#I run four copies of GAMBLING in my deck | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bright-eyes-strawberry-lies · 4 years ago

Text

My (incomplete) Notes on The Lightning Thief

Percy Jackson, at 12 years old, is miserable

Percy is trying very hard to be good

Percy reacts violently when his friends are threatened

“I’m going to kill her”

I wish I’d decked her right there

Percy turns red when he gets called on

Percy knows a lot about both Greek and Roman gods

Percy has an “I’ll-kill-you-later” stare

Percy gives “safe” answers to authority figures

Percy sells an illegal candy stash out of his dorm room

Percy knows about shrooms and thinks that he was drugged on the field trip

Percy has nightmares about the teacher (Kindly One) that he killed

Percy has to get summer jobs

Grover is a very bad liar

Percy almost cries in class when his favorite teacher tells him that he’s different

Percy gets into fights to protect Grover from bullies

Percy sees the Fates snipping the thread and knows he’s going to die

Grover mentions that it’s always 6th graders who are killed

Percy ditches Grover at the bus stop

Grover’s bladder acts up when he gets nervous

Sally Jackson took night classes to get her GED

She wanted to be a novelist

Gabe Ugliano is Percy’s stepdad

His cigars make Percy nauseous

He drinks beer and leaves a mess everywhere

He takes money from Percy and uses it to fund his gambling and calls it their “guy secret.”

If Percy tells Sally, he’ll “punch Percy’s lights out”

Gabe takes over Percy’s room while Percy is at school

Gabe makes fun of Percy’s grades

Sally works at a candy shop and brings Percy blue candy

She runs her hands through his hair and asks him how he’s doing

She never raises her voice or says anything unkind to anyone

Percy wants to punch Gabe

Percy wants to kick Gabe in the balls and “make him sing soprano for week”

Gabe blamed Percy for things that aren’t his fault

Percy makes a hand gesture that Grover did, but at Gabe, and the screen door slammed shut

They have a rental cabin on the beach that is “half hidden in the dunes, full of sand and spiders”

Percy and his mom eat blue foods because Gabe said there’s no such thing as blue food. It’s an act of rebellion.

Percy thinks that his mom doesn’t want him around

Percy is mad at Poseidon for leaving him and his mom

In preschool, Percy is put to sleep in a crib at school. The crib had a snake in it and Percy strangled the snake to death.

Percy has a dream that a horse (Poseidon) and an eagle (Zeus) are fighting to the death

“O Zeu kai alloi theoi” means “Oh Zeus and other gods!”

Percy experiences panic when he realizes that his teacher was a monster trying to kill him

Lightning hits the camaro and blasts off the roof

Percy’s got good instincts; the hair frequently raises on the back of his neck when he’s in danger

Sally gets killed by the minotaur

She’s actually stolen by Hades

Percy rips off the minotaur’s horn and impales it into his side

Percy is crying, weak, trembling with grief and he literally carries Grover and drops onto a porch

Annabeth tries to get Percy to talk while she’s spoon-feeding Percy ambrosia

Percy has been unconscious for two days after his fight with the minotaur

Percy would rather live on the streets than live with Gabe

He considers lying about his age and joining the army

Percy is very good at telling when adults have been drinking

Grover is nervous about Mr. D

But he still manages to ask for the diet coke can to eat

The farm house is four stories tall, sky blue and white trim

The camp grows strawberries and the campers pick them

Grover is 28 years old but satyrs mature at half the rate that humans do

The Poseidon cabin walls glow like abalone. There are six empty beds with silk sheets. It smells salty.

Chiron gets horribly depressed about training heroes

Luke is very handsome except for a thick white scar that runs from his right eye to his jaw.

He’s the son of Hermes and the counselor

Luke is 19

He’s in cabin 11

Monsters will always reform because they don’t have souls

The bathrooms are cinder block buildings with a line of toilets and a line of showers; there’s a girls and a boys

Percy feels a tug in the pit of his stomach when he uses his powers

Annabeth just watched Clarisse drag Percy into the bathroom to give him a swirly

Luke steals Percy some toiletries from the camp store.

Percy is not good at archery, foot racing, or wrestling

The only thing that Percy is good at is canoeing

Percy can’t find a blade that fits right in his hand.

Luke has been the best swordsman in 300 years

Percy bests him after pouring ice water on his head (son of Poseidon)

Hades doesn’t have a cabin at Camp Half-Blood or a throne on Olympus. They say that it would be bad if there was a cabin for Hades.

Sixty years ago, after World War 2, the big three gods made an oath not to have more kids.

Two of them broke it; Zeus with Jason and Thalia, Poseidon with Percy.

When Hades found out, he let out all three Kindly Ones and a pack of Hellhounds

Thalia wound up becoming a tree.

Grover was the satyr assigned to bring only Thalia in. Thalia had befriended Annabeth and Luke, and she wouldn’t leave them behind.

Percy thinks that Luke’s scar makes him look almost evil

Clarisse has an electric spear

It makes Percy go numb wherever she touches him with it

One of the boys in Cabin 5 (Ares) cuts Percy across the arm

Once Percy gets into the water, he’s very good at fighting

Luke wins capture the flag

Annabeth has a Yankee's cap that makes her invisible. It was a gift from her mother.

Annabeth is the first person to figure out that Poseidon is Percy’s father.

No wait, Grover was first and then Chiron. Well, they knew he was one of the Big Three’s son.

As soon as Percy steps out of the water, he is exhausted and in pain.

When Hellhounds die, they melt into shadow and soak into the ground.

Hellhounds are from the fields of punishment.

When Poseidon claims Percy, everyone kneels.

“Poseidon, Earthshaker, Stormbringer, Father of Horses. Hail, Perseus Jackson, Son of the Sea God.”

Percy is miserable being alone in Cabin Three and being so isolated. He would rather get into fights every day than be ignored. People are steering clear of Percy.

Except for Luke, who gives Percy one-on-one sword training.

Annabeth teaches Percy Greek but she’s distracted.

Gabe tells the press that Percy is violent and a troubled kid. The newspapers say that Percy may be involved in his mother’s disappearance.

Gabe also tells the press that Percy has expressed violent tendencies in the past.

Percy has more dreams of Zeus and Poseidon fighting. He hears Kronos’ voice calling to him.

It doesn’t rain in Camp Half-Blood (or even get overcast) unless they want it to.

Dionysus wants to kill Percy.

Percy gets embarrassed when he knows something someone doesn’t want or expect him to.

Percy has a nervous laugh.

Illegal copies can be made of the Gods Symbols of Power.

Percy has tried to steal pizza from Gabe’s poker parties and got busted for it.

Percy is furious that the camp is being punished for his existence. He thinks he’s responsible for the gods' fight.

The Big House attic is four flights up. It’s full of mementos from old demigod fights.

Percy is scared of the oracle.

Percy’s fists clench at the very sight of Gabe.

Percy doesn’t have many friends.

Percy isn’t afraid of Hades; he wants to get revenge and take Hades on.

Gods can’t encroach on each other’s territories but demigods can. Gods can’t be held responsible for heroes actions.

Percy describes his emotions as rolling glass in a kaleidoscope.

Percy is so relieved that Grover is coming with him that he wants to cry.

Annabeth volunteered to go on the Quest. Percy is not surprised.

Previously, Luke told Percy that Annabeth has been harassing Chiron for a prophecy and that she’s been hanging onto all of the new campers until she’s sure they aren’t the chosen one.

Annabeth says that Percy will mess up this quest without her even though he’s been more than adequate at handling everything that’s been thrown his way.

The camp store loans Percy $100.00 and 20 golden drachmas.

He’s also given a canteen of nectar and a ziplock bag full of ambrosia squares.

The ambrosia and nectar is only to be used in emergencies; it will kill a mortal and demigods will literally burn up if they overdose.

Annabeth’s cap was given to her on her twelfth birthday by her mom, Athena.

Luke actually runs up the hill to give them the basketball shoes. They’re the flying shoes he got from his dad for his quest when he was seventeen.

Luke gives the shoes directly to Percy.

Percy is worried that Luke would have been jealous of the attention he’s been getting.

Percy blushes because Luke gave him the magic gift.

Luke seems uncomfortable talking to Percy. He trails off three times and uses “um.” And then there’s an [awkward] handshake.

Luke pats Grover between the horns and gives Annabeth a hug.

Annabeth’s crush on Luke has been brought up three times so far.

Percy figures out by this one interaction that Annabeth let Luke capture the flag instead of her.

Percy thinks that he’s a brat for wanting a magical gift from his father.

Riptide (Anaklusmos) is a gift from Poseidon that Chiron has been holding onto for the next child of Poseidon.

Riptide is forged by the Cyclopes, tempered in the heart of Mount Etna, and cooled in the River Lethe.

Mortals aren’t important enough for the blade to kill but it will kill demigods and anything from the Underworld.

Percy thinks that the real world feels like a fantasy after spending two weeks at Half-Blood Hill.

Percy thinks that Annabeth hates him.

Annabeth thinks they have to be rivals because their parents are.

Annabeth was also mean to him before she knew who his dad was.

Even after two weeks away from Gabe, Grover can still smell him on Percy.

This makes Percy immediately want a shower.

Grover says that Percy should be thankful Sally was with someone who smelled so repulsively human because it kept the monsters away and that Sally must have loved Percy a lot to put up with that guy.

This does not make Percy feel better but he hides his feelings; or hopes he does since satyrs can sense emotions with or without an empathy link.

Percy is on the quest because he wants to save his mom.

He is not on the quest to retrieve Zeus’s lightning bolt

Or to save the world

Or to help his dad out of trouble. Percy is actually really, really angry with Poseidon for never visiting or helping Sally.

Annabeth and Percy are good at playing hacky sack.

The three Furies are considered the worst monsters in the Underworld.

Percy had a chance to escape on the bus and didn’t take it.

Alecto threatens to kill Percy (again)

Percy can speak Latin

Percy knows that the Greek Gods (Zeus and Hades in particular) are being assholes to him.

The food at Camp Half-Blood is grapes, bread, cheese, and extra-lean-cut nymph-prepared barbecue.

“Your head is full of kelp.”

In Aunty Em’s emporium, Percy says that the smell of her cooking makes everything else go away, however he still has the sense of mind to notice Grover whimpering, the statues’ eyes following them, and Auntie Em locking the door.

Percy’s neck tingles when he’s in danger.

Percy is annoyed that Annabeth is being rude to a woman who just fed them for free.

#the lightning thief #pjo #riordanverse #percy jackson series #percy jackson and the olympians #long post #text post #it's funny the things you forget #the details you gloss over #i will not be finishing this

64 notes · View notes

radramblog · 3 years ago

Text

Full-Art Basic Lands

Magic is inherently a game about customizability and aesthetic, and nowhere is this best displayed than in one’s choices for Basic Lands. From longtime players flexing their Beta sets, to the cheeky people running exclusively white-bordered ones, to newbies and people who don’t care as much just grabbing what they can from the nearest land station.

However, a full discussion of basic lands would be highly impractical for this kind of post, seeing as there are 244 different arts for Plains alone, and I only have so much time in a day. However, what I did want to discuss is the different varieties of some of the most coveted basics in Magic- the Full-Arts. There’s a lot more types now than there used to be, so they’re worth discussing at length. Also, they’re freaking cool- expect a fair chunk of gushing in this post.

