#found family assigned by fate is a fascinating concept

[dark-elf-writes]

So you said we could drop soulmate suggestions. Does that include platonic? Because I would love a rooftop trio & deku/shinsou platonic soul bond. Whatever combination you want there, I just know that you would do wonders with it.🥰

Oh absolutely platonic soulmates are allowed I love me some nice found family vibes.

So for this one I would see it as a soulmark au that are possibly coded by area on the body. For a familial bond it would be on the left wrist and a romantic it would be on the right and you get images that represent your soulmate(s) in gray that turn to the color of their eyes when you lock eyes for the first time.

I always vibe with erasercloudmic so they’ve all been together since their UA years and it was really no shock to any of them that they share the same platonic bonds as well. A little bunny and kitten curled up together on their right wrists.

Their kids.

They are all on the lookout for years for their two missing little soulmates. Parental bonds aren’t incredibly common, but there has to be a reason their kids need them so much that fate chose them all for each other. Right? Like how Tensei’s parental bond with Tenya snapped into place the moment the younger Iida was born just in time for their parents to start pulling back, content that they had made their hero and spare and could look to their careers rather than the family they had made.

Their kids have to need them, right?

Then Oboro finds a dirty and scraped middle schooler crying alone on a rooftop with a burnt and stained notebook clutched to their chest as they kneel alone, forehead nearly touching the harsh concrete roof, while they sob. He drops of his cloud and kneels in front of them, so painfully aware of the image this presents, what it implies, and wet green eyes full of so much damn pain look up to see who the intruder is.

Oboro feels the familiar tingling burn on his wrist that he hasn’t felt since he was sixteen and saw Shouta across the field at the Sports Festival. And he knows.

The they ask the question that breaks his heart. The question he knows they have never heard the right answer to their entire life: “Can someone quirkless become a hero.”

He cups their wet cheeks between his palms, wiping grime and tears away from those freckles, and says the answer they should have heard every time they asked: “Yes.”

Their bunny is a shattered little thing, all self doubt and hate turned inwards. It doesn’t take much more than a token investigation into their home life to get them pulled out of the mostly empty two bedroom apartment and placed in his, Shouta, and Hizashi’s care.

Izuku is the one to find the kit, between the written and physical exams at UA. Angry violet eyes glaring at the world that has shown him no kindness. They, against all odds, were assigned to the same exam grounds and met eyes in the tense time when everyone was trickling out do the locker rooms in their athletic clothes and the smart amongst them were falling into stretches before the had to fight.

Hitoshi while equally shattered, had turned his broken pieces outwards rather than in, covering himself in broken glass and shattered dreams until it cut anyone who dared get too close. Izuku, so used to pain, didn’t even seem to notice as they locked fingers with their destined brother and ran hand in hand through the mock city that burned around them.

And, as the dust settles and Hizashi nearly falls off the walls trying to get to their kids, bleeding and broken after taking down the zero pointer to spare some of their fellow applicants but laughing through the pain because they both finally know what it’s like to not be alone, the last part of their family snaps into place.

[impressivepress]

Live like a Rockefeller — The Rivals by Diego Rivera

At first glance, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and the Mexican artist Diego Rivera couldn’t have been more different. She was the daughter of a prominent Republican senator and had married into one of America’s most famous capitalist families; he was a devoted member of Mexico’s Communist party, who had visited Moscow before his first U.S. mural commission in San Francisco.

Abby, however, was a huge admirer of Rivera’s art. He’d developed a reputation as one of his generation’s leading modern artists, and she knew all about his triumphs as a muralist in his homeland (in buildings such as the Ministry of Education in Mexico City), not to mention his mural for the Pacific Stock Exchange Tower in San Francisco. She purchased a number of Rivera’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolours. Her first purchase in 1929 was May Day Parade, a Rivera sketchbook (now in the collection at MoMA), which he had completed on a trip to Moscow.

In 1931, in her capacity as co-founder and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Abby invited Rivera for a solo exhibition at the institution, making him only the second artist, after Matisse, to receive that honour. It is likely that Mexico had been on her mind for decades, ever since her first trip to the country in 1903. Rivera embodied everything that Abby and Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first Director, were looking for in terms of the museum’s programming: he was both a modernist genius with a towering body of work and as Mexico’s leading muralist, he was the foremost proponent of a genuine art movement from the Americas to the world.

