#Boxcar Magazin

[mmmmalo]

Here's an odd one: if Kanaya living in a oasis implies that the legions of undead stalking the sand dunes are associated with mummies, would it be possible that the desert-dwelling musclebeasts act as a misrepresentation of camels? People do drink camel milk, but I don't think this is about the udders of she-camels, necessarily -- I think camel's humps are being deliberately misinterpreted as boobs, and the fat within them as milk. Perhaps a similar situation to whales, whose blubber is feminized... Here's a line we get from Caliborn, complaining about being unappreciated:

I BUST MY CHERUB HUMP FOR YOU "PEOPLE". // DAY IN. AND DAY OUT. I BRING HOME THE FUCKING BACON.

The alteration of the phrase "bust my back" and move from "hump" to "bacon" invoke a camel's fat deposits. Earlier still:

WE MILK THIS FuCKER AND MAKE ITS TEAT OuR BITCH. IT WILL BE DELICIOuS.

With Caliborn assuming the language of a subjugated party in the first quotation, the second seems to evoke not only nursing, but riding atop the hump, here called a teat. And if the teat is understood as a place to ride, we also have the option to understand the "milk" as cum, making this a sort of gay bestiality scenario. Caliborn's apparent camel fixation is rendered somewhat ironic by his elsewhere calling Dirk a "horseporking twit". Projection, perhaps.

At this juncture I should be clear that this is a slurquest: the appellation "camel fucker" is a slur against various peoples of the Middle East, and I suspect that Equius's horse/musclebeast fixation is a means of rendering the rhetorical bestiality politically neutral, allowing the reader's disgust to resound unmitigated by any suspicion of disingenuous discourse. His milky-horse love isn't racist, just weird, one would think. Another instance of camel eroticization can be found in this titillated reaction to RED CHEEKS MAGAZINE:

Those burgeoning red humps… that mischievous little tail… the snug, welcoming cleft…

In the spirit of Spade's Slick's doggy porn, the heart-shape seems to do double-duty represent the ass and the humps of the camel. Boxcars' bestial inclinations are affirmed by Cans: he first punches Diamonds Droog into a grayscale grocery, in apparent imitation of Droog's grayscale fetish porn. In the wake of this, we can infer that Boxcars being punched into a Spirited Horse calendar is the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy. There is perhaps a double meaning to the horses being "a pain in the ass".

At a glance it's somewhat divorced from other Orientalist discourses, but the divergent usage of hearts (and Boxcars' seemingly unrelated affection for wax lips, which by dint of Slick's scotty dogs we can expect to complement Boxcars' fetish) calls our attention to Nepeta, who uses the twin humps of a heart to represent lips? But the only strong pun I see around her is in Seek the Highblood:

> Examine teapot. // Chameowmile. It smells so good.

The cat-in-a-teapot in Mom's lab hinted that she was drinking Jasper's paradox slime, wishing upon her mellified mummy lamp that she might be restored to youth. Diving into the fountain of youth, getting tipsy on nostalgia, all with an orientalist bent. In such a context, a strong whiff of "chameowmile" (camel) could become a Zoosmells joke? though the other tea-based cat puns offer no such tertiary reading

The language of Boxcar's porn also suggests that the space between the humps, the "cleft", is yet another camel signifier, which provides us a few other options.

"Prong of flesh bereft of home found solace twixt a cleft of foam" is not only about puppet ass eroticism, but about groin at ease between the humps of its camel. This effectively unites Dirk's eroticized interest in puppets and horses under the Orientalist banner of his anime affectations. Rose continuing on to "a painted pair of parted lips" seems to draw attention to the animals floppy mouth in the same manner as Boxcars' wax lips.

Likewise Candy!Gamzee's comment that Roxy is "globes deep in [John's] dank nook", ostensibly as sexualized expression of deep romantic interest, might suggest that Roxy is riding John like a camel. Alongside Roxy calling John "dummy" (as in puppet) and "bb" (as in baby), it fuels my sense that despite John's apprehensions about being the only real person, Roxy viewed herself as the driving force of the relationship

And Vriska saying that talking about Tavros has lodged a "beef grub" in her nook means that a "calf" (a leg instead of a baby cow) is metaphorically seated between her humps -- reinforcing the sense of compulsion lent by the base metaphor "bug in your ear" with the image of a camel driven by its rider

That's about as far as I've gotten. I have a few other suspicions but they don't have enough substance to warrant posting here.

[moritmblrdlastudiow]

In 1939, the Bund was the most popular Jewish party in Poland. Four years later, its members had mostly been murdered in the Holocaust. Irena’s father, Michael, became a bomb maker for the Jewish Fighters Organization, and died charging a German machine gun in the Warsaw ghetto revolt. Her mother, who she called Mama Lo, almost did not survive Irena’s birth. She was so ill that, for the next six months, she entrusted Irena to the care of Michael’s sister Gina. A fellow Bundist who worked for the resistance, rescuing Jews as they waited to be loaded onto boxcars, Gina died during the war from a stomach operation, which she received while passing as Aryan. When the priest read her the last rites, she told him “I am a Jew,” as a final act of self-assertion. “Such a will to be known can alter history,” Irena wrote in her poem “Solitary Acts.” In photos, Gina resembles a tomboy Greta Garbo, dressed in a suit, her hair slicked back: a gorgeous, ideal butch. Gina “was probably a lesbian,” Irena told me. When the fate of the ghetto became undeniable, Mama Lo smuggled Irena to the Aryan side of Warsaw to place her at a Catholic orphanage, then kidnapped her back from the nuns and kept the two of them alive in the countryside until the war’s end.

After the war, Mama Lo made the same choice as the vast majority of Polish Jews, leaving the country first for Sweden and then for the Amalgamated Housing Projects in the Bronx, which were filled with fellow Bundists. The Bronx kids, themselves Jewish, bullied Irena for her European dress and accent. She grew up between three languages. At home, her mother spoke Polish, a language many survivors rejected as that of their betrayers. Five days a week, she studied Yiddish at a school run by the Workman’s Circle, a secular Jewish mutual aid society entwined with the Bund. In school, she struggled with English. Secretly, she began to write poetry.

Irena attended CUNY, when it was still called The Harvard of the Proletariat, and when it lifted countless working-class smart alecks (my Puerto Rican father included) into the middle class. She got her master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. It was the first time she ever had friends who were not Jews. She wrote about walking through nighttime Chicago in the aftermath of urban renewal, when vibrant Black and mixed-race neighborhoods were turned to rubble, their inhabitants forced elsewhere. She called it “the American hollowness… the incessant grinding down of lines for stamps, for jobs, for a bed to sleep in, of a death stretched imperceptibly over a lifetime…. The Holocaust without smoke.”

Irena’s lesbian world had much in common with the vibrant Bundist subculture in which her parents came of age. Like the Bund, queer women shut out of the mainstream built their own universe out of love and grit. “No institutions wanted us [the gays and the feminists] in any kind of way,” Irena told me, so she and her friends built their own platforms. By the 1980s, lesbians had created a national network of bookstores, newspapers, coffeehouses, bars, archives, and literary presses, to which Irena contributed with enthusiasm, particularly striving to make spaces for lesbian Jews. She started Out and Out Books with three friends, contributed to the first Jewish lesbian anthology, and co-founded the literary leftist magazine Conditions, which published some of the most exciting feminist intellectuals of the era — Barbara Smith, of the Combahee River collective, and Borderlands author Gloria Anzaldúa.

