#There’s so much cool stuff happening with our solar system this year and the next

[hearts4pearlescentmoon]

does anyone have pictures of the aurora borealis from tonight? It’s super cloudy where I am and I wasn’t able to see them yesterday or today

[theworldvsyoshiko]

Since I just linked it from my main blog anyway, I guess this would be a good time to do a State Of The Union for the colony. I usually do some kind of summary a week or so into each colony, but never got around to it for this one.

The fine seaside orphanage of Robot's Ocean is fucking huge now.

We've got multiple nested layers of defensive walls, a world-class temple and rec room, three geothermal generators, a tidal generator, a solar generator, a full natural gas helixien system for heating and cooling, a greenhouse, a genetics lab with an extensive gene bank, space for 5-6 prisoners to live in comfort, and enough freezers to keep about a year of food on hand at all times. And an in-colony hot spring, most importantly.

The colony's currently worth is about $400k, which is $50k more than any of the previous ones have hit, so it probably isn't a coincidence that I've needed to burn two antigrain warheads on recent attacks. That growth has stagnated a bit, which is fortunate, because as combat goes we're about at our limits. On the upside, we now have something like seven combat owlbears, a Scyther, a Tunneler, a Tesseron, a Centipede Blaster on the way, and of course Yoshiko's pet thrumbo Chiyo.

On the other hand, after investing about $15k into building and upgrading Spencer only for it to die trying to get to its bedroom, we're pretty strapped for cash. And we need some, because the map is just about mined out, and all of these robots and endgame weapons require a lot of materials. Unfortunately the map being mined out also limits our options for producing trade goods. The current plan is to mass-produce... corsets. If you haven't played the game just trust me when I say that this is a sensible plan, but we'll need to do a lot of hunting to make it work.

Following the terrible Tactical Nukes In The Hospital incident, I've rearranged things a bit. The short version is that we've only got one outdoor orbital targeting beacon now, and it should steer most drop pod raids to a less terrible location. Will this help much if another group shows up with a dozen rocket launchers? Hell no. Eventually I'd like to set up one or two extra beacons as decoys.

The population is currently 8, which is just about the lowest it's been in years. These kinds of things happen when four colonists get blown up in one evening.

Yoshiko "Happy" Russell

is, of course, a forever-22 psychic cyborg vampire foxgirl who controls robots with her brain. (Her actual effective age is now 34, but the game doesn't care about that.) She's currently undertaking her Dark Slumber in her Chambyr of Bloode for the next day or two, as one must when they are a vampire.

She's good at fucking everything now. (And good at fucking too; she's got an implant for that.) Her lowest skill is Plants at a 9, or 'solid professional.' She's rated as Expert or better in Shooting, Melee, Construction, Animals, Crafting, Art, Medical, Social, and Intellectual. She has 827 kills, 34 mechanical implants, maxed psychic potential with 10 psychic abilities, and wields a sapient EMP sledgehammer named Nalorgargur. Thanks to being a vampire, the only way to permanently kill her is to destroy her brain. With so many implants, I think the only other ways to even incapacitate her in combat are with an EMP or by destroying her liver. In theory you could make her bleed out too, but she's effectively immune to that. (You should go for the brain thing anyway, because she has pretty good body armor under that parka, but still insists on wearing a beret instead of, like... a helmet.)

Truly she is... the ultimate lifeform.

Toby Lang

Man, this makes for some real mood whiplash. I mean, look at him. There isn't much to say about Lang.

He was found in the wreckage of a space battle a few years ago. He spends all of his time cooking, doing doctor stuff, or handling the colony's pet rabbits. He's no good in a fight. Yoshiko adopted him and he adores her as much as is physically possible; her opinion of him is 7/100.

Actually though, Lang does have one solid accomplishment under his belt. During the last Diabolus fight, all of the blood bags prisoners staged an escape. Everybody who was good in combat was off doing that, and Lang was the only person nearby. So, he grabbed a shotgun and did surprisingly well at controlling the situation. By which I mean blowing their brains out. Can't get any blood out of them like that, but it's better than having them set the base on fire on their way out.

Saburo Richards

Listen, I can't stress this enough. He was like this when I found him. Unlike everyone else, he's an Animusen, a natural foxboy by birth. What benefits does this give? Well, uh. Not any, really. He's fast in the cold and slow in the heat, which was nice before the climate's average temperature got bumped up by 18F.

Richards is still 12 and I'm really hoping he gets some fantastic growth at 13, because he isn't good at anything. For whatever reason, he apparently gets really abusive when he's in a bad mood, because every mental break he's had has been an insulting spree. So most of the colony has opinions of him like

In fact, Olga and Yoshiko are the only two who would even be sad if he died, I think. Yoshiko, of course, adores him.

Raymond "Raywolfen" Wolfen

... has to be the most colorful kid here, as a slug person who was raised by wolves and then crashed outside during a space battle. Don't let the sprite fool you; the game just doesn't know how to render how fucked up she looks. According to her genes, she's got the body of a slug, but covered in scales, with the face of a fox, slug-style eye stalks, and constantly secretes a foul-smelling substance that decomposes corpses. You'd think that being a hideous slug/fox amalgam who smells like rotting bodies would be horrible for her social life, and you'd mostly be right, but Yoshiko adores her. She didn't even adopt her or anything. This happened naturally.

Raywolfen's only really good at combat, but that's okay, because we desperately need that right now.

Ben "Bush" Nitsiza

... is another adopted son who recently turned 13. He's great at melee combat, and got two mechanoid kills while horribly sick with the flu last night. He's... decent at crafting, art, and research. We're working on it. He's not decent at social stuff, but he's the preacher anyway. For now, at least.

Bush actually gets along with everybody else pretty well, which is surprising for somebody with the traits of 'snob' and 'too smart.'

Cindy

... is a sapient mech (it/its) that has only been around for half a year, as part of Yoshiko's ongoing quest to find true love. (This isn't working out very well.) As a hunter-killer mech, Cindy's only really good at combat, and is incapable of... most other things. It's decent with animals and research though, and is slowly learning how to do medicine too.

Cindy is currently flirting with Yoshiko about once every few days, which would be cute if it would just wait until Yoshiko considered it more than a passing acquaintance. It'll work out some day though. I'm sure of it.

Dae-up "Nerd" Kim

Is it fair for me to blame Nerd for the fact that he was chased here by pirates with rocket launchers? Probably not. But it still happened, and it got four people killed. And Nerd's a completely amoral kid who tortured small animals when he was little, so I'm not gonna pretend that I like him. I genetically modified him to be good at mining, so he could mine out the collapsed rocks that trapped Sora as he burned to death. Take some responsibility, you little prick.

Most of the colony likes Nerd, but he's really rooted in his intensely xenophobic ideology, so he hates almost everybody in return. The one person he actually likes is Yoshiko, and that's only because she's ridiculously pretty.

Nerd's actually pretty competent, unfortunately. He's great at mining, crafting, and medical. He's pretty decent at construction, and he'll pick up art fast if we find the time and resources for him to do much of it.

Olga Keuneke

... is 11 and a pretty recent arrival, so there isn't much to say about her. Unlike certain assholes, the trouble that she brought with her was a machine that warmed up our Siberian-ass climate, so I already like her. She's got a huge passion for animals, but she isn't learning much about it because she's not skilled enough to work with our animals. You can't start out by training predatory owl monsters that weigh half a ton.

[ailinu]

🌻🌻🌻

PLANETARY DECADAL SURVEY JUST DROPPED!

So the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey (2023-2032) was publicly released this past Tuesday, which determines what planetary science goals/missions are important to fund for the next decade, and there is so much cool stuff going on.

This is as opposed to the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, which happened a bit back---that's concerned a bit more with telescope development and the next Great Observatory, while this governs more of the orbiter missions that we're sending up.

Good news for me, specifically---the mission that I'm a (very small) part of is getting continued support! Should not elaborate further for Internet Privacy Reasons, but it's nice to see that our goals matter and that we should still be on track toward launch date.

But also, and this is much more important: URANUS ORBITER FLAGSHIP MISSION.

Genuinely I cannot express how excited I am about this. We know fuck-all about the ice giants in our solar system, relatively speaking, despite the fact that they're (1) cosmically right in our backyard and (2) apparently a very common exoplanet type. The last mission that went near Uranus or Neptune was Voyager II, so a mission to one of them was apparently a priority for this decadal survey, and I'm so stoked that it's Uranus. Favorite planet, hands down. It's so weird. It's so cool. We know so little about it, and everything we know is So Wild.

Like, obviously, right, the first thing that you get in your 1001 Facts About Space book (formative childhood influence for me) is that Uranus orbits on its side, so its poles take turns facing toward the sun, which I think deserves to be thought about a little more because Sir That Whole Planet Is Tipped Over; They're Not Supposed To Do That And We're Not Completely Sure Why It Happened. Here are some bonus facts:

Despite this, the equatorial region seems to be warmer. Unclear why this is!

Its magnetic field is also massively tilted relative to its axis of rotation. We're not sure why!

Actually we've got speculation about why Uranus is tilted like that and it's because it miiiiight have gotten hit by an Earth-sized protoplanet during formation. Also we may have had another gas giant in the solar system that traded places with Uranus while orbits were still settling. Both of these are Bad To Think About, but also So Fucking Cool.

Uranus has a ring system, and moons! All of which are surprisingly stable despite the fact that they are also tipped out of the ecliptic, in accordance with Uranus's tilt. This is the one that gets to me, because I can see how you'd tip a planet over (I guess) but there's Something Weird about the idea of tipping over all its moons and such as well. Need to do more reading about this.

In true color, Uranus has pretty much no standout features, making it a Really Good Orb.

One of Uranus's moons, Miranda, is (1) So Shaped, and (2) home to probably the highest cliffs in the solar system, Verona Rupes, which is maybe like 12 miles high!

When I was a kid, I think the prevailing theory about why Miranda Looks Like That was that it had gotten hit by an impact late in formation, blown apart, and then gravitationally collapsed back together But Weird, but that's since fallen out of favor! If I remember correctly, tidal forces are what's in at the moment.

All of which to say that sure, this mission has a tentative launch date of like 2038, and sure, the fastest way to get to Uranus is to get a gravitational boost from Jupiter and that'll still take like 12-15 years, so we probably won't get data from this until into the 2050s, but I'm still So Excited.

[the-softest-puffball]

of the naming of planets and the colliding of galaxies

notes: yes this is just an excuse to infodump about space and also make more space metaphors, but i like it so

prompt: Song/Stars

pairings: analogical

warnings: a curse word or two

read on AO3

@analogicalweek

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

“The constellation Orion contains two of the brightest stars in the observable night sky,” Logan said as he pointed towards the recognizable cluster of stars, “Betelgeuse and Rigel. Betelgeuse is about 300 times the size of the Sun’s diameter. It also is a red supergiant star, which is the largest class of stars. It’s so big, in fact, that when it dies, it will create a giant fireball that will be so bright it will outshine many of the stars around it for a brief moment.”

“Wow,” Virgil muttered from beside him. “That’s really cool.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Logan said, his gaze fixed on the constellation. “Rigel is directly opposite to Betelguese in Orion's chest in the constellation, and it is a blue supergiant, meaning it is still larger than the sun like Betelgeuse. However, it’s surface is thousands of times hotter, making it appear blue.”

“That’s awesome.” Silence filled the air around them after that, both deep in thought. Logan kept watching the constellation, imagining the surface of the stars, imagining seeing them up close with his very own eyes.

As if Virgil could hear his thoughts, he spoke again. “Do you think we could ever visit outer space? Like, I know space travel already exists and stuff, but do you think we could go that far into space to see those stars?”

“Well, it will possibly never happen unless we somehow discover the power of immortality, as it would take us about 8 million years to reach Betelgeuse, at least where it is now.”

“Oh, jeez. Time’s so fucked up.” Virgil laughed to himself, which made Logan smile as butterflies began to awaken in his stomach.

“Yes, time is a very strange construct.”

He looked over to Virgil, who was back to gazing at the sky with complete wonder, his eyes reflecting the stars as if he had captured them from the night. Logan’s breath apparently was also captured by him, and Logan willed himself to calm down.

The cosmos Logan could understand. He could conceptualize the creation of stars, gases coming together under pressure from an intense amount of gravity until it explodes in a sequence of fusion reactions. He could comprehend the constellations in the sky, how ancient people saw shapes in the sky and decided to connect them to their own mythologies and history. However, Virgil and his feelings towards him were an enigma.

Logan didn’t ever mean Virgil being an enigma as a bad thing; he always thought of enigmas as a new thing to learn, a new thing to explore. Virgil was another mystery that he wanted to uncover. Another universe that he wanted to understand, which confused him the most.

Logan had never been so fascinated by another being before. Space had interested him since Thomas was a child, and chemistry had come later, so much so that his infatuation with it spread to Thomas and pushed him towards getting a degree in chemical engineering. It was one of Logan’s proudest achievements, but Virgil made him feel different things than when he was looking through a telescope at the newest star he had learned about or when he was mixing different elements together to see how they reacted to each other. Virgil made him feel like he was solving a puzzle, but a puzzle that gave him figurative butterflies and distracted him from everything that wasn’t related to him.

Logan was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice Virgil had turned back towards him, possibly to ask a question, until he started talking again.

“Hey, you alive there?” He said with a joking smile, Logan quickly blinking for a moment to break the trance he was in.

“Yes, I’m alright. Why would I have died if I had been lost in thought too long?” He replied, catching back up to Virgil’s words.

“It’s an expression, Lo.” Virgil laughed again, the combination of Virgil’s laughter and the nickname he had used making Logan’s heart figuratively skip a beat. “Anyways, I have another question.”

“Of course, what is it?” Logan was glad Virgil seemed excited to learn about space and shared a similar appreciation to it. Answering questions was something that Logan thought was one of his strengths.

“How did all the planets get their names? I know they’re all based on ancient gods and stuff but how did we decide on those names for each planet?”

Logan thought for a second, trying to recall the information as he looked back out to the sky. “The planets in our solar system are named after ancient mythology, specifically Greek and Roman mythology, which you are correct about, but they were named over thousands of years ago. Mercury was named after the god of travel, possibly based on how fast it moves across the sky. Venus is named after the goddess of love and beauty, and only the moon and the sun shine brighter than it, at least from our viewpoint on Earth. Mars was the god of war, therefore the red planet, a color associated with blood and war, was named after it. Jupiter was the ancient Roman’s version of Zeus, and it is the biggest planet in the solar system. Saturn was named after the god of agriculture, though we are not sure why. Those were all of the ones that were observed by ancient astronomers, the outer planets only being discovered more recently, following the naming process of the other planets.”

Logan turned towards Virgil again, who had been watching him explain. “I hope that wasn’t too much information.”

“Nah, that’s really interesting. So the planets besides Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are all observable from Earth?”

“Yes, you are correct.”

“Wow.” Virgil looked to the stars. “Can we see any right now?”

Logan followed his gaze, scanning the night to see if he recognized any of the planets. Then, he spotted the small red spec of Mars, pointing at it. “There, you can see Mars clearly next to the constellation Taurus.”

Virgil leaned closer to him so he could follow his hand easier, which made Logan fluster slightly. It wasn’t the first time he and Virgil had gotten this close, but something felt different this time.

He looked at Virgil’s face, seeing as he stared with a furrowed brow, concentrating on trying to see it. Logan thought he looked adorable like that, which then made him want to shake his head to get the thoughts out of his mind. It wouldn’t actually work, but it didn’t make the urge to do it any less strong.

However, Virgil’s eyes then lit up as a grin stretched across his face. “I see it!”

Logan quickly looked back at the planet, feeling Virgil move away from him, which made Logan a little more upset than it should have. God, his feelings were so confusing.

“That’s awesome,” Virgil muttered. “That’s really Mars?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Woah.” Virgil paused. “Really puts into perspective the size of the universe, doesn’t it?”

Logan thought about it for a moment. The red spec floating between the billion of stars that looked about exactly the same size was a planet. He had never thought about it that much to realize it fully. “I suppose you’re right." He paused. "Doesn’t it make you feel small, though?”

“No. In fact, it kind of gives me comfort, you know? Like, you were telling me last time, we are all made of the same atoms and elements the stars are made of, so it almost makes me feel at home. We might be only here for a small amount of time but the universe has been here for billions of years, and just, I don’t know, it’s nice to know that we aren’t all alone. Maybe we'll become our own stars when we die.”

Logan looked back towards Virgil, the intense feelings of confusion and butterflies and love rushing back to him. The idea of Virgil finding comfort in the stars in that way made Logan understand the universe in a whole different way. He had always seen the universe more as collection of things to learn, but Virgil offering such a different perspective, connecting what he had learned to an emotion of loneliness and home was something Logan had never been able to do. The thought of Virgil being such a fascinating enigma returned, this time in such a profound and fond way Logan had to at least express his appreciation for such an interesting, figuratively eye-opening idea.

“You are much more astute than people lead on,” he said, hoping that Virgil understood what he meant.

“What? No, it’s nothing,” Virgil replied, glancing over at Logan before looking at the grass they were sitting on, slightly flustered.

“It is not nothing, you offered a fascinating perspective that I have never been able to even connect together myself.”

“Well, thanks.” Virgil sent him a smile, Logan noticing even in the dark the red dusting his cheeks. Logan returned the smile himself, hoping it didn’t look too fond as he didn’t want to let all of his emotions for Virgil figuratively spill all over the floor.

“You are a wonderful listener, Virgil. Thank you for joining me these past couple times.”

“Yeah, it’s no problem. Anytime.” Virgil looked back to the sky, his grin returning as he gazed at Mars.

Logan checked the time with his phone. 1:21 am. They should probably go to sleep soon if they wanted to be able to help Thomas fully tomorrow.

“We should go back, it has gotten quite late,” he said, voicing his earlier thoughts.

“Okay,” Virgil replied, but making no moves to actually get up. Logan slowly stood to his feet, stretching a bit as sitting on the grass for an hour or two was not very beneficial for his body.

He held out a hand for Virgil to grab, pulling him up when he did. Virgil also stretched, Logan turning around so he couldn’t see how flustered he was. His feelings were going to be the death of him if every time Virgil even touches him it sends shockwaves up his spine.

He started making his way to the door of the Imagination, which was just about a 3 minute walk away, but then he heard Virgil behind him speak.

“Hey, uh, actually, I have another question,” he said. Logan stopped, turning back towards him.

“What is it?”

Virgil got closer to him. “Well, you were talking about how the planets are named after ancient gods, and, uh, so Venus is named after the ancient Roman god of love, so, do you think that, uh, affects our lives here?”

“Well, of course, Venus is the name we use for the planet-”

“No, I mean, like…” Virgil paused and took another step closer, which was starting to distract Logan to an unreasonable amount. “Does that planet, and therefore the god it’s associated with, affect our relationships with people and how we feel about them?”

“Oh, you mean like astrology?”

“Yeah, I guess, yeah.”

“Well, there’s no specific scientific evidence supporting it, but perhaps, since many have said the planets’ positions in the universe is quite accurate in figuring out certain personality traits or relationships with others.”

“Oh, well, uh, okay.” Virgil seemed more anxious than usual, and Logan began to worry.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, it’s just, uh, that was actually just a really shitty segway into the actual question I wanted to ask, which is…” Virgil gulped and took Logan’s hands with his own. Logan instantly flushed deeply once more, and his stomach felt like the figurative butterflies had multiplied. “Since we mentioned a goddess of love, I wanted to ask…”

Logan didn’t dare interrupt. He didn’t know where Virgil was going with this, but he didn’t seem to care when it felt like he could barely get a sentence out anyway.

Finally, Virgil found the courage to say it.

“Can I kiss you?” He looked right into Logan’s eyes as he spoke, and Logan felt as if he was going to fall over if it wasn’t for Virgil’s touch grounding him. “Like, just I already liked you before, but right now I just realized while you were talking that I think I’m in love with you, and it’s cool if you don’t want to or if you don’t like me that way, we could just pretend this never happened, and yeah.”

Logan couldn’t find the words to reply. It was as if Virgil had taken all the words from his mouth by saying four words, four that Logan couldn’t believe he would ever hear. He knew he should respond, but his mouth wasn’t responding to his brain, which he knew was actually unlikely but it felt like it. How Virgil had managed to make him completely speechless was another mystery that Logan was desperate to solve. However, he noticed Virgil still staring at him, probably waiting for him to say something, and Logan sucked in a breath just enough so he could speak.

“Please do,” he said, breathless and a whisper, which he thought was completely pathetic but Virgil must have thought it was the best thing he’s ever heard because he grinned as bright as the sun before pressing their lips together.

It was as if two galaxies collided together; a merging of completely different planets and stars forming into one beautiful spectacle. Logan went to run his hand through Virgil’s hair, tugging slightly and moving his lips against Virgil’s as Virgil’s hands moved to his hips. Logan felt like he was moving through an entirely different universe, but it was one of the most captivating and effervescent universes he had ever seen.

This amount of emotions Logan was experiencing at that very moment threatened to overwhelm him, so he pushed Virgil back a bit to break the kiss.

He took a couple shaky breaths, his eyes still closed. He still had so many questions about Virgil, perhaps even more now, but when he opened his eyes and saw Virgil staring at him like how he stared at the stars he couldn’t seem to mind anymore.

“That was… wonderful,” he said, at a loss for any other words that could describe even the slightest of what he feels. Virgil laughs.

“Nerd. Come on, let’s head back.” Virgil separated a little more, but still grabbed Logan’s hand with his own as they began walking back to the door.

Logan looked back at the sky, stopping Virgil in his tracks as well, and watched as the stars twinkled knowingly from their spots in the night. He gave one last glance at Betelgeuse and Rigel and smiled.

Maybe he understood how to connect emotions to the stars after all.

[runpogorun]

Gravity

To fill my Marvel Fluff Bingo square, Astronomer AU. No warnings apply, rated G, Matt Murdock/Foggy Nelson, 2759 words. Read it here or over on AO3.

Matt makes his way slowly into the room. The first thing he finds is the couch in the middle, presumably facing the TV, so Matt circles it slowly, his cane tapping lightly between the heavy thud of upholstery on his left and the hollow chink of wooden skirting board. The cane makes a higher tink as it collides with a metal structure and Matt reaches out with his hand, searching, and confirms a metal cabinet. He continues sweeping his cane across the hardwood floor, wary of any rugs, as his hands skate the surface of the cabinet finding photo frames, three clustered plant pots. He sends some loose sheets of paper skating off the surface and freezes, trying to track their direction of flight. 

“Don’t worry about it!” Foggy calls from the kitchen. “I’ll get them.” 

Matt turns his head over his shoulder, towards Foggy, and grins sheepishly. “Sorry. Comes with the territory.”

