#extract from with the yellow half-moon and blue star

[jt1674]

[mimik-u]

Gloves, Ch. 1

Summary: There's a reason that Yellow Diamond doesn't take off her gloves.

A/N: The other day, as a part of my 100-word drabble word series for SU, I fulfilled this prompt, which required me to question what might be beneath Yellow Diamond's gloves. The headcanon I came up with intrigued me, and inspiration to write a seven pt. fic was thus born. Between school and other creative projects, I'm not entirely sure that this one will get updated regularly, but I do have a fairly firm outline in mind, so I hope the wait between chapters won't be too long! Enjoy!

AO3 Link

“Blue?”

“... yes, Pink?”

Though the other Diamond barely looks up from her screen, Pink Diamond can tell that she’s listening from the way that her long chin slightly inclines in her direction.

Good.

Because she has an important question to ask.

Attention is hard won from the likes of Blue and Yellow Diamond, so even half-victories are still victories that have to be capitalized upon with immediacy. Pink lightly hops upwards from her own throne to the arm of Blue’s, floating downwards into an expectant sitting position, happily ignoring the fact that her elder flicks away her screen with a sigh that filters visibly through her nostrils. If Blue was really annoyed, then she’d just have her Pearl usher her to her chambers... but tellingly, the imperial command never quite comes.

Pink takes courage from this implicit sign and forges ahead in a rush of breathless words.

“Why does Yellow wear her gloves all the time?”

It’s an observation that has increasingly captured her attention as the years have marched on with seemingly zero deviation in pattern.

Yellow Diamond never removes her gloves.

Pink wears gloves, too, but they’re nothing like Yellow’s—so stiff and armor-like, as inflexible as their wearer. Plus, she pulls hers off from time to time so she can feel flowers on her fingertips… their soft, delicate petals... those spiny, fragile leaves. Yellow, in stark contrast, never goes anywhere without hers—even when she joins the Diamonds in the pool on extraction cycles, even when she retires to her chambers at the end of a long day. Exceptionless in most things, so intransigent and firm, it’s no great surprise that the elder Diamond adheres to her own chosen mold, but still…

Even Blue Diamond lowers her hooded veil.

Even White Diamond occasionally unpins her cape.

Blue frowns thoughtfully, subtle lines striking themselves beneath her eyes as she peers downwards at Pink. There’s a look of calculation in her gaze, a sense of measurement, as though she’s already weighing how much she can get away with not saying.

“Have you ever asked Yellow about them directly?”

Pink briefly considers lying, but then thinks better of it. While she might get away with an occasional white lie to Yellow, Blue and White are far more discerning in their judgment—White especially.

(Sometimes, she swears that the matriarch can read her mind.)

“... not really,” she bites her lip. “I just assumed it would be rude to ask a Gem about her appearance modifiers...”

“And so you settled upon asking another Gem about someone else’s appearance modifiers,” Blue observes, a certain wryness in the slight tilt of her lips.

“Something like that,” Pink confirms, not entirely abashed. “I just figured that you would know, and that would save me the trouble from having to pester Yellow about them.”

But Blue’s expression recoils to its former solemnity again as she immediately shakes her head, her hair shifting heavily with the movement.”

“Yes... please do not do that, Pink... not unless she brings it up... Yellow—“

But now it’s Blue’s turn to be hesitant; she doesn’t blush, not in the way that Pink blushes—so furiously, all of her emotions scribbled across her face—but her cheeks aren’t as coolly colored as before, taking on a tinge less like her hair and more like the facets of her gem.

“Yellow what?” Pink asks insistently, pressing her momentary advantage. As subtly as she can, she leans forward a little bit on her blue perch, like an organic avian preparing for flight. “Please, pretty please tell me, Blue. I won’t tell Yellow that you told.”

(Probably.)

(Likely.)

(It’s a tossup of probability, really.)

“You’re being facetious, Pink,” Blue admonishes quietly, glancing away. “This is a serious matter that deserves the utmost respect.”

And though Blue is almost always serious, Pink instinctively intuits that Blue has rarely been more serious than in this conversation, which had begun so innocently, with errant curiosity. When she faces Pink again, her expression has returned to its usual placid coolness, but her fingers are interlocked in her lap, woven into a rigid temple that bespeaks far more about her feelings on the situation than the studious coldness of her eyes.

Pink cowers beneath the weight of this silent gesture, leaning backwards on her makeshift seat.

“Sorry, Blue,” she mumbles shamefacedly and hopes that the apology is sufficient. She doesn’t want to go to her chambers for the rest of the cycle. It’s so rare that Blue allows her to accompany her for the day.

Thankfully, though, the other Diamond seems to accept her contrition as sincere, nodding slowly, the ice melting from her eyes in degrees.

Pink can’t help but wonder at these microscopic exchanges, so subtle but undoubtedly there—who knew that gloves could wring such excess of emotion in the nigh emotionless Blue Diamond?

“Yes, well,” she says, each word doled out carefully, with all the air of internal constraint, “I can give you the basics... but as for the rest, you’ll have to wait until Yellow is ready to tell you—if and when that ever is. She doesn’t like to dwell upon the matter... even with me... perhaps even especially with me...”

Blue trails off, an aching concern seemingly troubling her brow. Pink think she’s know why.  Of the four Diamonds, Blue and Yellow emerged from the same supernova some hundreds of thousand years ago, sharing atoms and stardust and precious intimacy in a way that has always made Pink feel a little lonely. They’re bound to each other by far more than simple affinity, tangled, intertwined, and enmeshed.

Naturally, any breach between them doesn’t settle right in Blue Diamond’s gem.

Pink forces herself to be patient, to allow the other Diamond to find her words again.

“But that is no matter,” she finally says—rather unconvincingly. “I know enough… I know how it began.”

“And how is that exactly?” 

Blue’s arctic gaze settles upon the younger Diamond again, and there’s sadness in her eyes, ancient and unfathomable depth. 

It strikes her suddenly, with all the force of blow, how much older than Pink that she is.

That they all are.

White and Yellow and Blue and all the very stars which surround Homeworld in their bright and intangible embrace.

“It begins as we Diamonds all do,” Blue whispers, reaching upwards to glance her fingers across her gem. “As entities with nearly infinite power, inexplicably constrained within the boundaries and volatilities of our emotions…”

Pink’s immediate confusion must show in her face because the other Diamond immediately clarifies, frowning softly.

“Which is to say, think about your own powers, Pink—how, at the height of your emotions, they can inadvertently manifest in strange ways…”

“Like, a few cycles ago”—Pink can’t help but smile—“when I accidentally made those pebbles come to life.”

She’d cried on a few decorative rocks—upset that she couldn’t accompany Yellow to her Jungle Moon colony—and within mere seconds, they were animated with life, growing arms and legs and expressive faces, clumsily moving around on her vanity, knocking things over. 

Now, they live in her chambers, parroting the words she says.

“Yes, precisely,” Blue nods approvingly, in that way she only does when Pink manages to get something right. “The general theory—according to White—is that when we Diamonds feel any strong degree of emotion, we generate those emotions into tangible consequences, whether we intend to or otherwise…”

Pink tilts her head curiously. It’s hard to imagine any of her three elders showing a “strong degree of emotion.” In their own ways, each of them—White, Yellow, and Blue—are so meticulous in their chosen facades, bearing their regality on their faces with a modicum of control that they often scold their most junior Diamond for lacking.

But Blue is perceptive in this front, too, her frown slowly shifting into the slightest, most incremental of smiles. 

“Constraining yourself, learning to manage your emotions, will come with time and age,” she promises gently. “But it is essential that you learn this lesson sooner rather than later because, well, there are some consequences of our feelings that we can rationally accept, and others…”

“Not so much?” Pink guesses astutely, beginning to have a burgeoning idea of what this entire story must be about.

“Aye,” Blue Diamond affirms with a measured nod of her head. “Aye… Yellow Diamond’s powers are electric, you know. When we were younger Diamonds… when we didn’t have all that much possession over ourselves and our emotions and everything in-between … she couldn’t touch anything without hurting it.”

The finality of the statement bruises the entirety of the throne room with its magnitude. Pink stares upwards at the other Diamond with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“What?”

“You must understand, Pink,” Blue returns emphatically, her voice strained beneath its own quiet urgency. “Yellow then was very much like she is now—stoic, temperamental, quick to action and reaction—but all of these qualities were amplified by her youth and relative impulsivity—and so she was nigh constantly creating her own energy. It pooled in her fingertips. It sparked in her eyes. It electrified her entire body. When she was frustrated, she could barely touch a screen without short-circuiting it. When she was furious, she could destabilize an entire court of innocent gems. Even when she was happy, joyous after conquest or battle or victory… she couldn’t even touch—“

But Blue Diamond stops short, her breath hitching.

It only takes her seconds to recover, to regain at least the semblance of composure across the smooth facets of her face, but Pink isn’t entirely naïve. 

She knows that the completion to that self-interrupted sentence must have been me.

“After one especially harrowing incident,” Blue continues, closing her eyes against what appears to be a painful memory, “she tasked a group of Bismuths to forge special gloves for her that would insulate her powers more efficiently. The gloves helped. Absolutely. She could lean her hand against a pillar and not char it to dust… and since then, of course, she has become more… practiced in tempering her emotions, so much so that I have a sneaking suspicion that the gloves are less functional than they are habitual… but still, she wears them…”

Blue doesn’t say anymore, but the implicit completion to her speech needs no articulation to be known.

And she’ll continue to wear them.

Forever.

For time immemorial.

Pink Diamond scarcely knows what to say, how to process this terrible truth, how to feel.

Silence presses upon the cavernous throne room like the weight of a palm sinking downwards and downwards still, and she can’t help but stare downwards at her own gloved hands, wondering if they, too, have the capacity for engendering such violence.

She hopes not.

Stars, how she prays.

“What was the turning point?” She dares to ask when the quietude gets to be too much, the invisible hand too oppressive.

And yet, her own voice is quiet.

Solemn.

Terribly afraid and equally curious.

The oxymoron twists the gem in her stomach. She half-wants to know and half-dreads the answer.

Thankfully, though—(disappointingly?)—Blue Diamond shakes her head firmly, her brow lowered sternly over her eyes.

“That is not my story to tell.”

[clownmeat242]

the big, brown beaded rosary above my grandparents’ bed

a big, bulky backpack full of my dads things

a stick used to pry mud

an apple that stayed very good after a long time

pink, purple, and blue lava lamps

a special yellow lava lamp

an angel baby statuette, lying down holding a moon

2 special, blue coral dolphin figurines, 4 dolphins, 2 dolphins each

a mood bracelet

blue bangles with colorful gemstones

a card id that was my dad’s death identification

a big, interconnected dmv online system with games

a nun’s headdress

various gummy candy

christmas light lawn deer decorations

photographs of my dad

a photograph of my grandpa with my two young cousins

a plastic bag full of yellow rice and shrimp

my dad’s eggs

the string across sierra’s window with our things hanging from it

american flag sunglasses

a brown cigar box

a silver elk creature with silver chains hanging from it

black swirls of death

these goggle-like glasses that would have parts that would pop off when trying to be fixed

a clear, dry glue stick

a bitten off, red ring pop that resembled a pacifier

a peppa pig baby phone toy

a baby book with blue writing and bees all around it, saying “the cross dressing” something

the blue can of axe spray from 2016

my grandpa’s computer

clear, star shaped boxes of blue slime with pink beads

carrot cake

the red ball toy with the cat in the hat on it, from my childhood

a bulky, purple, show poodle toy

an oval shaped virgin mary necklace with a golden crown

a bigger, heavier, circular, holographic necklace of mary, joseph and jesus, with a message about love

a halloween wall decoration of a group of people wearing pink with blank faces

little sims 4 ghost light decorations

fancy bathtubs with buckets to collect water from them

chocolate straws and wafers

a big hole in the sand that resembled one my dad used to dig

the aloe vera plant on grandma’s balcony

the beaded necklace i made with cheap walmart beads, with a part of the ohio bead necklace attached to it

a deep blue, circular pendant of mary and jesus

this virgin mary, religious box and a mary/joseph/jesus figurine

a note written to a teacher about “what my grandpa did to me”

the rose lamp in my room

my puppy angel container

my backpack, stolen by my grandpa

sierra and i’s black notebook

a big toy bear that was actually a real bear

buttered toast

incomplete clown outfits

contradicting black/white couches

metal rods shoved through little mind people holding them in place, dead together

gratuitous cupcakes with baby blue icing

a mix of games i created with a crash code, crashing into itself like a death game black hole

orange juice

my jar of piercings, while my earrings were all missing from my ears

a big grey fountain with a statue virgin mary in the middle of it

mary made of the same opaque glass as the light angel

a documentary about the women who lived in the pink virgin mary house, as well as a youth group

a map of a beach area where mary was born

a metal helmet with little wings

dark black scribble drawings in my old puppy notebook

a drawing about something having to do with protecting the precious innocence of a child

a meth pipe with meth in it

a magnifying glass

a green backpack that belonged to my different dream parents, full of old photographs

golden tooth/gums dog implants

silver paw print dog tag

yellow greyhound bus tickets from savannah, georgia to west virginia

dried chunk of ramen noodles

a handful of clear dog teeth

a bag of blood to drink

my red axe, that i bestowed upon an ally

the blue manatee towel from my childhood

a thing that looked like a bowling pin but it was a “clown drink” and spawned in random places

holographic religious picture in my wallet

alcohol bottles at the store to smash

my clover ring (it’s “lost”)

blue toy unicorns, severed doll heads, naked barbies

a big heart collage figurine thing that my aunt created for me, with a bible verse, a glued picture of me when i was a child on green sea glass, a framed heart photo of my little cousin, a crying fairy angel figurine on top, a candle, and a figurine of st. francis crying, kneeling. it was stuck together with this movable white glue so it would come apart, but it was together.

these book pages that could have paint extracted from them

drawers that could only be opened with passcode

chicken patties that were cooked over and over, dropped in the same places, and eaten

blue ice pops that appeared frozen but were liquid

lemon flavored chips

a letter with evil energy written to me, with thick, scribbly distressed black writing, that said “GET SOME HELP” with a $500 bill, and on the back more unintelligible crayon writing, with 2 names, zesh & halla, and a pumpkin drawing

a shining blue orb in the sky with a mermaid inside, floating down to my grandma’s balcony and created energy

my mom’s teenage ring

a big box of tools

reflective mirror glasses

a screen that “needed repairing”

a dress up game where you could turn a man’s head into the head of a gorilla

2 stacks of childhood photos that i gave to an undeserving person, to look through

an alternate instagram account of someone i knew in middle school where he was dead and it was his memory page

a candid photo of 3 people i knew in middle school

donny’s white truck that i messed up somehow by turning the wheels on gravel

a huge container full of yellow pacifiers

a piece of paper that someone wrote “angel” on

a pink key and a red key

a huge stack of hay that could kill people by rolling over them

the window of a pool supply store with blue art of angels ascending

money that looked like superman cards

a purple vape with a synthetic marijuana substance (paranoia, hallucinations) called axlaxl

a pink box with feminine personal effects

huge cardboard boxes of fruit, stacked on top of small beer boxes stacked on top of each other

a red toy soldier holding a bazooka (counterpart)

a rainbow jumprope stuck in the dirt attached to roots

a huge yellow goodyear semi truck

a small amount of weed in an old altoids can

my dad’s red box of drill bits

my old purple bike

classic bubble gum

my green converse that had something written on them like “cage the lamb”

my tragic clown statue that and had its porcelain coat turned inside out to be a rodeo vest

a white pair of boxers with burgers, fries and soda pops, and another pair over them, cut and snipped

a golden outdoor christmas display of the virgin mary, joseph and jesus

a gargantuan statue of the virgin mary looking down at the ground, wearing a light blue veil, towering over the church

a mermaid drawing on a whiteboard

a white sheet tied up with a black and pink easter egg inside that could put a fully grown human inside of it

pink, rose shaped bouncy ball that lit up, and once lit it wouldn’t ever stop lighting up, a pumpkin one too

food tickets that could get you rice drowned in vegetable water

orange frog displays in dirt

a designated frog hat that lets the people know who the leader is

“angel water” in green vials

aztec heads in the pool bathroom

huge dead roaches

a box of ham

a cat angel statue

2 cherubs made of clay, had water dumped on them and they melted

tall blue flip flops

a white friday the 13th lighter

a white “the shining” lighter that had “jack” written in blood on a hotel wall

an airline called “popair”

silver hanging nipple rings, a silver chain and half blue, half red pants

severed amusement park parts being taken away in a white van

a box of nails/screws, a big black box

bamboo trees

a big ball of chocolate

my skyrim dragon keychain

a drawing pad with 2 girls kissing

a faucet that soaked everything

a disgusting poem written by my grandpa “lathered in water, a son and a daughter, how exquisite”

a red squishy bear toy

[spottedlekkudancer]

Lady of the Stars Part One - Contact

@paytonita @tranquility-or-chaos @inumorph 

THIS IS A SW/Witcher CROSSOVER. 

Geralt x Jedi!Reader

2.8K words

Originally planed on having 2 or 3 parts to this story but apparently I have diarrhea of the mouth and moved the plot too slow. So get ready to be strapped in for at least 4 if not 5 self indulgent parts. And feel free to send me all the questions you like. 

Warnings: Adult language, mentions of death, violence, and other adult themes.

By whim or by destiny light catches your attention though fluttering lashes. It kisses your cheek with warmth and the subtleness of a gentle dawn. After a moment the fog of sleep sheds from your brain. You adjust. The orange glow crackles at your nose and you realize that you are in more peril than the lingering caress of your dreams led you to believe. The pilot’s dash in front of you is consumed with flame.

“Crinking Hell! Dol'bfai!” You smack the Weequay to your right in an attempt to get his attention, but your hand meets nothing but the padding of your co-pilot’s chair. Heart dropping to your gut you look about the cockpit of your HWK-290. The leathery skinned man was in a broken bloody heap on the floor behind you. You might have felt bad if he wasn’t such E-chu-ta each and every day. If fact you couldn’t help but scold him mentally for not wearing his seat straps. “So much for ‘the experienced never falter’ line, Chuggnut.” You grunted, ejecting yourself from your own buckles to take care of the more pressing matter. 

You leaned over the Weequay smuggler’s body to get to the extinguishing hose and with a little effort you salvaged what was left of your controls. Outside your ship was another wreck all together. Fires were smoldering at every corner of your limited view from inside. You had half a mind to run out immediately, but thought better of it. If your ship was going to blow up it would have done so already you told yourself in a comforting manner. Sending your droids for damage control was the safer option on foreign planets. However, you couldn’t stay put forever. The damages weren’t going to evaluate themselves, moreover, the body of your partner needed to be dragged out before he started to stink. By the looks of things the atmosphere had to be breathable. Most planets with such green life gave off suitable levels of oxygen for humans. Whatever the case, you would have to risk it; your employer refused to provided vacuum suits or travel tanks. Too costly.

You were use to the miserly ways of the former pirate leader Hondo Ohnaka. You had been working with his smuggling cover company for half a decade now: ever since you ran from the Jedi training academy, or rather, Ben Solo. You didn’t know Solo to be a liar, in fact he had treated you like a little sister for all the years you had grown together, but when he told you and the others how Luke had turned on him you were too confused to chose between the two of them. Luke was your master, and Ben your friend. The force whispered something to you then. A soft encouragement to leave everything. You chose to listen; to not pick sides at all, and made a new life for yourself under an identity the Weequay stole for you. 

Once free of your hot metal cage it was clear that things were not as horrible as you imagined. You were safe from any fuel combustion’s or reactor leaks. The two DUM-series pit droids were clumsily scurrying about trying to put out the fire that was inching ever closer to your turret. It was also evident from the back that only one of Pathfinder’s two hyper-drive systems had taken on some heavy laser canon damage. Looked like the shielding component was scored too, but that wasn’t a necessity for getting back in the air.

“The kriff happen?” you weren’t fully talking to anyone, not even yourself. You had a vague memory of being cornered by Absolution, a First Order R-SD, and their TIE fighters on your way to a high bye delivery. But how, moreover where, you crash landed was still a mystery. You tapped the remote on your wrist. A projection fizzed in and out of view with vertical blue static. You must have knocked it out of order in the crash. Now you had no way of knowing what planet you were on or what it’s population consisted of.

“O-T!” The droid with the painted yellow stripe above his singular oculus ambled in your direction. “Once you get this mess under controls see if our Nav is still in tact. The job is a sham but we might be able to at least back track to base. I’ll go scout out the area for any nearby scarp yards. We aren’t getting off this durkload of a planet in this condition, that’s for damn sure.” O-T nodded and whistled a question in response. “Don’t know. Com link is out and I’m not able to check for life forms. If anything happens just lock yourselves in the ship 'til I get back.” You didn’t wait for the little droid to argue with you more as he usually would. It wasn’t likely you would be getting an extraction from Ohnaka Transport Solutions this close to First Order territory anyway. You were on your own.

You traveled 500 paces from your ship in each cardinal direction before you came to something of interest. Flowing SE to S was a small river bed. With noting more than a seemingly endless forest as your surrounding it was your best bet to finding civilization. For another hour you saunter down the unbeaten path until you felt night approaching. There was already little light beneath the canopy and you didn’t have the eyes of a cat, so with your wits and strength still about you you turned back. The rusted roof of your Corellian light freighter would have to suffice for the night.

