#I got a new project at work /and/ I got demoted /and/ I got added to a higher access level /and/ I'm in charge of a new database

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: April 15

"Something in the Way She Moves" by James Taylor

[rcreveal]

The Trouble with a Keen Manager

Chapter 2: Chapter 2 of 1990's "Trouble with a Keen Manager" Furfur and Shax are caught up with developments down in Hell. Crowley goes to Aziraphale for laundry advice, but laundry is the least of his problems.

In Hell, a couple of demons approached the flaming acid dispenser, sneaking a bit of a break.  Shax, who still worked in Intake, was sharply turned out in a pencil skirt and 1940’s era suiting jacket in deep red, sporting stiletto heels that were registered as a lethal weapon in at least thirteen countries.  Furfur noted her lingering over her cup of acid as he hustled up from Requisitions, dying for a cuppa.  The luckless Furfur had been shunned for years, since his sting operation against Crowley had gone so terribly wrong in 1941.  But he still hoped, how he hoped, that he might get promoted, despite the horrible demotion he'd gotten some 50 years ago.

“Hello, Shax.  How's tricks?” Furfur asked hesitantly, daring to speak to her. 

“Slow,” said Shax in a clipped voice not welcoming association with the persona non grata, “There haven't been as many souls as usual coming into the department,” she added, relenting, while she sipped her acid, before asking, “You?”

Taking the opening at once, Furfur burst out to the first person who’d been willing to talk with him in ages, “I’m bein’ run off my feet!  Itemized miracle reports!  Itemized requisition reports!  Running reports and authorized requisition and revised requisition requests and revised requisition authorizations back and forth and back and forth between Usher and all of the demons he's managing on Earth! It's a nightmare!  I've never seen this sort of paperwork!  An’ he makes ‘em re-do the reports if they have any spelling or grammatical errors!  Do you have any idea how few demons know how to spell?  One demon in Italy's still tryin’ to turn in a report from last month!”  

Shax collected gossip like a magpie collected trinkets.  You never knew what might help you get ahead, even from someone like Furfur.

Shax asked neutrally, “Usher just got the promotion to manage the demons assigned to Western Europe?  Had some ideas about accountability and conserving resources?”

“Yeah, that's the one!  Got promoted for complaining ‘bout the ‘profligate and excessive use of resources’ to wage the battle on Earth,” replied Furfur eagerly.

“Wasn't he the one that made his department bring him their used pencils before he would issue new ones?” asked Shax.

“An’ that when everyone knows that pencils never get to the nub, they always disappear first,” said Furfur darkly, suffering the ignominy of stealing pencils from other departments under this new regime.

Sensing an opportunity, Shax glanced at the files clutched under Furfur's arm.  “Are those the reports that need to be delivered to Usher?”

“Yeah. Why do ya ask?” Furfur replied, surprised.

Shax held out her hand, “Let me take them.”

Furfur raised an eyebrow.

“I'm bored,” Shax said flatly.

Handing over the reports, Furfur whispered, “Let me know what you find out!�� Then scurried back to his office, but not before liberating another pencil from Sins.

***

Crowley ignored the curious looks from passersby as they watched him, a blackclad suited man walking by carrying a black sheet tied up around black laundry.

As he shouldered his way into Aziraphale’s bookshop, one local resident called, “That’s a bookstore!  Not a laundromat!” 

Aziraphale looked up from his reading, as Crowley backed the door closed with his hip.

“Things have been piling up a bit, I see,” Aziraphale commented dryly, putting down his book, and standing up to lead Crowley upstairs.

Aziraphale ushered Crowley into a room with a wide table that held absolutely no books but did harbor a dizzying array of brushes, bottles, tinctures, chamois cloth, pastes, with an old fashioned iron cooking on the side.

Crowley halted in the doorway, arms full of clothing “Eh, what’s all this?”

Aziraphale bustled over to the midst of the room, slipping out of his fine three quarter length coat and twirling it onto a butler’s valet stand with a flourish then putting a couple of braces over his shirtsleeves and actually pulling on protective butler sleeves and an apron.  With a smile he turned to Crowley, “Lay them out here.  Let's see what we've got.”

Crowley handed garments over one at a time and Aziraphale tutted and clucked and started an incomprehensible babble directed at the uncomprehending Crowley.  “Well, you can see where the stain is fixed right here.  We'll try Mr Brown’s Imperturbable paste then some camphor.  And that stain.  Is that grease? Car grease? What were you doing?  Working on the Bentley with a silk shirt on?” The angel laughed at how ridiculous that was, until Crowley didn't join in, so he looked over at the demon, “You worked on a car wearing your best shirt?”

“I like that shirt! ‘S comfortable! How was I to know that black grease would show up on a black shirt!?”

Looking over a few more pieces, Aziraphale asked, “What is this?  This is ichor, isn’t it? Actual ichor!”

“If you know what it is, why’re you asking?” grumbled Crowley unrepentantly.

Staring at the demon, Aziraphale asked, “Have you ever laundered a garment, Crowley?”

Pausing thoughtfully, Crowley replied, “Nnn-no.”

“Really!? Never?” asked Aziraphale in astonishment.

Crowley appeared to be racking his memory, and finally offered up, “I did get pushed into a washing tub by a group of washerwomen once. Does that count?”

“Definitely not,” Aziraphale said firmly.

“Then, never,” said Crowley.

They looked at the pile of black and charcoal clothing that nevertheless was showing stains and wear.

Squaring his shoulders, Aziraphale dug in, “Alright. This is what you do.”

Aziraphale dove into the washing and mending, directing Crowley on the usage of the various butler's help meets arrayed before them.  The angel knew he was talking a ‘blue streak’ as he tried to impart several thousand years of knowledge.  Finally, Aziraphale looked over only to find Crowley peering at a box of powder in one hand and a tub of paste in the other, sunglasses pushed up on his head.  “And if I use this one first, it'll burn a hole in the cloth, but if I use this one it'll be perfectly, how’d you say it, ‘tickety boo.’”

“NO!!” Aziraphale snatched the solvents out of Crowley's hands.  “Those are the ones that will explode if mixed!” He set them far apart on the work table and took a deep breath, only to exclaim, “What have you been doing in that jacket!?”

“Uh.  Going about my normal day,” replied Crowley.

Pinching up a sleeve and inspecting it critically, Aziraphale complained, “How is digging in a ditch, palming a set of stage makeup, and drinking at a Middle Eastern coffee shop a normal day!?”

“Well, it is for me Mr Holmes, which is why I never went in for human laundering!  I’ve kept things tidy the traditional way, with miracles!” Crowley huffed.

“This jacket is a disgrace!  Take it off and hand it over! Go lurk in the stacks and keep the customers from the books! On second thought, hand over the shirt too, it's nearly as bad as the jacket.  You can glower at people in your undershirt.  And those slacks!” Aziraphale pointed an accusing finger at the pants.

“I'm not going to intimidate your customers in nothing but my skivvies!” Crowley shot back.

Handing over yards and yards of tartan, Aziraphale offered, “Here! You know how to wear a kilt.”

Curling his lip at the fabric and belted leather pouch, Crowley complained, “I'm not wearing this!  It's cream colored!”

“Oh for heaven's sake!” Aziraphale worked a little miracle,  “Now it’s black and green, your colors, as I recall!  Now put this on and get down there if you want me to deal with this, this…debacle!”

“I'm going.  I'm going!” Crowley said, arranging the tartan on the chaise lounge so he could shuck his slacks then lay back to deftly wrap and fold the kilt.  Strapping on the leather belt and bag, which he knew as a spog, and pinning the extra flag of tartan over his shoulder with a kilt pin he found got the kilt secured.  Rescuing a dark leather waistcoat from the pile and putting it on over his black undershirt and kilt, he stomped down the stairs barefoot in a towering temper.  It was demeaning having to wait around at the angel’s pleasure to do something that a few paltry little miracles could have achieved instantly! 

Aziraphale sighed happily, no one would stay in the shop, much less try and buy anything with Crowley in a snit like this.  Morphic resonance was already making him curse in Scottish.  Marvelous.

Clicking his teeth at the state of Crowley's favorite jacket, Aziraphale emptied all the pockets, as any good butler or officer’s batman would, though somewhat cautiously, this was a demon’s favorite jacket after all.

When he got to the breast pocket, the angel found the postcard.  Turning the piece of paper over carefully, he was surprised to find an advertisement for a book.

Why on Earth did Crowley have a book advertisement?  He’d never seemed much interested in books before.  Made him restful in the shop as Crowley never asked to take a book home.

Eyes scanning the color picture of a beautiful nebula, Aziraphale noticed the crabbed copperplate in the lower left hand corner which read:

“Temptation, ok?”

Hadn't the Americans had some spot of bother with that Handel telescope that was supposed to be the bee's knees for pictures of space?  Well good on them for fixing it, apparently! A book of pictures of stars and galaxies from the Americas, hmm.   Aziraphale had just gotten a catalog from this publisher and was even now putting together his order.  Interesting…a book about the stars that was a temptation.  Putting the advert in his own pocket, Aziraphale wondered, ‘what was it called when an angel tempted a demon?’

Crowley prowled the bookshop in his bare feet, since the angel had whisked away his shoes while he was distracted with the kilt.  This was his chance to steal the book (stealing was definitely permitted), but he couldn't find the bloody thing anywhere.  He'd searched the downstairs shelves, the upstairs shelves, the public section, the stacks of books in corners, the stacks of folios in boxes.  When a delivery man came by, Crowley had even snatched the box out of his hands, excited to see the Yankee publishing company logo only to be disgusted to find nothing but novels.  There were astronomy books in the shop, technical manuals for the astute gentleman with a Newtonian sixteen inch telescope, copies of Galileo's works (poor man, Crowley had enjoyed their conversations and still felt a pang of anger about how the Church had dealt with him).  Encyclopedias with some lovely pictures from the satellite probes, but no new Hubble telescope books in glorious color.  About the corners of the shop, he thought he glimpsed the kind of portals to other bookshops and libraries that this much information compressed into one place could cause.  But he was blessed if he was going to troop around other dimensions trying to find his star atlas.  Crowley wanted the bloody pictures of the sodding universe that he'd help make!  Not some other, inferior universe that might not even have had the good sense to make a Horsehead nebula!

When a gaggle of giggling University students straggled in, he snarled at them, “He probably hasn't got it, and he wouldn't sell it to you if he did! Push off!” But, apparently, even his license to menace had been revoked.  They kept giggling!

“Pity about the book, but you're cute.  Fancy a shandy over the road?” one young lady proposed.

“Cute? Cute!!?? I'm old enough to be…to…do you even…? Shandy? Out! Out, out, out, the lot of you!”

Still giggling, they sashayed out.  One stage whispering to the other, “I like a bloke in a kilt!”  

“Do you think he wears it Regimental?” another stage whispered back.

So not in the mood for fielding that sort of attention, Crowley locked the shop door and leaned against it.  What was going on?  Fretfully, he tried to miracle the blinds shut.  Nothing happened. So he pulled the blinds by hand.  Where were those miracles he’d requisitioned?  Was he reduced to requisitioning a creeping sense of dread, that was like, dead basic demoning!  Trying and failing to produce dread, menace, avarice, or even strong distrust, Crowley rummaged desperately in Aziraphale’s desk for paper and pen, only to give himself an awful papercut.

Staring at the beads of red blood on his finger as the wound refused to heal, Crowley wrote out another list of what he needed to do his damned job.

[omglisalithium]

With season 3 fast approaching, I'd like to finally post the project I've been working on since October:

Cinema Sins: Everything they did wrong/could have done better in TBB Season 2, according to me, and some other people.

Warning: this review of season 2 is very negative. If that's not your thing, then don't read. I did decide to add in some positivity about parts that were good writing choices and my personal favorite bits, but it doesn't start until episode 3. I would have added more in, but I have zero interest in watching season 2 again after all of the below atrocities. Please note: I'm just a very picky, very snobby writer when it comes to critiquing professionally produced content.

Season 2 episodes 1 and 2:

What they did wrong: Making us wait over a year for season 2 and giving us little to no updates about it. The perfect example of laziness and mindlessness.

Could have done better: the Batch's new outfits/armor. I get it, they had to blend in a little better. But it's just... not exactly right to me. Why is Tech's crotch not covered by his armor anymore? Was that for us or just a mindless choice made by the design department?

Could have done better: No visible damage on the ship after they escape the crabs. It looked like the crabs were ripping it up and yet the Batch were able to leave the atmosphere with no issues. OK.

What they did wrong: AZI being a drink server. Really? He's a medical droid and the writers didn't think to use him for something useful?? Wasted potential. Ok then.

What they did wrong: Not utilizing Bolo and Ketch yet. Really, what were the writers thinking?

What they did wrong: Having the Batch still working for Cid. I don't even need to defend this one.

What they did wrong: Introducing a love interest and then having her be rude to each of the Batch members right off the bat (Phee). At least try to make her likable? And she just dropped the cup into Cid's hands and ordered Wrecker around. Wow.

What they did wrong: Hunter giving in so easily to Cid's manipulation tactics.

What they did wrong: Having Wrecker aquire a new weapon only to have him never utilize it again. Maybe this will change in S3.

What they did wrong: The Batch never speak about how they still have Crosshair's sniper rifle after they acquired it in the last episode of S1. Really? Enough said.

What they did wrong: Having Tech break his leg only for it to have zero repercussions or healing time throughout the season. Lazy writing.

Season 2 episode 3:

Could have done better (rant incoming edition): I liked this episode, I liked seeing Cody and Crosshair working together. My problem is with the direction the writers decided to go with Crosshair's arc. I get why they did it; they wanted to show that Crosshair would see what the Empire was doing and slowly but surely change his mind on his own. I get it, but it's boring. I was really looking forward to Rampart and the Empire finding out that Crosshair escaped with the Batch on Kamino and dish out horrible punishment as a result and the Batch would need to rescue him, but we got this arc instead. Rampart even finds out that the Batch is alive and still doesn't do anything about it, he just keeps that information to himself. I get why, but still. Yawn.

Could have done better: Explaining why Crosshair is still in the black armor. Why demote him and then continue to put him in a different color armor than the other people at his level??? Or is it just because the other armor doesn't fit his unique build and the Empire doesnt want to waste resources on clones?

What they did wrong: Having Cody's squadron shoot the droids right as the droid was saying "there are no survivors" and then followed by "You can return to the city" "Roger Roger". Like hello???? Was it Crosshair that shot at them because he's not used to stealth missions, or did no one else hear the reply to go back to the city??? Explain this please.

Season 2 episode 4:

What they did wrong: HAVING THE BATCH STILL WORK FOR CID. ENOUGH SAID.

What they did wrong: Hunter and Echo had to deliver Chicken McNuggies and we don't get any references to this probably hilarious mission again.

Season 2 episode 5 (please note, watching this episode required an appetizer watch of a South Park episode, copious amounts of alcohol, and lots of hair being ripped from my scalp):

Could have done better: A LOT better. Part of what was making me tear my hair out was the musical score. I love the Kiner Bros work, but this particular episode's score drove me to tears. I hate it. Less dramatic, please.

What they did wrong: An appearance from Phee, followed by her being demeaning to Tech. Again, please at least try to make her likable.

What they did wrong: A side quest that did nothing for the plot.

What they did wrong: Hunter just going along with the rest of what the team wants. I get it, he has a soft spot for Omega and seeing her act her age and be excited to do something must be heart warming for him. But I'd love to see him in Sargent Mode again.

Could have done better: Older than the Jedi??? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the Jedi are 25,000 years old. You're telling me something with this kind of tech existed before then? Bet.

Could have done better: The pacing. Yeah. We get it. It's a puzzle. Pace it faster please.

Could have done better: Hunter and Echo's look to each other before venturing into the place further. I would have loved for them to share a few lines. They both clearly didn't want this "mission".

What they did wrong: Having Phee, Hunter, and Omega get separated from the rest of the group. If you're going to sell us a love story about Phee and Tech, at least let them have some time together. I hate the idea of love interests in this show (unless it's in fan works), but if you're going to do it at least make it believable. It seems to me that Hunter and Phee have more chemistry in this episode (*vomits at the idea*) than Tech and Phee ever did. Phee just waves off Tech's ideas while she seems to play off of Hunter better.

What they did wrong: The stupid mechanical dinosaur thing. You're telling me it existed 25,000 years ago and was able to move again after all that time without a ship load of space WD-40? Bet.

What they did wrong: Hunter saving Phee instead of Tech saving Phee. Again, way more chemistry there.

What they did wrong: That mission was boring and all for nothing. Filler. Enough said.

Bonus: That poor droid 🫡

Season 2 episode 6:

Could have done better: The team trusting that Omega wouldn't find trouble. It's been over 6 months; they should know better by now.

Could have done better: Explaining why Hunter knows Wookie language. Maybe it's a throwback to the unfinished Clone Wars episode. I'm not sure. Is it because Hutter has more hair than the rest of the Batch?

What they did wrong: "We'll all find a new path." Bruh I don't think they meant a path downwards 9 episodes later 😳

Bonus: I'm not going to complain any more about this episode. The references to Order 66? The reaction of a Jedi seeing clones after Order 66? Seeing a Jedi on this show after Order 66 (aside from Kanan in Rebels)? Seeing Tech do more translating? Seeing Omega see a Jedi and also a lightsaber for the first time? Seeing Omega interact with another kid and showing extreme care towards him? Seeing Wrecker get excited about food while also seeing Echo get disgusted by it? Seeing Hunter go back into Sarge Mode? Wrecker imitating Wookie roars? "Where did the kids go?" A grizzly implied-death of a bad guy? "Hmm not bad?" "They're both just kids but they don't get to be, not in this galaxy"? Seeing normal Batch interactions like how they were back in season 1?????? I'm all for it. Give me more of that, damn it.

Season 2 episode 7:

What they did wrong (spoiler alert): Crosshair not being the secret sniper at 79s. Yawn.

What they could have done better: CT0409 not being a known clone from TCW.

What they did wrong: Not having Crosshair in the episode at all and yet having parts of his theme play. Quit amping us up just to have us be disappointed by the end of the season. Stop it. Get some help.

Bonus: CORUSCANT!!!!! WE GET TO SEE 79s!!!! OMG POLITICAL FIGURES TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE CLONES! BAIL ORGANA! RIYO CHUCHI!!! RAMPART!!!!!! RAMPART'S THEME!!! CLONES TALKING TO RIYO ABOUT THE FUTURE! CT0409 REVEALING THAT RAMPART ORDERED TIPOCA CITY TO BE DESTROYED! RIYO AND RAMPART MEETING! "Follow the money"! Showing accurate shell shock in Riyo when her guard is killed? CAPTAIN REX???

Season 2 Episode 8

Could have done better (it took a while to get to this point because of how many good things this episode has): The Batch, Riyo, and Rex bringing Omega to see the dead body. Ok, for this one, I'm not placing the blame on the writers, as they were making the characters as canon as possible and I applaud that, but it doesn't show any growth aside from Echo, who is a bit more tactful by gently moving Omega away from the body.

What they did wrong: Make hints about (and eventually develop) the future Mount Tantiss Arc (more to come on this one).

What they did wrong: Ok, I admit this one is personal. Rampart being arrested. I loved him as a main villian. Ok moving on.

Could have done better: Echo's leave. It had to happen. I get it. But the goodbyes were a little less-than aside from Omega. It's not really implied about who knew and who didn't know that he was leaving aside from her. Also, it was very random and I admit that I did cry after the episode. Him kneeling in front of Omega was about the point where I was going "HEY! HEEEYYYYYY!" really loudly when I was still sharing a wall with my parents so.

Could have done better: Echo telling Omega to "keep an eye on the others". I have to admit, I'm really torn on this issue. We've been told that Omega is older than the Bad Batch, but developmentally, she still seems to be a kid. As a child who was parentified myself, that line struck a nerve in me. She's still a kid even though she may be older than the Batch (although it was never specified if she was older than Echo). I'm not sure how to feel about this.