Foggy tsks quietly. “It’s not a problem. They’re just bills. You said whisky, right?”

Matt nods, “Yes, thanks,” and resumes his exploration. There’s an open doorway just past the cabinet, and Matt pauses, head tilted. “This the bathroom?”

“Yup.”

Matt moves his cane again, and it twangs in his hand with another metal vibration. But this doesn’t feel as heavy as the cabinet. He frowns, and reaches forward as he hears Foggy come up behind him.

“Oh, that’s a little more fragile, but feel free to… feel away.”

Intriguing. Matt stretches through space and finds smooth, painted metal with his fingertips. The metal is curved into a tube, and as his fingers move along it they find an encircling ridge. The object gives under his touch, and he finds the pivot point, the tripod suspending it. He tucks his cane under his arm and takes a step forward, using both hands to get a better idea of its dimensions.

Matt turns his head back in Foggy’s direction. “Is a telescope actually useful in New York City?”

Foggy makes a considering noise. “It’s alright. Not as good as, say, the Socorro Desert. But I can still see things.”

“Does your apartment have roof access?”

“Not the apartment itself, but the super lets me use the service stairs. 

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

Matt files that away, drops his hands and turns towards Foggy. “Shall we sit?”

“Sure.” Foggy moves towards the couch. “Did you find the couch? It’s over here.” He pats the cushion with an open palm, a firm thump of orienting sound.

Matt smiles at him. “Yes, thanks.” There’s a coffee table as well that Foggy forgot to mention, but he expected that. He folds up his cane and drops it on the coffee table and sits down next to Foggy before accepting his drink. “So, what sort of things do you like to look at? You’re not a creeper, are you?” He takes a sip, revelling as always in the first burn.

Foggy laughs loudly at that. “No. I’m an astronomer.”

Matt tilts his head. “You said you were a teacher.”

“I am. I teach Observational Astronomy and Cosmology at NYU.”

Matt laughs. “And here I was, thinking you were a dance teacher.” Foggy had held the class in his palm, everyone drawn to him, like he had the strongest gravitational pull in the room. It had only taken three classes for Matt to succumb, and accept an invitation for a drink.

“That’s just a hobby. I like to boogie. And it’s a good way to meet people,” Foggy says, nudging Matt with his elbow.  

Matt raises his glass, and Foggy clinks them together. “Slainte. So, do you do this often?” He takes a sip.

“Meet people?”

“Bring strange men back to your apartment.”

Foggy laughs at that. “Strangers are friends we haven’t yet met. But, honestly? No. I don’t.”

Matt considers that. He, in contrast, does do this often, but usually only once or twice with the same person. Matt’s a comet, shooting in and out, plenty of noise and fuss but little substance.

“How about you,” Foggy asks.

“Me?” Matt mentally scans through all the men and women he’s dated in recent history. This may not be the moment to share that information.

“How do you make your crust?”

“Oh.” Matt leans back against the couch cushions and stretches an arm along the seat back, towards Foggy. “I’m a lawyer,” he says, mouth quirking in a slight smile, and waits for the inevitable praise. People are always impressed.

“Oh cool. I nearly did Law,” Foggy says. People often say this - it’s one of those throwaway lines. But then he adds, “I was aiming for Columbia but then… I took an intro to Astronomy class over the summer after high school and I sort of… fell into the stars.”

Matt tilts his head. “Tell me about it.”

Foggy hums, consideringly. “I’d always been interested, you know?” he says. “But I hadn’t really thought that it could be my job. I thought it would be fun to take the class, that it would be interesting. So I did.”

“Always a solid choice, choosing the interesting.”

“It was residential, close to an observatory. One morning we got up in the middle of the night, and towards dawn I saw the Orion Nebula. It’s near Orion’s Belt.  And it was so beautiful, and unknown. I wanted more. I couldn’t stop thinking of what else must be out there. 

“I mean, we do know a lot now, especially when a probe like Juno fires back information, but also a lot of it we can’t exactly know. No one knows what it’s like to stand on the surface of Eros, not really. Or what the Helix Nebula looks like from the inside. We can model it, sure, but we can’t know. I was hungry to find out what I could. I was hooked.” Foggy stops, abruptly, and Matt can hear him sip his drink.

Matt is struck by the emotion in Foggy’s voice, growing with every word. “That’s a great story,” he says. “Not everyone finds their passion, or follows it.

Foggy takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. “Yeah. You know, I don’t usually tell people all that, right out of the blocks.”

“I guess I should feel honoured,” Matt says.

“You should, my friend,” Foggy says, the humour back in his voice.

Matt angles his head towards the telescope in the corner. “And that. Do you use it often?”

“Uh yeah, I do, actually.” Matt can hear Foggy shifting against the cushions, like he’s embarrassed again, caught out. “I mean, it’s no match for the Keck telescopes, but it still lets me look. I like looking.”

“Why don’t you show me?” Matt suggests. “I mean, if it’s a good night for it.”

Foggy holds his breath for a moment, then lets out a puff of laughter. “Sure. Why not.” 

It takes a minute to get sorted. Matt snaps out his cane, stashes the whisky bottle under his free arm and holds the glasses in that hand. Foggy is gentle, almost reverent, with the telescope as he folds up the tripod. They head out the apartment door, Foggy and telescope leading, Matt and whisky following, and up the stairwell to the roof. 

The summer air is still warm, but cooler than the oppressive heat of the day. “Over here,” Foggy says. There’s a table and a couple of chairs set up to one side, and Matt settles down to listen as Foggy fusses over the equipment.

“You do do this often.”

“Mmm. It’s nice up here. Quiet.”

Matt listens to the sound of cars rushing in the street below. It’s muffled, sure, and you can’t ever escape cars in New York City. But Foggy’s right. It is peaceful.

“What do you see?”

“There’s still some light in the sky from the sun, but Mars is close and bright. And Venus. Not that I need the telescope for them.”

“You don’t?”

“Not to find them. They’re just like bright stars. But it’s not really dark enough yet. I’ll wait a bit.” The other chair creaks as Foggy sinks into it. “Tell me about your law practice, Matt. Are you a corporate hotshot?”

“Not so much.” Matt shrugs. “It’s just me and my partner Kirsten, and our paralegal Karen. I mostly do what Kirsten says.”

“Partner?”

“Business partner,” Matt says, smiling at Foggy. “Best friend from law school.” 

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Small stuff, mostly. Tenancy disputes, work visas, that kind of thing. Most of our clients come from here in the Kitchen.”

“Sticking up for the little guy!” Foggy cries. “Show me some skin.” Matt holds up his palm and Foggy high fives him. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well, like I said, it was the stars. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d learned in that in astronomy class. And I’m good at Math, so that helps. I ended up switching from Philosophy to Physics before the year started. And then I went on to get my doctorate at UC Davis. My parents were devastated when they realised I wasn’t going to drive a Bentley” he says, laughing.

Matt laughs with him. “Academia isn’t really a way to make money, is it?”

“It’s really, really not. Not like law. Mom wanted me to be a butcher but that was never going to happen, so at least I could have done something which would have made me rich. Such a disappointment.”

Matt laughs at that. “You sound like me. I’ll never be rich.”

“Your family counting on you for the bucks, too?”

Matt sobers. “Uh, not exactly.” He needs to get off this topic, now. “How far into the galaxy do you usually look?”

“The radiotelescope guys look right back in time, as far as we can look. But I kind of like our neighbourhood - our solar system. Each planet in our solar system is a whole world. Well, obviously they literally are worlds. They’re suspended, hanging in the enormous void of space. They look so serene, from Earth, as they hurtle through the endless blackness, but they’re dynamic and complex. Did you know that the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is so large that two Earths could fit side by side inside it? It’s an enormous storm that’s been raging for at least 150 years, probably much longer.”

Matt shakes his head. “I don’t know much about any of it.”

“We’re all so far from each other, and together at the same time. Once you leave our solar system it’s 25 trillion miles to the next one.”

“The next galaxy?”

“The next solar system. Our galaxy is fifty-two thousand light years across.”

Matt shakes his head. It’s too big a number to make sense.

“We’re bound by gravity to the rest of our solar system. There are so many stars and planets out beyond the Kuiper Belt,” Foggy continues, “And we’ll never be able to reach them. We can’t even see most of what we know is out there, we just have to make an educated guess at it, work it out from the clues.”

Matt half-smiles to himself, and takes a sip of his drink. “Seeing and knowing are two different things.”

“Uh, yeah, of course, I didn’t mean to--” 

Matt cuts him off with the wave of his hand. “So you took the class, and fell in love with astronomy?”

“Oh no, that happened much earlier. Growing up in the city I never saw that many stars, you know? When I was eleven I went away on summer camp to this place upstate. We stayed in these little cabins in the woods by a lake, just outside a small town. It was weird - so quiet, but sometimes you’d hear a wild animal. And at night, the stars! I didn’t know the sky could be like that. Like grains of sand scattered across a velvet blanket. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night when the sky was truly dark, and the entire sky was covered with stars. The trees were only visible as the places where the stars weren’t. 

“I discovered later that Aboriginal people in Australia, who live in the desert where obviously it’s really dark and the sky is very clear, have constellations that are the darker areas between the stars. The reverse of us who live with more light pollution. All people look up at the stars. We all wonder.”

Foggy suddenly sounds like he’s come back to himself, remembered where he was. “I’m sorry, I’m doing all the talking and this is probably really boring.”

“No,” Matt says quietly. “It’s not. I’ve never heard a description like this before. I-” He cuts himself off, unsure how to carry on without making himself sound wistful, and smiles. “I like it. I like listening to your voice.”

Foggy makes a quiet, pleased sound. “That’s a great line. I feel like I should be saying things with gravitas, or beautiful things. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars,” he quotes.

“Now that’s pretty,” Matt says.

“It’s Neil Gaiman. And he’s right, about the stars and planets dancing, caught in each other’s gravity.”

Matt smiles. “So then, tell me,” he prompts, gesturing upwards. “What’s there to see tonight? You said Venus?”

“Let’s see.” Foggy stands and goes again to the telescope. Matt hears the quiet scrape of metal as Foggy adjusts the focus. “There’s Jupiter. It’s high and bright right now. And Venus and Mars.” 

Foggy’s quiet, and Matt considers how far away his focus is. It’s hard for Matt to have a clear impression of anything beyond the reach of his hands - when he’s not touching something it could be anywhere, just out of reach or miles away. But Foggy looks at planets thousands of miles away, places he can never touch but he knows.

“Sometimes it’s better not to use the telescope at all,” Foggy says. “The Leonids meteor shower is going to arrive in a couple of months, and that’s better observed with the naked eye.”

“What are meteor showers like?”

“Fireworks. Bright, white hot stripes painting the sky. Streaking across the heavens.”

“But no boom.” Matt places his empty glass on the small table next to the bottle, and his glasses alongside.

“Good point! And several nights in a row. I’m looking forward to it.” Foggy sounds like he’s turned back to the telescope. 

Matt stands, the whisky now making him loose-limbed and easy, and walks slowly towards Foggy. His hand is slightly extended, reaching for the tune Foggy’s humming under his breath - it’s Drops of Jupiter. He clears his throat. “And what do you see, closer to home?” His voice is low and husky.

Foggy jumps and turns and his arm bumps Matt’s hand. “Oh! Um. Well.” Matt hears him take a quick breath, as Matt brings his hand to rest on Foggy’s shoulder. “I can see at least one beautiful thing.”

“That’s very cheesy,” Matt says, sliding his hand up to Foggy’s neck, then further to cup his cheek. He fans his thumb across to Foggy’s mouth, finding a goatee, and feels Foggy lean in to match him. “But I like it,” he breathes.

Foggy makes a small noise of pleasure for the brief moment that his warm, soft lips are pressed against Matt’s own. Matt brings his other hand to Foggy’s face, sliding both hands back and finding that Foggy’s hair is pulled back into a low pony.

“I didn’t think long hair would be allowed, Professor?” Matt asks.

Foggy huffs a laugh. “It’s Doctor to you, and anything goes these days.” He rests his forehead against Matt’s. “I like you,” he says, breathless.

“Really,” Matt says, one eyebrow lifted.

“I promise I’m usually better at… Words. And things.”

“What sort of things.”

“Oh, I can totally show you. But I feel obligated at this point to tell you that my super has a CCTV camera on this rooftop, and he is probably watching us right now because that’s the kind of guy he is. So, maybe we could take this back downstairs? If I’ve wooed you enough with the stars.”

“I could stand to hear more,” Matt says. “But yes, let’s go inside, and continue the story there.” And Matt follows Foggy again, drawn along by his gravity. He wonders what happens to a comet that gets caught in a gravitational field it can’t escape, wonders if he’s going to find out.

[dochub]

C O S M O S : A SPACETIME ODYSSEY - STANDING UP IN THE MILKY WAY

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was or ever will be.”  - Carl Sagan, September 28th, 1980.

A generation ago, astronomer Carl Sagan launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure: The exploration of the universe, revealed by science.

We’re about to go from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the dawn of time to the distant future. Explore galaxies, suns and worlds. Surf the gravity waves of space-time, explore planets of stars that never die, discover atoms as massive as suns, and universes smaller than atoms. 

Cosmos is also a story about us. It’s the saga of how wandering bands of hunters and gatherers found their way into the stars. One adventure. Many heroes.

If you want to see where we are in space, here it is:

Here’s what Earth looked like 250 million years ago:

And this is how it could be, 250 million years from now.

To go venture out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we need to know our cosmic adress. And this is the first line of that adress.

Earth.

EXPLORING THE SOLAR SYSTEM

The moon, our nearest neighbor, has no sky, no ocean, no life. just scars of cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the wind and the waves and all the life on the surface of our world. 

The Sun holds all the worlds of the solar system in its gravitational embrace. Starting with Mercury...

to cloud-covered Venus, where greenhouse effect has turned it into Hell.

Mars... a world with as much land as Earth itself.

Then a belt of rocky asteroids circles the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Jupiter is like it’s own solar system, with it’s four giant moons and dozens of smaller ones. It has more mass than all the other planets combined. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot... a hurricane 3 times the size of our whole planet, that’s been raging for centuries.

The crown jewel of our solar system, Saturn. Ringed by freeways of countless orbiting and slowly tumbling snowballs, each, a little moon.

Uranus...

and Neptune, the outermost planets, unknown to the ancients, only discovered after the invention of the telescope.

Beyond, lies a swarm of tens of thousands frozen worlds. Pluto being one of them.

Of all our spacecraft, Voyager 1 is the one that’s traveled farthest from home. She bears a message to a billion years from now. Something of who we were, how we felt and the music we made. Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night”.

From out here, the Sun may look like just another star, but it still exerts it’s gravitational hold on a trillion frozen comets, leftovers from the formation of the solar system, nearly five billion years ago. It’s called, the Oort Cloud. No one has ever seen it before, nor could they, for each of these little worlds is as far from it’s nearest neighbor as Earth is from Saturn. This enormous cloud of comets encloses the solar system, which is the second line of our cosmic adress.

Earth, Solar System.

EXPLORING THE MILKY WAY.

Rogue planet. World without a sun. Our galaxy has billions of them, adrift in perpetual night. Orphans, cast away from their mother stars during the chaotic birth of their native systems. They’re molten at the core, but frozen at the surface. There may be oceans of liquid water in between those extremes. Who knows what might be swimming in there?

How many worlds? How many stars? How many ways of being alive? Where are we in this picture? 

That’s where we live - about 30,000 light-years from the center. The Milky Way Galaxy is the next line of our cosmic adress. 

Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy. 

Andromeda, the galaxy next door, we call our two giant galaxies, and a smattering of smaller ones, the “local group”. Can’t even find our home galaxy from out here. It’s one of thousands in the Virgo Supercluster. 

On this scale, all the light we see, even the tiniest dots are galaxies. Each containing billions of suns, countless worlds. Yet, the entire Virgo Supercluster is but a tiny part of our universe. This is the cosmos on the grandest scale we know. A network of billion of galaxies. It’s the last line of our cosmic adress... For now.

Earth, Solar System, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe. That’s our cosmic adress.

Many of us suspect that all of this, all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe is one but tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes... A multiverse. Universe upon Universe. Worlds without end. 

EXPLORING TIME

How can we, humans, who rarely live more than a century, hope to grasp the vast expanse of time that is the history of the cosmos? The universe is 13.8 thousand million years old. In order to imagine all of cosmic time, let’s compress it into a single calendar year.

Cosmic Calendar begins on January 1st, with the birth of our universe. It contains everything that’s happened since then, up to now, which on this calendar, is midnight, December 31st.

On this scale, every month represents about a billion years. Every day, nearly 40 million years. Let’s go back as far as we can, to the very first moment of the universe.

January 1st. The Big Bang.

It’s as far back as we can see in time... for now. Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and matter we know today. As it expanded, the universe cooled and there was darkness for about 200 million years. Gravity was pulling together clumps of gas and heating them, untill the first stars burst into light, on January 10th.

On January 13th, these stars coalesced into the first small galaxies. Those galaxies merged to form still larger ones, including our own Milky Way, which formed about 11 billion years ago, on March 15th, of the cosmic year.

Hundreds of billions of suns. Which one is ours? Not yet born. It’ll rise from the ashes of other stars.

See those flashing lights, like paparazzi? Each one, a supernova. The blazing death of a giant star. Stars die and are born in supernovas, the stellar nurseries.

They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together within them, to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars.

You, me, everyone...

How much longer until the birth of our Sun? A long time. It won’t begin to shine for another six billion years. Our Sun’s birthday is August 31st, on the Cosmic Calendar... four and a half billion years ago.

As with the other worlds, Earth was formed from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the newborn Sun. Repeated collision produced a growing ball of debris.  The Earth took one hell of a beating in it’s first billion years.

Fragments of orbiting debris collided...

 and coalesced untill they snowballed to form our Moon.

The Moon is a souvenir of that violent epoch. It was ten times closer back then, locked in a much more intimate gravitational embrace. As the Earth cooled, seas began to form. The tides were a thousand times higher then. Over the eons, tidal friction within Earth pushed the moon away.

Life began somewhere around Semptember 21st, three and a half billion years ago on our little world. For all we know, life may have come from another part of the Milky Way.

December 17th was quite a day. Life in the sea really took off, exploding with a diversity of larger plants and animals. Tiktaalik was one of the first animals to venture onto land. It must have felt like visiting another planet.

Forests, dinosaurs, birds, insects, all evolved in the final week of December. The first flower, bloomed on December 28th.

The universe is already more than 13.5 billion years old. Still no sign of us. In the ocean of time that this calendar represents, we humans only evolved within the last hour of the last day of the cosmic year. 11:59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies only the last 14 seconds, and every person you’ve ever heard of, lived somewhere in there:

All kings, battles, migrations and inventions, wars, loves, everything in the history books happened here, in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar. 

Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors, yours and mine, stood up. Once standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated to the ground. We were free to look up in wonder. For the longest part of human existence, the last 40,000 generations, we were wanderers, living in small bands of hunters and gatherers, making tools, controlling fire, naming things. All within the last hour of the cosmic calendar. 

We’re so very young on the time scale of the universe, that we didn’t start painting our first pictures until the last 60 seconds, a mere 30,000 years ago.

This is when we invented astronomy. In fact, we’re all descended from astronomers. Our survival depended on knowing how to read the stars to predict the coming of the winter, the migration of wild herds. Then, 10,000 years ago, began a revolution in the way we lived. Our ancestors learned how to shape their environment, taming wild plants and animals, cultivating land and settling down.

This changed everything. For the first time in our history, we had more stuff than we could carry. We needed a way to keep track of it. At 14 seconds to midnight, or about 6,000 years ago, we invented writing.

Writting allowed us to save thoughts and send them much further in space and time. It shook the world. Moses was born seven seconds ago. Buddha, six seconds ago. Jesus, five seconds ago. Mohammed, three seconds ago. It was not even 2 seconds ago that, for better or worse, the two halves of the Earth discovered each other. And it was only at the very last second of the Cosmic Calendar that we began to use science to reveal nature’s secrets and her laws. 

The scientific method is so powerful that in a mere 4 centuries, it has taken us from Galileo’s first look through a telescope at another world to leaving our footprints on the Moon. 

It allowed us to look out across space and time, to discover where and when we are in the cosmos.

Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It’s the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher, a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

Now, come with me. Our journey is just beginning.

[atamascolily]

The cover of Junior Jedi Knights #5: Vader's Fortress by Rebecca Moesta features Anakin and Artoo dodging blaster fire while Tahiri does a bad-ass leap and Darth Vader looms in the background. So I guess this next field trip is to wherever the hell Vader's fortress is located... and given that this book was published in 1997, I'm pretty sure it isn't Mustafar.

Readers, I squealed with delight when I realized they were actually going to Bast Castle on Vjun.

[cut for length and discussion of Dark Empire]

Vjun's first appearance was in Dark Empire, but it's the main setting for Sean Stewart's Clone War-era novel Yoda: Dark Rendezvous (2004), which happens to be one of the best Legends books ever. Period. Drop everything and go read it now. Stewart's Vjun is a Dark side Gothic horror wonderland full of crumbling castles, crazed nobility, and flesh-eating moss. I love it, and you will, too.

Vjun also appears in various video games, with no less than Kyle Katarn describing it as "a big, dead, important rock". High praise, indeed.

Oh, and if you're curious, Wookiepeedia says Vjun is "pronounced as "VAH-JUHN" in Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, but in Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron, it is pronounced as "VUHN"".... so anything goes, really.

Anyway, so having dealt with his heritage by going to Dagobah in the last book, the logical next step is for Anakin to actually go and visit Vader's castle in person. You know, exposure therapy. Right?

Okay, let's see what the text says.

Anakin, Tahiri and Uldir are hanging out on the landing pad on Yavin IV waiting for Tionne to show up. Tahiri loves Tionne so much, she doesn't mind waiting around, and she wishes she could have gone with Tionne on this latest trip to Borgo Prime and I just... I love their relationship, okay?

Tionne has a new ship - the Lore Seeker! Anakin uses the Force to determine it's in great shape despite its odd appearance. (It has sails to harness solar wind, lol!)

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” the Jedi instructor said with a smile. “I thought so, too. But because the ship was so old, I was able to buy it from a Randoni trader for a song.”

“How much did you really pay?” Uldir asked.

Tionne shrugged.

“Just a song. Really. While I was looking for Jedi legends, I came across an ancient song that told about the very firstRan - doni merchants and the vaults where they hid their wealth. The trader was so interested that she offered me the Lore Seeker in exchange for the song. Now come help me unload my cargo, and I’ll show you some of my other treasures.”

DID I MENTION I LOVE HER???

Also, Tionne got some other stuff, too:

“You may carry this Twi’lek story-chain, Tahiri-each link tells a different part of a story. Please be very careful with it. Uldir, here is a holodisk. It holds a recording of some very old Jedi songs. Anakin, would you please carry this scroll? I’ll take the tapestry.”’

