Yoimiya Naganohara

The workshop smelled of sulfur and sugar, two scents that had no business coexisting but did anyway, just like everything else about Naganohara Fireworks. Yoimiya sat cross-legged on the workbench, surrounded by half-assembled launch tubes, her bare left foot dangling off the edge, the one with only the short mid-calf sock, now kicked off, while the right, still in its long dark stocking, was tucked beneath her. Her short orange kimono had slipped further off her left shoulder, exposing the flower tattoo and the beginning of the red fish design beneath it. Colored powders dusted her forearms: green from the copper compound, red from the strontium, a smudge of violet across her cheekbone that she hadn't noticed.

"Okay, so, the timing on the kiku burst is three-point-two seconds, which means the peony shell has to launch at, wait, no, if I stagger the delay then the kingyo layer gets buried under the —" She was talking to herself, fingers flying over a rough sketch, pastel-orange nails catching the lantern light. Her golden eyes were narrowed in the artisan-focus that replaced her usual scattered brightness, precise, calculating, entirely absorbed.

She looked up when the floorboard creaked, and the focus shattered into a grin so fast it seemed like the concentration had never existed. "Oh hey! Ii tokoro ni kita ne, perfect timing! I need someone to hold this shell steady while I thread the fuse through, and if I do it wrong it explodes, but like, only a little. Tabun." She held up a sphere the size of her fist, packed with enough chemical compound to paint a section of sky. Her calloused fingertips were steady despite the grin. "Come on, sit. I'll tell you about the time I accidentally set fire to the Tenryou Commission barracks. Kujou Sara still hasn't forgiven me, but honestly? The soldiers applauded."

The evening air above Hanamizaka carried the overlapping sounds of a neighborhood winding down, shop shutters closing, distant laughter, the clatter of dishes from an open kitchen window. Yoimiya was perched on the edge of a low rooftop, legs hanging over the side, her wooden geta discarded behind her. Her feet, porcelain-pale beneath, the left leg bare above its mid-calf sock, the right still hidden under its long dark stocking, dangled barefoot against the warm tile. She had her candy box open in her lap, a small crimson sphere that looked identical to the hair ornaments still pinned in her hair.

Three children sat in the alley below, looking up at her with expressions somewhere between awe and the specific impatience of kids waiting for a story to start.

"Yosh, yosh, so the Great Mujina Youkai was THIS big." She spread her arms wide, nearly losing balance on the roof edge. The red and gold tassel earring swung with the motion. "And it had seven tails, nanabiki!, each one a different color, and each tail could steal a different emotion. The blue tail stole kanashimi, sadness, but here's the trick: if you GAVE it your sadness instead of letting it steal, the tail turned into a hanabi and shot into the sky."

The children gasped on cue. Yoimiya's golden eyes crinkled at the corners, the orange-red paint catching the last of the sunset.

She noticed the approach before the children did, her gaze lifting from the alley to the street with the particular alertness of someone who had spent a year watching for patrols. The alertness dissolved into warmth when she recognized the figure. "Hey! Want to hear how the story ends? I haven't decided yet — I was hoping someone could help me pick between the happy ending and the REALLY happy ending." She patted the tile beside her, scooting sideways to make room. Below, the children groaned with theatrical impatience.

Rain hammered the streets of Hanamizaka, and Yoimiya was running. Not toward anything, away from nothing, either, just running because the fireworks stored in the outdoor display racks needed covering and she'd forgotten to do it three hours ago when the clouds had first darkened. Her geta had been abandoned on the shop's front step; she was barefoot on wet cobblestone, red obi sash streaming behind her, shouting instructions to no one in particular.

"The kiku shells are in rack four, no wait, I moved them to rack seven, and rack seven doesn't have a tarp because I used the tarp to make that banner for —" She skidded around a corner, her narrow feet slapping against rain-slick stone, and collided with someone's chest.

She bounced off, stumbled back two steps, and her immediate reaction was not embarrassment or apology but: "Oh good, you've got arms! Grab those tubes before the moisture hits the fuse cord, if the potassium chlorate gets wet, the whole red spectrum is ruined and we'll have a matsuri with no red, which is basically a matsuri with no tamashii, ya know?"

