#( not enough to matter in terms of being able to take martin's place in smashing the amulet
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what if - since the falcos are such an old family line - they had mingled with the dragonborn emperors at some point. which means...pax has some dragon blood.....
#❪ ⋅ ✹ ⋆ ���┊ ❛ ooc. ❜ ❫#( im so silly )#( not enough to matter in terms of being able to take martin's place in smashing the amulet#but like.....his magic and dragonskin ability have a slightly different flavor then whats normal#( and like in terms of dnd lore.....him being a sorcerer .... it isnt from the arne side at all....the origin source of his innate magic#would be a mixture of divine soul + draconic )#( bc akatosh is both a dragon and a god )#( its just dormant in most of the falcos )
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SHORTAKI WEEK DAY 2
FFN // AO3
Flinch
I'd never seen anybody go so hard on Arnold. And that's coming from someone who has literally bullied him since the dawn of time.
It all started when we decided to take the bus out of town to visit this record store that Arnold was dying to visit. It was new and located a couple of towns over—'The Record Skip.' It was a dumb name in my opinion and considering the size of the town it was located in, I didn't exactly anticipate business to be booming enough that it would stay open for much longer.
Thus, initiated our fun little trip.
Arnold was determined to get this one particular jazz album that he'd been hunting for online and at every thrift shop, music store, anywhere that you could possibly imagine. Personally, I thought it seemed like a lot of unnecessary work for a giant disc that was way larger than it needed to be when there are CDs or, dare I say it, streaming services that could play you the same music without lugging around ten pounds worth of equipment to do so.
But to Arnold, the records were just his… thing. Rhonda would call it an 'aesthetic' but in reality, he was just a big jazz nerd who liked the way that a record, "made the sounds of each instrument pop." He claimed that when listening to an old record on his fancy phonograph or whatever you call it, was like "being in the room of a jazz concert. You can feel the energy even if it was recorded years, decades ago."
Naturally, I laughed in his face, but I respect his love for the way the music feels and sounds. I remember when we first started dating our sophomore year, we would spend hours in his room with the lights down low as he played various vinyls while explaining the greats to me and the reasons why jazz music was his happy place.
Sometimes I think it's because it helps him stay close to his grandparents who, unfortunately, aren't around any longer to influence his eclectic tastes. Both Stella and Miles seem to understand why this mission of finding some specific LP was important, but me, his 17-year-old girlfriend who much preferred the music app on her phone, well I just couldn't quite wrap my head around the significance.
"So, how did you find this shop anyway?" I asked him as we jostled on the bus down the road towards the town I'd never heard of. "This city is like… the smallest dot on a map I've ever heard of."
"It isn't that small of a town, Helga," Arnold insisted before offering a small shrug of his shoulders. "I stopped here once one the way back from visiting Arnie a few years ago," he explained, and I rolled my eyes at the mention of his zany cousin.
"Right. Arnie. Talk about someone living in po-dunk nowhere," I commented, though Arnold didn't seem to react.
His attention was focused outside the glass of the window as he watched our bus slowly travel its way into the town Arnold was eager to visit. Once the sign for the town passed us by, I could feel Arnold's grip of my hand tighten slightly and I couldn't help but smile at the involuntary action.
He was excited.
That made me excited.
Even if it was just for some dumb record.
When the bus lurched forward at its stop, both Arnold and I stood up as he began rushing off down the aisle. He could hardly contain his excitement for the possibility of finding whatever long-awaited album he'd been searching for.
Me?
I was just interested in seeing what this album was in the first place.
Up until now, he had refused to tell me—said it was stupid and that I would laugh at him. While he wasn't exactly wrong because the chances of me laughing were pretty high, it didn't mean that I didn't care. I wanted him to be happy even if it was because of something that I found weird and dumb. My opinion didn't matter. This was his thing and as the loving, perfect, gorgeous, and incredibly supportive girlfriend that I had had the honor of being for nearly two years now, I was prepared to follow that footballhead into the depths of hell if it meant he'd wear that dopey grin of his for even one minute.
'The Record Skip' wasn't too far down the road from where our bus had stopped, and Arnold practically skipped his way down the sidewalk towards the small building with a giant record hanging above the door that read the name of the shop. It didn't seem all that busy and my suspicions were correct when we entered the store to find a lone cashier who looked bored to tears and a single customer perusing the endless rows of albums.
As my eyes scanned the bins filled to the brim with records of all varieties and in no particular order, I watched Arnold begin to sort through them feverishly. Wanting to help, I stood beside him and looked over his shoulder while quietly saying, "You know Hair Boy, if you told me what you were looking for, I might be able to help you find it."
"No thanks," Arnold replied automatically as a frown grew on my face. "If it's here, I want to be the one to find it. If that makes any sense."
Pulling away from peeking over his shoulder, I chuckled to myself with a lone shake of my head. "It doesn't, you know," I told him with amusement. "Make any sense, that is. I mean, look around!" I exclaimed while gesturing at the small store we had found ourselves in. "There must be hundreds of records in here and without my help, we could be here until closing time. And from the looks of 'Moody McGee' over there—" I pointed to the cashier tapping away on her phone without a care in the world, "—I just don't think they'd be all that stoked at such a proposition."
