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haro-whumps · 5 years ago

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Group Whumpees 10: Asking and Answers

So this chapter is interesting in that I wrote a lot of words, but not a ton of it is any sort of particular forward motion. Largely this is just me establishing setting, which I have sorely needed to do for my own self, and sort of giving my characters a breath before the next bad thing I have planned for them (which is just as fun as it is contrived and overdramatic). So if you wanna skip to Sasha’s first “eep” I would not fault you for it, since it is a rather long chapter and the first stretch of it is just a lot of detail work with hardly any action.

CW: slavery, aftermath of torture, referenced noncon, multiple whumpees, referenced alcoholic tendencies, referenced religious... stuff.

Tag List:@bleeding-demon-teeth @theycomeinthrees @redwingedwhump @whimperwoods @inpainandsuffering @whole-and-apart-and-between @whump-whump-whump-it-up @whumpingupastorm @newandfiguringitout @lonesome--hunter @looptheloup @icannotweave @deluxewhump @whumping-every-day @yeet-me-out-a-window @what-a-whumpy-world @burtlederp @constellationwhump @swordkallya @finder-of-rings @fairybean101 @adventuresofacreesty @arlennil @thingsthatgo-whump-inthenight @lumpofwhump @thatsthewhump @pinkdiamondprince

Masterlist

First order of business: what in the fresh hell was actually happening in this house?

Well, okay, the first first order of business was tipping the locksmith and offering a can of soda before sending them back on their way, but then the first order of business was finding out what the fresh hell was actually happening in this house!

Galo had, admittedly, left it more or less unexplored. He’d gotten down all the weird art of his aunt’s with the help of Nyla and Evan, which meant he hadn’t scoured the place thoroughly, and he had settled into rather regular haunts. He passed through most of the main floor, some of the second (and he begrudgingly accepted that his mission would send him into his dead aunt’s bedroom), but that still left an expansive attic, the majority of the second floor, the rest of the main floor, the entire basement, and most of the grounds. Because Galo was agitated as all hell and his monkey hindbrain said that threats came from outside, he started with the grounds.

He’d run around them, of course, wandered through the gardens and hedges and whatnot, but the fact of the matter was that his aunt’s estate was massive. And since he was on “The Great Easter Egg Hunt: Saw Edition” for horrible things hidden in amongst the grass, it took a while.

The smell of new mulch was thick in the air, pleasant and fresh. Galo also took the time to admire Lilah’s extraordinary work, wishing he was being this meticulous and thoughtful for more pleasant reasons.

He never encountered Lilah, Evan, or Greyson, though he would occasionally glimpse them off a ways. He was fairly certain they were avoiding him, or at the least were cognizant of his presence and deliberately giving him space, and he honestly didn’t mind. He really wasn’t in a place, mentally, to deal with hysterics or panicking slaves. Which sounded awful, but there it was.

He managed to finish the grounds right as the sun was setting, and checked out the secondary garage more thoroughly than just passing through warranted. So far, nothing suspect was to be found. Given Auntie Bethany’s obsession with keeping up appearances, that wasn’t terribly surprising. She liked to host garden parties and had no reason to enter the secondary garage, herself, so it tracked that the estate gardens were pristine and not-evil and the garage was left to Lilah’s devices.

The next day, after working out in a vain attempt to make himself stable enough to explore the house properly, he showered off and set to work. He started with the den.

It was blue, with a greyish-blue, dark, thin carpet, light slate walls and dark blue furniture. Galo opened the cabinets near the tv (and his aunt had so many tvs), but found only a vcr, dvd player, some unlabeled cords that he had no idea what they were for, some remotes, some old recordings labeled with name tags (shows Galo vaguely recognized, but couldn’t tell you anything about). Normal things. Not-evil things. Things that gave Galo no reason to believe this was a horrible, awful room that the slaves hated.

So he turned face and headed towards the other cabinets, the ones in the back of the room, behind a well-worn but clearly expensive armchair. Galo needed to know, but he also didn’t want to, and therefore was, quite literally, dragging his feet. Which was why he tripped, stumbling a bit. He turned back, brow furrowed, and his brain helpfully supplied that this was pretty much the exact spot where Evan had knelt, waiting for his punishment.

There was a D ring in the carpet. Dull; painted? But it blended with the carpet well, really only visible if you knew it was there. Galo sat on his haunches and hooked a finger through it, gave an experimental tug. No give at all whatsoever.

He took a deep breath. He had a bad feeling about this. He straightened, turned back to the cabinets, and flung them open simultaneously.

First he took note of the chains. Hard not to, they glinted--metallic and grey, and there was so goddamn many of them. Handcuffs, padded leather cuffs chained together, collars and muzzles, all of them with lengths of chain that could, presumably, be used to attach them to each other, or to, say, D rings on the floor. Ahahaha god.

Distantly, as Galo pulled a muzzle from the cabinet and examined it, Galo wondered why he even bothered to still be horrified by his aunt’s actions. Sure, she was family, and Galo wanted to believe that his family wasn’t like… this. But Auntie Bethany had proven herself horrible in life and he shouldn’t keep being surprised by how horrible she was, now after her death.

The lower cabinets had a couple of canes, the kind that clearly weren’t for walking assistance, an honest to god whip, a fucking knife, and a metal rod that Galo couldn’t really discern the purpose of. Probably something awful and horrifying. He shut the cabinets firmly, rested his forehead against the cool plywood, and tried to take a deep breath.

He pulled out his notebook and drew a very large circle, in red marker, around “The Den is a bad place.” He then flipped a couple of pages and started up a running list of observations

There isn’t really anything of note in the gardens or garden garage.

The Den has muzzles, collars, cuffs, and chains, plus a D ring in the floor

He wasn’t sure what he was ultimately going to do with this list, but simply making it made him feel a little better. Even if it was a list of horrible things he found in the mansion, it was still nice to have.

But okay. How to be sensible about this? He shouldn’t start removing things from cabinets, especially horrifying tools of torture, until he had somewhere to put them all, and something to do with them. He would need a plan, which meant he would need to complete his list of horrible things. And also probably rent a dumpster. So he removed his person from the cabinets in the den, glanced again at the half-hidden D ring in the floor, and then moved the furniture around a little. He found seven more D rings throughout the room, now that he was looking for them, subtle and easily blending in. One more on the floor, a little beyond the first ring, four in the walls, two in the ceiling, all clustered around the same relative spot, more or less. It further convinced Galo that yes, indeed, this was exactly where Evan had been kneeling.

Okay. Top down? Top down. Galo’s specific curiosity about the den now satisfied, he could just do a thorough, room-by-room sweep of the mansion, and so he made his way to the attic. The door to the attic stairs was in a guest bedroom, one that was meant for “children” in the way that it was cutesy and kitch, but had clearly been designed by someone who hadn’t really ever interacted with an actual human child. Galo had slept in one of those twin beds when he was very little, and remembered a distinct discomfort for the firmness of the mattresses and the scratchy quality of the overly-colorful block-pattern blankets. Should he go ahead and search this room now, since he was in it? No, stick to the plan, start with the attic.

He climbed the steps, flicked on the lights, and then promptly blanked.

How did one human being even own this much stuff?? The attic was massive, a snaking maze of shelves and clothes racks with plastic covers and boxes stacked and arranged. There was a clear path through, dusty but meticulous, and, in a display of wealth so obscene it turned Galo’s head, the ceiling was finished. Who finished the ceiling of their attic?! Attic ceilings were supposed to have dangerously exposed nails and shitty insulation fully visible. Galo was far from a religious man, but even he knew that an attic ceiling was meant to be left unfinished like the good lord intended.

He might have been balking at the ceiling to cover for the fact that he had… no idea where to start, with all this junk. The attic spanned nearly the entire width and breadth of the mansion, and it was full. Absolutely full. Galo turned off the light, went back down the stairs, and shut the attic door. He would devote an entire day to going through all of that shit. Hell, he’d make a weekend out of it. But today was not that day. Kitchy kid room it was.

He explored many different guest rooms, opening drawers and closets and chests and vanities and whatever the hell else, poking his head out onto their balconies, but found them empty of anything troubling. Again, this tracked. Auntie Bethany likely wouldn’t let her non-Guest guests or family members know what she did behind the scenes.

He found another sunroom on the second floor, the south-facing wall made entirely out of glass and a number of gridded skylights making up the southern half of the ceiling. There was a marble statue standing in the center of a tile fountain, here, and Galo held his pressed palms up in front of his mouth, squinting. He would’ve remembered this. He would’ve remembered the warm yellow walls and the aquatic mosaic flooring, he would’ve remembered the sprawling cluster of plants, he would’ve remembered the wall of glass, and definitely would’ve remembered the statue, with its detailed pubic hair and unrealistically buxom bosom. Had he just never been allowed in here? Had he simply failed to explore this far? Or was this an addition that had happened in Galo’s adulthood, when his primary method of surviving family gatherings had switched from “explore the castle away from the people” to “get drunker than them, faster”?

Who knew. What he needed to do was poke around in here and make sure it wasn’t another horrifying abomination. And check and see if the plantlife here was real, or plastic. He touched their leaves, the soil, and found, with surprise, that they were all alive. Huh.

Something… there was some gear in his head that started turning at that, some impression of a thought that was still too close to his brain’s horizon for him to make out just yet. He took out his pen and notebook and simply notated the second sunroom, which he crossed out and relabeled “plant room.” He flipped the page over and drew the general outline of the house, and then made some squares. He labeled each guest room and the plant room, and while he was no cartographer, it’d serve as a rudimentary map until he had a better idea of where everything was here.

There was only one cupboard, and it had fertilizer, a small watering can, a water spritzer, disposable gloves, and PH strips, which were more confusing than alarming if Galo was being entirely honest with himself. He hadn’t seen those things since freshman year of highschool in his mandated biology course. Actually, wait, there was also a folded up piece of paper, which Galo took out. He recognized Nyla’s careful script immediately, and read over her detailed list of the plants in the room, how much sunlight each needed and whether it was indirect or direct, and the watering schedule drawn out in a little grid calendar.

He couldn’t help but admire how meticulous she was. How put together. He had no doubt in his mind that she really was the one who’d run the whole household, when his aunt was alive. Hell, she still was--it wasn’t like Galo knew a ton of shit.

The second floor seemed primarily devoted to guest rooms, with an occasional cabinet or boudoir attached to said bedrooms. There was a large drawing room more or less in the “middle” of the mansion, a number of skylights directly over a sunken sitting area and a couple of tvs, plus places that art had clearly been stationed at before being removed for the crimes of being a bunch of fucking eyesores. A few pieces still remained, though, two different tapestries and a couple of abstracts. Plus a bunch of little tables, which were honestly charming and mercifully empty of tools of torture. Lots of little forks and platters though.

The master bedroom was not something Galo wanted to scour. His dead aunt had slept in there. (His dead aunt had hurt people, every night, in there). He made himself turn the door handle.

“Master Galo,” Nyla greeted, setting down a tiny, antique-looking watering can on the windowsill between a succulent and a corkscrew-curling plant Galo didn’t know the name of.

“Hey, Nyla,” Galo returned, extending his hand for her to cup lightly and kiss as she fluidly sank to one knee, then just as gracefully rose. “Don’t mind me, I’m just poking around a bit.”

“Yes Master,” she said with a charming little bow, her clasped hands dipping into the folds of her apron, “If I may assist at all, sir, please call upon me.”

“Will do, thanks.” He felt a surge of fondness for her. He knew she was just doing what she’d been trained to do, but he liked her smile when it wasn’t obviously-forced, and he liked her put-togetherness, and he liked, well, her.

He was very conscious of her presence, though, as he “snooped” around his own home. So he let her finish with the plants while he was in the en suite bathroom, opening the cupboards under the sink and checking the interior of the shower. Everything was meticulously clean, which he was grateful for (he could not handle it if he caught sight of his dead aunt’s body hair or some such thing). It was also perfectly normal, even if he found the little rugs along the side of the bath and looping around the base of the toilet to be ostentatious.

Nyla was still in the room, so Galo moved onto the closet door. He expected a walk-in with fifty billion changes of clothes (and really, had Galo ever seen the woman wear the same outfit twice?). He did not expect something that looked like it was intended to be a linens closet, stuffed full of canes. Canes, and, Galo noticed belatedly, knives, long strips of cloth and rope, plain eye masks far too crude to be used for her own sleep needs, and--god, was that lube?

The cane Evan had brought, that night he’d begged for punishment, stood front and center, clearly the most recently moved.

“Master?” Nyla’s voice cut through Galo’s shocked immobility, making him jump a little and tear his eyes away, “Is there anything from the tool closet you require, specifically?”

Galo shut the door harder than he should have, his own strength getting away from him and a tight smile on his face. The fact that he’d even opened that door was freaking her out, and the sudden loud noise did not help at all. For once, blessedly, Galo thought fast. “Actually, I was looking for her clothes closet? Which door is that behind?”

There were five doors in the master bedroom, one to the hallway, one to the bathroom, one to a fucking “tool” closet, so that left two guesses. Nyla visibly relaxed at Galo’s words, her smile losing it’s pinched edge (Galo was getting better, better at telling when her smile was tight or neutral or something approximating genuine happiness). Galo unwound a little, too, at seeing her return to the Nyla-equivalent of blank.

“Of course, sir, this one,” Nyla said, leading Galo to a different door, and the exhorbitant display he’d anticipated. There was a fucking… boot bench in the center of it, with tall mirrors in the center of the three walls that didn’t hold a door, separating closets. No, wait, this whole thing was the closet, the little… shelf… hanging rack things were--

Okay Galo didn’t have all the fancy names for ridiculous rich people things, but the point was, there were so many clothes, so many shoes, a goddamn chandelier, and it was all fucking color coordinated.

“You, uh, you set up the…” Galo gestured vaguely in front of him, “rainbow effect?”

“I did, Master Galo,” Nyla said promptly, and Galo nodded. Figured. “Greyson does the laundry, and has kept it meticulously organized since, Master Galo.”

Galo made a mental note to add Greyson being the laundry dude to his list of things he knew about the slaves. “Thanks, Nyla, I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

He saw her give a cute little bow in the mirror, and she ghosted off while he stepped further into the space. The boyish instinct in him wanted to reach up and smack the chandelier, just because he was tall enough, and he could. So, like, hey, he did. It tinkled and swayed, light dancing around the space, and he snickered incredulously. He sat down on the boot bench, chandelier swinging above him, and pressed his face into his palm, elbow to his thigh, and just laughed, absurdly.

It was too early in the day for hysterics, though, so Galo forced a deep, slow breath, then another, then a third for good measure. He took out his notebook, added Greyson’s laundry duties, and then wrote a bulletpoint on his aunt’s linen closet from hell. The worst part, the part that made him feel incredibly scummy, was that he was kind of tempted to keep the lube, whenever he managed to clear out all of the rest of that shit. It was useful, and Galo wasn’t in the habit of throwing away things that could be used. At the same time, though, why in the fuck and shit and hell was Galo entertaining the idea of using his evil aunt’s lube? Disgusting. But he’d feel bad if he threw it away. But also that was his aunt and she was evil.

Fuck, Galo thought as he ran his hands over his face, taking yet another deep breath. Fuuuuuuuck. Was there an off switch for his brain? He’d like it if there was an off switch for his brain.

Alcohol, aforementioned brain suggested helpfully. Later, he told it. For now: distractions. He stood and began pulling open drawers, lifting clothing in search for hidden horrors like a hyper-controlling parent looking for naughty magazines or diary entries. He found nothing but cloth, more cloth, more cloth, and silk.

Hey, remember how you didn’t give me alcohol? Galo’s brain told him spitefully, I’m going to make you think about your wrinkly aunt in lingerie, now.

Galo shoved the silk back in the drawer and shut it hard, mentally batting at his mind with a cartoon broom. Disgusting. Negative one hundred out of ten. Something he literally never, ever wanted to think about. He bopped the chandelier once more, in a spurt of whimsy, on his way out.

The fifth door led to his aunt’s personal boudoir, which made Galo sigh. He was definitely gonna find atrocities here. And he did! More rope, candles that Galo knew the exact purpose for (he might not have all the kinks, but he possessed some, and was aware of others), more restraints, and more canes. Good lord and he’d thought she had an extensive cane collection back when he didn’t know shit. Even the balcony had a cane on it! He gathered them up with intention to take them to the “tool closet,” where they could all collectively wait for the arrival of the dumpster, and spun too fast and tripped over the fireplace tool set, sending it over and its contents clattering. He sighed, setting down the torture shit on a nearby chair. Why did Auntie Bethany even have a fireplace tool set? All her fireplaces were gas fires, it wasn’t like she had anything to stoke.

Probably decorative. It was shaped to look like an antler, each spoke housing a different tool, which also had intricate carvings/detailing on the handles and along the metal rods.

Galo shoved the canes and shit into the “tool closet” and sighed, pressing his forehead against it. Fuckin… He wasn’t even done with the second floor. But, he hoped, the master bedroom would be the worst of it, he hoped, he hoped. Since that was where the slaves “attended” her, and where she spent the majority of her time in this massive fucking house.

He found a supply closet full of actual supplies, cleaning chemicals and rubber gloves and dust masks and scrub brushes. It was so completely, entirely normal (if heavily stocked) that Galo felt a ridiculous amount of relief. He nudged some stuff around, but ultimately left it alone.

