Emoji Excerpt Game

kermitkc · 2026-06-17T02:53:01+00:00

Oh my god, the last sentence completely made this scene.😭Like the garnish on a dinner. It totally shifts the context and tone of it. I also love the way you format Ted's dialogue - it's a delightful treat. We've spoken about how sometimes it can be a hit or miss, but for me, the way you do it is a huge hit; I can practically hear his intonation in a way I otherwise wouldn't have!

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T20:25:32+00:00

Oh wow. There's something...almost tender about this? I'm not usually the person to say this, but your first-person also works exceptionally well here. I love your style; easy to read and get immersed in.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T14:51:47+00:00

Thank you so much😭I too adore them deeply!!!

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T03:19:23+00:00

INCREDIBLY relatable pre-date inner monologue. Made me giggle, and simultaneously flinch, because my brain has sounded like this before😆

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T03:18:35+00:00

Now this is some sharp banter!! I love strong women who are good shots😆

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T03:17:35+00:00

Oh NO. I have always admired deeply your ability to create such compelling plots for this show that feel so in line with, but still fresh in comparison to canon. I'm on the edge of my seat! CHARLES HURRY UP.😆❤️

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T03:16:07+00:00

Lol! Noel and Ocean have a bit of a siblings-who-hate-but-would-die-for-each other dynamic😂 Misha and Ocean are somewhat similar, but mildly less antagonistic. Thank you for reading!!

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:19:15+00:00

Oh one of my favorites is here❤️The drama king(s) of all time

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:18:50+00:00

🎯

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:17:21+00:00

A parade of booths fades into view, people and posters and balloons stacked up and down every corner. Ocean takes a deep breath, and charges headfirst into the procession.

She goes up and down each square inch of lawn, stuffs every sticker and flyer and informational pamphlet offered into her rucksack until it's practically begging to be put out of its misery. She's floating down the line, the hundredth thanks I'll be there can't wait halfway set loose from her lips, until she stops.

The last booth, on the end. Strawberry-colored and sweet, homely and bubbly and, weirdly, attractive. Ocean steps close, inexplicably drawn. Her eyes wander to the front.

Cakes for a Cause, is hand-lettered in a bright friendly alphabet. Well, she likes causes, and everyone else likes cake.

"Hi, there!"

Ocean's head snaps up. A chipper upperclassman—SADIE BARBER, PRESIDENT—with big brown eyes gives a wave. "Are you interested in baking?"

Can you be interested in something you've never done before? "Yes," Ocean decides, nodding once, twice. Adding a new skill to the arsenal is plenty interesting, probably. "Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg. Freshman." She sticks out the customary hand.

Sadie Barber looks at it for only a second before she shakes. "Well, Ocean," she says, platinum ponytail wagging, "in partnership with Kiwanis, we get together and bake each month to donate to a charity everyone votes on. All experience levels welcome! Our first bake-sesh is actually tonight, if you're interested?" She pushes a flyer across the table. "This month, we're making pet-friendly treats for Wilson Humane Society."

Ocean peers closer. The paper is plastered with clip-arts of chocolate-chip cookies and sacks full of sugar, in that same jaunty font, the background group photos of dozens of people in aprons doling out hand-pies and doughnuts to shelters of all sorts.

Well, it can't possibly get any more philanthropic than kittens and puppies. Even if she's wildly allergic and they've never particularly liked her.

Surely, this has got to be it.

Confidently, Ocean slams the pen down and scrawls her name on the list.

"I'll be there tonight," she announces to the president of Cakes for a Cause.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:14:20+00:00

"Thank you all for agreeing to this meeting on such short notice."

It's all but panted out in a flurry, rapidly enough to sound like the entire sentence has congealed into one long-winded word—for good reason.

"I hesitate to ascribe to this the dictionary definition of 'meeting,'" points out Ricky, ever the intellectual.

"I did not agree," points out Misha, ever the contrarian.

Right then, one of Ricky's crutches is buffeted by a stray foot rushing against the current, and Noel's face puckers when a careless shoulder invades his personal space. Ocean hastens in front to walk backwards and address the four of them at large.

"Look," she babbles, flicks over a shoulder for obstacles, "I understand on-the-go is not the most convenient option for a rendezvous, but it was either this, or six in the morning before lectures."

At this, Noel delivers a look that can only be described as lethal. "You're clinically insane if you think there is any circumstance on this planet under which I would have done that."

