion that she couldn’t handle herself in her first grown-up relationship, as if she wasn’t a smart, experienced woman with a good head on her shoulders.

As it turned out, the “babysitter” probably would have been helpful. Maybe the babysitter would have been able to stop her from transferring all of those large, traceable funds into Neal’s accounts. When she has a difficult time conjuring up another good thing to add to the list, his smarmy voice pops into her head instead, reassuring her that “no one would ever find out.”

Three years and one prison sentence later she often finds herself haunted by her own words. Disgusted with herself for betraying the one person who had never been anything other than kind in a world full of monsters. “All’s well that ends well,” Lily had said in greeting upon picking her up from prison, her face hidden beneath the shadow of a baseball cap. “Breathe in that sweet, sweet freedom.”

The only useful thing that Neal had managed to leave in his wake, aside from a renewed sense of disgust with humanity as a whole, was the innocuous drug habit. She didn’t consider herself to be an addict by any means, not that an actual addict would admit to such a thing, but she certainly imbibed more frequently than she might have predicted a few years earlier. The problem (if you had to call it that) was using it for normal human things that most people were able to accomplish without the chemical assist—things like sleeping.

Emma has always had trouble sleeping. It was unsurprising given her history, but as it turns out, staring at screens almost 24 hours a day doesn’t really help the situation either. She had tried a handful of other remedies over the years: a hot cup of chamomile tea before bed (that always made her have to pee right on the edge of sleep); some user generated playlists comprised of soothing instrumentals (except for that one “experimental” song at the end that left her heart racing); charge and cast spells left waiting in her camera roll, various hand drawn sigils or long strings of emojis (while effective, often accompanied by odd dreams). For whatever reason, the weed had been the most helpful. She had felt ashamed at first; good little girls don’t use drugs after all (sounding suspiciously like Mrs. Swan in her head), but it was like Lily always said, “If it works, it works.”

4: [email protected]

While their first meeting had undeniably fallen on the rougher end of the friendship spectrum, there’s something about her that insists upon a second. Especially after he’s had more sleep, and his charm is significantly more effective. He’s held her hand for an almost inappropriately long few moments before he comes to his senses and asks after her problem—what is it she’s in the market for? It’s as she’s said, “trouble sleeping,” and he reminds her that his product, while almost exclusively well-received is a bit, shall we say, “stronger” than the usual fare.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, glancing suspiciously around his oddly lush studio despite it being midwinter.

“My methods can be a bit,” pausing for effect, a bit of vague handwaving for emphasis, “unusual.”

“‘Unusual,’ like laced, unusual?”

“Good heavens woman, no,” he says hurriedly at the angry look on her face, frustrated with his seeming inability to form sentences this morning. “Let me show you.”

Normally, he might not be so inclined to reveal his “gifts” to a new client, but as he surmised from their awkward yet brief conversation at his door, there was just… something about her. And for whatever reason, he got the sense that she wasn’t about to be shocked or frightened by his admission. He leads her over to a large, round window that looks out over a dismal alleyway. The tops of other apartment buildings with decrepit looking antenna rest precariously on their respective roofs. The glass of the window is warped, evidence of the building’s rather respectable age; dotted with air bubbles and flecked with dirt and pollen. The window itself, while framed by some aesthetically pleasing distressed brick, is also encircled by a rather impressive wreath of thick, green vines.

Beneath the window he’s setup his appropriately named “Alchemist’s Table,” complete with ceramic pots and glass test tubes, even an old microscope he had acquired at a middle school auction. “You some kind of mad scientist?” Her words sound a bit sharp, but they’re nowhere near harsh enough to hide the curiosity and wonder in her voice, and he plays along with a bit of a “mad” grin.

“After a fashion.”

He shows off a bit after that, there’s no denying it, sticking a finger into a pot of soil with a small sprout peeking out of the dirt. A young and fragile thing. Emma watches, entranced, as it begins to grow and stretch itself into being, and after a few seconds, a small, pale green strawberry appears. “It’ll be ripe enough to eat in a few hours,” he says casually, reining in his laughter at the look of shock on her face, “if you’d like to stay for a bit.”

While he’s used to women finding this particular trick alluring, he finds himself quite surprised at what she ends up saying instead. “You’re one of us.”

“Sorry, love, one of who?”

“Us!” she says happily, her hands clapping gently together, “I’ve never met a non-Techie before.”

“A non-what?”

“Do you not know?” she asks, suddenly sobering, her head tilted endearingly to one side. At the blank look on his face she smiles softly, her earlier fidgeting having evaporated at the prospect of revealing this apparent truth. She leans close enough that he can smell the sweetened coffee on her breath, and an oddly familiar floral scent that seems to stem from the blonde tips of her hair.

“You’re not the only one,” she divulges in an excited whisper, and he becomes abruptly alarmed at the likelihood of falling in love with this strange woman who ended up being undeniably  real. “There’s more.”

The smoke tastes sweet on his lips. She’s not sure if it’s magic or something else. Something unique to whoever or whatever he is. They kiss on the first day they meet and she’s not quite sure what that says about her. She’s fairly certain that it says more about him—that perhaps there is something a bit irresistible about a man who has briefly wondered whether or not you truly exist. Which is ironic, because for the first half of her life it was all she could do to make sure that people knew she was there, but that was mostly so someone would feed her or give her a place to sleep. It was only after she had stopped feeling so hungry that she had hoped she would disappear.

“I have a question,” she starts, taking a hit off of his “free sample” while trying not to marvel at the trail of pinkish smoke that escapes from in between her lips. “If you were so sure that I wasn’t real, why did you even talk to me?”

When he exhales the smoke is blue rather than pink, and when it meets the colorful cloud above their heads it blends together in shades of vibrant purple. She can’t help feeling like she has stumbled into a scene from Alice in Wonderland, having found herself in a strange land with an excitable man (who likes to leave empty mugs scattered about his home), as well as the literal toadstools and the rather odd sensation akin to falling down a rabbit hole.

“Rather pretty for a figment, I suppose. Wouldn’t do to ignore such a lovely, imaginary thing,” crushing the the last of the joint against a small, porcelain plate, “might hurt her feelings.”

Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she almost ignores it. But it was hard to forget about the nightmare that had ensued when she had ignored it the last time, and she pulls it from her pocket with a polite “give me a minute,” gesture.

She snorts at the sight of the word “airs,” her mind conjuring a 16th century French courtesan in a dramatically large dress, and silently warns her heart not to get it’s hopes up. Me too.When she looks up from her phone his head whips away too quickly for him to have been doing anything other than staring at her, and she wills the inevitable blush from her cheeks.

“We should exchange numbers,” she says suddenly, “for when I need more.”

Thankfully he ignores her rather abrupt request and pulls a most surprising device from his pocket that has her temporarily forgetting the way he had been so obviously observing her earlier. It’s a Motorola Razr V3 (launched in 2004), and the only thing funnier than the phone itself is the offended look on his face after she bursts into loud, obnoxious laughter at the sight of it.

“I’m doing my best not to feel quite so hurt right now, Swan.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasps in between her embarrassing bout of giggling, “I just didn’t think you could even get your hands on one of those things anymore.”

“It may not be your ‘high-tech’ nonsense,” he goes on proudly, “but she’ll do in a pinch.”

“Oh, Killian,” she says sweetly, “I’m sure she will.”

They start texting with a frequency far more reminiscent of an honest to goodness friendship rather than that of a business relationship, and Emma finds herself having to reassure the small, frightened girl inside of her that the whole thing won’t end in disaster. He’s not Neal, she thinks desperately, trying to trust in the hopeful parts of herself without succumbing to the bitter voice inside her head that struggles to forget the less admirable parts of humanity. What’s another potential stint in prison for such a pretty face, after all?

The first night she tries what he recommended, a strain he refers to as “Sailor’s Delight,” she dreams of the ocean. It’s an especially vivid dream, unlike anything she’s ever experienced—she can smell the sourness of low tide; taste the salt on her lips, and feel the warmth of the sun on her face. First thing in the morning she reaches for the phone beneath her pillow, her fingers flying across the screen.

She hesitates briefly before sending that last text. While it’s true her mind feels calm and her body re-energized, her heart hammers wildly inside her chest—the tiny fists of an anxious child warning her of the inevitable. While her own nervousness is enough to give her pause, she does try and take comfort in the fact that her “ghostlier” comrades would seem to have taken a backseat for the moment.

His texts often arrive in the form of mini paragraphs. Full sentences and words bundled together and sent to her as if they were handwritten letters. She can see his fingerprint on each and every one, a dirt-stained brand that conjures some unknown, vast greenery made of hills and fir trees, winding back roads and cloudless skies.

“He better not track any dirt in here,” Lily warns her the evening before he was supposed to be coming by to drop off another batch. It was to be his first visit to their apartment, and Emma could not be more nervous if she tried. She’s been back to his place a few times since that first visit, but allowing him to come here had been an unexpected offer on her part. Not that it matters, she thinks calmly, what do you care what he thinks?

“Don’t be such a snob, Lil.”

Lily’s mouth is full of frosted flakes as she leans against the refrigerator, glaring at the back of Emma’s head. “This shit’s expensive, and I don’t have time to fix anything he manages to break.” She suspects a note of jealousy in Lily’s ire, so she decides to cut her some slack, pressing a kiss to her cheek with a guaranteed dirt-free visit.

“It’ll be fine,” she says, heading towards her room to straighten up for no other reason than the fact that it has been a while. “Besides, aren’t you curious?”

A playful shout at her back, “Not nearly as curious as you, my little thief!”

The next morning he’s standing at her door holding a potted plant. “It’s a succulent,” he says happily, his hair sticking up in all directions. He smells like the city after it’s been sanitized by a particularly cold frost, and she wonders how he’s managed to keep warm in a half-buttoned flannel and a knitted scarf. “Notoriously hard to kill,” he assures her, shoving the thing into her hands, “I’m sure you’ll get along famously.”

The brief facade of confidence he had displayed while foisting the plant upon her departs rather suddenly at the sight of her apartment, and he looks all kinds of adorable and confused at the otherworldliness of it all. She supposed it would look rather intimidating to a person like him, surrounded by all those green things. Not that the wires and the screens were any less alive—they were just better at playing dead.

He does have some dirt on his fingertips and beneath his nails, but Emma finds herself quietly charmed by the sight of it; the deep impression of his prints highlighted by the dark soil permanently staining his skin. It’s been getting harder and harder to pass off their brief moment of intimacy as a one time thing. Especially when she can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Especially when she does stupid things like noticing his hands and trying not to recall the pleasant sensation of their roughness against her cheek.

“Don’t worry,” Emma says teasingly at the awed look on his face, “this is the most secure room in the city.” With a few magical fortifications no one and certainly no obscure, supernaturalthing was getting past the barriers they had implemented when they had first moved in, and it had only gotten stronger over the years.

Lily pops her head in from the kitchen, most likely with the intention of embarrassing her only friend. “Hey, Sprout,” she says, glaring at Killian from behind her thick curtain of hair, “don’t touch any of my stuff.”

“Don’t worry about her,” and Emma takes a moment to stick out her tongue in Lily’s direction. “She’s trapped in a state of perpetual grouchiness.”

“I heard that.”

There’s something incredibly momentous about the occasion of his entering her room. Lily had only hung out in there a few times, and Neal had never even been inside (she had spent all their nights together at his place). It’s her favorite time of day, which helps. Late afternoon, which often brings a light that seems warmer than at any other time—and with those big windows, the ones she suspects Lily had a hand in ensuring were a fixture of the apartment, the light falls and frames the room in a buttery yellow that makes winter feel that much further away.

