#old person voice: IN MY DAY YOU JUST PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE ONCE

[pfenniged]

So just that we’re all aware, Photoshop is officially sniffing cocaine and now charging 40 bucks a month for a month-to-month subscription-

#personal #what the actual hell #no wonder people are switching to online editing services like canva photoshop #this is no longer my job I can no longer justify it #old person voice: IN MY DAY YOU JUST PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE ONCE

[alarawriting]

52 Project #26: Marc Snowfrolic and the Quest for Biscuits

Look at him. Isn’t he the most dumbass-looking wolf ever? I love him. He’s the perfect faceclaim for Marc Snowfrolic.

I published part of this about 3 years ago. Finally done!

***

Marc Snowfrolic wanted biscuits.

It was really odd for him to want biscuits at a time like this. Also, very inconvenient, because he was a wolf, and couldn’t bake his own biscuits like he could have if this had been last Thursday. Not that he actually knew how to bake biscuits, but on Thursday he could have read a recipe book, and used his bipedal stance to stand at a kitchen counter and opposable thumbs to use tools and pour ingredients and put cookware into the oven and take it out, with appropriate oven mitts on. Today, and for most of the rest of the month, he couldn’t do any of those things, because he was a wolf.

If anyone in the town of Rema had been able to bake biscuits right now, Marc could have gone to that person and made his desires clear. He could read the Bisquick logo even though he was a wolf. There wasn’t any in his own pantry, but he was sure someone in town had some, and had some guesses as to who. And if, say, Heather Digswell or old lady Janice Eyehowler had some Bisquick in their pantry, he could go to their houses, knock on the door, walk into their kitchen when they let him in, go grab the Bisquick out of the pantry with his teeth, bring it to them, and point to the picture of biscuits on the back, and they’d get the idea. They’d be happy to make him some biscuits. If only they weren’t wolves too, right now.

Normally, he didn’t want biscuits when he was a wolf. Bread products were not usually the favored cuisine of wolves. He liked steak, and venison, and chicken, and elk, and pork, and mutton, and swordfish, not that he got much swordfish because Rema wasn’t particularly near any oceans but when he and his pals pooled their money and special-ordered it with 2 day delivery so they’d get it while they were still human, it was still delicious a few days later when they were wolves. About the only kind of meat he didn’t like when he was a wolf were crustaceans, because it was just too damn hard for a wolf to get the good meat out of a crab, or peel a shrimp, and honestly if he wanted to eat bugs there were plenty in Rema just waiting to be hunted. But today, he was really jonesing for a biscuit.

He trotted over to Ken Mayor’s house. The wolves didn’t generally spend a lot of time indoors, but Ken was an exception. Inside, the older wolf had a large flat-screen television, and a gigantic keyboard that he was typing on. Marc could almost make out the words on the television, but trying made his head hurt. He could see well enough to tell that Ken was writing an email, though.

Originally, the town of Rema had been fully self-sufficient. Wolves didn’t need much in the way of shelter or clothing and were quite capable of finding their own food. What little they couldn’t supply for themselves, they traded for with the humans, offering meat and pelts in exchange for things like nails to make the houses they built for their human days sturdier. But once the humans invented the automobile, it had been only a matter of time before they brought a road to Rema. And with roads had come salesmen, and more exposure to the modern conveniences the humans loved, which the people of Rema found pleasant for themselves on human days as well. Freezers, for example. Freezers were great, but they needed electricity, and both the freezer itself and the electricity that ran it needed to be paid for. Then there was the government, demanding that everyone in Rema pay taxes. And so forth.

Pelts and meat weren’t going to pay for all of that. But the citizens of Rema could get to places in the mountains that the humans couldn’t, and never had been. They mined for gold in places the humans had never managed to mine out. Wolves could dig, and humans could put up structures that would keep wolves safe while they did it. Everyone in Rema did shifts at the gold mine, and of course, they supplemented their income with their sales of meat and pelts from their hunts. All of the funds that anyone in the town owned were pooled to make them easier to manage. Wolves were not good at math.

Ken Mayor was the mayor, and had been the mayor for twenty years, not because he was a big or powerful wolf – he was actually smallish, and rather quiet. But he had a remarkable talent. He could read, do math, and, on a sufficiently large keyboard, even type, in wolf form. Back in the old days he’d used a typewriter, carefully, and sent a lot of letters, but he’d taken to this new Internet thing like a duck to water. He managed the town’s funds, paid the electric bills and things like that, and kept in contact with government officials via email to make sure they left Rema alone, or that if they had to come here they only came on human days. He had a teletype phone, like deaf humans used, but he’d made some kind of arrangements with the company that provided the service to make it clear to them that he was mute rather than deaf, because the wolves could understand human speech just fine even though they couldn’t speak it. Lately he was all excited about some kind of new software that would give him a cartoon human avatar when he talked to humans on the phone that ran over his computer, with a voice program that actually sounded human when he typed sentences into it. Mostly.

In the language the people of Rema used when they were wolves, Marc whined at Ken. “I really want some biscuits. Can I have money to go to a bakery and buy biscuits?”

Ken looked at Marc disbelievingly. “First of all, town’s thirty miles away. It’ll take you over an hour to get there if you run all the way, longer if you walk. Secondly, you can’t walk into a bakery and ask them for biscuits. Thirdly, if you act too smart, humans might get suspicious.”

“But I really, really want biscuits. Come on, Mayor.”

Ken growled. “Snowfrolic, you’re being an idiot. Which isn’t unusual for you, but you usually manage to keep your idiocy within a reasonable range. This is a totally ridiculous request. You understand that, right?”

“Absolutely,” Marc assured him. “I am being a grade A idiot here. But you can’t imagine how badly I want those biscuits. I will get in a car and drive to town if I have to.”

“How?” Ken asked flatly.

Marc stood up on his hind legs. He was a large wolf, six and a half feet long, so on his hind legs he was easily taller than most humans. “Trust me, I can reach the pedals and still see over the dash. And if I put my paws through the holes in the steering wheel, it’s not hard to steer the thing.”

Ken facepawed. “You’ve tried it.”

“Why do you think I have a 4 by 4? The snow in the mountains sticks around a lot longer, but you can’t bring warm towels to dry off in and those little hand warmer things for your paws and a nice blanket for sleeping in if you just run up the mountain.” His wolf name might be Snowfrolic for good reason, but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate human conveniences for warming up after a good long day of playing in the snow.

“How have you never been pulled over?”

Marc shrugged. “I drive at night and I follow the speed limits. Not a lot of human cops around here anyway.”

“And if I don’t give you the money to go to town and buy biscuits, which you can’t do because no one will sell anything to a wolf, how does the fact that you’re willing to drive your car to town change matters?”

Marc grinned triumphantly. “Because no one will ever suspect a wolf of taking a getaway vehicle! So I’ll just steal the biscuits, and then drive off.”

Ken face-pawed again. It was a very human gesture; most of the people of Rema wouldn’t use it in wolf form. There were always rumors that Ken’s father was actually human, not one of the men of Rema. Marc wasn’t sure he bought it; half-human children were supposed to be human most of the time and wolf only on the change-days. But Ken making human gestures when no one else in Rema did while in wolf form was kind of hard to explain otherwise. Also, there was that whole reading and typing and doing math thing.

“Have you considered asking Jeff Leclair or Mandy Gruenwald or someone like them to bake you some biscuits?”

Marc had rather forgotten that there were, in fact, humans in Rema; human spouses were problematic in the sense that they produced kids who were wolf when Remans were human and vice versa, but they were very important for teaching Reman children how to talk like humans. Remans didn’t start being wolves most of the time until they hit puberty.

He whined a bit and pawed the floor, head down with embarrassment. “I don’t want to ask them for favors. Bob Pigeonchaser isn’t in town this week and everyone else with thumbs is someone’s wife or husband, and, well, you know…”

Remans were notoriously territorial. This often translated to jealousy. Saying hi to someone’s human spouse or inviting them over for barbeque on human days was one thing, but asking them to bake you biscuits was entirely too intimate a favor to ask. And right now, the only half-human in town, Bob Pigeonchaser, was out of town, because he was in human form when it wasn’t a full moon and he could drive wherever he wanted and buy his own biscuits.

“So you’re insisting that you have to go buy some?” Ken sighed. Wolves were not supposed to sigh; a huff, a snort, those were wolf expressions, but not a sigh. Marc didn’t mention this; Ken was oversensitive about his overly human behaviors. “I am going to have to go with you to keep you out of trouble, aren’t I?”

Marc growled slightly. “I’m not sharing my biscuits, dog. You can buy your own.”

“I’m a wolf. I don’t eat biscuits. Maybe you’d do well to remember that you are also a wolf. Wolves don’t eat biscuits. Or drive cars.”

“I’m a wolf and I drive a car, so why can’t I be a wolf who wants a biscuit? I mean, it’s not every day. I’m just really jonesing for one right now. One of those soft chewy ones with a ton of butter inside. Or maybe crisp and flaky. Man, I’m torn. No point in wasting honey butter on a wolf tongue but oh, man, can you imagine what a biscuit would taste like with bacon inside?”

“This is ridiculous but your mother would kill me if I let you run off in a car, and steal biscuits, and get your fool self thrown in a pound or shot by Animal Control or some overzealous human with a gun. So I guess I’m going with you.”

“As long as you don’t eat my biscuits, we’re cool.”

***

The thought occurred to Marc later that maybe, what worked really well in the dead of night when he was driving up a mountain nowhere near human habitation, just possibly, could have been expected to not work nearly so well in broad daylight as he drove toward a town full of people.

“Goddammit, Snowfrolic, that’s a cop! You just blew past a cop at 85 miles an hour!”

“Lots of people go 85 miles an hour around here,” Marc pointed out.

“Yes, but none of them are wolves. And I thought you said you drive the speed limit!”

“I really want that biscuit.” Marc kept his eyes on the road, not glancing back at the blue and dark yellow lights strobing on the car behind him. (He knew perfectly well that the dark yellow light was actually red, because when he was human he could see the color red, but to his wolf eyes it just looked kind of brownish.) “Anyway, he probably didn’t even see I was a wolf. He just wanted to make quota.”

“Yeah, well, he’s gonna see you’re a wolf now.”

“He’s gotta catch me first!” Marc sped up. He’d never tried to push the SUV past 100 mph. Maybe today was the day to do that.

“What? No! What the fuck are you doing? You can’t outrun cops!”

“How much do you wanna bet?”

“I don’t want to bet! They’ll call for backup and they’ll be out here with guns!”

“They won’t have silver bullets, though, I bet.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t ruin your car and hurt like fuck!”

The cop was gaining on Marc. This was actually exciting. Like a hunt, although he was the one being hunted, which made it slightly less fun. It would be much more entertaining to be the one chasing the cop car.

Hmm. That was a thought.

“Marc, for gods’ sakes, slow the fuck down and pull over! We can both jump in the back seat and pretend the driver bailed on us.”

“Naah, I’ve got an idea that’s more fun.”

“I do not like the sound of that.”

Marc swerved around a rocky outcropping and brought the car to a screeching halt in the truck pull-off right on the other side. The cop car zoomed past, unable to stop or pull off in time.

“He’s gonna turn around and come back. You’ve pissed him off. Just watch.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m counting on it.”

Marc opened the car door, awkwardly – he always hated this part. Getting his paw under the lever to pull it and open the door was never fun; wolf forelegs just didn’t bend the right way. The door swung open and he half-tumbled out, rolled about in the dirt a bit, used his back legs to close the door, and then trotted around to the other side of the car, where he lay down in the dirt of the pull-off and watched from under the car.

The cop car, predictably, came back. Police shoes, attached to police uniform pants, approached the car. “Get out of the vehicle with your hands up!” the officer yelled.

This was Marc’s cue. He popped up on the other side of the hood and barked.

And then immediately ducked back under the car as the cop unloaded a weapon at him, human face dead white and smelling of terror. None of the bullets hit him, but a few hit the hood of the car. Dammit. Ken was right, as usual. The cop really had just fucked up Marc’s car by shooting at it.

This wasn’t fun anymore. Marc growled. He really liked this car.

Through the rolled down window, Ken barked at him. “Don’t do anything stupid!”

“Yeah, no, gotta take a hard pass on that,” Marc said, and leapt onto the hood. The cop screamed and backed up, trying to aim his gun, but in the time it took him to do that, Marc was already jumping onto him, knocking him to the ground and sending the gun flying. He shrieked.

Marc licked his face.

“No, no, get away from me, get – what the fuck?” The cop seemed to realize that this was not going the way he expected around the third slobbering lick. “What the – shit, are you licking me?”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Marc said, but since it was in wolf language, he knew all the cop would hear was whining and a bit of a growl.

“Marc. Stop torturing the poor guy. Knock it off.”

“He ruined my car! Shot a hole through the engine block! You see all that steam? There’s no way I’m driving this home!” Marc growled at the cop, who was trying to push him off, and then licked him a few more times for good measure. He strongly considered pissing on the cop, but Ken would have his head. “I can’t even get it fixed for most of a month – the full moon’s, like, three weeks off or something. And it’s gonna rain, and the rain will get in the bullet holes, and the whole damn engine will rust.”

“This is why I told you not to provoke the cops,” Ken said unhelpfully.

He got out of the car, tongue lolling, and trotted over to the cop’s gun. “Good doggie,” the cop whimpered. “Good doggies. Good, good doggies. Stay. Stay.”

Ken did not stay. He picked up the gun with his mouth, trotted over to where there was a scenic overlook down the side of the mountain, and dropped the gun over the cliff.

“Fuck!” The cop pushed Marc off, with difficulty, and struggled to his feet. “Goddamn it, dog, did you just – you did. You dropped my gun off the side of the mountain.”

Ken barked at him.

“Okay! Okay! Good doggies! I’m just… gonna take down this plate number—”

Marc growled and crouched, as if to leap. The cop hastily dropped his pad. “Okay, okay, I get it. I’m going. Someone trained you guys to hate the police. I’m just going to back away and get back in my car and call for backup and get Animal Control or something. A couple of officers with guns.”

Marc leapt and knocked him down again, growling and barking. The cop screamed. While Marc had him pinned, Ken trotted over to the cop car. “The things you make me do.” He pulled open the door to the cop car, which was unlocked, with his teeth, and climbed in. The cop struggled as Marc licked him some more.

Ken came back with a good portion of the cop’s radio in his teeth. He dropped it on the ground next to the officer. “Oh what the fuck,” the cop mumbled, head turned toward Ken, staring at the ruins of his radio. “Someone really went all out to train you guys.”

“We need to get out of here,” Ken said. “If he flags down another human who has a cell phone, he can still contact his backup. We’re gonna be doing the rest of this on paws.”

“Yeah. Shit. We only had like ten miles to go.”

“Well, if we run all out, we can get to town in about 20 minutes.” Wolves could run thirty miles an hour, and could keep it up for around 20 minutes, but Marc was impressed that Ken had been able to do the math to figure out that meant they could run the rest of the way to town. He couldn’t quite wrap his wolf head around the equations Ken must have done to calculate that.

“We’ll be wiped when we get there, though. Dammit. I loved that car.”

“This was why you shouldn’t have taunted the cop.”

“Yeah yeah. Rub it in, why don’t you.”

***

They were both panting hard by the time they reached town. Presumably it had been 20 minutes. Marc didn’t actually quite know what a minute was when he was a wolf. He knew it was a measure of time, but he couldn’t really keep track of how long it was.

“Damn, I’m tired. And my paws are killing me. I could use some water. Probably even more than the biscuit.”

Ken just whined, and folded his legs, flopping down on the side of the road. As rural mountain road turned into smalltown America, the road had acquired a sidewalk, but only on one side. Since humans tended to be intimidated by wolves, they were on the side that didn’t have one.

“Oh, come on, Mayor, you can’t be that wiped out.”

“I’m dead. Leave me. Save yourself,” Ken mumbled.

“Come on.” Marc nosed Ken in the ribs, and when that failed to produce a reaction, started licking him in the wrong direction, messing up his fur. “Let’s find some water. There’s a fountain in the middle of town.”

“Knock it off!” Ken growled, the discomfort of having his fur ruffled in the wrong direction finally seeming to overcome his exhaustion.

“I’ll stop when you get up.”

“I will bite you,” Ken said, demonstrating by snapping at Marc.

“No, you won’t. You’re Mr. Civilization and everything. Now let’s—”

“PUPPY!”

Marc and Ken both swiveled their heads to see what looked like a six year old girl running across the street toward them. This was a problem both because there was traffic on the road, and because appearing to be a dangerous animal anywhere near a human child was usually a bad idea. “Oh, crap,” Marc said.

He could hear a car vrooming toward the girl, around the bend. Marc leapt, grabbed the girl’s T-shirt with his teeth as she screamed, and pulled her over to the sidewalk where she’d come from just as the car zoomed past where they had just been.

Then he licked her, because that was what his wolf instincts told him to do with a child who’d had a scare.

“Oh – a car!” It seemed to be dawning on the girl that she could have been hit by that car. “Puppy! You saved me!” She threw her arms around Marc and hugged him.

“No problem, kid,” Marc mumbled, knowing she couldn’t understand him.

“Do you want to come home with me? Do you have people? Mom and Dad said that dogs who don’t have people are scary and I shouldn’t play with them but I don’t think so! You’re such a cute puppy and you saved me! I bet you’re nice!”

“I’m not a puppy,” Marc growled, hoping to intimidate the child into letting him go. It didn’t work.

“You’re so soft!”

Ken limped across the road, apparently having recovered from his temporary bout of death. “Snowfrolic, you need to lose that kid. If a human sees a six-year-old hugging a giant unleashed dog with no owner around – let alone if they recognize you as a wolf—”

“I know, I know! But I haven’t got thumbs, so how do I pry her loose?”

“Another puppy!” the girl yelled. “I wanna take you guys home with me! Do you have owners? Are you lost?”

Ken flopped down at the girl’s feet, behind her, and whined. “Oh, poor puppy!” The girl released Marc and knelt down to pet Ken, who looked absolutely miserable.

“Okay, Snowfrolic, I got her off you,” Ken said. “Let’s go.”

And then he exploded into motion, racing away from the girl, down the sidewalk. Marc followed.

“No! Puppies! Don’t run away! I want to play with you!”

The girl chased after them. The only reason they didn’t outdistance her instantly was that both of them had badly aching paws, both of them were in desperate need of water, and neither of them were city people. Rema was a small town, and very focused on integrating into nature; the few storefronts and public buildings that existed all had luxurious wild patches of green all around them, which the wolves kept trimmed with their teeth. This was a lot more like a small city, with sidewalk on this side of the road taking up all of what should have been green space, only occasional patches set aside to surround a random small tree. It was disorienting.

“We should cross the street again,” Ken panted. “There’s green over there, and trees we can lose her in.”

“Yeah, but that isn’t gonna be the direction of biscuits, now is it?” Marc replied, and put on a burst of speed, letting the cries of “Come back, puppies!” recede into the distance as he turned a corner and raced deeper into town.

“Slow down! I’m an old man, my heart’s gonna burst trying to keep up with you!”

“You’re not that old, and besides, you’re the one who said we had to lose the kid!”

“She’s six! We don’t have to run all the way to California to escape her!”

“Mayor, my biscuits aren’t gonna eat themselves! Gotta find a bakery!”

“Don’t you—” pant pant “—know where—” pant pant “—a bakery is?”

“No, why would I know that? I don’t live around here, I just come here to buy snow gear!”

“Did—” pant pant pant “—it—” pant pant pant “—not—” pant pant ‘’—occur to—” pant pant pant “—you—” pant pant pant pant  “--to check—” many pants “—a map—” so many pants Marc thought that was the end of the sentence “—before we—” a somewhat smaller amount of pants than the last time “—left?”

“No, why would I do that? I can’t read maps, I’m a wolf. I figured I’d just get into town and then walk around until I smell biscuits.”

“I can—” a lot of pants “—read a map—” many pants “—you idiot!”

“Then how come you don’t know where a bakery is?”

If Ken wanted to make a reply to this, he didn’t seem to be able to, with how hard he was panting.

It occurred to Marc that maybe he was pushing the old man a little hard. Werewolves had normal human life spans, so Ken, in his mid-forties, wasn’t all that old, and their regenerative powers made them all healthier and stronger than an equivalent human or wolf at the same stage of life. But Ken’s job as the Mayor made him very sedentary, spending most of his life writing emails and doing math and other not-very-wolflike things instead of healthy and fun stuff like running around town or snow sports or hunting his own food. Marc wasn’t actually sure Ken knew how to hunt. Biologically he was a wolf, but he was so human he might as well be a dog. So he was probably really out of shape in comparison to Marc.

Marc started to slow down, and then a random human man pointed at the two of them and yelled, “Jesus Christ, those are wolves! Someone call Animal Control!”

Ken put on a burst of speed that impressed Marc – he hadn’t known the old man had it in him—and raced past Marc, turning down an alley. Marc followed as Ken weaved through a network of tiny alleys and parking lots and small streets barely wide enough for a car, figuring the older wolf knew where he was going, until finally Ken stopped, less panting than gasping. There was a garbage can lid full of rainwater, but Marc didn’t get a chance to drink any of it because Ken picked it up with his paws and poured the whole thing down his throat rather than lapping it like a sensible wolf.

“Hey! I wanted some of that!”

“Find your own,” Ken panted.

Marc poked his head out of the alley. They were now well into the city proper. “I don’t see anywhere I can get any water,” he complained. “Where are we?”

“Yeah. Good question.” Ken trotted over to the edge of the alleyway and took a look.

“You mean… you don’t know?”

“Why would I know? I don’t live here either, and I didn’t have time to check a map before you dragged me on this quest.”

“Hey, you insisted on coming with me! And I thought you had someplace in mind, you seemed to be running somewhere. What’s with all the twists and turns if you didn’t know where you were going?”

Ken facepawed. “I was trying to lose the kid, you idiot. And then I was trying to lose the humans who wanted to call Animal Control.”

“Uh, they weren’t gonna follow some strange wolves into an alley, and it’s not like Animal Control can teleport. We’d have had time if we’d just strolled, we didn’t have to run like that.” Marc sniffed the air. “I don’t smell biscuits. Or water, either. Dammit.”

“If there’s rainwater in a garbage can lid, there’s probably rainwater in something else as well,” Ken said. He went back into the alley, down one of the ones they came from, and found another garbage lid full of rainwater, and also a random storage bin. “If you like your water with some flavor…”

Werewolves didn’t worry about getting sick. Marc drank the water eagerly despite the presence of mosquito larvae in it. Extra protein!

“I’m guessing we’re more likely to find bakeries downtown, in the touristy areas,” Ken said. “There’s likely to be some in out-of-the-way places near residential neighborhoods, as well, but we’ll never find those. Whereas downtown there might be some bakeries for the day trippers. Huh. Does Panera Bread make biscuits? I can’t remember.”

The last time Marc had been in a Panera Bread, he had not been obsessed with biscuits, and so he had not bothered to observe if they had biscuits or not. “Dunno, but you know where does? Fried chicken places. So it doesn’t even have to be a bakery. We could go to a fried chicken place.”

“Well, they’re more likely to be downtown, too.”

Down at the end of the block, Marc could see the kind of enclosure that usually signified a bus stop. “My paws are killing me. I’m gonna go take the bus downtown.”

“…what? You can’t do that! Animals don’t ride buses! And do you even know if that bus goes downtown?”

“Eh, I’m guessing it probably does.” Marc hadn’t looked at a map, specifically, but he’d seen enough maps of the area in his lifetime to know that the direction the traffic on this side of the street was going in was the direction of downtown. Unless the bus veered off and did something weird, it pretty much had to go through downtown.

There was one person at the bus stop, a young woman wearing headphones. She turned as Marc approached, and whistled. “Wow. You are a big doggie. Got an owner around here?”

Marc wagged his tail and panted in a way he knew from experience looked to humans as if he was smiling. “Aw. Such a cutie. I’d pet you, but I don’t know if you’re friendly if I get up close or not.”

Still wagging and panting, Marc walked closer to the woman, who watched him warily, and then lay down right near her feet. He wasn’t going to miss out on getting some pets.

“Snowfrolic, what the hell are you doing?” Ken called from the alley.

Marc didn’t answer. His language sounded to humans like barking, and barking could startle or upset humans. Instead, he looked up at the human woman, still panting and wagging, with his eyes open as wide as he could get them.

“You’re very tame. I wonder if you were a service animal at some point,” the woman said, and reached down to his head, slowly and carefully. “You wanna sniff my hand?” Marc didn’t really, he wanted pets, but he obligingly sniffed her hand while still panting and wagging. Having gotten that introductory formality out of the way, the woman scritched his head, including behind his ears. Ah, bliss.

“Snowfrolic! What are you… no, never mind. I was going to ask what you were thinking, but it’s obvious that you weren’t,” Ken snarked.

“Wow. Another one of you. You guys look a lot alike; are you related?”

“Does she expect us to be able to answer her?” Marc asked quietly, which sounded to human ears more like a whine than a bark.

“You’re the one who decided it was a good idea to get petted by a human.”

The bus arrived. The young woman stood up. “Well, doggos, my bus is here, so I have to leave you now,” she said. The bus stopped, the door slid open, and the woman mounted the steps.

