we make our own fortunes

The first time Hardison thinks about it, he’s doing their regular, seasonal ID clean up.

The team burns through IDs so quickly that he has to take the time to maintain them, even when there hasn’t necessarily been an emergency. Whether it’s burning identities they’ve destroyed, or just solidifying some—a Facebook post here, an updated LinkedIn profile, some new online friends, filing their taxes—they need maintenance.

He makes IDs practically every day, tailoring them to fit cons. These are more…these are like old favorites, he thinks, to continue the clothes metaphor. Tailored already, well-worn, in the back of the closet for when they’re needed again. Taken in or let out as needed.

The adjustments usually aren’t too big, by design. These are, for the most part, boring people. Each of them has one more outlandish ID, but most passports they keep under their bed are for boring people, people who could get on a plane without causing any fuss, people who could get a loan just fine without being extraordinary. Ordinary, every day people don’t need many major life updates. 

Except Parker had just torn her ACL on a job, and the hospital hadn’t told him anything while she was unconscious. Nothing. Not a damn word. 

So he quietly marries Alice White and Didi Grant to Alexander Smith and Luke Waters. 

And then he goes and marries Jane Smith and Michelle Frank to Derek Jones and Kurt Dowe. He even frames up some nice Honeymoon pictures for Parker and Eliot.

And then, while he’s at it, he marries Matthew Smith to David Price.

When he’s done, most of their most significant IDs are married to one or the other of their little trio. He’s doctored well over a hundred pictures—wedding shots for fancy ceremonies, and little elopements, and private, small, intimate weddings, and honeymoon shots, and dates, and everything else to make these relationships real—and he’s filed their taxes jointly. He’s legally changed some last names, filed change of address forms, and gotten official marriage licenses sent to him.

In short, he’s spent more time on this little fantasy world than he would ever care to admit.

Parker and Eliot don’t really monitor their IDs, he knows, other than keeping track of whose licenses and passports they plan on carrying at any given time. They probably don’t know what he did.

But he does. And he can tell himself all he wants that it’s just in case one of them gets hurt, but that doesn’t make it any more true.

Good thieves don’t lie to themselves, after all.

Parker

They say the words for the first time when they’re in DC together, and Parker is good enough with people now to know that they don’t understand them the same way she does.

Maybe Alec does. The way he looks in her eyes, the small smile he gives her after…She’d have to ask Sophie, to be sure, but she knows. Alec gets it.

Alec gets everything, has since the very beginning. He got pretzels and got her, even when he doesn’t really understand what’s going on inside her brain. He still gets her.

Eliot…he gets what’s going on inside her brain. They’re too alike, she knows. And it’s good, that they’re both on the team, that they do what they can do. But he doesn’t get it, because a few months ago, she wouldn’t have gotten it.

Still, the way Eliot’s eyes soften when she reminds him of their agreement, of how they’re in this together, for better or worse, the way he doesn’t send them away even when he wants to…maybe he’s getting it too.

Eliot doesn’t get it the same way she and Alec do. They’ve made their promises, said their words aready. Eliot…Eliot sleeps in their bed and kisses them sometimes and doesn’t leave, never leaves. It’s enough.

She wants more. She let them take down her walls, like Sophie said. She fell into love like jumping off a building, and she knows they’re always there to catch her. She just wishes they could all jump into this together.

Still. Alec was patient with her. She can be patient with Eliot.

Several months later, Eliot looks at the two of them with a softness in his eyes she’s never seen before and says he’s never needed anything but them, and promises to be with them until his dying day. Parker watches him back, catches his eyes. He doesn’t look away.

Parker looks away first, heart thrumming in a way it gets during a particularly good robbery. Like the diamonds are in her hand. Like she cracked the whole vault.

Forever, she wants to say. For better or worse, forever.

Eliot Spencer

Eliot’s not an idiot. 

Some people might argue different, and, to be fair, it has taken him a while to figure it out. 

Sophie sends them a gift for their anniversary. It’s a painting, of course, and it probably could keep the Brew pub afloat for years if they sold it on the back market. Hardison hangs it in the apartment.

Eliot…Eliot is aware he works here, both in the Pub and doing his real job. He sleeps here, too. As a matter of fact, he sleeps in their bed, and has for…well, since long before Nate and Sophie left. Pretending he was handling the Pub’s business was a good enough excuse to always be there.

He kisses them, too, in that soft way they like, Hardison always overly affectionate and Parker letting down her walls enough to demand the affection she was denied so long. With any other friends it would be strange, or wrong, but not with them. It just…is.

He loves them with his whole heart, will love them until his dying day, and that’s enough. 

And then the painting comes. And then the painting comes addressed to them and their aliases, to not one, not two, but six married couples.

Eliot blinks at it a bit, but doesn’t say anything, just uses the computer Hardison set him up on to search up those names.

Pictures of them, doctored by Hardison, on honeymoons and anniversaries, romantic dinners and walks on the beach. Couples, just like Sophie said. 

For better or worse, we change together.

Eliot swallows, and goes shopping.

