fuzzy space elf
also available with fabulous wintercoat
I love how alien looking these Andalites are, like they are clearly something not from Earth!
ive reblogged this before apparently but this is the best andalite fanart and i actually prefer it to the official art even
(via speckeltail)
[Yeerk gently rifling through my brain] You live like this?
(via speckeltail)
I absolutely love all the space australia/ humans are weird/space orcs things going around, so I haven’t been able to stop thinking about stuff like metaphors and idioms and figurative speech. Like, what if those had been purely human concepts?
Human: “He really broke Omar’s heart”
Alien: “What?? Is Omar still alive? Can he be healed? Is it culturally appropriate to seek out revenge?”
Human: “No, no, like… He hurt him badly.”
Alien: “Yes I understand that your cardiovascular system is important.”
- - -
Human: “She’s a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Alien: “What is a wolf?”
Human: “It’s a predator - you know, the one dogs descent from?”
Alien: “… She looks human. How do you know the value of her clothes?”
- - -
Human: “That dickhead stabbed me in the back”
Alien: “MEDIC!!!!”
- - -
Human 1: “Wish me luck!”
Human 2: “Break a leg!”
*Horrified aliens in the background*
Human: “It cost me an arm and a leg”
Human"Well burn that bridge when we get there"
Alien" we’ll be doing what now?“
(via sumersnowlilly)
I am watching Curse of the Black Pearl, and I am still super fucking committed to Elizabeth Swann, she of the wild eyes and voice like Damascus steel and hungry heart of a pirate.
#god i love elizabeth swann#best beloved and most feared#the girl with the hurricane in her veins and the glare of sun-on-sea in her eyes#homeless and wild and untamed as an albatross#norrington and jack and will are all so in love with her in their ways#norrington who loves her well-heeled mask first and then discovers (to his horror) that he loves her iron strength even better#jack who loves her as distractedly and madly as he loves the pearl#loves what she is to him: freedom and fire and wind in his sails and the glitter of stars on the horizon#and will who loves her flashes of aching gentleness#who was her possession from the first moment she said she was watching over him and learned that he loved her unbreakable grip#and elizabeth…elizabeth is in love with them all a little bit but she’s more in love with the sea and the sky and blood on her lips#with calypso and her wildness and her hunger and her cruelty#elizabeth doesn’t think of what she feels for those men as love#she thinks of it as claiming#they are hers and elizabeth is the pirate king and beloved of the sea#and she takes what she wants and gives nothing back#and she is stubborn and selfish and not sorry#i love her so much
Anonymous asked: Ngl I ship Alfred × the Waynes REALLY REALLY HARD now. Curse u!! How dare u make me ship something that there is literally 0 content for aaaah
when i started wayne manor i did not intend for this to happen but quite frankly it’s all thomas’ fault. WELCOME TO HELL.
i don’t know if there’s a name for a ship that is so obscure it might as well not exist, but then if you voice the idea out loud people go “WAIT BUT THAT MAKES SENSE??” but anyway that is the level of hell we are at with this and it’s just the worst.
The alarm went off, and Thomas grumbled, rolling over until he could reach far enough to hit it. Then he rolled back, throwing out an arm as he took his designated position as Biggest Possible Spoon. Martha sighed, comfortably nestled into her place as Rather Tall But Currently Littlest Spoon.
Alfred was of course in the position of Middlest Spoon, or possibly Actually Taller And Handsomer Than Average Spoon Even If You Wouldn’t Know It To Look At These Other Spoons, or to use an entirely different metaphor, The Blonde Center Of A Raven-haired Sandwich. He objected to being the cream filling, because that had connotations.
“Alfred,” Thomas mumbled, nuzzling at the back of his head. “Go make sure Bruce is dressing appropriately for the museum.” Despite this, he had made no move to allow Alfred to escape.
“He’s your son,” Alfred said. “You do it.”
“I’m doing it by making you do it,” Thomas said.
“You can’t make me,” Alfred said.
“The hell I can’t,” Thomas said, indignant.
“Tommy-love, you haven’t rehired him yet,” Martha reminded him.
Thomas had rules about fraternizing with staff. Thomas did not break rules. Particularly not rules about ethics. He had the kind of ironclad and unbreakable sense of right and wrong that consistently and without fail inconvenienced and annoyed the shit out of everyone around him.
