"Imagine what we could do next. Four more years. Pause."
— Joe Biden, https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1783184198477508785Isekai: 3.6
She held up a hand to ward off my angry outburst. “I can’t go there any more, and I don’t know why.”
She slumped into the nearest chair like a person, not a professional temptress. Without the Manic Pixie Fuck Bunny pose, she wasn’t the redhead I remembered. Not necessarily someone I’d like, and definitely not someone I’d trust, but I thought I was seeing something real.
“I found it a long time ago. I don’t know what Power created it, but it felt abandoned, unused. It was my refuge when I needed one, my ‘fortress of solitude’. I kept it a secret from the others, and was careful never to leave behind any trace that I’d been there, that it mattered to me. We weren’t… nice to each other.”
“Angel said you broke their toys.”
She laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’m horrible to everybody, especially the new ones. We’re the meanest pack of Mean Girls in the universe, and we never grow up or grow old, but sometimes we get replaced.”
“When I got back from my last job, there were three new girls. I’d never seen that many at once before. All of them older than your sweet Angel, sexier than your weird little hybrid Ariel. Sexier than me, which meant my days were numbered. I ran away to my safe place, and found something I never thought I’d need: a hero.”
Isekai: 3.5
Her panic receded a bit. “That’s… surprisingly accurate. We’re not those Muses, of course, and not all about poetry and music and such. Although I make an awesome groupie.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you do. Maybe I should have said Catalyst, or in your case, Succubus. Whatever you call yourselves, your job is to make men change. Inspire, tempt, seduce, distract, mother, annoy, whatever it takes. You pick a target, or someone does, and then you show up in his life again and again, pushing him in a certain direction. And when you’re not around, he forgets you. Mostly.”
“Holy shit, you really have been with Angel for three years.”
I found clothes laid out on a table, and started getting dressed. “Every hour of every day, and you’re taking me back to her, now.”
“I can’t.”
Pixiv: "by the original creator"
The most common usage of 本家 you’ll hear in anime is “main house”, as in the place from which distant patriarchs arrange marriages and summon disobedient underlings for punishment. On Pixiv, it generally refers to artwork created officially for a book, game, show, or a Youtuber, drawn by a professional artist.
It’s a good way to go trolling for some really well-done images, generally less explicit than the fan-art. In fact, pretty much all of these ended up outside the NSFW tag, and even the ones that went in were pretty tame, with mostly-mild violations of my PEEN (pose, exposure, emphasis, nipples) rule.
Isekai: 3.4
The names hit her like fists, and she dropped the tray in shock. She hadn’t known they were there, had never heard the names I’d given them, but I could see the recognition in her eyes.
“I came back for you as soon as I could. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
“It was thirteen years. The first ten alone, then most of three years with Angel; Ariel joined us a few months ago.”
“I don’t understand. How could you have been there for so long? How could they have even gotten in? How could you have given them real names? Do you even know what we are?”
She was honestly bewildered, and there was panic rising in her voice. She’d walked in certain she was holding a Royal Flush, only to find out we were playing Twister.
“Yeah, I think I finally do. Seeing you drop the slutty valkyrie act was the last piece in the puzzle.”
“You’re a Muse.”
Isekai: 3.3
Ariel suddenly burst into tears and began wailing, a high-pitched, hopeless sound. She was horny, not stupid, and had followed the same chain of logic I had, but to a different conclusion: she was the one who’d be abandoned. Again. We both scrambled to comfort her, ending up in a three-way hug, promising to stay together and somehow make it work.
When I woke the next morning, they were gone. Or maybe they were still there, together, because I was definitely gone. The satin sheets were a pretty big clue, and I had a feeling I knew who they belonged to. Sure enough, my least-favorite favorite redhead showed up as if I’d just rubbed her lamp, carrying a tray full of something she probably thought was breakfast.
Surprisingly, she was fully dressed. I wasn’t, but I’d been bathed and shaved, and all the little scars I’d picked up over the years were gone, like it had all been a bad dream.
She looked at me like she was expecting praise, and I was happy to disappoint her. “Take me back.”