My words gave Arnold food for thought as he paused in his sifting through the records to consider my observation. He knew that I had a point and after a moment of silent contemplation, Arnold breathed a heavy sigh of defeat. "Fine," he said softly before twisting minimally to look over in my direction with a stern expression painted on his features. "But if I tell you, you have to promise not to laugh, okay?"
Once again rolling my eyes at his inane paranoia, I agreed to his terms and conditions. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, Arnoldo. Now what is it that we're looking for, huh?"
Arnold took a heavy breath as if to prepare himself for some big dark secret he'd been harboring. The dramatics of his lead-up to the important and somehow embarrassing tidbit threw me off once it was finally off his chest. "It's this Dino Spumoni record. It's… It's really, really rare because it was a live recording from one of his shows when he was still singing with Martin and Lewis in the Lounge."
I stared at him with my mouth ajar as though in shock, which I quickly wiped off and swapped the expression for a skeptical glare instead. "That's it? That's the big mysterious record you've been hunting for? Dino Spumoni?" I soon rolled my eyes while letting out a scoff. "Cripes, Arnold! Didn't your grandparents own basically every single one of his stinkin' albums? I'll bet it's up in some closet somewhere in a box, all dusty and—"
"Well, it's not, Helga," he interrupted me, and my mouth instinctively zipped itself shut at the sudden ferocity in Arnold's tone. When his wave of agitation passed, he soon apologized and explained. "I'm sorry, it's just…" He opened his mouth to let words pass through his lips, though only air escaped. As he scrunched his brows inward, he seemingly tried to conjure just what it was he had hoped to already have said and been done with.
"It's just…what, Arnold?" I pushed gently and Arnold sighed before turning back towards the rows of records he began sifting through once again.
Quietly, he resumed speaking. "When Grandma died… Grandpa didn't take it too well." He glanced over his shoulder at me before returning his attention to the records he thumbed through, while muttering, "You remember that."
"Sure," I answered while walking away from him to walk around the end of the row and to the side directly opposite of Arnold. My hope was that from where I stood across the way, I could secretly peek over at him while pretending to look through records. "That was freshman year, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, it was," Arnold confirmed while holding an album up and turning it around to scan over the song listings before replacing it back to the slot he'd found it in. "Grandpa died our sophomore year."
"I remember," which I had—very vividly, in fact. It had been a really tough beginning of high school for the poor kid, and as much as I hated to admit it, their deaths were a large part of what brought the two of us even closer together. I hadn't been able to help myself from checking in on him and stopping by randomly to see how he was doing. Soon I was staying for dinner and helping move belongings and sorting through boxes.
It wasn't long after that Arnold and I began officially dating.
I always imagined how his Grandpa would have teased us; his grandma continuing to call me 'Eleanor' and maybe giving Arnold a new title of his own as an upgrade of sorts. It never had felt the same since they'd passed, but so was the nature of life—and Phil and Gertie had lived a couple of pretty amazing ones.
"Right when we first started sorting through things," Arnold continued on; effectively dragging me out of my thoughts and back to the conversation we were currently having. "I found this old Dino Spumoni record—one that I hadn't seen or listened to before. It was shoved all the way in the corner of my grandparent's closet, and we were all baffled as to why it had been hiding back there."
"So, naturally, we pulled it out and I began looking over the cover—memorizing it to the smallest wrinkle and shallowest scratch," he laughed at this as though ashamed of openly telling another person about what he'd done. "And one day, as I was pulling out the record to play it, it sort of… got caught on something? I yanked at it to try and wiggle it out of the slot, but when it got free, it slipped from my fingers and—"
"It shattered, didn't it?" I answered for him as he nodded slowly.
"Smashed," Arnold uttered with a shake of his head and a humorless smirk. "Just like the name of his song."
"And that's why we're on this hunt? To replace the record that you accidently broke?" I shrugged my shoulders while moving to the next column of miscellaneous albums. "I mean, I get it. It was your grandparents, but by replacing it, you're just honoring some other random person's copy, you know?"
"That's true," he agreed, though his tone suggested otherwise. "It isn't all about the record itself, though. After it fell and broken and I had been angry for a significant amount of time, I picked up the slipcover of the album and looked over it like I had before—memorizing every indentation and faded color that made the cover art. But this time, I ventured to look inside the slot to where the record used to lie."
A long pause followed as Arnold probably waited for me to beg for more. I was happy to oblige because I really was curious now. "And?" I pressed him.
Arnold shifted over to his next column of records and flipped with ease while glancing at each album that he passed. "There was a note shoved in the back corner. That's what the record had gotten stuck on. And since it hadn't been touched in who knows how long…" his voice trailed off as though verbally giving me a blank to fill in for him.
"It's no wonder you hadn't found it before," I finalized as he went on to tell me more about the note without my prompting.
"The note was a letter. It was dated from the 50s and it was addressed to my Grandma… from Grandpa… after their very first date."
My mind tried to imagine Gertie as a young woman and Phil as some young man; the two of them no different than Arnold and myself, but for a few years. I shook off the vision I couldn't make and said, "Well, are you going to tell me what it said, or what?"
