☆Iris☆

Sit with me a moment and think. Imagine, if you will.  What if you were in Bloomington, Indiana? What if you were a Junior there, just barely entering your third and hardest year of your entire educational career thus far. And what if in your English class, there was this one dude who was always burning holes into the side of your head with his eyes?

You don’t have to imagine. Because you’re there, sitting down and staring blankly at your notebook, trying to ignore the very real and very uncomfortable gaze of Ziggy Katz. 

Oh, you know lots about him. Not by choice, either. He has ten thousand (twenty thousand? Five thousand? You can’t bother to keep track) followers on Hi-Hat. He writes at least two songs a week, plays for a global audience, and is verified and featured; which, in his words, is terahard to get. Those are things you know about him because he’s told you. What you know about him that you can read from a mile away? That’s a different story.

He’s an arrogant, cocky, egotistical, self-obsessed, stupidly pretentious and pretentiously stupid himbo. With a face he doesn’t deserve. 

That’s why you’re not at all surprised, but very much irked, when he catches up to you as soon as the bell rings. 

“What are you gonna do for your essay?” He asks lightly, hands fiddling with his backpack straps as he takes long strides beside you.

You take a deep breath and shrug. You’d been too focused on stewing in your dislike for Ziggy that you forgot to actually listen to the teacher’s criteria for the assignment. You know that it was something about difficult decisions, but after that you started tuning out. Still, you didn’t ask what he was going to do in fear of launching him into one of his signature monologues.

“I think I know what I’m doing,” He supplied anyway, drawing out a subtle groan from you. “I’m going to write about this one time when I had to choose between two totally different songs to play first on my stream. They were both so good, it was, like, tearing me apart.”

“I’m sure it was,” you muttered sarcastically, though he didn’t seem to pick up on the tone.

“Totally. Anyway, I think it’s gonna be great. Do you have any plans for tomorrow night?” He adds suddenly, making you quirk an eyebrow.

“Other than banging my head against the wall trying to write my essay?” 

He laughs airily. “Yeah, other than that.”

“…No…?” 

It makes you wince to say it, because you really don’thave anything to do tomorrow night. You don’t have anything to do so much that you can’t even make something up, and you swear you feel like you just failed a quick-time event.

“Great! You should come down to Revolutionary Arts and see me play.” He offers you a toothy grin, one that has you cursing your heart for daring to flutter at it.

“Right.” you say slowly, nodding even slower at him with critical eyes. “Why?”

He scoffs jokingly. “Because it’ll be fun! Come on, tell me you have anything better to do.”

You sigh. It’s long and drawn out. 

“Exactly. Now will you please come?” He pleads dramatically. 

You pray to God for strength, which is unusual for you because you’re agnostic. Then, going against everything in your right mind, you let out a very unenthusiastic “Fine.”

“Great! Doors open at five thirty, I’ll be up at six. We should swap numbers!”

You blink hard, grimacing slightly. 

“Okay, fine, whatever.” You mumble, yanking your phone from your pocket and letting him do all the work after you unlock it.

🛸✨💫🛸✨💫

After letting your backpack drop unceremoniously to the floor, you flop onto your bed face first, complaining darkly into the pillows.

“I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life,” you chant, feeling the mattress rebound slightly in response to the sudden drop.

Propping yourself up on your elbows, you glare at your ceiling.

“Can I please get abducted by aliens or something so I don’t have to hear Ziggy play at six tomorrow?” 

It’s a joke, an unfunny one at best, but you find yourself mildly hoping that it’ll actually happen.

Before you have time to dwell on it, however, you force yourself up and walk over to your abandoned backpack to dig up the homework you need to do tonight.

🛸✨💫🛸✨💫

Revolutionary Arts is, to say the least, pompous. Not visually, oh lord no. Visually, it’s a cluttered mess of overlapping posters and graffiti with lighting dark enough to half hide all the stains of mystery fluid that cover most surfaces. The kind of place that labels itself as indie and authentic when in reality it’s just a biohazard and a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The pompous part comes from the people, ironically. The politically obsessive crowd; the ones that debate about obscure world issues at lunch as if reading a couple of untrustworthy articles magically makes you well-informed. 

