#when it aug and come april she be dead

[warrioreowynofrohan]

If anyone wants it, for the Aug. 1 Dracula Daily, here’s my attempt at translating Mr. Swales, though it lacks the colour of the original. People who are more familiar with this dialect, let me know if I’ve got anything wrong - there are places where I’m guessing about certain phrases.

Mr Swales: “It’s all nonsense - these ghost stories and legends are only fit for getting children and silly women to make a fuss. They and all of the supposed supernatural omens are all invented by preachers and busybodies and salesmen to scare and scam fools and get folks to do something they don’t otherwise want to. It annoys me! Why, they’re the ones that, not content with priting lies on paper and preaching them in pulpits, carve them on tombstones too! Look all around you [they’re in the graveyard] - all these tombstones are falling over from the weight of the lies written on them. ‘Here lies the body’ or ‘Sacred to the memory’ written on them, but in near half of them there’s no body there, and no one cares about remembering them! It’s all lies! My God, but it’ll be a strange sight on the Day of Judgement when the dead are raised, all trying to drag their tombstones with them to prove how good they were, and some not even able to hold onto them because their hands are so slippery from their bodies lying in the sea all those years.”

Mina: “Oh, Mr. Swales, you can’t be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?”

Mr Swales: There might be a few that aren’t wrong, except when they make people out to be better than they are; for people will think a little bowl is like the sea, as long as it’s their own. All lies! Now look, you come here as a stranger and see this churchyard. [Mina nods.] And you think that these stones are about people who are buried here, safe and snug? [Mina nods again.] That’s where the lie comes in! Why, there are loads of these that are completely empty! And my God! how could they be otherwise? Look at that one, read it!

Mina: Reads: ‘Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, age 30.’

Mr. Swales: “Who brought him home to put him here, I wonder! I could name you a dozen whose bodies lie in the Greenland seas up north, or where the currents have carried them. And there are their tombstones around you! You can read the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowrey - I knew his father, lost in the Lively off Greenland in 1820; or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in 1777; or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year later; or old John Rawlins, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned in the Gulf of Finland in 1850. Do you think all these men will have to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds at the Judgement Day? I doubt it! I tell you, when they got here there’d be sho much shoving and crowding and jostling that it would be like a fight up on the ice in the old days [when he was a sailor in the far north], when we were trying to hang up our catch of fish by the light of the aurora borealis.”

Mina [paraphrased]: But surely you don’t think people will need to take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgement.

Mr. Swales: Well, why else would people have tombstones?

Mina: To please their relatives, I suppose.

Mr Swales: Ha! To please their relatives! Why would it please their relative to have lies written over them, with everyone here knowing they’re lies? Read the lies on that tombstone?” [The seat where they are sitting is on top of this stone - it’s a flat tombstone, not an upright one.]

Lucy: Reads: ‘Sacred to the memory of George Carson, who died, in the hope of a glorious resurrection, on July 29, 1873, falling from the rocks at Kettleness. This tomb was erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son. “He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.” [That last line is a Bible quote.]’

Lucy: “Really, Mr. Swales, I don’t see anything funny in that!”

Mr. Swales: “You don’t see anything funny! Ha! But that’s because you don’t know the ‘sorrowing mother’ was a hell-cat that hated him because he was hunchbacked and lame, and he hated her so mich he committed suicide so she couldn’t get the life insurance she bought on him! He blew the top of his head off with an old musket that they had for scaring the crows. It wasn’t for crows then - it brought them to him! That’s how he fell of the rocks. And, as to hopes of a gloripus resurrection, I’ve often heard him say myself that he hoped he’d go to hell, for his mother was so pious she’d be sure to go to heaven, and he dudn’t want to be where she was. Now isn’t that stone a pack of lies? and won’t it make Gabriel laugh when Geordie comes panting up with his tombstone on his hump, and asks it to be taken as evidence [of how good he was]!”

Lucy: “Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot leave it; and now I find I mudt go on sitting over the grave of a suicide.

Mr. Swales: “That won’t harm you, my pretty girl; and it may make poor Georgie happy to have such a pretty girl sitting on his lap. I’ve sat here on and off for nearly twenty years, and it’s done me no harm. Don’t worry about the people lying beneath you, or those that don’t lie there either! It’ll be the time to get scared when you see the tombstones run away with and the place all bare! There’s the clock [chiming], and I need to go! Good-bye!”

This isn’t just local colour - there is one thing in this conversation that’s relevant to the plot (in addition to the things other people have mentioned about how it ties into the themes of the book, which I hadn’t thought about before!).

#dracula #dracula daily #mr swales #cw suicide #tw suicide #tw ableism

[captainelliecomb]

WIP Wishlist Round Thirteen

WIP Wishlists

Come-into-my-castle by Zeta_Mei @zetaaa (11,188 words, first posted 13 Aug 21, last update 04 Sep 21)

Summary: Maiden or Knight? Highborn or Commoner? Courtesy or Mockery? Honor or Dishonor? Choose your own mask and come to play. Just remember that all lions are grey, in the dark. It is known.

Things I Love: I don’t know where to start. Everyone’s voices, Ravella trying to protect her home, Ravella’s relationship with Pello, Acorn Hall itself, characters from all over coming together, Brienne and her orphans particularly Willow and their plan to go to Tarth, the Ghost of High Heart and what she’s seen, Lyle’s view of Brienne, the secret everyone is keeping from Brienne and her reaction when she learns the truth, the pacing of the storytelling, the feel of the writing.

A Shield That Could Crush You by CaliGirl90278 (15,442 words, first posted 29 July 21, last updated 17 April 22)

Summary: As he came back to himself, his wildfire eyes had tamped down to something sad and resigned, but not vengeful. He looked at her tears, her choking sobs, and sighed. "You deserve to be taught a lesson. But not like this, Wench," he muttered bitterly. "I'm not taking the gag off yet, Brienne of Tarth. We're still teetering on the edge of a precipice, and my cruelty to you is the only thing keeping those animals from doing far worse. If you could talk I've no doubt you'd put me in my place, and they are not going to tolerate you doing that," he said wearily. "Your naive sense of honor and your pigheaded courage will end with us worse than dead. So you can't be allowed freer rein until I've gotten us both through this."

Things I Love: Fic inspired by other fic, how the relationship between Jaime and Brienne grows, how vengeance is taken, Jaime’s plans to keep people safe, Sansa and Brienne’s friendship, Tyrion, Jaime, and Addam’s gossip session, Varys’ schemes to protect the kingdom and the smallfolk, Sansa and Jaime, the political intrigue.

The Queen’s Will by Ill_Tempered_Clavier (23,581 words, first posted 17 Sep 17, last update 6 June 18)

Summary: Daenerys worries about the line of succession and properly cowing Jaime Lannister.

Things I Love: The interesting plot, how so many disparate people come together to support Brienne, the awkward affection that grows between Jon and Brienne, Ghost spending time with Brienne and Jaime, the bedding being terrible and heartbreaking and hot and emotional all at once, how Tormund would save Brienne if it wouldn’t endanger Jon and all of the living, the love and fear between Jon and Daenerys, how long the Long Night stretches.

let your heart be light by makinggold (7,140 words, first posted 31 Dec 21, last update 4 Jan 22)

Summary: Jaime Lannister gets on a plane thinking he'll spend the holiday alone and miserable. He learns that life doesn't always go the way one plans. Sometimes the universe sends you a sign, and sometimes it sends you a tall blonde woman to upend your status quo. (or, Brienne's family adopts a sad sack of a man)

Things I Love: Jaime’s unplanned escape from his father, the Tarths in all their glory, Brienne and Jaime’s meet awkward and fun dialogue, Brienne’s history of picking up strays, Pod being protective of Brienne, Brienne’s quiet, dry humour, all the Tarth traditions.  

Interdisciplinary Studies by ellaoftarth @ellaoftarth (3,410 words, first posted 28 Feb 21, last updated 2 April 21)

Summary: Wildlife biologist Jaime Lannister finds himself stuck when the bears he has been studying start dying unexpectedly. He enlists the help of microbiologist Brienne Tarth to try and make sense of his findings. Though the two are reluctant to work together, their combined skill sets lead them to startling discoveries- both in their research and outside of it.

Things I Love: Brienne + Jaime + Science, their research, the sharp-edged bickering between Jaime and Brienne, Brienne as Sansa and Arya’s guardian, the different ways Brienne and Jaime approach science, the promise of interesting field work.   

#wip wishlist #game of thrones #asoiaf #jaime x brienne #jon x brienne #zeta_mei #caligirl90278 #ill_tempered_clavier #makinggold #ellaoftarth

[punkscowardschampions]

Drew & Carly

Drew: Carly Drew: I need to come over now Drew: On train Carly: k Carly: how long? Drew: idk does it fucking matter Drew: 40 mins ish Carly: i gotta clear out so yea Drew: alright Drew: do it then Carly: i am Carly: whats wrong with you? Drew: got some bad news Drew: need to get fucked up you may as well be there Carly: k Carly: ill make you feel better Drew: ha Carly: trust me boy Drew: no Drew: trust no bitch Carly: everyones out Carly: see im good to trust Carly: keeping my word Drew: tah Drew: don't invite anyone else round Drew: i don't want to fuck Carly: i wont Carly: this about her? Drew: You're jealous of Ro? Lmao, you have NO idea Carly: im not Carly: im asking for you Carly: you dont wanna fuck what else we gonna do cept talk Drew: i said Drew: get wrecked Drew: don't act like that's not what you want too Carly: k Carly: forget i said it Drew: least of my worries Drew: forget about it too Drew: doesn't mean anything Carly: yea Carly: getting that from you Drew: don't be weird Drew: don't need it today Carly: youre gonna get what you need soon Drew: i might need to hide for a bit Drew: cool? Carly: yea Carly: whenever you know Drew: good Drew: can't go back to my flat for a bit Drew: might need to move on Drew: not sure yet Carly: k Carly: for good? Drew: Yeah Drew: bridges burned, nothing here for me now Carly: they gonna come here? Carly: what you want me to say if theyre looking? Drew: Nah, nah Drew: not that Drew: Christ, I'd already be dead, that's where I've been past few days Drew: you're fine, you don't have anything to worry about Carly: Good Carly: can I come there? Carly: ill miss you Drew: I'll come back Drew: My sister will still be here Drew: we can hook up Drew: better get a new dealer for day to day tho Carly: yea Carly: fuck Drew: soz Drew: might not come to that Drew: idk what's going on Carly: what can i do? Drew: Idk, you know a good contract killer? Carly: all my contacts talk and talk Carly: whos fucking with you? Drew: no one Drew: but that's about to change Drew: you want a list? Carly: no Carly: i want you to feel better Drew: why do you care Carly: you make me feel good Carly: who does that for you? Drew: no one Carly: let me Drew: leave off Drew: i'm not in the mood Carly: anything you want Carly: when you are Drew: you're all the same, even the ones of you that front otherwise, makes me laugh Drew: tell you to have some self-respect but doesn't make a difference in the end Carly: im not hurting over this Carly: laugh it up Drew: oh, i am Drew: you're all jokes Carly: if youre trying to fight with me ill go there Carly: idc Drew: go on then 😂 Drew: what could you possibly say to make my day any worse Drew: I'd LOVE to know Carly: why do you want me to? Carly: none of your beef is with me Carly: hit up whoever else Drew: 'cos the last thing i want is that lovey dovey bullshit from you rn Drew: you said I could come to hide Drew: if you've changed your mind say Drew: don't waste my time Carly: its not Carly: you're good to me im trying to do the same Carly: if thats a waste of time its of mine Drew: no, i'm not, Carly Drew: that isn't what this is, or has ever been Drew: we use each other for personal gain, that's it Carly: yea you give me what i need Carly: let me do it for you Carly: stay here Drew: alright Drew: but that's all I need Drew: just the caravan Carly: k Drew: i only need a few days, alright, get my head fucked, then straight again Drew: i'll be out your hair asap Drew: and i'll stay on the sofa, just ignore me best you can Drew: you can keep people away for that long, yeah? Carly: yea Carly: ill put the word out now Carly: itll be sorted when you get here Drew: cheers Drew: i'm sorry okay Drew: know its not ideal Drew: got nowhere else Carly: youre welcome here whenever Drew: i don't get you Drew: none of you Carly: you know whats up Carly: personal gain Carly: i need some bad Carly: the good shit Drew: why not pay for it Drew: you have enough money Drew: what you saving for? new shoes? Carly: i got the sack Carly: whats it matter Drew: 'course Drew: nothing, nothing Drew: i wouldn't want to be anyone's bitch, that's all Carly: k Drew: 'bout 10 mins away Drew: im gonna take some in toilet Drew: can't wait Carly: dont be too greedy Drew: you'll get yours Drew: i'll do what i like Drew: my fucking drugs Carly: dont cry Drew: don't take the fucking piss Drew: you ain't paying Carly: i know Drew: had enough dealing with fucking junkies Carly: dont call me that Drew: what, grown a backbone? Drew: its what you are, darling Carly: if you wanna stay then don't Drew: might take my chances tbh Drew: doing my head in Drew: women Drew: know your bff had her baby? Carly: no Carly: she isnt my bff Drew: now, now, you're not exactly surrounded by offers Drew: though you will be taking back the flowers when you find out Carly: why would I care? Carly: nothing to do with me Drew: is with me Drew: still apathetic? Carly: fuck who you like Carly: youve wanted her for years Drew: well i got her now Drew: 25 to life Carly: thats why youre hiding Carly: she doesnt wanna play happy families Drew: yeah Drew: doubt caleb does either Drew: or her brothers and dad Drew: like i said, list is long Carly: she'll change her mind when she can't do it alone Carly: open arms for you Drew: no she won't Drew: she's not like you Carly: im not like her Carly: never having kids Drew: you shouldn't Drew: state of Drew: the way you go though you won't have choice in the matter Carly: piss off Drew: i'm serious Drew: never make me use protection Drew: doubt you do any other punter Drew: you need to take better care of yourself Carly: its none of your business Carly: im not gonna drop another kid on you Drew: yeah that's what I reckoned with Ali too Drew: like I said, don't trust any of you Drew: especially you Drew: my business when its mine Carly: its not happening Carly: you can go back to not caring Drew: No, I can't Drew: don't you get it? This has changed my entire life Drew: I've gotta leave my home and everyone I've known because Drew: even if I don't step up, she's still my kid Drew: she's not going away Drew: I've not got my head stuck in the sand or up my arse like you Drew: you'll get this rude awakening one day too, mark my words Carly: stay and be a dad Carly: theres no-one in your way Carly: and she's going to uni it'll be a part time thing Drew: Oh yeah, what a dad I'll be Drew: drug dealer with nowt else to offer but gear and a bit of dirty cash Drew: whatever she says, she won't want a kid 'round that, i fucking wouldn't Drew: and Caleb will always be in the way Drew: fuck that Carly: she cant stop you Carly: neither can he Carly: and she will want the kid to have a dad Carly: nobodys is decent Carly: be around Drew: Can if I'm a criminal Drew: they'll just dob me in when they're sick of having me hanging about Drew: it'll have a dad, she knows she's got him Drew: don't need or want me Drew: can't hack it Carly: go straight Drew: now why would you tell me to do a thing like that Drew: no more drugs for you if I'm stuck stacking shelves for a kid that calls him dad and not me Carly: youre not the only dealer, goldie Drew: i repeat, what's in it for you Drew: why you care if i'm around if i'm not funding you Carly: i wanna help you Drew: what about yourself Drew: who helps you Carly: whoever deals in your place Drew: you'll get hurt Drew: shouldn't mess around with people like that Drew: like me Carly: i can handle it Carly: nothing to matter to you Drew: s'not true Drew: you might be stoned enough to pretend you don't give a fuck about anything Drew: but i'm not a monster you know Drew: christ Carly: im not saying you are Carly: but don't pretend you care Drew: shut up Drew: of course i do Drew: i don't want you to get killed or beaten up every day 'and numbed out by the hardest stuff Drew: i only starting dealing to you so you wouldn't go to someone else Carly: its not gonna be that Drew: what's it gonna be? you'll knuckle down, get a job, get some friends, only do a bit for fun on weekends? Drew: that's not what you're doing, not where you're headed Carly: i can stop whenever i want Drew: you can't Drew: if you think you can then you're more gone than i know you are Drew: can't bullshit me on this, i have your tab, remember? Carly: fuck off Carly: im not a junkie Drew: yes you are Drew: and on the off-chance you aren't Drew: you certainly act like one Drew: do you think all girls fuck me for drugs? maybe once for a club drug but this is years now, as often as I'll let it happen Drew: and I shouldn't have but Drew: yeah Carly: don't drew Carly: dont come here either Drew: Carly Drew: I'm sorry Drew: I won't Carly: keep your sorry Carly: i wanted you ok Drew: i know Drew: i've known for a while, longer than i'd ever admit Drew: what else can i say? Carly: nothing Carly: dont talk to me Carly: stay away Drew: but Drew: i want you too Drew: i do Carly: no you dont Drew: i fucking do Drew: i just want to stop Drew: stop helping you kill yourself Carly: im not going anywhere Drew: you will Drew: everyone leaves me Carly: ive got nowhere to go Carly: this caravan is it Carly: and i cant leave you im not with you Drew: but you are Drew: you're constant Drew: you'll either get better and realise you're better than me like Ro and Ali and my own sister Drew: or you'll fuck off to be fucked up somewhere else like my mum Drew: or worse Carly: im not them Carly: im not trying to be better than you i know im not Carly: youre so good, drew Carly: i dont wanna be anywhere you arent with anyone else Drew: i'm not Drew: i'm bad but i can't stop Drew: i don't know how Carly: not to me, you've always been good Carly: looked after me Carly: you said yourself you wanted to protect me Drew: but Drew: i still gave you drugs and i call you horrible things and Drew: only see you when i wanted to, when Ro wasn't around or whatever else dirt I was pulling Carly: i ask ill stop Carly: im not scared Carly: i want you more Drew: its not your fault Drew: do you mean it Drew: will you try Carly: yea Carly: ill be better Carly: treat you better Carly: let me and youll see Drew: how do you want me Drew: i'll do whatever you want Carly: I just want you Carly: I love you Drew: I love you too Carly: be here now Drew: 🏃

#what a mess #when it aug and come april she be dead #sads

[kenway-headcanons]

If you look at the timeline of the AC4 game, it actually makes sense that Edward is or can actually be the father of Mary's child.

Note: This is purely based on my personal analysis of the game's timeline and how logically things would fit in. I have no objections at all for those who may have different views from me. :)

Aug 1720 - Mary gives birth and dies a few days later. Basis of the month of August is that at the start of the cutscene where Edward is on the gibbet it says 4 months later after Mary's trial cutscene which happens on April 1720. Of course this would mean she's 9 mos pregnant at this time assuming the birth is not premature.

April 1720 - Mary and Anne are captured and announce they're pregnant. So if Mary gave birth on Aug, this would mean she's already 5 mos pregnant at this time (even tho in game she has no baby bump during the trial).

Dec 1719 -Based on Rackham's entry in the AC Wiki, the trio got captured within 4 mos from leaving Nassau. So it would mean that Mary, Anne, and Rackham formed their crew and set off to sea only during Dec 1719. This entails that only sometime after December will Mary meet the anonymous sailor in Rackham's crew who is said to be the father of her child. It's also around this time that Kenway found the Observatory and saw Mary and Anne (thru Rackham's blood vial) chatting in Nasau, which would then be the start of the trio sailing together.