The old craft room, which was slowly turning into Galo’s computer room, was already scoured, so he passed it by. He moved into the music room--sound proofed, which made Galo’s stomach churn anxiously--with its piano and sound system and lounge chairs and folded up electric keyboard tucked behind a fancily carved record player. There were a couple of wind instruments in the cabinets, a violin or viola or whatever it was (Galo didn’t know instruments super well, hardly enough to distinguish on sight), and--yay--more restraints! A close examination revealed D rings in the floor, walls, and ceiling, like in the den, and Galo sighed as he took out his notebook.

There was some sort of… dressing room? Galo couldn’t discern the intent of it, until he found nursing blankets (which he knew were nursing blankets because they had lovely little cherub-like depictions of babies on them) in an otherwise empty cabinet. No devices of torture, so yay, big fucking mirrors for a room that people would allegedly feed babies in, less of a “yay” and more of a Giant Singular Question Mark.

He wasn’t gonna think too hard on it. He’d made that promise to himself the first night--or was it the second?--and he intended to keep it. Just accept things, and let them move on. If he didn’t let water under the bridge, he was going to drown.

There was a well-stocked office not far from Galo’s room, and he added that to a list of miscellaneous notes. He didn’t know if he’d need an office, all things considered, but if he needed a designated space to work on things and focus, this would be a good place to do that. A thorough examination revealed only office supplies, though some of the paperclips had been bent out of shape and there were a lot of those little clips, like what you put on manilla envelopes or stacks of looseleaf.

The library was a two-story thing, the upper floor boasting a large square hole in the middle that allowed a clear view to the main floor, one wall broken up by floor to ceiling windows between the bookshelves (or maybe the bookshelves were the ones between the windows? Eh). An ornate spiral staircase connected the two, and he smiled at it fondly, remembering being utterly enamored with it when he was a kid. Honestly, he was still pretty enamored with it as an adult. He stroked his fingers over the railing, wondering if he could spruce the place up a bit. Add fairy lights to the railing or something. Add more than just his aunt’s pristine, chic, expensive art that took up minimal space, like her home was a museum or some shit. Clutter it up, fill the space, make the damn mansion feel lived in.

Later. He wrote that onto his list of things to do, but lines and lines below keeping his demeanor calm, cheerful, and approachable, and finding therapists with experience with traumatized slaves.

Ugh speaking of he should really get on that. But first, the library. He half expected that if he grabbed the right book, or moved the correct artistically expensive bookend, a secret passage would open up. He’d housed the same belief since he’d been flopping around this place as a kid. He just had different ideas on what he might find behind the entrance. But the library was just a library, well-lit with lots of books on his aunt’s particular interests. He found a couple volumes on methods of torture used throughout history, and a couple of psychology books that he did not trust At All, and he moved those to a lower-level bookshelf where he could find them all later. The psychology books he debated on--he liked psychology, and was also the kind of person to read what was effectively a textbook for fun. And these were officially published, sourced, and researched. So it wasn’t like they were… bad… and Galo didn’t want to throw out useful things.

But he also wouldn’t be able to get a mental image of his aunt, reading over them, thinking up dastardly fucking bullshit as she read them. So if Galo wanted to read a textbook, he’d just buy one for himself.

He took lunch in the library, Greyson bringing it in and leaving it on one of the small tables. Galo picked at it as he picked through the books, and Greyson was quiet enough that Galo didn’t even notice him come in, grab the plate, and leave when he was done.

The library was not far from the foyer, so Galo beelined to the front door, spun on his heel, and took a deep breath. One floor down. Two to go. And the attic, but again, that shit was for another time. The foyer was a large, open space, sparsely decorated, mostly just an ostentatious display of wealth and wasted space and the giant fucking chandelier.

Immediately adjacent was the solar, which was full of tacky and ugly as sin furniture, but no terrible horrible secrets. Next to the solar was the parlor, which had nicer furniture and looked incredibly bare, which made Galo think that there had been a LOT of god awful art in here before the purge. Still no instruments of torture though. The living room was observed closely, but again there was nothing more than superfluous fire pokers for a gas lit fire, uncomfortable tiny furniture, and a wall hanging Galo kept waffling back and forth on about keeping.

After the dining room, Galo entered the sunroom and felt his mood lift. He really enjoyed the sunroom. He peered into nooks and crannies, but he spent enough time here that he wasn’t anticipating anything. A distant shriek made him look out the window.

Evan had lifted Lilah up in his arms, holding her about the waist as she visibly struggled. Galo frowned, alert, and was drawing himself up to his full height, about to bolt out there, when Evan set Lilah down, and draped himself over her. Galo could not hear them from here, nor could he make out the shape of Evan’s words, but Galo would bet his right arm that Evan was proclaiming a sudden increase in gravity. The posture was unmistakable. Galo smiled as Lilah wriggled out from under him, and Evan dramatically threw his arm up over his forehead and fell to the ground. Galo snorted when Lilah stared at him a moment before kicking him.

Galo watched, heart full of something nameless, as Evan wrestled Lilah back into his hold after chasing her halfway to the hedges, and he sank, body unexpectedly heavy, into a lounge chair. He watched Sasha enter the scene, carrying something Galo couldn’t see from that angle and prompting Evan to swing Lilah around like some long-suffering cat, dramatically talking with his hands, which were full of his friend.

Galo felt like he was letting out a breath he’d been holding for a long, long time. Since that first night when Greyson had knelt on his bedroom floor.

He got himself a drink of water and got back to his search, feeling… better. There was a room just next to the pool, with a little rinsing area and changing areas, plus pool supplies. He remembered this from when he was younger, and made a note to go swimming again soon. He had been up to his elbows hooking up his game systems in the entertainment center, so he did a quick perusal just to mentally mark it off. There was a room with gorgeous stain glass windows and old candles and religious iconography that Galo was pretty sure was some sort of personal chapel, which was gorgeous and had stale fucking comunion wafers and, haha, a bottle of wine. He still had to force himself not to drink it, but it wasn’t as alluring as it might have been.

There was a room filled, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with butterfly pinboards. It was smaller than a room-room, like a walk-in closet but without a clothes rack, and entirely, completely bare of anything except the pinboards. No furniture, no windows, nothing. Galo shut the door, mind blank, and felt the terror-giddy urge to write “set on fire” in his notebook. He did not.

Another drawing room, a study, the salon, the billiards room, and Galo’s search of the main floor ended in the kitchen. Auntie Bethany seemed to have her haunts, and kept most of her instruments of torture there. Galo just sorta poked his head into the kitchen to see if Sasha was back yet (she wasn’t) and left it at that, knowing his aunt wouldn’t set foot in the kitchen unless she felt it absolutely necessary. The pantry, which was large as hell, was also somewhere Galo had been, and wasn’t worried about.

The door to the basement had a series of locks on it, all on the side of the main floor. Galo remembered distinctly how Auntie Bethany had “put her staff away” during gatherings, and imagined each one of these locks being fastened. How had she gotten away with it? With treating them so terribly for so long? Why hadn’t anyone noticed? Why hadn’t Galo?

Descending the stairs was an experience. The basement was fucking vaulted. There was, there was, some sort of fucking ballroom or some shit, Galo couldn’t even describe the space, at the bottom of the stairs. It’d be cool as hell if it wasn’t fucking overwhelming. Actually, even still, it was cool as hell. Whatever architect had designed this place, they’d had the time of their life.

The wine cellar was massive.

Galo made himself walk away.

There were two series of apartments, with bedrooms, a sitting area, a mini kitchen, and a bathroom to each, which took up most of the basement. Concerningly, none of them seemed used. The kitchenettes were certainly something for long-term guests to use, make coffee or some shit before heading upstairs for the day, but the drawers and closets were empty, showing no signs of the slaves living there.

There was a massive bathtub/pool that Galo found, multiple showerheads rigged throughout the ceiling and a basin the size of two people laid out. Well, not Galo-sized people, but like, Lilah or Nyla sized people. Nothing outwardly horrifying to be found, but Galo was a little boggled to find a tub this size when there was already a pool outside. There was another bedroom, just hanging out on its own, also empty. There was the utility room, where Galo encountered Greyson.

“Master Galo,” Greyson greeted, and Galo tried to make his brain switch tracks while he was bending low to kiss his hand.

“Hey, Greyson. You doin’ laundry?”

“Yes Master; do you have need of me, sir?”

“No, no you’re good. I’m just poking around.”

Greyson nodded, and went back to switching the wet load into the dryer when Galo turned. Galo made note of a couple more D rings here, plus two dog cages and a pet carrier. Auntie Bethany had never had a dog. Certainly never one of this size. He added it to his list of awful shit to get rid of, his mind jumping. Who? Who had been locked in these? Nyla? Sasha? Greyson? Lilah? Evan? All of them? It was too easy, too easy to picture any one of them behind those metal squares, far too easy to imagine them forced into a cramped, cold, humiliating space.

Oh hey, the rat poison, just like Nyla had said.

Greyson made no particular note of Galo, after his back had turned, and left somewhere after Galo finding the first D ring. It was just him, alone in the utility room, the sound of the washer and dryer keeping him company. Leaving, he took a deep breath. There were two doors left unopened. It was fucking barbaric, having all this space and all these rooms, and making the slaves pack in like this. They were probably separated by gender, too, one of these belonging to the men, the other to the women, because Galo had a hard time imagining his “good god-fearing” aunt running a risk of canoodling.

He opened the one to the right, aware that he was most definitely entering a space that wasn’t his. But at the same time, he told himself, he needed to know what was happening, make sure they weren’t adhering to some atrocious routine simply because Auntie Bethany had ordered it and Galo hadn’t ordered it to stop.

This space, at least, looked lived in. Which was good, but also made Galo frown, because there was only one, large bed. He hadn’t thought his aunt, terrified of any implication of homosexuality as she was, would’ve encouraged her slaves to share sleeping space. Galo glanced at the dressertop, finding combs and hair ties and floral antiperspirant, so he guessed this was the women’s room. He poked his head into the en suite bathroom, finding only a standing shower and a relatively cramped space, not half as meticulously, tv-ready clean as every other bathroom in the house. Something made Galo relax at that, too, at seeing soap residue in the little indent next to the sink, at seeing the dust bunny behind the toilet. It was still a clean space, just, lived in. The marks of people’s presence were upon it.

Now Galo sounded fancy and old timey. He pulled open the top dresser drawer, and his brow furrowed. These clothes were Greyson’s, crisply folded and put away so that each section of the drawer was dedicated to a different type of clothing. Galo shut the drawer slowly, the idea that maybe he’d gotten it wrong, that this was the men’s room, flitting by once, but only once. He had a bad feeling about what was more likely. He opened the second drawer, and saw Nyla’s clothes, a drawer down was Sasha’s, Evan’s, Lilah’s, and the sixth drawer, the one at the very bottom, held more collars than Galo had ever seen gathered in one place. And men’s lingerie, which was equally horrifying for a different set of reasons. He shut the drawer quietly, sitting on his haunches, and took a deep breath.

He stood slowly, breathing slower, and pressed his palms together before running them over his face, up into his hair, down the back of his skull and lacing his fingers together behind his neck. He stared up at the ceiling, just allowing himself to process this information. He wasn’t particularly struck; he’d established that his aunt was terrible and he really shouldn’t expect otherwise, but he was surprised to know that they were all kept in the same fucking room as each other. And with only one bed, that was the really strange part.

“Eep!”

Galo turned, attempting not to look guilty for sticking his nose where it had no business being, and tried to smile at Sasha. Her dark hair was loose, flowing down to nearly her waist now that it was freed from her high ponytail. Her hands were wringing anxiously up in front of her chest, wide blue eyes on Galo, and he didn’t move fast enough to prevent her from dropping to her knees, forehead to the floor. He winced a little, approaching her.

“Hey, Sasha,” he said, squatting down again and extending a hand to her. She glanced up, took the hand, and kissed it. Gently, Galo curled his fingers around her hand, holding it loosely and stroking her thumb softly with his own. “‘M sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

Sasha glanced up at him, nodded as she glanced away, and Galo reached out his other hand, giving her shoulder a squeeze before bracing underneath her bicep and helping her to her feet. He left his hands where they were, once they were standing, contemplating her. It was hard to befriend, or, well, gain the trust of someone he couldn’t have conversations with. Not that any of them really talked, but with Sasha it felt like there was an added barrier. An extra obstacle.

“Is everything alright, Sasha?” Galo asked, remembering the most recent instance of Sasha being terrified and close to him. She nodded, and he smiled. “Good.”

He glanced back at the large bed, at the dresser that housed clothes for all of them. “Sasha, do you all sleep here?”

An anxious glance at his face and another, more hesitant nod. Galo’s lips pressed thin.

“Okay, well, we can fix that. There are those dorms on the other side of the basement, those would work, or we could choose individual rooms from--”

Galo was cut off by Sasha squeezing his hand urgently between both of her own, looking up at him with her wide eyes.

“No--!” she gasped, quiet but no less desperate for it, and Galo felt a spike of panic on his own end; what had he done wrong? “Pl--” she seemed to choke on the words, and Galo shushed at her, making as soothing of noises as he could as he pet at her shoulder.

“Easy, Sasha, shhh shsh, easy honey, what’s wrong--” No that was a stupid question, she couldn't answer. She whimpered while Galo was trying to find a yes or no question that could discern what set her off, then the strength in her grip shot up.

“Please,” she gasped, and Galo just wanted to hug her, pet her hair and face and tell her it was gonna be okay. “M-” she choked off again, taking a series of deep and panicky breaths, “Master, don’t m-make--” Sasha cut off with a whine, lifting a hand to cover her mouth as she curled in on herself.

Galo’s brain finally kicked back on and he blurted out, “Typing! Here, just type it out.” He pulled up the notes app on his phone and handed it to her, praying she wouldn't drop it with her trembling hands. Not that he was worried about it getting damaged--it was a good model and he had a solid phone case--just that he knew that if she dropped it she'd spiral entirely out of control, since she was already teetering on the brink.

She didn’t, thankfully, though she did fumble it a little when she handed it back to him, letting go too soon. He caught it, easy peasy, no troubles here, see? Please Master don’t make us separate was written with no ending punctuation, though Galo was pretty sure she was thinking in exclamation points. Aw, shit, okay, Galo read over it twice, then reached out and squeezed her shoulder again, trying to think.

The bed was large, very large, but to fit five people they’d need to pack in. It hardly seemed fair. But the idea of separating distressed Sasha, and given how tight-knit they seemed, would likely distress the others, too. If Galo suggested bunkbeds at this point, there would be no guarantee that if they agreed it would be because they liked the idea, or because the “alternative” was Galo forcing them apart. Still, it was just too much, to force them all to share a single room, with its single bed and single dresser, when they were all living in a literal mansion. But Galo couldn’t let his own feelings of injustice and his own wants preside over their wants and needs, and Sasha was telling him that she wanted to perma-sleepover with her friends.

Actually. This could be a really useful opportunity. Galo would feel bad for… “manipulating” Sasha, was really the only way to say it, but it’d get the idea across, hopefully? It was a gamble. But Galo really, really wanted to make headway with these poor people, so…

“Okay, Sasha, thank you. I like it when you ask me for things,” he said, gesturing a little with his phone, “that’s very good, and since you asked, you get what you asked for, see? No separating.”

Sasha’s eyes were jerking about, looking at Galo’s hand, his phone, the hand on her shoulder, his face, the room, back to Galo. He tried to patiently let her process his words, nervous on how she’d take them, if this would help encourage her to ask for things in the future or if this would be another thing that Galo would need to help her unlearn, this time with him as the culprit. Swallowing hard, Sasha raised a hand and pointed a finger at her own chest. Me?

“Yeah, you honey. And the others. I like it when all of you ask me for things that you want. Like when I took Greyson to the cemetery, yeah?”

Sasha nodded, visibly calming down, and kept nodding, lips moving silently over unspoken words. She seemed to catch herself, glanced up at Galo, and offered a shaky, unconvincing smile. Galo smiled back, surprised. He really hoped that meant it worked, that Sasha, and the others when news spread to them, would feel less anxious about asking for things they wanted or needed, moving forward.

It had the side effect of making Galo feel like a really, really weird sugar daddy, but he wasn’t going to examine that particular thought anytime soon, no sir, right into the repression hole with that concept. Galo gave Sasha’s shoulder a final squeeze and released her entirely, stepping back.

“Didn’t mean to interrupt whatever you were doing, here. Getting a hair tie?” Galo guessed, and Sasha nodded, smile gone and nerves rising once again. Galo gave her a wide berth as he passed her and left the room, giving her a little wave goodbye and a “Alright, have a good one.”

Ugh, shit, and, he knew Sasha was the kind of person who did better and felt less anxious when she had something to do. He meant to give her extra tasks, just as soon as he could think of some, but now would it feel like he was trying to keep her on her toes, or demanding “payment” for letting them all stay together? Fuck, everything was walking on eggshells, and he knew he couldn’t rush them, couldn’t push them without serious consequences, but damn if he couldn’t fucking wait for when they weren’t so… well, petrified and broken.

He turned the handle of the final door in the basement and came to a halt in the doorframe of the dungeon.

Sasha woke up before her family, just like every day before that one, and slipped out of the family bed, shivering in the early morning air. Her bra, when she put it on, was uncomfortably loose, and she wondered if Nyla could maybe… just put another one on the grocery list and buy one for her. Master Galo didn’t seem to check over anything that Nyla bought (he didn’t seem to check over anything), and also wouldn’t have any idea how recently Sasha had gotten this one even if he did, so she might not get scolded for wearing out the elastic so quickly. She tugged on her dress, settled her apron on, and combed her hair and pulled it up into a ponytail, then picked up her shoes and sat on the steps to the main floor to lace them up. The rest of the family sat on the bed, but Sasha didn’t like to risk waking any of them up.