Bonus: EVERYONE'S RELAXING! GONKY! OMEGA MEDITATING BECAUSE OF GUNGI! ECHO TALKING ABOUT HIS IMPRISONMENT AND HIS RESCUE! REX! STRATEGIC DEBATE! OMEGA SEEING CORUSCANT FOR THE FIRST TIME! ... The Batch are probably on the planet at the same time as Crosshair :( ahem... RIYO CHUCHI MEET THE BATCH! "Hello!" *Omega waves*!!! ECHO VOLUNTEERING TO BE A WITNESS! OMEGA OFFERING TO HELP! NEW OUTFIT FOR OMEGA! OMEGA MEETING RAMPART AND SHOWING DISGUST FOR HIM! RIYO SHOWING OMEGA THE SENATE FLOOR AND OMEGA EXCITEDLY RUNNING TO THE EDGE TO LOOK DOWN! RIYO FIGHTING FOR CLONE RIGHTS! OMEGA MEETING BAIL ORGANA! FORMER SENATOR OF KAMINO! OMEGA BEING UPSET! A LAMA SU REFERENCE! A GOOD OLD BAD BATCH MISSION FEATURING REX! WRECKER SHOWING DISCOMFORT! NEW WEAPON! ECHO AND REX TALKING ABOUT CLONES (sad foreshadowing but necessary)! REX IMPROVISING! WRECKER COMPLAINING ABOUT HEIGHTS! TECH DOING TECH THINGS! HUNTER SAYING "TECH" IN THE OLDER BROTHER SARGENT VOICE! "New plan. 14, 5, 86" "All of them?"(also 86 reminded me of my days in food service. It's code for "we're all out of ingredient/dish)! "I was off by 6.4 meters. Not my best."! MORE POLITICAL STUFF REGARDING THE CLONES! ECHO FLYING! EMPORER PALPATINE! OMEGA SEEING PALPATINE IN PERSON! PALPATINE BEING PALPATINE AND MANIPULATING THE SITUATION TO HIS FAVOR! IMPERIAL STORMTROOPER OFFICIALLY NAMED! The view of a child being like "I don't understand what went wrong when we did the right thing." :( What would have happened if the Batch didn't intervene??? OMEGA HUGGING ECHO!

Season 2 episode 9:

What they did wrong: They're still working for Cid. No further criticism needed.

Could have been better: Bad lookout planning. I stand with people that said that Hunter should have been the lookout. I get that the writers made everyone unbalanced on purpose but the team knows better.

What they did wrong: The ship being stolen. We get it. Every mission goes wrong. Yawn. Pick a different theme.

Could have done better: A Lion King refrence? Really, Disney? Yawn.

Possible plagiarism alert: Everyone go read "These Silver Linings" by Rowanartist on Ao3 NOW. I swear that someone on the creative team read this fanfiction centering around Tech and Omega and decided to almost exactly copy it. Weak.

Bonus: THE MUSIC! HUNTER TRACKING! OMEGA AND WRECKER TALKING ABOUT ECHO! Bruh all that designing from the creative team that went into the Ipsium drill! HUNTER'S SENSES BEING UTILIZED! OMEGA SEEING PARENTAL FIGURES FIGHTING! OMEGA FINALLY THROWING AN AGE APPROPRIATE FIT! TECH AND OMEGA BONDING! OMEGA PERIL! Just... beautiful scenery... THAT BREIF ANIMATION OF TECH CLEARING OUT HIS GOGGLES! TECH IS CANONICALLY AUTISTIC! CROSSHAIR IS FINALLY MENTIONED! TECH SHOOTING THE IPSIUM!

Season 2 Episode 10:

Could have done better: Ok, to be fair, I didn't make this same connection that my husband did. The second that the thief was on screen, my husband went "HONDO?!" and he was really disappointed that it wasn't Hondo when he took the helmet off. So I'm calling the design choice a fail.

Bonus: GONKY IS REFRENCED! Awesome use of manipulation and gaslighting from the antagonist in this episode also. OMG 5 PEOPLE ON THE SAME BIKE LOL! PRETTY SKY! WRECKER SMASH! OMEGA BEING INTIMIDATING! WRECKER ASKING GONKY IF HE'S OK! TECHNO UNION REFRENCE! BRUH THAT SCENE WITH HUNTER REPELLING DOWN! OMEGA AND BENNI TEAM UP! BICKERING BATCH! AWW TECH GAVE OMEGA HIS DATAPAD! OMEGA SHOWING KINDNESS! HUNTER PROTECTING HIS TEAM! DOUBLECROSSING! OMEGA PERIL! KIDS TEAMING UP TOGETHER! HUNTER AND OMEGA TRUST FALL! (seriously though, that was the ultimate show of trust right there) BAD GUY DED NOW! WRECKER PICKING UP GONKY! OMEGA AND TECH BONDING!

Season 2 Episode 11 (I'm going to get really critical on my review past this point. If that ain't your thing, stop reading):

What they did wrong: The entire Mount Tantiss arc as a whole. I was perfectly happy with Lama Suu being dead and Nala Se being taken into a secret base, never to be seen again. That should have been the end of it, but nope. The writers decided to extend that arc into the next season. I'm pretty sure that mostly everyone here had zero to no interest in a continuation until they reintroduced it. It seems like they're trying to tie it into the sequel trilogy that they ret conned a few years back. Why??? For what? As far as I'm concerned, all talk about the cloning technology should have ended after Tipoca City was destroyed. The end. Bye. Pick a different arc.

What they did wrong: The Batch decides to keep working for Cid even after she didn't help them.

Could have done better?: Tech saying "do not concern yourselves, I will be fine." Foreshadowing.

Could have done better: Explaining why Omega is used to the cold but the Batch (mostly Wrecker) doesn't seem to like the cold.

What they did wrong: More cloning shenanigans. All Zillo Beast stuff should have died in TCW. Enough said.

What they did wrong: The Batch staying to fight instead of leaving immediately. Fr why are we here? This is pointless and boring.

Could have done better: Explaining what happens to those villagers. I'm autistic so it's difficult to put the pieces together. Explain better.

What they did wrong: Again with Mount Tantiss. NO. JUST NO. Pick a different arc.

Bonus: Ok yeah this is a scary episode. Creepy scenery. The screaming. Yes. Omg it's a clone commando. He skid. Zappy fail. Oh no he above. Ok fine Hemlock is a cool character. Also Emerie. And no music for a few minutes is a bit unsettling. Ahem. OMEGA TRYING TO SAVE PEOPLE IN THE SHIP! THE TEAM BEING INTERESTING! OMEGA SHOWING KNOWLEDGE FROM HER PAST! ALIEN REFRENCE! THE MUSIC AGAIN YAS! EVERYONE SHOOTING TOGETHER! "Facinating" EVERYONE PROTECTING OMEGA! "It ate the crew? It ate the crew." FOLLOWED BY WRECKER COMFORTING! OMEGA AND TECH COLLABORATING! HUNTER PILOTING! OMEGA SHOWING KNOWLEDGE! TECH SAVING OMEGA! TECH GETTING OMEGA ON THE SHIP! OMEGA COMFORTING FROM LULA! ECHO AND REX ARE MENTIONED!

Season 2 Episode 12:

I'm starting out with the good this time, as there's literally only one complaint I have about this episode. THE MUSIC! OMG A CROSSHAIR EPISODE FINALLY! BRAGG FROM LAST SEASON! LIEUTENANT ASSHOLE! ICE VULTURE! CLONE SASS! MORE CLONES! CROSSHAIR TALKS WITH A REG! MAYDAY! AMBIGUOUS ICE VULTURES! CROSSHAIR SNIPING! CROSSHAIR TRACKING! CROSSHAIR SLIDING! THE DEADWEIGHT EXCHANGE! CROSSHAIR HAS TO RELY ON MAYDAY FOR HELP! CLONE FORCE 99 IS MENTIONED! MORE BANTER! TRUST! TEAMWORK! PERFECT AIM! FLOP! CROSSHAIR REALIZES THAT THE EMPIRE IS SHIT! THE ANIMATION IS SO FUCKING GOOD WITH THE SNOW AND THE PARTICLES AND THE FOG! CROSSHAIR SAVES MAYDAY! CROSSHAIR AND MAYDAY WHUMP! CROSSHAIR AND MAYDAY USING THE SNIPER RIFLE AS A CANE! CROSSHAIR PLEADING FOR A MEDIC FOR MAYDAY! THE ANGER AND RAGE IN CROSSHAIRS FACE OMG I CAN'T! LITERALLY EVERYTHING THAT UNFOLDS AFTER THIS (except the ending) IS JUST YES OMG!

What they did wrong: Mount Tantiss again. Yawn. And it came out of nowhere too, like was the Empire just waiting for Crosshair to screw up so they could send him to Mount Tantiss? Explain.

Season 3 Episode 13:

It admittedly took a while for me to get to this episode because it is one of my most hated episodes but here we go.

What they did wrong: Phee putting Omega in a dangerous situation.

What they did wrong: Still working for Cid.

What they did wrong: GET YOUR HAND OFF TECH!

My own opinion: This episode made me anxious and I'm not sure if the creators planned this. The comfort? Omega being a kid? A nice meal? Hmm. Gives me the ick and I don't like it.

My Californian opinion: Ok, as a native Californian looking at other people's interpretations of an earthquake, the earthquake/tsunami scene was terror for me. The animals acting strange was the first sign for me. Earthquakes are LOUD. Shaking is one thing, but seeing the animals react before the quake, hearing the loudness of the stuff moving... It really reminded me of real earthquakes here. The oceans receding like omg get UP NOW! And thankfully, I haven't lived on the ocean but tsunamis are a real threat that I feel like they really nailed. Kudos to the research team on this.

What they did wrong: Now showing Phee's interest in Tech. Wtf.

What they did wrong: Phee redirecting Tech away from part of his team. Isolating behavior. Ick.

Bonus: HUNTER USING HIS ENHANCED SENSES! THE TEAM WORKING TOGETHER! WRECKER THEME! TECH BEING TECH! OMEGA SHOOTS! A MISSION IS A SUCCESS! Um... Omega, Hunter, and Wrecker all shake with their left hands but Tech shakes right? Hmm. "I have not heard her laugh like that in some time" THE FATHER REFRENCE YEE! "Have fun" "I'm full. I am never full!" "I will note the date and time to commemorate such an occasion" "I'm so sorry. But you're safe here." THE WATER SCENE WAS SO GOOD OMG! AND THE YUCKY WATER THEY SHOW THE DAY AFTER YAS THAT'S ACCURATE!

Season 2 episode 14:

Bonus: WOW WE REALLY OUT HERE STARTING THE EPISODE WITH HOWZER AND THEN ECHO AND GREGOR COME TO SAVE HIM! ECHO SAYING "I need more time" JUST LIKE TECH! CROSSHAIR! WHUMP YEE! AND THEN SENATOR CHUCHI! WOW! MORE CROSSHAIR WHUMP! CROSSHAIR FIGHTING BACK! MOUSE DROID! CROSSHAIR HAVING GOOD AIM DESPITE NOT BEING 100% HEALTH! CROSSHAIR WARNING THE BATCH TO STAY HIDDEN! WRECKER CATCHING FEESH! FLYING LESSONS! SCARED TECH! THE TECH TURN! DRIFTING, GIRL! LEFT HAND SHAKE! ECHO HUG! WRECKER CHASING THE KIDS! THAT CUTE LITTLE SCREAM FROM OMEGA! YAY THE SECOND CROSSHAIR REFRENCE!

What they did wrong: Echo not having his kama. No explanation needed.

What they did wrong: The Princess Bride reference. I get why the writers did it. It makes Hemlock scarier, but honestly I would have preferred to see him in a gas mask or something.

Season 2 episode 15:

It took me a lot of weeks to get to this point. Let's do it.

What they did wrong: Phee trying to get Tech to act more neurotypical. Nah.

Could have done better: Tech being separated from the team.

What they did wrong: Saw Gurrera. Enough said.

Could have done better: Gurrerra's efforts not doing a damn thing that mattered in the end.

Bonus: CROSSHAIR REFRENCE! TECH WANTS TO GO FOR CROSSHAIR! KRENNIC APPEARANCE! I love Wrecker's fear of heights tbh. NO TECH DON'T SLIP! Wrecker asking Omega if she can handle placing the tracker aww. Everyone working together and comming! Typical deterral chaos! MOUSE DROID DEATH NOOOOO! TECH BEING SMARTER THAN GURRERA! Ok tbh they did Krennic beautifully in like the 2 minutes of screentime he has. OOO THEY DOING BLASTER BOLTS AT THE TK TROOPERS! TEAM TOGETHER AGAIN!

Bonus: Music edition!

The music at 23 minutes was the sign that I knew something big was going to happen. I love and hate that.

Season 2 episode 16:

THE MUSIC IN THIS WHOLE EPISODE. The music is literally why I didn't want to watch this episode again. From the moment it started, it put a hole in my stomach. This episode has the best and worst score in the series because of all of the emotion, terror, and helplessness it held. When this episode was released, I was going to be married less than a month later. This score left me so breathless and unable to function for so many days that I was worried that I wouldn't be able to shake the dread and uneasiness that it caused by the time it was my wedding day (my day turned out perfectly btw). Just a beautiful and terrifying score and it still evokes the same emotions as the day it was first played for us.

What they did wrong (Everything is on this What They Did Wrong because yes): Tech slipping again and being separated. That jump. Killing Tech. I'm one of the #tech'snotdead believers tbh. But the writers didn't need to do us so dirty here. Hunter being offscreen mostly when holding Omega back. They decided to go back to Pabu. Tech's goggles? The way Hemlock talked to Omega always rubbed me the wrong way. So creepy. Not having Crosshair say any more lines. Emerie being another female clone.

Bonus: The 99 refrence. Wrecker's "NOOOO". Hunter jumping to save Omega during the crash. Hunter and Echo in the background. Omega calling Tech's name. The in and out of consciousness thing. Hunter carrying Omega's bow. Wrecker carrying Omega. Omega's POV. AZI!!! Wrecker and Omega hug. Everyone caring for Omega. Cid showing care. Echo remembering Tech in the pilot's seat. Honestly I get Cid's position. Hunter getting Omega out of there. The paternal comment. Cid's hesitancy. Omega trying to protect her family! "Echo?" " Gotta be Echo" Scorch carrying Omega. Hunter watching Hemlock's ship leave. Hunter with Wrecker's gun. The ship having stuff broken. "We are going to get her back and we don't stop searching until we do." Omega being reunited with Nala Se.

We are finally at the end of our journey for season 2. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. Season 1 was so perfect, and it felt like they were setting up for an earlier Crosshair redemption. It completely reminds me of when The Force Awakens came out and it had such promise, but then the next 2 movies were, to put it lightly, garbage, and it's because they refused to listen to what the fans wanted. I do not trust the writers at Lucasfilms to make good decisions anymore. They've ripped the rug out from under us for too long. I've been honestly very angry about Season 2 and it wasn't until I got the idea of watching it again to point out all the flaws and facepalm moments that I realized just how angry I was.

I was hopeful when the season 3 trailer dropped, but then after a few certain scenes were shown, I was left facepalming and groaning about the writer's choices again, but I was willing to have some hope. Then the sneak peek dropped and my hopes lowered yet again.

Here's how I hope season 3 to go:

Crosshair and Omega escape Mount Tantiss but Omega is captured again and Crosshair is forced to leave her.

Crosshair finds the Batch (or what's left of them) and teams up with them.

The Batch hires bounty hunters, Ventress included, (not sure where they get the credits to hire them but whatever) to help get Omega back.

The mysterious clone is Tech.

The Batch finds out that the mysterious clone is Tech.

The mission changes to "we're getting Omega and Tech back"

Omega and Tech are back and everyone lives and goes into hiding.

The end. No room for ambiguity and no loose ends. I want to see a finality in the series finale, like in TCW. These people are definitely alive, and these people are definitely dead. No leaving us wondering. Just us going "That's it. That's the end."

I still don't trust the writers though.

[bloodfromthethorn]

Friendly Fire

Mac tries very hard not to make mistakes, because whenever he does, people always, always get hurt.  An army days fic.

Part thirteen of the July of Whump 2021 prompt challenge.

Also on AO3.

..

Despite what a lot of people seemed to believe, Mac did make mistakes. It didn’t happen all that often because he was viscerally aware that a lot of what he did was dangerous to more than just himself and that meant that you goddamn checked your working, but he wasn’t infallible. When he’d been younger, those mistakes had usually been small things, like falling out of a tree because he’d misjudged the distance between two branches or not picking up on his father’s mood quickly enough to avoid a lecture, but there had been some big blowouts too. The football field was probably the crowning example, but it wasn’t the only one.

Then he’d joined the army and been sent into the desert and suddenly the idea of making a mistake went from ‘possibly dangerous’ to ‘will almost certainly cost lives’. It was around that time that he started triple checking his working, just to be sure.

Which made it all the more horrifying when he did finally screw something up badly enough to get someone hurt. And, just in case that wasn’t punishment enough for his own stupidity and hubris, of course that someone would be Jack. Of fucking course.

..

He dug through the rubble like a man possessed, tearing open a gouge on his hand as he did so but not faltering for even a single second.

“Jack!” He didn’t dare raise his voice too high just in case any hostiles had survived the blast, but he needed his Overwatch to answer him. Since the wall had come down, he hadn’t heard a peep. “C’mon Dalton, you’re not going out like this. You do not get to die on me.”

He scrabbled for a moment against a chunk of sundried stone just a little too heavy for him to comfortably shift, then was rewarded with the smallest sliver of desert camo. More carefully, he tossed aside some of the smaller bricks, uncovering a gloved hand to go along with the arm he’d first seen. From there it was the matter of moments to clear the rest of Jack’s body, quietly thankful with each new revelation that at the very least he was still in one piece. Bruised and bloody, but whole.

And still not waking up. Maybe Mac wasn’t so relieved after all.

“Jack? Dalton? Can you hear me?” He felt for a pulse, gusting out a pained sigh when he finally found it – a little too fast for his liking, but strong all the same. “Thank god,” he breathed quietly.

There was blood around Jack’s eye from a gash on his forehead, with more dripping from a split lip, but otherwise he looked remarkably alright. No doubt his combat gear and dust coated skin was hiding a multitude of bruises and possible broken bones, but at the very least he wasn’t in danger of bleeding out. Or- well. A thought suddenly occurred to Mac and he spent the next ten seconds wrestling with Jack’s vest to get at his stomach to search for any signs of severe internal bleeding, not relaxing until his search turned up nothing more than unbroken skin.

“Okay,” he said more to himself than his unconscious partner. “We’ve got to get out of here. Stayed too long as it is.”

A glance around didn’t turn up anything he could conveniently use as a litter. He was thoroughly unwilling to leave Jack’s side while he was so defenceless, particularly when hostiles might be closing in, so that meant they were doing this the hard way. He started by untangling Jack’s rifle and making sure the safety was on before setting it carefully on the ground beside him; Jack would be giving him hell for messing with it, but if that was an argument he wanted to have then he was just damn well going to have to wake up and have it, wasn’t he?

Next came the man himself. Even though Mac was technically classified as a non-combatant, he’d still had to go through Basic with all the other recruits, so he’d done plenty of fireman’s lifts before. None of them had really prepared him for the added weight of responsibility he felt as soon as Jack was on his shoulders. He’d always considered their partnership to be two-way: Jack protected Mac and Mac protected Jack right back. It had never really felt this literal before though. Normally his protection came in the form of defusing a bomb before it went off, not bearing the man’s limp weight as they moved through hostile territory when at any minute a bullet could come their way.

But now wasn’t the time to be frozen by indecision and fear. Certainly not when he had to contend with the not inconsiderable weight of Jack and his gear, and then had to juggle his rifle in his free hand. Now was the time for action.