Marc followed right behind her.

“You can’t have your dogs on the bus unless they’re service animals,” the bus driver said.

“Uh… that’s not my dog. He was just waiting at the bus stop with me. I have no idea why he’s trying to get on the bus.”

“Lady, you’re not allowed to have a dog on the bus!”

“He’s not my dog!”

Marc squeezed under the woman, making her yelp as he slid between her legs and up the stairs, where he jumped onto an empty seat and started wagging and panting.

“Lady, if you don’t get the dog off the bus—”

“How am I supposed to do that? He has no collar and he’s not my dog. Do you really think he’s gonna – oof!” This was said as Ken squeezed past her, getting onto the bus as well. He sat down near Marc, looking downright morose. “Oh, shit, there’s two of them.”

“Just let the woman on the bus!” a person in the back yelled.

“Yeah, the dogs aren’t hurting anyone!”

“She said they weren’t her dogs!”

“They’re service dogs! I can tell!”

“Maybe someone called their service dogs on the phone and asked them to ride the bus to where they are!”

“That’s ridiculous, a dog can’t do that!”

“Sure it can! Dogs are amazing!”

“Uh, people, I think those are wolves…”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the driver said. “All right. Fine. Pay your fare and get on. But if those dogs get off at the same stop as you, I’m having you banned from the bus system.”

“Whatever,” the woman said angrily, mounting the stairs. She ostentatiously went all the way to the back of the bus, head held high, not even looking at Marc and Ken. As she passed them, she muttered, “Stupid dogs.”

“Uh, I kinda think we just proved we’re really smart,” Marc whispered to Ken in a tiny, quiet whine.

“I think we just proved no such thing,” Ken responded, a little too loudly, and it came out as a bit of a bark.

“Oh, look at them! It’s like they’re talking to each other!” an old lady chortled.

Ken’s ears flattened back. Marc recognized the sign of a wolf who was scared that his secret identity as a werewolf might be endangered, and shut up.

The bus drove onward on its route. Sometimes, when the bus stopped, people who had to go past Marc and Ken to get to the door shrank away from them, being elaborately careful not to go too near the “dogs”. Some unwisely petted them or even scritched them, and one man rubbed Marc’s cheeks. Marc tolerated it. Snapping at any of these humans was a great way to turn all the humans against them and get thrown off the bus, or handed over to Animal Control.

As soon as the buildings around them looked tall enough, and the pedestrians thick enough, to be a downtown area, Marc pressed the button with his entire muzzle, when just his nose didn’t do the job. “Did you see that?” someone said. “He hit the stop button!”

“Wow, those dogs are well trained!”

“They’re wolves…” the man who’d originally pointed out that they were wolves sighed.

The bus stopped, the doors opened, and Marc trotted down the stairs and out onto the street, followed by Ken. “Do you have any idea where we are?” Ken asked.

“Gimme a moment,” Marc said, watching the bus. The young lady from the bus stop did not get off with them. Good. This wasn’t her stop, so she wasn’t going to be forbidden to ride the bus. As the bus drove off, he turned back to Ken. “No idea, but I bet there’s a bakery around here somewhere! Or at least a fried chicken place.”

He started strolling down the street, drawing numerous comments. “Marc. We need to hide in an alley. People on the street around here are figuring out that we’re wolves.”

“How’m I gonna sniff out biscuits if we spend all our time in alleys?”

“How’re we going to find your biscuits if we have to run from the cops?”

Marc loped forward, ignoring how humans all around him yelled with startlement, or shrank back against buildings, or stared. He was definitely smelling food. Not biscuits, but where there was the scent of food, there might be restaurants, and where there were restaurants, there might be biscuits. “I’ve got a scent. I’m gonna track it.”

“Oh shit,” Ken said. “I don’t think you’re gonna.”

Marc turned his head to where Ken was staring, and saw a large white cargo van stopping in the middle of the street, its hazards on. The side door slid open and the passenger door banged open, and two men in white with rifles in their hands jumped out.

“We need to run!”

“Why? You know getting shot won’t kill us. You think they’ve got silver bullets?”

“Snowfrolic! Just move!”

Ken ran for the alley. After a moment, Marc followed him – until a bright stinging pain exploded in his right rear haunch. “Motherfucker!” he howled. “They shot me!”

“I told you!” Ken glanced at the wound. “Shit, that’s a tranq. They’ve got tranq guns! Move it!”

“Do those work on us?” Marc asked uncertainly, feeling wobbly. His leg hurt, and it wasn’t regenerating, because the tranq dart wasn’t out of the leg yet, but he had to run after Ken or they’d shoot him again.

“If they hit us with enough of them, yeah.” Ken skidded around a corner. As soon as Marc followed, Ken yanked the dart out of him with his teeth. “They’re following us. Move it!”

This time Marc didn’t argue. He and Ken wove in and out of alleys, pursued by the men with tranq guns, until they finally came upon a dead end – an alley that ended in a tall wire fence with brown plastic slats inserted into it to prevent anyone from seeing through it.

“They’re cornered! Stay back, watch out for them to charge!”

Ken and Marc, whose leg had healed, looked at each other. They both nodded. And then they turned toward the fence and used their werewolf strength to leap over it… landing in a dumpster on the other side.

“Shit! They jumped the fence!”

“Do we climb it?”

“Too slow! Go around, go around! Cut them off!”

Something under him smelled good. Marc started to pull at one of the black garbage bags he was sprawled out on.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… Snowfrolic. Biscuits?”

Oh yeah! Marc had been so enticed by the smell of the garbage, he’d almost forgotten his mission for a moment. “Right! Let’s get out of here!”

They jumped out of the dumpster and ran straight out of the alley they were in – into one of the guys with the tranq guns. “Shit!” Ken spun around and ran the other way, Marc following. Two tranq darts sailed after them, but didn’t hit.

There was a parking lot full of small trucks, folding tables, and tents. The smell of a variety of produce, and also, some scented soaps and candles, struck Marc’s nose. “Is that a farmer’s market?” he howled at Ken, and didn’t wait for an answer – he split off and ran into the parking lot, heading straight for a couple of hipsters holding hands. They shrieked and let go of each other to let Marc go racing through.

“Okay, great! The Animal Control guys can’t shoot at us if they’re risking hitting humans!” Ken followed Marc. More screaming ensued. The piercing shrieks of children, the high-powered cries of women, the deep terrified howls of men filled the air. Also, barking. Quite a lot of barking. Apparently many people had brought their dogs to the farmer’s market.

One of the guys in white had a weighted net. Marc saw it, saw him coming around the side of a truck that sold hot food, and made a decision. He angled himself directly for one of the tables selling produce, ducked under it – and then came up, fast and hard, before he was out from under it. This tipped the entire table over in the direction of his pursuer. Zucchini and tomatoes and apples and he really didn’t have time to notice what else went rolling across the pavement of the parking lot.

Ken joined him as they broke out the other side of the farmer’s market. “That was clever, with the vegetable table. Maybe you’re not a complete idiot.”

“I know, right? Every movie where there’s a chase scene on foot, a fruit cart ends up getting knocked over!”

Ken huffed. “I take it back, you’re every bit as dumb as I think you are.”

They ran down the nearest street. Touristy shop. Touristy shop. Fancy sandwich shop that did not smell like biscuits. Movie theater. Bookstore – wait, movie theater?

Marc opened his mouth, but Ken beat him to it. “Into the movie theater! Quick!”

They went through the spinning door. The ticket taker called out to empty air. “Hey! Dogs aren’t allowed! You gotta get your… the fuck? There’s nobody there!”

Since he was looking at the spinning door and not at the two wolves, Ken and Marc were able to slip past him. Ken pulled open the first movie theater door with his teeth, and he and Marc slunk in, hiding in the darkness.

There was some kind of very loud action scene going on, with car chases and bullets. Ken whined directly in Marc’s ear. “We can’t talk at all unless the movie’s being loud, and we have to whisper. That usher’ll be able to put two and two together if someone tells him there are dogs barking in one of the theaters.”

“Okay,” Marc whisper-whined back.

Movies were not that interesting when you were a wolf. The sounds didn’t have the depth that real life did – wolves could hear in ranges humans couldn’t, and humans only bothered to replicate the sounds they could hear. Wolf vision wasn’t really very good. And there were no smells. It was about as engaging as a cartoon from the 70’s with a low frame rate and lousy acting. Marc quickly grew bored of sitting quietly at the end of one of the rows, and padded over to the trash can.

“What are you—” The scene abruptly changed to a woman in a kitchen, much quieter than the explosions from the last scene, and Ken had to shut up. Marc stood on his hind legs. Jackpot! There was a large popcorn in there, one of those huge jobs movie theaters were famous for, barely eaten. He grabbed it with his teeth and carefully lifted it, stepping back, and lowering himself to the floor with a small enough jolt that most of the popcorn stayed in the tub.

He set it down at Ken’s feet. “Want some?” he whisper-whined.

Ken just glared at him, plainly not interested in popcorn. More for Marc, then. He shoved his face into the popcorn and gobbled as many of the buttery exploded kernels as he could fit in his mouth. They didn’t taste quite as good in wolf form as they would if he was human, but on the other hand, the smell was incredible and wonderful and mostly made up for it.

Now he was thirsty. The water fountain was unfortunately in the hallway outside the theater; there was no way a wolf could stand up and work the water fountain control lever and drink from a stream in midair without someone observing and realizing that went way beyond what a dog could be trained to do without supervision. He strolled back over to the garbage can and found what he was looking for – an almost full Pepsi, one of those super large ones.

Obviously he couldn’t drink from the straw. Wolf mouths wouldn’t do that. Just as obviously, he wasn’t going to be able to get it out of the garbage can with his teeth; it would spill everywhere, and then he wasn’t going to get to drink it. So he leaned into the trash can, carefully pried at the lid with teeth and tongue until he’d successfully pulled it off, and began lapping at the Pepsi.

The usher chose that moment to come back inside. Startled, Marc looked up at the man – more of a boy, really, a gangly teenager – as the light from the lobby of the theater shone through the door behind the usher, directly onto Marc. Who was a huge wolf on his back paws leaning on a trash can.

“AAAAAAAAAAH!” The boy turned around and ran for the door. “Fuck! Fuck! There’s a fucking wolf in Theater 3 getting into the trash can! Get Animal Control!”

This was not exactly quiet. Even over the sound of the movie’s action scene, theatergoers obviously heard it, because they all looked at each other, murmuring. “Did someone say—” “He said a wolf—” “Oh my god there it is!” This had to be them noticing Ken, as no one was positioned to see into the walkway from the theater door to the seating area, where the trashcan and therefore Marc was.

“They’re going to stampede! We need to get out of here!” Ken yelled.

“But I never got to drink my Pepsi!” Marc barked back.

“Take your Pepsi and shove it—” Ken described an activity that was technically possible for a wolf, but vastly easier for someone with opposable thumbs.

The barking set off the rest of the humans in the theater, filling the air with shrieks as they ran for the exits. Ken grabbed the scruff of Marc’s neck and dragged him toward the door out into the theater lobby.

“I knew there were goddamn dogs!” the ticket taker yelled as they ran out through the lobby.

The usher shouted back from somewhere, perhaps a back office, “They’re fucking wolves, Julio!”

Marc didn’t hear anything else, because he and Ken had just gotten themselves into the revolving door again.

Outside, they ran pell-mell down the street, trying to outrun any Animal Control officers that might be showing up. “I’m smelling biscuits!” Marc howled.

“Great, wonderful! I’ve got a plan, follow me!”

Oddly, Ken’s plan did not seem to be “follow the scent of biscuits”, but “follow a well-dressed middle-aged lady who was walking into a hotel.” Marc was willing to give Ken the benefit of the doubt, though; the mayor was a lot smarter than he was, so if Ken had a plan, it would be better than one of Marc’s plans… as long as it ended in biscuits.

The doorman glared at the woman. “Ma’am, this hotel doesn’t allow dogs.”

“Dogs?” The woman sounded completely puzzled. “What dogs?”

“The dogs behind you. The ones following you. Your dogs.”

She turned. Marc opened his eyes wide, panted in a way that looked like he was smiling, and wagged his tail.

“Those aren’t my dogs,” the woman said. “Are those even dogs? They’re huge, are you sure they’re not wolves?”

“I—I don’t—”

Ken barked at Marc. “Come on! We need to hide!”

Marc looked around the wide, open hotel lobby. “Where?”

“Follow me!”

So Marc did, his claws skittering and sliding uncomfortably on the polished floor. Ken shot past the elevators, drawing stares from various humans waiting for it, went around a pillar, and dove into a dim, partially enclosed area with a lot of tables covered with tablecloths. Ken went under a table, and Marc followed.

“So what’re we doing?” Marc whisper-whined. “This is a restaurant, right? Are there biscuits here?”

“There are no goddamn biscuits at a fancy hotel restaurant.”

“How do you know?”

Ken sighed a very human-sounding sigh. “Do I need to get you a goddamn menu to prove there are no biscuits?” he asked quietly.

“What, you can read a menu?”

“Yeah, if you get my glasses out of the pouch on my back.”

Marc stared. Somehow, this whole time, he had never noticed that Ken had a pouch strapped to his back. “…how did you get that thing on in the first place?”

“With difficulty.” Ken lay down. “Don’t break my glasses getting them out.”

Carefully Marc nosed the flap of the pouch up. When he had enough of it up that he could get the flap into his mouth, he pulled it open. It was Velcro, so it came easily. He managed, with difficulty, to get his paw into the pouch, where he managed to snag the glasses and pull them out. “How’re you gonna get these on your face?”

“Give me a moment.”

Ken stuck his head out from under the tablecloth, just a little bit. “You stay here,” he said, and then he bolted. A moment later, he was back, with a menu in his mouth. He dropped it on the floor under the table. “There’s not enough light under here, hold the tablecloth up with your nose.”

“Uh, okay, is that all right? Are we not worrying about getting caught anymore?”

“There is no one in this restaurant but the bartender and he’s not paying any attention.”

Marc obligingly held the tablecloth up, and thus had enough light to see Ken pick up his glasses off the floor like he had thumbs, using both his front paws. Ken set the glasses on his snout as Marc goggled at him, because wolves really could not do that, generally speaking. Then Ken peered down at the menu. “Okay. We have breakfast here. Waffles. Eggs. Sausage. Bacon.”

“Can we get some bacon? I’d love some bacon.”

“Focus, Snowfrolic. Fruit cup. On to lunch. Cold sandwiches: roast beef, BLT, club sandwich, reuben, turkey, ham, Italian cold cuts. Hot sandwiches: hamburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger with bacon, vegan patty, chicken patty. Entrees: not a biscuit, not a biscuit, this one’s not a biscuit either, can you just take my word for it there are no biscuits anywhere on this menu?”

“Then why are we here? You said you had a plan.”

“I do have a plan, I just needed people to stop yelling about the big dogs. The heat’s died down; I want you to walk, not run, behind me, calmly, and look as harmless and friendly as you can. Like we’re two dogs who are trained to run around and get stuff for our owner or something.”

“You’ve got a thing that looks like a harness with that pack on your back, but I don’t have one. I’m not gonna look like a service dog.”

“You’re not a service dog. You’re an emotional support dog.”

“I don’t need a harness for that?”

“Just stay calm. We’ll get you your biscuit.”

The two of them slunk out from under the table and started walking, calmly, down a hallway. “Mayor. Your glasses are still on!” Marc growled at Ken, low enough to make it hard for humans to hear.

“Shit. I don’t have time to take them off and put them away, and if I put them in my mouth I won’t be able to see through them,” Ken muttered. “All right, I’m just gonna brazen it out.”

They continued to walk calmly down the hallway. No one but a small child noticed the glasses. “Mommy, that dog is wearing glasses!”

Mommy, on her cell phone, said, “Oh really! Very interesting!” without looking at the wolves at all, and then continued her cell phone conversation.

Ken pulled a door open by the handle, with his teeth. “Good,” he said, his voice muffled by the handle in his mouth. “No people in here. C’mon.”

Marc followed him in. There was a computer on a table, next to a printer. “Block the door. We don’t want any humans coming in,” Ken said.

“What are we doing?”

“I’m writing you a note,” Ken said. He pulled the chair for the computer out, jumped into it, and sat in it wolf-style. With his right paw, he maneuvered a little thingy around – oh, right, they called that a mouse. Marc didn’t know why. It didn’t smell anything like a mouse.

“You’re what?”

“Writing. You. A. Note.” Ken started typing, supporting himself with his left paw while he delicately used the longest digit on his right paw to peck out a message on the keyboard. “Please. Give this dog. A bag. Of biscuits. In exchange for. This bill.”

“Is that what it says?”

“No, Marc, it says rubber baby buggy bumpers.”

“I feel like you’re being sarcastic.”

“What was your first clue?” Ken did something with the mouse again, and the printer whirred to life, a piece of paper slowly feeding out of it. “Now go back in my pack and get out my ten dollar bill.”

“You have money in there?”

“Just hurry up! While you’re away from the door getting the money out of my backpack, people could come in!”

Marc was pretty sure that if people shoved hard enough they could have gotten in even if he was leaning on the door; he was a big wolf, but a human had better leverage than he did. But there was no point in arguing with Ken about it. He stuck his paw in, felt around, and pulled a piece of paper out. “Is this your money?”

“Yeah. Okay, can you get the glasses back in?”

Marc considered the possibility of picking Ken’s glasses up with his mouth, and then tried to imagine how to get them into Ken’s backpack without breaking them, and came to the conclusion that it was not happening. “Nope.”

“Shit. Well, they’re readers, they’re cheap. I’ll get more from the drug store when I’m on two feet again.” Ken was for some reason sticking his tongue into a plastic dish full of little metal things, next to plastic dishes full of pens and plastic dishes full of rubber bands.

“What are you doing, Mayor?”

Ken glared at Marc, since with his tongue fully extended he could hardly talk. He withdrew his tongue. Oh, that was a paper clip! Marc recognized it now.

Using more dexterity in his paws than Marc could have imagined a wolf was capable of, Ken got the bill, the piece of paper that came out of the printer, and the paper clip together somehow, so that the bill and the paper were now clipped together. “Carry that in your mouth, but gently. Try not to slobber on it, we want humans to be able to read what it says.”

“I’m gonna have a hard time not getting slobber on something in my mouth, Mayor.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you have hands to carry it with, so you’ll have to make do.”

***

Outside, Marc picked up the trail of the biscuit smell again, and followed it down the street, Ken trotting behind him. They had to switch who was carrying the note, because all of that biscuit smell was making Marc salivate.

Marc traced the delicious smell to a glass window, which he pressed his face up against before realizing that he couldn’t actually go through the window that way. Ken pulled the door open with his teeth, which caused the note to fall down. Marc picked it up with his mouth, figuring that in the ten seconds it took him to get it to the counter, it couldn’t get too much slobber on it.

No one was at the counter. He dropped the note there. One of the bakers came out of the back, saw him do it, and stared. “Wow. You are a well-trained dog. Is that a ten dollar bill?”

Marc almost nodded, and then remembered not to do that because humans would freak out at the sight of a wolf nodding “yes” to their statement. Instead he made his eyes big, panted in a smile-like shape, and wagged his tail.

The baker picked up the note. “’Please give this dog a bag of biscuits in exchange for this bill.’ Oh, wow, someone trained you to go fetch them food! I wish my dog would do that.” She peeled the note away from the bill. “Ugh, dog slobber. Well, I guess there isn’t any other way for you to carry it, is there. But how about I give you a bag with handles, that way you don’t slobber on your owner’s biscuits.” She looked over at Ken. “Do you want some biscuits too?”

Ken whined and pawed at the door. “I guess not. You want me to let you out? How about I do that after I get your buddy the biscuits he came for?” She went into the back briefly, and came back with a tray of biscuits. “Fresh out of the ovens just fifteen minutes ago.” Marc had to resist the temptation to just grab one and run when she set it down on the counter and the smell wafted over to him. So close. So, so close to biscuit time.

The baker put several biscuits – more than Marc could count, but that didn’t prove much since he couldn’t count higher than five – into a plain white paper bag, and then put the bag into another bag, a shopping bag with handles that was made of a better, tougher quality of paper. Marc grabbed the handles with his teeth as the baker rang up the transaction, and put the change into a jar full of coins on the counter. “Pleasure doing business with you, sir!” she said, laughing. Ken shoved the door open, and he and Marc both trotted out of the bakery.

Within less than a minute, Marc was in the closest alleyway, hidden from casual human view. He dropped the biscuit bag on the ground, nosed into it, and pulled one of the crispy, flaky, buttery wonders out with his teeth. Biscuit time!

“Well?” Ken asked. “Was it worth all this?”

Marc chewed the biscuit thoughtfully, and then lowered his head, his ears going back a bit. “That’s disappointing. It doesn’t even taste very good.”

Ken’s ears flattened, he growled, and he crouched back in an obvious attack position, preparing to pounce. The body language was clear as day. Before Ken could jump him, Marc ran down the alley, leaving the rest of his not-very-good biscuits behind, as Ken chased him barking insults, curses and general imprecations the whole way.

#52 project #rema #werewolves #swift of foot and dumb of ass #accidentally named a werewolf after my ex #who identified as a werewolf

[horrorkingdom]

Blindness

It’s true what they say – that when a person goes blind their other senses heighten in order to compensate. Knowing that, and thinking back on everything that happened to me, I still can’t come to a rational conclusion of how these events unfolded around me without my knowledge. Granted, I couldn’t actually see any of it happening, but I never suspected anything of this magnitude when judging solely on the minor oddities that I had experienced.

Sure, every once in a while I would hear noises, but my house was old and seemed to have a mind of its own. All of its pops and creaks had become just as familiar to me as navigating its interior without the benefit of sight. Even when things began to turn more bizarre, I always found a way to rationalize them away. Looking back, I ask myself, “How could I have been so…well, for lack of a better word, blind?”

My mother had tried to convince me not to move into the house alone. “Sarah, a young blind woman shouldn’t be living all by herself,” she’d said. But I wanted to – needed to. I needed to prove to myself that I was strong enough to do it. Besides that, as a twenty four year old, I didn’t want to live with my parents forever. And I sure didn’t want to wait around for a nice man to marry and move in with. That may never happen.

Having lost my sight at an early age due to a freak accident with industrial strength cleaning chemicals, I knew all too well the nuances of learning to create a mental map of my surroundings.

When I first moved into the old house I used my cane exclusively. I waved it back and forth in front of me with every step I took. I knew roughly where all of the furniture was since I was the one that directed the movers on where to put everything. I employed the cane for nearly a week, using its tip to develop a mental image of the layout. The learning process was slow and clumsy at first, but I eventually got to the point that I was able to shed my cane after several days and began walking cautiously with my arms extended. I progressed further and became familiar enough with the territory that by the end of the first month I was able to walk freely without the use of my cane, or arms or any other aid.

I became quite adept at moving throughout the house freely. Not only that, but the house was located in a somewhat urban area which made it convenient to walk to any place I had the need. The grocery was only three blocks away. There was a department store across the street from that, and a bank and coffee shop just a bit further on. I got used to listening to the flow of traffic and timing the lights in my head so I would know when the “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signals were lit. Occasionally a kind stranger would offer to take my hand and lead me across. I would thank them and we would part ways once we were safely on the next sidewalk.

In those days I was working from home making phone calls to patients that had recently been discharged from the hospital. In essence, I was being paid by the hospital to administer surveys that were then used to improve their services. The hospital was kind enough to provide me with a laptop computer that contained several different voice-command software applications. I spent my days transcribing the recorded phone calls by speaking the customers’ answers into a microphone, and having the data fields automatically populate accordingly in the program.

The first odd event that I remember was on one particular day when I got up from my work desk for a lunch break. As I was headed into the kitchen, I kicked an object in the middle of the living room floor. I heard it slide a short distance on the carpet. I knew that I hadn’t left anything in the way of my path as I had just been through there not even an hour ago, and there was nothing on the floor.

I knelt down and patted around until I located the object. A book. By feeling its Braille title I recognized it as a book on national parks that I kept on my coffee table, some five feet away. I didn’t remember knocking the book off of the table. I stood there perplexed. The longer I thought about it though, the less frightening it became to me. I convinced myself that I must have simply forgotten about knocking the book to the floor, and I must have stepped over it or next to it during my other passes through the room. I returned the book to its place on the table and went about making my lunch.

That night, while lying in bed, I heard a sound that came from the kitchen. It was almost entirely masked by the usual sounds of the pops and creaks from the house settling, but I definitely heard it – faint as it was. It was a very light humming noise. So light, in fact, that an average person without enhanced hearing may not have heard it at all from this distance. I slowly got out of bed, listening intently, the sound increasing as I made my way down the hallway and through the living room.

As soon as I passed through the threshold into the kitchen I knew what the sound was. It was the compressor motor on the refrigerator, and it was substantially louder than usual. I approached the appliance and found that its door was standing wide open. I eased it shut and the hum returned to a normal volume.

“What on earth? Did I leave this open?” I questioned myself in a whisper. Maybe it didn’t close all the way the last time I swung it shut, I thought. I returned to bed, but had trouble finding sleep. My mind wandered and questioned how I could have overlooked the fallen book and the open fridge door when they’d first happened.

