#emilio: among us

[scavengedlegacy]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: Axis Investigations Office PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere and Natalia @scavengedlegacy. SUMMARY: Natalia finds out she's being tracked by Emilio and confronts him. He accuses her of doing the stalking. CONTENT WARNING: stalking, brief mention of family death

The night before, Natalia had been sitting across from an old client who was coming to make good on their part of their deal, and he had mentioned passing on her name to someone else. It was a normal event in her particular line of work, it wasn’t like she could publicly market stolen goods and secrets for trade. But when they described the man who had asked about her, it gave Natalia pause.

When he first moved into town, Natalia had clocked him as someone who she needed to watch. It was a gut instinct that had quickly proven to be right. He was a Cortez. And while her beating heart disqualified her from being his usual prey, knowing that he was looking for her made her uneasy. Was there a vampire that she had helped that he was looking for? Was the trinket the last one had traded to her something he wanted? 

Standing with her back to the wall, just inside the office of Axis Investigations, Natalia crossed her arms and stayed far from the chair that a client would normally take. “Who hired you?” Her tone was less questioning and more accusatory. “I can’t for the life of me think of what you would want with the scavenger, so, someone had to hire you. I’ve gone through all the suspects in my head, just rotating through names, and they’re either too lazy to go looking, too tied up in their own fucking principles to decide the ‘best option’ let alone agree on who to hire — and none of them would hire outside their own groups.” 

—

You saw all kinds of different cases in Emilio’s line of work. He got the feeling most of the ones you saw in Wicked’s Rest weren’t exactly standard for P.I.s in the rest of the world, but he’d gotten good at clocking them anyway. Missing people usually turned up in the stomach of something in the woods. Suspicious changes in behavior tended to find the subject with less of a heartbeat than they’d had before the shift. Stolen items were sometimes better off not returned when they were rediscovered in cursed shops. Emilio danced the line between detective and hunter pretty well for a guy who could only use one leg, and he was good at clocking which cases were supernatural and which weren’t pretty early on in the process.

But this one… This one could still go either way. The woman who’d hired him had been nervous. People who hired him usually were. No one ever really hired a private investigator because they were having a good day, after all. She’d told him someone was following her, and she was afraid it might have something to do with some illegal dealings she’d been a part of, so she couldn’t go to the police. Emilio didn’t care much about legality, especially not when it was for laws that didn’t matter, so he took the case without question. He did some digging, he found a name. 

Natalia Moreno seemed to have her finger in a lot of pies throughout town. And just as Emilio had found her on his radar, she seemed to have put him on hers. It wasn’t entirely surprising to find her in his office; if anything, he was surprised she hadn’t shown up sooner. From what he’d found out about her, she probably wasn’t someone who liked people digging into her work. “I’m not going to tell you who hired me,” he replied flatly, leaning back in his chair and mimicking her stance, arms crossed over his chest. “Es una política de la empresa. I tell you, other people want me to tell them, it goes out of control. People want privacy. You should understand.”

—

It was company policy. The words could have made her sick if she let them sink in past the surface. Too much like her parents who stood in a room with a bunch of other aging Scribes, making decisions for everyone around them, damning them with their desire to remain hidden and ‘neutral.’ Natalia wrinkled her nose and then rolled her eyes, letting the words roll off her in the same movement. 

“And yet, something tells me, Mr. Cortez, that if you were coming to me and asking me for information, you wouldn’t take ‘company policy’ and walk away, would you?” She watched him for a moment longer, a beat of silence before the blank look on her face cracked into something of a smile. Close to humor. She pushed off the wall and then pointed at the chair across the desk, “Can I sit here?” Natalia didn’t wait, she sat down and propped her feet up on the desk, making herself comfortable. If they were going to be posturing the entire time, she might as well do it where it looked like it was her office, instead of his. 

“So then, explain this company policy to me, love to hear the full thing. Especially the ‘in the event someone’s life might be in danger’ part. Because unfortunately for people like us, company policy has to be flexible to some degree, doesn’t it?” Natalia tipped her head to the side, wondering what had been asked of him, if he was just there to find her and out her, or if he had been asked to do something more. (She wasn’t a vampire, she reminded herself. And for all accounts, she didn’t remember the Cortezs making a habit of killing humans.) “Unless this is about money?” She blinked a few times, letting the question breathe before she shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, you wouldn’t be the first to sell your morals for a couple bucks.” It had been a long time since Natalia had felt desperate. Longer still that she had to rely on someone else for the answers. 

—

“Ah, I’m a bad example,” Emilio replied, waving a hand dismissively. She was right, of course; when met with ‘company policy’ that prevented him from doing his job, he had a habit of finding some way around it. Digging, or pushing, or threatening if he thought the person deserved it. But he felt differently when he was the one holding the cards… especially in a situation like this one. If Natalia was the person who’d been following his client, sharing the information of who’d hired him could put their life in danger. He had no idea if Natalia was dangerous or not; he’d prefer not to find out the answer to that question in a way that got his client hurt. 

And if he explained that, there was a chance she’d understand. If she wasn’t a worst case scenario, if he let himself believe that she was a decent person. But… Emilio and trust issues went hand-in-hand, most of the time. He didn’t want to risk trusting someone who was going to screw him over and Natalia, for all he knew, was just waiting for her chance to do that. So he crossed his arms, he tilted his head up, said, “Sit wherever you want. I don’t care.” 

He narrowed his eyes at her questions, irritation rising. “It isn’t about money,” he said flatly. Fuck knew if he was in this for the money, he’d be doing a shit job. Axis offered discounts to anyone Emilio found less annoying than the typical client, didn’t charge people he empathized with a little too much. “Try to think from my seat. Someone hires you. Says there is someone following them. Someone else comes in. Asks for information about this person. You see how this is a bad idea.” He leaned forward a little. “I don’t know you. I don’t know why you want to know what you want to know. I’m not putting my client at risk. Nothing you say will change that. If you want to waste your time, you can waste your time. I’m good at that. Or you can save us both a headache and fuck off.”

—

“A hypocrite, you mean.” As if Natalia didn’t wear that hat often when it suited her, pretending to do or believe in one thing as long as it fit the narrative she was trying to portray. The world was full of imperfect people: Scribes and hunters chief among them. She was curious, though, what had driven him to this line of work and why he was dealing with petty bullshit between humans. But a beat passed, and her mind opened up further, wondering, perhaps, if the person who had sent Emilio after her wasn’t human at all. 

She tipped her foot on his desk, rolling it back and forth while she listened to his short rebuttals. Not caring about what she did or said in this situation, not caring if she wasted her own time and how happy he would be to waste Natalia’s if that was what she wanted. But before all that, he told an all too familiar story. Of a client walking in, saying someone was following them, likely begging for help. “Someone was following them?” She repeated, brows furrowed as she looked up from the tips of her shoes to his face. “They said someone was following them? Did they accuse me directly? Or…” 

Sitting up straight, Natalia pulled her feet off the desk and threaded her fingers together on the surface of his desk. Janessa Hommel came to mind. “Let me… wager a guess as to who it was. Mid twenties? White? Blonde hair? Green eyes? Small scar under her left eye? Looks like she hasn’t slept in a week?” She sighed, working her jaw as she held eye contact. “My client looked like that. Said the same thing to me. Said someone was following her, she was sure of it.” What would have caused her to come running here as well? Had something escalated? Natalia ran through the last meeting she had with Janessa. “Did your client accuse the shadows? Say they were longer and darker than normal?” It had sounded absurd when Natalia had first been told, but there was often a shred of truth in the most outlandish claims in Wicked’s Rest. “Or we can just, you know, do this back and forth pissing match too instead, I like this part. It’s fun. Keeps the mind sharp.” 

— 

“If that’s what you want to call it.” He was self aware enough to know that it wasn’t an entirely unfair accusation. Hypocrisy was something Emilio wore well. Vengeance tended to be soaked in it, after all. He’d come to accept it a long time ago, allowed the word to drape itself around him like a blanket. It didn’t do much to keep him warm, but at least he could accept the truth when it was hurled at him. It made it a hell of a lot harder for anyone to weaponize against him. 

He watched her now, the way she sat with herself. She was putting on a show, just like he was. Feigning apathy, pretending to care less than she did. It was interesting. You could tell a lot about a person just by watching them. It was something Emilio relied on heavily, especially after his move to the States. When you didn’t speak the verbal language well, fluency in body language became a necessity. Tense shoulders and narrowed eyes meant the same thing in Spanish as they did in English. That made it a lot easier. He watched her reaction to his revelation, tilted his head to the side slightly. Surprise, concern, thoughtfulness. It seemed genuine. 

She described his client pretty well, but… that didn’t necessarily get her off the hook. There was a chance she knew what Janessa looked like because she had been following her, after all, so Emilio only crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged. But then she went on, talking about the specifics of what his client had said when she’d hired him, and… There weren’t a lot of ways she could know that without speaking to her. The possibility that Janessa had been bugged was there, but if that were the case, why would Natalia be here? She wouldn’t waste time looking for information she already had, especially not if it meant exposing herself to a private investigator who might not know about her involvement. “She was paranoid,” he confirmed. “Afraid. Desperate, by the time she got to me. What was she working with you on? We both share what we know, this goes faster. Or I can toss you out in the snow and have a drink, then work this by myself. Up to you.”

—

Natalia tipped her head to the side, a smile coming too easily to her face. False, but present. “I think that’s what most people would call it. Hypocrisy, maybe even condescending? Depends on the tone and angle you want to take. Shades of gray, perhaps? But either way, you don’t do as you say. We both know you’d force the information out of someone if you thought it would help your cause.” There was a reputation that was attached to the Cortez name, one that Natalia wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with, but perhaps, it was one that he was banking on people not knowing. From what she had heard, which was unfortunately very little, he hadn’t been making the same violent waves that the Cortez family was known for.

Then again, as far as she knew, he was the last of them. 

The way he kept his distance from her, but there was an olive branch offered. One that Natalia knew better than to pass up. Information for information. She had no guarantee that he’d hold up his end of the bargain, but that was a risk worth taking, wasn’t it? Better than being on the shit side of a slayer. Turning her head slightly from Emilio, she pretended like there was something far more interesting on the far side of the wall. “She kept talking about the shadows last I saw her. Something was following her but she could never place what it was. She said…”

Closing her eyes, Natalia tried to recall the exact wording. “Something was trying to take her place.” It was a strange sentiment. Darker than what she would have imagined for a stalker, not that having a stalker was something to sneeze at, but the wording was… hard to shake. “Every time I saw her, she had a fresh wound bandaged up. I don’t know if it was paranoia causing her to accidently harm herself or if the harm was the cause?” Natalia thought outside before finally looking at Emilio again. “She missed our last meeting. Last night, the Wormhole. I keep a strict schedule with my clients.” It wasn’t much, but it was the truth. And she figured that was better than embellishing anything. Especially with him. “Your turn, what did she say that tipped you in my direction?” 

—

“I’ve been called much worse.” He made no effort to deny any of it. Trying to do that would be an insult to them both. She was right, after all — Emilio could and would go to certain lengths to get information when he needed it. He had more limits than he used to, sure — these days, he only got information ‘the hard way’ from people who he knew had earned such methods — but he wasn’t so stupid as to think that he was a good man, and he wouldn’t pretend to be one. He did what he needed to do. She struck him as someone who did the same. But Emilio didn’t know if she had the same limits he did, and that was part of the problem. She was an unknown variable and, to him, that made her a threat. 

But he knew enough to use even a threat to his advantage. He was learning — slowly, sure, but still — that you could solve things without a knife, sometimes. An exchange, an agreement… you could turn a threat into an ally with the right deal. He’d done it more than once now, and it hadn’t bit him in the ass too hard just yet. It would someday, he knew; that was inevitable. But until it did, he might as well keep using people to his advantage. 

“Take her place?” That was an interesting tidbit. A stalker was one thing — it could be explained away in a thousand different ways. A human threat, or a vampire who liked to play with its food, or a fae looking for a constant source that they could snatch up and keep locked away somewhere. But something trying to replace someone? That narrowed the field a little. The wounds were another clue. “When was the last time you saw her? Did she seem… different at all?” His brow furrowed, gears turning in his mind. “She came to me, like I said. Told me she couldn’t go to the police because she was worried whoever was following her might have something to do with some… activities she was a part of that the police might not agree with. So I looked into her activities. Found your name through that. Thought maybe she’d missed a payment to you or something and you were trying a scare tactic. But you wouldn’t be here talking to me if that’s what it was.” If Natalia were responsible for this disappearance, she would have been more likely to kill Emilio than to talk to him. He knew that. “So I’m thinking… You and me are after the same thing here. On the same side, maybe.”

—

There was a smile at the corner of her lips when he admitted that. “Me too,” Natalia offered. It was almost a sign of friendship. Of kindred spirits meeting. If he was anything else like her, then this confrontation wasn’t going to be the deal breaker it would have been with anyone else. “But I am going to mark those statements as correct then, since you didn’t deny anything.” Raising her hand, Natalia made a checkmark in the air for dramatic effect. 

He repeated the line and his immediate reply pulled Natalia’s attention away from the rocky start of their conversation. “She kept saying it, over and over again, every time I saw her.” Which had only been a handful of times, but the fact that Janessa had said it each time had stuck with her. It had to be important, otherwise why was it stuck so firmly in the front of her mind during their short meetings? “I was supposed to see her last night but she never showed up. Instead I got a little rumor about you looking me up.” She hadn’t even realized the two were connected until he had been accusing her of being the mysterious stalker. “But last time she did make our meeting, she looked like she hadn’t been sleeping. More paranoid than before.” Closing her eyes, Natalia tried to imagine what she looked like again. The dark circles under her eyes, her unbrushed hair, the desperation.

She said she had nothing to give me, had been Natalia’s initial reply, but she kept it behind closed teeth. The last thing she wanted was to point the finger back at herself and try to defend how she hadn’t charged Janessa anything because when she had first met her, she had seen that look of desperation in her eyes even back then. Natalia wasn’t usually someone’s first call in a stalker case, but she wasn’t about to make her exceptions public. “You didn’t beat the shit out of one of my clients for this info, did you?” She hoped it had just been a conversation, but that’s not exactly what the Cortezs were known for. Standing up from the chair, she looked him in the eyes, considering what he said, before nodding. “Better allies than enemies.” In this situation, at least. “But I take it if you got as far as me, you didn’t get any leads about who the real stalker might be, no?” 

—

It didn’t bother him, the way she took his lack of denial as a confession. It kind of was one, after all. Emilio wouldn’t pretend that he wasn’t a hypocrite, or that he was never condescending. He was, beyond shadow of a doubt, both of those things. But… “I’m not a liar.” He had that going for him, at least. He was more than willing to admit to his flaws, more than ready to confess to being less than perfect. Wasn’t everyone?

Of course, there were far more important things to worry about here. If their shared client had found this fear large enough to repeat it every time she spoke to Natalia, it must have had something concrete behind it, right? It could have been simple paranoia, but it had clearly been a big concern. It wasn’t something Emilio thought someone would assume without reason. It was a big leap to make, a bigger one to admit to someone. So… there had to be something behind it. “Did she ever say why she thought that?” There had to be more to this story than someone paranoid that she was being stalked. Emilio got the feeling the stalker in question wasn’t the human sort. “She was… on edge when she met with me, too. Looked like you said — tired, paranoid. Felt bad for her.” Bad enough to give her a discount, though he wouldn’t advertise that. “Thought it might have been an ex-boyfriend at first, but doesn’t look that way. Then, I thought it might have something to do with you. Now, though…” 

Odds were, the stalker they were looking for wasn’t the human sort. But what was it? Emilio would need to do more research to be sure. He might have had a near encyclopedic knowledge of the undead, but no one could know every supernatural creature out there. There were just too many to keep up with, especially in a town like this one where the rules seemed constantly broken. Snorting at Natalia’s question, Emilio raised a brow. “I have other tricks up my sleeves.” Namely, Javi. The bartender tended to know a lot more about other people’s business than anyone had any right to, and he was more than willing to share that knowledge with Emilio for a price. (A monetary price, now that Emilio wasn’t sleeping with him anymore. It was getting expensive.) “I don’t have anything… concrete,” he confirmed. “But with what you’ve told me, I think I know where to start.” He paused a moment. Then, “I don’t think we’re looking for something human here. I don’t know how much you know about this shit, but I’m not holding your hand through it if you’re clueless. There’s not time for that. Not if we want any hope of finding a person instead of a corpse.”

—

There was something about the way Emilio said so fully that he wasn’t a lair that brought a smile to Natalia’s face. “Good, I hate liars.” A pause. “But withholding the truth, that’s different, isn’t it?” It wasn’t the jab it could have been, if anything, there was too much humor in her words. Because she had skirted the truth a number of times, but that wasn’t the same as outright lying, was it? (Then again, even if she was a liar, a healthy dose of self-hatred wouldn’t be the worst thing.) 

Her eyes shut as the question bounced around in her mind. Had there been any hints as to what it could have been that was following her? Were there any other clues other than her clear exhaustion and paranoia? No. Natalia’s brows furrowed, frustrated with herself. “Not that she said, and nothing that I noticed. I chalked it up to paranoia with her being stalked.” The word left a foul taste in her mouth. There had been too many cases of stalking on her college campus, too many times where she had heard women asking for help from anyone who would listen because the police couldn’t do anything — and now she was worried that she was part of the problem. Not acting fast enough, not solving it fast enough, and now she was missing. Likely dead. 

Shaking her head and the feeling from her body, she looked up toward Emilio once more. “Glad we’re on the same page there, then. Last thing I needed was a Cortez on my ass.” He said it wasn’t human and Natalia, at first, nodded her head in agreement before offering him a smile. “I promise the stupid look on my face is just for show.” There were a thousand things that she didn’t know about in the world. The quakes in the sky could punctuate that point if it cared to rear its ugly head once more. “You won’t need to hold my hand. I can’t say I know everything there is about the supernatural, but I know a whole hell of a lot. Like I know your family was renown for being hunters. Specialized in vampires. Figured I didn’t hit the marks for you to be on my ass, but I guess the times are changing.” She stood up straighter. “I know about fae, not all of them or their subtypes, but enough to know that when I said I promise, had you been one, I could have been royally fucked. I know about werewolves and I know about..." She couldn't remember if Felix had ever put a word to what they were. “The cat people?”  

She paused, shifting her weight. “If you have a name for what you think we’re after, I have access to some archives that might be useful to us. There are more like me. Human, not hunters, but still… knowing.”

—

“It’s not my job to tell everyone everything all the time,” he replied with a shrug. He didn’t tend to lie directly unless the situation called for it, but he had no problem leaving out important details. After all, there were things that people were better off knowing, and things you’d be killed for admitting aloud. “I’m sure you can agree with that.” He didn’t know her well — or at all, really — but he could tell she wasn’t the type to give more information than she had to. And he could respect that.

Paranoia. Emilio was an expert in that, wasn’t he? “Sometimes it’s… for a good reason. The paranoia. Can’t always write it off.” He was paranoid and he knew it, but given the amount of people out there who pretty specifically wanted him dead, he figured he had a right to be. And given the fact that the client he and Natalia shared was now missing, it seemed her paranoia had been pretty well-founded, too. But he could hardly blame Natalia for writing her off; plenty of times, Emilio had done the same. And plenty of times, it ended with someone dead. He hoped that wouldn’t be the case this time. For Natalia’s sake, for the client’s… This one, he thought, really needed a decent goddamn ending.

He tensed a little at the way she said his name, eyes darting down to his pocket where a knife was carefully stowed away. But she wasn’t undead, and most things with a heartbeat didn’t have a grudge worth having a conversation before killing him over. He hadn’t found anything in his brief dive into her that suggested she could have ties to anything he’d had his hands in. Maybe she was just… someone who knew more than she ought to. Still, he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone when he spoke. “Then you’re lucky you only have one Cortez to worry about.” He watched her a little closer now, trying to gauge her reaction. Was she a threat? He’d decided she wasn’t before, but maybe he needed to reevaluate now. She confirmed she knew about his family, knew what they hunted. Nostrils flaring briefly with an anger he didn’t entirely understand, he leaned back in his chair. “My family killed vampires,” he agreed. “I kill anything that needs killing. As long as you don’t make that you, we won’t have a problem.” She seemed to have a decent grasp on things beyond that, though. Fae, werewolves, balam even if she didn’t know the right word for them. “And what are you? You know about me. Seems polite to return the favor.” 