Nov 1719 - If you count 9 mos backwards from Aug 1720, it would mean that Mary got pregnant at the month of November the previous year. We've already established that she only joined Rackham's crew in Nassau on Dec. Remember that in May 1719, she was in Inagua when Kenway got back to his island from being marooned. As Nassau is currently Rogers' domain now, it would make sense that Mary would instead choose to stay or resupply at Inagua whenever she's not at sea or in Tulum. It would also makes sense that Edward would from time to time come back to Inagua in between his journey for the Observatory to resupply his ship. We can then assume that at some point in Nov 1719, Edward and Mary would hook up in Inagua resulting to Mary getting pregnant before finally parting ways as Edward would continue on to finally go to the Observatory and Mary would somehow find herself in Nassau (possibly for some Assassin business there) and eventually join Rackham's crew.

Okay this account had been dead for YEARS but this shit slaps

#ac #assassins creed #AC4 #kiddway headcanon #kiddway #kiddway au #edward kenway

[prorevenge]

Mock my mother’s death? I bankrupt you.

So this could be a very, very long story. I’ll try to summarize where and when I can.

My now ex-wife Kate and I moved to an apartment in 2010. The house as a whole a renovated town house split between two sides with two apartments on the bottom and two apartments upstairs. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the apartment as it was a much older building that I had ever lived in but I quickly adjusted to the wood creaking throughout the night. On the initial walkthrough we noticed that the only problem was that there was a dip in the bathroom ceiling. The landlord, Jay, promised he would get fixed ASAP.

One year to the day when we moved in there was a loud crash at 4AM. The bathroom ceiling had collapsed and there was tiling and wood all over over the floor and in the bathtub. Now Kate was typically the aggressive one, while I was more passive and laid back, and she kept calling Jay throughout the day. When she got in touch with him at around 9PM she explained what happened and insisted that it be fixed immediately. He rebuffed with him yelling that his girlfriend was a lawyer and he didn’t need to do anything. Now this is where I got mad. I went outside and called him myself. I feigned a relaxed demeanor and at first he began trying to talk to me as a “bro” and kept saying “Dude, I’m gonna get someone out there but it’s gonna take a few weeks..” When he couldn’t sway me that way he began yelling about his girlfriend and her knowing the law. What he was unaware of was that I had read the tenant laws in my state and so as he tried to lie I waited until he was finished and I recited the law stating that, if an apartment was considered uninhabitable then the landlord needed to pay for the tenant to stay in a place until it was resolved. He tried to say that our upstairs neighbor Phil was the super but he wasn’t sure if he could get down there that night. He put me on hold, then came back a few minutes later and said that Phil and his girlfriend were out of state. I rang Phils doorbell and asked, with the Jay on speakerphone, if he was assigned as the super. He laughed and said “No.” Dejected, he said he would have people out there the next day (previously he said they were busy for at least three weeks). There’s more to this incident but it lead to two conclusions:

If you’re going to lie then there has to be a consistency in your lie AND make sure that the people you lie to DON’T communicate with each other.

This is where a feud started between me and my Kate versus him and his mother (she was the original landlord and gave the house to him so he could begin to profit.)

So forward to a year later. Jay stopped coming to the house and his mom began doing the pick-ups. Around this time my ex- and I had been laid off and we were working with social security for food, health, and housing insurance. We were approved for all three in April but we would not get the check until May. When our typical check wasn’t in the landlord’s mailbox he immediately gave a summons saying that he was taking us to court for eviction. The day we went to court he had no lawyer and, going before the judge, here’s the summation:

Judge: Does the defense have a means to pay within 90 days of non-payment? Us: Yes judge (hands over paperwork showing that he will be paid for April and May) Judge: I see no problem. They are breaking no laws. Why are we here? Jay: Well your honor, they have been bullying- Judge: I don’t care, unless they are breaking a law then this case is dismissed.

Suffice it to say Jay and his mother’s were NOT happy. Around this time in my life things were tumultuous. My mother, who had been battling lung cancer succumbed to it in June . This happened at roughly the same time his mom came knocking looking for payment. I explained that I would leave it in the mailbox when we got back from the funeral home and to please just respect my right to mourn. She took her fingers and began rubbing them together, pretending to play the smallest violin.

I will never forget what she said next “Oooh, my mommy just died. Woe is me. She probably had it coming. I don’t care if your entire family is dead. I want my money.” She smiled smugly, proud with what she had just said. I saw red and my heart jumped into my throat. I went, grabbed the check, and handed it to her in absolute shock that anyone would say something so...fucked up? She had finally managed to push a button that very few people I’ve known throughout my life have seen. I went into rage mode but not in the way you would expect.

THE REVENGE: We were always told that if a health inspector came by to not open the door. I waited until Aug. since that was when the lease was going to run out and we knew they would not extend a renewal. I walked up the block to town hall to ask for a health inspection of our property. It was scheduled for several days later. Now it’s important to know several things:

I was friends with all of the tenants. Phil had moved out with his fiancé but the new tenant was Dani upstairs in our side. Tom and Hana on the other side of the downstairs floor had moved out and Jay was still looking for new tenants. The only one who wanted to stay out of this was Rose on the upper right apartment.

I had gotten a key so I could let the inspector in Dani’s apartment and I knew that I could use the back staircase on the right side to let him in on Tom’s, now vacant apartment.

I also knew that Dani was moving out in September along with Kate and myself.

The inspector came and it was glorious. He checked the exterior of the house first noting that wires were exposed, there was an old empty dryer along with other odd clutter in the backyard. I bought him inside the shared entrance and, as I was counting on, he noticed that the last inspected dated back to 1994; 18 years. This meant that for each year he did not have an inspection there would be appropriate fines. For our apartment we had black mold growing in our bathroom and the bubble in the ceiling had begun to grow to problematic proportions. Upstairs, Dani’s apartment was suffering from leaks in the ceiling and it looked like her bathroom ceiling was also on the brink of collapsing. We then went to the basement. The boiler was on the verge of exploding, there was flammable items along with gasoline and a pack of matches sitting right beside it. Two things that I did not know was 1. The fire door that separated the two sides did not close all of the way rendering it moot and, on the right basement side there was a toilet. A toilet that had blown up. It had coated the surrounding walls and the leakage prevented us going up to the floor via the right side. The entire time the inspector was photographing and writing constantly.

We stepped outside and he said he needed to come back. When I asked why he said he had run out of space to write down all of the infractions (he had filled the front and had written an entire page on the back portion). I kindly and coyly asked “Well, how much will it cost right now?” He scratched his head and said “Around 20-30k from what I can see but it’s probably going to be higher as this house was never licensed to be split into apartments.” I thanked him and he was going to come back with the county inspector.

So we moved out and but I got the rundown from Rose. Because he was the current owner he owed all current fines and no one new could not move into the empty apartments until everything was up to code. Because three out of four were vacant he was losing 4,500 in potential rent. He handed the property back to his mother and had to claim for bankruptcy. Now here’s the other thing. Every time an old tenant left and a new one was coming in an inspection was supposed to be done. Now that all of the financial burden fell on her they looked into the records and was she was fined for each time she had broken that rule 750/per. By the end of the year Rose had moved out so the place was hemorrhaging money. I sat back, proud of what I had done, and left it be.

Haha, no, fuck that. I wasn’t close to done yet.

I felt like I had destroyed Jay but my real target had always been his mom. I learned that she had about eight properties throughout three towns in my county. I went to each one, spoke to the tenants, and said I was a concerned tenant from another property and asked if they had any problems with their apartments. EVERY person I asked described the apartment in very poor to intolerable levels and that the mom was effectively a slumlord. She would ignore problems unless someone turned to litigations, she was threatened that they would summon the inspector, or, more often than not, the people would move out, she’d refuse their deposit, and sink those into repairs. People rarely fought back because she knew that the occupants were of upper, lower class minorities. So, being the concerned person I was, I want to the inspector of the other two towns and asked for an inspection to be done with at least one, if not more, would be awaiting the inspector when they came. Turns out that she faced pretty much the same infractions on every apartment she owned. It turned out she actually had 12 apartments but I initially only knew about the ones that fell within my county. The remaining properties in the next county over were given a heads up for a surprise inspection. From what I can tell Jays mom had been in the landlord business for about 35-40 years. That collapsed quickly.

Since we moved literally one block down the road from our old one I got to see Jay lose his primary source of income and have to claim bankruptcy BUT also saw that his mother was also trying desperately to find a buyer for all of the apartments so she could pay off the fines. I learned two years later that she too had to file for bankruptcy. Jay and his mother camped out in front of our next apartment two days in Oct. of 13 before she filed for bankruptcy (I’m guessing to scream at me and/or Kate) so I called the cops and said that there were strange people standing in a no parking zone and they kept looking up at the second floor. A cruiser swung by and told them to leave.

I know I should have used the two months I spent monitoring everything to find a new job but this was the one and only time I wanted to cripple a person where they hurt the most; their wallets. I think I got my point across. None of this would’ve happened if you had just fucking fixed the ceiling before it collapsed Jay!

Th;dr: Had a couple of slumlords, they pushed me to a place where I snapped, and so I went a bit crazy and bankrupted the slumlord AND his slumlord mother as well.

(source) story by (/u/Theliterside)

#prorevenge #by /u/Theliterside #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

[outoftimewriting]

Imagine (Son of Hades! Percy; Godswapped! Big Three's kids) The Lost Hero AU (1/7) (6/12)

Okay so before you read this, there's the whole PJO AU that I've wrote on this - check on the masterpost - that is more or less essential to this plot. So enjoy! Have a good reading, and leave reviews and ideas! And don't forget to check the warnings before reading :))

Jason wakes up on a bus - he doesn’t remember where he is. Why he is here? How is he here? He is not supposed to be here - where is he supposed to be? Who is this girl holding his hand?

Coach Hedge seems familiar - somehow. Something in his posture, in the way he walks a little wobbly, it’s strangely comforting. And he knows that Jason doesn’t belong here - it means he is not going crazy. Maybe. The jury is still out on that one.

He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t know what a “Wilderness School” could possibly be - and who is this messy-haired hyperactive boy cracking jokes? Why is he with them - they're all seventeen? Sixteen? This boy looks young.

Piper. Leo. He has names now - information. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Say not always what you know, but always know what you say.

Jason has no idea where he learned that, but it seems like good advice. He doesn’t stutter - his back contracts with the phantom pain of lashes. He starts to ask - who are they, where are they, where are they going.

They are not helpful at all. Leo thinks he is joking - Piper is too busy defending her heritage, and he can’t really blame her for it - a flash of black skin, dark as night, crosses his mind, but is gone before he can connect it to anyone.

There's a pen in his pocket, a name carved onto it. It says Undisonus - which he knows means "resounding with waves".

They are in a Dam. The Hoover Dam. Jason ditches hyper kid, and goes to talk with the Coach - the man is a crackpot fool and Jason kind of thinks he is hopped up on cocaine or smh. He makes no sense - and he explains shit, like who lets this dude supervise children if he can't be clear.

At least Jason is not going crazy. Or not going crazy alone. There’s something evil in the storm - and the coach is a faun-...satyr-...Half-goat. Well, Jason hopes he is not traveling with his dude after this - the whole bus will smell like a barn.

They are fighting an evil storm. Jason's pen is not a pen - it's a sword, made of gold with green stones in its handle. Apparently, the rain doesn’t make him wet, and his sword can absorb energy.

He destroys the monster - Dylan was his name - By singing. He sings - it's not really singing as much as it's producing a very deep sound out of his chest - and the monster gets sloppy, erratic. The weaker ones - the venti - explode when the sound waves connect. It's like he is drawing the sound from the water itself.

Then he saves the girl from falling by using the tides to form something - a tornado? - and catch her. She seems cool. Kinda. Jason feels weird - he doesn’t know her last name. He doesn’t remember his last name.

Some teens come - three of them, in flying horses that he can hear on his mind, like badly connected radios. One of them is a tired blonde girl, who seems to take his presence as a personal offense. The second one is a buff girl who could probably break his neck by flexing her biceps, while the third one is a boy - a boy missing half a leg.

Jason tunes the rude girl out for a second - he is already getting punished for this mess by having to hear her. Apparently, she is after someone that is not Jason. But then, the boy missing half a leg - Alabaster - brings a name up, and Jason startles.

That’s the thing: He doesn’t remember anything - anything but a name. Perseus- no. It sounds wrong. Percy.

"Percy Jackson?" He asks.

Annabeth - or Commander Chase, how he thinks it would be right to call her - the rude blonde - looks like he just solved world hunger. Her voice cracks a little - Percy Jackson. Jason feels weirdly possessive of the name - it's his memory, his link to whoever he is.

"How do you know him? Do you know where he is?" She is on the verge of either fainting or crying, but Jason can't blame her - he would be bawling his eyes out too if only something inside of him didn't fear the sheer idea of sobbing.

Because Jason can’t tell why, or how, or who he is - but he knows that Percy is the key to unlock his memory. But he's been missing for a month.

He knows things. Jason knows they are demigods, what it means to be one - and Valdez (it sounds wrong to call him Leo in such an official situation) is a son of Vulc-... Hephaestus.

The blonde doesn't ask a lot of questions: he has been trained to follow orders, he has been hardwired to be a soldier. He stays in military parade rest the whole time until Commander Chase drags him to see an Oracle.

Jason is pretty sure it should've been called an augur. But they go anyway - and it's not the official person he is expecting. It's a redhead girl painting a face - a black teen, more or less Jason's age, with a purple and orange flower crown and a closed-off expression.

That's Perseus Jackson. He learns a lot about the boy in a conversation - Perseus is a son of Hades (Pluto, God of Riches and the Dead, his mind supplies). He is not sixteen/seventeen like Jason apparently is - he is eighteen and a high school graduate. He was - is, because Commander Chase is sure they're finding him - taking a sabbatical year before going to college - MIT or Stanford, the impossible choice, the Oracle jokes. No one calls him Percy - except for a select few close friends.

Something about this is wrong, just wrong. Augurs - Oracles, whatever - are not supposed to be girls in ripped jeans. They are not supposed to be planning to go to Parsons in the next summer - Aug- Oracles shouldn't even have close relationships to soldiers!

Something must show in his face - because the Cherokee girl, who followed them for a tour of the place, tries to grab his hand. He doesn't let her - Jason knows he shouldn't show affection in front of officers.

Commander Chase asks questions he can't answer. He doesn't know where Perseus had gone for a week without communication six months ago, nor why he came back with no memories of it. He doesn't remember meeting him. He doesn't know if he was in Kronos' side - even if a pit of rage opens in his gut at Saturn's - Kronos - name.

Perseus starts to sound wrong in his mind - Perseus is their leader, and it's clear in the way Commander Chase talks about him that she is his second in command - so he starts calling them General Jackson and Lieutenant Chase in his mind. He doesn't voice this - because even McLean is being called by her first name, and Jason follows as well.

Jason has a tattoo of a trident with bars - no, not a tattoo, a brand. So they split ways - Jason goes see (Senator? Consul? Magister? Consiliario?) Chiron, and McLean stays to be weaponized - It's bad management, Jason thinks, to give a soldier weapons before they know how to use them. But Jason is also just a foot soldier here - he has no opinion and no voice.

Piper is not having a good day - she is not having a good week. Her boyfriend, apparently, is not her boyfriend. Her mother, a goddess. She keeps having dreams - and the Queen of Gods just gave her a mission. To save her - or the whole world ends.

And Annabeth - the beautiful girl with the missing boyfriend (who Piper is not sure is hers or Rachel's, but she is pretty sure all priestesses must be virgins or something) - just rolls her eyes.

This happens all the time - the gods mess things up, and they clean it up. It'll have to wait until they have more information - and until there's an official quest.

They give her a weapon too - she has no idea how to use it, but it's a beautiful dagger. It even has a name, Katoptris. She feels like Arya Stark in that new show that aired in April - a true wolf.

Leo is also having a very weird experience - he has half-siblings. After all those years in the streets or being shoved in and out of foster homes, he has a family - and they think he is the second coming of Jesus or the Antichrist - no one is really sure yet.

Leo is a fire manipulator. Some of the younger kids there look at him with fear - but most of the older ones talk about Perseus Jackson (and isn't that a very popular person, jeez), and how he saved all of their collective asses with his own fire.

Leo gets curious - it's the boy Jason has never mentioned before, but is the only thing he remembers, his brother?

Jake Mason - their incapacitated leader - says that unofficially, yes. The dead counselor - the one that brought the curse - was Perseus's father figure, before he died in the war. But Perseus wasn't - isn't, they avoid using the past tense - a Hephaestus kid. He was the one and only son of Hades.

The thing is, Leo doesn't have a filter. So the first thing he blurts out is "Well, at least they did the fire right in the Hercules movie". Nyssa - and the idea he has a sister is equal parts amazing and terrifying - looks at him like he is crazy, but laughs anyway.

Jason has a vision of a goddess - he doesn't know her. She calls him her champion - but it sounds wrong - and she doesn't tell her anything, because why would her, really. Then, McLean enters, and, apparently, the Oracle was possessed (how is this any news, isn't the Oracle supposed to be possessed?).

This is all connected by the fact that Jupiter - Zeus - has closed off all mortal communications. Well, mostly - Magister Chiron says that it's possible the King still has some contact with his only mortal son, Nico di Angelo.

And isn't it just marvelous that the name makes something stir on him like everything else? Even so, Jason doesn't say anything - Magister Chiron is an officer. Di Angelo is clearly also an officer - and one who answers directly to Jup- Zeus.

Di Angelo appears - looking like a beggar in need of a shower and a haircut - and isn't this a blessing. Jason wants to interrogate him - but the moody teenager has important news - Hera is missing. And she is probably the goddess sending them the messages.

They go see a boy named Clovis, in the Hypnos Cabin - and that makes something stir in Jason - he feels happy. They're so relaxed - and while he has no memories, this feeling of comfort is foreign in his body.

Clovis - who Jason is half-sure is a zombie in human skin - tells him what he already knew - someone took his memories. News: It was Hera. Or Juno - because Jason didn't fall out of the railway yet and the gods have split personalities.

They go to sleep - all three of them because this has been a long day and none of them are in shape for the bonfire later.

Piper dreams of her father, and a fiery giant that tells her to go to a quest - and she is so, so tired of these all-powerful beings telling her to do something and not explaining anything. When she wakes up, she tells Rachel exactly that, and the redhead laughs.

"You and Percy, you'll be best friends. I don't even need to be an Oracle to tell you that" And then proceeds to tell Piper all about Perseus Jackson roasting the gods for being awful parents.

She thinks she might like him - Piper has never seen a black hero before. There's not much prejudice against color or gender or sexual orientation here - its harshly punished, and the person has to undergo classes about equality and prejudice. When Rachel spins her tale, it's clear Perseus was in love with Luke - and it's obviously unrequited but no less important for the decision that saved their civilization.

Leo is in a much similar situation - he dreams about his Aunt Rosa, and wakes up in a panic - he hated the woman. It's Nyssa - the acting counselor - who calms him down - she tells him all the newbies are like that, and once, it was Perseus who hold her.

It's weird how the hero seems like this larger than life person - everyone talks about him, all the time. He was their hero, an invincible wall of muscles and shadows with a giant ax, but most of the people his age see him as a big brother, a soft protective guy with big blue sweaters and horrible morning breath.

