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softschofield · 4 years ago

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(1/2) do you have any headcannons for baumer? I don't know a lot about ww1 but I really want to imagine scenario where this german baby gets to live! Do you think he'll thrive (assuming he survived getting strangled by scho) if by chance he had the unfortunately luck of meeting the brits and getting caught? I love your account btw, reading all your 1917 posts is fuel for my soul

hello my love!!!! i haven’t been active in waaaay too long but thank you so much for your gorgeous ask, you’re such a sweetheart ♡♡

so! i’ve posted a few short tidbits about canon era bäumer (and kilgour) headcanons before and after the war - here, here, here, and here - but i’ve never really gone in depth about what i think his life was like, and what it could have been if he’d lived. hold on, lemme get back into 1917 mode, it’s schofield playlist time

so, first, let’s focus on the part of your ask that deals with being caught by the british. there’s an excellent web article about german POWs (prisoners of war) that you can flick through here, but what it all boils down to is a few key points: it’s thought that survival rates of german prisoners in british camps could have been as high as 97%; there are numerous accounts of works of art, literature, and music being produced in those camps; after the signing of the armistice, the british helped to repatriate its prisoners, while those being held by russia were forced to find they own way back home; and beginning in 1917, german POWs were no longer sent to britain and used for labour because of opposition from trade unions (or they started to be used in britain in 1917? i have two sources contradicting each other), but they were still used in france and north africa on the battlefields.

but though those POWs from 1917 onwards may not have had to face vitriol and mistreatment from the british at home, they had to contend with the horror of life at the front. it was considered the worst place to be a prisoner. france, for instance, had german POWs work under shellfire for months on the verdun battlefield, aka “the mincing machine”, in 1916. understandably, combat-related deaths were common - minus any actual combat. because they were enemy soldiers, because there were little to no tangible consequences, and because they needed the manpower, it didn’t matter if these POWs suffered, lived, or died. i don’t have any sources to cite for this theory, but i expect germans were sent to do tasks the BEF would hesitate to ask their own soldiers to do - simply because if there was any cognitive dissonance still sticking in the generals’ craw about sending their own boys into a slaughter, they would have no such qualms about using german boys.

at that time, the rules for treatment of prisoners of war were stipulated in the “convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land”, part of the hague convention, which was signed on october 18, 1907. chapter ii, article 4 stated that “prisoners must be humanely treated”, and this meant ensuring that there was no abuse or forced labor in any of the camps. of course, because we know how desperate each party became in the war, and because we know human nature, this didn’t happen.

Prisoner labour was key to the war effort of many states. Overall by 1916, across Europe most non-officer prisoners of war, whom it was legal for the captor to put to work under international law, were working, some returning to the prisoner of war camp at night, others lodged under guard near to their place of work. For those housed outside the camp conditions could vary considerably. While prisoner of war camps were inspected during the war by the Red Cross, working units outside the camp were rarely inspected. The worst camps, however, were those run by armies near the front line. By 1916, the British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies were all keeping permanent units of prisoners as forced labourers for the army at or near the front. These men had to work under shellfire and live in desolate, unhygienic conditions. (x)

so, basically, let’s hope bäumer wouldn’t have gotten captured had he survived!

now, let’s move onto two other possibilities: one, that he fled écoust with müller, found his way to the hindenburg and reunited with his battalion, and endured the rest of the war; two, that he deserted. i’ve already said that i think he and müller had deserted and were in hiding in écoust, so i like that theory the best - and i think it makes for the best story.

so basically, i like to think bäumer took scho and the death of his friend in the lockhouse as signs from god that it was enough, that this place was death, that he had to get out. the english had discovered the hindenburg line and they would be descending upon this part of france any day - they’d already hid in the rubble of the buildings and watched the convoy shuffle past earlier that day.

so, with bruises blooming round his throat, he embarks on a journey across france, trying to find his way back to germany through raging battles, across no man’s lands, through abandoned trenches and half-collapsed bunkers, skirting around villages he can hear german drifting from and skirting further yet around villages he hears english singing in, discarding his uniform for a dead farmer’s trousers and shirt he finds in a shelled farmhouse. it becomes a parallel journey to scho’s, though much, much longer. it takes him three weeks, though time stops having any meaning long before that.

somewhere along the way, müller is killed. now alone, too afraid to sleep unless there’s something behind his back, numb and flinching at every little sound, slipping into unconsciousness against his will because his body is so broken and exhausted and yelping out in terror every time he realises he’s closed his eyes, bäumer continues on. he knows a few scraps of childhood french and mumbles his way through that on the few occasions he runs into german or english soldiers, head bowed and eyes down, the elbows of his sleeves in tatters, flinching in silence when the germans spit on this bare-footed french farm boy and laugh. the rest of the time, he doesn’t speak. he doesn’t dare accept kindnesses or pity from anyone. he becomes a bitter wraith trudging along a war-torn country in the vague direction of home.

and then, finally, he makes it home. in my mind, bäumer comes from osnabrück, purely because that’s where erich maria remarque was from and, in my mind, bäumer in all quiet on the western front is our boy’s cousin ♡ so he comes back to his mother, to his ivy-covered childhood home with his neat little bedroom on the second floor and the creaking stairs and the kitchen that smells like potato cakes. dirty and bruised, the villagers don’t recognise him - the villagers who babysat him as a child, who let him help bake cakes and pick apples from the orchard behind the church, who cooed at him adoringly when he played the organ at a christmas service when he was ten and cried when he fumbled a key. they watch him distrustingly and sneer about him behind their hands.

his mother, dull-eyed and skinner than he’s ever seen her, comes home from collecting her weekly rations, the rations she’s always sent more than she can afford to give away to him, to find him with a steaming cup of tea in the kitchen. she cries and shouts and pulls him to her, and he lets her hold him and doesn’t notice there’s tears on his cheeks through all his numbness; and for the rest of the war, they keep his presence a secret. a deserter, a coward, a traitor - someone, a childhood teacher or a neighbour or the grieving mother of a dead boy who deserved to come home more than he did, would have turned him in and they both know what would have happened to him then.

and so, for a year and a half, he stays in the house during the day, and wanders the fields and woods at night, and reads and reads and doesn’t take in a single word. sometimes he’ll wake up and it’ll be the engländer’s hands round his throat and flares in the sky. sometimes he’ll wake up and it’ll be the gurgle in müller’s chest. sometimes he’ll drift asleep in a meadow and wake up thinking he still has miles to go before he reaches home. sometimes there really is shellfire in the distance - shellfire falling upon boys braver than him, falling upon the boys who stayed, the boys still screaming in the trenches and in the mud. slowly, the bitterness turns to self-loathing. he snaps at his mother and meets the eyes of villagers like he’s daring them to recognise him, to call him all the names he calls himself. he loses himself.

he stays awake at night, alone in his room, imagining his discarded uniform being driven by the rain into the mud, imagining all the things that would happen if he went back to his battalion. his mother has to stop him at the front door, kicking and thrashing and screaming and finally sobbing, when he convinces himself he needs to go back. she lets him hit her as she holds him, and eventually he hugs her back and weeps.

in late 1918, with the armistice looming, the news comes that his cousin has been killed.

and eventually he somehow meets kilgour and ends up with him in england and they settle down in a little countryside cottage, and heal, and live happily ever after, and every year he goes back and visits his mother and she’s happy too and they have a wonderful relationship and i love them. kilgour slowly learns how to process his trauma in a way that isn’t just putting on a smile and making himself believe it’s real, and bäumer lets go of his bitterness and regains his softness and eventually his heart feels quiet and gentle again and he can read like he used to, and they’re happy ♡

#anon #re the first part: as always it's incredibly frustrating trying to find information about the german perspective in ww1 #at least just at a cursory glance - so i did my best ♡♡#1917 #mine #ilysm anon!!!! i went off on a complete ramble but thank you for getting me back in the 1917 headspace you angel!!!!!#♡#i'd just like to add a little disclaimer that i do think bäumer died in écoust and so i only think he ends up with kilgour in modern aus #but for the sake of this ask i LOVED exploring another possibility :')#asks #and disclaimer number 2 just because i hate the way women are always excluded from discussions about war: there WERE female POWs xx

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dimancheetoile · 5 years ago

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of stardust and galaxies

Written for @shikasaku-week Hanami 2020 Day 2 Prompt 1: of stardust and galaxies

Read on AO3

I had an absolute blast writing this, you have no idea. This story is set before another that will also be posted for ShikaSaku Week.

Yes I did re-use the parents I invented for Sakura in Withered Flowers but they're really not important enough in this story to warrant me spending time researching names for them.

Please tell me what you thought about this one, I'm truly interested given how much I like it!

•

The war went on for much longer than anyone could have ever anticipated. The losses were massive, in scale of destruction and in numbers. After a particularly violent attack from Madara, Konoha was simply razed off the map. Entirely and thoroughly destroyed, until not even the foundations of the buildings remained.

The scope of the fire jutsu Madara used went far deeper than simply destroying the entire history of their village and every single memory kept in those narrow streets and green parks. His black fire, raging and wild, scorched the earth deep into its own core. They tried to rebuild, for a while. Tenzō's mokuton had been vital to the reconstruction effort, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn't worth the chakra exhaustion. Nothing would grow on the cracked earth left behind by Madara's madness.

Driven out of their own homeland by starvation, Konoha's remaining population began its exodus.

Having lost most of the people who used to lead Konoha no Sato, and a good chunk of the people who would have been considered successors to those leaders, the citizens were aimless for days as they regrouped and gathered the very few items they had remade for their new homes that they were going to abandon one more time.

In the end, things settled in the way things always settle after a disaster. Desperation and urgency bred to create exceptional circumstances and someone who wanted nothing to do with power ended up with way too much of it on their hands for their taste.

Haruno Sakura was born to civilian parents in the Farmers' Guild, who only had one expectation for their daughter, which was to marry a nice civilian who owned a reasonable business or worked a reasonable job and live a reasonable life together until they died at a reasonable age only a reasonable amount of years apart.

Unfortunately for Haruno Hashiru and Uzumaki Noroshi, they would both lose their life in a raid of their small property in the farm lands around the village. Having no living relatives and her inheritance barely paying for the funeral arrangements and handling of their property, Sakura was put in the orphanage, and that was that.

Sakura grew up in one of the worst orphanages of the Five Nations, surrounded by children who suffer just as must as you and whose bitterness and malice is proportionate to how poorly they're, in turn, treated by the people supposed to care for them. You don't grow up in that kind of environment and have huge expectations for your life.

Had Sakura not met a clan heiress and her clan heirs friends when she was at a turning point in her life, she would have remained a low-life, desperate kid who would have grown up on the streets of a village that never had the emotional capacity to care for its civilian population, given that it was born out of the desperate attempt at peace of two historically warring clans that treated its own, very rare civilians like cannon fodder.

She would have grown up starved and angry, desperate to put food in her plate day by day. She would have begun selling her body at the age of twelve, to the highest bidder willing to pay for her virginity, and the money from that sale only would have put food on the table for three months, in the underground squat where she would have lived with a few other street urchins, leftovers from a government feasting on its weakest population.

(in another life, she would have kept her eyes shut, round, childish face crushed against the pillow and thankful that she didn't have to look into the beady eyes of the man paying for the last shreds of her hopeful innocence, his white mane moving in rhythm to the thrusting of his hips. She would have thrown a shaking hand forward when he was done, feeling cold and clammy inside, numbly wondering that he kinda looked like a frog, from this angle, then closed her fist around the money before leaving in a rush. In another life, the man would have pulled his loose pants back up under his yukata, feeling good about himself because he just gave a girl enough money to feed herself for a few months. In another life, it never would have crossed his mind that he could have simply given her the money and offered her a shoulder to cry on)

(in another life... right?)

She would have eventually joined a gang, on her knees as often as she would slit throats in back alleys, and a few days before her seventeenth birthday, she would have bled out in the backroom of an unregistered club, throat torn open by a masked figure in a grey uniform the gang members knew too well. As her life would have slowly poured out of her, she would have looked at the back of the ANBU that just killed her and was giving a highfive to the one standing closest, and she would have died with a smile on her lips because the figure smelled like the ramen from Ichiraku that she had never gotten to taste, too expensive for her and her crew.

But Sakura met three clan heirs and after living for ten years in the orphanage, she had been taken in by the Akimichi Clan, when the three friends had taken one look at her shared bunk, on the third day of knowing each others, and had unanimously decided that this would not do and their new friend needed a better place to live.

(Ino had stomped her feet and Shikamaru had pleaded and Chōji had cried a little and eventually, Chōza had caved in and took in the girl. None of the three sets of parents had told their children that their actions didn't solve the problem. None of the three sets of parents asked their heirs why they didn't insist on bringing back every single child from the orphanage, or asked them what they thought would happen to the other children who hadn't made friends with clan heirs. None of them asked anything, because as kind as they are with their own children, willing to give in to their whim of playing heroes for an orphan, they ultimately don't care enough to change a system that benefits them first)

Sakura grows up learning two very important lessons: no one cares about the civilians, and she'll never be in control of her own destiny.

So she's not surprised a single bit when, as the last surviving member of the inner circle around the executive powers of Konoha, she's eventually pushed to the top under the guise of “honoring the deceased” and “giving her the position she deserves for her heroic actions in the war” and named Nanadaime Hokage.

That night, as the slow caravan of Konoha survivors comes to a stop for supper and rest, Sakura crawls into her tent and cries herself to sleep.

A few days later, they finally reach Kiri and Sakura negotiates asylum with the Mizukage. In those few days, she's named herself a cabinet made of the last remaining experts amongst Konoha's sparse population. There aren't enough people in that cabinet for her liking but she can't afford to be picky, so she brings all three of them into the negotiations and they come out with the least worst deal they can hope for, one that is still considerably better than anything they would have managed before the days of the Alliance and better than anything Sakura could have come up with on her own.

The Konoha survivors are put in the deserted district where people who died in the Mist coup used to live in. It's a bit cramped, but they can't afford to complain, so they adapt. At least they have a roof over their head and enough food to feed everyone. Kiri was just as affected by the war as the other nations, though the village itself didn't suffer much in its infrastructure. But they're lacking the numbers lost on the battlefield, and that's where the Fire citizens come in.

People just fill in the gaps left by the war, integrating seamlessly into Wave's economy. They're not naturalized, keeping their Fire citizenship and Sakura remaining their leader. The way it works is that the workers build a wall to close the district off, with a big gate that remains, more often than not, open. Sakura lives in an old administration building, having transformed the top floor offices into a few bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, two empty rooms waiting to be converted to a kotatsu room and a shrine.

On the ground floor, she has meeting with her advisors, she does hearing for her people and she forges the basis of what promises to be the Fire-Mist treaty, a cooperation and integration policy that would make Konoha's survivors into what amounts to a foster village of Kiri. If this thing comes to pass, they would essentially be a separate state-entity, with its own laws and government, but with privileged relations with Kiri in terms of right of passage, trade, taxes, imports and exports, as well as an equal share of the land.

An equally beneficial treaty, then, but a text of law that still takes a long time to redact and hammer into shape to be certain that no one is getting screwed over by poor wording. The main thing that her village-within-a-village brings to the table is the proposition of an Academy of Medicine and a House of Health.

In short, Sakura would open what amounts to a carbon-copy of Konoha's Academy, training kids to become genin. From that point on, the children would get two options: either continue on the path of becoming a shinobi of Kirigakure, or join the Academy of Medicine and train as a medic-nin. All children of the village would go through the first part of the training, not only Konoha kids, and would receive complimentary medic training so that every genin, even if they don't go on to become medic-nin, have a solid understanding of chakra control and healing, in hopes of reducing field-losses.

The House of Health would be civilian medics, in every specialty, all in one place for convenience. Classes would be provided for Kiri citizens to learn first-aid or more in-depth knowledge. It would double as relief for the overcrowded Kiri hospital, taking in all non-threatening cases so that the hospital could focus entirely on its surgery division and two research labs, as well as the paediatric wing.

The House of Health would have a sub-division for monitoring pregnancies and offering a more casual environment for labour, with a few empty houses around the House, fully furnished and waiting for the soon-to-be parents. They would spend the entirety of the labour in the comfort of the provided home, going at their own pace and being on their own or with their family. And if anything goes wrong, there would be an entire House of professionals right next to the houses to give a hand when needed.

Those propositions are basically what sold the treaty to the Mizukage, despite a few clauses that she was a bit iffy on, but agreed to in the end because the prospect of a fully-functional, advanced medical system and healthcare administration, alongside trained professionals under the tutelage of the greatest medic in the world is one of those things you don't say no to, under any circumstances.

So the treaty is signed, the old Kiri Academy building is remodelled to host the new courses and the House of Health is built right next to the Konoha district. Happy endings, right?

It's another morning, another day of working a job she frankly wants no part in and that she only performs to the best of her abilities because she's aware of the weight of the enormous responsibility placed on her shoulders. You know. A typical morning.

There is a rasp on the door, barely a knock before the bamboo panel slides open. It's not meant for privacy anyway, simply there to protect the inside of the house against Kiri's weather. Sakura looks up from her paperwork, vaguely surprised to see Shikamaru standing there. Vaguely, because he's still her Councillor and they have a lot of private meetings without the rest of her advisors, and because she's way too exhausted to question anything more deeply than with mild curiosity and vague surprise.

“Hey, Shikamaru. What's the new disaster?”

Half-fallen over her desk, legs starting to sore from the extended kneeling, it takes her a moment to realize he's not moving, and he's not answering. She looks up, frowning, but what she sees on his face is enough to have her up and right in his space, taking one of his hands.

With Ino and Chōji, Shikamaru is amongst the three people she's known the longest in her life. Only her parents beat that record, and they're dead, so the three clan heirs are probably the people she knows the best as well. Living with Chōji might have made her slightly more attuned to his emotions, but the difference is inconsequential. So she knows for certain that something is wrong.

“Shikamaru?”

His lips are pressed into a thin line, his eyebrows furrowed. He's not looking her in the eye, instead looking down at their feet, still quiet. She dares a hand forward, brushing against the side of his arm before retracting, a small comfort for both of them, she hopes.

“I need your help,” he finally says through gritted teeth. With that, it seems like all the tension is drained from his body, and he looks more defeated than anything.

“You have it, always,” she answers, trying for a soothing voice but knowing her own anxiety at this weird situation is slipping through the cracks. Shikamaru has always been the stable one, the rock, and she knows, as sure as the sun rise and sets, that if he crumbles, he'll be taking her, and the entirety of Konoha with him.

He scoffs at her answer. “I never wanted you to know this. This is mine and I don't want you to know.”

She flinches a little, surprising herself by how much that hurts. For one second, Shikamaru catches it, and guilt joins the frustration and anxious expression on his face.

“I'm guessing you don't have a choice,” she says softly.

“I really, really don't.” He sighs, a sad, depressing little noise that Sakura feels all the way inside her bones. “I need you to- I need a surgery.”

Sakura's eyebrows rise in disbelief. “You... need me to operate on you? Why? What's going on? You know I can't just perform surgery on you based on your words, I need to do, at the very least, a physical exams, and maybe a few scans depending on where the problem lies.”

Shikamaru's smile is feral, self-deprecating, and she hates it so much. “Oh, trust me, you won't need to do scans.”

Sakura sighs, leaning against the way with a leg propped up.

“Would you consent to a physical exam right now? We can go to the House.”

Shikamaru shakes his head. “I don't want anyone to know there's something wrong with me. You don't need an exam room to see the problem anyway.”

She bites her lip in consideration, then nods seemingly to herself. “Alright, follow me then. We'll go to my place.”

The tension seems to bleed out of Shikamaru's shoulder and he accepts easily. Sakura leads them out of her office and into the corridor that leads to a staircase. After climbing it, Sakura slides the door panel open and walks into the part of the building that serves as her home.