On arrival in New York, Rivera paid a visit to the Rockefellers’ Manhattan home with his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. ‘He was a very imposing and charismatic figure: tall and weighing three hundred pounds,’ Abby’s son, David Rockefeller, recalled in later life.

Rivera brought with him a new canvas, titled The Rivals, which Abby had commissioned and which he had painted in a makeshift studio aboard the steamship, the SS Morro Castle, en route from Mexico. The painting depicts a traditional festival from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca known as Las Velas, a colourful celebration in observance of local patron saints and of the natural bounties of spring.

‘It’s undoubtedly one of Rivera’s masterpieces,’ says Virgilio Garza, Head of Latin American Paintings at Christie’s. ‘Compared with his murals — which are epic in scale and content, with sweeping vistas and narratives that are often ideologically or historically driven — this easel painting is equally monumental in presence, yet devoid of Rivera’s politics. It’s a much more intimate scene focused on regional traditions, and the brushwork is deliberately looser.’

Others have praised the rich combination of bright colours, reminiscent of Matisse (whom Rivera knew from the decade he’d spent in Paris, between 1911 and 1921) but also, more pertinently, reflecting the vivid hues evident across Mexico: from its flora to its architecture. ‘And then there’s his modern conception of space through the use of multiple planes of colour that recall the formal effects of synthetic Cubism,’ says Garza. ‘Forms and figures are synthesised and reduced to their essential elements. The viewer’s gaze recedes in stages, from the men in the foreground, to the brightly dressed women under the hanging papel picado. Rivera’s brilliant composition of intersecting planes creates a cinematic narrative.’

The Rivals  was as popular with Abby as Rivera’s sell-out MoMA retrospective proved to be with New York’s public. In 1932, she approached the artist about another project: completing a mural for the lobby of the RCA Building, the centrepiece of the Rockefeller Center, her husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s new complex in Midtown Manhattan.

Rivera’s idea was a fresco on the twin themes of human cooperation and scientific development, and he sent Abby a planned sketch of it along with a letter saying, ‘I assure you that… I shall try to do for the Rockefeller Center — and especially for you, Madame — the best of all the work I have done up to this time.’

In the process of painting the mural Man at the Crossroads, Rivera made several changes to his original sketch that would have fateful consequences. Chief among these was the addition of Lenin’s features into the face of a labourer. When news of this change in the mural reached  Nelson Rockefeller, David’s older brother, he asked Rivera to substitute the late Soviet leader for another figure.

The painter, despite many attempts to persuade him, refused. Equally vexing to the Rockefeller family was the depiction of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on the left side of the mural drinking among a group of men and cavorting with women of questionable repute. The latter was a striking image given the family’s devout religious views and their abstinence from drinking and smoking, as well as the Rockefellers’ firm support of U.S. Prohibition-era laws. With no compromise reached, Rivera was dismissed, and although he was paid in full the mural was destroyed. ‘The mural was quite brilliantly executed,’ wrote David Rockefeller in Memoirs in 2002, ‘but not appropriate’.

Rivera would go on to recreate Man at the Crossroads, in modified form as Man, Controller of the Universe, on the walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Here again, Rivera depicted John D. Rockefeller, Jr. clutching a martini amid scenes of gambling and excess, while the other side featured workers and various Communist leaders.

Despite all these events, Abby and her sons Nelson and David remained admirers until the end. She would donate many of the Rivera works she owned to MoMA, although The Rivals  was one piece she held on to. As a sign of how highly she valued it, Abby gave it to David and his wife Peggy McGrath as a wedding present in 1940. They, in turn, would give the painting pride of place, for decades, in the living room of their summer residence, Ringing Point, in Maine.

David Rockefeller’s interest in Latin America and its art and culture spanned many decades. In January 1946, after completing his military service in the Second World War and before he started work at Chase Bank, he and Peggy decided to take ‘a second honeymoon’. They settled on Mexico as the destination for their six-week holiday.