AHHHHHH, I LOVE THIS.

But Tionne found out something else important "in an old fortress on a planet called Vjun" and this is where I started SCREAMING because I know exactly where this is going and this is such a great set-up - especially since none of the kids have a clue.

Of course, they want to go, and Tionne's trying to be diplomatic about it.

“Does anyone live in the fortress?” Anakin asked.

Tionne shook her head.

“Not anymore.”

“Well, if it’s really that important, don’t you think you ought to go find it?” Tahiri said. “And don’t forget that you promised to take me with you this time.”

“I’d like to go along, too,” Anakin added.

“Yeah, it sounds like fun,” Uldir said.

Tionne frowned.

“I’m not sure Master Skywalker will approve. It could be a bit dangerous."

LOLOLOLOL, since when has that ever stopped anybody in this series?? But according to Tionne, the danger isn't Sith ghosts or anything like that - it's other people trying to snag a certain treasure first.

And what is this special object? the kids want to know.

Tionne’s face lit with a wondering smile, and she gave a happy sigh.

“It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber!”

ITS A MACGUFFIN! Also, given all of Vader’s issues with Obi-wan, the fact that he kept his old master’s lightsaber in his hidden Gothic Drama Castle is... something. But I digress.

Cut to Luke, being Luke.

Luke Skywalker, dressed in a comfortable black flightsuit, sat on the stone floor in the room where he meditated and did his office work. At the moment, though, Luke was not meditating. Before him in the center of the room stood his barrel-shaped blue and white droid, ArtooDetoo. It was time for Artoo’s routine cleaning. Anakin’s older sister Jaina often helped Luke with this chore, but the Jedi Master didn’t mind doing it himself. He actually found it relaxing. With his tools neatly laid out on the floor and fresh packets of lubricant beside him, Master Skywalker opened ArtooDetoo’s front panels and got to work.

After checking the droid’s numerous electrical connections, Luke added a few gadgets and upgrades Jaina had scrounged up for Artoo: a retractable mirror attachment, a power booster for the comm unit, and a new focusing lens for the hologram projector.

I'm sure NONE of these upgrades will come in handy later on in the book. Nope. Nope. Nope. Move along, nothing to see here, just a boy and his bro-bot.

Ikrit is hanging out on top of Artoo's head during all of this, when there's a knock at the door. Luke asks him to open the door and Ikrit DOES and I don't know why I find this so adorable, but I totally do. More of this, please.

Luke looked up from the packet of slippery lubricant he held in his hand, then smiled when he saw who his visitors were.

“Come in,” he said, “all of you.”

His words seemed to open an invisible dam, because people and noises instantly flooded into his quiet room. Luke laughed as everyone tried to talk to him at once.

“Master Skywalker, I have wonderful news,” Tionne said. “You’ll never guess in a million years,” Tahiri added.

“Can I go with them?” Anakin asked.

“Yeah, me too!” Uldir said.

News of Obi-wan's lightsaber makes Luke have all kinds of Feels (and a handy flashback for those who have forgotten the movies). Luke's like, Oh, yeah, Bast Castle, I've been there before back in Dark Empire when things got weird, and Anakin FREAKS OUT. Tionne's like, huh, maybe that's why my contact said only family had a right to claim the lightsaber then.

Tionne wants Luke to come with her, but Luke is meeting with Leia for pressing NR business, so Anakin volunteers to go as the family rep. I love that Luke looks at Ikrit first, and only says okay when Ikrit nods. Of course Uldir wants to come too, and Luke is about to say no, but Tionne's like "he's just going to stow away, so you might as well and the cargo hold on my ship is too small for him plus our stuff" so Luke caves. DID I MENTION HE'S A SOFTIE?? And with Artoo and Ikrit to help, Luke feels good about it, but again, he insists on the parental permission first.

[Oh, no, I just realized that Luke might not want to go back to Vjun after all the traumatic shit that went down in Dark Empire, and that's ALSO horrifying to contemplate. Like, it's not dangerous anymore, so he's okay with sending Anakin there with supervision, but he might not be eager to re-visit it? MY HEART.]

We skip that scene, though, and jump immediately to everyone in the Lore Seeker, and Tionne teaches them about lightsabers. Nomi Sunrider is namedropped (queen!) but overall lightsabers are reified, and I don't know how I feel about that tbh, even though they are admittedly SUPER COOL LASER SWORDS BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ.

Fortunately, Ikrit's there to say "Not All Jedi," since I am not, which catches Tionne off guard, since she didn't know he was a Jedi master. Tionne is apologetic about treating Ikrit like a pet, but Uldir continues to be a jerk, especially when Ikrit starts sharing his own personal trauma. And then Ikrit declaims about Anakin and Tahiri's powers, but graciously includes Uldir once Uldir pokes him about it.

The skies of Vjun are stormy, so it's a bumpy ride down. They land outside the castle instead of on the landing pad at the top because the weather is so awful. Anakin did his homework, and explains the situation (Dark Empire recap!):

“Did Uncle Luke tell you anything about the fortress itself?” Anakin asked.

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Well, I found out as much as I could before we left. Apparently Vader built Bast Castle as one of his private strongholds; he was a powerful man. After both he and Emperor Palpatine died, some of the Emperor’s followers brought a copy of Palpatine’s body here-a clone. This second Emperor was defeated too. Since then, the fortress has been abandoned, as far as we know.”

“I still don’t get it,” Uldir said to Anakin. “Why would your grandfather choose to build in such a desolate place?”

Oh, you sweet summer child.

They spy another shuttle, and Tahiri is forced to wear shoes again so they can climb up in the rain. It's basically the Stairs of Minas Morgul from LOTR, only the rain is turning to sleet. Artoo hates stairs and Ikrit rescues him when he falls off - but he can hack the door open, so that's good. The hall has a giant, larger-than-life statue of Darth Vader toppled over on the floor, because... drama.

Then the laser fire starts, and everybody ducks for cover. Artoo uses his newly-installed reviewed mirror to deflect the laster bolts, so they can disarm the automatic security system. Tionne steps in with her lightsaber when Artoo gets shot, and she and Ikrit start tossing random objects to block them while the kids race for the control panels and it's epic. The statue explodes and Artoo manages to hack the system right before he powers down.

Uldir clapped one hand down on Anakin’s shoulder. “Not half bad for a kid,” he said.

Quiet, you condescending fuck. Yes, I know, he's like 14, but he's still obnoxious as hell here.

Anyway, they repair Artoo, except he can't climb any more stairs (I'm so confused how he did it earlier, but okay), and they debate whether to split the party. The smart answer is always "No," but they eventually do anyway, because plot. Tahiri's just happy not to wear shoes. You'll be happy to know that the bathrooms still work. This whole thing feels like an RPG dungeon crawl and I'm HERE FOR IT.

Tahiri notices the floor's texture shifts and that turns out to be a clue and I LOVE THIS. There's a secret pit trap full of spkes, and then suddenly they're attacked by monsters. But eventually, the others find them and deduce that they're holograms. Anakin IDs himself to a door and it opens into a secret chamber... and then this happens:

At the same moment, a puff of smoke erupted in the doorway, and a dark-haired man with a neat beard, tawny eyes, and a deep purple cloak stood before them. The man threw back his head and laughed, although Anakin couldn’t see what was so funny.

“The powerful Mage of Exis Station thanks you,” he said. “I would never have found the lightsaber without your help.” He snatched the weapon from Tionne’s hand. “But I’ll take it now.”

Tahiri starts pestering this guy with questions and he is startled enough to admit he's the Mighty Orloc. Tahiri realizes he's a stage magician, but even so, he manages to open a trapdoor, sending Tionne and Ikrit elsewhere. The kids rush him, but there's smoke and when it clears, Orloc has vanished.

Ikrit and Tionne are fine, and they start looking to rejoin the kids, who are searching for them and/or Orloc. Artoo and Uldir take a tunnel while Tahiri and Anakin go up stairs. Everyone keeps tossing the stale Imperial ration bars they picked up earlier to test for traps, and the RP gamer  in me approves.

“What’s this?” Tahiri asked, pointing to a raised platform that held a huge tube made of black plasteel. Wires and hoses snaked out from the cylinder in all directions. She ran a hand along its smooth side and found some sort of control panel.

“This looks like the tubes they use to bury dead people in space,” Anakin said.

It's actually Vader's bedroom! They find a little hidden hologram of a young Luke and I just... can't even...

Anakin opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The little hologram of a young Luke Skywalker turned in a slow circle, so that they could see it from every angle.

...Anakin felt a lump form in his throat. “My mom keeps holograms of me and Jacen and Jaina on her desk at work, and Dad has one of me and the twins in the Millennium Falcon. I think Darth Vader was just doing the same thing.”

“So maybe he wasn’t all bad,” Tahiri said in a soft voice.

Anakin starts to feel better about coming to Bast Castle, which is good, because he has Deep-Seated Issues that need to be resolved.

Meanwhile, Uldir sees the lightsaber as a magical talisman that will help him become a Jedi. He abandons Artoo and confronts Orloc, who draws the blade on him. Orloc offers to teach Uldir his powers if he'll come with him. Orloc's looking for the Holocron in Vader's private quarters, and Uldir is tempted, but ultimately turns him down because he realizes Orloc is a fraud.

Anakin and Tahiri find Orloc and Uldir and Tahiri slides down a pole to confront him. Orloc attacks her with the lightsaber. Tionne and Ikrit show up, and Artoo uses a high-frequency blast to distract Orloc long enough for Ikrit to yank the lightsaber with the Force. Orloc disappears, and Uldir mentions the Holocron in Vader's private quarters. So Anakin and Tahiri take them back there.

Tionne's like, let's GTFO, but Uldir suggests they test it, which is a mistake, but Tionne agrees. OF COURSE Orloc comes back and snags it. They chase Orloc through the castle, and there's a lot of trap door shenanigans, but ultimately Artoo helps save the day and they get the holocron back, even though Orloc conveniently escapes.

(Maybe I've been watching too much Scooby-Doo, but I honestly expected Orloc to say "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids and your talking [lagomorph]!" ...maybe in the next book?)

Ikrit suggests they use the ships in the hangar to fly down to the Lore Seeker instead of walking. Anakin suggests Ikrit keeps the ship, since he seems to enjoy piloting, and I don't know how Ikrit is piloting this thing since he's a lagomorph, but it makes him happy, and they all make it back to Yavin in two ships without incident, which means it's time for the inspirational moral!

“It feels good to be back,” he said with a sigh. Tahiri giggled. “That was certainly more of an adventure than I had bargained for.”

Tionne looked at her two students.

“Are you sorry you came with me?”

Anakin shook his head.

“The trip was worth making. I learned some interesting things about Darth Vader.”

“I learned to trust the Force and not just my eyes and ears,” Tahiri said.

“And we did find a lightsaber and a Holocron,” Anakin said.

“And a new ship for Ikrit,” Tahiri added. “So I think we’re glad we came along, but it may be a while before we go looking for adventures again.”

HAHAHAHA, right, kids. You just keep thinking that.

Ikrit names his ship the Sunrider after Nomi Sunrider, because he, too, stans a legend. Anakin and Tahiri ask if they can take the turbolift up to the Great Temple when Luke starts walking up the outside stairs, and Luke has NO IDEA WHY THEY HATE STAIRS, and... on that note, the book ends, with Luke being VERY confused. [I like that Moesta remembers the Great Temple has outside stairs, but... THE LAYOUT STILL MAKES NO SENSE!!!]

So, I don't know how to feel about this book. PROS: I love the character details with Luke, Ikrit, Tionne and Tahiri, and I like how all of the adults continue to be responsible while still allowing opportunities for the children to be competent and show initiative. It's great to see Bast Castle, and the whole thing has the feel of a classic RPG dungeon crawl. Yay for Artoo saving the day ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS, lol.

CONS: Uldir is annoying, and I wish he'd stop being such a jerk. None of the characters have ever played RPGs and it shows in their lack of genre-savvy. And I guess we'll see Orloc again in the next book, because... it feels like there wasn't much resolution of that particular plot in this book... no resolution to who Orloc actually is, or what or why. I feel like this book is part one of a two-episode plot, and I wasn't expecting that, but okay.

It's unclear if Obi-wan's lightsaber has any further plot significance or if it's just a macguffin. Ditto the holocron. But given the next book is Kenobi's Blade, I suspect Orloc's going to try and snag both, and Uldir is going to have a Not-So-Secret Test of Character about it. (To be fair, he passed the one in this book, so he's not all bad, but he's so obnoxious, it's challenging for me to give him credit where it's due.)

This book also kinda sorta falls into the "Jedi lightsaber fetish" trope, which I hate. Don't get me wrong, I love the laser swords and they are freaking awesome, but I hate how everybody latches onto "Jedi = laser sword" business as a symbol of identity. I know, I know, Star Wars is really ambivalent about whether the Jedi are Space!Samurai or Space!Monks, and I just... lean more towards the latter than the former, I guess?? But like I said, the lightsaber is more of a macguffin here, and Ikrit at least lampshades the issue a little bit, so I feel better about it.  

Also, it just occurred to me it's unclear whether Tahiri hates shoes, sand, or stairs more, lol.

[architectuul]

Nomadic Community Gardens

is a temporary community project on Fleet Street Hill, off Brick Lane in East London’s Shoreditch. It has been almost five years when Jimmy and Junior had a dream about creating a community space.

Source: Nomadic Community Gardens Web

After they presented it to landowners it attracts, inspires and brings together local people, artists, musicians and visitors, who come to the garden and create, explore, relax and most importantly meet each other. 

The place is hidden from the street but visible from the railway above. Garden beds with vegetables, herbs and flowers, sculptures made of reused materials, benches everywhere, graffiti wall, open fireplace, playground, old piano, there is something for everyone to enjoy and feel a part of it! Nina Savič talked with Steve, a volunteer who has been involved since almost the very beginning.

Hayley at the Roving Cafe | Photo Nomadic Community Gardens Web

How did the project start? So we are on a railway line now and this piece of land used to belong to Network rail. They would not entertain anybody using it before anything but as soon as they sold it to private landowners, Jimmy&J put in their plan. Nike wanted to move in here as well and some other people wanted to use this space but the property developers liked the idea of a community gathering space so they allowed it and we got a six months licence and then another six months and then it grew and it grew. It is kind of an indefinite licence but still in September we don’t know what is going to happen. As soon as they want us to go, we will say thank you very much and we will go.

So that’s the agreement between Nomadic community garden and landowners? Absolutely, when they want the land back we give it to them. Because if we didn’t do that no other landowner would ever allow this to happen again and it is not a good precedent. We could probably fight and keep it but how selfish would that be? There is a big demand for places like this. This is unique, it is nowhere else– all these people who come in here, we all talk to each other. Out there, you would never talk to these people, you would never meet! Here we are all the same.. we are all in the same little planet.

Bee keeping at  Community Gardens. | Photo Nomadic Community Gardens 

How can one get involved? Come here, be here, really it is just hang out and become a part of it. Some people come here and do nothing, some people come here and just do stuff. So Sherily (walks by with watery can) she is just a local person who came here and now she is head gardener, she is totally about gardening. This is a community space, so the community is everybody, everybody is welcome to come in here and if they want to do something that is not harmful or is a good thing..it can happen!

How did you get involved? I used to walk my dog around here and this was just overgrown empty piece of land… My dog used to come here and I would have to wait an hour for him to come out. And one day these guys were here and the gates were open…  and I just got involved, started building some of these beds. We started over in that corner there and worked all the way around.

How do you organize yourselves? We tried having meetings but meetings don’t work. In general things roll along and Jimmy has final say because his name is on the list. There is a core group of about 3 - 5 people, everybody else is kind of in and out. You can’t have too many people and it is good to have someone who has final yes or no.

What would be for example unwanted activity? Supposedly non political, non religious representing..everybody is equal there is no bias on any side of anything. We are also not allowed to build anymore buildings. We built too many of them already.

What are you going to do with the buildings, gardens and other furniture once you will have to move? The reason why it is called Nomadic community garden is that it can be moved somewhere else. These garden beds for example are built on plastic pallets.. so they get lifted up and moved on a lorry to the next garden space. Some of them we will lose because of rots but pretty much everything can be dismantled, flat packed and put away.

Where do you get the materials from? Most of this wood that garden beds are made of came from a company that deals with recycling art packaging..We also invested a bit of money to scaffold boards. After we bought a van, we picked up pallets and other useful things from the streets. We had a lot of rubbish here at some point. The piano came from a squat when they got evicted and they couldn’t take it with them..it has been here for about 4 years. Solar panels were given to us. People would turn up here and asking do you want this or that? All the stuff here was donated by people. Not so much now but when we started the van was crucial to bring things here.

Allotment beds. | Photo Nomadic Community Gardens Web

What are the main expenses of the project and how do you finance them? On Sunday when we have our main day, we have music, people doing food, if we can get a licence from the council we have a bar and we have a guy at the door with a bucket collecting contributions. Sometimes we have or host other weekend events but every Sunday there is our event and something going on. It started off with 20 people around the fire in the rain, playing the guitar and piano.. and then it grew into a Sunday jam night. People could come with their own instruments. The money that is gained from Sunday is used to pay the public liability insurance, the van, and it provides also some money for local people who spent a lot of time and effort here… You cannot make a living out of coming here, but you can get some quids a day. Mondays we are closed. If you come here on Monday, you come here to work..and after we buy some food, have a barbecue, some beers.

Another way of making money here is hiring our place to film crews or photoshootings..Lara Croft was filmed here and some big music videos as well.

How busy does it get on Sundays? Officially we are never more than 499, including staff..but probably it is about 800-900, maybe even 1000.. It can get incredibly busy! But there is always a good atmosphere and never any trouble. What we used to say when we started with – if you build it they will come and here four and a half years later people have come. And it has been through many changes, turmoils,  arguments… but now is at its peak, I think. We got busy after about two years. First time we had a day when it was like one in one out was 2nd birthday. And now Google tells you to come here! We are even in inflightmagazins, like Easy jet ‘Top cool things to do in London’.

What about the infrastructure - water, electricity, waste and toilets? We collect rainwater that feeds all the plans. The containers by the gate we fill up with water from hydrants. We produce electricity with solar panels and we have generator for the sound system we use for the events. We have four port-a-loos that we get cleaned every Thursday. 

Street Food | Photo Nomadic Community Gardens Web

We also have a piss wall, with filtration system with charcoal. We have to pay for rubbish to be taken away..we accumulate a lot of rubbish. We used to be able to sell the aluminium cans but they are not taking them anymore. Anything we can burn (cardboard, wood..) we burn and the rest we pay the council to take it away. We try to tell people to take their rubbish away but sure we don’t want that they take it away and dump it in the park however I think people are getting much more respectful.

Would you say that if the place is clean and looks like someone is taking care of it, also people take care of it more likely? There is kind of self police here. People are very proud of what they have created so they keep an eye on it.

What would you say is a general rule for this place, is there any? Play nice..it’s a bit hippy, it’s a bit love&peace but yes that’s basically it..to be nice to each other!

--- 

text and photo by Nina Savič

Nomadic Community Gardens, Fleet Street Hill, London E2 6EE ​From Brick Lane, go to Allen Gardens, go left through the underpass and you will see us.  Alternatively, cross the footbridge from Cheshire Street and you will see a door opposite the bottom of the steps. We are located in the space between the two overground lines. 

Opening hours Tuesday-Thursday 9am-6pm, Friday 9am-8pm, Saturday & Sunday 9am-9pm. Closed on Mondays

[ne-nsw-stargrazing-festival]

Bored in lock down at home?

Yep, we are locked down to.  Our StarGrazing event sensibly postponed till next year  2021. Probably around 16 to 18 April. 

In the mean time, can we help you out a little, with the ‘stuck at home’ syndrome.   

1.

If you have thought about it, but not done it yet, perhaps now is the time to try a little astro-photography.  The way to learn is just give it a go. 

The moon is a great way to begin.  Visible at some time from your balcony, unit window or backyard.  Capture it silhouetted by tree branches, or in full moon brightness.  Add some photo manipulation software, and perhaps you can combine photos of a low light earthly scene with a different zoom photo of a clear full moon.  Astrophotography can be creative, artistic, evocative, blending of images, not just recording a scene in factual scientific details.

Lachlan, one of our very young StarGrazing enthusiasts sent me two of his pics of the moon this last week.  I am posting the one I like the most.  Simple, Dark, Moody.

2.

One of the good things about astronomy is it is (mostly) family friendly. Things for kids and adults, different intellectual levels.  And it is educational. Gets young minds thinking. How big? How fast? Cool.  So to help you find something to distract the kids for awhile, or give your mind a little something different to think about, below are a range of utube and vimeo links you may want to explore. 

I know technically any of you can just go do a net search.  But what do you search for?  What sort of thing is new, interesting in Astronomy and space?  That is where we can help by giving you some video links, with a bit of a guide, to get you going.  A sort of short cut guide to current evolving space and astronomy topics. (Or at least some of them!)

Share with the kids, make it home work, chat over dinner with what they thought and think.  Inspires young minds, and old. 

Lets begin with a full tour of the universe to put your mind a little more in the picture of all that is out there.  Journey to the Edge of the universe. Narrated by Alec Baldwin.  Lasts for 1.5 hours, so put the older kids in front of it and take a break.  Kettle on ... oh work yes  ... more emails to attend.. coffee first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P17h_JwzMuU

Rockets:  Humans recently succeed in the “reusable rocket”. (Thanks Elon and Space X). Cheaper, we can do more, go more, put more probes and astronomy stuff into space.  The last scene here is like one straight out of science fiction movie.  But it is real, on Earth, year 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0FZIwabctw

The above is an amazing achievement.  This video goes with it.  The mistakes along the way.  Failing in tasks is part of learning how to achieve something new.  A key part of every endeavour.  (You may be in that cycle right now! Take heart!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

Rocket size comparison. (For the kids mostly.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ380rPYE4Q

How to land the space shuttle (and how young people can be passionately inspired by space stuff.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU

At one of our past StarGrazing events, we watched the international space station pass over us.  Here is a long (1 hour) detailed tour of the International Space Station.  (In zero gravity, there is no “up or down”.)  A robot makes a very brief appearance in a zip up bag.  This is an international collaboration while wars and pandemics go on below.

