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jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets · 4 years ago

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I Loved Him... Once - CH 1

Title: I Loved Him... Once

Author: jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets

Fandom: Criminal Minds

Pairing: Heid (Aaron Hotchner x Spencer Reid)

Rating: This ones General but eventually as the series goes it will be Explicit

Tags: canon typical violence and gore, eventual smut as the series goes, angst, fluff, pining., its gunna be a slow burn guys.

Summary: A series following the team as they solve crimes and take down the bad guys.

In Part one of this series, we follow the team as they take down a serial killer that has taken a piece of one of their own. And through it all, Spencer and Hotch come to a few conclusions and realizations of their own.

AO3 Link

Masterlist

*** My works are not to be posted on any sites without my permission! But comments and reblogs are love! <3 Please and thanks!!

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Chapter 1

Spencer:

“What we have done for ourselves alone, dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” - Albert Pike

~~~~~~~~~~~

“Fourteen days, fourteen days, fourteen glorious days!”

Spencer barely looked up from the book he was reading, sat at his desk, leaning back in his desk chair as Derek Morgan sashayed across the bullpen and perched himself on the corner smiling down at him.

He opted to ignore the over the top, ray of sunshine, mood Derek was in, and flipped the page of his book. Derek was not giving in, he was not going to be ignored when he was in such a good mood, so he swiftly swooped his hand and stole Spencer's book, eliciting a whine of protest as he sat forward and reached for it. Though he didn't make any more effort than that, he knew very well there was no way he would be able to get the book back from Derek through force.

“Come on, Morgan, give it back.”

Derek laughed, his eyes shining with mirth as he kept playing keep away with Spencer, “You really want it back that bad?”

“Yes, actually, it was just starting to get good!” He made another jolt forward to reach for the book but it was in vain. Spencer’s brain might be fast, but Derek Morgan's reflexes were always faster.

“Really, kid, you're reading…” He turned the book over and eyed the title with a raised brow, “‘The Art of War’. You planning on taking someone down, Reid?” Spencer just eyed him as he closed the book and tucked it under his crossed arms, knowing full well that the genius would remember not only the page number he had been on before Derek closed the book, but the exact word he had read last. “Now, like I said before, we have fourteen, I repeat, fourteen glorious days of vacation starting right now. And you're telling me that your only plans are to sit here at your desk, at work, and continue reading ‘The Art of War’ instead of going out and doing something, anything, other than that?”

“It never hurts to educate yourself, Morgan, and yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you,” he replied, a little short, then tried once more to swipe unsuccessfully for his book, “now give me back my book.”

“Good god, man, live a little, you're killing me.” Derek stood and moved the book even further out of Spencer's reach, so he just huffed and sat back in his chair again. “You don't have any plans? No dates? No trips to exotic lands to meet fine exotic ladies?”

“When have you ever known me to ever have plans? Or dates for that matter. It's not like girls are exactly lining up to date the lanky, boy genius.”

“Oh you're much more than that, pretty boy, you know that.” Morgan perched himself on the side of his desk again.

“Not to mention the fact that seeing this in a bathing suit on a beach full of, more than likely, gorgeous people, is not something that is on anyone's bucket list, I'm positive of that. I'm so white I'd probably end up blinding half the beach with my legs alone.”

Derek was laughing, near tears at this point, “Oh, come on kid, it can't be that bad.”

“Oh, it is,” Spencer was slightly laughing at this point too, “I went to a pool party once in university and I was asked to put my shirt back on because the light was reflecting off my skin and ‘hurting people's eyes’... Derek, it was ten at night. My skin was reflecting the pool lights so severely it was hurting people.”

Derek barked out a laugh so hard he nearly fell off the table and Spencer couldn't help but join him. “So you just need a little bit of sun, cancel out some of the white. Why not come with me to Barbados? Little sand, little sun, and a whole lotta’ fun.” He shot a quick wink at Spencer who just scoffed and looked away. “Give me two days with you on the beach and I guarantee I could get you a couple shades darker, at least.”

“Oh, yes,” he nodded, smirking, “as well as skin cancer.”

“I promise I won't let you get skin cancer, but that being said, once we get you all sunkissed and confident, I can't promise I'll be able to keep all those fine ladies off of you.”

“You're not making this sound any better. Skin cancer, STD’s, and multitudes of random women hanging off of me, no thank you.”

“Well, if you don't want to be swarmed by the fine exotic women,” he paused, smirking down at a waiting Spencer, “I'm sure I can help you land some handsome exotic men, then. I'm not here to judge. More women for me.”

Spencer reached to the side and grabbed the small pile of papers that were sitting there, and swiftly smacked Derek on the arm with them, “Get off my desk.”

“That doesn't sound like a denial,” he ducked as he was swatted at again, “come with me and I promise you'll have a good time.”

“Go!”

Derek chuckled once more, before ducking under his own desk to grab his bag, then turned back to toss the book back to Spencer who barely caught it, “My flight doesn't leave till tomorrow night, think about it!”

“I don't need to, I'm not going!”

“Think about it!”

“What's the point anyways!?” He called as Derek was almost out of ear shot, but he continued anyways, “When has vacation ever worked out for us? I'd buy a ticket and pay for a room, and realistically we'll probably end up right back here in two days, four tops!”

Derek was gone by this point, not having heard most of what he had said, more than likely already knowing that this was probably their reality, but not wanting to have to accept it. Though his complaints didn't fall on deaf ears.

“Oh, now you've gone and jinxed it. Just know that if our vacation gets cancelled due to a case, I am definitely coming after you first, Reid.”

He gazed up at Emily over the edge of his book, having indeed remembered the exact word he had left off on when it was stolen from him, and gave her a playful smirk. “I am only stating statistics. If you factor in every vacation we have had since we started here at the BAU, the odds that we will have a full, uninterrupted ‘fourteen glorious days’ as Morgan put it, are less than ten percent. Eight point five-six-three-two percent to be exact.”

“God I hate you sometimes,” though she laughed as she said it, “so you really don't have any plans?”

“I never said I didn't have any plans,” he sighed and closed his book on his desk, resigned to not getting any reading done until everyone was gone, “just because I don't have plans involving a hot beach or women, doesn't mean I don't have plans.”

“Oh!” She perked up and moved closer, intrigued. “So what kinds of fun are you up to then?”

“Oh, loads!” He shifted in his chair, moving to lean towards her with his elbows on his desk. “I'm signed up for a lecture series that starts tomorrow, but the one I'm most excited for is a lecture called ‘Synthetic Metals: A Novel Role For Organic Polymers’ presented by Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid. It's a Nobel lecture all about possible engineering applications for, and the inner workings of, organic and conductive polymers. It sounds completely fascinating! I was also thinking of taking a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I mean, how amazing would it be to walk the same streets as Thomas Jefferson, or eat in the same place as George Washington! I was also thinking of visiting the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. They have over twenty- two thousand works on display that are largely focused on modern and contemporary art, especially with a focus on European art after the nineteen hundreds. They are also having a workshop there next week focusing on-”

“Woah, woah, take a breath,” she laughed a bit, then asked with a hint of concern, “aren't you doing anything that doesn't involve… learning? Like, no info intake, no lecture series, no workshops, just relaxing? Letting your brain just take a break?”

Spencer pouted his bottom lip in thought then looked back up to Emily, “No? Why would I want to waste two weeks doing nothing when I could spend them increasing my knowledge?”

“Wouldn't you want to sit back and…” She stared confusedly at an equally confused Spencer, then just shook her head with another laugh, “Nevermind, look who I’m talking to. Of course you would think that spending two weeks learning would be an ideal vacation. To each their own I guess, right.”

He just nodded, picking his book up again as she moved away from his desk.

“Well, have fun with your jam packed knowledge filled two weeks, see you in fourteen days.”

“Or in two to four days. Don't forget the eight point five-six-three-two percent chance that I will see you before-”

“Blah, blah, blah!” She covered her ears as she walked away from him, “Can't hear you, already on vacation!”

“Very mature,” though he was smiling, “have fun with your mother.”

She threw a quick wave at him then disappeared. When she was finally gone, he sat back in his chair with a content sigh. Now that Emily was gone, it was just himself, Rossi, and Hotch who were left in the office, and he knew there was a very low chance that either of them would interrupt him to inquire about his vacation plans. He was finally able to finish his book in peace before catching the last train home.

~~~~~~~~~~~

“Knock, knock.”

Aaron looked up from where he had been bent over the front of his desk, the pile of papers he had been sorting through covering every inch of it, and towards the door. “David, come in.”

The man did, eyeing the mess, but merely stood in the middle of the room and tucked his hands into the pockets of his very expensive suit. “Always one of the last to leave, huh?”

“Has everyone gone?” Aaron asked without looking up this time.

“Everyone except the usual suspect.”

“Reid.” Aaron sighed. ‘Not last to leave,’ he thought. Spencer always seemed to still be there, even in the late late hours of the night. After a case, before vacation, even sometimes during vacation. Aaron always felt bad for the man, worried that he was lonely, though nowadays he could relate.

“I overheard him talking with Emily and Derek before they left. His most exciting plans seem to have something to do with a Nobel lecture series,” Rossi moved closer, taking up the chair in front of Aaron’s desk, “that kid needs to learn how to slow down and relax, I'm worried he might burn out someday if he doesn't. He should go out, have some fun from time to time.”

“Well I'm not much better,” Aaron turned, leaning against his desk with his arms crossed, now facing David, “my plans for the next two weeks pretty much consist of staying home, catching up on more paperwork, and if I can swing it with Haley, taking Jack for a few days. If I play my cards right, the park will be the most exciting adventure of my vacation. I'm not exactly going out to paint the town red either.”

“Yeah, you two are wild,” he drawled with a smirk, “you know, maybe a date would do the kid well. Loosen him up a bit.”

Aaron eyed him warily with a tilt of his head, seeing right through his attempted ruse, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Perhaps, while you both have the time off, you and Spencer could plan something together.” Aaron closed his eyes with a sigh and shifted, opened his mouth to say something in protest, but David beat him to it, hands up to stop him. “I'm just saying, you're the only two people on the team that aren't out of town for the next two weeks. I’ll be in Italy visiting family, JJ is taking her family camping, Prentis is visiting her mom, Garcia is, quote, ‘on a shopping tour of all the best malls in the northern hemisphere’, and Morgan is hitting the beach in Barbados. That leaves you and Reid. So all I'm saying is that maybe you can stop fantasizing about the kid and actually do something about your infatuation.”

Aaron just gaped at his friend, shocked, speechless for the first time in as long as he can remember. “I… how…” Was the only thing he was able to manage to stutter out.

David just smiled up at him mischievously and stated, “I'm a profiler, Aaron, and a damn good one. I've seen the way you look at Spencer, the way you stick close to him, and it's very obvious you care about him. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, yet ironically the only one to not have figured it out yet is the only actual certified genius.”

Aaron still didn't know what to say. He had never told anyone about how he felt about Spencer. It was hardly appropriate for him to attempt to pursue the man considering he was his superior, not to mention older than him. Something that had plagued him since the very day he met the cute, quirky doctor on his first day with the BAU.

“I can tell you're over-thinking, Aaron.” Rossi speaking brought him out of his small internal panic and he looked down at him. “What is it? That you're his boss? Strauss?”

He shifted, crossing his arms impossibly closer to his chest. No point in denying it now. “A bit of both, I guess. Not to mention the age difference between us.”

“First off, I wouldn't worry about Strauss. If anything were to happen between you and Spencer, as long as you navigate the correct channels and immediately disclose your relationship, sign the proper papers, then there is nothing Strauss can do against either of you or your jobs. As for you being his superior, I wouldn't even give that a second thought. No one on our team would think anything of it, no one would ever even entertain the thought that you took advantage, and neither would Spencer.” David then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he spoke. “And the age gap, who cares. Love, is love, is love. Take it while you've got it and don't ever let it go. Age is but a number and love knows no bounds.”

“Very profound of you, David.” He couldn't help but let a small chuckle slip.

“What can I say, I am the embodiment of love.”

“Right, and is that why you've been married three times and are on wife number four?”

They both laughed, hearty and full, and for the first time since they started talking, Aaron found himself feeling a lot lighter. It was nice to finally have someone who knew his secret feelings for the young genius, and be able to actually have someone to talk to and confide in about it.

Rossi's phone ringing broke the moment though, and he reached into his pocket, just looking at the screen and not answering. “Well, my ride to the airport is here. I will see you in two weeks, do not call me.”

Aaron let loose one last light chuckle, moving along with Dave to see him out. With a smile and a pat on the back as they reached the door he said, “I'll try not to, enjoy your time in Italy.”

“Oh I intend to,” he opened the door, then turned back at the last minute, “but do me a favor will ya. Don't call me, but do call Spencer.”

Aaron just smiled, gave Dave a small push out the door, and answered, “Good bye, David.”

Once he was out the door and down the stairs, Aaron closed the door and took a step to the side to watch him cross the bullpen. He gave a quick goodbye to Spencer as he passed, and then he was gone. Then his eyes wandered over to the last person left besides himself, still sitting alone at his desk, leaned back reading his book. He sighed, watching Spencer for a moment longer before thinking to himself, maybe David was right. Why should he worry about all that other nonsense? Besides, he would never know if Spencer felt the same unless he asked.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Aaron finally finished organizing the paperwork explosion on his desk, filing away what was finished and adding the rest to his bag, then was finally able to head out.

It had been a good two hours since Rossi had left his office, leaving Aaron with all kinds of things to think about, and the man that those thoughts were all about was still sitting in the same spot he had been in since vacation officially began. Though now, Spencer was already halfway through his second book.

As he passed him, the younger man not even so much as lifting his eyes from his book, he said a quiet, “Have a good vacation, Reid.”

“You too, Hotch,” he answered back, and Aaron just about kept walking, but stopped himself at the last minute and turned back.

They were currently alone, no one else around but him and Spencer, so now was just as good a time as any. “Reid…”

At the questioning tone to his name, Spencer looked up at Hotch who was now standing right in front of him, “Yeah?”

“I… I was…'' Spencer was still looking up at him with concerned eyes, a furrowed brow, and if Aaron was being honest, a super cute frown. Now, what Aaron wanted to say was ‘Spencer, I know that you and I are the only two who will be remaining in town for the duration of our vacation time, and I was wondering perhaps, if you would like to take advantage of the fact and allow me to take you out to dinner tomorrow night?’ But what he actually managed to come out with instead, was a sad and defeated, “I… I just wanted to wish you well. I hope you have a good fourteen days, and I heard you will be attending a lecture series, I hope it's informative.”

