#explodeS INTO TEN MILLION BILLION PIECES

[mercenarymage]

"Hugh?"

They had already realised they miss him, earlier, when he is not around. Worry, deeply, like they do for anyone they pledge themself to in one way or another. Sometimes, it's rough prods in the ribs, teasing and affectionate. Sometimes it's yelling at eachother in a drafty old house, affection in worry again. Either way, it is an unspoken 'please don't go', a roundabout 'let's go home'.

Softly, then louder. "Hugh. HUGH!"

They've developed a limp to favor their right leg in the past hours of hell on earth— Between injury, between flight, between being too restless-anxious to actually rest, heart beating an enduring staccato against the cage of their chest. their own vulnerability is barely a thought— It's in this incessant, uncertain searching that they realise that the certainty of who is gone and who remains that Araphen instilled in them was a fucking blessing in comparison.

One more certainty: Hugh is here. Hugh is here. They run to him wiithout a second thought, hurling themself against him, irreverent of whatever angle he's standing at, and knocks their head hard against his shoulder, and stills. They'd scoured every stone of this goddamn shelter and finally found Hugh.

Found lavender-night, violet-bright, russet-stone, snow and roses. Missing from this portrait of home, was still...

Meadowshine. Grass and daffodils, the harvest taking root. Face to the sunshine, to the spring, to...

One last uncertainty, all the more stark for their certainties. Terror yawns wide. Their fingers curl in the fabric of his clothes. Their shoulders begin to shake. Every time they manage to keep the fraying of their nerves together, the tugging and pulling of that worn weave starts to make it come apart. Once-steady breaths stick and hitch and choke. "—I can't find Lugh," They speak, a rush all at once, and voicing the fact is what makes their fear burst apart at the seams.

"I can't find Lugh," He repeats, slower, horrified, "I c-can't find Lugh, I, I can't find him, I,"

The words accelerate, scramble but don't stop. Hugh's shirt is growing damp. Chad's hands are growing clammy. "—Don't know— Know where he, I can't—" A gasp, voice steadily rising, "I can't find, I, Hugh, I can't lose h— I, I can't, I can't I can't I can't—!!"

The impact comes when he least expects it. It's after he's been patched up thanks to the help of Elffin, found time to put at least something in his stomach to keep his body steady. Anything that Hugh had been thinking, had been worrying, had been uncertain about - all of that had stalled to a halt in that moment.

A wishful self awaits a playful jab, a 'how dare it take so long to find you'. Something that shows him the person that proves to Hugh that there's some hope to be had.

The grip on his clothes tighten. This isn't like the last he's seen him upset. At least then, they were able to determine that the person he was worried for was ok. More importantly, the person back then was among them, instead of...

A careful hand is placed on their head. Above all else, the last he wants is for Chad to believe that he needs to be strong now. He doesn't have to prove anything to Hugh. And with everything that's happened, all Hugh wants to do is to give them the chance to breathe, before everything comes crashing down on all of them once more.

"I'm worried about Lugh too." He speaks carefully, a practiced levelness to hide how truthfully scared he is. "But I'll find him. Not everyone was at the monastery, and he's a smart kid. I'll make sure to bring him back home."

Hugh has no idea how to respond if he's questioned about it. About whether or not it's the case, about what happens if he's wrong about his assumptions. Just as much as he could find Lugh's smiling face at the end of this search, there's just a real of a possibility that no smile can be found. Only traces of what was.

But there's no turning back. He's made this promise.

And if anyone has to find that harsh truth first, Hugh wants to be the one to shoulder, above all else.

[exanuz]

ten should explode into 1 million billion little pieces

[siglai]

dearest friends im about to lose it

[hacked-wtsdz]

The earth was covered in shrapnel, and so was her heart. The moon where they crashed was deserted and silent, motionless but for thin streaks of grey smoke still swirling up from the venator’s remains. And in front of it was a graveyard.

Soldiers at war never get the privilege of being buried. They are left where they died, nobly or not, it doesn’t matter. They get eaten by wild animals and birds peck at their mindless eyes, they rot into the dirt, into the water, into the sand, until nothing but the bones remains. They freeze inside of their armour or steam alive, depending on where they died. Some get burned by kind natives, some are left naked by thieves, some are forgotten forever. And almost none get to know the comfort of the endless sleep under the gentle weight of the earth. It doesn’t cradle them, it doesn’t protect them, instead, it eats them, slowly but persistently.

Ahsoka had always thought that this was unfair. That all of her good friends who died not by being exploded into a billion tiny bits deserved a quiet end. Jedi were almost always cremated, for Jedi lives and legacy was valued. Despite them being ten thousand, they were still rare, compared to the clones, whose numbers counted millions upon millions. Clones weren’t valued, not by most, and their brave sacrifice wasn’t even deemed necessary to appreciate by the Republic. But while senators made snarky remarks about these men being created for the sole purpose of dying, each and every death tore a piece out of every padawan’s heart. When your friend dies, you don’t care much if he’s a Jedi, a clone or a senator. At that moment, when life leaves his body, when with his last whisper he lets out a hopeless “I’m sorry,” nothing like that even races through your agony-embraced mind.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry

The senators’ words make perfect sense, you think afterwards. But in the midst of battle, during those short seconds when you actually get to see your friend off, and not just feel his breathless body fall at your feet, they seem absurd.

It doesn’t matter now. The senators turned out to be more right than they could ever have imagined. In the end, the clones die. Not nobly, not bravely, not even sanely. They just die. And the Jedi die with them.

This time, she decided, she’d give her friends what she couldn’t to the others. This time the senators can be screwed, for they will never be here. They never have been. They aren’t here now.

You find every single body. Every single broken, dead body with your face on their dirty helms. You haven’t even noticed it while they were trying to kill you. You do now. You know that the memory of your own face hunting you down, lying dead and beaten and betrayed at your feet, will haunt you forever.

You bury every single clone. You take each helm off and gaze shortly into the identical faces. There is nothing but numbness on them, and nothing but bloody bruises in your heart. It’s sliced to pieces. It bleeds all the blood these troopers don’t.

You put all the helms above every grave. You dig into the cold dead earth, trying to bury your grief with your friends, but it won’t go. The grief is to stay forever, as well as loss.

You’re suddenly happy for all the clones who died before this day. At least they thought they died for a noble cause. At least they could think of something while dying.

Then, you say goodbye.

Goodbye to your past

Goodbye to happiness

Goodbye to freedom

Goodbye to the clones, to the Jedi, to war, to victory, to love and to friendship

Goodbye to your war-scarred childhood

You leave a part of yourself with the clones too. You leave them your lightsabers. You don’t want them anyway, and with them a part of you shall also know their peace.

[razieltwelve]

Courting Death (Final Effect)

The Glorious Claw of Ten Thousand Cuts (GCoTTC) jabbed one claw at Princess Victoria. “You dare challenge my Claw Intent? Hah! You are courting death!”

The Fourth Princess of the Arendelle Empire jabbed one finger back at the uplifted cat. “You dare challenge a princess of the Empire? Hah! You are the one courting death!”

The cat’s eyes narrowed. “Foolish princess! Face the Rain of a Thousand Claws!”

There was a sound like a hurricane, and the space where the princess had been exploded into nightmarish storm of Aura blades. The literal rain of cutting power would have reduced a heavily armoured tank to little more than strips of mangled metal, if even that much remained. Even a Synthetic would have been forced to dodge, lest they be shredded into so much chaff.

But Victoria was not there, and even the sharpest blade was useless if it could not strike the opponent!’

The princess reappeared next to GCoTTC and lashed out with one foot, a strike that would have levelled a building... only for her foot to meet a wall of cutting power. Only the Aura around the limb prevented it from being severed completely, but even her own enormous reserves could not protect her completely.

Yet Victoria possessed Ragnarok, and shredded flesh was nothing to her. Her foot continued onward, and GCoTTC leapt, flipping in mid-air to avoid the strike.

“A worthy strike! But useless! Behold, the River of One Million Claws!”

Instead of a rain of cutting power, what slammed into Victoria was a river of severing force. It washed over her, reducing her surroundings to mere strips of monomolecular material before those two were shredded even further, atomising completely.

But Victoria’s Semblance swirled, and the river of death was met head on by a shield of material designed to withstand and spread concentrated spikes of force across a multi-dimensional axis, dissipating the deadly might of the attack into thin air.

GCoTTC landed a short distance away. “Oh? That’s new. It would seem you’ve been practicing, princess. However... you are no match for my fighting spirit!”

The raging Aura around the cat took solid form, a massive, glowing tiger composed of pure slicing and dicing energy. The ground at his feet was destroyed, and even the air was cut to pieces. The tiger mimicked his movements and grew until it loomed over the battlefield, ten stories tall.

“Behold the technique passed down from the founder of my line! The technique that Claw used to win the Battle of Arcturus IX! Witness... the Spirit of Ten Billion Claws... the Raging Tiger of Death!”

Victoria tilted her head to one side. “Okay, there is no way that he named his technique that.”

GCoTTC huffed. “You dare question the name of my technique? Have at you -”

“Victoria,” Artemisia drawled, stepping between the two combatants. “It’s dinner. We’ve been calling you for the last ten minutes.”

“But... but... we were just about to face each other in a climactic battle of protagonists!” Victoria cried.

Artemisia tilted her head to one side. “Protagonists?”

GCoTTC released his technique, allowing it to dissipate. “She clearly lacks genre awareness.”

Victoria sighed. “Yeah. I guess I should go eat dinner...” She looked over to where her plush toy and hedgehog were watching. “I was totally winning, right?”

“Winning?” GCoTTC scoffed. “You were seconds from death.”

“Yeah, how about now. I was seconds from exploding your technique and punting you into next week.”

“Hah! I, GCoTTC, have never been punted!”

“Anyway,” Artemisia said. “Dinner. Now.” She nodded at GCoTT. “You’re welcome to join us too.”

“It is an honour to dine with the Imperial Family.” The cat lifted one claw high into the air. “I swear, if there is food that needs to be cut, it shall be my claws that do it! For no knife can match the keenest of my Claw Intent!”

X     X     X

Author’s Notes

GCoTTC is a descendant of the original Claw, and he is a member of the Imperial Guard. He has a kind of... Xianxia attitude to things although he’s definitely a benevolent master, rather than a malevolent one. The original Claw didn’t talk like this, but one of his descendants went on an epic journey of self-discovery and heroism... and GCoTT is a descendant of that cat, so he picked up the habits.

Victoria thinks he’s the greatest thing ever, and they’re close friends.

GCoTTC has received dozens of awards for infiltration work. He is supremely good at stealth, so he is often asked to sneak into place and wipe out bad guys. He usually starts spouting his ‘courting death’ talk while doing so, once it’s become clear that the bad guys have got nowhere to go.

[gabriel4sam]

For your celebration of "And then he wakes up...", could you write something on either Jangobi + tooka, or a Ventrobi timeloop, please?

Under the cut, a small Obi-Wan/Asajj Ventress fic, with time travel fix-it!

Asajj is busy inside the motors of her ship when it happens. The little beast roars like no other and can outlast the most determined other bounty hunter, or idiotic imperial, but fickle is a too nice word for it. Half of her money is spent on pieces.

So, here she is, oil on her arms and a swear on her lips when something explodes in the Force. It’s so ferocious and intense that she bashes her head on metal so hard she probably gives herself a concussion, then only has the time to reach for the bucket full of oil she just used to bath a recalcitrant butterfly valve and she’s violently ill.

She reaches into the Force with wobbly intent and is meet with weeping and distress. Something monstrous just happened.

Once before, once only, Asajj sensed such lament, just after Order 66, when the Force mourned Its children. Only, there are no more Jedi to genocide, the Inquisitors, Vader and bounty hunters took care of it. But not Asajj, never Asajj, those bounties, she never took, even if she refused to examine the reason why. But today, the Force had been shaken in a very similar way. What sort of horrors could have been so terrible to be felt this way?

The answer is on the Holonet only minutes after. The Empire really wants people to know about its new toy, this planet killer born of a nightmare.