The next morning, I decided to go have breakfast at Espresso Express, the little coffee shop up the road. They served excellent coffee, and you could also get a ham & cheese croissant melt that was to die for. That alone was worth the effort of showering, dressing, and leaving the safety of the house to be plunged into a buzz of whizzing traffic, honking horns, and people clamoring on the sidewalks.

On that morning a gentle stranger helped guide me across the intersection just ahead of the coffee shop. I said, “Thank you!” as they released my arm, but there was no response. He or she was lost in the shuffle of people on cell phones, their conversations momentarily audible to me as they passed in front of and behind me. The tinny sound of a bicycle bell alarmed me, and I felt the breeze left behind when the rider whipped past. I entered the coffee shop to a much more serene environment and enjoyed my favorite breakfast at a seat near the plate glass window, bathed in the sunlight that washed in on me.

That afternoon I took a break from making phone calls to use the bathroom. As I was seated on the toilet, I heard something next to me. It was as if something had brushed against the sink – an ever so subtle sound. My heart rate rose and my brow furrowed as I strained to listen closer. All I could hear was my pulse throbbing in my ears. Suddenly a wall clock in the living room chimed four ‘o clock, startling me to the point that I jumped slightly while still seated there. I regained my composure, washed up and returned to the computer to transcribe the data from my phone surveys.

I closed the laptop and went to make dinner at 6:30. Over the years, I had learned to be extra careful when dealing with the hot oven and burners. Once I had accidentally set a plastic plate directly onto a burner that was still hot, resulting in a cloud of noxious fumes that lasted for days – long after I’d finished cleaning up the mess. I was lucky that it had burned itself out and the damage wasn’t any worse. After that close call, I bought a small fire extinguisher to keep on the countertop next to the oven.

On this particular night, I made my dinner without any risk of fire. However, the undertaking wasn’t completely without incident. As I proceeded to make dinner I discovered that the canned goods I needed for the recipe were missing from the cupboard. I have always kept my canned goods in very specific places on the shelves so that I would always know what was what without the benefit of being able to see the labels. I don’t remember using up the items I needed that night, but apparently I already had. So, I opted to make a casserole instead.

I sat at the dinner table enjoying the simple meal I had made. The television was playing in the background, filling me in on all of the day’s news headlines. I finished the first portion on my plate and reached to dip into the casserole dish once more. I scraped the inside of the dish, the sounds of metal on ceramic echoing throughout the kitchen. It was empty.

“I can’t believe it! I couldn’t have already eaten it all!” I said incredulously. I had thought for sure that I’d prepared a bigger portion than that, and I didn’t remember emptying the dish fully onto my plate. Thoughts ran through my head in an attempt to reason out the matter: Had it baked up to be less than I’d anticipated? Had I spilled some on the table while dishing it onto my plate?

In search of the missing food, I placed the palm of my hand on the tabletop and moved it steadily over the area within my reach. As I was doing so there was a distinct movement in front of me. I gasped and my heart rate immediately quickened. I felt the blood pulsing through my neck. This sound was not as subtle as the others I’d been hearing. It was obvious – a sudden motion of something moving across from me. I continued listening, but all I could hear was the much-too-chipper weather man on TV giving the forecast.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with a feeling that I was no longer alone at the kitchen table. “Is someone there?” I called out, hoping there was no reply.

Silence.

I felt a shift in the air pressure as if something moved behind me followed by the creak of a floorboard. I froze. Something brushed against the back of my hair, gentle as a feather. I recoiled and let out a squeal.

I shot up out of my chair, made my way to the corner of the kitchen and turned to face the interior of the room. “Who’s there?” I demanded. No answer. By this time I was breathing heavily, practically hyperventilating. My chest and throat radiated heat as my heart raced inside, giving me the sensation of acute indigestion. I thought I might vomit.

I slowly made my way to the doorway leading into the living room. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity listening for something, anything that would explain the circumstance. Eventually I moved on and worked my way into the hallway bathroom. I locked the door behind me.

It took over an hour and a half for me to calm down. While in the locked bathroom, I wrestled with my thoughts. I reasoned with myself. I didn’t want to admit that my mother was right, but maybe I shouldn’t be living alone. It appeared to be taking its toll on me. On the other hand, all of these things could be logically explained, I told myself. If I wasn’t blind, I’d have seen whatever it was that caused the noises and it would be so obvious. I’d laugh about how ridiculous it was to be scared of it, I’m sure. At least that’s what I tried to convince myself.

What finally brought me out of the bathroom was the ringing of the telephone. I admit it startled me at first, but only because it had been so quiet for the last two hours. I cautiously opened the door and entered the hallway. My phone was in the living room. I approached it quickly and answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey Sarah, it’s Jill.”

Thank God, it was just my friend Jill. “Hi Jill, how’s it going?”

“Oh, I’m doing good. I saw you at Espresso Express today,” she said in a playful tone, which I didn’t understand initially.

“You did?”

“Mmm hmm. I saw you in the window when I walked by on the sidewalk.” Still in a playful tone.

“Well, why didn’t you come in and say, ‘hi’?” I asked.

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Disturb me? Why would you be disturbing me?”

“Because, silly, I assumed you were on a date. Who’s the lucky guy that was sitting with you?”

My mouth slacked open. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t form words.

“Sarah?” Jill asked, “Are you okay?”

I dropped the phone. I could still hear Jill’s muffled voice even though the speaker was face down on the carpet. I frantically made my way around the house, arms flailing in front of me.

“Who are you?” I yelled into the house. “What do you want?”

I was terrified, but also angry. I felt violated. I didn’t necessarily want to encounter whatever it was, but I couldn’t go on hiding in my own house any longer. I spent hours searching every square inch of the property and found nothing. I finally went to bed after I was able to calm down, but I did not fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning.

A light rustling sound woke me not long after I fell asleep, still in the dark hours of early morning. I wasn’t sure at first if it was real or if I had dreamed the noise. As I was about to get up, I noticed that the sheets next to me were pulled back. I stretched out my right arm into the empty space beside me. It felt warm as if someone had been lying there with me. The events of the previous day flooded back into my memory. My sightless eyes welled up with tears as I began to question my own sanity. Frustrated, I bolted up and out of the bed. I threw on some old clothes and headed toward the front door with the intention of fleeing the house, unsure exactly where I was going to go – maybe Jill’s place. She lived fairly close.

I wanted to take my cane with me as I always did whenever I went outdoors. I searched the house frantically, unable to remember where I’d left it. I almost always left it propped against the wall by the front door, but it wasn’t there. I made my way along all of the perimeter walls, feeling desperately for the cane.

When I neared the kitchen I still had not found my walking aid, but I made a discovery of a much more startling nature – a barely detectable vertical crevice in the wall I had not known about previously. I used all my fingers to follow the crease up the wall, across the top, and down the other side. It was a doorway designed to fit perfectly flush within the wall. I leaned my weight inward against the panel and felt a slight give on its right side. I worked my fingers into the crevice on that side the best I could, eventually prying the panel free. It swung open to the left. I gasped in shock and my pulse quickened. A hidden room right in the center of my house.

How I wish that I would have had sight at that moment. I faced a completely unexplored territory inside my own house with the possibility that someone else was in there with me.

I entered slowly, arms extended. “Is someone in here?” I whispered, afraid to ask the question. There was no response. I stepped forward. To my right I discovered a flat surface – a tabletop. I ran my hands along its surface. On top of the table I was able to make out several unopened cans of food. No doubt these were the missing canned goods I’d been looking for. The table also contained silverware and a can opener that disappeared weeks ago.

My heart rate increased even more and my palms began to sweat. I worked my way forward until I came to a wall that I knew bordered the living room. I found a hole the size of a quarter at eye level. Sweat began to form on my brow as well. I found another similar hole on the next adjacent wall. This wall bordered the bathroom. Tears started to well up in my eyes. I was able to find two more holes on the two remaining walls bordering the kitchen and the bedroom.

I dropped to my knees in absolute horror and disbelief. How long had this person been watching me? How could I have not known? My hands were on the floor in front of me and I felt something soft. I investigated further with my fingertips. It was some sort of comforter or sleeping bag. At one end was a fluffy pillow.

At this point not only was I terrified beyond description, I was also furious. How dare someone spy on me covertly from within my own walls! I knew I had to run out of the house and get to safety immediately, with or without my cane. I decided I would go to Jill’s house and we’d call the police from there.

I made my way to where I remembered the hidden door to be, my arms sweeping the area ahead of me in a panic. Instead of the open door, my hands found the warm torso of a human, a male, standing silently in the doorway. He grabbed both my arms and pulled me out of the hidden room and into the house.

We struggled in the kitchen. I kicked at him and screamed as loud as I could into his ears. I was able to get one arm free and I used it to grasp for the fire extinguisher that I knew would be by the oven. He attempted to pull me away, but my fingers reached its nozzle. I swung it at him, feeling the metal cylinder connect with the back of his skull. He released my other arm and I pulled the trigger in his direction, enveloping him in a cloud of white foam.

I ran into the utility room off of the kitchen where I knew my only advantage existed – the fuse box. I found the box and tripped every lever I could find, eliminating all power from the house. If this perverted psycho wanted to kill me, he’d have to do it on an equal playing field – in the dark.

The intruder had not followed me into the utility room. The fire extinguisher must have dazed him. I remembered the toolbox I kept in that room, and I quickly retrieved the longest screwdriver I could find. I stood in the corner and listened carefully. If he was still conscious, he would not be able to move around in the pitch darkness without creating a noise. I would surely detect his movements.

I held the screwdriver against my chest, gripping its handle tightly with both hands. I felt my wildly beating heart against the side of my fist. After an eternity, I moved forward a bit. I may have knocked him out, or even killed him. I had to make sure.

I left the utility room and entered the kitchen. There was still no sound from anywhere in the house. I passed into the living room and headed toward the front door. Halfway through the room I could feel his presence. Something in the air around me had shifted. Without warning there was breath on the back of my neck followed by a deep whisper directly in my ear, “The showers were my favorite.”

I screamed and swung around, stabbing the screwdriver into empty air. I ran for the door. It was merely a few feet away, but I couldn’t reach it due to the resistance I met when the voyeuristic brute’s arms wrapped around my waist. He wrestled me to the floor and straddled me. I tightened my grip on the tool and plunged it as hard as I could into his side.

I shudder to think about it when I recount the feeling of the steel shaft separating two of his ribs. It was horrid, and I was only able to stomach it knowing that if I hadn’t acted, my life would have ended then.

The man winced in pain and let out a deep, growling grunt. He fell backward and rolled off of me. I turned over onto my chest and pushed up off of the floor, then crawled over to the couch and used it to get back onto my feet. I still held the screwdriver, a warm trickle of blood seeping onto my knuckle.

I could tell that the intruder was writhing around on the floor near the doorway. I would have to exit through the back door. From the opposite end of the living room, I entered the sun room where the door was located. I wasn’t as familiar with this entry point, causing me to fumble around with the deadbolt and screen door locks for longer than I would have liked.

I knew there were concrete stairs there leading to a flat patio. How many steps? Four? Five? I couldn’t remember. I proceeded slowly. The last thing I needed was to fall and twist my ankle. After navigating the steps, I came to the end of the patio, which emptied into a narrow alleyway between the shotgun-style houses behind mine.

My steps were slow and cautious. My hands told me there was a brick wall to my right, and a brick wall about five feet to my left. The sides of the two houses. I was entering unfamiliar territory without the benefit of my cane. My breathing was frantic and the tears continued to fill my useless eyes. I kicked something and nearly fell over. It felt plastic – a child’s toy maybe. I was moving much too fast compared to my level of comfort with the surroundings. But I had no choice as footsteps were approaching behind me.

I picked up the pace, waving the screwdriver out in front to buffer my impending collision with any obstacles. Ten more feet of forward progress and the screwdriver alerted me, with metallic clanging, to the presence of a chain link fence connecting the two houses.

I stopped and cried out, my voice breaking up through my tears, “No.” I turned around, my back to the fence. I began swinging the screwdriver violently.

“Leave me alone!” I screamed.

More hyperventilating.

More tears.

The man approached slowly, and then stopped just a few feet away from me. I got the feeling he could see what he was doing. Either there was an electric light in this alley or the dawn had already crested enough that ample ambient light was available. I didn’t know which one was the case because I had no idea what time it was.

Knowing I was about to die, I just wanted answers. “How long?” I managed to ask. “How long have you been in there?” My voice was angrier than I’d expected.

“Since before you lived there,” he replied calmly, his voice deep. “I got lucky with you – a blind girl. With the others I couldn’t come out in the open when they were home. I couldn’t sit and eat their dinner with them. I couldn’t stand over them while they worked at their computers. I couldn’t go to the coffee shop with them.” There was a pause as he moved even closer. “I couldn’t stand next to them in the bathroom.”

I cried uncontrollably in a whirlwind of emotions. I had never before felt so violated, so angry, and so terrified all at the same time. There was sudden movement again in front of me.

“Don’t touch me!” I demanded as I held up the screwdriver. I don’t know exactly how it happened. I don’t know if he didn’t see the tool or just didn’t care, knowing that he was caught. But as he lunged forward, he managed to impale himself on the screwdriver and pin me up against the fence. My hands were still gripping the handle, but it was so deep inside him that his shirt was touching my fist.

His breathing became gurgled, and his last words to me were, “I couldn’t snuggle next to them in bed either.”

We collapsed together as one unit. The fence tore at my back as we slid down onto the ground. His dead weight nearly crushed me, but I managed to push him off and crawl away. I crawled all the way back to my house, in through the back door and into the living room to my phone. I sobbed hysterically as I keyed in the digits 9-1-1 and fell to the floor.

Credit: moonlit_cove

#explore #horror #follow #beginner witch #creepy photo #creepy #creepypasta #horror community #new to tumblr #journal #horror kingdom #horror stories #murder #death in paradise #death mention #blindness

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A Reluctant Hero Chapter 12

JD left after accepting the job that came in as soon as he turned his phone back on, but not before yanking me to him and kissing me thoroughly.  A tiny nip to my bottom lip, the dark hungry look still in his eyes, promising me he’d see me soon, he was gone.  I shook my head and swallowed down the rush of lust that he’d created with a single fucking kiss, and tried to decide if food or work would be my first course of action.  

Kelsey found me in the kitchen, having seen her dad leaving she decided to come see if I was still capable of speech, or movement, I thought as I caught her smirking.  “What?”  I asked, pulling out the ingredients for French toast.  “Hungry?”

“Looks like Dad had you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” she offered, her smirk growing into a full blown smile.  “Seriously, you have a little-” she gestured to her own neck and I felt my eyes widen.  He hadn’t.

I turned my head and tossed my hair back as I studied my neck in the reflection of the microwave glass door, and sure enough, a bite mark.  Shit.  I groaned and then glared when she laughed.  “Not funny, Kelsey.”  I pulled my hair back down, but then sighed as I looked at the ingredients in front of me.  Hair hanging meant a greater chance of eating said hair by accident, fuck.  I sighed and pulled it back and twisted it into a knot as I pulled open the junk drawer and grabbed a hair tie.  “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that he-”  I was muttering, trying to flip through ALL the times we came together and remember the feeling of him BITING me, but nothing came.  Nothing other than the flush caused by how good every time he touched me felt.  Or the images of his body, naked and glistening with sweat as it hovered over mine.  Fuck.  

“You just went red, pale, and then let out a gasp,” she offered from the stool she was studying me from.  “You want me to leave you alone to take care of whatever caused all that?”  

I shot her another look and picked up the first egg.  Cracking it with more force than necessary, I ignored her.  Eggs, cinnamon, a hint of cream, vanilla, then thick slices of bread before adding each to the lightly buttered pan.  “Grab the powdered sugar, syrup, and I think there’s some whipped cream in the fridge-”

“You didn’t use that with-”  I groaned out loud at the very idea that my best friend kept mentioning the sex she was insinuating I’d had with her own father.  “Joking, Ani, God get a grip.”

“Let’s never, ever, ever discuss YOUR dad and me-”

“Screwing like rabbits?”  She offered, which earned her another sharp look.  “Fine, but I’m your closest friend, so if not me, then who?”  

JD called a few hours after Kelsey had tortured me to her heart’s content.  He was elbows deep in a case, but he wanted to hear my voice.  After reminding me of all the ways he liked to hear my voice, he sighed and said he had to go.  My answering sigh was met with a low chuckle and he promised me that he was just as eager to see and hear me in person as soon as possible.  

I had gone back to my desk, listening to the voicemails from the calls I’d missed while we were ‘occupied’, I rolled my eyes at Roger’s insistence that he wanted to speak to me again.  Hearing my dad sound irritated that Pandi was down, and that I’d closed the loopholes for him to backdoor his way into the AI’s system.  I knew I’d have to call him back, but work called to me.  

Getting lost in the story I’d been working on, I ignored the reminder that Roger had shown up at my house AGAIN while JD and I were locked in our own bubble.  I took heart in knowing that he hadn’t been able to breach my security, but it was annoying regardless.  Pandi broke through as I fell into a world of my own creation, telling me that once again, Roger was on my doorstep.  

Asking for the intercom, I kept typing as I spoke.  “If you don’t remove your lying, cheating ass from my property, Roger, I will be forced to electrify the door, the porch, and the fucking pathway.  While seeing you flail around as current flows through your sorry ass would amuse me, I hear the paperwork for such shit is enormous and a pain in the ass to fill out, so kindly fuck off.” 

“Ani, come on, you know that you can’t throw away what we had.”  He was pleading, while trying to make it sound seductive and alluring.  I snorted.  “Do you really think that JD Richter, hero at large, is gonna be happy with you after screwing a hybrid astronaut?”  Nice, first try to remind me of how ‘good’ we had it, then insult me.  “I mean, have you SEEN Molly Woods?”  Even better, show that you’d fuck her, you more moron.

“Roger, what we had was at best temporary insanity for me, at worst it showed how fucking desperate I was for sex with something not battery powered.”  Take that, you tasteless prick.  “As for JD and his past?  I have seen Molly Woods, and he and I have talked about her.”  Again, what did he think, I just randomly hump hot men?  “He seemed pretty fucking happy after we spent almost 24 hours locked in MY house, which again, I want you to walk away from.  This is your last warning, Roger.  Leave now, never darken my fucking door again, or ZAP.”  I hadn’t stopped writing, multitasking wasn’t only something JD excelled in.  

“Fine, but don’t call me when your little rebound implodes.”  I truly snorted so hard I had to stop typing.  Shit, honestly?  “I mean it, I’m moving on-”

“With the coed?”  I offered, through giggles that the snort had turned into.  “Great, let me know where you register.  I won’t buy you a wedding gift, but fuck if I won’t laugh at the teething toys she picks out for playtime.”  With that parting shot, I told Pandi to turn off the intercom, but watched the camera to make sure he flounced off, and hoped that he’d go asshole over head again so I could keep the good times rolling.  Sadly he didn’t fall down, he shot the camera a glare and then walked calmly to his car.  I sighed and wondered if he would stay fucking gone this time.  

I answered my dad’s call as I was making breakfast the next morning.  I could hear his frustration in just the ringing of the phone, but the heaviness of it in his tone caused another eye roll.  

“Dad,” I cut him off before he could gain steam at how irresponsible it was to ignore the world, meaning him clearly, for whatever idiotic reason I could have had.  “I wanted, no I needed, time alone.”  With JD, and his naked body, and fuck, where was I?  “I don’t know what the big deal is, we used to ‘unplug’ every weekend when we went camping.”  

“Yes, but then I had you in my sight and I could keep you-”  I heard him huff an exaggerated sigh.  “Anilea, you have to understand that you’re my little girl.  No matter how old you get, no matter how independent you are, you’re still my daughter.”

“I understand that,” I sat down with my full breakfast and put him on speakerphone.  “But you have to get that I AM an adult, Dad.  Putting surveillance software on my AI, or GPS trackers on my car, or any of the other ‘protective’ measures you want to take is stifling.  Trust that you raised me to be careful, please?”

“Roger-” he started, and I groaned.  “You have to admit, Ani, he’s not the first in a long line of assholes that took advantage of you.  He lived in your house, ate food you bought and prepared, paid no bills, and I’d bet money that you even bought him things he mentioned he liked.”  So?  I like to give people gifts, and what better gifts than things I knew they wanted?  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be generous.  Kelsey is a case in point, she’s good people.”  He’d met Kelsey during one of his visits to the house and took to her immediately.  “But men?  You have a bad track record.  Think of Jason-”

“I’d rather never think of Jason, Dad.”  The fling, if you could call it that, that had made me blush when JD asked for more information about my past indiscretions.   “Besides, that didn’t go that-”

“He had my name forged on the marriage license, Ani.”  I shut my eyes at the memory of Jason Sallinger.  A lab tech that worked under my dad, but was nearer his age than mine.  Attractive, and predatory, I hadn’t known at sixteen men like him existed.  At least not in my world.  “If I hadn’t realized what was happening, I can’t even think of what would have happened.”  We’d learned, as the police investigated Jason, that I wasn’t his first attempt at the con.  And at least one of his past paramours was missing and had never been heard of after they eloped.  

“You know that I’m more careful, Dad.”  Now, I thought, I didn’t let anyone really know how deep my pockets were. How fast the wealth was that I’d earned through my own creativity, and through my inheritance from Mom.  “Roger has no idea how much I’m worth.”

Dad sighed again.  “Your house alone paints a picture, Ani.  Your two vehicles, the trips you take that aren’t promotion related.  And the books?  For fuck’s sake, sweetie, you’re on every talk show every time another one is released.  He knew enough.  It’s why he can’t let go, or at least-”

“He showed up while the system was locked down.”  Dad’s end went completely silent.  “And he showed up a few hours after it went back up.  I told him I planned on shocking him, literally, if he shows up again.”  

“Ani, let me send the man I use to-”  He took a deep breath and I could almost see him preparing to admit something he knew I’d find irritating.  “Help keep you safe.  He can check to be sure that Roger doesn’t have his own shit in place to watch you.”

I didn’t consider that Roger would do anything like that, but in a flash I realized that he might.  Maybe not before I caught him, but now?  Now he seemed desperate to keep me.  I reluctantly agreed to his offer.  Adding that I’d want this man to remove anything he found, which Dad said was the entire point, of course.

He promised to come with the man, hopefully later in the day, and I told him I’d make us an early dinner.

“Get the Scrabble board out,” he demanded, and I smiled.  “It’s been too long since I trounced you at wordplay.”

“Good luck, old man,” I challenged, and hung up grinning from the return to normalcy.

Dad was true to his word, and with Kelsey beside me, we watched the two men, the stranger holding a device of some sort in his hand go inch by inch around the exterior of my house.  Then, even though I protested that there wasn’t any way that Roger had planted anything in my house, they did a repeat performance to the interior.  I was shocked when they found a few tiny gadgets inside to add to the small group they’d uncovered outside. 

“This,” Dad told me as he held up one of them, “is MY GPS tracker from your car.”  Nodding to show my understanding, he went on.  “It’s going back on, Ani, because there were two others in the same car.”  Wait, TWO?  “One is no doubt Rogers, but the other one?  Either he’s idiotic enough to double up, or someone else put it there.”  

“I’d think it was him,” the other man offered.  “There were two of everything we found.  Close enough to make me think that he was using two simply to make sure he had a backup in case one failed.”  He shook his head at the stupidity.  “He’s not a rocket scientist, is he?”  

“He teaches poetry,” Kelsey offered, bringing Dad and his friend lemonade.  “So, no, not a rocket scientist, and he also has the most pedantic ideas about Longfellow.”  I shook my own head at her irritation with Roger’s opinions on poetry.  

The other devices were for sound, which means that he had probably heard JD and I from the first visit he made to my house and most definitely the sounds of our lovemaking.  Good, I thought, suck on that.  I invited the security man, whose name he reminded me was Kelvin to dinner, but he declined.  

“My wife made reservations for tonight.”  I smiled and walked him to the door.  “I put your dad’s tracker back on your car.  Both of them are being tracked, and I’d advise you to keep them on.  This ex of yours, he doesn’t sound all that stable, but even if he is it’s safer.”  I agreed and thanked him for his time.  “Don’t mention it.  Just stay safe.”

“I’ll try,” I started to shut the door, but he stopped me.

“JD is a good guy,” my eyes widened and he grinned at me.  “Your dad filled me in.  I know him, and he’s a good one.  If you’re with him, you’re safe.”  Then he said goodbye and I finally closed the door.  

Dad had invited Kelsey to dinner, like she needed an invite, and the three of us ate and then gathered around the Scrabble board I’d set up on the opposite end of the dining room table.  I was laughing as the two of them argued about the validity of a word when Pandi informed us that we had a guest.  Dad looked at me with shrewdness as I told it to let him in, and then as I sat at a table with my dad and Kelsey, JD walked in to meet my father for the first time. 

#JD Richter x OFC #mention of smut #Extant #After the Series

[uzumaki-rebellion]

“Stark’s New Intern” Chp. 6

Summary: Erik hangs out with Tony...

NSFW.  Mature Audience. Smut.