(Update: I forgot just how many sets had FABLs at this point, so this ends up being a two-parter. The other half’s already written, at least, and it’s probably going up on Thursday seeing as that’s going to be a very fucky day for me. It’s just, like, nobody wants to read 3000 words of this in one sitting, I think.)

Unglued

The first iteration of what could be called full-art lands was in Magic’s first Silver-Bordered parody set, Unglued. Considering what these look like, though, it might not be appropriate to call the Unglued lands full-art, as maybe “alternate border” is a better description. The framing of the art on these cards is, well, frame-like, with a verticality that reminds of a tall window or Egyptian cartouche.

I believe these ones used to be somewhat divisive, and I can see why. As much as the frame is interesting, it is also fairly distracting, and the dull brown of the Land frame doesn’t look particularly great when extended. And while the taller frame well suits the art for most of the cards, the Plains looks a little weird next to the very tall trees and forbidding rock faces of the other four arts. Interestingly, the Plains is also the cheapest of the five, though this is probably owing to this version being reprinted in The List for…some…reason. And not the rest. Huh.

Unhinged

Much like Unglued, Unhinged is a parody set, and the basics that come with it served as experimentation on the design much like the joke cards toyed with potential future card mechanics. Unlike the Unglued lands, though, the Unhinged Basics are pretty universally agreed to be fucking gorgeous.

Almost the entire card is dominated by the art of the card, with a thin frame and border the only dividers between art and edge. The modern land frame looks much more interesting than the old-border one, frankly, meaning that the parts of the card that aren’t art just look a little bit better. And that art…John Avon is an absolutely excellent landscape painter, and his skill is in full swing here. There’s intense colours and hundreds of subtle details, with the vastness of each land’s world conveyed through either an aerial or first-person perspective. The Forest and Swamp are impossibly deep, the Plains and ocean impossibly vast, the Mountain impossibly tall.

For a while, these were the de facto full-art basics, to the point where the MTGO Cube tournaments gave them to your decks by default. They’ve well earned that title, frankly, as there aren’t a lot of Magic cards that look as good as these do.

Zendikar

Zendikar is the first Standard set to have come with an alternate style of basic, an choice made to support the set’s Landfall theme and adventurous world. For the first time, the full-art lands were made to convey landscapes utterly alien to earth, worldbuilding in much the same way as those from previous Planes like Mirrodin and Alara. This also means it was the first set with full-arts that also had more than one art per basic, adding collectability and variety to this and many future sets.

The landscapes of the Zendikar full-arts are bizarre and otherworldly, with floating rocks (and the infamous “cup Island”) and impossibly gnarled and branching trees. The violence of the plane’s Roil is conveyed through crashing mountains, steaming vents, and tornadoes of water. While previous lands have had charm, these have character.

It was the Zendikar basics that were the defaults when I started playing Magic, since the Unhinged ones were prohibitively expensive and the Unglued ones were that and also not everyone liked them. Even then they were pricy, not 4 years since their printing. It’s also worth noting that these were the first iterations of full-art basics that would get a normal-frame version, the art compacted into a standard Basic shell- obviously they don’t look as good, but in pieces of art designed for a portrait, the cropped landscape doesn’t quite work.

Judge Promos 2014

There isn’t a lot to say about these, seeing as they’re basically irrelevant to most players. They’re the only other set of basics in the “Modern” (8th Edition-Conspiracy) frame as full arts, and they make up a panorama which is fairly cool. They’re pretty, sure, but not especially notable.

Also, fuck Terese Nielsen. And fuck TERFs in general.

Battle for Zendikar

I remember these fondly, seeing as the were the first that came out since I started playing, and the Fat Packs containing a solid block of them sold out almost immediately. I did manage to pick one up for Oath of the Gatewatch, though. This was the first set in the current frame, with a border that’s only tapered at the top and the black bottom section for collector information. Hot take, but I think these look better framewise than Zendikar.

As far as art goes, each land type has 4 new arts and 1 reprinted (yes, including Cup Island), and I think some amount of the unique character of Zendikar was lost in the 6 years between releases. Much of the violence and chaos of the originals is missing, and there’s more of an emphasis on the amazing vistas of the plane- brighter skies, even on some of the Swamps, and relatively fewer of the Hedrons which dominated the landscape.

However, I’d argue this works thematically for the set. Original Zendikar was about exploring this dangerous, rugged world, where survival is not guaranteed and landmarks were just as likely to float away or collapse as they were to remain standing. But Battle for Zendikar is a war story, of fighting against an insurmountable force- thus, the basics are here to show that the world and all its beauty are worth fighting for.

Oath of the Gatewatch

This is kind of a special case, seeing as the Plains, Islands, Swamps, Mountains, and Forests from this set were the same as those in Battle for Zendikar. However, Oath of the Gatewatch added a new basic “type”, in the typeless Wastes, along with two different art treatments representing the devastation in the wake of two Eldrazi Titans, Ulamog and Kozilek.

There’s a clear winner here. The desolation of Ulamog is chalky, dry, and skeletal, and while it’s kind of disquieting, it holds no candle to the utter unreality of the bismuth landscape left by Kozilek. It’s ultimately just so much more of an interesting piece of art, a world as alien to us as the Wastes were to the game of Magic. There’s a reason that was the version they chose to put in the old border in Time Spiral: Remastered.

��Amonkhet

For a world as monobiomic as Amonkhet, the basic land art is surprisingly varied. I was wondering how they’d make Forest work on a desert plane with one main city. Unfortunately, the full-art land art is somewhat less interesting. Amonkhet, like most sets, has 4 arts per basic land type, but in this case, only one of those is full-art, making packs marginally more of a gamble.

I see what they were going for. The visions of Nakhtamun presented by these cards are relatively peaceful, with the Throne of the God Pharoah in the background adding this ominous mood, as the Second Sun slowly creeps towards it. It is somewhat jarring, though, when you realize that all of these pieces are apparently taken from the same angle, meaning that that section of the city must be a bit of a hodge-podge.

These arts are basically fine. I don’t have a huge issue, but I wish there was a bit more variety, especially considering the gorgeous shots in some of the other basics from the set. You could have put the Monuments in the background instead of the Bolas horns, like some of those other basics do, but I suppose that wouldn’t do for the next set, would it.

Hour of Devastation

The full-art lands of Hour of Devastation are the same shots as from Amonkhet, but after the God-Pharoah’s return has laid waste to Nakhtamun and its people. The rivers run red with blood, the sky is an ominous haze, swarms of insects ravage the clouds, and those big buildings acting like mountains are, uh, kinda broken.

I will confess a love for these cards, if only because the non-Swamp ones are a great thematic choice for basics in a Black-based multicolour deck. In addition, and this is kind of a unique, personal bias, but: When the Sealed League for this set came around, foils of these were given out to players as promotion, but the batch we got at our local was heavily, heavily overprinted. Thus, I have a single copy of the Forest from this set that looks utterly gorgeous, this incredible darkness only pierced by the glow of the horns that are somehow more foreboding than the night surrounding them. It’s been in my Sultai EDH deck ever since.

Unstable

Much in the vein of its predecessors, Unstable has basic lands trying out a new Thing than the others, and in this case the basics aren’t just full-art, they’re borderless. And they got John Avon back for them, so the art is as incredible as Unhinged was.

One interesting thing about these is the haze of colour in the background of the art pieces. The Forest has this green glow, and the tinge of the clouds in the Swamp and Mountain lean black and red respectively. This helps a lot in these cards, letting the semi-transparent frame blend into the art, helping that seamless feel.

My main, and probably only, issue with these basics is the holographic rarity stamp present on every rare since Magic 2015, as while these obviously would be and did become valuable, they’re still just basics. The only real money in Unstable, sure, but I don’t think that’s deserving of the stamp, which is kind of distracting. It’s absence would also have allowed the bottom border to be even lower, were WoTC willing to compress the collector’s information to a single line. It is a missed opportunity, but not especially much of one.

#ramble #mtg #basic lands

2 notes · View notes

inkribbon796 · 4 years ago

Text

Like a House of Cards Ch. 4: Meanwhile in Forced Vacation Land

Summary: While the battle rages outside, Dark is forced to take a vacation he never wanted to take.

A/N: . . . And now for something, completely different . . .

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Down in the south Atlantic — or at least a very accurate copy of it — was a large luxury cruise ship. Dozens of people milled about on the deck, families played in the large top deck water slide and pool.

And up in the dining area there was amongst the sparse crowd, a family setting in the shade and enjoying the comforting breeze shielding them from the scalding sun and heat.

“Lunky, come on,” King tried to convince his child to eat some more human food. So far the spawnling could be convinced to eat something on a good day but anything else they turned their nose at.

Today Lunky didn’t want to even try food he normally enjoyed.

“Keep trying, they’ll eat some eventually,” Dark smiled, swirling a glass of red wine as he sat back in his crisp white suit. He was looking as calm and composed as ever — despite not feeling it for a second.

“Hopefully,” King smiled, watching Lunky turn around in their chair and look over at Mini who was talking with Iplier and the Host in the next table over. Lunky let out a little screech and Mini turned to look at them. “Yeah, you two can go off, just don’t play near the water or edge of the ship.”

Lunky made an excited, happy steak and raced off with Mini, the spawnling running right over Illinois who was laying on a bench next to Eric. Illinois coughed when his nephew used his stomach as a springboard. He glared after Lunky, taking off his sunglasses. Then he rolled his eyes and stood up to walk over to Dark, the Host stood up to follow him.

“Your kid’s a pill, bro, you know that?” Illinois told King in a good natured tone. “To quote Anti, “a real fookin’[1] ankle bitter” and all.”

“Yeah?” King began to retort back, “when you’re up for 24 hours with a kid we can talk about it. Or, you know, you get fifty newborn kittens.”

“Right, whatever, baby bro,” Illinois rolled his eyes, reaching over to rough up King’s hair but King began batting and pushing him away.

Then Illinois looked around, “Where are the others?”

Dark took a sip of his wine, “Well ever since that Brazilian dance troupe came on Bim wanted to hunt one, Yan wanted to stalk one, and your father wanted to take one out for drinks; so when they might be down three members by the next show.”

“My dad, yeah right,” Illinois grumbled, his tone firm.

The Host smiled, “If the Host’s family will excuse him, he has business to attend to for a second or two.”

“Host,” Dark called out, before his eldest could walk away. “Thanks again, this vacation was unexpected.”

The Seer smiled warmly, “It was the least the Host could do.”

And then the Host walked off, knowing he had duties to still perform, a gamble to emerge victorious in.

The Host knew that the Entity was confused and shaken because unlike any other “bootleg anomaly field trip” as the King of the Squirrels liked to call them, this luxurious cruise was not the Entity’s doing.

It was the Host’s. A tentative bubble of protection that was designed to placate and entertain the main inhabitants like rats in an observation tank. The Host was one of those rats, but that was beside the point.

With a slow and casual stride, as if his whole world was not poised to collapse around his ankles, the Host strode to the other side of the ship from the Entity, opened a cabin door and walked inside.

His aura melded with the anomaly’s, taking on a dark color rather than his swirl of words. His eye sockets began bleeding. Then he opened the door he’d walked into, the outside just a mass of black aura and the Seer reached in to the swirling mass with two hands and pulled two things out: a blue solid state drive with three charms attached to it — one of the charms was hanging broken with the other two sleeping charms — and the second thing he pulled through was Roman.

The instant the creative Side was through the door it shut and the black aura dissipated and Roman’s sword and shield clattered to the ground.