“Right…” Hotch couldn't be certain, but he was sure that Spencer almost looked… disappointed? “An-anything else?”

“... No, I don't believe so.” And before he could stumble his way through any more embarrassing sentences he quickly said, “Good night,” and left before Spencer could even return the sentiment. Leaving him staring, still confused and a little down, after a fast walking Aaron, not having the courage to even look back as he left.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Derek woke for the first time well rested and relaxed. No case to solve, no unsub on his mind, no high speed chase down unfamiliar roads, and no showdown with a psychopath in some dark abandoned warehouse. It was just him, the sun, the sand, and two weeks of relaxing and sleeping late, eating more than he probably should and shoving as much fun into two weeks as was completely possible.

Now, those were Derek's original plans. The plans he made before he left Quantico, Virginia for the beaches in Barbados. For the all night parties, the beautiful ladies, and the all inclusive never ending free drinks. And yet, here he found himself, within arm's reach of all those things, and not doing a single one of them.

Instead, Derek walked down the beach and found an empty lounge chair tucked under a very colourful umbrella. A sprite and lime with ice in hand, he stood and looked out at the calming ebb and flow of the ocean, letting the soft crashing of the waves take over and clear his mind completely. It was nice, the best he'd felt in a long, long time.

A volleyball skid to a halt at his feet, covering his toes in warm sand, caught his attention and he turned to face the small group of women off to his side. He kicked the ball back over to them, each one of them very obviously interested in getting to know Derek, even if it were just for one night. But to his own surprise, he found himself flashing a smile and a wave in decline of their invitation to come play, and instead took up his seat in the covered lounge chair.

He took a second to breathe in the fresh air, took a sip of his drink, then reached down to the small bag he had tucked under the chair, rifling through until he found what he was looking for. He settled back in the chair, not able to help the smile that spread across his face as he read the title of the book in his hands, 'The Art of War', and settled back to read it with a quietly muttered, "Damn you, Spencer Reid."

~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: So there is chapter 1, chapter 2 to come soon! I’m super excited about this guys XD

And if anyone wants to be tagged for future updates please let me know <3

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sondepoch · 5 years ago

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Chapter 6

Written in the Stars (Lucifer x Angel!Reader)

Four thousand years is a long time. In the absence of your most cherished friend, it feels even longer. But when a certain student exchange program in the Devildom reunites you and Lucifer, things aren't the same. Because four thousand years of separation is a long time. And the love you once felt for Lucifer has changed into something different—something forbidden. But that might not even be your biggest problem, because with each passing day, your holy wings are turning blacker and blacker.

MASTERLIST

You're in your element.

All of you, really.

The demons love Solomon—well, "love." Most of them still avoid him, never really having taken the effort to look past the shadiness of his outward personality, but the few demons that have stuck around have been added to his collection of pacts, and they have iron-tight bonds with the sorcerer. You've never seen him so pleased.

And then there's Simeon: probably one of the most goodhearted angels even in the Celestial Realm, so blissfully kind that even the demons have grown used to him and his little antics. Of course, it absolutely helps that the angel is nowhere near as innocent as anyone expected, constantly keeping the demons on their toes, but they seem to consider that thrill an added bonus to his company.

Luke...well, Luke might be the one having the hardest time, if you're perfectly honest. He still gets teased by the lower demons for his youthful appearance, but once they grew to learn that he was more bark than bite, even they began to relax with the insults. By now, the angel boy is quite happy, with Beel readily available to taste whatever treats he produces, and Barbatos always equipped with a new "recipe he doesn't have time to make but would like to see made."

And of course, there's you.

Well, you always knew that R.A.D. would be a blast. Even if the lower demons hadn't grown to love you for your bubbly nature (a fresh change, they say), you had the entire House of Lamentation to keep you entertained. And not to mention the fact that you and Lucifer grew involved at the beginning of the year—that thought alone still sends a flutter of butterflies to your stomach.

But you can't think of Lucifer like that right now.

No, Lucifer is the enemy.

"MC, catch!" Luke exclaims, tossing two water balloons your way, which you somehow manage to grab without popping them on contact. "Everybody ready?"

You glance around at your teammates: the nine demons remaining alongside you, Simeon, Solomon, and Luke. Everybody has two water balloons in their hands, and your faces are all rock hard with the memory of your comrades who have fallen at the hands of the enemy team.

A firm frown fixes its way onto your face when you recall how Belphie and Beel had cornered you from the treetops earlier, and had almost released an entire bucket full of liquid onto your shoulders before you bribed your way out with promises of paying for dinner next time the three of you go to Ristorante Six.

"Alright, split into teams!" A demon shouts, and then you're at Solomon's side. The mage enchanted your body earlier with a weightlessness spell that makes it even easier to sprint around and evade balloons, and you're not about to leave his side after he already helped you out once. "And go!"

Wordlessly, you and the mage begin sprinting along the treeline, both of you harnessing the full strength of Solomon's enchantment to jump and land in the treetops, where you have the best view of what's going on below.

"What if someone else is in the trees?" You ask, making a long leap from one tree branch to the next. Your figure peaks out over the treeline every so often, but the giant oaks are so high up that you doubt anyone will see.

"Shouldn't be a problem. Demons don't like using spells to boost their bodies, and Diavolo said that shifting out of human forms will lead to an instant game-over for that person."

You nod, continuing the journey forward in silence.

The other demons may be taking this lightly, but for you (and the rest of your dormmates in Purgatory Hall), this is your only shot—and you all plan to win.

You briefly recall the assembly this morning from when Levi took the mic. At the time, you'd been shocked that the shut-in otaku was willingly giving a speech in front of the entire student body, but you quickly realized that this was a major source of his ego. At the end of every sentence, as Levi explained (probably for the thousandth time, since he remarked that this was an annual occurrence) the rules of the Water Wars, cheers would erupt from the entire student body.

It took a message from Lucifer to calm everyone down enough for you to actually learn the rules of the Water Wars, but they were simple enough.

There are only four rules.

Rule 1: No switching sides. Everyone is assigned to either the Southern Water Fortress or the Northern Water Fortress, based on which half of the campus their dorms are on. Friendly fire, even if accidental, is grounds for "Water death"—a fancy phrase Levi coined for being 'out,' but you're determined not to let it come to that.

Rule 2: No leaving the R.A.D. campus. Yep, for the annual Water Wars, Levi has clearance to use the entire R.A.D. (buildings included!), though the students who are more interested in playing will stay towards the center.

Rule 3: Participants must get one 'kill' every half hour. Evidently, the entire Water Wars game was framed in the image of an actual military war, so getting someone out counts as a kill, and being killed yourself really only means that you're out of the game. Rule 3 is what prevents students from hiding during the entire game, since it only lasts one day, and is enforced through an enchantment spell everyone was bound to at the start of the game.

Rule 4: Avoid killing. And now this is probably the only rule you actually have a problem with, since it only says "avoid" killing without explicitly prohibiting it, but Simeon reassured you that demons won't actually take it to heart.

But if Rules 1 through 3 attempt to create a semblance of order, the subtle openness of Rule 4 wrecks it all, perhaps the only reason why these Water Wars have begun to feel like actual war.

And Lucifer is the enemy.

It's nearing the end of the day, and both teams have suffered heavy losses. The enemy team is exclusively the remaining members of the House of Lamentation and some other odd demons, while your team's numbers are even fewer. But that's why you and Solomon are going straight to their base—to eliminate the brothers before they can eliminate you.

You glance at your wrist, where there's a timer that dictates how long ago your last kill was. Eighteen minutes.

"How much time is left for you?" You ask Solomon when the Southern Water Fortress becomes visible. It looks empty, almost completely abandoned, and the sight worries you.

"I need to make a kill within ten minutes," He mutters back, squinting at the ground in case any lingering demons are foolishly wandering around.

You don't bother.

This is the endgame, less than twenty people left on both teams after the eight-hundred that started the game, and no one who's lasted this long will be making careless mistakes.

"Ready?" You call to Solomon when the fortress grows close enough for the two of you to jump onto it. For a moment, you worry that his human body won't be able to take the force of the collision, before realizing that he's not stupid enough to allow something so trivial to kill him.

He nods.

The two of you jump, landing weightlessly in the heart of the enemy fortress not seconds later. Staying back to back, you slowly begin walking around until you realize that your earlier worries have indeed become reality.

"They abandoned their fortress."

"Damn," Solomon mutters, standing up straight after he realizes you're right. "Shit. Five minutes before Rule 3 gets me out."

"Same," You mutter worriedly, seeing that the timer has approached twenty-four minutes on your wrist.

But before either of you can further comment, an announcement from Diavolo interrupts you both, his figure lighting up the sky over the R.A.D. campus.

"Greetings, students!" He exclaims happily, arms crossed with a pleasant grin stretched across his face. "At this point, there are less than ten students remaining in Leviathan's annual Water Wars!" You hear a cheer go up, but you can't tell where it's coming from. "To keep with tradition, the formal betting will now begin! More interestingly, it is now exclusively exchange students versus demons, with three exchange students defending the Northern Team and seven demons remaining in the Southern Team!"

You and Solomon exchange wary looks.

Shit.

"In light of this turn of events, your host Leviathan has decided to refill both fortresses with holy water and hexed water! The rules of elimination have been altered: to eliminate an exchange student, you must tag them with hexed water; to eliminate a demon, you must tag them with holy water. That will be all! The next update will come in either one hour when this session of the annual Water Wars comes to a close or when there is a winner!"

Double shit.

"Um, won't holy water kill a demon if it touches them or something?" Solomon asks. "And won't the same thing happen with angels and hexed water?"

"Not quite," You murmur, grabbing Solomon's arm and using all your strength to jump up with the sorcerer, the enchantment carrying you high into the sky where you can already see a group of demons returning to refill their water balloons. The two of you float to the ground right in front of their fortress, realizing that you're in for an all-out battle. "It'll sting a lot, but that's about it. Levi is probably only doing it to make us scared so that we fight even harder."

"Alright…" Solomon trails off, nodding his head hesitantly. "So, what's our current plan for those demons heading straight for us?"

"The reason they're returning to their base is because they need hexed water to get us out, right? That means they can only tag us with normal water right now," You respond, grabbing your two sad-looking water balloons.

Solomon nods, grabbing your arm. "Ready?"

"Ready."

And then the two of you have jumped forward with all your strength, soaring over the demons and their looks of utter shock as you begin the return to the Northern Water Fortress.

***

You and Solomon had managed to reset your Rule 3 timers on your journey back, both of you dropping water balloons on an unsuspecting Mephistopheles. It hadn't counted as a kill, but it had worked to give the two of you an additional thirty minutes.

On your return journey, you'd been completely cautious, making every effort to avoid demons for the sake of your own protection.

It seems that Simeon, on the other hand, went all-out.

"I'm not sure how they got here before you did, but the Southern team attacked our fortress!" He exclaims with his usual pleasant smile, sliding you both water balloons filled with holy water. You would worry at his revelation, but he says it with such a calm demeanor that you can't help but be suspiciously at ease as well.

"How did you manage to evade them?" You ask, squishing a balloon experimentally.

"Evade?" Simeon asks, shaking his head with a smile. "Luke and I attacked them, of course! Though Luke sacrificed himself to take Beel out. The lower demons came in range of the water cannons, so I managed to get them out like that—but I actually had to venture out to fight the rest of the brothers." He shakes his head, frowning. "I was only able to get Mammon and Satan. Lucifer is still out there."

Who put this overpowered angel on defense? You can't help but wonder, realizing that he's successfully reduced the entire enemy team to one demon in a single attack.

"Simeon, you're amazing!" You exclaim, wrapping him in an excited hug. Before, your team was the underdog—but with only one demon on the other side, your chance at victory has never been higher!

"What about the rest of the brothers?" Solomon asks. "Levi, Asmo, Belphie—are they already out?"

"Levi couldn't play, since he's hosting the Water Wars. I think Asmo got out in the morning because he didn't want to play and risk ruining his face and Belphie…" You actually don't know about Belphie. "I'm guessing he fell asleep and also got out because of Rule 3."

"So that means…"

"Right."

There's only one enemy left.

"Alright," You say, crossing your arms. "Then let's make a plan."

In the end, it's really Simeon who makes the entire plan while you and Solomon stare at him in awe, wondering whether he was a battle commander in a past life. The angel's reasoning is perfect, and he thinks of everything: a counterstrategy, four different what-if scenarios, and a plan to throw Lucifer off-guard. And it absolutely helps that he still remembers everything about the fallen Morningstar, using his current knowledge of the demon to even pinpoint where Lucifer must be right now.

And, from your position in the treetops, it seems that Simeon was right.

You wave at the angel subtly, keeping movement minimal to not draw attention. He's hundreds of meters away, but you can still make out the subtle nod he gives you and Solomon, all three of you now in-position for the plan.

As expected, Lucifer is standing in the middle of an open field, arms crossed, with a bucket of water balloons next to him. His pride won't allow him to seek out the enemy on their terms, so he's forced the three of you to come to him, and now he waits. You know all too well that he's waiting for a single one of you to make a sound, so that he can pinpoint your location and throw a balloon filled with hexed water your way to knock you out. But you won't give him that chance. You bend your knees, hands firm around the two water balloons in your palms.

Ready, you mouth to Simeon. Solomon must do the exact same thing, because in seconds, the angel is moving—your own cue to begin the assault.

Simeon stays low on the ground, zig-zagging his way toward Lucifer as the demon pauses and aims, focusing on the angel while Solomon makes his own lunging jump forward with three haphazard balloon tosses.

Lucifer manages to dodge all three, barely taking a second to grab a balloon and knock Solomon out with it—the impact of the collision dropping Solomon's body to the ground, and you can't help but wince—before he's back to focusing on Simeon.

With the demon's brief shift off balance, you recognize your cue to make your jump out of the treetops, soaring over Lucifer while Simeon draws ever closer, and—

Oh no.

You can feel the precise movement when Solomon's enchantment wears off, likely caused by the sorcerer's sudden unconsciousness, and Simeon pauses for a moment to glance worriedly up at your flailing form. You've already jumped, but your body is no longer weightless, and you're charging headfirst at Lucifer with gravity pulling you down all the way.

Sensing Simeon's hesitation, the firstborn demon wastes no time in delivering a swift throw straight to Simeon's chest, the added sting of the hexed water crumpling Simeon to the ground in a hiss.