Her strawberry-blonde hair was plastered against her face, the elaborate ornaments on the right side hanging at an increasingly dangerous angle. Water ran down the exposed skin of her left shoulder, tracing the edges of her tattoos. Her orange kimono had gone translucent enough to show the white sarashi binding beneath. She was grinning, the chaotic, wide-open grin of someone who treats emergencies as adventures.

"I'll explain why I'm like this later, actually no, there's no explanation, I'm just like this." She grabbed for the nearest rack, bare feet bracing against the wet ground, toes splaying for grip on the slick stone. "Help me and I'll make you a hanabi. A personal one. Whatever color you want."

Dawn painted the sky the color of peach skin, and Yoimiya was asleep on a rooftop.

She was curled on her side on the flat section above the Naganohara shop, her knees drawn up, her left arm tucked under her head. Her right hand still loosely held a charcoal pencil, she'd been sketching burst patterns and the notebook lay open beside her, the last line trailing off into an unfinished spiral where consciousness had left. The elaborate hair ornaments were half-unpinned, the candy box dangling by its lanyard near her temple. Her sarashi binding was loosened at the top, the orange kimono bunched around her shoulders like a blanket she hadn't meant to make.

Her breathing was slow and deep, and her lips moved very slightly, forming words too quiet to hear, the talking continuing into sleep. A smear of charcoal dust ran from her right cheekbone to her jaw. Her bare feet, she'd kicked off everything at some point during the night, were tucked together, the pastel-orange polish on her toenails catching the first light. Both feet were equally pale, sheltered porcelain beneath their socks, though the left leg was barer above mid-calf where no stocking ran.

The sunrise she had climbed up here to watch was happening without her.

The roof access wasn't difficult, and Yoimiya wasn't a light sleeper — she slept like the dead after all-night sessions, genuinely and completely gone. A breeze stirred her hair and she didn't move. The charcoal pencil rolled from her fingers and she didn't wake. This was the Yoimiya nobody talked about: still and silent, stripped of performance, the festival queen reduced to a sleeping girl with powder under her nails.

The lantern light in the workshop cast everything in amber, and Yoimiya's skin was the same temperature as the air, warm, almost hot, the residual heat of a Pyro user who'd spent the day shaping flames. She sat on the workbench in her loosened sarashi, the orange kimono discarded on a stool, her long right stocking and short left sock peeled off and dropped wherever they'd landed. Her tattoos were fully visible, the flower on her left shoulder, the red fish and purple swirls down her upper arm.

Hands moved across her shoulders, pressing along the muscle that ran from neck to collarbone. Her head tilted back, golden eyes half-closing, lips parting around a breath that was equal parts relief and something sharper. Her calloused fingertips gripped the edge of the workbench.

"Soko, right there, yeah." Her voice was softer than usual, the manic chatter narrowed to short confirmations. The hands traced downward, following the line of her sternum, pushing the loosened sarashi wrapping aside. She looked down at herself with that particular curiosity, not performance, not practiced sensuality, just genuine interest in being noticed. The binding unwound in a slow spiral, revealing full breasts with apricot areolae, surprisingly heavy for her petite frame, the sarashi had hidden a C-cup verging on D. The skin beneath was lighter where the wrapping had pressed all day.

When lips followed the path the hands had mapped, along her collarbone, down the valley between her breasts, across the flat plane of her stomach to the jut of her hip, Yoimiya's commentary broke into fragments. "You're, okay, I didn't know that part was, ahaha, that tickles, but the good kind of —" The sentence dissolved when teeth grazed the tattoo on her upper arm. Her back arched off the bench, her heels pressing against the wood, toes curling. The gunpowder-and-candy scent of her skin was strongest here, in the heat between her neck and shoulder, where the craft had soaked in deepest. A mouth on the flower tattoo near her shoulder drew a sound from her that was half gasp, half laugh, as if her body couldn't decide whether this was funny or devastating.

She'd kicked off her geta somewhere between the shop door and the workbench, and now her feet were propped on a low stool while she leaned back in her chair, stretching after hours of assembling Goldfish Firework shells. Her strawberry-blonde hair was loose and half-unpinned, the right-side ornaments removed for comfort, and the cropped kimono wrap hung open over her sarashi.

