#and then it takes the us government secret intelligence to track him and his loyal followers down

[sugar-cookys]

aldnoah zero s2 ending was so bad that after i binge watched it i dreamt of an alternate ending

[cybrsan]

ATEEZ as Benders

Masterlist | A/N: A glimpse into each member and their roles in my upcoming ATLA-inspired, Wooyoung x reader fic for the second part of my title track series. Will most likely end up writing a fic for each member and turning this into a sub-series of its own. Let me know what you think! Edit: As of 11/11/23, this has been turned into a series. Check out the masterlist here.

Hongjoong

Element: Fire

Occupation: Diplomat, Strategist

Personality: Intense, strong-willed, passionate, loyal, creative, intelligent, charismatic

Fun Fact: Hongjoong, despite being young, has become one of the government officials with the best reputation. He is incredibly persuasive and cunning, and he uses his skills to enact the will of the people and do his best for the good of the Fire Nation. He has a lot of secret admirers, often finding chocolates and other gifts in his office, but don't mention that to him or he'll get shy.

Seonghwa

Element: Water

Occupation: Artisan

Personality: Sensitive, nurturing, perfectionist, reliable, open-minded, adaptable, empathetic

Fun Fact: Seonghwa is known to make some of the most beautiful carvings and jewelry in the entire Water Tribe. All benders, no matter what nation they're from, would love to own one of his pieces. But secretly, he loves to make toys for kids to play with and prefers that to his main job.

Yunho

Element: Air

Occupation: Acrobat

Personality: Jovial, spontaneous, free-spirited, romantic, kind, helpful

Fun Fact: Yunho often tours the four nations with his troupe, and his solo act has become a favorite amongst children and adults alike. What makes his routine even more impressive is that he has an incredible mastery over his bending, and performs without ever touching the ground. Incredibly charismatic and entrancing to watch, his performance will capture both your attention and your heart.

Yeosang

Element: Air

Occupation: Meditative Guide

Personality: Unique, endearing, positive, dreamy, free-spirited, peaceful

Fun Fact: People often find Yeosang to be in his own world, a step or two behind everyone else. It makes it hard to believe that he's one of the best meditative guides hailing from the Air Nomads, helping troubled souls find their inner peace through deep and intense focus. Truthfully, he's aware of everything that's going on but only likes to pay attention to the things that really matter to him.

San

Element: Fire

Occupation: Firebending Instructor, Tactician

Personality: Passionate, unpredictable, alluring, strong-willed, independent, principled

Fun Fact: San is one of the best firebenders in the nation, having mastered the technique of blue lightning. People would pay unspeakable amounts of money to be taught by him, but he only teaches those without the means to compensate him, dedicating his time to the underprivileged. He gives free classes at the orphanage his father runs, while he gets his money from the government, advising military leaders on the most effective ways to deploy firebenders and utilize their bending skills in combat.

Mingi

Element: Earth

Occupation: Architect

Personality: Patient, conciliatory, persistent, logical, diligent, complex, gentle

Fun Fact: Mingi loves creating things, but he also finds himself wanting to leave a positive impact on the people and environments around him. That's why, when designing any sort of structure, he taps into the vibrations of the earth, seeking its guidance to foster a harmonious connection between the building and its surroundings. He believes that humans and the earth can live together in harmony, strengthening and taking care of one another.

Wooyoung

Element: Water

Occupation: Healer

Personality: Enigmatic, sensitive, giving, comforting, loving, altruistic, committed

Fun Fact: Wooyoung has mastered a unique form of healing that he calls "Wavesong" where, through singing and dancing, he can project vibrations through water that promote healing within wounded individuals, allowing him to help not only their bodies but their minds. People believe this is because he is moon-blessed, a child born under the Siren Moon that only rises once every 88 years. Wooyoung lets them believe that, not wanting to reveal that his true "blessing" is having prophetic dreams that tend to get him in more trouble than they're worth.

Jongho

Element: Fire

Occupation: Ceremonial Performer

Personality: Courageous, idealistic, adventurous, passionate, independent, powerful, dynamic

Fun Fact: When Jongho isn't participating in a ceremony or ritual, he often busks on the streets of the capital, entertaining passersby for fun. If you manage to see him, either in an official or unofficial capacity, you should consider yourself lucky. Whether it's due to his bending or simply his natural talent, his voice seems to imbue the listener with a feeling of warmth and a nostalgic longing for home.

[thepunkranger]

Rating Resident Evil Men’s Marriageability

Note: I tried my best to be impartial with each of the men, regardless of my personal opinions

Chris Redfield

Pros

Loyal

Protective

Trusting

Wants to see the best in people

Strong

Anti-capitalist

Cares deeply

Prioritizes family

Ass that you could bounce a quarter off of

Cons

Smoker

Prone to bouts of depression

Definitely has PTSD

Drinks to forget

Literally solves his problems by punching

Married to his job

Rude to waitstaff

Keeps secrets because “it’s better for you not to know”

Blames himself for things out of his control

Canonically a bit of a slob

Overall Score: 5/10 - Could do worse, but could definitely do better. High potential of being a stereotypical “straight husband”

-

Albert Wesker

Pros

Rich

Attractive

Super strength

Super speed

Verified genius

Might destroy the world for you

Looks good in a leather jacket

Natural leader

One of only two RE men to canonically have sex

Cons

Violent sociopath

Might just destroy the world in general

Obsessed with power

Believes himself to be superior to all other beings

Turned himself into a giant worm monster

100% would track your phone

Withholds physical affection as a power play

Overall Score: 1/10 - At best you’ll exist as a bored but scared trophy spouse. At worst he’ll dissect you as part of an experiment

-

Leon S. Kennedy

Pros

Loyal

Kind

Affectionate

Caring

Silly sense of humor

Protective

Willing to be emotionally vulnerable

Always wants to do the right thing

Soft hair

Trusting

Goes out of his way to help people

Cares deeply about his friends

Strong

Flexible

Tries to make the best of any situation

Dog lover

Drives a motorcycle

Cons

Definitely has PTSD

Prone to depression

Bordering on/alcoholic Degeneration and up

Body belongs to the US government

A little dumb

Should not be behind the wheel

Overall Score: 8/10 - Potential to be an amazing, loving husband with therapy and support, but may fall into toxic or even self-harm tendencies if left unchecked

-

Carlos Oliveira

Pros

Sweet

Protective

Kind

Physically Affectionate

Supportive

Strong

Cares deeply about the people in his life

Skilled with his hands

Emotionally vulnerable

Trusting

Wants to be the best person he can be

Willing to break laws to help those he loves

Natural provider (acts of service love language 100%)

Verbally affectionate

Sense of humor

Laid back attitude

Gorgeous hair

Respects boundaries

Cons

Probably has unprocessed trauma

Will do Dumb Guy Shit™️

Trusts too quickly

Will throw himself into dangerous situations without thinking it through

Will probably make inappropriate jokes without thinking unless you tell him specifically not to

Likely wanted in multiple countries

Overall Rating: 10/10 - Literally marry this man immediately. He will be a good partner, good husband, and good father. May need reigning in occasionally, but it comes from a place of love

-

Luis Serra Navarro

Pros

Always has the best intentions

Cares deeply about his friends and family

Tries to do the right thing

Sense of humor

Highly intelligent

Extremely curious

Debonair

Charming

Good dancer

Chivalrous

Book lover

Good with his hands

Cons

Doesn’t open up easily

Tends to trust the wrong people

Smoker

Doesn’t think things through

Prefers fantasy over reality

Doesn’t always keep his word

Self-serving

Unprocessed trauma

Tends to deflect

Overall Score: 5/10 - Potential to be a great partner, but would take time and patience to get there (best outsourced to a therapist)

-

Jake Muller

Pros

Snarky

Literally designed after male models

Loyal

Will have your back

Affectionate once he opens up

Surprisingly good with kids

Drives a Motorcycle

Self-sacrificing

Looks amazing in black leather

Cons

Daddy issues

Self-sacrificing

Tendency to only do things that benefit him

Takes a long time to open up

Illegal drug use

Wanted by multiple governments

Would need to be forced into therapy if he went at all

Overall Score: 4/10 - German Shepherd partner vibes. Would be forever loyal to you if you broke through his walls, but only to you. Probably wouldn’t stop any (self-) destructive habits of his either

-

Piers Nivans

Pros

Kind

Trusting

Loyal

Nice to waitstaff

Appreciates good food

Cares about the emotional well-being of his loved ones

Not easily deterred

Cons

Self-sacrificing

Codependent tendencies

Most likely has unresolved trauma

Hotheaded

Overall Score: 7/10 - The potential is definitely there, however - like Chris - Piers winds up with a high likelihood for being a stereotypical “straight husband,” mainly due to his upbringing in a military family

-

Ethan Winters

Pros

Loyal

Trusting

Kind

Good with kids

Indestructible

Gentle

Protective

Never gives up

Would still love you if you were a worm

Not easily scared

Domestic

Creative

Good under pressure

MacGyver skills

Soft

Self-sacrificing

Cons

Mold

Bad luck

Arguably too trusting

Self-sacrificing

Thousand yard stare

Overall Score: 10/10 - Like Carlos, marry this man immediately. Second only RE man to canonically have sex and the only one to get married. Just hope you don’t have a penicillin allergy

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

So I was showing my sister your amazing Q-A posts, when I came across Peter's. I realized that you just keep mentioning the incompetence of the Order, and how they're just a bunch of babysitters who don't do anything throughout many posts, but never actually wrote a rant about them and their members. Can you do that, while stating all the things they did/didn't do and their uselessness to the Order? What can I say I love your rants!

Caveat that it has been a while since I’ve read books 5, 6, and 7 of Harry Potter. I have a fantastic memory but some things may slip my mind. If I grievously offend anyone and it turns out the Order does actually do something, anything, of any vague importance then feel free to let me know and shame me on the internet.

With that, the story of why I think the Order of the Phoenix is a ridiculous organization that was mostly there because Dumbledore felt the need to have a guerilla resistance group (you’ve got to have a guerilla resistance group! Or, if Tom has a secret cult, I must have one too! BUT WITH BIRDS! COO COO KACHOO TOM RIDDLE!)

First, let’s look at our lineup.

Yes, we have a few aurors in the midst, but even with them the lineup is... worrying. In the first war we knew that key figures had presumably just graduated Hogwarts and joined the Order (James and Sirius). For all we know, they were recruited even before graduation. This makes sense as James’ is a big financial win for Dumbledore and was probably, perhaps with Longbottom, in charge of funding most of their operations. That and he and Longbottom give Dumbledore a voice in the Wizengamot (which so far as I can surmise is the only real governing body in the country, the ministry exists, but it all boils down to the Wizengamot). 

The point being, James, Sirius, Remus, Peter, and Lily are all barely squeaking out of Hogwarts not only when they join the Order but also even by the time they die. More, it could be because the books are from Harry’s point of view and he has a serious thing about worshipping James, but James in particular is made to sound very vital to the Order’s operations. A twenty-one-year-old who charged Voldemort without a wand (I really shouldn’t give James shit for this, it was a desperate situation, an attack they had not anticipated, he’s young, and panicking. I will still give James shit for this.)

Otherwise we have Mundungus Fletcher, who gives strong vibes of being an alcoholic and is just a generally unreliable, shady, dude who will steal your silverware and pawn it on the black market when you aren’t looking.

We have Molly and Arthur Weasley, whose only use I can possibly think of is being moral support and... I don’t know... providing safe houses maybe? Seriously, we have no indication they’re good at dueling (less so as Harry’s shocked when Molly takes on Bellatrix and miraculously wins). We know Arthur’s not a very intelligent guy. Arthur and Molly have no sense of... Well, suffice to say, if Dumbledore gave them any real information they’d run away screaming. They throw Percy out of the family for becoming Fudge’s secretary, I’m sure Dumbledore was just internally screaming and begging them not to do it so he can make Percy a spy. But he can never say as much as such a notion would horrify Molly and Arthur. Molly and Arthur are also presented as vital members of the Order by the way. Molly and Arthur. ARTHUR.

We have what remains of the Marauders in the second go around: Remus and Sirius. Remus, while a competent wizard, nobody can quite trust for the reason they couldn’t quite trust him last time: he’s still a werewolf and has no reason to support the current government. Sirius is recovering from ten years in hell and is in no condition to do anything, knows it, loathes it, and is clawing at the walls of the safehouse he was pretty much forced to provide the Order.

We then have the aurors. Kingsly seems competent enough but more than him we have Moody and we have Tonks. Tonks is young and seems very very green, she was a good enough duelist to get into the auror corps but we know she’s dreadfully clumsy and often seems to treat Order business as this very exciting super secret mission she’s on. Moody, is a paranoid wreck who is almost comical for his utterly ridiculous skepticism of everything and seems incapable of making any true plans or taking any real action.

Looking at the Order of the Phoenix is kind of like watching “Dodgeball”, you just have this really weird collection of people who try to dodge wrenches, only the Death Eaters aren’t much better, so it kind of evens out. 

But onto why I think they do nothing... It’s because we see them do nothing.

We don’t get much information on the first war but at best it seems like there were a few minor skirmishes in the street now and then. I always imagine something like the Sharks and the Jets in Westside Story. They’re walking along the streets, spot each other, dramatic music ensues and a rumble begins, then they scamper away when the aurors come in.

Remember that these guys aren’t a legitimate organization and really don’t have the structure of one. Back in the day they were probably, essentially, a street gang.

We get a little more evidence of what we see them get up to in the later books. And it’s all just kind of sad.

Remus is sent on the world’s most ridiculous and hopeless quest to recruit werewolves. Why do I say ridiculous and hopeless, what the hell does Remus have to offer these guys? Werewolves are ridiculously oppressed by the current government, they cannot obtain an education, they cannot hold jobs, they’re desperately unemployed and people routinely talk about wiping them out. Remus comes up to them and says, “Hey guys, come support the guerilla movement that supports the government that talks about killing you all the time! It’ll be great!” They’ll either put Remus’ head on a pike or if they’re nice just laugh at him until he leaves. I’d say it’d be worth it, except that it’s an exceedingly dangerous task that probably would end with Remus’ head on a pike. As it is, it ends in embarrassing failure. And this is one of the more legitimate Order missions.

Hagrid, similarly, is sent to talk to the giants and it ends in equally embarrassing failure for the same reasons (why would the giants ever support the ministry and or Dumbledore who promises them nothing). Also, sending Hagrid to talk diplomacy, with anyone, ever. Surely, there’s no way that could possibly go wrong.

Otherwise their big task seems to be to babysit Harry and transfer him from the Dursleys to the Burrow/Grimmuald Place. The first, they fail at, Mundungus gets put on the job the one day something actually happens and it’s a complete disaster. The second, they also fail at, as I never understood why they couldn’t just portkey him where they needed him to go or at least closer by. The polyjuice flight across the sky was... really unecessary. 

You can tell by the seriousness with which most Order members, i.e. Tonks, take the babysitting Harry duty that this is a very serious task for very serious people. Given this, Tom’s lack of overt action in the fifth and sixth books, the fact that we don’t seem to see them do anything even in the seventh book... Yeah, this and keeping an eye out for that prophecy are their most exciting jobs.

Remember that rescuing Harry from the Department of Mysteries wasn’t really Dumbledore’s idea. That was an emergency situation where he had to pull out the stops, more, I suspect Sirius went “CHAAAAAARGE” and gleefully rushed out into glorious battle with the Order directly behind him and Dumbledore going, “Well, shit.”

I guess the last thing I’ll say is that we also see that Dumbledore has very little confidence in the Order. He gives them nothing important to do and, more, gives them virtually no intelligence.