In a probable attempt to diffuse the tension of Lily’s condescending nickname (and subsequent scolding), he laughs and runs a hand through his hair, making it bigger than it already was.

“Well, she’s charming.”

“She’s a good friend,” Emma says quickly, irritated with her sudden urge to leap to Lily’s defense as if he had said something wrong. Which he hadn’t.

“I’m sure she is, Swan,” he reassures softly, “it was only a joke.”

Then comes the urge to apologize, which she knows she has no reason to, and fuck, there is no reason why this should be so hard . He takes a seat in a large armchair she’s tucked away into a corner of the room, his eyes making quick work of all the unfamiliar equipment. The curious awe with which he observes her space gives her pause—takes her back to the day when she had first seen the Swans’ new computer in the room at the end of the hall. Forbidden, yet waiting for her all along.

“Make sure you keep her in the light.”

“Who?” Confused by the pronoun and wondering if he’s been seeing imaginary women again. “The plant,” he explains, gesturing towards the small, green twig in her hands, “make sure she gets a decent amount of sunlight.”

A part of her wants to remind him that she’s shut up in the dark most of the time. That was why she needed the drugs in the first place. Aside from the few short hours pre-sunset when she would, occasionally, open the curtains. But he looks so hopeful, she doesn’t really have the heart to deny him. “Sure. Sunlight.”

In the days following Killian’s visit to the apartment, all of the various cords and sundry start growing towards the sunlight as if they were starving for it. She even starts to notice some small weeds pushing their way through her keyboard. It doesn’t seem to be a problem at Lily’s end of the apartment; her equipment seems to have stayed blessedly put, but Emma’s room is another matter entirely. She even goes so far as to make a post on a message board where other witches have been known to frequent, despite the fact that they usually have terrible advice and she’s generally better off not having spoken to them in the first place.

She attaches a picture and hopes for the best, but unfortunately no one seems to have a clue. Someone does suggest watering them and seeing what happens, but that seems incredibly stupid, so she deletes the post and moves on. Or she tries to at any rate—pretends that there is nothing at all odd about her frequent compulsions to text him anytime a meaningless thought enters her head. The way she starts opening her curtains for a few more hours each day; the feeling of the sun on her skin becoming a welcome part of her routine, as opposed to a cruel reminder of the world that exists beyond the walls of her bedroom.

Their odd, somewhat unlikely friendship grows and flourishes like one of Killian’s plants. It is not without the occasional thorn or weed, like most relationships. The both of them are not without their mutual baggage that stings when you poke at it. Neither one of them can help messing with the other’s wounds, it would seem. Emma had always been under the impression that picking at the thing made it worse, but Killian insists on acting as an infuriating salve that alleviates the pain and leaves the injured place stronger than it had been before.

Beyond the niceties of being one’s drug dealer, getting to know another person can be quite difficult, which had been expected. From the very first, Emma had betrayed an innate desire to keep parts of herself hidden from others. Her passion for witchcraft—the excitement with which she had explained her kind to him that first meeting, it was a good trick, but it wasn’t long before he would come to realize that Emma Swan would rather place a curse upon herself than share the sordid details of her past with anyone.

It had been in the aftermath of his own unburdening—his sudden desire to finally reveal to her all of the messy details of his own life. About his mother, her passing, how maybe he was living a life she had not wanted for him. Emma had been nothing but understanding in the face of his admission, just as she suspected, their unexpected kinship made his pain an easy pill for her to swallow, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily ready to reciprocate.

“I barely tell Lily things about my past,” she had shouted angrily, her arms folded defensively in front of her chest, “why the fuck would I tell my drug dealer?”

“Oh, is that all?” Spoken into the sudden, sucking quiet of his apartment, forcing himself to ignore the painful look of regret on her face. She could wish away her words all she liked, he refuses to be anyone’s whipping boy, no matter how damaged they are. “Then you’ve gotten what you came for,” he said, patiently opening his front door for her convenient departure, “and you let me know should you require my services again.”

Her facial expression could not have been more pained—a fervent desire to take back what she had said, to offer an apology and admit to him the facts of the case. The fact that he had, quite unexpectedly, become one of the more important people in her life. The fact that she often daydreamed about the hour or so in which they had forgone the illusion of platonic friendship. The fact that she often considered the Killian-shaped hole in her future where he would almost undoubtedly be. But, alas, stubbornness won out, and she stormed away, so swiftly and in such a rage with herself that she left her jacket behind. A weathered, burgundy leather number, soft to the touch and smelling vaguely like an electrical fire. At least she’d have an excuse to see him again.

He waits a few days. Keeps his phone buried in a drawer beneath all of his socks and underwear, resisting the urge to send her a text, to wonder if she had sent him one. Eventually, he returns the jacket with a proposition. “Come with me,” he says, not quite begging, but with a breathlessness that he does find mildly humiliating. “Please.”

They take a bus upstate, far enough away from the farm that he doesn’t feel claustrophobic, but with enough distance between themselves and the city that he feels like he can finally breathe. They wander through small, sleepy towns full of charming coffee shops and bookstores, grabbing a cheap breakfast before venturing further into the countryside, stumbling through various trails and parks suggested to them by the locals. “There’s a particularly nice spot,” remarked the older woman who had served them coffee, “right here.” Marking up the paper map that Killian had insisted they buy.

It is a bit nippy further north, and despite the fresh smell of earth and rain, their noses still turn pink as they walk through the woods. The “nice spot” in question is a ledge of rock that overlooks a large, clear lake that sparkles in the sun. A light mist hovers over the top, and when he takes a quick peek to gauge Emma’s reaction, he is momentarily stunned at the way the sunlight has fallen across her face—how it has betrayed the sheen of wetness that seems to be gathering at the corners of her eyes.

“Swan?”

“It’s not a nice story,” she begins after a few moments of quiet. “I don’t like to tell people. Because it’s just not…” She huffs in frustration, turning away briefly to face the sun, staring out over the water as if it will be able to finish this conversation for her. “I don’t want people treating me differently.”

He hesitates before gently pulling some stray hairs from her chapped lips, and when she looks back at him it feels as if he’s been punched in the gut. Having never seen this particular look on her face before; perhaps moments away from arriving at this emotional plateau, only to shutter it away at the last moment. It is glassy eyed and fragile, her nose wrinkling and her hands fidgeting with the ends of her sleeves—it is a choked admission of all the horror she has known; of her adoptive family, her villainous “father,” the computer at the end of the hall, the young girl waiting at the other end who had stormed the tower and rescued her from a cruel fate.

When the tale is finally done, and he pulls her into his arms, the sun has moved higher into the sky. The fog has evaporated completely from the surface of the water, and now it merely shimmers. Their legs dangle over the rockface, and he presses a firm kiss against the side of her head. “I swear,” he whispers against the shell of her ear, “you are still the same person you were before. And if it seems as if I look at you differently—” He considers his words carefully, her fingers tapping nervously against his upturned palm, “It’s because I am more in awe of you then I was before.”

Her kiss is a salty, stinging thing against his tongue, and he can still feel the occasional soft hiccup resonating from the back of her throat. “I’m tired,” she admits quietly, her head rolling against his shoulder.

“Aye, love,” giving her another squeeze, a brief kiss to her cheek that reddens under his lips. “Let’s go home.”

It’s the fact that he never actually asks that makes her want to do it. That and the fact that he has bared his soul to her on multiple occasions and asked for so little in return. And quite honestly, there’s not much left he could do to her, given the fact that she’s spilled her damage all over him anyway.

Their feet hang over the fire escape out Emma’s window, the chilly spring air keeping it brisk yet refreshing. A hint of warmth that reminds the world of the impending season. “If you could,” she begins gently, taking a sip of their shared beer, “would you want to talk to her?”

He nibbles at his lower lip in response, an infuriating and distracting movement that has her discreetly pinching the top of her own hand. “I’m not sure,” he admits quietly, looking a bit like someone who feels ashamed by who they have become. Although, if she had the strength, she would have stopped him in that moment, reminded him that there was nothing to be ashamed of. That he was every bit the sweet, loving man his mother had suspected he would become. “Not sure she’d very much want to speak with me, if I’m being honest.”

Her heart breaks at the sound of his nervous, self-deprecating laughter, but she keeps her earlier, enamored thoughts to herself. While he’s lighting a cigarette she pops back into her room quickly, grabbing her laptop and returning to the ledge to face his sadness; the light and sound of a sleepless city, awaking slowly from a long, hard hibernation.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” resting the quiet machine on her lap, trying not to twiddle her thumbs, “but we can try.”

When she boots up the laptop, a soothing hum ignites in her fingertips and rushes through her veins. Now this, this she can do. She can feel his nervousness from over her shoulder, can see his fingers peeling the label away from the bottle out of the corner of her eye. “Relax,” she says softly, closing her eyes, her fingers flying across the keyboard. She’s not sure how much time passes, but at some point, in the midst of all the chatter, she hears it—a song that sounds familiar even though she is certain she’s never heard it before. “Do you hear it?”

He doesn’t seem to, not at first, not until she increases the volume on the laptop and slides it carefully onto his lap. “Take as long as you want,” pressing a kiss to his temple before standing and returning to her room, “I’ll be right here.”

It’s hard for her not to let her mind wander, to consider the particulars of a conversation that he’s been waiting to have for years , a voice and a face that he’s been tortured by everytime he closes his eyes. She had never even really considered looking for her own parents. What would she even say to them? Thanks for the childhood trauma, I have multiple lifetimes worth of debilitating baggage and it’s all thanks to you. And what would they do, anyway? Apologize? Fat lot of good that would do.

When he comes back inside she’s petting the soft edge of her succulent, somehow still flourishing regardless of her complete lack of knowledge as to how to properly care for the thing. His eyes are red and wet, and he tries to smile when he sees her obviously worried expression, only it crumbles as soon as she touches him, her hands coming up to frame his face with a gentleness she had not been sure she possessed. “Killian—”

“I’m quite alright, Emma. Thank you.”

It hurts to call the look in his eyes “love,” but she doesn’t know how else to describe the way he admires her with words of gratitude on his lips. It doesn’t matter what it is he’s thanking her for, whether it be the opportunity to speak with his mother one last time, her physical presence, or something else, it seems to encompass all of these things and more. The weight of this realization leaves her grasping for how to react, and in a moment of panic and a heavy, painfully beating heart, she presses her lips to his; aligns their bodies so firmly and precisely together that any suggestion of space between the two of them ceases to exist.

“Real enough for you?”

“Yes,” he rasps hotly against her lips, and the shiver she feels traveling down her spine and between her legs allows the terrifying rush of unwanted thoughts skittering elsewhere. “You are the realest thing I have ever known.”  

The sun shines bright and disarming the following morning. Having left her curtains open the night before, he is able to admire the sight of her eyelashes dusting atop her cheeks in the cleansing light of a new day. The world feels different. The only other time he can recall feeling this way was waking up the morning his mother had passed, sensing that something fundamental had changed, that his life would be forced to take a direction he had not expected. For the first time in years, he can picture the farmhouse in his head as if it were a photograph. Can smell the aged wood, the cooling stove, the chamomile tea brewing on the counter. Time to go home, he thinks suddenly, staring at Emma as she twitches mildly in her sleep.