‘This was our first direct exposure to Latin America, and we were very much taken with what we saw,’ David wrote years later. ‘We were especially fascinated by the remarkable pre-Columbian monuments and artefacts, as well as by the charm of much contemporary Mexican painting and folk art.’ He recounted how keen they were to see the famous Mexican frescoes of Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. ‘We especially wanted to see Rivera’s murals, since I had met Rivera with my mother when he first came to New York in 1931,’ he recalled. ‘I had always found him to be a very sympathetic person, and I liked his painting.’

The couple had travelled to Mexico armed with letters of introduction from Nelson Rockefeller, who had been appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs by President Roosevelt and had subsequently visited virtually all the Latin American nations. One letter was addressed to Roberto Montenegro, an artist friend of Nelson’s, who introduced David and Peggy to other contemporary Mexican artists.

At the beginning of his long career with Chase, one of David’s first assignments was in the bank’s Latin American division. In 1965 he assumed the chairmanship of both the Council of the Americas and its new cultural adjunct, the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR). The latter was responsible for introducing Americans to the cultures and artists of Latin America, including staging the first one-man show in New York for Fernando Botero.

In 1991, he endowed the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, which continues to explore Latin American politics, society, and culture, and after his retirement from the bank David was made chairman of The Americas Society, which afforded him, he said, ‘many new opportunities to visit the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and to appreciate their diverse art and culture.’

~ ROCKEFELLER COLLECTION | AUCTION PREVIEW · 9 May 2018.

[kayawagner]

Tachyon Squadron Review

I was extremely young when my family took me to see Star Wars at the drive-in, and there were a lot of details I didn’t remember until years later when I viewed the movie again on HBO–but I remembered Luke flying in his X-Wing. A year later, with slightly better cognitive functions, I was fascinated by Battlestar Galactica and the starfighter combat between the Colonial Vipers and the Cylon Raiders.

 Did I outgrow my love of starfighters when I got older? Not if the hours I spent playing TIE Fighter, Freelancer, or Rogue Squadron are any indication. Even today, my favorite part of Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the starfighter missions.

 Tachyon Squadron is a supplement for Fate Core that focuses on playing military science fiction campaigns that center on a starfighter squadron and the pilots of that squadron. 

Sizing up the Spaceframe

 This review is based both on the PDF version of the product, and the hardcover release. Tachyon Squadron is a 184-page product, with a four-page index, two-page quick reference sheet, a ship sheet, and a character sheet in the back.

The physical book is a digest-sized hardcover, similar to other Evil Hat releases. It is a full-color book, with numerous line art illustrations of pilots, starfighters, and capital ships. Formatting is similar to other Fate releases, with clear headers, call-out boxes, and very easy to digest pages of information.

Tachyon Squadron and Creating a Pilot

There is a brief five-page introduction to explain the style of science fiction that Tachyon Squadron is emulating. It’s a has a strongly military flavored sci-fi feel, and features humans skirmishing with other humans, rather than dealing with alien threats. Adversaries will include pirates and oppressive regimes, and FTL and artificial gravity technology exists without too many details. There is also a quick callout box to explain how the Fate rules are used and modified for the setting.

Creating a pilot delves into some of those ways in which the setting utilizes and modifies the Fate rules. While creating a character will look familiar to anyone that has spent some time with the Fate Core rulebook, there are a few key differences.

You don’t just need a name, you need a callsign

You don’t have a Trouble aspect, you have a decompression aspect

You get two personal stunts and a gear stunt–the gear stunt representing a special piece of equipment you have available to your character

There are example names and callsigns, as well as some archetypical skill assignment arrays. There are sidebars discussing player safety when it comes to exploring decompression aspects, as well as some guidance on how disability isn’t a limiting factor to fighter pilots in the setting.

Unlike a standard game of Fate, in Tachyon Squadron, the Trouble aspect is, instead, replaced with the decompression aspect. This aspect is split between a positive means that the pilot can decompress, and a negative means. The only way a pilot recovers stress is to decompress. If they fail their check to decompress in a positive manner, they can always blow off steam in a less productive manner, which is likely to cause problems for them, now or in the future.

Skills and Stunts

The next section of the book delves into skills available in the setting, example stunts, and new rules for gear stunts that are introduced in this book.