Archives? He thought of Arden, wondered if this was a situation like that. Should he ask her, he wondered? Would she know Natalia’s name if he said it? He made a note to test it out later. “I have a hunch,” he said. “I could be wrong, I don’t know. This isn’t exactly my area. But… Look in your archives, your books. See what you can find about doppelgangers. If I’m right, we go from there. If I’m wrong, we start from scratch. Sounds good?”

— 

It was funny, in a way, that everything coming from Emilio’s mouth was something that Natalia would have said. In another life, perhaps they could have been friends. Folding her arms, a frown touched the corners of her mouth. “Paranoia is in frequent supply in this town. It’s not always something that requires action.” Which she had failed to tell the difference in this case, but she had a feeling he understood. After all, a private investigator in a town like this? There was no doubt in her mind that he had seen his fair share of people worried about all the wrong things. “I was wrong here, clearly.” 

He tensed and there was this feeling of satisfaction in the back of her mind. Like she had won something here. His eyes darted toward his pocket and Natalia kept a straight face. Thankful, for a brief moment, that she had studied psychology and not art like she had wanted. Reading people was far more useful. “Oh, I know. But I’d rather not deal with any Cortez.” She hadn’t known them to hunt humans but the look in his eyes? And the confession that he killed anything that needed killing? He was one she’d have to watch out for. The last thing she wanted was a knife in her back. Or a stake. Who knew what his favored method would be? Family was a sore nerve, as she knew it would be, which was why she didn’t mention what had happened to his family or that she knew about the tragedy — she just wanted to give him enough so that he’d understand that she wasn’t some blind child walking into danger without knowing. 

“A scavenger,” she offered at first, knowing that wasn’t what he had asked. “Human. I’d meet you at the 3 Daggers if that would prove it for you.” If he had any other questions, he could pay like anyone else. Natalia was sure he could afford to trade something for it. Or he could look it up himself, prove how good of an investigator he was.

“Doppelgangers?” The word took her by surprise, but Natalia nodded her head immediately after. Off the top of her head, no one she knew had interacted with any directly. But maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe they didn’t know. Or they had been replaced. Natalia’s mind fumbled around, thinking of anyone from the Scribes that defected over the years or had been acting odd — and outside of Natalia herself? No one came to mind. Not immediately, at least. “Agreed. If there’s anything to be found, I’ll get it.” That was a promise. And it had been too long since something went ‘missing’ from the Library. “I’ll be in touch.” She knocked on the desk before heading out the door. Doppelgangers. Natalia had a lot to think about.

[fleouriarts]

time for a jamie and co LORE POST!!!! here's them with their (immediate) families. all the actual lore and such below

JAMIE: only child with a single mom. since furries in this universe can only have kids within their taxonomic families, adoption is really common among smaller families like prionodontidae. however jamie's mom erica really wanted a bio kid, so she ended up marrying another linsang who she liked... well enough, but not that much. they get divorced when jamie's a little kid. she had jamie at an older age; by the time he's in college her markings have already started greying, which is why she looks a little dull next to him. nowadays she works as a teacher and she loves her son vewy much :3

SANTIAGO: santiago is the only one in the main cast with different species parents. cross-species kids are just the species of either parent with a 50/50 chance cus i don't feel like dealing with hybrids... HOWEVER sometimes genetic fuckshit happens. because of said genetic fuckshit, santiago grew to a cow size instead of a sheep size. i couldn't fit all the family relations shit on the actual image but emilio is santiago's OLDER brother (hes 25) but people always assume hes younger because santiago is a giant. magnolia and amapola are twins and both 8. mariana is either a teacher or a librarian (haven't figured it out yet) but she used to paint when she had more free time which is how santiago got interested in painting and eventually went into fine arts. jorge is a plumber and emilio is a graphic designer. santiago is the first in the family to leave their hometown (key west) for a degree (emilio went to a local college) and his mom + sisters were SOOOOOOOOOO SAD so he comes home to visit as often as he can. also since he is in family bovidae he has several cousins/aunts and uncles/etc that are different species. all i know for sure is that one of them lives near jamie and co's college and is some sort of antelope (leaning towards bongo bc i like them). also using this poast to announce that i changed santiagos outfit here is his new cute flowers and bees sweater look

JOHNNY: her family works on a chicken (and other assorted birds) farm, the chickens are for both eggs and meat while the other birds are just for eggs. this is actually a common set-up in the dorian furryverse, it's hard to farm livestock as a carnivore (because all the livestock are deathly afraid of you) so herbivores usually do the job even if they can't actually eat what they farm. johnny's parents are sorta "confused but got the spirit" about her being a butch lesbian. jimmy is an ass about it but he gets better. shoutout to this horse color calculator for helping me figure out which coat colors were plausible for them

NULL: null has an older brother and does not talk to their parents. sakichi is six years older than null and they were never very close; their parents treated sakichi as the "successful" child and null as the "problem" child. they're also quite conservative. null realized they were agender in high school but stayed closeted at home, they planned to come out to their parents immediately once they got to college and were able to support themselves. something happens that instead makes them come out a few days after their graduation and they get kicked out. null doesn't know where to go and ends up living at johnny's farm for the summer before college (sakichi lives far away doing some tech job and so can't take them in). the clantons are basically null's family at this point. once null legally changes their name they remove their last name entirely (it probably says X on their documents just cus there has to be SOMETHING there). sakichi and null see each other very occasionally, and sakichi still talks to their parents, but only when absolutely necessary. it's not malicious, he'd just feel too guilty cutting himself off from them completely

ARGYLE: argyle is an only child with well-off parents, his mom is a lawyer and his dad is a quirky ancient history professor. his parents are like EXTREMELY doting so they were secretly kinda glad that he came back home so they could see him more often. argyle was really scared that they would hate him for going into a less stable field, but his parents love him to death and are ready to support him in whatever. suzanne was probably a nightmare at pta meetings i'll be so real

[tmntkiseki]

Oh damn, some more previews have been made available for the TMNT 40th anniversary comic anthology, one of which includes the complete listing of stories and the writer/illustrator credits. They are as follows

Mirage Comics

Mirage 1 Story

Story, Art: Kevin Eastman

Poem: Edgar Allen Poe

Letters: Tom Napolitano

"Monsters"

Story, Art, Letters: Jim Lawson

Colors: Steve Lavigne

"Gang Wars"

Story: Tristan Jones

Art: Paul Harmon

Letters: Tom Napolitano

Urban Legends

"Downtime"

Story: Gary Carlson

Art: Frank Fosco

Colors: Adam Guzowski

Letters: Tom Napolitano

TMNT Adventures (Archie)

"The Man Behind The Mask"

Story, Art, Letters: Chris Allan

Saturday Morning Adventures (1987)

"What About Tomorrow?"

Story: Erik Burnham

Art: Sarah Myer

Colors: Luis Antonio Delgado

Letters: Shawn Lee

2003 Series

"Splinter Forever"

Story: Lloyd Goldfine

Art: Khary Randolph

Colors: Emilio Lopez

Letters: Tom Napolitano and Shawn Lee

2012 Series

"Kraang Among Us"

Story, Art: Ciro Nieli

Letters: Shawn Lee

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

"Farewell"

Story, Art: Andy Suriano

Letters: Tom Napolitano

IDW

"Father's Day"

Story: Tom Waltz

Art: Michael Dialynas

Letters: Tom Napolitano

"Teen Spirit"

Story: Ronda Pattison

Art: Pablo Tunica

Letters: Tom Napolitano

They also list all the art credits for the pinups that will appear in the issue, which include

Freddie E. Williams II

David Petersen

Ken Mitchroney (with colors by Aaron Hazouri)

Dan Duncan (with colors by Ronda Pattison)

Ronda Pattison

Sophie Campbell

Jodi Nishijima

Stan Sakai (with colors by Emi Fujii)

[pralinesims]

On a fine november night at the cinema 🎬

Start | Next

TRANSCRIPT under the cut:

Pic 1: Luca: "Hey!" Emilio: "Evening..." Vale: "Oh, hey." Aaron: *eyes glued onto the screen*

Pic 2: Aaron: "You're wearing a suit?" Emilio: "Yeah, yeah, good evening to you too."

Pic 3: Emilio: "Anyways, we're late, I'm gonna grab the tickets." "I'll take care of everything, trust me, it's MY big day!" Vale: "Appreciate that!" Luca: "Thank you!" Aaron: "You really don't have to do this!"

Pic 4: Luca: "How come that you two were faster here than Emilio and me, just by walking?" Vale: "Aaron got his ass up for once, solely for some sickly sweet coffee..."

Emilio muttering to himself: "breathe, Emilio, just breathe..."

Ticket Seller: "Good evening! What can I do for-" Emilio: "Good evening, Ms! Well..."

Pic 5: Emilio: "We're 4! 3 tickets please for the movie "Crumbs of Destruction", hello and thank you very much." "3 tickets, okay? A V.I.P. is among us!"

Pic 6: Luca: "You think the movie is actually gonna be good?" Vale: "Might be." Emilio prepared himself and is ready to take over the world.

Pic 7: Ticket Seller: "Oh, I recognize your friend in green." "He'll get a free entry. Thank you for stopping by"! Emilio: "Why is HE the one getting a free ticket?!" Aaron: "..." Ticket Seller: "Sorry, I can't do anything about that. I'm just following the protocol."

Pic 8: Emilio: "HE'S NOT EVEN IN THE MOVIE, I'M THE ONE WHO'S DEBUTING AS AN ACTOR!" Aaron: "Would you quiet down? I can pay for my own ticket..." Luca: "Should we step in?" Vale, muffled sounding: "nu-uh." Emilio (to the ticket seller): "no, no, you're getting that wrong, I'm telling the truth-" Aaron payed for his own ticket meanwhile.

Pic 9: Vale: "You EXACTLY know what happened the last time we tried to intervene." Luca: "pffft, don't remind me." Emilio: "It's time to get going, we've got the tickets."

Pic 10: Aaron: "...my god, that was SO embarassing." Emilio: "Can't you see how embarassing this was for me too?" Aaron: "Christ, YOU were the one making a scene! Why didn't you just shup up and pay?"

Pic 11: Emilio: "You're ALWAYS freeloading with that influencer bullshit." Aaron: "DUDE, I PAYED FOR THAT DAMN TICKET, I'M NOT A FREELOADER!"

Luca walking from the background towards Emilio & Luca: "Ugh... this is going to be a long night."

Emilio: "but I'M in this movie! Why don't I get any kind of compensation?"

Pic 12: Luca: "Yeah, we get you, but you're acting a bit weird today. Is everything okay?" Emilio: "...it must be the nervosity, I'm sorry. I really-" Aaron: "Just stop screaming at me."

Pic 13: Emilio: "BUT I DIDN'T SAY ANY-" Luca: "Aaron, you too. Calm down." Aaron: "Huh?"

Pic 14: Vale: "You know what?" Emilio: "At least someone told him to shut up for once." Luca: "I'm not choosing any sides. You're both insufferable right now." Aaron: "Newsflash: he's FOR REAL the one who's built this whole circus." Vale: "I can't take this anymore, let's go inside." Aaron: "CAN'T YOU EVER BEHAVE LIKE A PERSON?" Emilio: "WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SUCH A SMARTASS?

Pic 15: Vale: "What the hell is wrong with them?" Luca: "...fucking finally- Yo, where did the ticket lady go?" Emilio & Aaron are still arguing in the background.

To be continued...

[hypermoyashi]

Okay!!! Chapters 15-20 of my Trimax reread are done!! I don't have too many thoughts on some of these chapters since they were mainly fights, and I'm sure there are plenty of people to break down those better than me, but!! Man that fight between Wolfwood and Ninelives was raw--I want if he used a vial off-screen during that fight, because Ninelives took a lot of hits and Wolfwood looked pretty bad off by the end, almost more from exhaustion than injuries. That makes sense, when you're fighting someone who just doesn't die, honestly. But I absolutely adored the Meryl and Milly clutch at the end, saving Wolfwood right at the moment where Ninelives came back yet again but Wolfwood was just too exhausted to fight him. He seemed resigned in that moment, but thankfully, the women showed up to help.

And then the fight between Emilio and Vash... Man, this one fucking gets me. The fact he had actual people scattered in with the puppets, meaning Vash couldn't ever take the first shot and then wound up accidentally hurting someone, who he then had to protect through the rest of the fight (and man, carrying around an unconscious, injured person while fighting is not easy). The fact he knew Emilio, too--Vash truly does not forget a face, and man, him trying to appeal to and save Emilio despite all the horrid things Emilio had done to the people Vash cared about... The fact the ship lost 170 people in that attack, man... Really, Emilio targeting Vash's home, trying to force him into a position where he picks between a child he met and his home, trying to force him to kill the people mixed in with the puppets or be forced into constant disadvantaged states within the fight... Using the faces of the very people Vash cares for to hurt him... Man, this was a rough fight. Kind of glad we got the hospital yuri arc after to give them a moment of rest. More under the cut!

We also get confirmation that Doc (or sensei, in this translation) was one of the people who found Vash 70 years ago, meaning there was about 80 years between the Fall and their meeting. Vash also noted that Doc was included among the puppets, and Luida dodges the question when Vash asks after him. From Vash's expression after she leaves... Yeah, Doc was probably one of the 170 who died in the attack.

I did also really like the conversation between Vash and Wolfwood, where Vash thanks Wolfwood for his helps. Wolfwood is confused because he killed, so of course he's going to assume Vash would be angry with him for it--but Vash just notes he couldn't have protected the ship without Wolfwood, and that he was sorry for burdening Wolfwood with his feelings. So I think that's Vash's way of saying he doesn't blame or judge Wolfwood, since he knows he's doing the best he can under his circumstances, and it's not fair to always hold others to Vash's own incredibly strict standards (which he cannot even live up to himself). I really liked that, because Vash had forgiven many things which feel unforgivable and tried to help people who've done some pretty heinous things (see: Emilio), so it'd feel weird if he was constantly chewing into Wolfwood over it. I think it shows that, even if they have their ideological differences, they are able to meet at a middle ground and understand and be grateful for one another.

And then we also get Wolfwood's thoughts on Vash! He hears about Vash's history from Luida, gets confirmation he isn't human, but also learns that Vash remembers every single name and face of every single person he's met. Luida comments that Vash has only ever done kind things with his long, long life--and that impossibly fond look Wolfwood gives Vash, even knowing he isn't human now... Man, that hits me right in the fucking feels.

I also adored Vash bringing Meryl and Milly out to the cryosleep pods, a place he holds dear and is very drawn to... I love him getting those little moments with them, it's very sweet.

[shipcestuous]

Appassionata 1974 (f/d) (submission)

Hey Shipcestuous. ShipCestFan here. Didn’t see 1974’s “Appassionata” on your list so thought I’d submit it.

TL;DR:

Eugenia, a voluptuous, curious and coquettish young woman, decides to seduce her suave, sophisticated father with the help of her BFF.

DETAILED SYNOPSIS:

(WARNING - NARRATIVE AND GIFs CONTAIN SPOILERS!)

Appassionata is a 1974 Italian film made when morality was IMHO at one of its least restrictive points in cinematic history. And I say that as a good thing because I’m not sure this movie would be made today. Then again? It’s the Italians, so who knows? LOL Thank God for me that the 2 young women looked older than the 17ish year olds they were portraying.

I couldn’t find a rating for the movie, but I would put it at rated-R for strong sexual content, taboo themes like ‘cest, con-noncon, zoophilia dreams (don’t ask…just watch the movie), and nudity. And while that is all well and good, I rather enjoyed this film more for how it flip-flopped, back-n-forth from familial to romantic/sexual between father and daughter. One moment dad is scolding his insolent, 17ish year old teenage daughter for staying out too late or not picking up her mess. The next moment, she’s intentionally flashing him, and he’s willingly taking it in. One moment she’s innocently asking daddy to take her shopping; the next moment, she’s devilishly removing her panties for him.

The tagline for this movie on IMDB is “deep inside every young girl burns the passion of a woman.” IMHO, they forgot to add, “…woman’s desire for her father.” LOL The film basically revolves around two best friends, Nicola and Eugenia, who are on a mission to explore love, romance and sex. And they decide to use Eugenia’s sophisticated father, Emilio, as the object of their affection! Mom suffers from mental health issues, spending most of her waking hours on the piano or in bed or talking senselessly as she scurries about. Emilio, his daughter and her BFF pretty much do as they please.

As was popular with 1970s, Italian films of this genre, there’s plenty of gratuitous nudity and sex (altho I would not put this in the softporn/sexploitation category). The stars of the movie were big names back then, especially the still very beautiful Ornella Muti, who plays Eugenia – then 19 years old.

Among some of the key scenes for shippers are Nicola visiting her BFF’s dad – a dentist – under the guise of having dental work and screwing his brains out on the first visit and each visit thereafter. Meanwhile, the more nubile Eugenia is executing her plan to seduce dad, flirting coquettishly, and in one of the more appealing scenes, teasing her father mercilessly with her body. The look of agony on his face is priceless! One of the other things I like about this movie was that Emilio looks very much like a middle-aged dad. He has a paunch, graying temples, is mustached and seemed too old for having just a late-teenaged daughter. I’d put his age in the film at close to fifty.

The film ends with mom being committed because she has a particularly bad meltdown after discovering dad and Eugenia consensually behaving as more than father and daughter. So Elisa is locked away while Eugenia and Nicola take the opportunity to complete their final seduction of Eugenia’s dad.

Without Elisa around, Emilio calls up Nicola with whom he’s now having a full blown affair. But the viewer gets the sense that Nicola and Eugenia were expecting his call. Emilio picks Nicola up and they head back to his home where she gets to work seducing him. She relaxes him, bringing him a bourbon, lighting a cigarette for him and unbuttoning his stiff collar. Once he’s relaxed and in bed, she disrobes and surprises him with sex. But as the morning sunlight shines through the window, it’s Eugenia who’s lying naked next to her father in bed. The movie intentionally obscured the lovemaking scenes through the night so it’s not quite evident who’s making love with him? Is it Nicola? Is it his daughter? I like to think it was both.

The movie’s closing scene was quite satisfying for me. It shows the girls leaving the house, happily, arm-in-arm while Emilio watches them from a window. The shipper in me wants to believe that ending was communicating their new life, now, as a throuple. But it could just be that the girls satisfied their curiosity. And life for everyone is back to familial normality. Your followers who enjoy these types of movies should watch the movie and decide for themselves on that ending.

Here are some GIFs from the movie with my editorial comments in yellow. I added the white-font subtitles for clarity.

[mortemoppetere]

TIMING: current LOCATION: owen lundkvist's apartment PARTIES: @technowarden  & @mortemoppetere SUMMARY: emilio and eve team up to break into a mutual... something's apartment and figure out just what the fuck is going on with owen. CONTENT WARNINGS: wrspice (implied), mentions of past child death, alcoholism (alluded to)

Which meant just one thing: in the best case scenario, Owen was covering for a hunter-killer. In the worst…. He was one. Tonight they’d found out which.

Well, this felt familiar. Eve sitting in her car, down the street from a target building, waiting for Emilio to join her. Last time they’d done this, it had gone so well! They’d parted on great terms. Eve couldn’t possibly see breaking into the apartment of the guy she suspected was responsible for multiple hunter deaths being any more complicated than releasing some dildos from police custody. 

The same guy that, well, there was some sort of complicated knot in her stomach when she thought about it. There was an equally complicated one at the idea of seeing Emilio again. Eve reached for her coffee, taking a deep gulp. The less her emotions were involved in any of this, the better. She buried the knots so deep she couldn’t feel them. 

While she waited, it was easier to skim through what she’d found on her tablet. Nasir’s body was the obvious one, the canary in the coalmine. When she’d started looking back at other hunter deaths, Eve hadn’t found any that looked too suspicious, general vampire bites or mauled by werewolves were common themes, but then one had stood out. Natasha, who was a fellow fucking Warden, had died at the start of September. She had cuts all over her, and Eve had assumed that sprites were to blame, as they so often were for this kind of warden death, but the more she’d looked, the more the similarities started to glare. The killing blow, for example, was so similar it might have been identical. On the other hand… Eve couldn’t tell if she was finding excuses for it not to be Owen, or if she was right in saying that there were only so many ways to wield a dagger. Only so many fatal blows that a hunter’s body could take. It wasn’t all the same. Natasha had more cuts, far more shallow each one of them, and her own blade had never even touched her assailant; there wasn’t any blood on it but hers. Maybe whatever had killed Nasir had killed Natasha. Owen had killed that vampire, and that was the end of it. Except… 

Here was Maya. From the night Emilio and Eve had last seen each other, in fact. Maya dying had been inevitable a while, she’d crossed fifty a couple years ago, and her injuries had been slowing her down. The night Eve had been called to her body, she’d been so detached from anything hunter related she’d barely absorbed what she was cleaning. It was only after, when she’d looked at the pictures. Same aggressive cuts again. 