Shikamaru follows her without a word until they reach one of her unoccupied bedrooms. Or that's what it used to be anyway. Shikamaru raises an eyebrow, looking at her questioningly. She gives him an awkward smile, gesturing at the miniaturized operation room and the drawers upon drawers of medical equipment.

“Look, you have no idea how many people just barge in through my window after a mission, Mist and Fire alike, just because they don't feel safe going to the hospital. Post-mission paranoia is real enough that I'm willing to indulge them, and I refuse to let a disaster happen at the hospital just because I want my beauty sleep.”

He nods, the reasoning sensible enough. It's not like she needs the four bedrooms anyway, given that she lives alone.

(silently, he wonders about that, why she's never dating, why she's never showing signs of being interested by anyone. He wonders how anyone can work as much as she does and not want to come home to someone who wants to take care of you. Dating, post-war, is awkward. No one wants to actively seek out partners, because everyone is just a little too depressed to be able to make the efforts required to have a healthy, communicative relationship. But on the other hand, a good bunch of them are getting desperate. He can't really talk, he's single too, but at least he's dated before, civilians and shinobi alike, and he knows how important it can be not to be alone)

(she's always been alone)

“Well, we're alone and I've got everything I need. Do you want to tell me what's going on, now?”

The knot is back in his stomach, and Sakura looks like she knows exactly how little he wants to talk about this. Not that any of her patients is ever easy, unless they're civilians, but she doesn't tell him that, because she wants him to trust her sometimes this year and not worsen the situation.

Eventually, Shikamaru sighs, and begins to unhook the clasps of his flack jacket. Sakura nods, satisfied, and brings the tray with her basic equipment closer. She already has her stethoscope around her neck and the monitor for his blood pressure, when he takes his shirt off, and really, she has to put down everything now, doesn't she, because it's obvious what's going on.

Shikamaru self-consciously crosses his arms in front of his chest, but it's not enough to cover the two scars running across his upper torso.

She sighs, dropping the monitor back on the tray, and looks at him, head slightly tilted.

“Does anyone else know?” she asks, more to get him to talk than because she needs to know. She has to get him to relax, to trust her with this.

“My parents, obviously. Ino's and Chōji's parents too. And the surgeon who did this, he was one of the first to openly do those surgeries, so my parents brought me all the way to Kumo to see him. He's- like me.”

“Thank you for sharing this with me, Shikamaru. It does me great honor to know you find me worthy of who you are.”

“I- Sakura, I need to know if... will you see me differently now?”

She's never seen him like this, so uncertain, so out of place. He's so confident and calm, such a driving force for their people. She hates to see him like this. Sakura offers her hand, in the space between them, and Shikamaru uncrosses his arms to take it without even pausing. She smiles softly, touched.

“Do you see me differently for my own scars, Shika?” With her free hand, she bunches her shirt up to show her midsection and the seven, thumb-long scars scattered on her skin. “Sasori skewered me like dango on a stick. His spikes were thorough and touched all of my lower organs. I have a fake portion of small intestine and I'll never be able to have a child. Do you see me differently, knowing my scars?” she asks again.

He's looking at her with wide eyes and a deep, bleak sorrow that they all learned from the war, when grief and tears could put you in danger and you needed to get over things quickly on the outside, only to break down on the inside later.

“I'm sorry,” he says quietly.

She shrugs. “I'm not. I killed an akatsuki member, someone who would have kept hurting people again and again, and both Gaara and Kankuro survived because I was a part of this mission. I won't ever regret losing a few pieces of meat if someone's life is on the line.”

She squeezes his hand, a small smile on her face.

“So, about that surgery. Were you asking about a cosmetic procedure, to make all the scarring disappear? Or were you thinking about bottom surgery?”

Shikamaru frowns, and she can see the cool, confident guy coming back little by little, putting a happy smile on her face. “I didn't know you could do something for the scarring. In that case, both I suppose.”

“Why come now? Why not before the war, or right after? Did something change?” She hates to ask personal questions when he already seems so uneasy, but she can't agree to anything without all the facts.

“Before the war, the surgeon we went to used to send me parcels with shots and creams. He stopped, I don't know if it's because of shortage, or not knowing where to send it, or-” Or maybe he's dead, she thinks but doesn't say. “I ran out of shots two months ago and I was fine for a while, but I- it came back,” he says awkwardly, a plea in his eyes for her to understand without him having to say it. She nods quickly, refusing to let him worry. “I can't live like this. I'm miserable, Sakura.”

To hear those words, from the kind of man Shikamaru is, is heartbreaking. He deserves nothing less than happiness and fulfillment, after everything he went through being the youngest chūnin, then the youngest jōnin, then a War Councillor. Someone as calm and reliable and smart as Shikamaru shouldn't be miserable. Not on my watch. Maybe being Hokage will finally do her some good, if it means she gets to help him feel good again.

Sakura nods, weighting her words carefully before speaking. “Well, the scarring I can take care of right now, it's quick and painless. However, for your surgery, I need to know what result you want. Size, shape, do you want to be able to have biological children, all of that.”

He doesn't try to hide his relief when she doesn't push or try to have him talk more about his mental health. Not that I won't later, she thinks, but she can cut him so slack right now, given hos vulnerable he must feel.

Shikamaru is silent for a long time, eyes downward on his hand in hers, looking deep in thought. She wraps her other hand around his, pressing gently to show her support.

“I have a feeling you're exponentially more competent than the man I saw when I was younger. He only had one option for me, and a pretty scary one. But I'd like to reduce the scarring now, yes. I haven't taken my shirt off in public my entire life.”

Sakura smirks, dirty and unashamed. “Oh trust me, it was for the best. You have no idea the talk I've heard in the onsen about the comparison some of the kunoichi and jōnin make. I think a good portion of them is keeping a tally and you staying as cool as a cucumber whenever they try to get in your pants is making you the grand prize of their little competition.”

He grins, a small blush on his face that Sakura doesn't comment on. “I'm not Sasuke or Naruto, I don't have an urge to flash everyone when I'm fighting bad guys.”

Sakura bursts out laughing, the joke so unexpected it releases all the tension she hadn't noticed was left in the room. It's the first time she laughed thinking about them ever since the war, and being suddenly the last living member of a cursed team. Feeling almost giddy with being able to laugh again, she raises their joined hands and kisses his knuckles. He looks at her with wide eyes, his blush even more noticeable now.

“Right, options,” she says, wiping a tear. “Lay down for me, will you? I'll start working while I explain.”

He obeys, laying down on the examination table while her hands light up in green. She gets closer, bending slightly over him to have better access, then her palms slowly swipe over his chest, her chakra coaxing his cells into duplicating faster and cloning the genetic makeup of the older, original cells around the scars. Slowly, the two raises lines begin to smooth and loose their color.

“So there's an invasive procedure, and even more invasive procedure.” Shikamaru snorts in nervous laughter and she gives him a wry smile. “The first one involves using the unneeded tissue from what's already there and constructing a penis using what your body knows to be his. With implants, you'll get testicles, and connecting nerves will give you sensation. You will be able to get a full erection, but because I'm only using pre-existing tissues, your result will remain small compared to the average.”

She can see that he's listening intensely, but his blush has crept onto his neck despite her using very clinical language. She finds it absolutely adorable but she doesn't fancy being choked to death by her own shadow so she doesn't mention it. She doesn't say it either, but she's so proud of him it warms her up from the inside.

“The more invasive surgery starts with me collecting sample from you to be grown in lab so I can get enough skin and nerves and muscle made of your genetic makeup to basically construct a penis of the size and shape of your choice. Once attached, just like the other option, it'll be fully functional, sensitive and responsive. Now in both cases, you'll have a choice between implants to give your testicles the appropriate shape, or they can also be grown in lab and I can use your eggs to synthesize sperm glands and make you fertile.”

Sakura leans back, her hands loosing their green tint. Shikamaru sits up, staring down at his chest with wide eyes, tracing with his fingers the smooth skin where his scars used to be and where nothing is left now but an absolutely normal chest.

“Now bear in mind that I've only theoretically managed a successful transplant to make someone fertile, but I was doing the opposite procedure on a woman. When you break it down, it's exactly the same process and I've synthesized it all before, but I've never done it on a man, simply because I was never asked to. I'm certain I can pull it off, but you know, warnings and all thaaa-wow!”

Sakura can't stop the shriek of surprise when Shikamaru draws her in for the strongest hug of her life. She flails for a moment before she manages to wrap her pinned arms around his waist, his own circling her shoulder and crushing her against his bare chest. Shikamaru hides his face in her neck, and she stops the words that were about to leave her mouth when she feels the first tear drop into her neck and roll down her chest.

He's crying silently, face scrunched up enough that she can feel it against her skin. She caresses his back, drawing patterns over his warm skin, and she hums gently, rocking them together to the rhythm of a song she can barely remember.

“Thank you,” he manages, his lips moving against the fragile skin of her neck.

“Always, Shikamaru. I promise.”

She doesn't move any more than her rocking his large, warm body, waiting for the storm to pass, for the clouds to part enough that they can see the stars. Finally, he releases her, rubbing harshly on his skin until she gives him a tissue. His eyes are red and puffy and his cheeks rubbed raw, but he's he most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

“I'll take the second option,” he finally says, clearing his throat when his voice cracks. “Including the fertility package. Do you do a price for family?” The joke is weak but he's trying and she's so proud she might just choke on it so she laughs and she draws him into a side hug, his head resting on her shoulder.

“Put some clothes on, exhibitionist. Let's get out of here and we'll talk more about this later, yeah?”

He nods silently and complies, following her out of the house and into the streets of Kiri. Time passed quickly and it's already well into the night. Without saying a word, Shikamaru takes her hand and laces their fingers together. She gives him a smile, shaking with excitement and giddy with the novelty of simply walking hand in hand with someone. The people of the Konoha District give them long looks, but their eyes are kind and their smiles wide, happy to see their leader finally take something for herself.

Kiri's night sky is beautiful, so different from the one in Konoha, often hidden in clouds. Here, they can see every single star winking at them from their shimmering clusters, count the constellations drawing patterns into the darkness of the void, watch galaxies form and die as they live day by day in their new normal.

“Hey, Sakura?”

She hums in response, looking away from the beautiful canvas of the sky. He's looking at her like she's personally responsible for every star shining above them, and her heart picks up.

“Can I take you out to dinner?”

She breathes in the joy, grins wide. “Of course you can.”

He blushes again, and it's her new favorite thing, she could watch him for hours. She's so happy and humbled that he trusted her with himself like that.

“On one condition, though.”

He does his best to hide his nervousness when he answers, “What is it?”

“Money upfront for the surgery, Nara. I want a kiss before the fourth date.”

He giggles, high and pretty, and even he seems surprised by it. “You've got yourself a deal, Hokage-sama.”

#shikasakuweek #shikasakuhanami #shikasaku #shikasakuhanami2020 #naruto #my writing

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ofmarcos · 6 years ago

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( shawn mendes, cismale, he/him ) i just saw MARCO SPIEGELMAN walking down the street’s of provincetown the other day playing 100 BAD DAYS BY AJR out loud. rumor has it that the TWENTY TWO year old is WARMHEARTED, but can also be UNNECESSARILY OVERWROUGHT — overall they’re a POLYMATH. they remind me of A WORN GUITAR NECK WITH OLD STRINGS, COMING HOME THREE MINUTES BEFORE CURFEW, A CRACKLING WOODFIRE, AND FRESHLY BLOWN OUT BIRTHDAY CANDLES. ( ophelia, 19, est, they/she )

hello guys, gals, and non-binary pals, my name is ophelia and it’s lovely to meet u all!! i am nineteen, living in florida, work at an escape game, and my t key on my laptop gets stuck so um if u ever see me leave a t out of a word that’s why. also, fun fact!! i’m originally from a small town in ma about a two hour drive from provincetown :O but enough about me !! this is marco, he’s an actual meme, and you can read all about him under the cut. like this and i’ll come slide into ur dms for plots. <3

(also this got way longer than anticipated, i’m sorry, pls love me)

PINTEREST.

tw: cancer, death, car crash, addiction

marco joshua spiegelman was born on an overcast august day in the city of boston, massachusetts. he was the fourth child and the youngest by seven years, meaning that in some way, he was his parents’ last hope.

the spiegelman family practiced orthodox judaism – his dad was raised orthodox and his mom converted from reform judaism in order to marry his dad– so marco’s childhood was very much focused on religion. the spiegelman family went to services every friday night, celebrated every holiday, forced marco to wake up early on sundays to go to hebrew school, and treated him they same as they had treated his older siblings. however, as his siblings grew up and moved out, they all stopped devoutly practicing judaism and moved into a more modern and laid back interpretation of their religion. marco craved this from a young age, but because he was stuck at home with his parents, he was forced to follow their rules and beliefs.

marco went to jewish private school for elementary and middle school, had his bar mitzvah in the seventh grade, and tried to blend in as best as he could. he liked history and english, eager to learn more about the past and help shape the future. at this point in his life, he had his goal of becoming a politician pretty much set. he would help the end the fighting in israel, solve world hunger, and just be an all around awesome guy.

however, his plans shifted on valentine’s day his eighth grade year. after coming home from school, his parents sat him down and told him that his dad had stage four exocrine pancreatic cancer. he knew that his dad had been losing weight and not eating as much recently, as well as complained all the time that his back hurt, but marco didn’t realize that it was something so terrible and life threatening.

with a survival rate of about one percent, the spiegelman family knew that his dad’s chances of survival were not good. the next few months were difficult, his dad went through lots of chemotherapy and experimental trials, but nothing seemed to be working, and he passed away before june. this crushed marco and his mom; his dad was a kind, gentle, and loving person, and the three of them had grown extremely close with each other due to marco being the youngest and the only child still living in the house.

it was hard for the two of them to live by themselves in a town that his mom didn’t really have any connection to, so a few months after his dad’s passing, marco and his mom moved to provincetown, the place where she had grown up, to try and start fresh. their new beginning came coupled with the loss of their connection to their religion, and marco and his mom no longer practiced judaism

freshman year in a brand new town was intimidating for marco, and this resulted in him being extremely quiet and shy for the majority of the year. however, his history teacher saw how invested in history and current events he was and convinced marco to join the debate team. this is where he found his voice once again.

marco did a type of debate called public policy debate, a style of debate where you talk extremely fast and have to do an insane amount of research to ensure that you know what you’re talking about. in order to participate in that style of debate, his teacher assigned him a partner and he grew extremely close to her very quickly. the two of them went on to win the national title their sophomore and junior years

after joining debate, marco grew more confident in himself and began to talk more both in and out of class. being good at something gave him the boost he needed to no longer be shy, and he was well liked by most people at school. this was also when he found the snackpack, and he has always been grateful for their presence in his life. marco’s sophomore and junior years were quite possibly the best years of his life.

however, right before the trophy ceremony his junior year, he got a call from his mom, telling him that his sister had gotten in to a car crash and that she was in a coma in a hospital in san francisco. marco flew to san fran immediately after receiving the call, leaving his partner to collect the trophy on his behalf.

for the following two weeks, marco rarely left the hospital for fear that his sister would pass away without him there. although the two of them were not that close, losing another family member was something that marco could not imagine. on the fifteenth day of her being in the hospital, the doctors said that there was nothing they could do to save his sister. so they harvested her organs as donations, and the spiegelmans were forced to put another member of their family into the ground.

senior year came around and marco was a changed person. he was not as passionate or confident as he used to be, he quit debate, and he focused on judaism again to try and give his life some meaning. however, he explored the type of judaism his sister was into, reform judaism, based more on learning and exploring the ideas of religion than sitting in a sanctuary and praying.

although he skipped school often and had mediocre grades, he managed to graduate, his dreams seeming unimportant and his life in shambles. throughout this, he still managed to keep a positive attitude, now convinced that god had a plan for him and that everything would work out fine. he does have really bad anxiety tho, so it’s this classic combination of trying to have faith in the way things work out but never really being sure that they will

without his debate professor, he wouldn’t have even gotten into college, but with the help of someone making sure he followed through, he got into u mass amherst to study sustainable food & farming. this seemed like a out of the blue choice, but it combined marco’s love of research & science, and allowed him to feel like he could have a greater impact on the world than he could as a politician.

college went by without incident, but here are some highlights (joined hillel and loved being w/ other jews, was a nerd, did nerd things **including a lot of acid, lived his best life)

he just graduated and is home for the summer, he has a job working for the local farmers’ market, and is just chillin��, trying not to think about the other shoe that is bound to drop

he’s doing okay, and that’s all he’ll ever answer the question “how are you?” with

headcanons:

marco worked as a waiter at an italian restaurant in high school so that he could have spending money. money was never a problem in his household as his mom is a cardiologist, but he always felt bad asking for money for things, so he made his own money instead

if marco was a crayola crayon, he’d be pine green. the color is a bit darker than most of the other greens in the crayola family, just like marco in his family, but also has a hint of blue in it, hinting at the sadness that lies beneath marco’s outer layer.

marco really loves old school video games. his old nintendo 64 is collecting dust in his closet, and although he rarely has time to play it anymore, he refuses to throw it out. while growing up, video games were his way of connecting to his two older brothers, his older sister always watching on with a disapproving gleam in her eye. whenever the siblings get together, however, they always manage to turn on an old, favorite game of theirs, and the competition is always heated

in high school, marco smoked a lot of weed. he would always be seen outside at any high school party, smoking by himself or with a group of other people. however, after graduating, marco switched to cigarettes. he smokes frequently, but will furiously deny being addicted if approached about it

marco plays as waluigi when he plays mario kart/party

marco has a slight boston accent

marco is a night person. he utterly hates getting up early in the morning, but staying up late comes easy and natural to him.

marco recycles religiously. if something is recyclable and you don’t put it into the recycling bin, he’ll lose a bit of respect for you as a person

marco absolutely loves space and the universe and stargazing (part of his appreciation for nighttime), but he also wholeheartedly believes that aliens are real, no doubt about it.

wanted connections

his debate partner from high school

romantic connections (male or female or nb!!)

exes w/ lingering feelings

exes who ended on good terms

the person who took his virginity l m a o

that person that he’s been pining after since freshman year in high school who he just wants to get w/ but has convinced himself he cannot

neighbors when they were growing up

current roommate

that friend that u always compete with and like ur friends w/ them still, u are, but also u always want to brag about how great ur doing

someone who confides in him who he rarely confides back to

u KNOW they probably made a band in high school

people he went to college with

anything ur heart desires!!

#snackpackintro #im sorry that i wrote a novel i really am

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argotmagazine-blog · 6 years ago

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Dear Worrier Princess: On Polyamory Pickles and College Coming Out Conundrums

Queery #1: Last summer I (32, queer) met someone (26, baby dyke) at the farmers market near my house, she lives in a town 2 hours away near the farm she works at. We started hanging out as friends and realized we had giant crushes on each other. We saw each other on & off through the winter. Now it’s April, & we really like each other, and have had fun sex a couple of times. The thing is: she says she doesn’t want a relationship—she’s busy farming, working 60+ hrs/wk and can’t commit to being in touch or making time to visit me. She also says she’s still processing her last relationship (5 yrs! her first queer relash!) so she needs to figure some stuff out. I totally get it. However, her actions are different from her words: she stays in touch a BUNCH and when we are together, she says a lotta stuff that feels VERY girlfriendy to me.

We both have established that we love hanging out, we feel fun and comfortable, we care a lot about each other, and we learn a lot from each other. I feel a lotta love between us although we haven’t said ILY but rn it doesn’t feel like we need that. For me, I really like her, I love hanging out w her. At the same time, I DO want to be in a relationship, but I don’t think a monogamous long-distance relationship would work for me. If I’m going to date someone I have needs! and want to have a lot of sex!! And only seeing someone like every other week *at most* doesn't feel enough, and if we’re monogamous, maybe there’d be a lot of pressure on those times to have a good time.