Skills are broken up into the following groups:

Spacefaring Skills (Gunnery, Pilot, Tactics, Technology)

Action Skills (Athletics, Fight, Notice, Shoot, Sneak)

Social Skills (Discipline, Empathy, Investigate, Provoke, Rapport)

Those categories help to summarize the expected scenes that pilot characters will play through in the game, as they fly their ship, participate in ground-based missions, and interact with civilians and military personnel between starfighter missions.

Gear Stunts introduce some new rule interactions into Fate. These stunts represent equipment that a character has available on their missions, but they can allow characters to maximize a die in certain circumstances. Maximizing a die is just taking a die from the dice, after they have been rolled, and setting it to “+.” If multiple pieces of gear would both help, you may get to maximize more than one die, but you can never have more than two maximized on one roll.

While the Gear Stunts introduce ways in which characters can maximize their dice, this is also where the concept of minimizing dice is introduced. In some disadvantageous circumstances, characters may need to set a die from the rolled dice aside and set it to a “-.” Like maximized dice, you never need to minimize more than two dice in a single roll.

Engagements

The turn order in starfighter combat is resolved in a different manner than other Fate conflicts. The next chapter in the book explains how to run engagements, and what the phases look like.

Engagements have the following parts:

Detection

Maneuver

Action

End of Round

Detection involves using the technology skill to determine if both sides know how many fighters the other side has, and where those ships are. Maneuvering involves using the tactics skill to determine what order the ships take their actions. The action phase involves performing standard Fate actions using whatever skill is appropriate to the action. The end of round phase degrading the tactics score that was used to determine ship order, as well as being the phase of the engagement where ships that declared their intent to escape leave the scene.

At a brief pass, that all can sound a lot more complicated than a standard Fate conflict, but the maneuver chart included in the book helps to illustrate how the rules work, and the individual phases are very clearly explained.

Undetected ships can’t be attacked and can attack anyone in the fight. Other ships can only attack ships with their own tactics result or lower. A ship that attempts to bug out can be targeted by anyone, but if they make it to the End of Round phase, they escape the fight unscathed. There are undetected and special spots on the maneuver chart, and the special slot goes after everyone else. This is where capital ships take their actions in a fight.

Unlike a standard Fate conflict, in the action phase, players may take actions in Step 1 or Step 2 of the round, with some special actions taking both Step 1 and Step 2 slots. Some actions allow a pilot to reroll their tactics check to move up (or down) the chart, while others may allow a pilot to harass an opposing pilot to change their score and position on the chart. Characters can also do things like making emergency repairs or recovering ejected pilots.

Fighters have specific fighter sheets that show what happens when a given component takes damage. Enemy fighters might use full ship sheets, they may use simple damage rules, or they may be organized as flights (several fighters using simple rules, adding shifts to damage as they act as a unit), or as swarms.

Swarms are one of my favorite rules for adding a ton of fighters to a battle. They act as free invokes for other ships, and the aspect representing the swarm can be removed depending on the actions taken by the PCs on their turn. Nobody in a swarm is wearing a Corellian Bloodstripe.

The Galaxy and Combat Pilots at War

The next two sections detail what the galaxy looks like and what the pilots of Tachyon Squadron do on a day to day basis. There are various example planets and space stations, as well as explanations of the daily duty and routine of fighter pilots, and what various mission profiles look like.

In short, the galaxy was split between two big human empires, who were at war. The war came to an end, but a third group split from one of those empires and is now catching all kinds of heat from the less friendly of the two superpowers. Because the Draconis System is a new player in the galaxy, the fighter pilots of Tachyon Squadron are technically volunteer civilian contractors, waiting for the full-fledged Draconis military to get up and running.

This sets up the player characters as the underdogs in most fights, trying to cause enough hassle to their better funded and backed enemies to get them to back off, rather than trying to conquer or overthrow any empire on their own.

GMing Tachyon Squadron

The next section in the book starts off by presenting consistent, current, impending, and future issues for a typical Tachyon Squadron campaign. Consistent issues are thematically appropriate story beats for the whole campaign, current issues are the “starting” problems that the group will likely be taking on, impending issues are those that are ready to move into the forefront in the near future, and future issues are emerging long-term issues that surface once the PCs have had a chance to play with the setting for a while.

