#coming in ADDITION to max's visions of a storm. here we have the storm in the one scene where max goes to the photo. & then skme things that

[sydmarch]

very confused by the chapter 4 ending

[haloud]

things we could burn in one go (eminence) - chapter 6

also on ao3

Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Isabel Evans & Max Evans & Michael Guerin, Michael Guerin/Alex Manes, Forrest Long/Alex Manes Additional Tags: post-s2, Canon Compliant, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, starts forlex ends malex, other characters may appear - Freeform, tags subject to update

Chapter Summary: Alex comes home to find his world turned upside down; Max and Isobel struggle to save Michael’s life.

Excerpt:

How close did they come to that chest being stilled forever? The answer was clear, splashed rust-red across Michael’s clothes, and Alex couldn’t stand it, couldn’t reconcile it, couldn’t balance the equation made by Michael this morning and Michael here, now, this.

Alex stood sharp, with a purpose, stood over Michael whose eyes moved rapid behind his lids, Michael who flushed with life but hadn’t lived since being healed, Michael who could so easily be an illusion of hope, snatched away in a second, snuffed out. Jerkily, Alex shot out a hand, then yanked it back, checked over his shoulder for Max or Isobel or—anyone—like a kid with a hand in the cookie jar. A touch so innocuous, necessary, even; Michael shouldn’t be forced to rest with dirty clothes; but. Was he allowed? Was the universe watching?

His hands were heavy; purpose and gravity worked on them, yet with a weightless almost-faith they remembered the hill and valley of Michael’s chest, the texture and temperature of his skin, the cartography, topography of loving him and being loved.

-

Rain pounded the windshield, and pain pounded Alex’s head, from the back of his neck to behind his eyes. He huffed out short relief when he finally turned down his quiet street and settled back against his seat, no longer needing to squint through the panicked flutter of the windshield wipers at the too-bright lights of other cars as he coasted into his driveway. Parked, he rolled his shoulders back and stretched, heavy eyelids opening and shutting, brain ticking over slowly as it tried to marshal signals to his body to get him out of the car and to the door.

Exhaustion didn’t cover the way everything wore on him. Work, other people, the Project hanging over him like Damocles—how much longer could he hold Fields off without an answer before she took drastic action or moved on, maybe even called Flint in? He had a calendar in the drawer by his bed counting down the days to the end of his contract, hidden away so he didn’t have to explain himself when Forrest stayed over. Not that he relished everything about a return to civilian life, a life he’d never lived as an adult…

Even his loved ones wore on him sometimes. Guilt was another chain around his shoulders, from the way he’d ghosted Kyle for weeks, to shooting down offers from Maria to hang out, to letting his morning call with Liz this week slip from a real conversation to a perfunctory text confirmation that Arturo and Rosa were fine. On top of that, he still hadn’t texted Forrest since he landed, and now Alex was avoiding his phone, the tension of expectation he imagined on the other side of the line too much to bear.

And then there was Michael. Brilliant, stubborn Michael, who reminded him without meaning to how wide a gulf he still had to cross to regain his trust, the trust that Alex would always protect him, no matter what.

But—one day at a time. Hour by hour if he had to. Old advice from the counselor he saw after his injury, but no matter how high the papers piled up in his mental inbox (call your therapist), he hadn’t been able to get himself to book a new appointment with a new one, so he’d do what he could, and fall back on the somewhat insufficient tools he had in his outdated toolbox.

And one day at a time meant getting out of his car, carrying his groceries through the rain, and getting in the front door. Okay.

As he turned to leave the car, something moved in his peripheral vision, and he whipped his head around to chase it. Squinting through sheets of rain and twilight-gray haze, he could just make out a dark shape huddled beneath the overhang, but whether it was human, animal, or object, it was impossible to tell. Through the thundering static downpour, Buffy howled behind the door.

Moving slowly, he retrieved his combat knife from the glove box and cracked the door open. The rain rushed up from a rattle to a roar, loud enough to cover the scrape of his boots against concrete and brick as he crept toward the porch. He was soaked cold within moments, blinking water out of his eyes, still and smooth as a cat after decades of conditioning, every muscle locked to avoid tremor. The closer he got, the louder Buffy grew, barking and slamming herself against the door. A few feet closer, and the shape took form—human, definitely human, adult male by size, but whoever it was, they were slumped beside the door, not crouched, not lying in wait, so Alex lowered his knife.

Still creeping closer, he spoke up, “Hey! Do you need help—”

But before he could get out a single word more, the person lifted their head, and—

“Michael?”

Alex bounded forward the last few feet, dropping his knife with a splash, flinging himself to one knee beside Michael’s huddled form, grasping at his sopping clothes, seeking injury, something, anything.

“Michael, what’s wrong? What—”

He tipped his face up and his head lolled back; his breath rattled in his chest. The only color between his ashen face and rain-black hair was an ugly streak of red from the corner of his mouth across his cheek and chin, and a gust of wind blew the storm against them, washing his blood pink, and then it was gone.

“Michael!” Alex repeated, more urgently, frantically. How did this happen? Who could have done this? Alex’s mind shot straight to his own earlier question—how long would Fields let him go without answering. Was this his answer? Tripp’s dog tags hung leaden around his neck. He could choke on them, on the cold tin symbol of his own inaction, even now.

“Max is already on his way,” Michael said, voice breathy and labored, then laughed, a bizarre and throaty caricature of his normal laugh, and his elbow bent robotically to let him tap his temple. “Called him.”

“Why didn’t you go straight to him so he could heal you? Michael? Michael!”

But he was gone; his eyes rolled back to whites, and he slumped strings-cut so Alex almost dove to catch him in his arms; his hand fell from his head to the brick patio and struck the ground with the force of gravity, skinning his knuckles.

It took seconds for Alex to process his shock—seconds Michael might not have to waste, but nonetheless--the rain had his hands slipping on his skin, so Alex held on tighter, clutching Michael’s head to his chest, curling his body around him on the most animal instinct to shield, shelter, protect.

Despite the cold downpour, Michael’s skin was feverish, his breathing bad and worsening, his pulse fast and weak. Bracing his weight on his good leg, Alex pulled Michael over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and stood and unlocked the door.

Buffy’s barking stopped as it swung open; she scrambled around Alex’s feet, pawing at his legs, herding him inside, sniffing at Michael’s fingertips that dangled inches from the ground. Panting, Alex hauled him to the couch and set him down.

Inside, out of the rain, Michael somehow looked worse. His entire front was soaked with blood along with rain; he stank of it, all copper and salt, and bile rose in Alex’s throat. He held his breath and grabbed a towel.

“Gonna ruin your stuff,” Michael rasped. “Gonna ruin…”

Milliseconds before pressing call to figure out how far away Max was, Alex dropped his phone from numb fingers as Michael—there was no word for it, for a second, a heartbeat, Alex lost all faith in his own eyes—as Michael blurred and disappeared and blurred and reappeared a few feet away, whining like a shot doe.

“What the f—Michael!”

“Alex!” Max’s voice bellowed. A fist pounded on the door, shaking the entire frame.

“It’s open!” Alex called back, dropping to the ground beside Michael again and lifting his head into his lap. “Michael,” his voice broke as Max threw the door open. “Michael, what happened? What’s happening?”

His only answer was a babble, words Alex couldn’t understand, words that doubled, tripled in on themselves, moved backwards to forwards and slid out of Alex’s mind the second he heard them, alien, unknowable.

“Michael!” The word wrenched out of Max’s mouth. Buffy paced behind him, whining, letting out a single loud, anxious bark that went unanswered as all the energy in the room funneled toward Michael.

“Hey—[][][][][][][],” Michael said, a horrible, gasping laugh rattling out of his chest.

As the words left his mouth, he groaned and curled in on himself, choking, splattering himself with more blood as it bubbled up between his teeth; then Alex had to strain to hold him still as his back snapped into an arch. Light flashed, then flashed again, and Alex’s logical mind wanted to call it lightning but—but it wasn’t. It came from inside Michael, as all the strength left his muscles and he collapsed, again, limp against Alex. He was so feverishly hot, even for him.

“What the fuck,” Alex whispered. His mind came up blank for anything else to say; his hands tightened, one hand’s nails digging into his bicep, a fistful of bloody shirt in his other. Michael tipped his head to the side, nodding against Alex’s chest.

“Alex,” he croaked.

“I’m here.” To Max, he repeated, “What the fuck? I saw him just a few hours ago, what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Max said, reaching out to grab him.

Alex’s hands tightened more, on pure instinct, clutching Michael to his body, but then he forced himself to let him go, to let Max lay hands on him.

Max continued, “I heard him in my head, like he screamed in my ear, and I just—knew he’d be here, somehow. It’s not normal, it’s not—we never hear Michael, he’s always closed off. I don’t know what happened.”

As he spoke, his hands wandered over Michael, across the bloodstains on his chest and neck. His brow furrowed; he moved as if on autopilot, until his hands found purchase on Michael’s temples, and he closed his eyes. Softly, his hands began to glow, and Alex held his breath.

If Max couldn’t fix him…

No. He wouldn’t even entertain the thought for a second, not when his body still tingled with the sense memory of Michael’s living heat. He couldn’t die; it went against nature.

Max grunted, and his exertion pulled Alex back down to earth. He couldn’t do anything for Michael that Max couldn’t right now, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be helpful. Levering himself to his feet, he headed for the bathroom, Buffy following, barking anxiously. Wrenching open the medicine cabinet, he downed two Tylenol dry to head off the pain in his leg and hip he knew was coming, then from under the sink he snatched a fresh bottle of acetone and marched back to the den.

There, it was something out of a horror movie, rain lashing the windows, lit only by the artificial twilight of an afternoon storm, Michael spread out, skin grey, blood red, Max hunched over him looking half as sick, and Alex thrust the bottle at him.

“Drink,” he ordered, and as Max obeyed, guzzling the acetone, gasping between gulps, Alex returned to where he belonged—at Michael’s other side, holding on to him as if their bodies touching would be enough to keep his spirit tethered to this world—the only world—that is, the world they shared together, rendering all others that may exist utterly meaningless.

As nightmarish a scene as they made, Alex let out a sigh of relief when he clutched Michael’s wrist and felt his pulse strengthen. His eyes moved rapidly under his lids; his breathing was regular.

“It’s working,” Alex said, voice croaking out through a thickened throat.

“I hope,” Max groaned. “His mind is like—it’s like an animal fighting back. I need Isobel, I called her, but I’m afraid if she went in we’d lose her too. I can’t think—” his eyes met Alex’s, terrified. “It has to be Jones. Jones did something, I can’t think of anything else that might have done this.”

Alex could. But he seized on the opportunity to have an enemy he could exact answers from, one that didn’t lie at his own front door.

Absentmindedly, searching for soothing and knowing on a base level where it lived, Alex ran his fingers through Michael’s rain-soaked, sweat-soaked hair, stroking it away from his forehead. Blood was drying in rivulets now on Michael’s face and neck, and Alex followed the path of one with the tip of his finger, from the corner of his eye down his cheek.

How close had he come to losing him? If he’d been stuck in traffic, if he’d stopped for coffee on the way home, would it have been too late?

No. No thinking like that now. Stay in the moment.

“What do you need?” he asked Max, who finished off the acetone and tossed the bottle aside, reaching for Michael again.

“I think I won’t know until Michael wakes up again. If he does. If not…Isobel will be here soon.”

“When you heal, can you feel what it is you’re healing? Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“Sort of?” Max’s hands began to glow again. “I’m healing burst blood vessels—all over his body. Internal scarring, almost like burns, it’s—bizarre.” He shuddered. “What I can feel from his head is separate, and I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

Michael shivered in Alex’s arms as Max placed his hands on his head again and filled his body with light, and Alex kept his eyes on Max, watching for any sign he was hitting his limit.

“How’s your heart?” He asked, though the concern flowed bitter and false over his tongue. Even at his coldest, most calculating, he wouldn’t bring himself to sacrifice Max outright, but if Max had to give his life to save Michael’s, would Alex truly stop him?

“I’ll live,” Max replied through gritted teeth.

Over by the door, Buffy rattled off a series of barks, getting louder and louder until the door slammed open. Alex flinched at the sound, hand flying to where his gun would be if he was wearing it, even though he knew with near-certainty who it would be.

“Where is he?” Isobel shouted, red-faced and panting as she rounded the corner into the living room, Buffy jumping and barking at her heels. “Michael!”

“Iz!”

The glow from Max’s hands faded, and he struggled almost to his feet, but Isobel was there before he stood fully, folding him into the hug he was trying to give her. Then Isobel reached for Michael, shoving Alex aside so she could cling to her brother, and Alex went.

She made a strangled noise when he was in her arms, limp and lifeless even after all Max’s effort.

“I’ll get more acetone. Maybe he’ll drink some,” Alex said, using the couch to pull himself to his feet.

Isobel continued to ignore him, but Max grabbed Alex’s wrist and said a quiet thank you as Alex left the siblings alone.

The bathroom door snicked closed behind Alex before he turned the light on, and in the dark he breathed in deep and deliberate until his lungs no longer caught on every inhale against his aching ribs, his galloping heart. He white-knuckled the sides of the sink to keep himself upright until the shaking stopped.

And when he checked all his welds and seams and found himself still watertight, he turned the light on, met his own eyes in the mirror, just once, and got back to business, grabbing the rest of the eight-pack of acetone.

Before he opened the door, his phone buzzed, and he flicked it open. It was a text from Forrest.

 Hey! Just got back to the hotel after dinner. Having a great time so far…but I keep thinking I’d have more fun with you here. How’s my girl doing? And how’s my man?

Alex’s thumb hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds, lips pressed together, head blank of anything to say. Then, a lump in his throat, he shut it down without replying, and headed back to Michael and the Evanses.

He breathed a little easier when he re-entered the room and was met with a different scene than before. Max and Isobel had Michael laid out on the couch—and Alex’s mind flashed back to the way Michael had disappeared and reappeared and what the fuck was that?—and he rested more peacefully than he had before. Color was coming back to his skin.

Isobel sat on the arm of the couch, stroking Michael’s hair off his forehead, while Max sat on the floor at the other end, back against the couch.

“Thank you, Alex,” Isobel said, acknowledging him for the first time.

Alex acknowledged her back with a nod, as Buffy paced from the couch to the door and back again a few times, finally settling with a whuff against Max, resting her head on his thigh, looking up at him with huge, soft eyes.

“Hey girl,” he said softly, petting her ears.

“How is he?” Alex asked.

“Alive. Sleeping.” Isobel ran her hand across his forehead again. “We’ll see where his mind is when he wakes up.”

Alex sat on the piano bench, folding his hands between his knees. “Max kept saying he’d never felt anything like this before. Can you describe it to me?”

She groaned and rubbed her temples, and Max nudged a bottle of acetone closer to her. “It’s almost like interference, but not. There’s nothing in there that isn’t Michael; he’s not possessed. But it’s like Michael’s been repeated. A thousand different Michaels all shouting at once. He’s quieter now. But…I don’t know.”

Watching Michael’s face, approaching peaceful in an unconsciousness Alex was too fearful to be fooled by, Alex spoke slowly, uncertainly.

“When you discovered you could use telekinesis alongside your other powers, what was that like? Was it spontaneous, or…?”

“Not really? Noah said that we all had the potential for much more than we imagined, and—after—I was so angry, I thought, if Michael can use his anger this way, why not me?” She shrugged an elegant shoulder. “So I wouldn’t call it spontaneous. I could always have done it, I just never thought to, until I did. Like knowing how to swim and learning a new stroke. I was clumsy at it at first, but I was just doing something I already knew how to do in a different way.”

“Hm.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Before you both got here, Michael was…”

“He called me. Like your psychic scream, Isobel, except he’s never done that before. And he kept emitting light. While I was healing him,” Max said, looking up at Isobel. “Flashes of light. Not electricity.”

“And before you got here, he—teleported. Only word for it. Something none of you have ever done.”

“What?”

Isobel grabbed Michael’s shoulder tightly, like he might disappear right in front of her, like she could stop him. Max just shook his head silently. He really did look awful, eyes red, dark bruises beneath them, a shakiness to him that hadn’t been there last time Alex saw him, some random Thursday when he brought marshmallows to Michael’s because he’d never actually had a smore that wasn’t made in the microwave. Maybe his condition came down to the rigors of saving someone’s life with your own, but considering how worried Michael had been for weeks, Alex thought not.

“I don’t know,” Alex said, dragging his hands over his face. “None of us know. We’re just talking in circles.”

“I guess we just have to wait for Michael to tell us,” Max said.

“Or we go beat it out of that bearded f—”

“No, Isobel.”

“You can’t keep defending him.” Her voice went high and loud, zero to a hundred. “Look what he’s done! He almost killed Michael, what is wrong with you?”

“I’m not defending him!” Max shot back, wounded. “I’m telling you not to go running off on some half-cocked vengeance scheme when Michael still needs you here! If he’s lost inside his own head somehow, there’s no one who can help him but you. We’ll deal with Jones later, when we know Michael is safe.”

Isobel growled but capitulated.

Not letting any ugly silence settle, Alex got up and said, “I’ll put some coffee on.”

They watched over Michael for all the rest of that evening and into the night, as the storm quieted and the sun set and Michael’s hair dried into a familiar halo of curls. At some point, Isobel brought Alex’s groceries in, half-ruined, and Max made dinner with whatever could be salvaged. While they worked, Alex sat with Michael in a chair pulled up to the couch where he lay, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest.

How close did they come to that chest being stilled forever? The answer was clear, splashed rust-red across Michael’s clothes, and Alex couldn’t stand it, couldn’t reconcile it, couldn’t balance the equation made by Michael this morning and Michael here, now, this.

Alex stood sharp, with a purpose, stood over Michael whose eyes moved rapid behind his lids, Michael who flushed with life but hadn’t lived since being healed, Michael who could so easily be an illusion of hope, snatched away in a second, snuffed out. Jerkily, Alex shot out a hand, then yanked it back, checked over his shoulder for Max or Isobel or—anyone—like a kid with a hand in the cookie jar. A touch so innocuous, necessary, even; Michael shouldn’t be forced to rest with dirty clothes; but. Was he allowed? Was the universe watching?

His hands were heavy; purpose and gravity worked on them, yet with a weightless almost-faith they remembered the hill and valley of Michael’s chest, the texture and temperature of his skin, the cartography, topography of loving him and being loved.