Ignoring my sarcasm, Arnold recalled the letter as though he had recited it countless times before. "Gertie—I had a swell time with you at the lounge, tonight. Here's a cut from that performance, courtesy of Dino himself. Maybe on our next date I'll take you to meet him, as long as you don't go running off with him. He'd better not touch my gal." The both of us laughed as he ended the letter and offered a shrug. "Then he just signed it, 'yours, Phil.'"
"Your grandparents really were something," I noted while sorting through my pile; Arnold moving from the row he was in to the next one over and started going through more albums. Just beside him, the only other customer in the entire store also carefully inspected record after record—also a man on a mission.
It was clear that finding this record wasn't because he missed the music or wanted it for some kind of collection he had. Arnold was looking for this record because it was made from the very night in which his grandparents had shared their very first date. Unlike some of the zany stories told by both Phil and Gertie respectively about such a date, that letter had given Arnold tangible proof of their love story.
Finding that record meant completing the album Arnold had probably stashed away beside his bed so he could look at it the way he used to look at that old picture of his parents. Not like I knew that or anything. I didn't watch him from the skylight sometimes when it was really dark out because there was a new moon and he was distracted which meant I could hide in the shadows of the rooftop above him.
But that was beside the point.
I had to find that album. I wanted to give that back to Arnold—return to my beloved that which was lost with two of the most important people in his life. My sweet, poor, footballheaded darling. How I longed to take away the pain clouding his heart. How I desired to wave a magic wand and turn back time so he could reunite with his grandparents once again. If only I could find that album. If only I could be the hero and bring to him the one thing that would set off the familiar glimmer I longed to see from beneath his emerald green eyes.
If only… If only… If only …If—
"Hey! Give that back!"
Arnold's voice echoed through the shop, and I blinked myself back to reality to look over in the direction of where my familiar footballhead was glaring up at the other customer who was the size of a linebacker. In their hand was an album—one that I could see from where I stood had that of Dino Spumoni's face on it.
It was the album.
"No way, little dude," the stranger insisted while holding the album away from Arnold's desperate grasping. "Do you know how much this puppy is worth?"
"But I had it first," he expressed, his tone growing more distressed with each word and fling of his arm toward what the man held away from him. "You took it out of my hand."
"Yeah, so that I couldhave it," the man's voice was smug; arrogant. This dude thought he could just get away with taking something because he could.
As nice as Arnold was and as harsh as he could be when pushed, he didn't seem to phase the giant stranger who towered over him. "Please," Arnold began to plead, "You don't know what this album means to me…"
"And you don't know what it's gonna mean to my wallet," the man countered.
That was all that I needed to butt my way in to their dispute and place myself directly between this douche-nugget and Arnold. This imbecile thought that he was going to walk away with this album after swiping it out of Arnold's hands because he was some 'big, strong, tough guy?' He was clearly looking for a sweet, sweet kiss from my fists.
"Hey. Iron Giant," I addressed him while shooting a confident glare up in his direction. "How about you leave my friend alone here and I'll let you mosey on home without your eyes so swollen shut that you end up running into every single trash can, pole, and sign that you encounter?" My long-winded threat didn't strike fear in the man's eyes, though I could tell he was surprised at my sudden involvement.
With a somewhat awkward chuckle, the man shifted his gaze between Arnold and me. "Are you really threatening me? Over some stupid record?"
"Are you really so stupid that you think I won't punch your lights out faster than you can say 'I'm sorry for being a literal ass?'" I retorted as I tightened my fists at my side in preparation for my next move.
Arnold wasn't having it though.
"Helga, stop," He demanded in a harsher tone than I'd anticipated. The sudden change in his demeanor threw me off guard, and I stepped aside to look at him as he moved to the forefront to stare up at our selfish stranger.
"Listen," Arnold began firmly without so much as a stutter or waver in his voice. "I found that album first. Fair and square. It was in my hand and you will give it back to me."
This amused the man and he took a lone step in to further intimidate and loom over Arnold and me. In a low growl, he said, "Oh yeah? And what are you gonna do about it… kid?"
My eyes shot over to Arnold who didn't even flinch at the words the man spat in his face. With an intensity I hadn't seen in Arnold in a long time, he narrowed his eyes and matched the stranger's tone to say in return, "What will we do?" He repeated before turning to look at me and silently tell me the next step in his plan. Fully understanding what it was I had to do, Arnold faced the stranger again and simply stated, "We're going to take it back."
With that, as the stranger was distracted and utterly confused, I reached out to snatch the album from his grubby hands. "C'mon, Shortman!" I hollered as Arnold and I turned around to begin running away from the angry man we left behind.
"Hey! Get back here!" he demanded, but we didn't listen. The man may have been dumb, but he certainly wasn't dumb enough to follow after the two of us and cause a scene. Not only did this cashier not care, but we were just teenagers. Surely the dude didn't want to get into a huge fight with a couple of kids.
After we paid for the record and it was safely in a bag that Arnold carried with pride at his side, we slowly walked down the sidewalk in pursuit of the bus stop. Evening was approaching and the sun had just begun to slowly sink into the horizon; the sky morphing into bright hues of oranges and pinks that swirled together like paint on a canvas. Once we made it to the bus stop, we took a seat on the bench to wait while Arnold pulled out the album and gave it a look-over.