Alec stares at the rings. “For…for Matthew and David? Or—“

Eliot’s already shaking his head. “For Alec Hardison. And Parker. And me,” he clarifies. Eliot doesn’t get nervous anymore. That was beaten out of him long ago. Somehow, he still feels it, his heart seizing, waiting for its absolution. He could have read this wrong. They’re a team, the IDs are convenient, the words mean family and team too. They could want to get married. They could love him as they always have, and he could have ruined it, because they’ll never be convinced he’s okay with that again.

He’s not convinced he’ll be okay with that again. He will be, for them, of course he will be when the alternative is being lost again, but— 

Parker, he realizes, has already stolen the band from his hand, the one with the diamonds he knows she’d appreciate, and slid it on her left hand, studying it in the setting sunlight. “I like it.”

Alec takes his own band, but doesn’t put it on. “No going back now,” he warns.

and when lemony snicket wrote ‘i will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies’

and when lemony snicket wrote 'i will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods’

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.

- STRONG character and world introduction

- WEAK character and world exploration

Why not just put brownies in your story then? Almost identical effect without all the slavery.

If you wanna make the Malfoys look worse just idk maybe they put a spell on Dobby to bind him to their house and he can’t leave unless the malfoys break the rules and they’re bad to him but don’t technically try to break the rules until Harry tricks them into paying dobby with some clothes.

There. Problem solved. You can have hundreds of brownies living at hogwarts even. And when Hermione misinterprets their situation and tries to thank them and start paying them the brownies start getting offended and leaving and this causes an actual problem for the school. Much easier to make a subplot about not listening to the people that you’re trying to help.

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

Turns out that there's this ancient society of wizards who perfected the means of telepathically linking up two individuals. While early uses included stuff like espionage and such, early on there was an incident where a wizard accidentally synced the wrong targets up. It just so happened that instead of syncing the crown prince to the intended informant, the mistaken target was a young lady who was a shrewd political match, and both their parents had been looking to arrange the matter (but were struggling with the reluctance of the relevant parties).

With sudden telepathic bonding on the table, the couple took it as a sign from the gods that they were meant to be, and got together of their own accord.

The wizards realized the potential for matchmaking as a means of manipulating the political landscape, and abandoned their prior attempts at subterfuge (a limit of the telepathic bond is that it's two-way, so the target also gains your secrets, which meant a lot of them had to be assassinated after the fact.)

So the wizards converted their lair into an ostensible temple of the Goddess of Love, where people could come to pray to find their soulmates. Wizards were also sent out to arrange matches that would advance the interests of their cult, as well as some random ones just to help cover their tracks. As the influence of the Goddess of Love grew, new branches of the temples sprang up. The cultists were soon divided into two categories: wizards who still knew the truth and pretended to be priests, and actual priests who weren't in on it and genuinely believed they were helping soulmates find one another.

The culture around it goes something like this:

Not everyone has a soulmate, and not all soulmates are destined to be together in every lifetime. But if they are, the Goddess will bless you with the ability to hear one another's inner voice, if it is your fate and/or if you pray hard enough. Some soulmates know each other from their first meeting, but others take time to recognize the bond and open their hearts to the possibility of connection. If you're wondering why it took like eighteen separate meetings with someone before the bond manifested, do some introspection and consider why you might have closed your heart off or whatever. Like it's definitely a you problem, and it's rude to blame the Temple of Love, which is only trying to help people and has no other agendas whatsoever.

Also consider donating more money to the temple next time. Higher donations mean more priests can petition the Goddess on your behalf, and she's a busy lady, sometimes it takes a lot of petitions to get her attention. 👌

How would this factor into a plot?

My thinking is that a pair get setup as soulmates, and they are just absolutely both adamantly convinced that they are not. Like not in an enemies-to-lovers sense or anything, they just get the psychic bond thing and it's like, no. I don't know what's up but the Goddess of Love has definitely made a mistake. So they set out to gain an audience with her, but along the way they uncover the truth about the cult and its manipulation of generations of political marriages and business alliances.

It could be a metaphor for amatonormativity. Like some of the priests argue that even if it's a con, it's one that's been running for so long it's already steeped into the culture. How could the main characters bring themselves to expose it? To tell people who think they've found their soulmates that it's not really the case? Think of all those bonds they'd be threatening!

But then like, wait a minute. That's bullshit. This whole format for relationships has so many problems, and it's all working in service of manipulating and controlling people anyway! Why should they let the cult go on hooking up individuals that suit it? Shouldn't people know that it's possible to CHOOSE to make a telepathic bond with someone they actually want to? Shouldn't they be able to decide to manage their own relationships as they see fit, without some misleading pressure of fate or gods? And what about the ones left feeling excluded and unlovable because they don't "have" a soulmate? It's not like people are going to stop loving one another or finding themselves if they aren't being led around to do it this specific way!

So they upend the whole thing, and upset a lot of people, and then have to deal with the fact that they're still telepathically bonded until one of them dies.

Ugh.

oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.

according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.

laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.

standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.

laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877

definitely worth a lot more research.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

She didn't sneak into occupied France under cover of darkness. She walked calmly to the front door, rang the bell, and smiled.

"I'm looking for a room to rent," she said in perfect German, her manner gentle and unassuming.