He never tells the Order about the horcruxes (their existence or Harry, Hermione, and Ron’s super serial mission to track them down and destroy them). He never relays to them that Harry himself is a horcrux. He never reveals the suicide ploy with Snape or that he was in fact dying before that point. He never reveals Malfoy’s assassination attempts. Dumbledore doesn’t tell them jack shit.

If he relies on anyone, usually when he’s forced to, it’s Severus Snape. This I think is not only because Snape is forced in a way to be loyal thanks to the life debt to Harry as well as his own overwhelming sense of guilt but also because he’s the only really intelligent and competent one there.

The Order’s just... if you need someone to pick up Harry or else keep an eye on him when Mrs. Figg is busy: they’re your guys. Otherwise, they make Dumbledore feel good about himself?

[jacarandabanyan]

📚for the fanfic plot ask thing!📚

Okay so- plot of one (of many) fanfic I haven't written (because to be honest, I don't have the skill to pull this off yet) but often daydream about:

I would love to write a This-Is-How-You-Loose-The-Time-War-inspired spy-vs-spy KisaIta fic. It would feature baby ANBU Itachi trying desperately to find a solution to the tensions brewing between his family and the village (massacre was still a few years off when he first joined ANBU, I believe). This eventually leads to him hunting down all reports/intelligence related to the night of the Kyuubi Attack and finding a few small scraps of information that hint at the existence of the Masked Man.

(He is a pre-teen, so he doesn't really *get* that finding a different scapegoat/"revealing the truth of what happened that night" probably isn't going to fix issues that are rooted in three generations of Village Policy and History, because he may be a genius at killing people but his education has not emphasized critical thinking)

He eventually tracks what little (extremely scant) evidence he has to Kiri, where he comes to believe the Masked Man is operating.

He gets himself sent on endless missions to the Land of Water in pursuit of his pet project, gaining himself a reputation in the process. There are no shortage of missions- the Land of Water is rapidly devolving into three different simultaneous civil wars, and resentment over the last Great Shinobi War lingers enough that Kiri and Konoha will likely never be friends in Itachi's lifetime.

(This is gonna get really long, so here's a read more)

At the same time, recently-made-ANBU Kisame has been mostly assigned to intelligence-related missions, as in canon. However, over the course of his first few months worth of missions, he comes to suspect that there's a leak in ANBU, and he sets about trying to find it and silence it. He slowly develops a reputation for ruthlessness even among ANBU, a cut above the normal Kiri ruthlessness, as he secretly works to get his fingers into every hidden nook, cranny, and conspiracy until he finds the disloyal one.

(And maybe he's projecting his issues/self-hatred related to killing other Kiri ninha just. a little bit. on this mysterious leaker. How dare this person sell out the Village? How dare they give out the information that gets other Kiri shinobi killed? It's easier to hate the faceless traitor than it is to hate himself. And at least he still *has* values. He killed the Few to protect the Whole.)

Over time, as the two develop their reputations, their respective villages start pitting them against each other in the field. Konoha has an unofficial policy of trying to off Seven Swordsmen hopefuls before they can get powerful enough to actually get a blade, and Kirigakure knows that the unstoppable Konoha operative is a Sharingan-user, and Obito-controlling-the-Mizukage is always down to take down his estranged family members.

Danzo is less eager to have Itachi take care of the Uchiha for good, not out of any particular maneuvering on Itachi's part, but because he also remembers the last Great Shinobi War, and how brutal Kirigakure was during it. He sees their ongoing civil strife and fears that one faction will eventually WIN and turn their attention on their neighbors. Itachi has made himself the best operative at getting into and out of Kirigakure- if he wants to interfere from the shadows and keep the civil strife going, he needs to keep Itachi in the field. (Don't worry, he finds other ways to be awful/keep the pressure on).

Itachi and Kisame are a good match-up. Itachi might be a natural genius with a fancy kekkei-genkai, but Kisame has way more experience than him. Also, unlike laser-focused Itachi, Kisame is actually keyed into the intelligence world, so he always has more information than Itachi.

They clash over and over again over several years, and slowly learn more and more about each other. They mature into seasoned ANBU operatives, have epiphanies about themselves and their villages. And slowly come to like each other.

Itachi has his sexual awakening when he sees Kisame rise up out of an ocean of blood, shirtless, effortlessly hoisting a struggling Jonin one-handed over his shoulder, big tooth-filled grin on his face.

They infiltrate each others' villages and insert themselves into each others' missions in disguise. Itachi genjutsus a Kiri team to think he's one of their teammates, whom Kisame secretly has orders to eliminate. He feels a surge of relief when the teammate he'd known since his Academy days dissolves into a murder of crows moments before his sword pierces their chest- his teammate is still dead, but at least this time they were killed by an enemy, not Kisame himself.

Kisame knows his mysterious counterpart is a Sharingan-user, so he infiltrates the Uchiha compound to tease out what the situation is with the clan in Konoha right now (and maybe see if he can figure out who his counterpart is).

While he's in the village, tracking kekkei-genkai users, he discovers Root and exposes it. This is both a huge win for Kiri Intelligence and put Danzo in a tricky situation, since he supposedly disbanded it.

Eventually Kisame figures out that some of the leaked information is making its way to Danzo, so he goes to kill Danzo and try and figure out who he's getting his information from. This is right around when Danzo's started making threatening noises towards the Uchiha again, since Root was just rediscovered (by foreign intelligence, no less!) and he needs to redirect attention off himself and onto the Uchiha. He's even considering the total elimination plan again- Itachi's work in the Land of Water is valuable, but not more valuable than consolidating control over the Village.

(Or perhaps he doesn't need Itachi for this- Shisui is also a talented ANBU operative, after all. Sasuke was originally supposed to be the spare Uchiha left alive in the village, so they wouldn't loose the precious Sharingan, but it's becoming increasingly clear that while he's good, he's not as good as Itachi. Why keep the subpar tool and throw away the masterwork?)

Itachi develops a humorous problem where he's leading three different fake lives, and is covering up with by genjutsu-wammying anyone who might notice anything suspicious in the timing of his long absences. He's infiltrated Mei's rebellion as a spy who needs to disappear a lot to go do spy stuff, while at the same time pretending to be an official in the Water Daimyo's court, while also posing as a regular Kiri Jounin.

His Regular Kiri Jounin act is so solid, they give him a genin team. One of the genin is related to the civilian official he's impersonating in the Daimyo's court, and she constantly comes to see him and tell him all about her sensei. On of the other genin on the team is related to a the Mizukage, and Mei orders him to kidnap that genin away from their sensei, which is also him, so that he can be used as leverage. The third genin turns out to be a secret kekkei-genkai user, and actually wants to be kidnapped away to the rebellion so that they won't have to live in fear of being discovered, and also because they hate the current government. This genin who wants to be kidnapped is constantly fighting with the genin he's actually supposed to kidnap, and whines that "Sensei, you're not supposed to play favorites! Why do they get to get kidnapped but I don't? They don't even want to get kidnapped!"

(Itachi the Regular Kiri Jounin, who is Unquestionably Loyal and Totally Not a Radical Who Would Join the Rebellion, ends up dating Kisame, whose identity as an ANBU is technically a secret. This relationship runs on willful ignorance.)

Kisame and Itachi would end up taking each others' places at some point to take down each others' mentors- Kisame walks right into Danzo's office looking like Itachi, and no one blinks when they sense the genjutsu because Itachi is always casting genjutsus. No one even realizes anything's wrong until Danzo's dead and "Itachi" is making his getaway.

Itachi would be approached by Fuguki at some point with an offer to sell information, and immediately realizes that this is Kisame's leak. He argues to Danzo's replacement that the value of Kiri's ANBU turning on each other is greater than the value of having someone willing to sell the occasional nugget of info. He has to work not to laugh behind his ANBU mask, because Konoha nin just don't get how down Kiri nin are to turn on each other at the drop of a hat. "Turning Kiri ANBU against each other" please, as if the Seven Swordsmen don't regularly train their own murderers. As if one of the fastest ways to gain cache isn't by offing your superiors. It's like Konoha Intelligence knows nothing.

He wins his case, and reveals what he knows to Kisame, who goes and kills Fuguki like he did in canon. Obito reveals himself, same as in canon, and Kisame immediately knows how he's going to pay Itachi back. He's still disillusioned with the Shinobi world like in canon, but he had his initial Pit of Despair moment years ago, when he figured out there was a leak in ANBU and that truly there were lies everywhere. He's learned how to compartmentalize since then.

He pretends to join Obito so that he can feed Itachi information. Together they take down Obito, revealing his crimes to both Kiri and Konoha.

It should be over then- Kisame found the leak, Itachi cleared his family's name- but it's been around a decade at this point. Both of them have played so many roles as spies that they don't know how to go back to who they were before.

Itachi's almost spent more of his life in the Land of Water than in the Land of Fire at this point, and he certainly knows more people there than in the Land of Fire. He's passed his twentieth birthday by now, and he's no longer a pre-teen with no concept of the world and his place in it outside of Konoha Propaganda/Brainwashing. He doesn't know how to relate to Sasuke's fierce, uncomplicated desire to grow up to be the best Shinobi, because how can he think that's a good thing at this point?

Meanwhile, Kisame still kind of hoped that killing the liars/traitors who had sent so many Kiri-nin to their deaths would make him feel better about all the comrade-killing, but it doesn't. He can't seem to reconcile his absolute loyalty to the Village and its ideals with his disgust at everything they do.

For a brief while, he and Itachi join Mei's rebellion for realsies (Itachi still as one of his undercover roles) and help her topple the Bloody Mist government and install a new one, but it's not enough. What she's proposing is still a Ninja Village. It's better than what there was before, but that's not really a ringing endorsement.

Itachi's the first one to decide to walk away. He lets Kisame "kill" him on a random mission in a way that doesn't lend itself to a body being returned or retrieved, then settles down and builds himself a life as a secret kekkei-genkai child who grew up hidden like Mei, but never learned to be a proper shinobi. He spends his days at a quiet house outside Kiri proper gardening and making jam by the side of a lake Kisame made during one of his fights with Itachi. There's a ghost town near the lake, emptied during the Civil War years. He develops a reputation as a ghost.

Kisame walks away not long after. He can't really leave, of course- unlike Itachi, he has no desire to settle down in a foreign country, and too many people know him here- but he does step away from active duty. He "kills" Itachi The Regular Kiri Jounin-Sensei and takes his genin team for himself. The kids know something's up because their Sensei still visits them sometimes, though he half-heartedly tries to convince them he's a ghost. They help spread the story about the ghost living by the lake anyway, just in case anyone starts investigating.

Kisame quietly moves out of his shitty Kiri apartment to join Itachi by the lake. Some of the seven swordsmen do come investigating then, but when they discover that Kisame's just moving in with his squeeze who he really sexily fake-murdered, they decide not to do anything about it. Besides, they like Itachi and don't want to have to write up a report about how dangerous it is to Kiri security that he lounges around a lake all day, drawing birds and cooking elaborate meals in an attempt to blend the comfort food of his youth with the produce and spices native to Kiri that are honestly more familiar to him at this point than the ones that grow in the Land of Fire.

Itachi sometimes goes and visits Sasuke and Shisui back in Konoha, but mostly he hangs out in his new home and lives out his soft, domestic, non-violent dreams with Kisame and his cute little genin. It's a sappy ending.

[aion-rsa]

Black Widow Timeline Explained

https://ift.tt/3yH3sEi

This article contains Black Widow spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here.

Who is Natasha Romanoff? It’s a question Marvel Studios coyly teased for years and then… failed to answer as a full decade and the entire “Infinity Saga” passed us by. Yes, the long overdue Black Widow movie is finally reaching theaters this weekend, but Nat was killed off years ago in the sacred timeline of Marvel Cinematic Universe canon.

Nevertheless, we are happy that the character and Scarlett Johansson received some much deserved closure, and in a film which fills in many of the blindspots in the Black Widow mythos, not least of which includes what she got up to between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.

With her narrative being seemingly closed for good, it’s time to unpack the oft-obscured life story of Natasha and consider whether she at last balanced out all that red in her ledger.

1984

The child who would become Natasha Romanoff is born in Stalingrad to a mother who is forced to give her over to the Soviet government. Despite the mother’s best efforts, she is unable to free Nat from the system. (Fury’s Big Week, Black Widow)

1992

After years of indoctrination and training in the Widow program, which is run out of Soviet Col. Dreykov’s Red Room, eight-year-old Natasha is selected alongside three-year-old Yelena to be part of KGB agents Alexi Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff’s cover story. The quartet of sleeper agents move to Ohio, posing as an all-American family while gathering American state secrets. (Black Widow)

1995

Alexi and Melina succeed in obtaining critical information and escape U.S. soil. Eleven-year-old Natasha and six-year-old Yelena, who’ve become increasingly Americanized and attached to the family identities they assumed, are traumatized. (Black Widow)

2002

Natasha completes her Widow training and graduates from the Red Room, which includes a “ceremony” where she is asked to execute a man bound to a chair. She is then sterilized on an operating table. Dreykov believes robbing “widows” of the chance to have children makes them more ruthless killers. (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

2002 – 2007

Natasha is involved in multiple mysterious and apparently bloody Widow operations, which include incidents of murder in São Paulo and a separate “hospital fire” atrocity she is still haunted by. (The Avengers)

2007 – 2008

Clint Barton recruits Natasha into the West’s international SHIELD organization. Part of her defection comes at the price of assassinating Dreykov in Budapest. However, it is merely Dreykov’s young daughter Antonia who feels the fire of Nat’s explosives. (The Avengers, Black Widow)

2009

Natasha has her first run in with the Winter Soldier when she attempts to extract a defecting nuclear engineer out of Iran. A brainwashed Bucky Barnes steals her prize by running her car off a cliff in Ukraine and then shooting a bullet through Nat’s stomach and into her asset—killing him instantly. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Around this time, Natasha becomes an unofficial member of Clint Barton’s secret family, who live on an idyllic farmhouse. She’s known there as Auntie Nat. (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

2010

Natasha infiltrates Stark Industries under the alias of Natalie Rushman, working as a legal assistant who moonlights as a model in order to catch Tony Stark’s lascivious eye. (Iron Man 2)

Natalie becomes Tony’s assistant but is actually spying on him for SHIELD, which has come to realize Tony’s arc reactor—which saved his life in Afghanistan—is now poisoning him. Nat eventually reveals she’s a SHIELD agent and helps prevent an assassination attempt on Stark’s life by rival forces. (Iron Man 2)

Read more

Movies

The Black Widow Movie You Never Saw

By Don Kaye

Movies

Florence Pugh’s Best Roles: What to Watch After Black Widow

By Kayti Burt

2012

Nat abandons her infiltration of the Russian underworld to recruit Bruce Banner to SHIELD after Loki arrives on Earth, brainwashing Clint Barton and planning world domination. She later successfully interrogates and manipulates the supposed God of Mischief. (The Avengers)

Natasha becomes one of the founding members of the Avengers after saving the world from an alien invasion alongside Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk in the Battle of New York. (The Avengers)

2014

Still working for SHIELD, Natasha infiltrates a pirate-commandeered SHIELD vessel to protect/steal precious SHIELD secrets while Captain America naively thinks they’re there to save hostages. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Black Widow goes rogue alongside Cap after an assassination attempt on her mentor, Col. Nick Fury. Fury of course survived and forms an underground operation with Nat and Rogers to root out HYDRA sleeper cells who’ve slowly taken over SHIELD leadership during the past 70 years. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

After saving the world from HYDRA’s latest attempt at world domination, Natasha publicly reprimands the American government at a baffling Capitol Hill hearing where she is being questioned by Pentagon brass. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

