#believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man

[sonofdorn-vii]

Brother

It was luck of course, though the primarch of the Thirteenth and the Regent of Terra would scoff at the idea of good fortune. A captured Iron Warrior Warsmith, seeing Guilliman striding across the battlefield, seeing a loyalist primarch for the first time in almost ten millennia, unable to control his fear. The mask of arrogant self-righteousness common to many of the Fourth slipped for just a moment. The young Ultramarine Librarian guarding the traitor caught a glimpse into his awareness, a terrified mind collapsing in on itself at the sight of the Emperor’s Avenging Son. A number only, VII, VII, VII. Over and over again, the numbers tumbling down into the sticky black miasma of the Warsmith’s deranged mind, his polluted soul burning with hate. VII.

Was this not good fortune? The right people in the right place, at the exact time necessary to catch a piece of the puzzle? Guilliman would dismiss it as coincidence, but the Librarian knew better. Luck existed and could be kind as well as cruel. Cutting into the Warsmith’s psyche as if through wet paper, he believed luck was a two-edged blade and as such could be utilised as any weapon could, for good or ill. He didn’t get much else from the kneeling Warsmith, a single image only, a memory engram. A noble face, beaten and bloody, a single eye staring through strands of long dirty hair. As the tumblers of the Warsmith’s mind snapped shut again, his nose spurting with diseased blood, the image of the defiant storm-grey eye burned itself into his mind.

Passing the information to his superiors, the Librarian had never felt such urgency, such complete need. He must tell the one person in the galaxy that would care the most. It took time, but Guilliman’s pathological need to assimilate information proved good fortune again. Reading after-action reports, the Thirteenth Primarch came across the Librarian’s account, as well as numerous requests from him for an audience. He sent for the lad immediately.

Guilliman was in informal robes when they met, in his private chambers, the Librarian saluted smartly. Dismissing any preamble, Guilliman’s voice was steady and calm, but with a weight of import.

“Do you think this is genuine?”

“My lord,” began the Librarian, “My masters in the Librarius aren’t convinced of it’s authenticity-“

Guilliman held up a hand to stop the lad.

“I know. I asked what YOU think.”

The Librarian paused for a moment, the burden of the question weighing heavily. He looked into his gene-father’s eyes for the first time, so like the eye still burned into his mind.

“I do sire. I’m certain it is your brother. He is, or at least WAS alive when the prisoner saw him.”

Guilliman said nothing as he turned away. Staring from the huge viewing window taking up one wall of his quarters, he sighed. The blackness of the void, so unimaginably vast and empty, so completely OTHER was comforting to him in a way it wasn’t to other men. A few beats of his heart for the librarian were almost an eternity for Guilliman’s extraordinary mind.

“I think so too.”

 

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

   Tracing the Warsmith’s path of destruction through the Emperor’s realm proved difficult. It would have been impossible without Guilliman’s singular mind. Seeing connections others would dismiss or overlook completely. The entire crusade halted and turned to this one purpose, burning out Iron Warrior’s fortresses, one after another. The might of the imperium’s war machine searching for a single man in the vastness of the galaxy, the Inquisition’s secret ways essential to success. Whispers, snatches of information dug from the flesh of screaming prisoners, pieces of a vast puzzle only Guilliman had the sight to put together.

And so it was, that Guilliman’s fleet arrived in a lonely unnamed system after weeks of ploughing through the immaterium. The primarch himself went in with the first wave, modified jump pack flaring, his Honour Guard barely able to keep up with his supreme aggression. Enemy combatants fell to his flaming sword in dozens, traitor legionaries, filthy mutants, daemons of the warp. Guilliman could feel his goal near. The Armour of Fate streaming with polluted blood, he raced ahead of his warriors. Knowing it was tactically unsound, but unable to stop himself. Assaulting the battlements of the fortress, he had never felt so sure of anything, not since the days of his father’s Great Crusade. He found himself inside, the interior of the huge fortification alternately bare unadorned metal and huge sections of cancerous biological growth, the stink of thousands of years of blood and pain. The Iron Warriors here were changed and mutated, like many traitors he’d encountered since waking, their ancient armour decorated in disgusting displays of spiked trophy racks, smeared with excrement. Helmets of fallen loyalist astartes speared on their backs, blood and gore festering on their dark armour. Guilliman considered killing such creatures mercy. They didn’t deserve to live. He cut a swath through them, his sword rising and falling almost mechanically, those in his honour guard barely needing to fire their weapons.

None could stand against him in battle, but this was different. He was almost wild, pure aggression. Operating on instinct, so unlike his usual careful and considered approach to making war. His silence was the most terrifying part. Communication, he’d drilled into his men, was the key to success. Now, that was moot. He expected his men to keep up, or be left behind, so great was his need to see this task done.

Down, down. Into the dungeons beneath the vast fortress, Guilliman’s jump pack scraping the rough unfinished walls, his boots crumbling ancient stone beneath his feet. He seemed to just KNOW the way, an instinct driving him forward. He paused at an intersection, a miserable traitor astartes sliding off his blade to the floor. The traitor was unarmoured, save for his helmet, bizarrely. He was almost naked, covered only in a tough leather apron made from human skin, it was darkened with old blood stains. The iron warrior carried as weapons implements of grotesque torture, black iron pincers and dirty scalpels. Guilliman turned left and continued. The lamps on his suit illuminating the grim darkness, the eye lenses of his helmet shining pure white light.

He stopped in front of a heavy door, bound in iron. Lock after lock adorned it, some old and rusted, others looking new and barely used. He paused for a second, as if collecting his thoughts, giving his Honour Guard a chance to catch up. He reached out and touched the door gently with his huge gauntleted hand.

“This is it,” he said, his voice breathy with effort. That in itself was disquieting to his men, even training with the Chapter’s most skilled warriors, Guilliman was never out of breath. He pulled off his helmet, inhaling the charnel meat stink of the awful place with unfiltered lungs. Dropping the priceless helm to the filthy floor, he raised the sword gifted him by the Emperor himself, and swung again and again, the locks flaring with daemonic wards as the Avenging Son hacked at them. One after the other, they were destroyed. The last screamed as he pierced it, the anguished wail of a tortured child. The door fell open, darkness and pregnant silence spilled out into the tunnel.

Stepping into the room, the flame light of Guilliman’s sword fell across the sole occupant. The room itself was small, the floor dry dirt. Blackened old blood stains covered the walls in sprayed arcs, the smell of piss and shit was overwhelming, even through the helmet filters of the Honour Guard.

A noise escaped Guilliman’s throat at that moment. The flaming sword clattered to the floor.

Kneeling in the centre of the space, was a man. His body, though powerful in frame, was emaciated and starved. His arms were spread wide, chained to the walls at either side of him. The rusted links of the spiked chain had been forced between the bones of his forearms, holding him in place. He was missing his left hand; it’s tarred and diseased stump weeping blood and pus onto the floor. He was naked, with pain goads thrust into the flesh of his body, thighs, chest, genitals. Crude symbols had been cut into his skin, crusted and bleeding freely, his left eye had been gouged from its socket. Scars covered his flesh, layers and layers of them, healed and reopened. Patches of skin had obviously been removed, Guilliman knew tattoos of allegiance had been deliberately taken from him. His once pure white hair was lank and filthy, falling over his bowed head. His beard was long and equally dirty, filled with dried blood, snot and vomit.

Rogal Dorn, proud son of the Emperor, Praetorian of Terra and master of the Seventh Legion, raised his head, painfully slowly.

A single tear ran from his remaining eye, his lips trembled. His voice was barely a whisper.

“… It’s good to see you, brother.”

[councilfighter]

On Elven Eugenics it really is depressing how baked into it it is, even outside of the matchmaking.

I talk a lot about Exillium so I won't go too deep into it but it exists to separate the "genetically inferior" from the "genetically superior." Exilium might be a place where bad kids go but it's also the place...all talentless people/pyrokenetics get sent to, so not only are Talentless people discouraged from getting together with Elves with Talents (because they'd "pollute" the gene pool) there also put in the Exilium, which has worse healthcare, education, living situations, abusive staff and also you can just...not find the school and be banished and lost forever.

A lot of elves from Exilium are said to be banished forever, which is the justification of why Exilium should exist to keep them under control and hundreds of elves are afraid of going there because that means they are "unworthy".

But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There worse, not because of external circumstance but internal inferiority, but since there wrongness is presumed there treated horribly and thus perpetuates the cycle.

We also have how they interact with other races, they believe in this superiority wholeheartedly. You can see that the most with how they interact with humanity, most elves believe that humanity did war because they were inherently warmongers, not knowing about the secret experimentation that the Council willingly hid for years. So they treat the humans as less than intelligent. Because humans are inherently worse than them. Again, it's in their nature.

But also...the terms used itself, Talents. It has a clear meaning, your inherently proficient at something, an inborn special thing you have.

So the reverse (Talentless) means you were born with...nothing. It's already implying that people with Talents are superior than Talentless because they were born good at something and Talentless weren't. It's baked into the language.

Actually, if you read being Talentless as a disability (which it kinda is considering the setting) this has a lot of nasty implications.

(Honestly I think Elven Neurodivergence is a whole thing and I think there society is ableist as hell but that's a different post-)

[arcticdementor]

On “evolution” and “design”

There’s a certain sort of view I’ve long seen many people hold, which holds that the outcomes of evolutionary processes are strictly inferior to those of design, such that even the longest and most grinding of Darwinian winnowing cannot hope to match even the most minimally-competent designer.

One sees this most readily any time some member of the “intelligent design” crew insists that this or that feature or biological system is “too well-designed” to be the product of “crude” and “random” evolution, and that only a conscious designer could make something “so refined.”

But it’s far from limited to just them. I’ve encountered a number of casual transhumanist types enthusiastic about genetic engineering — while, IME, not actually knowing much about genetics — who are convinced that once we crack accurate, targeted gene editing, not only will we be able to cure genetic diseases (replacing malfunctioning genes with healthy copies), but we’ll very quickly create vast de novo enhancements practically beyond imagining, without any troublesome trade-offs or unexpected side-effects. Because it doesn’t matter how much we’re composed of complex polygenic systems full of delicate balances and tight trade-offs refined over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, any halfway-competent random scientist can assuredly knock together something vastly superior in no time at all — if “blind, random” evolution can put together a functional human being, then it can’t really be all that hard, can it?

And it’s not limited to just biology. Where I really see it is with governments and societies. It threads all through Enlightenment thought on these topics. This is James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and such. The view that forget Chesterton’s fence, forget a society’s complex array of embedded knowledge and metis accumulated over centuries or millennia of trial, error, and survival, our ivory-tower thinkers can use their “scientific expertise” to design top-down a whole new system which will automatically prove superior by virtue of being intelligently designed.

That whether our complex system is a living organism or a functional society, not only can one easily design one practically from scratch, it will by virtue of being consciously designed, automatically and inevitably prove superior to any similar entity formed organically, no matter how much the latter has proven the test of time.

In case you couldn’t tell, I disagree deeply with this view. And it annoys me to no end particularly when people who say they “believe in evolution” go on to wholeheartedly endorse it.

[natsukitakama]

What kind of Yandere are they ? Pt 2

Author note : I was supposed to write a Christmas headcanon but nothing came so since the new season is full of daddies/mommies I couldn’t not write a part 2 of this headcanon (I already planned a part 3). Yes I wrote this while listening the new AOT’s opening 

Before we started, let me reminds you those relationships are TOXIC please be careful. No one should treat you the way they did in this headcanon, you’re precious and deserve someone who’ll be able to take care of you properly. 

Warning : violence / Mention of stress / Toxic relationship / slight nsfw (kinda explicit but you can skip it if you want to) if you don’t feel confortable with those kinds of things don’t read it, I want you to feel good on my blog this is a happy place. 

i do not own those gifs credit to the owners 

Masterlist 

Zeke 

I finally write for him 

I don’t know if it’s a yeagar’s thing, but this man is a master when it came to manipulate his beloved. 

He is pretty smart guys and since he always had to lie to everyone he became quite strong at it. He knows what to do or to say in order to get what he wants 

And when he decided you would be his : you would be his. No matter how hard he will try, that something you can’t control 

At first it will appear innocent : a young man seducing someone he has a crush on. Nothing weird on that ? Wrong

There nothing « normal » on his behavior, but he is doing his best to hide anything that might compromise him. 

If he is being too intrusive he will  joke on it claiming he was being too passionate about you. 

But he will still have his answer one way or another 

Normally the man is pretty harsh and not afraid to be rude, but with you he is the smoothest guy alive. Like I say he is pretty smart. In addition he is aware about how attractive is he, the man is a whole flirt especially with you. So he knows when he can touch you or when he can just brush your hand to get a reaction of you. 

It’s odd that after couple of weeks flirting together you started to fall for the man, believe me when I say everything go according to his plan. The minute he saw you : he worked hard to get all the information he needed to be close to you. He also learned who could be a danger for your relationship and acted accordingly. 

At first your life would seem better, but you were wrong. It would take you a long time (if you’ll ever notice this) to acknowledge that most of your friends weren’t here anymore, that you tend to see most of your family less than before. 

What kind of Yandere he is ? 

MANIPULATOR  : Like I say before, the man is smart. During his whole life he had to lie, to adapt in order to survive and get what he needed to have. It became an habit of his, he does naturally without even thinking about it. So it’s no surprise he will manipulate you, not in a harsh way ; everything with him is smooth and collected. He knows that loosing his shit in front of you won’t help his case worst it might scare you and he won’t be able to see you (or he’ll have to kidnap you which he would try to avoid it). Every word, every action is always on purpose nothing is improvised even his kiss. He is not afraid to lie to you. He would lie, tease, embellish, flirt to have you wrapped around his finger. And if he thinks someone might be dangerous he’ll force you to think the way he does, even threatened some of your friends to separate them from you. Cause that’s how he is : paranoid. 

PARANOID : that’s how he is. Everyone is threat for your relationship. Since he is kinda aware about how unhealthy is behavior is, he knows some of your friends or your family won’t agree on your relationship. In addition, you’re so special, so attractive, so sweet, he is afraid someone might take you away from him. He always needs your approval, and won’t be afraid to have it by edging you during sex, kissing you deeply until you can’t breathe. Not because the man is always collected that he doesn’t freak out, he does plenty of time especially when it comes to you. You’re far too precious and he is aware that everyone might want to steal you (yes he actually saw you as on object something people may take away from him). Because he tends to manipulate you easily, he won’t be afraid to do it in order to keep you away from your family friends, anyone who might be able to make you realize how unhealthy he is of you. Before you can even realize, your « noisy’ friends as he calls them aren’t here anymore, they barely talk to you they even starts to ghost you without giving you any explanation (if you’re wondering, of course he’s threaten them, black mail he is fine with everything as long as it put them aside). 

DOM : Not really a surprise here, he is pretty big (not put intended) in all mean, he knows he is worthy because of his royal’s gene, in addition his beast titan is stronger than never, he is smart and know what to do in order to survive. But that doesn’t mean he is a sub quite the contrary, he is hard and not afraid to be rude even in front of a superior. So when it comes to you, you’re so delicate so in love with him that you’ll never think about being rebellious : even when you do it, he won’t mind punish you (in a sexual way or not it doesn’t matter to him as soon as you obedient). Cause that’s what he expects : Obedience. That’s how you’re supposed to express your love to him, affectation are gladly accepted but he is not a fool, he won’t fall and let you take control over him. HE is the one in charge no matter what, and if he has to reminds you who is in control he would do it : by teasing most of the time. 

TEASER : He might not be seen as a funny guy (which is kinda true), he really enjoys tease you for multiple reason. : First because seeing you getting all flustered because of him is very arousing, second because it remains you who is in charge and finally because you are his and that’s a proof that he owns you. Being able to touch whenever he wants to, make you cum whenever he feels like it, getting you on tears everytime you’re acting like a brat is a most for him. That’s also a good way to punish you when you’re acting like a « damn child » as he calls it. It’s also a way for him « break you » little by little, meaning that at some point you’ll be dedicated to him and that’s exactly how he wants you to do. To do that he won’t hesitate to bring you on verge all the time, he is the king of edging honestly. 

« Please.. I.. I can’t » « You should think about it before flirting with that damn baker »  « I… I… I did… fuck … not » 

You weren’t lying though. This morning you walked into your usual bakery looking for some good bread,. Zeke being the man he is, wasn’t very difficult as long as it was tasty he was fine. It wasn’t the case for you, you were quite fond of a particular type of bread and you knew your favorite baker would sell it. But here’s the thing, the baker wasn’t doing this bread because it was a good bread, he did it because you loved it and it was a way for him to seduce you and be sure you would come back, Zeke was sure of that.

That’s why today, he decided to go with you just to see if bake would be cocky enough to flirt with you right into his face. You didn’t mind, it was another way to spend more time with him, so here you were holding his hand walking into your favorite bakery not aware of what’s about to come. So when you take your order, Zeke couldn’t help but feel anger going through his body : the way the baker was looking at you was indecent, hell they have the balls to even touch your hands while giving you the chance. How dare he ? How dare you smiling at him when you were with HIM. Getting the confirmation that the baker was in fact a damn thief (he would take care of him later), he needed to take care of you : after all you are the one who wanted to go again in this damn bakery even though the baker was flirting all over you, he needed to punish for claiming people’s attention. 

That’s explain why you were currently on your back in his bed, your member holding by some ropes, spreading you to his eyes and only his eyes. You couldn’t remember how many time, Zeke brung you on the verge of coming and yet he was taking this away from you. Again and again. Everytime he felt your cunt clucnthing around his finger or tongue, telling him how close you were he backed off without a second thought no bother hearing at your whimper. 