Which is why Martha had fired Alfred.
Martha was very good at finding workarounds for her husband’s sense of ethics.
“Alfred,” Thomas said, his voice adopting the particular baritone of Professionalism, as if he were not still in mid-cuddle with the man. “I hear tell my wife fired you last night.”
“Yes, Mr. Wayne,” Alfred said, interrupted by a yawn. “I’m sorry to leave, of course, but I’m not a man to overstay my welcome.” His hand wandered over Martha while he could still get away with it, and she giggled.
“Between you and me,” Thomas said, “I’m afraid my wife may be suffering from her monthlies.”
Martha gasped. They could hear the fire lighting in her eyes. Immediately Alfred clamped his arms around hers.
“It may even be hysteria,” Thomas added, and he had to wrap his arms around both Alfred and Martha to keep his wife from sitting up and hitting him. Thomas could feel the subtle shaking of Alfred trying not to laugh as Martha tried to get her arms free. He was trusting Alfred enormously not to let her go, since Martha had a mean right hook and a manicure that could kill. “I’m a doctor,” he added, in case anyone had forgotten. “This is my professional doctor-man opinion.”
“I see,” Alfred said as seriously as he could, having to lean his head back toward Thomas so Martha couldn’t headbutt him.
“How about you just come on back to work,” Thomas said, “and we forget this whole thing ever happened?”
“While I can think of nothing I’d like better,” Alfred said, “if I’m going to be returning to such an unstable work environment, I will require greater compensation.”
Martha’s angry struggling was forgotten as she started to laugh.
“God damn it,” Thomas said, clearly outmaneuvered.
“Oh, Alfie, you’re marvelous,” Martha said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wayne,” he said. “One does one’s best.”
“I don’t suppose you take payment in dick?” Thomas asked, and Martha laughed again.
“I thought that was the benefits package,” Alfred said.
There was a familiar sound in the bedroom walls, a faint thump.
“Shit,” Martha said, all three of them bolting upright. “We took too long.”
Immediately and without preamble, both Waynes shoved Alfred downward and covered him with the comforter. He did not protest.
“How much do you wanna bet he’s wearing the pith helmet?” Thomas asked.
“That’s not even gambling,” Martha said with disdain.
Bruce appeared outside their bedroom window, because they’d made it too difficult for him to get in directly through the vents. He’d gotten in the habit, instead, of going through the walls and then out a decorative window, clambering across sills to get to theirs.
Martha was beginning to consider re-opening some of the secret passages into the bedroom, if only so he didn’t fall while climbing on all the architecture.
Bruce was, surprising no one, wearing his pith helmet. He was the sort of ten-year-old that believed very strongly in dressing for the occasion.
He had the window unlocked from the outside in no time at all, bending halfway through it so that he could retreat if he was seriously yelled at.
“The museum opens in an hour,” he said before they could say anything, clearly upset with their lollygagging. He was also the sort of ten-year-old that believed very strongly that ‘on time’ meant ‘a minimum of ten minutes early, but preferably more’.
“Brucie,” Martha said, her voice stern. Since she didn’t sound the kind of upset that Bruce considered dangerous, he slid inside, having the approximate weight and compressibility of a Hoberman sphere made of balsa wood. “What have I told you about breaking into our room?” The comforter was wrapped around her chest and tucked under her armpits, and she managed to make it look dignified.
“I might as well just pick the lock on the hall door,” Bruce said, as dismissive as any child repeating something he’d been told a thousand times. “This route was more efficient. And if we’re not one of the first two-hundred people in the exhibit, we don’t get the collector’s coin!” His change of subject was a flawless pivot, holding up the brochure that the museum had sent them in the mail, which of course he’d brought with him as a visual aid. He pointed at the embossed picture of the coin.
“Brucie, we’re their biggest donors,” Thomas reminded his son. “If you want a coin, all we have to do is ask.” They were technically included free at the ‘recurring five-hundred dollar donation’ level, which the Waynes far exceeded.
“That’s cheating,” Bruce said, not for the first time. “We have to get it right or else it doesn’t count.”
Bruce also had a particular sense of right and wrong, and it made his love of collecting things much more difficult than it had any right to be when his parents were billionaires.
