i don’t reply to comments on ao3 but to anyone who reads my stuff from there and follows me, i hope you know that each and every comment means a lot to me and always brightens my day! thank you so much ^^
I know that several of the Avengers are likely to die in Avengers End Game, but I swear to all things glittery, if they kill off Captain Marvel, I’m rioting!!!
This is something I fully believe in. If i had a daughter, believe me when I say she would be taught that never…EVER…should she accept anyone telling her that shes not good enough. Or that shes “just a girl, in a mans world”, or that she cant do something because “thats a mans job, not a woman’s!”
To all the young women out there, if you put in the hard work, if you believe in something passionately enough, and more importantly, if you believe in yourself…there is nothing that you can’t do!
Hell, thanks to the shewee, we can even pee standing up these days!
Happy International Womans Day ya’ll ✈️⚖️♀️♀️♀️♀️
Ive come to realise that time spent as a writer is mostly 90% daydreaming/thinking about what you want your characters to say/do…5% finding time to jot those thoughts down…4% cursing because you cant remember those awesome ideas you had and totally didnt jot down….and 1% actually writing your story.
So like…thinking about your story totally counts as time spent being productive on that story yeah? Yeah???
There was a part of the panel at Earpapalooza, where Kat says she and Dom now know what each others “comfortable” boundries are when doing intimate scenes.
So like….i wonder at what point one of them was like “whoaaaa ok, thats a bit too gay for me thanks!”
And what had the other done to make them say it?!?
Having just watched Dom and Kat interact for over an hour on Tea & Biscuits, its fairly easy to see that both are VERY straight! Sorry shippers, but they are just really good actreses!
*Warning* - some no doubt unpopular opinions ahead. Here is a thread of some of my thoughts on this season of my fav show Wynonna Earp
1. Post-Pregnancy Wynonna: Love love love the emotional range that MelanieScrofano has been showcasing this season. Our girl on top can act!!! You go girl!!
2. Domestic Wayhaught: I won’t lie, I’ve been left a little disheartened by my fav two gay characters interactions this season. Not because of the fact there’s been less heat, or that there’s been less intimate sexy time shown. I actually think that is a good depiction of how a relationship develops over time. I personally have been with my wife 7 yrs now, and confirm the lust and heat of new relationship sex does eventually calm down into a more relaxed and loving state. Its nice. And its normal! No, the thing thats bugged me this season is that there seems to be a general feeling of “distance” between Wayhaught, for which I am going to place blame on Waverly for. She’s appeared to be more aloof, less thoughtful, and less considerate towards Nicole in general. Whether this is intentional by the writers or not, I don’t know. But if it is intentional, I hope the reasoning behind it comes to light eventually.
3. ♂️ Doc: Another aspect of this season i have LOVED! The character development that has been invested into Doc has been phenominal & provided some of the best moments this season in my humble opinion. That scene between Tim Rozon & MelanieScrofano when she first discovered he’d become a vampire, was pure tv gold, and both the writers and the actors deserve emmy’s for the gravity and emotion portrayed so beautifully in that moment
4. Jeremy & Robin: Yes! Yes yes yes! Finally, a cute & adorable male gay couple on tv. Varun Saranga & Justin Kelly have played this fledgling romance perfectly, & kudos to the show writers 4 telling this particular story with such diversity & warmth. We, the gays, thank you!
5. Now for the probable unpopular opinion - Bulshar just does not cut it as a “big bad” for me. Well, not so far anyway. I have yet to feel any gravity of presence from this supposed “baddest demon of them all”. I feel like Bobo has more severity and magnitude of doom about him than Bulshar has so far created. It may be due to the lack of screen time that this seasons big evil has so far been give, or the ambiguity of his intentions and ultimate goal. I understand that his goal has been purposly been left up in the air so far, with the characters themselves struggling to ascertain what Bulshar intends to actually do when he gains access to the garden of eden. But I still feel a little more interaction and screen time for this seasons big bad could have been called for, just to instill a greater sense of impending doom in the fans of the show. I hope that the final two episodes really help to slot the wicked and malevolent intentions of #Bulshar into place, as I really do think he has the potential to be the shows most fearsome character to date.