"I can't believe we found it," He mused while staring at the cover with a smile.
"Technically you found it," I corrected him before smirking and leaning back into the bench we sat on. "And what I can't believe is you, Hair Boy."
Arnold carefully placed the album back in the plastic bag before turning to look at me with a raised brow. "What can't you believe?"
"That guy was huge, Arnold," the words came out in shock as though the memory of him was even bigger than he had been in reality. "I'm surprised you had the guts to stand up to him like that. You didn't even flinch."
"You were the one threatening to start a fight, Helga, not him. Why would I flinch?" he soon countered, and I shrugged my shoulders.
"He seemed pretty antagonistic to me. He could have socked you right there, but you just…. Stood there." I said with a smirk. "But me? That's not really how I work, you know that. I was ready to pick a fight. And If he ended up giving me two black eyes, he would have at least gotten one and it would have been worth it, too. You were walking away with that album if it was the last thing I did, today."
"At least it didn't come to that," Arnold said while reaching out to lace his hand with mine and offered a light squeeze. "I think our plan worked just fine."
"You're telling me. For once you and your giant head were the brains of the operation," I offered, and Arnold shook his head in amusement.
"It can't always be you, you know," he soon replied with a twinkle in his eye; the hint of a tease with a half-smile that I could hardly resist. "I can be clever and witty too."
"You have your grandparents to thank for that," I told him earnestly; the glimmer in his gaze dulling as he soaked in what I was saying. "I think that Gertie and Phil would be proud of you for holding your ground and getting that album back. I'll bet it was something they would have done."
"Grandpa definitely would have," Arnold agreed with a nod and a smile at the thought. I could tell that he was thinking of either a memory or trying to imagine him doing such a thing. He was lost in the thought for a moment before letting out a chuckle and adding, "Grandma would have gone a much, much more dramatic route, though."
"You're probably right about that, footballhead."
Together we sat, hand in hand, on the bench as we waited for the bus to arrive. With each new conversation and laugh that we shared, I relished the future the two of us would surely have. If today had proven anything, it was that Arnold and I worked best in tandem with each other; just like another couple we knew.
And when we reached Sunset Arms again and headed up for Arnold's room, the first thing he did was put on that record; the music filling the air to transport us back to that legendary couple's very first date. Like them, Arnold and I would have many a story to tell our grandchildren one day, and maybe someday, they too would go on a mission to find some missing relic of our love and fight to get it.
My only hope was that, like Arnold, they too wouldn't flinch at the opportunity.
#shortakiweek#shortaki week#shortaki#heyarnold#hey arnold#day 2#flinch#writing prompts#fanfiction#fanfic
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Prodigal Son, Episode 11: Malcolm’s No-Good, Very Bad Day
Episode 11 of Prodigal Son and, good Lord, was this an episode worth waiting for.
Malcolm begins the episode metaphorically much were we left it - in the hands of a maniac - and geographically in an unknown location. Being hit hard enough to be knocked out isn't good for anyone, so it's probably no surprise that we start off with a little flashback/hallucination to a much younger Malcolm being reassured by Jessica that he is not a monster; he's a survivor.
As the episode proceeds, all we can do is hope that Jessica is right.
Full review and spoilers galore under the cut.
The story splits off into two separate threads - Malcolm trying to survive his imprisonment and torture at the hands of Paul Watkins, the Junkyard Killer, and the rest of the team desperately trying to find him in time.
Malcolm's interactions with Paul serve as a very good reminder of how good Malcolm is at his job, as he uses his knowledge of Paul to try to forge a connection or, at least, find a weak spot to exploit. The trouble comes from the fact that Paul knows more of Malcolm's story that Malcolm may of Paul's - particularly when it comes to their original meeting. Over the course of a significantly unsettling conversation, we learn that Paul did accompany Malcolm and Martin on a camping trip, and that Paul enjoyed his time "working with" Martin - I'm really hoping for some hints in later episodes as to how the discovery of the Junkyard Killer develops the story of the Surgeon. Maybe it could be the topic of Ainsley's next exclusive?
Interestingly, Paul declares himself to be finished with his previous mission of punishing the wicked, in favour of trying to convince Malcolm to take his father's place as Paul's co-murderer. Even though Malcolm makes the valid point that he's not a killer, Paul remains unworried - he wasn't a killer either until he passed "the trials".
Paul also indirectly confirms that the girl in the box was real and that she was killed on the camping trip which Malcolm can barely remember - but she wasn't the only one to suffer on that trip, as Paul himself was stabbed.
He was stabbed by none other than little Malcolm.
And, because turn-around is fair play in the world of serial killers, Malcolm gets stabbed as well.
Meanwhile, the NYPD and the FBI are doing all they can to find Malcolm. Paul's blind and furious grandmother refuses to do anything more helpful that sing creepy Old Testament hymns about the wicked being punished, so Gil gets Special Agent Swanson to agree to two very different, and equally questionable, lines of inquiry - Malcolm's mother and Malcolm's father.
Sidenote, but Swanson does explicitly say that she doesn't trust Jessica purely because she was married to the Surgeon - and while a certain degree of scepticism about Jessica's innocence or guilt may be understandable (I indulged in a little of it myself in the first half of the season), intending not to inform someone that their son has been kidnapped by a serial killer is a choice which I really want someone to call her out on at some point.