The cacophonous sounds of shrieking and the boisterous gargling of goose like honks was your first indication that something was awry near your ship. The closer you got the more defining the racket became. Whatever the creature was, and you were sure it was some kind of animal, had to have a massive pair of lungs on it. 

With much disappointment you found your analysis to be correct. Thought the brush you could see some kind giant blue feathered lizard-bird striking at your dead co-pilot’s flesh. You cursed yourself for not burring the poor man right away, and true to your command your pit droids had barricaded them selves inside your transport. 

“Mother of …” You sighed to yourself. Your Jedi teachings told you to let the beast be, however, just hiding behind a tree all night while it desecrated the Weequay’s body didn’t feel right to you. Regardless you held yourself back from attacking the thing. It was just trying to survive after all, and if you didn’t have to get into a fight you didn’t want to. You were already stranded. Adding injury to that would not be wise. 

When morning came the feathered brute had not yet left; roosting atop your ship like it had always belonged there. 

Well if the giant critter wanted it, he could have it. In your groggy state you had little patience and didn’t want to be bothered with defending what you didn’t currently posses. You had everything you needed: canteen, provisions in your belt pouch, republic credits, and of course your trusty light-saber. Once you got what you wanted from the scrap shop you would deal with the overgrown pidgin.

“You’re alive.”

The voice of your pursuer was clear. This wasn’t part of your imagination. The force had bonded you and Solo again. “Careful Ren, you almost sound relived.”

Kylo scoffed. “Surprised is more likely." 

You stood and turned around. Were there was once endless forest now stood the masked Dark Jedi you both dreaded and longed to see. "How is it you keep your standards for me so low when I’ve evaded your every move." 

"I wouldn’t call narrowly escaping with your life an 'evasion’.” Gloved hands ringed rightly around themselves. Anger or worry built like a tumultuous storm inside of him: you couldn’t tell which. “How did you manage that Jump?”

“Jump?” The query slipped though your lips too quickly.

“Don’t remember? Maybe your not as well of as you look” Kylo straightened with pride. You were sure he was gloating to himself on his small victory. “My Knights had you cornered at the edge of a nebula. With no larger ship close enough to tractor you in I gave the order to immobilize you.”

“Why not just kill me?" 

It was an abrupt interruption that went unanswered. Kylo waited for you to calm yourself before continuing. Even now as a villainous "dark lord” he was patient with you. “We took out your Hyperdrive, Y/N. That jump should have been impossible.”

It was coming back to you now. You had prosperously led the TIEs to the cloud of gas and dust. You planed to enter into it blind and use the force as your guide. You figured the lot you were running from wouldn’t dare try to fallow. Instead your ship started to shake and spark as it tried desperately to hold against the onslaught. You panicked. You didn’t even complete the calculations before you pushed your freighter to enter hyperspace. You could have died. You could have been thrust into a star or another mass and exploded into dust.

Your stomach tightened. Dol'bfai was dead because of your rash behavior. He was in the middle of un-tethering a knot in his seat straps when you made that decision. You pulled out of it almost immediately, giving your best attempt at the “skipping” the other smuggler pilots did so often, but it was too late. You were entering the atmosphere of another moon or planet. There was not time to pull up, and you crashed.

If Kylo saw the tear you shed just then he didn’t bother to comment on it. “If you were with those goons of yours you could have planned better for that. You know as well as your father that every standard HAWK series come with two hyperdrives." 

You could have sworn you heard Kylo curse from beneath his helmet. His breathing was expeditious and heavy now; you cold feel his fury swarming in the force around you. 

"Cookie points to you if you are able to find me this time Ren. Even I don’t know where I am.” You teased rather lightheartedly.

This only pushed his buttons more. He gestured to you pointedly. “Oh don’t worry about that. I’ll bring you in myself if I have to.”