A whole world. Alderaan is no more, Alderaan of the shining culture, of the precious beauty, Alderaan with its poetry, with its literature, its theatre and songs and food, with its ideas and its history. Alderaan, the world who fought so hard, always, for the disenfranchised, for the slaves, for the forgotten. Alderaan, who always opened its doors to refugee and voted following its heart in the Senate, its Senators the last bastions of resistance in a sea of sycophants.

Alderaan and its millions of sentients, and its billions of life force.

Asajj feels very old and very tired. If she was the sort of self-righteous idiot prone to this sort of gesture, she would probably search and join for the Rebel Alliance on the spot, but she’s smarter than that.

That night, she still buys herself a very, very nice vintage, quite decided to drink herself into stupor. Sometimes, that’s the only thing to do, if not done too often. She’s in that dangerous state for a Force User, not passed out but drunk enough her control on her powers is not the same, her shields not so tights, when she feels the Light flares. She reaches out, more reflex than decision.

“Ventress!” Someone calls in the void, surprised to feel someone reaching out, and the voice brings back memories of a taunting smile and grey eye and then it’s snuffed out.

Asajj sits up, terribly sober. Wherever he was, Obi-Wan Kenobi just died. In any other time, she wouldn’t have feel it, but tonight, drunk and tired, and with so little Force sensitive beings left. She never liked the guy but to her surprise, she feels a wave of grief. She almost reaches for the bottle again, but decides against it. This night, her dreams are plagued by memories and she sleeps so poorly that the next morning, she doesn’t question it when the ship’s hyper drive acts out again. Exasperated, she opens the compartment, searches for the reason of the problem….By the Force, how much did the resonance in the Force of Alderaan’s blowing up affect her? She would have sworn she had done a better job than that, it’s exactly like…. She needs a holiday. Something safe and quiet and far, very far away from the Empire blowing up entire worlds and killing old enemies who were of the last people in the whole galaxy who knew, really knew Asajj. Because it was certainly the Empire: Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn’t exactly the style to die from anything else than a full legion, or at least a full Sith. She’s there in her memories, thinking of that time on Drall when she had tried to cut him in two with an ancient Sith Weapon, and that time on Selonia when Kenobi had foiled her whole plan by, she was quite sure of it, seducing the twin ambassadors… Strangely; all those occasions who had infuriated her at the time are now bringing a half-smile on her pale lips. He had been a ferocious adversary, but a fun one. And it would be a lie to pretend, but only now, now that he was dead, that she had never imagined what sort of adversary he would have made on another battlefield, one of linen and pillows. She’s there, working on the butterfly valve and thinking of twinkling grey eyes, when the Force explodes in pain. Asajj bashes her head on metal, again.

What the…. This time, she doesn’t throw up, breathing careful, sending her pain into the Force.

Not even ten minutes after, the fate of Alderaan is on the holonet again.

Asajj needs to sit down. Didn’t she live that already? A vision, perhaps? No, her visions are rare, fragmented, honestly not very useful, her talents in the Force residing elsewhere. Quickly, she puts her motor in order and starts her ship.

Asajj Ventress is a lot of things but indecisive is not one of them. Run away? Where? If it’s the will of the Force, running away in the Unknown regions themselves would be useless. The Force can’t be outrun and if Its paths can be mysterious, they are stubborn.

Direction Alderaan, or whatever is left of it. Here, perhaps she will find answers. She’s just leaving hyperspace when she feels the Light flares up, once again. Much more closely, she can almost taste the last breath of Kenobi, feel the lightsaber and something…something strange and powerful and like a note in the music of the universe she never heard before.

Even dying, Kenobi can’t do it simply, the overachiever flirt that he is.

This time, it isn’t sleep which makes Asajj leaves this day. This time, it’s the Empire which destroy her little ship, because she had no chance against a Star Destroyer.

The next day, Asajj doesn’t bash her head on metal hull. That day, her ship is already in the system when the Death Star arrives and here she waits, almost in ambush except she has no intention to reveal her presence, all the powers on her ship on shielding it, and too small fry to interest them , ready to collect all information she can.

She sees the destruction of Alderaan in direct and it’s even more terrible on her nerves like that, the Force howling.

And then…then, she feels Kenobi, in a garbage ship. Kneeling on her bunk, she shields herself and she follows him, letting the all she can collect itself in her mind, the useful and the useless, letting it settle, like organic matter in a swamp. When he dies, again, she reaches for him, letting her presence be a last comfort to his light.

Seven days, Asajj does nothing more than arrive before the Death Star, shudder in deep horror for Alderaan and let the fate of Kenobi, every step he takes on that damn space station, enlighten her about the forces in presence.

Before, when she was the Count’s apprentice, she never would have found the patience. She would have raged and yelled and stormed, and probably died even before Kenobi! Now, she knows better. Sometimes, she would swear she can see, at the corner of her vision, her former Master, the first one, the dead one, the Jedi, almost there, almost real, but when she turns, it’s always empty. But she feels it, as she kneels for the entire day, deep in meditation, learning that horrible space station, feeling the lives on board, she feels her dead Master, right there, and he’s so proud a younger Asajj would cry.

So, Asajj learns and Asajj plans, and Asajj thinks to run, but never does. Whatever the Force wants of her, it’s important, too important. Every morning, she jumps from her bunk and goes to repair her motor; to arrive on in the Alderaan system first. She never even checks the date. Now that the Force had put things in motion, It wouldn’t stupidly let time pass normally for Asajj.

Seven days, she waits. She learns. She meditates. Seven days, she reaches for a dying man, and feels him reaching out, sending him comfort. She never need to send peace. Obi-Wan Kenobi dies in peace, like only a Jedi could.

The eighth day, she strikes.

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

When Obi-Wan, Luke, and their pilots arrive on Alderaan, the whole planet is quite busy panicking, in the very polite way they have about it on this world. The old Jedi find Bail and Breha waiting for him the moment he put foot on their soil, and a monstrous blasphemy in the Force high in their sky.

“It arrived hours before you,” the Vice-Roy explains, “and no tentative of contact of our part has been successful. We have been prepping evacuation, but how be sure that any ship leaving the planet won’t be attacked? And there will never be enough ships” At this moment, a technician calls for them and at they move to the holotransmetter, Bail adds quietly, just for Obi-Wan “And we lost contact with Leia’s ship almost three days ago.”

Obi-Wan’s hand claps on his old friend’ shoulder: “She’s alive,” he swears, “I would have felt it in the Force.”

They meet around the holotransmitter and that’s the moment the whole galaxy flickers, like a flame hesitating before going out and continuing….and then it changes and takes a better path. If not an easier one, perhaps simply one with less death. And that’s how it starts, with two scoundrels, one of them quite hairy, one Jedi, two royals and a moisture farmer powerful in the Force, congregating around a blue image of a former Sith, who looks exhausted and a little manic.

“They’re quite busy with me,” she says, “And I have made as much damages to important electronical stuff as I could, so it’s time to board this horror while they’re busy trying to open the command control room to kill me”.

“Ventress?” Obi-Wan asks, after a second of silence.

“Yeah, yeah, Ventress. Don’t tell me I have changed so much, I would be crossed with you, I mean, have you seen yourself? If I hadn’t feel you in the Force, I would never have recognized you. Why have you aged forty years in twenty?”

“Is this a dead body?” Breha interrupted, her gaze fixated on something at Ventress’s feet.

“I have decapitated a Grand Moff,” Ventress admitted, like she was saying space was cold and water wet, “And honestly, someone should have done it long ago.” Her attention was taken by something outside the view of the holotransmitter. “I barricaded myself into Tarkin’s central command, I think it was made in case the space station was boarded by hostiles. But Vader is there, so, you have thirty minutes to help, or it will have all been for nothing, for me and for the young princess in the cells.”

“We’re losing communication,” the Alderaani technician intervened, “someone in the space station understood she was talking to us.”

“I will guide y-“ Ventress had the time to say, then nothing more.

Chewbacca had just the time to extend his arm to stop Obi-Wan from falling.

“Oh.” The Jedi simply said, “Oh. That’s what she meant.”

For the old man, the sensation of Ventress reaching out in the Force was like something long forgotten. Like they had done that already, before, at their most dire times. He was pretty sure he had never reached out into the Force to her, but in that moment…in that moment, it was like coming home, their two Force presences responding to each other, and here, in his mind, Ventress knew just how take the abomination in the sky with minimal blood loss, like she had studied the plans of the Death Star quite extensively, like she understood the thing in and out, and knew what a small determined commando could do, now that she had temporarily blinded the Death Star.  

The rest was quite a busy day. The rest, as Han Solo would say later, was history and he would always be proud to have been there, to the first Death Star battle, when the Alderaan security forces had crept into the Death Star, using the mess Ventress had made. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t have been, if Chewie hadn’t insisted. But he saw history, that day, he saw what a small, determined group of people could do, he saw the impossible fight between Vader, Kenobi and Ventress, and the fall of a giant in the Force.

At the end of the day, Alderaan had won a moon, who would stay there, manned by the Rebel Alliance, as a warning to Star Destroyers who would come knocking. They would never use it on a planet, of course, but the Empire would never win it back and the Rebel Alliance had a new base.

At the end of the day, Asajj Ventress and Obi-Wan Kenobi would try to unravel their Force presences, with no success. “I suppose I could do worse than you,” Asajj would admit, when their third try had sent them directly to bed, because there was a limit of the closeness in the Force two Force sensistives could feel before things started to get physical.

At the end of the day, once all was done, which meant it was closer to the dawn of the next day, Asajj would finally meet the Princess, the one who had started everything, and that she had only peripherally felt in the Force before. She would understand, then, the feeling of her dead Jedi Master in the Force, this sort of giddy joy. “Well met, Padawan”, were the first words of Asajj to the young woman.

[nalgenewhore]

A rogue storm had her presumed dead and stranded on the red planet. Left on her own, astronaut Aelin Galathynius has four years to make it to the next drop-site, some two thousand miles. Armed with her smarts and dwindling supplies, Aelin attempts to survive on an inhospitable planet, when the nearest help is only millions of miles away.

masterlist - ao3 - last chapter - next chapter 

+*+*+*+*+*+*

The young man – boy, really – was sleeping on the love seat in his office, snoring ever so slightly.

Vaughan Kuāutli popped his head in the open door and rapped his knuckles against the doorframe, “Luca?” The sleeping boy simply snored and smacked his lips together. Vaughan sighed and said louder, “Luca, wake up. RPL needs the probe courses.”

Luca sprang up, his mop of unruly hair facing every which way. “Oh, hey, Vaughan.” He stumbled to his feet, yawning as he made his way to his desk and computer, where graphics of the course projection were spinning around. He grabbed an opened can of some energy drink and chugged the rest, crushing the can in his hand and tossing it into the wastebasket. He missed.

Vaughan didn’t blink an eye, knowing this was normal behaviour for the son of Malakai Scéalaí. Despite the fact that he was TNSB legacy, Luca had worked harder than anyone he knew to get here, where he held the position of astrodynamicist. The boy was near genius status. “I know we’re coming at this from the wrong way, but we can’t commit to launch dates with these many unknowns.”

Luca waved his hand as he sat down in his wheeled chair, nearly missing it. Why did I let him get a wheeled chair, Vaughan thought. There’s so many things that could go wrong. “It’s fine. All twenty-three models will take four-hundred and four days to reach Farnor. They only slightly vary in thrust duration and fuel requirement is almost identical.”

His boss entered the messy room. Messy might have been an understatement. Vaughan thought that ‘biohazard’ was fitting for Luca’s office/bedroom - he ended up spending the night here more often than not. “Four-hundred and four days. Not a good launch window, huh?” His eyes roved over the calculations.

Luca snorted, “It’s terrible. Like, it’d almost be easier to…” his chestnut-brown eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up behind his floppy fringe.

“Almost easier to what?”

Luca got to his feet slowly, looking as though he’d seen a ghost, “I need more RedBull. And coffee.” Honestly, it was a miracle Luca hadn’t dropped dead from cardiac arrest yet.

“Almost easier to what?” Luca was too lost in his head and scrambled for the door, pushing Vaughan out of the way. Vaughan stared after him, “You do remember that I’m your boss, right?”

The only indication Luca gave that he heard him was a thumbs-up over his head and then he disappeared around the corner.

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“Am I reading this right, five-hundred million?”