Gil, one way or another, gets permission to share some of the photos of John's childhood home with Jessica, in case she can remember anything about John or the camping trip which might help them locate Malcolm. It certainly shuts down her attempts to identify the Girl in the Box, at least in the short term.
(I also like that Gil clearly knows how Jessica got the picture of the bracelet, because he's not an idiot, and also how he is clearly not sharing that information with anyone else, because FBI doesn't deserve to know.)
We also get a brief glimpse into Ainsley's life; the interview with her father has benefitted her career in the way which she had hoped, and she's on her way to a meeting with some bigwigs about her next move when her mother summons her home for emotional support. Ainsley and Jessica's last conversation was hugely stressful for all involved, and for me watching it, but I couldn't help but notice that at least one thing that Jessica said in episode 10 seems to have stuck ("There are victims! Real ones! ...And why is the story never about them?"), because she wants to do the next feature on the victims, not the killer. I am very amused that Jessica using 911 as an emergency code fails - but the word please succeeded.
And then we get the interaction which I have been dying to see for quite some time now - Gil versus Martin.
Apparently an NYPD consultant being kidnapped by the Surgeon's former accomplice is a valid reason to yank someone out of solitary confinement, but Martin's time in solitary has scrambled his brains a lot more than maybe anyone was anticipating. Amusingly, Martin instantly knows that it was Malcolm, not the NYPD, who found Paul Watkins - although the news that Paul has taken Malcolm knocks him for six. So convinced is he that Malcolm is dead that he collapses. There are still plenty of questions still to be answered about Paul and Martin's partnership, and about how Paul evolved after Martin was arrested, but it's very interesting that Martin is so instantly convinced that Malcolm is dead - unlike the NYPD, who are clinging to the fact that Paul liked to hold his victims for some time before killing them. Is that a habit which he developed after Martin was out of his life - or does Martin simply know that the relationship between John and Malcolm was far more adversarial even before Malcolm started actively hunting him?
Either way, the strength of Martin's reaction to the news prompts medical intervention in the form of sedatives - which gives us all the joy of seeing a Martin Whitly who is not in full command of his faculties accuse Gil of trying to replace him in Jessica and Malcolm's lives. Apparently this is a notion which has been plaguing the bad Surgeon for quite some time. But even with his concerns, he can still be convinced to give up the location of the cabin from the camping trip - if only as a sign of faith in his own son's ability to stay alive.
Given the amount of time left on the clock, I was pretty certain that the cabin location was going to be a bust, but I was still on the edge of my seat as the show cut between JT and Dani on one side of a door and a madman with an axe on the other side. Different doors, of course, but a classic done well is always a lovely thing.
While the FBI, the NYPD and a whole host of other people with guns kick down the wrong door, Malcolm learns a little bit more about his camping trip - and his first serious assault, which was apparently in self-defenses, as the whole point of the camping trip was allegedly to kill Malcolm. Little Malcolm, who had seen too much and, apparently, been chloroformed to the point of it losing effectiveness, and who therefore was starting to remember too much.
It's a revelation which definitely takes Malcolm by surprise - and while it's something which he openly rejects when Paul first says it, it is something which he later accuses his 'father' (okay, fine, the stress-induced hallucination of his father) of attempting to do. Most telling of all, the hallucination of Martin openly admits to it. No matter what the truth was or is, in the moment, Malcolm truly believed that his father attempted to kill him - and will he ever really be able to believe any of Martin's denials?
Unfortunately, in the course of this particular argument, Malcolm reveals his ultimate motivations: "I protect my community and my family!"
And Paul, being not all that stupid, immediately zeroes in on the best way to hurt Malcolm: by hurting his family: "Sacrifice shall be your final trial. But don’t worry. It won’t be something you have to do, just something you have to endure."
Meanwhile, Ainsley is putting together some of the story for herself. The photos left by Gil almost immediately trigger a memory - the collection of angel statues in John's childhood home matches one which Ainsley was given as a child. Jessica brushes this aside as a present from Martin, but Ainsley disagrees - her imaginary friend, Mr Boots, gave it to her. The imaginary friend who she saw moving through the Whitly home, but thought was simply a ghost because he vanished in the basement.
And then, in a gorgeous piece of timing worthy of any high budget horror film, Jessica and Ainsley look around a corner to see John Watkins emerging from the secret room in their basement, axe first.
(Was this secret room where Martin killed his victims? How paranoid will Jessica be about that entire basement from now on? SO MANY QUESTIONS)
In the ensuing chase sequence, Jessica loses some points for stopping to fiddle with light switches, then immediately gains all those points back and then some for smashing John over the head with the first ceramic object to come to hand. She gets herself and an injured Ainsley upstairs in a bathroom, behind two locked doors, and barricades the door further with a dressing table. She is calm, collected, and absolutely bloody furious. Her attempts to reassure Ainsley are simply heartbreaking, talking about the headache Ainsley have in the morning, the illicit pills Jessica will offer, the simple declaration that they don't need anyone to save them even as John starts to chop through the door.
All she had was a pair of scissors, but I truly believe she would have made John pay dearly before the end.