A conversation with Anzaldúa triggered a new direction in Irena’s work. Anzaldúa often used untranslated Spanish in her writing, refusing to cut off her Chicana heritage to conform to white American sensibilities. Anzaldúa asked Irena why, since she grew up with Yiddish, she did not do the same. Irena began to use the language within her English poetry, as a chorus, a dagger, or refrain. Perhaps her best-known poem of this sort is “Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A few words in the mother tongue,” where she delineates the roles — Jewess, lesbian, whore, gossip, and little wife — that traditional society forced women to wear like straightjackets.

Growing up in the anti-Zionist, Bundist milieu, “Israel was not on my map,” Irena said. But after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and massacres supervised by the Israeli Defense Forces in Sabra and Shatila, she felt that the subject of Palestine could not be avoided. She met with Israeli and Palestinian feminists, and, with a few friends, started the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation, or JWCEO. It was a strictly DIY affair — often they stood on a street corner near the famous bagel joint Zabar’s and passed out fliers denouncing the occupation. “People would say the worst things to us, like ‘I wish you had died at Auschwitz,’” Irena told me. “I’d never heard Jews talk to each other that way. It was sobering. And, sometimes it was really good, because we really engaged people.” The JWCEO went on to inspire groups around the country. Irena is now a supporter of the one-state solution, of a single state in Israel-Palestine which would give equal rights to all, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Her Birth and Later Years includes a poem in memory of Razan al-Najjar, the Palestinian nurse murdered by an Israeli sniper during 2018’s Great March of Return in Gaza. However, her most astute piece on Palestine was written about a much earlier event — the 1967 war, where the quick Israeli victory inspired a poisonous joy in even the Bundist survivors: Didn’t we all glow from it our sense of power finally achieved? The quickness of the action the Biblical routes and how we laughed over Egyptian shoes in the sand how we laughed at another people’s fear as if fear was alien as if we had known safety all of our lives.

[thegoosecast]

Entity designation: 1973-023-A

Threat class: Mass mental; real cohesion (possible); timeline (possible)

Category: Tulpaform, other; conceptform, persistent; media, text and visual; transmissible

Potential category/categories: Evolving; retroeffective; precursory.

Status: Active uncontained

Status history:

Note: records below are based on incomplete and actively threatened data. Missing context or content should be expected.

1972: Motion picture director Martin Scorsese involved in vehicle collision. Is clinically dead 30 seconds during emergency surgery. Inquires to multiple associates about screenplay he says they had been developing with him; no associates recall any such project. Scorsese is last seen at wrap party following conclusion of film Boxcar Bertha, one of only two feature films he directed in his short career.

1987: advertising for the film The Last Temptation of Christ is first known film credit to Scorsese, credited as director, in 16 years. Material refers to fictional previous works titled Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Several articles published in trade magazines questioning authenticity of all three films. (Articles no longer present in magazine archives.)

1988: Microfiche image search indicates a small number of movie theaters list The Last Temptation of Christ on their showtimes. No film reviews can be found. Actor Willem Dafoe is interviewed by Entertainment Weekly about the film. Interview as printed references other alleged Scorsese films The Color of Money and The King of Comedy. Dafoe states he’s not familiar with those works. Interview as printed cuts off mid-sentence.

1995: The film Casino is released. Director Brian De Palma refuses all press interviews, except to give credit to “the true creator, Martin Scorsese.” (Current public archives do not show any such quote, and have Scorsese credited from beginning of production.)

2002: First public appearance by Martin Scorsese in 30 years during promotion of film Gangs of New York. All recorded interviews with Scorsese stored on Warded servers show him mute and motionless, responding to no inquiries though all interviews proceed as though he is behaving normally. Interviews seem to make reference to various films attributed to Scorsese, but audio and video distortions make the titles unintelligible. Publicly available archival footage shows no such anomalous behavior by either Scorsese nor the footage itself. A full history of each named film is easily found via Internet searches on non-Warded computer networks. Public media searches indicate no disagreement among the public with Scorsese’s credited work.

2003: Warded computer misses a security update and during a network outage, an intern connects it to a wireless hotspot. An estimated 5TB of data is corrupted, including most records related to Scorsese.

2004: Scorsese releases The Aviator. Anomalous interview behavior repeats. Several more films are added to his history.

2011: Scorsese releases Hugo. Interviews are all recorded as normal. The film The Departed now exists, credited release date in 2006.

2019: Scorsese releases The Irishman.

2022 (present): internet message boards begin referring to a previously unreal Scorsese film titled Goncharov, allegedly released in 1973. Current public discussion split between intense discussion and analysis of Goncharov (including high level of specificity), and active denial. Scorsese has not been publicly seen since the first mention of Goncharov. Warded server archives compared with public websites show Scorsese is now publicly credited with directing over 270 films, including The Godfather parts 1 and 2, Alien, Batman (1989), Heat, Inception, Mortal Kombat, and The Simpsons Movie, as well as the television program Friends (Seasons 1-5).

This record will be updated as becomes prudent and as remains possible.

[brainrotallthewaydown1312]

I have so many. I'll just say some of my favorites, but know I have several others.

Books: i have several hundred books. most of them were bought used on severe discounts or gifted to me. I have a special interest in storytelling and media and this is the easiest one to physically collect. I am a fairly active reader, but mostly of ya and na fiction. i have a decent amount of those, but also a lot of non fiction about creative writing, science, and history. I also have classic lit, vintage books to be repaired and a handful of rare books I got from second hand stores that didn't notice their value. my most valuable ones are antique limited prints of Sherlock Holmes books. I'm very proud of my books.

I also have a sub collection of middle grade and children's pulp paperbacks. i have maybe 150 standalone single print middle grade novels. I haven't actually read any of them since middle school, but I still like them. as an extension on my thing with storytelling and media, I find children's media fascinating, especially stuff like pulp fiction that gets cranked out fast and often has a cult following. and I'm also working on collecting one of every book in the babysitters club, boxcar children, Nancy drew, Junie b Jones, and hardy boys, all in the original covers. I'm about half through the babysitters club and about a quarter through boxcar children. I have a lot more to go on the others. these ones make me happy because having a specific series that I know a lot about and am trying to have in full feels like the most "proper" collection I have. it's the kind of collecting that people think of when you say you're a collector.

stuffed animals: i have a lot of them. this is a less active collection because most of them are nostalgic items from my childhood and at this point I mostly only add ones I've made or ones that are notably unique or of a character I like. I have a whole corner dedicated to them with a stack of those stuffie hammocks.

this one also has a sub collection, which is more active: dolls. but not fashion dolls like Barbie or nice collectible porcelain dolls. vintage dolls. mostly cloth ones but a few classic baby doll. I have special interests in both fiber arts and in the history and mechanics of toy production, so i like looking at the construction and maintaining them so that they don't degrade and become creepy. although I do have a few that if I fully believed in ghosts, I would think they are haunted. that collection started when I inherited a bunch of dolls and also sewing materials when my great grandmother died. ever since then, I've been enamored with unique vintage and cloth dolls. its a slow growing collection but one of my favorites. and one I can talk your ear off about if you let me.