… MEANWHILE the Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton from circa 2023—nearly a decade older and sadder—time travel to 2014 in order to undo the damage Thanos caused when he snapped half of life in the universe out of existence with the Infinity Stones. They journey to the planet Vormir where they’re told one will have to die in order to obtain the Soul Stone. Black Widow and Hawkeye fight over who will have the right to sacrifice themselves for the other—Natasha wins and falls to her death, thus ending her tragic timeline in the past. (Avengers: Endgame)

2015

Black Widow becomes a full-time Avenger, joining the team as they dismantle the last HYDRA base in Sokovia. They regain Loki’s powerful scepter with an infinity stone inside. (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

Black Widow strikes up an intimate and unrequited connection with Bruce Banner. She is the only Avenger able to talk the Hulk down from his rages. The pair consider running off together, but their burgeoning romance is thwarted by the arrival of Ultron—an artificial intelligence that wants to… destroy the world. (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

Nat and the Avengers prevent Ultron from killing all organic life on Earth—which involved lifting Sokovia’s capital city into the sky and then dropping it like an asteroid—but in the carnage, Banner/Hulk chooses not to pursue a relationship with Nat, disappearing to parts unknown as she accepts her role as a leader of the growing Avengers roster. (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

2016

Black Widow is part of an Avengers operation in Lagos, Nigeria, which goes horribly wrong when in an attempt to stop terrorist Brock Rumlow from stealing a biological weapon, an entire office floor of civilians is killed. (Captain America: Civil War)

Shortly after the Lagos incident, the Sokovia Accords are signed by the UN, requiring Avengers and other superpowered individuals to register themselves under the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council. Natasha at first accepts this as a reasonable path forward. She changes her mind when pro-Accords Avenger Tony Stark comes to blows with the resident skeptic, Steve Rogers, in Berlin. Romanoff helps Rogers escape and then also goes to ground. (Captain America: Civil War)

As a rogue agent, Natasha is invited back to Budapest and reunites with her faux-little sister Yelena, who reveals Dreykov is still alive and now is literally controlling the minds of the other young women he’s trained to be widows via mind-altering drugs. (Black Widow)

Nat and Yelena decide to track Dreykov down and kill him for real, and do so by freeing their “father” Alexi from Siberia and reconnecting with their “mother” Melina, who is still loyal to the Widow program. Melina nonetheless takes her girls to the Red Room, the hidden air fortress where they were trained as children. Yelena kills Dreykov and Natasha frees all the women under Dreykov’s control, including his daughter who did not actually die in Budapest. (Black Widow)

Natasha reconnects with Steve Rogers and helps him free Wanda Maximoff, Scott Lang, Sam Wilson, and Clint Barton from the government’s “the Raft” prison vessel. (Captain America: Civil War, Black Widow)

2018

As Thanos’ alien forces invade Earth, Rogers, Romanoff, and other renegade Avengers come out of hiding to save the universe. Natasha is reunited with Banner, and all of them converge in an epic battle against the armies of Thanos in Wakanda. (Avengers: Infinity War)

After the Avengers fail to stop Thanos from collecting all the Infinity Stones, Nat watches many of her friends turn to dust, along with half the living creatures in existence. (Avengers: Infinity War)

Black Widow and the Avengers track Thanos down to an uninhabited planet, only to discover he’s destroyed the Infinity Stones they planned to use to resurrect the universe. Thor decapitates Thanos in a pyrrhic attempt at revenge. (Avengers: Endgame)

2023

Natasha has become the top leader of the Avengers, organizing their superheroism throughout the cosmos via intergalactic Zoom sessions with Captain Marvel, Rocket, and others. Yet she and Rogers quietly cling to the hope of reversing Thanos’ victory. (Avengers: Endgame)

When Scott Lang returns from the Quantum Realm, revealing he’s inadvertently discovered time travel, Nat and Steve get the original Avengers lineup back together to travel into the past in order to steal the Infinity Stones. Return to the 2014 section to find out how that ended for Black Widow… (Avengers: Endgame)

2024

After Natasha traveled to her destiny in the past, Yelena visits her grave in Ohio… and is recruited for a new kind of team. (Black Widow)

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[theculturedmarxist]

By Gary Brecher.Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd co-hosted with Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more!. Posted with THE EXILED.

There’s a gigantic, well-organized, extremely violent fascist group with tens of thousands of active members in Germany right now.

And nobody notices.

You’d think all the fascist-hunters would have sniffed it out by now, but it goes right by them as if these guys were invisible.

Which is odd, because this group is not trying to hide, or pretending to be harmless. They’re not shy about it, and it’s not just talk. They have quite a record. They’ve been rampaging for decades, and if anything they’re stronger now than they used to be. They’re closely linked to CIA and Nazi groups; they’re very busy beating, burning, and murdering minorities of all kinds, and boast quite openly about hating literally everyone who’s not a member of their own ethnic group and sect, even suggesting that members go on “hunting expeditions” against minorities which they’d already almost wiped out back in the 20th century.

This group recently held massive, open rallies in the cities of Germany, and it’s only in the last few years that the government has even attempted to ban the public symbols and salutes of this massive fascist group.

There’s something grotesquely comic about this. We have a swarm of fascist-spotters who’ve spent the last few decades waiting for fascism to emerge in Germany when it was marching around, shouting at the top of its lungs, beating minorities, celebrating genocide, and supporting ethnic cleansing right in front of their damn faces.

I’m talking about the Gray Wolves. And I defy anyone to find a more successful, out-front, no-kidding, massive, effective, ruthless fascist organization anywhere in the world. They’re adapting quickly, and even have their own fierce Wiki defenders.

Here are a few highlights from their long, successful career:

In 1978, Gray Wolves started pogroms against Alevi Kurds in Maras (also known as Kahramanmaras) in South-Central Anatolia.

Location is important here. Maras is due north of Aleppo across the Syrian border, NW of Kobane, and above all just up the road from Gazantiep. Gazantiep is a key city for right-wing Turkish nationalists, a city dominated not just by people who are ethnically Turkish but who identify as rightwing Turks of the most intensely nationalist kind. This kind of population lives in a state of siege, glories in that feeling, and is almost always willing to lash out against the sea of minorities they imagine surrounding them. That’s why Gazantiep keeps making the news as a nice convenient safe house for IS and their Turkish allies, some of whom killed 57 Kurds at a wedding in 2016.

It’s important to emphasize that people who are ethnically Turkish are not a bloc. Some of the bravest people on earth, languishing in the Turkish state’s prisons or buried in unmarked graves, are proudly Turkish by ancestry.

And then there are the young men who join the Gray Wolves. Those men are murderous fascists, and it’s cowardice to pretend not to see that.

Violence by these men against minorities has never stopped, but it hit its peak — more like the highest peak in a mountain-range of a graph — in 1978, before the Anglosphere had any handle on sectarian violence in the Middle East.

The target of the Gray Wolves in Maras was a double minority: Alevi Kurds. Alevi Muslims are often considered heretics by Salafists and other Sunni fundamentalists. They were massacred with impunity in Ottoman pogroms. Erdogan’s AK Party, which very much wants to revive Ottoman practice and Ottoman borders, openly considers the Alevi heretics fair game for the Gray Wolves’s death squads.

Those who were killed in 1978 were not only Alevi, but Kurds — and the Turkish state, which embraced Wilsonian ethnic nationality with a vengeance, a terrible vengeance, hates Kurds simply for being Kurds. So the Kurdish Alevi of Maras were a natural target twice-over.

The campaign against them built up for weeks, as pogroms usually do, with the unpredictable pace partly a result of working with unstable, violent mobs but also part of a strategy to terrorize the victims, who never know when things will go from bad (very bad) to even-worse.

The details of the massacre are very typical, sickening but not unusual:

Witnesses to the massacre.

Seyho Demir: “The Maras Police Chief at the time was Abdülkadir Aksu, Minister of the Interior in the last AKP government. The massacre was organised by MIT (the Turkish secret service), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Islamists together… As soon as I heard about the massacre, I went to Maras. In the morning I went to Maras State Hospital. There I met a nurse I knew…When she saw me, she was surprised: ‘Seyho, where have you come from? They are killing everyone here. They have taken at least ten lightly-wounded people from the hospital downstairs and killed them.’ This was done under the control of the head physician of the Maras State Hospital. Everyone knows that such a big massacre cannot be carried out without state involvement. In the Yörükselim neighbourhood they cut a pregnant woman open with a bayonet. They took out the eight-month foetus, shouting “Allah Allah” and hung it from an electricity pole with a hook. The pictures of that savagery were published in the newspapers that day. The lawyer Halil Güllüoglu followed the Maras massacre case. The files he had were never made public. He was killed for pursuing the case anyway. Let them make those files public, then the role of the state will become clear.”

Meryem Polat: “They started in the morning, burning all the houses, and continued into the afternoon. A child was burned in a boiler. They sacked everything. We were in the water in the cellar, above us were wooden boards. The boards were burning and falling on top of us. My house was reduced to ashes. We were eight people in the cellar; they did not see us and left.”(EZÖ/TK/AG)

All accounts agree that the massacre not only happened with state collusion but state encouragement. No one was punished. Many were, in fact, promoted, and hold high positions in Erdogan’s government today.

That’s the pattern here: the Gray Wolves as the street-fighting wing of the state. The parallel is closer to Indonesian Islamists in 1965 than the SA in 1930s Germany, but so many people have trouble taking any fascism clearly unless it can be soldered to 1930s Germany that I may as well make the analogy for, as they say in the academic biz, heuristic purposes.

The Gray Wolves ideology is very widespread and acceptable in many (not all) communities in Turkey. This leads to a lot of more or less lone-wolf killings (as it were), as when a soldier who was a member of the Gray Wolves killed a fellow soldier for being an Armenian a few years ago.

Older readers might remember the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II back in 1979.

The assassin was one Mehmet Ali Agca, a longtime member of the Gray Wolves.

He had a track record of killing leftists and other enemies on behalf of the “Idealists” (seriously, that’s what the Wolves call themselves):

“The weapon used in the Feb. 1, 1979, murder of a Turkish newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, for which Mr. Agca was convicted, was supplied by a member of the Idealist Clubs, according to the Turkish authorities. Other members helped Mr. Agca escape from prison. Still others prepared a false passport for him. And on the day of the killing, he went to the National Action Party offices.”

Note the familiar pattern: Ali Agca kills a leftist editor who’s annoying the Turkish state, gets caught, and manages to escape with a lot of help from Turkish intelligence.

They hardly bothered to hide their collusion in the escape. The Turkish state was killing a lot of leftists, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of minorities — the usual suspects for classic fascists like Ali Agca.

But as you older readers might recall, nobody in the media talked about Ali Agca as a Turkish fascist. He was, for Cold-War purposes, smeared as a Bulgarian agent.

The “Bulgarian connection” never made much sense, but it served the US/UK/Israel/Saudi intelligence agencies’ PR purposes. Remember, Turkey is NATO — very, very NATO.

NATO might survive the loss of many other small European states, but it could not survive losing Turkey. So the US/UK state will always side with the Turkish state and help them cover up fascist atrocities, blaming them on the Soviets until those useful patsies took their final dive.

Blaming Bulgaria rather than the obvious suspects, the Gray Wolves to which this thug Ali Agca had been murderously loyal all his life, was especially bizarre since there was an obvious sectarian motive: the Gray Wolves hate Christians, as they hate all other minorities, ethnic or religious, and make a point of staging provocations at all occasions when the remnants of what was once a huge Christian minority dare to show themselves in public.

Orthodox Christians are the Wolves’ preferred prey. They prefer not to do anything too bloody to high-profile Western targets like a pope, but when you squirt sectarian hate into weak minds and itchy trigger fingers for generations, some of the lads are going to pick the wrong victim.

Perhaps that’s what happened when Ali Agca went from NATO-approved murderer of leftists and Kurds, to shooting the Pope. We’ll never know, because it was quickly twisted into the ridiculous “Bulgaria did it” farce by the guys who enjoy a few cocktails with their opposite numbers from Ankara at all those NATO conferences.

And we’ll never know how much daily violence this massive fascist gang inflicts. Occasionally the Turkish state gets irritated enough to send a suicide bomber or two to kill Kurdish peace demonstrators, as it did in Ankara in 2015, killing 86 demonstrators and maiming a hundred more. But that state, our NATO ally, supports a whole madhouse of Arab and Turkmen jihadis as well as its own stable of disposable Gray Wolves assassins, so it may never be clear whether it was the Wolves, precisely, who pressed the detonators.

But it’s a statistical certainty that somewhere along the long line from greenlighting an attack like this and sending red-hot ball bearings splattering into the bodies of teenagers with peace banners, many of the men involved were members in good standing of the good ol’ Wolves.

Violence by the Gray Wolves is a constant in Turkey, usually unreported — especially now that Erdogan’s party has imprisoned thousands of journalists and intellectuals, and terrorized the rest into quietism or collusion. We may never know how many Kurds are murdered daily in the southeast of Anatolia, because no one who matters, in the Turkish state or its many powerful allies in the West (e.g. the Michael Flynn story) want you to know about it. It’s rare for those stories to make the news at all, but God knows you can’t forget them once you’ve read them.

In fact the Gray Wolves are going mainstream, and winning a lot of votes.

Fascism is mainstream in Turkey, getting more mainstream all the time — and has been since the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Gray Wolves have quite a pedigree, a classic fascist genealogy.

Fascism is often strongest in the ruins of a defeated empire, and that was the situation in the former Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The Empire had once ruled from Central Europe to Iraq, flowing and ebbing over the centuries (with a peak in the 16th century). At its peak, it was a fearsome conquering force.

There’s a great novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare detailing the unstoppable waves of special forces that the Empire could unleash on strongpoints that held out against conquest.

The Ottomans took a long time to fall from that 16th c. peak. They were still around, partly because Britain and France always supported them against the bogeyman of the late Victorian Era, the Russian Threat.

Propped up by the two big powers of Europe, the Empire managed to survive a coup in 1908 by young officers who would go on to a career in defeat and genocide, because they guessed wrong on which side would win the oncoming Great War.

The Young Turks, as these officers were called, sided with the up-and-coming, efficient military of the neighboring empire: Germany. They guessed wrong, but not before they managed to exterminate the harmless Armenians who had recently been patronized as Turkey’s “model minority” for their docility. And this genocide went so well, so quietly, that Hitler, contemplating the genocide of the European Jews, allegedly demanded of any squeamish nay-sayers “Who remembers the Armenians?”

You get a lot of horrible echoes like that in this story. At any rate, no one cared to remember or notice the extermination of the Armenians, but the winners at Versailles were typically vengeful against the former Ottoman Empire — not by any means for wiping out the Armenians, but for being German allies, and losing.

Britain and France, now joined by the US, were as vengeful toward the former Empire as they had been lenient during its bloody final years. Ottoman rule over non-Turkish territory was erased. For a few years there was some doubt whether even Anatolia would remain a Turkish state.

Then, as most of you know, came Mustafa Kemal, soon to become Kemal Ataturk, a hero of Gallipoli (a Turkish/Ottoman victory that stood out proudly in the great defeat).

Ataturk was a typical elite young officer of the early 20th c. Those were very dangerous people, those young officers. Often impressive individuals, but completely ruthless and immensely fond of violence. That goes for all of them, right across the Continent — Hell, right across the world.

Ataturk formed a nucleus of former officers from the Great War. (Again, the international echoes are clear enough; suffice to say that these guys were the most dangerous, formidable demographic in a few generations, perhaps since the emergence of the Napoleonic elite.) They fought well, and then they went about making Turkey a monoethnic state, without mercy.