They started slowly. He eased up the hem of Michael’s ruined t-shirt with a pinch of fabric, without touching his body at all; he inched it up his back where it rested against the couch, until he ran out of room to work with cloth alone. The shirt bunched around his underarms.

Alex had no choice but to touch, so he did.

His hand still fit the circumference of Michael’s arm, and he lifted it. Michael moved without resistance, idle art in living warmth, velvet skin, liquid veins. Alex moved as if he was as delicate as glass. The second arm was no easier; Alex worked just as tenderly, every inch of his skin lit up with sensation. Leave no trace, like Michael’s body was some untouched scrap of woodland in Alex’s brief custody rather than the sweetly historied path toward home. But that was where Alex was right now, what time and choice made of them.

He pulled the shirt over Michael’s head, and it came away easy in his hands, and he went to his bedroom to get a new one.

The whole thing took less than a minute.

Michael slept on.

“Any change?” Max asked softly, handing Alex a plate of the dinner he’d already forgotten about. Buffy followed him from the kitchen, but she didn’t go after the food, opting for her bed beside the piano, where she continued to watch Max with adoring eyes. He didn’t comment on Michael’s shirt, for which Alex was pathetically grateful. In the kitchen, the water ran as Isobel did the dishes.

“No. Can…you sense any change? Through your bond, or through a handprint?”

“No. Maybe? When I first got here, he took up so much space, metaphorically, psychically, that it was almost hard to breathe. He feels more like himself now. Like he fits inside his body. So that’s probably good.”

“Probably,” Alex agreed.

The water shut off, and Isobel appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “I’m going in,” she said flatly.

“What?” Max asked.

“His head. I’m going in. I need to see what he’s seeing; to try and pull him out. This?” she waved a hand at Michael. “Isn’t normal. Liz died and she wasn’t out this long. I’m going in to get our brother back.”

Take me with you? Alex almost said it, almost begged, as much a violation of trust as it would be to walk Michael’s mind uninvited. But as Max healed his body, as Isobel healed his mind, Alex was helpless to do anything, and he never wore helplessness well. It clawed its way out of him. It destroyed things if he failed to catch it in time.

But he held its leash tight, for now, and gave Isobel an equally tight nod.

“What do you need?”

“Space. No interruptions. It seems like you’ve got enough acetone”—five bottles were still left at the foot of the couch—“so I just need time.”

“You can have the guest bedroom,” Alex agreed.

He and Max carried Michael between them, sharing his weight. Some rearing and needy part of Alex wanted to do the work himself, bundle Michael in his arms and hold him close, but he’d already carried him once today, and Tylenol only went so far. Once he was situated on the bed, Max went to get acetone and water for Isobel.

Weak in the legs, Alex sat beside Michael’s head, never taking his eyes off him. He couldn’t; he wouldn’t. And neither was it a possibility for him to reach out and touch his hair, his forehead, his cheek, so he only watched.

In the door, Isobel cleared her throat. She held both liquids—Max had put them in different-colored cups—and set them on the bedside table before sitting on Michael’s other side.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Alex said, but made no move to go.

After a few seconds, Isobel made a frustrated noise and tossed her hair. “Whatever. You can stay.”

“I—really?”

“It’ll be boring, and if it freaks you out, you can’t interrupt. But yeah.” Alex opened his mouth to respond, but Isobel just held up a hand. “I don’t pretend to understand your weird alien soulmate bullshit. Yours or Max and Liz’s. And I don’t really care what your deal is with Forrest Long, but if you mess my brother around, I’ll end you.”

“I’m not—”

“Again, don’t care. I just know…” she softened. “…I just know how much you mean to Michael. So you can stay.”

Alex swallowed, the lump in his throat too big for him to answer with words, so he nodded, and Isobel nodded back.

“Okay. Starting now.”

Her eyes slipped closed as she lifted Michael’s hand and pressed it between both her own.

The world didn’t change; no power within Alex’s senses rippled between the two of them. Isobel wasn’t wrong to call it boring, as even the uncertain anxiety of what was transpiring in Michael’s head couldn’t keep his attention from wandering. Half an hour in, Max came into the room to stand beside the bed as well, and he clapped a hand on Alex’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, an attempt that reassured neither of them. But it was a brother’s touch, and that meant something.

In that room, throughout that silent ordeal, they were family. Alex was part of that family. It was a feeling he had no room on the shelves for; it fit in none of his boxes. He could barely comprehend it, so it sat in the center of the floor, and for a few hours, everything rearranged itself neatly around the new centerpiece of his world, like it was meant to be there all along.

The night deepened on, pain and exhaustion graying Alex’s vision. Discretion and strategy overtaking his determination, he was close to calling it quits and attempting a few hours of sleep when Isobel surfaced, bone white and nose bleeding as Max scrambled to hand her the acetone.

“Did it—”

Max didn’t even finish the sentence before, with a drowning, sucking gasp, Michael followed her out. Alex shouted, elation, shock, fear, everything, as Michael coughed and coughed until a clot of blood dislodged from his throat, guzzling the water that Alex passed him. His bloodshot eyes met Alex’s over the rim of the glass, confused and shocked, and Alex just nodded, trying to say without words everything that…just everything.

Everything.

On Michael’s other side, Isobel was laughing, breathless and triumphant.

“I’m going to kill you! I’m going to fucking kill you,” she wheezed, throwing herself into Michael’s arms.

Michael’s eyes fell shut as he rested his head against hers. “I know,” he rasped in return, but his lips pulled into a smile anyway. “I know.”

“Michael,” Max said weakly.

And Michael replied, “I know.”

Max rounded the bed to fold the both of them into a hug. Alex might have even joined them, if he wasn’t—he realized only now—shaking too badly to move. But in the midst of all the sensory overload, the misfiring nerves electrifying his helpless flesh, one sensation rang true.

Alex’s hands rested on the bed, stiff and motionless, until one of Michael’s crossed that untouched skin, light at first then more firmly, finger atop finger, knuckle nestled into soft palm, and Michael held his hand and gave it a squeeze, and Alex squeezed him back.

[nortonclarissa]

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So I hatched a complete plan of future action on the way. 0 nel 2005 insieme a del 2006 rilasciato una versione innovativa della sneaker, la Nike Free vostro cinque. Slippery shoes can also be an issue here. I may find a better copy маратонки puma mercedes amg there, if I can find a way inside the Black Walls to the city’s heart.. And again. But there was no explaining such things to Stannis Baratheon. Dell Alienware noted that specifically the black shiny plastic grill and top handle areas will have textured and painted finishes for a much more premium look and feel. A: Yes, when it's eaten as a whole food as an edamame appetizer, for example. La Sylva peut aussi bien servir de chalet de villgiature que de minimaison. “Dear Madam: Your letter of the 6th of the 7th puma red bull racing evo cat ii mo. Owner Gus, who sandisk mp3 mode d emploi formerly worked at Parthenon, liked the idea of having gyros and other Greek specialties in a gas station. It is often so fantastic and also full of amusement for me and my office co workers to search your site the equivalent of three times in a week to find out the fresh secrets you have got. Wagenberg, Charles Joseph Born June 13, 1920 in Chicago. “You could bring the north to me. M. Last year, when ABC executives hoped that Max Headroom would restore luster to the izraeli kézműves ékszerek network, one of air jordan aj4 the wisest decisions they made was hiring the shows British creator, Peter Wagg, to produce it, and its original star, Matt Frewer (who plays Edison and Max) to star in it. The ATC will demonstrate a component's manufacturing readiness before needing to scale for full rate production.The introduction of additive manufacturing represents a significant technology breakthrough for GE and the jet propulsion industry. It also allows me to report that while it never fun sleeping in an economy class seat it can be done with five inches of recline and 31 inches of leg room (on the lower end of the scale for a longhaul flight). Then ask them the same question again. A Ravenna area resident since 1953, he also a pillar of the community, having served as a volunteer for 40 years at the Skeels Center in Ravenna Township, where for 25 years he delivered food donations. The auctioneer stood on the portico of the house, and the “men and boys” were ranging in the yard for inspection. The more I give him, the more he wants. Interment will follow at Sunset Memorial Park, 924 Menaul Blvd. Why would I want a rock? My manse is large enough for any man, and more comfortable than your drafty Westerosi castles. The space includes a wet bar and flows easily into a custom designed kitchen with clean contemporary lines.. As befit his rank and station, Quentyn Martell had been given papuci de casa din pasla quarters within the Great Pyramid, two levels down—a handsome suite of rooms with its own privy and walled terrace. Discussion must and will come. “Man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same.” Her voice made Jon Snow think of anise and nutmeg and cloves. The overclocked ASUS GTX 660 Ti DC II TOP was 7.5% faster and averaged 65.8 FPS. The towers in her fire had been different, but that was oft the way with visions. Ford is taking a significant gamble here, as volumes in this minivan subset have historically been very low and the body counts high (anyone remember the Nissan Stanza Wagon or Axxess? Mitsubishi Expo LRV? Colt Vista? Isuzu Oasis?). The horses plodded on, the litter creaking and swaying between them.

[akimmito]

Heroes are made by the path they choose

First | Previous | AO3 | Next

Master List

Chapter 14

Silent Hill: Something happened, I'll take someone over for Marie to judge

Needle: Ah, what was missing

It’s a Nara: Don't sleep, there is an Akuma

It’s a Nara: Who is Available?

Almost Pretty: This Akuma itself is causing disaster

Needle: There goes the national library

It's a Nara: Who is Available?

Perfect Crime: We are at the airport, we can escape to the bathroom. Just tell us, Kanté

It’s a Nara: Perfect

Aithusa: I'm ready, Max.

Wild goat: I'll go! I'm available

Olive: You have communications, don't be ridiculous

Almost Pretty: I can't escape the Bourbon Palace for this, we are being evacuated to the basement

------

Ateliade, Jade Shield, LadyNoir and Rakkīgāru are on the ruins of the national library, the last place that al Akuma ruthlessly destroyed. Observing the damage and trying to understand how he did it, the cameras failed to capture the attack, they just watched as the building collapsed on its own. A troublesome situation.

"Rakkīgāru, use the Lucky Charm."

Kagami obeys immediately, the Lucky Charm delivers a candle similar to the ones she has placed in the meditation room. The four heroes look at the object with curiosity, its function is totally unknown to them, but somehow they understand that what they need at the moment is in the MT.

"We need a more thorough evaluation. Mures?"

"Yes, LadyNoir?"

"Come here, we will use the mouse to try to identify your abilities from all possible angles. "

"Ok."

"Maybe that's what the Lucky Charm was referring to." Ateliade offers her opinion on this, looking at the candle. After all, Marc is on the MT, but neither Kagami nor Marinette feel that is the case. Surely they will need the specific abilities of some Kwami that is not being used, their instincts are screaming at them.

Before long, Mures appears in all his nervous figure. It's the first time that he will go out into the field like the mouse, he's more used to his vigilante suit, but he's confident that everything will turn out well.

"Let's follow the Akuma."

At Jade Shield's words, the five heroes move to follow the Akuma's trail of destruction. When they see the purple Dolphin flying over The Turkish Consulate General and they are suddenly aware that they are now in District XVII where most Embassies and Consulates are. That could be a problem if it reaches international ears, endangering citizens of other countries. They can already hear Chloe yelling at them for speeding up, they don't want anyone from outside sticking their noses into something they don't understand.

"Multitude. "Marc activates its power and divides himself into five copies of himself, remaining in a size similar to that of a child. Each duplicate goes in different directions, each hero follows a different one while the main one remains in place to serve as backup.

Marc can see from their different perspectives the way power works, there is no way they can get closer without perishing like buildings. The others don't fully understand him, but he does.

The Akuma seems to detonate its powers through a form of echo location, similar to what bats do, only instead of just directing it around the place, it also causes perfectly directed destruction, if they get close they will be hit and probably killed. It's inconspicuous from the directions you see, but it's enough.

If there was ever any doubt that the new villain wanted them dead, this new Akuma victim is proof that this is the case.

"We need one of two, someone who can demonstrate directly in front of the Akuma or someone in armor to withstand the impact of the echo location."

"Is that?"

"It's the closest I could discern."

"We need Tunin." Kagami suggests, it's better not to trust again and the Dragon's abilities are easily used over long distances, they wouldn't even be exposing the child.

"Yes…"

"It's done. Equuleus, bring Tunin to the field. ”Felix smiles, sure Damian will be ecstatic with the news. Since the first attack Akuma has wanted to leave and although there have only been two before that, they had not wanted to risk it yet.

Quickly, the boy appears next to LadyNoir and when he sees his mother, he feels guilty. Running away to find Constantine doesn't count as betraying her trust, does it? He may think that even she should have considered it, although perhaps what should bothers her is that he blackmailed Plagg.

"Something happens?"Marinette asks her little boy, who doesn't seem fully prepared, although his amber eyes seem to reflect something else.

"No mother. What should I do?"

"Can you simulate a storm, baby dragon?" Ateliade questions, if they can confuse the echo location (as Mures calls it) she can release her power and allow them to attack to obtain the Akumatized item, although it cannot be seen which one. Guessing is not much fun.

"Something happens?"Marinette asks her little boy, who doesn't seem fully prepared, although his amber eyes seem to reflect something else.

"No mother. What should I do?"

"Can you simulate a storm, baby dragon?" Ateliade questions, if they can confuse the echo location (as Mures calls it) she can release her power and allow them to attack to obtain the Akumatized item, although it cannot be seen which one. Guessing is not much fun.

"Yes, two of the abilities are combined. It's harder, but if I just have to do that, it'll be fine.”He says with conviction.

Jade Shield moves to take people out of the Akuma's path, who cannot fully escape. Rakkīgāru unites to help, as long as they are not sure that their little plan works, they should avoid casualties as best they can.

Damian draws his sword and begins to move in parallel with the Akuma, at a good distance while concentrating on the two abilities he wants to activate at the same time. He can do it only because he's stubborn and his mother was helping him with every step, he wanted to be able to be a real help to fight alongside miraculous adult users and for that he needed to make an effort. As he tries to muster his energies for that, he better understands why his mother insisted so much that not yet, but done or not, it's his time.

"Tunin! Now or never."

He growls at Ateliade's words, but activates his powers.

"Dragon of Air and Lightning. "

Damian disappears to make way for a thick black cloud of storm that spreads around the Akuma, the lightning moves through the clouds and attacks the Violet Dolphin, which he barely dodges due to the interferences that the sound makes in his abilities... In addition to the poor vision that it has is frustrated by the intense light intervals that the rushing rays generate.

It really is a storm.

-----

Bruce Wayne is Batman

I can jump from eighth floor and survive: Paris has strange creatures.

Hell rejected me: What kind of strange creatures? Metas?

I can jump from eight floor and survive: No... it's a bat-winged dolphin that destroys everything in its path. And there are the heroes they mentioned!

I'll rest when I die: Is it real?

I can read your mind with a single glance: Are they the heroes and not the vigilantes?

I can ump from eight floor and survive: Yup, it's the heroes. Although they are still while talking.

I’m not Batman: I want a report.

I'll rest when I die: Your interest in our safety is flattering

-----

"Oh God! The boy just turned into a storm! How?! Where's the point in all of this?!"Dick almost has the jaw in the ground when seeing how the hero boy vanishes in a black cloud that begins to flash and cover the strange creature.

Everything is being televised with drones, according to the presenter. It also features the new hero, who is registered as part of the Team.

"Tunin is the current owner of the Miraculous Dragon, it was entered into the official register two months ago. His abilities are much more polished than previous Miraculous user Ryukko, demonstrating much more training. Despite his young age in relation to other heroes, we can be sure that he's trustworthy. He has already demonstrated this by displaying new skills and a great mastery of his powers. "

Tim watches with too worrying ease, still holding his cup of coffee, but he seems to pay little attention to what the newscaster has said.

He doesn't blame him, the situation seems to come out of a dream, with the same little sense.

He doesn't lose attention to what happens, they are far enough so that what happens is only barely visible through the window, but the view from the drone is very accurate. Soon another hero, the presenter calls her Ateliade, activates another power and a dragon stuffed toy falls into her hands, she and LadyNoir (the leader, according to what they said) put themselves in position taking advantage of the fact that the Akuma is too busy dealing with the cloud storm.

"It seems we managed to capture Rakkīgāru and Jade Shield as well, helping civilians to get out of the Akuma's path." Indeed, the two heroes move through the streets picking up people from the probable routes of the Giant Dolphin. "Mures remains on the sidelines, he seems to be fulfilling the role of watchman. Like Tunin, it's his first appearance. He has been registered as an official part of the team for six years, he's the second user of the Miraculous Mouse, after Multimouse with a single appearance ten years ago. "

Dick is surprised to learn that information, ten years ago? Since when is Paris dealing with this villain? Maybe he should go to the prosecution and the KanTech offices to find out the information required to know the matter.

"Dick..."

"Hmm?"

"Am I dreaming?"

"No."

"I'll leave the caffeine." Tim puts the cup on the table in front of him and takes his computer to start investigating, having his location in Paris, the information about the Akuma begin to appear. "Eleven years ago Hawkmoth first appeared and with him two heroes: Ladybug and Chat Noir. As time went by more heroes appeared and rotated, before Gabriel Agreste was arrested for being Hawkmoth, Paris was left alone with three heroes: Ladybug, Chat Noir and Vulpes. Chat Noir turned out to be the son of the villain, who was devastated and gave up being a hero... "

"What?" Dick stops watching television, missing the exact moment the Akuma goes crazy and its echo location loses the destructive effect because he can't focus enough for it.

"This is a summary of what happened seven years ago. The Butterfly Miraculous was stolen by the killer of Nathalie Sancour, the previous user of the Peacock. That Miraculous returned to the hands of Ladybug... Graham de Vanely spearheaded the lawsuit against Gabriel Agreste and Adrien was forced to marry Lila Rossi to keep his mother alive, as the heroes investigate a cure for the magical coma..."

"How did they manage to hide ALL THAT from the world?"

"Magic." Tim growls, that's the main reason, then with the joint efforts of different government bodies they became self-sufficient in it, making laws that allowed Parisian heroes and vigilantes to run freely making them an official identity within the country, but without being linked to it. How did it evolve to that point? Not even in the United States, with the acceptance of the heroes in the country, have they managed to do something like this... Will the French be more intelligent or are they much more paranoid? Because there is a complete security protocol so that the information does not come out.