craft supplies: now this one is a functional collection. I have supplies for several different media of art, only a few of which I actively make things with regularly. the two biggest categories in this collection is my acrylic paints (which I don't use very often but regularly sort and check to make sure they aren't drying or molding) and my yarn stash (which I use in some capacity almost every day because crochet and fiber art is my main medium as an artist) this is not as classically a collection but it fits this definition and its something I spend a decent amount of time maintaining, so I'm counting it here.

writing prompts: this is a habit I picked up from an English teacher in middle school. little trinkets and pictures and quotes on scrap paper. everything from nice figurines to Polaroids to magazine ads to seashells to bottle caps to fortune cookie fortunes. think a grandma's souvenir and picture cabinet meets those crow scoop junk bins you see on tiktik. when I'm stuck on writing, I'll either look for something that sparks inspiration or I'll pull something at random. I keep it all together in one box and every few months, I'll sort through it and get rid of anything that is breaking or falling apart or that I just don't like anymore. I love this collection. and I love explaining it to people because that conversation often starts with "why the hell is this box full of both nice collectible ceramics and also literal garbage" and usually ends with "that's actually really cool"

again, I have several others but those are my favorites to talk about and show off. I love my collections so much

Because polls get the most engagement I’m making a poll lol

(For the sake of this poll: a collector is anyone who *currently has* a collection of things either physically or digitally that they intentionally acquired which can be grouped together)

Please please please please pleeeeeeeaaaaaaase tell me what you collect and optionally why!!!! (This is doubly true if your collection is related to a regulatory/“special” interest!!!!!!! That’s honestly the only reason I’m making this poll, I am begging youuuuuuuuuuu

Neurodivergent related tags are for reach as I know a lot of neurodiverse people are collectors. I do try my best not to clutter those tags, if anyone has an issue with it please tell me and I’ll remove them

[xtruss]

At the U.S. Army’s Camp Century on the Greenland ice sheet, an Army truck equipped with a railroad wheel conversion rides on 1,300 feet of track under the snow. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University

The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research! The Odd Arctic Military Projects Spawned By The Cold War

The Cold War Spawned Some Odd Military Projects That Were Doomed To Fail, From Atomic Subways To A City Under The Ice.

— September 19, 2024 | Paul Bierman, Undark Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine

In Recent Years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t always that way.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, ­idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic region as a place of unlimited potential for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most tantalizing proving ground for their research.

Scientists and engineers working for and with the U.S. military cooked up a rash of audacious cold-region projects — some innovative, many spit-balled, and most quickly abandoned. They were the stuff of science fiction: disposing of nuclear waste by letting it melt through the ice; moving people, supplies, and missiles below the ice using subways, some perhaps atomic powered; testing hovercraft to zip over impassable crevasses; making furniture from a frozen mix of ice and soil; and even building a nuclear-powered city under the ice sheet.

Today, many of their ideas, and the fever dreams that spawned them, survive only in the yellowed pages and covers of magazines like “Real: the exciting magazine For Men” and dozens of obscure Army technical reports.

Karl And Bernhard Philberth, both physicists and ordained priests, thought Greenland’s ice sheet the perfect repository for nuclear waste. Not all the waste — first they’d reprocess spent reactor fuel so that the long-lived nuclides would be recycled. The remaining, mostly short-lived radionuclides would be fused into glass or ceramic and surrounded by a few inches of lead for transport. They imagined several million radioactive medicine balls about 16 inches in diameter scattered over a small area of the ice sheet (about 300 square miles) far from the coast.

Because the balls were so radioactive, and thus warm, they would melt their way into the ice, each with the energy of a bit less than two dozen 100-watt incandescent light bulbs — a reasonable leap from Karl Philberth’s expertise designing heated ice drills that worked by melting their way through glaciers. The hope was that by the time the ice carrying the balls emerged at the coast thousands or tens of thousands of years later, the radioactivity would have decayed away. One of the physicists later reported that the idea was shown to him by God, in a vision.

What I Left Out is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, author and geoscientist Paul Bierman shares a story that didn’t make it into his recent book, “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future” (W.W. Norton & Company).

Top Left: U.S. Army test of the Snowblast in Greenland in the 1950s, a machine designed to smooth snow runways. Visual: U.S. Army. Top Right: A U.S. Air Force C-119, Flying Boxcar, delivering a bulldozer to northern Greenland. Visual: U.S. Air Force. Bottom: Lead canister carrying the fuel rods from the U.S. Army’s Camp Century nuclear reactor in Greenland, during decommissioning in 1960s. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

Of Course, the plan had plenty of unknowns and led to heated discussion at scientific meetings when it was presented — what, for example, would happen if the balls got crushed or caught up in flows of meltwater near the base of the ice sheet. And would the radioactive balls warm the ice so much that the ice flowed faster at the base, speeding the balls’ trip to the coast?

Logistical challenges, scientific doubt, and politics sunk the project. Producing millions of radioactive glass balls wasn’t yet practical, and the Danes, who at the time controlled Greenland, were never keen on allowing nuclear waste disposal on what they saw as their island. Some skeptics even worried about climate change melting the ice. Nonetheless, the Philberths made visits to the ice sheet and published peer-reviewed scientific papers about their waste dream.

Arctic Military imagination predates the Cold War. In 1943, that imagination spawned the Kee Bird — a mystical creature. An early description appears in a poem by A/C Warren M. Kniskern published in the Army’s weekly magazine for enlisted men, YANK. The bird taunts men across the Arctic with its call “Kee Kee Keerist, but it’s cold!” Its name was widely applied. Most well-known, a B-29 bomber named Kee Bird that took off from Alaska with a heading toward the North Pole, but then got badly lost and put down on a frozen Greenland lake in 1947 as it ran out of fuel. An ambitious plan to fly the nearly pristine plane off the ice in the mid-1990s was thwarted by fire. But the Kee bird lineage was by no means extinct.

In February 1955, Real magazine published the story of the U.S. military’s first base inside Greenland’s ice sheet. Visual: Real Magazine

In 1959, The Detroit Free Press, under the headline “The Crazy, Mixed-Up Keebird Can’t Fly,” reported that the Army was testing a new over-snow vehicle. This Keebird was not a flying machine but rather a snowmobile/tractor/airplane chimera that would cut travel time across the ice sheet by a factor of 10 or more. Unlike similar but utilitarian contraptions of the 1930s, developed in the central plains of North America and Russia and equipped with short skis, boxy bodies, and propellors that pushed them along, this new single-propped version was built for sheer speed.

The prototype hit 40 miles per hour at the Army’s testing facility in Houghton, Michigan, thanks to the “almost friction-proof” Teflon coating on its 25-foot-long skis and a 300-horsepower airplane engine that spun the propellor. The goal was for the machine to hit a hundred miles per hour but after several failed tests, and a few technical publications, it warranted only the one syndicated newspaper article written by Jean Hanmer Pearson, who was a military pilot in World War II before she became a journalist and one of the first women to set foot on the South Pole. The Soviet version, known as an “airsleigh”, was short, stout, and armed with weapons for Arctic combat. There’s no record the Army’s Keebird carrying weapons.