"Why are you selling dreams of who you wish you could be A prince in all of the magazines They'd have no words for the man I've seen Talk real fast 'fore they see your face

And would they love you if they knew all the things we know We've got these images We need them to be true Not ready to believe we're no more insecure than you…"

Res – "Golden Boys"

Erik wore his expensive suit again when he sat in the foyer of Stark's office. Tony's secretary Devika eyed him from time to time. She offered him water and juice to drink but he sat on the foyer couch rigid, muscles ready to spring and take him far away from Stark Industries and Los Angeles. His suitcase and duffle bag sat right next to his left leg.

"The restroom is over there if you need to use it," Devika said. She let her chin rest on her hand, her dark dewy skin looked radiant. Working for Tony must've been great for her.

"I'm good."

His voice came out gruff. Devika's eyes went back to her computer.

"I'm cool, just chillin," he said in a softer tone.

Devika's dark brown eyes watched him. She glanced down at his bags.

The door of Tony's office swung open and four of the intern project managers walked out. Erik's project manager, Yuri Deetz, stepped out last. When he caught Erik's eye, he gave a weak smile to him as Tony swept into the foyer.

"Erik Stevens is here," Devika said.

Tony glanced at his watch and then his eyes planted themselves on Erik's face. He walked over to Erik and stood in front of him, folding his arms across his chest. Erik kept his own stare steady. Face hard. He wasn't backing down over no bullshit white boy.

Tony looked as if he was going to spill a lecture, but then he glanced at his watch again.

"Come with me," he said.

Erik stood and followed Tony to a private elevator. On the ride down, Tony stayed quiet and Erik just stood in silence too. The ride down to a mid-level floor had Erik keeping a swift pace with Tony's stride. Passing through several security checkpoints, they arrived inside a cutting-edge computer lab. Erik's eyes marveled at the hardware and Stark employees programming with software that was never going to fall into the hands of the general public. Not even the military.

"Hi, Janine, this is Erik Stevens, one of the new interns…"

Tony stood next to a red-faced programmer with piercing gray eyes who leaned against a specialized programmer's desk and stared at Erik.

"Stevens…you programmed some Sandex code to be a placeholder for Yang's new software," she said.

"Yeah," Erik said. Janine's eyes stared him down and their intensity made him nervous. He glanced at her expansive four-dimensional screen.

"How's that working out for you?" he asked, recognizing the AmDX7 computer language that was all the rage in certain programming circles.

Janine glanced over at her screen. A simulated biometric passport glowed before them and she enlarged it.

"Trying to figure out a way to keep data secure from RFID tech is proving to be quite a task. We want to be the first on the market with full-proof E-Passports, but the problem is—"

"Many national identity cards aren't ICAO9358 compliant, and a lot of countries don't want a universal chip," Erik said.

Janine smiled. She looked over at Tony.

"Can I keep him?" she asked.

"I'll pick him up at dinner time," Tony said.

"Pull up a seat," Janine said.

She didn't have to tell Erik twice.

###

Rubbing his eyes, Erik leaned back in the computer chair and took a moment to rest his brain. Ten hours straight he had been at Janine's desk coding for her, skipping lunch and dinner in the cafeteria. The regular staff was already gone for the dinner break, and Erik was left to be supervised by Janine's assistant Manuj and four other programmers. Janine's crew oversaw all of Stark Industries' facial, fingerprint, and iris recognition technology.

This is where Erik wanted to be. Stark was so far ahead in the future with biometrics that Erik felt confident that everything he learned in this department would secure his future. Technology changed at an extreme pace, but to be with a company that shaped future tech would bode well for him at this time. Learning the pitfalls of cybersecurity would help him devise ways to hack it when he needed to. A day would come when he would have to go into Africa…East Africa in particular…Wakanda to be exact. He needed to find ways to circumvent some of the tech that his father showed him before he was murdered. And if Wakanda really was that far ahead of the world, the lab he sat in at that moment was the start of his preparation to defeat it.

"Janine said for you to go home and be back here tomorrow at seven. We've sent you some time-sensitive cheat codes to help get you to speed. Read them over tonight and be ready to rock and roll again in the morning. Good work, Stevens," Manuj said heading back to his desk on the other side of the room.

Erik stood up and put on his suit jacket. Ten hours and not one word from Tony—

"There he is."

Tony walked in wearing a totally different suit from the one he had on that morning. Formal. Black. With a bow tie.

"I was told to come back here in the morning," Erik said.

"Well, Janine must really like you. She doesn't like very many people. Good on you."

Erik just stared at Tony.

"I thought we were going to talk this morning—"

"You sat in that chair for over ten hours, without a break I was told and did what you love to do. You want to be here—"

"What about Wesley?"

"What about him? His dad is just a Congressman. Who fucking feels threatened by a Congressman? A Senator…maybe a little concern. Let's go. There's a party at my house tonight and we are going to be late if we don't get you dressed to impress."

"My stuff is still—"

"Your bags are back in your apartment. Maria made sure it went in your room. We have about thirty minutes to get you some new threads before we go to mi casa su casa."

Erik grinned.

"You really think I would cut you loose just because you punched a drunk asshole? You know how many times I have punched people…or been the asshole? I brought you to Janine so you would know what you are here for. She's your new project manager. And she wants to know who else on your old team you want to bring over with you. So, if you could pick only two people to ride with you—"

"Valentina and Maria."

"Nice. Let's go."

Tony's Lagonda Vision was waiting for him in the parking garage with his personal valet standing watch over the car. Tony opened up the moon roof and the Cali air blew in.

"Tonight, I think we'll put you in Hugo Boss," Tony said glancing at Erik.

They drove into Beverly Hills and Tony ushered Erik into a Boss shop where Tony paid for a brand new tuxedo, shirt and bow tie for him. The shop owner threw in some free boxer briefs and dress socks to be nice. The tuxedo didn't even have a price tag on it. None of the suits did.

"I've been in an office all day. I need to clean up," Erik said.

"I already have toiletries at the house. Never opened. I've got you covered. And if we hurry, you will have time to shower and shave."

The PCH was packed and by the time they reached Tony's Malibu "house", hired valets and caterers were already looking after people in the ultra-luxury mansion overlooking a high sea bluff. They slipped into the mansion through a back entrance and Tony took Erik up to a private guest suite where he could shower and change.

Pepper was already hounding Tony when he arrived complaining that she had to entertain too many people without him being there as the real host.

Tony had everything he needed for Erik to get ready, and within twenty minutes, Erik was showered, suited and booted. He had trouble with the bowtie. He stuffed it in his pocket and made his way down several stairs looking for the party spot. Over one hundred people were already in the home and Erik found Tony standing next to a group of attractive white women who hung onto his every word.

"Kid, ya gotta wear the tie to complete the look, excuse me, ladies…"

Tony ushered Erik to the side and helped him tie the bow correctly. "I thought I looked suave without the tie," Erik said.

"No…no you didn't."

Tony stood back and admired his handiwork.

"You look good, kiddo."

Erik nodded.

"Stick next to me a learn something," Tony said moving back into the crowd.

The man was smooth. Memory impeccable. He knew names and nicknames and greeted each person with enthusiasm. When there was a break in the mingling and Tony sipped a bit of white wine, Erik could finally talk to him.

"What is this party for?"

"Some investors in the lower-tiered companies I own. I throw them a shindig every now and then to make them feel special. Let them know that no matter how global I am, I always remember the little guy. It's once a year and it makes me look peachy."

"Gotcha."

"I will allow you a glass of wine here…hey…one glass of wine," Tony said as Erik put one of the wine glasses back on a server's tray as they swept past him.

Two chic blondes walked over to Tony, red wine in their hands as they fawned over him.

"My, my, my," Tony whispered as his eyes took in the décolletage on their dresses that highlighted their fake breasts. The only things that weren't plastic on them were the leather heels on their feet.

"This is my assistant, Erik Stevens," Tony said. Erik went along with the ruse and watched Tony maneuver his way to the other side of the room without the women realizing he was dumping them.

"Does this ever get old?" Erik asked.

"Here in Malibu, yes. I'll take you to my European digs and you can see how the Euro Trash party crowd changes everything," Tony said winking.

"I'll hold you to that," Erik said.

Later in the evening, Tony gave a speech to the crowd touting the growth of the companies he owned and highlighted the party-goers fatter bank statements due to Tony's leadership and smart business acumen. Two hours in, Erik became bored. And tired.

Tony worked the room and his rock star status among his guests was apparent. He was truly the King of razzle-dazzle and Erik watched Pepper keep him in check as she also worked the room, helping to move Tony when he was tired of talking to certain people. Pepper must've been working for Tony for a while because on instinct almost, she knew when to interrupt and pull Tony away with her to meet other guests. As much as Pepper came off as nit-picky with Tony, Erik got the sense that she loved her job with him. Tony allowed her a lot of leeway to butt in when she felt the conversations were veering into territory that Tony didn't need to speak on. She was also good at cockblocking certain women who didn't seem to fit Tony's type.

That's where it got interesting.

Tony's only type was beautiful and female. He was a breast man and a leg man from what Erik could see from the women he took an interest in. One tall sleek white brunette eased into his orbit, and within an hour, Tony was walking around with an arm around her waist. She was now the chosen one.

At one point, Erik had walked around a staircase where Tony was speaking to the head of a law firm, and Tony had his hand up the back of the brunette's dress digging all in her ass. The woman was standing there as if nothing was happening while Tony fingered her. When the lawyer walked away and they thought they were well hidden from view, Tony lifted the back of her dress higher and openly fingered her shaved pussy. She had no panties on at all.

Tony whispered in her ear and the woman's eyes shut tight. Her moan was loud.

"Talk that talk, T," Erik said under his breath as he sipped on a glass of Chablis. Tony's fingers were glossy and he must've been digging deep in the right spot because the brunette whimpered and held onto his left arm that cradled her waist while his right hand went to work. After a few minutes, Tony positioned himself behind the woman, unzipped his pants, rooted inside the fly of his underwear, and inserted his lengthy erection between her folds.

"Damn, no condom…bruh," Erik thought to himself watching the action.

Tony's strokes were hard as he palmed the woman's pale breasts that spilled out of her dress. Slamming into her, he kept talking, his voice urgent.

"Take it…take it…like a good little slut," Tony grunted, his eyes pressed shut and his face tight with lust. He was getting close. Looked like it was going to be a fat nut too. He pulled out abruptly and the brunette fell to her knees facing him, her hungry mouth wide open.

Time to go.

Erik turned and walked in the opposite direction feeling himself wanting to find a babe to finger fuck and clap cheeks. But there was no one there worth his time or energy and he had no condoms. The reality was, the women who were young enough for him to step to had their eyes on Tony. A billionaire genius was better than a broke genius.

He pulled out his cell and contemplated calling Giselle. The memory of her hand on his dick had him wanting a part two encounter. Tony was out here getting his rocks off. Erik wanted to do the same.

"Erik."

Tony's secretary Devika walked over to him. She wore a copper-colored body con dress and her thick black wavy hair was tucked in a chignon.

"Having fun?" she asked.

"It's interesting," Erik said.

"Very diplomatic answer," she said, giggling.

"How often does he party at his house like this?"

"Four or five times a year. I think you might be the first intern to ever come here."

Erik's eyes swept over the entire first floor.

"He lives in this big ass mansion by himself?"

"Yes."

"Rich people."

"This could be you one day."

"My spot will be bigger than this. A palatial estate."

"Listen to you," she said slapping his arm.

She dug into her small purse and pulled out a cell.

"You'll be back tomorrow, hopefully?" she said.

"I'll be there."

"Good. I heard nothing but good things about you."

"From who?"

"Mr. Stark."

Pepper walked over to them, her eyes looking around the room as she approached.

"Have you two seen Tony?" Pepper asked.

Erik's eyes swept over to the last place he saw him and there was no sign of Tony or his dime piece.

"He was talking to that lawyer from Fielding and Houstons," Erik said.

"If you see him, tell him that Mona Richards wants to speak to him and it is very important," Pepper said.

She walked away from them on the hunt for Tony.

Devika's eyes scanned the room.

"He was with a brunette," Erik said, making sure Pepper was far away.

"Ah, let me guess, the one with the…"

Devika held her hands out in front of her chest.

"You be knowing," Erik said.

"I'm going to call it a night. If Pepper is hunting him down, it can't be a good sign."

"Where do you live?"

"North Hollywood."

"Can I get a ride with you to the Oakwood?"

"Party over for you so soon?"

"I'm beat. Gotta get up early."

"Was Mr. Stark your ride?"

"Yeah."

"I'll give you a ride."

"Cool, let me get my stuff," Erik said.

He stood for a moment trying to remember which direction he came down to the first floor.

"Come on, I'll show you where your stuff is. You were in the guest room on the third floor."

"Thanks."

Erik followed Devika to the East side of the mansion and they walked up some stairs.

"There it is," Erik said walking into the room and grabbing his original suit that he placed inside the Hugo Boss bag he kept.

"You know where I can get my hair lined up?" he asked her.

"I look Black so you assume I know where to get hair done?" she said.

Erik stared at her face.

"My bad. I thought…the name Devika…it sounded…"

"It's Sanskrit and means 'little Goddess'. My parents are Indian—"

"I didn't—"

"—and Black. My brother gets his hair cut on Crenshaw, right across from the mall."

Erik smiled. "Los Angeles is a melting pot," she said.

"A segregated one."

"I hear you."

"I'm ready. Let's dip."

"I just texted Mr. Stark to let him know you are leaving. Just in case he wants to keep you longer," she said.

When they made it back down the stairs, Tony was waiting for them. Erik noticed his tie was fixed back up in haste. His hair was not as perfect either.

"Pepper said there's a Mona looking for you," Erik said.

"Here? Now?" Tony said looking around like a sniper was gunning for him.

"Yeah."

"Shit. Follow me," Tony said.

Erik and Devika followed him out onto his ocean view balcony that circled the entire mansion. Tony's eyes darted around as he slipped past guests out on the balcony and entered his private den.

"You owe her some money or something?" Erik asked, intrigued by how secretive Tony was acting like they were in a spy movie.

"No, she's just a friend with benefits whose benefits I no longer want."

Devika rolled her eyes at Erik.

"Hopefully she didn't see you with that brunette," Erik teased.

Tony's eyes narrowed. Erik threw up his hands.

"Hey, you were getting it in. I just happened to be there when it went down."

"Really? In front of Devika?" Tony said.

"I'll just be leaving Mr. Stark. Erik asked for a ride—"

"Yeah, I saw your text. Thanks for taking him. Put it on your T & E report for mileage. I'm going to hang out here," he said. He swiped his hand over his desk and security cams popped up on a floating screen.

"There she is. Damn it. I thought I had her taken off the invite list," Tony huffed, his hands on his hips looking distraught, "…oh shit."

"What is it, Mr. Stark?" Devika said.

"Pepper found her…and…oh no��"

Erik and Devika stepped around Tony's desk to look closer at his security feed.

"Let's go, let's go!" Tony said shoving Erik and Devika toward the door.

They exited the den and headed toward Tony's private exit where he and Erik had first entered the mansion. They were practically running down a hall and jumping into an elevator.

"Why are we running?" Erik asked.

"Pepper is bringing Mona to me," he said. Tony glanced at his watch and the security feed popped up there.

They scurried into an underground garage. Tony made them jump into a silver Lamborghini.

"Where are you parked Devika?" Tony asked.

"Second level."

Tony sped them over to a little red BMW.

"See you in the morning," Tony said.

"Where are you going?" Erik asked.

"I have a penthouse downtown. I'm staying there tonight."

"You're leaving your own party?" Erik asked.

"Pepper will shut it down," Tony said.

"Goodnight Mr. Stark," Devika said.

"Night Devika. Good job today, Stevens."

Tony took off like the wind.

"Get in," Devika said.

###

Part 7

Tag List:

@fd-writes​ @soufcakmistress  @cherrystainedlipsbaby @tclaybon  @thadelightfulone @allhailqueennel @bartierbakarimobisson @cpwtwot @shookmcgookqueen @yoyolovesbucky @raysunshine78 @the-illllest @terrablaze514  @l-auteuse @amirra88 @jimizwidow @janelledarling @chaneajoyyy @sweetestdream92 @purple-apricots @blackpinup22 @hennessystevens-udaku @scrumptiouslytenaciouscrusade @bugngiz @stariamrry  @honeytoffee

#Stark's New Intern #killmonger #erik stevens #tony stark #black panther fanfiction #n'jadaka

[violetsmoak]

Philtatos [4/?]

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20101543/chapters/47615902

Blanket Disclaimer

Summary: During a patrol where Red Hood and Red Robin cross paths, Jason is infected with the blood of the Eros, the ancient God of Love, who informs them that they must track down his missing bow and arrows, or Jason will go slowly mad with an obsessive desire–for Tim. Though overwhelmed by the sudden attention being paid to him, Tim sets to work trying to solve the case, before Jason succumbs to madness. In the meantime, Jason discovers that there’s more than godlike powers at work here, as well as a legacy that reaches back through the sands of time.

Rating: PG-13 (rating may change later)

Beta Reader: None at the moment.

JayTimBingo Prompts This Chapter: #gods in disguise #secrets #shield #undying love

First Chapter

Author's Note(s): This one's a little less polished since my computer decided to eat half the chapter and I had to rewrite it in a hurry, but I'll fix it later.

________________________________________________________________

How does this even happen?

It’s tempting for Tim to let his head fall against the computer console in his frustration.

A week in, and nothing. No reports of random people wandering around with a bow and arrows, none of his underworld contacts have mentioned anything showing up at on the black-market or at illegal auctions. It’s as if Eros’ diviners have vanished into thin air.

That he’s frustrated is putting it lightly.

Adding to that is the fact he hasn’t seen or heard from Jason in the same amount of time. The other vigilante finally appears to have found the tracer Tim stuck on him and sent it on a trip to the Gotham City dump. It’s both a relief, because it means he’s acting like himself, and a disappointment, because it means he’s still resistant to Tim’s help.

Apparently when he asserted the Red Hood would eventually reach out to him, he underestimated the exact amount of stubborn that is Jason Todd. He’d come to Eros about something, as Tim discovered when checking his now blank security feeds; the Olympian wouldn’t say what, instead complaining about rude capes and the obstinacy of men.

Tim scowls at the dot pixel pattern of static where the footage of their meeting should be, trying to get his emotions under control. He’s annoyed, because Eros is annoying, but also because Jason managed to not only get into his apartment undetected, but down into the Nest.

Yes, he knows Jason is a lot smarter than he pretends to be, but it’s a dart to his pride because he thought he was being clever.

He’s also worried, since something upset Jason enough to come here in the first place. And he’s hurt because he’d chosen to speak to the winged appetite that compromised him to begin with instead of the one person trying to help him right now.

He waited until I wasn’t around to come here. And Eros won’t say what they talked about.

Mostly to be contrary.

As for the reports coming in from the authorities cleaning up after the Red Hood in the past few days, his take-downs are edging toward the worse side of brutal once again.

Something must be going on. If he’s being affected, though, wouldn’t he not have the interest to keep on with his usual activities?

It’s been an almost physical effort not to approach Jason once again, to plead with him to just accept help for once.

Versions of that plan have never worked for Bruce or Dick—or, well, any Bat, really—so Tim doubts it will work for him.

It’s why he now forces his focus back onto Eros’ case, as futile as it’s been. He knows he’s has more difficult cases, but this one feels like it’s intentionally trying to frustrate him in a way even the Riddler’s games never have.

You’d think people carrying around a bow and arrows would be pretty easy to find, but apparently not.

The Olympian is irritating, even as he answers Tim’s questions. His story hasn’t changed from when he first told it—a trip to Amsterdam that didn’t go as planned, and then a desperate hunt throughout all the cities where Tim tracked thefts.

So far, everything lines up with the investigation Tim was running before and offers no new information.

“Are your diviners like you?” Tim asks, considering the giant map on his computer screen; a red line drags across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting locations on the bordering continents. “I mean, will they not turn up on CCTV or other security devices?”

It would explain why he hasn’t found anything yet.

“Nah, that’s just me,” Eros tells him as he flips through a gossip rag. “I have to make the conscious decision to not show up on camera. It’s a strain on my abilities.” He sighs, putting down the magazine. “I used to be able to go completely invisible in the good old days. Back when people truly believed in us.”

“And now you just, what, mess with imaging frequencies?”

“Pfft—Glorified camouflage.”

“Considering government reliance on facial recognition software, you’re still able to ghost the system. That’s something.”

“Don’t patronize,” Eros grumbles. Then he tilts his head as something occurs to him. “Although, now that you mention it, they can change forms.”

Tim stills. “…What.”

“Yes, to make them less conspicuous. You don’t think I wander around with a bow and arrows all the time, do you? Outside of a Renaissance fair that sort of thing catches the wrong kind of attention—”

“Why the hell didn’t you say this before?” Tim hisses, fingers itching with conflicting impulses to tear at his hair or punch the Olympian in the face. Luckily for the well-being of all parties involved there’s a thick sheet of bulletproof glass between them.

“Uh, one, you didn’t ask. Two, I’m the only one who knows how to change their form, so I didn’t think it was an issue,” Eros replies, ticking options off his fingers.

Tim takes a deep breath through his nose and releases it. “If you want me to solve your case and get your property back, you have to tell me all the information. Even if it seems insignificant.”

“Well I know that now,” Eros huffs; at Tim’s continued unimpressed expression, he rolls his eyes stands up. “Fine! Mea culpa. What do you want to know?”

“What forms can your diviners take?”

“Since they were forged to be divine weapons, they have to conform to their purpose. So they can only be reshaped into other weapons.”

“Any weapon? Knives? Brass knuckles? Mace?”

“In theory?” Eros answers, and then looks curious. “Actually, that’s an interesting concept. I might try those out when I get them back.”

His attention span is possible worse than Bart’s.

“Focus—what form were they in when you were in Amsterdam?” There’s no footage of that, because apparently that café valued customer privacy over possible security issues.

“Well, I’d just finished watching a James Bond marathon, so I was inspired. I made them into these sweet, gold-plated .45 calibre revolvers. Single shot, custom-design, monogrammed.”

And another breath…

“Which you didn’t think to mention.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, was that important?”

“Yes, it was important! How am I supposed to help you find your diviners when you have me looking for a bow and arrows, and they’ve basically become the Golden Gun?!”

“Guns. Plural.” Eros corrects reasonably. “And you’re a detective. It’s what you do. I already said I don’t tell you how to do your job.”

Tim’s heard that love is blind; it turns out love is also an idiot.

With monumental effort, he lets it go; he’ll revisit the shape-changing weapons on his own time. There’s other information he needs. “Back to the theft, though—is there anyone you were with at the time, anyone who might have witnessed what happened?”

“I was with a lot of people that night. And it’s not like those people are going to a pot café to pay attention, if you know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that’s not surprising. You don’t strike me as the fun one.”

Tim rolls his eyes at the dig, “What about other Olympians?”

“What about them?”

“Could they have stolen it from you?”

“In theory, but I would have noticed. And then booked it in another direction.”

“You don’t get along with your family?”

“Do you?”

“It’s…complicated.”

“It always is.”

“What about your wife?”

Eros tenses, expression going unnaturally blank. “What?”

“I started doing a bit of research on you,” Tim explains, studying the sudden change in demeanour. “Just the basics. But the most popular story about you has to do with your wife, Psy—”

“Dead,” Eros cuts him off, abrupt.

“But I thought she became an immortal goddess?”

“How many times do I have to explain that the stories don’t get everything right?” Eros sneers. “She’s dead. Point final.”

The message in his voice and eyes is for Tim to drop it; even as his curiosity grows, filing the information into his mental dossier of the Olympian, Tim can recognize a painful topic.

He lets it go. For now.

“So, no one was around? The coffeeshop, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Eros groans, body language easing out of it’s rigidity once more. He winds his fingers into his hair. “There was a pair of identical twins from Sweden that looked like walking Alps, and by the Styx did I want to climb those.”

“Gross.”

“And then there was the clingy redhead, the hot waiter with the manbun, one total MILF relieving her glory days—I don’t know, okay? There were a lot of people!”

Tim leans back in his chair, carding his fingers together. “What exactly is a god of love doing getting stoned in Amsterdam, anyhow?”

“Hey, I don’t judge your life choices.”

“I’m not judging, I’m just—curious. You’re not human, you can go wherever you want, do whatever you want, without being tracked—can probably influence people to get whatever you want. And you decide to gorge yourself on pot brownies in a glorified basement?”

“You might not understand this, but sometimes it’s nice to go somewhere and forget for a little while,” Eros drawls.

Actually, I get that more than you imagine…

“That’s unexpected,” Tim offers. “Considering who you are, you’d think you’d be happier."

"When has love ever been synonymous with happy?" Eros challenges. “You know that better than most, right?”

“I’m fine. I’m living with it.”

“Not talking about your walking Alp, darlin’. I mean the loss you’ve gone through.” The Olympian is studying him now. “I can see the scars left over from every person you let into your heart and who left you. The boy you loved, your parents, your best friends, your father figure…and it’s not just death I’m sensing. You’ve had things taken from you, things you loved more than anything, just wrenched away.”

“My entire life has burnt down! Again! I don’t call this ‘okay’, Dick.”

“You have to understand—”

“Oh, are you still here?”

“What Earth are we on that you choose him over me?”

Even after all this time, it hurts.