After thoroughly washing her hands, she prepared Master Galo’s breakfast juice. Was it juice? Sasha was never sure what to call it. She didn’t really know what else it would be, but it also didn’t really seem like a juice. It wasn’t a slushy, though, and was it a ‘drink’ if it was technically food?

Sasha reliably saw their Master once a day, almost like clockwork, except there was a whole half-hour range when he might show up, and she was invariably nervous that whole half hour until he finally arrived, smiling at her and thanking her for his… thing. He showed up early, that morning, right on the upper limit of that half hour, and the way he clasped her shoulder was now familiar and not particularly alarming. It helped that he did it every morning, and it was always on her right shoulder, and it never hurt. He was still big and his hand was still very warm and very strong, but especially on the heels of what had happened to Nyla yesterday, Sasha wasn’t frightened by his touch.

Bread was next, and Sasha contemplated what she should make for breakfast for her family and herself that morning. Now that it was her job to make sure they all ate every day (and what an incredible responsibility to have!), she was experimenting a little more with what she made, branching out. That morning, she decided on blueberry muffins, making two trays of six so that when Evan and Lilah finished theirs, they wouldn’t need to split a muffin between them. Sasha also soft-boiled an egg for each of them, peeling the tricky shells off with practiced efficiency.

“Morning Sasha,” Lilah greeted as she entered the kitchen, Evan right on her heels and yawning loudly. Sasha smiled and bent down so Lilah could press a kiss to her cheek, then gave her an egg to keep her busy until the muffins were done. Same for Evan, who ate the whole thing in a single bite. While it was the best way to keep the yolk from spilling out, Sasha had to wonder if it was tricky to eat like that, what with his mouth being so full and all.

Sasha asked Nyla about the bra when she was up, and Nyla jotted it down on her neat little notebook with a small nod, voicing Sasha’s thoughts on how Master Galo didn’t really check the grocery purchases, and probably wouldn’t care if Sasha got a new bra. Nyla was so smart.

When the muffins were gone and the bread was sitting on the cooling rack, the family departed to do their tasks, moving slower and easier with their workloads reduced and their Master out of the house. Greyson stayed noticeably close to Nyla, and Sasha didn’t doubt why. News that Lady--no, not Lady, Master Galo had told them to stop calling the Guests Lords and Ladies--Barbra had nearly stolen Nyla had shaken them all badly, left them clinging to each other, Nyla in the middle, in bed that whole night. Master Galo had kept anything terrible from happening, though, and if he was right back to his routine, then they could go back to theirs.

It was nice, too, that Master Galo’s routine didn’t involve checking over their work as frequently as Mistress Bethany had, or maybe his standards were perhaps just possibly a tiny bit less exacting than hers had been. Conceivably.

He seemed to like what Sasha made for food, at least. She’d only been wrong once, so far, trying out breaded pepperjack cheeseballs that Nyla couldn’t eat because they were too spicy, and Master Galo had sent back with one single bite taken out of one single ball. She’d spent that evening terrified, pacing listlessly about the kitchen and pantry, wondering when the punishment would come, but it hadn’t. She’d made other food that he had liked, which had probably been her saving grace. But also, he just, didn’t punish her for the mistake. Which she was grateful for! And she would never take for granted! She wouldn’t get complacent just because he’d shown her mercy, no sir!

Stuffed bell peppers sounded fun, and she’d asked for all the ingredients last time Nyla got groceries.

She got all the prep work done, doing everything except actually cooking the peppers, and stuck them in the fridge. She decided a roast might be nice for dinner, so she rubbed the salt and herbs into it and settled it into the crockpot with onions layered overtop. She set the crockpot on low, knowing it would ever so slowly cook over the course of the day and be fall-apart tender by the time dinner made its way around.

Sasha went to the cupboard just above the kitchen phone (and she never understood why there was a phone in the kitchen; even when cooking had been Greyson’s job no one but Nyla or Mistress ever answered it) and pulled out the small tablet. Sasha was given internet access and allowed to peruse for the sake of finding recipes, which worked out, because she genuinely loved watching food videos. She could, and did, spend hours watching people mix together ingredients in aesthetically pleasing ways (she had the materials, she could do it like they did, if she felt like washing a lot of dishes). She enjoyed watching the time lapses of the food actually cooking, and she liked watching the specific action of people cutting into their creations with such intense precision, perfect triangles skewered on perfect forks.

She set a timer, checking that the tablet was still on its lowest volume, and let herself lose a little time until she needed to put the bell peppers in to cook.

It was kind of lonely, in the kitchen, but Sasha didn’t usually mind. She liked being secluded, most of the time, and she got to make all kinds of fancy, interesting things. Her family would pass through from time to time (more often now, with Master Galo), and she was out from underfoot. She’d been at this for long enough, she wouldn’t know what to do, if she were reassigned to another area of the estate.

She saw a video for fluffy cheesecake with strawberries and decided she wanted to make that for dinner that night.

After Greyson brought lunch to Master Galo, Sasha got food out to her family, first Evan and Lilah, who were both outside, then Greyson, then Nyla, who was… perturbed.

“He seems to be looking for something,” she said, the two of them in an unused boudoir that had, as Nyla reported, already been checked. “I don’t know what it is he’s looking for, but he certainly seems to be looking for something.”

“M-maybe he just wants a nicer b-bedroom?” The one he had wasn’t really the best in all the mansion.

Nyla seemed to shake it off, and smiled at Sasha. “Maybe. We’ll know when we know.”

It was a mantra that they’d clung to, with Mistress Bethany and her games, but it had hardly been a reassurance, then. More like a final thread to grasp. Hearing Nyla say it now, it was almost like… almost like a “we’ll worry about that later,” even though they’d absolutely worry about it now, too.

Things were different, with Master Galo, Sasha mused as she started planning potential meals for the upcoming week and composing a grocery list for Nyla. She pulled out an apple, after, and sliced it, carving the peels off in such a way that they looked like little red rabbits. It was cute, if a little time consuming, even for her practiced hands, and when she was done she rinsed her hands and then stared at the plate, towel in her palms. What to do with them now? Evan and Lilah were pretty guaranteed to always be interested in food, and Master Galo had said to feed people a minimum of three times a day.

She had waffled for days, now, on whether or not to bring people food outside of mealtimes, or if she was supposed to wait for them to approach her. Today, she mustered up the courage to pick the plate and… leave the kitchen with it.

She felt like a rabbit, herself, out in the open air just waiting for a hawk to catch sight of her. Just waiting for something sharp to carve into her, reshape her how it wanted her to look. She tried to remind herself that it was fine, it was fine, it was fine. Master Galo told her to leave the kitchen to bring people food, and even though it wasn’t a meal this still counted. Besides, he never really saw her anyway, and it was a big house, what were the chances of them bumping into each other?

Sasha would try to be quick, even so. She felt marginally better once she was out of the door, out into the sunlight which warmed her. The weather was gorgeous, that day, and Sasha hardly ever got outside...

Evan and Lilah were roughhousing, Sasha could see them at a distance, and part of her was happy to see them having fun, but another part of her was anxious to see them slacking off. What if Master Galo saw them? And what if Master Galo saw her, with them, and got mad at all three of them? But Master Galo was looking for something inside the house, and he’d already been out in the garden the evening before, so it was fine, it was fine.

Evan caught sight of her before she tried to call out, and grinned wide, hoisting Lilah up into the air with both arms around her waist, setting off another peal of laughter. “Avast! Intruder! A second stowaway beholden to mine eyes!”

Sasha giggled, shoulders hunching up.

“Nay nay f-fair sea ca-captain. It is only your h-h-humble scullery maid.”

“Aarrrrg,” Evan called, swooping Lilah down so she dangled close to the ground, wiggling only a little because she didn’t actually want to be dropped. “If ye were truly of my crew you would know me for a pirate! No fair captains here, lassie!”

“Oh,” Sasha said, taking a moment to switch gears while Evan pretended to chomp at Lilah’s face. “Then m-mayhaps this rowdy p-pirate can be bribed?”

“Death! Death to the pirate king!” Lilah pretended to shout, because none of them were actually stupid enough to be loud. “I shall have him mounted to the bow as my new figurehead!”

“Arrg, big talk for such a wee lass!” Evan kissed her temple and set her down. “But maychance I shall let the shrimpy go uneaten, at the lovely dame’s behest.”

Sasha giggled again, accepting a kiss on the cheek from Evan while Lilah “awww”ed at the apple rabbits. A hand on her elbow brought her attention to Lilah, red rabbit pinched between her fingers. “Are you good to be out of the kitchen?”

“I… don’t know,” Sasha said honestly, nerves kicking back up. “N-nervous.”

Evan nodded, chewing on the apple slice in his hand, and hooked his arm around her shoulders, giving her a squeeze. He tongued the mouthful into one cheek and said, “You could say you’re giving us a late lunch, if Master gets bothered. We’ll back you up.”

Lilah nodded, and Sasha felt her nerves uncurl. It was hours after they’d actually eaten, but not so late to warrant scrutiny for the excuse.

“Though, if I’m c-caught out here, you t-two definitely would b-be.”

“Point,” Evan and Lilah chorused. They moved further into the hedges, sitting down on a little stone bench together and Sasha told them about how she planned to start doing more food carvings, since she had all this time on her hands, and she liked the extravagance and challenge they presented. The sun was really hot, actually, and Sasha wondered if maybe she’d already started to burn. She didn’t want to leave, though.

But she did, when Lilah playfully gave her hair a tug and her worn elastic finally bit it. She sighed, taking that as her cue to head inside, and set the plate down in the kitchen before moving down the stairs.

Master Galo was there.

Sasha couldn’t help the “Eep!” that escaped her, only a decade of practice keeping her from recoiling, from shrinking back, her now-trembling legs barely saved from backing away. Master Galo turned, face indiscernible before he gave a smile to Sasha. He filled their bedroom, loomed inside it with the light casting his face in a shadow, massive, like he was waiting--

Her knees gave out, body instinctively curling so her forehead was to the floor, hands wringing and clutched close to her chest. She couldn’t even breathe as he approached her.

“Hey, Sasha,” he said, his voice taking that easy, careless tone he always seemed to take when he played his games with them. Not like his morning greetings or thanks for his green juice, something sinisterly akin to comforting, to soothing. She glanced up, and found his hand outstretched. Graceless, she took the hand, and pressed a shaking kiss to it while she prayed he would forgive her the oversight of not doing that when she saw him. She knew he preferred that to kneeling--she was so stupid! And she must have fucked up, because this time Master Galo didn’t retract his hand like he normally did, instead he curled his fingers around her hand, holding it loosely and stroking her thumb with his hand that could crush the fragile bones of her own at any moment.

“‘M sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

Sasha glanced up at him, terrorized; how was she supposed to respond to that!? What did he want? Did he want anything in particular, or was this just some script for manners that he included in the game? She nod nod nodded as she glanced away, and in her peripheral she saw him reach out his other hand, but it only landed on her shoulder. That at least was familiar. Comforting. But then, with a squeeze, he shifted his hand underneath her arm and brought her to her feet. She’d been graceless the first time he lifted her, and she was graceless again this time, too, weeks to adjust and prepare herself and still she couldn’t keep her weight off him, made him take some of her disgusting weight in his own hands in order to position her how he wanted and she knew that wasn’t forgivable. She braced for it, shivering minutely as his hands lingered where they were. She could barely breathe, standing there under his scrutiny, feeling his eyes on her as another one of his slow, thoughtful silences dragged on.

“Is everything alright, Sasha?” Images of Barbara came unbidden, of terrible things that had happened just the day before. But nothing had happened that day, so she nodded. “Good.”

It occurred to her, belatedly, as he took another (far briefer) pause to think, that perhaps he had been asking if she was behaving herself, or if she had any reason to be out of the kitchen at this time of day. Really, where did she get off even thinking that he might be voicing concern for anyone’s well-being? Stupid! (Unprecedented; her own thoughts alarmed her).

“Sasha, do you all sleep here?”

She dared a glance at his face, not understanding. Why… why..? But hers was not to understand, hers was to obey, and her Master had asked her a question. She nodded, but it was the wrong answer. Master Galo’s lips pressed thin.

“Okay, well, we can fix that. There are those dorms on the other side of the basement, those would work, or we could choose individual rooms from--”

Sasha felt panic flood her, her anxiety lancing her with sudden, violent intensity, enough for her to cry out a choked “No--!” He looked to her, surprised, (and in truth, she was surprised by her own actions, or at least would be later, at her defiance, at her arrogance) “Pl--” don’t stutter, don’t stutter, she couldn’t stutter, it’d make it worse, Master Galo was being forgiving still, she hadn’t fucked up the game he was playing he was shushing her and touching her but she needed to not stutter. Maybe, maybe if she could ask without stuttering, maybe then he’d, maybe they wouldn’t have to--

“Easy, Sasha, shhh shsh, easy honey, what’s wrong?” She choked down a high whine, a small whimper escaping her anyway (sloppy, the rest of her family would’ve stayed quiet, she was supposed to be quiet).

She needed to get herself together. She was the one he was playing his game with, now, she needed to… to win. She squeezed his hand with panicked desperation, maybe if she could prove she wanted it enough, he’d find it entertaining. “Please,” she gasped, “M-” She cut herself off, feeling the stutter before it could bubble out of her, breathing hard like that had ever once made the stutter go away before. “Master, don’t m-make--” No! No, no, she covered her mouth with tears stinging her eyes, curling in on herself (ugly, poor posture, no-good rotten girl). She wanted to beg on the floor, curl down on her knees and huddle in on herself without it being bad but he was still touching her so she couldn’t!

“Typing! Here, just type it out.” He pulled out his phone and tapped on it before handing it to her, and she took it with shaky hands. Now she couldn’t curl down on her knees because she was holding his property, his possession, and she didn’t let herself even think about the possibility of dropping it because if she thought about it she would make herself sick. Right now, she needed to focus on begging, on keeping her family together in the one space that had been some small degree of safe, that had been in some miniscule way theirs.

Please Master don’t make us separate, she wrote, and when she handed it back she fumbled it. She gasped, one tear slipping out, but she wiped at it while Master Galo read what she’d written and she thought maybe he didn’t even notice. When his hand approached her she flinched, but he just touched her shoulder again, and maybe it was just because nothing bad had happened to her while he was touching her there, so far, but it almost soothed her.

Master Galo had another one of his long thoughtful pauses, staring at the phone screen and moving his thumb slowly, lightly over her shoulder, skimming the edge of her apron strap. She stood, shoving down the tears, shoving down the trembling, shoving down her need to curl into a ball at his feet and beg him to just kick her and get it over with, as she waited on his response. Please, Master Galo, please don’t make us separate she willed, like if she just thought hard enough maybe he’d feel it.

“Okay, Sasha, thank you,” he said at long last, “I like it when you ask me for things, that’s very good, and since you asked, you get what you asked for, see? No separating.”

Sasha’s eyes blew wide, looking at Master Galo’s hand, at the phone in it, then the hand on her shoulder, his face, the room, back to her Master. He, he liked? He liked it, when, when they--or, when she? When, asking would, he liked it when they asked for things? She didn’t understand. She’d ask her family later, what they thought, what the game was, if he was lying, if they should ask--or if she should ask? Swallowing hard, Sasha raised a hand and pointed a finger at her own chest. Did Master Galo want her, Sasha, to be the one to ask, like a responsibility, like it was her responsibility to feed everyone?

“Yeah, you honey.” God oh no oh no Nyla was the one who was good at talking why did Sasha have to be the one--she couldn’t even talk right and-- “And the others. I like it when all of you ask me for things that you want. Like when I took Greyson to the cemetery, yeah?”

Oh. Oh! Oh!!! Sasha nodded, feeling herself calm down. Like Greyson and the indulgence. Like how Master Galo had made Evan beg to be punished before he would--oh, oh it made sense! It made sense now! Master Galo, it must be some sort of power display or something, it was the act of being asked that he liked! Like, maybe like just the reminder that he had the ability to tell them yes or no because he owned them and--and she should be paying attention to him, right now, in front of her. She risked another glance up at her owner’s face, and maybe it was just because she felt like she finally understood one of the rules to a game but she gave him a shaky, if genuine smile. Master Galo smiled back, and it almost felt like Sasha was in on something. First to know. The one who would share with the rest of the family, what she had learned.

Master Galo released her with a step back, and Sasha drew in a tremulous breath. “Didn’t mean to interrupt whatever you were doing, here. Getting a hair tie?” Sasha nodded, remembering that just now, herself. Master Galo passed her by with a “Alright, have a good one,” and Sasha took two hesitant steps toward the dresser, out of the line of sight of the doorway, before collapsing onto the carpet. She… didn’t even feel particularly scared. Just, just, so much, so intensely, and it had drained her of all her strength. She just needed a moment, please, just a moment, to collect herself, to refind her strength and composure.

She didn’t let herself stay down long, just enough for the worst of the shakes to pass through her in ebbing waves, cycling out of her, before she rose, grabbed a hair tie, got herself presentable again, and left.

Master Galo was in the Punishment Room.

