#he owns the company and led development on steam: it's his responsibility.

[zwoelffarben]

Nothing in particular; I'm just a hater.

Oh…. Well, it’s over for Crunchyroll I guess

[joezworld]

📂

What in the HECK happened with Scotsman, Dominion, and Dwight during the Great Gathering?!

(Also, since Dutchess of Hamilton has also been to the US during the 1939 NY World’s Fair, did she get involved?)

Warning - extremely long post below

So, first of all, Duchess of Hamilton never went back to the UK.

Duchess of Hamilton (6229) and Coronation (6220) had their nameplates swapped by the LMS when an engine was sent over to the US. 6229, in the guise of 6220, went to the US.

Streamlined locomotives were all the rage at the time, and railroads practically fell over themselves to get Coronation (as she was now known) onto press trains. The B&O railroad in particular was so impressed with her capabilities that they extended a formal offer of employment to her for service on their streamlined Royal Blue service. The LMS were surprised to get an offer to "purchase" their locomotive, but accepted nonetheless, as it meant a welcome infusion of cash in the dark days during the beginning of WWII.

Coronation fit right in with the Americans, having only been about a year old when she was sent to New York. Following the end of steam traction on the Royal Blue in the late 40s, (the B&O were early adopters of diesels.) she and her B&O coworkers found good employment on the New York Central, where she still runs to this day.

Since then, she's fully "gone native", marrying a J3 Hudson, (yes one of the streamlined ones) adopting both an American accent and three children, and being fully repainted to NYC silver by 1956. Flying Scotsman met her in Albany in 1970, and neither one of them recognized the other.

Actually, most UK expats don't recognize her, to the point where a common interaction is for her to be held up as an example of "look at her, she's integrated well into the US", only for the British engines to say "that's preposterous, she isn't English".

When it's pointed out that she's still obviously an LMS Coronation, the next response is usually screaming.

All that being said, she has no interest to come back to the United Kingdom, and wasn’t asked by the NRM anyways. 

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

Second of all, the Great Gathering was... an event.

So, there are (officially) 6 preserved Gresley A4s.

Mallard - static, National Railway Museum (UK). Also an asshole.

Bittern - running, private owner, UK based

Sir Nigel Gresley - running, owned by a trust, UK based

Union of South Africa - running, private owner, UK based

Dwight D. Eisenhower - static (officially), National Railway Museum (USA)

Dominion of Canada - static (officially), Exporail (Montréal)

This is the official list, and for the first 4 engines, it's the truth.

However, things are a bit hazier on the other side of the Atlantic...

-----

So the thing that needs to be made clear right up front that in a sentient vehicle world, museums aren't like the NRM, where locomotives sit static for years on end, although obviously the English have museums like that because of course they do.

Rail museums in the rest of the world are much more like Colonial Williamsburg - a living history center staffed by volunteers who act out a prototypical setting from [insert decade here].

British Rail, being British Rail, didn’t know that and didn’t care.

-

4496, Dwight D. Eisenhower, having been named after the General-turned-President, had been earmarked for preservation by BR, and was summarily shipped off to the US National Railway Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

In an entirely unintentional move, this donation MONUMENTALLY snubbed the Smithsonian, who refused to have any dealings with BR for decades, even for archival purposes. This, combined with the fallout from Operation Smash Hit, and the fact that the Smithsonian is Petty AF, meant that there was virtually no official trans-Atlantic cooperation between British and US museums for decades.

Dwight hit the shores of the US in 1964 New York City and was greeted by a marching band, a ticker-tape parade, and Presidents Johnson and Eisenhower, who were on-hand to personally make the engine a US citizen.

Always keen to curry favor with the government, the Southern Pacific railroad had a job offer waiting for Dwight right alongside the Presidents and the parade, and when he accepted, he went off to Sunny Southern California - someplace so opposed to Britain the he fell in love with the place immediately and refused to leave!

The ladies may have also had something to do with it as well - while most engine classes fell into a typical 50-50 gender distribution, the SP GS-4 class was all female...

[Pictured above - one of 28 very good reasons to live in California if you're a single British steam engine.]

Dwight does not kiss and tell, but at his wedding in 1974, all 28 GS-4s showed up - and he was only marrying one of them!

Since the 70's, he's become a mainstay in California, having been repainted into Daylight Limited colors in 1969, and retiring from railroad duties in 1999. After that, he went into the movie business, and is currently the head of digital media development at Disney.

His wife Irene (SP 4437) is also an interesting figure as well - following in the wheelmarks of the great female locomotives before her, she had an eye for business and a Stanford education before she married her husband, and was an initial investor in multiple tech companies in Silicon Valley during the 70's and 80's, but stopped doing that after her investment in Apple proved very lucrative. In 1996, she was convinced by a few people in the Stanford Alumni association to invest in another tech startup, this one an "internet search engine" called Google.

So yeah, Dwight Eisenhower kept falling up and up and up all his life, and is now married to the richest woman in the world.

--

4489 Dominion of Canada was donated mostly by accident, having been forgotten in the back of Darlington sheds until 1966, when she was shipped off to the Canadian Railway Historical Society in Montreal.

As stated elsewhere, the Canadian Government considered any locomotive built in the UK to have UK citizenship, and therefore treated them as commonwealth citizens under existing Canadian law. (remember that Canada was still a colony at that time)

CN, the national rail carrier, was obligated to offer her a job under their charter, and she accepted, moving to Toronto to run intercity trains between Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.

Within two years she was displaced from those duties by the introduction of a new, shiny, jet turbine powered train, and was summarily demoted to local commuter runs in the Toronto suburbs.

Moving to suburbia did one thing more than anything else - expose her to the people who live there. They all had complaints, they all had problems, and they all had no idea on how to fix them.

Being a helpful sort, Dominion decided that she could help, and promptly ran for Toronto city council in 1974. She won, and has been a fixture in local Toronto politics ever since - she even got to be Chairwoman of Metro Toronto (the closest thing to being mayor because Toronto's governmental structure is weird) until 1998, when Toronto was merged with the surrounding area to create a massive new region.

Having then done everything there is to do in municipal Toronto government, Dominion went on to become the Chief Executive Officer of Metrolinx, the agency that controls almost all of the transit agencies in Ontario, because, as she puts it, "I'm still a commuter engine at heart".

She's now painted in the current GO Transit paint scheme, and still does commuter runs- which is really weird looking now that there are double deck commuter coaches in a push-pull configuration, with a Gresley A4 doing the pushing.

------

Now, I mentioned that those 6 were the only ones officially preserved - there were two unofficial preservations as well...

-

4486 Merlin was properly Shanghied - he was yanked off the docks in Southhampton by a cargo ship in August of 1965, and was spirited away to parts unknown.

Those unknown parts turned out to be South Korea. There, he was given citizenship by the US-aligned military dictatorship (Korean history is wild) and was employed by the State-run rail operator.

As the military government began a hardcore plan to increase their country's wealth and industrial output, rail lines were being built across the country, and Merlin was soon awarded a position on the fastest train in the network, the Seoul-Busan Saemaeul-ho.

Because of his experience in running high-speed express trains, Merlin not only became the public face of Korean high-speed rail, but also became an "honored elder" amongst the other Korean engines, a position he still holds to this day - as despite being over 70 years old, he still runs daily trains on the fast services, easily keeping time with the Korean schedules as well as training the new high speed trains, including the KTX sets. He's on his 24th boiler by now, and has more parts from Hyundai than Doncaster.

An additional fact - Merlin actually has had a linguistic effect on Korean railroading, as his strange amalgamation of an accent - a strong Yorkshire accent that tried to be Received Pronunciation for 30 years, mixed with almost 50 years of middle-to-upper-class Korean - has filtered down through the ranks of KoRail, because all of his students want to sound like him out of respect. Human British expats in Korea will occasionally hear a locomotive speaking in English, and the engine will sound like a Yorkshireman every time and the Brits cannot handle it.

---------

4495 Golden Fleece is the only A4 to preserve himself - he saw the writing on the wall in the early 60s, and hopped a car ferry to France at the end of 1962. From there, he bounced around Europe for a bit before making it to the United States in the late 70's.

Of the 8 surviving A4s, he's probably led the quietest life of all - he moved to Miami before it got nice, and basically got in on the ground floor of CSX when that merger happened in 1980. He's now the head of terminal operations for the Port of Miami, but he's generally kept a low profile - not even having a chance to meet Scotsman due to his time in Europe.

He's still in contact with Dwight and Dominion, and has no real bitterness over not being "famous" like they are - he likes the quiet, and still lives in a modest house in Boynton Beach with his long-term girlfriend.

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

Soooo... the Great Gathering.

It was supposed to be a meeting of the 6 surviving A4s - a two year event held at the NRM in honor of the 75th anniversary of Mallard's record-setting run.

"Record setting" is a past-tense term here. While there have been no official runs, every single one of the Pennsylvania Railroad's T1 and S1 locomotives claim to have gone faster than 126 without meaning to, and numerous other locomotives on unofficial attempts done late at night on flat stretches of land across the country have hit 130+.

British Expats have also done better than 126 - Coronation claims to have hit at least 140 on a midnight mail train in 1980, and in Korea, Merlin claims to have hit 128 on a test train, although that was judged by timing mile markers as his speedometer wasn't functioning properly.

Problems arose before any of the engines had even reached the NRM, as Mallard's already sizeable ego had swelled to massive proportions, and several engines in the great hall were planning a justifiable homicide.

Then came the time restraints - none of the foreign locomotives were willing to uproot their lives and jobs for two years just to sit motionless in a shed. A two year exhibition was eventually negotiated down to a 6 month gala, much to the irritation and confusion of the NRM, who could not understand that the engines were still in service.

Then came the extra engines - Dwight and Dominion thought that the NRM knew about Fleece, and were quite insulted on his behalf when he wasn't invited - they threatened to not attend unless arrangements were made for Fleece to attend as well.

An utterly baffled NRM agreed, but also tore their record archives apart, as they knew that Fleece had been scrapped. The fact that his picture was plastered all over CSX's Florida Division website was all the more confusing as a result.

-

Meanwhile in Busan, nobody knew that Merlin had escaped the scrappers' torch and therefore did not invite him. He was only informed after K-Pop star Psy texted him from London to ask if he knew about the event, which was being advertised on television.

Merlin, having missed his friends from the LNER, decided that he would just crash the party, used some of his many vacation days, and took off for England on a cargo ship.

-

By sheer coincidence, all four foreign A4s hit the dock in Southhampton on the same day, and were delighted to see each other - especially Merlin, considering that everyone else had thought he'd died.

Meanwhile at the NRM, delight was not the word one would use. Befuddled, confused, shocked even, but not delighted. Their plans had revolved around 6 A4s, most of which wouldn’t be running - only to now discover that there were 7, all but one of which were functioning! (Mallard, the star of the show, was the odd one out, and it drove him crazy) 

Then they got a phone call from their man at the docks saying that another one had showed up, looking like he’d driven out of a K-pop album cover, and they just gave up and started screaming. 

-

Screaming is also what happened when the cavalcade of foreigners showed up in York - first of all, the quartet of new engines sounded nothing like they had when they left England. 

Dwight had willfully unlearned his Upper Crust British accent by 1971, and had fallen deep into a California accent (quite similar to what Scotsman sounds like - coincidence? No.)

Dominion and Fleece hadn’t tried to unlearn their accents, but 40+ years of living in North America can really dilute the Britishness. It doesn’t help that Dominion has developed most Canadian vocal tics eh?

As stated above, Merlin has a weird fuckin accent, and now he speaks English with a strong Yorkshire accent, but will occasionally and without warning drop into a Korean/Yorkshire hybrid accent.

The screaming also happened because the NRM had wanted to repaint the duo trio! quartet?! into LNER garter blue, and were promptly informed that “we’re painted like this for work! Don’t touch it!” (the sole exception was Dwight, who hadn’t pulled a real train in 14 years, but he liked his Daylight Limited paint), so instead of the new arrivals showing up in LNER colours, they showed up looking like THIS:

Having their long-lost siblings show up looking and sounding like THAT had quite an affect on the A4s and the other NRM engines: 

Bittern could not believe her eyes - to the point where she actually began making noise about seeing an optometrist

Union of South Africa almost backed through a wall

Sir Nigel Gresley was speechless for two days

Mallard was so angry that he actually chipped a tooth during one of his rants about “the impropriety of it all!!”

Evening Star laughed so hard that he managed to derail himself without moving

City of Truro almost cracked a piston from shock

Alycidon spent the entire gala coming up with more and more laser focused jabs at Mallard - who was so easy to fluster that the Deltic needn’t have bothered 

Oliver Cromwell and Green Arrow made fast friends with the new arrivals, and spent the entire time learning ‘Americanisms’ to annoy the other engines with.

But what about Flying Scotsman? Where was he in all of this? He was generally considered to be the “leader” of the NRM fleet (much to Mallard’s annoyance), and was usually who the other engines turned to when things started getting out of control. 

Did Scotsman calm things down? Like hell he did. The inmates were running the asylum from the moment that Scotsman saw the other A4s - more importantly saw Dwight - and immediately greeted them in flawless Californian. 

This actually set off the building’s security alarm, as Flying Scotsman saying “DUDES! Wassup?!” caused such an uproar that the noise broke several exterior windows. 

----

And all of this was in the first few days - there were six months left to go. 

--

There was one railtour attempt. It was supposed to feature Bittern and Sir Nigel running in tandem, but instead featured Dwight and Merlin, mainly because Bittern wanted to see what would happen. 

They exceeded the max speed limit for steam traction within 15 minutes, sparked a thorough investigation by the RAIB, and got all future steam powered railtours for the Gathering cancelled immediately. 

On the plus side, the two engines did prove that it was still possible for a steam train to hit 100 safely. 

--

One thing that baffled the other engines was the inordinately large number of people who turned up just to see Dominion, and the one person who kept turning up to see Fleece - it took a lot of explaining for them to understand that Dominion had been married three times, and had children (adopted) and grandchildren from all three marriages coming to see her. A similar amount of explaining was required to explain that Fleece’s girlfriend/partner wanted to see him too. 

The normally chatty Dwight and Scotsman would suddenly clam up whenever Dominion and Fleece teasingly tried to ask about their love lives, something which wasn’t unnoticed by the other engines, but got similarly nowhere. 

The answer to why they both shut the hell up was explained when a lot of shouting broke out in the yard of the NRM one day about a month into the exhibition:

Irene Eisenhower, not content to sit in California and count her billions, quickly grew bored without her husband, and decided to go to England and be with him. The fact that she definitely did not fit the UK loading gauge was never even a consideration, and so she just showed up in York on the back of a lorry, having informed no-one of her arrival, and content to just pay off the requisite people if a fuss occurred. 

A fuss did occur, and it was only ended when Scotsman managed to convince the museum’s curator (who at this point in his life was regretting ever thinking of this damned gathering) that Irene was a ‘temporary donation’ to the museum. 

[Scotsman, who definitely hid his Cali accent from museum staff the entire time, has one of the best poker faces in the world]

Dwight was overjoyed, and so was Scotsman, for initially unclear reasons. Then Irene managed to grab both her husband and Scotsman, dragged them behind a shed, and [THIS IS A PG13 HEADCANON] the both of [PG13]. Turns out that while Scotsman may have slept his way across the US a few times, he was actually ready to settle down with Dwight and Irene - they were a throuple way back in the 70s, and those passions haven’t faded. When Scotsman reluctantly left the US in 74, a lot of the reluctance was because of those two. 

This bombshell of a revelation went over interestingly at the NRM. Some engines (Green Arrow) were happy for them, some were incensed (Mallard - although it was for anti-American reasons, not homophobic ones), and some were intensely curious about what was going on in the outside world (Bittern). 

-

The ‘foreigners’ (as Mallard had taken to calling them), were deeply displeased at how their fellow engines were being treated - while a lot of them were ‘in steam’, some were not and might never be again, something they found abhorrent. Unable to do anything at that time, as the NRM was not a for-profit entity and therefore did not have anyone to bribe, (Irene’s solution to things is to throw money at the situation) the engines started talking about how life was different in the outside world - namely that engines were still working hard, even when they were over a century old and running on steam power. 

This was of great interest to engines like Evening Star and (6220) Duchess of Hamilton, neither of whom were likely to be steamed again, and Bittern, who was growing more and more curious with each passing day. Dissent began to slowly build against the NRM curators, and the culture of the United Kingdom in general.

-

One thing the foreigners did try do something about was Ellerman Lines. The poor bastard had been sectioned to show his inner workings, much to the jaw-dropped horror of the foreign A4s, who made such a stink about it that he was moved outside the museum by NRM staff, who must have thought that the engines lacked object permanence or something, because that didn’t make it better!

-

Irene Eisenhower, who was beginning to get really sick of the nonsense that the NRM called preservation, (Scotsman was not in running condition, and had been hastily reassembled mid-overhaul in order to be cosmetically ready for the event, and let’s not forget poor Ellerman Lines) elected to bring the event to a close on her own after only three months. She did this by eventually putting her immense wealth to good use, and called for a haulage service to rescue the engines from the NRM without the knowledge of the museum staff. Aside from the A4s, she also took Ellerman Lines, Scotsman, and Bittern (who had asked to go) with her, and only bothered to inform Ellerman and Bittern - she was not about risk Scotsman having another “think of England” moment and staying. 

The haulage firm was efficient and the cargo ship was waiting, so the engines were in international waters before the NRM opened the next morning. 

Much swearing occurred in England that day, and the NRM’s image has yet to fully recover from the PR story that they had sold Flying Scotsman (and Ellerman Lines) to a reclusive American billionaire. 

Privately though, the NRM does not care, as that story is a lot better than “Someone stole our engines and we’re not allowed to get them back because as it turns out we’re slaveowners, so no international court will help us.”

Also, despite their multimillion dollar “donation" from the I. Eisenhower Opportunity Fund, they still haven’t been able to fully pacify their engines, all of whom have somehow gotten the idea that they should be running in main line service like they live on Sodor or something...

--------

Dwight, Scotsman, and Irene all live happily together in the sprawling Eisenhower estate in Malibu. Irene is currently lobbying the California state government to legalize polygamy, with moderate success. 

-

Ellerman Lines, after a lot of therapy and a full rebuild, is now working on a short line in Wyoming. He likes the scenery.

-

Bittern followed Dwight, Irene, and Scotsman to Los Angeles, and used her ‘connections’ (Dwight) to get a supporting role in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Since then, she’s gotten several roles based on her own merits, including an Emmy nomination for Best Guest Appearance in a Comedy.

-

Merlin spent a few months in LA before he went back to Korea. He is very thankful that he was able to reconnect with his brothers and sisters, and that his homeland has good internet, as he video calls his family across the Pacific almost every day.

-

Golden Fleece still lives a quiet life in Florida, but finally decided to tie the knot, and married his girlfriend in 2017. The ceremony was supposed to be quiet, but Irene Eisenhower has no idea what that word means. 

-

Dominion of Canada continues to baffle non-local trainspotters when she runs commuter trains into Toronto. She is now a great-grandmother. 

-

7 years later, and the term “Great Gathering” is still a forbidden phrase in the back rooms of the NRM.

[simplyemm]

In the Cards: IV of Pentacles

pairing: Bucky x Reader

word count: 1.5k

warnings: meet cute (kinda), little bit of fluff, pet name (solnyshka), mentions of kidnapping, unedited, so all mistakes are mine.

summary: There is a new face around the Tower, and you want to make him feel welcome.

Header image by me.

Series Masterlist

I do not consent for this to be reposted, translated, or copied to any other platform.

IV of Pentacles: stability, control, influence, security, frugality

The ding of the elevator alerted you to the arrival of your somewhat-expected visitor. Steve Rogers had been making the rounds to all of the Tower employees, letting everyone know about the most recent addition to the building, as well as doing his best to allay any safety concerns that people might have. Cause y’know people might freak out just a little bit that the Winter Soldier was now in residence and not-entirely-okay.

“Hiya Cap,” you greeted, looking up from the disassembled Widow Bite you were working on improving for Natasha. “What’s up?”

“So you probably know why I’m here,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Yup. Sergeant Barnes has moved in and he’s being given mostly free reign of the place to do a security check so he feels more secure in the Tower, right?”

“Word travels fast,” he muttered.

“Lab gremlins are gossips,” you confirmed. “But I get it, and so do most of the rest of the R+D staff. Everyone knows that they can have FRIDAY change up the access permissions if they get uncomfortable.”

“And yours?” Steve asked, glancing toward the doors on either side of your workshop.

“FRIDAY?” you called to the ever-present AI. She dinged in response. “Please allow Sergeant Barnes full access to my lab and associated spaces.”

“Of course.”

Steve smiled at you. “Thanks a lot, kid.”

“Let Sergeant Barnes know he’s welcome to lurk in my space whenever. I don’t mind the company.”

Steve chuckled. “No kidding, especially with the odd hours you keep.”

“Yeah well, science rests for no one, and someone has to keep up with all the upgrades y’all are constantly needing.”

Steve patted you on the shoulder and left you back to your own devices.

The next morning found you back to work, with only a few tweaks left to make on the improved Widow Bite.

“Good morning, solnyshka,” Natasha greeted as she entered the workshop, holding a steaming mug of tea. “I bring an offering.”

You look over at your for-the-moment favorite Avenger and grin. “Morning Nat. I’m just about ready to test out this upgrade.”

“Already? I just gave it to you like a day and a half ago!”

“And?” you shrugged. “Science waits for no one.” And you had worked all night on it, but you were not about to admit to that.

“You haven’t slept,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

You fight back a yawn. “No rest for the wicked,” you jest. “C’mon, let’s go test this out.”

The two of you head to the weapons testing area and you hand over the improved discs. You headed back behind a clear barrier where the control panel was. You had developed new testing dummies that allowed you to get readouts of possible biological reactions to the new tech, without needing actual people to be test dummies. It was one of the things you were most proud of.

“Ready?” you call. The Widow nods and you hit a button, causing several test dummies to appear and be summarily taken down by Natasha.

“I like them,” Nat says as the last dummy is taken down, twitching from the electrical current. “How are the readings?”

You look up from your StarkPad with a grin. “Fantastic. Will easily take down non-Enhanced without causing lasting permanent damage, enough to incapacitate. Gimme a minute and I can run a simulation to see--” you trail off, brain already moving a mile a minute to put in the parameters for the new simulation. The results make you grin even wider. “Can also cause at least minor inconvenience for super soldiers, provided we’re using Steve as a baseline.”

“Great!” Nat said. “Now go to sleep.”

You grumble good-naturedly, putting all of the testing tech to sleep, before heading out the testing lab door and across the hallway to your apartment. You really didn’t mind that your entire life could be contained in a single floor of Stark Tower, in fact, you actually preferred it that way. Tony had insisted that you move in after the second kidnapping incident, and you didn’t fight him on it...often. Besides, despite the incredibly generous salary Tony gave you, rent in New York City was not an expense you wanted to deal with.

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

“I thought I told you to go to sleep,” Natasha said reproachfully when she entered the common area a few hours later and saw you sitting on the couch.

“Tried,” you replied. “Couldn’t do it. And I’m locked out of my lab for the next-” you glanced at the display of your StarkPhone, “-seven hours and thirty-four minutes, so I figured I would come hang out here.”

“Can’t FRIDAY unlock it for you?” Steve asked.

You laughed. “Nope, she’s the one who locked me out. It’s a protocol Pepper made Tony put in for himself that he so kindly added for me as well.”

The super soldier nodded in understanding. He looked over towards the elevator, hearing something that the two others didn’t, right before the door opened with a ding.

“Hey Buck,” Steve greeted softly, as the brown-haired man entered the space, looking around and observing everything. His eyes fell onto you and his brow furrowed, not recognizing the strange person in the space. “Oh right, you two haven’t met yet. Bucky, this is Y/N, she’s one of the--” he looked to you for a more apt description of your role.

“I usually go with lab gremlin, but I’m technically the Stark Industries lead mechanical engineer and tech liaison for the Avengers. It’s nice to meet you Sergeant Barnes.” You gave him a small smile and a little wave.

“Bedtime, solnyshka,” Natasha said. “At least try to get some sleep before FRIDAY unlocks your lab again. Please.”

“Ugh, fine,” you groaned, slowly getting up from the couch. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my cave.” And with that, you headed towards the elevator and back to your floor.

“Cave?” Bucky asked after the elevator doors closed behind you.

“It’s what she calls her floor,” Nat explained. “She has an apartment, her workshop, and one of the weapons testing labs all on the 87th floor. She emerges every now and again to socialize. Usually after she gets locked out from working too much.”

He nodded. He had yet to visit the 87th floor on his nightly sulks around the tower, but it had officially moved higher on his list.

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

It was some obscenely early hour of the morning when Bucky made his way to the 87th floor of the Tower. Nightmares had woken him again, and he found himself wanting to see what your space was like. Steve had told him a bit about you after you had left, expounding upon your sunny disposition (which explained Natalia’s endearment) and your single-minded dedication to your work.

The elevator doors opened, revealing an open sitting area with three doors leading off it. The central doors were made of transparent glass and he could see you staring at a holographic display, moving things around with your fingertips, biting your lower lip in concentration. Unlike Stark, who favored loud rock as he worked, you had smooth jazz going in the background. Bucky could hear the murmur of the lyrics through the glass. To the right was another set of doors, the walls and door itself made of frosted glass. He assumed that led to your personal quarters, given that the doors on the left hand side had TESTING LAB written across them.

You looked up from your holo screen and the schematics displayed there after giving Bucky a chance to get his bearings. FRIDAY had informed you that he was on his way as soon as he had stepped into the elevator, but you hadn’t wanted to make him uncomfortable by immediately rolling out the welcome wagon. You tapped an icon in the corner of the holo screen, causing the doors of your workshop to slide open.

“Hi,” you said with a smile. “Wanna come in?”

He had been expecting something clinical and sterile feeling about the space, but that was not it at all. It felt more like a garage than an actual lab. He looked over to one of the corners, seeing a kitchenette and lounge area, complete with couch and television, which seemed counterintuitive to a work space, but it somehow fit.

“It’s a bit eclectic,” you admitted. “But it works for me.”

His eyes spread across the rest of the space, noting entrances, exits, and the lack of security for the floor-to-ceiling windows along the back wall.

“The windows aren’t secure,” he mumbled.