The way the blankets have come to rest beneath her breasts, her hair splayed over the pillow, she looks not unlike some unnamed renaissance painting one might see hanging in a museum somewhere. Her skin smooth, soft, and warm, he can’t resist the temptation to run his fingers gently over her ribcage, observing the slight, sloping arcs of her.

“Hey,” she says quietly, stretching her arms above her head. “What are you thinking about?”

In the days, weeks, and months following this morning, he will freeze this moment in his head. The way she had looked at him, with a contented yet desirous look that had almost convinced him to put off the conversation for a few hours. Oh, how he wished he had. Perhaps, if he had waited just a bit longer, if he had considered how she might respond with greater care—if he hadn’t been quite so excited by the change in the wind.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said with a smile on his face, “that it might be time for me to return home.”

Hell, if he had even relayed the thought in a way that implied his wish for her to come with him. That he was by no means planning to abandon her , that in all of his visions of the future,of course she played a starring role. But in his haste to share the news, to embark upon this journey that he had awoken to find simmering beneath the surface, he had failed to consider the fragility of her heart. A vulnerability she often hid well, but to his eyes, not well enough.

“Oh,” responding with a deceptive pleasantness, leaving his side quicker than he would have liked. “That’s uh, that’s great, Killian.”

“I think you’ll like it,” he continued, oblivious to her discomfort, a point which he would absolutely kick himself for later. “Might take a bit to get the Internet hooked up, but—”

“Wait, did I miss something?”

For someone with so remarkable a memory, all of the words they throw back and forth seem to grow a bit fuzzy after that. Their voices grow louder and crueler than he can stand; they twist and turn inside the labyrinth of his mind with all the gentleness of a machete hacking through a jungle—sharp, incomprehensible things that end in one undeniable fact: he leaves, she stays.

A year passes. In the city, a year passes in rides on the subway. It passes in television shows and which bars you’ve decided to stop going to. Some new diet you’ve decided to try in lieu of really examining oneself as a person. On the farm, it passes in sunsets—in which vegetables take root at what time, and will they make it? Maybe, and he can hear his mother’s voice, if it’s their time. It passes in whether or not Chammy has decided if she’ll be sleeping at the end of his bed. Can he feel her small, humming warmth atop his feet? Winter. Has he lost track of her hungry chirps each morning? Spring.

The months without Emma Swan are dimmer than he can stand. Desaturated, cornerless days of trying not to think about the jagged edges of her hair. Or the way she smelled, or how she had curled around him in sleep with a fierce, desperate grip. Please, stay. Winter is hard, since winter was when it had all began. With beanies and boots, and pale hands reaching for his. He will wonder, occasionally, if she’s managed to keep the plant he had given her alive without his reminding her to water it. And then, inevitably, his mind will wander to the shape of her face, or the color of her eyes—and the months apart feel more like years. He writes a lot of e-mails that he never gets around to sending. Some of them biting and cruel; others quite obviously lovelorn. Pathetic.

Sometimes, when he stands in his cold kitchen waiting for the fire to take the early morning chill out of the place, he imagines his mother’s voice in the silence. Come now, Killian, she remarks playfully, it’s not all bad is it? And then the sun will shine through the bare trees, and Chammy will scratch at the door, and he’ll take a breath. No, not all bad. The only time he hears the honk of a car horn is when he drives into town for supplies. His lungs never feel as if they were in danger of collapsing (unless he’s thinking about Emma Swan, in which case, he finds himself yearning for the gritty, polluted haze of the city); and his feet feel rooted to the earth.

Life goes on—it grows.

Emma Swan returns to him in midsummer. All solid flesh and sinew, with striking green eyes that appear almost golden in the pre-evening sunlight. She walks towards him in the same boots she had worn the morning they met, only with more tape wrapped around the toes. She walks with a lightness that he had only managed to catch a glimpse of—that day at the lake, when her blessed history had come rushing through her lips like a waterfall after too much rain.

It feels like another year has passed when she comes to a stop in front of him, her bag falling heavily off of her shoulder. The both of them staring at the ground as if it will save them, her bag and his feet, toes wiggling in the dirt.

“Your hair,” he says finally, admiring the sight of the freckles that have begun to bloom across her cheeks. “I like it.”

Grown past her shoulders in the months following his departure in long, soft waves that he has often dreamed of running his fingers through. Only he’s not dreaming now, and has grown sick with waiting. “Thanks,” she begins to say, only he finds himself overcome with the sound of her voice, and before she can complete her thought he has snuck a hand against the back of her neck and pulled her mouth to his—all of those beautiful words waiting in the lovely depths of her soul, and he is ecstatic at the prospect of being able to hear each and every one.

Eventually, he leads her by the hand towards his front porch, newly sanded and finished, replete with antique rockers and potted plants lining the steps. He thinks it might be polite to offer her a drink, to ask her about her trip, but he’s finding it difficult to do anything other than stare at their joined hands—his browned with the sun and the dirt, her’s just as pale as he remembers, only her polish has turned a friendly blue as opposed to the chipped black he can recall with such fondness.

“Lily says ‘Hi,’” she says, her voice thick with emotion.

“I have a hard time believing that.” His heart thumps at the brief, shy smile she sends his way, her knee moving up and down with a familiar degree of anxiety that he knows he still loves—even still, he knows, and although there are few things he knows, this he can say with certainty, he loves her. He places a hand on her knee and she stills, her eyes roaming over his features with a gaze so hungry he finds himself struggling to breathe.

“I’ve missed you,” she says softly, and he can practically feel her nerves buzzing around them as if they were sitting beneath a hornet’s nest, “I thought that, maybe, everything would just go back to the way it was, like always, but—”

Her hair lifts in a warm breeze that seems to engulf them in an almost eerie, magical quiet, and while he wants nothing more than to ease her fears, to reassure her that no matter what she says, he will never let her go again, he lets her speak her piece, her eyes meeting his once more. “I didn’t want it to. I don’t want things to go back to the way they were before you.”

When their foreheads meet, he thinks he might catch a flash of their future. In the next few minutes, they might move inside to find a bright, well-ventilated kitchen that he has renovated with his own two hands. She might meet Chammy with a pleased hum, cradling his old companion in her strong, steady arms. Would she then relax in the garden with him? Snapping pictures of his bare, freckled back with her phone, laughing and sending them to Lily even though she held little affection for such things. Installing wires and cables and slipping them beneath the persian rugs in the living room in order to maintain the illusion that she has fully embraced the country life.

Holding one another tightly each night, perhaps recalling the loneliness, the anger they had once felt and marveling at the seeming improbability of finding each other in such a vast, concrete sea. But for now he makes her tea. He tucks some strands of that new, thick hair behind one ear as they listen to the final, evening chorus of the birds, the water boiling in the kettle. “I am so very happy to see you,” he admits with a smile, relishing in the sight of her flushed, joyful face, “Emma Swan.”

#cslb #ouat ff #cs ff #cs fanfic #captain swan #cs: shit is breathtaking bro #@hencethewriter #seriously tho #this was such a labor of love #i cannot say enough about kat and tessa #u will dance with me at my wedding #also both of my artists #like i cannot even with the art #it's absolutely perfect #i hope y'all enjoy it #i know it's all atmospheric #and occasionally nonsensical #but that seems to be my thing #so #it is done #amen

[archiveofprolbems]

On Space Art by Xin Liu & Xin Wang

Xin Liu, Orbit Weaver, 2017. Production still of artist's performance during a parabolic flight. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Steve Boxell.

During the prolonged lockdown that defined much of 2020, the Xinjiang-born, New York-based artist and engineer Xin Liu juggled multiple roles. These included participating in a volunteering network that supplied PPE to medical workers in dire need of protection against Covid-19; designing an indie game, Sleepwalk (2020), which reflected on the conditions of confinement and hyper-connectivity; engineering a series of hypnotic sound experiences with her partner Gershon Dublon titled The Wandering Mind (2020), which guides the dreams of a sleeping audience with source materials organized by an AI system; and live-streaming an ambient soundscape recorded on Whitehead Island, off the coast of Maine, for the Camden International Film Festival.1

As the Arts Curator at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and an artist who makes work for exhibition spaces, film festivals, and astronautical conferences, Liu’s ongoing fascination with space as a medium and destination for new art has seen her send a wisdom tooth into outer space, cultivate potato seeds that had travelled to the International Space Station, and imagine weightlessness as an intimate, “body-opening” condition. In this interview, we spoke about the past lives and expansive futures of Space Art, her unique mixture of academic and identitarian backgrounds, and the creative strategies of innovation and resistance while working at the juncture of art and technology.

Xin Wang: You’ve recently been referred to as a “famous space artist” in a panel discussion poster, which suggests that this is a solidified genre.

Xin Liu: It is a genre! If you google “Space Art,” there’s a Wikipedia page that defines it, though it’s very much about visual artists depicting the vision of space exploration, like images of Martian colonies, weightlessness, spaceships, etc. It was also called Astronomical Art, with notable artists such as Chesley Bonestell. These artists really tried to define the aesthetics of space, which even changed the way we would later color actual scientific images captured through different telescopes. Even now, if you look at NASA’s art programs, that’s still basically the main concept. Slowly it diverged into art in space, or art that uses space and environmental textures for creation, experimentation, and storytelling.

For me, Space Art conceptually connects more to Land Art in the seventies; the questions they were asking—regarding spatial-temporal dimensions and the way we engage with geological transformation—are more related. However, there is this jump in the Space Art medium from astronomical paintings right away to “art in space.” It is a gap in our understanding of Space Art; in my position as the Space Art curator at MIT, I have made sure to take into account Land Art, science fiction, and so on, in lectures.

XW: What questions do you want to ask with your Space Art?

XL: First of all, the duality in our perception of the world: being a human being walking, eating, sleeping, drinking, and laughing on this planet; and on the other hand, knowing that we exist on a gigantic rock spinning around another hot rock in endless space. The epistemological jump is exciting but also problematic when we distance one from the other. People talk about science versus culture as if they are the polar opposites. I’m trying to reconcile the two views of the world and find places to live in-between. My other interest has more to do with the body, our sensations, our death, and the cycles of life and materials.

XW: Your works have always struck me as poetic—you sent one of your wisdom teeth into space in Living Distance (2019), which was inspired by childhood folktales and executed with robust engineering. But the whole debate around the idea that culture and science are antithetical has a long history. Susan Sontag wrote about it in the sixties, for example; what are you seeing in terms of new manifestations of, and challenges to, that tension?

XL: The philosopher Yuk Hui has proposed the concept of cosmotechnics, which argues that science and technology aren’t objective but are born of human cultures. One of my current projects, Unearthing Futures, is a collaboration with the Peruvian artist Lucia Monge, the International Potato Center in Lima, and the International Space Station (ISS).2 We are interested in potato history as human history; native to Peru, the potato’s journey becoming one of the most widely grown crops in the world mirrors colonial history. As we set foot and grow crops beyond the earth bond, one option here is to engineer the perfect potato that survives all conditions, while the other is to trust the possibilities of biodiversity, where a consortium of diverse species that are mutually dependent yields a higher chance of survival in extreme environments. Both are questions of science and technology, but at the same time they reflect philosophies—ones about how we survive.

We selected six varieties of native Peruvian potatoes with different characteristics, sent the potato seeds to the ISS to spend a month in microgravity, and exposed them to environment stressors such as radiation. The project has not grown potatoes in space, but it’s a significant step to understanding how environmental stressors affect thesis seeds. Having harvested the first generation in our respective studios, we plan to grow multiple generations and increase the numbers that we can process. Maybe in the fourth or fifth generation we can cook them and use them in workshops that involve the general public (we are working with public elementary schools in Portland) to think about the possibilities of food and agriculture in space exploration. Space potatoes are the protagonists in our stories and would facilitate these dialogues.