Without stopping to overthink it, he hitched Jack up a little higher and took off in the direction of their Humvee.

..

No doubt he made a hell of a scene pulling into camp and skidding the vehicle to a stop beside the medical tent, but by that point he was far too wound up to care. Jack hadn’t so much as stirred once, and while his breathing and heart rate were holding steady, Mac could feel his skin crawling with the awful sense that maybe something was critically wrong after all.

As soon as the Humvee came to a stop, he was on his feet and shouting, summoning the random assortment of medical staff who happened to be both in earshot and available. On the other side of the ‘road’, a handful of signalmen poked their heads out of the communications tent to see what was going on. Mac barely spared them a glance – all he cared about was getting Jack inside and to help as quickly as humanly possible and then finding somewhere quiet so he could have a breakdown in peace.

To that end, he hauled Jack back up onto his shoulders and met the medical staff halfway, breathlessly explaining what had happened. A gurney was unceremoniously shoved in front of him and he carefully tipped his charge down onto it. The second Jack was down, the staff were pulling him away, whisking him off for an examination inside. He took half a step to follow, but was immediately blocked by one of the nurses.

“Sir, are you injured?”

Mac barely spared the Private a glance, trying to push past but getting stopped by a firm hand on his chest. “No, I’m fine, but he’s my Overwatch, I have to-”

“Specialist,” the nurse said sharply, moving with him to keep him from getting past. “Your partner is getting the best care he can. If you’re not injured, you’ll need to report in. Only medical staff and patients are allowed past this point.”

A prickle-hot wave of frustration raced through Mac at being denied access to his partner, but it was almost immediately chased away by a wash of cold when he properly registered what the man had said. ‘You’ll need to report in.’ Of course that’s what he needed to do – standard protocol and all that. Theoretically he was already in violation of his orders by not having turned on his heel the instant Jack was in the hands of the medical staff, although he was pretty sure he could be forgiven in this particular instance.

But even then, he needed to report in. He had to walk up to his commanding officer and explain that because of his own stupidity and carelessness, he might just have gotten his own partner killed. Jack wasn’t well liked by the Brass, exactly, but he was certainly well respected and now Mac had to walk up to the Major and explain just how badly he’d fucked up. And then, assuming that didn’t get him transferred or demoted or fucking arrested, he was going to have to walk into the barracks filled with Jack’s friends and hope that none of them decided revenge was a dish best served hot. The Brass might not like Jack too well, but the men sure did.

Well, at least he had one thing going for him: since they were in the FOB and not the main operating base, he wouldn’t have to report directly to the Colonel. Small mercies.

“Specialist?” The nurse was saying, apparently alarmed by his sudden freeze. “Are you injured?”

“N-No,” he managed when he finally managed to find his voice again. The nurse didn’t look convinced, so he repeated himself more firmly. “No, I’m fine. You’re right, I need to report. Just- Look after him, okay?”

The nurse’s severity and concern fell away under a blanket of reassurance, his expression turning soft. “We will, don’t you worry. I’ll make sure someone lets you know when he gets moved to the ward, okay? You’ll be able to visit him then.”

Barely clinging to the present moment, all Mac could do was nod. The nurse gave him an appraising look, but whatever it was that Mac was projecting apparently passed muster because he nodded sharply and backed off, giving him one last glance before ducking into the tent and disappearing. For a long moment, Mac just stared at the spot where he’d been in the hopes that if he waited long enough, his brain might kick into gear before he had to face the Major.

Of course, it didn’t happen.

In a daze, he backed up from the entrance to the medical tent, glancing about in sudden self-awareness but finding himself mostly alone. The few people he could see appeared to be going about their days as normal, not paying him the slightest bit of attention.

Right. Things to do. No matter what had just happened, he was still on duty. He had work to be doing.

With a firm mental shake, he forced himself to climb back into the Humvee and drive it over to the much more suitable parking lot. He procrastinated for a few minutes then, sorting out his and Jack’s stuff and making sure the equipment he’d collected earlier that morning was still secure. It already felt like a thousand years ago. That done, he checked the vehicle in with the mechanics and headed to the command tent to face his fate.

..

Mac had never had much cause to interact with Major Torres beyond receiving the occasional direct mission brief or having to give an in-person report when a mission went sideways. Both cases usually ended up being pretty stressful affairs, either because there was a lot on the line or because Mac had to own up to some hare-brained scheme that would probably have gotten him court marshalled twenty times over if his skillset hadn’t been in such high demand. The result was that almost all of Mac’s recollections of the Major were coloured in shades of concern and unhappiness, despite the man himself having never done anything particularly bad to Mac himself. On the contrary, the man had been ridiculously forgiving of some of the shit Mac had tried to pull in the past.

Nonetheless, as he stood in front of him now, he couldn’t help but feel incredibly small.

“So you arrived in Sakini at 1300 hours?”

“Yes sir.”

“What was the situation on the ground?”

“At first, quiet. There were a couple of locals around, but they didn’t appear armed and they didn’t visibly react to our presence at all.”

“At first?”

Mac swallowed, willing himself to keep his thoughts in the right order. The last thing he needed was to add ‘filing an inaccurate report’ to his list of transgressions. “Jack – Sergeant Dalton – went out to do a survey of the area. I stayed back in the vehicle. When he deemed it was clear, he called me out while he set up on the roof of a building in- the town square, I guess.” He pointed at the appropriate place on the map, well aware that the handful of buildings hardly constituted a town, much less one in possession of anything resembling a square, but the building Jack had chosen had good sightlines and that was the main point.

“You went looking for the IED.”

“Yes.”

“Did you encounter any resistance?”

“No. The locals all kept out of my way, but not so much so I thought they were actively avoiding me. More like they just didn’t want to get involved in our business.”

“But you did find a device?”

“Yes sir, but not for an hour or so. It had been tucked into the gap between two buildings and blocked off with crates. Just getting to it took longer than it should have done.”

Torres’ expression twisted in something that might have been sympathy. Two US soldiers alone in possibly hostile territory for over an hour was never the start of a happy story.

“Once I did get to it,” Mac continued, bracing himself, “I was able to disarm it pretty quickly. The device was well hidden, but not particularly well built. It had a single failsafe, but compared to a lot of what we’ve been seeing recently, it was surprisingly basic.”

Evidently, his opinion was not welcome; the Major’s face darkened. “If that’s the case, then why is one of my men in the infirmary following an explosion, Specialist?”

He ducked his head on instinct, shame and fear washing over him afresh. It didn’t matter; what had happened, happened, and beating around the bush now wasn’t going to change that.

“Because I messed up, sir,” he said honestly. “The device was successfully disarmed, but before I could pack it up, Sergeant Dalton alerted me to hostiles closing in on our position. One of them must have been watching Sakini in case we showed up. There were too many of them for Jack to safely deal with alone and they were between us and our transport, so I came up with a plan to funnel them into a small space, and then trigger the explosion. It seemed like our best shot of taking them all out at once, so Jack agreed.”

Torres nodded, but didn’t interject with his own opinion.

Mac cleared his throat. “I needed a minute to rearm the device, and we needed to make sure they all got into position, so Jack acted as the bait. He took a few pot shots at them to get their attention, then made a run for it. Thankfully, they followed. I planted the device at a weak point on the building’s exterior, armed it, and retreated.”

“Dalton didn’t have time to clear the building?”

If Mac had been a little more dishonest – and perhaps less certain that he wouldn’t immediately get caught in the lie – he might have said yes. It still put him on the hook for blowing up his Overwatch, but it still felt a little less like a crushing failure on his part. But that wasn’t who Mac was, and even if it had been, it certainly wasn’t who Jack was, and the second he woke up he’d be asked to give his own account of things. The only way forward was the truth, no matter what it might be.

“Actually, he made it out okay. Things appeared to have gone perfectly but… I wasn’t watching my back, sir. I thought that all the hostiles had entered the building and I wasn’t careful enough. One of them managed to flank me. He was yelling something – I don’t speak Arabic – and dragging me back towards the building – I fought him, but…”

The memory flashed back to him, a warm hand painfully tight on his arm, the hard barrel of an assault rifle jabbing into his ribs, and neither of those things as scary as the IED he was being hauled towards. He’d tried to say something, tried to struggle, but the man had been huge even if he hadn’t had a gun to back him up. Mac hadn’t stood a chance.

Fortunately, Torres seemed to read into what he wasn’t saying. “Dalton doubled back to help you.”

“Yes sir.” His voice sounded small even to himself.

“And he got caught in the blast when he came too close to the building.”

“Yes sir.”

A pause. “Were you hurt in the explosion?”

Mac blinked in surprise, caught off guard. In truth, once Jack had gone down and stopped answering his radio, it had never occurred to Mac to even think about himself. “Uh, no sir. The man holding me was – he was between me and the device, so he caught the worst of it. Knocked him out, I think.”

“You think?”

“I- uh. I knew Sergeant Dalton was hurt. I was more focused on getting to him and getting him out than I was about the hostiles.” He knew it sounded bad even as he said it. He tried his best to look sheepish, but all he really felt was bone-deep weariness. He wanted this to be done. “I’m sorry sir.”

The Major shook that off, unconcerned. “With your Overwatch down, Dalton should have been your priority. EOD aren’t trained to be combatants.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but Mac was hardly about to argue with the man. Besides, he doubted it had escaped notice that he wasn’t wearing his sidearm; he’d been given one as part of his kit and told to carry it with him whenever he was in uniform, but after about a month of working with Jack, he’d felt safer leaving it in the Humvee instead. He wasn’t confident that if there was a hostile in front of him he’d be able to shoot them anyway, so carrying around a loaded weapon was more of a liability than anything. Jack didn’t agree, but he hadn’t pressed the issue.

“What happened next?”

“I found Jack buried in the rubble. He had a visible head wound and he was unconscious. When I couldn’t wake him, I carried him back to our vehicle and came straight here.”

Torres nodded slowly. “Do you have anything else of note to report?”

“No sir.” He held still, waiting for his verdict. He could personally point out about twelve different things he’d done wrong, and every single one of them added up to Jack in a hospital bed. If it really was anything worse than a concussion…

If it came to that, there wasn’t anything the Major could do to Mac that he wouldn’t deserve.

“Alright,” the man said, his voice heavy and drawn. “I take it you know that I’ll have to report this up the chain. Circumstances aside, catching your own teammate in a repurposed IED blast isn’t going to look good and that’s before we even get to you getting ambushed.”

“Yes sir.”

Torres sighed, looking momentarily softer than he had any right to after the shitshow he’d just heard about. “For now, the most any of us can do is wait for Dalton to wake up so he can give his own report. We’ll go from there. In the meantime, I’ll send some men out to Sakini to work on clean-up; you go get washed up. You’re off rotation until your Overwatch is back on his feet.”

The very idea of having a shower and going to bed felt utterly heavenly – just thinking of being gifted such a reward after what he’d done made something in Mac balk. He straightened up, trying to make himself look firm. “That’s not necessary, sir. I’m still fit for work.”

Torres paused in surprise, then gave him a quick look up and down. “You’re asking for another Overwatch?”

Mac hesitated, but didn’t back down. “Not permanently, sir. I know Sergeant Dalton’s tour is conditional. But while he’s in recovery, if there’s work that needs doing then I’m happy to do it.”

The Major didn’t look entirely thrilled by the idea, but he wasn’t turning him down cold either. Mostly, he seemed thoughtful. “It sounds like you were pretty close to an explosion yourself. You’re sure you’re in good shape?”

“I mostly caught the blowback, sir. Made my ears ring, knocked the wind out of me. Nothing serious, nothing permanent.” It was true, too. He really had gotten off incredibly lightly given the severity of the situation, and he could mostly thank the man who had been trying to kill him for it. He’d ended up acting as a surprisingly effective human shield, in the end.

Slowly, Torres nodded. “Okay. I’m going to ask you to get a medical check-up to confirm you’re as okay as you say you are, but if that comes back clean, you can keep working. As it happens, one of our other EOD techs – Garcia – is shipping out in the morning, and his Overwatch doesn’t have a new partner yet. You know Corporal Lee?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. You can stick with him until Dalton’s back on rotation. Check in with him directly to get your instructions, clear?”

“Clear, sir. Thank you.”

“Good. Now, go get that check-up and find out what’s become of your partner. You know he won’t be happy about you working with someone else.”

Torres said it lightly, sharing something of an in-joke that Mac was only half party to. Jack had never properly explained the nature of his deal with Torres – and the Colonel above him – to extend his tour with some provisos, but he’d got the impression that there had been a lot of shouting involved. Honestly, he’d been glad to steer clear of it. Apparently, though, it wasn’t too much of a sore point with Torres anymore and Mac was grateful; he’d hated to know that Jack had put so much on the line for his sake.

With a clear dismissal, Mac saluted, then turned on his heel and headed back to the medical tent. He avoided the emergency area this time, electing instead to go into the space just beyond it that was set aside for the standard check-ups that active soldiers were routinely subjected to.

Stupidly, it wasn’t until he was gestured towards an unoccupied booth that he realised his palm was still coated in dried, flaking blood. In everything that had happened, he’d completely forgotten about the minor wound. Not that there was anything to be done about it now. It wasn’t like he could hide it and besides, it really was only very minor. It shouldn’t pose any threat to his ability to work.

When the doctor made it round to him, he suffered through the indignity of the exam with little grace, too worn out and drained to make small talk. Fortunately, the doctor seemed to understand his mind was elsewhere, because he maintained a solid professional demeanour throughout and didn’t prod when others might have done. He cleaned out the slice in Mac’s palm, agreeing that it wouldn’t need stitches, and carefully checked his torso for any signs of major damage. Finding none, he signed off on Mac’s duty form and gave him back his shirt.

“You’re Dalton’s partner, right?” He said, just as Mac finished getting dressed again.

Mac’s eyes snapped up to look at him. “Yes. Is he- Is there news?”

The man shot him a reassuring smile, flapping a hand to soothe his obvious concern. “Everything’s okay, calm down. He took a hell of a knock to the head, but there’s no signs of critical damage. We’ll be keeping him in for a few days for concussion and cognition checks and the like, but from what I’ve heard, he got off remarkably lucky. He’s sedated at the moment, but I think they’re planning to bring him around in the next hour or so – you can go and sit with him if you like?”

He made a vague sweeping gesture in the direction of the main ward, an obvious invitation, but despite his desperation to see that his partner really was still in one piece, Mac hesitated.

The last time Jack had been injured – a bullet graze over the meat of his shoulder that he seemed annoyed by more than anything – Mac had planted himself at his partner’s side and refused to budge. It had felt like the right thing to do; Jack had always made a point of sticking around whenever Mac was ill or injured, and the least he could do was return the favour. Besides, sitting and chatting with him was a lot better than continuously replaying the moment when the bullet had caught him, his cry of pain and surprise. Jack had certainly seemed to appreciate the company while he waited out the required bedrest portion of his recovery.

But that had been then, when Jack had been wounded by a bullet Mac couldn’t possibly have done anything about. Now, he was laid up with a head injury because Mac hadn’t been smart enough to watch his own back for all of five minutes and had ended up luring his partner into an explosion he caused. On every possible level, Jack’s injuries were his fault.

There wasn’t the slightest chance that the first thing he would want to see when he woke up would be Mac’s face.

He became distantly aware that he’d frozen in place and the doctor had started to eye him critically, so he slapped on what he hoped looked like a relieved smile.

“Nah, that’s okay. I don’t want to disturb him if he needs the rest. Besides, I’m knackered too.”

To his credit, the doctor managed to keep whatever he thought about that off his face. Instead, he offered an obliging smile. “Of course. You’ve had a rough day too.”

Mac nodded, then a thought occurred to him. “Can you let me know, though, if- If something happens?”

No matter how much Jack might not want to see Mac, the only way Mac would be able to not bear seeing him is if he knew that the man was going to be okay. He needed to know that his own stupidity hadn’t done worse than what he already knew about.

“Of course. You’re set up as his base contact anyway, so you’re supposed to be kept in the loop.”

He hadn’t known that Jack had done that, though in hindsight it made sense. He’d done the same the day after Jack had decided to stay on after all. Still, the very thought of it now, when Mac was just about the one person in the entire FOB who Jack shouldn’t be relying on to be there in times of trouble- It stung.

He buried the sensation as best he could under a wave of fatigue and hopped down off the examination bed. If he was going to have a breakdown over this, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be here.

“Is that everything?” He asked the doctor, wanting to be done and away from here.

He smiled. “That’s everything, Specialist. You make sure you get some rest before shipping back out tomorrow, okay? I don’t want to see you back here any time soon.”

“Sir yes sir.”

With that done and a form confirming he was ready for active duty clutched tightly in one hand, he scooped up his and Jack’s packs, as well as Jack’s rifle which he still hadn’t had time to return, and marched back out into the blazing sunlight.

..

The first few times Jack woke up, he spent the few minutes of consciousness he had in muddled confusion. There were bright lights and lots of sound, then pale blue moonlight and muffled voices, then light again – through all of it, he couldn’t have said where he was or what was happening. Everything was too distant and vague to grasp, and fatigue had sunk its claws deep into his mind, dragging him back whenever he dared to try to push ahead.

He couldn’t give up though. He might not know what was going on, but he was sure that there was something he was forgetting, something important. Whatever it was didn’t matter – all that did, was that Jack needed to wake up and get to it.

It wasn’t until he finally blinked himself properly awake that he was able to put some logic to the flashes he’d caught before. He was in a hospital bed, with the slowly undulating fabric of a tent above him – the FOB. That certainly made sense, given that he felt like he’d been hit by a truck, but it didn’t really explain the why of that whole situation and no memories seemed ready to spring forth from the depths of his mind to enlighten him.

Christ, what the hell had happened to him?

He crawled his hand over the scratchy bedding, searching for a call button and ending up surprised when he actually found one. Any higher tech than the stone age was normally reserved for the MOB, and since he was in a tent then he clearly wasn’t there. Shrugging it off as unimportant, he hit the button and waited.

A nurse appeared between the screens around his bed less than twenty seconds later. “Sergeant Dalton? Back with us this time?”

“This time?” He muttered, then regretted it when his throat rasped horribly over the words. Clearly he’d been out for a while.

Understanding brightened in her face, and she stepped closer to retrieve a cup of water from his bedside table and present the straw in front of his face. Uncomfortable as he was, he was pretty certain he could have held the cup himself, but it hardly seemed worth the argument when she was willing to do it. Besides, having a beautiful woman feed him by hand was hardly going to be the low point of his day.

When he was done, she returned the cup to its place and pulled out his chart. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling? Any pain?”

“Headache. Feels like I got run over. What happened?”

Her eyes flicked towards him, measuring. “How would you rate the severity of your headache on a scale of one to ten?”

“Four. It’s fine. What happened?”

She pulled a penlight out from the pocket of her scrubs and leaned in to examine his pupils. He let it happen with increasing impatience, long since aware that trying to rush medical staff when they were intent on checking him over was a losing game. Better to let her get it out of her system before pushing too hard for answers.

“Pupil response is normal,” she said after a moment. “It looks as though your concussion is clearing up nicely. Unfortunately you’re still in what we would consider the danger period for head injuries, so you’re going to be staying with us a few days yet for monitoring.”

That was annoying as hell, but with no idea what was wrong with him, he had no scale of what was reasonable. “Sure, fine, whatever. Can you please tell me what happened? I don’t remember getting hurt.”

Truthfully, he didn’t remember much of anything.

She hesitated, but she must have seen the determination in his eyes because she folded without further argument. “You were hit by falling masonry following an explosion. I don’t know the details beyond that. Your partner brought you in.”

His partner-?

Mac!

A rush of memories suddenly hit him, so sharp and fierce that he actually sucked in a hard breath in surprise. The IED in Sakini, hostiles closing in, an utterly insane idea from Mac that just might be crazy enough to work – and it did, right up until he heard a scuffle over the radio, Mac’s voice tight with stress saying, let go of me, we can’t go in there, there’s a bomb-

He hadn’t hesitated for a second to race back in the direction he’d come.