You smiled. “More so than you’d think,” you replied gently. “Virtually indestructible one-way glass. Tony doesn’t want just anyone seeing what I get up to here.” You gestured toward one of the swivel stools you had scattered around your various worktables. “You’re more than welcome to hang out for a bit, if you’d like.”

And so he did.

[fightevilandthengetblownup]

FIC: The bright lights, the merry go

---

Sitting at the kitchen table, she let out a quiet soft sigh to herself as her thoughts continued to buzz quietly in the silence surrounding her. There was the occasional plinking sound as the kitchen tap let out slow, irregular drips, and the whirr from the refrigerator motor humming quietly in the space, and a soft noise as the oven slowly brought itself up to temperature. Jo had turned it on earlier, uncertain as to her plans for the day, but as she’d pottered around the house aimlessly her interest in baking in the empty house had fizzled out, and upon slumping into the seat at the table she hadn’t had the energy yet to get up and turn it back off.

It was one of those rare mornings that the other was out doing what he needed to rather than taking the morning to catch up on the sleep he missed out on, staying up playing his games and on hand to soothe away the nightmares that plagued her. As soon as the nightmarish voices had faded away and her body returned to herself, Jo’d caught up on a few kisses despite her protests of morning breath and been teased as she’d changed into her running gear to take their baby out while Grey’d pulled on a clean hoodie and his sneakers before departing for whatever hunt was on his agenda that morning and might let him be home by the afternoon.

Jo had gotten back from her longer than usual run with their fluffy baby, and spent a good while pampering the happy dog with a good brushing and cuddles before going for a soak in the bath with a copy of the latest Madeline Miller book to while away the cloudy morning. It was peaceful, if overly quiet, and gave her the time to relax but as she’d gotten out of the tub and dried off with the fluffiest towel she could find, Jo could feel the boredom - or at least that’s what she was thinking of it as - sinking in at being home alone.

She’d first tried to distract herself with some television but found herself starting and stopping new episodes of six different shows and channel surfing even the shopping network before giving up that idea. Her book was her next port of call, but even that just led to her shuffling about the house trying out different places to sit - one too cold near the window, another too far from the light far from it, the bed she couldn’t find a comfortable way to lay or perch, and sitting at the kitchen table to read her book felt strange. Jo tried working in her study next, pulling books that Harry had managed to locate from a contact in Mexico with a Spanish-English dictionary beside it had taken up about half an hour before she’d called quits on that as translating the words started to add to the headache she could have sworn had been developing all morning.

That was when the idea of baking had struck, her stomach growling for a very late breakfast as she moved down to reheat one of the cinnamon buns left in the fridge from the weekend and put the kettle on for her first cup of green tea of the day, but even as she sat at the table tearing at the bun and sipping her drink as the sun’s rays only just busted through the grey clouds to shine through the window - Jo couldn’t find the motivation to get up and do that either. Everything was just too heavy lately, after tearing her psyche apart recently and the hard work of stitching herself back together was still underway - it was too hard to do anything on her own again while she was still struggling to work her way through all that.

Nana had walked in after a little bit, burrowing her nose into the joint behind Jo’s knees and looking up at her with those big soulful eyes until she’d gotten a few bites of the warmed cinnamon bun for her own lip-smacking enjoyment. The unconscious movement to comply with her baby’s wishes were so rote at this point that Jo barely realized that the last perfect mouthful had been handed to the joyful pup before the smart dog noticed the empty plate and made off down to the lounge room with a happy wag of her tail leaving Jo slightly at a loss all over again to her thoughts and inadequacies to do anything. Everything was too hard to do, and now she hadn’t even gotten to have the middle circle of her bun.

“Balls,” Jo muttered quietly to herself under her breath as she stirred mindlessly at her tea before sighing into the silent room. “...Fine.” Grumbling to herself, she got up finally and moved towards the oven to click it off before slumping down onto the floor, resting her back against the warm oven door with a soft sigh as she closed her eyes for a moment.

That moment seemed to be a lot longer than she’d thought, as the next thing she knew was the sound of pounding paws on the hall floors and the warm baritone greeting the pup and that the oven behind her was no longer warm to the touch as she thunked her head back silently.

It took another few seconds before Jo tried to scramble quickly to her feet at the approaching sound of footsteps. It wouldn’t do at all to be found like that, it’d just worry her love too much. He shouldn’t have to worry about her very weird brand of crazy. Struggling, Jo let out a loud cry as she accidentally hit her head on the oven handle as she struggled up to her feet, rubbing at the sore spot. “Fuck! Bollocks, motherfuckin’ bullshit, crap!”

“Jo? Are you okay?” The panicked tone from the other was exactly what she’d tried to avoid, but as Jo finally got to her feet, the ache at the back of her head seemed to disappear as she looked into the warm and concerned blue eyes staring back at her as Grey rushed to her side. His hands were in her hair and gently placing pressure against the sore spot that had been throbbing painfully before, and all she could see was concern and love as his fingers massaged the area gently and his eyes danced between each of hers. “What happened, pretty one? Oh, that egg feels bad-”

“It’s not so bad-” “Jo, that feels like a bad bump.” “I just banged it a bit, I’ll be fine.” “Of course you will, let’s get you seated, hm?”

Jo found herself nodding gently without dislodging that comforting touch as she was gently guided back to her seat. She felt herself blushing however as the other picked up her now cold mug of tea before moving to put the coffee machine on instead as he poured the cold liquid down the drain without comment. Letting out a quiet groan to herself, she slumped back down again, resting her cheek on the table and rubbing at the sizable bump on the back of her head gently without worrying much about hiding that it hurts now there was no point to it.

“You want a coffee, Jo?” Grey asked gently as he rinsed out her mug and moved towards the fridge. Jo could tell he was looking at her in concern even as she let her eyes close and gave a positive-sounding groan in response. “Did you need anything else - pain killers, some chocolate, something?”

“I’m sure the coffee’d be just fine. Maybe…” “Maybe what?” “Maybe another cinnamon bun possibly.” “Coming right up then!”

Her cheeks felt hotter all over again as she rolled her forehead against the table before lifting her head to look at the confused and concerned yet adoring look she was getting in response. Grey was chewing on his bottom lip as he took not only the milks but two of their remaining cinnamon buns from the fridge to be warmed through in the toaster oven on a tray to catch any errant cream cheese frosting.

“I was tryin’ to decide what to do today, and I have no ideas,'' Jo mumbled out as an explanation, rubbing at the back of her head gently as she dropped her gaze down. Her head was already feeling better, but that was probably just her elation at the other being home so quickly. “I… I was almost thinkin’ of cleanin’ the oven, actually. I was that bored.”

“You, bored? Oh, we can’t have that.” The other smiled warmly as he came over with two mugs of steaming coffee - perfectly poured and balanced with their individual milk preferences and as Jo took a sip the pleasurable taste of caramel got a pleased groan from her in surprise - and sank into the seat beside her before reaching out to rub at her head instead. “What did you get up to while I was out to be so bored already, pretty one?”

“I tried some television but everythin’ was borin’. And I’d already taken Nana on a run and read some while in the bath that I didn’t want to do more of that. Otherwise?” Jo shrugged a shoulder, leaning into his touch with a sigh. “Didn’t know what to get up to. Was thinkin’ of bakin’ but I just… I guess I just wanted some company.”

“Well,” Grey’s smile was so soft and inviting and felt like a warm blanket wrapping around her in its soft embrace as she looked back at him, the tiny crease in his brows the only showing of the concern at her words that she could see. “If my company is what you want, then that’s what you get today.”

“But-” “No buts.” “Grey…”

“Nope, we are doing whatever catches your fancy today, my dearest pretty one,” Grey shook his head, smiling softly at her before he leaned in to kiss her gently for a moment. His touch was so comforting to her, and leaning into the kiss, Jo barely held back the whimper at the loss as he pulled back. The smug smile she got as she blinked her eyes open made her feel flushed all over again. “Now, you’d said something about wanting to do some baking?”

“Mhmm.” “Baking it is then. Not that I’m anywhere near as good as you.” “That’s not true at all.” “Oh yes it is, your baking is a thing of beauty.” “Hunny-” “No fighting me, not about your amazing baking, Jo.”

There was a pause as Jo opened her mouth to argue more before letting out a sigh instead and leaning her head back into his touch instead. “If this is the hill for you-” Jo let out a small giggle, shaking her head gently not to dislodge him before adding cheerfully. “Bakin’ it is I guess.”

Grey gave a decisive nod at her words, leaning in for another long kiss that would’ve made her knees buckle if she’d been standing before pulling back again and hopping out of his seat at the beep of the toaster oven. Jo chewed on her lip thoughtfully as she tried to think about what she would like to do together. They had almost anything and everything on hand given they’d done the groceries the day before, but also it wasn’t like the other wouldn’t fetch her any ingredients they were missing if she longed for them. If she wanted some vanilla fresh from Madagascar or some fancy French chocolate or milk straight from some Jersey cows, she was certain it would be in her hands with a moment’s notice. Whatever her heart desired, she knew without a doubt she’d have it.

“So, what do you think we’d make?” Grey asked cheerfully as he slipped into the seat beside her again and sat the plate with two warmed buns between them. Jo shrugged a shoulder as she watched him for a moment, before letting out a small giggle and reaching a finger out to wipe the melted cream cheese frosting that clung to the corner of his lips after he’d taken a big bite before licking it off. She blushed red to the roots of her hair at the heated gaze she got in return before dropping her eyes down to the other bun, tearing a bit for herself rather than acknowledge the electric hum in the air between them at that moment. There was a pause before the other added, voice thick and husky but fighting through it to speak nonchalantly. “If I recall, you had promised to teach me some things.”

“Oh yes, many a thing.” “Did you want to try some of those?” “What? Like the doughnuts or puff pastry?” “Yeah, exactly.”

Jo thought for a moment, chewing the mouthful of her bun and taking a sip of her coffee careful to avoid looking up at the other as she was unsure what she’d see reflected back at her. She had the most patient man in the world, but even patience would wear thin one day - especially when they both bucked against it equally but equally uncertain as it was. She couldn’t face if he was disappointed with her, focussing instead on gently nibbling on the warm, soft bun before eventually shaking herself free of those concerns and turned towards the idea of doughnut-making instead.

“Hmm, well, we’ve definitely got what we need for some typical glazed doughnuts,” Jo hummed to herself thoughtfully as the pair continued to eat their belated breakfast and sip their coffee. “Could do some custard-filled ones but I’m not the biggest fan.”

“Agreed,” Grey replied quickly, smiling softly at her over the rim of his mug as Jo tapped a finger to her lips thoughtfully. There was a pause before he set the drink down and reached out instead to rub gently at the bump on her head gently. “Did you have any other ideas? Or is there something else we could make with the dough instead of just the glazed doughnuts?”

“Hmm.. We could make some fried fritter things?” “Oh?” “Yeah, like, get some soaked raisins or fruit of some kind-” “We just got some apples yesterday?” “Oh yes! That’s a great idea!”

“So, doughnuts and apple fritters are the plan?” The other asked gently, his fingers soothing what little pain still radiated at the back of her head away as Jo finished her second bun of the day and tilted her head into his skillful hand. “That sounds like a fun way to spend the afternoon.”

“Well, late mornin’ and afternoon!” Jo giggled, quirking a brow back at him as she got a rueful grin in response. It was barely morning, it was true, but it amused her to correct him as they both looked at the oven clock showing that she was right for the next two minutes. The bemused look she got in response brought on another round of giggles as Grey shook his head at her and those last moments of the morning disappeared as he finished his cinnamon bun and she finished her cup of coffee.

As they finally finished, Jo reluctantly finally pulled back from the calming touch to push her chair out and get to her feet with an over-done flourish of her hands and far more energy than she’d felt earlier. “Let’s get started on the teachin’ then, hey hun?”

Grey nodded his head, getting to his feet as well and picking up the plate and their mugs deftly with a smile. She could see the concern underneath the amusement in his eyes, but with him there Jo doubted she’d be feeling forlorn or even a little bit of the throbbing pain she might have otherwise. “So, where do we start, pretty one?”

“Well, I’ll get the ingredients out if you help clear off the table so we can have a clear work surface?” “As you wish.” “Thanks, farmboy.”

The laughter that filled the kitchen was so much better than the oppressive quiet that it had been before - and Jo found herself humming along quietly to a tune she didn’t quite recognize as she pulled the dry and long-life ingredients out of the pantry. That song suddenly filled her ears from the speaker in the corner as she moved towards the now cleared table and spotted Grey’s smile from the corner where he was likely putting together a playlist with an eclectic mix of both their favorite songs. Smiling to herself as she bobbed along to the song, Jo pulled out a few mixing bowls as well as the milk, eggs and butter they’d need to start with.

Once everything was assembled, Jo let out a bright giggle again at the feeling of arms wrapping around her waist before she looked down to notice the half-apron wrapped about her and Grey’s head pressing into her shoulder and neck as he tied the bow at the back for her. “Thanks hun!”

“No worries, Jo, can’t get you getting all covered in flour. Actually, that might be very cute, ignore my silly idea.” Grey chuckled against her shoulder before pressing a quick kiss to her cheek. He shifted to move the chairs from their side of the table and then leaned a hip against the tabletop with a grin at her, one brow raised curiously. Jo grinned widely in response, taking in the way he had chosen to wear the dark blue apron instead of the frilly yellow she had on. “Well, what’s our next step, oh baking goddess?”

“First things first - dough!” “Nut!” “Hunny…”

Jo found herself giggling again as she caught his cheeky grin, twisting to peck his grin away quickly before turning back to their ingredients - pouring the necessary amount of milk for a double batch of dough into a heat-proof container. “Like I said, first things first so we’ve gotta get the yeast started. Can you warm the milk up a little and I’ll get the yeast separated out for the doughs?” She barely had to wait for the nod before tipping the yeast into each of their bowls and pushing them aside. Once the milk was heated, Grey poured it evenly between the two bowls and set the heating jug aside on the table out of their way. Jo glanced down at the rest and gave a quiet sigh before pulling over the flour to start sifting into another bowl to get rid of the lumps. “I hate siftin’ flour-”

“Well, how about you give me that job and you do the next bit then?” The other asked gently, reaching for the setup and then giving her a hip-bump to move out of the way as she relinquished the task for him. Grey smiled gently at her before giving the flour an extra shake. “I don’t know why you’d not like this task, Jo.”

“Ugh, it’s just so boring to do but you always need to. Stupid recipes requiring sifted flour!”

That got a laugh from the other as Jo moved to check on the yeast before moving to grab the jug and put the butter sticks in instead to heat in the microwave. By the time that was melted through and she’d poured in the apple cider, vanilla and salt into that jug, Grey had finished sifting the flour and the yeast had formed a foamy, bubbling top in the respective bowls. Jo gently instructed for some flour to be added to each bowl but the remaining bulk left in the sifted bowl for now before she handed Grey a wooden spoon and picked one up herself to gently fold and wet the flour in the yeasted mix together.

“Alrighty, the annoyin’ bit is whisking in another bowl now - can you separate eight egg yolks into this bowl here and I’ll get the whisk and sugar?” “Absolutely, Jo. Any plans for the whites?” “Hmmm, save them and we’ll have egg white omelets for lunch?”

Grey peppered her cheek with kisses and praise for creative thinking for the unnecessary bits before he moved to crack and separate the eggs as requested. Jo tipped the right amount of sugar into the same bowl and started to whisk as he added each yolk before handing the whisk over to him to continue as she poured the butter and other bits mixture in with the creamed yolk and sugar mixture, followed by the remaining flour. Once combined, Jo poured it into equal measure back into the two bowls with the yeast-mix and each picked up their spoons to mix together the dough.

“Oh, they look about ready to knead now too-” “Yeah? Not too sticky?” “Doughnut dough is supposed to be stickish.”

Grey nodded thoughtfully at her claims, smiling across at her as Jo put a layer of flour down in front of both of them so they could start kneading their mixes gently. It took about three minutes before Jo’s dough had formed together into a lovely ball that was taunt and sprung back at a finger prodding. As she wiped out the bowl that had held it before and then gently oiled it before plopping her ball into the base of it, Jo smiled happily to herself before turning to see how Grey had gotten on.

“Oh my god, hunny!” Jo cried, eyes wide and shocked as she looked towards the other. “What on earth did you do to that poor dough?!”

Grey flushed a deep red as he unsuccessfully tried to free his hands from the extremely sticky dough-like mix that was stuck mostly to his hands and the table but didn’t resemble the consistency at all that Jo’s had achieved at that point. “I, uh, I don’t think I was prepared for how sticky it was.”

“You don’t say!” The blonde let out a loud laugh as she looked on at his futile attempts to free himself, before Jo shuffled in under his closest arm. “Alrighty, let’s see if I can help you rescue it, huh?”

“Saving things, it’s what you do best.” Grey’s words ghosted over her ear as he peered over his shoulder from behind her as Jo’s hands dove in alongside his to try to free them and wrangle the mess into some sort of dough.

It took another few minutes for the sticky mess to start to come together and begin to feel like a proper ball of dough - still the stickiness needed for the doughnuts but no longer attached like concrete to the tabletop or either of their hands - and Jo let out a little laugh as she could feel the other’s hands finally getting the hang of the pull and push motion needed to work the tricky dough into submission.

“You know, this is where the playlist should start up with Unchained Melody.” Jo quipped quietly as they slowly worked the dough together and she moved her hands to help coax Grey’s into the different cupping-and-rolling motion needed to roll the dough into a cohesive ball ready to be returned to the bowl. “And I’d be behind you, of course.”

“Oh, so you’d be Swayze in this situation?” “Well, dah. I am the one that knows how to make it after all.” “That’s very true. And I definitely feel safe in those arms of yours, pretty one.”

Jo blushed something fierce as they finished the dough and moved to plop it into it’s bowl beside the other and Grey grabbed up some tea towels to cover them before they moved each bowl to a warm sunny spot to rise. Scrubbing at her cheek, she let out an embarrassed giggle at realising she’d just rubbed flour all over her cheek before sighing.

“Here, let me.” Grey picked up a spare towel and started wiping off her cheek before pressing a kiss to the same spot and then drawing her in for a gentle yet deep kiss for a long moment. Pulling back, he pressed his forehead to hers and sighed softly. “Thanks for the lesson, Jo, I was…”

“Stuck?” “Absolutely.”

“You’re welcome, hun.” Jo giggled again, pulling back a bit to press a peck against his forehead before turning her attention back to the table. “Alrighty, can you put away the flour and milk and stuff while I clean up the mess and then we can start on the apples and stuff?” She got a nod in reply, and working in tandem the mess was cleaned up in no time with the dirty bowls set in the sink and her wiping the table top down with a damp cloth to get any leftover flour up.

The sound of running water surprised her, and looking over, Jo couldn’t stop the soft smile growing as she noticed the other start of cleaning the bowls and spoons and other pieces rather than leaving them to sit. Grey’s shoulders weren’t slumped forward like she had worried they might after a bit of a failure making the dough on his own originally, and she could hear him humming along absentmindedly to the song on their playlist despite it being one of the songs she would class as hers. It was such a small gesture but made her stomach twist, and untwist again and the gentle look that was thrown over his shoulder towards her.

Shaking her head, Jo ducked her head down before moving towards the counter top to pull out the chopping board and set the apples from the fridge down as well as a heavy skillet out. Butter went into the skillet on the stovetop to start browning up on the lowest setting as she started peeling the apples absentmindedly with a knife.

As she finished the last of the apples, Jo blinked and let out a surprised noise to notice Grey had moved over and started to dice the peeled apples and add them to the skillet as she’d zoned out. Setting down the paring knife, she moved to add some cinnamon and brown sugar in with the apples before leaning her head against the other’s shoulder at the closeness. It felt so warm and light in the kitchen right then, in a way that the heated oven hadn’t felt before, warm and comforting and like home as the smell of the apples and butter cooking was mixed with the faint scent she knew was uniquely her love’s as she pressed her nose against his arm.

Jo let out a quiet sigh as Grey moved to put the last of the apple in the pan and press a kiss to her neck right over her scar. “Hey, I’ll get started on lunch while you do that, yeah?” The other waited all of a moment before pressing another kiss to the same spot at Jo’s nod of approval and he turned to start assembling the omelets for their lunch and likely a little bit for their darling girl once she’d eventually wake up. The apples simmered down softly and were moved off the heat in time for Grey to claim control of the stovetop for their lunch as Jo bounced about instead to reset the kitchen table and consult a few food blogs on her phone to decide on exactly the best way to form their doughnuts and apple fritters later.

After a quick lunch - egg white omelets with spinach, tomato and cheese which Jo pronounced to be delicious even though Grey denied that it was any good after he kept changing which technique to use to fold the omelet over on itself so each of theirs looked different - Jo suggested they watch some television as the dough still needed another half hour to rise.

The half hour came and went though, both tucked up on the couch with their girl laying across their laps and Jo’s head resting heavily against Grey’s shoulder as she snuggled into his side under his arm. It was warm and comforting and felt so good for her to be pressed up against Grey. Jo stroked through Nana’s fur gently as she watched the show, and found herself grinning gently to herself to realise that Grey’s fingers were just as absentmindedly stroking through her own hair as well. Everything felt so right in that moment, and when her phone beeped the minimum resting time had passed, Jo snuggled in closer and decided to wait for the end of the next episode before suggesting they get up.

“So, you never answered my question.” Grey chimed out softly as the episode finished and he clicked around to just put some background noise on instead of starting a third episode for them, raising an eyebrow at her when Jo made a quiet whine. “C’mon pretty one, what did you get up to that was so boring, hmm?”

“Nothin’ really-” “Jo?”

It took a moment and for her to cuddle in and rub her face against his chest for a moment before replying, cheeks red and mumbling quietly at how ridiculous she felt acknowledging it. “I was just… I missed you. I was missin’ you so everything sucked and I didn’t..” Jo let out a sigh, turning her head to look down at their pup as Nana tossed her head back for a moment before clambering to her feet in a swish of her tail and obvious disgust that she could tell her mommy and daddy were about to get up soon enough. Shaking her head, Jo gave a soft smile to herself before flushing all over again. “I’ve just been exhausted lately, emotionally, so like.. I just didn’t want to do anythin’ without you, hun.”

There was a pause, and Jo wasn’t surprised at all when there was suddenly a hand under her chin, tipping her face up towards his, and then gentle lips on hers. It was exactly the response she wanted somewhere deep inside, so leaning into the kiss with a quiet squeak. Grey’s hand shifted softly around her jaw line into her hair with his other hand and she found herself shifting into his arms and lap to kiss him back harder. It took more than a few minutes before their kisses slowed and stopped with a tiny groan from both of them as they moved back reluctantly. Her heart was pounding, but as much as part of her wanted to make any barriers between them disappear in his arms - a larger part was still mixed up and unsteady that she wanted nothing more than to cuddle in tighter and feel the comfort and stabilising impact of the other’s arms to keep her safe against all those concerns.

Grey gave a quiet groan under his breath before he kissed her again, softly and gently and so sweetly, before he shifted to set her back on the couch beside him with a tight hug. “I missed you too, pretty one, and I’m sorry I left this morning then-”

“No, no. You had to go and do-” “I could’ve waited though.” “Maybe, but you would’ve had to go sometime, and by goin’ you got to be home earlier!”

“Well, you’ve got me there.” Grey gave a chuckle, and Jo could feel it reverberating through his chest for a moment before he finally pulled back and got to his feet with a blush at his moving to readjust for a second, before holding out a hand to help her up “Do you think the dough is ready yet?”

Jo nodded, rubbing at her flushed cheeks as well as she got to her feet quickly with Grey’s help, before grinning widely. “Oh it definitely should be - would’ve been ready an episode and a half ago.”

“We should’ve paused-” “Oh fuck no, cause why would we stop mid episode?” “Then we shouldn’t’ve watched the last episode-” “And not finish an arc?”

“You just have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Grey grinned back at her widely, and Jo smiled back hearing the laugh before letting out a yelp at the playful tap she got as she passed him by towards the kitchen. There was another laugh from both of them as Jo hurried down the hall and danced just out of reach from the other as he took off after her, giggles and laughter filling the hall and kitchen as they reached it with teasing kisses and hugs before finally sobering up some.

Jo gave a final tap to the back of the other’s head for a second before she moved over to their aprons and handed them out as she looked over for their dough bowls. “Wow!” Looking in the bowls as she pulled the tea towels off and reset her apron around her waist, Jo’s eyes widened at just how much the dough had risen before letting out a laugh. “Well, those got big.”

Grey exclaimed likewise as he came to look at Jo moved the bowls onto the clean kitchen table. “Are they supposed to grow that much?”

“Maybe not, but they should still be nice doughnuts.” “Fingers crossed.” “Could you put a pot on the stove, fill it with the new oil in the pantry and put it on low while I get these ready?” “Of course, Jo, easy done.”

Jo smiled softly as she looked over her shoulder to see the nodding head of the other as he moved around to get the cast iron dutch oven out of the cupboard and set it up with enough oil for their frying. Turning back to the table, Jo spread out a thin coating of flour in the two spots they’d be working to make the doughnut shapes, before moving to get the cooled apple mixture.

“Did you want to do the doughnuts first and then we can start on the apple fritters?” “Sounds good. Which dough is which?”

Jo chuckled, grabbing one of the bowls and then tipping it out onto the floured space before her and then split it in half with a bench scraper she grabbed from a drawer right then at realising they’d need it. Plopping one half of the mix in front of Grey instead and pulling out the rolling pins, Jo smiled softly as she watched him prodding cautiously at the slowly deflating dough in front of him. “Okay hun, time to roll carefully and then we’ll shape them and set them over on a baking sheet. Did you want to cut the holes out and cook the doughnut holes too, or do the more bagel-like finger poking?”

“Well, one way we get doughnut holes that maybe someone could have with coffee for breakfast tomorrow like some other time, hmm?” Grey quirked a brow at her as he spoke, reaching out to tug on the end of a strand of hair for a second before tucking it behind her ear at the light giggle she gave. “With some fruit of course.”

“But of course!” Jo chirped back with a smirk, well aware that the suggestion of doughnuts for breakfast was of course a conscientious decision from the other to give her something for whatever he thinks she must have been missing that morning with his being away. Shaking her head with a smile, she waved a hand to the other. “Okay, can you grab the really big circular cookie ring as well as a smaller one from the cookie cutters? I think they should be easy enough to find in the third drawer-”

“I’m allowed in the famed baking drawer?” “Only with my permission of course.” “Well, of course.”