She is not comfortable with polyamory, specifically with me having sex with other people in the same time period as with her. My question is about ethics, tact, care, and timing:: Should I break up with her now, knowing that inevitably I will be boning some local person? There is no one else in the picture right now but I would like to be dating people; I also really don’t want her to feel like a “placeholder,” you know? That would feel like a shitty dynamic. Or, should we continue to “love each other while we can”? We’ve tried being just friends before and it was sad, there’s like this string that keeps wrapping each other together. Should I keep hanging out with her until it gets to a point where I am seeing another local person and want to bone them too? I’m feeling stuck between a rock & a hard spot, & it feels like an ethical decision which i don’t have the answer for. I want to be responsible and not be a douchebag.

I did not expect to see the words “she lives in a town 2 hours away” followed by “long-distance relationship.” As a lesbian from the Midwest, I have driven two hours for really good beef jerky and that is NOT a double-entendre. Two hours is not long-distance in my book, but I digress. We’re talking about you, not me and my horndog travels.

You’re in a pickle—an organic, free-range pickle from the farmers market, but still a pickle. You want an open relationship. Your farm boo does not. You want to spend more time together, but she’s overwhelmed by a semi-recent heartbreak and intense farming schedule. Neither of you are willing to compromise. This is a situation I see all the time here at Dear Worrier Princess: two people recognize that fundamental aspects of relationship aren’t working, but they stay together because the relationship is familiar and has redeeming qualities like good sex, rapport, or mutual love and care.

To be honest, it sounds like your farm boo is someone who wants what she wants when she wants it. The following sentences set off some alarms for me: “she can’t commit to being in touch or making time to visit me” followed by “she stays in touch a BUNCH and when we are together, she says a lotta stuff that feels VERY girlfriendy.” This is a boundaries issue and it’s 100% something you should discuss with her. Say something like, “It’s confusing for me when you say our relationship is one way, but then you text me frequently and say things like [EXAMPLE 1] and [EXAMPLE 2].” Similarly, you keep deciding to be friends and sliding back into romance-territory. This doesn’t mean you’re fated to be together, it means you need better boundaries and a solid chunk of time without any contact. I’m also wondering, during these stretches when you’re supposed to be friends, who escalates things? Who sends the first sext? Might be something to think about.

Is it wrong to date someone you don’t want to be with forever? No. I think most relationships fall into this camp. As long as you’re mindful not create a placeholder dynamic (which I interpret to mean becoming a dismissive or callous partner), it’s fine to see an end on the horizon. However, it’s never as simple as, “we’ll just date until things naturally end.” Even in the best of circumstances, breakups are hard. What if you meet someone available and local, but you’re still raw from the breakup? What if you struggle to establish post-breakup boundaries with your farm boo and this causes tension in your new relationship?

My advice is to set a course towards friendship, though I also understand how difficult it can be to end a relationship without the solid impetus of a fight or someone new. Ask yourself: if I end this relationship now, will I regret not spending more time together? If I keep seeing her, will my feelings become stronger and make it more difficult to separate? Is the agony is worth the ecstasy? Only you can decide.

Queery #2: Last semester (my first semester of college) I was pretty into this girl I thought was straight or at least very closeted. Almost immediately after returning to school after winter break we both got very drunk and ended up hooking up that night. Since then we've continued to see each other and the relationship seems to be getting more and more serious; however, only as long as we are in very private spaces. The only people who know about it are my friends and her friends all seem to believe that I am tragically in love with her, a straight girl. I have never been in any sort of serious relationship, I only first hooked up with a girl last semester but I've been out and open about my sexuality with those close to me for the past three years. I've tried to initiate conversations with her about this, which is hard as she freezes up with any sort of difficult topic that requires talking about ones emotions. We've gotten a little better at these conversations lately and it seems like she also wants a more serious relationship and wants to be able to be more public about it. In the past few weeks she has told one of the people she is living with as well as a close friend but it still seems like we're stuck in this strange place. I don't want to pressure her to do anything she feels very uncomfortable doing and I also recognize that feeling like I am, in a way, going back into the closet to be there with her is unhealthy for me. How do I keep my frustration for our current situation from clouding the good parts, if that's possible? Lately this is about all I think about or want to talk about and I find myself often getting stuck on these negative aspects. How can I best support her without damaging my own wellbeing?

While reading this queery, I realized that my first semester of college was TEN YEARS AGO. My mom drove me to Staples to buy an ethernet cable because my my dorm didn’t have wifi—that’s how we lived in 2009. I can confirm, in extreme retrospect, that your first year of college is overwhelming. It’s no small thing to leave home for the first time, make new friends, and balance coursework/relationships/a job. And then, on top of all that, your girlfriend is smacked with her own queerness and everything it entails. It’s a lot!

It doesn’t help that “coming out" is one of those those terms like “hooking up” or “middle class”—we pretend it’s this definite thing, when it actually means something different to everyone. As a femme lesbian, I come out to new people when it feels safe and pertinent. My butch friends, on the other hand, rarely get to come out on their own terms. Some people take years to come out, others make a snap decision and tell the world via Facebook. I have friends who are openly gay in the United States, but are closeted to their parents and extended families in their countries-of-origin. Sometimes I get DMs from women who say Instagram is their only queer outlet because marriage and other life circumstances make coming out impossible. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I meet a lot of young people who grew up in affirming homes and were exposed to queer adults and culture at an early age. All this to say that I totally agree with you: you can’t pressure your girlfriend to come out before she’s ready. I applaud you for recognizing that her life and decisions are hers and hers alone.

None of this changes the fact that your relationship makes you feel Bad. When you’ve escaped the deep closet, dating someone who’s struggling with self-acceptance can dredge up all sorts of insecurities and painful memories. It feels shitty to be someone’s secret; it implies that your sexuality is shameful and wrong. Like, have you ever had a friend who body-shamed themselves constantly and said stuff like “I’m so fat and disgusting”? Even though their comments aren’t directed at you, you come away feeling self-conscious and weird. Shame is contagious like that.

All relationships require compromise, but how do you know when you’re compromising too much? What do you owe yourself and what do you owe your partner? I ask myself these questions all the time. Kind of recently, I dated someone who habitually snapped at me. Like one time, we were walking dogs in a snowstorm and I joked that I could kick snow over the poop and it would be the perfect crime. They were full-on like, “THAT WILL CONTAMINATE OUR WATER SUPPLY.” It stung. Despite all this, I liked them a lot. I was in extreme cuffing mode and really, really wanted to be in a relationship. We talked it over and I left the conversation feeling hopeful. They acknowledged their outbursts and apologized, but the snapping kept happening to varying degrees. I could still feel the worst part of our relationship wearing me down. I kept second-guessing myself: “am I annoying? Am I difficult to spend time with? Is everything I say stupid and destructive to Wisconsin waterways?”

I turned to a friend for advice. L, who recently ended a complicated and bittersweet relationship, had the perfect response. I’m going to leave you with the text she sent me: “It’s your choice to stay in an imperfect relationship. Just make sure you’re staying because y’all are communicating openly and making the necessary changes. Stay cause you have a plan and solid reasons to believe things will get better, NOT cause you’re afraid of hurting her or afraid of being alone.”

dear worrier princess answers your qs about love and strife in relationships in this complex and modern queer world.

shoot an email to [email protected] or fill out the form below.

Maddy Court is an artist and writer based in Madison, WI. Keep up with her on Twitter @worrierprincess, or on instagram @xenaworrierprincess.

All illustrations for this column are done by Sid Champagne. Sid is a freelance illustrator based in Baltimore by way of the Gulf Coast. You can find them on Twitter @sid_champagne, or Instagram (more cat pics) @sidchampagne

#dwp #dear worrier princess #maddy court #sid champagne #advice #advice column

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josthecommision · 6 years ago

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WIP

Been working on a new original story with several inspirations from things I love. Thanks to the great works of artists and their commissions, I am able to tell my story. Despite being only a pilot chapter that I am working on, its still a brand new story so ill be working on aspects of the world I am building like the races and even the world map (as soon as I find a good artist for that course). Here is my first breakdown, the first two members of the main cast representing their races. (if you want, you can ignore the DnD/Pathfinder gimmick there, it was for fun) from right to left! Disclaimer that wile there are some Inspirations from real world lore and history, I took artistic liberties. With that out of the way, lets start!

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Aos Sidhe - The fairy of the hills, they are members of the Tuatha De Danaan or the people of the goddess Danu along with the Ondines if the river lands and the Half Fae that still take to the old ways after the great Fae schism. they were lead by their ancestral founder gods: Caernunos, Morrigan, Nuadha and Cu Cullain, Bridgid, and Danu as their queen.

The Tuatha De Danaan being peaceful people unless provoked, the Sidhe have taken this deeper to heart than the other three two off shoots. Hanging up their swords and spears for plows and fishing poles, they live a life of happiness and indulgence away from the worries of the violent world. Living and breading for the harvest and party, they have become skilled fishers, farmers and shepherds and all that entails, their magic having slowly shaped to meet their everyday needs. This is why a Sidhe with offensive magical abilities is rare now days.

The Sidhe have actually in a way evolved into two sub groups shaped by their environment and daily needs. The first group is the Inland Sidhe who mostly still live in their land of origin Fa-Ire’ but deep in great underground kingdoms carved from stone. They tend to be taller than their forest and island dwelling cousins and more likely y to retain the warrior way of their ancestors due to their closer proximity to the rest of the world.

Their culture is built in mining of precious stones and metals as well as harvesting roots and fungi that grows in their great complexes. Wile mostly self sufficient, trading almost exclusively with the other Tuatha De Danaan, some of the more industrious and daring Hills have begun to compete with the Dwarves of the mountain kingdoms. Inland Sidhe have also developed the ability to see in the dark allowing them almost perfect night vision but effecting their sight out doors, specially for those that live in the deepest recesses of the hill underkingdoms which is why they wear hoods when outside in the day. They tend to be the paler of the Sidhe but share hair colors and the magical eyes normal attributing to their immense magical ability and the freckles.

Exports are metals, quarry stone, precious stones, paint, art, spider silk clothing, spider silk and outside exports. Imports are fruits, vegetables, grains, fish, art wool clothing, game and farm raised animals, wood among other goods.

Some hills deep in the forest and near the east coasts have actually grown into great multicultural cities were all of the Tuatha De Danaan live together. It is in this metropolises were the second sub group if the Sidhe can began to be seen here attributed with their distinct shorter statures, darker skin and a peculiar culture that marries the traditional Sidhe culture with more exotic tastes and colors.

The sea Sidhe or water Sidhe are the second group of the Aos Sidhe. Short, darker of skin and almost exclusively peaceful, they are less likely to have members with combative abilities.

They are the farmers, fishers, shepherds and artisans and that is echoed in their proclivity for festivities and great artistic arts. Happy to keep to themselves for the most part, they happily rely on the rest of the Tuatha De Danaan for anything they are missing. Their magic almost exclusively focused on their labors, they are known to have a miraculous green thumb and even “cheat” at fishing, easily using Aquakenisis to pull their catch to their small and swift shifts only to freeze their catch for the way home.

Being islanders, their Hills a re not as grand and majestic as inland hills and don't run as deep so their houses tend to spill into the surrounding island. Despite of being masters of practical magic and overall reclusive, the fog that surrounds their territory giving it the name “Sea of mists” is some how natural and not of their doing and seems to be thickest at the very center of the sea. Being a culture of sear faring people, they have learned to navigate the thick fog flawlessly even during the day. Its this remarkable ability that has allowed them to not only conduct a perfect web of trade with the mainland unseen but also allowed them to remain hidden even to the point of becoming myth. The trade with outsiders once in a wile, conducted as if it were a dream has evolved their culture to mix with western and eastern customs, becoming some what unique and exotic.

Common traits between both groups besides their short statures are their exceptional sense of hearing, prodigal dexterity and their near eternal youth after reaching 16-18 years of age. Along with their rather long lifespans has made the illusion of immortal young adults with no adult supervision. It is this fact of near eternal youth and long life that has made the older males grow and bleach their beards as an elder status as well as woman with the tips of their hair.

As safe as the Sea of Mists is, the very center were the fog is the thickest is actually a place of great danger. Along with the forbidden pit, the Dragons pond deep in the underkingdoms and wyvern mountain’s top, the island at the center of the sea of mists is home to a biomechanical leviathan. It is said that the founding gods gifted their people artefacts, coral horns to pacify the fierce guardians of this places. It is with this few and highly treasured artefacts that allow the Sidhe to roam the most dangerous places of their homes. Despite the horns, the territories of the guardians are avoided. The Sidhe culture’s focus on a simple, honest and peaceful life away from the rest of the world can be quantified and organized by the teachings of their god founders.

Followers of Caernunnos or Cernunnos would respect nature in all forms when seeking bounty and would happily let their natures flourish. Hunters are to enjoy the challenge in the woods or at sea and would give thanks and respect for the bloody bounty. In correlation to this, butchers, cooks and crafters would strike to use every single inch of the catch from horns to bones and even organs. Waste is taboo. Followers of Cernunnoos would also freely express them selves lovingly and intimately with their lover or wife in celebration of life. To live a passionless life alone was a tragedy and followers of the horned god would even help others find their true love as “love packs on the hunt” as they were playfully called.

Just as Morrigan shares the spheres of passion with Cernunnos and war with Cu Cullain who focuses on martial prowess wile she focuses on magical might, the usual followers being female. A goddess honored in more in the hills of the deep due to more warrior like people living there, her female followers tend to be the most skilled female warriors and miners. What sets her aside from her fellow patrons besides magic is the duty to the dead the followers of Morrigan enact. In the past were war was much more prevalent, the followers of the war goddess would scour the battle fields to retrieve the dead and clean their corpses and armor for burial. Her worship has dwindled in times of peace but not gone as the guardians that keep the hills safe hold both Cu Cullain and Morrigan in high regards. It is believed that the thick endless mists are a gift of the war patron.

Nuadha is the high king of the Tuatha De Danaan second only to Danu. Patron of monarchs, Nuadha blesses the followers of the old ways and their rulers with greater skill in their arts to aid in king and country. Chiefs that follow the way of Nuadha are honor bound to lead the vanguard of every battle and thus are blessed with nearly unmatched skill so long as the pact is kept. Also patron of the brave cripples, it is believed that when he lost his arm in battle, magical artificers were divinely inspired to inspired to create arcane prosthetics. As patron of the brave cripples, it is believed that those that rise up from weakness no matter the reason are empowered when they strive to surpass their weakness.

Cu Cullain is one of the two war and martial patrons of the Tuatha De Danaan and holds over physical dominion of combat. Followers of Cu Cullain tend to be more militaristic and so focus more in the broader aspects of combat. Skilled in the lightning fast warfare of chariots, accurate marksmen ship of archers and strength in spear, sword, axe and hammer, his warriors aim to maintain such prowess. This days of ever lasting peace has seen a decline in war god reverence yet not forgotten as even peace needs safeguarding. Wile the Aos Sidhe favor violence much less than their river dueling Ondine cousins, each of the 20 Hills spread out the islands hosts 50 Sentinels at the time. Operating as Militia, scouting and peace keeping force, Cu Cullain and Morrigan Sentinels make it their duty to keep their skills honed at all times. It is debated weather it is a problem or not but Sentinel numbers have began to dwindle in numbers and youth as most of the Sentinels today are veterans that have lived several millennia, some members even being founding members. Still, as interest dwindles, the Sentinels view it as misguided indulgence and continue their endless vigil in land and sea. Waiting for the muster of the two thousand strong to fight for their land under Cu Cullain and Morrigan’s guidance.

As Bridgid discovered the Fae steel that would not burn the Fae on touché, her followers are skilled smiths and artisans. Followers of the fire patron created some of the best and sharpest weapons the world had seen, not only safe for fairies due to Fae metal but also easier to bind magic to. Now days very few still practice martial metallurgy as the smithy of a Hill now focuses on metal for every day use from simple nails to beautiful works of art. Followers of Bridgid have become so diverse that commerce has become one of her spheres and the number of her devoted grows almost rivaling Caernunos and Morrigan. few merchants of the Tuatha De Danaan go about this business with out her fiery charm.

-----

Nahual - Shape shifting beings of unknown origins, the Nahual are a scattered people with few homes to call their own. With their origins having been lost during the ancient war that herald the apocalypse of the civilized world giving way to savagery and a regression of civilization, the Nahual themselves know little of their origins. Only known records are passed down by oral accounts in that they may have been artificially created as eldritch abominations with ever shifting forms. The Nahual generally accept to be the creation of mad artificers for war only to be gifted control and sentience over themselves by beings beyond anyone's understanding.

The Nahual are tall and stout, being as tall as ten feet tall in extreme cases and are able to shape shift into any beast they choose. Their appearance are rather mixed between lupine and feline with tufts of hair, pointy ears, claws and fangs. A fact that gives credence to their origins as manufactured weapons is how they are stronger and more resilient than normal humans. It is this fact and their lack to a true home and country that the Nahual turn to blades for hire in hopes of obtaining a home to live in or simply for riches and love for battle.

Nahual who practice the ever perplexing arts of Eldritch magic can potentially empower their already potent shape shifting into any form they wish. Living normal lifespans of around 100 years tops, this are descendants of Nahual that lived through the end of the prior world and have seen the world change. Despite their natural life span, there are reports of a select few that claim to have slept in stasis sarcophagi that have proven to live beyond that and still maintain their prime. It can be theorized that this individuals can live indefinitely and are the cause of some eldritch blessing or even a prototype procedure to further improve on the already formidable super solders. Sadly, nothing more can be learned as this “immortal” that had lived up to five times the normal life span had been killed in battle. However, it is a possibility that youth was granted by some form as the Nahual maintained relative youth with appearance at around mid 20s. It is sadly only speculation and cant be truly proven to be real or of a special case entirely.

With no king and country and being too ostracized as unnatural, run of the mill Nahual tend to be self serving and selfish. It has been accounted that Nahual mercenaries would defect when believed to be cheated or when their contractor dies. It is theorized that millennia of being seen by the general populace as nothing more than fighters for hire or even entertainers of less reputable forms have embittered the race into a belief of survival of the strongest and most clever. It is in light to this face that surprises scholars at how Nahual bandits aside from cartels are relatively none existent. Some how, the Nahual are more than happy to engage in genuine business just as long as prospects don't go under.

Wile occasionally atheistic, there are few who adopt the religions of the land for genuine need for higher powers or as tools to manipulate socially. There are others that follow the pantheon of gods believed to have taken part in their creation and the characteristics of this eldritch orders vary. One must note that the very concept of eldritch beings originates from their entities and thus almost impossible to truly comprehend. Many a scholar have gone mad trying.

Z’yag Zathakh the Amused is an eldritch god with questionable yet apparently benevolent motives as far as it is known. The only eldritch god to have some level of genuine benevolent interest in mortals, he is believed to be the one that created what is now known as the Nahual. If it created them from nothing or by changing their nature is unknown. What is some what understood is that Z’yag Zathakh has an interest in the day to day life of mortals in a way that could be described as amused providence. What ever the motives if there are any at all, all understood examples of his interference have been playful and even curious to a point of view. It is as if mortals are his playthings or puppets played with by an adolescent. A curious fact as its fellow eldritch gods have a sense of indifference if not malice towards mortals.

Some question if there is even a point to the god’s machinations.

Z’yag Zathakh’s curiosities upon our world and its chaotically random miracles have given birth to cults of fertility, philosophy and even candy. Magic that derives from reverence of the eldritch god is as curious as the god itself. Most of the magics one gains are mostly esoteric in nature, some also bend space time to the will of the user. It should be noted that ability and use with the magic derives from the approval of Z’yag Zathakh. It is theorized that if one strays from the path set by the eldritch god that gifted such magic, the ability to use it vanishes until the time one returns to such path. What is perfectly understood is that the eldritch god finds the results of his acts highly entertaining as new reports of out of this world miracles continue to sprout seemingly at random with the same unpredictable yet relatively harmless results. What most of its cults understand is that the eldritch god has a stark opposite in the form of the eldritch god of destruction Apophitehp. Were Z’yag Zathakh is chaotic creation, miraculous chance and curiosity, Apophitehp is destruction and malice.