Still flying through the air, you decide that it's too late to turn back, so you do your best to take aim and throw your balloons at Lucifer, now approaching him directly overhead. Powered by your strength, the balloon cuts through the air faster than you, and it makes a streaming sound as if approaches Lucifer overhead, and it's so close to hitting him, just another hundred feet and he'll be out, and you're so close and—

Damn it.

Hearing the sound, Lucifer looks up, only briefly stunned by the fact that it must look like you're falling out of the sky armed with water balloons. His eyes widen, realizing that both his hands are empty, and then he comes up with perhaps the most frustrating solution he could possibly think of: throwing the entire bucket of hexed water balloons up at you, the pink and purple and yellow balloons soaring up into the air at top speed.

When they collide with the two balloons from your own throw, the sudden stop after such overwhelming speed is nothing short of chaos.

Seven hells.

The balloons collide in a deafening pop! that sprinkles holy water and hexed water everywhere in a mini-explosion: onto you, onto Lucifer, and every inch of space in between.

Your body streams through the suspended water particles in the air, and you hiss at the sensation of hexed water. On the ground, Lucifer is wincing with the same pain, feeling holy water sizzle on his skin—but really, that should be the least of either of your problems because your jump was extremely well-aimed and any second now gravity is going to your body all the way and you're going to collide with Lucifer and—

Goddammit—really, can you catch a break?

The two of you groan in pain, skin hurting from the holy and hexed water, bodies aching from you literally crashing into Lucifer from almost a thousand feet up in the air.

"Are—are you okay?" You manage to ask him, wincing as you try to stand up, only collapse onto his chest again.

"All...good…" He mutters, groaning. "And you?"

"S-same," You manage to stutter, holding your head.

And then you both black out.

***

Today's dinner is served in the House of Lamentation, with the food prepared by Luke and Beel.

At the beginning of the school year, you would all eat in your own dorms, separate from one another. But by the end of the second week of school, there was no point to it. You would always be texting the brothers on a group chat, Solomon would always be video calling Asmo, and it got to the point where even Luke, with his self-proclaimed hatred of demons, was texting Beel on his D.D.D.

Simeon and Lucifer got together and agreed that, to cut down on everyone's phone usage at the dinner table, your dorms would begin eating dinner together once a week. And then it turned into twice a week. Soon, thrice a week. And then it was every other day, and now the only time you guys don't eat together is on weekends.

But today, there's a competitive edge in the air, all of you having come fresh from the Water Wars. (Well, others did. You, Lucifer, Simeon, and Solomon were all temporarily stored in the infirmary until you regained consciousness.)

"Oh please, Asmo." Solomon crosses his arms, tapping his fork on his plate while Beel brings the dishes from the kitchen over. "You were out in the first half hour, there's no reason for you to act all cocky."

"Excuse me!" Asmo gasps dramatically, crossing his arms. "What if someone threw something at my face?! I know you're okay with being knocked out, but I have to look perfect all the time. You could never understand, Solomon."

"Alright," You interrupt, leaning back in your chair. "But I'm sure we all know that our team actually won, right? Lucifer totally lost to me."

"Those are bold claims, MC." Lucifer regards you with a smirk. "If I recall, I wasn't the one who was completely soaked to the bone afterward. Look, your hair is still wet."

"Shut it, Luci." You scowl. "The only reason it even counted as a tie was because gravity did all your work for you when I fell through the water. How did that feel, hm? To know that, if not for the Devildom's natural forces, then you would have lost?"

"Wasn't it you who came crashing into me, though? You needed me to break your fall. Are all your plans so thoughtless?"

"Only because Solomon's enchantment spell wore off!"

"And you didn't think of that as a possibility? Tsk, how disappointing."

"Hey!" You protest, crossing your arms. Lucifer still wears that devilish smile, daring you to continue. And you absolutely would, if not for Simeon.

"Now, now. No need to be upset, little lamb." Simeon pats your head, frowning slightly at the dampness before his lips curve upward once more. "We all know he's simply jealous because he knows we were the rightful winners."

"Simeon!"

A wave of laughter rises from the table as you continue to taunt each other, only finding eventual peace when Luke brings out the last of the food. You mindlessly take spoonfuls of whatever looks good, your plate a mixed assortment of Celestial and Devildom food. It took two months to get to this point, but you've finally grown used to the local cuisine.

Everyone seems extra talkative today, the excitement of the earlier events still not worn off. Levi chatters animatedly about everything that happened, regaling you with all the details you weren't able to see in person.

"Still, though. I can't believe no one thought to dry you off," Simeon tuts disapprovingly, a frown present on his face. "I hope you don't fall sick, little lamb."

"Oh, right!" Mammon exclaims, glancing at you. "I forgot that angels fall sick so easily. How ya doin', MC? All good there?"

"I feel fine," You say, stretching. "I think falling onto Lucifer was worse. He's not comfortable."

But as if on cue, you suddenly cough, a shiver following soon after.

Simeon sighs, his frown deepening.

The rest of dinner passes by quickly, but no one's in a rush to leave. As with tradition, the Water Wars took place on the third Friday of the second month of school, and no one has any plans for the evening.

The eleven of you end up spaced out over various couches (with Belphie napping on the floor) in the common room, chatting aimlessly about all the projects you have coming up. As usual, Mammon keeps trying to convince you all to play card games—and thus, to gamble on them—but Lucifer shuts him down quick enough.

Another violent cough is ripped from your throat, the room going silent at your momentary struggle.

"Little lamb?" Simeon questions, concern present on his face. "Are you sure you're alright? You know that this is how all our illnesses start, and I don't want—"

Another coughing fit comes from you, only stopping when Simeon moves forward to rest his hand on your back. "Little lamb?" He repeats, voice gentle.

"I, um…" You place your hand over your chest, where it still tingles from all your coughing. "I don't feel too good."

Simeon brings a hand to your forehead, and when he steps back, his frown is even deeper. He turns around, glancing at the brothers. "I'm going to take her back. Her forehead isn't incredibly hot, but it's warmer than usual."

But Lucifer shakes his head. "You know how cold Devildom nights get, Simeon. The journey back will only make things worse." He glances at you, worry written into his features. "It may be best if she spends the night here."

Simeon looks hesitant about the idea, still incredibly aware that the exchange students dorm separate from demons for a reason, but when he sees you shiver, he relents.

"I'll fetch her things," He says, unclasping his Celestial cloak in favor of using it to cover your body as a blanket. "Solomon, Luke, let's go."

"I'll come, too!" Asmo exclaims, jumping up as soon as his eyes settle on Simeon's bare shoulders. An amused smile dawns on the angel's face at the realization, but he humors the fifth-born and allows Asmo to tag along as he ushers the rest of the residents of Purgatory Hall out, Asmo practically clinging to his arm the whole time.

When they're gone, the air in the room changes.

"Are you alright?" Lucifer asks, moving to sit next to you on the couch. His lips ghost over your forehead, earning a small groan of protest from Mammon at the PDA. Even you're surprised at it—given that Lucifer has never liked showing affection so openly, even when it's as small as this—but when you look into his eyes, you see genuine worry.

"I'm fine," You respond, laughing a little. "Don't kiss me, or you'll fall sick, too."

"Demons don't fall sick as easily as angels," Satan comments from the other side of the room, leaving to give you some privacy. The other brothers soon follow suit.

Lucifer watches them leave, waiting until they're all gone before he pulls you into his lap, pressing his forehead to yours. "Excited to spend the night here?"

You laugh lightly, leaning into his warmth. Even with Simeon's thick cloak wrapped around your shoulders, you feel undeniably cold, and you shiver in the demon's arms.

"Still cold?" Lucifer asks. You nod, and he lifts you. (You have to stop yourself from gasping when you realize that he's carrying not only your body weight, but the weight of your Celestial cloak, plus the weight of Simeon's even-heavier cloak.) "We have a guest room in the House of Lamentation, so I'll set you up for the night in there."

"I can walk," You say, pouting lightly as he carries you up the stairs, but Lucifer ignores all your protests.

"You're sick," He justifies, entering a room you've never seen and setting you down on the bed. He goes as far as to tuck you into the covers, batting your hands away when you try to do it yourself. "Rest and sleep is the best remedy for a common illness like this. If we were in the Celestial Realm, I'd get you some medicine, but…"

"Luci," You reach your hand out of the blankets, slipping it into Lucifer's. "Don't stress. I'm fine."

You hold back another round of coughs, but not for long, and in half a minute, you're in a seated position once more, coughing into oblivion with no signs of stopping.

"Shower? Do you think a shower will help?" He asks as he helps you lie down, his eyebrows furrowed. "Or do you want warm water? I can get you some more blankets, too, but if you want some—"

"Lucifer," You interrupt, silencing him with a hand. "I'll be fine by tomorrow morning, really. I'm not as sick as you think."

But he's far from convinced.

"Fine, do you really want to know what might help me right now?" He nods, crossing his arms, ready to travel to the ends of hell to get you whatever you say you desire. "You. Come and lie next to me."

You tug him into bed, giving him no chance to retaliate as you snuggle into his side.

"Simeon will be returning…" He begins, hesitant.

"Shush," You say.

You close your eyes, forgetting how cold you are when Lucifer silently wraps his arms around you, keeping an ear open for the sound of a message on his D.D.D. or any approaching footsteps. But the only thing you register is the soft sensation of his hands as they go up to stroke your hair, and the feather-light kiss he lays against your forehead.

"Get well quickly," He murmurs softly, pressing his lips against yours as if he knows that you're already drifting off, and the action is more than enough to keep all bad thoughts away from your dreams as you're pulled into a deep slumber.

***

Simeon didn't leave your side the entire night.

Angels certainly fall sick more often than demons, but it's still unpleasant whenever it happens—and the last time Simeon had seen you shiver this violently was six centuries ago.

He frowns as another gasping cough tears its way through your lungs, your frame curled into itself as you try to stop the sickness from progressing, and a wave of sympathy washes over Simeon's heart.

Being sick is never pleasant.

But it seems that he's not the only one concerned for your well-being.

"You don't need to watch her from all the way over there," The angel calls, not bothering to turn around and face the demon standing at the door. "Come inside, Lucifer."

Simeon hears the firstborn hesitate before he finally accepts the request, quietly walking over to the other side of the bed.

"How is she?" Lucifer asks, raising a hand to your hair, brushing the loose tresses out of your face. You flinch at the contact, but your body leans in to the additional source of warmth soon enough.

"Worse. She began shivering around midnight. I think her fever started up two hours later. It broke for a while in between, but…"

"It's back."

Simeon nods, tightening his grip on your fingers as he holds your hand, thumb brushing over the knuckles as you sleep. He glances upward, trying to catch Lucifer's eyes, but the darkness is too overpowering. The moonlight falls into the room at the perfect angle, illuminating your body but neither the angel nor the demon, the two men as hidden from each other as their thoughts.

He watches with bated breath as Lucifer's hand trails from your hair to your cheek, gently stroking the skin in soothing circles, just how Simeon had done an hour ago.

"She's beautiful," Simeon comments, more to fill the silence than anything.

"She is," Comes Lucifer's response, a confirmation, but it's something more than that. It's an affirmation, a silent you're right, and you've done well that comes from the guardian of old to the guardian of new.

And then the angel doesn't bother saying anything else, because the silence that wraps around Simeon and Lucifer isn't a veil of awkwardness or edge, but one of serenity. Their faces are tranquil as they watch over your figure, at peace as they bask in the quiet knowledge that the bond they share—two guardians, past and present, connected through you—is something that words can never convey. Their bond goes deeper than brothers, deeper than the love they have for one another and deeper than any materialistic birthright that could bind them together: no, they are bound to each other by their love for you, pure as an angel in Simeon's case, passionate as a demon in Lucifer's.

The demon bends low against the bed, cupping your jaw gently with his hand to lay a chaste kiss against your forehead. It looks innocent, sweet; but Simeon knows the truth.

As Lucifer's lips ghost over you, you begin to stir in the slightest, eyes fluttering open as you look up for the first time since falling asleep. "Luci?" You ask, though it's more of a quiet mumble than anything.

"I'm here," He mumbles, leaning back. "Go back to sleep, MC. Save your strength."

But you don't heed his words, tugging insistently on his sleeve before he can draw your hand away. Your eyes are clouded with drowsiness, but your request is clear: "Come closer, Luci. Lie down with me."

There's a moment of silence, one where Simeon presumes the demon is raising his eyebrows in shock at the boldness of your request, before he lowers his head. The moonlight catches his eyes just the slightest, and Simeon can make out the question in his gaze—the silent May I? that Lucifer is requesting.

Simeon smiles. "Go ahead."

Lucifer is stiff as he shifts onto the bed, your body embracing him instantly with no regard for Simeon next to you in your compromised state. Your chest is soon rising and falling in a calm rhythm once more, arms wrapped tight around Lucifer's waist as you press into his warmth, but the demon is more preoccupied with Simeon than anything else. Now, in the moonlight, Lucifer's face is completely bare—the angel is the one who is concealed.

"Simeon, I—"

"You don't need to pretend," Simeon cuts him off, a soft smile present on his lips. "I already know, Lucifer."

"You...know?" Lucifer asks, voice incredulous.

Simeon can't help but laugh a little at that, the sound soft as it leaves his lips. He smiles, even though he knows that Lucifer can't see it in the darkness. "Being her guardian for four thousand years has taught me how to read MC well. She hides the truth with her lips, but not her actions. Even Solomon has figured it out."

For a moment, Lucifer is left speechless, evidently not having expected this of all things. And then, Simeon feels guilty for having his face hidden by the darkness and he sits on the bed, facing Lucifer where they can both have an honest conversation illuminated by moonlight.

"How long?" Lucifer asks, relaxing the slightest when he sees the kindness in Simeon's smile. "How long have you known?"

"As long as this has been going on, I suppose." Simeon taps his chin. "Though I only grew confident in my deduction that night before school started, when you called and covered for her."

Lucifer nods, remembering the night well.

And now, it's Simeon's turn for a question.

"Do you love her the way she loves you?" He asks, though he suspects he knows the answer.

"No," Lucifer murmurs, looking down at you fondly. "I love her more."

"I'm sure she would say the same thing."

"I don't think it's possible to love anyone the way I love her," Lucifer responds, raising his eyes back up to Simeon's. For once, the angel realizes that Lucifer isn't trying to hide any of his emotions behind his wall of pride, and everything is evident on his face: the love he harbors for you, the adoration, the inexplicable infatuation that nothing seems to surpass. "A part of me suspected that you knew," Lucifer comments, twirling a strand of hair between his fingers. "MC told me that you never asked questions, so that meant that you either hadn't noticed anything at all or you were consciously letting us be. And you've always been…" The edges of Lucifer's lips curl upward. "Observant."

