#censored and he was indeed right censored does a lot of damage but it also has not a lot of health and is easy to grind through

[arolesbianism]

Aleph quest complete 🎉

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

My laptop is currently updating, so while I have that working in the background, I wanted to share a series of six short, mostly-opera-inspired autobiographical narratives/prose poems I wrote last April and May:

I would kill to have some wine right now.

There is a bottle of red wine sitting on the kitchen counter. My father bought it when he went to the store the other day─ don’t ask me what day it was, I don’t remember, the days already blend together as is─ and I have considered pouring even just a little bit into a glass and downing it.

And then proceeding to throw the glass against the wall and shatter it.

I’ve been contemplating doing that a lot lately.

True, I would kill to have some wine, but if I did go ahead and pour even just a little bit into a glass, and down it, and possibly then proceed to throw the glass against the wall and shatter it, I would most likely be killed before I had the chance to kill.

Kill or be killed. We are all trying our very best to do neither these days, but it happens anyway.

I am sixteen years old. As I start writing this, I am nine days away from turning seventeen. For me, alcohol consumption is thus not only not approved by the Parents, but also illegal. But then again, so is voting blue in the 2020 US Presidential election. That is also something neither approved by the Parents nor legal for me. But I digress.

Thirty-one, twenty-nine, thirty-one again, sixteen now, that makes sixty, ninety-one, one hundred and seven days since I watched one of my classmates get drunk at a New Year’s Eve party. She downed a whole bottle of peach wine (I didn’t even know that was a thing) and looked at me with her red eyes and silver-sequined halter top and curly dark brown hair in a high ponytail. You’re more beautiful than Jesus she told me and you’ll go to the moon on a rocketship. I laughed.

I laugh when something’s so unexpected I can’t do anything else. I laughed when I first heard Notre Dame Cathedral had caught fire because it seemed so ludicrous that I couldn’t do anything else. Notre Dame on fire? You can’t be serious, it can’t be serious.

It was serious.

I’m not sure if she was.

A little part of me wishes she were.

When I was in sixth grade, I told the same girl I thought her hair was luscious. Sixth-grade me didn’t know the word had a sexual connotation; the girl did and was offended.

Maybe a little part of me did know, somehow.

***

As I write this next part, I am working on a paper about state-sponsored censorship. I have picked this topic because it is a fascinating topic, it fits the requirements for the paper─ write about a major global problem─, and because I feel censored myself.

Expressing anything that conflicts with the Parents’ thoughts and opinions is strictly forbidden. If you are different, you are ostracized. I am different, so I am ostracized.

I am too proud, too strong to succumb. But it still hurts.

As I write this, I am listening to Act IV of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, an opera about liberation, appropriate for both me and my paper. At this moment, Hedwige is calling on God, ‘the hope of the hopeless’, to save her husband and break the yoke of oppression that binds Switzerland.

It’s very nice, and the sentiment is good and true, and it works for her and Mathilde and Jemmy and the Swiss women, but it does not work for me. I lost my faith a long time ago. Ironically, it is French grand opéra, the genre to which Guillaume Tell belongs, that is partially responsible for my loss of faith.

It was impossible for me to watch Verdi’s Don Carlos for the first time in eighth grade and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots in tenth and not be horrified by the things people do in the name of religion, to kill people senselessly just because they believe slightly differently than them─ even their own daughters (as is the finale of Les Huguenots).

How can a good God allow such things?

Do I realize these works are fictional? Yes. But do I know they are based on history, on real events? Yes.

“These things are meant to happen; they are all in God’s plan.” Well, can God just not find another way to make what’s meant to happen happen? I cannot believe in a God that allows these things to happen. To say that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God who can allow such things exists is a lie.

***

Now that Guillaume Tell is over, I am listening to another grand opéra, Les vepres siciliennes, albeit in its Italian version, I vespri siciliani. Another opera about occupation and liberation, but a liberation that comes at a horrible cost: the entire French ruling class is massacred by the Sicilians at the end of the opera.

If I didn’t care, I would stage my own personal ‘massacre’: I would turn my back, walk out the front door with the possessions I most needed to survive on my own, and never come back.

But I do care. They may not care, but I do.

One of my greatest curses is that I care about what I care about too much. My heart is too deep to not care.

There are some battles that are not worth being fought.

If a massacre is your only recourse to accomplish something, perhaps you should not do that thing. Or, at least try to find another way.

Right now, I am at the beginning of Act III, at Monforte’s aria “In braccio alle dovizie”. In the original French, it’s called “Au sein de la puissance”. At the breast of power.

Monforte is the hated French governor of Sicily, the revolutionaries’ primary target. When he sings this, he has just learned that one of the main revolutionaries, Arrigo, is his long-lost illegitimate son.

By rape.

‘The breast of power’ indeed.

Just like with a massacre, if rape is your only recourse to accomplish something, perhaps you should not do that thing either.

Just a thought.

I’m a woman. What do I know, in the eyes of many out there?

One of my friends said that Verdi gave Monforte his just deserts, but also overly beautiful music. “He couldn’t help it, though, not when his Dad Music Instincts were activated.”

I feel guilty listening to the aria, even though it is truly a beautiful piece and the recording I’m listening to─ a 1989 recording from the Teatro alla Scala, with Giorgio Zancanaro as Monforte─ is absolutely gorgeous.

Can we separate the music from the character, the art from the artist? I do not know. Everyone has something utterly heinous to someone else. Once we stop separating the art from the artist, where do we begin again? And yet, I do not want to support people who do horrible things to others.

Perhaps it is all relative.

Perhaps everything is.

Perhaps nothing is absolute at all.

That frightens me.

***

Today is Rome’s 2,773rd birthday. As a six-year Latin student and future classics and history double-major, this is cause for celebration.

If things were normal and I were at school, my Latin teacher would bring birthday cake for all the Latin students, and we’d eat it and sing “Felix dies natalis, Roma”. Happy Birthday, Rome.

But things are not normal, and I’m at home multitasking between this and a presentation script for that paper, and still listening to I vespri siciliani.

Now I’m at the end of Act IV. Everyone is celebrating the impending marriage of Arrigo to Duchess Elena, one of the Sicilian revolutionary leaders. Sicilian and French, united at last. Everything is set to work out.

But there’s still Giovanni da Procida, the other major revolutionary leader, who is hellbent on revenge. He sees this wedding as the perfect opportunity to strike down the French once and for all.

And thus, the massacre.

Everything can be set to work out, but there is always something that comes up. A massacre, a pandemic, a set of internal troubles that bring a proud empire to its ruin.

Now I’m in Act V, at Elena’s bolero ‘Merce, dilette amiche’. She has no idea about Procida’s plans; she’s just excited to marry Arrigo and bring peace to her beloved Sicily at last. I think I’m going to change operas again after this is over; the act is rather uneven (though I still very much like it) and I would prefer not to listen to everything falling apart today.

I debate listening to Berlioz’s Les Troyens, the closest thing to an opera about the founding of Rome and a masterpiece itself. But there is still too much about collateral damage for my tastes today: one kingdom falls and another loses its benevolent queen, all in the name of a supposedly greater destiny. And that’s just based on the first third of the Aeneid. I wrote an essay about that first third once for English class, using that thesis; my English teacher said it was one of the best essays he’d ever read. But I digress.

After a quick refresher on the synopsis, I decide to change styles and go with a story from the heyday of the Roman Empire: Handel’s Agrippina. Lots of plotting, but everyone gets what they want in the end and it ends happily for all. No collateral damage here. I am weary of that.

Sometimes I feel like collateral damage.

It’s tough to remember that you’re the master of your own story, not just a side character or a scapegoat in so many others’.

Everyone in this opera knows they’re the masters. That’s the problem. But it ultimately works out.

I want nothing more than for it to work out for me. It hasn’t yet.

But I have a feeling it will.

***

I got maybe halfway through the first act of Agrippina yesterday. I love Baroque opera, but I guess only in small doses.

No matter.

Today I’m listening to the beginning of Act II of Verdi’s Don Carlo. This is the fourth time in a row I’ve listened to it.

I read John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down recently. The main character frequently finds herself stuck in ‘thought spirals’, where she keeps thinking more and more about the same thing. I have those too, although I tend to picture my mind more as a bullet train: it always moves hundreds of miles an hour, faster than I can control, from one thought to the next. I constantly find myself retracing the figurative map of my mind to figure out what I was thinking about, what I need to remember but simply cannot. And it’s like my mind keeps returning to the same stations a lot; these are my equivalent to the spirals.

This opera, this moment, is one of my frequent stations.

Make that five times in a row now. This will be the last, I promise myself.

In this scene, a group of monks chant, praying for the rest of the dead Emperor Charles V, whom, I note with a smile, was himself a character in one of Verdi’s earliest operas, Ernani. In that opera, he sings an aria where he confronts his destiny as the next Holy Roman Emperor. My legacy will live throughout the ages, he sings.

Including in two different Verdi operas.

But there I go again on another bullet-train route.

The monks are singing now, their stark minor-major shifts making me feel as if I am there, in the cloister of San Yuste or in any of the great cathedrals of Spain, looking up into the vaults of the ceiling, of heaven itself, seemingly. The only lights come from candles in my mental picture, and I gaze up, my head uncovered, my mind only partially spellbound, more by the visual beauty and the history than by any religious feeling.

I am a heathen.

I have only been inside a Catholic church once, when I was fourteen; it was an impromptu side trip during a school-sponsored tour of colleges in St. Louis. One of the chaperones said the Cathedral Basilica had can’t-miss art, and thus managed to get a large section of the attendees to come with her.

She was right. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. And that was all I thought.

Okay, that’s a lie. I did wonder what it would be like to be able to have faith again, to be able to kneel in one of the pews, and pray, and believe, as my ancestors have done before me; after all, if religion were something you inherited in your blood, then I would be half-Catholic.

But I cannot kneel and pray and believe.