Apophitehp is understood as a god of destruction that believes in its nihilistic view point that life’s true destiny is destruction. revered and feared by both the Nahual and the Wadjat

#Aisling #Aos Sidhe #Zer-Jo #Nahual #original #tuatha de danann #RobD2003 #commision

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lokirupaul · 3 years ago

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Lokiru Paul : The Life and Suspicious Death of Cachou the Bear

The Life and Suspicious Death of Cachou the Bear

Cachou the brown bear was found dead on the mountains just above the village of Les, in the Aran Valley.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

By Laura Millan Lombrana for

Bloomberg

July 8, 2021, 7:01 AM GMT+3

Para leer el reportaje en español.

Ivan Afonso checked his computer one last time before picking up the phone. It was April 2020, and like most of Spain, Afonso was stuck at home under a strict Covid lockdown. But his mind was in the mountains.

An environmental scientist, Afonso also served as head of the environmental division in the Aran Valley, a tiny area of the Pyrenees mountain range that forms a dent along Spain’s border with France. For the past three years, his duties had included monitoring the movements of Cachou, a 6-year-old, 130-kilo (287-pound) brown bear. The bear was a local celebrity, one of the few males born in the wild in the Pyrenees and living proof that conservationists’ efforts to rejuvenate the region’s struggling brown bear colony were working.

The task had been a nightmare from the start. Cachou was young and fiery, and—to the dismay of conservationists and farmers—prone to wreaking havoc. Like most bears, Cachou had a sweet tooth. He’d started with assaulting bee farms, but by 2019, he’d learned to hunt horses many times his size. Eventually, authorities put a tracker on him, but even that didn’t work. At one point he was blamed for four attacks within two weeks.

Aran Valley

Source: USGS, EarthExplorer

Cachou had given Afonso and horse breeders in the valley some rest during winter. But the tracker showed the bear had come out of hibernation earlier than usual. He’d been in France in March, but a more recent ping put him somewhere in the mountains above Les, a tiny village of fewer than 1,000 people. After that he’d ventured deeper into the forest, close to a trail—and then stopped. The next 24 pings were all in the same spot. Afonso couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

“Either the tracker had dropped, or he was dead,” he thought.

The Garona river, seen here from the village of Bossost, is born high on the Pyrenees and flows into the Atlantic Ocean in France.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

In light of the vast extinction event currently underway on Earth, the death of a single bear might seem less than significant. And yet, on the morning of April 9, 2020, Afonso decided it was time to do something. He called the head of Aran Valley’s government first, then dialed the valley’s ranger corps and requested two trustworthy agents who could discreetly hike to the place the pings were coming from.

Finally, he dialed the head of Catalonia’s park ranger corps in the Northern Pyrenees, Anna Servent. Spry in her early 40s, with a resolute expression and brown hair cut short on one side, Servent heads a small, semi-secret team of investigators who specialize in animal poisonings. Their methods are unconventional. While most rangers focus on analyzing animal remains, the people on Servent’s team spend years building networks of local informers. They wear plainclothes, change vehicles often, and tend to visit their sources in the middle of the night to avoid drawing attention.

By the turn of the 21st century, brown bears were almost extinct here after decades of indiscriminate hunting and poisoning. In 1996, just three survived in the entire 430-kilometer (267-mile) mountain range. While the population has recovered after several European Union-sponsored conservation projects, it remains Europe’s smallest colony, with a count of 64 bears as of 2020. The lower Aran Valley, with its thick forests covered in old beech, oak, and chestnut trees and a milder climate, has become a breeding ground for the endangered predators.

But what conservationists consider a victory, many who’ve grown up in the mountains see as a declaration of war. “Naturally, when you reintroduce a species that has been previously eliminated on purpose, you’ll run again into similar conflicts that caused the reduction in numbers in the first place,” says Elisabeth Pötzelsberger, head of the resilience program at the European Forest Institute, an EU research center. “It would be quite naive to think everyone will be happy and clapping hands.”

Anna Servent heads a small, semi-secret team of investigators who specialize in animal poisonings.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

After talking to Afonso, Servent and one of her investigators—whose identity can’t be revealed to avoid compromising ongoing cases—jumped in a car and drove fast through deserted, meandering roads into the Aran Valley. The view on the way in is bucolic, with rocky peaks covered in snow and slopes so steep one fears they might collapse onto the bright green pastures below. The stone towers and slate roofs of Romanic churches dot the expanse, which is split in two by the Garona river. Those who live there still speak a modern version of Occitan, a romance language troubadours used for songs and poems before the Renaissance. They’re proud of their rural roots and tend to look suspiciously at anyone coming from south of the Pyrenees.

The Aran Valley community is so tight, Servent’s rangers hadn’t been able to groom informants in the area, so she hoped their car would go unnoticed as she and her teammate neared Les. They headed up the mountain trail, climbed through the steep forest, and reached Cachou’s body at roughly the same time as the local rangers.

Joan Vazquez, founder of environmental organization Ipcena, holds a picture of a book showing Cachou’s body in the forest where it was found.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The bear was lying belly up at the bottom of a 40-meter rocky cliff, a single canine sticking out of his half-open mouth. There were signs he’d been there for a long time, but that the death was quite recent, indicating that he could have lay there suffering for a long time, which happens sometimes in poisoning cases.

Servent speaks in a low voice and a calm tone as she details their inspection of the body and the surrounding area, but her face is serious behind a blue surgical mask. “We didn’t see any signs of poisoning initially,” she says. That made them even more restless. Before they left, Afonso had told them: “If you don’t find an obvious cause of death, look for antifreeze.”

Ivan Afonso likes to think of himself as a man between two worlds. He was born of the Pyrenees, but not of the Aran Valley, and completed his university degree in cosmopolitan Barcelona. At 47 years old, he still feels more at ease in the mountains looking for endangered birds or scouring remote ponds for rare frogs than he does in his small office in the Aran government’s headquarters.

Born in the Pyrenees and educated in Barcelona, Ivan Afonso likes to think of himself as a man between two worlds.

Photographer:Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

It pained Afonso not to be able to go out into the mountains to find Cachou, but he had reason to believe that they’d be walking into a crime scene, which meant that the fewer people there disturbing evidence, the better. Twice during 2019, he told Servent’s rangers, he’d overheard a man from Les talk about using antifreeze against bears, according to court documents seen by Bloomberg Green—once during a private meeting, and once during a public speech. This same man had once headed the Aran Valley Land Department, and was partially responsible for overseeing 2.4 million euros ($2.8 million) of EU funds intended for brown bear conservation in the Pyrenees.

“I didn’t pay attention to him at that time. Maybe it was a mistake, but I was skeptical,” Afonso says. “There are rumors about killing bears all the time. People boast about having killed a bear and the next day we see it appear on a surveillance camera.

“Even if I had paid attention,” he goes on, “what could have I done? Everyone in the valley has antifreeze. I’ve got two bottles at home.”

A rusty trap used to catch bears is kept on a storage room on the basement of the Catalan rangers’ headquarters in Tremp (left). Aldicarb (right) is a pesticide now banned in Europe. A small quantity is enough to kill a wild boar.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Antifreeze is a ranger’s worst nightmare. Used to prevent car engines from freezing and therefore widely available in shops and petrol stations, it goes undetected in common post mortem tests and vanishes from corpses within days, if not hours. It can only be found if the body is fresh, and if pathologists are specifically looking for it.

A few hundred miles from where Cachou’s body was found, wildlife pathologist Roser Velarde was sitting in in her office at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, surrounded by microscopes and deer skulls, when she got a call from Afonso, telling her that the bear would be on her operating table by the next day. With 20 years of practice behind her, Velarde didn’t flinch—Cachou’s would hardly be her first animal autopsy, and certainly not her most challenging. Once, much to the amusement of her students and colleagues, she performed a necropsy on a whale on the patio outside because the animal wouldn’t fit inside her lab.

During Cachou’s necropsy, Velarde spoke in the same patient, explanatory tone she uses with her students. The body had no bullet wounds, no broken bones, cuts, or major signs of violence. Some superficial teeth marks on the side of his head suggested that an animal, most likely another bear, had bit him, but that was ruled out as the cause of death. As she opened him up, she also ruled out death by common poisons, as most cause massive internal bleeding. Velarde spent four hours cutting, weighing, measuring, gathering samples, and taking pictures, but she found nothing. It wasn’t until after all that that Servent’s investigator, who attended the necropsy, told Velarde about Afonso’s antifreeze suspicion.

A professor at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Roser Velarde has been performing necropsies, mostly on wild animals, for 20 years.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Back in her office, Velarde processed samples of urine and brain tissue. Three days later, the university’s head of wildlife eco-pathology confirmed that the samples contained crystals of calcium oxalate, which are consistent with the presence of ethylene glycol, the chemical that comprises between 90 and 95% of antifreeze.

About 12 hours after ingesting the antifreeze, Cachou’s neurological system would have started to malfunction. He would have felt severe stomach irritation and possibly slipped into a coma. His lungs and heart would have started to shut down within hours, but he could have stayed alive for as long as nine days later, until his kidneys finally failed.

“Cachou the bear suffered a slow and very painful agony that went on for days—until he died,” Velarde concluded in her report, according to court documents. That, combined with the signals from the tracking device, meant Cachou was poisoned on or around March 26.

“The first thing we did was to request the judge to keep the investigation secret,” Servent says—something typically only done in highly sensitive cases such as those involving drug trafficking and political corruption, and never before for the suspected murder of a wild animal. “It terrified us that people would find out and start getting ideas—and obviously we didn’t want the poisoner to know we knew.” Her request was granted. As a result, details of the investigation haven’t been made public.

Bees in the Aran Valley were among the first victims of Cachou’s attacks—like many bears, he had a sweet tooth.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

With no reliable sources in the area, Servent knew her team’s usual methods wouldn’t work, so she put in a call to the Catalan police, also known as Mossos d’Esquadra.

Deputy inspector Cesar Jou tried to hide his surprise as the voice on the other side of the line told him about his next case. After 25 years as a policeman, most of them on the Mossos’ crime unit in the Pyrenees, he was used to homicides, drug trafficking, and organized violence. But Cachou was his first bear victim. “I was surprised when they asked me to investigate the death of a bear, but we treated it as if it was a homicide. It was a challenge,” he says.

Jou’s first move was to go to Les with his agents and ask locals if they’d seen anything strange in the days around when Cachou was poisoned. In places where everyone knows each other, crime is often seen as an attack on the community as a whole, Jou says. With the country on a strict lockdown, surely someone would have noticed something, he thought.

He was wrong. “No one knew anything, no one had seen anything,” Jou says. Cachou’s killer was perceived as the savior of the village. “There was a sense of angst among the ranchers.”

Anti-bear sentiment in the region goes back generations. “Living with the bear is an obligation, something we haven’t decided,” says Frances Bruna, the current head of the Land Department in the Aran Valley government. A horse-breeder himself, Bruna talks dearly about his mares and explains that he, too, has suffered bear attacks in the past. “They’ll give us subsidies, aid, they’ll pay back whenever there are attacks. But inside us there will always be that feeling.”

Bruna’s various responsibilities are often at odds with each other. He’s charged with leading environmental and bear conservation initiatives in the valley, but he also looks after the wellbeing of farmers and their animals. Catalan authorities have spent years trying to mediate between these two worlds. The regional government now compensates ranchers for each animal killed by a bear, and last year spent 84,500 euros to install fences and pay for shepherds and mastiff dogs to watch over sheep and cattle in the Pyrenees during the summer months. It also pays for the animals’ insurance and has hired an external company that acts as a mediator between farmers and the administration.

“Bears were something imposed from Europe, paid with European funds that I guess someone was very happy to collect,” says Marc Cuny, the president of the Association of the Pyrenees Catalan Horse in the Aran Valley. “No one asked for our opinion, they just told us it would be the panacea—and it wasn’t.”

Marc Cuny feeds two of his mares at a field near Vielha. Breeders’ bond with their animals is emotional and goes back generations.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

It isn’t a matter of money, says Cuny. Standing in his field next to Ines, Monica, and Nera, three of his 16 mares, he keeps a close eye on a filly born just hours ago that his young daughter has named Peppa Pig. Horses are an important part of the valley’s traditions, and breeders’ bond with them is emotional, he says.

“Poisoning the bear was a mistake, and whoever did it wasn’t thinking about the consequences,” Cuny says. “But when a beast kills 12 or 13 horses and is not removed from the mountain, you can understand that someone decided to do it themselves.”

Two Mossos d’Esquadra agents hike across the steep slopes of the Pyrenees to the place where Cachou’s body was found.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

With no cooperation from locals, the investigation into Cachou’s death advanced slowly. Eventually, police identified five potential subjects, including the official who had talked publicly about poisoning bears; a local ranger who was part of the bear restoration program and had access to Cachou’s positioning data; two people whose phone signals showed they had been in the area around the date of the killing; and one who’d installed a surveillance camera near the place where the body was found.

Still, the investigation bore no real clues until the end of June. After weeks of fruitless interrogations, one witness—a ranger with the Aran Valley government—finally broke the code of silence, divulging the existence of a WhatsApp group called, bluntly, the Anti-Bear Platform, according to court documents. All the messages in the chat had been deleted, but Jou’s investigators could see that the group had over 140 members. Among the administrators was the official who’d talked about poisoning bears.

Jou’s agents had already begun tapping the phones of the suspects they’d identified, but the Anti-Bear Platform gave them the key they needed to begin deciphering how the group operated. In the latter half of 2020, however, the investigation took an unexpected turn. The taps showed a network of people who were changing phone numbers frequently, working in tight shifts in a house in the valley. Some of them had Colombian accents.

On March 29, Jou’s team arrested 12 people suspected of belonging to a cocaine trafficking ring. Agents seized almost 2 kilos of pure cocaine worth about 200,000 euros, an unprecedented amount in an area where no one had previously suspected of drug-dealing activity of this magnitude. The Aran Valley is famous for the high-end resort of Baqueira, which attracts jet set skiers and mountain hikers from both sides of the border, including the Spanish royal family, and many now suspect the traffickers were serving its rich patrons.

“We thought it was Cachou’s way of saying ‘thank you’ for having investigated his death,” says Jou jokingly before getting serious again. “It’s been the most important cocaine operation for Mossos d’Esquadra in the Aran Valley for several years.”

More than a year after Cachou’s murder, the investigation is almost complete.

In November, police arrested two of their original five suspects, including the ranger who had access to Cachou’s positioning data and had been caught on a tapped phone discussing the position of a different bear entering the valley. The ranger denied the charges—which included the commission of a crime against fauna, revelation of secrets, and perversion of justice—and refused to give a statement. He was eventually released and remains a member of the Aran Valley rangers, although he’s no longer involved in bear-monitoring activities, according to the local government. The judge also summoned the official who’d boasted about antifreeze-soaked sponges, but he, too, refused to give a statement.

Finally, in early June, police arrested the ranger who’d disclosed the existence of the Anti-Bear chat. His statements to the police were full of contradictions, and in tapped phone conversations with the other arrested ranger, he’d discussed deleting possibly incriminating messages. He also refused to give a statement and was freed on the same day.

The inquiry into Cachou’s death is the first criminal investigation into the death of a wild animal in Spain, and possibly anywhere else in Europe, environmental groups say. But it’s unlikely to be the last. The EU has made the conservation and restoration of natural habitats, including increasing biodiversity and expanding forests, an essential part in its fight against climate change, wildfires, and disease outbreaks.

Wolves, lynx and bears play a key role in that plan. These super-predators are known as umbrella species; because they’re at the top of the food chain, they can only thrive if every other animal and plant below them is healthy too. Their success or failure is therefore seen as a proxy for the state of conservation and biodiversity efforts, on which the bloc plans to spend 20 billion euros ($24 billion) a year over the next decade.

A police agent looks down at the exact place where Cachou was found, deep inside the forest at the bottom of a rocky cliff.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The trial could also bring further scrutiny to how European conservation funds are spent. In addition to the former Land official who was once in charge of administering this money in the Aran Valley, the ranger who allegedly leaked Cachou’s location was paid entirely by EU conservation funding.

“Aid must come with conditions,” says Joan Vazquez, founder of conservation organization Ipcena, which will appear as an individual prosecutor in the trial. “States are not watching how that money is spent, they just send reports to the EU saying everything’s going perfect. And the EU believes it unless there are cases like Cachou’s proving the contrary.”

This is not an isolated case of dubious oversight. A recent report by European nonprofit Bankwatch Network documented biodiversity plans by several Eastern European countries. Analysts found that some, including Bulgaria and Poland, directly infringe current laws, while others engage in greenwashing or other deceptive practices, all while receiving EU funding and applying for more.

In this harsher, more bureaucratic light, Cachou wasn’t just a bear, he was a bellwether. The fact that he was wearing a tracking device—and that Afonso moved fast to locate him—meant rangers got to the scene before his body deteriorated, which allowed Velarde to prove the cause of death in a way that would stand up in court. Because of Cachou’s fame and the existing tension between the Aran Valley’s bears and humans, the judge encouraged investigators on the case, include Servent and Jou, to use all means necessary to find the killer.

The judge in Vielha, the capital of the Aran Valley, is expected to formally charge the ranger, the public official, and potentially others when she closes the investigation, likely within the next few months. At that point, a different judge will bring the case to trial sometime next year in the city of Lleida, about 160 kilometers south of the valley. The mystery of Cachou’s death has raised so much attention that authorities fear Vielha’s tiny courthouse won’t be big enough to hold all the interested spectators.

Back in Les, locals await the start of the trial with a mix of uneasiness and indifference. On a foggy morning in April, a few of them read the paper and eat breakfast at an old cafe, casually chatting about whether the end of the lockdown would bring French tourists back. On the wall hang black and white pictures of dead bears and smiling hunters.

“I remember old people in the villages telling us stories about bears,” says Bruna, the current head of the Land Department. “Whoever arrived to the village with a dead bear was hailed as a hero and everyone wanted to be in the picture with them.”

Frances Bruna, the current head of the Land Department in the Aran Valley government, remembers the times when bear hunters were hailed as heroes.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The investigation of Cachou’s murder has done nothing to erase those decades-old lines, Afonso says. Locals who either sympathized with the bears or who didn’t care either way have since turned against them after being summoned to testify, realizing their phones were tapped, or seeing the names friends and relatives written about as suspects in the local press. If anything, it’s made the community even more wary of strangers.

At base, the case is a clash between two ways of seeing the environment, Afonso says: the Araneses’ pragmatic view of nature as a profitable resource, and the outsider’s more romanticized view of humanity’s duty to protect and preserve.

“The most extreme examples of these two worlds are represented in this case,” Afonso says. “Very zealous justice and police systems that acted as if a person had been killed, and a wise guy who decided to take matters into his own hands.”

Servent thinks it will be a turning point in how authorities treat wildlife deaths. About 40 bears have died since 1996, some in circumstances that have never been properly investigated, according to Ipcena. Mysterious bear deaths include that of Cachou’s father, Balou, who according to reports by French authorities was hit by lightning and fell off a cliff.

“Everyone who has participated in this has taken it very seriously so it wouldn’t end in nothing,” Servent says. “Everyone has seen that the death of a bear can’t go unnoticed.”

The Pyrenees mountain range acts as a natural wall that isolates the Aran Valley from the rest of Spain. Its inhabitants are proud of their distinct identity and speak a modern version of Occitan.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

As for Cachou’s killer, there are different views of who did it. The police and rangers think it was someone from the area who had access to Cachou’s confidential positioning data, knows the forests well, and knows how to use poison. The perpetrator has also likely suffered bear attacks, they say, possibly at the teeth and paws of Cachou himself.