“The Host greets Roman, and wishes for him to know that he is now safe,” the Host greeted.

“Ughh, where am I?” Roman groaned in disorientation.

“South Street, Egoton,” the Host answered. “But however it currently has the appearance of a south Atlantic cruise. Would the creative Side like some mimosas, maybe a cocktail with a little umbrella styled like a pride flag?”

Roman looked downright panicked, “Very kind, I will take you up on such a glorious idea in the future. But I must find Virgil, I must find Logan, and . . .”

The Side trailed off, realizing something, “Oh great Caesar’s ghost! Patton! What happened to Patton? He was supposed to pick us up.”

“The emotional Side is unharmed and resting,” the Host reassured and Roman looked instantly relieved. He reached down to pick up his sword and shield.

“Very well,” Roman sheathed his sword. “I shall journey far and wide to find him, and wake such a dashing gent from his slumber with a beautiful and stunning ballad of our love.”

“As much as the Host would enjoy watching such an act, he would like to inform him that the remaining Core Sides are all here,” the Host held up the drive for emphasis.

“Where?” Roman froze and looked at the drive, “Wait, this was on Logan’s desk when I walked in to find that fiend in there.”

The Host smiled and held up the drive. He pressed his palm to the center of the drive. The drive emitted a harsh blue glow before the energy seemed to be pushed out of it and the drive turned grey and Logan fell out of the blue energy. The logical Side shaking and wide-eyed.

Roman was on him in an instant, wrapping his arms around him, “Logan, my sweet darling, are you harmed?”

“No!” Logan screamed and flinched away in panic the instant Roman’s hand touched him.

Flinching back, Roman held onto his hand as if Logan had slapped him.

“It’s too much right now, please don’t touch me,” Logan didn’t look him in the eye, his voice was weak and shaky.

“Of course, of course,” Roman immediately wrapped them around his arms. “Whatever you need.”

Logan just stared at the floor for a bit before rubbing his hands on the cheap carpet. Then he rubbed his face in the carpet and let out a shuddering breath.

“This is real, right?” Logan asked.

“Pretty sure,” Roman sat next to him.

The Host took the remaining two charms off the drive, the golden heart locket and the thundercloud, and held them out for Roman. “Patton and Virgil are sleeping, and will not remember their captivity. They cannot feel anything.”

“Good,” Logan blurted out, almost like he was forcing the words out of his throat, he was still lying on the ground. “Good. That’s good. That’s a relief.”

Roman took the charms.

Then the Host walked toward the cabin door, “the Host will give the Sides a moment to themselves. They will need it, and should they need help with anything they can call out to the Host.”

After a quick nod from Roman, the Seer left the cabin and headed back to the main dining area where Dark still was, making sure to pick up Yan, Bim, and Wil on his way.

For a bit the two Sides sat in silence, the only motion was the occasional dipping and bobbing of the ship.

“Lo?” Roman tried to prod again.

“10 hours, 47 minutes, and 16 seconds,” Logan’s voice was almost choked with tears. “He kept me in that thing for all that time. He never let me out, and made me feel every second of it. Putting things inside my head. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t sense, and was only aware of the passage of time.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Roman felt his eyes growing wet.

At that point Logan weakly pulled himself over to lay his head on Roman’s lap, entwining one of Roman’s hands with his own.

Logan clutched onto Roman’s hand like it was an anchor, and started to cry, “You’re so warm.”

“I’m here, Lo,” Roman offered, taking his other hand and carding it through Logan’s hair.

The logical Side let out a shaky breath. “He told me people were going to die, he threatened me and told me that if I didn’t listen to him, you and Virgil were going to die.”

“I’m not dead, my sweet,” Roman bent down to gently kiss Logan’s head holding him as he cried. “I’m here now, my dear nerdy. I’m not leaving you.”

Logan nodded, as Roman looked at the charms again.

“We should get them out,” Roman decided.

No!

They’re sleeping.

Keep them safe.

None of these thoughts came from Logan, but they were inextricably his all the same.

“Let’s wait until he’s gone,” Logan forced out, in an almost desperate panic. “I don’t want him to harm them. I just want . . . I . . . Those thoughts aren’t mine. They’re his. What did he do to me?”

Logan sat up and Roman gently kissed his forehead.

“Maybe we get Patton out here and all four of us talk about things,” Roman offered. “And then we can figure out what to do?”

Hesitantly, Logan nodded and the two Sides broke open the locket and the thundercloud charm. With two soft clouds of light, Virgil and Patton came back and the two Core Sides were once four again, as the dome silently covered them from the chaos raging in the rest of the city.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Accessibility Translations

1. fucking

#Superhero AU #Masks and Maladies #footnotes #mentions of kidnapping #Darkiplier #Illinois the Adventurer #ahwm Illinois #Eric Derekson #King of the Squirrels #Lunky #Mini Bing #the Host #Roman Sanders #Logan Sanders #Logince #Logan's not doing well #but then again no one is this week

5 notes · View notes

engineeredfiction · 4 years ago

Text

Space Is a Harsh Mistress Ch 3

AU: A blend of 1984, Rollerball (1975), Prospect, and We.

Warnings: Nothing in this chapter. Future warnings…violence, smut, angst, Ezra being Ezra.

Notes: I’m just doing this to break writer’s block but I hope it’s mildly entertaining. Part 3 of purposed 7 parts.I’m winging this! Also the formatting is shite.

Summary: Ezra is tasked to a life altering and nearly impossible task for a group of rebels.

There’s no starvation, no poverty, no suffering, and no wars. All that is asked for is your full cooperation.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 4

Ezra thumb the pages of his copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and he happened to land on a particular page with the following quote:

...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative…

He reread the lines until they were burned into his memory. Hard copies of books were hard to come by those days as products made from paper were heavily regulated in hopes to preserve Earth's entire tree population. The book Ezra held had yellowing around the borders of the stiffened pages. There were his pencil notes within the lines and an ink message on the first page to a person named Orielle from the book's prior owner. A loud buzzing sound from the shipping docks grabbed Ezra's attention.

He had been sitting where Dax told him to wait for the past thirty minutes on one of Mars's commercial docks. He scanned the docks until a familiar figure caught his eye. Aloisa was short and stocky compared to the group of men she was conversing with. Ezra could see through her tough persona wardrobe there was physical softness, but underneath was a system of muscular strength that has been fine tuned from years of training. She’s not physically weak and certainly not mentally weak, he thought. Her dark auburn hair was in the usual high bun he’s seen her wear previously. Even from his distance he could see her clear grey eyes and flirtatious smile. What is she talking about with them? She made eye contact him and smiled. Ezra closed the book, wrapped it in soft cloth, and placed it into his canvas satchel. Her approach was slow and deliberate. He recalled to himself:

...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative…

Without removing her gaze from his face Aloisa asked, “Was that a book I saw? A bound book?”

“It is indeed a bound paper book,” Ezra hummed.

“Such a rare commodity. Honestly I wouldn’t have guessed you as a reader type, let alone own a physical book.” Ezra stiffened his lips and looked away. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to come off as an asshole. It’s just that many people don’t read...literature. I’m being presumptuous. What were you reading?”

“Well you have presumed correctly. A suitable work of art by Yevgeny Zamyatin,” Ezra shot at her.

“Russian literature, impressive. A subversive piece of literature if I recall correctly,” she beamed. “Your ship is ready. Would you like a tour?”

“You wrap your demands in a cloak of pleasant inquiries?” Ezra wearily smiled at her. He was sure he could run off at any time and they would be forced to find someone else. Yet, he knew too much now. The business of sneaking human commodities away from The United Corps had one exit and it was death.

***********************

The Opportunity was a few decades old, but still highly functional and offered more space and amenities than Ezra’s antiquated ship. Ezra’s hand glided along the seats of the flight deck. His fingers lingered on the control panels. His calloused fingers felt every button, knob, and lever. He felt out of his element as he took in the aged grandeur of Opportunity’s technology.

“I don’t know if I can fly this,” he choked.

“I can,” Aloisa rebutted, “so that’s not an issue.”

Ezra turned to face her, “You’ll be gracing me with your presence?”

“Of course,” she laughed, “You can’t fly my ship.”

“It’s yours?”

“Officially I am the prime owner and you’re the sub. I don’t have the mining credentials to get through The Final Wall. Mining credentials...are out of our league to fake apparently and we have no friends on The Final Wall, yet.”

The Final Wall was a term dubbed during the early days of The United Corps for the perimeter between Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. More than a dozen of Final Fleet ships were scattered about with military personnel and weapons stationed to make sure no one escaped the paradise of The United Corps. Rendering a ship untraceable to pass the The Final Wall is impossible and a fleet ship could detect a rebel one from a far off distance. Only certified ships and their operators with proper IFF transponders could go beyond. Ezra’s prior long standing certifications proved to be valuable.

“Where do we need to go?” Ezra asked as he plopped down in the pilot chair and swivelled around to face Aloisa.

“We need to drop off the payload...at Proxima Sol Alpha base. With this ship it’ll take us two years. We put the payload, so to speak, in hypersleep. It’ll save on resources and there’ll be no noise to pick up on by the Final Fleet. We could take turns in hyper if you prefer.”

“And that is it? We take a two year vacation to transport...goods and come back?”

“Yes, exactly.” Aloisa waited for a response from Ezra, he was deep in thought and no longer made eye contact with her. “Would you like to see the kitchen and quarters?”

The kitchen was outfitted in white streamline furnishings and a garden wall. Ezra thumbed a basil leaf, it was soft and crushed easily between his fingers. The heavy aroma stimulated his senses. Garden walls were a real treat in ships. They provided fresh food, oxygen, and were visually pleasing among the many dull walls that kept them safe from the vacuum of space.

Ezra knew Aloisa was observing him, it didn’t bother him. She stood in the corner with her arms crossed, her eyes followed him as he moved through the kitchen. A stove, a sink, coffee machine, electric kettle, cupboards, a variety of utensils, and packaged spices. This ship has been lived in and taken care of, Ezra thought. This ship has been well loved and it’s apparent from the state of the kitchen. He appreciated it. His hand guided him around the counter space and Ezra met Aloisa’s gaze. She looks disquieted.

The quarters were spacious for a ship of Opportunity’s size due to some of them being converted to hold extra hypersleep pods. There were four small quarters the size of walk-in closets and two large ones with decent sized beds.

“The mattresses are firm, so I hope you like to sleep on a rock. It’s good for the back supposedly. The lights are dimmable, you have a closet, a safe, smart mirror, and the lavatories are just down the hall with a shower. Rooms are soundproof,” Aloisa stated as if she had memorised a speech.

Ezra gave the personal quarter a final look. The light gave a warm glow that soothed and comforted him if only temporary. The glow radiated across Aloisa’s face, he found he couldn’t take his eyes off her face. She propped herself up against the door frame and was staring at an imaginary spot on the floor. She had a scar perpendicular on her left eyebrow, faded by time. Her scarred eyebrow raised when she felt him.

“What’s your verdict? You haven’t said it to me yet,” she declared.

“I know I’m not the most moral man in the universe. I have done questionable things Kevva only knows. But this is a venture that is bigger than I have ever done. It’s bigger than my scope. I’m not familiar with extravagant transportation, missions, or danger that could potentially bring innocent people to a demise. I’ve known Dax for nearly a generation and he gambled on me,” Ezra admitted. He wasn’t sure why he said what he did to a stranger.

“Do you think he made an erroneous gamble?”