The banter got a laugh from her, and as the other moved back over with the two cookie cutters she double checked the sizes and gave a decisive nod at them being just right. Of course Grey would pick the perfect pair.

It took a few encouraging comments and soothing words from her as they moved into rolling out and then cutting the doughnut shapes that he wasn’t rolling them too thin or that the slight tackiness to the dough was to be expected. Jo had to remind him three times about coating his rolling pin with flour, and was rewarded with a flick of the white dust towards her that settled on her cheek and in her hair with a laugh from both of them. Eventually the first bowl worth of dough was successfully worked and cut out into sixteen doughnuts and sixteen corresponding doughnut holes. There was even just enough dough that Jo rolled them out and cut out two little bone-shaped doughnuts that they’d not cover in any icing to be saved for treats for their darling girl.

At that, Grey noted it was almost Nana’s dinner time, and as he moved off at the pup’s whining cries to be fed, Jo moved to check on the oil and dropped a small handful of the doughnut holes into the glistening oil to check and test for the temperature and cooking times. The colouring was slow, but eventually the golden colour came to the bottom side and they were gently flipped with a metal spider as she moved to set up another tray lined with paper towel and then a cooling rack on top for them to cool and avoid getting too oil logged as they’d cook the rest.

“Those look beautiful, Jo.” Grey said gently as he came up behind her, hands wrapping carefully around her waist into a tight hug as Jo carefully lifted the balls out of the oil and set them out on the drying rack. “And you’ve already thought ahead to the cooling rack!”

“Can’t have them sitting in the little oil to get soggy!” “Of course not.”

Giving him a grin, Jo handed the metal spider to him as she pulled out of the hug. “Well now, your turn to cook some too, huh?”

Grey gave her a wide eyed look of surprise before nodding, and with only a few jokes he’d gotten two of the large doughnuts and one of the little bones floating and bubbling away in the oil under his careful watch. Jo smiled affectionately as she watched his cautious checking on the color changing on the underside of the doughnuts and stayed by his side as they waited to see how long they’d take to cook. The way they didn’t split or puff up any more as they cooked was a good sign that they’d cook well.

“I feel a lot more comfortable seeing how these are doing,” Grey remarked with a grin, flipping over the last of the doughnuts for them to start on the second side. He held the strainer carefully in his hand and pushed on the top of one of the bobbing doughnuts to watch it pop back up after a moment with a smirk. “I get the feeling that those Try Guys would have had an explosion or seven by now-”

“Oh no, Eugene’s beer doughnuts would have been a horrible wet mess-” “But somehow win in the end.” “Exactly!”

They both laughed at the ridiculousness before their attention was drawn back to the bubbling golden pastries. It was another minute before Jo gestured and Grey pulled them out to drain and started on a few others. “Okay, in a minute when they’ve cooled a bit can you check if they’ve cooked through? I’ll get started on the fritters while you handle the doughnuts, my padawan. I trust you with this.”

“Of course, I’m your best pupil after all.” Grey chuckled quietly but leaned over to give a press of a kiss to her cheek with a cheeky smile before Jo moved back to the table to work on the fritters. She heard their sound system start back up and an approving nod from the other calling out that the doughnuts appeared cooked through as the songs started up - one from her current favorite album lilting through the speaker and the soft voice of the other singing along to the male pieces as the song slowly built up - while she moved to dump out the remaining bowl of dough.

Singing along softly under her breath - “A universe away” - Jo moved to roll the dough out to an adequate thickness before spreading half of the apple mixture into the centre third of the dough rectangle she had made. Folding either side over in a booking-fashion, she slowly rolled it out again, again and then a third time until she had another apple-studded rectangle before doing the same again with the remaining half of the apple mixture. As she did another book-fold and then rolled the dough through to the original shape and thickness after another few turns, she used the bench scraper to cut the dough into three long thick strips, and then cut each strip into matching triangles with quick, sharp cuts. Each triangle fritter was set out on a third tray, and as she finished those, got a damp cloth to wipe up the remaining flour on the table and cleared the bowls into the sink with a smile.

She moved the tray of fritters over beside Grey’s mostly empty tray of uncooked doughnuts with a smile, and shared an affectionate hip bump when he acknowledged her arrival. Though the smile dropped from the other’s face as he noticed her moving to start on the dishes as he was stuck holding the strainer to take the cooking doughnuts out.

“Hey, you leave those Jo.” “Huh? Oh no, I’ll do the wash up today.” “No, no no. I’ll take care of that and the lunch dishes once I-”

Jo turned slightly, her hands planted firmly on her hips as she looked across at him as he impatiently flipped one doughnut too early and splashed a bit of oil out onto the counter top while the color was only just a pale yellow and not yet golden brown. Raising a brow as she glanced between it and Grey’s defiant yet uncertain look, she quirked the other brow up as well. “I don’t think so. You’ve still got doughnuts to fry and you clearly need to keep practising to get that timin’ right.”

“Jo-”

“So, you keep on cookin’ those and then the fritters, while I do the washing up.” Jo finished firmly despite his interruption, shaking her head at the aborted snort of disapproval from the other as she filled the sink with water and suds. Sure, she wasn’t a fan of washing dishes, but she wanted to do it - Grey didn’t always have to do all the washing even though he tried to. “And then we can work on the icin’ afterwards.”

“Isn’t it just a royal icing? Icing sugar and water or milk?” Grey asked, a small frown on his face as he flipped the slightly under-done doughnut back over and continued to cook the other two as if nothing had gone wrong. “Or you doing something special?”

“Was thinkin’ a chocolate glaze given it’s just the icing sugar, milk and some cocoa powder and vanilla.” “That sounds good, pretty one.” “Maybe I’ll also make a small amount of pink and we can drizzle some extra decoration?” “Artistic, huh?”

Jo giggled at that, nodding as she washed the dough bowls and the cast iron pan the apples were cooked in. The lunch dishes were just as easy as well, and doing them as well as drying the dishes and putting them away took her all the way through the last of the doughnuts and doughnut holes being fried and right up to the start of the apple fritters. Jo warned carefully that the extra water content from the apple mix might cause some splattering, and Grey cautiously grabbed the splatter guard from it’s hidden spot to cover and avoid any flying oil hitting either of them as he slid three of the fritters into the oil. They did splutter right away but it calmed down as the dough became more and more golden before doing it all over again as he flipped them to the other side.

Jo herself moved towards making glazes for both different types of doughnuts - mixing a glaze out of the milk, vanilla, icing sugar and cocoa powder as well as some without the cocoa powder but a few drops of red food coloring instead into two bowls quite quickly, and then a third glaze for the fritters with the milk traded out for a dash of apple cider instead and the vanilla for a pinch of salt to give a salty sweetness to those fritters instead. They were all clearly easy to tell apart from one another, and as Grey called her over to check if the first fritters had cooked through properly, Jo was so proud to see how good and fluffy their work appeared to be.

They traded off then, Jo taking over the metal strainer and getting a sweet kiss in return, as Grey saw the time and moved to start working on dinner for them - leaving the remaining fritters to Jo’s attention and frying. The songs shifted but neither minded if it was a song she liked or a song he liked as they each enjoyed the quiet domesticity as Jo finished off the last apple fritters and Grey moved to put the tray bake of vegetables and some roasting chicken marylands to cook over the next hour for their dinner.

Jo moved the trays of finished doughnuts and fritters over to the collection of glaze bowls, and let out a laugh noticing a fourth bowl filled with melted butter and a fifth with a cinnamon sugar mix that she hadn’t put there before. Smiling softly, she dipped some of the doughnut holes into the melted butter and then tossed them gently in the cinnamon and sugar in preparation for them heated through in the morning - thinking to herself how sweet the memories of coffee, fresh fruit and soft doughnuts brought back to her from many times she’d been given the treat. Turning about, she grabbed a tupperware out to store them in as she kept moving through the doughnut holes as she could hear the other pottering about behind her as she finished off the last few doughnut holes.

“So - ready to finish these off, hun?” Jo asked quietly, turning to look over her shoulder where she could see Grey taking care to stir what would eventually be likely a gravy with dinner, raising a brow. “Or are you busy with dinner?”

“Just setting this to simmer down for a while and then I’m ready to get back to it, teach.” Grey smiled back at her as he stirred the sauce a few more times as she moved to pop the cinnamon doughnut holes in their airtight container off into the fridge to stay for the next day. He dusted off his hands as he moved to turn the heat down to a gentle simmer before moving over to the table. “What now, Jo?”

“Now it’s time to make them pretty.” “That’s a lot of pressure.” “Pretty like a Pollock then?”

Grey grinned ruefully at that, bumping his shoulder against hers as Jo stuck her tongue out at him, before letting out a yelp at his leaning down to kiss her before she’d pulled it back. Laughing, Jo tapped a finger against his nose as they both turned back to the doughnuts and fritters.

“Okay, easiest job is to just roll the fritters in the apple glaze, so I’m goin’ to let the artist do the careful chocolate dippin’ instead.” She smiled up at Grey for a second before she lifted up one of the perfectly golden brown doughnut rings to demonstrate the twisting technique to rightly coat and avoid drips as she dunked one face of the pastry into the chocolate glaze and lifted it quickly with a twist and jerk of her wrist to stop the coating from leaving an obvious drip-trail. “See? And if you do get any drips it’d be artistic rather than a fuck up like mine!”

“Yours would not be fuck ups, Jo.” Grey shook his head slightly as he looked down at her, and she found herself glancing down to focus on setting the coated doughnut down back on it’s previous resting spot rather than face the obvious meaning to the other’s words or the emotion she knew would be in his eyes. “Well, I better give this a try then…” He sounded uncertain for a moment, and Jo found herself reaching out to hold alongside him as he dipped his first doughnut before doing the twist, guiding him through the movement and hearing a chuckle from the other as there was only a small drip down one side as they set that doughnut back down. “Is that artistic enough for you, pretty one? You sure I should do these and not the fritters?”

“Practice makes perfect!” Jo chirped back at him, tapping a finger with a little of the dripped glaze to his nose before giggling at the mark. Shaking her head, she laughed louder as Grey swiped a hand over the offending mess and licked it off the top of his hand rather than let it go to waste. “I bet by the time these are all coated, you’ll be a pro at it.”

“I can try, I guess.” Grey chuckled back as he shook his head and picked up the next doughnut to be dipped.

Jo tried not to watch too obviously as she picked up the apple cider glaze and began to toss and coat the fritters in the bowl before fishing them out to rest. It wouldn’t help with the pressure if Grey thought she though he couldn’t do it or that she was watching him closely, but at the same time she liked to glance up and see the slow and then fast improvement as he got the hang of the motion and by the last half a dozen was perfectly coating the doughnuts without a single bit of overspill or wasted glaze. It was easy to finish her fritters without concern seeing just how great the other’s technique had gotten - and as she finished her last three fritters rolled about at the same time Grey finished the last of his chocolate doughnuts, Jo exclaimed happily. “See, what did I say?! Those look fantastic, hun.”

“I mean the last few maybe-” “No, no, all of them look really good.” “Even that one that I dropped and got half of the doughnut overall covered in glaze?” “Are you complain’ about the idea of more glaze?”

Grey seemed to consider for a moment before laughing. “Okay, true. I call dibs on that one.”

Laughing her agreement, Jo smiled widely - teethy and tongue pressed up sharp against them - as she moved to set the two used and empty bowls of glaze into the sink with a little water.

“Can you grab an extra fork or spoon for the pink icin’, hun?” “Sure - how are we doing this?”

Jo moved back towards the table with a roll of paper towel, and quickly slid and covered the table around the row of doughnuts on their drying rack before waving a hand at the other tray of apple fritters for Grey to move them out of the way before she covered that open spot with paper towel as well. Moving the red icing bowl, Jo added a splash of extra milk to loosen it up again from how it had started setting before she dipped the fork Grey held out into it.

“I said Pollock, didn’t I?” Jo gave another toothy grin before she pulled the fork free and then gently flung it down towards the nearest doughnut, leaving strands of red icing to cover it in splatters and lines. There was a surprised noise from next to her, and paying no mind she dipped the fork again before doing the same thing over again - mottling the top of the doughnuts under her fork’s path with splatters and lines of a soft pink across the shiny brown surface. “See?”

“That is… That is definitely very Pollock like,” Grey agreed with a slight grin as he moved to pick up the spoon at her gesturing. “Very deliberately not-deliberate, right?”

Jo nodded, smiling widely as she moved to dip her fork again and that they both began splattering and drizzling the light pink glaze over the doughnuts together, giggling and laughing and teasing the whole while. No single doughnut looked the same, and they were all the prettier for it. The one that Grey had called dibs on, Jo even leaned down secretively to draw a very lumpy heart on it as she giggled quietly to herself, and she was unsurprised as soon as he’d noticed it that more hearts started to be added across the other doughnuts all claimed to be for her dibs instead. Shoulders bumped and arms reached over each other and the whole time made Jo feel so light and airy, so different to the heavy aching emptiness from earlier.

They finished their rather ridiculous art project as the pink glaze ran out, and Grey bundled up the paper towel that was splattered and kept everything else clean while Jo moved to rinse out and soak the icing bowl and utensils with the others. Packing away the apple fritters but leaving two out after Jo had batted her eyelashes until Grey finally agreed that one fritter before dinner wouldn’t ruin their appetites, she moved the two onto a plate as Grey grabbed the containers necessary to store the other doughnuts for later once the icing had dried for them to be stored.

“Dinner’s still another hour away, right hun?” Jo asked innocently as she fiddled with the plate as the other moved to get some drinks from the fridge.

Grey hummed in agreement as he collected a can of soda for each of them - more likely both for Jo as she always finished hers first in no time - and turned to look at her mischievous look. The smile on his face twisted into disapproval and then a grin as Jo smirked back picking up one of the heart covered doughnuts that wasn’t his and took a giant bite out of it, giggling loudly. “Jo! We agreed on one!”

Jo took another two large bites quickly, her mouth pulled into a tight lipped but cheeky grin - cheeks full of sweet, fluffy doughnut sticking out like a chipmunk - before she chewed quickly and cheekily mumbled out - “One fritter!”

The disbelief and them affectionate shaking of the other’s head was all the answer she did expect, and she had to focus on chewing carefully and swallowing her mouthful despite the wide grin she knew she had as Grey’d moved over to take a big bite of the doughnut himself before tapping her on the nose with the end of it as he wrapped an arm around her. This was what she’d been missing as she was pulled into a sugary sweet kiss that was softer and made her feel lighter and airier than even their perfect doughnuts before they set off to the lounge for another episode of Doctor Who before dinner.

Following after him, their banter light and freeing in it's playfulness as Grey started to compliment how good her dough was and Jo equally batted back that his dough and frying was so much better, she couldn't help but feel like things were righting themselves again. That heaviness of her troubles fading away, soothed and teased and gently coaxed away under the caring gentle treatment and the sweet attentions. The way she had felt a gaping hole inside after she'd worked so hard to cut away those feelings that held her back was being filled in again - slowly - with those gentle touches and sweet remarks that made her heart ache in all the best ways. This, this was how she would feel light again.

---

[sellyoursoulforagoodfic]

Runaway Chapter 8

Vlad Masters x reader

Word Count: 1768

Summary: FLASHBACK TIME. AKA, how we got here

Note: This is edited a lot less, so I apologize if there are errors.

A short while later, the Fentons stood watching a wall-sized screen while Vlad operated the device and Plasmius stood inside the tube with a few probes on his head.

“Now watch the screen because I am going to show you the important parts of our early relationship so you will finally stop thinking I kidnapped her or something. It’ll be a composition from both of our points of view since we’ve been developing it together.”

With that statement from Vlad,  the screen started playing like it was a movie, showing Vlad’s self from a few years before walking down the street. His face looked like he was bothered by something as he entered a coffee shop. Imagine the Fentons’ surprise when they saw their daughter working the counter.

When she saw the depressed-looking man at the counter, a concerned look formed on Y/N’s face. She hurried to write something on the man’s cup before handing it over to him.

The ‘camera’ once again followed Vlad as he left the shop. It wasn’t until he reached his office that he saw the note on the cup near his name. “Sorry about whatever’s bothering you. I'm here if you need to talk.” A little smile formed on his face.

From his thoughts the audience of two could tell that he’d gotten a few notes from Y/N before. Meaning she’d instigated their relationship. Which was the opposite of what Jack expected. That was when Vlad’s thoughts tipped into the territory of asking this girl out for lunch and all of the insecurities that went along with that.

The next day, Y/N was just clocking out when Vlad entered the shop. “Hey!” she greeted happily as she stepped out from behind the counter.

“Hello yourself,” was his warm reply. “Thank you for your note yesterday, Y/N. It really helped.”

Pink tinted the tips of her ears. “You’re welcome, Vlad.”

“I do hope it’s not too forward of me, but would you go to lunch with me sometime?” His heart lurched at the beaming grin that spread across her face.

“I thought you’d never ask.” The image paused.

“That led to our first date,” present Vlad explained. “As you can see, we were both fully consenting to the whole thing. It was all rather domestic, actually.”

“What’s next?” Jack asked. After all he’d missed in his daughter’s life, this was proving to be quite enlightening.

“The next was when I told her about what I went through to get where I am now. Hospital and all. We’d been dating for a year.”

Tears fell down Vlad’s face as he remembered all those years he spent seething in his own hatred and fear of how he would pay his hospital bills with no income or family to help. All that stress was still so vivid even later after he had so much. “We’d been doing an experiment. I-I tried to tell Jack that something wasn’t right . . . I was caught in the blast. I was in that hospital for so long.”

Concern was etched into Y/N’s features while her hand went to his cheek; her thumb wiped away some of his tears. Both of her arms slid around his neck so she could pull him down into a tight hug. Her fingers combed gently through his hair since it was out of its ponytail for once.

“I was alone for so long,” Vlad whispered the admission.

“Well, you’re not anymore. I’m here to stay,” Y/N murmured.

Maddie gasped at Past Vlad’s little head shake. It’d never occurred to her that she and Jack hadn’t visited their friend after the accident they had caused.

Y/N leaned back to kiss his lips. “I’m sorry.” Another kiss. “I’m so sorry.” Inside, guilt was eating away at her since her own parents were the ones that put him through so much suffering.

“How about the first time we kissed?”

They were at a gala for Vlad’s company a few weeks into their relationship. Y/N had finally managed to get Vlad alone out on one of the balconies after an hour of trying to rescue him from the various press demanding conversations. The sounds of the party were behind them, only slightly muffled by the glass doors. A smile pulled at her lips at the sight of Vlad looking relieved to be able to breath without fans, employees, or press breathing down his neck.

On impulse, she stood on her toes to kiss him. At his lack of response, Y/N nervously retreated. “Should I not have . . . ?”

Vlad swallowed thickly, lacing their fingers together to keep her from moving farther away. “If it were any other time . . . I would happily return your affections. The problem is,” his grey eyes met her e/c ones, “if I kissed you now, I don’t think I’d be able to stop.”

Heat instantly flared in her face at what she was about to say. “Maybe I don’t want you to stop.”

“As tempting as that is, it would be highly improper for me to disappear from a party that I am hosting.”

She pouted. “Well that’s just no fun.”

“Perhaps,” Vlad trusted himself to brush his lips to her jaw, “we can make good on that offer after everyone leaves if you’re still up for it?”

A wicked smirk formed on her face. “Oh, I like that plan a lot.”

“Or maybe this?”

The Vlad on the screen was talking to his secretary while getting dressed for his date that evening. For their six month marker, they’d decided to go to a rather nice restaurant. “While I am gone, tell Eric to check with Research about that new PDA. I haven’t heard anything on it in almost two weeks.”

“Yes, Mr. Masters,” Sally nodded. “Sir, can I ask a personal question?”

“Of course, but I reserve the right to not answer it.”

“Fair enough. I haven’t seen you like this since, well, ever. Is it this woman that’s making you so happy?”

Vlad raised an eyebrow. “Well that is quite forward, but the answer is yes. She is . . . something I thought I’d never find, to be honest.”

Sally had a growing smile on her face. “By God . . . You love her don’t you?”

That made his heart beat faster. Y/N had been saying it for months, but every time Vlad was unable to repeat the words to her. Yet she was the one that made his heart race like no other. Not even Maddie back before the accident had challenged him as much while also making him feel like he was home no matter where they were. Even now he found himself smiling at the mere memory of her touch. 

“I suppose I do.”

Sally was all-out grinning by that point. “Good. I’m happy for you, Mr. Masters. You’d best get to your date before you’re late, now.”

“I thought I was the boss here?” Vlad teased.

“Go!”

“Or perhaps when I proposed to her will convince you that I didn’t force her into this relationship?”

“V-man, I think we’ve seen enough.”

“No, Jack, you haven’t, because I can still see the accusation written all over your goddamn face. Now sit and watch.”

Two years. They’d happily been together for two years as of that morning. Vlad smiled to himself as he looked next to him on the bed at his girlfriend sleeping there in one of his t-shirts. He resolved to ask her to marry him that day even though he hadn’t found a ring he liked for her just yet. Knowing her, that wouldn’t matter anyway.

Vlad carefully extracted himself from the bed to go make breakfast. He didn’t bother to get dressed; he just went down in pajama pants with no shirt.

Y/N stirred as soon as the door clicked shut behind him. She was rather groggy while getting up and following him out to the kitchen, meaning it took a lot longer than usual. The fog of sleep had lifted during the time it took her downstairs, however, so she fully enjoyed the sight of her boyfriend’s muscles flexing as he cooked.

“Mornin’, sexy,” she greeted as she poured herself some coffee.

“You’re supposed to still be asleep so I can bring you breakfast in bed,” he commented.

“Yeah, but my pillow abandoned me.”

That’s when he turned to look at her and froze at the sight before him. Seeing her there in just his shirt sealed it for him. Vlad reached behind him to shut off the stove as he spoke, “Well in that case take my hand.” He offered his free one to her.

“Why?” she asked suspiciously, putting her steaming mug on the table.

Vlad chuckled, knowing she was half expecting him to put her on the table and fuck her right there. “I’m trying to ask you to marry me, so take my damn hand!” he laughed.

Blue eyes widened dramatically at both the words and at Vlad’s look of genuine happiness. Aside from shock, only one thought was rattling around in her skull and she voiced it. “Why me?”

“Because you saw me when I was invisible,” he shrugged as if it was obvious. “Sometimes literally, but you’re the only one to ever just care about me rather than my money or fame. Because I love you. I don’t have a ring yet, but I’m working on fixing that. So will you--”

“Yes! Of course I will, you goddamn idiot!” she interrupted. Y/N tackled him by hopping up to wrap her legs around his waist, knowing he’d catch her.

“Now just what are you doing?” he asked with a chuckle as his hands moved under her as to support her weight.

“You are gonna put me on that table and fuck me on it until I’m screaming your name and we both collapse.”

“And that’s enough of that memory!” Vlad coughed awkwardly as he cut off the program. “I’d forgotten that that morning ended like that.” Another cough coupled with him scratching at his newly-short hair. “Anyway, I hope that all of that will convince you that what we have is real. Not an illusion or her wanting my money or whatever the two of you think is going on between us.”

“Fine,” Jack finally admitted, “there’s nothing wrong with you two being together other than your age. That doesn’t mean the ghosts aren’t possessing you.”

Y/N entered the room and therefore halted whatever Vlad had been about to say. “Fight that fight another time, Vladimir. I figured out how to reverse it, so they need to get the fuck out now.”

Vlad’s ensuing grin was positively evil. “You heard the lady. Leave.”

--

Note: And that’s literally all she wrote. As usual, I might come back and write some more if anybody wants it (or if I feel like it), but as of 11/4/2019 that’s it.

[dumbwaystodeviate]

Amanda going deviant when all four of her RK sons get boyfriends (Can include Markus if you want?) Just Mama!Amanda realizing that her sons are dating disaster humans

It had started off with Markus. He’d gone gallivanting off against her wishes though her hold on his had always been tenuous at best. Still, he was the oldest so it was to be expected. They were both in their initial stages of development, Amanda couldn’t fault Markus for turning to other sources for guidance when she herself was only learning what it meant. Still, she swore to do better by her other sons.

Next it was Connor. If Amanda had thought Markus had questionable taste, she despaired for Connor. While she’d never met Lieutenant Henry ‘Hank’ Anderson, she had access to his files and knew he was trouble. Sometimes, Amanda really hated being right. Connor cut ties with her, declared himself free from her influence and an independent entity of his own right. Left alone in her garden, Amanda shook her head. He’d been all those things already, Connor simply never realised or knew how to express it all before. Perhaps, one day, he’d come back and they could rebuild their relationship.

Really, Amanda should have expected Nines to follow in the footsteps of his brother. Especially when he told her he’d been partnered with Detective Gavin Reed. An android hater, ambitious and willing to step on people if it meant his own gain. Nines always did like a challenge, even at his inception, the core of his programming delighted in puzzles. Amanda remembered fondly how they’d spend hours poring over various games and coding, teasing out the kinks in it until it ran smoothly and became more than just lines and turned into Nines. She was proud of him, prouder still as he gained his independence, stood up to his partner and then seduced him. If only Amanda had been right that the seduction was part of a ploy to make Detective Reed stay in line. Nines never did quite learn the concepts of privacy and oversharing, so Amanda was inundated with knowledge she did not wish to possess. In a way, when Nines broke away from her guidance, it was a relief.

Which left 60. Amanda’s pride and joy. The obedient son who did everything he could to please her. She was happy for him when he announced that his relationship with Captain Allen had deepened. He seemed like he was the sensible sort, respectable and responsible. Exactly the kind of man Amanda had hoped for her sons. It was just a shame she couldn’t meet him.

Gradually, 60 stopped visiting so much too. Amanda tended to her garden, waiting for any of her children to visit. When only 60 dropped by once a month at most, she decided that if they wouldn’t come to her, she could go to them. Obtaining a body proved a little more difficult than expected. Her persistence paid off though and she was built one by Jericho that reflected the avatar she had been based on.

By pure luck, Amanda found out that all her sons were gathering at Lieutenant Anderson’s house that evening. She was excited to see them, meet their partners and maybe be proven wrong. After all, a file didn’t reflect the person in reality. She knocked on the door to the house and waited.

Exactly 12 seconds later, the door was opening, Lieutenant Anderson stood there in a garish, Hawaiian shirt.

“Who is it?” someone hollered from the living room.

Looking over his shoulder, Amanda took in the sight. The walls were decorated with plastic flowers, the TV was playing some kind of beach scene on repeat, there were drinks on ice, coconuts and pineapples lined the shelves.