Sasha knew better than to recoil, but even so, on her quietest feet, she ran. Through the basement, up the stairs, to the kitchen, and she was cornered, she couldn’t leave, but, she was hiding, “hiding,” he could find her he could come find her any moment but this was where she was supposed to be she was good she was good she wasn’t being bad she didn’t want to be bad there wasn’t any reason to put her in the Punishment Room god please god not the Punishment Room even Evan hadn’t been in the Punishment Room in so long and Mistress hadn’t put her in it in so so long and Master Galo didn’t need to use it please please not the Punishment Room why was he there what was he doing why please no please not--

“--sha? Sasha?”

“Nyla!” Sasha gasped, clinging to her the moment her eyes registered that she was there.

“What’s wrong? Sasha, what happened?”

“I--he--” Sasha choked, curling into Nyla, face pressed into her shoulder, clutching at her apron skirt, desperate, needing, and Nyla’s arms came up around her back, holding onto her (safe, safe, Nyla was safe Nyla would protect her Nyla would make everything better). She tried to speak, her mouth not working, and it took her three, four attempts before she finally managed to get it across that their Master was in the Punishment Room. Nyla soothed her, soft shushes with her hand in Sasha’s hair.

“He’s been searching the house,” Nyla said in hushed tones, “He’s looking for something, that’s all, he isn’t,” Nyla seemed to falter, but pressed on, “Master Galo isn’t going to hurt us. Not, not there, at least. He’s just searching for something, that’s all, it’s alright Sasha, pull yourself together it’s alright, sh sh.”

Sasha nodded, trying to tamp it down. Master Galo had searched the garden the day before, he’d been through the house that day, Nyla had discussed it with her earlier! Master Galo was looking for something, and, and that had to be it, right? He was just checking all the rooms. Slowly, far too slowly, Sasha wound down.

Nyla pulled back enough to cup Sasha’s cheek in her palm, and searched her eyes. “Maybe… do you suppose he’s surveying the household; he didn’t go through room-by-room when he arrived, perhaps he’s just doing it a little late?” Nyla suggested. “Or possibly inspecting our work?”

And Sasha had just been thinking, earlier, on how lucky they all were that he didn’t seem to do that. She couldn’t help but feel that she’d jinxed it.

“M-maybe?”

Nyla took a deep breath and Sasha caressed her cheek in return, their foreheads pressing together.

“Just focus on your job, for now. I’ll speak up if something happens.”

Sasha felt herself soothe down a little more. Nyla would handle it. She nodded, trying to seem more confident than she was (her nerves were shot), and Nyla drank a glass of water before leaving.

Sasha remembered belatedly that she needed to tell Nyla that Master Galo wanted them to ask him for things, but this way she just ended up telling everyone at once, once their Master had eaten and they were gathered together in the kitchen for dinner.

“So he likes grovelling,” Evan mused, not sounding as bitter as he might have. Maybe despondent? But not angry, and Sasha’s brows knit to see him so… reduced. But maybe this news would cycle through and he’d feel better.

“It explains why I didn’t have to pay for the indulgence,” Greyson mentioned quietly. “Why he rewarded me for it.” Oh right, Greyson had gotten an easy day, hadn’t he?

“And why Evan was given prolonged threats with a comparatively mild punishment,” Nyla mused, “And it also might actually explain why we weren’t allowed to eat that first week. He was waiting for us to ask, and Lilah’s stumbling indicated that we would pass out first.”

Lilah huffed and stabbed her potato. “Mistress only liked begging when we were hurting,” she groused, voicing frustration that Sasha, personally, wasn’t even brave enough to feel. “And we sure weren’t supposed to ask for anything.”

Nyla could, because Nyla knew when to ask, and how to ask, and how to ask for only so much at one time, so it didn’t come off greedy, but balanced it with not asking too frequently, to avoid pestering Mistress. But now Master wanted to be pestered.

“Arrogant,” Evan whispered, barely a breath, not bold like he was normally (like he was supposed to be (no, that was a bad thing to think)).

“We c-can grovel,” Sasha said, kinda hopefully, “I don’t m-mind grovelling.”

“It’ll take a bit to get used to,” Nyla said, setting her fork down on her empty plate and patting down her apron, “but I think ultimately this is going to be a better situation for us. And, by some stroke of fortune, it doesn’t seem that we’ve left the adjustment period yet.”

“He might not like that he had to spell it out for us though,” Lilah said, and oh, Sasha hadn’t even thought of that. He kept waiting for them to figure it out and they hadn’t. That was… probably not good.

“We’ll…” Nyla huffed through her nose. “Everyone just keep minding their manners, and let me know if his temper seems shorter or if you notice anything peculiar, or any changes, really.”

“He seemed different during tonight’s meal,” Greyson mentioned, and the family turned to him. “Not in any discernible way, but,” Greyson shrugged, a small barely-there movement that Sasha knew as well as her own skin, “different. Stiff, maybe.”

Nyla took a deep breath, the family looking to her, waiting for her verdict. “That probably means he’s a little irritated, but still not inclined to hurt us. It might also be from not finding--or finding, possibly--whatever it was he was looking for during the day. Don’t step on his toes.”

The sensation of mild alarm left the room, and Sasha… honestly felt good. Wrung out from her encounter with their Master, but they knew he liked begging, he liked being asked for things, that was--hopeful. That was a good thing, important to know, and, well, he seemed inclined to grant the things they asked for. Probably just to encourage them to keep doing it. But his motivations still meant he would do it!

It had been many years since Sasha had received any formal training, but, she vaguely remembered a unit on how to ask for things attractively. She shut down that line of thinking, because her stutter meant she would never be able to, but… as she cleaned up the kitchen, it made for a nice idle fantasy.

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nowitsdarkfic · 5 years ago

Text

chapter thirty-three (the ghostly subway again)

“When I am king, you will be first against the wall. With your opinion which is of no consequence at all.” -“Paranoid Android”, Radiohead

Sandra is quick to the lock on the handle of the front door to keep the scorpions out there, and then she turns the sign in the window to prove that Smell the Magic is in fact closed for the New Year. Marcia and Sonia close the display case; meanwhile, Lars and I are huddled in the corner once again with the radar detector and that book opened over another milk crate right next to my left knee. The rain is coming down in torrents now—I think it might flood because there's already a good sized river running around the roundabout outside of the bakery here.

“There are drones utterly everywhere,” Lars informs me.

“All those little donuts—” I gesture to the dish, which is utterly littered with those markings indicating the drones. Down at the bottom, it gives a key to what's what: the scorpions, meanwhile, are indicated by tiny chevrons. And where there isn't a donut, there's a chevron. Which means we're surrounded by these damned things.

I can only imagine what the scorpions look like. Are they mutants like the banana slugs? Or are they massive like the spiders? Either one gives me the heebie jeebies. Those big lobster claws, those faceless plated bodies, and of course, those tails. I'm giving myself the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

My throat's dry, but at least the pressure is off my stomach a bit. It's gotta be from all of this happening at the moment. That guy downstairs wouldn't give me a glass of milk, I still can't believe that!

Marcia and Sonia duck into the kitchen right at that moment; the former leans over the stove top of the lead oven to switch it off. The latter squats down in between us and eyes the radar detector.

“How you boys doing?” she asks us.

“Thirsty,” Lars replies.

“And a little tense,” I add to it.

“What's—all that?” She nods to the dish.

“The drones and the scorpions headed our way,” he says. “See, there's a key down here—this thing is smart. Picking up—nearly everything that's got a trace of radar or radio waves to it. I only had to point it at the ceiling one time to get this reading—here, let me do it again—”

He picks up the radar detector by the handle and points it up to the ceiling. If I didn't know, I'd swear he's pointing a label maker at the ceiling. There's silence, except for the rain on the roof over our heads. Then there's a quiet beep.

He lowers it to better examine the dish and gestures to the top.

“Yeah, see? It's recalculating—and it did. Wonder how the scorpions are being picked up. Looks they've backed off—unless they're underneath us.” He lifts his gaze to me and I shake my head.

“I didn't see any downstairs,” I confess to him.

“Wonder where they could be,” Sonia wonders aloud. Another pause. Then—

“Oh, my God in heaven.” It dawns on me. And Lars, too, as he gapes at me and his eyes widen.

Sandra then yelps out from the front room. Marcia leaps back as she barrels into the kitchen.

“Scorpions!” Sandra shouts as she shuts the door behind her with her apron in hand. Her face is as white as a sheet. “They're crawling all over the outside of the windows.”

“The only thing more terrifying than a bunch of giant spiders is a bunch of giant scorpions,” I say aloud.

“I think both are pretty horrifying, Joey,” Lars points out.

“See, the thing with scorpions is you don't know what happened,” I continue on. “Yeah, they're desert creatures,” Sonia tacks on. “It's weird to see them in New England, whereas spiders you can find anywhere in the world.”

“What should we do?” Marcia asks us. Sandra, who's fanning herself and trying to calm herself down, turns to me.

“What's it like downstairs?”

“Aside from the idiot who wouldn't give me a glass of milk? Chilly. And a little wet. Forgot to tell you ladies, I fell on my ass into a puddle down there and my butt's all wet.”

“Oh, man!” Sonia declares.

“Yeah, I'll say. At least it's warm in here, though.”

“Well, I was thinking we could go down there because that's where the stash is,” explains Sandra, “the staples. The dairy, the bread, and the potatoes.”

“Yeah, that's where the smell of potatoes is coming from!” I say to Lars. “I should tell Angeline that.”

I stop for a second. I don't know if it's the presence of the drones all around us or what.

“Angeline!”

“What about her?” Lars chews on his bottom lip.

“The drones are in the City! If there's an infestation here, there's gotta be one there 'cause we're so close!”

“Oh, SHIT!”

“She also told me if I have any questions, I should ask her.”

“Well, let's go ask her 'cause—we have tons of questions!”

“How are we gonna get to New York City, though?” Marcia demands to us as the three of them are now all gathered around us. “It's pouring rain outside and there's scorpions trying to get in.”

I turn to my coat, folded over on another milk crate, and I pry into the pocket on top. I take out the arrowhead pendant.

“Of course!” Lars exclaims, switching off the radar detector and sticking it back into the burlap sack.

“What is that?” Sandra asks me.

“No ordinary pendant, that's for sure,” I tell her, and I can't resist the grin on my face. I return to Lars. “I just have a question. Can you take stuff with you through the wormhole?”

“Oh, yes,” he answers, putting the book back in there. “I found that one out pretty quickly after I got my place down in New Orleans.” He slings the sack over his shoulder.

“Have at it, Joey.”

I make a wormhole over the empty racks, one that's big enough for all of us to climb through. I focus on the headquarters for the New York Times as I stand to my feet and dive through it with my stomach sucked in. But then I realize I don't remember exactly where it is in the City. I only know it's in the City.

Shit. Ah, shit.

It's the French Quarter all over again, especially when I look up and I see I'm in the subway.

God, not the subway.

I look behind me to find Lars had landed right on his ass on the cold floor, right next to Marcia and Sonia. And I realize I'm laying face down on a bench. Not a good position to be laying in when the stomach's full of pastries. Sandra, meanwhile, landed upright on the bench next to me.

“The subway, Joey?” Lars demands to me, his voice echoing over the floor and the walls.

“Apparently so,” I confess to him. It's cold down here, and I don't know if it's from the rain outside or the fact the tunnels are haunted. I raise my head and lift myself onto my elbows so I'm laying on the bench like a sphinx. I not only landed on a bench but on a disheveled copy of the New York Times itself. I turn it over to the back page: there at the bottom is the address. I lift my head up to examine the wall behind us.

“Where are we?” I wonder aloud. “Like—what terminal is this? Sandra, is there a plaque over there by you?” She leans to her right.

“Yeah, right here.”

“What's it say?”

“125th Street and Lexington.”

“125th?”

“Yeah.”

I glance back down at the paper.

“The New York Times is down on 41st and Eighth Avenue—which means—”

“Manhattan?” Lars wonders aloud, climbing to his feet.

“This here says we're in Harlem,” Sandra continues.

“Yeah, 41st is down in the heart of Manhattan. I know that from all the times I hung out with Anthrax.” I turn my head to find Lars, Marcia, and Sonia already to their feet; Sandra stands up from the bench in front of me. Ugh. Fine. The subway it is.

My chest aches from landing on such a hard bench as I pick myself up and straighten myself out. I stand to my feet and guide them towards the platform. The whole station is deserted: we're the only souls in here. Or least, the only souls in here with fleshly bodies. Even the railway is empty.

“I don't even know if it's in operation right now,” I confess to them, stuffing my hands into my pockets.

“It's New Year's Eve,” Lars points out as he adjusts the burlap sack over his shoulder, “it's bound to be.”

“Okay, so how far are we going?” Sandra asks me. “I just want to know.”

“Basically we're going all the way down towards Time Square and then before we get there, we're hanging a right.”

“We're definitely not in Portland anymore,” Marcia declares.

“Not at all. When I was with Anthrax, I found pretty quickly that you better get disoriented easily in order to get lost here, especially once you realize the blocks are organized the way they are. It just seems like a lot if you're an outsider or if you're on foot, on a bus, or in a cab. Five minutes upstate or in over Portland for that matter seems like forever down here. If we're standing here on the one hundred and twenty fifth block of—basically a grid, like the one we saw on the radar detector—assuming there aren't any stops, it's not gonna take very long to get down to forty one. Add to this, you guys don't have to deal with the chilly city folk, too.”

“Yeah, the worst thing we've gotta deal with is bicyclists who aren't paying attention,” Sonia laughs.

“There's just—one problem with the subways, though,” Lars says in a low voice.

“What's that?” asks Sandra.

“The tunnels are haunted.”

“They're haunted?”

“Totally,” I answer for him. I glance down one side of the terminal, down the pitch black tunnel. Nothing there. I take a glimpse down the other way. Nothing there. “He and I were down here the other day—we went through Grand Central, which is right near there—and we actually saw… a ghost.”

“A boy with no hands and no face,” Lars joins in, shifting his weight. “Glowing bright like a glow stick.”

“Oh my God.” She sounds appalled by that. “Where did he come from?”

“No idea,” he confesses. “Not a single idea where he could've come from. I guess there's a whole community of ghosts down here, too. Like—” He stops and I turn to have a look at him pointing to the left of us. “—I believe that's one right there!”

There's a pale white light emerging from the darkness to our left. It's getting bigger as it's coming closer.

And then we hear the ungodly metallic shriek of brakes grinding it to a halt.

“It's the train, Lars!” I shout over it slowing to a stop before us.

Once it does, the doors slide open and the five of us file into this car near the front. As we're taking our seats on the hard benches, I think back to what Candace had told us about the ghosts down here. And I remember that sign I saw in the Bronx that day I came down here. Yeah, I have no doubt that they like to prey on kids in particular, so I'm riding with my guard fully up and the lapels of my coat covering the bottom half of my face. I still feel like a kid sometimes after all. A kid who's lost in the City.

When the doors close, I sigh through my nose and close my eyes. Aside from the fact the tunnels are haunted, I really don't know why I'm so nervous. Sonia, who along with Marcia is sitting across from Lars and me, shows me a little smile.

“You look like a secret agent, Joe,” she cracks.

“He kinda does,” Marcia joins in.

Lars mouths something to them and I don't what he said, especially since the train is starting up again and whirring down the pitch dark tunnel. I'll admit it, I'm a little paranoid right now. There's a myriad ghosts down here and we've got a metric shitload of scorpions that may or may not be of unusual size coming after us.

Once we pass through Grand Central, I feel I've calmed down a great deal and I fold my collars over so I can breathe again. At one point, I look around the car, and I lean past Lars to better examine the one behind us.

“I just realized we're the only ones in here,” I declare. “That's probably why we're making such excellent time.”

“We are,” he notes as he takes a look around himself. “Where is everyone?”

“Also, who's driving the train?” asks Sandra. I take a look to my right to the other side of the car: we're two behind the lead one. Usually there's a guard or someone on board with us, but it's just us. As far as I can tell, there's nobody there.

“I—I don't know,” I confess to her.

“Do you know where we're getting off, Joey?” Marcia asks me. There's no signs lit up in here, and usually there is, but it's as if we boarded a train that's out of service that's going nowhere.

“Here!” I exclaim. “Ring the bell, Lars—”

Lars reaches up behind him but before he can even touch the thing, there's that shriek of the brakes again. He grips onto the pole next to him and I brace myself. I don't trust this thing. I don't trust whoever's driving, that is if there is anyone there.

The lights of this next terminal flood into the car. I don't even know where we are.

“Here?” Lars repeats.

“Yes!” And I don't hesitate once the doors slide open: he follows me out, then Marcia, Sonia, and Sandra. We gather around a bench in the middle of the platform to regather our bearings, but I keep walking to check out who's up in the front of the car. The windows are dark but as far as I can, there is in fact, nobody there. We were riding on a ghost train. I return to them right as Lars is slinging the burlap sack over his shoulder.

“Do you know where we are?” Sandra asks me.

“I don't, but there should be a sign somewhere around here that should tell us—”

Indeed, there's one on the wall down towards the stairs.

“42nd Street Bryant Park,” Lars reads aloud. “Where’s that?”

“If I remember correctly,” I tell them, “I think Angeline's office is right near here. If it is, we're good. If not, you guys can blame me for royally fucking things up.”

We make our way over to the stairs and ascend into the City, the heart of I think is Manhattan, which is lit up to the brightest neon I have ever seen in the wake of the incoming night. It's like the University District of Seattle all over again but much bigger and with far more overkill. Everything has some trace of neon on it. Everything. Even the crappy bus stop behind us and even the payphones on the corner. I raise a hand to my face to shield my eyes it's so bright.