Fortunately, it doesn't come to that. Malcolm, egged on by the hallucination of his father (I, as always, preferred the therapist), smashes his own hand with a hammer to get out of the cuffs and off he goes after John. He's been stabbed, concussed, and now just a little mutilated, so it's understandable that he avoids a straight-up confrontation, instead luring John back downstairs so he could freak him out with a open trunk and then blindside him with a crowbar - before locking him in the trunk.
The framing of the final confrontation made me wonder for a second if we were going to have to watch Malcolm become the killer he's always feared, probably as he brutally beat to death the man who had tried to kill his family. A potentially unsatisfying plotline would develop of Malcolm being tormented by his own dark side, or equating justifiable homicide with his father's sadism. Maybe even a hugely dull trial. But I didn't need to worry. As Jessica said in the opening scene, Malcolm isn't like his father. He's a survivor.
A survivor with a bit of a mean streak, given the way in which he effortlessly uses John's claustrophobia against him, but still. Not yet a killer.
The reunion with Jessica and Ainsley was adorable, and almost makes up for us not getting to see Malcolm reunite with his team - especially after they gave us cute flashbacks of Dani's developing friendship with Malcolm, and showed JT's obvious and understandable concern for the guy. Hopefully we'll get to see a little more of that in next week's episode.
Previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here.
Ainsley Whitly Character Profile available here.
#prodigal son#episode review#Episode Recap#tv review#Thomas Payne#bellamy young#michael sheen#Michael Raymond James#halston sage#themachiavellianpig watches
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The Short and Long of Grief
My aunt Deb died a few weeks ago. I received an email the very next day from my friend Don. I'm in a writing group with him and his wife Jean. And he asked me about grief.
Here's part of the email.
- - - - - - -
Hi Jeff,
Interesting to browse through your comments on grief, thanks. Question: can one grief about the present, case in point, can we grief that we are stuck in a lockdown on account of a damn little virus that is killing some of us. Given your implied sense of time relativity, I’d guess that grieving the present situation is possible. Today certainly means the future we were anticipating is different. We’ve already had our trip to the Netherlands canceled, after planning on it for more than a year.
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Obviously the trip to Europe is most likely annoying, but not a major emotional issue like the loss of a life. Although emotions are complex things, and it's hard to know what's going to hit people the hardest. Across all of these situations the process of grief is the same, although the range of intensity seems almost limitless.
I've been struggling to communicate my own discoveries around the grief process for the last few years. It was a personal phenomenological process that led to insights which have been immensely useful to me. The thing with personal insights is that we must learn to communicate them to be useful to others. That's what I've been working on with grief. The core idea is that when we suffer a loss it is not the past that died. The past cannot die. The future is what dies. Rewriting our future is the intensely emotional psychological process that is grief.
Here is my email response. Afterward I'll have a short note about the longer process of grief.
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It's good to hear from you.
That's a great question to contemplate, and I have somewhat. I think my insights on grief are genius, but I've struggled with communicating them in any useful way so far.
Yes, the grieving process results from any loss of an expected value. So, whenever we become aware of that the grieving starts. The Netherlands trip being an expected future value that is now gone, means that that's a fairly normal version of grief. But, you end up with weird timeframes when people don't go through the grieving process, which there is no way to avoid and stay mentally healthy. For instance, if someone dies and a person ignores their grief, which is common because it is painful and you can distract yourself with various activities, then you are passing through a time where you are violating expectations. This means that when you start to accept the loss and go through grief you are actually grieving about moments that you've passed in time, yet, the grief is still because they were a future expectation that was violated. I'll see if I can do a short example that is pertinent. There's an even more complex scenario that often occurs when there are various types of deception from others, but I'll ignore that for now.
My aunt Deb died yesterday from complications with the virus down in Battlecreek. My uncle Ron is obviously in a bit of shock. Plus, now he is quarantined in his house completely alone, trapped with his grief and guilt. So it's a bad situation. In a group family chat this is my attempt at emergency mental health intervention. He wasn't allowed to be with her in the hospital, and he can't have a funeral. So, it's slightly odd in those aspects as well.
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Devastating news. She was a very good person. Death does not erase a person. The existence and life of a person lives on, in memory, and then beyond. The things they did, the conversations they had, it changes things, and it changes people. Those changes lead on to more changes. And so, what Deb did over her life will reverberate through time. And it can never be taken away or lessened.
I remember her hiding behind a couch during a nerf gun war not so long ago, while Ron used the slingshot. Lol. Good times.
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In a loss of life situation people often fear that the person's life is erased. So I worked to quell that fear first. Then, people often try to remember a person in general, and then freak out because they cannot. So I referenced a specific shared memory to help make a good memory real for him, and start that process in a good direction.
If he starts grieving now then he has to rewrite basically his entire future. She was healthy, so he wasn't expecting this. He planned on doing tons of stuff with her. The closer you are to someone, and the longer your expected future interaction, the more grief you must go through, because the more expectations you have. Now, he'll start traveling through the emotional ups and downs of coming to terms with a new future. For as long as that is happening he will be grieving. Some people never make it through that process when someone is close enough to them, largely because they resist the process. Which is why I write on it, to help people to realize what's really happening and to realize that they can come through it.