Ezra hung his head down. Clearly Dax thought highly of him to trust him with this mission. Twenty lives depended on being transported to Proxima Sol Alpha safely and without notice.

“I’ve been in peril before,” he nodded to where his right arm should be, “I’ve been shot, poisoned, abandoned, and this task should not be weighing on my mind as heavy as it does.”

“Do you think it’s because this is the first time you were made aware that the system is not a favourable one to so many while it’s been extremely favourable to you even though it may not have seemed that way? That if caught, you would be sentenced to the fighting ring until they deemed it was your time to go?”

“To think being stranded on a death-dealing planet with little food was a privilege. You are willing to risk your own life for these people?”

“At times like this we have to make a choice between what’s morally right and the law. I like to think I’m making the morally right choice, are you?” She straightened her posture as Ezra bit his lower lip and moved closer to her, he could feel her breath against his chest. “Dax will be depositing an extra five thousand credits into your account today.”

“So I can get a new arm?”

“You can do whatever you want with it, but you should definitely say yes out loud to me. I know you already made up your mind, but I need to hear you say it to me, to my face,” she insisted.

“How do you know I have resolved to do this mission? I know I didn’t give Dax an affirmative,” Ezra retorted.

“You’re reading a Zamyatin novel. You’ve been a rebel all your life and you never knew it,” she said sternly.

Ezra conceded, “My answer is a yes, I’ll use my highly valuable certifications to get you and a sleeping payload to Proxima Sol Alpha safely.”

#Pedro Pascal #ezra prospect #dystopian future #dystopia #space is a harsh mistresses #sci fi writing #sci fi #science fiction #prospect (2018)#writing #yevgeny zamyatin

21 notes · View notes

unsettlingshortstories · 3 years ago

Text

The Specialist's Hat

Kelly Link (1998)

“When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”

“When you’re Dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”

Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being Dead than Samantha.

The babysitter yawns, covering up her mouth with a long white hand. “I said to brush your teeth and that it’s time for bed,” she says. She sits cross-legged on the flowered bedspread between them. She has been teaching them a card game called Pounce, which involves three decks of cards, one for each of them. Samantha’s deck is missing the Jack of Spades and the Two of Hearts, and Claire keeps on cheating. The babysitter wins anyway. There are still flecks of dried shaving cream and toilet paper on her arms. It is hard to tell how old she is — at first they thought she must be a grownup, but now she hardly looks older than them. Samantha has forgotten the babysitter’s name.

Claire’s face is stubborn. “When you’re Dead,” she says, “you stay up all night long.”

“When you’re dead,” the babysitter snaps, “it’s always very cold and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the Specialist will get you.”

“This house is haunted,” Claire says.

“I know it is,” the babysitter says. “I used to live here.”

Something is creeping up the stairs, Something is standing outside the door, Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark; Something is sighing across the floor.

Claire and Samantha are spending the summer with their father, in the house called Eight Chimneys. Their mother is dead. She has been dead for exactly 282 days.

Their father is writing a history of Eight Chimneys, and of the poet, Charles Cheatham Rash, who lived here at the turn of the century, and who ran away to sea when he was thirteen, and returned when he was thirty-eight. He married, fathered a child, wrote three volumes of bad, obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel, The One Who Is Watching Me Through the Window, before disappearing again in 1907, this time for good. Samantha and Claire’s father says that some of the poetry is actually quite readable, and at least the novel isn’t very long.

When Samantha asked him why he was writing about Rash, he replied that no one else had, and why didn��t she and Samantha go play outside. When she pointed out that she was Samantha, he just scowled and said how could he be expected to tell them apart when they both wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, and why couldn’t one of them dress all in green and the other pink?

Claire and Samantha prefer to play inside. Eight Chimneys is as big as a castle, but dustier and darker than Samantha imagines a castle would be. The house is open to the public, and during the day people — families — driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds and the first story; the third story belongs to Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play explorers, and sometimes they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to visitors. After a few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and they mouth it along with him. They help him sell postcards and copies of Rash’s poetry to the tourist families who come into the little gift shop. When the mothers smile at them, and say how sweet they are, they stare back and don’t say anything at all. The dim light in the house makes the mothers look pale and flickery and tired. They leave Eight Chimneys, mothers and families, looking not quite as real as they did before they paid their admissions, and of course Claire and Samantha will never see them again, so maybe they aren’t real. Better to stay inside the house, they want to tell the families, and if you must leave, then go straight to your cars.

The caretaker says the woods aren’t safe.

Their father stays in the library on the second story all morning, typing, and in the afternoon he takes long walks. He takes his pocket recorder along with him, and a hip flask of Old Kentucky, but not Samantha and Claire.

The caretaker of Eight Chimneys is Mr. Coeslak. His left leg is noticeably shorter than his right. Short black hairs grow out of his ears and his nostrils, and there is no hair at all on top of his head, but he’s given Samantha and Claire permission to explore the whole of the house. It was Mr. Coeslak who told them that there are copperheads in the woods, and that the house is haunted. He says they are all, ghosts and snakes, a pretty bad-tempered lot, and Samantha and Claire should stick to the marked trails, and stay out of the attic.

Mr. Coeslak can tell the twins apart, even if their father can’t; Claire’s eyes are grey, like a cat’s fur, he says, but Samantha’s are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining.

Samantha and Claire went walking in the woods on the second day that they were at Eight Chimneys. They saw something. Samantha thought it was a woman, but Claire said it was a snake. The staircase that goes up to the attic has been locked. They peeked through the keyhole, but it was too dark to see anything.

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty. There was another man who wanted to go with her, and first she wouldn’t, because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did. Her husband found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some of this snake’s blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had learned this from an island man who had been on a ship with him. And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said he saw it. — An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

Eight Chimneys is over two hundred years old. It is named for the eight chimneys which are each big enough that Samantha and Claire can both fit in one fireplace. The chimneys are red brick, and on each floor there are eight fireplaces, making a total of twenty-four. Samantha imagines the chimney stacks stretching like stout red tree trunks, all the way up through the slate roof of the house. Beside each fireplace is a heavy black firedog, and a set of wrought iron pokers shaped like snakes. Claire and Samantha pretend to duel with the snake-pokers before the fireplace in their bedroom on the third floor. Wind rises up the back of the chimney. When they stick their faces in, they can feel the air rushing damply upward, like a river. The flue smells old and sooty and wet, like stones from a river.

Their bedroom was once the nursery. They sleep together in a poster bed which resembles a ship with four masts. It smells of mothballs. Charles Cheatham Rash slept here when he was a little boy, and also his daughter. She disappeared when her father did. It might have been gambling debts. They may have moved to New Orleans. She was fourteen years old, Mr. Coeslak said. What was her name, Claire asked. What happened to her mother, Samantha wanted to know. Mr. Coeslak closed his eyes in an almost wink. Mrs. Rash had died the year before her husband and daughter disappeared, he said, of a mysterious wasting disease. He can’t remember the name of the poor little girl, he said.

Eight Chimneys has exactly 100 windows, all still with the original wavery panes of hand-blown glass. With so many windows, Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should always be full of light, but instead the trees press close against the house, so that the rooms on the first and second story — even the third-story rooms — are green and dim, as if Samantha and Claire are underwater. This is the light that makes the tourists into ghosts. In the morning, and again towards evening, a fog settles in around the house. Sometimes it is grey like Claire’s eyes, and sometimes it is more gray, like Samantha’s.

I met a woman in the wood, Her lips were two red snakes. She smiled at me, her eyes lewd And burning like a fire.

A few nights ago, the wind was sighing in the nursery chimney. Their father had already tucked them in, and turned off the light. Claire dared Samantha to stick her head into the fireplace, in the dark, and so she did. The cold, wet air licked at her face, and it almost sounded like voices talking low, muttering. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.

Their father has been drinking steadily since they arrived at Eight Chimneys. He never mentions their mother. One evening they heard him shouting in the library, and when they came downstairs, there was a large sticky stain on the desk, where a glass of whiskey had been knocked over. It was looking at me, he said, through the window. It had orange eyes.

Samantha and Claire refrained from pointing out that the library is on the second story.

At night, their father’s breath has been sweet from drinking, and he is spending more and more time in the woods, and less in the library. At dinner, usually hot dogs and baked beans from a can, which they eat off of paper plates in the first floor dining room, beneath the Austrian chandelier (which has exactly 632 leaded crystals shaped like teardrops), their father recites the poetry of Charles Cheatham Rash, which neither Samantha nor Claire cares for.

He has been reading the ship diaries which Rash kept, and he says that he has discovered proof in them that Rash’s most famous poem, The Specialist’s Hat, is not a poem at all, and in any case, Rash didn’t write it. It is something that one of the men on the whaler used to say, to conjure up a whale. Rash simply copied it down and stuck an end on it and said it was his.

The man was from Mulatuppu, which is a place neither Samantha nor Claire has ever heard of. Their father says that the man was supposed to be some sort of magician, but he drowned shortly before Rash came back to Eight Chimneys. Their father says that the other sailors wanted to throw the magician’s chest overboard, but Rash persuaded them to let him keep it until he could be put ashore, with the chest, off the coast of North Carolina.

The specialist’s hat makes a noise like an agouti; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a collared peccary; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a white-lipped peccary; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a tapir; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a rabbit; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a squirrel; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a curassow; The specialist’s hat moans like a whale in the water; The specialist’s hat moans like the wind in my wife’s hair; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a snake; I have hung the hat of the specialist upon my wall.

The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods. He is going to meet her, tonight, and they are going to have a picnic supper and look at the stars. This is the time of year when the Perseids can be seen, falling across the sky on clear nights. Their father said that he has been walking with the woman every afternoon. She is a distant relation of Rash, and besides, he said, he needs a night off, and some grownup conversation.

Mr. Coeslak won’t stay in the house after dark, but he agreed to find someone to look after Samantha and Claire. Then their father couldn’t find Mr. Coeslak, but the babysitter showed up precisely at seven o’clock. The babysitter, whose name neither twin quite caught, wears a blue cotton dress with short floaty sleeves. Both Samantha and Claire think she is pretty in an old-fashioned sort of way.

They were in the library with their father, looking up Mulatuppu in the red leather atlas, when she arrived. She didn’t knock on the front door, she simply walked in, and up the stairs, as if she knew where to find them.

Their father kissed them goodbye, a hasty smack, told them to be good and he would take them into town on the weekend to see the Disney film. They went to the window to watch as he walked out of the house and into the woods. Already it was getting dark, and there were fireflies, tiny yellow-hot sparks in the air. When their father had quite disappeared into the trees, they turned around and stared at the babysitter instead. She raised one eyebrow. “Well,” she said. “What sort of games do you like to play?”

Widdershins around the chimneys, once, twice, again. The spokes click like a clock on the bicycle; they tick down the days of the life of a man.

First they played Go Fish, and then they played Crazy Eights, and then they made the babysitter into a mummy by putting shaving cream from their father’s bathroom on her arms and legs, and wrapping her in toilet paper. She is the best babysitter they have ever had.

At nine-thirty, she tried to put them to bed. Neither Claire nor Samantha wanted to go to bed, so they began to play the Dead game. The Dead game is a let’s pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed to do anything they want to. They can even fly, by jumping off the nursery beds, and just waving their arms. Someday this will work, if they practice hard enough.

The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant. The twins keep a list of important numbers in a green address book that belonged to their mother. Mr. Coeslak’s tour has been a good source of significant amounts and tallies: they are writing a tragical history of numbers.