And with that your force connection faded. The experience left you feeling diminished and torn. Your past kept endangering the people around you. With a heaving breath and shaking knees you looked ahead to the southern half of the forest. You could dwell on these events all day if you’d like, but it would just be a waist of time. You needed to set your pity party aside and focus on getting off this planet before he really did find you. 

~~~ Two days had passed and you thanked the force that not one of them brought you any sign of the First Order. Your only gripe was that the town you had found proved your worst nightmares had come true. This planet was primitive. The citizens here weren’t even literate, moreover, building any sort of machinery. You were shit out of luck, money, and a plan.

  Was this punishment? You thought it might be far more often than you would like to admit. The force had never led you so astray before. What kind of design could it have for you now?

Your credits weren’t worth anything here but one tavern keeper in this shit stained town you did take a fancy to your Heart of Beskar necklace. You debated for a long while if you should give it to him in exchange for a few hot meals and a bed. It was the only thing you had to remember your birth family of after all. But after a particularly stormy night you didn’t have choice any longer. Not unless you wanted to freeze to death. It was hard to let go, but not as hard as it was each day that passed knowing your parents let you be raised by a stranger. 

Sure becoming a Jedi was a noble cause to enlist your child into, but unlike so many of your piers you did not ever go back home to your parents. Ben and the others always got to see their loved ones for a few weeks every so often, and yet you were kept locked away on the training camp with Luke year round. When asked Luke assured you that your parents were still alive; he even gave you their names and home planet. Even now after having found their old home and poppers grave you didn’t understand.

So to the inn keep you gifted your father’s old armor piece, and two nights stay was what he offered you in return. Not a fair trade by any means, however, how exactly were you supposed to explain the galactic value of Beskar to these simple people? 

A man dressed in bright colors played a 15 stringed instrument in the corner of the tavern. He was merry and boisterous; entertaining at the vary least. You pitied that the crowd this morning was not taking well to him. Half of them were hung over, the other half looked mean and dirty enough to scare a Dewback.

The Musician caught you staring at him. A smile brighter than the three suns of Helioss graced his features. You cringed internally and returned his gesture with a timid one of your own. Silently you prayed he wouldn’t goat you into some volunteer sing-song delights so publicly.  

The Man’s strut was so vaunt it had every patron staring at him as he made his way though the tables to presumably talk to you. You shrunk a little in your seat, not wanting this kind of attention. You had already drawn enough as it was with how oddly you were dressed; you didn’t need any more. He plopped down opposite you at the table. 

“So! How come the only person in this shit stick interested in my song is a pretty young woman like you?” He gave you almost no room to think of an answer before continuing his self serenade. “If it’s my corky charm or boyish good looks please don’t keep me waiting in sufferance to hear those sweet words leave your lips.” The line could have been considered smooth to some, however, the awkward and eager demeanor he carried was a little too much. You could see how it was putting off the rest of the room. 

The only response you had to offer was a perplexed smile. 

He rested his chin in the palm of his upturned hand. “Come on!” He whined enthusiastically. “Care to comment on the quality of my performance? I do love getting reviews from the public.”

You sighed though your nose and fiddled with the food in front of your. “Yes, well… I suppose we all yearn for validation. Don’t we?”

It was the bard’s turn to bewildered. He sat up stat tall in his bench now, brows furrowed, taking a briefer moment to ponder. “What’s your name?”

Your head tilted. “Where I’m from it’s rude to ask for someone’s name without offering your own first.” It was a plane way of throwing his question back at him; you weren’t looking to get overly acquainted with anyone if you could avoid it.  

“Oh!” He was beaming excitedly again. “Where is it you are from?!" 

You gave him an unblinking stare for what felt like a medium sized eternity. Clearly he was not accustom to taking non verbal ques. You decided to just give in to his delicate personality. "Florrum.”

“Ahh.” He nodded in a knowing matter. “Beautiful country.”

“Right.” He was pulling Bantha wool over your eyes in an attempt to impress you. It was arguably charming. 

“Where is that exactly? From here I mean.” The bard laughed nervously as he knocked his head playfully. “I get so turned around while mindlessly fallowing my muse on his travels.”

“Your Muse?” It was time to change the subject. 

“Oh hohoho! He is a man of Destiny, Heroics, and Heart Brake.” The man practically jumped out of his seat and with one leg propped up onto the bench he swung his instrument back front side. “Shall I play you a song about him?”

Head half in your hands you nodded. Your bashful nature told you you would regret this, but you didn’t have the heart to say no. 

He was taking his first heaving breath before starting to strum when another interrupted the musician, yanking him back by the shoulder. “Jaskier. We’re leaving.” The new man was hulking and clad in black studded leathers, with eyes of gold. He wasn’t old, but his hair was as silver as his blades. A striking appearance. Perhaps humans weren’t the only sentient species on this forsaken planet.

[papermoonloveslucy]

LOOK! TV: TURN ON OR TURN OFF?

September 7, 1971

The September 7, 1971 issue of LOOK Magazine (volume 35, number 18) dedicated their entire issue to the medium of television. Inside, there is a feature titled “Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist on page 54. 

The photograph on the cover is slightly distorted to give it the look of an image through a TV screen.  The shot was taken by Douglas Bergquist in January 1971. 

The issue presents a variety of viewpoints about the state of television. Is it ‘tired’ or is there an infusion of new energy to take it into the new decade? John Kronenberger writes an article that asks if cable television is the future. Hindsight tells us that it was not only the future, but is now the past. 

“Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist. 

Bergquist first interviewed Lucille Ball in 1956 for the Christmas issue of Look. 

The photograph is by Douglas Kirkland, a Canadian-born photographer, who not coincidentally, also took the photograph used on the cover. This shot was taken in the garden of Ball’s home in June 1971.  At age 24, Kirkland was hired as a staff photographer for Look magazine and became famous for his 1961 photos of Marilyn Monroe taken for Look's 25th anniversary issue. He later joined the staff of Life magazine.

Bergquist launches the article talking about her friend Sally, who is besot with watching Lucille Ball reruns, preferring Lucy over the news. Under the headline, she sums up the purpose of her interview: “Sorry, Sally. But Lucy is a serious, unfunny lady. So how come she’s a top clown of the fickle tube for twenty years, seen at home 11 times weekly and in 77 countries?”  

LUCILLE BALL: THE STAR THAT NEVER SETS...

(Lucille Ball’s quotes are in BOLD. Footnote numbers are in parentheses.)

My neighbor Sally, nine, turns out to be a real Lucy freak. Though she likes vintage-house-wife I Love Lucy best, she'll watch Lucille Ball 11 times a week, if permitted. That's how often Madame Comedy Champ of the Tube, come 20 years this October, can be caught on my local box. Ten reruns, plus the current Here's Lucy on Monday night, CBS prime time. Friends, that's 330 weekly minutes of Lucy, which should be rank overexposure. Did you know that even the U.S. man-on-the-moon walkers slipped in ratings, second time around?

Quel mystery. Variety last fall announced that old-fashioned sitcoms and broad slapstick comedy are passé, given today's hip audiences. With one big exception - Lucy. When the third Lucy format went on in '68, reincarnating Miss Ball as a widowed secretary (with her real-life son, Desi Jr., now 18, and Lucie Jr., 20), Women's Wear Daily said not only were the kids no talent, but the show was "treacle." "One giant marshmallow," quoth the Hollywood Reporter, "impeccably professional, violence-free, non-controversial . . . 100% escapism." 

Miss Ball: "Listen, that's a good review. I usually get OK personal notices, but the show gets knocked regular."

So why does Sally, like all the kids on my block, love slapstick, non-relevant Lucy? "Because she's always scheming and getting into trouble like I do, and then wriggling her way out of it." A 44-year-old Long Island housewife: "Of course I watch. I should watch the news?" When the British Royal Family finally unbent for a TV documentary, what was the tribe watching come box-time? Lucy, over protests from Prince Philip. (1)

"I've been a baby-sitter for three generations," says Miss Ball briskly. "Kids watch me during the day [she outpulls most kiddy shows]. Women and older men at night. Teen-agers, no. They look at Mod Squad. Intellectuals, they read books or listen to records.... You know I even get fan mail from China?" MAINLAND CHINA? "Hong Kong, isn't that China?" No. "Where is it anyway?"

The Statistics on the Lucy Industry are numbing. In recent years, she has run in 77 countries abroad, including the rich sheikhdom of Kuwait, and Japan, where, dubbed in Japanese yet, she's been a long-distance runner for 12 years. Where are all those funny people of yesteryear - Jackie Gleason, the Smothers Brothers, Sid Caesar, the Beverly Hillbillies - old reliables like Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton? Gone, all gone, form the live tube - except for reruns dumped by sponsors, out of fashion, murdered in the ratings.

Even this interview is a rerun. Fifteen years ago, I sat in Miss Ball's old-timey movie-star mansion in Beverly Hills, wondering how much longer, oh Lord, could Lucy last? She has a different husband, a genial stand-up comic of the fast-gag Milton Berle school, Bronx-born Gary Morton, 49. He replaced Desi Arnaz, her volatile Cuban spouse (and costar and partner) of 20 years, who lives quietly in Mexico's Baja California, alongside a pool shaped like a guitar, with a second redhead wife. "Ever been here before?" asks Gary, now her executive producer, who's brightened the house decor. "Used to be funeral-parlor gray, right?"

Otherwise, the lady, like her show, seems preserved in amber. Though newly 60, she could be Sally's great-grandmother. Of a Saturday, she's unwinding from a murderous four-day workweek. Her pink-orange-fireball hair is up in rollers. Her black-and-blue Rolls-Royce, inherited from her friend, the late Hedda Hopper, is parked in the driveway. But in attitude and opinion, she comes across Madame Middle America, despite the shrewd show-biz exterior. Good egg. Believer in hard work, discipline, Norman Vincent Peale. Deadeye Dickstraight, she talks astonishingly unfunny - about Vietnam, Women's Lib, about which she feels dimly, marriage to Latins, books she toted up to her new condominium hideaway in Snowmass, Colo. "Snow" is her new-old passion, a throwback to her small-town Eastern childhood. For the first time in family memory, this lifelong workhorse actually relaxed in that 9,700-foot altitude for four months this year, learning to ski, reading Pepys, Thoreau, Shirley MacLaine's autobiography, "37 goddamned scripts, and all those Irvings" (Stone, Wallace, etc.). She had scouted for a mountain retreat far away from any gambling. Why? Is she against gambling? "No, I'm a sucker. I can't stay away from the tables."

From yellowing notes, I reel off an analysis by an early scriptwriter. Perhaps she comes by her comic genius because of some "early maladjustment in life, so you see commonplace things as unusual? To get even, to cover the hurt, you play back the unhappy as funny?"

Forget any deep-dish theorizing. "Listen, honey," says Miss B, drilling me with those big blue peepers, "you've been talking to me for four, five hours. Have you heard me say anything funny? I tell you I don't think funny. That's the difference between a wit and a comedian. My daughter Lucie thinks funny. So does Steve Allen, Buddy Hackett, Betty Grable."

BETTY GRABLE THINKS FUNNY? "Yeah. Dean Martin has a curly mind. oh, I can tell a funny story about something that happened to me. But I'm more of a hardworking hack with an instinct for timing, who knows the mechanics of comedy. I picked it up by osmosis, on radio and movie lots [she made 75 flicks] working with Bob Hope, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges - didn't learn a thing from them except when to duck. Buster Keaton taught me about props. OK, I'm waiting."

Well, I hedge, I caught Miss Ball in a few funny capers on the Universal lot this week. Like one day, in her star bungalow, she throws a quick-energy lunch in the blender - four almonds, wild honey, water, six-year-old Korean ginseng roots, plus her own medicine, liver extract. "AAAGH," she gags, then peers in the mirror at her hair, which is a normal working fright wig, "Gawd," she moans, "it looks as if I'd poked my finger into an electric-light socket!" No boffo line, but her pantomimed horror makes me laugh out loud. Working, she is fearless - dangling from high wires, coping with wild beasts. She talks of animals she's worked with, chimps, bears, lions, tigers. "I love 'em all, especially the chimps, but you can't trust their fright or panic. Like that baby elephant who gave a press job to a guest actress." (2) What's a press job? "Honey, once an elephant puts his head down, he keeps marching, right through walls." Miss Ball puts her own head down, crooks an arm for a trunk, and voila, is an elephant. Funny as hell. So off-camera she's no great wit, but then is Chaplin?

Four days a week, through the Thursday night filming before a live audience, she labors like some hungry Depression starlet. Monday a.m., she sits at the head of a conference table, lined by 12 staffers, editing the script. Madame Executive Tycoon in charge of everything, overseeing things Desi used to do. Also the haus-frau, constantly opening windows for fresh air and emptying ashtrays. She wears black horn-rims, three packs of ciggies are at the ready. "Do I have to ask for a raise again?" she impatiently drills the writers, "I've done that 400 times." "QUIET!" she yells during rehearsal, perching in a high director's chair, a la Cecil B. DeMille. "Isn't somebody around here supposed to yell quiet?" She frets about the new set. "Those aisles - they're a mile and a half wide. What for?" The audience is too far away, she won't get the feedback from their laughs are her life's blood. (Once I hear Gary Morton on the phone, in his British-antiqued executive office, saying: "We need your laugh, honey. Go down to the set and laugh; that's an order.")

That physical quality about her comedy, a la the old silent movies or vaudeville - which were the big amusements of her youth - seems to transcend any language. (A Moscow acting school, I was told, shows old Lucy clips as lessons in comic timing.) So what did she learn from that great Buster Keaton?

"At Metro, I kept being held back by show-girl-glamour typing. I always wanted to do comedy. Buster Keaton, a friend of director Eddy Sedgwick, spotted something in me when I was doing a movie called DuBarry - what the hell was the name? - and kept nagging the moguls about what I could do. Now a great forte of mine is props. He taught me all about 'em. Attention to detail, that's all it is. He was around when I went out on a vaudeville tour with Desi with a loaded prop." What's that? "Real Rube Goldberg stuff. A cello loaded with the whole act - a seat to perch on, a violin bow, a plunger, a whistle, a horn. Honey, if you noodge it, you've lost the act. Keaton taught me your prop is your jewel case. Never entrust it to a stagehand. Never let it out of your sight when you travel, rehearse with it all week." Ever noodge it? "Gawd, yes. Happened at the old Roxy in New York. I was supposed to run down that seven-mile aisle when some maniac sprang my prop by leaping out and yelling 'I'm that woman's mother! She's letting me starve.'" What did you do? "Ad-libbed it, and I am one lousy ad-libber."

After 20 years, isn't she weary of playing the Lucy character? "No, I'm a rooter, I look for ruts. My cousin Cleo [now producer of Here's Lucy] is always prodding me to move. She once said Lucy was my security blanket. Maybe. I'm not erudite in any way, like Cleo. But why should I change? Last year was big TV relevant year, and I made sure my show wasn't relevant. Lucy deals in fundamental, everyday things exaggerated, with a happy ending. She has a basic childishness that hopefully most of us never lose. That's why she cries a lot like a kid - the WAAH act - instead of getting drunk."

Aha! Is Lucy the guileful child-woman, conniving forever against male authority - whether husband or nagging boss - particularly FEMALE? ("None of us watch the show," sniffed a Women's Libber I know, "but she must be an Aunt Tom." Still, I ponder, hasn't that always been the essence of comedy, the little poor-soul man - or woman - up against the biggies?)

"I certainly hope so. You trying to con me into talking about Women's Lib? I don't know the meaning of it. I never had anything to squawk about. I don't know what they're asking for that I don't have already. Equal pay for equal work, that's OK. The suffragettes rightly pressed a hard case - and when roles like Carry Nation come along, they ask me to play them, perhaps because I have the physical vitality. But they're kind of a laughingstock, aren't they? Like that girl who gave her parents 40 whacks with an ax? Didn't Carry Nation ax things, was she a Prohibitionist or what?" (3)

She'd just said nix to playing Sabina, in the movie of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Why? "I didn't understand it." She turned down The Manchurian Candidate for the same reason. "Got that Oh Dad, Poor Dad script the same week and thought I'd gone loony." If she makes another movie, she'll play Lillian Russell in Diamond Jim with Jackie Gleason, "a nice, nostalgic courtship story that won't tax anyone's nerves." (4) 

Is Miss Ball warmed by the comeback of old stars in non-taxing Broadway nostalgia shows like No, No, Nanette? (5)

"Listen, I studied that audience. I saw people in their 60's and 70's enjoying themselves. That had to be nostalgia. The 30's and 40's smiled indulgently, that Ruby Keeler is up there on the stage alive, not dead. For the below 30's, it's pure camp. I don't put it down, but it’s not warm, working nostalgia, but the feeling 'Ye gods, anything but today'

"Maybe I'm more concerned about things that I realize. I told you politics is definitely not on my agenda - I got burned bad, back in the '40's signing a damned petition as a favor. (6) Just say the word 'politician,' and I think of chicanery. Too many subversive angles today. But I must be one of millions who are so fed up, depressed, sobbing inside, about the news...the atrocities, the dead, the running down of America. You can't obliterate the news, but the baddest dream is that you feels so helpless.

"I was sitting in this very chair one night, flipping the dial, and came to Combat! There were soldiers crouching in bushes, a helicopter hovering overhead. Nothing happening, so I make like a director, yelling, 'Move it! This take is too LONG!' It turned out to be a news show from Vietnam. That shook me. There I was criticizing the director, and real blood was dripping off my screen... That drug scene bugs me. It's ridiculous, self-indulgent. We're supposed to be grateful if the kids aren't on drugs. They're destroying us from within, getting at our youth in the colleges. OK, kids have to protest, but how can they accomplish anything if they're physically shot?

"One of the reasons I'm still working is that people seem grateful that Lucy is there, the same character and unchanging view. There's so much chaos in this world, that's important. Many people, not only shut-ins, depend on the tube, too much so - they look for favorites they can count on. Older people loved Lawrence Welk. They associated his music with their youth. Now he's gone. It's not fair. (7) They shouldn't have taken off those bucolic comedies; that left a big dent in some folks' lives. Maybe we're not getting messages anymore from the clergy, the politicians, so TV does the preaching. But as an entertainer, I don't believe in messages.

"Some Mr. Jones is always asking why am I still working - as if it were some crime or neurotic. OK, I'll say it's for my kids. But I like a routine life, I like to work. I come from an old New England family in which everyone worked. My grandparents were homesteaders in New York and Ohio. My mother worked all her life - during the Depression in a factory."

What does she think of the new "relevant" comedy like All in the Family? "I don't know... It's good to bring prejudice out in the open. People do think that way, but why glorify it? Those not necessarily young may not catch the moral. That show doesn't go full circle for me."

Full circle?

"You have to suffer a little when you do wrong. That prejudiced character doesn't pay a penance. Does he ever reverse a feeling? I'm for believability, but I'm tired of hearing 'pig,' 'wop,' 'Polack' said unkindly. Me, I have to have an on-the-nose moral. Years ago, the Romans let humans be eaten by lions, while they laughed and drank - that was entertainment. But I’m tired of the ugly. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, that's my idea of entertainment. Anything Richard Burton does is heaven. Easy Rider scared me at first because I knew how it could influence kids. But at least that movie came full circle. They led a life of nothing and they got nothing. Doris Day, I believe in her. Elaine May? A kook, but a great talent. Barbra Streisand? A brilliant technician."

On her old ten-minute daily interview radio show, (8) she once asked Barbra, like any star-struck civilian: How does it feel to be only 21, a big recording artist and star of the Broadway hit Funny Girl? "Not much," said Barbra. "That cool really flustered Lucille. It violated everything she believes in," says cousin Cleo Smith, who grew up with Miss B in small-town Celoron, N.Y. "For her, nothing ever came easy. She didn't marry until she was 30, or become a really big star until she was 40. She's still so hard on herself, sets such rigorous standards for herself as an actress and parent. She honestly believes in all the old maxims, that a stitch in time saves nine, etc. She's literal-minded, a bit like Scarlett O'Hara. Does what needs doing today, and to hell with tomorrow."

Her self-made wealth a few years ago was reckoned at $50 to $100 million. After her divorce, she reluctantly took over the presidency of the Desilu studio and sold it six years later to the conglomerate Gulf & Western for nearly $18 million. Does that make her the biggest lady tycoon in Hollywood? (The 179 original I Love Lucy reruns now belong, incidentally, to a CBS syndicate; her second Lucy Show, to Paramount. She owns only the current Here's Lucy - OK, go that straight?)

"Hah! Like Sinatra, I owe about three and a half million bucks all the time. That figure is ridiculous. All my money is working. I lost a helluva lot in the stock market last year and haven't recouped it. It's an illusion that people in show biz are really rich. The really filthy rich are the little old ladies in Boston, the old folks in Pasadena, who've had dough for years and haven't been seen since."

The divorce from Desi Arnaz can still set her brooding. "It was the worst period of my life. I really hit the bottom of despair - anything form there on had to be up. Neither Desi nor I has been the same since, physically or mentally, though we're very friendly, ridiculously so. Nobody knows how hard I tried to make that marriage work, thinking all the trouble must be my fault. I did everything I could to right that ship, trotting to psychiatrists. I hate failure, and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes... Anything in excess drives me crazy. He'd build a home anyplace he was, and then never be around to enjoy it. I was so idealistic, I thought that with two beautiful babies, and a beautiful business, what more could any man want? Freedom, he said, but he had that. People don't know what a job he did building that Desilu empire, what a great director and brilliant executive he was yet he let it all go....Maybe Latins have an instinct for self-destruction..."

Was that the conflict, a Latin temperament married to an old-fashioned American female? "It has a helluva lot to do with getting into it and getting out. The charm. But they keep up a big facade and don't follow through. No, the machismo didn't bother me, I like to play games too.

"Desi and I had made an agreement that if either of us wanted to pull out of Desilu, the other could buy. I wanted to go to Switzerland with the kids, anywhere to run away, but he wanted out. The I found out that for five years, our empire had taken a nose dive, and if I wanted to get my money back, I had to rebuild it first. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely terrified - I'd never run any show or a big studio. When I came back from doing the musical Wildcat on Broadway, I was so sick, so beat, I just sat in that backyard, numb, for a year. I'd had pneumonia, mononucleosis, staph, osteomyletis. Lost 22 pounds. Friends told me the best thing I could do physically, psychologically, was go back to work, but could I revive Lucy without Desi, my old writers, the old crew?"

You didn't like being a woman executive? "I hated it. I used to cry so much - and I'm not a crier - because I had to let someone go or make decisions I didn't understand. There were always two sides to every question, and trouble was I could see both sides. No one realizes how run-down Desilu was. The finks and sycophants making $70,000 a year, they were easy to clean out. Then during the CBS Jim Aubrey regime, I couldn't sell the new pilots we made - Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Ethel Merman. I couldn't sell anything but me." (9)

Was it tough to be a woman bossing men? "Yeah. It puts men in a bad spot. I could read their minds, unfortunately, wondering who is this female making this decision, not realizing that maybe I'd consulted six experts first. I'm all wrong as an executive, I feel out of place. I have too many antennae out, I'm too easily hurt and intimidated. But I can make quick surgical incisions. I've learned that much about authority - give people enough rope to hand themselves, stand back, let them work, but warm them first. Creative people you have to give special leeway to, and often it doesn't pay off. Me, I'm workative, not creative. I can fix - what I call 'naturalize.' I'm a good editor, I can naturalize dialogue, find an easier way to do a show mechanically.

But I didn't make the same marriage mistake twice. Gary digs what my life is, why I have to work. We have tranquility. We want the same things, take care of what we have."

She shows me Gary's dressing room, closets hung with shirts and jackets - by the dozen. "My husband is a clothes and car nut, but it's a harmless vice. Better than booze or chasing women, right?" (His cars include a 1927 Model T Ford, a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, an Astin Martin, a Rolls-Royce convertible.)

"Anyone married to me has an uphill climb. Gary and I coped by anticipating. We knew we should be separated eight, nine months a year, so he tapered off his act, found other thing to do - making investments, building things. He plays the golf circuit, Palm Springs, Pebble Beach, and tolerantly lets me stay at Snowmass for weeks. Sun just doesn't agree with me. He didn't come into the business for five years. I didn't want to put him in a position in which he would be ridiculed. I could tell that he was grasping things - casting, story line. I said, 'You've been a big help to me. You should be paid for it.' "