Sartaq nodded, looking like he was about to drop dead right on the carpeted floor of his office. “Yes, sir, that’s correct.”

Weylan’s brows rose, the only indication of his shock and he turned his gaze from the screen to the table in front of him, Manon and Asterin somber on the other side. “And now for the expensive question, where’s your team at?”

“…we’re behind.” Sartaq said, sounded defeated. “If I had fifteen more days, I could get it done.”

“All right. Say I can get you fifteen days, then… what? It’s thirteen to mount the probe?”

The RPL director tilted his head to the side a few times, “It actually only takes three days to mount the probe. I can get that down to two and the other ten are for inspections.”

Weylan drummed his fingers on his briefing folder, contemplating something. “How often do those tests present a problem?”

Everyone froze and Manon asked, her voice almost aghast, “Are you saying we don’t do the inspections?”

“Right now, I’m asking how often they present a problem. Sartaq?”

The exhausted man looked nervous and almost as if he resented saying, “One in twenty, but that’s still grounds for countdown halt. Weylan, we can’t take that chance.”

“If you have a safer way, by all means, tell me. Anybody?” Nobody answered him and he nodded, “Right then. Manon, tell Dr. Towers to stretch Aelin’s rations four more days. She won’t like it, but it’ll get us to fifteen. Cancel the inspections.”

“Sir-“

“It’s on me, Gavriel. Sartaq, you have your two weeks. Get it done.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Aelin was standing by the microwave, watching her plate of food spin around and around until the machine beeped and she hastily grabbed the plate, hissing at the heat as she put it down on the counter. Meatloaf and potatoes. Again.

Grabbing her knife and fork, Aelin cut up the meatloaf, “So. I have to hold out here until the probe arrives with more food. This is what minimal calorie count looks like,” pointing to the meager plate, “standard issue ration.”

She snorted a laugh, “Usually, it’s three of these every day and now… one every three days.” The meatloaf was cut into thirds and she transported two of the pieces onto a separate plate. “This is today’s allotment. Which I get to supplement with potatoes. Which I am beginning to abhor, happy, TNSB? I watched my language. Anyways, I am beginning to loathe these things with the passion of seven billion million burning suns. I’ve been told to do this,” she cut her potato in half and put one of them on the plate with the meatloaf. “You know, I used to like Yrene Towers. Point is, ‘stretch the rations four more days’ is a real tit punch.”

She walked over to the desk, where there lay two white pills. Aelin sat down and crushed the pills with her knife. She looked to the computer camera, her eyes conveying just how done she was, “I ran out of ketchup three days ago.” Moving the crushed powder into a neat circle, she said, “So I’m dipping my potato in Vicodin and no one can stop me.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

The energy in Mission Control was electric as they all waited for Manon’s signal. She slipped on her headset, “Mission Control, this is Flight Director Blackbeak. Begin launch status check.” This is where Manon was in her element and it was obvious to everyone around her.

“Roger that, Flight Director,” the Launch Control director answered. “Launch Control test is complete and we are ready.”

“This is Flight. We are a go for launch.”

The timer controller started its countdown, the robotic voice booming through Mission Control. “T-minus 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2��1…”

Asterin paced behind Manon’s seat, praying as liftoff was announced and the rocket was launched from the holding hull.

The flight was clean and when Manon let go of a held-in breath, the room relaxed, all smiles and happy faces as the rocket flew high. But something changed.

“Flight, this is Guidance Control, we’re getting large shimmy in the tail.”

“No…” she whispered, shaking her head as the rocket began losing guidance and telemetry, absolutely powerless as it exploded right before their eyes.

The probe was gone and Weylan Darrow had just signed Aelin’s death certificate. 

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Kashin and Hasar Dalavtchai were in her office in Antica, watching the head of TNSB do an interview. The woman spat to her brother, “They forced our brother to skip inspections and now their astronaut is going to die.”

“Perhaps,” Kashin replied, sliding a document her way, “The Rukhin’s booster. We ran the numbers and it has enough fuel for a Farnor injection orbit.”

Hasar, the director of the Southern Continent National Space Administration, looked over the document thoughtfully, flipping through the pages, “And they haven’t approached us, why?”

“They don’t know. Father kept the booster technology classified.” It was one of the reasons Sartaq had left. He believed that all of their knowledge should be public access.

“Hm.” Hasar narrowed her eyes and stood up, walking to her office’s large floor-to-ceiling windows. “If we do nothing… the world will never know we could have helped.”

“Yes.” Kashin hid his satisfied grin. He knew what Hasar was thinking and agreed with her wholeheartedly. “If we give them the booster, we will be effectively cancelling The Rukhin.”

Hasar turned to him, her mind already made up. She was tired of her father’s secrecy. “We keep it between SCNSA and TNSB. An exchange between scientists…”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“Yes, we understand.” Manon watched Weylan where he was pacing on the phone, with whom she didn’t know. “Yes. Yes… thank you.”

He hung up the phone, relief flooding his face. Manon sat up from where she had been slouching in his office chair. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“Ok, Luca, you need to listen to me,” Vaughan said, serious as he rested his hands on the boy’s shoulders, trying to make him stop shaking. Mala save him, how much caffeine had he ingested? “These people run TNSB, do you understand? You need to be professional. They will not be as easy on you as I am, they don’t understand your thought pattern. And if they ask you to explain, do not, do not, let them know you think they’re stupid, alright?”

Luca nodded, trying to contain his bouncing. “I know, I know. I had some coffee, so I think I’m good to speak to the normies, boss man.” 

Vaughan just shook his head and whispered a prayer of protection as he herded the boy into the conference room, where Weylan Darrow, Asterin and Manon Blackbeak, and Gavriel Aryeh were.

Luca tripped over the threshold, sending his papers flying. Vaughan just hung his head and sat down beside Gavriel, “I’d like to introduce Luca Scéalaí, astrodynamicist.”

To his credit, Luca didn’t piss himself as Manon and Asterin helped him gather his papers, their sharp sharp nails shining. Gavriel rose a brow, “Scéalaí?”

“Um, yeah, my dad’s Malakai? He did some rover thing a while ago.” Luca shrugged, as if it was no big deal of one his fathers had built the first craft ever to reach Farnor. With a deep breath, he put a thick folder on the table. “This is it.”

“And what would that be, Luca?” Asterin questioned him, exchanging an amused glance with Manon. To Vaughan, it looked like two predators who found their next meal to be adorable.

“Oh, yeah, duh,” Luca slapped his forehead. “I can get The Lani back to Farnor by day five-sixty-one.”

That had everyone in the room choking and shooting up. “What,” Manon breathed, eyes wide. “How?”

Luca looked around the room, spying a half-empty mug of coffee which happened to be Gavriel’s. He snatched it up and chugged the contents, to the half-horrified audience. “Ok, let’s pretend that this is The Lani and you…” he pointed at Weylan, moving his finger to indicate the man to his feet, “sorry, what’s your name?”

“Weylan. I’m the director of TNSB.”

“Oh, deadass? That’s sick, man, but anyways, you’re Farnor and you,” he pointed at Asterin who eagerly stood, relishing the chaotic way that the meeting was going, “you’re Earth. So, right now The Lani is beginning the month-long de-acceleration to enter into Earth’s orbit, yeah?” He walked the mug towards Asterin, who was shaking with her attempts to control her laughter as he made a rocket noise with his mouth and slowed with every step. Vaughan closed his eyes and groaned quietly. “But what I’m proposing…,” Luca walked faster to Asterin. He froze, looking around for something. Without a care, Luca jogged back to Weylan and plucked a pen out of his breast pocket, hurrying back to Asterin. “This is The Rukhin, alright?”

He bopped the pen off her head, causing Manon to cackle, and dumped it in the mug, “We grab whatever provisions we need and now we’re speeding up, like, nyoom, and we fly around Earth and kinda, I guess, slingshot back to Farnor.” He puttered back to Weylan, making more rocket noises.

Luca hovered the mug over Weylan’s head, “But now we’re going too fast to slow down so we do a flyby.”

“How?”

Vaughan spoke up, “By using The Crone’s FAV.”

Luca snapped his fingers and pointed at his boss, “Yes, that. I did the math. It checks out.”

“Luca?”

“Yeah?” He turned to face Weylan.

“Get out.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea, I need some coffee anyway,” Luca mumbled, leaving his things scattered about the room. “Deuces, dudes and dudettes.” 

Weylan turned to Gavriel and Vaughan. “So is he right?”

“Yes, he is,” Vaughan replied. “His math is correct; the boy is a genius. Crazy, space-cadet, can barely take care of himself, but a genius.”

“And we need to use The Rukhin?”

“Yes, sir.”

Asterin frowned, “Am I missing something?”

Manon nodded, “There’s only one booster. And both plans require it.”

“What about The Lani crew? Luca’s proposal adds…” she did the math in her head, “five-hundred and thirty-three days to their mission.”

“They wouldn’t hesitate,” Manon said, standing up and seething, because she knew what Weylan was leaning towards. “Not for a second. That’s why you made this meeting a secret, isn’t it?” she accused him, meeting his eyes until he looked away. “You want us to decide.”

Weylan nodded.

“You gods-damned coward. It should be Commander Salvaterre’s decision and you know it.”

“It’s a matter of life and death, Manon.”

“He’s the Mission Leader, life and death matters are his decisions.”

Gavriel interrupted the fight before it could escalate, “Can The Lani even do that?”

“Yes,” Vaughan said, “it was built to do all the Three-Faced Goddess missions, so it’s not even two-thirds through it’s lifespan.”

“But if something went wrong, we’d lose the crew.” Asterin furrowed her brow, fighting between siding with Manon, who she agreed with, or with Weylan, who’s option was safer. “So… what? We either have a high chance of killing one person or a low chance of killing six? How do we make that decision?”

“We don’t. Weylan does.”

All eyes turned to him and they waited for what seemed like an eternity before, “We still have the chance to bring home five astronauts. Safe and sound.”

“Let them make that decision,” spat Manon, murder in her eyes. Weylan was grateful for the table separating them, not that it would be a hindrance to her if she tried anything.

“Manon. We’re going with option one.”

She made a disgusted sound and looked around the room. No one dared to meet her eye, not even Asterin. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Aelin trudged up the hill to the solar panels, getting ready to scrub them clean. Again.

As she crested the small incline, she paused. No. She couldn’t do it anymore. 

Without another thought, she sat down, staring at the crimson sun.

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Nox was sitting before his computer, tracking Aelin’s course. Gavriel was next to him and wondered aloud, “Where is she going?” She would walk for three-hundred metres in one way, pause for ten minutes and repeat the process in another direction. “RPL didn’t ask her to do this, what is it?”

“I don’t know, oh… she’s at the rover, incoming data dump… what is this, Chem analysis, batch 1A-17A?”

Realization dawned on Gavriel and admiration coursed through him. “She’s finishing the mission.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“We evac’d on day eighteen of thirty-one, which means we still have thirteen days of labs to do.” Aelin crushed up a rock sample, “Commander Salvaterre, your work’s in good hands. Whitethorn… um… I really have no understanding of chemolithotrophic detection. Did I say that right? Anyway, I’m doing my best. Faliq, I know you hate it when I touch the ChemCam but guess what? You left me on a desolate planet, you’re not allowed to get mad at me. Lochan,” she carefully tapped the fine powder into a container and screwed the lid on tightly, labeling it with a black marker, “I got a new cataloguing system that you’ll really like. As for Marama’s jobs… there are none. Really, I don’t know why we even brought you along.”

Aelin sighed through her nose, “I know keeping everything organized and ordered isn’t my strong suit but I want it to all make sense for later. Maybe you can teach it in a class, the Galathynius syllabus. ‘How to make water out of rocket fuel’ or ‘how to grow plants on a planet with no living organisms’, I don’t know, but be creative with it, please. I refuse to have my name attached to some boring class.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Elide was sitting in her bunk, muttering curses at her computer when it wouldn’t let her load the attachment’s from Lysandra’s email. Eventually, she gave up and called Nesryn over the radio, “Nessie darling, can I bother you?”

“Yep, what is it?”

“There’s this email from Lys, subject line: Your Bachelorette Party. I can’t open the attachments, it’s all this code.”

“Ok, well, bring it to me and I’ll see what I can do. I’m in the rec room.”