Leo goes spend time with Jake - but Jake is occupied. Being half a mummy and preparing to lose one foot because of nerve damage doesn't make him incapable of snogging his nurse, a very willing Will.

Jason is also on the Perseus Jackson boat - but he is in much deeper. He dreams about the hero.

He wasn't doing anything heroic though - it was just him, not even eleven yet, alone in a playground. He is sitting in the grass and there's a book in his lap, and some bigger kids are calling him names - charcoal lump, nigger, ape, monkey, negro - it just goes on.

Jason is a white person. A very Californian tanned one, but a white, blonde person nonetheless. He doesn't remember anything, and he has had no real contact with racism - that he remembers - even though he knows what it means.

But he is pretty sure people of color shouldn't be racist. Shouldn't they support each other? Why is there an Asian and a clearly Hindi (maybe Muslim, Jason is no good with this) person attacking him for his skin?

The memory changes now. Perseus is in his early teens, and he is at camp - well, at least this should be better. It's not.

Perseus is walking alone - this time, there's no one mocking him. It's worse. People look at him with a mix of fear and disgust - even people who have been singing his praises since Jason entered this camp. Even Chase steers clear of him.

The pavilion is different, Jason thinks. There are fewer tables, and the Hermes one is full - is where Perseus sits. People enter after him, and, although there's plenty of space around him, the only people who sit with him are three boys: one dark-haired in his later teens, a young blonde adult with an ugly scar, and Alabaster, with his full two legs and at least five years younger.

Jason feels some kinship for Perseus - the feeling of being ostracized is not unfamiliar. He tries to push after it - but he just wakes up.

When he wakes up, the first thing he does is chase Lt. Chase down (ha) and ask her about his dreams.

He doesn't tell her the first vision - she wasn't there, is not his to tell - but the second in great detail. She asks for a description of the two boys - and suddenly, she is both sad and happy.

"It happened to him," She says, and there's a tear rolling through her cheek that makes him think that this is Annabeth "Those guys... These are Luke Castellan and Ethan Nakamura... You're... You're getting visions of Percy. This... This is good. We can work with that."

Then she leaves muttering to herself, so Jason goes to track down the person who can tell him more: Alabaster.

Jason tells his dream again - and Alabaster gets a sad and wistful face. There are blue sparks playing in his fingers, and his mechanic prosthetic - a bold shade of red with a whip painted across the knee, the mark of Nemesis - whirs a little.

Alabaster doesn't paint Perseus as a hero or a beloved leader - he paints Perseus as a scared, relatable kid, twelve years old with the weight of the world in his shoulders.

He tells Jason how Perseus never had his own bunk - how most of them slept on the floor. How there were no cabins for minor gods and Cabin 11 brimmed with unclaimed children. How Perseus raged against the gods - but couldn't leave his friends to the mercy of Kronos.

How Perseus was never a hero just because he fought in the war - but because he fought for them, all of them, no matter which side they were in. They were just kids - the real battle was with the immortal beings.

Jason learns this, and something shines in his eyes. Lou Ellen snorts from her top bunk from where she is half-watching the scene - it's the same shine Nico Di Angelo got after Grover told him about Percy Jackson and that never left his eyes. At least this one is older.

The three newbies go to the bonfire - and they trade stories in the way. All of their stories involve Perseus - it's like he is the entity of this camp. He is this camp - there's no other explanation.

Jason starts talking about his dream - and Piper and Leo, who "remember" the blonde's crush on Piper, look at each other with resignation. Their memories may be fake - but this is very much the insufferable Jay they know.

Piper thinks she should be much more worried about her relationship with Jason, but she is cool - first, she apparently doesn't even know him, though she would like to, cause he is cool. Second, he is just a boy. The real life version of Aquaman - but a boy nonetheless. And she has bigger problems - like, for example, who is her mother?

They go to the bonfire - Jason creates a hurricane, and he's proved to be a son of Poseidon - he has a sister apparently, the Lieutenant of the Hunt.

Katie - a girl with the most amazing dreads Piper has ever seen in this life and a staff, which is not as cool as Piper's dagger, but just as lethal - tells her all about the huntresses.

Piper thinks that if there's a thing that she would give up boys forever for, it's an immortal hunt with a goddess. She asks Katie if the hunt accepts trans girls - perhaps after this whole business with Hera, she can join.

Maybe there, she will finally be accepted as a tomboy. Maybe there, she won't have to fend off questions of why does she "wants to be" a girl if she likes her messy hair and doesn't care about "girly" things. If cis girls are allowed to like skating and use baggy clothes and have short hair - why isn't she?

But she is kind of against the whole misandry thing. Sure, she can stop being with a man in romantic or sexual ways, but to not have male friends because "man is evil" is clear prejudice - doesn't matter where it comes from.

Rachel issues a prophecy - Leo volunteers (under the condition he must find a water-based way of transportation), and Piper thinks that's her chance, she is been having those weird dreams for a while now. But- as a girl she hasn't met, named Drew Tanaka - points out, she is not claimed.

Well - that changes pretty quickly. The dress isn't her style - not at all - nor is the make-up. But at least her mother recognizes her gender - it's Aphrodite, what could she expect? At least there are no feathers in her hair or animal skin clothing - the stereotype is just ridiculous.

At least now her magic voice has an explanation and she can throw it in Leo's face - see, she was asking!

Piper is given a bunk on Aphrodite's cabin - which has twenty-one children between the ages of 7 and 25, of all races and genders - and learns quickly that no one there is prejudiced - beauty comes in very different ways.

She makes friends, and discovers that Drew isn't a counselor - she trash-talked Silena Beauregard once and tried to use her charm speak on a young boy, and everyone ousted her - all Aphrodite children are resistant to charm speak.

Lacy is thirteen, and just a summer camper - she is cis and white and blonde with blue eyes. She also has social anxiety - so she is the only one Drew doesn't bitches to in public.

Mitchell is the only boy (of her fourteen half-brothers) in this cabin who actually talks to her. He is from Texas, and he's a shy nerd, with a big crush on both Annabeth Chase and Malcolm Cage - who Piper learns leads the Trans Support Group on camp, which has more or less twenty-five kids, from the now 157 campers.

Piper is surprised - it's 2011, and gender is still kind of taboo - but she shouldn't be. They tell her the gods are way freer with both gender and sexuality - Lacy doesn't have a father, but a mortal mother. There's a lot of year-rounders who stay because of homophobic parents.

She asks if gods can transition people. They tell her maybe Aphrodite, maybe Eros - but the ones who are over eighteen can ask to go on quests to see the deity Hermaphroditus - they are the only one who magically transitions people, but it's not without a price - they are a god, after all.

She decides that - prejudiced or not - Drew Tanaka is a bitch of mythic proportions. The girl has weaker charmspeak than Piper - but she uses it way more, and for worse reasons. She is twenty - almost four years older than Piper - and picks on everyone she cans - mostly young children of other cabins, even though she already got punished for it four times - counselors are ridiculously protective of their children.

Piper thinks Drew is such a bitch because of her trauma - the Cherokee girl sees her walking with a cane that looks directly out of a Prada store, and Lacy tells her Drew had to do a total knee replacement after the war, and when it's way too cold it bothers her. When she tells her theory to Mitchell, the boy laughs for the first time.

"Darlin'" He starts, with the southern drawl that makes people doubt he has no charmspeak "Drew was always a bitch. She was a bitch before she even knew she had charmspeak. She was a bitch when she got to Camp if that fella from Demeter is too be believed."

The older Aphrodite children just roll their eyes at it - Drew has no real power here.

"Don't worry, kiddo," Says the counselor, a non-binary kid that goes by Ariel and has an uncanny similarity to the princess, if not for the undercut and the pixie hair "She does her thing once more, and she is in laundry duty for the rest of the summer. And if she says an A about Silena too you, you come directly to us. No one trash talks Silena Beauregard in this Camp."

Leo has just done something amazing, he thinks. He fixed the steel dragon - Festus because maybe Jason will feel better with a Latin name - and he can totally make him work on water - like a sea serpent! He always wanted a Gyarados anyway.

It leads to an underground bunk - and isn't this the coolest camp ever - and Leo attaches motors to it. And a tail that works in water, so the transport is well and done.

Jason goes to explore his cabin - and he finds pictures there, of Thalia Grace's friends, that she left behind. There's one with Perseus, two girls in silver jackets with bows, a faun and Thalia herself - in the same Dam they were this morning.

She is his sister. He knows it, just like he knows the curve of his nose and hers are the same, the way both of them have the same curls when they let their hair grow - that's why both of them have it cut short.

He tells it to Lt. Chase. Not under the Styx vow - he has no need for it. Jason hopes she contacts his sister, and tells her about it - even when she tells him Thalia never told anyone about him. Well, maybe they're estranged. She might know something about him, anyway.

They leave in Festus, and Jason's water powers aren't even needed - Leo has it handled with his magical mechanic beast.

It's difficult to travel in the cold water - but Jason wills the water away, and it obeys.

Do you know who doesn't obey? Khione. The boreads go away easily with Piper's charmspeak - and isn't it a scary thought that she can will away gods - but Khione is more powerful than her.

And the gods keep complicating their lives. Instead of appeasing Aeolus - no. Let the demigods pay the price for their mistakes. However, Jason is a son of Poseidon - or Neptune, because Boreas exchanges form when they talk.

Their next stop is Chicago - which is really convenient because they can go the whole way by water.

The travel is, however, long, and Piper dreams of the fiery giant again - Enceladus. She hates dreaming about him - he calls her boy, doesn't care for her pronouns, and is clearly the villain, and Piper knows about dreams.

Her father may not care for their culture - and she is okay with that. However, she loved her grandfather's stories. And while Piper is Cherokee, she knows about the Navajo dream walkers and the Abenaki legend about the world created by the dream of the Great Spirit.

Dreams have power - in all cultures, in all religions. She is not making a deal with a creature that uses her dreams to communicate.

Jason - Jason Grace - Also dreams. And once again, he dreams of Perseus Jackson.

His first vision - they're not dreams, dreams mean they're not true - is of Percy in his middle teens. He is in a familiar pier and it's winter - as far from the water as he can possibly get. By his side, Luke Castellan - the one Jason knows later becomes Saturn.

They are talking. Well, Castellan is talking, all wide smiles and side-hugs. Perseus laughs at his jokes and blushes every time they get close to each other. There's not a sliver of Percy's skin to be seen under his neck - but Jason is pretty sure he is shivering when Luke whispers something in his ear.

It makes Jason weirdly bothered - two men aren’t supposed to act like that towards one another outside of the privacy of their tents or the throes of war. It’s a weakness - same sex’s company is stimulated in battle - to unite the ranks. But soldiers are supposed to do their duty and procreate more soldiers - even if he doesn’t remember who the war is against.

Perseus eventually leaves - melting into the shadows - and with him, Luke's smile is gone. Alabaster and the dark-haired boy - that Jason knows it's called Ethan now - come to talk to Luke, who is clearly bothered by something.

Alabaster asks him if he convinced Perseus yet. Luke says he didn't, but he'll keep trying - the son of Hades would be a huge asset to Kronos' army. The blonde's face is as cold as the waters must be.

The memory changes. Perseus is now maybe sixteen, hopefully, older - Jason doesn't know - with a giant hellhound by his side, hugging his own knees. He is in front of a river - somewhere dark, the Underworld probably - and he is crying.

This is the first memory where Perseus - Percy, for this memory is too intimate - shows any bare skin. He doesn't have a shirt on - nor shoes or socks. Jason gets sidetracked by the muscles - totally in a comparative way - but the presence of Alabaster brings him back to reality.

"Luke is going to rebirth," Percy says, full of sorrow "I saw him in Elysium only once - I'm barely able to get there, I'm no good with spirits, and I couldn't talk to him. It's his last rebirth before the Isle of the Blessed. Is it selfish, that I wanted him to wait for me?" Alabaster shakes his head, hugging the younger boy close.

"Did he ever love me, Alabaster? Even as a friend?"

Jason can’t see how it would be any different. Men don’t love men - men share beds and quick escapades into the night. But this - this thing Perseus has for Luke - is different. It’s all encompassing.

"Of course, Percy. He loved you as much as you love him. Just... Just not in the same way." He doesn't even hesitate to lie.

Jason wakes up furious for no reason - but he has no time to deal with that now because Festus is caught in a tempest. Without ways of controlling him, they shipwreck in a deserted beach - in Detroit of all places, still a day and a half of Chicago, even with Festus' speed.

There's an abandoned warehouse there. Both Jason and Piper are distraught from their dreams - everyone talks it over (kinda, Jason is too angry with his visions and too deep in denial) and they try to calm themselves while letting Leo solve the dragon problem.

Leo is worried about his companions. They can't sleep without having weird dream visions - Nyssa told him back in camp that was "normal" for demigods, especially those questing, but Jason has been dreaming of a missing person while being a missing person himself, and Piper is having dreams of a monster he is already 80% sure they'll confront sooner or later.

He must've been really sleep deprived and way too into his friends' stories, because he has a hallucination.

His sleep paralysis demon is clearly not up to news - She thinks Jason and Piper are together, even if Jason is having a hard crush on his literal dream dude and Piper is in love with her dagger - Leo thinks that if she doesn't get to stab something soon, she'll be stabbing them while they're asleep.

And even if they were together - what does it matter for Leo? In his fake memories at least, he has been third-wheeling for a while now. He doesn't really care - he is fifteen, for gods sake. Leo jokes a lot - but he had like, two crushes on his whole life: Penelope Cruz and Johnny Depp, and both because of the pirate movie they watched in class last semester.

Turns out the Muddy Mary was just stalling him - but he is Leo Badass Valdez, and he totally destroys those cyclops - What name is Ma Gasket anyway, what was Poseidon thinking.

They try to reform, but Jason mixes his relatives - and yes, Leo is holding this over him forever - with water: Monster Kool-Aid.

It gains time for them to get back on Festus and go to Chicago - with the tune up Leo gave on the disk, they're there in half a day and they don't even drown in Lake Michigan - even though Jason says he thinks there are sirens there.

Then its explore the sewers time. Festus is too small for them - so they are disgusting alone. Leo feels like a rat.

He and Jason talk - they start talking about their powers, and how Leo is confused about his own fire. If a hero had it, it couldn't be bad, could it? Jason equals it to his water powers - its the same, but in different sides of the elemental spectrum.

"If I learned anything with the Camp's fan love for Perseus - and I'm not kidding, Lacy totally has a shrine for him somewhere," Piper starts "Is that our powers, our parentage - it doesn't define us."

"I'm not a manipulative bitch because I can charmspeak... shut it Leo! It was just a car" Leo mimes driving away, and she swats him upside the head.

"Leo is not a demon because of his fire. Maybe a gremlin but-..." It's his time to try and swat at her, even if she is probably capable of killing him with her pinky after spending the whole two days in Camp with Rachel - her Oracle facade doesn't fool Leo, he saw that knife strapped to her leg - doing gods knows what.

"And Jason is not a fish, so we're all fine" They are laughing - and Leo thinks this is way better than those fake memories.

Their encounter with Medea goes a little differently this time. Jason is a son of the sea - his mind is too fickle. He and Leo don't fight each other - even though the scrawny boy tries really hard and Jason will lord this over him forever.

They battle the Sun Dragons - they're no match for Jason's power over water, and he does the weird singing thing - this time to lesser results. Maybe the bigger the monster, the less his powers work.

They escape through the sewers - with one very petrified Coach Hedge and a cage full of air spirits in tow. Jason liquefies the vapor trail in the sky - and they pray together for Zeus not to strike them out of his sky.

Leo finally has prophetic dreams of his own - his father. He is less cool than Leo though he was - but maybe that's Leo's internalized ableism talking. Or the fact that the god looks like he hasn't showered in a week - Leo can identify with that, being a sewer rat himself.

Their prayers don't work. Zeus - or something up there - shot them out of the sky when Festus is malfunctioning. Jason cushions their fall with a mini-hurricane - because the dude is clearly Ororo Munroe's frat boy version.

His baby is broken, partially cause someone up there hates him, partially because of where he landed. He prays to his father - and Leo thinks he's way cooler when he actually answers. With nowhere to go, the three of them go into the house.

Midas didn't count Jason being capable of controlling water. Soon, nothing is gold anymore - And he loves his sword a lot, but he hopes he doesn't have to see it for a while because anything gold will burn his retinas again.

Jason dreams of Perseus again. This time, the demigod is with a goddess who has the same exquisite skin color as him - and dreadlocks adorned with bones. They are curving shadows like smoke around their hands - even if Jason can barely focus on their conversation, because the guy he has been having visions about every time he naps is basically in a skirt and nothing more. Is he allowed to appreciate him if he is wearing womanly clothes?

It's really weird, to be peeving in a boy - in a man - he has (probably) never met and does not remember - but Jason is watching the guy's life. Private moments that someone (probably Hera/Juno, he bets she is the one who took Perseus too) is showing him - he feels like he knows him.

Perseus and the goddess talk - mostly about Perseus' school and Rachel. He seems happy - and carefree, even though he is probably over sixteen (if the last memories make any sense), and Luke Castellan is already dead. This is perhaps a little before he disappeared - and Jason rages against the unfairness of the gods' games.

Jason knows men aren’t supposed to be together - but he saw them at Camp. Same sex people holding hands and kissing in public - wherever Jason comes from, this isn’t talked about. He wishes that he could stay forever at Camp - this alternative reality where they are allowed to live freely. Jason thinks he might’ve asked Perseus for a date - lunch at the beach, perhaps. If he is allowed to stay and they find the son of Hades, he might do exactly that.

They rest in a mountain cave - and discuss Jason's dreams about Perseus (not in great detail, because Leo is teasing him enough about it) and Piper's nightmares about the evil fire giant - who Medea told them it's Enceladus. They have no idea who it is, but Jason is apparently a human encyclopedia of mythology - it's the bane of Athena.

They're attacked by Lycaon - who calls Jason "Lupa's seal cub". Jason is so tired of not remembering anything because this is probably supposed to be offensive, but it just sounds funny, and now Leo is going to keep calling him seal cub. If they survive, because Jason is way too exhausted.

He meets his sister - with Leo, because he needs a security net, and Piper has hypothermia - he feels guilty, because he did this to her.

And their story sounds like a tragedy. Thalia thought he was dead - and then she ran away, became a crying tree for five years, was saved by Perseus - because clearly, that Camp does not work without him - went on a mission with him to save Chase, almost destroyed the world, lost over half of her quest mates (because apparently, Perseus left the camp for reasons she won't explain - he doesn’t care, he’ll probably dream about it later), became the Lt. of the Hunt - and was now going stir-crazy because her mistress is locked up in Olympus.

Lieutenant Grace - how his soldier mind reverts her name quickly, sister or not, is really worrying - is happy to see him. They hug - and it feels for the first time, things are going well for Jason. Thalia and Leo even bond a little - over laughing about Jason's stupid decisions and dream crush on Percy Jackson.

He does have a crush on a guy - at least in the privacy of his mind. It’s just the boy’s stupid muscles and his stupid curls, and the way he was so carefree with that goddess, the way he curled in Alabaster’s arms, the way Luke Castellan never deserved him.

They keep talking - about Perseus, their missions, their lifes - and he feels like this was what he was supposed to find all his life, the missing piece to a long-standing puzzle.