“Bloody hell,” Lars remarks, squinting against the bright light.

“Yeah, I'd say Maxwell has maxed out here,” I declare. “Let's walk. I think we got off at the wrong place. It's not easy to get lost here but it is easy to get turned around, though.”

“I think we did in fact get off at the wrong place, Joey,” Lars adds as the five of us start walking up the street, “because there's Grand Central, also known as 42nd Street. And we should've gotten off there!”

“Like I said—you guys can blame me for royally fucking things up, 'cause I'm a country boy. I ain't from the City.”

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ironbound-praetorium · 6 years ago

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A Place to Start Over

Tirisfal still smelled like blight and ash even days after the Horde and Alliance clashed at the gates of Lordaeron, but it didn’t deter any member of the Praetorium from venturing out in the hopes of finding those left behind to ruin. Raelin Dawnsorrow, above all of them, had stood at first hand witness to the atrocities committed under red and blue banner. As days bled into one another , he raced across the tree line in an endless grid pattern ferrying civilians back to the trio of ships that hovered over the landscape. Only when he was commanded to sleep did he fall into his rack and nightmares about those he hadn’t been able to reach in time.

The Ironfist had a soft heart, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it was directly centered on the children of the world, as he hardly thought it was fair they had to deal with adult concept like war and unnecessary death. It was a direct result of his own tragic past with regards to his younger siblings whose ashes now lay peacefully in the Dawnsorrow mausoleum. Those losses had driven him near to madness, but purpose had been found in knowing he could stop others from suffering the same fate… if only he was strong and fast enough.

Thankfully, Raelin had an ace up his sleeve when it came to the speed necessary to grid out Tirisfal and search block by imaginary block for those left in the wake of the war machine. Dalis, the Ironbound protodrake had been encountered in Ulduar when the world’s heroes sought the release of the Titan stronghold from the grip of the Old Gods, but it had been fate which brought the two together. They’d weathered a hundred battles together since that day, and not once had their trust wavered, even when words between them were entirely absent.

It was that trust that kept Raelin steady as Dalis veered hard to the right and made a beeline for a outcropping of trees along the eastern border of Tirisfal. Shifting his weight, the ginger elf laid flat against the drakes back as the air rushed over him and bright blue eyes scanned the ground for whatever target they were after. It could have been up to three miles away knowing how keen draconic eyesight was, but the pungent smell of decay and smoke signaled they were far closer.

Their target was seen as the drake maneuvered to a clearing a short distance away, landing with a thud that shook the ground and caused loose and burning limbs to fall. Dalis wasn’t even fully settled to his haunches before Raelin was off his back and striding for the burned out remnants, his loud voice sure and strong as he announced his arrival; a necessity given the volatile climate he was current in.

“I’m here to help! Hello? Anyone here?”

Long strides carried him up the broken stone path, though the moment he reached the door long ears flicked in response to the sudden knowledge that he wasn’t alone. Raelin knew better than to make any sudden moves, as war gave way to paranoia for many, and he rather liked his head attached to his body.

“Just here looking for civilians that need help…Silver Hand…promise I’m not here to cause any ha- oh shit…” Turning around slowly as he spoke, the Ironfist’s eyes went wide as his ‘company’ was viewed clearly.

Five childlike figures clad in mud streaked rags formed a half circle around the Ironfist as the scent of ichor stung his nose. Undeath had not been kind to any of them, as protruding bones and missing parts came more clearly into view. Ligaments and sinew hung limply from one’s arm where clearly an axe had tried to lop off the offending limb, while another’s cheeks were stained black from the dangling eye that clung only by a bundle of nerves. Their injuries were substantial, yet not one of them seemed to register the pain, as no doubt the shock of everything they had seen had muddled their minds to the most base of responses.

“Hey there…” Raelin began, slowly beginning to crouch down in order to not tower over the diminutive figures. “M’dragon over there seemed to think you guys needed some help, yeah?” His voice, while usually littered with vulgarity became soft and quiet as he offered a hand outward. “M’name’s Raelin...”

The smallest of them, a little girl who couldn’t have been anymore than 6 when she rose as a Forsaken, began to take a step forward as if she would accept Raelin at his word but was blocked by the lanky boy who stepped in front of her in a protective way. His spindly fingers curled against his tattered pants as hollow eyes stared down the large man while the others seemed more fixated on Dalis, who had intentionally gone very still as to not frighten the poor creatures.

“Your eyes are blue…” the ‘leader’ said, his raspy voice cracking as if he was perpetually stuck in the throes of puberty.

“Mmm, they are...but not here under the Alliance banner, see?” Moving cautiously, the Ironfist shifted upwards to tug on the Silver Hand tabard that was displayed over his chest, tapping one finger against the closed fist. “I don’t much like red and blue, always preferred yellow… like in sunflowers? My Ma used to grow them in our gardens back in Eversong when I was younger…”

Skeptical to be sure, the boy took a step forward to inspect the tabard with a narrowed gaze while the small girl’s voice piped up in garbled tones. “I like flowers...”

“Yeah? My favorites are blue roses…” Raelin offered, casually glancing to the others who remained wary of him as he reached to flip up the edge of his tabard where the aforementioned flower was embroidered.

The tension in the air was palatable, as it always seemed to be when dealing with the Forsaken, as they were not at all inclined towards dealing with the living. Drawing in a deep breath, his forearms settled on his knees as he looked between them all with a faint smile cast across his rugged features. “How about you let me take a look at all your hurts, and then we see about getting you to a safe place, hrm?”

“We’re not fucking children, you idiot!” Taken back by the temper that came out of nowhere, Raelin’s eyes shifted back to the leader with both brows raised in response. It hadn’t dawned on him until that moment that they’d been stuck in this perpetual state of youth for gods knew how long and that he’d gone about the whole situation in entirely the wrong way.

Lifting his hands again, a helpless shrug was given with a crooked grin. “Oh, well good… means I don’t gotta watch my fucking mouth. Guess you’re just going to have to forgive this big dumb elf for making that mistake and let me make it up to ya, yeah?”

“And how th’fuck is some Quel’dorei bastard going to do that, hrm? Drag us off and put us in chains to be held at the mercy of the Boy-King?” countered the leader of the small group as steps were taken closer to the elf in defense of his companions. “No-fucking-way that shit is happening. We didn’t want no war t’begin with!”

“Actually, was kinda thinking we’d go take a little ride on my dragon to a big shiny ship in the sky… get ya injuries seen to and a hot meal? I mean… if chains are your thing, good on ya… but not exactly too pleased with ol’Anduin and his puppet master Greymane at the moment, so...” Raelin kept his tone nonchalant as he moved to lean against what remained of the house, again holding his hands out to the small contingent.

“Fuck that flea-ridden asshole, deserves to be skinned and mounted!”

“Well…I can’t argue with that…” Raelin laughed which seemed to ease the group from the precipice of violence. “However, none of us are getting away with that anytime soon… so, how about we make sure we get to see that day come and raise an ale to the ol’bastards death? “

“Where will we go?” questioned the ‘little girl’ as she moved closer to Raelin, reaching to flip up the edge of his tabard and trace the rose stitched neatly into the fabric.

“Most of your people I’ve been giving lifts to end up in Silvermoon…” the Ironfist stated, watching their displeased reactions scrunch up little noses and set their lips into grim lines. “….but I mean if you’re really after getting away from the war, I know a pretty decent spot to start over…”

“At what cost?” Another of the ‘children’ asked, stepping next to the girl to put a protective arm around her shoulders.

“No cost… just have to want to live in peace and not play into the faction crap the world would have you believe is necessary…” Raelin said, shrugging his shoulders as he shifted to accommodate the curious inspection of his tabard.

“How do we know you’re not feeding us a line of shit and plan to throw us in the Stockades?” It was a viable and logical question that, unfortunately, Raelin didn’t have an answer to.

“You don’t…suppose it’s a leap of faith in that regard. Just going to have to trust this big stupid elf if you want to get the fuck outta here and away from the bullshit going on. Question is…. Do you really want to?” Shared looks and silent understanding brought all five to nod their heads as Raelin crouched down to look eye to eye with the small girl and offered the crook of his arm as any gentleman might, causing a tittering of laughter to slip out in raspy tones. “Shall we then, my lady?”

One by one, the Ironfist lifted the injured and tattered Forsaken ‘children’ onto the back of the massive protodrake and gave them each a small loop of leather to hold onto. After climbing on himself, the Praetorium communication stone was pulled from his pocket as Dalis lifted into the air. “Commander, got an intake of five Forsaken on the way… give Bri a heads up for me?”

“Bri’s on patrol with Cora…but I’ll let Tanner know to give the medbay a heads up” came Maladir’s tired voice as the small party raced across the skies towards the awaiting Sanctuary City ships and what was hopefully a decent and peaceful future for the refugees at the Ironfist’s back.

(( @sanctuary-city-wra @kelladen @silverfall-patriarch for mentions/involvement))

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Can Virgil Abloh Fit in a Museum?

CHICAGO — There is one room in “Figures of Speech,” the Virgil Abloh exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that vividly demonstrates how his aesthetic principles, emotional range and commercial ambitions all cohabitate cozily.

On one wall is an Inez & Vinoodh triptych of a young black child playing with Louis Vuitton items, from Mr. Abloh’s first ad campaign as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear design. The most striking is the middle image, in which a girl wears a psychedelically colorful sweater with a “Wizard of Oz” theme — is draped in it, actually — with small, fragile origami paper boats strewn at her feet. Her left arm is outstretched and she’s gazing off into the distance — it’s beatific.

But step to the other side of the room and see these photographs anew. On the floor in front of you will be a sculpture of a sort, an array of 16 numbered yellow markers, the kind used to denote the location of evidence at a crime scene. (What’s not on any information card is that 16 is the number of shots a Chicago police officer fired at Laquan McDonald in 2014, killing him.)

On the floor, there is tragedy. On the wall, there is hope.

It was also striking just how many people stepped right around the ghost on the floor — barely noticing it, if at all, as they snapped photos of an ad.

[Read more about Virgil Abloh on his career and the MCA exhibition.]

This midcareer retrospective of Mr. Abloh’s work turns on unanticipated juxtapositions — visual, sociopolitical and even structural. As an artist, he’s a light-touch conceptualist, his work a series of small disassemblies and reassemblies. Mr. Abloh trained as an architect and was Kanye West’s right-hand man for several years before branching out and becoming a fashion designer for Louis Vuitton and his own line, Off-White; a D.J.; a visual imagineer for other clients; and a collaborator with Nike, Ikea, the Red Cross and others.

He is the standard-bearer for the internet-speed globalization of haute post-hip-hop style, suggesting that the chasm between taking a marker to your shoes and ending up the head designer at an iconic fashion house may not be as vast as it once seemed.

That he has achieved so much so rapidly is its own provocation, one amplified by “Figures of Speech.” It is his first museum exhibition, and fundamentally it asks how a museum — by practice, a static institution — can capture and convey the work of someone who moves quickly, has prodigious output, and who isn’t nearly as preoccupied with what he did yesterday as what he might do tomorrow.

HIP-HOP, STREETWEAR, SKATEBOARDING AND GRAFFITI are all art practices born of resistance, and by the time Mr. Abloh found them, they were eking their way into institutions. More than any of his generational peers, he has applied their disruptive urges in new contexts.

His art is about besting capitalism — from within. He has a just-make-it ethos; the essence of his work is process as much as product. In a 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design — published as a book, “Insert Complicated Title Here” — he focused on “shortcuts,” about how changing an existing thing just 3 percent is often enough. “I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new, trying to be avant-garde,” he told the students. “Basically, that’s impossible.”

For Mr. Abloh, there is no art practice outside the mode of consumption. You sense that for him, the sneaker in the store (which costs you money) and the picture of the sneaker in the store that goes on Instagram (which costs you time) serve effectively the same purpose.

That same blitheness is at work in “Figures of Speech,” curated by Michael Darling, which gives equal weight and space to Mr. Abloh’s most meaningful work and his loosest-conceived projects. Perhaps most jarringly, the space given over to his signature work — his fashion design for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, his various sneaker prototypes for Nike — is rather small.

In the second gallery, clothes hang on racks that make it tough to appreciate the unusual details — whether in terms of silhouette, or design in-jokes — that Mr. Abloh has made his stock in trade. At the end of one rack are some prototype Vuitton pieces with a strip of paper attached that reads “LEWIS VUITTON,” an intriguing in-house tweaking of a design lineage that could also fit in at a group exhibition at a Bushwick art gallery. (Such garments were never actually produced.)

Later, a grid of Abloh/Nike prototype sneakers has been set at ground level. Presumably artifacts like these are what draw many people to the exhibition, but the presentation minimizes their importance and their strengths.

There is a kind of exhibition that’s effective for work like this, something more process-focused that shows the inspiration and the innovation side by side — a display of tools, techniques and gambits.

In places here, that happens — mentioning Calder on the wall text next to a mobile-like sculpture made of pink insulation foam, or pointing out the Caravaggio that was referenced in his earliest clothing line, Pyrex Vision. But some are obscured: the oversize version of the clear CD case Mr. Abloh designed for Kanye West’s “Yeezus” album is missing any mention of Peter Saville, a mentor of Mr. Abloh’s, who did something similar for New Order.

BORROWING IS IN MR. ABLOH’S DNA, and one of the unlikely pleasures of this exhibition is the way he freely absorbs the work of others. One wall is completely wheatpasted with posters of the Chicago rapper Chief Keef wearing a Supreme T-shirt, photographed by Ari Marcopoulos — it all clings to the wall like a proud stunt, one of several places where Mr. Abloh imports a vernacular context into the museum setting. Similarly, there are works made of concrete cast to resemble outdoor benches that would be manna to skateboarders.

Mr. Abloh also applies that mode of creative direction to his own emotions. In one case, he displays some of his gold and platinum paper-clip jewelry (by the celebrity jeweler Jacob Arabo), made-real versions of pieces he once fashioned for himself out of actual paper clips, an aspirational nod to the luxury rapper chains he never expected to be able to afford.

Just across the gallery from those pieces is one of the show’s most convincing arrangements. On the left is Mr. Abloh’s D.J. setup — austerely beautiful wooden speakers (by Devon Turnbull), glimmering CD turntables (by Pioneer DJ) — presented as a shrine. And hanging on the wall to the right is a cease and desist letter from the United Nations chiding Mr. Abloh for using its logo on fliers for D.J. gigs.

There it is — reverence and flippancy all together, and a reminder that flippancy can often be a byproduct of reverence.

And yes, Mr. Abloh is in on the joke. A biographical video near the end of the show includes a scene in which he waters, with a hose, the “WET GRASS” rug he made with Ikea. By the gift shop, I spied some tickets on a table that read “Virgil Abloh: ‘Bathroom Pass.’”

Mr. Abloh even folds critique into his work — a rug in the first room is imprinted with an arched-eyebrows quotation from a Four Pins story about Pyrex Vision in 2013. An information slide in the fashion gallery alludes to some unkind things the fashion designer Raf Simons once said about Mr. Abloh: “Simons described Off-White as not bringing anything original to fashion. Abloh immediately responded with the collection ‘Nothing New.’”

When Mr. Abloh is playful, he can be exhilarating — there’s serious joy in the gallery that includes a pile of his Ikea collaborations, which looks as if it were assembled via tornado. When he works in the métier of consumer goods, he understands how to differentiate just enough from the norm to stoke passion. But the pieces here that hew closest to traditional artistic disciplines are the least inspiring.

More than a dozen are marked as having been made in 2019 and as belonging to a private collection. Mostly they are room fillers: grand-scaled billboards, an all-black Sunoco sign sinking into the ground, and so on. Taken together, they betray an anxiety about what type of work might belong in a museum exhibition. They eat a lot of space, but don’t communicate a lot of information.

Mr. Abloh’s best work could fill these rooms several times over, just in a very different fashion. He is a tinkerer. Rather than a simple grid of sneakers, what about a video of him drawing on them, or cutting one up and making something new? Instead of racks of largely obscured clothes, what about the WhatsApp messages between him and his colleagues that led to his creative decisions? For Mr. Abloh, paterfamilias to a generation that understands garments are to be modified, not simply worn, that would have been apt. (The show’s hefty, excellent catalog embraces this spirit, deploying a titillating level of detail.)

As this exhibition is standing there, still, Mr. Abloh is plowing through ever more references on his Instagram stories. What about a screen that displays his real-time preoccupations? The notion that the museum can only hold finished works is an obsolete one.

THOUGH THERE IS NO ROOM for true hands-on interactivity in this exhibition — probably a crowd control measure — at least two works elsewhere in the museum do invite interaction: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “‘Untitled’ (The End),” an endlessly replenished stack of paper that you can take freely from, and Ernesto Neto’s “Water Falls From My Breast to the Sky,” basically a divan you can sit on, covered by crocheted nets extending to the top of the building.

But Mr. Abloh still found ways to break the borders of a museum show. Security guards wear limited-edition cool-blue Nike Air Force 1’s that he designed for the occasion. One guard told me he’d been offered $7,000 for his pair. (They’re currently going for around $2,000 to $3,000 on resale sites.) And the exhibition extends into the gift shop, which sells a rotating collection of T-shirts, posters, art pieces and $5,000 gradient-painted chairs — almost everyone I saw bought something.

Millions of people rarely, if ever, experience art in a museum setting. They see it on the streets, in their clothes and sneakers, on the walls around them. The way for art to have wide impact is to set it free — Mr. Abloh understands that his real museum is the world outside these walls.