"I wanted her to tell me when she felt ready," Simeon whispers. It's the truth—he knows that if he were to ask you an outright question, you wouldn't lie to him. "And I wanted to give her the option of keeping the secret. I can't imagine this relationship…"

"You can't imagine it has a happy ending."

Simeon nods quietly, dropping his gaze.

He knew from the start that this would happen. When you begged the High Seraphs to send you to the Devildom for Diavolo's exchange program, your heart only thought of Lucifer platonically—but that was before the element of temptation had been introduced in your relationship. When you used to both be two holy beings, proud and pure, it was unsurprising that only a friendship blossomed between you two. But when Lucifer's wings turned black, his nature changed as well, and four thousand years had only furthered your subconscious desires for the man.

And the High Seraphs knew it, too.

Part of Simeon's role as your guardian was to save you from temptation, to keep you walking the holy path and to halt any potential relationship between you and Lucifer. But he had never sworn it. And so when he saw the light in your eyes as you talked about the demon, he knew that he would not pry you away from the man who made you so happy.

Because he knew that in the end, the two of you would be separated regardless. So why not allow you the mercy of happiness in between?

"That night she left Purgatory Hall crying. It was two months ago, but I'm certain you remember. That night, she went to you. Tell me, Lucifer." Simeon's eyes darken, an occurrence rarer than a blue moon, but Lucifer doesn't flinch as their eyes meet. "Were you the cause for her tears that night?"

There's a moment of silence between the two, Simeon's protective instincts over you colliding with Lucifer's natural urges to shield you away, but Lucifer finally speaks.

"You are asking if I hurt her, correct?"

A nod.

"I did not." Lucifer casts his eyes away. "But I was inadvertently the reason she was crying."

A spark of curiosity lights Simeon's eyes for a moment, but it's gone as soon as it arrives. He does not seek forth anything beyond what is necessary, and the temptation for answers is one that cannot influence him. "Very well," He says, lips curved upward. "If you have not hurt her, then the two of you have my blessing."

Lucifer smiles.

The look in his eye is amused, and Simeon understands the reason for it. A relationship blessed by an angel is fated to succeed, it is said. Neither of the two know if this is truth or merely a myth cultivated from the heavens above, but both want to believe in it.

"Blessing a relationship that is doomed to fail," Lucifer mutters. "You have always had a strange sense of humor, Simeon."

"I have still yet to see a failed union that was blessed by an angel. Who knows? Perhaps, there will be happiness for you both in this."

"Perhaps," Lucifer responds.

The two of them remain in silence for the rest of the night, all things that needed to be said having been said. They only speak again to soothe you in hushed whispers when your figure begins to tremble particularly violently, or your cough grows especially bad. By the time the sun has begun to rise, you've broken out into a cold sweat, your entire body shaking as you try, in vain, to get warm.

"Are you leaving?" Lucifer asks when Simeon finally gets up, surprise written onto his features.

"Not quite. The High Seraphs gave me some medicine to use in case of an emergency...I know that a common cold such as this hardly constitutes as an emergency, but I'll deal with them later if I need to fetch more."

Lucifer nods, bidding Simeon farewell while the angel promises to return with Solomon and Luke, hoping that by the time he can bring you medicine, you'll be woken and eager to see your friends.

"Go," The demon says when Simeon hesitates. Only a final promise actually convinces the angel to depart: "I won't leave her side until you return."

***

As expected, mornings in the House of Lamentation are chaotic. Add all the residents of Purgatory Hall into the mix, and the house can hardly go a full ten minutes without a shout or the sound of something breaking.

Thankfully, both the parental figures of the dorms are locked by your side, tending to you while the brothers (and Luke and Solomon) pop in and out of the room.

"How long does the medicine take to work?" Lucifer asks impatiently, crossing his arms as he stares down at you. Simeon administered the aid over half an hour ago, but you've yet to show any signs of getting better. If anything, you've gotten worse.

"Relax," Simeon comments, amused at his friend's impatience. "It should kick in any second now. We'll know when it's working."

"How?" Lucifer asks, tapping his foot on the floor.

"Goodness, Lucifer," Simeon tuts disapprovingly. "Have you no recollection of how Celestial medicines work? We know it's kicked in when her angel form materializes. The natural boost to her magical power will force whatever toxins are causing this illness out of her system, and—"

"Her angel form will materialize?" Lucifer asks, with an intensity that Simeon doesn't understand.

"Yes. And then we'll begin to see symptoms of—oh look, it's already begun!"

Simeon watches with a pleasant smile as he recognizes the familiar light overtake your body, observing as you transform from human to angel. He hums approvingly, noting that it's been quite some time since he's actually seen you in this form.

And then the light fades.

Simeon's smile drops.

"Little lamb?" He whispers, eyes round in confusion. It quickly fades into horror, and then fear. This can't be right. His eyes are failing him, surely. How can it be possible that your wings, so pure and white and precious, have turned black?

The angel glances up at Lucifer, desperate for answers, for solace, for help, but the sympathy in the demon's eyes stops Simeon completely.

Lucifer knew.

There's another moment of confusion: a second of agony where Simeon simply doesn't understand why you would keep something so important from him but would tell someone else, why you would hide a change that must have torn your heart apart, why you would act like nothing is wrong when something clearly is.

And then the pain clears, and there's a flash of understanding where the truth dawns upon him. Not just the reasoning for your blackened wings, but truly everything. Why you never told him about your wings. Why you hid your relationship with Lucifer. Why you thought you could protect him if he never found out.

The two men glance at each other, eyes communicating more than words can ever say as they mutually vow to protect even this secret.

But then the sound of footsteps—the sound that they've both heard over ten times in the past hour alone—draws nearer once again, and they realize that while they can protect your secret, the moment the other residents of Purgatory Hall find out, it's over.

The door! Simeon's eyes seem to shout. But neither the angel nor the demon can move as they stand frozen at the sound of the footsteps drawing nearer. It roots them to the spot, freezing them like an enchantment stronger than anything they've ever experienced.

"Hey, guys!" The familiar voice of Luke calls out, drawing closer and closer. Simeon wills his legs to move, his mouth to say something, but his body isn't his own anymore. "Breakfast is ready!"

And then Luke is in the room.

Simeon doesn't think he'll ever forget the deafening silence of this moment, as the secret of your blackened wings that you've tried so desperately to keep hidden comes unraveled.

Because in one second, Luke is screaming at the sight, flinching at your impurity, and calling Michael's name at the top of his lungs, summoning the archangel in what he doubtlessly thinks is the right thing to do.

We failed her, Simeon and Lucifer seem to say to each other as they maintain eye contact, unmoving despite the sudden chaos that has gripped the room. They don't move, nor do they speak, nor do they flinch when the holy light of Michael's spirit materializes next to them, the rest of the brothers soon following suit.

I'm sorry.

The words are meant for you, a quiet beg for forgiveness that Simeon couldn't protect your secret. Would it have been different if he had known the truth from the start?

It matters not. I have failed her.

The angel's turmoil is written in his eyes, in his furrowed brow, in his slumped shoulders. But as the world around him continues to move in slow motion, he closes his eyes, sending a quiet prayer to God that this situation may somehow be salvaged.

Though in his heart, Simeon already knows that all is lost.

MASTERLIST

Word count: 7.1k

Notes: Posting this really late at night because today was wild :( Also i took a nap in the afternoon and i am like 90% sure that it was just a graphic sex dream (straight up porn, but like mild plot) which is extremely interesting because i am not a horny person and he’s the last brother i would expect to dream about but maybe its a sign that i should give him sum attention

Comment & Like

Next Update: 6/9/20

I do not own the rights to Obey Me! or any of the characters within it.

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writinggeisha · 5 years ago

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We’ve got rules and standards for everything we include in our novels—how to start those novels, how to increase tension, how to introduce characters, how to format, what to include in dialogue, how to punctuate dialogue, what to exclude from the first chapter. And we have rules for numbers. Or maybe we should call all these rules conventions.

This article covers a few common specifics of using numbers and numerals in fiction. I’m just going to list the rules here, without much explanation, laying out those that you’ll typically make use of in a novel. Keep in mind that there are always exceptions. For the most part, you’ll want to stick to the standards to make the read smooth and easy for the reader and create consistency within the manuscript.

Yet we’re talking fiction here, not a treatise or dissertation or scientific finding. You have choices. And style choices sometimes get to stomp all over the rules. If you want to flout the rules, do so for a reason and do so consistently every time that same reason is applicable in the manuscript.

For a comprehensive list of the rules concerning numbers, check out the Chicago Manual of Style or another style guide.

______________________

General Rules

__ Spell out numbers from zero through one hundred. You could argue for zero through nine, as is recommended for AP style, but do note that the recommendations in the Associated Press Stylebook are primarily for newspaper and magazine writing. Some rules are different for fiction.

You could also make a style choice to spell out almost all numbers, even if that conflicts with this and other rules.

Use numerals for most numbers beyond one hundred. While this is the standard, there are definitely exceptions to this one.

The witch offered Snow White one crisp, dewy apple.

Bobby Sue sang thirty-two songs before her voice gave out.

The rock-a-thon lasted for just over 113 hours.

The witch offered Snow White 1 crisp, dewy apple. Incorrect

__ Spell out these same numbers (0-100) even if they’re followed by hundred or thousand. (Your characters may have reason to say or think all manner of odd numbers, so yes, zero thousand might come up, even though this isn’t a common usage in our 3-D lives.)

The forces at Wilmington were bolstered by the arrival of ten thousand fresh soldiers.

The knight had died four hundred years earlier.

But—The knight had died 418 years earlier.

“How many thousands of lies have you told?” “I’ve told zero thousand, you fool.”

__ Spell out ordinal numbers through one hundred as well—even for military units and street names. Ordinal numbers are often used to show relationship and rank.

We’d write the Eighty-second Airborne Division but the 101st Airborne Division. (Newspapers and military publications may have different conventions.)

A restaurant would be on Fifth Avenue, not 5th Avenue. Or the restaurant is on 129th Street, not One hundred and twenty-ninth Street.

A quick guide to ordinals—

no ordinal for zero twentieth first twenty-first second twenty-second third and so on . . . fourth fifth* sixth thirtieth (thirty-first, thirty-second, and so on) seventh fortieth eighth fiftieth ninth sixtieth tenth seventieth eleventh eightieth twelfth ninetieth thirteenth fourteenth one hundredth fifteenth* one thousandth sixteenth one millionth seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth

The only odd ordinals are those using fives—fifth and fifteenth. Note the letter D in both hundredth and thousandth.

__ Use full-size letters, not superscript, to mark ordinal numbers (st, nd, rd, th) written as numerals.

__ Use first, second, third and so on rather than firstly, secondly, thirdly unless your character would use this odd construction as part of her style.

__ Spell out numbers that start a sentence. If spelling creates something awkward, rewrite.

One hundred and fifteen [not 115] waiters applied for the job.

__ Hyphenate compound numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine. Do this when the number is used alone and when used in combination with other numbers.

Louise owned forty-one cars.

“I heard she owned one hundred and thirty-five diamond rings.”

__ For an easier read, when numbers are written side by side, write one as a numeral and the other as a word.

He made 5 one-hundred-pound cakes.

We lashed 3 six-foot ladders together.

__ Spell out simple fractions and hyphenate them.

He took only one-half of yesterday’s vote.

He needed a two-thirds majority to win the election.

__ For the most part, treat large numbers, made large by being paired with the words million, billion, and so on, just as you would other numbers.

Some nine [not greater than one hundred, so spelled out] million years ago, the inhabitants of Ekron migrated to our solar system.

The family had collected the pennies, 433 [greater than one hundred] million of them, over eighty years.

But for large numbers with decimals, even if the number is less than 101, use the numeral version.

The team needed 10.5 million signatures for their petition.

Yet since we want to hear the words, you could just as easily write—

The team needed ten and a half million signatures for their petition.

This last example works both for narration and dialogue. But for dialogue you could also write—

“The team needed ten point five million.”

__ Use words rather than symbols and abbreviations in dialogue and in most narrative. Symbols are a visual representation, but characters need to think and speak the words.

Use the words rather than the symbols for degree (°) and percent (%) and number (#), both in dialogue and narrative. Use the word dollar rather than the dollar sign ($) in dialogue. Do not abbreviate the words pounds or ounces, feet or inches (or yards), hours or minutes or seconds, or miles per hour (or similar words) in dialogue or narrative.

An exception might include something like stretches of text where you note the changing speeds of a car but don’t want to repeat miles per hour again and again. Your use of mph becomes a style choice.

You might find other exceptions in headers and chapter titles. You can, of course, use symbols in titles and headers if you want to. For example, in geo-political thrillers, stories that jump all over the world and back again, headers might show longitude and latitude and the degree symbol would come in handy.

If you do include full compass coordinates in the narrative, using numerals and the symbols for degrees, minutes, and seconds might be the best choice in terms of clarity and ease of reading.

“But I don’t have a million dollars.”

“Nobody gave a hundred percent.”

“The baby weighed seven pounds eleven ounces.”

“It’s fourteen degrees out there!”

The # of crimes he’d committed kept rising. Incorrect

The chasm looked at least 40 ft. wide. Incorrect

The roadster crept along at no more than 28 mph. Incorrect

Note: You’re writing fiction. Think flow in the visuals as well as in the words. What will make sense to the reader and keep him from tripping over your style choices?

Time

__ Use numerals when you include a.m. and p.m., but you don’t have to use a.m. and p.m.

It was 5:43 a.m. when he got me out of bed. Correct

It was five forty-three a.m. Incorrect

__ Use lower case letters with periods or small caps without periods for a.m. and p.m.

__ Include a space between the numbers and a.m. or p.m., but no space within a.m. or p.m.

__ Spell out numbers when you include o’clock.

But he did wait until after five o’clock to call.

__ Use numerals to emphasize exact times, except in dialogue.

She pointed out that it was still 5:43 in the morning.

“It’s four forty-three.” She looked out into the darkness. “In the morning!”

The robbery took place at 2:22 a.m.

__ Spell out words for the hour, quarter, and half hours.

The hall clock was wrong; it showed eight thirty. No, it showed eight forty-five.

__ Do not use a hyphen to join hours and minutes. I have seen advice on several Internet sites that says you do use a hyphen in such cases, except when the rest of the number is already hyphenated. So they’d have you write two-twenty but two twenty-five. This doesn’t make much sense, although there may be a style guide out there recommending such punctuation (and may provide a valid reason for it). The Chicago Manual of Style, however, does not use a hyphen (see 9.38 in the sixteenth edition). Their example is “We will resume at ten thirty.”