They go to Aeolus castle. Due to their shared conversations, Leo doesn't make any conclusions - because all of these theories, about exchanging camps, they were talked about in the cave - when Jason first discovers the Wolf House.

They leave the mountain in a hurricane - Jason is really handy with these. At least they know where to go to find Enceladus: Mount Diablo. What a fitting name.

Piper meets her mother - and it's pleased that, when Aphrodite looks at her, she doesn't see blonde hair or green eyes - she sees a Cherokee woman, with short-cropped up hair and a lightning tattoo - the mark of a warrior. It's the woman she wants to be - not a boy she considers now one of her best friends.

Aphrodite tells her where they need to go. She tries to talk about Jason - but Piper says it was a bad idea. She shouldn't have given her those fake memories - it hurt more that way.

Aphrodite gives Piper a potion - and not only that, but she tells her that, when they meet again - not in a dream, but in life - she shall give Piper what she wants the most.

Her mother tells her some of her children are destined for greatness, and Piper is the Aeneas of this generation. Aeneas founded Rome - and Piper will shape the future of their civilization.

Then she tells Piper about the true enemy: Gaea. Suddenly, she wakes up, and oh Toto, they aren't in Kansas anymore.

They are in San Francisco - which triggers something in Jason because when they take a taxi, it's like he can't stop looking at everything.

There's a pier - Pier 36 - that Jason looks ready to cry when they pass through it. If not for the fiery giant threatening to kill Piper's father, she would probably stop the taxi - it's the first time Jason's facade breaks.

She thinks he might've been indoctrinated, as they do in cults or some religions, to believe that males have to act a certain way. Or fighters have to act a certain way - because he is certainly not misogynist. He looks fearful just to talk about his dreams about Perseus, though - like someone will come and take those from him because he likes them.

There's no much time for consideration, Leo thinks - soon, Piper saves her dad (who is prettier in real life). Then, they're fighting against Dirty Bubbles - because Jason is clearly Mermaid Man - if the way he keeps singing and the creatures get rekt by his voice are any signal. Does that mean Leo is Barnacle Boy?

The Earthborn holds no candle to Jason's power on an island. And Leo is helping a lot too because that's his best friend's father and he can totally paralyze mud with fire - is basic Chem.

Poseidon helps them defeat Athena's Bane - and how is that for irony - with an earthquake followed by a giant wave that - if not for Jason - would've killed them all.

Jason dreams on the helicopter - it's the first one not about Perseus. This one, there's a woman - her skin is as dark as the soil, but her hair merges with the wheat around her. She is clad in a green dress and holds a basket of strawberries to her chest as she whistles through the plantation.

Then, she sees him - and changes. Her hair goes up - there's a staff in her right hand, the corn went in exchange for loaves of bread. The woman smiles, and Jason feels like he's been embraced by warmth.

"My champion" Ceres starts, for he knows her name, with infinite care in her voice "You don't need to fear Juno's machinations. She knows nothing of motherly love - she shall never understand it. The winter is difficult - but the Harvest will bring deliverance."

It's the first time he is sad to see a deity go. Deliverance - does that mean that Perseus will come back by June? Summer is harvest - even if June is six months away.

Piper doesn't use the potion on her father - no. It won't help anything, to forget - she learned that with Jason. The boy has no memories and all kinds of triggers and internalized problems. Tristan McLean is going through shock - and as soon as Piper is done with the whole Hera/Juno and Gaea thing, she is going home and taking care of him.

Leo's fire can't see to open Aunt Callid-... Hera's cage. And isn't really weird his babysitter was a goddess grooming him for war - even though Aphrodite told Piper Gaea only awakened after Kronos, and they didn't even know Kronos would rise twelve years ago.

So Hera just groomed him because her mind went "Oh, Hades' child. May cause the end of the world - Idk how. Might need firebender - time to groom this child". Was he supposed to be her pawn for the first Titan War? Her way of being recognized - but she hid away her card when she saw the bigger threat on the horizon, to gain what? Prestige? Glory?

Is that why he survived so many years away from Camp, with no random monster attacks? Was he just... just hiding for later use?

Man, he sure understands now why people rose against the gods. They are assholes.

Khione is pretty - but as Leo said, a goddess. So, an asshole. She has this whole elaborate plan to make Jason's demigods (Romans?) start a war - but her plan is shit. So he fights her because she is an asshole and isn't even a good villain.

A mysterious horse appears - a very rude horse if Jason's increasingly appalled face is to be believed. Its (his) name is Arion, and together with Jason, they literally turn the battle tides.

Piper is magical. Literally - Aphrodite's blessing apparently doesn't cover only beauty - it makes her a battle queen. She jumps - and the air supports her. She falls - and the earth trembles. Piper moves like a dancer - even though she barely fought before - and her and Jason's voice make the wolves so confused they start banging their heads in the walls.

Piper sometimes forgets her mother is a daughter of the sea and the sky - because Jason's tides don't touch her, and the air seems to help her, to mold her. Aphrodite is not only pretty - Love is always in the last place you expect it. And so is Piper.

Jason fights Porphyrion - and the only thing he can think about is why. Why is he doing this, for a goddess who took his life from him - who took everything he was. Why him? Why not Di Angelo, who is a son of Zeus? Why not anyone else?

They keep fighting and fighting and fighting - and Hera helps, in the end, and claims all the credit - because this apparently isn't all her fault at all. She almost kills Jason - because is not enough to wipe his mind - but water (and Piper's reality control power) save him.

They go back to Camp - and nothing changes. They don't become their Cabin counselors - except for Jason, because he is the only mortal kid of Poseidon.

Lacy suggests it - but the older ones quickly shut it down. Piper might be a hero - but she knows nothing of schedules or child care, she has no idea of how to counsel - She is barely seventeen. She is a sophomore - Piper can't even be a year-rounder, and there are young children there.

Ariel does say she has potential - worth grooming to succeed be second in command to their second in command - Troy - when Ariel leaves for her master's degree in Chemistry on Princeton.

And Leo - Leo has no responsibility to take care of others. He is an incredible engineer - and his firebending powers are amazing - but he is also not a counselor. Between the sixteen Hephaestus children, he is the second youngest - he's beat by nine-year-old Francisca Alves - a Brazilian girl who gave them a whole lot of problems to immigrate because her mother was Hi Merimã (an isolated indigenous tribe north of the country).

Being a counselor is not something harsh - is hard work, taking care of tens of demigods of all ages, taking stock of their basic needs, and making sure they are educated and welcomed - it's not a job given away freely to fifteen-year-olds.

The cabins with more people generally have older demigods in charge - twenty-year-olds who don't run into danger unless under dire circumstances, who are year-rounders and take online college courses - an exception of technology rule made by Chiron when they first started getting old enough for it to be possible.

Ceres talks to Jason - she is the one to deliver back his memories, for Juno is otherwise incapacitated. She tells her what it means - the Greeks, the Romans. And that they shall not go looking for Perseus Jackson - for it'll damage the Romans' trust if the hero doesn't win them by himself.

Jason feels bad for Perseus - he won't find in the Romans the kinship he found in the greeks. The Romans are people of war and discipline - soldiers, and not friends. Everything within Rome, nothing outside Rome, nothing against Rome.

Leo is the Captain of the Argo II - who will go to Greece so they can defeat the giants. The prophecy is clear - Seven shall answer the calling. When Jason comes bearing news of Ceres' message and his past memories, it's pretty clear - Seven shall go to the Jupiter Capitol - the head of the Twelve Cities that compose the Roman side of the demigods.

It's easy to decide who goes. Jason, Leo, and Piper - for obvious reasons. Annabeth and Malcolm - who are diplomatic leaders and have their own mission on Greece. Nico Di Angelo - for they're traveling by both air and water. Will Solace - for they also need a healer.

Fourteen cabins are build - they don't know how many Romans are coming with them, but at least Perseus is. Well, probably. He has been through one Great Prophecy - he might just be way too tired of this bullshit.

Jason has his memories back. The Prophecy is in the works. He didn't count, though, on keep dreaming of Perseus for the next six months it takes for them to make it to Rome.

Oh, how he's going to be so happy when his counterpart punches Juno in the face.

#jason grace #piper mclean #leo valdez #the lost hero #percy jackson and the olympians #heroes of olympus #bi jason grace #trans piper mclean #jason grace son of neptune #percy jackson #annabeth chase #drew tanaka #percy jackson son of hades #people really like percy #alabaster torrington #lou ellen #nico di angelo #nico di angelo son of zeus #will solace #soldier jason grace #poc percy jackson #racism #transphobia #bullying #internalized queerphobia #thalia grace daughter of poseidon #thalia grace #jercy #percabeth #nicercy

[nicholasvallo22]

From 1948 all the way to 1997 Enrique Metinides is someone that will surprise you with how real and gory the pictures he takes are. From seeing his first dead body at 12 years old Mentindies fell in love with photography. Born in Mexico death was around Enrique all the time. During Enriques time he has seen many things in his life that people might never see. This made Enrique fall in love with photography.  Enrique continued to photograph things that many people have never seen before. The two bodies of work I will be focusing on is “Mexico City, April 29, 1979” and “Polanco, Mexico City, Aug. 9, 1967”.

Enrique Mentinides was a unique photographer and really made known what was going on In his pictures. In Enriques work called “Death in Mexico City’’ its hard not to look and to feel bad. These pictures taken by Enrique show us the whole picture and are so raw. These pictures in there own way are beautiful and are things that you dont see everyday. In a article it states “Mexico City, April 29, 1979: “Adela Legarreta Rivas was a Mexican journalist. She had a press conference later that day where she was presenting her latest book. She had been to the beauty parlor that morning where she had her hair and nails done. On the way from the beauty parlor to her home, she was killed, hit by a white Datsun on Avenida Chapultepec. This photograph was not the one published the next day in the papers. Often the photographs that later went on to become important were not those chosen by the editors for the paper.” In this picture you can see a women dead with paramedics coming to her aid. Enrique seen this as a opportunity to take a picture the world maybe hasn’t seen. By taking pictures the world hasn’t seen you are gaining viewers because people want to see unusual things and that’s what Enrique gives to his people.

The next piece of work that caught my eye is “Polanco, Mexico City, Aug. 9, 1967” From what we see there is no violence and only happy people in this photo which makes it so different. In a article it states“I saw these kids, who were North Americans, having fun in the midst of this natural disaster. They were car surfing in a sudden flash flood on the corner of Horacio and Presidente Masaryk! When they saw me taking photographs they turned and waved!” As a photographer that always takes picture of violence and gore this picture shows you the good in Mexico. Enrique shows us that even when there is bad there is always some hope and good in every situation.

The two pictures “Mexico City, April 29, 1979” and “Polanco, Mexico City, Aug. 9, 1967” both share similar features but also show us how different Enrique is when photographing different bodies of work. In the photograph “Mexico City, April 29, 1979” you can see a lot of violence and gore. This picture you can see a picture of a women laying on the road dead. This women was just murdered on the street in broad day in Mexico. This photo has no emotion to it and is straight to the point. In the picture called “Polanco, Mexico City, Aug. 9, 1967” you see two kids on the back of the car driving through water. These two pictures were both taken in Mexico only 12 years apart. These pictures share similar features for example in picture 1 you can see the facial emotions of the people and you can almost like know what is going on and what kind of tone the picture is. In the second picture you can also see the pure expression on the boys faces as they are having fun. These pictures both give different stories as well. In the picture “Mexico City, April 29, 1979” violence is all over that picture. There is blood on the ladies head. You can see from everyone else’s faces that something bad just happened. Opposed to the other picture you see happy kids enjoying their life and having fun. There isn’t anything in the picture that stands out and its simple and straight to the point. Enriques Photographs are unique and original because they can either tell you a story or you have to try to guess what happened. Another thing that stood out from the first to the second picture is how different they truly are. These two pictures both tell a story but also hold things that we will never know. Enrique was great at taking a picture that spoke volumes to you.

Its crazy to see how Mentindies took these pictures and what story and value they hold behind them. From going to crime seen to crime seen and putting in long hours Enrique Metindies made a name for himself. He made it because of how original and different he was. In the pictures “Mexico City, April 29, 1979” and “Polanco, Mexico City, Aug. 9, 1967” you can see how much effort and work Enrique put in to get these one of a kind shots. Even though so may disagree Enrique Mentindies really showed what life was like in Mexico and gave us a story to follow throughout his journey. Enrique will always be a unique photographer for future generations and for century’s to come.

Articles used

https://slate.com/culture/2013/03/enrique-metinides-101-tragedies-of-enrique-metinides-documents-50-years-of-crime-scenes-in-mexico-city-photos.html

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/21/enrique-metinides-photography-dead-mexico

https://americansuburbx.com/enrique-metinides

[zirkkun-uthcs]

General Info (Act to Flirt Cast)

This list includes short bits of information on the Act to Flirt cast. If you’re looking for a specific one, please use CTRL+F to search for the character, due to the length of this list. Reminder as well that most of this information is only “canon” to my fangame AU Act to Flirt, and I have only written this for the characters as of the latest demo (4.1 as of September 2021), to avoid spoilers.

Please note: Because of the nature of how Act to Flirt is written, all characters will be considered to be panromantic/pansexual, unless otherwise specified.

Gaster

Date of Birth: ??? Height: 6′3″ / 191 cm Gender: cisman Pronouns: he/him

+ watches over the world of Undertale and Deltarune sitting outside of the code itself + gets bored very quickly in a black void by himself, so he’s always interested when something new happens in the games + his SOUL is very vague, almost like it’s fading; or so it seems, by his emotions

character tag

Willo

Date of Birth: May 14th Height: 5′10″ / 178 cm Gender: (as player) any/interpretive (as self) [???] Pronouns: (as player) they/them (as self) [???]

+ mostly acts entirely as a vessel for the player; created by W.D. Gaster + their thoughts are never entirely their own; they hear voices all of the time and, most of the time, just accept that as is + has no SOUL of their own -- just Determination

character tag

Flowey

Date of Birth: May 1st Height: 1′6″ / 46 cm Gender: cisman Pronouns: he/him

+ no longer bothers with Saving and Resetting, due to the fact that he can see the code of the game and it leaves him concerned + has aged mentally, but not physically, otherwise his flower body would have died long ago + after failing to get the six SOULs to work for him through Frisk, he’s decided he’d rather focus on getting seven

character tag

Napstablook

Date of Birth: Aug. 28th Height: 3′6″ / 107 Gender: non-binary Pronouns: they/them

+ lives with Mettaton now, who lives in a major chunk of the highest level of the MTT Resort building + has gained some confidence, thanks to Frisk, but still gets flustered very easily + has extreme inferiority complex when it comes to his work

character tag

Toriel

Date of Birth: May 10th Height: 6′8″ / 203 cm Gender: ciswoman Pronouns: she/her

+ now that seven humans have gone through her, she can only assume the worst: all seven are dead. she feels like she has failed and has little interest in protecting Willo in the same manner + partially relieved to see an adult human; she’s only been around human children for so long, it’s relieving to interact with another adult + doesn’t mind being flirted with, no matter how cheesy

character tag

Sans

Date of Birth: Dec. 14th Height: 4′0″ / 122 cm Gender: demiboy Pronouns: he/him

+ has a not-so-obvious grudge against humans as a whole + had stopped doing things on account of resets, but now that time has passed, he’s trying to do things again, more or less + less familiar with the new string of resets and acts as such

character tag

Papyrus

Date of Birth: April 21st Height: 6′10″ / 208 cm Gender: cisman Pronouns: he/him

+ has been trying out new things on advice of Undyne; designing different kinds of puzzles is one of them, including ones he’d previously thought were not as difficult + has a vague memory of Frisk’s resets, but considers them to be just dreams, since no one else seems to understand what he means when he mentions it + trusts very easily, which ends up being sometimes to his detriment

character tag

Undyne

Date of Birth: Oct. 3rd Height: 6′8″ / 203 cm Gender: ciswoman Pronouns: she/her

+ has calmed down a bit about killing humans ever since Frisk came through, even though she’s still very passionate about finding the final SOUL + tries to vary the different type of foods she teaches Papyrus to make now + acts abrasive, but can and will make friends very quickly, despite her conscious hesitation. she’s just internally very gentle

character tag

Mew Mew

Date of Birth: April 6th Height: 5′7″ / 170 cm Gender: transwoman Pronouns: flexes between he/him, she/her, they/them, and it/its

+ dresses how he wants and just wants to be considered himself despite that + likes being told how great they are and loves to hear compliments about themself + is a bit of a himedere, meaning she’s more of the type to want someone to do things how she wants and to be treated like royalty

character tag

Alphys

Date of Birth: Feb. 1st Height: 3′11″ / 119 cm Gender: ciswoman Pronouns: she/her

+ only one who still talks directly to Asgore since Frisk came through the Underground + stays in hiding just as much as he does, purely for the fact that she’s even more nervous about things than he is + can fall in love really easily and has simultaneously -- for her best record -- had a crush on four different people at once, not including fictional characters

character tag

Mettaton

Date of Birth: Nov. 20th Height: 6′2″ / 188 cm Gender: transman Pronouns: he/him

+ doing his best to improve himself as a person, ever since he met Frisk and realized that he’d been very selfish + acts confident to make up for his plethora of self-hatred + his new body doesn’t have a switch on the back for his boxy form and android/EX form. Now, it’s a switch between his NEO and EX forms.

character tag

Muffet

Date of Birth: March 14th Height: 3′11″ / 119 cm Gender: ciswoman Pronouns: she/her

+ used to be a ghost, but one day possessed a spider-like doll in order to support the spiders of the Underground + is very money-stressed all of the time, so she tries to make quick cash to avoid this + she either hates you or loves you, there’s no in between with her

character tag

Asgore

Date of Birth: Jan. 6th Height: 7′ / 213 cm Gender: cisman Pronouns: he/him

+  talks to his flowers in the garden as a way of letting go of the stress on his mind + has a profound guilt over what he’s done. he can’t bring himself to do what he set out to by absorbing human SOULs even after Frisk’s sacrifice + has chosen to lock himself inside (unknowingly) because he’s too scared to admit his feelings to his people

character tag

Asriel

Date of Birth: May 1st Height: 6′7″ / 201 cm Gender: cisman Pronouns: he/him

+ angrier and angrier about how he was left behind by Frisk, but relieved to see them return in the form of Willo + doesn’t want his world in Undertale to end, despite how much it seems like he does + irrationally emotional, but he’s not as self-conscious or upset about this fact as he used to be

character tag

#uthcs headcanon #uthcs pin #undertale #undertale headcanon #undertale act to flirt

[andsjuliet]