XW: When we were reviewing proposals for Sojourner 2020, an open call for artworks to be sent into low earth orbit by the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, there were equally visible tendencies to flatten the crossover between art and technology into very gimmicky projects. In your position as both curator and artist working in this increasingly hyped juncture of art and tech, what are some of your goals and challenges?

XL: With the dropping costs of space launches and privatization, we are entering the New Space Age. Space Art is truly at the frontier now (no pun intended). There are many amazing art practitioners I’ve been able to invite to MIT and imagine together what this practice can be. The artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, for example, created The Moon Goose Colony, where she trained geese on planetary science and different flight patterns to prepare them for the Moon.3 She even incubated and hatched the eggs herself. In 42-The Large Meteor T-R-A-P (2014), she uses electronic magnetic devices to guide the movement of meteorites, which can be viewed as a planetary defense system. In fact, the first planetary defense systems launched by NASA (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) this past year also had to do with devices latching onto the meteorites to change their course of movement. I really like projects that are ambitious, beautifully executed, and which explore scientific possibilities as well as artistic ones. Unapologetically inserting yourself into other domains is also something I’m passionate about.

XW: What are some examples of such insertions?

XL: I recently had a conversation with the researcher Weng Jia, who looked into the detailed history of weather satellites beyond the pragmatics of weather forecast—itself a form of weather control that generates state power. It’s important to understand that history, but at the same time we can ask, as cultural producers, what now? We can either involve public engagement and sign petitions to request open access, or we can learn from the hackers—there are so many amateur enthusiasts who eavesdrop on state-owned radio signals, and through listening we are able to understand so much already. During the pandemic, my partner Gershon Dublon and I have tinkered with software-defined radio. Using just a tiny, 20-dollar USB dongle with an antenna we built from our clothing wires, we could receive the signals from retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites as they pass through the sky.

Even before the pandemic, my partner was looking into personal monitoring of air traffic, as most aircrafts have to broadcast their locations after reaching 18,000 ft. This was a fun plane-tracking activity at home. But later on we were put in touch with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, who were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline encroaching their territories. They were being illegally harassed and even sprayed with unknown chemicals by aircraft flying over their encampment, but couldn’t track the perpetrators. We helped them set up the aforementioned system using a computer, a 20-dollar dongle, and electrical metal wires, with which they were actually able to “see,” ID, and track the aircraft. Using that data and US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the water protectors were able to pursue their harassers and hold them accountable. Is it art practice? I think it’s important and exciting to examine the “wall”; there’s no wall that’s perfect—there are always cracks. You can find things between the breaks and slowly percolate, and, in a way, take back those powers—I found those processes most exciting.

XW: I think this is a powerful approach that counters the general pessimism towards big tech, technocratic states, and surveillance to the point that people don’t even want to think about the possibilities of cracks.

XL: But that’s a facade, and I don’t know who marvelously crafted it. A lot of these things, such as the radio, are not so complicated. Given a week and the internet, most people can figure it out; it’s not rocket science. You know who is most interested in amateur radio nowadays? The fifty-plus generation, sometimes grandpas. There is a big community in Staten Island in New York. However, in the arts, these systems and disciplines are rendered unfathomable, which prohibits further investigation. That’s the problem.

XW: When you were speaking about “the cracks in the wall” earlier, I had a very dark thought—in the future, planetary warfare will look drastically different and be much more deadly than the wars currently taking place on Earth.

XL: Future wars may not be quite so physical as we imagine—the virus is a powerful model for what could happen. It shows how fragile and resilient humans are; cyberattack, trade wars, geoengineering manipulation of nature—these are all struggles on different planetary scales, and we have to constantly self-educate as citizens and decode what the decision makers are actually saying.

XW: You received your undergraduate training at Tsinghua University, which is known for its rigorous focus on scientific training and as a place that has groomed many of China’s top technocratic leaders. It’s also considered the Chinese counterpart of MIT, where you completed a graduate program. How do those experiences compare and inform your trajectory?

XL: When I was in Tsinghua, I studied mathematics, physics, and mechanical engineering; my degree was in precision instruments. Nowadays I still practice them in my sculpture in its manufacturing and fabricating processes. It’s a craft. I later went to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), not because I wanted to be an artist, but out of a sad realization. In China, we separated art and science education since high school, and my liberal arts education was limited.

It was a selfish desire to study fine arts after college just to become a “complete” human being. I am very grateful that my parents didn’t disapprove this decision. At the time I told myself that I’d probably still end up working for Google and Microsoft; I had interned at both places during graduate school, thinking that’s how I would make a living eventually. But those two years were transformative and gave me an absolutely new way of looking at the world. Even graduating with an MFA from RISD, I still couldn’t commit a hundred percent to being a professional artist, as it is really difficult financially. I’m a practical immigrant. I had to figure out a way to stay in the country and feed myself. Then I went to MIT, because it was fully funded and I had the luxury to do research; after another two years in school, I decided that I wanted to work freely, and “artist” is the title that offers the most freedom.

XW: Do you still believe that?

XL: I do. If you tell people you are an artist, whatever you do doesn’t surprise them as much. It’s harder to talk about sending a tooth to space as a physicist.

XW: I’m struck by the way you describe gravity as a “momentum of feelings” on your website.

XL: That’s something I was thinking about when I first experienced weightlessness in 2017, during a parabolic flight. The plane literally free-falls in the sky, and in reference to the cabin, everything inside the plane is weightless. I had a bit of a performance background in dance. The experience was shocking: there was no “free from gravity”—gravity is always there. It was just everything falling together. The experience was less about me floating or flying than about the ground beneath me dropping. It’s not liberating in the way that you are accelerating and going up, which is what we associate with space exploration probably, but rather a kind of letting-go and descending. It was an eye-opening—body-opening—experience for me, and a bitter-sweet moment as well.

XW: Speaking of bodies and embodiment, do you find this excessive attention to—often performances of—an artist’s identity shows up more or less or differently for you, given the curious juncture of disciplines and identities you inhabit?

XL: It depends on who is seeing me. The tech aspect of me can seem alarming to people who are used to traditional practices, and in the so-called media/tech/science art world, gender might manifest more. The audience decides who I am. My name reads as gender-neutral in both English and Chinese. Sometimes people assume I’m a man initially, because I’m working with technology; but a bit more engagement with the work might compel one to realize that I could be a woman, because of the way I deal with technology. Still deeper into it, you might realize I’m Asian.

Another interesting aspect comes from the fact that I don’t just participate in art events; I also present my works at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), where it’s just pleasing to see my portrait—that of a young Asian woman—next to attendees that are largely from different demographics. And I enjoy that—inserting myself in different systems. It’s not just gender, but also geographic. I am an outlier in many ways—I went to a military-affiliated high school, so the instinct to fit in was strong growing up. But here, as people of color and women, we naturally stand out and have more identities. It could be tiring but it’s also our power—meaning that we can potentially empathize with more people. People like you and me—when we talk about America in a positive light in China or criticize the Chinese government, we are perceived as brainwashed by Western liberalism; but when we talk about Chinese companies like WeChat positively here, or the effective Covid-19 responses and technological innovations in China, we’d be considered brainwashed in the other direction too.

XW: I always feel that exposure to different systems of brainwash leads to utmost clarity. What do you think the future of space art will be, or what you hope it could be like?

XL: I think it will mature like digital art, bio art, internet art, AR/VR art—all these sub-domains. I read extensively on space policies, which obviously figure prominently on many nation states’ agendas. At the IAC conference in 2020, eight national space agencies just signed the Artemis Accords, which is an international agreement on the principles for corporations and civil explorations for the moon, Mars, comets, and asteroids. Particularly notable is the encouragement and protection for private entities to participate in the future of space exploration, and its effect on commercial activities will be significant; even the ISS is going through a commercialization process already. Space will become more commercial and privatized; it will engender more conversations and force us to be involved and investigate the industry.

XW: What’s your favorite Space Art piece?

XL: I was struck by Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985) when I first knew about it. I have been (and am still) confined in my apartment due to the pandemic. It is the absolute desire to break the ceiling and get out. Though both are heading towards outer space, the Soviet campaign in space exploration and a personal desire to leave, to be free, cannot be more different. In fact, one is defeating the other.

_____________________

Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer. She is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of New INC in New Museum, and a studio resident in Queens Museum. She is also an artist-in-residence in SETI Institute and the recipient of numerous awards and residencies.

Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. She is currently planning an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms for The Museum of Chinese in America, New York. While pursuing her PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she’s also been conducting a series of public zoom webinars on topics of technology, new media, and Asian American perspectives for the Whitney Museum of American Art since spring 2020.

Source: https://www.art-agenda.com/features/372727/on-space-art

[immediateedgeappuk]

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[thenickelportrust]

Yolanda’s Romance Example

If there’s one thing you’ve learned from dating Yolanda Waltz, or ‘Nickelport’s shining starlet’ as she seems to be referred to more often than her actual name, it’s how to blink through camera flashes. Honestly, you have no idea how the press got hold of your dinner date. The two of you just scheduled it on a whim! You’re a reporter on heroes and villains, and not even you have intel that works that fast.

Still, you have to remember to keep that stunned expression from your face and force a smile- elsewise you’d end up on some trashy magazine cover with some kind of insulting title. ‘Princess and the Pauper! Yolanda Waltz’s new girlfriend has no idea how to handle media attention.’ But a bit more snappy and less wordy.

Of course, Yolanda takes it all in stride- an easy, elegant smile as she wraps her arm through your’s.

You can only imagine how it must look- her, professionally done up with hair dripping with gems and pearls, a dress specifically made to fit her and her alone next to you, with whatever you could throw together and look decent. Oh, wait, there’s two things you’ve learned about by dating Yolanda Waltz. How to deal with camera flashes… And the burn of self-conscious embarrassment.

Still, her black-clad bodyguards keep the paparazzi at a distance, folding themselves into a human flesh-and-sunglasses-wall in front of the sliding glass doors of the kind of restaurant you could only dream of peeking through the window.

You feel a squeeze on your arm, and glance up at Yolanda’s face, that practiced grin falling away into an ever so slight, closed-mouth upturn of a smile. “Are you alright?”

“Of course.” You return the pressure, placing a hand over hers. A waiter dressed more expensively than you comes up to take your name.

“Ah- Miss Waltz, here for your reservation, I presume?” The waiter goes unheard, or ignored, by Yolanda. Who’s slight-smile degrades even more into a worried pursing of the lips. She detaches herself from you for the briefest of moments, tucking a small strand of hair behind your ear as she silently traces the side of your cheek.

“Wait a moment, dear.” She, with some reluctance, pulls her lingering touch away and strides confidently towards the waiter. She whispers something you can’t hear and the waiter’s face briefly scrunches in on itself. After a few more whispered exchanges he turns briskly on his heels and walks away. Yolanda gestures for you to stay there, and only smiles in response to your quirked eyebrow and confused look.

You stand there for what feels like half an hour, rocking back and forth on unsteady heels and, once or twice, having to explain that no, you don’t work here. In your free time you take a moment to ponder the necessity of such a large chandelier as dangles precariously over the dining patrons heads. All it takes is one hero coming crashing through the ceiling and the entire place would be caked in fake diamond glass. Dangerous, ostentatious decorations at their finest.