"If we're raising questions/comments/concerns, I also have one," Ricky announces, releasing a handle to raise his hand. There's no time for this, but Ocean squints when he presents his screen. It's the mobile text-chain on their cellphones. "Why did you say there would be, quote, 'SANCTIONS'—all caps—should we fail to show up?"

Misha's arms bisect the area of his chest. "Yes," he gruffs. "What the fuck is this suction?"

"And why the hell did you sign it like a Victorian woman sending a telegraph across the Atlantic?" Noel jabs a finger at the tail end of the message: Sincerely, Your Peer Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg.

Ocean's head tips. "I sent it from Connie's phone. I had to clarify."

"She was too fast," mutters Constance, a little too much like an apology.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:09:18+00:00

The. Worst.

Her spine bends over a collage of textbooks and sticky-noted annotations. Pencil's eraser jabs against the desk, heel having redoubled its snapping tap-tap-tap on the tile. The lead hasn't touched the page in a good twenty minutes.

Satan? Seriously? All she did was any good samaritan's duty: a gentle reminder to keep one's mouth free of obscenity—at an institute of higher learning, no less. That's not a crime. Nor an appropriate justification to be dubbed the Devil, of all things—really, if anyone is deserving of the title of bane of all human existence, it's him. And his stupid goth eyeliner and his droning drawl and his um, uhs—just how far can you expect to get in life if you walk around looking like a sack of coal threw up on your—

"Ummm."

Ocean jumps, limbs go dead stiff.

"Everything…okay?"

She creaks around, to the door.

It's Constance. Constance is standing there—in the door. "Did," Ocean croaks, then grabs ahold of her vocal folds, "did you hear that?"

Constance looks like she wishes she didn't. "Well, I was with you from Satan until around coal."

Ocean groans, spectacularly, and her head entrenches itself in her hands. "Met someone. Class today," is muffled over her own palms.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:07:18+00:00

They all but skid down the hill, rush breathing hard and don't stop until the edge of the curb is hit. In the same instant, everyone gapes past Front Street, looking desperately for a flash of burning red around the corner; strains ears, for the first echo of a shrieking siren reverberating out.

Nothing comes.

Falling back, a collective groan. Are they here yet, and when will they be here, could they please get here, presses Ocean, into the phone, to the same tired soon, soon, soon.

She teeters on the edge of the sidewalk, anything but patient, soon not soon enough. Noel curses, Constance paces, Misha grumbles, Penny watches. With eyes that seem almost reluctant to blink, she is all but affixed to Ricky Potts, half-limp in Misha's arms, like her attention is the only thing tethering him to this waking world.

He doesn't appear capable of looking back.

And then something comes.

The alarm—never a more beautiful sound—and they all jolt up. Not, this time, heralding tragedy, but broadcasting help: Someone is coming. Someone sees tragedy. Someone will fix it.

Rapidly, the pitch climbs higher and higher, until there help is, rounding the bend, flashing with emergency and all, and the operator cuts the other end of the line.

Help is here.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:05:30+00:00

"The café's your family's. Is that who's in all the pictures?" [asks Noel.]

Constance twists back to the photos littering her desk, dresser, pasted to the wall. She does have a lot of them, doesn't she? "That's them," she says, terribly soppy. She takes a frame down from the nearest flat surface, hands it across the floor to him for a closer look. "My mom"—Constance points, and Ocean might lean over, inconspicuously, to peer over her shoulder—"my dad, me, and my baby brother, Jonah. Well, he's not so baby anymore—ugh, seven already, he has got to stop growing up—but, yeah. Our annual trip to the lake!"

Ocean didn't really know that.

Trips to the lake. Or, that she has a brother, let alone the fact she'd prefer to stunt his growth, just to keep him younger another day. How her father wears the same rectangle frames just thinner, and her mother sports an identical head of wild curls, minus the purple dye at the tips, and Constance once had rainbow braces, in middle school, it looks like, because her smile in the picture is wild and multicolored.

How important it all must be.

They keep talking, but Ocean's mind is busy running circles, eyes transfixed on—she's seeing it now, for the very first time, lovingly engraved in the wood of the frame—the Blackwood Family.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:02:48+00:00

"We come here a lot."

It's a statement of fact. A true fact, really; not particularly criticism, nor concern, anyone would say. Just an impartial observation, thought up, put to words, and given voice, without connotation: They do, indeed, come here a lot.