And lastly…6. Dani Kind…. Yes!!! Oh hell yes!! Mercedes is such a great female character and I love that Emily and the writers decided to being her back into our Earper lives. DANI FUCKING KIND…you absolute legend!
I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week. At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read. I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos.
People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom. I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it. On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button. Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked. Let’s look at the one shot posted before that - less than 16% left kudos. Before that - 10%, and then 16%. I’m not even going to get into the comments. Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot. I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc. And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.
Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted. Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them? Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button. It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert.
TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.
Reblogging again
So much this
You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.
I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;
Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.
I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range.
Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.
And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.
When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve.
And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.
I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.”
In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link.
My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product.
I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.
Reblogging this bc it is a take on fan engagement at AO3 that I haven’t seen before, and as a writer I find it helpful to have this reality check. Also I wonder which came first: the overall low engagement rates in internet commerce, or the freaking shit-ton of unwanted spam and advertising we’re constantly bombarded with?
I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption.
I should know this, because I ‘like’ very sparingly here and reblog only less sparingly, and yet I read and enjoy a lot of posts I don’t like or reblog.
Also, while I will always defend people’s right to take down their work if they want to, I will point out that taking your work down simply because you think it didn’t get enough engagement prevents you from having the experience of seeing it slowly grow over time. You’re doing the equivalent of cancelling a TV show that doesn’t have an amazingly successful pilot episode, without waiting to see if it gains a devoted following by mid-season. It’s short-sighted. It means you’re not going to potentially have the pleasure of someone commenting on it 5 or 10 years later to explain that it was their favourite story, that they re-read it 20 times, that they shared it with their friends, or even just that they’re so glad they found it on that specific day, years after you posted it. You might not even have the pleasure of going back to re-read it yourself and see how you’ve progressed as a writer.
AO3 is an archive - it’s there to preserve fanfic. It has longevity, and if you leave your works there, they can have longevity too. And you never know when something is going to be rediscovered, or who it might mean something to (including yourself).
It’s also important to remember that your numbers/ratios are also affected by factors like which fandom/ship you’re writing for and the rating of your fic. There’s different fic-interaction cultures in every fandom (for example, in some fandoms, there might be a stronger comments culture, which leads to a higher average of a comments to fics ratio than another fandom). Smut fics always have a lower kudos to hits ratio. If you’re a writer trying to evaluate how your fics are doing, base it off of the numbers on fics in the same fandom/ship (and rating), not your previous works or your own expectations. You’ll find you’re doing much better than you think.
I have a couple of observations that I want to make here, and I say that as an author that feels incredibly, incredibly, incredibly privileged by the level of engagement I get on AO3 (although I also admit I’ve never looked at my ratio numbers, so I honestly have no idea what they may be). But I’ve been thinking about how fandom feels different in the 15 or so years I’ve been writing fic, so I’ve got two observations, which are going to be gross overgeneralizations based on the LJ (or earlier) natives and the post-LJ world:
(1) I think that engagement on AO3 feels different from the writer vs. consumer perspective for a couple of reasons. Writers who write on AO3 are doing it for free, so we’re not getting any money, so we feel like we’re getting “paid” in the engagement. That’s a bad analogy, because I don’t think engagement = money, but you see what I mean. The engagement means more to us because we can’t comfort ourselves with a royalty check, however measly. Now I am not saying we should be paid, I’m very happy with my choice to put my fic up for free, but I do think it skews us to want more engagement, because arguably that is the entire reason we put it up there. That’s different for published writers (which I am also one of). People buy my books, and I think they like them? But I seldom hear from them, and that’s okay: they’ve bought my books, they paid for them, it’s cool, our transaction is completed. Honestly, my books feels so disconnected from me as a person for that reason. And I think sometimes from a reader’s perspective, it can be hard to remember to engage, because our capitalist society has conditioned us to be passive consumers, and the only engagement expected of us is the money we’ve paid. In a situation where we didn’t pay any money, it’s worthwhile to think about “paying” in “engagement” instead – but our society doesn’t “train” us in that, so to speak.