They are so in jail just for mentioning all that to their family.

"We can't give that report to B... or come out as Robin and Nightwing."

"Should we register?" "Tim nods, but as far as he knows, only the MT can register heroes or vigilantes and for that they would need to contact them and give a good excuse for their visit." Everything is very well detailed, the theme of the vigilantes is not super secret like heroes. It's illegal to mention them on social networks outside the jurisdiction of France and word of mouth would not be credible because there is no information available. "

"Rakkigaru launches the cure!" The television distracts them again and they are surprised, again, to see how all the damage begins to repair itself and return to its original state.

"W-What…?

"It's one of the Miraculous Ladybug powers... it's one of the few skills that are publicly known and accurately described. The rest appear as: doubtful or not precise. "

"Do you think they are handling it well?"

"Yes... according to what Felix Graham de Vanely said, half of the evidence he presented was offered by the heroes of Paris and was, precisely, the most incriminating. Seven years have passed and they have the support of the MT, which have cleaned up the country's organized crime very well and have followed several very difficult cases that they have managed to manage... They have a more brilliant list of achievements than ours. You know, the Joker escaping Arkham every month is a stain on our record. ”Tim laughs a little when he says it. He would like to know their methods, although he suspects that they must have a network of informants, something that they have not used much because in Gotham it's unlikely to find trustworthy people, only Jason got several informants, but they have not reached more than that.

"Then let's just say hello."

"And let's seek to join that information network."

Tim sets that goal, to be part of that vigilant circle to which the MT belongs.

-----

Vivian @ LadyLuck_08

I loved Tunin's debut, will his hair be naturally long?

Leonor @Scar_FullMLeo

Did you see Mures? He's so cute

Ladybug comeback @ LadybugHero_89

It took a round hour to stop the Akuma. New record.

Chloe B. @BourgeoisQueen

Finally! I hate the basement. Who was the smart one who decided that it would be a good Akuma refuge?

[skytouches]

I posted this on twitter yesterday in reply to someone asking why portrait of a lady on fire slaps but other period pieces are bad and I just want it here for My Thoughts and Posterity lol (she also noted it wasn’t the music or just because it was lesbians)

I know nothing about “Film” but I personally am obsessed w period pieces and one thing that’s v different to me is how it’s shot — if I can legally say that w/o a film major attacking me — To Me some of the shots were reminiscent of horror or thriller scenes like the obvious vision in white and singing at the bonfire but also where heloise is in the rock tunnel thing and the camera pans to find her and another better example that I blanked on but they evoke feelings of dread that doesn’t crop up in the same way in most period pieces — I think a lot of the good ones play w angles and whatever like the dance sequences in p&p 05 but it’s not the same emotion where your hearts like oh god what is it — ALSO travel is often an important part in them cause you have to go really far and stay for a while usually ? Like again in p&p traveling to darcys or the bingleys or in the new little women you’re even in multiple countries and in Mansfield Park you take the same trip from the seaside hovel to the big estate and back a couple time vs in portrait Marianne arrives but we’re pretty much secluded on the beach and in the house from then until the very end so we’re more connected to those spaces? (Slightly diff in tv shows but you’re usually still in multiple houses and spots even if they’re close together) ALSO in terms of seclusion there’s a very small cast that we’re close w and there are Massive families in a lot of period pieces lol but we’re not involved w those here — also the drama is distant and spoken of but not There it’s roiling in the background but we’re in the calm before the storm in a way and we don’t get to see past it plus it’s framed as a looking back which doesn’t really happen (?) like little women had two timelines interwoven but most are just present straight through and even the two timelines aren’t a reflection they’re paralleling each other while both move forward — also I really liked how they amped up the Seeing aspect that’s in many period pieces like the Looks people give one another are essential in all of them because they’re Quiet films if you will? (Not always obvs like war ones and whatever aren’t but in this brand of wealthy estate type) and in portrait we have Looking AND Seeing and they’re pushed to the max w the portrait, the mirrors, the visions, the watching at the concert at the end :: Addition to that post: also re close cast of characters were essentially ONLY with women men are referred to (the last painter, the fiance) but we don’t see them — we see only the men on the boat w Marianne at the beginning and then the man in the kitchen at the end who — because we’ve been so surrounded by women — comes as a shock (Marianne is breathless both because the moment is here and the shock of reality perhaps) and again refers back to the horror images it’s someone so out of place we’re startled

[somniatcr]

a few quick inosuke hcs

while we know that he’s bad with people’s names  ( as, generally, he doesn’t often care enough to bother remembering them ),  in truth, he’s bad with names in general and often gets the names of other things wrong, too--- animals, inanimate objects, etc. that said, he does occasionally get people’s name right when he deeply respects or cares about them and, oddly enough, when in high stress / dangerous situations. 

his vocabulary is somewhat limited in comparison to that of most of the people that he meets  ( and understandably so given his upbringing ),  and so certain words and phrases will be entirely lost on him. as a result, he also tends to misunderstand what people are trying to say and will misuse words, phrases, and idioms himself.

he’s technologically challenged regardless of verse or time period. i spoke a bit about what this means to a degree in regard to his modern verse here, but in canon he's unfamiliar with many  ( if not all )  inventions of that time period  ( trains, cars, boats / ships, anything whatsoever that may be deemed as being technologically advanced )  and so has no idea what they are, what they do, whether they’re living creatures or happen to be man-made. he’s never seen them before, he’s never even heard of these sorts of things before. and he will always try to fight them.

though he has altered with the eyes of his mask so that he can see when wearing it, his vision whilst the mask is on isn’t perfect; it isn’t as clear as it otherwise could be  ( as when it’s off )  and his peripheral vision isn’t great. however, many of his other senses make up well enough for his lack of visual clarity that this doesn’t impede him even in combat. both his hearing and sense of touch are heightened--- he can hear before he sees and is capable of sensing the vibrations in the earth beneath his feet, in whatever he happens to be touching, in the air itself. furthermore, he has something of a sixth sense and can feel when people are watching him, namely when they’re doing so with a more malicious, harmful, or murderous intent.

he’s easily influenced by the words and the actions of others, he’s impressionable; especially by those he’s particularly come to admire or respect. 

he really doesn’t explain things well--- not events that have taken place, not people that he’s met, not his own thoughts and / or feelings. he might want to, he may even try to, but ultimately he’s just... bad at it.

he chips his swords for a reason. he doesn’t like the clean cuts, the straight and precise slicing, of a sword as it’s made, as it’s meant to be. he likes the jagged slashes, the rough cuts left by his swords; the way that they rip and they tear through the flesh of his enemies. in fact, jagged blades are made for just that, for ripping and tearing, they’re made to make their enemies bleed, to do max damage--- perhaps not necessarily ideal against demons  ( though they certainly do the job well enough all the same ),  but for someone brought up in the wild, forced to fight nature itself to survive, they’re fitting. also, they look cool. and he is cool.

sometimes he’ll remember the oddest and most abstract facts about the people that he’s come to care about. for example, he might not remember their birthday, or exactly how old they are, and he’ll still get their name wrong like 50% of the time, but he’ll remember their favorite snack or their favorite flower or the fact that they hate this one sweater specifically because it’s itchy even though it came up in conversation once like five years ago.

 he’s capable of falling asleep in a matter of seconds and is an incredibly heavy sleeper but with a twist--- while he does sleep like the dead, it’s as if he’s attuned to react to and to ignore specific sounds while he’s asleep. for example, he can sleep through the loudest of conversations, through the heaviest of storms, but might shoot up, fully alert, at the slightest noise that may indicate any inkling of danger. 

he finds overly sweet tasting foods as well as overly sweet scents to be overwhelming. he doesn’t like them and will react viscerally to them every time.

he isn’t used to more affectionate gestures, to intimacy, but the more that he does become used to it, the more that he genuinely enjoys it, thrives on it even. not that he’ll admit it because pride. that said, until he does become used to it, he’ll likely be an ever-varying array of flustered, confused, and loud in fits of misplaced  ( or startled )  anger.

he takes things incredibly literally. as he lacks social experience  ( yanno, being raised by boars and all ),  things such as sarcasm, jokes, slang, innuendos  ( abbreviations in text messages in his modern verse )--- it all tends to go right over his head. he just doesn’t understand it and takes it all so literally.

in addition to the above, certain phrasing and figures of speech will be very quickly and easily misinterpreted when used on him. he’s exactly the sort of person who will hear ‘i beg your pardon’ and respond with ‘then beg’.

[savvysass]

Self Sacrafice is A Bitch: Chapter 3

Ao3

-

Comments are greatly appreciated! Give me advice on what to do and I might give you a sneak peak at the story!

Rating:Not Rated

Category:Gen

Chapter: 3/?

Chapter Summary: There was blood on their scrubs, on their shoes, in a puddle on the floor. People were shouting, running around the table, machines and tubes twisting in his vision.There were people using cuffs to restrain Peter’s other arm, a tube down his kid’s throat that he looked to be choking on. He was thrashing around, blood pouring from his wounds as tears were streaming down his face. For a brief moment, he met his eyes, and the panic that filled them, the fact that Peter was begging him for help, consumed him.

Then he saw it.

A mutilated arm was on a table to the side. He wouldn’t have known what it was if it wasn’t for the stones still attached to it.

His kid’s arm.

Amputated .

Additional Tags: endgame fix it fic, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Whump, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Near Death Experiences, Recovery, Amputation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, probably more than i remember

.

.

.

“Stark, you better have a good explanation.” Ross said darkly, venom on his tongue.

“Not now, Ross.” Tony growled, his hand clenching around the phone. He didn’t have time for this.

“Then when would you like to do this, Stark?” Ross growled. “There is an unregistered enhance on the news with a bunch of rogue avengers fighting without any accountability? I-”

“Just shut up, Ross! I have more important things to deal with than you and your damn obsession with the accords!” He screamed into the phone. His vision blurred with rage as he stared down at the linoleum floor, his teeth clenching so hard it was almost painful. Rhodey put his hand on Tony’s shoulder.

“Give it to me, Tones. I’ll handle-”

“No! Who does he think he is?!” Tony seethed. He turned away, his shoes squeaking on the tile.

“We’ve got actual issues to deal with here, Ross! A kid- a fucking child is dying so he could save your ass. I don’t want to hear a damn peep about the fucking accords right now. They are DONE. They’ve been DONE. You wanna know what happened, ask someone else. I have better things to do than-”

Rhodey grabbed the phone from him, Tony’s eyes filling with rage.

“We have to be careful with him, Tony. He has more power than he should. I’ll deal with this.”

Tony pulled on his hair. He needed to blow up at someone- anyone- and Ross deserved it.

How could he think about the damn accords- something that is practically null and void- while his kid was in there dying?

He wanted to break something. He wanted to punch Ross in his power-obsessed face for even daring to bring up such a trivial matter. He wanted to yell- scream- roar-

He grabbed the phone back, Rhodey looking at him incredulously.

“You keep the hell away from my kid and my team, Ross. A child is dying!” He screamed, spit flying from his mouth. “You take your whole authority obsession and figure out who’s going to be accountable for that! And don’t call me again!”

“Stark-”

Tony clicked the end call button. God, did it feel good to hang up on that jerk. Rhodey put his hand on his shoulder tentatively, and he could feel himself shaking.

“I’ll deal with Ross, Tony. I’ll send updates to Steve. Don’t worry about it.”

Tony clenched his teeth. Rage consumed him- Why did no one understand his kid was dying? That he was breaking into a million pieces? That the sound of a flatline was still ringing in his ears, and he couldn’t think of anything else but that horrible noise?

He kicked a chair away from the white wall, a guttural scream tearing at his throat.

Pepper pulled him back, setting him in his chair.

“Easy, Tony. Breathe.”

Tony shook his head. He didn’t want to breathe. He wanted Peter to get better. He wanted answers. He wanted the grief that was consuming him to disappear. His eyes stared at the white tiles, a gray dot in the middle of each one. He tried to focus on it, to catch his breath. He felt more exhausted than ever. He thought blowing up at someone would help, but it only made him feel more empty.

May wandered back in after that, her eyes puffy and swollen. She looked to Tony with a lifeless look in her eyes that made him want to puke.

“That Ted?” He whispers.

She nods loosely, collapsing back into her chair.

“Ned. He saw the news reports. He’s in hysterics, demanding to be brought up here. He never demands anything, Tony, but he says he needs to be here. I told him I’d come get him when he’s awake if I could, but-”

“I’ll get him here.” Tony says softly. “That kid is important to Peter. He would want to know he was okay after being snapped back.”

Relief poured over her, even if it was just a little. The tension was still there, as expected for having a child in surgery. Tony wanted to comfort her, but he was clueless as to what to do. Hell, he didn’t even know what he needed for himself. Pepper took her hand, and Tony was grateful his wife was more apt to give physical comfort.

For a moment, all was still.

Suddenly, the doors to the OR flew open, Helen Cho frantically storming out. May stood up and looked to her in desperation.

“Who the hell is this kid, Stark?!” she all but screamed. “Where are his records- his pain killers? His blood bank?!”

Tony floundered for words, his mind racing.

“I don’t- he doesn’t have any-”

Cho threw her hands up in exasperation, a string of Korean falling from her lips. His heart dropped to his stomach.

“That child will not stay under, Stark. We have given him all we can think of, the max amount of every drug that we usually use, and 3 hours into the surgery he just starts waking up! Nothing will put him back under- He is in agony! We can’t tell if his metabolism has burned through the meds that fast or if his liver is still processing- I refuse to let my staff operate on a conscious child, Stark!”

Tony felt himself shaking, trying to wrap his head around the situation. He had been so focused on keeping Peter away from anyone in authority so he could keep up the neighborhood spiderman routine, he had never gotten around to actually getting him set up with a medical record. Banner was MIA, and it kept getting pushed to the backburner. He knew it had to be done, but it was out of his wheelhouse. The kid didn’t seem stoked about being poked and prodded either, so he swept it under the rug. 

God, what had he done?

His thoughts were jumbling into a panic when Steve spoke up.

“Cho, use my stuff. If anything will knock him out, its my meds.” He said urgently. How did he stay calm in a time like this?

“Wait- we can’t just put random medicine into the kid” Bruce interrupted, Tony vaguely wondering when he got there. “Your medicine has Propofol, Succinylcholine, Fentanyl, and tons of other extremely strong medicine mixed together. An elephant could overdose on that stuff!”

“We don’t have a choice, Dr. Banner.” Helen said firmly, the weight of her decision coating the room in tension. “We are going to flush what we have out of him and give him a small dose of Roger’s anaesthetics. Hopefully it will put him under.”

“Okay- Okay, but I am going to come in and try and make him his own medicine in the meantime. I’ll need samples.” Bruce said as he stood, his large form towering over everyone.

“Come on then! I’m not waiting.” Cho said curtly. She turned on her heels and opened the doors, Tony hearing the chaotic rushing of the medical team as they tried to contain Peter.

“Wait- Cho!” Tony said frantically, trying to catch a glimpse of his kid. She looked at him with a ferocity he had never seen. “What can I do, Helen? Let me come in there- Let me calm him down-”

“No Stark.” She said forcefully. He looked to her, his panic and desperation raw in his eyes. Her eyes turned dark and sorrowful.

“You don’t want to see this.”

With that, she turned into the OR, and in possibly the worst lapse of judgement he ever had, he rushed forward to try and see what was happening. 

What he saw will haunt him forever.

There was blood on their scrubs, on their shoes, in a puddle on the floor. People were shouting, running around the table, machines and tubes twisting in his vision. 

There were people using cuffs to restrain Peter’s other arm, a tube down his kid’s throat that he looked to be choking on. He was thrashing around, blood pouring from his wounds as tears were streaming down his face. For a brief moment, he met his eyes, and the panic that filled them, the fact that Peter was begging him for help, consumed him.

Then he saw it.

A mutilated arm was on a table to the side. He wouldn’t have known what it was if it wasn’t for the stones still attached to it.

His kid’s arm.

Amputated.

He stood in shock as Helen pushed him back out, stumbling over his own two feet as Rhodey steadied him. She looked at him with pity as she closed the door.

Agony. His kid was in agony.

He can feel his heart in his throat, each pulse tearing through him like a bolt of lightning. His hands went numb, shaking as they started to pull at his hair. His breathing came in short gasps, and he rushed towards the bathroom. He heard people talking to him, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t lose his composure in front of everyone.

He entered the bathroom and emptied the content of his stomach into the sink, not even making it to the toilets. He didn’t have much in him, and soon bile was dribbling down his chin with every heave. When he looked into the mirror, he didn’t recognize himself. He fell to the floor, bringing his knees to his chest as he pushed his back against the wall. His ears were ringing, visions of blood, blood, blood flashing before his eyes.

A soft hand on his shoulder pulled him from his flashback.

“Pep…” He said, his voice raspy after the assault on his throat.

“Shh… just breath, Tony.”

He let out a sob.

“Pepper- I can’t- I can’t do this, Pep.” He choked out. “He- He has to get better. He has to- I can’t-” His words caught in his throat. He wouldn’t allow himself to think of other possibilities. He couldn’t. There was too much darkness there, threatening to swallow him whole. They simply couldn’t happen. Not after all he had done to get Peter back. Not this soon.

“You won’t, Tony. He is alive. He is fighting-”

“He’s hurting Pep! He’s hurting so bad!” He sobs. A pain comes up his arm as he imagines what it must feel like to lose it.

“I know… Honey I know…” Pepper says softly.

She simply holds him in her arms after that, running her hand through his hair as she tries to get him to breathe. Splashes of blood and manled arms are dispersed throughout the memories of the bright-eyed boy looking up to him lovingly. The emotional whiplash it gives him sends him into a trance where time has no meaning. 

He needs to fix this. He needs to have something in his hands- something he can work between his fingers and physically bind him to this situation. The kid is going to need an arm- he needs to make him an arm. Because he will pull through. He will wake up, and he is going to need an arm that makes Barnes look like a toy. He tries to think about it- about designing a prosthetic, but the longer he thinks about it, the more he visualizes the mangled arm on the metal table, dripping blood onto the tiles below.

He sobs, his brain refusing to be logical for even a second. If he was logical, he’d have to admit how bad this looks.

And right now it looks like he’s going to die.