After your morbid journey down hypothetical lane, you feel a light tap on your shoulder- you expect to find Yolanda but instead come face to face with a waiter that you’d almost mistake to be the same one as the man Yolanda left with. No, but his eyes are a slightly different color… Other than that… it’s almost creepy.

“Right this way, Ma’am.” No. No actually, it is creepy.

You trail this waiter-doppleganger through the rows of tables, a maze of glass panels set up to split up the different sections of dining into an elaborate, Romanesque structure. You’re dizzy by the time he stops, and almost crash into the waiter’s back. Stepping away quickly, and doing your best to not look like you almost headbutt his suit, you glance past the waiter to… a door?

“Somehow I thought I’d be eating at a table, guess you do things a little differently here, huh?” He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even so much as crack a politely pitying smile while making awkward eye-contact with the furthest wall possible from you. Instead he just opens the door and gestures inside.

The space inside itself is relatively plain, painted a dull eggshell and without any decapitating possibilities via precarious chandelier, but you can almost immediately see where Yolanda would have liked it. The side wall is entirely glass, opening up to a view of the Nickelport inner-city skyline with all its uneven buildings clawing towards the dark night sky. You step a little closer to the window-wall. You’ve grown used to the view from Yolanda’s office by now, that familiar city skyline, and somehow… it’s become a little comforting. Something familiar.

As familiar as the feeling of hands slipping around your waist, and a kiss pressed to the skin just behind your ear. “I hope you don’t mind the change of reservation,” Yolanda purrs quietly, “But it seemed to me as if you might’ve preferred something with a bit more… privacy.”

“Not at all.” It’s easy to turn around in her loose grip, and return the kiss with a quick peck on the lips, “Can’t say I’ll miss being blinded every three seconds.”

You wonder if you’ve said something wrong, as her smile falters for the briefest of moments. A moment made even more fleeting by the cleared-throat arrival of another nearly identical waiter- you’re seriously considering the possibility of a duplication powered waiter- who pulls out one of the chairs at the only table in the small room. Guided by Yolanda’s hand, you take your seat at the table, just barely being able to settle in before the waiter immediately prattles off in a list of wines so long you’re almost tempted to applaud his memorization skills by the time he finishes.

“Now, then,” With a bright flourish he produces a pen and notepad, turning to you with a plastic smile, “What may I get you to drink, Ma’am?” A list so long that you… didn’t hear any of it.

“I… uh…” Shit. What were the options? No, there’s no way you could ask him to repeat all that. With a helpless look you turn to Yolanda, who- with all the grace of a broadway actress- redirects the waiters attention and quickly repeats one of the many fancier-sounding reds that you can only assume the waiter actually did mention.

Feeling suitably misplaced in this socialite lime-light, you bury yourself in the two-page selection of appetizers, the back of your neck still burning with embarrassment. You carefully peek over your shield at Yolanda, who- even just flipping through the pages of a menu- manages to look graceful. Sophisticated. Belonging in this environment, even if you do not.

You get about halfway through the second page of appetizers- no, sorry, hors d’oeuvres- when a sudden sigh draws your attention once more to your otherwise silent dinner companion. Yolanda quietly folds her menu closed and sets it aside, fingers locked beneath her chin as she cradles her head in them. Staring right at you with half-lidded, calculating dark eyes.

“What is it?”

She draws a long breath, shoulders rising ever so slightly as she turns her gaze away from you. “This… was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

Well, something just sucker-punched your gut. You blink, hard, too hard to be a normal blink, carefully and slowly folding your menu and setting it aside. You clear your throat, then clear it again, training your voice away from a stutter. “I-Is that so?” And… you failed. Like most things tonight- you failed.

You should’ve expected this. Should’ve expected that some unknown reporter who has no more to her name than a dingy apartment and a broken down car wouldn’t have any chance with someone as famous as Yolanda Waltz. What are you even doing here? You look at the table, covered in a pristine white cloth, then to the plates with their intricately flowering designs, anywhere but the woman across from you. “I should… go, then.”

You stand, and almost immediately a manicured hand wraps around your wrist, Yolanda’s other palm cups your chin as she lifts your head to face her, eyes wide and surprised. “Oh, no, no! I don’t mean you, I-” She shakes her head, a rueful smile on her face, “I’m so sorry, you would think that someone such as myself would have chosen better words.”

“You don’t-?” She cuts you off with a mere shake of the head.

“Not at all.” The small smile comes a little easier now, a little happier, “I meant that this,” She gestures to the room around you, “Was a misstep- on my part. I should’ve scheduled something less…”

“Ostentatious? With less doppelgangers?”

“Doppelgangers?”

“Have you seen the waitstaff?”

Yolanda considers this… and eventually nods. But the expression of realization is quickly replaced with one of concern. “Why would you ever believe that I meant you?”

You weigh the possibility of not answering her, but there’s that honeyed coaxing in her voice, urging you to tell her everything, that calm confidence that reminds you to trust her. And, eventually, you end up admitting to your concerns. “I guess it’s just… farfetched. The idea that I would ever end up with someone like… you.” You step away, Yolanda’s fingers regretfully lingering until you’re out of arm’s reach, and gesture to her in full, “Nickelport’s shining starlet. I mean,” You laugh, a little harshly, “I’m a reporter. I don’t date the stars, I just take photos of them and then write trashy articles about their personal lives.” Mostly other things but… you still do that, as well.

Yolanda says nothing for a long while, just stares at you with her lips pressed into a thin line- an expression you’ve come to associate with deep thought on her part. Eventually, she straightens her shoulders, smoothing down her skirt as she takes careful steps forward, “Do you know why I originally thought to invite you to such an… ‘ostentatious’ outing?” her lips curl into a smile around your word.

You shrug. Yolanda reaches you and once more takes your hands in hers, “It was because I wanted to impress you- the very same way you’ve impressed me, over and over.” She squeezes your palms.

“You were trying to impress me?” You repeat slowly, “You felt the need to impress me?”

She nods, head tilting ever so slightly, “Truth be told I feared I was falling behind… and I’m not one to be outdone so easily, my dear.”

“But that’s-” Ridiculous, impossible, and several other words come to mind- yet they all remain blocked behind a single finger pressed to your lips.

“Which is exactly what I felt when you explained your own doubts.” She taps your lips lightly, before a frown twists her face, “I realize my lifestyle can be… intimidating, and I also realize I’ve done nothing to alleviate the situation… However, I promise that from now on I shall strive for more… private, personal activities.” Her gazes follows a quick sweep of the room, “Preferably in a more comfortable environment.”

“You really don’t have to do that.” You assure her, “It just… takes some getting used to is all.”

Yolanda shrugs, “Perhaps it is not necessary and yet it is what I wish to do.” She smiles, “Well- I suppose that’s not entirely true. If you were to express that you wanted something such as all this then I would be happy to oblige… For what I truly wish to do is to be able to make you smile, my dear.” The back of her fingers graze against your cheeks, “And if that means sneaking off to some back alley hot dog stand then I would be more than happy to do so.”

“Well, I do know this great hole-in-the-wall place for hot dogs,” You grin, “But that depends on whether or not you’re really ready to slum it.”

Yolanda laughs, a high, airy sound like clinking glass, “Even if it meant eating in a back alley on the Rusty Side, I’ll go if I’m with you.”

Your grin turns a little roguish, “Oh, I’m definitely holding you to that.”

Yolanda’s laughter peters off, “Just… let’s not go anywhere where we’ll end up getting stabbed and robbed, alright?”

You laugh and pat her arm, “Don’t worry, I’ll be there to protect you.”

“Well, then I suppose I have something to hold you to, as well.”

#yolanda waltz #model citizens unmasked #shorts

[shrekthemusicalontours-blog]

Megabox HD APK Download For Android, PC Easy Download

In case you were looking out for the best options to stream and watch your favorite movies and TV shows online and through an application, you have come to the right place. Megabox HD is a globally recognized application for smooth and efficient streaming of movies as well as TV shows. With its unique features, it has positioned itself on the top of chart in streaming application world. But there is one problem with this application that it is not available on Google Play Store which is a little setback but do not worry as we have added the link through which you can download it in apk version.

Features of Megabox HD

Ever since it was introduced, the developers of this application have been refining and updating it to make sure there are no glitches and the users can have a smooth and convenient experience. In this section, we have added various features which make the Megabox HD the first choice of movie lovers. The size of this application is very small and this is because it had to be compatible with the limited storage of Android phones. Even after downloading this application, users will have a lot of space in their phones The user-interface is very friendly which makes it a top priority for common people as it will not require any technological expertise and people of any age can use it without any issue The application has various categories in accordance to the genre, latest releases, star ratings, and much more which makes the searching for movies and TV shows very easy and hassle-free This application does not only provide streaming options but also provide the option to download the desired movie or TV shows The application is always being updated which ensures that users will have access to all the latest releases without having to wait The updates of this application also ensure the smooth working of application and it never crashes or hangs the phone There is a wide variety of movies and TV shows to choose from. Does not matter what your age or choice is, Megabox has something for all age as well as taste groups All the content available is offered in high quality resolution such as 360p or 720p The application is very easy to use The application is completely free and users do not have to pay anything

How to Install Megabox HD in your Android Device

Go to the settings option on your phone and enable the download option from “unknown sources” Now, download the apk from the link given on our website Once downloaded, run the application in your phone and you are free to watch movies and TV shows Download File Information Click the below button to download the Megabox HD APK. It comes in a zipped folder. Once it is downloaded, just tap and click “Extract” to unzip the folder. Now tap the extracted folder and select “Next” to move ahead on the privacy page. Selecting “Next” automatically makes you agree with the rules and regulations of the app. You May Also Like: Cinema Box APK Bobby Movie Box APK PlayBox HD APK OneBox HD APK   Read the full article

[magzier-blog]

Sparklers For Birthday Celebration: Jagex Will Open Runescape's 18th Birthday Event With Fireworks

As we mentioned several days before the startup when we were still in the countdown of 2018, the Runescape 18th birthday celebration will launch on today as scheduled. The opening ceremony, reportedly, was a firework show in the game hosted by players themselves. The sparklers, which can be freely acquired from Treasure Hunter, are the main prop to maintain this firework show and features different colours and different effects during their sparking.

Based on the announcement from Runescape official site, we are convinced that these sparklers have been categorized into four different types according to numbers of grabbing and colours. In former categorization, there are four different types of sparklers to choose from: Purple, Double, Tripple, Quadruple. The bunches of different numbers of sparklers separate them each other. Other than Bunch amounts categorization, the latter one is Color Taxis. All two different colours, including red and purple, are on the list and optional. However, there are two types of fireworks does not belong to any of these categorizations we claimed previously. One is called "Skill", which we assume is the firework that shows the patterns or outlines of random Runescape skills in the game; and the other is "Mystery". "Mystery" firework is capable of transforming into any other type of fireworks while you fire it up, which works quite alike "Loot Box".

The firework show doesn't wish to induce all the entrants by itself, along with some one-off prizes attached, any sparkler you choose will demonstrate with different effects when it is given off by yourself. Kindly reminder that even though it sounds quite intriguing all the way, the show will be expired on January 7th. Whether there will be another show approaching after the deadline of this one or not still remains unknown.

Based on the agenda that Jagex has revealed, birthday cake and live stream are indispensable for the Runescape tomorrow birthday. And the real celebration will kick off on the very moment of the deadline of the Firework Show. What's next to lure us into? We keep on track of all follow-ups for you.