On a Friday night, I dine with the Mortons. Dinner is served around 6:30, just like in my Midwest hometown. Lucille is still fretting about this week's show - "over-rehearsed; because there were so many props, the fun had gone out of it." Gary, just home from unwinding his own way - golfing with Milton Berle, Joey Bishop - asks if I'd like something to drink with dinner? Coke or ginger ale? "No? I think we have wine." No high living in this house, but the spareribs are superb. "Laura asked me an interesting question," he tells his wife. "Like isn't there a conflict when a husband in the same business - comedy - marries a superstar? I told her I'd never thought of it before."

They met the summer when Lucille was rehearsing Wildcat, and he was a stand-up comic at Radio City Music Hall, seven days a week. "We both came up the hard way," he says. "I got started in World War II, clowning for USO shows. I've been in show biz for 30 years and can appreciate what she goes through. Lucy can't run company by herself. Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there. She's a thoroughbred, very honest with me, a friend to whom I can talk about anything. She never leaves me out of her life; that's important for a man. Do you know how many bets were lost about our marriage lasting? It's been nearly ten years now, and I've slept on the couch only once."

Past dinner, we adjourn promptly to the living room, and a private showing of Little Murders. It's not a pretty movie of urban American life, and Lucy talks back indignantly to the screen. (10) The flick she rally like was George Plimpton's Paper Lion, with the Detroit Lions, which she booked under the illusion it was an animal picture. "At the end, 12 of us here stood up and cheered, and I wrote every last Lion a fan note. You know that picture hardly made a dime?"

On a house tout, I'd noted the Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth albums in the living room, and a memo scotch-taped to her bathroom wall: "Get Smart with N.V.P."

N.V.P. Is that Norman Vincent Peale, her old friend and spiritual mentor? "Yes. He marred me and Gary. I still adhere to his way of thinking because he preaches a day-to-day religion that I can understand. Something workable, not allegory. Like how do you get up in the morning and just get through the day?

"Dr. Peale taught me the art of selfishness. All it means is doing what's right for you, not being a burden to others. When I was in Wildcat, he dropped around one night saying, 'I hear you're very ill, and working too hard.' 'Work never hurt anybody,' I protested. But he reminded me I had two beautiful children to bring up, and if I was in bad shape, how could I do it? I've learned you don't rake more leaves than you can get into the wheelbarrow. I've always been moderate, but I was too spread around, trying to please too many people. You don't become callous, but you conserve your energies."

What about her kids? Passing a newsstand, I'd noted a rash of fan mags blazoned with headlines about Desi Jr., something of a teen-age idol, and at 18 a spitting image of old pop. (A rock star at 12, he'd recently garnered very good notices indeed for a movie role in Red Sky at Morning.) "Why Lucille Ball's Son Is So Bitter About His Own Mother," read the El Trasho covers. "Patty Duke Begs Desi Jr. To Believe Her: 'You Made Me Pregnant.' " Does the imbroglio bother this on-the-nose moralist?

"I worked for years for a quiet personal life and to have to personally impinged on, with no recourse, is hard. I brought Patty to the house, feeling very maternal about her, saying look at this clever girl, what a big talent she is. Now, I can thank her for useless notoriety. She's living in some fantastic dreamworld, and we're the victims of it. Desi being the tender age of 17 when they met, she used him. She hasn't proved or asked for anything. I asked Desi if he wanted to marry her and he said no. My daughter helped outfit the baby, which Patty brought to the house, but did she ever say thank you?

"Desi's going to CIA this fall." Not the CIA? No, the new California Institute of the Arts, where he'll study music. "Yes, he's very much like his father, too much sometimes - I just hope he has Desi's business acumen. I'm glad he didn't choose UCLA or Berkeley or a school full of nonconformists. Lucie just now wants marriage and babies - maybe she'll go on to college later.

"I took the kids out of school deliberately. Desi was at Beverly Hills High, Lucie at Immaculate Heart."

Why? "I didn't like the scene - it was the usual - pregnant girls, drugs." That goes on at Immaculate Heart? Sure. "A lot of girls who boarded there were unhappy misfits, and Lucie was already working in the nunnery. All the friends she brought home were the rejected. I'm that way myself."

Did they mind, well, your stage-managing their lives? "No, they were as sick of that weird high school scene as I was. I made them a proposition - told them to think it over for a month, while I was in Monaco. Do you want to be on the show? I told them the salary would be scale, that most would be put in trust. They'd be tutored and not able to graduate with their classes. They both thought they were going to the coast, but working with a tutor, they really got turned on by books for the first time. They wanted to be in show business, and I wanted to keep an eye on them."

Of course her show is nepotism, she grants. "Cleo thought a long time before becoming the producer, wondering if it wasn’t overdoing family. Nobody seems to be suffering from it, I told her." Thursday night show time is like a tense Broadway opening night. Gary Morton, in stylish crested blazer, warms up the audience, heavy with out-of-town tourists. "Lucy started out with another fellow, can't remember his name.... What is home without a mother? A place to bring girls." Lucille bursts out onstage, exuding the old MGM glamour, fireball hair ablaze, eyelashes inches long, in aquamarine-cum-rhinestone kaftan. "For God's sake," she implores, "laugh it up! We want to hear from you... Gary, have you introduced my mom?" Indeed he has. Loyal, durable, 79-year-old Desiree "DeDe" Ball, her hair pink as Lucille's, has missed few of the 409 Lucy shows filmed to date, and is on hand as usual with 19 personal guests. Gary also asks for big hands for Cleo, and her husband Cecil Smith, TV critic for the LA Times, who has also appeared on the show. (11) 

One day Desi Jr. wanders on the set, just back from visiting his father in Mexico. He'd gone with Patty Duke and the baby. The young man does have Latin charm, and apparently talent. I ask him a fan-mag query: Is it rough to be the spin-off of such famous show-biz parents?

"Well, I grew up with kids like Dean Martin, Jr., and Tony Martin, Jr., and we had a lot in common." What? "We all had houses in Palm Springs." Any generational problem with Mom? "She's found the thing she's best at, and sticks to it. As long as she has Snowmass, she has an escape, some reality. I realize she lives half in a man's world, and that must be tough on a woman. My father - he worked hard for years, and then he'd had it. This is silly, weird, he felt. He aged more in ten years than he had in 40. I'm like him. I feel life is very short. He's had major operations recently, and he's changed a lot."

Patty Duke is six years older than Desi Jr., paralleling the six-year age gap that separated parents Lucy and Desi. "Patty is a lot like my mother, the same drive, and strong will, a perfectionist...But I'm never going to get married. Marriage is unrealistic, expecting you to devote a whole life unselfishly to just one person. Do you know people age unbelievably when they marry? From what I've seen, 85 percent of married couples are miserable; 14 percent, just average; one percent, happy." (12) 

His mother's own childhood, in little Celoron, an outspring of Jamestown, N.Y., was oh-so-different from her kids'. "She was always a wild, tempestuous, exciting child," say Cleo, "doing things that worried people, plotting and scheming, though she knew she'd get in trouble." Interesting, because that's one basic of the Lucy format, Miss B forever finagling second bananas like Vivian Vance into co-trouble. "One summer, she conned me into running away. It was only to nearby Fredonia, but in her sneaky way she really wanted to catch up to a groovy high school principal who was teaching there. He played it very cool, calling Mom and telling her we were staying overnight in a boarding house. On his advice, when we got home, DeDe acted as if we hadn't been away. That devastated Lucille, no reaction, nothing."

The classic Lucy story line also has her conniving against male authority, whether husband or boss, now played by Gale Gordon. "I need a strong father or husband figure as catalyst. I have to be an inadequate somebody, because I don't want the authority for Lucy. Every damned movie script sent me seems to cast me as a lady with authority, like Eve Arden or Roz Russell, but that's not me.

"No, I don't remember my own father," says Miss Ball. "He was a telephone lineman who died of typhoid at 25, when I was about three. I do remember everything that day, though. Hanging out the window, begging to play with the kids next door who had measles... The doctor coming, my mother weeping. I remember a bird that flew in the window, a picture that fell off the wall.

"My brother Fred [who was born after her father's death] was always very, very good. He never did anything wrong - he was too much to bear. I was always in trouble, a real pain in the ass. I suppose I wasn't much fun to be around." To this day, says Cleo, Lucille suspects Fred is her mother's favorite, even though DeDe has devoted her whole life to this daughter.

Family ties were always fierce-strong. After her father's death, "We lived with my mother's parents, for a while. Grandpa Hunt was a marvelous jack-of-all-trades, a woodturner, eye doctor, mailman, bon vivant, hotel owner. [And also an old-fashioned Populist-Socialist.] He met my grandmother, Flora Belle, a real pioneer woman and pillar of the family, when she was a maid in his hotel. She was a nurse and midwife, an orphan who brought up four pairs of twin sisters and brothers all by herself. He took us to vaudeville every Saturday and to the local amusement park. When Grandma died at 51, all us kids had to pitch in, making beds, cooking.

"Yeah, I guess I am real mid-America, growing up as a mix of French-Scotch-Irish-English, living on credit like everyone else, paying $1.25 a week to the insurance man, buying furniture on time. But it was a good, full life. Grandpa took us camping, fishing, picking mushrooms, made us bobsleds. We always had goodies. I had the first boyish bob in town and the first open galoshes.

"My mother then married Ed Peterson, a handsome-ugly man, very well-read. He was good to me and Freddy but he drank too much. He was the first to point out the magic of the stage. A monologist came to town on the Chautauqua circuit. He just sat onstage with a pitcher of water and light bulb and made us laugh and cry for two hours. For me, this was pure magic. When I was about seven, Ed and mother moved to Detroit, leaving me with his old-fashioned Swedish parents, who were very strict. I had to be in bed at 6:30, hearing all the other kids playing outside in the summer daylight. Maybe it wasn't that traumatic, but I realize now it was a bad time for me. I felt as if I'd been deserted. I got my imagination to working, and read trillions of books."

The adult Lucille, talking to interviewers, used to go on and on about her "unhappy" childhood, little realizing that she was reflecting on her mother, to whom she is passionately devoted. "Just how long do you think you lived with the Petersons?" asked DeDe one day in a confrontation. "Three YEARS? Well I tell you it was more like three weeks."

"I left home at 15, much too early, desperate to break into the big wide world. Looking for work in New York show biz was ugly, without any leads or friends or training other than high school operettas and plays and Sunday school pageants. I was very shy and reticent, believe it or not, and I kept running home every five minutes. I got thrown in with older Shubert and Ziegfeld dollies and, believe me, they were a mean, closed corporation. I don't understand kids today who get easily discouraged and yap about doing their own thing. Don't they know what hard work is? Where are their morals? I always knew when I did wrong, and paid penance."

Yet she was venturesome enough to sit in on some recent Synanon group-therapy sessions for drug addicts. "They wanted me to raise some money, and I wanted to find out what it was about. The games were fascinating, wonderful, until I couldn't take it any more. The other participants kept bugging me: What are you here for? Are your children drug addicts? I had to start making up problems."

For two decades, she's been risking her neck in those murderous ratings, outlasting long-ago competitors like Fulton Sheen, and now up against such pleasers as pro football and Rowan and Martin. (13) 

Suppose the ratings drop, what would she do?

No idea. "Might take a trip on the Inland Waterway form Boston to Florida. In my deal with Universal, I can make specials, other movies, TV pilots. I wouldn't have to ski 'spooked' at Snowmass." What's that? "Honey, I have to be careful. If I break a leg 500 people are out of work. (14) I'd be happy in some branch of acting with some modicum of appreciation. Listen, it never occurred to me, in life that I'd fail��ever, because I always appreciated small successes. I never had a big fixed goal. When I was running Desilu, it drove me wild when people asked, 'Aren't you proud to own the old RKO studio where you once worked as a starlet?' What $50-a-week starlet ever walked around a lot saying, 'I want to own this studio'?

"I don't know what you've been driving at, what's your story line? But it's been interesting, talking."

FOOTNOTES: HINDSIGHT IS 20/20

(1) This refers to a rare 1969 BBC documentary about Britain’s royal family that gave the public an inside look at the life of the Windsors. In one scene, the family was watching television, and on the screen was “I Love Lucy”, much to the chagrin of Prince Philip. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were mentioned on the series, especially in the episode “Lucy Meets the Queen” (ILL S5;E15).  

(2) Lucy is referring to a 1967 episode of “The Lucy Show” titled “Lucy The Babysitter” (TLS S5;E16) in which Lucy Carmichael babysits three rambunctious chimps for their parents, played by Jonathan Hole and Mary Wickes. In the final moments of the show, Wickes reveals a fourth sibling - a baby elephant!  The animal went wild and pushed Wickes (what Ball described as a ���press job”) into one of the prop trees. The trainer had to physically subdue the elephant to get it away from Wickes, who injured her arm. The final cut ends with the entrance of the baby elephant.

(3) Lucy is conflating (probably intentionally) the stories of real-life prohibitionist Carrie Nation (1846-1911), who famously hacked up bars and whisky barrels with an axe, and Lizzie Bordon (1860-1927), who famously hacked up her parents with an axe. (Photo from the 1962 TV special “The Good Years” starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.) 

(4) There was never a film version of Thornton Wilder’s play Skin Of Our Teeth which was on Broadway in 1942 starring Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina, the role offered to Ball.  There were several television adaptations; one in Australia in 1959; one in England the same year starring Vivian Leigh as Sabina;  one in the USA in 1955 starring Mary Martin (above) as Sabina; and a filmed version of a stage production starring Blair Brown as Sabina in 1983. Although it is possible that Lucille Ball might have been considered for the role of the sexy housemaid Sabina in 1955, the article says that the role was “just” offered to her, so it probably refers to a 1971 project that never materialized. Wilder’s story tracks a typical American family from New Jersey from the ice age through the apocalypse. 

(5) In 1971, there was a popular revival of the 1925 musical comedy No, No, Nanette on Broadway. The cast featured veteran screen star Ruby Keeler and included Helen Gallagher (playing a character named Lucille, coincidentally), Bobby Van, Jack Gilford, Patsy Kelly and Susan Watson. Busby Berkeley, nearing the end of his career, was credited as supervising the production, although his name was his primary contribution to the show. The 1971 production was well-reviewed and ran for 861 performances. It sparked interest in the revival of similar musicals from the 1920s and 1930s. The original 1925 cast featured Charles Winninger, who played Barney Kurtz, Fred’s old vaudeville partner on “I Love Lucy.” In that same episode (above), they sing a song from the musical, "Peach on the Beach” by Vincent Youmans and Otto Harbach. Like the revue in the episode, the musical is set in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  

(6) Lucy is referring to her 1936 affidavit of registration to join the Communist Party.  Lucille said she signed it to appease her elderly grandfather. The cavalier act caught up with Ball in 1953, when zealous red-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy tried to purge America of suspected Communists. Although many careers were ruined, Ball escaped virtually unscathed.  

(7) The popular big band music series “The Lawrence Welk Show” (1955) was unceremoniously canceled in 1971 by ABC, in an attempt to attract younger audiences. What Lucy doesn’t mention is that four days after this magazine was published, the show began running brand new shows in syndication, which continued until 1982. Welk, despite not being much of an actor, played himself on “Here’s Lucy” (above) in January 1970. 

(8) “Let’s Talk To Lucy” was a short daily radio program aired on CBS Radio from September 1964 to June 1964. Most interviews (including Streisand’s) were spread over multiple installments.  

(9)  To showcase possible new series (pilots) Desilu and CBS aired “Vacation Playhouse” (1963-67) during the summer when “The Lucy Show” was on hiatus.  This would often be the only airing of Lucy’s passion projects. “Papa GI” with Dan Dailey as an army sergeant in Korea who has his hands full with two orphans who want him to adopt them. The pilot was aired in June 1964 but it was not picked up for production. “Maggie Brown” had Ethel Merman playing a widow trying to raise a daughter and run a nightclub which is next to a Marine Corps base. The pilot aired in September 1963, but went unsold. “The Hoofer” starring Donald O’Connor and Soupy Sales as former vaudevillians aired its pilot in August 1966. No sale! 

(10) Little Murders (1971) was a black comedy based on the play of the same name by Jules Feiffer. The film is about a young nihilistic New Yorker (Elliott Gould) coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s. Definitely not Lucille Ball’s style of comedy!  Paper Lion (1968) was a sports comedy about George Plimpton (Alan Alda) pretending to be a member of the Detroit Lions football team for a Sports Illustrated article. 

(11) Cecil Smith appeared in “Lucy Meets the Burtons” (HL S3;E1) in 1970 playing himself, a member of the Hollywood Press with a dozen other real-life writers. The casting was a way to get better coverage of the episode (featuring power couple Dick Burton, Liz Taylor, and her remarkable diamond ring). The gambit worked and the episode was the most viewed of the entire series. 

(12) Desi Jr.’s 1971 views on marriage did not last. He married actress Linda Purl in 1980, but they divorced in 1981. In October 1987, Arnaz married dancer Amy Laura Bargiel. Ten years later they purchased the Boulder Theatre in Boulder City, Nevada and restored it. They lived in Boulder with their daughter, Haley. Amy died of cancer in 2015, at the age of 63.   

(13) From 1952 to 1957, Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen hosted the inspirational program “Life Is Worth Living”, winning an Emmy Award in 1953, alongside winners Lucille Ball and “I Love Lucy.”  “Here’s Lucy” was programmed up against “Monday Night Football” on ABC and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” on NBC.  Instead of ignoring her competition, Ball embraced them by featuring stories about football and incorporating many of the catch phrases and guest stars from “Laugh-In.” 

(14) Lucy spoke too soon!  Just a few months after this interview was published Ball did indeed have a skiing accident in Snowmass and broke her leg. With season five’s first shooting date approaching, Ball was faced with either ending the series or re-write the scripts so that Lucy Carter would be in a leg cast.  She chose the latter, even incorporating actual footage of herself on the Snowmass  slopes (above) into "Lucy’s Big Break” (HL S5;E1). 

Elsewhere in the Issue...

“This Was Our Life” by Gene Shalit includes images of Lucille Ball in the collage illustration. 

A week after this issue of Look hit the stands, the fourth season of “Here’s Lucy” kicked off with guest star Flip Wilson and a parody of Gone With the Wind.  Three days later, Ball guest-starred on his show. 

Not to be outdone, LOOK’s rival LIFE also devoted an entire issue to television, on news stands just three days later.  

Naturally, “I Love Lucy” didn’t escape mention!  I’m not sure why the show’s run is bifurcated: 1952-55, 1956-57.  Actually, the show began in 1951 and ran continually until 1957. 

Click here for more about Look, Life and Time! 

[granny-snek-7673]

The Ballad of Passion and Fury

Summary: Fable and her two best friends move into the quaint town of HavensView in Maine to start their new lives. The people they meet there seem nice enough, but everyone has their secrets; some are just darker than others.

Chapter 1

I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.

           It was dark outside, the thick storm clouds blocking the moon and the stars, heavy rain pouring down like God himself had tipped over a bucked filled with all the water from the ocean. I couldn’t see anything and my body was so wet and cold that I could hardly feel my bare feet hit the ground at my breakneck pace as I ran through the woods. I didn’t need to see where I was going, it was instinct leading the way. But I wasn’t running from something, I was running toward it; it being someone. Through the woods was the fastest way to get there; it was the fastest way to get to her. I needed to see her. I had to tell her something. It was important. She had to know. This changed everything.

           Fable woke with a start and groaned. She was back in the passenger seat of her best friend’s car, tired, thirsty, sore, and extremely hungover. The slate gray 2009 Subaru Forester hummed softly as they drove. Sunlight streamed in through the window, assaulting her vision and worsening her alcohol induced headache like a pickaxe on a stone. “Figures,” she thought, sullenly, referring to the familiar nightmare. She sighed softly, her dark thoughts getting the best of her. All Fable wished was that a nightmare was all that it had been. Instead, it was a memory of the worst night of her life. She glanced to her left and corrected herself; it was the worst night of their lives. But what was worse was that she couldn’t remember what she had discovered that had set off the chain reaction of tragedy that night.

           Fable groaned and stretched her sore extremities as best as she could with her body strapped into the passenger seat of the car by her seatbelt. Her bones creaked and cracked like she was an eighty year old woman and her muscles screamed in protest. After a minute of stretching that slowly morphed to something more akin to writhing in pain, snickering from the driver’s seat drew Fable’s blurry vision to her best friend.

           Pearle Serafin was smiling and trying to hold back her laughter. She brushed her waist length straight silky silver tresses back from her angular face and glanced over at Fable with her golden flaked brown eyes. “Did you have a nice nap, lady-drinks-a-lot?” she snickered.

           “Well I can’t say much for the comfort of these seats,” Fable grunted, adjusting herself. She wasn’t exactly wrong about the seats; the car was an older model.

           Pearle laughed and shook her head. “You know, it’s a good thing Carson is leading the way because I don’t think you would have made a very good navigator after that going away party last night,” she said.

           “Not to mention an even worse driver,” Fable quipped.

           Pearle laughed again and nodded her agreement. “Well, we’re here anyway,” she added, pointing to the sign that read ‘Welcome to HavensView’ as they sped past it on the road.

           “Thank God,” Fable snorted. Pearle rolled her eyes in response.

           As they followed Carson, who lead the way in his 2015 Toyota Tundra pickup truck that pulled the full moving trailer down a winding dirt road, Fable studied her friend. To Fable, Pearle had always seemed to be a creature not of this earth. Her lithe figure, angular features, and rose kissed pale skin always reminded Fable of the elves from fairy tales. Even the dress she wore, a full length pale blue sweetheart cut sundress with pale pink and yellow flowers printed on it, seemed to support Fable’s idea that Pearle had been a princess in another life. Pearle’s thin pink lips were turned up in a smile and the nostrils of her petite nose flared as she inhaled the scent of the forest trees through the rolled down window.

           Fable was a stark contrast to her friend, both in appearance and temperament. Fable stared at her own reflection in the passenger side mirror. Intense ice blue eyes laced with thick black lashes stared back at her, set into a heart shaped face with a slightly upturned nose and full, supple pink lips. Fable’s wild, untamed ringlets fell past her lower back in rebellion, looking like the flames of a fire; the roots a dark wine auburn, which faded to a copper orange, which then faded to gold at the ends. Her skin was tan and freckled from the sun, covered with tattoos and spotted with scars. Her 5’6” frame sported toned muscles that could rival those of some men, but she had what most would consider a curvy build. She glanced back at Pearle. If Pearle was an elven princess, then Fable was a dwarven warrior.

           Where Pearle was soft and moldable, Fable was hard and unyielding. Where Pearle was pretty and lenient, Fable was plain and rough. Where Pearle was reasonable, Fable was not. Where Pearle used diplomacy, Fable used force. When Pearle forgave and sought compromise, Fable held grudges and sought revenge. It had been that way for as long as Fable could remember; two sides of the same coin. The only thing that they could truly agree on was compassion for those in need and punishment for those who truly deserved it.

           Fable remembered the day that she, Pearle, and Carson became friends. She smiled when she pictured five year old Pearle on the playground, tears streaming down her cheeks, a true damsel in distress if there ever was one. Not a great way to start the first day of kindergarten, Fable mused. What had prompted Pearle’s tears was, in fact, Carson, who had taken Pearle’s purple ribbon right from her hair. Whether he did it out of malice or out of an attempt to get her to chase him, the friends still didn’t know to this day. Fable couldn’t remember what had come over her tiny self, but little Fable had marched right up to little Carson, kicked him in the shin, smacked him in the face, and pulled his hair until he dropped the ribbon and ran away. Fable was a fighter, Carson was not. Fable then returned the ribbon to Pearle, who from that moment on never left her side. Obviously, Carson had tattled and when everyone’s parent’s got involved, apologies were made, and mandatory get-along-or-else playdates were arranged. But somehow, the trio had become more than ordinary best friends in that time of forced companionship in their hometown of Chesapeake City, Maryland. And that more than ordinary friendship continued through school and college and into their careers and adult lives. Fable’s smile brightened a bit more when she realized that the purple ribbon that had started it all was still wound around Pearle’s willowy wrist.

           That event was what Fable had pinpointed as the start of her desire to become a police officer. Fable had always wanted to right wrongs and protect the weak; she wanted to use her strength to serve others. And that’s exactly what she did. Fable had gone to the Police academy right out of high school and had a job on the force within the year. Fable couldn’t imagine a more perfect occupation for herself.