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

Humanities next step - setting up a permanent base on the moon.  The challenges...  space radiation, need for shelter, need for water for humans and to make fuel.  Solution.... find a cave.  Set up your moon base in there protected from space radiation.  Yes, there appear to be caves on the moon.  Like Hawaii, the moon has ancient flows of lava, called lava tubes.  The difference is, and it is a good difference for us human explorers, the moon has 1/5 the gravity of Earth.  So where as the cooled lava tubes in Hawaii are up to 10m high, on the moon they are up to 100m tall and wide.  Huge.  Sometimes somewhere along a part of a lava tube, a meteorite strike or something, the roof of the lava tube has caved in, so you get a deep dark hole that looks slightly different in lunar photos to a deep dark shadowed crater.  Hence the search is on to find a lava tube moon cave, in a good place to set up a permanent human moon base.  Within decades there will be cave men and women again.  On the moon! 

(Note: It was school kids exploring moon photos on the web that discovered the first moon cave.  A major breakthrough opening up this whole solution to the “professionals”.  Before then, no one had noticed these rare things. All assumed to be the normal run of the mill craters in deep shadow. )

https://vimeo.com/250518650

Here is a question.  This planet has been through several catastrophes with mass extinctions.  As we humans evolve, we are endangering this planet by our sheer numbers.  Is our emergence as a ‘planetary dominant species’ naturally what planets do over time.  To eventually evolve a species with a capacity to either destroy itself, .... or act to defend that planet from mass extinction space risks?  Depending on that species collective intelligence and behaviour, it may be the source of another self extinction and mass extinction, or if it can manage itself responsibly go on to be an asset to that planets overall survival.  Could this be a part of a ‘natural selection’ process for life on planets through out the universe?  If so there is a challenge, and a more positive thought for our species! 

The kind of event that killed of the dinosaurs can happen again at any time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEIjKjIgCA0

You probably did not know it, but NASA and ESA have missions planned to try some techniques on asteroid deflection to see how they can work.  (Yeah!)  Set for launch 2021, with an asteroid strike attempt 2022.

I think their careful selection of a target so that they can observe changes after impact from Earth based telescopes is so simple yet such a really clever solution.  I would have just chosen any asteroid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9fxIxH8LqM

Just so you now in recent years, humans have formed a ‘planetary defence unit’ officially.  With a budget.  It is no longer science fiction. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSYuY6N1Rs

Humanity exploring our local solar system.  Human camera’s going everywhere on probes.

Did you know you can explore the surface of Mars, using Google Earth, downloadable for free here. https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html?hl=en-GB

Thanks to some NASA missions to Mars, there were a few years where humans had a more complete and finer resolution photographic map of Mars, then we did for our own home planet Earth.

You can explore this mass of imagery using Google Earth from home.  This is an old video from 2009 as a starter for you.  Shows you what to click on to look at Mars imagery in Google Earth.  I do not think things have changed much since 2009.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjcCF6cIlPw

Prefer an on the ground level view of Mars.  Try this next video.   This is the surface of another planet. Cool.  So much the same, yet different.  ( May be its all secretly filmed in outback Australia, like man never really went to the moon, it was filmed in outback Arizona .. te he. )

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

The next Mars rover (is that no 4?) is due to launch soon for Mars. (Google search and Wikipedia is your friend to find out more.)  Possibly now is a great time to introduce this next mission to the kids, and have them follow it as a hobby project over the next few years.  Plan your own ‘watch the launch’ and ‘watch the landing’ parties.

Above we talked about asteroids.  OK, would humans have close up pictures of the surface of an asteroid yet?  Yep.  A loose rubble pile type of asteroid, just held together by gravity.  So if your curious if it looks like some past Armageddon movie scene, find out.  Thanks Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHvDO_fzZLs&list=PLpGTA7wMEDFjzlSiNurKy6TyDRmPWMlLd

Lets go further out.  How about a video of, not just the surface of another planet, but the moon of another planet.  Its 2020, can do.  Here is the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn.  No oil crises on Titan.  Rivers of hydrocarbon.  Awesome.  Hard to believe this is real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L471ct7YDo

As for other planets, here is a solar system tour of images ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF14sGoymW0

This next video is for the geeks amongst you.  A long lecture, but not too technical.  (1.25 hours and not for kids really).  There is talk of another, yet undiscovered, “Planet 9″ in our solar system.  10 to 20 times the mass of Earth.  No 9 with Pluto demoted from being a “planet”.  The evidence from modelling seems pretty sound.

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

Other planets around other stars ..

Over the last decade new instruments are discovering 100′s of planets around other stars, and even using maths to work out what the conditions may be like on them.  It is looking like many other solar systems are not at all similar to our own.  Our solar system, and hence the circumstances that have led complex life and us to evolve on this planet may be rare.   Two videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I_FOEh47RY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mVRc80vhhQ

Any planet earth like planets - rocky, with water, in the temperature goldilocks zone?  Yes.  Check out the Trappist System.  Its not far from us either. ..!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKFaAS30X8

How will we know more about the character of other extra-solar planets around other stars.  Ones like Earth?  To really know if there are planets with life supporting environments like Earth, one way is to gain the spectrum of light from a star that has just glanced and passes through the atmosphere of that planet of interest.   In so doing, the kinds of molecules in that atmosphere, oxygen, nitrogen, and organic life molecules like methane and other complex molecules each absorb and take out specific frequencies of that stars sunlight.  This provides a finger print of “absorptions” that can enable us to read what gases are in that planets atmosphere.  This amount of light is so incredibly small that it is just beyond our current best Earth based telescopes and their exquisitely sensitive detectors.  A key hope of being able to observe such light is with the next space telescope after the Hubble Telescope. The $10 billion dollar (including wages and run time into the next 10 years)  James Webb Telescope.  This due for launch next year, around this time.  March 2021.  Here are some videos.

About it:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqG3Jazrfs

With most space missions, including the James Webb telescope, require long time lines from conception to final outcomes. Their team members have to bet their entire working careers on the project going through to success, with the risk that if the rocket blows up, it is decades of life work gone in a few seconds.  For the love of knowledge, ..”To go where no one has gone before..” (Chuckle, but kind of true.)  The James Webb telescope project is no different.  It began back 30+ years ago, 1989.  Here is the story from then to now, and on into the future, all going well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXiU1YxWyzY

NASA and ESA gets all (or most) of the public mind attention.  Australia has fostered and hosted an equally significant project. (Including my old work place, cool ..)  The Square Kilometer Array SKA.  This is an international collaborative project.  The radio astronomy equivalent of the CERN Hadron Collider.  Did you know it is currently in the process of being built.  It is being assembled in both Western Australia and Southern Africa.  The telescope hardware will span across two continents!

This radio telescope system will look out deep into the universe in radio waves.  Without the pretty pictures in the visible light our eyes see, this project attracts much less attention from the general public than Hubble and James Webb telescopes.  Scientifically though, it is very exciting.  Like the above telescopes, when this is fully operational, what it sees will make or break lots of current cosmological theories.  When fully operational, it will create as much data in real time, as the entire world internet currently generates each second.  Wow!   Petabytes (look that up).  This is a really major science endeavour.  World class, world leading. 

This project will also reach further than ever before, and one of its capacities will be detecting radio signals from other civilizations.  The “We Are Not Alone” moment is most likely to come from this project in the next 20 years. 

Go Aussie’s go! (Quiet achievers.) Project and construction is uniting people from across continents.  And at less than half the cost of the James Webb. (Yeh - both are really valuable projects.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hog411ZSzEY

I have spent a couple of days looking through old and new video links to put this list together.  There are so many good videos out there.  These are chosen to cover a range of topics and starting points for you to follow up and explore further.  Hopefully covering kids interests and adults in the mix.

Doing so has lifted my spirits.  I think one of the values of astronomy and space in uncertain times, is that it helps to see others facing challenges, problem solving, working successfully, collectively, to get to new places.  New in knowledge, new in exploration, new in endeavour and achievement, and new in human cooperation.  Such is not an easy or simple thing to do. 

I certainly needed the reminder and the lift. 

Best wishes to you.

[naturepointstheway]

Looking ahead at another year of study.

So, yet another year of university, but at least now I’m on the steady and straight road with my geology major, and there’s a whole lot of classes I want to take, one or two which may be changed (or dropped all together). Right now, the summer’s still hot and my geology-related internship is still running (although it’s not going great at the moment this week as I’ve been “glomped” by sudden extreme fatigue out of nowhere, which meant I had to try and parcel my energy carefully, which sucks ass. :( And right before an intense geology field school thing next month. Body, can you please not screw up my study plans for once? Kthxbye.) 

That aside, in prep for taking geochemistry later this year (semester 2, which will be in July during mid-winter), I decided to go all in and do a self-paced distance course through the university to get myself re-acquainted with high-school (final year equivalent) chemistry--had a price to pay, but I find I tend to be way more likely to finish an introductory thing if there’s a significant price tag on it. I thought, thanks to past experience, I’d probably struggle and hate every step of the way, but I’m finding that I’m actually enjoying re-learning (or learning again) about the basics of chemistry. If my relationship to chemistry (so to speak) was a fic with associated tags, one of them would definitely be “enemies to friends” (not lovers. Sorry, it’s platonic, not romantic chemistry, here.) 

Anyway, let’s look ahead to the year ahead for my Geology major. 

@luna-and-mars​ @astudyinchocolate​ @rose-of-the-underworld​ @dand3l1on-fluff​

SEMESTER 1: 

Minerals and Rocks (Core paper) 

Oooh boy, I’ve heard all sorts of things about this paper, ranging from “Hardest paper ever” to “Fuck this paper and my life”, but seeing that other geol majors fought through nevertheless, especially the crystallography and petrology, then I feel like I can fight it too. I’ve fought worse papers, so bring it on.

Field Studies and New Zealand Geology (Core paper) 

Oh boy, the prospect of having to sleep in the same cabin/dorm/whatever as other strangers who don’t even know me is making my social anxiety shoot through the roof just thinking about it. And it doesn’t help that the last time I had to share a dorm with someone (at a backpackers), they complained about me to the receptionist (who took their side, effectively) about me making “so much noise at 4am” and they couldn’t bear to sleep another night in the same room as a “handicapped” person” and were so uncomfortable sharing the same space as someone with a hearing impairment (I wear hearing aids). Part of me wants to feel bitter about that, but you know what? Fuck that noise. It’s not my problem if someone feels uncomfortable with people who happen to have a disability or whatever. So, as Chloe Price would so eloquently say, with her fingers alone: 

On the upside, the prospect of going out on an adventure and seeing geology in the real world so to speak, and being able to take alll the photographs and writing down all the things I discovered and everything from day to day? Sounds AWESOME. Sign me up. 

Geomorphology: 

This sounds quite similar to a class I took last year on sedimentology, only this is looking at the more geographical aspect of things--i.e. what you can see on the surface of the planet (whether that be Earth, which I still live on, or Mars, or wherever) and what that tells us about the history of the landscape and also how it came to be that way. So hopefully it’ll be more interesting than the frankly boring-sounding summary. Also, taking it at final year in undergraduate level means I can also do a research project, which would be awesome. 

And of course, it can be related to elsewhere in the solar system, notably Mars:

Introduction to Remote Sensing Technologies:

Again, taking this because of its relatability to many different fields, notably including astronomy (I think you can start to see a pattern here: taking classes that can be related in some way to astronomy as well.) It includes stuff like learning about how light interacts with objects (e.g. vegetation, water...), photogrammetry (basically making measurements from photos), and so on. This definitely looks like it would be really useful, and is kind of like an offshoot in a way of my favourite hobby: photography. So hey, in a way, I can learn a little photography!

Also, I’ve always been fascinated by how photographing, say, galaxies in different wavelengths of light really brings out different aspects of their nature, and it’s just cool. Go Hubble Space Telescope. 

SEMESTER 2

Geophysics: 

Say it with me, fellow human beings, what is the one thing I can relate this thing to as well? Yep, astronomy. This is more aimed at seismology and radar imaging and whatever, but since at least one of the postgraduate (or independent project in final undergrad year next year) projects I’m interested in involves geophysical aspects to a great degree, this will be super-useful for that as well. Let’s give the Earth’s heart a listen, using geophysics. 

(Incidentally, the Mars Insight Lander on Mars is using geophysical tools to listen for Marsquakes.)

Geochemistry: 

Hopefully, this’ll be really interesting, even if challenging--I am definitely looking forward to learning more about things like isotopes and how it relates to geology. And once again, yep, can be extended beyond our planet too. If I want to have a significantly improved chance of getting a job related to my geology major in the future, this bad boy’s definitely the one to have on my team, so to speak. 

And, honestly? If it wasn’t for chemistry, the universe wouldn’t even exist. So give it up for chemistry--it’s here to stay, so may as well learn to enjoy it and have fun while I can. There’s gotta be some chemistry, no matter what. If this was a song, it would be “Something There” from Beauty and the Beast, particularly Belle’s lines.

Marine Geology: 

This sounds amazing, and I am definitely looking forward to this, as it brings together geology and oceanography in a way that just makes everything I’ll probably learn in this class fantastic. I think this is another paper I’m definitely genuinely excited about, and what’s even cooler is that it also gives you a taste of science communication and also research out in the field, at Stewart Island (which I’ve been to years ago (six years ago), and fell in love, so it’d be awesome to see it again.) 

Science and the Public

This one, I’m cautiously curious about, but the atmosphere of that department is...let’s just say, so pretentious and elite and that kind of White People (TM) nonsense. However, they promise to teach you about how to make science accessible and welcome to the public via things like science outreach, engagements with the community, and exhibitions. Those I’m looking forward to, so I’m hoping they will more than make up for any possible toxicity in the atmosphere, and I will still learn something nonetheless. 

Otherwise, the class on volcanoes (that’s on the same exact day and time, so much for being able to be in two places at once or having a time turner or rewind powers) will take its place instead. Volcanoes sounds way more fun than a class that could be good, but the science communication department is...not so friendly--especially to diverse people--they literally take on mostly white, able-bodied (and able-eared in my case lol) students which stinks. They had fifty spots for their introduction to science communication paper (which is the 2nd year class, which I took last year) and yet only took on 16 white, young, able students. Like...what the schist? Come on.))

So gonna keep my eye on this one, but definitely very cautiously hopeful for this thing. 

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

uuuuuuuuuugh

At what point can you pry an interesting setting and a reasonable plot out of hackey, thudding prose?  I keep running into this problem with science fiction, even stuff that's fairly modern and highly recommended, where it's like a goddamned laundry list of activity with no connective tissue or life to it.   Like you’re reading along and it might as well be

Brian McAstronaut awoke in his space-bedroom to find that the ship's solar sails had become tangled in some space-debris while he slept.  He would have thought 'overnight' instead of 'while he slept,' but of course he was in space and so there was no such thing as 'day' or 'night.' There was only sleeping in his space-bedroom and being awake in his spaceship.  The year was 3030, and not being in space was something that people did in the Before Times, back when they lived on Earth and drank earth-liquor and believed in climate change.   Brian McAstronaut lived now, and in space, and he only believed in himself and his solar sails, because his exceptionally clear idea of what life was like in 2020 in spite of that having been a really long time ago gave him some really cool and cynical ideas about the nature of men.  That was dangerously close to introspection, though, and he decided to stop doing it, because introspection was for people in other genres.  Brian McAstronaut scrambled the semi-sentient space robots to go out into space and straighten the solar sails, which his spaceship needed to travel through space. As he watched them work, he drank some space-liquor and listened to a piece of wildly anachronistic music that, presumably, the author likes very much or thinks will make the character sound cool or cultured to the readers, like if this was all happening here on Earth and now in the year of our lord 2019 and the character was listening to a troubadour's banging lute solo on his airpods.  Which would be pretty great, wouldn't it, if we found some weird old-ass science fiction where the protagonist is listening to a rhapsody on their electric pianoforte and never mind, that's Jules Verne. Anyway, as Brian McAstronaut drank his space-liquor and listened to that Rolling Stones album you had to be a really hardcore Rolling Stones fan to like, he looked out at the stars and waited while the author absolutely ransacked a fucking thesaurus to describe the panorama.  It did not affect him emotionally in any way, because having emotions is for girls, or maybe for people who aren't in science fiction novels, which is basically the same thing.  Brian McAstronaut had always lived in space.  Living in space was what Brian McAstronaut did.  Being impressed with space instead of alternating fighting for survival in space with treating space like it was his sofa in a twenty-first century living room was for people who weren't Brian McAstronaut. And it's not that the writers are necessarily incapable of making it better.  The book I'm reading now is fairly interesting when it dives into its self-contained stories and leaves the main narrative in the dust, but the second it crawls back out into the bitter blast of the main narrative, it's "Brian McAstronaut did this" and "Brian McAstronaut did that" and Brian McAstronaut better wind up being a badly-programmed android or some shit, because there's really no excuse for this.   Your protagonist is not a wooden puppet to carry your plot around--even the pulp detective guys churning out murder mysteries for a penny a page knew that.  It's also like... I mean, not to tell science fiction authors how to do their jobs, but ideally your prose should do something other than give space fetishists something to jerk off to.  There's the old razzle-dazzle, and then there's just whaling on the genre descriptor buttons like a drunk dude playing whack-a-mole. Like don't go out and start writing something like Brian McAstronaut ran his callused, manly hands over the glossy black hull of his new ship.  It jutted proudly from the platform, its two heavy rockets hanging below it in an extra virile way.  The extremely phallic, powerful spaceship excited him, but not in an overtly gay way, because the primary market for these books is straight men who are weirdly insecure in their own masculinity, and if they wind up conflicted about how a scene makes them feel in the pants department, they'll leave a bunch of one-star reviews on Amazon and spend all their free time calling the author a cuck on reddit.   Brian McAstronaut was super-secure in his own masculinity, because he had a spaceship kitted out with all the bells and whistles, which are of course named after twentieth- and twenty-first-century physicists--male physicists--because physics stopped being done after that and also because we're all running around right now hitting our Lanchester brakes in cars powered by Benz engines while our phones use a Haartsen connection to blast music over our de Forest speakers.  Brian McAstronaut was glad he'd shelled out the extra credits for the optional ramjets, which made him feel a very straightforward and normal way in the pants department. The entrance to his new spaceship was a vertical slit located between the two rockets--full to bursting with rocketfuel, just ready to spray it all over the stars--and Brian headed for it like a man on a mission, like a man's man who knew what he was doing and had never disappointed anyone with a rocket in his life.  He grabbed the hefty entrance handle firmly and confidently, by the base, and pushed his way into the dark warmth of the vertical slit.  It was keyed to his unique genetic imprint, and it telescoped open, welcoming him home. Inside, the spaceship was spartan but inviting, needing no furniture or decoration or anything other than the quiet of the red womb-chamber.  He could spend years here, suspended in cryogenic sleep, one with the ship while they sped across the stars.  It would just be the two of them, Brian McAstronaut and his ship--the ship which was all his, and which he would never have to share with another person.  He was pretty sure the ship loved him, and that this was a perfectly ordinary conviction to have.  It was certainly very normal to not have to care about the rest of society, or how much time was passing, or whether or not his friends missed him, so long as he was one with the ship.  He was like twentieth-century actor John Wayne, when twentieth-century actor John Wayne was astride a horse. Everything that wasn't the womb-chamber was full of computerbanks and monitors and blinking lights that he could control with his strong man hands.  Nothing would happen without him inputting commands, which was just how it should be.  He was the man who hit the space-buttons and charted the space-course and decided when to pull over for more rocketfuel. Brian McAstronaut climbed into the womb-chamber and pushed the red button next to the emergency brake for the onboard Nixon recorded.  A Schimmelbusch mask was extruded from the placental lining, and Brian McAstronaut took it gratefully, wrapping himself in the thin, flexible umbilicus that trailed from it to the ship's life support system. "Mother," Brian McAstronaut said, breathing in the cryosleep space-gas.  This was a normal thing to say, and he didn't feel at all weird about it.  A nineteenth-century psychologist called Sigmund Freud had discovered that this was a perfectly healthy response that perfectly healthy men had to womb-chambers, and Brian McAstronaut didn't need space-therapy to deal with his space-issues. On the launchpad, a space-dockhand pounded on the hull yelling about the ship being parked outside the lines and tying up the pad, but he couldn't get in because it wasn't his ship, and Brian McAstronaut's ship only loved Brian McAstronaut and, maybe, a special resupply ship or two that also loved Brian McAstronaut and so the ship would be willing to share him every so often.

Also, if you slam on the brakes every few pages for five paragraphs of salivating descriptors that are just a SkyMall catalog of shit coke-addled futurists and thought-leaders were giving tedtalks about the month you wrote it, it's pointless and annoying and dumb and also it dates the shit out of your story.   Like, most science fiction is going to feel dated after a bit no matter what.  It's the nature of the beast.  Ideally, you want to avoid everyone in your target audience picking up the book a mere three years down the road and a) feeling like they opened a time capsule and b) being able to tell precisely when you wrote a scene just by searching Cory Doctorow or Warren Ellis's twitter feeds for the relevant buzzwords.   In conclusion, I know we're not all out here writing fucking Shakespeare, but these really aren't that hard to avoid!  At all!  Just... hire an editor who's not high on their own supply or something.

(crossposted to dreamwidth)

[welcometothepenumbra]

JUNO STEEL AND THE PROMISED LAND (PART ONE)

SOUND: RAIN. TRAIN ARRIVES, CREAKS TO A STOP. DOOR CLANKS OPEN.

CONDUCTOR: Ah, good evening, Traveler. And welcome… to The Penumbra. Take your seat, please, take your seat.

MUSIC: STARTS.

SOUND: DOOR CLANKS SHUT.

The junction lies just ahead, Traveler. If you’ll allow me just a moment.

SOUND: TRAIN WHISTLE.

(CHUCKLES) Well, next stop? Hyperion City.

SOUND: TRAIN MOVING.

A career of ending cases has made Detective Steel very aware of what a closing should feel like. And this case should be a closing. With the mayor cornered and the clues gathered, the mystery that has dogged Detective Steel for months should be in its final act. But the end of any story is only the beginning of another; and, for that matter, the prologue, epilogue, and table of contents for a dozen more, some of which run deeper and deadlier than Detective Steel is prepared for.

SOUND: TRAIN BRAKES. DOOR CLANKS OPEN, RAIN.

Our next stop: Juno Steel and the Promised Land.

ALL SOUNDS: FADE OUT.

***

MUSIC: STARTS.

JUNO (NARRATOR): It was two hundred years ago when the day came that Erin Marshall D’Arc decided the world just wasn’t worth saving anymore.

Can’t blame her, really. D’Arc had seen the worst humanity had to offer: a squabble on some other planet turned into a galaxy-spanning barroom brawl, the beginning of the war that would be humanity’s self-destructive story for the next two centuries. And, if you asked most people at the time, they’d probably tell you it was the beginning of the end, too.

Faced with that – the creeping panic that everything’s about to end, or worse, like we’ve all just proved that everything should end – D’Arc came to the only conclusion left: the world just wasn’t worth saving anymore. So, she decided to go make one that was worth saving.