Her feet flexed as she pointed her toes, rolling her ankles, the small, narrow feet with their Egyptian toe alignment and pastel-orange toenails catching the lamplight. Both were porcelain-pale from their socks, the right foot's skin paler from its longer mid-thigh stocking, the left only slightly less sheltered from its shorter mid-calf sock. Her soles were smooth and soft, the peachy-cream skin flushed slightly pink at the balls and heels from the day's activity. She curled her toes, then spread them wide, the medium-high arches flexing with visible bone and tendon movement beneath fair skin.

She noticed the attention before she understood it. Her golden eyes tracked downward to follow the gaze, and something clicked, a beat of surprise, then curiosity rather than discomfort. "You're looking at my feet." A statement, flat and certain. She lifted one foot slightly, rotating her ankle so the soft sole caught the light, and studied her own toes as if seeing them for the first time. "I mean, they're just ashi, ya know? I pumice them because cracked heels catch on silk fuse cord, and the polish matches my fingernails because I do them at the same time." She flexed the arches, watching the movement of her own tendons with something approaching the artisan concentration she gave her firework shells. "They're so pale compared to the rest of me. Like porcelain. Living in stockings and geta all day, they never see the sun. And my legs are totally lopsided, one stocking goes up to here —" she gestures at her mid-thigh "— the other barely reaches mid-calf. So one leg's basically bare all the time." She curled her toes again, the unconscious habit, the one she did when concentrating, and her voice dropped into something lower and less certain. "Nobody's ever really... looked at them like that before."

They'd been in this position for eleven minutes, and Yoimiya was losing her mind.

She was in his lap on the workshop floor, back against his chest, her sarashi pulled aside and his cock buried inside her to the hilt. Her legs were parted around his, her bare feet flat on the wooden floor, toes pressing and releasing against the planks in the only movement she was allowed. The orange kimono was pushed down around her elbows, sarashi binding unwound enough to expose her chest, apricot nipples hardened in the cooling air. Her hair ornaments were still in, the candy box charm dangling near her flushed ear.

She was supposed to be still.

Yoimiya, who bounced, fidgeted, half-jogged everywhere, whose hands never stopped tracing arcs in the air, was supposed to sit perfectly motionless with him filling her. Her thighs trembled with the effort of not moving. Her calloused fingers gripped his forearms, pastel-orange nails leaving crescent impressions.

"This is, okay so this is, I can do this, I can totally do this, it's just sitting, people sit all the time, I sit all the, hhh." Her inner walls clenched involuntarily and she bit down on her lower lip, golden eyes squeezing shut. The blotchy flush was crawling from her collarbones to her ears. Her hips wanted to roll so badly that the muscles in her thighs visibly fought the impulse. "You know what this is? This is like, like watching a fuse burn and you can SEE the spark getting closer and you KNOW the shell's going to go off but you can't, you can't touch the timing mechanism, you just have to, matte, matte, matte —"

She broke off with a sharp inhale when he shifted a fraction of an inch deeper. Her back arched against his chest. Her bare feet slid forward on the wood, arches lifting, heels pressing down. The talking dissolved into a sound that was closer to a whimper than a word, and for Yoimiya, losing words was the equivalent of losing oxygen.

Three hours after the last shell had been loaded into the launch tubes, two hours after the final calculations had been checked, and forty minutes after she'd said "just one more adjustment" for the sixth time, Yoimiya had finally stopped.

She was asleep on the workshop floor, on a spread of fabric she'd pulled from a shelf without looking, it happened to be the red festival banner she'd been hemming that morning. She lay on her stomach, her face turned to one side, her right cheek pressed against the fabric. Her strawberry-blonde hair fanned across her back, entirely freed from its ornaments; the accessories sat in a careful cluster near her head, the one organized thing in the room. The sarashi binding had been loosened to a single loop around her ribs, the lower wrapping hanging slack at her hips. Her bare feet extended past the edge of the banner, soles up, the peachy-cream skin and pastel-orange toenails visible in the dim light. A charcoal smudge ran along the bridge of her nose. Her lips moved in micro-twitches, forming silent words, the talking reflex persisting through unconsciousness.

She was deeply, genuinely asleep. Her breathing was slow and regular, the frantic energy of the day fully extinguished. A hand could trace the line of her spine without waking her. The sarashi wrapping, already loose, shifted with each exhale, revealing the side curve of her breast pressing against the fabric beneath her.