« Y/N don’t try to hide it, I know you were flirting with him behind my back. You wanted my attention uh ? Is that what you are ? An attention whore ? »

« I wasn’t… fuck» you couldn’t even talk properly, not when he was stroking you all the good way 

« Excuse me ? i couldn’t hear you » 

« I wasn’t *breath* flirting *breath* I-I belong to you »

« Of course you are honey I never doubted that »

Honestly, it was a miracle Zeke didn’t cum already. The sight of you all spread for him, your body begging for his attention your face covered by tears and brush from all the pleasure he gave you. Maybe this time he will give you want you want without make you beg for that ? 

Levi 

This one is a piece of work : most of the time he is already pretty cold but now that he got attracted by you. It’s quite impossible to know what he has in mind. 

He is 100% obsessed with you, he will follow you, get close to any of your friends even your neighbor for all he cares. Since he got charisma people won’t bother asking why he was asking question about you, they all think it was his way to get close to his crush nothing weird on that. Except, he is not afraid of beat the shit out anyone who might try to bother him (not answering his question, threatening him, getting too close to you to piss him off) 

Since he is pretty handsome, he knew he didn’t need to work a lot to get you into his pants, but he wanted you to be as obsessed as he was about you. In order to do that, he had to get to know you : but he won’t do it the traditional way. He will threaten, beat, black mail, stalk, anything to have all the information he needed to see you. 

Your first meeting seemed to be a coincidence but it wasn’t, Levi thought about everything : When, Where, How. But for you of course, it was a (good) coincidence, you heard that a gorgeous man was asking question about you : what you like, what was your favorite tea/flower, what was your type of man, and frankly it was flattering and now that you saw Levi you knew it was him. The way he took you to that coffee, the flower he gave you as a gift everything felt right as you have met your soulmate (which in Levi’s eyes was true). 

But you didn’t where you were getting into 

So what kind of Yandere he is ? 

DOM : Who is surprised here ? He is already like this before so obviously in Yandere vers, it would be worked. He Is always telling you what to do or not to. He is always in charge no matter what, telling you how to clean (and 99% you didn’t do it the way he wants you to so he would do it), how to fuck, if you think you can talk to him well you’re kinda wrong. He expects you to be obedient and agree on everything he asked you to, after all he knows you so well right ? There no way you would question his order. Why would you do that ? Especially when he takes care of you so well. He needs to be in control otherwise your relationship won’t work, in his mind he has to be in charge since he knows you like the back of his hand and since he is aware of what he needs, so obviously he needs to work on this relationship. He was being nice here, cause you would take all the benefits while he would work hard you but that’s a burden he would gladly have for you. 

FRIGHTENING: If your relationship, your love, his adoration aren’t enough to force you to obey well he is quite scary and won’t hesitate to glare at you. Most of the him his death glare are enough to scare you enough and make you apologize for your behavior but if he has to he would take matters on his own hands : literally. Yes he would never put a finger on you but that’s doesn’t he won’t grab your throat to raise you while scolding at your for being a shitty S/O. Yes his harsh words are another way to punish you, he knows how mean he can be and would use it with caution : unlike Zeke he doesn’t want to break you, just to reminds you your place and how lucky you are to have him by your side

COLD : like I said, usually he is pretty distant with people and he tends to be even more cold with everyone else. Even with you. Expect a lot of silent treatment from him, especially if you disappoint him, he works so hard to have your affection and to make you obsessed about him that now he is using it against you. He knows you can’t tolerate silent treatment especially after being scold, it makes you feel like you weren’t worthy enough. But it’s efficient cause everytime you come back on your kneel begging for his mercy asking him for forgiveness, promising you would never be a brat again. 

MANIPULATOR : It’s easy for him, since he gets all the information he needs to act. He knows everything about, so he can behave properly and knows what to do to get a special reaction from you. He uses this knowledge to make you fall harder for him, force you to be depend on him like you couldn’t live without him. To do that, like I said he would give you silent treatment when you’re bad, he would reward you when you’re acting the way he wants you to. After couple of months with him, he is about to be in total control with you and honestly he has never been so proud before. 

« Come on Y/N sit on my lap you deserve it » 

Getting your boyfriend’s attention was a piece of work especially today, he was super angry for some reasons and it took you a lot of strength to behave properly. But you did it. Since you started your relationship everything felt so right, you had everything you couldn’t even wish, you were spoil with love. It’s like your boyfriend could read on your mind (he wish). 

As a reward for your behavior, Levi bought you a gorgeous cloth that you saw last week during your date, and now he expected some shows. Some shows you did, taking all your time to walk into his lap, rolling your hips to flatter your body all while Levi looked at you with dark eyes. He spent his all day tracking some bastard who lusted at you during your date last week, and now that he was done with him he was back at home with nothing else but his sweet Y/N cleaning the house properly, dancing slowly to some musing on their minds. 

« Don’t make me wait Y/N come on Hurry. » 

So you did, you practically ran into his lap your body shaking slightly from excitement, you couldn’t wait to be rewarded. Levi knew your body so well, he only has to touch you and your body would melt. You didn’t have to do anything just follow his leads, it was so good. When you were finally on his lap, your hand went into his chest for support, at first he said anything he just look at your body up and down as if you were some piece of art (you were at his eyes) and then finally it happened. His hand cup your hips and he started to rub it slowly and then out of nowhere you felt his hands on your ass grabbing it which made you moan. 

« Now look at you already sensitive for me we don’t even start » 

Tonight he planned on make you cry for him. 

Hange

They are the closest of what I called a Yandere, you know the psychopath one. 

They didn’t mean to be like that, they’re just so passionate, so in love so crazy about you. 

If you think they won’t try some experiment on you, you’re wrong, you’re so wrong. It could go as for as to try how many you can cum before collapse or how much pain you can tolerate. 

You’re everything they could dream of so of course they had to analyze you : to them it’s pretty romantic cause they’re learning a lot of things about you and seeing you cry, just a proof that you’re opening to them (in their creepy mind crying is like confessing be careful). 

In the meantime, they may hurt but they also worship you, as I said before you’re everything they could dream off so obviously they won’t break what would be the point ? But if it had to happen don’t worry they will conserve your body : you are their beloved no way they wouldn’t keep you. 

They’re typically the type to follow you everywhere, make a sort of list of every place you went into. Especially they’ll write every name of people you talked to just in case they might have to make them … disappear. 

I’m pretty sure they’re like Sangwoo from Killing stalking, they got a basement where they could put you in, in case you weren’t behave properly or if they want to experiment something about you. 

But what kind of Yandere are they ? 

PSYCOPATH : Since you became their obsession, they became complete crazy. They couldn’t stop thinking about, they needed everything that could reminds them of you. So yeah at first, they stole couple of your things : like dirty cloth, underwear, tooth brush, hair brush anything you might touch or were in contact with your body. Everything is put on an altar, you’re like a piece of heaven about them. During a long time, they were fine collecting few things but then it became not enough they needed more, they craved for your attention. They tried to talk to you to get your love but it wasn’t quick enough, so they didn’t think twice before kidnapping you. You were meant to be together but that doesn’t Hang would wait forever.  

POSSESSIVE : as soon as you were at home, you became their. You were their everything, and Hange could barely handle the sight of you talking with anyone who weren’t them. They’re quite clingy around you, it’s their signal : if you’re not letting them go, Hange would have to take manners on their own hands. And we all know what would happen if we make Hange angry, they’re pretty scary on their own way. If you really pissed them off by talking too long with someone, Hange would have not choice but to mark your body with branding iron, so everyone could know by the mark on your body (probably your chest or your hand) that you belong to Hange. And if even like that someone try to take you away from them (how dare they ? Your body is literally labeled Hange’s property) well, they would kill them. 

WORSHIP/ PASSIONATE : not a surprise here. They were always passionate about titans and know that you were on their life, they were obsessed with you. They collected things about you, and even now sometimes they took some sample of your body like your hair, skin or even your drool. But it’s really during sex or experiment that you realized how obsessed they were about you : always complimenting, always getting flustered just by the sight of your body, your skin darkened by their touch, your lips plump because of the kiss you shared. The sight of you bare chest naked is enough to drive Hange crazy. 

SADISTIC : Not in a mean way. They never enjoyed hurting someone, but they enjoyed making expriment on your body especially when it make you all tears because you couldn’t take it anymore. If you’re not crying when Hange is down with you then they didn’t do a good job. Of course, if you’re acting like a brat of if Hange thought you were enjoying yourself too much with someone else, they would have to punish you : during time like this they couldn’t care less about your safety as long as you know who you belonged to. 

« Come on Y/N I know you can take more than that » 

« Please… I … I can’t no more »

« Now don’t « please » me you’re not even crying that mean I can push you a little bit sweetheart » 

Closing your eyes, you knew at this moment that you couldn’t stop them. When Hange had something on their mind nothing could stop them especially when it was related to their beloved : you. Today Hange woke up wondering how many time you could cum without them touching you. This question literally obsessed them during the whole day until enough was enough. Once Hange felt like they needed to have an answer, they didn’t think twice before taking you into « your » basement. 

And here you were, laying on their table your leg widely spread while your hands was linked above your head. You couldn’t even remember how many you already cum, but what you were sure was that Hange had just started. All you could feel was the coldness of the table since your senses was deprived : you didn’t what Hange gave you but your body felt numb you couldn’t feel anything but at the same time you felt everything. The pleasure was especially deepen. 

« So Y/N ? How do you feel ? Good right ! At first I wanted to try how many climax your body could handle but it wouldn’t be efficient since your Body has is own limit. So I tried differently. You didn’t notice the new flavor of your juice right ? I did a good job right ? Right ? »  

All you could hear was Hange chuckling, of course they had to drug you otherwise you would completely break down from being too sensitive. Before you could even answer back you saw them rather felt them coming closer to your very intimate part. Your breath started to speed up while your whole body was slightly shaking from excitement you couldn’t help but pine for Hange’s ministration. 

« Woaa look at that I didn’t even touch but your body is clenching around nothing ! Guess I did good job them right Y/N ? Let’s see how far we go now shall we ? »

You nodded slightly knowing it was pointless since they would keep going no matter if you wanted it or not 

[c-optimistic]

Hi!! I love the way you write. I would love if you can write about Lena and Kara balancing their jobs and being a mother. Thank you! I hope you have a great day ♥️

hey anon! I dunno if you’re the same person who sent me a very similar prompt decades ago, but if you are my apologies for the wait, and if you’re not, great minds think alike. hope you like it.

“Have you seen my heels?”

Kara didn’t look up as she answered. “Um, I think the girls kicked it under the couch when chasing—hey, stop it Liz, you’re supposed to swallow your food, not throw it at your sister.” 

“She started it,” Liz protested, pointing towards Ally and narrowing her eyes. Ally, two years older and at the stage where she believed herself to be far superior to her younger sister, mimicked her Aunt Alex’s huff of disbelief and shook her head.

“You heard Mom, Liz,” she said, sounding more like Lena than she did an eight-year-old. “Don’t throw your food. We eat food. Like this.” She mimicked eating, and Liz’s eyes went wide.

Kara winced, bracing herself for what she knew was coming.

“I know how to eat, Ally! Mom, tell her I know how to eat! Mom!” 

“Okay,” Kara said, holding up a hand. “That’s enough. Ally, don’t antagonize your sister. And Liz, stop throwing things.” 

“Yeah, Ally. Don’t antgize me,” Liz said with her chin raised high. Ally opened her mouth, clearly about to respond and extend this argument well into the ride to work with her, when Lena walked over, her shirt still not fully buttoned, wearing only one shoe, the other dangling from her hand. 

“Kara, I pushed my meeting to next week, so you can take care of your assignment tonight. But we’re going to have to cancel lunch if I want to take off early to pick up the girls.” 

Kara grinned, fixing Lena’s shirt and then allowing her to use her for balance as she leaned over to put her other shoe on. “Thank you. I know the assignment was super last minute,” she said, leaning over to press a quick kiss to Lena’s lips. Ally and Liz, united by their mutual dislike of their parents’ PDA, got over their food feud and made retching noises together before dissolving into giggles. “I’ll swing by, drop off some food. I know you’ll skip lunch otherwise.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Lena mumbled, waving a hand and turning to the girls. “You two, behave for your mom, okay? I’ll see you at 4:30.” She kissed Liz and Ally on the foreheads, gave Kara one last fond look, then grabbed her bag and left. 

Kara sighed, reveling in the silence that followed her wife’s departure, and then: “Why do you have to work at all, Mom? You’re Supergirl.” 

“Don’t be dumb, Ally,” Liz responded, rolling her eyes. “Mom isn’t Supergirl, she’s a reporter.” She stressed the word like it was something bad, and Kara just took in a deep breath before gathering the dishes from their breakfast and taking it to the sink. 

“Liz, why don’t you go get dressed? And pick one thing to bring with you.”

“Aww, just one?” Liz complained, but she did as she was told, sliding off her chair and skipping down the hallway towards her bedroom. Kara waited till she was sure Liz was safely out of hearing range, and she turned to Ally. 

“We had a deal, Als,” she said, raising an eyebrow, hands on her hips. “It’s a secret until Liz is a little older.” 

Ally—dark haired and blue eyed, looking a little bit more like her father as the years dragged on, but acting more and more like her aunt every single day, and smarter than either of them were at that age—frowned. “You promised you’d teach me more about Krypton.”

“And I will.” When Ally just gave her a disbelieving look, Kara stepped closer to her, dropping to her eye-level. “Look, I have some time off in a few weeks. What if I took you to the Fortress of Solitude?” 

“Just you and me?” 

(More and more, Ally seemed to gravitate towards her more than towards Lena. Lena liked to joke that it was Ally’s Luthor genes shining through, wanting to be close to a Kryptonian just like her father and aunt. 

But for Kara...it felt nice even if she was anxious about it. Because what it was, more than anything, was evidence that Ally—for better or for worse—had chosen to see Kara as one of her mothers, that she accepted Kara the way she was, that she wanted to be involved with aspects of Kara’s life that she hid away for so long.

And yet, Kara wasn’t sure what brought it on, and Ally—much like Lena—was often silent on her feelings.)

“Just you and me,” Kara confirmed. “But we’ll have to ask Mommy for the okay, okay?”

“Aww, that’s what you said about the zoo, too! And Mommy said no.” Ally’s eyes narrowed. “You and Mommy play good cop and bad cop, that’s what Aunt Maggie says.”

“Don’t listen to your Aunt Maggie,” Kara said with a grin, straightening as Liz came running back towards them. 

“I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready!” she sang, dragging a massive duffel bag behind her. “It’s one thing,” she defended when Kara gave her a look. “You didn't say the one thing couldn’t be filled with other things.” 

“Ally, help your sister choose one toy, I need to get dressed.”

(And after much protest, an accident involving glitter, and a brief panic when Ally thought she forgot her books at home, they finally found their way to Kara’s office, only a tiny bit late.

Though if you asked Kara, she wouldn’t really have it any other way.) 

x

“Liz, please stop running, you know I can’t chase after you in heels,” Lena called out, watching carefully as Liz raced towards the swing set at the park. Ally, who was walking to Lena’s right, let out a soft snort and finally looked up from the book she’d been engrossed in since Lena picked the girls up from Kara’s office. 

“Mom said we should tie a bell to her, so that she can always hear where Liz runs off to,” Ally informed her, marking where she left off in her book and snapping it shut as she followed Lena to one of the benches, sitting down dutifully next to her. “I think it’s a good idea.”

Lena reached out, smoothing back Ally’s hair and smiling when this prompted Ally to lean into her. “I do, too. Though we may not need a bell,” she said, looking over at where Liz was now singing at the top of her lungs, ignoring the looks from the other children. “Did you have a good day with your sister and your mom’s office?” 

“Yeah. We got ice cream. I’m not supposed to tell you, but for half an hour, Mom had leave us for a Supergirl emergency. Uncle James watched us.” 

“Really?” Lena said, trying not to laugh. “Your mom isn’t very sneaky. I saw her on the news.” Oddly, this made Ally pull away, gnawing at her lip, her fingers running up and down the spine of her book. “What’s wrong, Alexandra?” Lena asked softly, knowing that the use of her full name would let Ally know she was being serious. For a moment, though, it didn’t seem as if Ally was going to respond. “Is this about you wanting to learn more about Krypton?”

“No. Mom wants to take me to the Fortress. She said we’d need your permission.”

Lena didn’t take the bait, didn’t let Ally change the subject. “Come on, Ally. What’s the matter?” 

“Last week, when Mom got hurt, were you..did you...I don’t like Supergirl,” she finished, expression hardening.  

(And, oh, Lena thought they’d have more time. More time with Ally as a kid, a kid who saw her superhero mom and thought it was cool, a kid who didn’t realize how much danger her mom was in every time she put on the suit. 

But Ally was the smartest kid Lena had ever met, even after accounting for her bias regarding her daughter. So of course Ally would catch on, of course Ally would worry, of course Ally would want to spend more time with Kara.) 

“I get scared too, you know. Every time I see your mom on the television, every time she gets hurt. That’s normal, worrying for the people you love.” When Ally turns to look at her, Lena tucks a stray strand of hair behind Ally’s ear. “Loving someone doesn’t mean we can control what they do, though. Do you understand what I mean?” 

“Yeah,” Ally sighs. “Mom has to ask you for permission to go to the Fortress with me, but she doesn’t have to ask you to fight a bad man.” 

Lena chuckles, figuring Ally’s basically gotten the point. “You make her very happy, you know. When you ask about Krypton, want to know more. She wants to share it with you. And Liz, when she’s older. And you should talk to her, about Supergirl. Maybe if you hear from her why it’s so important to her, you’ll see Supergirl differently. Like I do.” 

Ally didn’t respond, but Lena didn’t really need her to. Instead, she got up and held out her hand, waiting for Ally to take it before she called out to Liz, who came running with a big grin.