In this scene, one of the monks claims that Charles V fell because he was too proud, because he believed that he was greater than God. If a god exists, I do not claim to be greater than them. I am not perfect, not by a long shot.

He did not die because he did not believe in God. He died because everyone dies, even those who are supposedly the greatest of us.

God alone is great, the monk proclaims. I do not, cannot believe that. We are all great to begin with, but some of us are led to believe we are not.

We are the masters. I must remember that.

And I realize that I have let it play a sixth time.

Sometimes I am not the master of my own mind.

***

The sixth time was the last.

Now I am at the end of the act, listening to the showdown between Filippo II, King of Spain, and Rodrigo, Marquis di Posa. Filippo is the guardian of the way things are; Verdi called Rodrigo an anachronism, and indeed, he was the only principal character who never existed.

Rodrigo, he said, was at least two centuries ahead of his time.

I don’t know what exactly Verdi’s feelings were about this, but personally, I do not think this is a bad thing. Progressivism is often progressivism in any age.

At any rate, Rodrigo, who has recently returned from Spanish-held Flanders, has taken his chance─ a rare private meeting with the King, who is confused as to why Rodrigo has never approached him for favors like all the other courtiers─ to confront him about the horrific conditions of Flanders and its people. Give them liberty, he pleads.

No. I have given them the same peace I have given Spain.

A horrible peace!, Rodrigo fires back. The peace of the tomb!

We should not have to suffer until death.

Let history not say of you, “He was a Nero.” A murderer of innocents, a torturer of the defenseless, an occupier, a denier of liberty─ perhaps the greatest torture of all.

I once watched a video in which a director said, “To live in an occupied country is to live only half a life.” I would say that to live in an occupied country, or even any place where you cannot be free, cannot live fully as yourself, is not even that. It is to barely live at all. It is to merely have a beating heart and breath.

To live in spite of this, to simply be as you wish, is the ultimate act of defiance.

[politicalprof]

A letter to my former student:

This is going to be a long post, and I realize almost no one will actually bother to read it. But I need to say it. So let’s begin.

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

Recently, I had a Twitter exchange with a former student. He’s a really good guy; I like him a lot, and always have. Our interactions are positive and respectful. He’s a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who has gone on to be a teacher, an administrator, and a coach at at a high school. He has been a servant to the nation and the community and deserves nothing but respect for that.

In the course of our exchange, he volunteered the following comment:

“and, please understand that it is possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president - in fact, I've been waiting for a while to cast a vote for someone I actually favored as opposed to against someone I do not!”

What follows is my response:

Of course it it possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president -- in theory. In theory, there might be a credible conservative alternative to Donald Trump who might advance a conservative political agenda that you might agree with.

But we don’t live in the world of “in theory.” We live in this world, at this time. And the conservative politics you wish to support no longer exists. Rather, conservatism in its American sense -- belief in limited government, support for independent businesses, a confidence in the rights and capacity of the individual to make choices for themselves and to live with the consequences of those choices (at least in matters not related to abortion rights, which American conservatives do not seem to trust women to exercise) -- has been dying for at least 30 years. Modern conservatism is a mere shadow of its former self, and there is no evidence that there is a credible conservative core inside the Republican Party around which a contemporary conservative movement that looks like the older one might form.

My concern with your impulse to vote against candidates you don’t like (Democrats, I presume) is with the unchallengeable fact that Donald Trump and his enablers now constitute an existential threat to the survival of American democracy itself. Voting for Trump OR his Republican enablers makes one complicit in advancing that threat. Indeed, so long as no serious challenger to Trump and his enablers emerges from within the Republican Party, there is no moral or ethical way to support the party’s candidates -- at least for federal office. (Federalism still allows the possibility of credible Republican choices at the state and local level, at least in some regions.)

I can’t possibly describe all the ways Trump and his enablers have made the Republican Party an existential threat to American democracy. I will focus on five: 1) Trump’s demonization of the media; 2) Trump’s demonization of the weak and defenseless in society; 3) Trump’s demand for the prosecution of his political opponents; 4) Trump’s delegitimation of elections; and 5) Trump’s delegitimation of the rule of law.

Please note that none of these topics has anything to do with daily disputes about regular political issues. I am not addressing the wrong-headedness of Trump’s actions that have undermined NATO. I am not focusing on the stupidity of his unconcern about global climate change, or about his failures in healthcare reform, or his appointment of federal judges. I might critique all of those things, but those are the stuff of ordinary politics. Rather, I am focusing on forces that pull democracies apart. Supporting Trump -- and his Republican allies today -- constitutes a threat to the American republic.

--1. The demonization of the media. OK: all presidents dislike the press. Some, like Nixon, hated the press. But they all seemed to understand that the press was part of the system. They (mostly) all seemed to understand that the often antagonistic relationship between the press and the politicians was a key component of a functioning democracy. They seemed to understand that, as Justice Black put it in his concurrence in NY Times v United States (the Pentagon Papers case), “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Donald Trump does not believe this. In fact, he has openly stated as much, telling 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, “You know why I do it? [Attack the press?] I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” In other words, Donald Trump is engaged in an open, unrestrained effort to undermine the press in order to serve his own power and advance his own agenda. 

In undermining the possibility of a free, critical press Trump is damaging the prospects that any future American people will believe that the press can do the job it needs to do. Once all media is framed as partisan, the notion of information, of facts, dies. And no future president will face constraint by a free press either: what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Trump will not be the last president to rely on the “lyin’ media” frame if Trump manages to convince the American people that no one should believe the press, however imperfect it may be.

Notably, no significant part of the Republican party or its leaders are challenging Trump’s attacks on the media in any meaningful way. They are, if anything, promoting it. As a consequence, supporting either Trump or his Republican enablers threatens a linchpin of American democracy. It cannot be justified.

--2. The demonization of the weak and the vulnerable: The savageness with which Donald Trump treats his targets is remarkable. It has been a long time coming, of course: recall the infamous scenes in which Tea Party activists mocked a homeless veteran for seeking help during the 2010 midterms. But Trump seems to delight, indeed to positively revel, in punching downwards. Like most bullies, Trump focuses on people who can’t really fight back as he spews bile, hate, and mockery at them. His targets don’t just include minorities and immigrants, of course, but disabled persons, people -- usually women -- Trump decides aren’t attractive, victims of natural disasters, and, of course, even war heroes/prisoners/soldiers killed in combat serving the United States.

Please note that the research here is clear: when presidents demonize one group or other, many in the president’s audience end up hating the targeted groups more than they were already predisposed to. In other words, when presidents attack, public opinion measurably shifts in ways that reflect and amplify the president’s rhetoric. 

Trump’s disgusting, hate-filled rhetoric harms the vulnerable and marginalized in society in ways that you and I, who are after all middle class white guys, simply cannot understand -- even as we can empathize with them. And so long as no serious Republican challenger emerges to resist Trump’s vile perversion of our politics, so long as Republican doctrine -- not just Trump’s -- is to serve the powerful and afflict the afflicted, then supporting Republicans, at least at the federal level, is immoral. It also erodes the promise of the American civic experiment to discover if people of different races and creeds and ideas and histories can live together in some semblance of freedom.

--3. The demand for the prosecution of political opponents: Politics is a blood sport, and at least in elections it is zero-sum. My win is your loss. Yet most democracies manage to survive because a norm develops that win or lose, we have to respect others’ rights to participate, advocate their policies, and promote their points of view. Opponents are not enemies. They are competitors.

There has been an undeniable trend over the last 30 years to shift the language of political competition from “opponents” to “enemies.” Not all this shift has been concocted by Republicans, or by Trump, by any means. But Trump is the first president in modern US history to respond to political opponents by insisting that they need to be imprisoned for crimes against the nation. He is the first to systematically incite his supporters to openly chant for the jailing of a political opponent. He is the first since Richard Nixon to demand that the law enforcement agencies of the United States serve his partisan political agenda by investigating his opponents for crimes that they have already been cleared of.

This is the stuff that happens in crackpot countries. Newly-installed dictators purge their opponents, using the levers of power to confirm their authority. But in so doing, they make the stakes of any moment of political transition extraordinarily high: the game literally becomes all or nothing, since the consequences of losing can mean imprisonment. And since the stakes are so high, so is the conflict: no one can afford to lose, so they fight it out to the last breath.

“Lock her up” isn’t funny. It isn’t cute. Weaponizing law enforcement for political ends has profound consequences for the stability of democracy.

Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton and other opponents ought to be imprisoned undermines confidence in the possibility of peaceful transitions of power in the United States. Until I see evidence that anyone on the Republican side is fighting back against Trump’s gross abuse of federal power, supporting him or the party that enables his abuses undermines the possibility of democratic governance as such.

--4. The deligitimation of elections: No one likes to lose. And gerrymandering, and manipulated vote counts, and other forms of voter suppression have been an unfortunate part of our political life since the Republic was formed.

But Trump has exceeded any other president in his all out assault on the norms of electoral politics. He claims he won the popular vote in 2016 ... once you discount the 3,000,000+ votes cast by illegal aliens. Against all evidence he continues to assert that in-person voter fraud is vast -- but only in those elections that he and his party members lose. In 2018 he described legally-prescribed recounts as efforts to “steal” the elections from his team.

All this, meanwhile, is happening when it is clear that the majority of vote shenanigans in the US are perpetrated by Republicans: North Carolina’s Voter ID law was overturned for its explicit racial bias, while both North Carolina’s and Pennsylvania’s Congressional districts were declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered. (Pennsylvania’s redrawn districts produced a balanced outcome; North Carolina’s were not redrawn due to time concerns, and Republicans in North Carolina perpetuated their 10-3 majority in Congressional seats despite the fact that Democrats in North Carolina got 100,000 more votes statewide than Republicans did.) And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the closing of vote stations in minority dominant districts, the purging of voter rolls, and the like -- all of which have been shown to be disproportionately burdensome on people of color.

