Dinas Emrys

this couple come through her line with a lot of stuff and they acting like they are in a hurry. this was the wrong thing to say to this girl. you say that to her and she goes slower cause it freaks her out.

she finally gets to the end and the guy hands her a bunch of 20′s. first she straightened them out and counted them, and then she took her pen out. when i used it i made a little flower so that i would know that i did it. she made a swirly. the first swirly came back black, the second swirly came back black. she got out the SECOND truth teller pen and scribbled a like down the center of the bills…. black as coal.

she was freaking out. dude look like he was intense. she very politely asked if he had another form of payment as she would not be able to accept his money. “WHY NOT?!”

*gulp*

“cause it’s not real, sir.”

“MONEY IS FUCKING REAL! YOU BETTER GET MANAGEMENT OVER HERE! MY MONEY IS AS GOOD AS ANYONE ELSE!!”

she very quickly walked over to the phone and paged, and her voice, was so tinged with panic that everyone, even CUSTOMERS stopped dead in their tracks and listened to the page. 

you’d never seen a page answered so quickly. it was prolly ringing before she put the phone back on the receiver. “what’s wrong? what’s going on? are you in danger? are you okay?”

and she told them that no, she wasn’t okay,, her customer was screaming and cursing at her and his money wasn’t real and she had no idea what to do now, this wasn’t covered in the CBL’s! 

this got manangement on their feet. “stay call, take a deep breath, we’ll be there in 5 seconds with back up. it’s going to be okay. just breathe.”

which is easier said than done with a man that weighs 150 lbs more than you is screaming his ever loving head off. even the retiree door greeter came over and stood by her just as a show of solidarity, she couldn’t really have done anything, but she was a witness, and sometimes that’s enough to get people to back down.

it must have felt like a hour later, but it was about 2-3 minutes before the store managers came walking down the aisle with the popo trailing behind them. the cops were soooooo happy to see him. 

one member of management took over the register as the other led the cashier off to sit and collect herself, while the cops talked to the guy and eventually arrested both the guy and the girl. (apparently they’d been looking for them)

management was so fucking happy that she caught him because he had like 300 dollars in funny money and she caught him dead to rights. they calmed her down, thanked her profusely, gave her the rest of the day off with pay, and called her bf or mother or someone to get her home, because she was shaking like a leaf and they didn’t want to her to get hurt on her way home.

So yes, i will use my pen when i have too. i’ll hold them fuckers up to the light to make sure that the right pressie is in the corner pocket.

The watermark of Ben Franklin on the bill looked like the shittiest line art of a man you’d ever seen. It was horrendous. But it passed my marker test, so I had to give the guy his change and with a smug grin and $50 worth of Copic markers, he left.

I thought about it all night and into the next day, when the local weed dealer came in to buy his baggies. See, jewelry baggies are cheaper than ziplocks despite being the same fucking thing, and I was the only one who would treat the guy like a normal fuckin dude, so as we were chatting as I rang him out, I sighed and said, “I got a counterfeit hundo the other day.” And I told him about what I’d gone through. I told him what the guy looked like, what he bought, how he acted in line. And when I was handing him his receipt, I said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, man, but just watch out for any suspect looking Benjamins over the next few weeks.” I gave him one of the counterfeit markers and told him that they wouldn’t do any good, but he could have one anyway.

I guess I just wanted to tell someone about it, because I stopped thinking about it after that.

Until the day I got a call from the pot dealer about a month later. He was furious. Someone had ripped him off in over $250 of weed, and they’d done it with–yup–fake Benjamins. He gave me the guy’s name, his description, everything. And then, at the very end, he added, “I’m luring him downtown for a drug deal. Call the fucking cops.”

So I did.

The cops swooped in and grabbed the guy, and not only did they find my Copic markers that he’d bought from the store, he found similar high ticket items from other stores in the area. The cops came back, returned me my markers, and asked how I knew to tip them off.

I told them it was a lucky guess.

crab: ah fuck im in a bit of a conundrum, maybe if i wiggle i can-

Totally not-shady NPC: I’ll need you to retrieve my secret cargo from the abandoned spaceship, but it’s very private, so don’t look inside–

Player: Is it a girl in a box?

NPC: …What?

Player: This is a sci-fi story, and there’s a box you don’t want us to look into. There’s only ever one way that ends, and it’s always with a girl stuffed into a box.

Other Player: Hey, we don’t even know how big it is. It could just be a cigar box.

First Player: Okay, you’re right. It could be a bunch of sex toys. How big is the box?

NPC: It’s… uh… six feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep…

who do you love | blake x yang

           directed by erin, edited by me

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

Weiss is suspicious of the new girl.

Not that she has any right to be; she’s perfectly polite to Weiss every time they speak, even somewhat helpful when the situation calls for it, lending her pens, notes, answers. She tends to keep to herself, though other people seem to be drawn to her for reasons Weiss can’t quite comprehend; the popular boys sometimes take over her table in the dining hall during lunch, laughing and tossing fruit into each other’s mouths as she watches on, bored and haughty. Sometimes she doesn’t show up at all, disappearing to other corners of the grounds.

For all intents and purposes, the only thing Blake Belladonna’s done since transferring to Beacon is live up to her name: she’s beautiful, enigmatic, a dark charm to her like a spell, with shadow-fingers that crook and call people to ruin. And she’s a senior, for fuck’s sake. Nobody transfers as a senior.

But none of that is why Weiss is suspicious. No, Weiss is suspicious because of Yang - specifically, why Yang seems so suddenly nonchalant and secretive, as if a vault were a personality trait and not a box with a lock. She and Blake never seem to hang out, but lines are always being drawn to connect them: they pass each other in the halls and exchange a look, or Yang nods at her across a room, or Blake catches her by her locker and asks her about a textbook. There’s an odd air about them, indicative of something weighted. Something close.

Here’s where it starts - Weiss has made maps, pinpointed days into coordinates - Yang’s paired up with Blake for a project in their literature class, and they meet in a library. She doesn’t go home with Weiss that day, texts her some kind of smiling emoji and a cup of coffee meant to signify tomorrow. But then she’s out with Blake again, and again, and again.

Heyo! After several friends mentioned they were disappointed by the lack of a formal Medusa character option in the new D&D 5E Ravnica setting, I–to no one’s surprise, probably–homebrewed one.