He is uncomfortable at the reminder of blacker times, some fresher in his mind than others. He still has moments when his mind is trapped back in the days after losing Robin, after his father’s death, when he gets stuck in those memories and can barely get out of bed. It’s like sleep paralysis, except he’s awake, and it usually takes Dick dropping by his place unannounced or Alfred phoning him to remind him not to miss upcoming family dinners, to get him out of it again.

To remind him it’s in the past and can’t hurt him anymore.

But now, this latest thing with Jason has more than just the potential to hurt, it’s practically a certainty. In fact, Tim wonders if Jason being cursed to desire him isn’t just the universe continuing its general theme of dumping on him.

“I don’t need a replay, I was there,” Tim says stiffly, and decides he needs a break from Eros for a little while. In about three hours he has to get up and go to work, something he’d rather skip, but the old guard on the Board of Directors is getting up to their usual bullshit and he can’t skip the meetings today.

The rest of the week continues in the same trying fashion. When he isn’t working the case, going through hours of footage from various airports, train stations and other checkpoints for a sign of someone carrying any weapons this time, he’s at WE fighting a bunch of old, fiscal conservatives trying to undercut employee wages. Neither initiative seems to be going anywhere.

On the sixth night since the warehouse fight, Tim is running on very little fuel, to the point his judgement is starting to waver. He’s weighing the pros and cons of checking in on Jason again. He thinks he could probably manage it without him noticing this time. But then, Eros is taking one of his rare (and much appreciated) food-coma naps, which means some valuable quiet time for him to think.

The main computer chooses that point to blink to life with a message from the Tower, and Tim’s stomach leaps with hope that Cassie has something for him.

Except it’s not her that grins down at him.

“Superboy? Where’s Cassie?”

His best friend makes a face. “Ouch, not even a ‘hello’?”

“Sorry, just a bit stressed,” Tim groans. Apparently his exhaustion has brought him past the point of basic etiquette. He needs another Red Bull. “Hi.”

“You sound so enthusiastic,” Connor deadpans. “Anyway, Cassie’s gone to see her Mom in Gateway City. She said she’d be back soon.”

Tim nods. That makes sense, considering Dr. Sandsmark’s knowledge of Ancient Greek artifacts and mythology; he feels stupid for not thinking to contact her before.

“Hey Rob!” Bart shoves his face into the frame. “When are you coming back?”

“Might be a little while. I got side-tracked with a case here that’s, uh, time sensitive.”

“Sucks.”

“While you’re here, can I get some of those bars of yours?”

He thinks Batburger is about to offer him and endorsement deal.

“Are you pulling another case where you’re too lazy to get up and eat? Dude, we talked about that.”

“Also, those bars are gross.”

“Of course they’re gross to you, you’re used to homemade Kansas awesomeness that fills you up if you just look at it.”

“They’re not for me,” Tim interrupts. “It’s for a…actually—” There’s no other way to see it. “He’s my prisoner.”

His friends look impressed.

“Damn, Rob, are you going Dark Side on us?”

“Ooh, do they have cookies?”

“Ha, hah. And even if I was, everyone else has already done it, I’m due. But no, the guy’s a glorified witness, with the metabolism like a Speedster.”

“So, hell on the grocery bills,” Connor says with a nod.

Tim’s comm buzzes, the line from his cellphone; against the backdrop of his mask, Cassie’s number pops up.

“Gimme a sec, incoming call,” he says, and patches into the line. “Hey—”

“Everything he said is true,” Cassie interrupts before he can finish the sentence. “Eros, I mean. People infected by his blood only get worse unless treated—think the Henry VIII, the Manson family, or John Hinckley Jr before they were cured.”

Tim recognizes all of those names. “Wait, but they all lived afterward.”

“They were the ones who got cured. Other’s haven’t been so lucky. Medea killed her own children and set her ex’s new girlfriend on fire.”

The blood rushes from his face. “What?”

“I mean, all those people had severe issues before they got infected, which might be a factor, but if your victim already has trouble controlling their emotions…”

Cassie trails off.

It’s like the bottom has dropped out of his stomach. “How long?”

“Two weeks, give or take. It depends on the mind frame of the victim.”

A very real, visceral fury spreads throughout Tim’s body, anger on Jason’s behalf and at the spoiled godling that’s watching all this unfold like it’s one of his TV dramas.

“…Thanks, Cassie,” he manages to croak. “Call you later.”

He hangs up.

“Are you okay?” Connor asks; on screen, his body becomes more tense in response to Tim’s expression.

“I have to go,” Tim replies, tipping his cowl over his head.

“Need help?” Bart asks. “You know we can be there in less than three hours if you do. Two if we’re really booking.”

Tim considers, then shakes his head. “I—we should be able to handle this.” Bruce is never happy when metas show up without his permission, even when they’re saving the collective asses of the Family. “But I’ll keep you posted. If there is anything, I’ll contact you right away.”

“Good luck,” Connor says, still concerned.

“Thanks,” Tim replies, ending the call.

I think I’m definitely going to need it.

⁂

The sun beats down on him from its zenith, and he can feel his arms burning. The air is hot and humid, carrying with it the taste of the sea he usually associates with the Mediterranean, yet he’s still sweating in his linen tunic.

In his hands—browner than he’s used to, scarred but in a different way than he expects—he carries a wreath of laurel leaves, woven together with fine gold thread. In front of him, a giant mound rises out of the earth, grass and wildflowers covering it, rippling lazily in the wind. At its base, a thick column of aged marble, already falling into disrepair.

He should see about having that fixed before they head for Sardis.

Jason takes a few steps forward, kneeling to place the wreath at the base of the column; despite the heat, a chill moves up his spine as he presses his hand to the earth, clutching a handful of dry soil and bringing it to his lips.

“It is my privilege to stand at the hall of your rest, Honored Forefather,” he murmurs. “And know that I will do your blood proud.”

The words are less flowery than anything the priests and governors might come up with, but the sentiment remains just as genuine.

Glancing to his right, he sees a similar column several yards away, and another man is kneeling there with his own wreath. It takes him a moment before he recognises him.

Tim.

Except—he’s different: his hair is longer, skin darker than Jason can ever remember seeing, because Tim is supposed to be a pasty-faced nerd. He’s also wearing a red tunic and lace up sandals, and his features are much more relaxed than Jason is used to. No dark circles beneath his closed eyes. He mouths words that are lost in the breeze.

Jason’s own gaze falls there for a moment, taking in the flushed colour of his lips. Something at the back of his mind chides him for looking, but it’s lost within a burgeoning warmth in his chest.

He’s lucky to have him here, someone as faithful and intelligent and honest—

Eyes blinking open, Tim notices him watching; his mouth tilts upward in amusement, and Jason’s heart seems to beat faster. The smaller man straightens up, leaving his offering behind him and wanders over, movements as smooth as a cat. And—

No, this isn’t a good idea, he’s supposed to be avoiding him, right? He can’t remember why, but—

“What are you thinking of?” Tim asks softly. “You’re supposed to be making sacrifices to your ancestor’s memory, not staring at your liegeman.” He adopts a severe expression. “It’s distracting me from being appropriately solemn.”

Jason shrugs, fond smile on his own face.

“He was happy, when he lived,” he says, nodding at the column where he knelt before. “And fortunate in finding a faithful companion, and a great poet to sing of his deeds after his death.”

“You say that as if you have neither,” Tim snorts.

“There are no more poets of merit to speak of my deeds. Everything is lost to the logical, pedantic record of history.”

“And there’s the sense of drama I was waiting for,” Tim deadpans. “You could always write the histories yourself.”

“Hah! You would say something like that. Always planning, aren’t you?”

“Well, someone has to.”

Jason rolls his eyes, and gestures with his hand that Tim should follow him. They amble down a grassy footpath, returning to the level ground where their horses wait for them. There are guards spread out around them, close enough to help if something should happen but far enough away, they can’t hear what’s said.

He approaches the massive black Thessalian, absently patting the ox-head brand on its haunch with one hand while his other reaches to detach a large cloth-wrapped package from his saddlebags.

Tim appears curious when Jason hands it to him.

“I made sacrifice at the temple this morning before we rode out and left them with one of my finest sets of armour,” he explains. “They insisted it was too much and that I should take something in return. This called to me.”

Tim opens the bundle, eyebrows raising at the bronze shield that gleams in the sun.

“It was found in the ruins of the great city herself after the battle. It made me think of you.”

“Oh?” Tim watches him from beneath hooded eyes, a delicate colour blooming across the bridge of his nose. “You think of me as a shield?”

“I think of you as my shield,” he corrects seriously. “I will always be a sword. I can’t be anything else, or others would see it as weakness. But you…you protect everything that I am, even from myself. You throw your own needs and wants to the dirt to raise up mine. You weather the anger of men who believe themselves to be greater. For my sake.”

Tim appears struck mute at this, clutching the shield to his body as he stares at Jason with shining eyes. His mouth parts several times, as if he’s trying to figure out what to say, and once again Jason’s gaze falls upon his lips.

Tim shoots a darting glance at the guards near them, and something like frustration passes across his features, mixing with calculation.

And then he’s grinning that sharp grin again, and Jason’s stomach flips pleasantly as it fixes on him. Tim sets the shield to one side with careful reverence and takes a step forward until their faces are within inches of one another.

Jason licks his lips, expectation weighing heavily on him, and waits for Tim to break the silence.

“I think we should run a race.”

Which...was not the response he was expecting. Jason blinks at the non sequitur. “What?”

“In the old style,” the younger man continues, setting the shield on the ground and backing away. He’s reaching for the belt of his tunic, eyes sparking with mischief and something else. “To honour our ancestors, of course.”

“Of course,” Jason agrees, and reaches for him, but Tim dances out of his way.

“Ah, no! You’re entirely to dressed for that.”

He’s jogging backwards now, and Jason laughs, reaching again for him, “Get back here—”

“You’ll have to catch me—”

“Hood!”

Jason gives a full-body jerk, dragged out of his reverie by a voice that is no longer laughing, but tense.

“Red Hood!”

The world returns to him, gritty and smelling like rancid trash and smoke. There are several bodies at his feet and the smell of blood in the air; he hears groaning, so he knows they’re alive. That should be a relief, somehow, except he’s distracted.

There’s someone standing in front of him, the height and build familiar, it could be him, except the eyes are wrong and he’s younger and—

Not him. Nothing like him.

For a beat Jason is irritated when he realises the person in front of him is not Tim, because he was sure he just heard him. On the heel of that annoyance is the realisation that he’s looming over a kid that can’t be more than a few years older than Damian, who’s staring at him with unbridled terror, pressing himself into the walls of the alley.

New kid on the corner. Johns were harassing him, so I taught them a lesson, but then…

Jason’s hand lingers in front of his face, inches away, fingers curved like they intend to brush the boy’s jawline.

Realisation hits at what he must look like, what the teenager must think, and it’s soon followed by disgust because he knows the motivation behind his current position. He pulls back, staring down at his hands in horror.

What the hell did I almost do?

“Hood, look at me,” Tim says, only it’s the Red Robin voice, growled from the shadows, and it sends a shiver up Jason’s spine.

He immediately turns to face him.

The nameless teen take off at a run, but that’s not important; what’s important is that Tim is here, barely three feet away. He moves to close the distance, posture open and soothing, and Jason is already relaxing in response, twitching to reach toward Tim’s outstretched hand.

And…no.

He should not be relaxing. He should not be reaching out or touching Tim in any way because—

Because…

It’s hard to think why, but then he remembers.

Because it’s not him who wants to, it’s the infection. And he might do something worse.

Jason’s entire body seizes up again, and he stumbles backward.

“Hood, it’s okay,” Tim says in a placating whisper. “I’m going to help you. I promise.”

And Jason wants to, he really does. Wants to just go with him, maybe let himself fall against his body in exhaustion, because Tim might be small but he’s strong and could hold him up and—

“Back off!” Jason snaps, both to himself and to Tim, who jerks as if he’s been slapped. The sight helps ground him a bit more. “You are the lastperson I should be around right now.”

“Ja—”

“No!”

He takes off. Doesn’t bother with shooting a line into the air—his hands are shaking too much for that—and just runs. He knows this place better than the other vigilante ever will, knows how to disappear even when being pursued by a Bat.

And right now, he needs to disappear.

Grotty buildings and dark alleys fly by him as he crashes through the backways.

This is better, just one foot in front of the other. The icy air in his lungs is painful, but the good kind—distracting. Waking him from whatever funk he was in.

What the hell was that before? A dream?

But he was awake. And since when are dreams, or even hallucinations, so cohesive? Sequential? He knows it happened like he was living it, though he can’t remember exactly anymore. The details are drifting away like sand grasped too tightly in a fist, but he remembers feelings. Warmth. Safety. Laughter.

And Tim smiling at him; everything else is hazy, but he remembers that detail without difficulty.

Jason’s stomach lurches, torn between something fond and possessive, and the sense of disgust crouching at the back of his mind and spreading through his body the more he thinks about it.

He has to stay away—from Tim, from anyone who looks like him. Just until he can figure out a fix (or hell, even afterward, just to be sure). No, wait, he can’t figure it out. It would involve investigation, chasing down leads, probably running into—

No. Better barricade himself in somewhere. Take himself out of the equation.

Tim will be fine to figure this out on his own—he said he was trying to help, which means he’s aware of what’s going on with Jason. Which, yes, is mortifying, but also a comfort, because he trusts the younger man to figure it out.

He wonders for a moment if that’s because of the growing fascination, and then decides it’s not. Even before, he’s had an inexplicable amount of faith in Tim’s abilities to plan and get results.

It’s why he wanted him to be his Robin.

Why he still wants—

“Damn it!” Jason growls, stopping for a moment to breathe and then to punch the nearest wall in frustration.

The comm in his ear buzzes to life.

“Red Hood?”

Not Tim, but Oracle.

“Tell me you found something,” he orders, trying to get his mounting panic under control.

“Not yet. I’ve got a lead that looks promising, but still waiting on confirmation,” Oracle replies. There’s a pause, and then when she speaks again, it’s without the voice synthesizer. “Tim told me what’s going on.”

Shame hits him. “Of course he did.”

“We want to help you, Jason. This isn’t something you have to go through on your own.”

“Tell me that the next time you get shot up with Olympian blood that makes you fixate on Huntress or Clayface or someone. I just need somewhere to ride this out—”

“I can think of somewhere that would be well-equipped.”

The Cave.

“No.”

“Now isn’t the time for your pride. If you really don’t want to hurt someone—to hurt Tim. Again. Your best bet is to get B’s help.”

The kicker is, Jason knows she’s right. And he’s off his game enough that all of his usual arguments and complaints and resentments just don’t seem to register. All that he can focus on right now is Tim—and wanting to do everything he can to stop obsessing over him.

To stop wanting him, wanting to touch and taste and—

“Damn it,” his says again, but this time it’s whispered, almost defeated.

Bruce is the only one Jason knows that will do anything in his power to stop him from becoming exactly the kind of monster he’s been fighting his whole life. Even if it means throwing him in Arkham until whatever is driving him insane gets fixed.

And even if it doesn’t…

He’ll lock me up and throw away the key to keep me from hurting Tim. And I’d let him.

“He’s enroute to you now,” Barbara says.

“Is the demon brat with him?”

“Yes.”

He remembers the terrified expression on the nameless teenager’s face as he reached out to him.

“Keep him away. I don’t…know what I might do.”

Barbara’s silence is heavy, and Jason feels a wave of disgust with himself rush over him.

“I’ve told B to send Robin to rendezvous with Red Robin,” she says, and it’s Oracle’s voice again. “He’ll be there in five minutes. Try not to bolt.”

It’s the longest five minutes of his life.

⁂⁂⁂

Next Chapter

#jaytimweek2019 #jaytimweek #jaytim #jaytimbingo2019 #fanfic #jaytim fic #batfic #tim drake #jason todd #eros (new earth) #teen titans #connor kent #bart allen #cassie sandsmark #fate #gods in disguise #secrets #undying love #drama #angst #stubborn boys trying to save stubborn boys

[cherryeoo]

Morning Star (Ateez Fantasy!AU) Ch 3

Summary: Two unlikely companions join together to ride the rollercoaster known as: Life. With a yin and yang balance, they soon discover that there’s not only beauty in the beast, but beast in the beauty.

Flipping on her desktop lamp, Saetbyeol sinks into her chair, locking her purse in the desk’s only drawer. Tapping her finger on the smooth surface of her desk, she impatiently waits for her computer to come to life. Today was going to be an exhausting day.

Saetbyeol was usually always the first to arrive in the morning. She wasn’t a morning person per-say, but she liked to get a head start on her work so she wasn’t having to get off late or be the last to leave. The glow of her computer monitor illuminated her face, exposing the exhaustion in her eyes. Taking a swig of her coffee from her travel mug, she opened her web browser and document software. The cave incident left her so baffled that she began thinking of any and all possible explanations - no matter how bizarre it seemed. Before she could document and publish the article, however, she had to find solid evidence on what could’ve caused this. The scenes from that day constantly flashed in her mind; the whole situation was unsettling.

Shaking the images from her mind, she cracked her fingers and let out an audible sigh before typing ‘behaviors of hunters’ into the search bar. Time slowly passed by as she read article after article on hunters and their occasional strange behaviors, but none of it matched with what she saw in the cave. The carcasses - piled perfectly on top of one another with only their livers missing. It just didn’t add up.

   Her next option was to research murders and bizzare patterns as well as various killings, but regardless of how deep she ventured into the rabbit hole, Saetbyeol couldn’t find similar cases. She didn’t want to rule out murder, or a deranged hunter, but she couldn’t find any solid reasons as to who would do such a thing, or why. Hunters never stacked carcasses neatly and perfectly, so maybe it was a warning? Maybe a serial killer lurked in the shadows and utilized animal carcusses to send out a subliminal threat?

Breaking her concentration, she heard the bells on the office’s front door chime. Looking up, she saw San walk in and towards his desk. Removing his thick black jacket, he draped it perfectly over the back of his chair. Placing his belongings neatly in their proper places, he pressed the power button on his computer as he waited for the machine to come to life.

Saetbyeol never once paid attention to his strange organizational behavior, but after the cave incident, she had become more aware of her surroundings. However, considering San was her co-worker, she didn’t dwell upon his actions. Sensing someone watching him, San spun around in her direction only to catch her watching his every move closely. Smiling sweetly at her, he waved to his mysterious co-worker. Her eyes quickly darted back to her screen, fully prepared to go back to ignoring him at all costs. Cheeks flushing just the slightest tinge of pink, she hoped he couldn’t see her discoloration from across the room. San frowned, he was always curious about her and why she never spoke to anyone other than the girl he saw her with the other night. Shaking his head, San makes his way to the coffee bar to make himself some tea.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Saetbyeol groaned in frustration - she was getting nowhere. She was just about to give up and try a different route when she noticed a comment from an anonymous user with a link to another article. Furrowing her brows, she gnawed on her lip - she might as well check it out. Clicking on it, she stared at the words in big bold letters, Mythical Creatures: A History,  the color of a dark red wine, maybe even a blood hue.

As she scanned the article, Saetbyeol quickly perceived that it was written by an amateur author. The more she read, the more skeptical she grew - what even was this? Fiction perhaps? The author talked about the reality of mythical creatures walking amongst human beings which which, in return, earned an audible chuckle from Saetbyeol.

The author probably wrote it to get a rise out of people and to fuel others’ superstitions. There’s no such thing as mythical creatures and even if there were, how would people know? Did they see one? Doubtful. The more she read, the more absurd the article grew - such creatures apparently took the form of human beings to fit in which caused Saetbyeol to, once again, question whether or not the author had seen such a sight, to which she, yet again, declared that it was doubtful.

It took everything in Saetbyeol’s power to not roll her eyes at the mention and definition of each creature. There’s no way people actually believed these things, right? She had to give the writer some credit, though - a lot of the information was very detailed, but there’s no way they weren’t making this up. Sighing, Saetbyeol moved her cursor to close the tab when suddenly, a familiar word caught her eye: Kumiho. Gnawing on her lower lip, she hesitantly clicked on word to read more. Just as the page finished loading, her boss called to her; Saetbyeol jumping in her chair as her head whips in the direction of her boss’ voice. “Yes boss?”

“Can I speak to you in my office real fast?” Ms. Kim stood at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to her office.

Jumping up, she made her way to her boss and up the stairs to her office. Returning to his desk, tea in hand, San noticed Saetbyeol was nowhere to be found. He wondered if she had gone to the restroom or to get something to eat. Why was he suddenly so concerned about her?

Shaking his head, he made his way back to his desk, setting his teacup down on top of the coaster next to his keyboard. The room had started to fill up with more of his coworkers, their voices becoming louder as they started to bid good morning to their friends while working on bringing their computers to life. Sitting down, San’s eyes scanned the crowd of people, eyes darting left and right in hopes to catch a glimpse of Saetbyeol, but to no avail.

“What do you mean I have to work with him?!” Saebyeol replied to her boss. The two of them were good friends from college, but at the end of the day, Ms. Kim was still her boss, so she had the final say in decision-making.

“I know this isn’t easy for you Saetbyeol and I’m not doing this to punish you by any means, but I am teaming you up with San for your cave investigation. An outsider's view might be a good thing, not to mention the attention he’ll bring to the story.” Ms. Kim replied giving Saetbyeol a sympathetic grin.

“So you are using him for publicity! This isn’t even his department anyway!” She groans as she folds her arms across her chest.

“Well, yes, but I’m doing this for you. You know I’ve always wanted you to go far in your career, so I’m using this opportunity to help you out as well.”

“Fine, whatever. But don’t expect me to be nice to him.” Saetbyeol snaps back, glaring at her boss and old friend.

“I’m not expecting you to, but do try to at least work with him.” At that Ms. Kim dismissed Saetbyeol.

She stormed out of the office, back down the stairs and to her desk. Flopping in her chair, she snaps her head in San’s direction, shooting daggers from her eyes into his back, hoping he could feel it. As if abiding by her wishes, San tensed up and turned his head to lock eyes with her, suddenly taken aback by her gaze. The look of pure hatred twisted the features of her face, her eyes cold as a storm brewed within them. Confusion overtook his body - what had he done to her that made her behave this way towards him? Had he taken her mug by mistake? Did he say something about one of her articles without realizing it? Eyes growing wide, Saetbyeol whipped her head around - focusing on her computer screen in front of her.

Frustration coursing through her, Saetbyeol tries once more to read the article she had found in the comments, but her attention was pulled elsewhere once more. Saetbyeol watches out of the corner of her eye as her boss makes her way towards San’s desk. Great she’s going to tell him the news. Pretending not to be paying attention, Saetbyeol fixated her eyes upon the monitor, but didn’t read the words virtually plastered to it. Stopping in front of him, Ms. Kim places a file of all the copies Saetbyeol made of her report from the cave and her findings so far beside his hand. Watching San flip through them, his eyes grew wide as they dart straight to Saetbyeol - he must’ve just been told the news.

Feeling her cheeks flush, she bends down, pretending to pick up something off the floor so her hair could fall freely from behind her ear to hide her face from his view. Straightening up slightly, she could see his shoulders tense up through the curtain of her black locks as he sighs; nodding in agreement with Ms. Kim, knowing he, too, cannot refuse. His reluctance was obvious, but being the good poster-child he was, he confirmed his agreement without too much hesitation.

As Saetbyeol continued to watch, a warm feeling of anger began pooling in the pit of her stomach. Sighing, she fully straightened up, unlocking the desks drawer, as she grabbed her purse and stormed out of the building. She needed fresh air before she snapped. How could Ms. Kim team her up with him? Of all people, why did it have to be Choi San?

An audible sigh escaped her lips - she was going to get so many glares from this, as if she already didn’t get enough. San was the most desired person at their workplace, but he was also the most unavailable person in the office. Clenching her jaw, Saetbyeol ran a hand through her hair once she realized how her female co-workers would react. San was fairly popular amongst women - especially those in their office. Countless times they had tried to make their move on him and each time, he politely turned them down. That, alone, was going to cause trouble for her, but she had to at least give him some credit - he was always a professional gentleman, even to her.

But she was cold, closed off from everyone; never made friends or spoke to anyone, and when she did it was laced with intense sarcasm. No one approached her for anything, and she liked it that way. Honestly, her only true friend was Mirae. Her boss knew of Saetbyeol’s past, so how could she do this to her? Ms. Kim said it was for Saetbyeol’s benefit, but there’s no way anything good is going to come out of this.

Paying for her lunch, Saetbyeol slipped into a secluded picnic table nestled under a tree. She always came to this park near the office for lunch, or whenever she needed some alone time to cool off or to think. Glancing down, Saetbyeol took a quick glance at her bandaged ankle. The bleeding had stopped, but considering the wound’s vulnerability and placement, it was easy to re-open the tear. Noticing no signs of blood seeping through the bandage, however, she went back to focusing on her lunch - doing her best not to think of the fact that she is going to have to work with the Choi San.