The chapter then moves into advice on how to structure engagements, with some example opposition for different types of missions of varying difficulty. There is advice on how to handle concessions in starship combat, as well as how to transition missions into “out of cockpit” encounters.

The chapter wraps up with examples of how to structure a campaign, with advice on how to determine the opposition’s objectives, and how many times the PCs can stymie them before they change tactics, and eventually start to turn the tide.

I’ve always been a big fan of games clearly presenting how they are intended to be played, and this chapter has a very clear set of examples not just for individual missions, but for how the beginning, middle, and end of a campaign should look. 

Ships to Fly and People to Meet and Example Player Characters

The next two chapters have statistics for spaceships, modular equipment, and characters that can be found in the setting. The example player characters can serve as examples, pre-generated characters, or NPCs if the players decide to make their own characters.

There are statistics for capital ships and fighters, and the opposition fighters have separate stat blocks for “regular” opposition and aces. The ships have aspects, skill ranks, and stunts, and the more detailed ships have lists of damaged components that can be used in a similar manner to minor consequences, with each damaged component having a special narrative effect, or causing certain rolls to be minimized.

NPCs and sample player characters are very diverse, including characters with various gender identities, sexualities, physical abilities. While I always appreciate an RPG setting that has that degree of diversity, it’s great to see actual examples of that diversity, rather than just seeing it stated in the higher-level descriptions of the setting. The commanding officers, other pilots, and civilian contacts your character runs into will reinforce that element of the setting. 

The Pirates of Kepler Valley and Defense of Arcosolari Kalamos

The next two sections of the book contain sample campaign arcs for the game. One campaign focuses on defending outposts and caravans from pirates while also fighting the Dominion, and the other revolves around a space station hub where the PCs may have to root out spies and Dominion sympathizers as well as flying starship missions.

To reinforce the idea that Tachyon Squadron doesn’t have unlimited resources and is fighting against a bigger, better-supplied force, the campaign setup section lays out what equipment the PCs can expect to have available to them when their own gear conks out, or when they need specialized tech for missions. There are also outlines of specific scenes that may come at pivotal moments in the campaign, and new NPCs and locations.

 If you have ever thrilled at starships shooting lasers at one another while dodging fire from capital ships, the text is going to hold your interest. 

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Inspirations and Influences

Inspirations and influences is a section of the book where various media that inspired the game can be found. One thing that interests me is that, the longer the RPG industry is around, the more diverse the inspirations become. In this instance, I’m not just referring to a broad range within certain media, but that influences now include tabletop games (including older RPGs) and video games.

Target Lock

Tachyon Squadron does a remarkable job of explaining exactly what it is trying to do and showing you how to achieve that goal using the rules and structure provided. Minimizing and maximizing dice are tools that may prove useful for modeling other thematic elements in future Fate games. The structure of starfighter engagement creates a procedure that feels like dogfighting without needing to track exact positioning, distance, and orientation. The diverse range of characters reinforces a setting element with substantive content.

Pull Up

One of the book’s strengths could also be a weakness–the procedure for engagements may be just a little bit too structured depending on the flavor of Fate you prefer. While it’s not hard to adapt, Tachyon Squadron defaults to gritty “everybody’s human” military science fiction, so if your love of starfighter combat involves lots of crazy ship types, alien co-pilots, and maybe space wizards, you may need to pull from other Fate sources to fill out your preferences.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

This product is a great example of using existing rules to reinforce the tropes of a genre. If you have ever thrilled at starships shooting lasers at one another while dodging fire from capital ships, the text is going to hold your interest. Even outside of Fate, the structure for creating tactical dogfights without using exact positioning is something you may want to check out.

Have you ever adapted an RPG to model your favorite starfighter video games? Do you have a preference on how to model tactical maneuvering between ships in a sci-fi game? How gritty do you like your military sci-fi? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Tachyon Squadron Review published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

[bradenparks-blog]

The Rise and Fall of Josiah Klaus Randall Hendrickson von Kaiser Van Smith, and His Brother Joe -- Flash Fiction

Joseph and Josiah Klaus Randall Hendrickson von Kaiser Van Smith could not be more different. Joe likes Friends, walks on the beach, Coldplay CDs, parting his hair to the left, and a nice medium-well steak. Josiah, on the other hand, loves fast cars, gambling, horse racing, parting his hair to the right, and lines of cocaine. Neither twin had a family; Josiah was too unobtainable to settle down, and Joe was too exceptionally average to settle down with. Josiah lived in a penthouse on Park Avenue and bet horses, Joe lived in a small Manhattan apartment and worked for a large accounting firm. The most significant difference between the two men was that Josiah was untouchable, and Joseph was indistinguishable.