And who’s fault is that he asks himself bitterly. The kid did this to save him- because he tried to be the hero. He was willing to die for Peter, but he wasn’t ready for Peter to die for him. He would never be ready for that.

He never should have taken that kid away from his life in Queens. He never should have let him take a step out of that apartment. He would be happy and safe with is aunt right now, reuniting after the snap, not dying in on an OR table with his arm ripped off.

Peter shouldn't even be here. It should be him on that damn table about to flatline, not the kid who bought an umbrella on patrol just to walk an old woman home in the rain. He slammed his fist against the side of the sink, making Pepper jump at the noise. He had been spared countless deaths over the years and it had been leading up to that moment with the stones. And now what? What did it matter that he was still alive while his kid was losing an arm?

This is his fault. The guilt consumes him.

He feels like they sit there for an eternity, his back aching from being on the floor. He looks at his watch. 4 hours have passed. God, he’s awful for keeping Pepper on the floor that long, but he can’t seem to get himself to pull back onto his feet. He’s about to tell her to get up, to go somewhere comfortable, when May rushes into the bathroom. They look up at her with their hearts in their throats.

“It’s over,” She says with a sob. “He’s stable.”

[friendshipcampaign]

Session Recap 5/26/19: Here We Go Again

Erwyn tried using his portal-sensing ability after the party had arrived back at the castle. He found he could sense the one to the Nine Hells that Kevin guarded, as well as another leading to Arborea, which was likely where the celestial guardian was located. However, he also felt a strange concentration of muddled planar energy in the area of the throne room, and at the edge of his sensation, as if deep, deep below him, another similar patch, though its energies seemed a little more focused on the Material Plane. He told the others about all of this.

The party headed to the area of the Arborea portal and found a chamber with a running stream and a calm pool. Dragonflies flitted about lily pads in the pool. A large, chubby elf wrapped in a bright yellow robe with patches of iridescent scales on their neck and reeds braided into their hair sat in the stream.

“You’re all mortals, aren’t you?” they said, seeming startled. “It’s been quite a long time since anyone came through here.”

The elf explained that they were responsible for tending the rivulet of the river of Olympus that passed through the Faewilds on its way to other planes. They told the party it would soothe them if they were weary or injured so long as they were not of evil heart. Voski asked what to call them and they introduced themself as Ehtelewë. They expressed interest in what the party was doing here, explaining their posting at the castle had been very quiet. Echoing what Kevin had told the party, Ehtelewë said that visitors had been nearly nonexistent for some time -- citing as a reason for this a great storm that had shaken the island just after the current Lady came to power seven “long years” ago (an elvish unit of time that encompassed a hundred and forty-four solar years).

Ehtelewë mentioned that with the exception of the changeling children that had passed through, they hadn’t seen true mortals in the castle for some time. The party asked them what they knew of the children, and Ehtelewë said they were generally kids who had been abandoned and who left the Faewilds upon coming of age. There had apparently been a number of them around recently, but all except for Fletch had been sent back. When Ehtelewë commented on the solitude of their posting, Voski suggested she could bring the guardian some bread from “a gentleman on one of the other levels.”

Somewhat awed, Erwyn asked if he could touch the waters before he ran his hand through the river experimentally. There was a power to its waters, filling him with something akin to a sense of wonder, and he suddenly felt significantly less tired than before. Ehtelewë explained that the river itself was toxic to creatures of the lower planes, and offered the party one of her lilies with the power of the river in it, which Voski accepted. 

Erwyn stayed to talk to Ehtelewë, shyly saying that he would be fascinated to hear a bit about Arborea, which he’d grown up hearing bedtime stories about. Voski went to get bread while the other three returned to their chambers to mess around with the Rhymer’s Ring some more, though Amaranth was more of a spectator.

Ditto tried to see what would happen if she used “Fly” to cast “Scry,” to see if the effects of another spell could be replicated. She placed water in a bowl to look into before casting.

“What is Hubris doing?” she asked.

The bowl clouded over, and a caricature of her own face replied, “Hubris is doing things you know you shouldn’t out of the folly of your heart.”

“I got bad news, everyone,” Ditto said. “The ring’s a smartass.”

Kriv tried casting “Divine Height” on Amaranth and she grew to half a head taller than him, as little dragon wings sprouted on her horns and her feet grew long and segmented like an isopod’s. She asked if she looked awesome as the others laughed, then graffitied “Amaranth was here” in Infernal high up on one of the walls of Kriv’s room with a dagger in the minute before the spell wore off.

Meanwhile, Voski asked Kevin at his post if he would be able to make anything safe for a Celestial. He mentioned he had a no-knead flatbread that shouldn’t have any fiendish contamination. She stuck around and chatted with him as he baked, giving him the jar of jam she’d bought from the farmers near Wayspell. He gave her some tasty rolls in return. Once the bread was done, she delivered it to Ehtelewë, who was still chatting with Erwyn. The celestial elf said the bread was delicious, and asked Voski if she thought the baker (whose identity she had not mentioned) would like one of their flowers -- prompting Erwyn to quickly put a hand on Voski’s shoulder and the dragonborn to say Ehtelewë’s gratitude would be enough. On the way out, she gave Erwyn a quick thumbs-up.

While talking to Ehtelewë, who brought up that they’d come across some of the Elvish gods a few times in Arborea, Erwyn pulled out the arrow with the symbol of Corellon Laresian on it that he’d picked up from the Morkoth’s lair. They examined it and told him it was suffused with divine energy and would do additional magical damage to whatever it hit.

That evening, Ditto made an attempt to get a Sending to Daisy.

“If you can hear me, keep fighting. I believe in you,” she Sent.

There was a weird screech of static and she heard two voices reply simultaneously. One said, “She isn’t here. I ate her. Give up!”

The other, quieter, said, “I’m trying.”

In the midst of their rest, the party were all roused by knocks on their doors and told by Elm and Lichen that the Lady had need of them once more. Erwyn, who had only just been finishing trancing, emerged wearing a more traditionally Elvish-looking clothing than he’d worn previously. Amaranth briefly ducked off to tell Astoria, and told Max to look after her while they were gone. The group was then lead to the throne room, where Elessea was waiting. She told them that one of the favors they’d passed out at the market was already in need of repayment, and created a pane of water in front of her. It displayed Squall, the aarakocra woman Amaranth had met at the Goblin Market, sitting in a darkened room with her shoulder bandaged.

“My name is Squall of the Widening Gyre,” the vision said, “and I call upon your favor, Elessea. I want you to find my wife and bring her back to me.”

The image faded and Amaranth angrily demanded to know what had happened. Elessea said she didn’t know details, but that Squall’s location had been identified and the party would be sent to a fae crossing 15 miles north of the city of Veritas, where they would find her in an inn called the Slumbering Grell. She had apparently waited a while to make the request, and was unwilling to leave her accommodations. Once the favor was completed, the pearl she had would disintegrate and lose its power.

A portal was generated for the party to pass through, though Ditto dragged her feet a little in getting there. The throne room disappeared and they found themselves in a darkened wood in the middle of the night, in the center of a circle of mushrooms. As they began to walk south, Ditto recalled that Alembic and Palava had mentioned running into some trouble near Veritas and asked what the others remembered about that. Erwyn said they’d told the group they’d dealt with an Abyssal incursion. As they reviewed what they knew, Amaranth mentioned she’d gotten her swords from Quest, Squall’s wife, at the Crossroads market the month prior. This meant they had likely gotten into trouble fairly recently, as it was a trek of several hundred miles between the two places.

The forest eventually gave way to farms as the group walked on. Ditto had started riding in Voski’s backpack but didn’t stay there long, babbling and full of nervous energy. Kriv, still groggy, asked if she could chill. About halfway to the city, they reached a crossroads and heard footsteps from behind one of the walls of turf at the side of the road. The party made eye contact with each other and Amaranth stepped into the shadows, sneaking forwards to where she could see three figures -- two humanoid in dark robes, and one much taller figure, with a leg with a cloven hoof and a barbed tail, wearing a muzzle. They were stopped, as if waiting for the party to make the first move.

Amaranth backed up and alerted the others to what she’d seen. When she mentioned the the appearance of the more chimerical creature reminded her of the psoglav, Erwyn commented that Abyssal rifts had the potential effect of causing mutations to organisms in the area.

“Hello ahead,” Voski called out. “Are you ambushing us, or are you waiting for us to pass? Because at this point this is getting silly.”

“Uh...just…. waiting,” a voice replied.

The strangers sounded in over their head, and said they would let the party pass without trouble, claiming their “pet” could be aggressive with strangers. The party cautiously decided to move forward, with Kriv casting Protection from Evil and Good on Erwyn, Ditto casting Mage armor on herself, and Voski Inspiring Amaranth by saying, “Well, you know, you heard them, everything’s completely fine, so you may as well just go on ahead.” 

As they stepped forward, the creature growled at them. Kriv asked if there were any more creatures like this around they needed to worry about, and the hooded figure continued to stammer, taken off-guard. When Erwyn asked exactly what their friend was the other figure spoke, saying that there were dark things going on -- demons in the air, and water, that could take hold of you. Voski tapped Erwyn carefully, noting that the muzzled creature seemed to be listening to the conversation. He asked if the chimaera-like creature had been a person prior to this and received confirmation. In parting, he wished the farmers luck with the situation.

The party walked onward and reached the city around sunrise. Ditto mentioned that she knew Veritas pretty well, though it had been 50 or 60 years since she’d been there. Erwyn mentioned also having passed through more recently, but still about 20 years prior and not for very long. Amaranth asked Ditto if there was anything they should know about. Ditto said the place was mostly run by the guilds, and that it had been the first place she’d hung out after the incident where she’d summoned the creature from the Far Realms, meaning it was also close to where she’d grown up. She also warned them not to stand by the elephant statue in the middle of the day if they wanted to lie about something.

“They’re big on truth,” she said.

“That’s new,” Kriv said.

Kriv commented that it was easy to forget how old Ditto and Erwyn were, with the two of them talking about having been to the city decades ago. Ditto said that she was 87, though she didn’t feel like it as she really thought she’d “have more of her shit together” by 87. When Erwyn mentioned being 125, a couple of the others asked if that was old for an elf, as he didn’t give off an “old” vibe. He confirmed he was at least fairly young by his race’s standards. For perspective, Kriv pointed out that when Erwyn said he’d been in Veritas “recently,” he hadn’t even been born yet. 

There was an extensive customs setup at the city gates, which wasn’t familiar to those who’d passed through the city before. On the outside the walls, there was graffiti reading “Auster Lives!” and “Laugh at your own risk,” along with old city laws carved into stone. A newer sign indicated there was a toll of one silver piece for non-citizens to enter, and a curfew between the hours of Wick’s End and Cock’s Crow.

As the party started to move towards the entrance, Tiktik and Volfred both suddenly found themselves unable to move any further. Ditto also found that her bag, containing Mynskay, couldn’t pass, and Erwyn felt a tug on his cloak from Melima. A city worker asked if Volfred and Tiktik were arcane companions and directed the party to a secondary gate. There, they were greeted by a cheerful, black-furred bugbear in uniform named Nubbins, who informed them they would all be put under the effects of a truth spell as part of the customs procedures. Amaranth and Voski both tried to resist the effect, but failed.

The party were all asked for their full names and Amaranth, Ditto, and Kriv obliged. Erwyn paused before identifying himself as Erwyn Isilmë. Voski gave her first name but then paused, pulling out an ID and saying she might be on record in Veritas as Kasia Adorna. She implied that Voski was actually a stage name, which seemed to satisfy Nubbins. He asked them their business in Veritas and they said they were doing a favor for a friend.

Nubbins asked if there were any celestials, fae, fiends, or undead with the party and Tiktik and Volfred were both mentioned and approved. Erwyn cautiously said that after freeing a place of an undead presence, he’d been told that there was a strange, undead aura that followed him around sometimes. Nubbins seemed slightly perturbed, but not too suspicious. Ditto jumped on the same idea and said she’d been told the same thing about her book, presenting her spellbook instead of Mynskay. When asked if she’d ever done any necromancy she admitted to once casting Gentle Repose as a “favor for a friend,” but only that one spell.

The party were then asked about their respective magical abilities -- Ditto and Kriv were clearly casters and confirmed this, but Voski and Erwyn both spoke up about their own powers as well. Nubbins then asked the group if they were willing to defend the city in an hour of need. They agreed, though Voski asked if this was a common question and the bugbear explained that it was a result of the recent events in the city. They were given a pendant in the shape of an eye that would open if their services were needed. When Ditto asked a little about all the increased security, Nubbins explained they were worried about demonic cultists flocking to the city in the wake of disaster. They were all also asked to confirm they had no affiliations with any fiendish organization.

Satisfied, Nubbins gave them all papers saying they had passed through the security checkpoint, which would need to be renewed after a week in the city, as well as small pins with the city seal. They were then able to enter the city. The group looked around, lost, for a bit, trying to find the Slumbering Grell, which Ditto was unfamiliar with, but were approached a young dragonborn kid in tattered clothes who asked if they needed directions. Their eyes went wide as Amaranth flipped them a gold piece and they told the group they could take them to the inn. Voski gave them an additional nine silver pieces (change from breaking a gold at the gate) and asked if they could make it a direct route.

The child lead them to a seedy part of town and a sturdy building with narrow slit windows near the city wall. The sign out front had a picture of a grell on it, enchanted to snore. Erwyn tipped the child another gold piece before Kriv and Ditto both gave even more generous tips. Noting this, Voski warned them not to spread word of the party’s generosity around.

On entering the inn, the party saw an intimidating-looking orc woman in a dark cloak at the front desk. She introduced herself as Kenska Darkseeker. The party explained they were looking for Squall, and Kenska’s cloak, which on further examination seemed to be some kind of living creature, detached itself and floated up into the ceiling through some kind of door above them. After a short while it returned, and Kenska told them she would take them to see Squall, who would prefer to meet them in her room.

As the party stepped into the aarakocra’s room, she indicated that they should slide the bolts on the door. Squall was still wearing the bandage on her wing that they’d seen in Elessea’s scrying, and seemed weakened. Voski put a Tiny Hut up for further privacy. Squall expressed she was somewhat surprised this was the form Elessea’s help had taken, but began to explain the situation.

She and Quest had been in town since early in the month of Blomhath to meet with a buyer they’d done business with before, Winstanus Albach. However, on the 7th, her wife didn’t return to their lodgings. The watch were overwhelmed with the state of the city and had been of little help when she asked them to investigate, and the private investigator she’d hired had proved useless. It was now the 20th of Blomhath, still with no sign of her missing wife. However, she assured the party she knew that Quest was still alive -- their hearts were magically bonded, and though she couldn’t locate her she could tell that Quest’s was still beating.

Quest had apparently been meeting with Winstanus the evening of her disappearance, before stopping by a shop belonging to Linda, a specialty butcher, to purchase food to accommodate Squall’s particular diet. According to Linda, she might also have stopped by the Guildhouse to see a magical sword that was on display there, which had been unearthed from the wreckage of the area destroyed when the Abyssal portal opened, but no one there said they had seen her. Squall herself had been asleep when Quest left that night, as she had been struggling with a bout of a chronic illness of hers that caused her fatigue from time to time.

Squall said that it wasn’t until after she lost her temper with the progress of the city guard and was thrown out of the watch house on the 15th -- and after she gave up on the private investigator she’d hired, a half elf named Eckjeth Siek -- that she ran into real resistance. She had apparently been forced to abandon her old lodgings when someone came in the night and attacked her. The attacks had come in two waves, though she was unsure if they were affiliated. The first night, a band of mercenaries consisting of a human man, woman, and either an orc or half-orc tried to come in her window, but she fended them off. The second night, however, she’d been attacked by several constructs, including a spider-like thing that had tried to sting her and another, larger one that tried to carry her off. She suspected that the constructs at least were affiliated with a local group called the Obsidian Shard.

Searching for more clues, the group asked about the sword on display at the Guildhouse that Quest had been interested in. It was apparently called Truthseeker, and legend told that it once belonged to a hero called Auster. (Voski recalled seeing several plays about Auster when she had last been in Veritas, mostly with plots surrounding a conflict with its nearby rival city, Caritas.) Many locals now believed the sword had been sent to them by the god responsible for the founding of the city, and that a new hero would emerge to wield it and lead them out of the dark times that Veritas had been plunged into since the opening of the Abyssal breach. Though the name of the city’s founding deity had been lost to time, local legend held that the elephant who was honored in Veritas’ iconography had been a celestial messenger sent by them to tell settlers where to build their city.

Kriv asked if Squall thought it would be dangerous for Ditto to try Sending a message to Quest. She replied that it had been one of the first things she’d tried, but there had been some sort of interference, though Ditto would be welcome to try again. Voski asked her exactly what Quest had come to the city to sell. Squall said it had been a sword acquired at the Goblin Market called the Blade of the Summer Night, made of mithril with a vine motif on it, which was animated but not particularly well-behaved. Quest had successfully made the sale. When asked if a rival merchant could be a suspect, Squall acknowledged the possibility, but said it seemed unlikely, as Quest just had a temporary guild membership and they only visited the city a few times a year. She did name one local merchant who dealt with similar wares, a man named Banquin Andriolo, as someone the party could potentially question.

[pendulumprince]

It’s episode 28, and all I gotta say is: fuck Faust.

Okay, so Playmaker comes in to save Lonely Brave’s ass

LB START’S FANBOYING

PLAYMAKER TELLS HIM TO LET HIM TAKE CARE OF FASUT

LB IS SO HAPPY HIS BF IS COMING TO SAVE HIM

He returns Cyberse Wizard

Playmaker accuses Faust of stealing his card’s data to give to lonely brave

Faust denies it; Playmaker is hella confused

He tries interrogating Faust—

BUT AI TELLS HIM THAT IT DOESN’T MATTER, THEY NEED TO KICK HIS ASS ASAP

Lmao it was totes Ai, you can’t tell me he didn’t at least KNOW this was gonna happen

Faust says he only has one goal: defeat Playmaker and kidnap Ai

So he activates the data gale

Playmaker recognizes it as the same program Doctor Genome and Vyra used against ‘Go' and Blue Angel

Alright alright, they jump on their d-boards!

LET’S GO

After the opening!