“How,” Martha asked, “is crawling in the window a more efficient route than just taking the hall?”
Bruce huffed impatiently, lowered the brochure. “Because I went to Alfred’s room first, which is the other reason I’m here, because Alfred is missing and we need to find him because I’m not leaving without Alfred.” He stomped his foot to emphasize this point.
Thomas pressed his lips together into a thin line of not-grinning.
Martha pointed at the door. “Back to your room,” she ordered. “Dress properly, this time.”
“Mooom,” Bruce protested, putting his hands protectively on his hat. “I’m wearing it in the old-timey paleontologist way! Not the old-timey archaeologist way!”
“No one can tell that to look at you, darling, you look like a grave-robber with a mild case of syphilis.”
“Mother!”
“Go put something on that suggests you know we’re living in a society, so that your father and I can get dressed. Then we’ll all go find Mr. Pennyworth so we can go to the museum together – and we will arrive on time, when it opens and not a moment sooner. Won’t that be lovely?” She smiled, dazzling white, and Bruce knew there was no point arguing.
“Fine,” he said, dragging his feet as he headed for their bedroom door. “But if we get there, and there’s a long line and I don’t get my coin, I’m going to put on a brave face and try not to let it ruin my day because there’s so much cool stuff to see, but it’s still going to ruin my whole day, and you’re going to be able to tell because I’m bad at lying about my feelings, and then you’re going to feel bad and it’s going to ruin everyone’s day.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Martha said, because she had a much better sense than her son of exactly how many people were clamoring to get in to the obscure new exhibit on trace fossils.
“You hear that?” Thomas said when Bruce had left, lifting the comforter. “You’ve gone missing.”
“How distressing,” Alfred said, wiggling back out from underneath it. “Do you think you’ll be able to find me in time?”
“Bruce won’t rest until we have,” Martha said, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek.
“No Alfred left behind,” Thomas agreed, kissing the other.
“I suppose I should – I don’t actually need a raise,” Alfred said suddenly. “To be clear, I’m… more than happy.”
<
p>“Too late!” Thomas said, ruffling Alfred’s hair in the way he knew annoyed him, leaning over Alfred to rub noses with his wife. “You’re in a new tax bracket now and nothing can stop me.”
Neil Gaiman on protecting racial diversity in new 'American Gods' adaptation -
“Recently Gaiman shared his thoughts on “racebending” in an interview with Junot Diaz. Bleeding Cool reports that during the interview, Gaiman brought up two of his books: Anansi Boys and American Gods. Apparently Gaiman refused to the sell the rights to Anansi Boys when a producer told him he would have to change the race of the two main characters because “Black people don’t like fantasy.” Considering the entire book is about two brothers whose father was an African god, their race is vital the story and is not something Gaiman would ever consider changing.”
Yup and yup Neil.
I remember his interview from 10 years ago, when Neil could’ve sold Anansi Boys for TV or a movie a lot earlier:
Gaiman had offers to make a film out of his 2005 best seller Anansi Boys, about the sons of an African god discovering their magical background while living in the corrupt modern world, but moviemakers wanted to change the lead black characters to white or drop the magical elements altogether. “I don’t need the money,” Gaiman says. “Not needing the money puts me in a magical place because I can say no. I like the idea of having good movies made or having no movies made.”
(via slyrider)
why come they called him “beast” in the castle when everyone knew his name cuz they’d been working for him forever anyway? like …. i would just be like “hey chewbacca-Adam” or some shit, there’s no reason to call him beast … id hide in my room all day too if my employees started making fun of me..
If my manager decided to pull some rude ass shit with a witch and got me living the next ten years of my life as an immortal singing toaster oven you can bet your ass I’d wake him up every goddamn morning with a flaming panini directly to the face. rise and shine, you ugly fuck, time hear a song
I call this one, “ode to an inconsiderate pissbaby” and the first 9 verses are just me screaming at various decibels
(via fandom-adoration)
I love everything about this. David would absolutely be that guy.@jollysunflora, who suggested an AU with modern technology. Going to split this one in half to avoid one ginormous post, because this is one headcanon per book.