Capitalizing on his relationships with established brands, he set up de facto satellite locations for the show. At the NikeLab installation next to the Nike store on Michigan Avenue, a few blocks away from the museum, there was an ocean of shredded sneaker bits in the windows and walls. Inside, you could piece together D.I.Y. projects with markers, rubber ink stamps and various embellishments — I filled in a coloring book outline of an Air Jordan Spiz’ike in shades of pink, green and brown, and pocketed a couple of pink chenille swooshes.

Louis Vuitton opened an orange-themed pop-up location in the West Loop neighborhood carrying select items from the FW19 collection. (New York had a similar green-themed one a few weeks later.) The space was filled with life-size (and larger) mannequins that were surprisingly emotional, and wouldn’t have been out of place at the museum.

But perhaps the greatest provocation — the most ineffable artistic moment — came at the main Louis Vuitton flagship store on Michigan Avenue, which was carrying several pieces of Abloh-designed clothing emblazoned with references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One varsity jacket had a hand-embroidered patch on the back in the shape of Africa. In this temple of high fashion were clothes that shouted their radical intentions, locating black history at the very center of the aesthetic conversation. It was moving, and also undaunted — a dash of capitalist conceptualism hiding in plain sight.

Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’

Through Sept. 29 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org. The exhibition will come to the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, after making stops at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the ICA Boston.

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stopsblog · 6 years ago

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Paris, Sunday morning (Montmartre)

People have brought their homes out on to the streets, turned their unwanted possessions over to those who might see something in them; I walk between table after table of clothes, bric-a-brac, furniture, utensils, all of it lining two closed-off streets in Montmartre, one mild Sunday morning in late September. I stumble upon all of this by accident, following my sense of interest directly to this treasure I could have so easily missed; the Derivé, once again, bearing fruit.

Endless picking, poking, coveting. The tables seem to extend on forever before me, stretching away down the street before bending round a corner and out of sight. I care not where they end; as soon as I arrive on the scene I am hopelessly lost, instantly captivated by the luck of finding this picturesque scene, any sense of time that I previously fostered disappearing as soon as I set my eyes on it. I am perfectly embedded in everything that it is, forgetting the rest of Paris and any other direction or want I might’ve possessed. For nearly an hour I amble to and fro, speaking to the owners of the stalls in shy French snippets, smiling and weaving off to the next stall, enjoying the soft bubbling and animation of the natural fluency that surrounds me. Their soft exclamations and purr-like lingering over final syllables is like silk to my ears, and after months of Portuguese heat, the gentlest touches of autumn cool are as equally well-received.

I round the corner and wander further into the slow Sunday crowds. I see people pouring thermos-fulls of hot black coffee into small plastic cups, sipping on them and smiling as they talk to their customers. Between these streets drawn at oblique angles to the growing sun, the buildings I amble through offer shade, enhancing their feeling of seclusion. Having emerged from my bed directly into this small foreign maze, these near-silent Sunday grids of passage are filled with a hovering sense of potential that’s left to rest until tomorrow, all usual business and hurry eagerly and thoroughly forgotten in place of total, final relaxation before the week begins again. The morning extends out slowly around me, unhurried, the immediacy of sunlight not yet finding its way over the roofs of the buildings, the day, too, also suspended in a sublime place of stillness. I feel the vibrations of no noise other than that which is around me when walking between the five or six stories of windows; no doubt their inhabitants are mostly here, mingling in their just-recovered jumpers, faded shoes and small peaked caps. Small change jingles in pockets, and china plates clink under inspection.

As I progress down the street, the stalls slowly change to the colourful, more solidly built structures of a food market. Tentative sunlight creeps over a shorter building to my right and falls over their wares, vividly accentuating all colours, form; large, fresh cuts of chalk-white fish lay on dazzling beds of ice, with sprigs of evergreen parsley tucked beneath them. A huge arrangement of wild mushrooms tumbles over layers of wooden crates in gorgeous autumnal colours, tawny browns and creams and near-oranges, hinting, like the small bite in the air, of the season to come. The smell is immediate and fresh; the saline tang of fish is mixed with a subtle undercurrent of produce, and swept away with each soft gust of breeze. The air is clean, light, and refreshing. Weighty bunches of grapes lay with vines and leaves around them, presented with full splendour and care, and low, welcoming sunlight glances off of the tiny twinkling droplets of water that adhere to their tight, shining skins. I purchase a tangerine from a small mound of brilliant orange fruits, picking one wrapped delightfully printed wax-paper, and place it in my jacket pocket for safe-keeping.

At the end of the street I round the corner to full sun, and am thrust again into another apogee; a café sitting on the end of the street suddenly begs me to enter, the golden sun pouring through its open doors, windows, and over array of sparsely-populated seats. It invites me, like a great warm pool, to dip my toes. I head inside, order café and pain au chocolat, which are arranged in a golden display rack, and take stock. The lighting and ambience inside is all golden; warm, secluded, luxurious in its seclusion, sure of its place in Paris, in the world. One or two people sit, reading papers, talking to the staff, friends, or simply with faces fixed in distant gazes, ruminating on unknowable aspects of their lives. The waiter gestures in the direction of any number of seats, and I offer my thanks. Outside I bask in the deliciously balanced strength of the morning sun, detuned slightly from summer’s oppression, back to a place of comfort and accessibility.

I feel a true and deep sense of isolation, away from so many things - nobody, not even I, knows where I am - and I fully realise it here, in this moment. Perhaps it is the location that has brought it on, the experience just passed. Behind me, I hear the whirring noise of the grinder, followed by a series of clunks as the barista attends to the machine. Then a small period of silence, whilst he waits. I cannot see him, but know the routine, that small window of lucidity when, thankfully, it is quiet and there’s nothing to do apart from wait for the coffee to come dripping out. There is nothing especially noteworthy about this place, but perhaps that’s why it is perfect; my sudden stopping here is a surprise even to myself. The waiter appears with my order, and completes the scene. I look around, finding that same wistful, engaged stare that others here also possess, and relax.

I sip on my hot, sweet espresso that has been delivered with small spoon, saucer, sugar and wrapped caramelised cookie. It’s this small attention to detail that I love; in Paris you get the full package, every time. The coffee is sweet, strong, and immediate; like the café it has no pretension, and I enjoy it for exactly what it is. I look back down the street, and see market shimmering in the growing light, and I retain the feeling of pleasant bustle having walked through only moments before. Nearby, people stand idly around, with absolutely nothing to do; it is Sunday morning, and they are out, meandering, just as I. They stand, leaning on posts and railings, exhaling great plumes of smoke, holding their small cups of coffee gently in their fingertips, taking small mouthfuls, savouring the taste in the cool morning air, then balance their cups on railings or tables between bouts of rhythmic gesture, and pass the time. Their presence softens the edges of the café, extending it out into the street, creating an intensely casual air in which to reside. I feel the coffee working through me, its heat and explosion of flavour awakening me from within as the sun pours down over my body. The road next to me hums with its own rhythms, the energy of momentum and noise heightening my feelings of seclusion and belonging precisely because I ignore them, allowing everything around me to flow and fuse into a sumptuous picture that I watch, as if from a distance, safe for a while, in the golden warmth of the golden café.

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technato · 7 years ago

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The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener

How these emission-belching behemoths will transition to batteries and fuel cells

Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

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Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

The Big Leagues: The Emma Maersk, one of the world’s largest container ships, is powered by a diesel engine. The ship can transport 11,000 containers with a crew of 13.

At the pier outside Amsterdam’s central train station, commuters stride aboard the IJveer 61. The squat ferry crisscrosses the waterfront, taking passengers from the city’s historic center to the borough of Noord. Beneath their feet, two electric motors propel the ferry through the gray-green waters, powered by 26 lithium-ion polymer batteries and a pair of diesel generators.

Hybrid vessels like the IJveer 61 are increasingly common in the Netherlands, where officials are pushing to limit toxic air pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the maritime sector. Patrol vessels and work ships are turning more to batteries and using less petroleum-based fuel; so are crane-carrying boats that pluck fallen bicycles from Amsterdam’s famous canals.

Some of these vessels recharge during off-hours, pulling from the harbor’s electric grid connection. In other boats, diesel generators recharge batteries as they run. As the harbor’s electricity infrastructure expands, more vessels could ditch diesel entirely, says Walter van der Pennen from EST-Floattech, the Dutch energy-storage company that oversaw installation of the IJveer 61’s series hybrid system.

“The next step is to move away from hybrids,” he tells me one drizzly afternoon from a café overlooking the waterway. “For all of the vessels here, it’s perfectly suitable to go full electric.”

Meanwhile, at a nearby shipyard, another company is building what it dubs the “Tesla ship”—an all-electric river barge, like a Model 3 for the sea. Its makers at Dutch manufacturer Port-Liner expect to complete five small barges and two large barges this year to edge out the area’s diesel-burning, soot-spewing versions.

These Dutch vessels mark the beginnings of a much larger energy transformation sweeping the world’s maritime shipping industry. As emissions climb and environmental policies strengthen, shipping companies and engineers are accelerating their pursuit of so-called zero-emissions technologies—a category that includes massive battery packs and fuel cells that run on hydrogen or ammonia. Hundreds of large cargo ships are also switching to liquefied natural gas, which produces less toxic air pollution than the typical maritime “bunker fuel” and is widely considered a stepping-stone on the path to full decarbonization.

“It’s been a journey for the shipping industry, but there’s now a broad understanding and agreement that there is a need to do something” about climate change, says Katharine Palmer, global sustainability manager at the shipping services company Lloyd’s Register. “Now it’s a case of working out what that ‘something’ is.”

Unlike vehicles and power plants, cargo ships remain conveniently out of sight to most of us. Yet shipping is the linchpin of our modern economy, moving about 90 percent of all globally traded goods, including T-shirts, bananas, and smartphones along with medicine, fuel, and even livestock. Around 93,000 container ships, oil tankers, bulk carriers, and other vessels now ply the world’s waterways, delivering some 10.3 billion metric tons of goods in 2016, according to United Nations trade statistics. That’s four times the cargo delivered in 1970.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Nearly all cargo ships use diesel combustion engines to turn the propellers, plus diesel generators that power onboard lighting systems and communications equipment. Many vessels still burn heavy bunker fuel, a viscous, carbon-intensive petroleum product that’s left from the crude oil refining process.

As a result, maritime shipping contributes a sizable share—about 2 to 3 percent—of annual carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the U.N. body that regulates the industry. Left unchecked, however, that share could soar to 17 percent of global carbon emissions by 2050 as trade increases and other industries curtail their carbon footprints, the European Parliament [PDF] found in a 2015 report.

With pressure mounting to tackle climate change, the IMO has taken steps to limit emissions, including requiring newly constructed ships to meet energy efficiency guidelines. In April, regulators adopted a landmark agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from shipping by at least 50 percent by 2050 from 2008 levels. Yet to align with the Paris climate agreement’s goals of keeping global warming to “well below” 2 °C above preindustrial levels, the industry must go even further, slashing its emissions to zero by midcentury. That means all vessels, from small ferries to ocean-faring cargo ships, must adopt zero-emissions systems in the coming decades, according to a research consortium comprised of major shipping companies and academic institutes.

Many shipbuilders and owners still aren’t convinced that such an overhaul is possible. But Palmer and other researchers say the technologies already exist to achieve this clean-shipping transformation. The challenge now, she says, is “making those technologies economically feasible, as well as being able to scale them.”

To get a glimpse of shipping’s future, I visited Hydrogenics, one of the world’s largest hydrogen producers and fuel cell manufacturers, at its headquarters near Toronto.

Among shipping experts, hydrogen fuel cells are considered the front-runner for zero-emissions technologies on larger, long-distance ships. Briefly, fuel cells get their charge not by plugging into the wall, as batteries do, but from hydrogen. With onboard hydrogen storage, fuel cells can produce power for the duration of most trips. Today’s batteries, by contrast, can’t make it very far without stopping to charge—and that’s impossible if a ship is in the middle of the ocean.

Cargo ships are “just too power hungry, and the run times are too large,” Ryan Sookhoo, Hydrogenics’ director of business development, tells me. “When we look at the marine space, we see it as a natural adopter [of fuel cells]. There’s only certain technologies that will be able to deliver.”

Hydrogenics has installed its fuel cells in buses, trains, cars, a four-seater airplane, speedboats, and a research vessel in Turkey. In recent years, the company has partnered with the U.S. energy and transportation departments and Sandia National Laboratories to build and test a fuel cell system that could eventually propel a cargo ship.

Sookhoo leads me through the company’s cavernous research and development wing, out a back door, and into the rain. A bright-blue 20-foot shipping container sits in the parking lot, labeled “Clean Power” in white block letters.

Photos: Top: Hydrogenics; Bottom: ABB

Fuel Box: Hydrogenics hopes its fuel cell, which lives inside of a shipping container [top], can provide propulsion for cargo ships. When hydrogen gas flows into the cell, an anode breaks molecules within the gas into ions and electrons. Ions pass directly to the cathode, but electrons are blocked by a membrane and must first travel through a circuit, producing electricity. When the electrons finally reach the cathode, they reunite with ions to form water [bottom].

We step inside. In a back corner, four 30-kilowatt fuel cell modules are stacked on sliding shelves, like computer servers on a rack. Elsewhere in the container are 15 cylindrical tanks full of compressed hydrogen gas.

As it’s set up now, the blue container works as a generator. But unlike its diesel counterparts, it doesn’t emit any sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, or carbon dioxide—only a little heat and water, which is vented out the container’s side like mist in a steam room.

Fuel cells have three key components: a negative post, or anode; a positive post, or cathode; and a polymer electrolyte membrane, an extremely thin material that resembles plastic kitchen wrap. Hydrogen gas arrives at the anode, where the molecules break down into positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. The membrane allows the positive ions to pass through it into an electrolyte and thence to the cathode; the electrons flow from the anode through an outside circuit, producing current. Finally, at the cathode, the electrons returning from the circuit reunite with the hydrogen ions coming from the anode and, together with oxygen from the air, they form water.

In the container, the electricity produced by the fuel cell flows to a separate rack of power inverters, which change the direct current power to alternating current. That electricity then goes into a transformer, shaped like a chest freezer, and then over to a dozen power outlets on the external wall. A suitcase-size battery, charged by the fuel cell, runs the fans that cool the container and vent any hydrogen that leaks from the tanks.

Before returning to Canada, where the unit was built, this fuel cell system was tested in the Port of Honolulu. The Hawaiian shipping company Young Brothers used it to power refrigerated containers on shore. Eventually, Sookhoo says, Hydrogenics and Sandia plan to assemble these components inside a ship’s engine room to run electric motors that drive the propellers.

About two dozen early projects have shown that fuel cells are technically capable of powering and propelling vessels. The most prominent among them is the Viking Lady, a supply vessel for offshore rigs that launched in Copenhagen in 2009. Its molten carbonate fuel cell, with a power output of 330 kW, uses liquefied natural gas in lieu of hydrogen.

Wärtsilä Corp., the Finnish manufacturer that installed the Viking Lady’s hybrid system, has said its chief challenge was establishing industry-approved technical standards and safety procedures for the first-of-its-kind installation. (Separately, ExxonMobil is testing whether molten carbonate fuel cells could generate electricity from power plant emissions.)

While maritime fuel cells haven’t yet been deployed on a large, commercial scale, a recent Sandia study [PDF] suggests that oceangoing ships could feasibly operate using existing hydrogen fuel cell technologies. For instance, researchers studied the Emma Maersk, a mega–container ship with an 81-⁠MW diesel propulsion engine that routinely travels some 5,000 nautical miles (about 9,000 kilometers) from Malaysia to Egypt. Based on the available volume and mass of the ship’s engine and fuel rooms, they found the vessel could support enough fuel cell modules and hydrogen tanks to complete one of these long-distance trips before needing to refuel—on paper, at least.

Joseph W. Pratt, who coauthored the study, says he had expected to find that fuel cell systems simply wouldn’t work on bigger ships or on longer voyages. He thought that as the ship scaled up, the amount of required fuel cells, tanks, and storage equipment would become too heavy, or too voluminous, to fit within the vessel.

“The biggest surprise was that there wasn’t a limit,” Pratt recalls from San Francisco, where he recently founded Golden Gate Zero Emission Marine to provide fuel cell power systems and fueling logistics.

His team also studied batteries, which proved the better option for high-power vessels making short trips, such as ferries or yachts. If ships can recharge at point A and again at point B, they don’t need to carry hydrogen storage tanks, which saves space and weight. And batteries are less expensive than fuel cells.

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The hybrid IJveer 60 carries passengers and cars around Amsterdam along with its sister ferry, the IJveer 61. Photo: EST-Floattach

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MS Ampere was the world’s first commercial ferry to run exclusively on batteries. Photo: NCE Maritime CleanTech

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After delays, the battery-driven Tycho Brahe now runs a regular route between Sweden and Denmark. Photo: John Peter/Alamy

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The Viking Lady is powered by a molten carbonate fuel cell and transports supplies to offshore rigs. Photo: Wärtsilä Corp.

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Port-Liner’s all-electric “Tesla ship” should begin sailing this year. Photo: Port-Liner

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Sookhoo says future zero-emissions cargo ships will likely use both technologies. Batteries can provide the initial spike of electricity that fires up the electric motor and puts the ship in motion—much as a car battery functions—while fuel cells will serve as the “range extender” that takes over as the battery winds down.