           While Fable was at the academy and on the force, Pearle and Carson had gone to college together. Carson got his teaching degree with an emphasis on English Education and Pearle got her degree in Theatre and Arts. Those five and a half years were what the friends often called the lost years; the years that none of them felt like themselves, the years that they were apart.  

           When the winding road finally came to an end, Fable and Pearle both gasped in delight as their new home came into view. They drove past an old dilapidated sign with chipped paint that once read ‘The BrookeMoore Estate’, but the paint was so faded and flaked that only the ‘B’ from ‘BrookeMoore’ was actually recognizable. The dirt road ended in a circle drive in front of a two story farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. To the west, there was an old barn that had been converted to a large garage. The front yard had two impressive flower beds and space for a vegetable garden. Carson pulled his truck and trailer into the circle drive in front of the house and Pearle pulled her car into the driveway in front of the converted four car garage. Run down as the place was, it was quaint and suited their needs perfectly. Besides, with their combined effort, Fable was sure that it would be in prime shape within the year. Even so, Fable could still hardly believe it was theirs.

           When Pearle parked the car, Fable quickly extricated herself from the seatbelt and bailed out the door, her stiff legs barely supporting her as she stood and stretched more thoroughly, every muscle and joint groaning in protest. She took a moment to survey her surroundings and quickly concluded that she had her work cut out for her with the weeding and landscaping. And just about every fence and exterior wall could really use a fresh coat of paint. Then she closed her eyes and took in the soft sounds of nature that surrounded her; the wind in the trees and the grass, the soft singing of the birds, rushing water from somewhere nearby. The house was far enough from town that it was quiet, but it only took about twenty minutes to get to the police department in town where she would start work as a detective next week. She’d been promoted to detective just before she’d requested transfer to HavensView. Peace seemed to settle over Fable as her anxiety and anticipation about the move and starting a new life quickly turned to excitement.

           Fable was wrenched from her thoughts when muscular arms wrapped her up in a suffocating hug and lifted her feet from the ground. Fable grunted and squirmed, trying to extract herself from Carson’s purposefully painful embrace. She poked and prodded and kicked and when her voice was reduced to a wheeze, finally managed to push away from her friend. She landed on her feet, but only remained so because Carson steadied her with strong hands on her shoulders. Fable glared up at Carson, who stood nearly a foot taller than her, his jade green eyes shining with mischief, his whole face smiling. He ran a hand through his golden blond hair and he laughed his deep, whole-body laugh.

           “I’m surprised you didn’t die of alcohol poisoning on the drive here,” he chuckled. “I half expected you to still be passed out cold when we arrived. I had a plan to dump water on you and everything.”

           Fable stared up at Carson, pretending to be annoyed with his honest nature. She was able to keep it up for nearly three minutes and saw Carson become visibly anxious, sweat beading on his forehead. Finally, a roar of laughter boiled over and escaped Fable’s lips. “It’s going to take a lot more liquor than that to kill me!” she managed to gasp out between bouts of laughter. Carson laughed with her, at ease once again.

           Pearle, who decidedly did not ever under any circumstances consume alcohol of any kind, rolled her eyes; but the smile didn’t disappear from her lips. “Can we maybe not try to find that limit?” she asked, always the voice of reason. “I really do like it when you’re both alive.” She winked.  

           Fable and Carson shrugged, pretending to weigh their options, but when Pearle’s eyes narrowed, they both quickly raised their hands in surrender.

           “Alright,” Pearle said, “enough joking around. Let’s get all the boxes inside so Carson can call the moving company and arrange for them to pick up the trailer tomorrow.”

           Before the unpacking could begin, the three friends did a quick walkthrough and cleaning of their new home. Fable noted how new the inside appeared in contrast to the slowly decaying exterior. She wondered if the people who had lived there before them had moved out before completing the renovations or if it was a purposeful and stylistic decision on their part. She shrugged and helped sweep and dust, exploring as she went.

           The front door was solid oak painted white and led into the living and dining room. Hooks were hung on the wall between the door and one of the windows to hang coats and shelves were built into the walls for shoes. The kitchen was to the left through the dining room and the living room was to the right.

           The kitchen was spacious with a large island, a deep farmhouse sink, and stainless steel appliances. The counters were gray granite and the cabinets, some of which looked like framed glass windows, were painted white with stainless steel knobs with etchings. The island had a smaller, more traditional sink and there was a rack above it that functioned as a light fixture and a place to hang pots and pans. There was a fair sized breakfast nook to the far side of the kitchen next to the side door.

           The dining room was right next to the kitchen, no walls separating them. It was a surprisingly open concept for an old farmhouse. The space was plenty big enough for their large table with three chairs on one side, chairs at the end, and a bench on the other side. To the right of the dining room on the right side of the front door was the open concept living room. It had a built in entertainment system cabinet on the far wall and some shelving units. In the corner, there was a large river stone fireplace.

           Straight through the front door, there was a hallway that led to the back of the house on the left and a staircase that led to the second floor on the right. Halfway down the hallway, there was a half bathroom and just past it was the laundry room and mudroom, complete with a washer, dryer, and folding table. Across from the laundry/mudroom was the utility room, which housed the water heater and other household essentials. At the end of the hallway, there was the back door, which led out onto the wrap around porch and the expansive unfenced backyard that faded to forest trees.

           Up the stairs on the second level, directly to the left there was the master bedroom that was complete with its own master bathroom. To the right, there was a hallway that led to two fair sized bedrooms that shared a bathroom between them. The shared bathroom had a double vanity with plenty of storage space, a claw foot tub, and a glass shower.

           Once all the cleaning was finished, the trio set to the task of moving in and unpacking efficiently. Carson, always the muscle of any operation, carried the boxes two at a time to the front porch, though he admittedly had some trouble with Fable’s boxes of books. Fable then sorted them by their labels and began to take them inside and deposit them in the appropriate rooms. Pearle, as always, supervised and directed the other two. Once all the boxes were in the right rooms, Fable and Carson moved all the furniture inside to their proper places, moving each piece around as Pearle saw fit. However, whether or not Carson and Fable heeded Pearle’s advice depended entirely on the situation. Once all the boxes were out of the trailer, Carson unhitched it, pulled the truck into the driveway in front of the old barn turned parking structure, and pulled out the ramp to get Fable’s current mode of transportation out of the bed of the truck. Carson helped Fable roll her all black and chrome 1959 Harley Cruiser motorcycle down the ramp and into its own place in the garage. When they made their way back into the house, Pearle was already at work in the kitchen going through each box and putting things in their rightful places. Minutiae had always been her strong point.

           Carson and Fable left Pearle to do her work and moved to the living room to fight with the TV, DVD player, and various video game consoles. Fable scanned the user’s manuals, as she usually did, to try to get it right the first time. Carson dove right in, his square cut jaw set in determination, but after fighting with cords for nearly thirty minutes, handed control over to Fable, who got it right with the help of the printed instructions. Pearle, now finished sorting out all the dishes and appliances and other kitchen things, called for Carson’s help with various pieces of furniture. This left Fable to go up to her room on the second floor to unpack her personal belongings in her bedroom.

           Fable and Pearle opted for the bedrooms that shared the bathroom because neither would ever wish the mess of Carson’s bathroom habits on the other. Carson agreed to this happily. Fable spent nearly three hours unpacking her belongings, twice having to ask Carson to help her move the many bookcases that lined one of the walls. But when the task was finally completed, she ventured back downstairs to find Carson and Pearle lounging on the couch in the living room. They had managed to unpack the majority of the boxes and put things in their proper places. Fable plopped down onto the old, plush couch cushion between them.

           “I’m starving,” Fable groaned.

           “Then make something to eat,” Carson suggested, laughing.

           “We just moved in,” Fable retorted, “there’s no food here yet, dumbass.”

           “Sounds like someone’s a little hangry,” Pearle laughed. “There’s bread and peanut butter in the cabinet next to the refrigerator.”

           “I want real food,” Fable whined.

           “She’s hangry and hungover,” Carson agreed, “She drank almost half her body weight in booze last night and finished like four fights. She’s not craving carbs. She’s craving grease.”

           “Notice that I didn’t start the fights. I get points for that,” Fable added.

           “Doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be a bitch,” Pearle replied, nudging and winking at Fable playfully.

           “If I say please, will one of you drive me to dinner?” Fable asked.

           Carson laughed and shook his head. “You need to find a real car,” he suggested, “Adults with real jobs don’t ride motorcycles.”

           Fable laughed. “Fine. If I say please and promise to start looking for a responsible adult car tomorrow, will one of you drive me to town for food?” she asked. Both Pearle and Carson nodded. Fable sighed, “I promise to look for a real car starting tomorrow so will one of you PLEASE drive me to town to get dinner?”

           “I’ll drive,” Pearle replied.

           “I’ll buy,” Carson added.

           All three friends laughed and walked out to Pearle’s car where Carson and Fable fought for the front seat. After Carson tossed Fable over his shoulder and physically threw her into the back seat, he got into the passenger seat and Pearle drove them into town. Pearle parked on the street on the southwest side of town where most of the restaurants were as indicated by Carson’s phone GPS. The trio walked around, weighing their options and trying to decide where to eat. At one point, Carson took pity on Fable and carried her piggy-back style, her hunger driving her to complain pitifully, whale mating calls seemingly originating from her abdomen. After walking around for somewhere between thirty and forty minutes, the trio settled on a restaurant called Remi’s Bar and Grill.

           Luckily, it was a Tuesday night, so there weren’t too many people there and they got a table right away. Carson ordered a steak with mashed potatoes, Pearle a grilled salmon salad, and Fable a double bacon cheeseburger with fries. As they waited for their food, they talked quietly about various things, the conversation flowing as it usually did. As was the norm, Fable excused herself to wash her hands before the food arrived and went in search of the bathroom. She found it at the end of a dimly lit hallway near the back of the establishment and thoroughly washed her hands, as living with her clean freak mother had conditioned her to do. Once she was satisfied that her hands were clean, she opened the door with her foot and tossed the used paper towel in the bin before leaving the bathroom. Fable was a pro at getting out of bathrooms without using her hands.  

           As she made her way back down the hallway, she was taken by surprise as a door swung open and nearly hit Fable in the face. In a split second, she noticed the sign that read ‘Manager/Proprietor/Owner’ and quickly jumped back to avoid having her nose kiss the door. Two men walked out of the manager’s office, one of them walking back out into the restaurant, his gait and posture reflecting anger, and the other stood staring after him for a moment before turning to face Fable.

           The man was tall—6’3” at the least—and sported a very muscled and toned frame with broad shoulders. He had fair tanned skin and his sandy brown/blond hair was cut shorter on the sides but left longer on the top and worked into a peak with soft mousse. He had a soft face with a square jaw and chin, full lips, a large yet proportionate angular nose, thick furrowed brows, and deep brooding green eyes. Fable had to clear her throat and look away to recover her dignity after staring at him with her mouth open for several moments. She silently scolded herself for acting so skittish as though she hadn’t spent six years on the job as a cop. But the man didn’t say anything; he just stood and stared at her, Fable acutely aware of his gaze on her. She felt a blush work its way onto her face as the silence between them extended.

           “I’m so sorry,” the man finally said, “I hope he didn’t hit you with the door.” His voice was deep and melodic but there was a rough edge to it. Fable detected a subdued confidence in the cadence of his words.

           “Just missed me,” Fable replied quietly, “I’m pretty quick on my feet. It’s all good. No worries.” She glanced back up at him and nearly jumped back again at the intensity of his gaze. She admonished herself again. He wasn’t the first man to stare at her like that, so why was it making her so nervous? In a lame attempt to bring the encounter to a civil end and rescue her first impression to him, Fable smiled and said, “You must be Remi.”

           The man laughed. “Excuse me?” he queried.

           “The sign on your door,” Fable explained, pointing, “it says Manager/Proprietor/Owner. And since this is Remi’s Bar and Grill, you’re either Remi or a liar.” She grinned.

           The man laughed again, his deep voce ringing in Fable’s ears. “Very clever,” he replied, “but Remi is actually in reference to my family’s surname; Remington.”

           “Like the firearm?” Fable asked. He nodded, a soft smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “Well then, Mr. Remington, I’d best get back to my family. They might eat my food if I give them the chance,” she continued.

           “My name is Wesley,” he replied, “You can call me Wesley.”

           “Nice to meet you, Wesley,” Fable replied, “I’m Fable. Fable Ballard.” She held her hand out for him to shake.

           Wesley took her hand and shook it gently. “Nice to meet you, Fable,” he said softly, “I hope you and your family enjoy your meal.”

           “Thank you,” Fable said, smiling. Then she dropped his hand and moved past him in the hallway to walk back to the table where Carson and Pearle were talking and laughing as they waited for their meal. She returned to her seat and easily joined the conversation. The food arrived soon after Fable had gotten back from the bathroom and silence fell over the trio as they quickly consumed their meals, though afterward Carson remarked that Fable had looked like a feral beast eating the first meal in many months. Once they were all finished, Carson settled the bill and they ventured back to their car. Carson drove home and Pearle and Fable fell asleep together in the back seat; food coma. Carson gently woke the girls when they got back to their new home and they all bid each other goodnight before retreating to their own rooms. Fable dug her poker chip out of her pocket and set it on the bedside table. Then she brushed her teeth, put her pajamas on, a pair of green and gray flannel pants with a long sleeved gray shirt, pulled her hair back into twin French twists, and crawled into bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

[starshineskyandthepowerofrock]

First Impressions

Part 4 of Starshine, Sky, and the Power of Rock.

I had intentionally not told any of the students which band I would be a part of with the hope of making it a pleasant surprise when I walked in their dorm. I suppose they're still in for a surprise, but seeing a vampire walk in right behind me may dampen the "pleasant" part.

Skylar has caught up to me. Her smile gives me the fullest view of her fangs I've seen all night. I have to fight every muscle in my body not to instinctively step back, because at least she's being friendly.

"Seriously?" she says. "We're gonna be in the same band?"

I swallow hard. "It would appear so," I say, trying to restrain the shake in my voice.

"Well, in that case," Skylar says, holding out a hand. "It's a pleasure to work with you."

It takes me a second to realize what she's trying to do, largely because I can't recall the last time I shook hands with someone. I'm used to curtsies and bows. I adjust my tiara a bit, wondering if she's somehow unaware of my royal status. Her eyes flit to my tiara, then to her hand, then back to my eyes. Her brow furrows.

"Do people not shake hands around here?" she asks, beginning to pull away.

Oh no, I'm being rude! I grab her hand and shake it. It's rough and highly callused, especially around the fingertips. It's also room temperature. Like a corpse. "Sorry," I say. "Allow me to formally introduce myself. I am Her Royal Highness, Princess Starshine of the Land of Light, but you may call me Star. I mostly sing, but I also play a little guitar."

We let go and Skylar puts her thumbs in her belt loops. "And I'm Skylar Acdalur... of... Acdalur Family Farm, but you can call me Sky," she says. "I mostly play guitar, but I sing a little."

Well, Sky is a far more Land of Light-esque name than Skylar, so I'm more than willing to call her as such. I nod. "Okay, then. Sky, it is. I'll go to your dorm with you."

And so we walk. Something Sky said is sitting with me weird. "You own a farm?" I ask.

Sky chuckles. "My family owns a farm," she says, then looks up at the high ceiling. "All this is kinda a big change for me."

I think back to the tiny orphanage. Its square footage was probably smaller than this hallway alone. "I know what you mean. But you'll get used to it. I certainly did... Did you say your family?"

"Yep," Sky says. "Mom, Dad, and seven big brothers." She turns to me, amused. "Mom really wanted a girl."

I nod, taking this in. "You... have a family," I say, as though saying it again will help me better understand.

"What, did you think we divide like cells?"

I scoff. "No! I just... I guess I never thought about monsters having, like, families and stuff. But I suppose it only makes sense."

We chat the rest of the walk, and all the while my mind can't move on from the concept of a monster having a family. I think about how much my parents love me. Do her parents feel the same way about her? Or did they have her for utilitarian reasons? But her face when she spoke about them reminds me so much of how anyone else would speak about their family. So, why would she leave them, then? But I suppose that's what all of the kids here are doing. It doesn't mean they don't care about the ones they're leaving behind. Huh.

When we get to the dorm, Sky blinks at the handle-less door in confusion. I guess they don't have this kind of lock on the Isle. I'll have to demonstrate, then. I lean towards the little mic in the wall next to the door, press the button that turns it on, and hum the little jingle for this specific door. The doorknob appears in a little whirl of sparkles.

Sky smiles, impressed. "Nice," she says.

I enter the front living area of the three-room apartment first, sure to block Sky because maybe I can do some damage control before the "What is a vampire doing in my room" storm hits.

Three girls turn upon the door's opening, and their eyes light up in delight. "Your Highness!" they all say in unison, and hurry to greet me.

I recognize Gossamer Glade from earlier. "Are you going to be in our band?" she asks, giving a submissive curtsy. Her big, round, green eyes and heart-shaped face make her look a whole lot like her older sisters, but I'm willing to judge her on her own merits. I smile at her.

"Yes," I say, to which the girls begin to squeal.

One of the girls, whose long, fuzzy ears sticking out from the top of her bubblegum pink pixie cut mark her as a moon rabbit, bows straight down and back up, failing to contain her excitement. "Ohmygoodness, Your Highness, I lovelovelove your voice SOOOO much! My name is Waxing Crescent! I play drums!" she says in a very high-pitched voice.

"And I'm a bassist," Gossamer says.

The third girl I know to be a mermaid, based on her pale blue skin and the fact that her deep blue hair smells heavily of salt water. She's looking down at her scaly feet, body parts she is likely unused to, judging by her awkward stance and the fact that she's swaying. "I'm Pearlessence," she mumbles. "I play keyboard."

"We were wondering why there were only three of us in here," Gossamer says. "You don't know how relieved I am to know that you're the fourth member."

"So, are you gonna live in our dorm with us?" Crescent asks. "'Cause there's space for one more!"

"Um, actually, I'm sleeping in my own room. But..." I step out of the way so that Sky can enter the room. Faces fall, and a horrible stillness descends over the three girls. Pearl looks like she's trying not to look terrified. Crescent looks purely bewildered. Gossamer looks like she wants me to guide yet another student to the principal's office tonight.

"Everyone," I say delicately. "This is Sky. She's a guitarist. She's the fifth member of our band."

"Nice to meet you," Sky says, and holds out a hand. The girls jump back as one. Sky gets the message and puts her arm down.

Gossamer looks to me. "May I please speak to the principal." It's phrased like a question, but the tone suggests a demand.

Ugh, my legs are jelly at this point! I don't want to make that walk twice in one night! Especially with someone in such a bad mood. "You may speak with her tomorrow," I say. I need to change the subject. "I trust everyone has been settling in nicely?"

"We were," Gossamer says.

"'Were'?"

"Yes," she says, turning to stare daggers at Sky. "We were."

Sky says nothing, but refuses to break eye contact with Gossamer. The unreadable mask has fallen back over her face, and it's only now I notice it had been starting to come off earlier. I place cautious hands on her shoulders and guide her to one of the bedrooms on either side of the living area. "Why don't we ensure your room is in order?"

"Wait!" Gossamer steps in front of us. "I'm sleeping in this room!"

"The bedrooms are designed to accommodate two people," I reply.

"Yes," she says. "Two people."

I blink. "Are you implying that Sky isn't a person?"

Gossamer looks Sky up and down. "If the shoe fits."

Sky tenses under my hands. I look at her face to find her pale eyes wide and her nostrils flared. The slightest twitch in her upper lip reminds me of the razor-sharp fangs gleaming just behind it. I remove my hands from her with haste.

If Gossamer realizes she's gone too far, she doesn't make it apparent. Nose up, she walks past us and towards the door to the hallway.

"We'll see what my father has to say about this," she says before slamming the door behind her.

Crescent's voice breaks the silence. "Her father?"

"Mr. Glade is the history teacher," I explain.

"We're gonna have to be taught by her dad?" Sky asks with disgust.

I pat her on the shoulder gently. "Don't worry, Sky. Come on, let's get you situated."

⭐⭐⭐

The discomfort of the previous encounter has encouraged Crescent and Pearl to retreat into their room, so now it's just Sky and me in a half-furnished bedroom. Gossamer has already claimed the side nearest to the door, as evinced by an ornately designed oak canopy bed with sheer, green and yellow floral hangings, and a matching vanity and wardrobe. In a corner farthest from the door are a couple beat-up leather trunks and a guitar case.

"I take it those are yours?" I ask.

"Yeah, your guys are good," Sky says, taking in the room as she makes her way inside. She starts digging through her envelope again. "So, I read the instructions for the Soul Key thing back home, but could you give me a refresher?" She pulls out the key in question. It's plain stainless steel. They're normally much shinier, and made of silver. An exception must have been made for her sake.

"Okay," I say. "Open that little compartment on the end there."

Sky undoes the tiny latch on a clear, circular compartment that makes up the handle of the key and opens it. She looks up at me. "And then you put, like, one of your fingernails or something in there, right?"

I swallow back a trace amount of vomit. "A part of your body, yes. Most opt for a couple strands of hair."

Sky looks down at her stubby fingernails, which look like they haven't had a day of care her whole life. Or death. Or... existence? "I guess that would make things easier," she says before plucking a couple strands from her swooping bangs. "Why am I doing this?" she asks as she balls up the white hair between her fingers.

"The Soul Key needs a bit of you so that it may extract a bit of your soul and use it to, among other things, automatically personalize your living space. You'll find it saves loads of decorating time."

Sky's fingers pause. "That's a pretty creepy way to decorate."

I refrain from pointing out the irony in a vampire calling something creepy and instead watch with interest as Sky puts her hair in the key and closes it up. My impression of vampires has always been that they don't have souls, which is why they don't have reflections. So, what happens when a Soul Key tries to extract a soul from a person who doesn't have one? As I ask myself this question, I look up at Gossamer's vanity to see both Sky and myself reflected back. Huh.

We watch her hair disappear with a magical spark, and soon the key starts glowing hot pink. The glow gets bright to the point where we can't make out the form of the key anymore, then subsides to reveal that the handle has transformed into the shape of a hot pink heart. The rest of the key is no longer gray, but sports an anodized rainbow pattern. Interesting. I would have expected the visual representation of a monster's soul - which I guess she has - to be much scarier than this. And nowhere near as cute.

Sky looks up at me, and I her. "Cool," she says. "What next?"

I snap out of my thoughts. I'm supposed to be helping her. "Put it in the appropriate keyhole," I tell her, indicating the wall across from the door. Sky locates the keyhole in the wall and does as instructed. She turns the key hard, and seems surprised to find it cranking like a music box wind-up. She cranks it a few more times, then lets go.

"Stand back!" I tell her, and she obeys.

A music box tune pumps its way through the walls, and a sparkly, rainbow-colored mist sets in, taking the form of the same basic furnishings as Gossamer, but it's all rather minimalist when compared with Gossamer's numerous flower carvings, and it's made of polished ebony instead of Gossamer's matte brown oak. Forgetting who I'm with for a second, I expect the largest furniture piece to take the form of a bed, but no, it's a coffin. Sky gravitates to this part of her new room immediately. She runs a hand along the shiny split lid, giving an impressed whistle.

"A real casket..." she says, lifting the lid's top half to reveal a cushy, pastel interior, including a comfortable-looking blanket with a rainbow-colored cobweb print. "I never thought I'd sleep in one of these."

"What else would a vampire sleep in?" I ask.

"Back home, all we could afford were coffins," Sky replies. Apparently, there's a difference.

"Well, I clearly don't know much about coffins, but this casket seems... cozy," I say, and I mean it. Curious, I push down on the plush bottom, and my hand gets a good couple inches down before springing back. It really seems like something one wouldn't mind sleeping in, if breathing wasn't an issue. It adds a fascinating new context to something I normally only see during funerals.

