Your response should be exactly 100 words long. You do not have to include the prompt in your response -- it is meant as inspiration only.
Please use the tag "prompt: #477 - elegant" with your response.
Please put your drabble under a cut tag if it contains potential triggers, mature or explicit content, or spoilers for media released in the last month.
If you would like a template for the header information you may use this:
This person realized far too late that she married a mama's boy, and her overbearing MIL's latest stunt is grounds for divorce.
One of the internet's favorite pastimes is telling people to leave their terrible spouses. When people come to the internet for advice on an issue within their marriage, they'll often get a mix of good advice and "leave him, sis!" type sentiments. Relationships are way more complex than just staying or breaking up, especially if you're married or have kids. But oftentimes, hundreds of commenters telling you to leave your spouse when they're treating you poorly can be quite eye-opening. It makes you reconsider everything about who your spouse is and why they treat you in certain ways. And in cases like this, it makes me wonder if this person has actually hit her limit and truly decided to leave her mama's boy husband once and for all.
Some mothers have this weird obsession with their sons — these days, we call them "boy moms" — and they can't fathom their son ever loving another woman more than her. It's as if they don't want their son to ever get married, because no woman could live up to mom's standards. This dynamic makes it incredibly difficult for a wife to be around her mother-in-law. Even when the MIL is pretending to treat the wife nicely, conversations will be peppered with passive-aggressive comments, little "jokes" that are more mean than funny, and adoration of the son while the wife gets pushed to the wayside. The son is just used to this, and unless he sides with his wife, the marriage will just devolve over time, leading to situations like this stunning mid-airport decision.
You can't always tell when a relationship will end, but moments like this make it pretty clear that things are over. As this woman shared, she and her MIL don't get along. She kind of avoids talking about her husband's relationship to his Mom, yet it still shines through in the story she tells. She shares that she was looking forward to spending 2 weeks with her husband on a nice vacation… only to show up at the airport and discover that her MIL was ready to join in! And not only was she ready to embark on this couple's trip with them, the husband insisted that she come along. Wow. Just such strange behavior. Not to sound like your average internet user but girl… please leave him and find a man who idolizes you and would never dream of bringing Mommy along to a couple's vacation. The bar is on the floor, but at the young age of 30, she can easily start anew and find a much, much better husband (and MIL!).
As if we don't have enough microaggressions to deal with at work, by the looks of what's going on online lately, I certainly feel like Vacation envy has become its own little workplace outbreak.
Some people treat another person's time off like a personal betrayal, as if the office air supply drops by half the moment someone else steps out. The coworker in this story built her whole personality around that logic. Every responsibility she dodged turned into someone else's emergency. There's always a reason she can't stay, can't show up, can't manage the adult part of employment.
The Dark Invader, Kapitänleutnant Franz von Rintelen (available on Gutenberg Australia) The autobiography of one of Germany's most successful secret agents in WW1. One of the good bits from my previous book was the mention of this autobiography in the author's note at the end, since Rintelen appears as a minor character in 'The Spies of Hartlake Hall'. So I looked it up and read it, and what a read it was. Rintelen is an absolute lunatic; what he most reminded me of was a German Miles Vorkosigan, including the bit where his superiors ship him off to cause problems for the enemy instead of having him meddling in politics at home. He likes coming up with wild ideas and carrying them out, he has bucketloads of chutzpah, he's not above creatively delaying his obedience to orders, he's not afraid of wading into just about anything and he's very cocky. He is exactly who you don't want as a coworker in headquarters, but exactly who you do want to send off to sabotage the enemy.
And since he spoke excellent English - the memoir is written by him in English, not translated from German - the Germans sent him to America to do something about the fact that America, though neutral, was supplying huge volumes of ammunition to the Allies. And so he sets about arranging the manufacture of time-bombs to put in the holds of cargo ships carrying munitions, he looks for ways to sabotage harbours, he tries to send money and weapons to Mexico to encourage them to invade the USA, he gets involved in organising strikes among dock workers and munition workers, and he makes friends with Irish nationalists and encourages them to help him with all of this. And, because this is real life and not fiction and he's not quite as lucky as Miles Vorkosigan, eventually he gets captured by the British on his way back to Germany, and put in a POW camp, and then later was sent for trial and imprisonment in the USA for his crimes there - he doesn't get back to Germany again until 1921, after four years of hard labour in pretty grim conditions which he makes plain in his memoir that he felt was extremely inappropriate as an enemy soldier.
But he did very obviously adore the British officers who captured him, he's incredibly Anglophile and the whole description of his being captured is interleaved with a description of him spending Christmas with one of the officers involved years later and how well they got on ('dearly beloved ex-enemies' is his phrase); he loves England and the British. He found that Germany wasn't the place for him when he got out - not least because von Papen, the Weimar chancellor, was his fellow naval attache in the US embassy while he was carrying out all this sabotage and they hated each other's guts and, according to Rintelen, Papen deliberately let his name leak out so that the British knew who he was and could arrest him. So Rintelen moved to London and settled there, and according to the Wikipedia article about him, it's possible that when WW2 came around he helped train SOE operatives in sabotage work, this being something of his area of expertise.
The memoir is very obviously written with his own biases and interpretation and grievances about various things, but it's a fantastic read and honestly even though he was clearly a complete nightmare in so many ways, I couldn't help but like him.
This job candidate's new attempt to game the system is either brilliant or a recipe for professional disaster, and people seem to be split on it.
On the one hand, applying for new employment opportunities has never been more challenging than in the current market. Not only are decent jobs harder to come by, but also you're dealing with the artificial intelligence of it all. This, of course, applies to both sides of the job search process. For candidates, they have to tweak their resumes and cover letters with key words in order to get past automated review processes. For recruiters and hiring managers, the process has become even more impersonal, as quality candidates are slipping through the cracks and some are using AI themselves to try to stand out.