As with Jagex is on fire with planning for the Runescape 18th birthday celebration, as one of the most-loved and widely praised OSRS Gold dealer, MMOAH is also hyped up about hosting a unique sales promotion in Runescape transaction area for all consumers. From now on, every order on MMOAH regarding RS Gold, especially OSRS Gold, will be given freely with exclusive coupon code "RS6" - Anyone can use this code in the checkout page to save your payment 6% off when you place an order of Runescape Gold order on our website. And more importantly, for anyone who yearns for substantial OSRS Gold with fast and secure delivery, our website guarantees that all of our Runescape order will be completed within 30 minutes otherwise a full refund will be issued immediately. Now we gladly inform you that One Million OSRS Gold on our site only cost $ 0.99! Plus there are a variety of Runescape accounts, power levelling services, and Fire Capes in the store for your selection. We are dedicated to improving every customer's purchase experience and enhance the credibility of our service in the long run. Choose MMOAH, no one can top our services in Runescape and you will get more than what you ordered!

#18th birthday #adulthood #bunch #colors #effects #festival #firework show #Jagex #prizes #Runescape #Sparklers

[rofics]

Three’s A Charm

Request: Taehyung and Hoseok X reader. set in a magic universe

Y/L/N means your last name

Agents Kim and Y/L/N are a duo. They work at an underground agency that deals with the Supernatural. Agents look into different species, keeping them in check and making sure everything is okay. If mishaps occur it’s the agents’ job to fix the problem with their powers. Agent powers are the strongest as they have had a lot of training and are very precise. Agent Kim Taehyung, or Tae has the power of mind control and illusion. Agent Y/L/N has the power of element manipulation and time travel which is a dangerous power to have. 

Recently the duo became a trio as Agent Jung Hoseok was new and was paired with the experienced duo. Agent Hoseok has the power of teleportation and is a psychic. He’s predicted when a lot of things would happen and the Agency was able to catch problems on time. The three made an unstoppable team that got along extremely well and had an excellent dynamic. Agent Tae was in charge of the talking, using his powers to get the truth. Agent Y/N was in charge of the fighting, the elements being a great aid. Agent Hoseok made his way in by predicting what will happen so the other two could prepare properly. 

Being so great at their jobs comes with praise but also jealousy and hatred. Certain species held grudges for what the trio did to their kind and they often dealt with outside forces trying to sabotage them. Other Agents didn’t mind the trio, as it meant they didn’t have to do the difficult jobs. A select few agents however, hated how liked the trio was and wanted them taken down. With all of this hatred blooming, the trio decided it was best if they all moved in together, instead of being alone. They found an affordable three bedroom apartment and started to move in right away. 

Present Day

Y/N woke up to the sound of clanking? Tae won’t wake up until another 30 minutes or so and Hobi doesn’t make much sound when the others are sleeping. Y/N gets up very slowly and silently, summoning a fire sword and creeps towards the door. Y/N opens it very slowly and the door makes no noise. Y/N listens more and realizes that it’s multiple feet and decides to summon black armor for protection. Continuing in silence Y/N slowly makes it to the kitchen, a peek from the side shows Hobi and Y/N sighs in relief. 

“Damn it Hobi, you scared me. I thought it was an intruder” Y/N scolds, relaxing. 

“Y/N? Who you talking to?” questions Hobi’s voice from the living room. Y/N stops cold and stares at the other Hobi, normal kind eyes turn pitch black as the impostor lets out a blood curdling screech, launching itself at Y/N. The fire sword flies up as Y/N blocks the attack, sharp nails collide with the black armor. Y/N swings the sword down, slicing the being straight in half. The thing dies and disintegrates into a black smoke, then disperses. Hobi comes running in

“What happened? I was watching tv, couldn’t see or hear anything then you started talking and then I couldn’t move” Hobi explains and Y/N gives him a big hug. Tae come out of his room, looking very confused

“What was that screech?” he asks and inserts himself in the hug. 

“I’m not sure, but that thing had powers of blocking and shape shifting. It was impersonating Hobi and then attacked me, but I killed it” Y/N informs and Tae hugs the two tighter. 

The three were quit close so many thought that they were dating. They all did like each other, neither of them wanted to confess. 

“I’m glad you’re okay” Hobi says and pats Y/N’s shoulder

“Yeah, I’m glad you two are okay” Tae adds and the three hug more. Y/N always got sandwiched in between the two, Tae liked to be in back with Hobi at the front. A beep in three different rooms signaled that it was time to head into work because there was an assignment. They go get ready and do one last sweep of the apartment before leaving. Hobi always drives so he slid into the driver’s seat of a black Jeep with Y/N in the passenger seat and Tae in the back. The drive was more silent than usual as they were each racking their brains on what the creature could have been. Maybe it’s something new, a hybrid nobody’s heard of or something that someone created. Hobi pulls into a parking lot that only agents can find and the car begins to descend underground. There’s more parking spots that are designated for certain agents so Hobi pulls into the first spot. The three get out and head to the double glass doors that await their assignment. Other agents are walking around, some smile and others sneer to which the three ignore. They make it to the boss’s office, ready to receive the assignment. 

The assignment was to check out a warehouse that had randomly appeared and make sure it wasn’t dangerous. They walk out of the office and go back to the car to go back home. Home is where they brainstorm on how to approach the assignment, with Hobi sometimes seeing and outcome. 

“A random warehouse...that doesn’t make any sense” Y/N says, glancing at the other two. 

“Yeah, we normally know about everything because the Agency has such tight surveillance.” Tae adds and Hobi hits the steering wheel

“Do you think it has something to do with the thing that attacked Y/N yesterday? An unknown warehouse shows up and then some random creature appears that we’ve never seen before..maybe they’re connected!” Hobi exclaims, making some sense. 

“They could be, if that’s the case then we should be extremely careful when investigating. Because we don���t know what we’re up against or how many there would be. I vote we do some research and ask around first” Y/N replies as they reach their apartment. Tae steps inside first, trying to hear any random noise. Hobi went next, right behind Tae just in case something happened. With the apartment empty the three relaxed and fell onto the couch

“I hate being like this, having to be cautious in our own home, it’s ridiculous! And all because of these random shit faced monsters!” Y/N yells and kicks at air with a frustrated sigh. Tae pouts and curls into Y/N’s side

“It’s okay, we’ll figure it out” he murmurs, pressing a small kiss to Y/N’s cheek that makes them blush. 

“Hey! That’s not fair! I wanna kiss Y/N too!” Hobi whines and gives Y/N a giant kiss on the cheek. The two boys smile widely at the red mess they’ve created and wrap Y/N in a hug. 

“I love you both..very much” Tae confesses and Hobi cheers

“I do too! I have for a while actually” he adds and Y/N blushes

“I do too” Y/N whispers shyly and the hug gets tighter

“Yay poly relationship!” Tae and Hobi shout together, making Y/N laugh. With confessions out of the way, the three finally got to work.  

Y/N was looking online and in books for different hybrids, trying to get a name for the unknown creature. Tae was calling around to people they knew to see if they had any info on the warehouse or the creatures. Hobi was concentrating, trying to see something that might be able to help them. After an hour of phone calls Tae finally caught a break, an old Faery friend of theirs named Lana had some information. She was going to come over as soon as possible. When Hobi couldn’t see anything he started making a few calls to help Tae out and would scan though books in between. Y/N was making all kinds of notes, marking pages in the books and writing down anything from the internet. Hobi managed to get a bit more information from a Shapeshifter named Eli. Eli didn’t want a meet up but he still gave great detail and Hobi thanked him before hanging up. Tae ran out of contacts so he say down next to Y/N who had given up after looking through everything they could find. 

“Lana should be coming withing the next hour, what did you find jagi?” Tae asks, laying his head on Y/N’s shoulder. 

“Well, those creatures are created. Not like a normal hybrid where they’re birthed. These things are physically created and altered with different genes. Someone with an immense amount of power can give them the powers that they have, but nothing else. So whoever created them has powers of Shapshifting and mind blocking” Y/N explains, leaning back into the couch. 

“Wait..doesn’t the director have those powers? It’s how he keeps the trouble making agents in line, I’ve seen him do it before” Hobi questions wide eyed and a sense of dread settles into Y/N. 

“That makes so much sense..he could tell them where we lived, how we operate, anything” Tae mumbles with a look of betrayal on his face. 

“If that’s the case we can’t tell him anything, we can’t even trust the other agents. We’d have to fight the Director himself in order to get rid of those things” Y/N sighs in defeat. Hobi sits down on the couch and they all lay against each other, figuring out what to do. A frantic knock is heard at the door and their head snap up. They all get up at the same time and look at the peephole to see a bloody and frantic Lana at the door. Hobi opens the door, pulls Lana inside and slams it shut again on time before something slams into it. Y/N puts an elemental ward around the apartment that stops unwanted visitors from coming in. If they tried, said creature would have to deal with all of the elements Y/N can master. 

“What happened Lana?!” Tae questions frantically, looking the Faery up and down. Lana tries catching her breath before speaking

“I was leaving my place to come over and half way through this figure appeared and started chasing me. It attacked me with these giant claws and kept shifting into different things. It tore one of my wings off so I had to run here, it got caught at the front entrance but got in somehow and you guys saved me right on time” she whimpers out and Y/N inspects Lana. 

“Let’s go get you cleaned up, I’ll see if I can heal your wing any okay?” Y/N says gently and Lana nods

“We’ll make some soothing tea” Hobi adds and Tae solemnly nods.

With Y/N and Lana

I take Lana to the bathroom and help remove her clothes that were all tattered from different claws. She winces a bit but does nothing more, despite looking fragile Faeries can be very tough. I pull out medicated body wash that I got from my best friend and healer Rose. I grab the shower head and turn the water to warm, being careful of the gashes. 

“I’m sorry this happened to you, I know how important Faery wings are” I apologize and she smiles sadly. 

“It wasn’t your fault, I’ll be avenged when they’re all destroyed” Lana says and I chuckle

“Will do. Now I’m gonna put this medicine on to heal these gashes and it’s going to hurt like hell” I warn and Lana nods her head. I put some in the palm of my hand and rub some on my pointer finger. I start with the smaller gashes and they heal immediately. There are about 6 gashes left, some crossing each other and I wrinkle my nose at the sight. I put more medicine in my hand and pick the smallest gash which is on her right shoulder blade. She lets out a whine and I continue, watching as the gashes slowly mend back together. The biggest gash was two that formed a perfect X. I shake my head and gently apply the medicine from top to bottom. Lana lets out multiple yelps and high pitched whines as I make my way to the center of the gash. The wound was so deep that I needed to go in a second time to make sure it closed all the way. When I was done, Lana sagged into the wall and I gently rub her arm. I put gauze on the bigger gashes and help her get into bigger clothes and help her out to the living room. 

Normal P.O.V 

Tae and Hobi had four cups of tea set out and were cuddling each other when Y/N and Lana walked out. 

“Thank you for the tea” Lana says and takes a sip, instantly relaxing. It was special tea that Rose made for clearing and relaxing. 

“So the reason why I came is because I saw one of those things being created. They had captured my friend Aurora and I saw the process through her eyes. There was a large man, and he was pouring power from his hands into this machine with multiple openings. And after a bit of time they started forming, flickering in and out of shape as they settled on a form. After one main batch was done they started cloning more from one of them, so there was a small army after 30 minutes. Some of them didn’t last though, as they just kind of disappeared into smoke. And I really hope I wasn’t imagining but the one making those things was your boss” she says and a stillness fills the air

“We figured that..and now it’s confirmed” Y/N sighs out, taking a long sip of tea. 