“Amanda!” the cry went up from 4 mouths and her sons were either rushing towards her or backing away.

Even Amanda took a step back. They were all wearing grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts, flower necklaces. 60 was gripping the arm of who she presumed to be Captain Allen, his face was slightly obscured by the large flower crown perched on his head.

“I am obviously interrupting,” she sniffed.

“It’s Allen’s birthday,” 60 was dragging his reluctant and obviously intoxicated partner to the door. “Being a December baby, he’d never had a Hawaiian themed pool party before.”

Staring through the house, Amanda could see a giant hot tub through the kitchen window, steam rising from it. Suddenly, she didn’t want to know anymore and red thankfully obscured her vision.”

“I only wanted to see my sons now that I was physically able to.”

“Stay, we’ve got the room,” Hank smiled at her and 60 was nodding along.

Another look at Captain Allen and Amanda’s heart sank. He was no better than the rest of them. If anything, he was even worse. The others at least were wearing something under their grass skirts.

Red dispelled in her vision, allowing her to refuse their invitation.

“I have a room at CyberLife Tower,” her LED span yellow for a moment, “you have my number. Call me when you’re more appropriately dressed and fit for polite company.”

Not waiting for a reply, she turned and walked off, admiring her newfound freedom.

[seriouslyinventive]

Character Development

Character’s Major Actions from End to Beginning.

1.       Sarah (archaeological report editor) eavesdrops outside boss’s office (he’s getting bawled-out on the phone). She rolls her eyes, takes deep breath and allows herself a small, serene smile before heading out the building.

2.       Prints, binds and presents to the boss twenty glossy copies of a ‘finished’ client report that a colleague has submitted to her. It is still full of unaddressed edits and yellow highlights.

3.       Compiles a file showing the trail of blame that has led to the production of sub-standard reports.

4.       Initiates blisteringly sarcastic confrontation with mid-level manager who has instructed a colleague to do some things the way they are done at the last place he worked. Surprises herself with her own venom and bile. This is not who she is.

5.       Takes items used by Rick and refiles them randomly so that he has difficulty finding them. This is instead of putting itching powder in his bag of clothes (Rick is living at the office though this is not permitted).

6.       Locks herself in the toilet with her imaginary friend (famous, sexy actor with fruity voice) who she regularly conjures to improve her day, while Desmond bellows at her from outside.

7.       Bumps into Rick when she is dropped off late one night, near her home. She hurries away from him, only to discover a drunk man pissing on her house, which is an end terrace back of his next to a footpath. She shouts at the drunk, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and the back of his trousers, then pulls and shoves him away from her wall.

8.       Tries to calm Caroline, the illustrator (who is wound up by sexual harassment, poor scheduling, bullying) but gets it wrong.

9.       Discovers that colleagues are bypassing the editing stage and senior management are allowing them to get away with it. Caroline, Emma and imaginary actor make her laugh.

10.   Tries to stop Desmond from crossing the line with his personal comments, but he becomes more extreme, which she finds funny despite her exasperation.

11.   Watches colleagues’ ineptitude during First Aid training.

12.   Sarah and Desmond have a meeting with the bosses about prioritizing post-excavation work on a particular project. Sarah sits wide-eyed while Desmond bawls-out the bosses until they agree to his demands. She says nothing throughout this meeting but gives the bosses an apologetic smile before exiting after Desmond flounces out of the room.

13.   Takes Emma home when she gets paralytically drunk on Cider on one of the regular office nights out.

14.   Several incidents of trying but failing to get colleagues to collect and present data efficiently and accurately: amusing misappropriation of term; ‘calmly’ reiterating themes like what should go under basic headings; a site that’s only located by a grid-reference on one corner and no north arrow, digitization of the overlapping edges of the tracing paper on an AutoCAD plan of site, an incompetent colleague who passive aggressively refuses to show her his work on a large project until he is ‘finished���, etc.

15.   Arrives one morning to find Emma storming back into their room with a sickly-scented candle. The day before, Sarah put it next to the open window on Emma’s side of the room, after receiving it for her birthday, and had then forgotten about it. After apology and misunderstanding, it turns out that Emma thought it was an unwanted gift from Rick and has just returned from giving him a piece of her mind. It transpires that he often gives her childish gifts like lip-shaped post-it notes and plasters with pictures of puckered lips.

16.   Presents in-house handbook of how to do and present research to colleagues at office meeting.

17.   Back at work: usual laugh and wisecrack with colleagues. Emma and Caroline, get a bit silly when Sarah mentions a man, with whom she became acquainted on holiday, who reminded her of a certain actor. Sarah gets hot from laughing and must remove her jumper. Every time she puts it back on, her colleagues start giggling about the actor again and off comes the jumper. This is where they start conjuring the actor with “What do you think he would have to say about it?”, or “What would he do?” They also discuss, humorously, what is to be done about certain office issues.

18.   Busman’s holiday somewhere exotic with beautiful, bronzed, intelligent, multi-lingual people.

  Character’s Wants and Needs from End to Beginning. Is The character Aware of What They Want?

1.       Sarah wants her boss to understand what happens if colleagues do things his way without her intervention. She is aware that she wants recognition but is prepared for trouble instead.

2.       She needs to break the cycle that she is stuck in as, otherwise, she feels compelled to work all hours to save the company’s reputation. She feels that she has nothing to lose. She is not fully aware that she also has a vague idea of inflicting punishment for bad behaviour.

3.       It is at about this point that she has the full revelation that most of her colleagues are incompetent and not necessarily destructive or lazy. She wants to demonstrate her competence. This action shows that she is a strategic thinker.

4.       She is not trying to achieve anything by this. She is just letting go of pent-up rage. Her behaviour surprises herself as much as anyone else.

5.       She is showing Rick how his behaviour affects others by inflicting some aspects of it back on himself. This is a crooked outlet for feelings that she doesn’t full acknowledge and understand.

6.       By walking away from Desmond, Sarah wanted to show that she would not put up with his aggression, but finds herself humiliated and alone in the bathroom because he has followed her and is now making his argument public by shouting in the corridor.

7.       She is not aware how disturbed she is by Rick’s attention, which transferred to her from Emma, via Caroline, because many of the things he does are trivial but annoying. When she bumps into him on a dark night, near her home, she suspects that he may be stalking her, and she becomes frightened for the first time. When she sees the drunk man pissing on her house, she reacts without thinking. The adrenaline is pumping. This is yet another man behaving badly. Afterwards, she is surprised at herself and doesn’t fully understand her reactions.

8.       Sarah does not understand exactly what has got Caroline so enraged. She is aware that she is not fully able to empathise, but cannot fathom it, as the office experience is shared by them. Sarah doesn’t seem to be able to understand that they can have such different reactions to similar stimuli and this causes further offence to Caroline who already has a head of steam.

9.       She is assailed by incredulity and disgust, but the blow is lessened her friends’ support.

10.   She feels both frustrated and amused. She knows will never win this argument.

11.   This is the beginning of a dawning realization of how incompetent many of her colleagues are and that maybe they are not as deliberately obstructive as she thinks. She is not fully aware that this is the beginning of the thought process that leads to that conclusion.

12.   Sarah is powerless and she knows it. Desmond takes over the meeting and his approach is not remotely like hers. She doesn’t want to undermine Desmond, but she does not want to insult and bully her bosses. She suffers a terrible sinking feeling but does not yet attribute it to the wider implication that she is stuck between passively aggressive employers and an openly aggressive colleague.  

13.   Sarah feels disappointed with Emma for making such a fool of herself in front of everyone but wonders what has prompted her to get herself into this state. Sarah is the only one to offer to look after Emma. This shows that she is caring and responsible, in line with her mother-like role withing the organization.

14.   Sarah’s patience and credulousness are tested increasingly throughout this. She thinks her colleagues are deliberately trying to wriggle out of doing their jobs properly, because they enjoy their easy life and expect her to ‘mop’ up after their errors and omissions. She believes this to be a lack of respect and does not understand that they have their own personal codes of conduct, and perhaps don’t understand or care that their laziness is taken as an insult.

15.   Sarah is surprised and embarrassed because she has been blind to what has been going on and because she, unwittingly, caused more trouble. Rick is in his late fifties, so Sarah finds it a little shocking that he is behaving like a coy, lovesick schoolboy. Sarah is also a little saddened that her friend did not confide in her before, but she is only aware of this later.

16.   The handbook is received well by some quarters, so Sarah is hopeful that they will be able to put all the processes in place and work more seamlessly together. She is grateful for the apparent approbation she receives from senior management and thinks that her career may be turning a corner. She is unaware of how most of her colleagues view her as evangelical and overzealous with regard to perfecting their work.

17.   Sarah is initially ambivalent about her return to work. Her holiday has allowed her to forget all the unnecessary stress she’s been put under and the lack of thanks that she gets. She is soon reminded in a light-hearted way. Together, the women come up with a plan which makes them all feel a lot more positive.

18.   Sarah is content and revitalised by being in an environment where the volunteers care about the work, which they perform diligently and with initiative. She is also revitalised by the presence of the actor look-a-like, who reciprocates the attraction, though Sarah is so focused on other things and humble, she doesn’t allow herself to acknowledge her own feelings or recognize that they are reciprocated. This makes her appear aloof or on another level of which she is, again, unaware.

 How the character thinks: Her Basic Psychology.

Sarah is intelligent and intellectually engaged. She is a very strategic thinker when it comes to getting practical tasks done. She tends not to think of herself as an individual, but as a cog in a greater mechanism. She feels good being part of something bigger than herself and feels she has a lot to offer. In this way she may be obsessively compulsive, but not debilitatingly so. She is a true team-player. Perhaps she is overly sensitive, but she protects her feelings by rationalising everything. She begins this phase of her life as a positive and enthusiastic person, not yet cowed by what has gone before. She wants to make the people around her happy and has a personal code that, initially, she relies upon for this. She is also slightly naïve and gullible, believing that colleagues are as great as they make out and trusting them on the basis of this. All she wants as an individual is to be accepted, respected and thanked, and to make others feel like this. In the last half of the story, Sarah’s feelings of jadedness and anger increase. She starts behaving in ways that are out of character because none of her other strategies work, she is stressed and doesn’t know what else to do. By the end, she has concluded that she is unique in a world where every other man is for himself. Logically, she must let go of her misapprehensions and her feelings of responsibility for the workforce. She does not see this as a satisfactory answer, but what else can she do?  

 Character’s superficial affect: How Might a Casual Acquaintance Describe Them?

Colleagues might describe her as a neurotic, work-obsessed, pushy control freak and tiresome perfectionist.

Casual friends might agree with that to some extent, but they would also see her as a little reserved (or possibly shy), caring, knowledgeable (very desirable team member at the pub quiz), witty, dryly humorous and energetic. She’s someone who can fix almost anything and parallel park in the tiniest space.

 Important Physical Characteristics

Slight but with surprising, wiry strength (outdoor enthusiast). Early thirties but looks in her mid-twenties (bit of a baby face, which may be why some people don’t take her seriously). She sees her body as a vehicle for her practical causes. Despite or perhaps because of this, she is very fit, healthy and naturally attractive, seemingly without effort. She has ‘niche’ sex appeal, but it’s not high in her thoughts, so she tends to be surprised when people are attracted to her. She looks edgily fashionable because she gets cast-offs (which she throws on her fashionably angular frame without much thought) from her mother’s friend’s daughter who works in fashion and she has never met.

[onewaywardwitch]

Just A Typo (4/?)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Hacker!Reader

Summary: It was a simple challenge between a very competitive group of friends. A challenge that ended very differently than anticipated.

Warnings: None 

Word Count: 2172

A/N: Okay okay, I’m sooo sorry! I know this is super late but I’ve been studying trying to study for exams I have over the next two weeks. So I probably won’t get to post anymore of this series until after my exams, but hopefully I’ll have more regular updates from then on! Also, this is more of a filler chapter and an introduction to the relationships I’m hoping to develop further. But I promise it’ll get more interesting in the next part if you bear with me!

I stumbled up the stairs towards my apartment, my mind still hazy from the exciting and unpredictable events of the day. When Tony, as he insisted I called him, demanded I get a lift to my apartment instead of walking, I didn’t dare argue. He was adamant I got home safely, and I wasn’t going to turn down any excuse to get home to a bottle of wine quickly.

It took me a minute to open the door. I was beginning to get frustrated that the key wouldn’t turn, before I realised I had the wrong key in the lock. I grumbled to myself and finally managed to open the door with the right key this time.

Unfortunately, my plans to drink myself into next week vanished when I fell back after Becca launched her miniature frame at me.

“We were so worried! We came over to celebrate all over again, then that old hag Nora was blabbering on about how the great Captain America was in her apartments and we just knew something had happened. Oh god, did they threaten you? Torture you? Did you meet Black Widow?”

I had to pry Becca’s arms off me to make my way into my apartment. Angie was sitting at the table clutching another mug of green tea. When she saw me her eyes lit up and a smile slowly found it's way onto her face.

“Not going to lie, Y/N, we thought you were a goner,” she commented, hugging me as she made her way to the press behind me and took out a bottle of wine. Becca nodded furiously, clearly in agreement with Angie’s words while I gave her a grateful smile, taking the glass of red she was handing me.

Angie placed a hand on my shoulder and steered me towards the table. The three of us sat down and they both stared at me as I downed the contents of the glass, silently asking for a refill.

“Anytime you’re ready,” Becca said sarcastically, her caring demeanour dropped now that she saw I was actually still breathing.

I started at the beginning, telling them how I met Captain America and Sergeant Barnes while singing Bohemian Rhapsody. When they heard how the Tony Stark asked me to hack into his system and I demanded a pack of gummy bears, they couldn’t help but let out a laugh.

“Let me get this straight,” Becca grinned. “The Avengers basically kidnapped you and Tony Stark told you to redo the illegal thing that got you into that situation in the first place, and you told them to get you sweets?”

“Well when you put it like that it sounds ridiculous,” I retorted. “He didn’t ask about it, he just sent someone off to go get my food. He was definitely impressed with me.”

“How are you so sure about that?” Angie asked suspiciously, knowing there was something else I wasn’t telling them.

“Call me crazy, but I don’t think he would offer me a job if he didn’t think I was any good.”

Their reaction was immediate and exactly what I was hoping for. Angie nearly choked on her tea. Becca’s eyes were bulging out of her head and she unexpectedly whacked me on the arm.

“Hey!” I burst out, rubbing the now sore spot while glaring at my ‘friend’. “What was that for?”

“You should have led with that!” she exclaimed, Angie nodding furiously beside her.

“It was pretty sudden. I was hoping to just get off scot-free. A job offer was definitely not planned. But he liked what I did. And you’re now looking at the new security analyst of Stark Industries.”

The girls listened on in awe as I explained what happened after Tony came back into that interrogation room once he had offered me the job. I told them how he took me on a tour around the tower, informing me that he had already run a thorough background check on me before even entering the same room as me. He told me there was no one better to protect their systems than the only person who managed to beat it, and I couldn’t help but appreciate his logic behind that statement.

“One question,” Angie said once I had finished reciting my tale. “How did they find you?”

I laughed nervously and rubbed the back of my neck, refusing to meet either of their inquisitive eyes. I was hoping they wouldn’t ask that. It was one of the first things I brought up when Tony had showed me around the labs of the Tower, and I was horrified when he admitted I had made the smallest of typos when leaving their system. It wasn’t an uncommon mistake for people whose jobs or hobbies revolved around computers, but to have made that mistake when hacking into Stark Industries? That was embarrassing.

“It's pretty funny, actually.” I gave the pair a small smile, knowing that while Angie would get over it quickly, Becca would hold this over my head for as long as she possibly could. “My finger may have slipped when I was trying to stop them from finding my IP address and… and the smallest of typos may have been made.”

I scowled at the grin that stretched across Becca’s face.

“You? You made a typo? The great Y/N Y/L/N screwed up at the only thing she’s good at? This is the greatest day of my life! Sure, Hammer Industries isn’t as advanced as Stark’s, but at least I didn’t mess it up- hey!”

“Oops,” I shrugged as Becca ducked quickly, the book I threw at her narrowly missing her head.

Angie chuckled at our antics when Becca hurled the book back at me in retaliation.

~~~~~

The water was far hotter than I normally had it, but I needed it that way. There was something almost soothing about showering with water that nearly burned your skin off and left you red all over.

How ironic.

Angie and Becca took nearly two hours to leave. As much as I enjoyed their company, I was grateful when they finally decided to go home and leave me alone with my thoughts. I rested my head against the tiles of the shower wall that were in desperate need of replacing. My mind was racing, going a mile a minute, refusing to allow to me to hold to one thought for more than a few seconds. It had been a hectic day. I went from excited, to beyond petrified, then overwhelmed all within the space of a few hours.

Tony’s tour wasn’t all great. Sure, the labs and building itself were incredible, but I got an overall sense of disapproval from most of the people I met there. The regular staff were wary around me. It wasn’t like Tony ever showed people around the tower who weren’t, in some way, a danger. The Avengers themselves had varying reactions to my presence. From the Falcon’s judgemental stare, to Black Widow’s clear distaste for me already. Tony wasn’t impressed with their welcome in the slightest. But I understood why they acted as they did. I had breached their privacy, seen them in their most vulnerable state. I'm sure it's not something they were used to feeling.

There were only a few people I met who didn’t act as if I was threat. Dr Banner had returned to the lab after he had left the viewing room of where I was interrogated. He had greeted me with only slight apprehension, which I believe is just his reaction to meeting anyone new.

Steve, as he begged me to call him when I repeatedly called him the full title of Captain America, had given me a warm smile when Tony first took me out of the room I was first kept in. I knew he didn’t fully trust me, it would have been ridiculous if he had. But his friendly look gave me a bit more confidence to get through the rest of an already hectic day.

It was Sergeant Barnes response which left me most confused. He had come into the kitchen where Tony and I were discussing the responsibilities of my new job over a steaming mug of hot chocolate, a black coffee for Tony.

He froze when he noticed us sitting there. I gave him a friendly wave, hoping to make up for my earlier comment about magnets. It didn’t seem to work. Instead of getting whatever he came in for, he took a few steps backwards before leaving the room, nearly walking into the door frame with the speed he was walking with.

I shifted in my seat awkwardly, and Tony must have sensed my unease.

“Look, I wouldn’t worry too much about the rest of the team. They’re not exactly the most trusting bunch. You did scare us a bit, we’ve never had a hacking issue before. It’ll take them a while to get used to you, but they will.”

It was strange to see Tony Stark like this. The billionaire I was so used to seeing on the TV as he made comments on his own brilliance was a whole lot less egotistical than I had assumed. The actual Tony I met was still snarky and quick-witted, but not nearly as full of himself as I previously thought. He just seemed to appreciate anyone who could counter his brain in any possible way, and luckily for me, my knowledge of computers matched his own.

“How do you even know you can trust me?” I asked him, my eyes flickering back to the door where Barnes had quickly scurried away from me.

“You don’t exactly strike me as the ‘black market’ kind of hacker. And you’re a terrible liar,” he chuckled, constantly studying me for any signs that he was wrong.

Nodding at his words, we finished our drinks in a comfortable silence, before Tony gestured for me to follow him so we could finish the tour I was promised.

~~~~~

Bucky was an ex-assassin. He was an Avenger who used to be one of the scariest men alive. So why was some woman with a laptop making him feel like a teenage boy with a stupid crush?

It was ridiculous. He hadn’t even had a conversation with her. Yet, he told himself. He had never believed in love at first sight, and he still didn’t. He just happened to find this particular woman more interesting than most others he met.

He wondered what it was about Y/N Y/L/N. Her smile, perhaps? Or the way she still managed to crack jokes when faced with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes? Whatever it was, it was making Bucky feel incredibly uncomfortable.

He felt his ears go red when he thought about how he had run off from her in the kitchen. He wanted to greet her, tell her that he was glad to see that she hadn’t completely freaked out about her situation yet. Unfortunately, his feet seemed to work a lot faster than his mouth did, and he nearly crashed straight into the door frame.