Given the potential, why aren’t more cargo shipbuilders ditching diesel and switching to fuel cells?

The technology is still prohibitively expensive, because fuel cells aren’t yet mass-produced. On a dollar-per-kilowatt-hour basis, the electricity cost from a fuel cell is roughly double or triple that from a diesel generator, Sookhoo estimates.

Second, hydrogen refueling stations are scarce and unevenly distributed around the world, whereas bunker fuel remains cheap and ubiquitous. For fuel-cell-powered freighters to succeed, ports will need to pipe in and store more hydrogen, and hydrogen production must ramp up dramatically.

Nearly all hydrogen produced today is made using an industrial process called steam-methane reforming, which causes the methane in natural gas to react with steam to create hydrogen and carbon dioxide. However, because natural-gas production and use results in greenhouse gases—methane itself is such a gas—the best way to make hydrogen for clean transportation is through electrolysis.

That process involves splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen by using electricity, ideally from renewable sources such as wind and solar power. Electrolysis facilities are growing in number, particularly within renewables-rich Europe, but not yet at the rate needed to supply tens of thousands of ships.

Finally, maritime authorities are only now starting to finalize the safety codes and design standards that will govern how fuel cell ships and fueling stations are built. Pilot projects can quickly adapt to rule changes, but large multimillion-dollar constructions cannot. This regulatory limbo also feeds into the wariness that many shipping companies and port operators feel about hydrogen as a fuel source.

For many people, the word “hydrogen” still evokes visions of the Hindenburg, a hydrogen airship that burst into flames in 1937 when hydrogen technology was still in its infancy. “Everyone references it,” Sookhoo says, with a hint of frustration. Modern hydrogen systems, however, are equipped with ventilators, sensors, and automatic shutdown modes to prevent flammable gas from building up and exploding.

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

No-fuel megaships would need what we do not have as yet: megabatteries or mega–fuel cells.

However, one segment of the shipping world is readily embracing fuel cells: cruise lines, which face stronger air quality restrictions than other maritime companies. Many cruise ships and ferries don’t use diesel combustion engines. Instead, they have “diesel-electric” power trains. A diesel engine drives an electric generator, which in turn powers large electric motors. Because this platform and fuel cells are both rooted in electricity—not combustion—the new technology can more easily integrate into existing cruise ship designs.

Last fall, Viking Cruises announced plans to build a 900-⁠passenger vessel in Norway that will use fuel cells running on liquid hydrogen for its main propulsion. A competitor, Royal Caribbean Cruises, is installing a fuel cell on a new vessel to supply onboard electricity while stationed in ports, with a longer-term vision of using fuel cells for propulsion.

While fuel cells are early on the adoption curve, battery-powered ships are steadily multiplying, particularly in Norway.

The Scandinavian country has deep pockets to invest in new maritime technologies, thanks to both its sovereign oil fund—which topped US $1 trillion last year—and a tax on ships’ emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are potent greenhouse gases and key ingredients in acid rain. The region also has an abundance of hydropower, which can support more battery-charging stations and hydrogen-production facilities.

Norway’s government plans to have 60 all-electric ferries in its fjords within three years, a target it set following the 2015 launch of MS Ampere , the first midsize commercial ferry to operate fully on battery power.

The Ampere carries 10 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries to power two electric motors, each with an output of 450 kW. The ferry fully recharges its batteries overnight but tops off every time it docks, for a period of about 10 minutes.

During trials, this fast-charging system repeatedly disrupted service on the rather small local electric grid. Siemens, which designed the charging infrastructure, fixed the problem by placing a high-capacity lithium-ion battery at each pier, enabling the Ampere to quickly recharge from the battery, while the battery gradually recharged from the grid.

The Ampere was a turning point for battery-powered shipping, says Jostein Bogen, the global product manager for energy storage systems in ABB’s marine and ports division. “The big start came from Norway, but now we see it coming all over the world,” he says from his office in Oslo, citing ABB’s electric ship projects in China, Turkey, and across Europe.

ABB recently converted two diesel ferries, the Tycho Brahe and the Aurora, into the world’s largest battery-driven ferries. The vessels, which connect Denmark and Sweden via the Øresund strait, each carry batteries that can deliver 4.16 MW of power and have a combined storage capacity of 8,320 kWh—equivalent to 10,700 car batteries. The ferries will quickly recharge at automated shore-side stations.

That project hit a snag in mid-2017, when it experienced a technical challenge in connecting and disconnecting the charging cables from the vessel, under certain conditions. The automated system had been tested successfully in a simulated factory environment, but it needed additional testing to make sure it could operate reliably in the real world, ABB said.

After postponing the Tycho Brahe’s launch, the ship operator HH Ferries began sailing the ferry in late 2017 in both full-battery and hybrid modes. ABB said it continues to make adjustments to the charging procedures.

As for container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers—the biggest contributors to the shipping industry’s carbon footprint—zero-emissions technologies may still be years away. But early projects with ferries and cruise ships could help convince shipbuilders and operators that fuel cells, batteries, and other technologies are viable alternatives—particularly where there is access to low-cost energy sources, or where ship operators can pass on additional costs associated with each voyage to their supply chain.

“Niche sectors have the ability to do this and drive the innovation,” says Palmer of Lloyd’s Register.

The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

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jonathanbelloblog · 7 years ago

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First Drive: 2019 Mercedes-Benz G 550

LANGUEDOC-ROUSSILLON, France — The bluff wasn’t vertical, but it wasn’t far off it, either. Our instructor was pointing at a slice through the low brush, the pale, broken stone of Southern France exposed in jagged steps. From head on, it would be a hard climb in any vehicle, but we weren’t squared off at the obstacle. Instead, we came at it from a hard, right-hand turn, off camber just to make it interesting. No part of me believed the 2019 Mercedes-Benz G 550 would make it. Not stock. Not without a lift and aggressive tires. Instead, the SUV was unfazed, idling up the rock and dirt, sending my gut spinning with a brief lift of the right rear tire as we pivoted. If you were worried that the new G-Class had been neutered for the new age, don’t be.

Imagine the curse of being tasked with bringing modernity to the G. The 463-model G-Class has soldiered on without significant revision since 1989, and Mercedes-Benz sold better than 20,000 units last year. This is a vehicle that has thrived in spite of change, stalwart in both shape and function even as the world around it has grown hostile to both. Here is an SUV with a bludgeoning drag coefficient of 0.54 (the Ram 1500 manages a comparatively svelte 0.36) that consumes premium fuel with abandon. The elements that have made the G-Class an off road titan—narrow width, boxed frame, and solid axles—make it ill-equipped to coddle the luxury buyers who favor it. Compared to rivals from Range Rover, the previous G-Class drove like it was nearly 30 years old because under a thin veneer of leather and deep pile carpet, it was.

That’s also part of what’s made it so popular. While competitors have constantly worked to make their towering SUVS feel like a sedan, the G has remained suitably truckish. It has no interest in pretending to be a car. The team behind the all-new G-Class had the unenviable job of improving the vehicle without spoiling the elements that have made it one of the marque’s signature models. The result is a larger SUV with a touch more civility that hasn’t sacrificed any of its capability.

That began with a new frame, body mounts, and body, which pulled around 374 pounds from the structure thanks in part to an aluminum hood, fenders, and doors. Even so, Mercedes says the design is 55 percent stiffer than the previous version. It’s also 2.5 inches wider and two inches longer, delivering more interior room than before. There’s now a functional center console up front, and rear passengers don’t find themselves rubbing knees with their neighbors. The extra width also allowed engineers to fit legitimate climate controls for the back seats.

That cabin now looks like it belongs in the upper echelon of the Mercedes-Benz lineup, with a completely revised dash. The optional, high-resolution instrument cluster is gorgeous, as is the massive 12.3-inch central display. The latter still isn’t touchscreen, but is easy enough to navigate through the console-mounted touchpad and rotary selector. More importantly, the G-Class is quieter than before. An acoustic windshield and side glass, extensive sound deadening, and double door seals do a better job of keeping noise at bay.

That’s not to say the new G is silent. There’s a reason modern vehicles look so round and generic. Every sharp or vertical edge, every protrusion is a chance for wind to sing and whistle. While the 2019 G-Class now has a slightly softer exterior design, it still retains many of the harsh characteristics of its predecessors, including those protruding, fender-mounted turning indicators and the vehicle-length body protector strip. The door handles are even carryovers from the previous model. Combine all that with a steeply raked windscreen, and there’s more racket than you’d expect from a freshly designed vehicle. Still, we don’t care. It’s a good reminder that this is still a G.

The biggest change is a new independent front suspension. Abandoning the old stick axle was the key to modernizing the G-Class, allowing engineers to use an electromechanical rack and pinion steering system. It also opened the door to the complete suite of Mercedes-Benz driving aids, including parking assist, and lets the engine sit lower in the passenger compartment for a better center of gravity, to meet pedestrian safety criteria, and improve crash ratings. More importantly, the change civilized the G’s driving dynamics.

It’s strange how familiar the 2019 G 550 feels from behind the wheel. The doors still require a certain amount of force, shutting with the satisfying and solid sound of metal on metal. The locks are a carryover, and they still snap in place with the sharp punctuation of a rifle bolt. You can hear the clatter from across a parking lot. The A- and B-pillars are now thicker and made of high-strength steel to meet federal rollover standards, but the former are cleverly turned on edge to maintain the model’s traditional visibility. At no point are you confused about what you’re driving.

When the road inevitably turns to something other than a straight line, the 2019 G 550 actually behaves itself. The catastrophic understeer and body roll of the previous generation hasn’t vanished, but it takes considerably more speed to find it. For most buyers, it will feel like sliding behind the wheel of a Tahoe, whereas the previous generation was more akin to coaxing a wheelbarrow full of top-heavy crates down a hallway. Power still comes from the same twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 as last year, with 416 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque

But none of that would be worth a damn if the SUV didn’t live up to the G’s reputation as a mechanical force of nature. Mercedes admits that a very, very small percentage of G-Class buyers will ever use the full extent of their machine’s off road ability. But really, that’s no different from any other high-performance vehicle. How many C 63 sedans will see a track in their life? How many Wrangler Rubicons will go bashing up a trail? The company could have very easily abandoned the machine’s three locking differentials, body-on-frame construction, and slab-sided looks in favor of something more aligned with the vehicle’s actual use case. It would have been a sin.

There’s more ground clearance than before, now 9.5 inches, and the combination of the new 9-speed automatic transmission and a transfer case with a 2.93:1 low range (previously 2.1:1) means the new G can inch its way over whatever is in its way. The torque converter was set up specifically for the G-Class. While some vehicles offer a hill-hold function that relies on a sensor and the parking brake, the converter can hold this SUV on nearly any incline without assistance from the brake for up to an hour. It’s a simple system that uses all four wheels to maintain grip. Likewise, there is no hill descent control system for the G-Class. It doesn’t need it. In manual mode with low range and first gear engaged, we inched down 30 percent grades without so much as looking at the brake.

We spent hours scrambling over the ridges around us, crawling up near-vertical, loose-footed ledges and wading through headlight-deep water, chasing a row of windmills to their perch overlooking the Mediterranean. This was not some manicured trail. It was a collection of unforgiving, nerve-peaking scrambles, and at no point was the new G 550 out of sorts. Whether lifting a wheel, or two, or lunging up difficult grades, the truck just kept going in spite of everything around it, the same as it always has. The same as it will for years to come.

2019 Mercedes-Benz G 550 Specifications

ON SALE Late 2018 PRICE $128,000 (base) (est) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V8/416 hp @ 5,250–5,500 rpm, 450 lb-ft @ 2,250–4,750 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, 4WD SUV EPA MILEAGE 15/17 mpg (city/hwy) (est) L x W x H 189.7 x 85.7 x 77.2 i WHEELBASE 106.2 in WEIGHT 6,700 lb (est) 0-60 MPH 5.8 sec (est) TOP SPEED 130 mph

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jesusvasser · 7 years ago

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First Drive: 2019 Mercedes-Benz G 550

2019 Mercedes-Benz G 550 Specifications

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aaronbhope84 · 7 years ago

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Planning Our Galley Kitchen

Our kitchen renovation has been one long ass journey, with many ups and downs, frustrations and really it's put a lot of our life on hold. But having a plan from the get-go was something that really helped us to focus on the job and keep going. It was also essential for knowing where to run electric cables, lights and plumbing too! I realised I never shared the plans for our kitchen, or how we came to design it - so this is going to be a very quick post before I share the actual kitchen installation and reveal. I think I'll do a full separate post on tips for designing your own kitchen as well as how to keep costs down. But, for now - he's the grand kitchen plan and design!

Why DIY-Kitchens.com?

So first up was selecting an actual kitchen supplier. We knew we wanted to buy from DIY-Kitchens after visiting their showroom which you can read all about here. Their kitchens are amazing quality, affordable and they have heaps and heaps of different options for cabinet sizes as well fancy units like internal pull out drawers, larders, plate racks and even dresser units. Their kitchens had the biggest selection of different colours and there's even the option to colour-match or pick your own bespoke paint as well. Unlike other suppliers, the idea behind DIY-Kitchens is that you design and plan the kitchen yourself, select the units you require in a kinda off-the-shelf type deal and then they are bespokely made and built especially for your order. You then fit it yourself, or you source your own kitchen fitter. It's simple, affordable and it works.

Choosing a Kitchen Range

I knew I wanted a shaker style kitchen, I think they look modern but also classic and are pretty much age-less. I also knew I wanted solid timber doors - I think they're a really good investment as they can be painted in the future without too much hassle and they can also be sanded if any damage does occur over the years. Affordability was a big part of our decision as well. I loved the Harewood Style kitchen but the cost was more than I was willing to pay, so instead we went for Linwood. It's not THE cheapest kitchen they sell, but it's the cheapest for solid timber - and that was something I was prepared to pay a little more for.

Grey, Grey or Grey?

If you didn't know, I love grey. Grey grey grey! So it had to be grey. But which shade of grey? Well, I wasn't prepared to go for a bespoke colour at additional costs, so that narrowed it down to the three greys they had in their standard range. Originally I thought I would go with Lamp Room Grey but after ordering a door sample in the colour, I realised it looked very different under different lights. Under a white-light it looked beautifully grey and I loved it - but under a more warm toned light, it had a very green undertone. Our lights happen to be warm lights and I really wanted them that way - particularly with the Edison bulbs that are also warm toned. So I went back to DIY-Kitchens to look at the colours again. I was particularly inspired to take a second look at the dark grey kitchens after I fell in love with a gorgeous dark grey kitchen on Instagram (to be more precise - Faith's @darcinderdiary on Instagram - or go check her blog out here!). Her kitchen is a gorgeous dark grey colour (Graphite) with white worktops, which I absolutely loved but I was really unsure whether a dark colour in our narrow and not-always that bright kitchen would work. So in some kind of rock n roll fashion, I asked Instagram to vote on it for me. And the outcome was pretty phenomenal 39 votes for Graphite to 14 votes for Lamp Room Grey. So we had a winner and I rolled with it!

Cabinet Colour

As well as door colours, DIY-Kitchens also offer a range of cabinet colours and wood effects. I really liked the look of the wood ones, just to add a bit of interest to the interior of the carcass when you open the doors. I decided to steer clear of the matching graphite colour available as I figured it'd way too dark for me to see inside otherwise! These were my top 3 picks, but Light Winchester Oak stood out to me the most. I think they work really well together and I also think it makes the units look more expensive/high end.

Wood Worktops from Worktop-Express

As beautiful and as much as I love quartz, our budget is miles too small it. I'm not really a fan of laminate, so the next obvious option was wood. We used Beech in our old house and despite the general upkeep of wood (not always for everyone!), I really loved it. This time I knew I wanted something lighter (Beech was quite orange-y toned) so ordered a whole bunch of samples from Worktop-Express. Unfortunately DIY-Kitchens don't offer many choices on wood and their prices are also more expensive. We used Worktop-Express in our old house and had no problems - they even offer a bespoke cutting service, so it can arrive and be put straight into place! The decision on which wood was pretty instant - Ash stood out to me straight away and luckily it was one of the most affordable option (second to Beech, that is!). It's light but with a gorgeous grain and I think will look perfect against the dark units. This photo does not do it justice! (And yes, it's a tad tea-stained from being used as a coaster!)

Layout & Design

So finally the fun bit - actually designing! The room that will be the kitchen is pretty much long and kinda narrow so it obviously had to be a galley kitchen - if you don't know what that is, it's a kitchen with cabinets either side of the room in a straight long kind-of runway type deal. We wanted our dining room to be a separate space, so that's why we're not bringing the kitchen out into there. On-top of that, it would have made the costs of a kitchen vastly more expensive! Designing a kitchen is much like doing a jigsaw puzzle. I took measurements of both sides of the room and positioned the appliances first; the cooker opposite the sink (keeping the sink in pretty much the same position really helps to keep costs down!), the washing machine and dishwasher either side of the sink and then the fridge against the back wall near the french door. Then I added units into the spaces we had leftover. I knew I wanted one set of pan drawers as well as a basket unit. Once those were positioned, the rest really just fell into place. We've opted for fewer larger units over many small ones - as this is also something that keeps costs down. Finally, I treated myself to wall dresser unit because well, I freaking love them and have always wanted one!

You'll notice there's no wall units - this is partly due to costs but mainly because I wanted the space to feel open. With the room being long and narrow, I was worried wall units could just aid the room into feeling claustrophobic. We have very few kitchen items anyway, so we really don't need a whole bunch of storage. We also toyed with the idea of a bench seat, which you can see on the plan above - but decided against this in the end.