In 1964, the Army tested a distant relative of the Keebird in Greenland. The Carabao, which floated over the ground and over water or snow on a cushion of air, was developed by Bell Aerosystems Company and had been previously tested in tropical locales, including southern Florida. It carried two men and 1,000 pounds of cargo, and had a top speed of 60 miles per hour. The air cushion vehicle skimmed over crevasses but was grounded by even moderate winds, an all-too-common occurrence on the ice sheet.

Top: Kee Bird, a B-29 bomber that got badly lost and put down on a frozen Greenland lake in 1947. Visual: U.S. Air Force. Bottom: U.S. Army test of the Carabao air cushion vehicle over snow in Greenland, in the 1960s. Visual: U.S. Army

Another Problem: The craft went uphill fine, but going downhill was another matter because it had no brakes. Unsurprisingly, the Carabao — its namesake a Philippine water buffalo — proved to be unsuited for ice travel despite the claim that: “All this is no mere pipe-dream following an overdose of science-fiction. The acknowledged experts are thinking hard about the future use of hovercraft in Polar travel.” Despite all the hard thinking, hovercraft have yet to catch on and are still rarely used for Arctic travel and research.

IN 1956, Colliers, a weekly magazine once read by millions of Americans, published an article titled “Subways Under the Icecap.” It was a sensationalized report of Army activities in Greenland and opened with a photograph of an enlisted soldier holding a pick. Behind him, a 250-foot tunnel, mostly excavated by hand and lit only by lanterns, probed the Greenland ice sheet. Colliers included a simple map and a stylistic cut-away showing an imaginary rail line slicing across northwestern Greenland. But the Army’s ice tunnels ended only about a thousand feet from where they started — doomed by the fragility of their icy walls, which crept inward up to several feet each year, closing the tunnels like a healing wound. The subway never happened.

That didn’t stop the Army from proposing Project Iceworm — a top-secret plan that might represent peak weirdness. A network of tunnels would crisscross northern Greenland over an area about the size of Alabama. Hundreds of missiles, topped with nuclear warheads, would roll through the tunnels on trains, pop up at firing points, and if needed, respond to Soviet aggression by many annihilating many Eastern Block targets. Greenland was much closer to Europe than North America, allowing a prompt strategic response, and the snow provided cover and blast protection. Iceworm would be a giant under-snow shell game of sorts, which the Army would power using portable nuclear reactors.

A tunnel cut into the Greenland ice sheet by the Army in the 1950s, mostly using hand tools. The tunnel was a prototype for a subway system — in part to move nuclear missiles under the ice — that never came to fruition. Visual: U.S. Army via United Press Associations

Except it wasn’t a game. The Army hired the Spur and Siding Constructors Company of Detroit, Michigan, to scope out and price the rail project. A 1965 report, complete with maps of stations and sidings where trains would sit when not in use, concluded that contractors could build a railroad stretching 22 miles over land and 138 miles inside the ice sheet for a mere $47 million (or roughly $470 million today). The company suggested studying nuclear-powered locomotives because they reduced the risk of heat from diesel engines melting the frozen tunnels. Never mind that no one had ever built a nuclear locomotive or run rails through tunnels crossing constantly shifting crevasses.

But in the end, Iceworm amounted only to a single railcar, 1,300 feet of track, and an abandoned military truck on railroad wheels.

The Split personality of Arctic permafrost frustrated Army engineers. When frozen in the winter, it was stable but difficult to excavate. But in the summer, under the warmth of 24-hour sunshine, the top foot or two of soil melted, creating an impassable quagmire for people and vehicles. When the permafrost under airstrips melted, the pavement buckled, and the resulting potholes could damage landing gear. The military responded by painting Arctic runways white to reflect the constant summer sunshine and keep the underlying permafrost cool — a potentially good idea grounded in physics that was stymied by the fact that the paint reduced the braking ability of planes.

The military engineers, ever optimistic, put a more positive spin on permafrost. Trying to use native materials in the Arctic, where transportation costs were exceptionally high, they made a synthetic version of permafrost that they nicknamed permacrete – a mashup of the words permafrost and concrete. First, they mixed the optimal amount of water and dry soil. Then, after allowing the mix to freeze solid in molds, they made beams, bricks, tunnel linings, and even a chair. But permacrete never caught on as a building material, likely because one warm day was all it would take to turn even the most robust construction project into a puddle of mud.

U.S. Army engineers test permacrete strength in a tunnel cut into the frozen soil beneath the Greenland ice sheet in the 1960s. A permacrete chair is in the front right. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

The Army’s most ambitious Arctic dream actually came true. In 1959, engineers began building Camp Century, known by many as the City Under the Ice. A 138-mile ice road led to the camp that was about 100 miles inland from the edge of the ice sheet. Almost a vertical mile of ice separated the camp from the rock and soil below.

Camp Century contained several dozen massive trenches, one more than a thousand feet long, all carved into the ice sheet by giant snowplows and then covered with metal arches and more snow. Inside were heated bunkrooms for several hundred men, a mess hall, and a portable nuclear power plant. The first of its kind, the reactor provided unlimited hot showers and plenty of electrical power.

The camp was ephemeral. In less than a decade, flowing ice crushed Century — but not before scientists and engineers drilled the first deep ice core that eventually penetrated the full thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet. In 1966, the last season the Army occupied Camp Century, drillers recovered more than 11 feet of frozen soil from beneath the ice — another first.

A two page diagram of Camp Century published in the 1960s by Pilote, a French comics magazine. Visual: Pilote

Top: In the 1960s, a plow excavates the trenches that will hold Camp Century. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University. Bottom: Men install metal roofing forms over a completed trench at Camp Century, which are later covered with snow. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University

One module of a portable nuclear reactor being moved into Camp Century. The first of its kind, the reactor provided unlimited hot showers and plenty of electrical power to the camp. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

Little studied, the Camp Century soil vanished in 1993, but was rediscovered by Danish scientists in 2018, safely frozen in Copenhagen. Samples revealed that the soil contained abundant plant and insect fossils, unambiguous evidence that large parts of Greenland were free of ice some 400,000 years ago, when the Earth was about the same temperature as today but had almost 30 percent less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In half century or so since the demise of Camp Century, global warming has begun melting large amounts of Greenland’s ice. The past 10 years are the warmest on record, and the ice sheet is shrinking a bit more every year. That’s science, not fiction, and a world away from the heady optimism of the Cold War dreamers who once envisioned a future embedded in ice.

— Paul Bierman is a Geoscientist and a Professor of Environmental Science and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. He is the author, most recently, of “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future,” a study of Greenland, the Cold War, and the collection and analysis of the world’s first deep ice core. Bierman’s research in Greenland is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

[hodgdon-rifle-powder]

THE HODGDON STORY

Success in the American tradition demands the qualities of motivation, determination, willingness to sacrifice, hard work, timing and a true element of luck. Even in our modern times of high taxation, escalating costs, and governmental regulation, it is still possible for the “common man” to become successful if he has a good idea and most or all of these qualities.