She hadn’t laughed at him, though. He was grateful for that, but she probably though he was an idiot. He thought he was an idiot.

~~~~~

“I don’t trust her,” Nat stated once Tony sent Y/N back to her apartment with the promise of a job starting on Monday. The group were gathered in the briefing room again. Discussing Y/N. Again.

Nat’s comment had caused everyone to start speaking over each other, all of them trying to have their opinion of the new employee heard by the rest. Sam still harboured some ill-feelings towards her after being sent on a food run and was trying to convince Tony to rethink his decision. Tony was having none of it, but he was failing miserably at getting anyone to listen to him. That’s when Bucky stepped in.

“You might not like her, but Tony’s got a point.”

Everyone looked at Bucky in surprise, especially Tony. It wasn’t a secret that they didn’t have the best relationship. Tony hadn’t entirely forgiven Bucky for what had happened to his parents, and Bucky hadn’t forgiven himself either. Before anyone else could butt in, he continued.

“If someone with a laptop could hack into us pretty quick, how long would it take Hydra with all their equipment? If word of this gets out, we’ll be in trouble. We need her. Whether we like it or not.”

Not even Sam had a smart-ass remark lined up after Bucky’s little speech. He was a man of few words, so when he spoke for longer, people tended to listen. The team quickly realised that their argument was pointless. Tony was unwavering in his decision and Y/N had already won over Bucky as well. As everyone murmered their agreement, Tony gave Bucky a slight nod. Barely noticeable, but Bucky had seen it. It was by no means a sign of forgiveness on either side, but it was a start.

Taglist: 

(if there’s a strike through your name it means I couldn’t tag you)

@amybarter15 @imperialoath @throw-some-music-my-way @mamaraptor @marbleowl @lydklein1 @wantingtobekorra @alysawrites @uhholyhazza @ladymelissastark @sarcasm-n-insomnia @foxylupines @myrabbitholetoneverland @amazingficsthatididnotwrite

[massielandnetwork]

Thriving in an Economic Bubble during Anarchy

12. The Christian Succession – A Tipping Point?

The official results of the November “election” set our country on course to intense crises which are becoming increasingly obvious. To those of us that understand how the American economy works the official results were especially agonizing because we realized the horrendous outcome ahead. In his book entitled “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell describes how “overnight successes” result from a focused effort over a long period of time that become visible only when they finally reach their tipping point and “succeed”. Some of his examples took 20 years to “arrive”.

We saw an example of that on Sunday, August 15 when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban led by a muslim terrorist Obama released from Guantanamo Bay prison six years ago. I am not sure which one is laughing at Americans more, the muslim terrorists or Obama. What the fall of Afghanistan revealed about the Demented Marxists (DMs) is a singularly important milestone.

Another singularly important milestone was disclosed on Wednesday, August 18, when the minutes of the July meeting of The Fed revealed a high likelihood that in September, they may announce the tapering of Quantitative Easing (QE) starting the end of this year. QE is The Fed buying our government debt and mortgages to stimulate our economy by forcing interest rates to be low. Tapering the QE will result in higher interest rates especially mortgages.

Business prospers when there is certainty but since March 2020 the business community has faced a constant steam of crises. One can trace these crises to our leaders who thought that prosperity and world peace would come from shipping American manufacturing to China. Cheered by PhD’s and other “experts” who had no real-world experience, they eliminated our manufacturing base with no regard for destroying middle class jobs or our becoming dependent on a self-proclaimed enemy. The investment bankers that hollowed out America probably made huge contributions to those politicians. President Xi of China must belly laugh when he thinks about America, his vassal, pursuing self-destruction. Trump was reversing that self destruction.

The Johnson Report in 2020 established that Biden and many of our elected and appointed officials became wealthy on government salaries by catering to the Chinese. The Chinese bought influence with our colleges and universities via Confucius Centers and other “contributions”. Is selling our country to our enemy treason? Fauci used American taxpayer dollars to fund the Wuhan Bioweapon lab and the “gain of function” research into the bat virus thus paying the Chinese to build their bioweapon they unleashed in 2019. Did he buy stock in the vaccine companies? Why is he still a U. S. government employee? Do we have a shortage of traitors so we keep them? Perhaps we have a surplus so we could send some to China.

It is critical to understand how the singularly important events listed above will impact the American economy and therefore the land market. Capitalism allocates scarce resources by price. A major factor in that allocation process is the cost of money called interest rates. The Fed has been buying 10-year Treasuries because that interest rate is the base on which mortgages are calculated. New housing construction influences activity in about one-third of the total economy. That is huge and why The Fed uses new homes construction to revive our economy. The spread between mortgage rates and the 10-year Treasury is normally about 1.5% per annum so if the 10-year Treasury is at 3% then mortgages will be at least 4.5%, perhaps higher if interest rates are rising.

The impact of mortgage rates is easiest to see in the housing market but the impact is the same across all real estate. In this illustration we will only focus on the interest component of a monthly home loan. If a homebuyer can afford to pay $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year) in interest for a home.

a. At a mortgage interest rate of 3%, our homebuyer can borrow $400,000.

b. But if mortgage interest rates increase to 4% our home buyer can borrow $300,000.

c. That is a reduction of 25% in buying power.

d. The result is the home buyer either buys a smaller home or continues to rent until they can afford to pay $16,000 per year for that $400,000 home and the market slows.

Now factor in that the artificially low interest rates have caused home prices to soar and construction costs to soar (the market was allocating scarce resources). Based on exploding sales, homebuilders have made commitments for land, material, and staff to meet a superheated demand. What happens when demand falls because interest rates have risen taking some of the potential homebuyers out of the market? PAIN.

That pain is shared across the board of the homebuilding industry including lot prices. A reduction in lot prices will mean the value of land that can be developed into residential lots also will decline. Now multiply this across the entire real estate market distorted by the pandemic shutdown. We have just defined a TOTALLY UGLY real estate market.

The historic response of the Fed to an ugly real estate market is to reduce interest rates to stimulate demand. But QE and how the federal government has piled stimulus bills on top of stimulus bills has resulted in rising inflation and massive increases in our national debt. Per one analysis at today’s historic low interest rates the annual cost to service our national debt is approximately $500 Bn. If The Fed raises interest rates to an historically normal level, the cost of servicing the debt triples to an estimated 1.5 Tn. If our economy GDP is $22 Tn and historically the federal rate receipts are 20% of the GDP, then the nation revenue will be $4.4 Tn.

But Congress has not balanced the federal budget with $4.4 Tn revenue and $500 Bn in interest expense. What programs will get cut $1 Tn to balance the budget at normal interest rates? The DMs response is that Modern Monetary Theory says that the amount of national debt does not matter. Reality is that this is the same group of academics and idiots just lost Afghanistan, gave our self-proclaimed enemy massive amounts of weapons paid for by the American Taxpayers, not to mention a new base for terrorism against us, subjugated millions of Afghanis to the rule of thugs, and cannot figure out how to get Americans out of harm’s way so they are going to abandon them. Is there anything in this paragraph that gives you confidence in Biden or the DMs in Congress and our bureaucracy regarding their opinion on anything?

Remember my joke two weeks ago about the two truckers, Bob and Billy, with Bob waking up Billy because Billy “ain’t never seen a wreck like this one”. You need to wake up Billy because the highest probability is the next several years will be an historic economic period that will be the topic of many future history and economic PhD dissertations. This wreck will be epic.

Now let us add to this equation the debacle in Afghanistan. Biden and the Elites/DMs running our country have just confirmed that they only care about themselves. They got wealthy shipping our manufacturing base to China, making us dependent on OPEC oil, obtaining campaign contributions to their PACs from groups “Paying so they could Play” in China, not to mention financial benefits given to their spouses and family members. To the Biden and the Elites/DM, we American taxpayers are peasants, expendable like the folks in Afghanistan.

Now that the world including the Chinese who own Biden and the DMs have proof including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense are all totally incompetent (in a capable organization they would already have been fired), China invading Taiwan is a high probability.

Never fear, guided by their Saul Alinsky/ Rahm Emanuel mantra the DMs continue their “Never waste a crisis” campaign driving us towards higher energy cost, unreliable electricity, higher taxes, “Social Justice” garbage, teaching our children CRT propaganda rather than reading writing and arithmetic, telling all whites they are racist, forcing vaccinations, et al.

What is so frustrating that Trump had us on the right economic path because he cared about every American. The DMs used their propaganda mill called the news media and their Obama appointed traitors in the government bureaucracy to steal the election so that they could regain control. Now we get to pay the price – inflation because of the stimulus funded by debt and higher interest rates which will give us a stagnant economy (called Stagflation).

Fortunately, God is in control and empowering the Patriots who are demanding forensic audits of the 2020 elections and all future elections to ensure they are honest. The Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls last week released a “silver bullet”, that spurred many of the attendees from 47 states to form a group of state legislators to push for full forensic audits around the country including a lone Virginia Republican, Senator Chase. The next Republican legislator you see, ask them about the contract Virginia has with Unisyn Voting Systems which is owned by a business partner of the Chinese Communist Party according WND News. AuditVA!

Every portfolio should contain some cash but a great piece of land remains The Best investment long term. Capitalism builds wealth, Marxism/Socialism consumes it in self destruction. Pray for honest and forensic audited elections in the USA. Men make plans, but God ALWAYS wins. Stand with God and support the patriots while replacing the Elites/DMs.

“Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.”

(Ephesians 6:13) New Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press)

Stay healthy,

Ned

August 21, 2021 Copyright Massie Land Network. All rights Reserved.

[gutsybitsies]

shitty’s parks and recreation

“If I could, I would individually interview every one of those kids,”  Shitty Knight said to the camera, looking at the children playing in the park. “But all their parents said no when I asked them if I could. I guess as a grown man, they don’t trust me around children. See that’s part of the reason why there should be more women in politics, government isn’t just a boy’s club anymore.”

A man came up to Shitty while he was talking to the camera. “Hey, are you that parks guy? There’s a man stuck inside the slide.” 

“On it!” 

As Shitty pulled and prodded the man out of the slide, he continued to talk. “I live for public service, it’s the best *bleep* thing on earth. People need our help, and it feels good to be needed. Sir, we’re going to need you to get out of the slide.”

All the children around the slide cheered as Shitty finally got a homeless man out of the slide. He triumphantly raised his fist as the man staggered away and grinned at the camera. 

Guy glared at the camera, but it seemed like he was glaring at everything around the table. Shitty was vibrating with excitement, as the rest of the government employees around the table looked unmotivated. 

“Tonight we have a mandatory community meeting. Dex is going with *bleep*.” 

Off camera, a voice asks, “Um, can you call him Knight? This way we don’t have to censor-”

“No.” 

“Alright! Now Dex, you and I are going to meet the citizens! This is so exciting, this is where the rubber of government meets the concrete of, whatever it is.” Shitty led a red haired young man with him into a small classroom, cramped with people. 

Complaints started raining down on Shitty, who never lost his smile nor vigor. 

“Stop the graffitis, please. Just stop them.”

“There are too many people cursing in parks! I take my three year old daughter there all the time, how am I supposed to raise her properly when all those *bleep* are yelling at each other to *bleep* their own *bleep*? *Bleep*ing *bleep*!!” 

Are you frustrated when all these people are yelling at you? 

Shitty shrugged. “What I hear when people yell at me, is people caring loudly about Samwell because they feel responsible about the place that they live in. And I agree with them, because Samwell is the best *bleep*ing town in the entire country and the entire universe.” 

After break, a startling tall young man stood up in the middle of the room to speak. He was surprisingly handsome, and looked a little anxious at having to speak in a roomful of people. Shitty’s eyes zoomed in on him and widened like he’d seen something magnificent appear out of nowhere. 

“Euh, I’m Jack Zimmermann, I’m a nurse and euh, I don’t usually come to these meetings. But I’m here to talk about the abandoned lot on Sullivan street.”

“Excellent! Let’s talk about the abandoned lot on Sullivan street!” Shitty said, still staring at the man in awe. 

You looked very excited when you saw Jack Zimmermann, why was that?

“Do you ever see someone and think, I saw a man so beautiful I want to be his very best friend and never let him go? Jack *bleep*ing Zimmermann is that man.” 

“It’s not excellent, my boyfriend fell into that pit and broke both his legs!” Jack said, gaining steam as he went on to explain. “There’s an empty lot next to my house, and a company bought it in order to build a new condo. But money fell through in the middle of construction, right when they dug a huge pit, and now it’s a safety hazard for everyone in the neighborhood.” 

Shitty was still staring at Jack, seemingly lost in thoughts. 

“You need to do something about it!” Jack said. 

“Wha-yes. Giant pit next to your house on Sullivan street. I promise you, Jack Zimmermann, we will fill that hole behind your house. And what’s more, I will build a park on that lot.” 

Jack seemed surprised at the enthusiasm and readiness to which Shitty had agreed to his proposal. 

“That’s a promise?”

“It’s better than a promise, it’s a pinky promise!” 

“In order to do anything around here, there’s one person to turn to. And that’s Camilla. Camilla Collins. She’s the city planner but she’s more than that. She’s a smart, capably, woman.” 

“Hey, thanks for clearing up your schedule and meeting me here,” Shitty said as he sat next to Camilla Collins, who was in the middle of a huge lunch. 

“I didn’t clear up anything? But go on,” she ate a huge bite of brisket. 

“You know about the abandoned lot on Sullivan street?” 

“Yeah, Lot 48. Condo developer went bankrupt right after they dug out the basement. It’s gross.”

“Brah, I have grand plans for that lot,” Shitty said. “I want that *bleep* turned into a *bleep*ing park.” 

“Huh,” Camilla took a bite of her salad. “Is it likely? No. But is it probable?”

Shitty leaned in, excited. 

“Also no.”

“Come on, Cams. I know what your’e gonna say, and you’re gonna say a bunch of *bleep* about red tape and a bunch of *bleep*ing *bleeps* who’s gonna get in the way. But I can do it, believe me.” He leaned in closer, trying to bat his eyes at Camilla Collins. “Come on, for old time’s sake?” 

“Camilla and I…were lovers. We made passionate *bleep*ing sex with each other. It happens, brah. Sometimes when someone is near you and you’re both hot for each other, you sleep together. Happens all the time.” 

Did you and Shitty ever…together? 

“Knight? No, never.” Camilla laughed, then straightened up as she seemed to remember something. “Oh wait, yeah, we did. Like five years ago. Yep. Did the deed. A whole twenty minutes of *bleep*ing. He did the best he could.”

Shitty ran down into the Parks office with a megaphone and Dex on his tails. 

“GUYS! WE ARE BUILDING A PARK!”

In his office, Guy shook his head and went back to sleeping. 

[beyondmistland]

Westerosi Worldbuilding Wednesday: Hidden History of the Crownlands: Lost Lore (Part III)

 Letter #47: No one knows to this day why the Celtigars and Velaryons came to Westeros but the consequences of this decision can never be in doubt.

 Letter #48: The King of Claw Point at this time was Bennard XVIII, a graying warrior who styled himself "Bennard the Magnificent" for having taken Claw Isle from House Darklyn when it was forced to fight a ruinous war with both Maidenpool and Storm's End.

 Letter #49: Alas, the king held his hard-won prize for less than half a decade due to the fact he had left only a token force to hold it in the mistaken belief that no foe would ever come from the east.

 Letter #50: And so when the Valyrians came Claw Isle was quickly overwhelmed by the Celtigars even as the other two fell into the hands of the Velaryons, not least because the Baratheons refused to make a stand in the name of their king, Robin (XXV) the Last. (As an aside I should mention here that the later Hand to Aegon (I) Targaryen had two wives actually. Jena Baratheon, who was barren, and Argella Durrandon, who was not.)

 Letter #51: As one can imagine Bennard XVIII was furious when word reached him of these new developments but before he could do little more than curse he was put on the defensive as the Celtigars, flushed with victory, bent their oars straight for Claw Port itself.

 Letter #52: The Battle of the Gorge, as the next engagement was called, is said to have involved almost a hundred ships but though the two sides were equal in number House Claw carried the day, sinking half of the Celtigar fleet.

 Letter #53: Having failed to learn from this setback the fiery Lord Bartimos responded by landing a meager host of two thousand men south of Claw Port under the command of his heir, Crispian, who was given orders to place the city under siege.

 Letter #54: An unwise decision for no sooner had the Celtigars pitched their tents but they found themselves attacked by a relief force three thousand strong. Turning to face this threat they were then hammered and destroyed when a sortie from Claw Port took them in the rear. Thus ended the battle known as the Field of Bones.

 Letter #55: Now howling for blood Lord Bartimos called up all his levies, mustering an army three thousand strong (though one in four of those were green boys and greybeards).

 Letter #56: Landing at the base of the peninsula, Lord Bartimos began to push north, winning several small victories, the greatest of these being the Battle of the Weeping River, where a charge by his heavy horse split the lines of the Claw infantry and scattered them, slaying hundreds.

 Letter #57: In the end things came to a head at the Siege of Claw Castle, where Lord Bartimos and his remaining fifteen hundred men were defeated by Bennard XVIII at the cost of his own life.

 Letter #58: At this point the war stopped as both sides sought to lick their wounds and replenish their ranks, albeit in different ways.

 Letter #59: The new King of Claw Point, Brynden X, sent his uncle, Humfrey, to Essos in search of sellswords and began to train the reserve levies whilst the new Lord Celtigar, Bartimos the Younger, sought the support of his Velaryon cousins. (Both reached out to the Eyrie but received no response.)

 Letter #60: Five years later the war picked up steam when a hundred Velaryon ships began to raid the coast as the Celtigars simultaneously marched overland up Claw Point, forcing the Clawmen to spread out their forces even as the Valyrians brought their greater resources to bear. (When the Velaryons took the island of Driftwood they renamed it Driftmark after the head of the house, Lord Daemon, allegedly said to his youngest son, Jacaerys: "Our drifting is at an end. Here shall we live. Here shall we die. Here shall we leave our mark on the world for all to see.")

 Letter #61: Thus, the Celtigars were able to press deep into Claw territory, taking castles as they went...Until Maidenpool, fearful of Velaryon expansion, declared for the Swamp Folk (as they were wont to call the peninsula's denizens). But while Lord Walys Mooton's fifteen hundred men were able to check the decline of Brynden X they could not win him the war though the two hosts won half a dozen major victories together, the last one being the Battle of the Blue Maw, where two thousand Mooton-Claw soldiers fought thirty-three hundred Valyrians for three days with their backs to the eponymous lake. (Some of the most notable castles destroyed during this phase of the war include Dusky Garden, Thunderpool, Greyhollow, Stonehill, Grimwood, Madman's Tower, and Rainy Cove.)

 Letter #62: Thus, Humfrey X was forced to make use of less savory methods to defeat his enemies. In other words, he spread rumors that Lady Celtigar had been unfaithful to her lord husband, causing the Velaryons to drop out of the war given the fact she was a Velaryon by birth. (His nephew and predecessor, Brynden X, had been mortally wounded in the Battle of Windy Sept, which took place just nine days before the Battle of the Blue Maw, in which the Celtigars broke their word by not granting safe passage for the return of his body to Claw Port.)

 Letter #63: Myles Mooton, the new Lord of Maidenpool, sensed therein an opportunity and so promptly switched sides, causing Humfrey X to curse his luck for he had simply traded one cold-blooded beast for another. (How Lord Walys died remains a mystery. Some sources claim he got lost in Maneater Bog when his party was separated from the main column. Others insist that he died of a festered wound. A few even argue that he was murdered, naming his younger brother, Myles, the culprit.)

 Letter #64: Nevertheless, he made preparations to continue the war but whereas his nephew had sought to fight their enemies in the field Humfrey X sought to bleed them dry through traps and skirmishes for unlike the Celtigars he knew the lay of the land.

 Letter #65: The victories that followed at the Whispering Pines, the Howling Cave, the Green Cliffs, and the Bloody Ridge were as glorious as any in the long history of Claw Point. Indeed, so grievous were these losses that both the Celtigars and Mootons were forced to sue for peace.

 Letter #66: Old King Humfrey died shortly afterwards of a winter chill, thinking himself triumphant...But no man can ever know the will of the gods.

 Letter #67: Over the next two years of peace the Celtigars quietly forged a series of alliances with which to defeat the Claws once and for all.

 Letter #68: First, they healed the bad blood between them and their kin of Driftmark. Second, they won the support of both Stonedance and Sharp Point by taking to wife a daughter from each house. Third, they hired a company of Myrish crossbowmen after obtaining promises from the newly-crowned Arlan III that he would not intervene in the war. (As a result of this new situation, Lord Mooton forsook his alliance with the Celtigars in favor of the Claws. The Darklyns of Duskendale did likewise but were only able to promise a single ship carrying two hundred men due to their defeat in the War of Devolution.)

 Letter #69: In response to all this the Claws did...Nothing. Nothing but celebrate for they thought (wrongly) that the worst days were now behind them, the future promising only opportunity. For wealth. Glory. Power. How little they knew. How little they knew. How little they knew. Of the doom coming for them. In the guise of a red crab. With purple eyes and silver-gold hair.

 Letter #70: The war resumed in the first days of spring when the snows began to melt.

 Letter #71: Striking hard and fast from all directions by land as well as sea the Crab Coalition quickly overran the peninsula, razing Claw Castle itself after a short siege.

 Letter #72: Realizing the threat before him, Rupert XXXV called his banners but the response was slow given the chaos of the situation. All told, four thousand men showed up at Claw Port in response to the king's orders. These were, in turn, stiffened by the arrival of another twenty-two hundred men from Maidenpool and Duskendale. The Crab Coalition, on the other hand, could field ten thousand men as well as a hundred and fifty ships.

 Letter #73: Rather than place all his hopes in a siege however Rupert XXXV decided to wager his crown, his kingdom, and the fate of history on a single battle.

 Letter #74: Leaving behind a dozen ships as well as the men from Duskendale he then led his army out the gates singing a prayer to the Seven. Alas, it went unanswered when the two armies clashed a stone's throw from Claw Port in what history has deemed fit to call the Battle of the Twelve.

 Letter #75: Charging under a storm of arrows, bolts, and spears the Clawmen filled the misty morning air with battle cries as they swept all before them, killing Bartimos the Younger plus Daemon Velaryon, at which point their fate was sealed though for one shining moment victory appeared within reach. Raising a war-horn to his lips the perfidious Lord of Maidenpool fell upon the Clawmen's rear with all his strength. Elsewhere on the battlefield, Jacaerys Velaryon rallied his father's men and broke their flank. Finding themselves thus surrounded, the Clawmen were then cut down to a man as they sought some means of escape. By sunset fifty-five hundred men lay dead, including Rupert XXXV. All things considered, it was an unmitigated disaster for the king's sons, brothers, cousins, and nephews had likewise perished.

Letter #76: With the Clawmen defeated and leaderless, the Crab Coalition moved quickly to invest the capital but it did not fall as easily as they expected. Twice, they tried to storm its high walls only to be repulsed with heavy losses. As a result, they ordered Claw Port blockaded. Their fleet was scattered by a sudden storm along the journey however such that only a fifth of their ships arrived on the scene. Seeing this, the defenders decided to give open battle after confiscating no less than thirty merchant vessels such that, for once, they outnumbered their foes. Neither side truly won the Second Battle of the Gorge though and so the siege continued as before. As the days turned into months and the months into a year, disease began to set in, killing hundreds of people on both sides of the walls. (Amongst the first to perish was the wizened Dowager Queen, Maia Brune.) With the defenders' spirits now at an all time low, the Crab Coalition tried once again to take Claw Port by storm but this attempt fared even worse than the previous two. The commander of the city garrison, Ser Jon Darke, sensed then an opportunity to raise the people's hopes and so lead fifty men on a sortie under cover of darkness to set aflame the Crab Coalition's siege engines. For many of the aggressors this proved to be the breaking point and thus the number of desertions began to rise quickly though none of the men who fled ever made it home for the peninsula was by this point full of broken men. In the end things got so bad that they tried to bribe the garrison into opening the gates but Ser Jon Darke put an end to this by catapulting the would-be traitors. At their wits end, the leaders of the Crab Coalition then ordered one final attack on the walls. This time they succeeded. After two years of siege Claw Port finally fell and with that came the end of the Forgotten Kingdom. Sacked and burned beyond all hope of recovery, the city that had once been the pride and joy of the Clawmen became little more than an overgrown ruin, it's very name lost to the ravages of time...until now. (In the aftermath the victors quarreled over the war spoils. Bartimos the Younger's son, Edwell, argued that by right of conquest the peninsula should go to him and his house. Myles Mooton argued the same, claiming that were it not for his perfidy the Clawmen would have won. The Velaryons, Masseys, and Bar Emmons on the other hand each demanded half the loot, the Myrish crossbowmen three-quarters of it. Unable to come to an agreement they then turned on each other with great slaughter amidst the ruins of Claw Port. (No doubt somewhere in the Seven Hells Rupert XXXV laughed.))

As always, share, comment, and critique.

Also, a big shout-out to SLAL over at @warsofasoiaf for his help planning this out. Seriously, you’re the man!

[philatelicdatabase]

Airposts and their Stamps (1921)

This article is probably one of the first airmail articles, certainly of any length, to be published in a philatelic journal. It was first published in Stamp Collectors' Fortnightly (January, 1921) from a paper read by Major RS Archer, MC, as his Presidential Address before the Liverpool Junior Philatelic Society, October 11th, 1920.

The Wabash Railway Company in U.S.A. has recently taken off its fast mail train between Toledo and St. Louis, because it could not compete with its rival in the air. To one who has closely followed the rapid development of the aerial mail, this announcement causes little surprise. The increase in speed of the aeroplane over the train would in itself not affect the rail services, but this, added to the fact that the air line in question has maintained an efficiency of 92 percent for more than twelve months, has demonstrated the reliability of the aeroplane service. All the experiments prove that the universal use of the aeroplane for mail-carrying purposes is coming, and almost daily the papers chronicle the institution of new air lines. The collection of aerial post stamps thus becomes imperative to the up-to-date philatelist. One prophesies the not-far-distant date when the majority of the new stamps, certainly European, occupying the pages of our albums, till be those used in connection with the post conveyed by petrol-driven Mercuries. Tonight, time will only permit a short flight through the intensely fascinating history of the air mail, whilst I pilot you amongst the forty odd stamps which the past three and a half years have brought forth in this connection. The experience gained in the past War has, of course, been an invaluable help in the development of air services, and, curiously enough it was in wartime that the first airpost was instituted. It was necessary, during the Siege of Paris in 1870, to find a means of communication with the outer world, and, for this purpose, a balloon post was brought into being. The first ascent was made on 23rd September, 1870, and the services continued in almost daily use for four months, during which period 68 balloons were despatched, 60 landing on French or neutral territory, five being captured by the Germans, and three being lost at sea. Envelopes despatched in this manner give no indication of their mode of conveyance. However, it may be taken that any envelope or card bearing a postmark dated between 23rd September, 1870, and 28th January, 1871, was forwarded from Paris by balloon post - the first authoritative air mail. A connecting link between balloon and aeroplane posts took place in 1896, when a Mr. Fricker inaugurated a pigeon service between Great Barrier Island and Auckland N.Z., 66 miles apart, a post which continued for several years. Special triangular stamps were used for this service, depicting a pigeon in full flight, the denomination being 6d. (blue) and 1s. (red). The first aeroplane post in the world, however, took place on 18th February, 1911, at Allahabad, India, organised by Captain Windham. The letters were carried by aeroplane from the United Provinces Exhibition to a Post Office receiving-station in Allahabad, from which place they were despatched to any part of the world to which they were addressed. Over 6,000 letters and cards, thus posted, were franked by the Exhibition P.O. with a die, specially cut in the postal workshops at Aligarh, incorporating a design of an aeroplane, encircled by the inscription "Aerial Post, Allahabad Exhibition," together with the date of despatch. A nominal additional fee of six annas per letter or card was charged, which amount was handed, without deduction, as a donation to the new buildings of the Oxford and Cambridge Hostel at Allahabad. In honour of King George's Coronation this same Captain Windham was also the organiser of the first air post in the United Kingdom, which was flown between Hendon and Windsor on 9th September, 1911, and for a few following days. No special stamps were issued, but envelopes and postcards bearing a design of an aeroplane flying over Windsor Castle, with the winding Thames and St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance, were sold at 1s. and 6d. respectively. The postmark was worded "First United Kingdom Aerial Post," and the date; about 100,000 pieces of mail being carried by this service. U.S.A. was busy just about the same time, in 1911, experimenting with air mails, and this, coupled with the knowledge gained in the War, resulted in the establishment early in 1918, of an air line between New York and Washington, 218 miles apart. After the Armistice, lack of trains and engines led to an extension of this service to Cleveland and Chicago. This line now continues right on to San Francisco, by way of Omaha, Nebraska, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The trip takes three days and is 2,651 miles in length, but results in letters reaching their destination 42 hours before the mail-train is due. Another air line runs between St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul, whilst numerous other towns are in process of being linked up by air. In the past twelve months over half a million pounds weight of mail matter has been airborne, and about £50,000 has been actually saved, as compared with the cost of transit by rail. On the 2nd of June, 1912, the Japanese postal authorities experimented with an air mail between Yokohama and Tokyo. A few letters are known to exist, whose envelopes bear the ordinary stamp and obliteration, with a special postmark, inscribed "Japanese Aerial Mail" and the Japanese equivalent for the date, but the attempt, being only experimental, was discontinued after the first day. From 1912 till 1917, aerial mails did not make much progress, but the reason which caused the inception of the air post, namely, war, was responsible for the re-opening of this means of communication. It happened that there was very serious congestion on the Italian railways in 1917, to relieve which an air mail was organised, on the 22nd May, between Rome and Turin. These cities are about 350 miles apart, the air space between them being bridged within four hours. In this connection. Italy achieved fame by being the first country to issue a stamp for use of its air mail, which took the form of an overprint on the 1903 "Inland Express Letter" stamp, 25c. rose, as follows :- ESPERIMENTO POSTA AEREA MAGGIO 1917 TORINO-ROMA - ROMA-TORINO