“Copy that, on my way.”

It only took a few minutes for Elide to float her way to Nesryn. She may have been distracted by her fiancé and his lips for a short while, but that was a moot point as she slid down the ladder and walked to where Nesryn was stretching on the floor. “Hey.”

Nesryn reached out for the laptop, looking like a young child on Yulemas morning, “Gimme gimme.” She lived to solve computer problems. Elide chuckled and sat down on the floor next to her friend as she worked. “Huh. These aren’t JPGs. It looks like plain TSCII files. Math equations, does this make any sense to you?” She angled the computer screen to Elide.

“’Luca Scéalaí Maneuver.’ Yeah, it’s a course maneuver for The Lani…” As the navigator for the mission, Elide tried to make sense of the equations, one phrase sticking out to her. “Day five-sixty-one. Oh, my gods. Nes, bless you, I could kiss you right now!” 

Without another word, Elide jumped up and hurried to the radio, her voice blasted through every speaker on the ship, “This is Lochan, emergency meeting in the rec room, ASAP.”

Nesryn stood up, bewildered, “E, what is it?”

“Just wait, I’ll explain everything.”

Soon after, the boys had made their way to the worktable and Elide told them everything.

They sat in shock. Fenrys was the first to speak, “Would this really work?”

Elide nodded, “Yeah, I ran the numbers. It checks out.” Respect flooded her eyes, an excited gleam that Lorcan hadn’t seen in months. “It’s a brilliant course.”

“So why all the cloak and dagger,” Rowan asked, the ink on his face scrunching as he wrinkled his brow.

“TNSB rejected the idea. They want to put a big risk on Ae as opposed to a small risk on us,” Lorcan spat, indignation in his tone, “whoever snuck it into E’s email obviously disagrees.”

“So, we’re talking about going against TNSB’s orders?”

“Uh-huh. If we do the maneuver, they’ll have to send a provisional probe. We’d be forcing their hand.”

“Are we gonna do it?” Nesryn asked, a determined tilt to her chin.

Lorcan sighed and spread his hands, “Look, if it were up to me, we’d already be on our way.”

Fenrys’ eyes narrowed in confusion, “I’m confused. You’re Mission Leader, isn’t it your decision?”

“Not this time,” Elide answered for Lorcan. “TNSB expressly rejected the plan.”

“We’re talking about mutiny,” Lorcan said and that was not a word any of them used lightly. “We either all do this together, or not at all. Before you answer,” he leaned forward, looking everyone in the eye, “think of the consequences. If we mess up the supply, we die. If we mess up the gravity assist, we die. Even if we do everything perfectly, we still had five hundred and thirty-three days to our mission. Five hundred and thirty-three days without seeing our families. Five hundred and thirty-three days of unplanned space travel.”

“Sign me up.”

Everyone let loose a dry chuckle and Lorcan turned to Fenrys, “Slow down there, pup. You and me? We’re military. Chances are, we get down there and they’ll court marshal us.” Fenrys made a face. “As for the rest of you, I can guarantee, they’ll never let you back up here again.”

Now Rowan spoke up, “Say we say yes. How does this work?”

Everyone turned to Elide and she shrugged, “It’s really not that hard. I plot the course and execute it. No biggie.” A sly grin grew on her round lips. “Nes?”

“Remote override. But Mission Control can remotely pilot the ship.”

“You can’t disable it?”

“No, I can. I’d have to disable remote override on each control, which is tricky – I’d have to jump over a lot of code-“

“Just so everyone knows, Faliq’s hacker handle was ‘Mrs. Robot’ all through high school,” Elide cut in, cackling as Nesryn shot her a dirty look and then continued, daring anyone else to laugh.

“Lochan is a liar. And should keep our conversations private.” She paused. “I can do it.”

“This has to be unanimous. If anyone says no, we go home as planned.” Lorcan tapped the table, emphasizing his point, “But I vote yes.”

“I vote yes,” Fenrys said, drumming his fingers on the table.

Elide mused aloud, her face growing sad, “If we do this, it will be over nine hundred days of space travel. That’s enough space to last a lifetime.” She smiled at Lorcan as he rested his hand on her thigh and traced soothing circles with his thumb, not looking at anyone else as she said, “Yes.”

“Let’s go get our girl,” said Rowan, a glimmer of a smile on his lips.

And then there was one.

“Faliq?”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“Flight, CAPCOM.”

“Go CAPCOM.”

“Unscheduled status update from The Lani.”

“Roger. Read it out,” the night shift was much quieter than the day. Usually.

“It’s… just a single sentence, sir.”

“What? What’s it say?”

“Um… it says: ‘Perranth, be advised: Luca Scéalaí is one steely-eyed missile man.”

“Who is Luca Scéalaí?”

Alarms rang out around Mission Control. “Uh… Flight, Guidance.”

“Go Guidance.”

“The Lani is off course.”

That had him sitting up straighter in his chair and he leaned forward, “CAPCOM, tell Lani they’re drifting. Guidance, get a correction ready-“

“Negative Flight. They’ve adjusted course. Deliberate rotation.”

“What the hell? CAPCOM, ask Lani ‘what the hell’.”

“Roger Flight.”

“Guidance, calculate how long they can stay their course before it’s irreversible and someone figure out who in Hellas’ realm is Luca Scéalaí!”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

Manon entered Weylan’s office and he made her wait as he stayed staring out the window.

“Asterin will go to the media and tell them of TNSB’s decision to reroute The Lani to Farnor.”

“Seems like a smart move,” she said mildly, picking at her nails. “Is there a reason you called me in here?”

“You may have killed the whole crew.”

“Whoever sent that to them only passed along information that was their right in the first place. The crew decided to switch course.”

Weylan turned to her, his face red with fury as he hissed, “We are fighting the same war, Manon! Every time something goes wrong, the world forgets why we fly. I am trying to keep us airborne, this whole program, the reason everyone here gets up and goes to work every day is bigger than one girl!”

“She is not a girl. She is a grown woman; how dare you belittle her right now? Aelin Galathynius is braver than anyone on any planet. No one in this agency is not better or bigger than her,” Manon answered, her voice dripping with cool condescension for her boss. “Especially not you.”

He straightened. “Once this is over, I expect your resignation.”

She just laughed coldly, “Yeah, we’ll see about that, won’t we, Weylan?”

“Get out of my sight.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

 +*+*+*+*+*+*

“Five hundred and thirty-three days extra? And you said yes to this?”

Fenrys was attempting to placate his wife’s rage through the computer, but he remained unapologetic, “I did. She would’ve done the same for me, Mia, you know that.”

Nehemia scowled at him and traced a hand over her swollen stomach, “You really think I am going to forgive you for this and knocking me up with your demon spawn before you left for a year and a half?” 

Fenrys grinned at her, “I do. Look at this face, no one can stay mad at me for long.” His grin was blinding and Nehemia sighed, pressing her lips together to suppress her grin. The smile won and Fenrys’ only grew wider, “There she is.” He didn’t think he liked anything more than seeing Nehemia smile like that at him. 

Nehemia lifted her hand to the screen and he mirrored her. “Bring her home.”

+*+*+*+*+*+*

an: i told y’all it would all be ok! comment to be added/removed from the tag list! 

@mythicaitt @kandasboi @schmlip-scribble @the-regal-warrior @westofmoon @empire-of-wildfire @rhysands-highlady @city-of-fae @shyvioletcat @alifletcher2012 @tangledraysofsunshine @ttakeitbacknoww @tswaney17 @ourbooksuniverse @flora-and-fae @thesirenwashere @queenofxhearts @that-other-pineapple @sleeping-and-books @superspiritfestival @faerie-queen-fireheart @chemicha @rowaelin-cressworth @mynewdreamwasyou @candid-confetti @bat-wing-rhys @the-reading-obsessed-stitchbear @feyrethedarklady​ @booklover41802​ @rowaelinforeverworld​ @jamesxdaisy​ @julemmaes​ @hellas-himself​ @kayjaybea​ 

[arcticdementor]

This was a comment I made in someone else’s post yesterday, but then it started getting shared: I don't even like Trump, but I've spent the last four years getting screamed at by angry people for defending him, when I'm actually usually just defending basic reality. Oh, we are so fucked. Today is nothing. It's probably going to get worse, because we're on a road that I can't see any off ramps. Sorry, here comes a rant. People are confused and constantly bombarded by conflicting information, some correct, some bullshit, and nobody knows what to believe because nobody trusts the people we are supposed to be able to trust. Then we have a super powerful global media complex that straight up gas lights everyone, and we're shocked the people have lost trust in information sources. Then when people have valid concerns, they get mocked, belittled, and insulted. They get gas lighted and told what they've seen with their own eyes didn't happen, and then they're "fact checked" with things that are basically a list of excuses generated by partisans who have zero clue what they're talking about. Repeat that daily, for literally every topic, and you get to a point where nobody trusts anybody and we have massive competing groups that can't even agree on basic pieces of relative truth anymore. And social media then rubs that in everyone's face, so we don't feel any commonality with our countrymen. But that's basically because we are several different countries crammed into one. As a people we've got two primary philosophies with a bunch of offshoots of those two, except they are mutually exclusive and cannot exist at the same time. So instead we get a muddled mixture of nonsensical bullshit that isn't really either, but is primarily a vehicle that exists to benefit the same people who benefit from our totally untrustworthy information sources. Then let's have a global pandemic, make everybody poorer, put them out of work, make everything they would normally do to blow off steam illegal, and once again if they express any concerns about this situation and the conflicting information presented to them, they get insulted, belittled, disparaged, and disrespected. Then let's have riots and looting and arson and murder for months on end, where the rule of law appears to be a one way street. Oh, and let's have a bunch of scandals with our political betters that tell everybody we have a two tiered justice system, where we're peasants, but our moral betters can do pretty much anything and get away with it. All while our information sources obviously lie and conflict with each other and run interference for their powerful friends, but giant soulless mega corporations will straight up destroy regular mundane people if they feel like it. And then at the very end of this shitty year, let's have a election that is insanely anomalous in a bunch of ways, but let's not actually investigate it in any meaningful manner, and instead let's just insult anybody who is concerned about it. Because nothing bad could possibly happen from tens of millions of people believing that their votes will never matter again and the system is irreparably rigged against them in a country with billions of guns and nuclear weapons. Whew... And that's just this year, after the last two decades of escalating tensions in a country filled with people who hate each other's fundamental beliefs. Which brings us to now... Which is why when buildings start exploding and politicians get beheaded, I won't be in the least bit surprised. And I'm usually the optimist. I'm seeing people I would consider boring vanilla normies, not gun culture people, not Trumpkins, not preppers, not even that political, now talking about violence and revolution like those are perfectly normal topics. Twenty years ago that was reserved for us internet gun nuts and taboo crazy talk for everyone else. Yeah... we are basically fucked.

Larry Correia

[thelittlesttimelord]

The Littlest Timelord: Cracks in Time Chapter 32

TITLE: The Littlest Timelord: Cracks in Time Chapter 32 PAIRING: No Pairing RATING: T CHAPTER: 32/? SUMMARY: A little girl escapes the Time War when the Timelord’s return in “End of Time Part 2″. The newly regenerated Doctor must now raise the little girl while trying to find out why cracks in time keep following them around.

“I can't believe I've never thought of this before!” the Doctor said as Amy came up to the platform, “It's genius.” The Doctor pulled the lever and the TARDIS landed with a thud. “Right. Landed. Come on.”

“Where are we?” Amy asked.

“Planet One. The oldest planet in the universe. And there's a cliff of pure diamond, and according to legend, on the cliff there's writing. Letters fifty feet high. A message from the dawn of time And no one knows what it says, because no one's ever translated it. Till today.”

“What happens today?”

The Doctor tapped Amy on the nose. “Us. The TARDIS can translate anything. All we have to do is open the doors and read the very first words in recorded history.”

The Doctor took Amy and Elise’s hands and pulled them outside.

On the cliff wall read two words: Hello Sweetie and a set of coordinates.

Elise smiled. That meant they were going to see River again!

“Vavoom,” Amy commented.

They went back inside the TARDIS and followed the coordinates which led them to a hill overlooking a Roman camp.

“Right place?” Amy asked.