Two. The twins don’t play the Dead game in front of grownups. They have been summing up the babysitter, and have decided that she doesn’t count. They tell her the rules.

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are Dead, you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Samantha and Claire aren’t sure who the Specialist is, but they aren’t afraid of him.

To become Dead, they hold their breath while counting to 35, which is as high as their mother got, not counting a few days.

“You never lived here,” Claire says. “Mr. Coeslak lives here.”

“Not at night,” says the babysitter. “This was my bedroom when I was little.”

“Really?” Samantha says. Claire says, “Prove it.”

The babysitter gives Samantha and Claire a look, as if she is measuring them: how old; how smart; how brave; how tall. Then she nods. The wind is in the flue, and in the dim nursery light they can see the little strands of fog seeping out of the fireplace. “Go stand in the chimney,” she instructs them. “Stick your hand as far up as you can, and there is a little hole on the left side, with a key in it.”

Samantha looks at Claire, who says, “Go ahead.” Claire is fifteen minutes and some few uncounted seconds older than Samantha, and therefore gets to tell Samantha what to do. Samantha remembers the muttering voices, and then reminds herself that she is Dead. She goes over to the fireplace and ducks inside.

When Samantha stands up in the chimney, she can only see the very edge of the room. She can see the fringe of the mothy blue rug, and one bed leg, and beside it, Claire’s foot, swinging back and forth like a metronome. Claire’s shoelace has come undone, and there is a Band-Aid on her ankle. It all looks very pleasant and peaceful from inside the chimney, like a dream, and for a moment, she almost wishes she didn’t have to be Dead. But it’s safer, really. She sticks her left hand up as far as she can reach, trailing it along the crumbly wall, until she feels an indentation. She thinks about spiders and severed fingers, and rusty razorblades, and then she reaches inside. She keeps her eyes lowered, focused on the corner of the room, and Claire’s twitchy foot.

Inside the hole, there is a tiny cold key, its teeth facing outward. She pulls it out, and ducks back into the room. “She wasn’t lying,” she tells Claire.

“Of course I wasn’t lying,” the babysitter says. “When you’re Dead, you’re not allowed to tell lies.”

“Unless you want to,” Claire says.

Dreary and dreadful beats the sea at the shore. Ghastly and dripping is the mist at my door. The clock in the hall is chiming one, two, three, four. The morning comes not, no, never, no more.

Samantha and Claire have gone to camp for three weeks every summer since they were seven. This year their father didn’t ask them if they wanted to go back, and after discussing it, they decided that it was just as well. They didn’t want to have to explain to all their friends how they were half-orphans now. They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins. They don’t want to be pitiful.

It has not even been a year, but Samantha realizes that she is forgetting what her mother looked like. Not her mother’s face so much as the way she smelled, which was something like grass, and something like Chanel No. 5, and like something else too. She can’t remember whether her mother had gray eyes, like her, or grey eyes, like Claire. She doesn’t dream about her mother anymore, but she does dream about Prince Charming, a bay whom she once rode in the horse show at her camp. In the dream, Prince Charming did not smell like a horse at all. He smelled like Chanel No. 5. When she is Dead, she can have all the horses she wants, and they all smell like Chanel No. 5.

“Where does the key go to?” Samantha says.

The babysitter holds out her hand. “To the attic. You don’t really need it, but taking the stairs is easier than the chimney. At least the first time.”

“Aren’t you going to make us go to bed?” Claire says.

The babysitter ignores Claire. “My father used to lock me in the attic when I was little, but I didn’t mind. There was a bicycle up there and I used to ride it around and around the chimneys until my mother let me out again. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?”

“Of course,” Claire says.

“If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can’t catch you.”

“What’s the Specialist?” Samantha says. Bicycles are okay, but horses can go faster.

“The Specialist wears a hat,” say the babysitter. “The hat makes noises.”

She doesn’t say anything else.

When you’re dead, the grass is greener Over your grave. The wind is keener. Your eyes sink in, your flesh decays. You Grow accustomed to slowness; expect delays.

The attic is somehow bigger and lonelier than Samantha and Claire thought it would be. The babysitter’s key opens the locked door at the end of the hallway, revealing a narrow set of stairs. She waves them ahead and upwards.

It isn’t as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green and mysterious during the day, don’t reach all the way up. Extravagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer windows. It lights the length of the attic, which is wide enough to hold a softball game in, and lined with trunks where Samantha imagines people could sit, could be hiding and watching. The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thick-waisted chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost angrily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight, they look like they are breathing. “They’re so beautiful,” she says.

“Which chimney is the nursery chimney?” Claire says.

The babysitter points to the nearest righthand stack. “That one,” she says. “It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery.”

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long, black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The babysitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.

“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” She goes to look through the boxes and trunks that are stacked against the far wall.

“It’s a special hat,” the babysitter says. “It’s not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it.”

“Our father writes books,” Samantha says.

“My father did too.” The babysitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it. It nickers at her. “He was a bad poet, but he was worse at magic.”

Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she could have a horse. She thought she would have given up anything for one — even being a twin was not as good as having a horse. She still doesn’t have a horse, but she doesn’t have a mother either, and she can’t help wondering if it’s her fault. The hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.

“What happened to him?” Claire asks.

“After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him, and it didn’t find me.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

There is a clattering, shivering, clicking noise. Claire has found the babysitter’s bike and is dragging it towards them by the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. “Rule number three,” she says.

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks again, and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she suddenly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat, and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of curassows, of white-lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash. The chimneys are moaning, and Claire’s voice booms hollowly beneath the hat. “Run away, or I’ll catch you and eat you!”

Samantha and the babysitter run away, laughing, as Claire mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them. She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist’s hat bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first towards the right, and then to the left. Claire’s knobby knees stick out on either side like makeshift counterweights.

Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars, and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire’s head.

“Shit!” the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter’s hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist’s hat has bitten her.

Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist’s hat rolls away. It gathers speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. “Go get it,” Claire says. “You can be the Specialist this time.”

“No,” the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. “It’s time for bed.”

When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist’s hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between their feet. “When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?”

“When you’re Dead,” the babysitter says, “everything’s a lot easier. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to. You don’t have to have a name, you don’t have to remember. You don’t even have to breathe.”

She shows them exactly what she means.

When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think), Samantha realizes, with a small pang, that she is now stuck, indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn’t been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles, maybe. She has chosen to be Dead instead. She hopes that she’s made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have.

Last year, they were learning fractions in school when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you think you have one under control, it throws up its head and tosses you off. Claire’s favorite number is 4, which she says is a tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much. She likes numbers. Take the number 8, for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. Maybe when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery window. She looks out through the wavy glass. It’s Mr. Coeslak. “Samantha, Claire!” he calls up to her. “Are you all right? Is your father there?” Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. “They’re always locking me in the tool room,” he says. “Are you there, Samantha? Claire? Girls?”

The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire’s eyes glitter at them from the dark bed. Samantha doesn’t say anything, but she waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can see them waving, because after a little while, he stops shouting and goes away. “Be careful,” the babysitter says. “He’ll be coming soon. It will be coming soon.”

She takes Samantha’s hand, and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit and wait. Time passes, but they don’t get tired, they don’t get any older.

Who’s there? Just air.

The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire, and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter says. “It’s the Specialist.”

Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?” The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?”

“Quick,” the babysitter says. “It’s time to go up to the attic and hide.”

Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when she mouths the word, Up. She goes first, so they can see where the fingerholds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then Claire. Samantha watches her sister’s foot ascend like smoke, the shoelace still untied.

“Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you’re scaring me. Where are you?” The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door. “Samantha? I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake.” Samantha hesitates for only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

0 notes

eiasuh014 · 4 years ago

Text

007카지노 pattern that give you money Part5 #1526

Unlike the three Spirits mentioned above, these four "Liberties" are not wearing the Phrygian cap of liberty but brandish them on staffs or spears. They are also all female. http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection®ion=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/먹튀검증사이트목록 Eleven other local lotteries in Nebraska followed suit, until the state banned the devices, effective 1985. The region of Limousine lay in the middle of France on the western side. Its design, which is regarded as a bad copy of the Auvergne design, was used by the cities of Limoges, Angoulême and Poitiers. Limoges also exported much of her production to Spain. Spanish-suited cards are still used in France, mostly in Northern Catalonia, and Brittany and the Vendée with the latter two using the archaic Aluette cards.

If you are a blackjack fan or just want to learn more, you should read on. You can learn its origin and other useful information. Playing cards spread in Europe rapidly -- in Spain 1371, in Switzerland 1377, and in Italy and France 1380. The game was then patented using the name Caribbean Stud Poker. Some time later, the casino owner sold the patent for over $30 million to a company called Mikohn. Suits are irrelevant. In most varieties of the game, a player receiving two cards of the same rank may split them, receiving a second card for each, and play the two hands independently of each other.

This is one move which led him to bring back his company from bankruptcy. The player would receive 7:1 minus half the total bet payout on half the total bet for craps and 15:1 minus half the total bet payout on half the total bet for 11 (yo). No casino currently runs a craps table with a bet that yields a player edge full-time. The red card in the red-numbered box corresponding to the red die, and the blue card in the blue-numbered box corresponding to the blue die are then turned over to form the roll on which bets are settled.

The tuck box may have a seal applied.Card manufacturers must pay special attention to the registration of the cards, as non-symmetrical cards can be used to cheat. In Germany, the card game that is played determines the type of deck that will be used - and all German decks are not alike. (See the page on Germany in this section for different decks.) On the left is a picture of German suit symbols. The first card features the "acorn" or in German the Eichel suit. The second card is of the "bells" suit or Schellen. Although the third card appears to look like a "spade", it is a "leaf", sometimes called a "green" and in German known as the Grun or Blatt suit. The fourth suit is the "hearts" suit or Herz. Germany produces playing cards for many different countries today. Some of these exports are made with the suit symbols illustrated, some exported decks use other symbols. Suiss suit symbols are somewhat similar to the German suits, but there are differences.The first card in the Swiss deck pictured in the second photograph on the left is also known as the "acorn" or Eichel suit. The second card is the "shield" suit or Schilten. The third card is the "bells" suit or Schellen. Finally, the fourth card is in the "roses" suit or Rosen. People in Swizerland who play a game (or a number of related games) called Jass will use a deck with these suit symbols. However, people living near the French border may use decks with the French suit indicators, while people living near the Italian border may use Latin suited cards. Casinos must set the i-Deal Plus shuffler to the “Caribbean Stud Poker Cover All” mode.After the dealer removes his hand from the shuffler and presses the green button, the i-Deal Plus will determine the number of players in the round and display the payouts on its front screen.The deck has Shields, Arrows, Helms, Swords, Crescent Moons, Orbs, Hearts, and Crowns, each suit numbered 1-9, plus a suit of dragons numbered 1-10, providing an 82 card deck. The system was released in 1996.

For players who choose to disobey the ninth of my Ten Commandments of Gambling, you'll be in side bet heaven at the Palms casino in Managua, Nicaragua. They have no fewer than four side bets you can make, as follows.Bonus,Power Play,Super Power,Fuego. Number 1 and number 3 each cost 27 chips and pay 297 chips. In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.It was used as housing for the administrators of the crystal works from the middle the 19th century.