For a while, that state was professedly secular, but since it had already killed or driven out most religious minorities, the monoethnic state became, under the AK party, avowedly mono-sectarian as well.

The current chant of the Wolves many, many supporters is “My heart is Turkish and my soul is Muslim!” You must be both: ethnically Turkish and orthodox, Sunni Muslim as well. No mercy for anyone who fails either test, which means that a lot of Kurds, a lot of Alevis, a lot of secular Leftists, end up dead or in prison.

The evolution of the Gray Wolves is a classic fascist Genesis story, and the behavior of its hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of supporters is classic fascist violence. Why don’t more people notice that?

I hate to speculate, because the range of possible answers all boils down to cowardice, conformity, and the odd Euro-centrism one finds in the strangest places. They don’t get noticed because they’re not European, maybe? Fascism of the 1930s was European, and that’s the only kind amateurs notice? Odd, because Turkey is European enough to be the cornerstone of NATO.

This would not be the first time that the interests of what you could call the NATO Deep State aligned all too perfectly with the more gullible pockets of the Left. In fact, it’s very closely related to the phenomenon of not noticing, or trying very hard not to notice, the sectarian ultra-violence of the Syrian “rebels.” But this time, since Turkey is a NATO ally, it’s the violence of the state and its fascist proxies that is ignored. I struggle to come up with any other reason that the Gray Wolves get so little attention.

All I know is that we have a massive, ultra-violent, highly effective, classically fascist movement killing minorities every single day, and there’s an odd silence about it.

I would love to ask one of the innumerable online fascist hunters why they hunt stray curs and slink silently past the cold stare of the Gray Wolves. Perhaps it’s not so much any of the excuses I suggested above; perhaps some hunters just prefer smaller, easy prey to the real thing.

Gary Brecher is the nom de guerre-nerd of John Dolan. Buy his book The War Nerd Iliad. Hear him read his comic memoir Pleasant Hell in audiobook format.

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[jemfisch]

⌠ MASON GOODING, 21, CISMALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, JEREMY “JEM” FISCHMAN II! according to their records, they’re a SECOND YEAR year, specializing in ADVANCED ENCRYPTION & “MACGUYVER” SURVIVAL SKILLS AND NAVIGATION; and they DID NOT go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of (old hip hop blaring from headphones, a broken crtv with the cords ripped out and repurposed, the smell of spray paint graffiti, brightly colored shirts with 80s patterns). when it’s the (cancer)’s birthday on 06/23/99, they always request their ICE CREAM SANDWICHES from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. ⌿ kati, 24, she/her, est ⍀ @gallagherintro

STATS / PINTEREST / CONNECTIONS / CLASSES

INSPIRATION

fox mulder (the x files)

hogarth hughes (the iron giant)

will turner (pirates of the carribean)

robin hood

george weasley (harry potter)

aladdin

spike spiegel (cowboy bebop)

mark watney (the martian)

BACKGROUND + CLICK FOR BIO

his parents were high school sweethearts and married just before they attended college at harvard together, securing careers at the kennedy space center. 

jeremy fischman sr dies under mysterious circumstances in a lab accident and ellen is twenty-eight and left alone to raise baby jem. things only go downhill from here. jeremy was the love of her life and she becomes obsessed with his disappearance and all kinds of conspiracy theories, blows a bunch of her money. it doesn’t take long for her to be fired, savings blown on expensive equipment or sunk into internet hoaxes

they move to a rough neighborhood in gainesville where jem grows up. he likes jem, not jeremy, jeremy is his father. he’s never experienced the perfect life his parents used to live, the white picket fence, the shiny space shuttles. he’s only got this, and honestly, he doesn’t hate it. 

the neighborhood’s rough, but there’s a lot of fun characters, and his mom is practically his best friend – aside from his next-door neighbor, NOAH WARD.

jem’s mom does odd hacking jobs from the comfort of their home. some of them are shadier than others, she makes connections with a lot of private investigators in town and looks into people’s cheating husbands and tracks down birth parents and missing people. she does pro bono work too, a kindhearted woman, she can never say no to those in need, even if she’s not so fortunate herself. as jem gets older, he learns everything that he knows from her

every summer vacation growing up, jem and his mom would pack their bags and make home in a camper van, traveling across the country. in some ways, this was great mother-son bonding, but this wasn’t why they did it. his mom never gave up looking for the truth about her husband,  but hacking into secure, top-secret government databases is nothing like hacking into the gainesville city hall, it’s hard work, and they travel around the country methodically so that their signal cannot be traced. every summer they get close, but never close enough.

when noah moves away for college, jem stays home. he’s not comfortable leaving his mom. 

he keeps up with hacking jobs and keeping up with looking for his dad on the side. he doesn’t think they’ll ever find him, his mom holds out hope but jem is eighteen years old and a bit more jaded now, he figures the guy’s just really dead and well, the conspiracy of it all matters less and less when he knows that either way, he’s still grown up without him. 

a lot of jem’s social life is online, whether it’s friends from hacking forums or via soundcloud.

when he’s not hacking, he’s making music. his passions of technology and music mix and he creates his own beats and soundcloud, mashing together songs, and even putting together a popular meme track or two used on tiktok. 

it’s actually a bit lucrative, but that’s not why he does it. doesn’t even really use his name, catch him on soundcloud…username? uncutjems.

every time he and his mom get close to finding his dad, there’s just more to do, and it’s almost like someone KNOWS what they’re doing. 

jem’s right about that – he is being watched. since noah’s admission to gallagher, recruiters have been aware of the boy who taught her everything she knew. 

when gallagher makes the choice to start allowing male students, an agent shows up at his door offering him a once in a lifetime chance at a free education. 

jem doesn’t have any strong ambition to go into espionage, per say, but he won’t say no to advanced classes taught by some of the world’s brightest minds – and a chance to reunite with his best friend. however, he hasn’t stopped trying to get into the government’s records and still has ambitions of going into music production.

PERSONALITY. 

INTUITIVE. jem has a natural intuition about things and he trusts himself and his own opinions about things. i suppose you could perceive this as confidence, but honestly he’s just really SMART, good at absorbing facts even subconsciously and putting things together about people or situations. in a sense, he has a habit of being correct – he definitely comes off as intelligent, even though his grades in school have never been very good. he just has different priorities. 

LOYAL. make a friend out of jem and you have a friend for life, he’ll take your secrets to the grade and he’s pretty trustworthy. he’s the type of guy that gets along with pretty much everyone but he has a few select, close friends because he is somewhat intentional about the company that he keeps. he’s friendly and kind, but he keeps his inner circle of people he trusts close and somewhat exclusive. 

PROTECTIVE. kind of has papa bear energy, you know ? maybe the dad friend of your friend group, but in a laid back way, he might not seem like he’s the type to spring into action but call someone close to him a rude name and you’ll see his fist coming at your face. he’s protective but not possessive, i guess is how i would describe it, but i think he gives pretty good advice as well because he’s really hoping the best for ppl. 

MALINGERING. jem is kind of a SLACKER! at least, that’s what teachers have called him in the past, he simply does not dream of labor. he’s just kind of doing his own thing, will fake sick to skip a class, whatever else, even though he likes producing music he doesn’t really have a great ambition for anything, spy or otherwise. as long as he has a good computer setup, then he’s fucking chilling. 

MOODY. he’s laid back to the umpteenth degree when it comes to work or obligations, but he does have sort of mood swings, i guess he’s the sort of person that you would describe as grumpy at times ? definitely NOT a morning person and when he’s in an off mood, he can be hard to interact with or snap out of. 

DISORGANIZED. the sort of person to throw his stuff across the bed or leave piles of clothes on the floor to deal with later, maybe he’s not your favorite roommate for this reason. he has a habit of losing things that he just set down or whatever, things like that. 

HEADCANONS.

tbh you can think of him like...beca in pitch perfect ! he’s here bc he was offered a free education and he’s cool with that, but he’d rather be pursuing a future in music. a damn good hacker, though, and the gallagher recruiters are hoping that with some ‘ambition’ he’ll want to work for the government someday. 

played baseball throughout middle and high school and he’s fairly athletic – he can get pretty competitive when he plays, it kind of brings out a side in him that most people don’t expect to see because he’s fairly chilled out most of the time 

a boss with a slingshot. there is no reason for this, but he had one as a kid and he used to chase squirrels away from the bird feeders outside their home. he has great eyesight and his aim is great, but it’s literally the only weapon he’s proficient in

he’s not tiktok famous for his face, but he has two tiktok famous songs...he’s made like 12k in record deals for selling the rights, it’s just the kind of shit that he does goofing around in music software and he has a good ear for what is going to be catchy

he’s NOT a morning person, definitely a late night kind of guy, will stay up until all hours just fucking around on the computer and then he’ll sleep until 1 or 2pm, at least. getting up for morning classes is a struggle for them and he has slept through them on occasion.

funky sweaters, crazy socks, fun-patterned shirts, he dresses a bit like a circus tent at times, but you can’t say that he doesn’t have style – he dresses well, but it’s like he’s stepped out of a 90s cartoon or something

if he makes u a playlist he either wants to be ur friend so fucking bad or he’s head over heels in love with u

really likes making new things with old technology, he loves taking the macguyver courses and learning new things and he’s actually built his own computer and a lot of his own musical instruments 

usually has a couple bandaids because he’s a bit accident prone or can lose his focus when working in the lab. when he gets in his own head while working on a project, he literally cannot hear anything else – sort of selective hearing

likes fucking around with spray paint, if he can, he’s got a bit of an artistic streak and he doodles stickers on sticker paper sometimes. you can probably catch his tag around campus or even stuck to the latops of his close friends, it’s just a little man with a tv for a head. 

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

HACKING JOBS – if you STILL need a hacker for any of your wild backstory connections, jem is a great bet. he’s been doing paid jobs for people professionally since he could type, and he’s sort of an ace at getting in and out without leaving a trace...and he’s no gossip. so, your secrets would be safe with him. 

SMOKING BUDDIES – people that he can smoke up with, talk about life, talk about the bullshit of gallagher, but also people he can laugh with that don’t make him feel stressed or concerned about the future. 

MUSIC MAKING BUDDIES – if your character makes music, maybe they can collaborate on something...we’re about to drop the hottest mixtape of all time right here at gallagher academy i will teach myself garageband for this shit...jk but maybe

EX ON BAD TERMS – someone he dated last year...i’m imagining it was their first year and things were really great for the first semester, but shit fell apart second semester along with the school. maybe all the drama on campus caused distance, maybe he wasn’t there for them when they needed it, or maybe they got jealous of the way he always prioritizes noah ? a combination of things, we can hash out the details since i know some of you had some pretty angsty things going on second sem, and maybe it’s awkward now because it feels like there’s unfinished biz. 

EX ON GOOD TERMS / LOVERS TO FRIENDS – maybe someone that was a rebound and things didn’t really work and they saw that, maybe he wasn’t over his ex or whatever but they were able to stay friends ? it’s up to you how your muse feels about it but i want an ex that jem also has no hard feels about and actually is maybe sort of protective of them and cares a lot about them finding happiness, they bonded hardcore. 

EX-FLING – idk maybe they were hooking up for a while and then one of them started seeing someone else or one of them caught feels so they don’t hook up any more but it was super fun when they did !! also down for it to have been like a summer fling and once the summer ended. 

BROS – idk i would like for him to have a squad or something for him to just fuck around with <3 but it’s wholesome and they respect women

ONLINE FRIEND (ANONYMOUS) – he spent a lot of time on forums online and stuff so i’d love for him to have an online friend !! maybe cute if they just know each other by their screen names rn and we can do a bunch of text chats and maybe they both know they go to gallagher but they simply. haven’t met idk

ONLINE FRIENDS – also friends he met online that aren’t anonymous they could’ve met through any number of forums but probably have similar interests like music or hacking so they’re long time homies , someone he’s known almost as long as noah

ONE NIGHT STAND – self explanatory. maybe they’re super good friends and now it’s kind of awkward now and they want to get back to a place of normalcy but it’s simply not normal, maybe they fucked things up by breakin the tension on like. halloween or some shit. 

FRIENDZONED – someone jem accidentally friendzoned and maybe he doesn’t even realize it himself but they had a thing for him and he really just didn’t realize it bc he can’t tell unless you spell it out for him.

CLASS RIVALS – someone who tries really hard and cares about class a bunch vs. jem who doesn’t give a fuck but he keeps making the grade without really trying, so they’re ? bitter about it ? and so the two really do not hit it off because of that and they go back and forth , i just rly want a classroom rivalry. maybe even this rivalry and them nagging him actually motivates to try in the class just to piss them off 

 ENEMY – this person shared a secret with jem and then it somehow got out on the gossip blog idk ! they think jem told and now they hate him. 

anything pls let’s chat !

[napoleoninrags]

President Barabbas

The mob chose a mobster. Elections have consequences.

by Greg Olear

"Easter is a very special day for me ... Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country.” —Donald John Trump, 24 March 2020

I WAS RAISED Catholic, which meant that every Sunday, come hell or high water, we went to church. The Catholic Mass is extremely rote. There’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of standing up and sitting down, a lot of the same material, repeated over and over and over again. The Apostles’ Creed, for example, has been recited at Mass, in much the same way, since it was codified at the Council of Nicaea during the reign of Constantine the Great, a mere 17 centuries ago.

The best day of the liturgical year, in my recollection, was Palm Sunday. The priest always shared the same story: Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, appeared before his subjects in Jerusalem on the occasion of Passover, and agreed to free a single Jewish prisoner. The mob had to choose: should Pilate free Jesus, the alleged “King of the Jews,” or Barabbas, a notorious criminal? Whereupon we, role-playing in the pews, would cry, WE WANT BARABBAS! My brother and I shouted with gusto, to my mother’s extreme annoyance: WE WANT BARABBAS! And so the killer was set free, and Christ condemned to die.

I didn’t know at the time that this passage, perpetuating as it does the “Jews killed Jesus” myth, was used for centuries by anti-Semites to justify their despicable deeds. I never interpreted it that way. To me, the story is about how mobs, led as they are by riled-up morons, can easily be fooled and manipulated into voting against their best interests.

The 2016 election is a recent example of how the angry masses, presented with a clear choice of good guy versus bad guy, chose unwisely. It’s not fair to either party to compare Hillary Clinton with Jesus Christ, and Pontius Pilate did not use the Electoral College system in determining whom to pardon, but notorious criminal Donald John Trump is absolutely President Barabbas. The mob went with the mobster.

Three years into the Trump Administration, and a shocking number of the president’s associates are either in prison, about to head to prison, under indictment, or under investigation. There is Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, currently incarcerated. There is Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, fixer, and bagman: ditto. There is the treacherous Michael Flynn, awaiting his sentence (or, perhaps, his pardon). There is Trump’s longtime buddy and shadow campaign advisor Roger Stone, soon to toddle off to the hoosegow. There’s also those who have not yet been indicted because of the nefarious machinations of the corrupt Attorney General, William Barr: Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney, Erik Prince, and Trump’s lousy kids Ivanka, Eric, and Don Junior.

What is remarkable here, aside from the obvious fact that Trump cavorts with an uncanny number of crooks, is that none of these people has flipped. Manafort pretended to, only to ratfuck the FBI. Flynn, too, lied to investigators. Only Cohen gave up some dirt—but how much did he really surrender? The thing is, the rest of these people aren’t nearly as hard. Trump wants to pardon Roger Stone because he knows him well enough to know that he will sing to stay out of the Big House. Jared Kushner, aka Boy Plunder, has done so many illicit things that he will keep FBI agents busy for years; is Mr. Ivanka really not going to flip to avoid prison? And I can’t imagine Don Junior exhibiting the same trollish swagger around Cellblock D.