2020 books read

1) Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Jan 1-Jan 1) 2) Since You’ve Been Gone - Morgan Matson (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Jan 1-Jan 7) 3) Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Jan 2-Jan 3) 4) Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far In Song) - Sara Bareilles (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Jan 8-Jan 8) 5) I Woke Up Dead at the Mall - Judy Sheehan (Audiobook) / (Jan 10-Jan 12) 6) A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson (Goodreads Giveaway Advanced Reader Copy) / (Jan 14-Jan 17 ) 7) The Cheerleaders - Kara Thomas / (Jan 18-Jan 19) 8) When I Was You - Minka Kent / (Jan 19-Jan 21) 9) Always Never Yours - Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka (Audiobook) / (Jan 21-Jan 27) 10) The Hand on the Wall - Maureen Johnson / (Jan 26-Feb 22) 11) The Haunting of Ashburn House - Darcy Coates / (Feb 23-Mar 2) 12) One of Us is Next - Karen M. McManus / (Mar 2-Mar 13) 13) The Carrow Haunt - Darcy Coates / (Mar 14-Mar 15) 14) American Royals - Katherine McGee / (Mar 20-Mar 22) 15) Tweet Cute - Emma Lord / (Mar 23-Mar 24) 16) The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Mar 26-Mar 27) 17) Burn for Burn - Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian / (Mar 28) 18) Fire with Fire - Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian / (Mar 28) 19) Ashes to Ashes - Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian / (Mar 28-Mar 29) 20) Love & Luck - Jenna Evans Welsh / (Mar 29-April 1) 21) The Summer I Turned Pretty - Jenny Han / (April 1-April 3) 22) It’s Not Summer Without You - Jenny Han / (April 3-April 4) 23) We’ll Always Have Summer - Jenny Han / (April 4) 24) Love & Gelato - Jenna Evans Welsh / (April 5-April 6) 25) As Kismit Would Have It - Sandhya Menon / (April 6-April 7) 26) All Eyes on Us - Kit Frick / (April 9-April 12) 27) The Babysitters Coven - Kate Williams / (April 18-April 27) 28) What I Like About You - Marisa Kanter / (April 27-April 29) 29) Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (April 29-April 29) 30) Nancy Drew: The Curse - Micol Ostow / (April 30-May 1) 31) Out of Left Field - Kris Hui Lee / (May 1-May 2) 32) The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyne Hardcastle - Stuart Turton (Audiobook) / (April 20-May 5) 33) The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater / (May 2-May 6) 34) If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (May 6-May 8) 35) The Dream Thieves - Maggie Stiefvater / (May 7-May 12) 36) Blue Lily, Lily Blue - Maggie Stiefvater / (May 12-May 18) 37) The Henna Wars - Adiba Jaigirdar / (May 16-May 24) 38) The Raven King - Maggie Stiefvater / (May 18-May 25) 39) Break the Fall - Jennifer Iacopelli / (May 25-May 26) 40) The Foxhole Court - Nora Sakavic / (May 26-May 27) 41) The Raven King - Nora Sakavic / (May 29-May 30) 42) The King’s Men - Nora Sakavic / (May 30-May 31) 43) The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (June 1-June 1) 44) Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (June 1-June 2) 45) Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (June 2-June 3) 46) On the Come Up - Angie Thomas (Audiobook) / (June 4-June 5) 47) The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern / (June 7-June 12) 48) The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid / (June 12-June 13) 49) The Lightning Thief - Rick Riordan / (June 13-June 15) 50) The Folcroft Ghosts - Darcy Coates / (June 19-June 20) 51) The Sea of Monsters - Rick Riordan / (June 20-June 23) 52) If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio (Re-Read, Physical + Audiobook) / (June 29-July 2) 53) The Titan’s Curse - Rick Riordan / (June 23-July 2) 54) The Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan / (July 2-July 4) 55) The Last Olympian - Rick Riordan / (July 4-July 5) 56) Beach Read - Emily Henry / (July 5-July 6) 57) Anna K - Jenny Lee / (July 7-July 7) 58) Circe - Madeline Miller / (July 9-July 10) 59) Emma - Jane Austen (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (July 12-July 15) 60) You Should See Me In a Crown - Leah Johnson (Audiobook) / (July 17-July 19) 61) The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller / (July 21-July 23) 62) Second Chance Summer - Morgan Matson (Re-Read) / (July 25-July 28) 63) Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You - Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi / (July 3-July 31) 64) Clique Bait - Ann Valett / (July 29-Aug 1) 65) Meet Me at Midnight - Jessica Pennington / (Aug 2-Aug 3) 66) By the Book - Amanda Sellet / (July 6-Aug 9) 67) The Black Kids - Christina Hammonds Reed (Audiobook) / (Aug 9-Aug 10) 68) She’s the Worst - Lauran Spieller / (Aug 10-Aug 10) 69) Love and Other Train Wrecks - Leah Konen / (Aug 10-Aug 12) 70) The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Aug 6-Aug 15) 71) The Poet X - Elizabeth Acevedo (Audiobook) / (Aug 16-Aug 16) 72) Fractured - Shay Siegel (NetGalley ARC) / (Aug 18-Aug 19) 73) These Witches Don’t Burn - Isabel Sterling (Re-Read) / (Aug 21-Aug 24) 74) This Coven Won’t Break - Isabel Sterling / (Aug 24-Aug 24) 75) This Spell Can’t Last - Isabel Sterling (Novella) / (Aug 24-Aug 24) 76) Save the Date - Morgan Matson (Re-Read) / (Aug 25-Aug 27) 77) I Hope You’re Listening - Tom Ryan (NetGalley ARC) / (Aug 27-Aug 28) 78) Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare (ReRead) / (Aug 12-Aug 31) 79) Boyfriend Material - Alexis Hall (Audiobook) / (Aug 31-Aug 31) 80) Only Mostly Devastated - Sophie Gonzales (Audiobook) / (Sep 1-Sep 1) 81) Where Dreams Descend - Janella Angeles / (Aug 30-Sep 5) 82) Majesty - Katherine McGee / (Sep 7-Sep 9) 83) I Killed Zoe Spanos - Kit Frick (Audiobook) / (Sep 10-Sep 11) 84) Nobody Knows But You - Anica Mrose Rissi (NetGalley ARC) / (Sep 12-Sep 12) 85) If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Sep 14-Sep 14) 86) Macbeth - William Shakespeare (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Sep 15-Sep 15) 87) The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life - Dani Jansen (NetGalley ARC) / (Sep 16-Sep 19) 88) Kisses and Croissants - Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau (NetGalley ARC) / (Sep 24-Sep 25) 89) The Lakehouse - Joe Clifford (NetGalley ARC) / (Sep 30-Oct 1) 90) The Poppy and the Rose - Ashlee Cowles (NetGalley ARC) / (Oct 1-Oct 7) 91) We Were Restless Things - Cole Nagamatsu (NetGalley ARC) / (Oct 8-Oct 10) 92) When Life Gives You Lemons Instead of Lattes - Rayna York (NetGalley ARC) / (Oct 11- Oct 12) 93) Where Dreams Descend - Janella Angeles (ReRead) / (Oct 17-Oct 21) 94) The Royal We - Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan (Audibook) / (Oct 21-Oct 23) 95) The Heir Affair - Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan (Audiiobook) / (Oct 23-Oct 24) 96) The Hollywood Jim Crow - Maryann Erigha / (Sep 30 - Oct 29) 97) Lies Like Poison - Chelsea Pitcher (NetGalley ARC) / (Oct 26 - Nov 1) 98) In Tune - Yeyet Soriano (ARC) / (Nov 2 - Nov 4) 99) Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Nov 2 - Nov 5) 100) These Violent Delights - Chloe Gong / (Nov 6 - Nov 10) 101) Influence - Sara Shepard (NetGalley ARC) / (Nov 4 - Nov 11) 102) Ten Rules for Fakiing it - Sophie Sullivan (NetGalley ARC) / (Nov 11 - Nov 13) 103) The Worst Best Man - Mia Sosa (Audiobook) / (Nov 13 - Nov 14) 104) Sixteen Scandals - Sophie Jordan (Edelweiss+ ARC) / (Nov 15 - Nov 16) 105) The Life and (Medieval) Tiimes of Kit Sweetly - Jamie Pacton (Audiobook) / (Nov 17 - Nov 17) 106) You Have a Match - Emma Lord (NetGalley ARC) / (Nov 19 - Nov 21) 107) Be More Chill - Ned Vizzini (Audiobook) / (Nov 21 - Nov 21) 108) Dear Evan Hansen - Val Emmich (Re-Read, Audiobook) / (Nov 22 - Nov 23) 109) The Bitterwine Oath - Hannah West (ARC) / (Nov 24 - Nov 25) 110) The Gilded Wolves - Roshani Chokshi / (Nov 18 - Nov 25) 111) Rent a Boyfriend - Gloria Chao (Audiobook) / (Nov 26 - Nov 26) 112) I Love You So Mochi - Sarah Kuhn (Audiobook) / (Nov 27 - Nov 27) 113) The Twelve Dates of Christmas - Jenny Bayliss / (Nov 26 - Nov 28) 114) Wiith the Fire on High - Elizabeth Acevedo (Audiobook) / (Nov 28 - Nov 29) 115) Not Our Summer - Casie Bazay (NetGalley ARC) / (Nov 29 - Nov 30) 116) Meg & Jo - Virgina Kantra (Audiobook) / (Dec 2 - Dec 2) 117) The Honey Don’t List - Christina Lauren (Audiiobook) / (Dec 3 - Dec 3) 118) Clap When You Land - Elizabeth Acevedo (Audiobook) / (Dec 3 - Dec 3) 119) The Wedding Date - Jasmine Guillory (Audiobook) / (Dec 3 - Dec 3) 120) Perfect on Paper - Sophie Gonzales (NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 1 - Dec 4) 121) The Wedding Partty - Jasmine Guillory (Audiobook) / (Dec 6 - Dec 6) 122) If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio (Reread) / (Dec 5 - Dec 6) 123) We Are Okay - Nina LaCour (Audiiobook) / (Dec 6 - Dec 7) 124) Royal Holiday - Jasmine Guillory (Audiiobook) / (Dec 7 - Dec 7) 125) Party of Two - Jasmine Guillory (Audiobook) / (Dec 7 - Dec 7) 126) The Silvered Serpents - Roshani Chokshi (Audiobook) / (Dec 7- Dec 8) 127) Pride and Premediitation - Tirzah Price (Audiobook, NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 8 - Dec 9) 128) Faking Under the Mistletoe - Ashley Shepherd / (Dec 9 - Dec 10) 129) We Met in December - Rosie Curtis (Audobook) / (Dec 10 - Dec 11) 130) The Insomniacs - Marit Wesenbeerg (Audiobook) / (Dec 11 - Dec 11) 131) Rebecca - Daphne de Maurier (Audiobook) / (Dec 12 - Dec 13) 132) A Midsummer Night’s Scream - R.L. Stein (Audiobook) / (Dec 14 - Dec 15) 133) Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare (Audiobook) / (Dec 15 - Dec 15) 134) Maggie Finds Her Muse - Dee Ernst (NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 15 - Dec 15) 135) Don’t Tell a Soul - Kristen Miller (NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 16 - Dec 17) 136) Yesterday is History - Kosoko Jackson (NetGalley ARC) (Dec 17 - Dec 18) 137) Admission - Juliie Buxbaum (Audiobook) / (Dec 20 - Dec 20) 138) A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday (Audiobook) / (Dec 20 - Dec 20) 139) I Love You So Mochi - Sarah Kuhn (Re-Read) / (Dec 19 - Dec 21) 140) RomaJuliette Christmas Short (These Violent Delights Universe) - Chloe Gong / (Dec 22 - Dec 22) 141) Roman and Jewel - Dana L. Davis (NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 22 - Dec 22) 142) That Way Madness Lies - Various Authors (NetGalley ARC) / (Dec 22 - Dec 24) 143) The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre - Robin Talley (Audiobook) / (Dec 26 - Dec 26) 144) Turning Pointe: How a New Generaton of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself - Chlooe Angyal (NettGalley ARC) / (Dec 24 - Dec 26) 145) Written in the Stars - Alexandriia Bellefleur (Audiobook) / (Dec 27 - Dec 28) 146) A Midsummer Night’s Dream - William Shakespeare (ReRead, Audiobook) / (Dec 28 - Dec 28) 147) Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas / (Dec 27 - Dec 30) 148) Keep My Heart in San Francisco - Amelia Diane Coombs / (Dec 30 - Dec 30) 149) Felix Ever After - Kacen Callender (Audiobook) / (Dec 30 - Dec 31) 150) The Falling in Love Montage - Ciara Smyth / (Dec 31 - Dec 31)

#post: 2020 books read

[mytwilightimagines13]

Vampire (Caius Volturi) (Part Eight)

Word count: 1785

(Alright, this is mostly just the musical. Only the last part is back to the main characters part. If anyone wants to see the musical with English subtitles: Part one Part two I hope you will all enjoy it!)

The judge called upon Luigi Lucheni to tell his story. To tell the reason why he killed the beloved empress Elisabeth. “Nacht für Nacht dieselbe Frage. Seit hundert Jahren! Was soll die Fragerei? Merda. Ich bin tot!” he would shout in his defence. Yes, he indeed was dead, yet this was his punishment. Every night he would have to stand in front of a judge and explain why he had committed such a horrible crime. “Nennen Sie endlich die Hintergründe!” the judge would shout out to Lucheni, wanting the murderer to take his responsibility. “Die Hintergründe? Ich habe sie ermordet, weil sie es wollte!” was his reasoning. He had only murdered her because she wanted him to. “Und reden immer noch von… Elisabeth!” he would shout as the dead slowly rose up and started to chant about how to old world has sunken. Luchini sang about how Elisabeth hated them all, every single one of them while the dead chanted about how everyone has danced with Death, yet no one like Elisabeth. “Attenzione! Ihre Majestät der Tod!” he would shout as the room grew quiet. Death made her way down the stairs, looking down at the dead. Her hair hanging in loose curls down her back, the upper part clipped back neatly with a Celtic looking pin. She was completely clothed in white, looking like and angel. “Was hat es zu bedeuten: dies alte Lied. Das mir seit jenen Zeiten die Brust durchglüht? Engel nennen’s Freude, Teufel nennen’s Pein. Menschen meinen, es muss Liebe sein.” She sang, her voice lovely yet dangerous. Yes, love was a curse, and it stood in the way of her job. She quickly made her way further down the stairs, past the dead and past Lucheni. “Mein Auftrag heißt zerstören. Ich tu es kalt. Ich hol, die mir gehören, jung oder alt. Weiß nicht, wie geschehn kann, was es gar nicht gibt – Doch es stimmt: Ich habe sie geliebt” she sang, yes she had loved Elisabeth, and the game they had played throughout the empress life, even though she had no idea how it had happened.

The first meeting between Death and Elisabeth was when the empress was only sixteen years old. At a family meeting Elisabeth had climbed up a tree, when a branch had broken below her feet and she had plummeted to the ground. Death, now dressed completely in black, had swooped her in her arms and gently brought her back to the living, wanting nothing more than to take the young woman with her, but knowing she couldn’t do it just yet. Elisabeth was a flower in bloom, and her beauty had Death in awe. “Est ist Liebe! Per Dio!” came Lucheni’s explanation. “Wohin gehst du, schwarzer Prinzessin? Warum bleibst du nicht hier? Ich hab mich in deinen Armen wohlgefühlt. Und ich spürte eine Sehnsucht. Mich von allem zu befrei'n. Wie ein schwarzer Vogel. Stolz und allein. Ja, ich weiß, du bist der Tod. Und alle fürchten dich. Doch ich denk an dich. Was immer ich auch tu. Träume und Gedichte schreiben. Oder reiten mit dem Wind... Niemand versteht mich so wie du!” Was Elisabeth’s claim of love for Death, her Death. She didn’t want her dark princess to leave, not now that she had felt what freedom was. And no one had every understood her as much as she had. Yet Death turned her back towards the young girl now and disappeared, yet she always stayed close to her. Soon Elisabeth met her other love, Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and soon their wonderful wedding day passed by. “Augustinerkirche, halb sieben Uhr abends. Merkwürdige Zeit für eine Trauung, aber passend, An diesem 24. April 1854. Sehr passend, porca miseria!” Lucheni shouted towards the judges. The crowd sang about how all the questions had been asked as the couple made its way towards the priest. “Wenn das Euer Wille ist, so antwortet mit Ja!” if this was their will, then they must answer once with Yes. “Ja!” was their answer. The wedding bells sounded and Death herself was hanging on the cord, pulling it down. Laughing frantically as she knew Elisabeth would be hers, and that Franz Joseph will begin the chain of events that would lead Elisabeth into her sweet embrace. Many of the guests along with Elisabeth’s father, mother and mother in law were bickering whether the young girl and the emperor were a good fit or not. As Elisabeth tried to dance in her own way, Franz kept the young girl on track of the classic waltz, not once giving her the freedom to dance the way she wanted to dance. Death looked at the young woman, a small smirk on her face as she and hear angels of death emerged. With a snap of her finger the angels spread and the guests froze on the spot. All but Elisabeth. Death held her hand out for Elisabeth, inviting her to dance. Elisabeth smiled and made her way towards Death and soon they circled around each other, never once touching. Soon Elisabeth got out of her trance and ran towards Franz Joseph, whom was still frozen in trance. Death made her way halfway up the slope, and slowly sat down in sync with her angels. She sang about the old song of one loved by two. “Der letzte Tanz, der letzte Tanz. Gehört allein nur mir! Den letzten Tanz, den letzten Tanz, Tanz ich allein mit dir!” she sang, her voice soft yet threatening. She sang about the time, how it influenced the wine and made it old, the air in the mirror hall was growing thick. Invisible eyes were watching the two of them, all of them waiting for their Rendezvous. Death grabbed Elisabeth and danced with her before pushing her down, in a dance of dominance, one that Death would win. “Und so wart' ich im Dunkeln. Und schau zu dir hin. Als der große Verlierer. Doch ich weiß, ich gewinn!” she sang, yes she was waiting in the darkness, looking like the loser, but she knew, she would win in the end. She ran up the slope as it ascended once more, making it into a bridge on the top of the stage. “Den letzten Tanz, den letzten Tanz. Tanz ich nur mit dir!” she sang, the final note long and strong before walking of the stage. Four years passed, Elisabeth herself very soon comes to regret her seemingly "fairy-tale marriage". She feels abandoned by her careless husband, psychologically abused by her possessive mother-in-law, and is chronically depressed due to her loneliness. There is only one thing that keeps her emotionally stimulated—the dark and sensual shadow of Death; but Elisabeth is reluctant to consummate their relationship. When Death takes her infant daughter, the tragedy shakes the young Empress extremely. “Nein!” Elisabeth shouted as her daughter blew out her last breath. She runs towards her but is stopped by Death and falls to her knees. Death sends her a gentle and welcoming smile. “Weißt du noch, wie wir erbebten. Als wir zwei im Tanze schwebten? Du brauchst mich. Ja, du brauchst mich.” Her tone grew threatening, but soon returned to her sweet, angelic voice. “Gib doch zu, daß du mich mehr liebst, Als den Mann an deiner Seite. Auch wenn du ihm scheinbar mehr gibst. Du ziehst ihn in die Nacht” she sang as she told Elisabeth the truth of her husband. “Die Schatten werden länger, Es wird Abend, eh’ dein Tag begann. Die Schatten werden länger. Mit dir stirbt die Welt. Halt dich nicht fest daran” Death finished, trying to sway Elisabeth to come to her embrace but she refuses to give in to Death's sway.

