The people of West Ham often forgot that Allie Pressman and Sam Eliot were cousins. Actually, the people of West Ham usually forgot about them period. If they did think about them, it was only ever as Cassandra’s sister and the deaf kid, not as actual people. But Sam and Allie had grown up together, they were cousins, they understood each other in a way that no one else could. Sam knew how Allie both loved and hated the relative safety of Cassandra’s shadow, knew how easily her parents overlooked her in favour of their perfect, and sick, eldest daughter. Allie knew how Sam felt like his parents never saw beyond his deafness and sexuality, and just how terrified of his brother he really was. But they weren’t just cousins — after all, Cassandra and Campbell were their cousins too. No, Sam and Allie were best friends and had been for their entire lives and that? That changes everything.
Welcome to my The Society fic series, City Is A Graveyard! Who We Were Then is the first of five fics in the series, and it’s a pre-canon AU in which Sam and Allie are best friends as well as cousins! Basically, it was born from me going (and I quote) “Listen you’d can’t give me a traumatized teenager with sibling issues and imposter syndrome and a traumatized teenager who’s gay and deaf and have them be family and expect me to care about anything else ever”, especially when you throw in Lord Of The Flies on top of that!
Rest assured, Becca is still the iconic best friend we know and love (to both Sam & Allie), Will is still one of Allie’s closest friends, Grizz is always everyone’s favourite, and we’ll still have plenty of pre-Hallie goodness (leading into full Hallie in later fics), but I was disappointed by how few fics I could find that really explored the Pressman-Eliot family, so here we are!
I will eventually make introductions for each fic in the series (and hopefully I’ll get to writing it soon), but here’s a breakdown of the plan for anyone who’s interested
Who We Were Then — pre-New Ham, some of Sam and Allie’s childhood but mostly focused on their junior year leading up to getting on the busses in 1x01; pre-Hallie & Grizzam
Fear Can’t Hurt You Anymore Than A Dream — no New Ham AU, where the students come back from a camping trip and the world is exactly as they left it, will follow the end of their junior year into senior year; eventual Hallie & Grizzam
Maybe There Is A Beast (Maybe It’s Only Us) — canon AU, the kids get off the busses in New Ham, exploring how a closer bond between Allie & Sam (and how that changed their junior year) would change the events of the show; still eventual Hallie & Grizzam
It Sounds Better Than It Is, This Business Of Surviving — post canon, the kids make it back to West Ham and have to find a way to return to ‘normal’ after everything they’ve been through; Hallie & Grizzam
We Are The Kids That You Can Never Kill — post canon, the kids make it back to West Ham only to find that everyone who died in New Ham woke up back in West Ham at their exact time of death, now they all have to return to ‘normal’ surrounded by people they’d mourned and people they’d killed; Hallie & Grizzam
I’m very excited about this project and will definitely be trying to make more edits & posts about it (and hopefully writing it lmao) so if you’d like to be tagged in anything for it, feel free to let me know!
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Mulan AU where she does get caught by the other fresh recruits while she's bathing but Mushu helps her spin it like the lake is cursed by an evil lizard demon and will turn men into women if they stay in it for too long.
From there it's not actually difficult to get the other soldiers onboard with covering up the fact that poor Ping took one for the team and got afflicted by the vagina curse, especially since it would have been all of them if they hadn't gotten the warning ahead of time. So they agree to help him cover it up, because obviously the army's not going to understand.
Shang is... tentatively glad that the men are bonding and getting along, even if they continue to be deeply weird about it.
Mulan: Uh, what boobs? Huh? Where did these come from?
Mushu: *facepalms and thinks quickly* (speaks from the shadows) I AM THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKE! BEWARE MY CURSED WATERS FOR THEY WILL TURN MEN INTO WOMEN!
Ling, Yao, and Chien Po: Oh no! The spirit of the cursed waters!
Shang: ...is this why you've all been insisting we don't camp anywhere that doesn't have a lake.
Shang: and then none of you actually swim in it.
Shang: and you all keep jumping at shadows.
Shang: wait a second Ping did this happen before or after you became insanely good at fighting?