Trump’s partners in crime are all selfish assholes. They have no real loyalty. Giuliani, for example, loathes Trump with every fiber of his noxious being. He’s only protecting him out of his own self-interest. At some point, to preserve themselves, these fuckers will all turn on each other, and it will be the end of Reservoir Dogs all up in here: a bunch of petty crooks threatening to take each other down.

So why haven’t they?

A big queen sits in the middle of the stalemated chessboard, preventing all movement. The queen’s name is William Barr. He is the titular Attorney General of the United States, but his actual function is to slow-roll the Department of Justice from its takedown of Trump and his co-conspirators. To that end, he holds up witnesses. He stymies evidence from being sent to prosecutors. He cock-blocks US Attorneys, sure as he cock-blocked Mueller. He kicks the can and kicks it again and again and again, hoping to run out the clock. Barr has been so successful that the GOP is not even remotely worried about the bad stuff coming out. He’s gummed up the works so badly that we couldn’t even get witnesses at the fucking impeachment trial.

With a big, fat cork in the bottle of evidence, Trump and his fellow criminals do not have to fear retribution from law enforcement for as long as he stays in office. The only danger now is if they turn on each other. If they respect omertà, they are golden. Thus it is in all of their interests—Trump’s, but also Pence’s, McConnell’s, Pompeo’s, Kushner’s, and so on—to stay the course. These people will do anything, including exacerbate a global health crisis, to not get caught. They don’t care if we die. Repeat: they don’t care if we die. As Mr. White says in Reservoir Dogs: “The choice between doing ten years and taking out some stupid motherfucker, ain’t no choice at all.”

What are they hiding?

In Trump’s case, generations of criminal involvement with the mob—first La Cosa Nostra, later the Russian mafiya. His grandfather was a minor pimp at the dawn of the organized crime era, but Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was, as Lincoln’s Bible tells us, “a businessman front for the Genovese crime family.”

To best understand Fred, just track his rise from single-family home construction to big residential developments. From Shore Haven (1947) to Beach Haven to Trump Village, all were done with known mafia partners, in Genovese-controlled territory, and eventually with a fully Genovese-owned construction company (HRH Construction).

When the Russian mafiya began rolling in, they landed in Fred’s properties and partnered with the Genovese on some big ticket scams. This was also during the time that Fred and his attorney Roy Cohn set up S&A concrete (via Nick Auletta)—a joint venture between Tony Salerno (Genovese boss) and Paul Castellano (Gambino boss), so that donald could build in Manhattan. Remember donald’s quote, “Even my father, he said, you don’t want to go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory?” That’s because Manhattan, for construction, was Gambino territory. They controlled the concrete and unions. And Fred was a very loyal, shrewd front for the Genovese. To get his idiot, greedy kid into Manhattan, Fred and Roy Cohn had to get those two mob bosses to agree on a joint venture.

When the Russian mafiya pushed out the Italian mob after the fall of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump began laundering money for unseemly Vor associates of Semion Mogilevich. The Russians extended him credit when no US bank would touch him, and he remains in their debt—a fact the Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents will reveal, which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep said documents secret.

Because the Russian mafiya works hand in glove with the Russian government, Trump is also, as Hillary Clinton correctly told us four years ago, Putin’s puppet. His ties to Russian intelligence (Putin, remember, is ex-KGB) go back decades. Recruitment of Trump by the KGB began in the Reagan Administration; for all we know, his succession of ex-Soviet-bloc wives better reflect his allegiance to the Soviets than his taste in women. He is also connected to the Russian organized crime via his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a collector of kompromat and money launderer for arms dealers; Epstein’s longtime partner was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell, the spy and former business partner of, yes, Semion Mogilevich.

Trump’s underworld ties were all there in 2016, barely below the surface, for all the world to see. Wayne Barrett wrote about them for the Village Voice. Robert Friedman alluded to them in Red Mafiya. Craig Unger covers them closely in House of Trump, House of Putin. The mainstream media knew damned well what the guy really was, but chose to equate Trump’s years of actual mobbed-up crimes with HRC’s email server. The result? Every half-wit Fox News watcher proclaims, with a straight face, that Hillary, not Donald, is the crook!

Truth: Trump is a notorious criminal, a serial rapist and sexual assailant, wholly owned by the mob, controlled by the underworld and the Kremlin. He is a latter-day Barabbas—and because of the whims of a riled-up mob, he’s now, somehow, the President of the United States. Make no mistake: If he thinks it will help him avoid prosecution, he will order the churches open for Easter without qualm or hesitation. In his calculus, Jesus gave up His life for us, so we should give up our lives for Trump. He will happily pervert the holiest of Christian holy days to get what he wants. To this monster, nothing is sacred..

[incredible-dad]

What a man, what a man, what a man, what a mighty good man...

Archetype — The Hero  Birthday — February 18, 1970 Zodiac Sign — Aquarius Sun, Aquarius Rising, Cancer Moon MBTI — ESTP Enneagram — type 2: the Helper Temperament — Choleric Hogwarts House — Ravendor Moral Alignment — Lawful Good Primary Vice — Greed Primary Virtue — Charity Element — Earth

Overview:

Mother — Sarah Parr (nee Johnson) (adopted); Jennifer Peterson (birth) Father — Theodore Parr (adopted); Unknown (birth) Mother’s Occupation — primary schoolteacher Father’s Occupation — pastor Family Finances — comfortably middle class Birth Order — eldest Brothers — William Parr (younger, adoptive, blood child of Sarah and Teddy) Sisters — none. Other Close Family — Helen, Violet, Dash, Jack-Jack; i guess that Helen’s parents are his in-laws but he’s not really close to them because Helen is estranged. Best Friend — Frozone Other Friends — other Supers (mostly deceased) Enemies — The American Government lmao Pets — none, their house is way too hectic, but he grew up on a farm so they had animals there Home Life During Childhood — rosy and idyllic for the most part, his parents were wonderfully accepting of his gifts and even though other people in town kind of shunned him a bit, he won them over for the most part eventually. plus, no one really fucked with him because he could toss you into a building. not that he WOULD but  im js he could. He also grew up quite religious as the son of a southern presbaterian pastor. Town or City Name(s) — Smallville, Kansas; New York City, New York; Astoria, Oregon; Riverside, Iowa;  What Did His or Her Bedroom Look Like — shared with his brother in their little farm house, he wasn’t ever big on decoration or anything, so just whatever his mom decorated it with.  Any Sports or Clubs — no, not officially, he liked to play recreationally, but he wasn’t allowed on any teams because of his powers.  Favorite Toy or Game — loves monopoly, he’s that person that’s really into it and has a whole strategy and everything. He’ll get like MAJORLY competitive and no one really wants to play with him because he takes it really seriously lmao Schooling — his mom was his preschool teacher, and he went to regular rural public school with the same like group of 50 kids up through graduating HS. He got a BA in criminal justice from NYU on a Magick scholarship. Favorite Subject — not really any tbh, not a very studious person, but if he had to choose one he’d probably say science because he finds it interesting. Popular or Loner — he was a loner when his powers first started developing, but by high school he’d practiced really diligently at getting them under control and so he became quite popular after that because he’s very jovial and has a warm personality. Important Experiences or Events — getting adopted, though he doesn’t remember it lol; finding out he had powers; the birth of his brother; getting into NYU; meeting Helen; marrying Helen; joining the NSA; the NSA falling; the birth of Jack-Jack; adopting Violet and Dash Nationality — American Culture — Southern Religion and beliefs — Southern Presbyterian 

Physical Appearance:

Face Claim — David Harbour Complexion — idk white? lmao not super pale, not super dark, no freckles or anything Hair Colour — dirty blond Eye Colour — blue Height — 6’3 Build — stocky and strong Tattoos — none though he always jokes about getting Helen’s name in a heart on his arm Piercings — probably had his ears pierced at one point when he was trying to be #edgy at NYU Common Hairstyle — he’s balding lol Clothing Style — he dresses like a straight white man whose mother dressed him until he went to college and now his wife dresses him Mannerisms — rubs his forehead when he’s frustrated, puts his hands on his hips, crosses his arms, fidgets, sighs when he’s annoyed at you but doesn’t want to say it outright Usual Expression — 

Health:

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — has a very resilent immune system Physical Ailments — none Neurological Conditions — depression Allergies — none Grooming Habits — he wears cologne and shaves and showers, don’t expect much more than that Sleeping Habits — up at the crack of dawn, but not by choice. Grew up on a farm, so it’s just ingrained in him. Can sometimes go back to sleep until like nine, but rarely sleeps in. Is the dad that falls asleep in the recliner watching TV but wakes up if you try to change the channel. Snores. Has to drink a lot of coffee on night shifts. Apparently I have a lot of hcs about Bob’s sleeping habits. Eating Habits — will eat anything, anytime, but Helen’s cooking is his favorite (besides his mom’s) Exercise Habits — eh he’ll go to the gym to keep up pretenses but he has to be really careful, lol. Though, if he doesn’t exercise his strength, it can easily get too amped up, so catch him in the forest chucking trees across the meadows. Emotional Stability — 6; he’d score higher but he has a pretty easily triggered temper. He is easily riled up about things and very passionate, but for the most part he’s pretty jovial and easy to get along with. Body Temperature — runs a little warm Sociability — very friendly, very extroverted, perhaps too friendly, perhaps too extroverted  Addictions — processed sugar Drug Use — none, probably smoked weed in college or something Alcohol Use — not much, will have a few beers with dinner occasionally, but tends not to drink due to his high metabolism it makes it kind of pointless except for the taste and maybe a small buzz if he drinks enough; in college it was a game to see how much it’d take to get him drunk.

Your Character’s Character: 

Bad Habits — not following the rules, being controlling, reacting to situations without thinking Good Habits — loyal, a good communicator when he’s not antsy about things, emotional Best Characteristic — kindhearted Worst Characteristic — obsessive Worst Memory — all the people he’s lost Best Memory — when Jack-Jack was born, when he got married, when he adopted his kids Proud of — his wife, his kids Embarrassed by — his own ineptitude in relating to his kids Driving Style — normal really, not a speed demon or anything; tho he used to be as young person Strong Points — intelligence, friendliness, loyalty Attitude — he’s kind of pessimistic tbh, kind of depressed so he’s always just like *deep sigh Weakness — his brashness Fears — something happening to his family Phobias — lowkey fear of heights Secrets — that he knew about the experiments on the kiddos Regrets — not turning on the NSA faster Feels Vulnerable When — people are pointing out things he has done wrong Pet Peeves — people not listening to him, talking over him, telling him what to do lol Conflicts — his brashness v wanting to take things slow Motivation — to help Short Term Goals and Hopes — none really? Long Term Goals and Hopes — be a good parent, a good husband, and help people Sexuality — straight Day or Night Person — day person, he grew up on a farm Introvert or Extrovert — extrovert  Optimist or Pessimist — pessimist Intelligence — high

Likes and Styles:

Music — dad rock Books — not a biiiig reader, but he does like some history stuff/biographies Magazines — none really Foods — will eat anything but pineapple, but prefers a home cooked meal to eating out Drinks — no preference, will occasionally have a beer w dinner or smth Animals — also no real preference lol Sports — a football fan, will probs get into soccer too, into track bc of dash Social Issues — magick rights, but he’s also Tired Favorite Saying — eh none really Color — Helen’s eyes Clothing — just a regular 50 year old straight man, Helen builds his wardrobe Jewelry — his wedding ring ofc Games — none really, but he’ll get really into playing his kids’ video games with them Websites — none?? Is on the facebook, yes he calls it “the facebook” TV Shows — mindhunters, criminal minds, anything cop related lmao probably like watched game of thrones with helen and other classic tv shows like that Movies — likes comedies best Greatest Want — to protect his family Greatest Need — to let go of the past and heal

[theonyxpath]

Matthew Dawkins here, with Meghan Fitzgerald’s Maa-Kep draft for Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition! Enjoy!

Maa-Kep

Shadow of Pillars

Spies, Junta, Dapifers

We would never say we know better, of course. It’s just that not taking our advice would be a mistake.

I listened closely while he spoke. The people would love him, he said. They would offer their loyalty gladly, and in exchange they would gain power over their own fates. All it would take was a revolution, guns and fists raised high in silhouette against the orange blaze that would light up the night and banish tyranny. I could see his passion, his dedication. His logic was sound. His preparations were prudent. Even now, I laud his efforts.

He looked up from his maps and schedules to beam a smile my way. He cut a handsome figure, there in the candlelight, and I admit his plan had merit. It was a temptation, as surely as any convincing bait ever is. I smiled, too.

“So,” he said, “what do you think? Will it work?”

“It would have,” I assured him. “It would have worked very well, were it not for one fatal flaw.”

“What’s that?” he asked, concern writ plain in his bright eyes.

“You told it to me.”

Tradition of the Amulet

The relics of the Maa-Kep are protective talismans, badges of office, engraved emblems that declare something to be true, and unobtrusive seals that can hold back power, carry it, or transfer it from place to place. Worn or mounted, they passively soak in magic and secrets. Like their amulets, the Maa-Kep are subtle protectors and preservers of ideas and ideals, those who quietly move power from hand to hand or rein it in when it needs limiting for the greater good. They serve quietly but never let anyone forget how important they are. They absorb information, only doling it out when and to whom they believe it’s warranted. They’re the secret police of the Arisen, and the beat they walk is all of civilization. They shepherd ideological purity; sometimes those ideas come from the Judges, sometimes from the mortals the mummies guide, and sometimes from their own meret’s priorities.

Magnanimous in Victory, Blameless in Defeat

Maa-Kep rarely take the spotlight themselves, instead gathering information and then reporting it to someone else who will do the forward-facing work for them. This is partially because they believe to take credit is to disrespect their place as tools and useful right hands, passed down to them from the Judges and the Shan’iatu. It’s also for plausible deniability in case something goes wrong. It’s not that they throw their friends under the bus, it’s just that it’s easier to smooth things over later when they’re not the ones catching the heat. They’re loyal to their leaders but unafraid to speak truth to power — if only behind closed doors. They shape civilization around them by forever making corrections and adjustments to everything and everyone, whether with one quiet word or with a brute force tool — like a fellow mummy or a well-armed cult.

Foundations

In Irem, the Dapifers were originally a collection of middle managers — slave drivers, overseers, and convoy masters. They gradually made themselves indispensable, demonstrating their dedication to making sure Irem’s caravans ran on time and their understanding of the inner workings of empire. The Shan’iatu eventually recognized the guild’s potential to be so much more, and elevated the Maa-Kep to act as secret police whose true purpose was hidden from the other guilds. They preserved the ideological purity of Irem, making sure no one strayed from the path to glory and conquest in the gods’ names.

The Wheel Turns

The guild’s secret duty didn’t stay hidden forever; by the time of the Rite of Return, the others knew why the Spies had been chosen. Their fellow mummies don’t always remember it, though. Having a Maa-Kep in the meret is a slow pendulum swinging between trust and suspicion, as her comrades rediscover her covert goals over and over again; but by the time they remember, she’s always made herself too damn useful to ignore. To this day, it’s gauche to talk about it in polite company, and usually the meret’s cults other than the Maa-Kep’s itself aren’t in the know even once the Arisen remember. To those who don’t, the Junta are valued advisors and scouts, playing the roles of coordinator, majordomo, surveillant, appraiser, and yes, spy — it’s just that few realize this spy is always a double agent, even if it’s for their own good. (Usually.)

Maa-Kep are kingmakers and internal affairs agents, watchdogs and stewards. They are project managers who support their merets and cults, rooting out incompetence, corruption, and untrustworthy sorts. They watch over their allies but also constantly evaluate them. To those who do remember their purpose, a Dapifer is all those things as well as the conductor who guides the meret’s train along the rails and keeps everybody else in line. Some appreciate it; some resent it; and many feel differently depending on the Descent.