You’re probably wondering how I know all that. But when you’re at my level, beating back ancient aliens and political assassinations, uncovering centuries-old conspiracies is just part of the job. Hell, maybe you’ve heard of me: my name is Juno Steel, I’m a private eye—

ALESSANDRA STRONG: Private eye, yeah, I get it. I am too. Not exactly impressed.

JUNO: Not impressed? I uncover a conspiracy two hundred years dead, and you’re not impressed?

STRONG: I never heard of it.

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

JUNO: Of course you’ve never heard of it. That’s called a “hook,” Alessandra; first you start off with something big and eye-catching to get people in the door, and then—

STRONG: Alright, fine, it was real pretty, Steel. You’re a poet and an inspiration or whatever. But you didn’t answer my question. How did you know I needed all that money?

JUNO: Oh, sure. So you want to talk about your apartment?

STRONG: My apartment– how did you know?

MUSIC: ENDS.

JUNO: Then we can get back to Erin Marshall D’Arc and the Free Dome later. Let’s talk about your apartment.

Bottom line: you need money because you want to buy your apartment, and you need it now because your landowner’s selling it out from under you at the end of the month. And I know that because you’re not alone: the fact of the matter is that people have been getting kicked out of their apartments in Hyperion City for months – maybe even as far back as the last time you and I worked together. The letter you got from the company that owns your place looks a lot like a letter a lot of people have been getting, from places named things like Babbling Brook Realty. A couple of cops I was working with the other day were both getting calls from Clearskies Real Estate; your bogeymen are from Crystal Falls Housing. And I’ll admit, that part Rita got for me.

STRONG: So this is all connected, somehow?

JUNO: I can’t get any specific paper trail, but real estate isn’t the only thing getting bought and sold in this city: so are real estate owners. Within the past year all those corps I just mentioned have all been bought by the same conglomerate.

STRONG: And you think Mayor Pereyra’s behind it.

JUNO: I do.

STRONG: Proof?

JUNO: Oh cool, you’ve got some? Maybe in that big backpack of yours? That’d be great.

STRONG: Steel—!

JUNO: I don’t have any, Alessandra. If I did, we wouldn’t be down here. I don’t know exactly how all this connects; I just know that it does. Because just over a month ago, Pilot’s piranha-faced right-hand crony was working for Babbling Brook Realty, trying to make their end of these evictions go off without a hitch. That connects Babbling Brook to Pilot. And just a few days ago she helped Pilot rob the Museum of Colonized History to get a map leading down here – which means all of this is connected. Somehow.

And also, the closer we’ve gotten to this little adventure in the subway, the faster the selling’s been happening. Oldtown’s getting hit the hardest, but so are the Boiler and Satan’s Diner. In poor neighborhoods, the evictions are spreading out in clusters. And now we’re after Pereyra, and where do they go?

STRONG: Underneath Oldtown.

JUNO: See? There’s definitely a connection in there, somewhere. We just gotta find out what it is.

STRONG: Okay. I think I’m following along. The mayor is trying to kick me out of my apartment. Why not? Everything else is going wrong. Why the hell not?

But that’s… I don’t know, normal mayor stuff? Barely a politician goes through Town Hall without trying some sort of con, and compared to the last few, real estate’s pretty tame, honestly. What the hell’s that got to do with the old subway system?

JUNO: Well, I was gonna tell you, but then you interrupted me.

STRONG: That story about… what’s-her-name from 200 years ago?

JUNO: What’s-her-name was what’s-her-named Erin Marshall D’Arc. And I told you, she was the first Free Domer.

STRONG: You keep saying that. Fr-free Domer… why does that sound familiar—

Oh, no. You’re kidding me. Steel!

JUNO: Could you do me a favor and just un-remember that for a second? I was really hoping I’d have time to make it sound convincing.

STRONG: The Free Dome?! Really? You dragged me down into the subway because you want to look for Martian Atlantis?

JUNO: No.

STRONG: Good, because—

JUNO: I dragged you down here because Pilot is looking for Martian Atlantis. Also, I always thought of it more like an El Dorado or a Floating City of Jupiter’s Eye kind of thing.

STRONG: Yeah, neither of which exist! I like knowing what I’m getting myself into, Juno, and you just told me I have to prep for a fairy tale! A lost city!

JUNO: Look, what do you care? If Pilot’s wrong, then hey, this is a short case after all. They take their Free Domer codex that I guess just exists for no reason, head to a dead end somewhere down here, we nab ‘em, and we’re done.

STRONG: That’s not the problem. I don’t care what Pilot thinks. I care what you think.

JUNO: I haven’t said anything about what I—

STRONG: No, but it’s all over your face.

(SIGHS) Listen, Juno, if I’m edgy it’s because that’s the only way I’ve figured out how to survive. Okay? You figure out what you’re getting into, and you prepare for it. And all these tall tales or whatever, they just distract you from seeing what you actually have to prep for.

JUNO: So you ignore the evidence all around you instead. Nice.

STRONG: What evidence? We haven’t seen anything except abandoned stations and busted-up old subway cars. There is nothing. Down. Here.

SOUND: ELECTRONIC BUZZES & BLIPS.

What the hell—?

VOICE 1 (FROM SPEAKER): There’s nothing– down here.

Please– turn back. There’s nothing for you here. Go away. Please, turn back. Turn back.

SOUND: BUZZING ENDS.

JUNO: (AFTER A PAUSE) So that’s basically confirmation, right?

STRONG: Fine. Tell your stupid story. But I’m not convinced yet.

JUNO: Ooookay. So. Erin Marshall D’Arc.

MUSIC: STARTS.

She was an engineer drafted into working on Solar military weaponry back in the start of the war. And back then that was bad news: it was a free-for-all, kill-where-the-tech-takes-you kind of thing, and working on the sort of weapons they had back then… tended to loosen people’s screws a little. A lot, actually.

And D’Arc was feeling it. All that pressure, all that panic. It just made her want to run away, find someplace where she wouldn’t have to kill anyone anymore, find someplace she could really be free. Just one problem: that place didn’t exist.

STRONG: So she built it. The Free Dome. Right, I get it.

JUNO: She didn’t just build it, Alessandra. Where the hell would she? Mars only has a couple cities and a few desert outposts ‘cause the radiation will bake you like a potato if you stay out there for more than a few hours, and Domes can’t be built just anywhere. So if you want a new city, you’ve got to figure out how to build a place to build it. You have to invent a better Dome.

STRONG: Which is impossible.

JUNO: D’Arc did it. She stole the tech from the military—

STRONG: Oh, give me a break.

JUNO: —escaped into the old subway system, and built the Free Dome! There was an investigation, Alessandra. It was in the papers two hundred years ago. They never found her!

STRONG: You were a cop, Steel. You’re telling me you’ve never been sent on a wild goose chase before?

JUNO: I mean, yeah, but—

STRONG: Okay, so someone named Erin Marshall D’Arc committed some crazy-unlikely crime and then ran away. Of course it turned into a whole urban legend thing: it’s exciting, and it sounds impossible, so why not throw in a few more impossible things for good measure?

But this is just a story, Juno. You can’t just make a new Dome anywhere. If you could, Mars wouldn’t be ninety percent desert. The conditions have got to be perfect, or something.

JUNO: Yeah, well, I bet whoever invented neon got told that a lot, too. “You can’t have light when it’s dark outside!” “Yeah, well look at this.”

STRONG: They figured out light before neon.

JUNO: What I’m saying is it’s not impossible, alright? If that tech really is down here and we stop Pilot from getting it? It would be huge! Losing your home would never be a problem again – there’d be so much open space you could live anywhere.

MUSIC: ENDS.

STRONG: Again: really nice story. Will be great if all that’s true. But I’ve got stuff to do that doesn’t include dying. So I’ll help you nab the mayor, which is all you’re paying me to do, but I’m not gonna go on some underground treasure-hunt without prepping ahead of time, just ‘cause you got attached to an adventure story.

JUNO: (PFFT) You-you-you have stuff to do? What the hell kind of stuff is more important to you than keeping people in their homes?

STRONG: I’m engaged, Juno.

JUNO: Oh.

Got engaged in… seven months, huh? That’s… fast.

STRONG: We were in the Solar Military together years ago. I thought she was dead, but… the paperwork finally went through and a bunch of PoWs just got released from the former Outer Rim. She was one of them, and she found me. Seems kind of rude to die after all that.

JUNO: Cool. Cool.

Is she… uh, nice?

STRONG: Not really.

JUNO: Oh.

STRONG: She’s smart, though. And tough. And ambitious. And funny. I like funny, as it turns out. I like pretty, too.

JUNO: That’s great.

Wow, that’s, uh… really great. So you got your happy ending, then.

STRONG: Except for the whole about-to-be-homeless thing, I feel pretty good about it, yeah. But. my point is it’s not an ending. More of a happy middle.

JUNO: “Happy middle.” (SNORTS)

STRONG: That wasn’t a joke.

JUNO: Yeah, it was. Nobody tells stories about happy middles. Well, not unless they’re about to end horribly, anyway.

STRONG: You know, this is exactly what’s wrong with the way you think, Juno.

JUNO: Just one thing?

STRONG: It’s always heroic sacrifices and blazes of glory with you. Taking that stupid pill, this case in the subway, your big “woe is me” speech when you and I—

JUNO: I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. The reason there aren’t any stories about happy lives that stay happy is because they’re boring.

STRONG: As stories, yes. But damn it, life isn’t just some story, okay? Death and suffering are not impressive. Dying’s easy: you’ve only got to do it once. You can never stop surviving. You’ve got to get up and do it all day, every day. That’s what’s hard.

JUNO: Hard doesn’t mean the same thing as worthwhile. Running on a treadmill’s hard, but at the end you still haven’t gotten anywhere.

STRONG: Just… let’s drop it, okay? I didn’t want to talk about this with you anyway. God, I forgot how depressing you are.

JUNO: At least we agree on something.

Hang on, stop, stop.

STRONG: What? Do you want to look for fantasy-land or not?

JUNO: The Theia’s been tracking Pilot and the Piranha’s footsteps, but here they just… end.

STRONG: So your cyber-eye is busted, too. Great.

JUNO: I don’t think so.

Last case I was on where footsteps just stopped like this, there was…

SOUND: CLICK. DOOR CREAKS OPEN.

Bingo. Still think it’s just a story?

STRONG: Yeah.

SOUND: INTERCOM BLIP. STATIC.

VOICE 2 (FROM SPEAKER): Testing, testing. This thing on?

JUNO: Who the hell is that?

VOICE 2 (FROM SPEAKER): Where are my goddamn headphones… Test! That’s better. (CLEARS THROAT) Listen, I probably only have a few seconds before her recording cuts in. The old lady might’ve had her head in the clouds, but she could write a hell of a security protocol. I can’t delete a second of her audio, and—

SOUND: BUZZ, JINGLE STARTS.

—oh GOD damn it, it’s about to start – okay, don’t listen a word she tells you, it’s all outdated—

SOUND: JINGLE ENDS.

VOICE 3 (FROM SPEAKER): Seekers of the Free Dome. Those of you who believe a better life can be made out there, away from the greed, the war, the disease. My new neighbors. Welcome.

VOICE 2 (FROM SPEAKER): Just ignore her! And go through the stupid tube, that’s all she’s gonna say at the end of this shpiel anyway. Marshall out.

SOUND: INTERCOM BLIP.

VOICE 3 (FROM SPEAKER): I am Erin Marshall D’Arc, and I am the founder of your new home: the Free Dome. Please. Come through the passage and join us. Everyone is welcome. Together, we can make a paradise on Mars. I know we can. We’ll be waiting for you, neighbors.

SOUND: STATIC ENDS.

JUNO: Alessandra?

STRONG: No thanks. I think you can go first.

JUNO: Don’t mind if I do.

SOUND: GRUNTS, RUSTLING.

STRONG: You see anything up there, Steel?

JUNO: About to find out.

SOUND: THEIA BEEP.

THEIA: Command received. Commencing full environment scan and database research.

Electromagnetic sequencing shows machinery within the walls. Recently active. Heat signatures appear to resemble those of password pads most commonly in use circa one hundred and seventy-two years ago. They have been. Deactivated.

JUNO: (QUIETLY) Wow, that was a hell of an update. Barely need to do any of the detecting on my own anymore.

STRONG: What was that? I can’t hear you.

THEIA: The tunnel will end in twenty feet. An entry button has been detected. Please be advised that the material appears to be. Of a different composition. Than the doors we’ve passed.

JUNO: Thank you, Theia.

THEIA: You are. Welcome.

STRONG: (QUIETLY) Now he’s having conversations with himself. You can’t have one normal case, can you, Strong? It’s always super-drug gang wars this and doomsday cults that—

JUNO: I’m hitting it. Get ready.

SOUND: CLICK. INTERCOM BLIP, STATIC.

VOICE 2 [MARSHALL] (FROM SPEAKER): So, look: my old lady probably just blew you some smoke about the Free Dome being for everyone, or whatever. She had a lot of big ideas like that. It’s why she never got nearly as much done as she said she was going to. But, lookit: I spent a whole childhood watching her mess our Free Dome up, and I’m not gonna let it happen again. I’m Marshall Erin D’Arc. Her kid. Boom! There’s a twist. You think you’re gonna get Good Cop and there’s Realist Cop, here to make you earn your keep.

But hey, you heard that? I’m not Bad Cop; I’m Realist Cop. Also: not a cop. This is a metaphor. But, I’m gonna drop the flowery language for a sec and get real with you, because that’s what Realist Cop does. Gets. Real.

‘Cause Ma? Might’ve had all that crap about everyone being her neighbor or whatever, but guess what? She’s dead. Marshall only takes the best, the brightest, the most loyal. So if you want in on paradise? You better be able to prove you can help make it paradise. I’ve got a full slate of tests lined up for you, and if you can pass ‘em, welcome to utopia. If not? Welcome to fertilizer. Alright, go ahead. Press the button. Come on in. What are you waiting for? Press it.

STRONG: (AFTER A PAUSE) Steel? He said press it.

JUNO: Hang on.

STRONG: Please tell me you’re having second thoughts. It’d imply some first thoughts that until right now, I wasn’t convinced existed.

JUNO: It’s just a hunch, but… the recording didn’t cut. Wait a second.

MARSHALL D’ARC (FROM SPEAKER): (AFTER A PAUSE) Ha ha! See? That’s test one. Test of Patience. You press that button, BOOM! Shrapnel. Pieces. But you listened to me, and you listened to my codex. Nice. Nice.

Now, is that true, that I was gonna kaboom ya? You don’t know. But you sure as hell aren’t about to test it, are ya? Call that test two, the Trust-Test. BAM, I’m knockin’ these out. Eat it, Erin! (PANTS)

She’s got another message for ya in the next room. Just ignore her, hit the button by the tracks, and wait for the pod. Might take a while ‘cause, y’know, she built it. Marshall out.

SOUND: INTERCOM BLIP, STATIC ENDS.

JUNO: Now do you believe—

STRONG: Just press the button and let’s go.

JUNO: If you say so.

SOUND: CLICK. GEARS WHIRRING, THEN CLUNK.

Oh… huh. That’s not great.

STRONG: What? What is it?

PIRANHA: For an abandoned subway this place makes a whole lot of noise, don’t it?

JUNO: That’s… worse.

PILOT PEREYRA: You might as well check on it. The pod isn’t here yet.

PIRANHA: Me? How come I—

PEREYRA: Do I look like the spooky noise-checking type? You begged to come along. Show a little gratitude.

STRONG: Damn it! Steel, get us out of here!

JUNO: (STRAINING) I’m trying, but the door… didn’t open all the way!

SOUND: METAL CREAKING.

PEREYRA: Besides, this is… I just want to check this out by myself for a minute. I’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time, buddy. You can respect that. …Bye now.

PIRANHA: Fine. (GROWLS)

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

STRONG: Can you close it, then?

JUNO: It’s a smooth piece of metal, Alessandra, what do you want me to grab it with, my teeth?

STRONG: Just stop whining and move aside!

SOUND: METAL CREAKS, GRUNTING.

PIRANHA: Whole damn place is falling apart…

STRONG: (GRUNTS)

PIRANHA: (GASPS) The hell was that?

STRONG: (WHISPERING) Move, Steel! Behind the support column, go!

SOUND: RUNNING FOOTSTEPS.

PIRANHA: Anybody out there?

SOUND: PANTING.

If you don’t come out quiet, I’m gonna make you and every one of your fingers I don’t bite off regret it, see?

SOUND: GUN COCKING. INTERCOM BLIP, STATIC.

MARSHALL (FROM SPEAKER): I’m Marshall Erin D’Arc. BOOM!

SOUND: REPEATED CLUNKS & MOTOR WHIRRING.

BOOM– BOOM– BOOM– BOOM– BOOM– BOOM– (CONTINUOUSLY LOOPS IN BACKGROUND)

PIRANHA: Oh, son of a…

Y’know, for keepers of some kinda ancient supertechnology the Free Domers couldn’t build a bunker worth a damn. Now this door’s broken, too.

PEREYRA: Well, fix it. It’s giving me a headache.

PIRANHA: Yes, your highness.

Ey, shaddup, you— (GRUNTS)

SOUND: BANG. RECORDING SKIPS.

I said shaddup! (GRUNTS)

SOUND: MORE BANGS. RECORDING SKIPS, THEN CUTS OUT. MOTOR DIES.

And unless you want some more’a that you’ll stay quiet. Creep.

PEREYRA: The man you’re threatening is about a hundred years dead, pal. You haven’t lost it on me, have you?

PIRANHA: (GROWLS) Could’ve sworn I heard something.

PEREYRA: Hearing things, huh? When we get back I’ll take you out to a nice padded cell I know. My treat. (CHUCKLES)

PIRANHA: (GROWLS)

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS DEPARTING.

(QUIETLY) Just you wait, Pereyra. This ain’t the only mouth my boot’s gonna close… Close yours so hard it falls off its hinges, see…

JUNO: That… was close.

(CLEARS THROAT) That was pretty slick, Strong. Glad I brought you with me.

STRONG: Yeah, well, you should be. Wanna see if we can get a closer look?

JUNO: Fine. You lead the way this time.

STRONG: I was planning on it.

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

JUNO (NARRATOR): The columns on the pillars said “Oldtown Station.”

I didn’t even know Oldtown had a station. The room we were in was all faded paint and old posters, advertising movies I’d never heard of with actors centuries dead wearing fashions I’d never seen before – a world long gone. This place was so old it must’ve already been ancient history when Erin D’Arc set the Free Domers up in here.

We climbed to a second floor landing to get an angle on Pilot and the Piranha, standing over by the tracks. Pilot was sizing up the place like they were thinkin’ about moving in. The Piranha was tapping her fingers on the desk, looking like she still had something in her serrated craw about all that noise.

PIRANHA: What the hell is taking so long? You sure that stupid pod is coming?

PEREYRA: Give it time. Wine improves with age. Engines, not so much.

Lot of space in this subway. I wonder why I never built anything down here. Some housing or something.

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

PIRANHA: People lose their marbles if they live under Martian ground too long. Radiation burns, brainswell…

PEREYRA: Probably cost more to tear all this down than you’d ever make on it anyway.

PIRANHA: Yeah, well, onto bigger and better things or whatever. (COUGHING) Where the hell is it? Damn dust’s got my asthma up.

SOUND: DISTANT HUM APPROACHING.

PEREYRA: Well, look at that. Saddle up, pal, because I think our ride is just about here.

SOUND: BUZZ, JINGLE PLAYS. STATIC.

VOICE 3 [ERIN D’ARC] (FROM SPEAKER): Thank you for waiting, new neighbors. In a galaxy gone so bitter, so violent, safety and peace are our highest priorities. We hope you understand.

PIRANHA: (SNORTS)

ERIN (FROM SPEAKER): Now, if all of you will please step up to the pod, it will bring you straight to your new home.

SOUND: STATIC ENDS.

PIRANHA: Damn it. Stupid door’s busted, just like everything else…

SOUND: STATIC.

ERIN (FROM SPEAKER): The journey to the Free Dome takes some time, and so for your safety, these doors will not open until all initiates within the station stand before the pod.

SOUND: STATIC ENDS.

STRONG: Steel… I’ve got a bad feeling about this…

JUNO: You and me both.

SOUND: STATIC.

ERIN (FROM SPEAKER): Currently – two – initiates stand before the door. Would the remaining – two – initiates please step forward?

SOUND: STATIC ENDS.

JUNO: Uh-oh.

PIRANHA: (GROWLS) You’re kidding me.

PEREYRA: Shhh! Let’s just… hang on. Why don’t we step into my office for a second?

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

PIRANHA: Into your what? Oof!

STRONG: I can’t make out what they’re saying. Steel?

JUNO: If I can’t see their lips, the Theia can’t help. Besides, I don’t think we need to hear ‘em to know what they’re talking about. Pilot’s thinking there are two more people in here. Only reason they’d have to keep their voices down.

STRONG: Damn, damn, damn.

Alright. We’ve got to pull the plug on this thing, Steel.

JUNO: What? Why?

STRONG: Because the price for going deeper, as it turns out, is giving up the only edge we have. So: no thanks.

JUNO: You’re scared of them? Alessandra, they’re harmless!

STRONG: Harmless? You told me she tried to kill someone by blowing up their cat!

JUNO: Yeah, well, do you see any cats right now?

STRONG: Knock it off. You do not go deeper behind enemy lines unless you have an actual plan – and you don’t. You don’t even know what’s in there!

JUNO: There’s a pod! She just said there was a pod!

STRONG: And then what?

I know you want to rush in and make this a big hero story or whatever, but guess what? Going out in a blaze of glory still means going out. And that’s not on the table with me.

Okay. I think this is the plan: we go down there together to scope out the situation. Then we each head around the monitor they’re hiding behind and cut off their exits, stun the two of them, take their weapons, and high-tail it out the front door with two sleepy crooks over our shoulders before this place finds another way to break.

JUNO: But… can’t we just… wait and see what happens? A little longer?

STRONG: You might be alright with gambling with your life, Steel, but I’m not. I’ve got someone who needs me. Now let’s move.

JUNO (NARRATOR): So we split up. And I felt bad for Alessandra, going off into the dark alone. At least I had backup.

THEIA: Scanning for footprints.

JUNO (NARRATOR): The Theia outlined every bootstep and heelstep our targets had taken, and for a second it was nonsense, just a big golden scribble. But even that could be taken care of.

SOUND: THEIA BEEP.

THEIA: Command received. Organizing footprints based on order of creation.

JUNO (NARRATOR): It was like looking at flashing signs, highlighting footprint after footprint, reliving old steps. They started in the dark corner we’d seen Pilot and the Piranha duck into, then slid out, separated, and the Piranha’s big bootprints went straight through an office doorway right beside me.