FAUST TAKES FIRST TURN

HE ACTIVATES A CONTINUOUS SPELL

IT OPENS UP SOME VORTEX IN THE SKY

A… giant orb made of floating rocks comes out

Lonely Brave wants to watch, but he’s too far away and there’s no broadcast where they’re at

BUT HE HAS A PLAN

“MAX EYES!”

AHHHH HIS EYES CAN ZOOM IN

AND HE HAS X-RAY VISION??

He was 10/10 checking out Playmaker’s bod you can’t tell me he wasn’t

BACK TO THE DUEL

THIS SPELL ALLOWS FAUST TO SPECIAL SIMMON A 0 DEF MONSTER

AND HE ACTIVATES ANOTHER SPELL

TWO MORE OF THOSE LITTLE 0 DEF TOKENS COME OUT

AI IS IMPRESSED?! OKAY LIL DIDE

FAUST LINK SUMMONS

IT’S A 1000 ATK MONSTER

ANOTHER TOKEN IS SPECIAL SUMMONED

AND THIS MONSTER GAINS 700 ATK FOR EVERY INSECT ON THE FIELD, INCLUDING HERSELF

LB HAD THE UTMOST FAITH THAT PLAYMAKER CAN TAKE THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN

BUT FAUST HAS A PLAN

HE SETS TWO FACEDOWNS AND ENDS HIS TURN

Back in Den City, Shoichi is breaking all kinds of traffic laws in his hellish crusade to get Naoki back

BACK IN LINK VRAINS

PLAYMAKER TAKES HIS TURN

HE SPECIAL SUMMONS LINKSLAYER AT 2000 ATK

AND BACKUP SECRETARY AT 1200 ATK

HE LINK SUMMONS SPACE INSULATER AT 1200 ATK

SPECIAL SUMMONS A 0 ATK MONSTER

HE LINK SUMMONS AGAIN

IT’S DECODE TALKER AT 2300 ATK

HE SUMMONS CYBERSE WIZARD

DECODE TALKER GOES UP TO 2800 ATK, BECAUSE HIS EFFECT IS “FRIENDSHIP”

LB IS SO HAP?? BECAUSE NOW DECODE TALKER IS MORE POWERFUL THAN FAUST’S MONSTER

C’MON LIL DUDE, YOU CAN’T THINK IT’LL BE THAT EASY

“I tricked you” I MEAN. OBVIOUSLY.

PLAYMAKER SETS A FACEDOWN

HE GOES IN FOR THE ATTACK

ANNNND HE ACTIVATES HIS CONTINUOUS SPELL (?)

SO INSTEAD OF ATTACKING HIS MAIN MONSTER

A TOKEN IS ATTACKED INSTEAD

HIS ACE ISN’T DESTROYED

“BUT YOU STILL TAKE DAMAGE!”

FAUST IS DOWN TO 3600 LP LOL

AND HIS ACE DOES DOWN TO 1700

HE HAS CYBERSE WIZARD ATTACK

HIS ACE IS DESTROYED

FAUST IS DOWN TO 3500 LP

BUT HE ACTIVATES HIS TRAP!BRINGS THAT BITCH BACK AT 1000 ATK

ANOTHER TOKEN IS SUMMONED

HIS ACE GOES UP TO 2400 LP

“The stage is set. Playmaker and Ignis, this is just the beginning!”

HE ACTIVATES HIS CONTINUOUS TRAP

“One of your monsters loses it’s effects, switches to defense position, and changes to insect-type!”

Hot. Damn.

THAT’S ANNOYING AS SHIT

PLAYMAKER IS DUMBSTRUCK

FAUST USES THE CARD ON CYBERSE WIZARD

A PARASITE LATCHES ONTO HIM AND TURNS HIM INTO AN INSECT

AI IS FUCKING DEVESTATED

AS LONG AS THAT CARD’S ON THE FIELD, CYBERSE WIZARD WILL BE AN INSECT TYPE

AND AS SUCH, HIS ACE GOES UP TO 2800 ATK

ANOOOOOOOYING

LONELY BRAVE IS FREAKING OUT

“Is there nothing we can do…?” Ai sounds so dead lol

Playmaker ends his turn

“THERE’S REALLY NOTHING WE CAN DO?!”

Faust thinks he’s got this shit in the bag lol

I AM 99.99% SURE THIS FODDER MOTHERFUCKER ISN’T GONNA BE PLAYMAKER’S FIRST LOSS

FAUST HAS MISTAKEN HIMSELF FOR A MAIN CHARACTER

PUT HIM IN HIS PLACE BBY

FAUST TAKES HIS TURN

ACTIVATES HIS SPELL? TRAP? I FORGOT WHICH TBH

HE TRIBUTES HIS TOKEN AND

SUMMONS TWO MORE ON PLAYMAKER’S SIDE OF THE FIELD

AI TRIES TO DO THE MATH; HAS TO COUNT ON HIS FINGERS

FAUST’S MONSTER GOES UP TO 3800 ATK OMGGGG

AND ANOTHER TOKEN IS SUMMONED

THIS BITH GOES UP TO 4500 ATK

FAUST PLAYS ANOTHER CONTINUOUS SPELL THA’LL LET HIM ATTACK PLAYMAKER DIRECTLY IF HE HAS NOTHING BUT INSECTS ON HIS FIELD

HE GOES IN FOR THE ATTACK AGAINST DT

DT GOES DOWN

PLAYMAKER’S DOWN TO 2300 ATK

AI IS SCREAMING

ALL OF PLAYMAKER’S INSECTS ARE BUGS NOW

AW

SHIT

FAUST THINKS ABOUT GENOME AND VYRA

HE’S DOING THIS SHIT TO AVENGE THEM

FUUUUUCK

FAUST ACTIVATES HIS SKILL

WHICH LETS HIS MONSTER ATTACK TWICE

“What?!” PLAYMAKER SOUNDS WORRIED AND I AM WORRIED

FAUST GOES IN FOR A DIRECT ATTACK

THE ATTACK

… goes into that wormhole from the start of the ep

All is silent…

Wait what? RUMBLING?!

THE ATTACK COMES FROM BENEATH HIM

“IT’S OVER, PLAYMAKER AND IGNIS!"

PLAYMAKER PLAYS HIS TRAP

IT HALVES BATTLE DAMAGE

PLAYMAKER GETS SLAMMED UP AGAINST A WALL

HE’S DOWN TO 50 LP

FUCK.

“50 LP. You’re barely alive.”

“But it’s enough to fight with” PLAYMAKER RUNS

JUMPS ON HIS BOARD

PLAYMAKER CAN NOW SPECIAL SUMMON A LINK MONSTER

BUT

HE CAN’T USE THE TOKENS TO DO IT

“Bugs bug me!” ME TOO AI ME TOO

“Too bad. You have no future!”

Faust, considering that you almost certainly know about Playmaker’s past.

Can you, um. Not. 

Okay but Playmaker isn’t giving up

“Playmaker… was one of the victims…”

Okay, flashback time!

“We created those victims. And that led to the creation of the detestable Ignis.”

Okay, so he, Kyoko, and Kogami were all 100% involved

Faust and Kyoko look HIGHLY DISTURBED, but they didn’t do shit to stop it

“I’ll beat this burden for the rest of my life. But I can’t get sentimental rightnow.”

He swears he’ll defeat Playmaker on his next turn

FAUST ENDS HIS TURN

PLAYMAKER TAKES HIS TURN

FAUST TELLS HIM TO GIVE UP

LOL LIKE HE’S GONNA DO THAT

HE ACTIVATES THE QUICKSPELL HE JUST DREW

HE BANISHES A DT FROM HIS GRAVE

AND DESTROYS FAUST’S ACE

BUT HE PROTECTS HIS MONSTER USING HIS CONTINUOUS SPELL

ONE OF THE TOKENS IS DESTROYED INSTEAD

BUT! PLAYMAKER WANTED THAT TO HAPPEN!

HE ACTIVATES THE CARD’S ADDITIONAL EFFECT

AND IT DESTROYS FAUST’S CONTINOUS TRAP!

AHAHAHAHA BITCH

“It wasn’t invincible :)” GOOD SHIT PLAYMAKER GOOD SHIT

ANOTHER TOKEN COMES OUT THOUGH

HIS MONSTER GOES UP TO 4500 ATK

FAUST IS STILL WEIRDLY CONVINCED THAT HE’LL WIN?? HOW ADORABLE.

PLAYMAKER ACTIVATES THAT SWEET, SWEET DATA STORM

HE GRABS THE CARD

“Here I go for real, Faust!”

HE GOES IN FOR THE LINK SUMMON

USES CYBERSE WIZARD AND THE TWO TOKENS FAUST FORCED ONTO HIS FIELD

IT’S! POWERCODE TALKER!! 

AT 2300 ATK

SPREAD QUEEN GOES BACK DOWN TO 2400 ATK

BRINGS ONE OF HIS MONSTERS BACK FROM THE GRAVE, AT 1200 ATK

AND HE NEGATES SPREAD QUEEN’S EFFECT USING POWERCODE’S EFFECT

THE ASSHOLE GOES BACK DOWN TO 1000 ATK

“The next strike will end you, Faust!” KICK HIS ASS BBY.

“LISTEN TO ME, PLAYMAKER! That Ignis… humanity’s future—“

***CLOSE UP OF AIS PISSED OFF FACE***

“Playmaker! Let’s finish him! ^^"

AI. DO WE NEED TO HAVE A TALK, AI.

DO YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU’RE LETTING ON YOU PURPLE LITTLE BASTARD.

PLAYMAKER LOOKS SUSPICIOUS, AT LEAST

BUT HE GOES IN FOR THE ATTACK

HE TRIBUTES THE MONSTER HE JUST BROUGHT BACK FROM THE GRAVE

AND THIS BRINGS POWERCODE UP TO 4600 ATK

YAS GIRL YAAAAAAS

THE ATTACK CONNECTS

FAUST GOES DOWN TO 0

PLAYMAKER WINS!

“PLAYMAKER! Through your actions, humanity’s future will be—“

Annnnd he disintegrates lol

That guy was fucking useless, I’ll tell you that much

“Humanity’s future…? What did he mean?”

“Who knows? *Ai* don’t know.” YES YOU DO YOU LITTLE BITCH

Okay, so Playmaker meets up with LB

“Playmaker, I’m very sorry for today. Since I bragged about Cyberse Wizard… I’m not worthy of carrying on Playmaker’s will.”

“Do you have the courage to keep going?”

“???”

“Create your own path by yourself. No matter how difficult the path…”

That was so fucking solid.

And? Do I smell character development?? Just last episode he shut Naoki’s ass down but here, he’s encouraging him.

Playmaker logs out

“Create my own path…”

Back in Den City, Shoichi FINALLY makes it to where Naoki’s at

Yusaku jumps out the back

Omg don’t tell me he’s about to out himself to Naoki lmao

“SHIMA!”

“Fujiki! You came to rescue me?”  lmao okay, he’s fine

“No.” YOU FUCKING LIAR. “Was there anyone else here?”

“No, just me…”

Annnnnd now Faust is lying all snuggly in his own lil coffin

Next to Genome and Vyra

Rev is walking the fuck away

Back in Den City, Shoichi is asleep at the wheel

“Anyway, guess who saved me?! Playmaker! And Playmaker is carrying on my will.” Omg Nakoi shUT UP

NO ONE IS CARRYING ON ANYBODY’S WILL

Yusaku’s ignoring him, at least.

“The restraints were made to release automatically. That means Faust had no intention of turning Shima into Another.”

Naoki is still rambling to himself. “It’s like… it’s like we’re on the same page. Our hearts are united on a deep level. We might form a team!”

Ai thinks he talks a lot and I fucking agree lmao

“Someone used Shima to lure me out… The one who sent Cyberse Wizard is the culprit. If it isn’t Faust, the one who can is…”

He looks at Ai.

“It can’t be…”

YES IT FUCKING CAN.

Okay so outside some apartment building

Creepy piano music is playing??

Somebody takes a book from a shelf

Pulls something out

UM

THEY HAVE THE SAME LIL TATTOO ON THEIR HAND AS IRL!REVOLVER

Okay they pulled out a video camera??

It’s… footage of Shoichi and Yusaku at Vyra’s apartment, discussing her purging

Oh no.

OH FUCK NO

THEY SEE YUSAKU’S FACE

THAT EVIL GRIN

YUSAKU’S BEEN FOUND OUT

I REPEAT

SOMEONE OFFICIALLY FOUND HIM OUT.

*gross sobbing*

P-preview time??

Okay it’s literally just Shoichi, Yusaku, and Ai in the hotdog truck making their record of events

Another fucking recap lmaooo *punches a hole in the wall*

[meditatemoremedicateless]

The Raven (Before the Storm Theorycraft)

Credit to @geekremix for many of her theories of the original Life is Strange, as well as the Geek Remix Lets Plays I’ve been using as my source material for most of my research of the original game.

Since the release of the first trailers for Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the Raven has been a seemingly omnipresent figure. In the opening of many scenes in the game, including almost every scene with Rachel, the setting is shown, followed by the Raven’s entrance or presence in the scene before the player assumes control. It, for all intents and purposes, appears that Chloe is being followed by a bird. But why?

The symbolisms associated with ravens are varied, but both essential properties of ravens as well as myth specifically included or referenced in the game seems like a fair place to look. With that in mind:

- As carrion birds, ravens frequently represent coming death. They are highly intelligent creatures known to follow large groups of humans, such as caravans or military battalions, in expectation of death (and therefore food).

- As referenced in the placard next to the totem, ravens often stand in as trickster spirits or symbols of transformation.

- In many mythos, ravens act as godly messengers, likely due both to their intelligent and ability to mimic language.

 Now, the Raven could be understood as a mere symbol of death, transformation, or a divine message if they did not interact with the cast of their own accord. For instance, the blue jay in Life is Strange may have interacted with Max, but it didn’t demonstrate any awareness of her or anyone else, and doesn’t try to engage with her beyond responding to her actions (such as shooing it in episode 3). However, the Raven is heavily implied to be the source of Chloe’s vision in the junk yard, in which she discovers Rachel’s location and is told that “Sometimes, people need you, though. Even when they don’t admit it.” The way that the vision fragments visually, with William seeming to be more illusion than person, and with the Raven appearing every time the vision fragments.

Because the information that the Raven provided was accurate, I think there are a few safe possible interpretations.

-        The Raven may be a familiar/spirit animal (I detest Life is Strange’s use of spirit animals, so I’ll be replacing them with familiars for the rest of the post) belonging to Chloe, guiding her according to her own intentions. They watch over her, only interfering to help her accomplish things she wants (repairing things with Rachel) and help others (keeping Rachel safe). This would fulfill the ‘messenger of the gods’ role.

-        The Raven may be a guardian spirit for Rachel. I say this simply because of how often the Raven’s appearance is associated with Rachel’s, most notably at the Fire Walk event and the park hill between Arcadia and Culmination. Additionally, the Raven only actually interfered in a way that helped Rachel, both emotionally and in terms of safety (it showed Chloe a vision of Rachel burning, after all, and if she becomes injured she’ll likely require Chloe’s help to get out of the forest). In addition, Max’s special connection to animals in Arcadia Bay appeared at the same time that she developed her powers, meaning the Raven may be connected to Rachel’s relationship to the wind.

-        The Raven may be a puppet of the woman who kissed Rachel’s dad / watched the fire, hereafter referred to simply as The Woman. Because the Woman’s appearances are both directly related to the destruction of Rachel’s life, and because she takes so much pleasure in watching the fire begin (without any apparent excitement or agitation, suggesting she knew it would happen), it’s possible that the woman may be using the Raven to spy on and manipulate Rachel and Chloe in order to cause a sequence of events. More on this in another paper.

-        The Raven may literally be a person. Hearkening back to old theories of a shapeshifting Mark Jefferson, the concept of shamanism or animal shapeshifting in Arcadia Bay has always been a stretch, but a reasonable one. If that is the case, my assumption is that the Raven would be someone with a way to access both knowledge of the future as well as being able to gain a psychic connection to others. The most obvious way that this might be possible is if they have some bond with Arcadia Bay itself – however, whether this person wants to protect the people in the bay or to destroy them so far remains a mystery.

 Now, I have one last theory, and it is a theory that relies on other theories, and also my actual theory. Stick with me as I catch you up on my accepted theories regarding animals following episode 5 of Life is Strange.

-        Both because the butterfly is present for Max gaining powers as well as Chloe’s funeral, I believe that the butterfly is Chloe Price. I follow an interpretation of the Sacrifice Chloe ending of the game that the ultimate justification for Max’s powers was to give Max some of the time with Chloe that was stolen from her upon Chloe’s death. In so doing, Max was able to realize her feelings for Chloe as well as recognize that Chloe could forgive her – in effect, Chloe granted Max her powers so she could make her know how she felt about her, to forgive her, and to give Max a chance at making new connections with people (all the people she got to know in the week she erased).

-        It is heavily implied that the doe in episodes 1-4 is Rachel, guiding Max through her journey so that her body might be discovered and she could gain closure. Because Max is the only one capable of seeing her, it seems clear that Max is capable of seeing a version of Arcadia Bay that other people can’t – a spiritual plane lain over the same landscape. Considering the way in which her reality literally fragments in the Nightmare, it appears that people may exist simultaneously on an embodied and spiritual plane.

If we are to believe that certain animals within Life is Strange are the spirits of people, there is no reason to assume that familiars actually exist in Arcadia Bay. Rather, the Raven is the manifested spirit of someone who needs to resolve something. While William is certainly one possibility, and one of the only relevant dead characters at this point, I simply can’t imagine William becoming a raven after his death – transformation, death, and trickery all don’t line up with anything we know about him. However, someone who was interested in creating death and tricking Chloe would appropriately come in the form of a raven. Currently, the game still seems to be hinting a lot about the storm, so the coming death that the Raven is trying to bring may in fact be the storm. Except, who would gain anything by bringing the storm?

My proposition? A Prescott. Of course. I always come back to the Prescotts, don’t I?