1. When Cassie calls out to Elfangor, Marco whispers, somewhat hysterically, “Don’t be silly. Aliens don’t speak English. Haven’t you seen District 9? Arrival? The Avengers?”
- Elfangor proves them wrong, of course, but when Marco blurts out a question he merely explains (with a hint of amusement) there are some forms of communication more sophisticated than mere words.
2. After Rachel sneaks back out of Chapman’s house, they listen intently to everything she describes.
- “So what you’re really saying,” Marco says, “Is that the yeerks have enough technology to travel between stars, create impossibly advanced illusions of just about anything, take over entire other species… And all they did with it is make Skype 3D?”
- “Yeah,” Rachel says, “but, like, good 3D. Not shitty have-to-wear-glasses 3D.”
- “Nah,” Marco concludes, “still lame.”
3. Rachel gets Tobias a smart watch. She tells him it’s so that he can keep track of their time limit, but in reality she knows he’s lonely and bored out there in the woods, and at least this way she can call him. He can answer calls and check the time if nothing else; they talk for almost an hour before bed every night.
4. With Ax’s help, they turn off location and tracking and wifi and cookies on their phones. After that, there are a lot fewer meetings in Cassie’s barn, a lot more group messages with carefully coded content. Tobias proves to have something of a knack for coming up with ways to talk about yeerk plans (usually disguised as discussions of video game or movie plots), suggestions of morphs slipped into long-winded anecdotes that happen to mention a single animal species by name, and meeting locations’ coordinates as extra phone numbers added to the group chat with no actual phones connected. Jake encourages them not to talk in person, once their phones are secure from traces, because it’s safer this way.
5. After they get back from the mission, Marco spends almost two hours scrolling through Eva’s Facebook page, forever set to In Memoriam. The messages still come in sometimes, from friends and coworkers and distant family members Marco has never met; as the page admin, he filters them all.
- So much wasted grief, he thinks. So much pain and loss and longing, all of it caused by the yeerks. Sound and fury, all over a death that never happened. Helpless and sick, he writes on her wall one last time: “I love you, Mom. I miss you. I WILL find a way to help.” And then he deletes the page.
6. “Don’t send anyone to Jake’s house,” Marco says, “it’s too risky. Instead, we just have Jake…” He gestures at Ax. “Video-call his parents a few times a night to reassure them that he’s still doing just fine working on that project at my house and not…” He gestures to Jake, who is currently tied to a chair with zip-ties using a technique Marco found on a Pinterest tutorial.
- “Of all the stupid ideas you’ve come out with so far, that has got to be the stupidest,” Temrash 114 says in Jake’s voice. “Do you seriously think my parents won’t notice anything off about Ax? How clueless do you think they are?”
- “They never noticed your sorry ass living in their house for over four months,” Marco says coldly.
- In the end, it works, more or less. Jake doesn’t exactly appreciate the long lecture about communication when he finally gets home, but no one asks whether he was replaced by an alien so at least there’s that.
- The next day, Tom’s inbox displays a single new email from an anonymous sender.
7. Rachel’s Instagram account is, in many ways, its own work of art. She copies down famous quotes onto post-it notes with swirling writing, multicolored pens, and even tiny illustrations crammed between the words. She has over 5,000 followers, and she doesn’t even think about how much she’s lost interest in the project until one of her mutuals messages her to ask when she’ll start posting again. She opens her account and realizes that she hasn’t posted any new photos in almost a month, and stares at the multipack of micro-tip Sharpies on her desk for a few minutes before she shuts her laptop without responding.
MM1. They don’t worry about Rachel not texting them back—after all, her gymnastics camp is way off in the mountains and it’s entirely possible she doesn’t have a cell signal there. It’s not until Ax tracks down her phone and finds it abandoned in her bag next to the bus stop that they all start to worry.
- There’s a weird incident with a tornado at Darlene’s house in the middle of the Rachel crisis, but after the twenty-third different cell phone video of the incident gets uploaded to YouTube, the bizarre dust storm made of tiny mouths disappears into thin air and no one hears about it again.
8. “I don’t think I can do yeerk pool reconnaissance tonight,” Rachel says. “Too much homework.”
- Ax sighs loudly. «Boo, you whore.»
- There’s a very long pause, and then Tobias says, «Okay, that’s it, I’m deleting your tablet’s Netflix app.»