Afonso has a different guess. He suspects someone has been killing bears for a while, but that Cachou wasn’t necessarily the target. The area where his body was found is a route frequently used by bears, and at a time when sightings are increasing everywhere on the Pyrenees, they’re falling precisely in that place.

“If I was the poisoner, I wouldn’t kill the only bear that’s wearing a tracking device,” he says. “That person was unlucky that Cachou passed by. I’m quite sure of that.”

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robininthelabyrinth · 7 years ago

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Countless Roads - Chapter 39

Fic: Countless Roads - Chapter 39 - Ao3

Fandom: Flash, Legends Pairing: Gen, Mick Rory/Leonard Snart, others

Summary: Due to a family curse (which some call a gift), Leonard Snart has more life than he knows what to do with – and that gives him the ability to see, speak to, and even share with the various ghosts that are always surrounding him.

Sure, said curse also means he’s going to die sooner rather than later, just like his mother, but in the meantime Len has no intention of letting superheroes, time travelers, a surprisingly charming pyromaniac, and a lot of ghosts get in the way of him having a nice, successful career as a professional thief.

———————————————————————————

"But you're not," the kid – his name was Jax, apparently – says for the fifth time, sounding increasingly frantic. "You're not a necromancer, boss. That was always important. Not a necromancer. Don’t you remember?"

"You seem to have trouble accepting reality," Len observes dispassionately. He's slouched back against one of the consoles, watching his ghosts explore the ship for details. They found an instruction manual a few minutes ago; Barry is speed-reading it now. Soon, Len won't have any need to keep the crew alive.

He wonders if they realize that.

His poltergeists are keeping them bound to their seats, arms tightly pressed to their sides, but Len has no particular problem letting them whisper conspiracies and plans on how to escape their situation to each other in the meantime. It won't help them, of course; nothing will help them, in the end. The ship will soon be Len’s, and he will be able to return home to the empire of dust and ruin he’s slowly building.

"My reality is fine; yours, on the other hand, I ain't too sure about," Jax shoots back. He hasn't been whispering; he persists in trying to talk to Len, instead. He's combative without being disrespectful.

And he already calls Len boss.

"I will have to keep you when you're gone," Len muses.

The grey-haired academic – Grey, Jax calls him, though the others call him Stein - bristles and tries to move forward protectively before Len’s ghosts pull him back. "Gone? What does that mean? Surely you don't intend to murder us wholesale, Mr. Snart."

"No," Len says, and sees all of them but the revenant relax until he adds, "Not till I confirm that I can run the ship without your living assistance, anyway."

"So - that means - you are intending on killing us," the tall man – Ray? – says, sounding a little blank. Maybe a little betrayed.

"Oh, yes," Len says. "More grist to my mill, most of you. Your lives will serve to empower my other ghosts, and you yourselves will join my legions as servitors. Except you, Jax. You can be a lieutenant."

"Oh goody," Jax says. "Just what I've always wanted to be - a dead lieutenant."

"I can't guarantee control of you otherwise," Len points out, almost amused. Almost. Close enough for him, nowadays; it’s as close as he comes to what he vaguely recalls as that emotion.

"You could just trust me," Jax says. He sounds hurt, the little puppy. “Ever think of that?"

"No,” Len says honestly. “The living are by nature liars."

"Mick isn't," the bird-woman, Kendra, says. She'd nearly escaped when she'd pulled out those wings; it had rather shocked the ghosts. But she was still no match for a speedster ghost, with all the power of Len's favorite poltergeist enforcers behind him. "Mick was always honest, and you trusted him. Don’t you remember?"

"I keep telling you, I don't know who this 'Mick' guy is," Len says.

"He's your partner," the revenant says. "And we made a terrible mistake, and changed the timeline, and took him from you."

Something is wrong.

Something is missing.

Len turns to her with a frown, as do some of her colleagues.

"What are you talking about?" Ray asks.

"I’ve figured out what happened," the revenant says grimly. "Jax, was Mick alive when we met him?"

"Nah," Jax replies. "He was a ghost.”

“He was?” Kendra asks.

“Yeah. That’s why he was always coming along on dangerous missions and stuff, since he knew he couldn’t die twice."

"He was originally from the 1930s, I believe he said once," Grey adds, nodding in agreement.

The revenant nods. "Yeah, well, the rest of us didn't know that, and that's how we made the mistake," she says, making a face. "Remember the last mission, guys? Chasing after the Pilgrim? We saved Mick Rory from dying in a fire with his family. A fire he probably didn't survive the first time around."

“Aw, shit,” Jax says, understanding. “No death, no ghost. No ghost, no Len meeting that ghost at juvie. No meeting, no partnership…”

"So, wait, you’re saying that having the younger Mick in our cargo bay..." Ray says, eyes going wide.

"...is why Snart is acting like this," the captain concludes, scowling. “It’s a massive time aberration, and we’re the ones that caused it.”

“Gideon told us she hadn’t been able to track the temporal anomaly involved in the Pilgrim’s actions,” Kendra says with a groan, knocking her head back against her chair. “Remember? That’s because there wasn’t any. If the Pilgrim had killed him, nothing would’ve changed.”

“But surely you should have noticed that you were in the wrong era!” Grey exclaims. “Perhaps you did not have the insight that Jefferson and I did as to Mr. Rory’s state of being, so to speak – and we were in the medical bay as a result of the Pilgrim’s ear;oer actions, of course – but surely being in the 1930s…”

“The clothing looked about the same,” the revenant says defensively. “It was a farm, okay? I don’t know anything about farms or farmers, we just landed in a field and saw a house on fire and the Pilgrim walking up there aiming a gun at some teenager who was asleep on the couch and we saved his life, okay? We're heroes, it's what we do. It was totally reasonable.”

“Shouldn’t Gideon have said something, though?”

“We didn’t wait for Gideon,” Ray says ruefully. “We just followed the Pilgrim’s ship, remember? We didn’t even have time enough to check what year we were going to!”

“Clearly, we should have,” the captain says. “Thought obviously it would have helped if we knew about Mr. Rory’s…ah…living status before this had all happened –”

“How did you not know about it?” Jax shoots back. “You’re the Time Master! Mr. From the Future guy! And hey, while we're at it, how is it that you don’t believe in ghosts, but you know about necromancers?”

“Necromancers and mediums are a specific type of magic user known to the Time Masters, albeit fairly rare ones, and ones I have never encountered before,” the captain says stiffly. “They utilize magical projections and summonings which they refer to as ‘ghosts’ –”

“And it never occurred to you those might, y’know, be real ghosts?”

“Most necromancers don’t exactly use them as sentient beings, Mr. Jackson –”

“We’re getting away from the point here,” the revenant interjects. “Namely the fact that we are being held down by ghosts commanded by a necromancer version of Leonard because we saved Mick’s life –”

Len watches them bicker, his eyes flickering between them as he follows along in the conversation. He probably ought to be concerned or something. They are talking about him, after all, and about someone who they believe meant something to him.

Someone who they apparently stole from him.

Someone who – if what they’re saying is true – is in the cargo bay right now.

Len’s –

Len’s not sure what to do about that.

It seems to require feeling something. He’s not too good at that these days.

Barry appears in front of Len, much to Len’s relief. "We need a palm-print to open the next room," he says without fanfare. He's learned that Len prefers directness.

"From?"

"Any of the crew,” Barry says, then adds, preempting Len’s next question, “Living; there are automatic protections against the dead. Or at least, there are against corpses, anyway; I guess the palm-print might theoretically still work if you empowered someone all the way back to full solidity."

Like Len would ever do that. Why waste the effort?

"There are protections against unwillingness, too," the captain says. Rip Hunter, he'd introduced himself as; he’s been chief of the whisperers and the least cooperative. It was his fault they were floating dead in the timeline; once he realized the scope of Len’s power, he tried to activate a shutdown of the whole ship through pre-planted keywords, forcing Barry to rip the interior computer controls out with his hands to make it stop. That, in turn, had messed up the process of getting control over the Gideon system. They'd been obligated to wait in the time stream until the time wraiths could bring over some of the more technically inclined of Len's victims.

Len does prefer to use his own victims, really, whenever possible. He hadn't learned much from his father, whose spirit Len had very much enjoyed pulling out of the man's corpse and having his other ghosts rip apart, slowly, over the course of a week, but he had learned this much: the personal touch is always better.

They fear you more, that way.

Cisco Ramon – the one referenced by Jax earlier – turned out to be another victim of Len's elimination of STAR Labs, one that Len hadn't paid much mind too before. Clearly a mistake: it turned out he was a very skilled mechanic and, according to Barry, would be of great value in repairing even a ship from the future.

And so Len called, and so Len waited. He’s here now, Ramon; he's elbow deep in the ship's guts, learning her. Deactivating any other trigger words.

Very useful. Len will have to promote him to the inner circle if he continues to be this useful.

Rip Hunter is still speaking.

" – as you see, you have no choice but to negotiate with us if you wish to regain control of the ship. Gideon's sensors, even – even brutalized, as you have done, will not permit you to use a hand of a person who doesn't want it used."

"So, according to you, wanting not to use it is important," Len says. "An unconscious person might do the trick."

Hunter's eyes flicker. He probably hadn't thought of that. "Feel free to try it," he says arrogantly. A bluff, if Len had to wager.

Luckily, he doesn't.

"Sara Lance," he says, based on the name that the others have been calling her. Names have power. "You will unlock it for me."

The revenant laughs a little, sounding incredulous. "Me? You think you can trick or force me into opening it for you? I hate to break it to you, but you've got the wrong girl."

"I don't think I do," Len says. "Release her."

The ghosts let her go.

She immediately leaps to her feet, adopting a fighting position, but before she can even finish the gesture, Len bends his will upon her and says, his voice echoing full with his power, "Stop."

She stops.

And then she looks surprised at herself, and tries to move, struggling with ever more horror at her body's failure to obey her.

"You may speak," Len says. He never liked gags. His dad –

He’s not thinking about that.

"How are you doing this?!" she spits immediately.

"Do you really not know?" Len asks. "Surely you must have felt drawn to me from the beginning."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"You're a revenant. You were once dead, your spirit free, and then you were called back and bound within your body by a medium," Len tells her. His voice is as cold and smooth as ice, just as it always is; he can see that the unemotional recitation disturbs her and mildly regrets that it does, but he can't change it. There's no fire that heats his blood.

Not anymore.

"So what?" she says, but there is fear in her voice. She understands, even though she doesn’t want to.

"You are a ghost in a living body," Len says. "There are spaces between you and your body, spaces that come from death. Spaces that you can only fill by violence or shedding of blood, or sex, or food, or some other vice. Which is yours?"

She's gone still.

"Answer." He doesn’t put power behind it, but she answers anyway.

"The bloodlust," she whispers.

"Quite typical," Len says. "You need not be distressed. The vampire myth had to come from somewhere."

“Yeah, you've mentioned that before," she says with a sneer, trying to cover her distress with bravado and not entirely succeeding. "People like me being vampires and werewolves –”

“People like you inspired the vampire and werewolf myths," Len corrects her. "If it’s any consolation, the medium who brought you back did a better than average job; you’ve got a lot less spaces left in you than others I've seen. Tell me his name."

"What, so you can go kill him and force him to join your undead armies?"

"Firstly, my armies are dead, not undead. And secondly, no, probably not. His powers may require him to be alive," Len says regretfully. He learned that through his experiences with other mediums. "Blood is such a popular device for that sort of person."

He wrinkles his nose, disapproving.

"Whereas you just prefer outright murder."

"I don't prefer anything," Len says truthfully. "But death and control of ghosts is the most efficient approach. People don't object to orders that way."

“Sure, I bet that's what you tell yourself,” she sneers. She’s lashing out to cover her fear. It’s fine. Less streamlined than he might like, less efficient, but he doesn’t mind the delay too much. He’s in no rush: he’s got nothing to look forward to, after all. “The necromancer who walks, trailed by the ghosts of his victims – cold and heartless – that’s just what’s efficient.”

“It is,” Len says, and stands. “Come along; I apparently require your palm-print.”

Len wants to get away from the crew before they talk any more about this – Mick. The suggestion that he had a partner, that there was someone close to him, someone he misses; it disturbs him. Deeply.

He doesn’t like that thought.

Why would he ever make himself so vulnerable to another person? Does that mean that – what happened all those years ago - with Lisa –

No.

He’s not thinking about that.

He never thinks about that.

“You realize this means we have to put the young Mr. Rory back if we are to repair the timeline,” he hears the old one who is called Grey say to the others as he walks out of the room.

“We can’t!” Ray exclaims. “He’s a teenager! If we put him back, he’ll die!”

“We clearly have no choice,” Rip says.

“You’re hardly a good judge, you always default to child murder,” the bird-woman snaps. “Remember Kasnia?”

“Miss Saunders, my best intentions to save the world aside, I likely wouldn’t have been able to actually carry it out –”

Len is very grateful when the door slides shut behind him and cuts them off.

“Are they always so – well, like that?” he asks the revenant. No, Sara. He should be gracious and refer to her by name, if she is to work with him.

He always tries to know them by name.

Especially his victims.

Sara looks amused despite herself. “Yes, they are,” she says. “You were part of our crew, once, you know.”

“That seems unlikely.”

Though theoretically, if true, his own palm-print would work on the door. He wonders if she realizes that she’s rendered herself useless with her little revelation – assuming that he believes her.

Which he doesn’t.

He can’t believe her, because if that part’s correct, then perhaps the other part –

No.

“Do you know how time aberrations work?” she persists. “The timeline is unsettled, for now. If we put it right, you’ll be back the way you were. With a partner you trust. A partner you love. That must be appealing to you, right? Having someone you love and trust?”

Len feels his lips turn up in what is really not a smile. “You’re taking the wrong approach.”

“Why’s that?”

“Nothing appeals to me anymore. Certainly not emotions.”

She frowns. She doesn’t understand.

“I’m a necromancer,” Len tells her gently. “I command the unwilling dead. And more than that, I committed the greatest of all crimes: I took one of the dead from the black book of God and returned her to life. And though I do not regret doing it, I suffer for it.”

“I don’t understand,” Sara says. “What – what do you mean?”

Len shakes his head. There’s no point in explaining it.

In explaining any of it.

He doubts anyone could understand.

The wrenching pain that shattered his heart when his father, enraged beyond reason, brought the bottle down on Lisa’s head, again and again and again, until there was nothing but a smear of blood and blonde hair that never got the chance to fade to brown; pain which never fades.

His father’s bellowing rage going quiet in Len’s ears; sound which has never returned.

The feeling of joy, lost; the feeling of anything muted.

He only knows what he feels because he remembers the sensation from before. And even those sensations are limited: things amuse him, or annoy him, and sometimes even disturb him, but he hasn’t felt anything stronger since the day he took the easy route out of the pain that is his sole companion now.

He couldn’t even feel joy at the sight of Lisa, returned to him, rising up from the dead – not merely a ghost, no, but alive. Alive, yes, but repulsed by him, by his actions, by how he robbed her of her freedom to pass on, as all dead longed to do.

He has hope that she might forgive him for what he’s done one day, but he will never know. That which he takes from God is not his to keep.

He remembers the way everything he loved began to die at the moment that she began to live.

His friends, his livelihood, his city.

He remembers not being able to care enough to act, or to stop himself from lashing out in ruinous destruction, but still enough – just enough – to be able to suffer from it.

The worst thing you can do is also the easiest, his mother had told him. Let me tell you how to make the dead dance on this earth again. But, my son: this you must never do!

But he did.

And he pays and he pays and he pays, endless payment, payment in a heart made of ice and stone, payment in cruelty he cannot stop himself from meting out, payment in days that go on and on, filled with nothingness, without end – without even hope of end.

For him, after all, even death is no longer an avenue of escape.

Len cannot cut off his own life anymore, artificially prolonged by his curse so that he might truly learn the meaning of suffering; he must wait for someone else to do it. And so now he builds himself a monument of ruin, his armies of the dead a creeping sickness on the cities he once so loved, posing them as a challenge to the world: if you dare, come here and stop me.

Please.

Please, stop me.

“Here’s the door,” Cisco says, pointing.

Len nods at Sara, who scowls.

“Do it yourself, or I’ll order you to,” Len says mildly.

She puts her palm on the scanner.

Look at that, coercion still works just fine.

“You should tell Rip that his fantastic plans need a bit of trouble-shooting,” Len says dryly.

“It’s creepy how much you still sound like you,” Sara says. “Except you managed not to make a ‘get it? shooting? because he carries a six-shooter?’ joke at the end of it.”

“That’s funny,” Len observes. “I like that.”

“Great,” Sara mutters. “Maybe I’ll also get to be a lieutenant in your Army of the Dead. Yippee.”

“Not with an attitude like that you won’t,” Len lies. He kind of likes the attitude.

“Great, that’s one of the last few pieces we needed,” Cisco says. He’s very perky. Len slides him a bit more power as a reward, which makes him glow. Yes, very perky. Maybe he should assign him to Lisa’s defense squad; she might like him. That’s far more important than his mechanical skills could ever be. “We’ll be able to get the ship up and running momentarily.”

“Good,” Len says. “I don’t like the time stream.”

One of the time wraiths whines, a choking half-scream half-hiss that sounds like a machine. Of course it likes the time stream.

“It separates me from the dead,” Len tells it, feeling for some reason reminded of a puppy. He’s not sure why; he’s never had that thought before. “I need to be back on Earth, where my armies are.”

“Activating now,” Barry says.

The ship shudders back to life.

And an alarm promptly goes off.

Len sighs and lifts a hand to tell them to turn the ship back off. One of Rip Hunter’s tricks, no doubt – he’ll give it to the man, he’s certainly persistent –

“No, wait!” Sara exclaims, grabbing at Len’s arm. “That’s the time aberration alarm.”

“So?”

“So, someone might be in danger!”

“And I care because…?”

“It might be you,” she says. "Maybe it's your younger self, about to get killed."

Len frowns. He doesn’t really much care if anything happens to him, but the ghosts around him are looking worried.

He wishes he knew why.

“Fine,” he says shortly. There’s no harm in giving in on this matter, after all; she did provide the palm-print he requested. “Gideon, report on the time aberration.”

“The Pilgrim is targeting Leonard Snart at age 17,” Gideon’s mechanical voice, stripped of all emotion, says. “Central City. 1629 Handley Avenue.”

Len can feel his brow furrowing. Handley Avenue. That’s where he grew up.

His father’s old house.

Where Lisa lived.

“We go there now,” he says, and his voice is cold, cold, cold, so cold that even the ghosts flinch away, that Sara instinctively takes a step back, and Len turns on his heel and goes back to the bridge.

Sara and the ghosts follow behind him.

“Is he always like that?” he hears her ask.

“It’s always cold when he looks at you,” Barry tells her in return. “Always.”

“Always?”

“He’s a necromancer,” Cisco says. “He’ll die when someone kills him, and then his spirit will be ripped apart by his own ghosts, and only then will we be free. That’s kinda the way it works.”

“Holy crap,” Sara says. “That’s – awful.”

Len waits for the door to the bridge to slide open, then strides in.

“Tell me about this Pilgrim,” he says.

“She is the Time Masters’ most deadly assassin,” Rip replies promptly. Perhaps he hopes that Len will take pity on his mission. “Her specialization is what the Time Masters call the Omega Protocols – the destruction of an individual’s younger self in order to ensure that they do not live long enough to cause trouble. She’s smart, ruthless, powerful –”

“Enough adjectives. What are her weapons?”

“She’s got a temporal micro-manipulator,” Ray says. “It slows down time in her immediate area. She can use it to stop my lasers, or Firestorm’s flames, or even your cold gun.” He pauses. “Do you still have a cold gun?”

Len vaguely recalls Barry mentioning some temperature-themed weapons that had been stolen from STAR Labs before Len had taken it over. That would have worked quite well with a ‘cold’ persona, if he’d been interested in doing something like that.

“I don’t need a gun,” Len reminds Ray.

Might be cool, though.

Heh.

Cool.

Because it’s a cold gun.