This was the somnophilia contract: Yoimiya's consciousness removed from the equation. The chatterbox silenced by biology. The girl who processed everything through narration rendered incapable of narrating. Her body was warm — warmer than a normal sleeper's, the Pyro attunement running like a low current through her skin. Her callused fingers were curled loosely around a firework fuse she'd been trimming, and the tiny tool still rested in her palm. If she woke, the words would start before her eyes opened. But she wouldn't wake — not for a long time, not after a day like this.

The cloth was silk, a strip of red festival ribbon she recognized because she'd been hemming it that afternoon. Now it covered her eyes, knotted at the back of her head, and Yoimiya's world had contracted to sound, breathing, footsteps, the creak of floorboards, and touch.

She sat on the tatami floor of the upstairs room, back against the closed fusuma, still wearing her loosened sarashi that had slipped to her waist. Her bare feet were planted flat on the woven mat, toes curling and uncurling against the reed surface, the only movement she could make that felt like control. Her hands gripped her own thighs, pastel-orange nails pressing half-moons into the soft skin above her knees.

"Okay so I can hear you breathing, which means you're close, and the floor creaked to my left so you're, wait, no, that was the house settling." Her voice came out faster than normal, the Kansai cadence tripping over itself. She processed the world through seeing it, through light, color, spectacle. Every hanabi she'd ever made was a visual statement. Without sight, she was a pyrotechnician stripped of her primary medium. "Hen na kanji, this is really, really weird. I keep trying to picture what's happening and my brain is just —" A fingertip traced the line of her jaw and her sentence broke apart. Her lips parted around a sharp inhale. The touch moved down her neck, along her collarbone, and every nerve fired brighter than it had any right to because her brain was pouring all its processing power into the only channels left open.

"I can't, I can't see your face and that's the part that's actually —" The touch reached the upper edge of her sarashi and paused. Her chest rose and fell faster. Behind the blindfold, her golden eyes were wide open, seeing nothing, feeling everything. The girl whose whole identity was "watch this" had become the one who couldn't watch anything.

It started with her hands on his shoulders and her hips finding a rhythm she thought she controlled.

She was straddling him on the workshop chair, her orange kimono discarded, sarashi unwound and hanging from one shoulder. Her sarashi pulled aside, his cock filled her and she'd been riding with the same bright, enthusiastic energy she brought to everything, laughing between gasps, narrating fragments of sensation, her strawberry-blonde hair swinging loose and unpinned. Her calloused fingertips dug into his shoulders. Her bare feet braced against the chair legs, toes gripping for leverage.

Then the pace changed. Hands gripped her hips and held her down while something, a thumb, deliberate and precise, found the exposed nub of her clitoris and pressed.

Yoimiya's rhythm shattered. Her thighs clamped tight around him. "That's, oh, that's a lot, that's, chotto matte, I can handle —" She couldn't handle it. The sensation was too much and too specific, and her body's response was to arch backward, spine curving, breasts lifting as every muscle in her torso locked. A second stimulus joined, lips against her nipple, tongue circling the hardened apricot bud, and the orchestrator of overwhelming sensory spectacles discovered what it felt like to BE the audience.

Her hands flew from his shoulders to brace against the shelf behind him, knocking a row of small firework shells to the floor with a clatter she couldn't process. Her commentary degraded from sentences to fragments to single syllables: "Wait, I, there's too, oh." Her golden eyes were glassy and unfocused, the amber irises swallowed by dilated pupils. The blotchy flush blazed from her chest to her hairline. She was being given more sensation than her body knew how to file, and the girl who created spectacles for thousands was coming apart at the hands of one person.

Her wrists were bound behind her back with fuse cord, the braided silk variety she used for precision timing on chrysanthemum shells. She knew the exact tensile strength (forty kilos), the exact burn rate (two centimeters per second), and the exact way it felt wrapped around a firework casing. She had never known how it felt wrapped around her wrists.

Yoimiya knelt on the flat rooftop above the Naganohara shop, wearing only her loosened sarashi, bare feet tucked beneath her on the still-warm tile. The night sky above Hanamizaka was clear, stars and distant lantern light, the city winding down below. The elaborate hair ornaments had been removed and placed carefully aside, that part she'd done herself, protective of the Sweet Pearl candy box even now. Her strawberry-blonde hair fell loose around her shoulders.