The Wehrmacht commander saw exactly what he expected to see: a harmless middle-aged woman, polite and refined. A widow, perhaps. Someone who posed no threat whatsoever.

He had no idea he'd just welcomed a British spy into his home.

Her name was Lise de Baissac, and she was one of Winston Churchill's secret weapons—a Special Operations Executive agent tasked with setting Europe ablaze from within. Every morning she greeted her landlord with warmth and pleasantries. Every night she slipped into the darkness carrying explosives, meeting with resistance fighters and whispering her golden rule:

"We work quietly, or we do not work at all."

He thought she was his tenant. She was his surveillance. She was sabotage personified, living under his roof, studying his routines, gathering intelligence while he slept one room away.

But this audacious arrangement wasn't where her story began.

September 24, 1942. A British Whitley bomber roared through black skies over occupied France. At thirty-seven years old, Lise de Baissac jumped into the void—alone, armed with nothing but false papers and unshakeable resolve.

Her parachute snapped open over enemy territory. She hit the ground hard, hands frantically burying the silk and British equipment that could mean instant execution. Within minutes, she transformed.

Lise de Baissac vanished. "Madame Irene Brisse" appeared—a cultured widow with a passion for archaeology, sketching Roman ruins and cycling through the French countryside.

Perfectly invisible.

But in her bicycle basket lay coded messages, detonators, and maps of German positions. In the shadows, she built the Artist network—recruiting French resistance fighters who grew from dozens to hundreds to thousands. She established her apartment as a safe house for incoming British agents, briefing them, arming them, teaching them how to survive in a land where one mistake meant torture and death.

Her apartment sat one hundred yards from Gestapo headquarters.

The hunters passed her on the street every single day, never recognizing the ghost they walked beside.

Then came betrayal. June 1943. The Prosper network collapsed. Agents screamed in German cellars. Lise had minutes to live or die. She burned every document, smashed her radio, and sprinted across a moonless field to a waiting Lysander aircraft. As the plane climbed into darkness, searchlights clawed at the sky.

She didn't flinch.

London welcomed her home. Safety. Recognition. Rest.

She refused all three.

Eight months later, she parachuted back into France under a different identity. D-Day was coming, and she had work to do. She cycled hundreds of miles carrying weapons disguised beneath vegetables, smiling politely at German soldiers she passed on the road.

"They think women are invisible," she told fellow resisters. "They should fear what they cannot see."

And when she needed lodging in a heavily garrisoned town? She did the unthinkable—she rented that room from a Wehrmacht commander, living under the same roof as her enemy, gathering intelligence over tea and casual conversation, then vanishing into the night to coordinate sabotage operations.

June 6, 1944. Allied forces stormed Normandy beaches while behind enemy lines, Lise's network went to work. Roads exploded. Bridges collapsed. Trains derailed. Fuel depots erupted in flames.

The feared Das Reich Panzer Division should have reached Normandy in three days. It took seventeen—seventeen crucial days bought by bicycle chains, whispered codes, and carefully placed explosives. Days bought by quiet hands the enemy dismissed as harmless.

For two years, Lise operated deep behind enemy lines. Two parachute jumps. Two networks built from nothing. Torture always one mistake away. Execution always one betrayal near.

She survived.

After the war, she received the MBE, Croix de Guerre, and Légion d'honneur. But the French Resistance fighters who worked alongside her gave her the only title that mattered: "She was one of us."

Lise de Baissac quietly returned to civilian life, planting flowers instead of bombs, watering roses where she once watered courage. She never sought applause or recognition. True heroes rarely do.

She lived to ninety-eight—a graceful woman who broke an empire with patience and steel, who proved that courage isn't loud or showy. It's the archaeology enthusiast on a bicycle. It's the polite tenant who smiles at breakfast. It's the person the enemy never bothered to fear.

Until it was far too late.

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.

Infrastructure and citified heat islands also very much play a factor. And here the angle you’re at on earth also makes it worse. The sun being lower on the horizon can double the amount of solar energy affecting your house. The sun beating through your windows for 16+ hours a day when you have a house built for cold and no AC adds to the misery.

But what I’m talking about here is how hot you feel in your body when experiencing solar radiation from a lower angle. On the upside the sun’s rays have to pass through more atmosphere, weakening the UV strength, hence why populations that migrated north eons ago lost melanin (you still need SPF though). And in general the warming effect on the atmosphere is lessened. The warming effect on your body is magnified. To the tune of 10-20 degrees (yes Fahrenheit) above ambient. Winter gear prioritizes insulating your torso because that’s where all your vital organs are. It follows that the sun beating on your chest and back warms you up fast and with little relief except to get in the shade.

My eye doctor also told me living in Alaska made you more likely to get cataracts younger because the low-angle sun gets directly in your eyes in the summer (unless you’re big on sunglasses) and the snow and ice in winter reflect a lot of UV back up, doubling your exposure. Though the prevalence of cataracts in Alaska and other far-north locales is contributed to by other factors, notably poverty and the resulting lack of medical care. And is still not as likely as in people who live in equatorial climes or high altitudes and get the super-strength UV exposure all year round.