“My partner-” He said wildly, coming to life all of a sudden as cold terror rushed through him. “Mac- Is he- What happened? Where is he?”

Something had to have gone wrong. If he was alright then he would be here, teasing Jack for being so muddled and letting him see with his own eyes that he was unhurt. That was what they did.

The nurse’s hand pressed down firmly on his shoulder, forcing him back down from where he’d tried to jackknife upright. “Sergeant! Please, stay calm. Your partner is completely fine. Specialist MacGyver, right? He’s okay. No injuries.”

Jack’s wild eyes found hers and latched on, seeking truth. “He’s okay?”

“Yes. I promise you. When he brought you in, he wasn’t injured. He had a physical to clear him for duty and came up clean. You’re the one we’ve been worried about.”

There was a lot there that he needed to process, and most of it seemed beyond his exhausted mind, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. Mac was okay. That was- well, honestly, that was far better than he had any right to expect given the nightmare situation they’d been in, and the fact that apparently Jack had just checked out and left the kid to deal with it, in hostile territory no less. God, he owed him a beer.

But if he’d been sought medical clearance, then that meant… “He’s back on duty?”

The nurse nodded, evidently surprised by the question. It was standard practice for uninjured soldiers to rotate as needed around their teammates’ injuries, and if Mac really wasn’t hurt then there was absolutely no need for him to be sitting around the FOB twiddling his thumbs. But, then, ‘standard practice’ had never been their way of doing things. Thanks to Jack’s very carefully worded agreement with the Brass, the pair of them should have been free to turn down any requests for temporary reassignment.

Then again, Mac didn’t seem the type to pass on a call to duty, particularly if there were lives on the line.

He nodded slowly, letting that knowledge settle inside him. Mac was alive and uninjured, if not exactly safe. Jack was – apparently – alive and relatively okay. A win all round, really – so why did he feel like something had gone horribly wrong?

“Okay,” he said slowly, then again more firmly. “So, doc. Give it to me straight: how am I doing?”

..

Jack had kind of assumed that Mac had been absent when he woke because it was clearly the middle of the day, which logically meant that he was off-base somewhere. That was perfectly understandable and given the circumstances, Jack could understand why he’d done it – Mac hadn’t known that Jack was finally going to wake up after all and since he’d apparently been in and out for three whole days, it wasn’t surprising he’d not elected to sit around, bored out of his mind. Still, that logic fell apart just a little bit when night fell and no blond bomb nerd appeared at his elbow.

He knew that Mac was his contact, which meant he must have been informed that Jack was awake and talking and yet- He went to sleep that evening with no visitors.

He slept in the next morning, unintentionally, so if Mac had stopped by before heading out then he would have missed him. He almost wanted to ask one of the staff, but he had a sneaking suspicion that the kid hadn’t been by at all and that… That didn’t feel right.

It wasn’t that Jack thought he was owed Mac’s time or attention or anything like that, but he’d kind of thought that he’d get it anyway. The last time he’d been stuck in the hospital ward, he hadn’t been able to shake Mac off for more than a few minutes at a time, no matter how much he’d pleaded with him to go back to the barracks and get some proper sleep. Any time one of the staff had tried to chase him out, he’d planted his feet and refused to be moved. It had been touching, in an odd kind of way, a clear demonstration of Mac saying ‘If you’ve chosen me, I’ve chosen you too.’

Now- Now it was different, and Jack was pretty sure that wasn’t a good thing.

Some careful questioning – and an outright demand for an explanation from Major Torres when he showed up to get Jack’s report – had brought some things to light, but made others even murkier. For one, Mac had actively requested to remain on duty. After what had happened last time, that was a big red flag in its own right. He did at least have Lee watching his back, someone who Jack knew to be a crack shot and clever with it, so he probably wasn’t getting himself into too much trouble, but still.

Torres had also made it clear that their failed mission was not being received particularly well by the higher ups. When pressed, he’d alluded to the fact Mac had – apparently entirely willingly – painted himself right into the corner and placed the blame directly on his own shoulders. Jack hadn’t been able to keep himself from swearing aloud. Goddamn self-sacrificing idiot. He’d tried to make it clear that Mac hadn’t been to blame for what happened, and Torres seemed inclined to listen to him, but the details of his report did match up squarely with what Mac had said. The only difference was that Jack wasn’t about to start playing the blame game.

All signs pointed to something being very, very wrong with his partner.

When that evening rolled around and there was still no Mac, Jack had been about ready to climb out of bed himself and hunt the git down. In the end he was spared the trouble by a surprise visitor – just not the one he’d been expecting.

“Jackie! You’re looking- well, a bit shit, honestly, but much better than before.” Corporal Lee – Ryan, to basically everyone who had known him for more than five minutes – stuck his head through the break in the screens and offered him a wide, toothy grin.

“Thanks,” he shot back, grimacing at him then stopping when it pulled at the colourful array of bruising he knew was adorning his face – and most of the rest of him, come to think of it. “What are you doing here?”

Ryan slipped through the screens to stand beside him, casting a careful eye over his injuries even while he waved a careless hand in dismissal. “Your boy got a splinter that I’m making him get checked out. Thought I’d stop by to see you since I’m already here.”

White, electric panic shot down Jack’s spine. “Mac’s hurt?”

“No, no, he’s fine! Yeesh, calm down. It really is just a splinter, I promise, cross my heart. If he was anybody else, I wouldn’t have made him come here but I swear to god, someone needs to teach that boy he’s not immortal.”

The words were clearly meant in jest, but Jack felt the pit of worry in his gut that had opened when he woke up without Mac beside him suddenly yawn wider. Mac had never been particularly good at putting his own safety on his list of priorities, and if he really was blaming himself for Jack’s injuries, then there was a good chance he’d be acting downright reckless.

“He’s been giving you a hard time?” He asked, just to make sure.

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Honestly man, I have no idea how you do it. I’ve been driving myself hoarse telling him to keep his goddamn head down and I’ve only been working with him a few days.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” he said, hoping his levity covered the ice crawling through his chest. Goddamn it Mac, you don’t get to do this. “You two have any trouble?”

“Nothing worth reporting on. More IEDs than I ever wanted to see in my life but that’s kinda par for the course, right?”

“Tell me about it.”

“But other than that, it’s been pretty quiet. Word got around that your boy took out ten hostiles on his own, so maybe the T-men are all too busy trying to stay out of his way. I sure fucking would if I were them.”

That did actually pull a smile out of Jack, despite everything. The situation was definitely FUBAR, but it was about time someone other than him realised the sheer elemental force that was a pissed off Angus MacGyver. For a skinny little bomb nerd, he packed a surprising punch.

“You haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

“You have no idea how horrifying that is to hear, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Hey, you said he was here, right? In medical?”

Ryan rolled his eyes, smiling. Clearly he wasn’t distracted by Jack’s meek attempts at feigning disinterest. “Yes, he’s about twenty metres that way, and yes, I will tell him to come and see you as soon as that pretty blonde nurse stops flirting with him. I thought he was gonna come yesterday, but he ended up just crashing. Not sure he’s been sleeping all that well.”

The last was said with a quiet, gentle concern, the type of tone that made Ryan one of the most popular soldiers on base. He might be a devil in a firefight, but he was genuine and he cared about the men he served with well beyond what he was officially required to do. Jack was, not for the first time, very glad that this was the Overwatch Mac had been transferred to.

“Who does, in this place? Can you remember what your twenties were like? I’m glad I didn’t spend mine in this hellhole.”

Ryan shuddered. “I don’t think I was ever that young.”

“Me neither.” They shared a look of weary amusement as Ryan patted a warm hand to his shoulder and kicked off from where he’d been leaning against the bed.

“I’ll go make sure your boy doesn’t escape without saying hello. You take care man, okay? We’ve missed you in the barracks.”

“Not sure anyone’s ever missed my snoring before,” he shot back with a smile, then sobered. “And hey, thanks man. For watching out of him. There’s no one else I’d trust more.”

“Don’t sweat it. You’ve pulled my ass out of the fire before. You just rest up and let me take care of your bomb nerd for a bit.”

..

Mac knew that Ryan had only really been making him come to medical to prove a point and that it was all in service of trying to watch out for him while Jack was laid up, but he still found himself pissed off by it. He wasn’t a child in need of someone to pull out his splinters – he’d been perfectly capable of doing that since he was five. Besides, Ryan hadn’t even tried to pretend it wasn’t payback for Mac ignoring his warnings earlier that morning and momentarily ducking out of his sightline to check out a suspicious rock pile.

There hadn’t even been anything buried under the rocks – it was just a false alarm. He’d been back under the protective watch of Ryan’s scope inside of a minute.

All of this to say, he was pretty sour about the whole experience. The nurse was incredibly patient with him, raising an eyebrow at Ryan when he cheerfully explained the problem like he was a parent dropping a kid off at daycare. The attitude had not helped matters. Regardless, she’d sat him down and pulled out her disinfectant and tweezers, and hadn’t reacted at all to Mac’s stormy expression.

It was a waste of his time, and more importantly hers. There were soldiers here with real, actual injuries that needed tending to and here he was taking up space and resources for a ‘wound’ he had scarcely even noticed. Still, he was here now and it wasn’t like Ryan wasn’t going to give him shit for it if he didn’t stick around, so he stayed where he was, feeling worse with every passing minute.

The splinter was hardly difficult to find, in inch long fragment of wood sticking haphazardly out of the inside of his wrist. Too shallow to cause any real damage, but long enough to itch something fierce. It had taken all of Mac’s willpower not to scratch himself raw on the drive back. The nurse hummed in sympathy when she saw it, but didn’t take the opportunity to make a comment that would so visibly have been unwelcome. She simply disinfected her tweezers and got to work.

The process hurt, but it was superficial. More frustrating was the agonising amount of time she spent examining the wound, trying to make sure she’d removed every last bit of debris before she let him go. He knew that it was literally her job to thorough and that he’d live to regret it if there was something nasty still lurking under his skin, but he couldn’t help his own impatience. He’d done everything he could to avoid the medical tents in the last few days and now he was stuck here, no doubt metres away from his Overwatch.

The urge to give in and seek Jack out was almost overwhelming now that he was actually here.

He’d been told that he’d woken up and didn’t appear to have suffered any neurological effects from his injuries or from his extended sedation, but Mac couldn’t trust that until he saw it with his own eyes. If he hadn’t been so sure that Jack wouldn’t want to see him, he’d have been at his side as soon as he heard the news. As it was, Jack hadn’t asked for him so he’d stayed clear.

Ryan reappeared just as the nurse was smoothing a dressing down over the small gash. “Dalton’s a tough son of a bitch, huh?”

Mac’s head snapped up to look at him. “You’ve been to see him?”

“Yeah. And, as it turns out, I think he’s pretty surprised that you haven’t.” Ryan raised his eyebrows pointedly, somehow both a question and a condemnation. Mac was in no mood to answer either.

He shrugged. “I’ve been busy, and he’s been sleeping.”

“He’s not sleeping now.” Mac bit his tongue to clamp down on his response to that. Fortunately, Ryan didn’t seem to need one, because he continued, “He’s asking to see you. If you’re done here?”

The nurse, packing up her things, nodded amiably as an answer, then bid them both goodbye and left. Mac somehow felt more exposed with her gone and nothing else to distract Ryan’s attention.

He wanted to refuse. The only reason Jack would be asking after him is if he wanted to tear him a new one for being so uncompromisingly shit at his job that he’d nearly killed his partner, and Mac just didn’t think he was solid enough to take that right now. But, really, that didn’t matter. If Jack wanted to chew him out, then it wasn’t like it was anything Mac didn’t one hundred percent deserve. He’d have to face the music sooner or later and he stubbornly refused to be a coward about it.

“Okay,” he said instead of trying to find an excuse. “Lead the way.”

Brave face or not, apparently he was a coward in the end anyway, because he hesitated at the very last hurdle; it had taken Ryan physically pushing him forwards to get him past the screens surrounding Jack’s bed. The view that greeted him was- not unexpected, but hardly a pleasant one either.

Jack was awake and blinking at him, which was a vast improvement on the unconscious slump he’d worn the last time Mac had laid eyes upon him, but his face was also a patchwork of blues and purples, softening to a sickly yellow at the edges. He looked – well. He looked like a wall had been dropped on his head.

He opened his mouth with absolutely no idea what was about to fall out of it, but it didn’t matter because Jack immediately cut him off.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

It brought Mac up short. “I- What?”

“Me getting hurt. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Jack-”

“No, shut up, listen to me. I know you and I think I’m finally getting some idea of what’s going on in that idiot head of yours because you told Torres that you were to blame for all this. Isn’t that right?”

“Well. I am.”

Jack huffed, visibly annoyed, and Mac had no idea what he was supposed to do in this situation. He’d expected anger, shouting, not whatever this was. “Goddamn it kid. This isn’t on you, of course it isn’t. Why would you even think that?”

He’d apparently meant it as some sort of rhetorical question because he blanched when Mac put up a hand to count his mistakes on his fingers. Jack spoke before he had the chance to start.

“No, don’t actually answer that. Forget I asked. Look, whatever moon logic you’re using to blame yourself for this? It’s nonsense, man. And no one else is going to tell you that because they don’t know, but I was there, okay? I was there the whole time. And I’m telling you right now that you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Distantly, Mac felt his body trembling. This wasn’t what he’d expected.

“We were in a shit situation, and your quick thinking is what got us out of it. I’m the one who was stupid enough to run towards an active IED even when I knew it was about to blow. And even after that, when the person who’s supposed to be watching out of you was out for the count, you kept your shit together long enough to get us both home without any further injury.”

Mac blinked at him.

“You saved my life, man.”

That was too much. He hissed, flinching at the absurdity of it. “I nearly killed you.”

“Nah, I did that. My mistake, not yours. And besides, I’m fine – couple of bruises ain’t nothing.”

“You were coming back because I was in trouble. Because I couldn’t look after myself for three minutes.”

Jack was shaking his head and Mac wished he’d stop because it looked like it hurt, and he couldn’t bear any more of Jack’s pain right now. “We were surrounded by hostiles Mac. It’s my job to keep an eye out for them so you can keep your eyes right where they need to be, and even I thought they’d all gone into that building. Anyone outside of that was trying to keep out of sight and you had no way of knowing you needed to be watching for that kind of threat. That’s what I’m here for, remember?”

Unable to find words to refute him, Mac just shook his head adamantly.

His Overwatch’s gaze turned soft. “Hey, man, c’mon. You’ve got to know that you didn’t have any control over what happened, and the bits you did, you did great. You got me out of there all by yourself. So what’s going on man?”

Mac hesitated, feeling torn open and raw, but somehow still entirely safe under Jack’s eyes. When he said nothing further, Mac felt himself deflate. “I’ve never-” He stopped, retried. “I didn’t come out here to hurt people,” he managed quietly. “All I’ve tried to do is disarm IEDs and limit the destruction and then this time…”

“This time you were the one setting the bomb.” Jack’s voice was level, understanding and without judgement.

“Yeah. And, of course, not only do I manage to-” He bit off the end of that sentence, his breathing ragged. “I also nearly killed you.”

He was aware that there were tears welling in the corners of his eyes, but he honestly couldn’t have been sure what emotion they were trying to convey. He just felt overwhelmed.

Jack put out a hand, setting his fingertips lightly on Mac’s elbow, the only part of him he could reach where Mac was keeping his distance. “That was the first time you killed someone,” he said calmly.

Wordless and bereft, Mac nodded. One of the tears slipped free.

“Ah, kiddo,” Jack breathed, leaning over a little further to grab Mac’s arm properly and pull him closer. Laid up as he was, he couldn’t offer much of a hug, but he was able to settle for tucking Mac into the curve of his arm and settling him there. “You didn’t do anything wrong, you hear me? I’m so sorry that you were in that situation at all, but you did everything right. Those men- They would have killed you and me and everyone in that village without hesitation, okay? I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you were protecting people Mac.”

Exhausted, overwhelmed, and with no way of voicing any of it, Mac just clung to Jack with a desperation he’d be self-conscious about if he was anyone else. Jack shushed him softly, running his hand up and down his back, and it was only then that Mac realised he was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled wetly, not sure himself if he was apologising for Jack’s injuries or his own meltdown.

“Ain’t got nothing to be sorry for.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. I’ll keep telling you as long as you need to hear it hoss, but this wasn’t your fault. None of it.”

They stayed like that for a long time. Mac felt himself starting to come together again just a little, still raw and hurting but able to breathe again. It was imperfect, but it was still somehow the best he’d felt in days. When he pulled back his head to look at Jack, he found his Overwatch smiling at him.

“There you are. Had me worried for a moment.”

“Sorry.”

Jack snorted. “If you insist on apologising, you could at least have the decency to do it for something that actually deserves it. Like, say, driving Ryan up the wall with your reckless behaviour?”

Mac’s eyes dropped, flushing. Jack just laughed at him, warm and relieved, absent of any actual anger. That part would probably come later, but it was obvious to anyone who looked that Mac wasn’t going to be able to withstand that sort of attack right now.

“Damn it kid. You’re okay though, right? Not hiding any injuries or something?”

“No. I should be asking you that. You’re the one who nearly died.”

“I’m not that easy to kill, brother. And besides, I had you watching my back. I knew you’d get me home safe.”

Mac’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think unconscious counts as safe.”

“I’m awake now, aren’t I?”

“Jack.”

Unable to help himself, Jack ruffled a hand through Mac’s mop of hair, laughing when he chirped in alarm and rapidly backpedalled out of reach. “I’m going to be just fine Mac. Quit worrying about me. I’ll be back on duty and driving you crazy over the radio in no time at all.”

When it came, Mac’s smile was a careful thing. “Can’t wait.”

“Me neither kid. Me neither.”

[introvertguide]

Colonel Bogey March

The film The Bridge on the River Kwai is famous for the whistled march of the soldiers in a Japanese interment camp during WW2. The song is called “The Colonel Bogey March” and the titular Colonel has a long history with Scottish lore, golf, and mocking dictators. How can one person have done so much? Easy, this person does not exist. Let me give you a little bit of Bogey history:

This all started with a Scottish goblin called a Bogle which referred to any number of spirit types that plague humans. These wee beasties didn’t necessarily kill humans, but instead enjoyed causing trouble along the lines of a gremlin. As time passed, a song called Bogey Man became popular and listeners were told to beware the Bogey Man (this became the Boogey Man in American stories).

If you have ever tried to play baseball or kickball when there weren’t enough players, you might have had to have an imaginary player on base. When I was a kid, we would call these markers a ghost man. “Ghost Man on second!” Well, when standardizing the scoring for a round of golf was established, the players imagined a ghost player that played an ideal game with a low score. This was developed at a military course in the UK, so their “ghost man” was called Bogey and he was given a rank so he could use the course, thus Colonel Bogey was born. As golf scores got lower, American’s demoted the score of the Colonel and his score was considered one more than ideal and the new ideal score was call par. 

Eventually, a military man who golfed (and wasn’t very good) often lost to Colonel Bogey. In his frustration, he would not yell “fore” after a poor golf shot and instead whistle a two-note descending phrase which eventually became part of the tune for the Colonel Bogey March. The song was written by a British army bandmaster named Lieutenant J.F. Ricketts who witness this golf play. Ricketts published all of his works under the pseudonym Kenneth Alford since service personnel were not supposed to have jobs outside the military.

This famous march is featured in The Bridge on the River Kwai about the failing efforts of Japan to build a railroad that went from Burma to Thailand. The film is set in 1942, after the fall of Singapore, when Japan was already losing the war and building the railroad became a matter of honor. Abandoned British plans for building a bridge over the river were discovered by Japan so POWs were used to try and complete the project. In reality, the project was called “The Railroad of Death” because tens of thousands of prisoners were forced to build 250 miles of track in jungles filled with aggressive animals and practically impassible ground. 