The Hodgdon Companies, as they exist today, are an example of this tradition. Until he began the surplus powder business, Bruce Hodgdon was a salesman for the Gas Service Company, traveling local territory selling gas appliances. From a few dollars borrowed on the cash value of his life insurance policy has evolved a manufacturing and distributing company that has customers in all 50 states and many foreign countries.

All his life Bruce Hodgdon was interested in shooting, hunting, and reloading. He custom-loaded ammunition for friends during World War II while he was in the Navy and after, while working full time as a salesman for the Gas Service Company. Somewhere Bruce had heard that the government burned huge stocks of surplus powder after WWI because of the lack of market for them, and he figured that the same would be true after hostilities ended in 1945.

Even though he had no place to store gunpowder, and did not know if enough shooters would gamble to purchase unknown types of propellant, Bruce cut government red tape and soon owned 50,000 pounds of government surplus 4895. An old boxcar moved to a rented farm pasture served as the first magazine, the first one-inch ad placed in the American Rifleman, and Bruce was in business.

The first 150-pound kegs of powder sold for $30.00 each plus freight! Early shipments also consisted of metal cans with hand-glued labels sent out in wooden boxes made from orange crates and sawed on a homemade circle saw by Bruce and his grade-school age boys, J. B. and Bob. A little later, the boys delivered shipments to the REA or the Merriam Frisco train terminal each morning on their way to high school. The trunk of the family 1940 Ford served as carrier for hundreds of thousands of pounds of powder during this time. Bruce’s Wife Amy served as bookkeeper and saleswoman. Very quickly mail order sales grew to include other reloading components, tools, and finally firearms and ammunition.

In 1952 Bruce resigned from the Gas Service Company and B. E. Hodgdon, Incorporated, was officially underway. J.B. and Bob entered the business full time after graduating from college in 1959 and 1961. After considerable expansion in the 1960s, it became apparent that splitting the wholesale firearm business from the nationwide powder business would save confusion among customers and facilitate bookkeeping. Hodgdon Powder Company came into being in 1966 as a result. Eventually, the wholesale firearms company was sold in 1984.

If it were not for the efforts of a handful of men seeing that changes were made, shooters all over the country would now have much greater difficulty obtaining their powders. In 1963 and 1964, Bruce Hodgdon, Ted Curtis, Homer Clark of the Alcan Company, and Dave Wolfe of Wolfe Publishing Company, were successful in persuading the ICC – now the DOT – through exhaustive tests by the Bureau of Explosives to downgrade certain packages of smokeless powder to the much-easier-to-ship “4.1 – Flammable Solid” Classification. As a result, containers under 8 lbs. each and in approved packages of shipments weighing less than 100 net pounds can today be handled by any common carrier, including UPS and FedEx. Previous to this, all Smokeless powders were considered “Class B explosives” for shipping purposes, which is nearly as restrictive as the almost impossible task of transporting black powder.

After retlentless testing, Hodgdon Powder Company received approval for 1.4C shipping in 2014. Now, nearly all canisters up to eight pounds can be shipped under the 1.4c classification, making shipping much more efficient.

In 1967, the Hodgdon’s built what was then billed as “the world’s largest indoor shooting range,” an indoor structure allowing 44 shooters to share a 25 Yard range at the same time. This range and store is open to the public at 6201 Robinson, Overland Park, Kansas (www.thebullethole.com). Although this business was sold to outside parties in November 1982, we invite any of our nationwide customers to visit when in the Kansas City area.

Bruce Hodgdon passed away in 1997. Bruce was among other things an avid reloader, competitive rifle shooter, trap shooter, hunter, NRA Benefactor Member, and World War II Veteran. The industry honored Bruce for his contributions to the shooting sports in 1995/1996 with the Shooting Academy Award of Excellence. The responsibility of running the company then fell to his sons, J.B. and Bob Hodgdon, the two grade-school boys back in the late 1940’s, who worked hand in hand with their father to establish and grow this company.

Bruce’s oldest son, J.B. Hodgdon is still active in the business today and serves on the board and as Chairman Emeritus. He still remains passionate about shooting and hunting pursuits.

Bruce’s youngest son Robert Eltinge “Bob” Hodgdon went home to be with his Lord and Savior on January 14, 2023. Up to his last year, Bob was still active in shooting and hunting activities with friends and family.

Today, Hodgdon smokeless propellants are developed and manufactured to meet the needs of every reloader. The powder that started Bruce Hodgdon’s business, H4895, is still produced and sold along with world-class powders available for just about any Rifle, Handgun, and Shotshell load.

Smokeless propellants are only half of the famous Hodgdon story. Muzzleloading shooters and hunters around the world recognize Hodgdon as the company that makes the best performing, most convenient, safest, and easy to clean black powder substitute propellants. Pyrodex®, introduced in 1976, is the most successful black powder substitute on the market. Pyrodex products are safer, cleaner burning and produces 30% more shots per pound than common black powder. Pyrodex also makes it easier to clean the gun after shooting.

Innovation is a key part of Hodgdon’s philosophy and values. The patented Pyrodex Pellets give the modern muzzleloader speed and safety in a convenient preformed charge. They offer quick and safe no-spill loading, instant ignition, and faster second shots.

Always looking to the future, Hodgdon took muzzleloading to the next millennium with Triple Seven® muzzleloading Pellets and granular propellants. Introduced in 2001, Triple Seven has proven to be very consistent and accurate but is most recognized for its easy water clean up and no sulfur (rotten egg) smell! In 2007, Triple Seven Magnums were introduced. Magnums deliver higher energy for serious hunting knock down power.

Hodgdon Powder Company offices are located at 6430 Vista Drive in Shawnee, Kansas. The Powder magazine, packaging and manufacturing facilities are maintained about 140 miles southwest of the main office, in Herington, Kansas. In 2020, when Hodgdon Acquired Accurate, Ramshot and Blackhorn 209, the Miles City, Montana location was also acquired. The Miles City location is still occupied with office staff, warehousing space and a world-class ballistics lab.

To better serve our reloading customers Hodgdon Powder Company continues to grow. Hodgdon purchased IMR® Powder Company in October 2003. IMR legendary powders have been the mainstay of numerous handloaders for almost 100 years. IMR powders continue to be manufactured in the same plant and with the same exacting performance criteria and quality assurance standards that shooters have come to expect.

In March 2006, Hodgdon Powder Company and Winchester® Ammunition announced that Winchester® branded reloading powders would be licensed to Hodgdon. Winchester smokeless propellants, the choice of loading professionals, are available to the handloader to duplicate the factory performance of loads from handgun to rifle and shotgun.

In January 2009 Hodgdon acquired an American icon GOEX Powder, Inc. GOEX has a rich history dating back to 1802 where E.I. Du Pont de Nemours broke ground on his original black powder plant along the Brandywine River in Delaware. Goex Powder, Inc. manufactures black powder used for sporting applications such as civil war re-enactments and flintlock firearms, and is a vital component for industrial and military applications. Located in Minden, Louisiana, GOEX Powder, Inc. is the only U.S. manufacturer of black powder. Hodgdon then sold the GOEX plant and brand in 2021.

In October of 2020, Hodgdon purchased the Accurate Powder and Ramshot smokeless brands from Western Powders, along with the Blackhorn 209 black powder substitute brand.