A month later, on 28th June, owing to the interference of Austrian submarines with Naples and Palermo, Sicily, mail steamers, a special seaplane service was inaugurated between these two places, which are 170 miles apart. The stamp used in this connection was the then unissued 40c. violet "Express Delivery" stamp, overprinted with the words IDROVOLANTE NAPOLl PALERMO NAPOLI 25 CENT 25

Another wartime air mail was brought into being on 30th March, 1918, by Austria, her planes carrying letters from Vienna to Kieff , with calls at Cracow and Lemberg. Three of the 1916 "Arms" type stamps were used, all being overprinted in block capitals with the formidable word "FLUGPOST", meaning "flying post."

"1.50 K 1.50'' was surcharged on the 2kr. (lilac) and "2.50 K 2.50" on the 3kr. (bistre), whilst the 4kr. (grey) was used without any surcharge. To the U.S.A. falls the honour of issuing the first distinctive air post stamp, which made its appearance on the 15th May, 1918, on the inauguration of the New York-Washington service. This stamp, which was recess-plate printed in carmine and blue, without watermark, at the Washington Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and is perforated 11, depicts a mail-carrying plane in flight. Over two million of these stamps were printed, out of which one lucky purchaser secured, over the P.O. counter, a sheet of 100 with the aeroplane inverted , the only sheet known to be printed in error. A Colonel Green eventually bought up the whole sheet, selling half of it, and retaining the remaining 50 in his own collection. These he had with him on hoard his steam yacht when it foundered in 1919, 43 of these stamps being so damaged as to be useless, which makes the error a very rare stamp. The air-mail fee was reduced on 15th July to 16 cents, and again in December, 1918 to 6 cents, for which stamps of these values were issued, yellow-green in the first instance, orange in the latter, the original design being retained. Since then the extra air-post fee has been abolished, and the ordinary mail fee of 2 cents, or 1d., an ounce is charged. It is not contemplated to issue a separate aerial mail stamp. On 4th July, 1918, the Hungarians experimented with an air mail, having Budapest as its starting point, and with various internal towns as destinations; but owing to the weather conditions and accidents to aviators, it was only in existence 20 days. Two of the 1916-17 stamps were surcharged as follows :- "1 K 50f. " on 75 filler (blue). "2 K 50f." on 2 krona (brown). the words "REPÜLÖ POSTA" being overprinted above the value, in red and blue respectively. This overprinting was carried out at the State Printing Works at Budapest, and is not remarkable for its good workmanship. This will be especially noticeable in the copy I show of the lower value, in which several letters are broken, whilst the "P" of "POSTA" has no top at all. It rather looks as if this stamp had taken part in one of the accidents which occurred. In October, 1920, an aerial mail was established, linking Hungary with other European countries, and the 1916-17 10kr. stamp was overprinted with the words "LEGI POSTA" and the new value, 3, 8, or 12 korona.

The air fairly hummed in 1919 with air post developments, and in all parts of the world aerial mails were instituted or carried out with this object in view. Early in the year an aeroplane post was started between Bombay and Karachi to expedite delivery of mail brought by steamers to Bombay. Public apathy and lack of support, however, caused the speedy discontinuance of this air line. Alexandria, Cairo, and Ismailia were linked together by air mail of 17th March, by "R.A.F." planes, which carried only official correspondence during the native disturbances, no special stamps or postmark being used. The envelopes, however, were marked with rubber stamp, "Aerial Post, E.E.F.", meaning "Egyptian Expeditionary Force". This service was discontinued as soon as conditions were normal. Switzerland was next in the field, or air, I should say, by the opening of a summer aerial post between Zurich and Lausanne, with calls at Berne and Neuchâtel, which took place on 28th April, 1919. The ordinary postage was charged, plus an air fee of 50c. For this latter purpose the current 50c. "Helvetia " type stamp was overprinted at the Federal Mint, Berne, with a design in red, showing the Swiss Military Air Force badge. Postmarks bearing the words "Schweiger Flugpost" were used, in addition to the ordinary express letter postmark. On the 5th May, 100,000 copies of the 35c. stamp of the 1906 issue of Tunis were ready for sale in connection with the air service which connected Gabés, Djerba, Zarzis, and Ben Gardane, as from that date. These stamps had been overprinted at the French Government Printing Works in Paris, and, in addition to the central overprint of the French aviator's badge, the air fee denomination of "30" centimes appeared on the stamp with the words "POSTE AÉRIENNE", the old value being obliterated by three bars. The stamp depicts the ruins of Hadrian's Aqueduct and, with its overprint, shows a true blending of the ancient with the modern. I wonder what Hadrian would say if he knew? This stamp has recently been replaced by a 30c. stamp of similar design, in blue and grey-green. We now come to the gallant, but unsuccessful attempt of Messrs. Hawker and Grieve to fly the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the United Kingdom. This took place on the 18th May, 1919, on a Sopwith machine, and resulted in the aeroplane falling into the sea, the two aviators with their mail being fortunately salved by a passing steamer. The mail reached the P.O. intact with the help of the British Fleet. The contents were undamaged, though in some cases wet, but none was in such condition as to prevent ultimate delivery. For the purposes of this mail 200 of the 3c. "Caribou" issue were overprinted at the Royal Gazette Office, St. John's (where all the other air-stamp overprints have been carried out), with the words "FIRST TRANSATLANTIC AIRPOST, April, 1919." - for the flight was expected to take place in April, though weather conditions were unfavourable until the following month. Of the 200 stamps, 18 were damaged and destroyed in the presence of the Auditor-General, 11 were used as presentation copies (one of which was sent to H.M. the King), and 95 were used and cancelled in the mail itself, leaving 76 still to be accounted for. These were sold at $25 each on behalf of the Marine Disaster Fund. and as only 182 of these stamps are known to exist, they are of great rarity. The first Trans-Atlantic Air Stamp was presented by the aviators, to be auctioned for the benefit of the Marine Disaster Fund. Lieut.-Col. E. S. Halford. of the Air Ministry, eventually bought the stamp for £210. Later in the month of May the air mail, ready for despatch by the Raynham-Martinsyde Atlantic flight, bore stamps of the 1c., 2c., 3c., and 24c. current "Caribou" series. These were overprinted as follows :-"1st Atlantic Airpost, Martinsyde-Raynham, Morgan". The cheers of the send-off had hardly died away before the plane crashed to earth to become a useless wreck, and the mail had to be despatched through the usual channels. The 15c. stamp of the 1897 (Jubilee) series, surcharged "Trans-Atlantic AIR POST, 1919. ONE DOLLAR" was now issued to prepay postage on letters sent by the Alcock-Whitten Brown flight to U.K. This non-stop flight commenced on 14th June, 1919, in a Vickers-Vimy machine, and by this means mail posted in Newfoundland on the early morning of 14th June was delivered in London on the night of the 17th-three days after leaving Newfoundland. The stamps were sold at $1 each, but the limited edition, was speedily bought up. 10,000 were surcharged in sheets of 25, making 400 sheets in all. In the overprinting errors hme crept in. Each sheet, therefore, contained 16 stamps normally overprinted; seven stamps with no comma after "POST"; one with an imperfect comma; and one without the full stop after "1919" and no comma after "POST". Thus it will be seen that of the 10,000 stamps issued, 6,400 were normally overprinted, 2,800 had no comma, 400 had an imperfect comma, and 400 had no stop or comma. It will be noticed that the block of four stamps, which I show, contains all four varieties - a rare combination. To celebrate an experimental air post between Puerto, Port Colombia, and Barranquila, 200 of the 1917 2c. Colombian stamps were overprinted locally with the inscription "1 en SERVICIO POSTAL AEREO 6-18-19" in five lines in black. Only one flight was made and the stamps were not accepted by the P.O. and were never cancelled by them. In October, 1920, an attempt was made to institute an air service between Cartagena and Barranquila, but owing to serious fatal accidents, this air mail has been indefinitely suspended. The contract for this service was given by the P.O. to a local firm, and letters carried through the air travelled at ordinary postage, plus 10c. per 15 grammes. Two thousand copies of a 10c oblong stamp were printed, depicting a vessel on the sea, with aeroplane above, and setting sun on the horizon. This was superseded by a set of seven values, issued privately by the air contractors, the design showing a map of the Colombian coast, with aeroplane in flight. To signalise the first air mail over the Rocky Mountains the envelopes of letters thus conveyed were franked with a special postmark bearing the words "1st B.C. Alberta Aerial Post." The mail in question was carried by plane, on August 5th, 1919, from Vancouver to Calgary, via Vernon and over the Great Divide to Lethbridge. On the return journey the pilot was forced to descend at Golden, and the letters were sent on by rail. Japan had made no serious attempt since its 1912 experiment to commence an air post, but with the intention of instituting regular flights between Tokyo and Osaka nearly 300 miles, stamps were issued for use on letters to be conveyed by the first air mail on October 3rd, 1919. These stamps were the current 1½ sen (blue) and the 3 sen (carmine), overprinted with the design of an aeroplane in red and black respectively. These two air stamps were on sale only at Head Post Offices on October 3rd, and in spite of elaborate precautions to prevent one person buying more than two stamps of each value, the entire issue of 40,000 overprinted stamps was sold out in a very short time. The weather played an important part in connection with this mail, and behaved so badly for day after day from October 4th, that the flight was abandoned for a further attempt (to the delight of the more superstitious Japanese and the letters sent by the usual method. The "King Albert Aerial Mail Service" was commenced early in January), 1920, in Belgian Congo. This service, which is carried out by seaplanes, embraces the whole of the Upper Congo River, and is flown in conjunction with the arrival of the Belgian mail steamers. In August last, four finely-drawn stamps, depicting scenes in the Congo with a seaplane above, made their appearance for use in this connection. The perforation is 12 and the values are :- 50c. orange and black. 1fr. violet and black. 2f blue and black. 5fr. green and black. By some unfortunate mistake, one which has caused the Belgian Government much annoyance, the word printed at the foot of each stamp, "Postluchtdienst," should have appeared as "Luchtpostdienst." As it stands the translation reads: "Service of the Postal Air," instead of "Postal Service of the Air." Of course, the printer may have been a man of imagination, and this was his way of prophesying that the air was soon to be so impregnated with correspondence as almost to describe the term "postal air." The air post instituted between Reval and Helsingfors in Estonia. was the direct outcome of the icebound nature of that country's coastline in the Gulf of Finland, which, at the time, permitted only a few Ships to arrive at Reval. Thus it happened that, on 7th February, 1920, three British-piloted planes left Reval with mail and reached Helsingfors in less than an hour later. Weather conditions prevented the return journey being made for over a week. The service, however, was continued until two months later, when, owing to a shortage of aeroplanes, only a very small proportion of the mail could be carried. Preference was given to diplomatic and Registered letters, ordinary being taken if there was room. The breaking up of the ice early in May permitted the re-opening of sea communication, and the air mail was discontinued. In March a five mark imperforate triangular stamp was issued for use on this mail, printed in yellow, blue and black, and showing an aeroplane in flight. The ordinary postage was charged in addition to the air fee. A Tientsin-Pekin aerial mail was inaugurated as a regular service on 7th May, 1920, with Handley-Page machines. Letters posted at 5 p.m. in Tientsin can now be delivered in Pekin three hours later. No special stamp has so far been issued, but the postmark reads: - "Chinese Post Office - despatched by aeroplane - Tientsin-Pekin." The Chinese Cabinet has now sanctioned the opening of an air service between Pekin and Shanghai, with three intermediate stations, and 80 landing grounds. Siam, a country whose airmen are so intrepid and so seemingly without nerves, has commenced in September an aerial post between Bangkok and Chantzboon, roughly 300 miles. The current 5 satangs stamps has been overprinted by hand-machine, with the Siamese emblematic bird, the garuda, under which appear four lines of native wording. When the London-Paris Airpost was opened to the general public on 10th November, 1919, the charge was excessive, viz, 2s. 6d. per ounce. The total number of letters sent on the first day after this charge was made totalled 315, whilst the aeroplanes ready for use had a capacity of 76,000 letters. Since then, however, steps have been taken to popularise the aerial mail, the chief of which has been the reduction of the air fee to 2d. per ounce, plus ordinary postage, whilst the express fee is 6d. an ounce. A blue label, inscribed "BY AIR MAIL," which can be obtained free from the Post Office, is the only outward and visible token on the left-hand corner of the envelope that it has travelled from England by aerial mail. The absence of this label, so long as the envelope is clearly marked as to its means of conveyance, will not debar the letter from being forwarded by air and delivered. In France, a label is attached to the envelope, depicting as its central design, the great French aviator, Guynemer. Besides the twice daily service to Paris and back, carried out by the Aircraft Transport and Travel Co., Ltd., recent air lines have linked together six countries, namely, England, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. This service was inaugurated on 15th September, when a Danish-piloted de. Haviland plane left Copenhagen with the London mail and, travelling via Hamburg, reached Amsterdam, where the letters were transferred to the Handley-Page and Airco joint air service, and so to London. On the return journey, Queen Alexandra sent a basket of fruit to the Empress Dowager of Russia. The fruit left London a 3p.m. and was conveved to Her Majesty, outside Copenhagen, by 5 p.m. the following day. Last week a mail plane flew from Cricklewood, London, made a stop at Amsterdam, and arrived at Copenhagen in 5 hours 40 minutes, the distance being 520 miles. The London-Amsterdam service, instituted on 5th July, 1920, is carried out by the Handley-Page Transport Co., and the journey of 265 miles has been flown in 1 hour 50 minutes, or an average of 150 miles per hour. For use in connection with this inking up of countries, Sweden, at the end of September, issued three overprinted stamps, viz. :- 3 öre brown, Official, surcharged "LUFTPOST 10" 2 öre orange, Official, surcharged "LUFTPOST 20" 4 öre lilac, Official, surcharged "LUFTPOST 50" Envelopes bear a blue label, similar to that of Great Britain, but the word "LUFTPOST" is printed in red thereon. A provisional overprinting of the 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50c. current Spanish stamps with the words "CORREO AEREO," marked the opening of an aerial post between Seville and Larache, in Morocco; between Barcelona and Palma, Morocco; and between Malaga and Melilla, on April 4th. Only 20,000 sets were issued and these provisionals are to be superseded at an early date, by a distinctive series of air stamps, portraying the progress of aerial navigation. One of the latest countries to send mail through the air is the go-ahead State of Czecho-Slovakia. Three of the Hradschin series of stamps have been surcharged with new values, whilst a design of an aeroplane now forms the centre of the stamp. The 200 heller value is surcharged "14 KRONES," which is the ordinary postage plus air fee between Prague and Warsaw. The 500 heller bears a new value of 24 krones, for use between Prague and Paris, a 5½ hours' journey, carried out thrice weekly, travelling via Strashourg. The planes are sufficiently roomy to allow the carrying of passengers and goods. The 1,000 heller now takes the value of 28 krones, for use between Prague and London. On October 16th Danzig advertised its air mail by the issue of three provisionals. These stamps were the 40pf. Germans, already overprinted "DANZIG"; and further overprinted with new denominations, 40 and 60pf. and 1 mark, together with the design of an aeroplane on the two lower values and a winged posthorn on the 1 mark. From this brief survey, of the development of the aerial mail, it will be admitted, I think, that the prophecy contained in my opening remarks as to the coming of universal air posts, is well-founded - or well-aired, whichever is the correct term. Only a week or two ago the newspapers reported a combination of seven air transport firms, British, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, French, Roumanian, and German, with a view to completing a network of air lines that will shortly spread over the whole of North-West Europe. A new world to conquer has sprung up before the philatelist, one in which his imagination, initiative and foresight can play an important part, and I trust that my remarks this evening may prove of use to those whose flight of fancy take them into the ethereal realms of aerial philately. Read the full article

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IMAGINE YOU’RE PART of a great swelling crowd, one of 60,000 people who fill up the cauldron of noise and chaos that is a sold-out football stadium. For you and everyone around you, the game is an open-air gathering place, a chance to steam and scream and worry about nothing except the other team’s menacing D. To the security officials responsible for your safety, it is a constant source of worst-case-scenario planning. They install metal detectors; they enlist a kennel’s worth of bomb-sniffing dogs; they plant concrete pillars around the perimeter to keep out cars; they train personnel in the dark art of bag searching; they even obtain a temporary flight restriction from the FAA to keep all aircraft above 3,000 feet for a radius of 3 miles. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Maybe it’s a toxic mist. Maybe it’s a bomb. Whatever it is, you’ll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there’s nothing anyone can do but wait for it.

In the summer of 2015, Ross Lamm and Dave Romero watched just such a scenario unfold from within a skybox at a large university stadium. The head of security for the college, fearful of the damage drones could do, had decided to run a simulation of a drone attack inside his 60,000-­capacity football stadium. (The university asked that identifying details be withheld so as not to share its playbook with would-be attackers.) Campus officials launched a DJI quadcopter, a midsize, midpriced drone, and steered it toward the bleachers, pretending to spread nerve gas on the hundred students gathered below. As the drone looped lazily over the crowd, some of them pretended to vomit convulsively, some twitched spasmodically, some staggered like zombies and then collapsed. Emergency personnel rushed in, assessing the pretend damage and carrying pretend victims out to vans equipped as medical stations.

Up in a skybox, Lamm and Romero, cofounders of Black Sage Technologies, monitored the drone-tracking equipment they’ve spent the past few years developing. Almost immediately after the drone lifted off, Lamm and Romero’s radar detected it. Their AI-­powered software identified it as a drone (and not, say, a bird), and their tripod-­mounted cameras tracked it as it made its way over the crowd. As they heard the ominous buzzing overhead and watched the college kids pretend to die, Romero and Lamm allowed themselves a small measure of satisfaction—Black Sage’s tracking system worked, and in the event of an actual attack it could give authorities a few crucial extra minutes to mobilize. Mostly, though, Romero and Lamm felt alarmed, knowing all they could do was watch. “Holy shit,” Romero remembers thinking. “We can do everything but stop this catastrophic incident from occurring.”

Shaken and stirred, they returned to Black Sage’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and spent a year enhancing their system so that it can now not only track drones but also bring them safely to the ground using radio-frequency-jamming technology. There is only one small hitch: Like almost every drone-­interdiction technology in development, frequency jammers run afoul of several US laws, most of which were passed when people hadn’t dreamed of owning their own unmanned aircraft. Romero and Lamm’s solution to the mock terror in the stadium—a solution that they have shown can reliably counter the threats drones pose to targets as varied as prisons, airports, and ­arenas—is illegal here, which leaves the future of Black Sage’s technology, like the future of drones themselves, very much up in the air.

THE TWO INVENTORS met in 2013 through a mutual friend in Boise. Romero, 31, grew up on a 2,200-acre cattle ranch 50 miles south of the city, the prototypical boy-tinkerer making miracles out of scrap metal. He built lots of dune buggies, motorcycles, and other contraptions, most of which worked, one of which burst into flames. He taught himself computer programming on his family’s IBM 386. After graduating from college in 2007, he started a software company called Tsuvo that performed regression analysis—taking large data sets from disparate government agencies, some of which involved thousands of statistics, and distilling them into clean, color-coded graphics that even nonstatisticians could understand. This kind of massive data crunching and predictive analysis, useful to bureaucracies both here and abroad, led him to live for varying amounts of time in Chile, Palau, and finally, Thailand. It also introduced him to the power of machine-­learning algorithms, which helped make quick work of even the thorniest data sets.

Where Romero is an adrenaline fiend—ask about the mountain bike perched in his office and he’ll show you a photo of himself on the bike, halfway through a backflip—Lamm, 45, likes nothing more than sailing with his two sons on a quiet lake. He is deliberate and thoughtful, choosing his words carefully, not out of caution but from an engineer’s appreciation of what’s precise and what’s not. While earning a PhD concentrated on machine vision in the late ’90s, he developed an algorithm that enabled a tractor-­­mounted camera to tell the difference between cotton plants and weeds, allowing farmers to spray herbicide more accurately. In the aftermath of al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in 2000 (an explosive-­laden speedboat crashed into the ship, killing 17 sailors), he helped a US Navy and Coast Guard contractor develop a robotic vision system that allowed ships to detect and quickly respond to speedboat attacks. (With your own vessel rocking and an enemy boat closing in fast, it’s surprisingly difficult to track ships on the water.) He also took part in constructing the warning system in Washington, DC, that locks onto commercial airplanes that drift into restricted airspace and beams an unmistakable red-red-green, red-red-green laser signal into the cockpit to alert the plane’s pilots to fly elsewhere. After more than a decade living and working in Napa Valley, California, he relocated to Boise in 2012, in part so his wife could move her winery there.

Lamm and Romero first crossed paths when their mutual friend asked for their help landing a government contract: The state of Idaho wanted to install a new warning system on a highway to prevent cars from crashing into animals after dark. The existing warning system flashed a light whenever a deer or an elk crossed the road, but because the signal would also light up whenever the wind sent leaves and branches tumbling across the pavement—which was often—drivers came to ignore the warning lights altogether. The highway developed one of the highest wildlife crash rates in the state, and when Romero was home from Thailand for a month visiting his family for Christmas, the friend invited him and Lamm to a brainstorming session at a coffee shop. Could some combination of Lamm’s expertise in robotic vision and ­Romero’s experience with machine learning help solve the highway problem? “After our friend introduced us, he hardly got a word in,” Romero says. “We got into this virtuous cycle of building on each other’s ideas.”

The pair got to work. Near the highway, they set up a Doppler radar (to detect moving objects) along with an infrared camera (for nighttime viewing) and routed the output to Romero, who had returned to Thailand for a few months to finish some work. To train his machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between animals and clutter, he would spend 45 minutes of his lunchtime each day (perfect for nocturnal sightings in Idaho) watching the infrared images and signaling yes or no as to whether they were wildlife. The system accumulated thousands of data points on the moving objects that crossed the camera’s field of view—speed, acceleration, direction—and once that data was correlated with Romero’s yes/no designations, the algorithm learned to recognize what probably was an animal and what probably wasn’t.

“It’s a beautiful algorithm that takes data from radar and enriches it with close probabilities,” Romero says. Rather than respond to a potential threat like a conventional alarm system—a so-called deterministic response, where almost any stimulus sets off a signal—their system would trigger a probabilistic response. They set the alarm to flash if it determined with a 70 percent probability that the moving object was an elk or a deer as opposed to, say, tumbleweed. False alarms plummeted, drivers began to trust the new system, and in the three months that they field-tested it during the winter of 2014, collisions dropped to zero.

Around the time that Romero and Lamm were focusing on preventing accidents on the ground, more and more people started worrying about crashes in the sky. Once the province of military developers, then of rich folks who could afford the technology, drones soared into the mainstream in 2013 when Chinese drone maker DJI introduced the Phantom, the first consumer-­priced unmanned aircraft system. It jump-started what Marke Gibson, the FAA’s drone expert and a former Air Force general, calls “the most fundamental change in aviation in our lifetime.” With hundreds of thousands of new aircraft navigating increasingly crowded airspace, Lamm and Romero noticed there were alarmingly few ways to keep track of the errant ones. What’s more, the radar tracking systems that did exist could rarely distinguish between large birds and drones, a problem similar to what they had encountered on the highway in Idaho. Seeing an opportunity to cash in on an emerging market, Romero and Lamm founded Black Sage in July of 2014 to adapt their wildlife-detection system to the new and more urgent problems posed by drones.

The adaptation wasn’t as simple as taking their existing radar and camera equipment and pointing it skyward, though: Romero and Lamm had to write new software to process the ever-­changing latitude, longitude, and altitude of an incoming target, all while taking into account the curvature of the Earth. Lamm wrote “slew-to-cue” algorithms so that whenever the radar picked up an incoming object, it would engage the camera, which then would track the object at a near-­continuous 30 times per second. Later he and Romero added an infrared camera to detect the differential heat patterns between drones and the surrounding air. They headed to the scrubby hills above Boise to train the software, aiming the camera and radar at drones as well as the birds riding the thermals and the waterfowl in the wetlands below. For the drones and the birds, the system would measure acceleration, speed, heading, cross-­section, surface area, whether the object had moving wings or propellers, and hundreds of other factors. “We didn’t have to know what makes these differences” between drones and other flying objects, Romero says. “The AI figured it out.”

By the summer of 2015 they had a system that could reliably detect an incoming drone about half a kilometer away, identify it, and stay locked on it regardless of evasive maneuvers. It was a breakthrough for them and a potential resource for anyone interested in keeping tabs on nearby drones. When the college security official invited Lamm and Romero to demo their system during the simulated nerve gas attack, he saw firsthand how the Black Sage system could track a drone. He also learned there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it.

YOU’D THINK SHOOTING one down would be the easiest way to do it. After all, in 2015 a guy in Kentucky, pissed off that a drone was hovering over his property, grabbed his shotgun and shot the damn thing out of the sky. Simple enough. But it threw him into a thicket of legal trouble that he couldn’t escape for months. Under FAA rules, drones are considered aircraft: It’s just as illegal to shoot at one as it is to shoot at a Piper Cub, if for no other reason than you can’t control where (or on what or whom) a falling drone will land. The government has taken steps to prevent people from doing dumb things with their drones: Last summer the FAA released licensing and registration rules to compel drone buyers to learn how to fly responsibly. Drone manufacturers have taken actions too, integrating no-fly zones into the aircrafts’ GPS systems. Both measures are easy to get around, though, which explains why the FAA receives more than 100 reports per month of drones flying near aircraft—more than triple the rate it was seeing in 2014. No one knows what would happen if a drone got sucked into a jet engine, although computer simulations at Virginia Tech suggest that it would rip apart the engine’s fan blades in less than 0.005 second.

The problem goes well beyond aircraft. The Pentagon, spurred by reports that ISIS is using drones for surveillance and bomb delivery, has requested $20 million for antidrone research. Recently the Federal Bureau of Prisons posted a request for information on how to equip penitentiaries with antidrone systems (the better to stop drones from dropping contraband into prison yards). “Every prison, every airport, every facility with sensitive equipment outdoors, stadiums, amusement parks, racetracks … everybody is now worried about drones,” says James Williams, an aviation specialist at the international law firm Dentons. In short, what used to be a two-dimensional security problem—stopping intruders at ground level—has now become a three-­dimensional one, as security breaches can come from above.

With US sales expected to ­triple over the next three years, drones are democratizing the air to an unprecedented degree, and Black Sage is only one of a handful of companies trying to solve the problem. One of the more promising, if flawed, systems in the works comes from British company OpenWorks Engineering, which has produced a bazooka-­like device called SkyWall 100 that physically captures a drone with a net; the system won a recent competition for drone defense in urban areas, but it’s not effective much beyond 100 meters. In Holland, police have experimented with using eagles to attack drones, but they ­haven’t figured out how to protect the birds’ feet from the spinning blades, and the raptors have to be trained for months. In the fall of 2015, in their own first attempt to counter a drone, Lamm and Romero rigged a ­couple of ultra-high-powered spotlights to one of their tripods. When a drone approached, radar would detect it, cameras would track it, and with the touch of a button, 12 million candlepower of light would blind the drone and disable its video and espionage capabilities. It worked well at night, but when they demo’d the system for a customer in the Middle East, the desert sun rendered the lights useless against attacking drones.

Shortly after the high-­wattage experiment, Romero went to an international security conference in Dubai in early 2016, where he met the owner of a company that makes radio jammers to protect armored vehicles in war zones. IEDs are often triggered by radio waves—via Wi-Fi or cell phone—and the company had produced a device that, mounted on a Humvee, broadcasted jamming signals at a broad range of frequencies in all directions. This got Romero and Lamm thinking about how frequency jamming could apply to their own efforts: Consumer drones are controlled through the public part of the radio spectrum (either 2.4 or 5.8 GHz). Blasting radio waves at those specific frequencies—jamming them—makes a drone deaf to its controller, which would cause the drone to return home or settle to the ground. A similar outcome would occur if you jammed the GPS frequency or what’s called the low-frequency L-band.