Many POWs never even made it to the railroad because they were shipped in packed trams and given cholera water to drink. Once in Burma, the men were marched over a mountain where thousands more died. Once at the camp, the captured soldiers were hanged, beaten, worked to death, died from disease and malnourishment, and killed by tigers. The railroad was actually finished in 18 months when the original plan was for 5 years. 

The films depiction did not focus on the horrors of building most of the railroad, but focused on one section that was especially troublesome. The idea of the song was to demonstrate the “stiff upper lip” mentality of the British during WW2 (things are bad but just deal without complaining) since the song march had been given words that emasculated Axis power leaders, proclaiming their testicles did not work. The added lyrics go a little something like this:

“Hitler, has only got one ball. Goring, has two but very small. Himmler, is rather sim’lar, But poor old Goebbels, has no balls at all.”

The whistled song in the film was a big middle finger or two fingers (depending if you were American or British) to the camp supervisor and a message that their spirit was not broken. With all the history behind it, the song is simple and a little childish yet symbolic of undying spirit and thus a great moment in film. Thank you, Colonel Bogey, your memory and your spirit live on.

[prorevenge]

Bully me? Fine, but Ill start a fire as I leave.

I posted in Nuclear Revenge, but was also told to post it here! Sorry its so long, TL;DR at the end!

I worked at a fortune 500 company for almost a year and a half, I wont name names, but it was a shady company to say the least. I started in their quality department, but I was literally fired for being "too quality" for the quality department because I would report sales agents that were forcing crying retirees into making a purchase. So they moved me to the Business Verification Department, so I could instead make these customers happier with their purchase.

Im sorry to say I was far too good at this job as well. I got constant kudos from the quality department that I always hit my marks. I always verified and corrected information, followed procedure to a T, and even took on several extra projects just to help out, including preparing and sending gifts out to our higher volume customers on behalf of the sales reps. I was always on time, I was friendly with everyone, and yet I didn't quite fit in. As a matter of fact, only one person on this new team was someone I could talk to, the others were all mid to late 30s, with kids and husbands/ex husbands. Best way to describe them, its the Heathers that grew old, and hated it.

They would constantly bully me. I dont mean tease me, I mean they would joke about forcing me to work in a broom closet, they would report me for cell phone use even though cell phones were allowed, just no recording or video calling since we would verify card and address information verbally, they would deliberately leave me out of company food orders and celebrations, and even convinced the manager not to promote me, and instead promoted someone who had been there less time with worse quality, only because she 'fit in' better. Shed literally cost the company money shipping product to the wrong address multiple times, and still was promoted within the department.

They would also berate me for the state of my desk. I will say I dont keep a super clean desk, but we are not customer facing, and it was my organized chaos. It wasn't old food or trash, just a general scattering of notes and trinkets that NEVER overflowed past my desk. The real juice here though, was about 4 months into this position, I started documenting all the bullying. Every instance, every word, with a date and time and often a reference within the companies system for where to locate proof of the bullying, all on those little note pads. Well one day I come back from lunch and they had GONE THROUGH MY DESK to "clean" it, going so far as to move my trinkets and pictures around on my desk. I took everything home that day, but I know they'd actually been after my notebooks. Thankfully Id just had to buy a third one (I filled the first two up!) So it was mostly empty.

The final straw came on a fateful February afternoon. It was a Thursday. The one co-worker I got along with and I had been texting back and forth, mostly Craigslist ads for job openings and funny memes to get us through the day, because remember, phones are allowed. She goes to lunch as Im coming back, and I get called into their lawyers office. Me and my one and only friend, were being given formal write ups. Why? (Direct quote) "Your co-workers know you are texting about them and laughing, and they dont like it." So I was getting a write up... Because of an assumption that they had no proof of to begin with, and wasn't even remotely true. The topper of this was as I exited the write up, one of them was face timing her husband. Which was against the rules, but of course she wasn't even spoken to about it.

I was done. Beyond done. I put my head down, barely worked the rest of the day. When I got home, I texted my manager and let her know I was using PTO and Id be out Friday. I spent the whole weekend working on my resignation, because I wanted it to be -just right-.

You see, Id been there a year and a half at that point, and I knew a few things about how this shady company operates by now. I knew on Thursday this was going to be my first time ever to quit a job, and I wanted to do it up right. I wrote in there specific details of the bullying. Dates, times. I mentioned I had many more examples documented. I wrote how it was known behavior and even condoned by the manager. I wrote about the write up. Then, after many critiques, I saved it as a draft.

I walked in on Monday morning, 8 am on the nose. I didn't bother clocking in, and Id already cleaned out my desk remember? I sat down, printed two copies of my email, and then sent it DIRECTLY TO THE CEO.

I of course dropped a copy off with HR, and then walked out. Not a word to my manager. Only my one friend knew the plan. You see I knew theyd snuff out the fire if I said anything to them about why I quit. Sweep it under the rug, oh well, one more person who quit. By involving the CEO, I eliminated that as an option.

In 30 minutes their lawyer was calling me for an "exit interview". They were worried I would sue for a hostile working environment. In hindsight, I should've, but I was more worried about my mental health than monetary compensation.

I found out from my friend that I had in fact started that fire. The whole department was put under review for bullying, cell phones were completely banned, and the manager and her lackeys (last I heard) had been demoted. I also heard whispers that theyd dissolved it completely and merged it with the Quality team, but Im not positive on that.

Im sure it didn't fix everything, but I hope they at least keep their hands out of other peoples desks from now on.

TL;DR my entire team at a fortune 500 company and bullying and harassing me to the point of unfair write ups, so when I quit I sent an email directly to the CEO about my resignation along with the information that everything was thoroughly documented, causing them to majorly reform the department and demote people after I walked out.

(source) story by (/u/Audginator)

[jawritter]

Promised

Chapter 8

**Series Warnings!! ** ABO dynamics! Smut, unprotected smut, knotting, claiming, mating, heat, rut, language, overly protective Jensen, age gap! 19-year-old reader, 41-year-old Jensen, virgin reader, loss of virginity, sort of an arranged marriage, hint at possible mob type settings.

Story Description:

In a world where your presentation can be a blessing or a curse, a newly presented Omega will come face to face with the harsh reality of Alphas, Omegas, and pack alliances that are expected to be upheld with the union of your two families…

A/N: Pt.8!!! Please don’t copy my stuff! Feedback is welcomed! If you want to be added to the series tag list, or just my tag list in general let me know! Cross-posted on Wattpad! Hope you enjoy it!! This is my first ABO series so be nice lmao!

Word Count: 1863

Pairing: Jensen x Reader, OCF Uncle David x Read, OCF Uncle David x Jensen, Jensen x Siser, Jensen x other unnamed/mentioned FC.

Missed it so far? Catch up!!

**********MASTERLIST***********

Nervous was NOT an adequate word to describe what you were right now. Terrified was more appropriate. You felt like your heart was literally going to beat out of your chest, you had a knot in your stomach that made you feel like you wanted to vomit. You were shaking as you tried to apply your makeup standing in the Dallas hotel room that Jensen had rented so that you both could get ready for the ceremony. It also helped in prolonging your arrival time to get to the Ackles Estate.

Jensen wasn't in much better shape. You took Jared's private jet from Austin to Dallas so that you could fly home directly from the ceremony tonight. Jensen was in pre-rut. He had to knot you twice once you got to the hotel room before you could even get up and get ready for tonight. His anxiety was high. You could feel it. He was being way overprotective and couldn't turn it off.

After showering, you stood on one side of the mirror putting the finishing touches on your makeup, and Jensen was leaning against the counter watching your every move like some imminent danger was going to come through the door at any moment and try and hurt you if he got too far away for too long. 

The box that he hated more than you thought hating something was even possible, containing your matting collar, sat on the counter between the two of you waiting for your Alpha to put it on you like it was his right to.

When you zipped the bag and put it away, you turned to look at your Alpha. The lines were showing around his eyes a little more tonight than you ever saw them. His shoulders were stiff, and he looked every bit of on edge as you felt.

Taking your finger you slide the box toward him, and his green eyes drift down to look at it before running his fingers over the outside of the box.

You knew he hated this. You knew that he wanted nothing more than to run back to the plane, get on it, and never look back; but alas you knew, just like he knew, this appearance was mandatory, and if you didn't show your faces the 'civil war' as he called it would break out with vengeance.

Yes, this ceremony was about the transfer of responsibility from Jensen to Josh, but it was also so the families could see that you were indeed mated and that Jensen had claimed you, and there was no denying it.

Opening the box without a word, Jensen pulled out the collar and turned your back to him so that he could slip it around your neck. You felt him hesitate before he finally slipped it around your neck, closing the clasp as you dropped your hair, as you turned to face him again.

"I hate this, Y/N. I hate this thing, I hate this ceremony, I hate these stupid packs, I hate everything about this," Jensen said, his voice deep and low as he pulled you close to him as possible.

"One night Alpha, just a few hours, and then we're flying home. It will be over before we know it, just go through the motions. Keep the peace for the last time. Then for us, it's all over. We can go home."

Jensen took a deep breath like he was trying to pull you scent into his very soul.

"I'll keep you safe tonight Omega, you don't have anything to worry about. If your father tries anything stupid I'm going to rip his throat out with my teeth." 

You could feel the growl building in his chest before the sound made its way to his lips.

"Promised?" you asked him, fear settled deep in you as you heard Jensen's phone buzz in his pocket, letting you know that Clif was there to give you a ride to the Ackles Estate.

"Promised," he said, crashing your lips to his in a bruising kiss. Stealing your breath away from you, and making your heart momentarily still in your chest. You never seemed to get used to the way he could make you weak with just a kiss.

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

An hour later you found yourself sitting at a table with a bunch of Alpha men, all you assumed were part of the Ackles pack and their Omegas. All adorned collars that were very similar to yours.

At the small podium that almost looked like a preacher's pulpit, Mr. Ackles had given a speech explaining the change in headship of your father's pack, who you had yet to see; but you assumed that he was around there somewhere, angry and avoiding you, and the change in his pack as well.

Everyone seemed to expect the information with grace. The other Alpha's at the table kept the conversation lite as the dinner was served, brought out on plates, and sat in front of everyone while they ate.

Josh and his Omega, the new airs to the Ackles Estate, sat at the same table as Jensen and yourself. His Omega seemed nice, they seemed to be genuinely happy together, they were true mates though, and you were starting to think that made all the difference in the world. Josh was a lot like Jensen in a lot of ways, quiet, mild-mannered for an Alpha. He treated his Omega with a lot of respect compared to some of the other Alphas, who you could tell were highly mistreating their Omega's; but what could you do? It wasn't your place to say anything. Your mate forfeited his position in the pack as a pack leader. So you no longer had a say.

So you did the only thing you could, sat quietly next to your Alpha, waiting for the chance to get the hell away from this place, and these packs, and their strange rules, and oppressive lifestyles.

Jensen never took his hand off of you in one way or another. He either had a death grip on your hand, or he had his hand on your thigh. Either way, he never was not touching you. Possession reeking off of him in waves. His scent letting every Alpha around him know not to get to close to his mate. Which you didn't mind at all. It honestly made you feel better knowing that they all kept their distance.

Just when dinner was winding down, things were starting to wrap up. Alan had come to chat and left. Wishing you and Jensen well, Josh and his Omega had a line of people running at them, everyone wanting to get their name in good with the someday to be Alpha in charge.

You heard someone calling your name. Turning around like someone might attack you, you looked and saw your Uncle David standing there, a few feet away. His eyes locked on you.

Jensen saw him, his shoulders stiffened, a growl low in his throat.

"Jensen? Is it okay if I at least tell my niece goodbye before I go?" he approached with his head down, and his hands raised like Jensen had a loaded gun on him or something. Jensen nodded tightly, but never let go of your hand. Your Uncle came up to you, wrapping you up in a hug the best that he could.

"You know I was worried about you kiddo, but you look good, you really do."

"Thanks," was all you could manage to get out. Your nerves all the sudden on high alert again.

"Where's my father?" you asked, your voice low, afraid of what the answer might be.

"Opped not to come. I think he's still ashamed that he was demoted, but honestly, I'm glad you got out kiddo. You got a good man here, he's going to take good care of you. You deserve better than the life these packs have to offer, and he can give you that. Don't worry about your dad. He will survive."

You nod your head and hug your Uncle one more time. Relaxing a little when you found out that your dad wasn't at the ceremony tonight. You felt a little safer. Jensen seemed to relax some too.

"You know this is virtually over. Let's go home. I think we can slip out now without being seen, or questioned too much."

You nodded your head in agreement, giving your Alpha a peck on the lips as you leaned in.

"That sounds good to me. Let me just run to the little girl's room before we take off, and we can head to the airport. I'm ready to get out of here too."

Jensen nodded his head tightly. He knew he couldn't follow you into the bathroom without people talking, but he also knew that he didn't like you leaving his sight.

"Okay, but hurry please," he whispered as a man you didn't know came up and got his attention, asking him about some project that Jensen was rumored to be working on while you made your way down the busy hallway toward the women's room.

You thought you saw one of your dad's old bodyguards hanging out by the door, but assumed that he was here with your uncles and you brushed it off.

Walking into the bathroom you stood at the sink and started to check your makeup, Freshen up before you were stuck on a plane for an hour, you knew your Alpha would be ready for you again when the plane landed, just since arriving at the ceremony his sent was even stronger, and you knew he'd be in full blow rut before long.

You thought you heard the bathroom door open. Before you could turn to see who it was entering the bathroom there was a sharp sting in the back of your neck, right at your hairline. You felt the room spin around you. The edges of your vision are getting darker. The last thing you remember seeing as you hit the cold bathroom floor was a pair of nice black ack dress shoes and slacks that did not belong to your Alpha, then it all went black...

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Jensen's POV:

Where is she? What the hell is taking so long? She should have been out of the bathroom by now? What's taking her so long?

A high pitched whine fell from the back of his throat as he waited at the end of the hallway for his Omega to emerge from the bathroom. Some idiot fanboy wanted to talk about shit that was just rumor, and now he didn't know where you were. He was about ready to pull his hair out. Frustration from his rut, plus the panic that was starting to settle in was more than he could handle.

He saw an Omega emerge from the women's room. One that he knew. Thank God. Reaching out he grabbed his sister by the arm. Stopping her in her tracks.

"Hey! Was y/n still in there? I can't find her!"

Mackenzie stopped in her tracks. Looking at her brother like he was crazy.

"No Jay. I was the only one in there."  

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

Tag List:

@deanwanddamons @imabitch4jensen @rvgrsbrns @bi-danvers0

Series Tag List:

@spnfamily-j2 

@stoneyggirl 

@onethirstyunicorn

@bloo-moon-freak

@musiclovinchic93​

@perpetualabsurdity​

@theoneandonlymelol​

@xhannahbananax03​

@xcastielbabyangelface​

@leahnicole1219​

[mallowstep]

interstitial: hiatus announcement, blog update, mystery projects

from monday, april 19th, to may 1st, i'll be on hiatus.

exactly what that means is i'm not sure. i'll likely update, but no promises.

other blog news/updates below the cut

okay, to start with the fun stuff:

mystery projects

in this lovely month of may, i'll be doing windclan appreciation. the two major projects are...

i'll believe the wind is calling me (not the time i changed a title within twelve hours of posting, a different one.) feat. cinderpaw, deadfoot, and the old forest. i'm very excited about this one. so far it's looking to be pretty long, but i'm hoping i'll be able to finish it during hiatus and then edit the chapters before posting. because otherwise this is going on a very delayed posting schedule.

the only thing as holy as my love must be you feat. crowfeather, squirrelflight, and the three. (it's not a squirrelcrow au sorry i just realized that could be misleading.) anyway, this one is probably not going to post super often because of other demands, but i am excited for it. you may remember what it's about if you have a freakishly good memory.

other annoucements

i've decided after winds of change, i'm going to be doing a disabled character focus. that lets me finish ashes, i'll believe the wind is calling me, and waiting for me in some unholy sunlight, while also working on/posting dovefeather (med cat dovewing au). this was previously canon divergence stuff, but i almost exclusively write canon divergence anyway.

i'm pretty happy with this/looking forward to it so i don't see it changing.

also, dream of a home i'll never see is on indefinite hiatus. i wrote a post explaining this somewhere, but i'm just going to be upfront, i don't like the first chapter and until i can figure out why and how to fix it, i don't feel comfortable posting chapter two.

it's frustrating because i am excited for chapter two, but i just...there's some stuff i can put my finger on (the reunion scene is all wrong, for one), but there's a deeper, underlying issue i can't pin down. i try hard not to let this happen, but doahins escaped my notice.

ao3 updates

aka the self indulgent section where i list the top 5 fics

ashes remains most read, and it's second overall. which is pretty impressive. i don't think it's going to ever beat my drarry long one-shot, because, uh, that's very popular, but it's closer than i ever thought. so thank you guys.

ashes tops all the charts, but in second place...

better left unsaid still has the most kudos. its companion piece, "ilex aquifolium" (which i can now spell from memory) is also doing insanely well. both of these are two of my favorite pieces, so i'm glad y'all agree.

waiting for me in some unholy sunlight is also doing well. i'm glad, it's got a soft spot in my heart. the chapter updates are slow (at least, compared to ashes), but i'm quite fond of it.

may there be no sadness of farewell is nearly tied with ashes for bookmarks, which is frankly impressive. i'm working on the next chapter for that but lord knows when it'll be out. probably not today, i want to post the next chapter of ashes so everyone can lose their head again.

dream of a home i'll never see is subscribed to and frankly given i'm not sure when i'll be updating it again, i recommend subscribing to it if you like the squirrel that leaps into flight au.

general updates

okay, the twice a day thing worked for me over april break, but i'll be going back down to once daily updates starting in may. when my semester is over, i'll consider upping it, but don't hold your breath.

also, as far as ongoing projects go...

ashes it's physically impossible for me not to work on this, so i'm sure i'll continue to update. but it might get demoted down to weekly updates until june. we'll see.

waiting for me in some unholy sunlight in a good place right now, so probably won't see an update for a while.

may there be no sadness of farewell shrug? i'm not sure. it's got the longest chapters out of anything on-going (although once i start posting ibtwicm, it's going to lose that honor, because that has 3-4k chapters), so it takes the longest to write, and i also take it the most seriously. squils is important to me, i want to do right by her.

five clans alike in dignity will continue to update, albeit, in a somewhat slower fashion. i've got three+ works for this nearly or almost done. but they'll get posted here, to tumblr, first.

the elders' den i'm workign on it. we'll see.

vanishing point i'm not sure when i'll next be adding to this, but there are two more fics for it — a jay piece and a lion piece — so i will be adding to it.

here is the deepest secret shrug? we'll see

alright, that's all! y'all are wonderful, see you in two weeks.

<3

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

May 6, 2020 (Wednesday)

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, Trump was talking about disbanding his coronavirus task force because it had outlived its usefulness and the administration was going to go full speed ahead on rebuilding the economy; today, Time magazine issued this week’s cover: an “OPEN” sign with the N ripped off and put in front of the other letters to spell “NOPE.” The administration’s attempt to pivot from a focus on the botched response to the virus toward a triumphant story of the economy has foundered as reality has caught up with Trump’s cheery narrative.

Yesterday we learned that Rick Bright, the scientist who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the federal agency charged with developing a vaccine for this coronavirus, has filed a whistleblower complaint. The complaint alleges he was demoted for refusing to spend his agency's money on developing hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug the administration was promoting for use against Covid-19. But the complaint goes on to charge that the administration pressured him “to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”

In a very detailed 63-page report, Bright claims that he warned the leadership at Health and Human Services about the coronavirus on January 10, but was first ignored and then ostracized for his insistence that action to prepare for an epidemic was crucial. He says the everyone in the administration except trade advisor Peter Navarro simply refused to take his warnings seriously. Throughout February, Bright peppered administration officials with memos, begging them to secure medical equipment to prepare for the epidemic. Finally, they lost patience with him in March, when he refused to back hydroxychloroquine when the president was touting it as a possible cure for Covid.