Given that NO Republican leaders AT ALL have in any way challenged any of this, the entire Republican party is culpable in undermining American democracy as manifested in the need for free and fair elections. There is simply no way to vote for Republicans and also vote for the protection of properly run, properly managed elections. Voting for Republicans today is to support the undermining of free and fair elections in the United States.

--5. The delegitimation of the rule of law: Criticism is one thing. It is unpleasant, but it is fundamentally healthy. But demonization is another thing altogether. Asserting that law enforcement agencies are corrupt -- without evidence -- is corrosive to political legitimacy.

Trump, of course, is engaged in the systematic delegitmation of the rule of law. His understanding of the law is that it should serve his interests and his political purposes. His understanding of any investigation he doesn’t like is that it is a witch hunt.

This, too, is the enterprise of dictators. If the law only works for the powerful, who at the same time insist that they are victims of the law, then democracy cannot function.

And again, the actual Republican party, the one that actually exists right now, has wholly abetted this abuse. They have cravenly cowed to Trump’s rhetoric for fear of facing his tweets, the talking parrots at FOX News, and the hordes of Trumpizoidal maniacs who are likely to show up in primary elections. Lindsay Graham prosecuted the Clinton impeachment for charges ultimately derived from the fact that Bill Clinton lied about getting a blowjob from a woman who was not his wife. Today, he insists that campaign finance payoffs running to hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally spent as part of a scheme to protect a presidential candidate’s election chances are no big deal -- merely lies told to protect the candidate’s family. The hypocrisy would stagger ... at any other time than this one.

Voting for Republicans today inevitably means supporting the subversion of the rule of law. It means supporting the erosion of American democracy.

At this point, Trump apologists usually offer some version of the comment, “both sides do it.” Well, no they don’t. Not to anything close to this scale. Not organized at the very top of the political system, where now the Trump reelection team is being completely integrated with the RNC’s fundraising operation -- for the first time in US history. (The grift is about to get vastly bigger than anyone can even fantasize.) 

America is in trouble. It is time to recalibrate “voting against people you don’t like.” It is time to kill the modern Republican Party. It’s the only way to bring it back to life.

[soveryanon]

Review for MAG123 (rambling/pondering/speculating/ etc. /o/)

-  That’s it, time is catching up and we’re fully reaching Jon’s era as the Head Archivist: the statement was given on August 1st 2015, explicitly after the end of Gertrude’s reign, and the consequences culminated… when Jon was already firmly rooted in the position:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] I did do some light searching myself on Gregory Cox. … Vanished, unsurprisingly. Sometime in late July 2016, which is… [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. […] It looks like the statement came in just after Gertrude disappeared. […] I may be the first person to actually read it, so… sorry Angie, I suppose.

I always felt strongly for people coming to the Institute as a last resort – not because they wanted to share a story, but because they needed help and that nobody was able or knowledgeable enough to believe them. They don’t appear often (and none has topped the heartbreak of MAG037′s Jason North for me… yet) but they still pop up from time to time, and this one was almost in that category, which served as a reminder that from then on, people’s calls for help will technically be… Jon’s responsibility, too, unless he follows the Institute/Elias’s guidelines (MAG017: “record and study, not interfere or contain” / MAG092: “Jonah Magnus did leave him in that place, Jon. […] it was because he was curious. Because he had to know, to watch and see it all. That’s what this place is, Jon, never forget it.”) and declines to get involved. Jude Perry had also snarled about it, so it doesn’t sound like it’s an Institute thing, even less an Archivist, to intervene in anything (aside from stopping other rituals). Despite that, Jon still felt like he had to apologize to Angie – a bit light-heartedly… but he still did, as if he had indeed let down someone who was expecting assistance in her situation. Which… is not even something that Jon used to do in season 1. That’s pretty good?? I had feared that there would be something about his guilt getting cauterized, but no, it’s still sweetbean!Jon-trying-harder from the end of season 3???

(MAG123) BASIRA: Well, just back off. You haven’t been here. ARCHIVIST: O… Okay. You’re right. I haven’t. So explain it to me. […] BASIRA: That isn’t funny, Jon. ARCHIVIST: I know it’s not–! … Sorry. It’s just… it’s a lot.

He’s putting efforts in when interacting!! Relenting!! Taking a step back and calming himself down instead of taking offence right away!! Same strategy as with Tim in MAG114: developing what he’s thinking and avoiding to ask direct questions!! Jon!!!

- … so what the heck HAPPENED for Jon to apparently forget a chunk of memories, starting with the end of The Unknowing (and until – and including – when he apparently ~made his choice~ after Oliver’s statement). Jon might still be lying through his teeth when recording but… it sounds like he indeed doesn’t remember anything and still thinks he’s coming out of a normal (if long) coma (without any actual damage, since he’s back in office two days after waking up (the medical staff wanted to kick him out fast, didn’t they.), but still):

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [HEAVY SIGHS] Where did the– [PAPERS RUFFLING, THEN MUTTERING] Coma, great! Let’s rearrange his office. Sleeping people don’t need… pens. […] MELANIE: Tim is dead. Daisy is dead. And you, what? You’re just fine? ARCHIVIST: No, I’ve been in hospital for six months! […] ARCHIVIST: [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. … That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel like… … There’s just this… great… gap of time, where I wasn’t. […] [SIGHS] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired.

Is it Jon blocking out the memories because he can’t handle them? Beholding censoring them? The Spiders? Something else? (Also, has Jon had the time to visit his flat? Does he still have his flat? Does he still legally exist? I suppose that Tim’s body was Section 31’d, not sure that Jon was even reported as having been at the Wax Museum, the Institute could have transferred him without any proof… but aaaah, what is Jon’s current legal status.) I’m not sure whether the others never telling him outright that hi!! Jon!! only your brain has been functioning for the past six months, what the heck!! is a case of miscommunication (they tend to do that a lot ;;) or… something spooky preventing them from telling him, without them realizing it. Who will drop the news to Jon? Or will Jon remember it/pick up on the hints beforehand? Except his introduction with “the Archivist” and his feeling of being “more real” (MAG122), there has been no indication whatsoever that… he’s actively aware of something being Different. And I don’t feel like he’s acting differently from the end of season 3 either? He still sounds like he’s Trying a lot, aware that he could make the situation worse by reacting badly? Even powers-wise: he hasn’t compulsed anyone since he woke up (unless the tape recorder doesn’t react to it anymore). And if he doesn’t remember anything of The Unknowing past Gertrude’s appearance, he probably doesn’t remember about the shiny new power of… apparently being able to See/unravel someone’s backstory…

(- But there’s no way that he hasn't in fact become a full Beholding avatar, since he now makes awful Eye puns. “I mean, I know me and Melanie have not always seen eye to eye before” jON UHJBIUBHJHJBNUIHJN NO, DON’T–)

- … yeaaaaAAAAAAaaah, I’m definitely dreading Elias&Jon’s next conversation, whenever it finally happens: I’m fearing more and more that Jon or someone will be reduced to asking for Elias’s help since… nothing is good right now, and how are they supposed to get rid of Peter? How are they supposed to stop becoming a target for other entities? (I’m still wondering if Jon’s clock in his hospital room was Elias’s, and maybe acted as a protection? It’s curious that Jon wasn’t attacked when at his most vulnerable (even half-dead, there could have been ways to ensure he would get a bit deader.), while other avatars, such as Nikola or “Michael”, had been able to track him down before. Then again, the spiders apparently sent Oliver to him, so maybe they’d actually been protecting him, too?) But whether it’s a visit-of-shame to Elias in prison, or Elias coming back by himself at some point… I’m D: that if Jon still doesn’t remember, Elias… might know about it already anyway… He seems aware of which statements Jon reads, according to MAG102, so even assuming he would not know or have witnessed the moment of ~choosing~ firsthand from Jon’s dreams (since he demonstrated that he could see them in MAG120), he… probably has already noticed the switch to “the Archivist” in Jon’s introductions. (And no mention of Jon getting his hands on MAG120′s tape so far, but that one surely won’t be pleasant either.)

- Jon explicitly said that it’s been “Two days” since he woke up, which means that heeee recorded two statements in two days (and received Oliver’s), which is… a lot, but not unheard of (he got three VERY intense weeks from MAG071 to MAG081, and five awful days from MAG089 to MAG094). But!! Interestingly, he ended up audibly drained after this one. I thought he was mostly emotionally drained, but he did explicitly mention getting tired (“Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired. … End recording. [CLICK.]”) and his voice was getting slower and he sounded like he had trouble focusing. Which means that statements might still be taking their toll on him?

- Belated realisation, thanks to Melanie’s comment that… Well, I had assumed that Basira behaving so warily and firmly around Jon in MAG122 was because she suspected he might have fallen deeper into Beholding, hence the fact that he surprisingly managed to survive? But it’s because Elias’s statement in MAG120, and Oliver’s in MAG121, that we listeners knew that something was in the works in that regard. Other characters… had reason to suspect other things:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Me–Melanie, it’s me– MELANIE: No. No. […] How did you make it out, then, mm? […] Tim is dead. Daisy is dead. And you, what? You’re just fine? ARCHIVIST: No, I’ve been in hospital for six months! MELANIE: Something has been in hospital. Something that’s got your face like– I warned Basira, I said not to let you back in here, but she just doesn’t listen!

… with him back as basically a corpse with an active brain, did they initially think that he was one of the Stranger’s creatures that had managed to take his skin? Melanie’s description sounds exactly like… something resulting from an encounter with the Anglerfish… (AND AOUCH AOUCH AOUCH when thinking about Sasha ;; The Not!Them acted differently with her, overwriting her existence in the mind of others, but still… Melanie had been the only one to be able to tell that “Sasha” didn’t look like the Sasha she had met, and had to deal with people not believing her about the differences, back then… And unlike Jon, she actually liked Sasha, from their single encounter… even without taking her Possible Current Slaughter-Induced Condition into account, that would be enough to not want to go through that experience again…).