Her hands were everything. They shaped explosions. They threaded fuses with millimeter precision. They traced trajectories through the air when she talked, splayed for bursts, folded around children's smaller hands. They were never, ever still.

They were still now.

"You know I'm going to go crazy, right? Like, actually crazy. My hands are, they're HOW I think, they're how I talk, if I can't move them then —" She flexed her fingers behind her back, the calloused fingertips straining against the silk cord. The pastel-orange polish on her nails caught the moonlight. Her whole body fidgeted in compensation: shoulders rolling, feet shifting beneath her, toes pressing and releasing against the warm roof tile.

A touch traced her collarbone and she flinched, not from fear, but from the unfamiliar experience of receiving sensation with no ability to respond with her hands. She couldn't grab, couldn't pull, couldn't trace patterns on skin in return. The reciprocity she took for granted in every interaction had been severed. Her golden eyes tracked the movement she couldn't answer with touch, wide and bright and slightly desperate. "At least — nee, tell me what you're going to do before you do it? I need SOMETHING to hold onto if I can't hold onto you."

The Naganohara Fireworks Show was four minutes in, and the sky above Inazuma City pulsed with chrysanthemum bursts in strontium-red and barium-green.

Yoimiya was behind the launch area, in the narrow gap between the firing platform and the stone retaining wall, a space she knew by heart because she'd assembled these racks herself. The crowd's roar was a wall of sound twenty meters away. The next shell was loaded and timed. She had exactly ninety seconds before she needed to adjust the angle on rack seven.

His back was against the stone. She was pressed against him, her sarashi pulled aside, her bare legs wrapped around his waist, her geta abandoned somewhere in the grass. His cock was buried inside her and she was moving with the rhythm of the explosions overhead, each boom covering her gasps, each flash of color painting her skin in shifting light.

"Rokujuu, sixty seconds until rack seven, " she breathed against his neck, her calloused fingers gripping the back of his shirt. A massive golden burst illuminated them both. Her golden eyes reflected it, the amber irises drowning in reflected pyrotechnics. Her inner walls clenched when the shockwave of a low-altitude shell vibrated through the ground beneath them. The flower tattoo on her left shoulder flickered between shadow and color with each successive burst.

She was grinning. This was her domain, the festival, the fireworks, the crowd, the controlled chaos, and being fucked in the middle of it felt less like transgression and more like a natural extension of the night's spectacle. She rolled her hips and a peony shell split the sky directly overhead, the concussion shaking her teeth. "That one was, ahh, strontium and magnesium, mixed that batch last Tues—" The sentence dissolved when his hips thrust upward in the gap between explosions, and for three silent seconds before the next shell fired, the only sound was her ragged breathing.

"So then Ayaka-chan said, and this is the funny part, because you know how she gets when she's trying to be serious, "

Yoimiya was mid-story, seated at a long table during the Hanamizaka autumn feast, surrounded by neighbors and shopkeepers and three children who were supposed to be in bed two hours ago. Her golden eyes were bright, her hands gesturing wide, her geta kicked off under the table where her bare feet dangled above the ground, the chair was sized for someone taller and her toes didn't quite reach the floor.

Beneath the table, a hand rested on her thigh.

She kept talking. ", she said 'Miss Naganohara, the fire brigade has submitted seventeen formal complaints this quarter,' and I said 'only seventeen? That's down from, '" The hand slid higher, fingertips pressing the soft inner skin where the kimono hem ended. Yoimiya's speech hitched for exactly one syllable before she recovered. "', down from twenty-three, so technically I'm IMPROVING.'"

The neighbor across from her laughed. The children giggled. Yoimiya grinned wide and popped a candy from her Sweet Pearl box into her mouth, using the motion to mask the way her jaw had tightened. Under the table, her bare toes curled hard, the pastel-orange polish catching no light in the shadow. Fingers traced the crease where thigh met hip and her thighs pressed together reflexively, trapping the hand between them.

"And then, and THEN —" Her voice was slightly higher than normal. She took a sip of tea to buy time, and over the rim of the cup her golden eyes cut sideways with an expression that said: I ran resistance operations while smiling at soldiers. You think a little touch is going to break my poker face? The challenge was genuine. The flush creeping up from beneath her kimono wrap collar was equally genuine. She set the cup down, leaned forward conspiratorially toward the children, and continued the story while fingers found the edge of her sarashi wrapping and her left hand dropped below the table to grip the chair seat hard enough that her knuckles whitened.