Bright told a reporter about the dangers of the drug, and days later was removed from the directorship of BARDA to a post at the National Institutes of Health, because political appointees Alex Azar, the head of HHS, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Bright’s immediate boss, suspected him of being a source for the article. Bright claims to have been retaliated against for his role as a whistleblower, and is demanding his old job back.

Bright’s whistleblower report was only one of two that offered a window into the administration’s fumbling of the epidemic. We learned that on April 8, a volunteer on Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force, filed a whistleblower complaint with the House Oversight Committee. Kushner's group took the place of established channels staffed by experts in order to coordinate a private sector effort to find the medical supplies America needed. The complaint, supported by anonymous individuals in the government, says that the people working with Kushner were young volunteers from consulting and private equity firms with no significant experience in health care, procurement, or supply-chain operations, and had no knowledge of relevant laws or regulations. They were ill equipped to do their jobs, and were also ordered to pay particular attention to tips from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists like Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro, as they searched for medical equipment.

Today, Politico published a story based on audio tapes leaked from three conference calls between HHS and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and federal officials around the country fielding calls from governors trying to find medical equipment. The calls highlight that as Trump was saying the nation had plenty of equipment, his officials were scrambling to try to provide it. The leaked tapes also show officials privately acknowledging that reopening the states would lead to a higher rate of coronavirus infections.

In an interview with ABC News yesterday, Trump himself admitted the reopening of states for business could cause people to die. At a briefing, when reporter Jim Acosta asked why it was important to end social distancing right now, Trump told reporters "I'm viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They're warriors. We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country ... Will some people be badly affected? Yes."

But Trump didn’t offer much to provide confidence that the government was on top of the ongoing coronavirus response. In the ABC News interview, when Trump blamed President Barack Obama for leaving the “cupboard” of the Strategic National Stockpile “bare” of medical supplies when he left office, anchor David Muir asked him what he had done to restock it in the three years he’s been in office. The question appeared to catch the president, who is accustomed to a friendly audience on the Fox News Channel, off guard. “Well, I'll be honest,” he said. “I have a lot of things going on. We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine and that was a total hoax, then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason.”

A Washington Post article by Dr. Zack Cooper, associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale’s Economics Department, says that we do, in fact, have the ability to test at the rate of 20 million tests a day, which is what experts say we need in order to reopen the economy safely. But the rub is that it would cost about $250 billion, and there has not, so far, been sufficient political will to spend that kind of money on testing, especially when those most affected by the reopening of states have been poor Americans and workers who are disproportionately people of color. A Rockefeller Foundation committee on reopening the economy has published a report on how to do so safely; Cooper was a member of the committee.

But for all these events undercutting Trump’s push to reopen the economy, what got under his skin most dramatically was an advertisement released Monday by the Lincoln Group entitled “Mourning in America.” This one-minute spot plays on President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning In America” reelection campaign ad, showing Trump’s term as the opposite of the rosy vision people associated with Reagan. “There’s mourning in America,” the voice in the ad intones over shots of Covid-stricken patients and folks in unemployment lines in masks, “and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”

It took Trump four tweets to express his fury adequately, calling Lincoln Project founder George Conway a “deranged loser.” Ten hours later, he was still fuming, and ranted about the Lincoln Project to reporters for two minutes on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. This gave Conway the opening to hit him again in an op-ed in the Washington Post today. The article used Trump’s behavior to illustrate Conway’s usual concerns about Trump’s fitness for office, but it began with a new focus on the coronavirus: “Americans died from Covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night.”

[aion-rsa]

Neil Gaiman: How The Sandman Reinvents the Audiobook Format

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

“For years, I’ve said that I would rather have no adaptation of Sandman than a bad adaptation,” says Neil Gaiman – and for years we’ve had no Sandman adaptation. But perhaps surprisingly, given the very visual nature of a graphic novel, the first one to make it past the finish line is an audiobook – more than an audiobook, a scripted audio drama, something akin to a radio play or perhaps an ‘audio movie’ of the first three volumes of Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series. It might not be the adaptation audiences were clamoring for but it works surprisingly well and might just set a path for a whole new way of consuming classic storytelling during a time when traditional screen productions are stymied.

Directed by Dirk Maggs who is well known in radio for producing complex, immersive and cinematic audio productions, the new Sandman adaptation has a Hollywood cast and an epic feel, spanning almost eleven hours in total. It’s a project which almost certainly couldn’t have worked as anything other than an audio production and retained the scope and scale, especially right in the middle of lockdown.

“When we made Coraline, on a good day, you would get seven usable seconds,” Gaiman explains. “Shooting a movie, on a good day, you get four minutes. Shooting Good Omens, on a really good day, we would get six minutes done. The amazing thing about audio is because we are just using voice and sound and because you’re relying on the listener to work with you as a co-creator and to imagine and to build, themselves, things are relatively – and I’m using the word ‘relatively’ here just because I do not, in any way, want to diminish the magnitude of what Dirk Maggs and his collaborators have done here – but it’s ‘relatively’ simple.”

Simple compared to a full on 11 hour screen version but, still with a ferocious number of moving parts and a massive cast spread across different countries, there were still major factors to take into consideration. Talking separately to Maggs we start to get a sense of the magnitude of the production. Sound was, unsurprisingly, the key to making the series work.

Maggs explains that they first recorded the ensemble cast, a group of around 60 actors who between them formed all the smaller supporting roles – some who are A-listers in their own right. These parts were recorded in London.

Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

“I shoot on shotgun microphones, the same mics that you use on film sets to pick up actors’ voices, because I’m trying to carry this cinematic feel through everything,” he says. “So my first question to the other studios we were using is ‘what mic have you got?’ and then we work from that. Then it’s just a case of me carrying in my head how the recording is shaping up now. The director’s job for me is to make sure that as an audience, the listener isn’t suddenly thinking ‘hang on a minute, that sounds like it was recorded 3000 miles away, a month later.’” 

The layering of sounds effects is a complicated business too and something that Maggs has been perfecting for much of his career. From directing Superman radio plays back in the ’90s he’s no stranger to translating comic books to audio.

“The movie feel we strive for is a case of taking the voices and then basically mixing it as if it were a movie and not a radio play. It’s not the sort of polite teacups rattling, ‘more tea, vicar?’ BBC thing. This is where we add pretty much everything to the audio mix down to footsteps, clothing, rustles. If you listen to episode eight where Dream is feeding the pigeons and chatting to Death you can hear their movements as they turn to each other and throw and catch basketballs and so on. So it’s a very complex business and it’s very labor intensive, but the end result is something where if you close your eyes, you’ll see it play out on a screen in your head.”

It helps that the production managed to round up a cast that any blockbuster movie would be proud of. Front and center is James McAvoy as Morpheus – he was easy casting as far as Maggs was concerned.

“I knew that James had everything we needed to deliver Morpheus,” Maggs says. “We’d worked with him on Neil’s Neverwhere for the BBC. The thing about James is that he brings an energy. The tricky part with Morpheus is that he’s not a passive character, but he doesn’t actually do a lot of decisive action. A lot of the time he is reflective. I needed an actor who even in the reflective moments would get the sense of action and that’s what James brings.”

McAvoy was set to record his part last of all. “What none of us then knew was the day that he was due to go into the studio was the day that we went into lockdown…” Gaiman says, telling us that in the end they had to ship McAvoy “a studio” and he had to learn to work it. “He had to become his own sound engineer while Dirk Maggs directed him and talked him through, at the other end of a screen,” he explains. Gaiman says he’s started to do the same from his place in Scotland and shows us the very professional looking microphone he’s using for this Zoom call.

The result is surprisingly seamless. McAvoy and Gaiman himself are the two main constants throughout the series. Morpheus’ arcs in Preludes and Nocturnes sees the lord of the Dreaming captured by mortals and held prisoner for decades until he is able to free himself and go on a mission to win back his three stolen tools. The Doll’s House which is the second Sandman book adapted sees him on the hunt for errant dreams who have escaped from The Dreaming. While the third book, Dream Country tells standalone stories, not always featuring Morpheus at all, like the Element Girl tale, which stars Samantha Morton as a faded and long forgotten DC superhero who is severely depressed and longs for the freedom of death she is unable to attain. Morton is brilliant and the whole episode is just terribly sad.

“Dirk mentioned that, when he taped her performance, she wanted the lights down,” Gaiman explains. “He recorded her in the half dark. And then he had to go and find Kat Dennings in Atlanta. She’d been doing an all-night shoot, and she was exhausted. She still gave us her all, which is so wonderful.” The episode includes Kat Dennings as Death gently handing a tissue to Morton’s Element Girl in reality from across the Atlantic as if the two were sat together talking quietly in a dark room.

Kat Dennings voices Death

One element of the series that may provide an extra thrill to fans of the book is Gaiman’s appearance as the Narrator. By necessity, the adaptation adds extra levels of description to make up for the lack of panels to really paint pictures of The Endless and more in listeners’ heads. 

“The entire experience was very strange. I would very happily not have been the narrator,” Gaiman smiles. “Dirk wanted me, and this was Dirk’s project. My attitude was that I wanted whoever played Morpheus to be the focus and the voice that you were going to hear the most of.”

It’s a lovely bit of meta-casting which sees the creator of Dream of The Endless as the overlord, weaver of his own stories. And the extra description needed added no problems for Maggs or Gaiman since the original directions Gaiman gave to the artists on the series still existed.

“If you go into my hard disk, and you go into ancient photocopies of ancient drives on computers that have long since been forgotten and junked and abandoned…,” Gaiman says, taking us on another journey of undiscovered hidden treasures, “and you follow down ancient, DOS branchings, you eventually get to files with names like Sandman and Sandman Archives, in which all of the files are in WordPerfect 4.1 format. And they are the original Sandman scripts.”

Gaiman dug out the scripts of old and sent them to Maggs to work from.

“Everything in Sandman has been described by me at some point or another,” Gaiman says. “So Dirk would then go and find the lines that he wanted to use, which were my original descriptions to an artist of what a place looked like, what a person looked like, and slide that in and give me, as the Narrator, that line that I’d already written long, long ago, as a line of description. So, that was kind of weird. It’s almost like asking everybody who’s listening to this to become the artist for their own comic.”

It’s a rather lovely element to the adaptation which means it works just as well for people completely new to the comic as those who have images of the Endless already burned into their subconscious minds.

There’s another advantage to this approach too.

“I love the idea that blind and partially sighted people, people whose brains do not process comics, people who just can’t pick up the comics for whatever reason, now have a way of accessing those stories. That, for me, is huge,” Gaiman explains.

The Sandman brings in other well loved DC characters too with similar quality casting. Taron Egerton plays John Constantine in an arc from Preludes and Nocturnes which sees the occult detective visiting an old girlfriend to help Morpheus in his quest for his lost artefacts. Egerton plays Constantine as a convincing Scouser (Egerton’s parents are both from Liverpool) and Maggs says the Golden Globe winning actor gave him the most trouble in the edit. 

“Taron’s was the hardest because he gave me so many great choices on each line that it actually made it quite quite a challenge to make any set of decisions,” he says. “He’s like James, he comes in with ideas.”

Michael Sheen who played an angel in Good Omens, which Gaiman scripted, plays Lucifer Morningstar, “I’m not sure if it’s a promotion or a demotion,” laughs Maggs. He’s something of a favourite in the world of The Sandman who we are likely to see more from if the show gets a second series. “Michael came in and he ran with the idea of Lucifer being based slightly on David Bowie which was really nice,” says Maggs. “It worked really well with James’s Morpheus.”

With Miriam Margolyes as Despair, Riz Ahmed as The Corinithian, Arthur Darvill as Shakespeare, and Matthew Horne as Hob Gadling, among many favourites rounding out the cast, this is an all-star production that transports listeners to hell and back via the world of The Dreaming in a beautiful, sleepy way. 

There’s also the chance that this adaptation might reinvent people’s expectations and perceptions of what an audiobook can do, at the very time when many on screen productions have had to be shut down due to Covid.

“This was the chance to take a modern classic like The Sandman and realise it so convincingly in audio that people who think audiobooks consist exclusively of single voices reading against a silent background will have their expectations massively opened up by the breadth and power of the acting of our superb cast, the cinematic atmospheres, settings and sound effects, and the beautiful full score especially composed for The Sandman by James Hannigan,” explains Maggs.

“I’d love this production to open some doors for people who feel the only epic entertainment worth their attention has pictures already attached. Hopefully they’ll find the pictures in their head can match anything Hollywood can produce!”

There’s still so much material to adapt, too, with the rest of the series of graphic novels as well as The Sandman: Overture, the prequel, to work with. Gaiman is hopeful for more.  “Put it this way. This is currently number one in all categories in the UK and around much of the world on Audible and only number two in the US, because the thing about President Trump from Trump’s niece, about how awful he is, is just sitting there at number one,” says Gaiman. “Everybody’s very happy at Audible with how well this has done in terms of reach and listening and people enjoying it and everybody’s loving it. So, I cannot imagine a world in which we don’t now go on and do Season of Mists and keep going. I want the whole thing.”

The post Neil Gaiman: How The Sandman Reinvents the Audiobook Format appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3jr8iiw

[thedistantstorm]

Project Compass 21

Read along on AO3 Here

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This time:  Admiral Ar'alani watches. Ezra worries. Vah'nya recalls a memory.

Next time: Ezra demands answers from Eli. 

-/

The first time Admiral Ar’alani came face to face with the man known as Lieutenant Commander Eli Vanto of the Galactic Empire, she was unimpressed. This was the man that Mitth’raw’nuruodo had identified as being useful to the Ascendancy?

The human had looked like a child to her, bright eyed and barely out of his second decade.

It had not been easy for him, either. Acclimation had taken time and effort. He had not been given any special treatment or leeway. His name had been recognized, his rank adjusted with some consideration for the length of his military service, and he had been dropped into his new environment without delay. She had not been kind to him. Nor had she instructed her crew to be. Whatever he was given would be earned on his own merit.

Mitth’raw’nuruodo had seen something in him, and likewise, Ar’alani wished to see it. Naturally. He would either prove his worth, or he would not. If he did, it was in the Ascendancy’s interest. If he did not, she wouldn’t hesitate to deal with him swiftly in any way she felt appropriate.

He had difficulty waiting. A temper - usually well hidden, save for the warmth of his face - lingered beneath the surface. He’d learned to rein it in over the time since she’d gotten to know him, yet she knew old habits die hard and no one, not even a Chiss, was without flaws.

His transition from Eli’van’to to Ivant was something of an anomaly. She’d known what she was giving up, and she’d been willing to sacrifice him for someone she felt was of greater importance to the Ascendancy. The human understood her reasoning, and with the revelation of Vah’nya’s visions about what possibilities awaited them if they did not intervene, they agreed it was far better to lead the Grysks away. Mitth’raw’nuruodo had valuable secrets about the Chiss and the Empire. Eli’van’to’s work had not bore fruit. Whatever the Grysks inevitably got from him would be of little value. And, though it was more important to Ivant than it had been to Ar'alani, he would hopefully be able to save the lives of his former comrades.

She had never promised him rescue. He had never asked for it, either. He’d gone into it knowing that best case looked like finding a way to take his own life. She appreciated his bravery.

And then, Vah’nya happened.

Sweet, concerned, protective Vah’nya who stowed herself away on his transport, who abandoned her post aboard the Steadfast with only a scribbled note. Vah’nya, a true miracle of the Ascendancy, the oldest Navigator in centuries, and the crown jewel of Ar'alani's fleet.

How she had cursed the girl, Ar'alani remembered, fear and fury, having burned bright in her loins for months. She could not deviate from their course. Such a specimen would warrant research and hopefully guarantee her survival amongst the Grysks, and it was the only comfort she had, though she knew the Grysks would tear her apart from the inside out. She did not prepare herself for a happy ending.

And then, when they survived - when they escaped, together and on their own - it was too much to hope for. Too good to be true. She’d dispatched watchers, ensured that Thrawn was, in fact, making his way home and away from the wrecked hull of his once glorious Star Destroyer, and jumped to intercept.

She was not sure what she had been expecting to find, but what she had defied all logic and sense.

It was very much the same now. She watched as Un’hee bowed her head almost to the pristine white sheets beside a dying Thrawn and pressed her hands gently against his wounds, entering a sort of trance.

Before, Vah’nya hadn’t been unaware, vulnerable and in trance like Un’hee was now. She’d been clutching tightly to Ivant, cradling him to her chest as if she was all that was holding him together. Perhaps, Ar’alani thought, considering that moment and all she had come to know since, perhaps she had. Van'nya had refused to be parted from him because she said she was needed, to the point of restraints and sedation.

It had been the only thing the recovered Navigator had been willing to say in those first few days. It had taken Vah’nya weeks to open up to Ar'alani once more, to tell her admiral what had led to abandon her duties and offer herself up to the Grysks, a blatant violation of all she'd stood for before. When she had, Ar’alani believed her to be crazy. Her treasured, precious Navigator manipulated and broken, her mind shattered and fragmented by their vile manipulation and advances.

But Ar’alani hadn’t known what Vah’nya was doing when she’d found them in the husk of that hijacked Grysk ship. She hadn’t known until much later, when Vah’nya had taken her aside, and, to prove her very much in-tact sanity, had shown her. She was to light the way for her sisters, she’d told Ar’alani. She would be the first. And she had, in confidence, revealed why: Eli'van'to, an inferior, but tolerated human, a man who had meant to be a sacrificial lamb when he'd failed at being a tool, had reminded her of what it truly meant to be a Chiss warrior.

There was a shudder, a start from the bedridden Chiss. Un’hee’s eyelashes fluttered, then went still again as she continued focusing. Ivant stood at Ar’alani’s shoulder.

“He’s breathing on his own,” Ivant said softly. His words were more relieved than clinical. “See it?”

Ar’alani shook her head in disbelief. It was true. Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s chest rose and fell evenly, synced to Un’hee’s own breathing. “And now,” She whispered, a touch of awe coloring her tone, “There are two.” More seriously, she added, “Just how much will our people owe you, I wonder.”

The human shook his head. “They don’t owe me anything.” He motioned to Un’hee. “This is all her.” He looked down at Ar’alani, his brown eyes hard and haunted. “There is no formula to make this happen, Admiral.”

“And yet you are the common denominator.”

“I’m hardly anything important, Admiral.” He said. “I might appear to be the catalyst, but all I’m doing is simply giving them the tools.”

Ar’alani hummed, looking back at Thrawn. His pain seemed eased far more naturally now. “Perhaps.”

“There are limits to what their abilities can do,” He said. “She may heal his wounds, but she cannot counteract the rest of the poison’s metabolic effects. He will need to be monitored.”

“We are sailing for Csilla,” She said. “Senior Captain Khresh is taking over command of the Compass.” Her eyes flared brightly. “I will not allow the Grysks to destroy us from within,” She said. “Once Mitth'raw'nuruodo is recovered, we must figure out everything he knows. I have no doubt he can confirm his assailant, but we must find out what other patterns he can see.”

“We can’t afford to keep him in the dark, Admiral.”

“The project must stay a secret,” She insisted harshly. “I realize it is not ideal, but it must be done.”

“Even now?”

“We can tell him about everything else-” She tried to compromise, but Ivant interrupted.

“Ma’am, with all due respect-”

“You must listen to me, Eli’van’to.” She stole a glance at Un'hee, and relaxed slightly when the girl had not heard her sharper tone. “We are compromised. Our enemies have infiltrated our ranks. He will be in even more danger now than he was before once we make this known.”

“And we’re making this known?”

“Yes.” Ar’alani’s face was stiff, her shoulders tense. “We must make it known. You killed a man, Ivant. On the bridge, no less. Some will call for your demotion. Others, your life.”