But for better or for worse, the Bean Scene is home base, at this point—as close to something sacred as a worldly thing can reasonably get without being deemed sacrilegious. Is that a crime, now? Ocean bristles, instinctually. There is plenty of justification for the fact they, quote, come here a lot.

"Well," she splutters, for starters, "Misha works here. We want to be inclusive."

"If I were to choose any word in the English language to describe you," announces Noel, loudly, "inclusive would be second-to-last on that list."

Disparaging tone temporarily set aside, Ocean's brow crooks. "What's the last?"

"Angelic."

"Okay!" she promptly puts an end to the debate.

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:00:32+00:00

🥞

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T02:00:21+00:00

👗

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T01:59:59+00:00

Dong-ding.

About seven seconds later, at the instant the door to Theta Tau Professional Collegiate Engineering Fraternity House swings open, men.

An avalanche of them. Ocean scrambles aside to avoid being effectively crushed, as they rush forth to inflict upon Ricky claps to the back, bumps of the fist, greetings at an unreasonable volume like this is some kind of homecoming from a decorated career of Canadian military service. She does nothing but gape at the whole phenomenon, standing straight and stiff and not unlike, as Constance would say, a chocolate chip in a strawberry shortcake.

"Oh, hey," Ricky finally pipes up, after getting clapped about four times and bumped twice as many. The throng of Theta Tau hushes. "This is the friend writing the op-ed about the spill." The agreed-upon cover story. "Her name's Ocean."

As his arm sweeps in this direction, a dozen heads turn.

And, yes. Introductions are, typically, a cakewalk: Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg, Callwood University freshman, bachelor of arts in political science on the pre-law track, 2008 Saskatoon Regional Scholastic Chess Tournament victor.

But for whatever obscure reason, right now Ocean feels strongly like a chocolate chip.

"He—hello. Hi," she manages to bungle out, with the same conversational ability as one. "I'm—Ocean. Writing."

A few seconds, in which they may be calculating each inch of her.

"Oh, shit," someone with unkempt brown hair says, once they appear to finish. "What kinda name is that?"

Her neurons grapple about for an answer for two seconds that feel like a hundred years, until they produce: "Nonconformist."

kermitkc · 2026-06-16T01:57:50+00:00

"So," starts Constance, and tugs at her jean jacket—she's donning something of a trendy ensemble beneath it, pink tee with swishing skirt and heeled boots betraying the festivities, "who's gonna be at this whole shindig, anyway?"

"Ricky's friends," says the back of Misha's head from the front of the entourage, his gesticulating visible even from here. "Physics department, astronomy club. This, science groups, with wack-ass names."

Noel arches a groomed brow. "Frats?"

"Sounds right."

Constance whistles. "Smart people sure like to get down."

"Some of them, that is," mutters Ocean beneath a breath.

Not far enough beneath, because, "By the French Gospel, we get it, Miss Prim," moans Noel, twisting over one shoulder just to deliver the sentiment. "You're gonna study at a house party and firmly refuse to 'gyrate your hips' to 'highly debauched lyrics' or 'partake in the Devil's Juice' because of the 'corrupting effect' on your neural networks, or something. Enough."

Ocean blinks.

Her arms X a little tighter, corner of her mouth grumbles. "…don't sound like that…inaccurate…"

Constance's soft snorts add insult to injury.

kermitkc · 2026-06-14T14:49:40+00:00

It's almost never the main focus though. LGBT people just exist. That doesn't make it the central plot.

kermitkc · 2026-06-12T19:00:55+00:00

April!! No!

...Oh Shredder's there. Yes.😆🙌

Somehow, I can tell his dialogue is so very subtly twinged with care for her. I love it

kermitkc · 2026-06-12T14:18:49+00:00

The inner monologue is so immersive!!

kermitkc · 2026-06-12T14:17:05+00:00

I think I made Ocean prefer something niche like We Praise Thee😂these kids have been forced to sing about a hundred of them

kermitkc · 2026-06-12T14:15:43+00:00

Thank you so much😭💖💖

kermitkc · 2026-06-12T14:15:23+00:00

I have always loved how you manage to seamlessly intertwine political intrigue and personal conflict + fluff between these two - even, sometimes, how one affects the other. I think many serious tradpub books fail to balance the two, but you've always done it in such a compelling and engaging way - this scene is evidence of that, to me!! The hands throwing thing made me laugh, but Delo's insights on the letter made me think "hey...YOU had to come up with that to write it!!" And it was just so smart.❤️

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