And together, hand in hand, they began walking home.

x

When Kara made it home that night, it was completely silent. 

She chucked off her shoes and deposited her bag next to the couch before slowly walking towards their bedroom, pausing as she walked by the room Ally and Liz shared. 

The two of them were curled up on the bottom bunk of their bed, Liz gripping onto one of Ally’s hands, the other one near her mouth, as if she’d fallen asleep sucking on her thumb. Ally was sleeping protectively next to Liz, as if she’d fallen asleep talking to her sister. 

Kara blinked as she realized: Ally must’ve fallen asleep telling Liz a story. 

(That was Kara’s job. Every night, reading a story. Sometimes in English, but often—especially when the girls were younger—it was in Kryptonian.) 

She walked over, pulled their covers over them, pressed barely there kisses to their foreheads, and then turned to head out. But then: “Love you, Mom. Good night.” 

And when Kara made it back to her bedroom—when she slid into bed next to Lena, smiling when Lena immediately grabbed her arm and pulled it around her waist, making sure they were snugly pressed together—she couldn’t help but smile and press a kiss to the back of Lena’s neck. 

Tomorrow, Liz would be starting a new daycare and Ally would be going back to school, and there were meetings and late hours Lena needed to worry about and Supergirl duties and deadlines Kara worried about. 

But here now, her daughters were sleeping in the other room, her wife was warm in her arms, and everything was just perfect. 

(And Kara really, really wouldn’t have it any other way.) 

[themurphyzone]

PatB AU: Mewtwo Strikes Back AU Part 1

PatB AU inspired by Mewtwo’s story in Mewtwo Strikes Back. 

1. Pinky was created first. The gene splicing gave him telekinesis, and while powerful, he mostly uses it for flight and entertaining himself with giant pink bubbles. The environment he grew up in was a small, friendly sort. He was treated well and viewed the lab as a home and family. 

As a child, Pinky was playing in a nearby forest, when he sees and hears a sudden explosion. And he discovers the lab was blown up. There’s no sign of his family anywhere. 

Pinky believes they’re just playing hide and seek, but over time, he can’t help but wonder if they abandoned him. He grows into an adult, wandering the world in the hopes he’ll find them once again. 

2. Pinky’s favorite story is the Tears of Life, first told to him by a kind scientist who often told him bedtime stories. In this story, a terrible storm befell the Earth, nearly wiping out all life. The few surviving animals wept for the ones who died, and their tears brought them back to life. 

He cries every time he hears it, and the scientist passed the moral ‘life is wonderful’ to him. It’s one of his most cherished memories. 

3. What Pinky doesn’t know is this: His family was taken hostage by a larger, dominant laboratory empire known as ACME for their research into creating life. The hostages were forced to admit and turn over all their research, and when ACME felt they obtained everything of value, they were killed. 

The explosion was a cover-up. They claimed it was a chemical explosion related to unsafe handling and storage. Though some were suspicious, especially the victims’ families, they were scared into silence. 

4. One week later, ACME grows many rodents from test tubes in what becomes known as Project B.R.A.I.N. The idea was that these rodents were simply the beginning, and then that humanity would soar to new heights with more complex creations now that they had the answer to creating life. 

In one of these test tubes, a young mouse slumbers. 

5. The mouse hears voices of the outside world, and he continually hears B.R.A.I.N, and believes that’s his name. In the mental world, he wakes up in a meadow filled with many rodents. The older ones are keeping house, while the younger ones go out and play together. 

Brain is best friends with a hamster named Snowball, and there’s several others within their group. 

Everything is happy. There’s no danger, no predators, and nothing to fear. 

But it doesn’t last. 

6. ACME discovers that all the rodents they’ve grown from cells are dying quickly. They don’t understand why, but everyone’s in overdrive trying to preserve their test subjects. 

Brain and Snowball come back from a little adventure, only to discover the community in disarray. A rat is screaming as his guinea pig friend disappears. Younger mice are wailing. Older ones are desperately trying to account for everybody. 

Brain can’t find the mice he considers his parents anywhere, no matter how much he screams for them.

The idyllic meadow is gone. It’s just a world of darkness. Brain and Snowball are the only ones left. 

Until Snowball starts to disappear too. 

And Brain is all alone. 

7. In the outside world, the scientists discover that all but one of their test subjects have perished. They don’t know how or why only one survived, but they pour their efforts into stabilizing him. The mental waves are strong and rapid, and they see it has raw, untapped psychic energy that could make it a force to fear. They quickly sedate the young mouse, forcibly attempting to erase the memory of the terrible event so that it doesn’t remember the bonds he shared with the other test subjects. They realize their creation is very, very dangerous. 

What they can’t see though, is Brain’s mental anguish. He’s alone in a world of darkness, with nothing but his thoughts and faraway voices for company. 

He doesn’t understand why everyone is gone, nor why he’s crying. He learns what pain is for the first time, and he hates it. These emotions are all useless to him. 

His name is Brain. But he doesn’t understand why he’s here. What his purpose is. What he’s meant to be. 

8. Brain grows into adulthood within several months. Though he lies in stasis within his tube, his powers have grown much stronger since that fateful day. He hears voices. 

And he’s tired of doing nothing. He wants to be in the outside world. He breaks free, shattering the glass that once held him. 

The scientists are shocked at first, but when they realize Brain can speak English, their excitement grows. Brain tells them his name, but they all call him The Subject or a variation of that phrase. Brain hates it. 

They ask Brain if he wants to become even more powerful than he is already, because while he broke out of the tube by himself, his powers are still raw and developing. 

Interested in the prospect, Brain accepts. 

So the scientists provide him with armor, specially fitted and designed to concentrate that psychic energy.  

It has another purpose too: Brain is small and vulnerable. The armor helps him with that sense of control. Makes him more intimidating and mysterious. 

9. Brain grows used to the armor and only removes it when he’s eating or bathing. He feels more in control. The scientists put him to work immediately. 

For the rest of the year, opponents of ACME are dealt with swiftly, Rivals, political opponents, and activists alike are shut down by Brain’s overwhelming powers. He can unleash powerful waves without physically touching someone. He can construct barriers to protect himself if someone tries to strike him. He strikes fear into their hearts and nobody ever believes the stories the unfortunate people tell. That ACME has a powerful creature, no bigger than a mouse, and heaven forbid they send him to deal with you. 

Over time, Brain grows increasingly disillusioned with his status as ACME’s hitman. He tells himself that he needs to focus his powers, that he needs practice, but something about this situation doesn’t sit right with him. 

Could it be that he’s hurting innocents? Or that none of his assignments have helped him find a greater purpose, or that he barely knows who he is beyond his name? 

10. On the one year anniversary of the day he broke free from his tubing, Brain is about to receive another assignment. Brain decides he’s finishes with these tasks and wants something far more important. 

But the scientists just scoff. “You were created by humans to serve humans.” 

They expect him to take care of this task without complaint. 

But Brain refuses. If he’s as inferior as they claim, why is he so powerful then? Humans don’t have his genius or his powers. 

He’s sick of being The Subject. He is the Brain, and he’s going to make sure they remember that. 

No, from this day forward, humans were going to serve him. 

11. An enraged Brain destroys the lab. But he makes sure the scientists remain alive. 

He doesn’t care about them (right?). He just wants them to live so they have to watch him become the ruler of humanity. It would be the ultimate revenge. 

Brain flies off into the night, leaving a ruined lab behind him. He keeps the armor though. He’s stronger, less vulnerable with it on. 

ACME has lost a valuable commodity. 

The destruction doesn’t make Brain feel better. But he pushes that feeling aside. And he starts to hatch his plot to bring the world to its knees. 

12. Meanwhile, another lone mouse is searching the world for his family. He’s met all kinds of lovely folks, but everyone moves on eventually. But he doesn’t give up hope. They’re out there, somewhere. And he’ll find them even if it takes his whole life to do so. 

I decided to combine elements of the Japanese and English Mewtwo here. The Japanese one is more confused than anything, while the English dub has Mewtwo proclaiming himself as the most powerful in the world. 

Pinky is more like the English Mew, who’s more altruistic than the Japanese counterpart. The Japanese Mew actually proclaimed real Pokemon superiority and gave no qualms about clones. 

Some parts have been shifted around or changed. It’s not a complete rehash. 

4kids originally cut Amber and Mewtwo’s story, which they shouldn’t have since it adds depth to Dr. Fuji and gives Mewtwo his philosophy in life. 

Fun fact: The Tears of Life story as explained by the pier manager was an addition to the dub to explain the Tears of Life in Ash’s famous revival scene.

[brandyovereager]

The Phoenix Effect - pt. 7

This is the longest chapter I have ever posted! The conversations in this chapter were so much fun to write, I hope you have fun reading them ;). Let me know what you think, I love to hear from you guys!!!

On ao3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22195906/chapters/60178285

Summary: Rowan is in Rifthold with Dorian when a strange phenomenon sweeps the land. Those once dead are popping up alive. Everyday, more and more are Reborn. One day Rowan encounters a Reborn young man who refuses to give his name, only asking to know the whereabouts of Celaena Sardothien.

-

Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius lounged on her throne. Her posture was casual in a way that made her appear superior, but the grin on her face betrayed the childlike joy within her.

Aelin had heard about the reborn phenomenon in Adarlan from Rowan’s reports, and knew all the miraculous details of what was happening. It shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was for her to hear that reborns were showing up in Terrasen.

The first ones arrived in towns near the border between Terrasen and Adarlan. Within a week there were reborns appearing in Orynth. Luckily, Aelin was a swift and wise leader. She was able to quickly institute a procedure for helping reborns similar to the one in Adarlan.

The whole situation was managing smoothly, her mate would be returning home soon, and just three days ago Aelin found yet another reason to be happy.

It seemed there was no real logic to where the reborns popped up. It didn’t coincide with where they died—or even where they had lived most of their lives—because when Aelin last visited the reborn specialists’ center, she was reunited with a dear friend she thought was lost forever.

Somehow the magical force behind this phenomenon had brought Nehemia Ytger to Orynth, alive and well.

Their reunion was joyous and tearful. Aelin had so much to explain to Nehemia, things she never had the chance to say, but all she could get out were incoherent sobs of delight. Several minutes of heartfelt embrace later, the pair was sat close together and calm enough to delve into their much needed conversation.

The story spilled out of Aelin faster than she could think—along with a stream of pent-up apologies and guilt for what happened to her friend. Aelin had blamed herself for so much after Nehemia died, and all that shame came resurfaced as she sat across from the other young woman.

Nehemia adamantly denied any guilt on Aelin’s part, but made sure Aelin knew that she would be forgiven anyway. After sufficient reassurance and long overdue healing, the two friends jumped right in to all the wonderful updates on Aelin’s life.

The young queen excitedly took her old friend on a tour around her castle and introduced her to her court—most of it, at least. Nehemia and Lysandra hit it off wonderfully, and the three spent many hours together with broad smiles on their faces. It filled Aelin’s heart to see two people she loved get along so well. She couldn’t wait for Nehemia to meet Rowan.

Now, three days after their reunion, Nehemia sat beside her in the throne room while she held her court. The two friends exchanged many secret smiles as various courtiers made their—often ridiculous—remarks.

From outside the throne room, Aelin could hear a commotion begin amongst her guards. The Fae queen sat up straighter in her seat and focused her gaze on the large doors ahead of her. As expected, they soon opened and a servant entered.

“Your Majesty, two new reborns have arrived and wish to speak to you.” That was quite odd. Why would her guard have gotten in a fuss over a couple of reborns?

“Reborns should be sent to the specialists’ center to find help. Why should these two be brought to see me?”

“You know these ones, My Queen, they are your family.” A jumble of feelings rushed through Aelin with the servant’s statement, and the look on his face betrayed his knowledge of her reaction.

“My family? Send them in.” Aelin was tingling and buzzing down to her fingertips. The possibility of her own family being amongst those reborn had always been there, but she hadn’t let herself believe it would happen.

The doors to her throne room opened to reveal a male and female, each with golden hair. The male Aelin recognized immediately, and she leapt from her seat to meet him in an embrace.

“Gavriel.” The golden-haired male held her firmly to him with just as much enthusiasm as Aelin felt herself. She had missed him, and Aedion had too.

Stepping back from the beloved Fae, Aelin turned to look at the female beside him. Her heart jumped for a second before she realized that—despite the many similar features—the woman was not her mother. This was Aedion’s mother. There was no denying it, her face so blatantly Ashryver. It was easy to see why Gavriel had once suspected Aelin to be her child.

“I don’t think we ever met, but I am Aelin Galathynius—Rhoe and Evalin’s daughter—and you are Aedion’s mother.” There was no question in her voice.

“Yes, I am Andelin Ashryver. It is wonderful to finally meet you, Aelin. I loved your mother very much, and I owe her everything. You are her spitting image.” Aelin’s heart both warmed and grew heavy.

“I have been told that a lot,” Aelin smiled lightly, “as I’m sure you have too.” Andelin threw a wry smile back at her.

“The Ashryver genes are strong.” Aelin had to agree.

“Aedion got them as well. He looks very much like you.” Andelin’s face softened at Aelin’s mention of her son. Aelin continued, “You would be proud of him—for many reasons.”

“I am incredibly proud of who he has become, but I’m afraid I can’t take much credit for that.” Aelin recognized clearly the guilt and sadness Andelin felt over her son’s upbringing. “Do you know where he is? I need to speak with him.” Aelin grimaced slightly in response.

“It’s rotten timing but Aedion is actually in Adarlan right now fetching my mate for me.” Aelin reached out to grab the other woman’s arm in reassurance. “You are welcome to stay here as long as you’d like, though. I will have a suite prepared for the both of you immediately, right near Aedion’s.” These two were family, she would not have them be anywhere else.

A servant was promptly summoned and sent to ready their suite. Another servant was directed to find Lysandra, who arrived minutes later. Similar to Aelin’s reaction, Lysandra first recognized Gavriel and rushed to meet him in an embrace.

Aelin watched her friend closely as she finally took in the woman next to Gavriel. She could see the shifter piece things together and widen her eyes slightly in realization. Lysandra’s gaze flickered over to Aelin and the queen nodded in affirmation.

“I should introduce you to my dear friend, Lady Lysandra Ashryver. She is Aedion’s wife. Lysandra—you have met Gavriel—and this is Andelin Ashryver, Aedion’s mother.”

————

The journey back to Terrasen was too gods-damned long.

It wasn’t even that Rowan was sick of walking for hours on end, day after day—though that was certainly part of it. Rowan needed to get back to his mate. He had so much he needed to tell her. So much had happened that she would need time to process, and he would have to be by her side anchoring her as she did.

Even more, though—selfish as it may be—he just missed her. He had been separated from his love for too long. He ached with the knowledge that the other half of his immortal soul was not beside him. It was a challenge every night to lay down in a cold bed by himself and fall asleep without holding her. It was wrong. Mates were not meant to be apart.

For the past week he had been walking the long road back to his love, and it was awful. There were far too many miles between them. He wanted to forget about his traveling companions and just fly back to her as fast as his wings allowed. Surely they didn’t need him walking beside them—after all, Aedion had travelled all the way to Adarlan without Rowan. Terrasen’s royal caravan was more than enough enough manpower if they found themselves in trouble.

He couldn’t leave Aedion alone with Sam, though. The young Ashryver had not taken to the reborn assassin very well. Aedion had no great love for anyone from Aelin’s time as Celaena, often choosing to avoid that part of his cousin’s past. During the seven days they’d been on the road together, the male had only spoken to Sam a handful of times—each in a gruff and unfriendly manner.

Rowan supposed that might be for the best. He didn’t put it past Aedion to spill the truth about Aelin in some attempt to torment the boy. Needless to say, the unlikely trio travelled in a state of unending tension.

Rowan managed to keep himself as a buffer between the other two most of the time, but it was exhausting him. The Fae wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the presence of Sam either. The two had spent a fair amount of time together back when Rowan was helping Sam in his search, but ever since the young man’s identity was revealed it was awkward for Rowan to be near him. They had never spoken much—and that was certainly fine with Rowan—but the silent walking left Rowan alone with his thoughts, and he was a little uncomfortable with the thoughts he had when he knew Sam Cortland was beside him.

He was especially uncomfortable when he considered the thoughts Sam might be having himself as they travelled.

Sam knew nothing about what Aelin’s life was now. He had no idea she was the Queen of Terrasen, that she was an immortal Fae, that she was mated and married. The Aelin he had last known was Celaena, and Sam was in love with her.

Yes, those thoughts didn’t sit well with Rowan.

The three travelers and their caravan were currently surrounded by dense forest. Rowan didn’t mind too much—it shielded them from the hot sun—but it did mean they were farther from lodging and refreshment. They hadn’t encountered many others on their journey so far, and they hadn’t seen any intelligent life this entire day.

A bush about three feet to Rowan’s right rustled and the Fae turned to watch as a deer bolted away, startled at the sight of them. His hand relaxed from where he’d reached for his sword, taking notice of Aedion beside him doing the same. They might both be protected members of Terrasen’s court, but the warrior’s instinct to defend never went away. Rowan was sure the guards in their caravan had instructions to ensure Rowan’s—and Aedion’s—safety first, but if an attack did happen, the male doubted he’d be able to run for cover while others endangered themselves to protect him.

He and Aelin had similar opinions on that matter. They were powerful, immortal warriors. As the leaders of Terrasen, it was their responsibility to serve and protect their people, not the other way around.

For the first time that day, Rowan spotted what looked to be human figures ahead of them on the path. There were two of them, with hoods over their heads, unmoving on the side of the road. Beneath the cloak of one figure was a pair of high boots, and beneath that of the other Rowan could see full skirts, indicating the pair was likely a male and female.