Which meant just one thing: in the best case scenario, Owen was covering for a hunter-killer. In the worst…. He was one. Tonight they’d found out which. Eve swiped to a different app, and checked the location of Owen’s phone. He was still on route to a bar, so she figured they had at least a good hour. She looked up, and smiled brightly as she spotted Emilio walking over. 

“Howdy partner,” Eve greeted, leaning over to push the car door open for him, “Great night for some more crime, isn’t it? Looking forward to finding out who is Sus among us?” 

—

Distraction was a thing Emilio was profoundly familiar with. He’d always been far happier fooling his mind into believing his problems didn’t exist than he was acknowledging them, always found it easier to close his eyes as much as he could. It wasn’t always possible — some things seeped through even the most enticing distractions the world had to offer. But it made him feel a little better, at least, to have the illusion of an option when it came to his breakdowns. He could pretend it was feasible to distract himself from the drives Eve had dropped off on his porch, could pretend that planning to see her again now didn’t stir up all the complicated anger and grief she’d left him drowning in the last time they’d spoken face to face. It didn’t ease the hollow pit in his stomach very much. 

(Emilio was a bad liar and a paranoid bastard. It made believing the lies he told himself pretty close to impossible.)

Still, this distraction was a decent one. Whatever the fuck Owen was up to had been crawling under his skin for months now, thrashing and screaming since the moment the other slayer had shown back up in town. After their last encounter, with the vampire who’d mentioned that ‘she’ wouldn’t be pleased with Owen’s actions, the urge to find out more had only grown. He should have known Eve would already be poking around as well. The two of them certainly had different methods and motivations for their snooping, but they did seem to be similar in their nosiness. And as much as their last encounter had left him uncertain he ever wanted to see her again… he could admit that she was good at this kind of stuff. Emilio could break into Owen’s apartment without issue, could find whatever it was he was looking for without help, but Eve could make it so no one ever knew he was there. Staying one step ahead of Owen was the best move he could make, and Eve was better at that than he was. (Sometimes, that was on purpose. Emilio liked to gloat a little too much to be sneaky.) 

He did wonder, though, how their ideas of handling the situation might differ. It was clear that the two of them had different thoughts on a lot of things, and it wasn’t such a stretch to assume their opinions on this wouldn’t line up, either. Emilio wanted to know what Owen was up to, wanted to stop him, but… He also wanted to make Owen feel the way he’d felt when Owen shoved him up against that wall. He wanted Owen to feel small and hopeless, wanted to hurt him. He wasn’t sure how much of that sentiment Eve shared. He didn’t think asking would be very productive.

Her car came into view, familiar to him now even if it wasn’t quite as recognizable as something like the bright yellow Bug Teddy used to drive. He approached it slowly, dreading the awkwardness that was sure to follow their last meeting. They’d been able to exchange information online well enough, but it was easy to remain civil in a conversation where you didn’t have to look the other person in the eye. Things got a lot more complicated when they were sitting right in front of you.

Or… maybe they didn’t. Eve pushed the door open as he approached, greeting him in a tone that made it impossible to discern how tense their last face-to-face conversation had been. Emilio faltered momentarily, uncertain. But… this was what Eve did, wasn’t it? She covered shit up. She mutilated corpses to make sure the truth couldn’t be found in their bones. Carving up the corpse of an awkward conversation to turn it into something friendly was probably easy by comparison.

It was harder for Emilio, of course. He slipped into the passenger's seat stiffly, shutting the door behind him. “I don’t know what that means,” he said flatly. “Let’s just go. What’s the plan?”

—

“It’s a game, I think you’d actually really enjoy it,” Eve replied, but just like last time, he rebuffed any idle banter. Fine. Eve could cut to the chase no problem. She could as easily chatter about murder as she could about video games. When she’d messaged Emilio about her suspicions, he’d mentioned she wasn’t the only one with suspicions. The moment she’d read that, her stomach had dropped. Emilio was emotionally driven, but he was smart as hell. It was confirmation, at least, that Eve’s own frustrations with Owen weren’t being projected onto dead bodies. 

It hadn’t even occurred to her that there was something else to find suspicious to find. 

“The plan is to figure out whether Owen is covering for someone else or if Owen’s just covering for Owen. I’d love to completely absolve him of kin-murder and just find out that he’s still an ass, but that isn’t feeling likely.” She swallowed, hiding it with a mild shrug.  

“I have earbuds so we can keep in touch–” Eve put them on the arm rest— “I can keep an eye on where Owen is so there are no nasty surprises” — she held up her tablet with a security cam of Owen in a dank bar— “and I have these,” Eve pulled out a keyring with a couple keys on them from her dashboard, dropping them in Emilio’s lap. Each key was labelled O.L. along with his address.  “But you’re the actual investigator, this is your hunt. I’ll follow your lead.”

—--

“Don’t usually enjoy games.” Not the kinds everyone else seemed to think were fun, in any case. The things Emilio considered fun didn’t really line up with what most people would make a game of, after all. (Though… axe throwing seemed to be growing in popularity. He’d seen it offered at a few places Downtown while investigating various cases. Part of him wanted to ask Teddy if they’d be interested in a date to one of them, but another part figured that his and Teddy’s competitive relationship mixed together with axe throwing might not be the best thing to take into a public space.) 

Right now, though, he didn’t want to focus on any of that. He didn’t want to make small talk with Eve; he didn’t even particularly want to be in the car with her. In his stomach, there was a knot of complicated feelings. The anger was still alive, still burning. It was a hungry forest fire desperate to devour everything it touched. But there was more there, too. He’d started on the drives, at least a little. He’d seen comments on how she’d ‘edited’ the corpses and the stories they told, and that fueled the fire. But he’d also seen other things. Grocery trips to provide food to people whose livelihood had been affected by the massacre, conversations and interactions with children left alive, small translation notes that spoke of someone trying to better grasp a language. The drives painted Eve as more human than he wanted her to be. And so, the anger wasn’t alone in its bottomless pit. There was guilt, too. Guilt that she’d been there when he hadn’t, guilt that he’d snapped on her, guilt that he was angry, still. And grief sat on top of all of it, because it always did. 

He’d rather focus on Owen than unpack any of the rest of it, because Owen was simple. Maybe things had been complicated between Owen and Emilio once, when they’d first gone from fucking to fighting, when Owen had carved into him with things he’d never wanted to hear and used his words like a weapon designed to scoop out Emilio’s insides and toss them on the dirty floor, but it had simplified over time. Owen was good at making himself easy to hate, good at removing all hints of complexity from whatever thing they’d once had. These days, it was hard to remember that he’d ever liked the guy at all. Instead, he let himself recall how good it felt to shove a stake between his ribs, how satisfactory it was to snatch a victory. This would feel good, too. He was sure of it.

“Found out a bit last time I saw him,” he replied, absently rubbing the ring on his finger. An old habit he wouldn’t call nervous, even if that was exactly what it was. “I ran into him at a bar. Full of undead, and all of them seemed to know him. Managed to talk to a vampire who it seemed like thought Owen was on his side. Got a little bit out of him, but not much. Biggest thing was that he mentioned ‘she’ wouldn’t be happy Owen was with me. He killed the guy before I could get anything else from him. So… I know he’s got someone pulling his strings,” he commented, grabbing one of the earbuds. “A woman. And I know he’s willing — and able — to kill people he’s not supposed to kill to keep us — or me, I guess — from figuring out who that is. Him being willing to stake a vampire doesn’t tell us shit. He’d do that either way. Hell, he does that for fun. But the way he was able to do it? No physical reaction? That tells us more. If he’s bound, it’s a loose bind, which makes me think he isn’t. Bind loose enough to go against in a way that big wouldn’t be able to do much to keep him in it for long, and he’s been at this at least a few months. Not compelled, either, if he’s able to go around killing people he’s meant to be protecting.”

Popping the earbud in his ear — the one that a banshee hadn’t screamed in, since the other was still a little too muffled to do him any good — he moved his attention to the keyring. Seeing the key to Owen’s apartment gave him some pause, and he eyes Eve cautiously out of the corner of his eye. He wondered if she had a key with his initials on it, too. Paranoia creeped in, and he did his best to push past it. He could grill her about that later. After they figured out what Owen was up to. 

“There may be something in his apartment that’ll clue us in on how she — whoever ‘she’ is — has him leashed. Could be some kind of magic with looser terms. Could be blackmail. Though… not sure what Owen cares enough about to be blackmailed with.” His bias blinded him a little here, he knew; it was hard for Emilio to view Owen as a person for the same reason it had been hard for him to find those small details in Eve’s drives: it was easier for him if Owen was a simple kind of evil. But, of course, simple evil didn’t exist. Emilio knew that better than anyone. “I’ll go up and look around. You can come, or you can stay here and play lookout. Might have to go in behind me and clean up to keep him from knowing we’ve been there after.” He bit back a comment about how she ought to be good at that by now, though it was a hard thing to swallow. Emilio wasn’t really one to hold himself back.

—

Eve twisted to listen to Emilio fully, first out of interest, but the more he spoke, the more she began to frown. “What?” The idea of Owen voluntarily associating with vampires was laughable, except apparently it wasn’t, Emilio was dead serious. (He also referred to vampires as people, some part of Eve’s mind registered, which was notable for a Slayer) It made what she’d been suspecting him of seem… not trivial, but predictable. It was a damning reflection of how she saw Owen, Eve realised, that it seemed more likely that he’d murder someone than hang out with a vampire. It was a damning reflection on her, that her first thought had been that something in him had snapped, and not that something could be controlling him. “That's not what I was suspicious about.”

Eve sat there for a moment, twisting back to look at her steering wheel, because Emilio would be able to see every flick of emotion in her eyes if she kept looking at him. If there had been any hope left that she was wrong, it had dissipated with Emilio’s damning testimony. It only sat alongside the sickening dread, the knowledge of what would happen if they found more evidence in his home. 

“It could be a bind that prioritises her protection above any other. If revealing much about her to another slayer were endangering, it might make sense. But a fae bind like that would be complex to word, never mind for other kinds of magic. Probably makes more sense than blackmail.” Eve speculated, but her voice sounded like she was elsewhere. It was easier to twist her mind into warden contortions, and weigh up what a deal like that would take, how experienced a fae would need to be to pull it off. What situation Owen would have needed to find himself in to ever agree to that. It was the season for it, and he wasn’t immune to the charms of a faun. (He wasn’t immune to the charms of anyone.) Never mind the other kinds of binding magics Eve was less familiar with. Spellcasters were terrifying in the range of their abilities and magnitude of their powers. Demons even more so. 

If it was a fae, even the fae’s death might not offer absolution. Even if Owen had made no choice in the matter, he was the weapon. The logical part of her brain offered only one solution in that scenario: a threat that big to hunters had to be put down. What the rest of her thought about that was inconsequential, it always had been. If Eve swallowed and rubbed her face as if she could rub the emotion off of it. She ended the silence she had lapsed them both into, her voice remarkably clear. “I have evidence he killed a slayer. Maybe even three hunters. Which makes slightly more sense if someone's pulling his strings.”

“Here, look. Natasha Freemond, Nasir AlRokh, and Maya De La Costa. They all died of similar knife injuries. Look at how these wounds match up,” Eve pulled up her tablet, handing it to Emilio, where the screen highlight just how similar a couple of these injuries were. “I was called out for Natasha and Maya, their bodies were found a day or two after they died, Natasha had even been moved, but Nasir called me out to work on something else. Whatever happened to him happened after he was confident he’d cleared out all the undead in the area.” 

She slid her tablet over the arm rest to him, with the pictures of the three hunters. Emilio  knew death - slayers probably knew it more than even she did, their hunting grounds being what they were. He probably knew the stages of death and decomposition, the pallow and blood pooling in the two women, the autolytic sheen that the skin collected as it stiffened up. He could probably also see, in contrast, how alive Nasir looked. If it wasn’t for the pool of blood around him and the faint clouding in his eyes, he might not have even been dead in that picture.  If Eve had been a few minutes faster, he might not have been. She wondered if she might have hesitated the way Nasir had. She wondered if she would hesitate now. Her gun felt heavier than usual on her hip. 

“I found Owen on the scene, also injured,” she didn't mention that she had patched him up, that she had wiped Nasir’s blood from his arm.  “He said he’d killed the vampire that had killed Nasir, but his story wasn’t adding up. There was more blood on him than injuries.  Then Maya died after. I’m not a CSI, I can’t read blood spatters that well and say anything conclusive, but it feels pretty fucking damning, especially when taking what you’ve said into account. If he's been associating with vampires, protecting them, maybe that's why. Natasha was a warden, but we all tangle with things outside our duty sometimes.” 

Like, apparently, other hunters. One thought scratched the inside of her mind, jarringly. If Owen was killing hunters in the way of whatever leash he was being dragged by, what was she doing still alive? Eve had been so close to him, seated between his arm and his body, that if he’d stabbed her in the temples Eve wouldn’t have even realised it until she was already dead. She looked at Emilio, whose anger at her was still plain on his face. 

“Well, if Owen is as sloppy with incriminating evidence as he is with his normal hunts, I’m sure the answer will be in there somewhere. Do you really want to be in the same space as me for that long?” She smiled wrily, not giving him a chance to reply before making the decision for him. It was probably good to have a diversion on the outside anyway, just in case Owen caught them off guard somehow. Eve could be ever so distracting when she needed to be. “I’ll check out the exterior and play lookout. Don't you worry!”

—-----

Eve hadn’t known about the company Owen was keeping, then. In a way, Emilio felt accomplished. After all, Eve was typically someone who boasted knowing more than anyone else in any given room. She was smart and resourceful, and that often meant she figured things out before anyone else. And Emilio was fine with that; she was still an ally, even if things had been complicated by that damn book and everything that followed. But… he was also a competitive bastard, and knowing something that she didn’t felt good. It made him feel a little more in control, allowed him to reclaim something he’d lost when those drives had shown him things he’d never thought he’d see. “First time I caught him being un-Owen-like was a few months back, just after he came back to Wicked’s Rest,” he replied. “I was after a vampire. He stopped me from staking it. I thought he was just being a petty ass.” Not a poor assumption, given everything about their relationship.

He watched her digest the news, and he wondered how well she knew Owen. All things considered, Emilio didn’t know him very well at all. They’d fucked around a few times, but they’d never had any particularly deep conversations. That was by design. Emilio tended to avoid conversations like that with most people, didn’t tell anyone anything personal unless he had to. Eve was one of very few people in his life who knew about the massacre, who knew about his daughter, and he hadn’t even told her by choice. Similarly, she hadn’t revealed anything about her past willingly, either. Did Owen know about those kids she’d hung around with, the ones who’d died all at once? He doubted it.

He hummed at her speculation, drawn out of his thoughts by the sound of her voice. “Wouldn’t explain him willingly hanging around undead like that. Wording in that bind would have to be real specific, wouldn’t it? To make him go… against his instincts like that.” It would indicate a fae very skilled in word games, something that made Emilio uncomfortable just to think about. He’d been caught in a few binds through his time in Wicked’s Rest, but most were relatively harmless. (Even if the one Siobhan had trapped him in felt anything but.) 

It was… worrying, to say the least. Emilio didn’t like Owen, didn’t give much of a shit what happened to him at all, but if someone out there was able to make him behave in a way so unlike himself, it could spell trouble for more of them. Emilio had undoubtedly put himself on their radar with his snooping; Eve likely wasn’t far behind. What was the next step, then? What would someone like that do? The not knowing made his palms itch, made him all kinds of uncomfortable. If there was one thing Emilio hated, it was any sense of agency being taken from him. If someone could do it to Owen, could they do it to him, too? To Eve? That was what worried him.

Maybe other things should have worried him more.

He took the tablet as Eve handed it over, looking down at the pictures as she spoke. It was far easier to see this than it had been to look through photos of the massacre in Mexico, far easier to flip through images of dead strangers than it was to look at ones of people he’d once made small talk with on his porch. He could be far more clinical now, could make notes of the injuries that had killed them. Knife wounds, skilled and precise. Eve was right, the injuries on the different bodies shared similarities to one another. They’d either been made by the same person, or by someone with a similar background in style. 

The last one was different, but only in that the body was fresher. It was clear that, in this case, Eve had arrived only just after the hunter’s heartbeat stopped. Emilio glanced at her, wondering if he could find any semblance of emotion on her face. He thought of what he’d said to her the last time they’d seen each other, what he’d called out towards her as she walked out the door: that, one day, it would be his death she was covering up. Would she look just as stoic then as she did now, he wondered? Would she show pictures of his corpse to some other hunter, questioning his cause of death as if it were little more than a mystery to be solved? They didn’t know one another well, but they did know one another. She’d known this man, too, at least well enough for him to call her. How much did that complicate things?

He turned his attention back to the tablet, zooming in on one of the photos. “Whatever killed them, it definitely wasn’t undead,” he commented. “But… you knew that already.” Owen’s story was already full of holes, even without Emilio’s expertise putting the nail in the coffin. Still… “You think he killed them?” It was strange to think about. Typically, the idea of a hunter killing another hunter was something taboo. Emilio had come close to it a time or two, had helped Andy cover it up when she’d crossed that line, but… Emilio wasn’t what anyone would call a model hunter. Neither was Owen, but this was still a big line to cross. It was an especially big line to cross multiple times. There were three that Eve knew about. How many that she didn’t? 

Handing the tablet back to her, he shifted in his seat. He snorted at her mention of Owen’s sloppiness, shrugging a shoulder. “Slayers are used to things turning to dust when we stab them. They don’t exactly teach us how to clean up bodies.” He tensed when Eve asked if he wanted to share a space with her for that long, because the answer was no. But they weren’t talking about what happened last time, weren’t mentioning this canyon of awkwardness sitting between the pair of them. 

She saved him from having to bring it up, from having to think on it any longer, and there was a rush of relief at that. Maybe she was being kind, or maybe she didn’t want to share a space with him, either. Either way, he was glad for it. “If there’s something in there, I��ll find it,” he replied. “But don’t expect a bloody knife or another body. He’s stupid, but he’s not that sloppy. I don’t think.” There was every chance that Owen had fallen far enough to make this easy on them, but… Emilio had never been one for optimism. 

—

“I can’t imagine why the two of you wouldn’t get along at the best of times,” Eve replied jokingly, shaking her head. Emilio and Owen both had the instinct to aim for the raw spots when they could. It would be like a house on fire, in the worst way.  “We argued a lot, but he was much harsher than usual last winter. He fell off my radar after that, I didn’t even know he’d left town.” Arguing was understating it and overstating it. The first few times had been, sure, but then it had almost become a ritual. Instead of hey, how are you, she sent him grainy videos of him fighting, that were only recognisable because she knew him. His replies that at least he was doing something lost their edge. Sometimes, the arguments had still been real, but sometimes it had just been how the two of them spoke to each other at all. 

Eve nodded at Emilio’s comments, oblivious to his discomfort, as focused as she was at hiding her own. “If it was fae, it would have to be a full contract, I would expect. Which would beg the question of why he’d sign one. …Alternatively, do you think he could be possessed?”

As soon as Emilio was holding the tablet, Eve began driving them closer, focusing on the road rather than the growing dread in her stomach. She drove silently as he processes, although now she did spare a couple glances over to him, to judge his reaction. Wondering if Emilio knew any of these hunters, or if she was the exception in not having met him until recently. “I’d like to be wrong, but, yeah. Either he did or he knows who did.” 

When he finally put the tablet down, Eve was just pulling up outside his apartment complex. Eve clenched her jaw, because even hunts with disappearing bodies would sometimes benefit from a bit of a post-hunt cover-up. Now was really not the time, especially if it worked in their favour. “I’d hope he didn’t have a body in there. That’d be gross. Anyway. He’s in apartment 14. Have fun. Keep me updated on what you find, I’ll still be able to help from out here.” She turned on her own earbuds, testing the connection until she was happy with the volume. “Oh, and Emilio? If you could take pictures before you move things around, that would be a huge help.” 