San was still so confused as to why Saetbyeol acted with such anger and rage towards him. She obviously knew that they would be working together from here on out. San knew how she kept to herself, how she never spoke to anyone and what others thought about her. If someone started to talk about her around him, he would instantly change the subject in hopes to get the negative attention off of her; he hated how people spoke about her. They didn’t know her, nor did they ever try to, but it’s not like he attempted to, either. He had tried to approach her once in the past, but it blew up in his face, so instead, he secretly admired her from afar; his interest growing everyday. Now that he was getting his chance, though, he had to admit that while he was thrilled to get to know her, he was reluctant as well - he knew what their interactions would do to her. More people would start to stare and talk badly about her - pondering and speculating as to why the two of them had grown so close. They wouldn’t care about the fact of their pairing being for an assignment; human beings only ever cared about drama and how to twist stories for their own benefit.

San glanced once more at her now empty workstation, her frustration apparent. Sighing, he stood up, mug in hand, as he made his way back to the coffee bar for another cup of tea. Passing by her desk, he stopped in his tracks as he noticed the article she was reading. What did this have to do with the cave’s case they would be working on together? Noticing the new, unread article in a tab next to the currently open one, he frowned. Leaning in a bit to get a better look, he rolled his eyes as he moved the mouse's cursor to the small ‘x’ button in the top right-hand corner of the tab, closing both tabs pertaining to mythical creatures.

“How stupid,” San’s voice was soft, irritation seeping into his body. He never thought Saetbyeol, of all people, believed in such wild stories. He would have to ensure she didn’t look up such things if he was to work with her. Their pairing was already going to cause trouble - he wasn’t going to allow her to make a fool of the company, let alone themselves, as well. Deleting  that day’s browser’s web history, he continued on his way to the coffee bar.

Satisfied with his beverage, San moves gracefully between the scattered crowds of employees discussing various projects they were working on. It wasn’t uncommon for people from different departments getting teamed up, but why choose someone from the news and another from the entertainment section? Contrary to popular assumptions, those two categories were in no way connected - not for this story, at least.

Looking out the window, San noticed Saetbyeol walking back towards the building. Should he approach her? Just as she was about to enter, Saetbyeol was stopped by one of their fellow coworkers. He watched as the man got closer and closer to her as she tried to put a comfortable distance between them, but the man was not letting up. The look in his eyes made San’s stomach twist, anger boiling up inside him.

The man was taunting her. He watched as Saetbyeol tensed her shoulders, curling into herself as she lowered her head to avoid his intimidating gaze. The more he pushed, the more uncomfortable she grew. She wanted to just disappear. Tears started to sting her eyes as he continued to tease her as to why she was taken to the bosses office - repeating how he thought she was finally getting fired. San noticed her small frame begin to shake. He normally didn’t get involved in people’s affairs, but he could tell how truly frightened she was. He knew what consequences this would bring, but he wasn’t going to allow this to continue to happen, not to his new partner. He would protect her of what people had to say from now on.

Standing up, San quickly made his way out the front door. Looming behind the man taunting Saetbyeol, he cleared his throat, lowering his voice to sound more menacing. “Is there a reason why you are tormenting my partner?”

Snapping her head up Saetbyeol stares at San. His demeanor was suddenly menacing and quite frightful; completely contrasting his usual cheery and warm self. She had to admit she was scared of the San she was currently seeing. She had never once seen him show any sign of anger or aggression, so this was new. Glancing up at him, she saw his jaw clenched tight as a nearly visible fire danced in his eyes. Their co-worker turned around to face San, he stood just a few inches taller than him, but that didn’t stop San from confronting the man. She couldn’t hear any of the words the two of them exchanged as she froze in pure fear and anxiety. It had been a long time since she had a severe panic attack like this, but it wasn’t much of a surprise - it was triggered upon receiving the news about working with San and now, with her co-worker cornering her and San acting out of character, it only intensified.

Tears flowed freely down her cheeks as she noticed their co-worker backing down and heading back inside. Thankfully, only a small crowd of spectators had formed, and those who did gather around,all had their attention on San. Quickly wiping away her tears before anyone saw, she tried to calm her breathing when suddenly, a firm, but gentle hand grasped her shoulder. She already knew whose hand it was, but the feeling of him touching her, made her shy away from his touch.

“Are you okay?” His voice was laced with genuine concern, yet she could still hear the anger in his deep tone. He could tell she was still trembling, her breathing still somewhat uneven. Faint whimpers left her mouth as she started to speak.

“I-I didn’t ask for you help. I would’ve been fine on my own.” Her voice trembled uncontrollably as she tried to calm herself before she went back inside. She didn’t have any strength left to yell like she wanted to. She knew that her words were a lie, she wouldn’t have been fine on her own. Actually, if San hadn’t come to her aid, she would’ve been a lot worse. She couldn’t say it out loud, of course, but she was thankful that he showed up.

Flinching at her words, a deep sadness welled in his eyes, but only momentarily has he quickly replaced it with his usual gaze. Her words stung, and he didn’t understand why. He just helped her, why was she still behaving like this towards him? Deciding not to think too much of it he took a couple steps away from her, allowing her to have the space she needed to calm herself. This wasn’t his first time seeing someone have a panic attack, so he knew what to do in situations like these. To be honest, this was a whole new Saetbyeol; one had never seen before today. The girl before him was a fragile being - not the cold, hard-headed person he had always seen.

She truly was a mystery to him, but it intrigued him more. Maybe now he could finally crack her mystery.

Everyone else has quickly cleared the area, leaving her and San alone as they stood in the cool afternoon air. Small snowflakes had started to fall from the sky. Watching them, Saetbyeol began to finally feel her body relax, exhaustion consuming her, but she willed her body to remain upright. She couldn’t let San, or anyone who might still be watching, see her in this vulnerable state. This was the first time he had ever heard her voice, aside from when she was being short and sarcastic with people and when he overheard her talking to her best friend the other night after she got off work. The sound of it made him feel warm and soothed, it was soft and higher pitched than he imagined. This was her real voice.

“My name is Choi San. It’s nice to finally meet you after all this time --- partner.” He smiled sweetly at her, reassuring her that she had no reason to fear him. Making both of his hands visible, he extended his left hand out to her in a friendly gesture, hoping she would return his handshake.

Fear crept up within her once more, looking from his face to his hand she gnawed on her lip. She wasn’t used to physical contact with men, but she had already felt San’s hand. The feeling of his hand on her shoulder - faint, but still there. His touch was different, it was soothing and even though she shied away from his previous touch, she never felt fear from it. This was her first time ever being this close to him, or anyone besides Mirae, for that matter.

She was guarded but she didn’t feel afraid like she had with their coworker who, moments ago, stood uncomfortably close to her. She could feel her walls slightly crumbling in his presence despite how hard she tried to keep them standing. She still didn’t trust him, but if she was going to have to work with him for the case, she decided she would at least try to get along with San.

Slowly and hesitantly, she extended her right hand, placing it in his larger one. Watching his fingers curl around the back of her hand, swallowing her’s whole, she mirrored the movement and curled her fingers over his. Unable to take her eyes off his hand she spoke softly, yet hesitantly, “My name is Yoo Saetbyeol. It’s nice to meet you as well.”

#atzwriters #atinynet #ateez #san #ateez fanfic #ateez san #choi san #atiny #fanfic #writings #fanfiction #my works #cherryeo #cherryeo; Morning Star #q; Morning Star

[weaselle]

THIS IS WHAT BOILS AWAY INSIDE ME EVERY MINUTE, MAKING THE TEDIUM OF EVERYDAY LIFE AN UNBEARABLE TRAP - THIS IS WHY I CAN NEVER STAY AT A JOB OR DECIDE ON A CAREER. EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT THESE THINGS IS BORING AND FRUSTRATING ________________________________________________

I have researched and want to write pre-historical fiction exploring my personal theories about early human development, which are wild but entirely possible within the total evidence we have available. I’ve done probably tens of thousands of words in notes on it over the years; finished, it would probably be at least a trilogy in length.

_________________________________________________

I have written some songs, and I want to get a couple of friends with a good voices to sing them, and then get some musician friends to write/play music for them on analogue instruments, pair that with the singing as whole songs that they perform live somewhere, then record and give those songs to some other friends to make like, an electro-funk remix album of it, and then get some DJ’s I know to spin that shit at a party, take footage of the whole process featuring the live band performance and the party DJ's strongly, ask some dancing/choreographing people I know to create a couple of kick-ass matching dance routines featuring all the people who worked on the project, reach out to some video and animation folks, and make a small series of music videos out of the whole dang thing.

_________________________________________________

I want to change how we experience death by creating a personal website for individuals featuring a kind of A.I. social media bot that users set up and activate which will, upon their death, continue to like and reblog things based on patterns of preference in their posts while alive. These bot/A.I.s would be able to be interfaced with, so, after I died, someone could get to know me - they could ask AfterKie “what movies and TV shows did you like?” and if I had set it up with access to my netflix/hulu/youtube info, AfterKie could tell you which movies and TV shows I rated highly, which ones I watched more than once, read you any positive reviews about them, read you my tweet “idc what anyone says, Ghostbusters is the best movie there has ever been” etc. And the reposting algorithms would A: let me reach out from the beyond to remind people “oh, true, Kie probably WOULD have like that tweet about caterpillars” and B: even if they were not perfect the reposting algorithms would allow for an approximate continuation and growth, so that I could even be seen as developing new interests after my death “Have you heard from Kie lately? He’s gotten super into Swedish architecture ever since he died, it’s like, most of what he talks about now”. I could map my face onto an avatar and use some voice matching software and put myself on a screen on my grave stone that would be linked, so you could literally walk around a graveyard getting to know the people who were buried there, asking them questions about their life. ________________________________________________

I want to build a Pet Mech, a small robot that could be controlled by small pets walking on a rollerball surface housed in the floor of the “head” with a sleeping/snacking den in the “body”. So your rat or guinea pig or ferret or lizard wakes up, climbs up into the control room, the floor of which is the direction pad. Which ever way the pet walks, the robot goes. Your pet is a little closer to your face, safe from the cat, won’t get lost under the couch, and can move around with you and to the extent of it’s capabilities be a social participant in the family it belongs to. ____________________________________________________

I want to sell puppies that owners will come visit in my facility for the first couple months, then take them home one weekend a month, then two, then three, then every weekend, then by the time they are a year old the dog lives with it’s person/people but continues to spend one weekend a month at the facility for an additional year. The facility would provide full socialization and training. A lot of dogs wind up in shelters because in one way or another their owners do not know how to teach them to be a functioning member of the household/society. Just the other day, I heard a lady talking about getting rid of her two year old dog, because "he's getting on my damn nerves, I don't know what to do with him" which A: it is our responsibility to teach dogs how to be an acceptable fit in our households, and B: having never been taught that in his formative years, this dog will have more trouble learning it from even someone who knows exactly how to do that. Modern Americans typically lack the resources and/or proper knowledge to accomplish what could best be done for them by trained professionals who went to collage to study animal behavior and development etc. This way, the dog would have a realistic chance of being a good fit for the owner, and the owner would have clear methods of achieving behavior they require, as well as having access to a support facility for boarding, exercising, trouble shooting problem behavior, etc. At first, it would be very expensive, and I would look into a pairing program, where every dog purchased and trained would pay for an additional dog to be available for families with lower incomes. Additionally, you could defray the cost by predetermining your dog to be trained and available for dog-jobs for hire from the facility as adult dogs, to pay for their early care and training; jobs such as visiting senior homes or hospitals, sniffing things in labs (like tumors) finding lost people, working with livestock at high school Agg programs, etc... so a few days a month until they paid for themselves, these dogs would have jobs, which is fulfilling for many dogs and would help a family afford one of these canines. As facilities expanded, costs would go down, and the facilities would make great shelter alternatives, eventually allowing kill shelters to be closed and possibly getting access to shelter subsidies. Then, as more and more dogs were properly trained and socialized, and more and more families with dogs had access to support services, less and less dogs would be given up, further reducing both the need for shelters, and the number of dogs euthanized each year. __________________________________________________

I have a plan that might allow minimum wage workers to build equity and become property owners while having more free time, in a communities designed as entrepreneurial incubators that allow small businesses to develop in extremely low-risk environments. I’m pretty excited about that one. __________________________________________________

I want to start a store that focuses on local sourcing, and competes with stores like Target and Walmart. This store features a permanent farmers market, a suplimentary onsite greenhouse and nursery, and a large industrial kitchen attached to a small bistro and bakery. The greenhouse and nursery would focus on any produce not represented by local growers. The unsold produce from the farmers market would be given to the store as a substantial portion of the farmstand rental fee, keeping the cost low for the farmers and letting them get value out of produce the public doesn’t buy, and the bistro would sell food made from it. Additionally the industrial kitchen would process the remainder into things like mustard, tater tots, microwaveable chicken pot pies, frozen breakfast burritos, bbq sauce, etc. Instead of buying new tools from the tool section, there would be a large tool library, and a 3-D printer for printing high density ceramic tools in case a specific kind is not available. The ceramic would break down faster than tools of other materials, but since it’s loaned and not purchased, that is fine, especially as the ceramic material can be broken down and re-printed into new tools. Instead of Hallmark and Harlequin novels and Homemaker magazines... cards, poetry chapbooks, works of fiction and independent publications all from local authors. Instead of new toys, franken-toys made out of second hand toys, with a build your own franken-toy workshop open to the public and staffed with someone to assist children. Instead of an electronics department, a repair shop that also offers lessons in electronic repair, and a workshop and tools for public use. Instead of clothes made in overseas sweatshops, a fabric and second hand clothing store staffed with local tailors and would-be clothing designers, doing repairs and adjustments on the second-hand clothes and using them with the fabric to create whole new pieces of clothing. Our offer to the public: bring in any item of women’s clothing from anywhere, and we will add two functioning pockets for free. It would be a club, like Costco, with a small monthly fee that would help cover things like the workshop tool use, as well as encourage regular patronage. __________________________________________________

I want a genetically modified cactus or succulent that glows from bio-luminescence, to use as a night light in the bedroom or bathroom. I don’t know how to make this happen, but I keep looking into it, because MAN do I want this to happen. ___________________________________________________

Instead of people going to big sales, I want to throw a Black Friday make-your-presents party, where instructors and materials are provided for DIY christmas present projects. Tickets are sold in advance, are specific to the project (functioning as a sign-up) and the ticket price covers your materials (costs are averaged so ticket prices are all the same). The idea is, you show up for a party, head to your project space, get taught how to make the thing, and you make like, ten of them in two hours. Then you spend another couple hours eating, drinking, and trading gifts with people from the other projects, giving you a selection of about ten different gifts. ____________________________________________________

I want to make a computer-assisted table top RPG that keeps track of all the numbers and equations character movement speed and position on maps, so you can focus on the role-playing aspect (you still roll dice, but on a mat with sensors that track the result and apply your bonuses etc) ___________________________________________________

I want to do all this and so much more. I have some really cool alien fiction ideas - not the stories, but the aliens themselves, designed the right way, by creating a set of planetary conditions and then hypothesizing lifeforms likely to evolve therein... I have some energy creation process designs that utilize combinations of natural forces (like gravity/solar/tidal plants, that use all three things in a unified power production technique) which I’d love to look into further. I have a line of small pet housing I’ve sketched out, featuring tunnels connecting small pet environments in each room of the owner’s house.  I have a video game I’ve outlined and done character development for that I’m writing up as an RPG sourcebook...

___________________________________________________ I'm not saying this is genius stuff (I’m also not saying it isn’t tho) I'm just saying pursuing these thoughts is the only thing in life that commands my interest.

What I’m super tired of is trying to make my brain do anything but run on at full speed about this kind of thing, because it pretty much refuses to do anything else anyway.

I don't even care if I make any money from any of it, I just want to make it happen. ... I mean, money would be nice too, of course.

So, anyway, now if I die in my sleep at least this much of any of it is out in the world in some form. Meanwhile, I’m just a few days away from going live with the website I’ve put together to showcase my progress on this stuff and help find funding for development. A central location all of it can live and get updated. I should probably get back to working on that, actually

[gaiatheorist]

Improvising, and unpaid labour.

Half past four in the morning, I’m working around how to make a pie and a curry at the same time, with my ‘limited capacity’. I’m also factoring in energy costs, the impact of processes on end-products, and how to maximise my use of the ‘dead’ time between stages. My disabilities have an impact on my available functional hours, the hyper-vigilance that comes with my PTSD perversely helps me to portion-out my productivity. (Thanks, Mother, you didn’t teach me how to cook, or clean, or budget, but some other things you didn’t do mean that I can.)

Oliver Burkeman in this morning’s Guardian, is using the term ‘shadow work’. Most of us have always acknowledged that we have to do our own cooking, household chores and such. The category on my PIP award that scored the highest number of ‘points’ was ‘preparing and cooking food’. In reality, I actually find some of the other descriptor-categories more difficult, dangerous, and draining, but I was able to list more adaptations to my food-processing practices. If you don’t eat, you die. (Yes, that’s dramatic, it would take weeks to starve to death. If I miss too many meals, the blood sugar dip impacts on my background fatigue. I forget to turn the heating on, or take painkillers on schedule, and there’s that foggy-fugue state, where I’ll just stare at the phone until it stops ringing. I also sleep too much, not to escape the hunger-pangs, I don’t feel those, but because my body realises I have no energy, and effectively CTRL/ALT/DEL shuts me down.) 

‘Shadow work’ takes on a different meaning when there’s a disability to factor in. It’s not just the “I’ve put it in the bag, you beepy bastard!” annoyance at the self-scan checkout, or remembering dozens of passwords for online utility billing and such, it’s varying degrees of everything. 

Necessity is the mother of invention. I had a short discussion with an acquaintance earlier this week, he’s damaged his ankle, and has a cast and crutches for a minimum of nine weeks. This is the first week, and he’s finding a huge number of basic tasks difficult. I’ve actually offered to go to his house and help out during this initial adjustment phase. By week four, he’ll be managing everything much more easily, and by week six, he’ll quite possibly be finding uses for the crutches that the NHS wouldn’t like endorsing. It’s what people do, we improvise and adapt. That particular chap ‘only’ has nine weeks of this, but it’s still a useful analogy. Cast-and-crutches, or one arm in a sling, or your car off the road, after the initial “Well, this is an absolute disaster.”, you start to work around things. 

I’m looking at the idea of ‘shadow work’ from multiple angles. Head-on, the increase in automation of some previously-human employment will flood the labour market with the people who used to do a job that a machine does now, that’s increased competition for jobs, which will be a concern for me when I’m fit-for-work. Historically, I objected to part of my previous job becoming automated, which was at odds with my principles, and odd in that I’d streamlined another part of my job, to need as little human-input as possible. The future is computers, though, and it’s none of my business how that all-singing-all-dancing software actually works in practice. 

Recently, I’ve been entangled in doing shadow work for DWP, ‘Sleeping with the enemy’ to provide information that they already have, for their fancy new system. (Pride goes before a fall, but I’m probably using it more effectively than the staff paid to use it, they could have cut a significant number of person-hours if they’d followed my initial straightforward suggestion, instead of their convoluted one. They’re making part of my payment manually while I chase the ex to change the tenancy agreement, instead of a 30-second check with HMRC. They’re also making me ill, boo-hoo, poor me.) I saw a quote, I can’t remember the source, someone within DWP stating that claimants weren’t allocated any payments during the first week of a claim, because “The claim process won’t give people time to write a CV.” Furious, me? (I’m always furious, frontal lobe brain injury.) 

Despite peripheral issues in an imminent brain-scan, and providing evidence to student finance, I managed to fill in the forms, and find the additional evidence that was behind the ‘beware of the tiger’ tab. (Wasted trip to the cash-point, thanks to Kenneth on the help-line, who’d told me to take an advice-slip issued on the day, when what the system actually asked for was two months of bank statements.) Luckily for all concerned, the new work coach barely glanced at the bank statements, I was fully expecting the Spanish Inquisition on the plethora of Amazon purchases after the PIP money went into my account. Mostly disability-aids for ‘normal’ household tasks, and repairing/replacing things I hadn’t been able to do while I was living on fresh air and food bank parcels as it goes, but I’d overheard enough “You don’t NEED Sky Sports, cancel it.” interviews to know there was the potential for them to pick through the statement. 

I’d filled in the forms, secured the requested evidence, and moved onto the next task on the ‘to-do’ menu, because it was there. “Oh, you already have a CV uploaded, that’s great!” and “Did you write these? They’re excellent.” I’d done my work coach’s job for her, and I’d done it very, very well. (Arya Stark “You want to watch that one.” and such. That’s not a threat, it’s a reference to the conversation my previous work coach probably thought I couldn’t hear, “She will already have done it.”) *Liam Neeson voice over* “I am a nightmare.” It’s the paranoia that keeps me three steps ahead, I know I’ll have days when I’m less functional, so I ‘bank’ tasks before they’re due, to avoid missing deadlines, I did that before the disability, to mitigate against working hours lost to migraines, and ensure I never left colleagues in the s*it if I was absent. Now, with ‘please log in today’ emails pinging to my phone all over the place, that anxiety is compounded, my work coach has confirmed that my claim won’t be ‘stopped’ if I don’t respond same-day, and noted a mitigation/reasonable adjustment that I’m less functional later in the day, but there’s still that anxiety about missing a computer-generated ‘task.’ and incurring a sanction. My phone battery is wearing down faster because I’m repeatedly logging into my email, in case one has come through while I’ve been in a signal dead-spot. Shadow-work, the coach probably ‘should’ have made me an appointment in a month to review my Claimant Commitment, and another a month after that to write a CV. It’s done, she doesn’t ‘need’ to see me again until January, except she will, because I’ll have to produce a copy of the tenancy agreement once the ex sorts it out. 

That’s not the only shadow-work I’ve done for DWP. There was the pointless ‘Work Capability Assessment’, and the horrendous PIP process as well. Almost half of women taken through the WCA process have attempted suicide. I know I contemplated it once or twice, and that’s a major admission coming from me. (I don’t know why that statistic only focused on women, unless it’s because men are more likely to complete suicide, due to choosing different methods, that’s a different scenario, ending-all as opposed to reaching that point, and still having to live through it.) 70% of PIP applications that are initially declined are accepted at Tribunal. It took me 17 months, from applying for PIP this time, to having my ‘award’ granted at Tribunal, and it wasn’t 17 months of sitting on my behind just waiting for it to happen. There are agencies and individuals who can assist with WCA and PIP processes, but they’re stretched too thin to cover everyone who needs help, and I’m a bugger for prioritising the needs of others over my own. (I’m also something of a control freak, I’m very difficult to work with when I perceive others working inefficiently, my “Oh, you’re making a right mess of that, give it here!” streak is strong.) During the UC/WCA/PIP process, I was over-stretching myself, and I became very frayed as a result. I was over-stretched in part because I should have asked for help sooner, and in part because when I did ask for help, it was too stretched and fragmented to be of any use. A social prescribing case-worker, a social worker, a welfare rights advocate, and two ladies from Citizens Advice. Little old brain damaged me, sitting in the middle of this fragile web of support, asking one party not to duplicate work being done by another, to save them work-load, and trying not to bang my head on the desk and say “It would be easier if you did it *this* way.”   

Shadow-work. Providing the same medical evidence to two different parts of DWP. “Rolling six benefits into one”, my arse, the ‘disability’ part is still separate from the ‘unemployment’ part, I have an award of PIP for three years, which is completely distinct from the one year notice of ‘limited capacity for work’. Both departments have exactly the same evidence on me, I know, because I photocopied the files myself. (At 10p a page, I’ll have you know.) 

The PIP process, and the WCA strand not only involved a hell of a load of shadow-work in terms of admin and coordination from me, they also cast light, and, paradoxically, shadow on my improvisations. Back to the crutches/cast analogy, you look at where you are, and where you need to be, and you figure out whether you can get there. You fall over a bit, and adjust your methods to avoid falling over again. Unless you can’t get up, and the police end up breaking in when the neighbours report the flies, and the smell. There are hundreds, or thousands of things I can’t do ‘normally’ any more, so I’ve had to make my own ‘reasonable adjustments’. (Some of them are bizarre, some are profoundly maladaptive, but they get me through most days without major incident.) Those improvisations, the additional shadow-load that’s on me every single day of my life, for functions that used to be so simple they required no conscious processing are a Very Bad Thing when it comes to PIP and WCA ‘assessors.’ “You said you had difficulties with x, I have decided that you can x.” over and over again. I didn’t say I “couldn’t”, I said I have difficulties, but some bloke in an office somewhere can ‘decide that I can.’, and that’s supposed to be case-closed. At that point, I was supposed to ‘just get on with it’, to limp around my various disabilities as best I could, because a decision had been made that I wasn’t disabled enough. Physically, I can’t do that, but, more importantly in my twisted little head, emotionally, intellectually, and socially I can’t do it, without my deficits placing myself or others at risk of significant harm. If I have a bad fall, or a cognitive lapse, not only is my life at risk, but I could place others at risk when they have to fish me out of whatever mess I’ve landed myself in. I won’t do that.   