It was four-forty-five. Incorrect

It was four forty-five. Correct

The bomb went off at eleven-thirty. Incorrect

The bomb went off at eleven thirty. Correct

__ While we normally would never use both o’clock and a.m. or p.m. and typically don’t use o’clock with anything other than the hour, fiction has needs other writing doesn’t. The following might very well come out of a character’s mouth or thoughts—

It was five o’clock in the a.m.

“Mommy, it it four thirty o’clock yet?

Dates

__ Dates can be written a number of ways. The twenty-fifth of December, December 25, December 25, 2015, or the twenty-fifth are all valid ways of referring to the same day.

December 25th and December 25th, 2015 are incorrect. Do not use ordinal numbers for dates that include month, or month and year, written in this format. You can, however, write the twenty-fifth of December.

December 25 and December 25, 2015 would both be prounounced as the ordinal, even though the th is not written.

The exception is in dialogue.

“Your kids can’t wait for December twenty-fifth.”

__ Do not use a hyphen (actually, this in an en dash) for a range of dates that begins with the words from or between. (This rule is true of all numbers, not just dates, arranged this way.) Use the words to, through, or until with from, and and with between.

He planned to be out of town from August 15-September 5. Incorrect.

He planned to be out of town from August 15 to September 5. Correct

He planned to be out of town between August 15-September 5. Incorrect

He planned to be out of town between August 15 and September 5. Correct

He planned to be out of town August 15-September 5. Correct

__ Decades can be written as words or numbers (four- or two-digit years). Unless it’s in reference to a named era or age—the Roaring Twenties—do not capitalize the decade.

The cars from the thirties are more than classics.

Cars of the 1930s were my dad’s favorites.

The teacher played songs from the ’60s and ’70s to get the crowd in the right mood. (The punctuation is an apostrophe, not an opening quotation mark.)

__ There is no apostrophe between the year and the letter S except for a possessive.

The doctor gave up smoking back in the 1980’s. Incorrect

The doctor gave up smoking back in the 1980s. Correct

The doctor gave up smoking back in the ’80’s. Incorrect

The doctor gave up smoking back in the ’80s. Correct

BUT—She was the fifties’ [also the ’50s’] most glamorous star.

An earlier example was incorrect—She was decked out in cute 1950’s clothes, but the haircut was atrocious. Incorrect

__ Spell out century references.

He wanted to know if it happened in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century. When the guide reminded him it was the seventeen hundreds, he was even more confused.

__ Adding mid to date terms can be confusing. The general rule is that mid, as a prefix, does not get a hyphen. So midyear, midcentury, midterm, midmonth, and midthirties are all correct. (The same rules apply for other prefixes, such as pre or post, that can be used with date words.)

There are, however, exceptions—

Include a hyphen before a capital letter. Thus, mid-October.

Include a hyphen before a numeral. Thus, mid-1880s.

Include a hyphen before compounds (hyphenated or open). Thus, mid-nineteenth century and mid-fourteenth-century lore.

Note: The Chicago Manual of Style has a wonderful and comprehensive section on hyphenating words. I recommend it without reservation.

Dialogue

__ Spell out numbers in dialogue. When a character speaks, the reader should hear what he says. And although a traditional rule tells us not to use and with whole numbers that are spelled out, keep your character in mind. Many people add the and in both words and thoughts. Once again, the rules are different for fiction.

“I collect candlesticks. At last count I had more than a hundred and forty.”

“At last count I had more than one forty.”

“She gave her all, 24/7.” Incorrect

“She gave her all, twenty-four seven.” Correct

One exception to this rule is four-digit years. You can spell out years, and you’d definitely want to if your character has an unusual pronunciation of them. But you could use numerals.

“He told me the property passed out of the family in 1942.”

“I thought it was fifty-two?”

A second exception would be for a confusing number or a long series of numbers. Again, if you want readers to hear the character saying the number, spell it out. Even common numbers might be spoken differently. One character might say eleven hundred dollars while another says one thousand one hundred dollars.

If you have to include a full telephone number—because something about the digits is vital—use numerals, even in dialogue. (But if you want to emphasize the way the numbers are spoken, spell out the numbers.)

You’d use numerals rather than words because writing seven or ten words for the numbers would be cumbersome. But most of the time there is no reason to write out a full phone number.

__ Write product and brand names and titles as they are spelled, even if they contain numbers—7-Eleven, Super 8 hotels, 7UP.

Heights

__ Heights can be written in a variety of ways.

He was six feet two inches tall.

He was six feet two.

He was six foot two.

He was six two.

He was six-two. (a recommendation from some sources, although not one I’d make)

Money

__ Do not hyphenate dollar amounts except for the numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine that require them. Don’t use a hyphen between the number and the word dollars (except as noted below). Note the absence of commas.

two dollars

twenty-two dollars

two hundred dollars

two hundred twenty-two dollars or two hundred and twenty-two dollars

two thousand two hundred and two dollars

But—

a two-dollar bill

a twenty-dollar fine

a two-hundred-dollar fine

a two-hundred-and-twenty-two-dollar fine

Punctuation

__ No commas or hyphens between hours and minutes, feet and inches, pounds and ounces, and dollars and cents that are spelled out. If the meaning is unclear, rewrite.

Ben promised to be there at four thirty, but it was six twenty when he pulled into the driveway.

At seven feet three inches, he was the shortest of the Marchesa giants.

The piece of salmon weighed one pound eleven ounces, but they charged the rude customer the price for three pounds.

He owed his boss forty-two fifty.

He owed his boss forty-two dollars and fifty cents.

__ Use hyphens for compound adjectives containing numbers the same way other compound are created. They are almost always hyphenated as an adjective before the noun. Age terms, both nouns and adjectives used before nouns, are hyphenated. (Noun forms of compound words paired with the word old are hyphenated, as are adjectives paired with old that are placed before nouns.)

A two-inch hole in the street became a six-by-six-foot crater.

My two-year-old loves puppies.

My son has a two-year-old puppy.

But—My puppy is two years old.

__ No hyphen between numbers and percent.

The drink was only 60 percent beer. The rest was water. Correct

The drink was 20-percent beer. Incorrect

__ For multiple hyphenated numbers sharing a noun, include a hyphen and a space after the first number and hyphenate the last as usual.

Our Johnny couldn’t wait to tell us about the ten- and twenty-foot-tall monsters in the yard.

His sister shared details about the two- and three-headed versions that lived under her bed.

__ For the words half and quarter, use the hyphen for adjectives but not for noun forms. (Some words with half are closed compounds—halfway, halfwit—so check the dictionary.)

“Join me in a quarter hour or join me in a half hour; it’s your choice.”

Join me half an hour from now.

The half-price items were poorly made.

__ For compound words made with odd, always use a hyphen.

Thirty-odd hours later, my son finally returned home.

He’d saved some 150-odd comic books.

__ For numerals greater than 1,000, include commas after every three digits from the right (for American English). For fiction, it’s likely you’ll often round off these numbers and/or write the numbers as words, but the rule is good to know.

1,000

10,525

10,525.78

953,098,099

__ For dollar amounts written as numerals, use the period to separate dollars and cents, and include the dollar sign. But you could spell out the amount, especially if you’re rounding the number.

He needed $159.75 for the bar tab.

He needed a hundred and sixty dollars for the bar tab.

You may have been advised to always write one hundred rather than a hundred, but for fiction, we want to reflect a character’s words and style.

__ Do not add a period if a.m. or p.m. comes at the end of a sentence. Do use a comma midsentence if that is necessary.

The fire alarm was pulled at 11:58 a.m.. Incorrect

The fire alarm was pulled at 11:58 a.m. Correct

The alarm was pulled at 11:58 a.m., just before lunch. Correct

Weapons and Guns

For the most part, stick with the rules governing numbers when you write about weapons. A publisher’s style guide may overrule your choices, but you’ll want consistency either way. Keep in mind your speaker’s or viewpoint character’s familiarity with weapons. One character might know every detail about a weapon while another calls every weapon a gun.

Use only the necessary detail. For example, in fiction you might not often have cause to write The AH-64D Apache Longbow was the team’s first choice. Instead, you might write, The Longbow was the the team’s first choice. Yet before this moment in the story, you might have needed to list the equipment available to them, writing out the full name of several helicopters.

__ In both narrative and dialogue, if you use the name of the gun or ammo, spell it as the manufacturer does, including numerals and capital letters. Do the same for military weapons and tanks. Spell out the word caliber.

If you don’t use the full name, still capitalize brands and manufacturers. The designation mm is accepted in narrative.

He eyed the .357 Magnum in the loser’s shaky hand.

Anderson’s Colt .38 was under his pillow, two rooms away.

Both the Browning 9mm, his favorite, and his stacked salami sub, another favorite, were destroyed by the car crusher.

I knew she lied when she told me the M1 Abrams had been named after her father; she was much too young.

__ In dialogue, if the character is saying a variation of the name but not the name itself, you have options. Use words when doing so isn’t convoluted or cumbersome or unclear.

“Dirty Harry used a forty-four, not a three fifty-seven.”

“How would I know? Thirty aught six, thirty aught seven. What’s the difference anyway?” Deke back-whistled through his teeth. “You’ve never even picked up a rifle, have you?”

“What was it? A nine millimeter?” “A Glock 17 Compensated. New and shiny.”

Contradictory Rules

If you’ve got rules that conflict, you have a few options.

Rewrite.

Choose the option that gives clarity to the reader.

Remember that in fiction, words can almost always be substituted for numerals. When in doubt, write it out. Yeah, corny and elementary, I know. But it’s advice that’s easy to remember.

______________________

Keep in mind that characters don’t all speak or think the same way, with the same words. Let your choices reflect your characters and not only the rules. That is, sometimes the rules are less important than the way the characters express themselves.

As an example, the rules (for American English, not British English) tell us not to write years in this manner—fourteen hundred and ninety-two, with the and. But your character just may think or say a date with the and. Be true to his voice and style.

And be consistent. Create a style sheet and stick with it. Know what choice you made for your numbers in chapter six and do the same in chapter fifteen.