His whole life Joseph would be mistaken for any moderately attractive white middle-class man. There was only one exception: no one ever mistook him for his brother. No one ever got the two mixed up.

As the years passed at Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, and Johnson's accounting firm, Joe became restless. Nevertheless, he continued punching his time card, day in and day out, until one warm October night.

During his lunch break, Joe had been doing some light reading. Naturally, being a patriot, he picked up Killing Kennedy by Bill O' Reilly at an airport. He became fascinated by the concept of being a World-Famous-Assassin; he became enthralled by the concept of being known. However, there was only one thing that Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, and Charles J. Guiteau possessed that Joseph did not: a middle name. Joe's parents' never assigned him a middle name and they never signed his birth certificate either. But, he thought up an ingenious way to work around the issue: he could assassinate someone as his brother, Josiah Klaus Randall Hendrickson von Kaiser Van Smith.

                                                        #

Josiah Klaus Randall Hendrickson von Kaiser Van Smith, or "Joey" for short, was all coked up on a Thursday afternoon, as was typical after a big win at the derby. Joey had never had a single responsibility in his life; he could get away with murder. And that's what Joe was counting on.

One fateful humid night, Joe worked late, well after dark, and as he punched out, he jogged down the stairs, and his newly purchased switchblade bounced against his leg. He walked down the streets in anticipation of his soon to be fame.

After walking for some time, he spotted a strung out homeless man passed out on a city bench. Joe nervously pulled a comb out of his pocket and parted his hair to the right. Then he reached for the blade, and fantasies of fame flashed through his mind as his hands ran across the smooth metal handle.

He walked stiffly up to the man with the needle sticking out of his arm, carefully removed the needle, and forcefully stabbed the man in the crook of his arm.

"Oh god, that's a lot of blood. Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god. I'm so sorry. Oh god, I’m sorry, that's- that’s a lot of the blood..." Joe said, as his eyes expanded with terror.

And with that thoughtful sentiment, along with his crushing self-conscious, Joe hoisted the homeless man upon his shoulders and carried him twelve city blocks to the nearest ER center.

                                                        #

Joe hung his head in defeat as he sipped his morning Folgers in the breakroom. His outing had been even less successful than he thought.

"BILLIONAIRE GAMBLER, JOSIAH KLAUS RANDALL HENDRICKSON VON KAISER VAN SMITH, SAVES HOMELESS ADDICT FROM ATTEMPTED STABBING!" read the morning paper.

Joe considered himself a failure in all respects of the word.

As Autumn changed to Winter and Winter to Spring, Joe found himself fed up with the way Josiah was able to live his life with ease, while accumulating more and more wealth and more and more fame. So once again, Joe hatched a scheme.

                                                        #

It had been 48 hours since Josiah's horse had won it's eighth consecutive race, which meant he was nose-deep in powder already. Joseph, however, has disguised himself as his brother, by means of hair-parting, slipped through the lobby, and was now mentally preparing himself in the elevator.

He had had enough of being the forgotten brother. Year after year, Joey would receive his mail, his birthday checks, his indecent pictures, and his subscription to The New Yorker magazine. It was time for him to pay.

As the elevator opened into the large penthouse, Josiah paced manically in circles around the couch. Joseph marched forcefully into the path of his coked-up brother, and he made the deliberate action of standing directly in front of the open window, where tenants across the street would have a clear line of sight. With a steady hand, he then unholstered his weapon, and shot his brother dead, at point-blank range.

                                                         #

Joseph could hardly contain his excitement as he waited for the morning paper; once again thoughts of fame flashed through his mind. He immediately seized his ticket to stardom and began to scan the cover. He stood stiff, in complete shock. His eyes were fixed on the headline.

"BILLIONAIRE HORSE RACER SHOOTS HIMSELF DEAD IN HIS APARTMENT, EYEWITNESS REPORTS!"