Miracles of modern technology: an eye that solves mysteries for you. She was in there, laying out a trap for us. But, with the Theia boosting my reaction time, Piranha-face didn’t stand a chance. I pressed myself up against the door, closed my hand on the knob, and called in the troops.

THEIA: Sight focused. Pulse accelerated. Fast-twitch muscle fibers boosted to maximum percent. Action recommended in three. Two. One.

JUNO (NARRATOR): I threw open the door. For just an instant, I saw the Piranha, and what followed should’ve been the flash of my gun.

Instead I got a flash of something… else.

SOUND: GLITCH. REPEATED BUZZES.

THEIA: Error – error – error—

VOICE 4 (WITH THEIA FILTER): Little MONSTERS!

THEIA: —error – error—

JUNO: AHH!

PIRANHA: (GRUNTS)

SOUND: PUNCH. THUD.

Thought I’d bump into you again sooner or later, P.I. Didn’t think you’d be even more of a pushover on round two, though.

JUNO: (PAINED GROANS)

PIRANHA: I’ll be taking that gun, see? And just so you don’t try anything funny…

SOUND: BLASTER SHOT.

JUNO: Ahh!

PIRANHA: A stun-blasted hand might not do any lasting damage but it sure hurts, don’t it? Give a nasty burn, leave a little scar…

…right around here.

JUNO: Ahhh!!

PIRANHA: Now get up. Next time I shoot you it won’t be on stun.

JUNO (NARRATOR): She pulled me up to my feet, and distantly I could feel my hand throbbing. But it was nothing compared to the feeling in my head. Like roots spreading backward from the Theia into my skull and down my spine. Until… suddenly I didn’t feel it at all.

SOUND: THEIA BEEP.

THEIA: The Theia Spectrum is now online.

JUNO (NARRATOR): And in an instant it was over. The pain was gone, and I was just a beat-up, washed-up hack being dragged out the door by a gangster with my own gun held to my head.

SOUND: RUSTLING, FOOTSTEPS.

PEREYRA: Back off!

STRONG: Stay still! Damn it, stay still!

PIRANHA: Don’tcha know anything about respect? The mayor tells you to back off, you better back off!

STRONG: Who the hell are you? Where’s—

Steel. You’re kidding me.

JUNO: What?

STRONG: I take my eyes off you for two seconds and you get caught?

PIRANHA: You’ll notice I already decided to let some’a the air through one’a Deadeye Dip’s hands here. And unless you want me to punch enough holes in him so you can feel a strong breeze coming from the other side, I’m gonna recommend you put the mayor down.

STRONG: (GROWLS)

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS.

PEREYRA: (COUGHS) Alright. About time. She’s armed, by the way. You might want to take care of that.

PIRANHA: Drop the gun and kick it over here, Big-Eyes.

STRONG: Steel, you and I are gonna have some words about this later…

SOUND: CLUNK. SLIDE.

PIRANHA: Take it, Mx. Mayor.

PEREYRA: Not that it was much danger in her hands. She has a gun and she still goes for the headlock. Hope reliving the glory days of high school wrestling was worth it, lady, ‘cause it’s about to kill you, and your friend here.

SOUND: GUN COCKING.

JUNO: What?

STRONG: That fast? Why would you bother taking our guns if you were just going to—

SOUND: BLASTER SHOT. GLASS SHATTERS.

PEREYRA: You stay quiet, or the next shot tears something more vital than your sleeve.

So, buddy? You brought them in. I’ll let you pick which one dies first.

JUNO (NARRATOR): The Piranha’s breath was warm and damp as a wound. I heard her run her long, long tongue over her teeth. And then, sounding a little disappointed in herself, she said:

PIRANHA: Y’know… I hate to admit it, but I’m not sure we kill either of ‘em yet.

PEREYRA: Well, aren’t you full of surprises today. Getting soft?

PIRANHA: Well, it’s like you were sayin’, see? It’s all about that personal benefit. And so long as these two were so hard to come by, well… whaddaya say we make use of ‘em?

PEREYRA: Yeah, yeah, keep going.

PIRANHA: That recording, D’Arc’s kid – he said something about some tests. Might be dangerous. And even if they ain’t, this place is crumbling all around us, Pilot.

PEREYRA: The door worked fine. Better than fine, in fact. It found two snakes-in-the-grass that even we didn’t.

PIRANHA: But that tunnel was busted and you know it.

No matter how fancy D’Arc’s tech turns out to be, getting to it’s already been harder than the codex made it seem, and I’m guessin’ it only gets hairier from here. But what if – follow me on this – what if we didn’t have to risk a single hair on your pretty head with that danger? After all… we got two right here to disarm the traps for us. Two ways to clear a minefield, after all – either give an expert two years and a hell of a lot of overtime, or you schedule a relay race on top of it and bring an umbrella.

PEREYRA: (LAUGHS) Forget the gang, buddy: keep having ideas like this and I’ll find a spot for you in my cabinet. (CHUCKLES) Good thinking. Very good thinking. Now, come on. Let’s get them into the pod.

SOUND: PNEUMATIC HISS.

JUNO (NARRATOR): Under her breath, quiet enough that Pilot couldn’t hear it, quiet enough that even she might not have been able to hear it, the Piranha muttered:

PIRANHA: (QUIETLY) I’ll show you some good thinkin’, pal… gimme a few days and we’ll see how much you like it.

JUNO (NARRATOR): Was that for me? Just for her? Was it the underground stir-crazy in all of us? I didn’t know.

God, this was supposed to be an ending, but everywhere I turned I felt like there were four more things staring me down that I didn’t understand. And just the weight of that, knowing that there were more problems than I could fit in my head… it made me exhausted before we’d even begun. Hopeless. If I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on, what chance did we have?

STRONG: Steel.

JUNO (NARRATOR): I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at Alessandra Strong, who had every good reason in the world to live and who I’d probably just killed, again.

STRONG: Steel. Look at me.

JUNO (NARRATOR): So I looked.

And… she didn’t look angry. Not with me, anyway. She just looked tired. …But ready for a fight.

STRONG: I need you to remember what I told you earlier. Dying is—

PIRANHA: Shut up and get in the pod.

JUNO (NARRATOR): According to Alessandra Strong, surviving is what’s hard, because you never get to take a break from it.

You never get to stop. No matter how tired you are, how confused. You’ve just got to keep living… and you’ve got to have faith that, eventually, you’ll be glad you did.

I knew that was true. But, knowing you’ll want to live and feeling it… those are two different things.

MUSIC: STARTS.

Dying is easy. And sometimes, when things get bad, when nothing around you makes any sense, death seems like the only option that does.

STRONG: Steel.

PIRANHA: I said knock it off!

JUNO (NARRATOR): And when it gets that bad you just have to look at the people who rely on you, who think you’re worth… somethin’, and you have to believe they can’t all be wrong. It sounds crazy, but people believe in all kinds of crazy things. Promises and politicians. Love and… lives worth living.

SOUND: INTERCOM BLIP. STATIC.

MARSHALL (FROM SPEAKER): So. You��re on your way. (PFFT) Don’t think I’ll go easy on ya just ‘cause you got this far.

ERIN (FROM SPEAKER): The Free Dome is just ahead, neighbors. We are so excited to welcome you home.

SOUND: STATIC ENDS.

JUNO (NARRATOR): So… no matter how confusing this was getting, I had to think it would all make sense eventually. Because otherwise, being trapped down here with the mayor and their mobster, hearing generations of sermons and shouting and whatever the hell that was—

SOUND: ELECTRONIC BUZZES & BLIPS.

VOICE 1 (FROM SPEAKER): I’m telling you, go home. I only have a few seconds, right now, please—

SOUND: BUZZING ENDS.

JUNO (NARRATOR): —you could lose your mind that way.

So, instead: believe. Believe in the Free Dome. In Alessandra Strong, believe in whoever the hell and whatever the hell, just do it, and then, against your better judgment: survive.

Even if it feels like the last thing you wanna do.

MUSIC: ENDS.

***

SOUND: TRAIN MOVING, MUSIC.

CONDUCTOR: If you’ve enjoyed this tale, please consider donating to The Penumbra on Patreon. Our artists work tirelessly to bring you these stories, and if you have the means, we hope you will support our efforts. Every dollar helps. You can find that page at patreon.com/thepenumbrapodcast. If you support us on Patreon at the $10 level or higher, you’ll receive access to commentary tracks like this one, from actors Joshua Ilon, Kat Buckingham and Simon Moody, and co-creator Sophie Kaner:

SOUND: TRAIN STOPS, DOOR SLIDES OPEN, RAIN.

KAT: …it makes sense for her, though. Because, like, she’s very much of, like– full survival and also like, logic, so like she’s like, “Oh. Oh I found this person that I really like. Oh I love this person. Cool. Great. Alright. Let’s keep doing that.”

SOUND: LAUGHTER.

SOPHIE: It’s so romantic!

KAT: It’s– it’s very romantic.

SOPHIE: Like it is, though.

KAT: Yeah, yeah yeah. And then she’s like, “Okay cool. So how many times do I have to… carry you over the threshold, bef– like over my shoulders, before we’re married?”

SOPHIE & JOSHUA: Aw!

KAT: Like, that’s kind of how I pictured it, of like…

SOUND: DOOR SLIDES SHUT.

CONDUCTOR: You can also support The Penumbra by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter @thepenumbrapod, following us on Tumblr @thepenumbrapodcast, telling your friends about us, telling your friends to tell their friends about us, and especially by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. Every rating, comment, and kind word spreads our stories further and inspires us to keep creating more and better tales to come.

We would like to give special thanks to all who support us on Patreon, but especially to Vron, Charlie Spiegel, Minchowski, Jaimie Gunter, and the Princess and the Scrivener for their incredibly generous contributions per episode. Thank you.

This tale, Juno Steel and the Promised Land, was told by the following people: Joshua Ilon as Juno Steel, Kat Buckingham as Alessandra Strong, Simon Moody as Mayor Pilot Pereyra, and Sophie Kaner as the Piranha.

This tale also featured: Lauren Shippen of The Bright Sessions as Erin Marshall D’Arc, Zach Valenti of Wolf 359 as Marshall Erin D’Arc, and Rich Wentworth of Hadron Gospel Hour as the mysterious voice in the walls.

On staff at The Penumbra: Kevin Vibert is our lead writer and recording engineer. Sophie Kaner is our director and sound designer. Grahame Turner is our script editor. Noah Simes is our production manager. Alice Chung is our designer and financial manager. Kat Buckingham is our publicity director. Original music by Ryan Vibert. Promotional art by Mikaela Buckley.

The Penumbra is created and produced by Sophie Kaner and Kevin Vibert.

I’m afraid this is the end of the line for today, dear Traveler. We hope you will ride with The Penumbra again soon.

ALL SOUNDS: FADE OUT.

[maple-writes]

Novel Prep Tag

Tagged by  @oleander-fricke and @corishadowfang Thanks!!! This’ll hopefully be really useful as I’m still trying to figure out a whole new wip here

So bear with me lol.

Rules: Answer the questions and then tag as many writers as there are questions answered (or as many as you can) to spread the positivity! Even if these questions are not explicitly brought up in the novel, they are still good to keep in mind when writing.

FIRST LOOK

1. Describe your novel in 1-2 sentences (elevator pitch)

Richard, Volt and Skyler, the three person crew of courier ship the Lord of Chaos (working name for now lol) all have someone trying to track them down. As easy as it would be to live their new lives, none of them can run forever.

2. How long do you plan for your novel to be? (Is it a novella, single book, book series, etc.)

Just one book. I wish I had the patience for multiple books but… I do not.

3. What is your novel’s aesthetic?

It’s a little rough in this department, but something along the lines of romanticized space travel, far future society spread across multiple planets, daring heros and cunning villians. Tbh think like… Spatoon 2 Octo Expansion... but in Space.

4. What other stories inspire your novel? 

I am currently seeking some inspiration right now lol. But so far I don’t think there have been any specific stories that really inspired this one as much as just like… General ideas that come up in a lot of different stories like the vague notions of space stuff, fugitives, over-the-top skills/abilities, … I hope to find some outside inspiration soon though.

5. Share 3+ images that give a feel for your novel

*photo credit bottom: Xavier Portela

MAIN CHARACTER

6. Who is your protagonist?

Technically I have three planned for this one, but I’ll focus on Richard for now.

7. Who is their closest ally? 

Hands down, Volt Powell. He trusts her completely .

8. Who is their enemy?

He wouldn’t really call the Organization (name in the making still lol) an enemy, but he wants nothing to do with him and fears being captured and dragged back since he more or less ran away (and is VERY valuable to them both financially and practically).

9. What do they want more than anything?

To exist as freely as other people without having to hide away out of sight. He doesn’t want people to think he’s dangerous and he just kind of wants to live his life.

10. Why can’t they have it?

The organization that made him is trying to track him down, and he can’t usually leave the ship in populated areas without running the risk of someone reporting him (he’s not exactly human-looking as he was more or less created through a combination of genetics and engineering by what can kind of be considered space mafia/illuminati stuff?? More on that eventually when I have it figured out).

11. What do they wrongly believe about themselves?

That he’s only valuable/most valued for what he can do, not who he is.

12. Draw your protagonist! (Or share a description)

He’s fairly tall, with black hair that is so dark it doesn’t reflect any light. One eye is similar to that of a cats, with a yellow-orange iris and slit pupil that can dilate wider for better night vision while the other looks less biological, and was made to see light in the infrared spectrum (though has broken by the time the story takes place). He has sharp teeth, fingertips that can convert to claws, and antenna-like things by his ears that allow him to kind of... tune his hearing or something. His skin is fairly pale, with a kind of cool-toned complexion like he’d been outside in the cold for too long. 

PLOT POINTS

13. What is the internal conflict?

Since he’s kind of like a cyborg with biological and non-biological parts making up his body, he needs semi-regular maintenance, but its been years since he’s last been with the organization and the lack of upkeep is starting to show. He doesn’t want to worry Volt, and especially doesn’t want to worry Skyler, so he tries to keep it to himself, but there’s no question that his body is wearing out and will only get worse without treatment only the organization can give. But at the same time, if the organization were to operate on him, he knows they would replace a part that had been accidentally removed years ago which alters neurotransmitter function that made him easier for them to control and blocked most emotions except anger. So he doesn’t want that.

14. What is the external conflict?

That parts a little fuzzy right now, but it will involve the organization gaining on  their tail, the tyrannical prime minister’s daughter (skyler’s half sister) and a tangled web ready to unravel.

15. What is the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist?  

The Organization captures him back and turns him back into a tool for extermination.

16. What secret will be revealed that changes the course of the story?  

It’s all up in the air right now, so I’ve got nothing for sure yet. But I’m thinking that there may be one person who ends up being connected to more than meets the eye.

17. Do you know how it ends?  

No lol.

BITS AND BOBS

18. What is the theme?  

Different kinds of love (ie, family, friends, parental, siblings etc…) and ties between individuals.

19. What is a recurring symbol?  

I don’t know if I’ve gotten far enough to have that kind of detail known yet.

20. Where is the story set? (Share a description!) 

A solar system… somewhere… maybe our solar system… maybe not? Depends on if I want to make up planets or not.

21. Do you have any images or scenes in your mind already?  

Yeah some of them, though I can’t be sure how many will actually make it into the story when I start writing. None of them are in any way connected to each other either.

22. What excited you about this story?  

I’ve wanted to do a sci-fi thing for a while (my last two wips were both fantasy based) so it’ll be fun to explore the genera. This story also uses characters that I made when I was still a kid (like, elementary school and early high school) and I’m excited to see how I write them- Rick, Volt and Skyler- now compared to when I first made them. This also gives me an excuse to write about things like genetics and other science things that I find interesting.

23. Tell us about your usual writing method!  

Well, it’s kind of lengthy but it works. First I get the idea, then flesh out the characters and sort of form a vague story around them. Next I make a point form, chapter by chapter outline of what I  think I want to happen. Then I pick a nice notebook and handwrite the first draft from the outline. After that, I review what I wrote, make a few notes and rewrite it on the computer. After all that than I revise, and finally, I edit.

Thanks again, and hopefully I’ll know more about  this unnamed wip eventually!

tagging: @esoteric-eclectic-eccentric, @iwritetypos, @pens-swords-stuff, @lilmissravingwriter, @writingbusinessizzy, @writerproject, @urbanteeth, @iamidentical and @thelysstener have fun. 

[slashtakemylife]

Avatar/LOK world merged with VLD

What if the world of Avatar reached Voltron’s time period? I’ll explain some similarities between spiritual power (Avatar) and Quintessence (VLD) so this is basically some headcanon on an AU were Voltron is set within the world of Avatar, I’m just having fun with the idea, idk if it was done before but if there are fics send them my way

So in Avatar world, the driving force of power is spiritual power, which we see in the avatar state, this energy allows the avatar to have immense power and call out the wisdom and abilities of past avatars, also, people that achieve strong spiritual energy can do things like fly in Zaheer’s case or use astral projection, like Jinora

This is also what allows people to bend the elements and is with his spiritual power that Aang is able to take away bending and also for Korra to restore it, this is later on known as energy bending

So let’s go to VLD now, here the power comes from quintessence, it is also present in every life form and it’s used as pretty much fuel, we see Allura, an Altean, absorb and give energy, which is what she does in the Balmera along with the rest of the Balmeran’s, also we see this sort of energy with the Olkari and Pidge, a human, is also able to connect with nature just by though and power alone

So I think you know were this is going, WHAT IF? In Earth (Avatar world earth) what they call spiritual power is actually quintessence but it’s use is more like you could say personal, people use their own spiritual energy (quintessence) to allow them to bend elements, also the spirit world could be like a more friendly rift were it flows everywhere and spirits are mostly made of quintessence rather than be bound by a physical body, you could say, but quintessence in VLD is like a fuel or energy source, were here my friend is were we get to Korra S4, in here, they manage to mechanically take the spiritual energy from the spirit vines and create it into usable energy specifically for a weapon (this season was WILD btw, luckily Korra ended but I think this bad habits went to VLD and we all know what happened)

See something similar?

So yeah I know there’s a logical explanation on how this are different and I KNOW they are and that there’s also many pot holes on how this theory cold work but hey, the idea is fun so let me go with it in this next AU fusion of Avatar world with VLD

So Korra’s world build, specifically Republic City, is an industrialized 1920s feel to it, or a late XIX early XX century (wiki facts but you know what I mean)

So if we continue this on, if the Avatar world reaches not only our time period, but surpass it into were VLD is supposed to be timewise, imagine...

Republic Citiy’s Galaxy Garrison

Yes, so we could have bender Paladins, so here I go with it, Pidge (air), Hunk (earth/maybe lava later?) Keith (fire) Lance (water) Shiro (earth/metal)

So think about it, think of the Shiro clone saga, great kudos to Shiro for being the champion, but what if it were because of his bending? Now remember in space quintessence is an energy source, so none has probably seen someone bend metal, maybe Shiro only uses it in desperate situations but still, Haggar could take an interest on it because not only does she want to investigate why Shiro does what he does, but the possibilities!

One Shiro can easily destroy a cruiser with his mind, so she wants to do an army of Shiros BUT! She so far hasn’t made a clone that can actually bend, maybe she let’s lose a clone and the only way he can escape is using his metal bending abilites, which is why the fact that Kuron managed to escape is an indicator that Haggar has succeded in making the perfect Shiro copy

So now onto another HC on this AU, what if one of the kids that f*cked off to space, was the Avatar!?

At this peace time period, maybe the Avatar is not so needed so they go back to how it was done before Aang, at his/her 16 birthday it is revealed he/she is the Avatar and then taken to learn the elements, Aang was told early because of the situation while Korra came into this world bending 3 but maybe later on in a modern more peaceful society it’s not so needed so they go back to the previous ways

So I’m having fun with this and I actually like the idea of... Avatar Lance!

So yeah, Lance also came bending away like Korra but it was decided he could grow up normal and then get Avatar training, so the moment Lance graduates from the Galaxy Garrison he will be taken into Avatar training, making it something Lance dreads because he is insecure if he can be a good Avatar, but then a giant cat takes him to space, what are the chances?! Like Lance is low key grateful he doesn't have to deal with Avatar duties but wth a 10,000 year old war? I want to just go back home and do the avatar training

Imagine past avatars going like Well, I’ve definitely seen it all (Because THAT part in LOK S2 never happened)

Kill him! “No one asked you Kyoshi!” “Were you just talking to Avatar Kyoshi? What she said?!” “She says hi!” Murdeeeeer

What the flameo is that? “I know Aang, I know”

Imagine the paladins in space going like, "You're the avatar!?"

Imagine Lance learning leadership and diplomacy in space, the paladins teaching him the use of elements in spare time, also it would be fun to think this is why Lance hears Shiro’s voice, because he has a higher spiritual energy or connection to it than the team, thus been able to connect with Shiro, if Lance were to use meditation to get into the astral plane and meet Shiro before anyone else so you can actually follow that plot line instead of letting it blow in the wind until it’s not even needed anymore (yes I’m looking at you VLD)

Also, Avatar state Voltron? Kick ass! (They may not even need the Balmera’s for the Alta/Voltron fussion, f*ck it we do it ourselves

Lance saving Allura thanks to his sheer power? Like thanks Allura but I have the spirit of peace and light inside of me so kindly get back to your lion because these is no way I’m letting you go in there and not come back, or at least let’s do it together, Raava and the White Lion, together saving multiverses and keeping people alive, I’m all up for that

(I mean Bob is also like a space god/spirit or smth idk)

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine how aliens always get to do cool stuff while we humans are just blobs of concious flesh, so Imagine aliens being bewildered at the paladins bending abilities, aliens going like, lol, these guys haven't even managed to go outside their solar system and then get a ball of fire/earth/water/air thrown to their face

Sendak coming to earth like lol these guys have so weak technology and getting like a massive ball of fire onto his cruisers or just sharp ice projectiles like "we can take you aliens head on without any ships!"

Imagine them coming back to earth and someone mean going to Lance like "This is when we needed you! And you f*cked up to space while we here had to deal with aliens!"

But still, bender paladins would be like overpowered, like, since a comet/sun or the moon can increase power, imagine Keith in Red right beside a flaming sun, imagine Keith and Hunk using their bending along with the energy power of their lions and together just throwing a flaming comet or smth at Zarkon's fleet

Imagine the lions are down and the paladins go like f*ck I’m bending the sh*t out of this, or y’know, focusing their energy and powering them like they’ve done before in VLD canon, I mean I’m telling you, spiritual power could be quintessence

Idk is a fun concept, a bit problematic with the plot holes and overpowered paladins, but idk, it's fun to IMAGINE

[joongie-smiles]

A Place to Call Home

Hello, wonderful readers! So this is something a little different from my usual one-shots, This is just some stuff about Keith. I had started thinking about the relationship between Shiro Keith and Adam and thought it would be something like this. By the way, I didn’t know if Adam had a last name (canon or otherwise) only that his initial was W, so i just picked a random Arabic last name because. If any of my Arab readers (hope I don’t offend with an umbrella term) have any suggestions for Adam’s last name, please let me know!