Sometimes Len wishes he had someone to tell these stupid puns to.

Every time he tries to tell it to one of his ghosts, that part of him in his chest – the old him, the one from before, the one who can do nothing but suffer – screams in agony that he can almost hear; Len’s not sure whether it’s because it’s mean to impose puns on unwilling victims or if he’s remembering what it was like to have real friends, but he avoids it regardless.

He has to cut himself off from those feelings, or else he’d never get anything done.

“She’s trained with multiple forms of weaponry and close combat,” Sara volunteers. Helpful revenant; yes, Len will definitely have to keep her, too. “We’ve seen her use handguns, laser guns – she fought me with improvised weaponry, like chair legs and police batons.”

“How familiar is she with ghosts?” Len asks.

“Not at all,” Rip says. “Like most Time Masters, she likely doesn’t believe they exist.”

“Good,” Len says. He looks them over. “I’d like a few of you to come with me to make sure I identify the right person. Which of you would be able to identify her without stabbing me in the back?”

“If you’re gonna kill us to be sure about that, none of us,” Jax says.

Len rolls his eyes. “I’ve already made clear that I’m not killing you until I know I can run this ship without you. You’ll be under guard by ghosts, but you’ll be alive.”

“We all can identify her,” Ray says.

“Fine. You, Jax, and Sara will do,” Len says, nodding at the ghosts holding them down to release them. “Come along by your own free will. If you don’t want to, you’ll be dragged. It doesn’t matter to me which you select.”

They come with him, but the expressions on their faces are mulish.

Not good with authority. Len’s okay with that.

“Why us?” Ray asks.

“Because Rip and Kendra are more likely to stab me in the back on principle,” Len replies.

“You know I’m usually sent out with Grey when there’s a fight brewing, right?” Jax says. “We bond together to become Firestorm. It’s a whole thing. By myself I’m just a high school quarterback with a torn ACL.”

“And I don’t even have my suit,” Ray adds.

“Given that all I need from you is your eyes and your brain,” Len says, “I’m sure you’ll both do fine.”

They look surprised. “You don’t want us to fight?” Sara asks.

“Why would I?” Len says, waiting for the Waverider to land and the door to open, which it does with a hiss of pressure.

Handley Avenue awaits.

Len remembers this street. He’s pretty sure that in his time, it’s been completely demolished, except for the corner store with the ice cream that his grandfather used to deliver. After Len’s grandfather died, the owner would look the other way when Len was stealing food for Lisa.

Len had given the owner and his family a free escort out of Central City, with a warning that Len was only inclined to give get out of jail cards once.

He steps out into the warm summer air.

He breathes in the scents of his childhood: the smell of concrete and asphalt, grass and dirt smudged on lawns that barely deserved the name, the sticky smell of drying paint.

And as he exhales, his power goes out, too, and the ghosts come to his call.

Friendly, unfriendly, it doesn’t matter; he is powerful enough not to care.

He is empty enough not to care.

They come and they come and they come, until Len’s armies surround him, strong but unseen.

“Report,” he says.

“A woman is approaching the house from the back,” one ghost says. “And four men are leaving through the front – Family men, Don Tomio and his sons, and a local man, an enforcer.”

Len nods, recalling the instance. Don Tomio’s son had taken a swipe at him, and Len had recoiled, and he’d gotten a bottle bashed over his head in the meantime. He’d lain there for hours, bleeding on the flood, while his father took the Family representatives elsewhere – hours and hours, until Lisa came home and found him on the ground. She called the ambulance and saved his life.

The hospital got the glass out, but it had been too long to heal properly: the scars remained, and the flesh on his head pulled a little every time he smiled.

Luckily he doesn’t smile too much anymore.

He glances at the trio of the living.

“The woman,” Ray says. “That’s probably her.”

They avoid the men in the front and go to the back. The Pilgrim is dressed in skintight vinyl, with leather straps, looking like –

“Trinity from the Matrix?” Len asks. “Really?”

“So creepy how just like him you are,” Sara mutters. “So creepy.”

Len ignores her and walks forward, leaving the others behind.

She smirks when she sees him.

“Are you here to stop me from killing your younger self?” she asks. “By yourself? Really?”

Len looks at her. She looks cruel.

“Why do you want to kill me?” he asks.

“My orders –” she starts.

“You don’t need to follow them,” Len says. “‘I was just following orders’ is no excuse.”

Except for his servants, of course.

She scoffs and lifts a futuristic-looking gun, pointing it at him. “I’ll enjoy this,” she says conversationally. “I’ll kill you now, and then I’ll kill your younger self, too.”

“Even though I would be no further threat after the first murder?” Len inquires.

“Just for fun,” she confirms.

“Good to know,” Len says. “I always enjoy killing the cruel most.”

At least, he thinks he does.

She’s about to laugh at him, he thinks, when his ghosts descend upon her.

The battle is short and anti-climactic, at least to him, who knew the outcome from the first moment battle was joined.

The Pilgrim takes a little longer to catch on.

She fires wildly at them, which they solidify to catch in their bodies to avoid collateral damage from her bullets hitting anyone else; they are dead, after all, and it doesn’t hurt them as much as it would the living. She wield some sort of device to slow them down, but more approach from other directions.

She spins, slowly, on one foot, freezing them all –

And the ghostly hands of a poltergeist reach up from the earth to rip her apart at the knees.

A ghostly hand clamps over her mouth as she tries to scream, ghostly hands catch her as she falls, the ghosts move again as the temporal micro-manipulation device fails, yanked off of her, still clutched in her glove - with the hand inside of it still intact.

And then the ghosts are too many for Len to see what happens next.

No matter. He knows.

“Holy crap,” Sara says.

“Suddenly I get why he never uses ghosts for shit like that,” Jax says, sounding ill. “Or didn’t, anyway.”

There’s a noise from the house.

1629 Handley Avenue. His father’s house.

Len frowns and turns.

“Get out of here,” a ghost bellows, standing outside the back yard. One of Len’s, yes, by right all the dead are his, and yet also not one of his. This ghost, he’s strong. Amazingly strong, incredibly strong – he’s so strong, he’s practically shining to Len’s eyes. He’s rich with the warmth of life.

Len hasn’t been warm in so long.

“Get away, all of you!” the ghost continues, looking panicked. He keeps glancing behind him. “Lisa, dial the number already! We need to get the ambulance before any of these ghosts come any closer!”

This ghost knows Lisa.

This ghost –

“Is that Mick?” Ray asks.

“It’s gotta be,” Jax says. “The timeline’s twisted enough to change Len’s memories, but it hasn’t actually settled yet, so Mick hasn’t totally disappeared.”

“Yeah, he looks just like the one we pulled out of the burning house back in the ‘30s,” Sara says.

This ghost is at his house. He shines with Len’s life, life from long ago – life from before Len became what he is now, when his power was still warm, not cold.

This ghost talks to Lisa. He knows Lisa, and Lisa knows him.

Len feels it again, that pang, deep in his chest. That feeling of emptiness. That sense of wrongness.

Something is missing.

Could it be that the crew was telling the truth about their terrible mistake, about removing someone from the timeline and robbing Len of his presence?

Could this man, this ghost, really be Len’s partner?

No.

Surely –

It's impossible.

It has to be impossible.

If Len had a partner, someone he loved and trusted, he might have something to live for: something that would make him think twice about doing something terrible, something foolish, something permanent, and Len can’t risk that.

Len can’t risk not being there for Lisa when she needs him. Len can’t risk not having done what he needed to do. Len can’t have let this man, this ghost, substitute for what really matters. For Lisa, for Lisa's life. And more than that -

Len can’t risk starting to feel again.

He can’t.

Because if he did, he’d have to actually feel everything he’s done. Everything he’s lost. All that suffering, returned seven-fold, climbing into his brain, paralyzing him.

No!

But something is still missing.

Sara said, earlier, and Jax repeated it now, that the timeline hadn’t set yet. That there was still an opportunity to return the teenage boy back to his original death, to make sure that his ghost would be there, eventually, ready for Len to meet. Ready to change Len’s life.

Ready to make Len human again. To make him feel everything he's been insulated from feeling.

Len grits his teeth.

He can’t permit that to happen.

If the timeline will not do its duty and eliminate this ghost from Len’s timeline, then Len will do it himself.

He gathers his power, thick in his chest, and he reaches out –

#dccoldwave #mick rory #leonard snart #Jefferson Jax Jackson #sara lance #Kendra Saunders #Ray Palmer #martin stein #rip hunter #deadfic #my fic

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labdiary · 4 years ago

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From the Cultural Revolution to the Gene Therapy RevolutionMay 4, 2020

Guangping Gao, PhD, is professor and director of the Horae Gene Therapy Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA. Over the course of three decades, Gao has made profound contributions in the area of adeno-associated virus research, initially working with James M. Wilson, MD, PhD, director of the gene therapy program at the University of Pennsylvania. Gao has received multiple honors in recognition of his service, expertise, and dedication. For example, he was named president (2019–2020) of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.

Gao has published 250+ research papers, six book chapters, and four edited books, and has fulfilled editorial responsibilities for several gene therapy and virology journals, including the Human Gene Therapy, a journal that Gao currently serves as deputy editor-in-chief. Gao recently spoke to Kevin Davies, PhD, executive editor of Human Gene Therapy, about his remarkable life journey and hopes for the future of gene therapy. (The interview originally appeared in Human Gene Therapy, Vol. 31, Nos. 3 and 4, published by Mary Ann Liebert. Kevin Davies, PhD, executive editor of Human Gene Therapy, conducted the interview.)

We will get to your preeminent research and leadership in the gene therapy field, but let’s start at the beginning.

Gao: I grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Around 1975, I was compelled to leave my studies and go to the countryside to receive additional “education” from farmers and peasants. My dream about new medicine really starts there. I interacted with farm laborers on a daily basis, and I saw many of them suffer from various diseases and painful conditions.

I was trying my best to use acupuncture and traditional medicine to help them, but I wished I could have some “magic medicine” to make a more substantial impact, particularly for the elderly and people with cancer.

In 1978, I was one of the first generation of students to enter college after the Cultural Revolution. I was admitted to a medical university in Chengdu, Sichuan. I worked on drug development and medicinal chemistry. In 1988, I graduated from the university and got an opportunity to come to the United States, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO). I was looking for opportunities to develop the next generation of medicines that I had dreamed about back on the collective farm.

I started my PhD at Miami Children’s Hospital and Florida International University with my mentor, Reuben Matalon, a pediatrician and medical geneticist. He was a prominent researcher on rare diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Hurler, and Gaucher. His major contribution as a geneticist was the discovery of the biochemical defect in an inherited leukodystrophy called Canavan disease.

I remember it well—I published that paper in the early days of Nature Genetics!

Gao: Yes, thank you! I joined his lab in 1989. My assignment was to isolate the genes and the mutations responsible for Canavan disease. Working with my lab mentor, Rajinder Kaul, I discovered the gene and mutations for Canavan disease and published my thesis work in Nature Genetics in 1993.1

After that, I asked myself, what’s my next step? Because we saw many Canavan patients at these centers, we knew exactly what was going wrong with those kids. We had to figure out a way to fix it. In 1993, I decided to look for the next generation of medicine, specifically at the opportunities in gene therapy for genetic disorders. Finally, Jim Wilson accepted me as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Human Gene Therapy.

The first task Jim gave me was to create new generations of adenovirus. At that time, adenovirus vector was much hyped because it has a high transduction efficiency. Because we knew adaptive immunity/immunotoxicity is a major issue for adenovirus, we decided to cripple the virus further to make it more replication defective. This might prolong transduction efficiency and stability in tissues.

I spent about two years there, first making a cell line to complement the crippled virus. Then we used that cell line to create the further-crippled virus. (You need to transcomplement its growth with E1 and E4.) They called this third-generation virus at the time. We demonstrated that, yes, virus can reduce liver toxicity in mice and immunotoxicity and prolong expression substantially.

When I published that work in 1996,2 I said to Jim, “I’d like to move on and start my career in industry because I have two kids to raise.” I was 38 at the time. He said, “No! Why leave? I’m going to give you a job.” He told me they were trying to apply the next-generation adenovirus vector for clinical trials. There was a lab called the Human Applications Lab, a GMP facility at Pennsylvania Hospital where scientists were trying to grow the virus for multiple clinical trials, but they could not grow it well.

My career in gene therapy started from there. I spent about two years making the virus work. In the first two weeks, I was able to generate high quantities of virus. Jim was in his office, talking to a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer. I told Jim, “I got the virus, and they are 1013 or 1014.” Jim said to the reporter, “Now we can even swim in this gene therapy vector!”

By that time, we were doing several clinical trials in cystic fibrosis, ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC), mesothelioma, and others. By early 1998, we wanted to look for new viruses, the next generation of gene delivery vehicles. I started working with AAV prototypes such as AAV-2, AAV-1, and AAV-5. Those were the first serotypes to attract a lot of interest and development.

Who first identified AAV? Was it discovered serendipitously?

Gao: Yes, it was discovered in 1965 from some adenovirus preps. They called it adeno-associated virus (AAV) because when they purified the adenovirus and looked at it under a microscope, it was a very small virus in the company of the much larger adenovirus.3 I think Arun Srivastava and others sequenced AAV. Nick Muzyczka, Jude Samulski, Barrie Carter, and others started vectorizing—demonstrating you can create a vector in transduced cells very easily. Many groups then demonstrated that AAV can transduce animals in vivo. The difference is that adenovirus only sustains for a maximum of two to four weeks. But AAV—at that time, primarily AAV-2—can sustain for hundreds of days.

My first task with Jim was to figure out how to produce a scalable manufacturing process. I started making cell lines, creating adeno-AAV hybrids. I published a paper in 1998.4 We converted a transfection-infection system into a total infection system that generates tons of AAV. Working with my colleague Guang Qu, we developed a column purification system using heparin-binding columns in early 2000.

Then on September 17, 1999, this tragic event with adenovirus OTC gene therapy happened, and we lost 19-year-old Jesse Gelsinger. For the entire field, it was a drop from a peak to a deep valley. We experienced 10 years of dark ages for gene therapy. I continued my AAV work. We started the first AAV-2 limb-girdle dystrophy clinical trial with Jerry Mendell (Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH) and colleagues at Penn such as Hansel Stedman and Lee Sweeney. We started the trial using the vector produced with my manufacturing methods under GMP conditions.

After the Gelsinger tragedy, was there added urgency and commitment to establish AAV as an alternative vector?

Gao: Absolutely. We started working with adenovirus, based on the discovery by Yiping Yang (formerly at Duke, now at Ohio State). He discovered immunotoxicity of adenovirus. My job was to reduce that adaptive immunity to adenovirus. But we overlooked this innate immunity, this cytokine storm, which killed Gelsinger.

I had initially started with AAV-2, but we did not really think about AAV-1 and AAV-5, or about discovering new AAVs, until Gelsinger. Then we realized, when you compare the two vectors, adeno is much more efficient. But for immunotoxicity, AAV is much, much better than adeno. Jim and I thought, if we can find a virus as efficient as adeno but without immunotoxicity, that should be the future of gene therapy. Gelsinger was an additional driving force for me to discover new AAVs.

I started work in 2001, and soon we discovered a library of new AAVs in nonhuman primates. We published our first paper in 2002.5 That paper became the hottest paper in the field and gave us new hope to work on the next generation of gene therapy vectors.

How did that discovery come about?

Gao: Back in the winter of 2001, after we found some virus sequences, I presented the PCR data to Jim Wilson at a lab meeting. I could tell his mind was spinning:“Is this real or not?” After the meeting, he said, “Guangping, I think you stepped on a goldmine.”

I started with nonhuman primates. We found that we can detect AAV in any animal. You never run into anyone with absolutely no AAV. It is in any tissue. In any PCR reaction, I always found multiple AAVs. That tells you how diverse [it is], how rapidly AAV is evolving. Then we published our second paper about nonhuman primate viruses, demonstrating AAV evolution.6

At what point did you expand or focus the search for new AAVs in humans?

Gao: You can find AAV everywhere. You can find a different AAV in the same samples. That’s why AAV is amazing to me! As the initial discovery was based on nonhuman primates, I asked Jim in late 2002, “Should we move into human tissues?” He agreed. We discovered AAV-9, which is the first “super virus” for gene therapy from humans, in January 2003.7 Our objective was to develop AAV to be as potent, as efficient, as adenovirus for transduction. But we wanted them to have much less immunogenicity. I think we accomplished that (Figure 1).8

We did not go through the traditional viral isolate characterization. We focused on PCR amplification of the capsid because we realized biology is only determined by the capsid. We didn’t need anything else. We designed PCR primers in the conserved region and amplified through hypervariable regions, generating a new virus capsid with new biology.

When did you move to the University of Massachusetts?

Gao: I moved in 2008. At the time, under the Life Sciences Initiative, then-governor Deval Patrick gave $1 billion to promote biomedicine in the state. Our dean, Terry Flotte, and the chancellor, Michael Collins, wanted to take the momentum to set up three centers in gene therapy, stem cells, and RNA interference. They recruited me from Penn to UMass to set up the gene therapy center.

I continued my AAV discovery, and collaborating with Terry and others—including researchers at the New Iberia (Louisiana) Research Center, a non-human primate facility—we were able to get some primate tissues and start to look for AAV from chimpanzees. We discovered hundreds of AAVs similar to AAV-1, AAV-6, AAV-4, AAV-3, AAV-5, and even AAV-9, which I discovered from humans. I did not know other primates also have AAV-9.

How would you describe the repertoire of AAV vectors? To what degree can researchers adapt these vectors?

Gao: We have now isolated new AAVs from 850 human surgical tissue samples. And we have about 1100 new AAVs. We found large amounts of AAV-2, AAV-3, and AAV-8 in human tissues. My AAV-8 was initially isolated from monkey lymph nodes, but now we see it everywhere in humans. If you talk about the natural reservoir of AAV, I think there is still a lot there.

Of course, now the field has moved to new directions. In addition to a natural reservoir, scientists have started doing directed evolution, rational design, and machine learning. They will complement our original discovery. In the AAV field now, in the clinic, I’d say 98–99% is still the natural AAV as a gene therapy platform, but there are many other AAVs in development by those other methods.

What are the remaining hurdles? Is manufacturing still a challenge?

Gao: If we want to develop clinical AAV gene therapy and commercialize the drugs, we have to overcome four barriers:

Manufacturing. Currently, if you want to use a gene therapy for eyes, for localized delivery to the brain, you don’t need much. Current technology is good enough. But if you want to do things like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cross the blood-brain barrier, it may require up to 1016 viruses for each patient. In commercial terms, the current maximum scale is probably 1018. But if you are going to use gene therapy and commercialize the drug, usually you need to be on a scale of 1020. We are at least one or two logs away. Generating large quantities of highly potent virus is the number-one barrier we face in the field. This contributes to a major portion of the high cost of gene therapy.

Immunotoxicity. As we are giving AAV at much higher doses, preexisting immunity, innate immunity, and adaptive immunity to capsids and transgenes will become an issue. Some immunotoxicity with high-dose injections is starting to show up. We have to manage this.

Choice. People ask me, “Which AAV do you recommend if I want to target the brain?” That’s a hard question because my understanding, based on natural AAV, is you can either have an efficient or inefficient AAV. There is really a lack of a true tissue tropism, a true cell or tissue specificity. It doesn’t matter how you create a new AAV, that is the area we have to fight for. Eventually we will get there. We’ll make a designer AAV for a certain disease and certain targeted tissue.

Expression. When we do gene therapy, we typically think the more expression, the better. Soon, we will realize that sustained expression at a high, superphysiologic levels may not be good. Particularly with some haploinsufficient diseases, you may run into problems.