—

He shot her a look at that, expression utterly unamused. “I’m a goddamn delight,” he said dryly. “He’s the one who’s got problems.” But Eve was right in a way Emilio didn’t want to admit. He and Owen were always going to wind up butting heads. Even if Emilio’s morality hadn’t shifted into something most hunters didn’t agree with, even if Owen hadn’t shoved him up against that wall and sliced through him with harsh words that rung a little too true for Emilio’s liking, even if Emilio hadn’t stabbed him with a weapon Owen was far more accustomed to wielding himself, things never would have worked out in a way that would have allowed them to be anything resembling friends in the long term. They were similar, in a lot of ways, and that was the problem. Emilio had never hated anyone more than he hated himself. The fact that Owen shared a few similarities with him was not a point in his favor. 

Eve shared her own timeline, and Emilio wondered how close they’d been before the arguing started. Were they friends? Did Eve have friends? It was a harsh thought, but he thought it was something to consider. She was so purposely detached that it was hard to imagine her allowing herself to consider someone a real friend, especially another hunter. How many corpses of people like Owen, like Emilio had she made disappear? Was it possible to befriend someone while knowing you’d one day desecrate their corpse in order to keep a secret? “Surprised you didn’t find a way to keep tabs on him.” His tone wasn’t accusatory, though the words certainly could be interpreted as such. After all, Eve didn’t seem the type to allow someone to slip between her fingers when she still had questions they might be able to answer. (She and Emilio were alike, in that way.)

The mention of possession caught his attention… though certainly not in a good way. Absently, his hands dropped down to his thighs, fingers prodding the fabric of his jeans. The last time he’d dealt with someone possessed, he’d nearly ended up a human sacrifice. And he was fine with it, really. He didn’t waste much time thinking about how he’d woken up tied to a chair, or remembering Aesil’s blade carving into him in an attempt to bleed him dry. It was over, it was fine. But he didn’t particularly want to repeat the process, either. It was just too much work. That was all. “I think he’s still him. Still knows shit he’d know, still his brand of annoying. Somebody possessed, they’re like a different person. Don’t remember shit that happened to them, don’t act like themselves unless they’re trying to fool somebody. I think we can rule that one out.” He needed that one ruled out. The way his heart was pounding, the way the scars on his wrists and thighs ached — this wasn’t that. He knew this wasn’t that. 

He let the gentle movement of the car distract him, kept staring at the images on the tablet even though he’d already seen as much detail as there was to see. “Hell of an accusation,” he commented, “but I’m not sure you’re wrong. These injuries are from somebody who knows how to use a knife. Doesn’t mean it has to be Owen, but if he was telling you it was a vampire who killed the last one…” He let it hang. The lie was a damning one. Owen would have no reason to tell it if he weren’t covering something up. 

Emilio hoped they’d know exactly what that was soon. He looked up at the familiar apartment building, nodding. “I know which one it is.” He’d been there more than once, albeit not in a long time now. “If he’s killing hunters, I don’t think he’s drawing the line at gross.” He rolled his eyes, grabbing the key from the ring and stepping out of the car. He was just about to step away when Eve called his name again, catching his attention. With a sigh, he nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

Without another word, he turned towards the building, making his way to the door and slipping the key into the lock. Unsurprisingly, it went in without a hitch, unlocking the door just as keys were meant to do. Emilio had never had any doubt that Eve had the correct key for Owen’s apartment. She was resourceful like that. 

Slipping in, he flipped on the light and looked around. It looked a little different than the last time he’d been there, messier. Owen was clean, as far as hunters went. His place had always looked impersonal and eerie, but never messy, like Emilio’s tended to be. It still wasn’t quite on the same level as Emilio’s Worm Row apartment, but… it was certainly not as put together as it had been a year and a half ago. Emilio snapped a few pictures of the space for Eve, then got busy snooping.

“These things work two ways?” He murmured, testing to see if Eve would respond. “No dead bodies, so we’re off to a good start.” He moved through the living room and into the kitchen, opening the cabinet curiously. Mostly snackfood. He snapped a picture of how it was arranged before rifling through it, looking for anything suspicious. When he found nothing, he moved to the drawers. Not much silverware — at the most, it could allow for two people to share a meal. Emilio doubted that was ever the case. A peek in the fridge saw alcoholic beverages and takeout containers, along with largely expired food products. Emilio almost snagged a drink, but he figured Eve wouldn’t be happy about it. He pulled the flask from his pocket instead, taking a healthy swig and letting the fridge swing closed. 

Nothing out of the ordinary in the kitchen, then, though it did offer a clue as to how Owen had been living. It had been a little more functional before, Emilio knew; this shift was enough to make note of. Whatever was going on with Owen, it was affecting more than just the company he kept. If it were anyone else, Emilio might have felt a little bad for him. As it was, though… he moved on to the next room, and he felt nothing at all.

—

Eve merely shook her head. Yup, it was definitely only Owen who was the problem in that relationship. As Emilio explained his reasoning that Owen had to still be Owen, she nodded. Demons weren’t her area of expertise, and Emilio sounded like he was speaking from experience. It would be easier if it wasn’t Owen at all, in many ways, but it didn’t sound like they would get an easy way out. Looking at Emilio, the way he’d reacted to the suggestion, maybe it wouldn’t have been an easy out at all. Just a more morally comfortable villain. As he replied to her accusation, Eve nodded. There was no need to go into the specifics of it, the blood pooling, Owen’s antsiness, the hidden knife, the lack of bragging about his kill. A dozen symptoms in isolation that kept him off the hook, but in that room had painted a horrifying picture. “You don’t get someone else’s blood on you like that unless you killed them or you were holding them as they died. Owen isn’t the cuddly type.” How embarassing, that for a moment she thought he had been. 

Emilio’s parting shot just had Eve rolling her eyes. Sure, Owen’s standards for hygiene when he was in certain moods was low, but he’d always kept a clean home. She couldn’t imagine him bringing someone home, killing them, and then just leaving the body to decompose. Or worse, killing them and then deciding to bring the body home. He was murderous and protecting vampires, but surely he still had some standards? 

She watched Emilio enter the apartment, and checked Owen’s location on her video feed (still drinking, and acquiring a collection of empty glasses in front of him rapidly), then hopped out her car herself, grabbing a small satchel before approaching the building. There was only one CCTV camera that she could see, which had obviously been out of function for a while, the lens cracked and filled with debris. Disappointing that she wouldn’t get any old data off of it, but fine. The bricks of the wall gave her ample edges to start climbing it, her left leg uselessly flagging against the exterior while she pulled herself up to the camera’s height by her finger tips and one leg.

“Yep,” Eve replied, the tension in her voice audible. “I can even hear you rustling around.” She found her balance, standing on a quarter of an inch of brick with one leg and clinging on to another with one arm. Eve pulled a screwdriver out of her satchel, and began to unwire the old camera one handed. “Great. Where are you starting?” She shoved the screwdriver in her mouth, and pulled out a little button camera, small enough to barely be noticeable. She scrape the back of it against the wall until the back peeled off, and she could stick it on the underside of the camera. 

Deciding now was as good a time as any to pick up the conversation they were having int the car, Eve pulled the screwdriver from her mouth and said, “For the record, I don’t obsessively stalk everyone I know. I don’t have that kind of spare time.” If she had, they might not have been caught off guard by the Cortez reveal in that book. If she had, he might not even have ever known she had been in San Augustín Etla. “Normally, when hunters fall off my radar like that, they’re dead.” Screwing wires into sockets wasn’t exactly easy one handed, no matter how nimble you were. Eve grunted as she twisted the old wires into a plastic bracket to pair up with her new camera, and as soon as she was happy with the connection, dropped back to earth. She landed hard enough on one leg that she was sure Emilio could hear the thud through her microphone, and let herself sit down a moment while her muscles burned. 

—

The pieces of the puzzle seemed to be coming together in an obvious way now, but Emilio wasn’t sure he could blame Eve for not solving it sooner. Despite all the animosity between himself and Owen, even Emilio might have doubted, at least at first, that the other slayer was capable of doing something that went so against the ‘rules’ hunters set out for themselves. They didn’t have a lot of unspoken laws as a people. They were a group who killed until they died, who raised children like weapons and taught them to do the same. There were very few lines that the majority of hunters wouldn’t cross, but this was one of them. Emilio had known, for a while now, that he would cross the line if he had to. He would have killed Parker, still swore that he wanted to kill Owen, hadn’t mourned the hunter Andy killed. But Emilio was a shitty hunter, and everyone knew it. Emilio wasn’t what he was supposed to be. It was a little surprising to learn that Owen wasn’t, either.

“Only way he’d hold someone as they died is if he was checking their pockets,” he scoffed, shaking his head. It wasn’t a fair assessment, and deep down he knew that. But his judgment was clouded when it came to Owen. He couldn’t fathom anything good about the man, and it was easier that way. It was how he preferred it. Cases like this one were a lot simpler when you disliked the person whose shit you were riffling through. It allowed you to see things you might have missed if you were giving them the benefit of the doubt. (Of course, it also meant risking seeing things that weren’t there because you wanted the person in question to be guilty. Every pro doubled as a con, with this kind of thing. Detective work was full of double-edged swords.)

“Must have fucking dog ears, then. Not being that loud.” He snorted, rolling his eyes to no one. “Started in the kitchen. Nothing worth mentioning, except that his diet fucking sucks.” As if Emilio had any room to talk. “Seems… messier than it used to be. Food’s gone bad, floor’s dirty.” It was worth mentioning, even if it didn’t tell him much. To Eve, it might mean more. She’d clearly been friendly with Owen more recently than he had; she might be able to pinpoint a cause for that sort of thing a little easier.

With the kitchen clear, Emilio moved into the living room. He snapped a few pictures again, then got to work. The coffee table was more of a mess than it had been the last time he was here, too. Dirty plates that told the story of someone eating on the couch rather than at the table, a few knives left out instead of hidden in nooks and crannies the way they might normally be in a hunter’s house. Emilio flipped the cushions from the couch, raising a brow at the sight of dust bunnies, crumbs, coins, and… a wallet that must have fallen between the cushions. He reached for it, letting out a small hum as Eve spoke. “You stalking me now?” Probably not before, since she hadn’t known his last name before the police station. But after? He’d be surprised if she hadn’t started keeping tabs on him. 

Flipping open the wallet, he glanced down at the contents. Before he could even start riffling properly, something gave him pause. The driver’s license slotted into the small windowed pocket was definitely not Owen’s. “The name Lena Faulkner mean anything to you?” It could have been someone Owen was hooking up with, someone whose wallet had been lost in the couch cushions in the midst of some uncomfortable couch sex, but given the nature of their suspicions against Owen… it was probably worth seeing if Eve knew the name. 

There was a thud through the microphone, and Emilio tensed. “Everything okay out there?” If Owen was back, he trusted that Eve would have warned him… unless she was taken off guard. His eyes moved to the window, his body ready to follow if necessary. 

—

“If you say so. Huh,” Eve frowned, taking that in. It didn’t speak to someone that was thriving and happy with their life, certainly not in the way that Owen had seemed to before (not that that was a high bar, but, you know), but that was all she could glean from that. “You broken into his flat often, then?”

“Not really,” Other than having a read through his public social media, which had given her the tip off that Emilio wasn’t the biggest fan of Owen to begin with. But that was public, it didn’t exactly count. It was like sticking a newsletter to your front door and being upset anyone had bothered to read it. Other than personal curiosity, there wasn’t any reason to be keeping a close tab on Emilio specifically. Eve only really tracked threats to secrecy. Owen had felt watched because he was often the problem in that regard, not specifically because she was watching him. “Why, should I be? If you want to be the center of my attention, you just have to ask.”

Emilio’s question made Eve pause, and frown around the screwdriver in her mouth. She spit it out and dropped it back in her satchel. “Uh, yeah. Ranger, maybe? I’m not sure. Guessing you found something of hers?”

Maybe it would have been worth warning Emilio before she jumped down two stories, especially when she’d never fully met the description of Warden Grace. Oops. “Yep!” Eve exhaled heavily, pushing herself back to her feet. “Just installing some extra security features. Give me a sec, I’ll see what I can find on Lena.” Satisfied the drop hadn’t disrupted her prosthetic’s suction onto her leg, Eve looked around to confirm there wasn’t anyone new watching before hurrying back to her car, reaching for her laptop, and opening up one of her many databases. 

“Okay, Lena Faulkner, right? She specialises in marine monsters. I met her once at the three daggers, but we didn’t really cross paths otherwise. She mentioned she owned a boat. Let me see if I can find her mooring license, give me a few minutes.”  Eve opened up another directory to begin typing in the command line, and started humming a small tune to herself as she did. Only after a few seconds did she remember that they were on a hot line, and Emilio could definitely hear her. “Sorry.” Ironically, that was the first time she’d apologised to Emilio about anything. After a few minutes of accessing directories she definitely shouldn’t have been able to, Eve deflated. “Fuck.”

It could be that Lena had been a one night stand. It could have been that her and Owen had worked a hunt together. It could have been a coincidence. She could have drowned, could have been swallowed by a giant squid or a mermaid. But. Eve swallowed, and spoke. “Her boat was reported as abandoned on the docks after her mooring license expired a month ago. The licenses last for about a year, so that doesn’t tell us how long she hasn’t been back to deal with it.”

It could also mean that after all their arguments, Owen had finally started paying attention to Eve and had started properly hiding his kills. 

—--

“First time breaking in. Didn’t used to have to.” He was hopeful that things could be left at that. Admitting to having slept with Owen — more than once, on a semi-frequent basis — wasn’t something he was looking to do. It definitely wasn’t something he was looking to do via call while snooping around in the guy’s house. It wasn’t as if he was ashamed — Emilio didn’t tend to feel shame for his sexual exploits, despite the Catholicism… probably because there were other things he felt far more ashamed about — but it wasn’t something he was proud of, either. And it wasn’t relevant to the case, since it hadn’t happened in nearly two years.

There was every chance Eve could have figured it out for herself, of course, had she been stalking him. He and Owen hadn’t been private during their brief tryst, and it wouldn’t be hard to uncover evidence of it. The fact that Eve apparently hadn’t meant he was willing to believe her claim that she hadn’t been watching him. He huffed a quiet laugh at her question, rolling his eyes to the empty apartment again. “No, actually, I’d like you out of my business.” He wondered how feasible that was, given Eve’s tendency to keep tabs on hunters in town. Emilio had never been particularly good at keeping the supernatural secret when he felt it was more beneficial for a person to know the truth, and that seemed like a line Eve wasn’t willing to cross.

A ranger. He flipped through the wallet, making note of the contents. Maybe she was someone who’d come by for a hookup, though… it would be a little odd for Owen to bring a hunter back to his place to hook up when he was actively killing hunters. He was stupid, but if he was that stupid, he probably would have been caught much sooner. 

He relaxed a little when Eve reassured him that everything was fine, though he still eyed the window warily. “What kind of security features?” He turned away, carefully placing the cushions back on the couch. He didn’t return the wallet to its place; he doubted Owen knew it was there, so it wasn’t likely he’d know it was missing. In any case, going through it more in depth wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe they could find something useful… or at least have an opening to talk to Lena Faulkner and see if she knew anything.

They just had to find out what they were walking into with her first. He moved as Eve got to work, snapping a few more pictures of the space before beginning to search the shelves for anything worth seeing. He listened to Eve hum, an amused expression on his face, but didn’t interrupt her. “No, no, go on. Enjoying the show, really.” Dry, sarcastic, a little teasing. For a moment, he could almost let himself forget about the tension between the two of them, and the tension in this whole situation. But only for a moment.

Eve cursed, and Emilio tensed again. He listened to her report, he looked down at the wallet. Not damning on its own — hunters disappeared all the time, either because they left town without telling anyone or they died in a way that left their body digested instead of rotted — but coupled with what they suspected about Owen so far… “I’ll see what else I can find.” He’d rather have something a little more damning, even if he wasn’t sure Owen deserved any benefit of the doubt.

He moved into the bathroom, doing the obligatory photography necessary to fulfill Eve’s request before starting his snooping. A little too much product on the sink, a few too many options for soap and shampoo in the tub, though some of it looked like it might not have been used in a while. There was a chance Owen was forgoing showering; Emilio chose to believe it as fact, if only because it made it a little easier to make fun of the guy in the privacy of his own mind. The shower was far less interesting than the clothes hamper, of course; there was a reason dirty laundry was a metaphor for secrets, after all.

Emilio began rifling around, pulling out a few garments and inspecting them. Nothing noteworthy on top, but at the bottom… “Got some bloody clothes here. Not exactly unheard of for a hunter, but the shit Owen hunts shouldn’t be bleeding like this.” If you killed them quickly, most undead died bloodless deaths. If you took it slow, they bled something darker than living blood, something close to black. The stains on Owen’s pants were red. Could have been from a shifter — plenty of them died like humans, and Owen wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who’d refuse to hunt outside his ‘specialty’ — but given everything else they’d found… Emilio wasn’t keen on making excuses. When you added everything they’d uncovered so far together, it either painted a clear picture or told a far-fetched story that required a thousand different ‘possible but not the most likely’ excuses in order to work. Emilio was inclined to go with the more obvious answer. That was usually the best bet.

—

“Oh,” Eve replied, so caught up in working her computer that she didn’t quite manage to hide the knowing in her tone. When had Owen ever invited someone over for just a movie night or a meal? No, his home was so impersonal precisely because it was only intended for the bare essential, and for the one thing Owen would certainly have considered essential. Considering how Owen and Emilio argued in public, maybe this was just part of his thing. Not that it was any of her business, and not that she cared. It was just an interesting little snippet. Funny coincidence, too, although from what she knew about Owen’s proclivities, maybe not as big a coincidence as you’d expect. 

Eve grinned as he huffed something sounding almost like a laugh. “Roger, roger. But it’s fine as long as we’re both in someone else’s business, right?” Bonding over a shared enemy was practically a hunter rite of passage. Even if enemy wasn’t the way she wanted to think about Owen just yet. 

“I added a camera that I can access to the broken one they have outside the building. Just gives me another viewpoint on the comings and goings around here,” She replied, like it was the most normal thing in the world to prioritise. Well, she wasn’t going to ask Emilio to put a camera in Owen’s home, was she? Owen might have called her a creepy stalker, that did not mean she had to be one. She smiled at Emilio’s reply, “This is radio FM, playing the top hits all night long.”

Bloody clothes. Great. How many more final nails in the coffin did they need? Eve slumped in her chair. “I think at this point we can stop trying to come up with alternative explanations, right?” Eve sounded a little defeated. How many of the people she hadn’t heard from over the past months were dead at his hands? Were any of the bodies she’d handled actually at his hands, and hidden in the way she did it herself? Owen didn’t hang around for cleans, but he was pretty goddamn smart. “It’d be nice if we found something conclusive, but this all just points to one way. I don’t know how much more evidence we need.” She rubbed her temples. If he was finding laundry, Eve figured he was probably in the bathroom, unless Owen really was letting himself go. “Have you been through the bedroom yet? We really need to find something about this woman.” There was an extra dimension to the idea of finding something in Owen’s bedroom that made her jaw tighten. “He often shoves random shit in his bedside drawers.” 

Eve crossed her arms, flicking back to the CCTV view of Owen, drinking, oblivious to the storm gathering around him. Or perhaps trying to drown himself before it reached them. “So, here’s the million dollar question. If he’s killing hunters, that are, I don’t know, a threat to this mystery woman. Like, for example, the private investigator who knows there’s a woman pulling at his strings, or the person who literally caught him red-handed. Maybe he figured he couldn’t fight you in a full bar, or didn’t feel confident he’d win,” Which felt even less in character for Owen than anything else, “But…. We were alone. I was patching his fucking wounds. Why the fuck didn’t he?” Of course, it was possible he was just biding his time, planning the right moment, although for now Eve couldn’t think why. She took a deep breath, steadying herself, and voiced something she had been thinking all evening. “If we can’t find the cause of all this, we’re going to need to treat the symptom. We can’t let him keep doing this.”