“Thank you for telling us Lana, it was a great help. I think you should stay here until your wounds are better” Hobi offers and Tae nods in agreement. 

“Yeah! It’s probably not safe since you escaped and are here with us” Tae adds and Lana nods

“Okay, I’ll have to tell the others where I am so they don’t get worried” Lana says and slowly stands up. Faeries have special stones used for communicating so she walked into another room to activate it. 

“We have to destroy him somehow..this can’t go on” Y/N murmurs, taking Tae and Hobi’s hands. 

“We need a plan, and maybe back up because power wise, you’re the only one who can fight. And I’ll be damned if we let you fight alone against the director.” Hobi states 

“But I might be the only option. Yeah I can have help but Elementals are pretty good against mind blockers and shapeshifters. I’m a great counter to him. I’ll be careful” Y/N defends, fire swelling within them. 

Tae and Hobi deflated in defeat, finally nodding together 

“Okay, how will you confront him? It’s not like you can just go up to him and accuse of all of this” Lana ponders so Y/N, Tae, and Hobi all stare at each other

That’s what they were going to do...before Lana could do or say anything else Hobi teleported them to the headquarters. All of the lights were turned off except for one light all the way on the top floor. The street was dead, even though it was mid day. 

“Well, we’ll never get anything accomplished standing outside. Let’s end this” Y/N states, staring up at the light. 

So I am a terrible person..i haven’t been active at all and i feel so bad..but I literally can’t gather the energy to do this like I used to. And I probably ended this badly...buuuuttttt do you want a part 2?? I feel like it’s torture if I continue going :D

-Ro

#bts #bts x reader #bts poly fic #bts taehyung #bts v #bts j-hope #bts hoseok #poly kpop fic

[charlieharry1]

Long term reproduction photo test

Content has always been one of the pillars of seo. Besides links, content material has by using a ways been the maximum mentioned subject matter in the records of on line advertising. Discussions about the definition of “desirable content material” has raged on boards  Digital Marketing Company in London and blogs since the inception of search engine optimization itself. One factor that has remained steady all through the debate however is that google does not like reproduction content. But have you ever ever considered whether or not inventory snap shots, which are often duplicated across hundreds of other web sites, can also be handled as replica content and consequently purpose a rating issue? Numerous case research have shown that the level of duplication across your web page could have a in reality correlated impact on the ranking of the web site. Have a little bit of duplicated content? No hassle. It’s perfectly suited and natural for this to happen.

 However, after you begin having massive portions of your website duplicated, troubles can begin taking place. Those troubles can appear themselves as moderate rating issues, predominant lack of rankings due to particular algorithms (such as panda) all of the manner to google just giving up and sticking maximum of your web page within the disregarded search outcomes. In a few severe instances, wherein the aim of the duplicated website is judged to be malicious, a particular guide penalty can even be dished out. Ecommerce web sites have always inherently suffered from replica content troubles. A mixture of lethargy, unfastened rule framework for placing merchandise and scalability issues inherent with a massive product base have ended in hundreds of thousands of on-line shops the use of the precise same content material. Typically, photos and descriptions are taken word for phrase from the provider or producer of the product. Examine extra: the way to write extraordinary product descriptions for e-trade web sites

as google continues to test with methods of decreasing its algorithm’s dependence on links as a rating signal, content has honestly taken a greater central level. Inner conversations about the way to appropriately outline replica and thin content has been taking location right here at reboot on line in recent months and we saw the want to test ourselves with the effects lesser recognized replica content material troubles may want to have on a website’s natural performance. As in our different experiments, this one became born from a casual discussion among the search engine optimization geeks right here at reboot approximately the way to clear up content material problems regarding massive ecommerce web sites. Like so many other conversations before it, it fast transgressed into what precisely will we want to encompass under the scope of “reproduction content”. Other than the plain textual content content material, the next massive query mark is whether pics also are visible as duplicate content material and whether it would have any effect on ratings. Why is it so important? There may be no question that there may be no better way to specific the uniqueness and the persona of your organisation thru actual photos. Inventory photographs, even though extraordinary whilst you want some thing brief are regularly soulless and impersonal. It seems that stock images are in maximum instances right away recognisable as such and with that recognition comes slight emblem picture harm. Overuse of stock snap shots can deliver apathy, loss of imagination and the absence of creativity. Could it's that google algorithms also share that view? Have a observe the above two pics. One became taken from an photo library while the other we just took in our office with a normal camera. Yes, the second is a bit rough, lighting fixtures might be off and desks not extraordinarily tidy but it conveys real humans, in a actual running environment and google has never seen that photo earlier than, so it is completely clean and specific. Take a minute to head over your notion procedure as you scan both pictures. Imagine seeing them on an “approximately us” page. Which might you relate to greater? Which might you agree with greater? Which one would persuade you that you'll be managing actual people? Which might you consider greater? Hypothesis:

thinking about the load that google locations on fantastic, enticing, clean content, coupled with the truth that we know that google’s picture crawlers are clever sufficient to render/compare pix, and when pics are actual copies or very similar, we hypothesise that google will supply more weight to articles that include original, but unseen, pics. We accept as true with that the usage of precise photographs which are clean to your web page and your site handiest can be seen with the aid of google (and users) as a sign of:

 1. Ingenuity

2. Originality

three. Willpower

4. Motivation

5. Hard-working

6. Trustworthiness

 all of which assist differentiate your web site out of your competitor’s. We consequently hypothesise that websites with precise snap shots can have extra weight given to them in the google algorithms and therefore, assuming all different factors are equal, will rank better each in photograph seek and in web search when at once in comparison with structurally similar web sites the usage of widely used reproduction pics. Method:

as concluded with our different experiments, the logic behind this one proved to be lots less complicated than its execution. We might invent a term which we'd pre-affirm did no longer exist in google’s index and consequently confirmed no effects whilst searched. The time period would be a phrase that had a meaning and might be utilized in a sentence on associated sites. We selected the word [preotrolite]. We then defined the phrase as:

 preotrolite - the artwork/method of designing a properly flowing car park which takes into consideration volume, area, course and go with the flow. We'd create 10 websites in overall. 5 containing replica pix best whilst the other five would incorporate precise images most effective. We might then evaluate how the 2 sets of sites rank throughout a 3-month duration. How we did it? The first element to do turned into purchase the domain names. After ensuring all the domains consisted of fabricated words, all unknown to google we then went ahead and used them in a zig zag random fashion to further blur any footprints or age-related biases. Furthermore, all domain names were registered on distinctive registrars. Next, we desired to add 10 photos to each web site. On 5 websites, we would use duplicated pix and on the alternative we'd use absolutely unique photos. A complete of one hundred pictures had been wished. We painstakingly combed thru hundreds of snap shots of automobile parks on repositories including google photos and different image sharing websites. Each photo changed into then searched thru google photographs to see how many results it produced. We picked out those that had maximum sites the usage of them

 within the following instance of a duplicated image used for a duplicate photograph web page we can see that this unique image is utilized in 213 other websites and google seems to have extra results which have been neglected:

Once we had 50 duplicated photos, we went out armed with a digital camera and took 50 extra photos of the encompassing automobile parks around our office. Here is a contrast of the way google sees our unique snap shots as soon as uploaded and an photo search carried out:

 as you may see, even 3 months after the start of the test, the photographs are nevertheless visible as specific with handiest one result displaying for the actual photo towards the lowest of the page

 now we wished some minimum content on every site to encapsulate the keyword we were concentrated on. It changed into vital to make sure our key-word [preotrolite] become represented on all of the websites in a totally similar fashion. We desired them all to have the precise identical occurrences of the keyword but additionally to consist of them in comparable positions across the shape of the web page. This was not simplest a consideration for the principle content material of the web site but additionally in the h1/h2 tags and title/description tags. Right here is illustration of  web sites aspect with the aid of side (snap shots removed for area reasons) which demonstrates the care we took to minimise any variations across the websites. Be aware approximately web hosting:

preceding revel in has shown us that once strolling these sorts of experiments, it's important that the websites do no longer live on the same host/ip deal with. Furthermore, as we endeavour to minimise all other outside influences, we struggled with how to discover 10 hosts which have similar performances so that it will lessen any pace associated variables to a minimum. We consequently decided to use separate aws ec2 times located in numerous geographical areas and all with one of a kind ip addressclasses. This ensured we no longer most effective maintained a similar degree of overall performance however also that no other sites had been hosted at the equal server. Precautions:

the experiment turned into because of run for 3 months in overall. At some point of that point, apart from myself, oliver sissons (head of search engine optimization) and scott bowman (photograph designer), nobody else out of doors our search engine optimization business enterprise had details of the domains or focused key phrases. This became achieved to make certain that no “rogue” visits to the website should impact the scores in any way. Brian dean who volunteered as observer of the consequences tracked through semrush became given the full statistics approximately the test on nineteenth july 2019 . We additionally sent emails with info of the experiment to three facts visualisation experts and other assistants. We therefore recall the seventeenth july to be the remaining day of the test. Other precautions included:

hosts - all websites hosted on unique ip/elegance on aws/ec2

all domain names registered on unique registrars

keyword to be tracked is unknown to google at starting of experiment

all websites had google search console accounts created on distinct ip addresses and special dates and under special names. Domain names unknown to google at starting of test

all text used on web site could be very similar duration

all keyword mentions in similar positions throughout web sites

comparable but now not duplicate web page shape and code

no external traffic to sites until the 17th of july to make certain no ctr/jump/time on website or other metrics can have an effect on scores

meta information stripped from all images

all domain names are new and never been registered

all domain names have no historic links

 effects:

the results are conclusive. The usage of unique images for your website does have a tremendous impact on natural web ratings in addition to image rankings when as compared with equivalent websites the use of duplicated images throughout the web. The electricity of this impact is difficult to gauge however the graphs beneath try to exhibit the results in the great way feasible. The primary graph is the hardest to provide an explanation for but flawlessly shows the results of the test in one visible. Unique thanks go to noah iliinsky who helped with the below visual. Graph reflects natural internet effects

 every column represents an afternoon in the experiment. Every row represents a internet site. A vivid inexperienced block represents the web site being in the best organic internet function according to the hypothesis. I. E if a completely unique web site is within the top 5 positions or a replica web site is in the backside five positions. The lowest graph corresponds precisely to each day at the 1st visible and indicates the effects according to the speculation in easy % phrases. A hundred% approach all websites correspond successfully to the speculation and so forth. As you may see from the graph, at the beginning of the test, might also had a rating of seventy two% accurate, june raised to 81% and july peaked at eighty five% correct in line with the hypothesis. Highly uncomplicated effects. The second one graph is a easy line graph directly representing the ranking of the websites on semrush over the 3 month duration. This graph really splits the web sites into two companies. Specific = inexperienced and duplicate – crimson. As you could see, it’s a miles “busier” graph and tougher to decipher but nonetheless truely shows the dominance of the inexperienced lines towards the top 5 positions in google. Unlike the other visuals, the third and very last visual appears on the image search results instead of the natural web effects. It’s a screenshot of the outcomes for the key-word photograph search [preotrolite] with green or crimson spotlight superimposed to illustrate if the photo is a reproduction or specific picture. As can virtually be seen, specific photographs get a choice in picture search in addition to internet outcomes. End:

Read Also:-  Google Discovered a Search Console Reporting Bug

as in keeping with all our previous experiments, it's essential to notice that on the way to minimise outdoor variables, we needed to strip everything to the naked minimum. Which means that although this test indicates a clear advantage for websites with specific pix, it does not deliver in any way the strength this gain has in contrast with different signals. The usage of inventory images is something that is widely well-known across the web and despite the fact that a bonus for precise pics can logically be defined, there's nevertheless doubt at the real-life impact this may have on a case by using case foundation. Would we inspire you to exit and take some snap shots your self in your weblog or small ecommerce web page? Nicely, the solution to this is “it depends”. If you can achieve this cheaply whilst preserving exceptional and in fact provide something new in your traffic, then  Digital Marketing Agencies in Leeds honestly yes. If however you've got heaps of merchandise and could want to invest tremendous quantities of money into device and recognise how, then the answer is a ways much less conclusive and could be nice made after a few individual checking out for your own environment.