- ALL THE KUDOS TO LYDIA FOR HER PERFORMANCE THIS EPISODE HOLY HECK… The frenzy and irrationality and rejection was just WOW… And ;; Elias had pretty much stated that she would see Martin ensuring his arrest instead of letting her kill him as a form of betrayal (MAG120: “You didn't tell her. [CHUCKLES] Worried she might create too much of a scene. I understand. I just hope she… doesn’t hold it against you.”), and she hasn't even mentioned Martin in this one but… was not tender about Basira, worse towards Jon:

(MAG123) MELANIE: […] I warned Basira, I said not to let you back in here, but she just doesn’t listen! [STOMPING? AND FURIOUS STRANGLED NOISES] […] You don’t know me. And I don’t know… you, so stay the hell away from me, or I swear– ARCHIVIST: Okay– MELANIE: –I will…

It seems like the influence of the bullet (?) tends to make her see anyone as a potential enemy? ;; According to Elias, she mostly couldn’t stand the feeling of being trapped by the Institute (MAG102: “Even more than the others, she has a visceral hatred of being trapped. Regardless of how much freedom I afford her.” / MAG106: “A rationalization, of course. A lie, about your own selfishness, that you would rather be dead than trapped without the self-determination you prize so highly.”) and it seems to be confirmed that her biggest problem is with the concept of the Institute:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Basira said Elias was gone! MELANIE: Oh gone, right, yes yes, he is… he’s gone. Like that makes any difference. ARCHIVIST: I don’t understand. MELANIE: No? You don’t, do you? He’s still alive. You are still alive. So THIS PLACE is still–! [HEAVY STRANGLED BREATHING]

;; She had told Jon that she saw him as responsible when he had talked her into not killing Elias (right now) in MAG102 (“We’ll try it your way. But whatever your way actually is, you’d better figure it out fast. Because it is your fault that I’m here. Fix it, or get out of the way!”), and Elias’s arrest… indeed has fixed nothing. More dead people on the borders; a worst replacement; and attacks on the Institute itself. There is a part of irrationality in her reasoning (Jon wasn’t even there when she accepted the job, and he had done nothing to make her feel at ease in the Institute?) but also enough arguments that hit the mark so efficiently, holy heck. Her words were a riot, fifty shades of HURT and stabbing hearts here and there. She managed to render Jon speechless, for Arceus’s sake!!!

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Melanie, Melanie: it’s… it’s me. MELANIE: Oh! Okay, so what, “Hi Jon, how are you, get anyone killed lately?” ARCHIVIST: … I… MELANIE: Wipe that look off your face. Like you’re not the reason all of this is happening. Like you’re any better than– ARCHIVIST: [MESSY STUTTERING] MELANIE: –than him!

AOUCH AOUCH AOUCH for the fact that she’s putting Elias and Jon in the same bag!!! D: (And for telling Jon that… the assistants are dying because of him. That it’s a thing that's happening because of him. Tim’s death wasn’t Jon’s fault, he didn’t lie to Tim, but he still used him to stop The Unknowing, just like Tim wanted… from an exterior point of view, it would sound just like Gertrude already. If Jon was remembering any of it in the first place. Right now, for all anyone knows, it’s “Jon came back while Daisy and Tim didn’t”, and Sasha died during the Prentiss attack while Jon didn’t, and it feels like a long string of having assistants dying around/for Jon… until the next ones ;;)

- The use of “we” to talk about Beholding stuff was a bit worrisome:

(MAG123) BASIRA: [SIGHS] Alright. Best I can understand it, Beholding, or The Eye or… whatever you want to call it, we’re one of the only powers that hasn’t actually taken a shot at our ritual. Yet. And everything out there knows it. ARCHIVIST: … No, I mean, we… we can’t be the only ones, surely? BASIRA: I don’t know. Probably not. But we made a big noise with The Unknowing and… other stuff, and… now they’ve taken notice.

… but at the same time, maybe a matter of pragmatism from Basira? Kind of “us against them” talk from an ex-police officer? They’re de facto a “we” since they’re all tied (/trapped) with the Institute right now, and they have more or less the same goal of surviving. (Still, all these “we” to talk about themselves as The Beholding’s ilk hurt ;;)

1°) Basira sounded very cold and not absolutely invested in helping Martin nor preventing Melanie from falling deeper in, but that’s how she was operating before, too, and it’s not far-off from how she used to behave overall with the Institute (the only thing she adamantly wanted to do was to do something against Elias because of what he had done to Melanie after MAG106 and, even then, she didn’t act on her own but invited the others to do something about it). She’s grown colder in these six months, sounds even less ready to help than before, but at the same time… is apparently not serving? It doesn’t sound like they kept recording statements while Jon was away, and Basira was pretty dismissive/downright insulting towards the concept of Beholding when referring to it? And she insisted on leaving as soon as Jon was going to read a statement both in MAG122 and MAG123, while it used to not bother her with Martin? At least, Basira has turned against the tape recorders (“And we’ve got an audience. Perfect. I thought you said you decided to throw them all out.” “Yup. And I did. And here’s another one.”) which… is probably a good thing (or she’ll pay for it later ;;). Will Jon will be back to being the only one to record statements for a while?

2°) Squinting at the “The Unknowing and… other stuff”: is it about Gertrude interrupting the other rituals before, or did the assistants… do some other things while Jon was away? (Was there another leak of statements to the public?)

3°) Aouch aouch that of course, them preventing the other rituals from succeeding would be perceived as a matter of ensuring that their ritual would win the game… and not just plainly preventing the world from being transformed into a “factory farm” for any of them. Last time, The Stranger’s attempt had been countered by avatars from The Slaughter, and we know that The Tundra had brought Gertrude and Michael Shelley to the place where The Spiral’s ritual would happen (+ The Dark might have made a move against the old Archives in Alexandria in the 4th century, according to MAG053): it’s not only an Archivist thing to meddle with others’ rituals, people serving the powers do it all the time… but the Magnus Institute has probably been a bit too good at it to go unnoticed. Of course it would be their turn to be perceived as The Enemy…

4°) It doesn’t look like there could be many options to get out of this, uh ;; Either they stay on standby in the Institute forever (/until another power manages to wipe them out); either they launch the ceremony to get a chance of survival, or out of loyalty (ahaha.); either they find a way to kill their ceremony in the egg; either they find alternative ways. Will Jon try to make an alliance with other avatars? I’m… not sure that the archive team going vocal about not wanting to launch theirs would result in anything good: sounds a bit too much like blasphemy for it to be well-perceived by others? Is it even possible to turn against your own god without dying pretty quickly, even if Jon keeps on with the regular feeding-what-feeds-you thing through the written statements and his own fears (and avoiding the live-statements)? There have been a suspicious amount of deaths by heart diseases/cancers amongst people who were not serving while theoretically being tied to an entity (Evan Lukas, Gerry…), I’m not sure those were… natural.

- … sudden realization that maayyyybe The Lonely doesn’t have a ritual? Gerry was a bit ambiguous about it but at the same time literally said that not all of them had one:

(MAG111) ARCHIVIST: […] Tell me about the rituals. GERARD: Well, they all have one. Most of them, anyway. Takes centuries to build up to a level of power where they can try it, and if they fail, it’s back to square one. ARCHIVIST: Okay, but what do the rituals do? GERARD: They… kind of “shift” the world, just enough for the Power to come through. Merge with reality. Some say, or well, they guess, that it could bring other entities through with them. I mean, I doubt The Buried would be bringing through The Vast, but you know.

Could this be why The Lonely is collaborating with many other powers’ projects and throwing money around despite its, uh, whole… concept… of isolation…? (The ties with the Institute dating from its foundation, given that Mordechai Lukas was already on friendly terms with Jonah Magnus, that the Lukas family are currently patronaging it, and that Peter even helped Gertrude when she went to stop The Spiral; the Lukas also co-financed the Daedalus project with people from The Dark and The Vast…) Does it need to leech on others in order to have a chance to sneak in?

- I’ve literally spent a whole weekend with someone who would occasionally suddenly snortgiggle before muttering “Coma? great! Let’s rearrange his office.” out of the blue so: same, I’m still laughing hard at the return of rambling grandpa!Jon, I’M JUST LOVE HIM…

(MAG123) [CLICK–] ARCHIVIST: [HEAVY SIGHS] Where did the– [PAPERS RUFFLING, THEN MUTTERING] Coma, great! Let’s rearrange his office. Sleeping people don’t need… pens. [DISGUSTING MOIST SOUND] Ewagh? Oh, wha–

and I effing love the writing because it was an incredibly funny line (Jon is SO funny when he complains and takes mundane little things personally), it was also a very functional one (informing us right away that he’s back in his office, and that people apparently got access to it/moved things around when he wasn’t there, possibly that The Flesh attack reached all the way into there?, and that it’s another detail in the stack of alien things making him disorientated) aaaand it made the verbal roughness, the bittersweetness and the heartbreak even more violent afterwards. We began the episode laughing about Jon, we end it feeling awfully sad, thanks Darkrai. (I was wondering what was the disgusting thing that Jon had found/perhaps tried to eat or drink? Apparently, Word Of God confirmed on Discord that it was something disgusting under his desk. So, I’m guessing it was something from The Flesh’s attack. Still: laughing HARD at Jon just being earnest in his disgust =D)

- I’m not even mad at Jon for cracking up about Peter Lukas because seriously:

(MAG123) BASIRA: He’s been… restructuring. Separating out the departments a bit. Not a surprise, I guess, with his pedigree. ARCHIVIST: But i–if you’ve never… seen him, I mean… BASIRA: Rumour is, a couple of researchers up on the third floor decided to ignore some of his new directives, and… wwwsssshhhh. ARCHIVIST: … Sorry, what’s “wwwshhhh”? BASIRA: Wsssshhhhh. Gone. ARCHIVIST: … oh.