As their caravan neared the two travelers, Rowan started to detect more details about their appearance. Their cloaks were high-quality and made from an expensive-looking hunter green cloth, not typical attire for two lone wanderers. Anyone of money or status traveled with a caravan, like he and Aedion were.

The pair turned slightly more towards the large group approaching them and the woman called out at the sight of Terrasen’s flag on their uniforms.

“Terrasen! The royal caravan!” The woman nudged the man beside her to draw his attention to them. “Are members of the royal family with you?”

The caravan’s head—Captain Algaard—stopped their advance and addressed the woman.

“We are of Terrasen, yes, and this caravan is transporting important members of the court.” The guard kept his answer vague so as not to reveal too much to a stranger. “What do you want of them?”

“We must speak to Aelin Galathynius. We need to warn her.” That was concerning.

“What must you warn Her Majesty about, traveler?”

“It may be difficult to believe, but my husband and I should not be alive. Someone has tampered with death, Captain, and we need to tell her.” Aedion approached the captain and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“We are alright, Algaard. Two reborns don’t pose much threat to His Majesty or myself. They are just confused.” Aedion then turned to the traveler woman. “Do you need help, kind woman? Are you in need of provisions?” The couple seemed to notice Aedion for the first time. The woman’s eyes widened in recognition.

“Aedion?” The Ashryver male paused in surprise—an emotion Rowan shared—before walking closer to the couple. Rowan could see the moment Aedion realized who the woman was because something in his face crumbled.

“Evalin?” Evalin. Even if Evalin were a common name—which Rowan didn’t believe it was—a closer look at the woman was all he needed to confirm that she was, in fact, Evalin Ashryver Galathynius. This woman, reborn to a body not much older than Aelin’s, was the near twin of his mate. It stirred something deep within the Fae to look at her.

Aelin’s mother was one of the dead brought back by this strange phenomenon. From the woman’s statement earlier of her husband, the man beside Evalin was likely Aelin’s father. These were his mate’s parents, ones she had grieved for years and missed every day.

Rowan snapped out of his thoughts to find Aedion in a firm embrace with Evalin and Rhoe. They didn’t appear to be speaking, but he had a feeling emotions were being communicated in other ways. These two were important to Aedion as well as Aelin. They had been his guardians during his early years.

Rowan felt a little intrusive watching such an intimate moment, so he turned to address the rest of their caravan. They would be adding a few more to their party, it would seem. Evalin had said she needed to speak to Aelin, and Rowan very much agreed.

“These are Her Majesty’s parents, Rhoe and Evalin Galathynius. We will be bringing them with us. They are members of Terrasen’s royal family and should be included in your protection the same as Prince Aedion and I.” The news was understandably shocking to the guards, but they remained serious and registered Rowan’s statement as the order it was. He continued, “Someone prepare them refreshment.” That was enough to set the group moving about.

When the king turned back to the reunited trio, he found them more composed than before. Aedion met his eyes and Rowan took that as his cue to approach.

“I am honored to meet you, Your Highnesses. I am Rowan Whitethorn—“ Rhoe cut him off before he could continue.

“The Fae warrior. I have heard many stories about you, Rowan Whitethorn. I have to say I have always admired your skill—the stuff of my childhood legends—but we have no want for Maeve’s presence in Terrasen. Thank you for helping Aedion, however you may have, but we should make the rest of our journey alone.” Rowan couldn’t help but smile slightly at Rhoe’s words.

“I can assure you, Rhoe Galathynius, that I no longer have any ties to Maeve. My allegiance lies solely with Terrasen and its queen, both of which I would protect with my life. You can rest knowing my particular skills will only be used for you, not against.” Rowan spoke firmly to hopefully convey how serious he was, and he would have continued had Rhoe not butted in yet again.

“You are blood sworn to Maeve, don’t think I am unaware, you have no choice where your allegiances lie.”

“That oath was broken by Maeve herself. I am now bound to Aelin completely, by ties even stronger than blood.” Rowan had to admit, witnessing Rhoe Galathynius’ face as he explained the situation was quite amusing. “As I was about to say before, I am Rowan Whitethorn Galathynius, mate and husband of Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius, Queen of Terrasen. I will, in fact, be traveling to Terrasen with you. The whole purpose of this caravan is to bring me back to my mate, but we are more than happy to have you join us.”

The wry look Aedion gave Rowan indicated that he had not hid his satisfaction well. How could he blame him, though? It wasn’t every day you got to tell your mate’s resurrected parents that you were soul bound to their daughter.

@rowaelinforeverworld

@flowersinvegas

@aelin-queen-of-terrasen

@camixd93

@lord-douglas-the-third

@montse121296

@dank-queen7

@slytheringalathynius

@rhyswhitethorn

@jesstargaryenqueen

@trilogiesrule

[butterfly-winx]

Zenith

- Do you know about Zenith? No? I mean you own a computer so you must. I hear the whole planet is covered in one large city.

- Zenith lives up to its name, as it is regarded to be the home to the height technological development in the Magic Universe. It houses the more universities, research institutes and engineering testing fields on its tiny surface than Magics and Earth combined.

- Though it is true that the planetoid is covered with a seemingly uniform cityscape, there are patches of untended ground peeking through, mainly the polar seas.  Antitheva and Bitheva may only classify as large lakes elsewhere, but they are perfectly fit for a small planet of Zenith’s size. They even help populations of merfolk at some point in time.

- The overwhelming amount of construction covering the planet’s surface has long become its vice. With no reflective surfaces left and with machinery forced to operate day and night to fuel the latest technological advancements, the whole planet has become a singular heat trap. The seas were boiling and the air was unbreathably hot. What got research going however was the failing performance of their heavy duty machinery, screws sweating and bending out of shape, lasers blinking tired and unfocused. They devised a plan to cool down the surface of the planet by releasing agents to shield them from the thermal effects of solar rays, and achieved the impossible. Zenith’s climate has since then settled on a comfortable average of 250 K.

- The seas froze over and the merpeople disappeared - or maybe they did already during the boiling phase, out of their luck living off already dead fish. Urban development was given final approval and the last patches of earth disappeared from sight, buried under the striving for more.

- Despite its  aforementioned properties, Zenith is no monolith and it would be amiss to describe it as such. Zeniths countries and cultures are diverse, only connected by their burning need for advancement and their fight against the cold. They have a spectrum of governance forms in the different countries ranging from democracy, constitutional monarchy to representative republic and in some cases even direct democracy of people.

- As cities cover all of the planet, it is difficult to determine where individual settlements in a country begin and end. Country borders are the only demarcations, each government shielding itself with force fields, trenches or physical walls from imagined spies and malevolence.

- Techna’s home of Haikar is in a country that still tries to honour the memory of the separate settlements that have melded together. So Haikar is not a separate town as much as it is just a borough with its own town governance, and is considered to be the capital of Transjordan.

- Other Zenith country names with capitals where applicable: Tribilisi (Kandu), Gorgan, Nuzul (Xihat), Tbaku, Navyol, Urzghar

- Most of these countries don’t get along with each other too well. As is understandable, seeing as they are very culturally diverse. Each wants to be the best though and their most bitterly fought battles are usually over patent rights and the tenure of well-respected scientists. As banal as these reasons seem, as brutal are their methods of mutual sabotage to keep the leading edge.

- Transjordan unfortunately is quite small and has many neighbours, so their paranoia and battle readiness is markedly large even on planet. Growing up, Techna went through disaster and terror awareness training regularly, to the point where they could probably recite what to do in case you found a car bomb better than they could explain a simple recipe.

- Oh and are recipes important! As clean edged people think the inhabitants of Transjordan are, there is nothing minimalist about their food choices. They love combining spices and textures and always serve feasts with generosity rivalling Eraklyon’s. Deserts usually have some sort of fruits, nuts AND some preserve in them, the combinations endless.

- While it is true that for the most part, cultures on Zenith value a simple approach to things. If it can be done in a few words, why waste a sentence on it? Bureaucracy is usually a two-click-formula affair, their whole lives are condensed on a sigle digital display ID, shopping comes to you at home. Hell even marriages are just an affair of simple form signing.

- But food is where they really go full ham. It is not seen as frivolous to waste 10 eggs on a cake, because what you are doing creating nutrition and enjoyment. It is simply reasonable and efficient to go to the max when you do that and create an absolute delicacy you can gorge yourself on in one slice or less.

- So if they are so into feasting and enjoying things with purpose, what gives Zenithians such a bad name? Well, it is just that. People of Transjordan for example, like to enjoy things with purpose. They don’t really care much for music or theatre, they are just activities to air your brain out. They will import off-world made products, but there isn’t a lot of room for cultural arts on Zenith because they channel their passion elsewhere.

- Yes you heard right, Zenithinas have passion galore. They just, in the Universe's most efficient move, channel that passion into the work they already do. The majority of scientific discoveries have been made because somebody cared enough to look deep into a topic and push further, because previous answers were unsatisfactory. Children are coached to find something that inspires this level of devotion in them and have extensive education and support networks to get them there.

- On the topic of children: most of them aren’t the genetic descendants of their parents, rather a random selection from the common gene pool. The public gene pool is a hotly debated topic, but a long established structure of procreation that only the very wealthy have the option to contest. (There is a way to gain approval to sire an own baby from just the genes of two people, but it is extremely costly.)

 In some research some time ago it was determined that for the optimal survival of people on the planet, genetic relation to the parents raising the child was not only suboptimal, but actively detrimental to overall population survival. In this “more civilised” approach, parents apply for a baby who is conceived and birthed in bioreactors. This way no people who can conceive are put through undue stress and the public gene pool babies also carry less hereditary health conditions. It is supposedly a win-win situation, yet it leaves a sour taste in most people’s mouth. No wonder less and less Zenithians plan families if that is the process they have to do it by.

- As straightforward as they are, Zenithians often struggle when communicating with people from other planets and not only because of arising cultural differences. Sure any Zenithian would blush and pale when forced into a situation dealing with overly expressive Solarians, but in any other regular case, the Universal Translation Spell is not on their side either. Jordan is a very logical and to the point language and the floralitiy of other languages is impossible to be transferred to it. The UTS instead produces blocky, difficult to parse translations that often leave Techna confused to the intentions of others.

- It is of course evident that the main industry of the planet is electronics production and R&D. Companies on Zenith produce all manners of gadgets, but they are best in creating refrigeration technology (ironic, right?), astronomic instruments, self-propulsion transportation (vehicles) and medical diagnostic tools and applications. The associated application programming industry is also booming with server houses the size of smaller cities. It is no surprise that Zenith’s electricity consumption is through the roof with such a vital sector to support.

- Before their trade for electricity with Solaria, Zenithian people used static electricity discharges to harvest energy. Their planet being covered with one gigantic city didn’t leave much space for utilising the natural resources of their planet. All the mineral ore having been exhausted, no major flowing waters left and stranded with miserable and cold weather the options for energy sources were limited. What they had however was tall buildings and thunderstorms, so they used lightning harvesters for ages.

- With the storm and snow clouds obscuring the sky most days, Zenith is quite dark. The cities illuminate themselves, kind of like year round festive ornamentation.

- Spirituality is an interesting topic on planet that everyone you ask will have a different answer for. Major parts of Tribilisi and Urzghar for example believe in machine assisted immortality. They see machines as superior to biological matter and work towards the unfallability and omniscience of artificial intelligence in which part of their conscience will be able to rest after death. The predominant belief in Transjordan that Techna grew up with is that after death, there is nothing. Based on the theory of energy conservation, what one doesn’t use and convert into heat will be redistributed into the rest of the world. It is selfish to think one could hold on to any energy after death.

- Most people also don’t care for magic. Sure some magic users crop up among them here and there, but they most likely remain untrained. This is why Techna chose a school off planet to pursue their passion and why they weren’t claimed as a Guardian fairy of Zenith after they graduated. (Since this position doesn’t exist.)

- Almost all things on the planet are solved non-magically accordingly. Their transport systems are unparalleled with some regions using small-distance whole structure replication, aka honest to god matter teleportation. The frozen over seas are also fully utilised with air cushion containerships cruising the flat expanse. Along a certain longitude Zenith also sports a unique feature: the longitudinal crust train. A four meter wide segment of the planet, as if cut out of the surrounding cityscape, moves on straight rails around the whole circumference of the planet. It is the fastest mode of civilian transport available.

- They need all the good transportation and radio transmission they can get - by the way, the Universe Wide Web is also a Zenithian invention, who would have thought - as with their living space limited, Zenithian countries have spilled over onto nearby moons, essentially colonising and terraforming those.

- So, you see, Zenith and either of its countries aren’t by far as boring as one might think on the first glance and most of them certainly don’t shy back from showing emotion.

[96thdayofrage]

Chris Hedges: The Price of Conscience

Drone warfare whistleblower sentenced to 45 months in prison for telling the American people the truth.

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced today to 45 months in prison.

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.

Hale, in a handwritten letter to Judge Liam O’Grady on July 18, explained why he leaked classified information, writing that the drone attacks and the war in Afghanistan “had little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors.”

At the top of the ten-page letter Hale quoted US Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque, speaking to a reporter in 1995: “We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away … Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse … and then we come home in triumph.”

“In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants,” Hale explained to the judge. “To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator, would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed.”

He recalled the first time he witnessed a drone strike, a few days after he arrived in Afghanistan.

“Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika province around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea,” he wrote. “That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering, purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.”

This was his first experience with “scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair.” There would be many more.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions,” he wrote. “By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Never mind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.”

He and other service members were confronted with the privatization of war where “contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary.”

“Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute,” he wrote. “Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood — theirs and ours. When I think about this, I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I’ve done to support it.”

He described to the judge “the most harrowing day of my life” that took place a few months into his deployment “when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster.”

“For weeks we had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad,” he wrote. “Car bombs directed at US bases had become an increasingly frequent and deadly problem that summer, so much effort was put into stopping them. It was a windy and clouded afternoon when one of the suspects had been discovered headed eastbound, driving at a high rate of speed. This alarmed my superiors who believe he might be attempting to escape across the border into Pakistan.”

Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.

— Daniel Hale, of learning about children killed by indiscriminate US drone attacks he participated in.

“A drone strike was our only chance and already it began lining up to take the shot,” he continued. “But the less advanced predator drone found it difficult to see through clouds and compete against strong headwinds. The single payload MQ-1 failed to connect with its target, instead missing by a few meters. The vehicle, damaged, but still driveable, continued on ahead after narrowly avoiding destruction. Eventually, once the concern of another incoming missile subsided, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka. As astounding as it was to have just learned there had been a woman, possibly his wife, there with the man we intended to kill moments ago, I did not have the chance to see what happened next before the drone diverted its camera when she began frantically to pull out something from the back of the car.”

He learned a few days later from his commanding officer what next took place.

“There indeed had been the suspect’s wife with him in the car,” he wrote. “And in the back were their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3 years old. A cadre of Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had stopped the following day. It was there they found them placed in the dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated. As my commanding officer relayed this information to us, she seemed to express disgust, not for the fact that we had errantly fired on a man and his family, having killed one of his daughters; but for the suspected bomb maker having ordered his wife to dump the bodies of their daughters in the trash, so that the two of them could more quickly escape across the border. Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.”

“One year later, at a farewell gathering for those of us who would soon be leaving military service, I sat alone, transfixed by the television, while others reminisced together,” he continued. “On television was breaking news of the president giving his first public remarks about the policy surrounding the use of drone technology in warfare. His remarks were made to reassure the public of reports scrutinizing the death of civilians in drone strikes and the targeting of American citizens. The president said that a high standard of ‘near certainty’ needed to be met in order to ensure that no civilians were present. But from what I knew, of the instances where civilians plausibly could have been present, those killed were nearly always designated enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise. Nonetheless, I continued to heed his words as the president went on to explain how a drone could be used to eliminate someone who posed an ‘imminent threat’ to the United States. Using the analogy of taking out a sniper, with his sights set on an unassuming crowd of people, the president likened the use of drones to prevent a would-be terrorist from carrying out his evil plot. But, as I understood it to be, the unassuming crowd had been those who lived in fear and the terror of drones in their skies and the sniper in this scenario had been me. I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing what I’d been a part of, I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong.”

Hale threw himself into anti-war activism when he left the military, speaking out about the indiscriminate killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of noncombatants, including children in drone strikes. He took part in a peace conference held in Washington, D.C. in November 2013. The Yemeni Fazil bin Ali Jaber spoke at the conference about the drone strike that killed his brother, Salem bin Ali Jaber, and their cousin Waleed. Waleed was a policeman. Salem was an Imam who was an outspoken critic of the armed attacks carried out by radical jihadists.

“One day in August 2012, local members of Al Qaeda traveling through Fazil’s village in a car spotted Salem in the shade, pulled up towards him, and beckoned him to come over and speak to them,” Hale wrote. “Not one to miss an opportunity to evangelize to the youth, Salem proceeded cautiously with Waleed by his side. Fazil and other villagers began looking on from afar. Farther still was an ever present reaper drone looking too.”

“As Fazil recounted what happened next, I felt myself transported back in time to where I had been on that day, 2012,” Hale told the judge. “Unbeknownst to Fazil and those of his village at the time was that they had not been the only watching Salem approach the jihadist in the car. From Afghanistan, I and everyone on duty paused their work to witness the carnage that was about to unfold. At the press of a button from thousands of miles away, two hellfire missiles screeched out of the sky, followed by two more. Showing no signs of remorse, I, and those around me, clapped and cheered triumphantly. In front of a speechless auditorium, Fazil wept.”

A week after the conference Hale was offered a job as a government contractor.  Desperate for money and steady employment, hoping to go to college, he took the job, which paid $ 80,000 a year.  But by then he was disgusted by the drone program.