—

The oh she let out told him that she knew exactly why Owen had had Emilio in his apartment, and it took everything the slayer had not to let out a groan. So much for keeping that little tidbit on the DL. He scowled in the general direction of the mirror, though it was obvious that the expression was just for him. There was no way for her to see it. If she had any kind of cameras inside Owen’s apartment, she probably wouldn’t have needed him to break in. But, in any case, the scowl made him feel a little better about his dirty laundry being aired out, and that was enough for Emilio. 

It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, at least. This particular brand of irritation was something easier to swallow, something that was almost funny. It let him forget about the heavy shit. For a minute, Eve wasn’t someone who’d shown up in his hometown to mold the corpses of his friends and neighbors into stories easier for strangers to swallow, or one of a very small handful of people left alive who knew what he’d lost in that living room three years ago. For a moment, Eve was just someone who’d puzzled out that Emilio had slept with Owen fucking Lundkvist. She was someone who hummed to herself in his ear, and made a joke when he mentioned it. And that was better, even if it was temporary. He preferred that, even if he was the one who couldn’t let it last.

“Other people’s business is kind of what we both do, isn’t it?” His tone was dry, more clipped than it had been before. He wished it weren’t, wished he were capable of keeping up the lightness and avoiding the elephant in the room. But Emilio was so easily consumed by the dark shadows that lurked in the back of his mind. He’d never been able to outrun them entirely. “Camera’s a good idea. Might help us get eyes on this woman without her figuring it out.” It’d be better to see her in person, of course. Between the two of them, Emilio and Eve would be able to suss out pretty easily if she were undead or fae. If she was neither, it’d narrow things down a lot. But… at this stage, he got the feeling that secrecy was important. Owen already knew Emilio was snooping around, probably knew Eve was, too. Whatever they could keep from him would only work in their favor.

Right now, they knew plenty. Everything was mostly circumstantial — a missing woman’s wallet in your couch cushions and bloody clothes in your laundry might have convinced a human jury of your guilt, but hunters knew those things didn’t always mean anything — but coupled with what they’d known coming in, with the bodies Eve had photographed and the man Owen claimed died due to a vampire who was dust before Eve’s arrival to the scene? It spelled things out plainly. “Obvious answer is usually true, with shit like this,” he agreed. Part of him wanted to say I’m sorry, though he didn’t know why. This kind of behavior wasn’t something Emilio had expected from Owen, but he hated the guy enough to have no problem believing it. Was it different for Eve? Were she and Owen something closer to friends? He remembered how he’d felt when Rhett had crossed one too many lines, how his stomach churned and his chest ached. Was that what Eve was feeling now? Did he care? It wasn’t as if he and Eve were friends, either. They were allied due to a common enemy. How she felt about that — how she felt about anything — had no bearing on him.

But he wanted to say I’m sorry, and he couldn’t put a finger on why, so he didn’t say anything at all. He turned his jaw into a jail cell and locked the words behind his teeth, and he moved into the bedroom in silence. “There now,” he confirmed, snapping more pictures before beginning to dig. He dutifully opened the drawers, sifting through socks and underwear with little fanfare. Emilio was hardly one to care about digging through the underwear drawer of someone he used to fuck; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen most of these garments before in one way or another. 

He listened as Eve spoke, quietly rifling around. “Not sure he’d care much about getting caught in a bar full of vampires,” he commented. “Doubt anyone there would have given much of a shit. Could have been worried about transferring the body, I guess.” Some might find it strange, the casual nature with which Emilio spoke of his own potential death, or the way he referred to the body as if the corpse in this hypothetical wouldn’t have been his own. To Emilio, it was a simple way of laying out the facts. Why hadn’t Owen killed him? He doubted the other slayer was worried he wouldn’t win a fight, though he’d lost plenty against Emilio before. (Or… one. Which, in Emilio’s mind, was a substantial number.) Why hadn’t he killed Eve when her guard was down and they were alone? “Maybe he’s worried about blowback. You do cleanup. A lot of hunters call on you. You’re not on active hunts, so hard to sell that your death was related to that. Could be he just thought it’d be too much trouble. Or… he thinks he’s still got you fooled, and is hoping you’ll help him clean something up later.” But was Owen someone who planned ahead that much? He wasn’t exactly known for considering the consequences of his actions.

The obvious answer, then, was something more emotional, but that was difficult for Emilio to believe. It was easier to think of Owen as someone who felt nothing for anyone. It was easier to consider him a monster, to imagine him with sharp teeth and no remorse. The fact that he’d spared Emilio was something he could rationalize due to the public nature of their encounter, but sparing Eve? That was harder to explain away, and he hated it. He hated the way it made him pause for just a moment when Eve mentioned treating the symptom if they couldn’t uncover the disease, hated that Owen’s moment of pause gave him one of his own. He clenched his teeth together, silently chastising himself for that moment of hesitation. “We can’t let him keep this up,” he agreed. “You or me could be next.” Or Jade. Or Daiyu. It was lucky Kaden had left town and given him one less person to worry about, lucky Rhett had fucked off months ago. But there were still plenty of hunters in this town and, regardless of how often his morality set him apart from them, Emilio wasn’t sure he could sit back and let Owen keep killing them. 

Closing the drawer, he sighed. “Look… I can do what needs doing. I’ve got no problem with it. He’s not giving us a whole lot of choice here.” Eve seemed to give more of a shit about Owen than Emilio did. It shouldn’t be on her to kill someone she might still consider a friend when Emilio wanted to stab the guy half the time, anyway. Moving across the room to the garbage can, he rubbed his thumb absently against his ring. “It’s not like I haven’t tried it before. Stabbed him a few months back. Nothing fatal, but definitely pissed him off. Won’t pretend it didn’t feel good to…” He trailed off, bending down painfully to pick up a crumpled paper from beside the garbage and smoothing it out. Holding it up to the light, he furrowed his brow. “Huh.”

—

Eve exhaled. Fine, fun moment of banter over. She didn’t deign his sharp tone with a response. There was no point. This alliance would clearly end the moment Owen was dealt with, one way or the other, Emilio had made that perfectly clear. As he commented on her cameras, offered a tiny snippet of praise, she rolled her eyes. “I have those, sometimes.”

“If he’d left you dead in a vampire bar I can’t imagine he’d have needed to worry about your body,” Eve replied idly, as used to speaking about hunter death as the weather, because it only made the question bigger. There was no love lost between Emilio and Owen, their online presence had made that perfectly clear. If he was tasked with protecting a vampire, why not take out the obvious threat? She rolled the thought around in her head, twisting her laptop charging cable around her fingers as a nervous fidget while Emilio spoke. “No hunter will be surprised when I get killed on an interrupted clean, especially if it also killed the hunter who called me. You couldn’t have written a better explanation if you’d planned it.” Eve spoke of her own death in the way Emilio had spoken of his. She bit her lip, thinking of how she’d sat even closer to Owen as she’d made her realisations, kept up her flippant jokes, leant in instead of leant out. “I hope I have him fooled, but if I were him I wouldn’t want any loose ends.”

If Emilio’s hesitation phased her, she didn’t show it. What Eve was suggesting was radical even by her standards, it didn’t feel good, but it was also right. One dead hunter to save several more. The maths just made sense. When he finally agreed with her, she nodded. If little else, at least they had this in common. Curiosity, Etla, and pragmatism. 

Eve’s eyebrows drew close together, more than a little irked at Emilio’s chivalry. Like she’d have a problem with it. Like Eve didn’t lock up her heart behind carbon fibre hulls every single day to do what she did, what he couldn’t stomach. Like whatever affection she had ever felt for anyone had interfered in her work for ten years. Yes, perhaps it was easier to carve up dead humans than living ones, but it wouldn’t be hard. As he kept talking, her eyes widened slightly. Maybe she should consider herself lucky that Emilio hadn’t stabbed her in his living room. Before this, before Owen, hunter threats had been common as muck. Arguments about secrecy rarely went smoothly, and no matter how even keeled Eve could be, few hunters (especially those who weren’t wardens) regularly matched that. Knives held to her throat and even the occasional blows had all felt like bluster. Violence may be their native language, but hunters didn’t damage each other. Except Owen. And Emilio, apparently. “It’ll be whoever encounters him first, if it comes to it. As Owen has so neatly proven, it isn’t hard to kill someone who isn’t expecting it.”

Emilio had fallen quiet. Eve cocked her head, glancing down at the screen with Owen in the bar. His emptied glasses collection had grown absurdly large. “What?”

—

It was a good point, of course. Disposing of a body wasn’t exactly difficult for undead people to accomplish. Sure, Emilio’s blood was no good to them — he always got something of a kick out of watching one of them realize it, of biting into his skin expecting a meal and finding their mouth filled with acid instead — but there were other ways to deal with a corpse. There’d probably been a zombie or two in the crowd who would have gladly taken his body home in a doggy bag, or a vampire old enough to have the necessary contacts to make a corpse disappear in broad daylight without question. No, if Owen had wanted to kill him in that bar, there was little reason Emilio could see for him to avoid it. Just as the reasons he gave Eve to explain her continued heartbeat were flimsy at best. Owen had no problem killing hunters, and Eve and Emilio were both the sort who would almost certainly get in his way. So why leave them alive? 

(Why hadn’t Emilio driven that stake in deeper at the end of his last physical altercation with Owen? Why hadn’t he slit his throat when he’d been laying on the floor of that apartment? Why hadn’t he let the nymph Rhett carted them off on a joint hunt to take care of kill Owen in a way he could have pretended was impossible to prevent? Owen could have killed him in that bar, but he could have killed Owen plenty of times before that. He didn’t know what stopped him, so how could he possibly understand what stopped Owen?) 

“He’s a cocky bastard,” he said, trying to sound more certain than he felt. “Maybe he likes thinking he’s pulling one over on both of us. Maybe it just makes him feel smart.” It wasn’t even a good explanation, because while Eve might have made some attempt at convincing Owen that she was fooled, Emilio had done no such thing. Owen knew he was suspicious of him, knew he was already digging around and snooping in places Owen wanted him out of. Maybe he liked feeling smart at the idea of fooling Eve, but he knew he hadn’t fooled Emilio. There was no explanation that really made sense.

Just as there was no explanation that could fully allow him to understand the tightness in his chest, either. Hadn’t he wanted Owen dead since the moment he’d shoved him against that wall and delivered verbal blows that were impossible to dodge? Hadn’t he threatened it a thousand times now? Eve said that whoever ran into him next would have to do the deed, and Emilio wondered if he ought to make sure that that was him in spite of the way his heart stuttered at the concept. Was it the idea of killing another hunter that made him so uneasy? The concept hadn’t bothered him in the past. Not when Andy killed a ranger to protect her sister, not when he confronted Parker with the full intention of leaving him to rot in the woods. Why was Owen different? Emilio didn’t know. And, as most things did, the not knowing made him angry. “Yeah, well, I can’t say he won’t expect it from me. Doesn’t mean it’ll be any harder.” It was a lie, and he wished it wasn’t. It was a lie, and it shouldn’t have been.

He busied himself with the paper instead, with the feeling of it uncrumpling in his hand and the smudged writing on it. A list of names, both familiar and foreign. Emilio squinted at it, tilting his head to the side. Some seemed like people Owen might want kept safe. The surname Lundkvist appeared frequently enough in the beginning that, at first, he almost assumed it was just a list of family members. But the sixth name on the list broke the pattern. Wyatt Barlow. The lamia with the bad attitude? Emilio hadn’t even known Owen knew the guy. 

That name wasn’t anywhere near as puzzling as what followed. Emilio’s eye caught his own name, with Eve’s right beneath it. The remainder of the list — Jade, Rosemary, Bridie, Conor, the guy who owned the fucking blade shop, Rhett — all seemed secondary. His mind was spinning in circles with attempts to connect the names. A list of enemies? It was possible that Owen was on poor enough terms with his family to consider them as such, but he’d been uncomfortably friendly with Rhett. People who might take note of his recent behavior? He couldn’t imagine someone like Wyatt giving a shit about dead hunters, especially not when paired with the fact that Wyatt had seemed keen on eating him until they’d had something of a bonding experience. If not for his own name on the list, he might have considered the possibility that these were all people Owen cared about, but… Hadn’t Owen made it clear that Emilio was far from his favorite person?

Eve’s voice in his ear startled him from his thoughts. Embarrassingly, he’d almost forgotten she was on the line. He cleared his throat, smoothing out the list a little more and snapping a picture of it. “I found something,” he said. “A list of names. Sending it to you now. I know some of them. Different people from around town, or people who used to live here. Rhett Tangaroa, he’s a warden. Think you know Jade, she’s a slayer. None of the rest are hunters. Most of them aren’t even human. What do you make of this?” Maybe Eve would have more of a clue than he did. As much as he hated to admit it… Emilio was stumped. 

— 

“What, like a hit list?” Eve asked when he finally replied, clicking the notification the moment he sent it. The file opened on her laptop, crumpled paper in handwriting that even Eve knew couldn’t be Owen’s. She mouthed the names, one by one, like reading them would make them real. 

Benjamin Lundkvist

Katarina Lundkvist

Clark Lundkvist

Astrid Lundkvist

Felix Lundkvist

Wyatt Barlow

Emilio Cortez

Eve Farran

Jade Bloodworth

Rosemary Kane

Rhett Tangaroa 

Bridie Dougherty

Conor Kiernan

Chet

Eve sat in silence, letting it stretch between them, staring at her name on the list. Her mind wondered, just as Emilio’s had, if this was enemies, or threats, and dismissed them as out of hand. She looked at Jade’s, who was more playful than any hunter Eve had ever met, at Rosemary, who could brighten up a bloodied alley. People who were so easy to like and let yourself be liked by. And Eve, who tried to be as palatable as possible to everyone, who could pick a fight and sweep it under the rug at the next moment. Emilio didn’t fit in that mold, not in a million fucking years, but he was a a gasoline fire, warm right until it burned you. Eve looked at the other names on the list, the Lundkvists, and reached for her laptop again. It wouldn’t be a thorough search, and it wouldn’t be perfect - it wasn’t like Eve spoke Swedish, and translation apps only got you so far. Anything was better than the growing question in her chest. 

“Okay, at first glance, I can’t find Felix, Astrid or Clark of the Lundkvists online, but I’ve found Benjamin and Katarina. They look… old enough to be his parents. Or maybe aunts and uncles.” Both of them were on facebook, of all places. Katarina had an especially bloated friendslist. Eve idly scrolled through her profile as she sat there and thought. Her mind came back to the zombie, the basement, the fridge she’d locked herself in and the way Owen had held her later, checking for a bite he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about. 

“So, I hate to ask an incredibly awkward question for the both of us,” Eve began cautiously, as once again she had to reveal something about herself that neither of them wanted to know. “When the two of you went from slayers with benefits to threatening to kill each other on the regular, any chance you had that falling out winter of last year? Maybe an argument that he started, when he took every damn thing he knew about you and twisted it to throw it in your face? Where suddenly every teasing insult he’d ever said suddenly sounded like he’d always meant it? Any chance it was the kind of thing someone would say if they really wanted you to hate them?” Eve let the thought linger in the air, knowing how much it implicated her as much as him, how it reflected on both of them. Her joke, when it came, was not meant to be believable. “Hypothetically, obviously.”

It was only in the admitting that she might have the capacity to care that she gave herself the ability to lock that caring away so thoroughly. To hunt a fae, you had to be prepared to be emotionally compromised along the way. You had to be able to feel, and to finish the hunt either way. Not every hunter trained that way. How many humans’ bodies had she found, draped over another corpse as if to protect them? How many humans had she found dead with knives in their hands, ready to fight a threat they could barely understand? How many humans had let themselves become vampires, become werewolves, become monsters just to be strong enough to protect their community, only to be what destroyed it anyway? All the best and worst parts of Hunters were their humanity. Maybe that was true for Owen too.  “What I’m getting at is…. Any chance this is a blackmail list?”

It would be an absurd number of names. It was absurd for hers to be on there at all, yet as soon as she voiced it, it felt like it fit. Maybe just because Eve couldn’t picture having a family you’d want to kill. Maybe because it was on a piece of paper meant to be thrown away. Maybe because if it was, it answered the question they had just asked each other. 

As she spoke, Eve logged into one of her many fake facebook accounts, and sent Katarina a friend request. There were other ways to learn what she wanted to know, but sometimes the easiest was just to let people tell you. The accept came… worryingly quickly. Considering the time difference, but then again Slayers didn’t need to sleep the way Eve did. She scrolled the publicly available likes and groups Katarina was in, just to get some gleam of a hint of something, anything. She liked a lot of memes, apparently. In those Minion Mom groups, and elsewhere. You don’t know tired until you’re chasing a toddler at three am. Share this on your page if you love your kids. Like this if you’ll even go to your kid’s primary school graduation. 

It was kinda sweet, really. Not the vibe Eve expected from someone who was related to, well, Owen. The kind of thing she’d had given him shit for if the circumstances were different. Most of the memes were like that, but the children referenced in many of these memes were… young. Eve looked at the names on the lists again. 

“Emilio. I think Katarina Lundkvist has young children.” Maybe even ones called Astrid, Clark or Felix. 

—-

His eyes remained locked on his own name on that list. If he ignored everything around it, he could twist the situation into one that made more sense. Owen wanting to kill him wouldn’t be a surprise; if anything, Emilio might welcome the concept. If Owen wanted him dead, things could be simpler. He could do what needed doing, and he’d never have to think about it again. It would be as easy as staking a vampire, as simple as removing the head off a reanimated corpse. If this was a hit list, it meant that Owen was little more than another monster that needed to be taken out in order for Emilio to protect his friends.

But he was too good a detective to accept an assumption as fact just because he wanted it to be true. The truth was rarely ever what you wanted it to be. Emilio had learned that over and over and over again. It was a painfully complicated thing that changed with the wind, a shovel that hollowed you out and twisted you up. The truth was obvious, sometimes, like when all the evidence in Owen’s apartment pointed them in a very specific direction, but that didn’t make it simple. There was nothing simple about any of this.

“No,” he said, still staring at the list, “not a hit list.” He kept his voice even, neutral, but if someone knew him well enough… they might have been able to pick up on the hint of disappointment behind the words. There was a list, and it wasn’t a hit list. There was a list, and it wasn’t a hit list, and his name was on it. There was a list, and it wasn’t a hit list, and his name was on it, and he had no goddamn idea what to do with that. The truth was never simple; Emilio wished, just once, it would be.

Eve went quiet long enough to look up the names. Three came back with no results, but two proved more successful. Owen’s parents, maybe, or some other relatives. He tried to slot the information into place, tried to make it tie the story together a little better, but it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “All right, so… His parents, us, and a few locals. Plus the others with his last name. Relatives with no online presence?” In 2024? That was a hard sell. Maybe they were people who’d died before the internet became as ingrained in society as it was now, though that made little sense, either. Emilio had to assume that everyone on the list was alive, at least to Owen’s knowledge. But if Eve couldn’t find them…

Her voice pulled him from his thoughts again, asking questions it seemed she already knew the answer to. Emilio grimaced, trying not to remember the moment he and Owen had gone from, as Eve so delicately put it, slayer with benefits to threatening to kill each other on the regular. It was hard not to hear the echo of Owen’s voice in his mind, hard not to recall every syllable he’d flung in Emilio’s direction. You can barely keep yourself alive. Not just in a fight, no. You live like you’re already fucking dead and you’re just waiting for somebody to find your corpse. Except nobody will because you don’t have anyone. You can’t do shit because you’re fucking nothing. 

Hadn’t it done exactly what Eve was insinuating now? Hadn’t it been the only nail he’d ever needed to have driven into the coffin of whatever he and Owen had before? He disliked how familiar Eve’s story sounded, disliked the way it made him feel as if he’d been manipulated into reacting the way he did. If there was one thing Emilio hated, one thing he’d rage against until the end of fucking time, it was the perception of his agency being taken from him. The fact that Owen might have been able to accomplish it without him even being aware it was happening… 

“It was closer to autumn,” he replied, as if that made a difference at all. “Summer, even.” Did it matter if the encounter had taken place in August or October? The end result was the same either way. He scowled down at the list, glared at his own name on the page. He was angry Owen manipulated him; he was angry Owen might give a shit whether he lived or died. He was angry that he was angry, and wasn’t that a shitty way to be? “If it’s a blackmail list, it’s a weird one. Can’t imagine anyone using me as something to hold over his head. Can’t imagine it working.” Maybe Emilio’s name was there as an oversight, an incorrect assumption on the part of whoever had made the list. It was the easiest option to swallow.

(The truth was rarely easy.)