Oh My Gods, Peter. (He had mentioned that Elias was “very protective of his people” and given that Elias had allowed Martin to be besieged by worms for two weeks, Sasha to get killed by an agent from The Stranger, Tim&Jon to get worm’d, and that he traumatized Martin&Melanie himself… yeah, it was already a huge red flag for Peter’s own standards. And the Institute’s people are not even Peter’s people.) I kinda hope that the researchers are still alive, “just” isolated, though, because I’m not too fond of NPC dying around the corners when they were only doing their job and are not given any attention outside of “they dead” for nervous laughter :w But I’m also cracking up a lot jknrhdfjnrf Peter, that was so gratuitously extra fezhjdcfdnk… … I wonder how Rosie is doing.

- But, more seriously, WOW about how Peter is… already unsettling precisely because characters can’t reach him while he has an effect on them anyway. And he’s unsettling to listeners too, in the way he totally avoids categorizations so far! We don’t know what his intentions are, we don’t know why he’s set his eyes on Martin (sheer dumb bad luck because Martin was in the office the first time? Martin being a prey of choice for The Lonely partially because of sad one-sided gay crush, lack of relationships and no family? Elias sending him after Martin because less valuable, or precisely because he was reading statements? Martin having ties to the Lukas?), we don’t even know why he was specifically chosen by Elias as a replacement (Is it to prepare The Watcher’s Crown? It is to buy some time by having the assistants focusing on a shared enemy instead of teaming up against The Beholding? Is it because Peter was still the lesser evil for the Institute? Is it because the Lukas would have taken over anyway and Elias tried to damage-control the transition? Is it because Peter is supposed to keep an eye on Jon and nobody else?) ;; Even if he’s not intrinsically tied to Martin, I’m worried that there could be rumours in the Institute about how Martin could actually be the one pretending to be Peter…

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [LONG EXHALES] Yes. Well, I’m sure there are better ways to deal with it than getting cosy with Elias’s successor. Who I’ve yet to meet, by the way. BASIRA: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, join the club. ARCHIVIST: Sorry, you haven’t– BASIRA: Nop. Never seen him. As far as I can tell, Martin’s the only one who has. ARCHIVIST: … right. A–and you’re sure he’s… real? BASIRA: We get emails from him. Memos. ARCHIVIST: [HUMOROUS EXHALES]

…………….. the fact that Basira and Melanie have never met him is extra-weird, though, since he had asked Martin to bring them to him at the end of MAG120:

(MAG120) PETER: Oh, what’s that look for? You won! I am sorry if it doesn’t look quite like you hoped, but… here we are. MARTIN: I suppose so. So what now? PETER: Well, if you could send Melanie and Basira up to see me, I’d like to introduce myself.

Did Melanie&Basira come to the office and not realize that he was there (not seeing him while he was seeing them)? Or did they meet him and… immediately forget the encounter, somehow? It’s also strange, actually, that Elias never ever mentioned that he had chosen Peter as an interim director (even when he was escorted by the police officer, he didn’t taunt Martin about it), or even that he had been talking with Peter. We only have Peter’s word that he did…

- … is it a Lonely thing specifically, or is there something deeper about how some avatars (such as Agnes?) sound… more tied to a power than regular ones? This is the second time that a sentence referred Peter as an incarnation of The Lonely itself, and Martin had strongly reacted to it the first time (which… raised suspicions):

(MAG108) PETER: Ah, I see. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. It’s one of Elias’s little jokes. MARTIN: I don– What? PETER: Did he suggest you record a statement today? One that mentioned me? MARTIN: … yeah? Sssort of? I mean… not you specifically, but…

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Haven’t seen Martin about yet? BASIRA: Yeah, he comes and goes. He’s busy. Well, he seems it. ARCHIVIST: Working for Peter Lukas. […] Martin is working very closely with The Lonely, who is, predictably enough, isolating him […].

I don’t really remember other cases in which a Fear and an agent of it were equated so directly? Is there something deeper in here? *squints*

- I wonder if Jon will meet him soon, or if Peter will avoid him too, or if Jon will try to force his way to him. Technically, communicating through emails and memos is the best way for anyone to avoid Jon’s compulsion, so… he could still elude Jon. (I would have found it extra-funnier if he had met everyone but prevented Jon specifically from meeting him, what with Jon getting so frustrated about Elias telling him to back off when the Lukas were involved in past statements, but it seems like nop, it’s everyone-except-Martin! … Martin T___T). … if it were season2!Jon, he would probably have tried to break into Elias’s office anyway, to force a meeting and/or to try to get the rest of the files that Elias had taken from Gertrude (he had stolen the key for the tunnels from Elias’s desk before MAG041, after all) but 1°) not sure that Elias’s office is still accessible, 2°) not sure that Jon would find anything (never mind anyone) inside, 3°) Peter could make sure that Jon would grow to regret it, given how things have been going so far. (*whispers* I have no idea what Jon’s plans are since he’s been baaaaack, aarrrrg!!!)

- One of the constant things for the past two episodes has been about Jon losing small anchors, small familiar details: Georgie having enough and leaving; Basira being cautious and wary, then cutting and dry (“Ah… what do I do if… Melanie comes back…?” “I don’t know. Play dead.” was just outright MEAN, holy heck…); Melanie being hostile and threatening; Martin being… absent and working for someone else. Tim and Daisy are dead. Elias is gone and that good news is tempered with the fact that he got replaced by Peter Lukas, messing up the Institute. Jon’s clothes have been thrown away (uh.), his request of tea was cut short (while until now it was usually offered to him); his office was meddled with. It indeed feels like waking up in another world, with his footing thrown off balance, since he is aware now of what had been lost (and that it also covers missed opportunities: “I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…?”).

… I wonder how Jon will behave, next time he’ll see “Helen”. Six months have passed, there is no guarantee that she will still be as unsettled as she was in MAG115, but maybe Jon could understand that situation a bit deeper, now.

- The only “stable” thing has been the tape recorder popping up again, now fully acknowledged as being totally autonomous and… choosing to be there and record whether they agree to it or not.

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Aaand we’ve got an audience. Perfect. I thought you said you decided to throw them all out. BASIRA: Yup. And I did. And here’s another one. ARCHIVIST: Maybe it’s hungry. BASIRA: Seriously? ARCHIVIST: I mean, I did have a statement I was planning to record. BASIRA: Great. Perfect. You can get on with that, and I’ll just leave, then. [CHAIR SCRAPING]

Laughing for a long while at the fact that they now sound like demanding babies that will ruin your life if you decide to not cater to their needs right away. ;; I’m sobbing a bit at the mix of… annoyance turning into “trust”, with Jon ending the follow-up with his own feelings about what has been lost. It’s nothing new, but, I don’t know. It always feels more intimate when Jon acknowledges the tape recorders as sentient or actively listening? He hadn’t done it much, so far (unlike Martin), mostly in indirect ways.

- Jon is still a sweet bean… but I didn’t feel like he was as disgusted/scared of spiders as usual…? Is it a matter of knowing a bit more about them, or has he lost some of his fears by turning full Archivist? He used to react very strongly when it came to spiders:

(MAG056) ARCHIVIST: […] As for the spider person, the only… proof of its existence seems to be that I am far too unlucky for it to simply be an old tramp’s hallucination. I need to have some words with Martin.

(MAG059) ARCHIVIST: […] I have done my best to prevent Martin reading this statement in too much detail. I have no interest in having another argument about spiders. In fact, after reading this statement, I have no interest in thinking about spiders any more than is professionally required.

(MAG068) ARCHIVIST: I’m in the tunnels. I was exploring and I got lost. I haven’t gone down any of the stairs and I– I think I’m still under the Institute. There were a couple of spiders, so I changed routes and found, I think it’s a gas main.

(MAG069) ARCHIVIST: Statement ends. More spiders. […]

But true that there hadn’t been any Web-related statement afterwards in season 3 (or not… explicitly), except for his own, the failed attempt in MAG100, and the one Martin read in MAG110 and explicitly mentioned that Jon hadn’t worked on it (“I mean, I think it sounds like a Jurgen Leitner book. About spiders. Hum. Good that Jon didn’t have to read this one, anyway, I know he’s not a fan – although this one wasn’t too bad, actually.”) Maybe the fact that Jon gave his own statement about Mr. Spider, and learned more about the entities and a bit about The Web, removed some of the horror? It’s an aspect of the Beholding that Jane Prentiss had denounced (MAG032: “I see now why the hive hates you. You can see it and log it and note its every detail but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.”); but at the same time, we know that Jon used to feel the fears of the statements he was reading, and he was terrified during his dreams when Elias described them in MAG120… (;; Given how turning into an avatar seems to steal from you, I’m a bit paranoid about everything and wondering if anything that feels different in Jon is related to thiiiis…)

- It isn’t established, either, whether he had planned to record this statement right now, or if he wanted to research it a bit more (“I mean, I did have a statement I was planning to record”) and ended up recording now since the tape recorder looked like it wanted to be fed! I’m curious about why it ended up being this statement in particular since… spiders. Was Jon drawn to this one by them? Has he started to investigate spiders-related ones because he’s suspecting that they’re actually more important and dangerous than what he thought before?

- Since Jon said “I have no theories on it, no… no sudden insights” -> I wonder if “Insight” is referring to what happened with him suddenly knowing that Gerry had travelled with Gertrude (MAG099/MAG102)? It sounds like the right word to cover the phenomenon, indeed.

- The statement was tied to so many incidents happening in the Archives that it… raised questions as to whether or not these events were connected. Gregory Cox was contacted to begin his work on the website shortly before Gertrude’s death; the statement was given to the Institute after Gertrude’s death (1st August 2015) and either when Jon had just been appointed as new Head Archivist, either shortly before; Gregory Cox himself disappeared in late July 2016, which was around Prentiss’s attack on the Institute (Jon took the statements from the staff post-attack on July 29th 2016). Jon got suspicious, at the very least, but it was also… a series of reminders of what had happened to Jon in the Archives since he began with the job, what was lost, and the gap between what truly happened and Jon’s awareness of it?