Shang: did you get better at fighting after you became a woman.
Shang: are women better at fighting than us.
Mulan: ....uh. well. maybe? no one's ever tried to find out.
Yao: [thinking very fast] y'know Captain it's just so hard to find recruits these days.
Chien Po: Real shortage of men.
Ling: Lots of women, though.
Mulan: [catching on] Without marriage prospects.
Shang: You're right, men. The spirits must have done this in order to show us that we should be recruiting women as fighters.
Mushu [from the shadows, seeing an opportunity to do the funniest thing]: EXACTLY, LI SHANG. I HAVE TRANSFORMED PING INTO A WOMAN BECAUSE YOU HAVE TOO LONG OVERLOOKED THE TRUE WAY TO WIN THE WAR.
Mulan [seeing an opportunity to get all the stories straight]: O Great Spirit, is it reversible?
Mushu: WHY WOULD YOU WISH TO REJECT MY GIFT? I HAVE SEEN YOUR HEART, CHILD, AND HAVE ALREADY ALTERED THE MEMORIES OF EVERYONE WHO KNEW YOU BEFORE YOU LEFT FOR THE ARMY. YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THEIR DAUGHTER.
Li Shang: Welp, the spirits have spoken. Ping - wait is your name still Ping if you're a woman now?
Mulan: Uh. Actually, I was thinking of renaming myself. How do you feel about Mulan?
BONUS:
Mulan [climbing out of the eleventh lake the men have arranged for her to swim in]: Yeah no, it didn't work. Still got boobs. [tries to appear dejected].
Chien Po: If it makes you feel better, they're very nice boobs.
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every time someone realizes they dont have to pick between being a boy or a girl an angel gets its wings btw. and also extremely loud cheering can be heard in the distance from me specifically
Canon divergent AU where Shane is a little more paranoid and when Hayden first comments on "Boston Lily", he decides he has to do something to break up the pattern and make it not so noticeable that he's got someone on Boston.
Not seeing Rozanov is not an option, so instead Shane picks out a few other cities to regularly go out by himself in. He'll go for a long walk, maybe sit down somewhere for a drink, and then catch a taxi back to the hotel an appropriate amount of time later. It's honestly pretty nice, unwinding by himself in this way, and now disappearing after games is not a thing specific to Boston! It's just another strange Hollander quirk!
Unfortunately, he fails to account for the guys on the team jumping on the most obvious explanation for all these disappearances, which is that Shane now has a girl in every port.
Word about this starts to spread quick, because it is so out of character for Shane, and pretty soon half the league is under the impression that he's some secret playboy.
“Do it scared” “do it alone” are all great tips, but my biggest takeaway from therapy is do it messy. This is especially true if you’re getting out of a burnout, which I experience often. Literally just do it messy. You don’t need to pick the perfect trail to walk, the perfect playlist to listen to, whatever the fuck it is. You don’t need to have a meticulous to do list and wake up at the exact time you planned and drink the exact amount of water you planned to drink. Like the biggest thing for people like me to remember is sometimes it’s okay to do it messy. Put on a random yt workout and just get it done in sweats. Do 5 minutes of a daunting task and go from there. Sometimes just getting up is a win during intense burnouts or depressive funks. Literally just do it messy.
1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.
2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.
3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."
4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.
5. If the words are Google's, this solidifies the position of universities who demand that all answers from AI are fully cited. If all the in-line citations now have to be (Google, 2026), that's going to make it obvious when someone's trying to use Google as a source. There's still the difficulty with people who are academically dishonest by trying to pass off the AI writing as their own.
6. 91% accuracy is officially too low to use as a source of references, which means the AI can't be used as a source of references either. This makes it less legitimate for such purposes than Wikipedia of all places (Wikipedia might need date/time proof of when it was accessed for the reference to be valid, but at least it is possible to prove the link existed at a particular date and time).
7. This will help encourage the rollout of courses on how to avoid AI search for students who need academic accuracy, because it's statistically not good enough to use.
8. This strengthens the case intellectual property authors have against Google in the EU, as this is proof that an intellectual property transfer took place.
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