(2) It’s even easier to see ourselves as passive consumers who don’t feel compelled to engage when the platform where we share fic is no longer the same place we share the rest of our lives. I know everyone post-LJ is probably sick to death of hearing about LJ, but it was really hard to read fic on LJ without commenting because you *knew* these people. You knew about their pets and their jobs and their homework assignments. If they posted they were having a bad day, you left a comment. If they posted a fic, you left a comment. LJ, unlike AO3, was a place where communication and interaction was so habitual that you really would seldom think of reading a fic without leaving a comment. LJ didn’t really do stats, but I suspect my readership on LJ was much, much, much lower than my readership on AO3 – but I also suspect that the number of comments I got on a chapter was about the same (and probably higher than I get on FOB stuff, let’s be honest, which is *fine,* but I’m just stating a fact). I’m sure someone smart who’s not me has done a statistical analysis of this, but anyway, that’s what I suspect. I know I’ve been to academic presentations on the way fandom shifted when you separated the fic place from the life place, and I think this is one aspect of that: it makes the fic feel more impersonal, like any other commodity you interact with on a daily basis and treat like a big corporation is behind it who doesn’t care one way or the other.
Also, I’ve decided I have a (3) observation:
(3) I think the thing I miss most about the LJ era was the writing-class feel of it. Which wasn’t to say that we were doing homework assignments or anything, but just that writing felt like a true community experience on LJ. I learned *so much* about how to be a good writer on LJ. I met my betas on LJ, and I beta’d for other people, and in the process I just learned *so much.* Also, LJ would have writing memes go through every so often, where you would do things like “tell a scene you wrote from a different perspective” or “write the scene before the one that starts your story” or “do a DVD commentary on this scene.” These are writing exercises! They’re so helpful! And I never see those go around Tumblr or AO3. But you learn so much from doing that kind of thing (that’s why they do them in creative writing courses!). And you learn so much from watching other people do them. DVD commentaries on writing were invaluable in letting me see the way other writers achieved things that I wanted to improve in my own writing. We just don’t *do* that stuff anymore, it seems. Or maybe we do. Maybe it’s all on Discord and I just am too old to understand Discord. But I just want to say, the older fans and the younger fans feel so separated out these days, and it was never like that on LJ, I had friends much younger than me, I had friends much older than me, and I think that’s because we were all interacting and writing *together.* And instead what seems to happen now is a new writer puts a fic up, and they’re young and could probably use a beta and a little bit of polish, and instead of the kind of interaction that used to happen, they get three kudos and a comment and get discouraged. And that makes me incredibly sad, Idk.
Leave comments if you can. They’re so helpful to the writer, you can’t imagine. It’s okay, not everyone has to, but it really does help writers learn to get feedback. Not mean stuff! Just “this is my favorite sentence,” or “I love this scene,” or “Character A <3″ like, seriously, anything is helpful in guiding a writer to learn whether or not they’re achieving with their words what they want to achieve. And it feels increasingly like comments are the only way any of us are interacting with each other anymore.
I joined fandom because it was the only place I entered as a writer where other people wanted to talk about writing and do fun things writing and play around with creativity. It was the only place I found people who *loved writing,* and I found people who would happily talk about *each other’s writing.* It’s still the only place I’ve found where that happens, and it would be a shame to lose that. Because publishing is just…no place to have fun. And writing without fun is so sad.
/end of “I am the oldest fan in the world” discourse
I am part of that rare breed, it seems, of somebody who discovered fanfiction very late in life. I never got onto LJ. My fan journey started with fanfiction.net about 7 years ago, before veering into AO3, Tumblr and Discord.
And as an old sod, may I say that Discord is the way to go @earlgreytea68 ? That’s where you’ll find the writing exercises, the betas, the references to this or that writing blog, the commentaries on characters and episodes. Find one you like and give it a go. It’s important to keep up.