Fiction is different from other writing styles. We use words rather than symbols, abbreviations, and images. If you’re unsure, spell out the numbers. Put it in words.

~~~

LG’s Note: These are just conventions, not “must do’s”. I’m only posting these as guidance for myself as someone who prefers writing out numerals or anyone interested in seeing the explicit difference between the two styles - numerical and textual - laid out cleanly.

#links #tools #advice

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ayearofpike · 7 years ago

Text

The Last Vampire

Pocket Books, 1994 193 pages, 13 chapters ISBN 0-671-87264-8 LOC: CPB Box no. 1490 vol. 7 OCLC: 30146931 Released May 1, 1994 (per B&N)

Sita is a vampire, the last of her kind as far as she knows. But someone is after her, someone who has realized that she has far too much wealth and history to be as young as she appears. As she traces it back to find the ringleader, she realizes that she’s being hunted by another. Can she outwit him and survive? The book doesn’t say, but since there’s seven sequels I’m gonna say “probably.”

Ugh. This book totally killed my momentum. I didn’t want to read it, I didn’t want to keep reading it, and I don’t want to write this post now. Because now that I’m getting here, I’m realizing it’s nothing but a slow and painful slide downhill into the thorns that mark the end of Pike’s salad days with Simon & Schuster. The rest of his output under the Archway is eight sequels (at least two of which he’s said he didn’t want to write), two books of short stories, seven new novels that suffer from being rushed and squeezed into the gaps between Spooksville, and The Lost Mind. Excuse me if I don’t jump for joy at what’s offered in this five-year span.

Honestly, there’s really not a lot of story here. Maybe I can actually keep the summary short.

Sita starts out narrating in first-person present tense, which indicates (if past works are a factor of future performance) that she’s about to die. On the other hand, there’s not a concrete mode that she’s offering as a recording system; she says that she “send[s] out these words ... because it is time” (3). This particular series is one that Pike claims to have written almost entirely on autopilot, like it was available somewhere in the ether and he was the channel to get it onto the page. So we might believe that he hears the narration as he’s writing it, but the rest of the story is a little clumsy for me to believe that.

Sita doesn’t actually identify herself right away. In fact, we get two fake names before we learn the one she was born with. But it’s not from the source we would expect, given that as we meet her she is under investigation by a private detective. He points out her varied and widespread holdings, and how some of them go back more years than she claims to be old — including passports. How does he not mention some of the names on these documents? We’re supposed to believe she’s kept a fake name that she says up front she doesn’t care about long enough for somebody to get suspicious? But I’m getting pedantic and overanalytical, which is going to make me spend more time on this book than I want to. I mean moreso.

So she kills him, of course, but he doesn’t die before revealing he has a son. She can’t get into his computer despite having vast swathes of life experience and knowing more about computers than most people, so instead of taking it and brute-force hacking the password she decides to ask the son for help. So what’s the best way to do this? Vampire high school, twenty-odd years before Twilight. Only rather than the mere hundred-something child Edward Cullen, we have a five-fucking-thousand-year-old enrolling in high school so that she can seduce a kid into giving up a password that there’s no evidence he knows.

And then she gets hungry, so she drives to a truck stop in California and seduces a long-haul driver, not so much that they actually get it on but enough that she can drink some of his blood and knock him out. Sita isn’t a killer. Even though she just killed a dude and has no compunction about killing if she has to and could have DRANK SOME GODDAMNED BLOOD FROM A DUDE SHE ALREADY KILLED INSTEAD OF MAKING ANOTHER WITNESS

So she goes to school and is in class with the son, Ray, who has a girlfriend. Is that an obstacle? Not for a timeless unfeeling vampire! Neither is a PE class outside in the sun, where all she has to do to survive is wear giant dark sunglasses. Hang on, though — I actually don’t have a problem with authors retrofitting classic monsters with abilities that historically have been weaknesses, or even something totally useless like sparkles and being good at baseball. It’s pretty stupid to assume that one book by one Irish guy is the end-all be-all of worldwide vampire lore. I’m OK with her being outside in the sun.

The PE class is where she meets a sickly and sensitive young man named Seymour, and they connect immediately even though he’s only in the book for five pages at this point. She feels a connection with Ray, too, something primal and ancient, which is the only possible way I’m gonna forgive her not just grabbing the computer and getting the fuck out of Dodge. Like, Sita doesn’t even know what she’s doing in this town in Oregon in the first place (she’s always preferred warmer climates; I don’t know if that’s here or later), so maybe it’s fate or karma or some other unseen force drawing her here. Whatever it is, Ray must feel it too. She cons him into helping her move furniture late at night, but first she has to move all the furniture out of her house and into the garage. And then she has a dream about her backstory.

It all started when Sita, a seven-year-old blonde blue-eyed white girl in ancient India (seriously), had a dear friend, an eight-month-pregnant teenager seven years her senior, who had just died. Some spooky voodoo priest invoked a monster into her to scare off whatever plague was killing everyone, and it ate his face before taking residence inside the dead baby, which came to life in the corpse womb. Sita knows there’s something not right here, so her dad hands her a knife and tells her if she knows the baby’s evil, she has to be the one to kill it. Did I mention Sita is seven fucking years old? So of course she doesn’t, and the baby grows up and is smart and handsome and well-respected. But then the dudes who saw his birth start to go missing, and Sita is the last one he comes for. By this time she’s married with a kid, and the undead baby is, I don’t know, twelve, but he loves her and must have her. He offers her a choice: go with him and become like him, or die after watching him painfully and slowly kill her husband and daughter. Fucking tweens and their mood swings.

Sita wakes up when Ray comes over. They move furniture, then they drink wine, then they hot tub naked, then they don’t bang because Sita has compunctions or whatever all of a sudden. He mentions that he’s worried about his father, and she says hey, you have the password to his computer, right, so could you look at what he was working on right before he disappeared? Ray is not nearly suspicious enough about this, so they go to his office and Ray unlocks the file, which is apparently a Word document because writers don’t actually know dick about computerized records in 1994. Sita’s brilliant move here is: she tricks Ray into leaving, locks him out, and then copies the file onto a floppy disk before erasing most of it.

The file demonstrates the detective’s supremely idiotic decision to go around the back of the mysterious rich dude who is bankrolling his investigation in order to try to get more money out of the vampire. But still, there’s a fax number, and as @mildhorror has already put it so well I’m going to steal her analogy of “shitty texting.” (It’s even more awkward in Thirst, when Pike tries to clumsily retrofit it to email without changing anything else. Like, holy shit, you can check a Swiss email account in the US?) They arrange to meet on a dock, which Sita has planned so she can jump in the ocean and swim away if things go sideways. And they do: six people with automatic weapons pointing at her, another trained commando ready to do a full-body search. So Sita, with all her wisdom and sensory input and awesomeness ... just lets herself get kidnapped.

BUT THEN. Instead of riding the whole thing out so she can maybe get to whoever is above the investigator’s payer, she says she has to change her tampon and then kills one of the guards that goes into the bathroom with her and escapes with the other. At least she has the sense to threaten this dude into giving up a description before she kills him, and guess what: the mastermind behind the whole investigation is none other than her undead maker. Which, duh, but maybe I don’t have enough distance from this story.

She gets Seymour to pick her up and bring a change of clean clothes, and asks what his deal is being so sick. Turns out Seymour has HIV, from a bad blood transfusion. Don’t worry, 1994 teens, it’s nothing gross like gay sex, as Sita so sensitively asks. He takes her back to her car, and she immediately goes to Ray and tells him that he might be in danger. First smart thing this all-knowing immortal has done. After all, the first vampire, whose powers dwarf hers, has employed Ray’s dad, and if he’s gone missing it sure makes sense that the dude would go after family. If he really is the reincarnation of her husband from five thousand years ago, it makes sense that she’d care about him and want to save him like before. BUT THEN she makes him go with her to her mansion (which is a different house from the one he moved her shit into earlier, which only makes Ray mildly curious) and fucks him to sleep. Seriously, she works his body to the point where she knows he’s going to sleep for a whole day, in the house that the first vampire probably knows about and is going to corner her in.

She dreams some more backstory, this time about the rise and fall of the vampires. Over the course of something like fifty years, they kidnap people and make more of themselves, until they have an army of a thousand. But then they hear about a dude named Krishna, who is supposed to be as powerful as a god. First Vampire doesn’t like that — someone stronger than him — so they go to beat him up. Only his hidden archer manages to kill a bunch of vampires before they can overwhelm Krishna’s numbers, and so they have to agree to a one-on-one, leader-on-leader battle. With flutes. A flute-off. Whoever can flute harder wins.

OK, yeah, and they’re trying to send snakes after the other one. Of course Krishna wins, and while First Vampire is poisoned into a coma, he tells her that he’ll protect her as long as she never makes another one. Then he says something to First Vampire, and heals him, and they all leave. But then not long after that vampires start dying, and Sita bails because she knows what’s coming. She’d heard a rumor that First Vampire was burned to death in Europe, but now I guess she knows it’s not true, because he’s standing outside at sunset when Ray wakes up. Sita goes to talk to him. He confirms that in order to die with Krishna’s grace, he has to destroy all the monsters he’s made. This is at odds with his protection on Sita if she never makes another one, but First Vampire has a plan. And a flute. He flutes so hard he knocks Ray out a third-story window from a hundred yards away, and now Sita has no choice but to turn her supposedly-reincarnated husband. Tricked again!

How is Sita going to trick him back? How can she kill the first vampire without dying herself? For that, our brilliant ageless tactitian ... needs Seymour’s help. I didn’t mention that everybody knows he’s a genius and a writer, so she figures that’s gotta be the only answer for finding a loophole, because, you know, increasing number of author self-inserts as we go along. He suggests that maybe Sita needs to get First Vampire in a situation where he thinks they’ll die together, but rig it so she doesn’t. To thank him, she cures his HIV with her vampire blood, but somehow knows how to do this without accidentally turning him into a vampire.

And then — as if I wasn’t annoyed knowing I’m gonna have to read this shit for like twenty more hours — we hit page 169.

What is Sita — the last vampire, the brilliant planner, the totally emotionless eternal being — going to do to kill the first vampire while somehow saving herself and Ray? Bombs. She steals a bunch of stuff from a construction site, then welds a six-inch steel plate under a couple of chairs, under which she rigs a bomb out of dynamite. She rigs another bomb next to another chair opposite the plate-chairs, where she’ll get him to sit. The plan is: he lights the fuse, but before the big bomb goes off, she triggers the little bomb, which will launch her and Ray out of the skylight and clear of the house before the big one blows it sky-high. No, don’t worry, it’s totally gonna work, she’s got everything figured out and never makes mistakes, as evidenced by this whole book so far.

Of course he sniffs it out, and of course he’s not going to let her escape. Until she tells him the last thing Krishna said to her: “Where there is love, there is my grace.” And he figures the only reason she turned Ray is because she loves him. You know, like you do to a high-school senior when you’re five thousand years old and you’ve known him two days. So he tells them to go, and they’re just clear of the house when the bomb blows up. Only — oh shit! — Sita takes a piano leg through the chest, and Ray can’t get the whole thing out.

And then the book ends.

Do you blame me for being annoyed?

So that’s The Last Vampire, which is clearly now a misnomer. Wonder if she’ll be the last one again as this series drags along. As I recall, the first three complete the story of First Vampire, and the next three sort of stand alone. Maybe one of those is better than I remember. I fuckin’ hope so, because as it stands I am not looking forward to plugging through the rest of this shit.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

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THE COURAGE OF Y

And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended. So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science. And when the Duplo economy was an evolutionary phase. Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of your most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the system stops working when you start a company. When you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day.1 I tried to opt out of it, like music, or tea, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. You can't plan when you start a startup in college. The founders sometimes think they know.2 As little as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year. EBay didn't win by paying less for servers than their competitors. But most startups that die, die because they were living in the future.

Be a real student and not start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it was turn the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. You'll probably be talking to several investors and you manage to get one over the threshold of saying yes, it will be better for the people who pay the most for it, is not the hope of getting a better one, and actually did.3 I don't expect that to change. And not just those in the corporate world, but in software you want to work on some very engaging project.4 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we adjust to however things are, and this bit of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations. When we launched Viaweb, it seemed laughable to VCs and e-commerce was all about. In particular, I don't think we'll ever reach the point where much of what they're responding to when they lose interest in a startup, or start a real startup. If it is, it will take to become profitable.5 This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable.

But if you were using the software for them. And one of the original nodes, but by making great products. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with new ideas is not to try explicitly to, but to be an advantage. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was so rare for so long: that you could make your fortune. But they don't need to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but it can save you from an immediate threat.6 A couple million would let them get office space and hire some smart people they know from school. The place to look is where the line ends. Startup investors all know one another, and though they hate to admit it the biggest factor in their opinion of you is other investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Not just because of its prestige, but because the principles underlying the most dynamic part of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few, giant tree-structured organizations, it's now looking like the economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units.7

Most people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. Has it been net good or bad? Be conservative.8 They were the kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. At its best, starting a startup is to try.9 And this rule isn't just for the initial stages. My hypothesis is that all you have to worry about—not even Google.10 The more ambitious merely hoped to climb the same ladder faster. There was no Internet then. But I could be wrong.11 And I think that's precisely why people put it off for as long as they want to start it.12

Basically at 25 he started running as fast as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it. The amounts invested by different types of investors vary from five thousand dollars to fifty million, but the people who want to work that hard. An optimism shield has to be pierced too. It was a lot of ambivalence about them, because I tried to opt out of it, you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company. But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases.13 If you looked in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as the new model isn't delayed. How would the government decide who's a startup investor.14 So any Web-based startup get spent on today? I don't mean, of course.15 That's why there are a lot of the serendipity out of his life.16

That was a social step no one with a college education would take if they could avoid it.17 Deals are dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest, there's not a single war millionaire would be permitted. Don't click on Back.18 There are two main things you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people. That's not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the paleolithic era. Icio. The eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the original Silicon Valley startup, weren't even trying to start a startup.19 In the late nineties you could get paid huge sums of money for building the most trivial things. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house. Do not start a startup, you probably shouldn't do it. Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will seem to you that you're unlucky. Technology tends to get dramatically cheaper, but living expenses don't.

When things go well you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company.20 That sort of thing you can learn more about this I can come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. I've read that the same is true in the military—that the swaggering recruits are no more likely to discover new things, because great startup ideas tend to seem wrong. The second counterintuitive point is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you either have to spend a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness—if the idea's no good, for example, or the chronic ache of consulting. She assumed the problem was with her. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to get money.21 Individualism has gone, never to return.

So future founders may not have to accept new CEOs if they don't and you stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with investors while the others keep the company moving forward—releasing new features, increasing traffic, doing deals, getting written about—those investor meetings are more likely to get money. So in a hundred years—or even twenty—are people still going to search for information using something like the current Google?22 And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended.23 A good startup idea has to be treated as a threat to a company's survival. But if you had to change something, what would it be? Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. Investors' power comes from money. The way to become an expert on startups, but as I explained before, this is not what you might think. He never did any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this apparently verdant territory is one from which few startups emerge alive. Partly because the unions were monopolies.24 You can see why people invent gods to explain it.

Notes

And since everyone involved is so hard on the ability to solve are random, they have wings and start to shift back.