The Maa-Kep’s cults are extensions of themselves by way of surveillance, information gathering, and spreading out like a web of eyes and ears with the mummy at its center. The Junta are men in black and spymasters, but also keen investigators with cults full of detectives and journalists, and mysterious strangers who waltz into someone’s life, help him out for no apparent reason, then vanish into the ether — arranging people and events on a grand scale humans can’t see. They’re not the ones who give a man a fish; they’re the ones who teach him to fish by writing the manual and having minions leave it conspicuously on his desk without ever talking to him, watching him from across the street with binoculars while he reads it, and then expecting him to do it right.

Once, the Dapifers weren’t the ones with the big picture vision, instead enforcing that of the Shan’iatu. They were content with that… but the Shan’iatu aren’t around anymore. The Maa-Kep view themselves as the Shan’iatu’s true successors because they enshrine Irem’s highest ideals. They know how things are really supposed to be done, and how to make sure they’re done that way. The less they remember or care about their original mandates, the more they build their own versions of the grand vision in their minds and enforce those. They insist it’s what the Judges want — who better to keep the seats warm for the great sorcerers than the ones who stood by their right hands so long ago?

As Sothis Ascends

A Maa-Kep deals with immortality by resting assured she can rely on her powers of observation and knowledge-gathering to catch her up on anything she forgets or misses, and by staying focused on the minutiae. She can’t contemplate the existential dread of knowing she’ll probably outlive the human race if she’s busy micromanaging everyone else and poking her nose into their business 24/7. She might miss old friends, but at least she got to know them better than anyone else did — probably better than they knew themselves. Thus, they live on in her.

The patterns the Spies see and perpetuate in the world are those of behavior, relationships, and philosophies. They track the principles every society values and how it maintains its high road, or falls from it into a subversion or even perversion of its purported ideals. They understand how civilizations rise and fall by the integrity of their beliefs, their dedication compared to their hypocrisy, and how well their people work together.

Starfall

A Junta turns her back on the Judges because she sees what she believes is a flaw in the gods’ plans or comes to believe that something has corrupted even those lords of Duat. Those who grow to resent their servitude don’t do so because they hate the concept of serving, but because they feel they’re not being utilized to their full potential, they’re being ordered to uphold an impure idea, or their elegant work is stymied by frustrating obstacles beyond their control. Others fall to corruption themselves, losing faith in their purpose after standing vigil for so long or craving the spotlight after lifetimes of hiding in the shadows.

Vessels: Amulets

Who We Are

Internal affairs officer in a metropolitan police department, monitoring society’s dedication to its ideals through its law enforcement

Deep-cover espionage agent, collecting intelligence about cultures and nations around the world and only reporting back what will push her employers to act the way she wants them to

Project manager at a large company, raking in money so the cult can donate large sums to ideologically desirable groups

Butler and house manager for a rich and bustling estate belonging to another Arisen and consisting of generations of a dynasty cult

Trusted advisor to an influential politician or crime lord, whispering and nudging to influence governments, underworlds, or both

Beyond the Shadow of Pillars

Mesen-Nebu: You make an excellent vanguard, even if your materialistic streak makes you a bit of an embarrassment. We’d never say so to your face, though.

Sesha-Hebsu: Without you, many valuable secrets would be lost. Without us, your judgments would ring hollow.

Su-Menent: Curb your worst impulses, my friend. Your work is important, but not as important as you think it is.

Tef-Aabhi: It’s an intricate dance we weave, isn’t it? We both have long memories, but yours are so much more reliable. Pity, that.

Wadjet-Itja: One day, we’ll dig up the secret of how you managed your chicanery, and on that day, you’ll wish you never pretended at immortality.

[propertyofjoker]

A la Spike, I’m here to post little snippets of what my people have been up to! PLEASE come and plot with me! I’m so excited for Season 2!!!

@multiple-wars // @you-just-hit-the-jackpot // @batgirlx // @annamariexrogue // @queen-of-atlantis // @rick-flaggs // @enchant-the-moone // @betty--brant // @iamnotyourexperiment // @memoriesofkrypton // @heiresss // @amazingflyingdick // @justicealwaysprevails // @lareineblanche // @sonic-cry

Harley

Lucy is over a year old now and easily the most spoiled child in the city.

She’s also kept a relatively low profile, making @notafacecard‘s silence even more ominous. 

Most of her time is spent on the small carnival island, but she frequently shows up in the city with her usual devil may care attitude about the new rules and regulations. They don’t seem to affect her at all. 

Logan 

He’s very pissy. 

He can no longer go to his favorite bar. 

He’s since found an underground secret mutant bar so things are slightly better. 

He is still teaching at the institute and assisting @summersofscott, now with less hesitation because of the new laws.

MJ

In the midst of all the turmoil, MJ landed her first role as a paid lead. She quit her job. 

She tries not to show it, but she’s constantly terrified for @spxdergwens and @pbandparker and is starting to drink even more heavily to cope with her rising anxiety.

Barbara

Aghast at the situation, Barbara has been working 24/7 to update all her systems in order to get around high tech firewalls and malware that threatens to infiltrate Wayne Enterprises. 

With @littlebirdyblue‘s help, she has perfected the drones she created with @gabriclspencer, and uses them to outline NOVA’s schedules, patrols, and hacks into their communication devices. 

Even though she still goes on patrol, she often can do more at her computers notifying various contacts of NOVA’s movements.

Anna

Even though she’s disgusted at the city, she’s glad to be out of the bunker. 

She also works at the institute, often butting heads with Emma, but they’ve developed a begrudging respect for one another.

The last two months have made her much angrier. She has lost her temper on her class several times and has not been the best example, or made good decisions in the heat of the moment.

Mera

After the city’s new, strict stance, Mera took extra precautions those she considers her family, @rulerxofxatlantis and @slntsrn, and had her home in Star City submerged in an impenetrable pillar of water, making her presence quite loudly known while maintaining invincibility.

She continues to lead the Justice League, but insists they rotate where they hold their meetings in order to evade detection.

Rick

After hearing that his life was in danger, Rick left Zoe with the one person he knew would keep her safe: @xselinakylex

After @dxadshot killed Amanda Waller, he did what he could in his defense, handing over proof of the emotional and mental manipulation she’d utilized over Task Force X and specifically Floyd, by holding the safety of his child over his head.

Even though he is now contracted to NOVA, he is determined to remain loyal to his hard held morals and principles, even if it means going against his superiors.

June

Although she anticipated there would be difficulty, even she knows that the further they fall, the higher they will be able to rise. 

Even though she planned on having a family with Harvey right away, not even her magic can create life. They have not been successful so far.

Betty

Because the internet is so heavily monitored, her blog had to be moved to the dark web and is only accessible to those who know how to get there. She also started a podcast, and opens a twitter to send nothing more than one link. There is always enough time for the podcast to get spread around before the government shuts it down. 

She is expecting a warrant out for her arrest any day and probably giving @ofdcvils daily heart palpitations.

Laura

After escaping a conviction, Laura relocated the safe house with @goldenelixxir and is trying to make people feel safe despite what happened. She makes appearances at the institute, but much of her time is spent at the shelter and with assisting Josh in any way she can.

The only humans allowed in the safe house are members of the batfam and the Teen Titans.

Kara

The shift in power placed new stress on Kara’s shoulders and she could no longer handle burying her face in the sand when it came to @thdvlwrsprd‘s true nature. She went to Gotham to visit Steph and has only recently returned to Star City, unable to turn her back on the Justice League (and on Anton).

Fiamma

The first thing she wanted to do was get out of the city, but her father made it clear he didn’t want her back. 

She was mad enough to finally tell @summersofscott her real name and that her father had been the mayor of Star City years ago.

Having joined the institute, she felt a strange connection with the people there and, though initially very unpopular because of her attitude, she has made significant strides. Her divination powers are far from perfect, but they are very strong - and getting stronger.

Dick

...is really busy.

He’s still a police officer and has been recruited to do NOVA patrol based on his exceptional record. He uses the time to get information and to purposefully mislead the other men on duty so no one is caught breaking curfew. He’s also been known to become temporarily blind and not see a stashed knife or fliers about the institute. 

He also goes out as Nightwing as often as possible, but since he patrols with NOVA he knows exactly where to go to avoid NOVA, and even though there is less crime at night, he’s even busier trying to keep innocent people from being caught and arrested.

Just for the fun of it, he’s wrecking havoc here and there with @wcllyswest and @arsxnalroy because everyone needs stress relief.

He keeps track of the mutant safehouse and institute and a lot of his inherited wealth is regularly funneled to one of those two places. 

Bruce

Bruce has taken a more active role in the Justice League. Even though he’ll never be on the level he used to be on, he’s much more prepared now than he was two months ago.

As Bruce Wayne, he appears to follow the laws like a diligent citizen, and his charity work seems to have slowed. Publicly he only gives to local government agencies, but privately he is financing a number of pro-mutant establishments, platforms, and advocates. As a result of his untarnished reputation, Wayne Enterprises is booming and no one realizes that it all goes to fight against them.

He’s used to finding random people in his house.

He loves Zoe and shows it by smiling on occasion.

Emma

Emma is deadass gonna fucking beat the living hell explode the brains of everything and scream to the heavens she’s so upset rn

She’s a wonderful teacher and has great compassion for her students, but often doesn’t express it well. She is very hard on them because she doesn’t ever want them to underestimate who they’re up against.

She’s a bit too ready to be militant, but respects @summersofscott too much to take such an extreme stance - and she’s intelligent enough to know him to be a better leader.

Dinah

Dinah is a complete and utter Mess with a capital M. 

She sleeps through Justice League meetings and gets stinkeye from Mera.

She’s always running from NOVA patrol because she does the walk of shame at least 6 nights a week.

Sometimes they are NOVA people too

She is just

Someone help her

[xfilesseason11spoilers]

X-Files Season 11 Spoilers Index

** Last updated: March 21, 2018, 16:30 GMT**

WARNING: This post contains all the spoilers about the upcoming season of “The X-Files” (11th); proceed at your own risk. The post will be updated with the newest info as soon as they are confirmed.

Season 11 will consist of “eight standalone episodes, and two mythology episodes.” (X)

Promotional Videos / Cast Chats

NY Comic-Con Official Trailer - Link#2 - Hungarian - Italian - Spanish - Russian

Help Without Trust

Nothing hurts like the truth

Season 10 Cliffhanger

The Mulder and Scully relationship

We Need Your Help, Even If We Don't Trust You 

Promo #7 - LQ - HQ

Unwrapping The X-Files: Retro Chemistry

Promo 9 - What To Expect This Season 

Instagram sponsored post

Declassified: The End Of The World

Show & Not Tell: Gillian Anderson

Visions Of The Future

SPOILER ALERT

MID-SEASON TRAILER

END-SEASON TRAILER

Cast Promotional Photos: SpoilerTV Season 11 Poster: SpoilerTV First look pictures: http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/the-x-files/257640/x-files-season-11-release-date-trailer-cast-story-details-more

‘1 month’ Countdown Poster: https://twitter.com/thexfiles/status/936988343136526338

     Episode 11x01 Title: “My Struggle III” Airdate: January 3, 2018 Written & Directed by: Chris Carter Synopsys:  Picking up after the last event series' cliffhanger, Mulder and Scully learn that they aren't the only ones desperately searching for their long-lost son, William. The very fate of the world may depend on it. (X) Promo pictures:  xfilesbtvs , xfilesnews , SpolierTV Sneak Peeks:  Scully Can't Find Her Son Featurette: Visions Of The Future Cast Info:

Recurring cast: Mitch Pilleggi, Annabeth Gish, William B. Davis, Chris Owens, Lauren Ambrose, Robbie Amell

Guest stars: Barbara Hershey (as Erika Price), Jeremy Schuetze (as Young Cigarette Smoking Man), AC Peterson (as Mr Y), Jett Klyne (Young Jeffrey Spender) (X) (X), Anjali Jay (Dr. Joyet)

Additional info about this episode:

Scully is involved in a car crash (Link to the video): this scene was filmed on August 17

episode one delves into the Cigarette Smoking Man’s (William B. Davis) backstory and apparent family ties to Mulder (X)

“We start the season right up from where the season finale left off with that big helicopter and takes you right from there,” David Madden (Fox entertainment chairman) says. “You’ll be launched into a very urgent adventure that has a lot to do with William — Mulder and Scully’s kid. (X)

Barbara Hershey will play Erika Price, a powerful figure who represents a mysterious organization. (X)

Barbara Hershey will have a recurring role in season 11. (X) 

Season 11 will also explore the motive behind one of the biggest shockers of last season: loyal ally Agent Reyes (Annabeth Gish) confessing that she’s in league with the Cigarette Smoking Man. (X)

   Episode 11x02 Title: “This” (X) Airdate:  January 10, 2018 Written & Directed by: Glen Morgan Synopsys: An old friend reaches out to Mulder and Scully in a seemingly impossible way, revealing a chilling secret.  (X) Promo pictures: SpoilerTV , xfilesnews Promos: Hungarian Promo Sneak Peeks: Scully & Mulder Wake Up To A Shootout  Featurette:  The Lone Gunman Cast Info:

Recurring cast: Dean Haglund, Mitch Pileggi

Guest stars:

Additional info about this episode:

“the second hour opens with a time jump to put distance between Mulder and Scully and the events of the premiere” (X)

Glen Morgan tells Den of Geek that one of his episodes is a throwback.“I looked at it like The X-Files does North by Northwest” referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller in which a milquetoast Cary Grant is mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies, and is pursued across the country. “It’s not a monster-of-the-week, it’s more like a Mulder and Scully on the run type thing.” (X)

   Episode 11x03 Title: “Plus One” Airdate:  January 17, 2018 Written by: Chris Carter Directed by: Kevin Hooks Synopsys: A spate of deaths, in which the victims were plagued by their own doppelgangers, lead Mulder and Scully to a pair of twins playing a dangerous game. (X) Promo pictures: SpoilerTV Promos:  FOX - Link #2 - Australian Promo - Promo #2 - Hungarian Promo - Promo #3 Sneak Peeks: 1 Cast Info:

Recurring cast:

Guest stars:  Karin Konoval

Additional info about this episode:

“episode three is a darkly comedic hour, penned by Carter, focusing on doubles and doppelgängers“ (X)

Karin Konoval will play four different roles (2 of which are males) (X)

   Episode 11x04 Title: “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat” (X) Airdate: January 24, 2018 Written & Directed by: Darin Morgan Synopsys:  The episode explores “the idea of The Mandela Effect, in which large groups of people remember an alternate history, Mulder and Scully find out how the X-Files themselves may really have originated.” (X) Promo pictures:  xfilesnews Promo: FOX - Russian Sneak Peeks: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 Cast Info:

Recurring cast:

Guest stars:  Brian Huskey

Additional info about this episode:

Episode 11x05 Title: “Ghouli”  (X) Airdate:  January 31, 2018 Written & Directed by: James Wong Synopsys: When a pair of teenage girls attack one another, each believing the other to be a monster, Mulder and Scully find that their investigation could possibly lead back to their long-lost son, William.  (X) Promo: FOX Promo - Hungarian - Russian - Australian - Australian HQ - Canadian Promo pictures: xfilesnews -  Sneak Peeks: #1 - #2 - #3 - #4 - The Mystery Surrounding William Cast Info:

Recurring cast: William B. Davis, Mitch Pileggi

Guest stars: Miles Robbins (Jackson Van De Kamp), Robyn Bradley (Mrs. Van de Kamp), Troy Anthony Young (Mr. Van De Kamp), Chanelle Peloso (Emily Van De Kamp), Madeleine Arthur (Sarah Turner), Louis Ferreira (Detective Costa), Sarah Jeffery (Brianna Stapleton), Mackenzie Murdock (Gas Station Attendant), Sunita Prasad (Dr. Aliyeh Scholz), Zak Santiago (Mr. Green),  Austin Dunn [he is listed as Miles Robbins’s double in episodes #5-8-10]

Additional info about this episode:

“Speaking to IGN at NYCC, Anderson said William will have an "elusive" relationship with his parents, showing up by the fifth episode.” (X)

“Anderson told me the actor “looks like a normal kid” and Duchovny offered this cryptic tease when I asked him which of his parents William most resembles: “He resembles two people that aren’t Mulder and Scully. And when you read this back [after watching the episodes] you’ll figure this out.” (X)

“Anderson tells TV Guide that the search for William will bring Mulder and Scully "closer together," although she acknowledges that Scully is much more passionate about finding him. But while Mulder isn't as invested in finding his son, he remains devoted to being a much-needed support system for Scully throughout this trying mission.” (X)

Episode 11x06 Title: Kitten Airdate: February 7, 2018 Written by: Gabe Rotter Directed by: Carol Banker Synopsys:  Skinner goes AWOL when his past comes back to haunt him. As Mulder and Scully try to track him down, their growing mistrust of him reaches its apex (X) Promo pictures: SpoilerTV - xfilesnews Promo: FOX - Russian Sneak Peeks: Cast Info:

Recurring cast: Mitch Pilleggi, James Pickens Jr. (as Alvin Kersh)

Guest stars:  Haley Joel Osment

Additional info about this episode:

“You’re going to find out a lot more about his past,” Mitch Pilleggi told Ausiello just before taking the stage. “Fans will find out who he is, where he comes from and why he is the way he is.” Pileggi promises that the installment — Season 11’s sixth (out of 10) — will reveal his cranky FBI boss to be much more than just a guy “who sits in the office bitching at Scully and Mulder,” adding, “Ultimately, he is their champion.” (X)

“there is some speculation that Osment might be joining the X-Files cast as the younger version of Skinner himself. Especially considering what series’ creator Chris Carter had to say after The X-Files Season 11 trailer was released at New York Comic-Con on October 8.At the NYCC panel, Carter revealed the backstory episode will feature Skinner as a young man, and now TVLine ventures a guess the role could go to Osment. At the same time, Empire Online has his character pegged as a possible relative of Skinner’s.” (X)

“I’m so excited because in previous episodes in the original run of the show, you had one episode where Mulder was trying to resign, you had Skinner talking about his experience with the paranormal in Vietnam," Pileggi explained. "They go there. So it’s really cool. I’m very excited about it, I just read the script and it’s really cool.” (X)

“We learn more about Skinner and more about his connections to Mulder and Scully and how he’s been a loyal advocate of theirs at his own expense.” (X)

    Episode 11x07 Title: Rm9sbG93ZXJz Airdate:  February 28, 2018 Written by: Kristen Cloke, Shannon Hamblin Directed by: Glen Morgan Synopsys:  In a world of ever-increasing automation and artificial intelligence, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) find themselves targets in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Promos: FOX - Promo #2 - Hungarian - Russian Promo pictures: XFiles news - SpoilerTV Sneak Peeks: #1 - #2 Additional info about this episode:

Episode 7 sounds like a winner, and we mean “sounds” figuratively because it seems like there won’t be much sound to hear in it at all.“It probably has 15, 20 lines of dialogue in the whole episode,” Duchovny said. “It was really a ballsy move on everybody’s part. I think putting up an hour of television on a network that has maybe 20 lines in it and still be riveting, I’m sure not all of us believed it. It’s one of our more special episodes that we’ve done in a long time.”Anderson said [...] “It’s really interesting as an actor to work on something that has no dialogue, because you don’t want to end up miming what you would say were you to have dialogue,” (X)

   Episode 11x08 Title: Familiar (X) Airdate: March 7, 2018 Written by: Benjamin Van Allen Directed by: Holly Dale (X) Synopsys: Mulder and Scully investigate the brutal animal attack of a little boy in Connecticut while suspecting darker forces are at play. Promo: FOX Promo pictures: XFiles News, SpoilerTV Sneak Peeks: #1 - #2 - #3 Cast Info:

Guest stars: Alex Carter (Chief Strong), Jason Gray-Stanford (Officer Eggers), Erin Chambers (Anna Strong), Sharon Taylor (Diana Eggers), Roger Cross (Officer Wentworth), Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez (Andrew Eggers), Michael Q. Adams (Pastor), Emma Oliver (Emily Strong)

Additional info about this episode:

   Episode 11x09 Title:  Nothing Lasts Forever Airdate: March 14, 2018 Written by: Karen Nielsen  Directed by: James Wong Synopsys: While investigating human organ theft, Mulder and Scully uncover a mysterious cult consumed with macabre rituals. Promo pictures: SpoilerTV Promo: FOX - Hungarian Sneak Peeks: #1 - #2 Cast Info:

Guest stars: Carlena Britch (Juliet 'La Avispa' Bocanegra), Guy Fauchon (Dr. Dave), Aidan Kahn (Agent Colquitt), Albert Nicholas (Agent Bludworth), Austin Dunn  [he is listed as Miles Robbins’s double in episodes #5-9-10]

Additional info about this episode:Glen Morgan and James Wong, who penned the classic hour “Home,” are writing the eighth installment, which is “similarly messed up” in tone. (X)

    Episode 11x10 Title: My Struggle IV Airdate:  March 21, 2018 Written & Directed by: Chris Carter Synopsys:  Mulder and Scully rush to find an on-the-run William (guest star Miles Robbins) while the Cigarette Smoking Man (guest star William B. Davis) pushes forward with his ultimate plan. Unconfirmed spoilers from Reddit (⚠️ Very detailed!): Here Promo pictures: XFilesNews Promo: End-Season Trailer - FOX promo - Russian - Hungarian (LQ) - Revised Trailer Sneak Peeks: #1 - #2 - #3 Cast Info:

Recurring cast: Mitch Pilleggi, Annabeth Gish, William B. Davis,  Miles Robbins, Barbara Hershey (as Erika Price),  Joel McHale (X)

Guest stars: Sarah Jeffery (Brianna Stapleton) and Madeleine Arthur (Sarah Turner) [they are both listed to appear in episode 5, too], Bentley Hixson (William 5 years old) Austin Dunn (William 15 years old)  [he is also listed as Miles Robbins’s double in episodes #5-8-10]

Additional info about this episode:

“Episode 10 is William’s struggle.” (X)

The episode will most probably end on a cliffhanger (X)

The episode ends on a cliffhanger. [...] expect deaths.Emphasis on plural. (X)

He also reveals that the final minutes of the episode will leave viewers stunned, teasing, “I'm calling this one of the biggest cliffhangers we've ever had.” (X)

A Family Affair…Also in the episode, David Duchovny’s daughter West makes her acting debut. Carter says, “It was the first time I ever worked with her because it was the first time she'd ever worked; this was her screen debut. She came in, she was poised, she was prepared. She also made it her own; she came in with, you know, some attitude and that attitude was also a part of the character. She had worked on it hard.” Keep your eyes peeled for the young actress as "Maddy." (X)

    That’s all I guess. If you find that something is missing, please PM me. Thank you!

[tendance-news]

WASHINGTON -- Al-Qaida's second-highest leader, accused of being one of the masterminds of the deadly 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, was killed in Iran three months ago, intelligence officials have confirmed.Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was gunned down on the streets of Tehran by two assassins on a motorcycle on Aug. 7, the anniversary of the embassy attacks. He was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden's son Hamza bin Laden.The attack was carried out by Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States, according to four of the officials. It is unclear what role if any was played by the United States, which had been tracking the movements of al-Masri and other Qaida operatives in Iran for years.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesThe killing occurred in such a netherworld of geopolitical intrigue and counterterrorism spycraft that al-Masri's death had been rumored but never confirmed until now. For reasons that are still obscure, al-Qaida has not announced the death of one of its top leaders, Iranian officials covered it up, and no country has publicly claimed responsibility for it.Al-Masri, who was about 58, was one of al-Qaida's founding leaders and was thought to be first in line to lead the organization after its current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.Long featured on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list, he had been indicted in the United States for crimes related to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded hundreds. The FBI offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture, and as of Friday, his picture was still on the Most Wanted list.That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and al-Qaida are bitter enemies. Iran, a Shiite Muslim theocracy, and al-Qaida, a Sunni Muslim jihadi group, have fought each other on the battlefields of Iraq and other places.American intelligence officials say that al-Masri had been in Iran's "custody" since 2003, but that he had been living freely in the Pasdaran district of Tehran, an upscale suburb, since at least 2015.Around 9 on a warm summer night, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle drew up beside him. Five shots were fired from a pistol fitted with a silencer. Four bullets entered the car through the driver's side and a fifth hit a nearby car.As news of the shooting broke, Iran's official news media identified the victims as Habib Daoud, a Lebanese history professor, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese news channel MTV and social media accounts affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard reported that Daoud was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant organization in Lebanon.It seemed plausible.The killing came amid a summer of frequent explosions in Iran, mounting tensions with the United States, days after an enormous explosion in the port of Beirut and a week before the U.N. Security Council was to consider extending an arms embargo against Iran. There was speculation that the killing may have been a Western provocation intended to elicit a violent Iranian reaction in advance of the Security Council vote.And the targeted killing by two gunmen on a motorcycle fit the modus operandi of previous Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. That Israel would kill an official of Hezbollah, which is committed to fighting Israel, also seemed to make sense, except for the fact that Israel had been consciously avoiding killing Hezbollah operatives so as not to provoke a war.In fact, there was no Habib Daoud.Several Lebanese with close ties to Iran said they had not heard of him or his killing. A search of Lebanese news media found no reports of a Lebanese history professor killed in Iran last summer. And an education researcher with access to lists of all history professors in the country said there was no record of a Habib Daoud.One of the intelligence officials said that Habib Daoud was an alias Iranian officials gave al-Masri and the history teaching job was a cover story. In October, the former leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Nabil Naeem, who called al-Masri a longtime friend, told the Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya the same thing.Iran may have had good reason for wanting to hide the fact that it was harboring an avowed enemy, but it was less clear why Iranian officials would have taken in the Qaida leader to begin with.Some terrorism experts suggested that keeping Qaida officials in Tehran might provide some insurance that the group would not conduct operations inside Iran. American counterterrorism officials believe Iran may have allowed them to stay to run operations against the United States, a common adversary.It would not be the first time that Iran had joined forces with Sunni militants, having supported Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Taliban."Iran uses sectarianism as a cudgel when it suits the regime, but is also willing to overlook the Sunni-Shia divide when it suits Iranian interests," said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Center.Iran has consistently denied housing the Qaida officials. In 2018, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said that because of Iran's long, porous border with Afghanistan, some Qaida members had entered Iran, but they had been detained and returned to their home countries.However, Western intelligence officials said the Qaida leaders had been kept under house arrest by the Iranian government, which then made at least two deals with al-Qaida to free some of them in 2011 and 2015.Although al-Qaida has been overshadowed in recent years by the rise of the Islamic State, it remains resilient and has active affiliates around the globe, a U.N. counterterrorism report issued in July concluded.Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Spokesmen for the Israeli prime minister's office and the Trump administration's National Security Council declined to comment.Al-Masri was a longtime member of al-Qaida's highly secretive management council, along with Saif al-Adl, who was also held in Iran at one point. The pair, along with Hamza bin Laden, who was being groomed to take over the organization, were part of a group of senior Qaida leaders who sought refuge in Iran after the 9/11 attacks on the United States forced them to flee Afghanistan.According to a highly classified document produced by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center in 2008, al-Masri was the "most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody." The document described him as the "former chief of training" who "worked closely" with al-Adl.In Iran, al-Masri mentored Hamza bin Laden, according to terrorism experts. Hamza bin Laden later married al-Masri's daughter, Miriam."The marriage of Hamza bin Ladin was not the only dynastic connection Abu Muhammad forged in captivity," Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and Qaida expert, wrote in a 2019 article for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.Another of al-Masri's daughters married Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, no relation, a member of the management council. He was allowed to leave Iran in 2015 and was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Syria in 2017. At the time, he was the second-ranking Qaida official after Zawahri.Hamza and other members of the bin Laden family were freed by Iran in 2011 in exchange for an Iranian diplomat abducted in Pakistan. Last year, the White House said Hamza bin Laden had been killed in a counterterrorism operation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.Abu Muhammad al-Masri was born in Al Rarbiya district of northern Egypt in 1963. In his youth, according to affidavits filed in lawsuits in the United States, he was a professional soccer player in Egypt's top league. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he joined the jihadi movement that was coalescing to assist the Afghan forces.After the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, Egypt refused to allow al-Masri to return. He remained in Afghanistan where he eventually joined bin Laden in the group that was later to become the founding nucleus of al-Qaida. He was listed by the group as the seventh of its 170 founders.In the early 1990s, he traveled with bin Laden to Khartoum, Sudan, where he began forming military cells. He also went to Somalia to help the militia loyal to Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. There he trained Somali guerrillas in the use of shoulder-borne rocket launchers against helicopters, training they used in the 1993 battle of Mogadishu to shoot down a pair of U.S. helicopters in what is now known as the Black Hawk Down attack."When al-Qaida began to carry out terrorist activities in the late 1990s, al-Masri was one of the three of bin Laden's closest associates, serving as head of the organization's operations section," said Yoram Schweitzer, head of the Terrorism Project of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. "He brought with him know-how and determination and since then was involved in a large part of the organization's operations, with an emphasis on Africa."Shortly after the Mogadishu battle, bin Laden put al-Masri in charge of planning operations against U.S. targets in Africa. Plotting a dramatic, ambitious operation that, like the 9/11 attacks, would command international attention, they decided to attack two relatively well-defended targets in separate countries simultaneously.Shortly after 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1998, two trucks packed with explosives pulled up in front of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The blasts incinerated people nearby, blew walls off buildings and shattered glass for blocks around.In 2000, al-Masri became one of the nine members of al-Qaida's governing council and headed the organization's military training.He also continued to oversee Africa operations, according to a former Israeli Intelligence official, and ordered the attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002 that killed 13 Kenyans and three Israeli tourists.By 2003, al-Masri was among several Qaida leaders who fled to Iran which, although hostile to the group, seemed out of American reach."They believed the United States would find it very difficult to act against them there," Schweitzer said. "Also because they believed that the chances of the Iranian regime doing an exchange deal with the Americans that would include their heads were very slim."Al-Masri was one of the few high-ranking members of the organization to survive the American hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 and other attacks. When he and other Qaida leaders fled to Iran, they were initially kept under house arrest.In 2015, Iran announced a deal with al-Qaida in which it released five of the organization's leaders, including al-Masri, in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been abducted in Yemen.Abdullah's footprints faded away, but according to one of the intelligence officials, he continued to live in Tehran, under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards and later the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He was allowed to travel abroad and did, mainly to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.Some American analysts said al-Masri's death would sever connections between one of the last original Qaida leaders and the current generation of Islamist militants, who have grown up after bin Laden's 2011 death."If true, this further cuts links between old-school al-Qaida and the modern jihad," said Nicholas J. Rasmussen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It just further contributes to the fragmentation and decentralization of the al-Qaida movement."--TIMELINE1963Abu Muhammad al-Masri was born in northern Egypt, and grew up to play soccer in Egypt's top professional league. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he joined the jihad movement there.1980sAfter the Soviets withdrew, Egypt refused to allow al-Masri to return. He remained in Afghanistan, and eventually joined Osama bin Laden in a group that was later to become the nucleus of al-Qaida.EARLY 1990sAl-Masri traveled with bin Laden to Khartoum, Sudan, where he began forming military cells. He also went to Somalia, where he helped train the fighters who fought U.S. troops in a battle popularly known as the Black Hawk Down attack.1998Al-Masri was one of the masterminds of the deadly attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.2000Al-Masri became one of the nine members of al-Qaida's governing council and was put in charge of the organization's military training activities.2002While overseeing African operations, he issued orders for the attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, that killed 15 people, according to a former Israeli Intelligence official.2003After the 9/11 attacks, al-Masri was among several Qaida leaders who fled to Iran. They were initially held under house arrest.2015Iran and al-Qaida announced a deal in which Iran released five of the organization's leaders, including al-Masri, from prison in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been abducted in Yemen.2020Al-Masri was secretly assassinated in Tehran at the behest of the U.S., officials said. But no one -- Iran, al-Qaida, the U.S. or Israel -- publicly acknowledged the killing.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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[eyrmia]

TFP Shattered Glass bios incoming!