So while we have sympathy for the predicament wherein this candidate has found himself, on the other hand, one has to wonder if this rather unethical way of bypassing the traditional job search process will come back to haunt him one day.
Essentially, in order to combat the difficulties of the job search process, this author decided to start ignoring the fact that he couldn't seem to get an interview anywhere, opting instead to call up various Human Resources departments directly. He would then claim that he was asked to follow up with them to schedule an interview, which wasn't the truth. In fact, it wasn't even an exaggeration of the truth. He simply had not heard back from any of these places.
However, to this man's surprise (and to everyone else's), he managed to find success with this newfound method of applying to jobs. He landed several interviews and was only "caught" on two occasions. When that happened, he simply hung up the phone and moved onto the next opportunity. Keep scrolling below for his full account of his new tips of the trade.
If anyone has a pinch hit for this round of fffx but did not sign up at the start of the exchange to get both an assignment and a gift, you are welcome to leave prompts of your own here, in the comments. This round's tag set contains fandoms, characters, ships, and concepts that participants are already interested in, but you don't have to stick to what's already there - give prompts for whatever fandom(s) you want.
Please give your AO3 name and specify if you're interested in art, fic, or both. Please do not say whose pinch hit you are working on. Please make sure your AO3 preferences are set to allow you to receive unassigned gifts.
There is no minimum treat length - works submitted in response to these prompts may be shorter than 20 panels or 5,000 words.
Works for pinch hitters (including treats for past pinch hitters, at the tag) can be counted towards the achievements at triplecrownofexchanges (should they be resurrected). Or, if you were considering a treat in this exchange (thank you) and the existing requests haven't sparked an idea yet, maybe a new prompt will.
Happy New Year! Works are now due this year - this MONTH - happily not quite this week.
The following pinch hits are due at 11:59pm EST, Saturday 7 February. That's a little under four weeks from this post, and two weeks after the main deadline. To claim, please reply with your AO3 name, and let me know which recipient/PH number you want. You're also welcome to claim by emailing mod.modzilla@gmail.com. You can swap from your current assignment to a pinch hit; if so, please say that's what you're doing - otherwise I'll assume you're picking up an assignment on top of any current assignments.
Minimum requirements: An art gift must be a completed comic at least 10 pages or 40 panels long; a fic gift must be a story at least 10,000 words long. You can also fulfil a pinch hit by giving two complete half-length works, if your recipient has opted into that for the fandom(s) you are creating in. Any work must be for a fandom your recipient has requested and one character/relationship/worldbuilding tag requested in that fandom, and must avoid their DNWs.
Pinch hits can now be claimed in 5k or 20-panel increments if the recipient has opted into receiving half-length works. Please say in your claim if you're claiming a pinch hit for 5k (fic) or 20 panels (comic), and for what fandom.
It's warmed up a little, but we're still in the edge of the cold snap. It's been down to 11° (in the low fifties) inside the bedroom a couple of times this week, which seems to indicate there may be a problem with the radiator in there. We haven't remembered to bleed the radiators the last two years and it's definitely got air in it, but I'm not sure that could account for it.
The individual thermostats on our radiators don't do much, because they're all controlled by the electronic thermostat on the geothermal pump. There's only one sensor and it's on the tenant side, which is already more insulated because it was built in the 70s and not 1950, so our side is always a bit chilly in contrast, since they would be roasting over there otherwise. And the bedroom loses more heat because of its location right under the roof. But normally in winter it's been more like 14-15° (58-59) in there.
In the last week I've been sleeping with three duvets (mostly under two though; the third one is sideways over the feet). This is actually not inconvenient enough to stimulate the executive function to try to fix it promptly though. We are at "Oh, ugh, I guess we have to do something at some point?"
and it'll feel even faster, I'm sure, because I'm going on a trip soon!! I'm so excited, it's going to be great to see C again :)) I have a lowkey outfit for the main event we have planned, but not much because I'm only going carry-on about it.
I'm also looking forward to breakfast/brunch with some of the squad coming up, before everyone's gone past the winter break again. (I'm also a little nervy about the slosh tomorrow; I've kinda been talking with someone but like when in a text convo does one casually mention the probably-maybe-aro thing.....)
I've been particularly jazzed about going out of town, and this and that, so I haven't hit hard launch on a comm yet but it's on my whiteboard :) not forgotten! [link redacted, moved to login-locked post]
I've also been keeping up the writing!! my first work of 2026 is already one of my longest pieces in a while, and it's for a kink flash fest :') eyes closed head first can't lose!! actually, interestingly, I had to pull up and restart from scratch this past weekend because, while I really liked my first draft, it ended up being a story about isolation vs intimacy during COVID lockdown, of all things. And I think I was on to something! but I also don't quite think it's what a stranger might want as a kink meme gift. like, I'm a FIRM believer in writing from the heart, but also, don't be a dick to the target audience, right? So I'm putting a pin in that, and all its worldbuilding. I'm not mad at my final piece, but I can feel the rush on it lol. well, it was a flash-exchange after all; the whirlwind is part of the experience!
Writing is so fun, though. I haven't done relatively much with OCs, but they're such an adventure to get to know through the page in real-time. it's different from writing fanfic, for sure!
on the flipside, now I'm out a writing project! probably not that I could do much wordcount in the nearer future, out traveling, but it's important to keep the momentum going. hmmm. shoutout to the fandomcalendar though; I love hearing what people are up to! I'll poke around for a sense of deadlines, and see what to aim myself at next...
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