“Just followed the co-ordinates on the cliff face. Earth. Britain. One o’ two am. No, pm. No, AD.”

“That's a Roman Legion.”

“Well, yeah. The Romans invaded Britain several times during this period.”

“Oh, I know. My favorite topic at school. Invasion of the hot Italians.”

Both Elise and the Doctor gave Amy a look.

“Yeah, I did get marked down for the title.”

A soldier ran up to them and saluted. “Hail, Caesar!”

“Hi,” the Doctor said as the Roman knelt down.

“Welcome to Britain. We are honored by your presence.”

“Well, you're only human. Arise, Roman person.”

The Roman stood up.

“Why does he think you're Caesar?” Amy asked.

“Cleopatra will see you now.”

The Roman led them down the hill into a tent.

At the back sat not Cleopatra, but River dressed up as her. “Hello, sweetie,” River said smiling.

“River. Hi,” Amy said.

Elise ran towards her.

“My little star! You’ve grown”, River told her.

“You graffitied the oldest cliff face in the universe,” the Doctor said.

“You wouldn't answer your phone.” River clapped and the servants left the tent. She presented the Doctor with a rolled up document.

“What's this?” he asked.

“It's a painting. Your friend Vincent.”

The Doctor took it from River and unfurled it on a table nearby.

“One of his final works. He had visions, didn't he? I thought you ought to know about this one.”

“Doctor? Doctor, what is this?” Amy asked.

It looked exactly like Starry Night, except the TARDIS was exploding in the middle of it.

“Why is it exploding?” Amy asked.

“I assume it's some kind of warning,” River told her.

“What, something's going to happen to the TARDIS?”

“It might not be that literal. Anyway, this is where he wanted you. Date and map reference on the door sign, see?”

“Does it have a title?” the Doctor asked.

“The Pandorica Opens,” River said.

“The Pandorica? What is it?” Amy asked.

“A box, a cage, a prison. It was built to contain the most feared things in all the universe.” The Doctor got up from the chair he’d been sitting in and started pacing. “And it's a fairy tale, a legend. It can't be real.”

“If it is real, it's here and it's opening, and it's got something to do with your TARDIS exploding. Hidden, obviously.”

The Doctor laid a couple of maps on the table.

“Buried for centuries. You won’t find it on a map,” River told him.

“No, but if you buried the most dangerous things in the universe, you'd want to remember where you put it.” He pointed to a place on the map.

“Oh you can’t be serious,” River said.

“What? Where is it?” Amy asked.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

They galloped up to Stonehenge.

River dismounted her horse and set Elise on the ground.

The Doctor had wanted Elise to ride with him, but Elise had insisted on going with River.

The Doctor and River started scanning the stones around them.

“How come it's not new?” Amy asked.

“Because it's already old. It's been here thousands of years. No one knows exactly how long.”

“Okay, this Pandorica thing. Last time we saw you, you warned us about it, after we climbed out of the Byzantium.”

River tapped her lips with her index finger and said, “Spoilers.”

“No, but you told the Doctor you'd see him again when the Pandorica opens.”

“Maybe I did, but I haven't yet. But I will have. Doctor, I'm picking up fry particles everywhere. Energy weapons discharged on this site.”

The Doctor hopped on top of a large stone. “If the Pandorica is here, it contains the mightiest warriors in history. Now, half the galaxy would want a piece of that. Maybe even fight over it. We need to get down there.”

Night fell as River finished placing a device on each corner of the Altar stone. “Right then. Ready.”

The Altar stone started moving to reveal a staircase.

“The Underhenge,” the Doctor said.

Elise grabbed onto River’s hand as they descended the stairs.

The Doctor picked up a torch and lit it with his sonic screwdriver and did the same for River.

They unlocked a large wooden door.

It swung open to reveal the Pandorica in the next chamber.

“It's a Pandorica,” the Doctor said.

“More than just a fairy tale,” River told him.

The Doctor stepped forward and placed a hand on it. “There were a pair of goblins, or tricksters, or warriors. Nameless, terrible things, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared beings in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop them, or hold them, or reason with them. One day they would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.”

“How did the end up in there?”

“You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.”

“I hate good wizards in fairy tales. They always turn out to be him. Fairies on the other hand…” River said. She handed her torch to Amy and started to scan the Pandorica.

“So, it's kind of like Pandora's Box, then?” Amy asked, “Almost the same name.”

“Sorry, what?” the Doctor asked her.

“The story. Pandora's Box, with all the worst things in the world in it. That was my favorite book when I was a kid.”

The Doctor stopped sonicing the Pandorica.

“What's wrong?” Amy asked him.

“Your favorite school topic. Your favorite story. Never ignore a coincidence, unless you're busy. In which case, always ignore a coincidence.”

“So can you open it?” River asked.

“Easily. Anyone can break into a prison. But I'd rather know what I'm going to find first,” the Doctor told her.

“You won't have long to wait. It's already opening. There are layers and layers of security protocols in there, and they're being disabled one by one. Like it's being unlocked from the inside.”

“How long do we have?”

“Hours at the most.”

“What kind of security?”

“Everything. Deadlocks, time stops, matter lines.”

“What could need all that?”

“What could get past all that?”

“Think of the fear that went into making this box. What could inspire that level of fear? Hello, you. Have we met?”

“So why would it start to open now?”

“No idea.”

Amy cleared her throat, interrupting them much to Elise’s disappoint. She loved watching her father and River work together.

“And how could Vincent have known about it? He won't even be born for centuries,” she said.

“The stones. These stones are great big transmitters, broadcasting a warning to everyone, everywhere, to every time zone,” the Doctor explained, “The Pandorica is opening.”

“Doctor, everyone everywhere?”

“Even poor Vincent heard it, in his dreams. But what's in there? What could justify all this?”

“Doctor, everyone?”

“Anything that powerful, I'd know about it. Why don't I know?”

“Doctor, you said everyone could hear it. So who else is coming?” River asked

“Oh,” the Doctor said, realizing.

“Oh? Oh, what?” Amy asked.

River walked over to one of the stones. “Okay. If it is basically a transmitter, we should be able to fold back the signal.”

“Doing it,” the Doctor said, sonicing the pillars.

“Doing what?” Amy asked.

“Stonehenge is transmitting,” River explained, “It's been transmitting for a while, so who heard?”

“Okay, should be feeding back to you now. River, what's out there?” the Doctor asked.

“Give me a moment.”

“River, quickly. Anything?”

“Around this planet there are at least ten thousand starships.”

“At least?” Amy asked.

“Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, I don't know. There's too many readings,” River said.

“What kind of starships?” the Doctor asked.

“Maintaining orbit.”

“I obey. Shield cover compromised on ion sectors.”

Elise’s blood ran cold hearing the electronic voices that often haunted her nightmares.

“Daleks. Those are Daleks,” Amy said.

“Scan detects no temporal activity.”

“Soft grid scan commencing.”

“Reverse thrust for compensatory stabilization.”

“Daleks, Doctor,” River told him.

“Launch preliminary armaments protocol.”

“Yes. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Dalek fleet, minimum twelve thousand battleships, armed to the teeth. Ah! But we've got surprise on our side. They'll never expect three people to attack twelve thousand Dalek battleships. Because we'd be killed instantly. So it would be a fairly short surprise. Forget surprise.”

Amy tried to keep Elise calm, because she could tell the small Timelord was close to a break down.

River ran over to another pillar and scanned it. “Doctor, Cyberships,” River told him.

“No, Dalek ships. Listen to them. Those are Dalek ships.”

“Yes. Dalek ships and Cyberships.”

“Well, we need to start a fight, turn them on each other. I mean, that's easy. It's the Daleks. They're so cross.”

River scanned yet another pillar. “Sontaran. Four battlefleets.”

“Sontarans! Talk about cross, who stole all their handbags?” the Doctor tried to joke.

“Terileptil. Slitheen, Chelonian, Nestene, Drahvin. Sycorax, Haemogoth, Zygon, Atraxi, Draconian. They're all here for the Pandorica.”

“What are you? What could you possibly be?”

The four of them ran outside and saw spaceships filling the skies.

“What do we do?” Amy asked.

“Doctor, listen to me. Everything that ever hated you is coming here tonight. You can't win this. You can't even fight it. Doctor, this once, just this one time, please, you have to run. Take Elise and run,” River told him.

“Run where?”

“Fight how?”

“The greatest military machine in the history of the universe.”

“What is? The Daleks?” Amy asked.

The Doctor shook his head. “No. No, no, no, no, no. The Romans.”

[deadlytales]

There are secrets hidden in the colors you can't see.

(from this Reddit post, by J.L.)

Do you know what color a cockroach is? If you said brown, then you’re wrong. Its Vis. And Cimex. And it has slight hints of Foedus as well.

That’s not gibberish. Those are colors that you can’t see. But I can.

I am the first documented human being with pentrachromatic vision.

That means that I have five different types of cone cells in my eyes. Almost every human being is a trichromat. That means there are three types cone cells in their eyes. These cells can each distinguish around 100 individual shades, but they mix together with one another - which means that the average trichromat can see about a million different colors. As a pentrachromat, I can see around ten billion.

No other mammal can do that. Only pigeons and a few butterflies. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, then let me ask you a question - What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? A sunset? A rainbow?

Mine was a Hostess Twinkie. I was in a 7-11 and I saw a bunch of them sitting in a box on one of the shelves. Whatever chemicals they put in those things all have their own colors. Together, they create this beautiful swirling mosaic. Kind of makes the Twinkie less appetizing, but certainly better to look at. These colors are indescribable. I mean that in the literal sense – I can’t describe them to you. Color is an inherently private event. For the same reason you can’t tell that the shade of blue you see on a lid of I Can’t Believe it’s not Butter is the same as the shade of blue that your boss sees, I can’t tell you what most of the colors I see look like.

There are some things that I didn’t even know had color until I became a pentrachromat. Movement has color – every time something moves it creates a faint trail of a color that I can only describe as energetic. I’ve taken to calling this color Vis. Most fruits are multi-colored, but trichromatic eyes only pick up on the primary color present in them. If peaches looked to you how they do to me then you probably wouldn’t eat them anymore. I wasn’t born a pentrachromat. I was born with boring old trichromatic vision just like you. Then I got in a car accident. You know what color the sparks are when two pieces of metal collide? I call it Enk. That’s the sound my wife’s car made when it hit the Subaru next to us. It’s actually a comforting color – it evokes the same kind of feeling that you get when you smell wood smoke. Blood isn’t just red anymore. It’s also Cruor. Blood was the last thing I saw before I lost my vision. Victoria was driving. She was drunk, but not as drunk as I was. We were fighting. It was my fault.

“Was she worth it John? Was she worth ending all that we’ve had together?”

She wasn’t. Hiring a prostitute was never something that I thought I would do. Losing my marriage was never something that I thought I would do. But I had grown bored with our marriage. I wanted something new.

I didn’t know that wanting something new would mean she would let go of the wheel. As the car swerved onto the shoulder, I tried to pull the steering wheel back. I pulled too hard. We slammed into a car that had just pulled into the far right lane. A 17-year old girl was behind the wheel. The collision snapped her spine in half. She died in a pool of her own blood.

Our car spun out and crashed into the median. Victoria was thrown from the car. My seatbelt pinned me to the seat. The windshield exploded into a million pieces.

Broken glass has a whole slew of colors present in it. Too many to name.

Glass rained down on me. It sliced through my skin like it was clay. Two big shards lodged themselves in my eyes. The last thing I saw was blood. The last thing I heard was Victoria screaming. “God! It hurts! Please god it hurts!”

I’m not sure when I woke up. Without my vision I was helplessly adrift in a sea of darkness. After a while, I heard a voice asking me if I could hear it. It was a woman’s voice. A nurse.

“Yes. Where am I?”

She told me I was in the hospital and that I had been in an accident. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was frowning when she told me that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life.

As it turns out, you don’t need eyes to cry your eyes out. That’s all I did for the first few days. No doctor could help me. After a week of living in my own personal darkness, someone up above took pity on me. They called a specialist. He was working on an experimental procedure.

“How much?”

“No money. I’ll do the procedure for free.” He had a slimy, southern accent.

“What’s the catch?”