The former Deneuvre Mill (now a Crystal Lapidary and Engraving Factory) on Rue du Moulin de Deneuvre (1836) The most common are from cancers[37] resulting from exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke[38][39] and musculoskeletal injury (MSI)[40] from repetitive motion injuries while running table games over many hours. he Drouard et Berthault Lock and Metalwork Factory (now Société des Constructions Métalliques de Baccarat) at 10 Avenue de Lachapelle (1873) 적토마게임 Horn: This is a bet that involves betting on 1 unit each for 2, 3, 11 and 12 at the same time for the next roll.

Starting with an initial bet of, say, 1 unit, a loss would raise the next bet to 2 units. Jacks or Better, sometimes simply called "Draw Poker," is the most common variation of video poker. Payoffs begin at a pair of jacks. Sigma Flush Attack is a combination of video poker and a banking slot, in this case what is being banked is flushes.Fan tan is their ruling passion." The large Chinatown in San Francisco was also home to dozens of fan-tan houses in the 19th century.

This additional bet wins if the point is rolled again before a 7 is rolled (the point is made) and pays at the true odds of 2-to-1 if 4 or 10 is the point, 3-to-2 if 5 or 9 is the point, or 6-to-5 if 6 or 8 is the point. The Casino Estoril, located in the municipality of Cascais, on the Portuguese Riviera, near Lisbon, is the largest casino in Europe by capacity. To have the appropriate card counting, you must ensure all cards are out from the deck.Jumping the Gun/Premature Bingo – One who calls bingo before having a valid bingo.

0 notes

carruth00 · 4 years ago

Photo

HIT - by Luke Jermay - A Review (Gimmicks and Online Instructions)

Here's the Ad Copy...

With "Hit," you're able to perform an unforgettable, painstakingly clear demonstration of persuasion--and mind control. From a shuffled pack you remove just four cards and offer to play a few rounds of Blackjack with a participant. Despite letting her choose her cards every time, you, the performer, always prevail. Even when cards are exchanged and shown to the spectator, you are always left with the winning hand.

In the first phase, two hands of Blackjack are created but kept face down. The spectator chooses which hands they wants... and you win. In the second phase, a card of each Blackjack hand is shown and still...you are left with the winning hand. In the third phase all the cards are shown except one... and still you win. In the last phase ALL the cards are shown, and still you mysteriously win.

What makes "Hit" a spectacular addition to your mentalism or magic repertoire is that this is not a card trick about cards. It's about CHOICES, and makes an ideal forum to interact in a meaningful way with your spectator. This trick is entirely self-working, and can be learned in minutes. It comes with all of the required gimmicked cards, and more than an hour of video instruction teaching every facet of the routine.

My Thoughts:

First.. Luke Jermay is one of my favorite performers. His work is always pivotal and very influential. He has excelled in both the world of magic and mentalism, and served as a consultant to Criss Angel on Mind Freak, Derren Brown on both Mind Control and Trick of the Mind, Marco Tempest on Virtual Magician and on the tv show The Mentalist. He has composed a bookshelf full of books and manuscripts.

Psychological illusions and mental conundrums are Luke's specialties. To get a good idea of how 'HIT' fits into these styles.. I suggest you visit the Murphy's link below and watch a 7 minute plus trailer that will show you everything you need to know.. other than my opinion.

Luke employs a type of blackjack many of you will not be familiar with.. a two card blackjack where no additional cards are dealt. Think of Five Card Stud.. except a different game.. and two cards. You are dealt two cards.. and the highest hand wins. You cannot 'bust', as 21 is the highest possible sum with two cards. So, there is a winner and a loser of each deal. I suppose you could tie.. but Luke makes sure you don't.

The ad copy is correct. It plays out exactly as written. The only thing I could add is that it's also possible for you to tell your spectator they will WIN the next hand, in some cases. In either case, you are in full control of all hands, and you successfully predict who will win.

It's possible to present this as a gambling demonstration, but Luke presents it as a theorem on choices.. and how choices affect the outcome of our lives. I like Luke's psychological approach, and the gambling approach is simply another option.

The instructional video (online) runs an hour and seven minutes. It's thorough. Also included are a couple of additional handlings.. including one similar to the gambling demonstration I mentioned above and another using a pendulum, powered entirely by the spectator. Both are nice additions to the primary effect.

The secret, if you want to call it that, is all in the gaffed cards included with the effect. You are provided with enough gaffs to carry out four different hands, all of which you're in full control of from beginning to end. The gaffs are not typical Bicycle cards.. they are Cardshark Phoenix cards. I would like to have the option for Bicycle gaffs, but I have enough Phoenix decks that it wasn't a problem.

I really enjoy effects with a twist. You are encouraged to take the method and develop your own effect.. something that suits YOUR style. I'm sure you can think of many reasons why you are able to 'control'or 'predict' the outcomes. As I'm fond of saying.."Use your noggin' for something other than a hat rack" and create an effect that's complementary to YOUR style.

Again, watch the trailer to get a good idea of how HIT looks in performance. It is easily performed by beginners willing to put in a little practice to master the handling. There are NO sleights.. so everything is about remembering whether to fan a card to the right or left of another card. Simple enough guys... I am recommending HIT to all my friends and Magic Roadshow readers.

$ 25.00 Available from Murphy's Magic and all their associates..

https://www.murphysmagic.com/Product.aspx?id=59593

(Review by Rick Carruth for the Magic Roadshow )

0 notes

pomegranctes · 8 years ago

Text

u could stop at 5 or 6 stores... or jus 1

vesper ophelia reeve !

this is vesper my mc’freakin BABY.......

hayley law fc whom is not a tragic ass shit full of teenage angst despite that bein my speciality bcos i lov torturing my chars xDD

was raised by two hippie, nirvana searching, lush loving moms who cherished and loved vesper after finding her abandoned in a stroller at stanley park </3

despite being adopted and left on a huge fricken island she really doesn’t feel any resentment towards her birth parents ? she jus p much feels indifferent like isn’t in any rush to meet them and is jus content with where she is rn so don’t count on any philo soul searching

so like i said her moms were hella hippie and vegan and socialist and true believers in becoming one with the world, saving it, etc like they were jus super passionate bout making everything a better place and after adopting vesper that need only intensified as they wanted the best for their lil girl<3

like her parents, she grew up super healthy and earth loving and all-in-all an advocate for peace on earth and all this

it was NAWT easy to make friends tho bcos she was always the weird girl who only ever had thrift shop clothes ( before it became a #trend and was jus a sign of how broke u were xDD ) and never wore makeup but being the toughie she is, she stuck through it without complaint

she still shops at the thrift store tho bcos capitalism

attempted to have a rebellious teen stage after watching thirteen and took up smoking, ate some meat, pierced her nose, and did all this stupid stuff to fit in with everybody else but knew it wasn’t her crowd so she gave that up pretty quick and chalked it up to a learning experience

after graduating, with a heavy heart she said good bye to her moms and took off her london to study environmental law and she says it’s to save the bees and all this and convinces herself that’s why but she’s got an ulterior motive which p much just to have a mc’blast in london but her whole “i am above insouciance, all for the greater good, etc” mindset makes her feel almost guilty about it

since being in london tho she’s seen some things, learned some things, is p much now realizing that wanting to have fun for herself without the whole vegan guilt catching up to her isn’t that bad??? she knows that u gotta put urself first huns Xx

has a bubbly and approachable exterior but lowkey inside she still gets self conches about being the weird girl and will have these bouts where she doubts every fricken friendship she’s ever had

loves trying new things all the time and even if that restaurant you ate at last week gave you the shits but the food was good she’ll take the risk of food poisoning just to have that experience

is hella quirky but not in a bella thorne licking gregg skulkin way more in a hippie who listens to the weirdest music and loves orange pulp

works as a radio host for imperial college where she talks philosophy, feminism, and plays indie rock trash

leeder matheus sousa !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU13Ql0HRJc

i was not memeing around when i said that i was gonna make a rudy cult leader muse after watching that vid

his name is leeder but prefers people calling him leeds bcos even he can see the disgustign pun

grew up in vegas to some major gambling parents who ran off to sin city for a good time but got caught up in the fancy lights and found that they jus couldn’t leave ? eventually got knocked up and had leeder and would you know it, he was named after a slot machine

his life fluctuated from dinners at upscale restaurants to panhandling outside a casino and p much grew up having to take care of himself all the time what with his parents gone all the fricken time wasting their money

he tried confronting them about it once but things got out of hand too quickly and he ran away from home for a week but his parents hardly noticed his absence the times that they were home and just figured he was in his room or at a friend’s

at 15 he knew he had no savings or anything, he figured as much with his parents, so ever since his first job he started saving up whatever money he could in some last ditch self preservation

at 17 now he runs away just to see what would happen and he isn’t that shocked when there’s no milk carton portraits and no breaking news stories about a missing kid in vegas but some small part of him still held out that hope and was resentful for it

that stunt hella shaped him and hardened him and ever since then, he grew up bitter and spiteful and is p much hella self preserved and will almost always do whatever is best for himself even if other peepz are collateral

so anyway at 22 he basically formed his own cult :P he would scout and pick up these lost runaways and tell them all about “finding themselves” and all this load of bs and got them to believe they were leaving behind their old messy lives in favour of a sort of paradise which was p much just them being high off their minds a good amount of the time and strumming some shit music around a bonfire while they slept in tents outside his own decked out bungalo

so yea he got this cult going and on the low was dealing w some hella drugs and trafficking p much anything and everything and then disater strikes, shit hits the fan, there’s people after him, the whole lot which drove him to leave the country and come to london, hence why he’s here now :P

he still got some connections so he used those and got back into the whole drug thing and is now jus trynna find some new recruits to join his cult ( plot idea mayhaps :P )

hudson kirk schrader !

nickname is schrader but feel free 2 call him hudson, he jus goes w the flow :P

honestly been watching too much fricken workaholics

he’s deadass 100% blake and so catch me copying and pasting his bio

a hella burnout who faked some bullshit illness he searched up on wikipedia and got a medical marijuana lisence for it. how he pulled it off exactly is still unknown, even to himself ( believe it or not, he was high when he did it )

grew up in rancho cucamonga his whole life and the only time he saw outside of it was the one roadtrip he took to los angeles but he surprisingly hated it and he says its bcos the city is too big but he knows it’s bcos some guy he met at the beach called his sandals ugly and people laughed

his parents divorced when he was like 9 so he’s got two younger half siblings but he only sees them like once a month. he doesn’t mind though, they’re all p close and there’s not some family vendetta or anything lolz his parents still get along and all that

despite being stuck there though, he made the most of his small city life and grew up with a positive outlook on everything like u really cannot catch him thinking the glass is half empty

lives for the weekends. only works as a telemarketer/salesperson and yea it’s a shit job with no time off and a poor salary but does he care ? as long as it’s enough to keep living, he’s content

diet p much consists of cheap beer and delivery pizza. ihop breakfasts when he’s feeling rich or p much jus craving pancakes at 3am

took a stripper class one time for the sicc experience but he tells everyone it was to look at half naked peepz

can and will shove an entire party platter of sliced salamis that fell on the floor into his mouth if it means he’ll make some money off of it, even if it’s only $5 bcos hey, that can at least cover his tab at the bowling alley

he's the guy at the party who makes a massive cheese and cracker sandwich called the eliminator

enjoys pitting people against each other but not in a shit ass annoying naslund way or a devil reincarnate lourdes way more in a “hey what’ll happen if i do this” knowing dam well what will happen but going for it anyways

strange personality makes him interesting and fun 2 hang with but also a lil bit misunderstood bcos he jus trynna b himself </3

is a good friend who’s willing to take risks and try new things and he’ll trick u into joining him for a night you’ll never forget mostly bcos of the tattoo and the scar and the croatian wife u now have

a weirdo w self confidence who can pick up on that rude thing u said about his mom but spends too long thinking of a slick comeback and by the time he figures it out the conversation has already taken four different turns

understands human psyche and knows that u lose a woman when u forget 2 cherish her but honestly he’s always there if u need a pal to lean on and he will do anything in his power 2 make sure ur okay

spends his off time people watching on top of his house. deadass has got lawn chairs, a cooler, and everything set up on there and even after breaking his collorbone when he fell off, he refuses to listen to the safety concerns of his neighbours and p much the general public

truly has no story for how he got to london, jus decided to pick up and leave one day and is p much living the same life he lived in america but different setting :P

#holy fu #smoke:ooc

1 note · View note

reekierevelator · 8 years ago

Text

The Hand I Was Dealt

A Short Story by Brian Bourner

‘Did you hear about the leper who threw his hand in?’ Coco asked. That was the age we were at; sixteen or seventeen; still at school, playing cards.