Rebogging for all of the above - finding Discord has been amazingly helpful to my writing and while I’ve had a better experience in some communities than others, it’s overall been wonderful as a younger fan who never had LJ, to have that kind of community. My fandom and writing discord servers make fic writing so much better.
Also, especially reblogging this for the clarification about hits.
A kudo is an individual reader
A hit is any time your story gets clicked on by someone who isnt you. 3 hits could be the same person: opening your fic on their phone, and a tab on their computer, and then later opening it again to kudo or bookmark or download it to their kindle. Hell a hit could be a web crawler inflating your hit count.
So this post speaks to me and probably anyone who has ever posted fanfic. The joy when you get comments and kudos in your inbox is unparalleled! Equally so is the distress when a piece of writing you lovingly crafted is met with silence.
I think several of the previous commenters hit it on the head when they talk about marketing. And if I have a bad engagement I remind myself that things like tag choice, time of day of publishing, amount of other fics posted at the same time, popularity of fandom or ship, and general willingness to feed the fan desires vs. writing what you want all have much bigger effects on a stories engagement than the quality of the writing.
I don’t know the answer to this other than to tap the kudos button and write that comment, things I have been guilty myself of failing to do on fics I’ve read. Usually as I smash in a read between errands or on breaks, but I’m trying to get better. The other thing is to not discount the lurkers, remind yourself for every person that gave you some form of engagement there are probably ten others that loved what you wrote but did not leave you any notice. This is the Internet after all and many people come here specifically to avoid interacting with others.
And yes concur my entire fandom experience changed once I realized I could discuss and dissect my ship and writing with other fans on tumblr and Discord. I have long (lol I’m such a newb) lamented AO3 for not having any DM feature and believe we would all see more engagement if people could connect with authors and creators privately. Public perception can greatly shape public interaction on a work. Maybe something to lobby AO3 for in the next fundraiser.
most importantly just keep writing! And if you ever need any encouragement my inbox is always open! Happy to be your cheerleader when you get discouraged!
Finallygot an email back saying they have fixed my blog! It’s kind of exciting. It was so frustrating not being able to do anything, to be honest. I still have made a sideblog for my fanfiction work though. I’d love to see you follow me if you want of course! For a little while, I will reblog my fanfictions to here and my main blog as well. This blog will be mostly for the gifsets I make. I figured since I made it, I might as well use it!
I already have a new Dom!Billy Russo story was posted and have started writing works based on Henry Cavill’s characters. I have a new Dean fanfiction in the works and maybe finally writing something for Johnny Depp’s character from the Secret Window, that I have been putting off for years now.
TITLE OF STORY: The Loki Equation CHAPTER NUMBER: Part 24 AUTHOR: Spiesinthedark WHICH TOM/CHARACTER: Loki GENRE: Adventure/Romance FIC SUMMARY: Odd things begin to happen to a fanfiction writer…. RATING: T WARNINGS/TRIGGERS/AUTHORS NOTES: Language
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Loki Equation - Part 24
Loki’s car motored into a section of Charlotte that I had never been to, which said a lot. My roommate Mary and I took pride in our knowledge of the city, and most of our weekends in college had been spent driving and walking every neighborhood we could find. This place was unfamiliar, and honestly, I wished it would stay that way.
The streets were dark. Streetlights were few and far in between. What few there were were either smashed out or flickering sporadically. Big warehouses lined each side of the pitted, pothole-filled road. There were chain link fences, and the occasional vacant lot filled with trash. Buildings were dark, and there wasn’t a single human in sight. Not a city bus or stray cat, no movement at all. This was literally Silent Hill.
Loki swung his car around on Epsom Street, pulling up outside a grey warehouse with a sign that read “Foster Corp.”. He shut the headlights off and we sat in the dark for a few minutes. There were no lights on in the building, no cars in the small parking lot, which was lit by a single, dim floodlight.
“This is the place?” I asked Loki, peering through the window.
“Yes,” he replied, his eyes focused in the same direction as mine. “There is at least one book here, according to the source that I found.”