Sky has went to open her trunks. "I can't believe there's no tuition to get into here," she tells me. "This is so nice, I feel kinda bad."

"Oh, don't!" I say as I watch her move a small assortment of worn jeans and plain shirts from one of her trunks to the wardrobe that already holds several uniform sets. Is that all the clothes she brought to last through the school year? "Mama says that if you have what it takes to get in here, then money shouldn't hold you back. Plus, this school is state-run. Have you seen how big our kingdom is? We have no shortage of tax money!"

Sky chuckles as she closes the casket and climbs on top of it to hang up a couple posters for some monster bands I've never heard of. She teeters on the rounded, smooth surface.

"Um, maybe you shouldn't-" I start, but Sky has already slipped and fallen hard on her arm. I yelp and rush to help her up. "Are you okay?" I ask, pulling her up by her good arm. I'm afraid to see the damage on the other one.

Sky sucks in the air through her teeth, rolling her shoulder a couple times. "Yeah, it just hurts."

I sigh. "I thought you broke your arm for a second!"

Sky shakes her head. "I'm a vampire. Only a handful of things can actually hurt me."

I nod, reminded of what she is. "Oh, right! Like, um, silver is one, right? And garlic, and wooden stakes, and fire, and decapitation..." I trail off when I notice Sky's eyes widening, and the corners of her mouth coming down.

"... That's right," she says, her brow furrowed. "Guess you do know some things about vampires." She releases her arm from the grip I hadn't noticed I still had on her and turns to keep unpacking.

Hmm... Awkward... I consider telling her that the only reason I know all that is for defense purposes, but that may just freak her out more. Instead, I keep quiet and watch her take out a ragged plush spider with eight button eyes. She places it inside the casket, and its aging brown terrycloth looks a bit out of place amongst the soft, dreamy fabrics.

"That's cute," I say, trying to make things a bit less tense. "You didn't really strike me as a stuffed animal type."

Sky closes the casket again, shrugging sheepishly. "I've had him since I was real little. Can't sleep without him." She's staring at the floor.

I try to imagine what Sky as a child would look like. The image is actually kind of cute. "Daw," I say. "That's really sweet. What's his name?"

"Uh..." Sky drums her fingers on the casket. "Wilbur," she says, then turns away again. She goes to pull out a frame from one of the trunks, and places it on the vanity, whose mirror is shaped like a heart. "You were wondering about my family, right? Here we are."

It's one thing to hear someone has seven siblings, but Sky flanked, three on one side and four on the other, by vampire boys ranging in age from mid teens to early twenties is still quite a sight. Gender isn't the only way Sky differs from her brothers, though. Everyone in the photo wears clothes as old-looking as what Sky is wearing right now, but everyone else has at least made an effort to appear clean-cut. Sky, meanwhile, has half her shirt untucked and has attached a couple chains to her jeans, which once again have that spotted acid wash pattern on them. She's the only one with pants like that. So that's a choice. Interesting. Also notable is that all of her family members, including her parents, are holding dainty-looking flutes, all except Sky, who brandishes a black electric guitar with numerous fading stickers on it.

What strikes me the most, though, is how... colorful everyone else is. None of them are nearly as melanin blessed as me, mind, but despite their ashy, pale complexions they look positively glowing next to the bone white Sky. They also all have rather dark hair, and here's Sky with hair the color of snow. And their eyes are red, the standard vampire eye color that Sky seems to lack.

"Wow," I say. "They're... not what I was expecting."

"Yeah," Sky says, amused.

"So, how did..." I have to traverse this carefully. "The... all-white thing happen? Because you super don't look like your parents." Nailed it, Star.

Sky shrinks a little, averting her eyes. "I have albinism, if you couldn't tell."

I step back. "Is that contagious?"

"No!" Sky exclaims, indignant. She sighs and softens a bit. "It's genetic. It just means I'm missing a lot of melanin. You know, coloring?"

"Oh, so you're albino! Yeah, I've heard of that, come to think of it. I really should have realized, but it hardly registered what with everything else going on with you. You know... being a... um... a monster and all."

Sky blinks. "Right."

I clasp my hands together. "Well, it was nice to meet you, Sky, but I should really get to bed. See you in class!" I say.

Sky nods. "You too."

As I make my way back to my bedroom, my mind swims in the oddest mixture of bewilderment and bliss. I'm starting school tomorrow. I'm really going to be in a band. But craziest of all, I met a monster today, and she's going to be in my band. And even crazier, I think I'm starting to be okay with that.

[shadows-of-almsivi]

Snapshots: early adulthood, poetry

Preparation began the night before, gathering moonflowers from the bower in the rooftop garden. Sedra had lent me their long gloves; it’s very important not to touch the flowers, or let the sap touch my skin. I’d seen the faint scars along their hands and arms, where the sap had left them covered in blisters, so I knew better than to question their advice.

The flowers had to be simmered gently together with coda flowers over the shrine’s brazier, watched over by Sedra while the rest of us slept. The whole Order compound soaked in the smell of the steam, a little bit astringent and sweet, a little brackish like swampwater. By dawn, Sedra couldn’t stand the brightness of a candle, let alone daylight: their pupils had blown so wide from the fumes that I could hardly see any red in their eyes at all. I helped them clean off their makeup and brushed out their beautiful hair for them, making sure they were tucked deep into the darkest room we could find. They murmured poetry and fantastic, vivid tales I’d never heard before, mixed in with fearful rambling in a voice thick with sleep: they’d always told me never to leave them alone when they were struck with alchemist’s drunkenness in case they did something foolish. I was grateful for the extra few hours of sleep, my head pillowed on their small breasts, their spidery fingers stroking my hair like a beloved pet. Drolosi took my place for the morning chores.

After the midday meal, a smiling Armiger brought us a kwama eggshell full of fresh netch jelly, still glowing bright-blue, harvested from some still-twitching carcass only an hour or so before. Sedra emerged to meet with Armiger Breldryn in the meal hall, where many of us were in stitches listening to his tales: most of them were either hunting stories or soldier’s anecdotes, though the best were the racier accounts from the Armiger barracks. Our sibling-sect breeds gossip finer than anyone, I think. Sedra kissed Armiger Breldryn in payment, because Sedra’s like that; the Armiger disappeared into one of the rear altar rooms with a giddiness to him. We did not see him again for many hours, though we heard him now and then. Sedra’s sometimes like that, too.

The flower extract had to be added to the netch jelly slowly, drop by drop. It won’t blend right if it’s all mixed together at once. We formed pairs, one to stir and one to measure in the extract, and worked in shifts until it was all combined to Sedra’s approval. It took hours and hours: we’d worn out all our worksongs by the time it was done, and the sun had already set, but we did it.

Now, the moons are high, and I’m trying not to tremble in the low light of the ritual hall. The night breezes chill our skin, dressed only in sandals and skirts as we are, every breath of wind catching on the wet scripture. The candles shiver in honeyed carapaces, the lanterns made of arching brass and delicate panels of resin. The light spreads warm and welcoming, painted in the robes of sunsets, or the dying of the dust-storms in the summer. The alabaster of the shrine has accepted the light within itself, turning faintly to amber in its vague translucency…

Already, my thoughts are beginning to uncoil strangely, growing elaborate and ponderous. I’d been told such a thing might happen. The visiting Armigers look to each of us as they enter and smile with such curious and excited affection, like lovers eager to be reunited with their beloveds. I am not supposed to pay attention to them. I try to keep my eyes on my kindred here, set into pairs for the painting.

“Hold out your arm a little more,” Sedra whispers, taking to their knees beside me. I obey, a little slower than I mean to: their silken hair spills over their back, pooling on the floor like a bolt of fine satin, and for a moment all I want in the world is to touch it. Instead, I am carefully motionless, holding obediently still for the tickling brushes swirling over my skin. Glowing blue calligraphy flows over their body in ribbons of perfect cadence and meter, seeming to stream onto mine from their luminous hands, stained to the wrist with the salve we so labored for.

My temple-siblings are beginning to shiver in my vision. Some are almost covered and still stand for the laying on of greater prayer and poetry; others bear only a few dozen stanzas, all but bare yet deemed covered enough by the measure of their eyes. Their eyes seem as black as the Void; surely, they must see the places between the stars. Ritual vapors thicken the air around us as I watch them melt, shuddering, into the waiting arms of vividly-scrawled acolytes.

I do my best to be still, to move as I am told, but I feel time coming unstuck from itself and I find myself distracted. After-images scald themselves into my vision, every smallest motion creating a trail of echoes. Our painted bodies look as drawn as the murals on the walls, our shadows stepping down to dance. Mine seems to stare at me and will not stop. Movements around me seem to slow and speed impossibly, reality rendering itself into the art upon the pages of a book flicked by impatient hands, the stuttering mechanocasts of Dwemeri zoetropes. There is a weary murmur muttering below the earth, mocking and insidious, half-drowned in drumbeat and quake-thunder. Doom is coming; doom is here…

…No. These are not my thoughts. This is not my voice. I am not…

I hear panting in the dark between us, dripping and scraping on the floors. Long-legged shadows filigree the walls, creeping slowly towards the floor, crowding out the light. They are reaching into the edges of my vision, blinding me, I feel them on my skin, I feel them on my skin–

“Steady,” Sedra murmurs, their lips black-stained and soft on my burning skin. “You’re almost through. Don’t let the nightmare distract you.” Their hands lie tenderly from my temple to my jaw, running down to my throat, my chest, my waist with soothing pressure, their touch reasserting the inviolate bareness of my skin. They slip behind me, the better to guide, their warmth pressed to my back, separated only by incandescent scripture. “Look to the altar,” they say, running their hands down to rest at my hips. “Let delirium come. Let it take you. It will be well.”

I clutch at the drift of their skirts, eyes wide, and I sound too much like a little child again but that cannot be helped. I hear myself whimper. “I’m scared, Sed.”

I can feel their soft laughter on my bare back. “Oh, Meiya…” Their blue-stained hands guide me back to lie against their chest, stroking my cheek a touch too slowly. I notice, too late, that their voice is slurred, crooning with groans, tight already with the strain of holding back their own surrender. “That is for the best.”

I do as I am bidden, cradled in Sedra’s body. The candlelight that gilds the altar, scant and dim, pulses and flickers in some inscrutable dance. Vapor and smoke fills my breath, renders me lightheaded, and with each breath the candles’ flames grow brighter, more liquid, more like molten ores in a smelting furnace. I feel the warmth of it flooding into me, scalding my tongue, filling my throat with all the fierce promise of an era of monument, the essence of lacquer and gold hidden in the moans and sobs of such blessed children as we…

…This is not my… This is…

Oh…

We are witnessed.

The candlelight wavers in its character just a hair, the room unchanged yet irreparably altered, the sensation of a great unseen eye turning to read our skins with indecipherable judgement. The exquisite disarray of instinct at delicate war with our senses– ours, all of ours, I feel my brother-sisters’ shifts and trembles as easily as my own– sends me reeling, as the room fills with the air of eminence and apocalypse.

I am blinded, shivering, crying out at every touch and breath of air upon my skin. At once, I see all manner of vision and variance, all and none true: a towering fire of incalculable height with a voice like the howling of tearing steel, a battlefield carpeted in blood and loosed pages of perfect literature, impossible colours that taste of change and delight and summer. The curtains draw closed only partway, reality made dreamlike, floating above its own surface, meat made vapor made pearl, blue as devotion, yellow as cholera…

I am trembling; someone is trembling, at least, novitiate, or disciple, or dissociation. Our hearts each set themselves alight in holy terror, lapping war-drums climbing each other into thunder, inches from flying apart at every weeping breath and flaying us alive. Always, everywhere, there is the weight of the divine presence, terrible and beautiful, red with blood and black with ink, nails like golden knives, eyes of hellfire. Love without reservation, rage without end. We are pinned beneath the measurement of God, beneath the substance of our Lord’s will, and the fire burns our eyes to weeping.

We are terrified.

We are terrified beyond the applicable language for terrors. There exists no word of mortal tongue to contain such fear. Holy dread and shaking awe can be heard in every dripping, heaving breath. We are humbled, frightened, debased and rapturous, with no borders to cleave one state from another. Our adoration is sung in chanting, in blissful screams, in whisper and tear and moan, in biting fit to tear the skin. There is no sensation that is not welcome here. To hold such a state as this and retain sanity is a fine art. Refined hysteria is necessary.

The blood rises heady with urgent, desperate lust, aroused with awe, what would seem at odds with the consuming terror were it not the safest response response to it: the perverse hunger for oblivion trained against the will to live in fragile balance, an anchor of rapture to ward away the Void. The same urge to lean out over the highest precipices and contemplate dashing the body on the stones below, so too do our hands reach for ourselves, for each other. Our awe and love bends itself into new sensations, as yet uncharted by the common mortal experience, and we cling to each other in wonder and comfort, at once brutal and tender. By this cypher, we render a little of the unbearable ecstasy into a torment we can comprehend, that we can withstand. Thus do we ransom ourselves from our self-begged madness, from the lethal danger of our service.

It seems as natural a response as our trembling hands, our whimper-shot chanting, to brush our lips tenderly against the cheeks and throats of our companions, fondly kissing and pawing with our communal pulse too quick and loud to know shame or reservation. We press our foreheads together in love, sneer in each other’s faces with the wide baring of teeth reserved for violence, cleansed of malice and all the more dangerous for it. Riding panic without brutality is a careful dance, balanced on swords. All it would take is a single one to slip from delicate mania into savagery, and all of us would be cast down…

That is the purpose of the Armigers at each corner. They are there to assure, not to threaten. Our brothers will care for us, keep us safe in our holy delirium. They will remove what breaks, but that need not be sinister, for we will not shatter. We must not.

Every skin is worn with laughing joy and panting lust, and I watch the aspect-spirit move from one to the other, bestowing what was deserved, taking what was owed. In corners, at times, I watch as it kneels before itself in the forbidden ways, presses itself into the walls, kisses its own lips with violent desire. More than once, it leads the flesh it wears to an Armiger, smiling and speaking to each by name, though the Vimer has never met them. I do not know when I moved to the floor. I am preoccupied with the taste of the screams and songs, dazed with the hypnotic dance of painted flesh and eyes like night, opal-lit now with pale fire in the centres. Every moment feels an hour long. I feel chitinous armor beneath my hands: Sedra’s skin is bare as I touch them, but still my fingers trace over cracks and ridges regardless. I feel the weight and heft of daggers in my hands, and then they are gone again, my skin knowing only skin once more.

Languid, serene Sedra; dreugh-graceful, tide-limbed Sedra; nurturing alm'ata Sedra. Sedra, with their hands smearing star-blood glow along my waist, their begging spear gleaming slick in the shining blue gore, anointing our fitting parts. Sedra, with their body burning against mine, arched taut and whispering rapid, urgent words I cannot grasp the shape of, noise without meaning, meaning without form, the truth of language in the fervid and manic stab-thrust of animal life. Sedra, reborn in the honesty of selfish pleasure, obsidian-eyed and beautiful, screaming in grateful horror, their spear keeping pace with my seizing heart. Their nails sink deep into my hips, and I laugh to feel their painless descent; I am a live coal burning within insensate ash, a membrane of perfect dust begging to be pierced.

My bones are heavy, leaden. My body is gravid with twelve-score hidden concepts, leaping in spasm and tendon-dance to the shifting whims of holy narrative; it is beyond me, and I it. I watch my own ecstasy from higher places, forming wordless poetry to savage glory in the sacred place between sentence and meat. I watch my foolish body try to mouth the words, speaking nothing but fumbled moans and hisses, and the occasional snatch of long-fallen silks, anon Chimeris. I bless the dispensation of nereid composure at the altar-and-sacrifice of my flesh and weigh its worth as three times the generous, the distillation of unadorned humility, instructor insensate, acolyte made offering.

Above, black hands caress my skull, light touches and golden nails turning my eyes from the glory of spectacle. Sun-bladed and hollow-cheeked, the gaunt shade holds me to their gaze, eyes set blinding-pale with the milk of godfire. A crown of cooling flame throws sapphire shadows to paint their skin in shifting letters. Their hands trail dust upon my jaw.

What they speak to me is a secret, to be inked into my spine. I will carry the preserved essence upon my skin, the writ of my alteration’s authoring. Their smile is a beauty more terrible than the light of dying stars. Their kiss is soft, until it is not.

Black fingers pry apart my jaws with gentle insistence, wider, impossible to resist. Their teeth close at the root of my tongue. My blood spills in black gouts that taste of steel and persimmon tea, staining the face of God.

Below, I hear my body scream. It is an agonised, sharp sound, full of terror and pain, the sound of some tortured beast. It is weeping, howling. Laughing, “Thank you.”

Oh pillar of fire, I am yours. Oh angel of Veloth, I am yours. Oh master and bride and keeper, I am yours. I yield to your will with perfect ardor, I accept the great gift of your love and I return it three times over, I love you, I love you–

The body calls me back, and I come apart like glass breaking, a paroxysm of venom and fervor. I know nothing else.

[maychorian]

Weekly Voltron Fic Recs #31

Rules: You can find past weekly rec lists here, and non-list recs in my general fic rec tag. Also follow @maychorianrecs​ for individually tagged posts, the easier to search and reblog. This is stuff I like, and I have a huge bias toward Lance, hurt/comfort, and general fluff, in that order. Gen unless otherwise noted. Please comment on the fics if you read and enjoy them!

Made of Star-Stuff by hello my stars (arka_r) Words: 26,066 Author's Summary: The headquarters of the Blade of Marmora was not just a military base; it was also a home to refugees. Aliens of all sorts from planets the Empire had destroyed or were occupying lived there. Secured between the pulling forces of two black holes, protected by the solar flares of a blue supergiant star, the small rocky moon was the safest place to hide from Zarkon’s destructive fleet.Despite this diversity, Keith the half-Galra from Earth always knew that he was different. --Dads of Marmora AU / Blade of Marmora-raised Keith AU. Minor/background relationship tag refers to Thace/Ulaz and Kolivan/Antok. This series will have Shiro/Keith in the later installments. My Comments: Absolute fabulous fic. The worldbuilding is so detailed and so cool, and the characterization of Keith as an unintentionally abandoned child, and all of his anger issues and heartache and depression, is so spot-on and so heartachey. There are moments of great fear and grief, as well as plenty of uplifting moments and warm fuzziness. Very satisfying.

The Sea In Between by Oh_Contrary Words: 60,444 (WIP 14/25)  Author's Summary: Team Voltron has successfully reunited after they were separated by the corrupted wormhole. But now, as they start their most perilous series of missions, the team is once again torn apart when Lance is captured by the Galra. While Lance struggles to survive in the clutches of their enemy, the rest of the team struggles just to stay together. The team is determined to find their friend; but will they find him in time? My Comments: Tagged Klance, gen so far. I binged this at work today, and you should definitely mind the tags and trigger warnings. So far it’s been pretty brutal, but the love and care the Voltron team has for each other still shines through very strongly. We’re finally getting to the point where I expect to see some heavy-duty hurt/comfort, so I’m really looking forward to more.

Gifts of the Champion by librariansheart Words: 1,577 Author's Summary: Shiro has become the Champion of the Arena, and in the process has begun to lose sight of himself. My Comments: An achey but well-written glimpse of Shiro’s missing year.

Hold in your breath by Qpenguin98 Words: 2,670 Author's Summary: Keith tries to do what Shiro wanted, but it doesn't go as well as he hopes. My Comments: Post Season-Two, Keith is hurting so so bad, and he’s not making the best choices, but the support from everyone else helps.

Hunk: Yellow Paladin by ElfGrove Words: 2,618 Author's Summary: Archiving from my tumblr flash fics. Fanart Response Ficlet. -- Shiro gets into a tough spot and Hunk's heroism shines through. My Comments: I absolutely adore the art this is based on, and the fic is a perfect accompaniment. Shiro is in trouble, Hunk gets hurt rescuing him, and Shiro tries to remind Hunk that he’s important, too.

Fighting the Surface by tommino Words: 10,957 (WIP 7/10) Author's Summary: “Humans have shown quite the impressive drive for survival,” the Galra commander grins. “I want to see you fight against that. The druids claim drowning is quite the painful way to go." He tips Lance backward over the water, as Keith and Shiro struggle against their bonds. "If you surface, they die.” Lance’s eyes widen and he's pushed backward with a splash. ______ Keith, Shiro, and Lance are taken captive during a mission planet-side. The commander decides he only needs two paladins for interrogation, and decides to have a little fun while they wait for extraction. Lance is thrown into the deep with the threat that if he swims up for air, one of the other two will be shot. Obviously Lance would rather die than allow that. Later chapters will, of course, deal with Keith and Shiro losing their damn minds thinking Lance just drowned himself for them. My Comments: Tagged Klance, gen so far. Really great action/angst fic with self-sacrificing Lance and horrified Shiro and Keith. The tension and emotion is top-notch.

Take Me Home by Reader115 Words: 44,562 Author's Summary: “We’re going to see them today,” Lance said in a continued whisper. Keith’s ears flicked towards him, as much an indication that Keith was listening that Lance was likely to receive this early in the morning. “I just keep thinking about what it’s going to be like to finally go home. I know I said I wanted parades before, but — really I just want to sit down at the dinner table and stare at their faces.”A sequel to “Make Me Your Home” in which the paladins finally get to return to Earth for a visit. My Comments: Klance, but I was able to skip over the dating and sexual content (brief) without too much trouble. This is a great fic, a great exploration of Lance and his relationship with his family and just earth-shattering grief can be. It just go away when the object of that grief suddenly returns from the dead, no sir. All of Lance’s family’s different reactions were so poignant and so realistic. Beautiful stuff.

All This Dogged Innocence by yet_intrepid Words: 2,355 Author's Summary: Ulaz pinches at the bridge of his nose. It is—soft of him, really, sentimental. The Blade is of greater importance than any three prisoners among Zarkon’s thousands. But he does not like to see the humans cringe at his inspections, as if he will hurt them. Not that their fears are baseless, either, Ulaz thinks as he flips through his records to find the date of Shiro’s wrist injury. They have been hurt at the hands of many Galra, and Ulaz has had his share in that. It is necessary for maintaining his position, and he tells himself he does not regret it. “Concentration?” Matt says, hopefully. He holds out his hands again. “Matt,” says the older of the prisoners, the commander. He seems to have other names—Dad, Sam—but Ulaz is unsure of their significance. It’ll take more in-depth cultural research to determine what each means. “Let Shiro be.” My Comments: This is so heartbreaking and so sweet at the same time. Gah, this author excels at that. A Little TLC by partlycloudii Words: 1,572 Author's Summary: The defenders of the universe are a team, a family. My Comments: Super adorable Lance and Allura bonding, then dragging the whole team in. I love it. Nice Things by wingedflower Words: 2,875 Author's Summary: Protect the universe. Defeat Zarkon. Find her family. Pidge knew that those missions were more important than anything else. But sometimes she couldn't help but crave a little normality in her life, if only for a while. Luckily, Lance is there to remind her of some facts she has already forgotten. My Comments: Lance and Pidge friendship! He’s so sweet and so dumb, sometimes, and Pidge deserves nice things.

quiet moments by aah_bluejay Words: 2,493 Author's Summary: Sometimes she sat alone, dwarfed by the cavernous walls and reflective surfaces. But more and more often, now, she had company. Today it was Keith that dropped by, walking into the room with feather-light steps and sinking to the floor in one fluid movement once she gave him the okay to enter. // or: Pidge and Keith sit in silence. Sometimes it's comfortable and sometimes it's not. My Comments: Gimme that sweet, sweet Pidge and Keith friendship.

The X Files by Zurela Words: 11,130 Author's Summary: Three of the most brilliant people at the Garrison were sent on a mission and didn't return. No one will say what happened. Keith, Pidge, Lance, and Hunk are the only ones willing to find the truth. My Comments: Nice canon-divergence AU Keith doesn’t get kicked out quite as quickly and makes friends with the Garrison Trio. Blink and you’ll miss it Klance at the end.

Not Enough Soup by tanksquid  Words: 1,246 Author's Summary: For the given prompt: "How about a contagion thing where the four younger paladins get sick with some kind of space flu and Shiro takes care of them but then he gets it himself and he's way worse than they are because he's been running himself ragged and then they all team up and take care of their Space Dad and it's fluffy and sweet." Small whump prompt, ft Shiro being an actual dad and trying to take care of his terrible children. My Comments: Give Shiro the soup.