It was way back in the late 1960s. It was even before Lemmy had recorded Ace of Spades or Dylan had sung about Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.

As L P Hartley reminds us, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. In the Scotland of those years there were no state comprehensive schools. After primary level, schools were divided into three strata of mixed sex secondary schools: Junior, Technical, and Senior. In the rest of the UK a Senior Secondary was called a Grammar School. Wearing the school tie, and a blazer displaying the school badge, was obligatory. At least it was meant to be.

It wasn’t quite Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays but L P Hartley would have had little difficulty recognizing the classrooms and the lessons in Maths, English, French, Latin and so on in our school. Even the extra-curricular seminars in smoking, gambling, and sexual contact, might well have been familiar from the student high jinks of his own day, at least as far as he was aware of activities in the English ‘public’ schools. But the whole cultural backdrop of the Swinging Sixties might have thrown him.

In society at large a social revolution was taking place. Young people were much more questioning of authority, rejecting the conventions and staid social hierarchies around them. They were less credulous and deferential than previous generations had been. Hartley would have found that quite novel.

In charge of our school was The Beak, the Headmaster. No use trying to use the modern term ‘Head Teacher’ since he – and it was invariable a ‘he’ - didn’t teach any classes. Within the school walls The Beak was omnipotent. The long arm of the law seemed to suddenly shrink at the sight of those walls. The Beak’s mantra was In loco parentis. That was his watchword, his rationale for ruling however he pleased. In point of fact parents had no power over him and were seldom, if ever, consulted.

Like all the teachers in the school The Beak invariably wore an academic gown, a long black cape, the shibboleth of the grammar school. Most teachers’ gowns were stained with chalk dust – yes, it was all white chalk and blackboards back then – but The Beak’s was always jet black and hung around his corpulent body like a deadly omen. I think The Beak did have a real name. It might have been McNaughton or McNasty. No-one used it. ‘The Beak’ or ‘The Headmaster’ invariably sufficed. A swarthy man, his face had the features of an angry bull with some fair brown hair on top surrounding a shiny tonsure.

To assist him in maintaining authority The Beak selected some Sixth Year pupils as Prefects. Prefects were appointed as exemplars of honesty, integrity, and discipline - but primarily because of their blind faith in the status quo. They were allowed to shout at younger pupils who dared to run or talk too loudly in the corridors. They had the privilege of wearing a special coloured tie. In the case of our school it was blood-red.

Another variation in uniform applied to those who played sports for the school’s first teams. They were allowed to stitch vermilion coloured braid on the edge of their black blazers. Vermilion braid and a blood-red tie was a common combination. Coco used to say that a bindi spot on the forehead would have done just as well as a form of identification, and been much simpler to apply. Nowadays the privilege of youth is always to challenge conventions and orthodoxies. But in our school that was left to those lacking vermilion braid or a blood-red tie. And this at a time when all round the country youths coming of age were increasingly aware of things in society they wanted to change. Those with unadorned uniforms were the interesting people; the kind of people who wanted to explore alternatives and who would never want to be in a position to rein in or exercise power over others.

I’d been dealt my hand by my parents long ago. Robert Burns’ view that ‘a man’s a man for a that’ had been impressed on me at an early age. My father was a factory hand, a union man who had no automatic respect for ‘ribband, star, an a that’. He believed ‘the man o independent mind, he looks an laughs at a that’. His workmates called him a diamond, a King of Diamonds. My mother was my Ace of Hearts. She guided my independent mind down the socialist road. When she wasn’t cooking, cleaning, shopping, and making meals she would rest with a cup of tea and read out extracts from slim volumes by Guy Aldred and Kropotkin. I was for liberté, égalité, fraternité – but mainly for egalité.

Tobacco was the initial concern; the first time I opted to challenge convention. Now in that era most people smoked. I didn’t smoke, but it was common for people to start smoking very young, long before the legal age. Anyone just starting with cigarettes at sixteen was considered an extremely slow developer. Sixteen was also the age of majority, when you could legally have sex, get married, and do almost anything else except vote for a councillor or MP.

It had been a few weeks earlier that The Beak had pronounced smoking to be the big issue in the school. Actually the big issue was McKendrick, the head of the maths department, constantly touching up the senior girls inappropriately, but maybe his fulminations against smoking provided a useful smokescreen for that matter to be hidden behind.

Everyone knew, and had known since time immemorial, that boys used the toilet block - which was outside in the playground; yes, it was a different world - for smoking in. But after The Beak’s announcement a prefect suddenly ‘discovered’ five boys lighting up in there. Their names were Douglas Bain, Bryan McKeach, Michael Simpson, Mario Mesala, and Alistair Mclean - aka Bainy, Keech, Wee Mikey, Sal, and Snowball (Alistair being renowned for his partiality to the sweet confection that was a Lees snowball.) The Beak subjected all five boys to a veritable Spanish Inquisition of bellowed denunciations followed by painful physical assault with the leather belt.

So at the regular all-school Assembly meeting, which lasted for ten minutes first thing on Friday mornings and was held in the big hall that somehow always smelt of dust and varnish, The Beak, flanked by prefects, ranted on again about how smoking was disgraceful. Boys who smoked were such a shockingly bad influence on younger children. The fact that smoking tobacco causes terrible diseases and generally ends up killing the user wasn’t really much mentioned in those far off days.

When he finished his announcements I timidly raised my hand.

It caught him by surprise. He stared at me. Then he pointed a finger towards me.

‘That boy!’ - He never knew any of our names - ‘What is it?’

Trying to maintain some composure I said: ‘Sir, if boys who are of a legal age to smoke could be allowed to smoke in their own Common Room, in the same way as the teachers smoke in their staff rooms, would it not make the smoking problem more manageable? Boys smoking, like the teachers smoking, wouldn’t be in contact with, or even visible to, the younger pupils.’

He squinted at me. His face scrunched up and his nose twitched violently. His nostrils flared like a bull about to charge and I’m sure steam was coming out of them. For a moment I feared he might trample on me there and then. But suddenly he looked away, breathed deeply, and formally closed the Assembly, totally ignoring my contribution.

After that I knew I was a marked man, but The Beak’s campaign to persecute smokers did ease up a little.

Coco was making his tasteless joke about lepers in the Sixth Year Common Room while we were playing whist. We always played whist* – intellectually a stage on from Trumps, though still a long way behind its complicated cousin, Contract Bridge. Whist needs four players. Besides myself and Coco Campbell it was usually Ali Dickson and Shugs King. We always played on an old desk near the front of the room, where you could feel the cracks in the wood and the hand carved initials as you picked up your cards. At the back of the room there would usually be one or two games of three card brag going on for stakes of a penny. If our own game finished I would sometimes wander over to watch their’s. I never played myself, my view being that anyone willing to gamble with his lunch money wasn’t playing with a full deck.

Common Rooms for Fifth and Sixth Year pupils, with separate rooms for boys and girls, seemed to be one of those devices that had been introduced long ago to prevent the ‘challenging behaviour’ of older children contaminating younger pupils.

So that was where you were instructed to be if you arrived early in the morning or had spare time in the lunch hour. Not outside. The Beak wasn’t happy with boys having scratch games of football in the playground. That was bad form. After all, Senior Secondaries played rugby. Football was for the Technical and Junior Secondaries. And another thing he didn’t like was to see boys throwing pennies to the base of the playground wall, a simple game where the owner of the one landing nearest to the wall kept all the pennies tossed. Apparently that was gambling and was to be frowned upon.

Prefects, of course, had their own separate Common Room, and it was mixed sex. They were all trustworthy after all.

In those far off days before electronic games - even Gameboys wouldn’t be invented for another quarter of a century - the boys of the Sixth Year Common Room talked, read the NME, or played cards. Occasionally there was a chess game on a pocket chess set. Sometimes we even did our homework, or at least copied someone else’s.

‘You know that Phileas Fogg?’ Coco asked, as if Fogg might be a boy in Fifth Year.

‘No, who’s he?’ Ali asked. He’d abandoned English after Fourth Year.

‘Jules Verne,’ put in Shugs.

Ali’s face remained blank.

‘His only hobby was playing whist’, added Coco, who was a top man at English. ‘Same went for Horatio Hornblower, Elizabeth Bennett, and Scarlett O’Hara.’

‘Did they all go to our school?’ Ali asked in puzzled innocence.

On that particular day the points score in our whist game was almost even between me and Coco on one side and Ali and Shugs on the other. There was only the No Trumps round left. When it was Ali’s turn to bid he beamed broadly and offered ‘Nine’, nine tricks in No Trumps. Ali was the school’s best mathematician and it was no surprise when they made their nine tricks and won the game.

At the back of the room a game of brag had already gone several rounds. Confident opponents were starting to raise the stakes. A crowd gathered round to watch, as it always did on those occasions, eager to see if a player was bluffing with a low pair or whether a straight run would be thrown down in triumph only to be beaten by a prial. I wandered over to share in the increasingly febrile atmosphere.

It was almost the end of that lunch hour when one Fat Jack, aka John Thompson – in those days Jack was still a soubriquet, not the official registered name of half the country’s male children, - entered the boys’ Sixth Year Common Room to stand just inside the door, a pen and a piece of paper in his hand. He was a porcine specimen, rotund and jowly, with an acne-ridden face, but wrapped up in a braided blazer and blood-red tie.

The attention of almost everyone in the room was on the brag players. It was the most excitement they’d had all week, distracting many of them from thoughts of a double Physics period to follow. They crowded round, peering at the seated players over each other’s shoulders, totally unaware of Fat Jack’s presence.

Of course the next day all seventeen of the boys who had surrounded that brag game were summoned to The Beak’s office. It was a big room, half the size of a classroom, with a midnight blue carpet and a cream-coloured ceiling. It was the only carpeted room in the school. To one side there was a big mahogany desk accommodating a large black telephone, a fountain pen, and some papers in a wooden tray. Behind the desk Fat Jack and three of his blood-red cronies stood in a row smirking mindlessly. There was one shelf of books high up on the wall. The seventeen accused stood tightly bunched together on the other side of the room.

Unlike the usual institutional aroma of dust, sweat, and bleach The Beak’s room smelt of coffee, and I thought I detected a hint of tobacco smoke. Looking around carefully I spotted the stem of a pipe, only just identifiable, poking out between several pristine looking volumes on the high shelf.