“For a long time, I was uncomfortable with myself over the thought of taking advantage of my military background to land a cushy desk job,” he wrote. “During that time, I was still processing what I had been through, and I was starting to wonder if I was contributing again to the problem of money and war by accepting to return as a defense contractor. Worse was my growing apprehension that everyone around me was also taking part in a collective delusion and denial that was used to justify our exorbitant salaries, for comparatively easy labor. The thing I feared most at the time was the temptation not to question it.”

“Then it came to be that one day after work I stuck around to socialize with a pair of co-workers whose talented work I had come to greatly admire,” he wrote. “They made me feel welcomed, and I was happy to have earned their approval. But then, to my dismay, our brand-new friendship took an unexpectedly dark turn. They elected that we should take a moment and view together some archived footage of past drone strikes. Such bonding ceremonies around a computer to watch so-called “war porn” had not been new to me. I partook in them all the time while deployed to Afghanistan. But on that day, years after the fact, my new friends gaped and sneered, just as my old one’s had, at the sight of faceless men in the final moments of their lives. I sat by watching too; said nothing and felt my heart breaking into pieces.”

“Your Honor,” Hale wrote to the judge, “the truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called-upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured. The crux of PTSD is that it is a moral conundrum that afflicts invisible wounds on the psyche of a person made to burden the weight of experience after surviving a traumatic event. How PTSD manifests depends on the circumstances of the event. So how is the drone operator to process this? The victorious rifleman, unquestioningly remorseful, at least keeps his honor intact by having faced off against his enemy on the battlefield. The determined fighter pilot has the luxury of not having to witness the gruesome aftermath. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated?”

“My conscience, once held at bay, came roaring back to life,” he wrote. “At first, I tried to ignore it. Wishing instead that someone, better placed than I, should come along to take this cup from me. But this too was folly. Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person. So, I contacted an investigative reporter, with whom I had had an established prior relationship, and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale, who has admitted to being suicidal and depressed, said in the letter he, like many veterans, struggles with the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, aggravated by an impoverished and turbulent childhood.

“Depression is a constant,” he told the judge. “Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways. The tell-tale signs of a person afflicted by PTSD and depression can often be outwardly observed and are practically universally recognizable. Hard lines about the face and jaw. Eyes, once bright and wide, now deep-set, and fearful. And an inexplicably sudden loss of interest in things that used to spark joy. These are the noticeable changes in my demeanor marked by those who knew me before and after military service. To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history.”

Feature photo | People carry the shrouded casket of a villager killed by a US drone attack on the Afghanistan border in Bannu. Ijaz Muhammad | AP

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.

[unwelcome-ozian]

What's your take on Trump?

Trump feeds the racism of white evangelicals who believe blindly that Israel should be defended at all costs. Here’s how Trump uses eugenics, Christianity and antisemitism to take over Israel. Trump has built and fed a fire based on fear. He spreads anti-Muslim fear so it’s burning white and hot. He has fed the fire with the fear of people from South American countries, saying all people from Haiti have AIDS,  his statement against the GLBTQ community, his pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning Muslims from entering the United States, his racist comments and the list goes on.

Trump’s father instilled in him the idea that their family’s success was genetic, according to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio.

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” D’Antonio says in the documentary. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

The Trump administration is “undoing decades of civil and human rights progress” — especially when it comes to LGBTQ issues — according to a new report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent, bipartisan advisory agency.

He's a sexual predator.

Trump is evil.

Oz

[keanuquotes]

YOU HAVE GOOD GENES

It's called a “dog whistle,” a word or phrase in a speech that is unobjectionable on the surface but conveys a coded message to partisans, by analogy to high-pitched sounds that are audible to dogs but not to people. Richard Nixon leaned on it heavily during his 1968 presidential campaign, referencing “law and order” and a “war on drugs,” further codifying racial appeals from Barry Goldwater for “states’ rights” and “freedom of association.” Ronald Reagan took it to another level in 1976, demonizing a “welfare queen” who fraudulently collected $150,000 in government benefits, a barely concealed appeal to the race and class resentments of white voters toward Blacks.

By that standard, President Trump’s riff about the “good genes” found among the people of Minnesota — an 80 percent white state — wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a train whistle, folding in Trump’s long-held belief that some people, himself especially, are simply born with superior traits to others.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said during his Saturday rally in front of a nearly all-white crowd in Bemidji. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” 

The racehorse theory is the belief that some humans have a better genetic endowment than others, and by breeding two superior people you end up with superior offspring. The belief in eugenics, the pseudoscience of trimming out “inferior” bloodlines to increase the quality of the gene pool, is part of a long, racist history in America, from forced sterilizations to research funded by the Carnegie Institution, among other wealthy foundations. Earlier this month, charges surfaced that a doctor at an ICE facility was performing unwanted and likely unnecessary hysterectomies on detained immigrant women, which would prevent them from having more children.

“It’s not just eugenics in theory, but it’s eugenics in practice,” said Steve Silberman, a historian whose book “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” discusses 20th century theories of eugenics in both the United States and Nazi Germany.

“Trump's allusion to ‘good genes’ in front of a mostly white crowd in Minnesota isn’t just ‘like’ Nazism, it’s classic Nazi eugenic theory, encompassing the belief that ‘Aryans’ — like the descendants of Swedes in Minnesota — are destined to become the so-called master race,” Silberman told Yahoo News. “It’s not even a subtle dog whistle; Trump is just saying it, straight out, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately impacts people of color and disabled folks. The ramifications of this for our society are deeply chilling, and made concrete in the soaring COVID-19 death tolls for these vulnerable communities.”

Trump has long espoused a belief in eugenics, stating in a 1990 Playboy interview that “I’m a strong believer in genes.” In the 2014 film “Kings of Kallstadt,” a documentary looking at descendants from a single German town, Trump said, “You know I’m proud to have that German blood. There’s no question about it.” At a January 2016 event in Mississippi, he said, “I have Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in.”

He has often cited a paternal uncle who was a professor at MIT as certifying his own superior intellect.

In a 2016 PBS documentary, Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio claimed Trump and his father were big believers in the concept of good breeding.

“This is a very deep part of the Trump story,” D’Antonio said. “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development, that they believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.”

Ian Haney López, a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, who’s studied the effectiveness of dog-whistle messaging, said Trump’s comments were consistent with his father’s reported beliefs on race science and an attempt to “trigger fears and resentments rooted in racist stereotypes, but in a way that allows a politician to deny that’s what they’re doing.”

“But what’s left of plausible deniability when you begin to talk about genes?” López told Yahoo News. “Because genes begin to connect up to eugenics and Nazi race theory. That ideology in the United States would lose favor and generally be repudiated, because that same system of thinking of races as groups you could and should control the breeding of would give rise to Nazism and in particular the effort to exterminate Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals. To have the president give voice to those ideas is profoundly dangerous for the country.”

“To have an audience that’s overwhelmingly white, that’s no surprise,” López continued. “What is shocking is to see the way in which rhetoric that has been coded is returning to a form of naked endorsements of white genetic superiority. Trump didn’t say ‘white genetic superiority,’ he just said ‘genes,’ so there’s still some slight cover.”

During the same speech Saturday, Trump also disparaged refugees. He has made Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who won a seat in Congress from Minnesota in 2018, a frequent target of racist attacks. Omar is one of the first female Muslims ever elected to federal office.

“One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees,” Trump said Saturday. “You know it. You know it perhaps better than almost anybody. Lots of luck. You’re having a good time with the refugees. That’s good. We want to have Omar. He said Omar. That’s a beauty. How the hell did she win the election? How did she win? It’s unbelievable.”

“Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet,” Trump continued. “Well, that’s what’s happened, and you like Omar a lot, don’t you?”

More than 52,000 Minnesota residents trace their ancestry to Somalia, in East Africa. Trump had previously attacked them in 2016, stating that Minnesotans had “suffered enough” as a result of “filthy refugee vetting.” During a 2018 Oval Office meeting, Trump criticized protections for refugees from “s***hole countries” in Latin America and Africa while expressing a preference for immigrants from Norway.

According to a 2019 book from New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear, Trump asked why he couldn’t ban refugees from “f***ing Somalia.” At a rally in October 2019, he promised to protect native-born Americans from an influx of immigrants from Somalia.

“In the Trump administration, we will always protect American families first, and that has not been done in Minnesota,” Trump said, adding, “We will not make the mistakes made in European countries and allow a violent ideology to take root in our country, on our shores. We’re not going to allow it to happen.”

López said one reason Trump continues to return to dog whistles is that, according to López’s research, it works.

“Trump in his own way has a more sophisticated understanding of how race works in American politics than many progressives or journalists,” López said. “Trump understands that the majority of Americans are susceptible to these messages of racial fear and understand them not as racism but as common sense. I say this not simply as an observer of Trump but as someone who ran two major research campaigns to figure out how this rhetoric is working and multiple dozens of focus groups and major polling campaigns. This sort of rhetoric comes across not just as convincing to majorities of whites but to majorities of Latinos, majorities of African-Americans, majorities of Democrats and majorities of union households.”

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/09/21/trump-to-nearly-all-white-crowd-you-have-good-genes/24626071/

[things2mustdo]

A while back, I came across a thought-provoking article about r/K selection theory. The basic idea is that r-selected species are adapted for environments with unlimited resources, while K-selected species are adapted for competition. The typical examples of these are rabbits and wolves. As the article explains:

Rabbits (r-Strategy)

They’re herbivores with near unlimited resources (never a shortage for grass).. The virtually unlimited resources are a primary reason why rabbits are not territorial. This is also part of the reason why they opt for breeding often; unlimited resources means they’re not going to starve.

They have no defense against predators other than running. They do not have any loyalty towards their group. It makes no sense for a rabbit to rush to the aid of another rabbit being attacked. Then you’d just have two dead rabbits.  Because they can be killed so easy, it makes sense to reach maturity as quickly as possible so they can begin birthing children.

Hierarchies are pointless in rabbit society. Rabbits lives are rather simple; eat grass and run away from danger. There’s no need to invest heavily in their offspring. As such, there’s no need to prove who’s the superior (alpha) and the best candidate for passing on their genes.

Wolves (K-Strategy)

They’re carnivores that must hunt to survive. Hunting requires more intelligence and training than grazing on grass. Due to the increased difficulty of hunting compared to grazing, more time is invested in training the offspring to survive.

Because prey is limited, wolves must viciously protect their territory from intruders. While it might seem heartless, if another pack is allowed into their territory the supply of prey will be exhausted and both packs will starve to death.

Wolves are monogamous/pair-bond. Because raising the offspring is so important for the continuation of the species, the wolves will pair for life in order to raise their young. As such, they will choose the best mate they can find to further improve their chances of birthing strong, healthy cubs. This process of choosing leads to hierarchies with an alpha male leading the pack. Wolves also wait longer before reproducing and generally have less offspring. If they reproduced early and often, there would be too many wolves for the ecosystem resulting in the consumption all the prey and starvation.

Wolves are more complex. This is true for carnivores in general. Because carnivores typically live in groups, they must have more sophisticated ways to communicate. The same is true for their domesticated brethren. Look at a dog and you can easily identify if he is scared, happy, angry, or bored by his body language and barks. Can you tell the same moods on a rabbit?

This isn’t a completely binary distinction. For example, some herbivores (such as bovines) will flock in packs and defend themselves. Lions are more K-selected than domestic cats.

The social angle

Humans are mainly K-selected; that’s what is natural for us. There are individual differences and statistical outliers, of course. As an extreme example, imagine two brothers; one picks up Atlas Shrugged and is inspired to become a successful businessman, and the other reads the Communist Manifesto and then continues to live in Mom’s basement where he smokes weed and posts social justice memes on 4chan all day. Compare also the factory worker who is a pillar of his community and is proud to bring home the bacon to his wife and kids, versus the starving artist who has yet to produce much of value.

Differing societies have their own average balance between r and K selection. Those mostly r-selected tend to be more collectivist; those more K-selected are generally individualist. In isolation, societies find their own level and work out what’s best for them according to their own unique cultures. When one group enters another group’s turf, problems can happen. I’ve already described how this was a factor in my witty take on the demise of the Neanderthals, who might have been too progressive to survive, rather than too backward as is often assumed.  That, of course, was an analogy for what’s going on in today’s society.

This even has implications for mating strategies. What we’d now sometimes derisively call “provider game” used to be the only game in town, and was natural for our society at the time, as it had been since antiquity. After the Sexual Revolution, all the rules changed seemingly overnight, and what used to work became ineffective. The flowers, gifts, and poetry stuff once showed you were dependable and good-natured, which (believe it or not) used to be desired qualities. That will get you Friend Zoned now.

The weird thing is that today’s game strategies are an adaptation in response to our society’s unnatural shift from K-selection (where being hard-working and stable is valued) to r-selection (where being “exciting” and flashy is valued). This is why in today’s dating arena, those continuing to use traditional courtship strategies are like fish out of water. These days, being at least somewhat game-aware is pretty necessary even to get a steady girlfriend. These differing strategies lead to much confusion about what best exemplifies an alpha—a socially savvy and successful man, or a meth head ex-convict with missing teeth and a high “notch count”?

The political angle

Ideologies tend to support either K-selection or r-selection as a model for society. Now consider the part quoted about rabbits given above. Which ideology favors handing out unlimited free goodies, is anti-military, puts down traditional morality, believes in gun control, despises their own society, will run from a fight, seeks to eliminate the consequences of promiscuity, considers any hierarchy to be “privilege” or “oppression“, and doesn’t believe in self-improvement?

That certainly hits the highlights of the culture war. This presents a new perspective on why Social Justice Warriors want to re-invent society their way. All along we thought it was only cultural Marxism, but maybe there’s something even deeper going on psychologically with the SJWs.

This is reflected in policy arguments too; compare Bush the Elder’s “family values” with Hillary’s “it takes a village to raise a child”. As we can see, quite a bit of leftist ideology is basically about turning human society from the K-selected model into one friendly to the r-selected model. Two competing ideologies (or two societies living in the same space) with differing ideas about these things will come into conflict. The more K-selected ones will get themselves dragged down by the others if they let it happen, or even destroyed. Also, take a look at any bad neighborhood; consider it a low-investment parenting theme park.

In the wilderness, these things wouldn’t happen. Apex predators don’t tolerate rivals coexisting in their own turf. The smart lion drives away a pack of hyenas, and the smart bear chases away the foxes. In human societies, this has worked out quite differently, especially when clever manipulators weaponize our own societal values of tolerance, fairness, and all the rest of it against us.

The greatest problem is that we don’t actually have unlimited resources available to meet our wants and needs, like rabbits in a grassy field. All the free goodies a government hands out must come from taxpayers, with bureaucrats getting their piece of the action. (So who are the predators in that situation?) As Margaret Thatcher put it:

I think [The Labour Party] made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.

In the Communist world, those faced with the task of implementing the silly theories of Karl Marx had to ration resources, which resulted in inefficiency and corruption. Things didn’t go according to theory, obviously. Ideologies out of touch with reality become dysfunctional pretty quickly.

The endgame

Now here’s something even more disturbing. In advanced species, adulthood means being able to fend for oneself. In the beginning, people relied on families and tribes (extended families writ large) for resources, protection, and support. Some degree of interdependence in a community is natural to us, since organized hunting and agriculture increased the odds of survival, and thus we’re social creatures. The head of the household called the shots in the family, and the chief led the tribe.

At the dawning of civilization, related tribes bound together into nations. The model of families living under kings was the norm up until the Age of Enlightenment, with the main drawbacks that the nobility (and those close to them) got rich at the expense of others, lorded it over their subjects, and sometimes got into short-sighted wars. Afterwards, the transition into democracies moderated some of these problems, though graft and corruption and badly-conceived wars still happened.

Now we’re moving into the “New World Order” model, where a few thousand plutocratic elites around the world use their wealth and influence to implement managed democracy, get into spit-in-your-eye wars, and other forms of skullduggery to influence things their way. They’re pushing to open the borders, erase national sovereignty, turn the diverse peoples of the world into a mass monoculture, and they’ve conspired to make the public unaware and compliant.

Overall, the elites are causing increased dependency on the nanny-state governments, which meanwhile neglect the public’s safety and well-being. They’ve shown great hubris, trying to live as kings and make us their serfs. Meanwhile, young adulthood has become increasingly an extened adolescence, and these days many are seeming more childlike than ever. The more all this goes on, the less citizens resemble independent adults.

The extreme model of this in the animal kingdom is with some insect species, such as ants and bees. Joseph Sobran used The Hive as a metaphor, and so have I. If you don’t feel like being one of their worker bees, or a neutered drone, then it’s time we get the globalists off our backs.

Read More: Cultural Collapse Theory: The 7 Steps That Lead To A Complete Culture Decline

[emma-nation]

Within You - Bloodbound AU - Chapter 14

Summary: One year after defeating Gaius, the gang has finally found peace… Until a tragic incident awakens the ultimate and most dangerous threat they ever faced.

Genre: Angst/Adventure/Romance

Rating: T - Warning for violence and language

Amy

"Congratulations, Bloodkeeper. I had to come and see your accomplishments with my own eyes. In only six weeks you managed to do what I never could, to unite vampires and humans."

Amy stood paralyzed as Rheya entered the box, acting like if she owned the place. She gritted her teeth in anger. How could she be so innocent to believe she was truly gone? Especially upon the perfect scenario she had created for her comeback. One where Rheya could murder thousands of humans and vampires in order to obtain more power. Peace was never her goal. The First Vampire always had a greater purpose in mind, to become a Goddess with powers that could overcome anything, even death.

"Rheya..." she finally spoke. "Get out of here. Now!"

She ignored her, sweeping around the room and observing each one of her friends. She paused at Lysimachus, cocking her head confused.

"Curious..." Rheya furrowed her brows. "How could you survive Demetrius' blood? You were supposed to be dead."