Here's my reasoning. Firstly, the wildfire that Chloe and Rachel cause starts up to the north of Arcadia Bay, between it and Culmination. From what we know of Pan Estates, it is built very near there, and its construction doesn’t seem to have started yet. As such, the Prescotts may acquire the land that is to become Pan Estates after the wild fire deforests the land. Secondly, we know from at least one angle that the Prescotts could potentially benefit by bringing the storm to the Bay: in Episode 4 of Life is Strange, Max and Chloe discover that the Prescott family is responsible for a huge bunker boom in Arcadia Bay during the cold war. This exchange occurs in mandatory dialogue, so it must be significant, but there was never any follow-up in Life is Strange – to the contrary, the bunker beneath the Prescott barn was suggested to have been created with little knowledge or input by Sean. However, if Pan Estates were built significantly inland, and it either was built with bunkers or a large number of people in Arcadia Bay simply have bunkers under their homes, then Pan Estates becomes the obvious choice of real estate once people are forced to relocate during the reconstruction of Arcadia Bay. Lastly, in episode 4 of Life is Strange, if Kate was saved and Max brings up Nathan, Kate remarks that the Prescotts “have something to do with death.” While Nathan may have killed Rachel, there’s no real reason for Kate to generalize this concept. However, if the Prescotts actually have a spiritual connection to ravens, a symbol of death, and this Raven is capable of entering people’s dreams, it is possible that Kate encountered the Raven at some point (most likely when drugged by Jefferson).

So, let’s say I’ve gotten lucky and yeah, it’s a Prescott. Although in my own works I’ve usually pointed the Nathan’s mother as a source of a lot of the potential Prescott weirdness, she isn’t dead in Life is Strange – Sean clearly remarks about his and his wife’s feelings about Nathan’s deteriorating mental state in a letter than Max can read in the Bunker / Dark Room. Kristine, too, is alive as of Life is Strange. So what other Prescotts do we know? While I’m hesitant to suggest it, Henry Aaron Prescott seems like one of the easiest people to point to – with a supernatural view of both the spiritual plane of Arcadia Bay as well as the ability to see the future, the Prescotts’ acquisition of so much of the land and power seems trivial. However, it could just as easily be any other Prescott who has died, Henry is just the only one we know the name of.

Now, while this theory leaves Life is Strange extremely consistent in its supernatural logic, it is precisely because of that that I doubt it. At least under DONTNOD, the mystical elements of Arcadia Bay, including Max’s powers, were never consistent. Even if Max is considered to have say, four different powers instead of the expected two, parts of her powers don’t make much sense, such as her flash forward in the opening sequence of the game. Ultimately, I expect that the Raven will be a familiar to someone implicitly, and we’ll never get anything more explicit than the vision that they appeared in. That being said, there’s already a lot of material to work with on the Raven, so I think this is a good place to start.

Let me know if you have any more ideas about the Raven or animal spirits in Arcadia Bay!

[duaneodavila]

3 Questions For A Biglaw Challenger (Part I)

Recently, I was fortunate to have had a chance to conduct a written interview with a prominent IP attorney, David L. Hecht, co-head of the IP Group and New York office of Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP (“Pierce Bainbridge”). I have known David for a few years, having first met him while he was on the in-house team at Vringo, which was embroiled at the time in a high-stakes patent litigation using original Lycos search engine patents against Google. In addition to his in-house experience, David practiced in the IP groups of Jones Day, Quinn Emanuel, and Steptoe & Johnson, before jumping over to the self-styled “fastest growing law firm in the world.” At the tail-end of last year, David and his clients took over the news with the lawsuits they launched against the popular video games Fortnite and NBA2K, an effort immortalized on these pages with the paean to David’s talents recorded by his rapper client, 2 Milly.

I very much welcome to opportunity to share David’s insights with this audience. Both he and his firm are at the forefront of challenging Biglaw firms with a mix of marketing bravado, entrepreneurial gusto, and old-fashioned securing of litigation wins for their clients. A winning combination so far, and one that promises to lead to more noteworthy accomplishments going forward. As usual, I have added some brief commentary to David’s answers below, but have otherwise presented his answers as he provided them.

1) What is most exciting about leading the IP group at the “fastest-growing firm in the history of the world”?

DH: The unlimited potential is really the most exciting part of leading the IP group.  When Max Price and I first approached John Pierce about launching the New York office and the IP group, I saw great potential.  John’s vision was to assemble outstanding talent from the best firms and the best law schools and unshackle them. Without red tape or politics, brilliant, hungry lawyers could excel in ways that they could never even imagine at Biglaw.  John set forth 10 “commandments” for the firm that reflect his core values:

 All for one, one for all.

 We don’t try cases, we win them.

 There are only two cardinal sins — disloyalty to one another and not giving your best.

 Every case is the entire firm’s case and the case of every lawyer in it.

 We never give up.  There is always a way.

 We are global missionaries for the rule of law.

 Everyone is a rainmaker.  Everyone is a service lawyer.

 We gang tackle, swarm, and crowd-source.  The firm is a matrix.

 Everyone has a special gift.  Here you get to use it.

 No one gets left behind.  Ever.

These values resonated with me.  Many of them are the antithesis of the values and culture I found during my many years at Biglaw.  Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP was designed to support every one of its lawyers and unleash their full potential.

When we joined, it felt like a giant weight had been lifted from me.  I have been able to jump on opportunities more quickly and push cases forward more aggressively than at any other firm I’ve ever worked. As a result, the firm has been able to run circles around our adversaries.  It’s clear that we have intimidated those other firms with our agility and resourcefulness.

Since launching the IP group, we’ve been retained on dozens of really fantastic matters.  Our firm’s lawsuits against Epic for copyright infringement and misappropriation of likeness in Fornite are cases of the first impression widely covered by the popular media, from the Today Show to The Washington Post.  We’ve recently been retained to represent Social Technologies LLC against Apple in a trademark infringement case involving the mark MEMOJI, a registered trademark owned by our client.  We are also enforcing the “King of Bling” Chris Aire’s RED GOLD® trademark against the watch and jewelry industries (after settling one of Chris’s big cases in October, I received a Chris Aire “Capitol Hill” custom timepiece from the RED GOLD® collection — which helped me earn mad street cred with rappers like 2 Milly and another notable rapper who is about to file suit against Epic.)

We also represent former Philadelphia Eagles player Lenwood “Skip” Hamilton in another misappropriation of likeness case against both Epic Games and Microsoft.  On the patent side, we have several big patent infringement cases, including cases against Samsung, DJI, and Xiaomi.

We’ve also attracted top-tier talent to the firm.  The newest additions to our IP group are two former Kramer Levin senior partners: Brian Slater, our new Head of Life Sciences, and Greg Sephton.  Brian and Greg are first-chair patent litigators with phenomenal experience. It’s an honor to have them on the team. Our IP group now has talent and capability spanning the complete breadth of IP.

As our IP group has expanded to the point that we rival the size and capabilities of the most-respected IP groups in the country, Fortune 500 work has been steadily flowing to our firm.  Choosing Pierce Bainbridge is a no-brainer for GCs: we provide the same talent as they would find at our Biglaw competition (our firm consists of almost exclusively Biglaw expats), for drastically less cost.  Since we are fixated on world domination, we also want to ensure our clients keep coming back. So, we strive to provide the best possible services to our clients to ensure that they are not only happy with our rates but thrilled with the results we are obtaining for them.

GK: Hard to add much to the above, other than to say that David’s experience mirrors my own after leaving Biglaw to join an IP boutique. With the right moxie and dedication to client service, there really does not need to be a drop in the quality of matters one handles. In fact, the flexibility of a boutique environment can often be a catalyst for taking on higher-profile matters sooner.

2) How has your business background helped prepare you for your current role?

DH: My background in business is really what helped the most, both educationally and in practice.  Before law school, I pursued my MBA while working full-time as a network engineer. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.  Foundational business courses like accounting, marketing, and organizational behavior should really be required coursework for law students.  Those courses have certainly helped me in my role as co-head of the IP group at Pierce Bainbridge. They have also helped me relate to and understand my clients and their business requirements.  

But even those business courses can’t teach you everything you need to know.  Much of what I have learned over the years has come from the School of Hard Knocks.  I came from humble beginnings. My father was a public school teacher and my mother was a homemaker; we were always on a tight budget when I was growing up.  I became a lawyer because I was always fascinated with patent law: the intersection between science/engineering and the humanities. I was also led to believe that a smart lawyer who went to a great school and worked at a top firm would have some job security.  But that was wrong. I saw blood in the water during the Great Recession and watched as my former classmates were axed from even the most “elite” Biglaw firms.

At that point, I realized that I needed to look out for myself.  As I continued to scavenge for work at the firm I was working at, I also started leveraging my hefty Biglaw salary and began investing in real estate in my spare time, establishing a real estate investment company as other startups.  I created a safety net for myself and my family. Since I was lucky enough to find enough legal work and weathered the storm, I never left the practice of law and continued doing what I love the most: advocating for my clients and gearing up for the next trial.  But I will never forget the apprehension of potentially losing my job and possibly even my career.

My experiences sourcing and identifying deals, project managing, setting up financing, as well as hiring and delegating so that I could focus on high-level aspects of the businesses, directly impact my roles at the firm today.  The apprehension that led me to start-up my own businesses a decade ago never faded; the fear that tough times may be just around the corner now also what drives me to continuously hunt for new business opportunities at Pierce Bainbridge.

John Pierce and most of my partners are just as ravenous as I am.  That hunger is important to the mission.  We must be relentless and focused to overtake firms like Quinn Emanuel and the old guard. My focus is no longer on looking out for myself as I did a decade ago.  I am looking out for the firm and my colleagues; I am constantly seeking out lucrative cases and good clients.

Lawyers should realize that the practice of law is also a business; unfortunately, most firms are simply incapable of teaching young lawyers how to market themselves and seldom let anyone peek behind the curtain.  At Pierce Bainbridge, there are no secrets and there is no curtain. We bring in business through sheer force of will. Everyone who wants to become a rainmaker can do so.

GK: What shines through in David’s answer is the absolute lack of entitlement. As the saying goes, “hungry dogs run faster,” and nothing is as motivating as someone’s desire to provide for their family and gain some control over their financial destiny.

We will continue with David’s answer to question 3 next week.

Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.

Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

[casualarsonist]

Max Max (2015 video game) review

God bless George Miller - the patron saint of ballsy old men. I don’t think anyone expected the best action movie of the decade to be directed by a 70-year-old man returning to a franchise that hadn’t been touched since 1985, but that’s exactly what happened when Miller revisited the Mad Max universe with Fury Road in 2015. Bigger and bolder than any film in the series before it, to some it became THE Mad Max film - where Mad Max 2 was arguably the only really good one (quieten down - Mad Max was a proof of concept and Beyond Thunderdome was a clusterfuck), Fury Road became the new benchmark for quality. Oversaturated blazing orange desert and bright teal skies marked the new vision of the apocalypse, shying away from the genre-typical washed-out visuals in favour of bold colours (he would later go on to release his preferred version of the film in super-apocalyptic black-and-white, but that’s another story). The sandy desert scrubland of MM1, 2, and 3 became a dry ocean floor, marking the remnants of the seabed where bountiful water once covered the earth before the cataclysm that ended civilisation as we know it. The traditional masked freaks of the raiding parties became the bald, white-painted war boys; insane and out for blood. Avalanche likely couldn’t have been happier that they decided to take influence from the visual design of the newest film, nor would they be upset that it became the big success that it did, and neither could I, for that matter because, for what it is, Mad Max (the game) is a wonderful addition to a franchise that I hold dear to my heart. 

For those new to the series, Mad Max is a series of films revolving around the episodic adventures of Max Rockatansky (stifle your laughter, please) – a former police officer who lost his wife and young daughter to a gang of murderous motorbike raiders not long after an as-yet-unidentified event depleted the earth of most of its natural water. Civilisation has gone to shit and its every man for himself on this new desert planet as Max, mad with grief and dead inside from the horrors he has seen and endured, wanders aimlessly in search of some intangible release. His only remaining instinct is to survive, although to what end, he does not seem to know. There is a flicker of humanity still left in him that we see manifested in his various exploits helping other wastelanders in their time of need, but in the end he is always alone, having lost everything he held dear to him. The key to understanding the series is that the films are never about Max – he is simply the vessel through which we see the world. Instead they are about the greater story of the people he helps, and he is simply the axis upon which their fates tend to hinge. Max Max (the game) necessarily gives the player a more hands-on role, placing us in the boots of Max himself and ostensibly on a quest to reach the fabled ‘Plains of Silence’. He seems to believe that he will find peace here, although whether the location even exists is uncertain, and it’s suggested early on that he won’t find whatever it is he’s looking for. We’re dropped in media res and Max is being attacked by the war boys of Scabrous Scrotus – warlord of Gas Town, whose black smoke and burning chimneys can be seen ever-present on the horizon. Max is defeated and left for dead, his iconic car stolen and cut up for scrap. He comes upon a hunchbacked mechanic ‘Chumbucket’, who worship cars as gods and sees in Max a literal angel come to save the world. Max is then dragged into a series of events that see him working with Chumbucket and the various local settlement leaders to reconstruct his vehicle and make his way to Gas Town to dethrone Scrotus. It’s in keeping with the theme of the films that Max becomes involved in the story through chance and fate, and then stays until its conclusion for his own personal reasons, and one could perhaps spend a while musing on the deeper existential connection behind Max’s choice of actions and the player’s dutiful response to the commands we’re given; why do we venture out to destroy this particular enemy stronghold, because we’re told to, because it will help, or because we enjoy the act of fighting and destroying? Maybe all of the above. It’s not a tale of redemption as such, as Max never tempers his savagery in the face of opposition, but in his actions we see the way he does his best to make the terrible world he lives in a little better, and lightens the load on those who can’t defend themselves against the ruthless.

The narrative is flimsy, however deep the thematic suggestions might seem to go, and loses a lot of the urgency due to the fact that it’s an open-world game and filled with a solid amount of busy work, but its heart is in the right place. Mad Max (the game) seemed to infuriate a few critics, who are understandably likely to be appalled by a lack of innovation, and MM isn’t going to reinvent the wheel when it comes to open-world games, but I do find it falls on the better side of the trough that the industry was making its way out of at the time (leaving a clutter of Ubisoft collect-a-thons laying at the bottom to decompose).

Functionally, it plays like a Frankenstein’s monster of late-2000s open-world games featuring a simplistic version of Arkham’s fight mechanics, open-world driving, vehicular combat, upgrades, and (sigh) collecting, so there’s not a lot here gameplay-wise that’s going to stun you. It all works though, the only gripe I have with the gameplay is the brainless fighting. Hit Y when it tells you, and hit X at every other point and you’ll make your way through most battles easily enough. There’s a distinct lack of finesse and variation in the hand-to-hand combat – you can pick up weapons but these will break after a few strikes and you can use your shotgun but ammo is scarce – and when it’s all over you’re back to pummelling X again. This is exemplary of the game’s biggest failing and one could quite reasonably critique MM by ranking the various activities and features by how well the mitigate their repetitiveness.

Which is the primary point of contention for most people – the world tries its hardest to invest you, while the gameplay works to take you out of it. It’s a balancing act that so many open world games play, and one that MM just falls on the winning side of, in my opinion. You can run and punch and roll and drive, but you can’t jump, which is insane for an open world game, especially as some of the locations require you to traverse open gaps or inclines. Every time you collect water or eat food or loot there’s a few seconds of a cutscene or an action that you have to watch. It’s one of those things that was included for immersion’s sake, but the frustration adds up steeply over time. The icon-littered map and the reliance on a minimap for navigation serves as a constant reminder that you’re the player, but these negatives are countered by some solid world building that a love for Fury Road and a nostalgia for the Mad Max series will foster. For sure there are plenty of locations, hundreds even, to investigate for scraps of…well…scrap…but there is a thrill to be had venturing into each new cavern, hut, clifftop hideout, or scrapped ship’s hull, and encountering the delinquent denizens within. Most of the icons on your map are going to be these lootable locations, and you’re looting scrap which contributes to your upgrades. These upgrades make an appreciable mark on your quality of life in-game, so the compulsion to attend to these locations is quite strong, at least for the first little while. There will be a point later on in the game where you don’t have to worry about the small amount of scrap from these places, but for those that don’t mind taking the time, there are plenty of little things to be seen and found in each of these little areas. They’re not all mind-blowing treasure troves of detail and mystery, but there is enough variation and attention to detail to make it worth doing.

The upgrades themselves don’t feel too frivolous; almost all of Max’s personal upgrades come with a visual change and you can see his evolution with each additional unlock. Your car can be upgraded as well, and while you may think at first glance that you’re simply working towards having the biggest and best of everything, they’ve balanced the upgrades with positive and negative effects – bigger rams and stronger armour will weigh more and reduce your handling, top speed, and acceleration – and these changes will have real repercussions in-game, so if you simply want a bullish battering ram you can make one; if you want a light and manoeuvrable racer, so be it; if you want a balance, you can customise as you see fit.

The wasteland is dangerous, of course, and the hazards you’ll encounter are numerous, although you’ll primarily be tussling with bandits of various factions, either on foot or in your car as you come across patrols racing about. These factions are largely similar in function, if not in look - of note are the Buzzards, a mysterious, chaotic group of psychopaths who inhabit dark underground caves and emerge only at night driving cars crudely adorned with spikes, wearing masks with glowing red eyes, and they remain supremely unnerving throughout the entirety of the game. One of the most impressive of the wasteland dangers are the sandstorms. Chumbucket will usually spot them before you and warn you of their impending onset, and on the horizon the great wall of sand will bear down. You can enter a stronghold to find it having passed when you leave, or take shelter somewhere otherwise and wait it out in real time. But it’s far more fun to brave the storm and take your car out to find rich scrap rewards, tracking down and snaring boxes of scrap, and braving the lighting and flying debris to break them open and collect their loot.

Vehicular combat is enjoyable, and it’s rarely a hindrance when you come across patrols of bandits on the road as the engagements are spaced out enough to make you hungry for the fight. Depending on your weapons, armour, and health you may prefer differing tactics, but if you’re tired of ramming them, you’re equipped with a shotgun and a harpoon that can disable vehicles, kill the occupants, and destroy fuel tanks sending the offending vehicle spinning through the air in a shower of flame and debris.