The company continues to drive innovation in smokeless powder through the Hodgdon, Ramshot, Accurate Powder, IMR and Winchester brands. On the black powder substitute product side, brands Blackhorn209, Hodgdon Pyrodex, Hodgdon Triple Seven and IMR White Hots continue our history of bringing technologically advanced and unique propellants to the marketplace. Today, as over the last seventy-five years, the success of the Hodgdon Companies depends upon the goodwill and satisfaction of our loyal customers. Thank you for the trust you continue to give our products; we hope our products are a part of the reason you enjoy your chosen sport of hunting or shooting.

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 1,279

[I] ==>

You dump them in the WRATHTUB, then stick the tub in your own DECK OF CARDS. But you give Boxcars back his sordid literature, which he'd carelessly left in plain sight. No one will ever catch you leaving your smut around. And even if you did, that copy of TERRIER FANCY MAGAZINE could belong to ANYBODY. No one could prove nothin'.

Author commentary: Slick uses standard mobster logic here. He didn't leave that smut around. And even if he did, it could be ANYBODY'S. You can't prove nothin'. He's gonna beat the rap, ya hear?? He's a LEGITIMATE BUSINESSMAN. As it turns out, the mobsters are all basically just petulant little boys.

[pearliesterns]

Smoking Into Logan by Dave Blaze Rail Photography Just a long telephoto frame of this shot from last year's whirlwind Montana adventure. Montana Rail Link's train 844, the Logan Local, is almost home after a day spent working the 5th Sub as far as Sappington and 7th Sub branch to Harrison. They have 8 loads in tow lifted from the little elevator at the end of the branch, and four boxcars picked up at Willow Creek and Three Forks on the back. They are seen here smoking up over the hump at about MP 1.2 on this former Northern Pacific passenger mainline. This line was built in 1888 diverging from the original route at Logan and crossing the Continental Divide via Homestake Pass to Butte and then on to Garrison to rejoing the original 1883 route. While it remains intact for its entirety the stretch over the top of the Continental Divide (6329 ft) between the quarry at Spire Rock to Butte has been out of service for nearly four decades. The bare scarred hill to the right of the train just past that ramshackle structure once carried the Milwaukee Road's Gallatin Valley Branch up and over the NP here on its way from Three Forks to Bozeman and ultimately as far as Menard. Built in 1910 it was once the route od luxury passenger trains to the Milwaukee's Gallatin Gateway Inn in Saylesville that opened in 1927. Alas that inn and transfer point for Yellowstone was built too late at the dawn of the automobile age and never lived up to the road's expectations and was sold in 1951. The rest of the branch soldiered on freight only until succumbing to abandonment in 1978 only two years before the Milwaukee pulled out of Montana and the far west in its entirety. To see a Milwaukee train crossing at this very spot check out this agonizingly cool photo by Larry Zeutschel flic.kr/p/2jv9BEM The two classic EMD GP35s, MRL 403 and 401 (blt. Dec 1964 as DRGW 3039 and Jan. 1964 as DTI 353 respectively) have no other industry work on the return trip and will only pause briefly a couple times to pick up cars they'd worked on the way out. Countless articles have been written about the MRL over the past 35 years of its existence and if you care to learn more download this great series courtesy of Trains Magazine: www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/TRN-MRL.pdf Unincorporated Logan Gallatin County, Montana Tuesday September 6, 2022 https://flic.kr/p/2opXQQH

[boxcar-magazin]

Still need Christmas presents!? New BOXCAR shirts out now! Red silkscreen-printed BOXCAR "spiral" logo on the back.

Available at our online shop!

[hitzerot-prints-and-publications]

Boxcar Magazin – Drei

The Boxcar Magazine seems to become the new fixed standard concerning high quality publications on painted freight trains. With issue No.3 the author once again digged into his archive and fills up the 56 paged magazine with several gems, spotted in between 2011 and 2019.

Although more and more European writers seem to jump on the bandwaggon of painting cargo trains, Boxcar unites writers who still manage to peak out through the amount of steady rolling cars, an individual style or even both aspects.

Whether you are looking for monikers from TO GO, two-tone pieces from K100 or LIMP.H, silver bubble throw-up’s by KISS or full color top-2-bottoms by SHEM and OGTOK: Boxcar has it all! Just like the former issues, No.3 frames the spotted works in atmospheric shots and impressions of the freight trains natural surroundings: industrial landscapes.

Besides the mentioned writers Boxcar this time presents stuff from TADD, PIANO, KOSMO, FLASH, ZAUER, BUDE, EXOT, ANED, RALLY, NLOST, BARTO, AQUA, ZONKE, KATDOG, GRIP, MAGIK, TYLER, DEBIL, TRAZY, COOLIO, 2PAC, G.UNIT, REK, LIPS84, NIHIL, ZUKUNFT IST LUXUS, LOOF, WAVER, STACE, LASSE and PEREZ.

If you are not familiar with the Boxcar series, we highly recommend to check out the last years No.2 as well as the No.1 which are still available in our shop! Each issue is limited to 300 copies so be fast and don’t miss the chance of adding the remaining back issues to your bookshelf!

Now available at www.hitzerot.com

[walt-at-disneyland]

"I went about it systematically. After serving an apprenticeship in a machine shop, I studied metalwork and carpentry before I figured I was ready to start building. Then I built a train to one-eighth scale. The engine and the tender combined was seven feet long and operated on coal and water, like the ones I had known as a news butcher. I fashioned all the cars myself. The boxcars were big enough for a person to straddle, and the flatcars could seat two. My special pride was the caboose, which I furnished entirely in miniature, right down to the pot-bellied stove. The engine was designed after one that had run on the old Central Pacific, so I named my little railroad the CP, for Carolwood Pacific, the street I lived on." -Walt, Railroad Magazine, October 1965 #waltdisney #walt #disney #railroadmagazine #railroad #modelrailroad #miniature #waltwednesday (at Holmby Hills, Los Angeles) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch7vd9Fp3uS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[suppenzeit]

Toby can I be humbly request some spagratti? 👀👉👈

a hot plate of spagratti just for u

(there's some mild nsfw discussion and content, but nothing too explicit, you know how it is with these two)

Coming back from his shift, AV expected Electra to be tinkering with electronics, making some music, or just somewhere else entirely, hanging out with the components. What he didn’t expect was Electra on his bed, reading some of his adult magazines. Maybe he should stop putting them in the same place every time huh.

“...Hi” he wasn’t embarrassed, per se, but it just felt a bit weird seeing someone browse a magazine he’d no doubt used to get off multiple times.

Electra glanced back at him for a moment before going back to the magazine, flipping to the next page.

“Hello, I thought you’d be better at hiding these”

AV plopped down on the bed, and Electra shuffled a bit to make some more room.

“I haven’t had a reason to hide ‘em before, I thought you wouldn’t mind. You know how I am”

Peering at the pages Electra was looking at, AV saw an oiled up diesel, naked except for a pair of tiny shorts that barely covered his huge package, and on the other a particularly buff boxcar. Oh yeah he’d definitely jerked off to them before.

“I don’t mind them, I’m just curious. With magazines like yours I thought you’d go for Greaseball, and not me”

“Well, Greaseball couldn’t handle someone like me, obviously” That didn’t even get a smirk from Electra. Shit.