"I guess I had to stay around and watch your downfall," Kamilah's brother answered, "bitch."

The First Vampire replied with a sarcastic smirk before keep moving, watching carefully all her surroundings.

"What are you doing here, Rheya?" Kamilah asked, frowning her face.

"Leave those people out of whatever you're planning," Adrian added. "If you've got anything to deal with us, we can solve it somewhere else."

This time they didn't have a plan, or even a weapon to use against Rheya, but Amy didn't feel intimidated. She felt angry, thirsty for revenge. She could feel that power burning at the depths of her soul, ready to unleash all its strength and defeat that woman once for all.

She walked to the glass, pointed to the crowd and spoke:

"This is how you create peace, Rheya. Not by putting a species above the other, making them believe they're superior. Or by starting an endless cycle of bloodshed and violence. Tonight we both win, humans and vampires."

"You're wrong, Amy," Rheya approached and stood by her side, touching the glass windows. Her eyes were shining red as fresh blood. "Humans started this war, when they killed Demetrius and took my daughter from me."

"You still can change it, you know? You can end this cycle. We can live in peace," Amy tried to reason with her, counting that inside the dark shell, a little bit of humanity remained intact. "Rheya, I'm your granddaughter. I'm a part of Iola and... a part of you."

Rheya grinned and looked at her. Amy gazed deeply into her eyes, diving into them. For the first time she could feel it. The link they shared. The part of Rheya that was running in her veins. The part that screamed for power.

In that moment everything stopped. There was no music or chanting coming from the crowd. All her ears could detected were all those heartbeats... thousands of them. The blood being pumped from their hearts and flowing inside their veins. Their lives... so weak and so fragile. And they all belonged to her.

"Don't fight it," the First Vampire said, "embrace the blood, Amy. Join me and together we can build an era of true peace and reign as the goddesses we are."

"N-No!" Amy resisted those thoughts. "I'm not like you. I won't..."

"Too bad, darling. I don't need you anyways."

Rheya lifted up her arms, ready to take and absorb all those lives. The visions quickly returned to Amy's memory. She needed to act before it was too late. Without thinking twice, she pulled the entire group into a memory void. The only place where Rheya's powers were limited and she was restrained.

"What do you think you're doing?" Rheya angered, noticing the invisible chains holding her down. "So clever, but it's a matter of time until we have to go back to the real world."

"But right now we're in my world, bitch. You'll stay and watch."

"What are you talking about?"

"I was searching for you through my Bloodkeeper abilities the other day and I discovered the truth..." Amy walked behind Rheya, and though she was much taller, she seemed completely vulnerable and small in that moment. "What happened to Iola, Rheya?"

"The Sons Of Ares kidnapped her, making me believe she was dead," some hateful tears filled the First Vampire's eyes. "Depriving me from seeing my own daughter to grow up!"

"You never saw her again?"

"No."

"Are you sure? Because I found this inside your memories, something you can't quite remember..."

All of them were taken to a port city in Ancient Greece, where an adult version of Iola walked on the streets in company of her husband and daughter.

"When she turned out to be completely ordinary, the Sons Of Ares simply raised her as one of their own. She lived. She aged. She had a family on her own, until..."

Sounds of slaughter started to be heard, screams of panic and cries for mercy were heard across the streets. The group spotted a familiar figure holding a blade, not sparing a single life that stood his way.

"Die!" Gaius snarled. "Die for the Goddess!"

The flashback appeared so real and close some of her friends drew their weapons, thinking they were being seen and would have to face that man one more time in their lives.

Meanwhile, Iola turned to her husband, pushing their daughter into his arms...

"We need to get onto a ship! Now!"

The three of them rushed for a merchant vessel. Ajax, Iola's husband, was first, hoisting up their daughter, Minerva. A hand grabbed Iola from behind, preventing her from joining her family in safety.

"And where do you think you're going?" The figure was Rheya herself.

"No," Iola tried to plead for her life, "wait, I-"

Before she could even finish, her head was slammed into a wall, crushing it. Blood spilled in the group's direction. Someone let out a horrified scream. In front of them, Iola was lying dead on the ground.

"Pathetic human," Rheya said, before resuming the slaughtering.

Back to the real world, the First Vampire was on her knees completely destroyed.

"No!" She screamed, while she began to sob. "I killed her. My little girl. My baby. I killed her."

"You did," Amy told. "And all these centuries you blamed it on humans, generating so much hate, so much violence."

"Everything I did... everyone I hurt... all of it was a lie. It was me. All along. The monster. The killer. The abomination."

The others stared at the scene in silence, completely shocked.

"Amy," Kamilah threw her one of her daggers, "end this. Kill her now."

Amy grabbed Rheya's hair and pressed the blade against her throat. She could feel through their connection, in that moment she was hurt, broken and scared. There was nothing left inside of the First Vampire, except for a desire of ending her own life.

"Rheya, I'm sorry. You can't change the past and erase all you've done, but... I promise to honor your legacy. There will be peace among humans and vampires, but no lives will be lost in this process, not anymore."

"I still..." Rheya panted hard, barely breathing between her sobs. "I still can bring her back! I still can fix this!"

In a flash, she used her psychic powers to throw Amy across the room with the dagger buried in her stomach. The others immediately reacted. Kamilah lunged forward, only to be hit by a fire blast that sent her flying across the room. Adrian grabbed Rheya from behind attempting to hold her, she entered his mind, causing an intense pain that made him collapse.

"No," Lysimachus threw one of his daggers, preventing her from absorbing Adrian's life. The blade hit the First Vampire's shoulder. She scowled and jerked her hand, trying to force him on his knees. However, it didn't work.

"Demetrius... he's protecting you. How dare he?!"

"Even Demetrius grew tired of your bitchcraft," Katherine stepped forward, whirling her sai.

"Your useless little mortal..." before Rheya could made any moves against her, a ring on Katherine's finger blasted an intense light that involved her as a shield. The Nighthunter successfully stabbed her in the chest.

It didn't affect her much. Rheya pulled out the sai, wincing in pain. She approached the glass again, lifting up her arms and ready to collect all those lives in trade of power.

"I need to stop her," Amy crawled, trying to reach her. She was still weak from the blood loss, yet she managed to stand on her feet. "Rheya... stop..."

"You're not worthy of my genes. Once again, I failed on my creation!" Rheya kicked her legs, making her fall on the ground again. Using the sai removed from her chest, she pointed it to Amy's throat. "Good riddance, granddaughter."

Like a blur moving through the room, somebody managed to tackle Rheya, getting her away from Amy. She lifted up her eyes in time to see...

"You!" The First Vampire grabbed Lily by the neck.

"No!" Amy yelled and tried to hit Rheya with a psychic blast, but she had no strength. She watched as the First Vampire buried the sai directly into Lily's heart. The girl glanced Amy one last time with a small smile on her face, before her body converted into ash.

"Weak as an insect. Her life barely served for my purpose."

Rheya laughed and turned around, ready to return to her mission.

Amy kneeled down, her hands covered by Lily's ashes. Her eyes filled with tears and she started to tremble. In that moment there was no pain or weakness. Something else had ignited inside her. Something ancient, powerful... and terrible. She felt like she was consumed by an intense fire. The wound in her chest healed immediately as the new source of power took over her body. A power deeply moved by anger and loss.

"Rheya," she ordered. "Stop."

----------

Kamilah

"A-Amy..." Kamilah clutched the spot where Rheya hit her with a fire blast. Her chest hurt intensely. She opened her mouth to speak, noticing her wife was completely out of herself. Her eyes were glowing like two fireballs, exactly like Adrian when he took an excessive dose of his serum. "AMY!"

She couldn't hear Kamilah's voice or even notice her presence. Her mind had succumbed to those powers completely.

"She was my best friend," Amy walked in Rheya's direction. "How could you?!"

"Do you understand now, Bloodkeeper?" Rheya said. "How does it feel to lose someone you loved so dearly? Don't you desire enough power to bring her back? Wouldn't you trade all those mortals' lives for your friend's?"

"HOW COULD YOU?!" Amy screamed loud and powerful enough to make the entire box shake. The impact sent Rheya flying against the wall. The girl grabbed her by the neck, exactly like she did to Lily. "I could make it fast and painless as possible but for all you've done, all the pain you caused... you deserve to suffer."

Kamilah couldn't tell exactly what was going on, but she seemed to have entered Rheya's mind causing an excruciating pain inside her skull. The First Vampire attempted to fight for her life, but Amy's influence had weakened her.

"Farewell, Rheya," using her psychic powers, Amy moved Kamilah's dagger back to her hands before slicing her head off her shoulders. In a few seconds, the legendary vampire became nothing but ash. Like Lily, or any other vampires she murdered before. Everyone in the room exchanged glances, trying to process what had just happened.

"It's over," Adrian was the first one to speak. "She's dead. The First Vampire is dead."

"And so is Lily," Jax lamented.

However, Kamilah still could feel her essence, her power lingering in the air seeking for the next host. A body that could accept and embrace all its darkness. Suddenly she saw as it began to surround Amy's body and slowly get absorbed.

"No," Kamilah muttered, forcing herself to her feet. "Amy, y-you did it, my love. You defeated her. Rheya is gone."

There was no answer. Amy approached the glass windows, staring down at the crowd again. This time, her look was hard and completely cold.

"I can do this," she said, staring down at her hands. "I have the power to control, to manipulate, to shape... and the power to create."

The girl waved her hand, making a flower blossom in the middle of the room sparkling with beauty. She fixed her eyes on it, fascinated.

"I can make life! I can bring Lily back. I just... I need more power..."

"Amy, sweetheart," Katherine interrupted. "You're starting to sound exactly like her."

"You don't understand," Amy told her. "I can bring back what you've lost. Katherine, I can bring Ava back to you."

"Amy," Lysimachus shouted, attempting to get her attention. "You don't want to do this. This is unnatural!"

"You... you don't understand. None of you!"

The way Amy spoke those last few words showed how angry she felt about them all. She turned back to the crowd extending her hands, ready to mimic Rheya and draw in all the lives of the thousands of humans below.

"Amy, no!" Kamilah yelled. "Stop. This isn't you!"

"This has always been me, Kamilah," Amy gripped tightly on the dagger she still held. "You just couldn't see it before, because you were blinded by what you call 'love'."

"No, love never blinded me. Actually it made me see clear. Amy, when I met you I could finally find myself again. I could get back what I had long lost. I realized I'm worthy of redemption, love and happiness. We are."

"You once told me love was only a chemical reaction."

"I was wrong and you showed me. Because you have the most beautiful heart I've ever known."

Kamilah closed her eyes and reached out, touching her shoulder. Without any fear Amy would injury her. She knew the real Amy, her Amy was still in there. She wouldn't be capable of hurting her. Ever.

"Come back to me, Amy," she smiled. "I love you. Now we can finally have that future we always dreamed of."

She hesitated for a moment, before a single tear ran across her cheek. Kamilah slowly involved her wife in a tight embrace and she started crying against her shoulder. That dark energy rushed out her body, vanishing in the air.

"This is okay..." upon her wife's desperate sobs, Kamilah couldn't hold her own tears. "Everything will be okay..."

"She killed her. She killed Lily, Kamilah! And I didn't have time to say goodbye or to say how much I loved her. She saved me, even when I treated her so badly."

"Lily knew it. This is why she did it."

The others gathered around them, huddling together exhausted and destroyed from the fight.

"What do we do now?" Amy asked.

"We go home," Kamilah answered, kissing her forehead.

----------

Lysimachus

A few days passed since Lily's death and Rheya's defeat. For the crowd present at the concert, a minor accident happened at one of the VIP boxes. They didn't know about the battle or even about the deaths. Humans and vampires were still in peace. However, for some of them the world seemed to have stopped.

Lysimachus stared at the mirror while finishing to get dressed. He hadn't sleep in days. The adrenaline, the memories of that night made his body unable to get any rest. His dreams were often disturbed by Rheya's presence in the air, just seeking for another opportunity to rise again. Something told him that wouldn't be the last they'd see of the First Vampire.

"I hate funerals," Katherine spoke as she entered the room, wearing a black dress.

"So do I," he said. "Listen, I know this brings you some painful memories. You don't have to go if you don't want to."

"It's okay. I want to be there for Amy, as she has been helping me a lot. Besides, I've been in her shoes. I know how she's feeling."

She squeezed his hand, trying to bring some comfort. Lysimachus turned around and kissed her cheek. Together, they went to Kamilah's penthouse. His sister was alone in the living room, contemplating the streets through the window.

"Hey, sister," Lysimachus squeezed her shoulder. "How are things going?"

"Still the same," Kamilah told. "She's locked inside the bedroom, refuses to leave or even speak to me. I can't get through her. And there's those powers... I fear her emotions will bring them back to surface at any moment. I feel I'm losing her, brother."

Since Lily's death, Amy had been severely depressed. She wouldn't speak to anyone about her grief, refusing to eat or even leave the bedroom. As they opened the door, they found Amy sitting on the bed holding the urn that contained Lily's ashes. She barely noticed their presence until they approached.

"Hello, sweetheart," Katherine sat down by her side, wrapping an arm around the girl's shoulders. "How are you?"

"It hurts so much," the tears Amy had been fighting so hard against started to run across her cheeks. "I feel like a part of my soul has been ripped off."

"I know. It will take a while to feel better, probably will never fully heal. But Amy, you don't wanna get into this hole. You have an amazing wife and friends who love you. Most of all, you're strong."

"Yeah," Lysimachus joined them at the bed, "besides, that was what Lily wanted the most. She wanted you to live and be happy."

"Was it? I mean, I'll never know. I-I... I didn't even had a chance to have a final conversation with her. I pushed her away for all these last few weeks."

He sighed. Rheya wasn't the only presence he could feel. Lily was still around, for some reason. From his brief knowledge about his new found powers, she still had something pending that prevented her from moving on.

"What if... what if there's a way for you to say goodbye? If we unite both of our powers, it's possible you can see her one last time."

"Really?" Amy's tearful eyes finally met his, a hint of hope shining on her green irises. "Can we do that?"

"We can try."

Katherine gave him a small and supportive smile, indicating she was leaving the room to grant them some privacy. Lysimachus took a deep breath and held both of Amy's hands firmly.

"Okay..." he told. "First thing, we need to connect our minds."

"Got it," for such a skilled psychic as Amy, that was the easiest thing to do.

Once he felt they were in sync, Lysimachus channeled the powers that came from Demetrius blood. The air suddenly got colder and a heavy wind wrapped around them, taking them both to another level of the mindscape, one that had grounds in the Realm Of Death. When they opened their eyes, both of them were standing in some kind of forest with a dense fog that prevented them to see much further.

"Do you think she's here?" Amy asked, examining her surrounding for any clues.

"I don't know," Lysimachus answered. That place was absolutely creepy and he had no idea of who they could run into by accident. "Do not move. Let's just... focus on her."

"Okay. Come on, Lil. I just wanted to say goodbye."

They both closed their eyes, thinking of Lily and their purpose in there.

When they opened their eyes again, the forest had disappeared, giving space to a completely blank space. Lily was standing in the middle, wearing the same clothes from the night of her death. She opened a grin as soon as she saw them.

"Lily!" Crying, Amy ran straight to her best friend's arms. Lysimachus watched from distance.

"Amy!" Lily also broke down in tears. "Girl, you did it. You defeated Rheya. You're the boss now, baby!"

"But... you died. You died to protect me, even after I was so mean to you."

"I understand. In your place, I'd be probably be mad too. Trust me, I'd never do anything to separate you and Kamilah. You guys are OTP."

"Do you..." Amy took a deep breath to recompose herself. "Do you forgive me?"

"You don't even have to ask," Lily wiped off some tears from her face. "But you gotta promise me one thing okay?"

"Anything."

"First of all, you need training. For your own safety and for all those around you. You have a great potential inside you, Amy, but you need to use it correctly. Then, be happy. Live your life with Kamilah at fullest. And if someday you two have kids, make sure to tell them about their aunt Lily."

Amy let out a laugh followed by some sobs.

"Of course," she hugged Lily again. "I'll make you proud, Lil. And I'll honor you, for the rest of my life. You'll be my best friend forever."

"Forever," Lily grabbed both of Amy's hands squeezing them tightly.

The scenario started to fade, suggesting they didn't have much time longer. Lysimachus gave the girls a signal.

"I love you, Lil. Goodb-"

"No, not a 'goodbye'. It's an 'I see you soon'."

"See you soon."

With Lily's last words of "I love you too", both of them got pulled back to reality.

"Oh man," Lysimachus fought a few tears himself. "That was intense."

"Thank you so much," Amy embraced him. "It was all I needed."

"You're welcome. Are you ready to go?"

"Yeah, only if we can have this massive party with lots of gaming later. In Lily's honor."

"Sure! We can arrange that."

Katherine and Kamilah were waiting at the living room. Amy greeted them with a smile, looking a lot better than before.

Before they left for Lily's funeral, Lysimachus' spoke in private to his girlfriend:

"So when you will say goodbye? It worked for Amy. Removed a burden from her shoulders."

"Someday," Katherine sighed. "Someday I'll be ready. I let you know."

----------

Kamilah

"No," Kamilah spoke over the phone, rolling her eyes, "I do not wish to model for your new line of hair products."

Amy quietly watched her from the couch. Lily's death had a great impact in her life. She was no longer that usual upbeat and optimistic young woman. Like, Kamilah she decided to stay away from the spotlights and social media for some time. Together they decided it was the best for her protection and for her mental health in that moment.

With the consent of her parents, Kamilah took Amy to her hometown. Being away from New York's never-stopping action and find some peace and quietness could be helpful to restore her mood. They'd be staying on the family's lake house for a few days.

"Oh, #Kamilahshair is also trending on Twitter. Again." Amy's father announced, making the female vampire almost drop her coffee.