After her remaining two children are taken from Elisabeth, she grows cold, and sets Franz Joseph for an ultimatum. “Ich habe ein förmliches Ultimatum aufgesetzt. Wenn du mich nicht verlieren willst, erfüll' es. Ich möchte selbst über die Erziehung meiner Kinder bestimmen. Und von nun an will ich entscheiden, was ich tue und lasse. Lies mein Schreiben und entscheide dich: Für deine Mutter oder mich! Und jetzt lass mich allein.” She said as she felt her depression creep up to her again, and soon she heard the voice of her beloved Death. Elisabeth turned around and saw Death sitting on a love seat in her bedroom, her arms opened in a welcoming way. “Elisabeth! Sei nicht verzweifelt. Ruh dich aus in meinem Arm. Ich will dich trösten.” She sang and soon sprang up. “Flieh, und du wirst frei sein, Und alles Kämpfen wird vorbei sein. Ich führ dich fort aus Raum und Zeit, In eine bessre Wirklichkeit.” Death held her hand out for Elisabeth to take, her voice growing soft, and loving. “Elisabeth! Elisabeth! Ich liebe dich...” “Nein! Ich möchte leben! Ich bin zu jung um aufzugeben. Ich weiß, ich kann mich selbst befrein. Jetzt setz ich meine Schönheit ein.” Elisabeth sang, her voice growing firm. She didn’t need Death, she would find her own way to freedom! “Geh! Ich will dich nicht! Ich brauch dich nicht! Geh!” Death frowned and fled back into the shadows quickly.

But it had been too late. Elisabeth calluses over and becomes cold and selfish. She flees the Austrian court and spends decades restlessly travelling all over the world, trying in vain to escape from her fear of emptiness. Eventually, Elisabeth makes peace with her husband, when he finds her. He begged for her forgiveness, and he swore he would give her anything she wanted. Elisabeth walks through a mirror, completely dolled up looking absolutely gorgeous. “Soll ich dich verstehen. Will ich auch verstanden sein. Ich will mit dir gehen. Doch sperr mich nicht länger ein. Ich bin nicht das Eigentum von dir. Denn ich gehör nur mir.” She sang. Soon Death herself emerged from the same mirror, yet stayed within the frames. “Was heut das Auge sieht. Ist morgen schon Vergangenheit. Wohin dein Blick auch flieht. Auf meiner Seite ist die Zeit.” She sang as she watched Elisabeth from the shadows once more. “Du musst mir nichts geben. Nur lass mir mein Leben! Denn ich gehör...” Elisabeth sang. “ Du gehörst…” Death sang. “Nur mir!” Elisabeth and Death sang together.

During the final part before the break was the first time I looked up at the balcony I knew the Cullens and Volturi were sitting. I had felt his glance on me the entire time, and it made me want to perform on my best. His red eyes pierced through mine, and even from here, I could see a gentle look in his eyes as he watched me perform. Elisabeth sang her lust, high note and the lights turned off, signalling it was time for the break.

#Caius Volturi #musical #imagine #volturi imagine #twilight imagine #twilight #volturi #mate kamaras #vampire #elisabeth #elisabeth das musical

[alarawriting]

52 Project Master List

Probably I should have done this when I started.

Below the cut for list.

1 - The Chicken Story (April 3, 2020)

2 - Changeling (April 10, 2020)

3 - Graduation Day (April 17, 2020)

4 - Rand Mart  (April 24, 2020)

5 - Rosetta Stone (May 1, 2020)

6 - Birds (May 8, 2020)

7 - Lord of the Kethrie (May 15, 2020)

8 - Crab People (May 22, 2020)

9 - The Timeless Tunnels of Crystal Station (May 29, 2020)

10 - The Little Red Hen (June 5, 2020)

11 - Selkie (June 12, 2020)

12 - Mephistopheles (June 19, 2020)

13 - Merry-Go-Round (June 26, 2020)

14 - Angel (Jul 3, 2020)

15 - The White-Haired Boy (Jul 11, 2020)

16 -Norris and the Plague Doctors (Jul 17, 2020)

17 - Therapy (Jul 24, 2020)

18 - Thirteen (Jul 31, 2020)

19 - No Lullaby (Aug 7, 2020)

20 - The Lake (Aug 14, 2020)

21 - A Visit to the Doctor (Aug 21, 2020)

22 - Lynx (Aug 28, 2020)

23 - Firedance (Sept 4, 2020)

24 - The Princesses and the Peas (Sept 11, 2020)

25 - Where The Winds of Limbo Roar (Sept 18, 2020)

26 - Marc Snowfrolic and the Quest for Biscuits (Sept 25, 2020)

27 -The Pale Bro (Oct 2, 2020)

28 - The Court of the Lion King (Oct 9, 2020)

29 - The Last Boy (Oct 16, 2020)

30 - Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home  (Oct 30, 2020)

31 - Survival Traits (Oct 30, 2020)

32 - Five Minutes (Nov 6, 2020)

33 - Amaldis (Nov 13, 2020)

34 - The Anadvocate (Nov 20, 2020)

35 - The Swan Wife (Dec 6, 2020)

36 - Escape from Sonnebend (Dec 11, 2020)

37 - A Very April Christmas (Jan 3, 2021)

38 - All We Wanna Do Is Eat Your Brains (Jan 15, 2021)

39 - Seista Nikita (Jan 22, 2021)

40 - Angel of Darkness, Demon of Light (Jan 29, 2021)

41 - The Blood Mage (Feb 8, 2021)

42 - Lineage (Mar 1, 2021)

43 - Dev Environment (Oct 25, 2021)

44 - No Rescue (Nov 5, 2021)

45 - A Doll for Vasilisa (Nov 19, 2021)

46 - To The Other Side of the World (Nov 21, 2021)

47 - Nobody Believes Cassandra (Nov 4, 2022

(with bonus poem Song of Jane)

48 - Hoodie (Nov 11, 2022)

49 - She’s Got Diplomatic Immunity, She’s Got A Lethal Weapon That Nobody Sees (Nov 18, 2022)

50 - Grandma’s House (Nov 25, 2022)

51 - Dex (Dec 9, 2022)

52 - Nate and the Hyperpurples (Aug 25, 2023)

Bonus!

53 - After the Chicken Story (Sep 1, 2023)

#52 project #master post

[lemodo]

FBI Has Files From Laptop of Slain DNC Staffer Seth Rich

BY ZACHARY STIEBER

December 11, 2020 Updated: December 11, 2020

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has files from the laptop computer belonging to Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee (DNC) employee who was killed in 2016, according to a new email.

The bureau also has tens of thousands of documents mentioning Rich.

The FBI “has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker wrote in the message to attorney Ty Clevenger, who is representing a plaintiff in Huddleston v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, a case dealing with a Freedom of Information Act request to the bureau.

“FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching,” Parker added.

The Epoch Times confirmed the email is legitimate.

Parker, who is representing the FBI in the case, didn’t respond to an email or return a voicemail.

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The bureau also confirmed it has files from Rich’s laptop and suggested it still has the computer in its possession.

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The bureau is “currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed,” Parker said in the email. She also said the FBI plans on undertaking some level of review of the computer.

The disclosure came as part of a case brought in federal court by Texas resident Brian Huddleston, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April asking the FBI to produce all data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth Rich or his brother, Aaron Rich.

The FBI told the plaintiff in June that it would take 8 to 10 months to provide a final response to the request, prompting the filing of the case in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

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Rich was working for the DNC when he was shot and killed in Washington on July 10, 2016. The murder remains unsolved.

The new email bolsters a key charge in Huddleston’s filing: that David Hardy, the FBI’s records chief, was wrong when he said in two affidavits that the FBI searched for records pertaining to Rich but could not find any.

Epoch Times Photo

Seth Rich is pictured on a poster created by police officials to urge people with information about his murder to come forward. (Metropolitan Police Department)

The first sign that the testimony was erroneous came earlier this year when the nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch received emails exchanged between FBI agent Peter Strzok and Department of Justice lawyer Lisa Page. The production included several emails mentioning Rich.

Another sign came in March, when former Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines was deposed in a separate case, Ed Butowsky v. David Folkenflik et. al.

Sines testified that the FBI conducted an investigation into possible hacking attempts on Seth Rich’s electronic accounts following his murder. She said FBI agents examined Rich’s laptop as part of the probe and that a search should uncover emails between her and FBI personnel. She also said she met with a prosecutor and an FBI agent assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

The FBI declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on pending litigation.

The judge overseeing the Huddleston case in October ordered the defense to produce documents and an index.

In the new email, the government lawyer said the FBI has made “significant progress” in searching for documents mentioning Rich, but still has much work left, including processing the approximately 50 cross-references, undertaking some level of review of the laptop, and completing all remaining services.

The efforts are hampered by the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act office being at 50 percent of its normal workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government is proposing an amended schedule that would give it three more months to produce the records.

Julian Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at court in London on May 1, 2019. (Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images)

Clevenger, Huddleston’s lawyer, told The Epoch Times via email that his client is hoping to find out why the FBI was involved in the case, and why it originally denied involvement.

“We suspect the FBI may be right that the Metropolitan Police Dept. in D.C. was responsible for investigating Seth’s murder, so that leaves a couple of likely explanations for the FBI’s role: it was investigating a counterintelligence matter or a computer crime. Either scenario would be consistent with Seth transmitting DNC emails to Wikileaks,” he added, referencing a theory about the source of emails from inside the DNC that were later published by Wikileaks.

The theory was the core of a story Fox News published in 2017. It later retracted the report but was sued by Rich’s family.

Fox settled with Rich’s family last month.

A federal judge overseeing the case had earlier this year requested testimony from Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange.

Rich was killed less than two weeks before WikiLeaks “released a collection of thousands of internal emails and documents taken from the DNC servers,” according to a court filing. One month after Rich’s murder, Assange referenced the DNC staffer in an interview with a Dutch television reporter when discussing the dangers faced by WikiLeaks sources. On Aug. 9, 2016, WikiLeaks offered $20,000 for information about Rich’s murder. The website increased the reward to $130,000 in January 2017.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) several weeks after Rich was shot dead offered a reward for information. A spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email that the case “remains under active investigation.”

The spokeswoman declined to answer whether the FBI assisted police with its probe. “MPD remains the lead investigative agency over this homicide,” she said.

A firm investigating the DNC situation, Crowdstrike, alleged that the committee’s servers were hacked by Russian actors, but a transcript declassified in May showed the firm had no direct evidence of that claim.

Clevenger said he thinks the timing of the email from Parker, the assistant U.S. attorney, is significant.

“Some of my colleagues suspect the Trump Administration has pushed the release, but I doubt that,” he wrote. “With the purported election of Joe Biden, the FBI brass probably think they are in the clear, and nothing will ever happen to them, so they no longer have any reason to hide what they did.”

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.

Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieber

#seth rich #dishonest democrats #hilary rodman clinton #democrats are corrupt

[raven-dc-hypotheses]

Raven’s date of birth

I’ve seen many people have this headcanon that Raven’s birthday should be on 30th Oct aka Halloween (or some day around that day) since she’s a half demon and thus everything about her must be “related to everything creepy and dark”, even her birthday. Personally, I think it is quite cliché. Furthermore, I personally find giving a character a meaningful date of birth plays a big role in characterisation. In other words, the date of birth of a character should foretell the destiny and personality of that character. Halloween has never been about darkness or evilness: it’s just about commemorating the dead. Even the Satanist do not deem this day important to celebrate. But even if Halloween was a satanic day, choosing this day as the date of birth for Raven wouldn’t be meaningful: it reveals nothing about her personality or her destiny. To be more specific, her personality is not at all purely evil or dark, and her destiny is never to embrace darkness.

So, after thorough consideration, I’ve come up with other more interesting suggestions regarding Raven’s birthday. There are 5 options:

1. 00:00 25th Dec (aka Christmas)

So Raven is the child of a human mother and an evil god, and her supposed destiny is to make way for the ultimate evilness, her father, in the human world. She is the very definition of an Antichrist. So, wouldn’t it be realistic (and interesting) if she was also born on The Birthday of Christ? You know, the irony and the sacrilegiousness she’s supposed bear on her shoulders? On the other hand, her true destiny is salvation: to fight off and sacrifice herself to eliminate the evilness that is her father. In this aspect, her birth is very holy. So, it is also fitting to give her a birthday as holy as Christmas. Moreover, being born on this day means she is a Capricorn. Now I don’t have explicit knowledge about horoscope, but from my research, Raven is very likely to be a Capricorn.

2. 2nd Feb (aka Candlemas Day)

Candlemas Day is another Christian Holy Day. This day is also known as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ. In my country, on this day, the Christian family will bring their newborn children to the church holding a lit candle, and the babies will be blessed. Given Raven’s circumstance, she kind of was “brought” to the Azarath Temple and received the blessing from Goddess Azar, so I think it is really fitting that she was born on this day. Plus, I personally also have this headcanon of Raven being an Aquarius, so yeah.

3. any day from 9th to 19th Aug

Remember Halloween? In Satanism, it is called the Fall Climax when they encourage people to embrace darkness (but not really celebrate though). So what this day is the day when Arella was “married” to Trigon? Then doing the math, we can “estimate” that Raven’s birthday can be any day between 9th to 20th Aug. This makes her a Leo, which is interesting enough since she doesn’t appear to be one. And is Damian Wayne’s birthday on 9th August???

4. any day from 9th to 19th Feb

I did some research, and found that Satanist celebrate the 30th of April as the Spring Climax when they honour the victims of superstition and pseudoscience. Again, supposing that this is the day Arella became the bride and Raven’s birthday should fall in this time range.  She would be an Aquarius or Pisces, which suits her in my opinion. And I read somewhere that Bruce Wayne’s birthday is 19th Feb, so you can also suppose that the Batman and Raven have the same birthday.

5. any day from 25th Nov to 5th Dec

15th Feb is also a celebration day for Satanist (I forget what they celebrate on this day, btw). So, again, suppose that Arella was chosen on this day, and we can see that Raven would be born in this time of the year. This makes her a Sagittarius, another interesting choice for her horoscope.

So, these are my hypotheses about Raven’s birthday. What about yours? When do you think Raven’s birthday should be? And what do you think about this list?

#raven #raven dc #raven roth #rachel roth #raven dc hypotheses

[iireallyhavenoideawhatimdoing]

Equal rights?

Equal rights among race and gender is regrettably a flawed topic. We strive for equality but fail to see things stopping us from achieving it. In both cases, we often overlook people, and who they are. We look past the opposite side of the same coin. Double standards live in these topics. In race, we have races that can’t say anything remotely racist otherwise their life is basically ruined. On the flip side of that, you have races that can be openly racist in all aspects and walk away as if it’s a normal thing to do. With gender, people say they want equality, but they practice dominance and superiority instead. Why does society see these issues, and try to fix them, only to make them worse, but in an acceptable way? What if we were all equal? What if we were all just human? 

Racism is something the world still struggles with today. It’s an issue I wish we could move on from. Realize we are all the same. Why can’t we evolve to a world that knows no race? Different hair colors aren’t considered different hair races. I may have brown hair, but I’m not ostracized for it. I think we can still be Asian, Hispanic, Caucasian, African American, etc without it being a race thing; it’s still a culture. Such as you can have blonde, brown, red, blue, green, or even purple hair and it all still being hair none the less. Right now, there are a lot of cases of racism against white people, and I don’t bring this up to lessen racism against anyone else, but I bring it up as a double standard. In modern society, it’s okay to be racist towards white people. It shouldn’t be okay to be racist toward anyone. One of my good friends returned from a religious mission in El Salvador. He was the only white person in his mission. The only one from America as well. He was constantly bullied for being white, and for being from America. He was called out on it daily. Even from his fellow companions on the same religious mission. Sadly, no race is exempt from racism. There are still cases of people being extremely racist. There is what seems to be an epidemic of racism in cops. Racism is an issue we humans created. It’s one we should have been able to put to rest a very long time ago. People who are 100% blind and cannot see anything, they don’t understand racism. To them, everyone is the same. People are people. Tommy Edison, a man born blind, talked about racism in a video posted to Youtube on Aug 8, 2016. He says, “I have to be honest. I don’t really think about it.” He goes on to talk about how he doesn’t care about the color of someone’s skin, he cares about who they are, how they think, he cares that they are human. 

I’d like to point to a recent Netflix show called Love Is Blind. It’s an experiment to find if love is blind, hence the name of the show. In it, they put 15 men and women in things called “pods”. They can’t see each other, but have to get to know one another, and then get engaged. They don’t see each other until they get engaged. The first couple to get engaged was a white man named Cameron, and an African American woman named Lauren. They didn’t know this about each other until they finally saw each other in person. As the show progresses so does their love, ending in, spoilers, their marriage. They were married in November of 2018, and now in April of 2020, they are still happily married. This really shows that race ultimately doesn’t need to matter, and that who we are is what matters at the end of the day. Modern racism is, unfortunately, a thing, and it has a double standard with it, but take away everyone’s sight for a moment, and what’s the difference between everyone? Now the difference is in who you are. 

Equal gender rights have been a rising topic over the last few years. People calling for equal rights. Unfortunately, this subject is riddled with a double standard. People call for equal rights but want superiority. The loudest majority talk about women’s rights, pay, and opportunity, but when you bring up the draft as an example, their facade of equality begins to fade. Now, this is not every feminist. This is not everyone who wants equal rights. This is simply a very vocal part of the community, however small, they have a loud voice. The statistics for inequality among women are readily available and easy to find. The vast majority of articles about gender inequality specifically only mention women’s struggles. Unless you are seeking out information on male inequality, it’s buried to the point where it almost seems to not exist. When looking up “gender inequality” in a Google search, the front page brought up eight articles, not including ads. Each of these articles only talked about female issues and never once brought up any male issues, or even rebutted any of their own claims with anything about the opposing gender. Don’t get me wrong, women’s rights are important and something we need to make more of an effort with, but we also need to bring to light that there are issues with men as well. 

In the case of sexual assault, it is hard for a man to be seen as a victim. There is such a strong stigma in society that men should be able to deal with it. That men can’t be raped or sexually assaulted. When looking at court cases, men don’t have much favor. Brian Banks was a promising football player when he was accused of rape in 2002. He was 16 years old at the time. He ended up serving 6 years in prison. In 2011 the accuser, Wanetta Gibson, admitted to fabricating the claim. He lost 6 years of his life and a promising career in football to a false claim. On the opposite side of a coin, when a male accuses a woman of sexual assault, it isn’t as “easy”. Their word isn’t taken as truth, whether it is the truth or not. Where in most cases of women accusing men, their word is taken as gospel. This has lead to many false accusations like Brian’s. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, up to 10% of claims end up being false. Not only do false claims hurt men and take away parts of their lives it also destroys women who have actually been sexually assaulted and have found the strength to speak up. They now get questioned if they are lying, and now others chose to stay quiet. 

A big issue when it comes to gender rights is children and divorce. Men oftentimes are overlooked and given the short end of the stick for simply not being the mother. My Aunt and Uncle got a divorce a few years ago. She claimed he was abusing her and kicked him out of the house. Her claims of abuse were later proven to be false. When the inevitable divorce came, he lost almost everything. She got the house, the land, the kids. He only got the kids every other weekend even though it was obvious he was the more qualified parent. We would later find out that she had been cheating on him with their youngest child's kindergarten teacher. After the divorce, my aunt became a very distant mother. Their father used to drive them to the bus stop in the winter, which they lived a far way from. Without him around, the mother failed to do this, making her three kids walk the way to the bus. The bus driver eventually decided to drive all the way to their farmhouse each day. The majority of the money my Uncle would be making was taken for child support. Unfortunately, their youngest child, my cousin, had a stroke in the middle of the night and passed away in the same bed as her older sister. There was nothing anyone could have done. The older sister started to have severe issues from the trauma of waking to her dead sister. Instead of trying to help her daughter, her mother sent her to live with a relative in Utah, which only worsened things. Out of their three children, only one reminded with them, but with the mom absent so often, he spends most of his time with his dad. Even though she sent one kid to a different state, is barley around for one of them, and the other has passed away, my uncle still pays her child support for all three children, even though she hardly supports them. Men get robbed of their children in situations like this constantly, and it isn’t right. Gender rights aren’t only about women. They’re also about men. It’s about equal rights. Not one or the other. 