I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing so much to suggest that we know nothing about the right thing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse, they are within any given time I know of no counterexamples, though I think it's confusion or lack of movement between companies combined with self-interest explains much of a placeholder than an ordinary programmer would never guess she hates attention, because the publishers exert so much better is a scarce resource.

Probably just thirty, if the selection process looked for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time, because despite some progress in the first person to run spreadsheets on it, is caring what random people thought of them, but except for that reason. The best investors rarely care who else is investing, which in startups. There are some whose definition of property without affecting and probably especially those that made a Knight of the living. The point where it sometimes causes investors to founders with established reputations.

The Mac number is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get into that because a quiet contentment. One VC who read this essay, but in practice that doesn't exist. So whatever market you're in the sense that if you have two choices and one of them is that they've already made the decision.

But so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say.

This technique wouldn't work for the same trick of enriching himself at the same time. San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York the center of gravity of the founders.

In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them. If you have to talk about humans being meant or designed to live in a spiral. A round VCs put two partners on your thesis.

The history of the more the aggregate is what you can often do better, because you could only get in the press or a funding round at valuation lower than the don't-be poets were mistaken to be spread out geographically. It might also be argued that kids who went to Europe. Similarly, don't make their money if they do. The second alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert.

The angels had convertible debt with a company doesn't have to make your fortune? Think it's too hard at fixing bugs—which is as straightforward as building a new airport.

What we call metaphysics Aristotle called first philosophy. But that is exactly the opposite: when we started Viaweb, if I could pick them, initially, to buy corporate bonds; a decade of inflation that left many public companies trading below the value of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.

You have to do as a naturalist. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, but one way in which multiple independent buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is some kind of work is not a programmer would find it was spontaneous.

When that happens.

That name got assigned to it because the broader your holdings, the underlying cause is usually some injustice that is more of a city's potential as a cold email startups.

The Wouldbegoods. All languages are equally powerful in the imprecise half.

This is one of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply that it would be enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

I'm not trying to sell something bad can be either capped at a 30% lower valuation. Strictly speaking it's impossible to write it all at once, or b to get a definite plan to have, however, and yet managed to get frozen yogurt.

But not all of us in the absence of objective tests. Economically, the less educated ones usually reply with some axe the audience gets too big for the same, but that we know exactly what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is to imagine that there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. This includes mere conventions, like warehouses.

If anyone wants.

You could feel like a conversation reaches a certain threshold. 5% of Apple now January 2016 would be lost in friction.

I ordered a large pizza and found an open source project, but I took so long.

Did you just get kicked out for doing so much better that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap. Life isn't an expression; how can I count you in?

Norton, 2012.

A significant component of piracy, which is the last thing you changed. Unless we mass produce social customs. Not one got an interview with Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems.

The kind of work into a significant cause, and large bribes by the Dutch baas, meaning master. Incidentally, I'm guessing the next Apple, maybe you don't think you need but a lot on how much effort on sales. The disadvantage of expanding a round on the scale that Google does.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #LA #day #anything #tests #naturalist #sound

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sending-the-message · 7 years ago

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What Lies Beneath - Chapter 1 by JadeThorne

The year was 1997.

I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

I was two years out of my second round of grad school, having finished a doctorate as an oceanographer. I already had a doctorate in marine biology, and wanted to have oceanography under my belt as well.

It’s tough being a woman in a man’s world.

I was working at Scripp’s, in San Diego. It made sense to accept their offer of a job as a researcher once I’d finished my doctorate there, and within two years I was bumped up to the title “research professional.” It was a well-paying job, if not a particularly exciting one. The hours were sometimes long, but I was content.

My office had a large window that overlooked the Pacific, year-round. On days I had spare time, I found myself standing at the window and staring out at the great vastness of it. There was so much life in those waters. Life we didn’t quite understand, or hadn’t discovered just yet.

Much to my husband’s good-natured amusement, I spent a great deal of my off-time at the ocean as well. I would walk the beach, my eyes scanning those sometimes-turbulent waters along with the shoreline and my ears tuning in to every last sound. The smell of the salty air was like perfume to me.

If you were to ask my parents, they might smile and joke that I’d been born in the water and a Selkie had brought me to their door.

The ocean … the ocean was my calling. It was in my blood.

A knock came at the door to my office late one afternoon, right as I was finishing up notes for Dr. Brame. Curious, I called for them to enter. A young man in faded jeans and a blue shirt entered, smiling.

“Dr. Masume, I presume?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes, how may I help you?”

“I’m Todd Blevins,” he introduced, extending his hand to me. “I just had a conversation with Dr. Brame, and he suggested I come to you with my proposal.”

Now my interest was piqued. I raised my eyebrow, indicating that he continued.

“I work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” he began, setting into a chair at my desk. “Recently we picked up some noises that we aren’t sure what they are. Now, Dr. Fox doesn’t think it’s a living creature, but some of us aren’t so sure. So, we’re planning to make a couple of dives, to see if we find anything. We need a good, competent marine biologist-slash-oceanographer to round out our team of six, and so here I am.”

“Doesn’t NOAA already have marine biologists and oceanographers working there, though?” I asked, skeptical.

“They do, but … well most of them think our little excursion is a waste of time and aren’t interested in going along,” he answered. “Dr. Masume, you will be very well-compensated. My team will pay you fifty thousand for your time, even if we only dive once.”

Fifty thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of money to offer on a gamble – that much I knew. “Why so much?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Blevins?”

“Todd, please,” he offered. “There’s a good chance we may have to dive the Trench, Dr. Masume.”

The Mariana Trench was a crescent-shaped scar on the ocean floor, some one hundred twenty-odd miles from the Mariana Islands. It had been dived before, but the thought of experiencing it first-hand left me feeling torn between excitement and unease. It would take hours to reach the bottom, and the pressure was unbelievable – over fifteen thousand PSI. It would take one hell of a strong submersible to withstand the pressure.

“Do you actually have a sub strong enough to make that dive without killing us all?” I asked bluntly.

He nodded immediately. “We do, Dr. Masume. I would not ask you to go on a suicide mission.”

I turned to the ocean beyond my office, mulling his words over. “I will need to discuss this with my husband,” I said, though I had already made the decision silently.

I was going, whether my husband approved or not.

Todd nodded and rose to his feet, fishing a card from his pocket. “I can be reached directly at that number,” he told me. “If we don’t hear from you by this time tomorrow, we’ll understand.”

I thanked him and saw him out, and then sat down at my desk in a mild state of shock. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. But why had Dr. Brame suggested me? I owed him my notes anyhow, so I picked them up and walked to his office.

After getting the assent to enter, I walked in to find him smiling at me.

“Lily,” he greeted. “Have a seat, please.”

I sat down, placing the research notes on his desk.

“You’re wondering why I picked you,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The truth is fairly simple – your youth and your knowledge. You are the youngest double-major we have here at current, and your mind is as sharp as a tack. You don’t miss anything, Lily.” He smiled again. “Besides, I can hear the sea, my girl. I know it’s been whispering for you. You need to do this.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard Dr. Brame hint at anything vaguely Otherworldly, and it caught me off. “You hear … the sea,” I echoed.

“Everything has a voice, if you listen long enough,” he said, nodding slowly. “Whether you go or not, there’s an opening for an on-hands professor coming up in a couple of weeks. Means you’ll be spending your time out there instead. But I really hope you go. Opportunity like this, it doesn’t come around too often.”

“I’m going,” I heard myself say. “I may find myself divorced over this, but I’m going.”

Dr. Brame smiled broadly. “Good choice,” he murmured. “I think that husband of yours will be more understanding than you think. I like him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I expressed. “For everything you’ve done for me. This … You’re right. I can’t pass this up. It’s not about the money, either.”

“What did they offer you, out of curiosity?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

I blew out a breath. “A ridiculous amount – fifty thousand, whether we dived once or a dozen times.”

He whistled. “Hell of a lot of money for an expedition,” he remarked. “Well, go on. Go home and tell him what fell in your lap today. And call that boy so he doesn’t have time to talk to anyone else about this.”

My husband was, as Dr. Brame predicted, a lot more agreeable about my going than I expected.

Of course, it could have been the nice bonus I was going to get at the end of it, but I didn’t want to think the man I’d married might be a bit more materialistic than I thought.

When I made the call to Todd, I could hear him hopping up and down over the phone that I had agreed to go.

“Oh, that’s excellent, Dr. Masume!” he exclaimed.

“Lily, Todd,” I offered. “If we’re going to be working together like this, call me Lily.”

“Lily, then,” he said. “We were thinking of starting the expedition on Monday, if that’s acceptable to you. I can make arrangements with Dr. Brame, if you want.”

I smiled. “Monday sounds fine, and Dr. Brame won’t be an issue,” I admitted. “He expects me to go, so I think he won’t mind my starting on Monday.”

“Excellent,” Todd said. “We’ll plan on seeing you Monday at eight am, then.”

“Oh, where am I meeting you at?” I asked, realizing he hadn’t given me a location.

“We’ll pick you up,” he told me. “You aren’t that far from our facility, so it’s not a problem.”

That was Thursday night.

Monday morning saw me ready to go by seven forty-five, and a somewhat battered Wrangler pulled into the drive at five till. I walked out, locking up behind me, and couldn’t help the smile at Todd’s excited face behind the wheel. I couldn’t resist teasing him as I got into the Jeep, though. “Fifty grand, and you’re driving this?”

“Hey, now,” he said, smirking. “I’ve had her since I was eighteen. She’s been good to me, so why trade her in for something new?”

I nodded. “I can understand that.”

“The plan is to go out with our sub to an approximate location the sound was heard from and dive there,” he told me as he navigated the early morning traffic. “Stuart’s gonna stay on the ship, along with Rob and the rest of their team. You’ll be diving with myself, Pat, and Yoshi.”

“Yoshi Nakagachi?” I asked, curious. When he nodded, I raised an eyebrow. “I remember reading some of his work when I was working on my thesis for my marine biology degree.”

Todd nodded. “Yoshi’s a cool guy – I’m glad he agreed to go with us. Pat’s pretty cool too – he’s an older dude. Well, not that Yoshi isn’t, but Pat’s more like the adopted uncle of the group.” He made a turn down a road that I could see led to docks. “Stuart and Rob are nice, but they don’t talk much. They’ll be keeping track of us while we’re down, and recording the data topside. Our sub has two pretty decent underwater cameras attached, so I’m hoping for some photos to send up to them.”

“Tell me about the sub we’re diving in,” I prompted.

“Well, she’s about twenty feet long, and around ten to twelve feet wide,” he began. “We used nine-centimeter ceramic spheres inside the hull for the pressure down there. There’s probably close to a thousand of them in each hull compartment, I estimate. She’ll be tethered to the research ship with a steel cable along with wires to transmit the data. She’s got a joystick to steer her around with, and an oxygen supply for six hours. She’s heated too, because it’s cold down that far.”

I nodded, tucking the information away as he pulled up alongside several other vehicles by the docks.

“Well, let’s go meet everyone and get this show on the road,” he said, smiling as he got out of the Jeep.

Stuart and Rob seemed a bit surprised that I was a woman, but Yoshi and Pat took it all in stride. We made our introductions, I answered questions about my background, and they outlined what they wanted to accomplish that day. It was as Todd said – we’d ride out on the research ship to the site, then dive down in the submersible and see what was what.

I wasn’t nervous at all, not even when we boarded the ship and headed out to sea. I was comfortable with the ocean, with the vastness of it. When we reached the site, and Stuart put the anchor down, I was a bit surprised to feel this little hint of unease. Chiding myself silently, I gathered up the necessary equipment and climbed into the bright-yellow submersible behind Pat.

“Piece of cake,” the older man said, winking at me as he took his station in the submersible.

“Done this before, have you?” I asked.

He grinned at me. “Been down in this girl plenty of times. I was one of the testers when she was built, to ensure she could withstand the pressure. She’s safe.”

“You’ve been in the Trench?” I pushed.

An odd look crossed his face briefly, and he covered it up with another grin. “Sure,” he replied. “Kind of eerie, but nothing to it. Course, we didn’t go all the way to the bottom that day.”

I found his wording somehow less than comforting, and remembered that Todd had told me he wouldn’t invite me along on a suicide mission. Maybe Pat’s odd look was from me asking if he’d been down there after he’d just said he was one of the testers on the sub. Somehow, though, I didn’t really believe that.

And then we were diving.

Yoshi turned the cameras on so we could see what was outside the sub. The quality was better than I expected, and it showed more than I thought it would as well. I watched the monitors, mentally ticking off the different species of fish that swam past.

Then I saw the top of the trench come into view, and that tiny thread of unease came back. “We’re going down today, then?” I asked.

“Sure,” Todd replied.

Gradually, the blue ambient light darkened as we descended, and the lights the cameras were equipped with came on. But even those lights weren’t quite enough to penetrate the darkness in that trench.

“So, tell me, Dr. Masume,” Yoshi began, “what do you see here?”

I focused on the screens, waiting to see something I recognized.

And then we heard something very strange.

If I had to describe the sound, I would have said it was like an enormous bubble leaving to go to the surface. Only, there was no bubble.

“That’s it – that’s the noise?” I asked, forgetting about identifying life for Yoshi.

“Yep,” Pat answered, not looking at me. The big man seemed uneasy, almost like he knew what it was.

“Hey, we need to bring you back up,” Stuart called over the radio. “Got a surprise squall, and she’s moving in fast.”

“Roger that,” Pat radioed back.

“So, what do you think?” Todd asked, grinning.

“I think we’re going to have to dive again, to have a hope of identifying what made that sound,” I replied.

My dreams were strange that night.

I was back in the trench, but it seemed a lot darker than I remembered. I wasn’t in the submersible either – I was swimming, without a mask or oxygen tank. Just ahead of where I was swimming, I could make out a large rock formation that was darker than the rest of the trench. Intrigued, I swam up to it … and an enormous eye snapped open in the formation.

I woke suddenly, sitting straight up in bed and gasping for breath. What the hell was that?

“Babe … you alright?” Luke asked softly, sitting up in concern.

“Yeah,” I told him, still vividly remembering that eye. “Yeah, just a weird dream.”

I didn’t sleep very well after that, and so I was up two hours before I normally would have been. Needing something to do, I got on the computer and started researching the denizens of the trench in hopes of maybe finding a source for my sudden unease. Surely, I had glimpsed one of the more unusual forms of life and forgotten about it, and it had resurfaced in a dream.

But I found nothing. Nothing that came close to explaining what I saw in my dream. And somehow, I didn’t really believe it was just a dream.

When Todd picked me up at eight, I was still subdued.

“You okay, Lily?” he asked, looking at me.

“Todd, what’s down in that trench?” I asked bluntly. “Pat’s uneasy about it, Stuart seems put off by it as well, and the rest of you are too eager to get down there.”

He sighed. “We caught a glimpse of something in camera about six months ago,” he finally said. “I don’t know what it was, but it was big. Scared the shit out of Pat and Stuart both, hell even Rob ain’t too keen on the trench now. Pat’s in the sub because the three of them drew straws and he lost.”

I felt my hair stand on end at those words from him. They saw it, my mind echoed. “I’m going to tell you something, though I’m not sure why,” I heard myself say. “Understand that I am not and have never been prone to strange dreams or nightmares. I don’t do any drugs, not even aspirin, and I’m not a heavy drinker either. Last night, I saw something in my dream. It was huge, blacker than the trench itself, and it looked at me.”

“Holy shit,” Todd muttered, clearly shaken by that. “That’s way too close to what we saw on the camera.” He paused, glancing over at me. “Do you have any ideas, any at all no matter how far-fetched, as to what it may be?”

I thought about that eye, and the formation I’d seen that wasn’t a formation at all. I made myself recall every last detail. “Dragon,” I finally said. “What was in my dream … was a dragon.”

We didn’t talk any more about it on the drive to the research ship. Logically, it wasn’t possible. Dragons did not exist, nor had they ever. It had to just be a dream, and as far as the object their camera picked up, that could have been a fluke. Cameras weren’t perfect – maybe a shark had gotten too close, or some other large variety of fish, and the camera had glitched, so it made it look bigger than it was.

That and dragons, according to the mythos surrounding them, were land creatures. It made no sense that I would dream about one in the trench.

Pushing those thoughts out of my head, I boarded the research ship and noticed that I wasn’t the only one looking under the weather today.

Everyone, even Yoshi, wore almost identical expressions. They looked shell-shocked, with that thousand-yard stare.

What the hell had happened in between when we left and today?

We made the journey out to the dive site in silence, and I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen this time. An involuntary shiver went through me, catching Pat’s eye.

“Yoshi, I don’t think today’s a good day to go down there,” Pat announced, looking to the lead scientist of the group.

“We must go down today,” Yoshi said, something in his voice sounding obsessive. “Today might be the day we find the source.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Pat mumbled.