But as I was saying, this is standard fare for the most part. It’s the sandbox within which all these things sit that sets it apart from other games in the genre. Whilst Avalanche’s most well-known series, Just Cause, isn’t known for its nuanced and detailed world, MM excels at creating a believable and lived in landscape, with plenty of small and hidden details that activate your imagination. MM’s wasteland is comprised of surprisingly rich and varied terrain – sandy roads and dune-filled deserts transition into rocky plains, oily marshes, dry white coral ocean beds, and grey, craggy passes. Rotten hulls of long-abandoned ships lay half-buried, and lighthouses and bridges erupt from the earth and soar into the sky. Generally speaking, you can travel as far as the eye can see; if you’re expecting invisible walls, you’ll be hard pressed to find them, and what the game lacks in verticality it makes up for in vast ‘horizontality’. In each of the major areas of the map lies a hub which is visible for miles around, and provides a helpful landmark that can occasionally remove the need to rely on the minimap, which is a rare occurrence but a welcome one because the game is at its best when you get to look around; the visuals are quite stunning - screenshot fodder if ever I saw it, and standing on a high ledge and staring at the vista before you is mesmerising. The day/night cycle is modelled accurately and the colour palette of the landscape changes as you venture to different areas; there’s nothing quite like tearing along the remnants of a bitumen highway as the sun sets, casting and orange glow through the plumes of sand kicked up behind you, the lights of Gas Town burning in the distance. The underground Buzzard hovels are cramped and the sound is muffled by the dirt walls, so you never quite know where the enemies you can hear scrabbling about are coming from. Vehicles explode with an ear-popping bang, and dance through the air spewing orange and yellow flames. Metal parts and debris fly from the wreckages and litter the area around them, and the destroyed hull of the cars grind to a halt, burning grimly by the roadside. The game performs exceptionally well, although I’ve noticed some occasional visual glitches particularly in the shadowing in some of the dust plumes, but there’s little lag, even when you’re tearing around the landscape. There are nice little attentions to detail, such as tire marks and footprints in the dust, the way sand spits up from your wheels, the way convoys are visible from afar by the dust clouds they stir up, and the detail in the wrecked vehicles as they blast apart and then lay destroyed. It helps with immersion, which is something the game sorely needs to balance out the in-your-face-edness of its mechanics.

And that’s probably the core observation I have to make about the game – the quality of Mad Max (the game) in the eyes of the player is going to rely on how you weight each of the variables on the scales. I can see the frustration and validity of all the criticisms, but I’m also wooed by the qualities and intensity of the game world, and by the little details that show that, for every thing they got wrong, they got something quite right as well. If you want to play ‘Fury Road: The Video Game’, then you’re in the right place. If you want to brawl and blow up, if you want to run and drive, then you’re in the right place. If you want an beautiful post-apocalyptic world, then you’re in the right place. However, if want nuance and subtlety, if you want a complex narrative, if you want an innovative game that will relieve your Assassin’s Creed fatigue, then, like Max in his search for peace in the Plains of Silence, you’re not likely to find what you’re looking for here.

8/10 

Very Good

[theyearoftheking]

Book Forty-Two: Bag of Bones

“The most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones...”

Here’s a peek behind the curtain of my oh-so-glamorous blogging life. My eleven year old daughter insisted on calling this book, “Bag-o-Bones!” and every time she saw me reading it, she’d loudly ask, “Have they found the bag-o-bones yet??” Side note: I think she’d love this book, and am going to push her to try it once she’s done with Dorothy Must Die. And also? August 17th and the start of the (virtual) school year can’t come fast enough. Please and thank you. 

Bag of Bones is the perfect book to recommend to readers who claim, “Not to like Stephen King.” It doesn’t have the absurd (murderous clowns); but it does have the spookiness and fine writing craftsmanship you’d expect from Steve. It’s a treat for new and Constant Readers alike. I had read this book when it first came out and really enjoyed it, but now as a Constant Reader, I’m tickled by the number of Easter eggs I found. In no particular order, you’ve got:

A partial setting in Derry, Maine

Thad Beaumont (The Dark Half)

The writer, Bill Denbrough (It)

Roland and Rolanda (Dark Tower)

Norris Ridgewick and Alan Pangborn (Dark Half, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game)

Shawshank Prison

Juniper Hill Asylum

And... my absolute favorite line.. our main character, Mike Noonan, is out for breakfast when none other than Ralph Roberts slides into the booth and asks him, “Everything going all right? I only ask because you look tired. If it’s insomnia, I can sympathize, believe me...” I loved that scene so much. 

Bag of Bones starts with the unexpected death of Johanna (Jo) Noonan. Her husband Mike, a successful novelist, is plunged into deep despair after her loss, and has a bad case of writers block. In addition to being a spooky ghost story, Bag of Bones is also a tribute to modern fiction. The number of author and book references is dizzying. 

After a trip to Key Largo, Mike decides he needs to leave Derry for a bit, and head out to his and Jo’s lake house: Sara Laughs in the tiny town of TR-90. He’s hoping it might clear his head, and maybe revive his writing. 

Almost immediately upon returning to Sara Laughs, he makes the acquaintance of Mattie and Kyra Devore; a precocious mother/daughter pair. Kyra in particular catches Mike’s attention (not because she was wandering down the middle of the street unattended); but because he and Jo often talked about naming their unborn daughter Kia. Mike finds the coincidence uncanny. He’s drawn to Mattie (despite her young age); but she blows him off, and tells him it’s not a good time for her and Kyra to be making new friends. 

Understatement of the century. 

Mattie had been married to Lance Devore, who was estranged from his wealthy family, and wanted nothing to do with him once he got with Mattie. Lance died in a freak lightning storm, and since then, Max Devore, Lance’s father, had been fighting for custody of Kyra. Mike is warned off by basically everyone in town; they tell him to keep his nose out of Devore business if he knows what’s good for him. 

Buuuut Mike can’t stop thinking about Mattie and Kyra. And it doesn’t help that strange stuff has been going on at Sara Laugh’s. We’re talking ringing bells, refrigerator magnets rearranging themselves into cryptic messages, strage dreams, and voices. And, he finds out Jo had been out to Sara Laugh’s several times without telling him. One time, she was spotted with a handsome fella at a baseball game.She had also quit all her volunteer activities, and had been asking a lot of questions about the history of TR-90 and Sara Tidwell (the namesake of Sara Laugh’s). Mike doesn’t know what to make of any of this, especially considering he found out Jo was pregnant when she died. 

Against the advice of everyone in town, Mike starts spending time with Mattie and Kyra. He’s smitten with Mattie, and thinks Kyra is pretty much the cutest thing ever. Max Devore isn’t happy Mike is fraternizing with the girls, and in a strange sequence of events, uses his absurdly large motorized wheelchair to push Mike off a cliff into the water, and then his assistant, Rogette Whitmore (spoiler: his daughter) pelts Mike with rocks. 

Mike is understandably pissed after the rock pelting episode, and gets in touch with the best child custody attorney he can find for Mattie. The lawyer discovers something is rotten in the state of TR-90. There seems to be an inherent bias towards Max Devore, right down to the guardian ad litem assigned to the case. Mattie’s new lawyer, John, sews up a pretty neat case for why Mattie should keep custody of Kyra; and everyone celebrates. Well, everyone except Max Devore, who puts a bag over his head and kills himself. The town is PISSED: Max Devore was a huge benefactor, and they see Mike as the outsider who stirred up trouble with the young townie whore. His maintenance man leaves him, his cleaning lady turns her back on him... Mike is shocked. He didn’t expect that type of reaction. 

Meanwhile, his dreams are getting more vivid, and they involve Kyra. She is having the same dreams he is. A lot of these dreams center around Sara Tidwell; a blues signer and former resident of TR-90. Before her death, Jo had been doing some research about Sara, and the death of her son, Kito. It appears she had been uncovering some truths about the history of TR-90 that residents were none too happy about. It seems like Jo is trying to send Mike messages, but he’s not understanding them. And Mike is getting the impression Sara is not a helpful, benevolent spirit. She’s vengeful af. And he’s trying to figure out why. 

Mike, Mattie, Kyra, John and a few more associated friends celebrate Mattie’s win, and impending fortune... because Rogette called to inform her Max left all his money to her and Kyra. And Mattie makes it clear she wants to hook up with Mike. Winning! But then some townies conduct a drive-by shooting, and kill Mattie. Losing! 

Mike scoops up Kyra, and takes her back to Sara Laughs, where a massive storm breaks. Mike ends up cracking some of the puzzles Jo left for him, and discovers he needs to dig up the remains of Sara and Kito (the bag of their bones, if you will), and pour lye on their corpses to set them free. Come to find out, Sara had been brutally raped and murdered, and her son Kito had been drown by ancestors of several prominent TR-90 townsfolk, and they tried to cover it up. Why? Because they didn’t like a black woman living in their town. And she had the audacity to laugh at one of them. Yep... yet another book where art is imitating real life. The only thing Sara Tidwell was guilty of was forgetting that living while black is a crime in this country. 

So, Mike kills the evil spirits, and finds Rogette kidnapped Kyra. He gets her back, takes out Rogette, and they all live happily ever after. Well, kind of. Kyra goes into foster care, and Mike works to become her legal guardian. He realizes Jo was the love of his life after all (the handsome dude she was spotted with was her brother), and Kyra was the daughter they never got to have together. 

It’s a damn good story, with plenty of twists, and lots of Maine flavor. I loved it, and continue to recommend it to people looking for a spooky beach read. 

There was the one Dark Tower reference; and a Dahmer reference! It’s the second one I’ve found since starting my Constant Reader journey. That’s always fun... it’s been a while since we had a Wisconsin reference. 

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 28

Total Dark Tower References: 39

Book Grade: A-

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Talisman: A+

Wizard and Glass: A+

Needful Things: A+

The Green Mile: A+

Rose Madder: A+

Misery: A+

Different Seasons: A+

It: A+

Four Past Midnight: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

Bag of Bones: A-

The Wastelands: A-

The Drawing of the Three: A-

Dolores Claiborne: A-

Nightmares in the Sky: B+

The Dark Half: B+

Skeleton Crew: B+

The Dead Zone: B+

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

Cycle of the Werewolf: B-

Danse Macabre: B-

The Running Man: C+

Thinner: C+

Dark Visions: C+

The Eyes of the Dragon: C+

The Long Walk: C+

The Gunslinger: C+

Pet Sematary: C+

Firestarter: C+

Rage: C

Desperation: C-

Insomnia: C-

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Gerald’s Game: D

Roadwork: D

Christine: D

The Tommyknockers: D-

Next up is Storm of the Century. I initially assumed it was something King had been contracted to write. Nope! He thought it might be fun to try his hand a screenplay, and find a buyer for it later. I’ve never read it, and I’ve never seen the television series, but it’s already got a sick Dolores Claiborne reference, so I’m here for it. 

Until next time, Long Days & Pleasant Nights, Rebecca

[mrmichaelchadler]

Bright Wall/Dark Room November 2018: An Essay on Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf by Ethan Warren

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. This month, in honor of #Bergman100, and Criterion's upcoming release of a 30-disc box set of his work, they're devoting our entire November issue to the films of Ingmar Bergman, looking to bring new & diverse perspectives to the legendary Swedish auteur's work. In addition to Ethan Warren's "Hour of the Wolf" piece "The Tumult Breaks Loose" below, they also have new essays on "Scenes from a Marriage," "Cries & Whispers," "Persona," "Fanny & Alexander," "The Passion of Anna," "Face to Face," "Summer with Monika," "The Magic Flute," "It Rains on Our Love," and an intimate, in-depth interview with frequent Bergman collaborator Liv Ullmann.

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here

Eighty-five miles off the coast of Sweden lies the island of Fårö. With a population of around 500 and an area of under 45 square miles, this is, in the words of a 2016 New York Times profile of the region, “Where Swedes go to be (really) alone.”

The shoreline of Fårö is dotted with rauks, stone stumps that were once grand arches before they were attacked by the elements. The wind and the surf would drive against the arches until cracks formed, and once those cracks were there, it was only a matter of time until one half of the arch could no longer sustain itself and collapsed into the sea. The other half of the arch might manage to stay upright for a while, but without its supporting half, it too would crumble, leaving behind just a rauk.

Fårö has no bank, no post office, no police force. “It can feel dangerous to be alone in the country for long,” Christine Smallwood wrote in that New York Times profile. “Being alone is a sign that something is about to go wrong, perhaps catastrophically so.”

And in 1968, it was here that Ingmar Bergman chose to tell his most horrific tale.

*

Hour of the Wolf is the story of a marriage crumbling in a void. Johan and Alma (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, the ultimate Bergman power couple) have traveled to their remote island cottage to spend the season, but as we know from an opening title card, Johan will be gone long before the season is through.

Johan is a painter of some renown, but his professional success masks a turbulent inner life. As we’re told by Alma in a prologue delivered straight to the camera, Johan has a history of anxiety and paranoia. He can’t sleep at night—particularly not during “the hour of the wolf,” that predawn hour, as he explains, when nightmares become real—and he’s pestered by strange supernatural figures that he calls “flesh eaters,” drawing them compulsively until they’ve overflowed his sketchbook.

Johan is, in the old-fashioned literary sense of the word, mad. Bergman elides any proper diagnosis in favor of a more poetic depiction, the tormented artist as fairy-tale figure. And as you might expect of a storybook nightmare, it’s not long before Johan’s madness is made flesh. The demons step out of Johan’s sketchbook and present themselves as grotesque aristocrats who wine and dine Alma and Johan at their gothic castle. They menace Alma and flatter Johan, digging their claws into the cracks in this marriage until they’ve torn it apart. By the end of the film, Johan has abandoned Alma and given himself over to these physical manifestations of his madness and all its seductive promises of freedom and relief.

Hour of the Wolf is often cited as Bergman’s one true foray into the horror genre, and the surreal hysteria that awaits Johan in his climactic visit to the castle is absolutely unnerving—a woman removes her face and drops her eyeballs into cocktail glasses; a man walks onto the ceiling while another grows wings. To me, though, the horror stories it calls to mind are the ones where a monster is loose in the house—except here the house is a marriage, and the monster wreaking havoc is Johan’s instability, a festering rot borne of his secrets and regrets. And that kind of psychic monster can’t be kept at bay for long. Soon enough, “the tumult breaks loose.”That line comes from the climax of the published version of Hour of the Wolf included in Bergman’s 1972 book Four Stories; it’s spoken by Alma as she cowers in the forest watching Johan’s demons tear him limb from limb. This denouement is entirely reconceived from page to screen; in the most significant shift, Bergman’s text has the demons badger and taunt Johan as they rip at his flesh, hurling contradictory commands (“Keep standing, don’t be afraid! Lie down and it will be quicker”), taunts (“Can’t you take a joke?”), and nauseating boasts (“He can’t talk because I’ve made mincemeat of his tongue”). In the film, the dismemberment is punctuated only by avant-garde sound effects.

That was the right choice. The demonic chant is pleasantly disturbing, but those impressionistic bursts and shrieks are so much more accurate; when your madness is having its way with you, it’s impossible to convey in words the havoc being wreaked upon your mind.

*

My own tumult broke loose in the spring of 2011. Just before my 25th birthday, I slipped into a manic episode with psychosis. For a week, I cycled from howling rage to howling sorrow, operating on increasingly erratic impulses as my rational self was devoured by a hyperactive id, one powered by incessant emotional neediness and savage retaliative force.

The primary witness to my breakdown was my girlfriend, Cait. We had met in college four years earlier in the kind of old fashioned story you’re not even supposed to hope for in the 21st century—she was the beautiful clerk at the school store; I had a massive crush and visited every day for weeks, buying things I didn’t need just so I could exchange a smile and a pleasantry while I worked up the nerve to introduce myself.

By 2011, Cait was spending most nights at my apartment near Harvard Square, so as my hours of sleep and my interest in food decreased, she was the one watching with mounting anxiety, and as my grip on reality crumbled, she was the one bearing the brunt of my flourishing paranoia. While my friends received alarming phone calls and it was my family who drove me to the hospital when it became clear there was no other option, Cait was the one beside me every morning and evening. She was the one in the eye of the storm, tasked every night with convincing me to stop ranting long enough to eat even one bite, saddled with my belligerent calls and texts throughout her work day. And when it all started falling down around me, it was Cait I punished.

I spent years dragging my way back to something resembling emotional equilibrium, but even by 2015, when Cait and I relocated to Connecticut so she could attend nursing school, my trauma and grief was too raw to touch with anything but the briefest remembrance. And living hours from my friends with a girlfriend who worked multiple overnights a week at the hospital, I turned to movies to give my life shape. I gorged myself, consuming anything I could put in front of my eyes. And so one night, I found myself watching Hour of the Wolf for the first time.

I knew nothing about the film, I was simply seduced by a cover depicting a shadow-drenched face shrieking with what might be maniacal laughter, mortal terror or both. I was no stranger to Bergman’s visions of terror, but as they tended to lie in the theological (the “Silence of God” trilogy) or cerebral realm (Persona and The Passion of Anna, two more Fårö stories of crumbling psyches), I was tantalized by the promise of the master stripped of any enigmatic subtlety. I wanted Bergman with the gloves off.

I forgot to be careful what I wished for. Hour of the Wolf hit me with brutal force, leaving me gasping and reeling as I struggled to process a story that was simultaneously alien and shockingly familiar. In Johan’s struggle to maintain a grip on his sanity in the face of his demons’ temptations, I recognized how easily I’d succumbed to my own worst urges, and the horrors that lay in store once I’d given myself up.Most painful was the scene in which a demon invites himself into the cottage and politely places a handgun on the table between Johan and Alma. The demon claims that he wants Johan to be able to defend himself from the island’s small game, but the metaphoric implication is clear: the forces of madness have offered the tool to conclusively sever any connection to the tedious responsibilities of sanity.

Out of any damage that I did during my psychosis, the memory that still ached the most years later was of the night before I was hospitalized. Supercharged with the raging energy of a collapsing star, I took a gentle plea from Cait—“You don’t seem like yourself and I’m getting scared”—as an excuse to unload a torrent of wrath. When my madness pressed that weapon into my hand, I used it without a second thought. Though my memories of the night remained hazy, what lingered was the feeling that I had wanted to destroy the only woman I’d ever loved. And then, just like Johan, I had surrendered to my madness, and all the freedom it had promised had been revealed as a lie.

Bergman had held up in my face, with stark, monochromatic objectivity, everything that had happened to me, a tangle of trauma I could barely organize enough to begin processing. For years afterwards, I would remember Hour of the Wolf as my own personal cracked mirror. But it would be years before I could really begin examining the same question that Johan asks when his demons show him his shattered visage: “What do the shards reflect?”