References 1. Kaul R, Gao GP, Balamurugan K, Matalon R. Cloning of the human aspartoacylase cDNA and a common missense mutation in Canavan disease. Nat. Genet. 1993; 5: 118–123. 2. Gao GP, Yang Y, Wilson JM. Biology of adenovirus vectors with E1 and E4 deletions for liver-directed gene therapy. J. Virol. 1996; 70: 8934–8943. 3. Hastie E, Samulski RJ. Adeno-associated virus at 50: A golden anniversary of discovery, research, and gene therapy success—A personal perspective. Hum. Gene Ther. 2015; 26: 257–265. 4. Gao GP, Qu G, Faust LZ, et al. High-titer adeno-associated viral vectors from a Rep/Cap cell line and hybrid shuttle virus. Hum. Gene Ther. 1998; 9(16): 2353–2362. 5. Gao GP, Alvira MR, Wang L, et al. Novel adeno-associated viruses from rhesus monkeys as vectors for human gene therapy. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2002; 99: 11854–11859. 6. Gao G, Alvira MR, Somanathan S, et al. Adeno-associated viruses undergo substantial evolution in primates during natural infections. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2003; 100: 6081–6086. 7. Gao G, Vandenberghe LH, Alvira MR, et al. Clades of adeno-associated viruses are widely disseminated in human tissues. J. Virol. 2004; 78: 6381–6388. 8. Wang D, Tai PWL, Gao G. Adeno-associated virus vector as a platform for gene therapy delivery. Nat. Rev. Drug Disc. 2019; 18: 358–378.

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cruzrogue · 7 years ago

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Once upon Starling Woods ~The prompt:

I really want to read: -me

“You laughed in a restaurant but you have an ugly laugh and I thought you were choking, so I spent the last three minutes awkwardly humping you while performing the Heimlich maneuver” AU

which leads to having to get married because its a custom ritual of some dry humping tradition.

The person does land up choking but someone else has to save them because its now an endearing noise.

The end!

“Yes, write it. I want to read it now, too.” -Carol

Well @tdgal1 Carol, your wish is granted. (Hahaha) Hopefully this helps me out of my writing funk. AN OLICITY AU

Once upon Starling Woods

The cold nip in the air as a bundled up with as many layers as she could fit under her old coat steps off a bus and looks at the sign wonderfully decorated for the coming event. Felicity placing the invitation to the event sent to her by her father to join the community as they celebrate the special ceremony of mystical spirits that happens every twenty-one years in her coat pocket.

Noah Kuttler had sent his trusty handyman to pick up his daughter at the station he was so excited to see her in person. He traveled the world to one of the seven spots that held the magic of the planet every three years. Once she would arrive they would have something to eat at the best most extravagant restaurant in all of Starling.

He couldn’t wait to introduce her to Palmer a man of vision. He knew they would most likely hit it off and continue his work. He knew his baby girl was indeed a genius like himself that would configure the networks that helps the spirits travel to every enchanted point every three years.

-~-*-~-

Oliver was basically dragged with his parents to spend quality time as a family. It didn’t help that his baby sister was enjoying his torment. He just came back from an international working expo where he was there selling the newest big thing for his company and he hates to admit when he is feeling ill. So now he has had a bad cough for a few days and refuses to acknowledge it. His mother would have babied him relentlessly and he really didn’t want that with the upcoming ceremony of mystical spirits.

Though days before the event there is a charge in the air and weird unbecoming rules took place. Some just absurd in nature but during this time all things were legal and everyone went with it. People are mindful of many things that can take place for no one would want to upset the life-forces of old and new.

Oliver sighed so hard that his dad elbowed him as a few busy bodies of society made their way to their table.

“Ladies, You all look so delightful today.” Robert Queen chirped. Thea rolled her eyes and Oliver bit his tongue so he wouldn’t comment. Moira gave her respects as the ladies and their husbands sat down to join the Queens.

-~-*-~-

Felicity and her father entered the nice establishment and were heading to their seats when she heard a cackle, it sounded like a farm animal in agony that she once looked out for when she visited a farm with her mother one summer. She learned the Heimlich maneuver after the farmer saved his swine from what it tried to swallow moments before.

Without thinking she walks to the man who stands up as she reaches him and she wraps her arms around him. Well she tries to wrap her arms around his gigantic torso and for some reason he was bucking around trying to free himself and she was half in the air holding on to him. Her legs situating up and down his lean legs as he tries to move the small obstacle off his back. He hears the person’s voice finally as she tries to speak. He just wants this person off of him.

The patrons of the restaurant just look at the spectacle in awe as color ribbons of light surround the man and the petite woman on his back which looks to be an occurrence that no one ever imagines to see in one’s life time.

The woman finally slides off of him as he turns to look at the blond in a heated stance. She looks up at him irritated to say the least.

“What…? Why…? I…” He tried to form a sentence with no luck.

“I tried to save you. You big dumb pine tree.”

“Excuse me? Save me from what? A crazy blond chick?”

“You were choking and your welcome.”

“If I was choking I would know. I was laughing at a joke before having a coughing fit.”

“You laughed in a restaurant but you have an ugly laugh and I thought you were choking, so I spent the last three minutes awkwardly humping you while performing the Heimlich maneuver”

“You were performing something alright but I didn’t need to be ridden by…”

“Oliver!” a voice sounding like his father took him from the woman he was adamantly arguing with and for the first time since he was attacked he notices the crowd.

“Felicity!” another voice from the crowd called out getting her to snap out of the little trance of alternate world she was having with another being. Her eyes wide as she looks around the large room where all eyes are on her.

“Oh my. What have you done sweatheart?” Noah asks even though he was there witnessing the whole thing.

“I… I was just trying…” she let out before a regal woman spoke.

“You married my son.” The woman’s voice leveled that no one could tell if she was upset or not.

Both Oliver and Felicity in unison gasped. Though Felicity recovers first and asks, “Married? I don’t think so.”

“In your pirouette with my son, the spirits linked you through matrimony to my baby boy.”

“Mom? What do you mean?”

“Look at your ring finger.” Robert answered for his wife.

Both looked down to their own fingers and there it was proof of binding of two souls a rare mineral wrapped around their ring fingers.

“Felicity did you not see the guiding light around you and now my new son happening?”

“Um… no I was just wrapped around this Neanderthal as he was whipping me around.” She says in her defense.

Oliver just listening and looking at the people around him some already congratulating him on his fortune. He just states he needs a drink and heads to the bar.

“Hey, hey we need to talk.” Felicity calls out to the stranger she only knows as Oliver.

“Well you’re my new sister so welcome to the family. Good luck.” The girl with long brown locks says as she’s already two shades red from laughing.

“I need a drink.” Felicity mutters as she goes to sit by her now new husband. There are all sorts of people congratulating them which feels strange because they don’t know each other. “Well I didn’t expect that.” She says as she situates herself on the bar stool.

“Do you not know anything of the mystical inclinations?”

“I know enough.” She responded.

“Apparently not. You just jumped me and hence I now have a wife.”

“Um I guess that was a mistake, I really thought you needed help.”

“I guess that must be true. The spirits wouldn’t bind us if you did that out of malicious.”

“Wait? How many times has someone or somebodies…”

“Felicity.” Her father’s voice cut her off as he approaches with the Queens slightly behind him.

“Oliver.” His mother called out getting his attention and as his father made his way near him said, “It is time we head home for some needed privacy and some important matters.”

-~-*-~-

A year later for their anniversary Felicity is talking to a couple when she hears her husband cackle that once upon a time was an awful sound but now it was charming to her. Not that to hear it should be surprising this wonderful man got sick a few days ago but the stubborn fool just wouldn’t see his physician.

She came to Starling Woods to visit her father which was to be a temporary family visit during the ceremony of mystical spirits and landed up being a permanent resident. Her fitted dress something that was normal for a Queen hung around her gracious curves and highlighted the bump she caressed during diner. Her mind on baby names as she spoke to another couple their ages. She couldn’t be any happier as she glowed with the serenity of knowing everything was as it should be.

She heard though how her dad was a little bummed out that she never had a chance to meet Palmer in a different way. Her dad had planted seeds before she made it to this wonderful location as a perfect match. A man who loved working with the networks like himself. He knew his daughter would enjoy a man of his talents. But, to her joyful knowledge her dad came to love Oliver as he got to know his new son-in-law. He couldn’t gripe due to how the spirits proclaimed that his daughter’s match was made. He was beyond ecstatic to know of a future grandchild.

-~-*-~-

Oliver was very pleased with dinner. They were at the same restaurant that he came in once as a bachelor to leave married by the essence of the world to a woman who could infuriate him or go to the other side of the spectrum to make him the happiest man on Earth.

To say the least that their wedding was a learning curve as both had no clue much about the other. That was a very interesting wedding day and after everyone left them to talk alone he decided to start by introducing himself.

“Hi, I’m Oliver Queen.”

“Yes, yes. I know. Does that mean I should be a Queen too?”

“We probably should discuss this. My family’s lawyers will ask.”

“Well I’ve been Felicity Smoak for twenty-three years. Four of them as a legal adult.”

“Okay, I’m twenty-eight years of age. I’m a Taurus and I like the color blue but my wardrobe is overwhelmed by the color green thanks to my kid sister.”

“So, you were like seven when you celebrated the first ceremony here?”

“I guess so. Have you been to any other mystical points?”

“Yep. When I was young before my dad got caught up in the networks. My mom didn’t like traveling every third year as my dad eagerly set up for the next ceremonial event.”

They continued talking about small things every day by their anniversary they knew each other as if they have known one another since forever. The excitement that soon they would welcome their first child on their minds as they went to celebrate the date that held so much meaning.

That when he put the thicker piece of meat into his mouth he began to choke. He was in trouble if he couldn’t muster to get his wife’s attention. She was just so blissful in her conversation of names and such that listening to him guffaw didn’t make her look his way. Not until the commotion of a man helping her husband by giving him the Heimlich maneuver. Felicity had her hand held to her mouth startled but very, very thankful to the Samaritan that saved her husband’s life.

The End

#Olicity #oliver queen #Felicity Smoak #a crazy prompt

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littlemisswonton · 7 years ago

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The great generation gap of China: How “Mao’s generation” and their children are driving each other crazy

(A Chinese propaganda post to promote the one-child policy. Image from jschina.com)

China’s generation gap is so big you have to imagine Kim Jong-un fathering Donald Trump. Sort of.

What I’m talking about are two generations that each play a major role in the modern Chinese society: “the Mao’s generation” born in the decade following 1949 - the year when China officially became Communist - and their children, dubbed “the post-80 generation”, who were born after China’s economic reform in 1978.

“The Mao’s generation”, now in their 60s, are Communist through and through. They have many siblings (a result of Mao’s post-war family-planning policy); they recited Chairman Mao’s philosophy as a teenager; they worked one job in a state factory throughout their life; they believed the power of collectivism; and they want to be THE SAME as their peers, from what morning exercise they should do to when they should have a grandchild.

“The post-80 generation” are, in many way, very different. They are the only child in their family; they grew up watching Titanic and listening to Backstreet Boys; they study English not Russian, and compete to work for Fortune 500 companies; they learn to satisfy not sacrifice their own needs; and they don’t mind being different from the others - some of them even want to be outstanding.

No other country in the world is seeing two generations growing up under such different social backgrounds. “Mao’s generation” were told capitalism was the most “evil” thing in the universe; then they have to watch their children buy Gucci handbags, sing American hip hop and date Westerners.

Now here comes the problem. They are a family, and they have to get on with each other. “The Mao’s generation” are the parents. In the Chinese culture, it means they have absolute authority and should be obeyed with no exception. However, having grown up in a completely different social settings, “the post-80 generation” have their own expectation of life and moreover, they are the ones who have the financial power nowadays.

Thus, the great generation gap of China emerged.

(My mum, front left, and her dorm mates took a rare group photo during their spring festival break in 1972. They had been sent to rural Anhui from Shanghai to “learn about life from farmers” a year earlier aged 17.)

My mum and I are a typical example. My mum was born five years after Chairman Mao declared the founding of People’s Republic of China. She was the middle child of five siblings growing up under the brightly red “Five Stars” flag of China. Her most glowing childhood memory was to be selected to walk the National Day parade along the main thoroughfare of Shanghai to mark the country’s 20th birthday. She often says: “I was only 158cm, and the requirement for height was at least 160cm, but miraculously they let me in. Maybe because I stood really straight.”

My mum has never stepped out of line once in her life - something she is extremely proud of. For all of her life, she has followed the orders of the government - willingly and wholeheartedly. What is democracy? She is not sure. “Sometimes, it’s better to have just one say and one leader in one big family” - that’s what she thinks.

When her peers in the west were singing the Beatles, watching James Bond and chanting “make love not war”, she spent her most youthful years doing farm work in the middle of nowhere every day for eight years - after her country told her to. She never complained, because that was what her great leader ordered; and more important that was what everybody else was doing too.

She married her first boyfriend - my father - after meeting him on a blind date in a park through one of her comrades who she had done the farm work with. She had me when her elder brother and elder sister had their own child. It had never occurred to her that she should perhaps follow her heart and make her life differently.

She worked for a state-owned factory that manufactured valves for 30 years until the factory could no longer sustain itself in the market economy, so she retired. To my mum, she just wants to be like everybody else - it makes her feel secure and accepted.

(My mum, middle left, and her siblings, two nieces and parents, front row, are seen in this rare family portrait.)

I love my mum, and my mum loves me. But we cannot have a peaceful conversation for longer than 10 minutes. This is something I feel extremely sad about. I truly wish we could.

One major headache is Communist parents don’t have any concept of personal space or privacy because they themselves were never given any. For my mum, it is natural for her to enter my room without knocking, read my diary without permission and still hand-wash my knickers after I tell her not to. Because for her and her generation, they never had any privacy in their life, they were never given any chance to deal with their own life.

They had no say when they were sent to live on the farm - the living condition was so poor my mum and her comrades had to wash themselves in their tiny dorm room without any privacy curtains. They also had no choice when the government made the decision on behalf of them on how many children they were allowed to have. After China opened up its economy, they were also the first ones to lose their jobs because their state-run factory couldn’t survive competition. These major misfortunes in life were later reflected in a million small things here and there that cause difficulties between them and their child.

The other problem is that they faithfully believe that we should all be the same - just like how they wore the same clothes in the same material, same design and the same colour when they were young. We should all get married at 28, then have a child before 30, then give the child to them to raise - so they could have something to do after retirement.

My mum is a typical reflection of the faceless millions of people in her generation. The one word you’d often hear she says is “the others”. For example, she frequently says to me: “How am I ever going to explain to THE OTHERS when they ask me why you’re divorced?” When I ask: “Who are THE OTHERS?” My mum never answers the question (as if she is guarding a state secret) - it could be a nosy neighbour, her siblings, friends or former colleagues. Here is the point: having been on the receiving end of hard-core Communist education in her formative years, the impact of peer pressure on my mum is 10 times greater than one could ever imagine. For her it’s absolutely essential to be able to answer the others and to be able to be like the others.

This is the one thing I find most difficult to deal with. It’s really an “asteroid hitting earth” moment every time I hear the word “the others”.

I would tell her: “Mum, I am not living my life for THE OTHERS? Just tell them it’s not their business.” But she would tell me I have been corrupt by Western culture and have forgotten that she is my mum - which means she is the one entitled to make decisions, not me.

Whenever that happens, I could see the gap between us is so wide even Yangtze River could flow through. I am feeling sad about this, but there is really nothing I could do about it.

My mum and I are by no means unique. Many of my friends and acquaintances around me face similar problems - their parents would pressure them to get married, instruct them what partner they should find (or find a partner for them at the marriage market), or “teach” them how to educate their own child.

(When my mum and I are having a “civilised” phone conversation.)

Despite the difference between my mum and me, I have a lot of respect and sympathy for her generation. They are the “lost generation” of China - who lost their their youth, their opportunity to study, their rights to have more than one child and their ability to see that life could really be decided by themselves. They sacrificed their own lives for the Chinese leaders to test a social model - the great collective economy - that later proved to be unfeasible.

My mum wouldn’t be able to see this post because she doesn’t read or speak English. And sadly I really couldn’t live my life the way she wishes just to make her happy.

I would try to say this to her next time when we are on the right side of each other, but for now let me just write here: mum, I am sorry I can’t be the daughter you have in mind, but I love you and will always do.

#generation gap #generation gap in china #communist china #chinese parents

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thecenemiway · 7 years ago

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Nation

After the Oahk Empire dissolved, Cene developed in much less unusual ways. Now culturally dominant but a distinct minority, we had to reevaluate what parts of the Cenemi way could no longer be held to. Having settled down under Oahk, we found that modern life had progressed to the point where traveling was expensive and no longer useful. We were left with large ownership stakes in some of the first mass transit companies to build continent-spanning networks, and a large surplus of yellows relative to the caste balance of other nations, but otherwise lived as any farmer country. That we now shared land and government with farmers, even if they were farmers who understood, respected, and in some ways emulated proper Cenemi tradition, made this transition easier.

There was concern that we would have to reduce yellow permissions sharply not long into our history. Fortunately, this was done slowly. We compensated by having an informal rite of passage of going abroad for a year or two to work somewhere less oversupplied for yellow work and hence better-paid; a practically-motivated wanderjahr.

Before we cut our yellow fraction too deeply came the computing revolution. Some have claimed that programming is a yellow job because of an international yellow conspiracy to lay claim to the new territory. I was not alive for it, but I can certainly tell you from historical experience that Cene proves that yellow coordination can be quite powerful; translators, by their nature, speak with their counterparts across the globe, and feel tighter bonds to people who share a caste but not a country than less cosmopolitan castes or even blues. In any case, it could not have come at a better time for Cene; as other countries ramped up yellow credits fiercely, we switched from a modest reduction to a modest increase. Our credits were more expensive than any other country’s yellow credits, and other than to Voa and a few other places using their permissions system it was nearly impossible for a yellow to swap out until recently, but as a nation we prospered. The wanderjahr continued, just to meet the enormous demand across the globe.

Which brings us to the modern day. Today, though we have our traditions and they have spread to most of the country by osmosis, we are much like other nations. A foreigner in Cene will not notice much different. There are a few ways we still display our heritage, however.

The mercantile and itinerant history of our culture leaves its mark in what we consider worth of emulation. Our blues are more finance-oriented than most, and it would be considered shameful for one to not speak at least three languages by their first spring, or five if they intend to work in politics or foreign affairs. Even our rural purple schools will have at least two foreign languages available to learn. The wanderjahr spread across the more intellectual castes, and has stuck. We do not travel constantly as we once did, but anyone who can reasonably do it spends at least a couple seasons studying or working abroad. It’s rare for farming purples, of course, and for grays most professions find it impractical. Even there it’s common for dancers and of course the naval shipping industry, and I believe our military does significantly more long-term joint training than others. Oranges, greens, and blues manage it more easily, and yellows have of course kept it up. Personally, I spent three seasons in Voa and two in Ochero, writing legal translations.

Ultimately Cenemi has been the kernel of national identity, still the most important cultural, political, and in fact theological strand in a mixed country. Unlike Ochero and others like it, we have a shared identity to access, despite most of our population only dimly grasping where that identity came from. This is what has made Cene the great nation it is today.

#amenta rp #cenemi

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thesffcorner · 5 years ago

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In Real Life

In Real Life is a graphic novel written by Cory Doctorow and illustrated by Jen Wang. It follows Anda, a young girl who has just moved to a new town and isn’t adjusting well. She meets the creator of an MMO called Coarsegold Online and decides to join her all female guild. She becomes really popular in game, especially after joining fellow gamer Sargent to take out gold farmers, and starts getting paid. But when she starts talking to one of the farmers, a fellow 16 year old from China named Raymond, she realizes it’s not as simple as saying farming is bad, and her attempts to help Raymond, may put him into even more danger.

I have only read one other thing by Doctorow, his YA novel <i>Little Brother</i>, and this story is quite similar. It is also about an online game, with the difference here being that Anda lives in ‘our world’, not a futuristic one.