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Sometime in late July 2016, which is… [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. … That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel like… … There’s just this… great… gap of time, where I wasn’t. […] [SIGHS] I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. [SHORT SAD CHUCKLE] Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…? … Everything’s changed. … [SIGHS] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired. … End recording.

The Prentiss attack was also when Sasha got killed; she’s been dead for one year and a half, at present time. And yet, it took Jon six months to realize it, and he spent another six months in a “coma” afterwards – he was only aware of it for a third of that time (from February to August 2017). Tim has been dead for six months too, and yet for only two days for Jon. No wonder the timeline feels so messed up to him…

- Following up on dates: taking a step back to think about the passage of time also helps to contextualize a bit where characters are standing. It… might have influenced Basira and sheds some light on the fact that she sounds so firm (almost ruthless) to Jon right now. She had met him a few times before, but she joined the Institute (/was coerced into signing a contract) on April 28th 2017; Jon was barely present afterwards, keeping some distance with the assistants (as Martin mentioned in MAG098), then getting kidnapped for a month, then being sent to China and America, before they went to stop The Unknowing on August 6th. That’s barely three months and a half, during most of which Jon wasn’t physically there nor trying to be emotionally present with the assistants, versus more than six months with Melanie and (a bit of) Martin, trying to keep things afloat in a place she never chose to be, and which she joined only to save Daisy and/or herself and the other archival staff under Elias’s threats… when Daisy is now “dead”. I don’t think that Basira regrets stopping Daisy when she was on the verge of killing Jon, back in MAG091, but I cannot help but think that she at least wondered how things would have unraveled, afterwards, if she had allowed it? Maybe The Unknowing would have happened, but maybe other people would have stopped it. There is, at least, something very heart-wrenching in the fact that Basira had agreed to become a prisoner and coercing material to save someone from the Hunters of Section 31, when that person is currently officially dead, and that Basira is still trapped and that she was the one who had to be “keeping things together” (s4 trailer) in that place. I mean! She was planning to get in control of her own agency by the end of season 3:

(MAG117) BASIRA: I don’t want to be here. But by the end, I didn’t want to be police either, so… guess I don’t really know what I do want, which… maybe that’s just as well. My options… they’ve gotten a lot narrower over the last year. I don’t know. I feel kind of bad. Everyone seems to be having a much worse time of it than me, and I was meant to be the hostage. It’s amazing, how much you can ignore when you keep your head in a book. Mf! My dad would hate me talking like this. He couldn’t stand people who just passively moaned about their problems. He always said: “If you don’t like something, you accept it and you adapt; or your fight and you change it. Whining doesn’t help.” I’ve always tried to live like that, but I think sometimes… you feel like you’re adapting, but… it’s just denial. But not anymore. I’m going to fight and change it. I just hope I’m not heading into the wrong battle.

… but it was also when she was presenting Daisy as her own anchor (“she’s solid. She’s a fixed point. And if she’s there, I know exactly where I stand, exactly what I’m doing relative to her.”), and now she’s lost her. There would be enough to get very resentful and bitter about the Institute and the fact that she has to be the one in charge of everything, and that she doesn’t see Jon as a reliable person. Quite clearly, she doesn’t see him as a leader right now – and indeed, Jon… never was one.

- ;; for Basira being defensive of Melanie, despite it all!!!

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: You were attacked. … When? BASIRA: About two months ago. It was… it was The Flesh. ARCHIVIST: [MUTTERING] Oh god. BASIRA: Yeah, it was bad. We took them all out. Melanie did most of them. She was… she got a knife from somewhere and– ARCHIVIST: Basira, I… I don’t know if that’s a good sign…? BASIRA: … She saved my life, Jon. She saved all of us. I won’t forget that.

Jon is probably right on that one (the more Melanie gives in to The Slaughter, the worst it will get, probably); on the other hand, yeah, Basira indeed can’t really blame Melanie’s murderous urges if it actually protects them when nothing else does. She was also oddly defensive of Martin, after throwing some shade at him during season 3?

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [SIGHS] Fine… Fine. Haven’t seen Martin about yet? BASIRA: Yeah, he comes and goes. He’s busy. Well, he seems it. ARCHIVIST: Working for Peter Lukas. BASIRA: Don’t be too hard on him, Jon. Your, er… “situation”, it hit him. Hard.

;; Not one to kick the puppy when he’s (too) down, is she.

- … I wondered if Martin’s visit to Jon from the trailer was after The Flesh attack. He had claimed that he had decided to be more active, in MAG117, which resulted in him confronting Elias in MAG118 and the arrest in MAG120… but now, we know that it made their whole situation even more unstable and threatening, since Peter didn’t even protect them against The Flesh? So Martin probably felt responsible for that failure? ;; He was the one who ultimately threw Elias out of the picture and that backfired badly… In the trailer, he asked if the others would be “safe”, apologized and said goodbye to Jon, so it did sound extremely bad already, but if it happened after The Flesh attacked and he only got saved thanks to Melanie going on a rampage… no wonder that he went for something that already sounds an awful lot like self-sacrificing, in turn… (No clue about the details of what he’s doing ;; Does he specifically have to avoid the others as part of the deal? Did he trade his cooperation for a bit more protection for the others? … Is he actually helping in preparing The Watcher’s Crown, whether he knows about it or not? Or something specifically tied to The Lonely?)

- IT BREAKS MY HEART that Jon apparently still doesn’t get Martin and… is kind of assuming the worst from him? His wording was almost insulting:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [LONG EXHALES] Yes. Well, I’m sure there are better ways to deal with it than getting cosy with Elias’s successor. […] Martin is working very closely with The Lonely, who is, predictably enough, isolating him […].

On the one hand, Jon already picked up that Martin being inaccessible is not natural. On the other hand, “cosy with Elias’s successor”?? He… didn’t raise the possibility that Martin had been coerced, or had no other choice since the assistants had to find ways to survive while Jon was simply not there?? It… could be, once again, Jon Biting Because Hurt – hurt that Martin, who was supposed to be a fixed point, is not there, and the bitterness turning into resentment. He was pretty insidiously vicious to Basira after Georgie’s departure in MAG122 (“… What about you? Disappointed to see me alive? … Basira?”), and it’s a usual Jon thing, so… But I’m really worried that the next time Jon and Martin finally see each other, it�� will probably turn out to be a disaster. If Martin apologized to Jon in the trailer, it means he’s already doing something to feel ashamed of, and probably won’t want to have Jon anywhere close to it, or Jon misunderstanding what he’s aiming for. Or he could have changed, too, in these six months (;; when we left him in MAG120, he was very adamant about calling Peter ~Mr. Lukas~ to keep some distance between them, I really hope it hasn’t switched to “Peter” in the meantime. In a way, it would be more terrifying to picture Martin as not frightened of him anymore…?). And Jon sounds more peeved than worried about what Martin is doing, which makes me fear that he won’t be as patient with him as he was with Basira in this episode. There are so many ways it could go just awfully that… I don’t think that they will be ~nice~ to each other. (Hey!! Speaking of Hurting and How Things Could Get (More) Awful: it’s not like Idiot Jon could spit out that he heard about the crush in a moment where he would be blaming Martin for being fickle and switching loyalty so easily, is it!!)

- There is a question raised about who filed the statement, since it was given after Gertrude’s death:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] No notes or follow-up here that I can see, just… [SIGHS] It looks like the statement came in just after Gertrude disappeared. Another gap. And whoever took it didn’t do any follow-up, just… filed it away. I may be the first person to actually read it, so…

It could have been Jon who filed it, while mindcontrolled? Or one of the assistants? Or a random staff member? But someone filed it after Gertrude’s death, and without following the usual procedure, so… there might be something.

- Ssssooo Annabelle (assuming it’s her but. That description. This “network of pale stitches that stretched over one side of her head” wasn’t made of surgical stitches, uh) has been doing her own stuff for the past seven years… lo… vely… *cries*

1°) Spiders seem to be adamantly polite. Mr. Spider had “IT IS POLITE TO KNOCK” (MAG080), Annabelle wanted to have “Come in!” where the ~threads~ (YUGHJBNYUGHB I HATE) would be posted (MAG123). THAT’S SO NICE FROM THE ENTITY THAT MINDCONTROLS PEOPLE…

2°) Thank you Nelja for picking up that the website’s name was “Chelicerae”, I wouldn’t have made the word out on my own, and I’m half admirative, half horrified that you immediately understood what it was. *screams*. (Either spiders are super-smooth, operating from the shadows, hiding their very existence, either they don’t give a funk and are just the unsubtlest things that ever unsubtled. Very urban/school-legend like, though, I got Jigoku shōjo and Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni vibes from the concept of the thing!)

3°) ;; The website was created and running during Gertrude’s last moments as the Archivist… and shortly before Jon took over, and we know that a few people from the website went to the Institute. So it feels like the spiders might have been using the opportunity given by the transition to sneak into it…?

- Ooooooookay, but anyway. The concept of the website sounded like a mirror of the Institute, inviting you to tell a “horrible event that had happened to you or to someone that you loved”, though, unlike the Institute, baiting people with a reward (getting someone killed), and with a bit more ruthless selection process than the Institute’s, where… fake made-up statements are just taken and won’t cause you any harm (the only risk being that your story will be put in the “Discredited” section in the Archives and receiving Jon’s glares). The “Chelicerae” on the other hand wins in both cases: if you give a fake story, you’ll apparently be the one getting consumed (“I’m sorry I lied”); if you give an actual one, the person you hate will get killed by them… annnnd as Jon put into perspective:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] There’s a small supplemental document with it, though, that is a… bit alarming. I–it’s apparently a list of people whose names appear in the various pieces of text Mr Cox was pasting into the code. It’s unclear if they were meant to be… users or victims, but I cannot help but note that there seem to be the names of several statement-givers who found their way to the Institute, including noted arachnophobe Carlos Vittery. Perhaps a coincidence, just… people… shopping their traumatic event around… but I have to wonder… how much their actions were their own.