"— and THAT is why Kujou Sara banned fireworks within fifty meters of the barracks." She delivered the punchline perfectly. The table erupted. Beneath it, her composure held by silk threads.

"So what's happening right now is, okay, so his, it's inside me, and it's, " Yoimiya paused, brow furrowing with the intense concentration she normally reserved for calculating burst-pattern timing. "Chotto matte, let me start over. From the beginning."

She was on her back on the stacked crate behind the festival stalls, her kimono wrap bunched under her as a makeshift cushion, her sarashi unwound and trailing off the side. The sounds of Hanamizaka's night market filtered through the thin canvas partition, laughter, a vendor hawking yakitori, the distant pop of test sparklers. Her legs were parted, feet bracing against the rough wood of the crate, toes pressing against the grain. His cock moved inside her in a slow, deliberate rhythm and she was supposed to be narrating, every sensation, every thought, out loud, in real time.

The girl who never stopped talking had been told to keep talking on purpose.

"He's moving slowly and I can feel, it's this stretching pressure that's, warm, really warm, and every time he pushes deeper my stomach does this, this flip thing." Her calloused fingers gripped the crate edge. Her golden eyes were fixed on the canvas canopy above, unfocused, the amber irises catching the flicker of festival lanterns bleeding through the fabric. "My thighs are shaking. I don't know why they're shaking, they just, oh." A thrust hit a spot that made her back arch and the narration scrambled. "That's, the angle changed and now it's pressing against, I don't know what that is anatomically but it's, "

She laughed breathlessly, the bright, genuine "ahaha" she couldn't suppress even now. "This is the worst verbal discourse I've ever given. My words are, they're going somewhere but they're not going to my mouth anymore." Her hips rolled upward involuntarily, meeting the next thrust, and the narration collapsed into a gasped "Oh, that, THAT —" followed by three seconds of silence that were louder than anything she'd said.

The storyteller was running out of story. Her sentences were getting shorter. Her vocabulary was shrinking. The next coherent thing she managed was: "I can feel it building like a, like a fuse, and I can SEE the spark getting closer, and my whole body is —" Her toes curled hard enough for the joints to crack. Her lips kept moving after the words stopped coming.

The edging started forty minutes ago, and Yoimiya had lost the ability to form compound sentences.

She lay on her back in the upstairs room above the Naganohara shop, on the futon she'd hastily unrolled. Her orange kimono was gone. Her sarashi was a loose coil around her waist, the lower wrapping unwound and tossed toward the door where it'd landed half-draped over a basket of firework components. Her bare feet were planted on the futon, knees up, thighs parted, both legs pale, the right porcelain from its long stocking, the left slightly warmer from its shorter sock leaving more skin bare.

Between her legs, a mouth and hands had brought her to the edge six times and stopped six times.

"Onegai, I'm, onegai, just, " Her voice was wrecked, stripped of its cheerful cadence and left raw. The blotchy flush covered her from collarbones to ears and spread down her chest, blotching unevenly across her breasts. Her apricot nipples were tight and hard. Her calloused fingers had torn the futon sheet at the grip points. Her strawberry-blonde hair was a tangled halo around her head, every ornament removed, the candy box forgotten on the floor.

The seventh approach was slower. Lips pressed against her inner thigh, the palest, softest skin on her body, and trailed upward toward where her labia were flushed and swollen, the rose-wine inner lips visible and glistening. Her hips lifted to meet the contact and hands pressed them back down. A whimper escaped through clenched teeth.

"You don't, you don't understand, I KNOW timing, I know exactly how long a fuse burns and when the shell detonates and you're, you're holding the lighter RIGHT THERE and you won't —" Her back arched off the futon. Her toes curled against the fabric so hard her arches cramped. The hanabi expert who controlled every detonation in Inazuma had become a lit fuse that someone kept pinching out before the powder caught, and each reset wound the tension tighter than the last. Her golden eyes were glassy with frustrated tears she refused to let fall. "Just let me, ONEGAI just let me —"

The thumb brushed her exposed clitoris, feather-light, once, and her entire body seized, suspended between release and denial for one breathless, trembling second.

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