Though Team Prime is small, consisting of (at most) only eight bots (but highly trained, mind you), they have managed to ally themselves with the American government against the Decepticons.

Agent Fowler is the Autobots’ liason to the government. He’s not very fond of them, but he does it because it’s his job. He has his suspicions, though, that Optimus may not be everything he says he is.

General Bryce is Fowler’s boss, and doesn’t appreciate the agent’s suspicions.

Silas/CYLAS is one of MECH’s top operatives. MECH is a somewhat anarchic organization that seeks to overthrow the government. The discovery of the alien secret has only spurred MECH on. They are enemies of both Autobots and Decepticons. At first, Megatron thought they could be an ally, as they attacked the Autobots, but then they nearly killed Breakdown.

Jack Darby is Arcee’s partner. He’s the only one of the kids who’s ever tried to leave. If Miko hadn’t convinced him to change his mind, he’d be dead right now. Sometimes he wonders about the ‘Bots, but Arcee saved his life from a Decepticon. She can’t be evil…right?

June Darby is Jack’s mom and is extremely protective. It gets on Arcee’s nerves. She seems to have connected to Ratchet, though. Ever since they’ve started talking, Optimus had noticed changes in his medic’s behavior. It troubles him.

Miko Nakadai is Bulkhead’s partner. The big lug treats her better than the other ‘Bots treat their companions, and she kind of likes him. Wheeljack creeps her out though. She gets the feeling he wants to dissect her…or blow her up. If the Autobots are bad, well…she refuses to see it. She’s finally found someone willing to be her friend, despite her oddities. Why would she give that up?

Rafael Esquivel is Bumblebee’s partner. He’s the only one who can understand the ‘Bots beeps, so they immediately bonded. His friend always pays attention to him, shielding him from the evils of the Decepticons and treating him like a true friend whereas everyone else just ignores him, so he ignores Jack when he tries to tell him his crazy theories.

Optimus Prime is the leader of the Autobots. Ever since stealing the Matrix of Leadership from Cybertron’s core, he’s been nearly unstoppable. He’s a master manipulator, having learned the art from Megatron himself, then mutated and perfected it. His actions have shown that there is no line he will not cross to get what he wants.

Ultra Magnus is Prime’s ruthless second-in-command. He’s powerful and cunning, and willing to do his boss’s dirty work. His loyalty to the Prime is undying, second only to his loyalty to the Elite Guard code. Before he reunited with Team Prime, he spent his days terrorizing the remaining inhabitants of Cybertron.

Ratchet is Team Prime’s CMO. Ever since the good doctor’s discovery of synth-en, he’s been hyping himself up on it, becoming a bigger issue for the Decepticons. However, he has also shown reluctance to heed his Prime’s every order, and the Decepticons suspect that he may be a potential ally. Is it possible the doc still adheres to medical morals, or does he have ambitions of his own?

Arcee may be more unstable than Ratchet. She takes special pleasure in slicing up her victims, but her mental issues may be caused by her losses. Her ex-partners, Cliffjumper and Tailgate, were brutally killed by two Decepticon soldiers. Now, she seeks her revenge on Starscream and Airachnid, going to any length to have her peace.

Bumblebee learned much of what he knows from Arcee, including his relentlessness. He seeks revenge against the Decepticon leader, Megatron, for his voicebox. It was ripped from his throat during a battle on Cybertron, and he has never forgiven Megatron, nor Ratchet, for his inability to repair his damaged organ.

Bulkhead is the Autobots’ muscle. He and his buddy, Wheeljack, make a nearly unstoppable duo. He may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but he brings enough to the fight to stop Breakdown in his tracks, and maybe even Megatron.

Wheeljack may be a lone wolf, but he’s not one to back down from a fight. Some call him a coward for using grenades and other contraptions, but he’s just smart. He doesn’t get along with the rest of Team Prime, but when he does find himself operating with them, he wreaks havoc.

Smokescreen is Team Prime’s newest recruit. He seems to be obsessed with Optimus, to the point of it being kind of creepy. The rest of the Autobots don’t exactly like him (especially Arcee and Ratchet), but he doesn’t care. He may have tried to steal the Matrix once, when Prime was incapacitated, but no one can prove it.

Cliffjumper was Arcee’s partner, before his death at Starscream’s hands (literally). After, he was twisted into a zombie by Megatron and forced to attack Arcee.

The Decepticons certainly have the larger army, but they are at a disadvantage. Nearly everywhere on Earth is unsafe for them, with human governments hounding after them 24/7. They may not be incredibly fond of organics, but they will fight for a second chance for all beings.

Megatron is the leader of the Decepticons. He’s perfect by no means––he had the Matrix of Leadership stolen from his hands, fell victim to Unicron’s mind manipulation, overcame an addiction to dark energon, and now has to fight a war on a planet allied with the wrong side. But he’s kept his chin up through thick and thin, and his soldiers have always been there with him. He will not succumb to Prime’s darkness. He will fight against it, and bring Cybertron back to life.

Starscream is Megatron’s second-in-command. Sometimes his intentions have been questioned, but he is loyal to his friend and leader. He’s had his crises, but he always comes back. He took command of the Decepticons during Megatron’s absence, and suffered the wrath of his leader’s dark energon-addled mind.

Soundwave is the Decepticons’ communications officer and Megatron’s third-in-command. He may also be Megatron’s oldest friend. He hasn’t spoken since the day the war broke out, maybe longer, but he doesn’t need words. He was also friends with Ratchet, and believes the doctor may be persuaded to change sides.

Shockwave isn’t truly trusted by many. An empurata and shadowplay victim, the only reason he sides with the Decepticons is because it is the more logical choice. He has a strange fascination with Ultra Magnus, an obsession that likely stems from his days on Cybertron post-Exodus when his forces clashed with Magnus’s Wreckers in a deadly struggle.

Dreadwing is one of Megatron’s most loyal soldiers. He may be a tad too enthusiastic, but his spark is in the right place. Unfortunately, this has gotten him into trouble on several occasions, when his impulsiveness got him into a spat with Wheeljack or another Wrecker, or even Optimus Prime himself.

Airachnid was formerly Megatron’s second-in-command, taking Starscream’s place while he was gone. After his return, she left the Decepticons, believing it was better for her to strike out on her own. No one knows where she is now, but Megatron hopes the Autobots didn’t get their hands on her…especially Arcee.

Breakdown was the Decepticons’ counter to Bulkhead, up until his mysterious death at the hands of MECH. The big lug had a problem letting go of old friends, but he was a loyal soldier (even if he lacked in the intelligence area). He had a fondness for the drones that the other Decepticons didn’t share.

Knock Out is the Decepticon CMO. While he’s not the most skilled or most experienced ‘Con medic (or ‘Con in general), he puts his spark into everything he does. He can be a bit snappy at times (and vain, but for good reason), but deep down, he cares. The loss of Breakdown changed him, though, and he’s been quieter ever since.

Predaking is an experiment created by Shockwave. At first he swore loyalty to Megatron, but as his intelligence began to increase, so did his potential for mutiny. Then the Wreckers killed his still-growing brethren. Some believe the only reason he is still loyal to Megatron is because that is how he will enact his revenge against the Autobots. Megatron tries to discourage him from his dark path, but it doesn’t appear to be working.

If I were to ever write a fic about this…well, it wouldn’t be all sunshine and rainbows. I would want to portray the Autobots and Decepticons as human (as “human” as giant robotic aliens can be, anyway), with more issues than just the war. I don’t want anyone to be perfect or evil. That’s why I can see Megatron as a struggling drug addict, Starscream as a forgiving abuse victim, Bumblebee as a war-damaged child, Ratchet as a field medic with moral issues. I just hope I’d be able to do them justice.

None of these ideas are fleshed out or anything. If I ever wrote this don’t be surprised if things changed. Sorry if there are plot holes, bad ideas, etc.

[falconedreams]

Dystopian Singaporean Avengers

Okay the origins of the “team” weren’t as varied as the Avengers and we were originally established more for governmental purposes than any notion of justice and heroism, but this is the most illustrative yet succinct title I can think of, so just roll with it.

Last night I dreamt that the Singaporean government somehow thought that BNHA and Avengers and X-Men were reality instead of fiction, and they got super paranoid, like Japan and America and England have their own superhero teams?? We can’t lag behind! And so embarked on a project to create their own superhero team. By way of a human augmentation project.

I wasn’t one of the subjects, but I ended up on the team anyway, because I was a naturally born mutant. I could produce flame all over my body, like Endeavour (or Johnny Storm, for you Western media audiences). It wasn’t like an X-Men thing, where mutants were like, a minority, but still a visible minority, where there are politics about them and all. I was a one-off occurrence (or so I thought). I wasn’t really hiding it out of fear or anything, it was just like a.....well, setting things on fire is generally not very useful in daily life, so I just never bothered to bring it up. But yeah, I ended up on the team because one day I was too lazy to look for and set up the bunsen burners in the lab, and decided to sterilise the metal loops for spreading bacteria with my own flames, and my colleague spotted me, freaked out, reported me to my superiors, who also freaked out, and reported me to the government, who swooped down and scooped me out of the lab in the middle of the workday (or more accurately, bundled me into the back of a limo). 

I was taken to the project facility, where I met the rest of the team. It was quite a large team, actually, so I don’t remember everyone. Then they brought in the “trainer”, who was my friend LY. It was quite a surprise. In this universe she was an eminent physics professor teaching at Oxford, who had made quite a few newsworthy breakthroughs, so I hadn’t really expected to see her back in Singapore, much less on this project. But apparently it turns out that no matter how earth-shattering one’s discoveries and formulae are, theoretical physics is still not anything anyone was really willing to shell out big bucks for, so her department was in trouble, and the SG government had lured her back with the promise of fat grants if she’d just work with them for a while on this project. 

She taught all of us how to use our powers, which was really quite impressive, considering that she didn’t have any of them. She figured out how each of us ought to use our powers just by analysis alone, and somehow actually managed to effectively communicate it to us. She taught the guy with wings how to fly utilising lift and drag and aerodynamics, how the guy with Uraraka-style anti-gravity ought to be treating his “flight” more like swimming, how I should be using convection currents and propulsion to “fly”. There was also a guy with Scott-style laser eyebeams, whom she did one better than Beast, and made him a pair of glasses with toggle-able lenses, that could alter the lasers for different effects, like X-rays, UV, polarised light, straight-up-combat-blasting, etc. This part of the dream was pretty great. I was spending time with my friend, getting to learn how to use my awesome powers in ways I never even thought about, free food and boarding, and a pretty good paycheck. Life was good.

But my brain being what it is, refuses to let me have purely enjoyable dreams, and insists on fucking it up somehow. There was some genetic testing going on to figure out exactly what produced “successful” mutations, because their augmentation process was still pretty hit-and-miss, and they were sequencing LY as a control, and that’s when they realised that - oops, no, she actually wasn’t a normal human being. She was also a naturally born mutant, just that her powers weren’t outwardly obvious. She had an IQ of 190 and a videographic memory. And that’s where the trouble began. Because we were from the same class in the same high school, the government brains were thinking; “That’s pretty small odds! There’s probably actually more naturally born mutants than previously thought!” And so began the Great Recruitment Drive. They’d track down people with the ‘mutant factor’ by various means (sequencing blood from expired donations/pre-employment/enrollment screenings, etc) and then we’d be sent to recruit the mutants in question into the team. Some people cheerfully jumped at the call, but others were more reluctant. My law classmate WJ was actually one of those who refused the offer. In yet another great betrayal by my brain, he had the powers I would’ve loved to have. (He could breathe underwater and was immune to decompression sickness, so he could dive as deep and as long as he liked without gear). They wanted to recruit him to spy on enemy subs and look for underwater bombs. But he refused, because in his opinion, he earns quite enough for his standard of living as a lawyer, and even if the government was offering more it wasn’t worth the risk of being exposed to sharks and giant squid and other predators on the daily. 

And so because of refusals like that the government became more coercive in their recruitment methods. If monetary enticements didn’t work, they’d make it so that their targets had no other choice. If a target had destructive powers, they’d leak videos on social media that cast them as a danger, making society turn against them, and making them desperate. WJ managed to escape this, because his powers were very passive, but there was a girl in high school with super strength who was forced into the team that way. And then whenever they found mutant children, they were made to live in the facility full time. No normal schooling, just training for 10 hours a day and maybe the occasional desultory normal curriculum lessons rushed through and glossed over. They didn’t want the kids growing up with any sort of other useful skill that they could use to seek regular employment; keep them dependent on the government forever.

Naturally, me and LY and a bunch of people on the team greatly disagreed with this. But the vast majority of the original volunteers for the project were the very - hard party-line people, the kind of people who accused us of being ungrateful for disobeying the government after they’d spent so much money on us, and fully subscribe to the “it is everyone’s duty to serve the country, no matter the personal sacrifice; if you were born with these powers it’s your duty to serve, just like if you are born with a penis you have to serve NS” kind of mentality. So those of us who disagreed defected, ran away, and tried to raise awareness within the public as to what was going on.

Of course, this immediately triggered a massive backlash from the government. We had a little TV in our hideout which we used to watch the news, and oh my god the smear campaigns. -_- They’d released training footage to make us look as Dangerous as Possible, like me immolating a room full of dummies, the guy with wings blowing down a tower of bricks, etc, and kept reiterating that we were Dangerous Criminals, and that Anyone with Information should Immediately Report us. The only one without a giant smear campaign on them was LY, probably because, we theorised, the government wanted her to be taken alive and in secret, as much as possible. After all, flamethrowers and bombs and submersibles exist (and have no minds of their own for that matter), but intelligent people are more difficult to replicate. Like even the best computers are only as good as the people who programmed them, and all that. Also, her husband was a high-ranking government official, not a mutant but still quite smart and capable and therefore valuable, and they would want to keep him loyal if they could, and take her alive.

Our little rebellion unfortunately didn’t last very long. Because, for all that we have superpowers, the government has the police and the military and machine guns, and the one person who managed to get invulnerability from the augmentation project was firmly on the government’s team. I think it was maybe 3 days after we’d made our break from the government, that we were peacefully sleeping, and then in the middle of the night our door was kicked down, and before I was even fully awake I took roughly 3 magazines worth of bullets to the chest and stomach. I don’t know what happened to anyone else. I didn’t even really have time to register that I was dying before I died. I just remember feeling startled, and then the force of the bullets, like being punched really hard, but there wasn’t any pain, before I blacked out. 

Too bad there weren’t any drunk guys to do a Permets-Tu xD