He was left to swallow the unsettling ramifications as Eve typed away on her keyboard, wishing he had something more to do than look at the note in his hands. The apartment had been thoroughly searched; there wasn’t anything more to find. They knew everything they could know. It wasn’t as if Owen would have photos of the mysterious woman pulling his strings laying around somewhere to be uncovered, after all. They’d been lucky he kept the damn list — though, from the looks of things, that was largely due to his lack of motivation when it came to doing simple household chores like taking out the garbage. By the time Eve’s voice chirped in his ear again, it was a relief. 

Until he digested what she said.

Young children. The names on Owen’s list, the ones who weren’t easily found online, were kids. Emilio felt a familiar buildup of rage, a quiet fury that threatened to turn the world red. He didn’t like Owen, no matter what the fucking list implied. He didn’t give a shit if the guy was miserable, didn’t even really care that someone was pulling his strings. (He’d been an ass before someone was pulling his strings, too, after all.) But if this person was threatening kids, if there were children involved in all this…

“We need to find a way to end this.” He crumpled the list back up, tossed it back towards the garbage can and let it fall where it had been before. “One way or another, we need to figure out how to stop him and whoever’s in charge of him.”

—

“Guess that doesn’t match up with a timeline for getting people out of his life if a threat was hanging over his head,” Eve replied as Emilio answered her definite hypothetical. Maybe it didn’t mean anything after all, it was just something Owen did. Maybe only some of the names on this list were right. She didn’t have any more speculation to offer, no answers for herself or for Emilio. But if she was right, that meant a little bit of the blood spilled lined her hands too. Fuck Owen for that part particularly. 

“I agree, and whatever we do, we need to act quickly.” Eve looked at the list. The maths had changed. If she could be certain that taking out Owen would keep other hunters safe and wouldn’t jeopardise the people on the list, it would be one thing. There were complications on that page that didn’t fit in an algorithm. That were more messy than simply closing off her heart. It was a tiny relief, that the only lesson from this was that the first call wasn’t murdering Owen. It was just a much heavier weight that came with it, that there was no easy answer. Like a game of Clue, they had the locations,  the motive, and the murder weapon: Owen. But they weren’t any fucking closer to whodunnit. It was so much easier to be the one making the mystery than solving it. Eve smacked the car dashboard hard enough to leave a dent in it. “I’m fine,” she said lightly but just as quickly into the mic, because Emilio would have heard it. 

“Someone’s been watching Owen enough to put this list together, we have to assume someone’s keeping tabs on us too. We’ll need to be careful.” The thought sent ice down her spine. For a watcher, Eve did not love to be watched. The question lingered: who did Owen fear so much that he genuinely believed could be a threat to everyone on this list. Six confirmed adult hunters, a spellcaster, whatever Emilio meant by some of the names on there being not human. Owen wasn’t one to overestimate a threat. “We have the camera and someone on that list might know something. We’ll find her.” The reassurance was more for herself than for him. 

Eve glanced at her screen, just in time to see Owen starting to argue with what looked to be the dingy bar’s bouncer. Which would likely only go one of a few ways. “Time’s up, he’ll be out of the bar soon. I’ll reset the flat. See you around, Emilio—”

—Unfortunately, for all three of them. 

[theaddictedwatcher]

Hello everyone!

We're meeting again today to talk about a show that's very different from the ones I'm used to reviewing, but more importantly, different from the ones I'm used to watching, so I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity you've given me and for choosing it in the poll on Instagram (@theaddictedwatcherrewiews) last Saturday. The series I'm about to tell you about is an adaptation of Daniel P. Mannix's 1958 book of the same name, which was re-released in 2001 as The Way of the Gladiator. The book is said to have inspired David Franzoni's screenplay for Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000). The series' release on Prime Video at the end of July this year could also suggest that it is paving the way for the release of the film Gladiator 2, scheduled for November 2024. As some of you may have guessed, I'm going to tell you about Those About To Die.

And as usual, a short synopsis : Rome, year 79, a few years after the death of Princeps Senatus Nero. The population is tired and bored. Some are starving, mainly because of the slow arrival of grain from Egypt. The ageing princeps Vespasian, who had initiated the construction of the Flavian amphitheatre, tried to distract and entertain the people with gladiatorial fights and chariot races. All this kept many people busy behind the scenes, providing a real 'spectacle' for the people. The new amphitheatre also provoked jealousy among the Roman elite, who resented Vespasian's desire to share the site with the people. Vespasian also had to deal with the rivalry between his two sons, Titus and Domitian. Against this backdrop, we follow the fate of Tenax, a man who starts from nothing and tries to reach the upper echelons of Roman society. Along the way, he crosses paths with Cala, a mother who has come from Numidia to recover her three children, who have been forced into slavery and transported to Rome. And now a short technical presentation: - Created by : Robert Rodat - Music by : Andrea Farri - Starring: Iwan Rheon, Sara Martins, Tom Hughes, Jojo Macari, Moe Hashim, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Rupert Penry-Jones, Gabriella Pession, Dimitri Leonidas, Emilio Sakraya, David Wurawa, Pepe Barroso, Gonçalo Almeida, Eneko Sagardoy, Lara Wolf, Anthony Hopkins.

As I said at the beginning of this article, this series is an adaptation of the novel Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix (1958, reprinted 2001) by Robert Rodat, the man behind films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the Falling Skies series (2011), both directed and produced by Steven Spielberg.

In this work, which takes the form of a peplum, we find many of the codes found in other well-known productions such as the films Gladiator (2000), Spartacus (1960) and Ben-Hur (1959), as well as the series Rome (2005) and Spartacus (2010), to name but a few. The title of the work is a direct reference to the Latin salute given to the princeps during the games: Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, which translates into English as 'Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you'. It's a quotation that is used almost systematically in all types of works dealing with gladiatorial fights, chariot races and, more generally, the Roman arenas, as in the comic strip Asterix Gladiator by Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny (album published in 1964).

But let's stop for a moment. What is a peplum? The Latin name peplum is derived from the ancient Greek word péplos, meaning 'cloth used to cover the body to make a toga'. Since the twentieth century, it has been used to describe a genre of historical fiction films set in antiquity, particularly ancient Rome, ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. There are also biblical epics based on the Old or New Testaments. Its place in the history of cinema is proof of its importance. At once noble - because it deals with history and religion and uses authors such as Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey) or Gustave Flaubert (Salammbô) - and vulgar, because it exploits violence and eroticism, the ancient genre is associated with epic, comedy, fantasy and even the miraculous through its use of various mythologies. The basic recipe for the American peplum was laid down by Cecil B. DeMille: a handsome hero, preferably muscular, a beautiful heroine, spectacular action (orgies, battles), lavish sets and costumes.

Now that we've looked at the genre, let's take a brief historical look at the characters and the various themes.

BACKGROUND

Before we begin, this section will probably contain some historical spoilers about some of the main characters, but you need to know a little history to understand what's at stake.

Although the series begins in 79 AD, under the reign of Princeps Vespasian, we need to go back a little to understand the socio-political context of the time.

Before Vespasian

After the death of Nero in 68, the Roman Empire plunged into civil war, known as the Year of the Four Emperors, and power was hotly contested, leading to a highly unstable political situation. While the usurper Vitellius took power during 69, the Roman legions in Egypt and Judea declared Vespasian emperor on 1 July 69. He marched on Rome with his larger legions and defeated Vitellius, ending the civil war and becoming the first representative of the new Flavian dynasty.

Princeps Vespasian - played in the series by Anthony Hopkins

On 20 December 69, it was announced that Vespasian had triumphed over Vitellius, and his appointment was confirmed by the Senate the following day. Vespasian's reign was marked by a series of financial reforms and ambitious building projects. His most famous project was the Colosseum, an amphitheatre the size of which had never been equalled. Through his delegate Agricola, Vespasian also pursued the conquest of Britain.

Vespasian was the first Roman princeps to come from a family of the equestrian order (the order that followed the senatorial order in the hierarchy of classes), and was also the first Roman princeps to be succeeded by his natural son, Titus, on his death in 79. His military career was the source of his fame (Roman conquest of Britain in 43, Roman domination of Judea - modern Israel and Palestine - during the Jewish revolt of 66).

Princeps Titus - played in the series by Tom Hughes

The son of Vespasian, Titus reigned from 79 to 81. Initially serving under his father, he rose to prominence as a military commander during the First Jewish-Roman War. Titus aroused the suspicion of the Romans when Vespasian became princeps, not only because of his status as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, but also because of his relationship with Princess Berenice of Judaea. Despite several breaches of Roman morality, Titus became increasingly popular after Vespasian's death in 79.

His reign, though short, was marked by a series of disasters. Having just come to power, Titus had to deal with the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and distinguished himself by his great generosity towards the victims. The following year he had to deal with a fire that ravaged Rome just as the construction of the Colosseum was nearing completion. Finally, he personally intervened to help the victims of a plague epidemic that killed thousands in the city. Considered a good princeps by ancient historians, he died of a violent fever on 13 September 81.

Princeps Domitian - played in the series by Jojo Macari

The youngest son of Vespasian, Domitian succeeded his older brother Titus as Princeps from 81 until his death in 96. He was the third and last of the Flavian dynasty. As Princeps, Domitian strengthened the economy by revaluing the Roman currency, reorganised the frontier defences and embarked on an ambitious building programme in Rome (including the construction of the Arch of Titus in honour of his brother). His foreign policy was marked by Agricola's campaigns in Britain and the wars against the Germans and the Dacians.

He is also remembered for expelling from Rome the philosophers who, by spreading their ideologies, were creating opponents of the regime. Domitian's government, and in particular his policy of centurionism, showed many signs of despotism. Indeed, he saw it as his destiny to lead the Roman people into a new golden age. This image was conveyed through propaganda developed on religious, military and cultural levels. In fact, Domitian was popular with the people and the army, but he was considered a tyrant by the senators, to whom he had left only vestiges of power. Domitian's reign ended in 96 when he was assassinated by members of the court. After his death, like Nero, he was condemned by the Senate to abolitio nominis ('suppression of the name'; the modern equivalent would be damnatio memoriae, which literally means 'condemnation to oblivion' but was not coined until 1689), and Latin historians such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger published versions of Roman history in which he was described as a cruel and paranoid tyrant. Since then, modern historians have rehabilitated his reign, whose political, economic and cultural programmes helped usher in a flourishing era for the Roman Empire.

Berenice of Judea - played in the series by Lara Wolf

Berenice, also known as Julia Berenice, born around 28 BC, was one of the daughters of King Agrippa I. She was a descendant of the Herodian dynasty, being the great-granddaughter of Herod I of Judea. She was a descendant of the Herodian dynasty, being the great-granddaughter of Herod I of Judaea, known as Herod the Great.

She was married for the first time at a very young age. After this first marriage, Berenice spent some time in Alexandria until her husband's death. While still a young girl, she remarried her uncle, Herod V, King of Chalcis (south-eastern Roman Syria), with whom she had two sons. Widowed again around 48 AD, she married for the third time to Marcus Antonius Polemo II, the client king of Cilicia (in modern Turkey), whom she left to return to her brother Agrippa II in Jerusalem. At his side, she performed the duties of queen, a status that was recognised even though no wife of Agrippa is mentioned in ancient sources.

She became the mistress of Titus, the eldest son of Vespasian, while he was in command of some legions trying to crush all resistance in Galilee (northern Israel) between 67 and 68. Their relationship continued while Titus crushed the Jewish revolt of 66-70, known as the Great Jewish Revolt or the First Jewish-Roman War. Titus returned to Rome to witness his triumph (late 70s) and to help his father. Berenice joined him around 75. Because of negative rumours about the affair, he sent her back to her brother in Jerusalem when he became Princeps in 79.

The charioteer Scorpius - played in the series by Dimitri Leonidas

Flavius Scorpus, also known as Scorpius, was a famous charioteer in Roman times who lived at the end of the first century AD. Scorpus amassed 2,048 victories (that's almost 10 chariot races a week).

As one of the most famous chariot drivers in Roman history, Scorpus earned extraordinary sums of money; his income exceeded that of professional Roman sponsors.

Geographical context

A number of places are used in the series, and some of them have changed names over the course of the story, so here's a short list so that everyone knows where we're talking about:

Some of the characters are from Numidia, which now would be Algeria and part of Libya.

Berenice is from Judea, the kingdom that included Israel, Palestine and part of the modern West Bank.

CASTING

I'm not going to beat around the bush so I'll be quite honest about my feelings. This is just for me, and you are free, of course, to have a different opinion.

One of the main reasons that made me want to watch this series, apart from the subject matter, was the presence in the cast of Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs, Elephant Man, Dracula, One Life) and Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones, Misfits, Inhumans). The former, used to very charismatic roles, plays a Roman Princeps, so the casting could hardly have been more dreamy. As for the latter, whom many of you, like me, discovered in Game of Thrones, he plays Tenax, a secret crime boss and owner of the biggest betting tavern in Rome. It's a new role, full of duplicity and manipulation, and I was curious to see how it would differ from his role as Ramsay Bolton. So why not give it a go?

With the exception of them both, the entire cast was unknown to me, at least by name, and sadly I think for many of them, this isn't the show that will showcase their talents. And I'm not necessarily talking about a lack of talent, although some of the performances leave something to be desired, but I'm mainly talking about visibility. The show is packed with so many characters that the main cast of the show is also immense, and the distribution of screen time between each of them leaves them with only meagre moments of appearance per episode.

For my taste, the interpretations of certain characters are either too caricatured or too effete, and this gives the whole thing an unpleasant lack of harmony. In fact, when you go from a very intense scene full of political stakes to a scene of discussion between two pages (this is just an example, but I think it's representative enough), the emotion created by the first disappears and, with it, a large part of the viewer's attention as well.

However, I have to admit that I discovered some talented actors that I didn't know and who deserve to be seen more. I'm thinking in particular of Jojo Macari (Morbius, Sex Education, Harlots), who gives a brilliant performance as the ambitious and manipulative Domitian Flavius, the youngest son of Princeps Vespasian, and also as Aedile Ludi, the person who organises the gladiator fights and chariot races in Rome.

But I'm also talking about Sara Martins (Les Petits Mouchoirs, Petits Meurtres au Paradis, Alexandra Ehle), a French actress who plays Cala, a Numidian merchant and mother of three children - Kwame, Aura and Jula - who does everything she can to free them from the clutches of the Romans.

They're not the only two, of course, but their performances and complex characters contributed greatly in making me want to watch beyond the first episode.

Although the characters played by Anthony Hopkins and Iwan Rheon are both very interesting and their stories could be explored in greater depth. Their presence in the cast isn't enough to make up for the lack of material in the script. It's a flaw I've already mentioned, and I'll come back to it later in the article.

However, I would like to pay tribute to the work of the actors/stuntmen in the race scenes and the arena fights.

THEMES

There are several important themes in the series, and although they are not always tackled with sufficient depth or with a fresh eye, I won't list them all here as it would take far too long. Themes inherent to the genre such as politics, rivalry, but also slavery and arena fights as entertainment are all part of it.

However, I can't help but mention one of the key themes of the genre, and of historical works in general: the exploitation of sex. It's an interesting topic, not only because of the importance of understanding the sexuality of the characters, but also because of their sexualisation. In many works of this kind, when male homosexuality is depicted, it's not so much to show relationships between men as to show the decadence of Rome, whether through fascination or moral condemnation. While male homosexuality is suggested and (self-)censored, this is not the case with female relationships, which are instead shown with voyeuristic force to satisfy a male audience, as in Sapho, Venus of Lesbos (1960) or Sodom and Gomorrah (1962). When the characters are explicitly lesbian, they are portrayed as hating men, and it wasn't until Xena the Warrior in the 1990s that on-screen sapphism was appreciated and reclaimed by lesbian culture.

What I like about the show is that although there are - far too many - carnal relationships between numerous characters, they are mostly brief and often censored by a frame or a well-placed sheet. Sexual vulgarity in the primary sense is not necessary to understand the stakes of the story and therefore doesn't need to take up so much space. However, it is notable that the majority of relationships between characters of opposite sexes almost systematically involve some form of sexual relationship or exploitation, which prevents the creation of the slightest connection between the two genders portrayed.

Another important theme is rivalry, especially political rivalry. Whether it's the relationship between Titus and Domitian as they fight over who will inherit the title of Princeps, the factions trying to seize power from the Flavian dynasty, or the relationship between Roman rulers and their provinces - in this case Numidia and Judea - political rivalry abounds. And yet, for most of the season, I got the impression that none of this was more important to the characters than their choice of dinner.As I said in the casting section, the sheer number of characters leaves too little room for each plot to develop, which is a shame because politics is one of the two main themes of the series. In fact, that's why I was considering watching this series in the first place: to better understand the political stakes behind the Circus Maximus games and, more broadly, to better discover the era of ancient Rome. But here the relationships remain superficial, predictable and therefore, for the most part, rather boring. Nevertheless, as Roland Emmerich himself said when the trailer for the series was released, "So much of it seems relevant in today's society, from the intertwining of politics and sport to the disciplines of the games, which haven't changed much in the last 2,000 years. The most electrifying spectacles for the general public still involve two men in an arena fighting each other, and today's chariots are called racing cars, whose drivers still have accidents and often pay with their lives". And I quite agree, if you look at the dirty tricks played by our politicians - anywhere in the world - the way celebrities are stripped naked as if they were gods, certain aspects of life back then are easily transferable to our times.

Finally, the approach to slavery with Cala's family remains, in my opinion, one of the rare successes of the series. Although certain events remain unlikely for the period, the recruitment of her children into the service of the Roman Empire and their sale into slavery remains plausible. I particularly appreciated the writing of Cala's character, who, as a visibly single and black mother, knows how to use these two characteristics to her advantage in order to manipulate her environment and try to free her children.

She's a strong, determined woman; she doesn't back down until she gets her way, and for once I find it refreshing to see not only a woman fighting to save her family, but to see slaves in a position of strength, all proclivities aside, of course. Speaking about the series, actress Sara Martins - who plays Cala - says: "Narratively, it's a side of Rome we've hardly seen. It's not just about the rich, the patricians, the ruling family and their opponents. It's also about all the workers, the slaves, the wealthy… everything that's behind the curtains of a city like Rome, like all the slaves who built those beautiful buildings. It shows life in Rome at that time and on all social levels". And I agree that through her character's and other's journey, the show gives us a glimpse of that, and it's enjoyable.

PRODUCTION

With a budget of over $150 million for a ten-episode first season, the series marks the first venture into television for German filmmaker Roland Emmerich, known for his disaster films such as Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009).

Along with Marco Kreuzpaintner (Trade, The Collini Case, The Lazarus Project), with whom he had worked several times in the past, Roland Emmerich had already been commissioned by the American network Peacock back in July 2022. The script was to be written by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan, Thor: The Dark World, Kursk), with whom Roland Emmerich had already worked in 2000 on The Patriot.

But apart from the very ambitious technical aspect, which I'll come back to shortly, the production made a few mistakes which, in my opinion, are very detrimental to the series.

Firstly, the show jumps straight into the action without taking the time to set context, which is very important. The only introduction we get is a short monologue by Iwan Rheon's character, Tenax, who briefly explains how the circus games work and his role in them. As a result, viewers who aren't historians specializing in Ancient Rome - which is frighteningly specific in itself - will lack many of the elements needed to even understand who half of the main characters are and what's at stake politically in the series.

Secondly, the terminology is sometimes historically incorrect, although this may be done to help the viewer understand certain elements. For example, when talking about Andalusian horses, they should have said that they were horses from the Betic region, as it is incorrect to speak of the region of Andalusia 700 years before its creation. In fact, "Al Andalus" - which gave Andalusia its name - originated with the Arab invasions of Spain in the 7th century. At the time of the series, it would have been more accurate to speak of horses from Betica, a region created during the reign of Augustus [63 B.C. - 14 A.D.] by the division of Hispania Ulterior, which at that time covered the south of what is now Spain and roughly corresponded to present-day Andalusia. Its name derives from the Latin name of the Guadalquivir River, Baetis.

Finally, and this is perhaps the thing that annoyed me the most, but I've already mentioned it, is the over-numbering of characters, which drowns out the stories of all the characters, doesn't really bring anyone into the spotlight and loses its own purpose in random, superficial scenes.