Ivant tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling. He had made the call without fully thinking it through. He’d done what he had to, to protect his crew. “There was more poison,” He said. “Commander Wes’lash’andi was a threat-”

“I am not doubting you, nor am I opposing your methods,” Ar’alani said tersely. “A kill shot was the only thing that would have stopped him from harming anyone else, including a Navigator. If the Grysks have truly infiltrated our ranks as we believe ,” She reasoned, “No one is truly safe anymore.”

-/

Ezra drummed on the arm of his chair, trying to make sense of it all. Or at least, that's what he knew he should have been doing: it was what Admiral Ar'alani had told him to do when she left him here, in her office. He didn't know what to think, other than that he wanted to talk to Un'hee, who seemed to know what was going on, but she had asked to accompany Ivant and the Admiral for questioning.

And no one would let them see Thrawn. Thrawn, who, Un'hee had led him to believe was dying. The poison was called "Blue Death" for Force's sake. Nobody had said anything about antidotes or how to fix it, they only spoke of keeping him comfortable. Ezra knew Thrawn would hate that. If Thrawn were dying, he'd want to go out fighting. It seemed to do him a disservice to let him slip away easily.

He fixed a glance at the Admiral's memory wall. Apparently this was a very Chiss statement, and could be found on most command ships. The commander would have a wall representative of their personal triumphs and goals, and it would be used like a focus, to remind the Commander of what drove them in moments when they felt they'd lost their way.

Ezra found it to be too personal. It wasn't just pictures or medals, wasn't just military accolades. He felt like he was able to see her entire life here, on this wall, and he felt like he was intruding. Though, it did make him curious. Ivant didn't have a memory wall, and he'd been in Thrawn's office aboard the Chimaera. He collected artwork, but nothing like this. All of Thrawn's pieces meant something to him, but they were not as blatantly understandable as this overt telling of Ar'alani's life that stretched out before him. If an enemy saw this…

"If an enemy saw this, the Admiral would already be dead," Vah'nya said from behind him. Ezra jumped. He hadn't noticed her coming in, nor had he realized that he'd spoken the last bit aloud. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine," Ezra insisted, standing. "How's Thrawn? Have you heard anything?"

"They are working on him now," She said. "The Admiral and Ivant are watching over him."

"Yeah, because that clearly helped him earlier, right?" Ezra winced as the words left his mouth, but straightened up anyway. He had meant them. They might not be entirely fair, but he meant them.

Vah’nya swallowed hard, “I understand,” She said slowly. “I do not want Commander Mitth’raw’nuruodo to die.” Her lips pulled to the right when she pursed them. She eyed the memory wall, then let her gaze trail over Ezra. “Did he ever tell you about the time he let me order the Chimaera to fire upon the Grysks?”

“The Chimaera?” Ezra’s brows pulled together as the confusion fell over him. “Really?” His words were darkened by disbelief. It was enough to distract him momentarily. “And the Empire just let you-”

“He inspires loyalty in those who serve with him. He has yours, after all,” Vah’nya reminded Ezra, speaking over him until she regained his attention. “And you were bitter enemies. You nearly killed him.”

Ezra’s shoulders slumped. “No,” He finally said. “He didn’t tell me.”

“I wished for a memory for Un’hee,” She said, her voice and gaze making her look far away. “I was afraid, but more than that, I wanted to be able to give something to Un’hee, who’d spent so long in servitude to the Grysks. I wanted her to know that we could defeat them. I wanted to know that we could defeat them.” She blinked back to herself, turning her head to Ezra. “He gave me more than that. He gave me - and through me, Un’hee as well - the opportunity to participate. The Admiral was displeased. Thrawn seemed to constantly step on her toes, but it was his ship, and he is…” She smiled sadly. “He is a complicated man. But I believe he is good.”

When Vah’nya nudged Ezra’s shoulders, he hummed something in the affirmative. “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

“Well,” She began, “Un’hee identified the poison immediately. If she hadn’t been through what she had, we wouldn’t know what it was.”

“But we don’t have an antidote. And the damage, they said-”

Vah’nya linked their fingers. “I choose to believe, Ezra,” She said, as cool and calm, as serene in the Force as he’d ever felt her. She squeezed their combined hands. “Will you?”

-/

Ar’alani had retrieved them both hours later, finding them both in the middle of her office. Kneeling on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, they had been deep in meditation when she’d arrived. By then, Ezra had gotten his tumultuous emotions under control, though Vah’nya didn’t stray from his side, citing that he needed a friend in this.

“He will live,” Ar’alani said.

Exhaling a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, Ezra nodded, trying to hold himself in some semblance of professionalism. “Thank you, Admiral.”

“Do not thank me,” She snapped, then relented immediately, her voice going smooth in an attempt to be soothing. It was weird coming from such a high-ranking Chiss officer. “We were able to synthesize an antidote. He will be sick until the chemicals are purged from his system, but his life is no longer in danger.” She inclined her head. “It was also to our benefit that his assailant was not able to administer a full dose.”

“And the damage to his lungs?” Ezra questioned. “Un’hee had said-”

“There was damage, but the medics are confident they will be able to reverse it.” She cast a look at Vah’nya, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly before gesturing to the door. “I believe you wished to see him, did you not?”

“Oh! Yes, Admiral,” Ezra snapped to attention immediately.

The Admiral’s voice grew cautious, “Be on your guard, Jedi. This danger may have passed, but I do not doubt there will be others. Until he is fully recovered, you will need to act as his eyes and ears.” She fixed him with her intense gaze. “Even if he does not believe so himself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ezra said. His lips were drawn in a firm, determined line. “I understand.”

“Good.” She sounded satisfied enough. “You will not be alone. There are others,” She looked to Vah’nya, “Who will be assisting you.”

“You’ve contacted her?” The Navigator questioned.

“Yes,” Admiral Ar’alani confirmed. “She will be joining us en route to our destination.” Ar’alani took a brief pause, dropping into her reflection chair heavily, with the airs of someone who was, surprisingly enough, exhausted. Ezra tried not to act too surprised, though he’d never seen her show something so close to weakness. “We need allies we can trust.” She met Ezra’s eyes one final time. “I ask that you not allow your personal feelings to cloud your judgement.”

Ezra sighed. “Let me guess: She’s Imperial, isn’t she?”

“She was,” Vah’nya corrected. She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. “But remember what I said about loyalty.”

[dragon8641]

The Soldier and The Empress 3

Scales and Fangs

The day after, i walked into the meeting room, If was as if nothing had happened, perhaps it was for the better to think it was all a dream.

The following days were full of Demotions from the two stars who were easily defeated by Matoi, but also there were many new clubs being formed, at the very least i get the short end of the stick on that one, not that Gamagoori needs any help with the rest of it.

I used all the free time i got from no having to supervise as much clubs to think about what Satsuki wanted by letting Matoi loose and to Try and convince myself that what happened that night was all a dream, the latter was unachievable. I wanted it to be real, of course.

Lost in thought walking around the halls of Honnouji i get a call from Shiro Iori.

"You gotta see this!" He was a closet mad scientist, it was both scary and perfect for my plans.

"What you mean Shiro? Surely it can't be..."

"But it is, come see her, i believe we are not the only ones that will be pleased with this."

Izanami, that's what he meant to show me. I rush my way to the secret vault below the sewing club, which was in itself, a secret laboratory below Honnouji. A couple of password doors and a scan later i reach the vault, Shiro is already there, typing away at a console in front of the Shackled Izanami.

"Whoa there! What are all those Chains, eh Iori?" He did not realized i had just entered, damn, he's just like Inumuta when this stuff happens… "Oy, Iori! SHIRO!"

Finally he noticed me and stopped typing to turn around and look at me, the look on his eyes, like those of a madman.

"This is a fascinating development! Kai!" he was excited so he shouted.

"Care to explain what happened?" I pretend i'm not startled by his mad scientist lines to see if that get him to calm down.

He fakes a cough "Anyway, by using both Matoi's Senketsu and Lady Satsuki's Junketsu data i got from inumuta i managed to increase Izanami's power."

"I guess those are good news, care to give me more details?"

"By numbers alone Izanami should be stronger than Bakuzan, oh the chains were there because i also added some more Life Fibers into her mix and it didn't stopped rattling."

"Well that doesn't sound ominous at all..."

"Regardless, i've run the tests, and she's ready to be equipped."

That was quite the change in tone, he was now back to his normal self. I trust Shiro, and if he doesn't think this'll kill me, then so be it.

"Then how about i try it on right now?"

"I thought you'd say that, so please proceed as we practiced before"

The station looked like a giant sewing machine, well, that's what it is after all. i pu down my uniform in it, right sleeve below the needle. There was a big tube connecting this station with the place Izanami was chained. Just as Shiro was doing some last adjustments, he pressed a button and slowly Izanami was being moved towards the station.

He had a briefcase with him, he sat waiting for Izanami to arrive and opened it, a couple of cloths. I assume they are Four Star ones, like my own uniform, for the Union with Izanami.

"I assume you are ready for the toll she will take on you…"

"Of course, I can't and won't Leave Lady Satsuki to walk any path of alone."

"Thought so" he then looked towards the chained Izanami that had just arrived -"Then time to work"- He did not touched Izanami, a machine placed it in place to be sewn to my Uniform. It didn't took too long for Shiro to finish, but he did seemed somewhat tired.

/Red lightning started to emerge from where Izanami was placed towards my uniform and I heard the voice of someone in my head, telling me to kill again my madman logic kicked it "(Oh, You trying to take over me Izanami?! Bullshit i'll let you, Only Lady Satsuki orders ME around! You. Are. MY. Weapon!)" I scream as Shiro watches silently./

"How does she feels? Oh, i also took the liberty of changing it a little, so if you feel something different apart from the blade then don't panic."

I put my uniform on. Izanami was heavy, really heavy, maybe it was because i was exhausted. Fighting her inside my mind was really tiring. The uniform looked exactly the same, That's Shiro's magic for ya, he does a really good job at keeping appearances. Now to test this new toy.

The Three stars in my my right gauntlet and the one on the left lit up a little. The Uniform and the jacket i had on my shoulders fell apart and took a new form.

"Yottsu-boshi Goku Seifuku! Totsugeki no Sō: /Duelista!"/ (Four-Star Goku Uniform! Assault Regalia /: Duelista)

An tight looking armor was in place of my uniform, it looked like a combination between a Knight's armor and reptile scales alongside a tail. The helmet looked like a dragon's head that had four stars for eyes, instead of the normal human one. Big boots and gauntlets like Gamagoori's along with a Rapier for the finishing touches. Silver and Cyan, Shiro knows me well.

"I trust you like the changes."

/"Indeed" i looked at where Izanami should have been, it was hidden inside the gauntlet. "Now let's see if she is a good girl and behaves properly..."

Focusing my thoughts on Izanami to get it out, I make the rapier disappear. After a couple of seconds. Red lightning started to emerge from where Izanami was placed towards my uniform and I heard the voice of someone in my head, telling me to kill Shiro. Once again my madman logic kicked in.

"(Oh, You trying to take over me Izanami?! Bullshit i'll let you, Only Lady Satsuki orders ME around! You. Are. MY. Weapon!)" I scream as Shiro watches silently.

Izanami bursts through the gauntlet. A Silver blade made out of Life fibers, A red lightning surrounds it and i feel my armor shake a little.

"Yes, Upgrade complete!"/

"Can confirm this will be a nice surprise to Lady Satsuki once things start to move, good work Shiro"

"Thank you for letting me work on it, sadly i don't believe i can make more of them anytime soon, i'm gonna be busy with the increasing amount of new 'Club Leaders' "

"Tell me about it..."

We laugh it off and return make our way back up. Secretly hoping that Lady Satsuki will let me take care of the Matoi Girl myself, so i can show her what happens when you mess with with The Empress of Honnouji.

On the elevator though, i recall seeing something interesting in Shiro's personal quarters, a wedding dress.

"Oy Shiro"

"What now?"

"Who's the lucky girl?"

He blushes slightly "I have no idea what are you talking about..."

"Sure you don't, no need to worry, as long as Nonon doesn't found out by herself i'll keep it a secret."

"Fine… It's for... Lady Satsuki..."

"WHOA!"

"I've always wanted to handmade one of those..."

"Handmade?! damn you're good… is it finished?"

"Nah, it's a side project as of right now, with all the stuff i have to do at the Sewing club i barely have time to work on it… but i do i want Lady Satsuki to wear the dresses i make when her big day comes… that has been my dream since i've known her."- There was a short yet incredibly awkward silence -"Oh, just for the record, i'm not interested in her, i just want to be the one that get to make the dress for her..."

"Thanks i guess..." i look away from him trying to avoid eye contact, he sighs without looking at me and then smiles. "(I guess he also knows now…)" seconds later the doors open and we finally return to the Academy.

[go-diane-winchester]

How come Misha gets away with causing so much damage to this show?

Thanks for the conundrum @staycejo1:

That is a good question to ask.  How does Misha get away with so much?  The reason is simple.  Misha is smart.  Compared to Jared who is merely scholarly or book smart, and Jensen who is intelligent with regards to cinema and various arts [he hit the nail on the head with wincest, year ago], Misha is shrewd.  I don't like the man, but I have to admit, he is very smart.  He is using something I learned about whilst studying Public Relations: networking.  Networking requires skill.  You need to know how to talk to people and you need to know which people to talk to.  If you network properly, you reap major benefits.  There are a few cliques that Misha might be networking with:  SPN production personnel, SPN alumni and cast members, Creation Entertainment, media personnel and selected fans. 

SPN Personnel and affiliates

I elaborated on these people in other posts.

Bob Singer:

Bob Singer has been a co-showrunner for almost all the time that SPN has been on air.  He handles production while the other co-showrunner handles the story.  And yet, this man never gives the impression that he is a showrunner.  When Sera Gamble killed off Castiel, rumor has it, that Singer fought to bring the character back. 

Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner

She is Bob's wife and was brought on board with her writing partner, Brad  Buckner.  Since season 7, she has enjoyed many promotions.  Now she is a co-executive producer on the show.  Nice to work for your husband, huh.  She and Brad butchered Sam's character until recently.  I think Jared told them off.  They were demonizing Sam to elevate Castiel's status.  Currently, they are not writing destiel.  They are not stupid.  They are writing enough material to keep Misha on the show. 

Robert Berens

Robert or Bobo Berens started off as a writer and moved up to co-executive producer.  He allows the leads to be abused by heller fans, that he follows online.  Remember, he is the one following problematic fans and not the other way around.  Does that even make sense?   

What personal stake do they have in keeping Misha relevant?  Well, they all take their cue from Bob, and he is a close friend of Misha's.  If Bob has a stake in Random Acts or Gish, then it might explain why he isn't willing to let Misha go.  But I don't have that information just yet. 

Stands

Misha has shares in Stands.  For awhile now, they have been pushing destiel related merch.  When they start to regret it, you will see a change.  This is because hellers are already complaining about getting duped by Misha regarding the merchandise.  We will just have to wait and see.

SPN alumni, cast members and affiliates

I spoke about these people before so I will gloss over them here.

Kim Rhodes and Brianna Buckmaster

They needed Misha for Wayward Daughters.  They have affiliation with a bunch of fans who are involved in the Travis Aaron Wade scandal. 

Osric Chau and Orlando Jones

I don't think Osric had any personal stake in elevating destiel.  He really loved SPN and the fanbase.  He was probably trolling destiel for fun like Orlando Jones does.  The minute both men realized how problematic the hellers are, they slowly backed off.  I don't think Orlando Jones has spoken about destiel in a while.  He still is a friend with Misha as is Osric.  I don't think these actors have any ill will.  So far they just seem like a couple of trolls.  Misha's networking failed with Destiel but succeeded professionally because these two men may be able to ''hook him up'' with other projects. 

Creation Entertainment

Someone once pointed out that Adam, the CEO of Creation Entertainment, is in fact, Misha's cousin.  I don't have any sources of that.  However, for awhile CE was pushing a lot of YANA and destiel related things on their con circuit.  The reason is because they have financial stakes in Misha's charities and thought that pushing destiel might make his fans shell out more money.  The cockles photo ops probably gave them the erroneously impression that Misha himself, is profitable.  Recently, however, this happened. 

https://jolygram.com/profile/creationent/photo/1842990860569353024_552397215

They added a caption:  Name a better duo.  We'll wait.  So was Cockles not better anymore?  Misha is not profitable, so all of a sudden, CE loves the leads.  I think they realized that when Misha's entire con fails but one of Jared's sweaty hoodies which he wore all day, fetches $8000 during an auction, that maybe they were betting on the race horse that dances rather than runs to the finish line. 

Their personal stake was money which is why they dropped Misha and destiel related endeavors like a hot potato.  Misha's networking failed here.  Well, not completely.  I heard there might be a new Misha con.  I think they want to be sure that he is a failure before letting go completely. 

Media Personnel

There are many kinds of mediums that are available to Hollywood.  Some are more important than others.  There are small trendy little pointless media outlets, usually social media outlets, like Hypable, ONTD and Geekiary.  There are bigger more credible ones, also known as mass media outlets, like E! Entertainment.  The heads pick up on news coming from the mass media.  They don't bother with small outlets, and that is where Misha does his networking.  He has people working within these outlets who are not legitimate reporters.  They are merely gossipers and shippers in disguise.  These outlets are invited to meets to disseminate information and that is where Misha connected with these viruses.  Some of these pseudo-journalists have since been demoted, reprimanded or fired for misinformation. 

What is their personal stake?  Self-importance.  Hellers and their sock accounts keep these peoples social media handles active. 

Selected fans

These are fans that are overly invested in either Castiel or destiel.  Most of them are nobodies but because of their association with Misha, they are recognizable figures.  These are meta writers and influencers within the fandom.  Their names are: 

Lua James, with a twitter handle, poptivist.  Real name:  Theresa Cotter

Influencer who regularly attacks Jared on SM, and fled California after Travis's house was vandalized.  Close friend of Kim Rhodes.  Destiel shipper.  Claimed to be a Journalist.  Not sure about that.  Followed by Kim, Matt Cohen, Robert Berens and Briana on SM.

Monica Gleberman

Very big shot.  Lua's bosom buddy and Swagger magazine journalist or editor.  She is a minion who lied that she had sex with Jensen and Jared.  Commits fraud. 

Emily Cleghorn

Influencer.  Not sure if she is a meta writer.  Runs the SPN anti bullying twitter handle and Exorcising Emily blog on Tumblr.  J2 kicked her out of con once, because she made them uncomfortable with a tweet.  She got into a twitter fight with William Shatner over destiel. 

Reba Snodgrass 

Runs small cons like Wayward con.  Proven liar.  Has to know Misha personally in order to run the cons. 

Janelle Clay Davis

Influencer, also known as intelligentshipper on Tumblr and GhostofBobby on Twitter.  Claims to be haunted by the YED.  Pushes destiel like a religion.  Cyber stalks people.  Posted a selfie where she is posing with a gun recently. 

Sara Burnhope

Knows Misha and his parents personally.  Random acts volunteer as well as Gish participant.  Might have worked with YANA although I am not sure about that one.  Attacks people on his behalf on social media.  Cyber bully.  From the UK.  Might be an influencer.  Not sure if she writes meta. 

Melanie Adeline

Regular con-goer and influencer.  She has fans of her own.  She belittles Jared to his face.  Destiel shipper.  Knows Misha and Briana personally. 

These influencers and meta writers are important because without them and their overreaching meta, Destiel will fall flat.  Misha accidentally tagged their meta once in a tweet.  Or so he claimed.  What is their stake, other than canon destiel?  Self importance.  These randos are suddenly important people, because Misha put them in that position.  They are the ones who encourage people to vote for Misha for awards, and harass the execs for destiel.  They are the ones who attacked J2 for the Nolacon joke and influenced others to follow suit.  The above women were implicated in the Travis Aaron Wade scandal.  There may be more, but these are the worst of the worst.  As far as I know anyway.