When he was a kid, Keith was never really into superheroes. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them--he thought most of them were interesting, like Captain America and Iron Man--but he never felt the need to buy everything with their faces plastered on it or fawn over the latest comic book issue. He never had unbridled adoration for these fictional superheroes. Instead, all his awe went to the real life superhero in his life--his dad.

For as long as 7 year old Keith could remember, his father had always been a superhero. He didn’t have cool super powers like Spiderman, but he saved people every day. He was strong, courageous, brave, and the best dad a kid could ever ask for. His dad had been a firefighter long before Keith was born, and he would tell him all the stories of his adventures. His dad worked pretty much all day, but he always made an effort to spend time with him. When his dad finally deemed him old enough, Keith would tag along and stay at the fire department. He spent most of the day coloring in the coloring books the rest of the crew gave him or simply running around the station. He would often steal his dad’s helmet and done it proudly as he stood on the table and proudly told the firefighters around him that one day he would be a firefighter and save people just like his dad. His bold statement would be accompanied with a round of cheers and jubilant laughter. Most of his days were spent like that: with laughter and joy and the simple delight of being with his dad.

His dad was a real life superhero, and while it was glorious at times, it was also devastating. Even as a kid, Keith understood that those nights when his dad came back all patched up and looking beat, that meant it had been a bad day. He understood that when he limped around their small apartment and winced, it was from more than just the physical pain. He understood that when his dad hugged him tightly and told him that he loved Keith in that wobbly, tearful tone, it meant that they had lost someone in the fire. He understood that October 30 was a day of mourning for the Koganes, and he knew that when his dad started tossing and turning at night calling out for ‘Krolia’, he should just lie at his side and hold him close. He understood that when he opened the door that dreadful night to a policeman with a pained expression that something bad had happened. And he understood by just looking at the firemen around the police officer and hearing their soft, pained “we’re so sorry, Keith” that his dad wasn’t coming home.

After that, Keith stopped believing in superheroes all together. He had no time to fantasize about heroes and adventures, he had to focus on where he was going to stay. He had no relatives willing to take him in, and no matter how hard the crew fought to keep him, the lawyer assigned to Keith thought it would be best from him to go into the system and find a stable family instead of getting raised by a “village” as she’d put it. He fought the decision, and even threatened to run away, but in the end, he boarded the first train out of Houston and to some orphanage in Oklahoma. The first couple of months he tried to behave and fit in, he really did, but no one else seemed to be making the same effort. The older kids were forever mad at the world, and the younger ones were focused on taking care of themselves more than others. After all, there was no point in making connections when all you wanted to do was get out of there.

Keith soon discovered how mean children could be. Whether they pointed out his “weird looking” eyes or rudely imitated him when he spoke Korean, they always seemed to find something odd to point out about Keith. The incessant teasing soon turned into rough shoves and harsh glares. After the first month or so of such treatment, Keith was fed up with it all. In the cloak of night, he ran away from the orphanage and bought a ticket back to Texas with some money he had stolen from the orphanage’s owner. Honestly, Keith had no idea what he was doing, all he knew was that he had to get out of that place. He knew he didn’t have family in Texas anymore, but the orphanage wasn’t any better. He was a smart kid, he could figure out what to do once he got there. Looking back, Keith realized that what he did was dumb, and he was glad that a pair of policemen found him and stopped him from boarding the train to Texas. The lawyer assigned to Keith’s case agreed to transfer him to another orphanage, but only if he didn’t run away again. Keith agreed, and in no time, he moved up to Oklahoma City. This time, he lasted almost 5 months before he became restless and itched to leave. A family had been interested in adopting him, but Keith refused. He wasn’t ready to be a part of a new family, and he felt like accepting their offer was like he was replacing his father, and he would never, ever do that. He ended up running away again, and as a result, he was transferred to a new orphanage. The same thing happened again and again; he would go to an orphanage, get in fights, run away, then be sent to a new one and the cycle would repeat. He hoped from orphanage to orphanage, from family to family, never quite finding a place where he belonged. For years, it seemed that he just didn’t belong anywhere. It wasn’t until his 12th birthday that he had a little hope for happiness.

At the orphanage he was staying at for the time being, they allowed you to pick a place to spend your birthday as long as it was within their ability to take you there. Most kids wanted to go to the movie theater or a skating rink, but Keith wasn’t really interested in anything in , particular. Earlier that day, he’d seen a poster advertising the opening of the galaxy branch at their local museum, so when he was asked where he wanted to go, he chose to go to the museum on a whim. Though their caretaker was surprised by his answer. She agreed and took Keith and the rest of the kids to the museum. Once there, they were allowed to run wild. Most of them paired up and went to look at the dinosaur exhibits, but Keith decided to stay on his own and go to the new galaxy exhibit.

To put it in simple words, it was breathtaking. The room was dark, and there was a pattern of stars painted on every wall. Constellations littered the ceiling, peeking out behind the large planets that hung from the wall. The sun hung right above the entrance and glowed faintly with yellow light which pulsed every now and then to imitate a dancing sunspot. From there, the inner planets followed. Mercury was a mild grey one minute, but it jumped to life with swirls of gold and blue that ran across the surface of the planet, swift as the Roman god it had been named after. Venus hung large and proud, glowing with the light of a thousand fires, its beauty unmatched by the others. Beside it hund Earth. It was about the same size, but the contrast of colors--one dark red, the other blue and green--made it stand out beside the vain planet. The white clouds moved lazily across the face of the blue and green planet, and they twisted to and fro like a group of gymnasts tracing the path of the winds. The last inner planet, Mars, was a furious red that reminded Keith of a time long ago and stories of heroic firefighters saving the day. His lips quirked up slightly at the thought.

Following the inner planets, a ring of meteorites hung across the exhibit. The shape of the space rocks varied from pebble sized to boulder sized. They were lined up neatly and meticulously and stood firmly in place, like a line of soldiers holding back enemy intruders. Behind the army of asteroids was the outer planets. The outer planets were much larger than the inner planets, and their moons surrounded them. Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, hung low enough that when Keith stood right under it, he could vaguely see all the wires and lights hid behind the thin, sand colored cloth. It looked calm and peaceful for the most part, but in intervals of 10 minutes, a raging storm blew across the surface of the grand planet, bringing with it the rage and power associated with the Roman god of lightning. Where Jupiter was large and intimidating, Saturn was all elegance and grace. The yellow planet’s large rings shined delicately as if they had been constructed with ice from space itself. Though the circumference was impressive, the rings were barely thicker than a stack of papers. Next, to Saturn hung Uranus, the planet with the infamous funny name. For all the giggles it caused, the planet itself was beautiful. Its surface was painted with a dusty baby blue shone softly and paler than the elegant Saturn before it and the glorious Neptune after it. Neptune was a shade of blue Keith had never seen. It was bold and attracted the attention of anyone who walked by it. It proudly hung at the end of the solar system, and its radiance seemed to rival the sun’s. After Neptune, where Pluto should have been, was an entrance to a smaller room inside the exhibit. The sign above the entrance proudly deemed it “A Journey Through Space” and encouraged him to take a pair of 3D glasses. He did just what the sign suggested and walked in to experience space. Like the rest of the exhibit, the room was dimly lit, and stars littered the walls and ceiling. But here, meteors drifted by, and shooting stars zipped through space. Everything was much closer and the occasional space fact popped up on one of the walls. He didn’t mind the interruption, in fact, he thought the fascinating facts added to the experience. Unfortunately, the trip through space ended, but he had been rewarded with a thin book about space and a pin that identified him as a space cadet.

Eventually, his birthday and the trip to the museum came to an end, but Keith wasn’t sad. On the contrary, he was happier than he’d ever been in years. He no would no longer have to deal with the constant search for a place to call home, he now knew where he belonged. He belonged in space. He decided that he’d work hard and do everything that he could to go to space and become a real life space cadet. It didn’t matter if he didn’t feel at home in any of these orphanages or cities, they were just stepping stones for his goal, his future. Keith looked at the back of the pin and smiled down at the name inscribed in it. Galaxy Garrison. That’s where his home would be. There, at the Galaxy Garrison, he would find his place.

Keith worked hard to get into the Garrison. He took every advanced class offered at his high school, worked on his anger issues, and had read every book on space and piloting that he could find. When application season came, he busted his butt on them and spent weeks perfecting his essays and recommendations. After his application was submitted, he would rush to the mailbox every morning and searched through the mail for the familiar grey and orange G. It wasn’t until early spring that he received his reply. When Keith spotted the Garrison’s insignia, he grabbed the letter and ran to his room. He paced restlessly back and forth, holding the letter tightly to his chest. He was afraid of opening it. What if they were rejecting him? What if he hadn’t won any of their scholarships? What if--

He stopped and stared at the picture on his bedside of him and his dad. That picture and the dark-hilted knife his father always had were the only things he had left from his dad. He tried to rarely think about his dad so as to not get sad, but on this rare occasion, he did. He sat down on his bed and looked at the picture. His dad was beaming back at him, and his words whispered softly in his mind. You can do anything as long as you believe in yourself. With a shaky sigh, Keith carefully opened the letter and read the printer words: Keith Kogane, we are happy to inform you that you have been accepted to the Galaxy Garrison and are the fortunate recipient of a full-ride scholarship. Congratulations.

That was the first time since his dad died that he’d cried from joy.

When he met Takashi Shirogane, he was convinced that he’d met a superhero for the second time in his life. Junior Officer Takashi Shirogane wasn’t a teacher at the Garrison, he was an exploration pilot, but he would often poke his head in during pilot training. He was well known around the Garrison for being the best pilot of his time. Everyone looked up to him, and Keith was no exception. He was determined to be just as good of a pilot, if not better, than the famous exploration pilot. And if his simulation scores were anything to go off of, he was well on his way to being the best pilot of his generation. Keith knew that he was an amazing pilot, but he tried not to let it get to his head. He still stayed up late to study for exams and spent hours doing his homework just like everyone else. Whenever the flight simulator was open for practice, Keith would spend hours practicing and perfecting his technique. He continued to stay at the top of his class and people started to notice.

“Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it--” A knock on the door interrupted Mr. Wahim’s lecture. He turned to look through the little window in the door and scowled when he saw who it was. “Oh for goodness sakes,” he mumbled. “Class, read pages 100 to 120 from your book tomorrow and take clear notes. Make sure you understand the lesson because we will be taking a quiz on it.” He ignored the groans that followed and walked over to the door. He opened it just enough to poke his head through to talk with the person on the other side. Unlike his classmates, Keith ignored his teacher’s conversation and focused on reading the lesson assigned to them. The theory of the black hole was one of the most difficult things to study let alone understand, so he was determined not to waste any precious work time Mr. Wahim gave him. He was about to start the theory of general relativity when the curious hushed whispers became excited exclamations. Keith looked up to see what his classmates were so excited about and almost let out a cry of surprise of his own when he saw who was standing beside Mr. Wahim.

Takashi Shirogane smiled back at the classroom full of awe-struck teenagers. “I’m sorry to interrupt the class, but I just came by to talk with Mr. Wahim.”

“Even though Mr. Shirogane knows perfectly well that I have a class in session,” Mr. Wahim reprimanded him, but there was no real harshness behind his words.

Mr. Shirogane’s smile turned sheepish. Mr. Wahim relented and waved at his awe-struck students. “The bell rings in 30 seconds, go ahead and pack up your things. Don’t forget the assignment.” The class rushed to collect their things and went back to whispering excitedly.

“What do you think they have to talk about?”

“I don’t know but there probably won’t be talking at all. Didn’t you hear that they’re dating?”

“Wow, if Mr. Wahim let the class out 30 seconds before the bell for him then they must be.”

Keith ignored the gossip and collected his things. Next he had lunch, so he’d head to the library and get some homework done. Maybe if he finished early he might be able to get a couple practice hours in.

“Keith, can you stay back for a minute?” Mr. Wahim called out to him.

There was a low chorus of “ooh”s, and Keith rolled his eyes at his classmates immature response. He stepped away from the door and made his way to Mr. Wahim’s desk. Once the rest of his classmates had filed out the door, it was Mr. Shirogane who spoke first, much to Keith’s surprise. “So you’re the one who is trying to beat my record.”

Keith blinked, dumbfounded. “What?”

From beside him, Mr. Wahim scoffed. “I told you not to start like that. You’ll intimidate the poor kid.”

Mr. Shirogane rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. “Right, I forgot.” He cleared his throat and stuck his hand out for Keith to shake. “Sorry, let me start over. Hi, I’m Takashi Shirogane. I’m a pilot for the Garrison, and I think you have some pretty impressive skills.”

“What?” Keith repeated. Apparently when faced with his idol all he could say was that cursed one letter word. It was embarrassing.

Mr. Shirogane seemed to find his response endearing. “You’re doing really well in your classes and you’re way ahead of you classmates. You are an impressive cadet, and I just wanted to let you know that if you ever want a training buddy or maybe some flying tips, I’m here.”

Finally, Keith could get enough control to respond. “Wait, isn’t that favoritism.”

“Well, yes, but if we say that you asked for the help and I’m simply mentoring you, then there shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, every teacher has a favorite,” Mr. Shirogane admitted.

“That is true,” Mr. Wahim confirmed from his desk. He was grading the class’ solar system test. He motioned towards a large pile of papers. “They, for instance, are not my favorites.” He held up a small stack of 4 papers. “These are my favorites.”

Keith was tempted to ask if he was one of the four. “I appreciate the offer, but why me?”

“Like I said, you have the making of an amazing pilot,” Mr. Shirogane said. “Plus,” he added. “You remind me of myself when I was your age. Determined, ambitious--”

“--reckless, easily irritable,” Mr. Wahim added.

He ignored his comment. “So, what do you say?”

Keith didn’t have to think about it for too long. “Yes, of course. Thank you, Mr. Shirogane.”

The older pilot smiled. “Call me Shiro.”

Ever since then, Keith started spending more time with Shiro, and consequently Mr. Wahim--or Adam as he insisted Keith call him. Usually, they worked on Keith’s piloting and hand to hand and weapons combat. Keith had known that he was a good pilot and a good fighter, but beside Shiro, he was the opposite. He grilled flight plans and maneuvers into his head and pushed him to his limits. Though Keith had always worked hard in his classes, they had never required him to push himself, but training with Shiro did. Surprisingly enough, there was no real backlash to their afterhours training, in fact, the commanders seemed to encourage it. What better way to improve than to train with someone willing to share their knowledge and skill. In the beginning, some of his classmates were bitter towards Keith, but they quickly took this as a challenge to improve and become better themselves. Some even found junior officers or teachers to serve as their mentors.

Aside from the training, Keith spent time with Shiro just to hang out with him. He learned that despite his spotless record, Shiro could be more than a little reckless. One day after training, Keith and Shiro were sitting on a dune overlooking the endless sand surrounding the Garrison.

“Have you ever flown outside of the simulator before?” Shiro asked him.

“No,” Keith replied. “Apparently we’re not ready to fly yet.”

“Do you think you’re ready?” Shiro asked.

“Yes,” he immediately said.

“Good because this would have been a waste if you didn’t.” Shiro stood up and walked towards a pile of rocks nearby.

“What do you mean--” Keith was cut off by a low rumbling sound coming from behind the rocks. He frowned and ran to see what was causing the noise. When he rounded the boulders, he stopped in surprise and gaped in awe. There, standing before him, were two gliders. They were small, intended to be for only one person, and if the light scratches and worn down paint was anything to go off of, they were certainly not new. The Garrison’s insignia was stamped on the hull of each glider.

“They old gliders the Garrison used to use for pilot training, They’ve got some new, updated versions, so they don’t need them. I offered to take a pair off their hands,” Shiro explained.

“Wow,” Keith whispered softly. He walked over and touched the side of one of the gliders. The metal was cold under his fingertips, and he could feel the rough patches where the whipping sand had eroded the metal. The glider seemed to purr softly in response to his touch.

“So, Keith, ready to go on your first flight?” Shiro asked.

In response, Keith hopped into the small cockpit. Shiro laughed at his enthusiasm and climbed into the other glider. “All right, the controls are the same as the ones in the simulator, but it might take you some time to get used to them, so take it slow at first and they’re kind of old so--”

Keith made quick work of the control and zoomed forward. He cheered in delight. He flew past the sandy dunes and thin desert plants. He flew higher and grinned as the desert and the night sky alike became simple blurs of light. As he pushed forward and tore through the sky, he felt free. All his life, he’d been running away from his past and his present, and now, here flying through the night with no worries but the road ahead of him, he felt like he was running towards something. What it was, he couldn’t tell, but he did know that he never wanted to stop feeling like this.

Apparently, the universe had a different plan.

The glider gave a couple of jerks and started to slow down. Keith frowned and pushed on the controls, but it only seemed to make the glider stall more. He barely had enough to veer out of a boulder’s way before the glider skid to an abrupt, bumpy halt. Thankfully, the glider was equipped for sliding on the desert sand, so there wasn’t much damage done to either Keith or the glider itself. Keith popped open the overhead door and climbed out of the glider. Dark smoke started coming from the glider, so Keith stepped back. They had learned that black smoke wasn’t too bad of a sign and there wasn’t any immediate threat of the glider blowing up, but the sight of the billowing smoke made his heart squeeze. He knew that there was no danger, that there were no flames, but his skin got hotter and his breathing became labored. Images played across his mind: the firestation, a burning building he’d never seen but imagined so clearly, his dad. His dad. His vision became blurry, and he almost missed the second glider landing gracefully beside him. The smoke crowded his vision, and the only indication of someone else’s presence was the comforting arms that wrapped around his small frame.

“Hey, it’s okay, I’ve got you,” Shiro whispered soothingly. “I’m right here, okay? Your safe. Just breathe, breathe with me.”

It took a couple more minutes for the shaking to stop and a couple after that for the tears to stop. Keith leaned against Shiro and breathed with him. He allowed himself to just exist in the peace of the moment, and found comfort in the still night sky and Shiro’s comforting words. Eventually, Keith pulled away. “Sorry,” he said softly.

Shiro smiled softly. “Don’t worry about it. I can always get a new glider. Next time, just take it easy, these things are pretty old.” They both knew that he wasn’t talking about the glider, but Keith appreciated.

Shiro nodded in the direction of the Garrison. “Come on, let’s head home. You’ve got homework to do, and Adam will get mad if we stay up to late.”

Keith nodded and walked alongside him. Home, he thought with a smile. Maybe, just maybe, he had found his home.

Keith stuffed his books into his bag and made his way out of the library. Next week, he had exams coming up, and he had been spending all the time he could studying in the library. He would have done it at the apartment, but he thought Adam and Shiro deserved some them time. They hadn’t had any date nights and Adam was getting a little grumpy about it.

As he made his way out of the library, he passed by two cadets who had their heads craned over a large textbook. He vaguely recognized them from his class. Hunk and Taylor? Something like that. They were pretty talented cadets too, and they worked really hard. They were practically attached at the hip and Keith had never seen one without the other. He sighed and pulled his bag closer. It would be nice to have friends like that, it would make this day a little better. Maybe he would talk to them one day.

Keith made a stop at Adam’s classroom, but was surprised to find it empty. He was usually in here till 4 and it was barely 3. He shrugged it off and walked to the post. The post office was by the staff’s lounge and was where any mail for commanders and teachers was kept. The woman behind the desk barely spared him a look when he went over to Shiro and Adam’s boxes. The couple often sent him to do little errands like get the mail, so they were used to seeing him around. After picking up the mail, he walked to Shiro and Adam’s shared apartment. Keith had never officially moved in with them, it had just happened. Keith was over so much that Adam eventually gave their spare room to Keith. Even though he technically had a dorm room, Keith stayed over at the apartment, He wasn’t sure if he could consider it his home yet, so he just took to referring to it as “the apartment”.

Once he arrived, Keith placed his hand to the glass panel to open the door, but instead of opening, the panel glowed red with the words  “access denied” glaring at him. Keith frowned and tried again. The door stayed closed  He double checked to make sure that it was the right apartment. When he confirmed that it was, he stepped up to the door and tried the old fashioned way. He rapped his knuckles against the metal door. “Hey! It’s me, Keith. The panel’s acting up and it won’t let me in,” he called.

He was met with a couple minutes of silence before a quick “coming!” answered.

Keith stepped back and waited. There were a few beeps and a click, and the door slid open. Adam smiled at him. “Hey. sorry, must have accidently manuely locked it.” He stepped back to allow Keith to go inside. “Let’s go the the kitchen, Keith!” Adam insisting, raising his voice.

Keith frowned at the man. “Um . . . okay?” He followed Adam to the kitchen. As they go closer to the kitchen, Keith caught a faint whiff of something sweet. “Hey, why does it smell like--”

“Happy Birthday, Keith!” Adam and Shiro cheered in unison once they entered the kitchen. In Shiro’s hands was a hazardously frosted cake with a single lit candle. The words ‘Happy Birthday, Keef!’ were written in Adam’s elegant handwriting in red frosting.

Keith blinked. He was at a loss for words. He didn’t even know that Adam and Shiro knew what this day meant to him.

“You don’t like it,” Shiro concluding. He lowered the cake and his smile seemed to drop with it.

“No!” Keith hurried to exclaim. “It’s not that, I just . . . didn’t expect it. I didn’t even know you guys knew.”

“We didn’t until yesterday,” Adam admitted. “I was updating my student’s records and I noticed your birthday.”

“You hadn’t mentioned anything, so we thought it would be nice to make a surprise for you,” Shiro said.

Keith starred at the couple. Shiro was nervously standing behind the counter surrounded with what must have been some of Adam’s best cooking, and Adam stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. They had planned all of this and done this all last minute just for him? He knew how busy they both were and the fact that they took the time to make something for his birthday made a smile break out on Keith’s face. “Thanks,” he said.

Adam and Shiro’s smiles matched his and they quickly went about setting the table for dinner. Keith insisted on helping, but Adam shooed him away and told him to wash up for dinner. Keith smiled and went to the sink to wash his hands. As they ate, they made idle chit chat about their days, Shiro’s missions, Adam’s classes, and Keith’s upcoming exams/ Shiro promised to help Keith study, but only if he stopped staying up too late. Keith couldn’t seem to stop smiling, not that he wanted to. He honestly couldn’t remember a birthday as amazing as this one. After his dad died, Keith usually spent his birthdays alone, so he had stopped celebrating them all together. But now, here he was, surrounded by people he wholeheartedly believed loved and cared about him. He couldn’t be happier.