Mr. Southern Gentleman was from a testing facility in Giliman County, Colorado that was working on bio-mechanical enhancements. They needed somebody whose eyeballs had been destroyed but somehow still had functioning optic nerves. Someone who still had full brain function and could describe what they saw. Someone desperate enough that they wouldn’t mind being a human guinea pig. That was me.

The surgery took four hours. They had warned me beforehand that my experimental eyes would be more powerful than my original eyes. They didn’t warn me that my pentrachromatic eyes would see things that mankind wasn’t meant to see.

After the procedure, the first thing that struck me was my finger nails. They were colorful in a way I had never seen before. I asked the nurse if she had painted them. She hadn’t. Her fingernails were also colorful. As it turns out, fingernails aren’t colorless. They’re a color I call Foedus. It’s probably for the best you can’t see it. It’s not a pretty color. The nurse’s breath was a color I called Nubila. Most people’s breath is still colorless to me but if a person smokes cigarettes regularly enough then it becomes Nubila.

Growing used to being able to see again meant growing used to all the new colors. Everything looks different than it did before. People’s faces are so complexly colored that it’s easier to identify someone by the random patches of color on them then by the actual shape of their face. It’s comical that there is so much fighting about skin color in the world because when you can see 10 billion colors the slight chromatic differences between black and white don’t make a difference.

Sometimes I think that my new vision is a positive thing. But then I’m reminded of when I first laid my new eyes on my wife. I’m reminded of the things no man should have to see.

The first time I saw her was two months after the accident. Victoria had been more heavily injured than me. When she was thrown from the car it shattered the bones in both her arms and legs. The bone fragments tore up her musculature pretty bad. It took 12 hours of surgery to save her life. They had to amputate everything. Her skin was so burned by the asphalt that it took four skin grafts to restore her face. They never got it quite right.

I thought I was prepared for Victoria to be a quadriplegic. Doctors explained her condition ahead of time and warned me that it would be gruesome. They warned me that her limbs would be nothing more than stubs. But they couldn’t see what I could see. They couldn’t have warned me that there would still be something where her limbs had once been.

Four ghostly blobs extended from her bandaged arms and legs. They had the shape of her missing appendages, but they were contorted and bent at weird angles. When she moved the stubs the blobs followed as if they were the original limbs, albeit broken. They were a color that I’ve come to call Anima.

I dread seeing the color Anima. It appears in very… consistent circumstances. Most amputees have Anima limbs sprouting from their stubs. The air around graveyards and crematoriums is tinted Anima. Occasionally, the meat you get at the grocery store has an Anima aura emanating from it, but only if it’s really fresh. For a while, I thought that Anima was the color of death. Last week I learned what it really is.

Victoria passed away last Monday. It’s been almost a year since the accident. I guess it was her time. My wonderful Victoria fought as long as she could, but eventually her body gave up. She died in our bed while I was in the shower. I was heartbroken when I found her. Only when she was gone did I realize how much I took her presence for granted. I called 911 and laid down next to her while I waited for the ambulance to arrive.

Her last days had been hard for the both of us. Even with heavy medication, Victoria experienced constant phantom pain in her missing limbs. On the nights she was able to sleep through the pain, she usually had vivid dreams about the accident. I tried to push the thought of it out of my mind, but I was reminded of the crash every time I laid eyes on her ghostly limbs. When her time came, I secretly hoped her passing would be a relief for the both of us.

It was a beautiful funeral. I picked out the flowers. She would have liked them, even if she couldn’t have seen all the colors in them that I could. When I got home I saw that there was a stain on the bed where her body had been. It looked familiar.

It was Anima. The color of her ghostly limbs.

I changed the sheets. After a few hours another stain developed. I changed them again. The stain came back. No matter how many times I washed the sheets the stain kept coming back.

I started sleeping on the couch to get away from it. Looking at the Anima colored fabric just reminded me of her death. Two days ago, I was in our bedroom changing clothes and I noticed that the stain had disappeared. In the space inches above where it had been there was now an Anima-colored cloud floating in the air. It was moving. Over the course of the next few hours, the cloud took on a humanoid shape. The shape of my Victoria.

Last night, the Anima cloud got out of bed. Its movement is painstakingly slow, but somehow very humanlike. This morning it was standing in the kitchen when I made breakfast. I tried to ask my neighbor if he could see the shape too, but he just looked at me like I was crazy.

Only my special eyes can see the Anima figure. It doesn’t have a face or anything but I can still tell its staring at me. It follows me everywhere. It sits in the passenger seat when I drive my car, stands next to me at the bank, watches me while I shower. Its right behind me even as we speak. A dark, indescribably-colored visage of my dead wife. Staring at me. Watching me with eyes that aren’t there.

I’ve tried to outrun it but it always catches up with me. It won’t leave me alone. Anima won’t stop following me. Anima isn’t the color of death. The thing following me can’t be dead because it always knows where I am. It moves just like Victoria used to move. It’s her. I know that it’s her.

I see Anima clouds like her everywhere now, following people. They’re in the shape of our loved ones. The ones who can’t bear to tear themselves away from us. Most people have one. If you’ve lost a loved one, then you probably do. Only my eyes can see them.

Victoria – if it really is you in that cloud, then I’m sorry for everything I did wrong. I’m sorry for all the words I never got a chance to say. Please don’t follow me anymore. I just want to be alone. I know you can read this.

STOP STARING AT ME VICTORIA.

I don’t think Anima is the color of death. That things that follow us are alive, at least in their own way. They’re the souls of the departed. Souls that are trapped. Souls that can’t stop following us. Man was never meant to see Anima. We were never meant to know what happens to us when we die.

I see the colors you cannot and they hide a horrible secret. There is no heaven or hell. When we die, we don’t move on. We stay and watch, silently, until the end of time.

Please leave me alone Victoria. Please stop staring at me.

[neoduskcomics]

Aquaman

I just saw Aquaman.

Holy fucking shit what a fucking hot mess of fucking ocean garbage. If someone took the script from this fucking movie and tossed it into the pacific it would pollute the water more than any toxic waste or oil spills we've dumped in there for the past hundred years. AND SOMEONE READ THIS SCRIPT AND APPROVED IT.

What is dialogue? All we have on tonight's menu is 5 million gigatons of TNT-laden exposition and monologuing.

THERE ARE FOUR SEPARATE SCENES IN THIS MOVIE WHERE A CONVERSATION WAS INTERRUPTED BY AN EXPLOSION. FOUR. SEPARATE. SCENES.

Mera looks weird. Black Manta has a building montage in the middle of the movie for no reason. He gets a laser rifle that blows up a mountain and goes "Fuck dude this is awesome. Gonna make a giant saucer helmet now to stick THIS in."

"Oh the saucer helmet exploded because of course it did. BETTER MAKE IT BIGGER."

The entire plot is a stupid, contrived fetch quest. It felt like I was watching a cutscene compilation from the first God of War game.

Getting through this movie was like lying awake in bed with insomnia. You want it to be over. Sweet cheese and crackers you just want unconsciousness to take you. BUT IT DOESN'T. YOU JUST SIT THERE. EYES OPEN. TAKING IT. TAKING IT BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE HATES YOU AND YOU DESERVE IT.

Holy shit was this movie gorgeous though. Like there are a lot of boring scenes, but fuck, it has some of the most beautiful and amazing set pieces and action sequences I've ever seen in a superhero film. The ending fight is amazing even though it's dumb as fuck.

This movie is garbage though. Also the acting is terrible and everyone's careers should be ruined because of it. Final verdict -20 billion out of ten. Go see it. It's amazing and fun and action-packed. Fuck is it garbage though. But go see it.

I'm very tired.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 071

Last time... well, practically nothing happened.   Frieza killed some Namekians, but I’m pretty sure that was a filler scene Toei added because Episode 70 would have had no real action to speak of without it.   

And let’s face it, Frieza killing Namekians isn’t exactly fresh at this point.   The only novelty is that he did it personally this time.

Oh wow, that guy’s in pieces.    Yeesh.   Let’s move on.

So the Namekian population is now down to three: Nail, Dende, and Guru.    Guru, who created the Dragon Balls on Namek, is days away from dying, and when he goes, the Dragon Balls go with him.    Frieza’s here to force him to explain how to make the Balls work, but he won’t talk.    So Frieza wants to hurt Nail to loosen Guru’s tongue, but Nail doesn’t want to fight here in case Guru gets hurt in the crossfire.    Frieza doesn’t think it’ll be much of a “fight”, but he’s amenable to the idea.

They fly for a long time, until Frieza finally loses his patience and demands they set down immediately.    If I’m not mistaken, this spot happens to be on the opposite side of the planet from where Frieza’s ship is, so it suits Nail just fine.    This way, it’ll take Frieza longer to return to the Dragon Balls when he leaves.

Nail powers up, and Frieza measures his power level at 42,000.    I could have sworn it was more like 4,000, but okay.  So Nail could have done some good against the Ginyu Force.    Hell, he could have killed Vegeta, Cui, Zarbon, and Dodoria when they first arrived on the planet, if only he had been able to get each of them isolated before fighting them.   I’m not sure that would have altered the situation much, at least from the Namekians’ perspective, but it’s an interesting possibility. 

But in the here and now, 42,000 won’t get Nail anything but some hollow compliments from Frieza, who states his own power level is just over half a million.   A few things about this...

First, how does Frieza even know this number?   Every scouter we’ve seen on this show, including the one Frieza is currently wearing, explodes when it measures a high enough power.   Raditz’s exploded when Bulma tried to read Goku while he was using the Kaio-ken x3.   Zarbon’s blew up when he tried to get a reading on Vegeta when he fought Cui.   The one Frieza’s wearing is a “new model” scouter, which can take readings above 24,000, but it will eventually give out when Frieza fights Vegeta, who was probably weaker than 530,000 at the time.  

Second, I find the whole power level metric kind of ridiculous at this point.   The Saiyans Saga introduced the idea with a bunch of bad guys in the thousands forcing the good guys in the hundreds to work up to their level.    Goku and Vegeta ended up fighting in the low five digits, and in the Namek Saga, everyone who mattered had a power level of 20,000 or more.  Appropriately, the middle guys in the Ginyu Force were probably 40,000 to 50,000, and Ginyu himself was... I want to say 120,000?   I’m pretty sure it was stated on the show, but I don’t want to look it up.

Now we have Frieza claiming he’s 530,000, and this is just his first form.   I just feel like we skipped a lot of numbers in between for no good reason.   It only makes sense for Frieza to have a really high number, but did it need to be this high?    If Recoome was 50,000, let Captain Ginyu be 70,000, and then Frieza can range from 80,000 to 100,000.  

The reason I say this is because it’s kind of goofy how the good guys went from struggling against a guy with a power of 4000 to where we are now.    Is Frieza really 130 times stronger than Nappa?   

This is why all those fan attempts to extend the power level charts never work.    Everyone knows Cell was stronger than Frieza, but how much stronger?   It seems kind of dumb to just say Perfect Cell was 10,000 more than whatever Frieza was.    If Frieza’s in the millions, does that mean Cell should be in the billions?  It gets weird no matter how you approach it. 

I mean, Frieza is ripping off Nail’s arm, much the same way Nappa casually maimed Tien about fifty episodes back.   Nappa was maybe 25% stronger than Tien?   I think?    Frieza doesn’t need to be ten times stronger than everyone else to dominate this way.   Maybe it’s just to account for why large groups of strong guys can’t touch him.   I don’t know.

Of course, Nail can regrow his arm, which comes as a surprise to Frieza, but it doesn’t really change the situation.   His power drops when he does this, so his chances against Frieza get worse with every moment.

Meanwhile, Bulma tooling around the planet, when she gets chased by... the same pterosaurs and dinosaurs that live on Earth.   That’s pretty weak.   Toei’s added some rather interesting wildlife to Planet Namek up to now, but this is just plain lazy.  

Krillin and Gohan save her, and she throws a fit because they left her on her own for so long.   So Gohan reaches into her pocket to get the Dragon Radar, since they need it.  

The boys tell Bulma to get back to their hideout, and they also tell her Goku’s arrived.   This prompts Bulma to reflect on how studly Goku grew up to be.  The whole time, she was with Yamcha, and all they ever did was fight.   Maybe she could have hooked up with Goku instead.   I’m pretty sure Chi-Chi would have had something to say about that...