But, if he doesn't grieve and start reformulating all of his future expectations, then he's going to go past things that are losses. For instance, maybe they planned on watching a certain movie at home on Saturday together. Instead of doing that maybe he ignores that contradiction of his old expectations with what should be his new expectations. People do that a myriad of ways ranging from drinking to working to cleaning. When he gets to Saturday he now has a greater contradiction, the discrepancy between what he expected and what happened. As these things build up without him accepting them then he is accumulating things he's actually lived through that he still needs to grieve over. At some point in the future he will have to grieve over the fact that they weren't able to watch that movie together on Saturday. It's still a false future expectation, but it's a false future expectation that is in the past because it wasn't dealt with at the time.
With a spouse the process will be somewhat long no matter what, because there are just so many expectations built out in the future, many of which are subconscious and unconscious creations of the mind. A lot of times you have to be reminded of these things before you can even attempt to grieve. For instance, maybe a couple of years from now he's at a store and sees a postcard of flowers. That reminds him of a plan they had to go to some specific place. He now has to grieve that (rewrite and reformulate that expectation, in the loss of a loved one this often involves crying as various images of the old expectation and the new expectation fly through the mind crashing and smashing together until the old is supplanted by the new). It's a thing he forgot that he lost, but he lost it nevertheless, and when he's reminded of it then he must confront it and grieve to move through it. When it's a major loss there's no good way to make sure you've covered everything that is possible, everything that you've ever thought about your future experience and relationship, so it will inevitably come up over a fairly long period of time. It will become less frequent as more and more expectations are rewritten. That's the idea and process that people are referring to with "time heals", even though I don't know of anyone that has articulated this specific mechanism before me.
I don't need anything in particular at the moment. I still teach every morning. And reading, writing, and meditating haven't been hindered in any way. So most of what I do on a daily basis has remained the same.
I hope both of you are also doing well.
Jeff Martin
JeffThinks.com
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In that email I went through some of the ideas about handling the short term psychological problems. But, really, there's no great way to go about it that I've ever seen. Then, over the next couple of weeks things really get trippy because you feel like life has stopped, like the world should have stopped, but it hasn't. People are going about doing their thing, when it seems like life should be over, but it isn't. Reconciling that is difficult. That's the idea of grief. It's to take that feeling and sense of the death of the future and change it. There's no way around it.
Around a week ago my mother and I had a video chat with my uncle Ron and I went through how to do meditation with him. There are many types of meditation, and they do different things. The type that I use to manage my chronic pain issues also helps to process a lot of psychological and emotional issues. He said it helped some, so that's good.
Whether it's done with or without meditation, over the long term the process remains the same. To get through grief you truly have to go through it. There's this immense contradiction between what should have happened and what did happen, what should be happening and what is happening, and what should happen and what will happen. It's like a collision of the soul with the world.
Sometimes when the soul and the world collide, the world moves. But not in case of loss. Then the soul must transform itself. It's a rebirth of your future. And it's painful. But, if we voluntarily confront it. If we remember that the past cannot be erased. And we keep moving forward. We can honor the past, and build the future again.
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To read more from Jeff go to JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
For the last few years it feels like all I thought about was this game. Development started on Kerfuffle back in December of 2014, and it ended in April of 2017. In the almost two months since its cancellation, I feel as though I’ve thought about the game just as much as I had during the entire time it was in development. Thoughts and ideas running each other down, climbing over one another in a giant pile of chaos. It has been exhausting, demotivating, and depressing. Partially for my own sanity, and hopefully to help even a few people, I’m writing this to put my thoughts in order. Why did the game fail? Where did I, as the project lead, screw up? What could have been done to prevent this?
Why did Kerfuffle fail?
First things first. The failure of Kerfuffle had two major contributing factors. The first, was poor leadership. The second, which is attributed to poor leadership, is scope. When I started development I wanted to make a simple 1 hit 1 kill game with unique characters, and a handful of game modes. I thought that having unique characters in this setting would give rise to new play styles and more varied matches. Given the simplicity of the design, we had all of this extra development time to dedicate to a great art style. Later, due to poor planning, this came back to bite us in the ass.
After a few months we had a working prototype. People played it, said it was fun, but the look in their eyes when playing was… not a great one. We had a game that looked one hundred times better than it played. There were a number of contributing factors to this, and the overall design of the game isn’t the focus of this post, so I’m going to skip over that. Just know that the game wasn’t fun out of the gate. This is a really common thing when making games! I didn’t worry about it too much at the time. I had decided to redesign the game to make it more exciting. In theory this was the right move. In practice I believe that these redesigns lead the game to ultimate failure.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying you shouldn’t redesign your game. You absolutely should. I’m just saying that my redesigns lead my team and I down a precarious path. Essentially, a lot of my design decisions ended up being sort of flat, and uninteresting. The game changed over and over, something that is again, totally normal for a game in development. The changes weren’t drastic, but the way the changes were communicated, and the way the team was lead to meet these new goals, was poor. I would come up with a new design idea, tell the artist, and hope that he would understand enough to create the required assets. I put all of the responsibility for creating assets on the artist, the only other team member, and simply waited for results. Not a good move.