… some of the people with actual stories were sent to the Institute. The whole basis of the website sounds like ~a spider catching flies in its web~, it sounded like the point of it: getting stories? Was it The Web gifting the statements to the Institute/Archives, or was it way to make its way inside of it? In any case, yIIIIIPS… (I love/hate how there were so many concerning things in this episode and then… the confirmation that The Web has been doing a lot from the shadows for a while, while we discover it has been more active than what we could fear…)

- I’m so mad about the pun for this episode (“Web development”) rizefjkdsnfd and… given the weird parallelism between Annabelle’s website and the work at the Institute (and the fact that The Web most likely sent people to give their statements to the Magnus Institute), I can’t help but think back to MAG065… and… I’m going… to be… very mad… if the trick… was that… the “power” at work in that one… was actually a Web+Beholding collaboration of some sort … because. The title. Was “Binary”.

(Which worked because Internet + Tim&Jon arguing at the end, and Jon making the distinction between the Institute’s agents/victims… but if!! the thing!! in the statement!! was that it was actually about two powers willingly trying to work together… I had personally suspected either Beholding, either The Web, either The Spiral for that one, but given that you can also summarize it as “someone was forced to watch a terrifying video, which would pursue her until she agreed to watch it through to the end”… there is the trapping and the seeing something that you would rather avoid but that you have to watch even if it makes you suffer. And we have known for a while that spiders were spreading in the tunnels below the Archives, and the whole thing about the Assistants being trapped by the Institute has always felt more like a Web thing than a Beholding one to me… So… *squints*. Is the Web trying to force its way into the Institute and/or to parasite its ritual and/or to prevent it, or is it an actual willing and mutual collaboration?)

As usual: what does Elias know about it? He said he hadn’t bothered with Tim’s backstory but surely he would have known about Jon’s and his encounter with The Web as a child, before hiring him, he wouldn’t be this dumb? (… I’m honestly not sure. It was already super dumb and lazy to not bother with Tim’s when, come on, there were only three assistants initially, you… could have… bothered…) And even if he hadn’t known before offering the position to Jon, he would have known after MAG081 and Jon giving his own statement…? And he didn’t especially change his stance on Jon afterwards, it didn’t seem to bother him that Jon had been marked by The Web. So what the heeeeeck Elias, did you plan something in that regard or were you completely fooled too… He had insisted a lot on his free will (“it’s also very important to me, in a personal capacity, that you understand I’m answering you of my own free will. […] There’s so much of this place, of ourselves, twisted by forces far beyond us. I just wanted you to know– […] It’s very important to me you understand that no action I have taken has been controlled. I have done everything because I wished to.”) and told Jon “And your will is still your own, mostly.” back in MAG092 (that “MOSTLY” was… uh.)… which sounds more and more concerning know that we have confirmation that The Web has been lurking and scheming… What do you know about it, you terrible garbage man, you……………………

(I love how there are so many reasons to get anxious about everything??? Spiders, Lonely, Watcher’s Crown incoming, Martin doing… stuff, Melanie getting worse and worse, Jon’s whole status / what happened for him to be able to wake up?? So many elements laid around for things to get terrible pretty quickly??? Aaarrrgggg.)

[tinamrazik]

Revisited: My Interview with Lily Tomlin

  The Wit, The Wisdom, The Wonderful Lily Tomlin

 Lily Tomlin is more than a legend in the Entertainment business.  She is living proof that with talent and perseverance, a long and successful career is not only possible but it’s inevitable.  Comedian, actress, writer, producer, recording artist, activist, multiple award winner; there is nothing Tomlin can’t do.  Many of us remember first seeing her in the 60’s show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.  Her cast of characters is still as relevant today as they were then.  Like us, they have changed with the times, matured (except for Edith Ann, she’s still 5 ½ years old), and developed a wisdom and insight that comes with age and time, much like Tomlin herself.  Her films have also spanned the spectrum in regards to comedy vs. drama and the varied women she has played. Comedy classics “9 To 5,” “All Of Me,” and “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,”; dramas “Nashville,” (in which she made her film debut in 1975 and was nominated for an Academy Award), “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Tea With Mussolini,” and “Moment By Moment.”  First appearing on Broadway in 1977 her one-woman shows have also been memorable and that of which a legend is made. “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” was made into a feature film in 1991.  She has made guest appearances in such critically acclaimed television shows as “Murphy Brown,” “Will & Grace,” “The West Wing,” and “Damages.”  Her latest endeavor on the small screen now filming is “Malibu Country,” with Reba McEntire.  At age 72 she is once again embarking on the road with a few scheduled stops with her one-woman show.  She was called by Time Magazine “the woman with the kaleidoscope face.”  There is no doubt she has been an inspiration to hundreds of comedians who have followed after her.  A civil and gay rights activist she has been with her life partner Jane Wagner for over 40 years; a personal accomplishment almost unheard of not only in the Entertainment industry but the real world as well.  Lily Tomlin is truly an artist in every sense of the word and a woman for all seasons.  

May 6, 2012 is South Florida’s time in the sun with Ms. Tomlin; but on this day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her one on one. I found her to be extremely personable, funny, thought provoking, and completely in tune with the world we all share.   This certainly isn’t the fluff piece I was expecting to write and you may be expecting to read.  She was open, willing, and able to talk about everything under the sun, I felt as if I were catching up with an old friend. 

Tina Mrazik: Hi, how are you? Lily Tomlin:  I’m good.   Okay so, I’m coming to Miami. TM: Yes, to the Adrienne Arsht Center on May. 6th. How many dates are on your current tour? LT:  I do dates every year, I don’t do a tour.  I do what I can do in between other stuff.   I think there’s an advantage there.  Last week, I would have had to move a bunch of dates. TM:  Has "Malibu Country" been picked up for the season? LT:  No, I don’t know if it’s been picked up yet or not.  We shot it on Tuesday night, a week ago.  

