Ominous squeaky shoues

platonic appreciation day. because we all need to appreciate each other platonically more often! hug your friends tell them you love them platonically!!!

and the day? february 28th! a whole 2 weeks after valentines day!

live laugh love. throw romance and sex out the window for once, god damn it! be just friends with people for a bit :)

stan and dipper are locked away in their own apartment in the fearamid and have very little contact with ford and mabel. stan and dipper are basically just baggage bill has to deal with in order to uphold his end of the deal with ford, pawns he's not able to sacrifice so he has to keep them in bullshit plays just to sustain the game. they're little more than bargaining chips and bill does the bare minimum for them. ford and mabel really only see them at "parties" and even then it's under bill's close observation, limiting how they're able to communicate with each other.

i will admit i've spent more mental energy working thru ford, mabel, and gideon's story lines than stan and dipper's, so those are works in progress and i'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts!

but ford and mabel live in the penthouse suit together, with mabel being sent off to hang out with gideon whenever bill wants alone time with ford. there isn't much to do in the penthouse, though, since it's a glorified cage, and the entertainment pieces there are are meant for bill and ford. so they spend their time with ford teaching mabel how to play chess and how to play piano. unfortunately this really eats into ford's escape planning time, because if ford isn't helping her there isn't anything mabel can do to entertain herself (no sheet music for the piano for her to practice with, she doesn't know enough chess to play solitaire, she doesn't dare look out the window).

(aside: i said it in the tags of another post, but i'll repeat it in the main body here since it seems apropos: bill's goal is to get ford to snap, and the lack of entertainment outside of what ford can do with bill is intentional.)

How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard. 

it is easy to envy the shifter who runs with canid grace and flies on borrowed bones who hears metaphor in whalesong and drinks deep ultraviolet radiance

but what of the loss of such gifts with every shift?

we, landbound, tasting flight with our eyes forever cast skyward mourn every pang of loss upon waking from that dream of wing and loft and break

so how must the shifter feel?

with a thousand phantom limbs a hundred phantom senses mourning loss of seal language when in a form without ears doleful glare at sweet berries while a carnivoran tongue cannot taste its kiss hot tea left un-drunk in a garden where eyes no longer reach the full spectrum