Book adaptation

I won't go into too much detail on this, as I haven't read the book, but from what I've been able to skim through and understand from the various analyses of it, Daniel P. Mannix's work seems to cover several centuries of Roman history, and not just the principate of the Flavian dynasty, which may make it a more complete and complex work than the adaptation suggests. Indeed, on the very first page of the book, a single sentence briefly introduces the primary context in which the novel begins, as we are told:

"The situation here is out of control. The emperor is mad, the army is on the verge of mutiny, and the people are dying of hunger. For God's sake, get the sand! We must take their minds off their troubles! - Daniel P. Mannix, Those About to Die, Reed. 2024, p.7.

This only reinforces my feeling that the TV adaptation lacks a crucial introduction to the situation.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

I'd like to delve for a moment on the visual aspect of the series.

The series was filmed at the iconic Cinecittà Studios in Rome. This is one of the largest film studios in Europe and was originally a propaganda machine for Benito Mussolini's fascist government. It has been in operation for almost a century and has been used as the backdrop for classic productions such as Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963). In fact, the site has become so popular with American film-makers that it has become known as 'Hollywood on the Tiber'.

The fact that the cast and crew of Those About to Die were able to film in the city where their story was set allowed the show's creators not only to shoot in the Eternal City, but also to immerse themselves in its history while telling a fictionalised version of real events.

"We shot the series in Rome and we're surrounded by buildings built by these emperors. You are constantly surrounded by their legacy. So you can read as much as you want and research as much as you want. But when you go into Domitian's bedroom, which is still on the Palatine Hill, there is nothing like it." said Jojo Macari who plays Domitian.

Of course, the production couldn't necessarily film in the actual bedrooms of Roman statesmen, so ancient Rome had to be recreated through sets and visual effects. The sets for the series were designed by co-production designer Laura Pozzaglio, a native of Italy, who was inspired by archaeological discoveries made in a number of important Italian cities, including Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Ercolano and Oplontis. Together with Johannes Muecke - the production's co-designer - and the production team, they worked with a number of museums to reproduce certain objects for the props. A team of sculptors also reproduced statues from the period and carpenters reproduced furniture they had seen in Pompeii or in history books explained Laura Pozzaglio in the production notes, underlining the effort made to achieve precision.

What could not be achieved in practice was left to visual effects supervisor Peter Travers, who used the Volume LED video wall technology pioneered by The Mandalorian. He explained that the digital wall used was huge: around 51 metres in circumference and eight metres high. It's made up of LED panels and can be stretched infinitely, so even the smallest conversation scenes could have the Colosseum or the skyline of ancient Rome in the background, giving the actors the impression of living in ancient Rome.

And it's true that although the sets - be it the various patrician residences or the outdoor settings such as the Basilica of Julia or the Temple of Vesta - are grandiose in their excess, there's a big problem with the lighting in many scenes. This problem of light contrast is very present throughout the season, and as a result we sometimes can't see what's going on or even the physical reactions of the characters.

There are also problems with the use of special effects. The green screens are sometimes visible in some of the distant shots - particularly the aerial shots of the city at the beginning of the series. And I'll just mention the CGI of the lions, which is absolutely terrible.

However, I must admit that most of the cinematography of the chariot races and gladiatorial fights - particularly in the last two episodes of the season - is quite beautiful, and the photography of the scenes in the Circus Maximus is reminiscent of works such as Ben-Hur. I also think that the athletic realism of the chariot races is due to the fact that the horses were real animals and the races were not digitised. Of course, they were choreographed and stuntmen were hired for the most dangerous scenes, but the actors, including Dimitri Leonidas - who plays the charioteer Scorpus - had to learn to drive a real chariot pulled by real horses. Of this experience, he said :

"Learning the several stages [of racing] before they let us get onto chariots and practice with the chariots was a lot of fun. And then finally when the stunt guys let us on the four-horse chariots to try and learn, the feeling is just incredible. There's nothing like it. Four giant Hungarian horses going all out. It's like riding an earthquake. It's hard to describe, to be honest. All I can say is those guys that do it, the stunt guys and then the guys like Scorpus who actually raced, you'd have to be insane. It's completely bonkers what they're doing. [...] I didn't go that fast except for one moment where we were sort of training and the horses decided they wanted to race and I just got dragged along. There's a great photo, actually, one of our set photographers took just as the horses went, and you can see me and one of the other actors just trying our best to stop them as we hit the turn on Circus Maximus. And he said to me that he stopped taking photos because he thought something bad was going to happen. To be fair, I was on the chariot and I thought something bad was going to happen. But that's why you do all that training. You have to just train as much as you can, hope that everything goes smoothly, but then trust that if something does go wrong, you know the protocols and you know how to make it safe. But I'm glad I got to experience it because that was the only time really that I got to feel them go full pelt was when I wasn't expecting it. And it's wild. It's completely wild. And gave me a newfound sort of respect for Scorpus and all those guys that were doing it." - Dimitri Leonidas in an interview for NBC on July 12th, 2024.

The colouring of the series is also of high quality. They make up for a lot of empty moments in the plot by captivating the viewer's eye with grandiose imagery, which, combined with the spectacular sets and opulent costumes, is one of the show's few strengths in my opinion.

COSTUMES

My penultimate stop is the costumes! This is one of the great strengths of the series, and one that I have no criticism for: the costumes in this series are breathtaking! Under the supervision of Gianni Casalnuovo as head costume designer, not only the characters' outfits, but also the armours are of the highest quality. With the help of costume supplier Peris Costumes - which is based in Spain but also has a branch in Rome - the production team had access to rare, high-quality pieces that were tailored to fit the needs of the show. No stranger to film and television sets, Peris Costumes has also worked on projects such as Gladiator II and House of the Dragon. Together they have created a costume collection that faithfully reflects the opulence and grandeur of the great age of Rome.

The only downside would be the blood splatters, prosthetics of severed limbs and gashes in the gladiators' flesh which at times look crude, but in the heat of the action are almost negligible details.

MUSIC

The soundtrack of the series, composed by Andrea Farri, is quite interesting and epic enough to seduce the viewer. However, if you listen to the music outside of the episodes, you won't always be reminded of ancient Rome. Nevertheless, the violin and cello compositions are very beautiful and will appeal to music lovers, even if they do not match the instruments of the time, as the violin and cello were only invented in the 16th century.

What's more, the work on the show's theme music - which depicts rivers of blood running down the streets of Rome and its emblematic monuments - is reminiscent of many of the show's themes in recent years: Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Westworld and more. Set to music by Woodkid, the epic status announced by the show's synopsis is truly palpable.

CONCLUSION

Despite having called on some big names for this series, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. While the superb costumes and some of the sets may appeal, the lack of any real depth to the story leaves room for the clichés of the genre, which have already been exploited far too often. Even the presence of Anthony Hopkins isn't enough to restore the reputation of this epic, which is fantastic in name only…

I won't go through the whole review again, I think it's self-explanatory enough for you to understand that this series was a big disappointment for me. Although peplums are far from my favourite genre, I was looking forward to another chance to be proved wrong, to learn more about an era I know so little about, and what's more with Anthony Hopkins and Iwan Rheon in the cast! Well, what I'll take away from this is yet another disappointment that has the bitter taste of time wasted…

I was expecting the exploitation of the games to highlight the political issues of the time and this is partly achieved. However, I think they could have emphasised the politics and toned down the sexualisation of the characters. Perhaps this is due to the period chosen, which is not the most eventful in history? Perhaps another period of the Roman Empire would have been more suitable for a series?

So I won't be going to the cinema today to see the next Gladiator, and I almost hope that Amazon doesn't renew this series, because there's nothing really at stake in this dull story. It would save everyone time and money… If they do decide to renew it, maybe they'll choose to do a temporal ellipse and focus on a period where the stakes are potentially higher. They had the opportunity to diversify and innovate with the peplum genre and, in the end, they chose to stick with the outdated clichés it's full of. Hopefully this is a mistake they won't make again if the show is renewed for a second series.

That's all I have to say about Those About to Die. I hope that those who have made this choice will still be curious enough to give it a try, if only to see for themselves. Maybe you won't be as picky as I am?

I'd like to give a special thanks to my partner, who watches all these series with me. She proofreads each article, supports me and, especially for this one, was my historical advisor, as this is her field of study.

Until the next article, I hope you enjoy your viewing, have a great week and see you soon on Instagram (@theaddictedwatcherreviews) to choose the next article!

Eli

[ask-emilz-de-philz]

Emilio (Hunter): "Now I know that what was shared to us is they sometimes live among humans, I mean they do, but you wouldn't know. Even I, myself, a hunter? Can't distinguish them. They're that good in hiding. However, since hey're quite the elitists hehe, then I think they're among the rich and famous and you wouldn't know. And that they're the engkanto no one of their race don't even want to deal with. Like the rest, they make deals with those they consider to be of use or have great power in them. Don't eat the black rice they offer, you'll become their slave. And uh, don't actually make deals with them because they have fine prints in their deals that you'd only know once they come collecting."

#philmytcrea

#planetputo

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[ultrameganicolaokay]

Soul Taker #1 by Thomas E Sniegoski, Jeannine Acheson, Valeria Burzo and Emilio Lecce. Cover by Michael Sta. Maria. Variant cover (2) by Meghan Hetrick. Pride variant cover (3) by Rosi Kämpe. Out in July.

"LIVING FOREVER ISN'T WHAT IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE. Amarantha is the last of her race, an ancient species that has lived among us for millennia, feeding on the life energies of humanity. Now enjoying a peaceful existence in a retirement community, she continues to consume just enough to survive. But Amarantha has made enemies throughout her long life and an ancient foe thought long defeated has returned and is out for blood, while a newer threat seeks to capture her for their own nefarious purposes! Now Amarantha must do everything in her power to vanquish her enemies and protect the life she has made for herself."

[honeysmokedham]

Alternate Reality || Solo

In an alternate reality Declan’s hand was in hers. Nora had told him to close her eyes, his light laughter echoed in the abandoned chapel above the crypt. She would walk backwards, making sure he didn’t trip down the stairs. She’d settle him at the bottom, and memorize his face as he took his first look at their new home. The sign would say Welcome Home Declan and Nora. The birthday gifts would be opened together, because what was her was his and his was hers and this was theirs. They’d curl together on their cot, she’d put names to faces as they looked at the photos taped to the wall next to her pillow. Blood wouldn’t pool beneath them.

In an alternate reality Nora hadn’t gone to Ireland. The gifts at the steps had been opened on her birthday. She wouldn’t have gotten in a fight with Emilio about Regan’s choice, then ultimately pick at him so he wouldn’t think twice when she wasn’t around the next day. She’d have spent her birthday playing Fortnite Festival with Van, and forced her to play the same Olivia Rodrigo song over and over again until Nora managed to get a good score. She’d shown up at Teddy’s for dinner. Wynne and Emilio were at the table, Teddy would come through the door with the biggest display of ham. The night passed by in merriment, a game of trick Emilio into eating was played. Teddy hugged her goodnight. Wynne clasped her hands. Emilio patted her arm. She was happy with her family. She would never know that in Ireland Regan was crossing paths with Declan. The world would never explode into colors she’d never known existed. She’d remain who she was. Now ham reminded her of hamstring, and hamstring was disgusting.

In an alternate reality Declan was born to a family that loved him. He was raised with humans, among humans, as a human. He never knew a life where he was born to die for someone else. Instead he was valued for who he was. A shadow didn’t follow him around in life, waiting for the day a scream replaced his life. In that reality fate chose to cross their paths. He saw the monster before him and he felt fear. Without living in fear his whole life, he never learned about the emotion. It was always what waited in the darkness, the risk of heights and the stress of poor performance. Without fear cradling his whole life, he was unable to look at Nora with the same fearless love he’d held by the waterfall.

In an alternate reality Nora wasn’t sitting alone in the dark crypt. The sign welcoming her home hadn’t sent an arrow into her heart, and the presents neatly piled at the stairs hadn’t brought tears to her eyes. She hadn’t cut her finger on the paper while opening them. The cut hadn’t distracted her for hours as she watched drops of blood slip from the slash, a weak imitation of the cut across Declan’s throat. A shadow didn’t remind her how worthless and undeserving she was.

In the alternate reality there were no cups from Ariadne. An invitation to a picnic. A want to know her more. A carved bear from Metzli. Osito, the name she’d loved. A hope for a good birthday, and many more. A picture from Van. A message of good things to come. A hope that she was having fun. Fuck. She had been having fun in Ireland until reality snuck in and slit fun’s throat. In that alternate reality there wasn’t a bear from Emilio. A note that he was sorry. A note that he wanted her to come by. A note that told her he’d leave if he had to, as long as she had a good birthday.

In that alternate reality she read Regan’s note the day of her birthday, and after some brief annoyance, she let it go. She accepted the words. “If you’re reading this, then I am already in Ireland. I’m sorry I did not tell you when I was leaving. It was for the best. Your tenacity might have gotten you killed. Besides, this town needs you. It is full of people to extort, and help, if you are so inclined, which I know you to be. You’re a strange one, you know. I do not think that’s bad. I used to. Now I’m less certain. I will even suggest that you are correct not to listen to anyone, including Emilio.”

In that alternate reality Nora was still the girl that needed to hear those words. And she would have listened to them despite the last line. And Declan would be alive. People in the town would be extorted. Maybe she’d have found one person she was capable of saving. Every now and then she’d think of Regan, the screams they shared, and fun they’d had. She’d think ‘I hope Regan is doing okay.’ But the thought would pass and life would go on, and their fates weren’t so intricately woven together that she considered Regan to be family and hated her for it. In that alternate reality she wasn’t crying in the dark over a pile of presents and loathing herself for every choice she’d ever made.

But this wasn’t an alternate reality. This was the path she’d chosen. The consequences of her actions. The mistakes she’d made. The reality of it all. And that was too much. So Eleanor “Nora” Pine did what she always did. She walked away.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Yesterday's posts made me think of this song that I love. It's also a song inspired by the maquis (guerrilla fighters against Franco's dictatorship), or so I have always interpreted.

I si demà no tornara ("If I don't come back tomorrow") by the Valencian band Obrint Pas.

Here's the lyrics in Valencian-Catalan and the translation to English:

La por em desvetla a les nits sense dormir i sent el vell revòlver que descansa sobre el pit en aquest bosc humit els silenci és l’enemic a trenc d’alba partim seguint les llums del matí

Fear keeps me up on sleepless nights and I feel the old revolver that rests on my chest. In this humid forest silence is the enemy. At the break of dawn we leave following the morning lights.

Travessem l’aurora entre els cingles del massís en aquestes muntanyes sobreviure és resistir hem canviat mil cops de nom però tots sabem qui som guerrillers supervivents combatents de l’últim front

We cross the sunrise among the mountain range's cliffs. In these mountains, to survive is to resist. We have changed our names a thousand times but we all know who we are: surviving guerrilla fighters, combatants of the last front.

Unes flames roges cremem el nostre horitzó la casa on dormirem és un esquelet de foc han matat el masover ens solia refugiar anit em va somriure quan ens vam acomiadar

Red flames burn in our horizon: the house where we slept is a skeleton of fire. They have killed the sharecropper, he used to take us in, last night he smiled at me when we said goodbye.

La lluna ens recorda que som com estels errants ombres d’una guerra perduda en sendes de fang i quan la foscor em venç acaricie en soledat un record en blanc i negre el motiu del meu combat

The moon reminds me that we're like shooting stars, shadows of a war lost in muddy paths and when darkness beats me I caress in solitude a memory in black and white, the reason for my fight.

I si demà no tornara al lloc on et vaig deixar vull que recordes que un dia joves com nosaltres vam marxar a lluitar armats d’amor i coratge i un clavell roig amagat combatrem fins l’últim dia sota bandera de la llibertat

And if tomorrow I don't come back to the place where I left you I want you to remember that one day young people like us left to go fight armed with love and courage and a hidden red carnation we'll fight until the last day under the flag of freedom.

(Repeat lyrics)

The voices towards the end of the song, before the last chorus, are reading the names and ages of some of the antifascist fighters who were executed by Franco's dictatorship. Some of the voices overlap so I'm not 100% sure of all, but this is what I hear:

Àgueda Campos Barrachina, 29 years old. Isabel Sáenz González, 24 years old Agustí Jofre Capelinos, 50 years old Emilio (?), 16 years old (?), 29 years old (?) (?), 34 years old Emilio Caballero, 29 years old (?) Cabrera, 57 years old Vicenta Pont(?) Ferrer, 30 years old.

[empyrcals]

‘ hazal filiz küçükköse, cis woman, she/her, 34 / 340 , high fae ’ ― cauldron save you. it seems ZEHRA DRAVEN has finally made it to the capital, the LADY from the NIGHT COURT is said to be DYNAMIC and is said to describe themselves with STARFALL PERSONIFIED; YOU BURN BRILLIANT AND LEAVE THE WORLD IN AWE IN YOUR WAKE, A SOUL OF STORMS; YOU ARE AT WAR WITH THE MANY HIDDEN PARTS OF YOURSELF, A RARE SOFTNESS AMONG SHARP SHADOWS; YOUR LOVE IS HARD-WON BUT REWARDING, THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST REFLECTED IN ANOTHER CREATURE WHO KNOWS THE DARK, A SCATTERING OF ROSE PETALS and with all of this in mind their CALCULATIVE nature always seems to get them into trouble. may the mother hold them as they navigate this unthinkable time. 

BASICS

full name. zehra yildiz draven

position: lady of the night court, sister to the high lord of night

nickname(s): none, she doesn't really do nicknames. give her one I dare thee

age. 34 / 340 yrs old .

d.o.b.: july 20th

status. betrothed to emilios acheson, high lord of spring.

gender. cis woman.

orientation. bisexual

species: high fae ( able to storm wield, winnow due to the draven bloodline/court of night )

allegiance. zehra is loyal to those who have earned it, meaning her family - especially timur. only recently within a year is she loyal to emilios seeing part of herself in him - the rest of his family the jury is still out on where she stands with them currently..

spoken languages: common tongue, illyrian, old fae

FAMILY

father:  former high lord draven -- status deceased / murdered.

mother:  former high lady -- status: deceased  ?

siblings:  timur draven ( high lord, elder brother ), emira draven, melinoe draven ( younger sisters )

partner:  emilios acheson ( they've been betrothed for a year now )

children: none.

other  familial  relations: seraphina draven ( sister-in-law ), aylin & aslan ( niece and nephew via emira ). we also count her brother's inner circle as family.

PHYSICALITY

faceclaim. hazal filiz küçükköse

hair color. dark brown/ near black (it's a rich natural color changing shades depending on the time of year ) .

eye color. brown .

height. five foot nine.

scars. none.

build: athletic yet curvaceous. She is finely honed and has all the right curves in the right places - goddess level please.

dominant hand: while ambidextrous, zehra favors her right hand

notable features : her eyes, her bone structure, all the things

TRAITS, PERSONALITY & VICES.

cowardly     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ●      brave energetic    ○ ○ ● ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○     lethargic forgiving     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○      vengeful charitable    ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○ ○ ○ ○     selfish authentic     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○      deceitful chaste     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○      lustful humble    ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○     boastful naive     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ●      experienced cautious     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○ ○ ○      daring restrained     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○     bold trusting     ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ● ○ ○      suspicious

SMOKES ? : no. .

ALCOHOL USE : yes. within reason but not to access - zehra is the sort who always likes to keep command of her own senses.

PRONE TO VIOLENCE ? : no. not unnecessarily violent but it can be stated that while not able to manipulate nightmares as her brother can being high lord Zehra can be an absolute terror and force to be reckoned with. she is the storm and the darkness and the stars hurt something she cares about and she will burn your world down. this, though, is mainly kept at bay; part of herself she hides well and does not tap into regularity, choosing to plot her way through things and using her mind for much of her life, which is equally as dangerous with dark ambitions that whisper at the edge of her mind.

PRONE TO CRYING ? : no, not that she's not cried. its a deeply private emotion that even if she trusts her own blood its not ever on display. it takes great emotion to push her to tears..

EMOTIONAL STABILITY ? : quite high. zehra is emotionally stable through years of training herself to only show what she wishes.

SELF DESTRUCTIVE ? : no. zehra is a builder, an architect of her own design plotting out a way while not her brother's advisors nothing she does is ever not a calculated move playing a game ten steps ahead of everyone else. while her ambitions are not fully voiced or yet believed in - in the right circumstances her darker shadows and plans would thrive but destructive - never to herself but she will ruin you for anyone else.

PHOBIAS ? : none that she would admit.