It’s not that talking politics is a crime. Obviously it’s important and contributes to just about everything in life. But that doesn’t mean you need or want to be hearing about whether it’s morally right or wrong to be growing zucchini in your backyard, especially at eight in the morning. (Which has actually happened once. That’s what ‘obscure world issues’ means.)

You recoil a couple times as you weave through the crowd, dodging splashes of flying drinks as people haphazardly emphasize their conversation with their hands. You honestly don’t know why you’re here, putting yourself through hell for somebody you can’t even begin to like.

It’s only when you hear your name being called that you realize you’re scowling. You turn toward the familiar voice, forcing your face into a less scary expression.

“Ziggy,” you greet as neutrally as possible.

“Hey! Glad you could make it. Cool place, right? So authentic.”

“Uh-huh…” you narrow your eyes slightly at the thin layer of jungle juice on the warped linoleum floor. Authentic.

“Hey, before I go on, I wanted to take you outside for a minute, if that’s okay,” He says with a—is that a nervous smile? 

You’ve never known Ziggy to be nervous. Obnoxious, annoying, oblivious, absolutely. But seeing him fiddle with his thumbs is like spotting a UFO.

“Oh—why?” You tilt your head, shoving your hands into the pockets of your jacket. 

“Uh, I have some time before I go up, and I wanted to play you a song.”

“A song?” You repeat, arching an eyebrow.

He rocks back and forth on his feet, nodding. “Yeah, it’s, like, tera exclusive. Just you and me.”

Your lips pull down and both eyebrows raise in contemplation—you’re actually considering this. Why? Since when do you do what he asks? This has been a very weird day.

“Okay,” you say finally, feeling like it fell out of your mouth without permission.

“Cool,” he says, reaching forward to grab your arm and lead you around people and tables towards the back. You let him.

As you two climb the half set of stairs, he pushes open the door and a blinding strip of light floods through, making you squint. He walks through and you follow, staring at where he’s holding your hand.

He only lets go so that he can slide his beige guitar case off his back, gesturing for you to sit down on the bench.

You don’t know for sure whether you’re feeling excited or apprehensive, but you tell yourself it’s the latter to keep up with the narrative you’ve built for yourself. You do not like Ziggy.

You bend your knees and plop down on the bench, watching him unzip and reveal his guitar, slinging the strap over his head. He takes a deep breath, beginning to strum a few chords. 

Just as he’s opening his mouth to sing, a strange whirring sound breaks his focus, interrupting the moment. You look around for the source, expecting to see one of those electric cars barreling down the street, or a scooter on the sidewalk, or even a drone passing by. But you see nothing, and the noise just gets louder and louder. 

“You hear that, right?” You ask, stilling checking around. 

“Yeah…” he says dumbly, looking straight up at the sky. 

You pull a face for a moment, but then you see him slowly point a finger up. 

“What…Oh.”

You look up as well, and what you see makes you speechless. Every belief you did and didn’t and maybe held is on the floor and wheezing through a punctured lung as you gaze up at the bright blue luminescence like a deer caught in, well, UFO lights.

”Holy shit.”

The baggiest parts of your clothes, along with your hair, stand up on end, and you start to feel weightless. Your eyes dart to Ziggy, and the same thing is happening to him. You don’t move. It’s not that you can’t, it’s rather like every want and urge to move is artificially replaced with the desire to stay put.

Jesus fuck, this is cool. And terrifying. Very terrifying.

Your legs lift up off of the bench, your shoes leaving the ground shortly after with a slight scrape. The higher you ascend, the more your eyelids droop. You fight hard to keep them open,  but eventually your body succumbs to whatever sci-fi induced sleep they’re putting you into.

The very last glimpse you catch before you go under is of Ziggy’s limp form, arms and legs hanging loosely as if being pulled up by strings. His guitar is still on him.