“But for real. Why me?” Electra put down the magazine to look at him.

“Hmm, let's see…” he propped himself up on his arm. “Firstly, you’re gorgeous. You’re without a doubt the most gorgeous man, or woman, I’ve seen. Secondly, you could rewire a computer blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back, that’s how smart you are. Thirdly, you have so much power but you’re so effortless about it, I think you should know how attractive that is. And fourthly, you’re amazing in bed”

During the course of that, Electras mood clearly improved. He was flustered, looking away with his hair puffing up from the static energy he released.

“Shall I go on?”

“Shut up, and show me how much you love me”

“Gladly”

[wetsteve3]

David Mann's friend, Boxcar, is said to be the inspiration for this centerfold from Biker magazine April 2001.

[eyeballjazz]

I see a good fit on a model and I immediately open Clip and start drawing Boxcars

Inspired by Precious Lee’s spread for i-D magazine, photos by Tyler Mitchell

[rocksandrobots]

Of Rocks and Robots Ch. 41 - Finale (Pt. 3)

Abigail was gone.

Not again. No. No. Not again! Judy thought to herself.

She's already lost Abigail once; she wasn't going to lose her again. She watched helplessly from the balcony's railing scanning the sky line where her girlfriend and the ninja disappeared. She had to get her back! But what on earth was going to do? Jump out of a twenty story window?

Her boss, Krei called again, unaware of what had just happened. Instead of answering Judy almost threw the phone out into the street in frustration, but paused mid-action.

Wait! Krei! Big Hero Six!  

She had the supers on speed dial because of her boss. Heaving shaky breaths she called the number.

                                                 -------------------------

The gang of teenage superheroes were huddled on top of a skyscraper. They watched from above as Mr. Sparkles was arrested for his previous attack on the city. All, but Baymax, who scanned the skyline looking for Professor Callahan's bio readings.

"Well what next?" Gogo asked.

Hiro was about to answer but he was interrupted by his cell phone ringing. It was a very sacred Judy on the other end and she was crying and rambling.

"Judy, Judy, just calm down, take deep breaths." Hiro soothed. "Now what do you mean she's gone?"

Hiro pressed the speaker button and Judy's voice rang out.

"This ninja broke into our apartment and carried Abigail away. He was dressed head to toe in black, and you couldn't see his face behind his mask. He also had, like, super strength and he just jumped from building to building as if he wasn't even human."

"Robot ninjas" Fred gasped.

"Judy, I need you to listen to me. Hang up and call the police, tell them everything you know. I'm going to send one of us over your way to investigate and we'll be there soon. Okay?" Hiro told her.

Judy agreed and the call ended.

"Sparkles called his little escapade a 'distraction';" Wasabi said, "You don't think…"

"Oooh, that would totally make sense!" Fred jumped in. "This Bosu ordered Sirque and Sparkles to create a disaster to lure us away from Abigail's apartment."

"But how would they have known we were ever there?" Varian asked.

The answer became obvious to everyone at once, but only Honey Lemon gave voice to their fears. "

Unless, they're watching us." She shivered.

"I have found Professor Callaghan." Baymax stated calmly, interrupting their conversation.

"Where?" Hiro breathlessly asked.

"He is quite far away. Just on the outskirts of the city. He's nearly out of range of my sensors." Baymax replied and pointed his finger in a southeastern direction, though none of them could see what the robot saw.

"What about Abigail?" Varian asked.

"Scanning for Abigail." Baymax said and switched his programming over to look for the professor's daughter. A minute or two passed and then the android said, "There are no signs of Abigail."

"Hmmm...it looks like they're hiding Abigail elsewhere." Hiro contemplated. "They may have taken her in the opposite direction for all we know."

"So what do we do?" Gogo asked him.

Hiro found everyone staring at him waiting for orders, and not for the first time he wondered how he wound up being the leader of their little group. He was just flying by the seat of his pants most of the time. He didn't know anymore than they did. Still he had to come up with something.

"I think… I think we're going to have to split up again. Fred and Gogo, you two head to Judy's apartment and see what you can find out."

"Here are the directions;" Baymax helpfully offered, "Sending them to your phones, now."  

"Right," Hiro continued, "also if the police are there, just cooperate with them if you can or stay out the way until they leave if you can't. Honey Lemon, I'm tasking you and Wasabi with continuing the search down by the docks. Call Globby and Carl and let them know what's going on. Baymax and I will check out the energy readings he just found. If we find anything we'll let you know and if not we'll join you in the hunt later."

Hiro was just about to climb on Baymax's back when Varian stopped him.

"Hey wait a minute. You're not going by yourself."

"Look, it's fine. I know you don't like doing the whole superhero thing. You can wait at the Lucky Cat for us, if you want."

"Yeah, well what if I don't want to." Varian challenged.  

Hiro rolled his eyes. "Yeah, and how are you going to defend yourself if Supersonic Sue is there?" Since when was Varian the cautious, overprotective one?

Varian only screwed up his face in determination. "Honey Lemon, got any more chimballs I could borrow?"

"Oh, sure." She timidly said as she unbuckled the strap of her chim-purse and handed the belt with the chemical orbs on it to him.

He strapped it on him, like a hardness so the balls were in easy reach, while Honey Lemon used a smaller handle on the top of the purse to hold her weapon.

Hiro eyed the other boy coolly. He didn't appreciate not being trusted to handle things himself, especially when Varian was no less of a disaster, but the goggle headed teen ignored his disapproval.

"So are we ready to go or what?" He asked, as if hadn't been the one to grind everything to halt by protesting earlier.

Hiro gave up. They really couldn't afford to waste time arguing. He boarded Baymax's back and Varian climbed up after him. Then everyone else left, as the three took to the sky.

                                                -------------------------

The place Baymax took them to was a train depot. There were various rail lines with dusty boxcars sitting both on and beside them, a tall crane for loading and unloading cargo was stationed near the tracks, and an old warehouse stood in the middle of it all. It's windows were boarded up to indicate it's lack of use and large cobwebs hung from the porch railings. It was the perfect place for a hideout really.

Hiro directed Baymax to land on the roof of the building. He didn't want the villains to spot them coming in and get the drop on them. From there, they climbed down the fire escape and entered through one of the boarded up windows.

Or rather, they entered through the hole in the wall that Varian made where the window once stood. He had found Honey Lemon's labeling system on her utility belt and by combining two of the chemical orbs together he created some sort of acid that quickly and silently ate away at the wall, wooden boards, window, everything, like magic, leaving a hole big enough for even Baymax to slip through.

Hiro had to admit he was impressed as he snuck inside, but there was no time for compliments. As soon as they were in, he ran to one corner of the hallway to make sure no one had seen them come in. He ordered Varian to keep lookout on the other end.

"Callaghan is down the hall, towards the front of the building." The robot helpfully pointed out.

Hiro put a finger to his lips indicating that to the robotic nurse to lower his volume.

"Ok this way." He whispered as he motioned for his small team to follow him.

They made their way down the winding hallways with Hiro taking the lead and Varian bringing up the rear; chimball in hand just in case anybody tried to sneak up on them.