Another layer of shadow-work for DWP, painfully describing my improvisations in more detail. That part alone is enough to deter some people, it’s demeaning to have to explain, yet again, how you get on and off the toilet without assistance from another person. (Also the PIP system keeps the descriptor activities the same, but alters the qualifying thresholds without telling anyone. “Can you walk 200m?” has somehow morphed into some ambivalence about being able to move that distance, regardless of how long it takes, how difficult or painful it is, or what aids or adaptations are needed. They haven’t so much ‘shifted the goalposts’ as changed the game altogether.) I knew from the outset that the ‘computer says no’ would be the outcome, that the ‘assessors’ wouldn’t see the additional adjustments I have to make every day, they’d just bounce back that I ‘can’ complete all of the descriptors. Not repeatedly, reliably, or within a reasonable time-frame, though, and only with a massive degree of improvisation, which is physically and mentally draining, compounding the fatigue-element of my condition. (Shuddering at the thought of ‘home help’ assisting me with washing, dressing, or toileting, but that’s the PTSD, and PIP claims only deal with your most-recent condition, not anything underlying that compounds it, bizarre system.) 

You’re damned if you do improvise, because DWP/PIP will tick the ‘can’ box, the ‘fit for work’ box. You’re damned if you don’t, because some faceless decision-maker will decide you’re just not trying hard enough. What about the people that can’t improvise? The ones who are already stretched to the limits of their functional capacity? Have they tried just not being disabled/depressed/dependent? 

“Making work pay.” is a cute tag-line, but underneath it is the reality that vulnerable and disabled people are being churned through a workhouse that doesn’t work. We’re inputting our own admin. I have some cognitive issues, but nowhere near as high a level as some people. I have some visual issues, and my left hand doesn’t work properly, reading and typing are time-intensive, and painful, but I ‘can’ do it for a narrow window, given plenty of screen-breaks, some people can’t. It’s not hyperbole at all to say that this government has blood on its hands, it does, and it will have more to come while these systems are in place. People will fall through the gaps in the system, which will suit statistics, because ‘unemployment figures are falling.’ People. People are falling, into a shadow-realm of not being counted as ‘anything’. Some people’s improvisations to deal with that will be brutal. Domestic violence will increase when the ‘dole money’ suddenly stops going into bank accounts. Street robberies and burglaries will increase when people run out of their own things to sell. Referrals to social care and food banks will continue to increase. Evictions will increase, placing additional strain on local authorities to provide emergency accommodation, and I seriously doubt that people in emergency accommodation will be able to satisfy the conditionality of checking their online account for ‘to-do’ actions. Two-for-one sanctions there, I wonder if there are bonuses for that? 

This isn’t working, I genuinely don’t believe it was ever meant to, I think that the intent all along was for it to be so complex and intensive that people would just opt-out. All well and good if that opt-out is into gainful employment, some of the opt-outs will be of a more permanent nature, and the government will still have to allocate resources to deal with the very long shadows this shadow-work will create.

[xyliane]

what’s that? more alluka-the-dystopian-cyberpunk-rebellion-leader? when I should be sleeping but I just turned in another 10k edit of my work paper and I’m too tired to sleep or do anything productive? why of course I have more. 

(this got uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh real long so. here’s a cut. sorry mobile people, I feel your pain)

for people who download “legally” (i.e., rich people), they usually have some sort of pod for holding their bodies linked up to a closed-circuit net, something that allows them to come back whenever they please. it also prevents attempts at overrides or downloads. militaries involved in interplanetary warfare often will download mercs or specialized forces (like Hunters) into soldiers hardwired into being temporary IPRSes (Inter-Personal Remote Servers--the polite term is tipper, but most people just call them drones or meatsacks)--most of the time, this is much easier to accomplish with just sending people, since you need a link to send someone between bodies. or a ridiculously high-powered server.

Hunters have access to one, but there are so few of them (because they die a LOT or just get lost between up/down somewhere and never come back) and they are so scattered, there’d be no way of keeping track of them if they didn’t. it’s still nearly impossible. (ging abuses this power incessantly. gon is almost as bad by the time he runs into killua; there’s a reason he considers his own body to be a meatsack.)

but the zoldycks have one of equal power, used only for the family. silva prefers physical transport for himself in most cases, as he’s getting a bit older and prefers the power of his own hands--he calls it old-fashioned, alluka and killua know it’s just a way of solidifying power and re-emphasizing his wealth. but for the dirty work the family does, work that they only don’t go to prison for because so much of it is legally done? their kids and select employees can be sent across the system just barely under the speed of light, from their server rooms hidden in the bowels of mars.

(please note that if this doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry, it’s late and I’m not an IT person. if it helps, call it space cyberpunk magic)

killua, once he’s trained enough (so, 12ish) spends a lot of time assassinating people on the other side of the system, often on ios or triton or occasionally luna colony, and si fairly comfortable in bodies not his. it gets less distressing as he grows up, no longer having to adjust for the occasional adult body once he’s 18 because he is an adult and hormone levels are regulated in meatsacks most of the time. illumi stays close, more often than not, until killua’s 16 and formally named the zoldyck heir (and even then illumi does “check in” from time to time). kalluto joins the spiders, who are based on earth, but maintains a regular drone with one of the butlers. milluki runs the family servers, and kikyo is incredibly active in the field--her optic implants allow her to access a wide range of data visually, and she can basically be in two places at once. unlike silva, she loves downloading and getting someone else’s hands dirty, seeing through someone else’s eyes. even just hacking someone else’s eyes is almost good enough.

alluka doesn’t quite get that opportunity. she’s...not coddled exactly, since she knows she’s a girl and no one but killua really believes her, but ignored. given access to the family resources, as long as she stays in the mansion underground. and honestly, most days, “the mansion underground” looks more like an idealized outdoors than anywhere else on mars: blue skies, green grass, warm solar lights. alluka doesn’t know mars has a red sky until she’s 12 or 13, when killua takes her out of the mansion for a day trip.

but she keeps ending up in the download bays, trying somewhere new. someone new. at first, the butlers would accompany her, often tsubome or amane--”a family tradition,” gotoh explained once, which...fair, most of the family does travel with another, even if they’re less tradition and more tailing alluka (and killua, when he’s rebellious, which is more often as he gets older and has more responsibilities).

she rolls up her sleeves and installs her own download bay in her part of the mansion when she’s 14. she makes the butlers ensure she has the proper hardware installed on her brainstem, the same process every other zoldyck goes through. milluki complains to silva and kikyo, but alluka complains to killua and then no one complains after that. 

so alluka wanders: to ios, to see the ice caps and the O2 drills. to luna colony, to see that vast cities and immense urban sprawl and the fashion. she goes to earth and stays with a family with barely enough to eat, whose only reason for survival was their daughter’s not-entirely-complete hardwiring. even as far as the kepler belt, so far it takes her days to get used to her own feet once she returns. but killua’s out--for days, for weeks, maybe, doing things that make him look empty even when he’s back in his own head--so no one notices. no one ever notices she’s gone for so long, server pods keeping her muscles active and blood pumping even when she’s not using them. for years, she leaves home and tries to learn about others’. for the most part, she hates what she learns. but sometimes, she finds things so beautiful, so moving, so good, she can’t help but weep. she hopes killua gets to see some of that even in his worst jobs, something to remind him that the world isn’t entirely worth killing carelessly, and saves away the memories for later.

when she’s 16, alluka decides to explore mars. 

she tells tsubome--still hovering, still worried, still smiling a caring smile when she’s not paid to--she’s going to check out the domes near the remnants of the ice caps. domes she visited already, knows the ins and outs of, but that no one else knows she did. 

she wants to explore the city rooted in the zoldycks’ mansions, the city that feeds them and is nourished by them and that they feed on. so she picks a young girl to download into, someone who lives on the surface and works for the farms. alluka intends only to joyride, to remain quiet, let the girl do her work and help where she can. but once she’s downloaded, before the girl awakens, alluka notices a body with no name tucked into the corner of the available tippers. this isn’t a bad shop--alluka does have standards--but it’s not a place that zoldycks should be getting a drone from. but the other drone in the corner, standing but not seeing, looks different. and it’s not just the chalky white skin and blank black eyes, hair cut to a soft fuzz on their head to best display a poorly-centered hardwire on the back of their neck. 

“you don’t want that one,” the dealer says. “it’ll never be quiet with that one. it can’t move, but it can’t shut up. bad for business”

alluka immediately buys out her contract on the spot--hard creds only, killua taught her that’s important to not be traced. she’s not sure what she’s going to do with the tipper, if she’s as faulty as the vendor says, but alluka can’t just let the drone stay there with him. who knows what would happen.

she re-loads into the new body, not sure what to expect, and walks out of the shop into the grimy mars undercity, only a few levels below the dusty red surface. for a minute, there’s nothing but the usual fuzz of someone else’s consciousness, not quite coherent but still there, pressing at the edges of the link.

she absolutely doesn’t expect the quiet hi. 

alluka blinks their eyes. this person, this girl...this girl is like her. “hi,” she says. “what’s your name?”

the other girl is quiet long enough that alluka wonders if maybe the link is broken. because she can feel the girl pressing, buzzing at the edges in a way that almost feels like speech. it should be annoying, but alluka finds it comforting, that someone else is there with her. 

something, the girl says. or well, she says nanika, a glitch like an accent making her voice echo. 

alluka grins. “nanika,” she says, and the buzzing eases a little. “my name’s alluka.”

alluka. alluka is me. nanika seems to take a minute to process this. you have wish? images flash across alluka’s mind, violence and disgust and fear laced through them all like she’s experiencing the emotions herself. it’s terrible enough that she drops to a corner, the store’s coarse civvies not a comfortable fabric at all. 

“no, nothing like that!” alluka says when she stops shaking. the software in the wiring are supposed to stop feedback loops, but whatever’s taken nanika’s speech has overridden whatever programming that kept her quiet, leaving her nothing but echoes. alive, but not. like a ghost. alluka’s abruptly furious at whoever let this happen, ready to burn. “nanika, is that what you want?”

the buzzing ricochets around alluka’s head in a vehement negation. it’s replaced with sunlight, or at least the sort of sun you get on mars, filtered through several layers of dust and canopy and shelter, reflected down into the undercities. hidden deep in a tunnel, there’s a beautiful blue flower growing on a vine. and there’s relief, that she doesn’t have to be scared anymore. that little spark of something beautiful, something good, that might be able to take hold if only all the grime and muck and bad were gone.

alluka won’t let her be scared.

alluka is me. nanika is alluka. 

they smile. “let’s go see the sun,” alluka says. “we’ll start cutting the weeds down after that.”

#cyberpunk rebellion au #will I ever do anything useful with this? idk #but I love this au #I love cyberpunk #so much #solarpunk cyberpunk AND identitypunk #hxh au #alluka zoldyck #nanika zoldyck #nanika #hunter x hunter #hxh #bad things reference #uh #misgendering mention #abuse mention #depersonalization #body swapping #kinda

[xtruss]

Who Scams The Scammers? Meet The Scambaiters

Police struggle to catch online fraudsters, often operating from overseas, but now a new breed of amateurs are taking matters into their own hands

— Amelia Tait | Sunday, 03 October 2021 | Guardian USA

‘My computer’s giving me the worst vibes,’ began Rosie in Kim Kardashian’s voice. Illustration: Pete Reynolds/The Observer

Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds. For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on – scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you’ve recently been in a car accident you somehow don’t recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. “I waste their time,” she explains, “and now they’re not stealing from someone’s grandma.”

Okumura is a “scambaiter” – a type of vigilante who disrupts, exposes or even scams the world’s scammers. While scambaiting has a troubled 20-year online history, with early forum users employing extreme, often racist, humiliation tactics, a new breed of scambaiters are taking over TikTok and YouTube. Okumura has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms, where she likes to keep things “funny and light”.

“I waste their time and now they’re not stealing from someone’s grandma.” — Rosie Okumura

In April, the then junior health minister Lord Bethell tweeted about a “massive sudden increase” in spam calls, while a month earlier the consumer group Which? found that phone and text fraud was up 83% during the pandemic. In May, Ofcom warned that scammers are increasingly able to “spoof” legitimate telephone numbers, meaning they can make it look as though they really are calling from your bank. In this environment, scambaiters seem like superheroes – but is the story that simple? What motivates people like Okumura? How helpful is their vigilantism? And has a scambaiter ever made a scammer have a change of heart?

Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500. In her 60s and living alone, her mother saw a strange pop-up on her computer one day in 2019. It was emblazoned with the Windows logo and said she had a virus; there was also a number to call to get the virus removed. “And so she called and they told her, ‘You’ve got this virus, why don’t we connect to your computer and have a look.” Okumura’s mother granted the scammer remote access to her computer, meaning they could see all of her files. She paid them $500 to “remove the virus” and they also stole personal details, including her social security number.

Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother’s account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she’d called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer’s time. “My computer’s giving me the worst vibes,” she began in Kim Kardashian’s voice. “Are you in front of your computer right now?” asked the scammer. “Yeah, well it’s in front of me, is that… that’s like the same thing?” Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

“A lot of it is entertainment – it’s funny, it’s fun to do, it makes people happy,” she says when asked why she scambaits. “But I also get a few emails a day saying, ‘Oh, thank you so much, if it weren’t for that video, I would’ve lost $1,500.’” Okumura isn’t naive – she knows she can’t stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. “I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail.”

She has a point – in October 2020, the UK’s national fraud hotline, run by City of London Police-affiliated Action Fraud, was labelled “not fit for purpose” after a report by Birmingham City University. An earlier undercover investigation by the Times found that as few as one in 50 fraud reports leads to a suspect being caught, with Action Fraud frequently abandoning cases. Throughout the pandemic, there has been a proliferation of text-based scams asking people to pay delivery fees for nonexistent parcels – one victim lost £80,000 after filling in their details to pay for the “delivery”. (To report a spam text, forward it to 7726.)

Hook, line and sinker: the scambaiters. Illustration: Pete Reynolds

Asked whether vigilante scambaiters help or hinder the fight against fraud, an Action Fraud spokesperson skirted the issue. “It is important people who are approached by fraudsters use the correct reporting channels to assist police and other law enforcement agencies with gathering vital intelligence,” they said via email. “Word of mouth can be very helpful in terms of protecting people from fraud, so we would always encourage you to tell your friends and family about any scams you know to be circulating.”

Indeed, some scambaiters do report scammers to the police as part of their operation. Jim Browning is the alias of a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who has been posting scambaiting videos for the past seven years. Browning regularly gets access to scammers’ computers and has even managed to hack into the CCTV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the “relevant authorities” including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers.

“I wouldn’t call myself a vigilante, but I do enough to say, ‘This is who is running the scam,’ and I pass it on to the right authorities.” He adds that there have only been two instances where he’s seen a scammer get arrested. Earlier this year, he worked with BBC’s Panorama to investigate an Indian call centre – as a result, the centre was raided by local police and the owner was taken into custody.

Browning says becoming a YouTuber was “accidental”. He originally started uploading his footage so he could send links to the authorities as evidence, but then viewers came flooding in. “Unfortunately, YouTube tends to attract a younger audience and the people I’d really love to see looking at videos would be older folks,” he says. As only 10% of Browning’s audience are over 60, he collaborates with the American Association of Retired People to raise awareness of scams in its official magazine. “I deliberately work with them so I can get the message a little bit further afield.”

Still, that doesn’t mean Browning isn’t an entertainer. In his most popular upload, with 40m views, he calmly calls scammers by their real names. “You’ve gone very quiet for some strange reason,” Browning says in the middle of a call, “Are you going to report this to Archit?” The spooked scammer hangs up. One comment on the video – with more than 1,800 likes – describes getting “literal chills”.

But while YouTube’s biggest and most boisterous stars earn millions, Browning regularly finds his videos demonetised by the platform – YouTube’s guidelines are broad, with one clause reading “content that may upset, disgust or shock viewers may not be suitable for advertising”. As such, Browning still also has a full-time job.

YouTube isn’t alone in expressing reservations about scambaiting. Jack Whittaker is a PhD candidate in criminology at the University of Surrey who recently wrote a paper on scambaiting. He explains that many scambaiters are looking for community, others are disgruntled at police inaction, while some are simply bored. He is troubled by the “humiliation tactics” employed by some scambaiters, as well as the underlying “eye for an eye” mentality.

“I’m someone who quite firmly believes that we should live in a system where there’s a rule of law,” Whittaker says. For scambaiting to have credibility, he believes baiters must move past unethical and illegal actions, such as hacking into a scammer’s computer and deleting all their files (one YouTube video entitled “Scammer Rages When I Delete His Files!” has more than 14m views). Whittaker is also troubled by racism in the community, as an overcrowded job market has led to a rise in scam call centres in India. Browning says he has to remove racist comments under his videos.

“I think scambaiters have all the right skills to do some real good in the world. However, they’re directionless,” Whittaker says. “I think there has to be some soul- searching in terms of how we can better utilise volunteers within the policing system as a whole.”

At least one former scambaiter agrees with Whittaker. Edward is an American software engineer who engaged in an infamous bait on the world’s largest scambaiting forum in the early 2000s. Together with some online friends, Edward managed to convince a scammer named Omar that he had been offered a lucrative job. Omar paid for a 600-mile flight to Lagos only to end up stranded.

“He was calling us because he had no money. He had no idea how to get back home. He was crying,” Edward explains. “And I mean, I don’t know if I believe him or not, but that was the one where I was like, ‘Ah, maybe I’m taking things a little too far.’” Edward stopped scambaiting after that – he’d taken it up when stationed in a remote location while in the military. He describes spending four or five hours a day scambaiting: it was a “part-time job” that gave him “a sense of community and friendship”.

“I mean, there’s a reason I asked to remain anonymous, right?” Edward says when asked about his actions now. “I’m kind of embarrassed for myself. There’s a moment where it’s like, ‘Oh, was I being the bad guy?’” Now, Edward doesn’t approve of vigilantism and says the onus is on tech platforms to root out scams.

Yet while the public continue to feel powerless in the face of increasingly sophisticated scams (this summer, Browning himself fell for an email scam which resulted in his YouTube channel being temporarily deleted), But scambaiting likely isn’t going anywhere. Cassandra Raposo, 23, from Ontario began scambaiting during the first lockdown in 2020. Since then, one of her TikTok videos has been viewed 1.5m times. She has told scammers her name is Nancy Drew, given them the address of a police station when asked for her personal details, and repeatedly played dumb to frustrate them.

“I believe the police and tech companies need to do more to prevent and stop these scams, but I understand it’s difficult,” says Raposo, who argues that the authorities and scambaiters should work together. She hopes her videos will encourage young people to talk to their grandparents about the tactics scammers employ and, like Browning, has received grateful emails from potential victims who’ve avoided scams thanks to her content. “My videos are making a small but important difference out there,” she says. “As long as they call me, I’ll keep answering.”

For Okumura, education and prevention remain key, but she’s also had a hand in helping a scammer change heart. “I’ve become friends with a student in school. He stopped scamming and explained why he got into it. The country he lives in doesn’t have a lot of jobs, that’s the norm out there.” The scammer told Okumura he was under the impression that, “Americans are all rich and stupid and selfish,” and that stealing from them ultimately didn’t impact their lives. (Browning is more sceptical – while remotely accessing scammers’ computers, he’s seen many of them browsing for the latest iPhone online.)

“At the end of the day, some people are just desperate,” Okumura says. “Some of them really are jerks and don’t care… and that’s why I keep things funny and light. The worst thing I’ve done is waste their time.”

[transhumanitynet]

The Future Acts Like You - How To Live in the Future Part 7

My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.

Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”

Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.

First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:

“I’m raising him to inherit my dangerous and lonely life of bounty hunting!”

“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”

“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”

People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.

But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion”“caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you already, since your “you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once;and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.

Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)

Increasingly high fidelity echoes of people further disrupt attempts at linear history.

You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.

But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet… (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)

…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…

…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.

Most of you will likely get along.

But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”

The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.

The human form will live beyond humanity…often imagined as a diaspora of freed slave replicants.

We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.

So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.

Rave Egg Wants For Nothing. Rave Egg Is INEFFABLE.

To drive this home with repetition, this is already the case: the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.

“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.

Uncanny even for the uncanny: The liquid metal mimetic T-1000 mistakes a mannequin for one of his kind.

What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.

It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…

Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.

SalviaDroid knows what it’s like to have everything trying to distract you. Don’t give in to astonishment!

From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.

Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.

(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have two intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the version that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)

Do I really look like that?

(This is a draft chapter from my first book, in progress, and a companion text to Future Fossils Podcast. Learn more at Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield.)

The Future Acts Like You – How To Live in the Future Part 7 was originally published on transhumanity.net

#agi #AI #eva #t1000 #westworld #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

[nyxi-styx]

It’s hard joining a new fandom sometimes

I’m just going to take a minute to vent a little bit of my feelings and I honestly don’t care if anyone reads this.

At 25 years old (24 when I started getting dragged into it all), I thought I was “too old” to be a YouTube fan. It was, after all, rather after my time. Established in 2005, I didn’t really experience anything on YouTube until about 2007-2008. Back then it was meme-y BS like Shoop-da-Whoop, “Shoes”, Charlie the Unicorn, and Potter Puppet Pals. As I grew older, YouTube seemed like something better left to teens. Maybe use it to look up a music video or something instructional and then fall down a Slow-Mo Guys or choreography rabbit hole. Still not a fandom. The closest I came to such was binge-watching Rob Dyke’s WWYPTOTI series and Twisted Tens series.

At Indy PopCon 2016, I was there with friends to see a guest (and caught glimpses of a passing Kevin Smith as I was so that was badass). Two of my friends were already in the YouTube culture world and fans of Markiplier and Dan & Phil. While we were having a snack and playing a card game, they spotted Wade (THE LordMinion777) taking some photos with fans int eh same food court area. I went over and took the photo of them with him, having no idea who this dude was. Less than a month later, (I’d say about 2 weeks) one of those two friends finally introduced me to Markiplier. I don’t remember the reasoning, but she showed me I Am Bread first. It was funny. I liked it. I didn’t think I’d get as into it as she did. However, curiosity had the better of me and I went to my room that night and watched him play ALL of OctoDad: Dadliest Catch. I laughed so hard I cried and that sold it for me. I fell in love. Of course, I had known a little about him due to gratuitous gifs and photos all over this godforsaken hellsite and I always thought he seemed like a nice, genuine person. Overtime, I just kept watching. I got to know about Bob and Wade and Team Edge. I fell in love with Chica. I just really enjoyed myself. Of course, I knew a little bit about JackSepticEye too, but I though being a Markiplier fan was about as deep into YouTube fandom as I was going to get.

About February, I saw a recommended playlist of JSE videos on an unrelated site. At this point, the post with the playlist was about 4 months old. I decided to go ahead and watch it, just to try something new. Naturally, I fell in love. I loved Jack more than I love Mark soon enough, not through any fault of Mark or anything. He’s still a wonderful person. I just loved that Jack was jsut unabashedly, fully, enjoying himself and nerding out and THEN doing the “professional” thing and reviewing the game whereas Mark would try to review while playing and get distracted by his own emotions and reactions. Not that that is a bad thing. That doesn’t mean Jack is better than Mark. I love them both SO much, but I find it easier to connect with Jack that way because that’s how I am too. I think that’s how most of us are. Once again, I thought this was as deep into YouTube fandom as I was going to get. I caught up with most of their videos (both Mark and Jack). The ones that interested me anyway. And then I would go back and forth and catch up on their latest. So, naturally, I got to know Tyler and Ethan too.

Unfortunately- and I feel like dirt admitting this, like I feel so fucking guilty and that’s why I’m venting here- I paid a lot of attention to Tyler and Mark and not a whole lot to Ethan. I didn’t have anything against him at all. He was funny and adorable. I just... *shrug*. But eventually, his self-deprecating jokes about “my channel is dying” started echoing in my head. And I found myself going “Why?” I knew they would tease him about his opening (which I think is a little unfair since it happens to be joked about more than Mark’s or Jack though there’s are targeted too) and that was about it. So, I finally went and I hit that subscribe button and waited until I had a little bit of time to really check out the content.

I finally sat down and opened the Crank Gameplays channel and started saving playlists of content that I found interesting. I don’t remember where exactly I started but I was kind of like “Okay. Cool. Cool. I mean there’s a lot of similarities between YouTube gamers, so how much can you really do?” But then I saw the video of Ethan and his brother singing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and I was like “Wow! He can sing! He’s got a really nice voice! It’s kind of that rugged jazzy, folks-y type voice. He kinda reminds me of like... Train or Matt Nathanson. Neato.” But then in ‘recommended’ came a video (I assume a clip from a livestream) of Ethan playing ukulele and covering “Can’t Help Falling In Love”. If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Elvis songs.

I watched that video and fell. in. LOVE. Instant stan. I don’t know what it was but I just... couldn’t help falling in love. Haha.

Like I do, I instantly tried to find out a lot about him as if to play catch up. I was surprised to find out he’s a bit younger than me. But he’s got the same birthday as my dad (three days before mine and 3 days after my favourite actor) so of course I thought that was pretty freaking cool.

Maybe it’s because I always root for the underdog and the secondary characters... maybe it’s because blue is my favourite colour... maybe it’s because I am a sucker for hazel eyes... maybe it’s because I always fall for the biggest dork... I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint it, but Ethan is so wildly different from Mark and Jack. They’re all super nice, super genuine guys, but something about Ethan tugs at my heartstrings way more.

Whatever it is, I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to watch him grow and succeed in the next year. And I’m SO excited to have the chance to meet him at Indy PopCon 2018.