Peanut Butter Cookies by this_book_has_been_loved Words: 2,000 Author's Summary: A year ago today, Pidge had been woken up by Matt over an hour earlier than it already was. They’d raced down the stairs towards the kitchen, where their mom had already started pulling out bowls and pans and ingredients to start the day. Today, only a year later, Pidge sat alone at a table in the Garrison’s dining hall, staring through the open windows at the sunlight glinting off the red mountains. OR Pidge is left to celebrate their father’s birthday on their own. But, maybe they’re not as alone as they think. My Comments: Really sweet pre-series Garrison Trio fic with Hunk and Lance doing everything they can to help Pidge feel better.

In-Flight Conversation by Foxfire74 Words: 331 Author's Summary: The Green Lion is good at communicating. Really. My Comments: Super adorable Pidge and Green bonding. Am I Broken? by Adventures_in_Writing Words: 7,381 Author's Summary: Pidge is feeling a little lost and confused so she goes to Lance for some advice. My Comments: Really lovely fic about Pidge questioning whether she’s asexual and what that might mean, and looking to Lance for advice. There are background pairings that are important to the content of the discussion but don’t affect the main point of the fic, which is friendship and understanding.

Turn Back the Clock by phoenixyfriend Words: 4,632 (WIP 1/?) Author's Summary: Lance was all of nineteen years old, had spent the last two years and change fighting a war against an evil alien empire, and had lost six friends in one fell stroke just a week and a half ago. And with a little help, he was going to fix that. My Comments: Absolutely fabulous time travel fic in which Lance, a veteran of the war against Zarkon for several years, goes back in time to a point pre-series to try to save everyone from a catastrophic event. The writing is great, and the art is wonderful too. I can’t wait for more.

Coran's Guide to the Care and Keeping of Earthling Humans by WildWolf25 Words: 9,098 (WIP 8/12) Author's Summary: It turns out there a fair number of cultural differences between Alteans and humans. Confusion and hilarity ensues. (Based on some of those "humans are weird" or "take a human" posts I've seen floating around tumblr) My Comments: Super cute Team Voltron fic with a great Coran POV and fun, fluffy moments for all. Ghost Stories by SilverMoon53 Words: 1,678 Author's Summary: It started with an off-hand suggestion from Lance, which grew into a 3AM grouping around a campfire telling ghost stories and roasting Hunk’s marshmallow-like creation. My Comments: Lovely team bonding fic that gets really serious really fast.

Teeth Ready for Sinking by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) Words: 13,030 Author's Summary: Since waking up ten years in the future, Shiro hasn't been able to bring himself to get back in the Black Lion. The rest of the team is there to offer advice and help. My Comments: I both love and hate this ‘verse. It’s amazing and well-written, but it tears at my soul. That said, this is beautiful, emotional and very affecting. Of Seas, of Streams, of Falling Rain, of Naval Hurricane by twilighteve Words: 11,624 Author's Summary: “I should tell the others,” he whispered to himself, like he did every morning since he got the ability, despite knowing that this day-cycle would probably end the way other day-cycles did. Namely, with him not saying anything about this. The timing was just never right. Lance gets water/ice powers. He wants to tell the others, but either he has the worst timing in the universe ever, or Fate just likes to fuck with him. To be completely honest, he's leaning to the latter. My Comments: Lance is a sweet, sweet, darling, incredibly lovely boy, even when he gets Elsa powers and no one listens to him. Slightly OOC for my tastes, but I did enjoy this fic very much.

Man in the Box by Emerald_Ashes Words: 2,359 Author's Summary: The castle was quite vast, and had a lot of large spaces. But this part Lance couldn’t stand. The storeroom was just small. It was no secret that he wasn’t a fan of tight spaces. Dark. Enclosed. Cramped. He hated it all.Or: A day of chores ends rather badly for Lance My Comments: This is rough on poor Lance, but I loved Keith’s efforts to help.

Previously Recced Fics That Updated: As Color Fades Away by IcyPanther The Machinations of Perception by HapaxLegomenon Someplace Like Home by squirenonny The Size Of Our Actions by buttered_onions A Dream Away by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) (now complete) The Color Of Our Planet From Far Far Away by LonelyGirlInSpace Secret of the Blood by exclamation (now complete) Truce by kyanve Water and Blood by Stratagem A Couple of Ticks by easternCriminal Renegades by Stratagem Love and Other Questions by squirenonny (now complete, and so so so so good) Towards The Sun by Eastofthemoon Gate Keeper by MoonlitPaladin (MoonlitStardust) for cupcakelevi Here Stands a Man by awkwardCerberus (now complete) Voltron Meets Voltron! by Nameless_Knight Playing Catch-Up by 5557

[crystallinekingdom]

"Are you scared? ... Then why won't you look at the screen?" (Prompt)

hey this got a little long… also im sorry it took 2 days

Movie Night

Taako’s sprawled out on the couch in their suite, painting his nails a shimmering blue and watching the world below through the now-exposed porthole that makes up most of the living room’s floor, when his Stone of Farspeech starts ringing where he left it on the coffee table.

He had expected this to be a quiet day. Apparently, in the aftermath of saving the world, nobody cares if you take a few extra days off work - Merle was planetside visiting his kids, while Magnus had gone to spar with Killian and Carey.

Whilst attempting to grasp for his Stone with semi-wet paint all over his nails, Taako drops the bottle of polish onto the counter, and the device is suddenly covered in tacky blue sparkles. He curses three different gods as he brings it up to his ear, inwardly praying that the person at the other end isn’t Brad ready to lecture him for thirty minutes about his use of expletives and how it isn’t beneficial to a teamwork environment.

It’s not. His sister’s voice crackles through the speaker, muffled by bad reception but still audible, and a grin spreads across his face.

“How’s it hanging, dork?” Lup asks. Taako can hear gravel crunching under her feet as she walks.

“Just chilling up here. What are you and the nerd up to, do-gooding in some random village again?” Lup and Barry had not been as blasé about the aftermath of the apocalypse as him and the boys - every day they were assisting a cleanup effort somewhere, trying to get areas that had been hit hard by the Hunger back in working order.

“Not today, actually, and that’s why I called. We aren’t scheduled to be in Goldcliff till Wednesday morning, which gives us, like, a day and a half free. Figured we’d drop by the moonbase and say hi. Want to hang out, or do you have better things to do?”

“No can do, sis, I’m busy curing cancer and making shoes for orphans - of course I’m down to hang out, who do you think I am? What time are you gonna be up here?”

“I just summoned a sphere, so.” The audio crackles a bit as she pauses, presumably to check her watch. “Around six, give or take?”

“Hell yeah. I’ll be in the suite. See ya then, goofus.” Taako puts the stone in his pocket, taking care to cap the bottle of blue polish on the table before hefting himself off the sofa.

The glass face of the clock on the wall has a large crack down its middle, but he can still make out a time that’s somewhere around 4:50 p.m. Enough time to whip something quick up, he thinks as he makes his way over to the kitchen.

Taako is halfway through mixing a bowl of dough for a yet-unfinished batch of glazed lemon cookies before he hears a light knock at the door. It’s much earlier than the ETA Lup had given him, but he trudges over, leans against the wall with one batter-sticky hand, and looks through the peephole.

In the hallway is Angus, newsboy cap slightly askew and clutching his wand to his chest. Taako is momentarily taken aback until he remembers what day of the week it is. Oh, shit. Monday is magic day.

He unlocks the deadbolt and pushes the door open with a flourish, feigning ignorance as to why the kid is here. “Hey, Django. What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

“Hello, sir!” Angus shifts from one foot to the other. “Uh, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I was just wondering if our magic lessons are, um, still a thing that’s happening? I mean, I totally understand if you’re busy, or if you’re finished training me now that I’m done being a Seeker and not really useful to you guys anymore, or-”

Taako cuts him off with a wave of his hand. “Sorry, kiddo. Don’t think we’re going to be able to do a lesson today.” Angus’s face falls and he opens his mouth to say something, but Taako continues, “Lulu and Barold are coming up for the day. Want to stick around and ask them all those nerd science questions you’ve been asking me? Might even be some baked goods in it for ya.”

He leaves the door open and turns around to retreat back into the kitchen, catching Angus’s “Th-thank you so much!” and the sound of the door shutting, then small footsteps following him inside.

“Now that you’re here, bubbeleh, I’m gonna have to put you to work. Child labor isn’t illegal if it’s on the moon,” Taako says, lightly clapping Angus on the back. “Want to go grab me a half tablespoon of vanilla extract so I can add it to this sick batter?”

Lup and Barry open the door an hour later to the sight of cookies left to cool on the stovetop and Taako sitting on the couch with Angus, teaching him some particularly nasty Fantasy Yiddish curses.

After a bout of small talk (considering the twins have fallen back into their old habit of constantly keeping tabs on each other for blackmail material, there isn’t much catching up to do) and a brief trip back to Lup and Barry’s makeshift moonbase quarters, Barry lays out a stack of old DVD cases on the kitchen table in front of Angus.

“It’s my movie collection from back on the Starblaster”, he explains. “First thing I salvaged once we got the ship back up here. We haven’t seen any of these in at least a decade, so take your pick, kiddo.”

Angus takes his time opening each plastic case and reading the blurb on the back. By the time he’s done, the other three are in an angry debate over the Fantasy Star Wars prequels (“They give context for episodes four through six, you uncultured swines!”), and Angus has to throw the case he’s chosen at Taako’s head to get their attention.

Taako looks at the case - Fantasy Alien. He briefly questions whether the whole chestburster thing is too frightening for an eleven year old boy, until he realizes that said eleven year old boy has fought eldritch abominations and been thrown off the back of a moving train. So much for childhood innocence.

“Good choice, Agnes,” he says, twirling the case in his hand.

Twenty minutes later, the lights are off and they’re all piled onto the couch under a knit throw covered in yellow embroidered ducks. Barry’s got an arm around his girlfriend and is staring at the screen with an expression of childlike wonder, Lup is whispering suggestive comments into Taako’s ear between mouthfuls of cookie, and Angus…

As the characters onscreen argue about what to do with the young halfling lying on the operating table with a squid-alien-thing on his face, Angus’s eyes are anywhere but on the action. The blanket is wrapped tightly around him up to his chest, and he’s staring directly into it.

Taako wrestles his right arm free from where Angus had pinned it while leaning on him and uses it to ruffle the boy’s hair. “Are you scared?” he asks softly. Maybe Angus is more squeamish than he’d thought.

“Oh, no, sir! If this were a real mission, they would have listened to containment protocol and prevented all this from happening. This whole situation could have been avoided if not for the sake of dramatic irony!” Angus responds, without looking up from his blanket cocoon.

“Then why won’t you look at the screen?” Taako lightly noogies him, then tugs on Angus’s piece of the blanket.

Out falls a small spiral-bound notebook with blue and silver trim, hitting the floor face-up with a small thump. Honestly, Taako doesn’t know what else he expected - he reaches down to pick it up, and surveys the page it opened up onto.

Below some indecent Fantasy Yiddish phrases (he’s both proud of the kid and terrified Lucretia will come after him once she hears Angus using said phrases in conversation) is a detailed sketch of a spacecraft. It’s surrounded by liner notes, detailing the workings of each part of the craft, its name - SS Nostromo - and physics equations describing what looks to be its capability for interstellar travel.

“Woah, is this the ship from the movie?” Taako asks.

“Yes, um. I’m sorry for not paying attention, I just thought it was a really interesting concept and-”

“Angus. It’s really dang good. Consider me thoroughly impressed.”

“Thank you!” Angus grins. “I’m just wondering, I know the Starblaster was made for hopping between dimensions, but did it have the raw power required for regular-old third dimensional travel on a larger scale like in this movie? Like, interstellar spaceflight?”

Lup, who has apparently been paying more attention to this whisper-conversation than Taako would have thought, turns towards Angus and wipes a few stray crumbs off her face. “See, the thing with bond energy is that because it’s freakin’ everywhere, it only takes a small core to process a huge amount of it. That’s how we could use such a small exploratory vessel. Of course, traveling in five dimensions takes a lot more power than in three, but if you factor in gravity and antimatter-”

Taako cranks up the volume on the television just as Barry shifts to face them, presumably to point out some obscure law of astrophysics. Adorable. They should set up their own little think tank. Taako smiles fondly at them as they continue their conversation, his face lit by the dim glow of the screen, then turns back around just as the alien bursts out of the halfling’s chest.

By the time the credits roll, both Angus and Barry are out cold - Angus holding his notebook and curled up against Taako’s chest, Barry clutching a throw pillow with a picture of a corgi on it. Lup has extricated herself from the cuddle pile and is raiding his pantry, and Taako is trying to figure out the best way to reach for the remote without waking up the two nerds asleep on his couch.

“You know,” Lup calls out from the kitchen, “I still feel kinda bad about blowing up his macaroons. He’s a good kid. You think it’d be cool if I made it up to him by baking him some more?”

Taako looks down at Angus, takes off his glasses, and places them on the coffee table. “I think he’d like that a lot.”

[wristwatchjournal]

Hands-on – The 2020 Breguet Classique 7337 Calendar & Moon With New Dials

Earlier this year, Breguet unveiled its models for 2020 including this Classique 7337 Calendar & Moon watch. One of the main themes at Breguet for 2020 has been the introduction of blue dials in its Classique family with the 7137 Moon & Power Reserve, this 7337 Calendar & Moon and the 5377 Tourbillon Extra-Plat. Like so many Breguet watches, the 7337 was inspired by a historical pocket watch (well, in fact, two historical pocket watches) made by founder Abraham-Louis Breguet in the early 1800s. The exquisite layout of the original dial with its impeccable guillochage and the off-centred arrangement has been the muse for various iterations over the years. However, having had the privilege of a hands-on session with both the rose gold/silver dial and white gold/blue dial models of 2020, the only problem we had was deciding which one was our favourite.

Historical References

During his lifetime (1747-1823), Breguet’s innovative and highly technical mind led to the invention of the spring-gong for repeater watches, the first shock-absorber device (para-chute), the Breguet balance spring, the sympathique watch, the tact watch, and of course the tourbillon, patented on 26 June 1801. But Breguet was also famous for his aesthetic approach to watchmaking creating a new design language that eschewed the overly decorated watches of the day. Rebranded in more contemporary marketing jargon as the ‘unmistakable signs’ of a Breguet watch, features like guillochage, off-centred displays, enamel dials, caseband fluting, Breguet hands and numerals, and a host of other Breguet decorative dictates are rigorously upheld today.

Extract from the book Breguet – Art And Innovation In Watchmaking, by Emmanuel Breguet

One of the historical inspirations that is not specifically mentioned by the brand, but that we believe inspired the  7337, was the Breguet tact watch no. 4579. A delightful gold pocket watch, no. 4579 was sold to Monsieur De Roos on 1 June 1829 for the sum of 5,080 francs. (A quick search throws up the name of John Frederick Fitzgerald de Roos, a British Royal Navy commander. Was he the mystery man who bought this watch?) Displaying a moon phase indicator at noon, two lateral apertures for the day of the week and the date, a large off-centred hour ring for the hours and minutes, and even a small power reserve indicator, no. 4579 also featured Breguet’s ingeniously simple way of telling the time by touch. Using a pointer on the outside case to reproduce the position of the hour hand, the wearer could then calculate the time by counting the studs on the sides of the case. Sold from 1799 on, tact watches were sometimes known as ‘watches for the blind’ but you can imagine the utility of this system in a long-winded meeting or in a dark cabin below deck. It is a feature of elegant women and men, in order to tell the time without having to pull your watch out of its pocket.

The other pocket watch – no. 3833, sold in 1823 – is officially cited as the inspiration behind the reference 7337. It certainly displays the same layout and practically the same functionality as the current reference, but it was a half-quarter repeating watch. Whichever way, and taking into account that the power reserve indicator on the historic models was abandoned in exchange of a small seconds counter, there can be no doubt that these historic pocket watches were behind Breguet’s ref. 7337.

The 36mm Breguet Ref. 3330, the first wristwatch to reintroduce the elegant calendar & moon display seen in historical watches above. Photo by Antiquorum

Following the acquisition of the brand by Swatch Group in 1999, a wristwatch closely modelled on the above-mentioned pocket watches (and earlier models made when Breguet was owned by Investcorp) appeared in Breguet’s collection. Known as Ref. 7377, it was released in yellow, white and rose gold with silver dials. The two new 2020 models join this illustrious family displaying the subtle but effective design modifications on the dial and the novelty of a ‘Breguet blue’ dial colour. The case, the case size and even the movement are all identical to the existing models.

The modern evolution of this typically-Breguet display, with the new editions of the Classique 7337 – which includes this appealing blue model.

eccentric harmony

If you were to take all the features of the dial and lay them out on a table and then ask somebody from outside the watch industry to arrange them harmoniously, chances are you’d get a pretty ugly dial. Therein lies Abraham-Louis Breguet’s extraordinary talent for arranging disparate elements on a dial to create a harmonious effect. Instead of settling for a more conventional arrangement of peripheral hours and minutes and the phases of the moon at 6 o’clock, Breguet went for an extremely unorthodox layout.

Here, for example, you have a plump, bottom-heavy figure-eight composed of the hours and minutes chapter ring surmounted by a smaller arch-shaped moon phase indicator, exactly the same as the arrangement found on the historic pocket watches. On either side of the hour ring are two bosom-shaped apertures inclined at an angle, one at 10 o’clock for the day of the week and the other at 2 ‘clock for the date. And then there is the running seconds disc inserted inside the hour ring at an odd 5 o’clock position.  What is remarkable is just how harmonious and appealing this unconventional layout results.

The most apparent modification has taken place in the moon phase aperture at noon. The older 7377 models have a classic golden ‘Man in the Moon’ face surrounded by golden stars. The new silver embossed moon in the aperture is far more realistic. Complete with craters, the silver moon floats in a midnight blue sky punctuated with different sizes of silver stars. Another subtle modification is the use of slightly thinner, less heavy numerals on the hour ring (Roman) and the age of the moon (Arabic). The hands are classic Breguet open-tipped hands, which Breguet designed in 1783.

Guillochage

Breguet was the first watchmaker to apply guillochage to his dials and used different styles of guillochage to delineate the different functions and enhance legibility. Even without modern-day inventions like luminescent paint, you have to admit that the dials of both the 7337 watches are remarkably clear and easy to read; perhaps even more so in the blue version, which benefits from a greater contrast between the blue guilloche background and the silvered tracks.

The technique of guillochage has barely changed since Breguet’s days and guillocheurs in Breguet’s manufacture still rely on historic rose engine lathes operated by hand. You can get a feel for what this entails in our article and this short video filmed at Breguet. Starting life as a solid 18k gold blank, an engraver chisels the areas on the dial that will feature guillochage. Here you can see the central part of the dial has been decorated with a hobnail pattern (clous de Paris) while the small seconds at 5 o’clock has a chequerboard (damier) motif and the rest of the dial is engine-turned with a barleycorn pattern (grain d’orge). In addition to delineating the different functions, the guillochage provides a matte glare-free background that enhances legibility no end. Some light hand-engravings are also found next to the moon indication, which has also been updated with a realistic moon surface instead of a ‘face’ in previous editions.

The case is faithful to Breguet’s philosophy of neo-classical elegance and simplicity. Measuring 39mm across and with a height of 9.9mm, the case – in white gold or rose gold – is the essence of sobriety with a minimum of decoration, save for the hallmark fluting on the caseband.

Calibre 502

Underneath the sapphire crystal caseback is Breguet’s classic calibre 502 – in this case, the 502.3 QSE1. An ultra-thin automatic movement, the calibre has a thickness of just 3.80mm. Echoing the eccentric layout of the dial and the guillochage decoration, the rotor is also offset and decorated with guillochage. The bridges are bevelled and decorated with Geneva stripes and you can just discern the profile of the open barrel spring. Comprised of 236 components, with 35 jewels and running at a 3Hz frequency, the power reserve is 45 hours. It also features modern components like the incorporation of a silicon balance spring and a lever escapement with silicon horns.

Thoughts

Owning a Breguet Classique 7337 Calendar & Moon is like wearing a slice of history on your wrist. Practically every design detail harks back to the founder’s aesthetic dictates. What is surprising though is the timelessness of Breguet’s unusual layouts, as intriguing today as they were two hundred years ago.

While the silver dial model is classic Breguet to the core, the ‘Breguet blue’ model is even more intriguing. I know that Brice prefers the silver dial (editor’s note: I indeed prefer the silver version… but I have zero objectivity regarding this watch, being my all-time favourite Breguet watch), a colour that you won’t grow tired of in the long run, but my heart goes out for the blue dial. The crisp contrasts and the elegant shade of blue make it hyper-easy to consult and give it a more contemporary mood.

Price & Availability

Depending on the model selected, the Breguet Classique 7337 Calendar & Moon is accompanied on a blue or brown alligator strap with a folding buckle matching the case material and shaped like the brand’s logo. The price for these two new versions (7337BB/Y5/9VU, white gold and 7337BR/15/9VU, rose gold) will be EUR 41,900. Both models are now available from boutiques and selected retailers.

More details at breguet.com.

The post Hands-on – The 2020 Breguet Classique 7337 Calendar & Moon With New Dials appeared first on Wristwatch Journal.

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[recentanimenews]

6 Surprisingly Normal Jobs That Probably Exist in Anime Series

When it comes to anime (or any type of fiction), we're willing to suspend a lot of disbelief. That's a good thing; if we couldn't let ourselves believe that giant robots or magical girls or huge Titans could exist, we wouldn't have much fun. Sometimes, though, we can't help but have questions about the world of the anime we're watching—and not necessarily about big things like how magic or science work there.

  It's the little things that spring to mind when you're watching shows like Naruto or Pokémon: things that the characters in those worlds would likely take for granted, but that must be part of their daily lives in order for their worlds to work the way they do. Just like we have tech support to keep our computer-centric world running, the worlds of anime must have a few highly specialized jobs behind the scenes, right?

  We couldn't help but think of a few as we watched some of our favorite shows. Have you ever wondered about things like this in your favorite anime? Let us know in the comments what unusual jobs you think would be common—and necessary—in the worlds of your favorite anime!

  Ninja Headband Makers (Naruto)

A ninja's headband is an important part of who they are. It shows their dedication to their village, indicates that they are a trained shinobi, and also protects the forehead (unless their opponent uses magnet jutsu, of course). With the omnipresence and importance of the headband, clearly there must be someone—or rather, several people—making them on the regular.

  While this could be handled by blacksmiths along with weapons like kunai and throwing stars, we prefer to imagine there are headband shops that specialize in churning these out. Imagine a teacher ordering a box before graduation, or a newly-established village submitting their choice of design to make sure it isn't already taken. They already have custom fasteners; maybe they make novelty ones for parties, too.

   Rose Breeders (Revolutionary Girl Utena)

The great thing about Ohtori Academy (besides all the swordfighting and epaulets) is that it's pretty upscale... meaning that even ridiculously specialized professionals are affordable if necessary. That's a good thing when you've got an entire campus political system that requires the destruction of highly customized flowers on a regular basis.

  Tending the roses, as we've seen, is pretty much handled. But what about getting those colors just right to match each Student Council member's hair... er, theme? You could put white roses in food coloring, but we have a feeling Ohtori's Finest would prefer the real deal off their own custom rosebushes—and that means breeding and hybridizing unusually colored roses.

  That's especially impressive considering there is no recessive gene that will make roses grow naturally blue... so whatever they've managed for Miki is some high-level science.

  Pokéball R&D (Pokémon)

You know that feeling you get when you throw a Pokéball and have to wait for it to finish twitching to see if you've actually caught that Pokémon? Imagine that, but in real life and with a ball you've probably paid a fair amount of real money for.

  Pokéballs are as essential to Pokémon trainers as our own smartphones are to us. They're a bit similar culturally, after all: we take them everywhere with us, they store all our important stuff, and there's nothing scarier than thinking you've either lost it entirely or the contents have disappeared. Oh, and they're always coming out with newer, better ones.

  Considering how essential they are, we're pretty sure there are Pokéball beta testers whenever a new one comes out. We're also pretty sure they get paid in either college credits or "experience."

    Highly Specialized Therapists (Sailor Moon)

Living in the world of Sailor Moon means coming to terms with some seriously weird facts about yourself. As an innocent bystander in that series, your body would contain (in addition to the usual bones and muscle and stuff) a Dream Mirror, a Star Seed, and a Heart Crystal. Besides having those things stolen or corrupted, you could have your energy drained or be turned into a youma.