  TM:  How did you get the role starring alongside Reba McEntire in the upcoming ABC TV comedy “Malibu Country”? LT:  They had that part and asked me to do it.  I know Reba and I like Reba.  It was a funny script so I agreed to it.  I think it went pretty well.   TM: Do you enjoy working again network television? LT:  Oh yeah, I like to do a bit of it all.  I’ve done a lot of TV this past year.   TM:  Indeed, you’ve made several appearances on TV including Damages, in which you earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress for your role as Marilyn Tobin. LT:  Yes, I did.  Web Therapy starts airing on Showtime in July. TM:  You’ve also participated in several projects for cable networks including HBO and Showtime.  Do you find there’s a lot more freedom on cable verses commercial network? LT:    Of course there is, absolutely.  You get to step out a bit.  And I like all of them.  As long as the material is interesting, something exciting to play.  I especially love Web Therapy and I did Eastbound and Down too.  I had a lot of fun doing that.  You know what show Eastbound? TM: Yes, it’s a very funny show. LT:  I loved playing Danny McBride’s character, Tammy Powers.  It all has a different kind of feel to it.  And Reba’s show too.  This pilot was interesting too.  They let me name the character after my own mother. So I named her Lily May and that was sort of the attraction too.   TM:  There are many women of this generation that are working in comedy.  With the material they’re doing and the way they’re presenting it, do you think women are finally able to keep up with the boys when it comes to edgy material. LT:  Yeah, I think there is that youth audience.  Yeah, I do.  I think it’s expected.  Just like on cable, the language is expected too.  The sensibility, just being more ostentatious.   TM:  Do you believe this evolution in popular culture is going in more positive or negative direction?   LT:  Well, I don’t know.  I think the culture has a tendency to become a little coarser in general.  Maybe it’s good though.  Maybe it’s flattened boundaries.  It all depends on how it’s used.  I remember on Deadwood, the show on HBO, they said ‘c***sucker’ about every other word.  Then they had that woman, that nice woman in the first season that she was sort of gentile and became kind of rough.  Her husband, I can’t remember the exact, I didn’t watch it every week.  I hardly have time to watch anything every week including myself.  She was sort of a gentle woman you know.    Educated or married or something; and then she sat out awhile and then she (laughing) began out talking the guy who ran the saloon or whatever he did.  But yeah, I wonder all the people talking; probably they used a lot language at that time.  You know on Laugh-In we had The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate and the Farkel Family.  Everybody was always trying to push the barriers. TM:  With Laugh-In there was more innuendo, now everything is in your face. LT:  As I recall you couldn’t even say the word ‘ass.’  I remember I was an usher at the movies, movie house.  The first movie that ever used the word ‘virgin’ on screen was a big deal.   TM:  Do you think in some instances, we've become too politically correct when news anchors and TV personalities are having to apologize because they offended certain groups of people with words that most Americans hear everyday? LT:  Well some of those just happened recently.   It’s part of their vocabulary now.  If you do it what’s the point of apologizing you should just own it.  But I guess people, the group that’s offended, I don’t know, I’d have to be in their shoes.  It does seem a little over the top but it came from a desire to change the vocabulary and the culture, you know? Like calling women employees ‘girls’; "my girl".  "My girl will call your girl."  Stuff like that- that’s the feminist era.  But I remember concepts that were accepted, you know.  Even myself, I had begun working on a character and the result was an old person. I had a line in there that goes back to the very earliest 70’s.  And I had a line in it which became really foolish; the character was supposed to be like an old woman,  90 years old and she’s saying, “Drop kick those grandbabies up against a wall.”  And it seemed funny to me at the time but it was a stupid thing to say.  So that kind of stuff when you first hear it, and yet you can do it, the pendulum swings the other way gets deeper and heavier.  Because behavior is sometimes imitated is just like children grow up in a white supremacist group.  They’re totally programmed to be racist and hateful.  They know nothing else.  They just repeat the language.  So I don’t know where it stops and where it starts.   I would be the last one to try and censor someone.  And when you judge something, the idea of not apologizing is just immature.  I don’t know anyone who’s had to do it besides Tracy (Morgan).  Do newscasters do it a lot, commentators?  I doubt anybody at Fox does it. TM: Sometimes I think they go a little bit overboard as far as apologizing. Perhaps America has become too sensitive. I remember when we used to be a lot tougher. LT:  I think a lot of stuff is accepted, really.  There was a time when a certain amount of hatred, not even hatred, I don’t even want to use the word.  But you had people thinking Jews or blacks or whatever.  Women, gay people, whatever - they’re just going to have an attack mode for those people.  They don’t want to have to hear them, hear about them.  I think there are a lot of weird points of view in the world. I mean look, I grew up in Detroit, the inner city in a black neighborhood.  My mother and dad are both Southern, I went to Kentucky every summer on the farm.  I lived in an old apartment house; I grew up with all kinds of people.  And I’ve been exposed to a lot of different human beings and weren’t so different.  They may appear different on the surface. So again you have to have respect for other people’s feelings, you just do.  But if you’re not stupid and somewhat educated or sensitive or have a feeling, then you have room for other people too.  To say we’re too sensitive you’re talking about which group is offended; me, I don’t know.  I really don’t know where to draw the line. You have to draw it on your own sensibility.  TM:  You’ve been with Jane (Wagner) for over 40 years, correct? LT: 41. TM:  Congratulations. LT:  Thank you.  She thanks you too.  (Laughing) TM:  Is she there? LT:  No, no.  She doesn’t go on the road with me.  I love to perform a certain number of dates a year so she doesn’t go out too often.   TM: In my opinion, Hollywood is doing something that I’m not really crazy about. They’re doing too many remakes of classic films or turning TV shows into movies.  From your and Jane’s perspective as writers, is there a lack of originality in Hollywood? LT.  Well, we’ve talked about it sometimes just because we, yeah that has come up with us, you’re right.  The idea of remaking something and not doing something that’s original or not perusing something that’s original; we do comment on that.  But I can’t say we’ve started a movement in the organization; down with remakes.   TM:  They’ve put “9 to 5” on Broadway. LT.  That’s right, they’ve done that.   “ TM: How would you feel about a remake of “9 To 5”? What if it was completely different than the original?  Like what if it was remade into a raunchy sort of “American Pie”-type comedy, would that bother you?   LT:  Well, it wouldn’t bother me, I mean gosh, what bothers me is if we get into a nuclear war.  I’d be disappointed probably for a minute the fact that they would do that but I wouldn’t dwell on it.  There was the intention of Jane, Dolly and me to do a sequel to it, not a remake but a sequel.   And a sequel might have worked closer to the time the original appeared but nothing ever worked out; no script was ever acceptable all around the block.  And I know Jada Pinkett Smith had the rights and was going to do an African American version.  Now what form that would have taken I don’t know.  If it would have been a redo of the original or a completely different invention.  I just don’t know.  I mean I heard that Queen Latifah was going to redo “All of Me.”  So I don’t quite know what it means.  Or how far they’d go or don’t go or how far they’d corrupt it.  I would see it.  Maybe if I were the producer or the director had written “9 to 5” maybe I’d feel more possessive.  In the musical they used the actors to look and move just like us from the stage. Even Mr. Hart looked like Dabney; I can’t remember the actor’s name.  He was good in the musical.  Allison (Janney) looks enough like me from the stage.  I mean she’s tall and lankly.  Meg Hilty is very stocked and big busted like Dolly (Parton) and a little blonde you know.  And then the Jane (Fonda) character, anyway, they were enough like us; in a sense it looked like the movie. For us at that time, I don’t know about Fonda because she produced it originally but all of us felt it looked kind of eerie, surreal.  The three of us went to the opening because of Dolly in LA and New York. And sitting there watching those three people (laughing) and they were sitting there almost, because Pat Resnick wrote the book for the musical, and she had written the screenplay.  She took very much from herself and the original, even the costumes were similar to what Ann Roth had designed in the movie.  And anyway, so that’s the effect it had on me at the time.  It was kind of surreal.  And I wasn’t sure it was live, maybe it was us up there. (Laughing) TM:  Now that you have my number will you give it to Cher? LT:  If I run into her I will.  (Laughing)  Oh, my gosh, you’d get a kick out of her. TM:  I’ve actually met her. LT:  Yes, she fun and interesting. TM:  This is one of the great things about meeting people in the entertainment business and getting to talk to you.  Everyone that I’ve met has basically been very down to earth.  When I can go on record and say that I made Cher, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin laugh, that’s pretty good. LT:  Okay, (laughing) maybe we should do “9 To 5”?  Bette, Cher and I - they’re 24/7...

[astroni800]

Psychonauts Secret Santa! For @peteyplane!

As first - be carefull to do not see picture before text. The present contains both, but the pic is final spoiler! You must read first.

And I sorry for my English, as second! ^^;

Have fun and Merry Christmas!

Razputin was lying on a bed in a coma. Milla was sitting next to him, concerned. She could not forgive herself for taking him on this mission. It seemed so simple and short, the perfect opportunity for Rasputin to learn something. Indeed everything was going well – until they faced the commander of that group and he revealed his paranormal abilities. Events were so fast that neither she nor Sasha does not have time to react when a sudden psi-blast flew toward the boy... they were sure that nothing physically happened to him, but he had not awakened for a few hours.

Agent Nein walked around the room, pretending not to be nervous.

“How is our little soldier feeling?” Oleander was just entering the room.

“Unfortunately, still without changes.”

“I'm sure he is gonna pull through!” he shouted with conviction. “He is gonna pull through and will remember this day at the front for a long time!”

But she wasn't so sure. What if something terrible happened to his mind? Milla did not want to think about what had happened to Cruller. If only she could prevent it...

“We need to find out what's happening to him,” Sasha finally decided. “I'm going in.”

“All right,” she said. It seemed to be really the best solution, if not the only one. “Alone?” asked only briefly.

“Yes. You two monitor his condition.”

After crossing the psycho-passage, Sasha he looked around the green, dark landscape and adjusted his glasses.

“What an unorganized mind,” he commented instinctively, not knowing which way to go. “He did not learn anything from me.”

“You should visit foreign minds more often,” he heard the agent Vodello's voice in his head unexpectedly. “Maybe you will come to the party in mine next time?”

Three censors jumped out at him from above – he shot them all before they reached the ground.

“Milla, You know I can not dance,” Sasha replied thoughtlessly, choosing a random direction.

There could only be one answer for that:

“I can teach you.”

The man sighed. He knew her and understood that this was her way of dealing with the pain and fear caused by the suffering of dear child (whom Raz, despite his extraordinary abilities, was without no doubt), another type of control of emotions. On the other hand, he did not like when she behaved like that in situations like this – how is he supposed to control his emotions in such conditions? Imagining that he is dancing with Milla made him feel like a poorly cooled computer.

He decided to redirect his thoughts to other tracks. What could happen here? There are several options. His consciousness may have been somehow damaged, fortunately it is only the worst possibility, quite unlikely. Its functioning could also be temporarily disturbed. Or... Or...

Sasha stopped thinking and stood still, hearing distant patter and stopped. He turned in that direction and immediately remembered why he came here.

“Oh gosh...” he said quietly and took a few steps back.

“What is happening?” His reaction alarmed her.

“I think...” he spoke to her after a short deliberation. “I think you should come here and help me.”

“Tell me what you see there?”

“Too much to explain,” he stated, confused. “Just come as soon as you can. And take Morry with you.”

It did not take a minute as the two called psychonauts appears on the spot.

“You're right, Nein, nobody's going to clean up here like...” Oleander Morceau started, but immediately noticed what Sasha was looking at and fell silent, astonished, with his mouth wide open.

Milla looked in the same direction:

“Oh dear...”

From the top of the hill in front of them numerous red eyes looked curiously and long ears listened carefully. Until now, when big flood of several dozen white fluffy balls, that seemed to be looking out for guests, moved down towards them.

Coach jumped forward:

“Bunnies!”

A few bunnies hopped up to Sasha's legs, staring at him questioningly and anxiously.

“It seems that the dormant remains of Oleander's mind have been activated by the opponent's psi-blast,” the agent began to explain. “Unfamiliar animal entity appear to be vexed and lost, such a transposition must have been very stressful for them, same as the first hours in a new place. In addition, their huge number causes their mood to take over the overall emotional state of Razputin's mind, which in turn is the reason why he can not wake up. I suppose the only way to trigger positive mental stimuli is to improve the well-being of these creatures.

“Bunnies!” Coach looked around happily, and tears of emotion appeared in his eyes.

“They need love!” Milla guessed.

“So you can see for yourself that, that I am in over my head.” Nein spread his hands helplessly.

“We should cuddle them!”

“That's what I thought about, agent Vodello.” Sasha smiled. “And that no one can handle it better than you.”

“Bunnies!!!” The short man was already grabbing a dozen small downy animals with his long arms.

“And Morceau, of course.”

“And you too!” Milla said, moved by his shyness. Without waiting for resistance, she handed him one of the animals. The bun looked at Sasha's glasses with great interest and little hearts appeared over his head.

“Err...” murmured Sasha, returning his gaze. “I am not sure if... Umm...”

“Just come here and hug them all with us!” she laughed, sitting down to the great rabbit crowd next to Morry and helping him embrace it. “I am sure, you can, darling! For Razputin!”

This final encouragement worked. Nein squatted to them, petted the nearest bunnies and finally enfold as much as he could. And thought that tickling the soft bunny fur was even pleasant. Bunnies were thinking similarly about their company, as a lot of happy hearts appeared in air over their heads.

Razputin moved uneasily. Apparently the Sasha's theory worked, because the boy's eyelin twitched, he winced and eventually a gentle, warm smile settled on his face.