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Chapter 1: The Romans

By Paul Slade

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Southwark got its first brothels when the invading Roman army arrived in 43AD. The Iron Age settlement once sited there had long since been abandoned, leaving nothing but a patch of swampy ground on the south bank of the Thames.

General Aulus Plautius marched his troops straight here from their landing point on the Kent coast, a distance of about 63 miles, meeting little or no resistance along the way. Forced to halt by the river, they camped opposite what is now Cheapside, where a network of tracks branched out towards every corner of the island. It was there, on the river's north bank, that Britain's defenders had chosen to make their stand. Plautius ordered his engineers to build a platoon bridge at the relatively narrow, shallow spot where Southwark Bridge now stands and this was quickly done. The Romans made short work of the British fighters waiting at Cheapside, replaced their original pontoon bridge with a permanent wooden structure and set about expanding their Southwark camp into something more like a small town.

"At the bridgehead, they established their commissariat and stores, because Southwark - and not London - would have been their resistance base if the campaign had gone wrong," Ephraim Burford writes in his 1976 book The Bishop's Brothels. "At least a cohort must have been stationed there and at that period a cohort comprised between 600 and 1,000 men, to which must be added the supporting establishment and the camp followers. There would have been at least 2,000 people in that settlement at any one time." Those camp followers included a good number of Roman prostitutes, who set up shop in the new timber and thatch buildings provided just off the military highway. Any army camp of that size would have produced ample demand for the girls' services and this grew further once the Romans had established landing docks nearby to disembark new soldiers and unload supplies. (1)

Southwark took slave girls from all over the Roman Empire to keep its brothels staffed

Within seven years of arrival, the Romans had already pushed their British frontier all the way to a diagonal line between the Humber and Severn estuaries - now marked by the old Fosse Way. It was also around this time that Roman merchants first built a town on the Thames' north bank, surrounding it with defensive earthworks and christening the place Londinium. Tacitus, the Roman historian, tells us that the Londinium of 61AD was already "much frequented by merchants and trading vessels".

By 75AD, Southwark had grown into a large suburb, snaking out a string of taverns along the access roads to its south. Throughout the Roman occupation, these were the busiest roads in the country, lined all the way to the coast with grog shops and inns, each one with a resident whore on 24-hour duty. As its population grew, Southwark shipped in slave girls from all over the Empire to keep its brothels staffed. Evidence of busy landing docks and slave markets from this period has been found all along the Thames' north bank opposite Southwark at sites such as Queenhithe, the Tower and Billingsgate. (2)

A steady supply of new girls was essential to replace the many prostitutes who Southwark simply worked to death. "Once sold, these slaves had no rights whatsoever," Burford says. "Each one would spend the rest of her life on her back, day and night, submitting to every sexual vagary forced upon her by exigent men, until she died. If she were not lucky enough to be bought by some admirer for his personal pleasures, she would die of exhaustion or disease by the age of 30."

Disease was a problem for the Roman army too, if only because it didn't want its men too clap-ridden to fight. In an age where condoms and penicillin were still centuries away, however, there was nothing much their commanders could do to combat venereal disease but order every soldier to give his genitals a good scrub every now and again. The only other precaution available was to ensure that any girl who was obviously diseased be banned from further whoring and that responsibility fell to a band of civic officials called the aediles.

Every Roman city had a team of these men, who were charged with keeping a register of all the town's licensed prostitutes. They financed this operation by collecting a licence fee and taxes from every girl registered and from every licensed brothel-keeper too. Once she'd got a licence, the girl could choose a name to work under, tell the aedile what type of clients she planned to serve and then hang up a shingle outside displaying her prices. The licence gave her a measure of protection under Roman law, but in return she had to succumb to the aedile's regular health inspections and agree never to dress in a way which concealed her profession. Although local pimps and procurers were free to become Roman citizens, that privilege was not extended to the girls themselves. (3)

Southwark's busy brothels soon produced a satellite trade of rough-arse taverns, sleazy gambling joints and every other form of low-life entertainment. These, in turn, pulled petty thieves, gangsters, killers and conmen to the area, partly for the opportunities it offered them and partly because they felt safer there than in respectable Londinium itself. Runaway slaves and other fugitives flocked to Southwark too. "The very nature of the surrounding land - marshy, dank and uninhabited - made it a natural hiding place and refuge," Burford writes. "It was regarded as part of the pomerium of London. This was a swathe of 'no man's land' outside the walls of Roman cities, which was deliberately left clear so that approaching enemies could quickly be spotted and dealt with."

In placing their brothels outside the city wall, with a river segregating them from more respectable neighbourhoods, the Romans were following a familiar pattern from home. Rome's own red light district, the Trastavere, was sited just across the Tiber from the city itself and named to reflect precisely that fact: Trastavere translates as "on the other side of the Tiber".

There were other amusements on offer in Southwark too - perhaps including an arena for the Roman games. Archaeologists have found evidence of a female gladiator's funeral feast in what's now Great Dover Street and the grave goods buried with this woman suggest she was a worshipper of Isis. Another team of archaeologists found a Roman jug inscribed "London, at the Temple of Isis" in the Thames river bed near what's now Southwark Cathedral, which Burford believes was used in the regular "days of drinking" her worship required. Isis cults persisted in England until 350AD and these two finds suggest she was widely worshipped in Roman Southwark. (4)

And so, it seems, was her son Horus, who the Romans called Harpocrates. A small silver statue of this Egypto-Roman god, often depicted with a penis twice the height of his body, was fished out of the Thames near the Southwark end of London Bridge in 1825. Brothels throughout the Roman Empire displayed his picture as a means of spurring on the clients. Just as Isis worship encouraged regular bouts of heavy drinking, Harpocrates' followers were expected to indulge in the wildest displays of sexual licence. All the relics I've mentioned here date from the first or second centuries AD, long before Christianity gained any foothold in Britain. The pantheistic Romans had many gods to choose from and Southwark's selection of Isis and Harpocrates tells us the locals have always put drinking and sex very high on their own list of priorities. (5)

By 150AD, the Romans' army base had moved to a new home in London's northwest suburbs, leaving Southwark's brothels to serve a civilian clientele instead. Burford describes their new customers as "freedmen, petty traders, travellers, lower officials, even slaves - and, of course, criminal elements using whorehouses for nefarious purposes."

Rome's soldiers had dominated Southwark for little more than a century, but even in that short time, they laid down the pattern of everything we'd see in the borough for the next two millennia: licensed brothels, frantic commerce, boozy travellers, disease, low-life entertainment and a dual status as both London's sanctuary and its dumping ground. All these elements will surface again and again as we proceed through Southwark's history, and all their seeds were planted by Roman hands.

<<<Introduction  –  Contents   –  Next Chapter>>>

All contents © Paul Slade 2013 unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.

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Showbox not working

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Now you only have to sit back, relax and revel in this fun area, make some popcorn and have a nice viewing experience. Note: It is fantastic to be aware that the above steps are exclusively for downloading Showbox APK for devices that use Android. There's a different procedure to download and install on a PC. Frequently Asked Questions About Showbox Like many people who get their hands on a new app, you will likely have a few questions about Showbox APK particularly whenever you're just getting started. So whether it is regarding payment, ads or any errors which you may experience, or even the types of movies and shows you are able to watch, we have the answers to your most pressing questions directly below. Q: Do I need to pay to see all the movies and TV shows on Showbox APK? A: Absolutely not, you may flow anything on Showbox at no cost. No need to pay a penny. Q: Why Is Showbox available to get in Google Play or the App Store? A: No, you won't be able to download Showbox from Google Play or even the App Store. Q: Why is Showbox secure to see in my device? A: Yes, you can utilize Showbox on your phone, tablet computer and PC computer. Q: Is Showbox lawful? A: No, Showbox isn't legal and this is the reason you wont find from the Google Play for obtain. Q: I discovered that a person can encounter legal trouble because of using Showbox. Is this true? A: While Showbox is very popular all around the world, the truth is that Showbox does not own the rights to any of the movies and TV shows, and that's where it could get tricky. Recently, Hollywood studios have been moving after Showbox and a few of its users so try to be cautious. Q: How does Showbox operate? A: Showbox utilizes both peer-to-peer and non peer-to-peer tools that enables users download or stream movies and TV shows. It uses torrent technology which distributes files and information over the Internet. Q: What is the caliber of Showbox? A: When it comes to watching movies and TV shows via the Showbox app, users can pick out of 360p, 480p or 720p. It's essential to note that what you pick really is dependent upon the link and quality of your Internet services. Q: What do I do when I get an"Error" message when attempting to Install Showbox APK? A: Since Showbox is not accessible Google play, you need to remember that you can not ask for help when having an annoying Error message. The kinds of errors that you encounter can change and might include"Video Not Available""Server DownTown,""Showbox can't Play That Video," among others. Regardless of the problem, you would like to deal with problem as quickly as possible. To find a solution, consider a VPN. Search for the VPN of your choice. Open the host and connect into your US server. Ultimately, under Settings, Search for Programs, subsequently Showbox and Storage. Beneath the Storage segment, be sure to clear the Cache. Restart the Showbox app and check to find out whether you're still experiencing some problems with streaming. Q: Will my movie streaming ever be disrupted when using Showbox? A: Sometimes, there were instances when Showbox stops the movie in the center of seeing. Technical problems can occur in situations such as when you drop connection to the world wide web. In this case, you may have to reinstall Showbox APK to solve the issue and also clear the Cache. Q: Are there annoying advertisements that will look while streaming movie on Showbox? A: No, you won't encounter any ads when utilizing Showbox APK. Q: So what can I watch on Showbox APK? A: A great deal. Whether you prefer a comedy, classic older movies, sci-fi, TV shows and more. You'll never have an issue finding something to stream. Q: Does Showbox have a subtitle feature? A: Even though you are in a position to have subtitles on the video you're streaming, Showbox itself doesn't have a subtitle attribute. Instead, you are going to need to obtain a subtitle program from a third party. Q: Can it be possible to store any one of my selections out of Showbox offline? All you need to do is choose the Save Offline choice and then the selected movie or TV show will be automatically added into the section for Offline viewing. Q: What if I do if is says that the Showbox app is out of date? A: It is highly recommended that you get the update for your Showbox app so you can get the most current features and names. Do not skip upgrading the app if it compels you to do so, otherwise it could endanger your movie and TV show viewing experience. Q: What if my movie show doesn't play full screen? A: When this happens, visit the section called Quality Control, then uncheck the box for"Use Internal Player." Doing this solves the troublesome bugs and fixes any playback problems you might have. Now you have a better comprehension of all the advantages, advantages and drawbacks of the Showbox APK, are you really excited to put in it and revel in streaming your favourite movies and TV shows? In case the answer is yes, what do you plan on streaming ?