While racism has changed from a couple centuries ago, it still remains to this day. It’s unfortunate that people can’t just see each other as that; people. Turn off the lights in a room full of different people around the world. How are they different? Accents? Anyone can have an accent. A white man can have an Asain accent. A woman from Ghana can have a British accent. For the sake of the experiment, let’s say they all have the same accent. How do you tell race? Can you? Is it now just about who they are? With gender equality, the issue seems to be why women are lesser than men and how to swap that. Articles are riddled with bias and refuse to show any arguments for men and any inequalities they suffer. Unfortunately, we do live in a world where this is an issue, and to really start solving it, to come to true equality, we need to acknowledge both sides of the same coin. There are plenty of issues such as these, that on paper should be easily solvable. Regrettably, these issues have been around for a long time before you and I and may even be here for a long time after. If everyone could see each other as equals, the world could be such a greater place. Just close your eyes, take away all bias, and focus on who a person is. 

[cartoonfangirl1218]

EoA ships fluff headcanons part 5

Childhood activity they show the other?Eleteo: Elena introduces fencing to her man. All the fencing, she tried to train him through a less rigorous and much more flirty version of Gabe’s fencing training but Mateo fencing is like Mateo with the rope. All thumbs and falling. Not that either of them minds. Mateo tries to coach Elena through potion making. That’s right. Though Rafa did not overtly teach him, as he self studied he realized that the cooking information and herbal medicine recipes she taught him were just a precursor. What they didn’t expect that, surprisingly, similarly to Olivia, when Elena decided to get into her head to see what would happen if she combined the purple concoction with the fizzy olive one...well ba bam! Since then they stuck to magical battles. Gababel: As we know Gabe does NOT have any fond childhood memories whereas olaball was involved so that was out. On the other hand, Gabe does love baking, especially baking cookies. So that is the nice lazy weekend activity he and Isabel do together and although he does tease Isabel for her scientific calculations, there is always flying cookie dough and  giggles when they’re in the kitchen. Isabel knows Gabe doesn’t always follow her scientific treatises and conversations, so she showed him a more palatable one. Stargazing. She and King Raul used to do it all the time and it is one her favorite memories of her father. So on clear nights they spread a picnic blanket in the  royal garden and Isabel points out all the constellations and tells the old stories as her father did for her.

Estenaomi: This should be obvious from the get go. Sailing is Naomi’s thing and always will be. She has more sea legs than land legs when she was 4 years old and so she makes it her mission to teach Esteban everything she knows. Although at the beginning it was less fun and more like when this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Aby_UgFLxfQ She lets up because she doesn’t want Esteban to hate it. Not that he does, he understands why she loves the thrill of the salt air on her face and is kinda a waveaholic, it’s like a rollarcoaster ride. Esteban’s favorite thing was dancing because it reminded him of when he used to see his parents date nights in their ballroom (yes exactly like this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcmwgPw76Mc) And so Esteban teaches Naomi all the waltzes and ballroom dances he knows. She is pretty quick study and picks them up in a flash so they move on to salsa and merengue and soon they are hitting the clubs as the hottest couple on the dance floor, but they always return back to the ballroom for their own private dance too.  Estoma: Not only is dancing Esteban’s thing but olaball and goal! Esteban is such a bonafide fan of olaball, there is even a baby picture of him in a olaball Jersey and so of course, he takes Doña to one where it is Avalor vs Paraíso. Honestly, Doña didn’t really watch the game she was too busy watching the hilarity that was Esteban next to her yelling and fist pumping like a maniac.Doña didn’t do all those childhood things he did like going to the circus or making ice cream sundays (and did not appreciate Esteban looking at her as if her childhood was devoid of happiness) and didn’t really feel like taking the trip down memory lane but she eventually relented at the thought of horse riding again.  So they did just that and though Doña rode circles around him and laughed at Esteban’s saddle sore butt, he secretly thought it was worth it to see her looking so free and unguarded.

Birthdays?

Eleteo: (I agreed a lot with @pizza-n-sunshine’s zodiac post so some of these dates are based on astrology since the timeline isn’t really specified in EoA) Elena is totally a fiery Aries and I imagine her bday to be right in the beginning of Aries season, March 19. It’s perfect because it is also springtime which Elena loves because of the idea of new beginnings and fresh flowers and just being outside. Mateo usually treats Elena to a nice picnic for her birthday beside the Avaloran waterfalls where they can swim and frolic and have magical Scepter vs Tamborita contests. Mateo is a Virgo, his birthday being September 11, right in the middle symbolizing his moderate personality (that is when he is not in search for the Scepter of night). Mateo is such a modest guy that he doesn’t really want much for his birthday but Elena insists on giving him a sweet soirée anyway. Specifically bringing in all the citizens that Mateo has helped over the years, reminding him that his work is known and is appreciated and he is just a wonderful guy.😊 Gababel: While I see Isabel as being an Aquarius, I feel like she was born in autumn. Around Oct 5 right when the leaves turn crisp and school is getting into full swing. Sometimes, Isabel gets so into the latest project she is doing for school that she actually forgets her birthday is coming up so it’s always easy to have a surprise party for her. The party is a practical, but fun affair with lots of scientifically developed special effects with fireworks and illusions and all her close friends as they play party games. Gabe does seem to be a totally Capricorn and I see his birthday on January 5. Yes, same number day as Isabel, only 4 months later. He is similar to her that he is so dedicated to his work that he forgets it’s coming up. But more likely than not he remembers because he knows it will be a lovely day of celebration and a break from work which Isabel makes sure that it is. In the form of taking him to their favorite getaway. Opidian Island. Sometimes Gabe acts like a little kid, pretending to be a great adventurer like Agama and Isabel is all the happy to help him trying to figure out that temple maze again.

Estenaomi: This was easier since we sorta know when they’re birthdays are. Or at least the season. Esteban seems to have been born near the end of the summer so I say his birthday is August 6. Which is apparently a regal number indicated duke. Esteban’s birthday is all about seizing the moment in the summer and usually also at the waterfalls where he spends his time swinging on vines and jumping from the top of the cliffs like a maniac. Naomi also organizes a treasure hunt to further the fun. Naomi’s birthday seems to be in the spring, I say April 25 because April is the month of showers and showers are a great challenge for sailing which is exactly what she does for her birthday. It’s a party on the marinara where she and Esteban get into boat races, swimming and all sorts of adventures in the water and occasionally, meet up with Captain Chiloya again. And a lovely, romantic dance on the docks with the moon shining above them. Estoma: Esteban’s BDay is obviously still Aug 6 but it is more subdued since he has more refined taste. Admittedly he didn’t see much celebration in it for 41 years because of, as you guessed it, Shuriki. He almost didn’t celebrate any holiday or birthday because the guilt was too overpowering and again, Shuriki would have put a stop to it. Even so, Doña would sometimes leave him a small trinket on his desk. There was no words or acknowledgement about it but it was there. Nowadays, with his family around him, he gets a real party with his close family and friends catching up on those feelings he missed for so long. Doña’s birthday is the day after Navidad (I thought it would be a fun bit of irony😜) . That took almost forever for Esteban to find out since Doña doesn’t make much of a big deal of it as he thought she would. She just doesn’t want to do anything but relax after the mad rush that is Navidad selling season. Well, Esteban being someone who still takes great stock in celebrating birthdays actually surprises her by bringing breakfast in bed among other treats.

Meeting the parents? Eleteo: Mateo is a nervous wreck meeting Elena’s parents. I mean he is geeked out that he’ll be able to see ghosts (and the fact that his future wife sees ghosts because of her time in the amulet fascinated him to no end) but also it’s still meeting her parents and he hopes that they’ll accept him and be worthy enough for her. He needn’t to have worried so much though because since they have seen him with their daughter from the beginning they know that they would make a good couple and they admire that he loves and respects her so much. Rafa has no complaints against Elena at all. In fact she isn’t surprised the crowned princess is in love with her boy, who wouldn’t? But seriously, she treats Elena like the daughter she never had and tries not to go too overboard with giving advice and suggestions for dealing with Mateo. Gababel: As with Mateo, Gabe was super nervous meeting Isabel’s parents. Albeit he was very skeptical at first when Elena told him about her power but he had to accept it so when the time came to meet them, he was really unsure what to do. What exactly do you say to dead ghost parents? Does shaking their hands still apply? But like before, King Raul and Queen Lucia are very gracious to the boy who has made their youngest so happy and for all that he has done for the family and Avalor in general. Though Raul couldn’t resist doing the “If you hurt my girl...” talk (he did the same with Mateo and the poor kid was convinced for a full five minutes that Raul hated him). Blanca loves Isabel, she sees her as a calming grounded influence on Gabe and treats her like a daughter. At first Roberto couldn’t even believe that Gabe managed to snag the princess and scientist of Avalor but when it comes down to it, he’s glad that his son is happy. Estenaomi: Naomi can’t technically meet Esteban’s parents but she gets the closest by being “interrogated” by Luisa and praised by Francisco. They’re glad that Naomi can banter with Esteban and is able to handle his adventurous spirit with love and sass. It kinda reminded Luisa of herself and Francisco. The Turners were initially cool to Esteban which was simply part of their plan to make sure he had a proper amount of respect for Naomi and for them and completely surprise him later with hugs and congratulations when they announce their official together.   Estoma: Well they can’t meet the parents. It’s more like a bittersweet game where they talk about “If my parents had met you..” It’s sweet that it segueways into compliments like “they would love you for how happy you make me feel” and “They would think you have great taste in men and fashion” etc.

Taking care of the other when sick?

Eleteo: Mateo has his hands full when Elena is sick because she refuses to admit it and wants to continue work or doing whatever she usually does. But Rafa taught him a perfect sleepytime soup recipe that usually gets Elena asleep and relaxed. Then when she sorta kinda admits defeat she lets him sing to her. Mateo is also a handful in that he doesn’t think he needs anyone to take care of him and that he doesn’t want to get sick but Elena isn’t having any of that. They are a couple, she is taking care of him, she doesn’t care about the germs. And Mateo would be lying that he doesn’t enjoy the extra attention Elena feasts upon him. Gababel: Gabe is an absolute sweetheart when Isabel is sick with making specially prepared soups, dropping by from work every time he has a free and even writing down some of the scientific treatise that Isabel attempts to dictate through a stuffy nose.  Isabel is similar to Mateo that she has to hold Gabe down from insisting that he is fine and that he can work. Usually her puppy dog eyes work the charm and Gabe stays in bed so he can be sung to and read stories. Estenaomi: Esteban is such whiny child when he is sick. And cranky too about taking the medicine, and though Naomi rolls her eyes, she kinda indulges his antics because she finds them funny and though he doesn’t admit it, he appreciates how patient she is. As for Naomi, Esteban treats her like a fragile flower near death more than a common cold which annoys her to no end. But she does get massages and being fed grapes out of it which she admits it’s very fun too. Estoma: They generally avoid each other when they’re sick. Doña doesn’t have much patience for his complaining about sick and bored he is and Esteban doesn’t have much patience when she tells him that he is nursing her all wrong. The only time they can stand each other is when they’re peacefully asleep which is promptly ruined when they wake up with “Whad are you looking ad?”

Who wakes the other up?

Eleteo: Mateo obviously since Elena is so not a morning person. If anything she wishes she could sleep all day sometimes. Luckily, Mateo knows the perfect way to wake her up with lots of kisses. Gababel: Gabe is the early riser thanks to guard duty, and because of that he usually isn’t there when Isabel wakes up during weekdays but he does leave coffee and sometimes a note. During the weekends, it’s the opposite. Neither of them want to wake up so they laze around, nuzzling up against each other. Estenaomi: Naomi wakes up first, and let’s face it all the Flores family are so not morning people. Her way of waking Esteban is a good old fashion pillow fight. Well it’s a more one sided pillow fight since Esteban is trying to stubbornly stay in bed but she gets him out eventually. Estoma: Once again, Esteban is not a morning person. Doña usually wakes him up by blowing coffee steam in his face or just clap loudly, yelling that it is time to rise.

Who curses when they argue?

Eleteo: Neither. They very much prefer actually talking out their problems than yelling and screaming in anger at each other sinc that is counterproductive. Also I can't see Mateo having a cursing bone in his body and Elena wouldn't use that kind of harsh language to someone she loves. Estenaomi: Naomi. Blame the sailor's tongue but she can start cursing up a storm. And though Esteban tries not to do it in a girl's presence (yes, Luisa drilled it in) he would start too. Gababel: Again neither. For the same reasons as Eleteo. Estoma: Again like Estenaomi, Doña is more likely to curse before Esteban but he would snap back too. Who wears the other clothes sometimes? Eleteo: Elena sometimes wears Mateo's oversized shirts on a lazy Sunday morning without shame and sometime teasing that she should just wear it to her meetings. She also puts on wizards robes. It's just so comfy and warm and smells just like him. Gababel: They don't really do that since the size difference makes it ridiculous. Although Isabel has nabbed Gabe's guard jacket once or twice on a cold winter night. As well as shirt:) She says he has to practice his ability to withstand cold temperatures but Gabe thinks it more has to do with his gazing at his pecs. Estenaomi: A few times, Esteban has tried Naomi's clothes on account of her dares much to Naomi's personal amusement. Naomi does the same and dresses in Esteban’s fancy suits and shirts. Usually for fun. Estoma: Very rarely, though once Esteban went out in Doña's robe which he staunchly insists was a traditional Satu kimono. AU stories  Gababel: Isabel works in a science lab for the boss from hell aka Shuriki and her smarmy second in command/her personal advisor, Javier. What’s a single graduate girl in the city to do but keep on trying day after day while working on her thesis. Luckily, she has her roomie, Tomiko to lean on. And unexpectedly, the cute security guard at her lab, Gabe Nuñez. Soon, life gets a whole lot more complicated when love hits this young scientist over the head, a fun complicated. But will this burgenoning relationship be able to last once she starts her real job after grad school? And more distressingly, Javier’s attempts at sabotage and plagiarism. Estoma: Working in the same publishing house, Esteban is a publisher for the nonfiction imprint, while Doña is an editor for the romance novel section. They rarely associate except at one work dinner where they are forced to seat next to each other and learn of their disdainful views of the others genre. He thinks her clients write superficial, copy-and-paste  trash and she thinks his are pretentious, Pulitzer-wannabe rejects. They strike a challenge to read a list of the “best” of the other’s genres. Soon their meetings change from literary criticism to what outsiders call as dates, but that’s impossible. No way life is like a book. But soon the lines between fact and fiction begin to blur with meddling relatives, a murder mystery dinner, a regency style ball and way too many fairytale moments, leave them with one question, what exact genre are they in? And whether their story has a happy ending? Estenaomi: It’s a boringly ordinary day at Naomi’s part time job at her father’s antique nautical shop when her friend’s cousin, Esteban comes in, searching for a map. A map that leads to a Flores family mystery and chance for adventure that Naomi cannot resist following. Especially since that adventure is on the tail of the arrogant college boy with searing brown eyes and no impulse control. Of course, when that mystery leads them directly to the hideout of the notorious yet secretive mob family, The Delgados down in Cuba, it’s clear they’re in over the heads. And more dangerous still, their hearts are on the line as their feelings begin to grow with each adrenaline racing escape. Eleteo: Street performer and illusionist, Mateo comes under the wing of Elena Flores’ bohemian musical troupe when he moves to Avalor City. Soon the two form a special connection, marred by Elena’s family who is desperately searching for the eldest child to take over Raul’s company which Elena had forsaken in the midst of the traumatic death. Mateo is tempted between helping Elena gain her rightful place at head of the company with the possibility of never seeing her again or running away to Paris as she suggests.

Sweetest gift they got from each other? Eleteo: I feel like Mateo would give her the gift of a day without work or worry about the kingdom. One day out of the blue, Elena wakes up to find most of her appointments cancelled or being taken care of by the Grand Council for the day. Mateo first comes in with a bowl of cherries, and a kiss. Then they go out for a nice leisurely Jaquin ride. Then they just hang out with their friends at the beach or something. For the afternoon, they go dancing and for dinner that he had planned down in his workshop with lights and everything. So there it is. A nice day where she could spend time with her friends, family and her favorite wizard king. For Mateo: So Mateo is pretty good being by himself and just enjoy reading and practicing his magic. So Elena's gift to him would be a bit similar. A day free of appointments just so he could concentrate how to improve his mastery. But the plus would be she would be him the whole day. Helping, asking questions and being able to spend time and see do what he loves so much. Estenaomi: This was easier at least. For Naomi, I think the favorite gift Esteban gave her wasa ship. It wasn't big because they all knew she was going to inherit the Wayfarer but a houseboat. She was very surprised to see that he got her a full captain outfit with a hat and everything waiting for her in the closet. Esteban, she got him a brand new compass with an ancient map she got from some sale.  So they could go on a whole new adventure together. Estoma: For Esteban: A enchanted music box from Satu. It was a combo of two things. His admiration and memories of staying in Satu, and enchanted so only the one holding the music box could hear the music. So he could safely listen to it even close to Shuriki’s quarters.

Gababel: Isabel gave him a brand new saddle for Fuego and a sword that even though he learned his lesson from El Guapo, he still couldn’t help but stand up straighter and prouder with his new golden engraved sword. And Isabel, even though she is slightly embarrassed by such a nerdy gift but melted because Gabe knew her so well to buy her a stack of new edition science encyclopedias.  

Jealous? Eleteo: Elena won’t admit she’s jealous. She thinks she incapable of it which is so not true. So whenever some girl seems to be sniffing out Mateo, she rationalizes that she is just being protective making sure it’s not another Rita. See here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYka1DZNjU0 Mateo on the other hand isn’t proactive. He is still an insecure wizard king and would believe that as long as Elena likes the guy he won’t bother, I mean why would she ever go for him? So he becomes a little more distant, trying to pull himself together and not let his jealousy show. Gababel: Isabel would be like Mateo, drawing herself in and becoming more distant, a bit more sullen. Usually her jealousy would come out in muttered asides under her breath and sometimes even pointing out the others mistakes in grammar or whatnot. Gabe is more obvious, pointing out his own attributes and visibly rolling his eyes whenever he thinks what the other man is saying to be stupid. Estenaomi: Naomi is sorta a combo between Elena above and how she reacted in Spy in the Palace. Sure that every dig is against her, irrational as it seems. Also just general annoyance with the other girl and how she can be the exact same thing. Esteban gets all pouty too and goes into overtime doing ridiculous “impressive” stunts to show off his manliness and hotness and greater skills etc etc. Estoma: Neither would admit they like one another much less jealous. So it’s just more insults as usual. But these insults target the SO and them like “You’re dating her/him? I guess there’s no accounting for taste.“ “I just can’t believe you’re dating an idiot. But then again you do get uncomfortable with people who are intellectually superior than you so I suppose it makes sense.” “I thought you had high standards? Or did those high standards not like you?”

Who takes the covers?