🛸✨💫🛸✨💫

A/N #2: hope ygs enjoyed! There will be a part two out soon I promise 🫶 also by the ‘obscure world issues’ part I do not mean to say that Lila and her friends were talking about politics that don’t matter in the movie, those issues DO matter a lot. I was just trying to highlight how pretentious and annoying the place is so I hope that came across. Anyways love you (each and every one of you specifically) and I hope you have a good day/night!!

🛸✨💫🛸✨💫

See? Cool, right? Anyways, let’s move on to:

Picture rolls

you might have seen these before in fics. Two or three pictures of the character or of aesthetic shots. I like using these a lot, especially because they’re another easy way to spruce things up.

I like using Pinterest for this. Basically all you need to do is look for your character or the color you’re going for (I usually base my fic color off of my chosen song card. More on that later). Searches like “[character] aesthetic”, “relationship aesthetic”, or “green aesthetic” will help you out a lot. You only need about three pictures that you like.

from here, you can copy and paste your pictures into Tumblr. (Double or right click on the image, select ‘copy’, then paste or press control + v.) Alternatively, you can also download or save your pictures to your library, and upload them that way. Either works fine.

if you want them to be side by side, simply drag and drop them so that they are all in a horizontal line.

Sometimes Tumblr acts up and they can appear in their biggest versions (not side by side) when you post it or save the draft. I fix this by going into the edit mode again and dragging them so that they’re how I want them to be. Then I’ll take a screenshot of them, crop it to the necessary margins, and put that in instead of the actual pictures.

if you want to add something for the pictures, you can say something like ‘images sourced from Pinterest; credit to the original owners.’ Though it’s not always necessary.

Not happy with the color of the picture but still want to use it? You can use Canva’s photo editor to tweak the colors of your picture how you like it.

Song cards

These are very easy to use. All you have to do for these is to copy the link to your chosen song on Spotify and paste it into Tumblr. It will automatically pop up into a song card with a background color.

This background color is usually taken from somewhere in the album cover, so if you have a song with a blue album cover, the background color will be blue. (You can also double check by looking at the lyrics, if the song has that available. The color for the lyrics page, if it’s working, will be the same as the card.)

if you want to include a specific song but the color wasn’t what you were going for, you can also hyperlink the song over text with the song and artist name. Example: Happy Birthday - Finn Wolfhard (I used a yt short link but you get the idea)

Kaomojis ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

Using kaomojis is also very simple. This seems to be a theme, doesn’t it? Anyway, there are plenty of ways to get your kaomojis. Which are these things, by the way. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

One, you can look up #kaomoji or #kaomojis on tumblr. Lots of awesome resources here!

Two, there are websites for kaomojis and cute combinations that you can copy and paste. (Or even make your own!)

Kaomojis are probably the simplest way to make things pretty. They’re literally copy/paste symbols, and work on most formats.

Colorized text

At last, the moment we’ve been waiting for! This is probably the hardest decoration technique of the ones that I’ve talked about, but don’t let that fool you—all of these are pretty easy!

First, you need a colorizing site. You can just look up ‘colorize text’ and a few will pop up. Along with tutorials! Most tutorials will link resources, including color pickers and the like.

Next, type or paste in the text that you want to colorize in the relevant box.

Pick the colors that you want the text to be.

There are also drop-down menus on some colorizers that give you options for the gradient.

The text should pop up at the bottom as what looks like code. Because that’s what it is! If the site gives you two boxes, one for your forum and the other for your website, choose the website version.

Copy that text, then open a new draft in Tumblr. (Not the post you are intending to use it in. Trust me for a sec!)

In your new draft, click the gear icon.

It will pull up a list of settings. Click on text editor.

From there, click the drop down and select HTML. Exit the settings menu.

Now you can paste your code into the draft!

Once you have your text in, click preview. Your text should be colorized now! From here, feel free to make the text bold, italic, bigger or smaller.

All you have to do now is copy/paste the preview text into your intended post, and you should be good to go!

I hope this helps you out with your fic endeavors, and I’m so excited to see what you do! If you have any problems or questions, please feel free to ask or troubleshoot with me whenever! So much love,