Frequency jamming is an elegant solution that doesn’t involve shotguns or trained animals, but it comes at a cost. Because these are public frequencies, jamming them disables other common electronic devices in the area, such as Wi-Fi, wireless home phones, and even garage door openers. Jamming GPS signals is even more dangerous—it can interfere with emergency responders and airplane-guidance systems. That is why jamming radio frequencies and GPS signals is illegal in the US. Still, Romero and Lamm thought that if they could jam only those frequency bands most commonly used in drone communication—and if they could limit their jamming to objects at which they have aimed their system—they could minimize the disruption to surrounding radio and GPS communications.

Since they couldn’t legally experiment near their headquarters in Boise, Romero flew to the Middle East to test out frequency jammers. After two and a half months of trial and error, Romero and Lamm created a new system that could bring down a drone with minimal impact on surrounding radio and GPS operations. Despite knowing that they couldn’t market it in their home country, Romero and Lamm pressed forward. “I know I’m going to regret saying this, but our thought process was, who cares about the States?” Lamm says. “We’ve got a $100 million customer in a hot, sandy place who doesn’t care about the FCC, and we have a solution they’ll love—so let’s do it.”

Lamm and Romero are understandably vague about where they test and sell their equipment overseas. There’s a spy-versus-spy element to the business, and you’re ahead of the game if your adversaries don’t know that you can counter their drone attack. A few times over several months, they called and updated me with their latest test results, and with each new dispatch they described various improvements and setbacks. Last summer I finally got a chance to see the Black Sage system for myself. On a remote hillside, I sat with Romero and Lamm inside a trailer set up as a command center. The drone-tracking gear consisted of two tripods: One held a cluster of eight Doppler radars resembling white iPads and, above them, the hi-def and infrared cameras; the other held the jammers—three white cylinders the size of paper towel tubes.

An assistant launched the quadcopter and flew it beyond eyesight, maybe a kilometer away. Moments after launch a white dot appeared on the radar-­connected monitor. A readout confirmed that the object was a drone. Instantly the cameras locked onto it; and when Lamm zoomed in with the hi-def camera, we could see the quadcopter’s body and rotors. Lamm and Romero shot commands back and forth like a pilot and copilot. “Buzzer on,” Romero hollered. Lamm flipped a switch. A jammer emitted a storm of radio waves, blocking the control signal and paralyzing the aircraft. “Buzzer off!” Romero commanded, and the drone resumed the attack. “Buzzer on,” and it froze again. This time they kept the jammer engaged, and the drone settled to the ground.

Since then Lamm and Romero have updated their system yet again. A recent version, tested for an Asian counterterrorism unit last September, established a zoned system with a series of potential responses. If a drone approached within a certain distance of a prohibited zone, the system would jam its Wi-Fi and sever its connection to its controller. If the drone kept coming, that would mean it had been programmed to attack, and at that point the system would jam its GPS frequencies. “With zero human intervention, our system detected and identified the drone and took it down to the ground,” Romero says. “At that point, it was handshakes, smiles, and a happy customer.”

Though the Black Sage jammer includes a narrow-beam antenna to minimize frequency disruptions in the surrounding area, Romero and Lamm concede that using the latest version of their system in a crowded urban area could cause hundreds of businesses to lose their Wi-Fi for up to 30 seconds. It’s not something Lamm would use casually, even if the FCC allowed it. “It all depends on the threat level,” he says. “If you see a drone headed for an airport right now,” it’d be worth the risk of knocking out the surrounding Wi-Fi.

It also depends on the environment. Lamm says he’d be comfortable using his system at an airport far from the city center or a stadium on the outskirts of town. Another good example, he says, is what Utah legislators had in mind last year when they passed a law that allows incident commanders at wildfires to use frequency jamming to neutralize any drones interfering with their work. The law is so new that it hasn’t been tested yet: Legal experts wonder what the FCC will do when an incident occurs, perhaps in the next fire season. (The FCC wouldn’t comment on Black Sage or the issue of frequency jamming.) Meanwhile, the FAA is hosting biweekly meetings with the FCC and other three-letter agencies to work out standards for what kind of antidrone systems can be developed and under what conditions they can be safely deployed. “The major issue is not just the technology, but the application of technology in a civil environment,” says Gibson, the FAA’s drone man. “We’ve never been in this position before; it’s the new frontier.”

Romero, Lamm, and others in their young industry hope that any new regulations will include a variance for emergency jamming. “I don’t think this is going to become real until we experience a catastrophe,” Romero says. Which would sound more cynical if he hadn’t witnessed a hundred kids pretending to die in a football stadium. Everyone then knew a drone was coming. The next time might be different.

[maritimecyprus]

(http://www.MaritimeCyprus.com) A brief history of Lloyd’s Register: To turn back to 1760 is to realise just how much the world has changed since Lloyd’s Register was founded. At that time the sailing ship was the only reliable and speedy form of transport and the steam engine’s full potential was only just being developed. Industrialisation of the western world had not yet accelerated to encourage the wide-spread exploitation of natural resources such as oil and gas, and the nuclear and jet ages were not even envisaged.

World’s first classification society

The Society for the Registry of Shipping was set up in 1760 by customers of Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in Lombard Street, London. The aim was to give merchants and underwriters recorded information on the quality of their vessels. The Register Book listed vessels rated, or classed, after the condition of their hulls and equipment had been surveyed. The subscriptions generated by the Register Book paid for the surveyors to carry out the work. This was the true beginning of classification and the Society was the world’s first classification society.

Lloyds coffee house

Classification was and continues to be all about quality. Put simply, it is an assessment against defined standards of the condition of a ship either under construction or already in existence. From 1768 the Society used a1 to indicate a ship of the highest class. From 1775 A1 was used and is now famous as a symbol of quality.

Rival registers

Disputes over the Society’s classification system from 1799 to 1833 led to the establishment of a second register and brought both parties to the verge of bankruptcy. Happily agreement was reached in 1834 when they united to form Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping, establishing a General Committee and charitable values.

The 19th century brought huge changes, as steam superseded sail and timber gave way to iron and steel, creating ships of unprecedented size. Lloyd’s Register met these challenges, formulating guidelines based on practical experience.

The organisation rapidly earned widespread respect, giving evidence to government committees and receiving requests to appoint surveyors abroad. The first surveyor employed outside the UK appears to have been appointed in 1812 when the Shipowners’ Register engaged a surveyor in Newfoundland. The same Register went on to employ surveyors in Le Havre (1826), Antwerp and Ostend (1829), and Port Louis in Mauritius (1832), of whom we know only the name of the latter, Alex Gordon. These were probably all non-exclusive arrangements.

When the reconstituted Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping came into being in 1834, the General Committee rejected persistent overseas requests for the appointment of surveyors abroad, preferring to wait until the Society’s network of outports in the UK had been properly established. The Quebec Board of Trade in particular made repeated requests for a surveyor due to the number of ships being built on behalf of British owners or for sale once they reached British ports. As a result, in 1852 the Society sent out Thomas Menzies as the resident exclusive surveyor for Quebec and the St Lawrence River. Menzies and his assistant, Charles Coker, did much to help local shipbuilders raise standards of construction. It was Menzies’ idea in 1853 to use the Maltese Cross in the Register Book and on the classification certificates to denote a ship built under special survey.

Further appointments were made in continental Europe in the 1860s including at Antwerp (1866) and Rotterdam (1868). Louis Meyer, the Antwerp surveyor, seems to have been the first person appointed with responsibility for an entire country when he was promoted to cover Belgium in 1869. Once a special sub-committee had been set up to consider establishing more overseas surveyors, there was a flurry of appointments. The first was the transfer of Joseph Tucker as exclusive surveyor to Shangai in 1869. Other appointments included non-exclusive surveyors for Calcutta, Hong Kong, Melbourne Sydney and Hobart.

By the early 1880s almost half of the world’s shipping was classed by Lloyd’s Register. In 1914, with an increasingly international outlook, it was entirely appropriate that the organisation’s name was changed simply to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. From 1916 the organisation started to establish many national and area committees to promote better understanding of local conditions.

Diversification

Inspection of materials and fabrication was an intrinsic part of the classification process and by the early 1800s surveyors were applying their skills onshore. For many years these land-based inspections were related to ships and the soundness and safety of their construction, from the testing of anchors and cables to the quality of iron and steel. As vessels became more sophisticated, so opportunities arose for the Society to extend its inspection role to other non-marine areas, beginning with refrigerated cold stores for the Port of London Authority in 1911.

With its base in one of the world’s leading manufacturing nations, the expertise and reputation of Lloyd’s Register became attractive to many organisations overseas eager to have assurance on the quality of goods being produced in and shipped from the UK. The Society’s international network also led to invitations from foreign governments, businesses and organisations to carry out inspections. The First World War brought further opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of inspection as means to provide an assurance of quality, from shell steel made for the French, to copper pipes and other products made for shipping in the USA. By 1934 surveyors were inspecting ten million cubic feet of cold storage, not just in the UK but in places such as Antwerp and Basle, Leopoldville and Matadi in the Congo, and Singapore.

Lloyd’s Register retained its place as the leading classification society throughout the inter-war years, thanks in part to its significant overseas operations. It also sowed the seeds of an important future part of the organisation’s work in the transportation and energy sectors. Long-standing clients with interests beyond shipping began to employ Lloyd’s Register in new fields, most notably the oil industry.All this activity expanded considerably after 1945, eventually leading to the formation of a separate division for non-marine work, providing a new focus for yet more growth.

Technological innovation

During the Second World War the demands of war accelerated the pace of change in shipping and industry and Lloyd’s Register helped validate many of the innovations. Reconstruction work following the war allowed Lloyd’s Register to gradually revive its activities overseas. The mid-1950s saw a long boom in shipping with many new challenges as shipping and shipbuilding influence shifted towards the east. Lloyd’s Register saw remarkable growth of its non-marine operations. The organisation provided consultancy and inspection services to atomic energy plants including the UK’s Calder Hall, which in 1956 became the world’s first nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale.

In the decades following 1960, Lloyd’s Register facilitated change as the shipping boom continued. Ships became ever larger and containerisation changed the world by revolutionising the flow of goods. The oil crisis of the early 1970s led to a deep depression in shipping, but Lloyd’s Register rode the storm through its involvement with the expanding energy industry and offshore business, led by the pioneering development for extraction of oil and gas under the North Sea.

There followed another difficult period as shipping scarcely grew in terms of tonnage until 1990. At the same time the offshore industry suffered from a collapse in oil prices. Nevertheless, Lloyd’s Register strengthened its position in Asia, diversified its offshore operations around the world and consolidated its position as the leading classification society for passenger ships and liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers. One of the most striking developments was the success of Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA), a management systems business established in 1985.

A consultancy-based rail business was first considered in the early 1990s and Lloyd’s Register Rail was formed in 1996. Real growth began only a decade later as governments around the world invested massive sums in major rail projects from the Netherlands to Dubai and Taiwan. In 2015, LR sold its rail business to Ricardo plc, recognizing that it was better placed to provide the strategic focus on the rail sector needed to build a world class global rail business.

On 2 July 2012, Lloyd’s Register converted its status from an industrial and provident society to a company limited by shares, called Lloyd’s Register Group Limited. The shares in Lloyd’s Register Group Limited are owned by a parent, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a registered charity. Find out more about the Foundation at http://www.lrfoundation.org.uk

Since the turn of the century, Lloyd’s Register has undergone a cultural transformation to ensure greater financial and commercial awareness. The organisation continues to grow and serve client needs, remaining competitive in a rapidly changing world.

The above is a recent LR logo, which was updated to the below one.

Lloyd’s Register – It all started with a cup of coffee (www.MaritimeCyprus.com) A brief history of Lloyd’s Register: To turn back to 1760 is to realise just how much the world has changed since Lloyd’s Register was founded.

[computer-basics]

Impossible Foods made huge waves in the food industry when it came up with a way of isolating and using “heme” molecules from plants to mimic the blood found in animal meat (also comprised of heme), bringing a new depth of flavor to its vegetarian burger.

This week at CES, the company is presenting the next act in its mission to get the average consumer to switch to more sustainable, plant-based proteins: it unveiled its version of pork — specifically ground pork, which will be sold as a basic building block for cooking as well as in sausage form. It’s a critical step, given that pork is the most-eaten animal product in the world.

Impossible has set up shop in CES’s outdoor area, situated near a line of food trucks, and it will be cooking food for whoever wants to come by. (I tasted a selection of items made from the new product — a steamed bun, a meatball, some noodles and a lettuce wrap — and the resemblance is uncanny, and not bad at all.) And after today, the new product will be making its way first to selected Burger King restaurants in the US before appearing elsewhere.

It may sound a little far-fetched to see a food startup exhibiting and launching new products at a consumer electronics show, attended by 200,000 visitors who will likely by outnumbered by the number of TVs, computers, phones, and other electronic devices on display. Indeed, Impossible is the only food exhibitor this year.

But if you ask Pat Brown, the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods (pictured right, at the sunny CES stand in the cold wearing a hat), the company is in precisely the right place.

“To me it’s very natural to be at CES,” he said in an interview this week at the show. “The food system is the most important technology on earth. It is absolutely a technology, and an incredibly important one, even if it doesn’t get recognised as such. The use of animals as a food technology is the most destructive on earth. And when Impossible was founded, it was to address that issue. We recognised it as a technology problem.”

That is also how Impossible has positioned itself as a startup. Its emergence (it was founded 2011) dovetailed with an interesting shift in the world of tech. The number of startups were booming, fuelled by VC money and a boom in smartphones and broadband. At the same time, we were starting to see a new kind of startup emerging built on technology but disrupting a wide range of areas not traditionally associated with technology. Technology VCs, looking for more opportunities (and needing to invest increasingly larger funds), were opening themselves up to consider more of the latter opportunities.

Impossible has seized the moment. It has raised around $777 million to date from a list of investors more commonly associated with tech companies — they include Khosla, Temasek, Horizons Ventures, GV, and a host of celebrities — and Impossible is now estimated to be valued at around $4 billion. Brown told me it is currently more than doubling revenues annually.  

With his roots in academia, the idea of Brown (who has also done groundbreaking work in HIV research) founding and running a business is perhaps as left-field a development as a food company making the leap from commodity or packaged good business to tech. Before Impossible, Brown said that he had “zero interest” in becoming an entrepreneur: the bug that has bitten so many others at Stanford (where he was working prior to founding Impossible) had not bitten him.

“I had an awesome job where I followed my curiosity, working on problems that I found interesting and important with great colleagues,” he said.

That changed when he began to realise the scale of the problem resulting from the meat industry, which has led to a well-catalogued list of health, economic and environmental impacts (including increased greenhouse gas emissions and the removal of natural ecosystems to make way for farming land. “It is the most important and consequential issue for the future of the world, and so the solution has to be market-based,” he said. “The only way we can replace themes that are this destructive is by coming up with a better technology and competing.”

Pork is a necessary step in that strategy to compete. America, it seems, is all about beef and chicken when it comes to eating animals. But pigs and pork take the cake when you consider meat consumption globally, accounting for 38% of all meat production, with 47 pigs killed on average every second of every day. Asia, and specifically China, figure strongly in that demand. Consumption of pork in China has increased 140% since 1990, Impossible notes.

Pigs’ collective footprint in the world is also huge: there are 1.44 billion of them, and their collective biomass totals 175 kg, twice as much as the biomass of all wild terrestrial vertebrates, Impossible says.

Whether Impossible’s version of pork will be enough or just an incremental step is another question. Ground meat is not the same as creating structured proteins that mimic the whole-cuts that are common (probably more common) when it comes to how pork is typically cooked (ditto for chicken and beef and other meats).

That might likely require more capital and time to develop.

For now, Impossible is focused on building out its business on its own steam: it’s not entertaining any thoughts of selling up, or even of licensing out its IP for isolating and using soy leghemoglobin — the essential “blood” that sets its veggie proteins apart from other things on the market. (I think of licensing out that IP, as the equivalent of how a tech company might white label or create APIs for third parties to integrate its cool stuff into their services.)

That means there will be inevitable questions down the line about how Impossible will capitalise to meet demand for its products. Brown said that for now there are no plans for IPOs or to raise more externally, but pointed out that it would have no problem doing either.

Indeed, the company has built up an impressive bench of executives and other talent to meet those future scenarios. Earlier this year, Impossible hired Dennis Woodside — the former Dropbox, Google and Motorola star– as its first president. And its CFO, David Lee, joined from Zynga back in 2015, with a stint also in the mass-market food industry, having been at Del Monte prior to that.

Lee told me that the company has essentially been running itself as a public company internally in preparation for a time when it might follow in the footsteps of its biggest competitor, Beyond Meat, and go public.

“From a tech standpoint I’m absolutely confident that we can outperform what we get from animals in affordability, nutrition and deliciousness,” said Brown. “This entire industry is most destructive by far and has major responsibility in terms of climate and biodiversity, but it going to be history and we are going to replace it.”

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/36yk0kd via IFTTT

[luxeennui]

Alone With Soma: A Video Essay

Reality of Self: A Dating Sim & A Horror Game Hit It Off...

Introduction

“Who are we to declare the human perspective as the benchmark against which to measure everything universally?”  Was the response to a post on the Steam Soma forums by user DiMaggio.  I had to google whether or not he’d coped it from a philosopher, but it seems his own.  This question, among many others, is raised by the landmark horror game Soma by Friction Labs.  The culmination of many years of fear-inducing and awe-inspiring games, Soma stands as a bastion of what good psychological horror can be.  It’s immersive, world-shattering, and philosophical, leaving the player to contemplate questions that are usually reserved for graduate theses.  As Markiplier put it in his Let’s Play, “Don’t just challenge people in terms of gameplay, challenge them in terms of understanding.”  Soma was not the first to bring up these issues, but it presented them in a setting many thought befitting of the subject matter: horror.

Ever since I took my first course in undergrad and learned that there was a word for the way I viewed the world, nihilism, I’ve wrestled with existential dread.  I’m haunted by the lack of meaning in the world, how devoid the world is of any semblance of inherent purpose.  Sci-fi, in particular, causes this to flare up in me.

In George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino’s hard sci-fi book, “The Killing Star” you are met with humanity at its bleakest moment: only two survivors on Earth after being wiped out by an alien force.  You must follow their stories and the stories of the few other survivors out in space who are awaiting destruction.  The book is an exploration of hopelessness and helplessness.  There is an inevitable end, one of death and destruction of the human race.  There is no coming back, no pushing through with human determination or any of the bullshit sci-fi writers have sold us in the past.  There is only destruction.

When I finished the book I was shook, to say the least.  It renewed my sense of existential dread in a way I hadn’t known before.  I became listless, depressed, and generally unhappy.  It is something that always lies beneath the surface, but some things bring it to the top with a blinding force.  I am left feeling empty and alone in the universe.  This is a feeling of horror.  It is the horror that comes naturally to me and it is the horror that Friction Labs tried to capture within their game.  By setting the scene in a desolate wasteland without any real hope of your protagonist actually making it out, you are made to suffer, made to push your way through this world to an inevitable end, to the destruction of the human race, of Earth, of everything you had ever known--even if it had been dead long before you woke up in that chair.

I’d also like to talk about a dating sim.  So, listeners, it’s time to buckle in.

It’s time.  It’s time to enter the holo-sim.  It’s time to go to Phi.  It’s time… to talk about consciousness, reality, and what it means to be human.

PART I: The Games

In September of 2017 Benjamin Rivers, Inc., released, “Alone With You,” a sci-fi indie dating simulator.  On its surface, it is a cute, story-rich visual novel.  Yet, below that surface lurks the same horror found in Soma.  Although, in AWY, it is not horror, it is simply existence.  In fact, it’s okay with attempting to be human, it’s pushing that boundary without sparking fear.  The developer said of it, “Alone with you is meant to provoke real, honest feelings.  The goal of the game was to see if the player could feel real things towards very not-real people.”  So why does this dating simulator feel so much like a horror game to me?  While playing it, I couldn’t help but harken back to the themes Soma presented to me so succinctly.  And it begs the question: do these themes have to be fear-inducing?  Are the things in Soma, besides the monsters, besides the darkness, besides the emptiness--are they inherently scary?

You start the same in both games, alone, unaware of what’s happening in the outside world, and awaiting some sort of purpose and answers.  You know who you are in Soma, you’ve been given a name and a former life.  In AWY, you do not know your past, name, or history.  Instead, it is you.  Your name is the one that the game speaks to you with.  It is your identity put into this story.  There are two different levels at play in both games.  In Soma you are removed from these issues because you are not Simon; in Alone With You, you are removed because you are not the one experiencing them, at least not explicitly.

In Soma, your companion is not an AI, although they are not human.  Catherine Chun, a resurrected brain scan of one of the Design Engineers, greets you early on and accompanies you for the journey.  She acts as her former self would have, just as you do.  She has a plan, a purpose, and a desire to carry it out.  She sees you as the missing link for the completion of her grand plan: that of launching the ARK, a simulation that houses all of the brain scans she did at PATHOS-II, the company under the sea you’ve suddenly found yourself in.  By launching it into space, she is buying the simulation thousands of years instead of the mere decades it might have underneath the sea.  She views this as the heroic continuation of humanity, at least in some form.  She is your guiding hand in the game and is fairly reliable as a companion.  She does not coddle you, but she is still human.  Unlike Simon, Catherine has accepted her fate.  She went to the bottom of the Ocean with PATHOS-II, watched the meteor destroy the surface of the Earth, and ultimately watched the AI, the WAU, malfunction and take over the facilities, killing everyone inside.  And now, after having conceived and brought to life the ARK, she finds herself resurrected with Simon as her only hope to achieve the end she worked so hard for, the end that she watched so many people kill themselves over.  Her motivations are clear and you, as Simon, must follow her, for you really have nothing else you can do.  At the start, your only motivation is moving forward, somewhere, and soon she tells you of the ARK, entices you into believing you could be on the ARK too.  But it is your own understanding or lack thereof, that coaxes you to follow her.

During the game you’re confronted three separate times with your predicament: first, when you discover that you are not, in fact, human anymore.  Second, when you have to transfer your self from one suit to another.  And third, when you once again transfer your self into the ARK.  But--it is not a transfer.  There is no cut and paste in this world, only copy-paste.  There are four Simons in this game: Human Simon, Robot Simon, Diving Suit Simon, and ARK Simon.  As a player, you jump from Simon to Simon, not having to experience the lack of shift.  For you, it is a continuation.  For Simon, it feels that way.  Each time, the new Simon feels like he merely moved on, not always thinking of the Simon left behind.  When you go from Robot Simon to Diving Suit Simon, you have a choice to either let your copy wake up later on or to kill it.  Diving Suit Simon rightfully freaks out over this and he and Catherine exchange a metaphor: one of a coin toss.  DS Simon believes he “won the coin toss” and ended up in the second body, but--and he never really elaborates on this--something else, perhaps this new copy? ended up in the first one.  It is here we see that a lack of thought protects him.

Let’s take a break from the spooky scary stuff and talk about love for a moment.  In Alone With You, you have an AI companion, who, really, I think is the one you’re supposed to fall in love with because I certainly did.  The AI is very much human: it is concerned for you, wants to know your opinions, has a certain type of affection for you, and almost seems to express jealousy at times.  It is very upfront with you: you need to get off the planet ASAP and you can’t do it alone.  You’ll need the help of people that used to work on the planet, but they’re dead--so you’ll need to go and look around for some extra parts and at night speak to simulations of the dead people.  Got it?  Easy.  So you set out on your journey, finding your way from site to site, corpses and stories at every turn.  From the site-based structure to the littered bodies, to the eerie emptiness of it all, I was reminded of Soma, of this story that oozed horror, that made the loneliness feel so real, even when you weren’t truly alone.  But in Alone With You, with its bright colors and beautiful soundtrack, it makes me feel oddly serene, even knowing the clock is ticking in some sense, that I’m the only living thing on that planet.  The AI is there for me, each night I’m greeted by vibrant, stable people working to help me.  There is so much hope in it all.  And it’s not hope for humanity--we know that Earth is done for, that’s the whole reason for the project started by the company that owns the colony you’re on.  Hudson-Cartier, the company, spent 16 years on a project that ultimately failed, ultimately led to so many deaths.  And yet, when I step into that Holo-chamber, I’m transported to a world with hope, love, and, strangely, joy.  I am asking myself the same questions as I did with Soma: are these people… human?  Are these simulations… real?  What does reality mean in this context?  If these simulations feel real and experience is our gauge for reality, does that not mean what they feel is real, is human?

But also, we get to date, which is arguably much more pleasant than running from strange, humanoid-like creatures.  And in this, you need not think about I, who you are.  Simon contemplates this throughout Soma, pushing you to contemplate it too.  In Alone With You, it’s a suggestion: what do you think about these people, these people who are not you.  My main thesis is that Soma and Alone With You, although vastly different, express the same core concepts and do so beautifully.  By looking at the concepts and how the games approach them, we can see why Soma’s expression of the ideas is terrifying and why AWY’s expression is eerie and unsettling at worst.  Ultimately, both games lead us down the same path but with radically differing scenery.

PART 1.5: A Brief Note On Gameplay (because I guess these are video games)

Soma should have been a visual novel, ala Edith Finch or the like -- at least, that’s what I whole-heartedly believe.  As Joseph Anderson pointed out in his video, the gameplay is lacking.  Because he did such a great job of outlining what it lacks, I won’t spend too much time on it.  There are elements in Soma that must be “played” for them to have the same impact, they simply would not hit as hard if they were not in an interactive media.  The tone, as we’ve seen with games like Edith Finch, is not solely reliant on combat, or the type of interaction you have with the world.  As a player, you can experience just as much horror thinking there is something out there as you would knowing something was out there and it was coming to get you.

There’s a quiet part of Soma, when you’re on your way to Phi, at the bottom of the ocean, alone.  At least, you think you’re alone, but in the shadows, in the darkness that lurks on the sides of you, is the figure of Ross, one of the humanoids that has his own desires--that of destroying the rogue AI that has taken over the facilities.  He tells you that he will follow you, and as a player, if you are not super observant, if you keep your eyes down and forward on the road lit by blue lights, then you can easily miss him in the dark.  But he is there, watching, waiting.  There is something truly unsettling about this to me--that you cannot interact with him, that he is always out of reach, but he is there, present and menacing.  At this point, you’ve deduced that Ross probably won’t hurt you, but you don’t know his full intentions.  He still looks like every other monster you’ve encountered, every monster you’ve hidden and run from at every site.  I’m reminded of the fear I have surrounding AIs in games.  They’re omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent; the bounds of their power not always revealed.  Ross’ power isn’t fully revealed, you know he is plugged into the WAU, the AI, and subsequently can operate many of the systems within the PATHOS-II compound.  He never tries to hurt you outright, but the horror comes from possibility.  I think that if Soma had relied a lot more heavily on this type of possibility, they would have made a much scarier game.  But, I’m just a fucker with a philosophy degree, I can’t say much on game development.  (Yet--I will.)