Only five boys had actually been playing brag and, of those, only three were still competing for the pot when Fat Jack had taken out his policeman’s notebook.

With wild eyes and a menacing expression The Beak questioned every boy in turn. Eleven of the boys weakly replied along the lines of ‘I was only watching, Sir. I was simply in the same room; the room where I was meant to be, Sir. I wasn’t playing cards or betting money Sir.’ Surprisingly, The Beak dismissed each of them in turn with a stern warning to keep away from unsavoury activities and dangerous social situations in future.

The five boys who had been playing brag, their faces pale and drawn, quickly admitted their offence, replying in monosyllables. Some, like Facecloth, aka Stuart Fairclough, adopted the hang-dog expression of the penitent culprit. Others seemed simply resigned to a fate of serious corporal punishment. Some looked abjectly down at the floor and others looked vacantly up at the cream-coloured ceiling.

He reached me last, pressing his face close to mine.

‘Were you gambling?’ he asked, spitting out the words between his taut lips.

Of course, I had merely been watching. I just happened to be in the room. In the room where I was meant to be. I never gambled in school. But I didn’t say that.

‘Yes sir,’ I replied ‘I was gambling at cards.’

Even now I’m not sure why I did it. You couldn’t really say it was a confession extracted under duress. Maybe I did it for the sake of feeling solidarity with my fellows. Maybe it was for the opportunity to make a case for the defence. Maybe deep down I knew I was guilty of as many things as the next man and was just overcome with an urge to admit as much. Maybe there was even a subconscious awareness that Coco and I had in fact been gambling, albeit with our pride as stakes. Against Ali and Shugs there was always the danger of serious humiliation, yet we still played on in the hope of an occasional opportunity to demonstrate superiority.

I continued speaking before The Beak could silence me.

‘There isn’t much else for us to do in the Common Room,’ I argued. ‘The money involved is trivial. And the younger pupils can’t see us so they can hardly be badly influenced by us.’

I quickly added that ‘Letting us older students experiment in this way is a good learning experience. It makes us more aware and more able to deal with the dangers of the adult world, which we will be joining shortly. It helps with maths, teaching us about statistical probabilities. We can see gambling’s a fool’s game in the long run if it involves betting shops and casinos; all the profits and running costs of those businesses have to come from the gamblers’ pockets. But, in the Common Room, there’s no commercial operator taking a cut – it’s just luck, skill, probabilities.’

The Beak’s face turned redder and redder until it was puce. He seemed about to explode, but I ploughed on, refusing to let him interrupt my flow, and looked past him at the perplexed and confused expressions on the Prefects’ faces.

‘If the school provided pupils with sound reasons for its prohibition on gambling,’ I said, talking more quickly and the words merging into each other, ‘then I think that might be more productive that meting out corporal punishment with a leather belt to those who breach the ban.’

I’m sure I made a number of other equally apposite points, which were rather blurred by rapidly increasing fear and trepidation, and I forget now what they were. But I do remember being pleased to glimpse my five fellow convicts occasionally nodding their heads in agreement.

All the same, the five guilty boys received the severe punishment they had been expecting.

And I was expelled.

Mind you, it did help me in making career choices. I saw clearly that we lived in a society where might is generally right. And in that case there was no point in even thinking about a career in the law. Debating and advocacy skills were obviously redundant. They might be decorative but could have no real effect.

Rather, I decided to work towards careers that would involve the creative use of language, careers where outcomes were less likely to be so stark, so severe, or so illogical.

The other day, in the Lord Darnley, I met up with Ali – or rather Dr Dickson as he is now, having enjoyed a long and illustrious career in mathematical physics - and he said ‘The Beak dealt you an Ace really, didn’t he? Turned you into the journalist you are today.’

‘Personally,’ I replied, ‘I may have been a little naïve back then but, even today, I still believe in playing with a full pack. It’s just that, like my parents, I learned that the King of Hearts is a very hard card to play.’

Then someone put a coin in the jukebox and our voices were drowned out by a dead man’s gravelly voice shouting: If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me. The pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say. I don’t share your greed, the only card I need, is the Ace of Spades, Ace of Spades.

* It was always just ‘whist’ as far as we were concerned. It was only later in life that I found there were many variations of the old game and was astonished to discover we had been playing ‘diminishing contract whist’.

#short story #Reekie Revelator #gambling #card games #school

1 note · View note

marthawelsh · 8 years ago

Text

Poker Industry 2017

It’s almost that time again for another WSOP Season so how about a little current poker industry news summary of this year past. What’s up Poker Industry 2017?

While there has not been that much buzz from a personal poker playing front for me besides playing a ridiculous amount of Spin n’ Go’s and Beat the Clock on PokerStars, and watching Kevin Hart liven up the ever-so-serious live scene, from where I stand it does not appear to have changed much. And from my last sentence, my only real connect with the online poker world is PokerStars by brand, and the others being involved in many local groups on Facebook including Card Players. The pro players and regular grinders I keep in touch with all seem quite stagnant in their progress with one single common feel amongst them which is along the lines of ‘meh…it’s poker’. The excitement on the ground seems to have died down, and new casual players seem to come in with less enthusiasm of fun for the game of poker and a higher skill entry level player.

So in related news, what are the key highlights in the global poker industry as of May 2017 backwards…

Party Poker hints at a much needed new VIP program in March 2017. “We will be announcing our plans for a new loyalty program in the next few weeks and will provide a confirmed date for the launch of the new scheme.” a partypoker representative posted publicly. The operator last refreshed its loyalty program two years ago, reducing the points requirement for reaching each tier. In 2013, the company ended its top VIP tier, Palladium Elite, and capped rewards at 30%. In that time, the company has been using its missions system extensively to encourage player loyalty in large promotions. Party Poker sitting at fifth in cash game traffic among dot-com operators today and down over 15% year-on-year.

A general industry trend towards achievements and personalization instead of straight VIP tiers and cash rewards.

Unibet launched with an achievements-only VIP program in 2014 and 888 switched to something similar last year.

An interesting loyalty program comment… “Despite the amazing growth … the promotions could be done in a way that encourages a different style of play��

New innovations in Poker games/variants

“Beat the Clock Tournaments” by PokerStars. The game kicks when 48 players are registered with a stopwatch set at five minutes with some sound effects. Blinds start off at 200/400 with an ante of 80 and increase every minute with the final level being 500/1,000 with a 200 ante. Not only is it fast paced due to the quick increasing of blinds and five-minute duration, but also due to the game being held in Zoom Poker format at four-max tables. Players surviving the five minutes each share a portion of the prize pool based on their chip counts.

PokerStars Power Up in technical testing. (kind of like a mixture between poker and Hearthstone) PokerStars Power Up is a combination of traditional No Limit Hold’em, injected with power cards that give players the ability to influence how hands play out and change gameplay in a variety of ways.

Some of the power injected cards players can play:

Clone

Receive a copy of the last power played this hand

Disintegrate

Destroy a targeted board card dealt this street

EMP

Prevent powers on this street

Engineer

Choose the deck’s next card from three options

Intel

View the deck’s top card for the rest of the hand

Reload

Redraw selected hole cards

Scanner

View the top two cards in the deck; choose whether to discard them

Upgrade

Draw a third hole card, then discard one

X-Ray

Force all opponents to expose one hole card

Bubble Rush Tournaments which are hyper-turbo games that go until the bubble is reached before slowing down when the bigger prizes are on the line. Play starts off fast until players reach the money and slows down for the remainder of play.

Players kick off tournaments with 10,000 chips and blinds increasing every three minutes in a hyper-turbo format. Once the tournament’s bubble breaks with the remaining players cashing, blind levels increase to “regular” times before increasing even further as the tournament becomes deeper.

To help promote the launch of Bubble Rush, PokerStars introduced Bubble Rush Challenges. Players that opt into the challenge will receive a ticket to the $7,500 Re-Entry Bubble Rush Freeroll the following day. The challenge allows players to be awarded up to five tickets for the following day’s freeroll by cashing in multiple Bubble Rush tournaments.

PokerStars is the world’s largest online poker operator, representing approximately 50% of cash game traffic in the dot-com market, dominating online poker tournaments, and operating large online poker rooms in the segregated markets of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and New Jersey.

Regulated US Markets

WSOP: WSOP Winners List

888 is once again the official WSOP online poker partner and the only authorized provider of online satellites in the dot-com market for World Series of Poker events.

Last year the operator sent a total of 148 players to the Main Event, representing more than 2% of all who entered. Two of them reached the final table.

Winamax is the exclusive WSOP partner in France, and the operator is running satellites for both the Main and the Monster Stack events.

Party is aiming to send 100 players to play the Main Event with a recently announced satellite schedule awarding $12,000 packages. (Vegas players will wear a patch and encourages attendance to a party organized in Vegas. Aria is the “official Las Vegas Poker Party hotel.”)

None of these poker sites are noted to allow USA players outside of regulated markets – Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware.

NJ Online Gambling Revenue Projected To Reach New Heights In 2017, No Thanks To Poker

Eilers projects that NJ online gambling will grow by an additional $33.2 million in 2017, representing a year-on-year increase of 17 percent.

That projection is certainly not out-of-bounds, and may even tend toward the conservative side given the recent trajectory of the market:

In 2016, the industry grossed $196.7 million in revenue. That marked an annual growth margin of 32.1 percent.

Momentum appears to be on the industry’s side. Last year’s y-o-y growth rate toppled that from the year prior, when revenue only climbed by 21.1 percent.

In the fourth quarter 2016, the industry averaged 33.1 percent growth, exceeding the total growth rate for 2016 by a full percent.

The Golden Nugget set a new revenue record for a single-license holder last month, generating $4,790,418.

All this, despite the addition of just two new operators in 2016 — PokerStars and Play SugarHouse — both of which have yet to capture more than a smallish segment of the online casino market. PokerStars did make waves on the online poker front, occupying a 32.9 percent share in 2016 despite only being in operation since mid-March. But as Eilers points out, this came primarily “at the direct expense of Borgata / Party and WSOP / 888.”

Of the $33.2 million increase expected, Eilers sees more than 100 percent of that figure coming by way of online casino growth (+$34.8 million / +20 percent). Which means that online poker revenue is projected to decline. “PokerStars has had a meaningful, but not transformative, impact on the NJ online poker market, which rose 11% year-over-year. Further, the impact heavily concentrated in the months immediately following launch and appears to be fading (to say it another way, the positive impact of PokerStars is no longer overcoming the natural decline of the market at large).”

On the poker industry horizon… some things to look out for:

California iPoker – The Ball is in PokerStars’ Court. Don’t hold your breathe.

New York and Michigan after Pennsylvania.

Run It Once online poker site – Phil Galfond (His desire to offer a player-friendly, low-rake online poker site reminiscent of old-school PokerStars is moving forward.)

Live Events – Live Poker Tourney Scene to grow beyond EPT, WPT & WSOP with reduced Main Event buyins, more festival stops.

Live poker was once controlled by two or three brands but has now diversified, with players starting to feel like they have more influence in the future of the game.

Player centric optimizations in tourney structures & payouts.

Article SRC: PokerNews.com, PokerFuse.com, OnlinePokerReport.com, Poker Industry Pro.com, Luckyladygames.com, Calvin Ayre, PokerStars.com, Party Poker.com

The post Poker Industry 2017 appeared first on Lucky Lady Games.

Poker Industry 2017 published first on http://ift.tt/2lsgkJd

0 notes