Meanwhile, Captain Ginyu finally plays his trump card.   Cripes, this saga is half-over and he’s just now getting around to this.   Let’s recap the Ginyu arc so far, shall we? 

Episode 68: Jeice flees and brings Ginyu back to deal with Goku.

Episode 69: Ginyu and Goku fight, but they’re both holding back, so it doesn’t matter.    Goku agrees to show his full power to Ginyu...

Episode 70: After an entire episode of powering up, Goku reveals that he’s stronger than Ginyu.

Episode 71: Ginyu laughs mysteriously and throws fireballs at Goku for no apparent reason.  

Now, finally, Ginyu uses the only trick that actually matters.   First, he punches himself in the titty.    I’m kind of impressed that he managed to puncture himself while striking from such an awkward angle.

From the sidelines, Jeice knows what’s up, which means he’s seen this before.

Then Ginyu fires a mouth laser into Goku’s mouth.  

And this causes them to switch bodies.   Goku is now stuck in Ginyu’s weaker, injured body, while Ginyu has Goku’s body and all the power that comes with it.

As Ginyu and Jeice head back to the ship, Goku laments his position.   He hasn’t even been on Namek for more than an hour, and he’s already lost his greatest advantage.   All the training he did on the way here is useless to him now, because he doesn’t have his body anymore.    Being stuck in Captain Ginyu’s body wouldn’t be so bad, except it’s wounded, and Goku isn’t familiar with its power.  He ought to be worried about bleeding out and dying on an alien planet, but instead he’s afraid that Chi-Chi will be mad at him if he ever makes it home.  

Oh, and here’s Vegeta, in case you forgot about him.    Right now, everyone’s heading for Frieza’s ship to secure the Dragon Balls, except Goku, who’s been sidelined, and Frieza, who doesn’t realize all of this is happening right now. 

I’ve always found Ginyu’s body-swap power to be kind of uncomfortable to watch, I guess mostly because it’s such a bitter betrayal of the idea of Goku swooping in to save the day.    The only way for Goku to get back to normal is to get Ginyu to swap back, and there’s absolutely no reason he would do that.  

But it also makes a perfect twist for this part of the story.    Goku’s strategy through most of DBZ so far has been to try to convince weaker aliens that they should just give up and leave.    Whether this is because of a misplaced sense of mercy, or an effort to conserve his strength, the bottom line is that Goku wasted three episodes on Captain Ginyu, and ended up losing to him because he didn’t want to hit him too hard.   Vegeta criticized Goku for being too soft-hearted, and in this case he was right.    Goku spared Jeice, who brought Ginyu to him, and then Goku tried to frighten Ginyu with his awesome strength, never suspecting that Ginyu would have a way to neutralize that. 

[falst]

One of these days they’re gonna make Sonadow canon in a piece of Sonic media and the internet is going to explode into ten million billion pieces

[deep-space-exploration]

How did the Moon form?

A new, surprising answer suggests that the formation of the Moon happened rather quickly, literally within hours.

The most widely accept theory is that he Earth's moon was created when the young planet was hit by a Mars-sized protoplanet (Theia) ca 4.5 billion years ago. Then the debris of the protoplanet and the ejected earth material first formed a debris ring around Earth, followed by a gradually concentration of its components by the greatest piece - via gravitational attraction - to form the Moon. What has puzzled researchers are lunar peculiarities like the almost identical isotopic composition of Earth and Moon. Then too, what happened to the rest of the protoplanet Theia in terms of what portion is present in the Earth and the Moon.

Jacob Kegerreis and his colleagues from NASA's Ames Research Center have analyzed the collision of Theia and Earth using more extensive computer simulations. Most previous lunar simulations comprised analyses of 100,000 to one million particles, resolutions that can’t conclusively determine some core features of the impact like the planetary rotation period or the mass of ejected debris. To improve on this, they used 100 million particles of 14 kilometers each and ten trillion tons of mass as a basis. Simulating about 400 collisions, they varied the angle of impact, the masses, temperatures and rotation of the celestial bodies involved as well as the impact speed, calculating which paths, shape and mass the ejected collision debris followed.

The analysis showed that If the protoplanet hit Earth at about a 45-degree angle (the usual assumption) this would throw large, only half-melted chunks into near-earth space, as their simulations showed. But, surprisingly, a second chunk would have detached from the first larger object and catapulted into a farther outer orbit like a slingshot:

What happens after a supernova explodes?  

[primorcoin]

New Post has been published on https://primorcoin.com/what-are-cryptopunks-and-why-are-they-so-expensive/

What Are CryptoPunks and Why Are They So Expensive?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) became a huge trend in the crypto industry throughout 2021. The demand for unique, rare, and scarce tokenized items continues to shoot through the roof at the time of this writing in January 2022. Artists, celebrities, and creators are launching different NFT projects to satisfy the insatiable cravings for the new asset class.

But while there are now hundreds if not thousands of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) flying around, with each aiming to become the next megahit, the whole NFT craze started with one project – CryptoPunks. And fun fact – it was back in 2017. Yes, you might guess what was their price back then (or find out later in this guide).

Today, CryptoPunks are some of the most popular and expensive NFT collections in the world, with some Punks selling for tens of millions of dollars. But what exactly are these crypto arts, and why are they so popular and expensive?

Just hang on, this guide provides all the information you need to know about CryptoPunks.

Quick Navigation

What Are CryptoPunks?

CryptoPunks is a well-known pioneer in the world of NFTs, as it is one of the earliest series developed on the Ethereum blockchain.

Created by the New York-based software firm Larva Labs in 2017, CryptoPunks is a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated 24×24, 8-bit-style tokenized and pixelated art images.

Each CryptoPunk NFT is randomly generated from several different attributes, effectively allowing them to be unique as no two CryptoPunks are exactly alike.

Types of CryptoPunks

The CryptoPunk collection consists of a vast array of designs featuring humans, zombies, aliens, and apes. The more unique their combination of distinctive features are, the rarer the CryptoPunk NFT.

Source: Larva Labs

There are nine aliens, 24 apes, 88 zombies, 3,840 females, and 6,039 male Punks, with each possessing some distinctive features, including mutton chops, 3D glasses, rosy cheeks, pigtails, buck teeth, lipstick, beanies, and many more.

The first 1,000 CryptoPunks were reserved for the project’s developers and are known as the Dev Punks. About eight Punks have no distinctive features, and they are often referred to as the Genesis Punks while one CryptoPunk, #8348, has the seven basic attributes and is one of the most coveted art pieces in the CryptoPunk collection.

Crypto Punk #8348. Source: OpenSea

The First Punks Were Given for Free

Interestingly, the idea behind the world’s most popular NFT project started as an experiment.

In 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the founders of Larva Labs, developed a software program that would create thousands of different pixelated images of misfits and non-conformists.

The idea was to use the program and the avatars in a smartphone app or game and had been inspired by the London Punk movement of the 1970s.

But little did they know that their small project would pioneer the massive NFT industry as we know it today.

Subsequently, the collection of 10,000 CryptoPunks was launched on the Ethereum blockchain at a time when the ERC-721 token standard was not even a thing.

CryptoPunks were initially issued for free, with every Ethereum wallet holder having access to the NFT collection. Shortly after, the 9,000 available Punks were snatched up, leaving the rest for the developers.

Fast forward to 2020, the NFT market exploded. Demand for digital images with ownership rights on the blockchain soared, and CryptoPunks became the most sought-after.

Their values on secondary NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea shot through the roof resulting in multi-million-dollar sales, auctions at some of the top auction houses in the world, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and attracting several high-profile investors, including Jay-Z, Gary Vaynerchuk, and more.

As of January 2022, CryptoPunks have generated over $2.5 billion in total traded volume on OpenSea alone, with the popularity and market value still increasing as the NFT space reaches mainstream users.

But why are these tokenized images so popular? Let’s find out.

CryptoPunks: The Most Ancient NFT Series

When there’s high demand for a commodity with limited supply, the price will jump sky-high. And that’s the case with the revered CryptoPunks. In fact, the NFT is so popular that Visa had to join the craze by purchasing a Punk for $160,000.

But the big question is – what really drives the demand for something critics would call a bunch of pixelated images?

While there are several reasons for the increasing demand for CryptoPunks, two factors stand outage and scarcity.

Age

The CryptoPunk collection is revered as one of the oldest NFT projects around. An aged NFT, such as CryptoPunk, is valued as much as a famous old painting like Picasso’s “Femme nue couchée au collier” of 1932 that was purchased and tokenized by TRON’s Justin Sun.

So, the age of CryptoPunks on the blockchain adds to their desirability. Most investors simply buy Punks to get their hands on one of the oldest NFT artworks still around.

Scarcity: Jay-Z, Serena Williams, and More

NFTs, in general, derive much of their value and popularity from the rarity and scarcity of tokens. CryptoPunks are also not left out.

The limited supply of CryptoPunks available for purchase adds to the thrill and pushes demand to the moon and beyond. The rarity of most CryptoPunks makes them highly coveted.

The plain-looking Punks are valued less than the rare Punks. For instance, alien CryptoPunks are among the rarest in the entire collection. As a result, they are super expensive.

Other demand drivers for the NFT collection include its popularity among high-profile individuals, including Jay-Z, Serena Williams, and many more. The images have been used as profile pictures on social platforms, which really clicked with the crypto community, further boosting the demand for them.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the most expensive CryptoPunks sold to date.

The Most Expensive CryptoPunks Ever Sold

Below are some of the most extravagant amounts that investors and avid digital art collectors have paid to get their hands on rare CryptoPunks.

CryptoPunk #7523 ($11.75 million)

Source: OpenSea

CryptoPunk #7523 is an alien Punk, and there are only nine of them in the collection. This makes it one of the rarest art in the collection. It depicts an alien wearing a surgical mask, and someone paid a jaw-dropping $11.75 million for the NFT at the popular London auction house Sotheby’s.

The Punk was purchased by Shalom Meckenzie, a major shareholder in the daily fantasy and sports betting firm Draftkings.

CryptoPunk #4156 ($10.26 Million)

Source: OpenSea

With only 24 ape Punks in the collection, an investor spent a hefty $10.26 million to acquire CryptoPunk #4156 in December 2021, making it the second most-expensive Punk ever sold to date.

CryptoPunk #7804 ($7.56 Million)

Source: OpenSea

CryptoPunk #7804 is a pipe-smoking alien wearing a hat and sunglasses. It was sold for $7.56 million to Dylan Field, the CEO of the cloud-based design tool, Figma.

CryptoPunk #3100 ($7.51 Million)

Source: OpenSea

CryptoPunk #3100 was last sold for $7.51 million earlier in March 2021. It is one of the alien Punks but with a white-blue headband.

CryptoPunk #5217 ($5.44 Million)

Source: OpenSea

CryptoPunk #5217 is an ape Punk wearing a red knitted headgear and a gold chain. It was last sold for $5.44 million.

How to Buy a CryptoPunk NFT?

As with other non-fungible tokens, you can view all of the available CryptoPunks in several NFT marketplaces, including on OpenSea, which is the biggest secondary NFT marketplace.

However, investors can only buy CryptoPunk through the Larva Labs website. There, the firm provides several tools needed to help buyers select which avatar they wish to buy, including a tracker that shows all of the listed Punks and their various prices.

First, you will need to log in with an Ethereum-based wallet, MetaMask preferably. Once you have gained access to the platform and are granted the necessary permissions, you can bid on, buy, and sell CryptoPunks using Larva Labs’ official website.

When you bid on, buy, and sell the NFTs on the marketplace, you can observe the status of each CryptoPunk NFT based on the color of their background.

A blue background implies that a particular CryptoPunk is not for sale and does not have any open bids at this time. A red background denotes that the owner of the Punk has placed it for sale, and a purple background shows that there is an active bid for the selected CryptoPunk NFT.

With all of the above in mind, we’ve prepared a detailed step-by-step guide on how to buy and sell NFTs on OpenSea that you can check out.

The Future of CryptoPunks

CryptoPunks have attracted several high-profile investors into the NFT space and are leading the way in the crypto art movement. In just four years, the price of one Punk has gone from being worth virtually $0 to several million dollars.