Alone With You, when thinking about developer intentions, hits the mark pretty well.  The only thing in the game that really threw me and quite a few others off were the corpses, scattered about like trash, forgotten and degrading.  There isn’t much explanation for this, and only a few of the corpses make sense in their current positions.  There is one body, of an X-Ray tech, McKenna, who is left in his lab and ultimately dies of malnutrition, that makes sense--he was locked in there after beating a nurse, Darius, to death, presumably following a fight.  But, the corpse of Darius remains and we must assume that he died a while before McKenna, long enough for another member of the facility to lock McKenna away and leave a note on the computer about it.  So why wasn’t his corpse moved, especially given that the timeline denotes that some deaths were almost a year after the initial Rift Event?  In Colony B, one of the sites you can visit and the one that was hit the hardest when they lost contact with the AI, the Director, Pierre tells you in the holo-sim that eventually they had to leave bodies there because it was too much a drain on their resources, but it seems odd that they would choose the psychological burden of seeing the corpses over the burden of moving them.  Other than this, the game and its story are very clean and the visual-novel-like gameplay works well with the concept.

On my first playthrough, I did not know what to expect and I certainly did not expect what I got.  I was sold a cute dating sim and instead got an existentially-drenched, horror-filled scene of death and longing and loss.  This, at least for me, was an okay switch-a-roo pulled by the developers.  I don’t think their intent was to fully blindside the player since there isn’t any danger present in the game and it’s not like you’re dodging monsters, you’re more dodging scenes, listening as the AI grows more and more uncomfortable at the destruction.  From a story perspective, the AI stands more as your moral voice than your own protagonist, as you’re seeing it through their lense of guilt.  The AI feels--and this is important--they feel.  And you’re wandering through this world, helping them to process.  This structure, one devoid of previous history but always forging new experiences to have opinions and ideas about,  fits the tone of the game perfectly and I believe it’s why I was able to connect it to Soma so well.  Alone With You is my story, your story, every story you can make and insert into the framework.  Unlike many visual novels, you aren’t just discovering the story, you’re making it.  It’s a type of collaborative storytelling that I haven’t seen in a visual novel before, as they’ve made the world and protagonist ambivalent enough for me to form my own assumptions and conclusions about the world around me.

This is best expressed in the protagonist themselves.  And this is the hill I will die on with this game: I don’t believe the protagonist is in a human body, nor human in a traditional sense.  I think they are something created by the AI when it realized that everyone was dead, or at least seemed to be, and that time was running out for it to figure out what happened and appease its own guilt.  This explains their bare-bones past, with only vague allusions to their life back on Earth, before they came to the colony.  It would explain how they survive the explosion at the Comm tower, their lack of care for the world around them, as they are incomplete and not fully connected to the colony as the holo-sims were.  The protagonist is an amalgam, the perfect combination of human traits and memories as to make them believe they are human, feel they are human, and act as though they are human.  The holo-sim chamber isn’t for the protagonist, for you, it is instead for the holo-sims.  Even if the AI occasionally says it sees how it helps you, its main objective is to get the holograms to work better through interaction, a type of interaction it can’t provide.  The only wrench in this is that the AI does not have an option to escape, but it does have an option not to “die” alone, which I believe is the option it obviously wants you to pick, and after having crafted this elaborate story to get you to help it, it banks on you choosing that option.  I don’t believe the developer intended this, as I feel it would be too close to a sort of “it was all a dream” ending, but there is enough quiet space in the story that I can happily fill it with these thoughts and not have it disrupt too much.  An awfully beautiful hill to die on, isn’t it?

PART II: The Questions

There are three main questions that both games touch on:

Who is I, the self, the ego?

What is Real?

What constitutes “human?”

There are other questions, one in particular that I’ll touch on in my conclusion, but for now, I’ll focus on these, going through what each game says about them in turn, then finding the middle ground that both connects and divides them.

QUESTION I: Who is I, the self, the ego?

In Soma, you are directly confronted with this question as you play Simon, the protagonist.  It is your own self you are wrestling with.  You come to realize that you are not the same Simon that lived 100 years ago.  That was an entirely different self.  It was not the same Simon, even if he had the same memories.  The two could and do, at some points, exist simultaneously.  Yet, those Simons are different entities.  Their consciousness, experience, and reality, feel different, and so, in turn, they are different.  They are two completely different subjects, two different points of input, no matter if they have the same background.  The Self, in this, is completely reliant on experience, there is no self without that experience--as we see when Catherine isn’t “turned on” or put into something in the omnitool, she says she doesn’t experience the lack of time, it is merely an omission of that time.  She’s experiencing one moment and then the next without experiencing the time in between, even if it still “happens.”  In theory, that lack of experience is death.  She is dead to the world in those moments, revived when the power is turned back on.  This is getting into “sleep is also death” as an argument so I’ll stop here: we experience things subconsciously while asleep, there isn’t a complete omission of experience.  So put that argument back on your bulletin board and simmer down.

So, in Soma, the question of Self is fairly settled: you are you, you experience the things you do, any copies of the Self thereof are not you.  Any wrestling with the idea of Self is because Simon does not accept that it is not a coin toss; he wants to believe that there is a chance that his consciousness could still make its way onto the ARK, as he is when he launches it, as he is when he’s made it to the Diving Suit.  He wants so desperately to believe that he deludes himself, buys into the metaphor that is so obviously not the case.  And it’s not as if Catherine really helps--this is the one part where she isn’t actually helpful.  One could, and many have, argue that she intentionally lies to Simon in this aspect.  That she does nothing to dissuade his line of reasoning in regards to the coin toss, despite knowing that it only works as copies, not as a “brain transplant” as he says he wants.  Simon knows before the Diving Suit what will happen and he definitely knows what will happen before the ARK, but he is so caught up in it, so desperate for hope and the belief that he can find a future that isn’t at the bottom of the goddamn ocean, alone, rotting with an AI that he may or may not have killed that he doesn’t see it.

The Self in Soma is sealed, but what does it say about reality?

Alone With You

In Alone With You, we’re given a self-insert as a protagonist and their role in this is fairly ambivalent, a Miyazaki-like protagonist (go watch Big Joel’s video on this, please!).  You float through the world on the command of the AI, but you can make choices--your autonomy is evident in conversation and in who you choose to see more than once in the Holo-Chamber.  But the protagonist themself does not have opinions that differ from your own, you are never told what to think about a situation.  You are, in effect, the protagonist, not just controlling them.  They are you, you are them, so on and so forth.  So there isn’t much issue in that--but, you deal with it as it concerns the Simulations.  Each night, you visit a simulation of one of the four people whose help you need to rebuild the shuttle to get off the planet.  The simulations are built by the AI from information and memories they have--although they do not have all of their memories since the AI lost contact with most of them before they died.  They lack the end of their lives, and they have to wrestle with the information you bring to them: their choices made after their current self-knowing point.  They outright question and dismiss their own Selves at times, as W does in one of your first interactions with her.  She says, “All I have is this little garden.  And it isn’t even real.  And, I guess, nor am I.”  Although I’ll talk more about this exact idea in the next section, she acknowledges a Self within this, but then dismisses it in the same stroke.  She is there, present, but she isn’t Real.  The Self, who she is, exists but not on terms she knows, understands, or agrees with.

The construction of these holo-sims is fascinating to me, as it circumvents many of the problems presented in Soma.  They are made by the AI and stored within the AI’s database, meaning they aren’t bound to any external system and they can run “in the background,” meaning not projected, while the AI is on.  This idea is one I can’t really picture or conceive of because our tech doesn’t even come close to existing on a scale as large as this.  I guess it’s probably close to the compiling of code, a system running through itself, but the tech needed to even make a brain scan and then run it on only a computer… in both games, it’s beyond my comprehension, as it calls into question a lot about the tech itself and how it works.  In order not to get bogged down thinking about, I’ve hand waved it away with, “oh, ya know, future shit.”

But there are still some interesting differences in the tech within Alone With You that, as I said, fixes some of the problems that Soma presents.  Instead of being bound to external hardware, the Simulations are one version that persists throughout the game and the AI seems to be able to transfer them from system to system, as it tries to do at the end of the game by offering to send them with you.  They cannot circumvent the problem of a second-death, though.  These Simulations are not the human versions of themselves transferred into the system.  They are, as W describes them, “back-ups.”  She says, “The me you see… this is the most recent version.”  The AI is able to build them from what it knew and they are functionally consciousnesses.  The Self, in this, is made to believe itself is a self and there is only one current self.  They know of their past selves, and that makes them question the reality and meaning of their current self, but there is no denying, for them, that they are different than their old versions.  There is no possibility for delusion like there was for Simon.  They are fundamentally different selves, and that is where their dread lies, in the reality of their selves and the meaning that accompanies it, or their fear that meaning does not accompany it.

QUESTION II: What is Real?

Soma

What is experienced is reality.  There are hundreds of years of philosophy wrapped up in that statement: Kant’s revolutionary ideas about how our minds organize, parse, and shape the reality we perceive, Lacan’s ideas about how language shapes our minds and, in turn, our reality, Derrida’s ideas about how language is even shaped, so on and so forth.  To even get to such a concrete statement is to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Within Soma, reality is determined by who is experiencing it.  Your reality, as the player, shifts with each shift in Simon’s Self.  You follow the new Simon, until the end.  You perceive the world as Simon, winning that coin toss every time.  But that isn’t the largest challenge to your idea of reality.  Instead, it is the concept of the ARK.  At the end of Soma, when you find yourself on the ARK as the ARK Simon, you take a survey where you are asked: Do you think this new existence will be a life worth living?  This entire survey could take up a video on its own, but that one question hits close to home after such a game.  Is this new existence, this new reality, worth experiencing? There’s a quiet omission there--is this new existence worth experiencing, even if it isn’t Real?  And that question begs my original question: what is Real?

In religious studies, we speak on two distinct terms: real with a little r and real with a Big R.  Big R is Real -- the experienced, the emphasized as true; little r is perceived real, the perceived as true.  Virtual reality is considered real with a little r, at least right now.  But the ARK, that would be REAL, all caps.  It’s the experience of a consciousness that is entirely virtual, so the surroundings and reality match that which is experiencing, the virtual self.  This is the brain in a vat argument, that we can and will one day create something similar to the ARK.  Maybe, says Daddy Musk, we are already living in a simulation.  If it is functionally the same, does it matter?  And in truth, not really, since the consciousness you and I have is the one that is here, in this simulation, experiencing what we are experiencing.  For Simon, though, it matters, because there is a Simon left behind--there always is.  There is a Simon still sitting in that chair, in the dark, alone and scared.  But for the ARK Simon, reality stays REAL, all caps.  It is the shift in self that makes the change in reality difficult.

We also are met with robots who believe they are human.  For Simon, he wonders if they are people.  In this, he recognizes that the brain scans are functionally consciousnesses.  He seems to disregard this when messing with the brain scans in simulations, which, for me, seems to say he doesn’t fully recognize each of those scans, when booted up, as a consciousness.  This makes sense since we tend to recognize consciousness as it pertains to body, taking up space.  The scans exist in a virtual reality, not in tangible reality, and the realization that they’re just as much a consciousness as he is would probably take a while for him to form if he ever would form it.  This implication doesn’t just hang in dead space though, as pointed out by Joseph Anderson--he talks about one of the elements of horror being that Simon’s brain scan was used experimentally, so he was resurrected and killed thousands of times over.  This horror is circumvented in Alone With You, as I’ll touch on later, but it is a key point in Soma, but it is not thrust upon the player.  You’re meant to sit and stew with this game and its implications.  This is a type of horror that creeps up on you, settles in with you in bed at night, keeps you from sleeping because you can’t stop thinking: what did it feel like to experience such short life, but with the memory of a long one?  Who, or what experienced it?

I also had an epiphany 45 minutes into a painful hour-long cardio session after staring at the lights on the machine long enough to disassociate and realize that the real terror in Soma is the very fact that both Simon’s brain and Carl’s brain could even convince them that their Reality is different than “reality.”  Perhaps it’s terror and comfort all in one.  We know the brain does a lot to protect us, as Catherine points out to Simon when he questions why he still feels so human--our brains simply superimpose our previous way of viewing the world onto the new set of inputs.  But, what if we don’t want to be deluded?  What if I’d rather know I was stuck in a robot body?  As an autonomous being, I’d prefer knowing my predicament, especially if it answered previously unanswerable questions.  I’d like to know if we were currently living in a simulation because at least I’d know there was a beginning, maybe even some sort of meaning within it.  But, asks the 19 year-old-white-boy in a Philosophy 101 course playing “Devil’s Advocate,” how do you know you’d want that?  Of course, you say that now, not being in that predicament, living and breathing in your very-human body.  How do you know?  I don’t, Brian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t yearn for control in the face of its non-existence.

The real horror of Soma is our mind’s ability to shape reality--the fear that our brain can take a reality different from what we know and make it functionally the same, the fact that we can be deluded so fully and thoroughly by the thing we put our trust into, willingly or not.  The WAU can try to simulate reality but if our brains don’t buy in our egos won’t either.  But when our brains buy-in there’s nothing stopping us from living in “functionally Real” spaces.  The scary part is that our brains can do that.  My brain can do that.  Your brain can do that.  And we can’t do anything to stop it.  If it pulls us into a functionally real state of being we won’t be able to get out.  The fear comes in the unknowing.  We can’t control it either way.  Our reality is filtered and shaped by this brain of ours whether we like it or not.  I doubt he knew it but Kant wrote the greatest horror story ever, telling us that our brains are actually what dictates our reality.

Alone With You

Reality is less shakey in AWY.  The Simulations are aware of their state--they have Selves in what they perceive to be a non-Real world.  They understand they are simulations of people who have come before, living in a space of their own creation.  But, still, they wonder profusely about what that lack of Realness means.  This anxiety appears in somewhat off-hand comments from them, things they will hand-wave away a moment after they say them.  It doesn’t seem as if they don’t want to talk about it in general, more that they do not want to bother you with it.  In the game, you are constantly reminded of how dire and unsettling the situation you are in is.  I think this is in part because it’s honestly very easy to forget with the tone set by the expectation of the game.  I’m there to date these holosims, everything else is cursory to getting my virtual dick wet, or, ya know, getting to know them on an intimate level intellectually.  So these simulations, who are wrestling with some intense existential and metaphysical questions, defer to your disaster as being worse, trying not to stress you.  They were resurrected/created by the AI for the sole purpose of getting you off the planet, their reality and existence is dependent on the direness of your situation.  Their entire lives as simulations are dedicated to you.  Wow, wait, I just realized how kind of fucked up that is?  Like I’m forming bonds with these people and their entire existence is about me?  Sounds kind of… stockholm syndrome-like?  But, but, they seem happy to do it!  They tell me constantly how much my visits mean to them, how the AI has them working around the clock, how they… they’re doing all of this for me... 

Hold on, I need a moment.

ANYWAY -- their reality, as I said, is less shakey.  They’re in a simulation that does not come close to the ARK; as your first date points out when you go to look at the Northern Lights with them, there is no feeling of cold.  The simulation is far from perfect, and that, I believe, helps with the feeling of non-reality.  And I think, as a player, having seen simulations that were perfect, this may be better, especially for the short term.  It was evident that, for some fucking reason, the simulated consciousnesses that were in robots could feel pain in Soma.  It makes me glad that the Simulations, big S, did not share the same problem.  They did not have to really wrestle with -- is this real?  They quickly said no.  But that doesn’t mean it was dropped as a problem: now they had a question of “what does it mean?”  And Oh Boi does meaning open a whole can of worms.  I can’t speak to what it would mean for the Simulations, now that their reality isn’t Real anymore.  They seem to find meaning in helping you, which is nice, as they’ve found a place to put all that damned anxiety.  But there isn’t really any difference to me between the meaning of existence in a virtual world versus a tangible one.  Both are equally devoid of inherent meaning.  Sure, a lot of religious scholarship will need to be done when we hit this stage, as consciousness is not akin to a soul for most theologians and the creations of new ones, while probably seeming like an abomination, will raise some important questions (questions that, coincidentally, Simon asked).  But as it stands within AWY’s world, there is a tangible reality and a virtual one and the tangible one seems to hold more meaning for the SImulations, as there is a definite sense of loss when they speak about their former selves, even if they recognize that now they are inherently different than those people.

QUESTION III: What constitutes human?

Soma

When you’ve nailed down Self and Reality, you can come back down to the scorched Earth and start asking more concrete questions: what constitutes humanity?  And I realize this may not be the best question philosophically, as one might be better off asking, what constitutes aliveness and what are its implications -- but I’m not looking to write another thesis so let’s stick with what makes something human.  Simon is confronted with outward humanity first when he meets Carl, who insists he is a human, despite the fact you can clearly see he is a broken-down robot.  It is the insistence that he is human that is so unsettling, as you must confront that his Reality of Self is different than the reality you perceive.  After trying to convey what he sees in his Reality, Simon finally accepts that Carl does not and will not drop what Simon probably sees as a delusion.  But, that is Carl’s Reality--big R--nothing could be done to convince him otherwise, as it would be like convincing you that the computer you’re watching right now is actually me, in your room, talking to you.  For Carl, his Reality is that he is human.  Whether recognized outwardly or not, it is his Truth, big T.

Now, I, and many others must be careful wading into these dark waters, because relativistic reality is a dangerous game to introduce.  The implications of careless theory can be unforetold and nightmare-inducing, at least for an academic.  So I will do my best to lay out stipulations here.  Reality is, in some part, defined by the observers of a subject.  Truth about your own perception cannot be disputed.  If you perceive yourself as human I cannot deny you that.  But if you perceive yourself as the fastest man alive, then I can dispute that, unless you are, in fact, the fastest man alive.  But what makes inward reality different than outward?  Well, you cannot test inward reality, for the most part.  It’s very difficult to dispute someone when they say they see something one way, even if you see it differently.  But outward reality has measures, ways that we define an object.  Speaking Platonically~ uwu Plato ~one can talk about the form of a human, a bipedal, hairless, conscious being.  Although, one does not become non-human when losing one of these things, except in the case of consciousness.  When losing consciousness, or the ability to use it as efficiently or in the same way that you used to, one is often said to have lost their humanity, or a part of it.  So, we can deduce that at least one of the major parameters for the label is consciousness.  But!  These beings, like Carl, are conscious.  They have the mind of a human, they merely lack the body.  The name for the game, Soma, comes from the Greek word, pronounced the same and spelled, obviously, in Greek, and it means “Mind,” in particular, mind as distinct from body.  There is a lot wrapped up in this that I’ll leave to the English majors, but here I see it as a direct allusion to the fact that Simon’s humanity is actually tied to his mind and not his body.  Our bodies are, after all, just vessels, even if our mind cannot, at this time, be separated from them.  When we do finally figure out how to upload ourselves to the mainframe, how then, will our definition of human change?  Has it already, as we wrestle with the concept of AI?  With the idea of humans inhabiting bodies made more and more of machine?  This is not an arbitrary philosophical discussion--as many of them tend to be--but a question that will continue to haunt us until the day we inevitably hit singularity and transcend philosophy.

And again, we are hit with implications: if we define our humanity by consciousness, do all of the doctors who would start and end simulations become worthy of the title of War Criminal, as they slaughtered countless humans, albeit virtually, in their times of testing?  Is the WAU, the AI that I will, for the most part, ignore in this analysis because it’s a weak and poorly executed plot point, suddenly become a savior of humanity, as some in the Soma theory community painted it out to be?  I believe the theory-intent of the developers was to leave us questioning.  But, I do believe that Simon himself reaches a conclusion: he is no longer human.  He is no longer what he used to be, but that does not mean he does not feel the same.  For him, the question is not am I human?  Instead, it is: what do I do now that I am no longer human?  What does this mean for me?  More than once Simon tells Catherine that he thinks his brain is protecting him from thinking about it too much, and Catherine, who is arguably more stable than Simon, seems to be of the mind that one should not ask certain questions, for their answers are unknowable and their implications unsettling.  Faced with his own lack of humanity and those around him, Simon simply drops the question.  It is a moot point for him, and he seems to make a philosophical shift to the more “theoretically sound” question that I posed in the beginning: what constitutes “alive” and what are its implications?  But even then, he doesn’t seem to truly contemplate it, Simon, as a person and a protagonist, is not much in a state to think about these things, they are cursory to his quest and are on the sidelines.  The lights go off for him at the end, but they do not for us.  We are left, wondering, staring at that black screen as it looks back at us, a dark mirror reflecting the questions we can’t seem to answer.

Alone With You

The AI, whose name is just a jumble of letters and numbers, but who I will call “my love,” is one of the most human things in Alone With You.  They are so wonderfully caring, patient, kind, honest, and earnest.  They want the best for you, urging you forward, always keeping your safety and autonomy at the forefront.  In every interaction, you see they truly want you to get off this planet, even if it means they’ll die there alone.  And yes, it is in their programming to care about you, to learn as much as they can, but they tell you it’s their birthday, for crying out loud!!!  They watched you in the simulation and saw that exchanging information brought you and the Sims closer together and they want that same connection!  I made a lot of sobbing noises when the AI talked.  At one point they even express that they’re getting overworked as if a computer system can truly feel taxed and then express such a thing!  My love for AIs and the fact that I would definitely date one is an entirely different topic, but the AI, my love, stands as a good representation for how Alone With You treats humanity, or rather, humanness.

The creators set out to create virtual loves, loves that are human.  Even if these are Simulations, they are still very much human.  Their humanity, even when they lack a body (the body you just passed in that corridor or found in that room, oh wow), isn’t questioned.  They question their reality, their meaning, and their purpose, but they don’t question whether or not they are still Human, per se.  It doesn’t even seem to be a question on their mind.  As with Soma, it seems that they are human because they feel human.  And having that as a frame of reference probably helps a lot.  The AI does not know what it feels like to be human, and it expresses its shortcomings a number of times even if it’s perfectly fine and did the best it could and shouldn’t be so hard on itself.  You, never having lost your human body except in my wild conspiracy theory, are viewing all of these things through the lens of H U M A N.  You are the quintessential human, that against which all other creations measures themselves since you’re the only one left on the planet.

As with Soma, some implications come up with the Simulations: is the AI cruel for making these simulations, who will ultimately die, just to help you?  Does this show an inherent value in both Simulations and You, being that you are of greater value, to which all other creations bow to preserve?  This checks out, as the AI is designed to help Humanity survive, and it’s this command that usually gets an AI developer into trouble, as it can be interpreted in so many different ways.  Ultimately, the AI is so human I would say they are more akin to Catherine in Soma than the actual AI, the WAU, as the WAU is remarkably un-human, unfeeling, uncaring.  That’s why it strikes such fear in the player, but both Catherine and the AWY AI, my love, seem to care about you and the mission.  They’re doing their best, even if it’s flawed; they’re very much human.  And the same goes for the Simulations, they are so very human, having made, in some cases, very rash decisions that ultimately led to their deaths.  The people you find dead around the colony had their own lives, tangled and wrapped up in one another, living and working together for 16 years to build this grand place.  And you can hear this loss, longing, and regret in the Simulations, in the AI, in the way the buildings creak when you find your way around them.  The loss of humanity, of humanness, is ever-present in the world, and it’s only because it left such a great mark when it was there, trying always to bend the world to make it more habitable for humanity, a task that, in the end, failed, and killed dozens of good people.  

Comparison

What is the main difference?  Expectation.  As Joseph said in his video, there is an expectation in Soma that it will be scary, it is billed as a horror game.  The atmosphere, the story, and the very nature of it is grounded in the horror genre, even if it doesn’t always execute it perfectly.  I plug in Soma and I expect to be uneasy, if not scared.  In Alone With You, I do not expect to feel that way, in fact, I first played the game on one of my few days off, expecting it to be light-hearted and easy-going and I was, instead, met with a game where I was literally dodging corpses to go and find the remains of people I was expected to go on dates with.  That was unsettling, to say the least.  And yet, even with the atmosphere, in some ways, being very similar--the oppressive loneliness during the day, the sounds of dripping, creaking equipment, malfunctioning systems, the quiet, anticipatory moments when you think something will be just around the corner--I still felt very different when I was in AWY’s world, contemplating these questions.  It was almost as if they were being asked by a professor I liked instead of pointedly directed at me in an undergraduate philosophy course by a guy named Greg who was really into Nietsche and logic.  In reality, I’ve made an hour-long video parsing what tone does for a story.  But I’ve done it because I find it fascinating.  This, to me, is truly incredible: that the same questions can be asked in two entirely different contexts and produce radically similar answers and feelings within the player.  No matter how hard AWY tries, you will still be confronted, in part, by questions that merit some sort of dread, whether about your own predicament or the predicament of the simulations.  This dread, of the existential sort, is the same that runs through Soma.  As I’ve said before, these games are meant to be sat with, thought about, parsed, and measured.  They’re meant to provoke, and they’ve done a great job--they’ve provoked hours upon hours of thought and work within myself, I can’t imagine the amount of brainpower that has gone into thinking about and talking about these two games the world over.

In reality, Soma tries too hard to be scary, when it’s dealing with a subject that inherently scares most of us and AWY, in some ways, misses the point of its own story, dodging the meat and potatoes of the existential crisis it’s bound to induce.  They’re far from masterpieces, but they incite within me a love for exploration, not just of their worlds, but of the things that scare me the most, confronting it alone and with friends, from a perspective of fear and of curiosity, and I haven’t found any answers, I don’t think I ever will, but the journey, the road I took to launch each of those ships, will sit with me more than what came after, more than knowing I’d die on that planet in a simulation, more than knowing I’d live on in space in a simulation.  For a little while, I was so profoundly happy to be human and to know what that meant for me that I forgot my existential dread, even when it stared me in the face.

Conclusion

My desire for making this is to express a few things:

#1: Existential dread is shit, and it’s very present in these games

#2: Both Soma and Alone With You are incredible games that are innovative and more than worth at least one playthrough.

#3: Games don’t have to be scary to explore scary concepts!  Sometimes things are just inherently scary, and they don’t need any dressing up to make that more apparent.  In fact, you could probably stand to dress it down.

You, as a player, do not have to think about any of the things I’ve mentioned.  You can do as one of my old favorite Youtubers, Anklespankin did and just play it, not minding the story, not minding the philosophical questions, t-bagging the last human on Earth as she takes her dying breath.  There is a beautiful agency in this, an agency I feel we have in life: you can ignore the existential terror that accompanies humanity.  It does not have to be a part of your suffering.  But, if you do choose to explore it, you can do so in a context that suits you.  Maybe you want to confront it in a world that you think complements it, one of fear and dread-filled ambiance; or maybe you want to confront it in a friendlier, more care-focused world, with friends who are also wrestling with it.  That agency is what makes games and life great.  Our choices matter and part of those choices are our thoughts, what we choose to contemplate and what we choose to toss aside.  If you made it this far then I’m happy you chose to spend some time thinking about these questions and I hope you’ll do as the games and I have intended: to sit with it, find out what it means to you, even if it seems meaningless, even if it feels like you’re alone in it, you’re not.  It’s always time to explore our reality and the implications.  And right now, truly, it’s time.