*

Alma’s greatest desire is to merge her life completely with Johan’s. On one of the long nights that she stays awake to keep her husband company, she muses, “I hope we become so old that we share each other’s thoughts.” This is no typical intimate union she wishes for; she yearns to become indistinguishable from her husband, even physically.

It isn’t her choice to sit up all night. “You have to stay awake awhile,” Johan has barked moments earlier. “Talk to me, Alma.” But he hides his face as she speaks, either unwilling or unable to engage. On first viewing, I felt Johan’s pain. But when I returned to the film two years later, I was startled to see the callousness in the gesture, a husband piling onto his wife the full weight of the night’s emotional labor.

Cait and I had been married nearly two years when curiosity, possibly half-masochistic, brought me back to Hour of the Wolf. I put it on late one night while Cait and our new baby slept upstairs, and though I was wary, I told myself that I’d already absorbed the visceral impact. Now I could view the film from an academic perspective, appreciate the craft.

Once again, I underestimated Bergman’s power; a film that had once been a blunt weight had sharpened into a razor. Perhaps it was the six years of therapy that had elapsed between my breakdown and this second viewing, but where I had once been so focused on Johan’s pain, I was now shocked to recognize the abuses with which he pummeled Alma, and her pain in every scene.

Johan takes up so much air in the film—and often so much of the frame, as in the aforementioned scene where von Sydow hunches in the foreground, filling half the frame with his face, while Ullmann sits in the background cloaked in shadow—that it’s easy to see Alma as merely a supporting player in his story. But when I made the effort to see the film through Alma’s perspective, it was as though the entire plot was inverted, causing moments that hadn’t even lodged in my memory to now stand out as the most crucial. I was devastated by the scene in which Alma sits Johan down with her ledger, forcing him to listen to her studious accounting of their household purchases—if she can’t find a way to see the world through his tormented perspective, then she can at least invite him into hers. And I cringed with agony and regret at the scene’s end, when Alma weeps in the face of Johan’s indifference to her gesture.

Bergman shoots this and so many other scenes of the couple’s strained domesticity in long, still takes with no cathartic cuts to guide your emotional response, leaving you stranded in each agonizing episode of a love succumbing to entropy. But despite the staid visuals, the film shifted beneath me to reflect something I’d never fully reckoned with: yes, I had been through hell during my psychosis. But I had put Cait through hell with me, driving the vehicle towards disaster with her as the helpless passenger.At the close of the film, Alma agonizes over all her unanswerable questions. Could Johan’s destruction have been prevented if she hadn’t loved him so much? Or if she had loved him more? I had glossed over the scene before, too focused on all the trials Johan had just endured, but now I ached for Alma—why couldn’t she see herself for the blameless victim she so clearly was?

As the screen faded to black, I thought of my week on the psych ward. I’d spent every day terrified to step into the phone booth and call Cait, unable to trust my tenuous stability enough to believe I wouldn’t lose my grip and do even more damage. When I was discharged, though, I opened my inbox to find it full of letters from her; she’d written to me every night that I was gone, even as she knew I had no access to email. She told me how much it hurt to know I was scared, and promised she’d be beside me for every step of my road to recovery. She wrote about the puppy her friends had brought over to distract her, and the therapist she had visited to make sure she was properly equipped to support me when I got home.

Reading the letters was a comfort, but it was a heartbreak, too. I had used the weapon my demons pressed into my hand, and Cait hadn’t run. How could I ever be worthy of her support again?

*

This is not the essay that I expected to write about Hour of the Wolf. I hadn’t seen the film in a year when I started organizing my thoughts, believing (in what I now should have recognized as a cycle of hubris) I finally had the film straight. I had my perspective locked down.

I expected to focus quite a bit on one scene that loomed large in my mind. In the second of Alma and Johan’s late-night vigils—which is, unbeknownst to them, the last night they’ll spend together—Alma murmurs, “It’s strange when the sea is completely calm. Scary somehow.” Seven years after my diagnosis, I still viewed my marriage as this calm sea—something that should be beautiful, but would always be defined the memory of a squall, and the question of when another might come.

When I sat down for another viewing of Hour of the Wolf, I felt secure in my understanding that this was the story of a marriage between an unstable abuser and his helpless victim. At last I could approach the film academically. But it shifted under me again, and this time that shift may have changed my life.

I waited to feel pity for Alma’s victimization, but scene by scene, something became clear: I had sold her short. Now, a bevy of holes sprang in my understanding not just of this story, but of my own. I had always wondered why in the world Alma stayed with Johan, willingly absorbing his onslaught. But as I mulled the film, I came to recognize I had robbed Alma of her agency, that in positioning her as Johan’s victim, I still viewed her through the lens of his experiences rather than seeing it as a shared narrative. And, I was ashamed to realize, I had spent years doing the exact same to my own wife.

Now, one scene that had always struck me as opaque finally became clear. As Alma and Johan walk home along the cliffs, shaken by their dinner at the castle, Alma’s pent up fear and confusion erupts. She whirls on Johan and lets him know that no matter what disaster they’re cruising towards, she isn’t going anywhere. She grabs hold of him, but her tone is defiant rather than pleading, and when she’s overcome and whirls away, she shirks his touch.

In Four Stories, Alma’s outburst is rendered from Johan’s incredulous perspective. “He realizes in a flash,” Bergman writes, “that her grief applies only to herself.” Alma is asserting her own needs, not merely pledging her devotion to him. She’s terrified of whatever might be happening to him, but just as much, she’s terrified over what might happen to her in the process. Their lives are too conjoined for his pain not to be hers as well, not just sympathetically but literally.This all may seem self-evident from an objective standpoint, but other people’s needs are a strange concept to grapple with when you see yourself as the protagonist of your nervous breakdown and interpret everyone else’s behavior through the distorting lens of your own perspective. When I managed to understand this scene—with a bit of guidance from Bergman’s prose—a tumbler fell into place in my own mind: by continually flagellating myself for what I’d done to Cait, I was casting our story as a one-way transaction rather than an interaction between two autonomous people.

I now saw that Cait’s letters during my time on the psych ward were as much for her as they were for me. As she noted in the first one, since the beginning of our relationship, we’d spoken every day, no matter whether we were in the same space or separated by half a world; now we were separated by only a few miles, but I’d been plucked out of her life entirely. I had always valued the letters as proof of our love, but until this most recent viewing of Hour of the Wolf, I had never really understood what it was they proved. Even if she knew I couldn’t hear it, Cait couldn’t go to bed without speaking to me. When she pledged to be there beside me as I worked towards recovery, the pledge wasn’t that she would hold me up, but that after all these years of falling deeper and deeper in love, we now leaned on one another so much that when one of us collapsed, the other couldn’t help but falter, too.

This lightning bolt shattered the essay I meant to write. But it may have just freed my marriage from almost a decade of my self-sabotaging self-pity, too.

*

Only after this last viewing did I take the time to untangle one of the stranger scenes in this strangest of films: during their visit to the castle, the demons treat Alma and Johan to a puppet production of The Magic Flute. In the scene performed for Alma and Johan, the hero, Prince Tamino, pauses during his quest to rescue his beloved, the fair maiden Pamina, from captivity. Alone and on the verge of despair, he asks two questions: Will this night ever end? And is Pamina still alive?

In his 1987 autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman writes at length about his enduring fascination with this passage in Mozart’s opera. “These 12 bars,” he writes, “involve two questions at life’s outer limits.” In asking whether the night will ever end, Bergman saw Mozart as wrestling with his own existential terror as he began succumbing to his fatal illness. And in asking whether Pamina survives, Bergman argues, Tamino is really asking after the very concept of love. Bergman believes the question to be, “Is love real?” and the answer to be, “Love exists. Love is real in the world of human beings.”

There was debate following the release of Hour of the Wolf as to whether it’s Alma who stands in for Pamina in Bergman’s calculus, or whether Johan’s lost love Veronica fulfills the role, always taking for granted that Johan represented the conquering hero. Personally, I was shocked to realize anyone would see Alma as the damsel and Johan the savior. Perhaps the notion would have tracked on my first viewing, but by now it could not be clearer to me that if anyone in Hour of the Wolf is battling staggering odds to rescue their beloved, it’s Alma, and that it’s Alma who has the right to wonder whether love is strong enough to slay the forces of darkness. Johan is preoccupied with many things—primarily a lifetime of simmering guilt, regret, and shame—but the power of love does not often seem to be one of them.

After Tamino’s questions are answered, the demons are momentarily struck dumb, shaken by the affirmation. But they can’t be conquered forever. No matter how strong love is, the pain must come eventually. And it’s just a matter of perspective whether that impermanence is enough to turn a romance into a tragedy.

*

“I have this theory,” I told Cait recently, “that every love story is really a horror story.” The thought had been percolating as I mulled all these new revelations spurred by Hour of the Wolf. Nearly every story of a lifelong love, I explained, ends with one lover burying the other and being forced to endure in a world they’ve forgotten how to navigate alone. “I think the happiest ending to any love story,” I concluded, “is the old couple in Titanic lying in bed together while the ship sinks. They had a long life together and they never have to live without each other.”

I was so absorbed in my theory that it took me a moment to notice her appalled expression. “Personally,” she replied with enviable serenity, “I would rather live a few years without you and go peacefully than drown.”

It was hard to argue with that. Cait’s and my perspectives are frequently diametrically opposed; I spend my days submerged in Swedish psychodramas from half a century ago while she spends hers at a hospital helping bring new life into the world. And when we see each other at the end of the day and I tell her the fantasies I’ve cooked up in the course of my work, more than once she’s gasped, “This is what’s in your head?”

And the more I think about it, the more it seems like that might be how we survived our tumult. Neither of us has ever wished for the other’s worldview. And while any marriage is necessarily an arch formed by two people leaning on each other for mutual support, neither of us has ever so fully surrendered to the idea of us as a single unit that we couldn’t endure without the other. Because we’ve maintained that measure of distinction between us, avoiding the temptation to surrender our individuation the way Alma dreams of, then if some new tumult were to break loose and the worst befell one of us, the other might be able to stay standing and avoid becoming a rauk, an incomplete husk living on only as memorials to the past.

Though one can’t be sure, it seems unlikely that Alma will escape that fate. By the end of Hour of the Wolf, she’s so thoroughly cleft that even her sentences are severed. Trying to make sense of the trials she’s experienced, she remarks, “Sometimes, you get completely…”

But she loses the thread. She turns away, and then just before that final fade to black, she turns back to the camera, aching for an end to her agony, one it seems may well never come.

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[garynsmith]

Surrounded by the Best to Be the Best

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Jeff Benson learned a lot over the years that factored into the success of the Milwaukee, Wis.-based real estate firm he opened in 1979. From his early days as a teacher to the sales savvy he developed in the automotive world, many things helped prepare him for his ultimate role as broker/owner of RE/MAX Realty 100—but perhaps none more than the life lesson instilled by his parents: “Put other people’s interests first and everything will turn out the right way.” Here, Benson shares how creating an environment where a like-minded, results-focused team could thrive has led to four decades of growth, no matter what the market dished out.

Maria Patterson: Jeff, tell us how you first got into the real estate business. Jeff Benson: After I graduated from college in 1971, I taught for three years. Then some people I had been involved with enticed me into selling high-end automotive equipment. I found that odd since I didn’t have any sales skills, but I had taught some of their children in class and, as a teacher, you are involved in sales—you’re selling an intangible. So, I sold directly to automotive dealerships, and this gave me a very good understanding of how to negotiate with people.

At that point, my old college roommate had gotten into commercial real estate and development and kept telling me to get my real estate license. So, I studied and got my license in 1976. I went on several interviews with some of the larger regional real estate companies, as I was looking for a training program that would give me a good level of understanding of what this industry was all about.

MP: What led to you opening your own firm? JB: I started working at one firm, then in 1978, I bumped into the RE/MAX concept and was intrigued. My original partner and I opened RE/MAX Realty 100 in ’79. Our goal was to build a place where we could surround ourselves with other like-minded people. We wanted to bring the right type of people in and continue to grow our individual businesses. That really developed into a leadership role for me. Some of my past sales experience, not only in real estate, but when I was selling automotive equipment—and even in teaching—came into play. I was also influenced by my parents, who taught me to put other people’s interests first and everything will turn out the right way. And that’s what happened at RE/MAX Realty 100.

MP: Sounds like you wound up exactly where you were supposed to be! So how large is the firm today? JB: We have four locations and approximately 160-170 agents; we also offer full-service title and closing, and have a mortgage affiliation, as well.

MP: What has been your strategy toward growth over the years? JB: It all goes back to making sure you’re able to identify the type of agents you want from the very beginning. We’ve been blessed to have like-minded people who think the same way…who truly want to take care of clients. Our goal was to be able to open offices through central parts of our marketing areas. We were looking at a way to help our agents become recession-proof by being able to market north, east, south and west in our locations. From time to time, there’s an area of the metro marketplace that may slow down. We try to make sure our agents are growing their business through relationships with clients who know people all over town. If they have a number of marketing areas where they have a sphere of influence, this helps them through the peaks and valleys.

MP: Makes sense. With four decades in the business, you’ve probably weathered some tough markets. JB: I’ve gone through several recessions, and what we’ve done each time is watch the type of recession we were in. During the first one, from ’81-’84, when interest rates exceeded 16 percent, we happened to be in a state where there was a lot of creative financing, and we were blessed that we had agents who were very good at understanding negotiations. We were able to recruit even during a bad time, going into the recession with a little over 20 agents and coming out with about 50. Don’t forget, the 100-percent concept was attractive—even though our transaction count may have gone down, each transaction was worth so much more when agents had the ability to make that much more commission.

The last recession saw more of a focus on distressed properties. Through our national brand and regional resources, we helped our agents retool their business for that type of economy by training them on distressed marketing.

The other thing we’ve been very attuned to as a company is maintaining a solid financial foundation and keeping our debt under control. When we went into the last recession, we were financially very strong. Every owner has to make sure they have the financial capabilities to continue to put dollars back into the organization so they can assist their agents.

MP: How would you describe your firm’s positioning in the marketplace? What sets you apart from the competition? JB: First of all, by riding out many storms, we’ve gained a very high level of respect within the local marketplace and the industry. Myself, Kathy [Martello, vice president of operations] and a number of agents over the last 40 years have been very engaged with charities, associations, MLSs, committees and boards, including some agents who have been recognized at local and state levels. We also have a very good reputation within the real estate community of working with other brokers. We want to help solve problems for our agents and their agents and continue to move the real estate industry forward.

We also have the highest per-agent unit count for companies that are at least 100 agents or larger. We’re ranked in the Top 50 of the Top 500 reporting companies in the United States—our small, quiet company in Milwaukee hit the Top 50. It all comes back to the quality of our agents. That, collectively, sets us apart. We look for individuals or team leaders that want to build a business that’s sustainable and projectable—not just a job to come to and start over every day.

MP: What most attracts agents to your firm, and why do they stay? JB: The support that we offer them, the professional business environment, the tools and the systems, the marketshare and the quality of agents we have around us. We don’t just have the frills. We don’t just want them to think of this year—we want them to think about three, five, 15 years from now. This is a business, and they can have their own business inside of it and really grow it. We also have the longevity. We’ve been through up and down markets and we’ve seen a lot of things that other folks running organizations have never been through.

In addition, the financial strength we’ve been able to gain through good markets allowed us to weather the storm of a recessionary market. Agents know they have a place to come to. We’ve never cut support, never laid anyone off due to a downturn in the market. If anything, we tried to add help in tough times.

Kathy Martello: Agents often seek the next, shiny object they think may grow and enhance their business. But this is a simple business—if they take care of clients and put them first, they will be successful. But they have to be with a firm that has great branding and organization, and leadership with a local sense of the market who runs that organization and truly gives them support.

When interviewing and recruiting agents, I always ask why they’re considering a move, and they often say, ‘I need support.’ The thing we’ve managed to do over the years is deliver support to agents on individual levels. In a company our size, we’re able to do that. Our family of companies includes a great staff of about 24 and a Client Services Division (myself and six others) to tend to their needs…and Jeff is a master at talking people through their marketing plans.

MP: How would you describe your company’s culture? JB: I feel we are a caring culture that helps our affiliates build their own personal business within our model. The culture involves the tools, the system and the branding, and all of that helps keep us in tune with our mission, vision and core values.

MP: How does your caring culture factor into your approach to coaching? JB: Whether you call it coaching or guiding, when we sit down with someone, we’re going to figure out what they want to accomplish. A lot of people are successful when they get to us, but they want to take it to another level. It gets back to that question: ‘Where do you want to take your business?’ Based on their responses, we help them develop a plan that incorporates a lot of ideas and concepts gathered from existing agents over the last 40 years. We’re more than happy to put an accountability program together so they can accomplish what they set out to do. A lot of times, people are switching careers from corporate America and know the sales and relationship-building process but have to adapt their skills to suit the real estate business. We try to provide that additional help, as well.

MP: How have you marketed the firm over the years? JB: A lot of it has to do with the RE/MAX concept—we’ve grown through quality agents who market their high professional standard to prospects and clients. We also do local advertising through radio and billboards. But in the end, it all comes back to the fact that the branding across the country is so strong. We’re the most recognized real estate brand in the world and we use that to our benefit. We continue to send the same message—we are the home of the top producer.

MP: How do you stay ahead of the curve on technology? JB: It’s a challenge. We leverage the local, regional and national support from RE/MAX and the systems and technology they provide. We use that as a springboard and do the rest inside of our Client Services Division, where we train and help agents understand new media and new technology.

MP: What’s in store for the firm’s next decade? JB: We want to continue to expand our local marketplace with quality agents. We would also like to continue to expand our footprint in Southeast Wisconsin. There are a lot of great things happening here. The Foxconn [electronics factory] deal will bring thousands of jobs to Wisconsin and offshoots of local companies.

MP: Sounds like you’re well-poised for even further growth… JB: We’ve been blessed to be able to grow through mergers, acquisitions and affiliations, and to deliver our value proposition to attract quality agents. We’ve also been blessed with agents and employees that have stayed with us for 10, 20, 30 and more years. We all understand that without our agents, this organization is nothing. It goes back to that basic belief that if you surround yourself with the best group, you will continue to move forward.

For more information, please visit www.movingmilwaukee.com.

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at maria@rismedia.com. For the latest real estate news and trends, bookmark RISMedia.com.

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