I twisted in my seat, to look at him. He hadn’t been clear on exactly what these books were, although I had helped him find two of them. I said as much to him now.
Loki sighed, and answered without looking at me. “Without overly complicating the explanation, they are what you would consider to be ‘magic’. They contain quite a lot of arcane wisdom and spells, powerful even in my world, which is why they were kept apart, in four cities. When all four are put together, the magic builds up, ready for anyone with the intent to use it, whether that is for good or…evil.”
He looked down at me now, and added “They should not be here, on your world, let alone all in the same city.”
I took this all this info in, and asked “Where are the two that we’ve already found?”.
“Back in Asgard, safe” he answered, smiling slightly.
“Okay, so everything should be fine, right? Don’t all four need to be in the same place for the end of the world to happen?” I asked.
Loki’s eyebrows raised, but he still answered “Even one book has enough power to destroy half of this city, if the wrong person figures out how to use it. It’s vital that the remaining two are found and returned to their homes.”
Fair enough, it made sense. I didn’t really believe in magic, as much as I loved Harry Potter. That opinion was slowly changing, though, the more time I spent with Loki. He made things happen that I couldn’t explain and had a nasty habit of showing up in my apartment when I KNOW I locked my door. Not to mention he could make a basket of cheese fries disappear in two minutes flat while I was in the restroom.
“What’s the plan?” I asked him, unbuckling my seat belt and pulling the pink flashlight out of my hoodie pocket.
He unbuckled too, turning the car off and pocketing the keys. “We get into the building and find the book, hopefully avoiding anyone that may be on guard inside”.
“What about cameras?” I asked, “Or an alarm system?”
He smiled and angled out of the car, shutting the door behind him. I followed, shutting my own door as quietly as possible. “The cameras won’t work while I’m in the area” he said.
“I’m sorry, what?” I said, finding that hard to believe.
His smile was bright in the darkness. “I think you are confusing me with the men you’re used to, darling. I’m a god, remember?”.
Be still, my heart. We were about to commit a B&E and he was still charming. Good thing I had a pretty clear arrest record, just in case.
Loki had parked half a block down from the building’s private parking lot, so we made our way across the grass and around to the side of the warehouse. He went first, with me trailing along behind, flashlight in hand, making our way to a side door.
I trained the flashlight beam on the door handle, while Loki tried it. Locked. He put his shoulder to it, and to my extreme surprise, the lock popped and the door swung inward. “Wow,” I whispered, “Nice!”. He grinned at me, and we stepped through the dark doorway, shutting the slightly dented door behind us.
No alarm sounded, so I figured that was a good sign. I shined the flashlight around the room. It was an office, but a really empty one. There were big glass windows on one end of the room, with blinds covering them. A few small desks were positioned around the room, each with a folding chair. As we moved around the room, I noticed that there were no computers. No phones either. There were file cabinets on one wall, and I curiously pulled one open. Empty. I randomly pulled open another cabinet, empty as well. I pointed this out to Loki.
“Well, my previous theory was correct” he whispered to me, “This is a shell office. No work happens here, I imagine.”
I believed him, that’s exactly what it looked like. What kind of office had no phones, computers, files, or even a coffee machine? A fake office, that’s what kind. I crossed the room and peeked out of the blinds. It was the parking lot in front of the building.
“This is the office section of the building,” I quietly said to Loki, “Door over there must lead to the warehouse part”. I pointed to the door to the right, and Loki put his ear to it.
“I don’t hear anything on the other side,” he said, trying the door handle. This one wasn’t locked.
He slowly pushed the door open, and I shined my flashlight in. The sight inside made both of our mouths drop open.
“Shit” he breathed. I completely agreed with his sentiment
TITLE OF STORY: The Loki Equation CHAPTER NUMBER: Part 23 AUTHOR: Spiesinthedark WHICH TOM/CHARACTER: Loki GENRE: Adventure/Romance FIC SUMMARY: Odd things begin to happen to a fanfiction writer…. RATING: PG-13 WARNINGS/TRIGGERS/AUTHORS NOTES: Language, sexual innuendos
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Why do you have that look on your face?”