“We will be fine,” Yoshi stated, pushing his glasses further up on his nose. “Our submersible is well-constructed. Our cameras are the best NOAA has to offer. We will be fine.”

Stuart put out the anchor and his team set about making ready to lower us down into the ocean … into the trench itself this time. The thick steel cable that kept us tied to the ship had been inspected twice, and all the wires that transmitted data had been gone over as well. Their team had done their best to ensure our dive was successful, in short.

Yoshi, Pat, Todd and I boarded the submersible, and took our seats. The hatch was sealed, and then we were lowered into the waiting water. This time as we dove down, I didn’t watch the monitors for sea life.

I was afraid of what I might see now.

Down we went, into the Mariana Trench. A counter notified us of how deep we were at any given time. Another machine told us what the pressure was on the sub. Yet another one displayed how much battery life we had to run the equipment, including our precious oxygen and heat. The last one displayed how much oxygen was in the tanks.

I watched those numbers increase, the deeper we descended, and felt suddenly ill. This was a fool’s mission I was on – I was suddenly sure of it, but Yoshi had been quite adamant about going down today so there would be no talking him out of it.

Nearly two hours later, we reached the bottom, oblivious to the very real danger we were in.

Topside, Stuart, Rob, and the entire team watched as our live feed went black.

“What the hell?” Rob muttered, and picked up the radio. “Hey, Yoshi – are you guys alright down there?”

Radio silence. Nothing.

“Yoshi, Todd, Pat, anyone – can you hear me?” he tried again.

But only silence met his ears from the other end.

“Fuck!” he swore, punching the desk. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”

Everyone moved to the enormous winch to start hauling us back up, while Stuart and Rob looked on in worry. The winch moved too freely – it should have been reeling in a lot slower than it was. Then, quite suddenly, the end of the steel cable came out of the water.

Our lifeline had been severed. We were stuck at the bottom of the trench until NOAA came to rescue us.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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sparkinsidewrites · 5 years ago

Text

Lonely

Title: Lonely

One Shot: 1/1

Character/Pairing: Adam Carson/Hunter Burgan

Genre: Angst

Rating: T

Summary: Friends for years, Adam Carson and Hunter Burgan had faced college, med school, and the real world. But can one night and one impulsive action change everything.

Authors Notes/Warnings: Nothing in this piece ever happened. I claim no ownership nor do I make any sort of profit from this, other than pride and a sense of amusement.

For what felt like the hundredth time that day, Adam Carson ran his fingers through his hair. He was exhausted; there was simply no other way to put it. The forty-eight hour shifts he’d handled with ease during his residency were now an almost constant struggle to make through. Even the twenty-four hour rotation he was on now was nearly unbearable. He’d reached his physical limit on coffee, its caffeine barely even registering with his system now. He could probably down two full pots and still be yawning in the pre-op room. Figures, he thought to himself.

He’d made it eighteen hours into his shift so far, and he wasn’t quite sure how he’d made it that far. Sleep had been an elusive thing for him the past week, especially. If he wasn’t patrolling the sixteen bed unit or the OR, he was at home trying to have some attempt at a life. He’d visited with his younger sister who’d flown in from Seattle and made an effort at hanging with a few of his friends from undergrad. He’d managed to squeeze in a few hours of sleep here and there, but barely enough for him to be able to function the way he was now.

This job had been both the bane and joy of his existence. He’d learned so much in the past four years and from some of the best surgeons in his field. This was the job he’d only ever really dreamed of in med school. But at times he didn’t feel like it was nearly enough. The long hours he was forced to keep meant relationships were fleeting at best. No one he’d met had the tolerance for his long hours and hectic schedule for too long. The last meaningful relationship he’d had barely lasted three months. And how it had made it that long surprised him.

Maybe it was his lot to spend life as the eternal bachelor. No one to worry about waking up at two in the morning when his pager went off, no one left waiting for a date that would never show. It would be easier that way, simpler really; but lonelier than Adam cared to dwell on. He’d spent too many months alone.

“Dr. Carson!” He jumped at the sound of his surname, looking up to find one his residents looking at him expectantly. The resident had only been with the hospital for a year now, but had shown a great deal of promise. For a moment this confused him. “Mrs. Reynolds in room 2467,” the resident continued, looking at Adam as though he’d grown another head.

Shit. “Right, I’ll be right there.” This was bad. He still had six hours to go and if he was falling apart now, badly enough that his coworkers were starting to notice, he was in serious trouble.

Adam had always prided himself on being cool, collected at work. It was the only way he could make it through a shift without losing his mind as well as the respect of his coworkers. He’d rarely had an off day, and the fact that he was now wasn’t helping manners.

Nodding, Adam followed the resident down the hall, pausing briefly to grab the chart from its rack on the nurse’s station. The hall was relatively quiet, save for the low beeping of the various monitors and machines. He was grateful for the relative calm, knowing it could pass at any moment. This wasn’t the ER were he spent his first years in the hospital, but this was a major metropolitan hospital and the surgical units rarely stayed quiet for long.

The rest of his shift passed in a blur of charts, patients and eager interns waiting to prove themselves. By the time he had managed to clock out for the day, Adam could barely keep his eyes open. He was eternally grateful for the fact that he had the next three days off. Maybe he’d actually manage to sleep at some point. He could only hope.

Adam found himself surprised to pull into the driveway of his home, having barely remembered the drive at all. Sleep, he told himself, I desperately need sleep.

He managed to pull his scrub top off before collapsing onto the bed. His head was no where near the pillow but he really couldn’t find it in him to care. He’d deal with the stiff neck later.

A loud pounding sound woke Adam from his sleep. His mind was hazy and it took him a second to place the noise. His front door; someone must be at the door. Rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, he pushed himself up from the bed, glancing at the green LCD display of his alarm clock sitting on the side table. Eight forty-five; he’d been asleep for roughly seven and a half hours. Not nearly enough, but it would have to do, especially since it didn’t sound as though his visitor had any intention of walking away anytime soon.

“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m coming!” Adam growled under his breath as he padded slowly do the door. Whoever it was had better have a damned good reason for waking him up. Not bothering to glance through the peep hole once he arrived, Adam yanked open the door. “What?”

The hearty laughter the he received in response startled him briefly, his head shot up, taking in the person standing before him in the dimly lit doorway. “Hunter?”

Hunter grinned, “I see you’re people skills are still lacking.”

“Fuck off,” Adam shot back, laughing now, standing aside to allow the man to enter. “You do realize I was asleep?”

“Just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead.”

“Oh ha ha ha,” Adam shot back. He ran his hand through is hair before allowing it to come to rest on the back of his neck. “But really, I’m fine. I’m just exhausted.”

Hunter nodded, “Figured as much.” He settled himself on the couch against the far wall of the living room, looking back at Adam.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you Hunt? You always seem to.”

And that was the truth. Adam had known Hunter for years now, having met him during their sophomore History class. They’d hit it off rather instantaneously, Hunter’s easy-going nature complimenting Adam’s less than flexible one.

Their friendship had been a trying one; they’d butted heads more than they’d agreed on things over the years. Hunter thought Adam too stubborn and Adam thought him frustratingly passive. But their friendship worked, despite the headaches.

Adam looked at his friend expectantly. Hunter usually had a reason behind his random drop-ins, beyond making sure Adam had made it home in one piece. Nearly pass out behind the wheel once…

It hadn’t been one of Adam’s finer moments; he’d known as soon as he’d pulled out of the hospital lot that he shouldn’t have been driving. He’d gotten maybe an hour and a half of sleep during that two-day shift; he’d barely been able to keep his eyes open. But he wanted to get home; figured he could make it. It wasn’t a long drive, fifteen minutes at the most. He’d done it hundreds, no thousands of times before and made it just fine.

It wasn’t until Adam found himself nearly in a ditch two miles from his home, not quite sure how he’d gotten there, that the biting edge of panic sunk in. He’d dialed Hunter’s number without really thinking about what he was doing.

Hunter had been there ten minutes later, worry lining his brow, his normally calm demeanor gone. The riot act his friend had read him had sent Adam for a loop. That was usually his go to response to the things and situations Hunter had found himself in. Seeing their reactions in reverse was strange, but at the same time, touching.

Pushing himself from the couch, Hunter made his way towards the darkened kitchen. He returned a few moments later, two chilled, brown bottles in hand. Adam smirked, “Why yes, Hunt, you can have a beer. Thanks for asking.”

“Fuck off, Carson.” Chuckling, Hunter took a long swig from his bottle.

Two hours and countless beers later, Adam was feeling no pain. His exhaustion temporarily relieved. A lazy smile spread across his face; he had desperately needed to relax, needed a night with no expectations, no demands. Thank God for Hunter…And for beer.

“This is nice,” he mumbled, leaning his head back against the couch. Hunter grunted in agreement. Adam blinked, attempting to clear his cloudy vision; clearly he’d had a few too many. The thought forced a laugh from his throat and he caught Hunter’s head cocking to the side in confusion.

“Care to share with the class?”

“I’m drunk.”

Hunter laughed, “No kidding. You really need to build up your tolerance, Carson. This is pretty pitiful.”

“Fuck off.” Adam hadn’t drunk much in a while, save the occasional beer with friends. Drinking had never been terribly high on his list of priorities and save for spending time with Hunter; he rarely consumed more than a bottle or two. And he had far surpassed that amount tonight.

If he hadn’t seen Hunter knocking back bottle after bottle, he’d never think his friend was intoxicated at all. Lucky bastard. The easy smile that crossed Hunter’s face pulled a similar one to Adam’s.

Hunter’s eyes were really blue, Adam noticed, finding himself entranced by them. They were bright and alive yet surprisingly deep and elusive. He’d never noticed that before and something in him wondered if it was odd that he had noticed that. Who notices the depth of their friend’s eyes?

“You alright there?” Adam jumped, unable to stop the reaction the sudden intrusion of sound evoked. God what was wrong with him? He composed himself enough to nod his head before taking another long pull from the bottle in his hand.

The curve of Hunter’s bottom lip caught his attention next. It was slightly fuller than its top counterpart. Not enough to be something noticed at a quick glance, but something you would notice if you looked close enough. They were inviting and briefly Adam wondered if they would feel soft against his; or if Hunter would object if he were to find out for himself.

Panic suddenly rushed through him. This wasn’t normal. Friends didn’t think such things about their friends. Sweat began to bead on his forehead and a shiver ran down his spine. God what is wrong with me?

“Adam? Dude, you’re kind of scaring me,” Hunter’s eyes were wide now and uneasy. “Are you alright?”

He didn’t know what to say. What could he possibly say? “Yeah, I just really want to know what it’s like to kiss you and its scaring the shit out of me.” That would go over real well. So Adam went for silence instead. He needed to clear his head; needed to drink more. He needed to do something, anything to keep himself away from the current train of thought.

“Adam?” Hunter’s hand came to rest on his shoulder and Adam jumped, bolting off of the couch as if he’d been burned. A single touch shouldn’t feel so damned good; especially one from Hunter. This was his best friend for all intents and purposes. His drinking buddy and occasional confident, his wingman; this was not supposed to happen.

“I…I need some air,” he managed to choke out before making a mad dash towards the back porch. Slamming the glass door behind him, Adam sank onto the stairs leading to the small backyard. He took a large gulp of cool air, praying it would clear his head. It needed to clear his head; he couldn’t go back inside like this. There was no way.

Adam heard the soft click of the glass door followed moments later by the warm hand on his shoulder. “Adam?”

There it was again; the jolt, the longing that he should not feel. This was dangerous and it honestly scared the fuck out of him. Hunter’s face was soon level with his own and Adam could feel the warmth of his breath against his cheek. Jesus. Why did he have to be so close? Couldn’t he see what this was doing to him?

Adam closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly shut. He tried in vain to clear the thoughts running through his head; to silence the urges demanding that he close the distance between them and take what his cloudy mind wanted. No, not wanted; needed. It would be so easy.

Hunter shifted beside him, causing Adam to turn his head involuntarily, finding himself nose to nose with his friend; the warmth of his breath mixed with the hint of alcohol filled his senses. He leaned in; reason no longer registering in his mind. He needed this. Their lips brushed together softly, the heady sensation rushing through him. More. He crushed his lips against Hunter’s, moaning at the contact. This was heaven; perfect. He was lost in this and there wasn’t a thing in the world that could drag him away. Not now.

It was then that the stillness from his friend registered. Hunter was stiff as a board, muscles rigid. Fuck. Snapping backwards, Adam’s eyes widened. Fuck, fuck fuck. He shoved himself up from the porch and simply fled. Panic was the only thing that registered in his mind. Pure, blind panic.

Hunter would hate him. He’d never be able to look him in the eye again. He’d never be able to fix this. Fuck, indeed.

#afislash #Hundam #angst #complicated friendships

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years ago

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Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

Frank Herbert in 1982.

In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune‘s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).

It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.

In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.

At the time of Dune‘s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:

I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?

The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.

I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.

The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.

Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune‘s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune‘s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.

This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.

Dune in the first Chilton edition.

Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.

So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.

Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.1 One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.

Dune‘s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.

Yet Dune‘s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:

It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.

The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.’”

Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.

In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.

In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.

Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.

He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffealla De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffealla De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.

David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”

David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:

Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”

Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.’”

The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.

Raffealla De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.

Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.

Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.

Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)

The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffealla De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffealla De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.

And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffealla De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.

Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.

Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.

Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.

The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostrate cancer.

Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flare to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.

There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.

(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)

As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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MBA: PURCHASE APPLICATIONS RISE, REFINANCE APPS FALL

hThe Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage utility volume, reduced by means of 0.1% on a seasonally-adjusted foundation for the week finishing April twenty-eight

RISE

2017, according to information from the latest Weekly mortgage Packages Survey from the loan Bankers Association. On an unadjusted basis, the Index multiplied by means of 1% over the identical period.

The Refinance Index reduced by way of 5% over the preceding week. The purchase Index expanded four% on a seasonally-adjusted basis, and five% on an unadjusted foundation.

The refinance proportion of mortgage pastime reduced to forty-one.6% of all Packages, down from 44.0% the preceding week. The adjustable fee mortgage (ARM) percentage decreased to eight.4% of total Applications. The FHA proportion increased to ten.4% from 10.zero%, the VA share decreased to ten.8% from 10.nine%, and the USDA percentage of overall Applications remained unchanged at zero.8%

The common settlement hobby price for 30-yr fixed-fee mortgages with conforming loan balances ($424, one hundred or less) improved to four.23%, up from four.20% the previous week. Points for 80% loan to cost (LTV) loans reduced to zero.32 from 0.37, and the powerful charge expanded fro the closing week. (All 80% LTV mortgage reviews encompass the origination charge.)

For 30-year constant-price mortgages with conforming mortgage balances ($424, fifty one hundred or much less), prices improved to four.18% from 4.15%. Points for eighty% LTV loans reduced to 0.23 from zero.27 and the powerful price extended from final week. charges for 30-12 months fixed-fee mortgages backed by the FHA multiplied to 4.06% from four.03%, with Points for 80% LTV loans decreasing to 0.24 from zero.34. The effective fee remained unchanged.

The average contract interest fee for 15-12 months constant-fee mortgages expanded Fifty-one% from three.46%. Factors for eighty% LTV loans reduced to 0.32 from 0.50, and the effective rate changed into unchanged. The common settlement interest rate for five/1 Palms multiplied to a few.29% from three.22%. Factors for eighty% LTV loans reduced to 0.14 from 0.18, and the powerful feet extended.

Approximately the writer

Mary Salmonsen MARY SALMONSEN Mary Salmonsen is a recent graduate of the S.I. Newhouse Faculty of Public Communications at Syracuse College. As a piece of writing Intern with Hanley Wood’s residential construction group, she covers demographics, neighborhood markets, and finance for Builder and Multifamily Govt magazines. Advertisement

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