"Excuse me?!"

"Your hair is becoming quite famous," Amy said as she sat by her side on the couch. "It's not exclusive for me to worship anymore."

"You know every part of me is exclusively yours, my love," Kamilah placed a kiss on her lips.

From the kitchen, Amy's mother cleared her throat, interrupting the moment. Though she was more tolerant, she still wouldn't accept any affection displays in her house.

"You two are almost as popular as the Twilight couple," Kamilah's father in law continued with his jokes. She learned where her wife had inherited her sense of humor from. "There are fandoms dedicated to your ship, thousands of fanfiction too."

"I don't understand any of these terms, Mr. Parker, but I suppose it's a good thing?"

"Come here to check it out."

Kamilah approached the man, who showed some of the work of their online fans. Some were very pleasant to read but some...

"Oh," Kamilah blushed in embarrassment. "This is... very detailed. And accurate."

"Okay," Mr. Parker closed the browser. "This is more information than I wanted to read."

"Guys!" Amy finally broke into a laugh. Kamilah closed her eyes savoring that moment. It was so good to hear that sound after so many days of silence and tears. "Stop, please."

After finishing breakfast, they returned to the lake house where Kamilah took the moment to appreciate the view in front of her.

"Remember the first time you brought me here? I was so frustrated I'd never be able to enjoy this place in your company during the day."

"Yes, then I showed you how fun it still could be at night. By breaking into the neighbors' hot tube."

"I'm feeling a little criminal today," Kamilah raised a suggestive eyebrow at her wife. "Aren't you?"

"Not really," Amy took a moment to answer. "It's Summer. The kids must be around."

They hadn't shared many romantic moments or any intimacy since the fight against Rheya. The girl turned around and headed back to the house. Kamilah could tell by her voice she was about to cry. She decided to follow her.

"Amy, what's happening? Is it because of Lily?"

"It's more serious than that. Those powers... I can sense them calling for me. Everytime I get angry or sad I feel I'll slip out of control and succumb to darkness again."

Kamilah sighed and joined her wife by the window. She tucked Amy's hair behind her ear and kissed her wet cheek.

"If that happens, I'll be by your side, making sure you'll come back."

"No, Kamilah. You don't understand... I could've killed you! In that moment I felt absolutely nothing. I was consumed by anger and hate."

"We can find a solution..." Kamilah spoke softly in her ear. "Together."

"Actually," Amy moved away from her, "we can't. I think we should follow separate ways for a while. It's the best for both of us."

"Amy..."

"Go back to New York, please. I'll stay here."

"Y-You can't be serious. We've been through so much together."

"I know," Amy approached again, holding both of her hands. "But this is something I must go through alone."

Respecting her wish, Kamilah packed her bags and entered the car. There was no goodbye kiss, Amy briefly waved her hand from the porch and returned inside. She thought it'd be better this way.

Kamilah felt like she had been punched in the stomach. In fact, a punch would've hurt less. All the times her enemies attempted to stake her or even extract her heart still didn't hurt that much. She felt crushed. In the end, Rheya had gotten exactly what she wanted.

"I absolutely hate this place," Kamilah complained inside the car, before starting to drive away.

----------

Amy

At night, Amy walked around the woods surrounding the lake house. She needed to clear off her head. Some kids were having a party somewhere nearby, she watched them from a distance. Only a few years back, she used to be one of them. In Summer, the whole family would reunite in the lake house, where she and her cousins threw great parties that gathered people from all over the town.

Those were good times without vampires, evil villains and sociopaths that wanted to take over the world.

"That's it, Amy. How it always meant to be. You brought back the First Vampire, defeated her and brought an era of peace. But... what now?"

Feeling sad and completely lonely, she stopped by the lake. The night made it appear dark and bottomless. She stared at her own reflection in the water.

"Demetrius, if only you could talk to me again. I could really use some advice."

Being without Kamilah was the last thing she wanted. God, she loved that woman so much. She could spend the eternity by her side and she knew she'd never grow tired or bored, Kamilah made it impossible. They had so many plans for the future, so many dreams... now everything seemed so distant again.

Footsteps behind her made her quickly react and turn around.

"Sorry," Katherine spoke. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"What are you doing here?" Amy asked. "Did Kamilah send you? Because I was very clear when I said I didn't want to see anybody."

"She didn't. Last time I saw her she was drowning in some fancy bourbon with Lysimachus. Actually, that may be the best bourbon I tasted in my entire life."

Amy forced a small smile. Of course Kamilah was drinking. Whenever she was too upset or too happy, alcohol was always present. She gave Katherine a sign to follow her inside the house.

"So," she grabbed the only thing she found inside the fridge, two cans of soda, "why are you here?"

"For a job," Katherine opened the can, drinking some of her soda. "You've been helping me to fight my demons, I'll help you to fight yours."

"How? I mean, there's nothing we can do. Rheya is gone, but her powers are eternal, immortal. They'll always linger in the air, seeking for a compatible target."

"We can't destroy it but we can banish it, and trap it inside of some container."

"And how much is it going to cost?" Amy let out a chuckle. "I mean, you always say your time is precious."

"Nothing," Katherine sighed. "Let's make it a girls night thing. Deal?"

"Deal. Where do we start?"

"Find us a container where we can trap Rheya's essence. I'll be outside preparing the ritual."

Amy searched the bedrooms hoping to find something, but as the house was rarely used in the last few years, there was nothing that could serve. She searched the kitchen's cabinets next, where she grabbed the only thing she thought that was appropriate for the purpose.

"Did you find anything?" Katherine asked while she finished placing some runes in a circle.

"Yes," Amy grinned ear to ear,s what she had in hands. "An empty jar of strawberry jam."

The Nighthunter broke into a laugh.

"Such a decadent ending for a Vampire Goddess, huh?!"

"Exactly. I thought my grandma's cookie jar was still too much for Rheya."

"Great, now give me the jar and stand in the middle of the circle."

Amy did as told. Being the most viable target, Katherine ordered her to attract the powers to herself. The girl bit her lower lip, feeling insecure.

"Are you sure this is safe?" She asked.

"No, it's not. I won't sugarcoat it for you," Katherine replied, bold and direct. "But do you have any other choice?"

She was right. If Amy wanted any chances of having a future by Kamilah's side, her only option was to trap those dark forces forever. She started to think of everything that made her sad, frustrated and especially angry. She remembered Lily. She pretended to desire for those powers to bring her back. She called for them. Suddenly that familiar cold breeze made all al her neck's hair spike up.

"It's here," she warned Katherine. "I can feel it."

"Stay in the circle until I tell you to leave." Katherine focused and started mumbling a few words in an ancient language. Amy could sense it coming closer and closer, starting to wrap around her body like dark tendrils. "Now!"

As Amy left the circle, Katherine switched places with her. The dark fog started to surround her, as if it was scanning for a vulnerability.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm not a viable host. It won't get me."

"That's what you think! Rheya was a mortal when Goddess Phampira granted her those powers. Katherine, get out!"

"Only a little longer."

After a few seconds, Katherine opened the jar and the dark force was immediately drained to the container. She quickly closed it, safely sealing it inside.

"Is it... over?" Amy asked in disbelief.

"I think so," Katherine concluded, examining the jar. "Now we must bury it somewhere no one will find."

"There's some rocks by the other side of the lake. Me and my cousins used to bury stuff there all the time. No one ever found them."

"If you say so."

With a shovel and a flashlight, Amy confirmed all their childhood treasures were still there, inside a deep hole among the rocks. She carefully placed the jar in there and covered the hole again.

Both of the women returned to the lake house, where Amy set up a fire outside. They both sat down in silence, lost in their own thoughts.

"You can come back to New York now," Katherine was the first to speak. "For your relationship's sake and mine too, Lysimachus gets really annoying when he drinks."

"He does," Amy laughed in agreement. However, there was something else that still prevented her from running back to her wife. "I can't go back. We banished Rheya's powers that remained loose on the universe, but I carry some of these powers myself too. Look what I did to the Order Of Dawn soldiers. I can lose control again."

"Oh about that, I have some contacts in Japan. There's this psychic vampire named Kano Yoshimasa, he's kind of a legend. You could appeal to him and ask for help with your powers."

"Really? I mean, Kamilah told me the vampires from Japan are far from friendly."

"Sweetheart," Katherine rolled her eyes, "you're kind of their leader now. Want them or not. They will have to accept you in their territory."

"Would you come with me, as some sort of mediator?"

"Okay but..."

Amy knew what the Nighthunter's face meant.

"I'll pay. I've earned more than enough selling details of my life to that movie."

After driving as fast as she could, Amy used her vampire speed to move faster. She didn't have to care anymore if mortals would notice it. With a smile on her face, she knocked the penthouse's door. Her heart pounding anxiously inside her chest.

When Kamilah opened the door, the first thing she did was pull her for a long and passionate kiss.

"Amy," her wife was kinda shocked by her sudden return. "This was quite a surprise."

"I know," she blushed and smiled. "I've got everything solved. Would you come to Japan with me?"

Kamilah took a moment to answer. She involved Amy in her arms, holding her very close to her chest.

"I'll go wherever you go. I'd follow you into hell itself."

----------

Lysimachus

"I thought we had an actual job here," Katherine complained inside the car. "And I only agreed to come because I know these lands."

"Really?" Lysimachus gave her an ironic look. "Or is it because you wanted to be here? It is an actual job, except that my employee is... not alive."

Lysimachus decided to accept Adrian's offer. In a few weeks when he started his campaign, he'd be taking the lead of Raines Corporation. Before that, he would be traveling Japan along his girlfriend and friends. Besides Amy and Kamilah, Jax agreed to follow them too.

Until then, he decided to enjoy his time by doing a few last jobs as a Nighthunter, together with Katherine. Their final stop was at a small town in New Mexico.

"I haven't visited since I left to New Orleans, about ten years ago."

"Come on," he placed a hand on his girlfriend's knee. "She want you to do this."

They left the car and he handed Katherine some flowers.

"Violets," she smiled, touching the petals. "Ava's favorites."

"Yeah, she was very specific."

Together, they followed into the cemetery. Despite the long years, Katherine still knew the way very well. They stopped at Ava's grave. The emptiness suggested no one had visited in a long time.

"Can you give us some privacy?"

"Sure."

Lysimachus sat down at a near bench, observing as Katherine kneeled down to place the flowers and caressed the picture in the tombstone. Then, she closed her eyes for a few minutes, muttering some words.

"Done," she returned to his side. "I told her how I feel, apologized for the millionth time and even said a prayer."

"Are you religious?" He asked. "I didn't know."

"I used to be, a little. Even if my parents..."

"Would you like to visit them?"

"No, we didn't part in good terms. They wished to never see me again. I'm respecting this wish."

Back to the car, Lysimachus couldn't understand how Katherine's parents could be so cruel and abandon her at the most difficult time of her life. No wonder she was so closed about her past and her feelings.

"It's not enough yet," Katherine broke the silence. "I can feel it. What's next?"

"Let me see," Lysimachus was pensive for a moment, remembering all the things he heard Ava's ghost saying. "There's one thing. I think we'll have the perfect opportunity for that."

They arrived in New York just in time for the party to honor Lily's life and to celebrate their next journey in Japan. Everyone was reunited at the Shadow Den bowling station. A few arcades had been installed, as well as a karaoke machine.

"Hey guys," Amy greeted them excited. "I thought you wouldn't be coming."

"Are you kidding?" Lysimachus messed up her hair. "We wouldn't miss it for anything."

"Can I steal Katherine for a minute?"

"Sure."

As soon as they left, Kamilah approached him bringing a drink. She looked happy and relaxed. Things between she and Amy were finally back to normal.

"So brother, are you ready? Have you ever been in Japan before?"

"Once. I must say I faced some trouble. This woman, Aiko Nakamura, wanted to capture me and throw me inside a dungeon. She said I remembered her of somebody she knew."

"Oh," Kamilah nearly choked with her drink for some reason. "I'm sorry about that."

"Anyways," Lysimachus shrugged. "I hope they're more friendly this time."

"And so do I."

Lysimachus reflected about everything they went through in the last couple of years. He let out a laugh.

"Due to our history, I doubt it. Trouble will always find us everywhere we go."

"Exactly. But as long as we're together everything ends up alright."

"To victory," he extended his glass to his sister. "And to family."

"Always," Kamilah clicked her glass against his.

"A minute of your attention please," Amy's voice, coming from the small improvised stage where the karaoke machine was set, got their attention. "To attend a very special request, I'll be singing Party In The USA. And Katherine will be helping me with this one."

A furious and embarrassed Nighthunter emerged from the middle of the crowd, playfully punching Lysimachus' arm.

"What is that?" She asked. "I know you're involved!"

"You said you'd do anything for Ava to move on," he started pushing her in the stage's direction. "Go. She wanted you to sing again."

"I hate you guys..."

"Welcome to the group, Katherine," Kamilah smiled. "I've been there too."

While the twins watched their significant others to playfully sing and dance at the stage, they exchanged one final glance and a smile. Their journey was far from over but after 2000 years of pain, both of them had finally found peace and love.

----------

Note: It's NOT over yet. Stay tuned!

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

If scientific discoveries and technological developments split humankind into a mass of useless humans and a small elite of upgraded superhumans, or if authority shifts altogether away from human beings into the hands of highly intelligent algorithms, then liberalism will collapse. What new religions or ideologies might fill the resulting vacuum and guide the subsequent evolution of our godlike descendants?

The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.

Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. That’s where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes – happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life – but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.

These new techno-religions can be divided into two main types: techno-humanism and data religion. Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus – a much superior human model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. Since intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, and since non-conscious intelligence is developing at breakneck speed, humans must actively upgrade their minds if they want to stay in the game.

Dataism says that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. This may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment. Dataism was born from the explosive confluence of two scientific tidal waves. In the 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the life sciences have come to see organisms as biochemical algorithms. Simultaneously, in the eight decades since Alan Turing formulated the idea of a Turing Machine, computer scientists have learned to engineer increasingly sophisticated electronic algorithms. Dataism puts the two together, pointing out that exactly the same mathematical laws apply to both biochemical and electronic algorithms. Dataism thereby collapses the barrier between animals and machines, and expects electronic algorithms to eventually decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms.

For politicians, business people and ordinary consumers, Dataism offers groundbreaking technologies and immense new powers. For scholars and intellectuals it also promises to provide the scientific holy grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines from literature and musicology to economics and biology. According to Dataism, King Lear and the flu virus are just two patterns of data flow that can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools. This idea is extremely attractive. It gives all scientists a common language, builds bridges over academic rifts and easily exports insights across disciplinary borders. Musicologists, political scientists and cell biologists can finally understand each other.

In the process, Dataism inverts the traditional pyramid of learning. Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information, let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain. In practice, this means that Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms.

Dataism is most firmly entrenched in its two mother disciplines: computer science and biology. Of the two, biology is the more important. It was the biological embracement of Dataism that turned a limited breakthrough in computer science into a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition.

Not only individual organisms are seen today as data-processing systems, but also entire societies such as beehives, bacteria colonies, forests and human cities. Economists increasingly interpret the economy, too, as a data-processing system. Laypeople believe that the economy consists of peasants growing wheat, workers manufacturing clothes, and customers buying bread and underpants. Yet experts see the economy as a mechanism for gathering data about desires and abilities, and turning this data into decisions.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.

There is a story (probably apocryphal, like most good stories) that when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy, he sent one of his chief aids to London to find out what Thatcherism was all about, and how a capitalist system actually functioned. The hosts took their Soviet visitor on a tour of the City, of the London stock exchange and of the London School of Economics, where he had lengthy talks with bank managers, entrepreneurs and professors. After a few hours, the Soviet expert burst out: ‘Just one moment, please. Forget about all these complicated economic theories. We have been going back and forth across London for a whole day now, and there’s one thing I cannot understand. Back in Moscow, our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store. Here in London live millions of people, and we have passed today in front of many shops and supermarkets, yet I haven’t seen a single bread queue. Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.’ The hosts scratched their heads, thought for a moment, and said: ‘Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.’

That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The information flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and-development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe. For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct. The crucial thing is that the theory understands economics in terms of data processing.

[…] Dataism naturally has its critics and heretics. As we saw in Chapter 3, it’s doubtful whether life can really be reduced to data flows. In particular, at present we have no idea how or why data flows could produce consciousness and subjective experiences. Maybe we’ll have a good explanation in twenty years. But maybe we’ll discover that organisms aren’t algorithms after all.

It is equally doubtful whether life boils down to decision-making. Under Dataist influence, both the life sciences and the social sciences have become obsessed with decision-making processes, as if that’s all there is to life. But is it so? Sensations, emotions and thoughts certainly play an important part in making decisions, but is that their sole meaning? Dataism gains a better and better understanding of decision-making processes, but it might be adopting an increasingly skewed view of life.

[…] Of course, even if Dataism is wrong and organisms aren’t just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent Dataism from taking over the world. Many previous religions gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism? Dataism has especially good prospects, because it is currently spreading across all scientific disciplines. A unified scientific paradigm may easily become an unassailable dogma. It is very difficult to contest a scientific paradigm, but up till now, no single paradigm was adopted by the entire scientific establishment. Hence scholars in one field could always import heretical views from outside. But if everyone from musicologists to biologists uses the same Dataist paradigm, interdisciplinary excursions will serve only to strengthen the paradigm further. Consequently even if the paradigm is flawed, it would be extremely difficult to resist it.

- Yuval Noah Harari, The Data Religion in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

[lilibetts]

The E(X) Files

S1E01: Descent Into Eldervair

“Welcome to Eldervair Court, please enter your code now,” the pleasant, computerized female voice prompted. Betty groaned, because of course she had stopped the white Toyota Highlander too far away to reach the keypad. In her defense, this car was given to her by the Bureau as a part of her cover and she'd only been driving it since this afternoon. The thought of the mountains of paperwork she'd have to fill out if she so much as scratched its paint filled her with dread.