“Wait, what? I told you, I resurrected you to be a hero. There’s no going back, you’re dead there.”
“Not to Earth, to the place where you really found me. The rock in the forest, in the world without people. The world with the only people I care about.”
“Take me back to Angel and Ariel.”
She’s back!
Gastro-astronomy
Dick Blick Ships Quick
No, I’m not buying art supplies now, but the combination of Brickmuppet’s recent Seussian links and Nespresso’s order fulfillment brought that old slogan to mind for some reason; my dad was a regular customer when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of their catalog.
As I’ve started to develop some ability to discriminate between the various available coffee pods, I’ve taken advantage of their new-customer offers to round out my stash. I now have more of Nespresso’s little jewel-like pods than I have of my precious Gevalia Mocha Latte K-cups, although they get consumed faster due to the general lack of calories; two Splendas and a Calf don’t add up to much. So far, Capriccio is the only one I can almost drink black.
Anyway, the order I placed Saturday morning not only arrived before noon on Monday, the pod sleeves were actually all carefully lined up so that all the labels faced the same way when I opened the box. A small touch, but like the free express shipping, a sign that they’re really focused on the customer experience. Important when their closest retail boutique is a good sixty miles away and their branded pods aren’t stocked in any stores near me.
Peet’s has the only good third-party pods in grocery stores, as far as I can tell. I found Illy pods in the Williams-Sonoma at the south end of Monterey, but that mall’s a rare destination for me, and not a place I’d go to stock up on consumables anyway; I only went in out of idle curiousity since I was in the area.
Great Red Spot
I’m not the Instagram-y sort to post pictures of all my food, but it amuses me to post the combined output of my three electric coffee appliances. I hereby present the Mocha-Latte/Red-Eye/Macchiato, in my 20-ounce Bosmarlin mug:
That’s a Peet’s Crema Scura espresso pod, 2 Splenda packets, a 12-ounce strong pour through a Mocha Latte k-cup with the froth packet already stirred into the espresso, topped with 60ml of whole milk run through the foam-as-a-service gadget on its “Latte Macchiato” setting (yes, vibration control seems to be the key to using less than the recommended minimum volume). ~125 k-cals.
Normally I do 14 ounces through the k-cup and add two Calfs, but I figured the milk I needed to use up would compensate, and it did. Previous attempts to add a 40ml espresso shot and a full 100ml of foamed milk on top of that had proved too substantial, both for the mug and for the first drink of the day, so I was up for expanding my FAAS testing parameters.
Send moar spiders, plz
Unrelated silliness from Hoyt.
Isekai: 3.2
It was Angel’s temper that broke first, shoving us both into an icy mountain stream. Mind you, she’d had to trick us into going ten miles out of our way so that there was ice water to be shoved into, but her anger had been building up for weeks.
Central to the epic rant she delivered while we shivered around a fire was the fact that Ariel was obviously going into heat for the first time in her life, and it was obviously my fault because I’d named her.
Guilty as charged, sure, and after the cold shower it was obvious to me, too, but identifying the problem didn’t solve it. Ariel was a cat, and she couldn’t stop being a cat.
But we could stop being together, the three of us. The thought chilled me in a way the fire couldn’t touch.
Isekai: 3.1
Ariel was physically about 17, emotionally about 7, and intellectually a cat chasing a laser pointer. Bright and clever, sure, but severely ADHD. She’d bonded with Angel early in both of their lives, but had been separated from the others a long time ago. Since they never changed physically, they didn’t know how long she’d been alone, but I got the feeling it was longer than I’d been alive. Maybe a lot longer.
Her presence disrupted our comfortable routine. No, that’s not accurate. She disrupted me, with her eagerness for physical contact and her sleek, sexy body. She craved affection, rubbing against us every day and sleeping between us every night. And the fur that covered her just enough for modesty (mine; she didn’t have any) was so soft it got me going even when she wasn’t pressing her firm breasts against me. And she purred; oh, god, the purring.
What made it even harder was that she clearly approved of my interest, and openly flirted and teased. Only Angel’s increasingly-silent presence was keeping me from trying for a piece of tail, and something had to break.