So to answer the question, why does he get away with this problematic system that he has put in place?  Notice, that he is affiliated with small fries.  Misha, like I mentioned before, is a nobody.  People are not linking the irritation they are dealing with, to Misha.  Misha's criticism of SPN's misogyny was reported in those petty small media outlets where his hellers are working.  And it was written in a such way that he is portrayed as a good guy.  If E! spoke about it, Misha would have been in trouble because Pedowitz and gang pay attention to E! not Hypable.  That's why they don't fire him.  They don't know what he has done because he has spn people in his back pocket covering for him.   

Even J2 don't have time to look through their own panels.  They are certainly not paying attention to Misha's panels.  So obviously Jensen doesn't know about this. 

If Jensen was aware of this, a fistfight would have broken out of the set.  Jensen would have boxed Misha's ear.  Because this is sick.  This was apparently at one of the Chicons.  I don't know which one, because I can't stomach looking at that over bloated loudmouth.  This is proof that the leads have no time to spare looking at this man's panels.  So he is confident enough to say these things knowing full well, that the lead are too busy to care about him.  He's behavior goes unchecked, and his continued presence on the show ensures that Gish and Random acts are continually funded.  He needs Castiel to keep these two machines running. 

Excuse the typos. 

[noona-clock]

Whatever You Want to Call it - Part 2

Genre: Office!AU

Pairing: Jackson x You

By Admin B

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

It had been a week - one week - and you were entirely certain you’d never had so much organic green tea in your life.

And while you did feel a little more energized, you were also exhausted and fed up and reaching the edge and you could not take this anymore.

“Please,” you pleaded to your boss, your brow furrowed deeply. “I can’t take it anymore. I’ve tried, but he’s just too annoying! He won’t shut up! I’m going to snap at any second now, and nobody wants that.”

“Oh, come on,” your boss chortled with a shake of his head. “He’s just enthusiastic! It’s why I hired him. I knew he could get the job done, quickly and correctly.”

“Yes, and I can see that. But oh my god. He’s too much. I really can’t -- please, just find someone else to train him. I can’t take on this condominium project and train him at the same time. I just don’t have the energy.”

Your boss pursed his lips, shooting you a look which clearly said ‘You’re kidding me, right?’ “Now, what does it say about you that you can’t handle two things at once?”

“No, no, no, no. Jackson doesn’t count as just one thing. He’s about fifty things.”

When you heard your boss sigh, you knew instantly you could never convince him. Not unless you wanted to admit defeat or potentially get demoted.

“I chose you to train him because you’re the best I have. You’re efficient and capable and I trust you. I trust you with my life! You’re the only person for the --”

“All right,” you interrupted with a sigh. “I understand. I’ll do it.”

Because you had no other choice. You either train him or... well, that was it. You train him. Full stop.

Your boss simply smiled at you before you pushed yourself out of the chair and trudged over to his office door. 

It was seriously challenging to not let out a heavy, frustrated exhale as you set foot back in the common area. And when the door to your boss’s office closed behind you, it felt like the soft ‘thud’ and ‘click’ had just sealed your fate.

Thankfully, you had a bit of time before work officially started. Before Jackson began pestering you yet again. And you knew just what you needed to do.

Rather than weaving your way back to your own desk, you turned on your heel and began working through the maze of the office toward Jinyoung.

“Please help me,” you muttered as soon as you arrived at his cube.

“With what?” he asked, spinning around in his chair to face you.

Jinyoung had been your best office friend since the two of you were hired at the same time. At first, you’d figured there would be nothing but competition between the two of you, but Jinyoung’s sharp intelligence and biting wit (which, at many times, could be labeled only as ‘savage’) drew you into a friendship unlike any other you’d known.

“This new employee!” you hissed. “He’s driving me insane!”

“So, ask someone else to train him.”

“Right, like I haven’t thought of that before,” you countered with a roll of your eyes. “I just asked Boss, and he said ‘No.’”

“What’s so bad about him?” Jinyoung chuckled, tapping his pen against his desk.

“Really? You’ve met him, right? He won’t shut up. He’s the most extra person I’ve ever met. I literally can’t be in the same room with him for ten minutes without wanting to strangle him.”

That all-too-familiar wrinkle in Jinyoung’s forehead appeared. The one which always preceded comments like ‘You’re being dramatic.’

And, lo and behold, the next words out of his mouth were, “You’re being dramatic.”

“I am not.”

Jinyoung simply rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Whatever. Okay, here’s what you should do.”

Oh, perfect. One reason you treasured Jinyoung’s friendship so much was because he always had some piece of advice to give you. Whether or not you took it was dependant on how judgemental he was being, but still. You loved his advice.

“Find something productive for him to do. Something that will keep him focused and busy.”

You let his idea marinate in your brain for a few moments before you began slowly nodding in agreement. “Yeah... that could work.”

“Of course, it could,” Jinyoung agreed. “It’s my idea. All my ideas are genius.”

Honestly, you didn’t have time to bring up all the ideas he’d had which had decidedly not been genius.

“Yeah, okay,” you quickly mumbled instead. And then you straightened up confidently, your lips forming into a smirk as you began to step out of his cube. “Thanks. If it works out, I’ll treat you to lunch.”

“Burgers or pizza only,” he reminded you with a nod.

You simply shot him a look which said, ‘Seriously? I know you well enough by now.’ Because you did! You’d been friends for almost five years! If you didn’t know his favorite foods, what kind of friend would you be?

Just as you stepped out of Jinyoung’s cube, you saw him. 

Jackson.

But now that you had a pretty solid plan to help you avoid him, you didn’t feel like shuddering. Too much.

“Morning!” he called out, lifting one hand in a friendly wave.

You simply nodded in reply as you approached him with self-assured conviction. “I have a job for you.”

“Ooh, a job?” he asked eagerly. “What is it?”

“Come with me.”

You’d give him this: Jackson was very good at following directions.  

...When he stopped talking long enough to listen to them, that is.

He immediately turned and trailed after you, practically stepping on your heels as you led him to the copy room.

“There’s a meeting this afternoon, and I need you to make twenty copies of the presentation booklet.”

“Copies?” Jackson asked, sounding just a tad bit disappointed. But that disappointment was completely gone when he added, “Okay, got it! Twenty copies.”

“You’ll just make copies of all these pages,” you instructed, patting a stack of papers next to the printer. “Then collate and bind them into twenty booklets. Easy enough.”

“Absolutely.” He grinned at you as he unbuttoned his cuffs and began to roll his shirt sleeves up.

“I’ll come back in just a bit.” And before he could answer, you darted out of the copy room. Because you’d caught a glimpse of his forearms, and honestly, you forgot for a second how annoying he was.

Once you sat back down at your desk, you let out a soft sigh of relief. You were, at least, free from Jackson for an hour. Plenty of time for you to think of something else he could work on to keep him busy - and away from you.

Unsurprisingly, you got quite a bit of work done over the next 45 minutes or so. You hadn’t had this much uninterrupted time to yourself in a week, and you’d almost forgotten what it was like to be productive.

But then you convinced yourself you really did need to go check on Jackson, so you locked your computer, pushed your chair away from your desk, and began your journey to the copy room.

What awaited you there, though... 

Oh, my.

There was paper strewn about on almost every surface. All of the copiers and printers were running at once. And - somehow - Jackson had ink on his hands, arms, and face.

“What the -- Jackson!” you cried, your tone one of extreme distress. “What is going on?!”

Jackson jumped a little before glancing back at you. “I’ve got it, don’t worry. It looks bad, but --”

“NO! It doesn’t look bad! It is bad! Oh, my god!” The place was a total disaster! How had he managed it in forty-five minutes?!

“Listen --”

“I’m figuring it out!” he assured you, sounding a thousand times more confident than he had a right to be.

“What do you mean figuring it out?! Number one, clearly, you are not figuring it out. Number two, you don’t know how to work the copy machine?!”

“Well!” he sputtered, his cheeks flaming adorably. (Wait, why ‘adorably’? Why did you notice that? Ew.) “All copy machines are different!”

You began to scoop up some of the papers on the floor, your brow furrowed deeply. “Why didn’t you just ask for help?!” 

“From you?”

“Well, ye --”

“Yeah, like I wanted to get my head ripped off,” he chuckled, though there was no amusement in it.

“What --”

“I know you don’t like me.”

And you were liking him even less because he kept interrupting you.

“Well, your little plan didn’t work because you’re still getting your head ripped off!” you pointed out, grabbing at some papers with visible (and audible) anger.

Jackson stopped the copy machine, sighing softly and letting his head hang. “Why don’t you just pawn me off on someone else? It’s very obvious you hate training me, and I would rather not keep on inconveniencing you.”

“Believe me, I tried,” you answered automatically, not really thinking about it.

“...Oh.”

The despondent tone in Jackson’s voice... kind of pulled at your heartstrings. And you felt... guilty.

Oh, great.

Without another word, you set the papers you’d been collecting on a nearby table, stepped up next to Jackson at the copier, and pushed your own sleeves up.

“All right, let’s fix this mess you’ve made,” you muttered.

Jackson took a step backward as if to leave you to it, but you quickly grabbed his wrist.

“You’re not going anywhere,” you told him, keeping your gaze on the copier. You felt if you looked at him, your guilt would only grow. “You’re going to learn how to do this right, so you’d better watch carefully.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, sounding every bit as determined as you felt.

Part 3

Master list // RULES // Read About the Admins

[af1899]

FEH - af1899 summons for Legendary Micaiah

Yo, what's good?

Recently, I have expressed my excitement for Legendary Micaiah and indeed, a summoning marathon was due to get her, as someone that highly appreciates her.

I summoned on the day the banner started and had been working on processing the recording, here's the finished video:

Can't say I'm great at making thumnails and I can't do my own art just yet, but it's something I'm looking forward to practice once I can get my own drawing pad.

And now, here's the text version commenting on my summonings if you do not wish to watch the video (screenshots included).

It all started with a 3★ Gordin, a guy I'm certain I'll never build, but signs of good luck had shown rather quickly as a Leanne from the recently pseudo-demoted pool has graced my barracks, she's now +2 +res and her build is this one:

I'd talk a little about her but I think I should leave that for another post, I should keep in mind to focus on matters at hand.

Next up, my rate has gone up to 9% before getting both Legendary Micaiah and Ashera in the same circle!

I'm really happy with the results, they all costed 62 [Orbs] which is great for the value, so I don't think I'd be able to ask for a better outcome.

In any case, I'm back to saving, hopefully I can get Sigurd+Deirdre, but I'm well aware that dipping on more red seasonal hell doesn't guarantee that I'll also get them just like how I got Hoshidan Summer Micaiah and Pirate Brigid, still, I'll at least try a little for them.

And a resume of pulls together with the destinies dictated for each of those individuals:

Leanne (at 0:43, -att/+res): merged as shown above, former +1 was +att.

Legendary Micaiah (at 1:49, -spd/+hp): IVs are actually good and of course project but hopefully that fancy new C-skill is added on a unit I like less so Idoun can collect it from them.

Ashera (at 2:20, -hp/+res): IVs seem a little better than Micaiah's but I'll also keep her, I don't feel particularly attached to Ashera but I do think she's OK, and her map theme in Radiant Dawn is breathtaking.

The last two's builds won't be shared yet because I need to finish teaching them their skills, but I will share them later.

Now, to work on Legendary Micaiah's review, but there's Brave version's refine hype to be shared too, along with a few thoughts. 👀

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Young Oon Kim hinted that Moon was not the messiah, but only in the line of the messiah.

▲ Allen Tate Wood with Miss Young Oon Kim in about 1971.

Moonstruck: A memoir of my life in a cult

by Allen Tate Wood (published in 1979)

extracts from pages 82-84 and pages 134-138

National headquarters was at 1611 Upshur Street, N.W., a big, funny old house with a double-pointed roof in a nice upper-middle-class black neighborhood with lots of big, shady maple trees. The building had once been the Libyan embassy. I was shown to a small room among the many on the second floor. There I would sleep on the blue close-cropped rug, because everyone in the Unified Family slept on the floor except Miss Kim, who did not either because she was a saint or because she was older or because she was rather frail.

▲ 1611 Upshur St NW, Washington, DC.

I had arrived during the dinner hour, and after I had brought my stuff to the room I joined the group of twenty-five or thirty seated at the two long cafeteria-style tables down in the linoleum-floored basement. Miss Kim sat at the end of one table and I was seated next to her. I was somewhat awed by Miss Kim. I knew her from the photograph that appeared on the back of the early editions of the Divine Principle, which she had translated. That picture showed a Korean maiden of about thirty-two in Oriental dress. She had an oval face, even features, lovely dark eyes and a mouth full and yet disciplined.

Now I saw her some eighteen years later and she was still pretty. Her hair was still long and jet black and she wore it pinned up. What her movements and posture now showed especially, and what the portrait had not been able to convey entirely, was how feminine and graceful she was.

I don’t remember what I ate that first meal, but I do remember Miss Kim’s quiet, gentle exploration of my personality. She asked me many questions about myself, but never in a rude stand-and-deliver manner that I might have expected from someone who so obviously held the respect of everyone in the room. She asked about the trip and observed that I must be exhausted, wanted to know about my education, my religious background, my hopes for the future, about my family and where I was from.

“Princeton,” I answered.

“I thought that was a university.” Her English was precise, pronounced delicately.

“It is. It is also a nice town. Many people are confused by that.”

“It is not so far from here?”

“No, not at all.”

“Will you visit your parents?”

“Yes, of course. We are a close family. I have not seen them for four months.”

“You have not seen them since you joined us?”

“No.”

“Have you written them?”

“Yes.”

“What do they say?”

“They don’t really seem to understand. But this has been a rather confusing time for us. They will.”

“They may not. I would not be surprised, Allen, if they never do. Most of us here are not old like me, but young. Many times families are the enemies of religious experience. Jesus said: ‘For I am come to set man at variance against his father. A man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’ Be prepared for the worst. Your family will oppose you in this. They will try to take you from us.”

This was not the first time nor the last time I would hear such sentiments. I had heard them many times already at Berkeley. We had been a young group, nearly all in our way dropouts, some of us deeply hurt, even maimed by the conflict with our society, and tales of ferocious fights with parents were commonplace.

________________________________________

pages 134-138

… I was demoted even further. I would not be a lecturer in Level III. I was going back to being a student. I was aghast. I had been expecting to be reinstated, like Frank and Neil Salonen, but here I was getting pushed even further down.

I went to Miss Kim. She was the power behind the power. She was everyone’s confidante; she knew all that was going on behind the scenes. And she had always liked me, favored me.

I remember talking to her as the late afternoon light faded in the kitchen. She sat with her elbows on the plastic tablecloth. Behind her on the shelves our motley, tacky collection of dishes was stacked. In the background the refrigerator hummed.

I told her the whole story in a great state of agitation. As I spoke she pulled the pins from her hair, which I had never seen down. Her beautiful blue-black hair cascaded about her shoulders. It was thick and long. It reached down to the middle of her back. There was greater meaning in the gesture, I thought. I felt I was seeing the unveiling of a celestial being. What she said did not disappoint me.

Miss Kim had always been a critical follower of the Reverend Moon. Once she had told me that she believed he had some years ago lost his ability to read minds and travel in the astral world. That was why he had to employ the three mediums now. Once she had hinted that Moon was not the messiah, but only in the line of the messiah. He was an Abraham figure, and his son or his grandson would be the true messiah. This was utter heresy, of course, and this was in the back of my mind as Miss Kim spoke.

“Do not worry, young Allen. Frank has many problems and you must bear with him. All this will smooth out later. Meanwhile, I have powers myself. I will look after you. You are under my protection.”

I left the interview completely satisfied. I felt that I had the blessing of a real-life good witch of the East. I did not know exactly what she meant, but I had faith in her. I recalled what had happened the last time I had come to her discouraged. I did become a student in Level III, and I bore with it the best I could. I was a good follower, and by November came the news that made me determined to remain one. The Reverend Moon was coming here!

In December 1971, about a week before Christmas, Moon was present for our Level III graduation, which was held at a church we rented across the street. We had been renting its basement for our Sunday services for a long time. I got a small printed certificate saying that I had graduated from Level III. Presumably I was rehabilitated.

Moon stayed in the Upshur Street house, in the “parents’ room,” which was a room we kept in every center, specially furnished and waiting, should the day come for the visit of Our Leader. He lay low for about a week. He watched a lot and he conferred privately with many people. I was not one of them; I was no longer in the inner circle. Then, on the day before Christmas, he came out of his room and began to speak. And he kept on preaching all through Christmas and on to the beginning of the new year, for the greater part of seven consecutive days.

Moon talked for many hours each day, until people began to fall asleep, and he would awaken them with a shout or a shake or even a slap across the face.

He told us many things. He told us that the messiah was now in the new Rome, that as of now he had made far more progress than Jesus ever had, though he was also far short of completing his mission. But from now on, his mission was here. Moon would not perform miracles, by the way, because miracles were merely crowd pleasers, nothing serious. Jesus’ miracles were a sign of failure, Moon said.

Moon retold the parables of the Bible, adding his own interpretations. Mrs. Won-bok Choi, the medium, translated for him, as she continued to do when he was in the United States and speaking more or less privately, to his own followers. When he spoke publicly, as he was preparing to do, for his mission was taking outward shape, Colonel Pak was the translator.

Moon told us about the nature of sin. The main duality in God’s creation was between good and evil. To do evil was to sin, but since everyone thought of themselves as good, how did we know when we were sinning? The answer was that when we were working for ourselves, we were sinning. When we were working for others, we could be sure that we were doing good. Even if we did things that seemed good to others, if we did these things out of our own vanity and egoism, then we were doing evil. Motive counted very heavily in Moon’s system. Just as we could lie for good motives, and thus be doing God’s work, we could tell the truth for bad motives and be doing Satan’s will.

Such a psychology kept us at constant war with ourselves, and if it succeeded in its aims, our energy would be constantly projected outward. Moon’s was not a religion of introspection, of mysticism, of finding a oneness with God or Nature, nor even a religion of peace or beauty. It was rather a path of action. He would tell us what to think, and our duty was to obey him. His was the perfect religion for those who wished to escape from themselves.

In those seven days Moon mapped out a plan of action and told it to us. He would begin a One World Crusade and he would speak for three days in each of seven cities. A number of us would be formed into mobile bus teams, whose job would be to go into each city as an advance guard. These people would rent the hall for him to speak, sell tickets, do publicity, preach in the streets and then, when at last the Master arrived, move on to the next city on the list and do the same thing. About all this there was an atmosphere of breathless urgency. This was not something that was to happen in the far future or even the near future, but right now. It was to begin even before the month of January was out.

But that was only part of the beginning of his mission, merely the bringing of the word. After having gotten our followers, we wanted to hold them. For that we needed more centers, at least one in every state, including Hawaii and Alaska. Despite our best efforts so far, we had centers in only eight states. We would immediately send out missionaries to all the other states.

In those seven days Moon also prayed many times, and each prayer ended with him in tears. He pulled out his big white handkerchief, snapped it open with a flourish, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He even sang to us at times; his voice was not pretty, but it was powerful. He sounded like a wounded water buffalo. Moon’s voice had great range, and sometimes, in contrast to the low ranges of his singing, it rose in passion to a mere mouse’s squeak. All in all he was a gigantic, an enveloping personality.

One of the sad things that happened for those of us who knew and loved Miss Kim—and particularly for me, since I was under her protection—was that Moon deposed her, abruptly, impatiently, bitterly, though privately. He was angry; he told her she had failed. We heard that he told her she must assume in regard to him the role of a child. She must learn everything all over again.

______________________________________________

Young-oon Kim – it all ended in flames and tears for the professor

Newsweek on the many Korean messiahs of the 1970s

Park Tae-seon – another Korean Pikareum Messiah

Kim Baek-moon talked about “sexual union with God”