  The Sailor Guardians may keep their identities and overall mission fairly under wraps, but there's only so long a city can be under attack before people start realizing there's more putting them at risk than standard illnesses. Powers like Moon Healing Escalation take care of that initially, but you're going to find yourself with a fairly big group of people wanting answers for why they have these extra organs in their body that monsters can just take.

We've yet to meet a holistic therapist who'd be equipped for that sort of thing in the real world, but we imagine after a year or so there would be some practices springing up to help with post-Star Seed extraction and coping with the fact that you were a youma for a night and trashed your own shop. We hope so, anyway.

    Police Recruiters (Lupin the 3rd)

To be fair, there are absolutely police recruitment drives in the real world. But what if you had to get a whole bunch of cops really quickly?

Fans of Lupin the 3rd know that wherever you see Inspector Zenigata, approximately 75 fully-armed police officers can't be far behind (usually as soon as the camera pans out). That's because he knows his long-time nemesis is just that good, and he's going to need all the help he can get to bring in the world's greatest thief. Never mind that he's only managed to accomplish this a handful of times in the last half century, and then only temporarily.

  Recruiting police officers is all well and good. Constantly recruiting lots of police officers specifically to go on international trips with Inspector Zenigata? Probably not so easy. Everyone already knows what he does for a living, and if you're going to work under him, you will be crammed into one of 15 tiny police cars chasing down a yellow Fiat before the month is out. Whoever can fill out those ranks (on a regular basis, since we imagine turnover is pretty high) must be an exceptional recruiter.

  Architects and Designers (The Promised Neverland)

WANTED: Fans of early 20th century history and literature to research and designs orphanages. Must be as historically accurate as possible and hold many snacks. I mean children.

  The deceptively idyllic premium farms of The Promised Neverland were designed specifically to give children the happiest, healthiest, most enriching life possible. The setting is straight out of vintage American literature like Anne of Green Gables and Daddy Long Legs, from the furniture in the orphanage to Mom's uniform.

  A lot of time and effort went into making Grace Field and other farms like it as perfect as possible. It's for horrifying reasons, but it's also pretty impressive. Clearly the designers understood both the actual design elements of the time and the fictional depictions that made homes like these so enchanting to children. Though it's probably easier not to think about why they're doing it.

  What do you think goes on in the background of your favorite anime? Give us your thoughts in the comments!

    -----

Kara Dennison is a writer, editor, and interviewer with bylines at VRV, We Are Cult, Fanbyte, and many more. She is also the co-founder of Altrix Books and co-creator of the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. Kara blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[lisseulement-blog]

in memory of ms. pontellier

SHE left the note on the nightstand, where he would surely see it. She had kept it brief, wrote single-spaced in stiff Times New Roman.

The hadn’t been much to say to him, much she could have said.

She had gone with the usual cliches, the repetitive messages that explained all she wanted to say.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

“You’ll find someone better.”

She had printed it in the office hours beforehand, folded it in half neatly and slipped it into her briefcase under the folders for the cases she would never see finished.

After he had fallen asleep she had had to pry his heavy arm off. His slumbering flesh had felt warm, and for a half-second she held the fleeting fantasy of climbing back in bed. She could still call it off, could still unpack the bags, could still shred the note.

She hadn’t turned on the lights--he was a heavy sleeper, yes, but why risk it?

White moonlight through the half-opened blinds guided her path as she grabbed the bags she had packed that afternoon. She took everything with her so he would have nothing to remember her by; nothing to cling to; nothing to miss. The sooner her got over her, the better.

The warm night air, languid and relaxed, cloaked her as she stepped into the driveway. Her steps were measured and resolute; she moved as king to a coronation.

“I’m moving to Europe,” she had written in the second paragraph, near the end of the letter. She kept it vague on purpose. Knowing him, if she listed a nation, he might actually go searching. “Don’t look for me.”

--

Deep in the dead of night, the city stirred with drunken light and fearful motion. People chasing money, people chasing dreams.

In her mind’s eye she could see the city, then the state, then the country. The satellite images of a city that became a dot, that became a speck. Further and further, until it became nothingness on a blue orb floating in a cloud of vastness. Even now, that cosmic insignificance still held a sort of bemusing novelty to it.

She smiled at the skyscrapers, at the office lights still glimmering in the pitch-black sky. So much blood and tears to carve a sliver out of that nothingness.

Then the city was behind her; only the road and the lights around her remained.

She stopped two hours in, at a mall with a Goodwill bin. It took her a good fifteen minutes to get everything out of the trunk--the clothes, the jewelry, the books, the bedsheets. She apologized silently to the Goodwill worker who would have to sort though it all.

She paused before she got back into the car, suddenly remembering several items she had meant to dispose of separately. She felt a twinge of embarrassment but pushed it aside. The Sexual Revolution had come and passed long ago; Goodwill had probably seen worse.

She turned the keys in the ignition and continued on her way.

--

Buying one-way tickets had felt strange. It was after only she had type in her credit card number that she’d realized it was the first time she’d bought a one-way ticket. The first and the last. She waited to see if she would feel regret. And as expected, she felt nothing. Just the same tiredness of the mundane, of the repetition, of the boredom. She had a sudden memory of an English professor lecturing--there was a better word for that constant feeling, one she couldn’t recall it now.

She looked to the dim horizon, peered into the half-lit darkness of the rural roads, and felt a sense of relief.

She felt like a runner nearing the end of a long awaited finish line. In a way, she was.

It was the same bone-tiredness she had felt years ago, backpacking through Europe. Staring at the palaces, staring at the tower, staring at the old cities and the history. There was supposed to be a sense of wonder, a feeling of reverence for old glories and arcing triomphes.

Instead she seen only old stone and crumbling foundations; metal and marble fighting against time. But she had seen it all, and when her friends asked, she had dutifully relayed the manufactured answers. Why yes, the Buckingham palace had been quite regal and the Eiffel Tower nothing short of breathtaking. The Arc de Triomphe had moved her in ways nothing short of the Brandenburg Gate could compare.

She had said it all with a smile to everyone that had asked; she’d posted the pictures after some light editing, and when it was all done she had checked it off of the list.

---

He’d been the last thing on the list: “Fall in love with a handsome guy and live happily ever after.”

She’d left out marriage and children on purpose. It hadn’t worked for her parents, so she hadn’t felt the need to make it an obligation.

He was every bit the fairy tale prince. Smart, handsome, well-off and deeply devoted to her. And she, for her part, had fallen in love with him correctly. She’d written the cute messages of love like she was supposed to, kissed him, cooked, cleaned, and given him her body for as long as he wanted, however he wanted. As long as she smiled, it was exactly like the love actors played out in movies and authors feverishly transcribed into books. She had done everything right.

Her dress shoes crunched on the pebbled beach. In the silence of the night, the lake roared like a slumbering beast, the rhythmic sound enveloping her in a pulsing heartbeat.

This was as close to eternity as she would ever personally experience she decided, as she walked towards the lapping waters. Long after humanity ceased, long after the world grew too barren and polluted to support life. Water would wear against land.

She looked up and saw the stars, their brightness unobscured by city lights.

This was as close to eternity as she would ever comprehend. The stars that shone when Earth had glowed in fiery youth; the stars that would continue to shine after the sun damned all of the human solar system.

She started scooping up rocks, piling them up away from a pit she had begun to dig. The action brought back memories. She was young again, her hair tied in pigtails, a her bright yellow one-piece blending with the blinding sun.

She remembered the companion that had been by her side, the kindred spirit that had laughed with her when the waves had suddenly reach up and knocked over their sand castle.

There had been weeknight slumber parties, movie premiers, amusement parks. They had gone to college together, roomed together, and when the time came, she had been there to catch the bouquet.

“You’re next,” her white-clad companion had said with a smile, a droplet of sweat running down her flushed face as she pointed. She could see the drop of sweat now, running down that slim neck, between the soft curves of those breasts, down into the depths of that tight wedding dress.

Then there were the words that had followed: “You caught the bouquet, so I’ll be attending your wedding soon.” The words were casual, nonchalant. Their truth was self-evident; obvious, inevitable.

From anyone else, it would have been easy to smile. To agree, to nod, to keep up the charade. But when she said it, something had broke. Control had falter and fumbled, and in that part of a second, she had almost lost everything.

Recovered had been graceless, awkward and forced. She hoped fervently that, in the all excitement of the day, no one had noticed. She told herself that, as long as she smiled, the tears were from joy.

“Yes,” she had replied, her voice quivering with what she told herself was excitement. “Yes.”

---

Satisfied with the hole, she stripped until she stood naked in the night.

The moon reflected off the waves; she noted this beauty absentmindedly as she searched for any last minute doubts. Anything else to add to the list, any excuse to prolong the meaninglessness.

“Call me,” she had said, years ago. Before the wedding, before Europe, before they had even graduated.

“If you ever need me, I’ll be there, I swear.”

The phone was in her hand without her realizing. She had pulled it out of the pit without thinking, had the number typed out before she had even determined what she would say.

I’ll tell her goodbye she decided at the first ring. She would say goodbye, and then she would be on her way.

Just goodbye? A voice asked her at the fourth ring. Is that really all you’ll say?

It was on the sixth ring that it dawned on her that people slept; that 3 AM was really not an appropriate time to make phone calls.

Then a click--a voice on the line.

“Hi, you’ve reached Barbara--and Brad!” a voice interjected. “Please leave a message after the tone.”

She smiled and shook her head. How silly she had been.

---

She ignored the pain of the pebbles digging into her feet as she filled the pit. She wondered how long her belongings would last. Perhaps in some distant future, archaeologists would excavate her phone; some academic hand would painstakingly extract her dress shirt from sedimentary rock and say, “Ah, so this is how humans of the 21st century lived.”

The roaring of the waves filled her now; the feeling of escape rushed through her like primal adrenaline.

She took a deep breath. She was at peace now, and would be at peace for all eternity.

The water was surprisingly warm when she stepped in; the pebbles still digging into her feet as she made her first strides into the water.

Then it was around her, shuddering and violent. It wanted her now. She had to struggle to stay afloat, to steal a breath between slams as the waves rushed at her. Not yet, not yet. I’ve still a ways to go.

----

He’ll never know she thought with some satisfaction. Her smooth breaststroke cut through the water at a leisurely rate. Her legs pushed in a powerful, lazy motion.

He’d never know the loneliness she had felt in his arms, never realize how unhappy she had been in his joyful embrace. The thought seemed absurdly hilarious, and she had to actively fight the urge turn back and text him all of it.

All of the feelings she had bottled up, her true thoughts and beliefs and opinions--all of it, she suddenly wanted--needed--him to know. But that would ruin it all, that would stain the pure fantasy life she had worked so hard to manufacture.

Nevertheless, the urge persisted. It pulled at her and pestered her with the voice of full of madness and desperation.

Tell him how horrible he is in bed, tell him how you were faking it every single time, tell him how you look at him and feel nothing but obligation. Tell him how you wish his arms were softer, tell him how terrible his body feels against yours, tell him how meaningless his job is, his promotion is, his coworkers are, his existence is.

The shore had long since disappeared into the darkness. She could feel herself tiring now, the slow, easy strokes becoming harder and harder to complete.

Finally she stopped, unable to continue. She started treading water, her arms and legs clawing furiously as obstinate animal instinct refused to succumb. But even as her limbs burned and her breaths came out in ragged gasps, she felt peaceful. Eyes closed, she waited for her body to tire, for the end to come.

---

Dawn came, shining and brilliant. The sun rose from the edge of the horizon, pushing back darkness slowly but surely.

In the last moments before her arms gave out and her legs ceased to struggle she allowed herself one last glance at the light.

Goodbye she had wanted to say, but there was no one to hear her and no one she wanted to listen. No one she told herself even as an inkling of someone gave her reason to pause.

Goodbye she insisted and then let herself be still.

She released herself to the water she had held at bay for so long. She fell into the darkness that had clamored at her face for hours, that had grasped her neck from dusk to dawn. She felt herself sinking even as her feet instinctively pointed downward on tiptoes in search of a bottom.

Finally, peace at last.

This was okay right? She had nothing to regret, nothing left worth pursuing. This was what she wanted, this is what she had planned. There was no meaning, no reason not to. All choices had the same end; now or later, it made no difference.

But the more she told herself, the more she embraced the cold logic, the more something inside her struggled.

There was no reason to her trepidation, no logic, no sense, rhyme or rhythm.

Biology she realized. It is biology she thought darkly as she felt the cold embrace her still body.

But, though she waited and waited, the water never filled her lungs.

Gradually, she realized she had touched the bottom of the lake--she had been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she had failed to register the soft sand between her toes.

She attempted to stand, her tired legs burning with fatigue with every movement. Gradually she realized if she stood up straight the water only reached her chin.  

She started to laugh. All that effort, all that planning, all for what?

The universe is laughing at me. Hot wet tears dripped from the corner of her eyes, mingling with the waves of the lake. She could not tell if it was laughter that wracked her or violent sobs. Probably both.

Relief filled her as the tension escaped. She stood limply, letting the waves push and pull her as she stared glassy-eyed at the light blue sky.

For a time she stood there in the lake, too tired to move, too tired to think.

Then, taking one last look at the horizon, she sighed and starting the long swim back to shore.

[puzzletreeguy]

Laughter part 3

There was nothing special, only the mountain's black soil and rocks. As they went deeper into the mine, they found train tracks heading down to their left and up to the right. The children went to the left, following the tracks. They kept following the tracks until reaching an exit.

The tracks they followed kept going down until they touched the ground some 70 feet away from the tunnel's exit.

When they step on the platform build at the side of the track, the moonlight gave them a glimpse of where they were: at the mine's railroad.

Everything was still and cold. Lifeless, like it has been like that for decades.

A thin carpet of fluffy snow covered the ground and the roofs of the locomotives. It was beautiful to see. It felt almost like Christmas night, but in the middle of the year, except for the lights. There was no light that wasn't from the full moon.

Krenan and Arlina went down the ladders. Krenan was the first to reach the ground, with Arlina right after him. Like a true gentleman, he held her by her waist and smoothed her landing. They ended up right in front of another tunnel just under the other one.

This tunnel was larger. It was dug by a tunneling machine, which rested silently at the warehouse near the hill.

Arlina turned to thank him for his kindness and noticed that his face was turning red. He started to notice some sort of beauty in his friend that he never felt before. When he touched her, he noticed a slight curve that wasn't there before. Her face was, somehow, more beautiful and her blond hair with mashes falling over her shoulders just made her prettier. Krenan's heart beat faster each second and he started wiping sweat out of his forehead.

- What's wrong? - she asked, unaware of his new feelings.

- Nothing - he said nervously.

Arlina became suspicious. Why was he being so odd lately? Why was he looking at her like that? He's so weird!

Forgetting the awkward moment, they resumed their walk. As they walked over the tracks, playing balance, Arlina passed right beside one of the mine's steam engines, the one her father operated. It was small, with an opaque red coloration and 15 wagons, all for crystals, and a coal wagon.

It could have some crystals in one of the wagons. He would have to fulfill his promise, otherwise Arlina would not accept another of his "invitations" for his so-called adventures.

Krenan removed the canvas covering one of the wagons and he entered into it, glancing upon a few remaining crystals from the last extraction. They were small, quite useless. But they could fit just well in a tiara. He grabbed all the crystals he found and put them in his pocket. Krenan just had to be careful because certain combinations could have terrible results if the crystals touched each other.

When he looked back to the train, he saw its kneaded side, a mark from the last accident. The thought bothered him, the memory was as striking as the train's own marks.

The boy jumped off the wagon and went in Arlina`s direction. He took the crystals out of his pocket and started comparing them. A pink one, the largest of the crystals, would be placed at the center of the tiara. The green one would be perfect in a necklace and the white one would be ideal for a ring.

Krenan took Arlina's hand and touched the crystal against her ring finger. Yes, it would fit just well.

When they gazed upon each other, their heads turned into two red tomatoes.

Both were totally embarrassed. It looked like Krenan had the intention to propose her.

They broke the trance and looked away from each other.

Unsure of what to say, Krenan decided to change the subject.

- Do you remember the last time we've been here? - he would prefer anything but that, but he had nothing else in mind.

- Yes, and we were grounded forever.

- You are overreacting!

- No, I'm not! Our parents don't want us to come here again!

- "Our parents"? You mean your parents.

- No, I mean our parents! And haven't you notice that no one is trusting in you for anything anymore? You'll end up alone!

Her words went deep into his mind. Krenan slowly noticed that there were no more children accepting him in any play and their parents shared no good eyes toward him. How he still had Arlina? Did he go too far this time?

After their little argument, they went back into the mountain. This time they entered in the lower tunnel, with more passages to explore.

It took a while, but finally, they've found a large crystal shaft. Crystals of every shape and size. Shining like colorful stars, the crystals sent the darkness and cold away.

Krenan felt just like a pirate who has discovered a treasure. Now, where was the gold and the silver?

The boy faced the darkness, dauntless. He was willing to go deeper into the mountain.

- It's so good to be so warm - he heard his friend say as she sprawled herself over a crystal larger than her.

With that, he too took his chance to warm himself up. It was nice to feel the cold go away from the tip of his toes.

- Tell me - he asked - Have I done it right this time?

- I guess so - she answered satisfied.

The two of them stayed there for a while, enjoying the wall's cozy heat.

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

The two were waiting quietly for uncle Jen to return. The man went to the other edge of the wagon line to tell the operators to stop the machines so one of the wagons could be detached. It was no longer safe to be included in the line because its juncture, attaching it to the other wagons was too rusty and could cause an accident at any moment.

Despite asking Rikkon to watch over him and Arlina, Jen still had hope for Krenan. Even after he made half of the barn's ceiling fall while he was playing with the children and knocked down a tree over a house.

Rikkon didn't seem to pay any attention to them, so Krenan put his mind to work as their caretaker seemed to busy, thinking of girls he had to impress and show to his friends he was the best.

The boy went to the wagon in front of the line, gave a quick look at the cargo and entered into it. There were some yellow crystals within it. They shouldn't be put together with red ones, otherwise, they would explode by the moment they touched each other.

- What are you doing?! - he heard Arlina as she was being careful to not raise her voice too much.

- Come in! - he muttered back to her - There are crystals here.

- You shouldn't be in there!

- Get in already! - he said impatiently - Just to give a quick look at these crystals!

Unable to say "no", Arlina was pulled inside the wagon by Krenan after he gave his hand to help her in.

She couldn't stand still with her feet stepping over a rug of crystals of many diferente sizes. All were yellow, with a faint golden bright, beautiful to look at.

As Arlina was hypnotised by the crystal's beauty, Krenan turned his head to the tunnel ahead when his trouble-maker side started imagining.

- We would get faster to the station if we drive this wagon down the tunnel. - he said out loud.

- No we woud not! Your uncle told us to not mess with anything! - Arlina said, now remembering the danger of the wagon's rusted juncture and rushing Krenan and herself to get out of the wagon.

- Look, we are totally safe! - Krenan said confidently, trying to calm her down. - The lever is locked and If anything happens, we would just pull it down and...

But by the moment he touched the lever, it broke, freeing the wagon's brakes completely and the bump broke the juncture.

- What are you two doing there?! - Rikkon said, awaking from his daydreaming. - get out of there!

They quickly gained speed and when uncle Jen returned, it was too late.

- Uncle Jen!!! - Both screamed as Jen and Rikkon ran in vain, trying to reach them.

- Have I not told you to take care of them? - Jen said furious, while Rikkon stayed quiet and in shame and worry.

The wagon ran down the tracks uncontrollably. Arlina screamed of fear while Krenan laughed of joy, despite the danger.

In a minute, they've reached the end of the tunnel, running down the tracks faster than anyone could imagine.

- We are going to die!!! - Arlina cried in panic.

- No, we are not!!! - Krenan said, still enjoying himself.

But he suddenly felt silent by the shock of heading straight toward a steam locomotive, that was leaving with a huge crystal cargo, and started screaming.

- We are going to die!!!

The point where the tracks, that separated the wagon from the train, met each other was getting closer by the second.

- Daddy! Look out! - her scream echoed in the distance.

The driver turned his head when he heard the unexpected scream of his daughter. He saw the incoming wagon running towards the train.

- Jump! - he screamed to the stoker and both jumped out of the engine. About time when the wagon hit the cargo wagons, throwing Arlina and Krenan into the air.

As the two kids flew, the wagons fell, losing all the cargo of crystals. They landed some feet away from the accident, but they had only a few seconds to start running because a worse disaster was about to happen. When the wagons fell, the cargo of red crystals was mixed with the cargo of yellow ones, unlocking a spontaneous chain reaction that resulted in a huge explosion.

The tracks and wagons nearby were destroyed as dust rose from the ground. Millions and millions of fragments flew from the explosion. When these fragments fell over crystals of different colors, other reactions were caused.

Flashes of light were happening everywhere, disorientating the workers. Force fields and intense electric shocks were emitted uncontrollably, no one would dare to come near until all the reactions were over.

A rail wheel was thrown by the explosion, hitting the steam engine's left side, leaving a deep mark on it.

- Arlina! - the train driver screamed for his daughter, but he had no sign of her until the dust has dissipated.

She and Krenan were protected by a pair of crystals, one blue and one green, that formed a force field around them, protecting them against the explosion. The words of Jen echoed in their minds: "If anything dangerous happens, join these two crystals together. They'll protect you if the roof or anything else falls over you. Everyone in this mine has a pair like this."

The two opened their eyes and looked around. They could only see dust, dust everywhere. But, when it came down, they saw what remained of the railroad.

Crystals were scattered everywhere, many lost their usefulness after reacting with each other. There were pieces of wood burning and broken pieces of metal. Wagons were reduced to wrecks and a huge hole was opened in the middle of the, now twisted, tracks.

The adults started to gather around the children as everyone's safety was confirmed. At the lead, there was Arlina's father, who gave them an angry look with his arms crossed and right behind him, came uncle Jen, who was also disappointed with what he just saw.

The minds of the two little ones shared a single word: "Oops."

They just destroyed the train that was leaving to the capital.

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

After the crystals' warmth, they continued to explore those dark tunnels. After turning left and right in a monotonous rythm, the only thing they found besides the crystals were rocks and more rocks and a small underground water stream.

- Are you sure we are going to find anything else here? - Arlina asked.

- I think so - he answered determined to keep investigating.

After a while, Arlina started to feel insecure as the tunnels appeared to be turning darker and more silent. Eventually she felt the need to check their safety. How would they return?

- Krenan, how do we get back? - she asked.

- What? - Krenan asked, not paying attention.

- I said how do we get back! - she said with an angrier tone.

- Calm down! - He said annoyed - we just have to go back to that left.

He pointed the way with the lantern.

- Wait - he corrected - It is to the right... Isn't it?

At that moment Arlina had her nerves exploding while her body was frozen and her eyes faced the darkness.

They were lost.