Shiro collected the plates and took them back to the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying a thin, rectangular present. “It’s not much,” Shiro admitted, “but we hope you like it.”

Keith took the present from Shiro’s outstretched hands and opened the wrapping paper carefully. Inside, there was something more valuable to Keith than anything anyone other than his father had ever given him. Inside, there was a red picture frame with a picture of Adam, Shiro, and Keith. It had been Adam and Shiro’s anniversary and they had invited Keith to go outside the base with them. Keith had insisted on staying, saying that it was their anniversary and that they should spend it together. They had laughed at his response, and insisted that they should spend the day together as a family. That had been the first time they had called their little trio a family, and Keith had cried. At the sight of his tears, Shiro had panicked and Adam hurried to apologize. Keith had only smiled and told them that he’d be ready in a couple minutes. In the photo, Shiro had one arm around Adam and the other was ruffling Keith’s hair. Adam’s hand rested on Keith’s shoulder, and all three of them were beaming. In black, elegant cursive the word ‘family’ was written along the bottom length of the frame.

Keith stared down at the picture and was silent for a moment. He looked up at Adam and Shiro’s smiling faces and he knew he was done searching for a home. He had the perfect on right in front of him.

[ramheavenandhell]

Rick and Morty Forever and One Hundred Years – Chapter 3: Coming over for Dinner

Warnings: still keeping the Rick/Morty slow burn going, also some dissing Jerry (but who likes him anyway?) Summary: High school AU in which Rick and Morty are not related, but classmates in the same grade. Rick is the super popular kid in school. Morty is the kid that no one wants anything to do with. So how did they end up becoming friends? And is it actually a good or a bad thing that they are? However, the most important question is, could they maybe be more?

Rick and Morty Forever and One Hundred Years – Chapter 3: Coming over for Dinner They were still inside the garage and Morty was still wandering around with a big trash bag in his hand, filling it with the empty beer cans that were strewn all over the floor. By now he had his emotions back under control and Rick had probably also calmed down again – or, at least, Morty hoped that he did. It was hard to tell with the other being so silent and busy tinkering with his portal gun. He looked over to the teen who was leaning over his workbench and staring down as the pulled apart gadget while also double-checking with his blueprints to search for the mistake. "Hey, Rick." Morty started. "Why don't you just let the portal gun be for now and work on something else instead? I mean, what about the space car. Don't you want to finish that one first?" The brunet's eyes drifted to the piece of machinery that was the leftover of a car that Rick had picked up from some scrapyard. This one had been already in the garage long before Morty had even met Rick and was one of his longest lasting projects yet. The first time that he had seen the car, which's model couldn't really be identified anymore, he had thought that it maybe was a DeLorean and Rick was trying to build a time machine. As Morty had told the other his thoughts though, he had commented, "This isn't "Back to the Future", Morty!" Rick didn't really see the point in building a time machine – though, he said that he probably could, if he really wanted to – and revealed that he was actually planning to convert this piece of scrap metal into a space cruiser. While a time machine would have been cool, Morty also realized that time travel came with all sorts of risks. Travelling through space – while also considered dangerous – sounded exciting, too, and the brunet had actually started to look forward to the completion of the space ship…uh, car. "I would continue to build the cruiser, but I started with the portal gun and had hoped to complete it so I can get the materials that I would need for the car easier." Rick began to explain. "You know, that I can't just use any material for it, right Morty? It would need to endure really high temperatures for the start but also for returning into the planet's atmosphere and I also don't want to have to build a new one after every landing, so it also needs to withstand the impact of that. But in truth that isn't even the biggest problem that I have. I mean, I know how to get those materials. At this point it just takes a lot of time and money…" He sighed deeply and threw the screwdriver that he held in his hand hard on the work surface before he turned in his swivel chair around to Morty. "You do know how NASA is sending their rockets into space, right Morty?" The boy nodded at that, having watched quite a few launches on TV or videos of it on the internet. "The method that they're using is just is-it-it's archaic!" The blue-haired teen sounded offended. "And do you know how long it takes for them to get to mars, Morty? It's taking them around 7 years! Seven long fucking years, Morty!! And that is when they time it with mars being in its closest position to earth. Mars! A directly neighboring planet!!" Rick stood up from his chair and began to walk around as he began to wildly gesture with his hands. To anyone, he would have looked like a madman now and would probably freak people out, but Morty was already used to his best friends antics and was only mildly worried. "You know, Morty, when I go out ther-to—into space, I don't plan to hang around on just a planet in the-the-the neighborhood. I want to be able to travel through our solar system and get to the next one over in no more than a single day." Rick continued and his eyes looked as if he was currently not in the garage but with his thoughts far, far away. "So the crucial thing that I need for the space cruiser is a new fuel. One that hasn't been invented on earth yet, that-that no human had even thought about yet!" He suddenly stopped pacing and looked at the ground. "But I'm afraid that there might not even be materials on earth that I could use to create such super fuel… So maybe, I need to focus on something else that allows me to travel off-planet—or, no! Even further than that! Maybe something li-like—that allows me to create a rip in space and time so that I can go to different dimensions…?" "Holy crap! How late is it?!" Morty's sudden yell completely ripped Rick out of his current train of thoughts. "What? Why do you need to know?" "'Cause I need to g-go—get home a-a-as soon as school's out, so my parents won't know that I skipped again. I-I-I'm still grounded, too, o-or have you forgotten that?" The brunet turned into full-on panic mode as his eyes fell on the clock that hung on the wall. "W-wa-wait! What if the principal called my parents again? I-I-I'm sure he called them again since I was skipping classes!!" "Calm down, Morty. I fixed the phone and also rigged Vag's mobile. His call went through the call divert earlier and I reprogrammed the AI to imitate your dad, so chill out. Here, take a—listen to that." With those words, Rick pulled out his mobile and dialed a number. He put it on speaker and held it up so Morty could listen with no problem as well. After a few rings, the receiver picked up and a voice that sounded like his father suddenly spoke. "Hello? Jerry Smith here. Who is calling?" "Hi. Am I talking to Morty's dad?" Rick asked. "Yes, I'm Morty's father. Jerry Smith. And I looove sucking biiiig, sweaty boners and licking disgusting, furry testicle sacks." Came the natural-sounding reply. Rick laughed loudly and hung up again. "See?" "That doesn't really sound like my dad! I mean, it's his voice but he would never talk like that!" Morty protested with a frown. "What? I think that this totally sounds like him." Rick argued back. "How can you say that, Rick? You haven't even met my dad yet." "Yeah, not in person…" the other drawled off. What was that supposed to mean? Could it actually be that Rick had…? Morty got a bad feeling as a certain suspicion was dawning on him. It couldn't really be that Rick had installed cameras and microphones in his house, or could it? Why would his best friend do something like that? And when should he have done that? Rick had never actually been over to his house…other than that one time when Summer had thrown a party on that weekend when their parents were gone, much to Morty's dismay who had to help cleaning the mess up again to avoid them both getting into trouble. However, it was impossible to think that his best friend had wandered through the house and planted this stuff without anyone else noticing. Also, he was pretty damn sure that his best friend had been too busy partying. No, it was impossible to think that Rick had bugged his house somehow. While it was technically possible for him to do something like that, it made no sense. Rick couldn't have done that! Morty hastily shook his head to get rid of his paranoid thoughts. "Anyways. When did you even do that?" "Last night, after we came back from watching the meteor shower." Last night? When had Rick slept then when he had been doing all that stuff last night? "I know that I messed up that one time. Even though that usually never happens. But I rectified it and I sure as hell won't make the same mistake twice, so stop looking at me like that, Morty!" The brunet shook his head again. "Still, I need to get home really quick or I get in more trouble than I already am!" "What can your parents actually do to you at this point? Lock you up in the basement that you don't have?" Rick joked. The humor was lost on the yellow-shirted boy and even if his friend might have a point, he still frowned deeply at the other. "Okay, okay. I'll give you a lift." Rick said and went to grab their helmets. The prospect of getting a quick ride home finally calmed Morty down and he accepted the helmet with a small smile on his face. Sometimes Rick was really a great friend…even though Rick was the reason why he was in all this trouble to begin with.

The drive towards Morty's home was a silent but not an uncomfortable one. "Rick? Please drop me off here. I'll walk the rest home." Morty suddenly spoke up when they were just a few streets away from his house. Rick stopped his vehicle as requested, but asked. "What? Why? I can drive you to your front door. This isn't like last night when you snuck out." "It's so my parents don't see you. I'm not supposed to hang out with you anymore." The brunet took off the helmet and stood up from the motorbike. "They think that you're a bad influence on me." Rick scoffed at that after he had also slipped his helmet off. "As if." However, his face said the opposite as if he knew exactly that he was not good for Morty. That being around the innocent boy was tainting him and Rick would eventually destroy him because he was toxic… "Hey! How about I ask my parents to invite you over for dinner on weekend or something, so that they can see that you're not so bad?" Morty tried to lighten the mood with this ingenious offer. "What good would that do?" Rick didn't see the point. "I doubt that your parents are going to agree to that." At Morty's crestfallen expression, he quickly added, "But if they're okay with it, sure. I'll show up." The brunet smiled brightly at that answer and maybe it was just a trick of the light, but it looked like Rick was blushing. "Great! I'll ask my parents and let you know when to come over. I'm sure when they see what a good guy you are, they'll let me hang out with you again. I'll still be grounded though, but at least you can come over to visit me or something." Rick looked a bit skeptical and if Morty was honest, he wasn't quite so convinced either. He knew that Rick wasn't really such a good guy – he was sometimes, but that was it. This would only work if Rick presented himself from his best side. But surely, he would manage to do that for one evening, wouldn't he? Well, Morty hoped at least that he would. He bid his best friend goodbye and hurried home, careful to get his timing right so to not arise suspicion. Apparently, that didn't matter though because shortly after he entered, his dad called him over into the parlor. Both of his parents were sitting on the couch and watching TV and they were miraculously not arguing with each other. "Morty? Have you hung out with your friend Rick again today?" Jerry asked skeptically. The question made Morty nervous. Did Rick's invention fail again and the principal had called even if his friend claimed that it worked perfectly earlier? Deciding that this might just be a trick question to make him confess something that they didn't know about, the brunet put on his best poker face and answered. "Well, we're in almost all the same classes, so I can't really avoid him at school, Dad." Jerry still bore with his eyes into him as if he was trying to poke hole in his son's logic. "He's got a point, Jerry." Beth spoke up. "We can't make Morty avoid his friend at school. That's ridiculous." "Sorry, that I don't want our son to hang out with that hooligan and end up becoming a criminal." The older brunet fired back. "Rick isn't a hooligan!" Morty protested before his mother even had the chance to reply something. Having his parents' eyes completely focused on him again made nervousness flare up in his gut once more, but now that he had their attention, he needed to pull through. "He-he really isn't such a bad guy. And you can't judge him because you don't know him. You've never even met him, Dad." "Well, I can't see how that's going to change." Jerry protested back. This was the perfect prompt that Morty had been waiting for. "Then how about we invite him over for dinner on weekend?" Beth was the one who was quicker to answer now. "Oh, that's a great idea, Sweetie! It would be nice to meet your friend Rick in person for once." "Beth!" Jerry protested and looked anything but happy at the prospect of inviting a potential criminal inside his house. "Oh, c'mon, Jerry. Morty had never a friend over at our house. And this also a good chance to see with who our son is hanging out with." She tried to give her husband an encouraging smile. Jerry only sighed and gave in. "Fine." Morty was glad that his parents had actually accepted his idea. And all of that without even breaking out into one of their big arguments like so often, which usually ended in both of them ignoring their son completely and leaving the issue that he brought up unresolved. "Great! I'll tell Rick! Uh, tomorrow at school!" He quickly caught himself on that one. If he let them knew that he got a new phone from Rick, they would immediately confiscate it again. After he hurried up to his room, he immediately texted his best friend the good news. The response he got didn't sound as enthusiastic as he felt right now, but it was good enough. Rick promised him that he would show up. Okay. Fine. I'll come over for dinner then.

On Saturday evening, Morty was so nervous and excited that he wasn't even sure that he could eat dinner without throwing up. Honestly, he felt like he might barf right now. He constantly glanced at the clock. Rick was supposed to be here any moment now and he hoped that he wouldn't give his parents a bad first impression by being late – because his parents didn't care if it was "fashionable" or not. Morty paced through the parlor and was driving his sister, who was sitting on the couch and trying to watch TV, almost insane. "God, Morty, calm down. This is just Rick who's coming over and not your girlfriend or something like that." The notion of a girlfriend threw Morty so out of his loop that he stumbled over his feet. Luckily, he still caught himself before crashing head first into the couch table. He didn't need another scar on his head or Rick making fun of him for it again. Before Morty could comment on what his sister just said, he was interrupted by the sound of a familiar engine roaring right in front of their house. It was Rick! Forgetting everything else, he stormed to the front door and swung it open to greet his friend. Rick just got off his motorcycle and pulled the helmet off, then ran a hand through his spiky hair to fix it, before he ventured over the brunet who was waiting for him like a puppy that had waited for his owner to come home. Morty noticed that the other hadn't bothered with dressing up. He wore basically the same blue t-shirt and khakis that he wore every other day. It made Morty feel a little silly, since he had actually pulled out one of his better dress shirts – a yellow button up shirt with the top two buttons undone – for the occasion. Thankfully, he had decided to stick to his simple jeans, or he would have felt completely overdressed now. "Hey." The other greeted him casually as he finally reached the front door. "Hi, Rick. C-come in." Morty invited overeagerly. "What's with the outfit? You're having a date after this dinner thing?" Rick snickered a little. A blush immediately worked itself up on Morty's face. God, he did feel overdressed now! "U-uh, no. Ju-just thought since you see me ina-in my plain boring t-shirt ea-every day that I could wear sum-something different for yo—for once." He quickly caught himself at the end there. "Looks good on you." Rick commented as he obediently followed the other teen into the parlor. "Tha-thanks, Rick." Morty stuttered to the obvious compliment and turned a tiny bit redder. No one had ever complimented him on his looks before… "Hey, Rick." The redhead that was still lazing on the couch greeted casually. Rick took a seat right next to her and they fist bumped. "Hey, Sum-Sum. What's up?" "Nothing much right now." Obviously, Summer and Rick already knew each other from school. While Morty's sister was usually someone who fawned about all the hot guys in school, Rick had been an exception to the rule. Or, maybe she had had a small crush on him and was over it already. Whatever the case, since he was one of the popular kids, she tried to stay in his good favors and they could probably consider each other as friends. At least they were cool with each other. It was at least one thing that Morty didn't need to worry about. His entire worries were focused on how his parents would think of Rick. "Wasn't there supposed to be dinner?" Rick asked, but looked like he already made himself feel at home in front of the TV. "My mo-mom and dad are still in the kitchen, but it should be done pretty soon." Morty hastily explained. "I-I-I should probably check up on them and see if they need any help." Without waiting for a response, he already made a beeline straight for the mentioned room. Both of his parents were indeed still standing at the stove and adding some last spices to the food – or rather discussing if and what spices should be added to it. In all truth, the sight of his mother cooking was such a rare one. Usually she was too busy with work and when she did cook something, it was always something microwaved or warmed up frozen food. Cooking wasn't her strength, but thankfully his father was pretty decent at it. This made Morty occasionally wonder if it was the reason why his mother had actually married him, so she wouldn't need to worry about that anymore. "I'm telling you, there needs to be more salt in the sauce." Beth argued. "Believe me, Beth, there doesn't. The roast is already plenty salted, so if you add anymore to the sauce, it would be too much." Jerry argued back. "Yeah, but if you eat the sauce together just with the potatoes and vegetables, it tastes too stale." "No one eats it that way!" "Um—" Morty dared interrupting his parents who were already salty enough from their discussion that no spice would be needed for dinner anymore. "R-Rick's here." "Where is he right now?" His father asked, not looking happy about the news at all. "H-he-he's in the den. Watching TV with Summer." Morty quickly added the last part before his dad would come down on him for leaving his friend unattended in their house. "This is great, Sweetie. Dinner is almost ready." Beth smiled, though it did look a little forced. "Be a darling and set up the table, will you?" "S-sure." The small brunet went over to the cupboard and got out the plates. "And be careful not to drop the plates." The blonde added in a chastising tone. She acted as if he let plates drop every day or something. Which was of course not the case! Even if he was a little clumsy sometimes, he wasn't a little kid!! "I won't drop them, okay?" He replied in a slightly annoyed voice. However, just after he said that, the tableware almost slipped from his fingers. He barely managed to catch the dishes again before they crashed on the floor. …that was a close one. Deciding to be a bit more careful and acting as if that hadn't just happened, he proceeded with setting up the table. After all the tableware and the food was placed and everyone was called to the table and seated, Rick was the one who began with the conversation. "I knew from Morty that you are a very intelligent woman, but he never mentioned that you are such a beauty, too, Beth." He directed at the blonde. "Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't even ask if first name basis is okay with you. I can call you Mrs. S. if you prefer that." "It's okay. You can call me Beth, Rick." Morty's mother giggled, obviously flattered by the compliment. Jerry looked horrified between his wife and the guest, not believing that this was happening. "Hmm. The food's delicious. Did you cook it?" Rick asked after he took a first bite. "I'm the one, who cooked it." Jerry interrupted rudely. "It was a combined effort." Beth said and threw her husband a warning glare for that. "Well, I can certainly taste your love in it, Beth." The blonde giggled again. "Oh, you." Morty swallowed nervously as he could feel the tension rising in the air around him like thunderclouds that were gathering overhead. Just what was Rick doing? It was nice that he got along with his mother, but his dad was throwing glances at his best friend that could potentially kill. "Hey, Morty. Could you please hand me the salt?" Rick suddenly asked. Morty's mother threw another glance over at her husband as she said. "I'm sorry, Rick, that the sauce is a little stale. I wanted to add some more salt to it, but someone else wouldn't let me." The yellow-shirted teen's mouth dropped and he stared in disbelieve at his best friend, who only grinned. Had Rick somehow overheard that conversation in the kitchen and did this purposely? But how could he have overheard that? Summer would have surely caught him if he would have gotten up from the couch to eavesdrop on them. Again, Morty felt paranoia settle in as he had the suspicion that Rick might have planted microphones inside the house. While he had no reason to do that, he certainly had the means… Despite the bad feeling in his stomach, the brunet followed the request and passed him the saltshaker. "Thanks." For a moment, there was silence around the table and only the typical noises that accompanied the devouring of a meal could be heard before Jerry finally decided to land his first strike against their guest. "So, Rick. I've been wondering what you have actually planned for your future? With skipping school all the time, the goals can't be really that high, right?" "What the hell, Jerry?" Beth hissed. "Dad?!" Even Morty was shocked at that direct approach of his father. "That's a low blow, Dad." Summer, who had been silent until now, threw in. "Nah, it's okay." Rick assured the people, who were clearly on his side here. "I know that I'm not attending school very often, but that's because I think it's stupid. As for what I'm planning to do in the future, I'll be a scientist. In fact, I already am one, which is also the reason why I'm so frequently absent from high school." "Morty mentioned that he's helping you with some projects." Beth's friendly demeanor was back. "Any breakthroughs yet." "A few, but nothing that I'm too proud of." "So, what? You've been winning a few school science fairs? What are the prizes for those? Hundred dollar or something?" The older brunet still sounded unimpressed. "Oh, I'm not wasting my time with science fairs. However, I do sell my inventions or the patents to them, so I make quite a sum on the side." The blue-haired teen was smug now. "I'm sure, I earn more with that then you do, Jerry. Oh, wait! You're unemployed, so that doesn't really sound like such a big feat. In comparison to you everyone makes more money." Jerry's facial features derailed, but the statement made Beth laugh loudly while Summer whooped at the comeback. Even Morty couldn't quite hide the smile at his father's epic defeat even if this was not how the evening was supposed to go and he should be rightfully worried now. The family patriarch shut up after that, however, he still threw occasional angered glances at the spiky-haired teen, who entertained the rest of the family during dinner with his charm, wit and funny jokes.

After Rick had left and Morty fell into his bed, completely exhausted from the events today, he thought that maybe it hadn't gone that bad. At least his mom seemed to like Rick and his sister had always been cool with him. Just his dad seemed to have a dislike for the teen, but that was also not completely unexpected after what had occurred. Deciding that it was more important to him what his mom thought about Rick, since she was always the one who had the last word, Morty decided that it was a success. However, as the voices of his arguing parents reached his ears, he sighed. It didn't particularly mean that they were quarreling about Rick right now. They always found something to argue about, but it was most likely that their current fight was related to the events of this evening. Morty decided that he didn't want to give a fuck about it this time and pulled his pillow over his head so that he could sleep in peace. This was how he dealt more and more often with his parents' arguing lately. Not that there was anything that he could do about it. He tried, he honestly did, by helping around the house, trying to be a good boy and acting responsible, but it didn't help. Summer kept saying that it would only stop once they would finally divorced, and while Morty did see her point, he didn't want that. He just wanted for his parents to make up and love each other as they used to in the past…they surely still did. They just needed to see past their disagreements and learn to be happy with their lives again. Morty didn't really know how his sister was able to be so calm about it. She didn't particularly care if they argued unless it involved her, which led to an even bigger argument that always ended with Summer storming to her room crying and claiming that she would leave – but she thankfully never did, because Morty could stop her every time – and their parents continuing to fight. She certainly didn't seem scared by the prospect that they might eventually "walk different ways". With uneasy thoughts and the dull voices of his parents in the background, Morty eventually fell asleep. Just across the hall, Beth and Jerry Smith were still in a heated discussion. And unsurprisingly it was about none other than Rick Sanchez. "I don't know what your problem is, Jerry! Rick is a decent kid. He's smart and he's already earning money and not by delivering newspapers. He's good for Morty and you should be proud of our son that he managed to find a friend like that." Beth was currently busy taking out her earrings as she looked angrily back at her husband through a small mirror. "I don't know, Beth! Is he really such a good friend?!" Jerry argued back. "Because if I were a decent teenager, I wouldn't be openly flirting with my friend's mother!!" "He wasn't flirting!!" "Oh, let's see here! Calling you by your first name. Making you compliments. To me that certainly sounded like flirting! And you were flirting right back at him!" "No, I wasn't! What are you even saying?!" "You were!! You were acting like a panther!" "Excuse me?" "I mean, uh…what are they called again…?" Jerry looked lost for a moment. "A cougar, I mean!" "You're being ridiculous, Jerry!" "Am I, Beth?! Am I really?!" The blonde huffed, crawled under the covers on her side of the bed, turned off the light and laid on her side, her back facing the brunet. For her this conversation was over. Jerry also laid down, but the male was still brooding. For him this conversation was far from over yet.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11