Visualising the Plan

So as you can see, I pretty much designed it in an old-school kinda way. Good old pen and paper and terrible terrible drawings. I can visualise things quite well, so this worked fine for me. And I didn't feel like I needed a to-scale drawing to do the math either. However DIY-Kitchens do offer a layout grid which you can use to help you see everything to scale/see if it will fit - but if you want to see how your kitchen will actually look properly, I recommend using this 3D Kitchen Designer site. I used it to show Grant the plan, as he claims to have no visualising ability. ;)

The Style

If I had to use a couple of words to sum up how I wanted the kitchen to look, it would be classic chic, with a hint of vintage industrialism. Makes sense right? Basically I love classic chic kitchens, I love hints of industrial style interiors and I love vintage pieces. So I'm combining all three in some kind of messy mix-up. It sounds like a chaotic awful combination, but hopefully it'll look better than it sounds. We've already picked out our traditional limestone floor (go see it here!) and the kitchen style will hopefully fit with this. We've exposed the steel beam for some industrialism as well as adding some Edison bulbs. I'd also like a more industrial style tap as well. And as for the vintage, well I have a whole bag in storage of random little pieces I've been picking up from fairs and antique centres (I've written a couple about what I've been buying over the last few years, which you can see here and here) that will on full display in here too.

So now you've seen all my terrible drawings and the design ;) I'm going to do a separate post on tips for designing your own kitchen as well as one for keeping costs down. But before then, you'll be seeing our new kitchen reaaaalll soon... and I'm absolutely chuffed to bits with it! So, watch this space!

from Home Restoration News http://www.kezzabeth.co.uk/2017/08/planning-our-galley-kitchen.html

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jaclynbross1 · 7 years ago

Text

Planning Our Galley Kitchen

Why DIY-Kitchens.com?

Choosing a Kitchen Range

Grey, Grey or Grey?

Cabinet Colour

Wood Worktops from Worktop-Express

Layout & Design

Visualising the Plan

The Style

from Tips For Basements http://www.kezzabeth.co.uk/2017/08/planning-our-galley-kitchen.html

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Art F City: L.A. Art Diary Week Four (Everyone Loves Eames, Erotic Art, and More)

Screenprint by Polkela, seen at Co-Lab Gallery.

In his fourth week in Los Angeles, Michael Anthony Farley discovers that there’s not enough to do on weekdays and way too much to do on weekends. Here’s how he spent the weekend. Everyone loves Ray and Charles Eames, and erotic art.

Catch up on Week One, Week Two (and Week Two, Part Two), and Week Three.

Friday 7/14

I am working from a Starbucks in a nondescript strip mall near a Gold Line station in Pasadena. I stand in line for my second coffee, and give my name to the barista, when the man behind me asks “Michael? Michael what?” I turn around and realize I’ve just run into an old buddy from art school in Baltimore who I haven’t seen since we graduated. We chat about how we both ended up in the same suburban California Starbucks, thousands of miles from our hometown.

He moved out here to work in visual effects on films. Now, he’s attending a graduate program at the Art Center College of Design a few blocks away, learning virtual reality skills for the coming boom in demand. He tells me that he, like all the contract artists who work on big blockbusters, is under constant surveillance by the studios to make sure footage doesn’t leak as it did in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine debacle. I immediately start mentally formulating the plot of a William Gibson-esque thriller.

Hopping on the Gold Line back into the city, I transfer to the subway, on my way to the Expo Line—the newest and arguably most-praised piece of L.A.’s odd rail network. It’s irritating that you have to pay for each transfer (bringing the cost of a three-line rail trip to about the same as a Lyft line ride) but otherwise I’m pretty impressed by how much smoother and cleaner L.A.’s trains are than aging East Coast systems. I feel slightly vindicated for my uncommon decision to take public transit when I look down out the window of the elevated train and see untold millions of cars sitting in seemingly endless gridlock. The opening I’m heading to (oddly, the sole art event I could find on a Friday evening) is at The Landing, a gallery about 16 miles Southwest from my starting point. Google Maps tells me the trip will take around an hour and a half by public transit. Not wanting to repeat my usual mistake of showing up too late for L.A.’s early-to-bed art scene, I plan to get there around 6 p.m.

(L-R) Ryan Fenchel, “Sidereal Procession, the Adept in Public”; Don Edler, “Chaise Lounge for Celeste and Unmonumental Table,” 2017 (with John Zane Zappas Ashtray); Gary Knox Bennett, “Pair of Eames Chairs Assemblage,” 1959.

By some strange magic of perfectly-timed transfers, I actually arrive to the opening early. For about half an hour I’m the only one in the gallery, and the staff are shocked that I beat rush hour traffic and found parking. I explain that I took the train, which has an elevated station nearly directly above the gallery.

“Wow. What’s that like? I didn’t know anyone used it!”’

I wouldn’t say the train was packed, but it was far from empty. The opening on the other hand, remains pretty dead for the majority of time I hang around, which is confusing because the show is great and they’ve laid out the most impressive buffet of snacks I have ever seen (another strike of good luck, since my opening/dinner buddy cancelled on me last minute).

Gabrielle Garland

The group show, The Useful and the Decorative, pays tribute to The Landing’s former identity as a design gallery. It’s a collection of art objects that allude to functional designwares from plates to furniture. It’s right up my alley, as I love both painterly surfaces and midcentury modernism—two things that are rarely conflated outside of nonrepresentational painting. Here, though, design classics such as Le Corbusier’s chaise lounge and the much-treasured Eames recliner populate endearingly wonky paintings of interiors by Gabrielle Garland. She’s cleverly balanced expressive brushwork with subjects iconic enough to be legible despite warped perspective. There are no figures in the paintings. Staring into each domestic space, I imagine this is what it must be like to take an ayahuasca trip in one of those immaculate California homes from the pages of Dwell. It occurs to me that’s probably not an uncommon occurrence.

Don Edler, “Anthropocentric Tablet and Chablet Tair,” 2017.

The other highlight of the show is Don Edler’s work, which “fossilizes” contemporary design objects on the verge of obsolescence in hydrocal—iPhones, calculators, credit cards, and so forth. One piece in particular, “Anthropocentric Tablet” reminds me of Michael Jones McKean’s recent dystopic anthropology museum at The Contemporary. In both installations, there’s a sense that the world as we know it will disappear, and our material culture will be a cryptic piece of archeology for another to interpret.

I take the train back Downtown and an old friend from Baltimore, Neale, picks me up at the end of the line to catch up. We’re sitting on his balcony in a particularly picturesque corner of Echo Park when I notice a friend from Berlin has checked in on Instagram a few blocks away. I message my friend, filmmaker Yony Leyser, and find out he’s in town touring his documentary Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. He invites us to an event at the Tom of Finland Foundation nearby and we decide to walk over.

In the garden of the Tom of Finland house.

As I should’ve come to expect by now, the walk takes far longer than we anticipated and everyone’s already hopping in Ubers by the time we arrive. Tom of Finland’s former home strikes me as surprisingly cutesy (a sentence I never thought I would type). Neale explains, “Navigating L.A. by Google Maps always fucks me up because you zoom in and there are grids within grids and the blocks are huge. It’s like watching Powers of 10.” Despite its Bermuda-Triangle-like navigational challenges, Los Angeles constantly redeems itself with Eames references.

We’re given an address to a secret-ish warehouse venue downtown, where a mini-festival of queer erotic performance art and video screenings is taking place. As soon as we arrive, someone wins a door prize comprised of various dildos. A performer described as “a proudly non-binary artist who prefers to be identified by their LinkedIn profile” begins lip-synching to Alice DeeJay’s 1999 club hit “Better Off Alone” while presenting their anus.

Having spent my day criss-crossing vast distances, I am deliriously tired. We’re being steered to some chill-out installation apparently intended to re-center our sexual qis or realign our erotic chakras or cleanse our auras (or something with crystals?). I’m told there’s no alcohol and I realize I probably can’t get through whatever this is without it. Yony disappears on foot to find an open liquor store. We warn him that after midnight in L.A. is the equivalent of 4 A.M. in any other city, but he persists.

He rounds a dark corner and it’s the last we see of him.

Saturday 7/15

Bodega Vendetta

I wake up on Neale’s couch and walk another deceptively far, scorching hot “10 blocks” to a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment who is a curator. He shows me this drawing by Bodega Vendetta and never have I wished more that a work on paper was an animated GIF.

Over the course of hours, I receive multiple conflicting texts from friends encouraging me to attend different events that all begin around the same time many miles apart. An art magazine release party! An opening in Culver City! An opening an hour away in the opposite direction! A party at a collector’s house! A party at a gallerist’s house! Yony’s screening! A party that’s “the L.A. pop-up of Club Glam”! (I am told that saying something is “The L.A. pop-up of _____” lends it credence, even if it’s a thing that hasn’t actually existed anywhere else.) I think about all the weeknights I’ve spent looking for something (anything) to do here and realize L.A. has the most extreme case of problematic weekend-loading I have ever encountered.

Megan St. Clair “FIRST PLANT,” oil on wood. Houseplant art is alive and well at Co-Lab Gallery.

I settle on attending The Co-Lab Gallery’s closing party with Liz Eldridge because I have heard good things from several friends about the Highland Park institution. Many of my peers in Los Angeles have small but impressive art collections, and a big chunk of those works came from Co-Lab. The gallery functions more like a retail space than a traditional white cube model—it’s jam-packed with art hung salon-style, with tables full of ceramics and racks of prints and other artist-made knick-knacks. This is a display strategy that normally would drive me crazy, but here it works because so much of the art is actually good and the volume allows the gallery to keep prices accessible. There are a handful of paintings priced under $100 that I’m seriously tempted to buy, but remember that figure represents about one week’s worth of necessary Uber rides here. I’m slightly ashamed that I’ve allowed L.A. to add another step in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Anti-gentrification wheat pastes in front of The Co-Lab Gallery.

I’m introduced to gallerist Kristin Hector, who first opened the space in Koreatown seven years ago, but has been in Highland Park for the past three. I ask her why the gallery is closing, and she blurts out “It’s not gentrification backlash! Everyone always assumes that!” (As in many pockets of East L.A., art galleries such as Co-Lab and “hipster” businesses like coffee shops and yoga studios along York Boulevard are frequently targeted by anti-gentrification graffiti.)

She explains that she wants to move into a larger space and shift the focus of the practice. I ask her if the jam-packed hang is indicative of every show or just a “going-out-of-business” sale vibe.

“Oh this is what all of our group shows are like!” she explains, between shouting out unthinkably reasonable prices across the room, “I love so many different aesthetics. It’s fun to see different styles come together—this is a good example,” she gestures to a wall of paintings that alternate between provisional painting, expressionist figuration, and realism, “Always colorful! Always a little ridiculous, and sometimes dark but vibrant!”

Liz and our friend Brittney are enthusiastically flipping through a rack of prints and other works on paper, asking each other for advice. Since wall space is already at a premium in Liz’s sunny Craftsman bungalow, I suggest investing in one painting for the same price as several cheaper pieces. We move around the room, deliberating. We’re both drawn to Julian Tan’s small acrylic paintings on panel. Each is obsessively jam-packed with detail, describing chaotic domestic spaces. (Naturally, as in the Gabrielle Garland paintings from the night before, Eames chairs make cameos. I start to think that if all artists in L.A. have such comfortable and tasteful furniture, it makes sense people become homebodies when they move here from cramped East Coast apartments).

Julian Tan’s cryptically detailed acrylic on wood paintings.

Liz—ever the dramaturg—begins excitedly fabricating narratives for each mise-en-scène: “This is clearly a room of privilege; it’s a kid who doesn’t understand what he has! I feel like this is the teenage fantasy of someone who grows up to be in the alt-right,” gesturing to an interior full of swords, video games, and other boy toys. Then, “Wait, is he making meth in this one? Meth AND an Eames chair?”

The paintings are all hypnotically captivating, but one detail (other than the titular cinematic reference) draws me to “2001 IS ON, LET’S CHILL”. On the coffee table a copy of Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” is described with a remarkable economy of tiny brush strokes. It’s one of my personal favorite books of the past few years, so I could spot its signature cover anywhere, but Tan’s ability to squeeze so much charmingly shaky detail into a few square millimeters is still impressive. Its inclusion also complicates the “bro-iness” of the other objects in the homes—one of the book’s main plot lines is in essence a feminist revenge tale.

Liz ends up purchasing the piece (and plenty of works on paper too) and we leave ecstatically talking about how good owning art feels. On the way out, we overhear that the gallery’s new reincarnation will actually be as an art rental facility for film sets in North Hollywood, close to Studio City and its endless sound stages. At first we’re disheartened to hear that—Co-Lab seems to have filled a niche position in the city wherein young creative types could actually afford to support their peers. I then remember Mel Chin’s collective GALA Committee, which infiltrated the set dressing of Melrose Place with conceptual artworks. Kristin Hector seems to have a penchant for curating works with sneaky details, and I’m optimistic Co-Lab’s next incarnation might carry that torch.

L.A., after all, owes its cultural gravitas to the intersections of art and spectacle, counterculture and schlock. Who knows what books might show up on the coffee tables of shitty sitcoms and soap operas in the years to come? As we dive ever deeper into this latest battle of the culture wars, tactics like that will only become more vital than the first time around.

Detail from Julian Tan’s “2001 IS ON, LET’S CHILL,” Acrylic on wood.

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technato · 7 years ago

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The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener

How these emission-belching behemoths will transition to batteries and fuel cells

Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

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/* Smartphone Portrait and Landscape */

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Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

The Big Leagues: The Emma Maersk, one of the world’s largest container ships, is powered by a diesel engine. The ship can transport 11,000 containers with a crew of 13.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

To get a glimpse of shipping’s future, I visited Hydrogenics, one of the world’s largest hydrogen producers and fuel cell manufacturers, at its headquarters near Toronto.

Photos: Top: Hydrogenics; Bottom: ABB

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The hybrid IJveer 60 carries passengers and cars around Amsterdam along with its sister ferry, the IJveer 61. Photo: EST-Floattach

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MS Ampere was the world’s first commercial ferry to run exclusively on batteries. Photo: NCE Maritime CleanTech

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After delays, the battery-driven Tycho Brahe now runs a regular route between Sweden and Denmark. Photo: John Peter/Alamy

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The Viking Lady is powered by a molten carbonate fuel cell and transports supplies to offshore rigs. Photo: Wärtsilä Corp.

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Port-Liner’s all-electric “Tesla ship” should begin sailing this year. Photo: Port-Liner

$(document).ready(function(){ $(‘#1388451410’).carousel({ pause: true, interval: false }); });

Given the potential, why aren’t more cargo shipbuilders ditching diesel and switching to fuel cells?

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

No-fuel megaships would need what we do not have as yet: megabatteries or mega–fuel cells.

While fuel cells are early on the adoption curve, battery-powered ships are steadily multiplying, particularly in Norway.

“Niche sectors have the ability to do this and drive the innovation,” says Palmer of Lloyd’s Register.

This article appears in the June 2018 print issue as “The Cleaner, Greener Cargo Ship.”

The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

0 notes

technato · 7 years ago

Text

The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener

How these emission-belching behemoths will transition to batteries and fuel cells

Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

.mobileShow { display: none;}

/* Smartphone Portrait and Landscape */

@media only screen

and (min-device-width : 320px)

and (max-device-width : 480px){ .mobileShow { display: inline;} }

.mobileHide { display: inline;}

/* Smartphone Portrait and Landscape */

@media only screen

and (min-device-width : 320px)

and (max-device-width : 480px){ .mobileHide { display: none;} }

Photo: Martin Witte/Alamy

The Big Leagues: The Emma Maersk, one of the world’s largest container ships, is powered by a diesel engine. The ship can transport 11,000 containers with a crew of 13.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Global Goods: The world’s busiest maritime trade route is the path from Asia to North America. Other popular routes connect Asia to northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

To get a glimpse of shipping’s future, I visited Hydrogenics, one of the world’s largest hydrogen producers and fuel cell manufacturers, at its headquarters near Toronto.

Photos: Top: Hydrogenics; Bottom: ABB

1/5

The hybrid IJveer 60 carries passengers and cars around Amsterdam along with its sister ferry, the IJveer 61. Photo: EST-Floattach

2/5

MS Ampere was the world’s first commercial ferry to run exclusively on batteries. Photo: NCE Maritime CleanTech

3/5

After delays, the battery-driven Tycho Brahe now runs a regular route between Sweden and Denmark. Photo: John Peter/Alamy

4/5

The Viking Lady is powered by a molten carbonate fuel cell and transports supplies to offshore rigs. Photo: Wärtsilä Corp.

5/5

Port-Liner’s all-electric “Tesla ship” should begin sailing this year. Photo: Port-Liner

$(document).ready(function(){ $(‘#1388451410’).carousel({ pause: true, interval: false }); });

Given the potential, why aren’t more cargo shipbuilders ditching diesel and switching to fuel cells?

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

No-fuel megaships would need what we do not have as yet: megabatteries or mega–fuel cells.

While fuel cells are early on the adoption curve, battery-powered ships are steadily multiplying, particularly in Norway.

“Niche sectors have the ability to do this and drive the innovation,” says Palmer of Lloyd’s Register.

This article appears in the June 2018 print issue as “The Cleaner, Greener Cargo Ship.”

The Struggle to Make Diesel-Guzzling Cargo Ships Greener syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

0 notes