“I don’t know…it’s just…not what I expected.”
“And what were you expecting, exactly?”
“Well…not this color, that’s for sure. And it’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be, honestly.”
“Thank you darling. How does it feel?”
“Good. It’s heavy, but I feel like I could hit someone with it.”
I hefted the thick pink flashlight, miming a swing at an imaginary adversary’s head. I don’t know if I could kill someone with it, but it could do some serious damage, despite the unfortunate color.
Loki had dropped a gym bag onto my dining room table and was digging through it, handing things out to me. A black sweatshirt, a fanny pack, a retractable stick thing that could easily bust out a kneecap or two. And granola bars, bless him. I’m a snacker.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked, pulling the sweatshirt over my head and picking up the fanny pack.
He pulled out what looked like a building blueprint, spreading it out and holding down the corners with few snack bars. “This is, allegedly, a shipping company’s warehouse. It’s on the south side of the city, and could possibly be the hiding place of one of the two remaining books that we need to recover. Or so I have gathered from a charming individual that resisted my questioning…at first.”
“Why do you say allegedly?” I asked.
“I have completed some preliminary research. The building has no registered owners or executives, no phone number, no internet presence, nothing other than the sign out front.” he responded, peering down at the outline of doors, windows and hallways. Imaging him browsing the internet was a weird visual, I wondered if he had seen porn of himself.
I knew that what he was saying was serious business, but I was having a hard time focusing. He had on a black sweater that was just the right amount of tight, an his green eyes were startlingly bright. He was flush with the thought of a chase. He was saying something about roughing someone up. Hot. I was wondering if I could convince him to rough me up a little. It had been a while.
“…they knocked the woman out, smashed the case and took the book, and set the building ablaze. She recovered in time to escape through a window and went to the authorities. My contact was there during the initial report and passed along the information. Why are you looking at me like that?”
I became vaguely aware that he was speaking to me, and snagged a granola bar to cover my tracks. “So we storm the place, kick butt, and then run away with the book in hand, right?” I asked, fumbling with the wrapper.
His smile was brilliant. “I am surprised, I did not think you were listening.”
“Are you kidding me? Look at me, I am all ears. The very picture of attention.”
Loki, god of mischief and lies, snorted. What a gentleman.
He took the snack from my hand, put it own onto the table, and backed me into the counter. “You’re distracted,” he murmured into my ear, “Would you like to fill me in on your thoughts?”
I absolutely did not. Honestly, the recon mission was the last thing on my to-do list, and he had just rocketed to the top. That sweater needed to come off. And then those pants. And then my pants. I’d probably keep the sweatshirt on, it was cold in my apartment. The books could wait a few hours, right? Did the apocalypse have a ticking timer, counting down? I didn’t think so, but what the heck do I know.
“How long do we have until we need to leave?” I asked, leaning back to look at his face. The crick in my neck was 100% worth it.
His eyes gleamed and darkened, and his smile got wide. “Not long enough, I’m afraid.” I guessed they don’t have quickies where he was from. He was right though, the sky outside the windows was dark and I could see the glow of the streetlights. He had shown up as the sun was setting, nudging his way past me to dig through my fridge before filling me in on his information and game plan.
Loki stepped back, putting space between us and allowing me to breathe again. He handed me the flashlight, and I tucked it into my sweatshirt pocket. Clipping on the fanny pack, I rolled the blueprints up too.
“What’s the chance of us getting shot?” I asked, halfway joking.
“If you stay close to me, highly unlikely” he replied, tucking the bars into my pack. His hands at my waist were warm and gentle as he zipped me up.
“Are you bulletproof?”
“Better, I’m a god.”
“Pardon me your highness.”
We left my apartment shortly after, locking the door behind us and silently making our way down to his car. We buckled in, and he navigated onto the freeway, headed towards the south end.
I had the feeling of impending doom following close behind us. Hopefully his royal highness was all he claimed to be, because I sure as shit wasn’t bulletproof.