- «I much prefer YouTube anyway,» Ax says cheerfully. «It has those shorter messages which play before the main video, and often concisely describe goods or services you can purchase through the use of bitcoins or other human currency. Did you know that those messages change so that their information reflects your preferences for different types of internet content? So informative! So considerate!»
9. The six of them spend over nine hours in the woods, morphing and demorphing and morphing and demorphing to try and keep their phones with them. It shouldn’t be that different from morphing minimal clothing, especially not when (for instance) Rachel has her phone taped tightly to the inside of her arm, but even Cassie can’t manage it. By the end of the exercise they’re exhausted, frustrated, and still short one solution for how to prevent Jake’s parents from freaking out when he regularly goes for several hours at a time without texting them.
10. “It’s really simple,” Marco says. “When it comes to resources, there’s a clear power difference here. I mean, seriously. If you only had to bet on one horse, wouldn’t you bet on the one that owns half the planet?”
- “It’s not about who has more toys.” Jake shakes his head. “It’s about doing what’s right. And sometimes that means breaking the law.”
- Marco throws up his hands. “There’s nothing right about Captain America starting a freaking war just because he doesn’t like Iron Man’s law! Anyway, what does he hope to accomplish outside of tearing the Avengers apart? He’s got, what, Hercules, Ronan, half a dozen other B-listers on his team? Does he seriously think he can take on Black Widow and Ms. Marvel and like 700 Thunderbolts?”
- Jake rolls his eyes. “I think you’re forgetting that the Anti-Reg team has Luke Cage, Black Panther, Storm, and Daredevil. Sometimes the battle itself is worth fighting, because the alternative is allowing a huge injustice to stand. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you—”
- “Don’t go quoting the River of Truth speech at me. We were having a perfectly civil conversation here!”
11. Rachel uploads a cell phone video of Jake and Cassie square-dancing to Facebook. Jake leaves dire warnings in the comments section, but Cassie gives it a thumbs-up and he stops threatening to murder his cousin.
12. “It’ll be okay,” Cassie mutters, “Just as long as my mom doesn’t start talking about Nice With Altruism.”
- “What’s Nice With Altruism?” Rachel asks.
- “You know, that one band with the initials NWA? The one whose iTunes album popped up on my mom’s credit card bill?”
- Rachel’s eyes widen in comprehension. “Cassie, you minx!”
13. Tobias becomes a grand master at taking out drones. Each time he manages to snatch one out of the air he immediately dives, hurling it toward the ground at the last second as he flares and swoops away from the metal and plastic exploding on the pavement below. Afterwards, he brings the broken pieces to Ax for dissection like a housecat bringing home kills to a proud parent. Some are yeerk (spy cameras or hunter-tracker bots), some are purely human (neither of them exactly feels guilty about destroying some rich creepers’ toys) and some are disguised as human devices but with yeerk tech inside (“like a human-controller!” Marco says, and no one laughs at his joke). The yeerks notice that their spy bots disappear all the time, of course, but can’t do anything about it short of sending an entire helicopter to check on that one section of woods.
14. After Cassie posts her first and only Facebook selfie, brand-new Aeropostale outfit and all, Marco writes a fifteen-sentence treatise in the comments section to the blinding power of her beauty, which has stabbed him through the heart following this magnificent transformation.
- “How much money did Rachel add to your Steam Wallet to get you to do that?” Cassie asks him in Messenger.
- “$10,” Marco tells her. “Would have done it for $5.”
- Jake, meanwhile, likes Cassie’s photo. After a minute he goes back and changes the thumbs-up to a heart. Then he panics, and changes the “love” back to a “like.”
15. “So we can’t morph brain-control chips,” Rachel says, “and we can’t morph cell phones. Maybe it’s just that we’re not allowed to morph technology?”
- «That doesn’t make sense at all,» Ax says.
- “Do you have a better explanation?” Marco snaps, more harshly than he means to.
- «No,» Ax admits.
- Rachel claps her hands. “All right, then. That’s the one we’re going with.”