My communication skills were less than desirable, to say the least. I thought I was doing something good by allowing the artist to have free reign, and let him design whatever he wanted. I trusted him to create something amazing, and he absolutely delivered on that, but at a huge cost. Not a monetary cost, but this put an immense amount of pressure on him. He had to be a full team of artists by himself. Concepts, animations, art for all characters, stages, UI, menus, logos, the website, and anything else was placed on the shoulders of one guy with no clear direction to head in. Eventually this, along with erratic design changes, lead to his early retirement from the project, and putting the final nail in the Kerfuffle coffin.
Where did the leadership fail?
For weeks after the cancellation, and even as I write this, I am heartbroken by the death of this project. Not necessarily because I really wanted the game to come out, or that I was really happy with the design (I wasn’t), but because I had failed. I failed myself, my team, and the people that were looking forward to the release of Kerfuffle. The game was in development much longer than it needed to be, the design of the game changed time and again, and our milestones were never clear. We never really had a solid plan. Flying by the seat of your pants works well enough for small projects, but in my experience, not so much on anything that takes longer than a month or two.
Having a solid plan is not a new concept, but really, you need a solid plan. I had no solid plan. I had some ideas that mostly didn't work out, and I adjusted as needed. That is the cornerstone of how games are made, but without any real goals in mind, I was digging a grave. Kerfuffle never had a true design document. Even if it did, I’d have re-written it at least five times to keep up with how dramatic the design changes ended up being. I had gone from simple 1 hit KO brawler, to a Smash Brothers like fighter, to an MvC like tag fighting game, and finally to a much more traditional 2D fighting game. Each change bringing a whole new set of tasks, and stress, to other team members, with no clear direction on how to achieve those tasks. Obviously had I known ahead of time that I wanted to make a traditional 2D fighting game, that would have saved us a lot of headache. But things change. They change all the time. Its how you handle those changes that matter.
As the head of the Kerfuffle ship, I should have had clear plans, documentation, and designs before I ever assigned a new task to a team member. If the animation that was made did not meet gameplay requirements, then I did not accurately communicate the requirements. If a song or sound effect didn’t match the feeling of the stage or animation, then I did not accurately communicate the what the sound needed to be. If a team member was confused about a design decision I had made, then I did not accurately communicate the reasoning behind the decision. I thought I was being a good leader by allowing everyone to have full artistic freedom. I was wrong.
The artwork, easily the greatest asset of Kerfuffle, is gorgeous. It is some of my favorite pixel art ever! I’m probably biased but damn, I really love the way this game looked. Martin Worister is a beautiful genius. He stepped up and created something truly amazing. Eventually we had to hire some additional artists, and this became a bit of an issue. I failed to communicate a lot of things, and trusted these new hired artists to just be able to pick up our art style, and replicate it. That was not the case, and lead to a lot of wasted time. Additionally, the art was so high quality, that it became almost impossible for one person to do it all himself. As a leader, I should have been able to identify this bottleneck early on, and help make the necessary changes to prevent it. My inexperience really kicked my ass on this one.
Had this been a simple jam game, or very short term project, allowing people to sort of do whatever would probably have worked. However the project evolved beyond that and my communication did not. We ended up with some incredible artwork in the end, and a lot of really fun gameplay mechanics, but ultimately it was too difficult to get to that point. If I had to release Kerfuffle right now I wouldn’t be happy with the end result. I don’t think anyone on the team would. When the plug was pulled we were still very far away from the finish line.
Closing
I learned a lot making this game. When I started I wasn’t a very good programmer, I had never tried to make anything of this size, and I had never really worked with a team. I learned an incredible amount about game design, and most importantly, about communication. I learned how to fail, how to own that failure, and how to move on. This is not the end of the road for me as a game developer. It's not the end of the road for any member of the Kerfuffle team. I feel much better about this now that I’ve written it all down. I hope that my failure can help someone else who may be struggling. Failure is important! Just do your best to fail fast, will ya?
Later nerds.
http://twitter.com/ratcasket ratcaket.com blog.kerfuffle.io
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#( not enough to matter in terms of being able to take martin's place in smashing the amulet #but like.....his magic and dragonskin ability have a slightly different flavor then whats normal #( and like in terms of dnd lore..... him being a sorcerer ... it is from the arne side and falco...the origin source of his innate magic #would be a mixture of divine soul + draconic ?? ) #(bc akatosh is both a dragon and a god) # its just dormant in most of the falcos )
anyways, still thinking about this. the falcos predate most of the empire. they formed after the alessian slave rebellion and establishment of the alessian empire. an old, old, old & well respected family despite being a bit….odd.
what if - since the falcos are such an old family line - they had mingled with the dragonborn emperors at some point. which means...pax has some dragon blood.....
#❪ ⋅ ✹ ⋆ —┊ ❛ study. ❜ ❫#( they’re also both cursed in blessed by two other gods — kynareth & zenithar )#( zenithar cursed the line because a member of the family worshiped in the worm cult & tried to aid molag in the planemeld )#( kynareth blessed them with the ability to speak with birds because they always showed a respect and reverence to them & nature )#( so pax is getting magic from both sides. it’s just not as cultivated in the falcos like it is the arnes )#( i feel like pax’s magic is a bit bassboosted )
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