Eleteo: Covers? What covers? They go on body warmth alone. Lol. I don't think either would since it's more of a cocoon they wrapped themselves in but I'm going to go with Mateo. I feel like Elenais just more of a body person while Mateo can sleep with tons and tons of soft blankets and it reminds him of his wizard robes so it is extra comfy. Estoma: Doña, she gets easily cold at night and likes to bundle herself up with all the covers. Esteban tries to shrug off, that he is too macho to get cold but sometimes he tries to tearing them away from her iron grip when she's sleeping and that almost made her fall off. Estenaomi: Esteban!! The guy is a duke, he is used to being a hundred percent comfortable. Forbid that he gets cold at night, it is the one thing he won't relent. He takes the covers he wants. Naomi usually wrangles it away but then she has to endure his complaints of how cold he is and equals it by lots of kisses. Gababel: Isabel take the covers. Moreover Gabe would gladly give it to her she use gets grabby when she's asleep so it doesn't matter if he gives it beforehand, she gets more and they end up hugging a lot.

Sexy outfit? Eleteo: Any outfit of Elena’s looks sexy to Mateo but if he had to choose, it might be the mermaid look for her. Her hair flowing around her like a halo, the seashell bra, standing under a waterfall, just wow. Elena surprised to find herself very into when Mateo wears his royal consort outfit with the empuletts. He really rocks the empulets. He looks just so noble and kingly. Gababel: Gabe likes it when Isabel wears reading glasses. A bit of the sexy nerd trope though when Isabel first put them on she had been nervous he wouldn’t like it but she really had nothing to fear. Isabel likes Gabe in his guard uniform so it is a good thing he wears it everyday but she also likes it when he’s in an apron. It reminds her of all the possibilities of baking and food and heating up the kitchen 😉 Estenaomi: Esteban has a preference for corsets though he would never admit it. But is always a slight thrill when she indulges him because usually she wears such comfortable, loose clothing and the corset is a different thing entirely. Naomi enjoys it when Esteban wears leather pants. It leaves nothing to the imagination and shows off all his leg muscles and importantly his butt. Estoma: Hmm I think Esteban would still enjoy corsets. Nothing is more tantalizing than the glimpse of it underneath a low cut gown. Doña likes Esteban in a hot cowboy outfit. You know, jeans and cowhide vest and nothing else. Esteban liked to tease her a lot about her lower class standards until she showed up with her female version.

Who sings in the shower?

Eleteo: Elena undoubtedly, but Mateo does also. Usually humming because singing was banned during Shuriki but Elena has been encouraging to sing out and to sing proud. Gababel: Gabe does surprisingly. Not often though but when he does he really belts it out. Isabel thinks it’s adorable. Estenaomi: Both But Esteban does more often. Though Naomi usually sings sea shanties to get in the mood and those get stuck in Esteban’s head the whole day. Estoma: Esteban, especially to the shower head. He might have practiced that booby trap dance once or twice. Who plays with the other's hair/toes in the morning? Eleteo: Both do. Mateo likes to stroke Elena's long, soft hair and smell the scent of it like flowers and sunshine. And Elena enjoys playing with his cute curls. When they wake up in the morning, if either of them curls up close enough, the other will play with their toes. I was thinking of your story, that they would want to wake up to smiles and laughter. Plus it's special for Elena since she hadn't had that kind of morning since Shuriki as you put in your fic. Estebaomi: Naomi plays with Esteban’s floppy Bieber hair. Since he takes so long to wake up, Naomi does small braids in his hair in the meanwhile. I imagine Esteban to be a very touchy feely bf and would play with Naomi's toes, scraping any polish and peppering her with kisses. Naomi kinda eats it up. Gababel: Gabe does. He likes feeling her wavy curls and spooning her. He plays with her toes on a lazy morning, when they don't feel like getting out of bed. It's almost like he's examining how they small they are in his large hands. And if they don't have to go to work, follow it up with a nice foot massage. Estoma: Esteban does. He likes to bury his nose in it and play with it before she puts it up in her usual bun. If he is feeling bored, he'll play with her toes.

#estenaomi #estoma #eleteo #gababel #elena of avalor #my headcanons #my hcs #headcanons #elena castillo flores #isabel castillo flores #esteban flores #gabe nuñez #naomi turner #doña paloma #mateo de alva

[bountyofbeads]

New Rule Would Let U.S. Hold Migrant Families Indefinitely https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/flores-migrant-family-detention.html

Migrant Families Would Face Indefinite Detention Under New Trump Rule

By Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs | Published Aug. 21, 2019 Updated 10:55 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted August 21, 2019 11:20 AM ET |

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration unveiled a regulation on Wednesday that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally, replacing a decades-old court agreement that imposed a limit on how long the government could hold migrant children in custody and specified the level of care they must receive.

The White House has for more than a year pressed the Department of Homeland Security to replace the agreement, known as the Flores settlement, a shift that the administration says is crucial to halt immigration across the southwestern border.

The new regulation , which requires approval from a federal judge before it can go into effect and was expected to be immediately challenged in court, would establish standards for conditions in detention centers and specifically abolish a 20-day limit on detaining families in immigration jails, a cap that has prompted President Trump to repeatedly complain about the “catch and release” of families from Central America and elsewhere into the United States.

“This rule allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress,” Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, said in a statement. He called it a “critical rule” that would allow the government to detain families and maintain the “integrity of the immigration system.”

The administration proposed the rule last fall, allowing the public to comment on the potential regulation. It is scheduled to be published this week in the Federal Register and would take effect 60 days later, though administration officials concede that the expected court challenge will probably delay it.

Under the new rule, the administration would be free to send families who are caught crossing the border illegally to a family residential center to be held for as long as it takes for their immigration cases to be decided. Officials said families cases could be resolved within three months, though many could drag on much longer.

Trump administration officials — who briefed reporters on Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans — said that many of the families would be detained until they were either released after being awarded asylum or they were deported to their home countries. Some families might be awarded parole to leave the facilities while the courts decide their fate.

The 20-day limit has been in place since 2015, a legal outgrowth of a 1997 court-ordered consent decree after a federal class-action lawsuit alleged physical and emotional harm done to immigrant children held for extended periods of time in the detention facilities.

Previous administrations tried to change the rules for detaining children in efforts to reduce surges of migrants crossing the border. Mr. Trump’s homeland security officials have repeatedly said that limiting the detentions of entire migrant families has driven the surge of Central American families who crossed the border this year.

The officials said on Tuesday that enacting the new regulation would send a powerful message that bringing children to the United States was not “a passport” to being released from detention.

They predicted that the rule would cause a significant decrease in the number of families trying to cross into the United States illegally, reducing the need for more family residential centers.

Withdrawing from the consent decree has also been a personal objective for Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy. Delays in finishing the new regulation had prompted Mr. Miller to lash out at senior homeland security officials, who were ousted from the department.

The New York Times reported in April that Mr. Miller berated the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald D. Vitiello, for not finishing the new rule. Mr. Vitiello later had his nomination withdrawn by Mr. Trump, who said he was not tough enough for the job.

The Flores settlement has also been at the root of partisan debates on immigration. Democrats have said the rules, are imperative to ensuring the well-being of detained children, especially after reports of children being kept in overcrowded cells and sometimes going without showers, toothpaste or hot meals.

Mr. McAleenan told the House Homeland Security Committee in May that the Flores settlement had incentivized migration to the United States, saying that “if an adult arrives with a child, they have a likelihood of staying in the United States.”

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, reminded Mr. McAleenan of the original purpose of the court-ordered regulations.

“It was about prolonged detention of children had proven to be harmful to their health,” Mr. Thompson said. “I think the court looked at it from that perspective rather than a punitive decision on the department.”

The Trump administration’s regulation, which is several hundred pages long, eliminates a requirement that federal detention centers for immigrant families be licensed by states, most of which had no such licenses.

Instead, under the regulation, the three centers built to house hundreds of immigrant families — in Dilley and Karnes City, Tex., and Leesport, Pa. — would have to meet standards set only by ICE, which runs them.

The administration officials insisted Tuesday that the facilities were, and would continue to be, maintained at high standards for the immigrants who were detained there. They said the facilities provided health care, education and “top notch” food.

But critics of the administration have long argued that the facilities were unsuitable for children to be held for long periods of time. And the recent examples of horrible conditions at overcrowded Border Patrol detention centers have underscored their concerns about the residential centers.

“We don’t disagree with detaining children when it’s necessary — namely, if they’re a flight risk or they’re a danger to themselves or others, we agree,” said Peter Schey, a lawyer who filed the original case and has continued to defend the settlement terms in court since. “It’s the unnecessary detention of child that this settlement sought to end. So these regulations really reflect a flagrant disregard on the part of President Trump and his administration for the safety and the well-being of children in the care of the federal government.”

Last summer, the Trump administration began separating children from their parents as a way to get around the Flores agreement. The children were sent to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services while the adults were imprisoned while awaiting trial on their violation of immigration laws.

A fierce political backlash forced Mr. Trump to publicly abandon the separation policy, though immigration advocates said some families continued to be separated after that announcement.

Administration officials said Tuesday that the effort to allow families to be detained indefinitely was an attempt to avoid having to either separate families or release them while they waited for their cases to be heard.

Even before the final rule was announced on Wednesday, immigration advocates said it amounted to a cruel effort to imprison families — some with infants or young children — many of whom are fleeing violence and corruption in their home countries.

Under the terms of the 1997 consent decree, the regulation must be approved by the judge in the original case, Judge Dolly M. Gee of United States District Court for the Central District of California. The government will have seven days to file a brief in her court seeking her approval of the regulation.

If she refuses, the administration is expected to appeal her decision in a case that could drag on for months or even years, legal experts said.

Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting from New York.

The Flores Agreement Protected Migrant Children for Decades. New Regulations Aim to End It.

By Miriam Jordan | Published Aug. 20, 2019 Updated 9:52 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted August 21, 2019 |

LOS ANGELES — Nearly 35 years ago, long before the current mass influx of Central American families making their way to America’s southern border, a different and more brutal migrant crisis was unfolding.

In El Salvador, government death squads were stalking suspected insurgents. Farmers, human rights activists and even priests were being caught in the crossfire. The widening civil war would leave more than 75,000 people dead, and send tens of thousands of people fleeing to the United States.

One of them was Alma Yanira Cruz, a 12-year-old girl who made her way north to join her mother in Los Angeles after her grandfather and uncle were killed.

What happened to her after she arrived in 1985 violated nearly every principle of today’s standards for protecting migrant children — an ordeal that even now, she said recently, is “too painful to remember, to discuss.”

And yet it had become shockingly routine.

A barricade of razor wire surrounded an old motel in Pasadena, Calif., north of Los Angeles, where migrants were locked in overcrowded rooms, children and adults jammed in together. For weeks, the girl remained there — offered no schooling, no recreation, no doctors, no visits with relatives.

“Alma suffered too much. She felt unsafe. She was mixed with all kinds of people and was afraid,” said her mother, Anna Aldana, who had come to the United States in 1979 and was working as a housekeeper in Los Angeles. “She told me they didn’t give her enough food. She told me she fell out of a high bunk bed.”

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping new set of regulations for detaining migrant children, replacing more than two decades of protections that were put into place as a result of what happened to Alma and her fellow detainees in 1985. The new standards, set to be published later this week, would allow the government to detain children and families indefinitely, revise the minimum standards of care and, if they stand up in court, end the 22-year-old consent decree, known as the Flores agreement, that has protected the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable new arrivals.

A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Ms. Cruz, one of the other young Salvadorean girls being held in Pasadena; Jenny Lisette Flores, 15; and two other adolescent girls paved the way for one of the most important changes in immigration policy in half a century. When it was finally settled in 1997, the litigation transformed the way migrant children all across the southwest border were treated after arriving in the United States.

No longer could they be held indefinitely in hard-core detention facilities: They had to be released quickly to a family member or guardian or, if that was not possible, transferred speedily to a licensed care facility that did not operate like a jail. A subsequent interpretation of the agreement limited the time most migrant children could spend in detention, generally to no more than 20 days.

The Obama administration, which battled a new surge in migrant families arriving on the border in 2014, tried and failed to get out from under the strict limits. The Trump administration railed against the “legal loopholes” in the consent decree and tried mightily to upend it. The Flores agreement, the administration argued, helped create the current chaos at the border by providing an incentive for migrant parents to bring their children with them — the equivalent, under the current legal framework, of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Administration officials said that the new regulations maintain the underlying purpose of the Flores agreement, and all children will be “treated with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”

But those who spearheaded the long-running litigation disagree.

“These regulations issued under orders from the White House show President Trump’s decision to politicize the detention of migrant children as part of his re-election campaign and his callous indifference to their safety and well-being,” said Peter Schey, who along with his co-counsel, Carlos Holguin, filed the original lawsuit.

When the Trump administration last year tried to get around the Flores agreement by separating children from their parents in order to detain the parents alone, the policy created such an uproar that it was soon rescinded, at least officially. Then, administration lawyers went to court to try to win permission to keep children with their parents in detention-type facilities for longer than 20 days.

Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, who oversees the agreement, denied the government’s request, blaming more than 20 years of congressional inaction and “ill-considered executive action” for the “current stalemate.” Three months later, in September, the administration published the proposed new Flores regulations for comment in the Federal Register.

After the final rule is published later this week, the plaintiffs’ lawyers will have one week to file a brief with the court if they believe the regulations fail to implement the terms of the settlement. If not rejected by the court, the regulations would take effect 60 days after publication.

The two plaintiffs’ lawyers have returned to court dozens of times to force the administration to abide by the agreement’s provisions and made repeated visits to detention centers to inspect them or interview children. Most recently, the legal observers in the case reported on a border facility in Clint, Tex., where they said migrant children were being held in filthy conditions with inadequate food.

“If someone had told me in 1985 that our work to protect children would continue into 2019,” Mr. Holguin said, “there is no way I would have believed it.”

Mr. Holguin was a 30-year-old lawyer working with Mr. Schey at a public-interest law firm when the two lawyers first got drawn into the case. It started with a phone call from the actor Ed Asner, who had heard about Ms. Cruz’s case and wanted someone to intervene.

Mr. Holguin’s father, the son of a Mexican immigrant, had been a public school teacher in East Los Angeles who had supported the 1968 Latino student walkouts across the city protesting racism and substandard education for Mexican-Americans. After college, Mr. Holguin enrolled in the People’s College of Law, an unaccredited law school in Los Angeles, convinced that the quickest way to a more equitable society was through the courts.

Mr. Schey was the son of a German gentile mother and a communist Jewish father who had escaped on a boat to South Africa during World War II. The family immigrated to United States when Mr. Schey was a teenager.

By the 1980s, Los Angeles was ground zero in the immigrant-rights movement. “The key national organizations were based in Los Angeles. The most vocal immigrant defenders worked in L.A.,” Mr. Schey said. The two lawyers were working together out of a 1920s-era Craftsman house with bad plumbing and a warped roof when the call about the girls being held in Pasadena came in.

Los Angeles was absorbing thousands of war refugees. “Back then, it was guerrillas, not gangs making people leave,” said Ms. Aldana, sitting recently in her modest one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood adorned with photographs of her teenage grandchildren — the twins her daughter would go on to have.

Guerrillas who rampaged through her neighborhood in El Salvador had forced her children to procure and prepare food for them, she recalled. “I had to get them out of there.” After her son, Luis Alberto, crossed the border undetected, she decided Alma should come.

But Alma was apprehended by border agents at San Ysidro, and transferred to the detention facility in Pasadena. Ms. Aldana feared she would be deported if she came forward to claim her daughter, and the authorities would not allow anyone else to take her. So the girl languished in custody.

“I wept and wept. I felt helpless,” recalled Ms. Aldana.

At about the same time, Jenny Lisette Flores, whose mother was also undocumented and living in Los Angeles, had arrived at the border and been sent to the Pasadena motel. Her mother, too, was afraid to pick up her daughter because of her immigration status.

“Children were being indefinitely detained. The government was using them as bait to arrest their parents,” said Mr. Holguin.

With an army of law students and volunteer lawyers, the pair began visiting facilities and documenting what they witnessed.

The most serious thing they found was that immigration agents were doing body cavity searches on migrant children, said John Hagar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, a co-counsel in the case. “They would look up a boy’s anus and a girl’s vagina,” he said.

The lawsuit filed on July 11, 1985, argued that the government needed to meet basic child-welfare standards, with education, recreation and medical examinations. It also said the authorities should release children to competent and available adults, rather than indefinitely detaining them until a parent or legal guardian could come forward.

On the day that the suit was filed, Ms. Aldana appeared at a news conference alongside Mr. Schey and the actor, Mr. Asner. To hide her identity, she tied a bandanna around her face, leaving only her forehead and eyes exposed.

“I was on TV, and I said that I had brought my daughter because I didn’t want her kidnapped by guerrillas,” Ms. Aldana said.

A few weeks later, a judge ordered the girls released to people appointed by their mothers who were American citizens. Ms. Cruz was handed over to a family friend who represented her in the lawsuit; Ms. Flores was released to an uncle.

The lawyers sought a nationwide injunction to apply the same principles to all children in federal custody. The parties began discussing a settlement and reached the now-famous consent decree in 1997.

“At the time, we didn’t realize it would be seminal,” said Doris Meissner, the immigration chief in the Clinton administration who signed off on the settlement. She said she had advised addressing the problems head-on. “If there are real issues surrounding the detention of minors, and the government is being held accountable for poor conditions, why are we litigating in favor of what we are doing wrong? Why don’t we settle the lawsuit?”

Complying with the standards in the settlement, she said, was “the right thing to do for kids.”

Little did the plaintiffs’ lawyers know that holding the government to the consent decree would become their life’s work.

“By and large, there was substantial compliance,” recalled Mr. Schey.

Then, in 2014, Central American families and unaccompanied children began pushing across the border in ever-larger numbers, fleeing horrific gang violence, domestic abuse and entrenched poverty. Most of them were seeking asylum. As the numbers climbed, the Obama administration responded by erecting large detention centers for families.

Mr. Holguin and Mr. Schey sprang into action in early 2015, filing a motion in federal court to enforce the Flores agreement. Judge Gee ruled that the settlement applied even to a child apprehended with a parent — meaning that the de facto 20-day limit on detentions applied not just to children, but to parents who were detained with their children.

The numbers of children in detention began rising again late last year, and Mr. Holguin and Mr. Schey enlisted dozens of lawyers and health professionals to inspect facilities like the one in Clint where they were being kept.

What they found was a constant pattern: One facility would be fixed. Then there would be problems at a different one.

“It’s like we are playing Whac-a-Mole. Done with that, then another violation comes up,” Mr. Holguin said.

Today, both Ms. Cruz and Ms. Flores live in Southern California, with children of their own. Though Ms. Cruz spoke briefly to The New York Times, neither wanted to be interviewed. Mr. Schey, who called the women “the Rosa Parks of the civil rights movement for immigrant children,” said he had not seen them in years.

“I’d love to see them,” he said, “to tell them that their willingness to be lead plaintiffs has provided protections for more than a million immigrant children.”

Michael Shear contributed reporting from Washington and Jack Healy from Denver. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

#politics #president donald trump #donald trump #donald trump jr #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #immigration reform #immigration #immigrants #homeland security #u.s. news #u.s. department of justice #u.s. government #u.s. border patrol #ice #abolish ice