16. “I lost my phone,” Jake tells his mom for the third time that year. This time around he’s even telling the truth. Nevertheless, she grounds him. He sneaks out anyway. She grounds him more when she catches him, and he waits until the middle of the night before he once again sneaks out. He starts timing their fights so that, when he has to disappear from all text contact, she mistakes it for the silent treatment. He hates himself a little more every time it happens.
17. “Send help!” Marco texts. “I told my dad that I bought so much oatmeal because it was gluten free, and now he has us BOTH on this stupid fad diet.”
18. When getting new shoes, new clothes, or food on the fly, Ax always buys for them. He does something with his home computer that allows him to literally make his own bitcoins, and so for now the limits of his bank account are nearly infinite. One of these days he’s going to get his accounts shut down by the NSA, but for now he’s (as Marco says) their sugar daddy.
MM2. “You know what’s not fair?” Marco calls over the building storm.
- Jake sighs. “The fact that we’re out here at all?”
- “No!” Marco gestures over at where Rachel and Cassie have both kicked off their boots—Uggs and Timberlands, respectively—and are starting to morph with the rest of their clothes still on. “How come girls get to wear yoga pants and camisoles in public, while if guys tried that same look we’d be the laughingstock of Reddit in less than an hour?”
- “Because,” Rachel calls back, voice dangerously sweet, “if we’re not going to get equal pay, reproductive rights, the ability to choose our own standards of appearance, or a say in Congress, then the least we deserve are a few consolation prizes.”
19. The Amber alert for Cassie and Karen floods the town, and for the next ten days until they’re found, the rumors fly throughout the school. Brittany’s friend Alice heard on their school’s message board that Cassie killed herself. T.T. was texting Andy, who said that Beth’s mom works for the school and she heard that Cassie kidnapped Karen. An anonymous tip to the local police website posts a blurry photo of what appears to be a half-eaten body with some hysterical story about an escaped jaguar.
- Rachel punches her classmate Allison for sharing a post which speculates that Cassie ran away from home to marry a guy twice her age she met on Tinder. Allison tattles immediately, since (she tearfully tells Chapman) it’s not like she wrote the post; she was just sharing it.
- Jake’s science teacher confiscates his phone after she catches him using it to watch a video in class. However, after she discovers that he’s live-streaming footage of a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, she decides it’s probably educational and gives the phone back without even a demerit.
- An anonymous post to their school’s confession board shows a cropped photo of Cassie, with text written over it: “Apparently, you have to disappear into thin air to get noticed around here. I wish someone would pay this much attention to me.” Rachel recognizes the handwriting as Melissa Chapman’s.
20. David leans in close to whisper to Marco. “It’s cool, see? I figured out how to make sales on the dark web using information I got off my dad’s computer, and once I had a buyer I just emailed the guy to negotiate—”
- “You sent him an email?” Marco’s voice gets a lot higher. “From your home computer? Please tell me you’re not actually that stupid.”
- Later that afternoon, the Animorphs assemble in the bushes outside David’s house. «The yeerks have his location, and they’re coming now,» Jake tells them. «So we break in, grab who we can, and run for it.» He hesitates, and then adds, «If we can only save one, the priority is David.»
21. Jake is mid-mission on CounterStrike with David, not actually giving a damn about firing imaginary weapons at imaginary terrorists but trying to bond with the new guy in TeamSpeak, when David says, “Man, that carry. You’re awesome at this! I bet you’re way better than Rachel, and she was bragging up and down about allegedly knowing shooters so well. I hate fake geek girls like that, always talking about their lame records. It’s like, go back to Animal Crossing!”
- Jake straightens up in his seat, not even noticing when blood fills the center of the screen as he meets a messy end. “Actually,” he says slowly, “Rachel kicks my butt every time we play this. She’s right that she’s got a knack for it.”
- “Ouch.” David laughs. “Must hurt, getting owned by a girl.”
- Jake forces a laugh of his own. “Yeah, but at least she doesn’t gloat about it like Marco does.”
- “Last time a girl thought she could beat me at this game, I doxxed the shit out of her.”
- “You did what?” Jake demands.
- “Chill. It’s not like I hurt her or anything. Me—and a bunch of other guys who got her info—were just sending the message that we saw through her bullshit and we weren’t going to stand for it. Not my fault she was too lazy to VPN. She probably even learned something from the experience.”
- Jake doesn’t say anything. He feels a little sick to his stomach.