They made it to the other end of the building without incident and found Professor Callaghan tied to a chair, sitting in a dusty office.

"H-hiro?" The former villain rasped when he spotted the armored boy and his pet robot.

"Shh.. We come to get you out of here." Hiro whispered as he went to untie Callaghan.

"Hiro, you shouldn't have come here." Callaghan bemoaned.

"Well too late for that. Let's go." Hiro said. "Is the coast still clear?"

"It is on my end- wait no, some tall guy is coming this way." Varian said.

"Must be Sue's grandson." Hiro replied. "Uh.. Let's try the other way out."

"Who's this?" Callaghan asked.

"A friend. Now let's try looping around." And with that Hiro took off once more while his ragtag team followed.

He paused though, when he saw Sue sitting in another office at the other end. Through the window  he saw her with her feet propped up on the desk and a magazine in her hand.

"Varian, got anymore of that acid?" He asked.

"No, I think ice bombs are all that's left." Varian answered.

Hiro spied the top of the stairwell. "Ok, everybody downstairs then. We'll just go out the front door."

Everyone hurried out the hallway and down the staircase while Hiro stood watch. Once the last of them had gone, he turned and followed; not noticing Sue peering at them over the top of her magazine.

                                                -------------------------

They made it all the way down to the first floor and were almost out the door when suddenly Supersonic Sue stood in front of them, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

"Leaving so soon?" She asked. "See that Stu, they were planning on taking off without even saying goodbye."

"That's not very friendly of them, is it nana?" Stu replied as he skated up behind them. They were surrounded.

Everyone went into a defensive stance, waiting to see who'd make the first move.

"Why don't you whippersnappers just give up now, and no one gets hurt?" Sue said with a wicked smile.

"Nothin' doin'" Varian shot back.

With a nod to her grandson, both speedsters started to rev up their skates. Suddenly a yellow blur was hurtling at them at high speed where Stu once stood. Everyone scattered.

Varian threw one of his chimballs down as he ran and a slick sheet of ice formed on the ground. Stu became unbalanced as he started to slide out of control and Sue had to dodge out of the way quickly.

Seeing an opening, Hiro shouted, "Baymax! The door!"

The robot shot his rocket booster at the larger double doors that stood at the end of the hanger. They shattered on impact, leaving an opening for their escape.

Hiro ran to the android, signaling his group to follow.

"Oh no you don't!" Sue yelled.

Before Hiro could reach his friend, Sue appeared next to Baymax; who suddenly, for some reason remained very still.

"Now what do you suppose this is?" Sue asked as she held Baymax's chip in her hand.

Hiro froze in horror, but Varian tried to throw another chimball at the woman while her back was turned. He got tackled by Stu before he could get his shot in.

Sue skated away to safety and held the chip aloft once more. "Turn yourselves in or I'll smash this."

Hiro pulled out his shuriken to knock the item out of her hand but was too slow.

Sue reappeared over in the opposite far corner. "Wrong answer." She said and stomped on the chip breaking it into pieces.

"Nooo!" Hiro shouted, only for Sue to suddenly appear next to him.

"Does your mama know you're playing with sharp objects boy?" She asked and next thing Hiro knew his utility belt had been removed. He turned to look for it and saw Sue standing in yet another corner of the large warehouse with the belt slung over her shoulder.

"Looking for this?" She taunted.

He tried to use his electromagnetic whips to pull down a stack of boxes on top of her, but she once more skated out of the way. He then found his gloves being pulled off in quick succession.

Now unarmed, and one man down, Hiro desperately looked around for Varian. But the other teen had been similarly disarmed in his tussle with Sue's grandson. Though that didn't seem to discourage the time displace teen who continued to fight the larger guy.

He jumped Stu and they both went rolling around on the ground.

"Ouch! Nana, he won't stop hitting me!" The bigger teen whined.

Sue rolled her eyes and went to break up the fight.

Using this as a distraction, Hiro tried to call for help over his intercom.

It didn't work.

Sue overheard him and snatched his helmet right off his head.

Hiro backed away quickly from the woman as she stalked towards him. Things had gotten completely out of control.

"Stu, once you're finished roughhousing with your new friend over there, make sure he doesn't have any communication devices on him."

"Like this one Nana?" Stu said as he fished Varian's cell phone out of his pocket. He was rewarded with a bop on the nose for his trouble.

"Ow! Hey, watch it little dude!" Stu said as he cupped his nose and the cell phone fell to the ground next to the blue folder that had also fallen out of Varian's coat pocket.

"Exactly, Buttercup." She replied, and then next thing Hiro knew she had his own cell phone in her hand. It was as if she'd hardly moved at all. He had blinked, once, saw a blur run past, blinked again and found his pocket had been picked.

She held the phone up mockingly, "Ready to give up yet?"

Then suddenly Callaghan got the drop on her from behind. He wrestled the older woman to the ground as he tried to rip the phone out of her hands.

"Hiro run!" He yelled.

"Not without Varian!" Hiro shot back as he watched the other teen struggle to get out of Stu's grip.

"I'll help you Nana!" Stu called out.

Sue stopped him. "No, I got it. You grab the other two and put them someplace safe till we get time to deal with them. I'll take care of our dear professor here." And with a grunt she kicked Callaghan off her.

Hiro ran to help the man, only for a strong arm to grip his sleeve and practically lift him off the ground. He looked beside him and saw Varian also caught in the same grip, though that didn't stop the other boy from trying to kick Stu in the shins.

"Here ya, ow!, go nana. Ouch! Oh and I found this on him too. Hey, stop that!" Stu handed over Varian's cell phone and chimballs to his grandmother, along with the notebook.

"Hey, my notes!" Callaghan shouted and ran to grab them out of Sue's hands. "Where did you get those?!"

Sue kicked him back down. "Well, don't look at me. You're the one who dragged literal kids into your affairs."

"We're not kids!" Varian shouted.

Sue gave him a reproachful look, as if she felt sorry for them. "Sure you aren't,  honey." Then she turned to her grandson and said, "Well go on, and do what I told ya, quick. We gotta move Callaghan to a new hideout before the rest of those do-gooders come looking for them."

"On it!" Stu saluted before dragging them away.

In a blink of an eye, Hiro saw Sue grab some rope and begin to tie Callaghan up again as Stu pulled them along.

The big galoot ignored both boy's attempts to squirm out of his grasp as he tried to think of a place to put them. "Someplace safe…" He muttered to himself before spotting a large wooden shipping crate over on the far end of the warehouse. "That's it!"

"This should be plenty safe for you two until someone can come pick you up!" Stu said cheerfully as he opened the crate and dropped them inside. "Oh and here's some snacks in case you get hungry in the meantime."

He threw a couple of candy bars down to them. "I always like to carry extra with me. Super skating burns a lot of calories, you know."

Hiro looked up at the villain in confusion. He would have assumed the taller guy was taunting them, but no, he seemed to genuinely care about their comfort; not realizing that being locked in a giant box was perhaps not the best thing for anyone's health.

"Stu! Time to go!" They heard Sue shout.

"Coming nana!" Stu replied and then turned to them once more. "Okay gotta go now. Bye. Nice meeting you."

And with that he closed the lid, which locked into place, leaving them in darkness.