While there is no way to know if the current demand for CryptoPunks and NFTs, in general, will continue in years to come, one thing is certain — they will always be an integral part of the NFT world as the most ancient series, several years before the Bored Apes Yacht Club and other popular NFTs.

That said, Larva Labs is constantly exploring new ways to improve the project even further since it’s very unlikely that it will issue more CryptoPunks as their limited supply is one of the critical drivers of their popularity.

The software firm revealed that it had put all of the CryptoPunk attributes and images on-chain on the Ethereum blockchain, which will help to secure their longevity and the durability of CryptoPunks investments.

For more information: The official website.

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What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

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What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

Republicans On The Affordable Care Act

Warren Buffett says GOP health reform bills are relief for the rich

In the 2012 Republican Part Platform, Republicans spoke out against the Affordable Care Act, stating that the Democrats used it more as an assertion of power than they used it to improve health care conditions in this country, and in doing so they detrimentally damaged the health of this nation. The Republican Party views the requirement for United States citizens to purchase health insurance as an attack on the Constitution. They believe that the financial burden it would bring upon the country, and specifically on individual states, through the expansion of Medicaid is unsustainable, and will harm the nation as a whole. The act was so firmly opposed by the Republican Party that not a single Republican voted for the final version that Obama signed into law.

Obamacare Repeal Requires Replacement After 2016 Election

Republicans had spent eight years trashing the Democratic health care overhaul, but now that they were in power, they ran up against the same political winds that forced ObamaCare tolook like such a political Frankenstein’s monster to begin with. Conservatives wanted a complete and total repeal of the law; moderative Republicans wanted to protect certain pieces of it.

Do Americans Like Socialism

In a list of ten ideologies;YouGov;put to Americans, socialism ranked fifth in terms of favorability. Three in ten Americans have a favorable view of socialism, while 47% do not. Another 13% arent sure, and 10% dont know what the term means in the first place.;

Least;favorable;are totalitarianism , fascism and authoritarianism .;

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the popularity;of self-proclaimed;democratic socialist Bernie Sanders,;Democrats take a more;favorable;view of socialism, and Republicans less so. Half of Democrats have a;favorable;view, while just over a quarter;;have an;unfavorable;one. Among Republicans,;11% have a;favorable;view and 75% an;unfavorable;one.;

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Nbc News/commonwealth Fund Health Care Poll

Three in 10 likely voters are worried about being able to afford health insurance and costs for prescription drugs and other health care over the next year; among most worried are Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and people earning under $50,000

Nearly 80 percent of likely voters believe reducing health care costs should be a high priority for the next president

Three in 10 likely voters are worried about being able to afford health insurance and costs for prescription drugs and other health care over the next year; among most worried are Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and people earning under $50,000

Nearly 80 percent of likely voters believe reducing health care costs should be a high priority for the next president

Press Release

In next weeks Super Tuesday primaries, voters in 14 states and American Samoa will cast their ballots for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Health care has emerged as one of the top issues in the 2020 election, at times dominating the Democratic presidential debates.

Controlling Drug Prices Top Issue For Republicans

Controlling drug prices is a top health care priority of the Trump administration, says James C.

Capretta, a resident fellow and the Milton Friedman Chair at the right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. In the healthcare sphere, drug pricing would be number one, he said. Then other issues, such as price transparency and health reimbursement accounts, would follow behind that.

If Trump wins re-election and the Republicans control at least the U.S. Senate, then its safe to say that past will be prologue for 2021 if not longer, Capretta observes.

The agenda for Republicans is almost certainly going to remain as it has been since 2017, he notes. By that I mean there will be a focus on administrative action related to loosening regulations.

If there is a second Trump administration, executive orders and administrative changes are likely to be the main tools of its healthcare policies because Democrats are expected to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives regardless of how the presidential vote turns out and whether the Republicans keep their current 53-47 hold on the Senate.

The idea of any kind of Trump legislative initiatives making it through the Congress seems quite remote, Capretta continues. Moreover, I don’t think they have a legislative health agenda that they would be ready and wanting to push as a priority.

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Republicans And Democrats Think With Different Parts Of Their Brains

American liberals and conservatives use different parts of their brains when assessing risks, a new study finds.

A new study says that the brains of American Democrats and Republicans are wired differently, and that they use entirely different sections when making risky decisions.

Let the debates commence.

Liberals show a higher level of activity in the left insula, a portion of the brain associated with self-awareness, social cues, addiction, emotional processing, empathy, and even orgasms .

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to weigh risk in the right amygdala, an area of the brain that aids in survival, including reacting to violations of personal space and controlling social interaction, fear, and aggression .

These conclusions were drawn from a study of 82 people performed by political scientists and neuroscientists at the University of Exeter and the University of California, San Diego. The study was published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

George W Bush On Health Care

During his time in office, George W. Bush advocated for HIV/AIDS relief, HIV prevention, and abstinence-only education. He implemented the ABC method of HIV prevention . He also worked towards HIV relief and prevention through efforts that emphasized regular testing, early diagnosis, ongoing monitoring, and the elimination of HIV/AIDS in newborns. He also increased the amount spent on abstinence-only education. Bush also restricted federal funding for stem cell research and created a ban on human cloning and the creation of human embryos that were solely for experimental purposes. During his time in office, he also restored a policy that banned the use of controlled substances for assisted suicide.

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Trump And Republican Health Care Reform: The Republicans’ Irrational Opposition To Medicaid

President Trump and almost all Congressional Republicans have consistently opposed Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Their opposition is irrational.

It is also unpopular with voters. In dark red states like Nebraska, Idaho and Utah voters recently went over the heads of their Republican legislators and governors by approving referendums to expand the program. And, Kansas is about to become the 37th state to expand Medicaid under Obamacare after a bipartisan agreement between the Democratic governor and Republican leaders in the legislature.

While Obamacare’s individual health insurance reforms and subsidies have been a disaster for the middle class , the Medicaid expansion in the states that have approved it has covered millions of people that would never have been covered otherwiseat a cost that could never have been less.

Republican opposition has centered around a number of arguments. Let’s take a look at each of them.

We can’t afford such a massive expansion of the welfare state and the impact that would have on deficit spending.

Our rapidly exploding deficits are a big issue we seem to have recently forgotten about.

But blowing up the deficit over health care didn’t bother Congressional Republicans in 2003 when they created the Medicare Part D drug benefit and didn’t pay for it adding $700 billion to the deficit over the following ten years . But that unpaid-for entitlement expansion helped a big Republican constituencyseniors.

Why Do Republicans Oppose Obamacare

Why Do Republicans Think Socialists Are Anti-Gun?

Patrizia Rizzo, SEO Reporter

11:10 ET, Nov 11 2020

Patrizia Rizzo, SEO Reporter

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REPUBLICANS have campaigned against Obamacare ever since it was signed into law in 2010.;

But with a change in presidency ahead, the Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including;key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

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Challenges Under The Affordable Care Act

Also known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010. The measure was an attempt by former President Obama to give every American access to affordable health insurance. At the time, 39 Democrats and 178 House Republicans voted against the ACA. The remaining 218 Democrats in the House voted for the ACA. The Senate passed the ACA with a 68-30 vote, with 68 Democrats and two Independents voting yea and 39 Republicans voting nay. The party-line vote exposed the ideological differences between the two sides on healthcare.

Despite widespread support among Democrats for the ACA, Obamacare has not lived up to some of its hype, and even those on the left agree that the law hasnt accomplished its full potential over the last seven years.

Here are some of the challenges that Obamacare faced:

Many Americans found it difficult to understand why the law required them to acquire insurance or face a fine. To further compound the problem, most people did not understand how the law imposed the fine. Plenty of taxpayers were surprised when they got charged an additional fee during tax time.

Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

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Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

There could not be a more radical divide between administrations than there is between these two. The Obama administration worked against almost insurmountable opposition from the GOP in order to pass the ACA. The Trump Administrations quest is to dismantle everything the Obama Administration has done. They even have court cases pending in order to do so.

Republicans Have A Health Plan Finally

The House Republican Study Committee has come out with a viable plan.

Getty

For the past ten years Republicans in Congress have been largely AWOL on health care.

If memory serves, there has never been a hearing to showcase the victims of Obamacare. Nor has there been a hearing to show how sensible reforms could make the lives of those victims better.

When it came to legislation, the GOP only had two ideas: either abolish Obamacare entirely or toss it to the states. Neither approach actually solved a health care problem. They just allowed Republicans in Washington to wash their hands of the issue and pass the problems along to someone else.

Until now.

The House Republican Study Committee has accepted the challenge and delivered. In a 68-page document, it identifies the worse problems in our health care system and shows how they can be solved.

The proposals are bold, impactful and easy to understand. Here is a quick summary.

Personal and portable health insurance. In an ideal world, if people like the insurance they get from an employer, they would be able to take it with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Under the Obama administration, this practice was not only illegal, employers who bought individually owned insurance for their employees faced huge fines.

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Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Despite what they say on television about protecting the most vulnerable, one by one the Republican senators are all getting in line behind Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. We don’t yet know who that is, but we can assume how he or she will vote on Obamacare.

People with pre-existing conditions like me are again terrified of losing our insurance, this time in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve lived through years of scary uncertainty and now months of sheltering in place. Enough is enough. We are all health care voters now. We’ll see whether our wavering senators are health care voters, too.

Laura Packard is a Denver-based health care advocate and cancer survivor. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions, co-chair of Health Care Voter, and runs the pharma accountability campaign for Hero Action Fund. Follow her on Twitter:

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Groups Opposing The American Health Care Act

Over 50 organizations oppose the proposed healthcare plan that will make Americans will pay more for less.;The list includes nurses, doctors, hospitals, teachers, churches, and more. You can see a few here:;

AARP: AARP opposes this legislation, as introduced, that would weaken Medicare, leaving the door open to a voucher program that shifts costs and risks to seniors.

Before people even reach retirement age, big insurance companies could be allowed to charge them an age tax that adds up to thousands of dollars more per year. Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions. This plan goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs.

On top of the hefty premium increase for consumers, big drug companies and other special interests get a sweetheart deal.

Finally, Medicaid cuts could impact people of all ages and put at risk the health and safety of 17.4 million children and adults with disabilities and seniors by eliminating much-needed services that allow individuals to live independently in their homes and communities. Although no one believes the current health care system is perfect, this harmful legislation would make health care less secure and less affordable.

AARP stands ready to work with both parties on legislation that puts Americans first, not the special interests.

That just wont do.

That is, above all, why physicians must be involved in this debate.

Universal Coverage Vs Market

What Virginia’s poorest citizens want from health care reform

Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACA’s “family glitch” by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.

But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .

Biden’s healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.

The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.

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Paging Cooler Heads Can We Meet Somewhere In The Middle Please

The solution to healthcare reform isnt easy, but it lies somewhere in the middle of these extreme ideologies. GOP leadership has been working on swaying members of its own party, but perhaps a different approach one that includes leftwing support would fare better in the long run. The ACA was passed without conservative support, and now, seven years later, the country is on the brink of a healthcare overhaul once more. Unless politicians work toward reaching middle ground, its unlikely that reform will be effective regardless of whos in charge.

Premium Subsidies And Affordability

The ACA’s premium subsidies were designed to keep health insurance affordable for people who buy their own coverage in the individual market. Premiums for individual market plans increased alarmingly in 2017 and 2018, although they were much more stable in 2019 and 2020, and rate changes for 2021 appear to be mostly modest. But premiums for people who aren’t eligible for premium subsidies can still amount to a substantial portion of their income.

The individual market is a very small segment of the population, however, and rate increases have been much more muted across the full population .

Democrats have proposed various strategies for making coverage and care affordable. Joe Biden’s healthcare proposal includes larger premium subsidies that would be based on the cost of a benchmark gold plan and based on having people pay only 8.5% of their income for that plan . Biden’s proposal would also eliminate the ACA’s income cap for premium subsidy eligibility and provide subsidies to anyone who would otherwise have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for a benchmark gold plan. This would eliminate the “subsidy cliff” that currently exists for some enrollees.

The 2020 Democratic Party platform calls for a “public option” health plan that would compete with private health insurance carriers in an effort to bring down prices, and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60.

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