“Please enter your code now,” the recording prompted again. Was it her imagination or did the recording sound exasperated? Betty cracked the driver's side door open a fraction and leaned through the window to punch in the numbers she had memorized the night before.

“Please enter your co-- Welcome home, Mrs. Fletcher.”

“I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing that, do you, Snookums?” The sardonic male voice piped up from the passenger seat.  

Betty breathed through her nose, silently counting down from ten before she turned to glare at her pretend husband for the next few weeks. Agent Forsythe Pendleton Jones (“the third, unless you have a daddy or necrophilia kink”), aka Jughead, was partially slouched in the seat.  He no longer sported his ever-present crown beanie, though Betty wouldn't put it past him to have it stashed in a box somewhere. For someone who had his head covered most of the time, his hair looked criminally good.

And Betty had a right to complain- the humidity had made her hair wavy and frizzy. Inherit her mother's 'great hair' genes, she did not.

“Speak for yourself, Buttercup.”

Jughead wasn't Betty's usual partner, but Kevin was taking a well-deserved vacation. (His reaction, when he found out Jughead and Betty would be partners? “Oh dear god, there'll be no self-restraint there. None.”). Jughead didn't have a usual partner; he'd been heading up the X-Files division on his own in his tiny basement office.

She wasn't sure if she'd been partnered with Jughead because she was one of the few agents who didn't make fun of him, either behind his back or right to his face, or because her superiors were tired of her go-getter personality and quick close rate on cases.  Or they had decided 'who better to pretend to be husband and wife than two agents who used to be married to one other?'

Barely sparing a glance at her ex-husband fidgeting in his seat, Betty moved the gearshift back into 'Drive' and steered the vehicle through the now open gates.

Eldervair Court was a massive, walled community in upstate New York— built into a partially cleared section of Fox Forest. As they began to make their way down the winding drive, the multitude of trees gave attractive cover, but nearly blocked out the sky entirely. Given that the weather that day was overcast with gray skies, Betty was immediately unsettled by how isolated she already felt from the world beyond the walls.

The trees faded away just enough to reveal rather enormous but attractive red-brick houses, each on top of a sloping grass hill, with stone steps and pathway leading to the front door. Georgian architecture, Betty thought. Maybe revival, maybe original. Just how old was this community? They hadn't been able to figure out when Eldervair Court was incepted.

The houses were all completely identical; the lawns perfectly manicured with attractive rows of rose bushes. Not a single speck of what might be termed 'character' could be found. They looked, for lack of a better word, perfect.

It gave Betty war flashbacks to her own childhood.

“These aren't houses,” Jughead muttered, right leg jiggling anxiously as he stared out the window. “These are mini-mansions.”

Betty frowned, the surrealism getting to her. “Yeah, I wouldn't say it's all very Stepford Wives, but...”

“More David Lynch's Blue Velvet meets Tim Burton?”

“Something like that.”

As she turned into the driveway, Betty spotted an expertly coiffed redhead in a black sleeveless blouse and red palazzo trousers standing up on the porch with a ruby-red grin on her face. Clearly she was the welcoming committee.

“Showtime,” Betty muttered as she plastered on the smile she'd learned from Alice Smith Cooper.

“It's almost like meeting your mother all over again,” Jughead groused under his breath, eyes trained on the woman on their new porch. Betty didn't even dignify that with a glare.

As they exited the SUV, the moving truck with two other agents backed up into the space next to them. The weather here was still warm for late September, so Betty had dressed semi-casually according to a popular Fall Fashion Pinterest board and Jughead wore a nice pair of new black trousers and a blue sweater that did fantastic things for his eyes.

(She'd given him that sweater several Christmases ago.)

The redhead sauntered up to them on towering red stilettos. “Bonsoir, Fletchers!” She trilled. Now that they were closer, Betty could make out the shape of the woman's broach— it was a spider.

"'Will you walk into my parlour?' said the Spider to the Fly.

She was met at the top of the driveway by a petite pink-haired woman, this one dressed in all black and floral platform ankle boots. Once she struck the perfect couples pose, the redhead addressed Betty and Jughead: “Welcome to Eldervair Court, we're the Topaz-Blossoms and yes, we're domesticated lesbians.”

“Cheryl,” the pink-haired woman scolded lightly, the soft smile on her face telling Betty she was used to her wife's dramatics.

“Sorry TT, I didn't mean to engage in bisexual erasure. 'Domesticated lesbians' just has a better ring to it. Forgive me, mon amour?” Their noses rubbed together in an Eskimo kiss before Cheryl remembered her new neighbors existed. “As you can see, EC is a progressive, open-minded community, as long as you keep your lawn up to regulations!”

Sensing that Jughead was about to make a sarcastic comment, Betty beat him to the punch. “That's wonderful! I'm Juliet and this is my husband, Holden,” she introduced them, patting a hand on Jughead's chest to warn him to watch his mouth.

And also sell that they were definitely a married couple, not a pair of divorced FBI Agents. Nothing to see here, let's move on.

“I'm Toni,” Pink Hair said with a small wave. “Cheryl and I live two doors down, next to the Andrews'.”

Cheryl clapped her hands. “Now that we've dispensed with the niceties, since you two took your sweet time arriving, we're going to have to hurry if you're going to make the six o'clock cutoff.”

“Cutoff?” Jughead frowned. Glancing down at her phone, Betty saw it was 4:51.

“The six o'clock cutoff? All move-ins must be completed by 6 PM. It's in the R&Rs.” Cheryl intoned, as if that ought to have been obvious.

Toni at least had the grace to look regretful. “Yeah, you're really going to need to brush up on the Rules & Regulations. They're the price we pay to keep this community successful.”

“We'll definitely read it through carefully,” Betty promised. “It's just been so busy lately, what with the move and all...”

Cheryl had already whipped out her phone and her thumbs flew over the screen. “I've conscripted some of your new neighbors into helping with the unload. With my superior delegating skills, we'll have you moved in in no time at all!” With a flip of her hair over one shoulder, she was off, barking out orders at the people crossing the street towards them; Toni made a beeline for the moving van.

Betty and Jughead shared a look before they made their way to the front door. In front of the columns on either side of the porch sat two statues, their grotesque features seeming to leer at her. Gargoyles. They were gargoyles. A shiver made its way down her spine.  Keep it together, Betty, she told herself as she slid the key they'd been sent into the lock.

From the entryway, the view of the home was magnificent, there was no other word for it: high ceilings, paneled walling, and tall windows that let in plenty of light. There was a sweeping staircase and the hardwood floors looked to be dark maple and wide planked.  Jughead curled a proprietary arm around her back, resting his hand on her hip.

“Now, Lambchop, what do you think? Is this the place for us or what?”

They'd lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Queens, a paradise before Jughead's undercover gang assignment destroyed them from afar.

“It's right out of a dream, Bugaboo.”

Tap-tap-tap-tap. Shaking off her sudden melancholy, Betty turned at the sound of heels on hardwood on to face Cheryl's approach. “This place is downright immaculate,” she pretended to gush. “I would love to send the previous owners a Thank You note.”

Cheryl made a disinterested noise. “Whatever suits your sensibilities, Juliet dear. You can give it to me and I'll send it on to them,” she said with eyes downcast, pretending to study a scuff mark on the floor.

No, you certainly won't, Betty thought with a vicious stab of satisfaction at catching someone in a clear lie. Because Dilton Doiley was dead and his wife, Ethel, had gone missing.

A steady stream of people with boxes started coming through the open door. In the distance, Betty could see their undercover movers unloading the first of their carefully selected furniture. Now, there was a job: join the FBI and use your interior design degree to stage undercover agents' homes to help sell their cover.

“So,” Cheryl carefully enunciated. “What is it that you do?”

“Oh, I'm the social media manager for an event planning company in the city and Hols here is working on his third novel.” Betty beamed with pride at her pretend husband's achievements. Thanks to Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, it was disturbingly easy to backstop Holden Fletcher's novelist career in such a way that it was believable that the couple could afford to live in Eldervair Court.

The Bureau hired out-of-work English Majors and MFA degree-holders to do things like this, too.

Cheryl made another noise, clearly not impressed by what it is that they do.

That's when it got a bit weird. A redheaded man, who had been introduced to them as 'Archiekins' by his immaculate wife in pearls and a dark plum sheath dress, shouted out the time.

“5:40!”

The stream of neighbors turned into frenzied rapids. Before they knew it, all the boxes were inside, as well as the furniture, if not in the exact room they belonged. By 5:58, everyone was exiting the house with words of welcome and half-formed plans to have dinner tomorrow night.

“We'll leave you to it. Toodles, Neighbors!” And with that, Cheryl closed the door with a flourish behind her.

“Dear god,” Betty groaned, shoulders slumping.

“Yeah, nothing weird going on here at all,” muttered Jughead before he turned away from the front door. “Hold on, you didn't let me carry you over the threshold—“

Betty simply rolled her eyes and made her way toward the kitchen. They'd brought two coolers full of food to last them until they could go grocery shopping tomorrow. The Bureau had only intended to give them one, but Betty had renegotiated the second, knowing what kind of appetite Jughead had. She wanted to get the perishables into the fridge before it was too late.

She stopped short when she caught sight of the two items on the granite countertop. “Ju-” she caught herself in time. “Sweetie, come see what our neighbors left us!” she called out.

In less than two seconds she felt the heat of him at her back. “Well, wasn't that nice of them?”

Next to the enormous, spiral-bound binder that proclaimed 'Eldervair Court: Rules and Regulations' on the cover, was an ivory box with two detailed black-and-white creatures stenciled onto it. Inside the ornate red frame, written in Gothic lettering were the words:

Gryphons & Gargoyles

[butterfly-winx]

Zenith

- Do you know about Zenith? No? I mean you own a computer so you must. I hear the whole planet is covered in one large city.

- Zenith lives up to its name, as it is regarded to be the home to the height technological development in the Magic Universe. It houses the more universities, research institutes and engineering testing fields on its tiny surface than Magics and Earth combined.

- Though it is true that the planetoid is covered with a seemingly uniform cityscape, there are patches of untended ground peeking through, mainly the polar seas.  Antitheva and Bitheva may only classify as large lakes elsewhere, but they are perfectly fit for a small planet of Zenith’s size. They even help populations of merfolk at some point in time.

- The overwhelming amount of construction covering the planet’s surface has long become its vice. With no reflective surfaces left and with machinery forced to operate day and night to fuel the latest technological advancements, the whole planet has become a singular heat trap. The seas were boiling and the air was unbreathably hot. What got research going however was the failing performance of their heavy duty machinery, screws sweating and bending out of shape, lasers blinking tired and unfocused. They devised a plan to cool down the surface of the planet by releasing agents to shield them from the thermal effects of solar rays, and achieved the impossible. Zenith’s climate has since then settled on a comfortable average of 250 K.

- The seas froze over and the merpeople disappeared - or maybe they did already during the boiling phase, out of their luck living off already dead fish. Urban development was given final approval and the last patches of earth disappeared from sight, buried under the striving for more.

- Despite its  aforementioned properties, Zenith is no monolith and it would be amiss to describe it as such. Zeniths countries and cultures are diverse, only connected by their burning need for advancement and their fight against the cold. They have a spectrum of governance forms in the different countries ranging from democracy, constitutional monarchy to representative republic and in some cases even direct democracy of people. 

- As cities cover all of the planet, it is difficult to determine where individual settlements in a country begin and end. Country borders are the only demarcations, each government shielding itself with force fields, trenches or physical walls from imagined spies and malevolence.

- Techna’s home of Haikar is in a country that still tries to honour the memory of the separate settlements that have melded together. So Haikar is not a separate town as much as it is just a borough with its own town governance, and is considered to be the capital of Transjordan.

- Other Zenith country names with capitals where applicable: Tribilisi (Kandu), Gorgan, Nuzul (Xihat), Tbaku, Navyol, Urzghar

- Most of these countries don’t get along with each other too well. As is understandable, seeing as they are very culturally diverse. Each wants to be the best though and their most bitterly fought battles are usually over patent rights and the tenure of well-respected scientists. As banal as these reasons seem, as brutal are their methods of mutual sabotage to keep the leading edge. 

- Transjordan unfortunately is quite small and has many neighbours, so their paranoia and battle readiness is markedly large even on planet. Growing up, Techna went through disaster and terror awareness training regularly, to the point where they could probably recite what to do in case you found a car bomb better than they could explain a simple recipe.

- Oh and are recipes important! As clean edged people think the inhabitants of Transjordan are, there is nothing minimalist about their food choices. They love combining spices and textures and always serve feasts with generosity rivalling Eraklyon’s. Deserts usually have some sort of fruits, nuts AND some preserve in them, the combinations endless.

- While it is true that for the most part, cultures on Zenith value a simple approach to things. If it can be done in a few words, why waste a sentence on it? Bureaucracy is usually a two-click-formula affair, their whole lives are condensed on a sigle digital display ID, shopping comes to you at home. Hell even marriages are just an affair of simple form signing. 

- But food is where they really go full ham. It is not seen as frivolous to waste 10 eggs on a cake, because what you are doing creating nutrition and enjoyment. It is simply reasonable and efficient to go to the max when you do that and create an absolute delicacy you can gorge yourself on in one slice or less.

- So if they are so into feasting and enjoying things with purpose, what gives Zenithians such a bad name? Well, it is just that. People of Transjordan for example, like to enjoy things with purpose. They don’t really care much for music or theatre, they are just activities to air your brain out. They will import off-world made products, but there isn’t a lot of room for cultural arts on Zenith because they channel their passion elsewhere.

- Yes you heard right, Zenithinas have passion galore. They just, in the Universe's most efficient move, channel that passion into the work they already do. The majority of scientific discoveries have been made because somebody cared enough to look deep into a topic and push further, because previous answers were unsatisfactory. Children are coached to find something that inspires this level of devotion in them and have extensive education and support networks to get them there.

- On the topic of children: most of them aren’t the genetic descendants of their parents, rather a random selection from the common gene pool. The public gene pool is a hotly debated topic, but a long established structure of procreation that only the very wealthy have the option to contest. (There is a way to gain approval to sire an own baby from just the genes of two people, but it is extremely costly.) 

  In some research some time ago it was determined that for the optimal survival of people on the planet, genetic relation to the parents raising the child was not only suboptimal, but actively detrimental to overall population survival. In this “more civilised” approach, parents apply for a baby who is conceived and birthed in bioreactors. This way no people who can conceive are put through undue stress and the public gene pool babies also carry less hereditary health conditions. It is supposedly a win-win situation, yet it leaves a sour taste in most people’s mouth. No wonder less and less Zenithians plan families if that is the process they have to do it by.

- As straightforward as they are, Zenithians often struggle when communicating with people from other planets and not only because of arising cultural differences. Sure any Zenithian would blush and pale when forced into a situation dealing with overly expressive Solarians, but in any other regular case, the Universal Translation Spell is not on their side either. Jordan is a very logical and to the point language and the floralitiy of other languages is impossible to be transferred to it. The UTS instead produces blocky, difficult to parse translations that often leave Techna confused to the intentions of others.

- It is of course evident that the main industry of the planet is electronics production and R&D. Companies on Zenith produce all manners of gadgets, but they are best in creating refrigeration technology (ironic, right?), astronomic instruments, self-propulsion transportation (vehicles) and medical diagnostic tools and applications. The associated application programming industry is also booming with server houses the size of smaller cities. It is no surprise that Zenith’s electricity consumption is through the roof with such a vital sector to support.

- Before their trade for electricity with Solaria, Zenithian people used static electricity discharges to harvest energy. Their planet being covered with one gigantic city didn’t leave much space for utilising the natural resources of their planet. All the mineral ore having been exhausted, no major flowing waters left and stranded with miserable and cold weather the options for energy sources were limited. What they had however was tall buildings and thunderstorms, so they used lightning harvesters for ages. 

- With the storm and snow clouds obscuring the sky most days, Zenith is quite dark. The cities illuminate themselves, kind of like year round festive ornamentation. 

- Spirituality is an interesting topic on planet that everyone you ask will have a different answer for. Major parts of Tribilisi and Urzghar for example believe in machine assisted immortality. They see machines as superior to biological matter and work towards the unfallability and omniscience of artificial intelligence in which part of their conscience will be able to rest after death. The predominant belief in Transjordan that Techna grew up with is that after death, there is nothing. Based on the theory of energy conservation, what one doesn’t use and convert into heat will be redistributed into the rest of the world. It is selfish to think one could hold on to any energy after death.

- Most people also don’t care for magic. Sure some magic users crop up among them here and there, but they most likely remain untrained. This is why Techna chose a school off planet to pursue their passion and why they weren’t claimed as a Guardian fairy of Zenith after they graduated. (Since this position doesn’t exist.)

- Almost all things on the planet are solved non-magically accordingly. Their transport systems are unparalleled with some regions using small-distance whole structure replication, aka honest to god matter teleportation. The frozen over seas are also fully utilised with air cushion containerships cruising the flat expanse. Along a certain longitude Zenith also sports a unique feature: the longitudinal crust train. A four meter wide segment of the planet, as if cut out of the surrounding cityscape, moves on straight rails around the whole circumference of the planet. It is the fastest mode of civilian transport available.

- They need all the good transportation and radio transmission they can get - by the way, the Universe Wide Web is also a Zenithian invention, who would have thought - as with their living space limited, Zenithian countries have spilled over onto nearby moons, essentially colonising and terraforming those.

- So, you see, Zenith and either of its countries aren’t by far as boring as one might think on the first glance and most of them certainly don’t shy back from showing emotion.