For a start, Wang’s art is beautiful and fluid; I like the brighter colors in the game world vs the regular world, and as always, she excels at facial expressions and conveying emotion. There were even some jokes that got a chuckle out of me like having a BFG in a WoW style MMO, or the game creator wearing a game over shirt.

The story… I had a lot of issues with. I did think it came from a good place, and I found it gripping enough to read it in one sitting. I also found that if you are someone who doesn’t know much about video games or gaming culture, this could serve as a good primer; for me it was a little simplistic, but I don’t hold that against the book.

My issues start with Anda. I had a lot of issues figuring out her motivations and age. She’s supposed to be 16, but she acted like someone who has never left their house, much less spoken to another human in her life. I don’t know any 16 year olds who act or think like she does; granted, I didn’t grow up in a sheltered household in Arizona, but for someone who’s supposedly in a coding class and does play video games, Anda knows nothing about anything! She doesn’t know what farming is, doesn’t know that farms where people can buy gold or in game items are a thing, at one point doesn’t understand voice chat, doesn’t understand how Paypal works, and is just generally so naive and sheltered that she didn’t seem like a real person.

I think the excuse was that she was lonely and was having a hard time adjusting to her new school, her online life being her main source of human connection. But we see that she has real-life friends; she in on of those, ‘you’re not a real gamer if you play Jenga’ D&D groups, so clearly she has other gamer friends. Her connection to Raymond didn’t come off as a genuine friendship between two lonely people, but more like Anda making it her personal mission to help this poor, exploited Chinese boy, which REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. The fact that Raymond was her first exposure to anything in the outside world didn’t help.

There is much one can talk about in online gaming; the kinds of communities that spring up, the proliferation of ideologies, the formation of subcultures, the unique language different communities develop. There are entire communities based on servers, countries and even sub genres of games; there’s no one single gaming community when it comes to MMOs.

There definitely are things that need to be discussed about the oftentimes illegal ways people make money in games; leveling up characters to sell them, having players bid real money on rare or exclusive items, item farming, loot farming, etc. Hell, the game industry itself is capitalizing on these online economies with the deluge of loot boxes, premium currencies and season passes. But the problem isn’t just, some people in China make it a job to farm gold in an MMO for 6 cents an h, the problem is a broken society that operates on capitalism, which by its very nature exploits any industry or hobby and turns everything into ‘profit’.

I liked that Anda trying to help ended up only worsening the situation for Raymond; her meddling with the socio-economic realities in a country she has no idea about, is incredibly short-sighted, ignorant and frankly more than a little white-saviory. I’m not saying educating or spreading information about unions and workers organizing to people from countries who suppress media or information is bad or it shouldn’t be done; having an American girl accidentally cause a walkout of a small group of Chinese gold farmers is. Not only is it insulting, it’s also not going to do much in a country with 1.3 billion people and a state sponsored capitalist economy that actively undermines human rights. It’s just downright reckless to promote a message that just proliferating a call to action in an MMO would be enough to make a substantial change; as someone who saw the Hong Kong protests as they were happening and watched American multi-billion dollar corporations like Disney and Blizzard capitulating to Chinese propaganda to retain their market, this feels… cheap.

In essence I think the message is positive at its core; helping and organizing is our power as humans, and we can potentially make a difference as a collective, whereas we would never be able to do it on our own. But there is a world of difference between organizing in the US vs organizing in China, and the fact that this story centers an American girl getting a Chinese boy fired and then inspiring a walkout… I don’t know. Something about it doesn’t seem right.

This is one of those cases where I don’t want to make you think this was bad; it wasn’t even if I had a lot of problems with the execution of its ideas. I’m very touchy about anything that glorifies ignorant American meddling into other countries’ affairs, even on a small scale like this. I still think the message is good, and if you are curious about how organizing can have an effect even in the virtual world, or if you don’t know much about farming or game economies but want to learn, then give it a read, and decide for yourself.

letterboxd

#in real life #in real life review #moni talks #book review

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tyrannobro · 7 years ago

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The World-Building behind the Pokeyman Sun/Moon/Violence comic Starting with Melemele Island Everything is for fun and took a lot of thought and work from this Ty so pls Don't steal, copy, claim as your own etc... Super rude. Its more creative if you make up your own stuff too ya know

Melemele Island, the lush tropical island of beginnings Current Kahuna: Hau Kahale Former Kahuna: Hala Kahale Guardian Deity: Tapu Koko Capital: Hau'Oli City Main Export: Fruit, Rockruffs Main Import: Fish, Grains -Melemele Island has the only school in Alola. The school is the biggest building next to the mall in Hau'Oli. Professor Kukui, Lillie Kahale nee Bellamy, Ilima Oahu and Mina Kekoa teach here with Samson Oak as the headmaster. Because its the only school in the region, children usually only go for basic Pokemon raising knowledge, the basics and a grasp of an elective of their choice before "graduating". -The Berry Farm spans over the densely forested area of Melemele and it does hold the top tier export of the island after all. It is constantly guarded by Gumshoos fending off the local infestation of Alola Rattata and Raticate. Somewhere between the berry fields and forests is an area dedicated to the other fruits mainly ones that can't be grown in the harsh earth of Akala and Poni or the bipolar weather of Ula'Ula. -Ten Carat Hill houses the population of wild yet easily tamed Rockruffs. Though unintentionally difficult to reach, it tests the trainer to be absolutely sure training one of these aspiring pups is definitely for them. It is the job of the Kahuna to relocate any Lycanrocs and also patrol the terrain daily looking for any stranded trainers. -Kala'e Bay and Seaward Cave have the only float of Totodile and sea dwelling Salamence. The Totodile are tagged and chipped to prevent illegal capture and poaching while the Salamence viciously defend their territory. Only Lana has ever been granted permission to capture a Totodile from here and this is where Baloo captured Timaeus as a young Bagon. -Melemele Sea holds the most aggressive population of Mareanie. The Brutal Star Pokemon though prey on Corsola are also known to pick on small children who are left unattended in the water. There's talks with Ula'Ula to have a specially bred Bruxish imported to keep them away. Until then Ilima has been tasked with lifeguard duty armed with a knife made of Bruxish bone ---------------------------- -Melemele though is known for the delicious fruit it exports, also has the best breeding facilities for Rockruff, Yungoos, Rowlet, Litten and Popplio. -Rockruff variants include: standard, toy, competition, show and stunted. --Standard Rockruffs are usually slightly wild and rarely ever bred intentionally. They come from Ten Carat Hill fresh and are bred to be distributed to stores for anyone to buy or shelters. There's nothing out of the ordinary about them though occasionally one will show up without socks or a patch on the eye --Toy Rockruffs are bred to be small usually with an Eon or Skitty/Delcatty parent. They have short legs with round features and can come with a normal, bobbed or no tail. Because of their small bodies it is illegal to battle them --Competition Rockruffs are bred big with a Mightyena or Arcanine parent. Thick shoulders and deep broad chests are a common feature on them. They're meant for professional battle and guard jobs but nothing else. Casual or even illegal battles will result in loss of trainer license and the Rockruff/Lycanroc will be taken away to be rehomed. They also occasionally have aggression problems and are not meant for casual family life --Show Rockruffs are bred to be eye catching with a Popplio/Brionne/Primarina, Skitty/Delcatty or Buneary/Lopunny parent. Their coats and gait are immaculate. They are usually bred for beauty pageants and contests but its not unheard of to see one in battle. Often they can be found as perfect family pets as their showy and need to please personality makes them easy for children to teach tricks to and cuddle. --Stunted Rockruffs are the worst tier. Usually found in illegal pet mills or the product of bad breeding, stunted Rockruffs usually do not live long fulfilling lives. They're usually plagued with respiratory problems, birth defects or horrible social problems. Not to say finding a stunted Rockruff at a shelter and giving it a loving home is bad, you just have to understand what you're getting into -Yungoos variants include: standard, toy and stunted --Standard Yungoos are usually lightly domesticated with at least one wild parent. Often a native Melemele child receives one at the age of 6 to teach a semblance of responsibility with Pokemon. They are usually kept as a semi-stray at the home if the child doesn't choose to keep it with them. --Toy Yungoos are bred to be more docile usually with a Sentret/Furret or Buizel/Floatzel parent. They have long bodies and fluffy fur with rarer ones having socks or dotbrow marks. These Yungoos are easily picked out by their friendlier and cuddly personalities with a tendency to want to be cuddled up on a shoulder or lap --Stunted Yungoos are bred for baiting. Their bodies are fatter and their legs are unable to move them normally. A stunted Yungoos will be tossed out to well bait a Pokemon into attacking it. They usually do not survive. However stunted Yungoos are sweet and naturally fearful of meeting new people. These Yungoos have no way of defending themselves and withdraw immediately if you raise your voice -Rowlet variants include: Standard and competition --Standard Rowlet are bred but monitored carefully to eliminate defects and the like. They're usually extremely friendly and eager to please whoever winds up taking them. However the rare few with a more headstrong, confident and at times uppity personality are released or returned. --Competition Rowlets usually have a naturally aggressive parent. Like Rufflet/Braviary, Doduo,Dodrio, Noibat/Noivern or even Aerodactyl. Because of this they have to be licensed to be trained for professional battle only. Competition Decidueye have been known to be ruthless and guiltlessly cruel at times -Litten variants include: Standard, toy, competition and stunted --Standard Litten like standard Rowlet and Popplio are bred to take out any negativity. It doesn't work on their attitude however. Litten bred standard are touchy and a bit harder to train. But raised right and your Litten will be a powerful asset to your team --Toy Litten are bred to be pets and nothing else. They can look standard or have floppy ears or a hypoallergenic coat. The toy Litten like any other toy Pokemon is illegal to use in battle. They usually have a Skitty/Delcatty or Espurr/Meowstic parent --Competition Litten are bred often dangerously with a Rockruff/Lycanroc parent. They are extremely hard to train and the license needed to own one is often more trouble then its worth. There are many illegally owned competition Incineroar and when captured they often need to be humanely euthanized due to how dangerous they are. Competition Litten/Torracat/Incineroar require a strict training regime not many are willing to keep and the consequences are severe --Stunted Litten are usually strays wandering the island. Though some are sweet and social enough to feed on the porch, some are not. They're often found in patterns deviating from the norm like tabby, bicolor, blastoiseshell and solid. The blastoiseshell are sought after the most and go from stray to family pet very quickly -Popplio variants include: Standard and show --Standard Popplio don't need as much monitoring to have positive outcomes. Their temperament is fantastic for family and trainer life due to how eager they are to please and need to be social and loved. Popplio raised right will follow an order to the tooth and never disobey unless such disobedience could save their trainer's life --Show Popplio are natural performers straight from the egg. Training them for pageants and contests is easy and very rewarding. Though purebred ones are naturally good, any separate parent can only contribute but rarely take away from the natural skill of the Popplio. ---------------------------- Iki Town -The kahuna manor is here however not many unrelated to him live in town. The population is more Hau'Oli City's thing. Because it seems so deserted, the ones who do live here are friendly and welcoming to everyone. -At night around midnight you can see Tapu Koko wandering the streets looking for something. If you see him, make sure he doesn't see you. No one knows what he's looking for and no one is brave enough to ask Hau'Oli City -The biggest city in Alola and constantly awake and moving. Apartments, hotels, stores, mall and the market. Despite how densely populated it is, everyone is friendly and helpful. -The mall holds: Battle Buffet: Hau and Baloo frequented this place to the point where their photos are on display. Though it can be for casual dining, its more of a thing for people who want to battle and eat. Gracidea: The most expensive clothing store in all of Alola. No one usually shops here unless its for a very special occasion Antiquities of the Ages: Oddly this place is new to Alola and a lot of it's stock comes from Olivia and Mina. Neither of them say where or how they find theses things Slurpuff Smoothies: A place occupied by Slurpuffs and offers a wide variety of delicious smoothies made with fruit, berries and dairy products. Very health concious -The market holds: Berry stand: The berry farmer's wife brings in berries from the field meant to be sold locally MooMoo Milk stand: Dairy products brought from Kiawe's ranch and its usually someone volunteering or Baloo managing the stand The Greens stand: Vegetables. That is all --------------------------------------------------- Iki Festival -A festival held every year presenting a promising child in battle for Tapu Koko to witness. If there are no children of age, everyone just parties and battles Malasada Festival -A recent event implemented by Hau. Everyone literally gathers in Iki Town with malasadas homemade or store bought and eats while watching the stars. Sharing of malasadas is encouraged Pancake Race -Racing with stacks of pancakes. Pancakes are also served. This island has a lot of food festivals

#ty doin stuff #headcanons #world building #comic stuff #super fukn serious too tho #thieves ruin the fandom but ill find you #and ill be far from amused or flattered

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pirate-empress-story · 7 years ago

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CH1 Just a smuggling run Part 1

Elizabeth stood on the wooden dock, her sun-lightened brunette hair tied back in a simple braid. She squinted at her ship, the fallen angel. Elizabeth is a medium height and a little on the plump side, but behind the small layer of blubber are thick muscles. Her blue eye glinted in the sunlight, her right eye hidden behind a black cloth eyepatch. She wore a soft, well-worn canvas shirt that billowed around her torso and arms, and nearly black pants that were loose enough for good mobility. Soft leather boots rose halfway up her calves and a leather belt held her sheathed sword.

There were many ships lined up in the harbor, each one slightly different. Most of the Fishing ships were at the east side of the harbor. They were small with no more than two masts, most of them had slots for paddles, and many of them were time worn and storm beaten. Not far from them were a strange, yet common ship. It looked impossible, looked at from above the ship looked like an eye, the iris was a large holding tank for rare fish, the pupil and whites of the eye were platforms for people to walk upon. The Ships were heavily enchanted, they were filled with water and yet they could float, the tanks were enchanted to not spill their contents, the sails enchanted to catch extra wind. Only rich fishmongers could afford these ships. After the Fish Eye ships were the various cargo ships, all haphazardly pulled into the dock. At the far right of the harbor were where the large military ships would be, if any actually bothered to go all the way out there. Only a single Starlian Military ship floated there, the soldiers that were assigned to it were probably loafing about the town, throwing around their faux prestigious titles and not actually caring about the laws they were supposed to enforce.

The ship that Elizabeth stood admiring was a rather small ship, and an older one as well. The three masts were small and triangular, in the style of the northern islands’ ships. The figure head was a muscular man wearing little more than a loincloth, he had two feathered wings that came out of his back conforming with the ship’s hull. The railing was elegant, hatches for cannons barely broke up the carved wood. The ship had been fixed up recently, it seemed to shimmer brightly in Elizabeth’s eyes, even though few things on it could make it glitter.

Almost all the preparations are finished, there’s not much time now. Elizabeth smiled to herself watching a small handful of people bustle around her.

“It is a nice ship Miss Argall.” A posh voice said behind her, Elizabeth didn’t need to turn, she knew the owner of the aristocratic tone. Erik Leifson, an old friend.

“A wonderful find indeed, and to think it was hidden in a damned cave on the north side of the island.” Elizabeth said over her shoulder.

Currently the two of them Stood on the main dock of the largest (and only) town on the Isle D’Makrel. D’Makrel is a small Island, perhaps 10 miles at its widest point. It was on the outer south eastern of the Starlian Archipelago. The island is known for fishing and textiles. Farms on the sloping hills of the island provide wool, cotton, and silk for weavers and seamstresses in the town. Of course, silk worms and Cotton plants aren’t native to the island, but the farmers have perfected the raising and care for both crops. Large schools of rare fish migrate past the island twice a year, making the fishermen rich with money from larger islands. Needless to say, D’Makrel is a wealthy, yet small island.

“Miss Argall, I think that it is time for us to finalize our agreement, now that you’re ready to set sail and my goods are on board.” The posh man said after a moment of silence. Elizabeth could hear him step over to a barrel that she had been using as a make-shift table.

Elizabeth turned, finally tearing her eyes away from the ship she now called hers. Erik was a tall man. Vibrant orange hair coifed attractively on his head, he kept it shorter around the sides, and long enough on top that his natural elegant wave caused his bangs to fall onto his forehead with a small twist. He had irritatingly pretty teal eyes, with long pretty eyelashes. His eyebrows were trimmed, and other that a light, attractive spackling of freckles no blemish could be found on his face. Today he was wearing a tan suit over a dark brown vest and white shirt with medium brown trousers. His skin was lightly sun-touched and it glimmered in the warm spring air. The monochrome of Erik’s suit only made the rest of his features more attractive, it pissed Elizabeth off. She’d known him since they were children and it pissed her off then too, this bastard had no right to be so pretty.

“Oh right, more paperwork, I thought I had John doing all this crap, he’s better at it.” She grumbled disdainfully.

“Mr. Argall had tried, but I insisted that it was a contract between you and me. He should not sign for you if he has nothing to do with the agreement.” Erik smirked, enjoying causing irritation to his childhood acquaintance.

Elizabeth looked over the scroll the man provided, “Count… right, I forgot your old man bit the dust last year. Sorry for your loss, but not too sorry, you got a county out of the deal.” Elizabeth said brashly.

“He should have died earlier than he did, his last few months he made stupid decisions that I’m still cleaning up. Selfish bastard.”

The Captain laughed heartily at the count’s response. “Cold hearted as ever Count Liefson.” She read through the agreement one last time. “Did you mark which barrel is going to the sea witch?” Elizabeth glanced up at her business partner.

“Yes, rather subtly too, there’s a small floating enchantment on it, once you get into the pi- HER territory, just drop it off the ship, then give the rest of the goods to my men in Galliea.” Erik corrected himself quickly.

“Very well, I’ve got my copy of the agreement here, and you’ve yours there. Now, anything else you need?” Elizabeth sorted out the paperwork on her barrel, passing some to her companion. “I hope the fact that you got the County doesn’t get those Starlian bastards all over my ass.”

“oh, it will, but not until you get into dock. So long as you don’t cause them trouble first.”

“You know as well as I that I’ve already got some enemies in the Realm.” Elizabeth retorted, “if they get a sniff of me it’ll be trouble”

“Oh, I’m aware what you and that minotaur got up to this past year.” Erik smirked, “we both know that could have been avoided with a small ceremony and a long peaceful life.”

Elizabeth snorted with irritation, rolling her eyes. “I’m sorry that I decided to become a pirate over being your adorable little wifey.” She mocked curtsying before lazing her head back to give a look of disgust at Erik.

“Pity too, you’d’ve made a wonderful trophy wife.” He mocked back, “I’d show you off to the king and he’d be envious of me for having such a strong woman to birth my children.”

“Boss! Trouble!” A woman with soft mocha brown fur. If people were shapes, she’d be a triangle, her broad shoulders tapered down into a thin waist. Thin is a relative term here, at the minotaur’s thinnest she was still as thick as a trunk. Gold rings glinted on her bovine ears, the clop of her hooves could be heard as they pounded the cobblestones while she jogged. She wore two large belts that crossed, ruffling the light tan fuzz on her chest. She wore simple white cloth pants with a large brass plate that rested over her navel.

“Whisper! What’s going on?” Elizabeth looked up into her crewmate’s disturbingly human eyes.

The minotaur’s contralto rumbled in her chest as she spoke, “Cale, he hired an academy mage, I-I don’t know why. I thought-I thought I’d tell you and inform… because.” The Bull-woman bent down and panted a moment.

“Don’t worry, I understand the situation. I asked Cale to hire a pair of magical hands so that I don’t have to be awake at all hours, constantly blowing wind in the sails.” Elizabeth smiled gently at her friend, “Erik, this is my good friend Thelly Whisperhooves; Whisper, this is Count Erik Liefson of Isle D’Makrel.” The captain introduced the two politely.

“Good to meet you Miss Thelly Whisperhooves.” Erik bowed a little, “I’ll be off now that everything is in order. I do apologize to leave in such a hurry, I do have places to be, however.” He dipped his head to the two women before spinning on his hill and walking away.

Author’s note: I know that this first part is really really short, but I just couldn’t wait to get it out