The thing is, though... I feel... like I don’t belong here. In Mark’s fandom, I really am just a number. Nobody notices. Nobody cares. In Jack’s fandom... well, the Overnight Watch was my first foray into community interaction and I was so surprised and overwhelmed by how welcome I was. Like it didn’t matter how long I had been a fan, what mattered was that I was a fan and I was happy to be interacting. And it’s nice to be a part of a fandom in which there’s little to no toxicity and drama and hatred amongst fans. It’s nice to be completely accepted.

In Ethan’s fandom... well, I’ve been here all of about a week... and I feel like I’m trying too hard. Like I shouldn’t be in this community because everyone else has been here longer. Everyone else understands more. Everyone else is better than me. I don’t matter.

This is why it’s nice to have @markidarkimoo as a friend. She stans with me no matter who or what.

The worst of it all in these three fandoms is that I can’t make fanart. I am shit at mood/aesthetic boards. I CAN make video edits, but my current laptop will not support my preferred software and I can’t afford a better laptop for a while. I am shit at photo edits.

I just... I can’t do anything worthwhile. I see all this other amazing work that all of the rest of you put out and I just... feel so insignificant.

Being part of a “big box” fandom like Supernatural or Marvel or Sherlock is easy for me because they’re all fictional characters and people eat up fanfic like they’re starving to death. Doesn’t matter if I can’t fan art. I can contribute to the fandom and show my love by making stories.

YouTube is different. It’s not based on fictional characters (Jack’s Egos and Darkiplier aside), it’s based all on real people. I can’t fanfic that unless it’s reader insert and that’s not something for the creators to see (*if they ever do, please kill me*) and enjoy.

I don’t know... I just feel pretty useless. These fandoms are smaller than the “big box” fandoms so I feel like I have to contribute something in order to properly show my love and appreciation and gratitude. But I can’t. I’m just useless. I’m just a blip.

#personal vent/rant #i'm sorry i'm useless #i can't contribute anything because i have no talent #jacksepticeye #markiplier #crank gameplays #crankgameplays #cgpa #ethan nestor #ethan nestor darling #mark fishbach #mark edward fishbach #sean william mcloughlin #tyler scheid #apocalypto_12 #lordminion777 #wade #bob #muyskerm #bob muyskens #cw: feelings of uselessness #cw: feelings of hopelessness

[orbemnews]

Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. However It Insisted on One Uncommon Situation. On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox Information agreed to pay thousands and thousands of {dollars} to the household of a murdered Democratic Nationwide Committee workers member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew way back: that the community had repeatedly hyped a false declare that the younger workers member, Seth Wealthy, was concerned in leaking D.N.C. emails throughout the 2016 presidential marketing campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, the truth is, had hacked and leaked the emails.) Fox’s choice to settle with the Wealthy household got here simply earlier than its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, had been set to be questioned below oath within the case, a doubtlessly embarrassing second. And Fox paid a lot that the community didn’t should apologize for the Could 2017 story on FoxNews.com. However there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement needed to be stored secret for a month — till after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed. Why did Fox care about conserving the Wealthy settlement secret for the ultimate month of the Trump re-election marketing campaign? Why was it necessary to the corporate, which calls itself a information group, that one of many largest lies of the Trump period stay unresolved for that interval? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was flawed would incite the president’s wrath? Did community executives concern backlash from their more and more radicalized viewers, which has been gravitating to different conservative shops? Fox Information and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to reply that query after I requested final week. And two individuals near the case, who shared particulars of the settlement with me, had been puzzled by that provision, too. The bizarre association underscores how deeply entwined Fox has grow to be within the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the harmful paranoia they set off, culminating within the deadly assault on the Capitol 11 days in the past. The community parroted lies from Trump and his extra sinister allies for years, in the end amplifying the president’s monumental deceptions in regards to the election’s final result, additional radicalizing lots of Mr. Trump’s supporters. The person arrested after rampaging by the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Fb {a photograph} together with his shotgun and Fox Enterprise on a large display screen within the background. The lady fatally shot as she pushed her method contained in the Home chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of instances on Twitter, NPR reported. Excessive profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not solely fed the baseless perception that the election had been stolen, however they helped body Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their viewers’s goals of overturning the election may very well be realized. And the community’s function in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has lengthy been the favourite channel of pro-Trump militants. The person who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox Information “religiously,” in line with his attorneys’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s declare that Democrats had been “encouraging mob violence” in opposition to individuals like him. And but, as we within the media reckon with our function within the current disaster, Fox usually will get ignored of the story. You may see why. Canine bites man is rarely information. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are merely considered as a part of the panorama now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for many years, and below President Trump’s thumb for years. So whereas the mainstream media likes to beat itself up — it’s a method, typically, of inflating our personal significance — we now have largely sought much less apparent angles on this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Put up’s Margaret Sullivan concluded final week that the mainstream press is “flawed and caught for too lengthy in outdated conventions,” however “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan mentioned the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump. I took my flip final week, writing about how a person I labored with at BuzzFeed performed a task within the rebellion. One considerate reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with an analogous sense of complicity. The engineer was on the crew that developed the skinny, brilliant glass that made doable the ever-present flat display screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether or not “this glass made it occur.” Once I shared the engineer’s electronic mail with some others on the Instances, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everybody needs guilty themselves besides the individuals who truly deserve blame.” And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s field for revenue. There’s just one multibillion-dollar media company that intentionally and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Company, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who’s nominally C.E.O.; and the chief authorized officer Viet Dinh, a sort of regent who largely runs the corporate day-to-day. These are the individuals in the end chargeable for serving to to make sure that one explicit and pernicious lie a few 27-year-old man’s loss of life circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has lengthy led Fox, to the extent anybody truly leads it, by a sort of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist appears simply his closing, lavish present to Mr. Trump. The corporate paid handsomely for it, in line with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo Information, who first reported on the settlement and has coated the case extensively. The Murdoch group didn’t originate the lie, however it embraced it, and it served an apparent political goal: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in serving to the Trump marketing campaign. That’s why the story was so interesting to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who stored hyping it for days after it collapsed below the faintest scrutiny. There has by no means been a shred of credible proof that Seth Wealthy had contact with WikiLeaks, and a sequence of bipartisan investigations discovered that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers. The story of Fox’s influence on the fracturing of American society and the notion of reality is just too massive to seize in a single column. However the story of its influence on one household is singular and devastating. Seth Wealthy’s brother, Aaron, mirrored on it Friday from his dwelling in Denver, the place he’s a software program engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years youthful and two inches shorter, however extra comfortable with individuals, extra in style, higher at soccer in highschool. Seth Wealthy was murdered within the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk within the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was nonetheless wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a pal advised him that one thing was occurring on Reddit. A information story had talked about that Seth was a workers member on the Democratic Nationwide Committee. Whereas among the high feedback had been merely condolences, the decrease a part of the web page was filled with unfounded hypothesis that the younger D.N.C. worker — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ supply of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks inspired the hypothesis, however it remained low-level chatter about complicated theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an nameless federal investigator had linked Seth Wealthy to the leak. The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fireplace,” Mr. Wealthy’s brother recalled in a phone interview from his dwelling in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everybody’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.” The story collapsed instantly, and in spectacular vogue. The previous Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record supply, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his personal quotes claiming ties between Mr. Wealthy and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and mentioned in a deposition this fall that the Fox Information article had been “prewritten earlier than I even received concerned.” “It fell aside inside most of the people inside 24 hours,’’ Aaron Wealthy recalled, but “Hannity pushed it for an additional week.” Lastly, Aaron Wealthy mentioned, he despatched Mr. Hannity and his producer an electronic mail, and the barrage stopped, however he mentioned he by no means obtained an apology from the Fox host. “He by no means received again to me to say, sorry for ruining your loved ones’s life and pushing one thing there’s no foundation to,” he mentioned. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a tough five-letter phrase for him.” A Fox Information spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to touch upon Mr. Wealthy’s request for an apology. Fox additionally pulled the story down every week after it was printed, with an opaque assertion that “the article was not initially subjected to the excessive diploma of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” The injury had been performed. The story remains to be in huge circulation on the suitable, to the purpose the place Mr. Wealthy was reluctant to share {a photograph} of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Instances. Each time he has performed that, he mentioned, the picture — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding ceremony, as an illustration — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists. Aaron Wealthy, who together with his brother grew up in Nebraska, mentioned he hadn’t thought a lot about who past Fox’s expertise was chargeable for the lies about his brother. Once I requested him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t positive who he was — “I’m actually unhealthy at trivia issues.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ administration of the place: They gather the money whereas evading accountability and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump. Mr. Wealthy isn’t occasion to the settlement together with his dad and mom, and he declined to debate its particulars. His dad and mom mentioned in a courtroom submitting that the barrage of conspiracy theories had broken their psychological well being and value his mom, Mary, her means to work and to socialize. However he mentioned he merely doesn’t perceive why Fox couldn’t merely apologize for its damaging lie — not in Could of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and never when it lastly made the settlement public after the election and wished his household “some measure of peace.” It jogs my memory of a widely known political determine now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or partaking in any soul looking out about his function in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses. “I used to be glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Wealthy’s brother mentioned, a bit hopelessly. “However they by no means admitted they lit the fireplace.” Supply hyperlink #condition #Fox #insisted #lawsuit #Lies #Settled #unusual

[cherryeoo]

Morning Star (Ateez Fantasy!AU) Chapter 3

Summary: Two unlikely companions join together to ride the rollercoaster known as: Life. With a yin and yang balance, they soon discover that there’s not only beauty in the beast, but beast in the beauty.

Flipping on her desktop lamp, Saetbyeol sinks into her chair, locking her purse in the desk’s only drawer. Tapping her finger on the smooth surface of her desk, she impatiently waits for her computer to come to life. Today was going to be an exhausting day.

Saetbyeol was usually always the first to arrive in the morning. She wasn’t a morning person per-say, but she liked to get a head start on her work so she wasn’t having to get off late or be the last to leave. The glow of her computer monitor illuminated her face, exposing the exhaustion in her eyes. Taking a swig of her coffee from her travel mug, she opened her web browser and document software. The cave incident left her so baffled that she began thinking of any and all possible explanations - no matter how bizarre it seemed. Before she could document and publish the article, however, she had to find solid evidence on what could’ve caused this. The scenes from that day constantly flashed in her mind; the whole situation was unsettling.

Shaking the images from her mind, she cracked her fingers and let out an audible sigh before typing ‘behaviors of hunters’ into the search bar. Time slowly passed by as she read article after article on hunters and their occasional strange behaviors, but none of it matched with what she saw in the cave. The carcasses - piled perfectly on top of one another with only their livers missing. It just didn’t add up.

   Her next option was to research murders and bizarre patterns as well as various killings, but regardless of how deep she ventured into the rabbit hole, Saetbyeol couldn’t find similar cases. She didn’t want to rule out murder, or a deranged hunter, but she couldn’t find any solid reasons as to who would do such a thing, or why. Hunters never stacked carcasses neatly and perfectly, so maybe it was a warning? Maybe a serial killer lurked in the shadows and utilized animal carcasses to send out a subliminal threat?

Breaking her concentration, she heard the bells on the office’s front door chime. Looking up, she saw San walk in and towards his desk. Removing his thick black jacket, he draped it perfectly over the back of his chair. Placing his belongings neatly in their proper places, he pressed the power button on his computer as he waited for the machine to come to life.

Saetbyeol never once paid attention to his strange organizational behavior, but after the cave incident, she had become more aware of her surroundings. However, considering San was her co-worker, she didn’t dwell upon his actions. Sensing someone watching him, San spun around in her direction only to catch her watching his every move closely. Smiling sweetly at her, he waved to his mysterious co-worker. Her eyes quickly darted back to her screen, fully prepared to go back to ignoring him at all costs. Cheeks flushing just the slightest tinge of pink, she hoped he couldn’t see her discoloration from across the room. San frowned, he was always curious about her and why she never spoke to anyone other than the girl he saw her with the other night. Shaking his head, San makes his way to the coffee bar to make himself some tea.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Saetbyeol groaned in frustration - she was getting nowhere. She was just about to give up and try a different route when she noticed a comment from an anonymous user with a link to another article. Furrowing her brows, she gnawed on her lip - she might as well check it out. Clicking on it, she stared at the words in big bold letters, Mythical Creatures: A History,  the color of a dark red wine, maybe even a blood hue.

As she scanned the article, Saetbyeol quickly perceived that it was written by an amateur author. The more she read, the more skeptical she grew - what even was this? Fiction perhaps? The author talked about the reality of mythical creatures walking amongst human beings which which, in return, earned an audible chuckle from Saetbyeol.

The author probably wrote it to get a rise out of people and to fuel others’ superstitions. There’s no such thing as mythical creatures and even if there were, how would people know? Did they see one? Doubtful. The more she read, the more absurd the article grew - such creatures apparently took the form of human beings to fit in which caused Saetbyeol to, once again, question whether or not the author had seen such a sight, to which she, yet again, declared that it was doubtful.

It took everything in Saetbyeol’s power to not roll her eyes at the mention and definition of each creature. There’s no way people actually believed these things, right? She had to give the writer some credit, though - a lot of the information was very detailed, but there’s no way they weren’t making this up. Sighing, Saetbyeol moved her cursor to close the tab when suddenly, a familiar word caught her eye: Kumiho. Gnawing on her lower lip, she hesitantly clicked on word to read more. Just as the page finished loading, her boss called to her; Saetbyeol jumping in her chair as her head whips in the direction of her boss’ voice. “Yes boss?”

“Can I speak to you in my office real fast?” Ms. Kim stood at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to her office.

Jumping up, she made her way to her boss and up the stairs to her office. Returning to his desk, tea in hand, San noticed Saetbyeol was nowhere to be found. He wondered if she had gone to the restroom or to get something to eat. Why was he suddenly so concerned about her?

Shaking his head, he made his way back to his desk, setting his teacup down on top of the coaster next to his keyboard. The room had started to fill up with more of his coworkers, their voices becoming louder as they started to bid good morning to their friends while working on bringing their computers to life. Sitting down, San’s eyes scanned the crowd of people, eyes darting left and right in hopes to catch a glimpse of Saetbyeol, but to no avail.

“What do you mean I have to work with him?!” Saetbyeol replied to her boss. The two of them were good friends from college, but at the end of the day, Ms. Kim was still her boss, so she had the final say in decision-making.

“I know this isn’t easy for you Saetbyeol and I’m not doing this to punish you by any means, but I am teaming you up with San for your cave investigation. An outsider's view might be a good thing, not to mention the attention he’ll bring to the story.” Ms. Kim replied giving Saetbyeol a sympathetic grin.

“So you are using him for publicity! This isn’t even his department anyway!” She groans as she folds her arms across her chest.

“Well, yes, but I’m doing this for you. You know I’ve always wanted you to go far in your career, so I’m using this opportunity to help you out as well.”

“Fine, whatever. But don’t expect me to be nice to him.” Saetbyeol snaps back, glaring at her boss and old friend.

“I’m not expecting you to, but do try to at least work with him.” At that Ms. Kim dismissed Saetbyeol.

She stormed out of the office, back down the stairs and to her desk. Flopping in her chair, she snaps her head in San’s direction, shooting daggers from her eyes into his back, hoping he could feel it. As if abiding by her wishes, San tensed up and turned his head to lock eyes with her, suddenly taken aback by her gaze. The look of pure hatred twisted the features of her face, her eyes cold as a storm brewed within them. Confusion overtook his body - what had he done to her that made her behave this way towards him? Had he taken her mug by mistake? Did he say something about one of her articles without realizing it? Eyes growing wide, Saetbyeol whipped her head around - focusing on her computer screen in front of her.

Frustration coursing through her, Saetbyeol tries once more to read the article she had found in the comments, but her attention was pulled elsewhere once more. Saetbyeol watches out of the corner of her eye as her boss makes her way towards San’s desk. Great she’s going to tell him the news. Pretending not to be paying attention, Saetbyeol fixated her eyes upon the monitor, but didn’t read the words virtually plastered to it. Stopping in front of him, Ms. Kim places a file of all the copies Saetbyeol made of her report from the cave and her findings so far beside his hand. Watching San flip through them, his eyes grew wide as they dart straight to Saetbyeol - he must’ve just been told the news.

Feeling her cheeks flush, she bends down, pretending to pick up something off the floor so her hair could fall freely from behind her ear to hide her face from his view. Straightening up slightly, she could see his shoulders tense up through the curtain of her black locks as he sighs; nodding in agreement with Ms. Kim, knowing he, too, cannot refuse. His reluctance was obvious, but being the good poster-child he was, he confirmed his agreement without too much hesitation.

As Saetbyeol continued to watch, a warm feeling of anger began pooling in the pit of her stomach. Sighing, she fully straightened up, unlocking the desks drawer, as she grabbed her purse and stormed out of the building. She needed fresh air before she snapped. How could Ms. Kim team her up with him? Of all people, why did it have to be Choi San?

An audible sigh escaped her lips - she was going to get so many glares from this, as if she already didn’t get enough. San was the most desired person at their workplace, but he was also the most unavailable person in the office. Clenching her jaw, Saetbyeol ran a hand through her hair once she realized how her female co-workers would react. San was fairly popular amongst women - especially those in their office. Countless times they had tried to make their move on him and each time, he politely turned them down. That, alone, was going to cause trouble for her, but she had to at least give him some credit - he was always a professional gentleman, even to her.

But she was cold, closed off from everyone; never made friends or spoke to anyone, and when she did it was laced with intense sarcasm. No one approached her for anything, and she liked it that way. Honestly, her only true friend was Mirae. Her boss knew of Saetbyeol’s past, so how could she do this to her? Ms. Kim said it was for Saetbyeol’s benefit, but there’s no way anything good is going to come out of this.

Paying for her lunch, Saetbyeol slipped into a secluded picnic table nestled under a tree. She always came to this park near the office for lunch, or whenever she needed some alone time to cool off or to think. Glancing down, Saetbyeol took a quick glance at her bandaged ankle. The bleeding had stopped, but considering the wound’s vulnerability and placement, it was easy to re-open the tear. Noticing no signs of blood seeping through the bandage, however, she went back to focusing on her lunch - doing her best not to think of the fact that she is going to have to work with the Choi San.

San was still so confused as to why Saetbyeol acted with such anger and rage towards him. She obviously knew that they would be working together from here on out. San knew how she kept to herself, how she never spoke to anyone and what others thought about her. If someone started to talk about her around him, he would instantly change the subject in hopes to get the negative attention off of her; he hated how people spoke about her. They didn’t know her, nor did they ever try to, but it’s not like he attempted to, either. He had tried to approach her once in the past, but it blew up in his face, so instead, he secretly admired her from afar; his interest growing everyday. Now that he was getting his chance, though, he had to admit that while he was thrilled to get to know her, he was reluctant as well - he knew what their interactions would do to her. More people would start to stare and talk badly about her - pondering and speculating as to why the two of them had grown so close. They wouldn’t care about the fact of their pairing being for an assignment; human beings only ever cared about drama and how to twist stories for their own benefit.

San glanced once more at her now empty workstation, her frustration apparent. Sighing, he stood up, mug in hand, as he made his way back to the coffee bar for another cup of tea. Passing by her desk, he stopped in his tracks as he noticed the article she was reading. What did this have to do with the cave’s case they would be working on together? Noticing the new, unread article in a tab next to the currently open one, he frowned. Leaning in a bit to get a better look, he rolled his eyes as he moved the mouse's cursor to the small ‘x’ button in the top right-hand corner of the tab, closing both tabs pertaining to mythical creatures.

“How stupid,” San’s voice was soft, irritation seeping into his body. He never thought Saetbyeol, of all people, believed in such wild stories. He would have to ensure she didn’t look up such things if he was to work with her. Their pairing was already going to cause trouble - he wasn’t going to allow her to make a fool of the company, let alone themselves, as well. Deleting  that day’s browser’s web history, he continued on his way to the coffee bar.

Satisfied with his beverage, San moves gracefully between the scattered crowds of employees discussing various projects they were working on. It wasn’t uncommon for people from different departments getting teamed up, but why choose someone from the news and another from the entertainment section? Contrary to popular assumptions, those two categories were in no way connected - not for this story, at least.

Looking out the window, San noticed Saetbyeol walking back towards the building. Should he approach her? Just as she was about to enter, Saetbyeol was stopped by one of their fellow coworkers. He watched as the man got closer and closer to her as she tried to put a comfortable distance between them, but the man was not letting up. The look in his eyes made San’s stomach twist, anger boiling up inside him.

The man was taunting her. He watched as Saetbyeol tensed her shoulders, curling into herself as she lowered her head to avoid his intimidating gaze. The more he pushed, the more uncomfortable she grew. She wanted to just disappear. Tears started to sting her eyes as he continued to tease her as to why she was taken to the bosses office - repeating how he thought she was finally getting fired. San noticed her small frame begin to shake. He normally didn’t get involved in people’s affairs, but he could tell how truly frightened she was. He knew what consequences this would bring, but he wasn’t going to allow this to continue to happen, not to his new partner. He would protect her of what people had to say from now on.

Standing up, San quickly made his way out the front door. Looming behind the man taunting Saetbyeol, he cleared his throat, lowering his voice to sound more menacing. “Is there a reason why you are tormenting my partner?”

Snapping her head up Saetbyeol stares at San. His demeanor was suddenly menacing and quite frightful; completely contrasting his usual cheery and warm self. She had to admit she was scared of the San she was currently seeing. She had never once seen him show any sign of anger or aggression, so this was new. Glancing up at him, she saw his jaw clenched tight as a nearly visible fire danced in his eyes. Their co-worker turned around to face San, he stood just a few inches taller than him, but that didn’t stop San from confronting the man. She couldn’t hear any of the words the two of them exchanged as she froze in pure fear and anxiety. It had been a long time since she had a severe panic attack like this, but it wasn’t much of a surprise - it was triggered upon receiving the news about working with San and now, with her co-worker cornering her and San acting out of character, it only intensified.

Tears flowed freely down her cheeks as she noticed their co-worker backing down and heading back inside. Thankfully, only a small crowd of spectators had formed, and those who did gather around,all had their attention on San. Quickly wiping away her tears before anyone saw, she tried to calm her breathing when suddenly, a firm, but gentle hand grasped her shoulder. She already knew whose hand it was, but the feeling of him touching her, made her shy away from his touch.

“Are you okay?” His voice was laced with genuine concern, yet she could still hear the anger in his deep tone. He could tell she was still trembling, her breathing still somewhat uneven. Faint whimpers left her mouth as she started to speak.

“I-I didn’t ask for you help. I would’ve been fine on my own.” Her voice trembled uncontrollably as she tried to calm herself before she went back inside. She didn’t have any strength left to yell like she wanted to. She knew that her words were a lie, she wouldn’t have been fine on her own. Actually, if San hadn’t come to her aid, she would’ve been a lot worse. She couldn’t say it out loud, of course, but she was thankful that he showed up.

Flinching at her words, a deep sadness welled in his eyes, but only momentarily has he quickly replaced it with his usual gaze. Her words stung, and he didn’t understand why. He just helped her, why was she still behaving like this towards him? Deciding not to think too much of it he took a couple steps away from her, allowing her to have the space she needed to calm herself. This wasn’t his first time seeing someone have a panic attack, so he knew what to do in situations like these. To be honest, this was a whole new Saetbyeol; one had never seen before today. The girl before him was a fragile being - not the cold, hard-headed person he had always seen.

She truly was a mystery to him, but it intrigued him more. Maybe now he could finally crack her mystery.

Everyone else has quickly cleared the area, leaving her and San alone as they stood in the cool afternoon air. Small snowflakes had started to fall from the sky. Watching them, Saetbyeol began to finally feel her body relax, exhaustion consuming her, but she willed her body to remain upright. She couldn’t let San, or anyone who might still be watching, see her in this vulnerable state. This was the first time he had ever heard her voice, aside from when she was being short and sarcastic with people and when he overheard her talking to her best friend the other night after she got off work. The sound of it made him feel warm and soothed, it was soft and higher pitched than he imagined. This was her real voice.

“My name is Choi San. It’s nice to finally meet you after all this time --- partner.” He smiled sweetly at her, reassuring her that she had no reason to fear him. Making both of his hands visible, he extended his left hand out to her in a friendly gesture, hoping she would return his handshake.

Fear crept up within her once more, looking from his face to his hand she gnawed on her lip. She wasn’t used to physical contact with men, but she had already felt San’s hand. The feeling of his hand on her shoulder - faint, but still there. His touch was different, it was soothing and even though she shied away from his previous touch, she never felt fear from it. This was her first time ever being this close to him, or anyone besides Mirae, for that matter.

She was guarded but she didn’t feel afraid like she had with their coworker who, moments ago, stood uncomfortably close to her. She could feel her walls slightly crumbling in his presence despite how hard she tried to keep them standing. She still didn’t trust him, but if she was going to have to work with him for the case, she decided she would at least try to get along with San.

Slowly and hesitantly, she extended her right hand, placing it in his larger one. Watching his fingers curl around the back of her hand, swallowing her’s whole, she mirrored the movement and curled her fingers over his. Unable to take her eyes off his hand she spoke softly, yet hesitantly, “My name is Yoo Saetbyeol. It’s nice to meet you as well.”

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