- David laughs, too high, too late. “I’m kidding, man. Kidding. I wouldn’t actually do that. Swatting, on the other hand…” There’s something calculating in the tone of his voice. “Better watch out, man. If you have a dog, the cops shoot it on their way in the door. Just saying.”
- “I should probably get to bed,” Jake says.
- “Jeez, I’m still joking! Come on, can’t you take a stupid joke?”
- “Apparently not.” Jake quits the game before he gets a response.
22. Rachel comes out of the bathroom to find her phone has a text alert telling her that she has several new picture messages. The most recent photo—the first one she sees—isn’t sent to her phone, but sent from it. It just shows a tiny bit of the curve of her back and her head wrapped in a towel, but it was taken less than five minutes ago.
- Hands shaking, face dead-white but fists clenched in rage, she scrolls up through the photos. All are of her, most taken from oblique angles. When she gets to the first one taken, of Jordan still asleep in bed some time last night, she has to run back into the bathroom to puke her guts out into the toilet.
- “How do you like me now?” says the accompanying text message.
- “I will tear your fucking head off with my claws, and I will enjoy it,” she sends back to David.
23. For his fourteenth birthday, Rachel gets Tobias a tablet which has been specially adapted to be easier for people with arthritis to use; after some experimentation, she and Cassie have figured out it’s not that hard to use with a beak and talons. He downloads Rick Riordan and Scott Westerfeld novels to read when he gets bored during the day. At night, he’ll often put on Ellie Goulding’s music, turned down so low that it would be undetectable to human ears, and he’ll fall asleep to the soft flow of her voice.
24. “If you couldn’t even be bothered to take a picture of the thing, can you at least tell me what kind of toy space ship we’re talking about?” the guy in the shop says. “Rogue One? Endurance? Axiom?”
- “Sort of like the Prometheus,” Rachel says, “with those engines on the sides?”
- “Yeah, but with a big thruster in the back like Serenity has,” Jake adds. “And flat on top, like…”
- “Like a helicarrier!” Cassie suggests.
- “Yep.” The guy nods. “I know exactly which one you mean.”
25. “Jeremiah,” Marco says. “What a beautiful name for a beautiful young man.”
- Jeremiah looks a little startled, but he leans against the locker door anyway to look at Marco through his eyelashes. “Do you like organic food truck rallys?” he asks.
- “I love organic food truck rallys!” Marco enthuses.
- Later, he googles “food trux rallie + organic” to find out what he just got himself into.
- “So much gluten free quinoa!” he texts Jake an hour into the date. “Such cultural appropriation! SO MANY FAUX HIPPIES! Send help.”
- Jake, being the true bro that he is, fakes an emergency call and rescues Marco from the granola overdose.
26. “I don’t think I like this section of Minecraft very much,” Marco says shakily.
- Jake rubs a tired hand over his face, looking around the brilliantly stacked Iskoort world for any sign of Howlers. “Same. I could kill for a cup of black coffee right now. And I don’t even like the taste of coffee.”
- Rachel turns around, slowly taking in his artistically-faded designer shorts and flannel-patterned t-shirt. “You are such an incredible hipster I cannot believe we’re even related,” she says.
27. “So,” Jake asks as they head for the beach, “What do we know about giant squids so far?”
- «Apparently,» Ax says, «giant squids are gay. Not just a subset of the population as would normally occur, but every single member of the species. Which raises several fascinating questions about their system of reproduction, and has important implications for our understanding of squid gender. However, the source of this information also informed me repeatedly that giant squids had copulated with my mother, which leads me to believe that this was partially a case of mistaken identity.»
- There is a very long pause. Tobias becomes the one to break it. «Ax, buddy, where did you go to look for information about giant squids?»
- «Initially, I posted an inquiry to an online platform known as Reddit which frequently encourages questions. However, I was then approached by several individuals from a website called 4Chan…»
- «Do me a favor and please don’t judge our entire species based on anything you saw there,» Tobias begs.
- They walk for several more minutes in shocked silence, and then Marco says, “O-kay! Who wants to know what I learned about giant squids off Wikipedia?”
I am still INTERNALLY SCREAMING at Ax saying «Boo, you whore,» oh my GOD
(via skymurdock)