BIOGRAPHY / OVERVIEW

vague but detailed enough | tw death, murder, violence mentions

you are named for what they've always hoped for you - radiant brilliant light sparkling amidst the heavens as a paragon of your kind. You will never lead, and you will never be a high lady of the night - you are the dazzling one. in many ways, from the moment you are born, they do a disservice to you. Your parents love you. There was never any mistake in that, but you were not the child born first to them, and try as you might, and you would try incredibly hard; you were only their spare. A decade of so younger than your brother, your beloved and beautiful brother - you were there if he were to fall. If he failed, the line of succession would fall onto you, and as much freedom as you had, there was structure and preparation for a thing all of them were thoroughly sure would never come to you. Still, their brilliant little star, their shining, shimmering darling, had to be prepared for all things to go at all costs.

Maybe you were born broken - the girl meant for greatness already shoved into a box you hadn't made for yourself, slowly tearing at walls, wanting to be more. You always, always wanted more, knowing from before you were even a century old you could never be a sister, daughter, or wife to just anyone and be just that. It was in that realization that you discovered facets of yourself - you found who you were amid the chaos of living for what would be an eternity to some. you love fiercely who deserved love back but waste none of it on pure folly or idiotic love sick passions in yourf youth. train for your own war, knowing while you would fight and could nearly claim to be better than a good portion of your brother's inner circle, even asking to work with Illyrians - the wars you would fight would be of deeper shadows. Let Timur prepare to be a lord of lords, and while younger sisters could thank you for their relaxed freedoms and privileges, you were the one to watch and be in awe of. A master of the game and of politics, knowing nothing you did was left to chance - everything was meant to move things in the right direction.

You loved your father more than anyone - you would dare say more than any of your other siblings despite not knowing secrets stil kept from you. you admit to him once at a game of chess under the stars, having parted from adoring followers at a midsummer party, that it is exhausting trying to impress him. You admit all you desire was to be helpful, irreplaceable, and invaluable - to be appreciated and involved- and to be told you were those things to the man you admired most. He merely sipped his wine with a smile and proceeded to play chess until the sky grew quiet and the sun shooed the moon from sight. you thought a most dangerous thought - Mother, preserve me. I wish he were dead. It was only a thought - one you'd never act on, but did it shock you any less when the next day he was? Did you also not selfishly hope just for a moment, even as you adored your brother, that maybe, in some twist of fate, you would inherit that power? It had been shocking, and you had such a passing thought, but this was never for you.

Timur had his inner court, the court of nightmares and all the things that came with it. You would be the storm, you would be protector and destroyer beyond them knowing as much as he hides it your brother fears and you will not allow him the same fate. You protect your jovial younger sisters and you protect your niece and nephew. How do you protect them, shoving down your own dark ambitions, wrapping yourself in a more profound mystery, and making sure you leave the rest of the world in awe of who you are? Let them stare at you, they will never know all that you are but in accepting this role you hide a piece of yourself that lingers in the dark. Where is the woman who wanted everything - wanted power and might - to have it all because one deserved the world? Do you remember your shadows?

You hide them; you fight those tendencies until you meet an unexpected stranger. Spring. Oh gods, how you loathed pastels and pretty, flowery things until the high lord of the spring court was nearly enough tripping over himself for you. Instantaneously, he could've declared you his ideal and perfection realized - everything he had ever wanted. You try to resist advances to make him earn what he desires - your hand. You see him, though, and you see yourself - you see what could become, and for the first time in centuries, the monster you know you are who craves a world shaped by your own hand, which has for so long been dormant beneath flesh, and bone is reflected in someone else's eyes. Do you love him when you accept his hand - do you love him now? Yes, it would be too simple an answer and a word too easily tossed around, but you've come to find something admirable in flowers, roses especially, and in wild beasts, and it is just the beginning.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

All the things please. Let me help you build up your beautiful characters and create something amazing. Old friends, new friends, enemies, former lovers, illyrian pals, sparring partners, rivals, people she is ready to use, unexpected and cool things. also to echo a want from timur's intro the person who ended the draven siblings father - all the things.

[livsunit2]

THE SWINGING SIXTIES

The Defining Look of the Sixties

Taylah Brewer. (2022). 60S FASHION FOR WOMEN (HOW TO GET THE 1960S STYLE). [Online]. www.thetrendspotter.net. Last Updated: 7 August 2022. Available at: https://www.thetrendspotter.net/60s-fashion-for-women/#google_vignette [Accessed 4 January 2023]

The Supremes

They were not only the most commercially successful female group of the '60s but among the top 5 pop/rock/soul acts of that decade. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard had a mature, glamorous demeanor that appealed equally to teens and adults. Beautiful, musically versatile, and unique, the original Supremes were America's sweethearts.

Steven Ward. (2019). VINTAGE GOLD: AMERICA’S MOST SUCCESSFUL VOCAL GROUP IN THE SUPREMES. [Online]. www.grimygoods.com. Last Updated: 25 February 2019. Available at: https://www.grimygoods.com/2019/02/25/americas-most-successful-vocal-group-in-the-supremes/ [Accessed 3 january 2023].

Edie Sedgwick

The original 'it girl' inspired Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, and was the toast of the New York art scene with her bouffant blonde hair, vintage chandelier earrings and by wearing nothing but a leotard and tights.

The Designers

London's fashion sector existed until the 1960s in the shadow of the renowned Parisian couturiers. Paris served as the centre of global fashion, specialising in tailored clothing for a fantastically wealthy, elite group of women. But all of a sudden, as the youth market expanded, London started to lead the pace.

Thanks to a handful of up-and-coming young designers trained in the couture tradition, Paris has maintained its edge. Fashion firms like Saint Laurent, Cardin, and Courrèges discovered how to appeal to younger customers. They established ready-to-wear shops and concessions in department stores and produced "space age" clothing that was quickly imitated on the high street.

The youth market was enormous in the US, and department stores made millions by importing London fashions. But retailers also recognised the boutique's potential. Local stores that catered to affluent customers by selling unique, cutting-edge designs thrived, notably in New York.

Andrè Courrèges

André Courrèges

The French designer is best known for introducing the revolutionary space look- featuring white boots, goggles and boxy dresses designed in futuristic metallic shades, high shine fabrics such as PVC. His look was a blend of avant-garde geometry with sports classic driven by the youth culture.

Pierre Cardin

Became famous for his brightly colored mini dresses. At the time his garments were "avant-garde" he like other designers at the time was heavily influenced by “Age" movement. His design style is mainly geometric shapes and colours.

Paco Rabanne

The Spanish born designer made a name for himself in the 1960s with his space-age inspired fashions. He used materials such as metal, aluminum, plastic, plexi glass and even fiber optics. He was the first fashion designer to use black models in a catwalk show. As a result, he was almost thrown out of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the governing body of Parisienne fashion.

Givenchy

Responsible for the iconic little black dress that is essential to every woman's wardrobe and dressing the most elegant ladies of the time such as Audrey Hepburn, U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco; Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor and socialite Babe Paley.

Yves Saint Laurent

Shift dresses and pea coats became YSL trademark styles. In 1965, colour blocking made its entrance in the world of fashion, when Yves Saint-Laurent introduced the colour block dress, inspired by the works of the famous painter, Piet Mondria.

Emilio Pucci

Is best known for colorful psychedelic prints, especially for headscarves and dresses. In 1962 the world lost screen siren Marilyn Monroe. It's believed that she was buried in one of his dresses. Monroe was a huge fan of his work which can be clarified by the volume of Pucci garments in her personal collection displayed at Christies in 1999 prior to auction. Although an already established designer, Pucci saw an increase in sales in the sixties which he attributed to Miss Monroe and her popularity.

The Birth of the Hippie

(1960-70s)

Originally used to designate beatniks who had settled in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the word hipple is derived from the hipster. The hippies sought for alternate lifestyles. The majority of hippies cherished independence, nature, closeness, peace, generosity, and spirituality.

Nudity was another expression of freedom that hippies used to set themselves apart from society's norms. They frequently stayed in parks or set up camp in the woods, discarding their belongings.

All throughout, people wore tight-fitting bell-bottom jeans, preferably with flower patches and ankle fringe, T-shirts, or just a skimpy halter top. All of the peasant blouses complemented jeans. Anything handcrafted was considered an accessory, and many of them had peace symbols. Popular shirts and dresses had floral prints that stood for peace and love.

In general, people dressed in a way that they believed represented who they were as individuals and not only to follow the rules of fashion. For instance, both sexes wore their hair longer and it had an unruly, uncared-for appearance. This was in response to the mid-60s girl in the miniskirt who had neat, short hair.

Woodstock 1969

At Woodstock over 250,000 hippies showed up to hear artists like Janis Joplin, The Who, Canned Heat, The Allman Brothers, and County Joe and the Fish. Woodstock was not just a music concert. It was a "profound religious experience."

vintag.es. (2015). 40 Rare and Incredible Color Photographs That Capture Scenes of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in August 1969. [Online]. www.vintag.es. Last Updated: 7 February 2015. Available at: https://www.vintag.es/2015/02/40-rare-and-unseen-color-photos-of.html [Accessed 3 january 2023].

The controversy of drugs

The most popular music of the time was psychedelic rock. Many of concerts were places for lippies to protest, socialise, dance, or take drugs. Drugs like marijuana and LSD were a big art of the hippy/counterculture movement. Using drugs made hippies feel like the were belling from mainstream society.

[dailycharacteroption]

Fist of the Godclaw (Warpriest Archetype)

(art by Emilio Rodriguez C. on Artstation)

 Power. That is the goal of lawful evil. Whether it be the one at the top or a dutiful (or not so dutiful) cog in the machine.

Officially, the many orders of the Hellknight mercenaries do not specifically worship the powers of Hell. They merely build their entire ideology around the idea of Hell’s order as the example of a perfect society, in which all are subservient to the whole, and those at the top reap the rewards that their “hard work” of ruling it all.

It is utterly baffling that even the lawful neutral among them believe that they don’t in fact serve the will of Asmodeus in deed, to say nothing of the rare lawful good ones (they do exist, though mostly in minor orders like the revived Order of the Torrent, whose focus is on disaster prevention and rescue). However, the delusion persists, and it doesn’t end there.

Among the Hellknight orders, there is the Order of the Godclaw, which specifically revolves around the worship of a pantheon of the five major gods of law in the Inner Sea Region: Abadar, Asmodeus, Irori, Iomedae, and Torag, each forming a “finger” of the “Godclaw”, the mighty fist of order. Of course, while the lawful neutral deities among them might be alright with occasionally working with Asmodeus, most worshippers would consider it blasphemous to associate Iomedae and Torag with the Dark Prince except in the most desperate end of need.

We’ve talked about the Godclaw before on the blog with the oracle mystery that shares a name with it, but the general gist is that the order cherry-picks doctrines from all five religions, creating a twisted version of all five as stern, armored rulers and paragons, and it their divine right and duty to stamp out disorder and lead the world to a perfect society by force (which conveniently adheres most closely to Asmodeus’s vision, because of course it does.)

This brings us to today’s subject, the so-called Fists of the Godclaw. These warpriests, whether they wear the armor of standard hellknights or as signifers, act as vicious warrior-priests and leaders in the order’s crusades. They act as mighty destroyers of chaos and disorder, though like all hellknight orders, their interpretation of such foes often leaves ordinary citizens in their line of fire.

There is no denying their power, however, and whether they serve as villain or antihero, they can be quite effective.

 Naturally, these priests must be of a lawful alignment, but they can actually worship any member of the Godclaw pantheon, or the Godclaw itself.

Regardless of who they decide to put their faith in, they must choose the blessings of Law and the special Godclaw blessing, the former granting them the power to harm chaotic foes and summon lawful allies, while the latter grants them the ability to break magical control by instilling an ally with their duty, as well as command their allies to act in unison. The fact that every fist must choose these blessings does raise the question about what exactly is granting them their divine power.

As soldiers against chaos, they also have an ability to sense it nearby, letting them root out hiding dissidents and confirm the morals of their foes.

They also have a knack for channeling their fervor to harm chaotic outsiders, being able to channel energy for that purpose much more efficiently and with much greater output.

The most powerful among them are able to briefly become paragons of law, gaining enhanced durability that only chaos can pierce, becoming totally immune to magic that sways the mind, and being able instill so much order into their actions that any action has perfect average results for a brief period.

Destroyers of chaos no matter the form it takes, if you’re interested in a paragon of law that has a nice slew of anti-chaos abilities, this archetype may be for you. The only super major thing it gets that other warpriests do not is the ability to use only one fervor to channel energy when using alignment channel against chaos, so you can build them however you like, though their locked blessings does mean that they likely favor buffing allies in addition to laying down the law directly, wading into battle rather than standing behind their troops.

 Now, this archetype does allow you to be lawful good, so you can in theory play such a character. Whether such a character believes the that the order can be steered in a more benevolent direction, or more likely, they believe in the warped versions of goodly deities that are roped into it. Either way, such a character might struggle to uphold such beliefs over time given the company they keep.

  The Fist Clan samurai, devoted to complete order, have taken a remote village hostage as they attempt to turn it into a new base of operations. The locals have been “conscripted” to build a fortress for them, and worse still, they have allied themselves with a yuki-onna, promising her to find the one who caused her death in exchange for preying upon interlopers that might disrupt their plans… or villagers trying to escape their yoke.

 The playful and mischievous vanara are exactly the sort of beings that the invading hellknights cannot abide, so they have sent a small army of their number into the mountains to hunt them. Obviously the armored warriors have the disadvantage in the treacherous terrain, but their tenacity, and the profane power of their leader, guarantee that the casualties to the monkey-folk will by high if nothing is done.

 There can be no doubt that the pantheon of the claw is blasphemy for all gods involved save one, the Dark One. This fabricated unity of deities seeks to corrupt the worship of the other deities into that of the master of evil, and the fact that it’s members gain divine power is proof in the eyes of many that it works, especially since true scholars of the divine are in short supply.

[s2willbyers]

the pierrot mike wheeler el público vision

exactly one (1) person asked me to elaborate on mike wheeler/el público vision so i wrote 1k+ words on this and pierrot mike wheeler. lets get into it

tldr the pierrot figure and the play el público are a space in which writer federico garcía lorca confronts internalized homophobia, and i discuss this in relation to michael wheeler, his worldview, and the ways in which will confronts/challenges it

So. pierrot and el público posts were created separately but are very closely linked thematically. i think the best place to start is with federico garcía lorca, a spanish poet and playwright who was born in 1898 and was killed by francoist fascist forces at the start of the spanish civil war in august 1936. his assassination was covered up by the franco regime, his work censored while being paraded around as emblematic of an exoticized ancestral spain for tourists. in the decades since his assassination, research has generally shown his assassination was prompted by his celebrity, his connections to and support for the spanish republic, and his more or less open homosexuality. 

lorca’s homosexuality was something that he struggled with throughout his life (as best we know). he was raised catholic in a conservative area of spain in a conservative period of spanish history — of course he struggled with it. as a young man he struggled with some compulsory heterosexuality, and then when he moved to madrid and away from his family, able to explore this aspect of his identity, he had the misfortune of taking a liking to salvador dalí. dalí is horrible for a number of reasons which i shan’t get into here, but really for our purposes it’s enough to say that he couldn’t return lorca’s affections and likely, through his own homophobia (internalized or otherwise), touched on some sore spots for lorca. added to that was his split with his boytoy emilio aladrén (epic bad bisexual representation), and lorca fell into a pretty bad depression. he needed a fucking break, so he travelled to new york and cuba from 1929-1930. the play el público was started in cuba and finished back home in granada spring and summer of 1930.

from 1924 (when he first met dalí) to 1930, lorca’s work became increasingly modernist and ventured into surrealist territory, which brings us the el publico and the pierrot. the pierrot figure (basically a clown) is a stock character that became popular among modernist artists in the late 19th century and continued into the 20th century as an incarnation of the artist. it was different for every artist, but for lorca the pierrot figure was a doomed, sort of pathetic character doomed to fail in love and perpetually ridiculed and ostracized by society. i think it’s easy to see how this might have connected to his homosexuality — he was a performer in his own right, giving dramatic readings of his plays and poems, but you can imagine how it might have felt to give voice to really personal feelings in a room with people you know are violently homophobic, that make jokes at your expense, that would throw you aside if they ever knew. the audience isn’t really a fear so much as it is a threat, which is when you get el público, a play that’s (sort of) about a play.

its been a while since i’ve read el público, and its one of those avant garde plays that eludes summary, but basically it centers around a character called the director who is trying to put on a production of shakespeare’s romeo and juliet. in between the scenes audience members comment on the play, while the director struggles with his own understanding of love and its implications in the public sphere, interacting with the audience themselves, other people in the theater troupe, the characters, set pieces, and costumes. it’s a hard read and very experimental, but its worth taking the time to sit with it if you are interested!

anyway so where does this put us with mike wheeler? i think fundamentally what unites the pierrot and el público is this fear of the public, the cisheteronormative majority that looks down on you. and with queerness, it is often a process of self discovery, not just a given part of someone’s identity. you’re conducting this process of self-discovery in a public arena of shame and hatred, and it’s constantly influencing your personal life. i mean, if we go back to lorca and dalí, their relationship undoubtedly suffered from homophobia. its fair to say dalí found homosexuality lesser than heterosexuality, he made fun of lorca for it more than once (even after lorca’s death) and regardless of whether he himself was queer or not, he was persistently belittling to lorca in this respect. this is a private relationship that was immensely important to both of them, but ultimately it could not hold out when all dalí ever wanted was for The People (this cishet majority) to admire him. queerness as being constantly under scrutiny, the punchline literally and figuratively, queerness as an invasion of privacy and a forced performance you can never escape.

within el público, within the masks and performances doing everything you can to perform a love that is acceptable and palatable and “correct”, love is difficult and messy and gross, hearts as an organ spilling blood and guts all over the stage, there is also this undercurrent of what it means to be a man, what masculinity is when its divorced from cisheterosexuality. i LOVE that last bit from BELLS, because its so opposite of lorca’s “ode to walt whitman,” a poem that gives masc4masc grindr profile from beginning to end. this play allows physical weakness as manliness, gay love as strength. if the pierrot figure is a weak buffoony guy, he’s also a MAN, regardless of what the rest of the world says.

i think mike admires will for the same exact reason we all do, which is to say mike admires will because he’s unrelentingly honest. when mike asks him if he expects to stay in mikes basement forever, mike is expecting to hear the voice of the majority echoed back at him, that they need to “grow up” and live out a suburban nuclear family fantasy, but will refuses to buy into it. will refuses to give anyone any ground on who he is. will, just by being himself unapologetically, is constantly and persistently challenging the CisHet voice in mikes head that’s telling him to shut up and blend in, that he is a man and so he is not queer, that if he is queer then he is lesser. i think, in el publico, mike is the director, trying his best to construct a heterosexual ideal when no one, not even the characters or the audience are buying into it. i think he’s already feeling it slipping out of his fingers and any time now it’s going to click for everyone and they’ll see him for who he really is.

thats why this bit from the students is so so lovely to me…. here are people in the audience who see the show and instead of hating it they discuss it and come to find refuge in it. this is so easily a conversation between mike and will to me (mike being first student and will being fifth) because you know if mike just asked, if he stopped performing, will would love to carry him. he’d be delighted to. i can imagine mike reading the play up to this point, feeling that half sick sort of feeling you get when you feel like someone can see right through you, that he’s destined to this constant push and pull that he’ll inevitably fail, and THEN he reaches this part and he realizes that if he just fucking TALKS to will, if he allows his performance to end, will is standing right there. always. and that’s not to say it won’t be difficult, that he won’t be ridiculed, that he’ll never feel the effects of homophobia and feel lesser and frightened and ashamed, but that he’s a man, a person, regardless of that, and that being a person is enough. 

i don’t know but as someone who deals with internalized homophobia and transphobia and whose life feels governed by shame sometimes, i love lorca’s work because it gets into the ugly meat of it, the gross stuff you never really want to say out loud and gives you that cathartic release, but there’s always this reminder that you are human regardless, that you are earth to feel bad and to feel good and to feel as much as possible, that your existence justifies itself even if it is rife with pain. it feels like crying into your own shoulder as you hug yourself so tight it hurts, and i think mike needs to learn how to do that.

let’s end with one of my favorite james baldwin quotes and this drawing from lorca: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

btw i didn’t proofread or edit this. sorry :/